“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.”
“Oh, several times lately.” She answered with the impatience of someone who has something else to say.
“Didn’t he have a long-standing affair with that woman Callie Stow?”
“Mmm. A few others, too.”
Tom felt vaguely reassured; the thought of Boaz, whose name gripped his mind in unease, slackened and let go.
“My mother says the tenants are definitely going to be out by the end of May,” Jessie said, beginning to put papers and photographs steadily back into her dressing-table drawer, so that she could ignore any reaction he might be showing. She was talking about Fuecht’s house.
He was careful what he said. “But what’s it like? I mean have you any idea whether there’s enough furniture and so on …?” and while they talked Ann’s heels went lightly, loudly about the old wooden floors, and clattered away from them.