Occasion for Loving

Twenty

The black spring of burned veld stretched for miles beside the road. They came up out of the sappy green of the coast that knows no seasons and remembered that winter had cut down to the bone in their absence. Already the hard, bright land was cleared, cattle hoof-marks dried to stone in what had been vleis, rocks split by frost. The black territory, as if shaded in on a map, ran round pockets of resistance formed by scrubby trees, and blanked out the shallow veins that marked the beds of dry streams. It was the black not of death but of life; peach trees along the railway tracks were blooming crude pink out of it, and there was a frizz of something light, hardly green yet, over a young willow. Jessie was not aware of a change of tone and pace in her being but it took place nevertheless, just as the engines in an aeroplane settle to the number of revolutions which constitutes their cruising speed, once the height of that speed has been reached. She drove without getting tired, and managed the children capably and companionably; a temporary state that made all others seem inexplicable. When they stopped to eat or to stretch their legs, she and Ann and Gideon had the confidence and easy closeness together that people often find only when the experience they have shared is about to be summed up by their return to those who are outside it. Before, Jessie had resented being drawn into the close orbit of Gideon and Ann; now she felt that they had also been drawn into hers. Gideon made a fire, when they had lunch, to please Elisabeth — there was nothing that needed cooking. There was no wood about and he used dry grass and cow-dung and was affectionately praised by everyone. The three grown-ups sat round Gideon’s fire drinking gin and tonic and laughed a lot about nothing in particular; everything that was said seemed a witty private joke between them. Elisabeth stood behind Gideon with her arms possessively round his neck and laughed when the grown-ups did.

Jessie packed the picnic things back into the boot of the Stilwell car, while Ann handed them to her. The girl stood with her arms hugged against herself, gazing round with the alertness of a last look. “When I think of what it was like driving the other way! Those two days while the car was being fixed! You know, when the man in the garage looked at Gid, and I stood next to him seeing Gid at the same time, it wasn’t the same person we saw …”

“It won’t be long.”

Gideon was trampling out the fire. First he had scooped up sand in his hands to pour over it. “Anybody got a rag?” He came over dusting his palms together. “What’s the matter?” he murmured intimately to Ann. “I want to go,” she said fiercely, sulkily. “Yes, we are going.” He aped her intensity.

“Oh, not to Johannesburg.” She walked away and got into the car; she drew the old towel that kept the draught off over her knees, and took a cigarette.

Gideon struggled to close the faulty catch of Jessie’s boot. He clicked his tongue at its recalcitrance, once it was done. “You’ll help her.”

“Whatever I can,” Jessie said.

He clicked his tongue again. “I’ll have to keep out of the way. It’s bad, you see.”

“Ann seems only just to have discovered what it’s all about.”

He laughed. “I know. She was like a kid playing hide-and-seek. Now she finds there really is something creeping up after her. I want to get her out as quick as I can. She’s got nothing to do with this sort of thing, man.” He was thinking of Callie Stow, who knew how to keep intact, untouched, her loves, her passions and her beliefs, even while the dirty fingers of police spies handled them. But he did not want Ann to change; like many people he confused spirit with bravery, and he saw her old thoughtlessness and recklessness as courage. He did not want to see her acquire the cunning, stubborn and patient temper of a political rebel. To him she was herself, her splendid self, a law to herself, and limited as little to the conventions of opposition as to the conventions of submission. She loved him; she did not love him across the colour-bar: for her the colour-bar did not exist.

“Come, my girl, let’s push off,” he said, putting a hand on Jessie’s shoulder. The gesture admitted her to the sort of moment she had been waiting for, not consciously, and she spoke. “Gideon, shall I keep in touch with the child — when you’re gone?”

He was not annoyed at the reminder, he was not indifferent. But he said, as if he took a chance on what was expected of him, “I’ll make some arrangements to send money every month or so, as soon as I can.”

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I could give him news of you, and I could send you photographs.”

“Perhaps it would be better to let it go,” he said. “There’s an uncle looking after him, a good friend of mine. When I’ve got money I’ll see that he gets it.”

She was looking at him with a trapped, uncertain face. He patted her hand. “It’s all right, Jessie, it’ll be all right.”

She drove ahead of them, parting an empty countryside where a tiny herd-boy, flapping like a scare-crow in the single garment of a man’s shirt, waved to the car. Little groups of huts were made out of mud and the refuse of the towns — rusty corrugated iron, old tins beaten flat, once even the head of an iron bedstead put to use as a gate. The women slapped at washing and men squatted talking and gesticulating in an endless and unimaginable conversation that, as she passed, even at intervals of several miles, from one kraal to another, linked up in her mind as one. In this continuity she had no part, in this hold that lay so lightly, not with the weight of cement and tarmac and steel, but sinew of the earth’s sinew, authority of a legendary past, she had no share. Gideon had it; what an extraordinary quality it imparted to people like him, so that others were drawn to them as if by some magic. It was, in fact, a new kind of magic; the old magic lay in a personality believed to have access to the supernatural, this new one belonged to those who held in themselves for this one generation the dignity of the poor about to inherit their earth and the worldliness of those who had been the masters. Who else could stretch out within himself and put finger-tips on both touchstones at once? No wonder the girl had turned her back on them all, on Boaz with his drums and flutes, on Tom with his historical causes, on herself with her “useful” jobs, and chosen him.

