The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  “Oh, I don’t know. How can you say that—”

  He lifted his hands off the wheel in a slight shrug. “You get all enthusiastic. The reign of the ear of corn.” (He was referring to the line of a poem by Lorca that I liked—“a black boy to announce to the gold-minded whites the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn.”) “But they don’t come any more. And they’re the ones who count, the ones who’ve really got something. Without them the others don’t get anywhere, their ideas will remain where they were. It’s always like that; there are a few who … you know, you see the same thing among ourselves, in a crowd like Isa’s. The hangers-on and the boys whose heads move somewhere. The hangers-on can only go so far as the heads take them.” He said after a moment: “Sipho would have asked some questions, all right. Belham and Dr. Lettica would have heard some calm cold logic from that black boy. … That look of making allowances for the poor inarticulate savage—the way Belham looked encouraging every time anyone black got up to speak—by God, that would have dropped off his red face as if Sipho’d suddenly taken a rabbit out of his own mouth.—Hell, if they’d been there.—I wanted a chap like Belham to see that his conception of the thinking African is out of date and third hand, bears as much relation to the real thing as a circus-trained ape to a man.”

  “But wasn’t Sipho at the debate last week?”

  “I’ve told you, they don’t come any more.” There was a growing movement, among the Africans, of non-co-operation with the whites. It had started with the policy of the Communists and the leaders of African Nationalism as a semiofficial affair, but now it was spreading and becoming something quite different: a kind of distaste, even in those Africans who had European friends with whom they could mix on decent dignified terms, for anything that was inspired or assisted by white people. Sipho was a friend of Paul’s; it was he who (in his person and what he told) in the first place showed Paul the refinement of frustration that comes to the educated African. He had asked Paul to help him arrange lectures and music recitals for the small group of his own kind who were starved for some sort of diversion in a society where the only pleasures allowed to Africans were old Wild West films (specially chosen as suitable for the primitive mind), all-night jive sessions on what was imagined to be the Harlem pattern, and illicit drinking dens.

  “Well, he’s cutting off his nose to spite his face.”

  “He’s right—he’s perfectly right—” Paul’s profile was closed against me. He spoke as if he were impatient with himself. “Anyone with any guts must do the same.”

  The ticking noise—which was not the running of the clock, for that had stopped at fourteen minutes to five some day long before I had even met Paul—was the only consciousness we shared for the rest of the way. It was somehow impossible for us to go on talking of Sipho because we sensed it would not really be talk of Sipho, but a dragging up and examination of what we had settled to live by: Paul in the job he did every day, I in the symbol I had made of him for myself. Shut off from each other by this, something else that was unshareable, but this time for different reasons, took me up and washed me that much further away from this loved person whose familiar head, like a beautiful shell from which the inhabiting creature is absent, was only a little higher than mine in the dark, and whose elbow, as he changed gear, touched against my arm unnoticed. A light sick nervousness for tomorrow flowed back to me from where it had been waiting. Anything connected with home always brought up with it the emotional reactions of childhood, so that if I thought of something pleasurable related to Atherton and my parents, I would not feel the mild, easy sense of the pleasant with which I would be impressed by a pleasure on the same level arising out of my adult, independent life, but the high-flown excitement with which a child invests the trivial. Now, when I was entirely independent of my parents and their mores, the thought of going home to Atherton tomorrow and explaining that I was living with Paul reduced me to the feeling of chilly hollowness, damp-palmed and with my stomach tightened inside me, that I had known the day before a music examination. The fact that I was ashamed of this feeling, and could refute it utterly over and over in my reason, did not shift it. It remained sitting there inside my body like some old genie, released by the word “Atherton” to possess me.

  And I could not speak of it to Paul. It did not belong with our life and I did not want to show it to him. It could only show him a girl I might have been whom he could not have loved; whom he would never have bothered to know—whom, in fact, he would never have met.

