Occasion for Loving (40 page)

She had a pleasant lunch with Gideon and Ann at the house one day, when everyone else was out. She did not know if they still met at the flat, but she gathered that they were seeing each other briefly, very discreetly, and probably through the agency of some friend not previously associated with them. The three of them talked mostly about the house at the sea and their time there, almost like people who meet to renew a holiday friendship. When Gideon left he looked round the smoky living-room where they had sat till nearly three in the afternoon over their lunch-time coffee (it was a bleak day and the fire, Jessie and Ann agreed, was not nearly so good as Gideon's grass and dung one had been), and then at Ann, whose beautiful smile rose to her face as if it existed for him and would always be there when he looked to her. Now it came to him as encouragement: not to be afraid to pronounce the future, not to be afraid to count on it. He put his arms round Jessie and held her, and kissing her, said, “When are you coming up to Tanganyika? Or will it be London? But Tanganyika's a good place, eh?”

She knew then that she would not see him again.

But she could not have guessed how this would come about, and for what reasons, that, if they were in the room that August afternoon, she failed to be aware of. The cigarette smoke that the three of them had breathed out of their nostrils and mouths hung like warm indoor thunder; the fire was all red, all paper-lantern glow, containing flame in the thinnest skin of matter, and would collapse into nothing at the slightest shift, but the bricks of the fireplace gave out a magnificent heat. Jessie put her back to it. She felt a peaceful weight in her own presence, alone there, left by the other two. I'm beginning to live vicariously, she thought, if I can feel so involved with other people's lives and step back and watch them go. But she knew it was something different, something that she couldn't be too sure of yet … She was beginning to slip into the mainstream, she was beginning to feel the substance was no longer something she must dam up for herself. Passion would not leave the world grey when it went out for her; struggle, love, the urge to grasp and shape living went on through the agency of others, too; Gideon and Ann held part of it; Morgan was coming up to have his share relinquished to him, and even the small girls were not far off. Her mind inhabited briefly the rooms of the house at the sea that had been talked of that afternoon; wandered to Fuecht; she thought, with the sudden summoning that brings the dead to life, that he had dammed everything up for himself right to the very end, right until his old claws couldn't hold anything any more, let it all slip through, and remained clutching at nothingness.

Three nights later the Stilwells had guests for dinner. Jessie had left the table to help Agatha serve the main dish, and she met Boaz at the foot of the stairs. Both he and Ann had said they would be out, and she had not pressed them further, but now she said, “Are you coming to eat? —Oh I like that Allen man!” The occasion of the dinner-party was the presence of a visiting Cambridge history don who Tom had told them was brilliant. He turned out to have that diffidently deprecating manner of presenting dogmatic opinions that Jessie found irresistible. “Yes, I hear he's pretty impressive.” Boaz smiled, responding to her mood of animation engendered by the success of the evening. Her mind was on the sauce, that might need thickening, and she said, “Well, come in, then!”—already on her way to the kitchen. “No … no, I don't think so …” Each in their preoccupation, they passed on. “D'you know where the key to the boxroom is?” he called after her. She was already stirring the sauce, standing well away from the stove so that her dress would not be splashed. “No key,” she called. “The door's just stiff, it's never locked.”

Agatha went into stony slow-motion when flustered, and there was real effort of encouragement and chivvying needed to get hot plates, hot food, and the sauce that must be served at once, all to the table at the same time. It was managed, but Jessie could not let her eye off anything while the process was going on. Tom always forgot to open the wine beforehand and, as usual, wandered about the room talking, using the bottles to emphasise his points instead of drawing the corks. He disappeared to find his favourite corkscrew, then was back again, but as he came close to her where she was serving she saw his face quite alien to the warm reflections of the room. The response to some other situation stung upon it like the outline of a slap. He was filling glasses, she was caught among plates and steaming dishes; she had no chance to speak to him, sitting down, at last, at the opposite end of the table. The don, who was young and tall, with the small head and
fine skin of handsome Englishmen, took on a patchy flush as he ate and drank appreciatively, and kept his golden eyes on George Thandele, Tom's African colleague who taught law at the university. Thandele talked so steadily that he scarcely ate at all; when he paused he would take a gulp of wine like someone coming up for air. They were not arguing, but agreeing about the inconsistencies of policy in the new African states. “It's a matter of coming to terms with freedom,” Thandele said, in conclusion.

“Well precisely. There's nothing really extraordinary about a Ghanaian cabinet minister's wife buying herself a gold bed in London while her husband's Government announces a special issue of stamps commemorating colonialist exploitation in South Africa.” There was laughter down the table, and talk became diverse again. Jessie forgot about Tom for stretches of the evening, and then would catch his glance, or, in a pause of her own, watch him engaged in talk with others, and receive some parenthetic flash of undecipherable concern.

At last they met at the broad window-sill in the living-room where the drinks stood.

“They're leaving.” He passed the phrase to her like a folded slip of paper. She looked uncomprehending.

“Upstairs,” he said. At the word she had in her mind Boaz; then the question about the key to the boxroom, where the suitcases were … but these facts did not fit together, as familiar objects looked at without the sense of their relationship to each other are unrecognisable. “Who?” she said. “Boaz has just told me that they are going back to Europe,” said Tom. He went off with the glass of beer he had poured for someone, and Jessie was drawn slowly into the activity of the room with the strange facility of one who has just been told something that cannot be grasped by the small, delicate apprehensions that remain independent on the oblique edge of one's being—but must be held back until it can be taken full on.

Tom went down to the gate with the last guest. She was standing in the middle of the shabby room, ready for him, when Boaz appeared. He clearly expected Tom to be there with her. “Everyone gone?” He smiled at her.

“You're going back to Europe,” she said.

“It's a long story—I want to tell you one day.” There was no victory in him.

