Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

The current of her preoccupation moved through the house. The children stumbled into it, startled, and went on again, forgetful and happy. Tom kept coming into its path, and always with a sense of dismay and surprise — so Jessie was still aware of this Morgan business! He could not for the life of him see why; next time Morgan came home for holidays they would have to make sure that his time was fully occupied, that was all. That was all they could do. It was a matter of finding a few fairly grown-up occupations for him. Tom had made up his mind to see to this when the time came, and Jessie knew that he would. There was nothing else to be done. It might not work, but there was nothing else to be done. Didn’t Jessie accept that any longer? Why was she turning the whole light of her being on Morgan now, when long ago, soon after he had begun to live with her (and the boy; the two went together), he had understood that he must give up trying to get her to turn that life-giving light the child’s way, even occasionally. She had never been able to do it. Not even then, when it was necessary and there was some sense in it. This business of the dance-hall was the least of the threats that had hung over Morgan.

Tom himself was moving in the inner constriction of his own difficulties at the time. The Bill that would close the university to all but white students for the future was about to be debated in Parliament; and there was talk of a “loyalty” clause being inserted in qualifications for the appointment of staff. The students’ council was demonstrating and pamphleteering in protest, and Tom was eager to see them kick up a real shindy, supported by the staff. The issue started off decently clear in his mind, but as the days went by it took on all the stains and nicks of handling, and began to be almost unrecognisable. One morning an administrative official of the university had torn down and stuffed into a rubbish bin some student posters. It was said that this was on instruction from the highest quarters; even if it had been done without instruction, as an expression of personal irritation, it would have had an ambiguous look about it. Tom was beginning to have a sickening sense of the whole affair — that had existed diamond-hard among those few crystal formations of bedrock morality — moving into areas of doubt where it did not belong. He scarcely spoke through dinner that evening and got up from the table while the others were still eating — he had to go to a private meeting with some members of the university staff and students. “Where are my cigarettes? I’d better move on, I suppose.”

There was the pause of confrontation with a subject everyone knew too well to want to talk about.

Ann was home for dinner for once, and she asked with the impartial interest she brought to most things, “Was there a big meeting at lunch-time today?”

“Not bad. Only let there be some noise and broken heads so that people begin to see that academic freedom is something to fight over in the street! People feel it’s a phrase that doesn’t concern most of them, like ‘higher income tax bracket’. Let ‘em understand it’s on a level with their right to their weekly pay-packet, the defence of their wife’s good name and blood-heating things like that.”

Jessie was moving restlessly about the room as if contemplating some tidying-up activity. “I’ll be up,” she said, indicating he needn’t take a key.

At the meeting that evening a student pointed out that the university never had been truly open to anyone but whites; the African and Indian students had never been allowed to take part in sports or social events. When one spoke of it as an “open” university one was already accepting some of the meaner and uglier evasions by which the colour-bar protected itself. Tom dropped in at a friend’s flat for coffee afterwards and got talking to an African whom he had met there a few times before. They left together and as they walked along the street Tom quoted the exchange that had taken place between those members of the university staff and administration who, like himself, wanted to fight the Bill unreservedly, and to back up the students and give them free rein, and others who protested that they abhorred the Bill but that it was foolish to antagonise the Government when it would go through in any case, and the university was heavily dependent on Government grants. In order to keep alive the idea of academic freedom, these people argued, the university must continue to exist at all costs, even that of academic freedom itself …

The brown, pock-marked face beside him appeared and disappeared as they passed together under street-lamps. The man turned to say goodnight: “Fight them over this business if you want to, man, but don’t think that anything you do really matters. Some of you make laws, and some of you try to change them. And you don’t ask us.”

When Tom talked to Jessie about it, she had still the clear-cut picture of it that he himself had had at the beginning. She had never cared much for academic people — if she had been married to a business man, she would have cared as little for his associates sworn to the twin gods of supply and demand, for she had the solitary’s genuine if slightly jealous dislike of guilds, jokes of the trade, and a soothing assumption of a common lot — and it did not surprise her that some of the university people were now found unable to clap their hands over their revealed careerism and lack of moral courage.

“I don’t see that there’s any problem. It’s only people who’re busy taking things into ‘consideration’—whether they’ll be kicked out or whether Professor Tiddleypush would like them to open their mouths or not — who need give the thing a second thought.” She commented on a satisfaction, in him, that she took for granted. Yet this truth seemed to him now flippant and casual. He thought, with a flash of vindictiveness, she sits there in a heap (she had waited up for him) and she has not been listening to me. She’s all attention but she has not heard. It was true that he was against keeping a man out of a university because of his colour just as surely as he knew it was wrong to murder. But she knew nothing of the disruption of the working atmosphere by conflict, she knew nothing of the feel of that curious conglomeration of usefulness, waste, inspiration and discipline that makes an institution, shifting and staggering beneath your feet.

He was awake in the night and she was aware of it. She felt him sliding carefully out of his side of the bed. “What is it?” “I don’t know,” he lied. “I want a cigarette.” He lay with his back to her in order not to disturb her, but she could feel the regular inhalations with which he took the cigarette, and the stretching of his arm muscle as he leant to put it out. He ran his foot, curved to caress, over her calf in security, but it was an hour when she could imagine how she would be if she had never met him. She had the actual feeling of herself free, alone, husband dead, mother escaped from, alone, with Morgan. It began to go through her mind in light and colour, a life with Morgan that seemed to have happened. Morgan was a boy of about five and she was pushing him on a swing. Then she was sitting on the swing and he was pushing her. She came toward his laughing face and away from it again, toward and away. Then she and Morgan were on a ship together, they were reading, side by side on deck, and people to whom they never needed to speak walked up and down. (They really had been on a ship together, once, but he had been little and she had put him in the public nursery most of the time, where he had stared down at her on deck in silence from behind wire mesh.) Then he was older, twelve or fourteen, and they shared a flat, orderly, with shaded lights; he poured the drinks for her and they went to the theatre together. They were having dinner, cooking and setting the table for themselves, and talking. She had him with her through crowded rooms, he looked grown-up in a light suit, his big, young, tender man’s hand she took suddenly … At some point these possibilities became a dream and in the dream she was actually looking with Tom at the projection of a roll of old film whose existence had been unknown and which recorded a life that had been forgotten.