“He said, come to his place in Maseru,” he said, dismissing it. Of course, the man thought he was alone.
They felt flat, cheerful with each other in the slight embarrassment of disappointment.
“I want to buy a tent.”
“Oh Christ,” he said. He ran his hand across the back of his head. “I need a hair-cut. Malefetsane would have cut my hair for me in Basutoland.”
“It looks like the filling of an old mattress. I remember the mattresses at boarding-school being emptied and picked over on the grass. —Let’s get a tent.”
“Who’s going to put it up and take it down.”
“I know all about tents,” she said. Hadn’t she and Boaz lived in them for weeks?
“Yes, I know,” he said quietly.
They decided, quite suddenly, to go on to Basutoland in any case; Gideon knew someone else there, lots of people there; someone would give them a place to sleep. They were driving in the dark again; the days had no recognisable shape, ballooning and extending into unmeasured stretches of time. The car broke down, but they were not far from a dorp and, flashing a torch, Ann waved a passing lorry to a stop. “I’ll get a lift quicker than you will,” she said. Businesslike both of them, he kept out of the way in the dark. She came back within an hour, bringing a new fan-belt and a big polony sausage and some beer. She had got a lift back easily, too; she was in the triumphant good mood which successful escapades always induced. Gideon put on the new belt and they went on. Fifty miles further, before they could cross the border, the car stopped once more, and although she worked beside him with her teeth clenched and her hands transferring their oily dirt to face and hair, neither his fair knowledge nor her bullying, practical flair helped them to get the thing going again. They waited for hours, but no car came by on that lonely road at that hour of the night. Very early in the morning there was a lorry loaded with fruit-boxes, thundering down on them. The Indian driver was friendly, “There’s room for him in the back,” he said, of Gideon, as he helped her into the cab. “Oh it’s all right, there’s room here next to me,” she said, and Gideon climbed in beside her in silence.
At the garage where their benefactor left them no one had come to work yet. She put up both hands and stroked Gideon’s cheeks with their little tufts of whorly beard and said coquettishly, “Are you very, very tired,” though she knew he would not answer. They sat on an oil-drum beside the old-fashioned one-armed pumps and waited. When the petrol attendant came, in the baggy skin of old overalls, with a breakfast of dry mealie-meal in a jam tin, Gideon persuaded him to go on his bicycle to wake up the white owner-mechanic. The big black man licked his fingers clean, wrapped the tin carefully in its newspaper, and went off. Presently he returned; the owner said he could take the break-down truck himself and bring the car in. Gideon would go with him. “Go to the hotel and have breakfast,” he said to her, out of hearing of the other.
She looked at him. “Should I?”
He was getting into the truck; he nodded once, vehemently.
Alone in the dining-room of the commercial travellers’ hotel she ate porridge and eggs and bacon and drank cup after cup of grey coffee. She asked, at the reception desk, whether she could pay to have a bath. The receptionist was not on duty yet. The Indian wine-steward-cum-waiter, with his professionally amiable smooth face, said efficiently, “Is madam not resident here? I don’t think it’s allowed if you’re not resident.”
As soon as the car came back she took the thermos flask and ordered coffee to fill it, and sandwiches. “Picnic hamper for the road, madam, certainly I’ll do it for you.” From the oil-drum she watched Gideon biting deeply into the bread, bent with the other man over the open engine. A rumpled-looking fair man arrived at last. He unlocked a plywood booth within the hall of his garage. “Come and sit down in my office.” It had the wet black smell of oily rags, there was an old varnished desk piled with invoices and glossy pamphlets put out by the motor corporations, an office chair with a broken back, a grass chair that she sat in, three calendars showing coy girls with cloud-pink breasts popping from wisps of chiffon or leopard skin. Everything was covered with gritty dust. She wanted to go back to the workshop, but she sat out a decent interval; for the first time in her life she was instinctively following a convention of behaviour, fitting an identity imposed from outside herself. In due course the garage owner came back and said in the encouraging, confused way of doctors and mechanics, “Seems to be a leak of some kind. Battery’s O.K., but the points’re the trouble. Acid or something on them—but we’re trying to file them down and see …”
She got up, released.
