Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Rain leaned from the horizon over the sea, and all, sea and rain, moved so quietly that the waves fell with the isolated sounds of doors shut far away. An epoussé glitter now and then broke the dream with a reminder of water.

Clem, who less than a year ago had been as unhampered by conceptions of time as her sisters were, now felt her being determined within it as the life of a character in a play is contained in sets arbitrarily put up and taken down. “Our last three days.” She was dismayed, she protested against the limits that obsessed her. Madge and Elisabeth chimed in with her, but forgot, next moment, that the game of bears in caves that the darkness under the high old beds in their room provided, would not go on for ever. “Let’s always play this,” they said to each other.

Clem took her rebellion to her mother. “Why does it just have to go and rain on our last three days?”

“You’ve had a whole month when it didn’t rain.”

But Clem’s sense of time had no dimension in the past yet, she was concerned only with the margin by which the present extended into the future.

Jessie gathered stray books and clothes wherever she happened to come upon them and put them on the spare bed in the room where she slept. She went through the contents of the magazine rack in the living-room, setting aside the children’s ludo board, some crumpled dolls’ clothes, and falling under the aimless fascination of reading snippets in the old magazines that had been there when she came and would be left behind when she went. Gideon and Ann stepped over the clutter that surrounded her as she sat on the floor. Their comings and goings were minor; they spent the days talking of the practical facts of rooms and rents and fares in other countries, like some ambitious young couple planning to spend their savings on a visit abroad. Ann even sat mending the unravelled sleeve of Gideon’s blue Italian shirt. Sometimes Gideon was silent for long stretches as he sipped beer and drew. They went tramping out in the rain, and once drove away through the mud and came back stretching and preoccupied, focusing upon familiar things with the daze of people who have shut themselves away to talk.

Jessie picked up a drawing of Gideon’s while they were out. Well, at least it wasn’t Ann again — seeing that it was abstract. But why be glad of that? Malraux spoke of the artist as one who annexes a fragment of the world and makes it his own. She did not know whether Gideon needed that more than he needed to share a common possession of what there was to be shared. Perhaps he needed to be a man more than he needed to be a painter. Not just a black man, set aside on a special form, a special bench, in a special room, but a man.

As she looked at the charcoal drawing that was almost like a woodcut in its contrast of thick black lines and spidery-etched connections, she thought it moved the way the water did that day when she and Gideon were talking on the rock; but the association was probably one that existed only in her own mind.

The day before they left was clear, with a colourless sky that turned blue as the morning warmed. The sea remained calm; the sand, beaten flat as a tennis-court, dried with a rain-stippled skin and took incisively the oblique cuts of crabs’ delicate feet and the three-branched seals imprinted by the claws of birds. Gideon and Ann came down to the beach soon after Jessie and the children. Like invalids, after the rain, they sat against a rock and smoked, both in long trousers, he in his sweater and she with her grey trench-coat pulled round her, only their feet bare. Jessie looked up from her book at some point and saw Gideon strolling towards the children. She and Ann chatted intermittently, and then Jessie decided to go to the village to get what was needed for a picnic lunch on the road next day. She was brisk, standing up with her hands conclusively on her thighs for a moment; she had about her the confidence of a woman who is about to return to the place where she belongs and who already takes on the attractiveness the man who is waiting there will see in her — an attractiveness made up of the freshness imparted by absence, the comfort of something well-known, the strength and weakness of her régime. For once, Ann was inert by contrast; her out-flung legs, her bent head that moved only to draw slowly on a cigarette made a figure that had come to a stop, there on the beach.

The shop in the village was not full, but service moved with a peculiar country slowness. You were supposed to help yourself from the grocery shelves but the grouping of things was haphazard — Jessie had to give up and wait her turn to be served at the counter.

The man and woman behind it conducted their business in an easy, talkative way, while a few Africans hung about on the fringe of the whites, hoping to get a turn sometime. A big pasty woman, with an identical daughter leaning on the counter beside her, was trying to decide on a tin of jam—“Ah, but how often do you get it these days that it’s not all mushy, like a lot of porridge …?”

The assistant was a little grey-skinned woman without breasts or lips or eyebrows, but whose head of hair, distinct from the rest of her, was fresh from the hairdresser’s, elaborately swirled and curled, stiff and brilliant yellow. “Not Calder’s Orchard Bounty, Mrs. Packer, I can guarantee you that. Same as you, I hate jam all squashed up’s if its bad fruit they put in it, but this is what I take home for myself.”

The next customer ahead of Jessie was a handsome woman with the air of authority that goes with a gaze that follows the line of a splendid slope of bosom. “How are you today, Mrs. Gidley?” The assistant took her pencil out of the centre of a curl and although the whole mass moved slightly, like a pile of spun sugar stirred by a knife, not a hair was drawn out of place. The tone of voice rose a little to meet the status of this customer, not unctuous, but no longer matey. “Stanley — Mrs. Gidley’s chickens, in the back there. — I put them aside first thing this morning, while I could get the pick for you. Or don’t you want to take them? We can send the boy, no trouble at all, he’s got to go up your way, before twelve? — Stanley, just a minute—”

“Oh could you? Oh that would be nice — but I’d forgotten about them anyway — all I wanted was to know if you’d be good enough to put this up somewhere—” The woman was leaning across the counter on one elbow, smoothing a home-made poster.

“Oh that—” The yellow head twisted to look. “I heard about that — yes, I should think I would! It’s getting too much of a good thing. My daughter was saying to me, Saturday afternoon and Sunday’s the only day you’ve got, if you’re working, and then the whole beach is full of them.”

The gracious voice said regretfully, painedly, “Well, we do feel that some arrangements ought to be made. Something that will be fair to all. One doesn’t want to deny people their pleasures. There has been a suggestion that a part of the beach ought to be set aside for them … but of course, once you make it official, you’ll get them coming from other places, and the Indians, too …”

“It’s all the servants, you see, that people bring down with them. That’s it, mainly. Down from Johannesburg and they’ve got their bathing suits and all just like white people …” The assistant bent her head towards the large woman and laughed indignantly, in spite of herself. “We get them in here, let me tell you, quite the grand ladies and gentlemen they think they are, talking to you as if they was white.”

“Well exactly, they’re not our simple souls who’re content to chat in their rooms.” Her kind of laugh joined pleasantly with the assistant’s.