Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

If Jessie walked up the beach in the direction of the hotel and the other houses there were people on the sand, fishermen, bathers and dogs. To the left of the path that led from the house to the beach there were no houses and no one came by except an occasional Indian fisherman from somewhere back in the cane. A juicy-leaved plant trailed right down on to the sands. On windy days she sat among the dunes where it grew, private and quiet. On other days she liked the firm-packed sand near the water, or the inlets among the loops of sand and rocks where the salt-greasy rocks provided a strangely comfortable kind of furniture, places to lean against, ledges to put things on, and also, at eye-level of a half-closed eye, crevices filled with the minute and dependent life of the sea, sealed until the tide opened it to food and life again. Each wrinkle in the rock lined with these crumbs of being gave not the anthropomorphic pleasure of more highly-developed living things, with an existence that a human being always guesses at in simplified terms of his own, but the pleasure of pure form. Volute, convolute, spheroid, they were order, perfect order at the extreme end of a process the other end of which was the perfect disintegration of the atom bomb. They were so small and fragile that now and then Jessie would crush one with a fingernail.

The children liked to lead her up the other end of the beach, towards people. (It was there that they had met the fisherman.) And sometimes she herself, needing nobody, free of everybody after days on the deserted beach, would find an impersonal warmth in the casual presence of people, simply people, she did not know. Women sat with their legs straight out before them in a V, gazing at the sea; they were really sitting down, after a long time. Young girls and their men lay on their faces, prostrate like worshippers. When she was among these groups and knots of people, isolated from each other by the strange perspectives of the sea, whose light, suffusing the light of the sun, creates an effect of distance, so that a figure twenty yards off seems far away, just as he is already out of hearing because of the sound of the sea — when she was somewhere on the sand among them, her consciousness was a plot without a theme. The simple narrative of the beach occupied her, the link-by-link happenings. A child got into a rubber canoe, was launched into a pool, and slowly overturned at the same point every time the preparations were repeated. A man cast his line for a while from one place; then, after a certain interval, moved up somewhere else. A woman in a leghorn hat with a yellow ribbon smoked and talked to a man with a bald head who, at some pause to which she seemed to return again and again (as the child in the canoe capsized again and again), took her hand and, stretching it out the limp length of her white arm to his knee, ran his own palm in a smoothing gesture up from her wrist to shoulder. A young servant in a kitchen-boy suit came down to the beach from one of the houses with a tray of bread spread with marmite. He sauntered to the children with the canoe, pausing to gaze, almost sniff, not so much at the sea as at the whole beach; his strong bowed legs, arms and head were very black against the unbleached cotton suit with its loose shorts, red band round the neck and sleeves, and ridiculous belt sewn high up at the back of the blouse. The children gathered round him. He stood talking with them in Zulu, eating, too, as they shared out. When they had finished, he went dreamily up the sand again, looking round, lifting his head into the breeze. He was dispossessed of everything but a moment of superb idleness.

At night Jessie was lethargic after dinner and felt she could have gone to bed when the children did, but by ten o’clock she was enjoyably awake and passing, with the silence and confidence of one who is alone, between the warm darkness where the sea was breathing, on the grass, to the open living-room, where she read late. One night the telephone rang — there was a telephone, on a party line, but she knew no one to ring her up, and though she had idly noted that the house’s particular code was three rings, she expected so little to hear it that, had it come at some other time, among the other combinations of rings that she had ceased to register, she probably would not have noticed it. But the telephone was only vocal at certain times of day, when the village was conducting its affairs, and in the early evening, when trunk calls were cheaper; it always fell silent after nine o’clock at night. On this night it rang quite firmly through the rooms, like a visitor who strides in calling out “Anybody home?” Jessie thought it must be a mistake and lifted her head, not putting her book aside. It was three rings, all right; she got up and went to the kitchen, where the black box hung on the wall. When she picked up the receiver there was a confusion of crackling, faint jumbled voices and distant ringing. She tried to get in touch with the exchange, by hanging up, turning the little crank at the side of the box and then shouting “Hullo? Hullo?” into the receiver again, all in the self-conscious manner of a city person unused to such contraptions. But there was no response and she quickly got impatient and went back to read. The book was Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man , a book that, that year, people were reading who, without distinctions of worth, had last year read interpretations of Buddhism, and the year before Simone Weil, or Ouspensky. They were read, quite often, in the same half-secret, deprecating way in which the same people, when they were twenty, had read treatises on sex ( The Function of the Orgasm ), for people between thirty and forty tend to have toward the meaning of their existence the anxious, suppressed urgency which at twenty they felt about sex. The real doubters and the mere consolation-seekers often go to the same sources; and it is the consolation-seekers who usually find something that will serve them — and if they do not, go on to another and yet another source, finding consolation in the activity of the search, if nothing else. The real doubters include those for whom politics has gone as deep as sex, but the consolation-seekers are not intelligent enough to have sought any kind of discipline outside themselves; they have never wanted to change the world: only to get their sweet lick of it. This was how Jessie defined these categories for herself. But the Chardin book was nothing for the consolation-seekers; only the title would console them, with its assurance of distinction and uniqueness. And she was reading it, here, without any of those spurious thrills of release and comfort by which a desperate flux of personality gives itself away; her mind followed the movement of the writer’s mind in a spirit of enquiry that stretched, muscle by muscle, to keep up with his. She went along with the book, did not scuttle back to her own little hole with the first scrap she could use in some much unpicked and re-made rag, part-garment, part-nest, part-shroud, that she had been putting together.

On the beach in the daylight she read novels, even some poetry. Some of the books she had brought with her from home were no use at all; there is no way of telling before you live in a place, in the way it creates, what you will be able to read there. One or two things were dead right; bringing Conrad was inspired, of course. How perfectly the book and the day you looked up to from it merged when the book was Victory ! (Tom had put it in for her, bought it in one of those students’ “classics” editions, neat and small, on India paper.) A novel by a West Indian writer was fine, too; she liked to read about these negroes whose way of life had a familiarity but brought none of the pain with which she was indicted and identified when she read novels about home. There was also a paper-back Thomas Mann translation. She had never read Mann in what she thought of as her “great reading days”; halfway through The Magic Mountain he had been put aside as a bore, old-fashioned. Now she was making the discovery that the massive style was not a Victorian catalogue of “character” and furniture but a terrifying descent through the “safety” of middle-class trappings to the individual anarchy and ideological collapse lying at their centre. Even a comfortable description of a man’s walk with a dog: “It is good to walk like this in the early morning, with senses rejuvenated and spirit cleansed by the night’s long healing draught …” fell away suddenly under foot like a rotten mahogany floorboard—“You indulge in the illusion that your life is habitually steady, simple, concentrated, and contemplative, that you belong entirely to yourself … whereas the truth is that a human being is condemned to improvisation and morally lives from hand to mouth, all the time.”