Occasion for Loving (14 page)

She called Mafolo “old Len”: the epithet for the childhood companion, the family friend … He got used to her, but sometimes when he looked at her and saw how she was like some lovely creature in its glossy coat, perfectly equal to its environment, he was seized with anxiety and hope. It was almost as if he were already reproaching himself for having missed something that, at the same time, he really knew never would be offered him.

The caravan exhibition was exactly the sort of venture that occupied Ann most happily. She knew a little bit about displaying works of art—in the fashionable sack-cloth-and-space way—because, although she did not take her attempts at various careers seriously, it was true that she had worked for a time in a small London gallery. She flew in and out of the house for nails, boxes, lengths of rope—all kinds of things—during the preparation of the exhibition. She was always running into Mrs. Fuecht, Jessie's mother (who was in the house at the time), with the sort
of object in her hands that must have appeared to require an explanation—the bathroom mirror, once, and another time a cooking-pot with an old sheet bubbling away inside it in a soup of purplish dye. The old lady showed no surprise, however—she was quite a surprise to come upon suddenly, oneself: rather an impressive old lady, slightly dotty, with the tragedy-queen air that Ann noticed often hung about aged women who were probably very attractive when young and who had given the greater part of their energies to love. “Your mother has been a beauty; she must have had lots of lovers, I suppose,” Ann said to Jessie. But Jessie laughed, and said in that menacing way of hers: “No, she was in love with me.” Perhaps Jessie was jealous of the old lady; certainly she had none of the old lady's air. Ann always stopped, in passing, to exchange a few words with her; at least, that was what appeared to happen; what was really exchanged was a brief kindling of each other's beauty, a flutter of recognition across fifty years. Once, the old lady seemed on the brink of beginning to talk to her—but it was not possible, that day. And one day her visit blew over, too, and she was gone.

Ann met Gideon Shibalo when she and Len were invited to take their travelling art exhibition round African, Indian and Coloured high schools. She had heard all about him before, of course; he was the man whose painting had attracted attention overseas and won him a scholarship to work in Italy, but he hadn't been able to take it up because the South African Government refused him a passport—he was involved in politics, the African National Congress movement. He came in during the school break and stood looking at his two pictures with the removed yet fascinated air with which one glances through an old photograph album. “Talented chap,” said Len, at his elbow.

“That's a fact.” They burst into laughter and pushed each other about a little.

“My partner in crime,” Len indicated Ann.

“Again and again, I've wanted to see if we couldn't get something more from you,” she said to Shibalo, “but he said it was hopeless, you don't paint any more.”

Shibalo chuckled, considering himself. “Hopeless. Quite right.” He and Len had an exchange, punctuated by laughter, in Sesuto. “You should have come to see me anyway.” Shibalo turned to Ann.

“Why?” she said cheerfully. “Any hope? We'll come if you've got something for us, any time.”

“I've put away childish things,” he said.

“Don't you worry, he can still knock out a picture if he wants to,” Len encouraged and reproached, resentfully.

“Do you dislike being probed about not painting, or do you enjoy it?”

They all laughed. “Good God, I live on it. Where has my inspiration gone? Don't I feel light, shape, colour, thickness, thinness, what-not? Don't I want to express the soul of Africa? Don't I want to make the line vibrate? Don't my guts wriggle and send new forms to my finger-tips? That chap Gauguin started at forty, I've stopped long before.”

He scarcely looked at the other pieces of painting and sculpture that Len and Ann were modestly proud of, and when he sat drinking coffee with them remarked that the exhibition was really “a waste of time”. “The shock of modern art—we don't need it around here, man. You can't shock my kids in there, in my class we've got three who smoke dagga, and two pregnant. Not bad, eh? And they're not even in matric yet.”

“Sounds like a very advanced class,” said Len to Ann.

She wagged her head: “He's done wonders with them.”

But Shibalo's tone changed suddenly and obstinately; he stood up now, apparently bored, and made some excuse to leave. “The ah—the headmaster wants to talk to me. I promised to drop in. About sports day.” He didn't seem to care about them being
aware that he was lying; he looked the last man in the world any headmaster would choose to organise a sports day.

