The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  The University. Should I go up the shallow gray steps between gray columns like great petrified trees; carry books; wear the blue and yellow blazer? I did not want to talk about it. I wanted to put off talking of it.

  “What’s happening, Helen?” Nothing stopped my mother. “You’ve got to make up your mind, you know. There’s barely a week left.”

  “When is the enrollment day?” my father asked.

  “Thursday, Mrs. Tatchett tells me. She’s going in with Basil.”

  “Oh—?—That boy’ll never do any good. He hasn’t a brain. What’s he going to do?”

  “Something to do with engineering. You know I don’t follow the different names of these things. Electro-something.”

  “I still think a teacher’s degree would be the best.” My father turned to me. “You needn’t necessarily use it as such afterward.”

  My mother, who saw deflection of purpose in the housewife’s sense of waste, immediately took this up. “Why not? What’s the sense of wasting four years becoming a teacher if you don’t teach?”

  “I don’t know.” My father nodded his head to himself; he believed he had educated himself on the Home University Library, the British Encyclopaedia and “Know Thyself,” but that he would have achieved this and his Mine secretaryship ten years earlier had he started off his career as a university graduate instead of a junior clerk. “It’s a good general education.”

  “You’ve got big ideas,” said my mother, “too big for your pocket. Helen must take up something that’ll fit her for the world.”

  I sat through their talk with a growing inner obstinacy. Now that phrase of my mother’s that I had heard so often, that had always sounded strong and practical as my mother herself, came to me as a disturbing question. Fit me for what world? So long as there was only my mother’s world, so long as I knew no other, the phrase had the ring of order and action. The world of my mother and father, or Ludi’s world? And if there were two, there might be more. But my parents wanted to fit me for theirs. My interest, that like a timid, nosing animal edged back and lay down in dim lack of enthusiasm before the advance of their discussion, was again forgotten in a sense of distress and bewilderment.

  My mother was tapping her front teeth with her fingernail, as she sometimes did in concern. But when she spoke, it was with her usual vigor. “Perhaps she’d be happier at home? If she didn’t go at all—Perhaps you could speak to Stanley Dicks about getting her into the Atherton library. She’s so keen about books, and there’s a nice type of girl there—”

  My father caught her with an accusing look, a kind of concentration of irritation, suspicion and wariness that comes from long observation, if not understanding, of someone’s methods and motives. It was as if he did not know what her next move would be, but he knew it should be prevented. He gave a curiously awkward fending gesture of the hand, and said, “Oh, the library—What sort of a career, pushing a barrow of heavy books about and stamping people’s names on cards! That’s no life for her. That’s not what I want for her.”

  And then, with the inconsequence of daily life in the fluid of which are suspended all stresses, the jagged crystals of beauty, the small, sharp, rusted probes of love, the hate that glints and is gone like a coin in water, my mother said without change of tone, “You won’t forget about the lawn mower, will you? It’s Charlie’s day again tomorrow.” And with a little glance at his watch to recall him to himself, my father nodded and returned to his office for the afternoon’s work.

  I went down to the Mine swimming bath. At first there was almost no one there; only the small boys, splashing and squealing hoarsely in their flapping wet rags of costumes. I lay looking at my shining brown legs; a stranger bearing the distinguishing marks of another land. Later some boys and girls of my own age came and dropped to the grass around me, gasping, fanning themselves after their bicycle ride. They exclaimed over me. You were away a long time! How long was it, Helen? My, she’s burned—look how she’s burned! They giggled and threw sweet-wrappers at one another, and every now and then, without a word, as if at some mysterious sign, a girl would tug at a boy’s ankle to trip him as he stood up, or a boy would pull the bow end of the strap that held a girl’s bathing suit, and suddenly they would be wrestling, chasing each other, shrieking round the pool, rolling and falling back into the middle of us, the girl screaming between laughter: No! No! Soon the grass around us was strewn with lemonade bottles and broken straws. A bright-haired girl, with the dimples she had had when she was four still showing when she smiled, carefully broke up a packet of chocolate so that it would go round. When I got up to swim, they all came flying, bouncing, chasing into the square tepid tank of water. Lorna Dufalette’s head broke through the surface beside me, water beading off her powdered forehead. “It’s not fair, those filthy Cunningham kids have got ringworm, and they come into the water. We might all get it.” I floated along amid used matches and dead grass. At last I pulled myself out by the shoulders and sat, feet dangling, on the side. One of the boys, at a loss for a moment, swam over to me, a bright challenging grin on his red face. His big teeth in the half-open mouth combed the water like a fish. “Come away to the lagoon with me, Tondelayo!” I had been watching the water streaming over his teeth and was startled when he suddenly appeared beside me. Saliva and water streaked his chin as he grinned, waiting my response. Apparently there was some film I had not seen that would have given it to me. Water poured from him and he laughed toward me. “Come on—” He slipped down into the water again and, at a howl from one of the others, turned his thick scarred neck and bellowed something back, then caught at my ankle. But with a quick slither I snatched my legs back and he was gone, threshing noisily after the jeer that had challenged him. I shifted away from the uneven puddle that marked where he had sat beside me.

