Occasion for Loving (6 page)

A creature who did not exist any more, the girl Jessica Tibbett aged seventeen, long ago had spent Christmas weekend away at a resort with her mother and stepfather.

Bruno Fuecht with his European sophistication and Mrs. Fuecht with the assumption of it that she had got from him did not have much taste for the Saturnalian side of the festival; as a rationalist whose only experience of faith had been faith in the political creeds current in his youth, the true occasion did not move him, and although Mrs. Fuecht had once been a devout Anglican, she seemed to feel that through her marriage to him she had lost the right to the meaning of Christ's birth. Jessie did not remember ever having been taken to church at Christmas (perhaps she had gone once, when she was very small and her father was still alive?) and apart from the excitement in the air, the coloured lights in the streets and the presents in the shops, the occasion was simply a public holiday like any other.

That year they decided at the last minute that they wanted to get away—the phrase was Mrs. Fuecht's, and implied a press of guests and gaiety. But the truth was that silent lack of harmony in the house, the deadly peace between three people who did not even guess at each other's thoughts, became unbearable at the combination of this time of year and this time of the girl Jessie's life. Even the most vulgar side of Christmas—the family booziness and the money-making sentiment of the shops—was a reproach to them for their lack of human weakness, their disqualification to stand in the comfort of the herd. And the child's emergence as a grown-up, no longer only victim but also witness of the unexplained state, was something all three must seek protection from
in the anonymous safety in numbers of some place, such as an hotel, where they did not belong.

None of this was admitted between them, but it set all three going: Mrs. Fuecht said they should get away; Fuecht intimated that he was agreeable if not much interested, and the young girl got busy eagerly telephoning various resorts. At last, one was found that could offer accommodation of some sort.

When they got there, it was at once clear why the place had room for them. It was a gimcrack building, begun perhaps two or three years before and already falling to pieces before it was completed. The pink colour-wash on the outside was deeply stained with the red earth that spread for miles around it. The windows and doors were set in out of true, and ants wavered along the cracks in a row of brick pillars put up to support an upper verandah that had never been built; a twist of steel cable stuck up out of each pillar like a wick. The dining-room stank of Flit, the lounge was furnished with american cloth chairs showing their springs, and a black pianola. The hotel was full of people like themselves who had not been able to get in anywhere else, and when the Fuechts arrived they were told that there was only one room available for the three of them—an old narrow bed was brought in for Jessie.

The ugliness of the place would have meant nothing to the girl if she had found there the way to play, to begin a life for herself in the grown-up games of the young people seeking amusement. If she were to dance there, to be teased by young men, to learn to use the fashionable slang of the girls, to rush about in the happiness of laughing too wildly and staying up too late, then she would remember it as a marvellous place, the mere scaffolding of joy. She put on one of the sundresses she had made herself, but though she looked like any one of the group of young people who already, the first afternoon, had clustered together, she did not know how to talk
to a boy, or how to form one of those alliances with a girl that boys seem to find an irresistible challenge—her only piece of equipment was the dress.

Some members of the group actually came from the mining town to which the Helgasdrift mining community belonged, and Jessie knew one or two of them by name. She had even been in the same class, before her mother took her out of school to have her taught at home, with one of the girls, Rose Price. Rose Price was there in a foursome that obviously included her particular boy friend; she waved a friendly recognition from where she sat swinging her legs on the verandah wall, but the greeting did not come from the distance, a few yards of cement, that separated the party of young people from the Fuechts passing on their way to lunch; it came from the distance of the girl's independence and confidence.

