Soon they began to spend hours out on the grassy mound in front of the house, and even to appear on the beach. Alone or led along by the children, sometimes with Jessie, they passed loop after loop of rocks and sand and lay on one of the small deserted beaches that must have looked exactly the same when Vasco da Gama sailed past in the fifteenth century. There was the feeling — of all fecund, tropical places where plant and insect life is so profuse — not of hostility to human beings, but of the indifference that man feels as hostility. Here there was no account taken of anyone who walked upright on two legs; the close groves of strelitzia palm between the arms of two rocky promontories were impenetrable — any sailor shipwrecked here in the service of the East India Company could not have got up from the beach to the interior that way, but the slim grey monkeys, tossing themselves from fronded head to head to eat the juicy spikes of the white and flame-blue flower sticking out there, found it an ordinary thoroughfare. A dead seagull on the sand was busy as a factory with the activity of enormous flies, conveyor-belts of ants, and some sort of sand-flea that made a small storm in the air above and about the body. Butterflies fingered the rocks and drifted out to sea. Dead fish washed up among smashed shells were pulled apart and dragged away to their holes by crabs. There was not nothing here, but everything.
No other person came. Ann went into the village one day and brought back a pair of swimming trunks for Gideon and gradually he found himself doing what she did, lying for hours as if he, too, had been washed up on this shore, like the fish or the seagull. This abandonment to the natural world was something that seemed to come so easily to the two women; even while he succumbed to it he watched them with some kind of alienation and impatience — it belonged to a leisure and privilege long taken for granted. If he sat about doing nothing it was always a marking-time, an hiatus between two activities or desires. It was a matter of despair, exhaustion or frustration. You lay on your bed in your room and drank because you could not do what you wanted to do. Outside in the township everybody, from the beggar who dragged himself across the road with bits of motor-car tyre over his stumps to the B.A. graduate who found himself a sinecure advising white manufacturers on how to tempt the blacks to buy more, was fully occupied every hour of his life with the struggle to wrest a share of living — and that meant position, responsibility, respect and power, as well as money — from the whites. All time and breath and strength were used up to compete with their privilege.
“How long’d you been here before we came? A couple of weeks?” he said to Jessie one afternoon.
“That’s right.” She was reading, some little cotton rag of child’s clothing keeping the sun off her head. Ann was in the water.
“What’d you do? Same as now?”
She leaned on the book and smiled. “I was alone. It isn’t the same.”
“What’s it all about, this alone business?”
“What business?”
“I asked your kid Morgan one day why he hadn’t gone away with you, and he told me, my mother likes to be alone.”
“Did he say that?” She looked pleased and yet annoyed, as one does when one hears of an astute remark made about oneself by someone to whom one has given no opportunity or justification for understanding.
“I’d always thought painters liked to be alone,” she said, questioning his question to her. “—Had to be alone, were alone.”
“I’m not a real one, I suppose. I don’t feel it. There’s always a feeling of others around, even if I’m working.”
“Really?” She began to have that look of pursuing the other person that comes when interest is roused. “But what about those empty landscapes of yours, with the dust?”
“Just fooling about. Seeing the sort of thing some painter had done and trying it out.” He often went in for the sophistication of deprecation; he hid behind it where no one could get at him.
“Even when you’re actually there with the canvas in front of you—” She returned to it, disbelieving.
“Yes, man, there’s always the business of a friend who’s going to turn up in half an hour, or something on your mind.”
“You feel connected all the time.”
“Mmm. You’ve got the pull.”
“When you’re alone, you’re connected but there’s no pull,” she said. “Now that you are here, I feel lonely.”
He gave his chuckle, looking at her with the air of not knowing what to expect.
“Because you’re making love,” she said. “You see?”
“Are you jealous, Jessie?” he said, bantering, flirting a bit, because he did not know what to say.
But she was not embarrassed, but quite serious and at ease. “No, not jealous. At least I don’t think so. Left out. Left out of something, that’s it. Perhaps a bit jealous, as well. I don’t have love affairs any more.”
Ann came up, beaded with water. She dried her face, blew her nose, shook out her hair from the cap, and lay down beside Gideon. She touched him with her sea-cold hand and mumbled for a cigarette. Presently there was a commotion where the little girls were playing at the edge of the water. Elisabeth came screaming over the wet sand, her lumbering shape, clumsy with pain or alarm, repeated in wriggling purples and silvers on the mirror surface. She held out her wrist, wrung in the other hand. Clem and Madge followed, regarding her distress with admiration. “The white part of a wave … she just put her hand in next to my foot …” A rough blue thread was buried in the red weal that had risen round the plump brown arm. “Oh poor old thing! They are beasts … all right, now, I know it’s sore … get some of those leaves, Clem …”
“I saw a couple of blue-bottles when I was in,” said Ann. And as Jessie broke the leaves of the ice-plant that grew nearby, and squeezed them on the sting, “Rub quite hard, that’s the best way. — It really does hurt like hell.”
“What is it?” Gideon said with distaste, leaning on his elbow.
“Haven’t you ever been bitten by a blue-bottle?” Ann said.
“What on earth is it, anyway?”
“One of those balloon-things that get washed up. The wind brings them in,” Jessie reminded him.
They showed him how the stringy appendage of the creature had attached itself to Elisabeth’s flesh; Madge raced off to bring a specimen of the whole creature, gingerly lifted up on a handful of sand, to demonstrate to him.
“You mean to say you’ve never been bitten by one?”
“Hell, no, I should think not.”
“But you’ve been to the sea sometimes?” said Jessie.
“Only once to Cape Town and then to Port Elizabeth. Congress conferences. We drove around the docks and on Sunday a couple of us walked for a bit on one of the coloureds’ beaches somewhere near Cape Town.”
Jessie had managed to get the blue thread away from the child’s wrist; the pain had subsided and Elisabeth sat as if listening for its diminishing impulses. Jessie looked at him over the head of the child leaning against her, and thought again how he never seemed to see any of it — sea, sky, or green. He was like a fox, panting blindly out of breath in a hole.
They went up to the house in a peaceful little procession, the child riding on Gideon’s shoulders with her sandy legs round his neck.
Seventeen
Nothing could be a greater contrast with the life they lived now than the week that had preceded it. Fragmentary references to that cropped up, more or less amusing anecdotes, before Jessie, but these were lip-service to a demand neither wanted to meet in themselves, either alone together, or singly. They had lived through something that remained undealt with. Blocks of experience can lie like this for years before they are tackled; sometimes they are never taken hold of at all, cluttering up one of those lives that become like an attic, a jumble of disparate things between which no relation has been established.