The Pickup

by Nadine Gordimer

  The air was thickening about them in preparation for rain; he breathed it deeply several times. He was speaking to the black thicket of leaves and branches meshing a gathering darkness—Why do you choose those friends. Instead of your family.

  For her, it’s as if she has overheard something not intended for her. The Table; but why change the urgent subject! Reluctantly she is distracted. I don’t know what you mean. Sometimes the limitations of his use of her language bring misunderstanding although she thinks she lovingly has taught herself to interpret him instinctively.

  They are people doing well with their life. All the time. Moving on always. Clever. With what they do, make in the world, not just talking intelligent. They are alive, they take opportunity, they use the (snaps his tongue against his palate in search of the word) the will, yes, I mean to say, the will. To do. To have.

  The crowd you saw at my father’s house. Those?

  Yes, your father and the other men. They know what they speak about. What happens. Making business. That’s not bad, that is the world. Progress. You have to know it. I don’t know why you like to sit there every day in that other place.

  The wind that sweeps a path for rain suddenly came between them. She jumped up to go indoors or not to have to accept what he said, let it blow away from them. He came in behind her.

  The bottle has fallen and the wine leaks out, its passage catching the light from the windows, a glisten, before the earth drinks it.

  Inside, in the atmospheric pressure of the rising storm she sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on him in a way that asked of him what it was that he wanted.

  You can go to your father. He knows many things. They don’t know about anything. If they know, they can’t do.

  Oh no! No. No. That’s impossible. No. He doesn’t know about such things. No, no.

  He moves swiftly into her recoil: afraid, after all, little girl afraid of father. —I don’t mean this of me, mine. But other things that are not easy, straight. He knows. Believe it.

  Almost weary—You can’t understand.

  And then she is taken by remorse because by saying this she has made him understand: it’s because he is not one of them. He himself said it only a day ago, of the one, anyone, entitled to divest him of the overalls and take his place under the vehicles: even this I’m wearing, this dirt, even a shed, a corner in the street to sleep in, that’s his, not mine … whatever I have is his: any one of them, those with the legal birthright, place in the social hierarchy, share of investments advised. Such a man. Already said: Whatever I have is his: you, your father’s daughter are his, not mine.

  How could he admire them, those other friends, her father’s Chairmen of the Boards, Trustees of the Funds, Director-spiders at the centre of the websites that net the Markets, and at the same time not realize this? For the father, what a timely end to this latest crazy, impossible behaviour on the part of a daughter! The man deported—finis, the whole affair solved without any need of parental argument, father-daughter conflict of values, souring of relations, the usual result of any necessary interference on the part of the father. The law will do it. Save her from herself, thank God. Her father need only be there to help put together the pieces of her bereaved state, if she’ll accept his love after her pickup (God knows where she found him) is once and for all out of the picture.

  They went to bed before long. The kindest thing for both surely would have been to make love. But that’s his right, that’s his—the suitable young man who belongs at the Sunday terrace lunches, the inside talk of the men the lover beside her admires so much.

  The end; end of a winter, theirs together. The first rain of another season beat on and about the cottage like a surrounding crowd. After brittle months of dryness all the stuff of which their shelter was made—wood, iron roof, plaster on brick—came alive and creaked and shifted as if it crumpled them in a giant fist; as if the hammering of water and the materials given tongue by pressure and expansion were voices of the curious, the interfering, the scornful, the spurious sympathizers and the judgmental, the curt rejectors dictating the piece of paper, gabbling all about them in mimic travesty of the familiar café babble.

  In the morning while she lay in the bath and he shaved carefully round the glossy pair of wings on his upper lip, he turned to her without seeing her nakedness. What about that lawyer? He did something for someone who killed. I heard a woman talking about it. You know him—he was there at your father’s, he knows who you are. You could find him. The black man.

  Well. It touches her with relief like gratitude that he has accepted she will not—cannot—go to her father. Yes, I suppose he would have been someone … but does he still practise law? I think he’s given it up for money-making, you saw how he was one of the cronies.

