Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

The unease that Jessie Stilwell had felt at the idea of the presence of two observers in the house was forgotten. Their presence belonged to the static on the surface of daily living; another voice or two interrogating, another laugh in the garden, another set of footsteps on the stairs. The girl was easily amused, and amused herself; she quickly became friendly with the Stilwells’ friends as well as Boaz’s, and she was in and out of the house, with a word and a telegraphic smile, between one diversion and another. Boaz was in a daze of work, and, if he was in the house, was not seen for hours at a time. Tom was busy and absorbed, a little grimly and reluctantly, sometimes, in his lectures and the life of the university. Jessie, whose current job was that of secretary to an association of African musicians and entertainers, worked every morning at the town office of the Agency, and sometimes in the afternoon or evening as well, and cared for the house and children and the demands of friends in those fits and starts of activity that served quite well to keep them going. In this immediate present — the continuing present of life going on — the Davis couple took a place unobtrusively; on any other level, she was hardly aware of them at all. She remained intact, alone.

Like many people, Jessie had known a number of different, clearly defined, immediate presents, and as each of these phases of her life had closed by being replaced with another, it had lost reality for her; she no longer had it with her. The ribbon of her identity was always that which was being played out between her fingers; there was no coil of it continuing from the past. I was; I am: these were not two different tenses, but two different people.

The latest, and present phase — her association with Tom Stilwell, their way of life, their children — she accepted without question as the definitive one (by this, for whatever it turned out to be worth, would her life be known). For the best part of eight years she had lived it honestly, wholly, and even passionately. But for some time now, she had been aware that though this was the way she had chosen to live, and by that fact deserving of all the fervour and singlemindedness and loyalty that she had it in her to put into it, it was not the sum total of her being. Not all the spit and polish of effort, the grace of love could make it so. She was feeling towards the discovery that there is no sum total of being; it flows from what has been, through what is, and so on to what is becoming. She had created herself anew, in eight years, as she had done several times before that; but this self was the creation of man; it did not belong to the stream of creation. From the fullness of life, she had, at last, time to ask herself why she lived, and although she had scarcely begun to know how to formulate the question, let alone grope for the possible answers, she had suddenly come to know, in her bones, that there is no possibility of question or answers, outside that stream.

So far as the past was concerned, Jessie believed that she had torn the grandmother’s clothes off the wolf long ago. She had looked him in his terrible eye with the help of someone who loved her before she met Tom, and though as an adult she openly marvelled that she had survived her childhood, she refused to make it an excuse for her inadequacies. She was bored and irritated by the cliché of the unhappy child who makes a mess of his life when he grows up. “In any case,” she once told Tom, “I don’t think I qualify. I was not unhappy at all. I was only unhappy when I grew up and discovered what had been done to me. I am only wild and unhappy now, when I think of it.”

She was the daughter of a petty official on a gold-mine; her father had been manager of the reduction works or something of that sort — she did not remember him. He died when she was eighteen months old and by the time she was three her mother had married again, this time a Swiss chemical engineer on the same mine, an intimate friend of the family, Bruno Fuecht. The Fuechts had no children and Jessica Tibbett remained a cherished only child. She was her mother’s constant companion, and this intimacy between mother and daughter became even closer when the child developed some heart ailment at the age of ten or eleven and was kept out of school. She was taught at home by a friend of her mother’s, and when she grew up, during the war, she left her mother’s house only to marry. A son was born of the war-time marriage, and her young husband was killed. She lived on her own — with the baby, of course — for the first time in her life, and worked and travelled for a few years before she met, and finally married, Tom Stilwell.

Those were the facts, with their apparently easy graph of formative events; there were all the obvious peaks, labelled. But the true graph of her experience lay elsewhere, and ran counter to the high and low of the facts. Horror and sorrow were contained in the cherishing, for example, and the death, off-stage and unrealised, was no more than losing touch with a summer’s companion who would, anyway, have been outgrown. Jessie knew the truth — coming to know it had been the biggest experience of all, in her life so far — and for some time she had thought that, knowing and accepting it, she had done with it. She had pulled out the sting; but all the rest of the past had been thrown away along with it. There were signs that it was all still there; it lay in a smashed heap of rubble from which a fragment was often turned up. Her daily, definite life was built on the heap, but had no succession from it, like a city built on the site of a series of ruined cities of whose history the current citizens know nothing.

Before she had begun to take any account of them at all, the Davis couple had been part of that daily life for three months. Morgan, child of the war-time marriage, came home from school; he was put into the closed-in verandah that was Tom’s workplace, and Tom moved his desk into the bedroom. The house was full, and at night charged with sleeping presences. Jessie, roused, one night, by a child’s whimpering that ceased before she got to the child, felt furtive, standing in the passage with the sleepers all round her, hibernating in dreams. Yet how alive they were, simply breathing; the mysterious tide of breath reached out to her and retreated, reached out and retreated, in the dark. The house smelled of them, too; the warm smell of urine and cheap sweets in the little girls’ room, the peppermint-and-wet-towel smell from the bathroom, the smell of crumbs and leatherette from the suitcases lying under dust in the boxroom, the smell — exuding from the closed door as if from a cedarwood box — of nail varnish, dried gourds and cigarettes, coming from the Davises’ room.

Jessie rustled quietly back to bed, by feel. She was asleep again almost at once, but just before she joined the others, she experienced — exactly like the silent flash of sheet-lightning that lifts the dark — another wakening in another night. She stood behind her bedroom door at home on Helgasdrift Mine and listened, above the pounding stroke of her heart, to small clinking noises in the bathroom. The gathering beat of her heart had woken her like a fist beating at her consciousness; she knew, before she was awake, why she was at that door. A tap turned on and off — the hot tap, that squeaked. More slight clinks, as of things picked up and put down. Silence. Then the sound of the bathroom door opening, the tsk! of the light turned off. She opened the bedroom door and confronted her mother. She put out her hand and turned on the passage light so that her mother should be spared nothing. There the woman was, the grease of the cream she put on her face before she went to bed shining like sweat, the celanese nightgown showing her drooping, middle-aged breasts, the triangular shadow of her sex.