Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  That is what is known; in television coverage that really had nothing to show but the pewter skin of the depths, in radio interviews with those few infirm, timid or prudent who had not come down from the hills, and in newspaper accounts of bodies that for some reason the sea rejected, washed up down the coast somewhere.

  But the writer knows something no one else knows; the sea-change of the imagination.

  Now listen, there’s a man who has wanted a certain object (what) all his life. He has a lot of – things – some of which his eye falls upon often, so he must be fond of, some of which he doesn’t notice, deliberately, that he probably shouldn’t have acquired but cannot cast off, there’s an art nouveau lamp he reads by, and above his bedhead a Japanese print, a Hokusai, The Great Wave, he doesn’t really collect oriental stuff, although if it had been on the wall facing him it might have been more than part of the furnishings, it’s been out of sight behind his head for years. All these – things – but not the one.

  He’s a retired man, long divorced, chosen an old but well-appointed villa in the maritime hills as the site from which to turn his back on the assault of the city. A woman from the village cooks and cleans and doesn’t bother him with any other communication. It is a life blessedly freed of excitement, he’s had enough of that kind of disturbance, pleasurable or not, but the sight from his lookout of what could never have happened, never ever have been vouchsafed, is a kind of command. He is one of those who are racing out over the glistening seabed, the past – detritus=treasure, one and the same – stripped bare.

  Like all the other looters with whom he doesn’t mix, has nothing in common, he races from object to object, turning over the shards of painted china, the sculptures created by destruction, abandonment and rust, the brine-vintaged wine casks, a plunged racing motorcycle, a dentist’s chair, his stride landing on disintegrated human ribs and metatarsals he does not identify. But unlike the others, he takes nothing – until: there, ornate with tresses of orange-brown seaweed, stuck fast with nacreous shells and crenellations of red coral, is the object. (A mirror?) It’s as if the impossible is true; he knew that was where it was, beneath the sea, that’s why he didn’t know what it was, could never find it before. It could be revealed only by something that had never happened, the greatest paroxysm of our earth ever measured on the Richter scale.

  He takes it up, the object, the mirror, the sand pours off it, the water that was the only bright glance left to it streams from it, he is taking it back with him, taking possession at last.

  And the great wave comes from behind his bedhead and takes him.

  His name well known in the former regime circles in the capital is not among the survivors. Along with him among the skeletons of the latest victims, with the ancient pirates and fishermen, there are those dropped from planes during the dictatorship so that with the accomplice of the sea they would never be found. Who recognised them, that day, where they lie?

  No carnation or rose floats.

  Full fathom five.

  The Generation Gap

  He 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 email. 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 heartbreak 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 email 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 latecomer, 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 wildlife 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.

  Now they are in touch again as they have not been since a time, times, they wouldn’t remember or would remember differently, each according to a need that made this sibling then seek out that, while avoiding the others.

  Ginnie and Ba even meet for lunch. It’s in a piano bar-cum-bistro with deep armchairs and standing lamps which fan a sunset light to the ceiling beneath which you eat from the low table at your knees. A most unlikely place to be chosen by Ba, who picks at the spicy olives and peri-peri cashew nuts as if she were trying some unfamiliar seed come upon in the wild; but she has suggested the place because she and Carl don’t go to restaurants and it’s the one she knows of since her stockbroker asks her to make bookings there for him. When the sisters meet they don’t know where to begin. The weeks go by, when the phone rings and (fairly regularly, duty bound) it’s the father, or (rarely, she’s in a mood when duty is seen to be a farce) it’s the mother, the siblings have a high moment when it could be another announcement – that it is over, he’s back, she’s given his life back to him, the forty-two years. But no, no.

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