I avoid now talking about her to my children — what can you call sons and daughters who are far from children. I know they think it’s ridiculous — it’s all ridiculous, to them — but I don’t want anyone running around making ‘enquiries’ about her, her life, as if her ‘suitability’ is an issue that has anything to do with them. But of course everything about what I suppose must be called this affair has to do with them because it’s their mother, someone they’ve always seen — will see — as the other half of me. They’ll want to put me together again.
The children (he’s right, what do you call a couple’s grown-up children) often had found weeks go by without meeting one another or getting in touch. Ginnie is a lecturer in the maths department at the university and her husband is a lawyer, their friends are fellow academics and lawyers, with a satisfying link between the two in concerns over the need for a powerful civil society to protect human rights. Their elder son and daughters are almost adult, and they have a late-comer, a four-year-old boy. Ba — she’s barren — Ginnie is the repository of this secret of her childlessness. Ba and her husband live in the city as week-long exiles: from the bush. Carl was manager of a wild-life reserve when she fell in love with him, he now manages a branch of clothing chain stores and she is personal secretary to a stockbroker; every weekend they are away, camping and walking, incommunicado to humans, animal-watching, bird-watching, insect-watching, plant-identifying, returned to the lover-arms of the veld. As Ginnie and Alister have remarked, if affectionately, her sister and brother-in-law are more interested in buck and beetles than in any endangered human species. Jamie — to catch up with him, except for Christmas! He was always all over the place other than where you would expect to find him. And Matthew: he was the childhood and adolescence photographs displayed in the parents’ house, and a commentator’s voice broadcasting a test cricket match from Australia in which recognisable quirks of home pronunciation came and went like the fading and return of an unclear line.
Now they are in touch again as they have not been since a time, times, they wouldn’t remember or would remember differently, each according to a need that made this sibling then seek out that, while avoiding the others.
Ginnie and Ba even meet for lunch. It’s in a piano bar-cum-bistro with deep armchairs and standing lamps which fan a sunset light to the ceiling beneath which you eat from the low table at your knees. A most unlikely place to be chosen by Ba, who picks at the spicy olives and peri-peri cashew nuts as if she were trying some unfamiliar seed come upon in the wild; but she has suggested the place because she and Carl don’t go to restaurants and it’s the one she knows of since her stockbroker asks her to make bookings there for him. When the sisters meet they don’t know where to begin. The weeks go by, when the phone rings and (fairly regularly, duty bound) it’s the father, or (rarely, she’s in a mood when duty is seen to be a farce) it’s the mother, the siblings have a high moment when it could be another announcement — that it is over, he’s back, she’s given his life back to him, the forty-two years. But no, no.
May he survive. That’s the axiom the daughters and sons have, ironically, taken from her. Who is this woman who threatens it?
Her name is Alicia (affected choice on the part of whoever engendered her?), surname Parks (commonplace enough, which explains a certain level of origin, perhaps?). She was something of a prodigy for as long as childhood lasts, but has not fulfilled this promise and has ended up no further than second violinist in a second-best symphony orchestra — so rated by people who really know music. Which the father, poor man, doesn’t, just his CD shelf in the livingroom, for relaxation with his wife on evenings at home. The woman’s career will have impressed him; those who can, play; those who can’t, listen: he and Isabel.
What happened to the man, father of the child? Has their father a rival? Is he a hopeful sign? Or — indeed — is he a threat, a complication in the risk the darling crazy sixty-seven-year-old is taking, next thing he’ll be mixed up in some crime passionnel—but Jamie, captured for drinks at Ginnie’s house, laughs — Daddy-O, right on, the older man has appeal! And Jamie’s the one who does what as youngsters they called ‘picking up stompies’—cigarette butts of information and gossip. The child’s father lives in London, he’s a journalist and he’s said to be a Coloured. So the little boy to whom he must be playing surrogate father is a mixed-blood child, twice or thrice diluted, since the father might be heaven knows what concoction of human variety.
At least that shows this business has brought progress in some way. Ginnie is privately returning to something in her own experience of the parental home only one other sibling (Matthew) happens to know about. The parents always affirmed they were not racist and brought up their children that way. So far as they felt they could without conflict with the law of the time. Ginnie, as a student, had a long love affair with a young Indian who was admitted to study at the white university on a quota. She never could tell the parents. When it came to a daughter or son of their own …
The fact of the child obviously doesn’t matter to him, now. Of course the mother, in her present mood, if she gets to hear …
Ginnie was at a door of the past, opening contiguous to the present. You never know about anything like that. Principles. Look at me. I wear a ribbon in support of no discrimination against AIDS victims, but what if I found the woman who takes care of my kid was HIV positive — would I get rid of her?
Alister, merely a husband among them, had something to say to the siblings. The matter of the child might be an added attraction for him. The rainbow child. Many well-meaning people in the past now want some way to prove in practice the abstract positions they hid in, then. Of course I don’t know your father as well as you do.
His wife had something to add.
Or as we think we do.
Ba did not speak at these family meetings.
She is in a house with her father. The house is something familiar to her but it isn’t either the family home or her own. Or maybe it’s both — dreams can do these things. Just she and her father; she wonders why he’s there in the middle of the day. He says he’s waiting for the arrival of the maid. There’s the tringtring of an old-fashioned bicycle bell, the kind they had on their bikes as children. She looks out the window, he’s standing behind her, and she sees — they see, she’s aware he knows she’s looking — a young and pretty redhead/blonde dismount from a bicycle, smiling. But there are no whites who work as maids in this country.