They pushed the table back into position, grunting and laughing; Ann was in her element at this kind of headlong activity. A splinter from the leg went into Shibalo’s thumb, and though he said nothing beyond the first exclamation, when they came out of the storage-place she saw that his hand was trembling with pain. “Oh look, it’s an awful one.”
He held up his hand; the splinter was driven like a wedge into the smooth dark skin beside the second thumb joint. She tried to get it out, and while she did so, concentrating on the broken butt of wood that could be felt sharp, dead and hard against the live, cold thumb, his hand came alive to her. This was he, this big slim hand half-curled and slack, like a living creature itself. The fingertips throbbed faintly, their skin showed their own unique engraving of whorls. There was an expression in the set of the fingers as there is an expression in the features of a face.
For a moment the quality of the reality she was experiencing underwent a swift change. It was as if she woke up from an idle day-dream and found herself holding some unexplained object brought with her from a dream-world.
When the splinter was out they went into the living-room and had a drink. She had never had the house to herself before, that she could remember, and she felt herself in possession of it in a special way, as a child does when she creeps into a deserted house through a broken window. She took him upstairs to show him a woodcut in Jessie’s room, and some carved figures Boaz had picked up in his wanderings. Their movements from room to room, pauses in their chatter, had the rhythm of a dance through the house.
They were about to drive away when she found she had forgotten the car-keys and went running back into the house. As she raced downstairs again, she suddenly saw the profile of Mrs. Fuecht’s seated figure, through the open doorway into the dining-room. She stopped; in the moment, the old woman turned her head. The girl was drawn across the entrance hall, through the door, to the window where the old woman sat.
“Hullo. All alone?” The girl’s face had the blind eagerness of a face in a high wind; nerve-endings alive, responses on the surface, like the flash of sun or the shiver of wind on water.
The old woman scarcely existed in the moment. Her carefully powdered face was a mummification of such moments as the girl’s; layer on layer, bitumen on bandage, she held the dead shape of passion and vitality in the stretch of thick white flesh falling from cheekbone to jaw, the sallow eyes and straggling but still black eyebrows holding up the lifeless skin round them, and the incision of the mouth. The lips showed only when she spoke, shining pale under a lick of saliva:
“It seemed I never would be.”
The air bridled between them. “Can I get you anything?” said Ann.
The old woman smiled. “What?”
“I just wondered …”
“Oh, I know. Now and then one notices other people and is at a loss.”
The girl laughed and the old woman took it like a confession. But it was an exchange of confidences: she said, “As time goes by there seem to be more of them — other people. And then, all of a sudden, you’re one of them.”
Ann sat down on the edge of a small table.
“Weren’t you on your way?”
Their eyes met, blank and intimate. She got up. “I’ll be going then.” She paused, a bird balancing a moment on a telephone wire. “Goodbye.”
The old woman did not change the angle of her head over her book while the front door banged and the clip of heels faded down the path, but when the house was silent again, the alert spread of her nostrils slackened. The silence where the voices of the girl and the unknown man had sounded was the silence within her where many voices were no longer heard.
The day Jessie met them at lunch they had been moving Shibalo’s painting things from the back-room of a shop to the flat in the white suburb where he came and went as he pleased. Ann had not been there before; the tenants, two young men in advertising, were at work, but Shibalo was supplied with a key, and everything in the flat was in the natural state in which the owners’ continuing activities had left it — he constituted no interruption. There must have been some prearrangement between them, however, because he stacked some canvases in the wallcupboard in the bathroom, and pushed two easels in beside the ironing-board in the dingy kitchen before he dumped the rest in the living-room. Ann was deeply curious about the canvases and stacks of drawings gathered in newspaper—“all old stuff,” he said; whenever one was revealed she would stop dead to look at it in searching silence. She showed, too, the possessiveness on behalf of the artist that attacks ordinary people once they get to know a creative person; she began moving various objects out of the way to make room for pictures, and was irritated by the screen that was carefully placed as a target for a projector. “Why can’t that thing be rolled up somewhere? They can’t be using it all the time.”
Vanity made him ignore this partisanship out of embarrassment; like most artists of any kind he thought himself far above the measure of privilege that ordinary people might think it necessary to claim for him. He put a record on the player and sat back to listen; he watched her, as if he were lazily following the movements of a bee or a moth about the room.
She put down a canvas she had pulled free from some others. There was a flurry in her busyness. She looked at her hand, picked up the canvas again, and then put it back.
“Look,” she said, coming over to him.
On her forefinger, with its slender tip that bent back supplely as she stiffened it, there was a streak of fresh wet paint.
He pulled a face of concern and, smiling, leant out to pick up the turpentine bottle. He took his handkerchief and used it to clean her hand; then he leant out again and got a sheet of paper between his fingers and put the hand flat down upon it on the chair-arm, twisting her arm awkwardly as she half-sat. He drew round the outline of her hand with a stub of charcoal. The triumphant, challenging set of her face weakened; she kept her eyes down on her own hand. He picked it up and gave it back to her.
He jumped up from the chair and began to fool about with spontaneous energy. “I must do the honours of the house. Forgive the informality of this humble abode. It’s the girl’s day off. There are no snacks prepared. The champagne isn’t cold enough. But in the kitchen you’ll find the glasses, and somewhere”—his head disappeared into one of those unidentifiable space-saving cupboards that might store anything—“we’ll find the brandy.”
She took off her shoes and drank her fingerful with ginger ale, stretching herself on a plastic-thonged chair on the balcony. He had taken out a big, hairy white sheet of card and sat in the shaded doorway of the room behind her, drawing. “Let me see.” He took no notice so she got up and went to look. It was her profile, glancing over a naked back.
“How do you know that’s how I look?”
“You’re all the same,” he said, “that’s the beauty of it.”
She went back to the sun and sat on the balcony ledge, the sun contracting the skin on her back, her bare soles just in contact with the grooved tiled floor.
“One push,” he said, looking and looking at her.
She crossed her arms over her stomach, balancing carelessly. “Why not?” A reddish warmth from the tiles was reflected in her skin. Death never occurred to her except as a thrill in life; the drop behind her brought a special smile to her face.
When Jessie left them at the Lucky Star after lunch they went back to the flat. There was suddenly nowhere else to go, nothing else to do; the whole city seemed to let them pass unnoted as if some intense preoccupation between them made them invisible. They sat in the room with the curtains pulled against the sun, facing each other. Ann was not thinking of Shibalo but was filled with consciousness of Jessie. She was aware of her in broken images from their association, that was unimportant for her and had gone by, irrelevant. This strong awareness of the other woman made her roused and shaky inwardly, as one feels after an exchange that has left one goaded at the point of the moment to speak.