Occasion for Loving

One

Jessie Stilwell had purposefully lost her way home, but sometimes she found herself there, innocent of the fact that she had taken to her heels long ago and was still running. Still running and the breathlessness and the drumming of her feet created an illusion of silence and motionlessness — the stillness we can feel while the earth turns — in which she had never left her mother’s house. It happened now, while she walked slackly from out of the shade of the verandah into the dry, hot wind of September that battered and mis-shaped the garden. It blew her dress in behind her knees; she was alone and did not trouble to straighten her back. The tap turned in her palm with a dry squeak; the spray from the hose sounded like a shower of gravel on the parched leaves. While the wind pushed and shoved at her, and every now and then the water came back in her face, she was conscious in exactly the way she had been at the age of eight, bent double in her mother’s garden. There was the inner hum of a wordless empathy with the plants sluicing and drinking, the shrubs with their glossy leaves obscured like dirty mirrors, the flower-petals curled at the edges at the flame of the sun, the grey weeds growing where they could, on stems of old string. It was an empathy gentle, sensuous and satisfactory. There was nothing peripheral to it; she had never been out of the garden, or challenged the flaming angels at the gates.

Suddenly this level of consciousness dislodged, was borne away in the stream of the present; instead, she remembered, now in words, that other garden. “What’s the water-bill going to be this month, I’d like to know!” her mother accused the plants. Nothing grew well in the baked red surface that was given a lick of water twice a week. A few coarse, bright blooms — a single iris, a yellow daisy — stuck up like hat-pins.

The garden of this house, where the Stilwells lived, did not have many flowers but it was dark and green. Veils of water from Jessie Stilwell’s hose swayed over shrubs cumulus-shaped and trailing, palms glinting their knives, great woody old fuchsias dangling cerise tassels; the water tore through dust-thick spider-webs and beat on the glistening pine-needles bedded under creaking trees. By the time Tom Stilwell came home, the water had released the smell of spring into the air. It made him smile but he did not recognise it; it came to him like the smell of baking bread or a bottle of spilled scent — spring has no smell in Africa. He waved a roll of papers at Jessie but went straight into the house. Presently she turned off the tap and followed him, stamping her feet, as she went up the steps, to rid her sandals of their rim of mud and pine-needles. The house was old, full of decently obscure corners where various homeless objects could lie; in one of these corners there was a wash-basin, where she put her hands under the tap, and dried them on her wide skirt. She wandered into the living-room and out again, she looked into the kitchen and passed some remark to the servant, shelling peas there. She hated to call out, she hated to make the house restless in the few pauses of peace that fell upon it. She found him upstairs, on the old wooden balcony closed in with modern windows, where he worked.

“She’s arriving on the sixteenth,” said Tom. He had dumped down his pile of books and was sorting his students’ papers, laying them on a mess of newly-opened letters, catalogues, and accounts.

“Well, that’s all right.” They were still at an easy distance from each other; always at the end of the day that took them away, each into his own activity, it was a little while before they could drift into the private harbour of their relationship again. They had married to share life; but, of course, there was no getting out of it, even by marriage: each must live his life for himself. Jessie sometimes thought, without blame or a sense of having been deluded, of the year they weren’t married, when, she now understood, they had splendidly stopped living; that was what it amounted to — to celebrate love, you must do no work, see no friends, ignore obligations.

Two boats, rocking gently on the same evening water; she went over and ran her finger down the side of his face. It was waxy from the day, he had not washed yet, so she did not kiss him. “How do you feel about it?” he said. “No, it’s all right.” But the silence after she had spoken seemed to echo doubt. “We don’t have to do it if we don’t want to,” he said firmly. The evening before, they had discussed whether they ought to offer to have a musicologist friend of Tom’s, who had been away for several years in England, to live with them when his young wife joined him in South Africa.

Tom began to say over again the things that he had said the night before. “A boarding-house is out of the question, with all his stuff; and I don’t like the idea of them in a nice, compact Hillbrow flat.”

“Heavens, no.”

“I just thought it would help them out. And really make very little difference to us.” He felt himself struggling against a heaviness in her response.

“It’s quite all right so long as Morgan’s not home,” she said, wanting to say something perfectly willing and reasonable. Her son, who had the big attic room with a wash-basin, was away at school.

“Well, Morgan’s gone out on to this porch before now; or they could, if it came to that.”

And the matter was left there. There was the noise of some shrill, roaring quarrel, suddenly, in the house beneath them — it seemed to have been blown in and, as swiftly, blown out again — and then the approach of slow, sulking, plodding steps, coming up the stairs with exaggerated stamps; Jessie pushed the door closed with her foot. Tom stirred restlessly, patiently, over something preposterous that he had come across in a student’s paper. The heavy breathing outside the door went away; Jessie experienced a moment of what she thought of to herself as childish triumph — she had escaped the child.

He put the paper away and turned to her, with his fair, crimpy beard, and his deeply-indented, kind frown — his was a fading, undergraduate shagginess that would miss out the assurance of middle life and one day suddenly be the shabby distinction of an old don. “You’re not wildly enthusiastic,” he said.

All at once, she spoke up out of herself. “I don’t want any observers.”

“Observers? Observe what?”

She felt ashamed, weakly happy, relieved. She went to him and put her hand for shelter between his arm and his chest. “I want to live in secret,” she said, half-joking.

“We do, don’t we?” he said.

“We do. But only between us. So far as our life is for each other. The rest of our lives is all set out open for anyone to see. Then it actually hardens into that which anyone can see, so that it stays set, fixed, accepted. But if one wants to change? How is it to change while everyone’s looking, being curious, and making comment? And if it’s not to change, then it will get to the point when it has no truth in it. Won’t it? Like a dance that acts out some great ceremony whose meaning the dancers have forgotten.”

There was no one upstairs now, but the life of the house, coming into its power, was beating on the door: the servant’s loud argument with a child in the kitchen, the clatter and bang of pots and doors, the nasal rise and fall of a voice on the radio, children’s voices, the telephone persisting with its nagging double ring. He made the effort to keep it shut out, away from her, but it gave a sense of scamping haste to the necessity to understand what she was getting at before the chance was lost. He found it difficult to relate their life to what she had said, and she looked at him with the intensity of helpless deceit, for, of course, she was really talking about herself. The urgency overcame him and he gave up, saying, “Jessie, for God’s sake, don’t let’s have them if it’s going to be a nuisance to you.”

She scrambled back to the level of half-truths on which daily life is conducted. “No, there’s no earthly reason why they should be a nuisance. Of course it’s all right. You’d think we’d never had anyone before.” “Not much chance of that,” he said with a good-natured ironic emphasis; he yawned sympathetically, a yawn that ended in a smile. They had never really lived alone; right from the beginning there had always been her son, Morgan, and ever since, kindness towards periodically homeless friends (of whom they seemed to have a number) or the need of money had made it necessary for them to share their house.

“Let’s go down and get a drink,” said Jessie.

“I’m coming.”

She left him and went through the big, old-fashioned landing and down the stairs. All the house was always full of litter eloquent of interrupted activity; she passed a shoe-box on which a doll’s bath stood, half-filled with scummy water, an empty cornflakes box which was being used as a garage for some small lead cars, and two chairs linked to the dirty brass knob of the bathroom door by a web of hairy red wool. Gestures that ended in midair, interrupted sentences — a house full of growth, the careless and terrifying waste of nature, that propagates in millions, and lets millions die. What did children care about “finishing what is begun”? They lived out of the abundance of things untried; their untidiness was the appalling untidiness of life itself, that had flung away a thousand thousand sperms to bring about the single birth of each of them. She railed against them, threatened and preached, saying, as she had been told in her turn, that she would teach them to be tidy; but the instinct that drove her was not housewifely or even motherly — she was aware that she was frightened, in a way, that she struggled in the hands of an elemental force.

At the elbow of the stairs she met her daughter Elisabeth, trailing up. Snail-trails of tears on her cheeks showed that her anger and sorrow had ended before the tears had had time to fall. “I’ve got a lady-bird,” said Elisabeth. “Clem’s going to give me a box and I’m going to put some nice leaves for him to eat. He’s going to be my pet lady-bird for ever.” She went on up the stairs. Yes, for ever and ever, and tomorrow the beetle will be thrown away dead in the cigarette box.

Jessie passed through the smell of cooking in the hall and went into the living-room. They had papered it themselves, and though it was attractive nothing in it was of good quality. Sometimes when she walked into the room she heard her voice saying, as if she had released a trip-wire, “We don’t see why we should ape Europe …” as she so often did when someone remarked on the curtains made of mammy-cloth from West Africa, or fingered a wooden bowl from Swaziland, or a clay pot. Like all statements of a stand, reiteration tended to make it smug and rhetorical; she must stop saying it. She took a half-full bottle of gin out of a home-made cupboard, and rummaged for a bottle of tonic water. When she went into the kitchen to fetch some ice, her middle daughter, Madge, attached herself to her. In the living-room, while Jessie poured the fizzling water on to the heavy-looking substance of the gin, the six-year-old girl clasped her round the hips. “Hi, I’ll spill.” She writhed free and sat down. Madge came and stood in front of her; vaguely feeling something was expected of her, Jessie blew up her one cheek in a comic invitation for a kiss. The child kissed the cheek, and then flung her arms round her mother’s neck and embraced her passionately. She stood again, her eyes on a level with her mother’s, and, meeting the child’s eyes, Jessie saw them fixed on her, blurred, impassioned, sick with love that would fasten on and suck the life out of her.

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.

After dinner Jessie took the girl upstairs. “I’ve got rid of all traces of Morgan in here,” Jessie said, and added, for truthfulness, “There wasn’t much anyway.” She had been surprised to find how little of her son there was in the room; how tenuous his hold on this house was. Part of a cupboard had been enough to take the stained, half-out-grown schoolboy’s suit, the two or three holey pullovers, the cricket bat and the broken bagatelle board that made up his possessions.

Jessie was anxious to make her guest comfortable. “Here — look — there’s at least another shelf going begging. You could put things you don’t need every day in here. And on top of the wall-cupboard in Clem’s room — you can put your empty cases up there.” Ann came running to see. “How marvellous! There’s bags of room. Thanks so much.”

“It’s dreadful not to be able to have order,” said Jessie, her hands dropping to her sides in the manner of a woman between one task and the next. “I long for order.”

“Oh yes!” With careless, social enthusiasm, the girl suggested that she did, too; but she did not even know what chaos was, yet.

She lugged her things cheerfully up and down the room, while Jessie sat on the bed and talked to her. Her ankles, fine as a race-horse’s, took any weight steadily although she wore such high-heeled shoes; she was really very gay and pretty. She gave a thump with her long-fingered hand on a drum that was part of Boaz’s collection of African instruments, and disentangled the belt of a dress from a pair of sandals.

“Do you know anything about all this?” Jessie leaned over to pick up a gourd decorated with an incised design and mounted on a reed. “Look, I can play that!” said the girl. She dropped an armful of dresses back into the suitcase. She took the contraption and blew into it, laughing and struggling with it. She produced a few low, blurred notes, surprisingly sweet. “It’s a chigufe, a special end-blown flute.” Jessie tried it, but nothing came. “I can usually get something out of these things,” said the girl, smiling. “Do you work with Boaz — I never asked him what you did,” said Jessie. “Nothing much.” She was hanging up dresses again. “What sort of work do you do, I mean? What are you going to do while you’re here?” “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll wander about with Boaz quite a bit, I suppose. And I’ll want to get to know what’s going on in Johannesburg. When I go somewhere I haven’t been, I like to get into it up to the neck, don’t you?”

The two women got on pleasantly enough in the feminine preoccupation of making ready a place to live, but each was conscious of reservations about the other. Ann Davis, in her innocent self-absorption, busy making herself comfortable, would never have remarked on this, but when they were alone in their room Boaz said anxiously, “Wonderful pair. I told you.” “Did she really want us to come, I wonder?” said Ann, curious. “I mean, she couldn’t have been kinder, but I had the feeling she wasn’t interested in me.”

“She doesn’t seem to work,” said Jessie to Tom.

“I don’t know what she did in England.”

“Nothing. She has no work of her own.”

“That may be.” Jessie’s feeling of the extraordinariness of the fact did not strike him.

“It seems so odd.”

He gave a sensible laugh. “Why odd?”

“Everyone works,” she said stubbornly.

“Now and then there could be someone who didn’t feel the need.”

Work was an article of faith by which they — Tom, she herself, their friends — lived. How could it become, by the casual word, the mere presence of the girl, a dead letter? Yet it was, it could be. And what was the good of an article of faith that would deny it? There was life beyond life as she had conceived of it for herself; there were freedoms beyond the freedom she understood. She added another word or two to the near incoherent consciousness that had been in the process of coming to birth in her for a year or more, and that perhaps would only be completed at the end of her life, or not at all. How many of the other articles of faith by which she lived were undiscovered dead letters? Is one living, while they remain undiscovered? She felt tired, solitary, and dogged.

She opened the window and hung out. The rain, like a quarrel, was over. The earth breathed warm and damp in its sleep. Clumsy drops fell from the old trees. Suddenly she saw her life as a bird let into a series of cages, each one larger than the last; and each one, because of its comparative freedom, seeming, for a while, to be without limit, without bars. It’s time to get out again; she knew, but told no one. She stared down at the dark and forgot herself. Under the plastered, hammered earth there was a fecund stirring in the old garden. Under stones, out of decay, sticky wings, moving jaws, feeble millipede wavings — they were all coming back to hunger and reproduction, to crawl and swarm and eat their way through the feast.

Two

The unease that Jessie Stilwell had felt at the idea of the presence of two observers in the house was forgotten. Their presence belonged to the static on the surface of daily living; another voice or two interrogating, another laugh in the garden, another set of footsteps on the stairs. The girl was easily amused, and amused herself; she quickly became friendly with the Stilwells’ friends as well as Boaz’s, and she was in and out of the house, with a word and a telegraphic smile, between one diversion and another. Boaz was in a daze of work, and, if he was in the house, was not seen for hours at a time. Tom was busy and absorbed, a little grimly and reluctantly, sometimes, in his lectures and the life of the university. Jessie, whose current job was that of secretary to an association of African musicians and entertainers, worked every morning at the town office of the Agency, and sometimes in the afternoon or evening as well, and cared for the house and children and the demands of friends in those fits and starts of activity that served quite well to keep them going. In this immediate present — the continuing present of life going on — the Davis couple took a place unobtrusively; on any other level, she was hardly aware of them at all. She remained intact, alone.

Like many people, Jessie had known a number of different, clearly defined, immediate presents, and as each of these phases of her life had closed by being replaced with another, it had lost reality for her; she no longer had it with her. The ribbon of her identity was always that which was being played out between her fingers; there was no coil of it continuing from the past. I was; I am: these were not two different tenses, but two different people.

The latest, and present phase — her association with Tom Stilwell, their way of life, their children — she accepted without question as the definitive one (by this, for whatever it turned out to be worth, would her life be known). For the best part of eight years she had lived it honestly, wholly, and even passionately. But for some time now, she had been aware that though this was the way she had chosen to live, and by that fact deserving of all the fervour and singlemindedness and loyalty that she had it in her to put into it, it was not the sum total of her being. Not all the spit and polish of effort, the grace of love could make it so. She was feeling towards the discovery that there is no sum total of being; it flows from what has been, through what is, and so on to what is becoming. She had created herself anew, in eight years, as she had done several times before that; but this self was the creation of man; it did not belong to the stream of creation. From the fullness of life, she had, at last, time to ask herself why she lived, and although she had scarcely begun to know how to formulate the question, let alone grope for the possible answers, she had suddenly come to know, in her bones, that there is no possibility of question or answers, outside that stream.

