Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

The eucalyptus plantation was not more than twenty minutes from town; it belonged to one of the dying gold-mines near Johannesburg. Ann was sure they couldn’t be seen there, though, leaning on her elbow, she could see men cross the veld from the shafthead not far away. The little old houses of the white married quarters near by were not lived in. She got up and began to pick the narrow leaves from her dress. “This is a good place to dump a body,” she said, with a laugh. “You know. You see those photographs on the front page with an arrow next to a tree — that’s where it was found after a three-day search.”

The dry, clean smell of the eucalyptus was strong; under the trees it was cool as menthol, in the hot sun it had the live fragrance of burning wood. There was no stir in the air but the leaves moved silently in the evaporation of heat as if unseen insects clambered among them. A dove throbbed regularly in the heart of the manmade wood. The city was so near they might have put out a hand and touched it.

“Do you think you are the kind that gets murdered?” he said proudly.

“… Nobody ever thinks they’re the kind. Who does get murdered anyway?” She appealed to him when she talked; he challenged her — that was their game of communication. Her eyes were lazily following the blanketed figure of a man on the veld path; he bent to pick up something, probably a safety pin he had dropped, and then took off the blanket, cast it out round himself, and secured it closely under his neck. They were both watching him now, and they laughed. “That’ll keep out the cold.” “He’s come up off shift,” Shibalo said. “It’s dark and wet down under the ground and now he’s going back to the compound for his phuthu and his nyama .”

“I wonder where he comes from,” she said. “These mines are worked out, or just about. We came this way one day when I first arrived — with the Stilwells and everybody. We saw them dancing at one of these mines.” The man walked on, unaware of their eyes on him, and disappeared out of sight round the yellow pyramid of a mine dump.

“People get murdered for money,” he said, lying back. “Where I come from it’s money. And women get murdered by men,” he added.

She looked at him, and smiled, and gave a brief toss of her head, to settle her hair and liven the angle of her neck.

Presently she came over and squatted beside him as if she were making herself comfortable at a fire, and said, “Boaz is coming home soon.”

“Wasn’t he home last weekend?”

“I mean he’s coming home to stay. For a while.”

“Your husband is your affair,” he said, stroking her ankle.

She liked to be free, but not as free as that. She smiled brilliantly and her forehead reddened. “I know,” she said, with an uprush of confidence and gaiety. Then suddenly: “Let’s go and buy lunch at Baumann’s Drift Hotel.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “I’m sure that would be lovely.”

“Why not? I mean it. I can go in and tell them I want lunch packed up to eat on the road, and a bottle of wine.”

“You can send the boy in to get it,” he said, grinning.

“That’s right.”

They got into the car and drove off over the veld to the track; the man they had seen, or another in a blanket like his, was sitting on an old oil drum, smoking a pipe. He was talking to another man who still wore his tin helmet and yellow oilskins from underground, and as the two looked up, unhurriedly and incuriously as the car brushed them, Shibalo slowed down and hailed them. They were suspicious and startled, and then their faces opened in delight. Whatever it was that he said seemed to shock them and make them laugh; they called back after him, still laughing. Ann was excited by the ease of this communication. “How did you know they’d understand?” “I talked to them in Shangaan. It’s the first language I ever spoke, up at my grandfather’s place. I could see they were Shangaans, they’re chaps from Moçambique. They were very polite.” “Did you see, the one had clay ringlets in his hair,” she said, her eyes shining. “Of course, that’s the right thing for a young man.” He was laughing with her, in a kind of pride.

They stopped just off the main road to eat the lunch they got from the hotel, and sat under a tree where any passing motorist who looked twice might see them. Neither mentioned the dangerous carelessness of this, or suggested that they might be more discreet. Ann met with the insolence of disregard the outraged curiosity of a woman who kept her face lingeringly turned toward them from a car window; she must have drawn her companion’s attention to the sight, for the car faltered before taking up the speed of its approach again.

