Occasion for Loving (2 page)

Two or three nights later, Tom brought Boaz Davis home to dinner. Jessie had met him once before, briefly, at some convocation cocktail party, but that was all. He was about thirty, eight or nine years younger than the Stilwells, a slender young Jew; his face had the special pallor of mutton-fat jade rather than the hardened shaven monotone of an adult male. There was upon him, curiously at variance with the rest of his manner, the unmistakable mark of mother's indulgence that touches so many Jewish boys for life. A firm and attractive fruit, Jessie thought, but suddenly your thumb might go right through a soft spot.

He drew the three of them into a quiet huddle over talk of his work, which lasted through dinner and well on towards midnight. When he had left South Africa ten years before, he had gone because he couldn't get what he wanted then—a training that would equip him to be a composer; his ambitions had changed during the intervening years and now he was returning because Africa could give him what Europe couldn't—a first-hand study of primitive music and primitive instruments. The confidence of his European studies filled him with an excited, almost proud approach to the field of study he had grown up in, all unknowing. Every now and then, the talk arrived at a point where his knowledge and Tom Stilwell's met—Tom was a lecturer in history, and there was a record of unrecorded history in the tracing of the introduction, from one tribe to another, of various types of musical instruments. “We might do a paper on it together,” said Tom. “At any rate, I could help you—or you could help me.” He laughed. He had been at work for two years, collecting notes for a history he hoped to write—a history of the African subcontinent that would present the Africans as peoples invaded by the white
West, rather than as another kind of fauna dealt with by the white man in his exploration of the world.

“You know Tom's going to do a history of Africa from the black point of view?” Jessie told Davis.

“Not the black point of view! For God's sake! The historical point of view!”

“Ah well, you know what I mean,” said Jessie.

“Hell, I couldn't agree with you more,” said Davis to Tom. Jessie had the feeling that he was relaxed in a special way in their company; he spoke, it seemed with a curious, luxurious pleasure, in the emotional, slangy, drawn-out South African way that so often appears to leave the speaker defeated, even dazed; as if
all
speech were like a foreign language to him, in which the use of a few lame phrases helped out with repetition and over-emphasis must serve to carry an impossible load of self-expression. He fell into this manner of speech as a man may fall into dialect.

“A-ah, you don't get me into
that
trap,” Tom assured. “I'm not getting busy cooking up a glorious past for the blacks in opposition to the glorious past of the whites.”

“It's like hope-of-heaven, in reverse,” Jessie said. “Don't you think?”

“How d'you mean?” They did not yet know each other well enough to talk all at once.

“You can assure yourself of glory in the future, in a heaven, but if that seems too nebulous for you—and the Africans are sick of waiting for things—you can assure yourself of glory in the past. It will have exactly the same sort of effect on you, in the present. You'll feel yourself, in spite of everything, worthy of either your future or your past.”

Jessie hunched her arms together as if to say, I can make it all clear when I choose.

“I'm dead off politics,” Boaz said to them both.

“That's right,” said Tom.

“Oh yes,” said Jessie, “but they blow in under the door.”

“I mean, you get together with a bunch of South Africans in London, and you begin to wonder how you would ever draw a breath here again without it meaning something political. I wouldn't have come back for that.”

“You've come to do your job.” Tom stated it for him.

“I'm not going to worry about anything else,” he said firmly. And then he added: “But I'm glad it brought me back here.” They laughed. “Well, naturally. I've come back free, in a way. I can go about among these people, and not—at least, without—” he was feeling for the right definition.

“Without hurting them,” said Jessie dreamily, nodding her head as if she had suddenly read aloud from a phrase in her mind.

“He doesn't mean that,” Tom said.

“Without being hurt by them.”

“No, no.” Yet the real identification of what had not been expressed lay suspended somewhere between the two phrases. Tom and Jessie went on trying, forgetful of Boaz Davis himself. “Without responsibility?” said Jessie.

“No,
with
responsibility, that's just it; not irresponsibly, but with responsibility to his work, which is impartial, by its very nature, disinterested.”