So far as the past was concerned, Jessie believed that she had torn the grandmother’s clothes off the wolf long ago. She had looked him in his terrible eye with the help of someone who loved her before she met Tom, and though as an adult she openly marvelled that she had survived her childhood, she refused to make it an excuse for her inadequacies. She was bored and irritated by the cliché of the unhappy child who makes a mess of his life when he grows up. “In any case,” she once told Tom, “I don’t think I qualify. I was not unhappy at all. I was only unhappy when I grew up and discovered what had been done to me. I am only wild and unhappy now, when I think of it.”

She was the daughter of a petty official on a gold-mine; her father had been manager of the reduction works or something of that sort — she did not remember him. He died when she was eighteen months old and by the time she was three her mother had married again, this time a Swiss chemical engineer on the same mine, an intimate friend of the family, Bruno Fuecht. The Fuechts had no children and Jessica Tibbett remained a cherished only child. She was her mother’s constant companion, and this intimacy between mother and daughter became even closer when the child developed some heart ailment at the age of ten or eleven and was kept out of school. She was taught at home by a friend of her mother’s, and when she grew up, during the war, she left her mother’s house only to marry. A son was born of the war-time marriage, and her young husband was killed. She lived on her own — with the baby, of course — for the first time in her life, and worked and travelled for a few years before she met, and finally married, Tom Stilwell.

Those were the facts, with their apparently easy graph of formative events; there were all the obvious peaks, labelled. But the true graph of her experience lay elsewhere, and ran counter to the high and low of the facts. Horror and sorrow were contained in the cherishing, for example, and the death, off-stage and unrealised, was no more than losing touch with a summer’s companion who would, anyway, have been outgrown. Jessie knew the truth — coming to know it had been the biggest experience of all, in her life so far — and for some time she had thought that, knowing and accepting it, she had done with it. She had pulled out the sting; but all the rest of the past had been thrown away along with it. There were signs that it was all still there; it lay in a smashed heap of rubble from which a fragment was often turned up. Her daily, definite life was built on the heap, but had no succession from it, like a city built on the site of a series of ruined cities of whose history the current citizens know nothing.

Before she had begun to take any account of them at all, the Davis couple had been part of that daily life for three months. Morgan, child of the war-time marriage, came home from school; he was put into the closed-in verandah that was Tom’s workplace, and Tom moved his desk into the bedroom. The house was full, and at night charged with sleeping presences. Jessie, roused, one night, by a child’s whimpering that ceased before she got to the child, felt furtive, standing in the passage with the sleepers all round her, hibernating in dreams. Yet how alive they were, simply breathing; the mysterious tide of breath reached out to her and retreated, reached out and retreated, in the dark. The house smelled of them, too; the warm smell of urine and cheap sweets in the little girls’ room, the peppermint-and-wet-towel smell from the bathroom, the smell of crumbs and leatherette from the suitcases lying under dust in the boxroom, the smell — exuding from the closed door as if from a cedarwood box — of nail varnish, dried gourds and cigarettes, coming from the Davises’ room.

Jessie rustled quietly back to bed, by feel. She was asleep again almost at once, but just before she joined the others, she experienced — exactly like the silent flash of sheet-lightning that lifts the dark — another wakening in another night. She stood behind her bedroom door at home on Helgasdrift Mine and listened, above the pounding stroke of her heart, to small clinking noises in the bathroom. The gathering beat of her heart had woken her like a fist beating at her consciousness; she knew, before she was awake, why she was at that door. A tap turned on and off — the hot tap, that squeaked. More slight clinks, as of things picked up and put down. Silence. Then the sound of the bathroom door opening, the tsk! of the light turned off. She opened the bedroom door and confronted her mother. She put out her hand and turned on the passage light so that her mother should be spared nothing. There the woman was, the grease of the cream she put on her face before she went to bed shining like sweat, the celanese nightgown showing her drooping, middle-aged breasts, the triangular shadow of her sex.

“What’s the matter?” the girl rasped out.

The woman was caught; light found out her face in a moment of private disgust, weariness, the secret shame of unwanted lust. “Go to bed; go on.”

They stood staring at each other, afraid of each other. The girl was not a child, but nineteen years old; her body could have been risen from the act of love. But she knew it only in books; she knew it only through the distaste her mother expressed for men; the things her mother did not say; the grouping of her mother and herself as opposed to the exclusion of her stepfather. The girl’s feelings were violent: was she trembling with pity and shame, for the outrage of her mother? There was a struggling animus, horrible, in her — did she want, as well, to shame her mother, to expose her, to force her to admit that she was outraged?

“What’s wrong? Are you ill? I heard you in the bathroom.” She would not let her off.

“Nothing. Go to bed.” The woman’s voice was hysterical, stern, almost on the point of foolishness, with embarrassment.

“But why were you in the bathroom so long?” the girl said cruelly, pitiful. She had caught her. She had shamed her. She had forced the unspoken into tangible existence.

“Nothing. Go back to bed.” Her mother gave in and appealed to her nakedly, as a woman.

Bruno Fuecht. He had no name. A creature lying on the other side of a door, in bed as in a lair. Love. Her mother, Bruno Fuecht, and—. A conclusion reached only once, in the middle of the night. Left unfinished, for ever, in her daytime self. Love. Mrs. Fuecht is so close to her daughter. “My daughter is my life.”

At last, she slept beside Tom Stilwell.

The next day there was a letter for Jessie from Mrs. Fuecht. Jessie ladled out macaroni cheese at lunch, and opened her post in between times. “That’s odd — I dreamt about them last night,” she said, picking up her mother’s letter. But it was not true that she had dreamt. She shook her head as she read: “The old man’s in a nursing home again. What a queer woman she is; she writes with a real air of triumph about it.” “Relieved to have him off her hands, I suppose,” said Tom; the Fuechts had retired to the coast just after he married Jessie: he had not met old Fuecht more than three times in his life, though Mrs. Fuecht had come up for a few awkward days each time a child had been born. He was satisfied that they had no part of Jessie, and he merely concurred with her token interest in them. Since Fuecht had got old, he had become ill, eccentric and difficult. “He’s been giving her a hell of a time. She says he threw his diet food out of the window and then got dressed and slipped out of the house to a restaurant in town.”

Ann Davis, who had been driving around all morning with a photographer friend who took pictures of rich people’s houses and gardens, was questioning Boaz about some arrangements he had promised to make for Sunday.

“Ann wants to see the mine dancing — do you know if it’s on every Sunday?” Boaz asked. Tom shook his head enquiringly. “Shouldn’t think so. Not every week. Eh, Jessie?”

“Definitely not.” Jessie ate slowly, reading booksellers’ catalogues, circular letters and advertisement pamphlets, though she chivvied the children for their slowness at table, and banished them if they brought toys with them.

“How can we find out?”

“Phone the Chamber of Mines.”

Morgan was at just that age at which, the moment a grown-up noticed him, he was asked to do something; for the rest of the time, he was not taken into account at all. “Morgan can ring up for you,” said Tom. “Bring the phone book, old chap. Chamber of Mines. Publicity department — something like that.”

Morgan was a smallish boy, for nearly fifteen; only his hands, big-knuckled and long, had shot ahead of him, and were nearly a man’s hands. He went readily; whenever Jessie felt people’s eyes upon him, she was impelled to make some remark to break their attention — it was an unconscious reaction. For the first few days at home, for some reason or other he continued to wear his school clothes — a clean, ink-freckled white shirt and clumsy grey flannel pants that reached to the knee and were held up by a belt made of striped webbing in the school colours. Jessie, before the fact of the institutional cast of his figure, at once created a diversion, like a bitch running senselessly back and forth before the humans who have come to look at her litter. Her remark drew attention to him, but deftly turned it off focus. “What a tramp he looks! Tom, you must take him to town next week and get him some decent things.” But the child wore the uniform as though he had been born in it.

“There’s no answer,” said Morgan, coming back into the dining-room.

“Of course not,” Tom remembered. “There’s no one there after lunch on a Saturday.”

Challenged, they began telephoning everyone they could think of who might be able to give them the information they sought, and the lunch table broke up, except for Jessie, and the three little girls, who were eating custard. Ann stood about in the alert way of someone having her way. Morgan stood about ready for orders.

“Leeuwvlei Deep, half past nine tomorrow,” Tom came in and announced.

“There, are you happy now?” said Boaz to Ann.

“Goody!” said Ann, and the little girls took it up, Goody, Goody! “We’ll all go,” she said to Jessie. “Shall we?”

“Well, the little girls’ve been. I’m not keen to go again, are you, Tom?” She looked at the boy, Morgan, who said nothing. She went on quickly, “But I suppose Morgan would like to go. Yes, I don’t think he’s ever been — have you, once when you were small, d’you remember?”

Ann took the coffee tray from the servant Agatha and carried it out on to the verandah. “I’ll pour.”

“Give me mine first, please, Ann; I must fly.” The Agency was running a jazz band contest that afternoon, and Jessie was to be cashier at the hall. As soon as Ann heard this, she turned: “Oh, could I come along? Could I?”

“If you want to, of course. It’ll be awfully hot and noisy. I don’t know how you feel about jazz bands in the afternoon. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me, if I didn’t have to.”

But the girl was off upstairs. Changing in her own room. Jessie couldn’t help warming towards her; everything attracted the girl, she expected interest instead of shrinking from the risk of boredom. Was that youth? Jessie had forgotten. She only knew that she herself became more and more aware of the need to protect herself from what she thought of as waste. Down in the garden, Clem and Madge and Elisabeth burst out of the house with their hands before them, in pursuit of dragonflies. Jessie and Ann went off together, looking, in their thin, bright dresses and sandals, curiously alike, for once, like acolytes who have both, at one time or another, served the same gods.

Ann was talking about the tribal dancing they were to see next day. “I remember someone — must have been our servant — kicking and jumping around with a shield made of a skin with brown and white fur. I suppose he was drunk. It was connected with some sort of a row in the house, I’m sure.”

“But I thought you’d left Rhodesia when you were a baby?” said Jessie. That was what Boaz had said.

“No … no,” the girl said tranquilly, smoking. “I remember that boy, his name was Justin. He was yelling, too, some sort of song.”

She remembered more of Africa than she told Boaz; she told Boaz, perhaps, only what she wanted to. She was unembarrassed by the lie, and made no attempt to disclaim it. For the first time, Jessie felt some curiosity about her; yet she sensed that the curiosity would be brought up short: Ann might rush into things with her hands out before her, like the little girls after dragonflies, but it would probably follow that, like the little girls, she would not be aware of her own motives.

She was helpful at the hall, and did not give way to any of those signs of bossiness that usually exhibit themselves in those who volunteer in situations of disorganisation. The afternoon session of the bands contest was for people of various shades of colour only, and a large, amiable and lagging crowd, mostly Africans, wandered in and out. A row of seats that had been shown on the booking plan did not exist in the hall, and this, added to the fact that nobody seemed to stay in his allotted seat for long anyway, confused Jessie’s box-office. Someone who had promised to be there to help her failed to turn up, and so Ann cheerfully did what she was told in his place. By the interval, Jessie had lost Ann entirely; walking up and down the aisles, she came upon her, sitting three rows from the front between two African girls who had been programme sellers, and drinking a green lemonade from the bottle. Jessie had with her, by this time, the young man who should have been there earlier to assist as the row emptied. “Here’s the culprit — Len Mafolo — Ann Davis.” The young man, with the sleepy, veiled look that many town Africans have, murmured some excuse, and sat quietly, letting the smoke curl out of his mouth before his face. Ann had already formed the fervent championing loyalties that take hold of spectators at any sort of contest. “Well if the third lot don’t win, I’ll eat my hat. I mean, there’s no comparison, no one else in the same class …” “… like a lot of tired grasshoppers — don’t you agree?”

“I came too late; I didn’t hear them,” said the young man.

A crowd of young bloods in the front row were whistling piercingly and throwing paper darts at the girls in the aisles; most of them wore teddy-boy clothes, inhabiting them with abandon, hilarity and vulgarity instead of the dead coldness, like lead, with which their white counterparts filled the get-up. Blasts of disgust from a trumpeter warming up off-stage were followed by a long, tootling sigh from a saxophone.

“D’you think I could go now, Len?” said Jessie, asking a favour.

“Yes, why not. I’ll do the returns. It’ll be quite all right, Jessie. I’m sorry”—he indicated an apology for being late.

“Good. Thanks so much, then — Ann, if you want to hear bands, we can fix it any time. You’ll get lots of chances.”

“Of course, if you want to go.” Ann did not demur, though she was enjoying herself. She edged smiling along the row; she had taken stimulus and excitement from the crowd, as some people can. She enjoyed the feeling of being among these good-natured strangers. As she passed before Jessie’s friend, who had stood up, loosely, to let them go by, she said in her dazed glow, “I’m going to see the mine dancers tomorrow.”

“Oh you are,” he said coldly; and then, confused by his snub, seemed to forget they were there. “Len, goodbye,” Jessie called from the aisle, and he recovered himself, half-rose again, and waved to them.

Tom Stilwell met Ann on the stairs when she and Jessie got back. He had been working all afternoon and was coming down to the sound of Jessie’s voice mingled with the voices of the children, in the garden. “Eardrums still intact?”

Ann checked her light flight up the stairs. “Oh yes!” she called, and added, in her English way, “It was splendid. Simply splendid.” He flinched a little, as if he had come too quickly from the gloom of his desk into the sun.

Jessie, as so often, had been waylaid by some need of the garden, and had not got as far as the house. She had kicked off her sandals in order not to muddy them, and was picking her way about gingerly between the leaning apricot tree and the bunch of palms. The palms were of a kind that had nothing of the tropical beauty that the word suggests; they opened out like a pen-knife with a bristling array of blades; once a year a tall stem rose out of the middle and bore a head of cream-coloured bells that usually proved too heavy for the plant: it keeled over, as it had done now. Jessie was trying to right it. The little girls gathered a pile of early windfall apricots, wasp-stung and smelling richly of perfume and rot. Tom lay on the coarse grass and watched these various forms of activity. Presently he called out, “That pepper tree ought to come down. And that bit of the hedge.” Jessie did not answer, obstinately propping one arm of the palm behind another that sagged less. He got up and strolled over to her. “Ought to come down.” He knocked at the crusty trunk of the old tree with his fist. Every few months he would come into the garden, “like Fate,” as Jessie said, and make pronouncements of this kind. They were true; necessary; sensible. He showed her the garden, in a word, as it was; she saw the broken macrocarpa hedge, the stooping pepper trees, the tangle of woody growth bald on its lower level and reaching towards the light. “Oh no,” she said. “Trimming a bit, perhaps.” She withdrew quietly, driftingly, immediately from the garden as he presented it; she picked up her sandals and disappeared inside the house.

The Davises had gone out again, and the emptiness of the house was emphasised by the buzzing of a few sleepy flies; suddenly she remembered that it was not empty — Morgan must be somewhere about. She went to her room and forgot him, for ten minutes, occupied in putting away the clean shirts and socks that Agatha had laid out on the bed. Then, on her way downstairs again, she looked in on his room. She did not think he would be there and so she did not knock, but simply opened the door. He smiled up at her, from the bed. He was lying on his back, with the little bedside radio playing on the window-sill beside him. The curtains of the converted verandah were drawn against the afternoon sun. “Hullo. Is that where you are.” He moved slightly to acknowledge her. “What you been doing?” she asked pleasantly. The noise of the little plastic box streamed between them, rising, falling, soothing, imploring. “Listening.” The braying, weeping, jostling went on. “It’s the Nicky Doone programme,” he offered. She nodded. “You should have come with me,” she said, in the jokingly reproachful tone of offering at least some sort of alternative. She forgot that she had not asked him. His long, half-grown hands played with a piece of matchbox. He smiled at her kindly, shyly, without awkwardness, while her own grew until it sounded in her ears as loudly as the radio. She did not go away but she and her son found nothing to say to each other. There was only the voice of the radio gibbering conversationally. At last, in interruption, Jessie said, “I’d better see if Agatha’s remembered the meat.” Her heart was thumping as she put her hand on the door; she looked at him — she was sure she would speak — but she did not.

