Occasion for Loving Page 9

  The situation—comfortably chronic and fortunately far away—was doubly foreign to Tom, first because he himself was fond of his old father (a retired doctor who gardened or smoked a pipe on the verandah while he gazed peacefully at the result of his labours) and secondly because there was something foreign, in the national sense, about it. As Bruno Fuecht had grown older and more difficult he seemed to have become more and more markedly a stranger in South Africa; his thirty or forty years as a chemist on the South African mines were brushed away and his foreign identity—a Swiss German, a man of Europe—reasserted itself. Yes, Fuecht was unmistakeably foreign, and the emotions of the situation he created about himself were foreign—the theatrical behaviour, the air of aged defiance, the melodrama, for example, of this sudden arrival in Johannesburg. Last week, a letter from Mrs. Fuecht saying that he had gone into a nursing home for observation, this week he’s off to Switzerland. What was the sense in hitting out like this, once you were old?

  Tom approached the Queen’s Hotel with a set mood of almost professional patience—like a paid mourner at a funeral—that did not touch himself. The Monday night streets of the city gaped; there were only a few black men, looking long and steadily into the windows of the outfitters’. The Queen’s had the cold sour smell of a drinking hotel—it was not a place where people went to dine or to live. Two or three tables in the bar lounge held up the elbows of men in striped blazers—perhaps some visiting bowlers’ team—and an elderly tart was arguing in drunken dead seriousness between two men, in a dingy corner.

  When you have your home in a city, it is always a shock to enter the brutal homelessness of a place like this; Tom forgot, for stretches of years on end, that such places exist and are part of the true character of all cities. He went to the desk where a night porter with the deeply suspicious face of his kind picked up a telephone without a word when Fuecht’s name was pronounced. While he waited for the phone to be answered, the man moved his left hand strongly over his face, pushing his eyebrows up out of line and then down, rubbing his nose sideways, pulling over his mouth and chin, like the rough tongue of some animal going over its young.

  “Second floor. One-nine-six.”

  Tom went up in the lift, and, with the sense of being let deeper and deeper into places where neither dark nor daylight exists, but only the light of single bulbs gathered like beads of sweat on the ceiling, came out into a passage. Past doors and more doors; before he knocked, it seemed, the door opened, and there was a blazingly-lit room, yellow-walled, with the luggage heaped, as it had been dumped down, in the middle, and the figure of an old man drawn up like an exclamation point before it.

  They looked, man and luggage, ready to take off for anywhere. The visitor was ready to back away before them.

  “So I wait,” said Fuecht, without any greeting. “They will come for me soon.”

  Tom would not have known him if he had seen him in the street. Was he really unrecognisable? He walked into the room and sat on the bed, under the chandelier that had been meant for grandeur and shone as a merciless inquisition of glare. No, Fuecht must be changed. He couldn’t possibly have looked like that; the way he looked was not something that could last for years.

  He was ill, of course. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t just the usual old men’s symptoms of the collar grown too big, the hollow, delicate-looking as the skin over an infant’s fontanelle, in front of each bloodless ear. He was blazing behind his line of tight mouth, behind his dark eyes made dominating, in the diminishing face, by his magnifying glasses; he was blazing like the chandelier. Something—a pulse, a convulsive swallowing—agitated all the time in the thin turkey-fold that connected his chin to his adam’s-apple.

  “They told me a wait of forty-five minutes,” he was saying, without a pause. He gave the little unpleasant smile of a man who knows better than to expect efficiency in matters that are out of his hands. “I should get off the plane from Port Elizabeth and then go straight through the customs and so on to the plane for Europe. That was the information. No one would have known. You would not have heard from me, eh? I would have been,” he threw up his unsteady hands like a drowning man, but in triumph, “many miles away by now.”

  “It’s very annoying to be delayed,” said Tom, but his eyes were on the luggage. “When did you decide to go to Switzerland?”

