Occasion for Loving Page 12

  For a moment the quality of the reality she was experiencing underwent a swift change. It was as if she woke up from an idle day-dream and found herself holding some unexplained object brought with her from a dream-world.

  When the splinter was out they went into the living-room and had a drink. She had never had the house to herself before, that she could remember, and she felt herself in possession of it in a special way, as a child does when she creeps into a deserted house through a broken window. She took him upstairs to show him a woodcut in Jessie’s room, and some carved figures Boaz had picked up in his wanderings. Their movements from room to room, pauses in their chatter, had the rhythm of a dance through the house.

  They were about to drive away when she found she had forgotten the car-keys and went running back into the house. As she raced downstairs again, she suddenly saw the profile of Mrs. Fuecht’s seated figure, through the open doorway into the dining-room. She stopped; in the moment, the old woman turned her head. The girl was drawn across the entrance hall, through the door, to the window where the old woman sat.

  “Hullo. All alone?” The girl’s face had the blind eagerness of a face in a high wind; nerve-endings alive, responses on the surface, like the flash of sun or the shiver of wind on water.

  The old woman scarcely existed in the moment. Her carefully powdered face was a mummification of such moments as the girl’s; layer on layer, bitumen on bandage, she held the dead shape of passion and vitality in the stretch of thick white flesh falling from cheekbone to jaw, the sallow eyes and straggling but still black eyebrows holding up the lifeless skin round them, and the incision of the mouth. The lips showed only when she spoke, shining pale under a lick of saliva:

  “It seemed I never would be.”

  The air bridled between them. “Can I get you anything?” said Ann.

  The old woman smiled. “What?”

  “I just wondered …”

  “Oh, I know. Now and then one notices other people and is at a loss.”

  The girl laughed and the old woman took it like a confession. But it was an exchange of confidences: she said, “As time goes by there seem to be more of them—other people. And then, all of a sudden, you’re one of them.”

  Ann sat down on the edge of a small table.

  “Weren’t you on your way?”

  Their eyes met, blank and intimate. She got up. “I’ll be going then.” She paused, a bird balancing a moment on a telephone wire. “Goodbye.”

  The old woman did not change the angle of her head over her book while the front door banged and the clip of heels faded down the path, but when the house was silent again, the alert spread of her nostrils slackened. The silence where the voices of the girl and the unknown man had sounded was the silence within her where many voices were no longer heard.

  The day Jessie met them at lunch they had been moving Shibalo’s painting things from the back-room of a shop to the flat in the white suburb where he came and went as he pleased. Ann had not been there before; the tenants, two young men in advertising, were at work, but Shibalo was supplied with a key, and everything in the flat was in the natural state in which the owners’ continuing activities had left it—he constituted no interruption. There must have been some prearrangement between them, however, because he stacked some canvases in the wallcupboard in the bathroom, and pushed two easels in beside the ironing-board in the dingy kitchen before he dumped the rest in the living-room. Ann was deeply curious about the canvases and stacks of drawings gathered in newspaper—“all old stuff,” he said; whenever one was revealed she would stop dead to look at it in searching silence. She showed, too, the possessiveness on behalf of the artist that attacks ordinary people once they get to know a creative person; she began moving various objects out of the way to make room for pictures, and was irritated by the screen that was carefully placed as a target for a projector. “Why can’t that thing be rolled up somewhere? They can’t be using it all the time.”

  Vanity made him ignore this partisanship out of embarrassment; like most artists of any kind he thought himself far above the measure of privilege that ordinary people might think it necessary to claim for him. He put a record on the player and sat back to listen; he watched her, as if he were lazily following the movements of a bee or a moth about the room.

  She put down a canvas she had pulled free from some others. There was a flurry in her busyness. She looked at her hand, picked up the canvas again, and then put it back.

  “Look,” she said, coming over to him.

  On her forefinger, with its slender tip that bent back supplely as she stiffened it, there was a streak of fresh wet paint.

  He pulled a face of concern and, smiling, leant out to pick up the turpentine bottle. He took his handkerchief and used it to clean her hand; then he leant out again and got a sheet of paper between his fingers and put the hand flat down upon it on the chair-arm, twisting her arm awkwardly as she half-sat. He drew round the outline of her hand with a stub of charcoal. The triumphant, challenging set of her face weakened; she kept her eyes down on her own hand. He picked it up and gave it back to her.

  He jumped up from the chair and began to fool about with spontaneous energy. “I must do the honours of the house. Forgive the informality of this humble abode. It’s the girl’s day off. There are no snacks prepared. The champagne isn’t cold enough. But in the kitchen you’ll find the glasses, and somewhere”—his head disappeared into one of those unidentifiable space-saving cupboards that might store anything—“we’ll find the brandy.”

  She took off her shoes and drank her fingerful with ginger ale, stretching herself on a plastic-thonged chair on the balcony. He had taken out a big, hairy white sheet of card and sat in the shaded doorway of the room behind her, drawing. “Let me see.” He took no notice so she got up and went to look. It was her profile, glancing over a naked back.

  “How do you know that’s how I look?”

