Occasion for Loving (16 page)

Because he was not much interested by her, Tom Stilwell made an effort to talk to Ann when he found her about. There were gaps in his attention to as well as his knowledge of her day-to-day life, and usually his attempts were of the well-how-are-you-getting-along-with-such-and-such variety. He asked her about the travelling exhibition one evening when she happened to be in to dinner, only to hear it had just closed. “Oh my God, everything's always over before I get to see it. I suppose that Japanese film's off by now too, darling?” he added to Jessie.

“Of course” she said cheerfully. “But there's a new place to eat opened up where the old Bella Napoli used to be. We could try that before it goes bust, perhaps.”

They passed from this to discussion about whether, in general, group shows were more or less satisfying than one-man shows. “In any case, I imagine there isn't anyone among the group you showed who could attempt a one-man show—except perhaps Shibalo.”

“Of course, yes. And he can get a gallery in town, any time he wants to,” said Ann.

“What about talking to Patrick Bold about the caravan now?” Tom said, half to Jessie.

“You can,” said Ann. “His brother's taking it for the next six weeks or so.”

“We wouldn't want it until about July—Jessie?” She had the component parts of a small doll beside her and was studying them between bites of apple. Her eyes hesitated over the coupling of this piece to that with obstinate enjoyment of the difficulties created by her ignorance of the principles of construction involved.
“I'm not so sure.” She was not referring to the time, but to the fact that a house that was part of Fuecht's estate might be available to them soon. It was a house at the sea where she had stayed as a child.

“How many would the caravan take?” The possibility of the house, vague as it was, stirred some opposition in Tom, as will any proposition that appears to bring to the active surface something one dislikes in the nature of someone one loves. He had the unexpressed knowledge, based on no facts and requiring none, that Jessie wanted to use the house because Fuecht was dead, perhaps to demonstrate that he
was
dead.

“It's huge. Oh, six can sleep in it, easily,” Ann assured him at once, with the confidence of a butterfly telling a bird how to build a nest.

“The kids could double up, anyway. And one could take a tent as well. How about you and Boaz bringing along a tent?”

“Marvellous. But it depends when. Boaz is supposed to go up into Moçambique in the winter.” Ann was drawn to the problem of the doll. “Wait a minute, why don't you try getting the head in first—then that bit”—she took up the torso irresistibly—“hooks in there. Ought to.”

Tom, too, picked up an arm, like the piece of a jigsaw that the passer-by feels sure he will drop into place unhesitatingly. He fitted the wire spring to the truncated shoulder and pushed it through one hole in the pink plastic body. Jessie watched with the silence of one who has tried all this before. The spring was too short to project through the hole on the other side, where the other arm was supposed to connect to it, and the hole was too small to allow fingers to enter and pull the spring through. “You need a bit of wire. Or tweezers would do.”

“Eyebrow tweezers? I'll get mine,” said Ann, and left the room for a minute.

Jessie said to Tom softly, looking up over the doll. “She's having an affair with Shibalo.”

Her tone was curiously reassuring and unconvincing.

“What on earth makes you say that?”

“I know. I was mad not to see it before.”

“Does Len say so?”

“I had lunch with them at the Lucky Star the other day.”

There was the almost dreamy quiet between them of a man and woman who have been sexual partners for an unbroken communion of some years. Like rain and tempest watched through the window of a warm, light room, they remembered wet and wildness out there.

Even while they were speaking, Ann's voice, da-la-la-ing a phrase of a jazz song she liked, cut across theirs. In a moment she was in the room again, calling out, “This'll do it,” and attention to the doll continued unbroken, each impatient of the other's attempt to get it together.

Boaz came home that weekend, but as he arrived while the Stilwells were out, on Saturday night, the first they saw of him was on Sunday morning, when he and Ann emerged from the house about eleven o'clock and joined the others on the lawn. They were both still in pyjamas. Ann wore a short gown over the cotton romper arrangement in which she slept, and Boaz's brown hand, dangling round her neck, stirred now and then in her tousled hair.

Jessie was lying on her stomach reading the papers and she turned dazedly on to her side, elbow propping up hand and head, at the approach. The lawn sprinkler was circling to provide a fountain in which the three little girls, Elisabeth naked and the other two in their pants, played. A couple whose sole claim to friendship rested on the exchange of such visits had dropped in on the Stilwells to drink some beer. Boaz agreed to have beer for his breakfast, and he and Ann settled themselves on the grass. Boaz was unshaven but looked handsome, squatting like an Arab with the planes of his olive-pale face shaded in by beard; the limits
of its growth were clearly defined, like the markings on the face of some deer. As usual, since he was so often the returned traveller, talk took its impetus from him for a while, though he in no sense dominated the conversation but simply shared, in his friendly, serious way, what he had to say. He had lost a camera and given some other things of his a good dunking, getting through a swollen drift, and as he told the story now the mention of the district where this misadventure happened prompted a question from Redvers English, the visitor, about oil prospecting that he'd heard was going on there. Boaz had got mixed up with an oil-prospecting crowd the other day, and had an amusing story to tell about them; this led the talk out of his single stream into the general pool where everyone's opinions, questions and desultory comments about what would happen to the tribes in the reserve if oil was found, made overlapping rings. Ann did not bother to take part in the conversation; only her laugh rang out now and then: she had pushed up the gown into the elastic legs of the romper and lay rolled over on to her back in the sun in feline laziness. The smooth skin of her knees soon took on a tight shine and the grain of her thigh-flesh came up rosy. She was not pensive, not “quiet”, not, perhaps, content. Nothing was projected from her. Jessie thought: she exists.

