The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  In the same way, I took a secret pride in the frugality of their living. Ever since I had begun to see the natives all around not as furniture, trees, or the casual landmarks of a road through which my life was passing, but as faces; the faces of old men, of girls, of children; ever since they had stepped up all around me, as they do, silently, at some point in the life of every white person who lives in South Africa, something had been working in me. The slow corrosive guilt, a guilt personal and inherited, amorphous as the air and particular as the tone of your own voice, which, admitted or denied, is in all white South Africans. The Nationalist farmers who kicked and beat their convict African laborers had it and it was in me. Like an obscure pain we can’t confess we clutch to it this counterirritant, or that. One pretense is kinder than another, that is all. With kicks and curses you may keep the guilt at a distance, with a show of the tenderness of my own skin, I may clasp it like a hair shirt.

  The Marcuses had little choice to live otherwise, since they had little money, but they made it clear that they regarded it as only decent to keep one’s wants as few and simple as possible. They had a kind of amused detachment toward wants which exceeded their own, making friends at whose house a servant waited white-aproned at table feel somehow ridiculous, and raising their eyebrows at Laurie when he brought to the flat a girl innocently wearing a rather cheap fur coat. While they scorned a superfluity of possessions, they believed that almost any sacrifice was worth the possession of one or two really beautiful things, and their Japanese-cum-Swedish aesthetic of utility answered perfectly my own reaction against the overgrown knickknackery of the Mine.

  But my response to the austerity of their living went deeper than that. It assuaged something in me which was nameless, which I scarcely consciously knew; that something working in me, eating at me, since the realization of those faces. It put me that much less of a remove from them, playing in the gutter when I had played in the garden; going to work in the silent dark while I slept; looking on at the armor of my white skin.

  Of course, I realized that my participation in the Marcuses’ way of life was that of the privileged amateur. My father paid my University fees and my share of expenses at the flat, although I no longer took a dress or spending allowance from him. During the long summer vacation, when I still had been living at home, I had taken a job in a bookshop, and I determined that the money I had earned then should last me until the next vacation, when I would get another temporary job. I had fewer clothes, if more ingenious ones, than I ever had had before, and even then, when I was going out, I felt a little ashamed to parade my choice before Jenny, whose entire wardrobe, she was always eager to admit, took up four hangers. I found, however, that I was spending money on things I had never bought before. Toward the end of the month, when funds were low and we were all a little tired of subsisting on thin stews consisting mainly of green peppers, I sometimes brought home a small smelly box of frozen crayfish tails that, as they boiled, sent a tantalizing scent of the sea through the flat, or a punnet of strawberries and some cream. I also contributed heavily to our liquor stock—the two or three bottles of brandy and gin and the case of beer that seemed no sooner delivered than they went to join the dusty collection of empties on top of the kitchen dresser. Although they shrugged at the delicate, high-heeled American shoes I brought home with a defiance born of vanity (Jen couldn’t wear things like that, said John, she’s got the strong, heavily modeled feet of peasant women, feet made to dance and walk), they were not affronted by these other signs of my social dilettantism; when there was something good to eat, and a bottle of Nederburg Riesling I had picked up at the bottle store on the corner, we ate and drank together with gusto.

  One Saturday morning something happened that surprised me. It was trivial and so overshadowed by the meeting that followed it that I did not really try to interpret it, yet its oddness, like something small, sharp and bright that is obviously part of a larger design, made me automatically put it away in my less immediate consciousness even while I forgot it.

  I had been to town early and, on coming back, had thrown my parcels and coat and hat on John and Jenny’s bed. I went into the bathroom and when I came out and passed down the passage, I thought I saw, in the liquid flash of the mirror through the door, Jenny looking at herself. When I had been in the other room for the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette, her silence in the room next door roused a faint curiosity. I got up lazily and wandered in on her. She was silting on the edge of the bed with my hat on. With her back to me, she saw me first in the mirror, and in the mirror, smiled, and with a little noise of embarrassment pulled off the hat as she turned round.

  “It suits you better than me,” I said ruefully. “But it shouldn’t be so straight.” And I put it on her again, at more of an angle. We both looked at her, a pretty girl in the red hat. She put up her hand and touched at the side. “The velvet’s so soft,” she said. “I saw a green one, not the same, but something like it, a dear, in town. So cheap, too. I’m dying to buy myself one, but John’d kill me.”

  And she quickly pulled the hat off again and held it out to me, with a little shake, as if she wanted me to take it from her quickly. With that smile of guilty pleasure warming her face, I suddenly had the feeling that this was not Jenny; I had not been talking to her the way I would talk to Jenny.

  She stood looking at the hat. “I wish I could persuade him. But I know he won’t.” She actually had lowered her voice, longingly.

  “What about the money you got for the Graham display?”

  She gave a little laugh and I really thought I saw her look at the door. “It’s not just that—he says—you know … only bourgeoise women wear hats.” She ran her first finger over the pile of my hat.

