“Good enough,” I flashed out. “That’s all they ever think of, the petty snobs. The only reason why one should be friendly with anyone is because they’re good enough.”
My mother turned on me. “No, you like to roll in the mud. Anything so long as it’s not what any other reasonable person likes. You’d rather be seen running about with the son of a Jew from the native stores, that’s much nicer, someone brought up among all the dirt and the kaffirs. He must be a finer person, of course, than anyone decently brought up by people of our own standing.”
A kind of thrill of getting to grips with real issues went through me. “Ah, I thought that would come. You’ve had that on your chest a long time. And you’ve always pretended to be so polite to Joel. And all the time you’re as bigoted as the rest. Worried because all the old crows of the Mine saw your daughter out with a Jew. Well, you can tell them to mind their own damn business, I’ll be friendly with whom I choose. And I’m not interested in their standards or who they think would be suitable for me. You can tell them.”
“We’ve got nothing against the boy,” said my father. “No one’s saying anything against the boy. But why him, rather than anyone else?”
“Why?”—I was almost laughing with excitement. “Because he’s alive, that’s why. Because he’s a real, live, thinking human being who’s making his own life instead of taking it ready-made like all your precious little darlings of sons on the Mine.”
“Have him,” said my mother shrilly. The venom between us seemed like a race that we were shouting on. “Why don’t you marry him? That would be nice. You can sit on a soapbox outside the store and shout at the natives. That’ll be nice for your father, after he’s worked himself up to a decent position to give you a background.”
I looked at her. “It would kill you, wouldn’t it? It would kill you to have the Manager ask after your daughter, who married the Jew from the Concession store. Well, don’t worry. He wouldn’t have me. He can find something better than the half-baked daughter of a petty official on a gold mine. He’ll want a richer life than a person with my background can give him.” I did not knaw where this came from in me, but all at once it was there, and it seemed to become true in the saying.
“After all, Helen, be reasonable,” my father was insisting, on the perimeter of this. “How can you have a native staying in the house? I’ve got to think of my position too, you know. It’s our bread and butter. What does it look like? I can’t do things like that. I’ve got a responsibility, my girl. Next thing is it will be going round the Group that I’m a Communist.”
“You disgust me. You both disgust me,” I said fiercely, half-weeping, half-laughing in shame at the shrill crescendo of pettiness of the scene that, inescapably, caught us all up for what we were. Like a certain shape of nose or tone of skin it showed in all of us. I had it, too. I burned for the dignity and control my blood betrayed. “Do you hear? You disgust me.”
“That’s all right,” said my mother. Her anger seemed to tremble meltingly through her, like a fire lambently consuming a bush. “That’s all right.” It was as if I had handed my words to her like a knife. The danger of them seized us both, but it was done. She would not give it back to me; I could not take it from her.
At that moment Anna walked in with the sweet, and her detached and servile presence, a kind of innocence of ignorance, showed up by contrast the peculiar horror that was in the room. She came in on her sloppy, shuffling slippers, and went out again, looking at no one. In the sudden, mid-air silencing of her presence, the intensity of the room was like that of a room enclosed by a hurricane. And all the stolid evidence of ordinary things, the familiar furniture, the food on our plates, the crocheted cover with the shells over the water jug, took on the awful quality of unknowing objects in a room where violence has been done.
When she had gone the silence remained.
My mother began to ladle stewed fruit into the three bowls. Suddenly she burst into weeping and ran from the room.
She cried like a man; it had always been hard for her to cry.
Chapter 18
I went to Joel. I had not seen much of him lately, but I went to him with an instinctive selection of the one person I needed to counter the situation at home. I telephoned him in the morning and we arranged to meet for lunch at Atherton’s one tearoom. Over breakfast and the business of dressing our household went about in silence, a kind of shame which made everything secretive and perfunctory, like the trembling hand and dizzy air that harks back from a hang-over to the excess that reeled behind it. My mother did not speak to me. But as I made ready to leave the house I heard her complaining to Anna behind the closed kitchen door, the familiar plaint of the mother who has “done all she can” for a callously wrong-headed child. The door was closed to exclude me, but her voice was as heedless of my being able to hear it as if I had been a child too small to understand anything except the tone. I could also hear the murmur of agreement from Anna like the hum of responses from a chapel congregation.
The tearoom was not a good place to meet because it was always full of Atherton women and women from the Mine, dropping in for tea between shopping. At eleven o’clock, too, the lawyers came over for the recess from the courthouse near by, and sat at two large tables to themselves, their heads together, very conscious of their serious purpose as compared with that of the women. Now it was school holidays in addition, and many women whom I knew gave me the smile of patronizing frankness used by married women toward young girls, as they trailed children in like strings of sausages, holding hands and straggling behind. I sat and waited for Joel in the atmosphere that smelled of warm scones and lavender water. The waitress said: “How’s your mother?” and dusted crumbs importantly off the table before me. Other women came up and spoke to me. Say hello to Helen, dear.—Won’t you? Oh, the cat’s got away with her tongue. That’s it, you know. Helen, the cat’s got away with her tongue. Laughter from the woman and myself. Well, remember me to your mother, dear? Daddy all right?
