Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

She spent the night in the hotel, alone, eating again opposite the huge black wooden chiffonier that hid the entrance to, but not the noise and smell of, the kitchen; going to bed in the room. Gideon slept in the garage on some sort of a bed provided by the petrol attendant. There were rooms for commercial travellers’ boys in the hotel yard, the garage owner said; she could get one of those — but she lied in shame for the dirty outhouses, “They’re full.”

Everything vanished but these practical details that had constantly to be worked out in the mind; the wangling of decent food, the arrangements for somewhere to sleep, the endless concentration on the coils and nuts and boxes within the gut of the car, and the news of it, the consultations about it. She said “Good morning, Gideon”, standing with the garage owner. She walked away with the man whose pink jowls were creased by his pillows. Gideon looked refreshed. He was shaved and had a clean shirt on. She wondered how and where he had managed this. All the mystery of the simplest mechanics of daily living parted them.

When they were on the road at last again, time had changed and stretched and swollen. No longer had they been a few days together; the other afternoon, the afternoon they had left Johannesburg, was far off. She said to him, “Stop for a minute somewhere.” She was stretched out in the seat beside him gawkily, her head flung back, smoking, the elbow of one arm cupped in the other hand. “What’s wrong?” “Just stop.”

With the engine cut off there was silence for a moment until the passing sounds of the empty road came to them — a chirrup as a bird flitted by, and the crack of a dry stalk in a mealie field. She was frowning intensely, provocatively, blinded by what she wanted to say. She kissed him suddenly with the powerful invitation of a woman who wants to be made love to. While he was uncertain how to respond, as a man is at the wrong time and place, and stroked her arm in some soothing, trifling caress, she sat up and said, “That bloody hotel.”

“What did you expect?” He made a gentle joke of it, and the reference became nothing more than a comment on the poor food and half-clean room.

She said, “Gideon, Gideon, Gideon,” ruffling him, touching him, putting his hand up under the hair on her neck to reassure herself.

“Is there any sense in going to Basutoland?”

He chuckled. “I only hope so. Why not?”

“But if your friends are away?”

He said nothing.

“Let’s go to Natal for a few days.” She had not thought of it before, it came to her suddenly, as she relied upon things to do. “There’s a house there we can go to … away up the coast.”

“Who’s there?” he said.

“Jessie’s house.” She was practical now.

“Stilwell’s?”

“It’s some cottage she inherited when her stepfather died. She’s alone.” Neither of them thought of Jessie as more than a name to a place that would do. It was, of course, because of her that it would do; she was one of their kind, she had a generic familiarity even though, in the blur of unimaginable family life in which they saw her, she seemed too remote from themselves to be taken account of.

“… It was because of Boaz, I suppose, that first night when I spoke to you,” (Jessie wrote to Tom) “but it isn’t now. I’m not putting up with them for anybody. They live almost like anyone else, here. Of course you can’t refuse them that chance — how could I? Probably this isn’t as big of me as it sounds, I don’t quite trust myself over the idea of a ‘chance’, when I see it written down … Test? Hurdle? Of what? They seem fonder of one another than I thought. Specially her; I mean I always thought of her as thriving on affection rather than giving out any. Playful, yes, but not tender, with B?” When she skimmed through the letter she paused in vague dissatisfaction, and to make some token effort to satisfy herself transposed “Test” and “Hurdle”.

Ann and Gideon had gone for a walk on the beach at night; presently she heard their voices, intimate in the dark, and they came up the verandah steps. Ann was wearing his thick sweater. “D’you want some coffee?” she said as they went into the kitchen. Jessie said no, she didn’t think so, but when they had made it, they brought a cup for her and called from the living-room that it was ready. She was drawn into their company and sat in one of the big chairs with her feet under her for comfort, because a wind had come up. “Here.” Gideon handed her the sweater that Ann had taken off.

Wrapped in their warmth, she thought: they’ve been making love out there. Ann was talking about fishing. Where could they go, she asked, aware of the absurdity of her enthusiasm — she had found some tackle lying about the house. “Ask Jason,” Jessie said to Gideon. “He must know all the local lore.”

“I suppose he would,” Gideon looked at her uncertainly.

“If a man asks your advice about fishing, you may feel a little friendly loyalty toward him? Don’t you think?” She smiled at Gideon.

“You may start boasting about your new friend, and where he lives.”

“That’s true.”

Gideon said, “Why were you so worried about him?”

“Oh it wasn’t him … All the other things too difficult to explain, or nobody’s business.”

“It was a bit of a shock,” said Ann, with a smile, of their arrival.

Jessie could smell her, the smell of her hair and the perfume that clung about the room at home, in the woollen collar rolled down round her own neck. “A year ago, then , I didn’t want Boaz and Ann to come to us. But I didn’t do anything to stop it. It was the sort of thing Tom and I have always done. One must be open to one’s friends. You’ve got to get away from the tight little bourgeois family unit. In a country like this, people like us must stick together — we live by the sanctions of our own kind. We haven’t any anonymous, impersonal code because the South African ‘way of life’ isn’t for us. But what happens to you, yourself … I don’t know. The original impulse towards decency hardens round you and you can’t get out. It becomes another convention.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said Gideon. “If you’re satisfied you’re doing what you ought to do?”

“It’s all a bit too snug. You can easily forget that it’s only the best you can do … for the time being.”

“You want to get right into the struggle then, man.” Gideon gave slightly scornful advice.

“Oh … it’s not all politics — not for whites, at least.”

He laughed.

“… Yes, I suppose it is. The whole way we live becomes a political gesture above everything else. Well, that’s part of what I mean — there’s no room to develop as a person because any change in yourself might appear to be a defection. And yet if you can’t change, can’t stretch out, how can you be ready for some new demand on yourself? In time you don’t even remember, really, how you arrived at the position you’ve taken up.”

“What sort of demand are you thinking of?” Gideon said, weighing her up.

“Well, if you want to live like a human being you’ve got to keep on proving it. It’s not a state automatically conferred upon you because you walk upright on two legs, any more than because you’ve got a white skin.”

“You might have to prove it in jail one day. You know? Your house won’t be big enough any more.”

“And when I come out of prison will you punish me all over again? What’m I going to do with my white face?”

They both laughed. “What’s the alternative for you?” Gideon said.

Jessie drew her head back through the neck of Gideon’s pullover like a tortoise, and took it off. She pushed away the strands of hair that clung to her face with the crackle of static electricity, and said, “Imagine Tom and me, along with the whites, shooting down blacks. ‘Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.’ Christ, I’d rather you shot me. — I’m going to bed. Don’t leave the door open, will you, that gorgeous lamp’ll blow down again.”