Occasion for Loving Page 17

  She said, “I want you to come to the house. Meet Boaz.”

  They were eating grapes, sitting in the car. He threw a couple into his mouth, ate them slowly, and spat the pips out of the window. She had no idea what he would say. Their relationship was a pure one, without questions or importuning. “If you think he would want to.”

  “He’s nice,” she said. “It seems idiotic. I mean, we always both know people—” She spoke as if the affair had already died and become a friendship; while she was speaking she believed that, from that moment, it really had.

  He did not know if what she said implied that her husband was used to her making love to other men; he felt himself, as he occasionally was, lost in this particular world, like a foreigner who speaks the language perfectly but is sometimes floored by some esoteric colloquialism. He was off-hand: “All right.”

  She said no more about it, though several times she talked of Boaz when they were together, held him off at arm’s length and considered him. She seemed touchy that Gideon Shibalo should appreciate Boaz. The references, the anecdotes were not ones that reflected the personal relationship between Boaz and herself, but showed him, a figure on the horizon, against an impersonal light. Once Gideon was describing an acquaintance who had a special kind of perception: “He’ll see you walk in the door and he’ll know at once you haven’t eaten yet today and are not up to much. Or he’ll catch on from something you let slip without knowing it that you’re about to lose your job. He smells you out and then uses what he’s found out … Not always to do you any actual harm … but to make you feel afraid of yourself …”

  She agreed about the existence of such people and remarked, a footnote in the flitting silence before they turned to something else, “Now someone like Boaz is just the opposite, you know.” She paused. “Just the opposite. He’s always amazed when you point out some weak spot in a person. He’s very self-absorbed, in a way, and he treats everyone as if they have the same standards and so on as he has himself. You can see a mile off that someone’s lying, or a perfect mouse, but he’ll treat them as if important work can be expected of them at any moment. Sometimes it’s just funny, of course, but at other times it’s wonderful. He never exposes people.”

  One afternoon after they had had lunch together at the Lucky Star she began to drive across town in the direction of the Stilwells’ house. “Where’re you going?” “Home,” she said. “Drop me off somewhere?” “Come in for a bit.” She had the faraway look that seemed the nearest she ever got to depression; in the Lucky Star she had sat quietly, smoking, her hand secretly covering his every now and then to exclude him from the distance she kept from the rest of the room. Once at the house, she was cheerful and humorously at ease; how beautiful she looked, clipping across the floor in her high heels, the slim strong tendon to which her ankle narrowed at the back hollowed away on either side. There was no getting away from it, no black girl ever had ankles quite like that.

  He had not given it a thought that the husband might be there, but when, after they had had the inevitable cup of tea and listened to a new record that Tom Stilwell had left in the living-room, she said, “Come up with me to see what Boaz is doing,” he felt no nervousness but a calm amiability to match hers. They went upstairs, talking. She was breathy, hospitable: “Mind your step there. Jessie’s children take a delight in creating hazards on the stairs. Oh, just look at this a minute—this is a wonderful timbila Boaz found, we’re trying to fix it—” They were standing on the landing, looking into a half-unwrapped parcel of sacking and newspapers, when Clem and a grubby friend appeared in one doorway and Boaz came along the passage from the bathroom. “Boaz, this is Gid,” said Ann. “Are you busy or can I bring him in to look at a few things?” Boaz had rigged up a darkroom in the bathroom, and his hands were full of wet prints pegged to a string. “Come in; let me get rid of these …”

