Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Jessie made some automatic assent. But her feeling of distaste for the contemplation of them returned to the way they were before, with Ann coming home at night to Boaz, rose uncontrollably and communicated itself to them.

“And then?” The appeal did not come from personal identification with their position, but out of something wider, urgent — the concern with human dignity as a common possession that, lost by individuals, is that much lost for all. She felt the same sort of involvement when she saw someone fly into a brutal temper: in any action callow, inadequate, not carried through to the limit of its demands of courage and sensibility.

“She’s got to get it all finally straightened out with Boaz.”

Ann said, “I must sell the car.” Everything that ever happened to her was simply announced obliquely and casually, in the form of such practicalities. That was how she dealt with unwieldy emotions, giving her confusion an appearance of headstrong sureness.

“We won’t be able to see each other for the next week or two anyway,” said Gideon, alluding to her return to the Stilwell house. Now that the love affair was no longer an escapade they would have to become cautious, prudent, fearful, where they had been brazen and careless; they could not risk running into trouble before they managed to leave the country.

Jessie was thinking of his need for friends and money to smuggle him out. “It won’t be too difficult.”

“No. But it’s got to be quick and quiet.” He paused. “I know the ropes.” Already passion had become discipline in him.

“I suppose you wouldn’t like to buy my car?” Ann thought that Jessie had inherited money from Fuecht. “We need cash.”

Jessie shrugged off the question as something that Ann must know was impossible. “You’ll be all right once you get to England, won’t you? Surely your people will help.”

“I shouldn’t think so, not this time,” Ann said.

“We won’t be able to get much further than Tanganyika, to start with,” said Gideon, eager to explain, almost anxious, wanting to have the worst admitted and therefore that much defeated. “If I can get out I’ll wait for her there.”

Jessie helped him to some more meat and turned with the plate to Ann, but she gestured it away. “I looked for you right up to the third rocks,” she said presently.

Gideon was opening beer for Jessie and himself. “Yes, but I’d gone further than that, right to where there’s that steep cliff, you know? — and I sat there for a bit, and when I started to come back the tide was so high I had to go through the bush.”

“You didn’t see the jeep?”

“I came along a path. Was there a jeep?”

Jessie remarked, “Ann says some fishermen came along the beach in a jeep.”

“Well, a jeep couldn’t get further than the third rocks anyway.” He sat down and began to eat. “Fishermen. We’ve been left in peace until now.”

“It lasted out our time,” Jessie said. “There’s something to be said for having held out for nearly three weeks.”

“Oh I don’t think a couple of fishermen’re anything to worry about. You’ll be able to make a regular hide-out for your criminal friends down here, Jessie. You say your mother’s not going to use it.”

“The residents of Isendhla are a vigilant lot. Just because they’re retired you mustn’t think they’ve gone soft, Gideon. I heard this morning in the village that they’re having a meeting to stop the cheeky servants from Johannesburg playing around on the beach in their off-time. Wearing bikinis, too, just like the white ladies.”

He began to chuckle to himself. “Is that it?”

“That’s it. On our beautiful Isendhla beach where all tensions are forgotten, and the tolerance and gentleness of a non-competitive life prevail.”

“What are they going to do with the stinking black brutes?”

“There’s talk about setting aside a remote bit of beach for them — say, up at Grimald’s cottage.”

Gideon slid back in his chair, and put a hand over Ann’s to share the joke with her, but she was inattentive.

“Good old awful Johannesburg, nice and vulgar and brutal, a good honest gun under the white man’s pillow and a good honest tsotsi in the street,” Jessie said. “I think we’ll get going about eight tomorrow morning, all right?”

Before the house emptied of them, it seemed fuller than it had ever been, for their possessions were piled up in the rooms, and the beds, though stripped, held hair-brushes, medicine bottles, damp bathing suits and toys — things for which there was no place in the Stilwells’ suitcases or that the children did not want to be parted from during the journey. At last they were ready to go. Gideon was making Jason laugh as they loaded the cars, talking Zulu. When Jessie wanted to say goodbye to him he was back in the kitchen, and when he saw that she meant to shake hands with him he became confused, brought his palms together in a kind of silent clap, and then took her hand awkwardly, his fingers damp from the sink.

When they had gone he brought out his polishing cloths made of squares of old blanket and his two tins of polish, one red and one brown, and smeared the floors thickly, replacing the dusty footsteps and the spoor of the children’s bare feet with overlapping circles of concentric shine that came up under the progress of his hand. He took the few bananas and bruised apples that remained in the bowl on the table out to his room; the smell of fruit was gone from the house. In the bathroom, he found a used blade and put it, carefully wrapped in newspaper, in the blouse pocket of his kitchen-boy suit. He swept out one of Gideon’s charcoal drawings that had fallen under the divan and been forgotten. In the lavatory, he carefully replaced the drawing-pin that had come loose with a curling corner of the declaration that he was unable to read but whose official look he had always interpreted as a sign of importance.

The lucky-bean seeds remained, month after month and year after year, where the children had spilt them that day and they had dispersed and settled, red-and-black eyes, into the cracks of the verandah.

The black spring of burned veld stretched for miles beside the road. They came up out of the sappy green of the coast that knows no seasons and remembered that winter had cut down to the bone in their absence. Already the hard, bright land was cleared, cattle hoof-marks dried to stone in what had been vleis, rocks split by frost. The black territory, as if shaded in on a map, ran round pockets of resistance formed by scrubby trees, and blanked out the shallow veins that marked the beds of dry streams. It was the black not of death but of life; peach trees along the railway tracks were blooming crude pink out of it, and there was a frizz of something light, hardly green yet, over a young willow. Jessie was not aware of a change of tone and pace in her being but it took place nevertheless, just as the engines in an aeroplane settle to the number of revolutions which constitutes their cruising speed, once the height of that speed has been reached. She drove without getting tired, and managed the children capably and companionably; a temporary state that made all others seem inexplicable. When they stopped to eat or to stretch their legs, she and Ann and Gideon had the confidence and easy closeness together that people often find only when the experience they have shared is about to be summed up by their return to those who are outside it. Before, Jessie had resented being drawn into the close orbit of Gideon and Ann; now she felt that they had also been drawn into hers. Gideon made a fire, when they had lunch, to please Elisabeth — there was nothing that needed cooking. There was no wood about and he used dry grass and cow-dung and was affectionately praised by everyone. The three grown-ups sat round Gideon’s fire drinking gin and tonic and laughed a lot about nothing in particular; everything that was said seemed a witty private joke between them. Elisabeth stood behind Gideon with her arms possessively round his neck and laughed when the grown-ups did.