Occasion for Loving (33 page)

In the half-hour when she had picked up Gideon on the Johannesburg street-corner and they had driven, just as if nothing had happened, through the city with the familiar checks and stops of traffic lights and street-names, he had said, “I want to show you Mapulane's place, in the Northern Transvaal.” That was enough; after the suddenness and completeness of action, they did not need anything more than the simplest objective.

They came out on the other side of the mountain pass and began to follow the sand roads and tracks of a reserve, in the dark, and there were no signposts, as if the black country people who used the roads could be expected to find their way like cattle. It was late when they arrived at the hummocks of a small village, gone back into the landscape in the darkness. The car woke chickens first, then dogs. The friend was a teacher, and had the only whitestyle house, a brick cottage with a verandah and a wire fence. He lit a lamp, brought out food, with the dazed smiling face of one who sees, the first time for a long time, an admired friend, but he had had no warning of their coming nor any idea who Ann might be or what she was doing there. He kept saying, in English, to
include her, “This is wonderful!” and starting up guiltily to refill the kettle, to poke the fire he had quickly got going in the stove, or merely to move, alertly anxious, round the room on the watch for any neglect. He seemed particularly troubled because he had no meat to offer them: “You wouldn't like a couple of eggs? We've always got good eggs from my mother's hens.”

Gideon enjoyed the spectacle of this generosity and concern before Ann. “James, take it easy, man, we've had plenty.”

“You're sure? Some milk? You don't have to be afraid to drink the milk—it's from our own cow.”

“I couldn't manage another thing.” Ann's assurance seemed to make him more and more aware of the inadequacy of what he could offer, past midnight, to people he had not expected.

“You're just dead beat, my girl, ay?”—Gideon leant across the table and gently tugged her earlobe, while her smile turned into an uninhibited yawn. James Mapulane saw at once, in this small exchange, what Gideon perhaps meant him to; he and Gideon went out to fetch the things from the car, talking again in their own language.

Ann was not often subjectively aware of places she found herself in. She was one of those people who carry a projection of themselves around as a firefly moves always in its own light. Left alone, she felt the room close around her, in a strange authority. It was like the first room one becomes conscious of in one's whole life: the room in which one first opens one's eyes on the world—and sees the bulk and outline and disposition of each piece of furniture as the shape of the world. The houses she paused in, the rooms where she slept, the coffee-bars and youth hostels and hotels and borrowed flats that she used and passed on from—they flickered by, anonymous and interchangeable. In this room the objects were the continuing personality of people who had worked and planned and changed, putting into their acquisition the ardour of much else never attained, so that the pieces of
furniture themselves became landmarks towards the attainment, and the difference between the teak sideboard with its bulbous carved legs and the flimsy bookcase leaning askew under the pressure of textbooks, grammars, paper-back classics and newspapers was the death of a generation and the birth and work and aims of another. It was a room that fitted no category; there was the big coal stove in it, and the sofa, squeezed in between the sideboard and the table, was somebody's bed—grey blankets were thrown back where whoever it was had been hastily pushed out when she and Gideon arrived.

It might have been Mapulane himself; anyway he insisted that he would sleep there now, and give them “the other room”.

“I'll make myself very cosy here, that'll be quite O.K.,” he said, ignoring the rumpled bedclothes that showed that someone already had been sleeping in the living-room, and Gideon and Ann ignored this too, out of a polite convention that amused her: in the sort of life she lived, it was taken for granted that you slept wherever there was something to sleep on, and no one would have found it necessary to pretend that there were enough bedrooms to go round. Mapulane went in and out busily, and there were voices; someone must have been sleeping in “the other room” as well, and have been persuaded to quit it; the dark neat little place smelled like a nest, of sleep, when Gideon and Ann were taken into it, though the bed had been freshly made up with sheets as well as blankets.