  From the corner of the car into which I had curled myself I looked at him, tightening and releasing the corner of his mouth at his thoughts. Of Sipho. Of the evening. If he thought about my silence at all, thinking it to be the same as his own. As we came through the town (people were winding out of the cinemas, breaking up like confused ants round the parked cars) an astonishing loneliness came out of me. I say came out of me because that was how I became aware of it: as the thin-drawn music of a street musician comes out of the noise of a street. You lift up your head as if all the clamor had been silence and this sound is the first you have heard for a long time.

  In the lift I said to him: “What are you going to do tomorrow?” and he looked up and smiled and then looked inquiring for a moment and said: “—Oh, of course—! You won’t be here. Well, then, I think I’ll ring John in the morning and see if they’d like to see a picture. Have to be a late show.”

  “Why, what’s happening in the afternoon?”

  “I’m going to plant grass. Really. The new sports field at Jabavu.”

  We eyed each other in the distorting greenish light of the lift and we both laughed, as people do when they have not forgotten a quarrel. In the morning we woke very early and I began to talk as I could never resist doing when I knew he was awake, no matter what the time. He slid his thigh between mine and scratched my neck with his beard. “Hell, darling, why do you have to go for a whole week end?” I began to kiss him and caress him with a desire born of reluctance; of the empty excited nausea that was back with me again the moment I wakened, making my very presence there with him unreal. Yet there was the familiar miracle I could never take for granted—how, from sleeping so close together, when we wakened our bodies were always both at exactly the same temperature of gentle warmth, so that for a few drowsy minutes it was difficult to tell the touch of your own limbs, one against the other, from the touch of the other’s.

  The character of that warmth changed in him now.

  I said dubiously—“I ought to get something.” “Oh, damn.” I loved the way he looked at me, glittering, demanding. At times like this when my whole body suddenly began to flow in desire for him, there was a moment of perfect tension, of balance before the terrifying slither down the sheer. And in that balance, the sight of a state that exists only between the here and now, and the measureless streaming of time from which we take up the little scoopfuls of here and now, I expressed my snatch at it, empty-aired, dissolving, in the wildly emotional compulsion to caress Paul’s face and head, that, though passion and the knowledge of being wanted made joyful, had something in it of the way a woman falls upon the face of someone dead; seeking to possess what is beyond the reach of lips, the touch of hands.

  We exist on so many levels at once.

  At the same time I was aware of the faint smell of soap round Paul’s ears; the ringing of an alarm clock in the flat below that came through in dull vibration, like a shudder; and the half-threat of fear that would come back to exact its due, almost superstitiously, for my practical carelessness.

  Chapter 26

  I did not say anything to my mother until Sunday afternoon.

  I had intended to tell her quite simply and flatly as soon as I got home, but I went through the whole of Saturday and Saturday night and Sunday morning and Sunday lunch with the words in my mouth, while at the same time all the things I did say and the whole manner of behavior in which I let myself get more and more involved, made them more impossible to be spoke
n. On Saturday when I arrived there was the present-opening—they had brought me a great many, and they produced the really beautiful things (there was an Italian silk shawl of the kind I had always wanted, and a wonderful hat made entirely of peacock feathers) and the hideous things (a set of “souvenir” wall plaques of London, made out of pottery molded in relief, a thistle brooch from Scotland with “Weel ye no come back again?” engraved round it) with a puzzling impartiality of triumph. Then at five o’clock there were “a few friends over a drink” and I found myself bending about, in the “good” frock I had fortunately brought with me, offering the plates of decorated biscuits and hot sausage rolls I had helped my mother prepare earlier. The arch tone of this gathering—the Cluffs, the Bellingans, the Compound Manager and his wife, and one or two other officials, who were accustomed to keeping in mind the occasion of a “party” rather than merely enjoying eating and drinking and company for their own sake—extended to include me. I was being “welcomed back” too, if only from Johannesburg; I had not been seen on the Mine during the six months my parents were in Europe. When I was chaffed, usually by the men who had “seen me grow up,” I responded with the same smile of deprecating my own sense of privilege that my mother was showing, near me, as she chatted and answered questions about her holiday, conscious of the new clothes and the obviously English shoes at which she could feel the other woman looking. Old Mrs. Cluff had her arm round me as she rose to go. “She’s grown into a lovely girl, Jess.—You were always my little lass, weren’t you?—That’s right. I used to tell you, didn’t I, Jess, there’s nothing like a daughter.” And my mother—she had put on weight in England, and had had her hair cut in a new way, so that on the animation of two or three drinks, her face seemed to have changed from the way it was when I was a child, rather than got older—saw us suddenly in the relationship that the old lady created, and paused in her high-pitched amiability to say with sudden emotion: “Yes, and I suppose I’ll be losing her soon.” The old lady shook her head like one of those big benevolent figures that nod in shop windows at Christmas. “A son’s a son till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all her life. …”

