Loot by Nadine Gordimer

have been intended as some sort of spacious dressing-room, adjunct to other quarters behind a second door which was blocked by a bed. There were blankets and pillows, no sheets. But she had no provision of pyjamas, nightthings, either; she was sitting on the bed a moment, contemplating this, the door to the passage still open, when he looked in to see if she wanted anything. She stood up to reassure, no, no, I’m fine, moving a few steps towards him to demonstrate self-sufficiency. He met her and whether she presented herself first or his arms went around her first wasn’t clear; the embrace became long, as if occupying one of his silences. His mouth moved from hers over her face and neck and his hands took her breasts. When they were naked he left her briefly without a word from either and came back into the room with the condom concealed in his hand as he might carry a ballot paper in a parliamentary process. On the bed that seemed to belong to nobody the torso revealed beside the faulty irrigation pump came down on her fulfilling all its promise. Sometime between the pleasuring, this man of few words, in his new guise, spoke her name as a lover does.—Roberta … Like a boy’s name, why did they call you …——Because they’d wanted a boy.—And after a moment, a breathy half-laugh against his neck:—Why’d they call you Gladwell. Same thing? Wanted you to be something else. Make you a white Englishman.—
    At six in the morning the driver-bodyguard had already brought the car round to the terrace, ready to go. He showed no sign of his night’s debauch. She was to wonder some time afterwards if he really had been drunk. Or had been given instruction
that he was; but then who could measure the unexpressed will, hers as well as her host’s, that was ready for the pretext.
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    People in official positions, men and women with a public persona know how to accommodate officially unsuitable private circumstances for some sort of decorum within these positions and personae. Even someone with as low a level of official and public persona as Administrator’s Assistant in an international aid agency knows this; along with computer competency and the protocols of tact and diplomacy in relations with the recipient country; another unspoken code. Aid personnel are not permitted to make personal attachments to local individuals on the premise that these might influence aid decisions; if they do indulge in such attachments—and they did—they are trusted to honour the Agency’s objective integrity by following the rules of discretion on both sides—the individual’s in exchange for the Agency’s blind eye. For members of Government of course the circumstance is taken for granted—a man or woman in high office would be expected to have along with a luxury car and security guards, some woman, some man, for relaxation; faces outside the official portraits at home with the family.
    The official car of the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs was often parked in the yard behind the house assigned by the Agency to the Administrator’s Assistant. The driver and security guards sat in Tomasi’s kitchen as habitués unremarked as any of his other friends. They might be called out and dismissed by their charge, the Deputy-Director, to leave the car and find their way home, return in the morning. Somehow though neither he nor she in their new-found rapport had to speak of it, neither
would make love with the men talking and laughing in the kitchen.
    She had only once before had a love affair abroad on a tour of duty, brief and in Europe in an hotel where the man arranged a room under a name other than his own (which the receptionist’s eyes made clear was well-known). The man’s wife was away and it was apparently his code of marital honour not to take a woman home in her convenient absence. But here, no doubt, there was the Deputy-Director’s