Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“Then they use the billiard table for a floor and build the house again on top. — But we could go and look at it, anyway?” said Len.

“I’ll ask Jessie what they think of doing with the thing, if anything.”

“You want to come and play tonight?” Shibalo asked Len.

“Thanks — I’m going to a concert with Ann and Boaz.”

Gideon was wandering about the caravan, quite at home now; he took down two pictures and exchanged their positions. “I might be there. I’m supposed to be there. — Who’s this guy out of the Bible?”

“Ann’s husband.”

“I’d like to meet your husband.”

She grinned at him. “He’d like to meet you.”

He had already turned to something else, in the manner of people who do not want to make the effort at real communication but toss a remark, like a small coin, as a signal of passing attention.

At the concert at the university they saw him on the other side of the hall, tall and carefully dressed, with a white woman whose short, flying grey hair and high pink brow made an authoritative head. He bent with her over the programme and seemed another person in this company.

Ann pointed him out to Boaz: “ That’s Shibalo over there.” Boaz twisted in his seat to see; he knew the story of Gideon Shibalo’s scholarship and how he’d had to give it up for political reasons. There were quite a number of people that she knew, and her attention was caught, this way and that, as people came down the aisles. “Callie Stow, with him,” said Len. At intermission they saw the backs of Gideon Shibalo and the woman, in a group that rather held the floor. He did not turn his head.

Next day he came to the exhibition — which had moved on to another school — at lunch-time and brought a large bottle of beer with him. “What about some cheese for a change?” he said, looking at the ham rolls.

“How’d you like the music?” Len wanted an opening in order to give his own views on it.

“Wasn’t there.”

“We saw you.” Ann laughed at him.

But he was unperturbed. “One can go to a concert and not be there. Sometimes you just don’t hear the music.” He shrugged.

“Well, you missed something good.”

“No doubt, no doubt.” He was overcome by weariness at the reminder of the evening, and slid his legs out across the small space of the caravan. Ann was obliged to step over them to get past.

He began to appear sometime nearly every day. Len bought cheese rolls, and if he were not there by one, the two of them sat smoking and talking without a mention of lunch. If he had not come by a quarter to two, one of them would say, at last, “Well, I’m hungry,” and then they would eat hastily, as if they had forgotten the meal.

One night the three of them went to a boxing match together; Ann had never watched boxing before. “Put on your best dress,” Shibalo ordered. “I mean it. A woman’s got to look like it at the ring-side.” They sat in front among the black promoters and gangsters and their girls. The girls in their drum-tight dresses, heels thrusting their haunches this way and that, swaying earrings beside brown cheeks and full red lips, made a splendid, squealing show; Ann pounded her knees with excitement like a schoolboy. Shibalo held her elbow as if to hold her down and explained in a swift and urgent commentary all that was going on between the two forces struggling in the ring.

Shibalo had seats for a match in a nearby town, and they went in Ann’s car to see it. Ann was delighted with the extravagant descriptions of the fighters on the handbills and posters. The brutality of the sweat-slippery black bodies, colliding and heaving apart, the bloodied eyes and the grunts of pain had for her the licence of a spectacle; she enjoyed being swept up, bobbing and buoyant, in the noise and show-off of the crowd. They went a third and a fourth time, following the African boxing promotions from town to town. Then Len said, “I’ve had enough of this craze — no thank you.” Ann and Gideon went anyway, on their own. “You won’t leave me stranded in the middle of the night in Germiston location, or wherever it is?” she asked, smiling at him. “Come on. You’ll be all right.” He made no personal assurances.

She had dropped the joke of dressing-up by now and looked even more conspicuous in the black crowd, in jeans and a leather jacket. There was a dirty fight, and a close one, and the crowd first snarled and reviled and then celebrated wildly. Gideon Shibalo got his tickets free because he knew the promoters, but apparently he considered this sufficient honour for them and never spoke to them. He pushed a way through the crowd as if he knew they would make way for him; but his indifference was met, as he and Ann passed, with glances and remarks of recognition: the regulars had seen them before, now; the white girl and the teacher were part of the circus. A brazen little caricature with stiff straightened hair darted out long red finger-nails to feel Ann’s coat; someone smiled into her face.

The looks, the casual remark of faces in the crowd, set them together; it was a picture imposed from the outside, like a game that partners off strangers. Shibalo drove the car home that night. They laughed and talked all the way; neither had ever been so amusing when Len was there.

Next morning Shibalo telephoned her at the Stilwells’ house. Oddly, she was greatly surprised when she heard his voice; with Africans, she still expected to take the initiative in any attempt to keep up a friendship: they seldom did, perhaps to show you that they didn’t need you.

“Where’re you having lunch today?”

She was supposed to be out with the exhibition, as he must know. “I don’t know, Gid, I’ve got to go into town to do some shopping this morning.” “What about the Lucky Star or Tommie’s, then.” Those were the two places where coloured and white people mixed. “Oh, Lucky Star, I think.” She at once chose the one where she went often, where everyone she knew went and was seen.

She simply did not turn up at the Agency office, where Len usually picked her up with the caravan. At half past one, rather late, Shibalo came into the Lucky Star; she left the people she was talking to and went to him: “Come—” They had something so important to discuss that there was no need for pleasantries. He went swiftly to a table at the wall. “I felt bored stiff at the school today. Ugh, the smell of the place gets me down, the ink, the musty old books.” “Let’s have curry, then, Gid, that’s a good smell.” He looked at her slowly, resentfully, with a smile that was an open, blatant declaration, cock-sure of welcome, full of guile. “You’re the one that has the good smell. Everything you touch in the caravan is full of it. Even the coffee-cup. You hand someone a cup of coffee, and as he puts it up to his mouth there’s the smell of lilies.”

She gave the laugh that is as female as the special note that birds find when they want to call to their young. “Remember, lilies that fester smell far worse than old books.”

“Oh, I remember all right. I’m always careful not to keep them too long.”

They began to go about together. It was another craze, like the boxing one. Every day they ate at the Lucky Star; there was not much choice of places where they could eat, and the food was crude, but this did not worry them: they chose the same table each day, and had their tastes anticipated by the waiter just as, in other circumstances, they might have done at the smartest restaurant in town. And the habitués noted the beginnings of a new grouping in their composition, just as, if Ann had lunched with a white man at the Carlton Hotel, the daily presence of a champagne bucket at the table would have made the necessary announcement. There are certain human alliances that belong more to the world than to the two people who are amusing themselves by making them; this diversion taken up by Shibalo and Ann was one. She was not the first white woman who had been interested in him, but she was perhaps the best-looking, and certainly the least discreet. The open flirtation, for the fun of it, meant more than going to bed with a white woman who was frightened to be seen with you in the street.