Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  Jessie paid five shillings and mumbled something about meeting someone, but the excuse was not necessary. No one was suspicious of her. On the other side of leather concertina doors was a large room lit to a fluorescent pink, with silver-painted globe chairs round the tables. On the walls hung huge photographs of young men with the faces of sulky girls, their lips snarling in song, but the band that was bumping and knocking out the rhythm of some supposedly South American tune was not a fanatic group of jazz-possessed youngsters, but ordinary commercial musicians with the stolid weariness of an endless night in their faces. The people were young, but not noticeably belonging to the teenage cult. Most of the girls must have been under twenty and looked like the bored or head-tossing misses who served in bazaars during the day. There was no hint of sophistication about them and they came from a class too new to the cheap bright benefits of the material to want to ape, even without understanding, its fashionable symbolic rejection by pale girls in black stockings.

  A loose-faced youth in a dirty white forage cap brought Jessie a Coca-Cola and a saucer of chips. A few people were dancing, but most of them hung about, the men in chaffing groups around the girls. They looked like young men who had come together in twos and threes from some of the reef gold-mining towns where the pleasures of the city were not available; there was a solidarity about the way they returned to their companions as soon as a dance was over, roaring back in sniggering laughter at each other’s remarks. On the periphery of the young men and girls were some of those men who appear, shaven, dressed in their one pin-stripe suit and shining cap of black hair, apparently from the rat-holes of every city. Every now and then one of them would take one of the paid dancing partners on to the floor, holding her with all the ghastly delicacy of a refined finger furled above the handle of a tea-cup. The favourite was a black-haired girl with a queenly, kidding look and a white neck with a crucifix round it. She was not fat but she must have been heavy, for her feet in their pointed shoes came down with an extraordinary impression of force, treading violence, as if they would spear, crush and flatten anything that might happen to fall beneath them. She giggled and nodded while she danced.

  One of the men walked twice past Jessie. Then he was there, bent over the table; a zig-zag of orchid-pink light shone on the hair as if on a dark pond. “You wouldn’t like to dance, madam?” The fastidious politeness, the obsequious male pride in knowing how a woman likes to think she’s being treated lay in a pathetic gloss over the craven ferociousness of the creature. His mean eyes had an objective loneliness, like the eyes of an animal that does not know it was born behind bars.

  She did not learn why Morgan had gone there. To do so, she understood at last, you would first have to know where he set out from.

  Five

  Adam, seeing Eve sprung fully-fledged from his side, could not have been more strangely troubled. There was always time to get down to Morgan; he would keep, he was there, whether she liked it or not, and one day she would be able to turn round and take up where she had set him aside. She no longer knew when exactly it was that she had set him aside and it seemed to her that this must have been at the time of her marriage to Tom, but in fact it had been much earlier, when she lay in bed at night in the room where the baby slept, and wept in self-pity and rage for the years her mother had cheated her of. Then the baby, with the enviable bloom of its life untouched by anybody, had seemed something that could well be left to itself in any but the obvious physical needs. It would be safe like that for a time just as its natural immunity from certain diseases, a legacy from before birth, would last for a year or two. Fifteen years had gone by, and now she was confronted with some strange creature: half-man, not-child. Where was the child who had been hanging about her, waiting?

  In psychiatric jargon, a man may be spoken of as mentally “completely inaccessible”; in order to survive without the disabilities of the past, without whining, without blaming, Jessie had made most of her past life inaccessible to her rather in this way; she had remained accessible to it, of course, on that level beyond control, the subconscious. She wanted to deal with Morgan here and now, of and in the present. Was that unreasonable? She was trying to put him together as you might a new acquaintance, from the images of the last five or six weeks. He was gone, of course, out of the house again, but he had been there, and, out of an old arrogance of her responsibility for him taken as mastery of him, she set herself out to pick up an easy trail. He was bored; he felt out of things, between the grown-ups and the little girls; he was led into the whole business by his weakness, following the Wiley boy rather than thinking for himself. Or it was the old story of the child who deliberately turns his back on the freedom to develop within the liberation won by his parents, and chooses the rigid and vulgar? Yet Morgan, as he began to fill out in her consciousness as he was—as she had seen him and, until now, not seen him—gave himself away in response to none of these clues. He had nothing to do with them; she could see that. He was not bored—the day she had walked into his room and found him lying listening to his endless radio, what stillness there was about him, a loneliness, yes, perhaps, wrapped soft as content. And out of things—out of things was his place, he had curled up there for years. And just as he had no spirit for resentment (there was shame and a twinge of contempt in her at the admittance) so his weakness would not have been enough to send him so far after the Wiley boy: something more potent than weakness, an initiative of his own, had sent him up the concrete stairs to the pink lights. As for their values—hers and Tom’s and the house’s—she had to admit with a sense of sullen pain she did not know whether they had “taken” or not with Morgan, simply through his being around: that was the only way they might have been expected to have done.

