Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Jessie packed the picnic things back into the boot of the Stilwell car, while Ann handed them to her. The girl stood with her arms hugged against herself, gazing round with the alertness of a last look. “When I think of what it was like driving the other way! Those two days while the car was being fixed! You know, when the man in the garage looked at Gid, and I stood next to him seeing Gid at the same time, it wasn’t the same person we saw …”

“It won’t be long.”

Gideon was trampling out the fire. First he had scooped up sand in his hands to pour over it. “Anybody got a rag?” He came over dusting his palms together. “What’s the matter?” he murmured intimately to Ann. “I want to go,” she said fiercely, sulkily. “Yes, we are going .” He aped her intensity.

“Oh, not to Johannesburg.” She walked away and got into the car; she drew the old towel that kept the draught off over her knees, and took a cigarette.

Gideon struggled to close the faulty catch of Jessie’s boot. He clicked his tongue at its recalcitrance, once it was done. “You’ll help her.”

“Whatever I can,” Jessie said.

He clicked his tongue again. “I’ll have to keep out of the way. It’s bad, you see.”

“Ann seems only just to have discovered what it’s all about.”

He laughed. “I know. She was like a kid playing hide-and-seek. Now she finds there really is something creeping up after her. I want to get her out as quick as I can. She’s got nothing to do with this sort of thing, man.” He was thinking of Callie Stow, who knew how to keep intact, untouched, her loves, her passions and her beliefs, even while the dirty fingers of police spies handled them. But he did not want Ann to change; like many people he confused spirit with bravery, and he saw her old thoughtlessness and recklessness as courage. He did not want to see her acquire the cunning, stubborn and patient temper of a political rebel. To him she was herself, her splendid self, a law to herself, and limited as little to the conventions of opposition as to the conventions of submission. She loved him; she did not love him across the colour-bar: for her the colour-bar did not exist.

“Come, my girl, let’s push off,” he said, putting a hand on Jessie’s shoulder. The gesture admitted her to the sort of moment she had been waiting for, not consciously, and she spoke. “Gideon, shall I keep in touch with the child — when you’re gone?”

He was not annoyed at the reminder, he was not indifferent. But he said, as if he took a chance on what was expected of him, “I’ll make some arrangements to send money every month or so, as soon as I can.”

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I could give him news of you, and I could send you photographs.”

“Perhaps it would be better to let it go,” he said. “There’s an uncle looking after him, a good friend of mine. When I’ve got money I’ll see that he gets it.”

She was looking at him with a trapped, uncertain face. He patted her hand. “It’s all right, Jessie, it’ll be all right.”

She drove ahead of them, parting an empty countryside where a tiny herd-boy, flapping like a scare-crow in the single garment of a man’s shirt, waved to the car. Little groups of huts were made out of mud and the refuse of the towns — rusty corrugated iron, old tins beaten flat, once even the head of an iron bedstead put to use as a gate. The women slapped at washing and men squatted talking and gesticulating in an endless and unimaginable conversation that, as she passed, even at intervals of several miles, from one kraal to another, linked up in her mind as one. In this continuity she had no part, in this hold that lay so lightly, not with the weight of cement and tarmac and steel, but sinew of the earth’s sinew, authority of a legendary past, she had no share. Gideon had it; what an extraordinary quality it imparted to people like him, so that others were drawn to them as if by some magic. It was, in fact, a new kind of magic; the old magic lay in a personality believed to have access to the supernatural, this new one belonged to those who held in themselves for this one generation the dignity of the poor about to inherit their earth and the worldliness of those who had been the masters. Who else could stretch out within himself and put finger-tips on both touchstones at once? No wonder the girl had turned her back on them all, on Boaz with his drums and flutes, on Tom with his historical causes, on herself with her “useful” jobs, and chosen him.

But a few days later, when Jessie happened to have to drive through the township where Gideon lived, the continuity of the little communities of mud and tin on the road was picked up again. Mean shops and houses lurched by as she bounced along the rutted streets; her errand (for the Agency, where she had found herself at once temporarily employed again because of some staff crisis) took her first to a decent, two-roomed box of a house between two hovels. She sat among shiny furniture behind coloured venetian blinds; then in an office converted from an old house, where a money-lender and book-keeper, with a manner of business irritability and suspicion, hovered over the scratchings of a girl clerk who went about in slippers between black exercise books and a filing cabinet like a weary woman in her own kitchen. The verandah outside the place was littered with the torn-off sheaths of mealie-cobs, and children with mouths and noses joined by snot watched from the gutter. A mule was being beaten and a huge woman, strident-voiced, oblivious of her grotesque body and dirty clothes, bared her broken teeth at a man. Gideon had someone he loved here; parents, perhaps; friends. Taking Gideon, Ann was claimed by this, too, this place where people were born and lived and died before they could come to life. They drudged and drank and murdered and stole in squalor, and never walked free in the pleasant places. When they were children they were cold and hungry, and when they were old they were cold and hungry again; and in between was a brief, violent clutch at things out of reach, or the sad brute’s life of obliviousness to them. That was the reality of the day, the time being. Oh, it would take courage to choose this, to accept it, to plunge into it, to belong with it; for that was what one would do, with Gideon, even if one were to be living in another country. Even among strangers in Italy or England, Ann’s lot would still be thrown in here, among these men and women and children outcast for three hundred years. Jessie found fear in herself at the idea of being allied to this life, and was uneasy, as if she might communicate it in some way, unspoken, to Ann. She fought it, denying its validity, but fear doesn’t lie down at the bidding, like a dog. Not even for love, that is supposed to cast it out: she remembered how Ann had said “… when the man in the garage looked at Gid, and I stood next to him seeing Gid at the same time, it wasn’t the same person we saw …”

Jessie was stopped by a policeman just past a cinema gutted in a riot some years before and never restored, and asked for her permit to be in the township. One of the easy lies that even the ruling caste has to learn to tell came readily: “My washgirl didn’t turn up this week, and I had to find out what she’s done with my things—” She had told the tale several times before, and it was always adequate.

“You really think she wanted him drowned? But you said one must believe she loves him?”

Jessie talked of Ann and Gideon but there was conveyed to Tom in the telling not only her experience of them but the vein that the experience had opened into herself.

“She’s in love with him, there’s no getting away from it, whatever we thought about her before.” The familiar background to the Stilwells’ intimacy, that looked the same whether they were in fact far removed from one another or drawn closely together, had been taken up again; she was cutting out a dress, at night, while he worked on some students’ papers. “But I don’t know what she wanted …”