Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

She kept smiling at him, a dent between her eyebrows, her mouth pressed together as if she were sure he would go on to say something else. He said nothing and went on smoking.

“What sort of thing?”

He gestured, and the movement put the whole thing out of her ken, took him back to a place where she did not exist. “A lot of travelling about, talking and so on.”

“I’m supposed to go to Moçambique,” she said.

“Going to go?” His voice sounded hoarse with the effort at naturalness.

“Yes, I think I’ll go. Terrific trip.”

He put his hand on the flat of her waist, where her breath rose and fell evenly beneath her dress. He felt an immense pride in her beauty and her toughness. He was filled with arrogance about her. He lifted her pale face distorted between his hands, the lips showing a gleam of teeth, the eyes giving nothing away in their many-coloured mottling, their tinsel fragments imbedded in glassy shadow. She pushed up his loose-clinging shirt and rested her head on his bare chest. To him her eyes seemed closed, but she was gazing out of lowered lids at the smooth skin, hairless, contoured by ribs and muscle; the colour of aubergine, but there was no shine to it. She smoothed the ripple of a rib with one finger. She was ashamed to let him see something that troubled her lately when she was with him, though she forgot about it instantly they were not together: the dark positiveness of his skin, the mattness of it, the variations like markings shading one part of his body in difference from another — some nerve in her had become alive to it. She dwelt on it in secret as soon as she touched him.

She put out her tongue and passed it quick and hesitant where the skin slid over the rib. She was always afraid he would look her in the eyes and find her out. When he did see her her face was confused, open, something that had been there already breaking up, like a sky of merging and melting cloud. He saw there only what he was feeling himself, the irresolution and confusion that he felt between himself and the one thing that he had had proved to him, that he had decided on, finally, that lay at rock-bottom under all that now obliterated, now exposed it in his being: the validity of whatever he did with the group of men who met in the back rooms of shops and in other people’s houses. All warmth and truth was there; didn’t he know it? Away from that , cut off from it, when his life was over he would be a dead cat flung in the gutter. How could it become cloudy, receding? Something that didn’t strike him deep, where the will is? He lost himself, his confusion in the confusion of her face.

The first few nights Jessie awoke suddenly sometime in the night and heard in the sound of the sea the voices of argument and the cries of children teasing one another. She was sure someone was there, walking through the house behind the muffle of the sea yawning away; the little girls were calling her. Things were being knocked aside and slowly falling … She was alone and her mind went on twitching and pulsating in response to all that recoiled upon it up the stairs and in the living-room, round the table and on the landing, from behind the closed door where the strange shapes of musical instruments were and the smell of another woman, in the enclosed verandah where Morgan lay and Tom stroked papers drily one on another.

The Stilwell house was not there. She listened and there was nothing but the sea; all voices were its own, all sounds. The sound was an element, like its wetness.

The mornings were light early. Moths and other flying creatures, clinging to the curtains, fell feebly away in the sun and crawled about the cracked concrete floor as she pulled the curtains aside with the first sound of the day and her occupation of it — the runners screeching faintly along the rust of the rod. The sea moved towards her shiningly out of the night; it was immortality, it had been there all the time. She went back to bed and when she woke again the room was hot, and the water all dazzling peaked surfaces.

Between them — herself standing on the verandah in a dressing-gown, Clem, Madge and Elisabeth in their pyjamas on the coarse short grass — and the sea, were high dunes sloping down bushy green, splendid aloes standing out against the water with their green serrated leaves peeled back and the rags of last year’s clinging to the bole, and groups of strelitzia palm crowded by spoon-leaved dark, short trees, bushes with torn silvery leaves, a mesh of shrubs and ground-creepers. It was not jungle; it made no darkness. It shone and shook and swayed in the sun. Along the coast where the village was, people had planted Scotch firs that were thinned by the wind and the heat and disappeared into the haze. She knew these skinny trees, growing in the dry sand and making it hurtful with stunted cones. Over above a pale red roof, a monkey-puzzle was set down where some retired mine manager or insurance agent had made things nice for himself.

The atmosphere in which she moved, from house to open doors, where the sea was, was a constant switch from a peculiar, dead, fusty stuffiness to blasts of intoxicating softness. The house was not as she had remembered it but was rather part of the memory of other beach houses as she remembered them and as they appeared to be, even when one did not live in them, but passed them, deserted, perhaps, and looked in, standing on the rough concrete supports that held them above the gap between the floors and the foundation that was left open against rot and termites. The walls of such houses were not grown thick with layer on layer of human personality, but were thin and interchangeable as the shells that gave shelter to various sea animals, first holding some blob of animate mucous, then inhabited by one crab or another. And all the time, as the sea washes in and out of all shells, sand, wind, damp, warmth entered and flowed through these houses; ants streamed over them as if they were part of the continuing surface of sandy earth, bats lived in them as they lived in caves, and all the silent things, the unnoticed forms of life — mould, verdigris — continued to grow as they did on natural forms.

She thought she recognised the water-tank, but when she looked at it closely it was clear that it was fairly new, so that even if it was there that she had washed the sand off her feet, the tap and tank itself were certainly not the old ones she had known. In any case, the village had a proper piped water-supply now, and a health board to certify it, and, of course, the house was connected up to the mains; the tank was only for watering the grass.

The house had been four narrow dark rooms surrounded by an open verandah on all sides. But walls had been knocked out and parts of the verandah filled in with rooms and even extended for the purpose. The concrete blocks moulded to simulate stone of which it was built were painted a dim green and the floors everywhere were red granolithic thickly polished and marked off — when the concrete was wet, long ago — in yard squares that held dust and sea sand in the grooves. The house showed signs of some sort of upheaval, fairly recent, which already had begun to yield to the landscape. Apparently the old couple who had lived in it for years had left (been forced out, maybe, in one of Fuecht’s drives of concern about his possessions?) about two years before Bruno Fuecht died, and the house had then evidently been smartened up for a more profitable letting. There was a big refrigerator with a deep freeze compartment, although the stove was an old paraffin burner, converted to use electricity. The furniture was the usual sort that comes to rest in seaside houses: a couple of heavy stuffed chairs that were once part of a “suite”, re-covered by amateurs in material from the local store, a standard lamp like a long pole of brown barley sugar, old black dressing-tables with drawers that stuck. Perhaps the later, smarter tenants had added furniture of their own that they had taken away with them. In the lavatory they had left a printed notice: