Loot by Nadine Gordimer Page B

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 e-mail 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.
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    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 his life—and therefore theirs. They, it obviously implied, could make up their minds about that.
    What he did not tell them was that she had left the orchestra at the invitation to join a Montreal chamber group. As first violinist: an ambition he knew she had and he wanted to see fulfilled for her. But Canada. She had taken into consideration
(that was her phrase) that there were not many such opportunities for her back in Africa.
    With him. In his long late-night calls to her he completed, to himself, what she didn’t say.
    She sent for her child; told him only after the child had left the country. Then she did not tell him that she was with someone other than her child, a new man, but he knew from her voice.
    Ginnie came out with it to their father. Is she coming back?
    When she gets suitable engagements here, of course. She’s made a position for herself in the world of music.
    So he’s waiting for her, they decided, poor man. Why can’t he accept it’s over, inevitably, put the whole thing behind him, come back to ageing as a father ,