Occasion for Loving Read Online Free Page B

let alone grope for the possible answers, she had suddenly come to know, in her bones, that there is no possibility of question or answers, outside that stream.
    So far as the past was concerned, Jessie believed that she had torn the grandmother’s clothes off the wolf long ago. She had looked him in his terrible eye with the help of someone who loved her before she met Tom, and though as an adult she openly marvelled that she had survived her childhood, she refused to make it an excuse for her inadequacies. She was bored and irritated by the cliché of the unhappy child who makes a mess of his life when he grows up. “In any case,” she once told Tom, “I don’t think I qualify. I was not unhappy at all. I was only unhappy when I grew up and discovered what had been done to me. I am only wild and unhappy now, when I think of it.”
    She was the daughter of a petty official on a gold-mine; her father had been manager of the reduction works or somethingof that sort—she did not remember him. He died when she was eighteen months old and by the time she was three her mother had married again, this time a Swiss chemical engineer on the same mine, an intimate friend of the family, Bruno Fuecht. The Fuechts had no children and Jessica Tibbett remained a cherished only child. She was her mother’s constant companion, and this intimacy between mother and daughter became even closer when the child developed some heart ailment at the age of ten or eleven and was kept out of school. She was taught at home by a friend of her mother’s, and when she grew up, during the war, she left her mother’s house only to marry. A son was born of the war-time marriage, and her young husband was killed. She lived on her own—with the baby, of course—for the first time in her life, and worked and travelled for a few years before she met, and finally married, Tom Stilwell.
    Those were the facts, with their apparently easy graph of formative events; there were all the obvious peaks, labelled. But the true graph of her experience lay elsewhere, and ran counter to the high and low of the facts. Horror and sorrow were contained in the cherishing, for example, and the death, off-stage and unrealised, was no more than losing touch with a summer’s companion who would, anyway, have been outgrown. Jessie knew the truth—coming to know it had been the biggest experience of all, in her life so far—and for some time she had thought that, knowing and accepting it, she had done with it. She had pulled out the sting; but all the rest of the past had been thrown away along with it. There were signs that it was all still there; it lay in a smashed heap of rubble from which a fragment was often turned up. Her daily, definite life was built on the heap, but had no succession from it, like a city built on the site of a series of ruined cities of whose history the current citizens know nothing.

    Before she had begun to take any account of them at all, the Davis couple had been part of that daily life for three months. Morgan, child of the war-time marriage, came home from school; he was put into the closed-in verandah that was Tom’s workplace, and Tom moved his desk into the bedroom. The house was full, and at night charged with sleeping presences. Jessie, roused, one night, by a child’s whimpering that ceased before she got to the child, felt furtive, standing in the passage with the sleepers all round her, hibernating in dreams. Yet how alive they were, simply breathing; the mysterious tide of breath reached out to her and retreated, reached out and retreated, in the dark. The house smelled of them, too; the warm smell of urine and cheap sweets in the little girls’ room, the peppermint-and-wet-towel smell from the bathroom, the smell of crumbs and leatherette from the suitcases lying under dust in the boxroom, the smell—exuding from the closed door as if from a cedarwood box—of nail