Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

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.

Jessie paid five shillings and mumbled something about meeting someone, but the excuse was not necessary. No one was suspicious of her. On the other side of leather concertina doors was a large room lit to a fluorescent pink, with silver-painted globe chairs round the tables. On the walls hung huge photographs of young men with the faces of sulky girls, their lips snarling in song, but the band that was bumping and knocking out the rhythm of some supposedly South American tune was not a fanatic group of jazz-possessed youngsters, but ordinary commercial musicians with the stolid weariness of an endless night in their faces. The people were young, but not noticeably belonging to the teenage cult. Most of the girls must have been under twenty and looked like the bored or head-tossing misses who served in bazaars during the day. There was no hint of sophistication about them and they came from a class too new to the cheap bright benefits of the material to want to ape, even without understanding, its fashionable symbolic rejection by pale girls in black stockings.

A loose-faced youth in a dirty white forage cap brought Jessie a Coca-Cola and a saucer of chips. A few people were dancing, but most of them hung about, the men in chaffing groups around the girls. They looked like young men who had come together in twos and threes from some of the reef gold-mining towns where the pleasures of the city were not available; there was a solidarity about the way they returned to their companions as soon as a dance was over, roaring back in sniggering laughter at each other’s remarks. On the periphery of the young men and girls were some of those men who appear, shaven, dressed in their one pin-stripe suit and shining cap of black hair, apparently from the rat-holes of every city. Every now and then one of them would take one of the paid dancing partners on to the floor, holding her with all the ghastly delicacy of a refined finger furled above the handle of a tea-cup. The favourite was a black-haired girl with a queenly, kidding look and a white neck with a crucifix round it. She was not fat but she must have been heavy, for her feet in their pointed shoes came down with an extraordinary impression of force, treading violence, as if they would spear, crush and flatten anything that might happen to fall beneath them. She giggled and nodded while she danced.

One of the men walked twice past Jessie. Then he was there, bent over the table; a zig-zag of orchid-pink light shone on the hair as if on a dark pond. “You wouldn’t like to dance, madam?” The fastidious politeness, the obsequious male pride in knowing how a woman likes to think she’s being treated lay in a pathetic gloss over the craven ferociousness of the creature. His mean eyes had an objective loneliness, like the eyes of an animal that does not know it was born behind bars.

She did not learn why Morgan had gone there. To do so, she understood at last, you would first have to know where he set out from.

Adam, seeing Eve sprung fully-fledged from his side, could not have been more strangely troubled. There was always time to get down to Morgan; he would keep, he was there, whether she liked it or not, and one day she would be able to turn round and take up where she had set him aside. She no longer knew when exactly it was that she had set him aside and it seemed to her that this must have been at the time of her marriage to Tom, but in fact it had been much earlier, when she lay in bed at night in the room where the baby slept, and wept in self-pity and rage for the years her mother had cheated her of. Then the baby, with the enviable bloom of its life untouched by anybody, had seemed something that could well be left to itself in any but the obvious physical needs. It would be safe like that for a time just as its natural immunity from certain diseases, a legacy from before birth, would last for a year or two. Fifteen years had gone by, and now she was confronted with some strange creature: half-man, not-child. Where was the child who had been hanging about her, waiting?

In psychiatric jargon, a man may be spoken of as mentally “completely inaccessible”; in order to survive without the disabilities of the past, without whining, without blaming, Jessie had made most of her past life inaccessible to her rather in this way; she had remained accessible to it, of course, on that level beyond control, the subconscious. She wanted to deal with Morgan here and now, of and in the present. Was that unreasonable? She was trying to put him together as you might a new acquaintance, from the images of the last five or six weeks. He was gone, of course, out of the house again, but he had been there, and, out of an old arrogance of her responsibility for him taken as mastery of him, she set herself out to pick up an easy trail. He was bored; he felt out of things, between the grown-ups and the little girls; he was led into the whole business by his weakness, following the Wiley boy rather than thinking for himself. Or it was the old story of the child who deliberately turns his back on the freedom to develop within the liberation won by his parents, and chooses the rigid and vulgar? Yet Morgan, as he began to fill out in her consciousness as he was — as she had seen him and, until now, not seen him — gave himself away in response to none of these clues. He had nothing to do with them; she could see that. He was not bored — the day she had walked into his room and found him lying listening to his endless radio, what stillness there was about him, a loneliness, yes, perhaps, wrapped soft as content. And out of things — out of things was his place, he had curled up there for years. And just as he had no spirit for resentment (there was shame and a twinge of contempt in her at the admittance) so his weakness would not have been enough to send him so far after the Wiley boy: something more potent than weakness, an initiative of his own, had sent him up the concrete stairs to the pink lights. As for their values — hers and Tom’s and the house’s — she had to admit with a sense of sullen pain she did not know whether they had “taken” or not with Morgan, simply through his being around: that was the only way they might have been expected to have done.

The boy loomed in her mind in a series of outlines that wavered into each other and faded into a thickening oppression. The sight of one of the little girls, coming with a splinter to be taken out of a finger, Clem wanting to chatter or Madge mournful with the desire to be kissed, brought about an instinctive withdrawal. Jessie felt like a dog who sees a raised stick. Love appalled her with its hammering demands, love clamoured and dunned, love would throw down and tear to pieces its object. This was love, that few people could live without, and that most spent the major effort of their lives to secure. And the burden of Morgan, Morgan, hung on her — always she turned in final exacerbation on this. Yet she did not love Morgan, and Morgan — that much she was sure of — did not love her. They seemed to meet over the admittance, looking at each other without expectation or malice, with that space, between the house, where she was, and the school, where he was, briefly blown clear.