We ate spaghetti and argued amiably about the election; none of us except Laurie considered that the Nationalists had a chance of coming to power. “The most they can get is a few more seats.” “Forces of reaction be damned—you can’t tell me people have forgotten the way the Nats cheered the Germans on during the war?” “The United Party is moribund.” Laurie drew the slippery strands into his big loose mouth, drooping his eyes sagely. “You can’t rely solely on the popular appeal of Smuts. Like a poor film counting on some idolized Face to put it over.” “Well there you are, Laurie—you fill in your entry predicting victory for the Nats. Dr. Malan our Prime Minister. Win a hundred pounds.” Laurie’s fat face creased into paunchy laughter. “Believe me I would, but somehow it seems a bit disloyal.”
Beneath the inconsequence of my part in the talk I was aware, as on another level, of the hollowed-out feeling within my body, a shaken newness hidden, yet like the trembling of one’s hands when they have been put to some delicate strained balance of muscle in the performance of an unfamiliar skill. Somewhere I was withdrawn in the consciousness of this, and I watched and listened, even talked, from something of the still center of the cat, blinking out of itself into a room, or pregnant women, who hold themselves secret and contemplative. I found myself watching Joel and Paul closely; Joel’s face when Paul was talking, Joel’s manner when he spoke to Paul. And when the certainty came to me: Joel likes him—I knew why I had been watching them. I had wanted Joel to like Paul. To admire him, even. When Joel gave me the opportunity by offering me a cigarette, he must have been puzzled by the depth of the smile I felt come into my eyes for him; grateful, appealing, confessing—the smile with which a woman presents her child, or her lover.
And so the strangely commonplace Sunday evening passed; I even spoke to my mother on the telephone, a polite, quietly pleasant conversation of inquiries and answers, and the promise that I would be home for the week end after next, if not the next.
The odd, self-conscious unreality of facing other people after making love with Paul passed so soon that I did not remember it had ever been. In the busyness of our lives and the casual proximity of John and Jenny our time alone together was limited and we grew increasingly reckless in our passion. Of course, we had whole long evenings together in Paul’s flat, but there were many nights when his work took him to meetings and he would come to the Marcuses’ to have coffee with me at eleven or twelve o’clock, and there were also nights when both he and I had work to do. If I took my books and went with him to his flat, we found that neither of us got anything done; we would lie on his bed in the dark, smoking and talking and drifting into a delicious slow love-making that left us exhausted and longing only to sleep where we lay. And then instead of sleeping, we would begin to make love all over again in order to stave off the horrible time when we would have to get up and go into the cold to take me home. The next day I would sit in a lecture theater with my head lightening to sleep with the low sound of the professor’s voice, and at lunchtime we would hear each other’s voices, faint and secret over the telephone, the clatter of a typewriter in the offices of the municipal Native Affairs Department at his end, and the enclosed echo of the public telephone booth at my end, somehow emphasizing the laughing, tender sympathy we had for each other’s weariness.
So we would resolve that I must work at the Marcuses’ flat. He would bring his reports to write up or he would read or talk to John and Jenny if they were in, and we should have the comfort of each other’s presence. But it was on these occasions that we found ourselves becoming more and more bold. The Marcuses would go to bed eventually and I would feel the edge of the electric light worrying my eyes like grit, and know that I was too tired to concentrate any longer. Paul would sprawl in his chair yawning again and again that quick young animal yawn, showing his teeth like a tiger weary of the cage, and say to himself: I must go. I must go home. Then we would rest on each other a moment in love and the desire for sleep. And the desire for each other, a strength beyond our tiredness, a freshness beyond our day-depleted energy would suddenly and desperately seize us, and with the fear that one of the Marcuses might come in for a book or something forgotten, at any moment, and the sweet inhibiting agony of withholding from each other those intimately known particular cries with which each found his pleasure intensified by the knowledge of the pleasure of the other, we made hasty and trembling love. Once the need came upon us irresistibly when the Marcuses had gone to have a bath, and we had promised to have coffee ready for them when they came out. With their voices a few yards away coming with the strip of light beneath the bathroom door, we lay on the floor, unable to resist as the salmon is unable to deny his death leap upstream. The inflamed bars of the ugly radiator burned over our heads, we smelled the city-ground dust of the carpet. Yet in our ignoring of the situation, with its threat of sordidness and embarrassment instead of danger, there was an element of the real, deep, dreadfully dignified moment of wild creatures, who accept their mating as compulsively and unconditionally as their birth or death. We could not postpone our need of each other for a more convenient place or a more socially acceptable time; we had not reduced love to the status of an appointment for tea. Although Paul was my first lover, and although, or perhaps because, I had been brought up in the world of the Mine where all human relationships were seen as social rather than personal, I had by some miracle grown up woman enough to recognize this proudly. I regretted nothing that I did with Paul, suffered none of the timid shames that sometimes come, despite reason and intellect, to women who have rejected the nurturing of a sterile gentility. And in the beginning of our relationship as lovers, I became aware, too, of the merging, in my love, of aspects of Paul which in any other human relationship would seem far removed from one another: my pleasure in his body and the work he had chosen to do, his involvement with the dreary, hidden life of the Africans, and his appetite for enjoyment, for dancing and drinking and talk, became one, each neither more precious nor even more intimate to me than the other.
