Free The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer Page A

woman’s shrouded hip while he tells her how she should conduct herself, they discuss the pills she needs to take, the exercise essential to maintain herself. They are two human beings equal in their vulnerability to the trials of life (of which his girls often confess to him their own specific ones), considering together how best one may survive. She knows this is not remotely the antenna of sex touching her, and he knows she understands this. He does not need a nurse to be present—a precaution most gynaecologists employ—to reassure his girls of his respect.
    â€˜Archie’ is also Uncle Archie, brother of Julie’s father.
    He used to fetch Julie to come and play with her cousins when she was a small girl. If she could have chosen a father, then, it would have been him. It still would be. He was a Gulliver over which children could climb and play. Teasing and story-telling. Her father took her to events on appointed days, to children’s theatre and galas at his riding club; her mother did not think it necessary for both parents to be present,and stayed at home. Or perhaps she went to one of her lovers—but a child can’t be aware of these accommodations in her parents’ lives. (Nigel: poor man: if she happened to think of it, once herself adult.) She no longer had any contact with the cousins, but now and then, infrequent perhaps as her own presence, she would find this uncle among guests at her father’s Sunday lunches. Julie would make for him among the people who were strangers although she might know well who were these components of Danielle’s and her father’s set—someone she was spontaneously pleased to see again, one with whom she felt an understanding that she was out of place in the company of the house built for Danielle. The working lives, the temperaments of the brothers were widely different, but he was still part of her father’s roots and perhaps Danielle was one of Archie’s ‘girls’? Julie herself, of course, had never consulted him; with Gulliver, a gynaecological examination would have seemed, if not to him, to her, anyway, some sort of incest. She’s aware that she retains traces of the well-brought-up female’s prudery, false modesty, despite the free exchange of all the facts of life at The Table.
    We must think of everyone, anyone who.
    Who?
    Before they go to the famous lawyer together—if he can be approached at all on the basis of his association with her father, who must not have the situation made known to him at all—there must be someone. Not a father, but in place of that surely outgrown dependency. Someone removed from themselves—interrogating themselves for a solution even in their silences, removed from her kind of conventional wisdom, the guidance she relies on from The Table. She’s going to speak to her uncle.
    What uncle is that?
    I’ve told you about him, my favourite grown-up, as a kid.
    He knows people?
    Well, he’s prominent …
    So. If she won’t go to her father, she is showing some sense of family as those his people naturally seek and find action from when you are in trouble. She comes to be embraced by him before she sets out; he holds her a moment as one grants this to a child being sent off to school.
    Although she has been privileged to be given an appointment at all she has to wait among women in the bright air-conditioned room with its images of elephant herds, lion cubs and Bonnard boating parties. Among women; but who among them, manicured hands resting secure on pregnant belly-mounds under elegantly-flowing clothes, diet-slim middles emphasized by elaborate belts, young faces perfectly reproducing the looks of the latest model on a magazine cover, ageing skin drawn tight beneath the eyes by surgery, elaborately-braided heads bent together—two black women, wives of the new upper class, laughing and chatting in their language; who, of all these can have any