Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,238

her?

Her lawyer had met him and an allowance for her had been arranged; there were other matters to be cleared up. Possessions. These were not specified, as if it had nothing to do with anyone but herself. It was Carl who was able to say, out of his privileged innocence close to nature’s organic cycles of change and renewal, Maybe your absence will be the right thing. For both of you. When you come back you may find you can work things out again together.

She looked at him half-pityingly, for his concern.

Things are worked out. It was his work.

And she turned away as of her right to grandmotherly talk with Ginnie’s small boy, for whom she had brought a model jeep, and then to a low exchange in intimate tone with her favourite, the elder of the two teenage daughters, who happened to be at home in the family that evening. No boyfriends around tonight? Usually when I come at the weekend I hear a lot of music and laughing going on upstairs. Helen’s friends, the girl says. And not yours, not your type – I understand. What’s your type . . . all right, the one, then – I have a pretty good idea of what would interest you, you know.

And the girl lies, describing the non-existent one as she thinks an adult would wish him to be.

When the mother-grandmother had left, Ginnie’s husband Alister told them: Isabel thinks we’re on his side, that’s the problem.

Why should we be.

Nobody takes up Ba’s statement.

May he survive.

Best of all. Early in the morning some days to wake at the sound of the key turning in the lock; her key. Hear it but not sufficiently awake to open eyes; and there’s a cold fresh cheek laid against the unshaven one. She’s left her apartment before seven to deliver the child to nursery school and after, she’s suddenly here. Yesterday. Heard her shoes drop and opened eyes to follow her clothes to the floor. She glides into bed, the cheek is still cold and the rest of her is her special warmth. Not today: waiting for the key to turn. Tomorrow. Again it will turn. Again and again.

They broach to one another the obligation – the usefulness, perhaps – of inviting him to bring her along some time. Sunday lunch? No, too familial a gesture, and Ba and Carl would not be there, why should Ginnie and Alister deal with this on their own, you can’t count on Jamie. Come by for a drink sixish, that would do. What’s she like – look like? The two men want to know in advance – after all, they are the father’s fellow males – what to expect in order to put themselves in his place. But the splash of stage lights drops a mask on faces, there were cave-hollows of eyes, white cheeks, bright mouth. It was the hands in movement by which an identity was followed.

The man who brings her to Ginnie’s house is another personage: their father? He who always listened, talks. Although this is not his home, he is not the host, he rises to refill glasses and offer snacks. He is courting her, in front of them, they see it! Their mother is much better-looking; still beautiful; this one has a long, thin, voracious face, the light did not exaggerate its hollows, and her intelligently narrowed eyes – hazel? greenish? doesn’t matter – are iconised by make-up in the style of Egyptian statues. She’s chosen a loose but clinging tunic and the sisters see that she has firm breasts. When they compare impressions afterwards it seems it was the women who noted this rather than, as they would have thought, the men. Her hands are unadorned (the mother has had gifts of beautiful rings from him, over the years) and lie half-curled, the palms half-open on chair-arm or lap; it’s as if the hands’ lack of tension is meant to put them at ease, these hands that make music. And pleasure their father. She has a voice with what the women suspect as an adopted huskiness they believe men find attractive. It turns out no one of the men – Jamie was present – noticed it either as an affectation or an attraction he might have responded to.

The talk was quite animated and completely artificial; they were all other people; chatting about nothing that mattered to whom and what they really were. There are so many harmless subjects, you can really