Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Ann was scarcely attracted to him at all, in the strong and sudden way that she had felt matters settled beyond protest between herself and other men. Yet when she saw that he was aware of her, keenly but casually, granting her the power of her sex and beauty but in no way over-valuing her — she was like someone who has no intention of playing the game but finds his hand go out irresistibly to return the ball that comes flying at him. Her sex and her beauty were her talent, her life’s work, the grace of her being that other human beings felt in her; whatever else engrossed her was, in all innocence, mere pastime. The vivid sense of life that she felt when people saw her walk in with Shibalo, laugh at private jokes with him, drive away with him in her little car, came as much from a subtle use of her gifts as from his company. It was a new and amusing variation of their employment to show other men, simply by a companionable silence with Shibalo over a cup of coffee, that she could ignore them for a black man, if she pleased, in addition to all the other incalculables the hazard of her desirableness contained. Even in the restricted clandestine fringe of the city’s activities that was open to Shibalo and her, this was an attitude that carried some subterranean force and audacity, and was seen in the context of the white city, to which, after all, she belonged, and to which she could return whenever she chose.

One afternoon Shibalo remembered the billiard table: “What have you done about it?”

Len made a gesture that suggested the idea had never been serious.

“Ann, eh? What’s happened?” Len seemed always in a lower key than the other two, now, and Shibalo instinctively tried to counter this by an impatient quickening of his own vitality.

“I forgot all about it — so did you,” Ann said to Shibalo.

“I want to have a look at it. Come on, let’s go.”

They were packing up the exhibition; Patrick wanted his caravan back. Everything was dismantled, and lay about, ready to go into the crates. The sun made a structure of hazy blue bars out of the cigarette smoke.

Ann was examining her dirty hands with absorption. She looked up at the stacked pictures and the mess, from Len to Shibalo.

“Come on.” Shibalo was on his feet.

A mixture of opposition and indulgence characterised Ann’s response to him: “I haven’t said a word to the Stilwells, you know.”

But though Shibalo took it for granted that the whole interest in the billiard table was on behalf of Len, and Len found himself suddenly assumed to be taken up again, he would not go with them. “Look at this”—his satisfaction in the work to be done was obstinate.

As they were driving, Ann said, “You know Jessie Stilwell, don’t you?” “I suppose so.” When they got to the house there was silence, anyway. Not even the children were there, and the servant was in her own quarters. Ann’s voice sounded through the rooms and up and down the stairs; Shibalo’s was a murmur behind it. She lugged aside broken toy wagons, frayed baskets, mud-stiffened gardening shoes and an old chandelier, and there was the billiard table, wedged against the wall, on its side. “Match size. That’s what I thought. Most of the felt’s finished.” They tried to pull it upright, but there was no room to turn it over. “I’m sure they’ll be glad to get rid of it. Would you really take it?” She knew that he lived in Alexandra township, but she had never wondered how, in what sort of place, though she knew the cabins, shacks, backyard rooms and occasional neat houses of Alexandra. His shoulders hunched with his inward chuckle. “I might.”

“Have you got somewhere to put it?” On her haunches, she smiled at him in the gloom. “I’ve got a place — maybe. There’s a flat in Hillbrow.” “Hillbrow?” It was a white suburb. So often she felt he simply gave her an answer, any answer, while he was thinking of something else. “Yes,” he said, with a touch of reserve, “Couple of chaps I know. I stay there sometimes.” He chuckled again: “It might be a good idea to give them a present of a billiard table.” “It’s supposed to be for Len.” “Oh of course, I can take anyone there I like. They don’t play.”

They pushed the table back into position, grunting and laughing; Ann was in her element at this kind of headlong activity. A splinter from the leg went into Shibalo’s thumb, and though he said nothing beyond the first exclamation, when they came out of the storage-place she saw that his hand was trembling with pain. “Oh look, it’s an awful one.”

He held up his hand; the splinter was driven like a wedge into the smooth dark skin beside the second thumb joint. She tried to get it out, and while she did so, concentrating on the broken butt of wood that could be felt sharp, dead and hard against the live, cold thumb, his hand came alive to her. This was he, this big slim hand half-curled and slack, like a living creature itself. The fingertips throbbed faintly, their skin showed their own unique engraving of whorls. There was an expression in the set of the fingers as there is an expression in the features of a face.

For a moment the quality of the reality she was experiencing underwent a swift change. It was as if she woke up from an idle day-dream and found herself holding some unexplained object brought with her from a dream-world.

When the splinter was out they went into the living-room and had a drink. She had never had the house to herself before, that she could remember, and she felt herself in possession of it in a special way, as a child does when she creeps into a deserted house through a broken window. She took him upstairs to show him a woodcut in Jessie’s room, and some carved figures Boaz had picked up in his wanderings. Their movements from room to room, pauses in their chatter, had the rhythm of a dance through the house.

They were about to drive away when she found she had forgotten the car-keys and went running back into the house. As she raced downstairs again, she suddenly saw the profile of Mrs. Fuecht’s seated figure, through the open doorway into the dining-room. She stopped; in the moment, the old woman turned her head. The girl was drawn across the entrance hall, through the door, to the window where the old woman sat.

“Hullo. All alone?” The girl’s face had the blind eagerness of a face in a high wind; nerve-endings alive, responses on the surface, like the flash of sun or the shiver of wind on water.

The old woman scarcely existed in the moment. Her carefully powdered face was a mummification of such moments as the girl’s; layer on layer, bitumen on bandage, she held the dead shape of passion and vitality in the stretch of thick white flesh falling from cheekbone to jaw, the sallow eyes and straggling but still black eyebrows holding up the lifeless skin round them, and the incision of the mouth. The lips showed only when she spoke, shining pale under a lick of saliva:

“It seemed I never would be.”

The air bridled between them. “Can I get you anything?” said Ann.

The old woman smiled. “What?”

“I just wondered …”

“Oh, I know. Now and then one notices other people and is at a loss.”

The girl laughed and the old woman took it like a confession. But it was an exchange of confidences: she said, “As time goes by there seem to be more of them — other people. And then, all of a sudden, you’re one of them.”

Ann sat down on the edge of a small table.

“Weren’t you on your way?”

Their eyes met, blank and intimate. She got up. “I’ll be going then.” She paused, a bird balancing a moment on a telephone wire. “Goodbye.”

The old woman did not change the angle of her head over her book while the front door banged and the clip of heels faded down the path, but when the house was silent again, the alert spread of her nostrils slackened. The silence where the voices of the girl and the unknown man had sounded was the silence within her where many voices were no longer heard.