  On Sunday morning I heard my mother up early and from the called consultations with Anna between the other rooms of the house and the kitchen, I knew that one of those total reorganizations of cupboards which had always followed our return from a holiday ever since I could remember was in energetic progress. This time, because she had been away so long and brought back a fair number of new things, the upheaval was on a larger scale than usual; standing beside her, directed to put this there and hand her that, with my father looking on, I thought: She is making space in their life for the fact of having been to England.

  My father had not put on any weight. Thin, but more bright-skinned than usual, whether from the cold in Europe or the heat of the latter half of the passage home, I did not know, he did not keep away from us in some reading or other occupation of his own, as he used to do, but hung about on the edge of my mother’s activity. Once or twice he ventured a mild protest: “What are you doing with that, Jess?”—My mother ignored him and threw onto the pile of things to be discarded the old golf umbrella with the broken spoke. She had a peculiar venom, as if they were conscious enemies, for things which she suddenly decided had outlived their margin of possible usefulness, and were therefore occupying her cupboard unlawfully. “The whole lot’ll do fine for the jumble sale. If they’re still holding them the third Tuesday of every month, I won’t have it cluttering up the garage too long.” (It fascinated me to see how quickly and unthinkingly she was taking up the order of her life from the Mine again; the six months among other peoples, in other countries, sucked smoothly in, passed along and assimilated by the Mine like a lump, rather larger than usual, taken in by a snake.)

  But mostly my father “fed” my mother as if they were partners in an act. “Wouldn’t mind being there now, eh?”—he pointed his pipe at a little painted wooden gypsy caravan they had bought in St. Ives to give to Maureen Eliot’s small boy. “Oh that creamed trout! And the view from our window …!” She shook her head as she sprinkled moth killer on a shelf of spare blankets. She twisted her head round to him. “Tell Helen about the fisherman who thought you had your own gold mine.”

  And my father told the story, taken up here and there and expanded by my mother, and then handed back to him again while she waited, smiling, for the well-known point—“Co on, you go on.”

  It seemed to me that in this unconscious pantomime of acting as a foil for each other, they oddly achieved a kind of intimacy that I had never seen between them before.

  At lunch we had a bottle of red wine—because they thought I should like it, I knew. “—It may be cheap there,” said my mother, “but you can’t get a decent cup of tea anywhere in Italy.” I drank it although I dislike red wine and I talked all the time I ate, about how hot it had been at Christmas, and the muddle-up there had been at the post office about a cable they had sent me before they left, and the way the piece of chiffon my mother wanted to know about had turned out when it was made up. I talked about the camping week end that Jenny and John and Paul and I had planned for what proved to be the wettest week end for five years … and, warming to it, my heart beating fast at the horrible homeliness of my duplicity, I told my mother that Jenny was expecting another baby, and … “Well, she’s quite right. They’re young people, and I suppose he’s doing quite nicely now; they might as well have their family while they’re young.”

