The Late Bourgeois World by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online

out-talk the other man’s, and there they are boozing together at the golf club. It terrifies me more than the idea of the judge. I like to think that when I go to a lawyer, he’s as tied up in my affairs as I am myself.’
    We both laughed; on ground we’d gone over before.
    â€˜But you know that wouldn’t do at all, he’d be giving very bad counsel if he were to be. You’re too emotional.’
    I thought of how we’d just talked of Max’s death. Honesty sounds callous; so that one is almost ashamed of it.
    â€˜Booker doesn’t know we’re going to appeal, anyway,’ he teased me drily. ‘I’ll get my own back in court if not on the green. I’m going to do somework this afternoon, that is, if I don’t sleep. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to resist a sleep. That chair you made me buy.’ In Denmark he ordered the beautiful leather furniture they make there, and we threw out the ugly stuff his wife must have thought suitable for a ‘gentleman’s study’. There’s a chair you could sleep the whole night in, even make love in, not that he ever would. Yesterday after the servant had taken the coffee away, although the mood for love-making came as we sat in front of the fire, we went into his bedroom as usual. What nonsense it is to write of the ‘disembodied’ voice on the telephone; all of Graham was there as he talked commonplaces. Last night he was held in my body a long time.
    The call box bleeped at his end and I said something again about the flowers, before we hung up. Once alone, I didn’t feel the slightest inclination to go out, after all; I felt, on the contrary, a relief. I brought the water in the vase to the right level. I threw the paper and cellophane in the kitchen bin and put the food I’d bought into the refrigerator. I opened the creaking joints of my plastic and aluminium chair and sat on the balcony in the sun, smoking. Many of the demands one makes on other people are nothing but nervous habit, like reaching for a cigarette. That’s something for me to remember, if I were ever to think of marrying again. I don’t think I’ll marry again. But I catch myselfspeaking of Max as my ‘first husband’; which sounds as if I expect to have another. Well, at thirty, one can’t be too sure of what one may still do.
    At eighteen I was quite sure, of course. I would be married and have a baby. This future had come out to meet me as expected, though perhaps sooner. Max might not have been the man according to specifications, but the situation, deep in my subconscious, matched the pattern I’d been given to go by. The concept of marriage as shelter remained with me, even if it were only to be shelter from parents and their ways. There, whatever the walls were made of, I should live a woman’s life, which was? A life lived among women like my mother, attached to a man like my father. But the trouble is that there are not more men like my father – in the sense that the sort of man my father is doesn’t represent to me, in my world, what it did to my mother in hers. I was brought up to live among women, as middle-class women with their shopping and social and household concerns comfortably do, but I have to live among men. Most of what there was to learn from my family and background has turned out to be hopelessly obsolete, for me.
    Graham and I have known each other since the trial. I was already divorced from Max, but there was no one else to do anything, that’s how I met Graham, I was told he was the right man for thecase. As it happened he couldn’t take the brief, in the end it was given over to someone else, but he remained interested and afterwards, when Max was in prison, he helped me make various applications on Max’s behalf. Graham didn’t ask me any questions, he was like one of those doctors with whom you feel that he knows everything about you,