In between I sat in a kind of listless daze, as if I were not there at all. I kept thinking: I want to go away. But there was no indignation, no strength in the idea any more. I did not want to be at home, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be, either. Often since then I have known the same grogginess of the spirit, that comes from emotional excess and, like any other bankruptcy, has no choice but to be passive. Sitting in the Atherton tearoom that hot day in November, I knew for the first time the distaste of no-feeling, the incredible conviction one hasn’t the strength to discover with anything more than a listless horror like nausea that not to care about the love that agonized you is more agonizing than the agony itself; to have lost the motive of anger is worse than living anger was.
When Joel came I did not say anything to him of what had happened, after all. My express intention seemed suddenly not to matter and I found myself saying: “I don’t seem to have seen you properly for such a long time. I thought it would be nice to get away from work and talk.” And we did. We discussed the people we knew and the things we had seen and done with all the space of the ground that was always so easy between us, and by the time the “pot of tea, 6d.” had been reached, I found that my numbness was coming alive, with a rush of gratitude I felt I was being taken back into human life again. The pain of the house on the Mine shrank to one pin point in a whole world; outside, other airs existed. So I was able to say quite easily: “There’s been a terrible row at home. It’s no good.”
When I told him, he said: “Did I crop up at all?”
“No,” I said, pouring his tea. And added because the shortness of my reply left a pause for doubt, “Why should you?”
“I don’t know—I’ve always felt I should, some day.—Of course the row wasn’t really about Mary Seswayo.”
“No, I know.”
“—So you’ll get away after all. You’ll get what you wanted.”
For a moment I had a return of the feeling that there was nothing that I wanted. �
�But I didn’t want it this way—” I appealed.
“Things keep on happening that way.—Did you want to see me to tell me?”
I smiled.
He drank slowly, deliberately, his eyes moving about the room. “No, it wouldn’t be much good letting it blow over and waiting for next time. Because it’s obvious there’s going to be a next time.” He shook his head with a half-smile to himself. “It’s a pity for them.”
“And what about me?” I felt impatiently it was something Jewish in him, this softening he had toward my parents.
“For you, too,” he said, not retracting the other.
“All this fuss about a girl going to live somewhere else. Hundreds of people never live at home after they’re grown up. The way we talk about it, you’d think—”
“Ah, but if they’d let you go while they still had you—” he said.
As he got up to go over to the little counter of cakes to pay, I laughed. “—You talk as if I’m leaving for ever.”
A week later I telephoned him to tell him that Isa had promised to find me somewhere to live in Johannesburg.
There was a pause. “Well, if that’s the case you might as well go to Jenny and John. The Marcuses.”
“Why?” I was intrigued at the suggestion.
“Yes, they’re a bit hard up and they want someone to help out with the rent of the flat.”
“But why didn’t you tell me before? I think that’d be a wonderful idea. Can I phone them?” The Marcuses had attracted me immediately the few times I had met them, and I was at once excited by the coincidence by which they wanted someone to share their flat, and I wanted somewhere to live. I badgered Joel with questions. “The flat’s very small—” he said dubiously.
“I shan’t be kept in the manner to which I’m accustomed—shame!”
“Well, you wait and see. The best thing will be for me to take you there. I have to see John on Thursday. I’ll have Max’s car so I’ll pick you up after four.”
After I had rung off I sat a moment or two on the little telephone stool, in the restless inertia of eagerness that must be curbed. Suddenly I wanted to telephone Joel again to tell him to be sure the Marcuses made no arrangement with anyone else in the meantime. I was trembling with excited urgency to have it all decided at once. For at the mention of the Marcuses, something lifted in me; I felt that here I might be about to come out free at last; free of the staleness and hypocrisy of a narrow, stiflingly conventional life. I would get out of it as palpably as an overelaborate dress that had pampered me too long.
Chapter 19
When I went to the flat for the first time that Thursday Jenny Marcus sat up very straight on a divan with her bare breasts white and heavy and startling. Like some strange fruit unpeeled they stood out on her body below the brown limit of a summer tan. She wore a skirt and a gay cotton shirt was hung round her shoulders, and face-down over her knees a baby squirmed feebly. As we came in behind her husband the baby belched, and, smiling brilliantly, calling out to us, she turned it over and wiped its mouth.
They lived on the sixth floor of a building on the first ridge that lifts back from the city itself. The building took the look of a tower from the immense washes of summer light, luminous with a pollen of dust, that filled up the chasms and angles of the city as the blinding eye of the sun was lowered; like eyelids, first this building then that was drawn over it; its red glare struck out again fiercely; came; went; was gone. As I got out of the car I had looked round me like a traveler set down in a foreign square; prepared to be pleased with everything he sees.
Inside, the building put aside the slippery marbled pretensions of the foyer and there was the indigenous smell, that I was soon to know so well, of fried onions and soot, and behind the door on which Joel and I rapped and walked in, Jenny in an unexpected splendor.
