Hillela moved again in the spring of the third year in the United States; but not on. Merely a practical domestic move, just down the road from the apartment where the namesake would never allow a door to be shut, to the brownstone whose mortgage was being regularly paid off. It was foolish to waste a monthly sum for housing in two places. That was how he broached it. She was delighted. He saw she was delighted. She was shelling peas; she took him by the shoulders, at arms’ length, and her eyes held him in that gaze of hers. — Brad, you’re so good to us. It’ll be so much more convenient, when I have to be away. Nomo loves the yard. Will you put up a swing for her? — And then the kisses, tasting green of the vegetable she ate while she shelled. She was so good, so generous with herself, as if the bountiful pleasures welled up in her, the more she gave — here, here, Brad — the more she had to give. Nomzamo, possessive about her new room, reversed her edict about doors: all had to be closed. And all was open, to him, the pale mushroom flesh discovered under sunburned breasts, the little twirled butter-curl of the navel, the cleft of buttocks, the hollow beside the poor crooked toe, the satin-walled cave of the mouth, the triumphal way between thighs. Usual enough to become erect, alone in an office thinking back on the night or early morning; but he found himself actually trembling.
The brownstone investment contained the imbalance of luxury and austerity common in the household of a bachelor in the intellectual professions. The floors had been sanded and the bookshelves put up from floor to ceiling when he moved in, but some rooms were empty of anything else, and others had pieces of inherited furniture for which no definitive location had yet been found. There was a bed of the size that can be bought only in America, hemmed in by hi-fi installations and towers of books and newspapers. There was a large empty freezer but few pots, a microwave oven and lattice wine-rack, but no cupboard for basic supplies. Some of the empty rooms quickly filled up with the child’s possessions — bicycle and doll’s house in the livingroom, construction sets fragmented all over what was supposed to be the study; in the bathroom, drawings of happy houses with smoking chimneys, moons and suns, and a male, female and child, figures whose faces sometimes were all crayoned black, and sometimes pink. The bachelor and the child; there was still no provision for the median mode of living. — We’ve got to decide how we want it all to be. What suits us. We must sit together and make a list, room by room—
Hillela took his hand. — What’s wrong with the way it is? I like your house.—
— Yes, but it’s our house. There’re things we need that I didn’t. What kind of furniture did you like — where you lived … What are the sort of things you miss?—
She was at once, in the new familiarity of the kitchen, in her nightgown, a stranger to him, smiling. — From where? My one aunt had antiques — rather like your parents’, but more elaborate. She collected. In the Embassy where I worked, everything was a diplomatic issue — gilt this and that — standard, nobody chose it.—
— I mean, when I think … I have had my paternal grandfather’s desk since I was fourteen.—
— I had a pair of Japanese china cats. I gave one away, I don’t know where the other is.—
— I’ll get you a real cat. Much nicer. We ought to have a cat sitting here on the window-sill.—
— In Lusaka the flat was furnished.—
— I see.—
— And in Europe.—
— Well, now we’re going to find out the kind of thing you really like. We can mix contemporary styles with my stuff, or we can hunt around for the same Early American period. Whatever you want.—
On Saturdays they went to antique fairs and bric-à-brac shops crowded with the continuity of his past — the cigar-store Indians as well as the samplers — and to the clinical, glassy spaces where contemporary Japanese- and Italian-designed furniture looked ready to accommodate extraterrestrials only. They bought a child’s 19th-century naïvely-painted bed and modern Czech lamps, absolutely functional. She chose an old patchwork bedcover whose price he concealed from her (she might be thinking how many antibiotics for wounded freedom fighters in Machel’s, Mugabe’s or Reuel’s country those dollars would buy). They found a New England farmhouse table to go with the six chairs he had inherited from Big Uncle Robert (not to be confused, he explained dryly, making fun of the hierarchy, with Boston Uncle Robert, the offshoot of another Burns branch). Laughing and staggering, with the namesake running wild around them, they lugged heavy pots of decorative plants to the windows. They were always within touch and happiness came simply, like sweat from activity; he looked across at her while they paused to drink coffee, and saw the faint lift of the flesh at the corners of the eyes; for him. She was, as Leonie remarked, ‘blooming’.
The house had turned out rather like the parents’ house. The objects from the past gave it the soft patina of somewhere long lived in and the products of high technology brought it alive in the current phase of the Burns chronology. Mrs Burns told Brad’s future wife secretly that she was going to give him the piano; it was not only for him, the little Nomzamo was old enough to begin taking lessons. Every Burns child started at the age of six or seven. She never forgot how the girl, Hillela, embraced her, moving — a stranger’s — curly head against her shoulder, as if she could not find words. There was no doubt that the emotion was genuine, no doubt at all. That girl understood, all right, that with the piano Brad was being given into her hands; as a secret between two women who loved him.
There was certainty, waking up in the morning. It flowed in with the light every day. Depend on it. The beautiful young man sleeping beside her; a pale body like her own, the body familiar as that of a brother. He would get up soon and go to his office — a real office, glass rearing up to the open sky confidently without need of protection — and come back safely every evening when the glass became a giant painting of the sunset. The huge bed into which they slid as an envelope of warmth and comfort was not on loan; nobody else’s clothes would hang in the cupboard. No need to watch out about how to manage — make out, the way people do it; not here. No caution necessary about whom you are seen with, because their factions are all announced out loud with brass bands and rosettes. No need to watch for what can be traded — searching pockets for attributes: martyr’s wife, expressive Latin eyes and large breasts, the probably unacceptable currency of avowal to a revolutionary cause — in exchange for a stamp on a piece of paper. Once married to a bona fide citizen of a country already existing and not still to be won back, there is full citizenship of the present.
She lay following the flaxen and gold threads shaded horizontally in the hand-woven curtains they’d chosen. — Like a field of grass.—
— Yes, they’re a real success. What do we still need?—
— Nothing. Nothing.—
— There’s always something you discover you still need.—
— Stop it. Stop measuring.—
His slender hand moved over her head as over a piece of sculpture. He received her fastidiously through all the senses.
— I want you to grow your hair.—
Softly stroking, now and then stiffening his fingers to press the plates of the skull.
She said nothing, perhaps took the request merely as a murmured endearment, along with the caress.
— No. — Her eyes moved rapidly under the thin skin of closed lids. — No, it’s not practical.—