Jessie and her mother had brought simple evening dresses to wear on Christmas Eve, and, studying the wine list with a look of due consideration for its limitations, Fuecht ordered a bottle at dinner. It turned out to be a bottle that the sort of people who patronised the hotel wouldn’t know about, and, probably acquired by mistake in the first place, it had lain forgotten since the place opened. A bottle of wine like that was one of the pleasures that remained to the grown-ups untouched by the tarnish that, for them, lay on other pleasures. Their murmured exchanges on its quality made an unaccustomed intimacy between them; unlike the girl, they were not open to the stir of the dance band—three men with slicked hair and red cummerbunds who began to blow and thump, each looking for the beat like a man searching for a lost bunch of keys.
When the music started Jessie felt a nervous, happy embarrassment, although she knew that there was no one for her to dance with. The young crowd began to slide round the chalk-sprinkled floor in the stylish, skating steps that were fashionable at the time. Married men grasped their wives clumsily by the back of the dress as they went slowly round, and the boys and girls swooped in and out between them like dragonflies. Jessie smiled in complicity with her mother at the married couples; and sipping the glass of wine that was given to her as a treat, she began to take on the lonely superiority that gave refuge to her parents.
But when the three of them went to bed, a secret black sadness came from her and obscured its cause as an octopus hides his enemy from himself in a cloud of ink. She had got into bed first, to let her mother and Fuecht prepare themselves for bed in privacy. But from far away, from that place of hers far from the limping beat and happy shuffle where the dancers were, far from the unfamiliar room with daddy-long-legs on the ceiling in which she lay, she watched her mother and her stepfather silently crossing and recrossing each other’s paths about the room. He put down his cigar-cutter and small change and keys; she hung up her dress and pulled out a squeaking drawer. The scent of some special face-cream she used brought a personal, expensive smell into the cheapness and passing-trade poverty of human personality in the room. She was putting the cream on out of sight, but the smell of it, anywhere, was her mother to Jessie; the moment the pot was opened, she was there. Bruno Fuecht appeared in the space of light, wearing only a shirt. His legs, shortish and strikingly male, like the bowed muscular legs she had seen in Japanese prints of wrestlers, held her attention coldly and intensely. She had never seen him like this before, but that was not the reason. She had never seen him before—he was hidden from her behind an outward self, a label “stepfather”. She was conscious of something forbidden in the way she lay still and looked at those legs; it was the way, as a small child, she had stared secretly at the deformed. She wondered—a flicker on the limits of her conscious mind—if he were her own father, would she see him like this?
Next morning it was raining and it rained for the rest of the time they were there. The young crowd were not seen again after Christmas dinner; they must have decided to go back to town and the possibility of more tempting amusements. The Fuechts sat it out in the hotel lounge. Outside the lake was red with mud and the road was a frothy scum of the same red mud and water. Jessie got up now and then to stare out for a minute and then came back to her book. All the people who had not packed up and gone were held in the unacknowledged bond that, for one reason or another, they could not face themselves at home. Four men played cards in a corner. Wives knitted. Near the Fuechts, a woman was sewing while the husband slept behind a newspaper and their child, a boy of roving, monkeylike attention, clambered and investigated his way round the room until he settled at the pianola. There was something wrong with the mechanism, and his pedalling produced “You are my sunshine” over and over, with pauses of stuttering aphasia. On and on the child played; the intensity of his mother’s concentration on her sewing began to distract Jessie more than the pianola did: she watched while the last sentence she had read hung in her mind. Suddenly she saw that the woman was sewing without any thread in the needle. It flashed in and out of the stuff, empty, connecting nothing with nothing.
Jessie occasionally saw the mad woman about town in Johannesburg, more than twenty years later. She was unchanged, for perhaps madness had aged her prematurely when she was quite young, and her hair with its streaks of henna and grey was tied back with the same sort of narrow velvet ribbon she had worn when Jessie was seventeen.
The weekend itself had changed its meaning for Jessie many times before it passed into that harmless state known as forgotten. Just after her young husband died, when she became aware that a large part of her life was missing, that she had been handed from mother to husband to being a mother herself without ever having had the freedom that does not belong to any other time of life but extreme youth—just then, knowing herself cheated, that Christmas weekend had come back to her with revulsion and resentment. There, in that cheap, ugly place, her youth had been finally bound and thrown out into the mud to die, while the middle-aged sat in their chairs. Maimed but living, they sat and held her as one of them, for whom there was nothing but to share their losses of the eye of love, blinded by disappointment or habit, and the leg of ambition, gammy now with self-limitations. Her mother sat there with her accomplice, Bruno, while their hired assassins did the job.
