Occasion for Loving (11 page)

The Stilwells were in the becalmed state that follows a quarrel, when the telephone rang. The quarrel over Morgan had dragged on into a deadly examination of the dissatisfactions and burdens of their daily life, that each took as the unsaid reproach of the other. Each felt the other was known to the bone; there was no possibility that a sudden turn of courage, of frivolity, even, might reveal itself unexpectedly in one of them, and so restore something of the mystery to life itself.

Tom went slowly to the telephone. “Here is Fuecht. Fuecht. Who is speaking?” The voice ended in a crackle.

Tom did not catch the name properly. “This is Tom Stilwell. Who is it you want?”

“This is Fuecht,” the voice came back sternly. “I'm speaking from the Queen's Hotel. I was on my way to Europe and the plane is delayed. They brought me to town and gave me a room. Listen, my plane doesn't go till two o'clock.” “Mr. Fuecht! That's unexpected.” Tom had the embarrassed, disbelieving tone of someone unfairly singled out by a man who had never before paid him any attention. “Can you see me?” the voice insisted. “Couldn't you come into town? I'm at the Queen's Hotel and I'll only be here a few hours, I'm on my way to Europe. You've got a car, eh, Stilwell?”

“Well, the trouble is, it's rather late.”

There was a strangely stirring silence on the other end of the telephone.

Why should a man who hardly knew him put such pressure on him? Tom said, “Just hold on a minute, will you, I'll speak to Jessie. Do you mind?” There was some sort of sound of assent.

He went back into the living-room where she was lying face-down on the divan. “Have you heard anything from your mother? Anything you haven't told me? That's Fuecht.”

Jessie stayed quite still for a moment, and then she turned round and sat up, all in one movement. “It's Fuecht?” The skin under her eyes seemed to tighten, as it did when she was afraid. “I ought to stop answering the phone altogether,” he said, with a feeble attempt at a joke.

“Fuecht?”

“Yes, at the Queen's. He's phoning from there. He says he's on his way to Europe and the plane's been delayed.”

She nodded. “Well, that's that. He's threatened my mother for weeks that he'd go.” She sat stiffly.

“What shall I tell him? He wants us to go to the hotel. The plane doesn't leave till two.”

There was a moment's silence. “I won't go,” she said. “Does he mean me?”

The coldness of the quarrel stirred again faintly. “I suppose so. Why should he want to see me? I hardly know him. I don't suppose I've seen him more than three times.”

Jessie gave a strange, set, painful blink, like the cringe of an old woman. Tom felt unease, an outsider to the silence between the man on the telephone and the woman bolt upright on the divan. He said, trying to be of use, “D'you want me to go?”

“I won't go,” she said, and sat running the nail of her forefinger rapidly under the nails of her other hand.

He went back to the telephone. “Hello? Mr. Fuecht, I'll be there in about half an hour. Jessie's in bed already. Where will you be?” “In the room,” came the voice, suddenly strong—Tom did not know whether it was the telephone, but the voice seemed to fade and rise to strength, intermittently. “Number a hundred and ninety-six, it's on the second floor. I won't go from the room.”

Tom drove to town subdued but not too unwilling. A quarrel is better rounded off than left in the air, a miasma. He was doing something now that he wouldn't be doing if he were not Jessie's husband; the relationship was quietly validated by this performance of a piece of family business. It was a token performance, of course, just as Bruno Fuecht was a token relative.

Tom had always thought that Fuecht was a strange, foreign choice to have been made by Jessie's mother; the explanation that he was the best friend of Jessie's own father, who had died when she was younger than Elisabeth, certainly seemed the only possible justification. Mrs. Fuecht had the cynical pride of bearing of the woman who has set herself to live out the length of an unhappy marriage. Where Jessie was careless of her
appearance, and, in her late thirties, already no longer beautiful, Mrs. Fuecht, at nearly seventy, was dressed in the perfection of cut and matched colour that demands unflagging concentration on one's own person. Tom had never seen her without a hat. Even in her own house, she looked perpetually like a visitor dressed for some occasion to which nobody else has been invited.

