Get A Life

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 di

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 Bo

So that was a whole new section and paragraph thereof to be added to the code.

He had said nothing when she came into their bedroom brushing her newly-washed red hair he always found so beautiful. They drove to the theatre, he seemed tired and they were comfortably quiet together. They chatted with acquaintances met in the foyer. During the performance she turned to whisper a remark to him and in the dark saw something that set her heart thudding out of rhythm with some sort of premonitory fear. A tear caught the light from the stage on his cheek screwed in anguish.

Anger battled with disbelief in the days, weeks that followed. And pain. Pain has to be managed. He asked, he demanded, who the man was. No-one you know. He guessed, was it -

No-one you know.

This one or that among her lawyer colleagues, their mutual friends -

No-one you know.

He did not accuse her, she did not defend herself; he did not give the ultimatum, end this or end us. He could not end Them, and she could not end Them.

He bore his pain and she bore his pain and anger.

The man went back where he came from. She continued for four years to go to conferences around the world. She was very successful in her profession. How was Adrian to know when there were conferences and when there were not. He was no part of the legal fraternity/sorority cognisant with such opportunities.

These are the facts.

Facts are what constitutes evidence; they do not go further than that.

I have to tell you something. The affair is over.

I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.

Case closed.

Fifteen years lived since then. In closeness and warmth, unable to do without one another. Never, as the meaningful common phrase goes, looked at another man, and Adrian knew that. As for him – he is the swan who mates for life, he'd had his contingent loves before marriage; they were differently contingent, in the sense of to the real one that was coming. Only once there was an impulse to speak – say, forgive me; a moment of ill-advised weakness occasioned by some passing shakiness in the family, bringing the parents particularly close – one of the girls in trouble, wasn't ever the boy.

Perhaps he would have been amazed to be reminded, confronted, the eyes would have gone black with intensity, resounding the statement, I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving. And there they were living fifteen good years as if what she wanted forgiveness for, never was. Who had made that possible; he: having the i

A state of existence. Unimaginable. Because her son, belonging to the historical continuity, brings a state of existence, his, before her days and nights, there returns a chapter not written, included, that surely ca

Forget so much, what a blessing the electronic notebook gadget when listening to long-winded witnesses, and how extraordinary that total recall of four erased years ca

– Adrian. – The fearful loss of control in her voice must have brought a certainty: this was a time when she was with the man. Some months had passed since there had been one of her professionally-required absences (Lyndsay has a case in Namibia, your mother's in Toronto for a week).