Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  Before she had begun to take any account of them at all, the Davis couple had been part of that daily life for three months. Morgan, child of the war-time marriage, came home from school; he was put into the closed-in verandah that was Tom’s workplace, and Tom moved his desk into the bedroom. The house was full, and at night charged with sleeping presences. Jessie, roused, one night, by a child’s whimpering that ceased before she got to the child, felt furtive, standing in the passage with the sleepers all round her, hibernating in dreams. Yet how alive they were, simply breathing; the mysterious tide of breath reached out to her and retreated, reached out and retreated, in the dark. The house smelled of them, too; the warm smell of urine and cheap sweets in the little girls’ room, the peppermint-and-wet-towel smell from the bathroom, the smell of crumbs and leatherette from the suitcases lying under dust in the boxroom, the smell—exuding from the closed door as if from a cedarwood box—of nail varnish, dried gourds and cigarettes, coming from the Davises’ room.

  Jessie rustled quietly back to bed, by feel. She was asleep again almost at once, but just before she joined the others, she experienced—exactly like the silent flash of sheet-lightning that lifts the dark—another wakening in another night. She stood behind her bedroom door at home on Helgasdrift Mine and listened, above the pounding stroke of her heart, to small clinking noises in the bathroom. The gathering beat of her heart had woken her like a fist beating at her consciousness; she knew, before she was awake, why she was at that door. A tap turned on and off—the hot tap, that squeaked. More slight clinks, as of things picked up and put down. Silence. Then the sound of the bathroom door opening, the tsk! of the light turned off. She opened the bedroom door and confronted her mother. She put out her hand and turned on the passage light so that her mother should be spared nothing. There the woman was, the grease of the cream she put on her face before she went to bed shining like sweat, the celanese nightgown showing her drooping, middle-aged breasts, the triangular shadow of her sex.

  “What’s the matter?” the girl rasped out.

  The woman was caught; light found out her face in a moment of private disgust, weariness, the secret shame of unwanted lust. “Go to bed; go on.”

  They stood staring at each other, afraid of each other. The girl was not a child, but nineteen years old; her body could have been risen from the act of love. But she knew it only in books; she knew it only through the distaste her mother expressed for men; the things her mother did not say; the grouping of her mother and herself as opposed to the exclusion of her stepfather. The girl’s feelings were violent: was she trembling with pity and shame, for the outrage of her mother? There was a struggling animus, horrible, in her—did she want, as well, to shame her mother, to expose her, to force her to admit that she was outraged?

  “What’s wrong? Are you ill? I heard you in the bathroom.” She would not let her off.

  “Nothing. Go to bed.” The woman’s voice was hysterical, stern, almost on the point of foolishness, with embarrassment.

  “But why were you in the bathroom so long?” the girl said cruelly, pitiful. She had caught her. She had shamed her. She had forced the unspoken into tangible existence.

  “Nothing. Go back to bed.” Her mother gave in and appealed to her nakedly, as a woman.

  Bruno Fuecht. He had no name. A creature lying on the other side of a door, in bed as in a lair. Love. Her mother, Bruno Fuecht, and—. A conclusion reached only once, in the middle of the night. Left unfinished, for ever, in her daytime self. Love. Mrs. Fuecht is so close to her daughter. “My daughter is my life.”

  At last, she slept beside Tom Stilwell.

  The next day there was a letter for Jessie from Mrs. Fuecht. Jessie ladled out macaroni cheese at lunch, and opened her post in between times. “That’s odd—I dreamt about them last night,” she said, picking up her mother’s letter. But it was not true that she had dreamt. She shook her head as she read: “The old man’s in a nursing home again. What a queer woman she is; she writes with a real air of triumph about it.” “Relieved to have him off her hands, I suppose,” said Tom; the Fuechts had retired to the coast just after he married Jessie: he had not met old Fuecht more than three times in his life, though Mrs. Fuecht had come up for a few awkward days each time a child had been born. He was satisfied that they had no part of Jessie, and he merely concurred with her token interest in them. Since Fuecht had got old, he had become ill, eccentric and difficult. “He’s been giving her a hell of a time. She says he threw his diet food out of the window and then got dressed and slipped out of the house to a restaurant in town.”

