The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  The Compound Manager, by virtue of his position, had a very large garden, laid out with the formality of a park and kept shaved, clipped and pared by bands of Compound boys who were always to be seen squatting like frogs on one lawn or another. Now the gates were open, one facing in toward the house, the other the wrong way, toward the street. About two hundred Mine boys blotted out the green and the color as they sat with their elbows resting on their knees, watching the house, and stood, looking up, packed round the veranda steps. If they had brandished the sticks that most of them carried, now they lay set down beside them; the boys smoked their pipes and stared round in the sun, almost as they did on the veld round the Compound and the stores. Nobody trampled the stars of tight-packed pansies, nobody bent the mound of white lilies that gave out their incense as if convinced they honored a grave. Though some sat beneath scythes of shade cast by the fronds of the palms, none leaned against the monster pineapples of the boles. An immense babble, like a tremendous tea party in full swing, filled the morning.

  As I came with my father and Mr. Bellingan a little uncertainly onto the driveway, the way visitors come who are not too certain if they have come at the right time, a few of the boys looked up over their shoulders and then slowly swung their heads back again, like cattle. One was trying to catch a fly that kept flying onto his big mouth as he shouted. Another was not listening at all, quietly exploring his nose. Another one said something about us and laughed.

  We saw someone signaling, a beckon and the rather foolish smile of excitement, from the bow window. “Come. It’s Mrs. Ockert.” My father shepherded us toward the house, through the standing groups who clotted more thickly round the veranda, slapping one another’s chests and backs in emphasis of argument, shaking heads and turning this way and that in laughter and disbelief. But they moved aside to let us through, absently. As they moved their blankets stirred the smell of flesh and dust.

  Right in the center of the veranda steps a heavy boy in low-slung khaki trousers and an old vest torn down under the arms shouted and moved his big full chest as if that were his form of gesture, curiously expressive, as if it came up out of him without volition. His hair was clipped off bald and showed only as a matt shadow where it would have encroached upon his forehead; beneath the oil of excitement he had a marked, lumpy skin. He was shouting, butting his head at two fat Mine boys who stood about with an air of righteous authority, backed a little away from him, though superior.

  We three white people stepped round him onto the veranda. I saw his thick tongue back in his mouth and his big teeth close together and looking strong as he yelled.

  Inside in the Ockerts’ long serene lounge—there were silky smooth carpets in intricate designs which were the oriental rugs my mother wanted to get someday, and little black tables with thin legs like baby springbok, looking almost alive, ready to leap—tea had been laid on a wide embroidered cloth, and men stood round talking over thin teacups. Mr. Ockert was laughing something confidentially to the Underground Manager, who wore a dotted red silk scarf folded inside his shirt neck. Thin Mr. Mackenzie hadn’t shaved; he was taking a scone from Mrs. Ockert. “Come on in,” she called to us. “You’ll be wanting some tea, I’m sure. We all need our tea after this!” She was laughing a great deal, rather apologetically, as if this was the best she could put up for an impromptu gathering.

  Mrs. Ockert is a woman who could carry off any position; she’s always a charming hostess—my mother often said.—Now there was no sugar left for Mr. Bellingan in the pot-bellied silver bowl. Mrs. Ockert bit her lip and hunched her shoulders gaily in guilt: “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bellingan, I’m so sorry. What a house! What chaos this morning!” And she laughed as if it were all her fault, something naughty she had done. “Richard, more sugar at once, please.—It’ll be here in just one moment, Mr. Bellingan—”

  “This business of changing the boys’ diet—it always does lead to trouble,” my father was saying to his neighbor, Dufalette. “—No, thanks—Of course, I wouldn’t say it to Ockert, but I’ve seen it time and again. If you’d been giving them boiled rag for years and you changed it to chicken suddenly, they’d be up in arms asking for the rag back again.” Bellingan nodded unsurely in agreement; his eye was on the back of the Underground Manager, standing rather near. He leaned over to put down his cup, taking the opportunity of saying quietly in my father’s ear, “All this to-do over mealie-pap.” My father laughed tightly inside his chest: “A storm in a porridge pot, a storm in a porridge pot.”

