Occasion for Loving

Fourteen

The first few nights Jessie awoke suddenly sometime in the night and heard in the sound of the sea the voices of argument and the cries of children teasing one another. She was sure someone was there, walking through the house behind the muffle of the sea yawning away; the little girls were calling her. Things were being knocked aside and slowly falling … She was alone and her mind went on twitching and pulsating in response to all that recoiled upon it up the stairs and in the living-room, round the table and on the landing, from behind the closed door where the strange shapes of musical instruments were and the smell of another woman, in the enclosed verandah where Morgan lay and Tom stroked papers drily one on another.

The Stilwell house was not there. She listened and there was nothing but the sea; all voices were its own, all sounds. The sound was an element, like its wetness.

The mornings were light early. Moths and other flying creatures, clinging to the curtains, fell feebly away in the sun and crawled about the cracked concrete floor as she pulled the curtains aside with the first sound of the day and her occupation of it — the runners screeching faintly along the rust of the rod. The sea moved towards her shiningly out of the night; it was immortality, it had been there all the time. She went back to bed and when she woke again the room was hot, and the water all dazzling peaked surfaces.

Between them — herself standing on the verandah in a dressing-gown, Clem, Madge and Elisabeth in their pyjamas on the coarse short grass — and the sea, were high dunes sloping down bushy green, splendid aloes standing out against the water with their green serrated leaves peeled back and the rags of last year’s clinging to the bole, and groups of strelitzia palm crowded by spoon-leaved dark, short trees, bushes with torn silvery leaves, a mesh of shrubs and ground-creepers. It was not jungle; it made no darkness. It shone and shook and swayed in the sun. Along the coast where the village was, people had planted Scotch firs that were thinned by the wind and the heat and disappeared into the haze. She knew these skinny trees, growing in the dry sand and making it hurtful with stunted cones. Over above a pale red roof, a monkey-puzzle was set down where some retired mine manager or insurance agent had made things nice for himself.

The atmosphere in which she moved, from house to open doors, where the sea was, was a constant switch from a peculiar, dead, fusty stuffiness to blasts of intoxicating softness. The house was not as she had remembered it but was rather part of the memory of other beach houses as she remembered them and as they appeared to be, even when one did not live in them, but passed them, deserted, perhaps, and looked in, standing on the rough concrete supports that held them above the gap between the floors and the foundation that was left open against rot and termites. The walls of such houses were not grown thick with layer on layer of human personality, but were thin and interchangeable as the shells that gave shelter to various sea animals, first holding some blob of animate mucous, then inhabited by one crab or another. And all the time, as the sea washes in and out of all shells, sand, wind, damp, warmth entered and flowed through these houses; ants streamed over them as if they were part of the continuing surface of sandy earth, bats lived in them as they lived in caves, and all the silent things, the unnoticed forms of life — mould, verdigris — continued to grow as they did on natural forms.

She thought she recognised the water-tank, but when she looked at it closely it was clear that it was fairly new, so that even if it was there that she had washed the sand off her feet, the tap and tank itself were certainly not the old ones she had known. In any case, the village had a proper piped water-supply now, and a health board to certify it, and, of course, the house was connected up to the mains; the tank was only for watering the grass.

The house had been four narrow dark rooms surrounded by an open verandah on all sides. But walls had been knocked out and parts of the verandah filled in with rooms and even extended for the purpose. The concrete blocks moulded to simulate stone of which it was built were painted a dim green and the floors everywhere were red granolithic thickly polished and marked off — when the concrete was wet, long ago — in yard squares that held dust and sea sand in the grooves. The house showed signs of some sort of upheaval, fairly recent, which already had begun to yield to the landscape. Apparently the old couple who had lived in it for years had left (been forced out, maybe, in one of Fuecht’s drives of concern about his possessions?) about two years before Bruno Fuecht died, and the house had then evidently been smartened up for a more profitable letting. There was a big refrigerator with a deep freeze compartment, although the stove was an old paraffin burner, converted to use electricity. The furniture was the usual sort that comes to rest in seaside houses: a couple of heavy stuffed chairs that were once part of a “suite”, re-covered by amateurs in material from the local store, a standard lamp like a long pole of brown barley sugar, old black dressing-tables with drawers that stuck. Perhaps the later, smarter tenants had added furniture of their own that they had taken away with them. In the lavatory they had left a printed notice:

“To ensure the satisfactory working of this sewerage system (septic tank) great care must be taken to see that the following articles are not deposited in the system:

“Cold cream, vaseline, sandwiches, sawdust, moth balls, cannon balls, golf balls, fish balls, press balls, footballs, cricket bats, curtain rings, telephone rings, engagement rings, smoke rings …” The list went on in this strain, ending up: “… red tape, brassières, two-way stretches, mosquito nets, hair nets, fishing nets — or, in fact, any article at all which may cause the breakdown of the system.

“God save the sugar farmers.

“Given at Isendhla Beach this day, the twenty-fourth of December, 1958, under my hand and great seal.

“BIG CHIEF SHAKA.”

The house retained no impress of the life that it had contained, first permanently, and then from time to time. Each room was like a person who had no memory, blank, carrying the objects of its purpose — table, bed, cupboard, as a name-tag. Jessie went from one to the other, meeting herself in strips of wardrobe mirror, pushing a fist into an unmade bed, sitting down suddenly. The windows stuck. When they were shut everything outside was seen through a dim cataract of salt. Reddish heaps of powdered wood appeared overnight from the ceilings.

After a week, she made no more claim on the house than any other creature that drifted in and out of it. It was shade she and the children came under when they trailed up from the beach; there was food there, somewhere to lie down; she was no longer contained by walls but had a being without barriers moving without much change of sensation from hot sun to cool water, from the lap and push and surge of water to the damp, blowy air. When her eyes were open they followed the sea; when they were closed the movement was in her blood.

The porpoises went by in the swell beyond the breakers, or, when the water was calm, closer in. She watched them as a child watches the game of another family of children, projecting into the pleasure of her half-smile an inkling, from her own experience, of their sensations. Where the grass was not shaved down by the mower, low mauve flowers the shape of sweet peas came out in dew or rain, and closed away invisibly when the sun shone. At night shrill bells went off everywhere in the bush and voiceless creatures flew in to the light and left transparent wings on the floor; in the morning, they were swept out. Madge cut branches of wild gardenia and put them in beer glasses that the wind blew down. Whatever was beautiful was webbed by spiders and dust and alive with the attentions of big agile black ants. They watched out for snakes on the path, and when they were in the sea occasionally remembered sharks, as though evil were impossible in that buoyant suspension on the world’s watery back.

Clem was embarrassed because Jessie wore old canvas shoes that had flattened into mules under her heels, and did not put her hair up with care. Jessie stopped wearing the shoes and went barefoot “like Boaz”, as Clem said in reproach. “But you go barefoot all the time, at home too.”

“Well, we’re children.”

When they drove to the store Jessie put on a bare-necked dress and perfume and made up her face. Clem capered about before her, as if she expected a sensation. They drove along the path with bush making a noise like a finger-nail on the glass of the car windows, and then away from the sea on to the road that divided cane-fields. The moment the sea dropped out of sight something seemed to have been switched off and the car was hot in the silence. Indian children plodded along the road, back from school. An old black cane worker with the bearded, moustachioed “fine” face of Zulus in Victorian missionary chronicles appeared with a panga hanging from his hand. The road crossed the lines of the canetrucks and there was a point where you could see far inland, across the curves covered with the pile of cane to flat-topped mountains holding their outline in the heat-shimmer and distance. As far as you could see, and further, it was Shaka’s country; less than a hundred and forty years ago the black king had trained his prancing armies and spread his great herds of cattle here.

The road led round the golf-course and back towards the sea again, to the village. The hotel was there, in the thin firs. Cars round the bowling-green; old men in shorts and old women in schoolgirls’ hats were bending and straightening on the grass. Everyone with a good position on the mine had thought of a retirement like this; the faces were familiar ones, that went early into middle-age and stayed there, helped by the uniformity of false teeth and glasses, far into old age. What had possessed Bruno to will, as if for peace, to end up along with them? An impulse that never came to anything, of course; except perhaps that he could always remind himself that his “little place on the Coast” did exist, proof of an intention.

An Indian with expanding bands holding up his shirt-sleeves was directing some piccanins who were piling up empty brandy crates outside the hotel bottle store. More children — porcupine-headed Indians with faces eager to please, dusty African brats with unself-conscious faces, one or two coloureds with yellow skins, the legginess of white boys, and hair as black as the Indians’ and as curly as the Africans’—hung about the caddy master’s hut. There were games with sticks, scuffles and yells. The Indians watched with tremendous eyes, jerking their younger members to order. Cooks with baskets over their arms stood talking while their masters’ dogs wagged puzzled tails, waiting. The caddy master, another Indian, with thick white-streaked hair and a bad-tempered open mouth showing brown teeth, upbraided somebody, scattering dusty legs. Big cars rolled slowly down from the hotel and white children, raw-faced from the beach, stood aside clutching loaves of bread or ice-creams.

The store kept stuffed olives and caviar, as well as the usual supplies, for there were some smart houses along the hotel end of the beach now, and on the sun-decks and behind the picture-windows people from Johannesburg brought the eating-habits of their way of life with them. Occasionally you saw a man dressed in the white trousers, navy scarf and espadrilles of someone who had been to the Riviera in the Thirties; or a blonde lion-headed girl in tights who might have been walking along in Saint-Tropez in the present time; both were received with the same lack of impact by the local residents in the khaki shorts and sand shoes they had worn without change, in comfort and suitability, through both eras. Jessie’s children were stimulated by the store, not only by the garlands of blown-up plastic toys, the tin pistols, the comics and the sweets, but by the link, through the atmosphere of buying and selling, the miscellaneous activity set in motion by the exchange of even petty sums of money, with the city life they came from. It always surprised her to notice how healthily children accepted as life the things that were to imprison them later — the arbitrary picking up and putting down of buses, the herding of traffic lights, the crowded desperateness in shops, the whole acquisitive palsy. How was it that these same children grew up to become neurotic, ulcerous, under it? She herself had been just like them; there was no excitement, for the little bourgeois girl from the mine, like buying something. When did it turn into an activity that drained without replacement; when did the faces poked across the counters for their money’s worth become so clearly marked as faces possessing nothing of worth? What made you want things so fiercely and meaningfully as a child, and then come to a time when you bought without lust, out of need, and never out of wanting, which was a different thing, stemming from needs spiritual and unconditioned? One did not know when the lust died, for first it was put aside by sex and the tremendous effort gathered together by even the meanest of living creatures to blossom or feather, to put out a perfume or a fascinating way of talking, to stamp a love-dance in a forest or walk down a street with a message in the way each knee brushed past the other. And only when this was over and accomplished did you have eyes for other desires again, and suddenly discover that of all that was displayed on the counters and hanging on shelves and set out under soft lights — of all that was offered to make you want, there was nothing that would not break or clutter or occupy falsely where it had been done without.

Every day, no matter what she was doing, she looked out at the sea and saw the porpoises passing. She had no idea that they were going to be passing, but when she looked out, there they went. She had this. It had survived. Neither petrol fumes nor phenobarbital, book-keeping nor all-night drinking parties had finished it. Living creatures came by out there in the wide water and she was able to know it. She never thought about it. But there they were. Some days they were going along steadily, each movement the length of their bodies through the swell. Sometimes they cut in formation through a sloping wall of glassy grey. Occasionally one shook himself terrier-free out of the water, made the arabesque dictated by his own weight, and splashed into it again. She had no means of communication with them except whatever it was that made her know when they were there; there was no reason to suppose that they did not have the same sort of knowledge about her.

Tom had assumed that she would take Morgan with her on holiday but she had protested, disintegrating into a kind of helplessness that forced Tom to plan for her, all the time with a feeling of disbelief because he knew there was always so little you could do for Jessie. He would say to her, the morning after she had argued adamantly, “Well, what have you decided?” and she would say listlessly, “I suppose he’ll come.”

He looked at her and away from her, dismayed, searching. He made as if to speak and then said something else. “What’d he find to do with himself here, that’s the trouble. I don’t mind having him—”

“No, I know. He’ll have to come.” And the night before she had explained how impossible it was for her to contemplate a month with Morgan sitting across the breakfast table — the little girls were companions for one another, what on earth would she do with him all day?

“If only Boaz would make up his mind whether he’s going to Moçambique or not.” (The reasons for Boaz’s indecision became suddenly irrelevant; it was annoying of him not to be able to be counted on for his offer to provide Morgan with just the right sort of camping holiday, complete with the mixture of adventure and self-reliance that would be good for him.)

“Well, even if it’s off with Boaz, maybe we could get some other boy to stay here with Morgan. Then I could manage.”

“No, you’ll never be able to get any work done. You’ll be nannying all the time and cursing me, quite rightly. They’ll drive you crazy.”

But the more she showed herself obstinately bowed to accept the inevitability of Morgan, the more Tom felt constrained to find some way out for her since she made it clear she couldn’t help herself. He had already made a great mistake, when the whole business of Morgan accompanying her had first come up, of suggesting that it would be a good opportunity to talk to him a bit, to get a little nearer to him in the easiest manner, since they would be set apart, alone together, from the smaller children without any other grown-ups around to claim her. But apparently the pursuit of Morgan was dropped; or perhaps it was so intense that she couldn’t face him alone with it. Tom didn’t know. Anyway, she reacted so strongly to Tom’s suggestion, jeering at a picture of herself subject to Morgan’s anecdotes, in which he was not interested and to which she was not listening, that Tom didn’t pursue it. In the end, without any actual decision being come to, she left for the house at the sea as soon as her month’s notice at the nursing home was worked, and a few days before Morgan was due to come home from school. The Moçambique expedition was still up in the air. One day Boaz was packing and talking practically, as if preparing to go, then there were signs of highly emotional talks with his wife, a charged atmosphere of things in balance, and his departure was unlikely.

Tom always wrote to Jessie about Morgan, just as if she always remembered to ask about him in her letters. That was one of the corrupting, wonderful things about Tom: he pretended for her when the real thing was painfully lacking in herself. He pitied her in her strength of wilfulness, her difficulty in pretending to herself. She did not resent this pity, unintrusive, so delicately expressed. She wondered what she did for him, of the same secrecy and necessity. Even between Bruno and her mother there had once been signs of things like this; it was only in the worst, last few years of his life that everything they knew of one another was emptied out upon the table, as a bankrupt turns out his pockets so that you may see for yourself the worthless miscellany with which he is left.

