Jump and Other Stories (19 page)

—No… no…—She stood up, hands dangling at her sides, bracelets slipping.—I hope you're refreshed… I certainly am.—She pressed the button that opened her fortress and saw him to the gates.—Maybe—I don't know, if you're not too busy—maybe you'd like to come round sometime. Lunch, or a swim. I could ring you—

—Thank you.—

—When my husband is back.—

She gazed straight at him; as if he were an inferior reminded of his manners he produced a thank you, once more.

—Where can I reach you? Your phone—

He, who could pass a police station without crossing to the other side of the street, tingled all the way up from his feet. Caught.—Well, it's awkward… messages… I'm hardly ever in—

Her gaze changed; now she was the one who was put in her place.—Oh. Well drop by sometime. Anyway, it was nice meeting you. You might as well take my number—

He could not refuse. He found a ballpoint in his trouser pocket but no paper. He turned his left hand palm up and wrote the seven digits across the veins showing on the vulnerable inner side of his wrist.

The number was a frivolous travesty of the brand concentration-camp survivors keep of their persecution; he noticed that when he got back to the house that was sheltering him at the time. He washed off her identification; it required the use of his hosts' nailbrush. The Movement wanted him to slip out of the country but he resisted the pressures that reached him. He had been in exile too long to go back to that state of being, once he had come home. Home? Yes, even sleeping on the floor in somebody's kitchen (his standard of shelter was extremely varied), going to football matches, banal movies, wandering the streets among the people to whom he knew he belonged, unrecognized, unacknowledged—that was home. He read every newspaper and had the rare events of carefully-arranged clandestine meetings with people in the Movement, but these were too risky for both himself and them for this to happen often. He thought of writing something; he actually had been an academic once, long ago, another life, teaching the laws that he despised. But it was unwise to have bits of paper around you, anything written down was evidence of your existence, and his whole strategy was not to exist, for the time being, in any persona of his past or present. For the first time in his life he was bored. He ate peanuts, biscuits, biltong, buying these small sealed packets and tearing them open, tossing the contents from his palm into his mouth before he'd even left the shop, as he had done when he was
an overweight schoolboy. Although he walked the streets, he had thickened, rounding into that mound under the diaphragm. Whatever he thought of to fill the days and nights, he stopped short of doing; either it would involve people who would be afraid to associate with him, or would endanger those who would risk it. Oddly, after more than a week the phone number came back to him at the sight of his own inner wrist as he fastened his watchstrap. Sylvie—what was her name? Sylvie. Just that. Sylvie, Sylvia Pass. Perhaps the name was also the invention of the moment, out of caution, self-protection, as his ‘Harry' had been.
May I speak to Sylvie? Who? I'm afraid you've got the wrong number
—it would be the husband's voice. And so she never had done anything stupid like picking up a man on a bus.

But from the point of view of his situation if anyone was safe this ‘Sylvie' was. He went to the telephone in the silent empty house, his present precarious shelter, from which everyone else had gone to work for the day. She herself answered. She did not sound surprised; he asked if he might take up her offer of a swim.—But of course. After work?—Of course—after he'd left the dust and heat of the building sites.

She was dressed to swim, the strap of a two-piece suit showing above the neck of some loose-flowing robe, and the ridge of the bikini pants outlined under the cloth somewhere below where her navel must be. But she did not swim; she sat smiling, with the thigh-high split in the robe tucked closed round her leg and watched him as he emerged from the chintzy rustic change-room (my god, what luxury compared with his present sleeping quarters) and stalked down to the pool holding in his belly and conscious that this
effort—with that diaphragm bulge—made him strut like a randy pigeon. She gave encouraging cries when he dived, he felt she was counting the lengths he did, backstroke, butterfly, crawl. He was irritated and broke water right at her bare feet with his greedy grin of a man snatching life on the run. He must not let that grin escape him too often. She wiggled her toes as water flew from him, his dripping pelt of chest hair, the runnels off his strong legs, spattering her feet. A towel big as a sheet provided a toga for him; wrapped in his chair, he was modestly protected as she was, whether or not she had sized him up like a haunch in a butcher's shop.

