It was the usual sort of party, and once there, with a thick tumbler full of warm gin in her hand, wandering from room to room in a house disarranged as if for moving, she was at home and even mildly enjoyed herself. Men she never saw except at parties came up and put their arms round her and said, as at a great and private reunion, “Come and talk to me, Jessie” or “Let’s go and have a drink”, and women exchanged with her greetings of exaggerated pleasure: “Oh poor Tom! Poor you! How’s the book going?”
Someone brought dance-music recorded on tape while in another room little Simon Sofasonke had been pushed to the piano. Couples danced everywhere, white girls in their black sweaters leaning back and then climbing the air, pelvises thrust forward, before their relaxed, encouraging black partners, white men moving in a hushed shuffle black girls with silver fingernails and straightened hair flattened and lacquered into a little black cap cut into ragged points round their faces. Every now and then a slender young black man with a fastidious drunken face came in and switched off the tape-recorder. “Anyone wants that stuff, he c’n tell me.”
Jessie knew everyone there, and those she did not actually know by name were merely new faces in a familiar context: a bespectacled white leftist down from Rhodesia, a coloured journalist from Cape Town, an addition to the usual girl students from the university, a change in the roster of black bachelors (some of them bachelors because they never brought their wives along) who always outnumbered the women guests. A white woman who had just been charged with incitement and was out on bail was dressed as if for a diplomatic reception, in a midnight-blue velvet coat and antique gold earrings. Someone said: “How she enjoys it all!” A white man who had been in and out of prison for years on political charges, and who worked with one of the African political groups, was attacking an African leader within the same group who was opposed to his influence. The black man said, “And whoever persuaded Sijake to make that statement, he was badly advised!”
“Badly advised, was he? Shall I tell you why you think so, Mapire? Shall I tell you why? Because you’re a racialist, that’s why …”
The far-off wail of a baby — a child of the house — seemed to be heard, like a noise in the head, between the music, the talk and the movement, but was always lost before it attracted attention; it was as inconceivable, it had no more relevance, in the clamour of politics, liquor and sex, than the call of a bird in a thunderous machine-shop.
At about half past ten a fresh influx of guests arrived, mostly Africans, and one white couple who had been somewhere else first. Jessie left the room where the tape-recorder was for the room where Simon played the piano, and, slumped on a sofa with his head against the shoulder of a woman as if against a door-post, there was Gideon. He was drunk; he must have come very drunk. They had put him down there, out of the way, but apparently he wanted, every now and then, to get up and make a nuisance of himself, because the woman had the air of sitting there kindly to restrain him. She was a big black girl with a pretty face and the solid legs and strong arms of a nurse. Jessie had come into the room to get away from the noise, and although the room was not much less loud than the one she had left, she felt the blare displaced at once by a deep, uncomplicated affection for this man. It flowed in in peace, one of the simplest things she had ever felt in her whole life. The experience of the disastrous love affair, to which she was so close, lay like the memory of a battlefield between herself and this battered man — one of the greedy ones, like herself: she knew what he saw, now, when he seemed to look through walls. His face was grey and the dark of his lips was split with red, was flowering patches of bloody colour, scarlet and purple, like some strange streaked tulip. She went up to him, putting aside her old superficial feeling that he would want to avoid the Stilwell household. But he was drunk, and did not answer her. She spoke to him again, and his gaze recognised something, though perhaps it was not her. He mumbled, “White bitch — get away.”
Somebody said, “Get him out before he spews over everything, for God’s sake.”
“Even the pigment in his lips has changed — from drinking, you know how horrible it goes. What’s going to happen to him?”
Jessie stood drawn up before Tom as before a tribunal.
Tom turned away. “He’ll be all right. He’ll go back and fight; there’s nothing else.”
When Jessie saw Gideon again, he clearly had no memory of what he had said to her. They continued to meet in a friendly fashion, sometimes in the Lucky Star, occasionally at the houses of friends, but the sense of his place in the Stilwells’ life and theirs in his that she felt that night never came again. So long as Gideon did not remember, Jessie could not forget.