Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  Soon they began to spend hours out on the grassy mound in front of the house, and even to appear on the beach. Alone or led along by the children, sometimes with Jessie, they passed loop after loop of rocks and sand and lay on one of the small deserted beaches that must have looked exactly the same when Vasco da Gama sailed past in the fifteenth century. There was the feeling—of all fecund, tropical places where plant and insect life is so profuse—not of hostility to human beings, but of the indifference that man feels as hostility. Here there was no account taken of anyone who walked upright on two legs; the close groves of strelitzia palm between the arms of two rocky promontories were impenetrable—any sailor shipwrecked here in the service of the East India Company could not have got up from the beach to the interior that way, but the slim grey monkeys, tossing themselves from fronded head to head to eat the juicy spikes of the white and flame-blue flower sticking out there, found it an ordinary thoroughfare. A dead seagull on the sand was busy as a factory with the activity of enormous flies, conveyor-belts of ants, and some sort of sand-flea that made a small storm in the air above and about the body. Butterflies fingered the rocks and drifted out to sea. Dead fish washed up among smashed shells were pulled apart and dragged away to their holes by crabs. There was not nothing here, but everything.

  No other person came. Ann went into the village one day and brought back a pair of swimming trunks for Gideon and gradually he found himself doing what she did, lying for hours as if he, too, had been washed up on this shore, like the fish or the seagull. This abandonment to the natural world was something that seemed to come so easily to the two women; even while he succumbed to it he watched them with some kind of alienation and impatience—it belonged to a leisure and privilege long taken for granted. If he sat about doing nothing it was always a marking-time, an hiatus between two activities or desires. It was a matter of despair, exhaustion or frustration. You lay on your bed in your room and drank because you could not do what you wanted to do. Outside in the township everybody, from the beggar who dragged himself across the road with bits of motor-car tyre over his stumps to the B.A. graduate who found himself a sinecure advising white manufacturers on how to tempt the blacks to buy more, was fully occupied every hour of his life with the struggle to wrest a share of living—and that meant position, responsibility, respect and power, as well as money—from the whites. All time and breath and strength were used up to compete with their privilege.

  “How long’d you been here before we came? A couple of weeks?” he said to Jessie one afternoon.

  “That’s right.” She was reading, some little cotton rag of child’s clothing keeping the sun off her head. Ann was in the water.

  “What’d you do? Same as now?”

  She leaned on the book and smiled. “I was alone. It isn’t the same.”

  “What’s it all about, this alone business?”

  “What business?”

  “I asked your kid Morgan one day why he hadn’t gone away with you, and he told me, my mother likes to be alone.”

  “Did he say that?” She looked pleased and yet annoyed, as one does when one hears of an astute remark made about oneself by someone to whom one has given no opportunity or justification for understanding.

  “I’d always thought painters liked to be alone,” she said, questioning his question to her. “—Had to be alone, were alone.”

  “I’m not a real one, I suppose. I don’t feel it. There’s always a feeling of others around, even if I’m working.”

  “Really?” She began to have that look of pursuing the other person that comes when interest is roused. “But what about those empty landscapes of yours, with the dust?”

  “Just fooling about. Seeing the sort of thing some painter had done and trying it out.” He often went in for the sophistication of deprecation; he hid behind it where no one could get at him.

  “Even when you’re actually there with the canvas in front of you—” She returned to it, disbelieving.

  “Yes, man, there’s always the business of a friend who’s going to turn up in half an hour, or something on your mind.”

  “You feel connected all the time.”

  “Mmm. You’ve got the pull.”

  “When you’re alone, you’re connected but there’s no pull,” she said. “Now that you are here, I feel lonely.”

  He gave his chuckle, looking at her with the air of not knowing what to expect.

  “Because you’re making love,” she said. “You see?”

  “Are you jealous, Jessie?” he said, bantering, flirting a bit, because he did not know what to say.

  But she was not embarrassed, but quite serious and at ease. “No, not jealous. At least I don’t think so. Left out. Left out of something, that’s it. Perhaps a bit jealous, as well. I don’t have love affairs any more.”

