Although Morgan had gone straight from school to a farm — Tom had arranged for him to join the three sons of the professor of botany — the little girls were at home for ten days at Easter and Jessie felt obliged to come home to lunch with them every day. It was not so much that they needed her; the reprieve of responsibility for Morgan usually produced some compensatory piece of dutifulness towards the other children. The second day she found Gideon Shibalo sitting in the garden. The angle of the two chairs (they were set slightly awry, as if their original intimacy had been put out by the restless movement of occupants in tense discussion), the remains of some clumsy sandwiches, the torn lace of beer-foam dirtying a glass, the litter of cigarette stubs — all these conveyed to her a sudden hope of signs of crisis. But when she came down into the deep shade where they might have isolated themselves in a deadlock of reckoning, she was at once aware that her high pitch was wrong: there was nothing to meet it. Gideon greeted her and belched, raising his eyebrows at himself. He had the slightly out-of-place look that she noticed Africans sometimes had in a garden. Ann had kicked off her shoes and sat pinching up grass blades between her toes. The children were playing house not ten yards away, in the curtains of the pepper trees.
“Was there anything to eat?” Jessie asked, falling back on hospitality. Ann assured her that it was all right, they had found something. An air of normality, of commonplace almost, prevailed between the three of them; Jessie felt that she ought to throw it off, but she was hampered by what now seemed to her the impossible code of personal freedom by which they lived. How could she suggest to Ann that she did not want Gideon Shibalo there? Why should she not want him to come? Was Ann in the house as an appendage of Boaz? If — and it was unthinkable, with the concept of individual dignity that the Stilwells held, that it should be otherwise — she was nothing less than herself, then that selfhood was entitled to determine its own actions, and they should be seen as such, and not at the angle at which they lay across Boaz’s being. Why choose Boaz, and not her? Oh it was all right to choose him, for oneself — but one could not put a finger out to flick her direction to suit his. Jessie had a horror of the attempt by a third person to deflect the life of one to serve another; without God, the unquestionable existence of this horror beyond the strength of a moral sense was a scrap of torn paper from the difficult documentation that might put together his existence. Any influence directed by consideration of Boaz’s life should come only out of a private covenant — and, to Jessie, this did not mean marriage — between Ann and Boaz.
Yet she was resentful in some constant, concealed part of herself at Shibalo’s presence, as at the awareness that he was at the other end of telephone calls, and the regular sight of him driving the car—“Boaz’s car” as she and Tom referred to it lately, although Boaz had bought it for Ann. She was resentful and yet she sat and talked with them amiably, because she liked him. He treated her in a good-humoured, dry way, certain they would get on. Ann again did not talk much, though at least her air was animated. When she did say something, it was invariably a corroboration of, or corollary to, what Shibalo was saying: “He really did. You should have seen the faces of the others.” “—And then that was when you met him alone and said to him …”
“Look at your children,” Shibalo said at one point, pulling out a sheet of cardboard from under his chair. It was a sketch of active angles half-recognisable as legs and arms.
“Very smart.” He must have been there the whole morning, then.
He took it without rancour. “I’ll come and do one for you one day. I’m pretty hot on drawing kids these days.”
“Like circus dwarfs,” said Ann, with the intimacy of a repeated bait.
Jessie was conscious of being drawn into their ambiance as a privilege which she had not consented to accept. Once she had been let in on them, they could not let her go without the temptation to make her party to themselves in some way; she was the outsider who stumbles upon the secret and is offered, as the price, the excitement of sharing it.
There is a magnetic field in the polarity of two people who are conducting a reckless love affair; the insolence, emotional anarchy, uncalculatedness have the gratuitous attraction of exploding fireworks even for those who regard the whole thing as a bit ridiculous. Something of the showy flare caught Jessie, and, in a mood that had risen to sharp banter and some laughter, she went off with the two of them to take up Shibalo’s old casual invitation, given at the Lucky Star that day, that she might come and see what his new work was like.
Ann was gay, in the car, and leant forward with her elbows on the back of the front seat so that she could chatter to the two in front. Gideon was driving. For the first time since she had come to live in the house, Ann treated Jessie as her equaclass="underline" equal of the freedom of her youth, her lack of conditioning responsibilities, her unreflective responses that made her flat “I love that”, “I hate this” an edict.
“Stop at the corner, Gid.”
“What for?”
“That shop has nuts. I’m dying for some walnuts.”
She dashed out of the car and back again with the supreme and arrogant self-consciousness of someone who feels she may be mentioned in her absence. Jessie saw her go straight to the counter to be served before others who were there before her, taking no account of them. She paused at the car window, on Gideon’s side, before she got in again. “Have one”—her face was beseeching, a big smile with the corners of the lips tensely pressed down, her forehead flushed like one of the children’s before they began to cry.
The flat that they went to was like many of those in which Jessie had lived. She looked at the draughty entrance with its list of occupants, under glass, its trough of pale plants, its one maroon and two yellow walls, and gave a grudging smile. The urban education: if someone managed to get out of the townships it would be to a place like this.
“How d’you find it, working here?” she asked.
“It’s just like having my own place,” he said, giving her the freedom of it grandly. “Nobody’s there all day and I can do just what I like. I’ll meet you up top—” He took the back staircase instead of the lift because he had to take care not to attract the attention of the caretaker; she must not suspect that her tenants were allowing a black man to use their flat. When the two women got to the flat door, he was already there, inside. “Come right in, just step over the mess”—he kicked away a parcel from the dry cleaner’s and a cardboard honeycomb of empty bottles. He pulled open the curtains in the living-room, picked up some letters, put a noisy Greek record on the gramophone, talking all the time with the relaxed busyness of someone who has just come home. Ann ripped the paper bandage off a magazine that lay among the letters and began to look through it. The purpose of coming there seemed to be forgotten. Jessie, kept standing by the presence all round her of objects meaningful to the lives of people she had never met, began to wander curiously around the room, touching this, glancing at that. She put her hand out to turn canvases without asking permission, for she had been asked twice to come and look at them. The third one was upside down; she righted it. It was a nude, Ann, flung down alive on the canvas as if on a rug. She turned another and another. They were all Ann, only in several she was black.
Gideon Shibalo came up beside her, professionally. “It’s the subject that takes your breath away, ay?” He laughed. “It’s not my new technique.” He began to put up for her, one by one, without comment, charcoal drawings and oils of children, friezes and splashes of children, old with the life of the street.