Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

A day or two after Mrs. Fuecht had gone, she left the nursing-home office at one and went to the western end of town to her old lunching-place, the Lucky Star. She had not been there for six weeks or more; there was the old smell of curry and chips, and the board in the doorway still said, “Try our famous Eastern delicacies, grills and boerewors.” Uncle Jack, the proprietor said, “How’ve you been — that’s nice,” as he always did, his sad Levantine face, produced by some alchemy of white, Indian, Malay and probably African blood, appearing to look up from his little gambler’s notebook, but not pausing in his calculations, and she turned to the tables with convalescent ease, ready to sit placidly over lunch with whoever was there that she knew. It was then that she noticed Ann, facing her at a table in one of the booths, with Len Mafolo’s back to the room. She went over to them and as she did she saw that the man was not Len. “Just push my things on to the floor.” Ann’s face was flung up at her, brilliant. “Will you have a delicious coke, that’s what we’re drinking.” “Pretty heady stuff. Wait, I’ll order some more,” the man said, swivelling round in his seat to summon one of the Indian waiters, and Jessie recognised Gideon Shibalo, the school-teacher, the painter. They had met somewhere, years ago.

She doubted if Shibalo could have remembered her; yet Ann talked to them both as if they had known each other intimately for a long time. “You’ll be relieved to hear that we won’t have to trot out those same two old pictures of his on our next exhibition — she’s one of your most faithful deplorers,” she added, to Shibalo. They might be drinking coke now, but they had been drinking brandy. There was a heightened tempo about them that made Jessie aware that she was too sober.

“As long as she’s faithful, that’s what matters.” Shibalo had a low, chuckling, snickering private laugh, with which he prefaced such remarks; it was directed at himself. His yellow-brown face, older than he was, had little whorls of uneven black wool sticking here and there between chin and ear — perhaps not a beard, but laziness about shaving over the past few days. He was dressed in a shabby way that suited him, with a red and black checked flannelette shirt, and the end of his trousers’ waistband tucked in against his belly.

“What sort of things are you doing?” Jessie asked.

“Come and see.” He woke up to the full plate in front of him, began to press and turn the rice and meat with his fork as if it were some plastic material rather than something meant to go into his mouth.

“Still the knotty stick-shapes and the sky with dust hanging in the air?”

He smiled in acknowledgement. “Ah, that’s out.” He put down the fork after a mouthful or two and took out a cigarette. “I’m in a different mood, these days. I hadn’t painted for so long my fingers creak.” He clasped his hands and cracked the joints.

“Serve you right,” said Ann, taking a cigarette from him and beckoning for the matches: “ Please! ” “Oh, sorry!” They smiled at each other. While Ann talked and ate she kept looking out round the room, neck held high, excited and assertive. “Len thinks we can get a bigger caravan. Not borrowed, but hired. We’ll use it part of the time, and we’ll let it to the Boys’ Club, and things like that, to cover the cost.”

“Pity you can’t buy one. We’d hire it from you to go on holiday — Tom wants to go to Pondoland in July …”

They talked trivialities with ease, but from the moment she saw Gideon Shibalo’s face Jessie had become aware of a sense of intrusion so strong that she felt it physically — her hands were awkward as she used her knife and fork. She talked, but she was in retreat behind every word as if to efface herself from the company.

She did not wait for coffee. “Oh Jessie,” Ann was quite effusive, “would you find out from Agatha whether my blue dress is back from the cleaner’s? And if not, would you be a dear and phone them about it?” The sudden request had the trumped-up ring of the little chores that Jessie herself often invented to distract one of the children.

“Of course. — I’ll look forward to seeing the new Shibalo,” she said to the man.

“You won’t like it.” —In the superior way that painters refer to a new trend in their work.

The open street, jagged with light, and small hard shadows of a hot day, broke upon her. They’re lovers; they’re lovers: she thought, and felt herself abruptly returned to the life around her, that had been going on all the time.