  Ann Davis, who had been driving around all morning with a photographer friend who took pictures of rich people’s houses and gardens, was questioning Boaz about some arrangements he had promised to make for Sunday.

  “Ann wants to see the mine dancing—do you know if it’s on every Sunday?” Boaz asked. Tom shook his head enquiringly. “Shouldn’t think so. Not every week. Eh, Jessie?”

  “Definitely not.” Jessie ate slowly, reading booksellers’ catalogues, circular letters and advertisement pamphlets, though she chivvied the children for their slowness at table, and banished them if they brought toys with them.

  “How can we find out?”

  “Phone the Chamber of Mines.”

  Morgan was at just that age at which, the moment a grown-up noticed him, he was asked to do something; for the rest of the time, he was not taken into account at all. “Morgan can ring up for you,” said Tom. “Bring the phone book, old chap. Chamber of Mines. Publicity department—something like that.”

  Morgan was a smallish boy, for nearly fifteen; only his hands, big-knuckled and long, had shot ahead of him, and were nearly a man’s hands. He went readily; whenever Jessie felt people’s eyes upon him, she was impelled to make some remark to break their attention—it was an unconscious reaction. For the first few days at home, for some reason or other he continued to wear his school clothes—a clean, ink-freckled white shirt and clumsy grey flannel pants that reached to the knee and were held up by a belt made of striped webbing in the school colours. Jessie, before the fact of the institutional cast of his figure, at once created a diversion, like a bitch running senselessly back and forth before the humans who have come to look at her litter. Her remark drew attention to him, but deftly turned it off focus. “What a tramp he looks! Tom, you must take him to town next week and get him some decent things.” But the child wore the uniform as though he had been born in it.

  “There’s no answer,” said Morgan, coming back into the dining-room.

  “Of course not,” Tom remembered. “There’s no one there after lunch on a Saturday.”

  Challenged, they began telephoning everyone they could think of who might be able to give them the information they sought, and the lunch table broke up, except for Jessie, and the three little girls, who were eating custard. Ann stood about in the alert way of someone having her way. Morgan stood about ready for orders.

  “Leeuwvlei Deep, half past nine tomorrow,” Tom came in and announced.

  “There, are you happy now?” said Boaz to Ann.

  “Goody!” said Ann, and the little girls took it up, Goody, Goody! “We’ll all go,” she said to Jessie. “Shall we?”

  “Well, the little girls’ve been. I’m not keen to go again, are you, Tom?” She looked at the boy, Morgan, who said nothing. She went on quickly, “But I suppose Morgan would like to go. Yes, I don’t think he’s ever been—have you, once when you were small, d’you remember?”

  Ann took the coffee tray from the servant Agatha and carried it out on to the verandah. “I’ll pour.”

  “Give me mine first, please, Ann; I must fly.” The Agency was running a jazz band contest that afternoon, and Jessie was to be cashier at the hall. As soon as Ann heard this, she turned: “Oh, could I come along? Could I?”

  “If you want to, of course. It’ll be awfully hot and noisy. I don’t know how you feel about jazz bands in the afternoon. Wild horses wou
ldn’t drag me, if I didn’t have to.”

  But the girl was off upstairs. Changing in her own room. Jessie couldn’t help warming towards her; everything attracted the girl, she expected interest instead of shrinking from the risk of boredom. Was that youth? Jessie had forgotten. She only knew that she herself became more and more aware of the need to protect herself from what she thought of as waste. Down in the garden, Clem and Madge and Elisabeth burst out of the house with their hands before them, in pursuit of dragonflies. Jessie and Ann went off together, looking, in their thin, bright dresses and sandals, curiously alike, for once, like acolytes who have both, at one time or another, served the same gods.

