Occasion for Loving Page 23

  The comfortable distance between herself and them closed; at once they were drawn tight together, with a jerk. Ann’s head rolled wearily to her shoulder where she stood, then, for a second, she and he looked at each other in the way of people who share some experience—something ugly, privileged, survived—that will never come out in the telling. He would not speak, he lit a cigarette as if what there was existed only when he looked at her. “Where we were coming from—?” she laughed encouragement to herself, awkwardly. “Where we were coming from. Oh well that’s another thing. —Look, I’ve got to lie down now.”

  Jessie went back to the beach to fetch the children. All the way down the path and over the sand she said to herself the things she should have said, wanted to say. She had lived so calmly for the past few weeks that her sulky outrage affected her like a strong emotion. She was hotly disgusted at the namby-pamby way she had received the two of them, just as naturally as if they had been neighbours dropping in for a cup of tea. A glass of cold milk! Why hadn’t she said at once, right away, at the car, what are you doing here? What have you come here for, dragging in the whole show, the witnesses and the events, the spies and the distractors?

  Her solitary stake of quiet personal belongings lay on the sand abandoned. The clouds that underhung the sky had blown away in a north wind and the sea was dyed hard blue by a clear sky. She felt as if she had left the place already. She found the children and they trailed up to the house in the mesmerised glitter of midday, to a monologue kept up by Elisabeth.

  Jessie knew how, when you were alone in the house and the children came up the path that gradually drew them level with the house, their voices flew in before them. She thought of the two sitting in possession there, and turned away inwardly, stubbornly set against the moment when again she would walk in with some normal, casual remark. Her feet slowed like a child’s in dread; it was important to her to delay confronting them again, even by the meaningless little time so gained. But the voices must have flown in unheard. The curtains of the room she had indicated to Ann were pulled and neither of them was to be seen. Jessie felt ridiculously relieved, as if they really were not there. She ate her lunch of fruit and cheese in the midday dream, served by silent Jason in his clean red-check shirt, not answering the chatter of the children.

  Afterwards she sat on the verandah. She smoked and rested her eyes on the horizon of sea. The sun was behind the house in the afternoons and the shadow that fell before it was deep, the brightness beyond it searching. The curtains bellying convex then concave on the windows that gave on to the far end of the verandah remained closed. She thought of him, going over him slowly and repeatedly, as if she were describing him. A black man sitting in the car, with the small ears they have and the tiny whorls of felted black hair. (“Wool”: but where was it like the soft, oily, or silky washed fleece of sheep?) A black man like the thousands, the kaffir and picannin and native and nig of her childhood, the “African” of her adult life and friendships; the man; the lover. He was these. And none of them. Shibalo. When she saw his back, in the car, he was for a steady moment all the black men that had been around her through her life, familiar in the way of people not known as individuals. She had known him in this way a long, long time; the other way hardly at all, by comparison. Did he pick his nose as some of the other Africans she had been friendly with did, out of nervous habit, while he argued? These were things one got to know, as well as the quality of the mind, when one began to enter into individual relationships with people. Frenchmen and Germans cleaned their teeth with slivers of wood while you were eating. What did she do, when she was alone or in the other aloneness of intimacy, that offended against that ideal of a creature living but not decaying that is kept up in public? Tom pared his toe-nails and let the cuttings from the clippers fly about the bedroom, so that she sometimes found a piece of sharp, yellowish rind in the bed or fallen into an open drawer. She felt some revulsion always but it passed because she was in love with him sexually; his flesh was alive for her: therefore he was dying continually. Perhaps you can accept the facts of renewal through decay only where there is love of the flesh.

  She was waiting for the moment when the man appeared from the sleep and silence behind the curtains. She had the feeling, half-mean, half-powerful, of a person of whom something is going to be asked. What did he expect of her, Gideon Shibalo? You had always to do things for them because they were powerless to do anything for you. But did this mean that there was no limit to it, no private demarcation that anyone might be allowed to make before another? Because he has no life here among us, must I give him mine?—thinking that this was wild exaggeration, that what was in question, what she was jealously disgruntled about, was an intrusion on her holiday. If he does not know where to take his girl, is that my affair, too? Her almost superstitious withdrawal from the idea of the Davises coming to live with her nearly a year ago had come back in a sweep of confirmation since this morning, with Gideon Shibalo confused unnoticeably with Boaz. The girl, too; what had she to do with this girl she’d kept meeting about the house all year, always with the smile on her face that you get from the stranger who bumps into you on a pavement? Yes, what? She accused belligerently. “A glass of milk”. Did I exist for her before the moment when she asked me that? Does my existence begin when she is forced to walk in on it, and cease when she walks out? Jessie went over the girl sharply, noticing like a jealous woman that she had carried off the arrival, but only just; there were school-girlish touches. She had made an idiot of herself; or very nearly. No doubt the intention was aplomb. Well, it certainly hadn’t been that. She had scraped through, making this mad—no, preposterous entrance just plausible. Just plausible enough to stop my mouth, she thought; and a different version of the meeting on the beach went through her mind, wide open, breaking the liaison between them and her even before the first meaningless convention of greeting could be used to ratify it. Like all lovers whose affair presents difficulties, involves others, and attracts attention, they’d become vain—distressed, maybe, but a bit proud of themselves at the same time, feeling nevertheless that there was something attractive in the idea of being associated with them. In with them; she recoiled from the idea. To take its place, rationalisations began to occupy her seethingly. They’ll have to go because of Jason, she thought. I can’t even speak to Jason in his own language. How can you expect a simple chap like that to understand? He stands aside and bows “Nkosikaz’” to every white bitch who pushes him off the road with her car. A chap like Jason has nothing but his peace of mind. You can’t take it away and leave him dangling; because he hasn’t got politics yet, and you can’t free the private man in him before the political man … A fat lot she cares about people like that. In a whole year, has she ever really said anything, except “It was marvellous fun” or “Let’s do this” or “So-and-so’s got a marvellous idea, we’re going to …”

