Occasion for Loving (42 page)

Someone brought dance-music recorded on tape while in another room little Simon Sofasonke had been pushed to the piano. Couples danced everywhere, white girls in their black sweaters leaning back and then climbing the air, pelvises thrust
forward, before their relaxed, encouraging black partners, white men moving in a hushed shuffle black girls with silver fingernails and straightened hair flattened and lacquered into a little black cap cut into ragged points round their faces. Every now and then a slender young black man with a fastidious drunken face came in and switched off the tape-recorder. “Anyone wants that stuff, he c'n tell me.”

Jessie knew everyone there, and those she did not actually know by name were merely new faces in a familiar context: a bespectacled white leftist down from Rhodesia, a coloured journalist from Cape Town, an addition to the usual girl students from the university, a change in the roster of black bachelors (some of them bachelors because they never brought their wives along) who always outnumbered the women guests. A white woman who had just been charged with incitement and was out on bail was dressed as if for a diplomatic reception, in a midnight-blue velvet coat and antique gold earrings. Someone said: “How she enjoys it all!” A white man who had been in and out of prison for years on political charges, and who worked with one of the African political groups, was attacking an African leader within the same group who was opposed to his influence. The black man said, “And whoever persuaded Sijake to make that statement, he was badly advised!”

“Badly advised, was he? Shall I tell you why you think so, Mapire? Shall I tell you why? Because you're a racialist, that's why …”

The far-off wail of a baby—a child of the house—seemed to be heard, like a noise in the head, between the music, the talk and the movement, but was always lost before it attracted attention; it was as inconceivable, it had no more relevance, in the clamour of politics, liquor and sex, than the call of a bird in a thunderous machine-shop.

At about half past ten a fresh influx of guests arrived, mostly Africans, and one white couple who had been somewhere else
first. Jessie left the room where the tape-recorder was for the room where Simon played the piano, and, slumped on a sofa with his head against the shoulder of a woman as if against a door-post, there was Gideon. He was drunk; he must have come very drunk. They had put him down there, out of the way, but apparently he wanted, every now and then, to get up and make a nuisance of himself, because the woman had the air of sitting there kindly to restrain him. She was a big black girl with a pretty face and the solid legs and strong arms of a nurse. Jessie had come into the room to get away from the noise, and although the room was not much less loud than the one she had left, she felt the blare displaced at once by a deep, uncomplicated affection for this man. It flowed in in peace, one of the simplest things she had ever felt in her whole life. The experience of the disastrous love affair, to which she was so close, lay like the memory of a battlefield between herself and this battered man—one of the greedy ones, like herself: she knew what he saw, now, when he seemed to look through walls. His face was grey and the dark of his lips was split with red, was flowering patches of bloody colour, scarlet and purple, like some strange streaked tulip. She went up to him, putting aside her old superficial feeling that he would want to avoid the Stilwell household. But he was drunk, and did not answer her. She spoke to him again, and his gaze recognised something, though perhaps it was not her. He mumbled, “White bitch—get away.”

Somebody said, “Get him out before he spews over everything, for God's sake.”

“Even the pigment in his lips has changed—from drinking, you know how horrible it goes. What's going to happen to him?”

Jessie stood drawn up before Tom as before a tribunal.

Tom turned away. “He'll be all right. He'll go back and fight; there's nothing else.”

When Jessie saw Gideon again, he clearly had no memory of what he had said to her. They continued to meet in a friendly fashion, sometimes in the Lucky Star, occasionally at the houses of friends, but the sense of his place in the Stilwells' life and theirs in his that she felt that night never came again. So long as Gideon did not remember, Jessie could not forget.

NADINE GORDIMER
's many novels include
The Conservationist
,
joint winner of the Booker Prize,
Get A Life, Burger's Daughter
,
July's People, My Son's Story, The Pickup
and, most recently,
No Time Like the Present
. Her collections of short stories include
The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot
and,
most recently,
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
. She has also
collected and edited
Telling Tales
, a story anthology published in
fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations.
In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in
Telling Times
and a substantial selection of her stories was published in
Life Times
. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.

NOVELS

The Lying Days / A World of Strangers
The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour
The Conservationist / Burger's Daughter / July's People /
A Sport of Nature / My Son's Story / None to Accompany Me
The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life / No Time Like the Present

STORY COLLECTIONS

The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country
Friday's Footprint / Not for Publication
Livingstone's Companions
A Soldier's Embrace / Something Out There
Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
Life Times: Stories 1952–2007

ESSAYS

The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (
with David Goldblatt
)
Lifetimes under Apartheid (
with David Goldblatt
)
The Essential Gesture – Writing, Politics and Places
(
edited by Stephen Clingman
)
Writing and Being
Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century
Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008

EDITOR, CONTRIBUTOR

Telling Tales

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New York, New Delhi and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in 1963
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com

This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Nadine Gordimer 1960, 1963

The right of Nadine Gordimer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

eISBN 978-1-4088-3634-7

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