Occasion for Loving (37 page)

Jessie said, “When?” to gain time, not for herself, but for the other two.

“Next week.”

“Well, school begins.”

She had never asked them what they were going to do. She had the feeling that they never talked about it, that they had hidden from it, escaped it until now when, as inevitably happens, the chance remark that her mother wanted to come for the “last few days” had discovered them. “I'm going in.” She was pushing her hair painfully under a rubber cap. Sand from her body sprinkled down on their heads as she got up. “Oh—sorry!” “It's all right.” Ann took a paper handkerchief and began to use a corner of it, very gently, to flick the grains out of the convolutions of Gideon's small, well-made ear.

“He should bend his head to that side,” said Jessie.

He shook it. “It's all
right
.”

“Wait a minute.” Ann persisted in her attentions to the ear. She said to Jessie, looking up at her, “Did you ever see anything so perfectly shaped?” He jerked his head as if he were being bothered by an insect. “I know,” said Jessie.

When she came out of the water he was busy helping the children lug something into the pools. She walked over to them, pulling off the cap so that the deep, indrawn breath of the sea returned to
her again in a gasp. He got the swollen plank afloat and came to the rock on which she had climbed to see. “Shipwreck,” he said. She smiled, watching the children, watching this game, like every other, fall into the pattern of what they were: Clem taking charge, Madge at once suspecting that her chosen part was not the one she wanted after all, Elisabeth forgetting, in her roistering pleasure, what it was supposed to be about.

“Can we go back together?” he said.

“Yes, if you want to.”

“She doesn't want to go back,” he said.

He began to pull winkles off the rock and throw them into the incoming tide that sucked and struck against the rock where they sat. “You can't get a thing like this sorted out in five minutes.” He was speaking for Ann, and Jessie answered, unconvinced, to give him the reassurance this asked, “Of course not.”

“What do you make of Boaz?” he asked.

“Why?”

“So nice and polite and so on, very much the good chap. Never says, what's this all about?”

“To you? But why should he? I'm sure he's talked enough to Ann.”

“It's pax when I'm around.” After a pause he said, “D'you think he'd be like that with anybody?”

She looked at him quickly. Perhaps he wanted a lie from her, but she had done with lies, even the good lies. “Probably not.”

He said, “She'd feel different about doing this if he'd just once stand up to me, you know?”

“Oh of course, if the other one can be got to behave badly at once everything's much easier. But here you have his nature, which is perhaps a bit of the natural victim's, plus the special situation. Civilised love affairs are bad enough, but this one's particularly civilised.”

“If I were white,” Gideon turned to her, wanting to confront her word by word, “you mean he'd tell me to go to hell.”

“And her, too. Maybe.”

“Good God.” He was scornful, confused, and all the time the balance between trust and half-trust quivered between them, and she looked down, where the water swirled loud with foam, and she seemed to plunge—“I don't think I'd ever have to give this business another thought. I believed it was all settled, once and for all, long ago. It's the truth, the rational truth, that a love affair like yours is the same as any other. But you haven't come to the truth while it's still only the rational truth. You've got to be a bit more honest than that. Do you know what I think while I look at you and Ann? Do you? I remember what was left out when I settled the race business once and for all. I remember the black men who rubbed the floor round my feet when I was twelve and fourteen. I remember the young black man with a bare chest, mowing the lawn. The bare legs and the strong arms that carried things for us, moved furniture. The black man that I must never be left alone with in the house. No one explained why, but it didn't matter. I used to feel, at night, when I turned my back to the dark passage and bent to wash my face in the bathroom, that someone was coming up behind me. Who was it, do you think? And how many more little white girls are there for whom the very first man was a black man? The very first man, the man of the sex phantasies … Gideon, I'd forgotten, I'd left it all out. It's only when something like you and Ann happens one suddenly needs to feel one's way back.”

He was looking tightly ahead as if under an insult.

