Occasion for Loving (38 page)

“It's all the servants, you see, that people bring down with them. That's it, mainly. Down from Johannesburg and they've got their bathing suits and all just like white people …” The assistant bent her head towards the large woman and laughed indignantly, in spite of herself. “We get them in here, let me tell you, quite the grand ladies and gentlemen they think they are, talking to you as if they was white.”

“Well exactly, they're not our simple souls who're content to chat in their rooms.” Her kind of laugh joined pleasantly with the assistant's.

The man behind the counter plonked down two frozen chickens. “Look at this, Stanley, Mrs. Gidley's just brought in a poster—there's going to be a meeting at the hotel on Tuesday.”

“Well, don't you agree—we feel that, as residents who've built up Isendhla, we want to enjoy our beautiful beach in privacy …”

“… she said to me, I didn't want to go into the water with all those natives looking at me … in trunks they were, too, the men.”

The majestic bosom had turned to the man. “Major Field suggests that we might set aside a stretch … Up near Grimald's cottage, then there would be no question—”

With thanks and profuse friendliness the woman left the poster and turned on her high heels and made her way out, backing into Jessie, gasping a smiling apology, as she went. Jessie caught full on for a moment, like a head on a pike, the fine grey eyes, the cheerful bright skin, the full cheeks and unlined mouth of a tranquil, kind woman.

The woman behind the counter set the meat-cutter screeching back and forth across a ham, and, while she was weighing out the slices for Jessie, remarked, “This always used to be such a lovely clean beach … I don't know if you was down on Sunday? You'd of thought they owned it, that's the truth … undressing all over, behind the bushes.”

“No, I wasn't down.”

“Where are you staying then?”

“I've got Grimald's cottage.”'

The woman pulled a face that was quickly suppressed. “Oooh, that's out of the way, isn't it?” she said, loading Jessie's basket with pampering tact calculated to take her mind off anything else.

Jessie was occupied for an hour or so in the house when she got back; then she got as far as the terrace and stood looking with a kind of disbelief at the wild, innocent landscape; the rain-calmed sea, the slashed heads of strelitzia above the bush almost translucent green with the rush of sap. The sun put a warm hand on her head. But nothing was innocent, not even here. There was no corner of the whole country that was without ugliness. It was no good thinking you could ever get out of the way of that.

She went down to the beach. Ann came slowly to meet her. “Is Gid up at the house?” she called.

“No, why?”

Ann was smiling, but she said, “Well, I don't know what's happened to him, but he hasn't been back …”

“You mean since I left?”

“Mmm,” said Ann, watching her expression.

“I saw him wander up the beach.”

“Yes, I know. I've walked right up beyond the third lot of rocks, but he doesn't seem to be anywhere.”

Jessie looked around the beach, as if she expected to be able to say: there he is. She was conscious of Ann watching her, ready to take a cue from her. She sat down on the sand, waving to the children. “When you start walking here, you go on for miles without noticing it. He'll get hungry soon, and be reminded it's time to turn back.”

Ann was still standing. “I've been miles.”

She drew a half-circle, dragging her toe in a ballet step over the sand, making a deeper and deeper groove. “Some fishermen came past while I was lying down.”

Jessie indicated surprise.

“The children shouted and I opened my eyes and there they were, in a jeep, of all things.”

“White men?”

“Oh yes. Lots of equipment.” She pointed up the beach where Jessie now noticed two long lines of ploughed-up sand.

After a minute, Jessie said, “Perhaps Gideon saw them and thought he'd keep out of the way.”

“Yes, but then he'd have gone up to the house from the bush,” Ann turned at once with the quick dismissal of someone who has already considered and discarded the same conclusion. “—Wouldn't he?” Jessie saw she was hoping for an alternative to be suggested.

“No, well, he might have gone a long way round.” But what other way was there? If he wanted to cut back to the house, he wouldn't walk further away in order to do so. “He'll turn up.” She wandered off to the children. Ann lay on her stomach on the sand, head resting on her hands. Jessie tried to round up the little girls. “It's lunch-time. Put your shirt on. Madge, isn't that your cap, there? No more water, Elisabeth—” but they dawdled and ignored her.

