Free The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer Page B

idea of what her version of a female complaint is, why she is here. In this, they are not even of the same sex. One of them smiles at her but her head is turned away as his is, often, in the EL-AY Café. Girls together. His girls. She has been amused at the way she has heard her uncle refer to them. But she is in her isolation.
    The white-coated version of the uncle has risen from behind his wide desk and come to meet her with a hug. —At last you decide to see where I hang out, isn’t that it! Shall we have coffee, tea, there’s our little kitchen here, we’ve got them all, Earl Grey to Rooibos, you know, or is it juice, mango, apple—
    There is the preamble of her apology for insisting on ousting some patient from an appointment, her thanks for his letting her walk in on him like this. —Apology! My dear Julie, how often do I get to see you! Oh I know from my own brood, the lives of generations fork out all over in different directions,the only crossroads we might meet at is at Nigel’s, and neither your way nor Sharon’s and mine run that route, we know. But that’s fine. Nigel’s such a Big Boy now, he’s done so well, and they’re wonderful together, he and Danielle—you and I must be glad about that, mmh?—
    Sharon. At the mention of her uncle’s wife’s name she recognizes why, in her confusion of thinking of someone, anyone, it was not only the childhood bond that has brought her here. Archibald Charles Summers in his day betrayed all expectations of his choice of a girl from well-known Anglican Church families, members of country clubs and owners of holiday houses at the Cape where he was so popular as polo player and dance partner, in the old South Africa; it was when he was actually formally ‘engaged’ to what everyone agreed was a particularly lovely and suitable choice, a show rider, that he suddenly married a Sharon, a Jewess, daughter of a Lithuanian immigrant who had a luggage-cum-shoe-repair shop in the very area where the backroom night clubs, bar hang-outs, the L.A. Café and the garage with its shed accommodation for an illegal had taken over now. Echoes of appalled family reaction to this marriage had drifted to the child’s ears; for her, Sharon was the pretty redheaded mother of the cousins, dispenser of sweetmeats made of ginger and carrots, colour of her frizzy hair, you didn’t get anywhere else, whose embrace was more and more cushioned by plumpness over childhood years.
    The coffee he had summoned (Be a dear, Farida, tell Thabi we’d like coffee—with biscuits, eh?) provided the comfortable transition of general interests. What career was she launched on now, she’s always so adventurous, quite right, there are many changes among people, everywhere in the country, new ways to be active, explore. And they laughed together when she dismissed her present occupation, the old con jacked up for what is called ‘new social mobility’, publicrelations. —Oh and he must tell her—he and Sharon had spent the long weekend at a certain guest farm in the Drakensberg—Sharon and I just became renewed, the walks in the bush, the hot sun and icy pools you can find where there’s no-one—you jump in, in the buff—if you don’t already know of it you two must take off and go there. He doesn’t know who the current partner may be, but he feels he ought to remember, from the most recent news he might have had in encounters with her.
    Not much chance of that right now.
    In her brief silence, although he never pries—his girls always find in him the right receptive moment when they can speak what must be broached—he finds the delicacy of an open, unsolemn response. —Now—you didn’t come to see me here rather than at home because of my bonny blue eyes—
    He makes it easy.
    Change. —There’s something—we, the man you perhaps don’t know of or