The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  I looked at him.

  “We were talking about it last night. Or part of it. Two things could have happened to you, once in that set. You could have been entirely taken in by them, for the rest of your life. Or you could have seen through them, and been hurt and disappointed, as you were. If the first had happened, I don’t think I’d ever have forgiven myself for introducing you to them.” He paused and looked at my hands, drawing my attention to the fact that I had spread them, like starfish, on the table. “Very selfish of me. But the second—I couldn’t warn you about them because I loved you.” He spread his own hand to match mine, as if he were giving me credit for a certain background knowledge before passing on to the further points in a discussion. “You know that. I loved you very much and I didn’t think, for reasons we discussed last night, it could ever come to anything. So I couldn’t offer you any—disinterested advice, Helen. How could you have believed me? How could I have believed myself? How could it have seemed, perhaps even been, anything but a desire to keep you for myself.”

  I sat looking at him across the table and my eyes slowly filled with tears. I felt it happen, and he saw it, the pinkening of blood, the brightening of the pupil, the brimming I could not control.

  He said, gently, still looking at me: “But you’ve known always, Helen.” And after a pause, “There’s nothing to be surprised about.”

  But he could not possibly know what was going through my mind. I said to myself, It’s the heat, the excitement, the drink and the stirring awareness of the occasion. Everyone here feels it in some way or another, that is why they laugh so much, are too talkative, or keep touching and fussing at their clothes. People only rise to the surface of their lives when there is to be change, a threat. You only say: I’m alive, when you see death. You only say: I’m here, when you’re about to go. But I could not calm the trembling that astonished me all through my body; I felt for a moment that my whole consciousness, resting since I was born, on one side, had suddenly turned over, like a great stone on the bed of the sea, and shown an unknown world, a shining unseen surface, different, different utterly, alive with waving weeds and startled creatures pulsating on the coral.

  I could not speak at all for a moment and then I burst out suddenly in a taut and trembling voice: “There’s a white hair. I’ve just seen it, let me take it out.” And I leaned over and plucked it, bending his head with my other hand.

  Soon there was a warning bell; a further wave of discreet gaiety took the ship. The band swung into a song which was taken up, somewhere in the room, by a phrase from a throbbing Italian voice. Joel and I talked and laughed as fast as the rest; a telegram boy raced up the gangway with a last-minute batch of telegrams. One was from me to Joel (I had thought it would not be delivered to his cabin until after the boat had sailed) and with amusement we tore it open and read it together. The officer with the brooding eyes, moving crisply now, kept coming into the lounge and looking over the heads of the crowd toward the bar, like a host discreetly indicating to the servants that the dispensation of refreshments should cease; it was time for the guests to be going.

  A voice echoed over a loud-speaker system, enunciating with great precision: “Will all nonpassengers please leave the ship. Tutti i non passeggeri sono pregati di lasciare la nave.”

  The groups began to disintegrate, these pulled away from those; it appeared that the woman in the elaborately veiled hat, carrying a pigskin cosmetic case, was not a passenger, whereas the girl in gray trousers and a pink head-scarf was. We kissed, and found, with the rest, that we had said good-by too soon; a kind of pause settled on the passengers, staying behind, the visitors getting up to go. Then the voice urged again: “Tutti i non passeggeri sono pregati di lasciare la nave.” A bell clanged. There is something about the knell of a bell; it is as old and as universal in its summons as a battle cry. We stood at the rail watching the people go down the companionway. Joel had his hand on the nape of my neck, just under the hair, where it was a little damp. I did not want to be the last to leave the ship, so in a little while we embraced again, holding each other hand by the shoulders, and I left him and made my way down behind a woman who kept looking back at someone she had left on the deck, and a man who pulled her gently toward the dock below. The companionway was not very steady and I had to watch the placing of my feet as the dock came up to meet me.

  And then I was standing on the dock and there was Joel, up there, watching me. He had taken out a cigarette while I was going down, and now it was in his hand, the thin waver of smoke passing before his face, I waved and felt foolish. He smiled back, never taking his eyes off me; I could see his hands so clearly, I remember, rather broad and the fingers spread on the white rail. A man was unhooking the companionway. It swayed off, the people on the dock backed, it was wheeled away. The ship was free, Joel leaned over and shouted: “Is it four o’clock?” And I ran to the edge of the dock and yelled back: “Yes. Don’t forget.”—That was the hour at which the Pretoria Castle would sail on Monday. I looked down again to steady my balance. There was a long curl of orange peel, swaying on the dirty water. As I looked the water slowly began to widen. I stepped backward, back to the protection of the waving crowd, from whom a long murmur had come.

  More and more water washed up between the dock and the ship. The people hanging over the rails had the look in their faces of children who feel a slide giving way beneath them. There were fluttering hands, calls. It was a long moment, very hot, twelve o’clock on a Durban dock.