The Davises acquired several volunteers for the outing to the mine dances, and while the Stilwell house was finishing late Sunday breakfast, various young people began strolling in. At last they set off in an assortment of cars; the little girls had been waiting, ready, in the Stilwells’ old Peugeot for an hour, but Morgan, who took on the colour of a crowd very easily, went off with strangers.

They drove westwards out of the city and through the settlements of worked-out or nearly worked-out mines that were now being linked to the city by its proliferation: strings of roadside stores, garages, road-houses that seemed to belong nowhere, and to be one with the litter of orange-peel and cigarette boxes thrown from passing cars. At one of the mine properties the cars gathered by prearrangement, and people jumped out to confer about the final directions. Morgan came over to his parents’ car. “Didn’t Granny live in one of these houses, or somewhere?” “No, not somewhere,” said Jessie, setting the words to right as if they were some object knocked over. “On Helgas-drift, on the East Rand.”

“Why is he so vague. He seems to take a delight in never quite knowing anything,” she said, irritated, to Tom.

“He’s afraid of being wrong, I should say.”

“Jessie, did you really live in a place just like this?” Ann leaned in the car window.

“I did.” She added to Tom as they drove on, “Bruno used to take me to see the boys dancing sometimes on a Sunday. We just walked across the veld from our house to the compound.”

“I can’t imagine Bruno doing an ordinary fatherly thing like that.”

Jessie watched the tall gum-trees, the brick bungalows behind their hedges, the traffic circles filled with marigolds, as they drove through mine property. A candle, taken down into the past, swiftly threw light over the bulk and outline of what lay there; and then passed on, to be quenched by daylight.

The cars skirted the compound — a rectangular barracks that presented blank walls to the outside world, and had all its life turned inward towards the quadrangle it enclosed — and came to a scene rather like a fair. A black man who filled out some sort of uniform with the afflatus of officialdom waved them to a level, grass-grown ground where a great many cars were already parked in neat rows. There were two flags flying; the restlessness of a close gathering was in the air. They trailed over the grass and up whitewashed steps to an amphitheatre partly covered by thatch. There were knots of white people about, wearing their city people’s fancy holiday clothing — the tight linen trousers, the dark glasses and bright shirts — and others with cameras were prowling and peering. Past a rope barrier there was a less homogeneously-dressed crowd of various kinds and colours — Indian families with their profusion of daughters, all pink and yellow nylon, and plaits of oiled black hair, city Africans with bicycle clips on their trousers and Bermuda straw hats with paisley bands on the backs of their heads, mine-workers who had strolled over from the compound but brought with them from much further off the faces, hairdress and blankets or ornaments of other countries in Africa. Just round the elliptical curve of the amphitheatre, on the left, duster-feathers waved; the backs of another crowd hid groups of dancers who were warming up in preparation for their appearance. There was a small rustic building marked REFRESHMENTS — ALL PROCEEDS TO NATIVE CHARITIES, and a white man at a table under an umbrella gave out programmes.

It was all perfectly neat and clean and orderly. No need for the American and German tourists who, under their guide, obediently occupied a special block of seats, to fear contamination, embarrassment, or the heat of the sun. The Stilwell party filed in where they could; the shadow of the thatch dropped upon them, making them part of the drowned brightness, the blue-dimmed whiteness of those tiers where the white people sat. A hanging garden of faces — black and shining, on the far side of the little amphitheatre — looked on a tarred arena, black where the shade fell upon it; in the sun, a yellow slice of lemon thrown down, startling.

The party twisted and chattered; Ann studied the programme notes and her questions and comments darted like swallows. Boaz kept saying to her, or explaining to other people that he had said to her, “You must realise that you’re not seeing the real thing at all.” “Oh I know, I know. I don’t expect it,” she said, the obedient pupil. But she was not ashamed of her eagerness to see the dancing, anyway.

“If they dance, and they enjoy it, why isn’t that real?” A heavy-faced dark girl spoke crossly.

Tom said, “What Boaz means is that these dances are usually part of elaborate ceremonies. Here you see them just as fragments, lifted out of their context.”

“And changed!” someone added. “Hotted up to please the audience. They’ve learned to make a performance of themselves.”

“The best one’s the gum-boot dance. You’ll love that.”

People related, as people will, unique and wonderful chances by which they had seen the real thing.

“But it’s nothing to do with the Chamber of Mines,” Boaz was protesting. “The blacks have always done it. The only difference is, it didn’t used to be organised for white people to come and watch. Jessie — isn’t that right?” The argument deferred to her. “When you saw these dances as a child,” Boaz asked her, “do you remember — what sort of impression did they make?” “Very little,” said Jessie, with a laugh. She thought a moment. “I don’t know. You know, the mine boys were not human to me. — Like a cage full of coloured parrots, screeching at the zoo. I watched them dancing and I walked home and forgot about them.” The black-haired girl raised her eyebrows and looked the other way; she had recently discovered the distinction of professing no colour feeling; she was surprised to find such things said among people in a set she aspired to — she had indeed adopted her present views because she wanted to join it.

Jessie sank into the pleasant, Sunday mood of the crowd; the talk and argument of her friends went on half-heard about her, and her consciousness of self was lost, as it sometimes was when she was surrounded by the common mystery of human faces. The backs of men’s necks, the nostrils and mouth of a woman shown beneath the brim of a hat, a young girl tossing back her yellow hair as the fly of vanity stung her — Jessie’s consciousness became variously these, as the shadow of a cloud, travelling over a landscape, becomes now the shape of a hill, now the colour of a lake. When the dancing began, though she said to Clem and Elisabeth, who were giggling and scuffling, “Sit up straight and look,” she herself was not gathered to attention. A portly African in a white coat and glasses put on an easel a board on which the tribal name of the group of dancers was painted; when they had pranced and yelled and stamped for an allotted time, a shrill blast on his whistle cut them short, and they left the arena, while the name of another tribe was set up, and the next group of dancers came in. So the programme went on — sometimes the dancers began languidly, hesitantly, and worked up to a strong, sustained beat just in time to have it brought down, as if by a shot, by the whistle’s blast, sometimes they burst in in the full force of lungs and feet, and swept out again, undiminished. There were men on stilts who wore, rendered harmless by reproduction in cardboard and poster-paint, the terrible fetish-faces of medicine men’s masks. There were comedians, hoarse, noisy and tumbling, with the ugly faces of all clowns everywhere, who played to the black gallery, where their quips were understood and brought derisive yells and laughter. There was a choir in white drill pants and satin cowboy shirts who sang while their leader, wearing fringed chaps and boots, released and captured again a small cage of cowed white rats. Now and then the parody of the white man’s voice, yelling an order in the jargon of the mines, sent a murmur of delighted recognition through the white audience, who did not know in what light they were being represented, but were glad to be mentioned anyway. Many of the dances were pyrrhic, and the audience and the performers liked these best. With bits of coloured rag tied to old bathing-trunks, lemonade bottle-tops making do for anklets round the legs of those who no longer had strings of rattling seed-pods, and, in their hands, cow-skin shields and wooden assegais, the black men went through the savage motions of warring. They jumped and yelled and shuffled ominously; they found, in their breasts and throats, as the dance took them up, that dreadful sighing grunt that belongs to the ecstasy of death dealt out. They stamped so that a ripple of force passed along the ground under the seats of the watchers.

Jessie registered the succession of dances mechanically, with half-attention; she had seen them often before, not only as a child, but as part of a dutiful “showing around” for visitors. Morgan was sitting not far behind her, but she thought about him as if he were not there, going over the five minutes she had spent with him in his room the afternoon before. The incident went up and down, like a balloon; now it seemed small and unremarkable; then another interpretation made it rise all round her. Yet while she was thinking of other things, her attention began to fix, here and there, upon what was going on before her eyes. There was a man whose muscles moved independently, like a current beneath the surface of his skin; marvellous life informed his ridiculous figure, and shook off the feathers and rags that decked him. Others emerged from and then were merged with the wild line of dancers. They pranced, leapt, grovelled and shook, taking on their own personal characteristics — tall, small; smooth, boy’s face or lumpy, coarse man’s; comic, ferocious or inspired — and then adding themselves to, losing themselves in the group again. Their feet echoed through Jessie’s ribs; she felt the hollow beat inside her. The Chinese-sounding music of the Chopi pianos, wooden xylophones large and small, bass and treble, with resonators made of jam tins, ran up and down behind the incessant shrill racket of whistles. Now and then a man opened his mouth and a shout came out that is heard no more wherever there are cities; a voice bellowed across great rivers, a voice that bellies wordlessly through the air, like the trumpeting of an elephant or the panting that follows the lion’s roar.

And it was all fun. It all meant nothing. There was no death in it; no joy. No war, and no harvest. The excitement rose, like a breath drawn in, between dancers and watchers, and it had no meaning. The watchers had never danced, the dancers had forgotten why they danced. They mummed an ugly splendid savagery, a broken ethos, well lost; unspeakable sadness came to Jessie, her body trembled with pain. They sang and danced and trampled the past under their feet. Gone, and one must not wish it back. But gone … The crazed Lear of old Africa rushed to and fro on the tarred arena, and the people clapped. She was clapping, too — her hands were stinging — and her eyes, behind the sunglasses, were filled with heavy, cold tears. It was no place to weep, she knew. This was no place to shed such tears. They were not tears of sentiment. They came from horror and hollowness.

She held in her mind at once, for a moment, all that belonged to horror and hollowness, and that seemed to have foreshadowed it, flitting bat-like through the last few days: the night in which she had awakened twice, once to her own sleeping house, and once to that other time and place in her mother’s house; Morgan, lying shut away with his radio in the kernel of the afternoon. Her hand went out, and took another’s; it turned out to be the hand of Madge, her daughter, who never took her eyes from the dancers, and it was as cold as her own. Yet slowly it restored her to the surface facts of life, and she was able, at the interval, to troop out with the others, exchanging the dazed smiles of those who have just been entertained, and make her way to the rustic hut where the ladies of the mine were selling tea and cake.

After the performance, Boaz wanted to have a closer look at some of the musical instruments. He wanted to see how the miners devised substitutes for the traditional materials out of which such instruments were made. The Africans grinned at him encouragingly while he turned their xylophones upside down, and they burst into laughter when he played one quite creditably. He lost himself; his sallow face closed with complete and exclusive interest. He kept up a patter, not addressed to anyone in particular. “These tins give quite a lively note, in a way. But you lose that light boum! quality, the round, die-away sound that you get from a proper gourd resonator. It’s important to find gourds of exactly the right size and shape to resonate xylophones.” Ann was taking photographs of the warriors with feather-duster tails. They lined up for the photographers like children in class. “Come on!” she wheedled. “Let’s have some life.” But they only stood more stiffly to attention.

“The art of making some of these things is dying out, even in the kraals,” Boaz said. “Most of them were not originally home-made, in the sense that everyone made his own. There were men who were instrument-makers, and you ordered your timbila or mbira or whatever it was from them. Now the old chaps are disappearing, and the young chaps are busy acquiring other skills in the towns. In time, no one’ll remember how to make certain instruments any more.”

“Well, these chaps seem to,” said someone.

“Yes, but they come recruited from tribal life — reserves and so on. They weren’t born in the locations. And look how the instruments they make have changed! They’ve had to adapt them to the material they find around them, here. Tin cans. Store stuff. Soon they’ll be new instruments almost entirely.”

“Ah well, that’s all right,” said Jessie, speaking suddenly. “Don’t you think that’s the best thing, Boaz?”

He looked at the woman and spoke almost tenderly. “I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “In my job, I like to find instruments in their true form … But, of course, yes, it must be.”

“It was marvellous!” Ann came running up to them. “Wasn’t it! I saw you clapping, Jessie!”

“Madge was enchanted,” said Jessie. “The other two fidgeted and lost interest after a bit, but Madge never moved.”

“Boaz,” said Ann, biting on the long, phosphorescent-pink nail of her thumb, and narrowing her eyes, “I want to see the real thing. You know? I want to go into the wilds and see—”

“Oh of course,” he said. He always parried her, quickly became playful, joked. “Bongo-bongo, savage rites, secret ceremonies.”

“What is it that you’d really like to do?” Jessie asked her curiously.

And unexpectedly, the girl gave weight to the question. She hesitated, and then looked at Jessie honestly, and said, with a laugh, “Oh I like to find new things. Things I don’t know. People not like the people I know.”

“Experience outside what you think you were meant for.”

The girl laughed.

“That’s just the sort of thing my mother and father said when I told them I was going to marry Boaz and that he was a Jew.”

As they walked away, the ancient instruments of Africa struck up the Colonel Bogey march.

Three

A creature who did not exist any more, the girl Jessica Tibbett aged seventeen, long ago had spent Christmas weekend away at a resort with her mother and stepfather.

Bruno Fuecht with his European sophistication and Mrs. Fuecht with the assumption of it that she had got from him did not have much taste for the Saturnalian side of the festival; as a rationalist whose only experience of faith had been faith in the political creeds current in his youth, the true occasion did not move him, and although Mrs. Fuecht had once been a devout Anglican, she seemed to feel that through her marriage to him she had lost the right to the meaning of Christ’s birth. Jessie did not remember ever having been taken to church at Christmas (perhaps she had gone once, when she was very small and her father was still alive?) and apart from the excitement in the air, the coloured lights in the streets and the presents in the shops, the occasion was simply a public holiday like any other.

That year they decided at the last minute that they wanted to get away — the phrase was Mrs. Fuecht’s, and implied a press of guests and gaiety. But the truth was that silent lack of harmony in the house, the deadly peace between three people who did not even guess at each other’s thoughts, became unbearable at the combination of this time of year and this time of the girl Jessie’s life. Even the most vulgar side of Christmas — the family booziness and the money-making sentiment of the shops — was a reproach to them for their lack of human weakness, their disqualification to stand in the comfort of the herd. And the child’s emergence as a grown-up, no longer only victim but also witness of the unexplained state, was something all three must seek protection from in the anonymous safety in numbers of some place, such as an hotel, where they did not belong.

None of this was admitted between them, but it set all three going: Mrs. Fuecht said they should get away; Fuecht intimated that he was agreeable if not much interested, and the young girl got busy eagerly telephoning various resorts. At last, one was found that could offer accommodation of some sort.

When they got there, it was at once clear why the place had room for them. It was a gimcrack building, begun perhaps two or three years before and already falling to pieces before it was completed. The pink colour-wash on the outside was deeply stained with the red earth that spread for miles around it. The windows and doors were set in out of true, and ants wavered along the cracks in a row of brick pillars put up to support an upper verandah that had never been built; a twist of steel cable stuck up out of each pillar like a wick. The dining-room stank of Flit, the lounge was furnished with american cloth chairs showing their springs, and a black pianola. The hotel was full of people like themselves who had not been able to get in anywhere else, and when the Fuechts arrived they were told that there was only one room available for the three of them — an old narrow bed was brought in for Jessie.

The ugliness of the place would have meant nothing to the girl if she had found there the way to play, to begin a life for herself in the grown-up games of the young people seeking amusement. If she were to dance there, to be teased by young men, to learn to use the fashionable slang of the girls, to rush about in the happiness of laughing too wildly and staying up too late, then she would remember it as a marvellous place, the mere scaffolding of joy. She put on one of the sundresses she had made herself, but though she looked like any one of the group of young people who already, the first afternoon, had clustered together, she did not know how to talk to a boy, or how to form one of those alliances with a girl that boys seem to find an irresistible challenge — her only piece of equipment was the dress.

