Occasion for Loving Page 13

  “D’you think she sleeps with the two of them?” He was diffidently curious, with a touch of male fear of the female.

  “She must. —I should think so, at the beginning, at any rate. The one may have become awfully familiar—you know—it may not seem like the same thing, perfectly harmless. —You never liked her much, did you?” she said, taking up the tone of curiosity.

  “I don’t know. I was pleased that he was so thrilled with her—”

  As he was dropping heavily asleep, Jessie’s voice woke him: “There was something wonderful about her today, though.” The quiet, ordinary voice startled him convulsively and his hand as it jerked out came into contact with the bony yet padded eminence of Jessie’s pelvis. In the dark behind his eyelids it was at once a skull turned up by a boot, and a grassy bank.

  They went to a party, in the week that followed, with Ann. It was one of those shapeless parties that people give to introduce foreign visitors to a succession of faces they will never see again. Tom got trapped in a corner with a bore who always lay in wait for him at such parties, and Jessie drifted ruthlessly from group to group, finding herself talking to people whose identity she ought to have known, since they appeared to know her. The only liveliness came from the small company where Ann was. She herself held the same glass of gin and tonic the whole evening, but her presence roused an appetite for pleasure in the others around her, so that there was constant traffic between their corner and the bar. Laughter, raised voices and general animation surrounded her yet appeared to emanate from her; she was not looking her best that night, her hair was in need of a shampoo and the dress she wore was not a really good colour, but she had, Jessie recognised, the attraction for men of a woman who is excited by some private amorous involvement. It was a state both helpless and powerful. The attention was not something one set out for; but the power! The power came from the brief time of balance between two men, the extraordinary moment before guilt, shame or regret set in, when one gave to and took from each of them an identical pleasure. Jessie remembered with something of a shudder the discovery that one could make love to one man one night, and another the next: the taboo that had lived in one’s mind as a hoop of fire—and simply fell apart, as one jumped, a thing of tissue paper.

  Tom was coming home one afternoon when he saw Ann’s car draw up outside the gate, Ann get out, and a man with a beard, whom he recognised as Gideon Shibalo, drive off again. When she caught up with him along the path, he said, “What’s happened to your car?” She laughed, gave him a look of surprise that might have been a rebuke. “I’ve lent it to Gid Shibalo.” The initiative seemed to have changed hands swiftly, so he said, “What is he doing these days?” They went up the steps together. “Teaching.” She smiled at him as he pushed open the door for her to enter; her hair was wet on the ends, she must have been swimming, and the powder had rubbed off her face on the cheek-bones and nose as the bloom rubs off the round prominences of a fruit. She never had the dazed look that, paradoxically, clouds the face of someone who has been doing intellectual work, she never carried the dull smell of smoky rooms, the staleness of ink, papers or cooking. She did not bring an ether of cold perfume, either. He felt it almost as an insult that he was unmoved by her living beauty. He went upstairs and said to Jessie: “So he’s driving around in Boaz’s car, now.”

  “Oh, several times lately.” She answered with the impatience of someone who has something else to say.

  “Didn’t he have a long-standing affair with that woman Callie Stow?”

  “Mmm. A few others, too.”

  Tom felt vaguely reassured; the thought of Boaz, whose name gripped his mind in unease, slackened and let go.

  “My mother says the tenants are definitely going to be out by the end of May,” Jessie said, beginning to put papers and photographs steadily back into her dressing-table drawer, so that she could ignore any reaction he might be showing. She was talking about Fuecht’s house.

  He was careful what he said. “But what’s it like? I mean have you any idea whether there’s enough furniture and so on …?” and while they talked Ann’s heels went lightly, loudly about the old wooden floors, and clattered away from them.

  Although Morgan had gone straight from school to a farm—Tom had arranged for him to join the three sons of the professor of botany—the little girls were at home for ten days at Easter and Jessie felt obliged to come home to lunch with them every day. It was not so much that they needed her; the reprieve of responsibility for Morgan usually produced some compensatory piece of dutifulness towards the other children. The second day she found Gideon Shibalo sitting in the garden. The angle of the two chairs (they were set slightly awry, as if their original intimacy had been put out by the restless movement of occupants in tense discussion), the remains of some clumsy sandwiches, the torn lace of beer-foam dirtying a glass, the litter of cigarette stubs—all these conveyed to her a sudden hope of signs of crisis. But when she came down into the deep shade where they might have isolated themselves in a deadlock of reckoning, she was at once aware that her high pitch was wrong: there was nothing to meet it. Gideon greeted her and belched, raising his eyebrows at himself. He had the slightly out-of-place look that she noticed Africans sometimes had in a garden. Ann had kicked off her shoes and sat pinching up grass blades between her toes. The children were playing house not ten yards away, in the curtains of the pepper trees.

