“What did you expect?” He made a gentle joke of it, and the reference became nothing more than a comment on the poor food and half-clean room.
She said, “Gideon, Gideon, Gideon,” ruffling him, touching him, putting his hand up under the hair on her neck to reassure herself.
“Is there any sense in going to Basutoland?”
He chuckled. “I only hope so. Why not?”
“But if your friends are away?”
He said nothing.
“Let’s go to Natal for a few days.” She had not thought of it before, it came to her suddenly, as she relied upon things to do. “There’s a house there we can go to … away up the coast.”
“Who’s there?” he said.
“Jessie’s house.” She was practical now.
“Stilwell’s?”
“It’s some cottage she inherited when her stepfather died. She’s alone.” Neither of them thought of Jessie as more than a name to a place that would do. It was, of course, because of her that it would do; she was one of their kind, she had a generic familiarity even though, in the blur of unimaginable family life in which they saw her, she seemed too remote from themselves to be taken account of.
Eighteen
“… It was because of Boaz, I suppose, that first night when I spoke to you,” (Jessie wrote to Tom) “but it isn’t now. I’m not putting up with them for anybody. They live almost like anyone else, here. Of course you can’t refuse them that chance — how could I? Probably this isn’t as big of me as it sounds, I don’t quite trust myself over the idea of a ‘chance’, when I see it written down … Test? Hurdle? Of what? They seem fonder of one another than I thought. Specially her; I mean I always thought of her as thriving on affection rather than giving out any. Playful, yes, but not tender, with B?” When she skimmed through the letter she paused in vague dissatisfaction, and to make some token effort to satisfy herself transposed “Test” and “Hurdle”.
Ann and Gideon had gone for a walk on the beach at night; presently she heard their voices, intimate in the dark, and they came up the verandah steps. Ann was wearing his thick sweater. “D’you want some coffee?” she said as they went into the kitchen. Jessie said no, she didn’t think so, but when they had made it, they brought a cup for her and called from the living-room that it was ready. She was drawn into their company and sat in one of the big chairs with her feet under her for comfort, because a wind had come up. “Here.” Gideon handed her the sweater that Ann had taken off.
Wrapped in their warmth, she thought: they’ve been making love out there. Ann was talking about fishing. Where could they go, she asked, aware of the absurdity of her enthusiasm — she had found some tackle lying about the house. “Ask Jason,” Jessie said to Gideon. “He must know all the local lore.”
“I suppose he would,” Gideon looked at her uncertainly.
“If a man asks your advice about fishing, you may feel a little friendly loyalty toward him? Don’t you think?” She smiled at Gideon.
“You may start boasting about your new friend, and where he lives.”
“That’s true.”
Gideon said, “Why were you so worried about him?”
“Oh it wasn’t him … All the other things too difficult to explain, or nobody’s business.”
“It was a bit of a shock,” said Ann, with a smile, of their arrival.
Jessie could smell her, the smell of her hair and the perfume that clung about the room at home, in the woollen collar rolled down round her own neck. “A year ago, then, I didn’t want Boaz and Ann to come to us. But I didn’t do anything to stop it. It was the sort of thing Tom and I have always done. One must be open to one’s friends. You’ve got to get away from the tight little bourgeois family unit. In a country like this, people like us must stick together — we live by the sanctions of our own kind. We haven’t any anonymous, impersonal code because the South African ‘way of life’ isn’t for us. But what happens to you, yourself … I don’t know. The original impulse towards decency hardens round you and you can’t get out. It becomes another convention.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Gideon. “If you’re satisfied you’re doing what you ought to do?”
“It’s all a bit too snug. You can easily forget that it’s only the best you can do … for the time being.”
“You want to get right into the struggle then, man.” Gideon gave slightly scornful advice.
“Oh … it’s not all politics — not for whites, at least.”
He laughed.
“… Yes, I suppose it is. The whole way we live becomes a political gesture above everything else. Well, that’s part of what I mean — there’s no room to develop as a person because any change in yourself might appear to be a defection. And yet if you can’t change, can’t stretch out, how can you be ready for some new demand on yourself? In time you don’t even remember, really, how you arrived at the position you’ve taken up.”
“What sort of demand are you thinking of?” Gideon said, weighing her up.
“Well, if you want to live like a human being you’ve got to keep on proving it. It’s not a state automatically conferred upon you because you walk upright on two legs, any more than because you’ve got a white skin.”
“You might have to prove it in jail one day. You know? Your house won’t be big enough any more.”
“And when I come out of prison will you punish me all over again? What’m I going to do with my white face?”
They both laughed. “What’s the alternative for you?” Gideon said.
Jessie drew her head back through the neck of Gideon’s pullover like a tortoise, and took it off. She pushed away the strands of hair that clung to her face with the crackle of static electricity, and said, “Imagine Tom and me, along with the whites, shooting down blacks. ‘Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.’ Christ, I’d rather you shot me. — I’m going to bed. Don’t leave the door open, will you, that gorgeous lamp’ll blow down again.”
She came upon Gideon in the living-room next morning while Ann had gone up to the village with the little girls. He was drawing, absorbed but not prepared, the paper backed by a wad of newspapers, his head falling back negligently now and then on the plump chair. Jessie twisted her neck to see. He softened the thick charcoal line with his thumb. “She’s beautiful,” Jessie said.
“She is.”
She watched him, amused by his attitude of repose, while his hand and eye worked on on their own.
“Gideon, you’ve got a wife somewhere, I suppose?”
“In Bloemfontein, to be exact.”
When she had been in the living-room a certain time, she was always drawn to the curtain that sagged and the bit of carpet that had frayed away. Sometimes, as now, she even wandered up to these things as if she were going to mend them. She slid out of her sandals and stood on the divan to take a look at the top of the curtain, where it hooked to a rail. “I’ve got a child, too,” Gideon said. “I don’t know if I’d know him if I saw him somewhere.”
She was trying to work loose a runner that had rusted against the rail, and her voice was tight with effort. “Oh why is it like that?”
“You change.”
She could not get the runner free and stopped, with the confusion of an obstinate task in her face. “But it’s like lopping off fingers. In the end your life is nothing but bits and pieces.”