Free Occasion for Loving by Nadine Gordimer Page A

be able to cap
that
.” She laughed, subduedly, straightening, and went on into the house. At the door she turned and added with a polite smile, “Are you worried?”
    Tom said, “Haven’t made up our minds what to be,” and she laughed again.
    He put on the lamp. Jessie’s face was closed to him in a look of complicity, horrifiedly amused. “Let him go back to school. Ignore it.” She spoke with the tone of meting out punishment without regret.
    He shook his head, looking at her.
    â€œThen for Christ’s sake, what?”
    â€œIf we knew what to say to him,” said Tom.
    â€œIt’ll come,” she said with distaste.
    â€œFrom where?”
    â€œI’d like to see this place.” She wanted to confront him, the boy, the child—there was an empty shape where the unknown identity of her son should have been.
    â€œDon’t humiliate him.” They would have to fall back on the child-manual precepts, the textbook rules.
    She began to insist on going to fetch him home, but suddenly remembered the thin little neck and the strange big hands—she flinched from the sight of them, exposed in that place. “All right. You’re probably right. Let him come home as if nothing’s happened.”
    The rows of figures on the paper she still sat in front of seemed to relate to nothing; in the short interval since she had looked up from them the whole urgency of the Agency’s affairs had lost life. She was lying in bed half-asleep at eleven o’clock when sheheard Morgan come in. A gentle, tingling curiosity lifted her into consciousness, like a girl aware of the presence of a strange man in the next room.
    Morgan, who had always been on the periphery of the life of the house, found himself at its centre. He must have come home with dread in his heart the night before, knowing that the Wiley boy’s parents would have informed on him, but at breakfast he put up his usual show of uncertain good spirits—there was nothing unnatural about his behaviour because he was never natural, but seemed always to be behaving in a way that he timidly and clumsily thought was appropriate. At the same time, this kind of selfconsciousness made him extraordinarily insensitive to the moods of the grown-ups with whom he was making a show of being at ease. He would ask Tom (not out of interest, it was clear, but out of a desire to flatter Tom by an interest in his work) questions about some historical point on a morning when Tom had been correcting history papers half the night and was disheartened with the whole business of teaching. When Jessie came home irritated because she had got a parking ticket, he would launch into a long comparative anecdote about an exchange between a traffic officer and a woman that he had overheard in town. When someone said—“Oh Morgan, do let’s have a little quiet now,” he stopped short without rancour, as if the questions or the anecdote interested him as little as they did his listeners. Between his attempts at entertainment, his presence went unnoticed, though he always kept his face mobile like the face of one of those actors in a crowd scene who, you are surprised to see if you happen to glance at them, have gone on acting all the time the audience has been entirely taken up with the principals. He would never have dared to retire into himself, in company.
    Elisabeth would not be parted, that morning, from her newly-acquired, minute school case, and it was constantly in the wayamong the breakfast things. “We ought to tie it on you somewhere,” Jessie said to her, and Morgan took up the suggestion thoroughly: “You know what you should do, Mum, you should get a cord and hang it round her neck, like those dogs. Those dogs who go in the snow with little barrels of brandy round their necks. No, I know! Get her a satchel, like I used to have. That’s a good idea—then it’ll be on her back. Why