Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  “I don’t think I want another one?” he said, smiling.

  “Yes you do,” said Tom, and, turning practical, added, “By the way, the usual system—I mean the one we’ve found works best, before—is that you pay your set whack for board-and-lodge, but then we split the liquor bill between us, each month. You’ll probably find you lose, in the end, as we’re bound to drink more than you do.” There was the usual exchange of laughing protests. But when the young man excused himself, a little while later, he said simply when he came back into the room: “I think we’re very lucky. I like this house. What’s there about it?”

  “We’ve convinced it that it doesn’t have to feel it’s a disgrace to be an old house, after all.” Tom made a precious face.

  “It’ll be a surprise to Ann. After my descriptions of Johannesburg, she’ll be ready for yellow brick or split-level with picture windows.”

  “Can’t be done, I’m afraid. Can’t afford it.”

  “Ann’s English, is she?” said Jessie, rousing herself to make some show of interest.

  “Well, she was born in Rhodesia, actually. But she’s grown up in England and never been back.”

  “And how long ago was that—this being born in Rhodesia, I mean?”

  “Darling, what elaborate circumlocutions!”

  Davis smiled. “Not very long. She’s twenty-two.”

  “A-ah! The pretty little dear! You’ll have to watch the old man, Jessie, I’m telling you!” said Tom in a cracked cackle, leering.

  The heat drew each day a little tighter than the last. Jessie fought sleep, after lunch, and went about the house stunned with the battle. She walked bare-foot and her only point of consciousness was the contact of the soles of her feet with the cool wooden floors. The children stood the sun like hardy flowers, taking it in, and exuding it in colour and energy; their legs and arms flashed in the yard. Jessie continued to water the harsh foliage of the stonily silent garden. But the heat broke the day the girl came. Jessie raced about town in the early afternoon under a great fist of contused cloud. The faces of people in the streets took on the alarmed look that comes to the faces of animals at the sense of some elemental disturbance. “It’s going to come down,” said a liftman, and Jessie heard his voice small against an electrical vacuum in her ears. From the seventh-floor corridor of a flat building where she called in to see a friend on the way home, she saw the enormous height of the sky, a sulphurous, flickering distention behind which a turmoil of disintegrating worlds seemed to be taking place, a pacing and turning of elements. Below, the ghastly outlines of the city were beginning to disappear in weird dissolving light.

  She had scarcely thought of the fact of the Davises coming until then. It was not so much conscious avoidance as apathy. The couple were about to come upon her unrealised; so it was that she sometimes met the face of some child who was a schoolfriend of her eldest daughter, Clem, encountered in the house on the very day that Clem had told her mother, weeks before, she would be bringing a friend to lunch. “But Mummy, it’s Kathleen.” “Yes, of course, I know. How are you, Kathleen?”

  Yet she responded now, as to a sudden recollection, to the urgency of practical things that must be done. She dropped her trappings in the living-room. “What’s the rush?” Tom followed her to the kitchen. “No dinner. Agatha’s off. I meant to be home by four.” “You know Boaz is coming?” “Of course, idiot. Where’s Clem? Please tell her to put on the bath. She must see that Madge baths and she must do Elisabeth.” She slammed through the kitchen, bringing it to rocking life. Her face as she worked took on the grim, hot openness of the manual worker; Tom thought, she might be firing an engine in the hissing cab of a locomotive. She came thrusting into the living-room, where he sat deep in the clamorous dissonance of the music he loved. “Where’s that parcel?” She tore the paper and shook towels free of the string. She resented spending any money on the impersonal needs of the household, and she made off with the cheap bright towels with distaste. “We’re in rags. They wouldn’t have had anything but holes to dry their faces on.” He gave a little comforting signal of approval, but she was gone. He remained, skimmed by, juxtaposed with, over-towered by blocks and spires and egg-smooth eclipses of shifting sound. He felt them shaping all round him, himself among them, sounds that were not at all like the voices of fire or wind or sea, or the cries of living creatures; not like anything. He had his freedom of them; and then they toppled, and were razed down to a hiss and scratch as the record finished and the faulty mechanism kept the needle going round an empty groove. He became aware of the measured, emphasised knocking—spelling out syllable by syllable the request to be let in—of the kind that has gone on unheard for some minutes. He jumped up and rushed to the door, and Boaz Davis and his wife stood there in the cold pause of the breath drawn before rain. As they bundled in under Tom’s happy cries, a gasp of chill wind, smelling of rain, running before rain, swept in round their cases, their card-board boxes, their strangely-shaped objects in newspaper leaning against each other like a family of freaks huddled on the doorstep. The door slammed behind them in furious force. As they were helped by Tom, rearranging the baggage against the wall, arguing in unfinished sentences whether they should drag everything upstairs at once or leave it till later, hindered by the presence of the children, who had immediately appeared and established themselves underfoot—rain fell upon the house.

