Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

The passion between Gideon and Ann set the pace of days that passed without slowness or haste or in fact any of the usual apprehensions of time. Jessie remembered that she had once thought, of Tom and herself, how you had to stop the ordinary business of living in order to love properly. As she walked down the path from the house in silence behind them, their relaxed, lightly swinging arms, backs of the hands just touching now and then, seemed to regulate the rhythm of her breathing. Wherever a group of people live together there are those from whom life emanates — anyone in whom, at that time, the force of vitality is swarming, as a particular tree among others is set electrically alive by bees. Jessie had for so long been the one at the centre; it was strange to her to feel now that this had passed from her. She had said to Gideon, “I don’t have love affairs any more”—but, at the same time, she caught herself walking along the beach conscious of a man’s eyes on her. The man turned out to be a boy the age of her son. She looked at the two lovers, passing a cigarette back and forth between them, lingering over what had touched each other’s mouths, silent together, speechless, enfolded in themselves before her. Perhaps it would be Morgan who would have the love affairs now. She thought of his hands; tender, gaunt, strong and timid — he could be mistaken for a man, he was a man. She walked miles up the beach, away from the lovers, away from the little girls.

When she came back, Clem and Madge had buried Gideon up to the neck in sand; his head rested on the thighs of Ann’s curled-up legs and her head watched over him, eyes closed to the sun, in a strange, naked, sleepy smile as if even his joking commonplaces with the children carried some code for her. Jessie took the children in to swim and then went up to the house with them. “I love Gid,” Madge said, confiding, admiring.

“I don’t mind him being black,” Elisabeth agreed.

“Do you mind sometimes when other people are?” Jessie asked.

“I don’t think it’s pretty,” said Elisabeth.

Clem began a long lecture about how unkind it was to talk about the colour of people and how you mustn’t hurt their feelings, and how it didn’t matter at all what colour you were, you were just the same — like people having blond hair or dark hair.

“Don’t boss me,” said Elisabeth, confidently. She was very successful and flirtatious with Gideon, and insisted, with the tyranny over guests that Jessie disliked in children, on his coming to kiss her in bed before she slept each night. But Clem had already lost sight, in an attitude, of her natural response towards people; an attitude of necessity impressed early in order to counter the generally-accepted one. If you did not find blackness abhorrent and outcast, was the only alternative the fastidious suppression of all personal responses in the common denominator of shared humanity? Did it follow that, because you weren’t repelled, you couldn’t admit to being attracted, either? Did one have to be so afraid of emotion— any emotion —in this business?

Through the ordinary contacts of daily life about the house together, Jessie knew that Gideon was not unaware of her as a woman; there was no covert desire in his behaviour towards her, but she knew that, quite legitimately and quite harmless to his complete preoccupation with Ann, there existed an objective recognition that she, Jessie, was a woman to whom one could make love. This recognition exists in silence and without a sign between a man and many women, or a woman and many men, in situations where there never has been and never will be anything more to it. In bus queues, across shop counters, in the houses of friends — everyone recognises those who exist for himself and for whom he himself exists in this way; just as there are others, even the beautiful and apparently desirable, with whom one has no sexual concomitant. Gideon did not desire her, he was in love with another woman against whom she was not even in the running in the general world of sexual competition, because she was too old — sixteen years too old — but he might have desired her in another time and place. He might have; and this, combined with the sixteen years between her thirty-nine and Ann’s twenty-three, meant that she herself could have been Ann — once, somewhere.

She was at once set at a remove from the love affair and at the same time curiously close to it. She was jealous no longer of the mere fact of love-making going on behind drawn curtains or in the darkness that stretched to the sea. Once when she returned to the house unexpectedly at a time when she thought the two of them were out, she opened the door into Ann’s room to look for a vanished pair of scissors. She was barefoot, from the beach, and the house was silent; the two lying there did not wake up as she gazed at them. She felt neither the guilty recoil of one who sees suddenly, as a spectator, a part of life where one is never a spectator and only a protagonist, nor the shame of the voyeur. She looked with calm a moment at the ancient grouping of the two bodies, the faces flung away from each other, the arms lax where they had held; all that had been centred rolled apart in sleep. Ann’s one brown-tipped breast was pressed out of shape, like her cheek, by the angle at which she lay on her side, with the whole of the lower part of her body swung across if she were lying face-down. And he lay on his belly with his head over the outstretched arm whose curved fingers, no longer within reach of her head, still conformed to the shape of it. His dark body had a shine going down the curve that followed the groove of the spine to the short, gleaming roundness of the buttocks. Their faces were sweaty. A fly rose and settled indifferently on either. Clothes dangled from the bed and lay sunk upon the floor; round the edges of the curtains, a frill of fire ran where the midday sun was held out. Jessie slowly closed the door and went away.

That afternoon they all went to a beach ten miles further up the coast that the children thought of as a place foreign and exciting. It was much like any other beach along there, but was reached by a track that went through eucalyptus forests instead of sugarcane and had a cold and thrilling smell that was like some ritual preparation for arrival. The beach and rough green about it had been declared an Indian beach township, but this was so recent that there were only two ugly little villas, one chalky pink and the other brilliant blue, and both empty and deserted except for an African family and some chickens in a hut down among the mealies and stunted paw-paws of each plot. These people did not venture on to the beach, anyway; the picnic party was perfectly safe from prying eyes. The necessity for taking care that Gideon was not seen had become something that they considered openly and took for granted without embarrassment or pretence, as some daily medical treatment that at first seems impossible to carry out while keeping up a semblance of normal living soon adapts the norm to its own queer needs. The children, not knowing why, but always racing eager to give their report, ran down first, as usual, to see if there was anyone on the beach. Then the two women and Gideon followed. The little girls tore off their dresses and ran into the pools in the nude; there was no reason why they should not do this on the beach where they were living, but they did it only here.

Jessie had unopened letters in her canvas bag among towels and bananas; one was from Tom, and she read it without comment, but the other was from her mother: “She wonders if she should come down next week for the last few days … would it be convenient. — Well, it would be extremely inconvenient …”

“She’s seen us,” Ann said, weighing sand in her long hand. “Once; in your house. No; perhaps she didn’t really see us together.”