It was the first time they slept together, in a bed, all night. She woke up in the morning with the happiness of waking in a foreign country; so it was that she had wakened in peasant houses in Italy, in fishermen's cottages in Spain. Hens were quarrelling hysterically and children's voices carried from far away. She was alone in the bed and two men were talking in a language she didn't understand in the room next door: Gideon and his friend. She got up and looped the curtain aside and tried to open the
little window, but it couldn't have been opened for years, and was stuck fast. Outside in the clear sun were the mud and thatch and tin houses of the village, a blue haze of smoke from cooking fires, a dog blinking against the flow of morning warmth. She knocked on the pane with the knuckle of her first finger, and although a woman with a tin basin of mealies on her head passed unnoticing, two little children playing on the bare, stamped ground looked up and changed to swift astonishment. For a moment Ann was surprised, then remembered, and smiled at them, the foreigner's friendly smile. Everything about the dark cold small house, smelling like a fire gone out, and the activities stirring around her, filled her with the titillating sense of entering this life in a way she had never done before. Because of Gideon it was all invested with the charm of something novel and yet annexed.

The other members of the household had been out of the house since daylight. Later in the morning a strong elderly woman came in from the fields, barefoot, businesslike, her head tied up in a long spotted doek. Mapulane introduced his mother and she stood through the formalities with the face of one already primed for this. Then she plunged into a long harangue with Mapulane's half-grown sister, full of commands, as they moved about the stove and yard together.

Once the old woman, passing Ann, stopped as if she had just seen her for the first time, and crossed her arms. “All the way from Jo'burg. A long way. Oh yes … a long way, eh?”

“Not so bad.” Ann wanted to make the most of this overture. “It was awful to disturb you like that so late at night.”

But it was not an overture, nor even a conversation, but a set piece, a symbolic politeness to keep her at bay. The good-looking old woman went on with impersonal admiring concern, “Myself I don't like to journey far. All that way. And cars, cars … Oh yes, a very long way.”

She turned abruptly back to her own affairs.

During the two days the visitors were in the house, the members of the family stopped talking and often even left off whatever it was they were doing when Ann came into their presence. They were polite and courteous; she was made conscious of her clothes, her manner, as if she were seeing them from the outside.

“They're old country people,” Gideon said, fond of them, of her; bringing them together in his attraction to both. He had spent most of the day talking to James and was alone with her for the first time since morning, walking out over the veld. “They don't think they have the right to ‘like' you—I mean, to have personal ordinary feelings about a white”

“I got on fine with the Pedi women. They couldn't even talk English, but I used to go in and out of their huts and play with their children—”

“—Tribal people.” He was stroking her hair in agreement while she was speaking. “These are mission people; the old man's a preacher, Sophie goes to mission school. They're nearer to you and so much further away—understand?”

“When I asked her if the water in that big jug was for drinking she called me ‘madam'.” Ann was accusing, almost annoyed with herself for confessing this.

Gideon laughed. But he was not really interested in the background members of the household, with whom he exchanged passing talk, easy in his masculinity, the naturalness of his manner towards his own people, and the aura he had about him as the clever friend from the political world that the son of the house shared with him in distinction and risk.

The village was beautiful if you put out of mind the usual associations that go with the idea of a beautiful place to live. Apart from Mapulane's house, that they could see standing out so distinctly from the rest, the houses were square mud ones with grass roofs or tin ones held down by bricks. In some there were
windows and painted wooden doors; all were a mixture of the sort of habitation a man makes out of the materials provided by his surroundings and the sort that is standard when his environment becomes nothing more decisive than an interchangeable
mise-en-scène
of his work. They were a realistic expression of the lives being lived in them, lives strung between town and country, between the pastoral and the industrial; in spite of their poorness, they had the dignity of this.

The village stood on a hill faceted with rocks gleaming in the sun, among other hills like it; they exchanged flashing messages in dry heat and silence and there was no witness but the personages of baobab trees. Ann and Gideon found themselves among these trees as among statues. They did not grow gregariously, in groves, but rose, enormous and distinct, all over the stretch of empty land. Like the single leg of a mastodon, each trunk weighed hugely on the pinkish earth; the smooth bark, with the look of hairless skin, shone copper-mauve where the sun lit up each one in the late afternoon, as it does the windows of distant houses.

