Occasion for Loving (34 page)

They slept in the car on the way to Basutoland. It was a small car and even the back seat, which Ann had, was very cramped. In the morning they were dazed and stiff-necked and she said, “We're going to buy a tent.” He had slept in all sorts of places but never in a tent; that belonged again to that world of pleasure jaunts and leisure that black children did not have.

“Oh look …” A stretch of tall yellow grass, where the sakabula birds flew, trailing their long tails, was passing her window. “A house there—imagine a house in the middle of that …” She had never had a house of her own, but all over the world she saw places where a house might be, and to which she would never go back.

“I like a place with trees. Right in the middle of trees. You know, one of those houses where the light is striped, all day long.”

The sluggishness of the cold and stuffy night in the car lifted as they drove, and their responses, that had coiled away back to themselves in separateness, began to warm and open.

“But grass all round, as high as your head, as far as you can see … Let's go down there a bit?”

“What for?”

“Oh what for, what for.”

Ann strolled over the whole earth as if it belonged to her, for she did not question, which amounted to the same thing, that there was nowhere where she wasn't wanted. He brought a blanket out of the car and when they had walked a little way they sat hidden in the grass, leaning comfortably back to back, eating bananas and smoking, coming back to life.

He said, “What time is it?”

“Are you hungry?”—because this was his usual way of suggesting they ought to get a meal. She leaned over and broke off another banana, offering it to him. But he wanted somehow to attach this
space of existence, which he and the woman both contained and were contained by indivisibly, to what he had all the rest of his life—to that constant bearing away upon actions and desires. He was not hungry—not in any way at all. He wanted nothing, and had in himself everything. He did not need to touch her, even without touching her he possessed her more completely than any woman he had ever had. She lay back and closed her eyes. He watched her a little while as she slept, the pulse in her neck the only moving thing in the silence about him, and then he got up and went in search of a reedy place that he had noticed, not far off, from the car; if there was water there, he wanted to wash. He smiled at the thought of the sight of himself, walking through the veld with her cake of perfumed soap and a nylon toothbrush.

Ann opened her eyes on one of the beautiful, untidy birds, swaying almost within reach of her hand on a thick dead stalk of the grass that was high as a wall round the nest the blanket had broken into it. She sat up with a cat-yawn. Her body was with lack of it. The strands of the bird's long tail tangled in panic with the grasses as it took off. She stood up to watch it and saw a man standing a few yards away.

“Hullo,” she said. “Did I startle you?”

“You all right, lady?” He had the slow sober speech of the country Afrikaner speaking English, but his voice was the voice of a man of substance, sensible and sure of himself. He did not come closer but watched her smiling her big smile at him, tucking her shirt into her skirt, a beautiful girl with the long brown legs he associated with the city. There was that immediate pause, filled with the balance of sleep, where before it had been hollow quarter taken and given, between an attractive woman of class and a man old enough and just worldly enough to recognise it. He was a farmer, in a good grey suit, thick shoes and the inevitable felt hat that country Afrikaners wear—on his way to the lawyer or the bank, most probably.

“I've just had a lovely snooze, that's all. You don't mind, do you?”

He softened into a more personal manner. “It's not my land, it's my neighbour's, see? But I just thought you was in trouble. The car there, and so on.”

“Thank you
very
much.”

“You're not on your own here? There's a lot of drunk boys around on Sunday—”

She snatched the conversation: “No, no, my husband's here, just gone over the—”

“Oh well, that's O.K. then, sorry to disturb you—” He was eager to be affable now, specially friendly in that indiscriminate comradeship that white people feel when they meet in the open spaces of a country where they are outnumbered. Her own voice had tipped over in her some vessel filled with fear that she didn't know was there; it poured into her blood while she smiled at him, brilliantly, smiled at him to go, and was afraid to look anywhere but at him in case she should see Gideon standing there too. Just as the man left and she heard a car start up away on the road, there was the figure, the hieroglyph in the distance that she could read as the quiet, slouching walk, the narrow khaki trousers, the blue shirt that was her present.

The car must have been gone five minutes by the time he came up. As he grew nearer a run of trembling went through her several times; she had the dread of something approaching that couldn't be stopped. She wanted to run back to the little car. When he stood there, paused as he came through the grass to their little clearing, and looked round it as one does round a room where one senses immediately something has happened in one's absence, she laughed excitedly, braggingly, and half-whispered, half-wept, “A man was here! A farmer! I've had a visitor!”

He looked at her, looked all round him.

Then, “You're sure he's gone?”

“Oh he's gone, yes he's gone, I heard the car, he's gone.” She was rocking herself with him, digging her fingers into his arms. He had never seen her so emotional, without a gleam of challenge in her. Suddenly it all came to her as if it had happened: “I wanted to run like mad to you when I saw you but I was terrified he might still be looking. —Any minute, any minute, you might have—He thought it wasn't safe for me, can you imagine, I couldn't get rid of him. I wanted to rush to you—” She broke off and began to giggle, holding his hands and moving them in hers in emphasis of her words—”A kind farmer. He was, really. A nice man.”

“Let's get off his land,” said Gideon.

“Oh no, it's not his. He told me, it's his neighbour's.”

He was pulling up the blanket. They fell into a pantomime of crazy haste, dropping their things, struggling and laughing, tussling.

What she had spilt was like mercury and rolled away into the corners of her being, impossible ever to recover and confine again.