  The boy loomed in her mind in a series of outlines that wavered into each other and faded into a thickening oppression. The sight of one of the little girls, coming with a splinter to be taken out of a finger, Clem wanting to chatter or Madge mournful with the desire to be kissed, brought about an instinctive withdrawal. Jessie felt like a dog who sees a raised stick. Love appalled her with its hammering demands, love clamoured and dunned, love would throw down and tear to pieces its object. This was love, that few people could live without, and that most spent the major effort of their lives to secure. And the burden of Morgan, Morgan, hung on her—always she turned in final exacerbation on this. Yet she did not love Morgan, and Morgan—that much she was sure of—did not love her. They seemed to meet over the admittance, looking at each other without expectation or malice, with that space, between the house, where she was, and the school, where he was, briefly blown clear.

  The current of her preoccupation moved through the house. The children stumbled into it, startled, and went on again, forgetful and happy. Tom kept coming into its path, and always with a sense of dismay and surprise—so Jessie was still aware of this Morgan business! He could not for the life of him see why; next time Morgan came home for holidays they would have to make sure that his time was fully occupied, that was all. That was all they could do. It was a matter of finding a few fairly grown-up occupations for him. Tom had made up his mind to see to this when the time came, and Jessie knew that he would. There was nothing else to be done. It might not work, but there was nothing else to be done. Didn’t Jessie accept that any longer? Why was she turning the whole light of her being on Morgan now, when long ago, soon after he had begun to live with her (and the boy; the two went together), he had understood that he must give up trying to get her to turn that life-giving light the child’s way, even occasionally. She had never been able to do it. Not even then, when it was necessary and there was some sense in it. This business of the dance-hall was the least of the threats that had hung over Morgan.

  Tom himself was moving in the inner constriction of his own difficulties at the time. The Bill that would close the university to all but white students for the future was about to be debated in Parliament; and there was talk of a “loyalty” clause being inserted in qua
lifications for the appointment of staff. The students’ council was demonstrating and pamphleteering in protest, and Tom was eager to see them kick up a real shindy, supported by the staff. The issue started off decently clear in his mind, but as the days went by it took on all the stains and nicks of handling, and began to be almost unrecognisable. One morning an administrative official of the university had torn down and stuffed into a rubbish bin some student posters. It was said that this was on instruction from the highest quarters; even if it had been done without instruction, as an expression of personal irritation, it would have had an ambiguous look about it. Tom was beginning to have a sickening sense of the whole affair—that had existed diamond-hard among those few crystal formations of bedrock morality—moving into areas of doubt where it did not belong. He scarcely spoke through dinner that evening and got up from the table while the others were still eating—he had to go to a private meeting with some members of the university staff and students. “Where are my cigarettes? I’d better move on, I suppose.”

  There was the pause of confrontation with a subject everyone knew too well to want to talk about.

  Ann was home for dinner for once, and she asked with the impartial interest she brought to most things, “Was there a big meeting at lunch-time today?”

  “Not bad. Only let there be some noise and broken heads so that people begin to see that academic freedom is something to fight over in the street! People feel it’s a phrase that doesn’t concern most of them, like ‘higher income tax bracket’. Let ‘em understand it’s on a level with their right to their weekly pay-packet, the defence of their wife’s good name and blood-heating things like that.”

  Jessie was moving restlessly about the room as if contemplating some tidying-up activity. “I’ll be up,” she said, indicating he needn’t take a key.

  At the meeting that evening a student pointed out that the university never had been truly open to anyone but whites; the African and Indian students had never been allowed to take part in sports or social events. When one spoke of it as an “open” university one was already accepting some of the meaner and uglier evasions by which the colour-bar protected itself. Tom dropped in at a friend’s flat for coffee afterwards and got talking to an African whom he had met there a few times before. They left together and as they walked along the street Tom quoted the exchange that had taken place between those members of the university staff and administration who, like himself, wanted to fight the Bill unreservedly, and to back up the students and give them free rein, and others who protested that they abhorred the Bill but that it was foolish to antagonise the Government when it would go through in any case, and the university was heavily dependent on Government grants. In order to keep alive the idea of academic freedom, these people argued, the university must continue to exist at all costs, even that of academic freedom itself …

  The brown, pock-marked face beside him appeared and disappeared as they passed together under street-lamps. The man turned to say goodnight: “Fight them over this business if you want to, man, but don’t think that anything you do really matters. Some of you make laws, and some of you try to change them. And you don’t ask us.”

  When Tom talked to Jessie about it, she had still the clear-cut picture of it that he himself had had at the beginning. She had never cared much for academic people—if she had been married to a business man, she would have cared as little for his associates sworn to the twin gods of supply and demand, for she had the solitary’s genuine if slightly jealous dislike of guilds, jokes of the trade, and a soothing assumption of a common lot—and it did not surprise her that some of the university people were now found unable to clap their hands over their revealed careerism and lack of moral courage.

  “I don’t see that there’s any problem. It’s only people who’re busy taking things into ‘consideration’—whether they’ll be kicked out or whether Professor Tiddleypush would like them to open their mouths or not—who need give the thing a second thought.” She commented on a satisfaction, in him, that she took for granted. Yet this truth seemed to him now flippant and casual. He thought, with a flash of vindictiveness, she sits there in a heap (she had waited up for him) and she has not been listening to me. She’s all attention but she has not heard. It was true that he was against keeping a man out of a university because of his colour just as surely as he knew it was wrong to murder. But she knew nothing of the disruption of the working atmosphere by conflict, she knew nothing of the feel of that curious conglomeration of usefulness, waste, inspiration and discipline that makes an institution, shifting and staggering beneath your feet.