Some members of the group actually came from the mining town to which the Helgasdrift mining community belonged, and Jessie knew one or two of them by name. She had even been in the same class, before her mother took her out of school to have her taught at home, with one of the girls, Rose Price. Rose Price was there in a foursome that obviously included her particular boy friend; she waved a friendly recognition from where she sat swinging her legs on the verandah wall, but the greeting did not come from the distance, a few yards of cement, that separated the party of young people from the Fuechts passing on their way to lunch; it came from the distance of the girl’s independence and confidence.

There were weevils in the porridge next morning and Fuecht pushed his plate away and lit a cigar, not taking his attention from the newspaper; his indifference to discomfort was not stoic or good-natured but due to the fact that he did not expect anything better of arrangements made by his wife. She was well aware of the hurtful nature of his lack of complaint. Jessie had the cheerfulness and automatic sense of anticipation that were simply there for her when she woke up every day, and she walked out between the unfinished pillars with her mother into the haze of a bare, brilliant morning. The shores of the irrigation lake were flat. Stony veld with the bald red earth showing through over-grazed grass spread to the horizon. Some black children clambered on the wheel-less hulk of an old motor car that had come to rest there; it was picked clean of everything but rust, like the horny shell of a beetle that has been eaten out by ants. A single bird of prey hung in the vacancy of a drought sky. As the mother and daughter stood there, the young people set out in a hired boat, oars waving and yells rising as they exhorted each other to sit down. Slowly distance smoothed out their erratic course and they became a fleck no bigger than the bird.

Jessie and her mother had brought simple evening dresses to wear on Christmas Eve, and, studying the wine list with a look of due consideration for its limitations, Fuecht ordered a bottle at dinner. It turned out to be a bottle that the sort of people who patronised the hotel wouldn’t know about, and, probably acquired by mistake in the first place, it had lain forgotten since the place opened. A bottle of wine like that was one of the pleasures that remained to the grown-ups untouched by the tarnish that, for them, lay on other pleasures. Their murmured exchanges on its quality made an unaccustomed intimacy between them; unlike the girl, they were not open to the stir of the dance band — three men with slicked hair and red cummerbunds who began to blow and thump, each looking for the beat like a man searching for a lost bunch of keys.

When the music started Jessie felt a nervous, happy embarrassment, although she knew that there was no one for her to dance with. The young crowd began to slide round the chalk-sprinkled floor in the stylish, skating steps that were fashionable at the time. Married men grasped their wives clumsily by the back of the dress as they went slowly round, and the boys and girls swooped in and out between them like dragonflies. Jessie smiled in complicity with her mother at the married couples; and sipping the glass of wine that was given to her as a treat, she began to take on the lonely superiority that gave refuge to her parents.

But when the three of them went to bed, a secret black sadness came from her and obscured its cause as an octopus hides his enemy from himself in a cloud of ink. She had got into bed first, to let her mother and Fuecht prepare themselves for bed in privacy. But from far away, from that place of hers far from the limping beat and happy shuffle where the dancers were, far from the unfamiliar room with daddy-long-legs on the ceiling in which she lay, she watched her mother and her stepfather silently crossing and recrossing each other’s paths about the room. He put down his cigar-cutter and small change and keys; she hung up her dress and pulled out a squeaking drawer. The scent of some special face-cream she used brought a personal, expensive smell into the cheapness and passing-trade poverty of human personality in the room. She was putting the cream on out of sight, but the smell of it, anywhere, was her mother to Jessie; the moment the pot was opened, she was there. Bruno Fuecht appeared in the space of light, wearing only a shirt. His legs, shortish and strikingly male, like the bowed muscular legs she had seen in Japanese prints of wrestlers, held her attention coldly and intensely. She had never seen him like this before, but that was not the reason. She had never seen him before — he was hidden from her behind an outward self, a label “stepfather”. She was conscious of something forbidden in the way she lay still and looked at those legs; it was the way, as a small child, she had stared secretly at the deformed. She wondered — a flicker on the limits of her conscious mind — if he were her own father, would she see him like this?

Next morning it was raining and it rained for the rest of the time they were there. The young crowd were not seen again after Christmas dinner; they must have decided to go back to town and the possibility of more tempting amusements. The Fuechts sat it out in the hotel lounge. Outside the lake was red with mud and the road was a frothy scum of the same red mud and water. Jessie got up now and then to stare out for a minute and then came back to her book. All the people who had not packed up and gone were held in the unacknowledged bond that, for one reason or another, they could not face themselves at home. Four men played cards in a corner. Wives knitted. Near the Fuechts, a woman was sewing while the husband slept behind a newspaper and their child, a boy of roving, monkeylike attention, clambered and investigated his way round the room until he settled at the pianola. There was something wrong with the mechanism, and his pedalling produced “You are my sunshine” over and over, with pauses of stuttering aphasia. On and on the child played; the intensity of his mother’s concentration on her sewing began to distract Jessie more than the pianola did: she watched while the last sentence she had read hung in her mind. Suddenly she saw that the woman was sewing without any thread in the needle. It flashed in and out of the stuff, empty, connecting nothing with nothing.

Jessie occasionally saw the mad woman about town in Johannesburg, more than twenty years later. She was unchanged, for perhaps madness had aged her prematurely when she was quite young, and her hair with its streaks of henna and grey was tied back with the same sort of narrow velvet ribbon she had worn when Jessie was seventeen.

The weekend itself had changed its meaning for Jessie many times before it passed into that harmless state known as forgotten. Just after her young husband died, when she became aware that a large part of her life was missing, that she had been handed from mother to husband to being a mother herself without ever having had the freedom that does not belong to any other time of life but extreme youth — just then, knowing herself cheated, that Christmas weekend had come back to her with revulsion and resentment. There, in that cheap, ugly place, her youth had been finally bound and thrown out into the mud to die, while the middle-aged sat in their chairs. Maimed but living, they sat and held her as one of them, for whom there was nothing but to share their losses of the eye of love, blinded by disappointment or habit, and the leg of ambition, gammy now with self-limitations. Her mother sat there with her accomplice, Bruno, while their hired assassins did the job.

Jessie wept for herself, then, caught in a bell-tower of self-pity and anger where anguish deafeningly struck her hour. She lay in bed in the small room where the baby Morgan slept too, and she beat the pillow with her fist in the night. The death of that young man, her husband, was nothing, in the end, to this: the discovery of the body of her youth out in the mud. Her husband was dead, but she was alive to the knowledge that, in the name of love, her mother had sucked from her the delicious nectar she had never known she had — the half-shaped years, the inconsequence without finger-print, of the time from fifteen to twenty.

Later, when the animus of blame had exhausted itself, Jessie saw that weekend in the critical light of the needs of new growth and shunned it out of disgust for herself as she had been then. Because she had courage now, a passion of self-assertion, she reproached herself for cowardice then. Why hadn’t she fought her mother for survival? She drew strength from these reproaches to herself without trying to understand the reasons for the paralysis of the will that had been brought about in her through a long, slow preparation of childhood.

Still later, she saw that the weekend was terribly funny. When she was living with Tom, and she told him the story, they laughed and laughed over it — Bruno loftily ignoring the weevils in the porridge, the woman furiously sewing at nothing, the pianola wheezing out “You are my sunshine”. And then it had been recalled too many times to seem funny any more. It lay harmless, an explosive from which the detonator had long been removed.

In Jessie’s own house, the Stilwell house, Christmas preparations were elaborate and began early in December with the day when Jessie and Tom met for lunch in town and then shopped for the children’s presents. The year that the Davises were in the house Boaz turned up with Tom. Home for a day between field-trips, he had found no one in when he arrived at the house; he had walked into Tom’s room at the university.

The three moved from the coffee-bar where Jessie was waiting to a restaurant where they could get a drink with their food. Boaz, in khaki pants and veldschoen, had the happy air of the returned traveller among people who have not left town. “Let’s have a bottle of wine. I’ve been drinking nothing but kaffir beer and I feel very healthy.”

“You look it, too,” said Jessie. In fact he looked very handsome, his pale opaque skin turned a shiny olive colour by the sun. Although the presence of the Davises made little mark upon the house, the return of Boaz from a field-trip had begun to bring with it each time a rounding-off of the family; besides, both the Stilwells always felt a spontaneous affection for him the moment they saw him, while Ann, although they liked her well enough, had not aroused what was, toward him, almost a family feeling in them.

“Ann’s probably eating with Len Mafolo today,” Jessie said.

“That’s what I suggested,” said Tom, “but we phoned the Lucky Star and they weren’t there. — She’s been very busy with culture and good works, your little wife. Last week she was prettily selling programmes at Jazz of the Year, this week it’s a travelling art exhibition in some caravan she’s begged off a friend.”

“So she wrote. Is there anything good there?”

“Two good Gideon Shibalos — the same two, the early ones he always trots out; I don’t think he’s doing anything these days. And a few wood carvings — not bad. The rest—” He put a bit of roll in his mouth and chewed it vigorously, disposing of the pictures.

“What would you give a boy of fifteen for Christmas?” Jessie had her list beside her plate, and she laid the problem before Boaz.

“Isn’t there anything in particular he wants? Surely there’s something he’s been longing for the whole year?”

“No,” said Jessie, “not Morgan. He doesn’t long for anything.”

“Not that we can tell,” said Tom.

Boaz filled his glass. He did not take Jessie’s question in the conversational way it was asked. He often went on thinking about things after the people who had begun to talk about them had moved on to something else. “Shouldn’t we talk to Morgan more?” he said now, assuming a responsibility nobody expected of him, but nobody questioned.

Jessie ignored the direction of the remark, turning Boaz swiftly back to the immediate and particular. “The present’s supposed to be a surprise, anyway. What did you get when you were fifteen?”

“I know what I got,” said Tom. “A bicycle with the handle-bars turned down. I always let everybody know what I was longing for, no mistake about that. You ask my father. His only worry was that he might buy something that wasn’t precisely to my specifications.”

“Well, I didn’t get Christmas presents, of course. But my bet is you ought to get him something grown-up and smashing.”

“You poor little brute,” said Tom, with a grin. “I forgot about that.”

The waiter arrived with trays and dishes balanced along his arms, and when these had all been correctly distributed, Boaz insisted: “Really smashing. What about a cine camera or a collapsible boat?”

Jessie and Tom burst out laughing. “Yes, why not?” said Tom, lordly. “Or a sports car? Morgan probably needs a sports car.”

They bought Morgan a new steel watch-strap and fell back on the choice of a game that Jessie had looked at but not decided upon, because they always seemed to give him that kind of thing. It was a bat and ball affair that provided good practice for tennis or squash, without the necessity for a partner — one of those games you play against yourself.

The Stilwells and the Davises pooled resources and had a very successful party that disposed of three different sets of acquaintances in one night: the university people came for drinks and tid-bits handed round by the little girls in the early evening; the friends stayed on to get drunk and eat two great potfuls of hot food; and the friends of friends — hangers-on, people the Stilwells or Davises had liked the look of at other people’s parties, invited to come along, and then forgotten — these came and went between midnight and four in the morning. As usual one or two of the Africans were stranded without any means — except their by then unreliable legs — of getting back to the townships for what remained of the night, and make-shift beds were provided for them.

On Christmas morning Jessie liked to take the little girls to church, and this year, since Boaz wanted to hear the choir there, it was decided that they would go to a big church in one of the townships instead of the church in the Stilwells’ suburb. The church did not have the front-parlour tidiness of the church in the white suburb. Paths worn by the feet of the congregation led up to it on its dusty hill above the township; inside, it was lofty, almost as big as a cathedral, and it smelled of the smoke from open cooking fires that was always in the clothes of the people. But the dresses of the little Stilwell girls stood out in ostentatious plainness beside the frills and pert fancy hats of the small black girls. And the high church service, with incense spreading from the swinging censers, and the white, gold and blue of the priest’s robes, and the flowers banking the altar — all this, in contrast to the monotony and stink, the bareness and dunness of the streets outside, was like the kingdom of heaven itself. These Christians had only to walk through the door to enter it.

It’s harder for us, thought Jessie. Just then she caught Boaz looking at her, and felt that he knew what had just passed through her mind. He did not kneel when the rest of them did, but all the time sat with repose, listening to the flock of voices that rose steeply around him, or the low sound of prayer. All through the ritual of Christmas, the curious swarming of the human spirit, some of it meaningless, some meaningful. He had given and partaken with zest and a pleasure in participation. Yet from time to time, as now, although she was kneeling and he was a respectful onlooker, she was aware of something that set them apart together. She, a Christian, assumed with her husband and others a common experience of the Christmas ritual, along with other common experiences. But the truth was that for her the common experience was not there. The part she took was not natural to her, in the sense that it was part of a continuity in her life; for her, it was assumed, just as, for different reasons, it was for Boaz. Behind the kissing and the laughter and the exchange of presents, there was his Jewishness, and her forgotten weekend the year she was seventeen.

Four

The house had the look of a trampled garden, after Christmas, and then in the New Year began to right itself as everyone in it again took up a less concentrated way of living. It was the first house Jessie had ever lived in that seemed to die back and put forth along with the humans; this, she supposed, was the organic quality that people were talking about when they called a house a “home”. She had lived in flats and houses which, once the reason for which she had gone to live in them in the first place — to be near a job, to provide a meeting-place for a lover — had fallen away, had to be left, like an empty box. This one would take anything.

The last and smallest of the little girls, Elisabeth, was about to begin school, Tom was trying to get in a clear month’s work on his book before the university term began, and Jessie was in the process of handing over her job to her African successor. It had been understood that, if and when an African could be found to do the job satisfactorily, this would be done. She was working particularly hard to leave everything running smoothly and to familiarise the new secretary with all the difficulties he could expect to encounter, and at the same time she was conscious of the loose end running out ahead of her. Tom suggested a job at the university that she could have if she wanted it; one of the professors needed a secretary. There would be the advantage that they both would be on holiday at the same time, and they could meet at lunch most days; he saw the idea in the pleasant, comradely light of someone wanting to draw another into the familiar satisfactions and frustrations of his own work. Jessie went to see the professor — she knew him, of course, from various official social meetings — but while they were discussing the job as if it were assumed on both sides that she would take it, it became clear to her in her own mind that she would not take it. Like many decisions, it brought temporary satisfaction. “I won’t go to work for De Kock,” she said serenely. “Didn’t it go well?” Tom was at once suspicious of the professor. “No, he’s a nice man. I’m sure we should get on. Only I just don’t want to work there. It was a good thing I went; I knew at once.”

She felt a relief at the thought of the city streets at lunchtime, the shopgirls pushing past arm-in-arm, the white suburban housewives and the black factory girls buying hats at bargain counters, the parties of glossy business men filing into expensive restaurants, the black men in the blue boiler suits of the wholesale firms, making a lido of the pavement, and gambling in the sun. There, she was whatever she might appear to be in the eyes of those whose eyes she met: was it not from the old disabled men who worked lifts and the stocky, impatient-eyed Greeks behind the tea-room counters, who suddenly had stopped calling her “miss”, that she had learned something, in the last three months? At the university the transparence of anonymity would be permanently silvered over; the eyes would give back to her an image of the senior lecturer’s wife, liberal but not radical, of course; sexually attractive but not immoral, of course; aware of the better things of life but accepting with good humour the inability to afford them, of course.

She toyed with the idea of looking for a highly-paid, commercial job this time, a job where she would work for money and nothing else; there was the punch of a kind of honesty in the idea. But once before she had gone to work as private secretary to the managing director of the overseas branch of a famous razor blade company, and she had never forgotten the extraordinary unreality of the life, when she had sat in at board meetings where terms like “faith in the future”, “continent-wide expansion” and “the benefits of modern civilisation” all meant razor blades, and nothing but razor blades.

In the end, she took a job that would do until something better turned up — half-day secretary to a company running a private nursing home. The place was only a block or two away from the house, so that she wouldn’t need the car all the time, which was an advantage. Once accepted, she scarcely thought about the job again; there was so much to do at the Agency in the meantime — it did not seem that she would ever get through it all. She brought work home every day and sat at it through the mounting incursions of the afternoon, from the hot peace of after lunch, when everyone else was either out or asleep, to the hour before dinner when everyone had straggled in, the grownups wanting to chat, or to read aloud bits out of the evening paper, the children wanting to be read to, and the servant asking for instructions about food. She was holding out as well as she could against the division and sub-division of her attention, one evening, and when the telephone rang she ignored it; this was the custom at this time of the day, anyway — everyone was home and everyone waited for someone else to answer it. Tom had just gone inside from the verandah to fetch a lamp, and he might have done so; but he appeared with the lamp and put it on the floor, as it didn’t seem dark enough for a light yet after all, and the ringing went on. Presently it stopped, and started again, and Madge was sent to answer it — Clem had abruptly suffered loss of the innocence where such errands are a privilege, and Elisabeth liked to pick up the receiver and listen to the voice inside it, but could never bring herself to reply.

“It’s for you,” said Madge, in the doorway.

“Which one?”

She looked from her mother to her father. Clearly, she did not know.

“Oh dammit!” Tom drew himself together and got up, going into the house with his arm round the child’s neck. She anxiously watched his feet and measured her steps to his.

Jessie began all over again to check a long account of royalties from a record company, and when Tom came back before she had come to the end of it, she held him off with a raised hand.

“Where’s Morgan, Jessie?”

The hand dropped and she looked up. “Upstairs. In his room, I suppose.”

But the moment she said it, she knew that she didn’t know where the boy was: in the hesitation that followed, both she and Tom noticed that the radio programme that sent crescendos of crackling applause out across the garden from the upstairs verandah at this time every evening was missing.

“About somewhere.” She had heard the irregular plak! plak! of the jokari ball as it flung itself back at him — when? This morning — or was it yesterday afternoon? Dismay came over her. She felt almost afraid of Morgan. She did not want to have to ask Tom what was the matter. In three days he will be back at school, she thought.

“Do you know of a Mrs. Wiley?” Tom said.

She shook her head, then—“Yes. Must be the mother of that boy Graham.”

“Mrs. Wiley on the phone. Her husband has just found Morgan and their son at a dance-place in Hillbrow. A place with paid hostesses. Ducktails go.”

Jessie looked at him. Her plastic pen rolled across the papers and fell to the verandah floor with the clatter of a cheap toy. Slowly she began to laugh, but he did not laugh too, as if she had not convinced him that this was the way to take it.

“Our Morgan …!” The little girls had stopped playing, and she said at once, “Go and wash your hands for supper. Go on.” Clem and Madge went off but Elisabeth ran into the darkening garden.

“Where was he last night?”

“Why do you ask? You know he went to a film. You gave him five bob yourself.”

“Well, he was at that place again.” He smiled this time, out of nervousness, with her. “Somebody tipped off the Wiley woman, and that’s how her husband caught them today.”

A blotch of white blundered up the steps. Elisabeth was talking to a stuffed animal dressed in a floral bathing suit and she ignored them. “I say it’s time to wash hands for supper.” “But what time is it?” “The time to wash hands.” “But what is the number of that time?”

“Blast Morgan,” said Jessie, after the dressing-gown had disappeared round the door. “I wish—” It rose with the curving jet of a fountain within her, breaking up the words, toppling them, carrying them: wish he had never been, never happened; oh how to get past him, over him, round him. “He’ll be back at school in three days. Pity it’s not tomorrow.”

Tom said, “I didn’t even know he could dance, did you?”

Her lips trembled and she began to giggle again. “Dance! Dance!”

While they were talking the lights of a car poked up the driveway and died back as Ann stopped and got out, coming lightly and quickly towards the house and almost past them, without seeing them. She was singing softly and breathily to herself. “You haven’t had supper, have you? I thought I must be terribly late …” They could see her eyes shining and her teeth in the dark. “Did you find my watch in the bathroom, by any chance?” The rhythm of another kind of existence seemed to come from her shape; they felt it, in the dark, like the beating of a bird’s wings or the marvellous breathing of a fish’s gills.

“Can you believe it? Morgan’s been going to some dance-hall,” Jessie announced at once.

“Oh, all the kids rock ‘n’ roll. They teach each other at school,” said Ann.

“No, it’s not that. He’s been going to a place where you pay a tart to dance with you.” Jessie insisted on setting the facts before her; if a stranger had come to the door just then, she would have done the same to him. She was sitting at the rickety table in the dark, drawn up in attention.

They could just make out that Ann had bent down, and was shaking something out of her shoe. “Good Lord, that’s rather an adventure. I shouldn’t think any of the other boys will be able to cap that.” She laughed, subduedly, straightening, and went on into the house. At the door she turned and added with a polite smile, “Are you worried?”

Tom said, “Haven’t made up our minds what to be,” and she laughed again.

He put on the lamp. Jessie’s face was closed to him in a look of complicity, horrifiedly amused. “Let him go back to school. Ignore it.” She spoke with the tone of meting out punishment without regret.

He shook his head, looking at her.

“Then for Christ’s sake, what?”

“If we knew what to say to him,” said Tom.

“It’ll come,” she said with distaste.

“From where?”

“I’d like to see this place.” She wanted to confront him, the boy, the child — there was an empty shape where the unknown identity of her son should have been.

“Don’t humiliate him.” They would have to fall back on the child-manual precepts, the textbook rules.

She began to insist on going to fetch him home, but suddenly remembered the thin little neck and the strange big hands — she flinched from the sight of them, exposed in that place. “All right. You’re probably right. Let him come home as if nothing’s happened.”

The rows of figures on the paper she still sat in front of seemed to relate to nothing; in the short interval since she had looked up from them the whole urgency of the Agency’s affairs had lost life. She was lying in bed half-asleep at eleven o’clock when she heard Morgan come in. A gentle, tingling curiosity lifted her into consciousness, like a girl aware of the presence of a strange man in the next room.

Morgan, who had always been on the periphery of the life of the house, found himself at its centre. He must have come home with dread in his heart the night before, knowing that the Wiley boy’s parents would have informed on him, but at breakfast he put up his usual show of uncertain good spirits — there was nothing unnatural about his behaviour because he was never natural, but seemed always to be behaving in a way that he timidly and clumsily thought was appropriate. At the same time, this kind of selfconsciousness made him extraordinarily insensitive to the moods of the grown-ups with whom he was making a show of being at ease. He would ask Tom (not out of interest, it was clear, but out of a desire to flatter Tom by an interest in his work) questions about some historical point on a morning when Tom had been correcting history papers half the night and was disheartened with the whole business of teaching. When Jessie came home irritated because she had got a parking ticket, he would launch into a long comparative anecdote about an exchange between a traffic officer and a woman that he had overheard in town. When someone said—“Oh Morgan, do let’s have a little quiet now,” he stopped short without rancour, as if the questions or the anecdote interested him as little as they did his listeners. Between his attempts at entertainment, his presence went unnoticed, though he always kept his face mobile like the face of one of those actors in a crowd scene who, you are surprised to see if you happen to glance at them, have gone on acting all the time the audience has been entirely taken up with the principals. He would never have dared to retire into himself, in company.

Elisabeth would not be parted, that morning, from her newly-acquired, minute school case, and it was constantly in the way among the breakfast things. “We ought to tie it on you somewhere,” Jessie said to her, and Morgan took up the suggestion thoroughly: “You know what you should do, Mum, you should get a cord and hang it round her neck, like those dogs. Those dogs who go in the snow with little barrels of brandy round their necks. No, I know! Get her a satchel, like I used to have. That’s a good idea — then it’ll be on her back. Why don’t you, Mum—” The little girl had forgotten about eating and was smiling proudly round under this attention. “Let her concentrate on getting her breakfast down, Morgan, please.” “All right.” He finished his own quickly, and slipped away from the table.

In his bedroom, they saw he knew they would come. He had gone to ground quietly, without hope. The radio was on, softly howling; it was not really his own ground — in a few days he would be back at school, and the bed, the portable radio, the socks lying on a chair and the curling pile of science fiction magazines and comics would be gone. Tom’s filing cabinets and boxes of papers remained in possession. Tom went over and switched the radio off, gently, but before he could turn round again, Jessie had spoken: “What makes you go to that place?”

If only she had started with the expected preamble, given them all a chance! What was needed was an explanation, not the truth. Tom tried to hold her with a look, but she was looking around the little boarded-in verandah as if the scattered marks of the boy’s tenancy were mysteriously eloquent, like smashed glass and overturned chairs left witness to a brawl.

Morgan was dead still. If they had put a gun against his ribs just then he would not have spoken. And then he picked up some bits of wire that were lying on his bed and began to wind a loose end of insulating tape round them. He looked at his mother and Tom, kindly, helplessly, blindly.

“Well?” Jessie could not stop staring at him, roving curiously over the little thin neck in the open shirt, the lips closed with nervous lightness over the slightly forward projection of the jaw (he had nice teeth; what a good thing that was), the shabby grey trousers folded over like a dhoti under the circle of belt round his thinness; the raw and tender hands. They were like the hands she sometimes saw on young mechanics at the garage, coarse and sad, not yet hardened to the bruises of heavy metal, and with their pinkness still showing through ingrained grease.

“Jessie and I didn’t think you were keen on dances and things like that yet, Morgan,” Tom said to him. “If you are, there are clubs and places for chaps of your own age, and girls, of course. I should think you’d enjoy those more.” Poor little bastard! Healthy recreation, they were offering him; who knew what it was he needed? We can offer him only what we’ve got, thought Tom.

“You don’t have to sneak off to some joint.” Jessie made an effort to be friendly. “You could have invited people here, for that matter, if you’d told me. Now it’s too late — you’re going back to school.”

He said, as if fascinated by her voice, “Yes, I know. Only two more days.”

They were talking about someone else. Morgan would never invite croaky-voiced jolly boys and petticoated girls to dance to the gramophone. Neither did he have any share of the teddy-boy’s animal vigour; the reverse side of cosy home respectability acquired in regular instalments. The interview had come to nothing; there was only the relief that it was over.

Tom said, “He may do the same thing again. I don’t see what’s to stop him. We’ll have to make some plans before he comes home next time.”

“He’ll have forgotten. You know how children leave things behind them.”

“Yes,” said Tom, “but he won’t be leaving them behind any more.”

Jessie was caught up again in the uncomfortable, uncontrollable amusement that had unnerved her the night before. “Tom, Tom, really now, Tom, can you believe that he ever did it, though? Is it real, to you? That little boy? That little pest, with his boring stories?”

It was over and he would be back at school in less than two days, and she accepted that that was an end to the whole ridiculous, queer business. She felt a cold irritability towards the boy and she did not want to talk to anyone about him, especially not to Tom. It seemed to her that Tom had come particularly badly out of the talk with the child, with his totally unspontaneous “understanding”—into which she had let herself be led, too — and his suggestion that plans should be made for Morgan. Plans — there came to mind at once a picture that had had a special appeal for her as a child. It was in a book of pencil drawings of children, dogs, horses, parents and English nannies that was both exotic and comforting to her, and it showed a young woman lying on her side on the sands, her hand shading her eyes as she gazed fondly at the small boy who rested against her big, soft hip, rising in a curve behind him: “What will he be? — A Maternal Reverie.”

She had battled to get him into a decent school (you were supposed to be entered when you were born, to get into anywhere really good, but his father had died, she had moved about with him from place to place, and she had not thought it worthwhile to arrange anything until he was almost ready to go). She counted on her mother and Bruno to help with the business of university. She would be unshockable — this she accepted in the abstract, thinking of homosexuality, getting a girl pregnant, running into political trouble, turning Buddhist or Roman Catholic. All this when the time came. But the time was far off; she herself was still in the season of loving and breeding, she had three babies hardly out of napkins, she was filling ever-open mouths … what would she be, that was the question that possessed her. She was kicking up her own dust.

Morgan was down there somewhere in that cosmic whirl, a particle flying round her. When it settled — ah, when it settled, the atoms would be combined in some other pattern, not her own.

She did not think of Morgan, who was going back to school anyway, but his appearance as a visitation in the eerie grown-up world was like a dream that, not remembered, drains the taste and colour out of the day that follows. Everything was as it was in her daily life, and yet for her it was not the same; she continued mechanically.

As she left the Agency office one afternoon she telephoned the house and left a message with the servant that she was working late and probably wouldn’t be home for dinner. She drove slowly through the surge of home-going traffic to Hillbrow and went and sat in a coffee-bar for a long time. It was a big place, that had been decorated with bad abstract murals and African masks and lights shining through the woven strainers that Africans use for maize beer, but it made functional noises that gave it, after all, a certain kinship with the comforting qualities of a kitchen. A stream of bright orange juice constantly rose and streamed hissing down the inner walls of a glass machine, nearly as good as the sound of a bubbling kettle; the espresso dispenser did its work with a hoarse, sizzling chuff, almost like the noise a roast makes when it is being basted with hot fat. The place was empty, and these things were companionable. Then people began to come in. The girls waited with the look of musing world-weariness that she remembered so well assuming herself when she was waiting with wild excitement for some man. The older men, with money and aplomb, read the fresh pages of the evening paper. The young men sprawled back, watching the door, or leaned, tense and pensive, chin on arms, over the table. The immigrants came in: German Jews of the Thirties, doctors of this and that, in shabby raincoats; young Italians of the Fifties, the poverty-civilisation-stunted ones — little men-dolls with lifts on pointed shoes — bold, handsome ones with curly hair, rolling their thighs apart to show off the fine curve of their sex in tight trousers.

Jessie began to pretend that she was waiting for someone, too. Only this was a waiting without anguish, without the possibility of being let down, without a trace of the worst risk of all — that the meeting would go wrong for no reason at all. When the place began to fill up she left with a nice sense of timing. She walked round the shops for an hour, looking with interest at everything, from the rakes and plastic buckets in the hardware shop, and the lilac and silver wigs in the hairdresser’s, to the patterns of turkey, duck and chicken corpses laid out at the kosher delicatessen, and the perpetual festival, with its scent of trampled fruit and wilting flowers, of the Indian greengrocer’s, banked with purple of aubergine and scarlet of tomato, feathered with carrot and curly lettuce, and glowing with the light showing through the bottles of bright cold drinks on the top shelves. It got dark and she bought herself another cup of coffee. But this time she drank it off and went back to the street at once. She did not know where the place was, but, passing in the car at some time, she must have seen the name up, and now she walked to it with hardly more than a moment’s hesitation at each block’s end.

There was a flight of concrete stairs set in a narrow passage off the street. As she went up she thought, with the criticism of one generation for another, how what she had sought had usually to be found in cellars.

A woman her own age sat in a booth like the one from which tickets are sold at the cinema. “Yes dear?”

The manner was the shop assistant’s one: now, that looks beautiful on you … The woman, by the adornments she used to disguise them, presented Jessie with a candid admittance of signs she sometimes surprised on her own face. The hair was gaily tinted, confirming as an enduring reality the few white hairs that sometimes appeared, sometimes were not to be seen. A thick coating of make-up defined as final, in two long cracks, the crease running from nose to chin on each side that came out at night, when preparations were being made for bed. The face was realistic, resigned and tough in its assumption of paint and curl; an urban, post-industrial-revolution version of the peasant woman’s reliance on the conventions of the various forms of dress and deportment to see her through girlhood, matronhood and widowhood.

Jessie paid five shillings and mumbled something about meeting someone, but the excuse was not necessary. No one was suspicious of her. On the other side of leather concertina doors was a large room lit to a fluorescent pink, with silver-painted globe chairs round the tables. On the walls hung huge photographs of young men with the faces of sulky girls, their lips snarling in song, but the band that was bumping and knocking out the rhythm of some supposedly South American tune was not a fanatic group of jazz-possessed youngsters, but ordinary commercial musicians with the stolid weariness of an endless night in their faces. The people were young, but not noticeably belonging to the teenage cult. Most of the girls must have been under twenty and looked like the bored or head-tossing misses who served in bazaars during the day. There was no hint of sophistication about them and they came from a class too new to the cheap bright benefits of the material to want to ape, even without understanding, its fashionable symbolic rejection by pale girls in black stockings.

