Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“But how was that?” Jessie was half-interested.

“When we were in the car, I ran back for the key and then I realised she was there … in the dining-room, by the window …”

“Did she call you or something?”

Ann smiled, surprised at how well she remembered the details. “No … well, I went in and she said something strange to me — she’d been there all the time and she knew I hadn’t noticed her. Something about — there are always other people and then one day you become one of them yourself … something like that.”

“Old people sit and watch like greedy cats,” said Jessie cruelly.

“No, she was rather nice, in a funny way.”

Jessie saw that there was some loyalty between the girl and the old woman whom she herself had never thought of as aware of each other’s existence.

Gideon was amused as he often was at the customs of white people. “Fancy, she asks if she can come to her own house …”

“Oh it was my stepfather’s. They were not like married people usually are — nothing cosy about them. I don’t suppose she’s been here since I was a child.”

A few moments later Ann said, “Are you going home, then?”

Jessie said, “When?” to gain time, not for herself, but for the other two.

“Next week.”

“Well, school begins.”

She had never asked them what they were going to do. She had the feeling that they never talked about it, that they had hidden from it, escaped it until now when, as inevitably happens, the chance remark that her mother wanted to come for the “last few days” had discovered them. “I’m going in.” She was pushing her hair painfully under a rubber cap. Sand from her body sprinkled down on their heads as she got up. “Oh — sorry!” “It’s all right.” Ann took a paper handkerchief and began to use a corner of it, very gently, to flick the grains out of the convolutions of Gideon’s small, well-made ear.

“He should bend his head to that side,” said Jessie.

He shook it. “It’s all right .”

“Wait a minute.” Ann persisted in her attentions to the ear. She said to Jessie, looking up at her, “Did you ever see anything so perfectly shaped?” He jerked his head as if he were being bothered by an insect. “I know,” said Jessie.

When she came out of the water he was busy helping the children lug something into the pools. She walked over to them, pulling off the cap so that the deep, indrawn breath of the sea returned to her again in a gasp. He got the swollen plank afloat and came to the rock on which she had climbed to see. “Shipwreck,” he said. She smiled, watching the children, watching this game, like every other, fall into the pattern of what they were: Clem taking charge, Madge at once suspecting that her chosen part was not the one she wanted after all, Elisabeth forgetting, in her roistering pleasure, what it was supposed to be about.

“Can we go back together?” he said.

“Yes, if you want to.”

“She doesn’t want to go back,” he said.

He began to pull winkles off the rock and throw them into the incoming tide that sucked and struck against the rock where they sat. “You can’t get a thing like this sorted out in five minutes.” He was speaking for Ann, and Jessie answered, unconvinced, to give him the reassurance this asked, “Of course not.”

“What do you make of Boaz?” he asked.

“Why?”

“So nice and polite and so on, very much the good chap. Never says, what’s this all about?”

“To you? But why should he? I’m sure he’s talked enough to Ann.”

“It’s pax when I’m around.” After a pause he said, “D’you think he’d be like that with anybody?”

She looked at him quickly. Perhaps he wanted a lie from her, but she had done with lies, even the good lies. “Probably not.”

He said, “She’d feel different about doing this if he’d just once stand up to me, you know?”

“Oh of course, if the other one can be got to behave badly at once everything’s much easier. But here you have his nature, which is perhaps a bit of the natural victim’s, plus the special situation. Civilised love affairs are bad enough, but this one’s particularly civilised.”

“If I were white,” Gideon turned to her, wanting to confront her word by word, “you mean he’d tell me to go to hell.”

“And her, too. Maybe.”

“Good God.” He was scornful, confused, and all the time the balance between trust and half-trust quivered between them, and she looked down, where the water swirled loud with foam, and she seemed to plunge—“I don’t think I’d ever have to give this business another thought. I believed it was all settled, once and for all, long ago. It’s the truth, the rational truth, that a love affair like yours is the same as any other. But you haven’t come to the truth while it’s still only the rational truth. You’ve got to be a bit more honest than that. Do you know what I think while I look at you and Ann? Do you? I remember what was left out when I settled the race business once and for all. I remember the black men who rubbed the floor round my feet when I was twelve and fourteen. I remember the young black man with a bare chest, mowing the lawn. The bare legs and the strong arms that carried things for us, moved furniture. The black man that I must never be left alone with in the house. No one explained why, but it didn’t matter. I used to feel, at night, when I turned my back to the dark passage and bent to wash my face in the bathroom, that someone was coming up behind me. Who was it, do you think? And how many more little white girls are there for whom the very first man was a black man? The very first man, the man of the sex phantasies … Gideon, I’d forgotten, I’d left it all out. It’s only when something like you and Ann happens one suddenly needs to feel one’s way back.”

He was looking tightly ahead as if under an insult.

“I suppose Boaz thought it was all settled, too. Years ago. But none of us knows how much getting free of the colour bar means to us — none of us. It sounds crazy, but perhaps it’s so important to him that he can’t help putting it before Ann, even. It sounds crazy; but even before her.”

They did not speak for a while, and the sea cut under the rock and tore away, bearing off what had been said.

“Where would you go, to England?”

“She thought Italy.” He did not want to mention the scholarship that he had given up, but that Ann saw simply as something that could be arranged again.

“What about some other part of Africa?”

“It doesn’t matter much.” Ann was coming towards them along the shore-line, her feet pressing the shine of water from the sand as she walked. They both watched her approach, but it was his vision of her that prevailed, so that Jessie saw her as he did, a glowing face, salt-stiff, blown hair, his shirt resting like a towel across her shoulders, and a line of the flesh — the white of a freshly-broken mushroom — that was hidden by the boned top of her bathing suit showing in a soft rise against her tanned chest as she walked. In this unselfconscious sauntering stalk everything was taken for granted, everything that had ever been struggled for and won with broken bodies and bursting brains — the struggle up from superstition and pestilence, religious wars and industrial slavery, all the way from the weight of the club to the rubber truncheon: the fight of man against nature, against men, and against himself. Gideon said between clenched teeth, “The other things I’ve been beating my head against the wall for — I don’t want them any more.” He was making, in the presence of a witness, an offering, throwing down the last that he had before the demand that he could not measure. And he laughed because of the present glory of it, as the figure came on, approaching, enveloping, over the sand. He jumped off the rock, staggered a moment in the knee-high wild water, and then ran up to the dry sand. When she came he took her by the shoulders in some playful exchange, knocking the shirt off. They stood there talking, arm’s-length from each other, her head impudently, affectionately bent, his thumbs pressing the hollow under each collarbone. The sun had ripened her skin like fruit, and even in the house the warm graining beneath which the blood lay near, brought to the surface by slight inflammation, gave her the look of someone seen by candlelight.