The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

— I love my country deeply and I am heart-broken at having to leave. But the highly-respectable company lawyers employed and the contacts with the British government implored for a foreign passport to get away! The intelligent-stupid face so indignant after police interrogation; shit-scared. What did they expect?
    — You’ve bought that farm! —
    - Come out to celebrate with me. —
    — Where? —
    Not yet the house; but soon, soon there. — Wherever you like. The Carlton. —
    — Oh God, no. Not champagne and smoked salmon. —
    -An Italian place? —
    — No, no. Parma ham and melon. —
    — All right, you don’t like restaurants. —
    — We can eat here. Better than those lousy expensive places where you go. I prefer my own cooking. But you must bring wine, I’ve got nothing worthy of celebrating your farm. -
    - My latest property deal. — It was part of the tone of their getting together for him to guy her attitude towards him, in his turn to assume her assumptions.
    Where she lived looked inside as he would have thought, glimpsing it once from the front door when he fetched her for that lunch. A large secretive, overgrown garden and small rooms with books and her husband’s family furniture in need of repair. Native pots. Leftist newspapers. She stopped him sitting in a chair that could take light people only. The whisky was low because her husband was ‘on loan’ to an Australian university for linguistic research.
    - Dusty subject, Bushmen and aborigines. Deserts you have to go to, to find them, the whole thing’s dry, from the past. I’m more interested in people who aren’t just about safely extinct. -
    He was always good at understanding what women really were saying to him when they were talking about their husbands.
    - People with a future. If I had your money —
    They laughed together across the table. A funny thing, the simple pretty ones disintegrate when they drink, the clever handsome ones become more beautiful, their sex comes to the surface. She shone, on wine; not the way a woman has a shiny nose, but like one of those satiny stone eggs, striped brown agate that come from the desert back where he was a child: warmed in armpit or groin, breathed on by the body’s heat, when the bloom was rubbed off again against the leg of his khaki shorts a graining of alluvial light would come up beneath the glassy brown skin. — You would build a school for the piccanins. —
    - A charity school on your farm? A Mehring Mission? Not on your life! —
    But of course: it would be ‘perpetuating the system’. For Christ’s sake! He should have had more sense than to give her the opening. But - then - what did it matter. They were drinking, and laughing at everything. — You’re the sort who has too much . You’ve brought too much wine. - She was very natural, she belched behind a frown and tightened lips, she said what she thought.
    A little brass chandelier suspended over the table held candles that were already burned half-way down before they were lit. She despised elegance. They lasted exactly through the meal, to the coffee. He was watching them; through everything he said and that was being said by both of them. There was a little brass handbell with the figure of a stork-like bird to shake it by, and the meal was punctuated by stages when she tinkled it to summon the servant, but the candles kept an unbroken kind of time. He witnessed how they burned out, one by one. Each flame was a yellow lotus with a brownish shape exactly like it, within it. Within that, at the base, was the same shape, still smaller, and incandescent blue. The blue rests on the wick. When the wax reaches the brass lip of the holder, the wick suddenly collapses over it. It sticks out sideways, as if gasping for air. The flame snuffs; then puffs into life again (no brown kernel - the wick is buried in wax - just the yellow aureole and the blue base, intenser blue now). Out; and then silently exploding into flame (she