Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

The movers came to take the furniture to be sold. She half-thought of inheriting the bed, it would be luxurious to flop diagonally across its generosity; but you wouldn’t be able to get it past the bedroom door, in her small flat. When the men had departed with their loads there were pale shapes on the floors where everything had stood. She opened windows to let out the dust, the special atmosphere of an occupation like the air of a cave, and turning back suddenly saw something had been left behind. A couple of empty boxes, the cardboard ones of supermarket delivery. Irritated, she went to gather them; one wasn’t empty. It seemed to be filled with letters. What makes you keep some letters and crumple others for the bin. In her own comparatively short life she’d thrown away giggly schoolgirl stuff, sexy propositions scribbled on the back of menus, once naïvely found flattering, polite letters of rejection in response to a job beyond her qualifications she had applied for — a salutary lesson on what her set called the Real World. This box apparently contained memorabilia different from the other stuff already dealt with. The envelopes had the look of personal letters. Hand-addressed, without printed logos of business, bank. Did Laila have a personal life at all that wasn’t her family-the-theatre? One child, daughter of a divorced marriage, hardly counts as ‘family’.

Charlotte — that was the identity she had in any context of her mother — sifted over the envelopes. If her mother did have a personal life it was not a material possession to be disposed of like garments taken on and off; a personal life can’t be ‘left to’ a daughter, a beneficiary in a will. Whatever letters Laila chose to keep were still hers; just quietly burn them, as Laila herself was consumed, to join her. They say (read somewhere) nothing no-one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space — atoms infinitely minute beyond conception of existence are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time. Just as she had noticed this one box that was not empty, as she shook it so that the contents would settle and not spill when lifted, she noticed some loose sheets of writing paper face-down. Not held in the privacy of an envelope. She picked them out face-up. Her father’s handwriting. More deliberately formed than Charlie knew it, what was the date at the top of the page under the address of the house she remembered as home when she was a small girl. A date twenty-four years back — of course his handwriting had changed a bit, it does with different stages in one’s life. His Charlie is twenty-eight, so she would have been four years old when he wrote the date, that’s about right, must have been just before the divorce and her move to a new home with Laila.

The letter is formally addressed on the upper left-hand side of the paper to a firm of lawyers, Kaplan McLeod & Partners, and directed to one of them Dear Hamish . Why on earth would Laila want to keep from a dead marriage the sort of business letter a neurologist might have to write on some question of a car accident maybe or non-payment of some patient’s consultation fee or surgery charges. (As if her father’s medical and human ethics would ever lead him to this last…) The pages must have got mixed up with the other, personal material at some time. Laila and Charlotte changed apartments frequently during Charlotte’s childhood and adolescence.

The letter is marked ‘Copy’.

‘My wife Laila de Morne is an actress and in the course of pursuing her career has moved in a circle independent of one shared by a couple in marriage. I have always encouraged her to take the opportunities, through contacts she might make, to further her talent. She is a very attractive woman and it was obvious to me that I should have to accept there would be men, certainly among her fellow actors, who would want to be more than admirers. But while she enjoyed the attention, sometimes responded with the general kind of social flirtation, I had no reason to see this as more than natural pleasure in her own looks and talents. She would make fun of these admirers, privately, to me, sharp remarks on their appearance, their pretentions and if they were actors, directors or playwrights, the quality of their work. I knew I had not married a woman who would want to stay home and nurse babies, but from time to time she would bring up the subject, we ought to have a son, she said, for me. Then she would get a new part in a play and this was understandably postponed. After a successful start her career was however not advancing to her expectations, she had not succeeded in getting several roles she had confidently anticipated. She came home elated one night and told me she had a small part in a play accepted for performance overseas in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She had been selected because the leading actor himself, Rendall Harris, had told the casting director she was the most talented of young women in the theatre group. I was happy for her and we gave a farewell party in our house the night before the cast left for the United Kingdom. After Edinburgh she spent some time in London, calling to say how wonderful and necessary it was for her to experience what was happening in theatre there and, I gathered, trying her luck in auditions. Apparently unsuccessfully.

Perhaps she intended not to come back. She did. A few weeks later she told me she had just been to a gynaecologist and confirmed that she was pregnant. I was moved. I took the unlikely luck of conception — I’d assumed when we made love the night of the party she’d taken the usual precautions, we weren’t drunk even if she was triumphant — as a symbol of what would be a change in our perhaps unsuitable marriage. I am a medical specialist, neurological surgeon.

When the child was born it looked like any other red-faced infant but after several months everyone was remarking how the little girl was the image of Laila, the mother. It was one day, a Saturday afternoon when she was kicking and flinging her arms athletically, we were admiring our baby’s progress, her beauty, and I joked “Lucky she doesn’t look like me” that my wife picked her up, away, and told me “She’s not your child.” She’d met someone in Edinburgh. I interrupted with angry questions. No, she prevaricated, all right, London, the affair began in London. The leading actor who had insisted on her playing the small part introduced her to someone there. A few days later she told: it was not “someone” it was the leading actor. He was the father of our girl child. She told this to other people, our friends, as through the press it became news that the actor Rendall Harris was making a big name for himself in plays by Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams.

I couldn’t decide what to believe. I even consulted a colleague in the medical profession about the precise variations in the period of gestation in relation to birth. Apparently it was possible that the conception could have taken place with me, or with the other man a few days before, or after, intercourse with me. There never was any intention expressed by Laila that she would take the child and make her life with the man. She was too proud to let anyone know that the fact probably was that he didn’t want her or the supposed progeny of one of his affairs.

Laila has devoted herself to her acting career and as a result the role of a father has of necessity led to a closer relation than customary with the care of the small girl, now four years old. I am devoted to her and can produce witnesses to the conviction that she would be happiest in my custody.

I hope this is adequate. Let me know if anything more is needed, or if there is too much detail. I’m accustomed to writing reports in medical jargon and thought this should be very different. I don’t suppose I’ve a hope in hell of getting Charlie, Laila will put all her dramatic skills into swearing she isn’t mine.’