Hazards like these have recognisable courses of action, emotional readjustments, to follow, even if individuals responding don't always do so in the same way. What has happened – that formulation implies the past, what is here now is a present that has no existence in the range of experience provided for. Only the Japanese would understand, maybe; they have had to make 'ordinary' ('normal' is a word that can't be used on this subject) the presence of children born, generations after the light greater than a thousand suns, with a limb or some faculty of the brain missing.
Paul's confrontation with an unimaginable state of self. She sees it in his face, the awkwardness of his body as if he feels the body does not belong to him, when he speaks, his choice of words, of what there is that can be said among all that cannot. She is aware of the state as she makes his bed and as she stands at the chuntering machine unable to leave off watching his contaminated clothes somersaulting in water behind a round window, Primrose standing by. This is Primrose's domain, no matter how contemptibly role-confining that may sound. Lyndsay's presence in the backyard laundry cannot be ordinary.
The endless hours he seems to spend in the garden. No book, no radio. Imagine, an attempt to leave the state behind in this prison-home. No-one could conjure that. It's more than a physical and mental state of an individual; it's a disembodiment from the historical one of his life, told from infancy, boyhood, to manhood of sexuality, intelligence and intellect. It's a state of existence outside the continuity of his life.
The evidence of such a phenomenon before her every morning when she puts her head round the door to greet him as she leaves for Chambers and the structure of the law ready to deal with the dislocations of human existence on the Statute Book, the return to find him in the darkening garden or lying in his cell – this stirs unwanted recognition that there are other states of alienated existence.
Now also become unimaginable.
Fifteen years ago she sat in this house one night and said, I have to tell you something. The affair is over.
This same familiar room where their son sits with them in the relation of childhood, these nights, listening to music.
This room was where Adrian was told that his wife Lyndsay's four-year love affair with another man had ended. He was looking at her as he was to all those years later when she told him his son had a cancer of the thyroid gland; blue eyes black with intensity.
I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.
She met the man at a conference through the advancement in her career he, Adrian, had made, in practicality, possible. For him love (one came at last to understand) is commitment to the fulfilment of the loved one. In their early life together he had taken on many responsibilities in the education of the children and distractions of domestic bothers, freeing her to continue her studies and pursue the right contacts to be admitted to the Bar, realise her ambition to become a civil rights lawyer. When she was briefed for a case that passionately interested her, her mood brought home was quickly matched by his; they would celebrate with her exposition of the issue for the layman he was, over their meal, late in bed. Sometimes she would say in reaction to his questions – a reflection on another's life – you could have been a very good lawyer, but he had wanted something else, also not realised, wanted to be an archaeologist. Go digging, as he dismissed the seriousness of the vocation become an avocation, subject of leisure reading and occasional viewings of the site of an archaeological find opened to the public. Not many become a Leakey or a Tobias. When they had to go for marriage, children and years might pass before, if ever, going digging could provide bread for a family, instead of studying for that profession he took, meantime, a junior position with prospects in a business firm, and indeed, with his wide intelligence that could not apply itself at less than its best, even to what did not really interest him, moved on to a successful middle-level niche in an international firm.
She became prominent enough in cases of civil rights to have worked with the great in the profession, Bizos and Chaskalson, in these final years of the old regime when daring legal opposition to it caught the attention of world support, while the powers of the world dilly-dallied whether or not to back, by sanctions against the regime, the liberation movement and its military action. She was invited here and there abroad to conferences on civil rights and constitutional law – this last in particular an aspect in which she was qualifying herself for the future: the country would have a new constitution, new laws to be upheld when the old regime was defeated.
It was at a conference in her home country, home city, in which she was a member of the Bar Association's organising committee, that she met the man for the second time. He was a European in the sense that she was not; from Europe, fairly distinguished on the international legal conference circuit. Hospitable on home ground, she followed the protocol by which her local colleagues shared out the obligation to entertain the visitors. She invited this one, with whom at least she had previous acquaintance, to a dinner at this house. Adrian as host. The man was not the most outstanding personality round this table where one of the settings is now with paper plates, and it is not memorable whether he and the husband of the colleague, with whom he was conferring professionally for a second time, exchanged more than casual dinner-table remarks. In the usual enjoyable assessment of guests after they had gone – fascinating, boring, or about whom there was nothing much to say – no recall of mention of him. But that might be repressed memory.
Perhaps as a return for the hospitality in place of delivery of flowers, next day the man suggested they skip lunch-break refreshments provided at the conference centre and get something interesting to eat elsewhere. He was more amusing tête-à-tête than at a dinner table. Maybe he had been bored. A few days later they went for a drink she agreed was needed after a long conference session. The half-hour in a bar was a continued session of legal complexities discussed – he seemed to have a special respect for her knowledge of the law's constraints in this country of which he had no experience. When the conference closed and farewells were made he said his to her, last of all. So it was that moment among the crowd; suddenly there: they had to see one another again.
