Occasion for Loving (24 page)

Tom's father was spending a week in the house and Jessie went now to give him some newspaper cuttings on indigenous bulbs that she had kept for him. He had just come in from the garden, an old man whose weakening eyes always had happy tears in them, and he was full of pained shock over the condition of the rose bushes, the enjoyable shock of one eager to prescribe—“My dear, I find it difficult to credit … just shreds of leaf, shreds. What you want is to go out there of an evening with an ordinary bowl of water and a strong torch. You'll attract those beetles in hundreds, simply fall in and get drowned, that's all.”

“Really, Dad? Will they?” It was true that Gideon had nowhere to take Ann to.

“… done it time out of number. An ordinary mixing basin will do …”

Where did he come from, when he was not living secretly at that flat? Somewhere there was a wife, children, old friends, a kinship—a man's life couldn't be lived by permission in the hours when someone else didn't need a flat.

“… when I was a boy, it was a paraffin flare. Tom's got a strong torch, of course?”

“Oh I think so. Clem's got one. From last Christmas—if it's not broken.” They couldn't go away together. He couldn't keep her; not on an African schoolteacher's earnings. Did it ever
come to that? Jessie thought of the other white girl she knew who had fallen in love with an African; the girl had kept him, and saved the money to get them both to Ghana or Nigeria or somewhere. Shibalo, for all his talent, no matter what he was, was on the receiving side, and the receiving side was always at a disadvantage.

“A tin basin will do.”

She turned her attention to the old man with a special softening of desire to please, because she had not been listening to him. He seemed to her, as the old often do to the young, endearingly innocent. Children were supposed to be, but she seldom found them so. There was Morgan, apparently born with all kinds of terrible knowledge. What she thought of as innocence was the lack of evidence, in another, of the things she mistrusted in herself.

Gideon came to the house with Ann on Saturday afternoon. He brought sketches he had done of the children, from memory. He gave them in a negligent, off-hand way, but Jessie thought that they were purposely “interesting”. She felt sorry for him for the necessity he felt to try to put in a word for himself with her by flattery, even so obliquely. Again he stayed for dinner—or rather for a cold supper, for that was what it was. Old Mr. Stilwell had never mixed with black people socially in his own life, but he understood that his son “looked at things differently”, as he put it, and was rather proud of the open house kept by his son. He liked to shock acquaintances of his own kind and generation by swanking about the way he often sat down to dinner there, without blinking an eyelid, between black guests. In fact, the only black guest he had ever met there before was Len. Len was present again, and called him “sir” in the way that he liked young men to do. The old man lived alone and was excited by the company of young people and children, the wave of life caught him up roughly again. Laughter, raised voices, interruptions, things begun and not finished, things that never got said: this
was the way it was; only when one was alone and it was over did the sentences get completed and end in silence.

His second gin (he had two every evening) warmed the impulse that is always there—to explain to the one in whose presence you have been silent all your life what you really have been thinking all the time. It was not truthful, but was simply the impulse made audible in phrases that would hold it harmlessly. He had cornered Gideon, and was saying with some of the charm he must have had when he was young, “I've always had a lot of respect for your people. And I've always found them show respect in return.” Later he became bolder, and more consciously candid: “After all, it's nonsense to talk of marrying and all that—politicians' scare-stories, I tell people. I'm sure none of us thinks of that. But you can't tell me there's any good reason why you and I shouldn't be having a chat together in a drawing-room if the mood takes us.” Gideon listened to him with carefully narrowed attention: his head inclined as if he must be sure to be wily enough to miss no word of a daring and debatable argument. Tom said between closed teeth, “Oh Christ.” But Len, who got up to renew the old gentleman's drink, was almost primly reproachful—“He's a sweet old man”—and a spirit of outrageous undercurrent amusement suddenly took over the company. They drank quite a lot and the need to be tactful disappeared. Jessie no longer felt it necessary to bother whether, if Boaz found himself at one end of the table, while it had somehow come out that Gideon was sitting next to Ann at the other, it would look ominous or odd. Boaz and Ann, reminded by a turn of the talk of some old private joke, caught each other's eyes and giggled.