Once she had begun to make preparations to go away that did not include provision for Morgan, the thought that she ought to be taking him left her. It was as if there had never been any question that he might come. He was in her mind, not very insistently, sometimes as the result of some sight or object in the house or on the beach. One morning she was walking along the firm shoreline near the hotel with the little girls, after a swim. The thud of her heels went through her head; drops of water flew from her thighs. They passed the slender figure of a young man fishing, making a loop behind him and his mess of bait, newspaper, and rumpled sand. As they came down to the water’s edge again on the other side, she was aware that she was walking, now, as a woman does when a man is watching her. Later Elisabeth wandered over to the same young man and got talking; she was given the present of a dead sardine. When Jessie and the children went up from the beach at midday the fisherman was squatting over his equipment, and as she made some casual remark in acknowledgement of the present, he looked up. She saw that the man she had been conscious of as she walked away from him over the sand was a boy, a boy Morgan’s age. “That’s nothing,” he was saying to the children’s enthusiasm and her polite admiration of his catch. “My dad and I came down at half-term, just for the weekend, mind you, and we took back thirty-four shad and a small barracuda …”

When she took off her wet bathing suit at the house she noticed that the dark shine of sunburn was beginning to cover the map of tiny red veins she had on her right leg, near the knee. It could scarcely be seen at all. There was the satisfaction of some small reprieve. She looked over her shoulder at her naked back and backside and legs in the mirror. How long? Five years? Six? (What did the bodies of women in their forties look like?) A few years and she wouldn’t be able to look at this any more.

About her face she had different thoughts. Clem’s reproaches made her realise that at home she was constantly composing her face, not just with the re-touches of lipstick or powder at different times through the day, but also with the confrontation with her own expression which these bits of touching-up before a mirror brought. Here sometimes the whole day went by before she saw her face again, once she had brushed her hair after swimming. Her face was left to itself. She wondered how one might look if one let a whole month go by without that check on what one’s face is saying that comes automatically with a glance in a mirror. What extraordinary things there might be in a face naked, open, weathered by an absolute freedom to take on the cast of feelings as rain and sun and wind move through the sky. At the end of it, a look might have come into the open that had never been allowed out before. The unguarded moment would have taken over altogether; nose, mouth, and, most of all, eyes.

Even when a man does something out of character it often turns out that what he really is has not failed to give the venture an unmistakable twist somewhere. Bruno Fuecht had bought his plot and house “on the Coast” with the apparent intention of any of the other mine officials who looked forward to life in a cosy community centred round the bowling green and the golf course, one day, past sixty. But as it turned out, the development of the township had come at the other end of the beach, and his house, after all, remained alone almost at the limit of the opposite boundary.

If Jessie walked up the beach in the direction of the hotel and the other houses there were people on the sand, fishermen, bathers and dogs. To the left of the path that led from the house to the beach there were no houses and no one came by except an occasional Indian fisherman from somewhere back in the cane. A juicy-leaved plant trailed right down on to the sands. On windy days she sat among the dunes where it grew, private and quiet. On other days she liked the firm-packed sand near the water, or the inlets among the loops of sand and rocks where the salt-greasy rocks provided a strangely comfortable kind of furniture, places to lean against, ledges to put things on, and also, at eye-level of a half-closed eye, crevices filled with the minute and dependent life of the sea, sealed until the tide opened it to food and life again. Each wrinkle in the rock lined with these crumbs of being gave not the anthropomorphic pleasure of more highly-developed living things, with an existence that a human being always guesses at in simplified terms of his own, but the pleasure of pure form. Volute, convolute, spheroid, they were order, perfect order at the extreme end of a process the other end of which was the perfect disintegration of the atom bomb. They were so small and fragile that now and then Jessie would crush one with a fingernail.

The children liked to lead her up the other end of the beach, towards people. (It was there that they had met the fisherman.) And sometimes she herself, needing nobody, free of everybody after days on the deserted beach, would find an impersonal warmth in the casual presence of people, simply people, she did not know. Women sat with their legs straight out before them in a V, gazing at the sea; they were really sitting down, after a long time. Young girls and their men lay on their faces, prostrate like worshippers. When she was among these groups and knots of people, isolated from each other by the strange perspectives of the sea, whose light, suffusing the light of the sun, creates an effect of distance, so that a figure twenty yards off seems far away, just as he is already out of hearing because of the sound of the sea — when she was somewhere on the sand among them, her consciousness was a plot without a theme. The simple narrative of the beach occupied her, the link-by-link happenings. A child got into a rubber canoe, was launched into a pool, and slowly overturned at the same point every time the preparations were repeated. A man cast his line for a while from one place; then, after a certain interval, moved up somewhere else. A woman in a leghorn hat with a yellow ribbon smoked and talked to a man with a bald head who, at some pause to which she seemed to return again and again (as the child in the canoe capsized again and again), took her hand and, stretching it out the limp length of her white arm to his knee, ran his own palm in a smoothing gesture up from her wrist to shoulder. A young servant in a kitchen-boy suit came down to the beach from one of the houses with a tray of bread spread with marmite. He sauntered to the children with the canoe, pausing to gaze, almost sniff, not so much at the sea as at the whole beach; his strong bowed legs, arms and head were very black against the unbleached cotton suit with its loose shorts, red band round the neck and sleeves, and ridiculous belt sewn high up at the back of the blouse. The children gathered round him. He stood talking with them in Zulu, eating, too, as they shared out. When they had finished, he went dreamily up the sand again, looking round, lifting his head into the breeze. He was dispossessed of everything but a moment of superb idleness.

At night Jessie was lethargic after dinner and felt she could have gone to bed when the children did, but by ten o’clock she was enjoyably awake and passing, with the silence and confidence of one who is alone, between the warm darkness where the sea was breathing, on the grass, to the open living-room, where she read late. One night the telephone rang — there was a telephone, on a party line, but she knew no one to ring her up, and though she had idly noted that the house’s particular code was three rings, she expected so little to hear it that, had it come at some other time, among the other combinations of rings that she had ceased to register, she probably would not have noticed it. But the telephone was only vocal at certain times of day, when the village was conducting its affairs, and in the early evening, when trunk calls were cheaper; it always fell silent after nine o’clock at night. On this night it rang quite firmly through the rooms, like a visitor who strides in calling out “Anybody home?” Jessie thought it must be a mistake and lifted her head, not putting her book aside. It was three rings, all right; she got up and went to the kitchen, where the black box hung on the wall. When she picked up the receiver there was a confusion of crackling, faint jumbled voices and distant ringing. She tried to get in touch with the exchange, by hanging up, turning the little crank at the side of the box and then shouting “Hullo? Hullo?” into the receiver again, all in the self-conscious manner of a city person unused to such contraptions. But there was no response and she quickly got impatient and went back to read. The book was Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man, a book that, that year, people were reading who, without distinctions of worth, had last year read interpretations of Buddhism, and the year before Simone Weil, or Ouspensky. They were read, quite often, in the same half-secret, deprecating way in which the same people, when they were twenty, had read treatises on sex (The Function of the Orgasm), for people between thirty and forty tend to have toward the meaning of their existence the anxious, suppressed urgency which at twenty they felt about sex. The real doubters and the mere consolation-seekers often go to the same sources; and it is the consolation-seekers who usually find something that will serve them — and if they do not, go on to another and yet another source, finding consolation in the activity of the search, if nothing else. The real doubters include those for whom politics has gone as deep as sex, but the consolation-seekers are not intelligent enough to have sought any kind of discipline outside themselves; they have never wanted to change the world: only to get their sweet lick of it. This was how Jessie defined these categories for herself. But the Chardin book was nothing for the consolation-seekers; only the title would console them, with its assurance of distinction and uniqueness. And she was reading it, here, without any of those spurious thrills of release and comfort by which a desperate flux of personality gives itself away; her mind followed the movement of the writer’s mind in a spirit of enquiry that stretched, muscle by muscle, to keep up with his. She went along with the book, did not scuttle back to her own little hole with the first scrap she could use in some much unpicked and re-made rag, part-garment, part-nest, part-shroud, that she had been putting together.

On the beach in the daylight she read novels, even some poetry. Some of the books she had brought with her from home were no use at all; there is no way of telling before you live in a place, in the way it creates, what you will be able to read there. One or two things were dead right; bringing Conrad was inspired, of course. How perfectly the book and the day you looked up to from it merged when the book was Victory! (Tom had put it in for her, bought it in one of those students’ “classics” editions, neat and small, on India paper.) A novel by a West Indian writer was fine, too; she liked to read about these negroes whose way of life had a familiarity but brought none of the pain with which she was indicted and identified when she read novels about home. There was also a paper-back Thomas Mann translation. She had never read Mann in what she thought of as her “great reading days”; halfway through The Magic Mountain he had been put aside as a bore, old-fashioned. Now she was making the discovery that the massive style was not a Victorian catalogue of “character” and furniture but a terrifying descent through the “safety” of middle-class trappings to the individual anarchy and ideological collapse lying at their centre. Even a comfortable description of a man’s walk with a dog: “It is good to walk like this in the early morning, with senses rejuvenated and spirit cleansed by the night’s long healing draught …” fell away suddenly under foot like a rotten mahogany floorboard—“You indulge in the illusion that your life is habitually steady, simple, concentrated, and contemplative, that you belong entirely to yourself … whereas the truth is that a human being is condemned to improvisation and morally lives from hand to mouth, all the time.”

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

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

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

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

“How did you find me?”

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

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

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

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

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

Fifteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tom should have told you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gideon appeared in the doorway that led from the dining-room to the verandah. It was nearly six o’clock. He tugged at his ear and shuddered wearily. Without speaking (she must still be asleep inside) he came over and squatted on the steps. He did not seem to see the sea but deflected the course of the ants on the steps with his shoe and gazed with abstracted attention round the verandah roof, as if he had some professional interest in the construction or the moths and praying mantises clinging there.

“You slept five hours.” Confronted with him, Jessie was relieved, now that the moment was here, of the difficulty of it.

He smiled, not at her. “Good God. I was very, very tired.”

“The brandy’s where you left it, in the living-room. Bring the gin — in the cupboard, there.” She got up and went into the kitchen for soda and ice. The floor had been newly polished with thick red polish that smeared off like lipstick; there was a strong smell of fly-repellent. There was something of the hospital matron in Jason’s merciless insistence on the cruder and more uncomfortable aspects of cleanliness. The lawn-mower was chattering between the back of the house and the track.

Gideon poured them each a drink, and, settling down in the chair where she had sat all afternoon, she said to him, “Where are you going?”

“Oh.” He had his glass in his hand but he put it down again between his feet, where he squatted. “That’s just it.” In a moment he picked up the glass and drank it off, as if he were alone in a drinking-place. “We were not too sure. Then yesterday we found ourselves somewhere around here” (how far does that cover, Jessie wondered) “and Ann had the bright idea of looking you up.”

“Harewood Road isn’t exactly somewhere around here,” she said. It was the address of the house in town.

He gave his chuckle. She noticed again his way of talking to himself rather than to you. “I’m well aware of that,” he said. Asking for an explanation was so out of character for her; he appeared to save her the embarrassment of the attempt by ignoring it.

She said quite gently, “I don’t know why you came to me, you know,” and for the first time he looked through the offhand impersonality of his manner and was about to speak when Elisabeth ran round from the garden and stopped, at the sight of a visitor, to sidle instead of tear up the steps. She knew Gideon Shibalo from home, of course, though she had forgotten that at lunch-time her mother had said that Ann was in the house, and another friend, the man who drew their pictures. He said, “Hullo, it’s Madge, eh?” and she gave him a routine smile for grown-ups as if he were right. She felt her mother’s eyes on her in a way that she was still a bit small to interpret; Madge or Clem would have understood that their presence was in some way restrictive to the grown-ups at that moment. Her mother said in a voice specially for her, surprised, enthusiastic: “Where you been?”

“Mowering with Jason.”

“And the girls?”

“Gone to find lucky-beans on the road.”

“It’s time for your bath, love.”

“Awwwrh … let me wait till they come, I want to bath with them …” and as she saw on her mother’s face softening and then capitulation, her tone of growling complaint changed swiftly, within the sentence, to cheerful sweetness.

“I’ll go back and do a bit more, shall I?”

Madge and Clem came noisily through the house. “Shh, someone’s sleeping,” said Jessie, but they ignored her, and the visitor too, being old enough to find it very difficult to remember to greet guests, and irresistible to imitate them crudely, and giggle, once safe in bedroom or bathroom, at any real or fancied peculiarities they might have. “We’ve found hundreds. There’s another big tree full we found, further up than yesterday. We went miles,” Clem boasted ecstatically to Elisabeth. Elisabeth was impressed and greedy. “—No wait, not those, that one I want for myself.” Clem held out of her reach one of the black pods that had been emptied from her skirt on to the verandah. “Here, I don’t want them—” said Madge, suddenly satiated. She dumped her whole gleaning on Elisabeth and began examining the marks left in her hot palm by a handful of loose beans. The hard little red beads with their black eyes rolled all over the verandah. Gideon said to one of these unidentified pretty female children, “You should make a necklace out of them. You get a sharp needle, and you make a hole through each one …” “Oh yes, I know,” said Madge, charmed at once by the attention. “You can buy them in the street in Johannesburg. You see African women selling them. And you can use them for eyes for things; Elisabeth’s got a monkey like that.”

Jessie was occupied for the next hour with seeing that the children got bathed and preparing dinner. Jason pared the comforting cabochon of each potato down to many deeply-cut facets and left them soaking in cold water; he also cut green beans into shreds and steeped them. Then he waited for her to come and do what she would with these materials, being very helpful in the most unobtrusive yet not self-effacing manner. He understood the names of common objects that they worked with and the verbs for certain tasks.

She saw him through the V made by the double poles of the pawpaw tree outside the kitchen window, toe-ing up the slope at a run with the lawn mower, and she called to him. He mowed always either in blue overalls or, as now, naked to the waist, in his usual shorts; but whichever the outfit, he had the look of one of those young men in training for some athletic event who loped around the city streets at home on summer evenings — the look of listening to some smoothly-running inner mechanism. While she trimmed meat she heard him draw water from the tap outside and in a few minutes he appeared, freshly washed, and in a clean, flapping shirt. They had got on all right without words, and now she felt — part of the intrusion she saw in everything — that the fact that she now needed to be able to speak more than naming the objects she touched was the end of something, even of another kind of privacy.

