Paul was gently whirring the handle of the machine. “Look, old fellow, listen to the lovely noise. …” But Jenny covered it again authoritatively. “No, he’s too frightened. It must have some association for him we don’t understand.” And she repeated to Paul a theory from one of the books on child care in which she was increasingly absorbed. Then we went on to speak of the proposal to buy a house. Paul mentioned the house of an acquaintance at the office that possibly might be for sale. “It doesn’t matter about it being old,” she said, wiping the baby’s unwilling face with a napkin. “We couldn’t afford a new one, anyway. I’ve found that out in the week I’ve been round the agents. But how do the bedrooms face?” Paul had been there only once, and could not be sure. She stood listening to him with her head tilted seriously. “You see, children’s bedrooms should face east, so that they get the sun when they wake up in the morning.”
When John came in I said: “Paul’s got a house for you in Parkcrest.” Jenny and he looked at each other and her nose wrinkled—“Oh, is that where it is—”
“Why?”
“Well, we thought we’d like to stay on somewhere around Hillbrow—our friends are here, or most of them—and somehow all the progressive, less materialistic people seem to live here.”
“Parkcrest belongs so solidly to the small bourgeois with his wife and his children. …” added John.
I began to laugh. It was not the kind of laughter that draws others warmly in, even if they do not know its cause. I laughed on my own and could hear my own laughter, a woman’s high peal, coming down through the room the way one sometimes hears a laugh in a restaurant and turns to see where it comes from. Paul looked at me with the little bracket of a smile marking the corners of his mouth. “Hillbrow,” I said, “full of dear old ladies living in boarding houses—that’s all—it’s just the idea of Hillbrow being a Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village.”
When John and Jenny were annoyed, they had a way of discounting the perpetrator of the annoyance by pretending that they were too much occupied in the conduct of their own affairs to notice unimportant comment. Now they both had their eyes fixed on some point in the room that ignored me, and he said, not as casually and irrelevantly as it might seem, “I asked Nathoo Ram for Thursday, Jen. And I’ve put off the von Berheims.” “Oh, good. It’ll be the girl’s day off and that’s always better for tempers all round.”
“D’y’know, Paul,” he said, with a careless laugh, “we run the risk of getting kicked out of this building every time Nathoo Ram comes? There’s a clause in the lease that says no non-Europeans are allowed on the premises unless in the capacity of servants.”
Chapter 23
It always amazes me to notice the disproportion of feeling to action which human beings show in their lives. In theory, there is an abstract value put on event which has little basis in reality. It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women—a new job, a new town, a divorce—which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves. This gives a shifting quality to the whole surface of life; decisions made with reason and the tongue may never be made valid by the heart—a woman may continue to love her husband when all her friends agree she was perfectly right to rid herself of such a worthless creature. And it also gives rise to those small mysteries which affront us when what we consider the appropriate emotions fail to appear in people: his friends are shocked by the passive acceptance of his wife’s leath by a man who cannot explain, for he scarcely knows it himself, that her presence has been dead to him for several years.
The changes of the next few months of my life came about almost absently. I passed through them like someone pushing a way unseeing through a crowd, her eyes already on the figure she knows is on the other side. I left the University with less emotion than I had sometimes felt over giving up a dress that I no longer wore; I saw my mother and father off at the station when they left for England with the mildly stimulated response to their excitement that one catches from even the most casual of holiday farewells, and that disappears the moment the train pulls out and you turn into a café where the measureless fascination of your own life waits over coffee.
Because they were preoccupied with the imminence of their “trip,” as this crowning fulfillment of success, solidity and privilege was always referred to by Mine people, they were less upset by my leaving the University than they might have been. My father had for some time been drawn toward the trap of the parent who gives his child the education he himself endows with the mystical powers of what has been denied him: informed as he believed I must be with this power, must he not doubt all his opinions where they conflicted with mine? If I wanted to leave the University before getting my degree, might not the fostering independence of the University itself be proved in this …?
My mother said: “Of course it’s this man behind it. I’ve told you all girls are alike. It’s a waste of money sending them to a University. As soon as some man comes along they forget all about their great keenness to study. I knew we’d be throwing our money out.”
I had taken Paul home with me to the Mine once or twice, and although the Sunday with its elaborate dinner and lack of conversation was hardly a success (Paul was polite but endured the day by seeming not to be there, his tall freckled brow behind the newspaper, a boredom that agitated me expressed in the angle of his legs), my parents accepted him for what he sounded to be rather than what he was. The son of an old respected Natal family—the fact that the Clarks were wealthy was pleasant, but what really impressed my parents was that Paul’s father was a Justice of the Peace and that “Natal” was in itself a guarantee of pure English blood and allegiance to England, the distinction of an eternal Colonialism they desired above all else. Like most parents on the Mine, they feared to find themselves with a son-in-law with an Afrikaans name; if it happened, they would say: “He’s Afrikaans, you know, but very nice, so what does it matter?”—but the disappointment would never be swallowed. If one’s daughter went so far as to marry a Jew, at least one would get the awe and sympathy with which people regard aberration.
But Paul could not have sounded more suitable, with his solid Anglo-Saxon background, and along with the suitability they naturally assumed the satisfactory pattern of his relationship with me. The young people were going about together pretty steadily—nowadays parents are not expected to ask, of course, but still, one sees. … When his position improves (or some such inevitable delay is over) there will be an engagement, a wedding (a big one with all the old residents of Atherton and the Mine? Or perhaps a quiet one with just His Family …). Anyway, Helen would be comfortably settled, and that was all one could ask.
