In the car I said to Joel: “I like them.”
The intensity of the way I spoke must have struck him, and he said quickly: “Why …?”
“They love each other.”
I kept my head down in a kind of shyness for what I had said. He did not answer, but later, in the silence of a long, straight stretch of road on the way to Atherton, he did something he had never done before; I was gazing at the green summer veld threading past when I felt his hand on the nape of my neck, which was turned away from him. I turned back in confusion and surprise, as at a summons; Ludi’s hand had come down upon me once just like that. And Joel was looking at me with the look of a smile in his deep, cool eyes, wondering in understanding, moved and questioning.
The little thread of continuity showing against a relationship so far removed in time, in experience, seemed part of the sense of disturbance and unreality that the upheaval at home had cast like a glare: a milk jug becomes an urn from another age; the feeling of fear, resentment and longing that I hold against the angry voice of my mother somehow becomes the feeling I had, pressed against the door of my room after a hiding. With my mind only half there, I watched the profile of the man sitting beside me; the hand that had rested on my neck relaxed on the steering wheel. Joel will never handle me with love, not even that love of the moment, like Charles’, that deeply desired, faintly insulting recognition of the pure female, discounting me, making of me a creature of no name. Yet I said to myself, Why? And I saw him then for a moment not as Joel, but a young man alive and strange beside me, the curve of his ear, the full muscle of his neck, the indentation at the corner of his closed mouth, his thighs with the unconscious lordliness of any young male’s legs. A faint ripple of sensation went over me. And instantly I was ashamed, I felt I had lost Joel for that instant. That was why it could never be; if I get him to touch me he will never be Joel again, he will never look at me the way he did just now, but with the concupiscence of lovers.
This peculiar afternoon light of my upheaval lay upon everywhere I went, everything I did, during that time. I did not see Mary Seswayo to speak to until after I had been to the Marcuses. She had smiled at me, or rather conveyed with the expressive quick movements of her intense eyes the sympathy of strain across the examination room, where we had sat together writing, but in the abnormal, distracted atmosphere which disorganized the normal life of the University at examination time, we had continually missed meeting. When we did meet, we were both exhausted by a three-hour paper rather pompously headed “Classical Life and Thought.” We sat on the low stone balustrade feeling the lightness of the sunny air with the indolence of invalids.
I said to her: “I tried to get you somewhere decent to work. I wanted you to come home with me.”
She looked at me quickly.
“Yes. I suggested to my mother that I should bring you home for a week or so. I had it all planned out. We’ve got a room that isn’t inside and isn’t out. But they were afraid to have you, even there.”
Her face, that always waited, open, to receive the impress of what I was saying rather than to impose on me what she felt and thought, took on, for the first time since I had known her, something set. Set against me. Her eyes searched me, shocked, and her nostrils widened, her mouth settled in a kind of distressed annoyance. It was the expression that comes to the face of an older person when a young person does something the other had feared he might.
I gave a short uncomfortable laugh against it. But she continued to look at me. The palms of her hands went down firmly to lean against the stone. She seemed to be waiting for an explanation from me; I could feel the pressure of it as if I were being shaken to speak. Just as suspicion makes an innocent person falter like the guilty, so I was queerly upset by this displeasure I felt in her.
“I shouldn’t have told you. Perhaps it’s hurtful, after all. But I thought we’d got to the stage where it was better not to pretend. Then between us, between you and me, at least, you would know …”
But I saw it was not that. There was nothing in her of the person who has been slighted. She was not humiliated; in fact I had never seen her so confident, so forgetful of herself, of what she inherited in disabilities before the fact of me.
At last she spoke. “Your mother was angry,” she said.
A spasm of annoyance caught me. “You mind? You expect it? And you think it’s right?”
“You made trouble for nothing,” she said.
“I don’t care about the trouble. It’s more important to me than the fear of offending. Even in my mother, what’s false is false. I won’t accept it. But you will. Where’s your self-respect?—Come to think of it, you should be hurt. Yes, you should. …—Or is it even worse—some sort of tribal nonsense coming up in you—what my father would call ‘the good old type from the kraal,’ full of ‘honor thy father and mother’ no matter how they think or what they do?”