The car surrounded them with the clutter of their inhabitation, enclosing and familiar as an untidy room where one day is not cleared away before another piles on top of it. Already they had a life together, in that car. Like any other life, it was manifest in biscuit crumbs, aspirins, cigarette boxes kept for the notes on the back, broken objects of use (a pair of sunglasses, a sandal without a buckle) and other objects that had become indispensable, not in the function for which they were intended, but in adaptation to a need—the fluffy red towel that was perfect for keeping the draught off Ann's knees, and the plastic cosmetic bottle that they used to hold lemon juice. Already the inanimate bore witness to and was imbued with whatever had been felt and thought in that car, the love-making, the hours when nothing was said and attention streamed along with the passing road, the talk, the fatigue,
the jokes. When Ann settled in and her eyes dropped to the level of the grey dashboard with its tinny pattern of grilles and dials, the dead half-hours were marked there for her: the time when she did not know why she was here rather than anywhere else. If the exciting silent dialogue of her presence and the man beside her ceased for a moment to sound in that place in herself where she had first heard it, she grew restless, pacing the logic of slots, circles and knobs.

Gideon telephoned from a dorp post office to tell his friends in Basutoland that he was coming. The people themselves, who ran a store in the mountains, had no telephone, of course, but a friend in a Government office in Maseru would give a message to his brother, who would pass it on to someone else—Ann did not question the circumlocutory mystery by which the warning of their arrival would reach its destination. She was charmed with and proud of the tightly-interlocking life where Gideon was as free and powerful, in his way, as some white tycoon arranging his life by telex. The call took the best part of the afternoon to come through, and then Gideon came back to the car to say that the man in Maseru knew straight off, without any further enquiry, that Malefetsane was away from home, gone to Vryburg on some family business.

“He said, come to
his
place in Maseru,” he said, dismissing it. Of course, the man thought he was alone.

They felt flat, cheerful with each other in the slight embarrassment of disappointment.

“I want to buy a tent.”

“Oh Christ,” he said. He ran his hand across the back of his head. “I need a hair-cut. Malefetsane would have cut my hair for me in Basutoland.”

“It looks like the filling of an old mattress. I remember the mattresses at boarding-school being emptied and picked over on the grass. —Let's get a tent.”

“Who's going to put it up and take it down.”

“I know all about tents,” she said. Hadn't she and Boaz lived in them for weeks?

“Yes, I know,” he said quietly.

They decided, quite suddenly, to go on to Basutoland in any case; Gideon knew someone else there, lots of people there; someone would give them a place to sleep. They were driving in the dark again; the days had no recognisable shape, ballooning and extending into unmeasured stretches of time. The car broke down, but they were not far from a dorp and, flashing a torch, Ann waved a passing lorry to a stop. “I'll get a lift quicker than you will,” she said. Businesslike both of them, he kept out of the way in the dark. She came back within an hour, bringing a new fan-belt and a big polony sausage and some beer. She had got a lift back easily, too; she was in the triumphant good mood which successful escapades always induced. Gideon put on the new belt and they went on. Fifty miles further, before they could cross the border, the car stopped once more, and although she worked beside him with her teeth clenched and her hands transferring their oily dirt to face and hair, neither his fair knowledge nor her bullying, practical flair helped them to get the thing going again. They waited for hours, but no car came by on that lonely road at that hour of the night. Very early in the morning there was a lorry loaded with fruit-boxes, thundering down on them. The Indian driver was friendly, “There's room for him in the back,” he said, of Gideon, as he helped her into the cab. “Oh it's all right, there's room here next to me,” she said, and Gideon climbed in beside her in silence.

At the garage where their benefactor left them no one had come to work yet. She put up both hands and stroked Gideon's cheeks with their little tufts of whorly beard and said coquettishly, “Are you very, very tired,” though she knew he would not answer. They sat on an oil-drum beside the old-fashioned one-armed pumps and
waited. When the petrol attendant came, in the baggy skin of old overalls, with a breakfast of dry mealie-meal in a jam tin, Gideon persuaded him to go on his bicycle to wake up the white owner-mechanic. The big black man licked his fingers clean, wrapped the tin carefully in its newspaper, and went off. Presently he returned; the owner said he could take the break-down truck himself and bring the car in. Gideon would go with him. “Go to the hotel and have breakfast,” he said to her, out of hearing of the other.

She looked at him. “Should I?”

He was getting into the truck; he nodded once, vehemently.

Alone in the dining-room of the commercial travellers' hotel she ate porridge and eggs and bacon and drank cup after cup of grey coffee. She asked, at the reception desk, whether she could pay to have a bath. The receptionist was not on duty yet. The Indian wine-steward-cum-waiter, with his professionally amiable smooth face, said efficiently, “Is madam not resident here? I don't think it's allowed if you're not resident.”

As soon as the car came back she took the thermos flask and ordered coffee to fill it, and sandwiches. “Picnic hamper for the road, madam, certainly I'll do it for you.” From the oil-drum she watched Gideon biting deeply into the bread, bent with the other man over the open engine. A rumpled-looking fair man arrived at last. He unlocked a plywood booth within the hall of his garage. “Come and sit down in my office.” It had the wet black smell of oily rags, there was an old varnished desk piled with invoices and glossy pamphlets put out by the motor corporations, an office chair with a broken back, a grass chair that she sat in, three calendars showing coy girls with cloud-pink breasts popping from wisps of chiffon or leopard skin. Everything was covered with gritty dust. She wanted to go back to the workshop, but she sat out a decent interval; for the first time in her life she was instinctively following a convention of behaviour, fitting an identity imposed from outside herself. In due course the garage
owner came back and said in the encouraging, confused way of doctors and mechanics, “Seems to be a leak of some kind. Battery's O.K., but the points're the trouble. Acid or something on them—but we're trying to file them down and see …”