But a few days later, when Jessie happened to have to drive through the township where Gideon lived, the continuity of the little communities of mud and tin on the road was picked up again. Mean shops and houses lurched by as she bounced along the rutted streets; her errand (for the Agency, where she had found herself at once temporarily employed again because of some staff crisis) took her first to a decent, two-roomed box of a house between two hovels. She sat among shiny furniture behind coloured venetian blinds; then in an office converted from an old house, where a money-lender and book-keeper, with a manner of business irritability and suspicion, hovered over the scratchings of a girl clerk who went about in slippers between black exercise books and a filing cabinet like a weary woman in her own kitchen. The verandah outside the place was littered with the torn-off sheaths of mealie-cobs, and children with mouths and noses joined by snot watched from the gutter. A mule was being beaten and a huge woman, strident-voiced, oblivious of her grotesque body and dirty clothes, bared her broken teeth at a man. Gideon had someone he loved here; parents, perhaps; friends. Taking Gideon, Ann was claimed by this, too, this place where people were born and lived and died before they could come to life. They drudged and drank and murdered and stole in squalor, and never walked free in the pleasant places. When they were children they were cold and hungry, and when they were old they were cold and hungry again; and in between was a brief, violent clutch at things out of reach, or the sad brute’s life of obliviousness to them. That was the reality of the day, the time being. Oh, it would take courage to choose this, to accept it, to plunge into it, to belong with it; for that was what one would do, with Gideon, even if one were to be living in another country. Even among strangers in Italy or England, Ann’s lot would still be thrown in here, among these men and women and children outcast for three hundred years. Jessie found fear in herself at the idea of being allied to this life, and was uneasy, as if she might communicate it in some way, unspoken, to Ann. She fought it, denying its validity, but fear doesn’t lie down at the bidding, like a dog. Not even for love, that is supposed to cast it out: she remembered how Ann had said “… when the man in the garage looked at Gid, and I stood next to him seeing Gid at the same time, it wasn’t the same person we saw …”

Jessie was stopped by a policeman just past a cinema gutted in a riot some years before and never restored, and asked for her permit to be in the township. One of the easy lies that even the ruling caste has to learn to tell came readily: “My washgirl didn’t turn up this week, and I had to find out what she’s done with my things—” She had told the tale several times before, and it was always adequate.

“You really think she wanted him drowned? But you said one must believe she loves him?”

Jessie talked of Ann and Gideon but there was conveyed to Tom in the telling not only her experience of them but the vein that the experience had opened into herself.

“She’s in love with him, there’s no getting away from it, whatever we thought about her before.” The familiar background to the Stilwells’ intimacy, that looked the same whether they were in fact far removed from one another or drawn closely together, had been taken up again; she was cutting out a dress, at night, while he worked on some students’ papers. “But I don’t know what she wanted …”

“Wanted him drowned … you said so”

“Being in love with him isn’t simple; I mean, the whole business isn’t. We say it’s just like falling in love with anyone, but it isn’t, the whole affair isn’t. Not for us either. You said at the beginning Boaz couldn’t behave just as if this were any man running off with his wife. And Gideon knows it. Boaz wants to treat Gideon like any other man, but he can’t because Gideon isn’t a man, won’t be, can’t be, until he’s free.”

“About Boaz — all right.” Their attitude in the business of black and white was something they shared completely without individual reservations. Yet now Tom felt the difference between them of two people, both of whom are familiar with a terrain through organised tours, one of whom has been lost there … Jessie went on sticking pins firmly through paper and material, privately carrying on with her task, while her voice drew him into an admittance of something that existed like a deed committed between them. “Ah, Tom, don’t ask me to postulate it. We don’t see black and white and so we all think we behave as decently to one colour face as another. But how can that ever be, so long as there’s the possibility that you can escape back into your filthy damn whiteness? How do you know you’ll always play fair? There’s Boaz — he’s so afraid of taking advantage of Gideon’s skin that he ends up taking advantage of it anyway by refusing to treat him like any other man.”

“Yes, yes, but all right — what ‘harm’ could you do or I do to Len or Gideon or anybody else?”

“But how can you be sure, while one set of circumstances governs their lives and another governs yours?”

Tom said shortly, “I don’t see Ann thinking about this, though.”

“One knows things sometimes simply by being afraid, you know that?”

Later when they had gone to bed, he returned to it, saying in the dark, “If she really loves him, as you say, what harm can she do him?”

