Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,233

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