Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

May he survive. That’s the axiom the daughters and sons have, ironically, taken from her. Who is this woman who threatens it?

Her name is Alicia (affected choice on the part of whoever engendered her?), surname Parks (commonplace enough, which explains a certain level of origin, perhaps?). She was something of a prodigy for as long as childhood lasts, but has not fulfilled this promise and has ended up no further than second violinist in a second-best symphony orchestra — so rated by people who really know music. Which the father, poor man, doesn’t, just his CD shelf in the livingroom, for relaxation with his wife on evenings at home. The woman’s career will have impressed him; those who can, play; those who can’t, listen: he and Isabel.

What happened to the man, father of the child? Has their father a rival? Is he a hopeful sign? Or — indeed — is he a threat, a complication in the risk the darling crazy sixty-seven-year-old is taking, next thing he’ll be mixed up in some crime passionnel —but Jamie, captured for drinks at Ginnie’s house, laughs — Daddy-O, right on, the older man has appeal! And Jamie’s the one who does what as youngsters they called ‘picking up stompies’—cigarette butts of information and gossip. The child’s father lives in London, he’s a journalist and he’s said to be a Coloured. So the little boy to whom he must be playing surrogate father is a mixed-blood child, twice or thrice diluted, since the father might be heaven knows what concoction of human variety.

At least that shows this business has brought progress in some way. Ginnie is privately returning to something in her own experience of the parental home only one other sibling (Matthew) happens to know about. The parents always affirmed they were not racist and brought up their children that way. So far as they felt they could without conflict with the law of the time. Ginnie, as a student, had a long love affair with a young Indian who was admitted to study at the white university on a quota. She never could tell the parents. When it came to a daughter or son of their own …

The fact of the child obviously doesn’t matter to him , now. Of course the mother, in her present mood, if she gets to hear …

Ginnie was at a door of the past, opening contiguous to the present. You never know about anything like that. Principles. Look at me. I wear a ribbon in support of no discrimination against AIDS victims, but what if I found the woman who takes care of my kid was HIV positive — would I get rid of her?

Alister, merely a husband among them, had something to say to the siblings. The matter of the child might be an added attraction for him. The rainbow child. Many well-meaning people in the past now want some way to prove in practice the abstract positions they hid in, then. Of course I don’t know your father as well as you do.

His wife had something to add.

Or as we think we do.

Ba did not speak at these family meetings.

She is in a house with her father. The house is something familiar to her but it isn’t either the family home or her own. Or maybe it’s both — dreams can do these things. Just she and her father; she wonders why he’s there in the middle of the day. He says he’s waiting for the arrival of the maid. There’s the tringtring of an old-fashioned bicycle bell, the kind they had on their bikes as children. She looks out the window, he’s standing behind her, and she sees — they see, she’s aware he knows she’s looking — a young and pretty redhead/blonde dismount from a bicycle, smiling. But there are no whites who work as maids in this country.

Ginnie and Ba, not telling anyone else, go to a concert. Seats chosen neither too near nor too far back. Yes, she is there with the violin nestling between jaw and shoulder. Follow white hands doing different intricate things, some fingers depressing strings, those of the other hand folded around the bow. She wears the sort of informal evening dress the other women players in the orchestra wear, not quite a uniform; the equivalent of the not quite black-tie outfits the male players allow themselves — roll-collar shirts and coloured cummerbunds. There’s some sort of fringed shawl slipped off the side of the bowing arm. Apparently the dress is quite sexily décolleté. They’ll verify when the orchestra rises at interval. She is certainly very slim — the left leg stretched gracefully, and there’s a lot of hair piled on top of her head. Not blonde, not redhead. It’s the colour of every second woman’s at present, an unidentifiable brown overlaid with a purplish shine of henna. She rests her bow, plays when summoned by the conductor, and the sisters are summoned to listen to her. They feel she knows they are there, although she doesn’t know them. She’s looking at them although blinded by the stage lights. She’s playing to them.

The palm of the hand.

All that you go through your life (sixty-seven years, how long it’s been) without knowing. Most of it you’ll never suspect you lack and it’s pure chance that you may come upon. An ordinary short flight between one familiar city and another in daily, yearly time. The palm of a hand: that it can be so erotic. Its pads and valleys and lines to trace and kiss; she laughs at me and says they’re lines of fortune, that’s why I’m here with her. The palm that holds enfolds the rod of the bow and it sings. Enfolds holds me.

Matthew mustn’t think he can stay out of it! They send him e-mail letters, despatched by Ginnie but addressing him as from a collective ‘we’—the sisters and their husbands, the younger brother — who expect him to take part in decisions: whatever there is to be done. Matthew writes, I suppose we gave them the general amount of trouble sons and daughters do. The parents, he means. And what is meant by that? What’s that got to do with anything that can be done? What’s he getting at? Is it that it’s the parents’ turn now — for God’s sake, at their, at his age! Or is it that because of their past youth the sons and daughters ought to understand the parents better? All these irrelevances — relevances, who knows — come upon, brought up by the one nice and far-away among the cricket bats and kangaroos. What is there for Matthew to disinter; he was always so uncomplicated — so far as they know, those who grew up close to him in the entanglements of a family; never ran away from anything — unless you count Australia, where he’s made what is widely recognised as a success.

The general amount of trouble. Jamie. And for the parents he’s unlikely ever to be regarded as anything other than troubling. As long as they’re happy , parents say of their engendered adults, swallowing dismay and disappointment. What did the parents really know of what was happening to their young, back then. Ginnie’s Indian; the irony, she sees it now, that it was his parents who found out about the affair and broke it off. Never mind falling in love, that kind of love was called miscegenation in those days, punishable by law, and would have put his studies at risk; his parents planned for him to be a doctor, not a lover — in prison. Ba’s abortion. How he would have anguished over his favourite daughter if he had known. Only Ginnie knows that this botched back-room process is the reason why Ba is childless. No-one else; not Carl. It belongs to a life before Ba found him, her rare and only elect mate, come upon in the bush. It’s unlikely that Jamie has a passing thought (in the reminder of the general amount of trouble they’ve given) for what he arranged for his frantic sister, that time; even as a teenager he had precociously the kind of friends who were used to mutual efforts in getting one another out of all manner of youthful trouble. Yes, it was Jamie — Jamie of all of them — Ba turned to; as it was Jamie — of all of them — her father had turned to in his trouble, now.