“Why is she so cold,” he had asked Jessie sometime, struck, on meeting the woman again, with this quality in her. “She loathes Fuecht,” said Jessie simply. “She's frozen into the state of living in the same house with him.”

Mrs. Fuecht had never been happy with the man, but since he had got old he had become demoniacal. From the coast, where they lived in retirement, came reports, year after year, of his moodiness, his contrariness, his downright devilishness. He was ill and quarrelled with his doctors. He made it impossible to keep servants for longer than a few days at a time. He brooded and threatened to sell up his excellent investments. And when, Jessie said, he had stilled her mother to a state of tight-lipped, despairing consternation at his recklessness—he suddenly burst out laughing in her face, as if all of it, everything, from the refusal to take his medicine to the threats to their security, had been directed to this one end: to make a fool of her.

Tom wondered, from time to time—with the impatience one feels toward other people's troubles—why the old woman hadn't left Fuecht long ago. He meant to ask her, just as a matter of curiosity; but somehow, once in her presence, he never felt himself taken sufficient account of to be allowed such a question.

He accepted that Jessie's relationship with her mother was an odd one, to say the least of it. Apparently she had felt herself passionately dependent on her mother as a child and girl; as a woman, she understood that the truth was that her mother had been passionately and ruthlessly dependent on her. It was clear
that her mother had clipped her wings and brain-washed her, to keep her near—the story about the heart trouble was a pretty dreadful one, if you really took a look at it. Before Morgan was born, Jessie had gone to a heart specialist to see if the old ailment had left any weakness that might make a normal birth dangerous for her, and he had told her with emphatic quiet that not only was her heart perfectly normal, but in fact it was not possible that a heart ailment serious enough to keep a child out of school for years could leave no sign of past damage … No, better not look into that at all. Jessie told him that as a child she had believed that her mother loved her more than other mothers loved their children. As she had come to understand, through her feelings for her husband and her own children, the free nature of love, her fascinated resentment toward her mother had grown proportionately; yet she supported the woman, at a distance of five or six hundred miles, against Fuecht.

The situation—comfortably chronic and fortunately far away—was doubly foreign to Tom, first because he himself was fond of his old father (a retired doctor who gardened or smoked a pipe on the verandah while he gazed peacefully at the result of his labours) and secondly because there
was
something foreign, in the national sense, about it. As Bruno Fuecht had grown older and more difficult he seemed to have become more and more markedly a stranger in South Africa; his thirty or forty years as a chemist on the South African mines were brushed away and his foreign identity—a Swiss German, a man of Europe—reasserted itself. Yes, Fuecht was unmistakeably foreign, and the emotions of the situation he created about himself were foreign—the theatrical behaviour, the air of aged defiance, the melodrama, for example, of this sudden arrival in Johannesburg. Last week, a letter from Mrs. Fuecht saying that he had gone into a nursing home for observation, this week he's off to Switzerland. What was the sense in hitting out like this, once you were old?

Tom approached the Queen's Hotel with a set mood of almost professional patience—like a paid mourner at a funeral—that did not touch himself. The Monday night streets of the city gaped; there were only a few black men, looking long and steadily into the windows of the outfitters'. The Queen's had the cold sour smell of a drinking hotel—it was not a place where people went to dine or to live. Two or three tables in the bar lounge held up the elbows of men in striped blazers—perhaps some visiting bowlers' team—and an elderly tart was arguing in drunken dead seriousness between two men, in a dingy corner.

When you have your home in a city, it is always a shock to enter the brutal homelessness of a place like this; Tom forgot, for stretches of years on end, that such places exist and are part of the true character of all cities. He went to the desk where a night porter with the deeply suspicious face of his kind picked up a telephone without a word when Fuecht's name was pronounced. While he waited for the phone to be answered, the man moved his left hand strongly over his face, pushing his eyebrows up out of line and then down, rubbing his nose sideways, pulling over his mouth and chin, like the rough tongue of some animal going over its young.