  Gideon appeared in the doorway that led from the dining-room to the verandah. It was nearly six o’clock. He tugged at his ear and shuddered wearily. Without speaking (she must still be asleep inside) he came over and squatted on the steps. He did not seem to see the sea but deflected the course of the ants on the steps with his shoe and gazed with abstracted attention round the verandah roof, as if he had some professional interest in the construction or the moths and praying mantises clinging there.

  “You slept five hours.” Confronted with him, Jessie was relieved, now that the moment was here, of the difficulty of it.

  He smiled, not at her. “Good God. I was very, very tired.”

  “The brandy’s where you left it, in the living-room. Bring the gin—in the cupboard, there.” She got up and went into the kitchen for soda and ice. The floor had been newly polished with thick red polish that smeared off like lipstick; there was a strong smell of fly-repellent. There was something of the hospital matron in Jason’s merciless insistence on the cruder and more uncomfortable aspects of cleanliness. The lawn-mower was chattering between the back of t
he house and the track.

  Gideon poured them each a drink, and, settling down in the chair where she had sat all afternoon, she said to him, “Where are you going?”

  “Oh.” He had his glass in his hand but he put it down again between his feet, where he squatted. “That’s just it.” In a moment he picked up the glass and drank it off, as if he were alone in a drinking-place. “We were not too sure. Then yesterday we found ourselves somewhere around here” (how far does that cover, Jessie wondered) “and Ann had the bright idea of looking you up.”

  “Harewood Road isn’t exactly somewhere around here,” she said. It was the address of the house in town.

  He gave his chuckle. She noticed again his way of talking to himself rather than to you. “I’m well aware of that,” he said. Asking for an explanation was so out of character for her; he appeared to save her the embarrassment of the attempt by ignoring it.

  She said quite gently, “I don’t know why you came to me, you know,” and for the first time he looked through the offhand impersonality of his manner and was about to speak when Elisabeth ran round from the garden and stopped, at the sight of a visitor, to sidle instead of tear up the steps. She knew Gideon Shibalo from home, of course, though she had forgotten that at lunch-time her mother had said that Ann was in the house, and another friend, the man who drew their pictures. He said, “Hullo, it’s Madge, eh?” and she gave him a routine smile for grown-ups as if he were right. She felt her mother’s eyes on her in a way that she was still a bit small to interpret; Madge or Clem would have understood that their presence was in some way restrictive to the grown-ups at that moment. Her mother said in a voice specially for her, surprised, enthusiastic: “Where you been?”

  “Mowering with Jason.”

  “And the girls?”

  “Gone to find lucky-beans on the road.”

  “It’s time for your bath, love.”

  “Awwwrh … let me wait till they come, I want to bath with them …” and as she saw on her mother’s face softening and then capitulation, her tone of growling complaint changed swiftly, within the sentence, to cheerful sweetness.

  “I’ll go back and do a bit more, shall I?”

  Madge and Clem came noisily through the house. “Shh, someone’s sleeping,” said Jessie, but they ignored her, and the visitor too, being old enough to find it very difficult to remember to greet guests, and irresistible to imitate them crudely, and giggle, once safe in bedroom or bathroom, at any real or fancied peculiarities they might have. “We’ve found hundreds. There’s another big tree full we found, further up than yesterday. We went miles,” Clem boasted ecstatically to Elisabeth. Elisabeth was impressed and greedy. “—No wait, not those, that one I want for myself.” Clem held out of her reach one of the black pods that had been emptied from her skirt on to the verandah. “Here, I don’t want them—” said Madge, suddenly satiated. She dumped her whole gleaning on Elisabeth and began examining the marks left in her hot palm by a handful of loose beans. The hard little red beads with their black eyes rolled all over the verandah. Gideon said to one of these unidentified pretty female children, “You should make a necklace out of them. You get a sharp needle, and you make a hole through each one …” “Oh yes, I know,” said Madge, charmed at once by the attention. “You can buy them in the street in Johannesburg. You see African women selling them. And you can use them for eyes for things; Elisabeth’s got a monkey like that.”

