Free Occasion for Loving by Nadine Gordimer

“Upstairs. In his room, I suppose.”
    But the moment she said it, she knew that she didn’t know where the boy was: in the hesitation that followed, both she and Tom noticed that the radio programme that sent crescendos of crackling applause out across the garden from the upstairs verandah at this time every evening was missing.
    â€œAbout somewhere.” She had heard the irregular plak! plak! of the jokari ball as it flung itself back at him—when? This morning—or was it yesterday afternoon? Dismay came over her. She felt almost afraid of Morgan. She did not want to have to ask Tom what was the matter. In three days he will be back at school, she thought.
    â€œDo you know of a Mrs. Wiley?” Tom said.
    She shook her head, then—“Yes. Must be the mother of that boy Graham.”
    â€œMrs. Wiley on the phone. Her husband has just found Morgan and their son at a dance-place in Hillbrow. A place with paid hostesses. Ducktails go.”
    Jessie looked at him. Her plastic pen rolled across the papers and fell to the verandah floor with the clatter of a cheap toy. Slowly she began to laugh, but he did not laugh too, as if she had not convinced him that this was the way to take it.
    â€œOur Morgan …!” The little girls had stopped playing, and she said at once, “Go and wash your hands for supper. Go on.” Clem and Madge went off but Elisabeth ran into the darkening garden.
    â€œWhere was he last night?”
    â€œWhy do you ask? You know he went to a film. You gave him five bob yourself.”
    â€œWell, he was at that place again.” He smiled this time, out of nervousness, with her. “Somebody tipped off the Wiley woman, and that’s how her husband caught them today.”
    A blotch of white blundered up the steps. Elisabeth was talking to a stuffed animal dressed in a floral bathing suit and she ignored them. “I say it’s time to wash hands for supper.” “But what time is it?” “The time to wash hands.” “But what is the number of that time?”
    â€œBlast Morgan,” said Jessie, after the dressing-gown had disappeared round the door. “I wish—” It rose with the curving jet of a fountain within her, breaking up the words, toppling them, carrying them: wish he had never been, never happened; oh how to get past him, over him, round him. “He’ll be back at school in three days. Pity it’s not tomorrow.”
    Tom said, “I didn’t even know he could dance, did you?”
    Her lips trembled and she began to giggle again. “Dance! Dance!”
    While they were talking the lights of a car poked up the driveway and died back as Ann stopped and got out, coming lightly and quickly towards the house and almost past them, without seeing them. She was singing softly and breathily to herself. “You haven’t had supper, have you? I thought I must be terribly late …” They could see her eyes shining and her teeth in the dark. “Did you find my watch in the bathroom, by any chance?” The rhythm of another kind of existence seemed to come from her shape; they felt it, in the dark, like the beating of a bird’s wings or the marvellous breathing of a fish’s gills.
    â€œCan you believe it? Morgan’s been going to some dance-hall,” Jessie announced at once.
    â€œOh, all the kids rock ‘n’ roll. They teach each other at school,” said Ann.
    â€œNo, it’s not that. He’s been going to a place where you pay a tart to dance with you.” Jessie insisted on setting the facts beforeher; if a stranger had come to the door just then, she would have done the same to him. She was sitting at the rickety table in the dark, drawn up in attention.
    They could just make out that Ann had bent down, and was shaking something out of her shoe. “Good Lord, that’s rather an adventure. I shouldn’t think any of the other boys will