  Ann came up, beaded with water. She dried her face, blew her nose, shook out her hair from the cap, and lay down beside Gideon. She touched him with her sea-cold hand and mumbled for a cigarette. Presently there was a commotion where the little girls were playing at the edge of the water. Elisabeth came screaming over the wet sand, her lumbering shape, clumsy with pain or alarm, repeated in wriggling purples and silvers on the mirror surface. She held out her wrist, wrung in the other hand. Clem and Madge followed, regarding her distress with admiration. “The white part of a wave … she just put her hand in next to my foot …” A rough blue thread was buried in the red weal that had risen round the plump brown arm. “Oh poor old thing! They are beasts … all right, now, I know it’s sore … get some of those leaves, Clem …”

  “I saw a couple of blue-bottles when I was in,” said Ann. And as Jessie broke the leaves of the ice-plant that grew nearby, and squeezed them on the sting, “Rub quite hard, that’s the best way. —It really does hurt like hell.”

  “What is it?” Gideon said with distaste, leaning on his elbow.

  “Haven’t you ever been bitten by a blue-bottle?” Ann said.

  “What on earth is it, anyway?”

  “One of those balloon-things that get washed up. The wind brings them in,” Jessie reminded him.

  They showed him how the stringy appendage of the creature had attached itself to Elisabeth’s flesh; Madge raced off to bring a specimen of the whole creature, gingerly lifted up on a handful of sand, to demonstrate to him.

  “You mean to say you’ve never been bitten by one?”

  “Hell, no, I should think not.”

  “But you’ve been to the sea sometimes?” said Jessie.

  “Only once to Cape Town and then to Port Elizabeth. Congress conferences. We drove around the docks and on Sunday a couple of us walked for a bit on one of the coloureds’ beaches somewhere near Cape Town.”

  Jessie had managed to get the blue thread away from the child’s wrist; the pain had subsided and Elisabeth sat as if listening for its diminishing impulses. Jessie looked at him over the head of the child leaning against her, and thought again how he never seemed to see any of it—sea, sky, or green. He was like a fox, panting blindly out of breath in a hole.

  They went up to the house in a peaceful little procession, the child riding on Gideon’s shoulders with her sandy legs round his neck.

  Seventeen

  Nothing could be a greater contrast with the life they lived now than the week that had preceded it. Fragmentary references to that cropped up, more or less amusing anecdotes, before Jessie, but these were lip-service to a demand neither wanted to meet in themselves, either alone together, or singly. They had lived through something that remained undealt with. Blocks of experience can lie like this for years before they are tackled; sometimes they are never taken hold of at all, cluttering up one of those lives that become like an attic, a jumble of disparate things between which no relation has been established.

  Both knew that some form of desperation had made them drive away. Being lovers, both had accepted that this desperation was love; the collective term for the hundred ambiguities of their b
eing together and apart—the wearing thin of interest between them sometimes when they were together, more than punished by the vividness of each for the other when they were apart, the calm with which the interlude of their knowing each other seemed to blend into their separate lives, when they sat chatting, and the crazy obsession with which the interlude filled the whole of living once a day was begun in which it was regarded as over. Fear of the vacuum it leaves behind is as common a reason for prolonging a love affair as continuance of passion. Ann’s inexplicable feeling of “panic” that she had mentioned to Jessie probably came from this fear. Her voice on the telephone (she had taken the single, decisive, outside chance—if he had not happened to be at the Lucky Star at half past one that day she would not have tried again, perhaps, not there nor at the flat nor further away, as far as the townships that took him in and closed over him)—her voice brought him back to swift excitement from the sober, not unhappy but flat acceptance that he would be spending July working for Congress in the dorps and locations. He was saved from the reluctance of doing what he really wanted to do. Stirring a vortex in the grey coffee that Callie Stow had made it difficult for him to drink, he had been going to go and see Jackson Sijake in his own time. He had already forgotten the lie about coaching Indian students; was forgetting other evasions. But Ann’s voice had it: the thing that Callie Stow lacked entirely, the element of self-destruction that found a greedy answer in himself. It was in the voice, that note that takes some of the fear out of life by suggesting that not everyone regards it as such a carefully-guarded gift, after all.

