Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

Ba has already heard it all before — all he will allow himself to tell — from the others. Same story to Ginnie, Jamie and according to an e-mail from Matthew, much the same in a ‘bloody awful’ call to him. Yes, she is not married, yes, she plays second violin in a symphony orchestra, and yes — she is thirty-five years old. He looks up slowly and he gives his daughter this fact as if he must hold her gaze and she cannot let hers waver; a secret between them. So she feels able to ask him what the others didn’t, perhaps because the enquiry might somehow imply acceptance of the validity of happenstance in a preposterous decision of a sixty-seven-year-old to overturn his life. How did he meet this woman?

He shapes that tight tolerant jaw, now not of disapproval (he has no right to that, in these circumstances) but of hurt resignation to probing: on a plane. On a plane! The daughter cannot show her doubtful surprise; when did he ever travel without the mother? While he continues, feeling himself pressed to it: he went to Cape Town for negotiations with principals from the American company who didn’t have time to come to him up in Pretoria. The orchestra was going to the coast to open a music festival. He found her beside him. They got talking and she kindly offered to arrange a seat for him at the over-subscribed concert. And then? And then? But her poor father, she couldn’t humiliate him, she couldn’t follow him, naked, the outer-inner man she’d never seen, through the months in the woman’s bed beside the violin case.

What are you going to do, she asked.

It’s done.

That’s what he said (the siblings compare notes). And he gave such explanation as he could. Practical. I’ve moved out — but Isabel must have told you. I’ve taken a furnished flat. I’ll leave the number, I’d rather you didn’t call at the office, at present.

And then? What will happen to you, my poor father — but all she spoke out was, So you want to marry this girl. For in comparison with his mate, his wife of forty-two years, his sixty-seven years, she is no more than that.

I’ll never marry again.

Yes, he told the others that, too. Is the vehemence prudence (the huge age difference, for God’s sake: Matthew, from Australia) or is it telling them something about the marriage that produced them, some parental sorrow they weren’t aware of while in the family home, or ignored, too preoccupied with their own hived-off lives to bother with, after.

There’s nothing wrong between Isabel and me, but for a very long time there’s been nothing right, either.

Wishing you every happiness. The wedding gift maxim. Grown apart? Put together mistakenly in the first place — they’re all of them too close to the surface marriage created for them, in self-defence and in protection of them , the children, no doubt, to be able to speculate.

And what is going to happen to our mother, your Isabel?

And then. And then. That concert, after the indigestion of a three-hour lunch and another three hours of business-speak wrangling I had with those jocular sharks from Seattle. Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 following Respighi. I’ve forgotten there’s no comparison between listening to recorded music in a room filled with all the same things — the photographs, the glass, the coffee cup in your hand, the chair that fits you — and hearing music, live. Seeing it, as well, that’s the difference, because acoustically reproduction these days is perfect — I know I used to say it was better than the bother of driving to concerts. Watching the players, how they’re creating what you’re hearing, their movements, their breathing, the expressions of concentration, even the way they sit, sway in obedience to the conductor, he’s a magician transforming their bodies into sound. I don’t think I took particular notice of her. Maybe I did without knowing it, these things are a human mystery, I’ve realised. But that would have been that — she’d told me her name but I didn’t know where she lived, so I wouldn’t even have known where to thank her for the concert reservation — if it hadn’t been that she was on the plane again next day when I was returning home. We were seated in the same row, both aisle seats, separated this time only by that narrow gap we naturally could talk across. About the concert, what it was like to be a musician, people like myself are always curious about artists — she was teasing, saying we regard theirs as a free, undisciplined life compared with being — myself — a businessman, but it was a much more disciplined life than ours — the rehearsals, the performance, the ‘red-eye night-work, endless overtime’ she called it, while we others have regular hours and leisure. We had the freebie drink together and a sort of mock argument about stress, hers, facing an audience and knowing she’d get hell afterwards if she played a wrong note, and mine with the example of the principals from Seattle the day before. The kind of exchange you hear strangers making on a plane, and that I always avoid.

I avoid now talking about her to my children — what can you call sons and daughters who are far from children. I know they think it’s ridiculous — it’s all ridiculous, to them — but I don’t want anyone running around making ‘enquiries’ about her, her life, as if her ‘suitability’ is an issue that has anything to do with them. But of course everything about what I suppose must be called this affair has to do with them because it’s their mother, someone they’ve always seen — will see — as the other half of me. They’ll want to put me together again.

The children (he’s right, what do you call a couple’s grown-up children) often had found weeks go by without meeting one another or getting in touch. Ginnie is a lecturer in the maths department at the university and her husband is a lawyer, their friends are fellow academics and lawyers, with a satisfying link between the two in concerns over the need for a powerful civil society to protect human rights. Their elder son and daughters are almost adult, and they have a late-comer, a four-year-old boy. Ba — she’s barren — Ginnie is the repository of this secret of her childlessness. Ba and her husband live in the city as week-long exiles: from the bush. Carl was manager of a wild-life reserve when she fell in love with him, he now manages a branch of clothing chain stores and she is personal secretary to a stockbroker; every weekend they are away, camping and walking, incommunicado to humans, animal-watching, bird-watching, insect-watching, plant-identifying, returned to the lover-arms of the veld. As Ginnie and Alister have remarked, if affectionately, her sister and brother-in-law are more interested in buck and beetles than in any endangered human species. Jamie — to catch up with him, except for Christmas! He was always all over the place other than where you would expect to find him. And Matthew: he was the childhood and adolescence photographs displayed in the parents’ house, and a commentator’s voice broadcasting a test cricket match from Australia in which recognisable quirks of home pronunciation came and went like the fading and return of an unclear line.

Now they are in touch again as they have not been since a time, times, they wouldn’t remember or would remember differently, each according to a need that made this sibling then seek out that, while avoiding the others.

Ginnie and Ba even meet for lunch. It’s in a piano bar-cum-bistro with deep armchairs and standing lamps which fan a sunset light to the ceiling beneath which you eat from the low table at your knees. A most unlikely place to be chosen by Ba, who picks at the spicy olives and peri-peri cashew nuts as if she were trying some unfamiliar seed come upon in the wild; but she has suggested the place because she and Carl don’t go to restaurants and it’s the one she knows of since her stockbroker asks her to make bookings there for him. When the sisters meet they don’t know where to begin. The weeks go by, when the phone rings and (fairly regularly, duty bound) it’s the father, or (rarely, she’s in a mood when duty is seen to be a farce) it’s the mother, the siblings have a high moment when it could be another announcement — that it is over, he’s back, she’s given his life back to him, the forty-two years. But no, no.