  “What about another scone? Come on? What about another scone?” Mrs. Ockert was smiling round the room. “These flies! As soon as they’re anywhere around you can be sure they’ll bring millions of flies.”

  “They soon quietened down when Ockert came out,” someone was saying. “I was here early, as soon as I saw them crowding along the road toward the house.—Yes, before eight—they came marching along; I tell you, quite a sight!”

  “But why come to the house? They could have complained through the boss-boys?”

  “The boss-boys!”

  “Oh, the Compound Manager or nothing!”

  “Did you hear it all, Mac?”

  “Well, there’ll be nothing more said now. They won’t make any trouble.”

  “Behind it? I shouldn’t say there was, at all.”

  The Assistant Compound Manager went out, came in again. “Starting to push off now,” he said, assuring, belittling, comforting, the way one stands between a child and the undesirable, insistingly smiling, “all on their way.”

  Soon we left, too, passing the dwindling groups of natives, the emptying garden; my father holding my hand but talking closely to Mr. Bellingan and not knowing I was there.

  The boys at the Compound didn’t like the food they were given, and so they all came together to Mr. Ockert’s house to complain. Now they were going back to the Compound and they were glad because, although they had behaved badly, Mr. Ockert wasn’t taking their Sunday ration of kaffir beer away from them. Between the two men talking above my head I heard the word “strike”; “—But it wasn’t a strike, was it?” I said quickly. My father smiled down at me. “Well, yes, it was, really. They didn’t refuse to work, but they wouldn’t eat; that’s a strike, too.” He had told me often about the 1922 strike of white miners, when there were shots in the streets of Atherton, and my grandmother, his mother, had stayed shut up in her little house for days, until the commando of burghers came riding in to restore order. To me the word “strike” carried with it visions of excitement and danger; something for which, alas, I had been born too late.

  Those native boys sitting around making a noise the way they liked to in the garden, and the lovely tea all ready in Mrs. Ockert’s beautiful lounge (the scones collapsed into hot butter; I should have liked one more)—That couldn’t be a strike—?

  Hunger was whistling an empty passage right down my throat to my stomach.—I twisted my hand out of my father’s and ran on ahead, to bacon and egg put away for me in the oven.

  Chapter 4

  My adolescence and the first years of the war were concurrent; both have a haziness in my mind that comes, I suppose, from the indefinite, cocoonlike quality of the one, and the distant remove from my life of the other.

  During that time my life was so much my mother’s that it seemed that the only difference between us was the insignificance of age. The significance of emotional experience that separates the woman, mated, her life balanced against the life of a man, that life again balanced against the life of a child begotten and born, from the girl-child, was as unrealized by my mother as by me. My mother, with her slightly raw-featured still-young face—the blood flowed very near the surface of the thin skin—accepted marriage and motherhood as a social rather than a mysterious personal relationship. Wives and husbands and children and the comfortable small plan of duties they owed to one another—for her, this was what living was. I accepted the outward everyday semblance of adult life, the men father-familiar yet creatures r
espected and allowed ununderstandable tastes of their own; ministered to because they were the providers and entitled to affection from their own families; women the friends, the co-workers, the companions, busy with one another in the conduct of every hour of the day. My mother’s weeks were pegged out to street collections and galas and dances and cake sales and meetings of this committee and that—remote from battlefields or air raids, with my father’s stomach ulcer excluding him from offering his services to South Africa’s volunteer forces, this was what the war meant in our lives. Outside of school, I too belonged to this busy to-and-fro that went on above the tunneling of black men and white in the Mine. I too had my place, the place of the Secretary’s daughter (my father had been promoted at last), in the hierarchy that divided the Mine Manager and his wife (tall in a clinging skirt, an exiled Mrs. Dalloway) giving the prizes in a certain order of rigid gradations from the busy small woman in the flowered apron stationed at the tea urn—wife of a burly shift boss called Mackie.

