Part Two
The Sea
Chapter 5
I had a new bathing suit.
It lay on the bed in my room; “Why shouldn’t Nell go down to Alice’s place?” my father surprised himself by saying. My mother looked from one to the other: “—Well, I don’t know, would she like it—?”
I could not conjure up in myself a projection into any single moment—a meal, the sight of the sea, Mrs. Koch smiling from a veranda—ready to exist on a little farm on the South Coast of Natal. We had been invited many times; we had never gone. Alice Koch was my mother’s old friend, corresponded with regularly, but materializing only every two or three years, when she would telephone to say that she had arrived in Johannesburg on holiday, and would come out to the Mine to spend a week end or a day. I had always read her letters, and reading them, was easy with her; yet when she got out at the station she was different; a big woman, much older than my mother, with a gentle smile and a faint, refined dew of agitation touching cool from her upper lip as you kissed her. Once—dim with sand castles and a doll that had had its feet trailed in the edge of the water—there was the memory of staying at a place near where Mrs. Koch had lived and Mrs. Koch had come with her two daughters and their children to sit with us on a beach.
“On her own … would she …?—I couldn’t go.” Mother patted the yellow bathing suit.
“Oh, yes.” I looked up quickly; it seemed as if there had never been a pause. “I want to go; I’ll go.”
I was seventeen and I had been a year out of school. The year had been spent working at a temporary job in my father’s office; the Secretary’s daughter in the Secretary’s office of Atherton Mine.
The train put me down on the siding paved with coal grit and blew back a confetti of smuts as it screeched off slowly over the brilliance of rails. When I took my hand from my eyes I was receding rapidly, alone on the glittering black dust. With a honk the train was gone.
A double white sign, converging on a V, said, KATEMBI RIVER, 17 ft. above sea level, 57½ miles to Durban. A tin shed, delicately eroded by rust a foot up from the ground, said, GOODS. It was empty. At the end of the strip of coal grit, like a short carpet abruptly rolled, thick bush green and black green and hard with light reached up and closed in high, singing with hot intimacy far within and dead still to the eye.
A tremendous heat watched everything.
I was conscious of the feel of the sea on my left cheek, where it bumped and exploded white below the roll of green that fell away from that side of the track, but I was still as a lizard, breathing, it seemed, shallower even than the air, not moving my eyes.
The shaking of a human hand unseen broke the authority of the bush as it swayed with the passage of human bodies passing down a grudging pathway I could not see; and the quiet buzzle of two people talking that suggests to the stranger they are preparing to meet a side of themselves he will never know, that will have disappeared in hiding by the time they come forward on a smile, gave a queer misbeat to my heart. I was hot, a little sweat came out and clung my hair to my forehead as I urged smiling to meet them; Mrs. Koch pointing and shaking her head beneath a checked parasol, her feet in men’s sandals, and a man with her.
“—My dear! I’m so sorry … shame … what a way to arrive. …” The soft, damp kiss, the Eau-de-Cologne. I laughed, shaking my head, hotter, unbearably hot now in the relief of the moment of greeting over. The man—it was a young man, I now saw, in a sort of half-uniform, khaki shorts and an army shirt and sandals, but no cap—wore glasses and stood back looking down at us with the polite smile of a stranger watching emotion which he does not share. The smile pulled the corners of his mouth down and in a little. “It was Ludi, he would stop by at the old Plasketts’ on the way to say hullo—oh, there was plenty of time. I am so sorry. … What will your mother think of us?”—Her son, of course; with the German name; the guilty smile of nonrecognition faded comfortably on my face.
