Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  “… little girls are always over at Peggy’s. I have the place to myself, except for Boaz, up in his room working. Everything disappears. It’s like it was when I was at home in Bruno’s house waiting to begin an imaginary life. I don’t seem to have had a second in between when I wasn’t completely concentrated on some person, blind, deaf, and busy. You remember those silk-worms, their jaws never stopped and if you were absolutely quiet in the room you could actually hear them going at it? —To have been so hungry, and not to have known why.”

  “But then they were full, and suddenly knew how to spin silk.”

  It would be idiotic to send it to Morgan; a nervous, hostile embarrassment came over her—it was a grown-up’s letter. She closed her fist on the sheets, squeezing them into a ball. They lay slowly opening on the grass while she dashed off the kind of note, full of studied friendly interest, that she sent to him every few weeks.

  The children came home, and then Tom. “Why doesn’t Josias cut the grass?” The sun had gone down and the swells of growth made gentle troughs of shadow. Jessie answered as if to some criticism of one of her children, “It’ll be brown underneath. It’s nice.” “Yes, of course it would be brown, it’s been allowed to grow much too long.”

  Madge edged herself on to her mother’s chair, pressing against her thigh. “State your case,” Jessie said, and smiled. “Oh Mummy…” the child scowled at her impatiently.

  “I got good seats for Friday.”

  “How many did you take?” A trio from Brazil was to play at the university hall, and Jessie wondered whether Boaz might not want to go too.

  “Well, I took three … I didn’t think she’d be coming. But I suppose it looks funny not to ask.” Tom looked doubtfully at Jessie.

  She smiled intimately, parenthetically. “She’ll probably be there with Shibalo.”

  “I know. That’s what I thought.”

  He squeezed her hand. Jessie turfed Madge off her chair like a bird pushing its fledgling out of a nest.

  “We’d better not ask him to come?”

  She murmured, “Difficult. Don’t know.”

  She added, speaking low because although it was out of hearing the window was up there in the house behind them: “He really does seem to like Shibalo. You know how it is when the man really likes the other one. Everybody being so considerate, and no hard feelings. My heart sinks. It’d be much easier if he thought he was a louse and wanted to kick him in the backside.”

  “Well of course that’s impossible this time.”

  “Only because Boaz is so fastidious about everybody’s feelings, and wants her back a hundred-per-cent off her own bat! No coercion whatsoever, like a unicorn that you have to wait to have come and put its head down in your lap. It’s a lovely idea, it’s how it ought to be …”

  “No, I mean because this is not a white man.”

  Jessie shook her hand out of his and sat forward. “What has that got to do with it?”

  “A lot. Quite a lot.”

  “If you’d said that it had a lot to do with Ann I’d understand it. She wants to prove she can do exactly what she likes! She wants—well, then I’d understand it. From her point of view the whole thing has everything to do with his being a black! But Boaz, Boaz—? You know that Boaz truly never thinks about these things, he has no feeling about it at all, you’ve told me yourself that he was once keen on a black girl, he’s slept with black women—”

  “Yes, yes—” Tom said for her in conclusion. “And Boaz cannot kick a black man in the backside.”

  Jessie began to speak but she saw the expression on his face change to acknowledge another presence and realised that Boaz had come out of the house. The Stilwells tried to treat him without any obvious special consideration these days, but a certain concerned brusqueness sometimes crept into their manner. “I met John Renishaw today, he wants to know when you’re going to see him,” Tom said as Boaz came up.

  “Christ, I want to know too. I promised weeks ago.”

  “Well, you better do something about it, because he’s going to Cape Town for six weeks. —Hey, what have you got there—”

  Clem and Elisabeth had smoothed out the sheets of Jessie’s crumpled letter and folded them into shapes that would hold water. “Water-bombs! Water-bombs!” Elisabeth shrieked and boasted, throwing hers, that she had filled at the garden tap.

  “Don’t leave the water running,” said Jessie, in a voice of patient repetition.

  “They’ve used some letter of yours!” Tom’s voice rose.

