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The Lying Days

Page 12

by Nadine Gordimer


  I began to look at other students covertly, as the member of an underground political movement might watch for signs that would discover to him others of the same conviction. These mouths pursed round straws over pink ice-cream foam, these heads bent over notes on the grass, these eyes faraway with overheard talk of tennis or dresses for the Engineers’ Ball—were they feeling that they were living inside a half-inflated balloon which had suddenly been blown up to twice its size? Surely there must be someone for whom, too, it had slowly to shrink again every day as the train door slammed behind, the porch door waited, the mouths of home opened to speak. Yet as we talked of lecturers and grumbles and advice, of timetables and clothes, it did not seem so. Or I forgot to look. And it was only afterward, sitting in the train, that I would examine the said and unsaid, and find nothing.

  But whether I knew it or not, I never ceased to be looking. This I found one day when I was in the cloakroom, excusing myself toward the washbasins past a knot of girls who hovered concentrically, like insects, attracted by the mirror. It bewildered me afresh to see them powdering and fluffing out their hair, eying themselves and looking without interest at the images of one another. And as I came through I saw on the other side of the washbasins an African girl drying her hands. She stood there in her nurse-girl’s beret and little dark dress looking at me quietly, half as if she expected a challenge of her right to be there, for the University was the one place in all Johannesburg and one of the few places in all South Africa where a black girl could wash her hands in the same place as a white girl, and this fact, so much more tellingly than the pronouncement that there was no color bar, took some getting used to for both the African students and the white. Yet as she saw me—perhaps it was something in my face, perhaps in my walk—the look changed. And I had the curious certainty, that one sometimes gets from the face of another, that what I saw on her face now was what was on my own. I recognized it; it was the sign I had been watching for, not knowing what it would be.

  We both left the cloakroom at the same time, and in silence, without embarrassment, she stood back to let me go through the door first.

  In the train in the mornings, the faces, the presence of the two students opposite were closed to me. The bulldog-faced one, smoking his pipe as if he were enjoyably cutting a tooth over it; the other, his eyes running a race with the printed page, sometimes meeting my eye with the slight smile that tells a child comfortingly that the grownup is there—there was no secret response from either of them to what was in me. Probably both came from places where university was merely a formal extension of an atmosphere in which they had learned to talk; I returned to my book.

  In time I learned that the bulldog-faced one was in fact not a student at all. Sometimes, on the days when the other was not there, the empty seat beside him would seem to make him expansive, eager to talk, and in between deep draws at his pipe—as if he were coaxing a furnace—talk and smoke poured out together. No, he wasn’t a university student, though, like Aaron there—he gestured his head to the space beside him—he was an ex-serviceman. Who? I asked. Young Aaron, he told me, you know, who sits here usually.

  His own name (I.P. on his briefcase) was Ian Petrie and he was a Londoner who had emigrated, fought with South Africans in Abyssinia and Egypt, and married an Atherton girl.

  “D’you read him at all—” He indicated his Trollope.

  I hadn’t yet. He talked about Trollope as people do of some delightful crank of a friend they would like you to meet. He smiled on the clenched pipe, an attractive smile showing uneven, smoke-tinted teeth. Even though I hadn’t read Trollope, I was prepared to like this man because he had. He said: “You’ve awed me with your George Eliot every morning,” and we laughed. (Meeting me on the siding Basil Tatchett had picked the book out of my hand, opened it, said, “Who’s he?” and not even waited for a reply.) When we had talked about books several mornings, he said to me: “I believe you might know my wife? Lindsay Theunissen?” I looked at him uncertainly. I did know her, but I felt there must be a mistake; there had been a wild-eyed girl at school, Lindsay Theunissen, very backward, as if the stammer of her excited voice kept her in too much agitation to be able to learn. One of those vague troubling rumors, half understood by children, said that her mother had “tried to get rid of her” and she had been born with some slight injury to the brain.

  “Then you do know her?” He seemed satisfied and confidential.

  “Long ago. At school. Then they went away, lived somewhere else, I think.”

  He waved out a match. “You’d be surprised how she’s turned out. She’s really pretty, you know. Still got that wild look—” He smiled, liking it.

  “I don’t think I’d know her—”

  “Oh, yes you would.” He sat back, frankly, not letting me evade, smiling at me. “It’s not so surprising as you think. Of course I can’t talk to her, you know what I mean. She’s not interested in what I read, and I tell her a few snippets from the newspaper that she can use for conversation. But she’s got a kind of instinct for sport; I can’t explain it. She simply can’t help playing everything extraordinarily well, almost the way a hunting dog can’t help pointing at a scent. And I have an admiration for that sort of thing; I play a lot myself, with more calculation and less success, I can tell you. Lindsay’s really quite amazing that way. She’s got what one might call a physical intelligence. And let me tell you—” He leaned his elbows on his knees, dropped his voice. He had the air of giving advice rather than a confession, and I found myself listening as if I were accepting advice. “—It’s very important. I enjoy making love to her and I enjoy playing games with her. What is married life, really? You’re away at work eight hours a day. Half of what’s left you spend in bed, one way or another, and the other half you spend looking for some sort of recreation.—I can talk to other people, I can read on my own.”

