Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  Between them—herself standing on the verandah in a dressing-gown, Clem, Madge and Elisabeth in their pyjamas on the coarse short grass—and the sea, were high dunes sloping down bushy green, splendid aloes standing out against the water with their green serrated leaves peeled back and the rags of last year’s clinging to the bole, and groups of strelitzia palm crowded by spoon-leaved dark, short trees, bushes with torn silvery leaves, a mesh of shrubs and ground-creepers. It was not jungle; it made no darkness. It shone and shook and swayed in the sun. Along the coast where the village was, people had planted Scotch firs that were thinned by the wind and the heat and disappeared into the haze. She knew these skinny trees, growing in the dry sand and making it hurtful with stunted cones. Over above a pale red roof, a monkey-puzzle was set down where some retired mine manager or insurance agent had made things nice for himself.

  The atmosphere in which she moved, from house to open doors, where the sea was, was a constant switch from a peculiar, dead, fusty stuffiness to blasts of intoxicating softness. The house was not as she had remembered it but was rather part of the memory of other beach houses as she remembered them and as they appeared to be, even when one did not live in them, but passed them, deserted, perhaps, and looked in, standing on the rough concrete supports that held them above the gap between the floors and the foundation that was left open against rot and termites. The walls of such houses were not grown thick with layer on layer of human personality, but were thin and interchangeable as the shells that gave shelter to various sea animals, first holding some blob of animate mucous, then inhabited by one crab or another. And all the time, as the sea washes in and out of all shells, sand, wind, damp, warmth entered and flowed through these houses; ants streamed over them as if they were part of the continuing surface of sandy earth, bats lived in them as they lived in caves, and all the silent things, the unnoticed forms of life—mould, verdigris—continued to grow as they did on natural forms.

  She thought she recognised the water-tank, but when she looked at it closely it was clear that it was fairly new, so that even if it was there that she had washed the sand off her feet, the tap and tank itself were certainly not the old ones she had known. In any case, the village had a proper piped water-supply now, and a health board to certify it, and, of course, the house was connected up to the mains; the tank was only for watering the grass.

  The house had been four narrow dark rooms surrounded by an open verandah on all sides. But walls had been knocked out and parts of the verandah filled in with rooms and even extended for the purpose. The concrete blocks moulded to simulate stone of which it was built were painted a dim green and the floors everywhere were red granolithic thickly polished and marked off—when the concrete was wet, long ago—in yard squares that held dust and sea sand in the grooves. The house showed signs of some sort of upheaval, fairly recent, which already had begun to yield to the landscape. Apparently the old couple who had lived in it for years had left (been forced out, maybe, in one of Fuecht’s drives of concern about his possessions?) about two years before Bruno Fuecht died, and the house had then evidently been smartened up for a more profitable letting. There was a big refrigerator with a deep freeze compartment, although the stove was an old paraffin burner, converted to use electricity. The furniture was the usual sort that comes to rest in seaside houses: a couple of heavy stuffed chairs that were once part of a “suite”, re-covered by amateurs in material from the local store, a standard lamp like a long pole of brown barley sugar, old black dressing-tables with drawers that stuck. Perhaps the later, smarter tenants had added furniture of their own that they had taken away with them. In the lavatory they had left a printed notice:

  “To ensure the satisfactory working of this sewerage system (septic tank) great care must be taken to see that the following articles are not deposited in the system:

  “Cold cream, vaseline, sandwiches, sawdust, moth balls, cannon balls, golf balls, fish balls, press balls, footballs, cricket bats, curtain rings, telephone rings, engagement rings, smoke rings …” The list went on in this strain, ending up: “… red tape, brassières, two-way stretches, mosquito nets, hair nets, fishing nets—or, in fact, any article at all which may cause the breakdown of the system.

  “God save the sugar farmers.

  “Given at Isendhla Beach this day, the twenty-fourth of December, 1958, under my hand and great seal.

  “BIG CHIEF SHAKA.”

  The house retained no impress of the life that it had contained, first permanently, and then from time to time. Each room was like a person who had no memory, blank, carrying the objects of its purpose—table, bed, cupboard, as a name-tag. Jessie went from one to the other, meeting herself in strips of wardrobe mirror, pushing a fist into an unmade bed, sitting down suddenly. The windows stuck. When they were shut everything outside was seen through a dim cataract of salt. Reddish heaps of powdered wood appeared overnight from the ceilings.

  After a week, she made no more claim on the house than any other creature that drifted in and out of it. It was shade she and the children came under when they trailed up from the beach; there was food there, somewhere to lie down; she was no longer contained by walls but had a being without barriers moving without much change of sensation from hot sun to cool water, from the lap and push and surge of water to the damp, blowy air. When her eyes were open they followed the sea; when they were closed the movement was in her blood.