“I suppose Boaz thought it was all settled, too. Years ago. But none of us knows how much getting free of the colour bar means to us—none of us. It sounds crazy, but perhaps it's so important to him that he can't help putting it before Ann, even. It sounds crazy; but even before her.”

They did not speak for a while, and the sea cut under the rock and tore away, bearing off what had been said.

“Where would you go, to England?”

“She thought Italy.” He did not want to mention the scholarship that he had given up, but that Ann saw simply as something that could be arranged again.

“What about some other part of Africa?”

“It doesn't matter much.” Ann was coming towards them along the shore-line, her feet pressing the shine of water from the sand as she walked. They both watched her approach, but it was his vision of her that prevailed, so that Jessie saw her as he did, a glowing face, salt-stiff, blown hair, his shirt resting like a towel across her shoulders, and a line of the flesh—the white of a freshly-broken mushroom—that was hidden by the boned top of her bathing suit showing in a soft rise against her tanned chest as she walked. In this unselfconscious sauntering stalk everything was taken for granted, everything that had ever been struggled for and won with broken bodies and bursting brains—the struggle up from superstition and pestilence, religious wars and industrial slavery, all the way from the weight of the club to the rubber truncheon: the fight of man against nature, against men, and against himself. Gideon said between clenched teeth, “The other things I've been beating my head against the wall for—I don't want them any more.” He was making, in the presence of a witness, an offering, throwing down the last that he had before the demand that he could not measure. And he laughed because of the present glory of it, as the figure came on, approaching, enveloping, over the sand. He jumped off the rock, staggered a moment in the knee-high wild water, and then ran up to the dry sand. When she came he took her by the shoulders in some playful exchange, knocking the shirt off. They stood there talking, arm's-length from each other, her head impudently, affectionately bent, his thumbs pressing the hollow under each collarbone. The sun had ripened her skin like fruit, and even in the house the warm graining beneath which the blood lay near, brought to the surface by slight inflammation, gave her the look of someone seen by candlelight.

Rain leaned from the horizon over the sea, and all, sea and rain, moved so quietly that the waves fell with the isolated sounds of doors shut far away. An
epoussé
glitter now and then broke the dream with a reminder of water.

Clem, who less than a year ago had been as unhampered by conceptions of time as her sisters were, now felt her being determined within it as the life of a character in a play is contained in sets arbitrarily put up and taken down. “Our last three days.” She was dismayed, she protested against the limits that obsessed her. Madge and Elisabeth chimed in with her, but forgot, next moment, that the game of bears in caves that the darkness under the high old beds in their room provided, would not go on for ever. “Let's always play this,” they said to each other.

Clem took her rebellion to her mother. “Why does it just have to go and rain on our last three days?”

“You've had a whole month when it didn't rain.”

But Clem's sense of time had no dimension in the past yet, she was concerned only with the margin by which the present extended into the future.

Jessie gathered stray books and clothes wherever she happened to come upon them and put them on the spare bed in the room where she slept. She went through the contents of the magazine rack in the living-room, setting aside the children's ludo board, some crumpled dolls' clothes, and falling under the aimless fascination of reading snippets in the old magazines that had been there when she came and would be left behind when she went. Gideon and Ann stepped over the clutter that surrounded her as she sat on the floor. Their comings and goings were minor; they
spent the days talking of the practical facts of rooms and rents and fares in other countries, like some ambitious young couple planning to spend their savings on a visit abroad. Ann even sat mending the unravelled sleeve of Gideon's blue Italian shirt. Sometimes Gideon was silent for long stretches as he sipped beer and drew. They went tramping out in the rain, and once drove away through the mud and came back stretching and preoccupied, focusing upon familiar things with the daze of people who have shut themselves away to talk.

