Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

They went upstairs with loosely linked hands. Castaways thrown together on the unfamiliar island, they moved about the room with a show of being at home, secretly watching each other. He never had asked her if she was still in love with him. Lying in bed she felt a lust like sudden generosity toward him, and longed to touch him.

Yet in the morning, when the whole business hung in wait with the smell of last night’s drinking in the house, and he asked, “Are you going to see Shibalo this week?” she wrapped the hair-combings from her brush round her finger and said, “I suppose so.”

Ten days later Boaz came home. There were sheafs of notes, drawings and photographs in the bedroom, and instruments and various African cooking utensils (these had nothing to do with his studies, but he picked them up anyway) littered the upstairs landing. He was in the house surrounded by these things all day and would have come downstairs perhaps only to the smell of dinner, in the evening, if someone had not broken in upon him from time to time. One of the children would stump slowly up the stairs, sent to say that lunch was ready, if he wanted some. Agatha would shout up the well, “Telephone for Baas Davis!”

Jessie appeared with a bottle of beer wearing a glass over its neck. “Still in a muck. How long is it going to take you to struggle out of this? I’d almost forgotten your existence.” “Oh, I’ve only started unpacking. Wait till I start editing my tapes; all sorts of horrible noises — you’ll remember I’m around then, all right.” He pushed at the papers before him with a gesture of washing his hands of them. He wore an old pullover as if he didn’t know that it was an exceptionally hot day, for April, outside. The beer seemed like an offering for an invalid. He took it from her and, fishing with one foot for his sandals under a chair, said, “You know about it, of course.”

“Yes.” Jessie stood blinking slowly, wary.

“What’s he like?”

“I like him,” she said.

He smiled. “That’s all right, you don’t have to worry about it.”

“I thought everything was fine with you two. Of course it may still be, you know. It may sound a vulgar way of putting it, to you, but these things blow over. You forget about them if you live together long enough.”

“Three years.”

She said encouragingly, “Not a bad basis. The trouble is that one always begins to think one owns a person. If you really could, you wouldn’t want them any more. I don’t think that’s bitchiness or neurotic; it comes from the destruction of polarity, and the tension of attraction that goes with it. Well, sex — love, whatever — apart, you have to let the other person live as he must. I don’t know why we always talk about power as if it were something generated by and operating only in politics. It’s a ghastly thing to resist taking hold of, anywhere. Oh I’m scared of it,” she shrugged in distaste, “and I’m always fondling it, like a dirty habit.”

They laughed, and went down to lunch. Tom was home, too, and the talk was of other things, not as if Shibalo did not exist, but in acceptance of the fact that he did, indeed. It could not be expected that the whole household should be stirred by his existence; Tom, Jessie, Elisabeth, Madge, Clem — Boaz had the pull of other lives about him, and felt comforted, and lonely.

The life of the house seemed to go on as usual for the next few weeks. The situation became, astonishingly, as impossible situations often do, part of the everyday comings and goings of eight people. The coarse, elastic fibres of being, that sustained so much, matted in the new tension.

Ann left the house, alone, three or four nights a week, and was often out all day. When she was at home she helped Boaz assiduously with his work, and would come swiftly downstairs every now and then, full of enthusiasm: “Look at this! Boaz copied it himself, made it himself from reeds. Look, he had to find the right grasses to bind it together, and everything!” Sometimes, when they were all in one room, she would seem to put herself apart from them — Boaz, Tom, Jessie — abandoning her usual way of lounging or squatting where she alighted, and holding her profile clear. Whenever she came upon Jessie in any part of the house she would take the initiative of a big, blazing smile — though, as Jessie remarked to Tom, “… I’m not going to ask her anything, for heaven’s sake.”

The Stilwells supposed the affair was tailing off, in the civilised way. There were two ways such adventures died, once they weren’t going to bring about a divorce: one, the primitive catharsis, with tears, threats of suicide, and a highly emotional reconciliation; two, the civilised way, with three-cornered talks, plenty of drinks, and an exaggerated courtesy. The Stilwells had heard Shibalo’s voice upstairs one afternoon; he was being shown Boaz’s collection of new instruments. Soon all three of them, Boaz, Ann and Shibalo, came down, and Shibalo stayed to dinner. He was charming, rather like a visiting celebrity determined to be natural.

Every day when Ann went to meet Gideon she held in her mind a frame of awareness that might fall into place and mark it as the last time. There did not need to be an event or a decision, merely the word or the look, the turn of mood that would give the affair its meaning and the grounds for its destruction contained within the meaning. She neither dreaded this nor was curious about it, but it lent intensity to the inanimate witnesses of her movements — the grain of tables that she scratched with a fingernail as she talked to Shibalo, the colour and heat-tacky texture of the plastic covering on which she sat alone in the car waiting for him at mid-day. People’s faces she scarcely saw, for she was aware only, in the house, of what they might be thinking of her: a scribble of fears and impulses scratched them out, like the faces in the children’s picture-books that she saw lying about upstairs.

She could not stop seeing Gideon simply because Boaz was home; it had never occurred to her that she might not stop whenever she felt like it, but after she had told Boaz that night, she knew that this was not so simple: if she gave up seeing Gideon because Boaz had come home, it followed that she had begun a love affair with him only because Boaz was away.

The day after she had talked to Boaz, Gideon saw her standing on the balcony of the flat watching him as he came up the road. She stood there with her arms open, hands resting on the balcony rail, and he could feel her attention on him long before he could make out her face clearly. She smiled suddenly as her face came within distance of recognition, and turned and went into the flat, leaving a single trail of cigarette smoke moving gently, like a water-weed, in the air where she had stood. He hurried instinctively. In the flat she had arranged flowers that she had brought; she must have been there some time, but she wore a coat, as if she did not intend to stay. The coat came to his eye and suddenly created the status of a past tense between himself and this woman; how many times had he seen it, flung on the back seat of the car, hanging from her shoulders with the sleeves empty! He had slept with it rolled up under his head, under the blue gums. He said to her once, “Your coat’ll get dirty,” and she said, “That old thing — nothing harms it.” It had been to Norway and Turkey and Italy, this coat, that was shabby-smart and designed to make a girl like her look lost and in need of no home.

“Where’re you off to?”

“Nowhere.” She stood in the middle of the room.

He came over to her kidding, tenderly, lingeringly, “I ought to paint you in that coat. Trench warfare.” He touched the belt, fiddled with the buttons and slid his hand down into hers. They began to kiss; when she felt him about to release her she held him and when he felt her about to draw away he enticed her closer. “You’ll find another model,” she said. “What about a picnicker — wha’d’you-call-it, an open-air companion.” “That too, I suppose.”