Jessie was silent for a moment, but as Tom put his arm under her head, she said to his profile showing like a mountain range close to her eyes, “First he couldn’t get out on his scholarship because he’s black, now he can’t stay because she’s white. What’s the good of us to him? What’s the good of our friendship or her love?”

For the Davises there was that withdrawal of people into their own affairs that often comes about when some crisis in which others have been involved shrinks back to the orbit of the protagonists, once a decision has been made. They did not need to discuss the details of their parting with Tom and Jessie; they needed to recover, even from the most sympathetic and familiar understanding, all that they had revealed of themselves in the distress of the last few months. It was necessary for Boaz to forget, at least for the present, the demands he had made on Tom while they were alone together; it was necessary for Ann to forget how close she and Gideon had drawn to Jessie in the house at the sea. It was a relief to the whole house, though when they all met the atmosphere was the drained, numb, considerate one of the railway or airport hall, where the end of something is reduced to the choice of a magazine to take into the void, and the solicitous provision of cups of coffee to while away the remaining half-hour. The help — that is, the continued intimacy — that Gideon had thought Ann would need from Jessie would have been an intrusion; in the end, Ann and Boaz knew each other so well that neither needed, or could be provided with, a defence against the other.

Gideon came to the house quietly once, and talked alone with Boaz and Ann; there was no dinner-party afterwards, and Gideon would not even stay for a drink. Boaz was seeing a lawyer friend of the Stilwells; Len came to consider taking over Ann’s car. Jessie met him in the garden as he left. “Well, are you driving away?” He came up confidentially and said, “They want cash. I understand that. But it’s out, for me, then.” “The best thing is to advertise.” It was the subdued small talk outside the sickroom door. Jessie walked to the gate with Len. When they were a little further from the house he said, “The husband’s a nice guy. What went wrong?” They both laughed, giving up at the inadequacy of the reason why it shouldn’t. “I didn’t take them seriously, honestly.” He was talking of Gideon and Ann. “I’d never have taken them seriously. But the whole town’s talking now. Everyone knows they went off together. Everyone’s asking me this and that.” By the whole town he meant all the intricate subcommunications of the town-within-the-town where the traditional human exchanges replaced the decreed separations. But Jessie felt no interest; the sensation buzzed over something that had already escaped out of reach of sensation.

She had a pleasant lunch with Gideon and Ann at the house one day, when everyone else was out. She did not know if they still met at the flat, but she gathered that they were seeing each other briefly, very discreetly, and probably through the agency of some friend not previously associated with them. The three of them talked mostly about the house at the sea and their time there, almost like people who meet to renew a holiday friendship. When Gideon left he looked round the smoky living-room where they had sat till nearly three in the afternoon over their lunch-time coffee (it was a bleak day and the fire, Jessie and Ann agreed, was not nearly so good as Gideon’s grass and dung one had been), and then at Ann, whose beautiful smile rose to her face as if it existed for him and would always be there when he looked to her. Now it came to him as encouragement: not to be afraid to pronounce the future, not to be afraid to count on it. He put his arms round Jessie and held her, and kissing her, said, “When are you coming up to Tanganyika? Or will it be London? But Tanganyika’s a good place, eh?”

Twenty-One

She knew then that she would not see him again.

But she could not have guessed how this would come about, and for what reasons, that, if they were in the room that August afternoon, she failed to be aware of. The cigarette smoke that the three of them had breathed out of their nostrils and mouths hung like warm indoor thunder; the fire was all red, all paper-lantern glow, containing flame in the thinnest skin of matter, and would collapse into nothing at the slightest shift, but the bricks of the fireplace gave out a magnificent heat. Jessie put her back to it. She felt a peaceful weight in her own presence, alone there, left by the other two. I’m beginning to live vicariously, she thought, if I can feel so involved with other people’s lives and step back and watch them go. But she knew it was something different, something that she couldn’t be too sure of yet … She was beginning to slip into the mainstream, she was beginning to feel the substance was no longer something she must dam up for herself. Passion would not leave the world grey when it went out for her; struggle, love, the urge to grasp and shape living went on through the agency of others, too; Gideon and Ann held part of it; Morgan was coming up to have his share relinquished to him, and even the small girls were not far off. Her mind inhabited briefly the rooms of the house at the sea that had been talked of that afternoon; wandered to Fuecht; she thought, with the sudden summoning that brings the dead to life, that he had dammed everything up for himself right to the very end, right until his old claws couldn’t hold anything any more, let it all slip through, and remained clutching at nothingness.

