Occasion for Loving Page 6

  In the end, she took a job that would do until something better turned up—half-day secretary to a company running a private nursing home. The place was only a block or two away from the house, so that she wouldn’t need the car all the time, which was an advantage. Once accepted, she scarcely thought about the job again; there was so much to do at the Agency in the meantime—it did not seem that she would ever get through it all. She brought work home every day and sat at it through the mounting incursions of the afternoon, from the hot peace of after lunch, when everyone else was either out or asleep, to the hour before dinner when everyone had straggled in, the grownups wanting to chat, or to read aloud bits out of the evening paper, the children wanting to be read to, and the servant asking for instructions about food. She was holding out as well as she could against the division and sub-division of her attention, one evening, and when the telephone rang she ignored it; this was the custom at this time of the day, anyway—everyone was home and everyone waited for someone else to answer it. Tom had just gone inside from the verandah to fetch a lamp, and he might have done so; but he appeared with the lamp and put it on the floor, as it didn’t seem dark enough for a light yet after all, and the ringing went on. Presently it stopped, and started again, and Madge was sent to answer it—Clem had abruptly suffered loss of the innocence where such errands are a privilege, and Elisabeth liked to pick up the receiver and listen to the voice inside it, but could never bring herself to reply.

  “It’s for you,” said Madge, in the doorway.

  “Which one?”

  She looked from her mother to her father. Clearly, she did not know.

  “Oh dammit!” Tom drew himself together and got up, going into the house with his arm round the child’s neck. She anxiously watched his feet and measured her steps to his.

  Jessie began all over again to check a long account of royalties from a record company, and when Tom came back before she had come to the end of it, she held him off with a raised hand.

  “Where’s Morgan, Jessie?”

  The hand dropped and she looked up. “Upstairs. In his room, I suppose.”

  But the moment she said it, she knew that she didn’t know where the boy was: in the hesitation that followed, both she and Tom noticed that the radio programme that sent crescendos of crackling applause out across the garden from the upstairs verandah at this time every evening was missing.

  “About somewhere.” She had heard the irregular plak! plak! of the jokari ball as it flung itself back at him—when? This morning—or was it yesterday afternoon? Dismay came over her. She felt almost afraid of Morgan. She did not want to have to ask Tom what was the matter. In three days he will be back at school, she thought.

  “Do you know of a Mrs. Wiley?” Tom said.

  She shook her head, then—“Yes. Must be the mother of that boy Graham.”

  “Mrs. Wiley on the phone. Her husband has just found Morgan and their son at a dance-place in Hillbrow. A place with paid hostesses. Ducktails go.”

  Jessie looked at him. Her plastic pen rolled across the papers and fell to the verandah floor with the clatter of a cheap toy. Slowly she began to laugh, but he did not laugh too, as if she had not convinced him that this was the way to take it.

  “Our Morgan …!” The little girls had stopped playing, and she said at once, “Go and wash your hands for supper. Go on.” Clem and Madge went off but Elisabeth ran into the darkening garden.

  “Where was he last night?”

  “Why do you ask? You know he went to a film. You gave him five bob yourself.”

  “Well, he was at that place again.” He smiled this time, out of nervousness, with her. “Somebody tipped off the Wiley woman, and that’s how her husband caught them today.”

  A blotch of white blundered up the steps. Elisabeth was talking to a stuffed animal dressed in a floral bathing suit and she ignored them. “I say it’s time to wash hands for supper.” “But what time is it?” “The time to wash hands.” “But what is the number of that time?”

  “Blast Morgan,” said Jessie, after the dressing-gown had disappeared round the door. “I wish—” It rose with the curving jet of a fountain within her, breaking up the words, toppling them, carrying them: wish he had never been, never happened; oh how to get past him, over him, round him. “He’ll be back at school in three days. Pity it’s not tomorrow.”

  Tom said, “I didn’t even know he could dance, did you?”

  Her lips trembled and she began to giggle again. “Dance! Dance!”

