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 wit
h 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.
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