  “Yes! I should have been gone!” The old man took a swift turn about the room. He checked himself abruptly; he moved with the incalculable rushes of a faulty clockwork toy, that jerks into action, moves with wild nimbleness, and then just as suddenly runs down and is arrested feebly in the middle of an uncompleted movement. He laughed, “Switzerland! Yes, begin with Zurich. I was a boy there, a young man, living as young men live. Zurich to begin with, but I won’t stay. Don’t think I’ll stay! I’m not crawling back to Zurich to …” He stopped. A close look came over his face, it was not so much as if he had lost the thread of what he was saying as that he had found himself saying something unexpected, something that lay in his mind ignored. He went on, “There are plenty of places in Europe where you can live, still. Well, I should have been gone already, I should have been on the way, eh?” He sat down suddenly, gleeful, shaken, on the chair.

  A waiter came in with whisky and soda, that Fuecht must have ordered to be brought when his guest arrived. While the man was in the room, the old man did not speak, and had a curious air of impatient resentment. When the waiter had withdrawn, he made sure the door was properly closed behind the man, and then handed Tom a drink: “Whisky is all right, eh?”

  “And Mrs. Fuecht—?” said Tom.

  The old man drew the whisky round his mouth and then put the glass away from him. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “When she wakes up, she’ll find there isn’t a penny. I’ve got all my money out. Here, in my pocket—here’s a cheque book for the Zurich bank. I’ve taken it all out. There are ways, you understand. I know people, I managed it—never mind. It’s all there. All I have to do is write out a cheque.”

  “It sounds as if someone’s going to have a good time.” It was impossible to remedy this conversation in which both were talking of different things, although their remarks appeared to follow one on the other in the parody of communication. Oddly, Tom was reminded of times when, talking to Jessie, he became aware that they were not talking about the same thing; she sometimes went through the motions of communication with her lips, while what she really was doing was to hug further and further into herself what it was she had to communicate.

  “I’m sorry about Jessie. She wanted to come, she would’ve …”

  Suddenly the old man seemed to realise Tom’s presence; he smiled a slow, grudging recognition, and the lie lay exposed between them.

  The old man took up his glass of whisky and finished it at a gulp, getting it over with, like medicine, and his other hand was raised, calling for attention, promising. “She doesn’t know I’ve gone, and when she finds out—well, too late! That’s all.”

  “Jessie had a letter from her last week. She said you were in a nursing home.”

  “That’s all right!” said the old man, swaggeringly, grim, shrugging. “That’s right! They wanted me in a nursing home. But I tell you”—he stopped and leant forward as he might have done if he had wanted to use the name of someone with whom he had entered into conversation in a bar, only to remember that the man was a nameless stranger to him—“I tell you, they won’t get a penny from me, just the same! I’m going to spend it all. D’you follow me? I may not be young, but I’ve got money, and a man with money is never lonely. There’ll be women—you understand? I’m not finished with it all yet!”

  His voice rose powerfully, as it had on the telephone, and came ringing back from the four walls of the room, shocking, so that it silenced even himself.

  He sat back in his chair, fixing his eyes on Stilwell angrily. He looked once or twice round the room, like the circus lion puzzled and restless on its painted barrel. And then he said again: “Wom
en. There are women who won’t say no to my money.”

  The middle finger of his left hand beat continuously against the chair-arm. Tom saw him notice it out of the corner of his eye, as an animal looks up, helpless, to see its rump twitch against the attentions of a fly.

  Tom spoke. “I wonder if you’re well enough to go.”

  The old man’s mind darted at once to the real meaning of this. “What’s the use to stop me,” he said. “I’ve told you, there’s not a penny here. And she can never get it into the country again without my signature. I’m not going to be buried yet.”

  Some hostility stirred between them. “Jessie should have come,” said Tom, almost crossly.

  “They will get nothing, either of them.”

  “Mr. Fuecht, you must know that Jessie has never had any hopes about your money.”

  “I didn’t expect her to come. She’s never been much like a daughter. Well, that’s an old story. Never mind.”

  Tom smiled. “Well, she’s only a stepdaughter.”

  “Yes, her mother kept that up. For the memory of poor Charles, she said. We both loved poor Charles. Only she couldn’t have loved him so much, could she? Eh?”

  Tom was bewildered by the old man’s wry grin, the surly, sly self-contempt that sounded in his voice.

  “Charles?”

  “‘Charles’!”

  “Jessie’s father?”