That evening, on the way home from a party, some white friends that they were with tried to get Gideon into a night-club with them. Someone’s brother was a member and had a bottle there, and there was a black cabaret act: these were the grounds on which, rather drunk, the party thought they would bluff their way into admittance. The story was that Gideon was a singer himself and brother of the leader of the act. “He’ll sing for you, you’ll see”—the amiable insistence of one of the young white men produced in the manager, who had been summoned to deal with the crisis, the special shrewd sternness, the clench-teeth lunatic tact, of the man who smiles in the patron face all his life and loathes and despises it. The party stood round him in the dim entrance among gilt mirrors, cigar smoke and muffled music; their appearance, the pretty, animated women, the authoritative, light-hearted air of the men, was like a distressing caricature of the scene inside, where such people were being subserviently tended, and where drunken whimsicality, fumbling sex, and argumentativeness, were respectfully condoned.

“You’ll understand, Mr. Solvesen, sir, I can’t do it. I’d lose my licence. I dare not even let the artists sit down at a table after they’ve been on.” The man’s eyes were dead with rage against these arrogant young fools who pretended not to know the vast difference between natives employed to serve or entertain and some educated black bastard sitting himself down, like one of themselves, among the members. He wanted to throw them out, but a long discipline of sycophancy held him back: he had an idea that although the brother was an insignificant member he had been introduced by and sometimes was in the party of a wealthy and important financier.

Ann, who was leaning amiably against the red velvet wall and pinching the plastic laurels of a fake Caesar on a cardboard pillar, said, “Oh, poor little man, let’s leave him alone.”

The group left quite calmly, exchanging private jokes. The girl who had spoken was good-looking, sure of herself; could one understand them? Suddenly, for no reason at all, the man in evening dress felt like a lackey — but of course , a black man was good enough for them to laugh with and slap on the back.

Boaz came home at the weekend again; he had been moving about as much as he could in the Eastern and Northern Transvaal, but the summer — the rainy season — was not a good time for field-work, and at the beginning of April he meant to come home finally to prepare for a long field-trip during the dry winter months. He brought a bottle of aquavit with him, and although it was still warm enough to sit on the old verandah in the evening, he and Ann and the Stilwells drank it instead of their usual gin or beer. Two small glassfuls each produced that stoking-up of social responses that the neat liquor of cold countries is famous for, and by the time the servant Agatha called them to dinner they were ready to open a big flask of chianti that was being saved for a special occasion, and to make a banquet out of the stew. Jessie felt too lazy and disinclined to absent herself from the others to put the little girls to bed, and they ran in and out as they pleased, left out of, but nevertheless infected by, the grown-ups’ mood. Only Morgan, who had arrived from his farm holiday the day before, remained unaffected. “Give him a glass of wine,” Jessie said. But he did not want it. “For God’s sake, you’re old enough now,” she said. “It’s wasted on me,” he said, with a smile. “I don’t like the taste.” He was innocent of the despising look she rested on him. He was going back to school in the morning. His hair was sunburned along the hairline and shone phosphorescent there; brown skin made his face more definitive but his voice was finally breaking and the awkward uncertainty of its pitch seemed cruelly appropriate to him. He made her restless, like a piece of furniture that never looks right in any room. The conversation was lively with anecdote and mimicry and the broad verbal gestures of vigorous people among their own kind. The atmosphere was not cosy, stressing the relationships of the four men and women to each other, but independent: each individual enjoying the licence of an adulthood that had no rules except those of personal idiosyncrasy. Morgan sat quiet, as the bewildered will; he thought that he could think of nothing to say, but the fact was that he had nothing to say in the context of talk that, as usual among grown-ups at home, ran counter to the tenets of adulthood that they taught him . In order to qualify as an adult (they said) one had to be kind, controlled and respectful of human dignity. Yet they criticised their friends and the people they worked with, laughed and shouted each other down, and referred with veiled bawdy cynicism to love. He was afraid to admit to himself that the rules they thrust on him were merely some kind of convenience, some kind of fraud by devaluation; and he had no way of knowing the inner disciplines by which they lived.