A loose-faced youth in a dirty white forage cap brought Jessie a Coca-Cola and a saucer of chips. A few people were dancing, but most of them hung about, the men in chaffing groups around the girls. They looked like young men who had come together in twos and threes from some of the reef gold-mining towns where the pleasures of the city were not available; there was a solidarity about the way they returned to their companions as soon as a dance was over, roaring back in sniggering laughter at each other’s remarks. On the periphery of the young men and girls were some of those men who appear, shaven, dressed in their one pin-stripe suit and shining cap of black hair, apparently from the rat-holes of every city. Every now and then one of them would take one of the paid dancing partners on to the floor, holding her with all the ghastly delicacy of a refined finger furled above the handle of a tea-cup. The favourite was a black-haired girl with a queenly, kidding look and a white neck with a crucifix round it. She was not fat but she must have been heavy, for her feet in their pointed shoes came down with an extraordinary impression of force, treading violence, as if they would spear, crush and flatten anything that might happen to fall beneath them. She giggled and nodded while she danced.

One of the men walked twice past Jessie. Then he was there, bent over the table; a zig-zag of orchid-pink light shone on the hair as if on a dark pond. “You wouldn’t like to dance, madam?” The fastidious politeness, the obsequious male pride in knowing how a woman likes to think she’s being treated lay in a pathetic gloss over the craven ferociousness of the creature. His mean eyes had an objective loneliness, like the eyes of an animal that does not know it was born behind bars.

She did not learn why Morgan had gone there. To do so, she understood at last, you would first have to know where he set out from.

Five

Adam, seeing Eve sprung fully-fledged from his side, could not have been more strangely troubled. There was always time to get down to Morgan; he would keep, he was there, whether she liked it or not, and one day she would be able to turn round and take up where she had set him aside. She no longer knew when exactly it was that she had set him aside and it seemed to her that this must have been at the time of her marriage to Tom, but in fact it had been much earlier, when she lay in bed at night in the room where the baby slept, and wept in self-pity and rage for the years her mother had cheated her of. Then the baby, with the enviable bloom of its life untouched by anybody, had seemed something that could well be left to itself in any but the obvious physical needs. It would be safe like that for a time just as its natural immunity from certain diseases, a legacy from before birth, would last for a year or two. Fifteen years had gone by, and now she was confronted with some strange creature: half-man, not-child. Where was the child who had been hanging about her, waiting?

In psychiatric jargon, a man may be spoken of as mentally “completely inaccessible”; in order to survive without the disabilities of the past, without whining, without blaming, Jessie had made most of her past life inaccessible to her rather in this way; she had remained accessible to it, of course, on that level beyond control, the subconscious. She wanted to deal with Morgan here and now, of and in the present. Was that unreasonable? She was trying to put him together as you might a new acquaintance, from the images of the last five or six weeks. He was gone, of course, out of the house again, but he had been there, and, out of an old arrogance of her responsibility for him taken as mastery of him, she set herself out to pick up an easy trail. He was bored; he felt out of things, between the grown-ups and the little girls; he was led into the whole business by his weakness, following the Wiley boy rather than thinking for himself. Or it was the old story of the child who deliberately turns his back on the freedom to develop within the liberation won by his parents, and chooses the rigid and vulgar? Yet Morgan, as he began to fill out in her consciousness as he was — as she had seen him and, until now, not seen him — gave himself away in response to none of these clues. He had nothing to do with them; she could see that. He was not bored — the day she had walked into his room and found him lying listening to his endless radio, what stillness there was about him, a loneliness, yes, perhaps, wrapped soft as content. And out of things — out of things was his place, he had curled up there for years. And just as he had no spirit for resentment (there was shame and a twinge of contempt in her at the admittance) so his weakness would not have been enough to send him so far after the Wiley boy: something more potent than weakness, an initiative of his own, had sent him up the concrete stairs to the pink lights. As for their values — hers and Tom’s and the house’s — she had to admit with a sense of sullen pain she did not know whether they had “taken” or not with Morgan, simply through his being around: that was the only way they might have been expected to have done.

The boy loomed in her mind in a series of outlines that wavered into each other and faded into a thickening oppression. The sight of one of the little girls, coming with a splinter to be taken out of a finger, Clem wanting to chatter or Madge mournful with the desire to be kissed, brought about an instinctive withdrawal. Jessie felt like a dog who sees a raised stick. Love appalled her with its hammering demands, love clamoured and dunned, love would throw down and tear to pieces its object. This was love, that few people could live without, and that most spent the major effort of their lives to secure. And the burden of Morgan, Morgan, hung on her — always she turned in final exacerbation on this. Yet she did not love Morgan, and Morgan — that much she was sure of — did not love her. They seemed to meet over the admittance, looking at each other without expectation or malice, with that space, between the house, where she was, and the school, where he was, briefly blown clear.

The current of her preoccupation moved through the house. The children stumbled into it, startled, and went on again, forgetful and happy. Tom kept coming into its path, and always with a sense of dismay and surprise — so Jessie was still aware of this Morgan business! He could not for the life of him see why; next time Morgan came home for holidays they would have to make sure that his time was fully occupied, that was all. That was all they could do. It was a matter of finding a few fairly grown-up occupations for him. Tom had made up his mind to see to this when the time came, and Jessie knew that he would. There was nothing else to be done. It might not work, but there was nothing else to be done. Didn’t Jessie accept that any longer? Why was she turning the whole light of her being on Morgan now, when long ago, soon after he had begun to live with her (and the boy; the two went together), he had understood that he must give up trying to get her to turn that life-giving light the child’s way, even occasionally. She had never been able to do it. Not even then, when it was necessary and there was some sense in it. This business of the dance-hall was the least of the threats that had hung over Morgan.

Tom himself was moving in the inner constriction of his own difficulties at the time. The Bill that would close the university to all but white students for the future was about to be debated in Parliament; and there was talk of a “loyalty” clause being inserted in qualifications for the appointment of staff. The students’ council was demonstrating and pamphleteering in protest, and Tom was eager to see them kick up a real shindy, supported by the staff. The issue started off decently clear in his mind, but as the days went by it took on all the stains and nicks of handling, and began to be almost unrecognisable. One morning an administrative official of the university had torn down and stuffed into a rubbish bin some student posters. It was said that this was on instruction from the highest quarters; even if it had been done without instruction, as an expression of personal irritation, it would have had an ambiguous look about it. Tom was beginning to have a sickening sense of the whole affair — that had existed diamond-hard among those few crystal formations of bedrock morality — moving into areas of doubt where it did not belong. He scarcely spoke through dinner that evening and got up from the table while the others were still eating — he had to go to a private meeting with some members of the university staff and students. “Where are my cigarettes? I’d better move on, I suppose.”

There was the pause of confrontation with a subject everyone knew too well to want to talk about.

Ann was home for dinner for once, and she asked with the impartial interest she brought to most things, “Was there a big meeting at lunch-time today?”

“Not bad. Only let there be some noise and broken heads so that people begin to see that academic freedom is something to fight over in the street! People feel it’s a phrase that doesn’t concern most of them, like ‘higher income tax bracket’. Let ‘em understand it’s on a level with their right to their weekly pay-packet, the defence of their wife’s good name and blood-heating things like that.”

Jessie was moving restlessly about the room as if contemplating some tidying-up activity. “I’ll be up,” she said, indicating he needn’t take a key.

At the meeting that evening a student pointed out that the university never had been truly open to anyone but whites; the African and Indian students had never been allowed to take part in sports or social events. When one spoke of it as an “open” university one was already accepting some of the meaner and uglier evasions by which the colour-bar protected itself. Tom dropped in at a friend’s flat for coffee afterwards and got talking to an African whom he had met there a few times before. They left together and as they walked along the street Tom quoted the exchange that had taken place between those members of the university staff and administration who, like himself, wanted to fight the Bill unreservedly, and to back up the students and give them free rein, and others who protested that they abhorred the Bill but that it was foolish to antagonise the Government when it would go through in any case, and the university was heavily dependent on Government grants. In order to keep alive the idea of academic freedom, these people argued, the university must continue to exist at all costs, even that of academic freedom itself …

The brown, pock-marked face beside him appeared and disappeared as they passed together under street-lamps. The man turned to say goodnight: “Fight them over this business if you want to, man, but don’t think that anything you do really matters. Some of you make laws, and some of you try to change them. And you don’t ask us.”

When Tom talked to Jessie about it, she had still the clear-cut picture of it that he himself had had at the beginning. She had never cared much for academic people — if she had been married to a business man, she would have cared as little for his associates sworn to the twin gods of supply and demand, for she had the solitary’s genuine if slightly jealous dislike of guilds, jokes of the trade, and a soothing assumption of a common lot — and it did not surprise her that some of the university people were now found unable to clap their hands over their revealed careerism and lack of moral courage.

“I don’t see that there’s any problem. It’s only people who’re busy taking things into ‘consideration’—whether they’ll be kicked out or whether Professor Tiddleypush would like them to open their mouths or not — who need give the thing a second thought.” She commented on a satisfaction, in him, that she took for granted. Yet this truth seemed to him now flippant and casual. He thought, with a flash of vindictiveness, she sits there in a heap (she had waited up for him) and she has not been listening to me. She’s all attention but she has not heard. It was true that he was against keeping a man out of a university because of his colour just as surely as he knew it was wrong to murder. But she knew nothing of the disruption of the working atmosphere by conflict, she knew nothing of the feel of that curious conglomeration of usefulness, waste, inspiration and discipline that makes an institution, shifting and staggering beneath your feet.

He was awake in the night and she was aware of it. She felt him sliding carefully out of his side of the bed. “What is it?” “I don’t know,” he lied. “I want a cigarette.” He lay with his back to her in order not to disturb her, but she could feel the regular inhalations with which he took the cigarette, and the stretching of his arm muscle as he leant to put it out. He ran his foot, curved to caress, over her calf in security, but it was an hour when she could imagine how she would be if she had never met him. She had the actual feeling of herself free, alone, husband dead, mother escaped from, alone, with Morgan. It began to go through her mind in light and colour, a life with Morgan that seemed to have happened. Morgan was a boy of about five and she was pushing him on a swing. Then she was sitting on the swing and he was pushing her. She came toward his laughing face and away from it again, toward and away. Then she and Morgan were on a ship together, they were reading, side by side on deck, and people to whom they never needed to speak walked up and down. (They really had been on a ship together, once, but he had been little and she had put him in the public nursery most of the time, where he had stared down at her on deck in silence from behind wire mesh.) Then he was older, twelve or fourteen, and they shared a flat, orderly, with shaded lights; he poured the drinks for her and they went to the theatre together. They were having dinner, cooking and setting the table for themselves, and talking. She had him with her through crowded rooms, he looked grown-up in a light suit, his big, young, tender man’s hand she took suddenly … At some point these possibilities became a dream and in the dream she was actually looking with Tom at the projection of a roll of old film whose existence had been unknown and which recorded a life that had been forgotten.

Beyond her volition, she began to try whether she might not be able to get at the fifteen-year-old boy through laying her hands on what she herself had been at that age. Out of an instinct that ran away with her, she sought out that girl who had been put away for so long as nothing more than a case history. It was easy enough to see her, going about the mine property and the town with her mother. She did not go to school but was taught at home and she and her mother spent the afternoons on shopping expeditions together. There were the counters draped with bolts of silk before which they were lost for hours, their eyes meeting in considering indecision. The final word hung, inevitable as the curtain embrace. “The blue, or the black and white?” “The blue is lovely, the patterned one has more style …” Her mother’s eyes held hers again. Then the decision: “I need a figured dress of some kind, there are times when—” They were free to go off and drink coffee, breaking the calm after tension by passing some remark, now and then, about what accessories would be right. “Take the stairs slowly”; her mother’s gloved hand pressed her shoulder. Sometimes Jessie did think she felt the labouring flutter of her heart when they reached the top: she panted a little, with a smile, to show it. When they got home, they rested together in her mother’s room.

She was not allowed to play tennis, of course, because of her heart — not an organic defect, and with care she would grow out of it, her mother explained to people. That was why she kept the girl out of school. No tennis or swimming, but she went out at night far more than other children of her age. Her mother and Bruno took her to the theatre and concerts in Johannesburg, and when they played bridge in the houses of the mine, she went with them and was not bored, listening to the grown-ups and helping the hostess efficiently with the tea. She read novels too, whatever she pleased; “I don’t believe that girls should be brought up in ignorance of life,” said Mrs. Fuecht. The girl looked with fastidious timidity at the great girls in dusty serge gym tunics who had once been her class-mates. She would have been dismayed if she had ever been pronounced well enough to go back to school.

Ignorance of life! Jessie felt no pity for this little creature, her mother’s boon companion. She was ashamed of her, repulsed by her sham grown-up poise, her pride in the sense of privilege that had been palmed off on her, her prodigy’s smirking acceptance of a dwarf’s status in the world of men and women. Thank God she had not lived — done to death with the violence of the truth, when it came to her.

But was that all there had been to her?

Once Jessie began to move down there in the past, once she had forced herself to it, she began to be able to see, like a cat in the dark. Masses crumbled to their components, the detail of delicate structures stood out. All there, all, all, for ever. She came, with great vividness, upon the extraordinary significance, at that time, that was attached to a small painted photograph of her father that she had begged from her mother. She had it still, and for years now it had had no power to stir her; it was simply something she kept, as a gesture of acknowledgement to the man who was her father and whom she could not remember ever having known. But back there it shone alive, charged with a force that held her as the little holy image in its dark niche holds the child who passes through an intensely religious phase. The picture had been in a chocolate box of old trinkets that she loved to rummage through. It was a photograph painted to look like a miniature, in a bevelled gilt snap-case meant to be carried in a handbag — the Twenties equivalent of the picture-locket. She was taken, in the manner of girls, more with the fancy case than anything else. It stood on her book-case between cut-out pictures of Beverley Nichols and Evelyn Waugh in bazaar frames. Then, in one of the loud storms that hit the mine in summer, her bedroom lamp fused, and Bruno came in to fix it. He worked by candle-light, quickly and well, as he did everything, and as the lamp came on again and he picked up his card of fuse wire from the book-case, he noticed the pictures.

“Your favourite film-actors, eh?” All his life he had been a connoisseur of women, and he remembered his humble beginnings as a boy with pictures of actresses pinned above his bed.

“They’re writers. And that’s …” She trailed off, because of course he knew who the third one was.

He picked it up. “I don’t know the names of these great lovers. You’re the age to remember that. Good-looker, eh?”

“Don’t you see who it is?”

He smiled. “Oh, it’s Charles.” It was the curious smile with which he would greet someone who had reason to avoid him. He put the picture back; straightened it. And then it was at once dismissed from his mind; he went out calling to his wife, “I wish you could get the boy to understand that he must not take my pliers to open jam tins or whatever it is that he does to ruin them …”

The picture showed a very young man. His grey eyes were fixed slightly askance on something out of the picture, and although he was not smiling you could make out, under the photographer’s “natural” skin tinting, the faint bracket-sign on either side of his mouth that showed that he had smiled or spoken immediately before the camera clicked. The just-concluded movement made a starting-point for her. She willed him to life, speaking to her mother. He spoke to her adoringly. And then, very smoothly and easily, it was she herself to whom the strange young man was speaking, it was she whom he adored.

