When they did come it must have been at a moment when politeness had forced me to look away from the stair to answer someone, for suddenly the American boy whom I had seen once with Edna Schiller caught Herby by the shoulder and said exasperatingly: “Good God.—You’re a bloody fool, Herb? We been battling half an hour to get in without your fraternity pin.” Herby broke out in fusses and apologies like a hen flying up off the nest but before he could convince the American that we had been watching, the rest of the party pushed their way up headed by an Isa stimulated by the argument at the door and glinting sharply, in the dimness and her dark dress, with earrings and some kind of broad metal belt. Her quick eyes and the whiteness of her small face and hands caught the light in the same way as her jewelry; darkness did not put her out, make her a vague shape and scent like the other women. The whole force of her personality was defined against the softness, a little knife showing steely and keen in a wicked ripple on dark ground. With her was Paul and a big, beautiful blonde girl.
We looked at each other for a moment like people who look across the water between the deck of a ship and the quayside and then he came over to me and sat down next to me. I had made some sort of conventional laughing greeting to him as well as to the others, but though he had answered the rest with his usual fluent gaiety, he had said nothing to me. He leaned across me to speak to them and his hand pressed down firmly on my thigh as he did so. The gesture was not expedience. The grip of his thumb and his four fingers on my flesh made that clear.
When the music started again he got up and held out his hand for me. He edged a way for us through the groups of men who stood laughing, arguing for attention around slowly smiling girls, and neither resisted nor moved as you pushed past, and as we went through a gauze of thin light I saw a girl turn her head swiftly to look at him; a look that opened her lips and showed a glint of teeth, like the hidden pistil in the softness of a flower. We were buffeted by the soft, blind shapes on the floor; now and then a voice said lightly—sorry! All the ugly, mysterious place turned slowly round us; Christ, the bulbous nude, the candles in their tin holders, the vents high up on the wall that, as you passed beneath them, breathed the fresh night like a queer reminder. Men without girls stood watching the dancers, their hands hanging as if something had just fallen from them.
My one hand lightly touched against the texture of Paul’s jacket and the other held his, a warm hand, not thin, in which you felt the bones. He said: “I saw a friend of yours today. Joel Aaron.”
“Oh, where?” I asked with pleasure, hardly knowing what he said.
“Bumped him in town.” When he wanted to talk, he had to press his chin back and down away from me, looking at me along his small nose with the beautifully curved nostrils. “I didn’t know you knew him. But he seems to know all about you.”
I said: “He’s the best friend I’ve ever had—” It sounded lame and almost insincere. I arched back from Paul a little to give what I had put so poorly the emphasis of my look.
But he was looking at me, smiling, ignoring my look. “Is he, is he. …” he murmured, and drew me back to him.
“Yes …,” I said, and it no longer seemed to matter what we had been talking about. Under the flow of cold air from the vents he dropped his head and kissed me delicately and passionately.
We moved round and round, slowly, among the others. I was sunk in the voluptuous relief of leaning against his body: ah, how I wanted this, I kept saying to myself, how I waited for this from you. A kind of midnight frenzy was on the place now. Smoke made the dark mist and the candlelight radiance, and the lonely young men were a little drunk. Two traffic policemen had wandered in and, with some hazy notion of keeping in with the law, were being made much of. Marcel carried a demijohn of wine above the crush; the one policeman put his foot, with the calf gleaming militarily in its fine high boot, up on a bench. The other man stood jeering amorously with a girl who had put his peaked cap on her huge head of curls that danced like springs as she moved. As we passed we heard his deep voice speaking a coy Afrikaans, egging, insinuating.
Everyone looked at two girls who had begun to sway before each other, each holding the gaze of the other like cocks about to fight. A woman danced with her whole body droopingly suspended from her arms about a man’s neck, her face sunk and eyes closed.
I smiled to Paul in the dark half-jokingly: “We’re just like the rest.”