  I read the books my mother brought home on her adult’s ticket at the library; gentle novels of English family life and, now and then, stray examples of the proletarian novel to which the dole in England in the thirties had given rise. “It’s about the life of the poor in England—but it won’t do her any harm if she wants to read it.”—My mother was sometimes a little uncertain about these books. “I don’t believe a girl should grow up not knowing what life is like.”

  A young man and a girl went up on a refuse heap above an ugly city and kissed. There was a drunken father who was horrible in an indefinable way—but all drunk people were horrible, I should have died of fear if … but it could not even be imagined that my father could dribble at the mouth, vomit without knowing. At the same time I read Captain Marryat, Jane Austen, and to Omar Khayyam in its soft skin-feel cover I had added Rupert Brooke. “She’s like us,” said my mother, “we’re both great readers. Of course, George likes his heavy stuff, medical books and so on—and detective stories! I don’t know how he can read them, but I’ve got to bring them home for him every week end.” A book of Churchill’s speeches and another of Smuts’ found a place on top of the special little bookcase which contained the encyclopedia; my father had bought them. The clean-cut shiny dust covers slowly softened at the edges as Anna dusted them along with the other ornaments every day.

  There was a dance, I remember, when I was about sixteen—to raise money for a special comforts-fund that the Mine had inaugurated for ex-employees now in the forces. My mother said, blushing with pleasure, the almost tearful moisture that came to her eyes when she was proud: “Daddy, this’ll mean a long dress for your daughter. …”

  My mother was completely absorbed in the making of that dress; we were up together late every night before the dance, while she sewed and fitted, and I stood on the table with my head near the heat of the light in its beaded shade, turning slowly to show how the hem fell. Then before we went to bed we sat on the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking. I had taken over the care of my mother’s fine wiry hair, red, like my own: “You can have it set at the hairdresser’s on the Thursday before—then it’ll be nice and soft for me to do up for you on Saturday.” My mother thought a moment. “But on Thursday afternoon I’ve promised to bake four-dozen sausage rolls. I don’t want to get all steamy in the kitchen after it’s been done.” “Tie it up! Why can’t you tie it up!” I stacked the cups in the sink for Anna in the morning.

  Up and down the passage, in the bathroom, snatches of our talk continued until the lights went out.

  We dressed for the dance together. My mother had surprised me with a real florist’s corsage—they called it a “spray”—pink carnations and pale blue delphinium, and it was pinned to the shoulder of my dress with its silver paper holder just showing. Every time I turned my head I could feel it brush my neck.

  I danced with Raymond Dufalette in a blue suit with his hair so oiled that it looked as if he had just come out of the sea, dripping wet. He went to boarding school and had learned to dance the previous term; he brought me thankfully back to where my mother and father sat, ready with kindly questions about how he liked school and what he was going to do when he was finished. Then I sat, my back very stiff, looking straight before me. I was afraid I was perspiring the little organdy balloon that encased the lop of each arm. I was still more afraid that my father might ask me to dance to save me.

  I remember that just as I was getting desperate, a fair boy astonishingly came right across the splintered boards to ask me to dance, and the dance was a Paul Jones, so that I found myself with a succession of partners, snatched away when the music broke into a march and I walked sheepishly round with the other girls—there was Olwen, but Olwen had come with a partner, and he kept her, swaying at the side—then replaced by the young man or somebody’s father who found himself opposite me when the march ended. The evening passed in the stiff hands of thin fair boys whose necks were too free of stiff collars. Their knees bumped me, hard as table legs. Their black evening suits and the crackle of shirt front encased nothingness, like the thin glossy shells, the fine glass wings of beetles which crunch to a puff of dead leaf-powder if you crush them. When the ice cream was served I ran hand in hand with my mother; we had promised to help. Over in the corner at the bar, the two Cluff boys in uniform leaned with one or two other soldiers home for the week end. They drank beer, and laughter spurted up in their talk, backs to the dancers. “Ice cream?” I held out the tray of saucers, smiling with impartial polite reserve, not knowing whether or not I should recognize them as Alan and Francis Cluff.

