Occasion for Loving (23 page)

“I don't know her
at all
,” said Jessie. “That's it.”

“She can't bear threats or rows. She knows nothing about the joys of crawling on your stomach and feeling remorse. She hates all that slimy stuff. Oh, you know how she is.”

Jessie kept smiling and shaking her head.

After a while he stood up, the movement bringing the grass around his feet alive with minute hoppers that exactly matched its brilliant green. He looked up at the house and at the sky, his long eyes shown by the unconfined light to be green, like black water where the sun strikes deep. The sky gave his face a blind look. He said under it, trying to see, “I ought to go to Moçambique.
There's that grant, you know; it's practically sure I'm getting it.” She said, “Perhaps you can go a bit later. I don't know … perhaps you ought to go anyway.”

“He's an interesting chap. Hell of a lot going on there, I felt. He talks a lot and so on, but he's really alive in secret behind that cover activity.” He drew them back to the evening a week ago.

“I like him,” Jessie said, meaning that she had admitted this before.

“Exactly. Not the sort of person you'd choose to play the fool with. Too vulnerable. You'd think twice.”

He went into the house and left her. His cigarette ceased to smoke in the sappy, succulent grass, but she saw him, his olive tan faded, with so much indoor work, to that smooth oriental pallor, his sallow hands and bare feet showing that hollow beside the tendon of each finger or toe that gives an impression of nervous energy. How bungling this beauty was, his and Ann's, that had brought them senselessly together and given them the appearance of happiness in each other, both to themselves and onlookers. Take away the running blood, the saliva, the animation of breath, let the beauty harden into its prototypes, and even this would be found something they did not have in common, but that was diverse in the kind of consciousness that shaped it. He was opaque, his expression and posture the Bodhisattva's outward cast of an inward discipline. She was one of those clay figures made by the Etruscans, grinning even from the gravestone.

Jessie began to write a letter to Morgan. She had brought a pad and a ball-pen out with her book, but had not used them. She wrote quickly now, tearing off one sheet after another, and looking up from time to time with her mouth parted. A barbet somewhere in the garden went off continuously like a muffled alarm clock. The afternoon was borne away steadily in the sound. She felt it going, left the letter for a moment, and when she looked
back at the pages covered with the thinly-inked pattern made by the bad pen, suddenly thought: who is this for? It was one of those incoherent letters that, when you get one, causes you to remark that so-and-so seems to be in a queer state. So-and-so has not been censored by the usual wish to amuse or impress, to give a certain idea of himself.

“… little girls are always over at Peggy's. I have the place to myself, except for Boaz, up in his room working. Everything disappears. It's like it was when I was at home in Bruno's house waiting to begin an imaginary life. I don't seem to have had a second in between when I wasn't completely concentrated on some person, blind, deaf, and
busy
. You remember those silk-worms, their jaws never stopped and if you were absolutely quiet in the room you could actually hear them going at it? —To have been so hungry, and not to have known why.”

“But then they were full, and suddenly knew how to spin silk.”

It would be idiotic to send it to Morgan; a nervous, hostile embarrassment came over her—it was a grown-up's letter. She closed her fist on the sheets, squeezing them into a ball. They lay slowly opening on the grass while she dashed off the kind of note, full of studied friendly interest, that she sent to him every few weeks.

The children came home, and then Tom. “Why doesn't Josias cut the grass?” The sun had gone down and the swells of growth made gentle troughs of shadow. Jessie answered as if to some criticism of one of her children, “It'll be brown underneath. It's nice.” “Yes, of course it would be brown, it's been allowed to grow much too long.”

Madge edged herself on to her mother's chair, pressing against her thigh. “State your case,” Jessie said, and smiled. “Oh
Mummy
…” the child scowled at her impatiently.

“I got good seats for Friday.”

“How many did you take?” A trio from Brazil was to play at the university hall, and Jessie wondered whether Boaz might not want to go too.

“Well, I took three … I didn't think she'd be coming. But I suppose it looks funny not to ask.” Tom looked doubtfully at Jessie.