There were weevils in the porridge next morning and Fuecht pushed his plate away and lit a cigar, not taking his attention from the newspaper; his indifference to discomfort was not stoic or good-natured but due to the fact that he did not expect anything better of arrangements made by his wife. She was well aware of the hurtful nature of his lack of complaint. Jessie had the cheerfulness and automatic sense of anticipation that were simply there for her when she woke up every day, and she walked out between the unfinished pillars with her mother into the haze of a bare, brilliant morning. The shores of the irrigation lake were flat. Stony veld with the bald red earth showing through over-grazed grass spread to the horizon. Some black children clambered on the wheel-less hulk of an old motor car that had come to rest there; it was picked clean of everything but rust, like the horny shell of a beetle that has been eaten out by ants. A single bird of prey hung in the vacancy of a drought sky. As the mother and daughter stood there, the young people set out in a hired boat, oars waving and yells rising as they exhorted each other to sit down.
Slowly distance smoothed out their erratic course and they became a fleck no bigger than the bird.

Jessie and her mother had brought simple evening dresses to wear on Christmas Eve, and, studying the wine list with a look of due consideration for its limitations, Fuecht ordered a bottle at dinner. It turned out to be a bottle that the sort of people who patronised the hotel wouldn't know about, and, probably acquired by mistake in the first place, it had lain forgotten since the place opened. A bottle of wine like that was one of the pleasures that remained to the grown-ups untouched by the tarnish that, for them, lay on other pleasures. Their murmured exchanges on its quality made an unaccustomed intimacy between them; unlike the girl, they were not open to the stir of the dance band—three men with slicked hair and red cummerbunds who began to blow and thump, each looking for the beat like a man searching for a lost bunch of keys.

When the music started Jessie felt a nervous, happy embarrassment, although she knew that there was no one for her to dance with. The young crowd began to slide round the chalk-sprinkled floor in the stylish, skating steps that were fashionable at the time. Married men grasped their wives clumsily by the back of the dress as they went slowly round, and the boys and girls swooped in and out between them like dragonflies. Jessie smiled in complicity with her mother at the married couples; and sipping the glass of wine that was given to her as a treat, she began to take on the lonely superiority that gave refuge to her parents.

But when the three of them went to bed, a secret black sadness came from her and obscured its cause as an octopus hides his enemy from himself in a cloud of ink. She had got into bed first, to let her mother and Fuecht prepare themselves for bed in privacy. But from far away, from that place of hers far from the limping beat and happy shuffle where the dancers were, far from the unfamiliar room with daddy-long-legs on the ceiling in
which she lay, she watched her mother and her stepfather silently crossing and recrossing each other's paths about the room. He put down his cigar-cutter and small change and keys; she hung up her dress and pulled out a squeaking drawer. The scent of some special face-cream she used brought a personal, expensive smell into the cheapness and passing-trade poverty of human personality in the room. She was putting the cream on out of sight, but the smell of it, anywhere, was her mother to Jessie; the moment the pot was opened, she was there. Bruno Fuecht appeared in the space of light, wearing only a shirt. His legs, shortish and strikingly male, like the bowed muscular legs she had seen in Japanese prints of wrestlers, held her attention coldly and intensely. She had never seen him like this before, but that was not the reason. She had never seen
him
before—he was hidden from her behind an outward self, a label “stepfather”. She was conscious of something forbidden in the way she lay still and looked at those legs; it was the way, as a small child, she had stared secretly at the deformed. She wondered—a flicker on the limits of her conscious mind—if he were her own father, would she see him like this?

Next morning it was raining and it rained for the rest of the time they were there. The young crowd were not seen again after Christmas dinner; they must have decided to go back to town and the possibility of more tempting amusements. The Fuechts sat it out in the hotel lounge. Outside the lake was red with mud and the road was a frothy scum of the same red mud and water. Jessie got up now and then to stare out for a minute and then came back to her book. All the people who had not packed up and gone were held in the unacknowledged bond that, for one reason or another, they could not face themselves at home. Four men played cards in a corner. Wives knitted. Near the Fuechts, a woman was sewing while the husband slept behind a newspaper and their child, a boy of roving, monkeylike attention, clambered and investigated his way round the room until he settled at the pianola. There
was something wrong with the mechanism, and his pedalling produced “You are my sunshine” over and over, with pauses of stuttering aphasia. On and on the child played; the intensity of his mother's concentration on her sewing began to distract Jessie more than the pianola did: she watched while the last sentence she had read hung in her mind. Suddenly she saw that the woman was sewing without any thread in the needle. It flashed in and out of the stuff, empty, connecting nothing with nothing.