“Visitors,” she said to him. She held up her hand, spreading five fingers. “Visitors. Five at the table. All right?” “Five,” he confirmed shyly, in English.

She went between the kitchen and the rest of the house, coming to linger outside for a few minutes now and then. The children were there, after the bath, so she and Gideon were in a truce of their chatter. The city ritual of evening drinks had fallen away for her while she was alone. (Sometimes she chilled a two-and-sixpenny bottle of white wine and drank some of it at lunch — the rest did for cooking fish.) He filled her glass when he replenished his own and she took it up again each time without remark. It was the hour of the day she never missed; half-involved, along with him, in the children’s game, she saw the surface of the water gliding shining over depths which were already dark, so that the sea was not a colour but a gaze, intense, gathering, glancing. A long bluff of beige cloud turned smoky mauve, like a distant prospect of land. From the point where the coastline took a backward bend and disappeared behind the firs that marked the community, the coloured sky began to thin and blur as if she saw it through breath upon a window-pane. Vaporisation perfectly dissolved this world, eddying in always from the right. When it could no longer be seen you knew that it had reached the dune; the house; the verandah. It became palpable though not visible in a darkness without distance that made sea and sky and the arm’s length of blackness all one. She liked to put her hand out into it, like water (the children had turned on the light); she said to Gideon, a little stimulated by the gin, and belligerently friendly now, “I notice you never once looked.”

“What at—?” He had just triumphantly broken his inquisitor (Clem) in the game where you must not answer “Yes” or “No” to any question. “Now you, Mummy, your turn,” Clem hammered. “He’s the winner so he must be the one to ask. Come on, Mummy!”

The presence of a man rounded out the group into a family; other evenings she had not been expected to join in the little girls’ games: they had almost forgotten about her, sitting quietly in the dark near them. Once or twice she and Shibalo got quite caught up in the nonsense, and argued animatedly about some point of fairness. The children wavered between admiration for his skill at beating them and despair at losing. Elisabeth became what was known among them as “cheeky”, flinging herself at Gideon, hiding her face so that no one knew whether she was crying or laughing. “Boy, if my brother was here he would’ve beat you,” Clemence jeered wamingly. “Just see if my brother Morgan was here.” Jessie looked at the little girls with a break of curiosity; she had not thought that Morgan had his place in their scheme of things.

They had dinner without Ann—“Should we call her?” Jessie deferred to Shibalo, and he said calmly, “I think the longer she sleeps …” They had drunk enough to meet as the two people they were, independent of the situation that presented each to the other in a particular light. They were amused by the children and linked in being adult. Jason brought in the food and for a moment seemed bewildered, not knowing where to put it down. As he served Gideon he mumbled some greeting and Gideon answered him absently. Jessie had the sensation of brushing over something with only a twinge of awareness. When the children had gone to bed — or at least were out of the way in their room for the night — they continued to sit on at the table. There was the air of the confidential imposed upon them, like people lingering in a deserted café.

“Yes, you come here for a bit, you bring your children, you go back to town again—” He spoke as someone does who takes it into his head to contemplate for a moment, without interest, out of his own deadlock, a kind of life that he has not taken notice of before.

“This is the first time I’ve been here since I was a child,” she said. “It isn’t my house. I haven’t got houses here and there.”

“I had an idea …” he excused himself in careless pretence.

“You had the wrong idea,” she said, matching up to him with a grin.

He gave a deprecating, culpable sniff of a laugh. “I’ve had a lot of ideas—” Her existence was dropped aside, he returned to reality, and paused after the first phrase, searching for accuracy. He weighed his hands in slow jerks in the air, he was looking for the right shape of gesture, and as he brought them up to either temple they became, while he talked, first blinkers, and then curved into a frame: “—You get it set, marking it off for yourself from the rest that’s going on. But that’s not real, there’s no place where things really are contained at right angles, a tree doesn’t stop at a line drawn down the middle. You land up miles — miles outside. Where you think isn’t where you act. When you get going, get moving, begin to push things around, smash things up, it’s not there.”

“You still in with Congress?” she said.

“I’m still in Congress.”

She said, “You know, all that — you forget all about it here.” She laughed.

“Oh yes?”

“Yes, I mean it …?” She was smiling at him, fiddling with things on the table, drawing his thought harmlessly out into the open. “The only black man I can’t speak to, and the whites I don’t speak to either — I just look at them sometimes, like looking at a Boudin …” The tension of holding the intruders at arm’s length produced the impulse towards a careless openness. She lazily said what she pleased whether he (and she herself) liked it or not. “I can tell you it’s true that you could probably live here without thinking of it right until they came up from the cane with knives and sticks and finished it off without giving you time to give it a thought.”

“You could?” he conceded, half-challengingly, half-ironically. The whites he knew never put themselves in this sort of context; it was always as if he and they were considering a third kind of person there. They looked at each other and laughed. When she said to him again now, “I don’t know why you came to me,” he only leaned across the table and took a banana and answered in the dry, amiable insolence between them, “Didn’t think you’d mind so much.” And added, almost with sympathy, “Is it because of him?” He meant Boaz.

“Has there been something final?” she said, forced to ask, slumping in her chair.

“They were talking day after day. I hadn’t seen her for two days. Then she phoned. She was in a hell of a state. All of us—” He had the face suddenly of a man who sits thrown against the wall, open to blows, given up, his only defence do-what-you-like-to-me. “Then she picked me up in the car.”

“When was this?” Jessie was as impersonal as a clerk filling in some form.

“Thursday — Friday. A week ago.”

While he was speaking Ann had wandered in, her hands pushing up the sleeves of a dressing-gown as she clasped her elbows. She came forward and then paused, following with slightly open mouth what they were saying as if she had walked in on a scene that she knew and was listening to hear that all went as it should. She looked far more exhausted than before she had slept, and held her eyebrows high and frowning.

“A week ago,” said Jessie. She looked at them both. They felt the meaning, surprise, rise in her; they ignored it, like people pretending modesty.

“Do they know where you are?”

“No … Well, no.”

“… we’ve been on the move,” Ann spoke. She pushed up a crumpled table-napkin and slid on to the table, supporting herself with one leg on a chair. “I see there are some towels in the cupboard. Can I have a bath?”

Jessie got up practically, but before she went through the door, she said it: “You really can’t stay here, you know.” She was looking at them both kindly, truthfully, doing away with artificial casualness.

Ann said, as if it were a matter of interest and had nothing to do with intentions, “Why not?”

“The boy — for one thing. I don’t know what someone like that would make of it”

Ann burst out laughing. “But since when would you care about a thing like that?” She was surprised into objective amusement, offering it as a reassurance to Jessie about herself.

In the bedroom that had not been used until that afternoon Jessie hauled down towels. “Only one of them’s a decent size — I didn’t bring a lot.” She put them on one of the rumpled beds. “I bought these the day you came, last year; my only preparations,” she said with a smile.

“I suppose we can stay the night?” said Ann.

Jessie sat down on the bed, holding her bare ankle. “You see, I don’t know you at all, Ann, it’s just as if you walked in here for the first time. Boaz says to me, you know how she is, she wouldn’t do this, she would do that, but, as I keep telling him, I don’t know at all how you are.”

The girl had the open, dazed look of someone who emerges from one of those dark journeys at a fun-fair that really only progress through a canvas tunnel hung with ordinary objects like feather-mops and clinging cloth, but that establish a link between fearful fantasy and the ordinary.

She stood there unembarrassed, only a little unsure. “I suppose I don’t think about people the way you do. I mean we’d slept in the car two nights and I thought of you being just here, on your own, with this house.”

It was fair enough. People like themselves kept open house in a particular way; it was nothing to do with “social” life and there was no regulation of times and days: somebody needed a place to work or to be alone in, a place to live through a certain stage in his life — one granted it or claimed it according to circumstances. Yet Jessie was strongly aware that she was not “just there”, and the two could not be “just there” in this shelter with her. This was not the old house, the Stilwell house where life was various. This place was completely inhabited, for the present, by her being; couldn’t they sense it? — she thought: it must fill the place, like a smell. If they came to her here, it must be through some special and deeply personal connection with that being.

She fought the idea, because the instinct to protect herself made her want to prevent Ann from discovering it. She stopped herself from saying. “But why me? Why to me?”—with its reminder to the girl that Boaz was the one she, Jessie, knew. She said, returning to the observer’s tone, mildly curious, “A week. Where, for God’s sake?”

“Oh, all over the show …” Ann dragged a small case on to the bed, opened it on wild disorder — suddenly the room where it must have been packed existed between them, the room where all the stringed and bulbous instruments leaned against the walls, and Boaz sat, bare feet under the table; Morgan’s old room—“Gid had some friend near Messina, we went there, then we thought of Basutoland, I don’t know, any old where,” she took a piece of clothing out, looked confused, “—where’s the top, dammit? — He’s a sweetie, this chap Mapulane, but of course it was impossible, he’s got a jolly nice little house and they were marvellous but it’s in a reserve … Then we thought we’d go to another friend of his, that’s the one in Basutoland, and I’ve never seen Basutoland anyway. Well, that didn’t work out …” She laughed; her hands began to turn over the contents of the case again, slowly.

“Was there some sort of decision behind this? D’you know where you’re going?” Jessie asked.

The girl picked up the bath-towel, a tin of talcum and a packet of cigarettes. “I don’t know what happened. The whole thing was finished. It felt O.K., really. And then while we — Boaz — were talking about other things, about ordinary things, beginning to be ordinary again — you know, just hanging around in the room together talking and tidying up a bit and so on — I began to feel scared. I can’t explain it. I began to get absolutely panicky, and I couldn’t tell him, I would’ve felt such a fool.”

“I’d better phone them and say you’re all right.”

“Tom wasn’t there. He’d gone to spend a few days with his father.”

“I know. I had a letter from him at the old boy’s. But he’ll be back by now.”

“No bath for two days. Just bits of washes in clean, A.A.-approved rest-rooms while my driver took petrol.” Her face was blank for a moment, then she laughed.

Jessie passed through the dining-room, seeing the outline of Gideon sitting smoking on the dark verandah. She went into the kitchen and, for the first time, hesitant, took up the motions of using the telephone again. The exchange told her that there would be a two-hour delay before the call came through, but Jason had only just finished washing up and closed the kitchen door behind him when the telephone rang and there was Tom’s voice at the end of a tunnel. It was not the Tom to whom she wrote the letters that belonged to the mainstream of timeless life, but the Tom of their segmentary everyday existence among the bobbing crowd of demands that matter singly and momentarily. He called, tinny through the megaphone of distance, “I was just writing to you, I got back yesterday”, and she said “I know”, meaning that she knew his news. “They turned up here this morning. They’re here.” There was a second’s awkward silence. “Well, that’s something.”

“They’re here now.”

“Are they all right?”

“Yes, all right. I thought I’d better let Boaz …”

“Yes, well, he couldn’t think where they could go, that’s the thing. You understand …”

She knew how he must be looking; she knew what his face must be indicating that he didn’t need to say. Although they could not see each other, familiarity made their communication as elliptic as if they had been face to face.

“The trouble was, I wasn’t here, you know, but Morgan …”

She said, “Morgan what?” losing his voice.

“Morgan, I said. I was at the old chap’s but Morgan stayed at home. He was here. I don’t know how much — anyway, apparently she just suddenly announced she was going, couldn’t stay. Everything was all right before; only the night before. So I thought. Well, Boaz’ll have a load off his mind, he …”

“But why to me?” she cupped the receiver and shouted an urgent whisper. “I said why to me?” Her whole body was clenched for an answer, as if by some miracle, or, better still, by some good sense, he would give her a simple answer that would let her out, have her rid of them.

She heard him laugh. A tiny hooter bleated and a voice said, right in her ear, “Three minutes.” “Well thank Christ,” he was saying. “It’ll be all right. I mean they’re all right there, no one … We thought they’d be picked up any day. It’s safe there, isn’t it?”

“I’ve told them they can’t stay.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know. Look, darling, it’s no joke. Boaz is only worried about one thing now. Understand? Jessie? If she gets picked up … Jessie?”

But it seemed that the police had nothing to do with it, nothing to do with what she was thinking of, nothing to do with them.

“I can’t believe in it,” she said, and he said, “I didn’t get it — what did you say?” and she couldn’t say “I can’t believe that that’s the danger.”

“Morgan sends his love.” The change in the voice told her that the child must have come up and be standing by the telephone.

“Yes. And mine. Don’t put him on the phone, I want to talk to you …” but Morgan’s presence with Tom at the other end of the line, and the presence of the others (she could hear someone moving through the dining-room on the other side of the door) at her end, made it impossible. Disjointed trivialities filled the last minute. “I’ll write to you tonight,” she called while he shouted goodbye, but his yielding, embarrassed “All right” was cut off, leaving her to it.

Sixteen

She did not write a letter, but unrest, like the excitement of an unfinished discussion, invaded deep sleep sometime toward morning. A disjointed dialogue went on, first in the eternal second where a dream unrolls and is comprehended totally and instantly, then slowed down to the more ponderous comprehension of the wakeful mind in the ordinary dimension of minutes passing. Have I been awake ten minutes, an hour? At first, though ferreting fully awake behind closed eyes in her sleeping body, she did not know, but gradually the pace that bore the night along became recognisable and measurable without the clock face, as animals feel the pace of the seasons.

Boaz is only worried about one thing.

How impossible, how unfair for Boaz that the time should come in a situation like his when the one thing that matters—the reality — gets flung aside by something external and irrelevant. A line in a statute book has more authority than the claims of one man’s love or another’s. All claims of natural feeling are overridden alike by a line in a statute book that takes no account of humanness, that recognises neither love nor respect nor jealousy nor rivalry nor compassion nor hate — nor any human attitude whatever where there are black and white together. What Boaz felt towards Ann; what Gideon felt towards Ann; what Ann felt about Boaz; what she felt for Gideon — all this that was real and rooted in life was void before the clumsy words that reduced the delicacy and towering complexity of living to a race theory. It was not a matter of being a man or a woman, with a mind and a sex, a body and a spirit — it was a matter of qualifying for a licence to make use of these things with which you happened to be born. It was all a routine matter, like the brass dog-tag put away in a cupboard or the third-party-risk insurance disc stuck on the car’s windscreen every year.

Did Boaz worry about the routine matter (“only one thing now”) because he loved her and didn’t want to see her go to jail? Because he had brought her here and felt responsible for her anyway? Like everything else personal, his reasons were of no importance. The routine matter was something they all flew instantly in their minds to prevent reaching its conclusion; the external reason that differences and even indifference were dropped for, as for war or natural disaster.