  “I know. I’d thrown it away, anyway.”

  “Why on earth …” He looked at her with amused, slightly aggressive curiosity.

  “It was wrong.” She waved a hand to dismiss it.

  While she returned to what she had been saying to Boaz, Tom glanced at the wet paper-shape covered with words running into each other. “Who was it to?”

  “—Morgan—” she said in quick parenthesis.

  “Why on earth write a long letter to Morgan and then throw it away.”

  She looked at him for a moment to make him see that he was putting her to the trouble of providing an answer. “Haven’t you ever written a letter that had to be torn up?”

  “But to Morgan?”

  “Why not?” said Boaz.

  Jessie smiled to discount his objection and opened her hands and clapped them loosely together before her again in indication of her own crazy lapse.

  “You do that with love letters,” Tom said. “Write them and tear them up and write them again. What was it all about, though?”

  “Oh nothing. Nothing for Morgan. Nothing that would interest him, that’s all.”

  “But what was it about?” Tom was encouraging, cornering her.

  “Well, if you really want to know.” Her face was a mixture of annoyance and the reluctant pleasure of giving oneself away. She said matter-of-factly, as if repeating something that she had heard or read, “I was just thinking how sex fills one’s life for so many years. Sex in its various aspects, I mean; looking for men, securing to yourself the chosen one, seeing children as the manifestation of the bond. It’s only when and if you’ve fulfilled all this that you begin to ask the purpose of it all—for yourself, not the biological one—and to want an answer with a new kind of passion.”

  What she had just been saying brought her into two separate streams of unspoken communication with the two men. Boaz recognised the mood of what she had said when they were talking alone together earlier, and it sprang alive in silent reference between them. Between her husband and her were the tremendous attempts at knowing each how the other lived, and the knowledge that the measure in which these failed or succeeded is never known. “That wouldn’t be the accepted idea of fulfilment, simply a making-room for another want,” Tom said.

  Sometimes they were all at home at this time of day, even Ann. She would hear the Stilwells’ talk as the Stilwells heard the children’s—half-listening, preoccupied. What were they saying? Always the same sort of thing; a drain was blocked, someone must take the car for servicing, who would pick up Clem from her swimming class, and had the renewal of the newspaper subscriptions been remembered? The enduring surface of marriage seemed to be made up of such things; they had little meaning, no interest, and they matted together as monotonously as a piece of basket-work. Her eyes rested often on Boaz. She liked him. They had always managed almost entirely without any paraphernalia to hold them up. She wondered if, in fact, he really liked living like that. It might have been to please her. She thought, with resentment making a quick fist inside her again, he would do almost anything to please her, but he could ask, as if prompted by the knowledge of some inadequacy in her that he did not admit, “Do you know what it’s all about?”

  Gideon was doing a tremendous painting of her. It was larger than life and the incised line along the solid brushstrokes released the figure from the flat background. She kept going back to look at it while she was in the room with it, not as a woman admires her
self in a flattering portrait, but in an excitable and terrifying curiosity: there was no surface likeness to provide reassurance; she knew it was the likeness of what he found her to be.

  She had an awareness of him as a single creature unrelated to any other. She did not know his parents or his brothers and sisters, who might have shown less attractively the looks and movements she thought of as his alone, neither did she know his real friends (Len, she suspected, did not count as one), who might have exhibited views and opinions that, although she thought them entirely his own, in fact he shared with others.

  She brought this awareness of the man she had just left into the company of the Stilwells and Boaz as unthinkingly as a dancer carries her posture from the rehearsal that has occupied her afternoon. They chatted as they had always done, sometimes joking, sometimes silent, often interrupted by children, now and then rising to an argument, or getting into a discussion. She was reassured, not only for herself, but also, oddly, for them all, by the ease with which she could resume her place among them. It had the same effect on her as the sight of one’s feet in familiar shoes may have when one sits down, rather drunk, among the press at a party.

