He was looking tightly ahead as if under an insult.
“I suppose Boaz thought it was all settled, too. Years ago. But none of us knows how much getting free of the colour bar means to us—none of us. It sounds crazy, but perhaps it’s so important to him that he can’t help putting it before Ann, even. It sounds crazy; but even before her.”
They did not speak for a while, and the sea cut under the rock and tore away, bearing off what had been said.
“Where would you go, to England?”
“She thought Italy.” He did not want to mention the scholarship that he had given up, but that Ann saw simply as something that could be arranged again.
“What about some other part of Africa?”
“It doesn’t matter much.” Ann was coming towards them along the shore-line, her feet pressing the shine of water from the sand as she walked. They both watched her approach, but it was his vision of her that prevailed, so that Jessie saw her as he did, a glowing face, salt-stiff, blown hair, his shirt resting like a towel across her shoulders, and a line of the flesh—the white of a freshly-broken mushroom—that was hidden by the boned top of her bathing suit showing in a soft rise against her tanned chest as she walked. In this unselfconscious sauntering stalk everything was taken for granted, everything that had ever been struggled for and won with broken bodies and bursting brains—the struggle up from superstition and pestilence, religious wars and industrial slavery, all the way from the weight of the club to the rubber truncheon: the fight of man against nature, against men, and against himself. Gideon said between clenched teeth, “The other things I’ve been beating my head against the wall for—I don’t want them any more.” He was making, in the presence of a witness, an offering, throwing down the last that he had before the demand that he could not measure. And he laughed because of the present glory of it, as the figure came on, approaching, enveloping, over the sand. He jumped off the rock, staggered a moment in the knee-high wild water, and then ran up to the dry sand. When she came he took her by the shoulders in some playful exchange, knocking the shirt off. They stood there talking, arm’s-length from each other, her head impudently, affectionately bent, his thumbs pressing the hollow under each collarbone. The sun had ripened her skin like fruit, and even in the house the warm graining beneath which the blood lay near, brought to the surface by slight inflammation, gave her the look of someone seen by candlelight.
Nineteen
Rain leaned from the horizon over the sea, and all, sea and rain, moved so quietly that the waves fell with the isolated sounds of doors shut far away. An epoussé glitter now and then broke the dream with a reminder of water.
Clem, who less than a year ago had been as unhampered by conceptions of time as her sisters were, now felt her being determined within it as the life of a character in a play is contained in sets arbitrarily put up and taken down. “Our last three days.” She was dismayed, she protested against the limits that obsessed her. Madge and Elisabeth chimed in with her, but forgot, next moment, that the game of bears in caves that the darkness under the high old beds in their room provided, would not go on for ever. “Let’s always play this,” they said to each other.
Clem took her rebellion to her mother. “Why does it just have to go and rain on our last three days?”
“You’ve had a whole month when it didn’t rain.”
But Clem’s sense of time had no dimension in the past yet, she was concerned only with the margin by which the present extended into the future.
Jessie gathered stray books and clothes wherever she happened to come upon them and put them on the spare bed in the room where she slept. She went through the contents of the magazine rack in the living-room, setting aside the children’s ludo board, some crumpled dolls’ clothes, and falling under the aimless fascination of reading snippets in the old magazines that had been there when she came and would be left behind when she went. Gideon and Ann stepped over the clutter that surrounded her as she sat on the floor. Their comings and goings were minor; they spent the days talking of the practical facts of rooms and rents and fares in other countries, like some ambitious young couple planning to spend their savings on a visit abroad. Ann even sat mending the unravelled sleeve of Gideon’s blue Italian shirt. Sometimes Gideon was silent for long stretches as he sipped beer and drew. They went tramping out in the rain, and once drove away through the mud and came back stretching and preoccupied, focusing upon familiar things with the daze of people who have shut themselves away to talk.
Jessie picked up a drawing of Gideon’s while they were out. Well, at least it wasn’t Ann again—seeing that it was abstract. But why be glad of that? Malraux spoke of the artist as one who annexes a fragment of the world and makes it his own. She did not know whether Gideon needed that more than he needed to share a common possession of what there was to be shared. Perhaps he needed to be a man more than he needed to be a painter. Not just a black man, set aside on a special form, a special bench, in a special room, but a man.
As she looked at the charcoal drawing that was almost like a woodcut in its contrast of thick black lines and spidery-etched connections, she thought it moved the way the water did that day when she and Gideon were talking on the rock; but the association was probably one that existed only in her own mind.
The day before they left was clear, with a colourless sky that turned blue as the morning warmed. The sea remained calm; the sand, beaten flat as a tennis-court, dried with a rain-stippled skin and took incisively the oblique cuts of crabs’ delicate feet and the three-branched seals imprinted by the claws of birds. Gideon and Ann came down to the beach soon after Jessie and the children. Like invalids, after the rain, they sat against a rock and smoked, both in long trousers, he in his sweater and she with her grey trench-coat pulled round her, only their feet bare. Jessie looked up from her book at some point and saw Gideon strolling towards the children. She and Ann chatted intermittently, and then Jessie decided to go to the village to get what was needed for a picnic lunch on the road next day. She was brisk, standing up with her hands conclusively on her thighs for a moment; she had about her the confidence of a woman who is about to return to the place where she belongs and who already takes on the attractiveness the man who is waiting there will see in her—an attractiveness made up of the freshness imparted by absence, the comfort of something well-known, the strength and weakness of her régime. For once, Ann was inert by contrast; her out-flung legs, her bent head that moved only to draw slowly on a cigarette made a figure that had come to a stop, there on the beach.
