Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  “There are things that are over and done with,” he said. “You must know how it is.”

  “I know how it is. You shed yourself every now and then, like a snake.”

  “Got to live,” he said with a shrug.

  “What’s one going to be, finally? The last skin before one dies?”

  He laughed. “—Ah but it’s different. You have a nice settled life that goes on, a home and so on. If things get too hot here, you’ll take your husband and your children and go and live the same way you’ve always done, only somewhere else, isn’t that so, Jessie? —You’ve got the man you want, haven’t you?” he added.

  “Yes, but I lived before I loved him, and maybe I’ll go on living after. I had another husband. I have another child. Sometimes I don’t know him when I see him …” She seemed to expect something, and he looked up for a moment, “But I am what I was then as well as what I am now; or I’m nothing.”

  His attention covered the restive, furtive look in his eyes. She knew this withdrawal that came sometimes in the closest conversation, when you were made aware that you had lost yourself in the white man’s preoccupations, when you were relegated to a half-world of doubts and nigglings that only whites afforded and deserved.

  “I don’t see much sense in digging up the past.”

  She smiled, looking at him from a distance. “We’re not talking about the same thing. It’s a question of freedom.”

  “Freedom?” He was astonished, derisive.

  “There’s more than one kind, you know.”

  “Well, one kind would do for me.”

  “Yes, perhaps it would, because you haven’t got it. Perhaps you’ll never have to ask yourself why you live. —A political struggle like yours makes everything very simple.”

  “You think so?”

  “Of course it does. You’re completely taken up with the practical means of changing the circumstances of your life. —Right, the ideological ones, too. The realisation—whatever you like to call it—the sense of your life would be the attainment of this change, or how near you’d get to it, before you die. One knock-out experience after another falls on your head, you die a dozen times, but the political struggle sticks you together again in the end. You’re always whole so far as that’s concerned. It’s all done from outside, and from necessity.”

  “I don’t think it’s quite as passive as all that,” he said ironically.

  “Passive! That’s the whole point. It’s all action, agony, decision—oh my God, it’s wonderful”—she made a mock blissful face, to break the mood between them.

  He continued to work on his drawing after she had wandered out of the room. In each successive sketch it grew simpler, as the single line drew up the many into its power; the face disappeared the way an actual face disappears into acute awareness of it. Suddenly Ann was there, putting down a few little paper packets, momentarily still in the guise in which she had been seen in the store and the post office: the youthfully arrogant jaw and lips showing something of the beauty and desirability carelessly hidden by dark glasses and wild short hair. “Blades, cigarettes, soft rubber—this’s the only sort of thing they had.” He tried it, erasing one of the abandoned sketches. “They’re all too hard.” “I told them I’d bring it back if it wasn’t any good.” He smiled at her rough treatment of shopkeepers.

  She was sitting in a chair with the blank regard of the dark glasses upon him. “I’ve got exactly four pounds and seventeen shillings,” she said.

  He gave a questioning grunt. “I’ve got a couple of pounds.”

  “No, you haven’t, you’ve got about fivepence less than I have.”

  “Fivepence more.”

  She remembered the glasses and took them off; he saw something he had never seen before, tears in her eyes as she was looking at him. “I hate them,” she said. “All around me in the shop and the post office.”

  He knew she was afraid of going back to Johannesburg, to decisions and questions and advice and being answerable to others. But if they were to leave the country and go away together they would still have to go back to Boaz first, back to the Stilwell house where everything that had begun remained unresolved.

  He was used to attack and recklessness in her and the change that showed in her sometimes now both dismayed and roused him. So she loved him, she was really his woman, this bright creature; he felt it under his hand when he was making love to her now, he felt it when she walked towards him in a room, or passed him food at table. But at the same time safety was gone out of their relationship: each had put himself in the other’s hands. Now he felt the weight of her being, strange, new, unaccustomed; and he gave over to her what was not even his own to give: he was aware of Mapulane (watching him drive off that day), away on that periphery to which passion banishes out of sight and sound the yelling, gesticulating influences that set themselves against it. He lay on the sand between the two women he could see with half-closed eyes, and among the children who ran to him with their treasures, and on this lonely beach destiny and history overlooked him; he could ignore both Shaka’s defeated kingdom around him, and the white man’s joke about it that he read each time he went to the lavatory … “vaseline, sandwiches, sawdust … God save the sugar farmers. Given this day … under my hand and great seal, Big Chief Shaka.” The black warrior and the white man’s derision of him; the savage ruined past and the conqueror’s mockery of it; both were dead and he suffered from neither.

  The passion between Gideon and Ann set the pace of days that passed without slowness or haste or in fact any of the usual apprehensions of time. Jessie remembered that she had once thought, of Tom and herself, how you had to stop the ordinary business of living in order to love properly. As she walked down the path from the house in silence behind them, their relaxed, lightly swinging arms, backs of the hands just touching now and then, seemed to regulate the rhythm of her breathing. Wherever a group of people live together there are those from whom life emanates—anyone in whom, at that time, the force of vitality is swarming, as a particular tree among others is set electrically alive by bees. Jessie had for so long been the one at the centre; it was strange to her to feel now that this had passed from her. She had said to Gideon, “I don’t have love affairs any more”—but, at the same time, she caught herself walking along the beach conscious of a man’s eyes on her. The man turned out to be a boy the age of her son. She looked at the two lovers, passing a cigarette back and forth between them, lingering over what had touched each other’s mouths, silent together, speechless, enfolded in themselves before her. Perhaps it would be Morgan who would have the love affairs now. She thought of his hands; tender, gaunt, strong and timid—he could be mistaken for a man, he was a man. She walked miles up the beach, away from the lovers, away from the little girls.

  When she came back, Clem and Madge had buried Gideon up to the neck in sand; his head rested on the thighs of Ann’s curled-up legs and her head watched over him, eyes closed to the sun, in a strange, naked, sleepy smile as if even his joking commonplaces with the children carried some code for her. Jessie took the children in to swim and then went up to the house with them. “I love Gid,” Madge said, confiding, admiring.

  “I don’t mind him being black,” Elisabeth agreed.

  “Do you mind sometimes when other people are?” Jessie asked.

  “I don’t think it’s pretty,” said Elisabeth.

  Clem began a long lecture about how unkind it was to talk about the colour of people and how you mustn’t hurt their feelings, and how it didn’t matter at all what colour you were, you were just the same—like people having blond hair or dark hair.

  “Don’t boss me,” said Elisabeth, confidently. She was very successful and flirtatious with Gideon, and insisted, with the tyranny over guests that Jessie disliked in children, on his coming to kiss her in bed before she slept each night. But Clem had already lost sight, in an attitude, of her natural response towards people; an attitude of necessity impressed early in order to c
ounter the generally-accepted one. If you did not find blackness abhorrent and outcast, was the only alternative the fastidious suppression of all personal responses in the common denominator of shared humanity? Did it follow that, because you weren’t repelled, you couldn’t admit to being attracted, either? Did one have to be so afraid of emotion—any emotion—in this business?

  Through the ordinary contacts of daily life about the house together, Jessie knew that Gideon was not unaware of her as a woman; there was no covert desire in his behaviour towards her, but she knew that, quite legitimately and quite harmless to his complete preoccupation with Ann, there existed an objective recognition that she, Jessie, was a woman to whom one could make love. This recognition exists in silence and without a sign between a man and many women, or a woman and many men, in situations where there never has been and never will be anything more to it. In bus queues, across shop counters, in the houses of friends—everyone recognises those who exist for himself and for whom he himself exists in this way; just as there are others, even the beautiful and apparently desirable, with whom one has no sexual concomitant. Gideon did not desire her, he was in love with another woman against whom she was not even in the running in the general world of sexual competition, because she was too old—sixteen years too old—but he might have desired her in another time and place. He might have; and this, combined with the sixteen years between her thirty-nine and Ann’s twenty-three, meant that she herself could have been Ann—once, somewhere.

