Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

He smiled. “Well, how are you to know?”

“Oh I know — you don’t. Certainly not when you’re in it. But so much of your life goes in this business of sex and love. It’s horrible to think that you may find that love wasn’t in it at all. You’ve just been manoeuvring . Like a pile of crocodiles on a mud-bank. Feel the sun and simply climb up on top of one another to find yourself no nearer to it when you get there.”

He was listening to her with the mixture of wariness and curiosity with which people see through a crack into another’s wilderness. But his whole being was tethered to the thought of Ann, himself and Shibalo, and he felt always the tug on his attention, pulling him back to it. Jessie said, and was ashamed of the obviousness, the lack of real concern, in the suggestion, “You don’t think that she wants you to kick up a hell of a row? Some women want to be beaten.”

“Ann’s not the sort who gets her kicks out of punishment. She’s a tremendously happy, pleasure-finding person. You know how she is.”

“I don’t know her at all ,” said Jessie. “That’s it.”

“She can’t bear threats or rows. She knows nothing about the joys of crawling on your stomach and feeling remorse. She hates all that slimy stuff. Oh, you know how she is.”

Jessie kept smiling and shaking her head.

After a while he stood up, the movement bringing the grass around his feet alive with minute hoppers that exactly matched its brilliant green. He looked up at the house and at the sky, his long eyes shown by the unconfined light to be green, like black water where the sun strikes deep. The sky gave his face a blind look. He said under it, trying to see, “I ought to go to Moçambique. There’s that grant, you know; it’s practically sure I’m getting it.” She said, “Perhaps you can go a bit later. I don’t know … perhaps you ought to go anyway.”

“He’s an interesting chap. Hell of a lot going on there, I felt. He talks a lot and so on, but he’s really alive in secret behind that cover activity.” He drew them back to the evening a week ago.

“I like him,” Jessie said, meaning that she had admitted this before.

“Exactly. Not the sort of person you’d choose to play the fool with. Too vulnerable. You’d think twice.”

He went into the house and left her. His cigarette ceased to smoke in the sappy, succulent grass, but she saw him, his olive tan faded, with so much indoor work, to that smooth oriental pallor, his sallow hands and bare feet showing that hollow beside the tendon of each finger or toe that gives an impression of nervous energy. How bungling this beauty was, his and Ann’s, that had brought them senselessly together and given them the appearance of happiness in each other, both to themselves and onlookers. Take away the running blood, the saliva, the animation of breath, let the beauty harden into its prototypes, and even this would be found something they did not have in common, but that was diverse in the kind of consciousness that shaped it. He was opaque, his expression and posture the Bodhisattva’s outward cast of an inward discipline. She was one of those clay figures made by the Etruscans, grinning even from the gravestone.

Jessie began to write a letter to Morgan. She had brought a pad and a ball-pen out with her book, but had not used them. She wrote quickly now, tearing off one sheet after another, and looking up from time to time with her mouth parted. A barbet somewhere in the garden went off continuously like a muffled alarm clock. The afternoon was borne away steadily in the sound. She felt it going, left the letter for a moment, and when she looked back at the pages covered with the thinly-inked pattern made by the bad pen, suddenly thought: who is this for? It was one of those incoherent letters that, when you get one, causes you to remark that so-and-so seems to be in a queer state. So-and-so has not been censored by the usual wish to amuse or impress, to give a certain idea of himself.

“… little girls are always over at Peggy’s. I have the place to myself, except for Boaz, up in his room working. Everything disappears. It’s like it was when I was at home in Bruno’s house waiting to begin an imaginary life. I don’t seem to have had a second in between when I wasn’t completely concentrated on some person, blind, deaf, and busy . You remember those silk-worms, their jaws never stopped and if you were absolutely quiet in the room you could actually hear them going at it? — To have been so hungry, and not to have known why.”

“But then they were full, and suddenly knew how to spin silk.”

It would be idiotic to send it to Morgan; a nervous, hostile embarrassment came over her — it was a grown-up’s letter. She closed her fist on the sheets, squeezing them into a ball. They lay slowly opening on the grass while she dashed off the kind of note, full of studied friendly interest, that she sent to him every few weeks.

The children came home, and then Tom. “Why doesn’t Josias cut the grass?” The sun had gone down and the swells of growth made gentle troughs of shadow. Jessie answered as if to some criticism of one of her children, “It’ll be brown underneath. It’s nice.” “Yes, of course it would be brown, it’s been allowed to grow much too long.”

Madge edged herself on to her mother’s chair, pressing against her thigh. “State your case,” Jessie said, and smiled. “Oh Mummy …” the child scowled at her impatiently.

“I got good seats for Friday.”

“How many did you take?” A trio from Brazil was to play at the university hall, and Jessie wondered whether Boaz might not want to go too.

“Well, I took three … I didn’t think she’d be coming. But I suppose it looks funny not to ask.” Tom looked doubtfully at Jessie.

She smiled intimately, parenthetically. “She’ll probably be there with Shibalo.”

“I know. That’s what I thought.”

He squeezed her hand. Jessie turfed Madge off her chair like a bird pushing its fledgling out of a nest.

“We’d better not ask him to come?”

She murmured, “Difficult. Don’t know.”

She added, speaking low because although it was out of hearing the window was up there in the house behind them: “He really does seem to like Shibalo. You know how it is when the man really likes the other one. Everybody being so considerate, and no hard feelings. My heart sinks. It’d be much easier if he thought he was a louse and wanted to kick him in the backside.”

“Well of course that’s impossible this time.”

“Only because Boaz is so fastidious about everybody’s feelings, and wants her back a hundred-per-cent off her own bat! No coercion whatsoever, like a unicorn that you have to wait to have come and put its head down in your lap. It’s a lovely idea, it’s how it ought to be …”

“No, I mean because this is not a white man.”

Jessie shook her hand out of his and sat forward. “What has that got to do with it?”

“A lot. Quite a lot.”

“If you’d said that it had a lot to do with Ann I’d understand it. She wants to prove she can do exactly what she likes! She wants — well, then I’d understand it. From her point of view the whole thing has everything to do with his being a black! But Boaz, Boaz —? You know that Boaz truly never thinks about these things, he has no feeling about it at all , you’ve told me yourself that he was once keen on a black girl, he’s slept with black women—”

“Yes, yes—” Tom said for her in conclusion. “And Boaz cannot kick a black man in the backside.”

Jessie began to speak but she saw the expression on his face change to acknowledge another presence and realised that Boaz had come out of the house. The Stilwells tried to treat him without any obvious special consideration these days, but a certain concerned brusqueness sometimes crept into their manner. “I met John Renishaw today, he wants to know when you’re going to see him,” Tom said as Boaz came up.