Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“Christ, I want to know too. I promised weeks ago.”

“Well, you better do something about it, because he’s going to Cape Town for six weeks. — Hey, what have you got there—”

Clem and Elisabeth had smoothed out the sheets of Jessie’s crumpled letter and folded them into shapes that would hold water. “Water-bombs! Water-bombs!” Elisabeth shrieked and boasted, throwing hers, that she had filled at the garden tap.

“Don’t leave the water running,” said Jessie, in a voice of patient repetition.

“They’ve used some letter of yours!” Tom’s voice rose.

“I know. I’d thrown it away, anyway.”

“Why on earth …” He looked at her with amused, slightly aggressive curiosity.

“It was wrong.” She waved a hand to dismiss it.

While she returned to what she had been saying to Boaz, Tom glanced at the wet paper-shape covered with words running into each other. “Who was it to?”

“—Morgan—” she said in quick parenthesis.

“Why on earth write a long letter to Morgan and then throw it away.”

She looked at him for a moment to make him see that he was putting her to the trouble of providing an answer. “Haven’t you ever written a letter that had to be torn up?”

“But to Morgan?”

“Why not?” said Boaz.

Jessie smiled to discount his objection and opened her hands and clapped them loosely together before her again in indication of her own crazy lapse.

“You do that with love letters,” Tom said. “Write them and tear them up and write them again. What was it all about, though?”

“Oh nothing. Nothing for Morgan. Nothing that would interest him, that’s all.”

“But what was it about?” Tom was encouraging, cornering her.

“Well, if you really want to know.” Her face was a mixture of annoyance and the reluctant pleasure of giving oneself away. She said matter-of-factly, as if repeating something that she had heard or read, “I was just thinking how sex fills one’s life for so many years. Sex in its various aspects, I mean; looking for men, securing to yourself the chosen one, seeing children as the manifestation of the bond. It’s only when and if you’ve fulfilled all this that you begin to ask the purpose of it all— for yourself , not the biological one — and to want an answer with a new kind of passion.”

What she had just been saying brought her into two separate streams of unspoken communication with the two men. Boaz recognised the mood of what she had said when they were talking alone together earlier, and it sprang alive in silent reference between them. Between her husband and her were the tremendous attempts at knowing each how the other lived, and the knowledge that the measure in which these failed or succeeded is never known. “That wouldn’t be the accepted idea of fulfilment, simply a making-room for another want,” Tom said.

Sometimes they were all at home at this time of day, even Ann. She would hear the Stilwells’ talk as the Stilwells heard the children’s — half-listening, preoccupied. What were they saying? Always the same sort of thing; a drain was blocked, someone must take the car for servicing, who would pick up Clem from her swimming class, and had the renewal of the newspaper subscriptions been remembered? The enduring surface of marriage seemed to be made up of such things; they had little meaning, no interest, and they matted together as monotonously as a piece of basket-work. Her eyes rested often on Boaz. She liked him. They had always managed almost entirely without any paraphernalia to hold them up. She wondered if, in fact, he really liked living like that. It might have been to please her. She thought, with resentment making a quick fist inside her again, he would do almost anything to please her, but he could ask, as if prompted by the knowledge of some inadequacy in her that he did not admit, “Do you know what it’s all about?”

Gideon was doing a tremendous painting of her. It was larger than life and the incised line along the solid brushstrokes released the figure from the flat background. She kept going back to look at it while she was in the room with it, not as a woman admires herself in a flattering portrait, but in an excitable and terrifying curiosity: there was no surface likeness to provide reassurance; she knew it was the likeness of what he found her to be.

She had an awareness of him as a single creature unrelated to any other. She did not know his parents or his brothers and sisters, who might have shown less attractively the looks and movements she thought of as his alone, neither did she know his real friends (Len, she suspected, did not count as one), who might have exhibited views and opinions that, although she thought them entirely his own, in fact he shared with others.

She brought this awareness of the man she had just left into the company of the Stilwells and Boaz as unthinkingly as a dancer carries her posture from the rehearsal that has occupied her afternoon. They chatted as they had always done, sometimes joking, sometimes silent, often interrupted by children, now and then rising to an argument, or getting into a discussion. She was reassured, not only for herself, but also, oddly, for them all, by the ease with which she could resume her place among them. It had the same effect on her as the sight of one’s feet in familiar shoes may have when one sits down, rather drunk, among the press at a party.

She was hardly aware of how she was going or what direction she was taking. The only conception she had of her life at that time came one evening when they were sitting outside after the sun went down. With her head tipped back over the hard rail of the chair she saw the upstairs windows of the house, open to the sky, space shading off into the high, last light. All the meaning of the almost-past summer gathered for her in the vision of Jessie’s old house — ugly old house — as it was this evening and had been so many evenings, with the windows open like hands and a first bat fluttering without sound, wandering and rising. None of the others saw the creature; it was only the acute angle at which she had let her head fall back that let her see it. It was in the air above them all, soft, deaf, remote, steered by warnings and attractions they lacked a sense to apprehend.

Boaz said to the Stilwells, “If I go to Moçambique, you don’t mind if she stays on here?”

“Naturally. If she doesn’t go with you.” There was a pause after Jessie spoke. “I must get started sometime,” Boaz said. “My whole organisation up there’ll break down if I don’t.”

Tom said, “And anything can happen — there could be a political blow-up at any time, you might not be able to get in.”

Behind this sensible talk the Stilwells saw that Boaz no longer assumed that the house was also Ann’s home whether he was there or not: it sounded as if he were already considering her life as separate from his own.

But he said, “If I’m not here, there’s no one who can do anything for her. At least if she’s living here she’s got some sort of a base …?” He added, “Without being unfair to Gideon Shibalo, he can’t actually look after her much.”

Jessie was not looking at him; she had her left elbow supported in her right hand, the left hand covering her face below the nostrils. He said to them, almost exasperated, with a little laugh, “I can’t say anything to him. And I can’t just leave her to it. Not really. I want to let her do what she has to, I mean she’s free to live her own way … but I can’t leave her to it — as things are.”

Tom’s father was spending a week in the house and Jessie went now to give him some newspaper cuttings on indigenous bulbs that she had kept for him. He had just come in from the garden, an old man whose weakening eyes always had happy tears in them, and he was full of pained shock over the condition of the rose bushes, the enjoyable shock of one eager to prescribe—“My dear, I find it difficult to credit … just shreds of leaf, shreds. What you want is to go out there of an evening with an ordinary bowl of water and a strong torch. You’ll attract those beetles in hundreds, simply fall in and get drowned, that’s all.”