Occasion for Loving by Nadine Gordimer

Author:Nadine Gordimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Twelve

The willows out in the veld where Ann and Gideon had picnicked a few weeks before were yellowing, but the garden was still dark and heavy. The tide of green had risen and risen with each rain; new growth overlapped old, the grass stood thick and soft. All around and overhead the leaves, layer on layer, shadow on shadow, swag on swag and tier on tier, were holed and lacy with the feasting of insects. Jessie sat reading, in the afternoons, among the remains of the banquet.

Recently she had begun reading again as she had done when she was seventeen or eighteen and it was possible for a particular book to influence her as the mind of no person she knew in the flesh could. The opening of a window or the snatch of some weird music from the house behind her kept her reminded, on the surface, where awareness of environment is automatically recorded, like a message taken in one’s absence, that Boaz was usually at home when she was. She felt not curiosity, but a shrinking away from what might be going on in him; she wanted to be left alone to no demands but her own. This adventure of Boaz’s wife would work itself out between them like so many others; since she (Jessie) was fond of him, she was slightly ashamed to find how now, once he knew, she felt herself disengaged from friendly involvement. She had been mixed up so many times with friends whose marriages or love affairs went awry because of another man or woman; the situation between Boaz and Ann was the same as the others—except that Gideon Shibalo was black, of course. That was the only difference. It was a difference that she assumed had very little significance for people like themselves—the Stilwells and Davises. It did mean that there was some element of calculable danger in the whole business for Ann, she supposed—making love to Shibalo was breaking the law—as against the incalculable dangers of pain and disruption present in every love affair.

But Boaz came down sometimes for a breath of air and his casual yet intimate presence, stretched on the grass beside her, or leaning forward in one of the old deck-chairs he had dragged up, brought them to the point when naturalness made it necessary to talk about Ann. Jessie did not ask him what was happening, but felt obliged, out of the only politeness she cared for, to acknowledge the subject of his silences. They were talking of Fuecht’s house at the sea; Jessie said, with the open-eyed assertion that was directed against Tom’s unexplained resistance to the place, “We can’t afford to turn up our noses at a free holiday. As I remember it, it was miles up the beach, which is nice. But it may be more built-up along there now, I don’t know; my stepfather had it let permanently for years, we were never offered it.”

“You want to go next month, you said?”

“If Tom definitely makes up his mind he won’t go in July.

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