Occasion for Loving (29 page)

The business of choosing books to match a mood or atmosphere was a bit of an insult, really—whether to the writers or herself she didn't bother to decide. It was something amusing to mention to Tom in a letter—she often dreamed letters to people, on the beach, sometimes people to whom she had owed a letter for years. (She did write Tom's, of course.)

She was reading on the beach on a morning so quiet that her book actually seemed to sound aloud. It was a cloudy day with the heat of the hidden sun coming hypnotically off the blurred shine
of concentrated radiance on a smooth grey sea. The grey moved oilily and broke in slow rolls, hesitantly, upon the sand. The tide was out, the rocks looked flattened. Once when she gazed up without focus she saw a woman pausing as if she had just come down “their” path, the path from the house. She kept the figure in this same dreamy gaze and then felt the pull of its attention on her. The woman was making for her, moving with the slightly ploughing gait that the heavy sand, up there where the tide did not pack it smooth, made necessary. It was Ann. Before she could make out the face, Jessie knew from the look of attention that the face had fixed upon herself that it was Ann coming.

The girl stood there holding her shoes in her left hand; seemed to begin to lift them, as if to wave, but then did not, and came on.

She saw she was recognised and came faster. “Jessie.”

“How did you find me?”

There was no wind and no sound in the airless air. Their voices dropped to the beach like dead birds. Both were amazed, as if Ann had given up thought or hope of her being really there.

“I tried to phone you. It went on for hours.”

“Oh, last night! That was last night?”

“Yes, I hung on and hung on, I think I actually heard you shouting hullo at one point.”

“I was just about to go to bed.” Jessie scrambled up and now they were both standing. “I thought the exchange was crazy— eleven o'clock—and no one ever rings me anyway. I nearly didn't answer …” They might have been two people bumping into each other in a coffee-bar after a misunderstanding about a meeting-place. Ann went into an animated, exaggerated explanation about how difficult it was to find someone who knew where the cottage
was
. She was laughing, making faces of mock despair, drawing deep breaths of exasperation, and the hand that she put up to her face now and then made the gesture tremulous. She wore one of the full skirts and dark shirts that she liked, but her hair looked
limp, and the thick line of pencil behind the thick eyelashes was smudgy and unrepaired. The white skin with its few small black moles shone new and strangely exposed to the hot, open radiance. Yes, it was strange to this place; the understanding rushed in on Jessie while the girl was talking. She had a moment of violent dismay, cringing fiercely from the intrusion. They began to walk back toward the house, and Jessie knew; it was only a matter of form that Ann paused, turning on to the path, pressing on the leaf of wild ice-plant that became a juicy stain under her foot, and said, “Gid's in the car.”

The back of his head and one arm, stretched along the top of the seat with the hand dangling, had the look of a person obdurately real, almost ordinary, at the centre of an upheaval. Jessie saw the sight in dissolving unbelief—he had gone out of existence, for her, into the situation he had created: he was here, alive. He didn't turn his head. He let them come up in silence.

Jessie had difficulty in bringing out a smile or the normal platitudes of greeting; and she could see, as he at last moved his head when they were facing his profile, that he knew this. He said, like a survivor, “You picked a nice quiet spot for yourself. Hullo …”

“Why don't you get out?” Ann chided, smiling. He gave her a glance to make sure of the signal; he continued to half-smile at Jessie, beginning remarks he didn't finish, lapsing into his selfish chuckle. “Hell, I don't know why … stuck here, I guess. You want to look for this place in the dark, man, the end of the earth … you're sure this is really where you live, eh …?”

“… I had no idea anyone was really trying to get me.”

“Bring the cigarettes,” Ann said. She was frowning into the glare, business-like now. He was out of the car, leaning back into it to get his jacket. “And that—no, my other one, the underneath—” He hung himself with her saddle-bag, then fished for something on the floor of the car and came up with one of the satchels made of woven mealie leaves that Zulu women sell on the road. The floor was crowded with newspapers, bruised apples, the cellophane from cigarette packets, a pineapple, milk cartons, a half-drunk bottle of brandy, and on the small back seat there was a new tartan rug and one of the lumpy, grubby cushions off the verandah chairs at home.

“The trouble is that all the houses around here are known by the names of their owners, but no one would know what you were talking about if you asked for Fuecht's because my stepfather never lived here and the place's always known by the couple who lived in it for years—Grimald's cottage.”

“Well, of course we were spelling Fuecht to everybody, black kids, old women in the fields …”

“Tom should have told you.”

