The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  I was so astonished at this view that I sat up, curious. And it became one of those intimate conversations that make people feel a delicious surrender of inconsequential confidence, very exciting to someone who discovers for the first time this special kind of talk that is released by physical intimacy.

  Sometimes when we found ourselves unexpectedly alone but certain to be rejoined by the life of the household at any moment (even the appearance of one of the cats, stalking silently in about its own business, made me start) we would stand together kissing as if at a leave-taking, and he would flatten his hands down my back into the notch of my waist and then cup them round my buttocks. At once I would flinch away, almost crossly put myself out of the way of his hands. But he was not offended. Here in the sweet closeness of intimacy the ten years between us opened up a gulf. I lowered my eyelids, mouth pulled accusingly. But he looked at me gently, with a short catch and release of the breath, smiling comfortingly at me, only wishing to take care not to offend. Clinging to his hard, fast-beating chest, he knew that with my eyes shut tight I could not take that ten-years’ dark jump in one leap. With gentle, sensuous selfishness, he only wished to enjoy me as far as I was ready to go, and sometimes, indeed, after a still, absorbed minute of passion when he knew nothing, he would come to himself quite abruptly simply to prevent me from following a blind instinct of desire which later I would not understand and might even disgust me.

  On Saturday afternoon Mrs. Koch had to go to a wedding. Ludi was leaving on Monday morning, and she did not want to go, but the obligation of being a very old friend of the bride’s mother was something that made an excuse out of the question for her. It was the first week in February and the first day of February heat, and when we had driven her to the MacVies’, who were to take her with them to the ceremony at a village twenty miles inland, we drove slowly back to the farm through heat without air, a heat that now burned silent and intense as the heart of a fire after it has seized crackling on all life—trees, grass, flowers. The house was preoccupied with the heat, and as I knelt on the sofa at the window, I saw, outside in the stillness, the very tops of the trees tremble slowly in anticipation of rain. For the first time we lay down together alone in the house. At once I struggled up again, as if I were fussing about the bed of an invalid. “Wait a minute, let’s get the cushion—” Ludi let his head be arranged with tugs at the cushion which turned it this way and that. Then I half lay down, but immediately got up to take off my shoes. Then I lay down beside him, moving my toes and sighing with my eyes shut. After a moment of sinking pleasure, I rose to wakefulness and opened them to see him looking at me, smiling under half-closed lids. I wondered how I looked at that angle, my cheek pushed by the pillow, and put up my hand to judge the distortion. But my hand came into contact with his jaw and I felt the wonderful shock of a burning warmth other than my own flesh; I rolled over to bury my face in the angle between his neck and the cushion.

  I had a night of my own in there. The warm sweetness of the skin felt but unseen, breathing out a slight moisture from the afternoon heat, was the essence, the surrender of Ludi himself in darkness. I seemed to sink into it, it lay upon my eyelids and my lips like warm rain, and I fell through it, falling, falling as one does in the mazy stratosphere between consciousness and sleep. Then I suddenly became aware of another presence; something else came and stood beside me in the darkness. The damp, cottony smell of the cushion in its thin, soft, faded cover beneath my cheek, musty from the climate and faintly musky with the impress of the cats’ round bodies, was sharp and sad to my nostrils, like the sudden cold blow across water in a landscape waiting for rain. Tears pricked at my eyes with strange pleasure. The smell of the cushion was the distillation of the friendly house, of our lives moving about there with the animals and old Matthew, of our voices lingering about the rooms, our calls in the garden unanswered by the glitter of the sea, the whole transience of this time that seemed my life but that would set me down at some point (although it would be soon, it did not seem so) and continue, far off and spiced, after I had awoken and gone.