  While they were talking the lights of a car poked up the driveway and died back as Ann stopped and got out, coming lightly and quickly towards the house and almost past them, without seeing them. She was singing softly and breathily to herself. “You haven’t had supper, have you? I thought I must be terribly late …” They could see her eyes shining and her teeth in the dark. “Did you find my watch in the bathroom, by any chance?” The rhythm of another kind of existence seemed to come from her shape; they felt it, in the dark, like the beating of a bird’s wings or the marvellous breathing of a fish’s gills.

  “Can you believe it? Morgan’s been going to some dance-hall,” Jessie announced at once.

  “Oh, all the kids rock ‘n’ roll. They teach each other at school,” said Ann.

  “No, it’s not that. He’s been going to a place where you pay a tart to dance with you.” Jessie insisted on setting the facts before her; if a stranger had come to the door just then, she would have done the same to him. She was sitting at the rickety table in the dark, drawn up in attention.

  They could just make out that Ann had bent down, and was shaking something out of her shoe. “Good Lord, that’s rather an adventure. I shouldn’t think any of the other boys will be able to cap that.” She laughed, subduedly, straightening, and went on into the house. At the door she turned and added with a polite smile, “Are you worried?”

  Tom said, “Haven’t made up our minds what to be,” and she laughed again.

  He put on the lamp. Jessie’s face was closed to him in a look of complicity, horrifiedly amused. “Let him go back to school. Ignore it.” She spoke with the tone of meting out punishment without regret.

  He shook his head, looking at her.

  “Then for Christ’s sake, what?”

  “If we knew what to say to him,” said Tom.

  “It’ll come,” she said with distaste.

  “From where?”

  “I’d like to see this place.” She wanted to confront him, the boy, the child—there was an empty shape where the unknown identity of her son should have been.

  “Don’t humiliate him.” They would have to fall back on the child-manual precepts, the textbook rules.

  She began to insist on going to fetch him home, but suddenly remembered the thin little neck and the strange big hands—she flinched from the sight of them, exposed in that place. “All right. You’re probably right. Let him come home as if nothing’s happened.”

  The rows of figures on the paper she still sat in front of seemed to relate to nothing; in the short interval since she had looked up from them the whole urgency of the Agency’s affairs had lost life. She was lying in bed half-asleep at eleven o’clock when she heard Morgan come in. A gentle, tingling curiosity lifted her into consciousness, like a girl aware of the presence of a strange man in the next room.

  Morgan, who had always been on the periphery of the life of the house, found himself at its centre. He must have come home with dread in his heart the night before, knowing that the Wiley boy’s parents would have informed on him, but at breakfast he put up his usual show of uncertain good spirits—there was nothing unnatural about his behaviour because he was never natural, but seemed always to be behaving in a way that he timidly and clumsily thought was appropriate. At the same time, this kind of selfconsciousness made him extraordinarily insensitive to the moods of the grown-ups with whom he was making a show of being at ease. He would ask Tom (not out of interest, it was clear, but out of a desi
re to flatter Tom by an interest in his work) questions about some historical point on a morning when Tom had been correcting history papers half the night and was disheartened with the whole business of teaching. When Jessie came home irritated because she had got a parking ticket, he would launch into a long comparative anecdote about an exchange between a traffic officer and a woman that he had overheard in town. When someone said—“Oh Morgan, do let’s have a little quiet now,” he stopped short without rancour, as if the questions or the anecdote interested him as little as they did his listeners. Between his attempts at entertainment, his presence went unnoticed, though he always kept his face mobile like the face of one of those actors in a crowd scene who, you are surprised to see if you happen to glance at them, have gone on acting all the time the audience has been entirely taken up with the principals. He would never have dared to retire into himself, in company.

  Elisabeth would not be parted, that morning, from her newly-acquired, minute school case, and it was constantly in the way among the breakfast things. “We ought to tie it on you somewhere,” Jessie said to her, and Morgan took up the suggestion thoroughly: “You know what you should do, Mum, you should get a cord and hang it round her neck, like those dogs. Those dogs who go in the snow with little barrels of brandy round their necks. No, I know! Get her a satchel, like I used to have. That’s a good idea—then it’ll be on her back. Why don’t you, Mum—” The little girl had forgotten about eating and was smiling proudly round under this attention. “Let her concentrate on getting her breakfast down, Morgan, please.” “All right.” He finished his own quickly, and slipped away from the table.

