Occasion for Loving Read Online Free PDF Page B

the risk of boredom. Was that youth? Jessie had forgotten. She only knew that she herself became more and more aware of the need to protect herself from what she thought of as waste. Down in the garden, Clem and Madge and Elisabeth burst out of the house with their hands before them, in pursuit of dragonflies. Jessie and Ann went off together, looking, in their thin, bright dresses and sandals, curiously alike, for once, like acolytes who have both, at one time or another, served the same gods.
    Ann was talking about the tribal dancing they were to see next day. “I remember someone—must have been our servant—kicking and jumping around with a shield made of a skin with brown and white fur. I suppose he was drunk. It was connected with some sort of a row in the house, I’m sure.”
    â€œBut I thought you’d left Rhodesia when you were a baby?” said Jessie. That was what Boaz had said.
    â€œNo … no,” the girl said tranquilly, smoking. “I remember that boy, his name was Justin. He was yelling, too, some sort of song.”
    She remembered more of Africa than she told Boaz; she told Boaz, perhaps, only what she wanted to. She was unembarrassed by the lie, and made no attempt to disclaim it. For the first time, Jessie felt some curiosity about her; yet she sensed that the curiosity would be brought up short: Ann might rush into things with her hands out before her, like the little girls after dragonflies, but it would probably follow that, like the little girls, she would not be aware of her own motives.
    She was helpful at the hall, and did not give way to any of those signs of bossiness that usually exhibit themselves in those who volunteer in situations of disorganisation. The afternoon session of the bands contest was for people of various shades of colour only, and a large, amiable and lagging crowd, mostly Africans, wandered in and out. A row of seats that had been shown on the booking plan did not exist in the hall, and this, added to the fact that nobody seemed to stay in his allotted seat for long anyway, confused Jessie’s box-office. Someone who had promised to be there to help her failed to turn up, and so Ann cheerfully did what she was told in his place. By the interval, Jessie had lost Ann entirely; walking up and down the aisles, she came upon her, sitting three rows from the front between two African girls who had been programme sellers, and drinking a green lemonade from the bottle. Jessie had with her, by this time, the young man who should have been there earlier to assist as the row emptied. “Here’s the culprit—Len Mafolo—Ann Davis.” The young man, with the sleepy, veiled look that many town Africans have, murmured some excuse, and sat quietly, letting the smoke curl out of his mouth before his face. Ann had already formed thefervent championing loyalties that take hold of spectators at any sort of contest. “Well if the third lot don’t win, I’ll eat my hat. I mean, there’s no comparison, no one else in the same class …” “… like a lot of tired grasshoppers—don’t you agree?”
    â€œI came too late; I didn’t hear them,” said the young man.
    A crowd of young bloods in the front row were whistling piercingly and throwing paper darts at the girls in the aisles; most of them wore teddy-boy clothes, inhabiting them with abandon, hilarity and vulgarity instead of the dead coldness, like lead, with which their white counterparts filled the get-up. Blasts of disgust from a trumpeter warming up off-stage were followed by a long, tootling sigh from a saxophone.
    â€œD’you think I could go now, Len?” said Jessie, asking a favour.
    â€œYes, why not. I’ll do the returns. It’ll be quite all right, Jessie. I’m sorry”—he indicated an apology for being late.
    â€œGood. Thanks so much, then—Ann, if you want to hear bands, we can fix it any time.