Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— Oh shame, that’s very nice… And the other daughter, that one the last-born, same age like you? — The black woman frowned shrewdly, laying a claim for old, reciprocal responsibility where it was due. — She’s got children?—

— No, no children. She’s married to a waiter in a big hotel in Pretoria. He’s got a good job, Lily’s pleased.—

— Only you’s not getting married, Rosa.—

Ivy hitched her Yorkshirewoman’s wide rump past the black woman to reach up and disconnect the iron. — Get away with you, Regina, stop giving her hell and give her a cup of tea.—

Dick was scrubbing his hands at the outside sink. His face came up divided by the open louvres of the windows. — Tell Clare who’s here.—

There was neither surprise at Rosa’s sudden appearance nor reproach at her neglect of them, from the Terblanches. And they were ready to vanish from her company into another part of their tiny house if a knock or the bark of the old Labrador that had once been a Burger family pet should announce the arrival of another guest — perhaps the plain-clothes man whose charge they were. He would find the first guest alone with their daughter.

— Clare’s washing her hair, she’ll be along.—

Ivy shuffled together papers and newspaper cuttings and dumped them on a chair under a typewriter to weigh them down. Ironed shirts, knitting and cats lay on other chairs, two huge wet pullovers of the kind Ivy had supplied her husband with for many winters were shaped to dry on thicknesses of newspaper. Dick clapped and cats sprang sourly down. Ivy put her hand on her guest’s — He wouldn’t dare if Clare saw him. She’s daft as ever over animals. In her bed every night. Ay…you look well, Rosa. Dick, don’t you think she’s looking better?—

— Since when did she look worse?—

— Flora wants me to throw away all my clothes and buy new ones.—

Ivy cocked her big, wild-haired head. — Oh Flora. Does she, now.—

— You living at her place? — Dick was slightly deaf from working forty years in industrial noise and spoke in a voice pitched to be heard in a machine shop.

— No, no. I see them sometimes.—

— Perhaps William Donaldson will give you a job. — Ivy addressed her husband, taking the opportunity of bringing up tongue-in-cheek, before a third person, something neither would have suggested in private. — He’s going to be retired next year in July, is Dick.—

— I’m four years younger than Lionel. He was twentieth November nineteen-o-five, mmh?—

Regina, with the glance from face to face of one who has lost the room’s attention, brought in and set out the tea-tray.

Rosa’s profile was very like her father’s as she looked down with light eyes hidden, sugaring her cup from the bowl Ivy held in a hand from which a cigarette rippled smoke. — When did you get to know Lionel, then — I thought you were together in Moscow that first time?—

— She means 1928.—

Dick and Ivy’s response to other people was close as if there existed between them a mutual system of cerebral impulses. — I wasn’t interested in the C.P. Soccer mad. And girls. When I was a youngster.—

— We didn’t meet until 1930.—Ivy sugared and stirred his tea and gave it to him.

Rosa had her jaw thrust, jaunty, smiling, the young flattering in unconscious patronage of the past — Girls.—

He nodded, feeling for a spoon with a thick hand pied with scaly pink patches of skin cancer. — It’s stirred. — Ivy’s words issued in smoke as those of comic book characters are carried by a bubble. — He was too young. I was meant to go but Lionel was already in Edinburgh, it was cheaper to send him from there… I’m the one as old as Lionel.—

— Did he take someone along — a girl?—

— Girl! We all had girls.—

But the wife required more female precision in these matters. — What girl?—

— Katya, wasn’t it? David’s mother.—

— Oh Colette. Could have been. I suppose they must have been together by then. The future star of Sadler’s Wells. I don’t know when that affair started up — Dick?—

— Were they married when we met?—

But neither was sure.

— She wrote me a letter. — They knew Rosa meant when her father died. Ivy’s broad alert face, powdered to the strict limit of jowls, relaxed into a coaxing expression of scepticism and expectancy. The woman Rosa had never seen had been materialized by her. — She did? Where has she landed up by now?—

— She heard via Tanzania. From David. She lives in France. The South of France.—

— D’you hear that, Dick? What’d she say in the letter? — Ivy’s lips shaped to lend themselves to the offensive or absurd.

Rosa was odd-man-out in the company of three, one absent, who had known each other too well. She spoke with the flat hesitancy of one who cannot guess what indications her hearers will read in what she is relating. — The usual things. — There had been many letters of sympathy, following one formula or another. But the Terblanches were waiting. Rosa stroked under the hard feral jaw of the cat that treaded her lap and smiled, placing words exactly. — She wrote about here. Well, she said something… ‘It’s strange to live in a country where there are still heroes.’—

Ivy lifted her hair theatrically through the outstretched fingers of both hands, suddenly someone unrecognizable. — About him.—

Dick, commenting, not participating, confirmed hoarsely. — Sounds like her.—

— When I saw the signature it didn’t strike me for a moment. She doesn’t use Lionel’s name.—

— And she calls herself Katya?—

— Ivy, they must have been married already when I met you.—

— You’re right. Ay. I don’t think he’d’ve found it easy, otherwise, with her.—

— Perhaps he wouldn’t’ve asked. — Dick drew his lips in over his teeth, turning on his wife an old man’s bristled jaw and frown.

Rosa contemplated them as a child opens a door on a scene whose actions she cannot interpret. — It is true you didn’t marry without the Party’s consent?—

— Some of us were required not to marry at all. — Dick’s formal, Afrikaans-accented phrasing quoted; he relaxed the grim jaw and smiled her fondly away from matters she shouldn’t bother with.

— Colette Swan was not the wife for Lionel by anyone’s standards. — Ivy thrust out the teapot.

Rosa got up to have her cup refilled. — And she wrote about you, Ivy.—

The nostrils opened pugnaciously, the wattles shook at Dick. — Good god, what could she have to say about me.—

He gave his slow, Afrikaner’s smile. — Wait, man, let’s hear.—

—‘You did what she would have expected.’—

Dick pulled an impressed face and Ivy made it clear she hadn’t listened; there are people whose approval or admiration is as unwelcome as criticism.

— So it was all right for Lionel and my mother to marry?—

— How d’you mean?—

But Dick looked at his wife and she spoke again. — Cathy was right for everything.—

It was not what the girl had asked. — They were approved first, before they married?—

Dick began to giggle a bit to himself at the past. — Hell, it’s not exactly that everyone, I mean it’s not as if…—

— If you’d ever known Colette Swan you wouldn’t talk about her in the same breath as Cathy.—

Like many people who have high blood pressure, Ivy Terblanche’s emotions surfaced impressively; her voice was off-hand but her eyes glittered liquid glances and her big breast rose against abstract-patterned nylon. Lionel Burger once described how, when she was still permitted to speak at public meetings, she ‘circled beneath the discussion and then spouted like some magnificent female whale’.