As he left he said: “I might change my mind.”

“About what?” said Len.

“Painting something.”

“Oh, really?” said Ann.

“Under certain conditions.”

She was alert to amusement, but unsure; his voice was serious, impersonal, bargaining.

“I might paint you,” he said. And stooped his head under the doorway, and was gone.

Ann was used to the admiration and interest of men; it was only the absence of these things that she noticed. Ten days later, when the exhibition was at an Indian school, the headmaster invited Len and her to tea in the staff room, and introduced Shibalo among the other teachers. Shibalo did not say they had met before.

“What are you doing here?”

“Inter-school sports. Some arrangements have to be settled.”

At lunch-time he was still there, and they saw him coming slowly across the field, smoking, and blinking as if the sun hurt his eyes. Len went and waited in the doorway for him. He sat with them and picked at the ham rolls they had bought on the way out to the school, and drank the coffee Ann made. He had the confidence of someone who is wanted everywhere, the moody ease of the man who pleases everybody but himself. Within the week, he turned up again; he had happened to meet Len in a shebeen the evening before, and had taken him on to the Bantu Men's Social Centre to provide an audience for his snooker game. Len had then had a lesson from him—Len's first. The casual chances of city life had thrown the younger man into the company of Shibalo, and Len was rather proud, as quiet, studious people invariably are, to be taken up by someone bold and amusing. He described his efforts
at the billiard table, giggling apologetically, rather enjoying the new business of making a fool of himself. “But when you pocket your white ball does that wipe out your whole score? Or what?”

“No, no, boy, don't you remember, last night, when Robert Duze pocketed his, he just lost the points he should have made with that shot—It's a good thing I'm a born teacher,” Shibalo complained to Ann.

“Good Lord, to think I had to come to the townships to get into the company of clubmen. Len—you know I do believe there's a billiard table lying around somewhere in the Stilwells' house. At least it looks like a billiard table, only very small.”

“Yes, yes, they do make half-size ones.” When she talked, Gideon Shibalo watched her rather than listened.

“Where did you see it?” Len was deeply interested and sceptical.

“In that sort of cellar or boot cupboard under the stairs. I'm sure they don't want it—you know what that house is like. Perhaps you could buy it from them?”

Len and Shibalo laughed. Shibalo was delighted. “Can you see it? A donkey cart comes along 16th street in Alex and delivers a billiard table to his house. First they take the door down to get it in. Then they take down the inside walls … Then his landlady comes home …”

“Then they use the billiard table for a floor and build the house again on top. —But we could go and look at it, anyway?” said Len.

“I'll ask Jessie what they think of doing with the thing, if anything.”

“You want to come and play tonight?” Shibalo asked Len.

“Thanks—I'm going to a concert with Ann and Boaz.”

Gideon was wandering about the caravan, quite at home now; he took down two pictures and exchanged their positions.
“I might be there. I'm supposed to be there. —Who's this guy out of the Bible?”

“Ann's husband.”

“I'd like to meet your husband.”

She grinned at him. “He'd like to meet you.”

He had already turned to something else, in the manner of people who do not want to make the effort at real communication but toss a remark, like a small coin, as a signal of passing attention.

At the concert at the university they saw him on the other side of the hall, tall and carefully dressed, with a white woman whose short, flying grey hair and high pink brow made an authoritative head. He bent with her over the programme and seemed another person in this company.

Ann pointed him out to Boaz: “
That's
Shibalo over there.” Boaz twisted in his seat to see; he knew the story of Gideon Shibalo's scholarship and how he'd had to give it up for political reasons. There were quite a number of people that she knew, and her attention was caught, this way and that, as people came down the aisles. “Callie Stow, with him,” said Len. At intermission they saw the backs of Gideon Shibalo and the woman, in a group that rather held the floor. He did not turn his head.

Next day he came to the exhibition—which had moved on to another school—at lunch-time and brought a large bottle of beer with him. “What about some cheese for a change?” he said, looking at the ham rolls.

“How'd you like the music?” Len wanted an opening in order to give his own views on it.

“Wasn't there.”