“Second floor. One-nine-six.”

Tom went up in the lift, and, with the sense of being let deeper and deeper into places where neither dark nor daylight exists, but only the light of single bulbs gathered like beads of sweat on the ceiling, came out into a passage. Past doors and more doors; before he knocked, it seemed, the door opened, and there was a blazingly-lit room, yellow-walled, with the luggage heaped, as it had been dumped down, in the middle, and the figure of an old man drawn up like an exclamation point before it.

They looked, man and luggage, ready to take off for anywhere. The visitor was ready to back away before them.

“So I wait,” said Fuecht, without any greeting. “They will come for me soon.”

Tom would not have known him if he had seen him in the street. Was he really unrecognisable? He walked into the room and sat on the bed, under the chandelier that had been meant for grandeur and shone as a merciless inquisition of glare. No, Fuecht must be changed. He couldn't possibly have looked like that; the way he looked was not something that could last for years.

He was ill, of course. But it wasn't that. It wasn't just the usual old men's symptoms of the collar grown too big, the hollow, delicate-looking as the skin over an infant's fontanelle, in front of each bloodless ear. He was blazing behind his line of tight mouth, behind his dark eyes made dominating, in the diminishing face, by his magnifying glasses; he was blazing like the chandelier. Something—a pulse, a convulsive swallowing—agitated all the time in the thin turkey-fold that connected his chin to his adam's-apple.

“They told me a wait of forty-five minutes,” he was saying, without a pause. He gave the little unpleasant smile of a man who knows better than to expect efficiency in matters that are out of his hands. “I should get off the plane from Port Elizabeth and then go straight through the customs and so on to the plane for Europe. That was the information. No one would have known. You would not have heard from me, eh? I would have been,” he threw up his unsteady hands like a drowning man, but in triumph, “many miles away by now.”

“It's very annoying to be delayed,” said Tom, but his eyes were on the luggage. “When did you decide to go to Switzerland?”

“Yes! I should have been gone!” The old man took a swift turn about the room. He checked himself abruptly; he moved with the incalculable rushes of a faulty clockwork toy, that jerks into action, moves with wild nimbleness, and then just as suddenly
runs down and is arrested feebly in the middle of an uncompleted movement. He laughed, “Switzerland! Yes, begin with Zurich. I was a boy there, a young man, living as young men live. Zurich to begin with, but I won't stay. Don't think I'll stay! I'm not crawling back to Zurich to …” He stopped. A close look came over his face, it was not so much as if he had lost the thread of what he was saying as that he had found himself saying something unexpected, something that lay in his mind ignored. He went on, “There are plenty of places in Europe where you can live, still. Well, I should have been gone already, I should have been on the way, eh?” He sat down suddenly, gleeful, shaken, on the chair.

A waiter came in with whisky and soda, that Fuecht must have ordered to be brought when his guest arrived. While the man was in the room, the old man did not speak, and had a curious air of impatient resentment. When the waiter had withdrawn, he made sure the door was properly closed behind the man, and then handed Tom a drink: “Whisky is all right, eh?”

“And Mrs. Fuecht—?” said Tom.

The old man drew the whisky round his mouth and then put the glass away from him. “I'll tell you something,” he said. “When she wakes up, she'll find there isn't a penny. I've got all my money out. Here, in my pocket—here's a cheque book for the Zurich bank. I've taken it all out. There are ways, you understand. I know people, I managed it—never mind. It's all there. All I have to do is write out a cheque.”

“It sounds as if someone's going to have a good time.” It was impossible to remedy this conversation in which both were talking of different things, although their remarks appeared to follow one on the other in the parody of communication. Oddly, Tom was reminded of times when, talking to Jessie, he became aware that they were not talking about the same thing; she sometimes went through the motions of communication with
her lips, while what she really was doing was to hug further and further into herself what it was she had to communicate.

“I'm sorry about Jessie. She wanted to come, she would've …”

Suddenly the old man seemed to realise Tom's presence; he smiled a slow, grudging recognition, and the lie lay exposed between them.