The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page A

for
them.
    Suddenly she has left, through the living-room, through the shadowy indoors and up the staircase.
    But it is another house she’s running away to hide in; she has never lived in this one. This is not the upstairs retreat of the house where she was a child. Each room she looks into up there—no one of them is the room that was hers, with the adolescent posters of film stars and on the bed the worn plush panda her father bought for her once on an airport. It is not that house she is wandering, pausing, listening to herself. The shame of being ashamed of them; the shame of him seeing what she was, is; as he must be what he is, away beyond the dim underworld of the garage, the outhouse granted him, the anonymous name she introduced him by, his being in the village where the desert begins near your house. Rejection implies hidden—her rejection hid this origin of hers now expansively revealed before him, laid out like the margaritas and the wine and the composed still-life of the fish-platter, salads and desserts. She blunders to one of the bathrooms; but cannot succeed in retching to humiliate herself.
    â€”Enjoying yourself, sweetheart—it’s an order to settledown again, after wherever she disappeared to, from her father who is standing up apparently about to propose a toast.
    â€”We’re not going to weep and implore don’t leave us, we’re not even going to complain about being deserted, but we do want to tell you we’ll get flabby on the squash court without your smashing serve, Adrian, not to mention the darts with which you hit—infallibly, you shrewdy—prediction in the rise of interest rates and fiscal matters. Always been there for us before the tax man cometh … and Gillie, her open house down at the coast in summer, her open heart … Danielle and I have brought friends together just to wish you enormous luck and happiness, may you triumph over Down Under, Adrian, with the huge expansion in relocation of your interests, this splendid recognition of your global-class expertise the communications giants have had the good fortune to take advantage of. You don’t need any advice— just don’t eat kangaroo meat if it’s patriotically served at Aussie corporate dinners, that’s strictly for Gillie’s two labradors I hear she’s taking with you …—
    With laughter and clinking of glasses the talk is of Australia, in place of Cisco Systems, gold or India. The women show appropriate interest in the house the emigrants will choose, suburban or out-of-town, lovely climate anyway. The man explains that he has a complete set-up ready—excellent Australian staff chosen by himself on preparatory visits. —You’ll perhaps not be surprised to hear of the exception, my old driver—Festus, remember? Yes—his wife died recently, he wants to try a new life, he says, so he’s being relocated with anything else we feel inclined to pack up.—
    The young foreigner (coloured, or whatever he is) moves from Nigel Summers’ daughter’s protection into the general exchange.
    â€”Was it easy to get entry?—
    Nobody must laugh at this: the idea that a man of suchmeans and standing would not be an asset to any country. The executive director of a world-wide website network, kindly, only smiles, gives a brief assuring movement, the chin and lower lip pursing, at the naivety.
    The foreigner looks back from a no-entry cave of black eyes: —I don’t mean you. I mean your driver.—
    â€”Oh I left that to my colleague here, Hamilton—Mr Motsamai. Hamilton’s a wizard, he knows exactly what one has to get together, whom to approach, documents and so forth. Bureaucratic stuff. It’s been tremendously useful, in our operation here, to have a top lawyer on the Management Board, a bonus quite apart from his invaluable financial nous, of course—
    The voice was raised for the benefit of the