  The two women met in the deafening roar of it. They might have been standing behind the curve of a waterfall. Jessie appeared straight from some mirror; she had found time to push up the wisps of hair that hung from the twist she piled up once a day; over-laying the sheen of effort, haste, the efflorescence of the kitchen, all the self-forgetful attrition of the day, was another face. It superimposed the textureless surface of powder, the painted lips of the woman whose first concern is the presentation of her beauty; it was the sign, if worn any-old-how, that she still belonged to the height of life, the competitive sexual world. The girl saw an untidy, preoccupied woman whose face was beginning to take on the shape of the thoughts and emotions she had lived through, in place of the likeness of heredity with which it had been born.

  Ann Davis was a nearly-beautiful girl, saved from prettiness and brought to the brink of beauty by one or two oddities—her eyebrows were thick, for a fairish girl, and she had one small pointed tooth that changed the regularity of her smile. Jessie saw her, so young that her share in the commonest kind of beauty was all the distinction she needed; she even wore with distinction clothes distinguished only by a better cut and material from those of the little gum-chewing girls who hung around the coffee bars. Her neck, flecked with small dark moles, shone living white in the turned-up collar of her black blouse. They exchanged shouted greetings against the excitement of the storm, and the girl’s introduction to the house was brought about at once, because everyone was pressed into service to go dashing from room to room to close windows. Then they settled into the living-room and drank sherry, to keep off the chill that the rain had brought.

  “To Ann, who came in like a lion,” proposed Tom.

  “But I promise I shall behave like a lamb,” she said.

  The three children stood around as if at the scene of an accident. “Don’t mind them,” Jessie explained. “They’ll follow you round gaping for a day or two, and then it’ll be all right. Just don’t think you have to be polite and strike up a conversation, that’s all. Then they’ll never leave you alone.” Boaz Davis was a little embarrassed at such a dispassionate view of children; he remembered them, perhaps, in some sentimental context of the centre of the household. He tried to talk to them, to jolly them along, but they turned away and sought shelter from his attention. His wife chattered easily, but he himself seemed different from the young man who had come to the house without her. He appeared slightly strung-up, and inclined to show off, in his eagerness to fabricate a ready-made intimacy between the four of them. “Annie, you don’t have to eat apricots just because it’s your first night here
. You can tell them right away that you loathe apricots.” “I don’t loathe them, they bring me out in bumps.” “She’s not always such a polite little thing, she’s on her best behaviour for you.” And he buttered a roll and put a wedge of cheese on it for her—“Here.” Jessie and Tom accepted the little display calmly; they knew from previous experience of living together with couples that with real familiarity, real intimacy—if it were to come—would come more reticence and a comfortable front that would exclude the nature of the couple’s private relationship, except in moments of crisis.

  After dinner Jessie took the girl upstairs. “I’ve got rid of all traces of Morgan in here,” Jessie said, and added, for truthfulness, “There wasn’t much anyway.” She had been surprised to find how little of her son there was in the room; how tenuous his hold on this house was. Part of a cupboard had been enough to take the stained, half-out-grown schoolboy’s suit, the two or three holey pullovers, the cricket bat and the broken bagatelle board that made up his possessions.