  “He won’t”—I was going to say “allow” but stopped myself at what was quite an unthinkable word between John and Jenny—“he won’t let you wear a hat? Oh nonsense—” I had to laugh to convince myself it was some kind of loverlike game between them. And I stood there forcing her with the laughter of unbelief. This was not John, either. For a second it was as if I caught a glimpse of two people who seemed very like, but were not them, could not be them.

  Before she could answer, the quiet of the flat was caught up with the creak and bang of the front door flung open in the assault that meant John was home. His voice was mingled with that of another man as he called along the passage: “Anyone home? Jenny, hi, look what I’ve brought—” At once he was in the doorway, a bag of eggs under one arm, a bunch of bananas in newspaper under the other, looking, as he always did when he had shopped, like a triumphant looter.

  What he had brought was Paul Clark, standing behind him looking at us over the gasping, disjointed, excited monologue. He wore a pale green waistcoat and I remember I wondered what the Marcuses would have to say about that. In his small, slim, energetic hand with the watch just above the wristbone and the veins nervously enlacing the knuckles, he held a toy rabbit by the ears, and a bottle of wine by the neck. Jenny rushed up and kissed him.

  —I stuffed away the curious glimpse of a moment or two before, like a scrap of paper with the address of the place where I had seen two faces and must return sometime to verify or refute the resemblance.

  In the confusion of greetings that followed, the stranger said, looking at me, “It’s grown up awfully quickly … I thought it was only six months?”

  “That’s not it, that’s Helen.” John was always a little wild when he brought friends home. “Here the thing is in its pram, you idiot.”

  Chapter 21

  The stranger. Paul the stranger. I have looked at that face as I shall never look upon another. There was a light in it for me that put something out; dazzled into black silence. So I shall never again answer with the vivid compulsion that made me watch the face of Paul, spelling it out feature by feature with my eyes, as if my finger traced it in the air and my lips moved about a name without sound.

  So much has been written about the curious compelli
ng fascination of the faces of some women, but I do not remember reading anywhere anything that would testify to the same innocent deadliness in the face of a man: a face such as Paul’s. Yet just as they do in women, these faces exist in men. It is as if a chance disposition of features, pleasant and ordinary enough in themselves, creates a proportion that is the magic cipher of power. The owners of these faces have only to look. They themselves cannot escape the power which is upon them; indeed some of them, a few men as well as many women, live their whole lives off it, making the world pay for a divine and lucky accident. Others, for whom it is not the only asset, are sometimes unaware of it, and even mistake the advantages it draws as due to some more responsible cause.

  Paul was an enchanting talker. When he talked his body became a puppet animated by his mind; he mimicked, he made emotion graphic with his hands, his voice turned his anecdote this way and that in quick pleasure. From that first day, when we sat over the lunch which Jenny and I had opened out of tins, I felt that he took up attention in a special way: I found that while he talked I must watch him intently, and believed that this was because what he said and the way that he said it were so interesting. But in time I came to know that it was his face itself that held me, that face at which I could look and look so that sometimes the fascination would take me away entirely, and I would lose whole passages of what he was saying.

  This angered me with myself then, and does still. My lip curls when I must admit that even had Paul not been what he was, had he been trivial, passionless and commonplace, I might still have loved him. The look of him never lost its power over me; even in anger and hurt it retained a higher authority that my whole self as a woman, deaf, dumb, blind, never failed to answer.

  As it was, Paul was quick. Quick as opposed to dead in the most accurate sense, for in no one I have known could one have more clearly the sense of blood running, heart beating, impatient intelligence alight, even the attraction of his sex upon him like the gloss on the plumes of a male bird—a creature becoming rather than merely being. And all this he took as carelessly as if it were as common an evidence of life as the first gulp of breath we all draw with the same eagerness at the sharp moment of birth. In him, it seemed to me, most of the things the rest of us talked about or hazily aspired to, came to life. He had spent a magnificent childhood on the farm in Natal which had belonged to his father’s family since the middle of the nineteenth century, running wild with no consciousness of the loadliness of the life, riding horses and playing with young native boys of his own age and prowess. He spoke the two main Bantu languages, Zulu and Sesuto, with the colloquial familiarity among their formal difficulties that comes only when you have learned a language as you have learned to speak, and so, unlike the rest of us, he did not move half his life like a deaf man, among people whose speech and thought and laughter were closed to him. The almost feudal character of his life as a child included his parents’ odd English tradition of courtesy toward any difference that became evident as he grew up, between their ideas and his. His rejection of the farm for the study of law, and then his rejection of law in favor of social science, and a job in the offices of the Native Affairs Department in Johannesburg, they gently regarded as a matter of taste. When Paul spoke about them, you could not fail to feel the charm of the way in which they saw what Edna might have called a revulsion against a capitalist-imperialist outlook and way of life—the putting aside, in fact, of everything they had to offer—as a young person’s whim, in which it was parental and polite to show mild interest. So, unlike my parents and me, whose differences, like our lives, were on a closer, more suburban scale, Paul and the Clarks remained on affectionate terms.

