Occasion for Loving Read online

  She doubted if Shibalo could have remembered her; yet Ann talked to them both as if they had known each other intimately for a long time. “You’ll be relieved to hear that we won’t have to trot out those same two old pictures of his on our next exhibition—she’s one of your most faithful deplorers,” she added, to Shibalo. They might be drinking coke now, but they had been drinking brandy. There was a heightened tempo about them that made Jessie aware that she was too sober.

  “As long as she’s faithful, that’s what matters.” Shibalo had a low, chuckling, snickering private laugh, with which he prefaced such remarks; it was directed at himself. His yellow-brown face, older than he was, had little whorls of uneven black wool sticking here and there between chin and ear—perhaps not a beard, but laziness about shaving over the past few days. He was dressed in a shabby way that suited him, with a red and black checked flannelette shirt, and the end of his trousers’ waistband tucked in against his belly.

  “What sort of things are you doing?” Jessie asked.

  “Come and see.” He woke up to the full plate in front of him, began to press and turn the rice and meat with his fork as if it were some plastic material rather than something meant to go into his mouth.

  “Still the knotty stick-shapes and the sky with dust hanging in the air?”

  He smiled in acknowledgement. “Ah, that’s out.” He put down the fork after a mouthful or two and took out a cigarette. “I’m in a different mood, these days. I hadn’t painted for so long my fingers creak.” He clasped his hands and cracked the joints.

  “Serve you right,” said Ann, taking a cigarette from him and beckoning for the matches: “Please!” “Oh, sorry!” They smiled at each other. While Ann talked and ate she kept looking out round the room, neck held high, excited and assertive. “Len thinks we can get a bigger caravan. Not borrowed, but hired. We’ll use it part of the time, and we’ll let it to the Boys’ Club, and things like that, to cover the cost.”

  “Pity you can’t buy one. We’d hire it from you to go on holiday—Tom wants to go to Pondoland in July …”

  They talked trivialities with ease, but from the moment she saw Gideon Shibalo’s face Jessie had become aware of a sense of intrusion so strong that she felt it physically—her hands were awkward as she used her knife and fork. She talked, but she was in retreat behind every word as if to efface herself from the company.

  She did not wait for coffee. “Oh Jessie,” Ann was quite effusive, “would you find out from Agatha whether my blue dress is back from the cleaner’s? And if not, would you be a dear and phone them about it?” The sudden request had the trumped-up ring of the little chores that Jessie herself often invented to distract one of the children.

  “Of course. —I’ll look forward to seeing the new Shibalo,” she said to the man.

  “You won’t like it.” —In the superior way that painters refer to a new trend in their work.

  The open street, jagged with light, and small hard shadows of a hot day, broke upon her. They’re lovers; they’re lovers: she thought, and felt herself abruptly returned to the life around her, that had been going on all the time.

  Part Two

  Seven

  Ann Davis had not thought, when she left England, that she would be spending much time in Johannesburg. She enjoyed the feeling that she had left behind the risk of the Chelsea flat or Hampstead or Kensington house from which so many of her friends looked out, captured, unlikely to get at the world. Marrying Boaz, she had been admitted to the select band who returned only at intervals from teaching jobs in Ghana, study grants in America, or one of those world organisations, born of United Nations, that seek to make deserts bloom here, and limit teeming population there, in the more fatalistic wilderness of the earth. She thought of herself as lucky; and no one could suggest, even, that a return to South Africa, for Boaz, was a condonement of the white man’s way of life there, for he was returning only to do something that could not be done anywhere else—to study the black man’s music, part of the heritage that was becoming as much of a cult as it had once been culturally discounted. This was important to her, socially; she accepted it just as, if she had belonged to another set and another time, she would have accepted that it did not do to be in trade. She was not really concerned with politics. The surge of feeling against the barriers of colour was the ethos of the decade in which she had grown up; her participation in it was a substitute for patriotism rather than a revolt. She had no lasting feelings about the abstractions of injustice; like many healthy and more or less beautiful women, she could only be fired to pity or indignation by what she saw with her own eyes.

  The field-trips with Boaz had not been a disappointment to her. She was seldom disappointed, anyway, but the very freshness that all things had for her tempted her away lightly from one to another. She played happily with the Pedi children, making stick boats to sail in the muddy river, and she got on well with the women despite the language difficulty. She had an intelligent grasp of the fundamental pattern of tribal life that the people tried to confuse—through secrecy, shyness, or a mistaken desire to please—before the eyes of strangers, and her good memory was often a help to Boaz. When she sat in the tent, under the lamp’s circling galaxy of insects, making fair copies of his sketch-notes of musical instruments, he was aware of no difference between her absorbed interest and his own. But the fact was that the day’s task was sufficient to her, while for him it stretched on to the distant end of his life, old age or death would interrupt him at it …

  She began to stay behind in Johannesburg more and more, simply because there were so many things she was asked to do, and they were all new to her, just as the field-trips had been. The idea of living in the bush was somehow never unpacked, like one of those apparently essential garments that turn out not to be needed for the climate after all. When Boaz came home for a weekend, there was so much to tell him—they lay awake for hours, smoking in bed. He smiled in the dark and stroked her smooth, cool arm while she talked.

