Occasion for Loving by Nadine Gordimer Page B

Ignorance, of course, the dreadful certainty, hopelessly accepted, that there is no one, not anywhere in the world, like you.
    Was it possible that Morgan was suffering like this?
    Yet Jessie was now an adult herself, and she was as inclined as any other to be lulled by the commonplaceness of the child. Morgan with his eternal bat and ball, Morgan jumping up with such prompt eagerness when you sent him off to do some piffling errand. Morgan with a front, of its kind, as bland as her own loved and loving daughterly one had been.
    â€œI should tell Morgan how he comes to have his place with us,” she said to Tom.
    He was trying to write a difficult letter, and reluctantly he roused himself at the sound of the slow, dead voice she always used when she had made up her mind to do something reckless. He stopped writing, put his elbows on the table and pressed his two thumbs against the sharp edges of his top teeth for a moment. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said at last.
    â€œTell him more. More about us. Tell him the truth. Why not? Why shouldn’t I admit to him that my marriage to his father wasn’t anything like this? Tell him that if his father hadn’t been killed the marriage would have ended anyway. He ought to know he hasn’t missed anything.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” He looked at her as if he were about to apprehend a crime.
    â€œWhy do people always protect children by keeping them on the surface? That’s not the way to do it at all. One ought to let them in on everything and make them strong.”
    In answer to his silence, she added, “We ought to talk to him more—Boaz said it once.”
    He gave a little weary snort, dismissing that as something different.
    With an effort at reasonableness, he began: “How do you think you can go about it?”
    â€œFind—a—way—to—get—at—him,” she said. She saw with a thrill of disappointment that she had stung Tom to concealed alarm. “—Well, what have I said?”
    He shrugged. “I think the thing for us to do is to stick to practical plans to occupy Morgan. Ease him on to his own feet … that’s all.”
    She felt the exchange falling into the pattern of their two personalities and she made an impulsive attempt to break it. “It may be the thing for you, but not for me.” She had never before claimed her relationship as the boy’s mother, as opposed to his as a stranger and a stepfather. Morgan was something they had put up with together, as best they could.
    But to Tom the sudden change had little to do with her actual feelings about Morgan; he saw it as a well-known sign of what he thought of as the amateurishness of her nature. She would want to have a go at something; the single achievement itself obsessed her, with the amateur’s disregard for what ought to have gone before in the form of proper preparation, or what might be expected to come after. She was often a brilliant amateur—it was this aspect of her that he had fallen in love with, reaching out in sure instinct beyond the pleasures of their affair to feel the hot flame of her fearful determination, time and again, to achieve a manoeuvre of her own life. How many human beings had this calm and reckless assumption that their life was in their hands? This quality that had deeply excited him and moved him for ever into her orbit turned out to be also, in the long run of marriage, the one that gave him the most trouble, rather as if he had married for a face and the beauty of it had brought its inevitable pain by attracting other men. What he loved most, he came to like least in her. If she was sometimes brilliant in her disregard for the rules, he had also learnt that she was more often dangerous.
    He aimed grimly, “Jessie, don’t try to catch Morgan in a bear-hug now.”
    â€œYou think I’m lying.”
    â€œI don’t think you’re