  “Here boys, ice cream, why not—” Alan began passing the saucers over my head. Francis said in an aside, his eyes lowered for a moment as if to screen him, “Hello, Helen.” The smell of war, of young men taken in war, a disturbing mixture and contradiction of the schoolboy smell of soap in khaki, and the smooth scent of shaven skin, the warmth of body that brought out the smell of khaki as the warmth of the iron brings up the odor of a fabric, came from them.

  I danced again and again that year at parties with the fair young boys in their formal dress clothes who, like myself, were in their last year at school. Once or twice in the winter holidays, one of them took me to the cinema on a Saturday night; but I was only sixteen, I was busy studying for my matriculation, there was plenty of time. “Time enough when you’re working and independent, and school’s behind you,” said my mother.—Olwen had left school a year ago; she attended what was called a business college, upstairs in a building in the town; the chakker-chakker of typewriters sailed out of the wide-open windows and at lunchtime the girls came down to stroll about the town, not in gym frocks, but their own choice of dresses.

  What was the stiffness that congealed in me and in the bodies of the young boys with the spiky-smooth hair beside me in the sinking dark of the cinema; made me sit up straight, my arms arranged along the rests helplessly when the lights went up and the music rose and the colored advertisements flipped one by one on and off the screen, and I waited? Back came the young boy with two little cardboard buckets of ice cream, edging bent, apologetic, along the row. We sat and ate with wooden spoons; the boy kept asking questions: Shall I put that down for you? Can you manage? Is it melted? Did it get on your dress? It seemed that I did nothing but smile, shake my head, assure, no. We spoke of films we had seen, veered back to school, fell back on anecdotes that began: “Well I know, I have an Uncle who told us once …”or “—Like my little brother; the other day he was …” Sudden bursts of sympathy ignited, like matches struck by mistake, between us; were batted out with the astonishment that instinctively deals with such fires. He had not read the books I had read; I knew that. He talked a great deal about the different models of motorcars. My jaws felt tight and I wanted to yawn.

  We sat seriously through the film. Sometimes the young boy’s foot would touch mine by mistake—they had such big feet in shoes with thick rubber soles—and there was a ruffle of apologies. The one—the nicer one, actua
lly—had a crenelation of incipient pimples perpetually lying in anger beneath the tender shaven skin along his jaw, to which, in the imagined privacy of the dark, I always saw, out of the corner of my eye, his fingers return feeling along as if reading the bumps in the tender, disgusting language of adolescence; curt, monosyllabic as obscenity, and as searching.

  At this time, too, my father was teaching me to play golf. When the hooter went at half-past four I left my books open on the dining-room table and went into my room to put on rubber-soled shoes. My father came home with the air of expectancy of someone who is waiting to go out again immediately, and we were at the first tee just as the sun shifted its day-long gaze and glanced obliquely off the grass. Afterward I sat on the veranda full of Mine officials at the clubhouse, drinking my orange squash at a rickety wicker table, with my father sipping his beer. Our heads were continually turned to talk to people; often two or three men screeched chairs over the cement to sit with us, others would swing a leg against the table while they paused to talk in passing. Even if their talk veered to channels that slowly excluded me, leaving me at some point gently washed upon the limit of my comprehension or interest, I rested there comfortably, hearing their voices rather than what they said, lulled by the warm throbbing coming up in my scarlet, blistered palms. I lolled my head back, put my dusty feet up on the bar of the table; the sky, swept clear of the day, held only radiance, far up above the shade that rose like water steeping the trees and the drop of the grass. Over at the water hole, the whole world was repeated, upside down. It all seemed simple, as if a puzzle had dissolved in my hands. The half-questions would never be asked, dark fins of feeling that could not be verified in the face of my father, my mother, the Mine officials, would not show through the surface that every minute of every day polished. I rested, my foot dancing a little tune; the way the unborn rest between one stage of labor and the next, thinking, perhaps, that they have arrived.