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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

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BOOK: Loot
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Y
ou remember; we were coming from a conference in that city and I had just noticed we were near the street, the block where the old friends lived. I was thinking—about to say to you—we should drop in, it's been such a long time, we'll be a real surprise, back here again. There were so many people from so many ages; so many periods, approaching us on that London street; in these ancient European cities they are all there in the gait, the shapes of noses and eyes and jowls, the elegant boots and plodding sandals, Shakespeare's audiences, Waterloo's veterans, comportment of the bowler-hatted past, slippered advance of the Oriental counter-immigration from the colonial era, heads of punk-purple-and-green striped hair in recall of 60s Flower Children, androgynous young shuffling in drug daze, icons of the present; black faces that could be the indelible after-image left behind, on the return to Africa by our political exiles. All these, recognisable but not known; coming at us, coming at us. And then he was singled out, for me, they shouldered around him on the pavement but he was directed straight towards us. His paper carrier with the name of a speciality shop, his white curls like suds over thick earlobes—just the way he always was, returning from his pilgrimage to buy mangoes or a bottle of wine from the right slope of a small French vineyard. I saw him.
Wasn't it lovely? Because it
was not
that everything changes. His image was him: the same.
We did go back to that Kensington flat with him? Didn't we? Its watercolours of Tuscan landscapes, engravings of early Cape Town, bold impasto oils by South African black painters he used to discover, music cassettes spilled about, the journals and books to be cleared off the sofa so you could sit. Christ! he said, this old unbeliever, where the hell have you been? People don't write letters any more. We might all have been dead for all we've heard of each other. He railed against whatever conservative government it was (maybe still Thatcher). He, who had left the Party after a visit to the old Soviet Union in the Fifties when he was taken round collective pig farms. But I was thinking—perhaps only thinking now—we all have our point of no return in political loyalty, and the stink of pigs is as good as, say, the disillusion of corruption. He was once detained, back home in the old South Africa, he had paid his dues, earned his entitlement to defect, I suppose, however we might have viewed the pretext.
You don't remember what we talked about? Neither do I. Not really. There he still is, walking out of the weave of people; for us. The apartment: well, as we knew it. But she didn't appear. No. After so long, can one ask … ? Maybe asleep, she often said she was an owl, not a lark, liked to lie late. If she's gone—died—or divorced? They've had their contingent loves, that's known. And not only the young have sexual freedom, people find new sexual partners at any age at all. We must wait for him to say something.
But no, he didn't. There are no flowers in the room; she always had majestic vases of blooms and leaves.
So we didn't need any other evidence.
Not there.
But perhaps she was just too busy to buy any flowers that day and he had forgotten her request and gone his usual route to pursue the fresh halibut or the mangoes or the restricted cultivar of a wine?
Will we ever know the significance of apparent trivial forgetfulness, what's ignored, in anyone's life—keys to stages a relationship is passing through. You'll have to invent them. I can't help you. Because I couldn't ask him. Her name didn't come up at all, did it? That close couple, politically involved, risking themselves, never a policy disagreement between them, a stance in total solidarity, together, over the years. Admirable, d'you remember! One commitment, one mind—he always said: we are convinced, we declare ourselves—it was—enviable. Yes.
She didn't have to confirm. No? Ever. Did she?
He forgot the flowers, followed the quest for fish and wine. She's not here, or if she is—
So that's how it always really was.
He
made
the opinions, created the ‘we', set the itinerary of the political quests. So it didn't—doesn't matter whether she's mentioned or not, does it.
You are, I am, because we have each our opinions. We exist.
Great thought comes to me, eh.
Oh but you do at least remember that we did decide to drop by, having seen him come, known, old friend out of the procession of all the unknown from everywhere who have lived in exile in London. Simply polite to stop by, one forgets old friends too easily. It's a building unaffected by the decline of the borough in this section. Mirrors in the entrance and the old lift behind its screen of wrought-iron scrolls. Number 23, it was on the second floor with the dove-grey door and brass knocker in the
form of a graceful hand. It struck the wood discreetly. Their souvenirs from France were more decorative than effective, and as nobody responded, we pressed the bell. Ringing, ringing, questioning through the rooms we knew. It was a woman who opened the door; some woman; not her. The woman heard his name. She said, Mr S———died four years ago, my husband bought the flat then.
 