  Jessie was anxious to make her guest comfortable. “Here—look—there’s at least another shelf going begging. You could put things you don’t need every day in here. And on top of the wall-cupboard in Clem’s room—you can put your empty cases up there.” Ann came running to see. “How marvellous! There’s bags of room. Thanks so much.”

  “It’s dreadful not to be able to have order,” said Jessie, her hands dropping to her sides in the manner of a woman between one task and the next. “I long for order.”

  “Oh yes!” With careless, social enthusiasm, the girl suggested that she did, too; but she did not even know what chaos was, yet.

  She lugged her things cheerfully up and down the room, while Jessie sat on the bed and talked to her. Her ankles, fine as a race-horse’s, took any weight steadily although she wore such high-heeled shoes; she was really very gay and pretty. She gave a thump with her long-fingered hand on a drum that was part of Boaz’s collection of African instruments, and disentangled the belt of a dress from a pair of sandals.

  “Do you know anything about all this?” Jessie leaned over to pick up a gourd decorated with an incised design and mounted on a reed. “Look, I can play that!” said the girl. She dropped an armful of dresses back into the suitcase. She took the contraption and blew into it, laughing and struggling with it. She produced a few low, blurred notes, surprisingly sweet. “It’s a chigufe, a special end-blown flute.” Jessie tried it, but nothing came. “I can usually get something out of these things,” said the girl, smiling. “Do you work with Boaz—I never asked him what you did,” said Jessie. “Nothing much.” She was hanging up dresses again. “What sort of work do you do, I mean? What are you going to do while you’re here?” “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll wander about with Boaz quite a bit, I suppose. And I’ll want to get to know what’s going on in Johannesburg. When I go somewhere I haven’t been, I like to get into it up to the neck, don’t you?”

  The two women got on pleasantly enough in the feminine preoccupation of making ready a place to live, but each was conscious of reservations about the other. Ann Davis, in her innocent self-absorption, busy making herself comfortable, would never have remarked on this, but when they were alone in their room Boaz said anxiously, “Wonderful pair. I told you.” “Did she really want us to come, I wonder?” said Ann, curious. “I mean, she couldn’t have been kinder, but I had the feeling she wasn’t interested in me.”

  “She doesn’t seem to work,” said Jessie to Tom.

  “I don’t know what she did in England.”

  “Nothing. She has no work of her own.”

  “That may be.” Jessie’s feeling of the extraordinariness of the fact did not strike him.

  “It seems so odd.”

  He gave a sensible laugh. “Why odd?”

  “Everyone works,” she said stubbornly.

  “Now and then there could be someone who didn’t feel the need.”

  Work was an article of faith by which they—Tom, she herself, their friends—lived. How could it become, by the casual word, the mere presence of the girl, a dead letter? Yet it was, it could be. And what was the good of an article of faith that would deny it? There was life beyond life as she had conceived of it for herself; there were freedoms beyond the freedom she understood. She added another word or two to the near incoherent consciousness that had been in the process of coming to birth in her for a year or more, and that perhaps would only be completed at the end of her life, or not at all. How many of the other articles of faith by which she lived were undiscovered dead letters? Is one living, while they remain undiscovered? She felt tired, solitary, and dogged.

  She opened the window and hung out. The rain, like a quarrel, was over. The earth breathed warm and damp in its sleep. Clumsy drops fell from the old trees. Suddenly she saw her life as a bird let into a series of cages, each one larger than the last; and each one, because of its comparative freedom, seeming, for a while, to be without limit, without bars. It’s time to get out again; she knew, but told no one. She stared down at the dark and forgot herself. Under the plastered, hammered earth there was a fecund stirring in the old garden. Under stones, out of decay, sticky wings, moving jaws, feeble millipede wavings—they were all coming back to hunger and reproduction, to crawl and swarm and eat their way through the feast.