Much later Paul was to say to me with hopelessness and fascination, as if he stared at something he could not see the end of: “We’re terribly involved with each other.” And I was to say, to avert his eyes and my own from it: “That sounds like Isa. The sort of thing she says, all dilated pupils.” But now, at the beginning, the total involvement, the man, the lover, the purpose, was only delight, a joy to be exclaimed over inside oneself.
The job that Paul did first interested then excited me. There was nothing romantic about it, except that it was poorly paid, a vocation rather than a profession. Yet it was the only kind of job, unless one was a priest working in a location mission, that could bring a white man deep into the life that went on behind the working faces of the Africans who surrounded us. Even a doctor working in a native hospital only touched the lives of his patients in one situation, that of hurt or illness. But as a welfare officer—first he had been a junior, now he was an assistant to the chief—Paul entered into the gamut of the Africans’ lives. Of course, he knew them chiefly in trouble, seldom in joy, but as he explained, the damnably wonderful thing about them was the way they scaled down their standards of expectation so that no matter how wretched and unlivable their lives were, there was always the possibility of some whiff off the abundance of life bellying momentarily the sails of their spirit. A joke, a good pinch of snuff, even a promise you might not be able to keep, brought out the living eagerness that ugliness and dreary dispossession stifled interminably but could not kill.
At this time Paul was handling what was officially termed “Poor Relief”—the work of the department was divided into two sections, the other headed “Housing.” The work that his section and in fact the whole department did was in principle the same as that done by similar municipal or government welfare organizations all over the world. Investigation into the homes of delinquent children, maintenance of deserted wives and families, some sort of succor for the extreme situations which breed out of poverty. All this
is commonplace in America or Europe. Everywhere in big cities there is a human silt of misfortune, a percentage of waste that through weakness, disability and the inevitable pressure of urban life, is cast out by the city and yet by the city’s guilt and conscience is kept alive. But in South Africa there is one difference; a difference so great that the whole conception of charity must be changed. The people among whom Paul worked were not the normal human wastage of a big industrial city, but a whole population, the entire black-skinned population on whose labor the city rested, forced to live in slums because there was nowhere else for them to live, too poor to maintain themselves decently because no matter what their energy, their skill, their labor was not allowed value above subsistence level. So he spent his days taking to this gigantic artificial pauperdom the palliative measures designed by sociologists for the small percentage of a city’s poor.
He was intensely aware of this and sometimes the knowledge of it, incontrovertible fact kicking away the sense of achievement from beneath the dupe of a difficult day well managed, would throw him into a mood of restless depression.—I noticed that with him, unlike other people I knew, depression did not produce inertia; he would want to go out, tackle things with a kind of anxiety and leave them unfinished, constantly search for someone to talk to so that if you were alone with him he exhausted you with his compulsiveness. “What’s the good of handing them out blankets when they need votes—?” he’d say. “Edna and her crowd are right. I’m wasting my time. Truly. One step away from the dear old ladies of the church, distributing buttered buns and alms.” At this I grew indignant. “We can’t all live historically, and leave it at that. Very comforting if we could. What are you supposed to do, let them freeze or starve while they’re waiting for the millennium?”
“I’m an enemy of progress because I am helping to resign them to their lot. Two-pound-ten a month pension and a delightful hessian shelter, and you’ll be so enchanted with your life that you’ll prostrate yourself before the white man forever.”
“Well, I don’t see why one can’t do both—support their right to emancipation and make their lives a bit more bearable in the meantime. That seems to me the most admirable thing anyone can do.” Paul laughed at my championing of him, but perhaps more than my lover, or a credo, it was the personal myth by which I wanted to live and which I had now embodied in him, that I was defending so jealously.
Paul worked very hard and rarely within the limit of set hours. The fact that there were no telephones in the native townships except in official offices, clinics and schools made it necessary for the welfare workers to make all their visits to the people’s homes, even for the most trivial inquiry, personal ones, and he spent his mornings, at least, driving out on investigations. His life came to me as a perpetual journey through the lives of others; snatches of their personalities, their predicaments, came on his speech and the vividness of his face, and filled me with enthusiasm and the sense of a closeness to life which I had never before known. The Mine was unreal, a world which substituted rules for the pull and stress of human conflict which are the true conditions of life; and in another way, the University was unreal too: it gave one the respect for doubt, the capacity for logical analysis, and the choice of ideas on which this equipment could be used to decide one’s own values—but all this remained in one’s hand, like a shining new instrument that has not been put to its purpose. In my case I sometimes looked at its self-evident efficiency (Miss Shaw has written an intelligent and painstaking paper on the prosody of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This examination of the sources of group conflicts is an excellent piece of work, indicative of a grasp of her subject unusual in a student …) and wondered what the purpose was. What Joel had said once about belonging only to the crust, beneath which the real life lay, came back to me. Paul was rooted in that life, in the rural, slow-gestured past and, more important, the confused and mazelike city life of the present.