But it was still the one thing that didn’t count. Not between Ann and Boaz and Gideon. Not between Ann and Boaz and Gideon and Tom and herself. Not in that house and not in this. I don’t want to do anything because of a dog licence — she saw the script streaming under her hand; at the same time Tom reading it, answering. — Or because I just happened to be here in this house. Real disinterested kindness is the only sort that’s any use and it comes on impulse. How often in a whole life does one really have that impulse? — She was completely awake now, inhabiting her body from the weight of the cast-off clothes on her feet to the slightly mouldy smell of the pillow under the left side of her head. — She thought with clarity and for herself alone: all other forms of kindness are only actions performed to conform with an image of oneself as a decent, generous person. Like any other image, you get confined in it … from the limit of clothes weighing on toes to the other limit where ear and cheek end at the pillow.

In the morning Ann was up early. Jessie found her already sitting in the sun on the grass.

“There’s something out there. I’ve been watching. Swimming out there. Dolphins.” She was all admiration at everything, as if she had just arrived.

“Porpoises.”

“They leap right out of the water!”

“Yes, we see them every day.”

The sea was some marvellous shining creature that had come up into the world overnight, light streaming off its back. In the radiance they both had the grimace that becomes a smile. Raucous brown birds with yellow beaks were strutting, flying and alighting; their activity seemed to stem from the figures of the two women, as if the birds had been released from their hands.

The girl’s outstretched fingers held the tousled hair pushed up from her face; it was smooth, filled out in contour again; at her age exhaustion or conflict leave no mark — like visible new growth the tendrils of a warm flush of blood under the skin reached up her neck. She wore the short cotton gown she had worn so often on Sundays at home.

“Where d’you swim?”

“Oh anywhere. There are sharks everywhere.” They laughed.

“Do you want to go down?”

“Oh I must have one swim. — Do you go?” she said, meaning at that time of day.

“Often.”

“Ah, it’s heavenly …” she said, as if she would fly, or melt.

Jessie lent her a bathing suit. They met again in a minute, on the verandah; Gideon was in the bathroom. They went barefoot, quietly, down through the wet undergrowth, breaking wet spider-webs, and when they were almost on the beach a small figure thudded into them from behind. “I wanted to come!” Madge was panting, her face thick with reproach. “Well, you have come,” said Jessie. “I wanted you to wait for me to get my costume.” “It doesn’t matter, you can swim without it.”

Ann was not claimed by the interruption; Jessie was reminded, this is the way she sees me, always in the context of demands she doesn’t know, always in the acceptance that I myself, my single being, have quite naturally ceased to exist. But the thought fell away before the sensation of chill sand underfoot and the light-headedness induced by the cool, huge air drawn in on an empty stomach. They swam for about half an hour and came up cheerful from the cold water. Jessie said to Ann after breakfast, “Look, Gideon’ll have to sleep in the living-room. This Jason may talk to his friends. He has to come into the rooms to clean up, I can’t keep him out …” Her tone was sensible, planning, and Ann was quick to catch it. She said, biting at a thread of skin beside her thumb-nail, “But what about last night?”

“I pulled the things off your bed and dumped them on the spare in my room.”

Ann laughed.

“We don’t know about these old colonels around here,” said Jessie. “We don’t want some local Ku-Klux posse riding up — you know?”

Ann said, “Oh, all right then,” thinking that she would tell Gideon about the arrangement when they were alone, but Jessie came upon him smoking in the living-room and explained at once, “That divan’ll have to be your bed, I was just saying to Ann. I don’t trust friend Jason, or rather the people his friends may work for.”

“What sort of people?”

“I don’t know them by name, but I know them well enough.”

“We’ll push off, Jessie,” he said, almost affectionately, completely reasonable. “No, we’ll push off.”

She picked up Victory where it lay, open, page-down, on the carpet, and put it on a chair.

The radio was playing (Gideon must have fixed it; it had not worked since Jessie’s arrival), smoke hung in the air, there were litchi pips in an ashtray. When she came back from the beach the first few days she always found Gideon and Ann in the living-room, the shape of their presence hollowing it out after the passing of a morning there. They greeted her ordinarily, concluding for the time being heaven knew what long, inarticulate, meaningful discussion, what private silences. They had invaded her; but she stood in the doorway and felt herself shut out by the self-sufficiency of lovers: she had forgotten it. They drew her back that much, each time, into the temporal world, took her back from the self that persisted in continuity to what could be lost. For a moment she was the one who had nowhere to go.

Soon they began to spend hours out on the grassy mound in front of the house, and even to appear on the beach. Alone or led along by the children, sometimes with Jessie, they passed loop after loop of rocks and sand and lay on one of the small deserted beaches that must have looked exactly the same when Vasco da Gama sailed past in the fifteenth century. There was the feeling — of all fecund, tropical places where plant and insect life is so profuse — not of hostility to human beings, but of the indifference that man feels as hostility. Here there was no account taken of anyone who walked upright on two legs; the close groves of strelitzia palm between the arms of two rocky promontories were impenetrable — any sailor shipwrecked here in the service of the East India Company could not have got up from the beach to the interior that way, but the slim grey monkeys, tossing themselves from fronded head to head to eat the juicy spikes of the white and flame-blue flower sticking out there, found it an ordinary thoroughfare. A dead seagull on the sand was busy as a factory with the activity of enormous flies, conveyor-belts of ants, and some sort of sand-flea that made a small storm in the air above and about the body. Butterflies fingered the rocks and drifted out to sea. Dead fish washed up among smashed shells were pulled apart and dragged away to their holes by crabs. There was not nothing here, but everything.

No other person came. Ann went into the village one day and brought back a pair of swimming trunks for Gideon and gradually he found himself doing what she did, lying for hours as if he, too, had been washed up on this shore, like the fish or the seagull. This abandonment to the natural world was something that seemed to come so easily to the two women; even while he succumbed to it he watched them with some kind of alienation and impatience — it belonged to a leisure and privilege long taken for granted. If he sat about doing nothing it was always a marking-time, an hiatus between two activities or desires. It was a matter of despair, exhaustion or frustration. You lay on your bed in your room and drank because you could not do what you wanted to do. Outside in the township everybody, from the beggar who dragged himself across the road with bits of motor-car tyre over his stumps to the B.A. graduate who found himself a sinecure advising white manufacturers on how to tempt the blacks to buy more, was fully occupied every hour of his life with the struggle to wrest a share of living — and that meant position, responsibility, respect and power, as well as money — from the whites. All time and breath and strength were used up to compete with their privilege.

“How long’d you been here before we came? A couple of weeks?” he said to Jessie one afternoon.

“That’s right.” She was reading, some little cotton rag of child’s clothing keeping the sun off her head. Ann was in the water.

“What’d you do? Same as now?”

She leaned on the book and smiled. “I was alone. It isn’t the same.”

“What’s it all about, this alone business?”

“What business?”

“I asked your kid Morgan one day why he hadn’t gone away with you, and he told me, my mother likes to be alone.”

“Did he say that?” She looked pleased and yet annoyed, as one does when one hears of an astute remark made about oneself by someone to whom one has given no opportunity or justification for understanding.

“I’d always thought painters liked to be alone,” she said, questioning his question to her. “—Had to be alone, were alone.”

“I’m not a real one, I suppose. I don’t feel it. There’s always a feeling of others around, even if I’m working.”

“Really?” She began to have that look of pursuing the other person that comes when interest is roused. “But what about those empty landscapes of yours, with the dust?”

“Just fooling about. Seeing the sort of thing some painter had done and trying it out.” He often went in for the sophistication of deprecation; he hid behind it where no one could get at him.

“Even when you’re actually there with the canvas in front of you—” She returned to it, disbelieving.

“Yes, man, there’s always the business of a friend who’s going to turn up in half an hour, or something on your mind.”

“You feel connected all the time.”

“Mmm. You’ve got the pull.”

“When you’re alone, you’re connected but there’s no pull,” she said. “Now that you are here, I feel lonely.”

He gave his chuckle, looking at her with the air of not knowing what to expect.

“Because you’re making love,” she said. “You see?”

“Are you jealous, Jessie?” he said, bantering, flirting a bit, because he did not know what to say.

But she was not embarrassed, but quite serious and at ease. “No, not jealous. At least I don’t think so. Left out. Left out of something, that’s it. Perhaps a bit jealous, as well. I don’t have love affairs any more.”

Ann came up, beaded with water. She dried her face, blew her nose, shook out her hair from the cap, and lay down beside Gideon. She touched him with her sea-cold hand and mumbled for a cigarette. Presently there was a commotion where the little girls were playing at the edge of the water. Elisabeth came screaming over the wet sand, her lumbering shape, clumsy with pain or alarm, repeated in wriggling purples and silvers on the mirror surface. She held out her wrist, wrung in the other hand. Clem and Madge followed, regarding her distress with admiration. “The white part of a wave … she just put her hand in next to my foot …” A rough blue thread was buried in the red weal that had risen round the plump brown arm. “Oh poor old thing! They are beasts … all right, now, I know it’s sore … get some of those leaves, Clem …”

“I saw a couple of blue-bottles when I was in,” said Ann. And as Jessie broke the leaves of the ice-plant that grew nearby, and squeezed them on the sting, “Rub quite hard, that’s the best way. — It really does hurt like hell.”

“What is it?” Gideon said with distaste, leaning on his elbow.

“Haven’t you ever been bitten by a blue-bottle?” Ann said.

“What on earth is it, anyway?”

“One of those balloon-things that get washed up. The wind brings them in,” Jessie reminded him.

They showed him how the stringy appendage of the creature had attached itself to Elisabeth’s flesh; Madge raced off to bring a specimen of the whole creature, gingerly lifted up on a handful of sand, to demonstrate to him.

“You mean to say you’ve never been bitten by one?”

“Hell, no, I should think not.”

“But you’ve been to the sea sometimes?” said Jessie.

“Only once to Cape Town and then to Port Elizabeth. Congress conferences. We drove around the docks and on Sunday a couple of us walked for a bit on one of the coloureds’ beaches somewhere near Cape Town.”

Jessie had managed to get the blue thread away from the child’s wrist; the pain had subsided and Elisabeth sat as if listening for its diminishing impulses. Jessie looked at him over the head of the child leaning against her, and thought again how he never seemed to see any of it — sea, sky, or green. He was like a fox, panting blindly out of breath in a hole.

They went up to the house in a peaceful little procession, the child riding on Gideon’s shoulders with her sandy legs round his neck.

Seventeen

Nothing could be a greater contrast with the life they lived now than the week that had preceded it. Fragmentary references to that cropped up, more or less amusing anecdotes, before Jessie, but these were lip-service to a demand neither wanted to meet in themselves, either alone together, or singly. They had lived through something that remained undealt with. Blocks of experience can lie like this for years before they are tackled; sometimes they are never taken hold of at all, cluttering up one of those lives that become like an attic, a jumble of disparate things between which no relation has been established.

Both knew that some form of desperation had made them drive away. Being lovers, both had accepted that this desperation was love; the collective term for the hundred ambiguities of their being together and apart — the wearing thin of interest between them sometimes when they were together, more than punished by the vividness of each for the other when they were apart, the calm with which the interlude of their knowing each other seemed to blend into their separate lives, when they sat chatting, and the crazy obsession with which the interlude filled the whole of living once a day was begun in which it was regarded as over. Fear of the vacuum it leaves behind is as common a reason for prolonging a love affair as continuance of passion. Ann’s inexplicable feeling of “panic” that she had mentioned to Jessie probably came from this fear. Her voice on the telephone (she had taken the single, decisive, outside chance — if he had not happened to be at the Lucky Star at half past one that day she would not have tried again, perhaps, not there nor at the flat nor further away, as far as the townships that took him in and closed over him) — her voice brought him back to swift excitement from the sober, not unhappy but flat acceptance that he would be spending July working for Congress in the dorps and locations. He was saved from the reluctance of doing what he really wanted to do. Stirring a vortex in the grey coffee that Callie Stow had made it difficult for him to drink, he had been going to go and see Jackson Sijake in his own time. He had already forgotten the lie about coaching Indian students; was forgetting other evasions. But Ann’s voice had it: the thing that Callie Stow lacked entirely, the element of self-destruction that found a greedy answer in himself. It was in the voice, that note that takes some of the fear out of life by suggesting that not everyone regards it as such a carefully-guarded gift, after all.

They drove away that bright winter afternoon into the actuality of the escape that everyone put into a phrase and never believes in—“I’d like to go off somewhere, just pack up and go.” It was no different, in its real intention, from the times they had driven into the veld to picnic while other people sat in offices. She looked at his hands on the steering-wheel; he noticed how her head, beside him, tipped back from the chin in her particular way. But although there was the reassuring sameness of their two selves enclosed in the small car, the release and pleasure, as usual, of being together after absence, and the enjoyable consciousness, for each, that absence made minute physical detail and gesture an object of secret observation and wonder — although all these were marvellously the same, this particular impulse was to take them far out of the depth they had sounded between them. They had come together in the constriction of sheltering cracks in other people’s lives — Boaz’s patience, the Stilwells’ tolerance, the young advertising men’s indifference. These seemed irksome but in fact provided a private status for a relationship that, publicly, did not exist. Once they had left behind them, by a few miles, the recognition of a certain group of individuals that they had the free choice of being together, and the anonymity of the city, where such recognition has the chance of passing unnoticed, everything changed for them.

Ann’s response to black people and the world that they were forced to inhabit was one of pleasure; she saw the warmth and vitality, the zest and freshness that existed there in spite of all the white man could do, missed by the white man. She saw the defiant fun of it, not the uncertainty, pain and brashness. She enjoyed the gawping white face staring from the passing car when she and Gideon sat eating chicken at the roadside; but then she had gone home to the Stilwell house when the day was ended. Now, as it got dark, there was the reality of the lights of a country hotel, with family cars drawn up beside rondavels and waiters in their white suits hurrying past on the other side of the windows, and she could not walk in and sign the register and lie talking in a hot bath as she had done hundreds of times, on countless journeys. She said nothing, but it was difficult to believe, in the bones of unreason, where habit is formed in the very pattern of expectation in the body.

At a petrol station she went into the tearoom attached to it and drank a cup of coffee and said, “I want one to take to the car,” and the fat, laconic woman behind the counter shouted to the waiter, “Take coffee out to the madam’s boy.”

