Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Love and destruction, life and death, were already possessed of the battleground of the mind and body of the child who sat politely, smoothing her new skirt, or hung on her mother’s arm, listening with self-important absorption to talk of dress. The courage that the child must have screwed out of herself to maintain this balance appalled Jessie; how was it possible for a creature to live so secret, so alone? Ignorance, of course, the dreadful certainty, hopelessly accepted, that there is no one, not anywhere in the world, like you.

Was it possible that Morgan was suffering like this?

Yet Jessie was now an adult herself, and she was as inclined as any other to be lulled by the commonplaceness of the child. Morgan with his eternal bat and ball, Morgan jumping up with such prompt eagerness when you sent him off to do some piffling errand. Morgan with a front, of its kind, as bland as her own loved and loving daughterly one had been.

“I should tell Morgan how he comes to have his place with us,” she said to Tom.

He was trying to write a difficult letter, and reluctantly he roused himself at the sound of the slow, dead voice she always used when she had made up her mind to do something reckless. He stopped writing, put his elbows on the table and pressed his two thumbs against the sharp edges of his top teeth for a moment. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said at last.

“Tell him more. More about us. Tell him the truth. Why not? Why shouldn’t I admit to him that my marriage to his father wasn’t anything like this? Tell him that if his father hadn’t been killed the marriage would have ended anyway. He ought to know he hasn’t missed anything.”

“What are you talking about?” He looked at her as if he were about to apprehend a crime.

“Why do people always protect children by keeping them on the surface? That’s not the way to do it at all. One ought to let them in on everything and make them strong.”

In answer to his silence, she added, “We ought to talk to him more — Boaz said it once.”

He gave a little weary snort, dismissing that as something different.

With an effort at reasonableness, he began: “How do you think you can go about it?”

“Find — a—way — to — get — at — him,” she said. She saw with a thrill of disappointment that she had stung Tom to concealed alarm. “—Well, what have I said?”

He shrugged. “I think the thing for us to do is to stick to practical plans to occupy Morgan. Ease him on to his own feet … that’s all.”

She felt the exchange falling into the pattern of their two personalities and she made an impulsive attempt to break it. “It may be the thing for you, but not for me.” She had never before claimed her relationship as the boy’s mother, as opposed to his as a stranger and a stepfather. Morgan was something they had put up with together, as best they could.

But to Tom the sudden change had little to do with her actual feelings about Morgan; he saw it as a well-known sign of what he thought of as the amateurishness of her nature. She would want to have a go at something; the single achievement itself obsessed her, with the amateur’s disregard for what ought to have gone before in the form of proper preparation, or what might be expected to come after. She was often a brilliant amateur — it was this aspect of her that he had fallen in love with, reaching out in sure instinct beyond the pleasures of their affair to feel the hot flame of her fearful determination, time and again, to achieve a manoeuvre of her own life. How many human beings had this calm and reckless assumption that their life was in their hands? This quality that had deeply excited him and moved him for ever into her orbit turned out to be also, in the long run of marriage, the one that gave him the most trouble, rather as if he had married for a face and the beauty of it had brought its inevitable pain by attracting other men. What he loved most, he came to like least in her. If she was sometimes brilliant in her disregard for the rules, he had also learnt that she was more often dangerous.

He aimed grimly, “Jessie, don’t try to catch Morgan in a bear-hug now.”

“You think I’m lying.”

“I don’t think you’re lying. I’m sure you’re thinking about Morgan these days in a way you’ve never done before. I’m simply warning you that you can’t foist intimacy on to him now. For Christ’s sake! He won’t know what to do with it.”

She kept feeling tears rise to the brink of her voice, awful, easy tears, and she said dryly, with perfect control, “No, let’s send him on a fishing trip instead. Let’s think like a school-marm, as you’re beginning to do …”

An old man sat in a hotel bedroom in the city that night. The room was charged with an alert irritability that emanated from him and his movements and then came back at him, electrically, with the bright yellow light that sprang from the walls. The room was too small for the light and it was too small for him. Luggage, not unpacked, stood around him, bearing dangling airways labels with a flight number scrawled on them, the name “Bruno Fuecht” and the destination, “Zurich”. He stood in the middle of the room in the concentration of one possessed by what is going on in his own mind, and ceaselessly it went out toward the walls and beat back upon him again. He went to the telephone beside the bed and snapped some enquiry into it, first bringing himself to the state of communication with the world by a sharp cough and a tremor of effort that moved his head unsteadily. He waited, holding the receiver, and the middle finger of his other hand beat jerkily on his knee. He got the information he wanted, and made another request; at last, he heard the telephone ringing in a house he had never seen.

The Stilwells were in the becalmed state that follows a quarrel, when the telephone rang. The quarrel over Morgan had dragged on into a deadly examination of the dissatisfactions and burdens of their daily life, that each took as the unsaid reproach of the other. Each felt the other was known to the bone; there was no possibility that a sudden turn of courage, of frivolity, even, might reveal itself unexpectedly in one of them, and so restore something of the mystery to life itself.

Tom went slowly to the telephone. “Here is Fuecht. Fuecht. Who is speaking?” The voice ended in a crackle.

Tom did not catch the name properly. “This is Tom Stilwell. Who is it you want?”

“This is Fuecht,” the voice came back sternly. “I’m speaking from the Queen’s Hotel. I was on my way to Europe and the plane is delayed. They brought me to town and gave me a room. Listen, my plane doesn’t go till two o’clock.” “Mr. Fuecht! That’s unexpected.” Tom had the embarrassed, disbelieving tone of someone unfairly singled out by a man who had never before paid him any attention. “Can you see me?” the voice insisted. “Couldn’t you come into town? I’m at the Queen’s Hotel and I’ll only be here a few hours, I’m on my way to Europe. You’ve got a car, eh, Stilwell?”

“Well, the trouble is, it’s rather late.”

There was a strangely stirring silence on the other end of the telephone.

Why should a man who hardly knew him put such pressure on him? Tom said, “Just hold on a minute, will you, I’ll speak to Jessie. Do you mind?” There was some sort of sound of assent.

He went back into the living-room where she was lying face-down on the divan. “Have you heard anything from your mother? Anything you haven’t told me? That’s Fuecht.”

Jessie stayed quite still for a moment, and then she turned round and sat up, all in one movement. “It’s Fuecht?” The skin under her eyes seemed to tighten, as it did when she was afraid. “I ought to stop answering the phone altogether,” he said, with a feeble attempt at a joke.