He burst into the flat one afternoon at about three o’clock. I was sitting at a space I had cleared for myself at the table piled with Jenny’s sewing, doing some work. He threw down his coat, came over to me with the cold hands and light face of someone who is stimulated by talking to people and driving through a city on a gray afternoon. He put his hands to warm into the hollow of my neck under my dress. “What’s addling your little brain now?”
I looked down at the half-typed sheet, the notebook with its scrawled points. Nineteenth-century English novelists. The kind of paper that thousands of students have written before me, thousands will write after me. The engraving of George Eliot with her massively intelligent horse face and her two bunches of ringlets staring up from an open book.
I felt stale and cramped, suddenly reminded of the woman who sat in the window of the invisible mender’s shop, crouched over old stockings. I dismissed myself. “And where have you come from so early?”
“Sophiatown. One of those erring husbands floored me this afternoon. I used all the classic arguments about responsibility and duty to persuade him to come back to his wife—the poor thing can’t seem to keep him home for more than ten days at a stretch. He’s one of those little men with wise monkey faces who make good craftsmen. He listened to me politely as if he understood it was my job and I had to get my piece over with. Then he said, producing something irrefutable, something we couldn’t fail to agree on—‘But she’s so ugly. Tell me, how can a man live with such a face?’” He shook his head. “—And, my God, she is a damned ugly woman; I couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for him.”
“So what did you say?”
He sat down in a chair and pushed his fingers through his hair. “You’re no oil painting yourself, I told him.—Couldn’t say a damn thing. She is ugly.—And he roared with laughter. We both did. We sat in my office laughing like two men in a pub.”
He laughed again at the thought of it, but I sat looking at my papers.
“Paul, what am I staying on at University for? Why don’t I get a job—?”
“But, my dear girl, you’re going to get a degree?” He knew what I meant, but he liked to test me.
I felt enormously disconsolate. Somehow Paul and the monkey-faced man laughing together in the office made me impatient with myself. “When I’ve got it, what’ll I do? I don’t want to teach. Any sort of academic life—I wouldn’t like it. I’ve never had any desire to write. So what’ll I be? A nicely educated young lady.”
“Darling, why do you ask me? If you want to leave University, if you want to get a job, for Christ’s sake why don’t you? I can’t stand you when you’re timid and uncertain. Damn it all, you’re not under Mummy’s wing now, are you?”
“But I am. So long as I stay at University and they keep me, of course I am.”
I went over to him and put my arms round his knees; he played with my hair, tugging it back behind my ears. “They’re looking for a house again,” I said, speaking of the Marcuses. “Jenny definitely pregnant?” “Almost certain.” We looked at each other as if to say, how can people let these things happen. “That’s the trouble with being married,” he said. I smiled. “But it can happen to any of us.” “Yes, but when you’re married the social sanction makes you careless. People say they won’t be, but they always are. You know … what does it matter, after all, if something should go wrong, we are married. … And there you are. Houses, families, necessity for money and more money, all the things you want to do pushed off into some vague future.” We held each other close in our agreement on this. The idea of domestic life came to me as a suction toward the life of the Mine, a horror of cosy atrophy beckoning, and it was becoming impossible for me to ignore the fact that even the marriage of John and Jenny had some disquieting elements for me.
“Joel once suggested marriage as the career for me. I was indignant.”
“Did he? I wouldn’t want a woman to make a career of me. If being married turns into a career afterward, that’s too bad. But I’d want it to start off because whatever else she wanted to do, she wanted to
do it living with me.”
I knew that I had not conveyed accurately what Joel had said and meant, but the small injustice to his perception seemed unimportant. I closed my eyes and was conscious with a kind of pleasurable fear that the whole world had narrowed itself down frighteningly into the possession of what I felt in my arms; my life had settled on Paul. “That’s what I want,” I said. “Whatever else I do, I want to do it living with you. The marriage part is incidental.” He dragged me up from the floor and kissed me as if I had something in my mouth he wanted to take from me. We had one of those moments of pure fascination in the absorption we had in each other. He said to me, studying my face with what was almost exasperation, “What is it in you? What are you, after all …? I ask myself that a million times. …” And he touched my face with a finger like a feather, and suddenly took my head in his hands and squeezed hard, as if he would crack a nut.
Later Jenny came back from a walk to the shop at the corner. She had the baby with her in his little cart, where he sat propped upright, his big head wavering in its knitted cap with the cat’s ears. As she wheeled him in she called sharply: “Throw something over the machine, quick!” But his gums had bared in the aghast silent preparation for a howl. She snatched him up and the scream came out, face down in her neck. “He’s terrified of the sewing machine,” she said to Paul. It seemed to me that she never entered the room these days without calling out some warning or instruction—The window, please, there’s a draft and he’s cutting his lower teeth. John, for God’s sake—those drawing pins. You know he puts everything into his mouth. Helen, put on a record with less brass, I think it makes him restless, it’s too loud. …
The Lying Days Page 28