The whisky and ice were wheeled out. The kitchen was forewarned this time; there were olives and salami, linen napkins.—Am I going to meet your husband before I go?—The man surely would be driving up any minute. It would be best for ‘Harry' to get out of the towel and into his clothes in order to seem the stranger he was. He wanted to ask how she had decided to explain his presence, since she must, indeed, have so decided. The question was in his face although he didn't come out with it. It suddenly seemed impatiently simple to him. Why not just say they'd met in a bus, what was there to hide—or were the circumstances of the casual acquaintance indeed too proletarian for the gentleman, beneath his wife's dignity! If only they'd met in the Members' Pavilion at the races, now!

—Not here.—It was brusque.—It was necessary to go to Hong Kong after Japan. Apparently opportunities are opening up there… I don't know what it's all about. And then to Australia.—

—Quite a trip.—

—So long as he's back by the time the boys come home for the holidays at the end of next month. They expect to
do things together with him. Fishing trips. Things I'm no good at. You've got a daughter—lucky. I go along, but just for the ride.—

—Well, I'm sorry—

—Another time. But you're not going… you'll stay for dinner. Just something light, out here, such a lovely evening.—

—But haven't you other plans I'd be disturbing, friends coming?—Harry cannot attend dinner parties, thank you.

—Nothing. Not-a-thing. I'm planning an early night, I've been gadding too much. You know how friends imagine, when you're alone, you can't be left to yourself for a single evening. I'm sick of them.—

—Then I should push off and leave you in peace.—

—No, just a salad, whatever they've got—you'll share pot luck—

Sick of them. A cure for boredom: hers. The paradox, rather than her company, was his enjoyment. He accepted the role so wide of his range; he opened the bottles of white wine—dry with the fish mousse, a Sauternes with the strawberries—in place of the man of the house.

Her fascination with their encounter rose to the surface in the ease over food and drink.—How many years is it since you met anyone you were not introduced to—can you remember? I certainly can't. It's a chain, isn't it, it's like Auld Lang Syne all the year, every year, it just goes on and on, a hand on this side taken by a hand on that side… it's never broken into, always friends of friends, acquaintances of acquaintances, whether they're from Japan or Taiwan or London, down the road or god knows where.—

—Good friends. They're necessary.—He was careful.

—But don't you find that? Particularly for people like you and him—my husband—I mean, the circle of people who have particular business interests, a profession. Round and round… But I suppose it's natural for us because we have things in common. I thought, that other day—when my car broke down, you know—I never walk around the streets like this, what have all these people to do with me—

It was coming now, of course, the guilt of her class in a wail of self-accusation of uselessness, of not belonging to real life. Hadn't she shown a hint of it in the bus? But he was wrong and, in his turn, fascinated by the overturning of his kind of conventional assumption.

—They're unreal to me. I don't just mean because most of them are black. That's obvious, that we have nothing in common. I wish them well, they ought to have a better life… conditions … I suppose it's good that things are changing for them… but I'm not involved, how could I be, we give money for their schools and housing and so on—my husband's firm does, like everybody else… I suppose you too … I don't know what your views are—

—I'm no armchair politician.—

—I thought not. But the others—what have I in common with those whites, either… I don't count in their life, and they don't count in mine. And the few who might—who're hidden away in the crowd in those streets (why is this town so ugly and dirty), it's unlikely I'd recognize them.—She really was quite attractive, unaware of a crumb at the side of her mouth.—Even sitting next to me in a bus.—

They laughed and she made the move to clink glasses.

A black man in white uniform and cotton gloves hung about wearily; her guest was conscious of this witness to everything that went on in whites' houses, but for once felt
that his own whiteness guaranteed anonymity. She told the servant he could leave the table and clear it in the morning. Frog bassoons and fluting crickets filled comfortable silences.—I must go.—He spoke, not moving.

—What about a quick dip first. One for the road.—Although he had dressed, she had eaten dinner in her robe.

He was not eager to get into water again but it was a way of rounding off the evening and he felt there was a need for doing this definitively, for himself. There were too few safe subjects between them—she was more right than she knew—they had too little in common, the acquaintance had come to the end of its possibilities. He went to the change-room again.