She ran across the wide country street to see if she could buy a thermos flask but only an Indian fruit shop was open. Gideon was smoking a cigarette, standing by while the tyres were pumped, and when she got into the car again he came up to the window and said, tersely intimate, “Want something?” She moved her head and smiled, implying that she had only meant to stretch her legs.

The place was called Louis Trichardt, and where the streetlights splashed into the darkness they washed clear of it drapings of cerise and orange bougainvillea. The humps of mountains raised the skyline all round, close to huge winter stars; down in the powdery yellow light of the town she watched some white youths wheel their bicycles up the street and a group of little Moslem girls in trousers playing round the pillars of the fruit shop. Gideon got into the car again; the road lifted up into the mountains that ran together in blackness. There were houses here and there, and a couple of garden hotels shining lights behind the thick lace of trees. Even though it was winter the subtropical forest filled the car with the strong, green, stirring odour that is the smell of the earth’s body. The town dropped behind them like a place that was not a real habitation but a scene representing part of an actual town, in a play, and having, in fact, nothing in the darkness beyond the few props and one-dimensional façades set up in light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She turned abruptly back to her own affairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They slept in the car on the way to Basutoland. It was a small car and even the back seat, which Ann had, was very cramped. In the morning they were dazed and stiff-necked and she said, “We’re going to buy a tent.” He had slept in all sorts of places but never in a tent; that belonged again to that world of pleasure jaunts and leisure that black children did not have.

“Oh look …” A stretch of tall yellow grass, where the sakabula birds flew, trailing their long tails, was passing her window. “A house there — imagine a house in the middle of that …” She had never had a house of her own, but all over the world she saw places where a house might be, and to which she would never go back.

“I like a place with trees. Right in the middle of trees. You know, one of those houses where the light is striped, all day long.”

The sluggishness of the cold and stuffy night in the car lifted as they drove, and their responses, that had coiled away back to themselves in separateness, began to warm and open.

“But grass all round, as high as your head, as far as you can see … Let’s go down there a bit?”

“What for?”

“Oh what for, what for.”

Ann strolled over the whole earth as if it belonged to her, for she did not question, which amounted to the same thing, that there was nowhere where she wasn’t wanted. He brought a blanket out of the car and when they had walked a little way they sat hidden in the grass, leaning comfortably back to back, eating bananas and smoking, coming back to life.

He said, “What time is it?”

“Are you hungry?”—because this was his usual way of suggesting they ought to get a meal. She leaned over and broke off another banana, offering it to him. But he wanted somehow to attach this space of existence, which he and the woman both contained and were contained by indivisibly, to what he had all the rest of his life — to that constant bearing away upon actions and desires. He was not hungry — not in any way at all. He wanted nothing, and had in himself everything. He did not need to touch her, even without touching her he possessed her more completely than any woman he had ever had. She lay back and closed her eyes. He watched her a little while as she slept, the pulse in her neck the only moving thing in the silence about him, and then he got up and went in search of a reedy place that he had noticed, not far off, from the car; if there was water there, he wanted to wash. He smiled at the thought of the sight of himself, walking through the veld with her cake of perfumed soap and a nylon toothbrush.

Ann opened her eyes on one of the beautiful, untidy birds, swaying almost within reach of her hand on a thick dead stalk of the grass that was high as a wall round the nest the blanket had broken into it. She sat up with a cat-yawn. Her body was with lack of it. The strands of the bird’s long tail tangled in panic with the grasses as it took off. She stood up to watch it and saw a man standing a few yards away.

“Hullo,” she said. “Did I startle you?”

“You all right, lady?” He had the slow sober speech of the country Afrikaner speaking English, but his voice was the voice of a man of substance, sensible and sure of himself. He did not come closer but watched her smiling her big smile at him, tucking her shirt into her skirt, a beautiful girl with the long brown legs he associated with the city. There was that immediate pause, filled with the balance of sleep, where before it had been hollow quarter taken and given, between an attractive woman of class and a man old enough and just worldly enough to recognise it. He was a farmer, in a good grey suit, thick shoes and the inevitable felt hat that country Afrikaners wear — on his way to the lawyer or the bank, most probably.

“I’ve just had a lovely snooze, that’s all. You don’t mind, do you?”

He softened into a more personal manner. “It’s not my land, it’s my neighbour’s, see? But I just thought you was in trouble. The car there, and so on.”

“Thank you very much.”

“You’re not on your own here? There’s a lot of drunk boys around on Sunday—”

She snatched the conversation: “No, no, my husband’s here, just gone over the—”

“Oh well, that’s O.K. then, sorry to disturb you—” He was eager to be affable now, specially friendly in that indiscriminate comradeship that white people feel when they meet in the open spaces of a country where they are outnumbered. Her own voice had tipped over in her some vessel filled with fear that she didn’t know was there; it poured into her blood while she smiled at him, brilliantly, smiled at him to go, and was afraid to look anywhere but at him in case she should see Gideon standing there too. Just as the man left and she heard a car start up away on the road, there was the figure, the hieroglyph in the distance that she could read as the quiet, slouching walk, the narrow khaki trousers, the blue shirt that was her present.

The car must have been gone five minutes by the time he came up. As he grew nearer a run of trembling went through her several times; she had the dread of something approaching that couldn’t be stopped. She wanted to run back to the little car. When he stood there, paused as he came through the grass to their little clearing, and looked round it as one does round a room where one senses immediately something has happened in one’s absence, she laughed excitedly, braggingly, and half-whispered, half-wept, “A man was here! A farmer! I’ve had a visitor!”

He looked at her, looked all round him.

Then, “You’re sure he’s gone?”

“Oh he’s gone, yes he’s gone, I heard the car, he’s gone.” She was rocking herself with him, digging her fingers into his arms. He had never seen her so emotional, without a gleam of challenge in her. Suddenly it all came to her as if it had happened: “I wanted to run like mad to you when I saw you but I was terrified he might still be looking. — Any minute, any minute, you might have — He thought it wasn’t safe for me, can you imagine, I couldn’t get rid of him. I wanted to rush to you—” She broke off and began to giggle, holding his hands and moving them in hers in emphasis of her words—”A kind farmer. He was, really. A nice man.”

“Let’s get off his land,” said Gideon.

“Oh no, it’s not his. He told me, it’s his neighbour’s.”

He was pulling up the blanket. They fell into a pantomime of crazy haste, dropping their things, struggling and laughing, tussling.

What she had spilt was like mercury and rolled away into the corners of her being, impossible ever to recover and confine again.

The car surrounded them with the clutter of their inhabitation, enclosing and familiar as an untidy room where one day is not cleared away before another piles on top of it. Already they had a life together, in that car. Like any other life, it was manifest in biscuit crumbs, aspirins, cigarette boxes kept for the notes on the back, broken objects of use (a pair of sunglasses, a sandal without a buckle) and other objects that had become indispensable, not in the function for which they were intended, but in adaptation to a need — the fluffy red towel that was perfect for keeping the draught off Ann’s knees, and the plastic cosmetic bottle that they used to hold lemon juice. Already the inanimate bore witness to and was imbued with whatever had been felt and thought in that car, the love-making, the hours when nothing was said and attention streamed along with the passing road, the talk, the fatigue, the jokes. When Ann settled in and her eyes dropped to the level of the grey dashboard with its tinny pattern of grilles and dials, the dead half-hours were marked there for her: the time when she did not know why she was here rather than anywhere else. If the exciting silent dialogue of her presence and the man beside her ceased for a moment to sound in that place in herself where she had first heard it, she grew restless, pacing the logic of slots, circles and knobs.

Gideon telephoned from a dorp post office to tell his friends in Basutoland that he was coming. The people themselves, who ran a store in the mountains, had no telephone, of course, but a friend in a Government office in Maseru would give a message to his brother, who would pass it on to someone else — Ann did not question the circumlocutory mystery by which the warning of their arrival would reach its destination. She was charmed with and proud of the tightly-interlocking life where Gideon was as free and powerful, in his way, as some white tycoon arranging his life by telex. The call took the best part of the afternoon to come through, and then Gideon came back to the car to say that the man in Maseru knew straight off, without any further enquiry, that Malefetsane was away from home, gone to Vryburg on some family business.

“He said, come to his place in Maseru,” he said, dismissing it. Of course, the man thought he was alone.

They felt flat, cheerful with each other in the slight embarrassment of disappointment.

“I want to buy a tent.”

“Oh Christ,” he said. He ran his hand across the back of his head. “I need a hair-cut. Malefetsane would have cut my hair for me in Basutoland.”

“It looks like the filling of an old mattress. I remember the mattresses at boarding-school being emptied and picked over on the grass. — Let’s get a tent.”

“Who’s going to put it up and take it down.”

“I know all about tents,” she said. Hadn’t she and Boaz lived in them for weeks?

“Yes, I know,” he said quietly.

They decided, quite suddenly, to go on to Basutoland in any case; Gideon knew someone else there, lots of people there; someone would give them a place to sleep. They were driving in the dark again; the days had no recognisable shape, ballooning and extending into unmeasured stretches of time. The car broke down, but they were not far from a dorp and, flashing a torch, Ann waved a passing lorry to a stop. “I’ll get a lift quicker than you will,” she said. Businesslike both of them, he kept out of the way in the dark. She came back within an hour, bringing a new fan-belt and a big polony sausage and some beer. She had got a lift back easily, too; she was in the triumphant good mood which successful escapades always induced. Gideon put on the new belt and they went on. Fifty miles further, before they could cross the border, the car stopped once more, and although she worked beside him with her teeth clenched and her hands transferring their oily dirt to face and hair, neither his fair knowledge nor her bullying, practical flair helped them to get the thing going again. They waited for hours, but no car came by on that lonely road at that hour of the night. Very early in the morning there was a lorry loaded with fruit-boxes, thundering down on them. The Indian driver was friendly, “There’s room for him in the back,” he said, of Gideon, as he helped her into the cab. “Oh it’s all right, there’s room here next to me,” she said, and Gideon climbed in beside her in silence.

At the garage where their benefactor left them no one had come to work yet. She put up both hands and stroked Gideon’s cheeks with their little tufts of whorly beard and said coquettishly, “Are you very, very tired,” though she knew he would not answer. They sat on an oil-drum beside the old-fashioned one-armed pumps and waited. When the petrol attendant came, in the baggy skin of old overalls, with a breakfast of dry mealie-meal in a jam tin, Gideon persuaded him to go on his bicycle to wake up the white owner-mechanic. The big black man licked his fingers clean, wrapped the tin carefully in its newspaper, and went off. Presently he returned; the owner said he could take the break-down truck himself and bring the car in. Gideon would go with him. “Go to the hotel and have breakfast,” he said to her, out of hearing of the other.

She looked at him. “Should I?”

He was getting into the truck; he nodded once, vehemently.

Alone in the dining-room of the commercial travellers’ hotel she ate porridge and eggs and bacon and drank cup after cup of grey coffee. She asked, at the reception desk, whether she could pay to have a bath. The receptionist was not on duty yet. The Indian wine-steward-cum-waiter, with his professionally amiable smooth face, said efficiently, “Is madam not resident here? I don’t think it’s allowed if you’re not resident.”

As soon as the car came back she took the thermos flask and ordered coffee to fill it, and sandwiches. “Picnic hamper for the road, madam, certainly I’ll do it for you.” From the oil-drum she watched Gideon biting deeply into the bread, bent with the other man over the open engine. A rumpled-looking fair man arrived at last. He unlocked a plywood booth within the hall of his garage. “Come and sit down in my office.” It had the wet black smell of oily rags, there was an old varnished desk piled with invoices and glossy pamphlets put out by the motor corporations, an office chair with a broken back, a grass chair that she sat in, three calendars showing coy girls with cloud-pink breasts popping from wisps of chiffon or leopard skin. Everything was covered with gritty dust. She wanted to go back to the workshop, but she sat out a decent interval; for the first time in her life she was instinctively following a convention of behaviour, fitting an identity imposed from outside herself. In due course the garage owner came back and said in the encouraging, confused way of doctors and mechanics, “Seems to be a leak of some kind. Battery’s O.K., but the points’re the trouble. Acid or something on them — but we’re trying to file them down and see …”

She got up, released.

“Would’ja like a cup a tea?”

“No thanks — I’ve had breakfast at the hotel. I’ll just go to the car — some things I want.”

“Make yourself at home here.” He reminded her of the hospitality of his office. “You travelling alone with the driver?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have to get to Maseru, you see …”

From the car she called, “Gideon,” in a soft neutral voice that came to her. He walked over obediently. She was bent from the front seat, pretending to search for something on the floor, and she signed to him to lean down toward her. Their faces were suffused as if with physical effort, hers was red and almost coarse, a vein stood out down the side of the bridge of his nose. “For Christ’s sake! How long will it take? Is it bad?” “Can’t say. I don’t know if they know what they’re doing. I suggested a new battery but they haven’t got the right one for this car.” “But can’t they patch it up so that it’ll get us to Maseru, then what’s-his-name, your friend, can get it to a decent garage.” “Everything should be fixed, they’ve done it, but the thing won’t kick over. It’s just dead.”

She was uneasy about knowing her part so well. “I’ve got to sit in that office.” Her eyes had, to him, the bulging look of someone who is held by the throat. He had never seen her almost ugly; he noted it with the cruelty of objectivity and then felt warm to her in a way he had not connected with his feeling for her before — the way he felt when he had a joke with the gossiping crones in their dirty dresses stretched across old breasts, in a location yard, or when Sol was holding forth late at night. It was as if he met her in some part of his life where he could not have expected her to be.

The car took the whole day to repair and, when it became clear that this was going to be so, she went to the hotel and took a room. She was “resident”; she could go down the granolithic corridors to the “Ladies” now, and let the water run resoundingly into the deep enamelled iron bath with its four iron claws. She went between the room at the hotel and the tin workshop of the garage, that heated up under the winter sun as the hours went by. The garage owner came and stood beside her, hands on hips, whenever she came into the workshop; in the hotel room she lay on the cotton bedcover patterned with an Arcadian scene of shepherdesses and sun-dials and looked at the curtains on the window where the same pattern was repeated but had almost faded away; she slept and woke, and her cigarette left another burn beside those that marked the night-table with its emergency candle in a tin holder. She never got a chance to talk to Gideon again, except for the remarks he passed at her, rather than to her, about the car, as he worked with the petrol attendant, helping the garage owner. She prevailed upon the wine steward to give her a plate of cold meat and salad and a knife and fork and recklessly took it, covered by another thick hotel plate, over to the garage. The garage owner smiled at her for being a woman, and soft. “You didn’t have to pay for a meal like that for the boy, mine would’ve given him something.” She saw him eyeing the plates, plates from the hotel dining-room, the plates white people used. At once she asked some question about the car; how much longer could it take, now?