The pitch of the group rose a little with the beer and the hot sun. Olga English had one of those weeping laughs, maddening as the repetitive cry of certain birds; Jessie began to be irritated by her but Tom, though he did not like her very much, was in the sort of mood when one enjoys drinking and talking not particularly witty nonsense rather more with people one does not care much for than with friends who draw more strongly upon one's personality. They had sent the children for biscuits and cheese, but although the sprinkler was deserted, the children had not come back. Warmed by beer, Tom in passing leant over Jessie with his arm round her and half-whispered,
half-showed off, “Are you gloomy this morning, my love …” It did not matter what he said—he knew that increasingly over the last year there had been times when she was not carried along with the mood of the company; he liked to give a sign, any sign, that he was in touch with her. She had merely felt rather impatient for the Englishes to go, but the softness of the gesture suddenly did make her feel sad; she saw out of the corner of her eye—the small movement that betrays the presence of an enemy—a lover's knot of raised blue vein showing on her left calf. In this full light it was obvious—she bent to examine the skin intently and saw that thin red-blue lines were spreading and branching from the vein, a faint map recording the advance of an invader. Madge and Elisabeth appeared at this moment, their dresses on but unbuttoned and with sashes hanging stringily. “About time, good heavens!” Jessie sprang up briskly. But they did not have the cheese with them, they had forgotten all about the cheese. Madge was crying. She held Elisabeth like a bailiff with his hands on a poacher. “Look what she's gone and done.”

“Oh that blasted doll again. No, I can't, I can't,” Jessie held it up tragically, while the others laughed, though (since Ann's eyes were closed) only Tom knew what at.

“Now the eyes have fallen back into its head.”

“Give here,” said Boaz. “Don't worry, Madge, we'll fix it for you,” and Madge went over at once to her new victim.

“If you knew the struggle we had with that thing the other night; Tom, Ann and I—we were all working on it.”

Tom's and Jessie's recollection of something else met suddenly over the bent heads of Boaz and the child. Ann rose up into the moment, stretching, smiling, yawning, “I'd better put some clothes on.” Moving sluggishly from hip to hip, she was arrested in her trail towards the house by some remark, and paused to stand talking to Olga English.

“Boaz doesn't know, anyway,” Tom said. They had returned a number of times since the evening when Jessie first spoke of it to the business of Ann and Gideon Shibalo. They never talked about it for long, nor very fully; what she did was none of their business—not in the trite sense of minding one's own business, but in the real sense that although she lived in the house they had nothing of the involvement with or concern for her that is the real reason for one human being being another's keeper.

“She hasn't told him.” It was a conclusion; this was an affair on the side (perhaps not even the first?) and not intended to break the marriage.

“It'll be all right if only she goes on resisting the temptation to tell him,” said Tom.

“Quite.”

Tom felt sleepy after Sunday lunch and was lying on the bed in his clothes. “She takes it all very calmly,” he said, with a slight hesitation.

Jessie was pushing open all the windows and drawing the curtains closed; she turned her head to him and laughed.

“D'you think she sleeps with the two of them?” He was diffidently curious, with a touch of male fear of the female.

“She must. —I should think so, at the beginning, at any rate. The one may have become awfully familiar—you know—it may not seem like the same thing, perfectly harmless. —You never liked her much, did you?” she said, taking up the tone of curiosity.

“I don't know. I was pleased that
he
was so thrilled with her—”

As he was dropping heavily asleep, Jessie's voice woke him: “There was something wonderful about her today, though.” The quiet, ordinary voice startled him convulsively and his hand as it jerked out came into contact with the bony yet padded eminence
of Jessie's pelvis. In the dark behind his eyelids it was at once a skull turned up by a boot, and a grassy bank.

They went to a party, in the week that followed, with Ann. It was one of those shapeless parties that people give to introduce foreign visitors to a succession of faces they will never see again. Tom got trapped in a corner with a bore who always lay in wait for him at such parties, and Jessie drifted ruthlessly from group to group, finding herself talking to people whose identity she ought to have known, since they appeared to know her. The only liveliness came from the small company where Ann was. She herself held the same glass of gin and tonic the whole evening, but her presence roused an appetite for pleasure in the others around her, so that there was constant traffic between their corner and the bar. Laughter, raised voices and general animation surrounded her yet appeared to emanate from her; she was not looking her best that night, her hair was in need of a shampoo and the dress she wore was not a really good colour, but she had, Jessie recognised, the attraction for men of a woman who is excited by some private amorous involvement. It was a state both helpless and powerful. The attention was not something one set out for; but the power! The power came from the brief time of balance between two men, the extraordinary moment before guilt, shame or regret set in, when one gave to and took from each of them an identical pleasure. Jessie remembered with something of a shudder the discovery that one could make love to one man one night, and another the next: the taboo that had lived in one's mind as a hoop of fire—and simply fell apart, as one jumped, a thing of tissue paper.

Tom was coming home one afternoon when he saw Ann's car draw up outside the gate, Ann get out, and a man with a beard, whom he recognised as Gideon Shibalo, drive off again. When she caught up with him along the path, he said, “What's happened to your car?” She laughed, gave him a look of surprise that might have been a rebuke. “I've lent it to Gid Shibalo.” The initiative
seemed to have changed hands swiftly, so he said, “What is he doing these days?” They went up the steps together. “Teaching.” She smiled at him as he pushed open the door for her to enter; her hair was wet on the ends, she must have been swimming, and the powder had rubbed off her face on the cheek-bones and nose as the bloom rubs off the round prominences of a fruit. She never had the dazed look that, paradoxically, clouds the face of someone who has been doing intellectual work, she never carried the dull smell of smoky rooms, the staleness of ink, papers or cooking. She did not bring an ether of cold perfume, either. He felt it almost as an insult that he was unmoved by her living beauty. He went upstairs and said to Jessie: “So he's driving around in Boaz's car, now.”