  In his bedroom, they saw he knew they would come. He had gone to ground quietly, without hope. The radio was on, softly howling; it was not really his own ground—in a few days he would be back at school, and the bed, the portable radio, the socks lying on a chair and the curling pile of science fiction magazines and comics would be gone. Tom’s filing cabinets and boxes of papers remained in possession. Tom went over and switched the radio off, gently, but before he could turn round again, Jessie had spoken: “What makes you go to that place?”

  If only she had started with the expected preamble, given them all a chance! What was needed was an explanation, not the truth. Tom tried to hold her with a look, but she was looking around the little boarded-in verandah as if the scattered marks of the boy’s tenancy were mysteriously eloquent, like smashed glass and overturned chairs left witness to a brawl.

  Morgan was dead still. If they had put a gun against his ribs just then he would not have spoken. And then he picked up some bits of wire that were lying on his bed and began to wind a loose end of insulating tape round them. He looked at his mother and Tom, kindly, helplessly, blindly.

  “Well?” Jessie could not stop staring at him, roving curiously over the little thin neck in the open shirt, the lips closed with nervous lightness over the slightly forward projection of the jaw (he had nice teeth; what a good thing that was), the shabby grey trousers folded over like a dhoti under the circle of belt round his thinness; the raw and tender hands. They were like the hands she sometimes saw on young mechanics at the garage, coarse and sad, not yet hardened to the bruises of heavy metal, and with their pinkness still showing through ingrained grease.

  “Jessie and I didn’t think you were keen on dances and things like that yet, Morgan,” Tom said to him. “If you are, there are clubs and places for chaps of your own age, and girls, of course. I should think you’d enjoy those more.” Poor little bastard! Healthy recreation, they were offering him; who knew what it was he needed? We can offer him only what we’ve got, thought Tom.

  “You don’t have to sneak off to some joint.” Jessie made an effort to be friendly. “You could have invited people here, for that matter, if you’d told me. Now it’s too late—you’re going back to school.”

  He said, as if fascinated by her voice, “Yes, I know. Only two more days.”

  They were talking about someone else. Morgan would never invite croaky-voiced jolly boys and petticoated girls to dance to the gramophone. Neither did he have any share of the teddy-boy’s animal vigour; the reverse side of cosy home respectability acquired in regular instalments. The interview had come to nothing; there was only the relief that it was over.

  Tom said, “He may do the same thing again. I don’t see what’s to stop him. We’ll have to make some plans before he comes home next time.”

  “He’ll have forgotten. You know how children leave things behind them.”

  “Yes,” said Tom, “but he won’t be leaving them behind any more.”

  Jessie was caught up again in the uncomfortable, uncontrollable amusement that had unnerved her the night before. “Tom, Tom, really now, Tom, can you believe that he ever did it, though? Is it real, to you? That little boy? That little pest, with his boring stories?”

  It was over and he would be back at school in less than two days, and she accepted that that was an end to the whole ridiculous, queer business. She felt a cold irritability towards the boy and she did not want to talk to anyone about him, especially not to Tom. It seemed to her that Tom had come particularly badly out of the talk with the child, with his totally unspontaneous “understanding”—into which she had let herself be led, too—and his suggestion that plans should be made for Morgan. Plans—there came to mind at once a picture that had had a special appeal for her as a child. It was in a book of pencil drawings of children, dogs, horses, parents and English nannies that was both exotic and comforting to her, and it showed a young woman lying on her side on the sands, her hand shading her eyes as she gazed fondly at the small boy who rested against her big, soft hip, rising in a curve behind him: “What will he be?—A Maternal Reverie.”