Jessie wept for herself, then, caught in a bell-tower of self-pity and anger where anguish deafeningly struck her hour. She lay in bed in the small room where the baby Morgan slept too, and she beat the pillow with her fist in the night. The death of that young man, her husband, was nothing, in the end, to this: the discovery of the body of her youth out in the mud. Her husband was dead, but she was alive to the knowledge that, in the name of love, her mother had sucked from her the delicious nectar she had never known she had—the half-shaped years, the inconsequence without finger-print, of the time from fifteen to twenty.
Later, when the animus of blame had exhausted itself, Jessie saw that weekend in the critical light of the needs of new growth and shunned it out of disgust for herself as she had been then. Because she had courage now, a passion of self-assertion, she reproached herself for cowardice then. Why hadn’t she fought her mother for survival? She drew strength from these reproaches to herself without trying to understand the reasons for the paralysis of the will that had been brought about in her through a long, slow preparation of childhood.
Still later, she saw that the weekend was terribly funny. When she was living with Tom, and she told him the story, they laughed and laughed over it—Bruno loftily ignoring the weevils in the porridge, the woman furiously sewing at nothing, the pianola wheezing out “You are my sunshine”. And then it had been recalled too many times to seem funny any more. It lay harmless, an explosive from which the detonator had long been removed.
In Jessie’s own house, the Stilwell house, Christmas preparations were elaborate and began early in December with the day when Jessie and Tom met for lunch in town and then shopped for the children’s presents. The year that the Davises were in the house Boaz turned up with Tom. Home for a day between field-trips, he had found no one in when he arrived at the house; he had walked into Tom’s room at the university.
The three moved from the coffee-bar where Jessie was waiting to a restaurant where they could get a drink with their food. Boaz, in khaki pants and veldschoen, had the happy air of the returned traveller among people who have not left town. “Let’s have a bottle of wine. I’ve been drinking nothing but kaffir beer and I feel very healthy.”
“You look it, too,” said Jessie. In fact he looked very handsome, his pale opaque skin turned a shiny olive colour by the sun. Although the presence of the Davises made little mark upon the house, the return of Boaz from a field-trip had begun to bring with it each time a rounding-off of the family; besides, both the Stilwells always felt a spontaneous affection for him the moment they saw him, while Ann, although they liked her well enough, had not aroused what was, toward him, almost a family feeling in them.
“That’s what I suggested,” said Tom, “but we phoned the Lucky Star and they weren’t there. —She’s been very busy with culture and good works, your little wife. Last week she was prettily selling programmes at Jazz of the Year, this week it’s a travelling art exhibition in some caravan she’s begged off a friend.”
“So she wrote. Is there anything good there?”
“Two good Gideon Shibalos—the same two, the early ones he always trots out; I don’t think he’s doing anything these days. And a few wood carvings—not bad. The rest—” He put a bit of roll in his mouth and chewed it vigorously, disposing of the pictures.
“What would you give a boy of fifteen for Christmas?” Jessie had her list beside her plate, and she laid the problem before Boaz.
“Isn’t there anything in particular he wants? Surely there’s something he’s been longing for the whole year?”
“No,” said Jessie, “not Morgan. He doesn’t long for anything.”
“Not that we can tell,” said Tom.
Boaz filled his glass. He did not take Jessie’s question in the conversational way it was asked. He often went on thinking about things after the people who had begun to talk about them had moved on to something else. “Shouldn’t we talk to Morgan more?” he said now, assuming a responsibility nobody expected of him, but nobody questioned.
Jessie ignored the direction of the remark, turning Boaz swiftly back to the immediate and particular. “The present’s supposed to be a surprise, anyway. What did you get when you were fifteen?”
“I know what I got,” said Tom. “A bicycle with the handle-bars turned down. I always let everybody know what I was longing for, no mistake about that. You ask my father. His only worry was that he might buy something that wasn’t precisely to my specifications.”
“Well, I didn’t get Christmas presents, of course. But my bet is you ought to get him something grown-up and smashing.”
“You poor little brute,” said Tom, with a grin. “I forgot about that.”
The waiter arrived with trays and dishes balanced along his arms, and when these had all been correctly distributed, Boaz insisted: “Really smashing. What about a cine camera or a collapsible boat?”
Jessie and Tom burst out laughing. “Yes, why not?” said Tom, lordly. “Or a sports car? Morgan probably needs a sports car.”
