Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“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 desire 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.