It could have been he who arranged to have her invited to a seminar in his country. The laughter together, the shared ironies of the proceedings, the delighted discovery, each for each, of how the other's intelligent intuition worked, the sense of something new, in man-woman, waiting to be acknowledged, life beckoning, crooking a finger, led to a room in an hotel. Not the one where they were quartered along with their colleagues – they are not naïve adolescents – he might be seen leaving her room or she his at some hour open to only one interpretation.
How girlishly exciting it must have been. To be irresistibly attractive to a man: at forty-something, with a loving husband, grown children, a successful career in a male-dominated profession; moving into a new maturity of freedom. Not to be foregone; to be taken as the other chances had been, to become a civil rights lawyer, an Advocate with Chambers. Sexual freedom, oh yes. Not as an orthodox feminist, god forbid, totting up orgasms as a constitutional right, but as one who'd read Simone de Beauvoir and the time had come to remember her concept of 'contingent loves'. Sexual freedom, yes. But not only that. Freedom of something new in experience, association of this with another mind, personality, within the same shared structure of intellectual activity. Didn't have that already, the shared intellectual activity, in abundance with daily colleagues? But not in the special context of other intimacy!
Contingency requires that what the situation is contingent to be not displaced. A whole strategy has to be devised to ensure this, or at least attempt to. It implies a code of conduct – also ancillary to, distinct from the one that always has been followed in private and professional ethics. The invitations to conferences and seminars at the safe distance of abroad were the available means of taking the freedom of contingency while protecting what must not be affected by it; Adrian, the foundation Adrian-Lyndsay
-son-and-daughters. Conferences that did not exist were just as good, for this purpose, as those that did. Surely there is a humane principle that lies save if not lives then the good order of life. That order was not materially deprived in any way: the code does not allow that. An advocate's earnings were sufficient to provide the usual contribution to school, university fees and family holidays, while paying for airfares to remote places where only urgent meetings of a non-professional kind were planned. The urgency was something come unbidden and undeniable, not to be self-questioned, too strong for that. As if some wilful drive that exists in everyone and can remain dormant, unevidenced, forever, an atavism not needed to be called upon, is suddenly, fiercely active.
She came home from these absences unlike any other and went back zestfully to the briefs awaiting at Chambers. (How was the last meeting – the Japanese, wasn't it…? Australians. Oh nothing we don't already know.) She and Adrian made love in the compact of celebration of her being home. Wherever she had been in another persona. The lovemaking with the other had improved her own advances and responses. That is how unaccountable human relationships are. She saw that she pleasured Adrian as she believed she had not done quite so expertly before. That must be what some expert prostitutes – sex workers they're called now – acquire. Adrian must have attributed this to the deprivations of absence.
The man managed to get himself invited back to her country, her city, to teach a course of international jurisprudence at a university. They met in afternoons at motels in nearby small towns. His teaching programme was not onerous, he could have been spending hours in the library on private research in Roman Dutch Law as an attribute of colonialism he was known to be doing, on the spot, as it were. Her secretary at Chambers informed callers she was out at a meeting with a client. He encountered the husband and wife at gatherings in her colleagues' houses. It would have looked strange if he had never been invited, as he was on a previous visit, to their house; once again, he came to dinner among other guests. He noticed on a table in this livingroom where the old dog who is at least some company for the quarantined son now lies on a sofa, several tomes and coffee-table books on archaeology. And host Adrian noticed his casual interest, came up to talk to him. A pleasant exchange. Would you like to visit one of the sites? I could arrange for you… Oh Cradle of Man and all that… I should take advantage while I'm here – I must see if I can make some time, yes.
Of course he did not. Ordinary, unavoidable social intercourse is part of the code, one doesn't go beyond it.
But it was inevitable that what was contingent in the Seychelles or Bonn would come too close to be managed without error, a slip of vigilance in the familiar complacency provided by home. They were going to the theatre, the couple, and she had come back from a motel and left an open straw handbag tossed on their bed. Whether Adrian had some disquiet about her afternoon absences from Chambers lately whenever he happened to call her there, and looked in the bag (for an address, a name?) – bizarrely unlikely, either the suspicion or the act – or whether the plastic container that held the rubber diaphragm she wore against conception, familiar to him as part of her feminine paraphernalia in their bathroom cabinet, had fallen out of the bag, is not known. She never will know. Neither will she know how he got himself to open the thing and see it was empty. The device inside her.
So that was a whole new section and paragraph thereof to be added to the code.
He had said nothing when she came into their bedroom brushing her newly-washed red hair he always found so beautiful. They drove to the theatre, he seemed tired and they were comfortably quiet together. They chatted with acquaintances met in the foyer. During the performance she turned to whisper a remark to him and in the dark saw something that set her heart thudding out of rhythm with some sort of premonitory fear. A tear caught the light from the stage on his cheek screwed in anguish.
