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.