  “Was there anything to eat?” Jessie asked, falling back on hospitality. Ann assured her that it was all right, they had found something. An air of normality, of commonplace almost, prevailed between the three of them; Jessie felt that she ought to throw it off, but she was hampered by what now seemed to her the impossible code of personal freedom by which they lived. How could she suggest to Ann that she did not want Gideon Shibalo there? Why should she not want him to come? Was Ann in the house as an appendage of Boaz? If—and it was unthinkable, with the concept of individual dignity that the Stilwells held, that it should be otherwise—she was nothing less than herself, then that selfhood was entitled to determine its own actions, and they should be seen as such, and not at the angle at which they lay across Boaz’s being. Why choose Boaz, and not her? Oh it was all right to choose him, for oneself—but one could not put a finger out to flick her direction to suit his. Jessie had a horror of the attempt by a third person to deflect the life of one to serve another; without God, the unquestionable existence of this horror beyond the strength of a moral sense was a scrap of torn paper from the difficult documentation that might put together his existence. Any influence directed by consideration of Boaz’s life should come only out of a private covenant—and, to Jessie, this did not mean marriage—between Ann and Boaz.

  Yet she was resentful in some constant, concealed part of herself at Shibalo’s presence, as at the awareness that he was at the other end of telephone calls, and the regular sight of him driving the car—“Boaz’s car” as she and Tom referred to it lately, although Boaz had bought it for Ann. She was resentful and yet she sat and talked with them amiably, because she liked him. He treated her in a good-humoured, dry way, certain they would get on. Ann again did not talk much, though at least her air was animated. When she did say something, it was invariably a corroboration of, or corollary to, what Shibalo was saying: “He really did. You should have seen the faces of the others.” “—And then that was when you met him alone and said to him …”

  “Look at your children,” Shibalo said at one point, pulling out a sheet of cardboard from under his chair. It was a sketch of active angles half-recognisable as legs and arms.

  “Very smart.” He must have been there the whole morning, then.

  He took it without rancour. “I’ll come and do one for you one day. I’m pretty hot on drawing kids these days.”

  “Like circus dwarfs,” said Ann, with the intimacy of a repeated bait.

  Jessie was conscious of being drawn into their ambiance as a privilege which she had not consented to accept. Once she had been
let in on them, they could not let her go without the temptation to make her party to themselves in some way; she was the outsider who stumbles upon the secret and is offered, as the price, the excitement of sharing it.

  There is a magnetic field in the polarity of two people who are conducting a reckless love affair; the insolence, emotional anarchy, uncalculatedness have the gratuitous attraction of exploding fireworks even for those who regard the whole thing as a bit ridiculous. Something of the showy flare caught Jessie, and, in a mood that had risen to sharp banter and some laughter, she went off with the two of them to take up Shibalo’s old casual invitation, given at the Lucky Star that day, that she might come and see what his new work was like.

  Ann was gay, in the car, and leant forward with her elbows on the back of the front seat so that she could chatter to the two in front. Gideon was driving. For the first time since she had come to live in the house, Ann treated Jessie as her equal: equal of the freedom of her youth, her lack of conditioning responsibilities, her unreflective responses that made her flat “I love that”, “I hate this” an edict.

  “Stop at the corner, Gid.”

  “What for?”

  “That shop has nuts. I’m dying for some walnuts.”

  She dashed out of the car and back again with the supreme and arrogant self-consciousness of someone who feels she may be mentioned in her absence. Jessie saw her go straight to the counter to be served before others who were there before her, taking no account of them. She paused at the car window, on Gideon’s side, before she got in again. “Have one”—her face was beseeching, a big smile with the corners of the lips tensely pressed down, her forehead flushed like one of the children’s before they began to cry.

  The flat that they went to was like many of those in which Jessie had lived. She looked at the draughty entrance with its list of occupants, under glass, its trough of pale plants, its one maroon and two yellow walls, and gave a grudging smile. The urban education: if someone managed to get out of the townships it would be to a place like this.

  “How d’you find it, working here?” she asked.

  “It’s just like having my own place,” he said, giving her the freedom of it grandly. “Nobody’s there all day and I can do just what I like. I’ll meet you up top—” He took the back staircase instead of the lift because he had to take care not to attract the attention of the caretaker; she must not suspect that her tenants were allowing a black man to use their flat. When the two women got to the flat door, he was already there, inside. “Come right in, just step over the mess”—he kicked away a parcel from the dry cleaner’s and a cardboard honeycomb of empty bottles. He pulled open the curtains in the living-room, picked up some letters, put a noisy Greek record on the gramophone, talking all the time with the relaxed busyness of someone who has just come home. Ann ripped the paper bandage off a magazine that lay among the letters and began to look through it. The purpose of coming there seemed to be forgotten. Jessie, kept standing by the presence all round her of objects meaningful to the lives of people she had never met, began to wander curiously around the room, touching this, glancing at that. She put her hand out to turn canvases without asking permission, for she had been asked twice to come and look at them. The third one was upside down; she righted it. It was a nude, Ann, flung down alive on the canvas as if on a rug. She turned another and another. They were all Ann, only in several she was black.

  Gideon Shibalo came up beside her, professionally. “It’s the subject that takes your breath away, ay?” He laughed. “It’s not my new technique.” He began to put up for her, one by one, without comment, charcoal drawings and oils of children, friezes and splashes of children, old with the life of the street.

