Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Gideon telephoned from a dorp post office to tell his friends in Basutoland that he was coming. The people themselves, who ran a store in the mountains, had no telephone, of course, but a friend in a Government office in Maseru would give a message to his brother, who would pass it on to someone else — Ann did not question the circumlocutory mystery by which the warning of their arrival would reach its destination. She was charmed with and proud of the tightly-interlocking life where Gideon was as free and powerful, in his way, as some white tycoon arranging his life by telex. The call took the best part of the afternoon to come through, and then Gideon came back to the car to say that the man in Maseru knew straight off, without any further enquiry, that Malefetsane was away from home, gone to Vryburg on some family business.

“He said, come to his place in Maseru,” he said, dismissing it. Of course, the man thought he was alone.

They felt flat, cheerful with each other in the slight embarrassment of disappointment.

“I want to buy a tent.”

“Oh Christ,” he said. He ran his hand across the back of his head. “I need a hair-cut. Malefetsane would have cut my hair for me in Basutoland.”

“It looks like the filling of an old mattress. I remember the mattresses at boarding-school being emptied and picked over on the grass. — Let’s get a tent.”

“Who’s going to put it up and take it down.”

“I know all about tents,” she said. Hadn’t she and Boaz lived in them for weeks?

“Yes, I know,” he said quietly.

They decided, quite suddenly, to go on to Basutoland in any case; Gideon knew someone else there, lots of people there; someone would give them a place to sleep. They were driving in the dark again; the days had no recognisable shape, ballooning and extending into unmeasured stretches of time. The car broke down, but they were not far from a dorp and, flashing a torch, Ann waved a passing lorry to a stop. “I’ll get a lift quicker than you will,” she said. Businesslike both of them, he kept out of the way in the dark. She came back within an hour, bringing a new fan-belt and a big polony sausage and some beer. She had got a lift back easily, too; she was in the triumphant good mood which successful escapades always induced. Gideon put on the new belt and they went on. Fifty miles further, before they could cross the border, the car stopped once more, and although she worked beside him with her teeth clenched and her hands transferring their oily dirt to face and hair, neither his fair knowledge nor her bullying, practical flair helped them to get the thing going again. They waited for hours, but no car came by on that lonely road at that hour of the night. Very early in the morning there was a lorry loaded with fruit-boxes, thundering down on them. The Indian driver was friendly, “There’s room for him in the back,” he said, of Gideon, as he helped her into the cab. “Oh it’s all right, there’s room here next to me,” she said, and Gideon climbed in beside her in silence.

At the garage where their benefactor left them no one had come to work yet. She put up both hands and stroked Gideon’s cheeks with their little tufts of whorly beard and said coquettishly, “Are you very, very tired,” though she knew he would not answer. They sat on an oil-drum beside the old-fashioned one-armed pumps and waited. When the petrol attendant came, in the baggy skin of old overalls, with a breakfast of dry mealie-meal in a jam tin, Gideon persuaded him to go on his bicycle to wake up the white owner-mechanic. The big black man licked his fingers clean, wrapped the tin carefully in its newspaper, and went off. Presently he returned; the owner said he could take the break-down truck himself and bring the car in. Gideon would go with him. “Go to the hotel and have breakfast,” he said to her, out of hearing of the other.

She looked at him. “Should I?”

He was getting into the truck; he nodded once, vehemently.

Alone in the dining-room of the commercial travellers’ hotel she ate porridge and eggs and bacon and drank cup after cup of grey coffee. She asked, at the reception desk, whether she could pay to have a bath. The receptionist was not on duty yet. The Indian wine-steward-cum-waiter, with his professionally amiable smooth face, said efficiently, “Is madam not resident here? I don’t think it’s allowed if you’re not resident.”

As soon as the car came back she took the thermos flask and ordered coffee to fill it, and sandwiches. “Picnic hamper for the road, madam, certainly I’ll do it for you.” From the oil-drum she watched Gideon biting deeply into the bread, bent with the other man over the open engine. A rumpled-looking fair man arrived at last. He unlocked a plywood booth within the hall of his garage. “Come and sit down in my office.” It had the wet black smell of oily rags, there was an old varnished desk piled with invoices and glossy pamphlets put out by the motor corporations, an office chair with a broken back, a grass chair that she sat in, three calendars showing coy girls with cloud-pink breasts popping from wisps of chiffon or leopard skin. Everything was covered with gritty dust. She wanted to go back to the workshop, but she sat out a decent interval; for the first time in her life she was instinctively following a convention of behaviour, fitting an identity imposed from outside herself. In due course the garage owner came back and said in the encouraging, confused way of doctors and mechanics, “Seems to be a leak of some kind. Battery’s O.K., but the points’re the trouble. Acid or something on them — but we’re trying to file them down and see …”

She got up, released.

“Would’ja like a cup a tea?”

“No thanks — I’ve had breakfast at the hotel. I’ll just go to the car — some things I want.”

“Make yourself at home here.” He reminded her of the hospitality of his office. “You travelling alone with the driver?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have to get to Maseru, you see …”

From the car she called, “Gideon,” in a soft neutral voice that came to her. He walked over obediently. She was bent from the front seat, pretending to search for something on the floor, and she signed to him to lean down toward her. Their faces were suffused as if with physical effort, hers was red and almost coarse, a vein stood out down the side of the bridge of his nose. “For Christ’s sake! How long will it take? Is it bad?” “Can’t say. I don’t know if they know what they’re doing. I suggested a new battery but they haven’t got the right one for this car.” “But can’t they patch it up so that it’ll get us to Maseru, then what’s-his-name, your friend, can get it to a decent garage.” “Everything should be fixed, they’ve done it, but the thing won’t kick over. It’s just dead.”

She was uneasy about knowing her part so well. “I’ve got to sit in that office.” Her eyes had, to him, the bulging look of someone who is held by the throat. He had never seen her almost ugly; he noted it with the cruelty of objectivity and then felt warm to her in a way he had not connected with his feeling for her before — the way he felt when he had a joke with the gossiping crones in their dirty dresses stretched across old breasts, in a location yard, or when Sol was holding forth late at night. It was as if he met her in some part of his life where he could not have expected her to be.

The car took the whole day to repair and, when it became clear that this was going to be so, she went to the hotel and took a room. She was “resident”; she could go down the granolithic corridors to the “Ladies” now, and let the water run resoundingly into the deep enamelled iron bath with its four iron claws. She went between the room at the hotel and the tin workshop of the garage, that heated up under the winter sun as the hours went by. The garage owner came and stood beside her, hands on hips, whenever she came into the workshop; in the hotel room she lay on the cotton bedcover patterned with an Arcadian scene of shepherdesses and sun-dials and looked at the curtains on the window where the same pattern was repeated but had almost faded away; she slept and woke, and her cigarette left another burn beside those that marked the night-table with its emergency candle in a tin holder. She never got a chance to talk to Gideon again, except for the remarks he passed at her, rather than to her, about the car, as he worked with the petrol attendant, helping the garage owner. She prevailed upon the wine steward to give her a plate of cold meat and salad and a knife and fork and recklessly took it, covered by another thick hotel plate, over to the garage. The garage owner smiled at her for being a woman, and soft. “You didn’t have to pay for a meal like that for the boy, mine would’ve given him something.” She saw him eyeing the plates, plates from the hotel dining-room, the plates white people used. At once she asked some question about the car; how much longer could it take, now?