  The porpoises went by in the swell beyond the breakers, or, when the water was calm, closer in. She watched them as a child watches the game of another family of children, projecting into the pleasure of her half-smile an inkling, from her own experience, of their sensations. Where the grass was not shaved down by the mower, low mauve flowers the shape of sweet peas came out in dew or rain, and closed away invisibly when the sun shone. At night shrill bells went off everywhere in the bush and voiceless creatures flew in to the light and left transparent wings on the floor; in the morning, they were swept out. Madge cut branches of wild gardenia and put them in beer glasses that the wind blew down. Whatever was beautiful was webbed by spiders and dust and alive with the attentions of big agile black ants. They watched out for snakes on the path, and when they were in the sea occasionally remembered sharks, as though evil were impossible in that buoyant suspension on the world’s watery back.

  Clem was embarrassed because Jessie wore old canvas shoes that had flattened into mules under her heels, and did not put her hair up with care. Jessie stopped wearing the shoes and went barefoot “like Boaz”, as Clem said in reproach. “But you go barefoot all the time, at home too.”

  “Well, we’re children.”

  When they drove to the store Jessie put on a bare-necked dress and perfume and made up her face. Clem capered about before her, as if she expected a sensation. They drove along the path with bush making a noise like a finger-nail on the glass of the car windows, and then away from the sea on to the road that divided cane-fields. The moment the sea dropped out of sight something seemed to have been switched off and the car was hot in the silence. Indian children plodded along the road, back from school. An old black cane worker with the bearded, moustachioed “fine” face of Zulus in Victorian missionary chronicles appeared with a panga hanging from his hand. The road crossed the lines of the canetrucks and there was a point where you could see far inland, across the curves covered with the pile of cane to flat-topped mountains holding their outline in the heat-shimmer and distance. As far as you could see, and further, it was Shaka’s country; less than a hundred and forty years ago the black king had trained his prancing armies and spread his great herds of cattle here.

  The road led round the golf-course and back towards the sea again, to the village. The hotel was there, in the thin firs. Cars round the bowling-green; old men in shorts and old women in schoolgirls’ hats were bending and straightening on the grass. Everyone with a good position on the mine had thought of a retirement like this; the faces were familiar ones, that went early into mid
dle-age and stayed there, helped by the uniformity of false teeth and glasses, far into old age. What had possessed Bruno to will, as if for peace, to end up along with them? An impulse that never came to anything, of course; except perhaps that he could always remind himself that his “little place on the Coast” did exist, proof of an intention.

  An Indian with expanding bands holding up his shirt-sleeves was directing some piccanins who were piling up empty brandy crates outside the hotel bottle store. More children—porcupine-headed Indians with faces eager to please, dusty African brats with unself-conscious faces, one or two coloureds with yellow skins, the legginess of white boys, and hair as black as the Indians’ and as curly as the Africans’—hung about the caddy master’s hut. There were games with sticks, scuffles and yells. The Indians watched with tremendous eyes, jerking their younger members to order. Cooks with baskets over their arms stood talking while their masters’ dogs wagged puzzled tails, waiting. The caddy master, another Indian, with thick white-streaked hair and a bad-tempered open mouth showing brown teeth, upbraided somebody, scattering dusty legs. Big cars rolled slowly down from the hotel and white children, raw-faced from the beach, stood aside clutching loaves of bread or ice-creams.

  The store kept stuffed olives and caviar, as well as the usual supplies, for there were some smart houses along the hotel end of the beach now, and on the sun-decks and behind the picture-windows people from Johannesburg brought the eating-habits of their way of life with them. Occasionally you saw a man dressed in the white trousers, navy scarf and espadrilles of someone who had been to the Riviera in the Thirties; or a blonde lion-headed girl in tights who might have been walking along in Saint-Tropez in the present time; both were received with the same lack of impact by the local residents in the khaki shorts and sand shoes they had worn without change, in comfort and suitability, through both eras. Jessie’s children were stimulated by the store, not only by the garlands of blown-up plastic toys, the tin pistols, the comics and the sweets, but by the link, through the atmosphere of buying and selling, the miscellaneous activity set in motion by the exchange of even petty sums of money, with the city life they came from. It always surprised her to notice how healthily children accepted as life the things that were to imprison them later—the arbitrary picking up and putting down of buses, the herding of traffic lights, the crowded desperateness in shops, the whole acquisitive palsy. How was it that these same children grew up to become neurotic, ulcerous, under it? She herself had been just like them; there was no excitement, for the little bourgeois girl from the mine, like buying something. When did it turn into an activity that drained without replacement; when did the faces poked across the counters for their money’s worth become so clearly marked as faces possessing nothing of worth? What made you want things so fiercely and meaningfully as a child, and then come to a time when you bought without lust, out of need, and never out of wanting, which was a different thing, stemming from needs spiritual and unconditioned? One did not know when the lust died, for first it was put aside by sex and the tremendous effort gathered together by even the meanest of living creatures to blossom or feather, to put out a perfume or a fascinating way of talking, to stamp a love-dance in a forest or walk down a street with a message in the way each knee brushed past the other. And only when this was over and accomplished did you have eyes for other desires again, and suddenly discover that of all that was displayed on the counters and hanging on shelves and set out under soft lights—of all that was offered to make you want, there was nothing that would not break or clutter or occupy falsely where it had been done without.