She listened to me calmly. “I can see,” she said, “you’re upset. There was trouble. And for nothing. For nothing, Helen—” She made an appeal of it, shaking her head.
“Well, I don’t understand you. Either you think that because you’re black you’re not good enough to be a guest in my parents’ house, or you’re distressed at the idea of my disagreeing with my mother.”
She said dully: “That’s talk.” Her eyes moved in her brown face looking for fluency. “The fact that I’m good enough doesn’t mean that she’s got to want me. If I were a white girl she could say no, if she felt like it. But because I’m black she’s got to say yes. Don’t you see, if I am good enough, I’m good enough not to go where I’m not wanted?”
“You mean you wouldn’t have wanted to come?”
“No. How could I come? All the time I would have had to feel that they were letting me be there because of your—ideas—”
I said impatiently: “Yes, of course, I know that—”
“Never your friend staying with you. I would be forced on them. And how would it have been for them with their friends? And the native girl who works for you?—It would have been hard for her. How was she to speak to me? Call me ‘Miss’ like you? Bring me tea?”
“Yes, why not? Anna’s a domestic servant, you’re not. There’s no indignity in her bringing you tea. The fact that you’re both black is irrelevant.”
She thought a minute. “But there are so few of me. We’re still exceptions, not a class. To your mother and Anna, I belong with Anna.”
“So, must that always be considered first? Mustn’t I think of you as a girl and a human being because that will upset the very thing that must be upset, my mother’s and Anna’s prejudices?”
She gave me her big, quiet, serious smile. “You want to give a nice plump person to practicing cannibals and tell them they mustn’t eat him because it’s like eating themselves. But they’re used to eating people. They haven’t had their ideas of diet changed yet, like you have.”
I couldn’t help smiling at her choice of analogy, the memory of some Bantu folk tale, cast in the form of the Department of English. She smiled back at me gently, expansively, a patient smile. But the moment of ease went out again.
“I’m so sorry …,” she said after a silence.
I was sharp. “You don’t have to be. I’m not.” I wanted her to say: I hate your saintliness. Don’t be saintly. But we were not equal enough for that; for all my striving to rid myself of what was between us, I did not respect her, accept her enough to be able to quarrel with her. I still made a special consideration of her for that.
“You are quick,” she said, with a flourish of the head, the way Anna might have said it, “quick, quick.”
She leaned toward me, distressed, wanting me to understand. “If it had been your own house,” she said, “but you can’t expect to do it with the house of your mother. …”
“Mary,” I said, “that’s what she said. That’s just exactly what she said. No—No—” and I would not let her talk. I laughed angrily, shook off what she wanted to say,
protesting. I felt in myself the brightness, the edge that is very near to tears. And so to change the subject and save myself I told her that I was going to live in Johannesburg.
She did not know then or ever that this had anything to do with of what we had been speaking. She rubbed her neat straight hands together to relieve the stiffness of leaning on them. “Oh, that will be better for you!” She was shyly pleased. “But you’ll miss them at home. I know. Like I miss mine.”
Part Three
The City
Chapter 20
I used to wake up for the first time very early at the baby’s one strange sad cry for food. The night had just drained out of the room, and in the pale, hollowed space, a cave dimly gleaming after the tide, I lay with my body in sleep. In the next room, the soft dull sounds of Jenny moving about. Round the curtains that did not fit well, white edges of light; and quietly, deathly still, the books came out round me on the walls, a silent arpeggio of gleam ran across the case of the piano. Somebody’s coat rose on a chair. A beer bottle answered from a corner. The white curl of Jenny’s sketch propped against the wall; my dead roses black in the hanging vase.
I oared soundlessly away.
