Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Jessie occasionally saw the mad woman about town in Johannesburg, more than twenty years later. She was unchanged, for perhaps madness had aged her prematurely when she was quite young, and her hair with its streaks of henna and grey was tied back with the same sort of narrow velvet ribbon she had worn when Jessie was seventeen.

The weekend itself had changed its meaning for Jessie many times before it passed into that harmless state known as forgotten. Just after her young husband died, when she became aware that a large part of her life was missing, that she had been handed from mother to husband to being a mother herself without ever having had the freedom that does not belong to any other time of life but extreme youth — just then, knowing herself cheated, that Christmas weekend had come back to her with revulsion and resentment. There, in that cheap, ugly place, her youth had been finally bound and thrown out into the mud to die, while the middle-aged sat in their chairs. Maimed but living, they sat and held her as one of them, for whom there was nothing but to share their losses of the eye of love, blinded by disappointment or habit, and the leg of ambition, gammy now with self-limitations. Her mother sat there with her accomplice, Bruno, while their hired assassins did the job.

Jessie wept for herself, then, caught in a bell-tower of self-pity and anger where anguish deafeningly struck her hour. She lay in bed in the small room where the baby Morgan slept too, and she beat the pillow with her fist in the night. The death of that young man, her husband, was nothing, in the end, to this: the discovery of the body of her youth out in the mud. Her husband was dead, but she was alive to the knowledge that, in the name of love, her mother had sucked from her the delicious nectar she had never known she had — the half-shaped years, the inconsequence without finger-print, of the time from fifteen to twenty.

Later, when the animus of blame had exhausted itself, Jessie saw that weekend in the critical light of the needs of new growth and shunned it out of disgust for herself as she had been then. Because she had courage now, a passion of self-assertion, she reproached herself for cowardice then. Why hadn’t she fought her mother for survival? She drew strength from these reproaches to herself without trying to understand the reasons for the paralysis of the will that had been brought about in her through a long, slow preparation of childhood.

Still later, she saw that the weekend was terribly funny. When she was living with Tom, and she told him the story, they laughed and laughed over it — Bruno loftily ignoring the weevils in the porridge, the woman furiously sewing at nothing, the pianola wheezing out “You are my sunshine”. And then it had been recalled too many times to seem funny any more. It lay harmless, an explosive from which the detonator had long been removed.

In Jessie’s own house, the Stilwell house, Christmas preparations were elaborate and began early in December with the day when Jessie and Tom met for lunch in town and then shopped for the children’s presents. The year that the Davises were in the house Boaz turned up with Tom. Home for a day between field-trips, he had found no one in when he arrived at the house; he had walked into Tom’s room at the university.

The three moved from the coffee-bar where Jessie was waiting to a restaurant where they could get a drink with their food. Boaz, in khaki pants and veldschoen, had the happy air of the returned traveller among people who have not left town. “Let’s have a bottle of wine. I’ve been drinking nothing but kaffir beer and I feel very healthy.”

“You look it, too,” said Jessie. In fact he looked very handsome, his pale opaque skin turned a shiny olive colour by the sun. Although the presence of the Davises made little mark upon the house, the return of Boaz from a field-trip had begun to bring with it each time a rounding-off of the family; besides, both the Stilwells always felt a spontaneous affection for him the moment they saw him, while Ann, although they liked her well enough, had not aroused what was, toward him, almost a family feeling in them.

“Ann’s probably eating with Len Mafolo today,” Jessie said.

“That’s what I suggested,” said Tom, “but we phoned the Lucky Star and they weren’t there. — She’s been very busy with culture and good works, your little wife. Last week she was prettily selling programmes at Jazz of the Year, this week it’s a travelling art exhibition in some caravan she’s begged off a friend.”

“So she wrote. Is there anything good there?”

“Two good Gideon Shibalos — the same two, the early ones he always trots out; I don’t think he’s doing anything these days. And a few wood carvings — not bad. The rest—” He put a bit of roll in his mouth and chewed it vigorously, disposing of the pictures.

“What would you give a boy of fifteen for Christmas?” Jessie had her list beside her plate, and she laid the problem before Boaz.

“Isn’t there anything in particular he wants? Surely there’s something he’s been longing for the whole year?”

“No,” said Jessie, “not Morgan. He doesn’t long for anything.”

“Not that we can tell,” said Tom.

Boaz filled his glass. He did not take Jessie’s question in the conversational way it was asked. He often went on thinking about things after the people who had begun to talk about them had moved on to something else. “Shouldn’t we talk to Morgan more?” he said now, assuming a responsibility nobody expected of him, but nobody questioned.

Jessie ignored the direction of the remark, turning Boaz swiftly back to the immediate and particular. “The present’s supposed to be a surprise, anyway. What did you get when you were fifteen?”

“I know what I got,” said Tom. “A bicycle with the handle-bars turned down. I always let everybody know what I was longing for, no mistake about that. You ask my father. His only worry was that he might buy something that wasn’t precisely to my specifications.”

“Well, I didn’t get Christmas presents, of course. But my bet is you ought to get him something grown-up and smashing.”

“You poor little brute,” said Tom, with a grin. “I forgot about that.”

The waiter arrived with trays and dishes balanced along his arms, and when these had all been correctly distributed, Boaz insisted: “Really smashing. What about a cine camera or a collapsible boat?”

Jessie and Tom burst out laughing. “Yes, why not?” said Tom, lordly. “Or a sports car? Morgan probably needs a sports car.”

They bought Morgan a new steel watch-strap and fell back on the choice of a game that Jessie had looked at but not decided upon, because they always seemed to give him that kind of thing. It was a bat and ball affair that provided good practice for tennis or squash, without the necessity for a partner — one of those games you play against yourself.

The Stilwells and the Davises pooled resources and had a very successful party that disposed of three different sets of acquaintances in one night: the university people came for drinks and tid-bits handed round by the little girls in the early evening; the friends stayed on to get drunk and eat two great potfuls of hot food; and the friends of friends — hangers-on, people the Stilwells or Davises had liked the look of at other people’s parties, invited to come along, and then forgotten — these came and went between midnight and four in the morning. As usual one or two of the Africans were stranded without any means — except their by then unreliable legs — of getting back to the townships for what remained of the night, and make-shift beds were provided for them.

On Christmas morning Jessie liked to take the little girls to church, and this year, since Boaz wanted to hear the choir there, it was decided that they would go to a big church in one of the townships instead of the church in the Stilwells’ suburb. The church did not have the front-parlour tidiness of the church in the white suburb. Paths worn by the feet of the congregation led up to it on its dusty hill above the township; inside, it was lofty, almost as big as a cathedral, and it smelled of the smoke from open cooking fires that was always in the clothes of the people. But the dresses of the little Stilwell girls stood out in ostentatious plainness beside the frills and pert fancy hats of the small black girls. And the high church service, with incense spreading from the swinging censers, and the white, gold and blue of the priest’s robes, and the flowers banking the altar — all this, in contrast to the monotony and stink, the bareness and dunness of the streets outside, was like the kingdom of heaven itself. These Christians had only to walk through the door to enter it.