Anger battled with disbelief in the days, weeks that followed. And pain. Pain has to be managed. He asked, he demanded, who the man was. No-one you know. He guessed, was it -
No-one you know.
This one or that among her lawyer colleagues, their mutual friends -
No-one you know.
He did not accuse her, she did not defend herself; he did not give the ultimatum, end this or end us. He could not end Them, and she could not end Them.
He bore his pain and she bore his pain and anger.
The man went back where he came from. She continued for four years to go to conferences around the world. She was very successful in her profession. How was Adrian to know when there were conferences and when there were not. He was no part of the legal fraternity/sorority cognisant with such opportunities.
These are the facts.
Facts are what constitutes evidence; they do not go further than that.
I have to tell you something. The affair is over.
I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.
Case closed.
Fifteen years lived since then. In closeness and warmth, unable to do without one another. Never, as the meaningful common phrase goes, looked at another man, and Adrian knew that. As for him – he is the swan who mates for life, he'd had his contingent loves before marriage; they were differently contingent, in the sense of to the real one that was coming. Only once there was an impulse to speak – say, forgive me; a moment of ill-advised weakness occasioned by some passing shakiness in the family, bringing the parents particularly close – one of the girls in trouble, wasn't ever the boy.
Perhaps he would have been amazed to be reminded, confronted, the eyes would have gone black with intensity, resounding the statement, I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving. And there they were living fifteen good years as if what she wanted forgiveness for, never was. Who had made that possible; he: having the inner strength to take the evidence: that his statement was refuted was a sign ordained, not to be questioned: they belonged to each other. Now the age of retirement coming – it's in that historical continuity of their life.
A state of existence. Unimaginable. Because her son, belonging to the historical continuity, brings a state of existence, his, before her days and nights, there returns a chapter not written, included, that surely cannot be believed was possible; could never happen to her as the son could not be thought ever to emanate danger out of the dark of his body.
Forget so much, what a blessing the electronic notebook gadget when listening to long-winded witnesses, and how extraordinary that total recall of four erased years cannot be silenced. How many places on the map were the meeting places, and what ruthless, cunning ingenuity brought those meetings about, the sight and smell and taste as the two strangers' bodies recognized one another beneath muffle of travel clothing in the arrival space of airports caged by the cicada shrill of foreign babble. How many hotel beds fallen to before even any suitcase or briefcase was opened. The bedside telephone where false names were answered to; an independent woman taking on in an hotel register that identity of a nonexistent Mrs-So-and-So. The selective avoidance of restaurants where someone might show recognition, in London or Sydney or the remote hideout on some island. The address of a complicit friend of the man, a law firm to which a c/o letter from home would be sent when – in fact – the recipient received it forwarded to another city, another country. All this so vivid, along with the leisurely shared baths, he liked to exchange the intimacy of each soaping and exploring the other's body, to end as a thrashing fucking. A night – Warsaw, he had the brief of a dispute between Poles and English clients – and there'd been a wonderful, stolen day sightseeing away in Cracow, she heard him use love-names in a call to his wife, and beat her fists in jealousy against pillows, a reversion to angry childhood. How could it have been. A successful lawyer in her forties, even if, as the man told her, using another set of love-names, she had the breasts of a twenty-year-old and the thought of her when he heard her voice on the phone gave him an erection you wouldn't believe, such a hard-on. Don't avoid the way he
would regale in being caressed to ready him for a second entry after the first, by the skilful hand on whose finger there was her wedding ring. And was there a night – what pitiless, relentless totality of all this come back – when he was in the hotel bar with a friend of his family who mustn't know she was concealed in the suite upstairs, and lying alone suddenly she was in cold fear, was sure that something was wrong with Adrian, vision of him dimmed by illness, disaster, and she sat up and dialled home. It was not an hour he would be likely to be there. He answered.
– Adrian. – The fearful loss of control in her voice must have brought a certainty: this was a time when she was with the man. Some months had passed since there had been one of her professionally-required absences (Lyndsay has a case in Namibia, your mother's in Toronto for a week).
He said out of that strange silence of distances, where messages come from the grave: – Don't call me like this. -
She wept (blubbered like a stupid girl and could feel him hearing the shamefulness of it). When she could speak: – Don't be like this. -
Then she asked him about the son and daughters, whether the prearranged grocery orders from the suppliers were arriving regularly, and he gave the facts and said goodbye just as she was beginning, somehow, a plea of explanation – of what? Herself? What explanation was there? She had remarked – stated? – supposed to be a credo? – at the start of what seemed then only a double life to be managed, I am not a barnyard hen. She could count on his remembering the reference to a line from a favourite poet they had shared enthusiasm for when first they met. There must be a foothold left somewhere on the common ground of falling in love.
Get A Life Page 6