  You can find out.

  Oh I can do that easily. But there’s so little time, no time. We must think of everything, anyone who—

  Three days of the edict gone by. He is looking at her, placed directly before her as she gets out of the bath aware of her nakedness, wraps her body in a towel. Think, think. She must: because he is there with her, hers; and not there, no name, no address, no claim on anyone.

  Chapter 11

  You’ve surely heard of him if you are a middle-class woman, or man who lives with that woman, in this city.

  Dr Archibald Charles Summers is the gynaecologist and obstetrician, MBBCh Witwatersrand University, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, St Mary’s London, Fellow of the Institute of Obstetrics, Boston Mass., with a practice which is, so to speak, always over-subscribed. Call him fashionable, but that would not be entirely just; he is much more than that, he gives more than any regular specialist fees could ever cover. Women talk about him to one another with a reverent sense of trust exceptional between patient and doctor even in this branch of medicine in which the doctor is priest, intermediary in the emergence of new life, and the woman is its active acolyte. As an obstetrician, he is each woman’s Angel Gabriel: his annunciation when he reads the scan of her womb—it’s a boy. And his shining bald head, outstanding ears and worshipful smile are the first things she sees when he lifts life as it emerges from her body. Between births and after reproduction is no longer part of his patients’ biological programming, he takes care—in the most conscientious sense—of the intricate system inside them that characterizes their gender and influences—often even decides—the crucial balance of their reactions, temperaments, on which depend the manner in which they can deal with the other man-woman relationships—the recognized ones with lovers and/or husbands.

  Dr Archibald’s consulting rooms are a home: the studio portraits of his children as babies and graduates, the blowups of wild life photography, which is his hobby, posters proposing the beauties of the world from museums he has enjoyed on his travels. The bejewelled hands of his Indian receptionist note any change of address of the habituée patient greeted once again, there is a bustle of several nurses with motherly big backsides, Afrikaner and black, calling back and forth to one another, who receive for urine tests the wafers peed upon by the patient in the privacy of a blue-tiled bathroom where a vase of live flowers always stands on the toilet tank.

  His patients—his girls, as he refers to them, whether aged twenty or seventy—talk of him to one another as Archie. I’ve got my six-month appointment with Archie due next week. I’ve just come from Archie—everything’s okay, he says, he’s pleased with me. And if everything is not okay, if rose thou art sick, Blake’s invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm and eats out the heart of the rose has invaded with a cancer, Archie with the knife in his healing hand will cut it out so that blooming continues, for Archie is the deliverer of life.

  The doctor has been married to and in love with his wife for thirty years at least. His seraglio of patients has nothing in common with the passion for her which has never waned; the penetration of his expert right hand sheathed in latex into the vaginas of his patients, young and desirable,
ageing and desexed, reduced to the subject of a kind of gut-exploration in the diagnostic divining of his fingertips, might be thought certain to end in a revulsion against women’s bodies. Or that—what about that?—the sight of parted thighs, the smooth heat that must be felt through the latex—all this should be rousing, a doctor is a male beneath his white coat. But neither professional hazard affects him, or ever has, even when he was a young man. He is unfailingly roused by the sight and scent and feel of his wife’s body alone (she who was so hard to win to himself) and it is the man, not the doctor, who enters her and journeys with her to their joyous pleasure, as if there is always accessible to her an island in warm seas like one of those they have travelled to, together. When he talks to his seraglio women after examination, and sits a few moments on the edge of the steel table where they lie, he may be in contact with the body whose exposure he has reverently re-covered under wraps, he will place a reassuring palm of the hand on the woman’s shrouded hip while he tells her how she should conduct herself, they discuss the pills she needs to take, the exercise essential to maintain herself. They are two human beings equal in their vulnerability to the trials of life (of which his girls often confess to him their own specific ones), considering together how best one may survive. She knows this is not remotely the antenna of sex touching her, and he knows she understands this. He does not need a nurse to be present—a precaution most gynaecologists employ—to reassure his girls of his respect.