  When he came to the flat for the first time that day, he had just been home on a visit, and before that he had been in Rhodesia for four months. This was part of the six-months’ study leave he had been granted by the Department to write his Ph.D. thesis on “African Family Adjustments to Urban Environment.”

  He was moving into a very small flat where the edge of the city raveled out into shabby suburbia—among the whores and the hoboes and the motor-spares business, he put it—and for a week was busy painting the one room and rearranging the intricacies of the cupboard-kitchen.—A dehydrated affair, he told us, open the doors, turn on the faucet and sprinkle—up comes the stove and the refrigerator. John and Jenny were amused but not particularly interested by his activity with the flat; I understood that he moved frequently, and they had gone through the whole reorganization process with him before.

  He spent a great deal of time at the Marcuses’ flat and I gathered that he always had. He was also an intimate of most of their friends, and was almost always on his way from or to people we knew. Over lunch the first day there had been much talk of common friends, questions asked, news related. “Seen Isa yet?” John had said keenly.—Later I saw that there seemed to be a vying for the attention and company of Paul among his friends. Often Jenny would say severely, almost jealously, “Now don’t forget I expect you tonight. I’m making a pilaff and I don’t want you to turn up at eight full of Laurie’s beer and sardines.” Since we seldom made any special preparation for anybody, and certainly not for anyone who came as often as Paul, it was not the waste of dinner but the idea that he might prefer to eat with others which prompted her.

  “Has she gone back to her book?” Paul asked. “There was a letter of hers supposed to be sent on to me from Luanshya, but it hasn’t come yet.”

  John shrugged his lack of interest. “She wouldn’t be discussing it with me, anyway.”

  “You should have heard her the other night,” said Jenny, warming to gossip, with an eager smile. “She simply snapped Helen up in one bite. One of her charming moods.”

  When he had heard the story, Paul said, supplying the answer to a problem that didn’t puzzle him at all: “You were having an argument? A political argument with a man, and keeping your end up? Of course; Isa can’t stand intelligence in other women, don’t you know? She has the greatest respect for the views of an intelligent man, but she can’t listen to another woman talking sense. Oh, she’ll defend the equality of men and women all right, but God help the woman who’s equal to her.”

  “Well, apparently she doesn’t think me intelligent enough,” said Jenny tartly, “because I’ve never had any trouble with her.”

  In the laughter that followed, John hooked an arm round her neck, pulling her over to him, and said, “Never mind, Jen, Isa’s just sex and a brain and nothing in between.”

  “John said that you would have been the one to deal with her,” I laughed to Paul. “He seemed to think you could defend the rights of women before the ardent feminist.”

  But he only smiled slightly, politely in answer and lifted his eyes once to John, who was not looking at him, before giving his attention to choosing a ripe tomato from Jenny’s untidy bowl of salad.

  “He likes her, eh?” said John to Jenny one evening after Paul had left us. He looked at me with the warning, smiling approval of the madam who sees one of her girls favored by a special client.

  I looked from one to the other.

  “You’ll see,” said John. “She’ll be the next.”

  “Oh, John, you’re awful,” smiled Jenny in what we called her “hush” voice; the awed, slightly arch reaction that belonged somewhere back in her English nursery. The two of them had the habit of discussing the personal lives of their friends as if they were entomologists observing the mating patterns of beetles; it did not seem to occur to them that the bald facts of who went to bed with whom might have the same meaning and emotional commitment as their own prized relationship, which they held jealously and privately apart. At first I had seen this attitude as part of a desirable frankness and acceptance of people the way they were, life the way it was, part, in fact, of their honesty. But when I had noticed that they excluded themselves from this clinical valuation, I had begun to think that the manner in which they discussed their friends’ love affairs was unfair—I would
not allow myself to consider that they were capable of the breach of human feeling that is bad taste.

  But now that their cold and gleeful surveillance was turned on me, annoyance rose. I was still unsure and admiring enough of their grasp of life to wish to conceal it, and so only my tone belied the carelessness of my words when I said: “Do they go in strict rotation? Are there so many?”

  They laughed. “One or two. There have been one or two, believe me. Women!” And John put on the face of knowing, reluctant bewilderment, contemplating the way they were attracted to Paul.

  Jenny said suddenly: “I wish you’d offer to type his thesis for him, Helen—” And added: “Otherwise Isa will.” She looked at my face as if she were entreating me out of some threat to herself.

  “Oh, yes.” John’s voice jumped to the eagerness of hers. “Go on, Helen.—Because she will, she will.”

  My annoyance rose a spurt higher at what I saw as an obvious acceptance that I wished to bait Paul Clark’s interest, and that they, tickling the beetles along with a blade of grass, wanted to connive and watch. “Damn it, why should I? What an idea! I haven’t the slightest intention of spending my evenings over a typewriter for Paul or anybody else. …”