When I woke again in the noise and brightness of morning all the life of the night before was about me, where we had flung it down. I took it up again as I put on my clothes, dropped here and there on books, sheets of music, letters, a half-sewn romper for the baby. The flat was so small and the lives of Jenny and John so expansive that our possessions and our movements were hopelessly interlaced. The cupboard which had been cleared for me soon attracted back many of the objects which had been housed there before; John would forget and throw in a concert program he vaguely wanted to keep, the exposure meter for his camera would be put for safety on top of my silk blouses. As there was no mirror in the room, it was more convenient for me to keep my cosmetics in their room, where I could use Jenny’s mirror. Then the piano was in my room —or rather I was in the room where the piano was—so that meant that my shoes had to share space with John’s music. This elastic exchange went on all the time, and was managed with a thoughtless ease that at first, out of my mother’s conviction that life outside the facilities of a particular order was utterly unworkable, almost surprised me, in spite of myself. We were clean enough, fed enough, and it seemed to me a lot more comfortable, without making these necessities the whole business of living.
I moved in with the Marcuses after the Christmas vacation, at the beginning of my third academic year. John was a structural engineer and, like me, was out all day, but now, since the birth of the baby, Jenny was at home. In England, where she came from and where he had met her, she had been a designer of stage-sets attached to some repertory group, but although she had come out to South Africa with ideas of bringing professional creative competence to what was a semi-amateur field, where dress designers and students experimented happily, nothing much seemed to have come of her crusade since she had done the décor for a play I had seen before I knew her, and that had been unremarkable in its conventional startling unconventionality and literally rather shaky in execution, so that in one scene it did not hold together as it should. Still, there was a cardboard box of programs with the imprint of one of those particularly English-sounding names of a repertory company, crediting her with sets for Shaw, and Restoration comedy and Clifford Odets, and every week when the New Statesman came she would have something to say as she read down the column advertising experimental theater and lectures: “John, they’re doing some Italian thing!” or “I see they’re trying Lorca again—God, I’d give something to do that set for Yerma—” So it was accepted that the opportunities for her work were ridiculously limited in Johannesburg, and she must simply look on and mark time, smiling at the efforts of the dress designers and the technical college students. Before the birth of the baby she had done window dressing for a firm of commercial artists, and now she still managed an occasional free-lance job, for which the preparation could be made at home.
Their friends were all people whom I knew; a kind of distillation of the acquaintances I had been meeting over and over again for some time. Like a school of fish these people appeared at Isa Welsh’s, at Laurie Humphrey’s, disappearing into the confused stream of the city again, and then reappearing, quite unmistakably, known at once by the bond of specie which showed them unlike any other fish and like one another, although they were big fish and little, tame fish and savage, as if they had all worn a pale stripe round the tail or a special kind of dorsal fin. Now I was permitted to see what went on when they had whisked out of sight round the deep shelter of a dark rock; in this home water they swam more slowly and clustered, two or three, in a favorite shade.
I called them, along with John and Jenny, “our kind of people”; and certainly I felt myself more closely identified with them than I had with any others who had looked in upon my solitude.—First Ludi, then Joel, in their different ways, had stepped within its circle and been with me there, but this had not broken its transparent compass. It still had thrown me back like a sheet of glass that smashes a bird’s head with the illusion of freedom. Now, quite undramatically, it melted, was suddenly simply not there: the way of life that I wanted seemed to be lived by these people with the acceptance of commonplace. Nothing could have been more reassuring. I felt as a man must who finds himself in a country where the subversive doctrine he has believed in for years is actually the dignified practice of government. An almost physical expansion took place in me; I began to wear bolder clothes, I even sat and moved with an ease and assurance of my own. And the timidity fell away from my opinions; in the intoxication of company I spoke them, ill-considered or not, in emulation of the outspokenness of Isa. At University, too, a new alertness, a consciousness of belonging to a certain attitude, made me more critical and less ready to accept as superior judgments the valuations of my professors.
