Occasion for Loving (30 page)

Gideon appeared in the doorway that led from the dining-room to the verandah. It was nearly six o'clock. He tugged at his ear and shuddered wearily. Without speaking (she must still be asleep inside) he came over and squatted on the steps. He did not seem to see the sea but deflected the course of the ants on the steps with
his shoe and gazed with abstracted attention round the verandah roof, as if he had some professional interest in the construction or the moths and praying mantises clinging there.

“You slept five hours.” Confronted with him, Jessie was relieved, now that the moment was here, of the difficulty of it.

He smiled, not at her. “Good God. I was very, very tired.”

“The brandy's where you left it, in the living-room. Bring the gin—in the cupboard, there.” She got up and went into the kitchen for soda and ice. The floor had been newly polished with thick red polish that smeared off like lipstick; there was a strong smell of fly-repellent. There was something of the hospital matron in Jason's merciless insistence on the cruder and more uncomfortable aspects of cleanliness. The lawn-mower was chattering between the back of the house and the track.

Gideon poured them each a drink, and, settling down in the chair where she had sat all afternoon, she said to him, “Where are you going?”

“Oh.” He had his glass in his hand but he put it down again between his feet, where he squatted. “That's just it.” In a moment he picked up the glass and drank it off, as if he were alone in a drinking-place. “We were not too sure. Then yesterday we found ourselves somewhere around here” (how far does that cover, Jessie wondered) “and Ann had the bright idea of looking you up.”

“Harewood Road isn't exactly somewhere around here,” she said. It was the address of the house in town.

He gave his chuckle. She noticed again his way of talking to himself rather than to you. “I'm well aware of that,” he said. Asking for an explanation was so out of character for her; he appeared to save her the embarrassment of the attempt by ignoring it.

She said quite gently, “I don't know why you came to me, you know,” and for the first time he looked through the offhand impersonality of his manner and was about to speak when Elisabeth ran round from the garden and stopped, at the sight of
a visitor, to sidle instead of tear up the steps. She knew Gideon Shibalo from home, of course, though she had forgotten that at lunch-time her mother had said that Ann was in the house, and another friend, the man who drew their pictures. He said, “Hullo, it's Madge, eh?” and she gave him a routine smile for grown-ups as if he were right. She felt her mother's eyes on her in a way that she was still a bit small to interpret; Madge or Clem would have understood that their presence was in some way restrictive to the grown-ups at that moment. Her mother said in a voice specially for her, surprised, enthusiastic: “Where you been?”

“Mowering with Jason.”

“And the girls?”

“Gone to find lucky-beans on the road.”

“It's time for your bath, love.”

“Awwwrh … let me wait till they come, I want to bath with them …” and as she saw on her mother's face softening and then capitulation, her tone of growling complaint changed swiftly, within the sentence, to cheerful sweetness.

“I'll go back and do a bit more, shall I?”

Madge and Clem came noisily through the house. “Shh, someone's sleeping,” said Jessie, but they ignored her, and the visitor too, being old enough to find it very difficult to remember to greet guests, and irresistible to imitate them crudely, and giggle, once safe in bedroom or bathroom, at any real or fancied peculiarities they might have. “We've found hundreds. There's another big tree full we found, further up than yesterday. We went miles,” Clem boasted ecstatically to Elisabeth. Elisabeth was impressed and greedy. “—No wait, not those, that one I want for myself.” Clem held out of her reach one of the black pods that had been emptied from her skirt on to the verandah. “Here, I don't want them—” said Madge, suddenly satiated. She dumped her whole gleaning on Elisabeth and began examining the marks left in
her hot palm by a handful of loose beans. The hard little red beads with their black eyes rolled all over the verandah. Gideon said to one of these unidentified pretty female children, “You should make a necklace out of them. You get a sharp needle, and you make a hole through each one …” “Oh yes, I know,” said Madge, charmed at once by the attention. “You can buy them in the street in Johannesburg. You see African women selling them. And you can use them for eyes for things; Elisabeth's got a monkey like that.”

