Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“The porch is O.K. for me.”

“No, it’s as draughty as hell, you’ll get ill.”

“You should feel our dormitories. And in our showers they’ve got vents that can’t be closed.” He grinned at his own stoicism. “Anyway, I want to toughen myself a bit.”

But he was accustomed to doing what Jessie decided, though he now did it more with an air of good-nature than submission. His suitcase and soccer boots moved in among Tom’s paper towers. Outside a jagged cold wind drew a torn finger-nail across the iron roof and set every loose hinge and wire screeching; the untidy, mouse-nest comfort of the room attracted the three grown-up members of the family and for it they quitted the rest of the house in darkness, after dinner in the evenings. Jessie had put the little radio downstairs in the living-room before Morgan arrived; he lay on the floor beside it, to listen to certain programmes, but he did not seem to miss having it up in his room, or to want to have it playing all day long. At night, while Tom made notes or did reading for his book, and Jessie read or devised the endless adaptations of children’s clothes that were required as outgrown garments were prepared to be handed down, Morgan was engaged in calculations for a model he was building. It was some kind of collapsible canoe; Jessie thought it seemed rather a simple thing, and that if he were going to make a hobby of building model boats he ought to be encouraged to do something more elaborate. She mentioned some impressive kits that she had seen in a hardware shop in town.

“Oh, those are the sort of things that old men build in their yards. With little plastic trees and things.” Morgan smiled.

“Yes,” his mother said, “Everything is worked out exactly to scale, authentic and so on — just as if they were real.”

He put his hand down beside the bits of plywood spread on a newspaper. “This’ll just be the model for a real boat — to see how the idea works out. Some other chaps and I’re each working out a plan, and then we’ll decide which is the best before we begin to build. Greg Kennedy’s father’s putting up the money, and then Greg and I want to see how far we can get down the Rooipoort River. It mustn’t be too heavy, because you’ve got to carry it where there are rapids. But it mustn’t be too small, either, because we want to have our camping stuff with us — that’s why we want to try out making it collapsible.”

His voice had broken completely since she had seen him at Easter, broken with childhood. She understood that the bits of wood and glue that she had seen in the category of play belonged to life. Morgan and Tom were talking about the possibility of using fibre glass for such a boat, and she remarked, “Boaz would have been your man. I’m sure he knows all about it.”

Morgan said, “Oh he does. We were going to build one to take up to Moçambique with us.” He still accepted with something of a child’s fatalism the adult’s prerogative of abandoning plans, breaking promises for reasons outside a child’s ken. But a few days later, when he and Jessie were having lunch alone together, and she was going through the post, that Agatha had brought in while they ate, he said: “Any news of the Davises?”

“Mm-mm.” Jessie shook her head slowly while she read. “Not a word since they left. No idea where they are.”

“I had a letter — from some place in France; I can’t pronounce the name. But that’s last month.”

Jessie was reading a long letter from her mother, and she frowned, half-lifting her hand to stay him; then, when she had come to the end of the paragraph that absorbed her, she looked up, confused, and said with great curiosity curbed by a sudden delicacy toward him: “You had a letter?”

“From Boaz. Wrote to me at school.”

Jessie laughed, putting her hand over her mouth. “Well!” Then, “And what did he say?”

The boy said shyly, “They’re O.K. They didn’t like the Seychelles very much. He was going to give some lectures at a music festival the next week.”

Jessie pushed her letter aside and weighted it down with the salt cellar. She seemed about to speak but only looked intently round the table a minute, and, catching Morgan’s eyes on her, murmured, “Funny … I was just thinking …” She asked him for the jam. “No, the apricot.” The exchange of ordinary objects on the table before them was like an exchange of grips; he remained calm, almost sympathetic.

“The letter I was just reading, from Granny — from my mother — there’s a fuss about the Isendhla house. The agent wrote and asked her to be a bit careful whom she puts in there in future—” A quick look of amused comprehension passed over their faces, making them look alike for a moment. “Someone saw Gid on the beach with one of the children … the little girls! A black man in bathing trunks carrying a little white girl on his shoulders …”

“Boaz was terribly worried, all the time. I mean, he was worried about Gideon Shibalo too. You can’t imagine anyone like Boaz, the way he—” The boy was suddenly able to release before her his first comprehension of grown-up ethics, of the private moral structure that each man must work out to hold himself together if he abandons or breaks down the ready-made one offered by school, church and state.

At once she was tempted to take advantage of this by confessing herself; she almost put in here, I know I shouldn’t have left you in the middle of the whole thing. But her tremendous instinct for survival held her back brutally: she had never taken up the right to the child; if there was to be anything now it must be between two adults. She picked up her mother’s letter and looked at it again, reading over the agent’s account of the complaint made by “certain local residents”. She put the letter down and turned her face away, opening her mouth stiffly for self-control. “Why is one always having to be so ashamed for these people — why do they have to spit on everything — She needn’t worry, I’ll never go there again—”

Swelling along the strained line of her neck, contusing her face and distorting her mouth, he saw the tension of feeling that had made his mother’s familiar and yet mysterious face what it was. It drew him more powerfully than any beauty; it was as if the flesh of life had been opened away and the heart bared, not the pretty pin-cushion of love-scenes in films, but the strong untiring muscle that pumped blood in the dark.

His discovery through Boaz found words again. “If you’re really in love with someone, I mean — I always thought you must hate the other person who wants her. Boaz really liked Gideon Shibalo. I mean, I couldn’t help knowing — he didn’t seem to trust her not to get Gideon Shibalo into trouble.”

“She’s a bad little girl,” Jessie said, not believing it, but because she was afraid of talking about the nature of love with Morgan. “But she’s very beautiful?” she asked him in sudden curiosity.

“Oh yes,” he said. “She’s very beautiful.” He was smiling, but he spoke surely, eagerly, from a part of life she had no part of.

She did not seem to have heard.

“You’ve got nice hands,” she said. “I wonder where you got them from?”

Morgan laughed and, withdrawing them swiftly from the table, put them in his pockets.

“You’re an unbeliever living in the midst of a fanatical cult; you still don’t understand what taboo means.”

“Gideon taking Elisabeth for a ride. I know what I see; I won’t start thinking like a madman,” said Jessie.

But Tom came home these days with his mind held ready only for his work; what travelled unavoidably under his mind’s eye was dealt with at the same distance he had set between himself and the peoples and events he was writing about. Jessie was envious, as usual — her life seemed to her by comparison the ball of fur that a cat licks off itself, swallows, and gags on. Tom had been asked to prepare a shorter version of his half-completed history of black Africa for a series of special paper-backs meant to provide an historical background to present-day world politics. He was struggling to condense, into two-hundred-and-fifty pages written in two months, twenty notebooks of material intended for a book that would take perhaps three years to write. He had no time at all to go out, so Jessie and Morgan went to the cinema and to plays together while Morgan was on holiday. Morgan wasn’t keen to go to a symphony concert, but Len Mafolo took him to the sessions of a serious jazz group that he kept wanting to talk about afterwards: enthusiasm was something that ripened out of sight, in Morgan, so that what occasioned it first sank away without appearing to have made much impression, then rose to the surface with some depth behind it. Jessie did not really care for parties without Tom, and Morgan was too young for the parties their friends were likely to have; she was pressed to go to several, but was persuaded only once.