The shop in the village was not full, but service moved with a peculiar country slowness. You were supposed to help yourself from the grocery shelves but the grouping of things was haphazard—Jessie had to give up and wait her turn to be served at the counter.
The man and woman behind it conducted their business in an easy, talkative way, while a few Africans hung about on the fringe of the whites, hoping to get a turn sometime. A big pasty woman, with an identical daughter leaning on the counter beside her, was trying to decide on a tin of jam—“Ah, but how often do you get it these days that it’s not all mushy, like a lot of porridge …?”
The assistant was a little grey-skinned woman without breasts or lips or eyebrows, but whose head of hair, distinct from the rest of her, was fresh from the hairdresser’s, elaborately swirled and curled, stiff and brilliant yellow. “Not Calder’s Orchard Bounty, Mrs. Packer, I can guarantee you that. Same as you, I hate jam all squashed up’s if its bad fruit they put in it, but this is what I take home for myself.”
The next customer ahead of Jessie was a handsome woman with the air of authority that goes with a gaze that follows the line of a splendid slope of bosom. “How are you today, Mrs. Gidley?” The assistant took her pencil out of the centre of a curl and although the whole mass moved slightly, like a pile of spun sugar stirred by a knife, not a hair was drawn out of place. The tone of voice rose a little to meet the status of this customer, not unctuous, but
no longer matey. “Stanley—Mrs. Gidley’s chickens, in the back there. —I put them aside first thing this morning, while I could get the pick for you. Or don’t you want to take them? We can send the boy, no trouble at all, he’s got to go up your way, before twelve? —Stanley, just a minute—”
“Oh could you? Oh that would be nice—but I’d forgotten about them anyway—all I wanted was to know if you’d be good enough to put this up somewhere—” The woman was leaning across the counter on one elbow, smoothing a home-made poster.
“Oh that—” The yellow head twisted to look. “I heard about that—yes, I should think I would! It’s getting too much of a good thing. My daughter was saying to me, Saturday afternoon and Sunday’s the only day you’ve got, if you’re working, and then the whole beach is full of them.”
The gracious voice said regretfully, painedly, “Well, we do feel that some arrangements ought to be made. Something that will be fair to all. One doesn’t want to deny people their pleasures. There has been a suggestion that a part of the beach ought to be set aside for them … but of course, once you make it official, you’ll get them coming from other places, and the Indians, too …”
“It’s all the servants, you see, that people bring down with them. That’s it, mainly. Down from Johannesburg and they’ve got their bathing suits and all just like white people …” The assistant bent her head towards the large woman and laughed indignantly, in spite of herself. “We get them in here, let me tell you, quite the grand ladies and gentlemen they think they are, talking to you as if they was white.”
“Well exactly, they’re not our simple souls who’re content to chat in their rooms.” Her kind of laugh joined pleasantly with the assistant’s.
The man behind the counter plonked down two frozen chickens. “Look at this, Stanley, Mrs. Gidley’s just brought in a poster—there’s going to be a meeting at the hotel on Tuesday.”
“Well, don’t you agree—we feel that, as residents who’ve built up Isendhla, we want to enjoy our beautiful beach in privacy …”
“… she said to me, I didn’t want to go into the water with all those natives looking at me … in trunks they were, too, the men.”
The majestic bosom had turned to the man. “Major Field suggests that we might set aside a stretch … Up near Grimald’s cottage, then there would be no question—”
With thanks and profuse friendliness the woman left the poster and turned on her high heels and made her way out, backing into Jessie, gasping a smiling apology, as she went. Jessie caught full on for a moment, like a head on a pike, the fine grey eyes, the cheerful bright skin, the full cheeks and unlined mouth of a tranquil, kind woman.
The woman behind the counter set the meat-cutter screeching back and forth across a ham, and, while she was weighing out the slices for Jessie, remarked, “This always used to be such a lovely clean beach … I don’t know if you was down on Sunday? You’d of thought they owned it, that’s the truth … undressing all over, behind the bushes.”
“No, I wasn’t down.”
“Where are you staying then?”
“I’ve got Grimald’s cottage.”’
The woman pulled a face that was quickly suppressed. “Oooh, that’s out of the way, isn’t it?” she said, loading Jessie’s basket with pampering tact calculated to take her mind off anything else.
Jessie was occupied for an hour or so in the house when she got back; then she got as far as the terrace and stood looking with a kind of disbelief at the wild, innocent landscape; the rain-calmed sea, the slashed heads of strelitzia above the bush almost translucent green with the rush of sap. The sun put a warm hand on her head. But nothing was innocent, not even here. There was no corner of the whole country that was without ugliness. It was no good thinking you could ever get out of the way of that.