“My, but it’s become a keen little scout …,” Isa broke in on an argument I had been having, one evening. Her eyes, nimble as caged rodents, were too alive in the narrow pale freckled face that seemed to tighten and shrink when she was tired. On this night she was in a bad mood, which had the same effect. I blushed burningly before her tone, her look, rather than what she said, the implication of which was a little vague to me, anyway. But I was not really annoyed because I was confident in my new emergence, and the very fact that she should cross her sharp tongue with mine, even in derision, was evidence of it. And still over and above that, there was the thought that here, among “people our own kind,” a bad mood was accepted along with the other facts of life, publicly. Someone might growl at Isa: “Stop bitching,” but no one would seriously suggest that she should pretend to be other than she felt.
The next morning, a Sunday, when we slept late, I wandered into John and Jenny’s room and lay across the foot of their bed talking lazily. “Paul’s the one for her.” John was touching a mole on his wife’s shoulder, covering it with his finger, then looking at it again. Jenny laughed.
“Kittie Paul?” I asked. There was a man we knew who for some forgotten reason was nicknamed “Kittie.”
“No, Paul—Paul Clark.”
“Oh, the one from Rhodesia.” They often spoke of this Paul Clark, though I had not met him. Now, as so often happened with them, they had become absorbed in a little private tussle, a thing of protests and stifled monosyllables and laughter. I rescued the baby from between them—it started out the night in its own cubbyhole, but as soon as it cried one or the other brought it into their bed—and said, “Really? Why him?”
John looked vague, then remembered whom we had been talking about. “He would’ve shut her up,” he said knowingly to Jenny. She began to laugh and they would have set about each other again but I put the baby into his arms. “Here—I’m going to get my cigarettes.”
“Put some music on? While you’re there—there’s a good girl?” he yelled after me. “—And the kettle?” called Jenny. And so on this, as on most Sunday
s, we sat about in pajamas until twelve o’clock, Mozart or Bach flowing majestically through the flat, the energetic breath of coffee coming from an untidy kitchen. The African servant girl did not come in on Sundays, and Jenny and I did not trouble to clean up beyond emptying the ash trays and making the divans. She went leisurely about tending the baby, with his complication of sponges and cotton wool and his incense of talcum powder, her hair hanging and her pink English skin shining pleasantly. But I always have been one of those women who look pale and desperate in the morning, who drown in sleep and must be brought back to semblance of life again, and so I used to slip into the bathroom and wash my face with cold water and put on some lipstick. Then they would laugh at me and Jenny would say, as from some superior knowledge: “You ought to get married, Helen.”
Sometimes on fine Sundays we would go out into the country for the day—not the elaborate folding banquet of jellied tongue, sliced chicken and ice cream that I had known at home as a picnic, but a sudden enthusiasm at the sight of the sun clean and light on the pavement trees below the balcony, and a quick trip to the delicatessen shop in the old Jewish quarter which was the only food shop open in Johannesburg on a Sunday, and then out of the town to some farm where Jenny could ride a horse. She was given to moods of yearning craving for a kind of life that astonished me; a sudden assertion of her big fresh country-girl’s body that belonged a generation or two back to a small squire’s daughter in an English hunting county. Then she would whine and sulk and cajole to be taken where she could ride, while John, Jewish and deeply city-bred, seemed in the bewildered muscular inertia of his sedentary body, something completely removed and eternally stranger to her. I would hurry to help make plans that would make it easy for her to go, not, as it seemed, out of real sympathy or unselfish concern for someone else’s whims, but because I did not want to see even the lightest crack running down the surface of their relationship. Their closeness—he practicing the piano intently, having about him that fascination of the person whose absorption in what he is doing is pure interest, while she, more practically and closer to the world, yet also with a decent relish for the performance of her hands, worked on a design; the knowledge that often, discounting my existence entirely, they were making love in the next room; even the swift anticipation of each other’s wants (like breathless trapeze artists who know when this must be slapped into the palm of the other, that must be quickly swung past) with which they got through the business of dressing and breakfast on a working morning—was some sort of important proof to me. They were my beliefs, all miraculously coalesced into the lives of two people—or rather the indivisible life of two people: that was an essential part of the belief.
The Lying Days Page 24