In the gaiety of arrival, exchanging questions we did not wait for each other to answer, we trudged up the steep pathway with cinders grinding away under our feet, a hand up to fend off the bush. The young man came up behind, with the luggage. The three of us were packed into the front of an old faded car and he drove away up and down a steep stony road that dipped now between flat-roofed trees where creepers dropped screens over bush secretive with a hidden trickle of stream, now through a cutting—black ooze and wet rock with a bunch of tough grasses stuffed in here and there as if to staunch the wound—rose and turned and discovered the river away below on the left and the sugar cane. As I talked to Mrs. Koch, my elbow crooked on the open window felt the pull of the sun and the sudden warm wet blow of the river. The river was drawn in a brown hank, shiny like the sheath of a muscle, through the soft hills of cane; one against the other they were folded, soft with deep cane, flattened like fur by the wind, down, silver-pale, up, green; sage and brilliant as the sun blew across.
The cane sang on either side of the road. We could not see beyond it. It was tall as a man and thick as tall grass to an ant. “Phew …,” said Mrs. Koch at the still heat, as if it were something she could never meet without faint astonishment. She moved her warm bulk to take out a small handkerchief and touch her cheek beneath her eyes, with the movement of wiping away tears. Ludi moved up a little, to give us more room; it was as if, although he did not speak, it was a gesture of having said something, allowing him to remain comfortably silent outside our conversation.
It was extraordinarily easy to talk to Mrs. Koch. She was the woman of the letters, the “Affectionately, my dear, Alice Koch,” sitting fat and comfortable with her feet in sandals and the little piece of cambric damply waving Eau-de-Cologne. I got out of the car before the white veranda faintly giddy with journey, smiling the mild happiness of having bridged space. It was all right; unknowing, the decision was made for me, and in my favor; the alternative that waits at all destinations—inescapable, a face in the crowd at the dock or the station you cannot avoid: the desolation of arrival—was not there for me. Unknowing of my escape, innocent even of relief, I stood laughing at my unsteadiness, seeing Black-eyed Susan embroidering the old veranda like gay, crude wool-work, ants trailing down a crumbling step—. I shut my eyes and opened them; two bushes that cast their shape again in pale fallen flowers instead of shade, palms on the breast of lawn cut out against the far-off drop of the river, the cane. Haze and glitter; the river looped through the arched body of a bridge. And there, there was the sea, stretching away, smeared off only into the sky.
In the house Mrs. Koch had prepared my room for me, and left me alone. There was no pressure, no effort demanded of me; I stood at the window in a pause between the open suitcase and the open wardrobe with a misty mirror, feeling the beat of the train in my blood, the cessation of the train’s noise in my ears. There was a withdrawal of sound like the tidal silence pulling away at the touch of a spiral shell to one’s ear; the sound of the sea.
The next day, the holiday did not begin because it rained. It seemed impossible, in the face of the existence of yesterday, blinding with brightness, that it should be raining. Yesterday nothing could be believed in but sun; today there was nothing but rain. I waited around the house with Mrs. Koch, getting to know the regarding stare of new rooms worn old long before I had ever come to them. I sat on the faded sofa on whose rubbed arms my hands now rested; groping for a hairpin, saw the strip of clear-printed design that lived on untouched down the hidden fold of the seat. I talked in the kitchen with Mrs. Koch while she made a cake, played with a rearrangement of the flowers on the back stoep. There were cats under my feet, dried-up saucers of milk they disdained. Three green budgereegahs chattered foolishly in a little cage with rolled-up blinds.
Ludi was gone all day, fishing in the rain. I stood at the window, watching it come down; if you turned away it did not exist, it was quite soundless. You could only know it was there if you looked, and saw it falling, falling, without the sound of falling. The garden a
nd the sea were a flash, perhaps seen yesterday, no more permanent than scenes turned toward me, then away, along the railway line. The sight had not been grasped sufficiently to exist for me somewhere beneath the rain. “He’s only got three weeks, so he’ll fish in any weather,” said Mrs. Koch, smiling for him. Her voice hung about the most trivial mention of her son with a gentle, unashamed expansion of love. Just as she spoke with emotion over the old photograph albums which she brought out to show to me, waiting for the expected face, the group of her dead husband, some friends, a frowning tall girl who she said was my mother at a picnic; faces shying from a long-set light of the sun.
