Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

She called Mafolo “old Len”: the epithet for the childhood companion, the family friend … He got used to her, but sometimes when he looked at her and saw how she was like some lovely creature in its glossy coat, perfectly equal to its environment, he was seized with anxiety and hope. It was almost as if he were already reproaching himself for having missed something that, at the same time, he really knew never would be offered him.

The caravan exhibition was exactly the sort of venture that occupied Ann most happily. She knew a little bit about displaying works of art — in the fashionable sack-cloth-and-space way — because, although she did not take her attempts at various careers seriously, it was true that she had worked for a time in a small London gallery. She flew in and out of the house for nails, boxes, lengths of rope — all kinds of things — during the preparation of the exhibition. She was always running into Mrs. Fuecht, Jessie’s mother (who was in the house at the time), with the sort of object in her hands that must have appeared to require an explanation — the bathroom mirror, once, and another time a cooking-pot with an old sheet bubbling away inside it in a soup of purplish dye. The old lady showed no surprise, however — she was quite a surprise to come upon suddenly, oneself: rather an impressive old lady, slightly dotty, with the tragedy-queen air that Ann noticed often hung about aged women who were probably very attractive when young and who had given the greater part of their energies to love. “Your mother has been a beauty; she must have had lots of lovers, I suppose,” Ann said to Jessie. But Jessie laughed, and said in that menacing way of hers: “No, she was in love with me.” Perhaps Jessie was jealous of the old lady; certainly she had none of the old lady’s air. Ann always stopped, in passing, to exchange a few words with her; at least, that was what appeared to happen; what was really exchanged was a brief kindling of each other’s beauty, a flutter of recognition across fifty years. Once, the old lady seemed on the brink of beginning to talk to her — but it was not possible, that day. And one day her visit blew over, too, and she was gone.

Ann met Gideon Shibalo when she and Len were invited to take their travelling art exhibition round African, Indian and Coloured high schools. She had heard all about him before, of course; he was the man whose painting had attracted attention overseas and won him a scholarship to work in Italy, but he hadn’t been able to take it up because the South African Government refused him a passport — he was involved in politics, the African National Congress movement. He came in during the school break and stood looking at his two pictures with the removed yet fascinated air with which one glances through an old photograph album. “Talented chap,” said Len, at his elbow.

“That’s a fact.” They burst into laughter and pushed each other about a little.

“My partner in crime,” Len indicated Ann.

“Again and again, I’ve wanted to see if we couldn’t get something more from you,” she said to Shibalo, “but he said it was hopeless, you don’t paint any more.”

Shibalo chuckled, considering himself. “Hopeless. Quite right.” He and Len had an exchange, punctuated by laughter, in Sesuto. “You should have come to see me anyway.” Shibalo turned to Ann.

“Why?” she said cheerfully. “Any hope? We’ll come if you’ve got something for us, any time.”

“I’ve put away childish things,” he said.

“Don’t you worry, he can still knock out a picture if he wants to,” Len encouraged and reproached, resentfully.

“Do you dislike being probed about not painting, or do you enjoy it?”

They all laughed. “Good God, I live on it. Where has my inspiration gone? Don’t I feel light, shape, colour, thickness, thinness, what-not? Don’t I want to express the soul of Africa? Don’t I want to make the line vibrate? Don’t my guts wriggle and send new forms to my finger-tips? That chap Gauguin started at forty, I’ve stopped long before.”

He scarcely looked at the other pieces of painting and sculpture that Len and Ann were modestly proud of, and when he sat drinking coffee with them remarked that the exhibition was really “a waste of time”. “The shock of modern art — we don’t need it around here, man. You can’t shock my kids in there, in my class we’ve got three who smoke dagga, and two pregnant. Not bad, eh? And they’re not even in matric yet.”

“Sounds like a very advanced class,” said Len to Ann.

She wagged her head: “He’s done wonders with them.”

But Shibalo’s tone changed suddenly and obstinately; he stood up now, apparently bored, and made some excuse to leave. “The ah — the headmaster wants to talk to me. I promised to drop in. About sports day.” He didn’t seem to care about them being aware that he was lying; he looked the last man in the world any headmaster would choose to organise a sports day.

As he left he said: “I might change my mind.”

“About what?” said Len.

“Painting something.”

“Oh, really?” said Ann.

“Under certain conditions.”

She was alert to amusement, but unsure; his voice was serious, impersonal, bargaining.

“I might paint you,” he said. And stooped his head under the doorway, and was gone.

Ann was used to the admiration and interest of men; it was only the absence of these things that she noticed. Ten days later, when the exhibition was at an Indian school, the headmaster invited Len and her to tea in the staff room, and introduced Shibalo among the other teachers. Shibalo did not say they had met before.

“What are you doing here?”

“Inter-school sports. Some arrangements have to be settled.”

At lunch-time he was still there, and they saw him coming slowly across the field, smoking, and blinking as if the sun hurt his eyes. Len went and waited in the doorway for him. He sat with them and picked at the ham rolls they had bought on the way out to the school, and drank the coffee Ann made. He had the confidence of someone who is wanted everywhere, the moody ease of the man who pleases everybody but himself. Within the week, he turned up again; he had happened to meet Len in a shebeen the evening before, and had taken him on to the Bantu Men’s Social Centre to provide an audience for his snooker game. Len had then had a lesson from him — Len’s first. The casual chances of city life had thrown the younger man into the company of Shibalo, and Len was rather proud, as quiet, studious people invariably are, to be taken up by someone bold and amusing. He described his efforts at the billiard table, giggling apologetically, rather enjoying the new business of making a fool of himself. “But when you pocket your white ball does that wipe out your whole score? Or what?”

“No, no, boy, don’t you remember, last night, when Robert Duze pocketed his, he just lost the points he should have made with that shot — It’s a good thing I’m a born teacher,” Shibalo complained to Ann.

“Good Lord, to think I had to come to the townships to get into the company of clubmen. Len — you know I do believe there’s a billiard table lying around somewhere in the Stilwells’ house. At least it looks like a billiard table, only very small.”

“Yes, yes, they do make half-size ones.” When she talked, Gideon Shibalo watched her rather than listened.

“Where did you see it?” Len was deeply interested and sceptical.

“In that sort of cellar or boot cupboard under the stairs. I’m sure they don’t want it — you know what that house is like. Perhaps you could buy it from them?”

Len and Shibalo laughed. Shibalo was delighted. “Can you see it? A donkey cart comes along 16th street in Alex and delivers a billiard table to his house. First they take the door down to get it in. Then they take down the inside walls … Then his landlady comes home …”