Occasion for Loving by Nadine Gordimer Page B

to husband to being a mother herself without ever having had the freedom that does not belong to any other time of life but extreme youth—just then, knowing herself cheated, that Christmas weekend had come back to her with revulsion and resentment. There, in that cheap, ugly place, her youth had been finally bound and thrown out into the mud to die, while the middle-aged sat in their chairs. Maimed but living, they sat and held her as one of them, for whom there was nothing but to share their losses of the eye of love, blinded by disappointment or habit, and the leg of ambition, gammy now with self-limitations. Her mother sat there with her accomplice, Bruno, while their hired assassins did the job.
    Jessie wept for herself, then, caught in a bell-tower of self-pity and anger where anguish deafeningly struck her hour. She lay in bed in the small room where the baby Morgan slept too, and shebeat the pillow with her fist in the night. The death of that young man, her husband, was nothing, in the end, to this: the discovery of the body of her youth out in the mud. Her husband was dead, but she was alive to the knowledge that, in the name of love, her mother had sucked from her the delicious nectar she had never known she had—the half-shaped years, the inconsequence without finger-print, of the time from fifteen to twenty.
    Later, when the animus of blame had exhausted itself, Jessie saw that weekend in the critical light of the needs of new growth and shunned it out of disgust for herself as she had been then. Because she had courage now, a passion of self-assertion, she reproached herself for cowardice then. Why hadn’t she fought her mother for survival? She drew strength from these reproaches to herself without trying to understand the reasons for the paralysis of the will that had been brought about in her through a long, slow preparation of childhood.
    Still later, she saw that the weekend was terribly funny. When she was living with Tom, and she told him the story, they laughed and laughed over it—Bruno loftily ignoring the weevils in the porridge, the woman furiously sewing at nothing, the pianola wheezing out “You are my sunshine”. And then it had been recalled too many times to seem funny any more. It lay harmless, an explosive from which the detonator had long been removed.
    In Jessie’s own house, the Stilwell house, Christmas preparations were elaborate and began early in December with the day when Jessie and Tom met for lunch in town and then shopped for the children’s presents. The year that the Davises were in the house Boaz turned up with Tom. Home for a day between field-trips, he had found no one in when he arrived at the house; he had walked into Tom’s room at the university.
    The three moved from the coffee-bar where Jessie was waiting to a restaurant where they could get a drink with theirfood. Boaz, in khaki pants and veldschoen, had the happy air of the returned traveller among people who have not left town. “Let’s have a bottle of wine. I’ve been drinking nothing but kaffir beer and I feel very healthy.”
    â€œYou look it, too,” said Jessie. In fact he looked very handsome, his pale opaque skin turned a shiny olive colour by the sun. Although the presence of the Davises made little mark upon the house, the return of Boaz from a field-trip had begun to bring with it each time a rounding-off of the family; besides, both the Stilwells always felt a spontaneous affection for him the moment they saw him, while Ann, although they liked her well enough, had not aroused what was, toward him, almost a family feeling in them.
    â€œAnn’s probably eating with Len Mafolo today,” Jessie said.
    â€œThat’s what I suggested,” said Tom, “but we phoned the Lucky Star and they weren’t there. —She’s been very busy with culture and good works, your little wife. Last week she was prettily selling programmes at Jazz of