“We never going to see you down at the office again?” Len said, turning to Ann. When he met her nowadays, he talked to other people, as if the two of them had quarrelled. He bore the slight that, so far as she was concerned, nothing had changed, she felt no less interested in him than she had ever done.

“Lennie, I'd love to get started on something. What's new there for us?”

He looked pleased in spite of himself. “Always
new
. You're a damned good unpaid worker, but like all people who don't get paid you're unreliable. Disappear in the middle of things, man.”

Her indignation was flirtatious. “I like that! There wasn't a school or a hall within seventy miles we didn't lug that caravan to.”

“Won't you give me my job back?” Jessie called out. “As a paid worker, needless to say. I think I'll leave the mortuary at the end of this month, I can't stick it any longer.”

“It's not our policy to employ whites where blacks will do.”

“Ha-ha. Don't we know it; unless they're unpaid and unreliable, eh?”

“Are you really giving up?” Boaz said to Jessie.

“Oh I must. I'm sick of the dying rich. Trouble is, what to do. The Agency job really did suit me down to the ground, you know. Useful, gregarious in a surface sort of way. Anonymous.”

“Work for me. I mean it,” said Boaz. “My things are in a hell of a mess. I must get someone to catalogue and type notes and so on.”

“Oh no,” she laughed and drew back, vehement. She sawed away at the leg of lamb with a rather blunt knife, while he went on, “Personal, convenient, learn in your own home. Write now for illustrated booklet.” She laughed but she felt in herself the symptom of a disease she had feared and forgotten, the set of opposition she had discovered nearly a year ago, when she and Tom first discussed the possibility of having the Davises to live in the house. It was just what she had been afraid of—the presence of strangers was influencing the way they lived, turning them to distractions that required the posturing that another pair of eyes on oneself demands. The Davises were drawing everyone into their own charged air; the whole house was the way things looked
within such an atmosphere. Now came the suggestion that she should work with him, put herself in danger of assuming jealous concern for his research, of standing in a comradely working alliance with him as Ann was not. They would end up going to bed together, maybe? She felt a wild and stirring indignation, a struggle for life. No, no, she wanted to say to him, it would be too nice, it would be too convenient, it would be the
end of me
.

She did say, with the rudeness of fear, “I don't want to be private secretary in my own house, Boaz old dear.”

“Len, I suspect you've got your shoes off under the table.” Tom was referring to a report in the morning paper that Rhodesian Africans had started a campaign to give up wearing shoes because “that was the custom before the white man came”.

“Why stop at shoes? My ancestors didn't wear trousers either.” He buttered a piece of bread as if it were the object of bored distaste.

“That's why I don't understand politics,” Jessie said. “They never function at my level. Whatever goes on is either rigged by big money and diplomats or clowned about in the streets. Nothing in between seems to work.”

Ann pretended to lift up the cloth: “And he's got knobbly toes, into the bargain!”

“Shaka's warriors certainly wore sandals,” said Tom. “I don't know about any others—Boaz? What d'you say?”

Gideon's voice, once he had begun to speak, went on through interruptions without emphasis and with an indifference to whether it was lost or not. “People must have something, something not hard, that anyone can do. It may be meaningless (“Not meaningless, this,” Boaz said) but that doesn't matter much. Take off your shoes. You don't have to be able to understand what goes on at a meeting. You don't have to read about it. You don't have to pay two and six membership. Useless, harmless, but you feel you're doing something.”

“It's not harmless,” Boaz said across the voice.

“Take off your shoes. People can afford it. You don't ask too much of them. You hold them together.”

“Whenever you talk about people—the people—I have the feeling I don't know who you're talking about,” Len said to Gideon. “You don't mean yourself, do you?”

“Can't ask them all the time to trust you, trust you. Let them have something they can do by themselves. Even if it's meaningless and harmless.”

“No, you never mean yourself.”