  He was awake in the night and she was aware of it. She felt him sliding carefully out of his side of the bed. “What is it?” “I don’t know,” he lied. “I want a cigarette.” He lay with his back to her in order not to disturb her, but she could feel the regular inhalations with which he took the cigarette, and the stretching of his arm muscle as he leant to put it out. He ran his foot, curved to caress, over her calf in security, but it was an hour when she could imagine how she would be if she had never met him. She had the actual feeling of herself free, alone, husband dead, mother escaped from, alone, with Morgan. It began to go through her mind in light and colour, a life with Morgan that seemed to have happened. Morgan was a boy of about five and she was pushing him on a swing. Then she was sitting on the swing and he was pushing her. She came toward his laughing face and away from it again, toward and away. Then she and Morgan were on a ship together, they were reading, side by side on deck, and people to whom they never needed to speak walked up and down. (They really had been on a ship together, once, but he had been little and she had put him in the public nursery most of the time, where he had stared down at her on deck in silence from behind wire mesh.) Then he was older, twelve or fourteen, and they shared a flat, orderly, with shaded lights; he poured the drinks for her and they went to the theatre together. They were having dinner, cooking and setting the table for themselves, and talking. She had him with her through crowded rooms, he looked grown-up in a light suit, his big, young, tender man’s hand she took suddenly … At some point these possibilities became a dream and in the dream she was actually looking with Tom at the projection of a roll of old film whose existence had been unknown and which recorded a life that had been forgotten.

  Beyond her volition, she began to try whether she might not be able to get at the fifteen-year-old boy through laying her hands on what she herself had been at that age. Out of an instinct that ran away with her, she sought out that girl who had been put away for so long as nothing more than a case history. It was easy enough to see her, going about the mine property and the town with her mother. She did not go to school but was taught at home and she and her mother spent the afternoons on shopping expeditions together. There were the counters draped with bolts of silk before which they were lost for hours, their eyes meeting in considering indecision. The final word hung, inevitable as the curtain embrace. “The blue, or the black and white?” “The blue is lovely, the patterned one has more style …” Her mother’s eyes held hers again. Then the decision: “I need a figured dress of some kind, there are times when—” They were free to go off and drink coffee, breaking the calm after tension by passing some remark, now and then, about what accessories would be right. “Take the stairs slowly”; her mother’s gloved hand pressed her shoulder. Sometimes Jessie did think she felt the labouring flutter of her heart when they reached the top: she panted a little, with a smile, to show it. When they got home, they rested together in her mother’s room.

  She was not allowed to play tennis, of course, because of her heart—not an organic defect, and with care she would grow out of it, her mother explained to people. That was why she kept the girl out of school. No tennis or swimming, but she went out at night far more than other children of her age. Her mother and Bruno took her to the theatre and concerts in Johannesburg, and when they played bridge in the houses of the mine, she went with them and was not bored,
listening to the grown-ups and helping the hostess efficiently with the tea. She read novels too, whatever she pleased; “I don’t believe that girls should be brought up in ignorance of life,” said Mrs. Fuecht. The girl looked with fastidious timidity at the great girls in dusty serge gym tunics who had once been her class-mates. She would have been dismayed if she had ever been pronounced well enough to go back to school.

  Ignorance of life! Jessie felt no pity for this little creature, her mother’s boon companion. She was ashamed of her, repulsed by her sham grown-up poise, her pride in the sense of privilege that had been palmed off on her, her prodigy’s smirking acceptance of a dwarf’s status in the world of men and women. Thank God she had not lived—done to death with the violence of the truth, when it came to her.

  But was that all there had been to her?

  Once Jessie began to move down there in the past, once she had forced herself to it, she began to be able to see, like a cat in the dark. Masses crumbled to their components, the detail of delicate structures stood out. All there, all, all, for ever. She came, with great vividness, upon the extraordinary significance, at that time, that was attached to a small painted photograph of her father that she had begged from her mother. She had it still, and for years now it had had no power to stir her; it was simply something she kept, as a gesture of acknowledgement to the man who was her father and whom she could not remember ever having known. But back there it shone alive, charged with a force that held her as the little holy image in its dark niche holds the child who passes through an intensely religious phase. The picture had been in a chocolate box of old trinkets that she loved to rummage through. It was a photograph painted to look like a miniature, in a bevelled gilt snap-case meant to be carried in a handbag—the Twenties equivalent of the picture-locket. She was taken, in the manner of girls, more with the fancy case than anything else. It stood on her book-case between cut-out pictures of Beverley Nichols and Evelyn Waugh in bazaar frames. Then, in one of the loud storms that hit the mine in summer, her bedroom lamp fused, and Bruno came in to fix it. He worked by candle-light, quickly and well, as he did everything, and as the lamp came on again and he picked up his card of fuse wire from the book-case, he noticed the pictures.