“Gid kept saying how confusing life is in the country. All the time he was moaning about how simple it is to move around among a million people with names on the streets and numbers on houses—” Ann began to giggle as one does at something that was not funny at the time, making common cause in amusement at him with Jessie. With the ruthlessness of a woman who wants to secure something for a lover or a child, she imposed upon them the pretence that she and Jessie were leading the man into the house with a shared sense of warm attention. They moved in a dazed, ill-assorted progression between the hibiscus bushes, down the cracked concrete steps to the back of the house, that lay below the level of the track: Jessie with sun-scrubbed face and brown hands with white nails, blanched clean in the physical honesty of salt water and abrasive sand; the other two full of the creased shadiness of those who have been too long in their clothes.

It was half past eleven in the morning. Jessie led the way into the house that acknowledged no ownership. “Would you like tea? You've had breakfast?”

Ann went to the windows of the living-room like a weekend guest, hands on her hips, looking at the sea. Gideon sat down in the middle of the divan that did duty as a sofa, sending up the sound of broken piano strings. He leaned forward with his hands clasped, elbows on knees, and looked round slowly from under his brow. “Any chance of a brandy in the house?”

“Of course. Beer, too, I think. Would you like a beer, Ann? I'll look in the fridge—I bought myself a couple of cans the other day.”

“Milk,” said Ann. “A big glass of cold milk.”

Jessie went into the kitchen. The young Zulu who was caretaker of the house when it was empty, and worked for the occupants when it was let, stood stirring a mug of tea. He said “Missus?” and she said “It's all right,” and if he did not understand the words he understood the tone and the smile, and she took the milk and a jug of water out of the refrigerator and arranged the tray for herself. She emptied a packet of biscuits on to a plate and unwrapped a piece of cheese, sweating in its red rind.

When she came back to the living-room with the tray Ann was deep in a big chair and Gideon had taken one of the stiff, curled-edge magazines left in the magazine rack by previous tenants and was turning the pages without looking at them. Ann sat up and drank the milk and cut a chunk of cheese, and Jessie said, “The brandy,” and took a bottle out of the sideboard. She put the iced water beside it, but he poured himself a big neat tot and drank it off. Ann pressed him: “Have some cheese. Don't you want biscuits?”

“Where are the children?” she asked Jessie. It was as if she had been particularly fond of them, like one of those adults who use children to draw attention to themselves, making a great show of their ability to get on with them and forcing their presence upon other adult company. Jessie answered as if this were so. “Down at the rocks somewhere, I suppose. I'll have to go and fetch them.”

They began to talk again about the search for the house in the dark the night before. Gideon kept screwing his eyes up, shaking his head, and then forcing them open again, in punctuation. Once or twice his mouth fell slackly and he breathed aloud in a catching pant. Ann's air of normal animation had breaks in it when
she seemed to lose the thread of what she was saying. Suddenly she demanded, “I've got to sleep. Can I have a bed somewhere?” Jessie, like the sane momentarily made aware of the exhausting fantasies of the mad, suddenly realised that they must have been up all night, perhaps more than one night. “Where were you coming from yesterday, anyway?” she said.

The comfortable distance between herself and them closed; at once they were drawn tight together, with a jerk. Ann's head rolled wearily to her shoulder where she stood, then, for a second, she and he looked at each other in the way of people who share some experience—something ugly, privileged, survived—that will never come out in the telling. He would not speak, he lit a cigarette as if what there was existed only when he looked at her. “Where we were coming from—?” she laughed encouragement to herself, awkwardly. “Where we were coming from. Oh well that's another thing. —Look, I've got to lie down now.”

Jessie went back to the beach to fetch the children. All the way down the path and over the sand she said to herself the things she should have said, wanted to say. She had lived so calmly for the past few weeks that her sulky outrage affected her like a strong emotion. She was hotly disgusted at the namby-pamby way she had received the two of them, just as naturally as if they had been neighbours dropping in for a cup of tea. A glass of cold milk! Why hadn't she said at once, right away, at the car, what are you doing here? What have you come here for, dragging in the whole show, the witnesses and the events, the spies and the distractors?

Her solitary stake of quiet personal belongings lay on the sand abandoned. The clouds that underhung the sky had blown away in a north wind and the sea was dyed hard blue by a clear sky. She felt as if she had left the place already. She found the children and they trailed up to the house in the mesmerised glitter of midday, to a monologue kept up by Elisabeth.