She spent the night in the hotel, alone, eating again opposite the huge black wooden chiffonier that hid the entrance to, but not the noise and smell of, the kitchen; going to bed in the room. Gideon slept in the garage on some sort of a bed provided by the petrol attendant. There were rooms for commercial travellers’ boys in the hotel yard, the garage owner said; she could get one of those — but she lied in shame for the dirty outhouses, “They’re full.”

Everything vanished but these practical details that had constantly to be worked out in the mind; the wangling of decent food, the arrangements for somewhere to sleep, the endless concentration on the coils and nuts and boxes within the gut of the car, and the news of it, the consultations about it. She said “Good morning, Gideon”, standing with the garage owner. She walked away with the man whose pink jowls were creased by his pillows. Gideon looked refreshed. He was shaved and had a clean shirt on. She wondered how and where he had managed this. All the mystery of the simplest mechanics of daily living parted them.

When they were on the road at last again, time had changed and stretched and swollen. No longer had they been a few days together; the other afternoon, the afternoon they had left Johannesburg, was far off. She said to him, “Stop for a minute somewhere.” She was stretched out in the seat beside him gawkily, her head flung back, smoking, the elbow of one arm cupped in the other hand. “What’s wrong?” “Just stop.”

With the engine cut off there was silence for a moment until the passing sounds of the empty road came to them — a chirrup as a bird flitted by, and the crack of a dry stalk in a mealie field. She was frowning intensely, provocatively, blinded by what she wanted to say. She kissed him suddenly with the powerful invitation of a woman who wants to be made love to. While he was uncertain how to respond, as a man is at the wrong time and place, and stroked her arm in some soothing, trifling caress, she sat up and said, “That bloody hotel.”

“What did you expect?” He made a gentle joke of it, and the reference became nothing more than a comment on the poor food and half-clean room.

She said, “Gideon, Gideon, Gideon,” ruffling him, touching him, putting his hand up under the hair on her neck to reassure herself.

“Is there any sense in going to Basutoland?”

He chuckled. “I only hope so. Why not?”

“But if your friends are away?”

He said nothing.

“Let’s go to Natal for a few days.” She had not thought of it before, it came to her suddenly, as she relied upon things to do. “There’s a house there we can go to … away up the coast.”

“Who’s there?” he said.

“Jessie’s house.” She was practical now.

“Stilwell’s?”

“It’s some cottage she inherited when her stepfather died. She’s alone.” Neither of them thought of Jessie as more than a name to a place that would do. It was, of course, because of her that it would do; she was one of their kind, she had a generic familiarity even though, in the blur of unimaginable family life in which they saw her, she seemed too remote from themselves to be taken account of.

Eighteen

“… It was because of Boaz, I suppose, that first night when I spoke to you,” (Jessie wrote to Tom) “but it isn’t now. I’m not putting up with them for anybody. They live almost like anyone else, here. Of course you can’t refuse them that chance — how could I? Probably this isn’t as big of me as it sounds, I don’t quite trust myself over the idea of a ‘chance’, when I see it written down … Test? Hurdle? Of what? They seem fonder of one another than I thought. Specially her; I mean I always thought of her as thriving on affection rather than giving out any. Playful, yes, but not tender, with B?” When she skimmed through the letter she paused in vague dissatisfaction, and to make some token effort to satisfy herself transposed “Test” and “Hurdle”.

Ann and Gideon had gone for a walk on the beach at night; presently she heard their voices, intimate in the dark, and they came up the verandah steps. Ann was wearing his thick sweater. “D’you want some coffee?” she said as they went into the kitchen. Jessie said no, she didn’t think so, but when they had made it, they brought a cup for her and called from the living-room that it was ready. She was drawn into their company and sat in one of the big chairs with her feet under her for comfort, because a wind had come up. “Here.” Gideon handed her the sweater that Ann had taken off.

Wrapped in their warmth, she thought: they’ve been making love out there. Ann was talking about fishing. Where could they go, she asked, aware of the absurdity of her enthusiasm — she had found some tackle lying about the house. “Ask Jason,” Jessie said to Gideon. “He must know all the local lore.”

“I suppose he would,” Gideon looked at her uncertainly.

“If a man asks your advice about fishing, you may feel a little friendly loyalty toward him? Don’t you think?” She smiled at Gideon.

“You may start boasting about your new friend, and where he lives.”

“That’s true.”

Gideon said, “Why were you so worried about him?”

“Oh it wasn’t him … All the other things too difficult to explain, or nobody’s business.”

“It was a bit of a shock,” said Ann, with a smile, of their arrival.

Jessie could smell her, the smell of her hair and the perfume that clung about the room at home, in the woollen collar rolled down round her own neck. “A year ago, then, I didn’t want Boaz and Ann to come to us. But I didn’t do anything to stop it. It was the sort of thing Tom and I have always done. One must be open to one’s friends. You’ve got to get away from the tight little bourgeois family unit. In a country like this, people like us must stick together — we live by the sanctions of our own kind. We haven’t any anonymous, impersonal code because the South African ‘way of life’ isn’t for us. But what happens to you, yourself … I don’t know. The original impulse towards decency hardens round you and you can’t get out. It becomes another convention.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said Gideon. “If you’re satisfied you’re doing what you ought to do?”

“It’s all a bit too snug. You can easily forget that it’s only the best you can do … for the time being.”

“You want to get right into the struggle then, man.” Gideon gave slightly scornful advice.

“Oh … it’s not all politics — not for whites, at least.”

He laughed.

“… Yes, I suppose it is. The whole way we live becomes a political gesture above everything else. Well, that’s part of what I mean — there’s no room to develop as a person because any change in yourself might appear to be a defection. And yet if you can’t change, can’t stretch out, how can you be ready for some new demand on yourself? In time you don’t even remember, really, how you arrived at the position you’ve taken up.”

“What sort of demand are you thinking of?” Gideon said, weighing her up.

“Well, if you want to live like a human being you’ve got to keep on proving it. It’s not a state automatically conferred upon you because you walk upright on two legs, any more than because you’ve got a white skin.”

“You might have to prove it in jail one day. You know? Your house won’t be big enough any more.”

“And when I come out of prison will you punish me all over again? What’m I going to do with my white face?”

They both laughed. “What’s the alternative for you?” Gideon said.

Jessie drew her head back through the neck of Gideon’s pullover like a tortoise, and took it off. She pushed away the strands of hair that clung to her face with the crackle of static electricity, and said, “Imagine Tom and me, along with the whites, shooting down blacks. ‘Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.’ Christ, I’d rather you shot me. — I’m going to bed. Don’t leave the door open, will you, that gorgeous lamp’ll blow down again.”

She came upon Gideon in the living-room next morning while Ann had gone up to the village with the little girls. He was drawing, absorbed but not prepared, the paper backed by a wad of newspapers, his head falling back negligently now and then on the plump chair. Jessie twisted her neck to see. He softened the thick charcoal line with his thumb. “She’s beautiful,” Jessie said.

“She is.”

She watched him, amused by his attitude of repose, while his hand and eye worked on on their own.

“Gideon, you’ve got a wife somewhere, I suppose?”

“In Bloemfontein, to be exact.”

When she had been in the living-room a certain time, she was always drawn to the curtain that sagged and the bit of carpet that had frayed away. Sometimes, as now, she even wandered up to these things as if she were going to mend them. She slid out of her sandals and stood on the divan to take a look at the top of the curtain, where it hooked to a rail. “I’ve got a child, too,” Gideon said. “I don’t know if I’d know him if I saw him somewhere.”

She was trying to work loose a runner that had rusted against the rail, and her voice was tight with effort. “Oh why is it like that?”

“You change.”

She could not get the runner free and stopped, with the confusion of an obstinate task in her face. “But it’s like lopping off fingers. In the end your life is nothing but bits and pieces.”

He did not want to be reminded of the woman who had been his wife and did not know what had made him suddenly mention the child. “What’s gone is gone,” he said.

“Then what’s going to be left in the end?” She stood there on the bed. “In a year’s time, in five years, this’ll be gone perhaps. You’ll see yourself here as if it happened in someone else’s life.”

He saw that this frightened her in some way, but there was no room in him for curiosity about others, there was no part of his apprehension that was not cut off by the concentration of forces that had brought him there; by what he shared with the girl, and what he could not share with her. He could not answer the woman, either, with the rush of affirmation for the present that suddenly came to him — but this is my life! Yet she spoke as if he had: “You can’t pick and choose,” she said. “You have either to accept everything you’ve been and done, or nothing. If the past is going to be past, finished, this will be as lost as the things you want to lose.”

“There are things that are over and done with,” he said. “You must know how it is.”

“I know how it is. You shed yourself every now and then, like a snake.”

“Got to live,” he said with a shrug.

“What’s one going to be, finally? The last skin before one dies?”

He laughed. “—Ah but it’s different. You have a nice settled life that goes on, a home and so on. If things get too hot here, you’ll take your husband and your children and go and live the same way you’ve always done, only somewhere else, isn’t that so, Jessie? — You’ve got the man you want, haven’t you?” he added.

“Yes, but I lived before I loved him, and maybe I’ll go on living after. I had another husband. I have another child. Sometimes I don’t know him when I see him …” She seemed to expect something, and he looked up for a moment, “But I am what I was then as well as what I am now; or I’m nothing.”

His attention covered the restive, furtive look in his eyes. She knew this withdrawal that came sometimes in the closest conversation, when you were made aware that you had lost yourself in the white man’s preoccupations, when you were relegated to a half-world of doubts and nigglings that only whites afforded and deserved.

“I don’t see much sense in digging up the past.”

She smiled, looking at him from a distance. “We’re not talking about the same thing. It’s a question of freedom.”

“Freedom?” He was astonished, derisive.

“There’s more than one kind, you know.”

“Well, one kind would do for me.”

“Yes, perhaps it would, because you haven’t got it. Perhaps you’ll never have to ask yourself why you live. — A political struggle like yours makes everything very simple.”

“You think so?”

“Of course it does. You’re completely taken up with the practical means of changing the circumstances of your life. — Right, the ideological ones, too. The realisation — whatever you like to call it — the sense of your life would be the attainment of this change, or how near you’d get to it, before you die. One knock-out experience after another falls on your head, you die a dozen times, but the political struggle sticks you together again in the end. You’re always whole so far as that’s concerned. It’s all done from outside, and from necessity.”

“I don’t think it’s quite as passive as all that,” he said ironically.

“Passive! That’s the whole point. It’s all action, agony, decision — oh my God, it’s wonderful”—she made a mock blissful face, to break the mood between them.

He continued to work on his drawing after she had wandered out of the room. In each successive sketch it grew simpler, as the single line drew up the many into its power; the face disappeared the way an actual face disappears into acute awareness of it. Suddenly Ann was there, putting down a few little paper packets, momentarily still in the guise in which she had been seen in the store and the post office: the youthfully arrogant jaw and lips showing something of the beauty and desirability carelessly hidden by dark glasses and wild short hair. “Blades, cigarettes, soft rubber — this’s the only sort of thing they had.” He tried it, erasing one of the abandoned sketches. “They’re all too hard.” “I told them I’d bring it back if it wasn’t any good.” He smiled at her rough treatment of shopkeepers.

She was sitting in a chair with the blank regard of the dark glasses upon him. “I’ve got exactly four pounds and seventeen shillings,” she said.

He gave a questioning grunt. “I’ve got a couple of pounds.”

“No, you haven’t, you’ve got about fivepence less than I have.”

“Fivepence more.”

She remembered the glasses and took them off; he saw something he had never seen before, tears in her eyes as she was looking at him. “I hate them,” she said. “All around me in the shop and the post office.”

He knew she was afraid of going back to Johannesburg, to decisions and questions and advice and being answerable to others. But if they were to leave the country and go away together they would still have to go back to Boaz first, back to the Stilwell house where everything that had begun remained unresolved.

He was used to attack and recklessness in her and the change that showed in her sometimes now both dismayed and roused him. So she loved him, she was really his woman, this bright creature; he felt it under his hand when he was making love to her now, he felt it when she walked towards him in a room, or passed him food at table. But at the same time safety was gone out of their relationship: each had put himself in the other’s hands. Now he felt the weight of her being, strange, new, unaccustomed; and he gave over to her what was not even his own to give: he was aware of Mapulane (watching him drive off that day), away on that periphery to which passion banishes out of sight and sound the yelling, gesticulating influences that set themselves against it. He lay on the sand between the two women he could see with half-closed eyes, and among the children who ran to him with their treasures, and on this lonely beach destiny and history overlooked him; he could ignore both Shaka’s defeated kingdom around him, and the white man’s joke about it that he read each time he went to the lavatory … “vaseline, sandwiches, sawdust … God save the sugar farmers. Given this day … under my hand and great seal, Big Chief Shaka.” The black warrior and the white man’s derision of him; the savage ruined past and the conqueror’s mockery of it; both were dead and he suffered from neither.

The passion between Gideon and Ann set the pace of days that passed without slowness or haste or in fact any of the usual apprehensions of time. Jessie remembered that she had once thought, of Tom and herself, how you had to stop the ordinary business of living in order to love properly. As she walked down the path from the house in silence behind them, their relaxed, lightly swinging arms, backs of the hands just touching now and then, seemed to regulate the rhythm of her breathing. Wherever a group of people live together there are those from whom life emanates — anyone in whom, at that time, the force of vitality is swarming, as a particular tree among others is set electrically alive by bees. Jessie had for so long been the one at the centre; it was strange to her to feel now that this had passed from her. She had said to Gideon, “I don’t have love affairs any more”—but, at the same time, she caught herself walking along the beach conscious of a man’s eyes on her. The man turned out to be a boy the age of her son. She looked at the two lovers, passing a cigarette back and forth between them, lingering over what had touched each other’s mouths, silent together, speechless, enfolded in themselves before her. Perhaps it would be Morgan who would have the love affairs now. She thought of his hands; tender, gaunt, strong and timid — he could be mistaken for a man, he was a man. She walked miles up the beach, away from the lovers, away from the little girls.

When she came back, Clem and Madge had buried Gideon up to the neck in sand; his head rested on the thighs of Ann’s curled-up legs and her head watched over him, eyes closed to the sun, in a strange, naked, sleepy smile as if even his joking commonplaces with the children carried some code for her. Jessie took the children in to swim and then went up to the house with them. “I love Gid,” Madge said, confiding, admiring.

