Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Agatha went into stony slow-motion when flustered, and there was real effort of encouragement and chivvying needed to get hot plates, hot food, and the sauce that must be served at once, all to the table at the same time. It was managed, but Jessie could not let her eye off anything while the process was going on. Tom always forgot to open the wine beforehand and, as usual, wandered about the room talking, using the bottles to emphasise his points instead of drawing the corks. He disappeared to find his favourite corkscrew, then was back again, but as he came close to her where she was serving she saw his face quite alien to the warm reflections of the room. The response to some other situation stung upon it like the outline of a slap. He was filling glasses, she was caught among plates and steaming dishes; she had no chance to speak to him, sitting down, at last, at the opposite end of the table. The don, who was young and tall, with the small head and fine skin of handsome Englishmen, took on a patchy flush as he ate and drank appreciatively, and kept his golden eyes on George Thandele, Tom’s African colleague who taught law at the university. Thandele talked so steadily that he scarcely ate at all; when he paused he would take a gulp of wine like someone coming up for air. They were not arguing, but agreeing about the inconsistencies of policy in the new African states. “It’s a matter of coming to terms with freedom,” Thandele said, in conclusion.

“Well precisely. There’s nothing really extraordinary about a Ghanaian cabinet minister’s wife buying herself a gold bed in London while her husband’s Government announces a special issue of stamps commemorating colonialist exploitation in South Africa.” There was laughter down the table, and talk became diverse again. Jessie forgot about Tom for stretches of the evening, and then would catch his glance, or, in a pause of her own, watch him engaged in talk with others, and receive some parenthetic flash of undecipherable concern.

At last they met at the broad window-sill in the living-room where the drinks stood.

“They’re leaving.” He passed the phrase to her like a folded slip of paper. She looked uncomprehending.

“Upstairs,” he said. At the word she had in her mind Boaz; then the question about the key to the boxroom, where the suitcases were … but these facts did not fit together, as familiar objects looked at without the sense of their relationship to each other are unrecognisable. “Who?” she said. “Boaz has just told me that they are going back to Europe,” said Tom. He went off with the glass of beer he had poured for someone, and Jessie was drawn slowly into the activity of the room with the strange facility of one who has just been told something that cannot be grasped by the small, delicate apprehensions that remain independent on the oblique edge of one’s being — but must be held back until it can be taken full on.

Tom went down to the gate with the last guest. She was standing in the middle of the shabby room, ready for him, when Boaz appeared. He clearly expected Tom to be there with her. “Everyone gone?” He smiled at her.

“You’re going back to Europe,” she said.

“It’s a long story — I want to tell you one day.” There was no victory in him.

Jessie was still standing in the same place, and she said, “Just — going off?”

He looked about him like a stranger, then sat down on the edge of the divan with his legs flung out before him.

“Yes, we’d better get out. We’ll hop on a ship, I think we’ll go to have a look at the Seychelles, and then start off at Marseilles. Wander around from there — we’ve been tramps before.”

“And the grant?”

He made a curiously Jewish gesture with his hand, pushing the possibility away.

The girl in the grey trench-coat took to the road and whoever went with her did not expect to choose his direction. Jessie suppressed the impulse to make a sign of goodwill with some advice she didn’t believe in — what he ought to do was settle her down in a little house somewhere with a couple of babies, etc. “Good luck, Boaz,” she said with a dry smile, but meaning it.

He accepted it with a little ironical pull of the eyebrows; he had changed, she saw, hardened in the only way possible to someone of his still, inert nature, by holding himself off from events a little more. It was the difference between waiting to see what would come to him, and knowing what would come, even while continuing to wait. What he had got back was not exactly what he had lost, then; when he said that he and Ann had been tramps before, he was seeing the romance of their relationship as their limitation. In place of the sweeping exultant relief that he must have been almost afraid to allow himself to imagine at the possibility of taking up their old life, he showed, when Tom was back in the room again, only the energy generated by purpose that moving on provides, in the same way as the kick of a stiff drink articulates a day that is out of joint. They — he and his wife — were already removed from this house and these friends by the distance they were about to disappear into; they were together by virtue of gritty docksides, echoing halls of airports where they would be alone. Tom asked whether Ann was upstairs and Boaz said that he’d already driven her to the hotel where they would spend the night. “You won’t take it the wrong way?” He turned to Jessie. “She says everyone has had enough. That’s the way she feels at the moment — it doesn’t mean we don’t know what you and Tom have done for us … Only whatever we say now — it just makes us more of a damned nuisance. When we get together next time, we’ll make it all right. You’ll all come over, you and Clem and Madge and Elisabeth — and Morgan, Morgan too.”

And Jessie smiled as if she had heard it somewhere before, while Tom, with the male gift for depersonalising an atmosphere in order to set another man at ease, said, “Pick up a cheap Greek island, man, and then give us a sign …”

Where was it, this island or mainland, in new old Africa or old new Europe, where a man believed he would belong with Ann?

“No one mentioned Gideon,” Jessie said to Tom. He felt her bringing guilt into the house, like someone going over the scene of a crime.

“No one was thinking of anything else. What was there to say?”

“We didn’t count him in at all.”

Tom said drily, “Where there are three people, one is always left out.”

But it was Tom who flung the question into their hurry to get out of the house to work next morning, “What do we do about him?”

She was cold because she resented having her own background thoughts sprung among the sunlight and the breakfast dishes, as if someone carelessly touched a switch.

“Nothing for us to do.”

Elisabeth dawdled, and Madge first complained and then began to go red and cry in case they should be late for school. Tom, who was to take them there, went upstairs and came down again, but they were still not ready, because now Elisabeth had lost her pencil. “Ask Agatha if there isn’t one in the kitchen drawer, where the tin-openers are.” Jessie passed on the crisis and put out her hand in the gesture she used when she wanted a cigarette from Tom. The sight of him, washed and dressed and ready for the outside world, while she still had the private pale face and unbrushed hair of the bedroom, always softened her; he dressed badly, out of lack of interest and shortage of money, in the same grey flannels, hairy jacket and brown shoes with thick rubber soles that had been the uniform when he was an undergraduate just after the war — yet this judgment was at the same time an admission of his attractiveness. “You don’t think they didn’t tell him — oh Christ!” She was suddenly alarmed. “Of course not. But just the same …”