Jessie occasionally saw the mad woman about town in Johannesburg, more than twenty years later. She was unchanged, for perhaps madness had aged her prematurely when she was quite young, and her hair with its streaks of henna and grey was tied back with the same sort of narrow velvet ribbon she had worn when Jessie was seventeen.

The weekend itself had changed its meaning for Jessie many times before it passed into that harmless state known as forgotten. Just after her young husband died, when she became aware that a large part of her life was missing, that she had been handed from mother to husband to being a mother herself without ever having had the freedom that does not belong to any other time of life but extreme youth—just then, knowing herself cheated, that Christmas weekend had come back to her with revulsion and resentment. There, in that cheap, ugly place, her youth had been finally bound and thrown out into the mud to die, while the middle-aged sat in their chairs. Maimed but living, they sat and held her as one of them, for whom there was nothing but to share their losses of the eye of love, blinded by disappointment or habit, and the leg of ambition, gammy now with self-limitations. Her mother sat there with her accomplice, Bruno, while their hired assassins did the job.

Jessie wept for herself, then, caught in a bell-tower of self-pity and anger where anguish deafeningly struck her hour. She lay in bed in the small room where the baby Morgan slept too, and she
beat the pillow with her fist in the night. The death of that young man, her husband, was nothing, in the end, to this: the discovery of the body of her youth out in the mud. Her husband was dead, but she was alive to the knowledge that, in the name of love, her mother had sucked from her the delicious nectar she had never known she had—the half-shaped years, the inconsequence without finger-print, of the time from fifteen to twenty.

Later, when the animus of blame had exhausted itself, Jessie saw that weekend in the critical light of the needs of new growth and shunned it out of disgust for herself as she had been then. Because she had courage now, a passion of self-assertion, she reproached herself for cowardice then. Why hadn't she fought her mother for survival? She drew strength from these reproaches to herself without trying to understand the reasons for the paralysis of the will that had been brought about in her through a long, slow preparation of childhood.

Still later, she saw that the weekend was terribly funny. When she was living with Tom, and she told him the story, they laughed and laughed over it—Bruno loftily ignoring the weevils in the porridge, the woman furiously sewing at nothing, the pianola wheezing out “You are my sunshine”. And then it had been recalled too many times to seem funny any more. It lay harmless, an explosive from which the detonator had long been removed.

In Jessie's own house, the Stilwell house, Christmas preparations were elaborate and began early in December with the day when Jessie and Tom met for lunch in town and then shopped for the children's presents. The year that the Davises were in the house Boaz turned up with Tom. Home for a day between field-trips, he had found no one in when he arrived at the house; he had walked into Tom's room at the university.

The three moved from the coffee-bar where Jessie was waiting to a restaurant where they could get a drink with their
food. Boaz, in khaki pants and veldschoen, had the happy air of the returned traveller among people who have not left town. “Let's have a bottle of wine. I've been drinking nothing but kaffir beer and I feel very healthy.”

“You look it, too,” said Jessie. In fact he looked very handsome, his pale opaque skin turned a shiny olive colour by the sun. Although the presence of the Davises made little mark upon the house, the return of Boaz from a field-trip had begun to bring with it each time a rounding-off of the family; besides, both the Stilwells always felt a spontaneous affection for him the moment they saw him, while Ann, although they liked her well enough, had not aroused what was, toward him, almost a family feeling in them.

“Ann's probably eating with Len Mafolo today,” Jessie said.

“That's what I suggested,” said Tom, “but we phoned the Lucky Star and they weren't there. —She's been very busy with culture and good works, your little wife. Last week she was prettily selling programmes at Jazz of the Year, this week it's a travelling art exhibition in some caravan she's begged off a friend.”