“And all that's left is for him to feel partial or impartial, as he pleases, as a man?”

“Exactly!” “Yes, that's it!” The two men came down where she had hit upon it, loudly, laughing.

“I'm not so sure that it's as easy as that.” Jessie spoke soberly, though her mouth was twitching with pleasure. She looked up to Davis. “Anyway I suppose Tom knows what you feel as a man.” It was her first reference to the fact that Davis was about to find a place in the Stilwell house.

The young man grinned. “He knows all about me.”

“You'll pass, you'll pass,” said Tom, with a gesture of acceptance that waved him towards the brandy bottle.

“I don't think I want another one?” he said, smiling.

“Yes you do,” said Tom, and, turning practical, added, “By the way, the usual system—I mean the one we've found works best, before—is that you pay your set whack for board-and-lodge, but then we split the liquor bill between us, each month. You'll probably find you lose, in the end, as we're bound to drink more than you do.” There was the usual exchange of laughing protests. But when the young man excused himself, a little while later, he said simply when he came back into the room: “I think we're very lucky. I like this house. What's there about it?”

“We've convinced it that it doesn't have to feel it's a disgrace to be an old house, after all.” Tom made a precious face.

“It'll be a surprise to Ann. After my descriptions of Johannesburg, she'll be ready for yellow brick or split-level with picture windows.”

“Can't be done, I'm afraid. Can't afford it.”

“Ann's English, is she?” said Jessie, rousing herself to make some show of interest.

“Well, she was born in Rhodesia, actually. But she's grown up in England and never been back.”

“And how long ago was that—this being born in Rhodesia, I mean?”

“Darling, what elaborate circumlocutions!”

Davis smiled. “Not very long. She's twenty-two.”

“A-ah! The pretty little dear! You'll have to watch the old man, Jessie, I'm telling you!” said Tom in a cracked cackle, leering.

The heat drew each day a little tighter than the last. Jessie fought sleep, after lunch, and went about the house stunned with the battle. She walked bare-foot and her only point of consciousness was the contact of the soles of her feet with the cool wooden
floors. The children stood the sun like hardy flowers, taking it in, and exuding it in colour and energy; their legs and arms flashed in the yard. Jessie continued to water the harsh foliage of the stonily silent garden. But the heat broke the day the girl came. Jessie raced about town in the early afternoon under a great fist of contused cloud. The faces of people in the streets took on the alarmed look that comes to the faces of animals at the sense of some elemental disturbance. “It's going to come down,” said a liftman, and Jessie heard his voice small against an electrical vacuum in her ears. From the seventh-floor corridor of a flat building where she called in to see a friend on the way home, she saw the enormous height of the sky, a sulphurous, flickering distention behind which a turmoil of disintegrating worlds seemed to be taking place, a pacing and turning of elements. Below, the ghastly outlines of the city were beginning to disappear in weird dissolving light.

She had scarcely thought of the fact of the Davises coming until then. It was not so much conscious avoidance as apathy. The couple were about to come upon her unrealised; so it was that she sometimes met the face of some child who was a schoolfriend of her eldest daughter, Clem, encountered in the house on the very day that Clem had told her mother, weeks before, she would be bringing a friend to lunch. “But Mummy, it's Kathleen.” “Yes, of course, I know. How are you, Kathleen?”