  In the damp change cubicle I put on my clothes and rolled my bathing suit in my towel. Looking at myself in the post card of mirror that was nailed to the wall brought two tears of loneliness into my eyes.

  My mother was sitting behind the fly screen on the veranda when I got home. She was following a knitting pattern from a book, and the tray from her afternoon tea was on the ledge beside her. As I saw her the words seemed to come to me quite suddenly, as if someone had given me a push forward, “Mother, I’ve made up my mind I’m not going to University.” She said, after a pause, not looking up, “All right. I suppose you’re old enough to know what you want. Nobody gave me the opportunity.” I pulled myself up on the ledge beside the tray and we sat in silence, rather heavily. After a while she said, “It’ll disappoint your father,”—and went indoors.

  My mother always had had the knack of filling me with apprehension by the meagerness of what she said, and the magnitude of what she left unspoken. Now, as I sat in her chair while the sun went down, the shape that she had hollowed for herself in the cushions, the warmth where she had leaned her back, seemed to speak on for her. I began to feel tense and nervous; in the heat, my hands were cold. I went down into the cooling garden and walked up and down, watching for my father. My heart was beating fast and I wanted to tell him at once. When he saw me hanging about the gate his tired, neat face lifted pleasurably into life and he gave a little signal as if to say, I’ll be with you rightaway, but I did not even wait for him to put the car into the garage, but opened the door as he slowed down to enter the gate, and got in beside him. He said: “Give us a kiss,” and his cheek was faintly salty from the sweat of the day. “—Daddy, I’ve made up my mind I don’t want to go to University.” As I said it we came to a halt in the dusty gloom of the tin garage.

  “Well, I won’t press you, my dear. It’s very important that you should be happy about what you do—no making a success of anything unless you’re happy in doing it. I must say I believe that. Not everyone has to go to a university to improve and open their mind, you could do a correspondence course—what about French? Always useful to learn a language. So long as one cultivates one’s mind, it doesn’t really matt
er—” He sat on in the car a minute or two and I watched his profile. But I could see he was not unhappy, he was absorbed, he had already set his mind on something else for me.

  We strolled into the house together, with him talking sensibly, enthusiastically. I found I was not listening but was thinking of Ludi, seized up increasingly by thoughts of Ludi and what he would have said if I had really thought of going to the University. Getting on, the bright ambitious daughter of the Mine Secretary. I smiled to myself at the idea that I might have lent myself to it. Now I would be able to tell him; I lay in the sun somewhere, caring for nothing, and we refuted the University together. Now that I had decided, it seemed ridiculous that I had ever even considered the place. I felt that Ludi and I were proudly alone, and I was as happy in the knowledge of him as if he had been there. I felt he knew all that passed in me, and that only the things that he and I knew mattered. My tongue shaped his name over and over, an intoxication of Ludi, Ludi, Ludi. I was excited and happy. It overflowed. Suddenly I kissed my father, having heard almost nothing of what he had been saying to me. He said: “Not such an ununderstanding old father, after all, eh?” And stood looking at me with proud tenderness.