Mrs. Koch did not attempt to “understand young people”; she did not apologize for her views or preferences. But it also never occurred to her to fear loss of dignity in showing that she felt, that she cared, that she had not the detachment of her years. I was drawn to her because she gave access to herself in a way that I did not know anyone ever did. Tears were embarrassments swallowed back, stalked out of the room, love was private (my parents and I had stopped kissing each other except on birthdays); yet tears were bright in Mrs. Koch’s eyes and one could still look at her. That same morning she had moved Ludi’s military cap where it lay in the kitchen; “I have been so happy here with him. And it was what he liked.” And she smiled and in the middle of the morning, in the middle of peeling fruit, tears had run down her cheeks, taking their place and their moment.
It rained again often, muffling up from the hills over the clear sky suddenly after a blazing morning; but it was no longer a soft restraint holding me back from the holiday. I went about in it, warm, soft, drenching where the ribbon grasses and the stiff lace bracken swept their dripping brushes past my legs, tingling lightly into my cheeks and eyes like tiny bubbles breaking when my face turned against it. Mrs. Koch and I trudged down to the store through the heavy mud that formed so quickly, and broke away in soggy runnels from the mixture of sea sand everywhere in the soil. Somebody stopped and gave us a lift, and in the store, that smelled of mice and millet and tobacco, we had tea with the storekeeper and his wife, a retired British army major with the pointlessly handsome face of a man of sixty left over from his days in uniform.
On the way back we met Ludi coming along the road from Plasketts’ without a coat, barefoot, soaked through, and he scolded us for being out. I knew that it was his mother for whom he was concerned, but he was always kind, and the concern was accepted for me, too. Then the rain ceased; suddenly, in a hollow, the grass, the air, the undergrowth steamed. Far behind grayness, the sun showed yellow as a fog lamp. We were steaming inside our clothes; threw off raincoats, the scarves enveloping our heads. Ludi, with his wet shorts clinging strongly to his buttocks, said: “Well, what can I do …?” And smiling wryly, like a father being imposed upon by children, loaded himself with our wraps. A bird called out somewhere as if the day were beginning over; some white, delicate flowers splashed all over common dark bushes let go their sweet breath again.
But mostly the sun shone, only the sun existed. In the mornings just after breakfast, the three of us pottered about the garden and the chicken houses. Ludi and his mother had the endless little consultations, the need to draw each other’s attention to this detail or that, the need even merely to remark one to the other what the other already thought or well knew, that people have who have long had a life in common and now live apart. Before Ludi had joined the army, he had been running some sort of little chicken farm; for five or six years after he had left school he had apparently had jobs of various kinds in various places—sometimes Mrs. Koch would say: When you were in Johannesburg … but you remember, it was when you were at Klerksdorp—always returning intermittently to the coast and his mother. What he had done during those months, it was difficult to say. Then there had been the idea of the chicken farm, and Mrs. Koch had bought the chickens and the necessary equipment and Ludi had built the runs and the troughs and the perches and the incubation shed by himself, in his own time. Whether the chicken farming was ever a success or not, it was again difficult to say; now Ludi was in the army, and most of the chickens had been sold, or had died, because Mrs. Koch could not look after them by herself.
Yet Ludi spent a great deal of time down at the chicken houses. He was mending the sagging wires, and dismantling and reassembling the incubator, which had deteriorated in some way through lack of use. The few fowls that were left wandered about unscientifically round his squatting figure. The morning sun, testing out its mounting power, frizzled brightness on his bright gold hair, and now and then he paused, frowning, took off his glasses and put them back. He looked strange without his glasses; someone else. Mrs. Koch came to him and went away again, her voice trailing off as she went over to feel the pawpaws pendulous from the finely engraved totem of a young palm but still green, then rising to a question as she returned and stood with her hand on her hip, drawing away from the sun. “But what happens to them, I’d like to know. I have a look at them and they’re green. And then when I come back in a day or two when they should be ripe, they’re gone. Now there are more green ones getting ready. But I never seem to see them ripen.”
