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 living room, 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 tring-tring 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.
Ginnie and Ba, not telling anyone else, go to a concert. Seats chosen neither too near nor too far back. Yes, she is there with the violin nestling between jaw and shoulder. Follow white hands doing different intricate things, some fingers depressing strings, those of the other hand folded around the bow. She wears the sort of informal evening dress the other women players in the orchestra wear, not quite a uniform; the equivalent of the not quite black-tie outfits the male players allow themselves – roll-collar shirts and coloured cummerbunds. There’s some sort of fringed shawl slipped off the side of the bowing arm. Apparently the dress is quite sexily décolleté. They’ll verify when the orchestra rises at interval. She is certainly very slim – the left leg stretched gracefully, and there’s a lot of hair piled on top of her head. Not blonde, not redhead. It’s the colour of every second woman’s at present, an unidentifiable brown overlaid with a purplish shine of henna. She rests her bow, plays when summoned by the conductor, and the sisters are summoned to listen to her. They feel she knows they are there, although she doesn’t know them. She’s looking at them although blinded by the stage lights. She’s playing to them.
The palm of the hand.
All that you go through your life (sixty-seven years, how long it’s been) without knowing. Most of it you’ll never suspect you lack and it’s pure chance that you may come upon. An ordinary short flight between one familiar city and another in daily, yearly time. The palm of a hand: that it can be so erotic. Its pads and valleys and lines to trace and kiss; she laughs at me and says they’re lines of fortune, that’s why I’m here with her. The palm that holds enfolds the rod of the bow and it sings. Enfolds holds me.
Matthew mustn’t think he can stay out of it! They send him email letters, dispatched by Ginnie but addressing him as from a collective ‘we’ – the sisters and their husbands, the younger brother – who expect him to take part in decisions: whatever there is to be done. Matthew writes, I suppose we gave them the general amount of trouble sons and daughters do. The parents, he means. And what is meant by that? What’s that got to do with anything that can be done? What’s he getting at? Is it that it’s the parents’ turn now – for God’s sake, at their, at his age! Or is it that because of their past youth the sons and daughters ought to understand the parents better? All these irrelevances – relevances, who knows – come upon, brought up by the one nice and far away among the cricket bats and kangaroos. What is there for Matthew to disinter; he was always so uncomplicated – so far as they know, those who grew up close to him in the entanglements of a family; never ran away from anything – unless you count Australia, where he’s made what is widely recognised as a success.
The general amount of trouble. Jamie. And for the parents he’s unlikely ever to be regarded as anything other than troubling. As long as they’re happy, parents say of their engendered adults, swallowing dismay and disappointment. What did the parents really know of what was 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.
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 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 orch
estra 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, there’s a dignified alternative to this disastrous regression to adolescence.
May he survive.
Together and individually, they are determined in pursuit of him.
The best was the cold cheek. Just that. What alternative to that.
In the mirror in the bathroom, there was her body as she dried herself after the love-making bath together, towelling between her spread legs, and then across the back of her neck as beautifully as she bowed across the violin, steam sending trickles of her hair over her forehead. A mirror full of her. For me, old lover she knew how to love so well, so well, her old lover sixty-seven. What alternative.
Life Times Page 53