Nadine Gordimer: Occasion for Loving

Jessie Stilwell had purposefully lost her way home, but sometimes she found herself there, innocent of the fact that she had taken to her heels long ago and was still running. Still running and the breathlessness and the drumming of her feet created an illusion of silence and motionlessness — the stillness we can feel while the earth turns — in which she had never left her mother’s house. It happened now, while she walked slackly from out of the shade of the verandah into the dry, hot wind of September that battered and mis-shaped the garden. It blew her dress in behind her knees; she was alone and did not trouble to straighten her back. The tap turned in her palm with a dry squeak; the spray from the hose sounded like a shower of gravel on the parched leaves. While the wind pushed and shoved at her, and every now and then the water came back in her face, she was conscious in exactly the way she had been at the age of eight, bent double in her mother’s garden. There was the inner hum of a wordless empathy with the plants sluicing and drinking, the shrubs with their glossy leaves obscured like dirty mirrors, the flower-petals curled at the edges at the flame of the sun, the grey weeds growing where they could, on stems of old string. It was an empathy gentle, sensuous and satisfactory. There was nothing peripheral to it; she had never been out of the garden, or challenged the flaming angels at the gates.

Suddenly this level of consciousness dislodged, was borne away in the stream of the present; instead, she remembered, now in words, that other garden. “What’s the water-bill going to be this month, I’d like to know!” her mother accused the plants. Nothing grew well in the baked red surface that was given a lick of water twice a week. A few coarse, bright blooms — a single iris, a yellow daisy — stuck up like hat-pins.

The garden of this house, where the Stilwells lived, did not have many flowers but it was dark and green. Veils of water from Jessie Stilwell’s hose swayed over shrubs cumulus-shaped and trailing, palms glinting their knives, great woody old fuchsias dangling cerise tassels; the water tore through dust-thick spider-webs and beat on the glistening pine-needles bedded under creaking trees. By the time Tom Stilwell came home, the water had released the smell of spring into the air. It made him smile but he did not recognise it; it came to him like the smell of baking bread or a bottle of spilled scent — spring has no smell in Africa. He waved a roll of papers at Jessie but went straight into the house. Presently she turned off the tap and followed him, stamping her feet, as she went up the steps, to rid her sandals of their rim of mud and pine-needles. The house was old, full of decently obscure corners where various homeless objects could lie; in one of these corners there was a wash-basin, where she put her hands under the tap, and dried them on her wide skirt. She wandered into the living-room and out again, she looked into the kitchen and passed some remark to the servant, shelling peas there. She hated to call out, she hated to make the house restless in the few pauses of peace that fell upon it. She found him upstairs, on the old wooden balcony closed in with modern windows, where he worked.

“She’s arriving on the sixteenth,” said Tom. He had dumped down his pile of books and was sorting his students’ papers, laying them on a mess of newly-opened letters, catalogues, and accounts.

“Well, that’s all right.” They were still at an easy distance from each other; always at the end of the day that took them away, each into his own activity, it was a little while before they could drift into the private harbour of their relationship again. They had married to share life; but, of course, there was no getting out of it, even by marriage: each must live his life for himself. Jessie sometimes thought, without blame or a sense of having been deluded, of the year they weren’t married, when, she now understood, they had splendidly stopped living; that was what it amounted to — to celebrate love, you must do no work, see no friends, ignore obligations.

Two boats, rocking gently on the same evening water; she went over and ran her finger down the side of his face. It was waxy from the day, he had not washed yet, so she did not kiss him. “How do you feel about it?” he said. “No, it’s all right.” But the silence after she had spoken seemed to echo doubt. “We don’t have to do it if we don’t want to,” he said firmly. The evening before, they had discussed whether they ought to offer to have a musicologist friend of Tom’s, who had been away for several years in England, to live with them when his young wife joined him in South Africa.

Tom began to say over again the things that he had said the night before. “A boarding-house is out of the question, with all his stuff; and I don’t like the idea of them in a nice, compact Hillbrow flat.”

“Heavens, no.”

“I just thought it would help them out. And really make very little difference to us.” He felt himself struggling against a heaviness in her response.

“It’s quite all right so long as Morgan’s not home,” she said, wanting to say something perfectly willing and reasonable. Her son, who had the big attic room with a wash-basin, was away at school.

“Well, Morgan’s gone out on to this porch before now; or they could, if it came to that.”

And the matter was left there. There was the noise of some shrill, roaring quarrel, suddenly, in the house beneath them — it seemed to have been blown in and, as swiftly, blown out again — and then the approach of slow, sulking, plodding steps, coming up the stairs with exaggerated stamps; Jessie pushed the door closed with her foot. Tom stirred restlessly, patiently, over something preposterous that he had come across in a student’s paper. The heavy breathing outside the door went away; Jessie experienced a moment of what she thought of to herself as childish triumph — she had escaped the child.

He put the paper away and turned to her, with his fair, crimpy beard, and his deeply-indented, kind frown — his was a fading, undergraduate shagginess that would miss out the assurance of middle life and one day suddenly be the shabby distinction of an old don. “You’re not wildly enthusiastic,” he said.

All at once, she spoke up out of herself. “I don’t want any observers.”

“Observers? Observe what?”

She felt ashamed, weakly happy, relieved. She went to him and put her hand for shelter between his arm and his chest. “I want to live in secret,” she said, half-joking.

“We do, don’t we?” he said.

“ We do. But only between us. So far as our life is for each other. The rest of our lives is all set out open for anyone to see. Then it actually hardens into that which anyone can see, so that it stays set, fixed, accepted. But if one wants to change? How is it to change while everyone’s looking, being curious, and making comment? And if it’s not to change, then it will get to the point when it has no truth in it. Won’t it? Like a dance that acts out some great ceremony whose meaning the dancers have forgotten.”