Nadine Gordimer: Occasion for Loving

“What’s the matter?” the girl rasped out.

The woman was caught; light found out her face in a moment of private disgust, weariness, the secret shame of unwanted lust. “Go to bed; go on.”

They stood staring at each other, afraid of each other. The girl was not a child, but nineteen years old; her body could have been risen from the act of love. But she knew it only in books; she knew it only through the distaste her mother expressed for men; the things her mother did not say; the grouping of her mother and herself as opposed to the exclusion of her stepfather. The girl’s feelings were violent: was she trembling with pity and shame, for the outrage of her mother? There was a struggling animus, horrible, in her — did she want, as well, to shame her mother, to expose her, to force her to admit that she was outraged?

“What’s wrong? Are you ill? I heard you in the bathroom.” She would not let her off.

“Nothing. Go to bed.” The woman’s voice was hysterical, stern, almost on the point of foolishness, with embarrassment.

“But why were you in the bathroom so long?” the girl said cruelly, pitiful. She had caught her. She had shamed her. She had forced the unspoken into tangible existence.

“ Nothing . Go back to bed.” Her mother gave in and appealed to her nakedly, as a woman.

Bruno Fuecht. He had no name. A creature lying on the other side of a door, in bed as in a lair. Love. Her mother, Bruno Fuecht, and—. A conclusion reached only once, in the middle of the night. Left unfinished, for ever, in her daytime self. Love. Mrs. Fuecht is so close to her daughter. “My daughter is my life.”

At last, she slept beside Tom Stilwell.

The next day there was a letter for Jessie from Mrs. Fuecht. Jessie ladled out macaroni cheese at lunch, and opened her post in between times. “That’s odd — I dreamt about them last night,” she said, picking up her mother’s letter. But it was not true that she had dreamt. She shook her head as she read: “The old man’s in a nursing home again. What a queer woman she is; she writes with a real air of triumph about it.” “Relieved to have him off her hands, I suppose,” said Tom; the Fuechts had retired to the coast just after he married Jessie: he had not met old Fuecht more than three times in his life, though Mrs. Fuecht had come up for a few awkward days each time a child had been born. He was satisfied that they had no part of Jessie, and he merely concurred with her token interest in them. Since Fuecht had got old, he had become ill, eccentric and difficult. “He’s been giving her a hell of a time. She says he threw his diet food out of the window and then got dressed and slipped out of the house to a restaurant in town.”

Ann Davis, who had been driving around all morning with a photographer friend who took pictures of rich people’s houses and gardens, was questioning Boaz about some arrangements he had promised to make for Sunday.

“Ann wants to see the mine dancing — do you know if it’s on every Sunday?” Boaz asked. Tom shook his head enquiringly. “Shouldn’t think so. Not every week. Eh, Jessie?”

“Definitely not.” Jessie ate slowly, reading booksellers’ catalogues, circular letters and advertisement pamphlets, though she chivvied the children for their slowness at table, and banished them if they brought toys with them.

“How can we find out?”

“Phone the Chamber of Mines.”

Morgan was at just that age at which, the moment a grown-up noticed him, he was asked to do something; for the rest of the time, he was not taken into account at all. “Morgan can ring up for you,” said Tom. “Bring the phone book, old chap. Chamber of Mines. Publicity department — something like that.”

Morgan was a smallish boy, for nearly fifteen; only his hands, big-knuckled and long, had shot ahead of him, and were nearly a man’s hands. He went readily; whenever Jessie felt people’s eyes upon him, she was impelled to make some remark to break their attention — it was an unconscious reaction. For the first few days at home, for some reason or other he continued to wear his school clothes — a clean, ink-freckled white shirt and clumsy grey flannel pants that reached to the knee and were held up by a belt made of striped webbing in the school colours. Jessie, before the fact of the institutional cast of his figure, at once created a diversion, like a bitch running senselessly back and forth before the humans who have come to look at her litter. Her remark drew attention to him, but deftly turned it off focus. “What a tramp he looks! Tom, you must take him to town next week and get him some decent things.” But the child wore the uniform as though he had been born in it.

“There’s no answer,” said Morgan, coming back into the dining-room.

“Of course not,” Tom remembered. “There’s no one there after lunch on a Saturday.”

Challenged, they began telephoning everyone they could think of who might be able to give them the information they sought, and the lunch table broke up, except for Jessie, and the three little girls, who were eating custard. Ann stood about in the alert way of someone having her way. Morgan stood about ready for orders.

“Leeuwvlei Deep, half past nine tomorrow,” Tom came in and announced.

“There, are you happy now?” said Boaz to Ann.

“Goody!” said Ann, and the little girls took it up, Goody, Goody! “We’ll all go,” she said to Jessie. “Shall we?”

“Well, the little girls’ve been. I’m not keen to go again, are you, Tom?” She looked at the boy, Morgan, who said nothing. She went on quickly, “But I suppose Morgan would like to go. Yes, I don’t think he’s ever been — have you, once when you were small, d’you remember?”

Ann took the coffee tray from the servant Agatha and carried it out on to the verandah. “I’ll pour.”

“Give me mine first, please, Ann; I must fly.” The Agency was running a jazz band contest that afternoon, and Jessie was to be cashier at the hall. As soon as Ann heard this, she turned: “Oh, could I come along? Could I?”

“If you want to, of course. It’ll be awfully hot and noisy. I don’t know how you feel about jazz bands in the afternoon. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me, if I didn’t have to.”

But the girl was off upstairs. Changing in her own room. Jessie couldn’t help warming towards her; everything attracted the girl, she expected interest instead of shrinking from the risk of boredom. Was that youth? Jessie had forgotten. She only knew that she herself became more and more aware of the need to protect herself from what she thought of as waste. Down in the garden, Clem and Madge and Elisabeth burst out of the house with their hands before them, in pursuit of dragonflies. Jessie and Ann went off together, looking, in their thin, bright dresses and sandals, curiously alike, for once, like acolytes who have both, at one time or another, served the same gods.

Ann was talking about the tribal dancing they were to see next day. “I remember someone — must have been our servant — kicking and jumping around with a shield made of a skin with brown and white fur. I suppose he was drunk. It was connected with some sort of a row in the house, I’m sure.”

“But I thought you’d left Rhodesia when you were a baby?” said Jessie. That was what Boaz had said.

“No … no,” the girl said tranquilly, smoking. “I remember that boy, his name was Justin. He was yelling, too, some sort of song.”

She remembered more of Africa than she told Boaz; she told Boaz, perhaps, only what she wanted to. She was unembarrassed by the lie, and made no attempt to disclaim it. For the first time, Jessie felt some curiosity about her; yet she sensed that the curiosity would be brought up short: Ann might rush into things with her hands out before her, like the little girls after dragonflies, but it would probably follow that, like the little girls, she would not be aware of her own motives.