She smiled intimately, parenthetically. “She'll probably be there with Shibalo.”

“I know. That's what I thought.”

He squeezed her hand. Jessie turfed Madge off her chair like a bird pushing its fledgling out of a nest.

“We'd better not ask him to come?”

She murmured, “Difficult. Don't know.”

She added, speaking low because although it was out of hearing the window was up there in the house behind them: “He really does seem to like Shibalo. You know how it is when the man really likes the other one. Everybody being so considerate, and no hard feelings. My heart sinks. It'd be much easier if he thought he was a louse and wanted to kick him in the backside.”

“Well of course that's impossible this time.”

“Only because Boaz is so fastidious about everybody's feelings, and wants her back a hundred-per-cent off her own bat! No coercion whatsoever, like a unicorn that you have to wait to have come and put its head down in your lap. It's a lovely idea, it's how it ought to be …”

“No, I mean because this is not a white man.”

Jessie shook her hand out of his and sat forward. “What has that got to do with it?”

“A lot. Quite a lot.”

“If you'd said that it had a lot to do with Ann I'd understand it. She wants to prove she can do exactly what she likes! She wants—well, then I'd understand it. From her point of view the whole thing has everything to do with his being a black!
But Boaz,
Boaz
—? You know that Boaz truly never thinks about these things, he has no feeling about it at
all
, you've told me yourself that he was once keen on a black girl, he's slept with black women—”

“Yes, yes—” Tom said for her in conclusion. “And Boaz cannot kick a black man in the backside.”

Jessie began to speak but she saw the expression on his face change to acknowledge another presence and realised that Boaz had come out of the house. The Stilwells tried to treat him without any obvious special consideration these days, but a certain concerned brusqueness sometimes crept into their manner. “I met John Renishaw today, he wants to know when you're going to see him,” Tom said as Boaz came up.

“Christ, I want to know too. I promised weeks ago.”

“Well, you better do something about it, because he's going to Cape Town for six weeks. —Hey, what have you got there—”

Clem and Elisabeth had smoothed out the sheets of Jessie's crumpled letter and folded them into shapes that would hold water. “Water-bombs! Water-bombs!” Elisabeth shrieked and boasted, throwing hers, that she had filled at the garden tap.

“Don't leave the water running,” said Jessie, in a voice of patient repetition.

“They've used some letter of yours!” Tom's voice rose.

“I know. I'd thrown it away, anyway.”

“Why on earth …” He looked at her with amused, slightly aggressive curiosity.

“It was wrong.” She waved a hand to dismiss it.

While she returned to what she had been saying to Boaz, Tom glanced at the wet paper-shape covered with words running into each other. “Who was it to?”

“—Morgan—” she said in quick parenthesis.

“Why on earth write a long letter to Morgan and then throw it away.”

She looked at him for a moment to make him see that he was putting her to the trouble of providing an answer. “Haven't you ever written a letter that had to be torn up?”

“But to Morgan?”

“Why not?” said Boaz.

Jessie smiled to discount his objection and opened her hands and clapped them loosely together before her again in indication of her own crazy lapse.

“You do that with love letters,” Tom said. “Write them and tear them up and write them again. What was it all about, though?”

“Oh nothing. Nothing for Morgan. Nothing that would interest him, that's all.”

“But what was it about?” Tom was encouraging, cornering her.

“Well, if you really want to know.” Her face was a mixture of annoyance and the reluctant pleasure of giving oneself away. She said matter-of-factly, as if repeating something that she had heard or read, “I was just thinking how sex fills one's life for so many years. Sex in its various aspects, I mean; looking for men, securing to yourself the chosen one, seeing children as the manifestation of the bond. It's only when and if you've fulfilled all this that you begin to ask the purpose of it all—
for yourself
, not the biological one—and to want an answer with a new kind of passion.”