The water crept like a cool hand over his genitals; she was already swimming. She doubled up and went under with a porpoise flip, and the light from the terrace streamed off her firm backside and thighs. She kept her distance in the water, they circled one another. Hitching herself out on long arms, she sat on the side of the pool and, again, he was aware of her watching him. He surfaced below where she sat, and suddenly, for a moment only, closed his hand on her wrist before leaving the pool, shaking himself like a dog, scrubbing at his arms and chest with the big towel.—Cold, cold.—

She repeated with a mock shiver:—Cold, cold.—

They stood up, in accord to get dressed.

The ring of water in his ears jinglingly mingled with the sound of the frogs. He put his arms round her and in a rush of heat, as if all the blood in his chilled body had retreated to engorge there, pressed his genitals tightly against her. He felt an enormous thrill and a fiercely crashing desire, all the abstinence of a planned nonexistence imploded like
the destruction of one of his imaginary twenty-storeys that she feared might fall on her head. She held him as he held her. There was no kiss. She broke away neatly and ran indoors. He dressed, raged against by his roused body, among the chintz drapings in the change-room. When he came out the water in the pool was black, with the reflection of stars thrown there like dying matches. She had turned off the terrace lights and was standing in the dark.

—Good night. I apologize.—

—I hope your car hasn't been pinched. Should have brought it into the drive.—

—There is no car.—

He was too tired and dispirited to lie. Yet he must summon some slapdash resource of protection.—Friends were coming this way, they dropped me. I said I'd call a taxi to take me back.—

The dark and the cover of chanting frogs hid whatever she might be thinking.

—Stay.—She turned, and he followed her into the house, that he had not before entered.

They began again, the right way, with kisses and caresses. A woman his own age, who knew how to make love, who both responded and initiated, knowing what they wanted; in common. On this territory between them, there was even a kind of unexpected bluntness. Gently pinching his nipples before the second intercourse, she said—You're not Aids positive, are you.—

He put a hand over the delight of her fingers on him.—A bit late to ask… Not so far as I know. And I've no reason to believe otherwise.—

—But you've no wife.—

—Yes, but I'm rather a constant character—despite my nomadic profession.—

—How will you explain you didn't come home.— He laughed.—Who to?—

—The first day you were here… ‘awkward', you said, for me to phone you.—

—There's no one. There's no woman I'm accountable to at present.—

—You understand, it's none of my business. But we don't want to make things difficult for either of us.—

The husband.—Of course, I understand, don't worry. You're a lovely—preposterous!—woman.—And he began to kiss her as if he were a cannibal tasting flesh.

She was a practical woman, too. Some time in the early hours he stirred with a grunt and found a strange woman standing over him in dawn shadows—oh yes, ‘Sylvie'. So that's where, waking often in unfamiliar rooms, he was this time. He had learnt to be quick to adjust his sense of place.

—Come. There's another bed.—He wandered behind her down a passage. She had made up a big bed in a guestroom; he stumbled into it and slept again.

In the morning at breakfast on her terrace she gaily greeted the black man who served them.—Mr Harry is a friend of the master, I asked him to stay the night with us.—

So she, too, had the skills of vigilance, making safe for herself.

Harry went back every night that week. Harry really existed, now, out of the nonexistence of himself. Harry the construction engineer, a successful, highly-paid, professionally
well-regarded man of the world, with a passing fancy, a mistress not young but beautiful, a creature lavished by the perfumed unguents of care from the poll of curly tendrils he would lift to expose her forehead, to the painted nails of her pedicured toes. Like him, she had her erratic moments of anguish, caused by conflict with the assertion of reality—her reality—rising within her to spoil an episode outside her life, a state without consequences. These moments found their expression as non sequitur remarks or more often as gestures, the inner scuffle breaking through in some odd physical manifestation. One night she squatted naked on the bed with her arms round her knees, clasping her curled feet tight in either hand. He was disturbed, and suppressed the reason that was sending a sucker from the root of his life: after interrogation in detention he had sat on the floor of his cell holding his feet like that, still rigid with his resistance against pain. A sear of resentment:
she
—she was only interrogating herself. Yet of course he had feeling for her—hadn't he just made love to her, and she to him, as she did so generously—he should not let himself dismiss the relative sufferings of people like her as entirely trivial because it was on behalf of nothing larger than themselves.