Jessie was still standing in the same place, and she said, “Just—going off?”

He looked about him like a stranger, then sat down on the edge of the divan with his legs flung out before him.

“Yes, we'd better get out. We'll hop on a ship, I think we'll go to have a look at the Seychelles, and then start off at Marseilles. Wander around from there—we've been tramps before.”

“And the grant?”

He made a curiously Jewish gesture with his hand, pushing the possibility away.

The girl in the grey trench-coat took to the road and whoever went with her did not expect to choose his direction. Jessie suppressed the impulse to make a sign of goodwill with some advice she didn't believe in—what he ought to do was settle her down in a little house somewhere with a couple of babies, etc. “Good luck, Boaz,” she said with a dry smile, but meaning it.

He accepted it with a little ironical pull of the eyebrows; he had changed, she saw, hardened in the only way possible to someone of his still, inert nature, by holding himself off from events a little more. It was the difference between waiting to see what would come to him, and knowing what would come, even while continuing to wait. What he had got back was not exactly what he had lost, then; when he said that he and Ann had been tramps before, he was seeing the romance of their relationship as their limitation. In place of the sweeping exultant relief that he must have been almost afraid to allow himself to imagine
at the possibility of taking up their old life, he showed, when Tom was back in the room again, only the energy generated by purpose that moving on provides, in the same way as the kick of a stiff drink articulates a day that is out of joint. They—he and his wife—were already removed from this house and these friends by the distance they were about to disappear into; they were together by virtue of gritty docksides, echoing halls of airports where they would be alone. Tom asked whether Ann was upstairs and Boaz said that he'd already driven her to the hotel where they would spend the night. “You won't take it the wrong way?” He turned to Jessie. “She says everyone has had enough. That's the way she feels at the moment—it doesn't mean we don't know what you and Tom have done for us … Only whatever we say now—it just makes us more of a damned nuisance. When we get together next time, we'll make it all right. You'll all come over, you and Clem and Madge and Elisabeth—and Morgan, Morgan too.”

And Jessie smiled as if she had heard it somewhere before, while Tom, with the male gift for depersonalising an atmosphere in order to set another man at ease, said, “Pick up a cheap Greek island, man, and then give us a sign …”

Where was it, this island or mainland, in new old Africa or old new Europe, where a man believed he would belong with Ann?

“No one mentioned Gideon,” Jessie said to Tom. He felt her bringing guilt into the house, like someone going over the scene of a crime.

“No one was thinking of anything else. What was there to say?”

“We didn't count him in at all.”

Tom said drily, “Where there are three people, one is always left out.”

But it was Tom who flung the question into their hurry to get out of the house to work next morning, “What do we do about him?”

She was cold because she resented having her own background thoughts sprung among the sunlight and the breakfast dishes, as if someone carelessly touched a switch.

“Nothing for
us
to do.”

Elisabeth dawdled, and Madge first complained and then began to go red and cry in case they should be late for school. Tom, who was to take them there, went upstairs and came down again, but they were still not ready, because now Elisabeth had lost her pencil. “Ask Agatha if there isn't one in the kitchen drawer, where the tin-openers are.” Jessie passed on the crisis and put out her hand in the gesture she used when she wanted a cigarette from Tom. The sight of him, washed and dressed and ready for the outside world, while she still had the private pale face and unbrushed hair of the bedroom, always softened her; he dressed badly, out of lack of interest and shortage of money, in the same grey flannels, hairy jacket and brown shoes with thick rubber soles that had been the uniform when he was an undergraduate just after the war—yet this judgment was at the same time an admission of his attractiveness. “You don't think they didn't tell him—oh Christ!” She was suddenly alarmed. “Of course not. But just the same …”

“I'll try to get hold of him at the school.”

Gideon Shibalo was not at the school where he taught, and Len could not find him, either at the room in the township or the flat in Hillbrow. Some weeks later, the Stilwells heard that he had been in Johannesburg all the time; he had thrown up his job; he was drinking, people who had seen him said. None of his African friends took his drinking very seriously; he would “come out of it”, or perhaps would simply become one of those who always remained one of themselves, carried along, however broken, by their unchanging recognition of what he really was aside from the brawlings and buckling legs and slurred tongue with which he was trying to destroy it.

Jessie was distressed, as women are, to hear that he was drinking. “He would have got drunk in Tanganyika or London, with her, when things didn't go right,” Tom said. “You said she might do him harm, didn't you? Perhaps it would have been worse if
they
had gone off together.”

“She didn't have to stick to him to harm him; it was done already.”

“But what could the bloody woman do, if she didn't want him, or couldn't face wanting him?”

“Nothing,” said Jessie. “Nothing. She's white, she could go, and of course she went.”

They came again and again to the stony silence of facts they had set their lives against. They believed in the integrity of personal relations against the distortion of laws and society. What stronger and more proudly personal bond was there than love? Yet even between lovers they had seen blackness count, the personal return inevitably to the social, the private to the political. There was no recess of being, no emotion so private that white privilege did not single you out there; it was a silver spoon clamped between your jaws and you might choke on it for all the chance there was of dislodging it. So long as the law remained unchanged, nothing could bring integrity to personal relationships.

The Stilwells' code of behaviour towards people was definitive, like their marriage; they could not change it. But they saw that it was a failure, in danger of humbug. Tom began to think there would be more sense in blowing up a power station; but it would be Jessie who would help someone to do it, perhaps, in time.

Gideon Shibalo did not come near the Stilwell house after the Davises had gone. Jessie was alone and unobserved again as she had wished to be before they came. Tom reminded her of this, saying, when the last of Boaz's instruments and equipment had been packed up to follow him, “It's a relief to be able to spread yourself—my filing cabinet can come back here—the desk there—”