“What's the time now?” Ann asked.

“About half past one.”

“And when you left?”

“I don't know—tennish—after ten.”

At last the children began to drift up the beach towards the path. Madge hung back and shouted, “Ma, I'm waiting for you.” Jessie did not answer but she felt the pull of that imploring, obstinate figure turned on her. “Go on up,” she called. “I'm coming,” and, sentenced, Madge dragged away over the sand, far behind the others.

Jessie tried to work out what Ann was thinking. Her eyes went over the hunched shoulders and the lovely dip of the waist, the fingers thrust into the hair. The girl wore one of his shirts again; the clothes of a lover are both a private reassurance and a public declaration: another kind of woman would wear rings and jewels, but for the same reasons.

“I must pack.” Jessie's remark rolled away, unanswered. “We ought to leave fairly early tomorrow,” she added.

“Oh I'll get things together tonight. There's so little.”

Ann swung round and sat up suddenly. She giggled a little, and, eyes searching Jessie, said, “What on earth can he be doing? Are we going to be here all day?”

“I think we should go to the house. He'll come to the house when he turns up, anyway.”

Ann continued to look at her and look away with an attempt at casualness, childishly nervous, smiling, pressing her lips one against the other. Her eyes met Jessie's deeply, dazzling, evasive in their displayed frankness, guilty in their innocence, as if she had done something that was about to be found out.

“But what
could
happen to him?” Jessie asked.

Ann was not looking anywhere now, though her gaze was holding the other woman. Her eyes seemed trapped, swimming with the tinsel fragments that made light refract in their depths. As a confusion of thoughts concealed sometimes stops one's mouth so that one loses the power of speech, so there is an aphasia of sight, when eyes cease, for a moment, to show anything but mechanical responses to light and the trembling of objects.

“Well … he wouldn't just walk out into the sea …?”

The moment it was said she was smiling at the absurdity, the preposterousness of it.

Jessie laughed too. “But why on earth should he do such a thing?”

In Ann's deep blush she saw the unconscious desire to have the course of this love affair decided by something drastic, arbitrary, out of her own power.

When they got up to the house they found Gideon about to come down to the beach for them. Ann was almost shy to approach him. “I went for a walk,” he said from the top of the steps. “I had no idea it was so far.”

“That's what I said!” said Jessie.

Ann was carrying the trench-coat, hung by the loop from one finger, over her shoulder. He came down the steps and took the coat from her. She said nothing.

The children had been given some lunch by Jason, and were already playing on the track at the back of the house. Jason was in his room, as always between two and four in the afternoon. The three of them sat in the dim cool dining-room eating cold meat and cheese that had been left set out.

“And what are you going to do now?” Jessie said suddenly. They waited but she did not go on.

“Ann'll probably come back with you to the house tomorrow,” he said, passing on something that had been decided as part of a plan. He looked at Ann, who was watching Jessie.

Jessie made some automatic assent. But her feeling of distaste for the contemplation of them returned to the way they were before, with Ann coming home at night to Boaz, rose uncontrollably and communicated itself to them.

“And then?” The appeal did not come from personal identification with their position, but out of something wider, urgent—the concern with human dignity as a common possession that, lost by individuals, is that much lost for all. She felt the same sort of involvement when she saw someone fly into a brutal temper: in any action callow, inadequate, not carried through to the limit of its demands of courage and sensibility.

“She's got to get it all finally straightened out with Boaz.”

Ann said, “I must sell the car.” Everything that ever happened to her was simply announced obliquely and casually, in the form of such practicalities. That was how she dealt with unwieldy emotions, giving her confusion an appearance of headstrong sureness.

“We won't be able to see each other for the next week or two anyway,” said Gideon, alluding to her return to the Stilwell house. Now that the love affair was no longer an escapade they
would have to become cautious, prudent, fearful, where they had been brazen and careless; they could not risk running into trouble before they managed to leave the country.