Three nights later the Stilwells had guests for dinner. Jessie had left the table to help Agatha serve the main dish, and she met Boaz at the foot of the stairs. Both he and Ann had said they would be out, and she had not pressed them further, but now she said, “Are you coming to eat? — Oh I like that Allen man!” The occasion of the dinner-party was the presence of a visiting Cambridge history don who Tom had told them was brilliant. He turned out to have that diffidently deprecating manner of presenting dogmatic opinions that Jessie found irresistible. “Yes, I hear he’s pretty impressive.” Boaz smiled, responding to her mood of animation engendered by the success of the evening. Her mind was on the sauce, that might need thickening, and she said, “Well, come in, then!”—already on her way to the kitchen. “No … no, I don’t think so …” Each in their preoccupation, they passed on. “D’you know where the key to the boxroom is?” he called after her. She was already stirring the sauce, standing well away from the stove so that her dress would not be splashed. “No key,” she called. “The door’s just stiff, it’s never locked.”

Agatha went into stony slow-motion when flustered, and there was real effort of encouragement and chivvying needed to get hot plates, hot food, and the sauce that must be served at once, all to the table at the same time. It was managed, but Jessie could not let her eye off anything while the process was going on. Tom always forgot to open the wine beforehand and, as usual, wandered about the room talking, using the bottles to emphasise his points instead of drawing the corks. He disappeared to find his favourite corkscrew, then was back again, but as he came close to her where she was serving she saw his face quite alien to the warm reflections of the room. The response to some other situation stung upon it like the outline of a slap. He was filling glasses, she was caught among plates and steaming dishes; she had no chance to speak to him, sitting down, at last, at the opposite end of the table. The don, who was young and tall, with the small head and fine skin of handsome Englishmen, took on a patchy flush as he ate and drank appreciatively, and kept his golden eyes on George Thandele, Tom’s African colleague who taught law at the university. Thandele talked so steadily that he scarcely ate at all; when he paused he would take a gulp of wine like someone coming up for air. They were not arguing, but agreeing about the inconsistencies of policy in the new African states. “It’s a matter of coming to terms with freedom,” Thandele said, in conclusion.

“Well precisely. There’s nothing really extraordinary about a Ghanaian cabinet minister’s wife buying herself a gold bed in London while her husband’s Government announces a special issue of stamps commemorating colonialist exploitation in South Africa.” There was laughter down the table, and talk became diverse again. Jessie forgot about Tom for stretches of the evening, and then would catch his glance, or, in a pause of her own, watch him engaged in talk with others, and receive some parenthetic flash of undecipherable concern.

At last they met at the broad window-sill in the living-room where the drinks stood.

“They’re leaving.” He passed the phrase to her like a folded slip of paper. She looked uncomprehending.

“Upstairs,” he said. At the word she had in her mind Boaz; then the question about the key to the boxroom, where the suitcases were … but these facts did not fit together, as familiar objects looked at without the sense of their relationship to each other are unrecognisable. “Who?” she said. “Boaz has just told me that they are going back to Europe,” said Tom. He went off with the glass of beer he had poured for someone, and Jessie was drawn slowly into the activity of the room with the strange facility of one who has just been told something that cannot be grasped by the small, delicate apprehensions that remain independent on the oblique edge of one’s being — but must be held back until it can be taken full on.

Tom went down to the gate with the last guest. She was standing in the middle of the shabby room, ready for him, when Boaz appeared. He clearly expected Tom to be there with her. “Everyone gone?” He smiled at her.

“You’re going back to Europe,” she said.

“It’s a long story — I want to tell you one day.” There was no victory in him.

Jessie was still standing in the same place, and she said, “Just — going off?”

He looked about him like a stranger, then sat down on the edge of the divan with his legs flung out before him.

“Yes, we’d better get out. We’ll hop on a ship, I think we’ll go to have a look at the Seychelles, and then start off at Marseilles. Wander around from there — we’ve been tramps before.”

“And the grant?”

He made a curiously Jewish gesture with his hand, pushing the possibility away.

The girl in the grey trench-coat took to the road and whoever went with her did not expect to choose his direction. Jessie suppressed the impulse to make a sign of goodwill with some advice she didn’t believe in — what he ought to do was settle her down in a little house somewhere with a couple of babies, etc. “Good luck, Boaz,” she said with a dry smile, but meaning it.

He accepted it with a little ironical pull of the eyebrows; he had changed, she saw, hardened in the only way possible to someone of his still, inert nature, by holding himself off from events a little more. It was the difference between waiting to see what would come to him, and knowing what would come, even while continuing to wait. What he had got back was not exactly what he had lost, then; when he said that he and Ann had been tramps before, he was seeing the romance of their relationship as their limitation. In place of the sweeping exultant relief that he must have been almost afraid to allow himself to imagine at the possibility of taking up their old life, he showed, when Tom was back in the room again, only the energy generated by purpose that moving on provides, in the same way as the kick of a stiff drink articulates a day that is out of joint. They — he and his wife — were already removed from this house and these friends by the distance they were about to disappear into; they were together by virtue of gritty docksides, echoing halls of airports where they would be alone. Tom asked whether Ann was upstairs and Boaz said that he’d already driven her to the hotel where they would spend the night. “You won’t take it the wrong way?” He turned to Jessie. “She says everyone has had enough. That’s the way she feels at the moment — it doesn’t mean we don’t know what you and Tom have done for us … Only whatever we say now — it just makes us more of a damned nuisance. When we get together next time, we’ll make it all right. You’ll all come over, you and Clem and Madge and Elisabeth — and Morgan, Morgan too.”

