Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Tom suggested that they should phone the airline and find out when the plane was expected to be ready to leave; the truth was, he felt he could not stand waiting shut up in the hotel with the old man indefinitely, and a drive to the airport would fill in part of the time. When Tom could decently say that they had better start off, Fuecht watched with glittering eyes while the luggage was being carried from the room. Then, with one strange look round it, a curious look of blind courage, he snapped off the blazing light and walked out.

He did not speak in the car going to the airport. He seemed exhausted, or resting, or husbanding himself through the drive in the dark. At the airport he became talkative again; the strength of his desire to be gone, the desperate glee of his going, trembled through his body ecstatically. Now and then he said: “Let them both look for me. Not a penny. Not a penny. I’m going to spend the lot, you understand.”

At last he was called. The number of his flight echoed and re-echoed through the airport halls, and Tom watched him walk down the brightly-lit ramp to the dark runway. He did not look back or wave. He walked slowly but the extreme lightness of his body, hardly there at all inside the tailor’s shape, suddenly came to the young man watching. Tom noticed for the first time that he was immaculately dressed, like a corpse laid out in new clothing for its long journey. There was a moment’s last glimpse of the face; the mouth was stiff, a little open, the eyes looked straight ahead into the dark. Then the figure came out in the stream of light from the aircraft, and was seen climbing, through the shafts of moted light, up the gangway.

Jessie woke the instant Tom moved into the room. She put up her hand and turned on the light, full in his eyes. Frowning, he moved the lamp’s neck.

He began to describe to her how the old man had been, standing with his luggage, ready to go, in the hotel room. He did not know how to convey the queerness, the dread, the sickness, defiance — madness, perhaps, in that room. But she seemed to know at once exactly what he had found there. She pressed her fist into her cheek and cried out, from something in herself: “He still wants to live! Isn’t it terrible? He still wants to live!”

Tom’s mind turned, like the needle of a compass coming to the north, to one utterance among all the nightmare mutterings of that night. “She’s never been much like a daughter.” There it was; he could not leave it alone. It rose out of the jumble of ravings, boastings, imprecations.

Other phrases came to join it. “Only she couldn’t have loved him so much, could she?”

What else had the old man said? Suddenly, because it became important to Tom to remember that part of the evening, he could not; it was all muddled up with the other things that sounded through his head in the old man’s voice. “Jessie’s only a stepdaughter”—he could hear himself offering, platitudinous, soothing; he had been so busy treating the old man like an invalid or a lunatic that he had not listened properly. What was it the old man had said? “That was kept up, of course” or “Her mother kept that up”—something like that. Again and again Tom sounded the same note, like a piano tuner looking for true pitch: “The memory of poor Charles … only she couldn’t have loved him so much, could she?”

He watched Jessie when she was unaware. What would it mean to her if she knew that she was Bruno’s daughter? Was she Bruno’s daughter? And at times it seemed to him: she knows she is really his daughter. It would be like her mother to have told her, when she was a young girl, perhaps, or half-child, half-girl, and to have made her see at the same time the necessity for conspiracy to conceal the fact, for her mother’s sake.

He felt an obscure danger in the possibility of asking her. Suppose she did not know? Suppose it was true and she had never known?

Days went by and soon he knew he would never ask her. He would never tell her the things Fuecht had said; or seemed to say. Yet he continued to think about it all, to be aware of this twilight tunnel of his wife’s life, walled-up, lost and over-grown, an extension of herself, hidden, or perhaps unknown to her.

A week later they knew that Bruno Fuecht was dead. He had died in a hospital in Rome. They never knew why he had left Zurich. Of course, he had not taken “every penny” with him, after all; he had transferred considerable sums to Switzerland, but there were still a number of investments and a substantial sum of money in South Africa. His mental state must have been such that he believed he had done what he had said; or perhaps this discovery, after his death, was contrived as just such another malicious laugh as he had sometimes had at his wife’s expense when he was alive?

Mrs. Fuecht was in the Stilwell house, come upon strangely, at all hours of the day, sitting on the verandah, or in a corner of the empty living-room, with her hat on. She had arrived from Port Elizabeth two days after Fuecht disappeared. Jessie treated her with quiet consideration; it was understood that, although she could not be said to be bereaved, she was certainly more alone. She had outlived two husbands, and was old. The two women talked of Bruno Fuecht as of some practical problem, a condition of life that had existed, and that, in its passing, had left things a certain way; there were ends to tie up.

“I wonder if it would be best to sell his car in Port Elizabeth or have it railed up here.”

“He’d had it reconditioned just the month before last. Heaven knows why, if he was going away. New seats, all real leather. I don’t suppose it’ll fetch anything.”

But Tom, coming upon mother and daughter talking like this, as he often did during those days, was filled with tenderness for Jessie. He was overwhelmed with pity for the lack of grief in this death. He sat on the verandah with the two women night after night, and their quiet words fell upon him like stones. Suddenly one evening he found it in himself to ask — an impulse of curiosity, idly remembered—“Bruno Fuecht — why did you never leave him, I often wondered?”

Mrs. Fuecht said without a pause, “I gave him my whole life; I did not think I could let myself lose his money, as well.”

There was a silence; if the jangle of the dinner-bell, that Elisabeth was ringing for Agatha, had not broken it, it might have gone on for ever — there seemed to be no words that could have ended it. Tom touched his wife, and she turned, awake, with a slight smile. They rose like lovers; for lately the sense of strangeness that one being has for another had come back between them.

Mrs. Fuecht went home to the coast to settle her affairs. Jessie felt that an immeasurable lapse of time separated her from the friendly comings and goings, the odd hours and long gossips of her days at the Agency office. Her job in the suburbs and the presence of her mother in the house had kept her away from familiar haunts. The arrival of Fuecht, that night, was something she seemed to have called up from the descent into the past that Morgan had forced upon her. The man had come and gone, and she had not seen him; would never see him again. Yet the shock of his coming when he did had established a connection. The connection existed in her mind alongside the answer that her mother had made to Tom’s queer question: “I had given him my whole life; I did not think I could let myself lose his money, as well.” The past rose to the surface of the present, free of the ambiguities and softening evasions that had made it possible in the living. Her mother spoke as someone who has accomplished her life, however bitterly. Nothing could be more extraordinary to Jessie than the discovery that, however remotely differently arrived at, this, her own need, had existed in her mother.