  Ann was talking about the tribal dancing they were to see next day. “I remember someone—must have been our servant—kicking and jumping around with a shield made of a skin with brown and white fur. I suppose he was drunk. It was connected with some sort of a row in the house, I’m sure.”

  “But I thought you’d left Rhodesia when you were a baby?” said Jessie. That was what Boaz had said.

  “No … no,” the girl said tranquilly, smoking. “I remember that boy, his name was Justin. He was yelling, too, some sort of song.”

  She remembered more of Africa than she told Boaz; she told Boaz, perhaps, only what she wanted to. She was unembarrassed by the lie, and made no attempt to disclaim it. For the first time, Jessie felt some curiosity about her; yet she sensed that the curiosity would be brought up short: Ann might rush into things with her hands out before her, like the little girls after dragonflies, but it would probably follow that, like the little girls, she would not be aware of her own motives.

  She was helpful at the hall, and did not give way to any of those signs of bossiness that usually exhibit themselves in those who volunteer in situations of disorganisation. The afternoon session of the bands contest was for people of various shades of colour only, and a large, amiable and lagging crowd, mostly Africans, wandered in and out. A row of seats that had been shown on the booking plan did not exist in the hall, and this, added to the fact that nobody seemed to stay in his allotted seat for long anyway, confused Jessie’s box-office. Someone who had promised to be there to help her failed to turn up, and so Ann cheerfully did what she was told in his place. By the interval, Jessie had lost Ann entirely; walking up and down the aisles, she came upon her, sitting three rows from the front between two African girls who had been programme sellers, and drinking a green lemonade from the bottle. Jessie had with her, by this time, the young man who should have been there earlier to assist as the row emptied. “Here’s the culprit—Len Mafolo—Ann Davis.” The young man, with the sleepy, veiled look that many town Africans have, murmured some excuse, and sat quietly, letting the smoke curl out of his mouth before his face. Ann had already formed the fervent championing loyalties that take hold of spectators at any sort of contest. “Well if the third lot don’t win, I’ll eat my hat. I mean, there’s no comparison, no one else in the same class …” “… like a lot of tired grasshoppers—don’t you agree?”

  “I came too late; I didn’t hear them,” said the young man.

  A crowd of young bloods in the front row were whistling piercingly and throwing paper darts at the girls in the aisles; most of them wore teddy-boy clothes, inhabiting them with abandon, hilarity and vulgarity instead of the dead coldness, like lead, with which their white counterparts filled the get-up. Blasts of disgust from a trumpeter warming up off-stage were followed by a long, tootling sigh from a saxophone.

  “D’you think I could go now, Len?” said Jessie, asking a favour.

  “Yes, why not. I’ll do the returns. It’ll be quite all right, Jessie. I’m sorry”—he indicated an apology for being late.

  “Good. Thanks so much, then—Ann, if you want to hear bands, we can fix it any time. You’ll get lots of chances.”

  “Of course, if you want to go.” Ann did not demur, though she was enjoying herself. She edged smiling along the row; she had taken stimulus and excitement from the crowd, as some people can. She enjoyed the feeling of being among these good-natured strangers. As she passed before Jessie’s friend, who had stood up, loosely, to let them go by, she said in her dazed glow, “I’m going to see the mine dancers tomorrow.”

  “Oh you are,” he said coldly; and then, confused by his snub, seemed to forget they were there. “Len, goodbye,” Jessie called from the aisle, and he recovered himself, half-rose again, and waved to them.

  Tom Stilwell met Ann on the stairs when she and Jessie got back. He had been working all afternoon and was coming down to the sound of Jessie’s voice mingled with the voices of the children, in the garden. “Eardrums still intact?”

  Ann checked her light flight up the stairs. “Oh yes!” she called, and added, in her English way, “It was splendid. Simply splendid.” He flinched a little, as if he had come too quickly from the gloom of his desk into the sun.