  I stirred and lifted my head into the room again, now filled with the queer presaging yellow light of a storm taking place unheard somewhere between us and the hidden sun. But Ludi was not looking at me now. His eyes, lids tender-looking from the protection of glasses, were closed and his whole face was beautiful with the tension of inward concentration. The corner of his mouth relaxed and then pressed back white against his cheek. He tightened his arms around me but I felt that for him I was not there. And the light, deepening to the greenish gold of wine or pools far down from the sun, lay solemnly on his cheek, but he merely flickered the thin skin of one eyelid, not able to notice what it was that passed over him. He began to kiss me in this concentration and to caress me, and soon I was in it too. It held me and I kissed him and gripped him back and I felt I was trying with all the gathered distress of my body to get somewhere, to reach something. He lay on top of me and he was heavy and that was what I wanted. I wanted him to be more heavy. He could not be heavy enough. I did not know what I wanted, but that I wanted. All at once, an astonishing sensation startled me. As if I had turned my head only in time to see something whipped away, my eyes flew open—. Ludi was gone, lifted away from me; he stood in the shadowy corner by the sofa, shapeless in rumpled clothes, pressing the palms of his hands up behind his ears.

  I cried sharply: “Ludi! Come back!”

  I lay hysterically rigid, exactly as he had left me.

  “Ludi!”

  He came slowly over, almost lumbering, and stood at the foot of the sofa. “I can’t,” he said, gently.

  “Ludi,” I said, not moving, “it was such a wonderful—so wonderful just now. Come back.”

  He shook his head. “It’s impossible,” looking down at me.

  I must have him back. I must find out. I must go back and find what I was about to feel. I felt my eyes terribly wide open, fixed on his.

  He sat down on the edge of the sofa and gently bent my bare foot in his hand. At the same time I loved him desperately and I resented the lax gentleness expressed in his touch. “It’s physically impossible,” he explained, gently, reluctantly. He stood up again, smiling at me. “I must go and fix myself up. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I watched him go out, so untidy, with a curious, disturbed look at the back of his hair, and as I lay, not waiting, but simply lying, my body slowly let go. Now I became conscious of a need to move my leg to another position, and, beyond my slow, deep breathing, heard that it was raining. It must have been raining for some time because the rain had already found its rhythm. All the room was darkened with the shade cast by the rain.

  Ludi came back with the air of brightness of people who have just washed their faces and combed their hair, and as he filled the doorway he seemed to be very big and heavy-shouldered and somehow not responsible for, signaling appealingly as a prisoner from, his heavy man’s frame. He lay down in the dimness beside me, quietly, hands behind his head. The warmth of his side made me sigh and smile. We lay a long while, perhaps five minutes. I was happy and sad, troubled and serene, bewildered and at rest. And I was thinking, vaguely, in snatches and dashes. And when I spoke, it was not of conscious intention, but like a sentence thrown out loud in sleep, the kind of accurate chance sum of thoughts and ideas not consciously computed in the mind.

  “Ludi, have you ever slept with anyone?”

  I think he knew what I was asking better than I knew myself. Ignoring the naïveté, the foolishness of the question, which he saw were not the question itself, he said, perfectly gravely, “Yes, miss, I have.”—He called me “miss” the way one flatters a little girl; it was his word of endearment for me.

  A weak protest of pain flowed over me, as if the protective fluid of a blister somewhere inside me had been released.—Now when I put a finger on the spot it would be raw, unprotected by ignorance. I was silent.

  Suddenly it did not seem ridiculous to him to be apologetic. He
began to comfort me by excusing himself and I believe he really meant it. For the moment he really believed I had the right to complain of the ten years of life he had had while I dragged a toe in the dust of my childhood, disconsolate, waiting. He said the oldest, comforting words, that were new to me. “Always very perfunctory. It’s no good without any real feeling, any other relationship to back it. Honestly”—he was looking at me now, not seeing me properly in the dark of the rain, without his glasses, his close, bristly lashes that I secretly loved so much, showing bright as he narrowed his gaze—“It’s no good.” He put his arm under my head. I thought, he means it would be different with me. He means he loves me. I was suddenly utterly happy. I turned my head until I could rub my nose on the hairs of his forearm.

