Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  “We have all become people according to the measure in which we have loved people and have had occasion for loving.”

  BORIS PASTERNAK

  “In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.”

  THOMAS MANN

  “… servitude, falsehood and terror … these three afflictions are the cause of silence between men, obscure them from one another and prevent them from rediscovering themselves in the only value which can save them from nihilism—the long complicity between men at grips with their destiny.”

  ALBERT CAMUS

  Contents

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Part Two

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part Three

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Part Four

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Part One

  One

  Jessie Stilwell had purposefully lost her way home, but sometimes she found herself there, innocent of the fact that she had taken to her heels long ago and was still running. Still running and the breathlessness and the drumming of her feet created an illusion of silence and motionlessness—the stillness we can feel while the earth turns—in which she had never left her mother’s house. It happened now, while she walked slackly from out of the shade of the verandah into the dry, hot wind of September that battered and mis-shaped the garden. It blew her dress in behind her knees; she was alone and did not trouble to straighten her back. The tap turned in her palm with a dry squeak; the spray from the hose sounded like a shower of gravel on the parched leaves. While the wind pushed and shoved at her, and every now and then the water came back in her face, she was conscious in exactly the way she had been at the age of eight, bent double in her mother’s garden. There was the inner hum of a wordless empathy with the plants sluicing and drinking, the shrubs with their glossy leaves obscured like dirty mirrors, the flower-petals curled at the edges at the flame of the sun, the grey weeds growing where they could, on stems of old string. It was an empathy gentle, sensuous and satisfactory. There was nothing peripheral to it; she had never been out of the garden, or challenged the flaming angels at the gates.

  Suddenly this level of consciousness dislodged, was borne away in the stream of the present; instead, she remembered, now in words, that other garden. “What’s the water-bill going to be this month, I’d like to know!” her mother accused the plants. Nothing grew well in the baked red surface that was given a lick of water twice a week. A few coarse, bright blooms—a single iris, a yellow daisy—stuck up like hat-pins.

  The garden of this house, where the Stilwells lived, did not have many flowers but it was dark and green. Veils of water from Jessie Stilwell’s hose swayed over shrubs cumulus-shaped and trailing, palms glinting their knives, great woody old fuchsias dangling cerise tassels; the water tore through dust-thick spider-webs and beat on the glistening pine-needles bedded under creaking trees. By the time Tom Stilwell came home, the water had released the smell of spring into the air. It made him smile but he did not recognise it; it came to him like the smell of baking bread or a bottle of spilled scent—spring has no smell in Africa. He waved a roll of papers at Jessie but went straight into the house. Presently she turned off the tap and followed him, stamping her feet, as she went up the steps, to rid her sandals of their rim of mud and pine-needles. The house was old, full of decently obscure corners where various homeless objects could lie; in one of these corners there was a wash-basin, where she put her hands under the tap, and dried them on her wide skirt. She wandered into the living-room and out again, she looked into the kitchen and passed some remark to the servant, shelling peas there. She hated to call out, she hated to make the house restless in the few pauses of peace that fell upon it. She found him upstairs, on the old wooden balcony closed in with modern windows, where he worked.

  “She’s arriving on the sixteenth,” said Tom. He had dumped down his pile of books and was sorting his students’ papers, laying them on a mess of newly-opened letters, catalogues, and accounts.

  “Well, that’s all right.” They were still at an easy distance from each other; always at the end of the day that took them away, each into his own activity, it was a little while before they could drift into the private harbour of their relationship again. They had married to share life; but, of course, there was no getting out of it, even by marriage: each must live his life for himself. Jessie sometimes thought, without blame or a sense of having been deluded, of the year they weren’t married, when, she now understood, they had splendidly stopped living; that was what it amounted to—to celebrate love, you must do no work, see no friends, ignore obligations.

  Two boats, rocking gently on the same evening water; she went over and ran her finger down the side of his face. It was waxy from the day, he had not washed yet, so she did not kiss him. “How do you feel about it?” he said. “No, it’s all right.” But the silence after she had spoken seemed to echo doubt. “We don’t have to do it if we don’t want to,” he said firmly. The evening before, they had discussed whether they ought to offer to have a musicologist friend of Tom’s, who had been away for several years in England, to live with them when his young wife joined him in South Africa.

  Tom began to say over again the things that he had said the night before. “A boarding-house is out of the question, with all his stuff; and I don’t like the idea of them in a nice, compact Hillbrow flat.”

  “Heavens, no.”

  “I just thought it would help them out. And really make very little difference to us.” He felt himself struggling against a heaviness in her response.

  “It’s quite all right so long as Morgan’s not home,” she said, wanting to say something perfectly willing and reasonable. Her son, who had the big attic room with a wash-basin, was away at school.

  “Well, Morgan’s gone out on to this porch before now; or they could, if it came to that.”