Jessie picked up a drawing of Gideon's while they were out. Well, at least it wasn't Ann again—seeing that it was abstract. But why be glad of that? Malraux spoke of the artist as one who annexes a fragment of the world and makes it his own. She did not know whether Gideon needed that more than he needed to share a common possession of what there was to be shared. Perhaps he needed to be a man more than he needed to be a painter. Not just a black man, set aside on a special form, a special bench, in a special room, but a man.

As she looked at the charcoal drawing that was almost like a woodcut in its contrast of thick black lines and spidery-etched connections, she thought it moved the way the water did that day when she and Gideon were talking on the rock; but the association was probably one that existed only in her own mind.

The day before they left was clear, with a colourless sky that turned blue as the morning warmed. The sea remained calm; the sand, beaten flat as a tennis-court, dried with a rain-stippled skin and took incisively the oblique cuts of crabs' delicate feet and the three-branched seals imprinted by the claws of birds. Gideon and Ann came down to the beach soon after Jessie and the children. Like invalids, after the rain, they sat against a rock and smoked, both in long trousers, he in his sweater and she with her grey trench-coat pulled round her, only their feet bare. Jessie looked up from her book at some point and saw Gideon strolling towards
the children. She and Ann chatted intermittently, and then Jessie decided to go to the village to get what was needed for a picnic lunch on the road next day. She was brisk, standing up with her hands conclusively on her thighs for a moment; she had about her the confidence of a woman who is about to return to the place where she belongs and who already takes on the attractiveness the man who is waiting there will see in her—an attractiveness made up of the freshness imparted by absence, the comfort of something well-known, the strength and weakness of her régime. For once, Ann was inert by contrast; her out-flung legs, her bent head that moved only to draw slowly on a cigarette made a figure that had come to a stop, there on the beach.

The shop in the village was not full, but service moved with a peculiar country slowness. You were supposed to help yourself from the grocery shelves but the grouping of things was haphazard—Jessie had to give up and wait her turn to be served at the counter.

The man and woman behind it conducted their business in an easy, talkative way, while a few Africans hung about on the fringe of the whites, hoping to get a turn sometime. A big pasty woman, with an identical daughter leaning on the counter beside her, was trying to decide on a tin of jam—“Ah, but how often do you get it these days that it's not all mushy, like a lot of porridge …?”

The assistant was a little grey-skinned woman without breasts or lips or eyebrows, but whose head of hair, distinct from the rest of her, was fresh from the hairdresser's, elaborately swirled and curled, stiff and brilliant yellow. “Not Calder's Orchard Bounty, Mrs. Packer, I can guarantee you that. Same as you, I hate jam all squashed up's if its bad fruit they put in it, but this is what I take home for myself.”

The next customer ahead of Jessie was a handsome woman with the air of authority that goes with a gaze that follows the line of a splendid slope of bosom. “How are you today, Mrs. Gidley?”
The assistant took her pencil out of the centre of a curl and although the whole mass moved slightly, like a pile of spun sugar stirred by a knife, not a hair was drawn out of place. The tone of voice rose a little to meet the status of this customer, not unctuous, but no longer matey. “Stanley—Mrs. Gidley's chickens, in the back there. —I put them aside first thing this morning, while I could get the pick for you. Or don't you want to take them? We can send the boy, no trouble at all, he's got to go up your way, before twelve? —Stanley, just a minute—”

“Oh could you? Oh that would be nice—but I'd forgotten about them anyway—all I wanted was to know if you'd be good enough to put this up somewhere—” The woman was leaning across the counter on one elbow, smoothing a home-made poster.

“Oh that—” The yellow head twisted to look. “I heard about that—yes, I should think I would! It's getting too much of a good thing. My daughter was saying to me, Saturday afternoon and Sunday's the only day you've got, if you're working, and then the whole beach is full of them.”

The gracious voice said regretfully, painedly, “Well, we do feel that some arrangements ought to be made. Something that will be fair to all. One doesn't want to deny people their pleasures. There has been a suggestion that a part of the beach ought to be set aside for them … but of course, once you make it official, you'll get them coming from other places, and the Indians, too …”