“I don’t mind him being black,” Elisabeth agreed.

“Do you mind sometimes when other people are?” Jessie asked.

“I don’t think it’s pretty,” said Elisabeth.

Clem began a long lecture about how unkind it was to talk about the colour of people and how you mustn’t hurt their feelings, and how it didn’t matter at all what colour you were, you were just the same — like people having blond hair or dark hair.

“Don’t boss me,” said Elisabeth, confidently. She was very successful and flirtatious with Gideon, and insisted, with the tyranny over guests that Jessie disliked in children, on his coming to kiss her in bed before she slept each night. But Clem had already lost sight, in an attitude, of her natural response towards people; an attitude of necessity impressed early in order to counter the generally-accepted one. If you did not find blackness abhorrent and outcast, was the only alternative the fastidious suppression of all personal responses in the common denominator of shared humanity? Did it follow that, because you weren’t repelled, you couldn’t admit to being attracted, either? Did one have to be so afraid of emotion—any emotion—in this business?

Through the ordinary contacts of daily life about the house together, Jessie knew that Gideon was not unaware of her as a woman; there was no covert desire in his behaviour towards her, but she knew that, quite legitimately and quite harmless to his complete preoccupation with Ann, there existed an objective recognition that she, Jessie, was a woman to whom one could make love. This recognition exists in silence and without a sign between a man and many women, or a woman and many men, in situations where there never has been and never will be anything more to it. In bus queues, across shop counters, in the houses of friends — everyone recognises those who exist for himself and for whom he himself exists in this way; just as there are others, even the beautiful and apparently desirable, with whom one has no sexual concomitant. Gideon did not desire her, he was in love with another woman against whom she was not even in the running in the general world of sexual competition, because she was too old — sixteen years too old — but he might have desired her in another time and place. He might have; and this, combined with the sixteen years between her thirty-nine and Ann’s twenty-three, meant that she herself could have been Ann — once, somewhere.

She was at once set at a remove from the love affair and at the same time curiously close to it. She was jealous no longer of the mere fact of love-making going on behind drawn curtains or in the darkness that stretched to the sea. Once when she returned to the house unexpectedly at a time when she thought the two of them were out, she opened the door into Ann’s room to look for a vanished pair of scissors. She was barefoot, from the beach, and the house was silent; the two lying there did not wake up as she gazed at them. She felt neither the guilty recoil of one who sees suddenly, as a spectator, a part of life where one is never a spectator and only a protagonist, nor the shame of the voyeur. She looked with calm a moment at the ancient grouping of the two bodies, the faces flung away from each other, the arms lax where they had held; all that had been centred rolled apart in sleep. Ann’s one brown-tipped breast was pressed out of shape, like her cheek, by the angle at which she lay on her side, with the whole of the lower part of her body swung across if she were lying face-down. And he lay on his belly with his head over the outstretched arm whose curved fingers, no longer within reach of her head, still conformed to the shape of it. His dark body had a shine going down the curve that followed the groove of the spine to the short, gleaming roundness of the buttocks. Their faces were sweaty. A fly rose and settled indifferently on either. Clothes dangled from the bed and lay sunk upon the floor; round the edges of the curtains, a frill of fire ran where the midday sun was held out. Jessie slowly closed the door and went away.

That afternoon they all went to a beach ten miles further up the coast that the children thought of as a place foreign and exciting. It was much like any other beach along there, but was reached by a track that went through eucalyptus forests instead of sugarcane and had a cold and thrilling smell that was like some ritual preparation for arrival. The beach and rough green about it had been declared an Indian beach township, but this was so recent that there were only two ugly little villas, one chalky pink and the other brilliant blue, and both empty and deserted except for an African family and some chickens in a hut down among the mealies and stunted paw-paws of each plot. These people did not venture on to the beach, anyway; the picnic party was perfectly safe from prying eyes. The necessity for taking care that Gideon was not seen had become something that they considered openly and took for granted without embarrassment or pretence, as some daily medical treatment that at first seems impossible to carry out while keeping up a semblance of normal living soon adapts the norm to its own queer needs. The children, not knowing why, but always racing eager to give their report, ran down first, as usual, to see if there was anyone on the beach. Then the two women and Gideon followed. The little girls tore off their dresses and ran into the pools in the nude; there was no reason why they should not do this on the beach where they were living, but they did it only here.

Jessie had unopened letters in her canvas bag among towels and bananas; one was from Tom, and she read it without comment, but the other was from her mother: “She wonders if she should come down next week for the last few days … would it be convenient. — Well, it would be extremely inconvenient …”

“She’s seen us,” Ann said, weighing sand in her long hand. “Once; in your house. No; perhaps she didn’t really see us together.”

“But how was that?” Jessie was half-interested.

“When we were in the car, I ran back for the key and then I realised she was there … in the dining-room, by the window …”

“Did she call you or something?”

Ann smiled, surprised at how well she remembered the details. “No … well, I went in and she said something strange to me — she’d been there all the time and she knew I hadn’t noticed her. Something about — there are always other people and then one day you become one of them yourself … something like that.”

“Old people sit and watch like greedy cats,” said Jessie cruelly.

“No, she was rather nice, in a funny way.”

Jessie saw that there was some loyalty between the girl and the old woman whom she herself had never thought of as aware of each other’s existence.

Gideon was amused as he often was at the customs of white people. “Fancy, she asks if she can come to her own house …”

“Oh it was my stepfather’s. They were not like married people usually are — nothing cosy about them. I don’t suppose she’s been here since I was a child.”

A few moments later Ann said, “Are you going home, then?”

Jessie said, “When?” to gain time, not for herself, but for the other two.

“Next week.”

“Well, school begins.”

She had never asked them what they were going to do. She had the feeling that they never talked about it, that they had hidden from it, escaped it until now when, as inevitably happens, the chance remark that her mother wanted to come for the “last few days” had discovered them. “I’m going in.” She was pushing her hair painfully under a rubber cap. Sand from her body sprinkled down on their heads as she got up. “Oh — sorry!” “It’s all right.” Ann took a paper handkerchief and began to use a corner of it, very gently, to flick the grains out of the convolutions of Gideon’s small, well-made ear.

“He should bend his head to that side,” said Jessie.

He shook it. “It’s all right.”

“Wait a minute.” Ann persisted in her attentions to the ear. She said to Jessie, looking up at her, “Did you ever see anything so perfectly shaped?” He jerked his head as if he were being bothered by an insect. “I know,” said Jessie.

When she came out of the water he was busy helping the children lug something into the pools. She walked over to them, pulling off the cap so that the deep, indrawn breath of the sea returned to her again in a gasp. He got the swollen plank afloat and came to the rock on which she had climbed to see. “Shipwreck,” he said. She smiled, watching the children, watching this game, like every other, fall into the pattern of what they were: Clem taking charge, Madge at once suspecting that her chosen part was not the one she wanted after all, Elisabeth forgetting, in her roistering pleasure, what it was supposed to be about.

“Can we go back together?” he said.

“Yes, if you want to.”

“She doesn’t want to go back,” he said.

He began to pull winkles off the rock and throw them into the incoming tide that sucked and struck against the rock where they sat. “You can’t get a thing like this sorted out in five minutes.” He was speaking for Ann, and Jessie answered, unconvinced, to give him the reassurance this asked, “Of course not.”

“What do you make of Boaz?” he asked.

“Why?”

“So nice and polite and so on, very much the good chap. Never says, what’s this all about?”

“To you? But why should he? I’m sure he’s talked enough to Ann.”

“It’s pax when I’m around.” After a pause he said, “D’you think he’d be like that with anybody?”

She looked at him quickly. Perhaps he wanted a lie from her, but she had done with lies, even the good lies. “Probably not.”

He said, “She’d feel different about doing this if he’d just once stand up to me, you know?”

“Oh of course, if the other one can be got to behave badly at once everything’s much easier. But here you have his nature, which is perhaps a bit of the natural victim’s, plus the special situation. Civilised love affairs are bad enough, but this one’s particularly civilised.”

“If I were white,” Gideon turned to her, wanting to confront her word by word, “you mean he’d tell me to go to hell.”

“And her, too. Maybe.”

“Good God.” He was scornful, confused, and all the time the balance between trust and half-trust quivered between them, and she looked down, where the water swirled loud with foam, and she seemed to plunge—“I don’t think I’d ever have to give this business another thought. I believed it was all settled, once and for all, long ago. It’s the truth, the rational truth, that a love affair like yours is the same as any other. But you haven’t come to the truth while it’s still only the rational truth. You’ve got to be a bit more honest than that. Do you know what I think while I look at you and Ann? Do you? I remember what was left out when I settled the race business once and for all. I remember the black men who rubbed the floor round my feet when I was twelve and fourteen. I remember the young black man with a bare chest, mowing the lawn. The bare legs and the strong arms that carried things for us, moved furniture. The black man that I must never be left alone with in the house. No one explained why, but it didn’t matter. I used to feel, at night, when I turned my back to the dark passage and bent to wash my face in the bathroom, that someone was coming up behind me. Who was it, do you think? And how many more little white girls are there for whom the very first man was a black man? The very first man, the man of the sex phantasies … Gideon, I’d forgotten, I’d left it all out. It’s only when something like you and Ann happens one suddenly needs to feel one’s way back.”

He was looking tightly ahead as if under an insult.

“I suppose Boaz thought it was all settled, too. Years ago. But none of us knows how much getting free of the colour bar means to us — none of us. It sounds crazy, but perhaps it’s so important to him that he can’t help putting it before Ann, even. It sounds crazy; but even before her.”

They did not speak for a while, and the sea cut under the rock and tore away, bearing off what had been said.

“Where would you go, to England?”

“She thought Italy.” He did not want to mention the scholarship that he had given up, but that Ann saw simply as something that could be arranged again.

“What about some other part of Africa?”

“It doesn’t matter much.” Ann was coming towards them along the shore-line, her feet pressing the shine of water from the sand as she walked. They both watched her approach, but it was his vision of her that prevailed, so that Jessie saw her as he did, a glowing face, salt-stiff, blown hair, his shirt resting like a towel across her shoulders, and a line of the flesh — the white of a freshly-broken mushroom — that was hidden by the boned top of her bathing suit showing in a soft rise against her tanned chest as she walked. In this unselfconscious sauntering stalk everything was taken for granted, everything that had ever been struggled for and won with broken bodies and bursting brains — the struggle up from superstition and pestilence, religious wars and industrial slavery, all the way from the weight of the club to the rubber truncheon: the fight of man against nature, against men, and against himself. Gideon said between clenched teeth, “The other things I’ve been beating my head against the wall for — I don’t want them any more.” He was making, in the presence of a witness, an offering, throwing down the last that he had before the demand that he could not measure. And he laughed because of the present glory of it, as the figure came on, approaching, enveloping, over the sand. He jumped off the rock, staggered a moment in the knee-high wild water, and then ran up to the dry sand. When she came he took her by the shoulders in some playful exchange, knocking the shirt off. They stood there talking, arm’s-length from each other, her head impudently, affectionately bent, his thumbs pressing the hollow under each collarbone. The sun had ripened her skin like fruit, and even in the house the warm graining beneath which the blood lay near, brought to the surface by slight inflammation, gave her the look of someone seen by candlelight.

Nineteen

Rain leaned from the horizon over the sea, and all, sea and rain, moved so quietly that the waves fell with the isolated sounds of doors shut far away. An epoussé glitter now and then broke the dream with a reminder of water.

Clem, who less than a year ago had been as unhampered by conceptions of time as her sisters were, now felt her being determined within it as the life of a character in a play is contained in sets arbitrarily put up and taken down. “Our last three days.” She was dismayed, she protested against the limits that obsessed her. Madge and Elisabeth chimed in with her, but forgot, next moment, that the game of bears in caves that the darkness under the high old beds in their room provided, would not go on for ever. “Let’s always play this,” they said to each other.

Clem took her rebellion to her mother. “Why does it just have to go and rain on our last three days?”

“You’ve had a whole month when it didn’t rain.”

But Clem’s sense of time had no dimension in the past yet, she was concerned only with the margin by which the present extended into the future.

Jessie gathered stray books and clothes wherever she happened to come upon them and put them on the spare bed in the room where she slept. She went through the contents of the magazine rack in the living-room, setting aside the children’s ludo board, some crumpled dolls’ clothes, and falling under the aimless fascination of reading snippets in the old magazines that had been there when she came and would be left behind when she went. Gideon and Ann stepped over the clutter that surrounded her as she sat on the floor. Their comings and goings were minor; they spent the days talking of the practical facts of rooms and rents and fares in other countries, like some ambitious young couple planning to spend their savings on a visit abroad. Ann even sat mending the unravelled sleeve of Gideon’s blue Italian shirt. Sometimes Gideon was silent for long stretches as he sipped beer and drew. They went tramping out in the rain, and once drove away through the mud and came back stretching and preoccupied, focusing upon familiar things with the daze of people who have shut themselves away to talk.

Jessie picked up a drawing of Gideon’s while they were out. Well, at least it wasn’t Ann again — seeing that it was abstract. But why be glad of that? Malraux spoke of the artist as one who annexes a fragment of the world and makes it his own. She did not know whether Gideon needed that more than he needed to share a common possession of what there was to be shared. Perhaps he needed to be a man more than he needed to be a painter. Not just a black man, set aside on a special form, a special bench, in a special room, but a man.

As she looked at the charcoal drawing that was almost like a woodcut in its contrast of thick black lines and spidery-etched connections, she thought it moved the way the water did that day when she and Gideon were talking on the rock; but the association was probably one that existed only in her own mind.

The day before they left was clear, with a colourless sky that turned blue as the morning warmed. The sea remained calm; the sand, beaten flat as a tennis-court, dried with a rain-stippled skin and took incisively the oblique cuts of crabs’ delicate feet and the three-branched seals imprinted by the claws of birds. Gideon and Ann came down to the beach soon after Jessie and the children. Like invalids, after the rain, they sat against a rock and smoked, both in long trousers, he in his sweater and she with her grey trench-coat pulled round her, only their feet bare. Jessie looked up from her book at some point and saw Gideon strolling towards the children. She and Ann chatted intermittently, and then Jessie decided to go to the village to get what was needed for a picnic lunch on the road next day. She was brisk, standing up with her hands conclusively on her thighs for a moment; she had about her the confidence of a woman who is about to return to the place where she belongs and who already takes on the attractiveness the man who is waiting there will see in her — an attractiveness made up of the freshness imparted by absence, the comfort of something well-known, the strength and weakness of her régime. For once, Ann was inert by contrast; her out-flung legs, her bent head that moved only to draw slowly on a cigarette made a figure that had come to a stop, there on the beach.