And Jessie smiled as if she had heard it somewhere before, while Tom, with the male gift for depersonalising an atmosphere in order to set another man at ease, said, “Pick up a cheap Greek island, man, and then give us a sign …”

Where was it, this island or mainland, in new old Africa or old new Europe, where a man believed he would belong with Ann?

“No one mentioned Gideon,” Jessie said to Tom. He felt her bringing guilt into the house, like someone going over the scene of a crime.

“No one was thinking of anything else. What was there to say?”

“We didn’t count him in at all.”

Tom said drily, “Where there are three people, one is always left out.”

But it was Tom who flung the question into their hurry to get out of the house to work next morning, “What do we do about him?”

She was cold because she resented having her own background thoughts sprung among the sunlight and the breakfast dishes, as if someone carelessly touched a switch.

“Nothing for us to do.”

Elisabeth dawdled, and Madge first complained and then began to go red and cry in case they should be late for school. Tom, who was to take them there, went upstairs and came down again, but they were still not ready, because now Elisabeth had lost her pencil. “Ask Agatha if there isn’t one in the kitchen drawer, where the tin-openers are.” Jessie passed on the crisis and put out her hand in the gesture she used when she wanted a cigarette from Tom. The sight of him, washed and dressed and ready for the outside world, while she still had the private pale face and unbrushed hair of the bedroom, always softened her; he dressed badly, out of lack of interest and shortage of money, in the same grey flannels, hairy jacket and brown shoes with thick rubber soles that had been the uniform when he was an undergraduate just after the war — yet this judgment was at the same time an admission of his attractiveness. “You don’t think they didn’t tell him — oh Christ!” She was suddenly alarmed. “Of course not. But just the same …”

“I’ll try to get hold of him at the school.”

Gideon Shibalo was not at the school where he taught, and Len could not find him, either at the room in the township or the flat in Hillbrow. Some weeks later, the Stilwells heard that he had been in Johannesburg all the time; he had thrown up his job; he was drinking, people who had seen him said. None of his African friends took his drinking very seriously; he would “come out of it”, or perhaps would simply become one of those who always remained one of themselves, carried along, however broken, by their unchanging recognition of what he really was aside from the brawlings and buckling legs and slurred tongue with which he was trying to destroy it.

Jessie was distressed, as women are, to hear that he was drinking. “He would have got drunk in Tanganyika or London, with her, when things didn’t go right,” Tom said. “You said she might do him harm, didn’t you? Perhaps it would have been worse if they had gone off together.”

“She didn’t have to stick to him to harm him; it was done already.”

“But what could the bloody woman do, if she didn’t want him, or couldn’t face wanting him?”

“Nothing,” said Jessie. “Nothing. She’s white, she could go, and of course she went.”

They came again and again to the stony silence of facts they had set their lives against. They believed in the integrity of personal relations against the distortion of laws and society. What stronger and more proudly personal bond was there than love? Yet even between lovers they had seen blackness count, the personal return inevitably to the social, the private to the political. There was no recess of being, no emotion so private that white privilege did not single you out there; it was a silver spoon clamped between your jaws and you might choke on it for all the chance there was of dislodging it. So long as the law remained unchanged, nothing could bring integrity to personal relationships.

The Stilwells’ code of behaviour towards people was definitive, like their marriage; they could not change it. But they saw that it was a failure, in danger of humbug. Tom began to think there would be more sense in blowing up a power station; but it would be Jessie who would help someone to do it, perhaps, in time.

Twenty-Two

Gideon Shibalo did not come near the Stilwell house after the Davises had gone. Jessie was alone and unobserved again as she had wished to be before they came. Tom reminded her of this, saying, when the last of Boaz’s instruments and equipment had been packed up to follow him, “It’s a relief to be able to spread yourself — my filing cabinet can come back here — the desk there—”

He seemed to have forgotten his easy companionship with Boaz in an almost fussy pleasure at getting back his working room — he liked to use Morgan’s room to work in. She teased him, “Only six weeks and Morgan’ll be home again.”

“Oh that’s different. I don’t mind old Morgan about.”

They were a family in spite of failures and evasions. In the family either nothing is forgiven, or everything: she went over and stood against him with her cheek against his chest and her arms wrapped round behind his waist. He held her in that room in which, while they were quiet, they could notice still the scent of Ann’s make-up. “You’re the only woman,” he said. Like all people who have been lovers for a long time, when they wanted to be loving in words they went back to the formula that had contained all that they had felt at the beginning. She was the only woman, then, for this gentle, passionate man several years younger than herself; now his image was softened at the edges, blurred a little with the tweedy pedantry of the liberal historian, frayed a little by battles for integrity in work, politics and love that he no longer always expected to win — what women were there for him to choose from, now? The thought drifted into Jessie’s mind without cruelty; she said, part of the embrace, “What’s happened to your shirt near the pocket? …”

“Oh I don’t know, I haven’t noticed …”

“Look, it’s going.”