“Hey, Matthew, the missus wants to know why the pawpaws don’t get ripe—” Ludi screwed his eyes up weak against the sun, calling to the native who was trailing slowly across the grass to an outhouse, carrying a rusty tin bath. “I didn’t see it,” said the servant, continuing.
Ludi squatted wider, giving his blunt burned hand a steadier grip on the screwdriver. Without lifting his reddened neck, he laughed. “Matthew!”
The native slowly lowered the bath and stopped, regarding us. He stood there in the sun.
The screwdriver slipped; Ludi grunted and tried again. His mother bent over a little, with the anxious grimace of someone who does not know what it is that is being attempted and proving difficult.
“I myself I never see those pawpaw,” said Matthew.
“Matthew!” Ludi shook his head.
The native burst into laughter, shaking his head, stopping to gasp, swinging up the bath in a mirror-flash, walking on in a flurry of culpable innocence. He laughed back at Ludi; Ludi laughed after him.
Ludi had gone into the incubation house. There was the sound of something being wrenched away. “Mother, did Plasketts ever take those brackets they asked for? There were two, I think, in the garage. Or in the shed.” “Which were they, dear—?” and she was in the dark doorway after him. I went back to the house to write a letter; I had written one when I arrived, had one from home. I went onto the veranda, sat down on the old green-painted chair at the shaky wicker table. I sat pulling at a fraying braid on the table top, my eyes half-closed at the glare that made a bright palpable mist of the space climbing up from the sea. The cane was so live a green that it seemed to be growing visibly; the river a twist of metallic light. Blossoms dropped silently from the frangipani trees. I sat there waving my bare foot.
It was impossible to write the letter; did it exist, a here and there, at this same morning? What could I write to the Mine, to the house with the lights on, the red haze of hair bending over the letter, handing it across the vegetable dishes. For one second I smelled the cold brick of the passage at the Mine offices. But it was not enough to create the existence of the Mine, to make it possible at the other end of a space of which this was at one end.
“Are you finding it too quiet?—I hope not. I know there isn’t much life for young people there, but the sea and …”
An ugly crawling creature (the old house was alive with such creatures, its own and those of the undergrowth) came out the rotting crevice of the table and ran across my mother’s letter and the open writing pad. I went slithering my bare soles over the steps down to the grass.
Mrs. Koch did not normally go to the beach except at week ends or to accompany friends, but now she went with me most mornings. Ludi drove us down in the old car and left us to settle ourselves up on the dunes where the bush leaned a little shade and the sand was powder-
soft and spiked with bits of leaf and twig; Mrs. Koch liked to sit there, with a sunshade over her legs and her shoes off. Then Ludi took his fishing rod and the stained canvas bag high with bait and was gone away up the beach, the jogging walk smaller and smaller, the old khaki shirt waving some signal of its own as a whip of breeze from the sea animated its loose tails; then gone round the rocks, slid in, it seemed, as if the cool smooth solidities had parted, like a stage-set, and closed behind him. If one could see, of course, there he would be, on the other side of the rocks, a khaki mark like a punctuation, drawing across the sands on the other side, and so on, and round the next bend, and the next, until he reached wherever his fishing ground might be.
The rocks held the scallop of beach. Mrs. Koch brought mending or a piece of knitting for one of the grandchildren; I had a book. We talked, but our words were tiny sounds lost in the space of the beach and the sea and the air; phrases torn fluttering rose to sound, sailed, fell to lost like the occasional birds lifted and dropped in the spaces of the air above the sea. We whispered in a great hall where our voices died away unechoed on the floor. We did not notice that we had stopped talking; Mrs. Koch knitted without looking, a fine sweat cooling her brow, her eyes absently retaining a look of gentle attention, as if she had forgotten that she was not listening to someone. Easily, like a satisfied dog that is so used to the limits of its own garden that it turns at the open gate and automatically goes back up the same path down which it has just trotted, her mind quietly rounded on the beach and the questioning of the silence and went again to examine the small businesses of her daily life.
The Lying Days Page 5