Jessie was occupied for the next hour with seeing that the children got bathed and preparing dinner. Jason pared the comforting cabochon of each potato down to many deeply-cut facets and left them soaking in cold water; he also cut green beans into shreds and steeped them. Then he waited for her to come and do what she would with these materials, being very helpful in the most unobtrusive yet not self-effacing manner. He understood the names of common objects that they worked with and the verbs for certain tasks.

She saw him through the V made by the double poles of the pawpaw tree outside the kitchen window, toe-ing up the slope at a run with the lawn mower, and she called to him. He mowed always either in blue overalls or, as now, naked to the waist, in his usual shorts; but whichever the outfit, he had the look of one of those young men in training for some athletic event who loped around the city streets at home on summer evenings—the look of listening to some smoothly-running inner mechanism. While she trimmed meat she heard him draw water from the tap outside and in a few minutes he appeared, freshly washed, and in a clean, flapping shirt. They had got on all right without words, and now she felt—part of the intrusion she saw in everything—that the fact that she now needed to be able to speak more than naming the objects she touched was the end of something, even of another kind of privacy.

“Visitors,” she said to him. She held up her hand, spreading five fingers. “Visitors. Five at the table. All right?” “Five,” he confirmed shyly, in English.

She went between the kitchen and the rest of the house, coming to linger outside for a few minutes now and then. The children were there, after the bath, so she and Gideon were in a truce of their chatter. The city ritual of evening drinks had fallen away for her while she was alone. (Sometimes she chilled a two-and-sixpenny bottle of white wine and drank some of it at lunch—the rest did for cooking fish.) He filled her glass when he replenished his own and she took it up again each time without remark. It was the hour of the day she never missed; half-involved, along with him, in the children's game, she saw the surface of the water gliding shining over depths which were already dark, so that the sea was not a colour but a gaze, intense, gathering, glancing. A long bluff of beige cloud turned smoky mauve, like a distant prospect of land. From the point where the coastline took a backward bend and disappeared behind the firs that marked the community, the coloured sky began to thin and blur as if she saw it through breath upon a window-pane. Vaporisation perfectly dissolved this world, eddying in always from the right. When it could no longer be seen you knew that it had reached the dune; the house; the verandah. It became palpable though not visible in a darkness without distance that made sea and sky and the arm's length of blackness all one. She liked to put her hand out into it, like water (the children had turned on the light); she said to Gideon, a little stimulated by the gin, and belligerently friendly now, “I notice you never once looked.”

“What at—?” He had just triumphantly broken his inquisitor (Clem) in the game where you must not answer “Yes” or “No” to any question. “Now you, Mummy, your turn,” Clem hammered. “He's the winner so he must be the one to ask. Come on, Mummy!”

The presence of a man rounded out the group into a family; other evenings she had not been expected to join in the little girls' games: they had almost forgotten about her, sitting quietly in the dark near them. Once or twice she and Shibalo got quite caught up in the nonsense, and argued animatedly about some point of fairness. The children wavered between admiration for his skill at beating them and despair at losing. Elisabeth became what was known among them as “cheeky”, flinging herself at Gideon, hiding her face so that no one knew whether she was crying or laughing. “Boy, if my brother was here he would've beat you,” Clemence jeered wamingly. “Just see if my brother Morgan was here.” Jessie looked at the little girls with a break of curiosity; she had not thought that Morgan had his place in their scheme of things.

They had dinner without Ann—“Should we call her?” Jessie deferred to Shibalo, and he said calmly, “I think the longer she sleeps …” They had drunk enough to meet as the two people they were, independent of the situation that presented each to the other in a particular light. They were amused by the children and linked in being adult. Jason brought in the food and for a moment seemed bewildered, not knowing where to put it down. As he served Gideon he mumbled some greeting and Gideon answered him absently. Jessie had the sensation of brushing over something with only a twinge of awareness. When the children had gone to bed—or at least were out of the way in their room for the night—they continued to sit on at the table. There was the air of the confidential imposed upon them, like people lingering in a deserted café.