Ann and Gideon could not have been further from the world of ordinary appearances, earth covered with tar, space enclosed in concrete, sky framed in steel, that had made the mould of their association. They walked over the veld and already it seemed that this was as it had always been, before anyone came, before the little Bushmen fled this way up to Rhodesia and the black man spread over the country behind them, before the white man rediscovered the copper that the black men had mined and abandoned—not only as it had been, but as it would be when they were all gone again, yellow, black and white. They did not speak, as if they were walking on their own graveyard.

Mapulane said, “You're not too comfortable, I'm afraid—stay as long as you like, man,” but he admitted to Gideon, in an impersonal way, when they were talking about his position in general,
that things were “a bit tricky”. The Native Commissioner would be bound to find out Ann was there. Gideon said lazily, “She helps with research about African music, eh—? She's been in reserves all over the show—”

Yet he was not seriously opposing Mapulane's need for caution; he knew that the good chap was already suspect enough on account of certain activities with political refugees on the run that the Commissioner suspected but hadn't yet been able to pin down. Mapulane had had mysterious visitors before now; they came and went before their presence could be investigated, and that was the best way.

He and Gideon had long talks about politics and the personalities of politics; whether Sijake was too much under the thumb of the white leftists who advised him, whether he could handle Thabeng, whether Nguni could be counted on in a mess. Listening to Mapulane's way of speaking, sitting with the tall, thin, “respectably” dressed figure near him (Mapulane kept, perhaps as a protective colouring, perhaps because, despite everything, some part of him corresponded to the image, something of the black teacher's humble assumption of a status that doesn't ask too much), Gideon felt the free running of a special, unimpeded understanding that comes with certain friends. Mapulane never said two words to him that did not go deeper than the words and touch off some recognition of an attitude or an idea that lay awaiting some such claim in himself. Yet when they left he saw in Mapulane's affectionate face what he was thinking now that he was driving away. The small head on the tall body, the glasses, neatly-parted hair and frowning smile—the smile was one of tolerance, helplessness at something that couldn't be enquired into; there went Gideon, landing up with this white girl, losing himself with a white girl on the way, the hard way that didn't provide for any detours. Here Mapulane did not follow him; only regretted him.

The baobabs passed, slowly turning forms as the car approached, then left them behind. The Rhodesian border was only a few miles away. Ann was one of those people who, because of the very casualness with which they regard formalities, are usually equipped to go anywhere. She had her passport lying somewhere in the suitcase she had hastily packed—the passport was simply kept there, anyway; in half an hour they could be over the border—no doubt someone like Mapulane could smuggle Gideon across somehow, if she and Gideon really wanted it. But she said nothing, just sang a little, as a soldier sings on a troop-ship or a transport lorry bound for some destination he does not expect to know. The border was something she and Gideon had not approached; they did not know how far or near they were from it in the real measure of their distance from the life that lay on the other side. They knew one thing: that it was irresistible to be together. Whether they wanted to make this fact responsible for the rest of their lives was not something they had troubled themselves with yet. Neither had she ever asked herself how long they could go on not troubling; not cowardice but a confidence rarely impaired by failure allowed her to come upon such things without preparation. She was bored by self-doubts and anticipations; she trusted herself to know what she wanted as she knew the moment to cross the road in traffic.

Gideon thought about James Mapulane's face, but he did not think about the border. He had not thought about the border since the time when he was supposed to be going to Italy, and had thought about it all the time, the form constantly changing like a cloud taking shape from what is in one's mind—now the actual veld and stones and baobabs, the wide brown river of this border near Mapulane's, now the sands and the kraals hedged with euphorbia that led to the one in Bechuanaland, now simply the outline and end of something, an horizon over which he was a still smaller dot within the diminishing dot of a silver aeroplane.