He seemed to feel the relief of the Davises’ departure far more than she did. She said to him, curious, several times: “You never really liked her, did you, that’s the trouble.”

“You always tell me that,” he said, with faint emphasis. He disliked people to say things to him for the purpose of watching his reactions. Yet he could not resist what had been calculated to be irresistible: “Ann’s altogether too open, too much on the surface, that girl—”

“—For you, yes I know—”

“I could never get over something unpleasant in the alert way she would turn at once to what attracted her, run her finger along it, taste it, laugh at it, point it out to someone. I don’t know — she seemed to have only one reason for doing anything, one reason only, that she was alive.”

“That’s her charm,” said Jessie.

He looked at her with familiar disbelief and doubt. “I don’t understand how you could get fond of her.” He thought there must be some explanation, though, that he would find out in time; he liked to follow the light and dark through which the many motivations of Jessie moved.

“You don’t get fond of her, you discover that she’s human, like yourself, but she’s afraid to touch herself — you know, like a kid who’s been told she’ll go blind if she explores her own body. That’s how she is about her life — she just lets it function without asking how or why.”

“That would do as a definition of either a hedonist or a silly ass. And you should have left her alone like that.”

Jessie was honestly astonished, though flattered, as a woman always is when someone who regards her as a force to be reckoned with demonstrates that he thinks she has again been active. “What are you talking about? She hardly knew I existed until the last few weeks in Isendhla. To her anybody over thirty, with a brood of children and a few grey hairs, is a different species.”

“But she saw you took Gid seriously, didn’t she? Didn’t she see that you thought he was a person, somebody, that you and he talked together as she didn’t talk to him?”

Her face opened up to defence. “—There you are,” he said, before she could begin to speak. “You said she lived by pure reaction — she flew into this thing as a bat steers into a certain path because it instinctively feels the bulk of objects being set up where other ways were open.”

“If she was influenced by what we thought of him, it was all of us — you and Boaz and all of us. We all talked to him and listened to him as if he were something special,” and her voice ended in doubt. “Well, he was — he is—”

“Something special,” Tom said firmly.

“Somebody special, and also a black man. For all of us there was the happiness that he was also a black man,” she added, slowly, pausing before the sentence. Then she said, “—So why me?”

“Because you were a woman, and we were not. She could go ahead and sleep with him and fall in love with him, and you could not. She had to become serious about this, because you were serious about the other things.”

“What rubbish,” said Jessie denying with a flash of the masterfulness of which she was being accused. Defending herself, she mixed up truth and lies picked up simply as if she had reached for a stone. “She was crazy about him. She only used me as a convenience when they had nowhere else to go. I was even jealous of them.”

In September Morgan came home for the holidays. There was a late cold spell so there was no question of his sleeping on the enclosed verandah, though he tramped straight up there with his things. “Oh no, we’re back to normal,” said Jessie, and then laughed. “—At least, Tom’s using your room, but it is yours again.”

“The porch is O.K. for me.”

“No, it’s as draughty as hell, you’ll get ill.”

“You should feel our dormitories. And in our showers they’ve got vents that can’t be closed.” He grinned at his own stoicism. “Anyway, I want to toughen myself a bit.”

But he was accustomed to doing what Jessie decided, though he now did it more with an air of good-nature than submission. His suitcase and soccer boots moved in among Tom’s paper towers. Outside a jagged cold wind drew a torn finger-nail across the iron roof and set every loose hinge and wire screeching; the untidy, mouse-nest comfort of the room attracted the three grown-up members of the family and for it they quitted the rest of the house in darkness, after dinner in the evenings. Jessie had put the little radio downstairs in the living-room before Morgan arrived; he lay on the floor beside it, to listen to certain programmes, but he did not seem to miss having it up in his room, or to want to have it playing all day long. At night, while Tom made notes or did reading for his book, and Jessie read or devised the endless adaptations of children’s clothes that were required as outgrown garments were prepared to be handed down, Morgan was engaged in calculations for a model he was building. It was some kind of collapsible canoe; Jessie thought it seemed rather a simple thing, and that if he were going to make a hobby of building model boats he ought to be encouraged to do something more elaborate. She mentioned some impressive kits that she had seen in a hardware shop in town.

“Oh, those are the sort of things that old men build in their yards. With little plastic trees and things.” Morgan smiled.

“Yes,” his mother said, “Everything is worked out exactly to scale, authentic and so on — just as if they were real.”