  I went slowly up the passage to the bedroom, dreaming, hugging my arms, and I heard him in the kitchen: “—Why d’you do it? You know it makes your hair smell, and you grumble—” My mother was frying fish. I lay down on my bed with my eyes closed; I could see Ludi’s walk, the startled way his eyes looked without glasses, the way he gave a little snort and his mouth curled up one side before he told me what he thought of something. I could have lain there all evening.

  My father was calling me. I let him call three times before I answered: “What?”

  “Look—I think this’s for you—”

  “What?”

  “Come here, I can’t shout.”

  To humor him, I got off the bed in mild irritation and wandered into the kitchen, blinking as if from a sleep. He took a letter from out of the folded newspaper he had brought home. “Sent care of the Mine Secretary—it’s yours. …” I took the blue envelope from him and read my name in a handwriting I had never seen before but that I knew instantly. A wave of blood went through me, my hands shook. It was the simplest thing for me to leave the kitchen and walk back to my room, but all at once I did not know how to do it. I did not know how to walk out of the door, I did not know at whom or what to look. It was not necessary to say anything but suddenly I did not know what to say. “Well,” I said, “I’ll open it just now—” My father was taking beer bottles out of the refrigerator. “What are you doing that for?” my mother was complaining. “I thought I ordered two dozen? Where’re the other six?” “You’ll never get them in that way. I’ve just put them straight and now you’re upsetting everything—” I made my escape as if I had been a prisoner momentarily out of surveillance.

  And in my room I tore open the envelope, took out the folded letter in that moment of perfect joy that comes just the second before realization; the mouth ready to be kissed, the possession lying ungrasped in the hand, the letter held unread.

  Then I unfolded the sheets, saw that there were three, saw the beautiful handwriting, the words “thinking,” “knack”…

  Barberton,

  Saturday.

  Dear Helen,

  It’s difficult to find space or quiet to write in a great bedlam of a camp like this one. But it’s now close on midnight so I can be fairly certain not to be interrupted by anything worse than snores. I didn’t have a bad journey—but you’ll know that by the telegram I sent mother—except that it all seemed a bit unreal, the yap of the other men, etc., the usual army nonsense, after the last few days at home. I kept thinking about it, and as usual—only a bit more so this time, the two planes of existence just won’t dovetail. Not in me, anyway. Every time I come back to the army I am sickened all over again at the senselessness of the way we live here. Still, you’ve heard all this from me many times before, so enough.

  Fortunately, there have been heavy rains and the dust isn’t so bad as it was. That chap Don Macloud I told you about is back in my tent again after all, and we have rigged up fairly comfortable beds for ourselves. As I told you, he’s really got a knack of making a home out of a fruit box and a bit of sacking, and is useful to have around. Also pleasant and inoffensive, and as unimpressed as I am by all this so-called army discipline. Also like me, has no wish to get a stripe or a pip up so that he can have a taste of inflicting it on others.

  I’ve had two letters from mother, written since you’ve gone, and I can see she misses you. You can’t imagine what it meant to her to have you around; she really likes you, and you know exactly how to treat her. Particularly just after I’d left. I’m grateful, I can tell you, for the way you stayed on and kept her company. Of course I know you like her too, almost love her, really, and it was no penance to you, but just the same, a real thank you. She’s such an extraordinary person, so absolutely right to live with, but not everyone is capable of knowing her and finding that out.

  Well, miss? And what about you? Have you settled down again? I hope you’ve decided what you’re going to do and that whatever it is you are happy in it. I don’t think we’ll be here much longer. All indications are that we shall be moving—soon. In a way, it’ll be a relief. I’m sick to death of the child’s game we’re playing here, even though I’ve little relish for the real thing. If I can manage a week end before we go, of course it’ll be spent in Atherton, if you and your people will have me? But there’s a rumor that all leave is to be canceled soon, so by the time my turn comes round, I doubt if there’ll be a chance.

  Write when you feel like it. When I think of you, in this place, you don’t seem quite true, you know. Figment of the imagination! End of my candle, so I’d better turn in.

  Ludi.

  P.S. Lost the piece of paper with the house address on it, so am sending this to your dad’s office. My regards to him and to your mother. L.