  ‘Archie’ is also Uncle Archie, brother of Julie’s father.

  He used to fetch Julie to come and play with her cousins when she was a small girl. If she could have chosen a father, then, it would have been him. It still would be. He was a Gulliver over which children could climb and play. Teasing and story-telling. Her father took her to events on appointed days, to children’s theatre and galas at his riding club; her mother did not think it necessary for both parents to be present, and stayed at home. Or perhaps she went to one of her lovers—but a child can’t be aware of these accommodations in her parents’ lives. (Nigel: poor man: if she happened to think of it, once herself adult.) She no longer had any contact with the cousins, but now and then, infrequent perhaps as her own presence, she would find this uncle among guests at her father’s Sunday lunches. Julie would make for him among the people who were strangers although she might know well who were these components of Danielle’s and her father’s set—someone she was spontaneously pleased to see again, one with whom she felt an understanding that she was out of place in the company of the house built for Danielle. The working lives, the temperaments of the brothers were widely different, but he was still part of her father’s roots and perhaps Danielle was one of Archie’s ‘girls’? Julie herself, of course, had never consulted him; with Gulliver, a gynaecological examination would have seemed, if not to him, to her, anyway, some sort of incest. She’s aware that she retains traces of the well-brought-up female’s prudery, false modesty, despite the free exchange of all the facts of life at The Table.

  We must think of everyone, anyone who.

  Who?

  Before they go to the famous lawyer together—if he can be approached at all on the basis of his association with her father, who must not have the situation made known to him at all—there must be someone. Not a father, but in place of that surely outgrown dependency. Someone removed from themselves—interrogating themselves for a solution even in their silences, removed from her kind of conventional wisdom, the guidance she relies on from The Table. She’s going to speak to her uncle.

  What uncle is that?

  I’ve told you about him, my favourite grown-up, as a kid.

  He knows people?

  Well, he’s prominent …

  So. If she won’t go to her father, she is showing some sense of family as those his people naturally seek and find action from when you are in trouble. She comes to be embraced by him before she sets out; he holds her a moment as one grants this to a child being sent off to school.

  Although she has been privileged to be given an appointment at all she has to wait among women in the bright air-conditioned room with its images of elephant herds, lion cubs and Bonnard boating parties. Among women; but who among them, manicured hands resting secure on pregnant belly-mounds under elegantly-flowing clothes, diet-slim middles emphasized by elaborate belts, young faces perfectly reproducing the looks of the latest model on a magazine cover, ageing skin drawn tight beneath the eyes by surgery, elaborately-braided heads bent together—two black women, wives of the new upper class, laughing and chatting in their language; who, of all these can have any idea of what her version of a female complaint is, why she is here. In this, they are not even of the same sex. One of them smiles at her but her head is turned away as his is, often, in the EL-AY Café. Girls together. His girls. She has been amused at the way she has heard her uncle refer to them. But she is in her isolation.

  The white-coated version of the uncle has risen from behind his wide desk and come to meet her with a hug. —At last you decide to see where I hang out, isn’t that it! Shall we have coffee, tea, there’s our little kitchen here, we’ve got them all, Earl Grey to Rooibos, you know, or is it juice, mango, apple—

  There is the preamble of her apology for insisting on ousting some patient from an appointment, her thanks for his letting her walk in on him like this. —Apology! My dear Julie, how often do I get to see you! Oh I know from my own brood, the lives of generations fork out all over in different directions, the only crossroads we might meet at is at Nigel’s, and neither your way nor Sharon’s and mine run that route, we know. But that’s fine. Nigel’s such a Big Boy now, he’s done so well, and they’re wonderful together, he and Danielle—you and I must be glad about that, mmh?—

