Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Every day, no matter what she was doing, she looked out at the sea and saw the porpoises passing. She had no idea that they were going to be passing, but when she looked out, there they went. She had this. It had survived. Neither petrol fumes nor phenobarbital, book-keeping nor all-night drinking parties had finished it. Living creatures came by out there in the wide water and she was able to know it. She never thought about it. But there they were. Some days they were going along steadily, each movement the length of their bodies through the swell. Sometimes they cut in formation through a sloping wall of glassy grey. Occasionally one shook himself terrier-free out of the water, made the arabesque dictated by his own weight, and splashed into it again. She had no means of communication with them except whatever it was that made her know when they were there; there was no reason to suppose that they did not have the same sort of knowledge about her.

Tom had assumed that she would take Morgan with her on holiday but she had protested, disintegrating into a kind of helplessness that forced Tom to plan for her, all the time with a feeling of disbelief because he knew there was always so little you could do for Jessie. He would say to her, the morning after she had argued adamantly, “Well, what have you decided?” and she would say listlessly, “I suppose he’ll come.”

He looked at her and away from her, dismayed, searching. He made as if to speak and then said something else. “What’d he find to do with himself here, that’s the trouble. I don’t mind having him—”

“No, I know. He’ll have to come.” And the night before she had explained how impossible it was for her to contemplate a month with Morgan sitting across the breakfast table — the little girls were companions for one another, what on earth would she do with him all day?

“If only Boaz would make up his mind whether he’s going to Moçambique or not.” (The reasons for Boaz’s indecision became suddenly irrelevant; it was annoying of him not to be able to be counted on for his offer to provide Morgan with just the right sort of camping holiday, complete with the mixture of adventure and self-reliance that would be good for him.)

“Well, even if it’s off with Boaz, maybe we could get some other boy to stay here with Morgan. Then I could manage.”

“No, you’ll never be able to get any work done. You’ll be nannying all the time and cursing me, quite rightly. They’ll drive you crazy.”

But the more she showed herself obstinately bowed to accept the inevitability of Morgan, the more Tom felt constrained to find some way out for her since she made it clear she couldn’t help herself. He had already made a great mistake, when the whole business of Morgan accompanying her had first come up, of suggesting that it would be a good opportunity to talk to him a bit, to get a little nearer to him in the easiest manner, since they would be set apart, alone together, from the smaller children without any other grown-ups around to claim her. But apparently the pursuit of Morgan was dropped; or perhaps it was so intense that she couldn’t face him alone with it. Tom didn’t know. Anyway, she reacted so strongly to Tom’s suggestion, jeering at a picture of herself subject to Morgan’s anecdotes, in which he was not interested and to which she was not listening, that Tom didn’t pursue it. In the end, without any actual decision being come to, she left for the house at the sea as soon as her month’s notice at the nursing home was worked, and a few days before Morgan was due to come home from school. The Moçambique expedition was still up in the air. One day Boaz was packing and talking practically, as if preparing to go, then there were signs of highly emotional talks with his wife, a charged atmosphere of things in balance, and his departure was unlikely.

Tom always wrote to Jessie about Morgan, just as if she always remembered to ask about him in her letters. That was one of the corrupting, wonderful things about Tom: he pretended for her when the real thing was painfully lacking in herself. He pitied her in her strength of wilfulness, her difficulty in pretending to herself. She did not resent this pity, unintrusive, so delicately expressed. She wondered what she did for him, of the same secrecy and necessity. Even between Bruno and her mother there had once been signs of things like this; it was only in the worst, last few years of his life that everything they knew of one another was emptied out upon the table, as a bankrupt turns out his pockets so that you may see for yourself the worthless miscellany with which he is left.

Once she had begun to make preparations to go away that did not include provision for Morgan, the thought that she ought to be taking him left her. It was as if there had never been any question that he might come. He was in her mind, not very insistently, sometimes as the result of some sight or object in the house or on the beach. One morning she was walking along the firm shoreline near the hotel with the little girls, after a swim. The thud of her heels went through her head; drops of water flew from her thighs. They passed the slender figure of a young man fishing, making a loop behind him and his mess of bait, newspaper, and rumpled sand. As they came down to the water’s edge again on the other side, she was aware that she was walking, now, as a woman does when a man is watching her. Later Elisabeth wandered over to the same young man and got talking; she was given the present of a dead sardine. When Jessie and the children went up from the beach at midday the fisherman was squatting over his equipment, and as she made some casual remark in acknowledgement of the present, he looked up. She saw that the man she had been conscious of as she walked away from him over the sand was a boy, a boy Morgan’s age. “That’s nothing,” he was saying to the children’s enthusiasm and her polite admiration of his catch. “My dad and I came down at half-term, just for the weekend, mind you, and we took back thirty-four shad and a small barracuda …”

When she took off her wet bathing suit at the house she noticed that the dark shine of sunburn was beginning to cover the map of tiny red veins she had on her right leg, near the knee. It could scarcely be seen at all. There was the satisfaction of some small reprieve. She looked over her shoulder at her naked back and backside and legs in the mirror. How long? Five years? Six? (What did the bodies of women in their forties look like?) A few years and she wouldn’t be able to look at this any more.

About her face she had different thoughts. Clem’s reproaches made her realise that at home she was constantly composing her face, not just with the re-touches of lipstick or powder at different times through the day, but also with the confrontation with her own expression which these bits of touching-up before a mirror brought. Here sometimes the whole day went by before she saw her face again, once she had brushed her hair after swimming. Her face was left to itself. She wondered how one might look if one let a whole month go by without that check on what one’s face is saying that comes automatically with a glance in a mirror. What extraordinary things there might be in a face naked, open, weathered by an absolute freedom to take on the cast of feelings as rain and sun and wind move through the sky. At the end of it, a look might have come into the open that had never been allowed out before. The unguarded moment would have taken over altogether; nose, mouth, and, most of all, eyes.

Even when a man does something out of character it often turns out that what he really is has not failed to give the venture an unmistakable twist somewhere. Bruno Fuecht had bought his plot and house “on the Coast” with the apparent intention of any of the other mine officials who looked forward to life in a cosy community centred round the bowling green and the golf course, one day, past sixty. But as it turned out, the development of the township had come at the other end of the beach, and his house, after all, remained alone almost at the limit of the opposite boundary.