  Jessie was occupied for the next hour with seeing that the children got bathed and preparing dinner. Jason pared the comforting cabochon of each potato down to many deeply-cut facets and left them soaking in cold water; he also cut green beans into shreds and steeped them. Then he waited for her to come and do what she would with these materials, being very helpful in the most unobtrusive yet not self-effacing manner. He understood the names of common objects that they worked with and the verbs for certain tasks.

  She saw him through the V made by the double poles of the pawpaw tree outside the kitchen window, toe-ing up the slope at a run with the lawn mower, and she called to him. He mowed always either in blue overalls or, as now, naked to the waist, in his usual shorts; but whichever the outfit, he had the look of one of those young men in training for some athletic event who loped around the city streets at home on summer evenings—the look of listening to some smoothly-running inner mechanism. While she trimmed meat she heard him draw water from the tap outside and in a few minutes he appeared, freshly washed, and in a clean, flapping shirt. They had got on all right without words, and now she felt—part of the intrusion she saw in everything—that the fact that she now needed to be able to speak more than naming the objects she touched was the end of something, even of another kind of privacy.

  “Visitors,” she said to him. She held up her hand, spreading five fingers. “Visitors. Five at the table. All right?” “Five,” he confirmed shyly, in English.

  She went between the kitchen and the rest of the house, coming to linger outside for a few minutes now and then. The children were there, after the bath, so she and Gideon were in a truce of their chatter. The city ritual of evening drinks had fallen away for her while she was alone. (Sometimes she chilled a two-and-sixpenny bottle of white wine and drank some of it at lunch—the rest did for cooking fish.) He filled her glass when he replenished his own and she took it up again each time without remark. It was the hour of the day she never missed; half-involved, along with him, in the children’s game, she saw the surface of the water gliding shining over depths which were already dark, so that the sea was not a colour but a gaze, intense, gathering, glancing. A long bluff of beige cloud turned smoky mauve, like a distant prospect of land. From the point where the coastline took a backward bend and disappeared behind the firs that marked the community, the coloured sky began to thin and blur as if she saw it through breath upon a window-pane. Vaporisation perfectly dissolved this world, eddying in always from the right. When it could no longer be seen you knew that it had reached the dune; the house; the verandah. It became palpable though not visible in a darkness without distance that made sea and sky and the arm’s length of blackness all one. She liked to put her hand out into it, like water (the children had turned on the light); she said to Gideon, a little stimulated by the gin, and belligerently friendly now, “I notice you never once looked.”

  “What at—?” He had just triumphantly broken his inquisitor (Clem) in the game where you must not answer “Yes” or “No” to any question. “Now you, Mummy, your turn,” Clem hammered. “He’s the winner so he must be the one to ask. Come on, Mummy!”

  The presence of a man rounded out the group into a family; other evenings she had not been expected to join in the little girls’ games: they had almost forgotten about her, sitting quietly in the dark near them. Once or twice she and Shibalo got quite caught up in the nonsense, and argued animatedly about some point of fairness. The children wavered between admiration for his skill at beating them and despair at losing. Elisabeth became what was known among them as “cheeky”, flinging herself at Gideon, hiding her face so that no one knew whether she was crying or laughing. “Boy, if my brother was here he would’ve beat you,” Clemence jeered wamingly. “Just see if my brother Morgan was here.” Jessie looked at the little girls with a break of curiosity; she had not thought that Morgan had his place in their scheme of things.

  They had dinner without Ann—“Should we call her?” Jessie deferred to Shibalo, and he said calmly, “I think the longer she sleeps …” They had drunk enough to meet as the two people they were, independent of the situation that presented each to the other in a particular light. They were amused by the children and linked in being adult. Jason brought in the food and for a moment seemed bewildered, not knowing where to put it down. As he served Gideon he mumbled some greeting and Gideon answered him absently. Jessie had the sensation of brushing over something with only a twinge of awareness. When the children had gone to bed—or at least were out of the way in their room for the night—th
ey continued to sit on at the table. There was the air of the confidential imposed upon them, like people lingering in a deserted café.

  “Yes, you come here for a bit, you bring your children, you go back to town again—” He spoke as someone does who takes it into his head to contemplate for a moment, without interest, out of his own deadlock, a kind of life that he has not taken notice of before.

  “This is the first time I’ve been here since I was a child,” she said. “It isn’t my house. I haven’t got houses here and there.”

  “I had an idea …” he excused himself in careless pretence.

  “You had the wrong idea,” she said, matching up to him with a grin.

  He gave a deprecating, culpable sniff of a laugh. “I’ve had a lot of ideas—” Her existence was dropped aside, he returned to reality, and paused after the first phrase, searching for accuracy. He weighed his hands in slow jerks in the air, he was looking for the right shape of gesture, and as he brought them up to either temple they became, while he talked, first blinkers, and then curved into a frame: “—You get it set, marking it off for yourself from the rest that’s going on. But that’s not real, there’s no place where things really are contained at right angles, a tree doesn’t stop at a line drawn down the middle. You land up miles—miles outside. Where you think isn’t where you act. When you get going, get moving, begin to push things around, smash things up, it’s not there.”