She went down to the beach. Ann came slowly to meet her. “Is Gid up at the house?” she called.
“No, why?”
Ann was smiling, but she said, “Well, I don’t know what’s happened to him, but he hasn’t been back …”
“You mean since I left?”
“Mmm,” said Ann, watching her expression.
“I saw him wander up the beach.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve walked right up beyond the third lot of rocks, but he doesn’t seem to be anywhere.”
Jessie looked around the beach, as if she expected to be able to say: there he is. She was conscious of Ann watching her, ready to take a cue from her. She sat down on the sand, waving to the children. “When you start walking here, you go on for miles without noticing it. He’ll get hungry soon, and be reminded it’s time to turn back.”
Ann was still standing. “I’ve been miles.”
She drew a half-circle, dragging her toe in a ballet step over the sand, making a deeper and deeper groove. “Some fishermen came past while I was lying down.”
Jessie indicated surprise.
“The children shouted and I opened my eyes and there they were, in a jeep, of all things.”
“White men?”
“Oh yes. Lots of equipment.” She pointed up the beach where Jessie now noticed two long lines of ploughed-up sand.
After a minute, Jessie said, “Perhaps Gideon saw them and thought he’d keep out of the way.”
“Yes, but then he’d have gone up to the house from the bush,” Ann turned at once with the quick dismissal of someone who has already considered and discarded the same conclusion. “—Wouldn’t he?” Jessie saw she was hoping for an alternative to be suggested.
“No, well, he might have gone a long way round.” But what other way was there? If he wanted to cut back to the house, he wouldn’t walk further away in order to do so. “He’ll turn up.” She wandered off to the children. Ann lay on her stomach on the sand, head resting on her hands. Jessie tried to round up the little girls. “It’s lunch-time. Put your shirt on. Madge, isn’t that your cap, there? No more water, Elisabeth—” but they dawdled and ignored her.
“What’s the time now?” Ann asked.
“About half past one.”
“And when you left?”
“I don’t know—tennish—after ten.”
At last the children began to drift up the beach towards the path. Madge hung back and shouted, “Ma, I’m waiting for you.” Jessie did not answer but she felt the pull of that imploring, obstinate figure turned on her. “Go on up,” she called. “I’m coming,” and, sentenced, Madge dragged away over the sand, far behind the others.
Jessie tried to work out what Ann was thinking. Her eyes went over the hunched shoulders and the lovely dip of the waist, the fingers thrust into the hair. The girl wore one of his shirts again; the clothes of a lover are both a private reassurance and a public declaration: another kind of woman would wear rings and jewels, but for the same reasons.
“I must pack.” Jessie’s remark rolled away, unanswered. “We ought to leave fairly early tomorrow,” she added.
“Oh I’ll get things together tonight. There’s so little.”
Ann swung round and sat up suddenly. She giggled a little, and, eyes searching Jessie, said, “What on earth can he be doing? Are we going to be here all day?”
“I think we should go to the house. He’ll come to the house when he turns up, anyway.”
Ann continued to look at her and look away with an attempt at casualness, childishly nervous, smiling, pressing her lips one against the other. Her eyes met Jessie’s deeply, dazzling, evasive in their displayed frankness, guilty in their innocence, as if she had done something that was about to be found out.
“But what could happen to him?” Jessie asked.
Ann was not looking anywhere now, though her gaze was holding the other woman. Her eyes seemed trapped, swimming with the tinsel fragments that made light refract in their depths. As a confusion of thoughts concealed sometimes stops one’s mouth so that one loses the power of speech, so there is an aphasia of sight, when eyes cease, for a moment, to show anything but mechanical responses
to light and the trembling of objects.
“Well … he wouldn’t just walk out into the sea …?”
The moment it was said she was smiling at the absurdity, the preposterousness of it.
Jessie laughed too. “But why on earth should he do such a thing?”
In Ann’s deep blush she saw the unconscious desire to have the course of this love affair decided by something drastic, arbitrary, out of her own power.
When they got up to the house they found Gideon about to come down to the beach for them. Ann was almost shy to approach him. “I went for a walk,” he said from the top of the steps. “I had no idea it was so far.”
“That’s what I said!” said Jessie.
Ann was carrying the trench-coat, hung by the loop from one finger, over her shoulder. He came down the steps and took the coat from her. She said nothing.
The children had been given some lunch by Jason, and were already playing on the track at the back of the house. Jason was in his room, as always between two and four in the afternoon. The three of them sat in the dim cool dining-room eating cold meat and cheese that had been left set out.
“And what are you going to do now?” Jessie said suddenly. They waited but she did not go on.
“Ann’ll probably come back with you to the house tomorrow,” he said, passing on something that had been decided as part of a plan. He looked at Ann, who was watching Jessie.
Jessie made some automatic assent. But her feeling of distaste for the contemplation of them returned to the way they were before, with Ann coming home at night to Boaz, rose uncontrollably and communicated itself to them.
Occasion for Loving Page 29
