Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

It was fair enough. People like themselves kept open house in a particular way; it was nothing to do with “social” life and there was no regulation of times and days: somebody needed a place to work or to be alone in, a place to live through a certain stage in his life — one granted it or claimed it according to circumstances. Yet Jessie was strongly aware that she was not “just there”, and the two could not be “just there” in this shelter with her. This was not the old house, the Stilwell house where life was various. This place was completely inhabited, for the present, by her being; couldn’t they sense it? — she thought: it must fill the place, like a smell. If they came to her here, it must be through some special and deeply personal connection with that being.

She fought the idea, because the instinct to protect herself made her want to prevent Ann from discovering it. She stopped herself from saying. “But why me? Why to me?”—with its reminder to the girl that Boaz was the one she, Jessie, knew. She said, returning to the observer’s tone, mildly curious, “A week. Where, for God’s sake?”

“Oh, all over the show …” Ann dragged a small case on to the bed, opened it on wild disorder — suddenly the room where it must have been packed existed between them, the room where all the stringed and bulbous instruments leaned against the walls, and Boaz sat, bare feet under the table; Morgan’s old room—“Gid had some friend near Messina, we went there, then we thought of Basutoland, I don’t know, any old where,” she took a piece of clothing out, looked confused, “—where’s the top, dammit? — He’s a sweetie, this chap Mapulane, but of course it was impossible, he’s got a jolly nice little house and they were marvellous but it’s in a reserve … Then we thought we’d go to another friend of his, that’s the one in Basutoland, and I’ve never seen Basutoland anyway. Well, that didn’t work out …” She laughed; her hands began to turn over the contents of the case again, slowly.

“Was there some sort of decision behind this? D’you know where you’re going?” Jessie asked.

The girl picked up the bath-towel, a tin of talcum and a packet of cigarettes. “I don’t know what happened. The whole thing was finished. It felt O.K., really. And then while we — Boaz — were talking about other things, about ordinary things, beginning to be ordinary again — you know, just hanging around in the room together talking and tidying up a bit and so on — I began to feel scared. I can’t explain it. I began to get absolutely panicky, and I couldn’t tell him, I would’ve felt such a fool.”

“I’d better phone them and say you’re all right.”

“Tom wasn’t there. He’d gone to spend a few days with his father.”

“I know. I had a letter from him at the old boy’s. But he’ll be back by now.”

“No bath for two days. Just bits of washes in clean, A.A.-approved rest-rooms while my driver took petrol.” Her face was blank for a moment, then she laughed.

Jessie passed through the dining-room, seeing the outline of Gideon sitting smoking on the dark verandah. She went into the kitchen and, for the first time, hesitant, took up the motions of using the telephone again. The exchange told her that there would be a two-hour delay before the call came through, but Jason had only just finished washing up and closed the kitchen door behind him when the telephone rang and there was Tom’s voice at the end of a tunnel. It was not the Tom to whom she wrote the letters that belonged to the mainstream of timeless life, but the Tom of their segmentary everyday existence among the bobbing crowd of demands that matter singly and momentarily. He called, tinny through the megaphone of distance, “I was just writing to you, I got back yesterday”, and she said “I know”, meaning that she knew his news. “They turned up here this morning. They’re here.” There was a second’s awkward silence. “Well, that’s something.”

“They’re here now.”

“Are they all right?”

“Yes, all right. I thought I’d better let Boaz …”

“Yes, well, he couldn’t think where they could go, that’s the thing. You understand …”

She knew how he must be looking; she knew what his face must be indicating that he didn’t need to say. Although they could not see each other, familiarity made their communication as elliptic as if they had been face to face.

“The trouble was, I wasn’t here, you know, but Morgan …”

She said, “Morgan what?” losing his voice.

“Morgan, I said. I was at the old chap’s but Morgan stayed at home. He was here. I don’t know how much — anyway, apparently she just suddenly announced she was going, couldn’t stay. Everything was all right before; only the night before. So I thought. Well, Boaz’ll have a load off his mind, he …”

“But why to me?” she cupped the receiver and shouted an urgent whisper. “I said why to me?” Her whole body was clenched for an answer, as if by some miracle, or, better still, by some good sense, he would give her a simple answer that would let her out, have her rid of them.

She heard him laugh. A tiny hooter bleated and a voice said, right in her ear, “Three minutes.” “Well thank Christ,” he was saying. “It’ll be all right. I mean they’re all right there, no one … We thought they’d be picked up any day. It’s safe there, isn’t it?”

“I’ve told them they can’t stay.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know. Look, darling, it’s no joke. Boaz is only worried about one thing now. Understand? Jessie? If she gets picked up … Jessie?”

But it seemed that the police had nothing to do with it, nothing to do with what she was thinking of, nothing to do with them.

“I can’t believe in it,” she said, and he said, “I didn’t get it — what did you say?” and she couldn’t say “I can’t believe that that’s the danger.”

“Morgan sends his love.” The change in the voice told her that the child must have come up and be standing by the telephone.

“Yes. And mine. Don’t put him on the phone, I want to talk to you …” but Morgan’s presence with Tom at the other end of the line, and the presence of the others (she could hear someone moving through the dining-room on the other side of the door) at her end, made it impossible. Disjointed trivialities filled the last minute. “I’ll write to you tonight,” she called while he shouted goodbye, but his yielding, embarrassed “All right” was cut off, leaving her to it.

She did not write a letter, but unrest, like the excitement of an unfinished discussion, invaded deep sleep sometime toward morning. A disjointed dialogue went on, first in the eternal second where a dream unrolls and is comprehended totally and instantly, then slowed down to the more ponderous comprehension of the wakeful mind in the ordinary dimension of minutes passing. Have I been awake ten minutes, an hour? At first, though ferreting fully awake behind closed eyes in her sleeping body, she did not know, but gradually the pace that bore the night along became recognisable and measurable without the clock face, as animals feel the pace of the seasons.

Boaz is only worried about one thing.

How impossible, how unfair for Boaz that the time should come in a situation like his when the one thing that matters —the reality — gets flung aside by something external and irrelevant. A line in a statute book has more authority than the claims of one man’s love or another’s. All claims of natural feeling are overridden alike by a line in a statute book that takes no account of humanness, that recognises neither love nor respect nor jealousy nor rivalry nor compassion nor hate — nor any human attitude whatever where there are black and white together. What Boaz felt towards Ann; what Gideon felt towards Ann; what Ann felt about Boaz; what she felt for Gideon — all this that was real and rooted in life was void before the clumsy words that reduced the delicacy and towering complexity of living to a race theory. It was not a matter of being a man or a woman, with a mind and a sex, a body and a spirit — it was a matter of qualifying for a licence to make use of these things with which you happened to be born. It was all a routine matter, like the brass dog-tag put away in a cupboard or the third-party-risk insurance disc stuck on the car’s windscreen every year.