He put his hand down beside the bits of plywood spread on a newspaper. “This’ll just be the model for a real boat — to see how the idea works out. Some other chaps and I’re each working out a plan, and then we’ll decide which is the best before we begin to build. Greg Kennedy’s father’s putting up the money, and then Greg and I want to see how far we can get down the Rooipoort River. It mustn’t be too heavy, because you’ve got to carry it where there are rapids. But it mustn’t be too small, either, because we want to have our camping stuff with us — that’s why we want to try out making it collapsible.”

His voice had broken completely since she had seen him at Easter, broken with childhood. She understood that the bits of wood and glue that she had seen in the category of play belonged to life. Morgan and Tom were talking about the possibility of using fibre glass for such a boat, and she remarked, “Boaz would have been your man. I’m sure he knows all about it.”

Morgan said, “Oh he does. We were going to build one to take up to Moçambique with us.” He still accepted with something of a child’s fatalism the adult’s prerogative of abandoning plans, breaking promises for reasons outside a child’s ken. But a few days later, when he and Jessie were having lunch alone together, and she was going through the post, that Agatha had brought in while they ate, he said: “Any news of the Davises?”

“Mm-mm.” Jessie shook her head slowly while she read. “Not a word since they left. No idea where they are.”

“I had a letter — from some place in France; I can’t pronounce the name. But that’s last month.”

Jessie was reading a long letter from her mother, and she frowned, half-lifting her hand to stay him; then, when she had come to the end of the paragraph that absorbed her, she looked up, confused, and said with great curiosity curbed by a sudden delicacy toward him: “You had a letter?”

“From Boaz. Wrote to me at school.”

Jessie laughed, putting her hand over her mouth. “Well!” Then, “And what did he say?”

The boy said shyly, “They’re O.K. They didn’t like the Seychelles very much. He was going to give some lectures at a music festival the next week.”

Jessie pushed her letter aside and weighted it down with the salt cellar. She seemed about to speak but only looked intently round the table a minute, and, catching Morgan’s eyes on her, murmured, “Funny … I was just thinking …” She asked him for the jam. “No, the apricot.” The exchange of ordinary objects on the table before them was like an exchange of grips; he remained calm, almost sympathetic.

“The letter I was just reading, from Granny — from my mother — there’s a fuss about the Isendhla house. The agent wrote and asked her to be a bit careful whom she puts in there in future—” A quick look of amused comprehension passed over their faces, making them look alike for a moment. “Someone saw Gid on the beach with one of the children … the little girls! A black man in bathing trunks carrying a little white girl on his shoulders …”

“Boaz was terribly worried, all the time. I mean, he was worried about Gideon Shibalo too. You can’t imagine anyone like Boaz, the way he—” The boy was suddenly able to release before her his first comprehension of grown-up ethics, of the private moral structure that each man must work out to hold himself together if he abandons or breaks down the ready-made one offered by school, church and state.

At once she was tempted to take advantage of this by confessing herself; she almost put in here, I know I shouldn’t have left you in the middle of the whole thing. But her tremendous instinct for survival held her back brutally: she had never taken up the right to the child; if there was to be anything now it must be between two adults. She picked up her mother’s letter and looked at it again, reading over the agent’s account of the complaint made by “certain local residents”. She put the letter down and turned her face away, opening her mouth stiffly for self-control. “Why is one always having to be so ashamed for these people — why do they have to spit on everything — She needn’t worry, I’ll never go there again—”

Swelling along the strained line of her neck, contusing her face and distorting her mouth, he saw the tension of feeling that had made his mother’s familiar and yet mysterious face what it was. It drew him more powerfully than any beauty; it was as if the flesh of life had been opened away and the heart bared, not the pretty pin-cushion of love-scenes in films, but the strong untiring muscle that pumped blood in the dark.

His discovery through Boaz found words again. “If you’re really in love with someone, I mean — I always thought you must hate the other person who wants her. Boaz really liked Gideon Shibalo. I mean, I couldn’t help knowing — he didn’t seem to trust her not to get Gideon Shibalo into trouble.”

“She’s a bad little girl,” Jessie said, not believing it, but because she was afraid of talking about the nature of love with Morgan. “But she’s very beautiful?” she asked him in sudden curiosity.

“Oh yes,” he said. “She’s very beautiful.” He was smiling, but he spoke surely, eagerly, from a part of life she had no part of.

She did not seem to have heard.

“You’ve got nice hands,” she said. “I wonder where you got them from?”

Morgan laughed and, withdrawing them swiftly from the table, put them in his pockets.

“You’re an unbeliever living in the midst of a fanatical cult; you still don’t understand what taboo means.”

“Gideon taking Elisabeth for a ride. I know what I see; I won’t start thinking like a madman,” said Jessie.