“Would’ja like a cup a tea?”
“No thanks—I’ve had breakfast at the hotel. I’ll just go to the car—some things I want.”
“Make yourself at home here.” He reminded her of the hospitality of his office. “You travelling alone with the driver?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have to get to Maseru, you see …”
From the car she called, “Gideon,” in a soft neutral voice that came to her. He walked over obediently. She was bent from the front seat, pretending to search for something on the floor, and she signed to him to lean down toward her. Their faces were suffused as if with physical effort, hers was red and almost coarse, a vein stood out down the side of the bridge of his nose. “For Christ’s sake! How long will it take? Is it bad?” “Can’t say. I don’t know if they know what they’re doing. I suggested a new battery but they haven’t got the right one for this car.” “But can’t they patch it up so that it’ll get us to Maseru, then what’s-his-name, your friend, can get it to a decent garage.” “Everything should be fixed, they’ve done it, but the thing won’t kick over. It’s just dead.”
She was uneasy about knowing her part so well. “I’ve got to sit in that office.” Her eyes had, to him, the bulging look of someone who is held by the throat. He had never seen her almost ugly; he noted it with the cruelty of objectivity and then felt warm to her in a way he had not connected with his feeling for her before—the way he felt when he had a joke with the gossiping crones in their dirty dresses stretched across old breasts, in a location yard, or when Sol was holding forth late at night. It was as if he met her in some part of his life where he could not have expected her to be.
The car took the whole day to repair and, when it became clear that this was going to be so, she went to the hotel and took a room. She was “resident”; she could go down the granolithic corridors to the “Ladies” now, and let the water run resoundingly into the deep enamelled iron bath with its four iron claws. She went between the room at the hotel and the tin workshop of the garage, that heated up under the winter sun as the hours went by. The garage owner came and stood beside her, hands on hips, whenever she came into the workshop; in the hotel room she lay on the cotton bedcover patterned with an Arcadian scene of shepherdesses and sun-dials and looked at the curtains on the window where the same pattern was repeated but had almost faded away; she slept and woke, and her cigarette left another burn beside those that marked the night-table with its emergency candle in a tin holder. She never got a chance to talk to Gideon again, except for the remarks he passed at her, rather than to her, about the car, as he worked with the petrol attendant, helping the garage owner. She prevailed upon the wine steward to give her a plate of cold meat and salad and a knife and fork and recklessly took it, covered by another thick hotel plate, over to the garage. The garage owner smiled at her for being a woman, and soft. “You didn’t have to pay for a meal like that for the boy, mine would’ve given him something.” She saw him eyeing the plates, plates from the hotel dining-room, the plates white people used. At once she asked some question about the car; how much longer could it take, now?
She spent the night in the hotel, alone, eating again opposite the huge black wooden chiffonier that hid the entrance to, but not the noise and smell of, the kitchen; going to bed in the room. Gideon slept in the garage on some sort of a bed provided by the
petrol attendant. There were rooms for commercial travellers’ boys in the hotel yard, the garage owner said; she could get one of those—but she lied in shame for the dirty outhouses, “They’re full.”
Everything vanished but these practical details that had constantly to be worked out in the mind; the wangling of decent food, the arrangements for somewhere to sleep, the endless concentration on the coils and nuts and boxes within the gut of the car, and the news of it, the consultations about it. She said “Good morning, Gideon”, standing with the garage owner. She walked away with the man whose pink jowls were creased by his pillows. Gideon looked refreshed. He was shaved and had a clean shirt on. She wondered how and where he had managed this. All the mystery of the simplest mechanics of daily living parted them.
