At the President’s celebration at State House on the anniversary of Independence Day she must have glanced over, without noticing, Flora tête-à-tête with someone in the crowd, a woman. Flora came up with the half-comic tolerant expression of having made an escape — Good soul, I’m sure, but what can you talk about with her — when you get onto the standby, what are her interests, she tells you about her favourite TV soapie. Homebody of the new kind, the city peasant — you know the poor dears — Flora stopped herself; then the aside — That’s Gladwell’s wife. Must have married her very young and apart from producing a brood … she’s sure no asset in furthering his career now.—
She looked across the room at the woman, as an intrusion on privacy; observing herself, rather, as the lover of the woman’s husband, squeamish; old conventions wagging a finger at her. It was the only time they met — or rather didn’t meet. He sometimes mentioned, in contexts where it was natural and inevitable, his wife: a car accident in which they’d both been slightly injured, subject come up when on one of the weekend trips to the farm the driver-bodyguard almost landed his passengers in a culvert (this time certainly did have a hangover).
There must have been some sort of accommodation with his wife; anyone, like Roberta Blayne, who has been once coupled knows there are many acknowledged sidetracks on the secret map of a marriage. Sometimes they met in a restaurant where he might be seen, by others in parliamentary suits, dining with a woman from the Agency personnel. His woman, no doubt. Many had theirs, if not in their company on that occasion. It was that sort of restaurant.
One day when she entered another restaurant he had chosen there was a young woman seated at the table with him. She hesitated a moment, whether she should approach, he saw her, lifted a palm, she came to it. He gave her name in introduction first. — Roberta Blayne. She is Assistant to Mr Henderson who heads the Agency here, now. — The girl half-rose with the casual acknowledgement of her generation and smiling, held out a hand to the woman standing before her. The hand was long, supple, ringed on fingers and thumb, nails painted fluorescent butterfly-wing blue; an attribute. She was a confidently attractive girl, her beauty arranged in contemporary high style — hair straightened and secured at the crown by a bobbing bunch of glossy curls to be bought in the shops, the liquid flash of slanting eyes, bold lips sculpted in purple-red. — Phila, my younger daughter, she’s just back for a break from her law studies in Nottingham. Your country. — So the two women, his women, talked about England, the girl’s impressions, what was endearing she said she found in ‘the Brits’, what was annoying, what in their ways made her laugh. — You miss England? You’re English, aren’t you?—
She supposed she was. But something of all the countries where there’d been tours of duty.
— How’re you finding Africa? I’ve only realised since I’ve been living away what it’s really like, here! My homeground, hometown. Weird! Really weird. My father doesn’t like to hear that, he says I’m forgetting who I am. Fat chance — the Brits keep me aware of that. But seriously — or rather not seriously, I’m having a great time. — She caught her father’s hand, flirtatiously reassuring any disapproval in his silence. A silence which otherwise was easy; his remarks to the girl now and then, over the food, no suggestion that the situation of the three present might evoke suspicion and another kind of disapprovaclass="underline" in the daughter.
She wanted to ask — sometime — why he had wanted his daughter to meet her, to reveal her, so to speak, to his family, his real life—that is how she thought of it. While she was not sure of what was hers, she was of his. The right time to ask never came. Perhaps he had not thought of the threesome in the way she had seen it; for him, simply some parental obligation to take his visiting daughter out to lunch.
If she had need to justify — exonerate — her presence at the table it would have to be in acceptance that she was not the first nor would be the last of the Deputy-Director’s affairs. Outside his real life.
What she knew was that she and this man were giving one another what each needed. Love, yes, in one of its many complex forms; one of the simplest. Not-so-young; what might be called the cerebral aspect of her (she knew she was no great intellect but she had a well-exercised intelligence of the workings of the contemporary world) first brought them together; he expected to engage seriously with her, draw from her opinions other than those he was supplied with officially, exchange different perceptions of motives, of what a newcomer saw happening here, his country, and the world she had had experience of quite widely.
In love-making there came an eloquence beyond speech. And this eloquence of pleasure brought her to the danger of confiding — part of the release of orgasm, handing over what can be used against you. In such a moment, the privacy that is like no other — Buffalo Mine. You know, the day I asked, that day. My grandfather owned it and he ran it like a slave plantation. 1920s. He sent a man on foot all the way to that liquor store, still there, you stopped at in town, to fetch a case of whisky for his weekend booze party and the man walked all the way back with a case of whisky bottles on his head. Went on Monday and was back on Friday. Every Monday every Friday. My grandfather made a famous joke of it, my man, what heads they have, thick as a log.—
He said nothing. Suddenly tears of shame, old shame unshed, what heads they have came from her and trickled to his shoulder. He released an arm from their embrace and brushed at the shoulder as if something had alighted there; the fingers discovered their wetness.
— What is the matter.—
— What we did here. In my family. The rest of us. What liars we are, coming to these countries as if we hadn’t ever been, marvelling at the primitive—oh yes it’s a dirty condescending racist word don’t ever use it but the sense of it’s there even in our commendment, our reports, our praise — don’t say it, naïve obtuseness thick-headed—oh the people’s capacity to endure burdens, the usefulness of this capacity, sound basis for development, hard as a log the possession of the power of money over it that’s my man — She could hear her raving whisper.
His voice in the dark a vibration through his breast. — Things like this happened long ago. Nothing to do with you. That’s how they were. That’s how it was with them. Those people. Such things … It was the tradition.—
They made love again and she sensed, from him, she must resist the desire to caress his head, pass her hand over its shape again and again to banish what cannot be changed, a past. Not even by development. She belongs, he belongs, to the present.
In every tour of duty that is going well there is a looming frustration that there will be recall, a new posting, another country, just when more time is needed to see projects fulfilled.
— What d’you think — should I ask for an extension? Would you stay?—
There was no innuendo in Alan Henderson’s question; he was thinking of their effectiveness as a working team. And she answered on the same practical level, using Agency-speak. — If you believe we really could get those five rural projects to the stage of capability they should have if they’re going to become viable under their own steam, when we do go. Worth a try, with New York?—