  He said, with the stiff little preparatory swallow of surrender: “It happens about once a year, with me. One feels—and then afterward—I don’t know, I’m disgusted with the woman. Meaningless, really.” He thought a while. I wondered if he was remembering this strange act that I had never partnered but that I now understood. I felt a voluptuous tenderness toward him and wanted to take his head in my arms. He got up, slowly disentangling himself as one puts aside boughs, and stood, feet apart against the dizziness of standing upright. Reflectively, dismissing it, he swayed a little. “I assure you it’s been a long time, now. Oh, many months.” He smiled at me, his sour, confiding smile.

  And then, as if he felt at the same instant my sudden desire for air, for the wet air of rain, he padded over to the window and opened it wide. It was sheltered by the veranda so that the rain did not come in, but the fresh, wild air did, rushing in as if the room drew a great breath. Drops like thick curved lenses distorted and magnified the brilliant green of the creeper shaking over the roof’s edge. Scent tanged with wet came up from the beaten petals of the frangipani. The veranda with the few unraveling cane chairs and the pot plants breathing the rain they could not feel had the green twilight of a conservatory. We stood with our nostrils lifted like animals, staring out into the falling rain, our arms lightly round each other.

  Curiously, this time when he went away and I was not to see him again, I was not lost. Almost before he had gone I had given myself up to the assurance of his letters. The idea of the first letter from him filled me with excitement, so that I half-wished him to go, be gone so that I might get that letter the sooner. And I should be able to write to him; perhaps to make him something. If I thought about home at all, it was to imagine myself sitting making something for Ludi, in absorption, in completeness. Mrs. Koch was mostly silent during these last few days of my stay, speaking of Ludi, at long intervals, as “he” and “him” as if the silences between her remarks were merely times when the conversation continued somewhere in her out of earshot. She would come hurrying from another room to show me something connected with him; a special winder he had made for her wool, a bracket for a bedside lamp that needed only the right kind of screw to complete it.

  Once she came in with a snapshot.

  “This isn’t bad.” Her crinkly gray hair hung over her eyes as she peered closely at it. When she had had a good look she passed it to me. Ludi, who, like most shortsighted people, did not photograph well, stood scowling at the sun in the artificial camaraderie of a garden snapshot. Two little boys grinned cross-legged in the foreground, a dog was straining out of the arm of a young woman with a charming, quizzical smile that suggested that she was laughing at herself. A badly cut dress showed the outline of her knees and thighs, and with the arm that was not struggling with the dog, she had just made some checked gesture, probably to push back the strand of curly hair standing out at her temple, which the photograph recorded with a blur in place of her hand. I was instantly drawn to her. “Who’s this?” I pointed.

  “Let me see—Oh, that’s Maud—Oscar—you’ve heard me talk of Oscar Harmel?—Oscar’s second wife. The old fool, we all thought; she’s young enough to be his granddaughter, almost. The two boys are his grandchildren, from his first marriage, of course. They love Maud.—Oh, she’s a sweet girl, a dear girl, no doubt about that. But of course it doesn’t work. She laughs a lot, but she’s not happy. She’s very dissatisfied with her life. Funny girl. Oscar’s not in this”—she lifted her eyebrows to see better, as if she had her glasses on and were peering over the top—”I wonder when it was taken? Oh, I know, last time Ludi was on leave, he went down there and stayed over. One of the little chaps had had a birthday, and got a camera for a present.—He brought me the picture specially, next time his mother—that’s Oscar’s eldest daughter, Dorrie—brought him to see me. …”

  Quite suddenly, it came to me that I knew it was she. I looked at the girl half-laughing, half-struggling against the nonsense of having the photograph taken and I knew it had been she. This is the girl, I told the sullen Ludi, not looking at me, not looking at the sun. And in his refusal to meet the eye of the camera, in the obstinate stance of his legs—in the silence of that photograph of him—he confirmed it to the tingling of my half-pain, my curiosity.

  Chapter 9

  Behind my eyes, inside my sleeping body, I sensed the surface of day. Knew the breath of the warm sea that would be blowing in the window. The conversation of the fowls with the dust. Mrs. Koch squeezing oranges in the kitchen. The great brightness of morning that would leap at me, blinding, joyous, as I opened my eyes.