  They drove away that bright winter afternoon into the actuality of the escape that everyone put into a phrase and never believes in—“I’d like to go off somewhere, just pack up and go.” It was no different, in its real intention, from the times they had driven into the veld to picnic while other people sat in offices. She looked at his hands on the steering-wheel; he noticed how her head, beside him, tipped back from the chin in her particular way. But although there was the reassuring sameness of their two selves enclosed in the small car, the release and pleasure, as usual, of being together after absence, and the enjoyable consciousness, for each, that absence made minute physical detail and gesture an object of secret observation and wonder—although all these were marvellously the same, this particular impulse was to take them far out of the depth they had sounded between them. They had come together in the constriction of sheltering cracks in other people’s lives—Boaz’s patience, the Stilwells’ tolerance, the young advertising men’s indifference. These seemed irksome but in fact provided a private status for a relationship that, publicly, did not exist. Once they had left behind them, by a few miles, the recognition of a certain group of individuals that they had the free choice of being together, and the anonymity of the city, where such recognition has the chance of passing unnoticed, everything changed for them.

  Ann’s response to black people and the world that they were forced to inhabit was one of pleasure; she saw the warmth and vitality, the zest and freshness that existed there in spite of all the white man could do, missed by the white man. She saw the defiant fun of it, not the uncertainty, pain and brashness. She enjoyed the gawping white face staring from the passing car when she and Gideon sat eating chicken at the roadside; but then she had gone home to the Stilwell house when the day was ended. Now, as it got dark, there was the reality of the lights of a country hotel, with family cars drawn up beside rondavels and waiters in their white suits hurrying past on the other side of the windows, and she could not walk in and sign the register and lie talking in a hot bath as she had done hundreds of times, on countless journeys. She said nothing, but it was difficult to believe, in the bones of unreason, where habit is formed in the very pattern of expectation in the body.

  At a petrol station she went into the tearoom attached to it and drank a cup of coffee and said, “I want one to take to the car,” and the fat, laconic woman behind the counter shouted to the waiter, “Take coffee out to the madam’s boy.”

  She ran across the wide country street to see if she could buy a thermos flask but only an Indian fruit shop was open. Gideon was smoking a cigarette, standing by while the tyres were pumped, and when she got into the car again he came up to the window and said, tersely intimate, “Want something?” She moved her head and smiled, implying that she had only meant to stretch her legs.

  The place was called Louis Trichardt, and where the streetlights splashed into the darkness they washed clear of it drapings of cerise and orange bougainvillea. The humps of mountains raised the skyline all round, close to huge winter stars; down in the powdery yellow light of the town she watched some white youths wheel their bicycles up the street and a group of little Moslem girls in trousers playing round the pillars of the fruit shop. Gideon got into the car again; the road lifted up into the mountains that ran together in blackness. There were houses here and there, and a couple of garden hotels shining lights behind the thick lace of trees. Even though it was winter the subtropical forest filled the car with the strong, green, stirring odour that is the smell of the earth’s body. The town dropped behind them like a place that was not a real habitation but a scene representing part of an actual town, in a play, and having, in fact, nothing in the darkness beyond the few props and one-dimensional façades set up in light.

  In the half-hour when she had picked up Gideon on the Johannesburg street-corner and they had driven, just as if nothing had happened, through the city with the familiar checks and stops of traffic lights and street-names, he had said, “I want to show you Mapulane’s place, in the Northern Transvaal.” That was enough; after the suddenness and completeness of action, they did not need anything more than the simplest objective.

  They came out on the other side of the mountain pass and began to follow the sand roads and tracks of a reserve, in the dark, and there were no signposts, as if the black country people who used the roads could be expected to find their way like cattle. It was late when they arrived at the hummocks of a small village, gone back into the landscape in the darkness. The car woke chickens first, then dogs. The friend was a teacher, and had the only whitestyle house, a brick cottage with a verandah and a wire fence. He lit a lamp, brought out food, with the dazed smiling face of one who sees, the first time for a long time, an admired friend, but he had had no warning of their coming nor any idea who Ann might be or what she was doing there. He kept saying, in English, to include her, “This is wonderful!” and starting up guiltily to refill the kettle, to poke the fire he had quickly got going in the stove, or merely to move, alertly anxious, round the room on the watch for any neglect. He seemed particularly troubled because he had no meat to offer them: “You wouldn’t like a couple of eggs? We’ve always got good eggs from my mother’s hens.”