  The old man nodded with exaggerated vociferousness, like someone satisfying a child with a careless lie. “All right, Jessie’s father. My friend Charles. Only I couldn’t have been such a good friend, after all, eh? She makes a great fuss, she bursts in tears when I bring up the name of Charles. Because we both loved Charles, she says. What’s the difference; the girl and I never had much to say to each other, anyway.” His mind turned back rapidly to the obsession of the present; he looked at his watch for the fourth time since Tom had come in, and said, with the fierce satisfaction of time passing: “Tell them what you like. Tell her what I said about going to Zurich and what I’m going to do. She’ll be on the telephone tomorrow. You’ll see. Well, you can tell her I’ve gone—what you like—you understand? You tell her I’m not finished yet.”

  Tom suggested that they should phone the airline and find out when the plane was expected to be ready to leave; the truth was, he felt he could not stand waiting shut up in the hotel with the old man indefinitely, and a drive to the airport would fill in part of the time. When Tom could decently say that they had better start off, Fuecht watched with glittering eyes while the luggage was being carried from the room. Then, with one strange look round it, a curious look of blind courage, he snapped off the blazing light and walked out.

  He did not speak in the car going to the airport. He seemed exhausted, or resting, or husbanding himself through the drive in the dark. At the airport he became talkative again; the strength of his desire to be gone, the desperate glee of his going, trembled through his body ecstatically. Now and then he said: “Let them both look for me. Not a penny. Not a penny. I’m going to spend the lot, you understand.”

  At last he was called. The number of his flight echoed and re-echoed through the airport halls, and Tom watched him walk down the brightly-lit ramp to the dark runway. He did not look back or wave. He walked slowly but the extreme lightness of his body, hardly there at all inside the tailor’s shape, suddenly came to the young man watching. Tom noticed for the first time that he was immaculately dressed, like a corpse laid out in new clothing for its long journey. There was a moment’s last glimpse of the face; the mouth was stiff, a little open, the eyes looked straight ahead into the dark. Then the figure came out in the stream of light from the aircraft, and was seen climbing, through the shafts of moted light, up the gangway.

  Jessie woke the instant Tom moved into the room. She put up her hand and turned on the light, full in his eyes. Frowning, he moved the lamp’s neck.

  He began to describe to her how the old man had been, standing with his luggage, ready to go, in the hotel room. He did not know how to convey the queerness, the dread, the sickness, defiance—madness, perhaps, in that room. But she seemed to know at once exactly what he had found there. She pressed her fist into her cheek and cried out, from something in herself: “He still wants to live! Isn’t it terrible? He still wants to live!”

  Tom’s mind turned, like the needle of a compass coming to the north, to one utterance among all the nightmare mutterings of that night. “She’s never been much like a daughter.” There it was; he could not leave it alone. It rose out of the jumble of ravings, boastings, imprecations.

  Other phrases came to join it. “Only she couldn’t have loved him so much, could she?”

  What else had the old man said? Suddenly, because it became important to Tom to remember that part of the evening, he could not; it was all muddled up with the other things that sounded through his head in the old man’s voice. “Jessie’s only a stepdaughter”—he could hear himself offering, platitudinous, soothing; he had been so busy treating the old man like an invalid or a lunatic that he had not listened properly. What was it the old man had said? “That was kept up, of course” or “Her mother kept that up”—something like that. Again and again Tom sounded the same note, like a piano tuner looking for true pitch: “The memory of poor Charles … only she couldn’t have loved him so much, could she?”

  He watched Jessie when she was unaware. What would it mean to her if she knew that she was Bruno’s daughter? Was she Bruno’s daughter? And at times it seemed to him: she knows she is really his daughter. It would be like her mother to have told her, when she was a young girl, perhaps, or half-child, half-girl, and to have made her see at the same time the necessity for conspiracy to conceal the fact, for her mother’s sake.

  He felt an obscure danger in the possibility of asking her. Suppose she did not know? Suppose it was true and she had never known?

  Days went by and soon he knew he would never ask her. He would never tell her the things Fuecht had said; or seemed to say. Yet he continued to think about it all, to be aware of this twilight tunnel of his wife’s life, walled-up, lost and over-grown, an extension of herself, hidden, or perhaps unknown to her.

