Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

It was awful the way Jessie appeared sometimes, like a ruin. She could still look attractive, when she took the trouble. She did not seem to know or care that at times her face was stripped, more brutally than the gradual methods of ageing would ever come, finally, to do it, by the violence of the spirit over the flesh. There was always a great to-do, in a delayed-action, muffled sort of way, over anything that happened in the house — queer things did seem to happen to the Stilwells, like the arrival of the old man, that night, and then his dying somewhere in Europe, but even quite ordinary incidents did not pass off and get forgotten in the usual way. Most of the time, she, Ann, really could not say what it was all about. Some incident that would appear to bear no particular weight at the time, and that, if she noticed it at all, was out of mind next day, would apparently lie gathering force in some dusty corner of the shabby old house until one day, coming in out of the sunny world outside, the girl would suddenly become aware of a great rumbling disturbance passing through the human conduction system of the house — snatches of talk, looks exchanged — and would be astonished to recognise the tiny motif of the forgotten incident, now fully orchestrated. Who did this? Jessie, she supposed. Who else? Not much interested in the whole business, there was still a feminine tartness in this uncritical conclusion of Ann’s. Once Jessie’s attention was on something quite ordinary, it was lit with fancy lighting. There were shadows denser than objects and the gauze curtain of appearances melted away … If Jessie hadn’t looked at it, you would never have seen it like that. The evening she, Ann, had walked into the fuss over the kid Morgan — the way Jessie called out what had happened in that intense, ringing voice: she made you feel she expected something, some response that you didn’t have. Honestly, one did not know what to say to her. It simply didn’t seem very terrible that the poor kid slipped out to go dancing; only funny, because he was so nondescript. And, of course, it all blew over in a day or two.

The Stilwells’ friends and such of Boaz’s old friends whose affinity with him had survived a ten years’ absence provided her with the sort of company she was used to in England, but it was Len Mafolo who let her into company where she could shine. When she walked in among his white and black bachelor friends and their girls, it was as if she had been expected. With her looks, her kind of liveliness, her impatience with the limitations of a mapped-out way of life, and her background with Boaz, she would not have fitted in with the night-club and country-club set of the rich white suburbs; and among the office drab of people who mixed with blacks on a philanthropic, religious or political basis she would have been a note of scarlet. But among the show people, whose spendthrift vitality she could match, and the small group of black men who found life most approachable late at night, through talk, through music, through drink, and in the company of whites like themselves, she was at home.

For she was that new being — beginning to appear, here and there — for whom the black man in a white city waited. In her, the kicks and the snubs and the vengefulness and the hate met, complemented and merged with each other, two terrible halves of the vicious circle become whole, and healed. She was white, top-class beauty, young; young and beautiful enough for the richest and most privileged white man. She was not a woman who could not find a white man, nor was she one of the nuts, hankering for a black man as a shameful sexual aberration. Neither did she merely offer friendship, understanding, and fellow-feeling. The truth was, she looked the kind of girl who would call you Jim Fish, but dancing with her, sitting talking to her, you were man to her woman. The laws had not changed, the pass was still in your pocket; this simple miracle happened in spite of these things and far beyond them, in a realm where their repeal would have been powerless to release you anyway. It was not worth much — yet it was beyond price.

Ann took an innocent pleasure in her success. When she pushed her way into a crowded township room admiration and attention turned on her, warmly, familiarly, with all the jokes and liberty-taking that go with appropriation. There were one or two other white girls like her; not slumming, but full of joy, they could dance nearly as well as the black girls. But Ann quickly became as good as the best of the black girls; like them, she could dance with her whole body and use muscles that most white women do not know are theirs to command. Sometimes the other dancers would fall back around her and the young man who was feeling the aura of her shape in the air as they circled and stalked each other. A thrilling awareness of movement caught up the spectators, as if they suddenly could feel the world turning them in space. “Great kid! She’s terrific, this girl,” they would tell her, patronising, celebrating. The repetitive music, the coming and going of people, the animation of movement and the passivity of being available to whoever drew her into the dance made her tireless. She could have danced until she dropped. Once, on a Sunday afternoon when she had gone with Boaz and Len to have tea with his sister in her respectable Orlando house, she drew Boaz with her into a group dancing round a couple of penny whistle piccanins in the yard outside. The gathering spread into the township street and a journalist on a black paper got a picture of her, a white face whirling, and Boaz, knees splayed, among the crowd.

Len Mafolo was not much of a dancer but he liked to talk, comfortingly shut in by music and noise. He would be in the same corner from nine or ten until one in the morning, drinking, but not too much, and arguing in a slow, lofty way, as if for him getting at the truth was like picking one’s way breath-holdingly, toe-hold by toe-hold, down from some dizzy spire on which one found oneself stranded. He had almost at once forgiven Ann for going to the mine dances; it was a joke between them now. He understood her not very fastidious enthusiasm for anything new to her, and she understood his distaste for tribalism. He described her as a “wonderful kid”: with a pause and a shrugging snort to follow the impossibility of defining her. He liked white girls because those he knew were good to talk to as well as beautiful; she was also extraordinarily easy to work with, undiscouraged by the slowness and difficulty of getting people beyond the planning stage, tackling everything without fear of failure because she found it fun. “Don’t be so limp, Len,” she would say, fretting at his pessimistic objections.

The idea of taking round an exhibition of African paintings and sculpture — that was something he had been talking about for years, ever since he’d been a clerk at the Institute of Race Relations and had been put on to packing orders for their special Christmas cards every year. But the moment he talked to Ann about it, it began to take shape out of all sorts of impossibilities. There were not enough halls, particularly on the Reef, where the exhibition could be seen by white as well as black; “I tell you what — you need a caravan!” she said, “We’ll borrow Patrick’s — that’s it! They’ve just traded in their station wagon for a caravan.” And when he objected: “Who’s going to drive the thing around?” “Us!” she said, “You and I, of course.”

And so the impossibilities were changed, one by one. She was marvellous with the people they got to exhibit, too; if someone sent in something disappointing, she would stand looking at it with Len, and just as he was ready to say he supposed it was all right, an obstinate look would come over the bottom half of her face: “Let’s go and see him and make him dig up something better. Where does he live? Let’s go now—”