He said: “Of course.” And I was suddenly pleased; I felt a kind of loyal partisanship with the crude advances of the traffic policemen, the lonely determination for gaiety with which men without girls passed the metallic-tasting wine, the hoarse, sentimental voice of the gramophone—the whole half-pathetic, half-greedy demand of the place. It seemed to me that all we wanted was music, someone to hold, a little talk. It made all human beings seem so simple; it was the touch of love that sounded so impossible in books and speeches. The one touch of love, of regret for barriers erected, misunderstanding, sneers and indifference, without which all intentions came to nothing. But although it was needed there so badly, it was not a thing that always attended or even, paradoxically, survived the conscious efforts of human beings to reach one another. Look at Mary, I thought; I tried hard with Mary. They try with justice, with declarations of human rights, with the self-abnegation of Christ. Love one another.—It becomes nonsense when you decree it. An absolute, like black and white, that has no corresponding reality in the merging, changing outlines of living.
When it does come, it comes irrelevantly; out of the unworthy cheap atmosphere of a place like this; out of the deep receptivity of a personal emotion. But it doesn’t matter where it comes from. Gods come like that, not in the places prepared for them, but appearing suddenly among the rabble. I only wished it would last, that I could take it with me away from the warmth of Paul and these faces pitiful with the strange strength of the desire to assert life in pleasure.
We went up the stairs and into the quiet street. We could not even hear the music. The night was clear but the blue light of the police station showed as if it burned through a fog. His short, self-possessed profile fascinated me with its detachment. When he had kissed me he said: “I wanted to do that properly,” and we both swayed a little, like people who have just stepped out of some unfamiliar motion, a swing or a boat. I drew his head down and, in the street, kissed him again, pulling the flesh of his lower lip through my mouth with soft ferociousness. When I let him go he gripped my arms with a little shake of pride and gratification, smiling at me. And all his gaiety and restlessness swept back to him with a boast. “Let’s get them some hot dogs,” he cried. “Come, there’s a stand about two blocks away.” We ran as if the air were nipping our heels.
Back in the Cellar again, the warm exhausted air burned against our cool cheeks. The others were hungry and exaggeratedly delighted with the hot dogs. Isa held hers away from her dress as if its steamy heat were dripping and called to me: “You shouldn’t let Paul drag you around the streets. He could have gone on his own.” But I only said, with the swagger in my voice of the child who has been tumbling out in the cold to the grownup who huddles at the fire: “But it’s a beautiful night, really—I could have walked miles.”
Later I smelled her perfume and found she was beside me. I said: “Do you want another? There’s a half left here—” I felt her looking at me appraisingly in the dark. “Yes,” she said to me, “you’re the kind. You’re a giver. You’ll pile everything on the bonfire. But don’t marry him.” She was a little drunk, but I felt also that she had caught from the atmosphere of the place, as I had, a sympathy and a softening toward the pain and danger of being human. So I was not annoyed or offended at her presumption. I merely mumbled something foolish about a gypsy’s warning. “Cassandra,” she said irritably, on a rising note, “Cassandra tipping it straight from the horse’s mouth. …”
Herby had his head on the big blonde’s shoulder; he had to sit up very straight to get it there, because he was much shorter than she. Jen
ny was begging John in a low, insistent, reasonable voice to come home. And Paul was offering some wine to a straggling group of burly young men who had hailed him and now drew him admiringly into their midst with the air of showing off in the flesh someone about whom they often spoke among themselves. They were heavily built, and the two blond ones had beards on their broad faces. They listened with smiles of anticipatory pleasure while he spoke: he was repeating some anecdote, apparently at their request; now he was mimicking someone; he shook his head and gave a quick twist to his shoulders, tossing the plaudits of their laughter away like the butt of a cigarette.
I watched him and suddenly Isa’s idea of me excited me; the warning, if that was what it was, aroused in me in the desire to stake my whole life, gather up from myself everything I had stored against such a moment, and expend it all on Paul. Everything on the bonfire. I stood up. Our heads were still in the smoke, the music and the voices, but a stiffening cold was coming up from the cement floor of Marcel’s Cellar, the cold of the earth that comes with the early hours of morning.