  “You’re all the same,” he said, “that’s the beauty of it.”

  She went back to the sun and sat on the balcony ledge, the sun contracting the skin on her back, her bare soles just in contact with the grooved tiled floor.

  “One push,” he said, looking and looking at her.

  She crossed her arms over her stomach, balancing carelessly. “Why not?” A reddish warmth from the tiles was reflected in her skin. Death never occurred to her except as a thrill in life; the drop behind her brought a special smile to her face.

  When Jessie left them at the Lucky Star after lunch they went back to the flat. There was suddenly nowhere else to go, nothing else to do; the whole city seemed to let them pass unnoted as if some intense preoccupation between them made them invisible. They sat in the room with the curtains pulled against the sun, facing each other. Ann was not thinking of Shibalo but was filled with consciousness of Jessie. She was aware of her in broken images from their association, that was unimportant for her and had gone by, irrelevant. This strong awareness of the other woman made her roused and shaky inwardly, as one feels after an exchange that has left one goaded at the point of the moment to speak.

  She went to the bathroom and did her hair and her face in a trance of skill; the smell of her trailed across the room. It was five weeks exactly since he had walked into the caravan. Time went so quickly for her; it had brought her here, now, quite suddenly. No good thinking of anything else.

  They began to kiss and please each other with some rivalry, like a pair of peacocks showing off their feathers. If there was laughter, there was also fascination. At last there was solemnity too, but it was the hectic solemnity of surprising passion.

  Eight

  Because he was not much interested by her, Tom Stilwell made an effort to talk to Ann when he found her about. There were gaps in his attention to as well as his knowledge of her day-to-day life, and usually his attempts were of the well-how-are-you-getting-along-with-such-and-such variety. He asked her about the travelling exhibition one evening when she happened to b
e in to dinner, only to hear it had just closed. “Oh my God, everything’s always over before I get to see it. I suppose that Japanese film’s off by now too, darling?” he added to Jessie.

  “Of course” she said cheerfully. “But there’s a new place to eat opened up where the old Bella Napoli used to be. We could try that before it goes bust, perhaps.”

  They passed from this to discussion about whether, in general, group shows were more or less satisfying than one-man shows. “In any case, I imagine there isn’t anyone among the group you showed who could attempt a one-man show—except perhaps Shibalo.”

  “Of course, yes. And he can get a gallery in town, any time he wants to,” said Ann.

  “What about talking to Patrick Bold about the caravan now?” Tom said, half to Jessie.

  “You can,” said Ann. “His brother’s taking it for the next six weeks or so.”

  “We wouldn’t want it until about July—Jessie?” She had the component parts of a small doll beside her and was studying them between bites of apple. Her eyes hesitated over the coupling of this piece to that with obstinate enjoyment of the difficulties created by her ignorance of the principles of construction involved. “I’m not so sure.” She was not referring to the time, but to the fact that a house that was part of Fuecht’s estate might be available to them soon. It was a house at the sea where she had stayed as a child.

  “How many would the caravan take?” The possibility of the house, vague as it was, stirred some opposition in Tom, as will any proposition that appears to bring to the active surface something one dislikes in the nature of someone one loves. He had the unexpressed knowledge, based on no facts and requiring none, that Jessie wanted to use the house because Fuecht was dead, perhaps to demonstrate that he was dead.

  “It’s huge. Oh, six can sleep in it, easily,” Ann assured him at once, with the confidence of a butterfly telling a bird how to build a nest.

  “The kids could double up, anyway. And one could take a tent as well. How about you and Boaz bringing along a tent?”

  “Marvellous. But it depends when. Boaz is supposed to go up into Moçambique in the winter.” Ann was drawn to the problem of the doll. “Wait a minute, why don’t you try getting the head in first—then that bit”—she took up the torso irresistibly—“hooks in there. Ought to.”

  Tom, too, picked up an arm, like the piece of a jigsaw that the passer-by feels sure he will drop into place unhesitatingly. He fitted the wire spring to the truncated shoulder and pushed it through one hole in the pink plastic body. Jessie watched with the silence of one who has tried all this before. The spring was too short to project through the hole on the other side, where the other arm was supposed to connect to it, and the hole was too small to allow fingers to enter and pull the spring through. “You need a bit of wire. Or tweezers would do.”

  “Eyebrow tweezers? I’ll get mine,” said Ann, and left the room for a minute.

  Jessie said to Tom softly, looking up over the doll. “She’s having an affair with Shibalo.”

  Her tone was curiously reassuring and unconvincing.

  “What on earth makes you say that?”

  “I know. I was mad not to see it before.”

  “Does Len say so?”

  “I had lunch with them at the Lucky Star the other day.”

  There was the almost dreamy quiet between them of a man and woman who have been sexual partners for an unbroken communion of some years. Like rain and tempest watched through the window of a warm, light room, they remembered wet and wildness out there.

  Even while they were speaking, Ann’s voice, da-la-la-ing a phrase of a jazz song she liked, cut across theirs. In a moment she was in the room again, calling out, “This’ll do it,” and attention to the doll continued unbroken, each impatient of the other’s attempt to get it together.