Boaz leaned out across the table like the figure-head of a ship, his clear-cut lips shining wet from the gulp of wine he had just taken. “Not harmless. You know that. You know quite well what it is.”

“Take off your shoes.” The voice said it to himself, for the sound of it.

“Oh yes, not harmless at all. Exactly the same meaning as burning down a church or a school or a clinic or a cinema.”

“Take off your shoes.” Gideon smiled at no one in particular, then gave his little chuckle, and fixed his consciousness of the room on Boaz, like a drunk choosing a point of focus. He said, suddenly, “An act of pure rejection.”

“Exactly.”

His cigarette was burning down in the crumbled bread on his plate and he picked it up, saw that it was almost dead, and brought himself back to the company with an effort. “Beautiful, stripped, pure—” The words were unsheathed, one by one, like a man giving up knives.

“A pure rejection.”

The phrase held for a second; and then all the talk round the table piled upon it and buried it. “Not harmless to the people who do it, I mean; I'm not talking of the act itself—” “An anomalous glorification of the past,
qua
past …” “Damned silly
to identify …” “More than that, dangerous, you can't substitute magic for political power …” “… step out of his shoes and out of his power, I suppose.” Everyone said what he always said, in one form or another, in every context, seizing automatically on what there was in the subject for them. For Tom it was institutions—the difficulty, for new, intensely nationalistic black states, of finding institutions of law, commerce, education other than those associated with former subservience. For Jessie it was the notion that people could externalise an influence by making some common object of use symbolic of it, and then getting rid of the object. Ann argued with Len about what the others were saying, and Boaz and Gideon tried to analyse how far it was possible for a political movement to rule with and not become ruled by the release of irrational instincts. “Of course it's dangerous, but what can we do in Africa?—colonialism was dangerous for the whites, it couldn't last without a pay-off coming sixty years or so later, but what could they do? We can't look much further than getting what we want—” No one had noticed that the old man, Tom's father, sitting at table, had become congealed in expression and posture as if, while all around him was noise, agitation and mobility, he would never move again. Tom took him quietly out of the room and murmured to Jessie as he came back and swung a leg over his chair to sit again, “Just one gin too many, I think—he's lying down.”

Len caught the domestic aside. “Passed out? Hell, he's a nice old man.”

When Gideon had gone home (in Ann's car) and everyone was on the way to bed, Boaz came down again to the living-room, where Tom was making notes for a lecture he was supposed to give at a discussion club the next week. They sloshed brandy into two glasses that already had been used and began, at first deliberately, then carried away by real interest, a long discussion about
a book on Chinese navigation pre-dating the Portuguese exploration of Africa. Jessie banged with a shoe on the floor overhead; they laughed, so loudly that she banged again. With the drop of their voices, the talk lost momentum. Boaz yawned until he looked quite groggy; he wandered about the room and paused, and wandered again. His face shone waxy and his eyes were hidden like a clown's in the diamond-shaped darkness made by the recess of shadow under each eyebrow and the triangle of plum-coloured skin cutting down the line of cheekbone from beneath.

“One thing I can't stand,” he said, “the way he repeats a phrase or a sentence as if he gets some meaning out of it no one else does. That sort of withdrawal … You know what I mean—he makes you wait for him to return before you can go on with what you're trying to say.” The moment he allowed himself to speak of Gideon, the brandy he had been drinking without apparent effect took hold of him like an arm hooked roughly round his neck. “If you knew the insane things that've been going on … the whole of tonight … ‘black bastard' … Over and over again, to myself, while I was talking … like a maniac? ‘Black bastard'. All that filthy cock, man.”

He stretched himself on the sofa, and when Tom finished his work he saw that he was asleep. His head was flung back on a raised arm behind his head. The fingers of the hand moved like tendrils in an effort against cramp that did not break through to consciousness; on the blank face of sleep traces of bewilderment and disgust were not quite erased round the mouth. Tom looked at him for a moment with the curiosity that is always aroused by the opportunity to contemplate suffering without having to respond to the sufferer, and then decided to leave him there, and turned out the light.