When they were on the road at last again, time had changed and stretched and swollen. No longer had they been a few days together; the other afternoon, the afternoon they had left Johannesburg, was far off. She said to him, “Stop for a minute somewhere.” She was stretched out in the seat beside him gawkily, her head flung back, smoking, the elbow of one arm cupped in the other hand. “What’s wrong?” “Just stop.”
With the engine cut off there was silence for a moment until the passing sounds of the empty road came to them—a chirrup as a bird flitted by, and the crack of a dry stalk in a mealie field. She was frowning intensely, provocatively, blinded by what she wanted to say. She kissed him suddenly with the powerful invitation of a woman who wants to be made love to. While he was uncertain how to respond, as a man is at the wrong time and place, and stroked her arm in some soothing, trifling caress, she sat up and said, “That bloody hotel.”
“What did you expect?” He made a gentle joke of it, and the reference became nothing more than a comment on the poor food and half-clean room.
She said, “Gideon, Gideon, Gideon,” ruffling him, touching him, putting his hand up under the hair on her neck to reassure herself.
“Is there any sense in going to Basutoland?”
He chuckled. “I only hope so. Why not?”
“But if your friends are away?”
He said nothing.
“Let’s go to Natal for a few days.” She had not thought of it before, it came to her suddenly, as she relied upon things to do. “There’s a house there we can go to … away up the coast.”
“Who’s there?” he said.
“Jessie’s house.” She was practical now.
“Stilwell’s?”
“It’s some cottage she inherited when her stepfather died. She’s alone.” Neither of them thought of Jessie as more than a name to a place that would do. It was, of course, because of her that it would do; she was one of their kind, she had a generic familiarity even though, in the blur of unimaginable family life in which they saw her, she seemed too remote from themselves to be taken account of.
Eighteen
“… It was because of Boaz, I suppose, that first night when I spoke to you,” (Jessie wrote to Tom) “but it isn’t now. I’m not putting up with them for anybody. They live almost like anyone else, here. Of course you can’t refuse them that chance—how could I? Probably this isn’t as big of me as it sounds, I don’t quite trust myself over the idea of a ‘chance’, when I see it written down … Test? Hurdle? Of what? They seem fonder of one another than I thought. Specially her; I mean I always thought of her as thriving on affection rather than giving out any. Playful, yes, but not tender, with B?” When she skimmed through the letter she paused in vague dissatisfaction, and to make some token effort to satisfy herself transposed “Test” and “Hurdle”.
Ann and Gideon had gone for a walk on the beach at night; presently she heard their voices, intimate in the dark, and they came up the verandah steps. Ann was wearing his thick sweater. “D’you want some coffee?” she said as they went into the kitchen. Jessie said no, she didn’t think so, but when they had made it, they brought a cup for her and called from the living-room that it was ready. She was drawn into their company and sat in one of the big chairs with her feet under her for comfort, because a wind had come up. “Here.” Gideon handed her the sweater that Ann had taken off.
Wrapped in their warmth, she thought: they’ve been making love out there. Ann was talking about fishing. Where could they go, she asked, aware of the absurdity of her enthusiasm—she had found some tackle lying about the house. “Ask Jason,” Jessie said to Gideon. “He must know all the local lore.”
“I suppose he would,” Gideon looked at her uncertainly.
“If a man asks your advice about fishing, you may feel a little friendly loyalty toward him? Don’t you think?” She smiled at Gideon.
“You may start boasting about your new friend, and where he lives.”
“That’s true.”
Gideon said, “Why were you so worried about him?”
“Oh it wasn’t him … All the other things too difficult to explain, or nobody’s business.”
“It was a bit of a shock,” said Ann, with a smile, of their arrival.