On rainy afternoons she stared at the face with strange and stirring emotions. The features, the ears, the eyes; she lingered over them tinglingly. Her own eyes would fill luxuriously with tears. I love you, I love you, she incantated passionately. He had taken the place of Beverley Nichols, or the young Evelyn Waugh as painted by Augustus John. They held long conversations in bed at night, and they kissed and kissed in the darkness, drawing up into these kisses all the wildly tender, terrible yearnings that swept through her body and sent her mind racing. She was in love, haunted and hounded by a fearful burden of the flesh although she did not yet have a woman’s body to fulfil it with, secreting devotion though she had no one for whom to set it working.

Did she ever admit that the fantasy to which she gave all this was her father? Here Jessie came upon the dreadful innocence of inner life, the life dreamt and not lived, that fills but is for ever confined in the globe of the skull. She knew and did not know that the man with whom she rehearsed both the domestic intimacies she had seen in films, and the erotic intimacies mysteriously hinted at in books and strangely understood somewhere in her body — that this man bore the label “father”. The truth was that he was a face, a young face, and she had made the face of love out of him. If there was darkness in the make-believe, it was hidden in the dark nature of make-believe itself. For nothing of all this passion existed in the light of her contact with the “real” world where she shopped and talked with her mother.

There were other things behind the self-composed face of the child who moved among grown-ups as one of themselves, like a little ape who has been taught to blow his nose in a handkerchief and eat with a knife and fork. Confronted with them after so long, Jessie took them up, uncomfortable, puzzled — and then came the stab of identity and recognition. The shape of cold terror that used to impress itself on the back of her neck when she turned her back to the dark passage behind the bathroom door at night, bending to wash her face. Had she ever, in the twenty years or so since then, found out who it was that threatened to come up behind her? Then there was the — even at this stage, an old inhibition came back, and she did not know what name to call it — the business of the electric plugs. She had been afraid to be alone in a room where there were electric plugs because she might be impelled to put her fingers into one and turn on the current. The sight of one, brown, shiny and commonplace, fascinated her horribly, and rising alongside the fascination was an equal fear — the two forces possessed her, but to whom could she cry out? Such things did not exist in the articulate world; “there is nothing there,” they came in and said, of the dark. Bruno and her mother had what she humbly accepted were “real” troubles — the grown-up ones of stocks and shares rising and falling, that they discussed in the deep dreamy concentration induced by money, in which their differences were surpassed; and the other grown-up ones of which nothing was said, but that anyone, even a child, could sense, dividing the stream of the house’s being in two, so that the very cat, coming in the door, paused electrically.

Love and destruction, life and death, were already possessed of the battleground of the mind and body of the child who sat politely, smoothing her new skirt, or hung on her mother’s arm, listening with self-important absorption to talk of dress. The courage that the child must have screwed out of herself to maintain this balance appalled Jessie; how was it possible for a creature to live so secret, so alone? Ignorance, of course, the dreadful certainty, hopelessly accepted, that there is no one, not anywhere in the world, like you.

Was it possible that Morgan was suffering like this?

Yet Jessie was now an adult herself, and she was as inclined as any other to be lulled by the commonplaceness of the child. Morgan with his eternal bat and ball, Morgan jumping up with such prompt eagerness when you sent him off to do some piffling errand. Morgan with a front, of its kind, as bland as her own loved and loving daughterly one had been.

“I should tell Morgan how he comes to have his place with us,” she said to Tom.

He was trying to write a difficult letter, and reluctantly he roused himself at the sound of the slow, dead voice she always used when she had made up her mind to do something reckless. He stopped writing, put his elbows on the table and pressed his two thumbs against the sharp edges of his top teeth for a moment. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said at last.

“Tell him more. More about us. Tell him the truth. Why not? Why shouldn’t I admit to him that my marriage to his father wasn’t anything like this? Tell him that if his father hadn’t been killed the marriage would have ended anyway. He ought to know he hasn’t missed anything.”

“What are you talking about?” He looked at her as if he were about to apprehend a crime.

“Why do people always protect children by keeping them on the surface? That’s not the way to do it at all. One ought to let them in on everything and make them strong.”

In answer to his silence, she added, “We ought to talk to him more — Boaz said it once.”

He gave a little weary snort, dismissing that as something different.

With an effort at reasonableness, he began: “How do you think you can go about it?”

“Find — a—way — to — get — at — him,” she said. She saw with a thrill of disappointment that she had stung Tom to concealed alarm. “—Well, what have I said?”

He shrugged. “I think the thing for us to do is to stick to practical plans to occupy Morgan. Ease him on to his own feet … that’s all.”

She felt the exchange falling into the pattern of their two personalities and she made an impulsive attempt to break it. “It may be the thing for you, but not for me.” She had never before claimed her relationship as the boy’s mother, as opposed to his as a stranger and a stepfather. Morgan was something they had put up with together, as best they could.

But to Tom the sudden change had little to do with her actual feelings about Morgan; he saw it as a well-known sign of what he thought of as the amateurishness of her nature. She would want to have a go at something; the single achievement itself obsessed her, with the amateur’s disregard for what ought to have gone before in the form of proper preparation, or what might be expected to come after. She was often a brilliant amateur — it was this aspect of her that he had fallen in love with, reaching out in sure instinct beyond the pleasures of their affair to feel the hot flame of her fearful determination, time and again, to achieve a manoeuvre of her own life. How many human beings had this calm and reckless assumption that their life was in their hands? This quality that had deeply excited him and moved him for ever into her orbit turned out to be also, in the long run of marriage, the one that gave him the most trouble, rather as if he had married for a face and the beauty of it had brought its inevitable pain by attracting other men. What he loved most, he came to like least in her. If she was sometimes brilliant in her disregard for the rules, he had also learnt that she was more often dangerous.

He aimed grimly, “Jessie, don’t try to catch Morgan in a bear-hug now.”

“You think I’m lying.”

“I don’t think you’re lying. I’m sure you’re thinking about Morgan these days in a way you’ve never done before. I’m simply warning you that you can’t foist intimacy on to him now. For Christ’s sake! He won’t know what to do with it.”

She kept feeling tears rise to the brink of her voice, awful, easy tears, and she said dryly, with perfect control, “No, let’s send him on a fishing trip instead. Let’s think like a school-marm, as you’re beginning to do …”

Six

An old man sat in a hotel bedroom in the city that night. The room was charged with an alert irritability that emanated from him and his movements and then came back at him, electrically, with the bright yellow light that sprang from the walls. The room was too small for the light and it was too small for him. Luggage, not unpacked, stood around him, bearing dangling airways labels with a flight number scrawled on them, the name “Bruno Fuecht” and the destination, “Zurich”. He stood in the middle of the room in the concentration of one possessed by what is going on in his own mind, and ceaselessly it went out toward the walls and beat back upon him again. He went to the telephone beside the bed and snapped some enquiry into it, first bringing himself to the state of communication with the world by a sharp cough and a tremor of effort that moved his head unsteadily. He waited, holding the receiver, and the middle finger of his other hand beat jerkily on his knee. He got the information he wanted, and made another request; at last, he heard the telephone ringing in a house he had never seen.

The Stilwells were in the becalmed state that follows a quarrel, when the telephone rang. The quarrel over Morgan had dragged on into a deadly examination of the dissatisfactions and burdens of their daily life, that each took as the unsaid reproach of the other. Each felt the other was known to the bone; there was no possibility that a sudden turn of courage, of frivolity, even, might reveal itself unexpectedly in one of them, and so restore something of the mystery to life itself.

Tom went slowly to the telephone. “Here is Fuecht. Fuecht. Who is speaking?” The voice ended in a crackle.

Tom did not catch the name properly. “This is Tom Stilwell. Who is it you want?”

“This is Fuecht,” the voice came back sternly. “I’m speaking from the Queen’s Hotel. I was on my way to Europe and the plane is delayed. They brought me to town and gave me a room. Listen, my plane doesn’t go till two o’clock.” “Mr. Fuecht! That’s unexpected.” Tom had the embarrassed, disbelieving tone of someone unfairly singled out by a man who had never before paid him any attention. “Can you see me?” the voice insisted. “Couldn’t you come into town? I’m at the Queen’s Hotel and I’ll only be here a few hours, I’m on my way to Europe. You’ve got a car, eh, Stilwell?”

“Well, the trouble is, it’s rather late.”

There was a strangely stirring silence on the other end of the telephone.

Why should a man who hardly knew him put such pressure on him? Tom said, “Just hold on a minute, will you, I’ll speak to Jessie. Do you mind?” There was some sort of sound of assent.

He went back into the living-room where she was lying face-down on the divan. “Have you heard anything from your mother? Anything you haven’t told me? That’s Fuecht.”

Jessie stayed quite still for a moment, and then she turned round and sat up, all in one movement. “It’s Fuecht?” The skin under her eyes seemed to tighten, as it did when she was afraid. “I ought to stop answering the phone altogether,” he said, with a feeble attempt at a joke.

“Fuecht?”

“Yes, at the Queen’s. He’s phoning from there. He says he’s on his way to Europe and the plane’s been delayed.”

She nodded. “Well, that’s that. He’s threatened my mother for weeks that he’d go.” She sat stiffly.

“What shall I tell him? He wants us to go to the hotel. The plane doesn’t leave till two.”

There was a moment’s silence. “I won’t go,” she said. “Does he mean me?”

The coldness of the quarrel stirred again faintly. “I suppose so. Why should he want to see me? I hardly know him. I don’t suppose I’ve seen him more than three times.”

Jessie gave a strange, set, painful blink, like the cringe of an old woman. Tom felt unease, an outsider to the silence between the man on the telephone and the woman bolt upright on the divan. He said, trying to be of use, “D’you want me to go?”

“I won’t go,” she said, and sat running the nail of her forefinger rapidly under the nails of her other hand.

He went back to the telephone. “Hello? Mr. Fuecht, I’ll be there in about half an hour. Jessie’s in bed already. Where will you be?” “In the room,” came the voice, suddenly strong — Tom did not know whether it was the telephone, but the voice seemed to fade and rise to strength, intermittently. “Number a hundred and ninety-six, it’s on the second floor. I won’t go from the room.”

Tom drove to town subdued but not too unwilling. A quarrel is better rounded off than left in the air, a miasma. He was doing something now that he wouldn’t be doing if he were not Jessie’s husband; the relationship was quietly validated by this performance of a piece of family business. It was a token performance, of course, just as Bruno Fuecht was a token relative.

Tom had always thought that Fuecht was a strange, foreign choice to have been made by Jessie’s mother; the explanation that he was the best friend of Jessie’s own father, who had died when she was younger than Elisabeth, certainly seemed the only possible justification. Mrs. Fuecht had the cynical pride of bearing of the woman who has set herself to live out the length of an unhappy marriage. Where Jessie was careless of her appearance, and, in her late thirties, already no longer beautiful, Mrs. Fuecht, at nearly seventy, was dressed in the perfection of cut and matched colour that demands unflagging concentration on one’s own person. Tom had never seen her without a hat. Even in her own house, she looked perpetually like a visitor dressed for some occasion to which nobody else has been invited.

“Why is she so cold,” he had asked Jessie sometime, struck, on meeting the woman again, with this quality in her. “She loathes Fuecht,” said Jessie simply. “She’s frozen into the state of living in the same house with him.”

Mrs. Fuecht had never been happy with the man, but since he had got old he had become demoniacal. From the coast, where they lived in retirement, came reports, year after year, of his moodiness, his contrariness, his downright devilishness. He was ill and quarrelled with his doctors. He made it impossible to keep servants for longer than a few days at a time. He brooded and threatened to sell up his excellent investments. And when, Jessie said, he had stilled her mother to a state of tight-lipped, despairing consternation at his recklessness — he suddenly burst out laughing in her face, as if all of it, everything, from the refusal to take his medicine to the threats to their security, had been directed to this one end: to make a fool of her.

Tom wondered, from time to time — with the impatience one feels toward other people’s troubles — why the old woman hadn’t left Fuecht long ago. He meant to ask her, just as a matter of curiosity; but somehow, once in her presence, he never felt himself taken sufficient account of to be allowed such a question.

He accepted that Jessie’s relationship with her mother was an odd one, to say the least of it. Apparently she had felt herself passionately dependent on her mother as a child and girl; as a woman, she understood that the truth was that her mother had been passionately and ruthlessly dependent on her. It was clear that her mother had clipped her wings and brain-washed her, to keep her near — the story about the heart trouble was a pretty dreadful one, if you really took a look at it. Before Morgan was born, Jessie had gone to a heart specialist to see if the old ailment had left any weakness that might make a normal birth dangerous for her, and he had told her with emphatic quiet that not only was her heart perfectly normal, but in fact it was not possible that a heart ailment serious enough to keep a child out of school for years could leave no sign of past damage … No, better not look into that at all. Jessie told him that as a child she had believed that her mother loved her more than other mothers loved their children. As she had come to understand, through her feelings for her husband and her own children, the free nature of love, her fascinated resentment toward her mother had grown proportionately; yet she supported the woman, at a distance of five or six hundred miles, against Fuecht.

The situation — comfortably chronic and fortunately far away — was doubly foreign to Tom, first because he himself was fond of his old father (a retired doctor who gardened or smoked a pipe on the verandah while he gazed peacefully at the result of his labours) and secondly because there was something foreign, in the national sense, about it. As Bruno Fuecht had grown older and more difficult he seemed to have become more and more markedly a stranger in South Africa; his thirty or forty years as a chemist on the South African mines were brushed away and his foreign identity — a Swiss German, a man of Europe — reasserted itself. Yes, Fuecht was unmistakeably foreign, and the emotions of the situation he created about himself were foreign — the theatrical behaviour, the air of aged defiance, the melodrama, for example, of this sudden arrival in Johannesburg. Last week, a letter from Mrs. Fuecht saying that he had gone into a nursing home for observation, this week he’s off to Switzerland. What was the sense in hitting out like this, once you were old?

Tom approached the Queen’s Hotel with a set mood of almost professional patience — like a paid mourner at a funeral — that did not touch himself. The Monday night streets of the city gaped; there were only a few black men, looking long and steadily into the windows of the outfitters’. The Queen’s had the cold sour smell of a drinking hotel — it was not a place where people went to dine or to live. Two or three tables in the bar lounge held up the elbows of men in striped blazers — perhaps some visiting bowlers’ team — and an elderly tart was arguing in drunken dead seriousness between two men, in a dingy corner.

When you have your home in a city, it is always a shock to enter the brutal homelessness of a place like this; Tom forgot, for stretches of years on end, that such places exist and are part of the true character of all cities. He went to the desk where a night porter with the deeply suspicious face of his kind picked up a telephone without a word when Fuecht’s name was pronounced. While he waited for the phone to be answered, the man moved his left hand strongly over his face, pushing his eyebrows up out of line and then down, rubbing his nose sideways, pulling over his mouth and chin, like the rough tongue of some animal going over its young.

“Second floor. One-nine-six.”

Tom went up in the lift, and, with the sense of being let deeper and deeper into places where neither dark nor daylight exists, but only the light of single bulbs gathered like beads of sweat on the ceiling, came out into a passage. Past doors and more doors; before he knocked, it seemed, the door opened, and there was a blazingly-lit room, yellow-walled, with the luggage heaped, as it had been dumped down, in the middle, and the figure of an old man drawn up like an exclamation point before it.

They looked, man and luggage, ready to take off for anywhere. The visitor was ready to back away before them.

“So I wait,” said Fuecht, without any greeting. “They will come for me soon.”

Tom would not have known him if he had seen him in the street. Was he really unrecognisable? He walked into the room and sat on the bed, under the chandelier that had been meant for grandeur and shone as a merciless inquisition of glare. No, Fuecht must be changed. He couldn’t possibly have looked like that; the way he looked was not something that could last for years.