  A dim, cool room. Silence. The call of a dove, curtains with a known pattern. Silence. High on the wall the lozenge-pattern of light filtered through the ventilator, the neatly spaced pale yellow crumpets of childhood, that moved round the room through days of sickness. And then my mother, rattling at the stiff lock of the hall cupboard with her keys. Missus, the butcher he send: Anna. I lay a minute, looking round the ceiling where every dent, every smudge was where I knew it to be, and then I got up, went to the wardrobe for my clothes, pulled the thin curtains back on the dusty, clipped jasmine bush, the patch of neat grass, the neighbor’s hedge.

  It was like this for a number of mornings; for an hour I would be quite dazed with the sense of having mislaid myself in sleep, or the half-will, half-suspicion that this was the dream and the awakening would be other. But soon it no longer happened; I knew before I woke that I was home on the Mine, in the bed, in the room that claimed me as their own.

  Soon I would wake to myself in the mornings, but I was not secure for the whole day. I came slowly up the path after the anticlimax of the post—there was no letter for me—with the dry, windless highveld sun making my hair too hot and electric to touch and my mother’s voice over the preparation of lunch coming from the kitchen, and I was seized again with the unreliability of my own eyes, ears, and the utter conviction of my other senses, that made me smell and feel noon on the veranda above the sea, with the sway of the sea, from which I had newly arisen, in my blood as I stood. I waited at the window in the empty house of early evening for my father to come home, and turned to the room to look at, and even to make tentative movements to touch, all the objects, ornaments, carpets, disposition of furniture, photographs, vases, that in their very evidence of reality, and lifelong involvement with me, suddenly could not summon meaning and belonging. Even more strangely, I spent a morning shopping in Atherton with my mother, and the hurrying along the streets gossiping together, the matching of a piece of last year’s material, my mother’s uncertain look outside a shoeshop where she wanted my confirmation of a decision she had already made to buy a pair of new shoes—all this pleasant, familiar activity came to me as it might come to someone who has been ill, and is filled with the strangeness of standing upright in the sun again. When we stopped to talk to people, I had the smile that invalids summon.

  “On Tuesday? Yes, that would be lovely, I think.—Helen, what about Tuesday?” I looked from my mother to the indulgent smile of the matron who was inviting us to tea, as if I had not taken in what my mother was asking. And the sight of the two of them, in their floral dresses and their veiled summer hats, small brown paper parcels from John
Orrs’ and the Sewing Center and the seed merchant hanging from their white gloved hands, filled me with a kind of creeping dismay.

  “Old Mrs. Barrow’s so fond of you—” my mother reproached later. “She’s always loved to have you, ever since you were a little girl. You can’t hurt her feelings—”

  I said nothing, but resentment, motiveless and directionless, seemed to crowd out even my sight.

  Less disturbing than all this was the habit I got into of disappearing into a re-creation of my time with Ludi whenever I was out with my parents among other people. At the cinema with them, I quickly learned not to see the film, but to use the darkness and the anonymous presence of people about me in the darkness, to create Ludi for myself more vividly than life. This was an intense and emotional experience, highly pleasurable in its longing, its secrecy. When I found myself at a tea party among the women in whose fondness I had basked, I could kill the troubled feelings of rejection and distaste by plunging into myself the fierce thrill of longing for Ludi, which would vibrate an intensity of emotion through me to the exclusion of everything else.

  My mother was irritated by me. “In a trance. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. Alice certainly fattened her up, but she’s made her slow.”

  “Dreaming.” My father smiled at me across the table. He had never forgotten his own youth, and mistook the memory of what he had been for an understanding of what I was.

  I ignored him kindly; I preferred my mother’s irritation; it seemed a temerity for him to pretend to understand a bewilderment of which he was so important a part.

  Then I knew what he was going to quote: What is this life, if full of care …—But he must have sensed my waiting for it, and he stopped himself this once and only said, with the inclined head of still more certain understanding, “It’s the time to dream. Later on she’ll be too busy.”