Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

It’s harder for us, thought Jessie. Just then she caught Boaz looking at her, and felt that he knew what had just passed through her mind. He did not kneel when the rest of them did, but all the time sat with repose, listening to the flock of voices that rose steeply around him, or the low sound of prayer. All through the ritual of Christmas, the curious swarming of the human spirit, some of it meaningless, some meaningful. He had given and partaken with zest and a pleasure in participation. Yet from time to time, as now, although she was kneeling and he was a respectful onlooker, she was aware of something that set them apart together. She, a Christian, assumed with her husband and others a common experience of the Christmas ritual, along with other common experiences. But the truth was that for her the common experience was not there. The part she took was not natural to her, in the sense that it was part of a continuity in her life; for her, it was assumed, just as, for different reasons, it was for Boaz. Behind the kissing and the laughter and the exchange of presents, there was his Jewishness, and her forgotten weekend the year she was seventeen.

The house had the look of a trampled garden, after Christmas, and then in the New Year began to right itself as everyone in it again took up a less concentrated way of living. It was the first house Jessie had ever lived in that seemed to die back and put forth along with the humans; this, she supposed, was the organic quality that people were talking about when they called a house a “home”. She had lived in flats and houses which, once the reason for which she had gone to live in them in the first place — to be near a job, to provide a meeting-place for a lover — had fallen away, had to be left, like an empty box. This one would take anything.

The last and smallest of the little girls, Elisabeth, was about to begin school, Tom was trying to get in a clear month’s work on his book before the university term began, and Jessie was in the process of handing over her job to her African successor. It had been understood that, if and when an African could be found to do the job satisfactorily, this would be done. She was working particularly hard to leave everything running smoothly and to familiarise the new secretary with all the difficulties he could expect to encounter, and at the same time she was conscious of the loose end running out ahead of her. Tom suggested a job at the university that she could have if she wanted it; one of the professors needed a secretary. There would be the advantage that they both would be on holiday at the same time, and they could meet at lunch most days; he saw the idea in the pleasant, comradely light of someone wanting to draw another into the familiar satisfactions and frustrations of his own work. Jessie went to see the professor — she knew him, of course, from various official social meetings — but while they were discussing the job as if it were assumed on both sides that she would take it, it became clear to her in her own mind that she would not take it. Like many decisions, it brought temporary satisfaction. “I won’t go to work for De Kock,” she said serenely. “Didn’t it go well?” Tom was at once suspicious of the professor. “No, he’s a nice man. I’m sure we should get on. Only I just don’t want to work there. It was a good thing I went; I knew at once.”

She felt a relief at the thought of the city streets at lunchtime, the shopgirls pushing past arm-in-arm, the white suburban housewives and the black factory girls buying hats at bargain counters, the parties of glossy business men filing into expensive restaurants, the black men in the blue boiler suits of the wholesale firms, making a lido of the pavement, and gambling in the sun. There, she was whatever she might appear to be in the eyes of those whose eyes she met: was it not from the old disabled men who worked lifts and the stocky, impatient-eyed Greeks behind the tea-room counters, who suddenly had stopped calling her “miss”, that she had learned something, in the last three months? At the university the transparence of anonymity would be permanently silvered over; the eyes would give back to her an image of the senior lecturer’s wife, liberal but not radical, of course; sexually attractive but not immoral, of course; aware of the better things of life but accepting with good humour the inability to afford them, of course.

She toyed with the idea of looking for a highly-paid, commercial job this time, a job where she would work for money and nothing else; there was the punch of a kind of honesty in the idea. But once before she had gone to work as private secretary to the managing director of the overseas branch of a famous razor blade company, and she had never forgotten the extraordinary unreality of the life, when she had sat in at board meetings where terms like “faith in the future”, “continent-wide expansion” and “the benefits of modern civilisation” all meant razor blades, and nothing but razor blades.

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.