If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real?
Writing it down.
H
e was the one told: James, the youngest of them. The father to the son—and it was Jamie, with whom he'd never got on since Jamie was a kid; Jamie who ran away when he was adolescent, was brought back resentful, nothing between them but a turned-aside head (the boy's) and the tight tolerant jaw of suppressed disapproval (the father's). Jamie who is doing—what was it now? Running a cybersurfers' restaurant with a friend, that's the latest, he's done so many things but the consensus in the family is that he's the one who's done nothing with his life. His brother and sisters love him but see it as a waste: of charm and some kind of ill-defined talent, sensed but not directed in any of the ways they recognise.
So it was from Jamie that they received the
announcement.
The father had it conveyed by Jamie to them—Virginia, Barbara, and Matthew called at some unearthly hour in Australia. The father has left the mother.
A husband leaves his wife. It is one of the most unexceptional of events. The father has left the mother: that is a completely different version, their version.
A husband leaves his wife for another woman. Of course. Their father, their affectionate, loyal, considerate father,
announces
, just like that: he has left their mother for another woman. Inconceivable.
And to have chosen, of all of them, the younger brother as confidant, confessor, messenger—whatever the reasoning was?
They talked to each other on the telephone, calls those first few days frustratingly blocked while numbers were being dialled simultaneously and the occupied whine sounded on and on. Matthew in Brisbane sent an e-mail. They got together in Barbara's house—his Ba, his favourite. Even Jamie appeared, summoned—for an explanation he could not give.
Why should I ask why, how?
Or would not give.
He
must have said something beyond this announcement; but no. And Jamie had to get back to the bar nook and the espresso machine, leave them to it with his archaic smile of irresponsible comfort in any situation.
And suddenly, from the door—We're all grown up now. Even he.
It was established that no-one had heard from the mother. Ginnie had called her and waited to see if she would say anything, but she chatted about the grandchildren and the progress of a friend she had been visiting in hospital. Not a word. Perhaps she doesn't know. But even if he kept the affair somehow secret from her until now, he would hardly ‘inform' his children before telling his wife of a decision to abandon her.
Perhaps she thinks we don't know.
No, can't you see—she doesn't want us to know because she thinks he'll come back, and we don't need ever to know. A private thing. As Jamie said.
That's ridiculous, she's embarrassed, ashamed, I don't know what—humiliated at the idea of us …
Ginnie had to intervene as chairperson to restore clarity out of the spurting criss-cross of sibling voices. Now what do we do? What are we talking about: are we going to try and change his mind? Talk some sense into him. Are we going to go to her?
We must. First of all.
Then Ba should go.
One would have thought Ba was the child he would have turned to. She said nothing, stirred in her chair and took a gulp of gin-and-tonic with a pull of lip muscles at its kick. There was no need to ask, why me, because she's her Daddy's favourite, she's closest to him, the one best to understand if anyone can, what has led him to do what he has done—to himself, to their mother.
And the woman? The voices rise as a temperature of the room, what about the woman? Anybody have any idea of who she might be. None of those wives in their circle of friends—it's Alister, Ginnie's husband, considering—Just look at them. Your poor dad.
But where did he and she ever go that he'd meet anyone new?
Well,
she'll
know who it is. Ba will be told.
Nothing sure about that.
As the youngest of them said, they're all grown up, there are two among the three present (and that's not counting sports commentator Matthew in Brisbane) who know how affairs may be and are concealed; it's only if they take the place of the marriage that they have to be revealed.
 
Sick. That's what it is. He's sick.
Ba—all of them anticipating for Ba to deal with the mother—expected tears and heart-break to burst the conventions that
protect the intimacy of parents' marriage from their sons and daughters. But there are no tears.
Derision and scorn, from their mother become the discarded wife. Indeed she knows who the woman is. A pause. As if the daughter, not the mother, were the one who must prepare herself.
She's exactly your age, Ba.
And the effect is what the mother must have counted on as part of the kind of triumph she has set herself to make of the disaster, deflecting it to the father. The woman has a child, never been married. Do? Plays the fiddle in an orchestra. How and where he found her, God only knows—you know we never go to concerts, he has his CD collection here in this room. Everything's been just as usual, while it's been going on—he says, very exact—for eight months. So when he finally had the courage to come out with it, I told him, eight months after forty-two years, you've made your choice. May he survive it.
When I said (Ba is reporting), doesn't sound as if it will work for him, it's just an episode, something he's never tried, never done, a missing experience, he'll come back to his life (of course, that would be the way Ba would put it),
she
said—I won't give it back to him. I can't tell you what she's like. It's as if the place they were in together—not just the house—is barricaded. She's in there, guns cocked.
What can they do for her, their mother, who doesn't want sympathy, doesn't want reconciliation brokered even if it were to be possible, doesn't want the healing of their love, any kind of love, if the love of forty-two years doesn't exist.
 
His Ba offers to bring the three available of his sons and daughters together again to meet him at her house, but he tells her he
would rather ‘spend some time' with each separately. She is the last he comes to and his presence is strange, both to him and to her. How can it be otherwise? When he sleeps with the woman, she could have been his daughter. It's as if something forbidden has happened between him and his favourite child. Something unspeakable exists.
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.
BOOK: Loot
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