Occasion for Loving by Nadine Gordimer

than other children of her age. Her mother and Bruno took her to the theatre and concerts in Johannesburg, and when they played bridge in the houses of the mine, she went with them and was not bored, listening to the grown-ups and helping the hostess efficiently with the tea. She read novels too, whatever she pleased; “I don’t believe that girls should be brought up in ignorance of life,” said Mrs. Fuecht. The girl looked with fastidious timidity at the great girls in dusty serge gym tunics who had once been her class-mates. She would have been dismayed if she had ever been pronounced well enough to go back to school.
    Ignorance of life! Jessie felt no pity for this little creature, her mother’s boon companion. She was ashamed of her, repulsed by her sham grown-up poise, her pride in the sense of privilege that had been palmed off on her, her prodigy’s smirking acceptance of a dwarf’s status in the world of men and women. Thank God she had not lived—done to death with the violence of the truth, when it came to her.
    But was that all there had been to her?
    Once Jessie began to move down there in the past, once she had forced herself to it, she began to be able to see, like a cat in the dark. Masses crumbled to their components, the detail of delicate structures stood out. All there, all, all, for ever. She came, with great vividness, upon the extraordinary significance, at that time, that was attached to a small painted photograph of her father that she had begged from her mother. She had it still, and for years now it had had no power to stir her; it was simply something she kept, as a gesture of acknowledgement to the man who was herfather and whom she could not remember ever having known. But back
there
it shone alive, charged with a force that held her as the little holy image in its dark niche holds the child who passes through an intensely religious phase. The picture had been in a chocolate box of old trinkets that she loved to rummage through. It was a photograph painted to look like a miniature, in a bevelled gilt snap-case meant to be carried in a handbag—the Twenties equivalent of the picture-locket. She was taken, in the manner of girls, more with the fancy case than anything else. It stood on her book-case between cut-out pictures of Beverley Nichols and Evelyn Waugh in bazaar frames. Then, in one of the loud storms that hit the mine in summer, her bedroom lamp fused, and Bruno came in to fix it. He worked by candle-light, quickly and well, as he did everything, and as the lamp came on again and he picked up his card of fuse wire from the book-case, he noticed the pictures.
    â€œYour favourite film-actors, eh?” All his life he had been a connoisseur of women, and he remembered his humble beginnings as a boy with pictures of actresses pinned above his bed.
    â€œThey’re writers. And that’s …” She trailed off, because of course he knew who the third one was.
    He picked it up. “I don’t know the names of these great lovers. You’re the age to remember that. Good-looker, eh?”
    â€œDon’t you see who it is?”
    He smiled. “Oh, it’s Charles.” It was the curious smile with which he would greet someone who had reason to avoid him. He put the picture back; straightened it. And then it was at once dismissed from his mind; he went out calling to his wife, “I wish you could get the boy to understand that he must not take my pliers to open jam tins or whatever it is that he does to ruin them …”
    The picture showed a very young man. His grey eyes were fixed slightly askance on something out of the picture, and although hewas not smiling you could make out, under the photographer’s “natural” skin tinting, the faint bracket-sign on either side of his mouth that showed that he had smiled or spoken immediately before the camera clicked. The just-concluded movement made a starting-point for her.