  After lunch my father went to lie down. He said the wine had turned sour on his stomach, but he had that hazy pleasant look of wanting to drop down somewhere and doze that goes with wine that has agreed with one almost too well. My mother and I went to sit on the veranda, where it was cool. She was knitting; some special wool she had bought herself in Scotland. Her chatter died away, perhaps also because of the wine. I sat there with my heart beating up faster and faster. After a few minutes of sunny, warm silence she said to the bird dangling in his cage: “Chrr-ip, chrr-ip, eh? Chrrip!” and looked back to her knitting.

  I said: “Mother, I should have told you I’m not living with the Marcuses any more, I’m living with Paul.”

  Her face suddenly came alive out of its content of food and relaxation. She looked at me with the quick intense suspicion of an adult hearing from the mouth of a child something it cannot possibly know.

  Then her glance stumbled; it was like a nervous tic catching a face unaware.

  “What do you mean?”

  And while she spoke coldness hardened into her face, it became something I have never known in the face of anyone else, possibly because the face of no one else could make that impression on me: stern.

  “I’ve been living with him in his flat ever since he was sick.”

  “You’re living with a man, living with a man as if you were married to him.” She stopped. “Living with this man and lying, writing letters and lying—What do you want? To end up on the street?”

  I thought with a rising distress of panic, I knew she’d do this; it’s ridiculous—she’s making it a tragedy, terrible, world-comedown, hateful. She’s twisting it up into hysteria. But she had done it already; I was in it, shaking before her horror of myself.

  I said: “It’s not like that. Don’t be silly, we’re going to get married anyway. People now—”

  “Yes, they’ve got no respect for anything, you’ve got no respect for yourself. And what kind of a person is he, to behave like that with a girl from a decent home. … Women who must have a man to sleep with. Women who can’t live without a man. A university education to live with a man. How can women be such filthy beasts?”

  All the time she had never taken her eyes off me.

  She began to weep, and I saw that now that she was older she cried like other women; it was no longer hard for her to cry, and so it no longer had any more meaning than the simple relief of other women’s tears. I cannot explain the strong strain of peculiar joy that
seized me, apparently so irrelevantly, as I understood this, so that I could say quite commandingly, “Don’t cry, if Daddy hears you cry he’ll be alarmed.”

  “I don’t want to see you,” she said, and already it seemed in her face that she no longer saw me, “I don’t want you in this house again. You understand that?”

  The peculiar joy swept into hatred. I hated her for leaving me, for blaming me, for making me care that she did. I trembled with hatred that for a moment made me want to laugh and weep and abuse; and that left me hot and cold at the escape of knowing that that was what she wanted: that that was how she wanted me to behave.

  My father came in and the whole scene was gone through again, but in myself I was stubborn; it was over. I was sitting it out.

  We even had tea before my father took me to the station. In silence as if someone had died. While we were sitting at the dining-room table drinking, the smell of the room when I bent over the table painting from my color box as a child came to me, immediate, complete, unaltered. The print-smell of the pile of English newspapers, the oil-smell of furniture polish, the cool dark fruit-smell from the dish on the sideboard; and the smell of ourselves, us three people, my father, my mother and me, with which everything in the house was impregnated like objects in a sandalwood box, and that, when I took out something from home in the atmosphere of the flat or the Marcuses’ house, gave me the queer feeling of momentarily being aware of myself as a stranger.

  Chapter 27

  As soon as I got into the train I dropped back my head and closed my eyes: Paul. Paul; Paul. I know that I should have liked to have said the name aloud, but opposite me in the empty carriage was a very young Afrikaans girl with a daughter of four or five years old, curled and hatted and hung about with trinkets, like her mother. Like her mother she was utterly composed, silent, absorbed in the trance of her Sunday best. She played with a little bangle engraved “Cecilia,” and stared at me without curiosity, as if she were measuring what I thought of her.