Jessie knew how, when you were alone in the house and the children came up the path that gradually drew them level with the house, their voices flew in before them. She thought of the two sitting in possession there, and turned away inwardly, stubbornly set against the moment when again she would walk in with some normal, casual remark. Her feet slowed like a child's in dread; it was important to her to delay confronting them again, even by the meaningless little time so gained. But the voices must have flown in unheard. The curtains of the room she had indicated to Ann were pulled and neither of them was to be seen. Jessie felt ridiculously relieved, as if they really were not there. She ate her lunch of fruit and cheese in the midday dream, served by silent Jason in his clean red-check shirt, not answering the chatter of the children.

Afterwards she sat on the verandah. She smoked and rested her eyes on the horizon of sea. The sun was behind the house in the afternoons and the shadow that fell before it was deep, the brightness beyond it searching. The curtains bellying convex then concave on the windows that gave on to the far end of the verandah remained closed. She thought of him, going over him slowly and repeatedly, as if she were describing him. A black man sitting in the car, with the small ears they have and the tiny whorls of felted black hair. (“Wool”: but where was it like the soft, oily, or silky washed fleece of sheep?) A black man like the thousands, the kaffir and picannin and native and nig of her childhood, the “African” of her adult life and friendships; the man; the lover. He was these. And none of them. Shibalo. When she saw his back, in the car, he was for a steady moment all the black men that had been around her through her life, familiar in the way of people not known as individuals. She had known him in this way a long, long time; the other way hardly at all, by comparison. Did he pick his nose as some of the other Africans she had been friendly with did, out of nervous habit, while he argued? These
were things one got to know, as well as the quality of the mind, when one began to enter into individual relationships with people. Frenchmen and Germans cleaned their teeth with slivers of wood while you were eating. What did she do, when she was alone or in the other aloneness of intimacy, that offended against that ideal of a creature living but not decaying that is kept up in public? Tom pared his toe-nails and let the cuttings from the clippers fly about the bedroom, so that she sometimes found a piece of sharp, yellowish rind in the bed or fallen into an open drawer. She felt some revulsion always but it passed because she was in love with him sexually; his flesh was alive for her: therefore he was dying continually. Perhaps you can accept the facts of renewal through decay only where there is love of the flesh.

She was waiting for the moment when the man appeared from the sleep and silence behind the curtains. She had the feeling, half-mean, half-powerful, of a person of whom something is going to be asked. What did he expect of her, Gideon Shibalo? You had always to do things for them because they were powerless to do anything for you. But did this mean that there was no limit to it, no private demarcation that anyone might be allowed to make before another? Because he has no life here among us, must I give him mine?—thinking that this was wild exaggeration, that what was in question, what she was jealously disgruntled about, was an intrusion on her holiday. If he does not know where to take his girl, is that my affair, too? Her almost superstitious withdrawal from the idea of the Davises coming to live with her nearly a year ago had come back in a sweep of confirmation since this morning, with Gideon Shibalo confused unnoticeably with Boaz. The girl, too; what had she to do with this girl she'd kept meeting about the house all year, always with the smile on her face that you get from the stranger who bumps into you on a pavement? Yes, what? She accused belligerently. “A glass of milk”. Did I exist for her before the moment when she asked me that? Does
my existence begin when she is forced to walk in on it, and cease when she walks out? Jessie went over the girl sharply, noticing like a jealous woman that she had carried off the arrival, but only just; there were school-girlish touches. She had made an idiot of herself; or very nearly. No doubt the intention was aplomb. Well, it certainly hadn't been that. She had scraped through, making this mad—no, preposterous entrance just plausible. Just plausible enough to stop my mouth, she thought; and a different version of the meeting on the beach went through her mind, wide open, breaking the liaison between them and her even before the first meaningless convention of greeting could be used to ratify it. Like all lovers whose affair presents difficulties, involves others, and attracts attention, they'd become vain—distressed, maybe, but a bit proud of themselves at the same time, feeling nevertheless that there was something attractive in the idea of being associated with them. In with them; she recoiled from the idea. To take its place, rationalisations began to occupy her seethingly. They'll have to go because of Jason, she thought. I can't even speak to Jason in his own language. How can you expect a simple chap like that to understand? He stands aside and bows “Nkosikaz'” to every white bitch who pushes him off the road with her car. A chap like Jason has nothing but his peace of mind. You can't take it away and leave him dangling; because he hasn't got politics yet, and you can't free the private man in him before the political man … A fat lot she cares about people like that. In a whole year, has she ever really
said
anything, except “It was marvellous fun” or “Let's do this” or “So-and-so's got a marvellous idea, we're going to …”