Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Did Boaz worry about the routine matter (“only one thing now”) because he loved her and didn’t want to see her go to jail? Because he had brought her here and felt responsible for her anyway? Like everything else personal, his reasons were of no importance. The routine matter was something they all flew instantly in their minds to prevent reaching its conclusion; the external reason that differences and even indifference were dropped for, as for war or natural disaster.

But it was still the one thing that didn’t count. Not between Ann and Boaz and Gideon. Not between Ann and Boaz and Gideon and Tom and herself. Not in that house and not in this. I don’t want to do anything because of a dog licence — she saw the script streaming under her hand; at the same time Tom reading it, answering. — Or because I just happened to be here in this house. Real disinterested kindness is the only sort that’s any use and it comes on impulse. How often in a whole life does one really have that impulse? — She was completely awake now, inhabiting her body from the weight of the cast-off clothes on her feet to the slightly mouldy smell of the pillow under the left side of her head. — She thought with clarity and for herself alone: all other forms of kindness are only actions performed to conform with an image of oneself as a decent, generous person. Like any other image, you get confined in it … from the limit of clothes weighing on toes to the other limit where ear and cheek end at the pillow.

In the morning Ann was up early. Jessie found her already sitting in the sun on the grass.

“There’s something out there. I’ve been watching. Swimming out there. Dolphins.” She was all admiration at everything, as if she had just arrived.

“Porpoises.”

“They leap right out of the water!”

“Yes, we see them every day.”

The sea was some marvellous shining creature that had come up into the world overnight, light streaming off its back. In the radiance they both had the grimace that becomes a smile. Raucous brown birds with yellow beaks were strutting, flying and alighting; their activity seemed to stem from the figures of the two women, as if the birds had been released from their hands.

The girl’s outstretched fingers held the tousled hair pushed up from her face; it was smooth, filled out in contour again; at her age exhaustion or conflict leave no mark — like visible new growth the tendrils of a warm flush of blood under the skin reached up her neck. She wore the short cotton gown she had worn so often on Sundays at home.

“Where d’you swim?”

“Oh anywhere. There are sharks everywhere.” They laughed.

“Do you want to go down?”

“Oh I must have one swim. — Do you go?” she said, meaning at that time of day.

“Often.”

“Ah, it’s heavenly …” she said, as if she would fly, or melt.

Jessie lent her a bathing suit. They met again in a minute, on the verandah; Gideon was in the bathroom. They went barefoot, quietly, down through the wet undergrowth, breaking wet spider-webs, and when they were almost on the beach a small figure thudded into them from behind. “I wanted to come!” Madge was panting, her face thick with reproach. “Well, you have come,” said Jessie. “I wanted you to wait for me to get my costume.” “It doesn’t matter, you can swim without it.”

Ann was not claimed by the interruption; Jessie was reminded, this is the way she sees me, always in the context of demands she doesn’t know, always in the acceptance that I myself, my single being, have quite naturally ceased to exist. But the thought fell away before the sensation of chill sand underfoot and the light-headedness induced by the cool, huge air drawn in on an empty stomach. They swam for about half an hour and came up cheerful from the cold water. Jessie said to Ann after breakfast, “Look, Gideon’ll have to sleep in the living-room. This Jason may talk to his friends. He has to come into the rooms to clean up, I can’t keep him out …” Her tone was sensible, planning, and Ann was quick to catch it. She said, biting at a thread of skin beside her thumb-nail, “But what about last night?”

“I pulled the things off your bed and dumped them on the spare in my room.”

Ann laughed.

“We don’t know about these old colonels around here,” said Jessie. “We don’t want some local Ku-Klux posse riding up — you know?”

Ann said, “Oh, all right then,” thinking that she would tell Gideon about the arrangement when they were alone, but Jessie came upon him smoking in the living-room and explained at once, “That divan’ll have to be your bed, I was just saying to Ann. I don’t trust friend Jason, or rather the people his friends may work for.”

“What sort of people?”

“I don’t know them by name, but I know them well enough.”

“We’ll push off, Jessie,” he said, almost affectionately, completely reasonable. “No, we’ll push off.”

She picked up Victory where it lay, open, page-down, on the carpet, and put it on a chair.

The radio was playing (Gideon must have fixed it; it had not worked since Jessie’s arrival), smoke hung in the air, there were litchi pips in an ashtray. When she came back from the beach the first few days she always found Gideon and Ann in the living-room, the shape of their presence hollowing it out after the passing of a morning there. They greeted her ordinarily, concluding for the time being heaven knew what long, inarticulate, meaningful discussion, what private silences. They had invaded her; but she stood in the doorway and felt herself shut out by the self-sufficiency of lovers: she had forgotten it. They drew her back that much, each time, into the temporal world, took her back from the self that persisted in continuity to what could be lost. For a moment she was the one who had nowhere to go.

Soon they began to spend hours out on the grassy mound in front of the house, and even to appear on the beach. Alone or led along by the children, sometimes with Jessie, they passed loop after loop of rocks and sand and lay on one of the small deserted beaches that must have looked exactly the same when Vasco da Gama sailed past in the fifteenth century. There was the feeling — of all fecund, tropical places where plant and insect life is so profuse — not of hostility to human beings, but of the indifference that man feels as hostility. Here there was no account taken of anyone who walked upright on two legs; the close groves of strelitzia palm between the arms of two rocky promontories were impenetrable — any sailor shipwrecked here in the service of the East India Company could not have got up from the beach to the interior that way, but the slim grey monkeys, tossing themselves from fronded head to head to eat the juicy spikes of the white and flame-blue flower sticking out there, found it an ordinary thoroughfare. A dead seagull on the sand was busy as a factory with the activity of enormous flies, conveyor-belts of ants, and some sort of sand-flea that made a small storm in the air above and about the body. Butterflies fingered the rocks and drifted out to sea. Dead fish washed up among smashed shells were pulled apart and dragged away to their holes by crabs. There was not nothing here , but everything.

No other person came. Ann went into the village one day and brought back a pair of swimming trunks for Gideon and gradually he found himself doing what she did, lying for hours as if he, too, had been washed up on this shore, like the fish or the seagull. This abandonment to the natural world was something that seemed to come so easily to the two women; even while he succumbed to it he watched them with some kind of alienation and impatience — it belonged to a leisure and privilege long taken for granted. If he sat about doing nothing it was always a marking-time, an hiatus between two activities or desires. It was a matter of despair, exhaustion or frustration. You lay on your bed in your room and drank because you could not do what you wanted to do. Outside in the township everybody, from the beggar who dragged himself across the road with bits of motor-car tyre over his stumps to the B.A. graduate who found himself a sinecure advising white manufacturers on how to tempt the blacks to buy more, was fully occupied every hour of his life with the struggle to wrest a share of living — and that meant position, responsibility, respect and power, as well as money — from the whites. All time and breath and strength were used up to compete with their privilege.