What she had just been saying brought her into two separate streams of unspoken communication with the two men. Boaz recognised the mood of what she had said when they were talking alone together earlier, and it sprang alive in silent reference between them. Between her husband and her were the tremendous attempts at knowing each how the other lived, and the knowledge that the measure in which these failed or succeeded is never known. “That wouldn't be the accepted idea of fulfilment, simply a making-room for another want,” Tom said.

Sometimes they were all at home at this time of day, even Ann. She would hear the Stilwells' talk as the Stilwells heard the
children's—half-listening, preoccupied. What were they saying? Always the same sort of thing; a drain was blocked, someone must take the car for servicing, who would pick up Clem from her swimming class, and had the renewal of the newspaper subscriptions been remembered? The enduring surface of marriage seemed to be made up of such things; they had little meaning, no interest, and they matted together as monotonously as a piece of basket-work. Her eyes rested often on Boaz. She liked him. They had always managed almost entirely without any paraphernalia to hold them up. She wondered if, in fact, he really liked living like that. It might have been to please her. She thought, with resentment making a quick fist inside her again, he would do almost anything to please her, but he could ask, as if prompted by the knowledge of some inadequacy in her that he did not admit, “Do you know what it's all about?”

Gideon was doing a tremendous painting of her. It was larger than life and the incised line along the solid brushstrokes released the figure from the flat background. She kept going back to look at it while she was in the room with it, not as a woman admires herself in a flattering portrait, but in an excitable and terrifying curiosity: there was no surface likeness to provide reassurance; she knew it was the likeness of what he found her to be.

She had an awareness of him as a single creature unrelated to any other. She did not know his parents or his brothers and sisters, who might have shown less attractively the looks and movements she thought of as his alone, neither did she know his real friends (Len, she suspected, did not count as one), who might have exhibited views and opinions that, although she thought them entirely his own, in fact he shared with others.

She brought this awareness of the man she had just left into the company of the Stilwells and Boaz as unthinkingly as a dancer carries her posture from the rehearsal that has occupied her afternoon. They chatted as they had always done, sometimes joking,
sometimes silent, often interrupted by children, now and then rising to an argument, or getting into a discussion. She was reassured, not only for herself, but also, oddly, for them all, by the ease with which she could resume her place among them. It had the same effect on her as the sight of one's feet in familiar shoes may have when one sits down, rather drunk, among the press at a party.

She was hardly aware of how she was going or what direction she was taking. The only conception she had of her life at that time came one evening when they were sitting outside after the sun went down. With her head tipped back over the hard rail of the chair she saw the upstairs windows of the house, open to the sky, space shading off into the high, last light. All the meaning of the almost-past summer gathered for her in the vision of Jessie's old house—ugly old house—as it was this evening and had been so many evenings, with the windows open like hands and a first bat fluttering without sound, wandering and rising. None of the others saw the creature; it was only the acute angle at which she had let her head fall back that let her see it. It was in the air above them all, soft, deaf, remote, steered by warnings and attractions they lacked a sense to apprehend.

Boaz said to the Stilwells, “If I go to Moçambique, you don't mind if she stays on here?”

“Naturally. If she doesn't go with you.” There was a pause after Jessie spoke. “I must get started sometime,” Boaz said. “My whole organisation up there'll break down if I don't.”

Tom said, “And anything can happen—there could be a political blow-up at any time, you might not be able to get in.”

Behind this sensible talk the Stilwells saw that Boaz no longer assumed that the house was also Ann's home whether he was there or not: it sounded as if he were already considering her life as separate from his own.

But he said, “If I'm not here, there's no one who can do anything for her. At least if she's living here she's got some sort of a base …?” He added, “Without being unfair to Gideon Shibalo, he can't actually look after her much.”

Jessie was not looking at him; she had her left elbow supported in her right hand, the left hand covering her face below the nostrils. He said to them, almost exasperated, with a little laugh, “I can't say anything to him. And I can't just leave her to it. Not really. I want to let her do what she has to, I mean she's free to live her own way … but I can't leave her to it—as things are.”