He was ill, of course. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t just the usual old men’s symptoms of the collar grown too big, the hollow, delicate-looking as the skin over an infant’s fontanelle, in front of each bloodless ear. He was blazing behind his line of tight mouth, behind his dark eyes made dominating, in the diminishing face, by his magnifying glasses; he was blazing like the chandelier. Something — a pulse, a convulsive swallowing — agitated all the time in the thin turkey-fold that connected his chin to his adam’s-apple.

“They told me a wait of forty-five minutes,” he was saying, without a pause. He gave the little unpleasant smile of a man who knows better than to expect efficiency in matters that are out of his hands. “I should get off the plane from Port Elizabeth and then go straight through the customs and so on to the plane for Europe. That was the information. No one would have known. You would not have heard from me, eh? I would have been,” he threw up his unsteady hands like a drowning man, but in triumph, “many miles away by now.”

“It’s very annoying to be delayed,” said Tom, but his eyes were on the luggage. “When did you decide to go to Switzerland?”

“Yes! I should have been gone!” The old man took a swift turn about the room. He checked himself abruptly; he moved with the incalculable rushes of a faulty clockwork toy, that jerks into action, moves with wild nimbleness, and then just as suddenly runs down and is arrested feebly in the middle of an uncompleted movement. He laughed, “Switzerland! Yes, begin with Zurich. I was a boy there, a young man, living as young men live. Zurich to begin with, but I won’t stay. Don’t think I’ll stay! I’m not crawling back to Zurich to …” He stopped. A close look came over his face, it was not so much as if he had lost the thread of what he was saying as that he had found himself saying something unexpected, something that lay in his mind ignored. He went on, “There are plenty of places in Europe where you can live, still. Well, I should have been gone already, I should have been on the way, eh?” He sat down suddenly, gleeful, shaken, on the chair.

A waiter came in with whisky and soda, that Fuecht must have ordered to be brought when his guest arrived. While the man was in the room, the old man did not speak, and had a curious air of impatient resentment. When the waiter had withdrawn, he made sure the door was properly closed behind the man, and then handed Tom a drink: “Whisky is all right, eh?”

“And Mrs. Fuecht—?” said Tom.

The old man drew the whisky round his mouth and then put the glass away from him. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “When she wakes up, she’ll find there isn’t a penny. I’ve got all my money out. Here, in my pocket — here’s a cheque book for the Zurich bank. I’ve taken it all out. There are ways, you understand. I know people, I managed it — never mind. It’s all there. All I have to do is write out a cheque.”

“It sounds as if someone’s going to have a good time.” It was impossible to remedy this conversation in which both were talking of different things, although their remarks appeared to follow one on the other in the parody of communication. Oddly, Tom was reminded of times when, talking to Jessie, he became aware that they were not talking about the same thing; she sometimes went through the motions of communication with her lips, while what she really was doing was to hug further and further into herself what it was she had to communicate.

“I’m sorry about Jessie. She wanted to come, she would’ve …”

Suddenly the old man seemed to realise Tom’s presence; he smiled a slow, grudging recognition, and the lie lay exposed between them.

The old man took up his glass of whisky and finished it at a gulp, getting it over with, like medicine, and his other hand was raised, calling for attention, promising. “She doesn’t know I’ve gone, and when she finds out — well, too late! That’s all.”

“Jessie had a letter from her last week. She said you were in a nursing home.”

“That’s all right!” said the old man, swaggeringly, grim, shrugging. “That’s right! They wanted me in a nursing home. But I tell you”—he stopped and leant forward as he might have done if he had wanted to use the name of someone with whom he had entered into conversation in a bar, only to remember that the man was a nameless stranger to him—“I tell you, they won’t get a penny from me, just the same! I’m going to spend it all. D’you follow me? I may not be young, but I’ve got money, and a man with money is never lonely. There’ll be women — you understand? I’m not finished with it all yet!”

His voice rose powerfully, as it had on the telephone, and came ringing back from the four walls of the room, shocking, so that it silenced even himself.

He sat back in his chair, fixing his eyes on Stilwell angrily. He looked once or twice round the room, like the circus lion puzzled and restless on its painted barrel. And then he said again: “Women. There are women who won’t say no to my money.”

The middle finger of his left hand beat continuously against the chair-arm. Tom saw him notice it out of the corner of his eye, as an animal looks up, helpless, to see its rump twitch against the attentions of a fly.

Tom spoke. “I wonder if you’re well enough to go.”

The old man’s mind darted at once to the real meaning of this. “What’s the use to stop me,” he said. “I’ve told you, there’s not a penny here. And she can never get it into the country again without my signature. I’m not going to be buried yet.”

Some hostility stirred between them. “Jessie should have come,” said Tom, almost crossly.

“They will get nothing, either of them.”

“Mr. Fuecht, you must know that Jessie has never had any hopes about your money.”

“I didn’t expect her to come. She’s never been much like a daughter. Well, that’s an old story. Never mind.”

Tom smiled. “Well, she’s only a stepdaughter.”

“Yes, her mother kept that up. For the memory of poor Charles, she said. We both loved poor Charles. Only she couldn’t have loved him so much, could she? Eh?”

Tom was bewildered by the old man’s wry grin, the surly, sly self-contempt that sounded in his voice.

“Charles?”

“‘Charles’!”

“Jessie’s father?”

The old man nodded with exaggerated vociferousness, like someone satisfying a child with a careless lie. “All right, Jessie’s father. My friend Charles. Only I couldn’t have been such a good friend, after all, eh? She makes a great fuss, she bursts in tears when I bring up the name of Charles. Because we both loved Charles, she says. What’s the difference; the girl and I never had much to say to each other, anyway.” His mind turned back rapidly to the obsession of the present; he looked at his watch for the fourth time since Tom had come in, and said, with the fierce satisfaction of time passing: “Tell them what you like. Tell her what I said about going to Zurich and what I’m going to do. She’ll be on the telephone tomorrow. You’ll see. Well, you can tell her I’ve gone — what you like — you understand? You tell her I’m not finished yet.”

Tom suggested that they should phone the airline and find out when the plane was expected to be ready to leave; the truth was, he felt he could not stand waiting shut up in the hotel with the old man indefinitely, and a drive to the airport would fill in part of the time. When Tom could decently say that they had better start off, Fuecht watched with glittering eyes while the luggage was being carried from the room. Then, with one strange look round it, a curious look of blind courage, he snapped off the blazing light and walked out.

He did not speak in the car going to the airport. He seemed exhausted, or resting, or husbanding himself through the drive in the dark. At the airport he became talkative again; the strength of his desire to be gone, the desperate glee of his going, trembled through his body ecstatically. Now and then he said: “Let them both look for me. Not a penny. Not a penny. I’m going to spend the lot, you understand.”

At last he was called. The number of his flight echoed and re-echoed through the airport halls, and Tom watched him walk down the brightly-lit ramp to the dark runway. He did not look back or wave. He walked slowly but the extreme lightness of his body, hardly there at all inside the tailor’s shape, suddenly came to the young man watching. Tom noticed for the first time that he was immaculately dressed, like a corpse laid out in new clothing for its long journey. There was a moment’s last glimpse of the face; the mouth was stiff, a little open, the eyes looked straight ahead into the dark. Then the figure came out in the stream of light from the aircraft, and was seen climbing, through the shafts of moted light, up the gangway.

Jessie woke the instant Tom moved into the room. She put up her hand and turned on the light, full in his eyes. Frowning, he moved the lamp’s neck.

He began to describe to her how the old man had been, standing with his luggage, ready to go, in the hotel room. He did not know how to convey the queerness, the dread, the sickness, defiance — madness, perhaps, in that room. But she seemed to know at once exactly what he had found there. She pressed her fist into her cheek and cried out, from something in herself: “He still wants to live! Isn’t it terrible? He still wants to live!”

Tom’s mind turned, like the needle of a compass coming to the north, to one utterance among all the nightmare mutterings of that night. “She’s never been much like a daughter.” There it was; he could not leave it alone. It rose out of the jumble of ravings, boastings, imprecations.

Other phrases came to join it. “Only she couldn’t have loved him so much, could she?”

What else had the old man said? Suddenly, because it became important to Tom to remember that part of the evening, he could not; it was all muddled up with the other things that sounded through his head in the old man’s voice. “Jessie’s only a stepdaughter”—he could hear himself offering, platitudinous, soothing; he had been so busy treating the old man like an invalid or a lunatic that he had not listened properly. What was it the old man had said? “That was kept up, of course” or “Her mother kept that up”—something like that. Again and again Tom sounded the same note, like a piano tuner looking for true pitch: “The memory of poor Charles … only she couldn’t have loved him so much, could she?”

He watched Jessie when she was unaware. What would it mean to her if she knew that she was Bruno’s daughter? Was she Bruno’s daughter? And at times it seemed to him: she knows she is really his daughter. It would be like her mother to have told her, when she was a young girl, perhaps, or half-child, half-girl, and to have made her see at the same time the necessity for conspiracy to conceal the fact, for her mother’s sake.

He felt an obscure danger in the possibility of asking her. Suppose she did not know? Suppose it was true and she had never known?

Days went by and soon he knew he would never ask her. He would never tell her the things Fuecht had said; or seemed to say. Yet he continued to think about it all, to be aware of this twilight tunnel of his wife’s life, walled-up, lost and over-grown, an extension of herself, hidden, or perhaps unknown to her.

A week later they knew that Bruno Fuecht was dead. He had died in a hospital in Rome. They never knew why he had left Zurich. Of course, he had not taken “every penny” with him, after all; he had transferred considerable sums to Switzerland, but there were still a number of investments and a substantial sum of money in South Africa. His mental state must have been such that he believed he had done what he had said; or perhaps this discovery, after his death, was contrived as just such another malicious laugh as he had sometimes had at his wife’s expense when he was alive?

Mrs. Fuecht was in the Stilwell house, come upon strangely, at all hours of the day, sitting on the verandah, or in a corner of the empty living-room, with her hat on. She had arrived from Port Elizabeth two days after Fuecht disappeared. Jessie treated her with quiet consideration; it was understood that, although she could not be said to be bereaved, she was certainly more alone. She had outlived two husbands, and was old. The two women talked of Bruno Fuecht as of some practical problem, a condition of life that had existed, and that, in its passing, had left things a certain way; there were ends to tie up.

“I wonder if it would be best to sell his car in Port Elizabeth or have it railed up here.”

“He’d had it reconditioned just the month before last. Heaven knows why, if he was going away. New seats, all real leather. I don’t suppose it’ll fetch anything.”

But Tom, coming upon mother and daughter talking like this, as he often did during those days, was filled with tenderness for Jessie. He was overwhelmed with pity for the lack of grief in this death. He sat on the verandah with the two women night after night, and their quiet words fell upon him like stones. Suddenly one evening he found it in himself to ask — an impulse of curiosity, idly remembered—“Bruno Fuecht — why did you never leave him, I often wondered?”

Mrs. Fuecht said without a pause, “I gave him my whole life; I did not think I could let myself lose his money, as well.”

There was a silence; if the jangle of the dinner-bell, that Elisabeth was ringing for Agatha, had not broken it, it might have gone on for ever — there seemed to be no words that could have ended it. Tom touched his wife, and she turned, awake, with a slight smile. They rose like lovers; for lately the sense of strangeness that one being has for another had come back between them.

Mrs. Fuecht went home to the coast to settle her affairs. Jessie felt that an immeasurable lapse of time separated her from the friendly comings and goings, the odd hours and long gossips of her days at the Agency office. Her job in the suburbs and the presence of her mother in the house had kept her away from familiar haunts. The arrival of Fuecht, that night, was something she seemed to have called up from the descent into the past that Morgan had forced upon her. The man had come and gone, and she had not seen him; would never see him again. Yet the shock of his coming when he did had established a connection. The connection existed in her mind alongside the answer that her mother had made to Tom’s queer question: “I had given him my whole life; I did not think I could let myself lose his money, as well.” The past rose to the surface of the present, free of the ambiguities and softening evasions that had made it possible in the living. Her mother spoke as someone who has accomplished her life, however bitterly. Nothing could be more extraordinary to Jessie than the discovery that, however remotely differently arrived at, this, her own need, had existed in her mother.

A day or two after Mrs. Fuecht had gone, she left the nursing-home office at one and went to the western end of town to her old lunching-place, the Lucky Star. She had not been there for six weeks or more; there was the old smell of curry and chips, and the board in the doorway still said, “Try our famous Eastern delicacies, grills and boerewors.” Uncle Jack, the proprietor said, “How’ve you been — that’s nice,” as he always did, his sad Levantine face, produced by some alchemy of white, Indian, Malay and probably African blood, appearing to look up from his little gambler’s notebook, but not pausing in his calculations, and she turned to the tables with convalescent ease, ready to sit placidly over lunch with whoever was there that she knew. It was then that she noticed Ann, facing her at a table in one of the booths, with Len Mafolo’s back to the room. She went over to them and as she did she saw that the man was not Len. “Just push my things on to the floor.” Ann’s face was flung up at her, brilliant. “Will you have a delicious coke, that’s what we’re drinking.” “Pretty heady stuff. Wait, I’ll order some more,” the man said, swivelling round in his seat to summon one of the Indian waiters, and Jessie recognised Gideon Shibalo, the school-teacher, the painter. They had met somewhere, years ago.

She doubted if Shibalo could have remembered her; yet Ann talked to them both as if they had known each other intimately for a long time. “You’ll be relieved to hear that we won’t have to trot out those same two old pictures of his on our next exhibition — she’s one of your most faithful deplorers,” she added, to Shibalo. They might be drinking coke now, but they had been drinking brandy. There was a heightened tempo about them that made Jessie aware that she was too sober.

“As long as she’s faithful, that’s what matters.” Shibalo had a low, chuckling, snickering private laugh, with which he prefaced such remarks; it was directed at himself. His yellow-brown face, older than he was, had little whorls of uneven black wool sticking here and there between chin and ear — perhaps not a beard, but laziness about shaving over the past few days. He was dressed in a shabby way that suited him, with a red and black checked flannelette shirt, and the end of his trousers’ waistband tucked in against his belly.

“What sort of things are you doing?” Jessie asked.

“Come and see.” He woke up to the full plate in front of him, began to press and turn the rice and meat with his fork as if it were some plastic material rather than something meant to go into his mouth.

“Still the knotty stick-shapes and the sky with dust hanging in the air?”

He smiled in acknowledgement. “Ah, that’s out.” He put down the fork after a mouthful or two and took out a cigarette. “I’m in a different mood, these days. I hadn’t painted for so long my fingers creak.” He clasped his hands and cracked the joints.

“Serve you right,” said Ann, taking a cigarette from him and beckoning for the matches: “Please!” “Oh, sorry!” They smiled at each other. While Ann talked and ate she kept looking out round the room, neck held high, excited and assertive. “Len thinks we can get a bigger caravan. Not borrowed, but hired. We’ll use it part of the time, and we’ll let it to the Boys’ Club, and things like that, to cover the cost.”

“Pity you can’t buy one. We’d hire it from you to go on holiday — Tom wants to go to Pondoland in July …”

They talked trivialities with ease, but from the moment she saw Gideon Shibalo’s face Jessie had become aware of a sense of intrusion so strong that she felt it physically — her hands were awkward as she used her knife and fork. She talked, but she was in retreat behind every word as if to efface herself from the company.

She did not wait for coffee. “Oh Jessie,” Ann was quite effusive, “would you find out from Agatha whether my blue dress is back from the cleaner’s? And if not, would you be a dear and phone them about it?” The sudden request had the trumped-up ring of the little chores that Jessie herself often invented to distract one of the children.

“Of course. — I’ll look forward to seeing the new Shibalo,” she said to the man.

“You won’t like it.” —In the superior way that painters refer to a new trend in their work.

The open street, jagged with light, and small hard shadows of a hot day, broke upon her. They’re lovers; they’re lovers: she thought, and felt herself abruptly returned to the life around her, that had been going on all the time.