Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“Really, Dad? Will they?” It was true that Gideon had nowhere to take Ann to.

“… done it time out of number. An ordinary mixing basin will do …”

Where did he come from, when he was not living secretly at that flat? Somewhere there was a wife, children, old friends, a kinship — a man’s life couldn’t be lived by permission in the hours when someone else didn’t need a flat.

“… when I was a boy, it was a paraffin flare. Tom’s got a strong torch, of course?”

“Oh I think so. Clem’s got one. From last Christmas — if it’s not broken.” They couldn’t go away together. He couldn’t keep her; not on an African schoolteacher’s earnings. Did it ever come to that? Jessie thought of the other white girl she knew who had fallen in love with an African; the girl had kept him, and saved the money to get them both to Ghana or Nigeria or somewhere. Shibalo, for all his talent, no matter what he was, was on the receiving side, and the receiving side was always at a disadvantage.

“A tin basin will do.”

She turned her attention to the old man with a special softening of desire to please, because she had not been listening to him. He seemed to her, as the old often do to the young, endearingly innocent. Children were supposed to be, but she seldom found them so. There was Morgan, apparently born with all kinds of terrible knowledge. What she thought of as innocence was the lack of evidence, in another, of the things she mistrusted in herself.

Gideon came to the house with Ann on Saturday afternoon. He brought sketches he had done of the children, from memory. He gave them in a negligent, off-hand way, but Jessie thought that they were purposely “interesting”. She felt sorry for him for the necessity he felt to try to put in a word for himself with her by flattery, even so obliquely. Again he stayed for dinner — or rather for a cold supper, for that was what it was. Old Mr. Stilwell had never mixed with black people socially in his own life, but he understood that his son “looked at things differently”, as he put it, and was rather proud of the open house kept by his son. He liked to shock acquaintances of his own kind and generation by swanking about the way he often sat down to dinner there, without blinking an eyelid, between black guests. In fact, the only black guest he had ever met there before was Len. Len was present again, and called him “sir” in the way that he liked young men to do. The old man lived alone and was excited by the company of young people and children, the wave of life caught him up roughly again. Laughter, raised voices, interruptions, things begun and not finished, things that never got said: this was the way it was; only when one was alone and it was over did the sentences get completed and end in silence.

His second gin (he had two every evening) warmed the impulse that is always there — to explain to the one in whose presence you have been silent all your life what you really have been thinking all the time. It was not truthful, but was simply the impulse made audible in phrases that would hold it harmlessly. He had cornered Gideon, and was saying with some of the charm he must have had when he was young, “I’ve always had a lot of respect for your people. And I’ve always found them show respect in return.” Later he became bolder, and more consciously candid: “After all, it’s nonsense to talk of marrying and all that — politicians’ scare-stories, I tell people. I’m sure none of us thinks of that. But you can’t tell me there’s any good reason why you and I shouldn’t be having a chat together in a drawing-room if the mood takes us.” Gideon listened to him with carefully narrowed attention: his head inclined as if he must be sure to be wily enough to miss no word of a daring and debatable argument. Tom said between closed teeth, “Oh Christ.” But Len, who got up to renew the old gentleman’s drink, was almost primly reproachful—“He’s a sweet old man”—and a spirit of outrageous undercurrent amusement suddenly took over the company. They drank quite a lot and the need to be tactful disappeared. Jessie no longer felt it necessary to bother whether, if Boaz found himself at one end of the table, while it had somehow come out that Gideon was sitting next to Ann at the other, it would look ominous or odd. Boaz and Ann, reminded by a turn of the talk of some old private joke, caught each other’s eyes and giggled.

“We never going to see you down at the office again?” Len said, turning to Ann. When he met her nowadays, he talked to other people, as if the two of them had quarrelled. He bore the slight that, so far as she was concerned, nothing had changed, she felt no less interested in him than she had ever done.

“Lennie, I’d love to get started on something. What’s new there for us?”

He looked pleased in spite of himself. “Always new . You’re a damned good unpaid worker, but like all people who don’t get paid you’re unreliable. Disappear in the middle of things, man.”

Her indignation was flirtatious. “I like that! There wasn’t a school or a hall within seventy miles we didn’t lug that caravan to.”

“Won’t you give me my job back?” Jessie called out. “As a paid worker, needless to say. I think I’ll leave the mortuary at the end of this month, I can’t stick it any longer.”

“It’s not our policy to employ whites where blacks will do.”

“Ha-ha. Don’t we know it; unless they’re unpaid and unreliable, eh?”

“Are you really giving up?” Boaz said to Jessie.

“Oh I must. I’m sick of the dying rich. Trouble is, what to do. The Agency job really did suit me down to the ground, you know. Useful, gregarious in a surface sort of way. Anonymous.”

“Work for me. I mean it,” said Boaz. “My things are in a hell of a mess. I must get someone to catalogue and type notes and so on.”

“Oh no,” she laughed and drew back, vehement. She sawed away at the leg of lamb with a rather blunt knife, while he went on, “Personal, convenient, learn in your own home. Write now for illustrated booklet.” She laughed but she felt in herself the symptom of a disease she had feared and forgotten, the set of opposition she had discovered nearly a year ago, when she and Tom first discussed the possibility of having the Davises to live in the house. It was just what she had been afraid of — the presence of strangers was influencing the way they lived, turning them to distractions that required the posturing that another pair of eyes on oneself demands. The Davises were drawing everyone into their own charged air; the whole house was the way things looked within such an atmosphere. Now came the suggestion that she should work with him, put herself in danger of assuming jealous concern for his research, of standing in a comradely working alliance with him as Ann was not. They would end up going to bed together, maybe? She felt a wild and stirring indignation, a struggle for life. No, no, she wanted to say to him, it would be too nice, it would be too convenient, it would be the end of me .

She did say, with the rudeness of fear, “I don’t want to be private secretary in my own house, Boaz old dear.”

“Len, I suspect you’ve got your shoes off under the table.” Tom was referring to a report in the morning paper that Rhodesian Africans had started a campaign to give up wearing shoes because “that was the custom before the white man came”.

“Why stop at shoes? My ancestors didn’t wear trousers either.” He buttered a piece of bread as if it were the object of bored distaste.

“That’s why I don’t understand politics,” Jessie said. “They never function at my level. Whatever goes on is either rigged by big money and diplomats or clowned about in the streets. Nothing in between seems to work.”