  Every day, no matter what she was doing, she looked out at the sea and saw the porpoises passing. She had no idea that they were going to be passing, but when she looked out, there they went. She had this. It had survived. Neither petrol fumes nor phenobarbital, book-keeping nor all-night drinking parties had finished it. Living creatures came by out there in the wide water and she was able to know it. She never thought about it. But there they were. Some days they were going along steadily, each movement the length of their bodies through the swell. Sometimes they cut in formation through a sloping wall of glassy grey. Occasionally one shook himself terrier-free out of the water, made the arabesque dictated by his own weight, and splashed into it again. She had no means of communication with them except whatever it was that made her know when they were there; there was no reason to suppose that they did not have the same sort of knowledge about her.

  Tom had assumed that she would take Morgan with her on holiday but she had protested, disintegrating into a kind of helplessness that forced Tom to plan for her, all the time with a feeling of disbelief because he knew there was always so little you could do for Jessie. He would say to her, the morning after she had argued adamantly, “Well, what have you decided?” and she would say listlessly, “I suppose he’ll come.”

  He looked at her and away from her, dismayed, searching. He made as if to speak and then said something else. “What’d he find to do with himself here, that’s the trouble. I don’t mind having him—”

  “No, I know. He’ll have to come.” And the night before she had explained how impossible it was for her to contemplate a month with Morgan sitting across the breakfast table—the little girls were companions for one another, what on earth would she do with him all day?

  “If only Boaz would make up his mind whether he’s going to Moçambique or not.” (The reasons for Boaz’s indecision became suddenly irrelevant; it was annoying of him not to be able to be counted on for his offer to provide Morgan with just the right sort of camping holiday, complete with the mixture of adventure and self-reliance that would be good for him.)

  “Well, even if it’s off with Boaz, maybe we could get some other boy to stay here with Morgan. Then I could manage.”

  “No, you’ll never be able to get any work done. You’ll be nannying all the time and cursing me, quite rightly. They’ll drive you crazy.”

  But the more she showed herself obstinately bowed to accept the inevitability of Morgan, the more Tom felt constrained to find some way out for her since she made it clear she couldn’t help herself. He had already made a great mistake, when the whole business of Morgan accompanying her had first come up, of suggesting that it would be a good opportunity to talk to him a bit, to get a little nearer to him in the easiest manner, since they would be set apart, alone together, from the smaller children without any other grown-ups around to claim her. But apparently the pursuit of Morgan was dropped; or perhaps it was so intense that she couldn’t face him alone with it. Tom didn’t know. Anyway, she reacted so strongly to Tom’s suggestion, jeering at a picture of herself subject to Morgan’s anecdotes, in which he was not interested and to which she was not listening, that Tom didn’t pursue it. In the end, without any actual decision being come to, she left for the house at the sea as soon as her month’s notice at the nursing home was worked, and a few days before Morgan was due to come home from school. The Moçambique expedition was still up in the air. One day Boaz was packing and talking practically, as if preparing to go, then there were signs of highly emotional talks with his wife, a charged atmosphere of things in balance, and his departure was unlikely.

  Tom always wrote to Jessie about Morgan, just as if she always remembered to ask about him in her letters. That was one of the corrupting, wonderful things about Tom: he pretended for her when the real thing was painfully lacking in herself. He pitied her in her strength of wilfulness, her difficulty in pretending to herself. She did not resent this pity, unintrusive, so delicately expressed. She wondered what she did for him, of the same secrecy and necessity. Even between Bruno and her mother there had once been signs of things like this; it was only in the worst, last few years of his life that everything they knew of one another was emptied out upon the table, as a bankrupt turns out his pockets so that you may see for yourself the worthless miscellany with which he is left.

  Once she had begun to make preparations to go away that d
id not include provision for Morgan, the thought that she ought to be taking him left her. It was as if there had never been any question that he might come. He was in her mind, not very insistently, sometimes as the result of some sight or object in the house or on the beach. One morning she was walking along the firm shoreline near the hotel with the little girls, after a swim. The thud of her heels went through her head; drops of water flew from her thighs. They passed the slender figure of a young man fishing, making a loop behind him and his mess of bait, newspaper, and rumpled sand. As they came down to the water’s edge again on the other side, she was aware that she was walking, now, as a woman does when a man is watching her. Later Elisabeth wandered over to the same young man and got talking; she was given the present of a dead sardine. When Jessie and the children went up from the beach at midday the fisherman was squatting over his equipment, and as she made some casual remark in acknowledgement of the present, he looked up. She saw that the man she had been conscious of as she walked away from him over the sand was a boy, a boy Morgan’s age. “That’s nothing,” he was saying to the children’s enthusiasm and her polite admiration of his catch. “My dad and I came down at half-term, just for the weekend, mind you, and we took back thirty-four shad and a small barracuda …”

  When she took off her wet bathing suit at the house she noticed that the dark shine of sunburn was beginning to cover the map of tiny red veins she had on her right leg, near the knee. It could scarcely be seen at all. There was the satisfaction of some small reprieve. She looked over her shoulder at her naked back and backside and legs in the mirror. How long? Five years? Six? (What did the bodies of women in their forties look like?) A few years and she wouldn’t be able to look at this any more.