  I laughed and shook my head to myself; there was something about this man that set one at ease, as if a tight button had popped. He returned to Trollope, I to George Eliot, until he said, “Damn, we’re here just as I get comfortable, always …,” and I looked up and saw him stretching for his briefcase as the sooty, antiseptic scent of the city came in at the window.

  “What time d’you say it leaves?”

  “Half-past seven.”

  “Well, it’s nothing. Only twenty minutes earlier than the one you usually get. I’m up at a quarter-to, anyway.” My mother was decorating a cake with candied violets. As I had always done, I put a petal on my tongue, let the sugar melt off, and stuck the tiny dab of bruised silk on my palm. “Don’t be a baby, Helen. I’ll be short.”

  But I winced at the idea of getting up still earlier to get to a lecture which had altered my timetable. “You see, here’s the disadvantage of staying out of town. Anyone else can get up at eight o’clock.” I saw by my mother’s precision and arched neck that it would be better not to pursue this reasoning, so I said, as I remembered: “Oh …! I shall miss my early morning talk.”

  She was not listening: “Who’s that?”

  “You remember I told you about the student with the pipe opposite me? D’you know who he is? He’s married to the Theunissen girl,—Lindsay. I think she’s lucky. We’re quite friendly.”

  “That awful man Petrie who was Belle Theunissen’s fancy man that she married off to her daughter—? I don’t know how you can talk to him.” She was making a green bow with strips of candied peel; the loops were exactly the same size, the ends were cut exactly level. I stood watching this. But she knew when she had annoyed or offended me, and she could say to my silence with the laugh of pretended innocence: “Huffed? Well, I can’t help it—I must say you have the most peculiar taste.”

  The early train was crowded. Like huddled cattle holding their horns motionlessly clear, men balanced their papers above the press. Yet out of habit I pushed through to stand in the third carriage. “Come and sit down.” Among the strangers, the other young man was there; he got up slowly, waited wh
ile I climbed over legs to his seat. “—No protests necessary,” he said.

  “Still, it’s very nice of you.”

  Holding on to the window frame, he smiled down at me the same way again, the resting smile of long acquaintance. Suddenly I was going to ask him … what, I did not know. But the conductor came struggling down the corridor, drowning hand appearing in an appeal for tickets. When ours had been passed from hand to hand and returned, the young man bent to me and said: “Petrie and Trollope are left entirely to themselves now.” I smiled with the quick pleasure one feels when someone unexpectedly confirms something one has felt and been doubted for. “He’s pleasant company, isn’t he? The journey passes quickly with him.”

  “He’s one of those people”—he was searching for exactly what he wanted to say—”one of those men whose presence makes—makes the air comfortable. It’s the only way I can put it. All those people rocking from here to there in the train every day; rocking back: he sits there like a sensible hand over the questions you’d pester yourself with.”

  I wanted to interrupt with eagerness to agree. That was it. But the young man with the biblical name returned to his reading. When two or three stations had drawn off their workers and the level of heads in the carriage sank to normal, he sat down opposite me, arranging his legs carefully so that his shoes would not scuff mine. I leaned forward and said: “Thank you all the same for giving me the seat,” and he smiled and slid down in his seat spreading his knees comfortably with a faint air of puzzled surprise, as some close member of one’s family, used to the silent acceptance of intimacy, might be surprised by formal politeness.

  I sat back gathering my own silence for a breath or two. But I would not let the moment glide by; in defiance to my mother, in response to the stirring that opposed her in me, I wanted to say something real, a short arrangement of words that would open up instead of gloss over. It came to me like the need to push through a pane and let in the air. I leaned forward. “Why do you treat me as if you know me?”

  He looked up; there was that quick change of focus in his eyes: from print to a face. He said patiently: “Because I do.” And now it was easy and my boldness made me laugh. He was laughing too. “I’ve known you ever since I can remember. You used to wear a yellow tartan skirt with a big pin thing in it—I used to think you must have a pretty bad mother, if she wouldn’t even sew up your dresses properly.”

  “But it was supposed to be like that!”

  “So I found out. Not for years though—” He shook his head. “I’d never seen anything like that.”

  “But where? I don’t know how it was you could have seen me, known me, if I don’t know you.”

  “In the bioscope, the town with your mother, passing in your father’s car—for years. Ever since I can remember.”