  She was hardly aware of how she was going or what direction she was taking. The only conception she had of her life at that time came one evening when they were sitting outside after the sun went down. With her head tipped back over the hard rail of the chair she saw the upstairs windows of the house, open to the sky, space shading off into the high, last light. All the meaning of the almost-past summer gathered for her in the vision of Jessie’s old house—ugly old house—as it was this evening and had been so many evenings, with the windows open like hands and a first bat fluttering without sound, wandering and rising. None of the others saw the creature; it was only the acute angle at which she had let her head fall back that let her see it. It was in the air above them all, soft, deaf, remote, steered by warnings and attractions they lacked a sense to apprehend.

  Boaz said to the Stilwells, “If I go to Moçambique, you don’t mind if she stays on here?”

  “Naturally. If she doesn’t go with you.” There was a pause after Jessie spoke. “I must get started sometime,” Boaz said. “My whole organisation up there’ll break down if I don’t.”

  Tom said, “And anything can happen—there could be a political blow-up at any time, you might not be able to get in.”

  Behind this sensible talk the Stilwells saw that Boaz no longer assumed that the house was also Ann’s home whether he was there or not: it sounded as if he were already considering her life as separate from his own.

  But he said, “If I’m not here, there’s no one who can do anything for her. At least if she’s living here she’s got some sort of a base …?” He added, “Without being unfair to Gideon Shibalo, he can’t actually look after her much.”

  Jessie was not looking at him; she had her left elbow supported in her right hand, the left hand covering her face below the nostrils. He said to them, almost exasperated, with a little laugh, “I can’t say anything to him. And I can’t just leave her to it. Not really. I want to let her do what she has to, I mean she’s free to live her own way … but I can’t leave her to it—as things are.”

  Tom’s father was spending a week in the house and Jessie went now to give him some newspaper cuttings on indigenous bulbs that she had kept for him. He had just come in from the garden, an old man whose weakening eyes always had happy tears in them, and he was full of pained shock over the condition of the rose bushes, the enjoyable shock of one eager to prescribe—“My dear, I find it difficult to credit … just shreds of leaf, shreds. What you want is to go out there of an evening with an ordinary bowl of water and a strong torch. You’ll attract those beetles in hundreds, simply fall in and get drowned, that’s all.”

  “Really, Dad? Will they?” It was true that Gideon had nowhere to take Ann to.

  “… done it time out of number. An ordinary mixing basin will do …”

  Where did he come from, when he was not living secretly at that flat? Somewhere there was a wife, children, old friends, a kinship—a man’s life couldn’t be lived by permission in the hours when someone else didn’t need a flat.

  “… when I was a boy, it was a paraffin flare. Tom’s got a strong torch, of course?”

  “Oh I think so. Clem’s got one. From last Christmas—if it’s not broken.” They couldn’t go away together. He couldn’t keep her; not on an African schoolteacher’s earnings. Did it ever come to that? Jessie thought of the other white girl she knew who had fallen in love with an African; the girl had kept him, and saved the money to get them both to Ghana or Nigeria or somewhere. Shibalo, for all his talent, no matter what he was, was on the receiving side, and the receiving side was always at a disadvantage.

  “A tin basin will do.”

  She turned her attention to the old man with a special softening of desire to please, because she had not been listening to him. He seemed to her, as the old often do to the young, endearingly innocent. Children were supposed to be, but she seldom found them so. There was Morgan, apparently born with all kinds of terrible knowledge. What she thought of as innocence was the lack of evidence, in another, of the things she mistrusted in herself.

  Gideon came to the house with Ann on Saturday afternoon. He brought sketches he had done of the children, from memory. He gave them in a negligent, off-hand way, but Jessie thought that they were purposely “interesting”. She felt sorry for him for the necessity he felt to try to put in a word for himself with her by flattery, even so obliquely. Again he stayed for dinner—or rather for a cold supper, for that was what it was. Old Mr. Stilwell had never mixed with black people socially in his own life, but he understood that his son “looked at things differently”, as he put it, and was rather proud of the open house kept by his son. He liked to shock acquaintances of his own kind and generation by swanking about the way he often sat down to dinner there, without blinking an eyelid, between black guests. In fact, the only black guest he had ever met there before was Len. Len was present again, and called him “sir” in the way that he liked young men to do. The old man lived alone and was excited by the company of young people and children, the wave of life caught him up roughly again. Laughter, raised voices, interruptions, things begun and not finished, things that never got said: this was the way it was; only when one was alone and it was over did the sentences get completed and end in silence.

