Free Get A Life by Nadine Gordimer

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