Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“How long’d you been here before we came? A couple of weeks?” he said to Jessie one afternoon.

“That’s right.” She was reading, some little cotton rag of child’s clothing keeping the sun off her head. Ann was in the water.

“What’d you do? Same as now?”

She leaned on the book and smiled. “I was alone. It isn’t the same.”

“What’s it all about, this alone business?”

“What business?”

“I asked your kid Morgan one day why he hadn’t gone away with you, and he told me, my mother likes to be alone.”

“Did he say that?” She looked pleased and yet annoyed, as one does when one hears of an astute remark made about oneself by someone to whom one has given no opportunity or justification for understanding.

“I’d always thought painters liked to be alone,” she said, questioning his question to her. “—Had to be alone, were alone.”

“I’m not a real one, I suppose. I don’t feel it. There’s always a feeling of others around, even if I’m working.”

“Really?” She began to have that look of pursuing the other person that comes when interest is roused. “But what about those empty landscapes of yours, with the dust?”

“Just fooling about. Seeing the sort of thing some painter had done and trying it out.” He often went in for the sophistication of deprecation; he hid behind it where no one could get at him.

“Even when you’re actually there with the canvas in front of you—” She returned to it, disbelieving.

“Yes, man, there’s always the business of a friend who’s going to turn up in half an hour, or something on your mind.”

“You feel connected all the time.”

“Mmm. You’ve got the pull.”

“When you’re alone, you’re connected but there’s no pull,” she said. “Now that you are here, I feel lonely.”

He gave his chuckle, looking at her with the air of not knowing what to expect.

“Because you’re making love,” she said. “You see?”

“Are you jealous, Jessie?” he said, bantering, flirting a bit, because he did not know what to say.

But she was not embarrassed, but quite serious and at ease. “No, not jealous. At least I don’t think so. Left out. Left out of something, that’s it. Perhaps a bit jealous, as well. I don’t have love affairs any more.”

Ann came up, beaded with water. She dried her face, blew her nose, shook out her hair from the cap, and lay down beside Gideon. She touched him with her sea-cold hand and mumbled for a cigarette. Presently there was a commotion where the little girls were playing at the edge of the water. Elisabeth came screaming over the wet sand, her lumbering shape, clumsy with pain or alarm, repeated in wriggling purples and silvers on the mirror surface. She held out her wrist, wrung in the other hand. Clem and Madge followed, regarding her distress with admiration. “The white part of a wave … she just put her hand in next to my foot …” A rough blue thread was buried in the red weal that had risen round the plump brown arm. “Oh poor old thing! They are beasts … all right, now, I know it’s sore … get some of those leaves, Clem …”

“I saw a couple of blue-bottles when I was in,” said Ann. And as Jessie broke the leaves of the ice-plant that grew nearby, and squeezed them on the sting, “Rub quite hard, that’s the best way. — It really does hurt like hell.”

“What is it?” Gideon said with distaste, leaning on his elbow.

“Haven’t you ever been bitten by a blue-bottle?” Ann said.

“What on earth is it, anyway?”

“One of those balloon-things that get washed up. The wind brings them in,” Jessie reminded him.

They showed him how the stringy appendage of the creature had attached itself to Elisabeth’s flesh; Madge raced off to bring a specimen of the whole creature, gingerly lifted up on a handful of sand, to demonstrate to him.

“You mean to say you’ve never been bitten by one?”

“Hell, no, I should think not.”

“But you’ve been to the sea sometimes?” said Jessie.

“Only once to Cape Town and then to Port Elizabeth. Congress conferences. We drove around the docks and on Sunday a couple of us walked for a bit on one of the coloureds’ beaches somewhere near Cape Town.”

Jessie had managed to get the blue thread away from the child’s wrist; the pain had subsided and Elisabeth sat as if listening for its diminishing impulses. Jessie looked at him over the head of the child leaning against her, and thought again how he never seemed to see any of it — sea, sky, or green. He was like a fox, panting blindly out of breath in a hole.

They went up to the house in a peaceful little procession, the child riding on Gideon’s shoulders with her sandy legs round his neck.

Nothing could be a greater contrast with the life they lived now than the week that had preceded it. Fragmentary references to that cropped up, more or less amusing anecdotes, before Jessie, but these were lip-service to a demand neither wanted to meet in themselves, either alone together, or singly. They had lived through something that remained undealt with. Blocks of experience can lie like this for years before they are tackled; sometimes they are never taken hold of at all, cluttering up one of those lives that become like an attic, a jumble of disparate things between which no relation has been established.

Both knew that some form of desperation had made them drive away. Being lovers, both had accepted that this desperation was love; the collective term for the hundred ambiguities of their being together and apart — the wearing thin of interest between them sometimes when they were together, more than punished by the vividness of each for the other when they were apart, the calm with which the interlude of their knowing each other seemed to blend into their separate lives, when they sat chatting, and the crazy obsession with which the interlude filled the whole of living once a day was begun in which it was regarded as over. Fear of the vacuum it leaves behind is as common a reason for prolonging a love affair as continuance of passion. Ann’s inexplicable feeling of “panic” that she had mentioned to Jessie probably came from this fear. Her voice on the telephone (she had taken the single, decisive, outside chance — if he had not happened to be at the Lucky Star at half past one that day she would not have tried again, perhaps, not there nor at the flat nor further away, as far as the townships that took him in and closed over him) — her voice brought him back to swift excitement from the sober, not unhappy but flat acceptance that he would be spending July working for Congress in the dorps and locations. He was saved from the reluctance of doing what he really wanted to do. Stirring a vortex in the grey coffee that Callie Stow had made it difficult for him to drink, he had been going to go and see Jackson Sijake in his own time. He had already forgotten the lie about coaching Indian students; was forgetting other evasions. But Ann’s voice had it: the thing that Callie Stow lacked entirely, the element of self-destruction that found a greedy answer in himself. It was in the voice, that note that takes some of the fear out of life by suggesting that not everyone regards it as such a carefully-guarded gift, after all.

They drove away that bright winter afternoon into the actuality of the escape that everyone put into a phrase and never believes in—“I’d like to go off somewhere, just pack up and go.” It was no different, in its real intention, from the times they had driven into the veld to picnic while other people sat in offices. She looked at his hands on the steering-wheel; he noticed how her head, beside him, tipped back from the chin in her particular way. But although there was the reassuring sameness of their two selves enclosed in the small car, the release and pleasure, as usual, of being together after absence, and the enjoyable consciousness, for each, that absence made minute physical detail and gesture an object of secret observation and wonder — although all these were marvellously the same, this particular impulse was to take them far out of the depth they had sounded between them. They had come together in the constriction of sheltering cracks in other people’s lives — Boaz’s patience, the Stilwells’ tolerance, the young advertising men’s indifference. These seemed irksome but in fact provided a private status for a relationship that, publicly, did not exist. Once they had left behind them, by a few miles, the recognition of a certain group of individuals that they had the free choice of being together, and the anonymity of the city, where such recognition has the chance of passing unnoticed, everything changed for them.