Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“I’ll try to get hold of him at the school.”

Gideon Shibalo was not at the school where he taught, and Len could not find him, either at the room in the township or the flat in Hillbrow. Some weeks later, the Stilwells heard that he had been in Johannesburg all the time; he had thrown up his job; he was drinking, people who had seen him said. None of his African friends took his drinking very seriously; he would “come out of it”, or perhaps would simply become one of those who always remained one of themselves, carried along, however broken, by their unchanging recognition of what he really was aside from the brawlings and buckling legs and slurred tongue with which he was trying to destroy it.

Jessie was distressed, as women are, to hear that he was drinking. “He would have got drunk in Tanganyika or London, with her, when things didn’t go right,” Tom said. “You said she might do him harm, didn’t you? Perhaps it would have been worse if they had gone off together.”

“She didn’t have to stick to him to harm him; it was done already.”

“But what could the bloody woman do, if she didn’t want him, or couldn’t face wanting him?”

“Nothing,” said Jessie. “Nothing. She’s white, she could go, and of course she went.”

They came again and again to the stony silence of facts they had set their lives against. They believed in the integrity of personal relations against the distortion of laws and society. What stronger and more proudly personal bond was there than love? Yet even between lovers they had seen blackness count, the personal return inevitably to the social, the private to the political. There was no recess of being, no emotion so private that white privilege did not single you out there; it was a silver spoon clamped between your jaws and you might choke on it for all the chance there was of dislodging it. So long as the law remained unchanged, nothing could bring integrity to personal relationships.

The Stilwells’ code of behaviour towards people was definitive, like their marriage; they could not change it. But they saw that it was a failure, in danger of humbug. Tom began to think there would be more sense in blowing up a power station; but it would be Jessie who would help someone to do it, perhaps, in time.

Gideon Shibalo did not come near the Stilwell house after the Davises had gone. Jessie was alone and unobserved again as she had wished to be before they came. Tom reminded her of this, saying, when the last of Boaz’s instruments and equipment had been packed up to follow him, “It’s a relief to be able to spread yourself — my filing cabinet can come back here — the desk there—”

He seemed to have forgotten his easy companionship with Boaz in an almost fussy pleasure at getting back his working room — he liked to use Morgan’s room to work in. She teased him, “Only six weeks and Morgan’ll be home again.”

“Oh that’s different. I don’t mind old Morgan about.”

They were a family in spite of failures and evasions. In the family either nothing is forgiven, or everything: she went over and stood against him with her cheek against his chest and her arms wrapped round behind his waist. He held her in that room in which, while they were quiet, they could notice still the scent of Ann’s make-up. “You’re the only woman,” he said. Like all people who have been lovers for a long time, when they wanted to be loving in words they went back to the formula that had contained all that they had felt at the beginning. She was the only woman, then, for this gentle, passionate man several years younger than herself; now his image was softened at the edges, blurred a little with the tweedy pedantry of the liberal historian, frayed a little by battles for integrity in work, politics and love that he no longer always expected to win — what women were there for him to choose from, now? The thought drifted into Jessie’s mind without cruelty; she said, part of the embrace, “What’s happened to your shirt near the pocket? …”

“Oh I don’t know, I haven’t noticed …”

“Look, it’s going.”

He seemed to feel the relief of the Davises’ departure far more than she did. She said to him, curious, several times: “You never really liked her, did you, that’s the trouble.”

“You always tell me that,” he said, with faint emphasis. He disliked people to say things to him for the purpose of watching his reactions. Yet he could not resist what had been calculated to be irresistible: “Ann’s altogether too open, too much on the surface, that girl—”

“—For you, yes I know—”

“I could never get over something unpleasant in the alert way she would turn at once to what attracted her, run her finger along it, taste it, laugh at it, point it out to someone. I don’t know — she seemed to have only one reason for doing anything, one reason only, that she was alive.”

“That’s her charm,” said Jessie.

He looked at her with familiar disbelief and doubt. “I don’t understand how you could get fond of her.” He thought there must be some explanation, though, that he would find out in time; he liked to follow the light and dark through which the many motivations of Jessie moved.

“You don’t get fond of her, you discover that she’s human, like yourself, but she’s afraid to touch herself — you know, like a kid who’s been told she’ll go blind if she explores her own body. That’s how she is about her life — she just lets it function without asking how or why.”

“That would do as a definition of either a hedonist or a silly ass. And you should have left her alone like that.”

Jessie was honestly astonished, though flattered, as a woman always is when someone who regards her as a force to be reckoned with demonstrates that he thinks she has again been active. “What are you talking about? She hardly knew I existed until the last few weeks in Isendhla. To her anybody over thirty, with a brood of children and a few grey hairs, is a different species.”

“But she saw you took Gid seriously, didn’t she? Didn’t she see that you thought he was a person, somebody, that you and he talked together as she didn’t talk to him?”

Her face opened up to defence. “—There you are,” he said, before she could begin to speak. “You said she lived by pure reaction — she flew into this thing as a bat steers into a certain path because it instinctively feels the bulk of objects being set up where other ways were open.”

“If she was influenced by what we thought of him, it was all of us — you and Boaz and all of us. We all talked to him and listened to him as if he were something special,” and her voice ended in doubt. “Well, he was — he is—”

“Something special,” Tom said firmly.

“Somebody special, and also a black man. For all of us there was the happiness that he was also a black man,” she added, slowly, pausing before the sentence. Then she said, “—So why me?”

“Because you were a woman, and we were not. She could go ahead and sleep with him and fall in love with him, and you could not. She had to become serious about this, because you were serious about the other things.”

“What rubbish,” said Jessie denying with a flash of the masterfulness of which she was being accused. Defending herself, she mixed up truth and lies picked up simply as if she had reached for a stone. “She was crazy about him. She only used me as a convenience when they had nowhere else to go. I was even jealous of them.”

In September Morgan came home for the holidays. There was a late cold spell so there was no question of his sleeping on the enclosed verandah, though he tramped straight up there with his things. “Oh no, we’re back to normal,” said Jessie, and then laughed. “—At least, Tom’s using your room, but it is yours again.”