  She was at once set at a remove from the love affair and at the same time curiously close to it. She was jealous no longer of the mere fact of love-making going on behind drawn curtains or in the darkness that stretched to the sea. Once when she returned to the house unexpectedly at a time when she thought the two of them were out, she opened the door into Ann’s room to look for a vanished pair of scissors. She was barefoot, from the beach, and the house was silent; the two lying there did not wake up as she gazed at them. She felt neither the guilty recoil of one who sees suddenly, as a spectator, a part of life where one is never a spectator and only a protagonist, nor the shame of the voyeur. She looked with calm a moment at the ancient grouping of the two bodies, the faces flung away from each other, the arms lax where they had held; all that had been centred rolled apart in sleep. Ann’s one brown-tipped breast was pressed out of shape, like her cheek, by the angle at which she lay on her side, with the whole of the lower part of her body swung across if she were lying face-down. And he lay on his belly with his head over the outstretched arm whose curved fingers, no longer within reach of her head, still conformed to the shape of it. His dark body had a shine going down the curve that followed the groove of the spine to the short, gleaming roundness of the buttocks. Their faces were sweaty. A fly rose and settled indifferently on either. Clothes dangled from the bed and lay sunk upon the floor; round the edges of the curtains, a frill of fire ran where the midday sun was held out. Jessie slowly closed the door and went away.

  That afternoon they all went to a beach ten miles further up the coast that the children thought of as a place foreign and exciting. It was much like any other beach along there, but was reached by a track that went through eucalyptus forests instead of sugarcane and had a cold and thrilling smell that was like some ritual preparation for arrival. The beach and rough green about it had been declared an Indian beach township, but this was so recent that there were only two ugly little villas, one chalky pink and the other brilliant blue, and both empty and deserted except for an African family and some chickens in a hut down among the mealies and stunted paw-paws of each plot. These people did not venture on to the beach, anyway; the picnic party was perfectly safe from prying eyes. The necessity for taking care that Gideon was not seen had become something that they considered openly and took for granted without embarrassment or pretence, as some daily medical treatment that at first seems impossible to carry out while keeping up a semblance of normal living soon adapts the norm to its own queer needs. The children, not knowing why, but always racing eager to give their report, ran down first, as usual, to see if there was anyone on the beach. Then the two women and Gideon followed. The little girls tore off their dresses and ran into the pools in the nude; there was no reason why they should not do this on the beach where they were living, but they did it only here.

  Jessie had unopened letters in her canvas bag among towels and bananas; one was from Tom, and she read it without comment, but the other was from her mother: “She wonders if she should come down next week for the last few days … would it be convenient. —Well, it would be extremely inconvenient …”

  “She’s seen us,” Ann said, weighing sand in her long hand. “Once; in your house. No; perhaps she didn’t really see us together.”

  “But how was that?” Jessie was half-interested.

  “When we were in the car, I ran back for the key and then I realised she was there … in the dining-room, by the window …”

  “Did she call you or something?”

  Ann smiled, surprised at how well she remembered the details. “No … well, I went in and she said something strange to me—she’d been there all the time and she knew I hadn’t noticed her. Something about—there are always other people and then one day you become one of them yourself … something like that.”

  “Old people sit and watch like greedy cats,” said Jessie cruelly.

  “No, she was rather nice, in a funny way.”

  Jessie saw that there was some loyalty between the girl and the old woman whom she herself had never thought of as aware of each other’s existence.

  Gideon was amused as he often was at the customs of white people. “Fancy, she asks if she can come to her own house …”

  “Oh it was my stepfather’s. They were not like married people usually are—nothing cosy about them. I don’t suppose she’s been here since I was a child.”