The shop in the village was not full, but service moved with a peculiar country slowness. You were supposed to help yourself from the grocery shelves but the grouping of things was haphazard — Jessie had to give up and wait her turn to be served at the counter.

The man and woman behind it conducted their business in an easy, talkative way, while a few Africans hung about on the fringe of the whites, hoping to get a turn sometime. A big pasty woman, with an identical daughter leaning on the counter beside her, was trying to decide on a tin of jam—“Ah, but how often do you get it these days that it’s not all mushy, like a lot of porridge …?”

The assistant was a little grey-skinned woman without breasts or lips or eyebrows, but whose head of hair, distinct from the rest of her, was fresh from the hairdresser’s, elaborately swirled and curled, stiff and brilliant yellow. “Not Calder’s Orchard Bounty, Mrs. Packer, I can guarantee you that. Same as you, I hate jam all squashed up’s if its bad fruit they put in it, but this is what I take home for myself.”

The next customer ahead of Jessie was a handsome woman with the air of authority that goes with a gaze that follows the line of a splendid slope of bosom. “How are you today, Mrs. Gidley?” The assistant took her pencil out of the centre of a curl and although the whole mass moved slightly, like a pile of spun sugar stirred by a knife, not a hair was drawn out of place. The tone of voice rose a little to meet the status of this customer, not unctuous, but no longer matey. “Stanley — Mrs. Gidley’s chickens, in the back there. — I put them aside first thing this morning, while I could get the pick for you. Or don’t you want to take them? We can send the boy, no trouble at all, he’s got to go up your way, before twelve? — Stanley, just a minute—”

“Oh could you? Oh that would be nice — but I’d forgotten about them anyway — all I wanted was to know if you’d be good enough to put this up somewhere—” The woman was leaning across the counter on one elbow, smoothing a home-made poster.

“Oh that—” The yellow head twisted to look. “I heard about that — yes, I should think I would! It’s getting too much of a good thing. My daughter was saying to me, Saturday afternoon and Sunday’s the only day you’ve got, if you’re working, and then the whole beach is full of them.”

The gracious voice said regretfully, painedly, “Well, we do feel that some arrangements ought to be made. Something that will be fair to all. One doesn’t want to deny people their pleasures. There has been a suggestion that a part of the beach ought to be set aside for them … but of course, once you make it official, you’ll get them coming from other places, and the Indians, too …”

“It’s all the servants, you see, that people bring down with them. That’s it, mainly. Down from Johannesburg and they’ve got their bathing suits and all just like white people …” The assistant bent her head towards the large woman and laughed indignantly, in spite of herself. “We get them in here, let me tell you, quite the grand ladies and gentlemen they think they are, talking to you as if they was white.”

“Well exactly, they’re not our simple souls who’re content to chat in their rooms.” Her kind of laugh joined pleasantly with the assistant’s.

The man behind the counter plonked down two frozen chickens. “Look at this, Stanley, Mrs. Gidley’s just brought in a poster — there’s going to be a meeting at the hotel on Tuesday.”

“Well, don’t you agree — we feel that, as residents who’ve built up Isendhla, we want to enjoy our beautiful beach in privacy …”

“… she said to me, I didn’t want to go into the water with all those natives looking at me … in trunks they were, too, the men.”

The majestic bosom had turned to the man. “Major Field suggests that we might set aside a stretch … Up near Grimald’s cottage, then there would be no question—”

With thanks and profuse friendliness the woman left the poster and turned on her high heels and made her way out, backing into Jessie, gasping a smiling apology, as she went. Jessie caught full on for a moment, like a head on a pike, the fine grey eyes, the cheerful bright skin, the full cheeks and unlined mouth of a tranquil, kind woman.

The woman behind the counter set the meat-cutter screeching back and forth across a ham, and, while she was weighing out the slices for Jessie, remarked, “This always used to be such a lovely clean beach … I don’t know if you was down on Sunday? You’d of thought they owned it, that’s the truth … undressing all over, behind the bushes.”

“No, I wasn’t down.”

“Where are you staying then?”

“I’ve got Grimald’s cottage.”’

The woman pulled a face that was quickly suppressed. “Oooh, that’s out of the way, isn’t it?” she said, loading Jessie’s basket with pampering tact calculated to take her mind off anything else.

Jessie was occupied for an hour or so in the house when she got back; then she got as far as the terrace and stood looking with a kind of disbelief at the wild, innocent landscape; the rain-calmed sea, the slashed heads of strelitzia above the bush almost translucent green with the rush of sap. The sun put a warm hand on her head. But nothing was innocent, not even here. There was no corner of the whole country that was without ugliness. It was no good thinking you could ever get out of the way of that.

She went down to the beach. Ann came slowly to meet her. “Is Gid up at the house?” she called.

“No, why?”

Ann was smiling, but she said, “Well, I don’t know what’s happened to him, but he hasn’t been back …”

“You mean since I left?”

“Mmm,” said Ann, watching her expression.

“I saw him wander up the beach.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve walked right up beyond the third lot of rocks, but he doesn’t seem to be anywhere.”

Jessie looked around the beach, as if she expected to be able to say: there he is. She was conscious of Ann watching her, ready to take a cue from her. She sat down on the sand, waving to the children. “When you start walking here, you go on for miles without noticing it. He’ll get hungry soon, and be reminded it’s time to turn back.”

Ann was still standing. “I’ve been miles.”

She drew a half-circle, dragging her toe in a ballet step over the sand, making a deeper and deeper groove. “Some fishermen came past while I was lying down.”

Jessie indicated surprise.

“The children shouted and I opened my eyes and there they were, in a jeep, of all things.”

“White men?”

“Oh yes. Lots of equipment.” She pointed up the beach where Jessie now noticed two long lines of ploughed-up sand.

After a minute, Jessie said, “Perhaps Gideon saw them and thought he’d keep out of the way.”

“Yes, but then he’d have gone up to the house from the bush,” Ann turned at once with the quick dismissal of someone who has already considered and discarded the same conclusion. “—Wouldn’t he?” Jessie saw she was hoping for an alternative to be suggested.

“No, well, he might have gone a long way round.” But what other way was there? If he wanted to cut back to the house, he wouldn’t walk further away in order to do so. “He’ll turn up.” She wandered off to the children. Ann lay on her stomach on the sand, head resting on her hands. Jessie tried to round up the little girls. “It’s lunch-time. Put your shirt on. Madge, isn’t that your cap, there? No more water, Elisabeth—” but they dawdled and ignored her.

“What’s the time now?” Ann asked.

“About half past one.”

“And when you left?”

“I don’t know — tennish — after ten.”

At last the children began to drift up the beach towards the path. Madge hung back and shouted, “Ma, I’m waiting for you.” Jessie did not answer but she felt the pull of that imploring, obstinate figure turned on her. “Go on up,” she called. “I’m coming,” and, sentenced, Madge dragged away over the sand, far behind the others.

Jessie tried to work out what Ann was thinking. Her eyes went over the hunched shoulders and the lovely dip of the waist, the fingers thrust into the hair. The girl wore one of his shirts again; the clothes of a lover are both a private reassurance and a public declaration: another kind of woman would wear rings and jewels, but for the same reasons.

“I must pack.” Jessie’s remark rolled away, unanswered. “We ought to leave fairly early tomorrow,” she added.

“Oh I’ll get things together tonight. There’s so little.”

Ann swung round and sat up suddenly. She giggled a little, and, eyes searching Jessie, said, “What on earth can he be doing? Are we going to be here all day?”

“I think we should go to the house. He’ll come to the house when he turns up, anyway.”

Ann continued to look at her and look away with an attempt at casualness, childishly nervous, smiling, pressing her lips one against the other. Her eyes met Jessie’s deeply, dazzling, evasive in their displayed frankness, guilty in their innocence, as if she had done something that was about to be found out.

“But what could happen to him?” Jessie asked.

Ann was not looking anywhere now, though her gaze was holding the other woman. Her eyes seemed trapped, swimming with the tinsel fragments that made light refract in their depths. As a confusion of thoughts concealed sometimes stops one’s mouth so that one loses the power of speech, so there is an aphasia of sight, when eyes cease, for a moment, to show anything but mechanical responses to light and the trembling of objects.

“Well … he wouldn’t just walk out into the sea …?”

The moment it was said she was smiling at the absurdity, the preposterousness of it.

Jessie laughed too. “But why on earth should he do such a thing?”

In Ann’s deep blush she saw the unconscious desire to have the course of this love affair decided by something drastic, arbitrary, out of her own power.

When they got up to the house they found Gideon about to come down to the beach for them. Ann was almost shy to approach him. “I went for a walk,” he said from the top of the steps. “I had no idea it was so far.”

“That’s what I said!” said Jessie.

Ann was carrying the trench-coat, hung by the loop from one finger, over her shoulder. He came down the steps and took the coat from her. She said nothing.

The children had been given some lunch by Jason, and were already playing on the track at the back of the house. Jason was in his room, as always between two and four in the afternoon. The three of them sat in the dim cool dining-room eating cold meat and cheese that had been left set out.

“And what are you going to do now?” Jessie said suddenly. They waited but she did not go on.

“Ann’ll probably come back with you to the house tomorrow,” he said, passing on something that had been decided as part of a plan. He looked at Ann, who was watching Jessie.

Jessie made some automatic assent. But her feeling of distaste for the contemplation of them returned to the way they were before, with Ann coming home at night to Boaz, rose uncontrollably and communicated itself to them.

“And then?” The appeal did not come from personal identification with their position, but out of something wider, urgent — the concern with human dignity as a common possession that, lost by individuals, is that much lost for all. She felt the same sort of involvement when she saw someone fly into a brutal temper: in any action callow, inadequate, not carried through to the limit of its demands of courage and sensibility.

“She’s got to get it all finally straightened out with Boaz.”

Ann said, “I must sell the car.” Everything that ever happened to her was simply announced obliquely and casually, in the form of such practicalities. That was how she dealt with unwieldy emotions, giving her confusion an appearance of headstrong sureness.

“We won’t be able to see each other for the next week or two anyway,” said Gideon, alluding to her return to the Stilwell house. Now that the love affair was no longer an escapade they would have to become cautious, prudent, fearful, where they had been brazen and careless; they could not risk running into trouble before they managed to leave the country.

Jessie was thinking of his need for friends and money to smuggle him out. “It won’t be too difficult.”

“No. But it’s got to be quick and quiet.” He paused. “I know the ropes.” Already passion had become discipline in him.

“I suppose you wouldn’t like to buy my car?” Ann thought that Jessie had inherited money from Fuecht. “We need cash.”

Jessie shrugged off the question as something that Ann must know was impossible. “You’ll be all right once you get to England, won’t you? Surely your people will help.”

“I shouldn’t think so, not this time,” Ann said.

“We won’t be able to get much further than Tanganyika, to start with,” said Gideon, eager to explain, almost anxious, wanting to have the worst admitted and therefore that much defeated. “If I can get out I’ll wait for her there.”

Jessie helped him to some more meat and turned with the plate to Ann, but she gestured it away. “I looked for you right up to the third rocks,” she said presently.

Gideon was opening beer for Jessie and himself. “Yes, but I’d gone further than that, right to where there’s that steep cliff, you know? — and I sat there for a bit, and when I started to come back the tide was so high I had to go through the bush.”

“You didn’t see the jeep?”

“I came along a path. Was there a jeep?”

Jessie remarked, “Ann says some fishermen came along the beach in a jeep.”

“Well, a jeep couldn’t get further than the third rocks anyway.” He sat down and began to eat. “Fishermen. We’ve been left in peace until now.”

“It lasted out our time,” Jessie said. “There’s something to be said for having held out for nearly three weeks.”

“Oh I don’t think a couple of fishermen’re anything to worry about. You’ll be able to make a regular hide-out for your criminal friends down here, Jessie. You say your mother’s not going to use it.”

“The residents of Isendhla are a vigilant lot. Just because they’re retired you mustn’t think they’ve gone soft, Gideon. I heard this morning in the village that they’re having a meeting to stop the cheeky servants from Johannesburg playing around on the beach in their off-time. Wearing bikinis, too, just like the white ladies.”

He began to chuckle to himself. “Is that it?”

“That’s it. On our beautiful Isendhla beach where all tensions are forgotten, and the tolerance and gentleness of a non-competitive life prevail.”

“What are they going to do with the stinking black brutes?”

“There’s talk about setting aside a remote bit of beach for them — say, up at Grimald’s cottage.”

Gideon slid back in his chair, and put a hand over Ann’s to share the joke with her, but she was inattentive.

“Good old awful Johannesburg, nice and vulgar and brutal, a good honest gun under the white man’s pillow and a good honest tsotsi in the street,” Jessie said. “I think we’ll get going about eight tomorrow morning, all right?”

Before the house emptied of them, it seemed fuller than it had ever been, for their possessions were piled up in the rooms, and the beds, though stripped, held hair-brushes, medicine bottles, damp bathing suits and toys — things for which there was no place in the Stilwells’ suitcases or that the children did not want to be parted from during the journey. At last they were ready to go. Gideon was making Jason laugh as they loaded the cars, talking Zulu. When Jessie wanted to say goodbye to him he was back in the kitchen, and when he saw that she meant to shake hands with him he became confused, brought his palms together in a kind of silent clap, and then took her hand awkwardly, his fingers damp from the sink.

When they had gone he brought out his polishing cloths made of squares of old blanket and his two tins of polish, one red and one brown, and smeared the floors thickly, replacing the dusty footsteps and the spoor of the children’s bare feet with overlapping circles of concentric shine that came up under the progress of his hand. He took the few bananas and bruised apples that remained in the bowl on the table out to his room; the smell of fruit was gone from the house. In the bathroom, he found a used blade and put it, carefully wrapped in newspaper, in the blouse pocket of his kitchen-boy suit. He swept out one of Gideon’s charcoal drawings that had fallen under the divan and been forgotten. In the lavatory, he carefully replaced the drawing-pin that had come loose with a curling corner of the declaration that he was unable to read but whose official look he had always interpreted as a sign of importance.

The lucky-bean seeds remained, month after month and year after year, where the children had spilt them that day and they had dispersed and settled, red-and-black eyes, into the cracks of the verandah.