  His second gin (he had two every evening) warmed the impulse that is always there—to explain to the one in whose presence you have been silent all your life what you really have been thinking all the time. It was not truthful, but was simply the impulse made audible in phrases that would hold it harmlessly. He had cornered Gideon, and was saying with some of the charm he must have had when he was young, “I’ve always had a lot of respect for your people. And I’ve always found them show respect in return.” Later he became bolder, and more consciously candid: “After all, it’s nonsense to talk of marrying and all that—politicians’ scare-stories, I tell people. I’m sure none of us thinks of that. But you can’t tell me there’s any good reason why you and I shouldn’t be having a chat together in a drawing-room if the mood takes us.” Gideon listened to him with carefully narrowed attention: his head inclined as if he must be sure to be wily enough to miss no word of a daring and debatable argument. Tom said between closed teeth, “Oh Christ.” But Len, who got up to renew the old gentleman’s drink, was almost primly reproachful—“He’s a sweet old man”—and a spirit of outrageous undercurrent amusement suddenly took over the company. They drank quite a lot and the need to be tactful disappeared. Jessie no longer felt it necessary to bother whether, if Boaz found himself at one end of the table, while it had somehow come out that Gideon was sitting next to Ann at the other, it would look ominous or odd. Boaz and Ann, reminded by a turn of the talk of some old private joke, caught each other’s eyes and giggled.

  “We never going to see you down at the office again?�
�� Len said, turning to Ann. When he met her nowadays, he talked to other people, as if the two of them had quarrelled. He bore the slight that, so far as she was concerned, nothing had changed, she felt no less interested in him than she had ever done.

  “Lennie, I’d love to get started on something. What’s new there for us?”

  He looked pleased in spite of himself. “Always new. You’re a damned good unpaid worker, but like all people who don’t get paid you’re unreliable. Disappear in the middle of things, man.”

  Her indignation was flirtatious. “I like that! There wasn’t a school or a hall within seventy miles we didn’t lug that caravan to.”

  “Won’t you give me my job back?” Jessie called out. “As a paid worker, needless to say. I think I’ll leave the mortuary at the end of this month, I can’t stick it any longer.”

  “It’s not our policy to employ whites where blacks will do.”

  “Ha-ha. Don’t we know it; unless they’re unpaid and unreliable, eh?”

  “Are you really giving up?” Boaz said to Jessie.

  “Oh I must. I’m sick of the dying rich. Trouble is, what to do. The Agency job really did suit me down to the ground, you know. Useful, gregarious in a surface sort of way. Anonymous.”

  “Work for me. I mean it,” said Boaz. “My things are in a hell of a mess. I must get someone to catalogue and type notes and so on.”

  “Oh no,” she laughed and drew back, vehement. She sawed away at the leg of lamb with a rather blunt knife, while he went on, “Personal, convenient, learn in your own home. Write now for illustrated booklet.” She laughed but she felt in herself the symptom of a disease she had feared and forgotten, the set of opposition she had discovered nearly a year ago, when she and Tom first discussed the possibility of having the Davises to live in the house. It was just what she had been afraid of—the presence of strangers was influencing the way they lived, turning them to distractions that required the posturing that another pair of eyes on oneself demands. The Davises were drawing everyone into their own charged air; the whole house was the way things looked within such an atmosphere. Now came the suggestion that she should work with him, put herself in danger of assuming jealous concern for his research, of standing in a comradely working alliance with him as Ann was not. They would end up going to bed together, maybe? She felt a wild and stirring indignation, a struggle for life. No, no, she wanted to say to him, it would be too nice, it would be too convenient, it would be the end of me.