The Late Bourgeois World

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘… It’s my birthday? I didn’t know … I don’t know anything.’

  I patted her hand, in which the pulse throbbed everywhere. They keep her nails painted red, as she used to, but the effect, like the pearls round her neck, is recognizable not as a familiar adornment but as something done to her.

  I said, ‘Have you seen the flowers I sent?’ and the nurse chipped in, ‘She won’t have it in the room. I arrange it nicely but she don’t want it near her.’

  ‘Why? But why don’t you want your flowers in here?’

  The old lady’s face went empty.

  ‘Do they smell too strong? Don’t you like the scent? I’m afraid it’s not the time of year for roses.’ She used to talk about how much she loved roses – perhaps because she had very little interest in natural things, and roses were a safe choice.

  ‘Yes, I think it’s the smell she find too strong. It must be. I brought it in and show it to her, but she won’t have it!’

  My grandmother looked from the nurse to me. ‘Who is that?’ she asked me, pointing at her. Her face drew together in accusation. The nurse began to bustle, smiling, cajoling, ‘Ag, grannie, it’s me, Sister Grobler –’ but my grandmother dismissed the explanation with an impatient flicker of the facial muscles and said to me, ‘Who is she? What is she doing here?’

  I told her, and she seemed satisfied and then said, ‘Is she good to me?’

  I said yes, yes of course she was good to her. The nurse was cataloguing in a sing-song lullaby voice, ‘I make your bed … I bath you … I make your hair nice … I make you your cocoa …’ but for my grandmother, again, she did not exist. The hands with the sunken hollows between the knuckles twitched now and then; they have never done any work, and my grandmother used to lavish pride and creams on them. She has lived on dividends all her life (her father was an engineer associated with Rhodes and Beit) but – my mother says – she won’t leave any behind her, the expenses of her senility are eating up the last of her capital. My grandmother’s capital has been a source of bitterness at home as long as I can remember; my mother’s father left no specific provision for his children, and her marriage to a penniless young man happened to coincide with my grandmother’s own second marriage to a man not much older than her daughter’s, on whom she spent the greater part of this capital and certainly all that she might have been expected to provide for the advancement of her daughter. It would have been useful if she could have left some money to Bobo, but there it is. Oddly, she never shared my parents’ attitude to the way Max and I lived, and, vague about the nature of Max’s shortcomings as a husband and provider as related by my mother, seemed to assume that he was merely rather a high-spirited and headstrong boy, some sort of charming adventurer (she had known a few) translated into present-day terms; some fashion she hadn’t caught up with yet.

  My mother and father were extremely gratified to have me ‘marry into’ the Van Den Sandts, although I’d spoiled the dignity of the alliance somewhat by being pregnant before the wedding. Yet even if people in our small town were able to say meaningfully that he’d had to marry me, the son of a wealthy MP was a son-in-law most of them would have liked for a daughter of their own. My parents will be equally gratified, now, to know that he is dead. Is that too hard a thing to say? The son of a wealthy MP – that was what they expected of Max, and they didn’t get it. But didn’t I, in my way, expect something of him that he wasn’t? The summer I was seventeen, the summer I met Max, I was helping out, for Christmas, in my father’s shop. The fancy goods counter, with painted ‘coasters’ for glasses, cheap cuckoo clocks and watches, maroon vases with gilt fluted tops, Japanese bridge pencils with tassels, German cork-screws with dogs’ heads, china figurines of ballet dancers. Shop girls came in and bought these things with the money that they earned in other shops, selling similar stuff. Black men lingered a long time over the choice of a watch that, paid for out of notes folded small for saving, would be back within a week, I knew, because those watches didn’t work properly. I had seen nothing of the product of human skills except what was before me in my father’s drapery shop-cum-department store, but I knew there must be things more worth having than these, and an object in life less shameful than palming them off on people who knew nothing better to desire. The shoddy was my sickening secret. And then I found that Max knew all about it; that the house he lived in, and what went on there, his surroundings, though richer and less obviously unattractive, were part of it, too, and that this quality of life was apparently what our fathers and grandfathers had fought two wars abroad and killed black men in ‘native’ wars of conquest here at home, to secure for us. Truth and beauty – good God, that’s what I thought he would find, that’s what I expected of Max.

  When my grandmother dies, Bobo will get her father’s gold hunter and chain, that Beit gave him.

  After the first five minutes with her, as usual, I didn’t know what to say. Searching the deep vacancy of her face for what lies lost there, I drew up from the trance of age her old pleasure in streets and cities, and described an imaginary shopping trip I had taken in the morning. ‘I was looking for something for the evening – you know, soon the weather will be getting warmer, and I want something light, but with sleeves …’

  Slowly her attention surfaced and steadied. ‘What are they wearing this year? Will it be black?’

  ‘Well, no. I thought I’d like white, as a matter of fact, not dead white …’

  She was leaning forward confidentially: ‘Hard on the face,’ she said.

  ‘Yes … But off-white, something soft and simple.’

  ‘Always at the cleaners, my darling. You can only wear it once. And did you see what you wanted?’

