Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,239

get along in any situation by sticking to what has been in the newspapers and on television about the floods/drought, the times of day to avoid driving in traffic congestion (keep off wars and politics, both local and international, those are intimate subjects), and, of course about music. It is the lover who brings that up; Ginnie and Ba would have preferred to keep off that, too. She might somehow sense how their eyes had been upon her while she played . . . He even boasts about her: Alicia will go with the orchestra to an international music festival in Montreal in the winter, and it will be particularly enjoyable for her because Alicia also speaks fluent French. He might be – ought to be – boring someone with the achievements of his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Ginnie’s eldest child. Ginnie’s biological afterthought, four-year-old Shaun, had been playing with his jeep around everyone’s feet. When the father and his woman were leaving, she bent to the child: I’ve got a little boy like you, you know. He has a collection of cars but I don’t think he has a jeep, yours’s great.

They are not embarrassed about anything, these lovers.

The new father of some other man’s progeny makes a pledge for the rainbow child. We’ll have to find one for him. Where did you get it?

Shaun asserts the presence not admitted to the drinks party. My grandmother did bring it for me.

A curious – almost shaming – moment comes to the siblings and husbands when they suddenly laugh about the whole business – mother, father, the woman. It begins to happen when they get together – less and less frequently – dutifully to try and decide yet again what they ought to be doing about it. The outbreak’s akin to the hysterical giggle that sometimes accompanies tearful frustration. What can you do about Papa in his bemused state, and oh my God, next thing is he’ll get her pregnant, he’ll be Daddy all over again. No no no – spare us that! What do you mean no – presumably that’s what it’s all about, his pride in an old man’s intact male prowess! And Alister in an aside to Jamie – Apparently he’s still able to get it up – right on, as you would say – and they all lose control again. What is there to do with the mother who is unapproachable, wants to be left alone like a sulky teenager, and a father who’s broken loose like a youth sowing wild oats? Who could ever do anything with people in such conditions? Ah – but these are mature people! So nobody knows what maturity is, after all? Is that it? Not any longer, not any more, now that the mother and father have taken away that certainty from their sons and daughters. Matthew calls and sends email from his safe distance, reproaching, What is the matter with all of you? Why can’t you get some reality into them, bring them together for what’s left after their forty-two years? How else can this end?

Well, the mother seems to be making an extended holiday-of-a-lifetime out of the situation, and he, he’s out of reach (spaced out: Jamie) dancing to a fiddle. Shaking their heads with laughter; that dies in exasperation. There’s nothing you can do with the parents.

Only fear for them. Ba’s tears are not of laughter.

At least adolescents grow up; that could have been counted on to solve most of the general trouble they’d given. In the circumstances of parents it seems there isn’t anything to be counted on, least of all the much-vaunted wisdom of old age. The mother wrote a long round-robin letter (copy to each sibling, just a different name after ‘Dearest’) telling that she was going to Matthew in Australia. So Mauritius had been halfway there, halfway from her rightful home, all along, in more than its geographical position across the Indian Ocean between Africa and Australia. She would ‘keep house’ in Matthew’s bachelor apartment while she looked for a new place of her own, with space enough for them to come and visit her. Send the grandchildren.

Alicia Parks, second violinist, did not return from Montreal. He continued to exchange letters and calls with her over many months. The family gathered this when he gave them news of her successes with the orchestra on tour, as if whether this was of interest or welcome to them or not, they must recognise her as an extension of