  Patrick, their photographer friend, and his wife Dodo were a pair whose enthusiasms bloomed like daisies—hardly a week went by when she was not caught up in their activities, which invariably concerned some rearrangement of the physical world that contained them. They dug a swimming pool or knocked a wall down, lugged rocks for the garden, and swopped a twoseater for an old caravan; the house they lived in, the disposition of walls and chairs, car, trees and even landscape—these stood around them like a set of blocks that, in the hands of children, is constantly changing shape. Ann joined in this game of house with enthusiasm, enjoying the dirt and the mess and the picnicking that accompany amateur undertakings. She often thought that it would have been fun if she and Boaz could have lived with Patrick and Dodo instead of with the Stilwells, but of course Boaz thought the earth of the Stilwells. It didn’t much matter, anyway. She was free to do as she pleased and the Stilwells, nice enough in their way, did not bother her. Although she got on well with Jessie down at the Agency—indeed, it was through Jessie that she had got to know Len and thereafter, through Len, the city world of young black men and girls where she found herself so pleasantly accepted—Jessie at home was often, so to speak, out of sight for her. Just as, in a musical work, there may be whole phrases that are out of the range of your understanding for one stage of your life at least, if not for ever, so there are sometimes people whom some stage in one’s own life, or composition of one’s own self-hood, prevents one from following all the way. Ann saw the Stilwells’ life as a set of circumstances—children, the queer elder kid from some other marriage, ugly old house, not enough money. There it was, remote as old age. She did not think of it as something that had begun somewhere different and might be becoming something different. The present was the only dimension of time she knew; she woke every day to her freedom of it.

  It was awful the way Jessie appeared sometimes, like a ruin. She could still look attractive, when she took the trouble. She did not seem to know or care that at ti
mes her face was stripped, more brutally than the gradual methods of ageing would ever come, finally, to do it, by the violence of the spirit over the flesh. There was always a great to-do, in a delayed-action, muffled sort of way, over anything that happened in the house—queer things did seem to happen to the Stilwells, like the arrival of the old man, that night, and then his dying somewhere in Europe, but even quite ordinary incidents did not pass off and get forgotten in the usual way. Most of the time, she, Ann, really could not say what it was all about. Some incident that would appear to bear no particular weight at the time, and that, if she noticed it at all, was out of mind next day, would apparently lie gathering force in some dusty corner of the shabby old house until one day, coming in out of the sunny world outside, the girl would suddenly become aware of a great rumbling disturbance passing through the human conduction system of the house—snatches of talk, looks exchanged—and would be astonished to recognise the tiny motif of the forgotten incident, now fully orchestrated. Who did this? Jessie, she supposed. Who else? Not much interested in the whole business, there was still a feminine tartness in this uncritical conclusion of Ann’s. Once Jessie’s attention was on something quite ordinary, it was lit with fancy lighting. There were shadows denser than objects and the gauze curtain of appearances melted away … If Jessie hadn’t looked at it, you would never have seen it like that. The evening she, Ann, had walked into the fuss over the kid Morgan—the way Jessie called out what had happened in that intense, ringing voice: she made you feel she expected something, some response that you didn’t have. Honestly, one did not know what to say to her. It simply didn’t seem very terrible that the poor kid slipped out to go dancing; only funny, because he was so nondescript. And, of course, it all blew over in a day or two.

  The Stilwells’ friends and such of Boaz’s old friends whose affinity with him had survived a ten years’ absence provided her with the sort of company she was used to in England, but it was Len Mafolo who let her into company where she could shine. When she walked in among his white and black bachelor friends and their girls, it was as if she had been expected. With her looks, her kind of liveliness, her impatience with the limitations of a mapped-out way of life, and her background with Boaz, she would not have fitted in with the night-club and country-club set of the rich white suburbs; and among the office drab of people who mixed with blacks on a philanthropic, religious or political basis she would have been a note of scarlet. But among the show people, whose spendthrift vitality she could match, and the small group of black men who found life most approachable late at night, through talk, through music, through drink, and in the company of whites like themselves, she was at home.

  For she was that new being—beginning to appear, here and there—for whom the black man in a white city waited. In her, the kicks and the snubs and the vengefulness and the hate met, complemented and merged with each other, two terrible halves of the vicious circle become whole, and healed. She was white, top-class beauty, young; young and beautiful enough for the richest and most privileged white man. She was not a woman who could not find a white man, nor was she one of the nuts, hankering for a black man as a shameful sexual aberration. Neither did she merely offer friendship, understanding, and fellow-feeling. The truth was, she looked the kind of girl who would call you Jim Fish, but dancing with her, sitting talking to her, you were man to her woman. The laws had not changed, the pass was still in your pocket; this simple miracle happened in spite of these things and far beyond them, in a realm where their repeal would have been powerless to release you anyway. It was not worth much—yet it was beyond price.

