Free Get A Life by Nadine Gordimer Page A

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.
    She came home from these absences unlike any other and went back zestfully to the briefs awaiting at Chambers. (How was the last meeting – the Japanese, wasn't it…? Australians. Oh nothing we don't already know.) She and Adrian made love in the compact of celebration of her being home. Wherever she had been in another persona. The lovemaking with the other had improved her own advances and responses. That is how unaccountable human relationships are. She saw that she pleasured Adrian as she believed she had not done quite so expertly before. That must be what some expert prostitutes – sex workers they're called now – acquire. Adrian must have attributed this to the deprivations of absence.
    The man managed to get himself invited back to her country, her city, to teach a course of international jurisprudence at a university. They met in afternoons at motels in nearby small towns. His teaching programme was not onerous, he could have been spending hours in the library on private research in Roman Dutch Law as an attribute of colonialism he was known to be doing, on the spot, as it were. Her secretary at Chambers informed callers she was out at a meeting with a client. He encountered the husband and wife at gatherings in her colleagues' houses. It would have looked strange if he had never been invited, as he was on a previous visit, to their house; once again, he came to dinner among other guests. He noticed on a table in this livingroom where the old dog who is at least some company for the quarantined son now lies on a sofa, several tomes and coffee-table books on archaeology. And host Adrian noticed his casual interest, came up to talk to him. A pleasant exchange. Would you like to visit one of the sites? I could arrange for you… Oh Cradle of Man and all that… I should take advantage while I'm here – I must see if I can make some time, yes.
    Of course he did not. Ordinary, unavoidable social intercourse is part of the code, one doesn't go beyond it.
    But it was inevitable that what was contingent in the Seychelles or Bonn would come too close to be managed without error, a slip of vigilance in the familiar complacency provided by home. They were going to the theatre, the couple, and she had come back from a motel and left an open straw