“Yes, you come here for a bit, you bring your children, you go back to town again—” He spoke as someone does who takes it into his head to contemplate for a moment, without interest, out of his own deadlock, a kind of life that he has not taken notice of before.

“This is the first time I've been here since I was a child,” she said. “It isn't my house. I haven't got houses here and there.”

“I had an idea …” he excused himself in careless pretence.

“You had the wrong idea,” she said, matching up to him with a grin.

He gave a deprecating, culpable sniff of a laugh. “I've had a lot of ideas—” Her existence was dropped aside, he returned to reality, and paused after the first phrase, searching for accuracy. He weighed his hands in slow jerks in the air, he was looking for the right shape of gesture, and as he brought them up to either temple they became, while he talked, first blinkers, and then curved into a frame: “—You get it set, marking it off for yourself from the rest that's going on. But that's not real, there's no place where things really are contained at right angles, a tree doesn't stop at a line drawn down the middle. You land up miles—miles outside. Where you think isn't where you act. When you get going, get moving, begin to push things around, smash things up, it's not there.”

“You still in with Congress?” she said.

“I'm still in Congress.”

She said, “You know, all that—you forget all about it here.” She laughed.

“Oh yes?”

“Yes, I mean it …?” She was smiling at him, fiddling with things on the table, drawing his thought harmlessly out into the open. “The only black man I can't speak to, and the whites I don't speak to either—I just look at them sometimes, like looking at a Boudin …” The tension of holding the intruders at arm's length produced the impulse towards a careless openness. She lazily said what she pleased whether he (and she herself) liked it or not. “I can tell you it's true that you could probably live here without thinking of it right until they came up from the cane with knives and sticks and finished it off without giving you time to give it a thought.”

“You could?” he conceded, half-challengingly, half-ironically. The whites he knew never put themselves in this sort of context; it was always as if he and they were considering a third kind of person there. They looked at each other and laughed. When she said to him again now, “I don't know why you came to me,” he only leaned across the table and took a banana and answered in the dry, amiable insolence between them, “Didn't think you'd mind so much.” And added, almost with sympathy, “Is it because of him?” He meant Boaz.

“Has there been something final?” she said, forced to ask, slumping in her chair.

“They were talking day after day. I hadn't seen her for two days. Then she phoned. She was in a hell of a state. All of us—” He had the face suddenly of a man who sits thrown against the wall, open to blows, given up, his only defence do-what-you-like-to-me. “Then she picked me up in the car.”

“When was this?” Jessie was as impersonal as a clerk filling in some form.

“Thursday—Friday. A week ago.”

While he was speaking Ann had wandered in, her hands pushing up the sleeves of a dressing-gown as she clasped her elbows. She came forward and then paused, following with slightly open mouth what they were saying as if she had walked in on a scene that she knew and was listening to hear that all went as it should. She looked far more exhausted than before she had slept, and held her eyebrows high and frowning.

“A week ago,” said Jessie. She looked at them both. They felt the meaning, surprise, rise in her; they ignored it, like people pretending modesty.

“Do they know where you are?”

“No … Well, no.”

“… we've been on the move,” Ann spoke. She pushed up a crumpled table-napkin and slid on to the table, supporting
herself with one leg on a chair. “I see there are some towels in the cupboard. Can I have a bath?”

Jessie got up practically, but before she went through the door, she said it: “You really can't stay here, you know.” She was looking at them both kindly, truthfully, doing away with artificial casualness.

Ann said, as if it were a matter of interest and had nothing to do with intentions, “Why not?”

“The boy—for one thing. I don't know what someone like that would make of it”

Ann burst out laughing. “But since when would you care about a thing like that?” She was surprised into objective amusement, offering it as a reassurance to Jessie about herself.