  I had not read it so much as flown through the lines, alighting on the word “you.” “Well, Miss? And what about you?”—What looked like an island, a beckoning palm top, was as uncertain as a piece of floating vegetation, rootless in the tide. I hovered, went on. And in the last paragraph, there it was. A small island, soon explored, but the place where my heart came down and beaked its feathers. I read it over, and again. “When I think.” He thinks about me. But “When” … that means it isn’t often. Yet it might be. “You don’t seem quite true.” Oh, the happiness of it! Now I am the woman and the princess and the dream. Now it is like a sign on my forehead. “You don’t seem quite true.” A dream. Something that’s over, then; can’t believe it happened. Just forgotten, an incident, like that?

  I read the whole letter over again, searching through every word, through the commonplaces, the information of the way he was living, the time, the weather—pushing it all aside like so much rubble. Now I would pick up a word or a phrase, as one fingers a pebble. But no. The repetition of “as I told you” seemed an intimacy, perhaps? Yes. Yes, that I could keep. The bit about his mother. This puzzled me. Of course, it could mean a special kind of confidence in me; of course.

  Some sentences I read over to myself a dozen times. Aloud, they sounded different; with another intonation, the meaning changed. Every word of the letter seemed ambiguous; happiness came and went like the color in the bird’s wing, showing and going out as it falls through the sun.

  I sat on my bed with the three thin sheets and the envelope spread evidence about me. Well, I had a letter, anyway. I rested in that.

  But strangely, the mood of exaltation, of closeness to Ludi, was gone. It was only when I was in bed that night, late and awake, thinking about him as I remembered him on the farm, as I had done when I lay dreaming before my father had called me, that it came back.

  Chapter 10

  It is amazing on how little reality one can live when one … is very young. It is only when one is beginning to approach maturity that achi
evement and possession have to be concrete in the hand to create each day; when you are young a whole livable present, elastic in its very tenuousness, impervious in its very independence of fact, springs up enveloping from a hint, a memory, an idea from a book. On this slender connection, like a tube of oxygen which feeds a man while he moves in an atmosphere not his own, it is possible to move and breathe as if your feet were on the ground. Through the autumn and into winter, this was the way I lived now. The quiet, steeped autumn days passed, as if the sun turned the earth lovingly as a glass of fine wine, bringing out the depth of glow, the fine gleam; the banks of wild cosmos opened like a wake, with the cream and pink and gilt of an early Florentine painting, on either side of the railway cutting from Atherton to Johannesburg and spattered, intoxicating bees with plenty in the bareness of flat veld and mine dumps, out of ditches and rubbish heaps; the last rains brought the scent of rot like a confession from leaves that had fallen and lain lightly as feathers; the cold wind of the highveld, edged with the cut of snow it had passed on the Drakensberg, blew round the house, blowing bare round the bare Mine, blowing the yellow cyanide sand into curling miasmas and mistrals over the road; the Mine boys walked with only their eyes showing over blankets. I did an afternoon’s duty at the soldier’s canteen in Atherton twice a week; I worked for three weeks in my father’s office again as a relief for someone away on leave. There it was chilly in the mornings; I noticed winter. Dressed in warm clothes, the distance of the summer came to me. I went nowhere, yet I took great care of my appearance, spending hours before my mirror in the poor light that always showed me shadowy. Sometimes while my parents were out at tennis (they were proud that they still made the second league) I would spend the whole Saturday afternoon arranging and rearranging my hair. In the evening I would not go out, but sat reading beneath an elaboration of shining whorls and curls, formal as a Gothic cornice. My dresses were chosen each day with hesitation and care, my hands were manicured. All these rites were performed alone in my bedroom, in silence, in a depth of dream that held me, deep, far away, as deafness holds someone still and serene in a room full of talk. Any faint temptation to enjoy the distractions of the Mine—a fete, a party, a concert—was paid for and nullified by the immediate feeling of estranging myself from Ludi, and what Ludi thought. The fact that he was in Italy, that the South Coast was months away, made no difference. Like God, to deny his tenets was to lose him.