Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  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 w
ild-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.

  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?

  Her name is Alicia (affected choice on the part of whoever engendered her?), surname Parks (commonplace enough, which explains a certain level of origin, perhaps?). She was something of a prodigy for as long as childhood lasts, but has not fulfilled this promise and has ended up no further than second violinist in a second-best symphony orchestra—so rated by people who really know music. Which the father, poor man, doesn’t, just his CD shelf in the livingroom, for relaxation with his wife on evenings at home. The woman’s career will have impressed him; those who can, play; those who can’t, listen: he and Isabel.

  What happened to the man, father of the child? Has their father a rival? Is he a hopeful sign? Or—indeed—is he a threat, a complication in the risk the darling crazy sixty-seven-year-old is taking, next thing he’ll be mixed up in some crime passionnel—but Jamie, captured for drinks at Ginnie’s house, laughs—Daddy-O, right on, the older man has appeal! And Jamie’s the one who does what as youngsters they called ‘picking up stompies’—cigarette butts of information and gossip. The child’s father lives in London, he’s a journalist and he’s said to be a Coloured. So the little boy to whom he must be playing surrogate father is a mixed-blood child, twice or thrice diluted, since the father might be heaven knows what concoction of human variety.

  At least that shows this business has brought progress in some way. Ginnie is privately returning to something in her own experience of the parental home only one other sibling (Matthew) happens to know about. The parents always affirmed they were not racist and brought up their children that way. So far as they felt they could without conflict with the law of the time. Ginnie, as a student, had a long love affair with a young Indian who was admitted to study at the white university on a quota. She never could tell the parents. When it came to a daughter or son of their own …

  The fact of the child obviously doesn’t matter to him, now. Of course the mother, in her present mood, if she gets to hear …

  Ginnie was at a door of the past, opening contiguous to the present. You never know about anything like that. Principles. Look at me. I wear a ribbon in support of no discrimination against AIDS victims, but what if I found the woman who takes care of my kid was HIV positive—would I get rid of her?

  Alister, merely a husband among them, had something to say to the siblings. The matter of the child might be an added attraction for him. The rainbow child. Many well-meaning people in the past now want some way to prove in practice the abstract positions they hid in, then. Of course I don’t know your father as well as you do.

  His wife had something to add.

  Or as we think we do.

  Ba did not speak at these family meetings.

  She is in a house with her father. The house is something familiar to her but it isn’t either the family home or her own. Or maybe it’s both—dreams can do these things. Just she and her father; she wonders why he’s there in the middle of the day. He says he’s waiting for the arrival of the maid. There’s the tringtring of an old-fashioned bicycle bell, the kind they had on their bikes as children. She looks out the window, he’s standing behind her, and she sees—they see, she’s aware he knows she’s looking—a young and pretty redhead/blonde dismount from a bicycle, smiling. But there are no whites who work as maids in this country.

  Ginnie and Ba, not telling anyone else, go to a concert. Seats chosen neither too near nor too far back. Yes, she is there with the violin nestling between jaw and shoulder. Follow white hands doing different intricate things, some fingers depressing strings, those of the other hand folded around the bow. She wears the sort of informal evening dress the other women players in the orchestra wear, not quite a uniform; the equivalent of the not quite black-tie outfits the male players allow themselves—roll-collar shirts and coloured cummerbunds. There’s some sort of fringed shawl slipped off the side of the bowing arm. Apparently the dress is quite sexily décolleté. They’ll verify when the orchestra rises at interval. She is certainly very slim—the left leg stretched gracefully, and there’s a lot of hair piled on top of her head. Not blonde, not redhead. It’s the colour of every second woman’s at present, an unidentifiable brown overlaid with a purplish shine of henna. She rests her bow, plays when summoned by the conductor, and the sisters are summoned to listen to her. They feel she knows they are there, although she doesn’t know them. She’s looking at them although blinded by the stage lights. She’s playing to them.

  The palm of the hand.

  All that you go through your life (sixty-seven years, how long it’s been) without knowing. Most of it you’ll never suspect you lack and it’s pure chance that you may come upon. An ordinary short flight between one familiar city and another in daily, yearly time. The palm of a hand: that it can be so erotic. Its pads and valleys and lines to trace and kiss; she laughs at me and says they’re lines of fortune, that’s why I’m here with her. The palm that holds enfolds the rod of the bow and it sings. Enfolds holds me.

  Matthew mustn’t think he can stay out of it! They send him e-mail letters, despatched by Ginnie but addressing him as from a collective ‘we’—the sisters and their husbands, the younger brother—who expect him to take part in decisions: whatever there is to be done. Matthew writes, I suppose we gave them the general amount of trouble sons and daughters do. The parents, he means. And what is meant by that? What’s that got to do with anything that can be done? What’s he getting at? Is it that it’s the parents’ turn now—for God’s sake, at their, at his age! Or is it that because of their past youth the sons and daughters ought to understand the parents better? All these irrelevances—relevances, who knows—come upon, brought up by the one nice and far-away among the cricket bats and kangaroos. What is there for Matthew to disinter; he was always so uncomplicated—so far as they know, those who grew up close to him in the entanglements of a family; never ran away from anything—unless you count Australia, where he’s made what is widely recognised as a success.

  The general amount of trouble. Jamie. A
nd for the parents he’s unlikely ever to be regarded as anything other than troubling. As long as they’re happy, parents say of their engendered adults, swallowing dismay and disappointment. What did the parents really know of what was happening to their young, back then. Ginnie’s Indian; the irony, she sees it now, that it was his parents who found out about the affair and broke it off. Never mind falling in love, that kind of love was called miscegenation in those days, punishable by law, and would have put his studies at risk; his parents planned for him to be a doctor, not a lover—in prison. Ba’s abortion. How he would have anguished over his favourite daughter if he had known. Only Ginnie knows that this botched back-room process is the reason why Ba is childless. No-one else; not Carl. It belongs to a life before Ba found him, her rare and only elect mate, come upon in the bush. It’s unlikely that Jamie has a passing thought (in the reminder of the general amount of trouble they’ve given) for what he arranged for his frantic sister, that time; even as a teenager he had precociously the kind of friends who were used to mutual efforts in getting one another out of all manner of youthful trouble. Yes, it was Jamie—Jamie of all of them—Ba turned to; as it was Jamie—of all of them—her father had turned to in his trouble, now.

  It became possible to have him to eat a meal at one or other of their homes, without the mother. As if it were normal. And not easy to convey to him implicitly that it was not; that his place as a lover was not at this table, his place here was as a husband with his wife, mother-and-father. This displacement did not apply to their mother because she, as they saw it, was the victim of this invading lover in the family circle. She had accepted to come to them, in her own right (so to speak), now and then, her carefully erected composure forbidding any discussion of the situation at table, and now she had gone to spend a holiday with her cousin, a consular official in Mauritius.