  Boaz came home that weekend, but as he arrived while the Stilwells were out, on Saturday night, the first they saw of him was on Sunday morning, when he and Ann emerged from the house about eleven o’clock and joined the others on the lawn. They were both still in pyjamas. Ann wore a short gown over the cotton romper arrangement in which she slept, and Boaz’s brown hand, dangling round her neck, stirred now and then in her tousled hair.

  Jessie was lying on her stomach reading the papers and she turned dazedly on to her side, elbow propping up hand and head, at the approach. The lawn sprinkler was circling to provide a fountain in which the three little girls, Elisabeth naked and the other two in their pants, played. A couple whose sole claim to friendship rested on the exchange of such visits had dropped in on the Stilwells to drink some beer. Boaz agreed to have beer for his breakfast, and he and Ann settled themselves on the grass. Boaz was unshaven but looked handsome, squatting like an Arab with the planes of his olive-pale face shaded in by beard; the limits of its growth were clearly defined, like the markings on the face of some deer. As usual, since he was so often the returned traveller, talk took its impetus from him for a while, though he in no sense dominated the conversation but simply shared, in his friendly, serious way, what he had to say. He had lost a camera and given some other things of his a good dunking, getting through a swollen drift, and as he told the story now the mention of the district where this misadventure happened prompted a question from Redvers English, the visitor, about oil prospecting that he’d heard was going on there. Boaz had got mixed up with an oil-prospecting crowd the other day, and had an amusing story to tell about them; this led the talk out of his single stream into the general pool where everyone’s opinions, questions and desultory comments about what would happen to the tribes in the reserve if oil was found, made overlapping rings. Ann did not bother to take part in the conversation; only her laugh rang out now and then: she had pushed up the gown into the elastic legs of the romper and lay rolled over on to her back in the sun in feline laziness. The smooth skin of her knees soon took on a tight shine and the grain of her thigh-flesh came up rosy. She was not pensive, not “quiet”, not, perhaps, content. Nothing was projected from her. Jessie thought: she exists.

  The pitch of the group rose a little with the beer and the hot sun. Olga English had one of those weeping laughs, maddening as the repetitive cry of certain birds; Jessie began to be irritated by her but Tom, though he did not like her very much, was in the sort of mood when one enjoys drinking and talking not particularly witty nonsense rather more with people one does not care much for than with friends who draw more strongly upon one’s personality. They had sent the children for biscuits and cheese, but although the sprinkler was deserted, the children had not come back. Warmed by beer, Tom in passing leant over Jessie with his arm round her and half-whispered, half-showed off, “Are you gloomy this morning, my love …” It did not matter what he said—he knew that increasingly over the last year there had been times when she was not carried along with the mood of the company; he liked to give a sign, any sign, that he was in touch with her. She had merely felt rather impatient for the Englishes to go, but the softness of the gesture suddenly did make her feel sad; she saw out of the corner of her eye—the small movement that betrays the presence of an enemy—a lover’s knot of raised blue vein showing on her left calf. In this full light it was obvious—she bent to examine the skin intently and saw that thin red-blue lines were spreading and branching from the vein, a faint map recording the advance of an invader. Madge and Elisabeth appeared at this moment, their dresses on but unbuttoned and with sashes hanging stringily. “About time, good heavens!” Jessie sprang up briskly. But they did not have the cheese with them, they had forgotten all about the cheese. Madge was crying. She held Elisabeth like a bailiff with his hands on a poacher. “Look what she’s gone and done.”

  “Oh that blasted doll again. No, I can’t, I can’t,” Jessie held it up tragically, while the others laughed, though (since Ann’s eyes were closed) only Tom knew what at.

  “Now the eyes have fallen back into its head.”

  “Give here,” said Boaz. “Don’t worry, Madg
e, we’ll fix it for you,” and Madge went over at once to her new victim.

  “If you knew the struggle we had with that thing the other night; Tom, Ann and I—we were all working on it.”

  Tom’s and Jessie’s recollection of something else met suddenly over the bent heads of Boaz and the child. Ann rose up into the moment, stretching, smiling, yawning, “I’d better put some clothes on.” Moving sluggishly from hip to hip, she was arrested in her trail towards the house by some remark, and paused to stand talking to Olga English.

  “Boaz doesn’t know, anyway,” Tom said. They had returned a number of times since the evening when Jessie first spoke of it to the business of Ann and Gideon Shibalo. They never talked about it for long, nor very fully; what she did was none of their business—not in the trite sense of minding one’s own business, but in the real sense that although she lived in the house they had nothing of the involvement with or concern for her that is the real reason for one human being being another’s keeper.

  “She hasn’t told him.” It was a conclusion; this was an affair on the side (perhaps not even the first?) and not intended to break the marriage.

  “It’ll be all right if only she goes on resisting the temptation to tell him,” said Tom.

  “Quite.”

  Tom felt sleepy after Sunday lunch and was lying on the bed in his clothes. “She takes it all very calmly,” he said, with a slight hesitation.

  Jessie was pushing open all the windows and drawing the curtains closed; she turned her head to him and laughed.