  Nine

  Gideon Shibalo sometimes had the use of a car, and sometimes had not. There were various complex arrangements, from time to time, with friends or relations. When he said, “I’ve got my car round the corner”, it could mean his own old black Studebaker that he had sold to his brother-in-law two or three years ago, or a Citroën that he was only keeping on the road until he could find a buyer on behalf of the owner—a friend who had gone to Nigeria—or even the little shaky “second car” of some white friends who didn’t need it over a weekend. At one time he had had Callie Stow’s car practically permanently; a tiny beige Austin with a feather duster on the back window-ledge, and a yellow duster, street-map and snake-bite outfit in the glove box. When he did not have a car he went back to the bus queues and the trains at which the people hurled themselves in the echoing caverns of the city station or the open veld sidings of the townships, marked by a single light that was still burning at dawn.

  The black car was sold when he was going to take up his scholarship, that time; his sister’s husband had given him a hundred pounds down and hadn’t paid off much more in the three years since then. The hundred pounds had gone towards the air ticket to Rome. He had got the whole fare back, of course, but he hadn’t kept it; some of it had gone into politics, but most went during the months when he hadn’t worked, and drank and gave it away. He was teaching now and he could have bought some sort of a car again, but he did not think of it; it did not irk him to depend upon the chance offers of others, in fact he took them all for granted in the manner of a man who is fobbed off with an abundance of things he does not want.

  For the past two years—longer; since the scholarship—he had been made free of a section of the white world, and had lived as much there as among the people in whose midst he was born. He did not have the obvious freedoms of the street and public places, of course, but was a frequenter of those private worlds where the rules of the street, the pronouncements of public sentiment, are disembodied voices shouting out of a megaphone—here, between four walls, the rules are quite different, and the sentiments diverse. He had never sat in school beside white children, or in a bus among white men and women, or shared with them any of the other commonplaces of life; he simply found himself taken right into their most personal lives, where all decisions are upon personal responsibility, and even punishment is self-meted. The first time he slept in a white man’s house was after a party, in the studio of a white painter who had liked his work and wanted to get to know him; there was a noisy quarrel, sometime towards morning, between the man and his wife, and the wife had rushed into the room and dumped a sleeping baby boy out of the way on Shibalo’s couch.

  During the months when he was trying to get a passport he saw a great deal of the liberal and political whites who took up his case and introduced him to the moral twilight zone of influence; from a people without power, he had not known that even among those who made and approved the laws that prevented a man like himself from going where he pleased, there were men who might have been able to help him, not out of a desire to do so, but in response to pressure on some tender spot in their own armour of power-survival. You touched the right secret place and the spring flew open somewhere else: it hadn’t worked, as it happened, for him, but there were others for whom it had.

  Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart. It was always easier to be drunk than sober, to exchange a confession than have a chat; even, he found, with amusement rather than surprise, to have a love affair than a friendship. He had found easy and mutual attraction between himself and several of the women. The affairs were short-lived, and, like dreams, never emerged into the light of day. This was not to say that they were nothing but sexual encounters—these were always far more than that, for even the most ordinary of sexual encounters was also the reaching out of two mysteries—but that they carried over nothing into the world of streets and public places. Nothing, nothing; if the two met in the street next day it was as if they had not met.

  Callie Stow was something else again. The very first time he remembered seeing her face was in the confusion of that stage at a party when faces, furniture, objects began to present shifting levels for which his ey
es could not make a sufficiently quick change of focus. As if he were on a trampoline, people now rose, now fell before him. He had seen her quite often before, but it was only when she became part of the onset of nightmare that he remembered her. She was a Scotswoman with a Scandinavian mother, and in her soft voice with a slight Glasgow accent she was talking to him as if he were perfectly sober. She told him that he had made a discovery, that was all, a discovery that would have had to come to him sometime, anyway. “There’s no time to go after what you want for yourself, you’ve got to be one of the crowd if you want your life to have any meaning to you,” she said. She had short, very clean hair that might have been blonde or already white, and the fine fair skin that those sort of Englishwomen have (he never did understand that Scots and English were not the same thing). She could have been any age; his grandmother, for all he knew; an Englishwoman with a skin like that, and blue eyes and no lipstick, might turn out to be anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. (Some sort of flowered dress, and a string of small pearls.) He thought about the matter-of-fact way she had spoken of the wall that reared up before him, although he was hazy about what she had said. When he met her again in someone else’s house less than a week later, he at once asked, “What was it about finding something out?”

  She said precisely, “I said that you’d have had to discover sometime that you can’t do anything for yourself, and perhaps now was the time—that’s all.”

  He gave his chuckle, and said sourly, “Thank you very much, but I don’t feel particularly philosophical about not being able to do anything for myself. Whether it’s the time or not.”

  “No one would suggest you should,” she said. “It just seems to me that now you’ve had clearly shown to you that the only thing that means anything if you’re an African is politics. You’ve made the only choice. You don’t need philosophy; you’ve got necessity.”