Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“What at—?” He had just triumphantly broken his inquisitor (Clem) in the game where you must not answer “Yes” or “No” to any question. “Now you, Mummy, your turn,” Clem hammered. “He’s the winner so he must be the one to ask. Come on, Mummy!”

The presence of a man rounded out the group into a family; other evenings she had not been expected to join in the little girls’ games: they had almost forgotten about her, sitting quietly in the dark near them. Once or twice she and Shibalo got quite caught up in the nonsense, and argued animatedly about some point of fairness. The children wavered between admiration for his skill at beating them and despair at losing. Elisabeth became what was known among them as “cheeky”, flinging herself at Gideon, hiding her face so that no one knew whether she was crying or laughing. “Boy, if my brother was here he would’ve beat you,” Clemence jeered wamingly. “Just see if my brother Morgan was here.” Jessie looked at the little girls with a break of curiosity; she had not thought that Morgan had his place in their scheme of things.

They had dinner without Ann—“Should we call her?” Jessie deferred to Shibalo, and he said calmly, “I think the longer she sleeps …” They had drunk enough to meet as the two people they were, independent of the situation that presented each to the other in a particular light. They were amused by the children and linked in being adult. Jason brought in the food and for a moment seemed bewildered, not knowing where to put it down. As he served Gideon he mumbled some greeting and Gideon answered him absently. Jessie had the sensation of brushing over something with only a twinge of awareness. When the children had gone to bed — or at least were out of the way in their room for the night — they continued to sit on at the table. There was the air of the confidential imposed upon them, like people lingering in a deserted café.

“Yes, you come here for a bit, you bring your children, you go back to town again—” He spoke as someone does who takes it into his head to contemplate for a moment, without interest, out of his own deadlock, a kind of life that he has not taken notice of before.

“This is the first time I’ve been here since I was a child,” she said. “It isn’t my house. I haven’t got houses here and there.”

“I had an idea …” he excused himself in careless pretence.

“You had the wrong idea,” she said, matching up to him with a grin.

He gave a deprecating, culpable sniff of a laugh. “I’ve had a lot of ideas—” Her existence was dropped aside, he returned to reality, and paused after the first phrase, searching for accuracy. He weighed his hands in slow jerks in the air, he was looking for the right shape of gesture, and as he brought them up to either temple they became, while he talked, first blinkers, and then curved into a frame: “—You get it set, marking it off for yourself from the rest that’s going on. But that’s not real, there’s no place where things really are contained at right angles, a tree doesn’t stop at a line drawn down the middle. You land up miles — miles outside. Where you think isn’t where you act. When you get going, get moving, begin to push things around, smash things up, it’s not there.”

“You still in with Congress?” she said.

“I’m still in Congress.”

She said, “You know, all that — you forget all about it here.” She laughed.

“Oh yes?”

“Yes, I mean it …?” She was smiling at him, fiddling with things on the table, drawing his thought harmlessly out into the open. “The only black man I can’t speak to, and the whites I don’t speak to either — I just look at them sometimes, like looking at a Boudin …” The tension of holding the intruders at arm’s length produced the impulse towards a careless openness. She lazily said what she pleased whether he (and she herself) liked it or not. “I can tell you it’s true that you could probably live here without thinking of it right until they came up from the cane with knives and sticks and finished it off without giving you time to give it a thought.”

“You could?” he conceded, half-challengingly, half-ironically. The whites he knew never put themselves in this sort of context; it was always as if he and they were considering a third kind of person there. They looked at each other and laughed. When she said to him again now, “I don’t know why you came to me,” he only leaned across the table and took a banana and answered in the dry, amiable insolence between them, “Didn’t think you’d mind so much.” And added, almost with sympathy, “Is it because of him?” He meant Boaz.

“Has there been something final?” she said, forced to ask, slumping in her chair.

“They were talking day after day. I hadn’t seen her for two days. Then she phoned. She was in a hell of a state. All of us—” He had the face suddenly of a man who sits thrown against the wall, open to blows, given up, his only defence do-what-you-like-to-me. “Then she picked me up in the car.”

“When was this?” Jessie was as impersonal as a clerk filling in some form.

“Thursday — Friday. A week ago.”

While he was speaking Ann had wandered in, her hands pushing up the sleeves of a dressing-gown as she clasped her elbows. She came forward and then paused, following with slightly open mouth what they were saying as if she had walked in on a scene that she knew and was listening to hear that all went as it should. She looked far more exhausted than before she had slept, and held her eyebrows high and frowning.

“A week ago,” said Jessie. She looked at them both. They felt the meaning, surprise, rise in her; they ignored it, like people pretending modesty.

“Do they know where you are?”

“No … Well, no.”

“… we’ve been on the move,” Ann spoke. She pushed up a crumpled table-napkin and slid on to the table, supporting herself with one leg on a chair. “I see there are some towels in the cupboard. Can I have a bath?”

Jessie got up practically, but before she went through the door, she said it: “You really can’t stay here, you know.” She was looking at them both kindly, truthfully, doing away with artificial casualness.

Ann said, as if it were a matter of interest and had nothing to do with intentions, “Why not?”

“The boy — for one thing. I don’t know what someone like that would make of it”

Ann burst out laughing. “But since when would you care about a thing like that?” She was surprised into objective amusement, offering it as a reassurance to Jessie about herself.

In the bedroom that had not been used until that afternoon Jessie hauled down towels. “Only one of them’s a decent size — I didn’t bring a lot.” She put them on one of the rumpled beds. “I bought these the day you came, last year; my only preparations,” she said with a smile.

“I suppose we can stay the night?” said Ann.

Jessie sat down on the bed, holding her bare ankle. “You see, I don’t know you at all, Ann, it’s just as if you walked in here for the first time. Boaz says to me, you know how she is, she wouldn’t do this, she would do that, but, as I keep telling him, I don’t know at all how you are.”

The girl had the open, dazed look of someone who emerges from one of those dark journeys at a fun-fair that really only progress through a canvas tunnel hung with ordinary objects like feather-mops and clinging cloth, but that establish a link between fearful fantasy and the ordinary.

She stood there unembarrassed, only a little unsure. “I suppose I don’t think about people the way you do. I mean we’d slept in the car two nights and I thought of you being just here, on your own, with this house.”