  Jessie, as so often, had been waylaid by some need of the garden, and had not got as far as the house. She had kicked off her sandals in order not to muddy them, and was picking her way about gingerly between the leaning apricot tree and the bunch of palms. The palms were of a kind that had nothing of the tropical beauty that the word suggests; they opened out like a pen-knife with a bristling array of blades; once a year a tall stem rose out of the middle and bore a head of cream-coloured bells that usually proved too heavy for the plant: it keeled over, as it had done now. Jessie was trying to right it. The little girls gathered a pile of early windfall apricots, wasp-stung and smelling richly of perfume and rot. Tom lay on the coarse grass and watched these various forms of activity. Presently he called out, “That pepper tree ought to come down. And that bit of the hedge.” Jessie did not answer, obstinately propping one arm of the palm behind another that sagged less. He got up and strolled over to her. “Ought to come down.” He knocked at the crusty trunk of the old tree with his fist. Every few months he would come into the garden, “like Fate,” as Jessie said, and make pronouncements of this kind. They were true; necessary; sensible. He showed her the garden, in a word, as it was; she saw the broken macrocarpa hedge, the stooping pepper trees, the tangle of woody growth bald on its lower level and reaching towards the light. “Oh no,” she said. “Trimming a bit, perhaps.” She withdrew quietly, driftingly, immediately from the garden as he presented it; she picked up her sandals and disappeared inside the house.

  The Davises had gone out again, and the emptiness of the house was emphasised by the buzzing of a few sleepy flies; suddenly she remembered that it was not empty—Morgan must be somewhere about. She went to her room and forgot him, for ten minutes, occupied in putting away the clean shirts and socks that Agatha had laid out on the bed. Then, on her way downstairs again, she looked in on his room. She did not think he would be there and so she did not knock, but simply opened the door. He smiled up at her, from the bed. He was lying on his back, with the little bedside radio playing on the window-sill beside him. The curtains of the converted verandah were drawn against the afternoon sun. “Hullo. Is that where you are.” He moved slightly to acknowledge her. “What you been doing?” she asked pleasantly. The noise of the little plastic box streamed between them, rising, falling, soothing, imploring. “Listening.” The braying, weeping, jostling went on. “It’s the Nicky Doone programme,” he offered. She nodded. “You should have come with me,” she said, in the jokingly reproachful tone of offering at least some sort of alternative. She forgot that she had not asked him. His long, half-grown hands played with a piece of matchbox. He smiled at her kindly, shyly, without awkwardness, while her own grew until it sounded in her ears as loudly as the radio. She did not go away but she and her son found nothing to say to each other. There was only the voice of the radio gibbering conversationally. At last, in interruption, Jessie said, “I’d better see if Agatha’s remembered the meat.” Her heart was thumping as she put her hand on the door; she looked at him—she was sure she would speak—but she did not.

  The Davises acqui
red several volunteers for the outing to the mine dances, and while the Stilwell house was finishing late Sunday breakfast, various young people began strolling in. At last they set off in an assortment of cars; the little girls had been waiting, ready, in the Stilwells’ old Peugeot for an hour, but Morgan, who took on the colour of a crowd very easily, went off with strangers.

  They drove westwards out of the city and through the settlements of worked-out or nearly worked-out mines that were now being linked to the city by its proliferation: strings of roadside stores, garages, road-houses that seemed to belong nowhere, and to be one with the litter of orange-peel and cigarette boxes thrown from passing cars. At one of the mine properties the cars gathered by prearrangement, and people jumped out to confer about the final directions. Morgan came over to his parents’ car. “Didn’t Granny live in one of these houses, or somewhere?” “No, not somewhere,” said Jessie, setting the words to right as if they were some object knocked over. “On Helgas-drift, on the East Rand.”

  “Why is he so vague. He seems to take a delight in never quite knowing anything,” she said, irritated, to Tom.

  “He’s afraid of being wrong, I should say.”

  “Jessie, did you really live in a place just like this?” Ann leaned in the car window.