Jessie could smell her, the smell of her hair and the perfume that clung about the room at home, in the woollen collar rolled down round her own neck. “A year ago, then, I didn’t want Boaz and Ann to come to us. But I didn’t do anything to stop it. It was the sort of thing Tom and I have always done. One must be open to one’s friends. You’ve got to get away from the tight little bourgeois family unit. In a country like this, people like us must stick together—we live by the sanctions of our own kind. We haven’t any anonymous, impersonal code because the South African ‘way of life’ isn’t for us. But what happens to you, yourself … I don’t know. The original impulse towards decency hardens round you and you can’t get out. It becomes another convention.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Gideon. “If you’re satisfied you’re doing what you ought to do?”
“It’s all a bit too snug. You can easily forget that it’s only the best you can do … for the time being.”
“You want to get right into the struggle then, man.” Gideon gave slightly scornful advice.
“Oh … it’s not all politics—not for whites, at least.”
He laughed.
“… Yes, I suppose it is. The whole way we live becomes a political gesture above everything else. Well, that’s part of what I mean—there’s no room to develop as a person because any change in yourself might appear to be a defection. And yet if you can’t change, can’t stretch out, how can you be ready for some new demand on yourself? In time you don’t even remember, really, how you arrived at the position you’ve taken up.”
“What sort of demand are you thinking of?” Gideon said, weighing her up.
“Well, if you want to live like a human being you’ve got to keep on proving it. It’s not a state automatically conferred upon you because you walk upright on two legs, any more than because you’ve got a white skin.”
“You might have to prove it in jail one day. You know? Your house won’t be big enough any more.”
“And when I come out of prison will you punish me all over again? What’m I going to do with my white face?”
They both laughed. “What’s the alternative for you?” Gideon said.
Jessie drew her head back through the neck of Gideon’s pullover like a tortoise, and took it off. She pushed away the strands of hair that clung to her face with the crackle of static electricity, and said, “Imagine Tom and me, along with the whites, shooting down blacks. ‘Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.’ Christ, I’d rather you shot me. —I’m going to bed. Don’t leave the door open, will you, that gorgeous lamp’ll blow down again.”
She came upon Gideon in the living-room next morning while Ann had gone up to the village with the little girls. He was drawing, absorbed but not prepared, the paper backed by a wad of newspapers, his head falling back negligently now and then on the plump chair. Jessie twisted her neck to see. He softened the thick charcoal line with his thumb. “She’s beautiful,
” Jessie said.
“She is.”
She watched him, amused by his attitude of repose, while his hand and eye worked on on their own.
“Gideon, you’ve got a wife somewhere, I suppose?”
“In Bloemfontein, to be exact.”
When she had been in the living-room a certain time, she was always drawn to the curtain that sagged and the bit of carpet that had frayed away. Sometimes, as now, she even wandered up to these things as if she were going to mend them. She slid out of her sandals and stood on the divan to take a look at the top of the curtain, where it hooked to a rail. “I’ve got a child, too,” Gideon said. “I don’t know if I’d know him if I saw him somewhere.”
She was trying to work loose a runner that had rusted against the rail, and her voice was tight with effort. “Oh why is it like that?”
“You change.”
She could not get the runner free and stopped, with the confusion of an obstinate task in her face. “But it’s like lopping off fingers. In the end your life is nothing but bits and pieces.”
He did not want to be reminded of the woman who had been his wife and did not know what had made him suddenly mention the child. “What’s gone is gone,” he said.
“Then what’s going to be left in the end?” She stood there on the bed. “In a year’s time, in five years, this’ll be gone perhaps. You’ll see yourself here as if it happened in someone else’s life.”
He saw that this frightened her in some way, but there was no room in him for curiosity about others, there was no part of his apprehension that was not cut off by the concentration of forces that had brought him there; by what he shared with the girl, and what he could not share with her. He could not answer the woman, either, with the rush of affirmation for the present that suddenly came to him—but this is my life! Yet she spoke as if he had: “You can’t pick and choose,” she said. “You have either to accept everything you’ve been and done, or nothing. If the past is going to be past, finished, this will be as lost as the things you want to lose.”
Occasion for Loving Page 27