Yet she responded now, as to a sudden recollection, to the urgency of practical things that must be done. She dropped her trappings in the living-room. “What's the rush?” Tom followed her to the kitchen. “No dinner. Agatha's off. I meant to be home by four.” “You know Boaz is coming?” “Of course, idiot. Where's Clem? Please tell her to put on the bath. She must see that Madge baths and she must do Elisabeth.” She slammed through the kitchen, bringing it to rocking life. Her face as she worked took on the grim, hot openness of the manual worker; Tom thought,
she might be firing an engine in the hissing cab of a locomotive. She came thrusting into the living-room, where he sat deep in the clamorous dissonance of the music he loved. “Where's that parcel?” She tore the paper and shook towels free of the string. She resented spending any money on the impersonal needs of the household, and she made off with the cheap bright towels with distaste. “We're in rags. They wouldn't have had anything but holes to dry their faces on.” He gave a little comforting signal of approval, but she was gone. He remained, skimmed by, juxtaposed with, over-towered by blocks and spires and egg-smooth eclipses of shifting sound. He felt them shaping all round him, himself among them, sounds that were not at all like the voices of fire or wind or sea, or the cries of living creatures; not like anything. He had his freedom of them; and then they toppled, and were razed down to a hiss and scratch as the record finished and the faulty mechanism kept the needle going round an empty groove. He became aware of the measured, emphasised knocking—spelling out syllable by syllable the request to be let in—of the kind that has gone on unheard for some minutes. He jumped up and rushed to the door, and Boaz Davis and his wife stood there in the cold pause of the breath drawn before rain. As they bundled in under Tom's happy cries, a gasp of chill wind, smelling of rain, running before rain, swept in round their cases, their card-board boxes, their strangely-shaped objects in newspaper leaning against each other like a family of freaks huddled on the doorstep. The door slammed behind them in furious force. As they were helped by Tom, rearranging the baggage against the wall, arguing in unfinished sentences whether they should drag everything upstairs at once or leave it till later, hindered by the presence of the children, who had immediately appeared and established themselves underfoot—rain fell upon the house.

The two women met in the deafening roar of it. They might have been standing behind the curve of a waterfall. Jessie appeared
straight from some mirror; she had found time to push up the wisps of hair that hung from the twist she piled up once a day; over-laying the sheen of effort, haste, the efflorescence of the kitchen, all the self-forgetful attrition of the day, was another face. It superimposed the textureless surface of powder, the painted lips of the woman whose first concern is the presentation of her beauty; it was the sign, if worn any-old-how, that she still belonged to the height of life, the competitive sexual world. The girl saw an untidy, preoccupied woman whose face was beginning to take on the shape of the thoughts and emotions she had lived through, in place of the likeness of heredity with which it had been born.

Ann Davis was a nearly-beautiful girl, saved from prettiness and brought to the brink of beauty by one or two oddities—her eyebrows were thick, for a fairish girl, and she had one small pointed tooth that changed the regularity of her smile. Jessie saw her, so young that her share in the commonest kind of beauty was all the distinction she needed; she even wore with distinction clothes distinguished only by a better cut and material from those of the little gum-chewing girls who hung around the coffee bars. Her neck, flecked with small dark moles, shone living white in the turned-up collar of her black blouse. They exchanged shouted greetings against the excitement of the storm, and the girl's introduction to the house was brought about at once, because everyone was pressed into service to go dashing from room to room to close windows. Then they settled into the living-room and drank sherry, to keep off the chill that the rain had brought.

“To Ann, who came in like a lion,” proposed Tom.

“But I promise I shall behave like a lamb,” she said.

The three children stood around as if at the scene of an accident. “Don't mind them,” Jessie explained. “They'll follow you round gaping for a day or two, and then it'll be all right.
Just don't think you have to be polite and strike up a conversation, that's all. Then they'll never leave you alone.” Boaz Davis was a little embarrassed at such a dispassionate view of children; he remembered them, perhaps, in some sentimental context of the centre of the household. He tried to talk to them, to jolly them along, but they turned away and sought shelter from his attention. His wife chattered easily, but he himself seemed different from the young man who had come to the house without her. He appeared slightly strung-up, and inclined to show off, in his eagerness to fabricate a ready-made intimacy between the four of them. “Annie, you don't have to eat apricots just because it's your first night here. You can tell them right away that you loathe apricots.” “I don't
loathe
them, they bring me out in bumps.” “She's not always such a polite little thing, she's on her best behaviour for you.” And he buttered a roll and put a wedge of cheese on it for her—“Here.” Jessie and Tom accepted the little display calmly; they knew from previous experience of living together with couples that with real familiarity, real intimacy—if it were to come—would come more reticence and a comfortable front that would exclude the nature of the couple's private relationship, except in moments of crisis.