Chapter 22
It was on a Sunday afternoon that we made love for the first time. I remember the deserted silence coming up from the streets where we had forgotten to pull the curtains; dawning on me slowly as I opened my eyes and saw, past the corner of the old eiderdown that covered us and the piece of feather that flattened every time I breathed, Paul’s room. I could see his shirt on the floor; one shoe. My skirt and the light heap of my stockings thrown down as only a man would handle them, irritated with their clinging substancelessness, snagging them on the wood of the chair. My sweater I had so often worn in our house in Atherton. Perhaps the last time I had had it on was there.
Paul’s head was buried in the heat of my neck beneath my hair as if he did not need to breathe. His arm lay across me like a spar. He might have been lying dead if it had not been for the little line of wetness that I felt him draw now and then with his tongue on my skin. I looked on his exhaustion with wonder; how far it was from the frenzy in which I had seen him snatched up—ten minutes ago, was it? And the squash racket behind the door, the alabaster ash tray—it was the kind of thing his mother must have given him—the three tomatoes ripening on the window sill, the calendar, the telephone: the casual disorder of our dropped clothes, lying there, provided the only link that related that unspeakable intensity, to these witnesses out of ordinary life. I remembered how when I was a child I had wondered how people could make love and then walk calmly in the streets, fit into rooms naturally among people and objects, with no revealing mark. …
I said to him: “I almost thought you were in pain.” He did not seem to hear. He lifted his heavy arm and put his hand up to draw my head down into the warmth, groping as if it were dark. I found with delight that his ears and his temples were still burning. “You seemed just as if you were in great pain. The way you arched your neck—” Now he smiled at the wonderment in my voice. I could not explain to him the blast of tender anguish that had come upon me, quite maddening and unbearable, at the astonishing onslaught of his passionate release. I could not believe myself, my body, the mesh against which he struggled like a creature meeting death: I once had seen a bird die wildly, like that, its wings magnificently caught up in some net you could not see. How often again I was to say that to him! Are you in pain? To grip him and beg him with a kind of savage insistent tenderness, even tears. What is it? What is it?
Now he opened his eyes dazedly with the slow smile of someone who hears something about himself he cannot know, and while I traced the soft brush of his mustache (it was younger and lighter than his hair, bleached, like the short hair at his temples, brighter than brown) he said with almost an element of curiosity in his voice: “This is nothing. You understand? It will be better for you next time. I promise you, it will be wonderful for you. I want to make it wonderful for you.”
I said: “You thought I’d made love before.”
“Well, yes, of course.”
I was silent. He kissed me.
“I was so ashamed. I wanted to invent lovers I’d had. But that would have been all right only so long as you didn’t make love to me. … Was I all right?” I suddenly felt that perhaps I had not pleased, that in my inexperience I was not a good lover.
He kept on kissing me. What I had said seemed to fill him with an anxiety of delight. “Oh, I adore you, adore you.” He stopped and looked at me with exasperation. “My little demi-vièrge.”
His words sent an afterglow of passive sensuality through me, his bright, tousled, roused face above me, the blood pulsing against the angle at which he held his neck, seemed to bring me to a marvelously full consciousness of being alive. Those empty moments of falling terror when the wings of life suddenly cease and drop and all the props of one’s effort cave in meaninglessness—not because they may fail, but because the end itself seems nothing—seemed secured against at last in this. This was the answer of reality to a phantom: perhaps the mystery of the end to which life is directed is simply the miracle of the means. With my arms about this other young human whom I had just taken symbolically and strangely into my body, I felt myself secure against the void of infinity.
So I, who had inherited no God, made my mystery and my reassurance out of human love; as if the worship of love in some aspect is something without which the human condition is intolerable and terrifying, and humans will fashion it for their protection out of whatever is in their lives as birds will use string and bits of wool to make a nest in the city where there are no reeds.