  ‘I went from shop to shop … it was so crowded. One shouldn’t try to buy clothes on a Saturday. I had coffee at Vola’s – you remember, you used to like the coffee there. And the day when you took Bobo for lunch and he went and stole the rolls off the next table …?’

  Very slowly the smile began, cracking the line of the mouth, lopsided and then coming through the whole deserted face, inhabiting it once more. We giggled together.

  ‘“Grannie, help yourself.” “Grannie, help yourself.”’ The precise memory was turned up; she was quoting Bobo.

  The nurse broke in, ‘You see? Look how lively she is! You can remember everything so nice when you want to! You see, when your granddaughter comes you can really talk nice … it’s just you get lazy here with me …’ Her red plump arms had pointed elbows the shape of peach pips as she waved them about.

  The old lady’s face drained of meaning. I chatted on but she gave me only a slow blinking glance, half-puzzled, half-indulgent. I was talking but there was a dignity, final, bedrock, in her ignoring me; it was true that I was saying nothing.

  She said suddenly, ‘What happened?’

  There is nothing to say.

  She asks now only the questions that are never answered. I can’t tell her, you are going to die, that’s all. She’s had all the things that have been devised to soften life but there doesn’t seem to have been anything done to make death more bearable.

  ‘If I can’t go out any more, what shall I do, then?’

  ‘Perhaps you could go out. Perhaps I could take you and Sister Grobler to a film one afternoon.’

  ‘But will I understand? What shall I do, then?’

  I said to her with a meaningless reassuring smile, ‘Stay here, quietly …’

  ‘But tell me, what happened?’

  I said, ‘Nothing has happened. There’s nothing wrong. It’s just old age, quite natural, quite normal. You are eighty-six – seven – it’s a great age.’

  Soon the hour I’d stipulated to myself was up and I said goodbye to her with the usual bright smiles and promises that I should see her again next week (if I don’t go for a month she won’t know the difference). She was repeating, ‘It’s old age, old age, great age, you are teaching me –’

  As I got out of the door of the Home my own step
came back to me after the silence of the corridors, quick, clipped, heel-and-toe on the paving, exhilarating and … slightly cruel. On the walls of the viaduct I have to drive under on my way home I noticed again the arrow-and-spear sign that has been there for a long time, now, the red paint still not entirely faded, and an unfinished message: TORTURE THE END. Perhaps it is one that Sunbun wrote. Whoever it was, was interrupted. There was one of those sunsets beginning – the kind we’ve been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We’ve never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It’s everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it’s from atomic tests; but it’s said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution.

  Chapter 5

  Graham was here. He came at six. I was slicing onions for the pork fillets and opened the door with the knife in my wet hand. I’d said this morning I was going out for dinner – but there was nothing to be done about it. My smelly hands were there held stiffly away from me. He had my newspaper that he’d picked up from the doormat, and while I saw from the faintest possible movement at the corners of his long mouth that he understood, he said, ‘So the Americans have brought it off, too. They’ve had a man walking in space – look at this –’ Not able to touch the paper, I twisted my neck to see the front-page pictures of a dim foetal creature attached by a sort of umbilical cord to a dim vehicle. ‘I wish they wouldn’t try to print newspaper pictures in colour. You’d see much better if it were in plain black and white. It looks like something from one of Bobo’s comics.’

  He wandered into the living room, opening up the paper while I closed the kitchen door and then disappeared into the bathroom to wash my hands. He was reading aloud the subheadings and bits of the long report: ‘He was several times ordered to return to the spacecraft, but he seemed to be enjoying himself out there … “Quit horsing around” came the terse order … No More Cookies … crumbs from Southern-style corn muffins posed a minor problem …’ I laughed and called out comments while scrubbing my fingernails. The smell didn’t come off. I came back into the living room rubbing lotion into my hands and he was sitting in his usual chair; it was not necessary, or possible, any more, to make an excuse or explanation. Only I could still smell the onion, if my hands moved close to my face.

  He said, ‘I walked down. D’you know that it doesn’t take more than twenty-five minutes?’

  ‘Well, no, I don’t suppose it would. It’s downhill most of the way. But going back! D’you remember one day at Easter when my car wouldn’t start and I walked home from your house?’

  ‘When was that? But why didn’t I drive you?’

  ‘You’d lent your car to that fellow from the World Council of Jurists, don’t you remember?’

  ‘Oh, Patten, yes. Well, I’ll have a drink and start the long trek before it gets too dark.’

  ‘No, I can run you back. There’s plenty of time for me to dress.’ Now that I couldn’t explain, it was so easy to maintain a lie.

  He smiled and said casually, ‘Oh fine,’ and got up to get the whisky bottle out of the cupboard. He supplies the whisky; I can’t afford to. I went to shut the balcony doors because it was getting chilly. The super-sunset was still framed there, a romanticized picture that made the room look drab. He said, ‘It’s magnificent.’

  ‘I’m getting used to them.’

  He went on looking, so that I couldn’t close the doors, and waited for him to have had enough, like a patient attendant at a museum. ‘I’d like a few cows, and lovers floating above Fredagold Heights, though,’ he said. He has a Chagall drawing in his bedroom; curious, the way some women have a Marie Laurençin print in theirs. Why not in the living room? There is some private vision, version of life to which the public one doesn’t correspond. Or into which the public is not allowed. And yet he had never been interested in Chagall until a rich client gave him the drawing. Then he hung it in the bedroom.

