Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Beyond her volition, she began to try whether she might not be able to get at the fifteen-year-old boy through laying her hands on what she herself had been at that age. Out of an instinct that ran away with her, she sought out that girl who had been put away for so long as nothing more than a case history. It was easy enough to see her, going about the mine property and the town with her mother. She did not go to school but was taught at home and she and her mother spent the afternoons on shopping expeditions together. There were the counters draped with bolts of silk before which they were lost for hours, their eyes meeting in considering indecision. The final word hung, inevitable as the curtain embrace. “The blue, or the black and white?” “The blue is lovely, the patterned one has more style …” Her mother’s eyes held hers again. Then the decision: “I need a figured dress of some kind, there are times when—” They were free to go off and drink coffee, breaking the calm after tension by passing some remark, now and then, about what accessories would be right. “Take the stairs slowly”; her mother’s gloved hand pressed her shoulder. Sometimes Jessie did think she felt the labouring flutter of her heart when they reached the top: she panted a little, with a smile, to show it. When they got home, they rested together in her mother’s room.

She was not allowed to play tennis, of course, because of her heart — not an organic defect, and with care she would grow out of it, her mother explained to people. That was why she kept the girl out of school. No tennis or swimming, but she went out at night far more than other children of her age. Her mother and Bruno took her to the theatre and concerts in Johannesburg, and when they played bridge in the houses of the mine, she went with them and was not bored, listening to the grown-ups and helping the hostess efficiently with the tea. She read novels too, whatever she pleased; “I don’t believe that girls should be brought up in ignorance of life,” said Mrs. Fuecht. The girl looked with fastidious timidity at the great girls in dusty serge gym tunics who had once been her class-mates. She would have been dismayed if she had ever been pronounced well enough to go back to school.

Ignorance of life! Jessie felt no pity for this little creature, her mother’s boon companion. She was ashamed of her, repulsed by her sham grown-up poise, her pride in the sense of privilege that had been palmed off on her, her prodigy’s smirking acceptance of a dwarf’s status in the world of men and women. Thank God she had not lived — done to death with the violence of the truth, when it came to her.

But was that all there had been to her?

Once Jessie began to move down there in the past, once she had forced herself to it, she began to be able to see, like a cat in the dark. Masses crumbled to their components, the detail of delicate structures stood out. All there, all, all, for ever. She came, with great vividness, upon the extraordinary significance, at that time, that was attached to a small painted photograph of her father that she had begged from her mother. She had it still, and for years now it had had no power to stir her; it was simply something she kept, as a gesture of acknowledgement to the man who was her father and whom she could not remember ever having known. But back there it shone alive, charged with a force that held her as the little holy image in its dark niche holds the child who passes through an intensely religious phase. The picture had been in a chocolate box of old trinkets that she loved to rummage through. It was a photograph painted to look like a miniature, in a bevelled gilt snap-case meant to be carried in a handbag — the Twenties equivalent of the picture-locket. She was taken, in the manner of girls, more with the fancy case than anything else. It stood on her book-case between cut-out pictures of Beverley Nichols and Evelyn Waugh in bazaar frames. Then, in one of the loud storms that hit the mine in summer, her bedroom lamp fused, and Bruno came in to fix it. He worked by candle-light, quickly and well, as he did everything, and as the lamp came on again and he picked up his card of fuse wire from the book-case, he noticed the pictures.

“Your favourite film-actors, eh?” All his life he had been a connoisseur of women, and he remembered his humble beginnings as a boy with pictures of actresses pinned above his bed.

“They’re writers. And that’s …” She trailed off, because of course he knew who the third one was.

He picked it up. “I don’t know the names of these great lovers. You’re the age to remember that. Good-looker, eh?”

“Don’t you see who it is?”

He smiled. “Oh, it’s Charles.” It was the curious smile with which he would greet someone who had reason to avoid him. He put the picture back; straightened it. And then it was at once dismissed from his mind; he went out calling to his wife, “I wish you could get the boy to understand that he must not take my pliers to open jam tins or whatever it is that he does to ruin them …”

The picture showed a very young man. His grey eyes were fixed slightly askance on something out of the picture, and although he was not smiling you could make out, under the photographer’s “natural” skin tinting, the faint bracket-sign on either side of his mouth that showed that he had smiled or spoken immediately before the camera clicked. The just-concluded movement made a starting-point for her. She willed him to life, speaking to her mother. He spoke to her adoringly. And then, very smoothly and easily, it was she herself to whom the strange young man was speaking, it was she whom he adored.

On rainy afternoons she stared at the face with strange and stirring emotions. The features, the ears, the eyes; she lingered over them tinglingly. Her own eyes would fill luxuriously with tears. I love you, I love you, she incantated passionately. He had taken the place of Beverley Nichols, or the young Evelyn Waugh as painted by Augustus John. They held long conversations in bed at night, and they kissed and kissed in the darkness, drawing up into these kisses all the wildly tender, terrible yearnings that swept through her body and sent her mind racing. She was in love, haunted and hounded by a fearful burden of the flesh although she did not yet have a woman’s body to fulfil it with, secreting devotion though she had no one for whom to set it working.

Did she ever admit that the fantasy to which she gave all this was her father? Here Jessie came upon the dreadful innocence of inner life, the life dreamt and not lived, that fills but is for ever confined in the globe of the skull. She knew and did not know that the man with whom she rehearsed both the domestic intimacies she had seen in films, and the erotic intimacies mysteriously hinted at in books and strangely understood somewhere in her body — that this man bore the label “father”. The truth was that he was a face, a young face, and she had made the face of love out of him. If there was darkness in the make-believe, it was hidden in the dark nature of make-believe itself. For nothing of all this passion existed in the light of her contact with the “real” world where she shopped and talked with her mother.

There were other things behind the self-composed face of the child who moved among grown-ups as one of themselves, like a little ape who has been taught to blow his nose in a handkerchief and eat with a knife and fork. Confronted with them after so long, Jessie took them up, uncomfortable, puzzled — and then came the stab of identity and recognition. The shape of cold terror that used to impress itself on the back of her neck when she turned her back to the dark passage behind the bathroom door at night, bending to wash her face. Had she ever, in the twenty years or so since then, found out who it was that threatened to come up behind her? Then there was the — even at this stage, an old inhibition came back, and she did not know what name to call it — the business of the electric plugs. She had been afraid to be alone in a room where there were electric plugs because she might be impelled to put her fingers into one and turn on the current. The sight of one, brown, shiny and commonplace, fascinated her horribly, and rising alongside the fascination was an equal fear — the two forces possessed her, but to whom could she cry out? Such things did not exist in the articulate world; “there is nothing there,” they came in and said, of the dark. Bruno and her mother had what she humbly accepted were “real” troubles — the grown-up ones of stocks and shares rising and falling, that they discussed in the deep dreamy concentration induced by money, in which their differences were surpassed; and the other grown-up ones of which nothing was said, but that anyone, even a child, could sense, dividing the stream of the house’s being in two, so that the very cat, coming in the door, paused electrically.