What is meant by love at the first sight is really a capture of the imagination; and I do not think that it is confined to love. It happens in other circumstances, too, and it happened to me then. My imagination was captured; something which existed in my mind took a leap into life. I saw the bright, half-bare room, the books all round, the open piano and some knitted thing of the baby’s on a pile of music, a charcoal drawing tacked on the wall, a pineapple on a wooden dish and the girl with her bare breasts over the baby. Something of it remains with me to this day, in spite of everything; just as in love, after years of marriage that was nothing like one expected it to be, the moment of the first capture of the imagination can be recalled intact, though the face of the person who is now wife or husband has become the face of an enchanting stranger one never came to know. It was a room subordinate to the force of its occupants; the first of its kind that I was to live in.
“We really wanted a man” Jenny explained, while her husband wandered about the room looking tousled and vague, pushing his shirt into his trousers. “They’re less trouble, we thought.”
“Ah, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “She’ll be able to sit with the baby. You’ll see, Jen, she’ll be useful to you.” And we all laughed.
“Of course I’ll move all the baby’s things out of here.”—She drubbed her stiff dark nipple at the little creature’s nose and with a blind movement of frenzy it snatched it into its mouth. I was fascinated by the look of her breasts; the skin with the silky shine of a muscle sheath over the whiteness of flesh, and the intricate communication of prominent blue veins. They did not seem recogenizable as a familiar feature of my own body, so changed were they from the decorative softness of my own sentient breasts. As she moved about settling the baby when he had fed, they swung buoyantly with the strong movements of her arms; she was a big girl with the slight look of rawness about the tops of her arms you sometimes see in English women. Still talking rather breathlessly—that was her way—she wriggled into a brassière and buttoned the blouse. “We must take the other room, John? Because of the porch.—We’ve rigged up a kind of little room for the baby on the porch, and the door leads from the other room—We’re going to start putting him out there to sleep. It’s not healthy to have him in with us. And you’ll have this divan—the only thing is the cupboard.” She caught her lip and laughed, waving toward the door of a built-in cupboard. “That’s why we wanted a man—they take up less space somehow.”
“Oh, I see—you mean my clothes. Yes, I’d have to have somewhere to hang—”
She nodded. “Exactly. Well, I’ll have to take the groceries out of the bathroom one and put the junk out of this one in there.” “If the worst comes to the worst. . ,” said John, hands on his hips, speaking slowly, “I could move those maps and other stuff of mine over to my father’s place.”
His wife giggled at him carelessly fondly: “Oh, no you couldn’t. Your mother’s acid about the stuff of ours they’ve got already—”
He had a way of raising his eyebrows exaggeratedly. “Is that so? We-e-ll. When, Jen? Did my father say anything—” And they got caught up in one of the wrangling personal exchanges that were always easily parenthetic to their participation in general conversation. Joel had his head in the cupboard, which John had o ened while he was talking, and he called out: “You’ve still got that archaeological data! Good Lord—” And started pulling out colored cardboard files. John dropped his discussion with his wife and went over to encourage him. Soon the floor was littered, and they sat in the middle of it. “It didn’t come to anything,” said John mildly. “I heard it was you, Jenny,” said Joel, with innuendo. “They tell me you put a stop to it.”
“Well, I like that!” she said. “Mickey backed out, and they didn’t have the money without him. All I did was say that I knew something like that would happen, that’s all.”
John pointed at her. “But she was pregnant and she couldn’t have gone!”
The two men laughed at her. I went over and sat down on the floor among the papers and photographs; they had the fascination of the practical details of something that had always been impressively remote: an archaeological expedit
ion. While John and Joel explained and argued, she went about attending to the baby, dipping in and out the talk, competently. Once or twice the husband got up to help her with something; they laughed and pushed each other aside officiously over the child, like two people over a newfangled machine whose workings they do not quite get the hang of. “Look, put it this way—” “No, you idiot, they’re always supposed to be put down on the opposite side to the one they were lying on before.” The baby was like something they had bought for their own use and pleasure; a casual, forthright attitude quite different from the awe and flurry and worshipful subordination of normal life to a little sleeping mummy that I had known in homes on the Mine where babies were born. I had never cared for babies and I did not feel constrained to admire this one; even this small freedom appealed to me.
It was just as casually accepted that I should come and live with them. We had discussed little of what my mother would call the “details,” but when Joel and I were leaving, John said as if he had just remembered: “Well, look, when is she going to come?”—I noticed he had a way of addressing remarks to people in the third person, through his wife, as if he and she interpreted the world to each other, and again I felt drawn to them for their evidence of solidarity, what seemed to me an intimacy as simple as breathing. This was what had appealed to me in them the very first time I had seen them, at Isa’s flat. I felt in some obscure way that what they had was the basis of all the good things in life; from it like casements their minds opened naturally on beauty, compassion, and a clear honest acceptance. Now as we said good-by to them at the door, he leaning an arm on her shoulder, I felt a pang something like jealousy, but without bitterness, as for something which was still possible for me.
The Lying Days Page 23