They bought Morgan a new steel watch-strap and fell back on the choice of a game that Jessie had looked at but not decided upon, because they always seemed to give him that kind of thing. It was a bat and ball affair that provided good practice for tennis or squash, without the necessity for a partner—one of those games you play against yourself.
The Stilwells and the Davises pooled resources and had a very successful party that disposed of three different sets of acquaintances in one night: the university people came for drinks and tid-bits handed round by the little girls in the early evening; the friends stayed on to get drunk and eat two great potfuls of hot food; and the friends of friends—hangers-on, people the Stilwells or Davises had liked the look of at other people’s parties, invited to come along, and then forgotten—these came and went between midnight and four in the morning. As usual one or two of the Africans were stranded without any means—except their by then unreliable legs—of getting back to the townships for what remained of the night, and make-shift beds were provided for them.
On Christmas morning Jessie liked to take the little girls to church, and this year, since Boaz wanted to hear the choir there, it was decided that they would go to a big church in one of the townships instead of the church in the Stilwells’ suburb. The church did not have the front-parlour tidiness of the church in the white suburb. Paths worn by the feet of the congregation led up to it on its dusty hill above the township; inside, it was lofty, almost as big as a cathedral, and it smelled of the smoke from open cooking fires that was always in the clothes of the people. But the dresses of the little Stilwell girls stood out in ostentatious plainness beside the frills and pert fancy hats of the small black girls. And the high church service, with incense spreading from the swinging censers, and the white, gold and blue of the priest’s robes, and the flowers banking the altar—all this, in contrast to the monotony and stink, the bareness and dunness of the streets outside, was like the kingdom of heaven itself. These Christians had only to walk through the door to enter it.
It’s harder for us, thought Jessie. Just then she caught Boaz looking at her, and felt that he knew what had just passed through her mind. He did not kneel when the rest of them did, but all the time sat with repose, listening to the flock of voices that rose steeply around him, or the low sound of prayer. All through the ritual of Christmas, the curious swarming of the human spirit, some of it meaningless, some meaningful. He had given and partaken with zest and a pleasure in participation. Yet from time to time, as now, although she was kneeling and he was a respectful onlooker, she was aware of something that set them apart together. She, a Christian, assumed with her husband and others a common experience of the Christmas ritual, along with other common experiences. But the truth was that for her the common experience was not there. The part she took was not natural to her, in the sense that it was part of a continuity in her life; for her, it was assumed, just as, for different reasons, it was for Boaz. Behind the kissing and the laughter and the exchange of presents, there was his Jewishness, and her forgotten weekend the year she was seventeen.
Four
The house had the look of a trampled garden, after Christmas, and then in the New Year began to right itself as everyone in it again took up a less concentrated way of living. It was the first house Jessie had ever lived in that seemed to die back and put forth along with the humans; this, she supposed, was the organic quality that people were talking about when they called a house a “home”. She had lived in flats and houses which, once the reason for which she had gone to live in them in the first place—to be near a job, to provide a meeting-place for a lover—had fallen away, had to be left, like an empty box. This one would take anything.
The last and smallest of the little girls, Elisabeth, was about to begin school, Tom was trying to get in a clear month’s work on his book before the university term began, and Jessie was in the process of handing over her job to her African successor. It had been understood that, if and when an African could be found to do the job satisfactorily, this would be done. She was working particularly hard to leave everything running smoothly and to familiarise the new secretary with all the difficulties he could expect to encounter, and at the same time she was conscious of the loose end running out ahead of her. Tom suggested a job at the university that she could have if she wanted it; one of the professors needed a secretary. There would be the advantage that they both would be on holiday at the same time, and they could meet at lunch most days; he saw the idea in the pleasant, comradely light of someone wanting to draw another into the familiar satisfactions and frustrations of his own work. Jessie went to see the professor—she knew him, of course, from various official social meetings—but while they were discussing the job as if it were assumed on both sides that she would take it, it became clear to her in her own mind that she would not take it. Like many decisions, it brought temporary satisfaction. “I won’t go to work for De Kock,” she said serenely. “Didn’t it go well?” Tom was at once suspicious of the professor. “No, he’s a nice man. I’m sure we should get on. Only I just don’t want to work there. It was a good thing I went; I knew at once.”
She felt a relief at the thought of the city streets at lunchtime, the shopgirls pushing past arm-in-arm, the white suburban housewives and the black factory girls buying hats at bargain counters, the parties of glossy business men filing into expensive restaurants, the black men in the blue boiler suits of the wholesale firms, making a lido of the pavement, and gambling in the sun. There, she was whatever she might appear to be in the eyes of those whose eyes sh
e 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.
Occasion for Loving Page 5