Jessie was thinking of his need for friends and money to smuggle him out. “It won't be too difficult.”

“No. But it's got to be quick and quiet.” He paused. “I know the ropes.” Already passion had become discipline in him.

“I suppose you wouldn't like to buy my car?” Ann thought that Jessie had inherited money from Fuecht. “We need cash.”

Jessie shrugged off the question as something that Ann must know was impossible. “You'll be all right once you get to England, won't you? Surely your people will help.”

“I shouldn't think so, not this time,” Ann said.

“We won't be able to get much further than Tanganyika, to start with,” said Gideon, eager to explain, almost anxious, wanting to have the worst admitted and therefore that much defeated. “If I can get out I'll wait for her there.”

Jessie helped him to some more meat and turned with the plate to Ann, but she gestured it away. “I looked for you right up to the third rocks,” she said presently.

Gideon was opening beer for Jessie and himself. “Yes, but I'd gone further than that, right to where there's that steep cliff, you know?—and I sat there for a bit, and when I started to come back the tide was so high I had to go through the bush.”

“You didn't see the jeep?”

“I came along a path. Was there a jeep?”

Jessie remarked, “Ann says some fishermen came along the beach in a jeep.”

“Well, a jeep couldn't get further than the third rocks anyway.” He sat down and began to eat. “Fishermen. We've been left in peace until now.”

“It lasted out our time,” Jessie said. “There's something to be said for having held out for nearly three weeks.”

“Oh I don't think a couple of fishermen're anything to worry about. You'll be able to make a regular hide-out for your criminal friends down here, Jessie. You say your mother's not going to use it.”

“The residents of Isendhla are a vigilant lot. Just because they're retired you mustn't think they've gone soft, Gideon. I heard this morning in the village that they're having a meeting to stop the cheeky servants from Johannesburg playing around on the beach in their off-time. Wearing bikinis, too, just like the white ladies.”

He began to chuckle to himself. “Is that it?”

“That's it. On our beautiful Isendhla beach where all tensions are forgotten, and the tolerance and gentleness of a non-competitive life prevail.”

“What are they going to do with the stinking black brutes?”

“There's talk about setting aside a remote bit of beach for them—say, up at Grimald's cottage.”

Gideon slid back in his chair, and put a hand over Ann's to share the joke with her, but she was inattentive.

“Good old awful Johannesburg, nice and vulgar and brutal, a good honest gun under the white man's pillow and a good honest tsotsi in the street,” Jessie said. “I think we'll get going about eight tomorrow morning, all right?”

Before the house emptied of them, it seemed fuller than it had ever been, for their possessions were piled up in the rooms, and the beds, though stripped, held hair-brushes, medicine bottles, damp bathing suits and toys—things for which there was no place in the Stilwells' suitcases or that the children did not want to be parted from during the journey. At last they were ready to go. Gideon was making Jason laugh as they loaded the cars, talking Zulu. When Jessie wanted to say goodbye to him he was back in the kitchen, and when he saw that she meant to shake hands with him he became confused, brought his palms together in a
kind of silent clap, and then took her hand awkwardly, his fingers damp from the sink.

When they had gone he brought out his polishing cloths made of squares of old blanket and his two tins of polish, one red and one brown, and smeared the floors thickly, replacing the dusty footsteps and the spoor of the children's bare feet with overlapping circles of concentric shine that came up under the progress of his hand. He took the few bananas and bruised apples that remained in the bowl on the table out to his room; the smell of fruit was gone from the house. In the bathroom, he found a used blade and put it, carefully wrapped in newspaper, in the blouse pocket of his kitchen-boy suit. He swept out one of Gideon's charcoal drawings that had fallen under the divan and been forgotten. In the lavatory, he carefully replaced the drawing-pin that had come loose with a curling corner of the declaration that he was unable to read but whose official look he had always interpreted as a sign of importance.