Nadine Gordimer: Get A Life

Berenice calls as soon as she gets to her advertising agency every morning. Or from her mobile if she's on her way to a working breakfast where she's to outline a campaign to an important client. Berenice . He visualises her by that name, as represented her to him when they first met and like most people tentatively attracted to one another used calls to pursue the attraction between meetings.

This call is supposed to be a substitute for the natural exchange of daily preoccupations and happenings they've had since living together, that's the premise both must keep up. She has to fill the silences by relating what's in progress in her working life in diverting detail as if giving a report to an interested party – another, an intimate kind of client; he has nothing much at all to say.

Yesterday I listened to the whole Fidelio .

This morning?

Maybe the garden.

Well, nice place to read, looks like a lovely clear day. Enjoy!

Some mornings she has as a hang-up conclusion, awkwardly irrelevant, I love you.

Benni , by contrast, comes often and regularly in the afternoons. This is Benni, all right. In her unconventional, gypsy form of business dress and scarves she carries off so well and that he likes to watch her arming herself with when she gets up from their bed to begin a day. He watches her now as they stand in that No-Man's-Land, the safety of the garden, and unbidden, inappropriate, nerves coming alive from some anaesthesia, he has the surging yearning to touch her. Cross the few feet of space between them, where they stand, or where on the chairs from the terrace he's put out they sit, apart, facing each other; feel her under his hand. She has rung at the gate on the intercom, he has pressed the remote control, she has driven up the drive and he has been there, not far, not near, as she gets out of the car, and they stop – each held back. A greeting across the void, laughing, had they forgotten the sheer pleasure in seeing one another? But it has no natural conclusion in touch. This gap she hastens to fill with the things she has brought, more books, clothes, letters – once flowers, but that, both saw, was a mistake, as if he were a sick friend in hospital. Who can say what his existential category really is?

His mother takes him to the hospital for his out-patient monitoring. His father substitutes if the appointments coincide with a court hearing at which she is appearing for a client but he is not as familiar with the medical procedures as she is, which makes her uneasy – one cannot know the bond the unfamiliarity makes, the father and son entering, as two men, the alienation of the one, the way men bond in the traditionally male circumstances of war. Or, in another kind of gender identity, when (vividly again present, in the hospital waiting room) the ten-year-old boy and the father were side by side like this in homage to the physical power of maleness at a rugby game. His father is Adrian, a man: this consciousness has become ignored under the filial relationship taking second place to that with wife and child. Sitting beside him in the nowhere of waiting rooms, the man knows that to look at your woman across space and to be held back from going over to touch her, breathe her, is a castrating frustration.

On the first weekend she brought their child to him, but later visits had to be confined to the three-year-old boy seeing his father from the other side of the iron-barred gate – he could not be stopped from running up to hug round his father's legs, in an open encounter. And then there came the day he flew into a tearful, violent rage, weeping as he clutched the bars and yelling, Daddy, Daddy, Paul , Daddy, Paul . The one called upon had to go away into the house so that the child could be persuaded, in despair, to let go of the quarantine bars. No-one of the adults who had brought him there to visit his father could reach the depth in him that was perhaps sure he would never see his father again.

It was decided not to expose the child to trauma while protecting him from danger he could not be expected to understand. Instead his mother substituted for the sight of him by beginning to talk a great deal about him, when she called, and when she was a visitor at a distance. How their baby (still was that) had had his first swimming lesson (there are many dangers to be anticipated), how cross he'd become when a friend from nursery school came to spend the night and wet the bed, how he'd developed a passion for avocados and would eat a whole one like an apple. Once she brought a crayon drawing – he said it's for you. There's the home every child draws, high walls, two windows, door, steep roof. A few strokes as birds in the sky. A free-floating flower with trailing kite-stems. His father had once bought a Chinese paper dragon and taken him out to fly it one Saturday afternoon but he was too young to understand how to control it. To the left and in the foreground, reaching up the picture higher than the house, a man with stick arms but carefully outlined pants, Chaplin-splayed feet, has a big head and huge bared teeth. Greeting? Or anger.

Primrose called to him at his breakfast, Why Nickie doesn't come to see his daddy no more? And the wail: Oh shame. But you must tell, you coming back soon, children don't think time like we do.

He had the impulse to bring the drawing from his bedside, where he had avoided looking at it since placing it where it ought to be, and he held it up for her to see from the distance of the kitchen door.

Adrian and Lyndsay manage the weekends well. It has never needed to be discussed, goes without saying that they refuse to keep their distance from him; even so far as that would be possible, sharing what's become the family house again. The only exception is that Lyndsay, the one who handles what touches him intimately, clothes and bedding, resists the move to follow him into his room and give him the goodnight kiss that a mother is entitled to, from childhood surely for all his life – the two men wouldn't be aware of this need. She herself does not know if she resists out of fear. Is there some sort of parenthesis in the mind: how can you fear your own child?

Neither Lyndsay nor Adrian plays any organised sport – Adrian likes to remark with pretended ruefulness, How can I retire, as I don't play golf? A vision of an eternity as an endless stretch of greens, tees, sand pits, small flags. He's always been a much diverted spectator of rugby, however, since he played scrum half in student days; on Saturdays he plans to pass the afternoon for his son, turning on the TV with the enquiring invitation glance to be joined in the living-room.

The form of exercise Adrian and Lyndsay take is long walks, ordinarily they would go off into the bush somewhere at least once a month, spend a weekend at some small resort from which they could cover trails with the exuberant dog, its sense of freedom matched by theirs. Paul knows, come Saturday-Sunday they would be doing what leisure best meant to them, and besides was essential for healthy people getting older. Living with a small child of his own two generations removed, he's been used to thinking of them as old, but in these days close in this house, a way one or the other moved, a reaction between them, a gesture or turn of phrase either used, returned them from individuals to what they had been before. Parents. He can't tell them, as he wishes, that they could go off and enjoy their walk in the country, he knows from living with Benni how, never mind the exercise, you have the need to do some things together, surely even in a marriage as long as theirs… how long must it be?… doesn't remember. He'll be all right. He's learning to be alone in his new way just as he and his sisters learnt in the old way when parents were absent from this house. But he can't raise the subject because logic of this kind brings up the unimaginable state: why is he here with them, at all. Adrian and Lyndsay, parents who are now also the new devout missionaries, no care possible for self, in this private place of asylum, taking care of the lit-up leper.