  A week later they knew that Bruno Fuecht was dead. He had died in a hospital in Rome. They never knew why he had left Zurich. Of course, he had not taken “every penny” with him, after all; he had transferred considerable sums to Switzerland, but there were still a number of investments and a substantial sum of money in South Africa. His mental state must have been such that he believed he had done what he had said; or perhaps this discovery, after his death, was contrived as just such another malicious laugh as he had sometimes had at his wife’s expense when he was alive?

  Mrs. Fuecht was in the Stilwell house, come upon strangely, at all hours of the day, sitting on the verandah, or in a corner of the empty living-room, with her hat on. She had arrived from Port Elizabeth two days after Fuecht disappeared. Jessie treated her with quiet consideration; it was understood that, although she could not be said to be bereaved, she was certainly more alone. She had outlived two husbands, and was old. The two women talked of Bruno Fuecht as of some practical problem, a condition of life that had existed, and that, in its passing, had left things a certain way; there were ends to tie up.

  “I wonder if it would be best to sell his car in Port Elizabeth or have it railed up here.”

  “He’d had it reconditioned just the month before last. Heaven knows why, if he was going away. New seats, all real leather. I don’t suppose it’ll fetch anything.”

  But Tom, coming upon mother and daughter talking like this, as he often did during those days, was filled with tenderness for Jessie. He was overwhelmed with pity for the lack of grief in this death. He sat on the verandah with the two women night after night, and their quiet words fell upon him like stones. Suddenly one evening he found it in himself to ask—an impulse of curiosity, idly remembered—“Bruno Fuecht—why did you never leave him, I often wondered?”
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  Mrs. Fuecht said without a pause, “I gave him my whole life; I did not think I could let myself lose his money, as well.”

  There was a silence; if the jangle of the dinner-bell, that Elisabeth was ringing for Agatha, had not broken it, it might have gone on for ever—there seemed to be no words that could have ended it. Tom touched his wife, and she turned, awake, with a slight smile. They rose like lovers; for lately the sense of strangeness that one being has for another had come back between them.

  Mrs. Fuecht went home to the coast to settle her affairs. Jessie felt that an immeasurable lapse of time separated her from the friendly comings and goings, the odd hours and long gossips of her days at the Agency office. Her job in the suburbs and the presence of her mother in the house had kept her away from familiar haunts. The arrival of Fuecht, that night, was something she seemed to have called up from the descent into the past that Morgan had forced upon her. The man had come and gone, and she had not seen him; would never see him again. Yet the shock of his coming when he did had established a connection. The connection existed in her mind alongside the answer that her mother had made to Tom’s queer question: “I had given him my whole life; I did not think I could let myself lose his money, as well.” The past rose to the surface of the present, free of the ambiguities and softening evasions that had made it possible in the living. Her mother spoke as someone who has accomplished her life, however bitterly. Nothing could be more extraordinary to Jessie than the discovery that, however remotely differently arrived at, this, her own need, had existed in her mother.

  A day or two after Mrs. Fuecht had gone, she left the nursing-home office at one and went to the western end of town to her old lunching-place, the Lucky Star. She had not been there for six weeks or more; there was the old smell of curry and chips, and the board in the doorway still said, “Try our famous Eastern delicacies, grills and boerewors.” Uncle Jack, the proprietor said, “How’ve you been—that’s nice,” as he always did, his sad Levantine face, produced by some alchemy of white, Indian, Malay and probably African blood, appearing to look up from his little gambler’s notebook, but not pausing in his calculations, and she turned to the tables with convalescent ease, ready to sit placidly over lunch with whoever was there that she knew. It was then that she noticed Ann, facing her at a table in one of the booths, with Len Mafolo’s back to the room. She went over to them and as she did she saw that the man was not Len. “Just push my things on to the floor.” Ann’s face was flung up at her, brilliant. “Will you have a delicious coke, that’s what we’re drinking.” “Pretty heady stuff. Wait, I’ll order some more,” the man said, swivelling round in his seat to summon one of the Indian waiters, and Jessie recognised Gideon Shibalo, the school-teacher, the painter. They had met somewhere, years ago.