Occasion for Loving (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Not that we can tell,” said Tom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which one?”

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

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

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

“Where's Morgan, Jessie?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where was he last night?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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