Free The Late Bourgeois World by Nadine Gordimer

came from about twenty different tribes and could scarcely understand English anyway. But there’d been some fiddle in the State Department – that’s clear – and she wasn’t the one who was supposed to be there, at all. The girls weren’t learning a thing, but old Alongi Senga –’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘– Senga, Minister of Education, d’y’know, stupid old bastard, MatthewOchinua says they say all he wants to do is inspect high schools so’s he can pinch the boys’ bottoms. Anyway, he’d had a row with the Field Service people –’ Most of the stories ended with a shrug of the breasts and the big face gazing away, as if she had just discovered them, at her tiny hands with their little shields of bitten-down nail pressed into the plump pad of each finger: ‘So that was that …’ ‘So I was off …’
    She made herself useful doing some typing for Max and spent a lot of time getting people out of what she called ‘messes’ – mostly the aftermath of parties she went to – taking home in her little borrowed car the corpses that piled up, staying the night with girls whose men had gone off with someone else. She patched the lining of Spears’ raincoat and drove him on his complicated errands. There was the night I got up and found her dressed as if for a picnic, carrying a spray gun. ‘Going slogan-painting,’ she said. She went off with a tiny torch to wait to be picked up by whomever it was she was working with. I went back to bed and told Max. ‘A midnight feast for Sunnybunny! O wacko!’ he said. The absurd play on her name was his invention; he and Spears treated her with the comradely mock-flirtatiousness that men show towards unattractive girls. I said, ‘Spears shouldn’t tease her, it’ll set her after him. She worships the two of you.’ ‘Why onearth not? Do Spears no harm, and she needs a man, our Sunbun.’
    She was always urging us to go to parties with her, but these were the parties where white liberals and black tarts and toughs went for what each could get out of the other. It surprised me that Max, once or twice, seemed willing to go. The work he and Spears were doing was going badly; Max was finding Spears evasive. Yet it became a sort of craze for the three of them – Max, Spears and Sunbun – to appear at these parties as a weird trio. I dropped out because I couldn’t last till three in the morning without drinking too much, and if I drank too much I couldn’t work next day; if Max and Spears couldn’t get on with their work, then, at least the parties provided a reason.
    Often when I came home from the laboratory Max would be sitting waiting; punishing Spears with his waiting as a child believes he is punishing the grown-up who is not even aware of being the object of resentment. When Bobo’s voice rose in the kitchen, or shrieked in the bath, Max gave me one of his seizing looks. The calm of white coats and routine work, life apprehended as a neat smear under a microscope, came from me like the bar on the breath of a drunkard.
    Felicity used to hover, importantly self-effacing. ‘I was desperate, d’y’know, he hasn’t turned upall day. I made some excuse to go out and scout around but no one knew where he was.’ She spoke to me out of Max’s earshot, as if he must not hear his condition discussed. Then Spears would arrive, and the casual tone of his excuses and apologies was not altered, whether Max was angry and sulky, or whether he suddenly was in a warm good mood and behaved as though Spears had not been expected until that particular moment. One night when this happened – the arrival of Spears at long last, and a quick rise in Max’s mood – Max was moving about the room like a cork caught up off the sand by the tide, opening beer, offering cheese on the point of a knife, talking,