  And the matter was left there. There was the noise of some shrill, roaring quarrel, suddenly, in the house beneath them—it seemed to have been blown in and, as swiftly, blown out again—and then the approach of slow, sulking, plodding steps, coming up the stairs with exaggerated stamps; Jessie pushed the door closed with her foot. Tom stirred restlessly, patiently, over something preposterous that he had come across in a student’s paper. The heavy breathing outside the door went away; Jessie experienced a moment of what she thought of to herself as childish triumph—she had escaped the child.

  He put the paper away and turned to her, with his fair, crimpy beard, and his deeply-indented, kind frown—his was a fading, undergraduate shagginess that would miss out the assurance of middle life and one day suddenly be the shabby distinction of an old don. “You’re not wildly enthusiastic,” he said.

  All at once, she spoke up out of herself. “I don’t want any observers.”

  “Observers? Observe what?”

  She felt ashamed, weakly happy, relieved. She went to him and put her hand for shelter between his arm and his chest. “I want to live in secret,” she said, half-joking.

  “We do, don’t we?” he said.

  “We do. But only between us. So far as our life is for each other. The rest of our lives is all set out open for anyone to see. Then it actually hardens into that which anyone can see, s
o that it stays set, fixed, accepted. But if one wants to change? How is it to change while everyone’s looking, being curious, and making comment? And if it’s not to change, then it will get to the point when it has no truth in it. Won’t it? Like a dance that acts out some great ceremony whose meaning the dancers have forgotten.”

  There was no one upstairs now, but the life of the house, coming into its power, was beating on the door: the servant’s loud argument with a child in the kitchen, the clatter and bang of pots and doors, the nasal rise and fall of a voice on the radio, children’s voices, the telephone persisting with its nagging double ring. He made the effort to keep it shut out, away from her, but it gave a sense of scamping haste to the necessity to understand what she was getting at before the chance was lost. He found it difficult to relate their life to what she had said, and she looked at him with the intensity of helpless deceit, for, of course, she was really talking about herself. The urgency overcame him and he gave up, saying, “Jessie, for God’s sake, don’t let’s have them if it’s going to be a nuisance to you.”

  She scrambled back to the level of half-truths on which daily life is conducted. “No, there’s no earthly reason why they should be a nuisance. Of course it’s all right. You’d think we’d never had anyone before.” “Not much chance of that,” he said with a good-natured ironic emphasis; he yawned sympathetically, a yawn that ended in a smile. They had never really lived alone; right from the beginning there had always been her son, Morgan, and ever since, kindness towards periodically homeless friends (of whom they seemed to have a number) or the need of money had made it necessary for them to share their house.

  “Let’s go down and get a drink,” said Jessie.

  “I’m coming.”

  She left him and went through the big, old-fashioned landing and down the stairs. All the house was always full of litter eloquent of interrupted activity; she passed a shoe-box on which a doll’s bath stood, half-filled with scummy water, an empty cornflakes box which was being used as a garage for some small lead cars, and two chairs linked to the dirty brass knob of the bathroom door by a web of hairy red wool. Gestures that ended in midair, interrupted sentences—a house full of growth, the careless and terrifying waste of nature, that propagates in millions, and lets millions die. What did children care about “finishing what is begun”? They lived out of the abundance of things untried; their untidiness was the appalling untidiness of life itself, that had flung away a thousand thousand sperms to bring about the single birth of each of them. She railed against them, threatened and preached, saying, as she had been told in her turn, that she would teach them to be tidy; but the instinct that drove her was not housewifely or even motherly—she was aware that she was frightened, in a way, that she struggled in the hands of an elemental force.

  At the elbow of the stairs she met her daughter Elisabeth, trailing up. Snail-trails of tears on her cheeks showed that her anger and sorrow had ended before the tears had had time to fall. “I’ve got a lady-bird,” said Elisabeth. “Clem’s going to give me a box and I’m going to put some nice leaves for him to eat. He’s going to be my pet lady-bird for ever.” She went on up the stairs. Yes, for ever and ever, and tomorrow the beetle will be thrown away dead in the cigarette box.

  Jessie passed through the smell of cooking in the hall and went into the living-room. They had papered it themselves, and though it was attractive nothing in it was of good quality. Sometimes when she walked into the room she heard her voice saying, as if she had released a trip-wire, “We don’t see why we should ape Europe …” as she so often did when someone remarked on the curtains made of mammy-cloth from West Africa, or fingered a wooden bowl from Swaziland, or a clay pot. Like all statements of a stand, reiteration tended to make it smug and rhetorical; she must stop saying it. She took a half-full bottle of gin out of a home-made cupboard, and rummaged for a bottle of tonic water. When she went into the kitchen to fetch some ice, her middle daughter, Madge, attached herself to her. In the living-room, while Jessie poured the fizzling water on to the heavy-looking substance of the gin, the six-year-old girl clasped her round the hips. “Hi, I’ll spill.” She writhed free and sat down. Madge came and stood in front of her; vaguely feeling something was expected of her, Jessie blew up her one cheek in a comic invitation for a kiss. The child kissed the cheek, and then flung her arms round her mother’s neck and embraced her passionately. She stood again, her eyes on a level with her mother’s, and, meeting the child’s eyes, Jessie saw them fixed on her, blurred, impassioned, sick with love that would fasten on and suck the life out of her.