When it was nearly five and the city afternoon began to darken with winter outside, we sat at the bright-barred heater drinking coffee that Paul had made. I was dressed again, a little self-conscious in the identical order of my clothes with the way I had been before. I felt suddenly like a visitor, looking round at the cheap, yellowish walled room that had the public look of rooms where people never live for long, like the eyes of restaurant cashiers who continually watch comings and goings. Paul’s few things, so eloquent of him as a separate entity, filled me with curiosity. My eyes wandered over the desk with its files and piles of paper, the bottles of green and red ink and the open typewriter, the snapshot of two shy native babies, the good old tapestry chair with the sagging arm where someone made a habit of sitting with his legs slung over, even the rumpled divan where we had lately lain, with its faded blue eiderdown quilt that belonged to an unknown childhood. Here he lived and moved among things when I was not with him and before I had known him: that old quilt must have followed him to boarding school in his mother’s winter parcel and covered him on cold nights in the antiseptic, serge-redolent atmosphere of a boy’s dormitory, his little boy’s rough hands clenched under the cold sheet years away from the softness of my breasts.
He put off the old coat he had used as a dressing gown and got into his clothes, and I watched this strong tender body, so different from my own, take on, like a public manner, the anonymity of men’s clothing. Those thighs with their dark warm hair, that other hair that drew a crucifix on his breast and belly, the bare-looking triangle of bony white at the base of his spine; all this which was withdrawn and secret from his outward appearance to the world made me conscious with a kind of solemnity of what else must be hidden; behind his voice and his impulses, the life he chose and the men and women with whom he chose to live it: even me, and what he believed he had found in me—all the unknown forces of memory, conviction and desire from which his personality glanced off, like a light. And I think I started then that strangest of journeys which is never completed, the desire to understand another in his deepest being. And I knew already, even then, that love is only the little boat that beaches you over the jagged rocks; for the interior something more will be needed.
When we got back to the Marcuses’ flat I was somehow a little irritated to find that they were waiting supper for us. We had not said, when we went out, at what time we should be back, and there was the echo of something irksome in the way Jenny came to the
door of the kitchen as we came through the front door: “Well, now I can heat the spaghetti—at last! What happened to you?” It seemed to me that although she was young, she too had forgotten already the liberation from time, the privileged suspension from all the practical mechanics of life into which it is really a device for plunging men and women deeper than ever, with which love begins. Momentarily there had already dropped across her young, passionate eye the film of the matron, who in suckling children has forgotten the other urgency. We went into the living room and Joel was there, with Laurie Humphrey and John.
“Was she putting grated cheese on it?” Laurie asked. “Did you tell her to put cheese on it?” and I said in a queerly put-out, startled voice: “When did you come? I didn’t know you were coming.” Joel seemed to know that the nervousness of this meaningless compulsion to say something was directed at him, and he lifted his familiar head (what a big, heavy head he had in comparison with Paul!) from the paper over which he and John were bent and said with a mock air of relief at finding someone who would be bound to know: “Now come on, Helen—who’s going to win in Calvinia—?” And because I was still in the startled moment of taking in the changed relationships with which the room was innocently charged, and so merely registered the convention of a question requiring thought instead of realizing what he had said, my expression of weighing consideration was unintentionally comic. The three men roared with laughter; John with a childlike, expansive delight in someone making a fool of himself, Joel with the gentle human amusement of sharing an absent moment with someone, Paul with a proprietary pleasure in the idiosyncrasy of someone over whom one has the ascendancy of possession in love. The Sunday paper was holding a competition in connection with the national election which was to take place in the coming week: a list was printed with the names of constituencies, the candidates and parties returned at the last election, and the candidates and parties standing for this election. The winner of the competition would be the person who predicted most accurately which party would come to power, and with what majority. Calvinia was a Nationalist stronghold and the seat of Dr. Malan himself, so there could be no possible doubt about who would win Calvinia.
The Lying Days Page 27