  Ann took an innocent pleasure in her success. When she pushed her way into a crowded township room admiration and attention turned on her, warmly, familiarly, with all the jokes and liberty-taking that go with appropriation. There were one or two other white girls like her; not slumming, but full of joy, they could dance nearly as well as the black girls. But Ann quickly became as good as the best of the black girls; like them, she could dance with her whole body and use muscles that most white women do not know are theirs to command. Sometimes the other dancers would fall back around her and the young man who was feeling the aura of her shape in the air as they circled and stalked each other. A thrilling awareness of movement caught up the spectators, as if they suddenly could feel the world turning them in space. “Great kid! She’s terrific, this girl,” they would tell her, patronising, celebrating. The repetitive music, the coming and going of people, the animation of movement and the passivity of being available to whoever drew her into the dance made her tireless. She could have danced until she dropped. Once, on a Sunday afternoon when she had gone with Boaz and Len to have tea with his sister in her respectable Orlando house, she drew Boaz with her into a group dancing round a couple of penny whistle piccanins in the yard outside. The gathering spread into the township street and a journalist on a black paper got a picture of her, a white face whirling, and Boaz, knees splayed, among the crowd.

  Len Mafolo was not much of a dancer but he liked to talk, comfortingly shut in by music and noise. He would be in the same corner from nine or ten until one in the morning, drinking, but not too much, and arguing in a slow, lofty way, as if for him getting at the truth was like picking one’s way breath-holdingly, toe-hold by toe-hold, down from some dizzy spire on which one found oneself stranded. He had almost at once forgiven Ann for going to the mine dances; it was a joke between them now. He understood her not very fastidious enthusiasm for anything new to her, and she understood his distaste for tribalism. He described her as a “wonderful kid”: with a pause and a shrugging snort to follow the impossibility of defining her. He liked white girls because those he knew were good to talk to as well as beautiful; she was also extraordinarily easy to work with, undiscouraged by the slowness and difficulty of getting people beyond the planning stage, tackling everything without fear of failure because she found it fun. “Don’t be so limp, Len,” she would say, fretting at his pessimistic objections.

  The idea of taking round an exhibition of African paintings and sculpture—that was something he had been talking about for years, ever since he’d been a clerk at the Institute of Race Relations and had been put on to packing orders for their special Christmas cards every year. But the moment he talked to Ann about it, it began to take shape out of all sorts of impossibilities. There were not enough halls, particularly on the Reef, where the exhibition could be seen by white as well as black; “I tell you what—you need a caravan!” she said, “We’ll borrow Patrick’s—that’s it! They’ve just traded in their station wagon for a caravan.” And when he objected: “Who’s going to drive the thing around?” “Us!” she said, “You and I, of course.”

  And so the impossibilities were changed, one by one. She was marvellous with the people they got to exhibit, too; if someone sent in something disappointing, she would stand looking at it with Len, and just as he was ready to say he supposed it was all right, an obstinate look would come over the bottom half of her face: “Let’s go and see him and make him dig up something better. Where does he live? Let’s go now—”

  She called Mafolo “old Len”: the epithet for the childhood companion, the family friend … He got used to her, but sometimes when he looked at her and saw how she was like some lovely creature in its glossy coat, perfectly equal to its environment, he was seized with anxiety and hope. It was almost as if he were already reproaching himself for having missed something that, at the same time, he really knew never would be offered him.

  The caravan exhibition was exactly the sort of venture that occupied Ann most happily. She knew a little bit about displaying works of art—in the fashionable sack-cloth-and-space way—because, although she did not take her attempts at various careers seriously, it was true that she had worked for a time in a small London gallery. She flew in and out of the house for nails, boxes, lengths of rope—all kinds of things—during the preparation of the exhibition. She was always running into Mrs. Fuecht, Jessie’s m
other (who was in the house at the time), with the sort of object in her hands that must have appeared to require an explanation—the bathroom mirror, once, and another time a cooking-pot with an old sheet bubbling away inside it in a soup of purplish dye. The old lady showed no surprise, however—she was quite a surprise to come upon suddenly, oneself: rather an impressive old lady, slightly dotty, with the tragedy-queen air that Ann noticed often hung about aged women who were probably very attractive when young and who had given the greater part of their energies to love. “Your mother has been a beauty; she must have had lots of lovers, I suppose,” Ann said to Jessie. But Jessie laughed, and said in that menacing way of hers: “No, she was in love with me.” Perhaps Jessie was jealous of the old lady; certainly she had none of the old lady’s air. Ann always stopped, in passing, to exchange a few words with her; at least, that was what appeared to happen; what was really exchanged was a brief kindling of each other’s beauty, a flutter of recognition across fifty years. Once, the old lady seemed on the brink of beginning to talk to her—but it was not possible, that day. And one day her visit blew over, too, and she was gone.