  She had battled to get him into a decent school (you were supposed to be entered when you were born, to get into anywhere really good, but his father had died, she had moved about with him from place to place, and she had not thought it worthwhile to arrange anything until he was almost ready to go). She counted on her mother and Bruno to help with the business of university. She would be unshockable—this she accepted in the abstract, thinking of homosexuality, getting a girl pregnant, running into political trouble, turning Buddhist or Roman Catholic. All this when the time came. But the time was far off; she herself was still in the season of loving and breeding, she had three babies hardly out of napkins, she was filling ever-open mouths … what would she be, that was the question that possessed her. She was kicking up her own dust.

  Morgan was down there somewhere in that cosmic whirl, a particle flying round her. When it settled—ah, when it settled, the atoms would be combined in some other pattern, not her own.

  She did not think of Morgan, who was going back to school anyway, but his appearance as a visitation in the eerie grown-up world was like a dream that, not remembered, drains the taste and colour out of the day that follows. Everything was as it was in her daily life, and yet for her it was not the same; she continued mechanically.

  As she left the Agency office one afternoon she telephoned the house and left a message with the servant that she was working late and probably wouldn’t be home for dinner. She drove slowly through the surge of home-going traffic to Hillbrow and went and sat in a coffee-bar for a long time. It was a big place, that had been decorated with bad abstract murals and African masks and lights shining through the woven strainers that Africans use for maize beer, but it made functional noises that gave it, after all, a certain kinship with the comforting qualities of a kitchen. A stream of bright orange juice constantly rose and streamed hissing down the inner walls of a glass machine, nearly as good as the sound of a bubbling kettle; the espresso dispenser did its work with a hoarse, sizzling chuff, almost like the noise a roast makes when it is being basted with hot fat. The place was empty, and these things were companionable. Then people began to come in. The girls waited with the look of musing world-weariness that she remembered so well assuming herself when she was waiting
with wild excitement for some man. The older men, with money and aplomb, read the fresh pages of the evening paper. The young men sprawled back, watching the door, or leaned, tense and pensive, chin on arms, over the table. The immigrants came in: German Jews of the Thirties, doctors of this and that, in shabby raincoats; young Italians of the Fifties, the poverty-civilisation-stunted ones—little men-dolls with lifts on pointed shoes—bold, handsome ones with curly hair, rolling their thighs apart to show off the fine curve of their sex in tight trousers.

  Jessie began to pretend that she was waiting for someone, too. Only this was a waiting without anguish, without the possibility of being let down, without a trace of the worst risk of all—that the meeting would go wrong for no reason at all. When the place began to fill up she left with a nice sense of timing. She walked round the shops for an hour, looking with interest at everything, from the rakes and plastic buckets in the hardware shop, and the lilac and silver wigs in the hairdresser’s, to the patterns of turkey, duck and chicken corpses laid out at the kosher delicatessen, and the perpetual festival, with its scent of trampled fruit and wilting flowers, of the Indian greengrocer’s, banked with purple of aubergine and scarlet of tomato, feathered with carrot and curly lettuce, and glowing with the light showing through the bottles of bright cold drinks on the top shelves. It got dark and she bought herself another cup of coffee. But this time she drank it off and went back to the street at once. She did not know where the place was, but, passing in the car at some time, she must have seen the name up, and now she walked to it with hardly more than a moment’s hesitation at each block’s end.

  There was a flight of concrete stairs set in a narrow passage off the street. As she went up she thought, with the criticism of one generation for another, how what she had sought had usually to be found in cellars.

  A woman her own age sat in a booth like the one from which tickets are sold at the cinema. “Yes dear?”

  The manner was the shop assistant’s one: now, that looks beautiful on you … The woman, by the adornments she used to disguise them, presented Jessie with a candid admittance of signs she sometimes surprised on her own face. The hair was gaily tinted, confirming as an enduring reality the few white hairs that sometimes appeared, sometimes were not to be seen. A thick coating of make-up defined as final, in two long cracks, the crease running from nose to chin on each side that came out at night, when preparations were being made for bed. The face was realistic, resigned and tough in its assumption of paint and curl; an urban, post-industrial-revolution version of the peasant woman’s reliance on the conventions of the various forms of dress and deportment to see her through girlhood, matronhood and widowhood.