But Tom came home these days with his mind held ready only for his work; what travelled unavoidably under his mind’s eye was dealt with at the same distance he had set between himself and the peoples and events he was writing about. Jessie was envious, as usual — her life seemed to her by comparison the ball of fur that a cat licks off itself, swallows, and gags on. Tom had been asked to prepare a shorter version of his half-completed history of black Africa for a series of special paper-backs meant to provide an historical background to present-day world politics. He was struggling to condense, into two-hundred-and-fifty pages written in two months, twenty notebooks of material intended for a book that would take perhaps three years to write. He had no time at all to go out, so Jessie and Morgan went to the cinema and to plays together while Morgan was on holiday. Morgan wasn’t keen to go to a symphony concert, but Len Mafolo took him to the sessions of a serious jazz group that he kept wanting to talk about afterwards: enthusiasm was something that ripened out of sight, in Morgan, so that what occasioned it first sank away without appearing to have made much impression, then rose to the surface with some depth behind it. Jessie did not really care for parties without Tom, and Morgan was too young for the parties their friends were likely to have; she was pressed to go to several, but was persuaded only once.

It was the usual sort of party, and once there, with a thick tumbler full of warm gin in her hand, wandering from room to room in a house disarranged as if for moving, she was at home and even mildly enjoyed herself. Men she never saw except at parties came up and put their arms round her and said, as at a great and private reunion, “Come and talk to me, Jessie” or “Let’s go and have a drink”, and women exchanged with her greetings of exaggerated pleasure: “Oh poor Tom! Poor you! How’s the book going?”

Someone brought dance-music recorded on tape while in another room little Simon Sofasonke had been pushed to the piano. Couples danced everywhere, white girls in their black sweaters leaning back and then climbing the air, pelvises thrust forward, before their relaxed, encouraging black partners, white men moving in a hushed shuffle black girls with silver fingernails and straightened hair flattened and lacquered into a little black cap cut into ragged points round their faces. Every now and then a slender young black man with a fastidious drunken face came in and switched off the tape-recorder. “Anyone wants that stuff, he c’n tell me.”

Jessie knew everyone there, and those she did not actually know by name were merely new faces in a familiar context: a bespectacled white leftist down from Rhodesia, a coloured journalist from Cape Town, an addition to the usual girl students from the university, a change in the roster of black bachelors (some of them bachelors because they never brought their wives along) who always outnumbered the women guests. A white woman who had just been charged with incitement and was out on bail was dressed as if for a diplomatic reception, in a midnight-blue velvet coat and antique gold earrings. Someone said: “How she enjoys it all!” A white man who had been in and out of prison for years on political charges, and who worked with one of the African political groups, was attacking an African leader within the same group who was opposed to his influence. The black man said, “And whoever persuaded Sijake to make that statement, he was badly advised!”

“Badly advised, was he? Shall I tell you why you think so, Mapire? Shall I tell you why? Because you’re a racialist, that’s why …”

The far-off wail of a baby — a child of the house — seemed to be heard, like a noise in the head, between the music, the talk and the movement, but was always lost before it attracted attention; it was as inconceivable, it had no more relevance, in the clamour of politics, liquor and sex, than the call of a bird in a thunderous machine-shop.

At about half past ten a fresh influx of guests arrived, mostly Africans, and one white couple who had been somewhere else first. Jessie left the room where the tape-recorder was for the room where Simon played the piano, and, slumped on a sofa with his head against the shoulder of a woman as if against a door-post, there was Gideon. He was drunk; he must have come very drunk. They had put him down there, out of the way, but apparently he wanted, every now and then, to get up and make a nuisance of himself, because the woman had the air of sitting there kindly to restrain him. She was a big black girl with a pretty face and the solid legs and strong arms of a nurse. Jessie had come into the room to get away from the noise, and although the room was not much less loud than the one she had left, she felt the blare displaced at once by a deep, uncomplicated affection for this man. It flowed in in peace, one of the simplest things she had ever felt in her whole life. The experience of the disastrous love affair, to which she was so close, lay like the memory of a battlefield between herself and this battered man — one of the greedy ones, like herself: she knew what he saw, now, when he seemed to look through walls. His face was grey and the dark of his lips was split with red, was flowering patches of bloody colour, scarlet and purple, like some strange streaked tulip. She went up to him, putting aside her old superficial feeling that he would want to avoid the Stilwell household. But he was drunk, and did not answer her. She spoke to him again, and his gaze recognised something, though perhaps it was not her. He mumbled, “White bitch — get away.”

Somebody said, “Get him out before he spews over everything, for God’s sake.”

“Even the pigment in his lips has changed — from drinking, you know how horrible it goes. What’s going to happen to him?”

Jessie stood drawn up before Tom as before a tribunal.

Tom turned away. “He’ll be all right. He’ll go back and fight; there’s nothing else.”

When Jessie saw Gideon again, he clearly had no memory of what he had said to her. They continued to meet in a friendly fashion, sometimes in the Lucky Star, occasionally at the houses of friends, but the sense of his place in the Stilwells’ life and theirs in his that she felt that night never came again. So long as Gideon did not remember, Jessie could not forget.