  Boaz had the great advantage of being on his own ground; the room, that Gideon had seen once before, briefly, was filled with the authority of work; the bed, the personal possessions and clothes scattered about were no more important than a few human necessities set up in the corner of a laboratory. Boaz pointed out various instruments, drawing attention, with the diffident modesty of a particular pride, to those he knew to be treasures. “This is quite interesting. The only thing I’ve ever seen at all related to it comes from Bangui, what used to be French Equatorial Africa … and this I think may be the only one left of its kind—beautiful, eh? It makes a mewing sound, rather disappointing after you’ve looked at it.” He paused and said half-questioningly, half taking it for granted, “I don’t know whether this sort of stuff means anything to you.” “Ah, it’s all Greek to me,” Gideon reassured him and laughed. “I remember a bit of tissue paper over a comb, at school. The kids hadn’t even begun the penny whistle craze in those days.” “Didn’t you have an old grandmother who sang you an old African song occasionally?” Boaz could not resist a flicker of professional interest. “No, no. I’m afraid not. I was brought up by an aunt, she was great on hymns.” Ann gave her usual performance, calling, “Wait, I can play this,” and determinedly producing a note blown out slowly as the thick bubble of a glass-blower. She drew them together in amusement, watching her. Boaz said, “But seriously, it’s quite amazing, you know. She’s intensely musical. She can sing almost anything. I mean, in African music the melodic patterns differ from area to area, according to the tone pattern of each tribe’s language—but she can sing accurately a song composed in any melodic pattern. And with wind instruments—a shipalapala, kwatha, anything like that—she controls her breath like an experienced trombone player!” They got down to the principles of construction of a group of instruments: Gideon challenged some of their features—“Why that bit of wood there? Seems crazy—why not the other way round?” and Boaz took the harp apart and, surrounded by bits of it, on the floor, demonstrated—“You’re way out. They know what they’re doing—you see, that conducts the vibration from the strings into here—like that. And if you put it anywhere else at all—see? It’s the principle of sympathetic resonation.” He looked up, intent and smiling. There was the atmosphere almost of gaiety that came of a new presence among extraordinary things that were familiar to the Davises. Ann, achieving a perfect balance between the two men, had a weightless freedom; she hummed, touched this and that, made a remark that brought the attention of both of them finely to her, like the eyes of runners breasting the tape—and came not so much as a feather’s breath down on the one side or the other. After perhaps half an hour, the three of them came downstairs, and, finding the Stilwells, joined them for drinks.

  For Ann, all that was necessary would have been over, now; but Gideon hung on in some sort of perversity or fascination, and then it was dinner, and of course he stayed. As the room upstairs had been, another cell of the house was roused to the hum of company. Tom and Jessie not only seemed determined to take Gideon as just another guest who had dropped in—they appeared actually to regard him as one. He and Boaz were at the centre of the talk, all through dinner. Ann knew that Boaz was impressed with him; with Gideon and Boaz both at the table with her, she was expansively charming to everyone.

  “Is it a fossil you’re preserving, or is it something living, that’s what I’m asking,” Gideon said, of Boaz’s studies in music.

  “Both,” said Boaz, with a look that suggested this must be self-evident for two people like themselves. “The instruments will disappear altogether very soon. But the impulse to make music won’t die.”

  “But can the drums and flutes and xylophones provide a tradition for chaps who’re now going to be playing the piano and the trumpet muffled with a tin pot—all right, then, say even the violin or the organ. You come to Schoenberg via Bach and those boys; can an African arrive at the same point straight from the talking drums and the rain-making dance played on an ox-horn covered with python skin and strung with monkey-guts?”

  Jessie and Tom and Ann laughed, but Boaz was excited: “
Now you’re getting to it. Once an African acquires all that the white civilisations have learnt about music, can he make use of a tradition that had not reached the same culmination, and perhaps was reaching in another direction?”

  As usual, Gideon moved the food about his plate without eating it. He leaned back against his chair with a cigarette burning down in his hand and said, “The whites took away the African past; once we accepted the present from them, that was that.”

  “The past is accomplished, living in your bones, you can’t lose it,” Tom said.

  “No, you must lose it. When we accepted the white man’s present, of industrialisation and mechanised living, we took on his future at the same time—I mean, we began to go wherever it is he’s going. And our past has no continuation with this. So it is lost. For all practical purposes it is lost. I don’t know if perhaps a musician or a writer or somebody might be able to make use of it still. And, of course, though you can sign on for somebody else’s future, you can’t share their past; that’s why we haven’t got one.” He seemed to be showing off a little now, but merely to divert. He looked down over the slope of his slouched body like a man who exhibits a stump where an arm or leg should be. “That’s what’s wrong with us.”

  Jessie was suddenly listening, as if she had been absent from the company and had returned, but before she could speak, Tom said “Peoples have survived a break with tradition before,” and Boaz said “What if the break had come from within?”

  “It always comes from there! Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?” Jessie called to Gideon. But he seemed to move a step out of their claims on him every time; he murmured, “Christ came from inside. Yes. I suppose you could say that. I don’t know whether something like that would have happened to us. If we hadn’t signed up.”

  He had never talked with Ann as he was talking that evening. Her impression of his presence came, not direct from himself, but as made by him upon the others. The least self-esteem demanded was a jealous, immediate assumption of the new valuation of him she saw in them. She was goaded to possessive pride in an aspect of the man, and therefore her association with him, she had been innocent of; she could not admit that while they found these things at once she had missed or ignored them.

  She began to see something that it might be “all about”.

  When she sat beside him in the car, now, she was aware of her distinction from the white faces passing in the street. They merged into a white blur, down there. Gideon became a black man to her; the black man that everyone pushed away, and that she, she, put her hand out and touched.

  Twelve

  The willows out in the veld where Ann and Gideon had picnicked a few weeks before were yellowing, but the garden was still dark and heavy. The tide of green had risen and risen with each rain; new growth overlapped old, the grass stood thick and soft. All around and overhead the leaves, layer on layer, shadow on shadow, swag on swag and tier on tier, were holed and lacy with the feasting of insects. Jessie sat reading, in the afternoons, among the remains of the banquet.

  Recently she had begun reading again as she had done when she was seventeen or eighteen and it was possible for a particular book to influence her as the mind of no person she knew in the flesh could. The opening of a window or the snatch of some weird music from the house behind her kept her reminded, on the surface, where awareness of environment is automatically recorded, like a message taken in one’s absence, that Boaz was usually at home when she was. She felt not curiosity, but a shrinking away from what might be going on in him; she wanted to be left alone to no demands but her own. This adventure of Boaz’s wife would work itself out between them like so many others; since she (Jessie) was fond of him, she was slightly ashamed to find how now, once he knew, she felt herself disengaged from friendly involvement. She had been mixed up so many times with friends whose marriages or love affairs went awry because of another man or woman; the situation between Boaz and Ann was the same as the others—except that Gideon Shibalo was black, of course. That was the only difference. It was a difference that she assumed had very little significance for people like themselves—the Stilwells and Davises. It did mean that there was some element of calculable danger in the whole business for Ann, she supposed—making love to Shibalo was breaking the law—as against the incalculable dangers of pain and disruption present in every love affair.

  But Boaz came down sometimes for a breath of air and his casual yet intimate presence, stretched on the grass beside her, or leaning forward in one of the old deck-chairs he had dragged up, brought them to the point when naturalness made it necessary to talk about Ann. Jessie did not ask him what was happening, but felt obliged, out of the only politeness she cared for, to acknowledge the subject of his silences. They were talking of Fuecht’s house at the sea; Jessie said, with the open-eyed assertion that was directed against Tom’s unexplained resistance to the place, “We can’t afford to turn up our noses at a free holiday. As I remember it, it was miles up the beach, which is nice. But it may be more built-up along there now, I don’t know; my stepfather had it let permanently for years, we were never offered it.”

  “You want to go next month, you said?”

  “If Tom definitely makes up his mind he won’t go in July. Are you going to Moçambique?”

  He said, in an ordinary voice, frowning at her, “I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Is she not going to go with you?”

  They looked at each other. “I haven’t asked her.” He added: “It may sound mad.”

  “Oh no.”