  Gideon enjoyed the spectacle of this generosity and concern before Ann. “James, take it easy, man, we’ve had plenty.”

  “You’re sure? Some milk? You don’t have to be afraid to drink the milk—it’s from our own cow.”

  “I couldn’t manage another thing.” Ann’s assurance seemed to make him more and more aware of the inadequacy of what he could offer, past midnight, to people he had not expected.

  “You’re just dead beat, my girl, ay?”—Gideon leant across the table and gently tugged her earlobe, while her smile turned into an uninhibited yawn. James Mapulane saw at once, in this small exchange, what Gideon perhaps meant him to; he and Gideon went out to fetch the things from the car, talking again in their own language.

  Ann was not often subjectively aware of places she found herself in. She was one of those people who carry a projection of themselves around as a firefly moves always in its own light. Left alone, she felt the room close around her, in a strange authority. It was like the first room one becomes conscious of in one’s whole life: the room in which one first opens one’s eyes on the world—and sees the bulk and outline and disposition of each piece of furniture as the shape of the world. The houses she paused
in, the rooms where she slept, the coffee-bars and youth hostels and hotels and borrowed flats that she used and passed on from—they flickered by, anonymous and interchangeable. In this room the objects were the continuing personality of people who had worked and planned and changed, putting into their acquisition the ardour of much else never attained, so that the pieces of furniture themselves became landmarks towards the attainment, and the difference between the teak sideboard with its bulbous carved legs and the flimsy bookcase leaning askew under the pressure of textbooks, grammars, paper-back classics and newspapers was the death of a generation and the birth and work and aims of another. It was a room that fitted no category; there was the big coal stove in it, and the sofa, squeezed in between the sideboard and the table, was somebody’s bed—grey blankets were thrown back where whoever it was had been hastily pushed out when she and Gideon arrived.

  It might have been Mapulane himself; anyway he insisted that he would sleep there now, and give them “the other room”.

  “I’ll make myself very cosy here, that’ll be quite O.K.,” he said, ignoring the rumpled bedclothes that showed that someone already had been sleeping in the living-room, and Gideon and Ann ignored this too, out of a polite convention that amused her: in the sort of life she lived, it was taken for granted that you slept wherever there was something to sleep on, and no one would have found it necessary to pretend that there were enough bedrooms to go round. Mapulane went in and out busily, and there were voices; someone must have been sleeping in “the other room” as well, and have been persuaded to quit it; the dark neat little place smelled like a nest, of sleep, when Gideon and Ann were taken into it, though the bed had been freshly made up with sheets as well as blankets.

  It was the first time they slept together, in a bed, all night. She woke up in the morning with the happiness of waking in a foreign country; so it was that she had wakened in peasant houses in Italy, in fishermen’s cottages in Spain. Hens were quarrelling hysterically and children’s voices carried from far away. She was alone in the bed and two men were talking in a language she didn’t understand in the room next door: Gideon and his friend. She got up and looped the curtain aside and tried to open the little window, but it couldn’t have been opened for years, and was stuck fast. Outside in the clear sun were the mud and thatch and tin houses of the village, a blue haze of smoke from cooking fires, a dog blinking against the flow of morning warmth. She knocked on the pane with the knuckle of her first finger, and although a woman with a tin basin of mealies on her head passed unnoticing, two little children playing on the bare, stamped ground looked up and changed to swift astonishment. For a moment Ann was surprised, then remembered, and smiled at them, the foreigner’s friendly smile. Everything about the dark cold small house, smelling like a fire gone out, and the activities stirring around her, filled her with the titillating sense of entering this life in a way she had never done before. Because of Gideon it was all invested with the charm of something novel and yet annexed.