  A few moments later Ann said, “Are you going home, then?”

  Jessie said, “When?” to gain time, not for herself, but for the other two.

  “Next week.”

  “Well, school begins.”

  She had never asked them what they were going to do. She had the feeling that they never talked about it, that they had hidden from it, escaped it until now when, as inevitably happens, the chance remark that her mother wanted to come for the “last few days” had discovered them. “I’m going in.” She was pushing her hair painfully under a rubber cap. Sand from her body sprinkled down on their heads as she got up. “Oh—sorry!” “It’s all right.” Ann took a paper handkerchief and began to use a corner of it, very gently, to flick the grains out of the convolutions of Gideon’s small, well-made ear.

  “He should bend his head to that side,” said Jessie.

  He shook it. “It’s all right.”

  “Wait a minute.” Ann persisted in her attentions to the ear. She said to Jessie, looking up at her, “Did you ever see anything so perfectly shaped?” He jerked his head as if he were being bothered by an insect. “I know,” said Jessie.

  When she came out of the water he was busy helping the children lug something into the pools. She walked over to them, pulling off the cap so that the deep, indrawn breath of the sea returned to her again in a gasp. He got the swollen plank afloat and came to the rock on which she had climbed to see. “Shipwreck,” he said. She smiled, watching the children, watching this game, like every other, fall into the pattern of what they were: Clem taking charge, Madge at once suspecting that her chosen part was not the one she wanted after all, Elisabeth forgetting, in her roistering pleasure, what it was supposed to be about.

  “Can we go back together?” he said.

  “Yes, if you want to.”

  “She doesn’t want to go back,” he said.

  He began to pull winkles off the rock and throw them into the incoming tide that sucked and struck against the rock where they sat. “You can’t get a thing like this sorted out in five minutes.” He was speaking for Ann, and Jessie answered,
unconvinced, to give him the reassurance this asked, “Of course not.”

  “What do you make of Boaz?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “So nice and polite and so on, very much the good chap. Never says, what’s this all about?”

  “To you? But why should he? I’m sure he’s talked enough to Ann.”

  “It’s pax when I’m around.” After a pause he said, “D’you think he’d be like that with anybody?”

  She looked at him quickly. Perhaps he wanted a lie from her, but she had done with lies, even the good lies. “Probably not.”

  He said, “She’d feel different about doing this if he’d just once stand up to me, you know?”

  “Oh of course, if the other one can be got to behave badly at once everything’s much easier. But here you have his nature, which is perhaps a bit of the natural victim’s, plus the special situation. Civilised love affairs are bad enough, but this one’s particularly civilised.”

  “If I were white,” Gideon turned to her, wanting to confront her word by word, “you mean he’d tell me to go to hell.”

  “And her, too. Maybe.”

  “Good God.” He was scornful, confused, and all the time the balance between trust and half-trust quivered between them, and she looked down, where the water swirled loud with foam, and she seemed to plunge—“I don’t think I’d ever have to give this business another thought. I believed it was all settled, once and for all, long ago. It’s the truth, the rational truth, that a love affair like yours is the same as any other. But you haven’t come to the truth while it’s still only the rational truth. You’ve got to be a bit more honest than that. Do you know what I think while I look at you and Ann? Do you? I remember what was left out when I settled the race business once and for all. I remember the black men who rubbed the floor round my feet when I was twelve and fourteen. I remember the young black man with a bare chest, mowing the lawn. The bare legs and the strong arms that carried things for us, moved furniture. The black man that I must never be left alone with in the house. No one explained why, but it didn’t matter. I used to feel, at night, when I turned my back to the dark passage and bent to wash my face in the bathroom, that someone was coming up behind me. Who was it, do you think? And how many more little white girls are there for whom the very first man was a black man? The very first man, the man of the sex phantasies … Gideon, I’d forgotten, I’d left it all out. It’s only when something like you and Ann happens one suddenly needs to feel one’s way back.”