  “I don’t want to force her to decide. —Anything.”

  “Yes?” Jessie spoke with her hand over her mouth.

  “I’ve got to wait to see how she feels. I’d expect her to do the same for me, as long as she was interested enough. —I am,” he added.

  “Well, that’s fine. It makes me sick when everybody’s playing. People show off so much in love affairs. You know, Boaz, I sometimes get afraid that everything we think of as love—even sex—is nearly always power instead. You know what I mean? Most of the time people don’t really want each other, they only want not to let go.”

  He smiled. “Well, how are you to know?”

  “Oh I know—you don’t. Certainly not when you’re in it. But so much of your life goes in this business of sex and love. It’s horrible to think that you may find that love wasn’t in it at all. You’ve just been manoeuvring. Like a pile of crocodiles on a mud-bank. Feel the sun and simply climb up on top of one another to find yourself no nearer to it when you get there.”

  He was listening to her with the mixture of wariness and curiosity with which people see through a crack into another’s wilderness. But his whole being was tethered to the thought of Ann, himself and Shibalo, and he felt always the tug on his attention, pulling him back to it. Jessie said, and was ashamed of the obviousness, the lack of real concern, in the suggestion, “You don’t think that she wants you to kick up a hell of a row? Some women want to be beaten.”

  “Ann’s not the sort who gets her kicks out of punishment. She’s a tremendously happy, pleasure-finding person. You know how she is.”

  “I don’t know her at all,” said Jessie. “That’s it.”

  “She can’t bear threats or rows. She knows nothing about the joys of crawling on your stomach and feeling remorse. She hates all that slimy stuff. Oh, you know how she is.”

  Jessie kept smiling and shaking her head.

  After a while he stood up, the movement bringing the grass around his feet alive with minute hoppers that exactly matched its brilliant green. He looked up at the house and at the sky, his long eyes shown by the unconfined light to be green, like black water where the sun strikes deep. The sky gave his face a blind look. He said under it, trying to see, “I ought to go to Moçambique. There’s that grant, you know; it’s practically sure I’m getting it.” She said, “Perhaps you can go a bit later. I don’t know … perhaps you ought to go anyway.”

  “He’s an
interesting chap. Hell of a lot going on there, I felt. He talks a lot and so on, but he’s really alive in secret behind that cover activity.” He drew them back to the evening a week ago.

  “I like him,” Jessie said, meaning that she had admitted this before.

  “Exactly. Not the sort of person you’d choose to play the fool with. Too vulnerable. You’d think twice.”

  He went into the house and left her. His cigarette ceased to smoke in the sappy, succulent grass, but she saw him, his olive tan faded, with so much indoor work, to that smooth oriental pallor, his sallow hands and bare feet showing that hollow beside the tendon of each finger or toe that gives an impression of nervous energy. How bungling this beauty was, his and Ann’s, that had brought them senselessly together and given them the appearance of happiness in each other, both to themselves and onlookers. Take away the running blood, the saliva, the animation of breath, let the beauty harden into its prototypes, and even this would be found something they did not have in common, but that was diverse in the kind of consciousness that shaped it. He was opaque, his expression and posture the Bodhisattva’s outward cast of an inward discipline. She was one of those clay figures made by the Etruscans, grinning even from the gravestone.

  Jessie began to write a letter to Morgan. She had brought a pad and a ball-pen out with her book, but had not used them. She wrote quickly now, tearing off one sheet after another, and looking up from time to time with her mouth parted. A barbet somewhere in the garden went off continuously like a muffled alarm clock. The afternoon was borne away steadily in the sound. She felt it going, left the letter for a moment, and when she looked back at the pages covered with the thinly-inked pattern made by the bad pen, suddenly thought: who is this for? It was one of those incoherent letters that, when you get one, causes you to remark that so-and-so seems to be in a queer state. So-and-so has not been censored by the usual wish to amuse or impress, to give a certain idea of himself.