Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“Wanted him drowned … you said so”

“Being in love with him isn’t simple; I mean, the whole business isn’t. We say it’s just like falling in love with anyone, but it isn’t, the whole affair isn’t. Not for us either. You said at the beginning Boaz couldn’t behave just as if this were any man running off with his wife. And Gideon knows it. Boaz wants to treat Gideon like any other man, but he can’t because Gideon isn’t a man, won’t be, can’t be, until he’s free.”

“About Boaz — all right.” Their attitude in the business of black and white was something they shared completely without individual reservations. Yet now Tom felt the difference between them of two people, both of whom are familiar with a terrain through organised tours, one of whom has been lost there … Jessie went on sticking pins firmly through paper and material, privately carrying on with her task, while her voice drew him into an admittance of something that existed like a deed committed between them. “Ah, Tom, don’t ask me to postulate it. We don’t see black and white and so we all think we behave as decently to one colour face as another. But how can that ever be, so long as there’s the possibility that you can escape back into your filthy damn whiteness? How do you know you’ll always play fair? There’s Boaz — he’s so afraid of taking advantage of Gideon’s skin that he ends up taking advantage of it anyway by refusing to treat him like any other man.”

“Yes, yes, but all right — what ‘harm’ could you do or I do to Len or Gideon or anybody else?”

“But how can you be sure, while one set of circumstances governs their lives and another governs yours?”

Tom said shortly, “I don’t see Ann thinking about this, though.”

“One knows things sometimes simply by being afraid, you know that?”

Later when they had gone to bed, he returned to it, saying in the dark, “If she really loves him, as you say, what harm can she do him?”

Jessie was silent for a moment, but as Tom put his arm under her head, she said to his profile showing like a mountain range close to her eyes, “First he couldn’t get out on his scholarship because he’s black, now he can’t stay because she’s white. What’s the good of us to him? What’s the good of our friendship or her love?”

For the Davises there was that withdrawal of people into their own affairs that often comes about when some crisis in which others have been involved shrinks back to the orbit of the protagonists, once a decision has been made. They did not need to discuss the details of their parting with Tom and Jessie; they needed to recover, even from the most sympathetic and familiar understanding, all that they had revealed of themselves in the distress of the last few months. It was necessary for Boaz to forget, at least for the present, the demands he had made on Tom while they were alone together; it was necessary for Ann to forget how close she and Gideon had drawn to Jessie in the house at the sea. It was a relief to the whole house, though when they all met the atmosphere was the drained, numb, considerate one of the railway or airport hall, where the end of something is reduced to the choice of a magazine to take into the void, and the solicitous provision of cups of coffee to while away the remaining half-hour. The help — that is, the continued intimacy — that Gideon had thought Ann would need from Jessie would have been an intrusion; in the end, Ann and Boaz knew each other so well that neither needed, or could be provided with, a defence against the other.

Gideon came to the house quietly once, and talked alone with Boaz and Ann; there was no dinner-party afterwards, and Gideon would not even stay for a drink. Boaz was seeing a lawyer friend of the Stilwells; Len came to consider taking over Ann’s car. Jessie met him in the garden as he left. “Well, are you driving away?” He came up confidentially and said, “They want cash. I understand that. But it’s out, for me, then.” “The best thing is to advertise.” It was the subdued small talk outside the sickroom door. Jessie walked to the gate with Len. When they were a little further from the house he said, “The husband’s a nice guy. What went wrong?” They both laughed, giving up at the inadequacy of the reason why it shouldn’t. “I didn’t take them seriously, honestly.” He was talking of Gideon and Ann. “I’d never have taken them seriously. But the whole town’s talking now. Everyone knows they went off together. Everyone’s asking me this and that.” By the whole town he meant all the intricate subcommunications of the town-within-the-town where the traditional human exchanges replaced the decreed separations. But Jessie felt no interest; the sensation buzzed over something that had already escaped out of reach of sensation.

She had a pleasant lunch with Gideon and Ann at the house one day, when everyone else was out. She did not know if they still met at the flat, but she gathered that they were seeing each other briefly, very discreetly, and probably through the agency of some friend not previously associated with them. The three of them talked mostly about the house at the sea and their time there, almost like people who meet to renew a holiday friendship. When Gideon left he looked round the smoky living-room where they had sat till nearly three in the afternoon over their lunch-time coffee (it was a bleak day and the fire, Jessie and Ann agreed, was not nearly so good as Gideon’s grass and dung one had been), and then at Ann, whose beautiful smile rose to her face as if it existed for him and would always be there when he looked to her. Now it came to him as encouragement: not to be afraid to pronounce the future, not to be afraid to count on it. He put his arms round Jessie and held her, and kissing her, said, “When are you coming up to Tanganyika? Or will it be London? But Tanganyika’s a good place, eh?”

She knew then that she would not see him again.

But she could not have guessed how this would come about, and for what reasons, that, if they were in the room that August afternoon, she failed to be aware of. The cigarette smoke that the three of them had breathed out of their nostrils and mouths hung like warm indoor thunder; the fire was all red, all paper-lantern glow, containing flame in the thinnest skin of matter, and would collapse into nothing at the slightest shift, but the bricks of the fireplace gave out a magnificent heat. Jessie put her back to it. She felt a peaceful weight in her own presence, alone there, left by the other two. I’m beginning to live vicariously, she thought, if I can feel so involved with other people’s lives and step back and watch them go. But she knew it was something different, something that she couldn’t be too sure of yet … She was beginning to slip into the mainstream, she was beginning to feel the substance was no longer something she must dam up for herself. Passion would not leave the world grey when it went out for her; struggle, love, the urge to grasp and shape living went on through the agency of others, too; Gideon and Ann held part of it; Morgan was coming up to have his share relinquished to him, and even the small girls were not far off. Her mind inhabited briefly the rooms of the house at the sea that had been talked of that afternoon; wandered to Fuecht; she thought, with the sudden summoning that brings the dead to life, that he had dammed everything up for himself right to the very end, right until his old claws couldn’t hold anything any more, let it all slip through, and remained clutching at nothingness.

Three nights later the Stilwells had guests for dinner. Jessie had left the table to help Agatha serve the main dish, and she met Boaz at the foot of the stairs. Both he and Ann had said they would be out, and she had not pressed them further, but now she said, “Are you coming to eat? — Oh I like that Allen man!” The occasion of the dinner-party was the presence of a visiting Cambridge history don who Tom had told them was brilliant. He turned out to have that diffidently deprecating manner of presenting dogmatic opinions that Jessie found irresistible. “Yes, I hear he’s pretty impressive.” Boaz smiled, responding to her mood of animation engendered by the success of the evening. Her mind was on the sauce, that might need thickening, and she said, “Well, come in, then!”—already on her way to the kitchen. “No … no, I don’t think so …” Each in their preoccupation, they passed on. “D’you know where the key to the boxroom is?” he called after her. She was already stirring the sauce, standing well away from the stove so that her dress would not be splashed. “No key,” she called. “The door’s just stiff, it’s never locked.”