  And then it hapened to the ship; she was no longer something breaking awy from the land, a part of the life of the people standing watching her go. The water glittered up, foreshortening her, and she was just another ship seen from, the hotel verandas on the beach front, flecked with colors and movement that must be unimagined people, saying unimagined things in an unimaginable, unheard pursuance of life.

  I took a taxi back to the hotel, and when I got there, I saw the Ostia once more, a squat white shape, slowly pulling the horizon over her head.

  Chapter 38

  Perhaps this story should end there. Perhaps all the thoughts that came to me alone in the hotel that long afternoon were inevitable; perhaps they were not even the truths they seemed then to be, but were merely one of those flashes generated by the stress of an unfamiliar emotional experience on a mind already keyed-up, like a fire springing from the friction of two sticks. Perhaps I could never have loved Joel, anywhere but on a ship due to sail in an hour; no matter how much I wanted to. I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

  But I thought that afternoon that perhaps I had always loved him, always wanted him, and merely made do, with others. With him, I believed, I might have achieved the synthesis of most of the things in which I believed. Of lovers and friends, he seemed the only one who had not discarded everything and found nothing. Unlike me, he loved his parents enough to accept their deep differences from him, and so he had not suffered the guilt of breaking the unreasoning ties of the blood. He had not placed upon any relationship with human beings the burden of the proof of an ideal. And now, he had the purpose and the hope of realizing a concrete expression of his creative urge, in doing his work in a society which in itself was the live process of emergence, instead of decay. All this came to me in shock and turbulence, not the way I have written it here, but in a thousand disconnected images, in the piecing together of a thousand things said and felt and half-remembered.

  Yet I believe that although no part of one’s life can be said to come to an end except in death, nothing can be said to be a beginning but birth, life flows and checks itself, overlaps, flows again; and it is in these pauses that a story is taken up, in these pauses that there comes the place at which it is inevitable to set it down. And for this, my story, it seems to me that place comes not on the afternoon on which Joel sailed, but a little later, a matter of hours, in fact.

  I must have been very tired that nigh
t and, my mind throbbing with exhaustion, had fallen asleep early and slept deeply. I woke to hear soft rain; to smell it. I lay quite still a minute and then I got up and went over to the open window. It was, I suppose, about midnight, and although there were still cars on the Marine Parade, they were muted by the rain and their feelers of light were mistily dowsed. The sea was entirely gone behind the rain. As I stood there, putting my hands out into the surprising warmth of it, I heard a faint sound beneath its own soft sounding, and I thought it was the ringing of my own ears. But it came nearer, clearer, and it was the drowned jingle of a tambourine against small sad voices. I saw in the street below the huddled figures of some little native minstrels, singing as they padded along in the rain. The song was a popular dance tune of a few years before, “Paper Doll,” but they made it infinitely mournful, infinitely longing. I stood there quite still, for a minute or more. I shall never forget how I felt. A feeling of extraordinary calm possessed me; I felt I could stand there in full possession of this great calmness forever. It did not seem to me that it would ever go.

  My mind was working with great practicalness, and I thought to myself: Now it’s all right. I’m not practicing any sort of self-deception any longer. And I’m not running away. Whatever it was I was running away from—the risk of love? the guilt of being white? the danger of putting ideals into practice?—I’m not running away from now because I know I’m coming back here.

  I was twenty-four and my hands were trembling with the strong satisfaction of having accepted disillusion as a beginning rather than an end: the last and most enduring illusion; the phoenix illusion that makes life always possible.

  For a long time after I had lain down in my bed again, I could hear the native children, still singing and shaking their tambourine as they were washed away, fainter and fainter, into the soft rain and the dark.

  A Note on the Author

  Nadine Gordimer’s many novels include The Lying Days (her first novel), The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, None to Accompany Me, The House Gun and, most recently, The Pickup, winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Africa. Her collections of short stories include Something Out There and Jump. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in South Africa.

  By the Same Author

  NOVELS

  The Lying Days / A World of Strangers / Occasion for Loving

  The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour

  The Conservationist / Burger’s Daughter / July’s People

  A Sport of Nature / My Son’s Story / None to Accompany Me

  The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life / No Time Like the Present

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country

  Friday’s Footprint / Not for Publication

  Livingstone’s Companions

  A Soldier’s Embrace / Something Out There

  Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black / Life Times

  ESSAYS

  The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (with David Goldblatt)

  Lifetimes under Apartheid (with David Goldblatt)

  The Essential Gesture — Writing, Politics and Places (edited by Stephen Clingman)

  Writing and Being

  Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

  Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008

  EDITOR, CONTRIBUTOR

  Telling Tales

  First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books in 1994

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Nadine Gordimer, 1953

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

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