  I sat there, smiling, doubting. He nodded his head slowly at me, as if to say, yes, yes, it’s true. “You used to have a little pale blond friend and you both used to carry white handbags. Like grown-up women.”

  “Olwen. Olwen Taylor and I! But you’ve got an astonishing memory.” My deep interest in myself made the fact of a stranger’s recollections of me remarkable; it was like being shown an old photograph, taken when one was not looking, a photograph of which one did not even know the existence until this moment. And yet there it is, the face one has sometimes caught unawares in a mirror.

  “But I used to see you so often in the bus, too. Coming from school.”

  “You were never in the bus—I should have remembered you. I can remember any child who traveled on that bus.” At once I was dubious.

  “Not in it. I used to cycle home from school at about the same time, and we used to pass the bus—two or three other boys and I, it was a great thing to race it.”

  I was filled with the delight of interest in myself. I asked a dozen questions. “I had a fringe? Did you know me when I had a fringe—awful, it was always too long, into my eyebrows. Or was it later, when I had plaits?”—I stopped in amazement again. “I remember all the phases,” he said.

  In the pause an impulse of regret grew in me at not remembering him; I could turn back to so many faces, some I had never known, watched and never spoken to, and all the time the one that had been fixed on me had gone unnoticed. His look questioned me, dark, water-colored eyes, mottled and traced with an intricacy of lines and flecks, like markings of successive geological ages on the piece of polished quartz my father kept. “I was trying to imagine you seeing me, and I not knowing you were.” He laughed. I was curious again: “But what were you doing that way? You certainly didn’t live on the Mine, that I’m sure.”

  “At that time we were living out at the store—my father’s store. Not in the town”—he anticipated the association—”The Concession stores just outside your property.” He went on explaining but now it was himself my attention was taking in and not what he was saying. Of course this was a different face. There was no place, no feature, no bone one could point to and say: Here, this is where it is; yet the face was different. The faces that had looked in at me when I was an infant, the faces I had fondled, the faces that had been around me all my life had differences, one from the other, but they were differences of style. This face was built on some other last.

  I said: “Your name’s Aaron?” not meaning it to sound, as it did, a conclusion.

  But he said with that sweet reasonableness that he seemed to keep inside him the way some people keep strength, or touchiness: “Joel. My surname’s Aaron.”

  “I thought Ian Petrie said it was Aaron, that’s why.”—Smiling, but I was thinking of a tortoise shell, a confused memory that brought up with it the faded camphor of a defiance, my mother, angry with me, in white tennis clothes. “There was one time I’ll never forget.” He was laughing, with the relish of a story. “I was riding into Atherton to have two of my mother’s hens killed—one under each arm, and balancing furiously—you were sitting at the back of a half-empty bus and you stood right up and watched me go by with such an expression on your face! I kept my head down and rode like hell.”

  “D’you know I’ve only been down there once in my life … to the stores. I couldn’t have been more than ten. I was angry with my mother, so I went down all by myself one Saturday afternoon.” The tone of my voice showed that it was still an adventure to me.

  “Was it forbidden, then?” he asked.

  “Oh yes. Quite forbidden; the natives, and unhealthy …” I did not think to pretend otherwise my mother’s distaste for the stores.

  I was right; I did not need to. “We survived very well,” he laughed, as if he knew my mother, too. Perhaps, knowing me, shaped by my mother, he did.

  “You certainly have,” I said with a little gesture of my face toward his books; I did not know why.

  “Yes.” Now he was thoughtful.

  I remembered something, seriously—”By the way, perhaps I should have said, but you seem to know so much—”

  He smiled at me again, that expressive smile that had an almost nasal curve to it, gently. “Yes I know; it’s Helen. Helen of Atherton.”

  It was a title. Perfectly sincerely, I could hear it was a title. And although the obvious reference that came to mind was ridiculous, it made me blush. Entirely without coquetry I suddenly wished I were better looking, beautiful. It was something I felt I should have had, like the dignity of an office.

  Chapter 12

  The Aarons did not live behind the Concession Store any more, but in a little suburban house in the town. There was a short red granolithic path from the front door to the gate, and the first time I went there a fowl was jerking cautiously along a row of dahlias. Joel said, opening the gate for me, the sun laying angles of shadow on his face: “I often thought about going into your house, but I never imagined bringing you to mine.”

  It was a Saturday morning, and I had met him coming out of the stationer’s in the main street of Atherton, carrying a paper bag from which the head of a paintbrush protruded. “My builder’s sup
plies.” He waved the bag. I knew all about the model hospital he was making as part of his year’s work as an architectural student. He had explained the sketches for it to me in the train.

  “Did you remember the ambulance for the front door?”

 

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