  Sharon. At the mention of her uncle’s wife’s name she recognizes why, in her confusion of thinking of someone, anyone, it was not only the childhood bond that has brought her here. Archibald Charles Summers in his day betrayed all expectations of his choice of a girl from well-known Anglican Church families, members of country clubs and owners of holiday houses at the Cape where he was so popular as polo player and dance partner, in the old South Africa; it was when he was actually formally ‘engaged’ to what everyone agreed was a particularly lovely and suitable choice, a show rider, that he suddenly married a Sharon, a Jewess, daughter of a Lithuanian immigrant who had a luggage-cum-shoe-repair shop in the very area where the backroom night clubs, bar hang-outs, the L.A. Café and the garage with its shed accommodation for an illegal had taken over now. Echoes of appalled family reaction to this marriage had drifted to the child’s ears; for her, Sharon was the pretty redheaded mother of the cousins, dispenser of sweetmeats made of ginger and carrots, colour of her frizzy hair, you didn’t get anywhere else, whose embrace was more and more cushioned by plumpness over childhood years.

  The coffee he had summoned (Be a dear, Farida, tell Thabi we’d like coffee—with biscuits, eh?) provided the comfortable transition of general interests. What career was she launched on now, she’s always so adventurous, quite right, there are many changes among people, everywhere in the country, new ways to be active, explore. And they laughed together when she dismissed her present occupation, the old con jacked up for what is called ‘new social mobility’, public relations. —Oh and he must tell her—he and Sharon had spent the long weekend at a certain guest farm in the Drakensberg—Sharon and I just became renewed, the walks in the bush, the hot sun and icy pools you can find where there’s no-one—you jump in, in the buff—if you don’t already know of it you two must take off and go there. He doesn’t know who the current partner may be, but he feels he ought to remember, from the most recent news he might have had in encounters with her.

  Not much chance of that right now.

  In her brief silence, although he never pries—his girls always find in him the right receptive moment when they can speak what must be broached—he finds the delicacy of an open, unsolemn response. —Now—you didn’t come to see m
e here rather than at home because of my bonny blue eyes—

  He makes it easy.

  Change. —There’s something—we, the man you perhaps don’t know of or if you don’t happen to have heard from Nigel that he was with me, there, one Sunday—we don’t know what to do about.—

  —Oh, that’s it. My girl… All right.— The light from the window behind him, speckled by climbing plants on the sill, shines through those protruding ears, mapping fine red capillaries. That face is still the face of the father you would choose. The one who would do anything to help you.

  And then she sees: he thinks she has come to him for an abortion.

  Chapter 12

  Unwanted conception—that seems the end of the world to many of his patients. What his niece relates to him of this man she has taken on is a threat from the world. The secure world in which, as someone who always has had her in his care, even if he did not see her for months, did not quite know where she might be, he felt himself somehow hoveringly responsible for her in what he has seen as the abrogation of this by the temperament of his brother in his highly-approved first marriage, and her mother’s subsequent desertion to her casino impresario. The intricacies of the law are not for him, that’s not his field, but he does know, from its physical and mental and spiritual manifestations (he believes in the spirit or soul, this is part of the innocence with which his gloved hand enters its shelter, the body), the indeflectable power of physical attraction in its victims, his patients; its ruthlessness and recklessness. A juggernaut thundering into the personality. He also believes in love (no doubt influenced by his own enduring experience of it)—love is the spirit— which is not necessarily present in physical attraction, but replaced by its denial, cruelty (he sees rape cases, these violent days that do not spare the rich). He knows how love, if mysteriously engendered by physical attraction, develops the characteristic of assuming, to the exclusion of all else, whatever assails the other being; that other has become the self. So in his presence she knows it; that he knows she loves the man who appeared to her, legs, body, finally head from under a car. And about that, he knows there is nothing to be done; although others might think otherwise, and be thankful that the law will do it for them. What there is to be done—he certainly urges engaging the lawyer, lawyers, in fact, any big guns available; as with his own profession, second and even third opinions are needed for alternatives in the need for radical action. Eleven days left of two weeks!