Ann Davis had not thought, when she left England, that she would be spending much time in Johannesburg. She enjoyed the feeling that she had left behind the risk of the Chelsea flat or Hampstead or Kensington house from which so many of her friends looked out, captured, unlikely to get at the world. Marrying Boaz, she had been admitted to the select band who returned only at intervals from teaching jobs in Ghana, study grants in America, or one of those world organisations, born of United Nations, that seek to make deserts bloom here, and limit teeming population there, in the more fatalistic wilderness of the earth. She thought of herself as lucky; and no one could suggest, even, that a return to South Africa, for Boaz, was a condonement of the white man’s way of life there, for he was returning only to do something that could not be done anywhere else — to study the black man’s music, part of the heritage that was becoming as much of a cult as it had once been culturally discounted. This was important to her, socially; she accepted it just as, if she had belonged to another set and another time, she would have accepted that it did not do to be in trade. She was not really concerned with politics. The surge of feeling against the barriers of colour was the ethos of the decade in which she had grown up; her participation in it was a substitute for patriotism rather than a revolt. She had no lasting feelings about the abstractions of injustice; like many healthy and more or less beautiful women, she could only be fired to pity or indignation by what she saw with her own eyes.

The field-trips with Boaz had not been a disappointment to her. She was seldom disappointed, anyway, but the very freshness that all things had for her tempted her away lightly from one to another. She played happily with the Pedi children, making stick boats to sail in the muddy river, and she got on well with the women despite the language difficulty. She had an intelligent grasp of the fundamental pattern of tribal life that the people tried to confuse — through secrecy, shyness, or a mistaken desire to please — before the eyes of strangers, and her good memory was often a help to Boaz. When she sat in the tent, under the lamp’s circling galaxy of insects, making fair copies of his sketch-notes of musical instruments, he was aware of no difference between her absorbed interest and his own. But the fact was that the day’s task was sufficient to her, while for him it stretched on to the distant end of his life, old age or death would interrupt him at it …

She began to stay behind in Johannesburg more and more, simply because there were so many things she was asked to do, and they were all new to her, just as the field-trips had been. The idea of living in the bush was somehow never unpacked, like one of those apparently essential garments that turn out not to be needed for the climate after all. When Boaz came home for a weekend, there was so much to tell him — they lay awake for hours, smoking in bed. He smiled in the dark and stroked her smooth, cool arm while she talked.

Patrick, their photographer friend, and his wife Dodo were a pair whose enthusiasms bloomed like daisies — hardly a week went by when she was not caught up in their activities, which invariably concerned some rearrangement of the physical world that contained them. They dug a swimming pool or knocked a wall down, lugged rocks for the garden, and swopped a twoseater for an old caravan; the house they lived in, the disposition of walls and chairs, car, trees and even landscape — these stood around them like a set of blocks that, in the hands of children, is constantly changing shape. Ann joined in this game of house with enthusiasm, enjoying the dirt and the mess and the picnicking that accompany amateur undertakings. She often thought that it would have been fun if she and Boaz could have lived with Patrick and Dodo instead of with the Stilwells, but of course Boaz thought the earth of the Stilwells. It didn’t much matter, anyway. She was free to do as she pleased and the Stilwells, nice enough in their way, did not bother her. Although she got on well with Jessie down at the Agency — indeed, it was through Jessie that she had got to know Len and thereafter, through Len, the city world of young black men and girls where she found herself so pleasantly accepted — Jessie at home was often, so to speak, out of sight for her. Just as, in a musical work, there may be whole phrases that are out of the range of your understanding for one stage of your life at least, if not for ever, so there are sometimes people whom some stage in one’s own life, or composition of one’s own self-hood, prevents one from following all the way. Ann saw the Stilwells’ life as a set of circumstances — children, the queer elder kid from some other marriage, ugly old house, not enough money. There it was, remote as old age. She did not think of it as something that had begun somewhere different and might be becoming something different. The present was the only dimension of time she knew; she woke every day to her freedom of it.