  ‘Suppose it is fallout,’ I said.

  ‘Well?’ He is sometimes a little patronizing towards me, though not offensively.

  ‘Then it’s not beautiful, is it.’

  ‘There’s nothing moral about beauty.’ He smiled; we were having what he calls an ‘undergraduate chat.’

  ‘Truth is not beauty.’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  I closed the doors but I couldn’t very well pull the curtains; he sat with his drink in his hand, the chair hitched round to face the view.

  I hardly notice these sunsets any more, but his attention attracted mine as one’s attention is attracted by someone’s absorption in a piece of music one has heard too often and ceased to hear. I said, gazing because he was gazing, following the colour, ‘If it is fallout there’s something horrible about it looking like that.’

  ‘How does it look to you?’

  I couldn’t see any floating lovers or fiddles or cows, out there. ‘Like the background to a huge Victorian landscape. Something with a quotation underneath with lots of references to the Soul and God’s Glory and the Infinite. Something that ought to have a scrolled gilt frame weighing twenty pounds. It’s what my grandmother would have been taught was beautiful, as a child. You know, that style. What’s it got to do with us. And with bombs.’

  ‘It’s a bit picture-postcard, but still.’

  ‘All the dawns and sunsets in all the albums rolled into one. The apotheosis of picture-postcard. Just imagine a colour photograph of that, exhibited in a hundred years’ time. Things are not like that with us at all.’

  The dark was coming now, graining the texture of the lilac space. A sharp star came through like a splinter of glass. Usually when I say something that doesn’t particularly engage his mind, but that he thinks sensible, he will say, ‘You have a point there.’ It doesn’t exactly irritate me; it is one of the gauges in which I read what he thinks of me. When people know each other as well as he and I do, this is what is really taking place all the time, no matter what they are talking about. Never mind whether they’re discussing politics, or gossiping about friends or planning a holiday – the important thing is the constant shifting and maintaining of balance, the endless replaying of the roles each has secretly chosen the other to present, and which the other secretly contrives to appear to fulfil by nature. Even though I know I’m a damned intelligent woman – by far the most intelligent female he’s ever had any sort of dealings with – and that a relationship with a woman of my kind implies the acceptance not only of intellectual equality but also coeval commonsense (none of the patronizing affection towards precocious feminine cleverness) – in spite of this, even when I’m holding up my end in discussion a shade better than he is, there’s a sort of backward glance, in me, at my performance before him. And this corresponds to a hidden expectation from him that he will be intrigued by the quality of a female mind – that mind whose quality is accepted rationally as taken for granted. In Europe last year, arguing about paintings and buildings we saw together, in discussions of various kinds at friends’ dinner tables, in his house or my flat, talking politics as we do most of the time – underneath, he coaxes me, and I show off to him, I coax him and he performs for me.

  While we were talking I was aware, as if standing aside from us both, that this other dialogue of ours was soothingly being taken up. Our speaking voices went on, a bit awkwardly, but, like the changing light in the Son et Lumière performances we saw in France, illuminating, independent of the narration, the real scene of events as it moved from walls to portal to courtyard and window, the light and shadow of the real
happening between us was going on as usual, in silence.

  Then instead of saying, ‘You have a point there,’ Graham said, ‘How would you say things are with us?’

  For a second I took it as going straight to all that we competently avoided, a question about him and me, the lie he had caught me out with on my hands – and I could feel this given away, in my face.

  I did not know what to say.

  But it was a quiet, impersonal demand, the tone of the judge exercising the prerogative of judicial ignorance, not the partisan one of the advocate cross-examining. There was what I can only describe as a power failure between us; the voices went on but the real performance had stopped in darkness.

  I said, ‘Well, I’d find it difficult to define – I mean, how would you describe – what could one say this is the age of? Not in terms of technical achievement, that’s too easy, and it’s not enough about us – about people – is it?’

  ‘Today, for instance.’ He was serious, tentative, sympathetic.

  Yes, this day. This morning I was driving through the veld and it was exactly the veld, the sun, the winter morning of nine years old, for me; for Max. The morning in which our lives were a distant hum in the future, like the planes a distant hum in the sky (there was a big air-force training camp, near my home, during the war). Grow big, have a job, be married, pray to the blond Christ in the white people’s church, give the nanny your old clothes. This same morning and our lives were here and Max had been in prison and was dead and I was not a widow. What happened? That’s what she asked, the old lady, my grandmother. And while I was driving through the veld to see Bobo (Max heard the ducks quacking a conversation he never understood) a man was walking about in space. I said, ‘Graham, what on earth do you think they’ll call it in history?’ and he said, ‘I’ve just read a book that refers to ours as the Late Bourgeois World. How does that appeal to you?’

  I laughed. It went over my skin like wind over water; that feeling you get from a certain combination of words, sometimes. ‘It’s got a nice dying fall. But that’s a political definition, they’re no good.’