  Two or three nights later, Tom brought Boaz Davis home to dinner. Jessie had met him once before, briefly, at some convocation cocktail party, but that was all. He was about thirty, eight or nine years younger than the Stilwells, a slender young Jew; his face had the special pallor of mutton-fat jade rather than the hardened shaven monotone of an adult male. There was upon him, curiously at variance with the rest of his manner, the unmistakable mark of mother’s indulgence that touches so many Jewish boys for life. A firm and attractive fruit, Jessie thought, but suddenly your thumb might go right through a soft spot.

  He drew the three of them into a quiet huddle over talk of his work, which lasted through dinner and well on towards midnight. When he had left South Africa ten years before, he had gone because he couldn’t get what he wanted then—a training that would equip him to be a composer; his ambitions had changed during the intervening years and now he was returning because Africa could give him what Europe couldn’t—a first-hand study of primitive music and primitive instruments. The confidence of his European studies filled him with an excited, almost proud approach to the field of study he had grown up in, all unknowing. Every now and then, the talk arrived at a point where his knowledge and Tom Stilwell’s met—Tom was a lecturer in history, and there was a record of unrecorded history in the tracing of the introduction, from one tribe to another, of various types of musical instruments. “We might do a paper on it together,” said Tom. “At any rate, I could help you—or you could help me.” He laughed. He had been at work for two years, collecting notes for a history he hoped to write—a history of the African subcontinent that would present the Africans as peoples invaded by the white West, rather than as another kind of fauna dealt with by the white man in his exploration of the world.

  “You know Tom’s going to do a history of Africa from the black point of view?” Jessie told Davis.

  “Not the black point of view! For God’s sake! The historical point of view!”

  “Ah well, you know what I mean,” said Jessie.

  “Hell, I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Davis to Tom. Jessie had the feeling that he was relaxed in a special way in their company; he spoke, it seemed with a curious, luxurious pleasure, in the emotional, slangy, drawn-out South African way that so often appears to leave the speaker defeated, even dazed; as if all speech were like a foreign language to him, in which the use of a few lame phrases helped out with repetition and over-emphasis must serve to carry an impossible load of self-expression. He fell into this manner of speech as a man may fall into dialect.

  “A-ah, you don’t get me into that trap,” Tom assured. “I’m not getting busy cooking up a glorious past for the blacks in opposition to the glorious past of the whites.”

  “It’s like hope-of-heaven, in reverse,” Jessie said. “Don’t you think?”

  “How d’you mean?” They did not yet know each other well enough to talk all at once.

  “You can assure yourself of glory in the future, in a heaven, but if that seems too nebulous for you—and the Africans are sick of waiting for things—you can assure yourself of glory in the past. It will have exactly the same sort of effect on you, in the present. You’ll feel yourself, in spite of everything, worthy of either your future or your past.”

  Jessie hunched her arms together as if to say, I can make it all clear when I choose.

  “I’m dead off politics,” Boaz sai
d to them both.

  “That’s right,” said Tom.

  “Oh yes,” said Jessie, “but they blow in under the door.”

  “I mean, you get together with a bunch of South Africans in London, and you begin to wonder how you would ever draw a breath here again without it meaning something political. I wouldn’t have come back for that.”

  “You’ve come to do your job.” Tom stated it for him.

  “I’m not going to worry about anything else,” he said firmly. And then he added: “But I’m glad it brought me back here.” They laughed. “Well, naturally. I’ve come back free, in a way. I can go about among these people, and not—at least, without—” he was feeling for the right definition.

  “Without hurting them,” said Jessie dreamily, nodding her head as if she had suddenly read aloud from a phrase in her mind.

  “He doesn’t mean that,” Tom said.

  “Without being hurt by them.”

  “No, no.” Yet the real identification of what had not been expressed lay suspended somewhere between the two phrases. Tom and Jessie went on trying, forgetful of Boaz Davis himself. “Without responsibility?” said Jessie.

  “No, with responsibility, that’s just it; not irresponsibly, but with responsibility to his work, which is impartial, by its very nature, disinterested.”

  “And all that’s left is for him to feel partial or impartial, as he pleases, as a man?”

  “Exactly!” “Yes, that’s it!” The two men came down where she had hit upon it, loudly, laughing.

  “I’m not so sure that it’s as easy as that.” Jessie spoke soberly, though her mouth was twitching with pleasure. She looked up to Davis. “Anyway I suppose Tom knows what you feel as a man.” It was her first reference to the fact that Davis was about to find a place in the Stilwell house.

  The young man grinned. “He knows all about me.”

  “You’ll pass, you’ll pass,” said Tom, with a gesture of acceptance that waved him towards the brandy bottle.