“We saw you.” Ann laughed at him.

But he was unperturbed. “One can go to a concert and not be there. Sometimes you just don't hear the music.” He shrugged.

“Well, you missed something good.”

“No doubt, no doubt.” He was overcome by weariness at the reminder of the evening, and slid his legs out across the small space of the caravan. Ann was obliged to step over them to get past.

He began to appear sometime nearly every day. Len bought cheese rolls, and if he were not there by one, the two of them sat smoking and talking without a mention of lunch. If he had not come by a quarter to two, one of them would say, at last, “Well, I'm hungry,” and then they would eat hastily, as if they had forgotten the meal.

One night the three of them went to a boxing match together; Ann had never watched boxing before. “Put on your best dress,” Shibalo ordered. “I mean it. A woman's got to look like it at the ring-side.” They sat in front among the black promoters and gangsters and their girls. The girls in their drum-tight dresses, heels thrusting their haunches this way and that, swaying earrings beside brown cheeks and full red lips, made a splendid, squealing show; Ann pounded her knees with excitement like a schoolboy. Shibalo held her elbow as if to hold her down and explained in a swift and urgent commentary all that was going on between the two forces struggling in the ring.

Shibalo had seats for a match in a nearby town, and they went in Ann's car to see it. Ann was delighted with the extravagant descriptions of the fighters on the handbills and posters. The brutality of the sweat-slippery black bodies, colliding and heaving apart, the bloodied eyes and the grunts of pain had for her the licence of a spectacle; she enjoyed being swept up, bobbing and buoyant, in the noise and show-off of the crowd. They went a third and a fourth time, following the African boxing promotions from town to town. Then Len said, “I've had enough of this craze—no thank you.” Ann and Gideon went anyway, on their own. “You won't leave me stranded in the middle of the night in Germiston location, or wherever it is?” she asked, smiling at him. “Come on. You'll be all right.” He made no personal assurances.

She had dropped the joke of dressing-up by now and looked even more conspicuous in the black crowd, in jeans and a leather jacket. There was a dirty fight, and a close one, and the crowd first snarled and reviled and then celebrated wildly. Gideon Shibalo got his tickets free because he knew the promoters, but apparently he considered this sufficient honour for them and never spoke to them. He pushed a way through the crowd as if he knew they would make way for him; but his indifference was met, as he and Ann passed, with glances and remarks of recognition: the regulars had seen them before, now; the white girl and the teacher were part of the circus. A brazen little caricature with stiff straightened hair darted out long red finger-nails to feel Ann's coat; someone smiled into her face.

The looks, the casual remark of faces in the crowd, set them together; it was a picture imposed from the outside, like a game that partners off strangers. Shibalo drove the car home that night. They laughed and talked all the way; neither had ever been so amusing when Len was there.

Next morning Shibalo telephoned her at the Stilwells' house. Oddly, she was greatly surprised when she heard his voice; with Africans, she still expected to take the initiative in any attempt to keep up a friendship: they seldom did, perhaps to show you that they didn't need you.

“Where're you having lunch today?”

She was supposed to be out with the exhibition, as he must know. “I don't know, Gid, I've got to go into town to do some shopping this morning.” “What about the Lucky Star or Tommie's, then.” Those were the two places where coloured and white people mixed. “Oh, Lucky Star, I think.” She at once chose the one where she went often, where everyone she knew went and was seen.

She simply did not turn up at the Agency office, where Len usually picked her up with the caravan. At half past one, rather late, Shibalo came into the Lucky Star; she left the people she
was talking to and went to him: “Come—” They had something so important to discuss that there was no need for pleasantries. He went swiftly to a table at the wall. “I felt bored stiff at the school today. Ugh, the smell of the place gets me down, the ink, the musty old books.” “Let's have curry, then, Gid, that's a good smell.” He looked at her slowly, resentfully, with a smile that was an open, blatant declaration, cock-sure of welcome, full of guile. “You're the one that has the good smell. Everything you touch in the caravan is full of it. Even the coffee-cup. You hand someone a cup of coffee, and as he puts it up to his mouth there's the smell of lilies.”