  Two

  The unease that Jessie Stilwell had felt at the idea of the presence of two observers in the house was forgotten. Their presence belonged to the static on the surface of daily living; another voice or two interrogating, another laugh in the garden, another set of footsteps on the stairs. The girl was easily amused, and amused herself; she quickly became friendly with the Stilwells’ friends as well as Boaz’s, and she was in and out of the house, with a word and a telegraphic smile, between one diversion and another. Boaz was in a daze of work, and, if he was in the house, was not seen for hours at a time. Tom was busy and absorbed, a little grimly and reluctantly, sometimes, in his lectures and the life of the university. Jessie, whose current job was that of secretary to an association of African musicians and entertainers, worked every morning at the town office of the Agency, and sometimes in the afternoon or evening as well, and cared for the house and children and the demands of friends in those fits and starts of activity that served quite well to keep them going. In this immediate present—the continuing present of life going on—the Davis couple took a place unobtrusively; on any other level, she was hardly aware of them at all. She remained intact, alone.

  Like many people, Jessie had known a number of different, clearly defined, immediate presents, and as each of these phases of her life had closed by being replaced with another, it had lost reality for her; she no longer had it with her. The ribbon of her identity was always that which was being played out between her fingers; there was no coil of it continuing from the past. I was; I am: these were not two different tenses, but two different people.

  The latest, and present phase—her association with Tom Stilwell, their way of life, their children—she accepted without question as the definitive one (by this, for whatever it turned out to be worth, would her life be known). For the best part of eight years she had lived it honestly, wholly, and even passionately. But for some time now, she had been aware that though this was the way she had chosen to live, and by that fact deserving of all the fervour and singlemindedness and loyalty that she had it in her to put into it, it was not the sum total of her being. Not all the spit and polish of effort, the grace of love could make it so. She was feeling towards the discovery that there is no sum total of being; it flows from what has been, through what is, and so on to what is becoming. She had created herself anew, in eight years, as she had done several times before that; but this self was the creation of man; it did not belong to the stream of creation. From the fullness of life, she had, at last, time to ask herself why she lived, and although she had scarcely begun to know how to formulate the question, let alone grope for the possible answers, she had suddenly come to know,
in her bones, that there is no possibility of question or answers, outside that stream.

  So far as the past was concerned, Jessie believed that she had torn the grandmother’s clothes off the wolf long ago. She had looked him in his terrible eye with the help of someone who loved her before she met Tom, and though as an adult she openly marvelled that she had survived her childhood, she refused to make it an excuse for her inadequacies. She was bored and irritated by the cliché of the unhappy child who makes a mess of his life when he grows up. “In any case,” she once told Tom, “I don’t think I qualify. I was not unhappy at all. I was only unhappy when I grew up and discovered what had been done to me. I am only wild and unhappy now, when I think of it.”

  She was the daughter of a petty official on a gold-mine; her father had been manager of the reduction works or something of that sort—she did not remember him. He died when she was eighteen months old and by the time she was three her mother had married again, this time a Swiss chemical engineer on the same mine, an intimate friend of the family, Bruno Fuecht. The Fuechts had no children and Jessica Tibbett remained a cherished only child. She was her mother’s constant companion, and this intimacy between mother and daughter became even closer when the child developed some heart ailment at the age of ten or eleven and was kept out of school. She was taught at home by a friend of her mother’s, and when she grew up, during the war, she left her mother’s house only to marry. A son was born of the war-time marriage, and her young husband was killed. She lived on her own—with the baby, of course—for the first time in her life, and worked and travelled for a few years before she met, and finally married, Tom Stilwell.

  Those were the facts, with their apparently easy graph of formative events; there were all the obvious peaks, labelled. But the true graph of her experience lay elsewhere, and ran counter to the high and low of the facts. Horror and sorrow were contained in the cherishing, for example, and the death, off-stage and unrealised, was no more than losing touch with a summer’s companion who would, anyway, have been outgrown. Jessie knew the truth—coming to know it had been the biggest experience of all, in her life so far—and for some time she had thought that, knowing and accepting it, she had done with it. She had pulled out the sting; but all the rest of the past had been thrown away along with it. There were signs that it was all still there; it lay in a smashed heap of rubble from which a fragment was often turned up. Her daily, definite life was built on the heap, but had no succession from it, like a city built on the site of a series of ruined cities of whose history the current citizens know nothing.