Loot by Nadine Gordimer

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.
    After the meal with her at Ginnie’s or Ba’s house, one of them, her daughters or their husbands, insisted on a sense of reality by bringing up the subject; the only subject. How did things stand now? Was there any exchange of ideas, say, about the future, going on between him and 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.
    Â 
    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