If my father was disappointed because I had not graduated, and my mother felt that money had been wasted on me, there was at the same time consolation for them, generated by my mother, in these indications that I was proving myself no less, if no more, than any other daughter of their world. In my mother’s softening toward me over the waste of my father’s money—she judged only by official results and it did not occur to her that although I did not have a degree I might have benefited by my years at the University—I could detect a curious note of satisfaction in seeing me caught by what she believed was rightly the inescapable; the ceremonial of engagement, marriage, a “nice little home.”
They were gone; my father with his bowling kit (he had at last given up tennis) and a letter of greeting from the Atherton Rotary Club to a Rotary Club in the south of England, my mother with the pigskin handbag presented by the ladies of the Mine. I was working temporarily in the bookshop that had employed me during vacations; Jenny and John had found a house at last, in the very suburb which they had scorned.
All this, though it affected its conduct from day to day, exis
ted lightly on the perimeter of my life; nothing could touch me at this time but Paul. My love for him was at that extreme, exclusive, intensely selfish stage when nothing and nobody interested me unless connected with him. All the small pleasures I had enjoyed before were blocked out by the strong joy of him—the shop windows I had lingered before, the poetry I had murmured over, the half-heard conversations in busses—the immediacy of life streamed past me ignored: I was fixed only on him. Food was actually tasteless unless I ate with him, in music it seemed I heard the tenderness, the excitement and the sadness of our love-making. Like some surgical alteration to the structure of the brain that blocks out certain capacities of thought and action, passion paralyzed my responses to anything outside its own image.
Although Paul was gregarious by nature, we saw less and less of our friends. I did not want to share him with anyone, was largely oblivious of any company other than his own, and he was so caught up in his work and in me that there seemed to be little time to spare for others. When we went to a concert or a play we would be surprised to be reminded by friends met in the foyer that it was two or even three weeks since we had seen them. “Where have you been?” someone would say. And we would look vaguely apologetic, the air of two people who have gone to ground, lightly affronting the group by their lack of need of them, setting up the slight irritation of an envious curiosity. Sometimes they merely waved, faces turned toward us over the heads of the crowd in recognition of the separateness we had retired into. Once or twice it was Joel whose big dark head I saw (even from the back I always recognized him instantly in a crowd) and it did not seem strange that I should be content to smile and flutter my hand, and not make the effort to go up and talk to him, our old, deep, dependable understanding of no more claim than casual acquaintance before my preoccupation with Paul and myself.
Even the limited interest of my job did not trouble me. It was so far from the work demanding and transforming all my energies and imagination that I had hoped would present itself to me through the University that, had it had any real place in my life at the time, it would have filled me with frustration. But the days passed quickly among the smell of books, and I earned enough money to keep myself in Johannesburg. Paul’s was the job into which I projected all my pride and interest.
I was now typing the thesis to which I had so vehemently denied I would give any time. I looked forward to the hour or two I spent over it every evening after supper, watching the phrasing and the punctuation as if it were a piece of literature. One evening when we had had a little argument over syntax—How many times must I tell you, he said, I don’t want a ghost writer, I want a typist—and it had ended in laughter and my getting my way, I said to him as I picked up fresh carbon and paper: “You know when you first came back from Rhodesia the Marcuses wanted me to offer to do this for you.”
He smiled, and said through teeth clenched on an empty pipe, “And you didn’t?”
“No. I said why the hell should I.”
He stretched out his foot and gave me a prod on the thigh. “Hoighty-toighty. Well, if you hadn’t changed your mind eventually, it certainly never would have got done.”—In the lethargy which sometimes comes up in reaction against a piece of trying work accomplished, he had let his thesis lie unpresented for four months, simply because he could not bring himself to go to the trouble of having a fair copy made of it.
I said as I typed: “They annoyed me by making a sort of privilege out of it, like wiping the blackboard for teacher. They kept impressing me, if you don’t offer Isa will do it.”
“Oh that,” he said shortly. He leaned across to the table and took up my pen, made an alteration on the sheet he was reading over. “I suppose they lost no time in letting you know about that.”
“About what?”
“Isa.” He put the pen back. “They were always dead against it. I don’t know why. Some sort of antagonism they have against her. They were right, of course, it was a mess and a mistake from the beginning. But not for their reasons.”
I had stopped typing and I kept reading along the lines of keys; the letters, figures, hieroglyphics, a chip on the tail of the question mark. I felt I was waiting for something to happen inside me. “Paul, I didn’t know about anything. I mean Isa. You’ve had an affair with her?”
He looked up; half-surprise, half-concern, with the suggestion of accusation that comes from disbelief. The intensity of the expression gave his face the vividness that was his greatest attraction. I saw him most pointedly, it seemed, as accident sometimes arranges things, at the particular angle which was my personal vision of him, the turn of his face that I could see with my eyes shut; that I can see still.
I thought of Isa, willed the sight of her, crinkling up her eyes at me over a glass, oddly haggard with her hair hanging round her like a little girl, precociously young with her hair drawn up off her long head as if it were painted on. “You slept with her?” I wanted to make it real to myself. Isa ugly toward the end of the evening when she had had a lot to drink and was tired. Isa making someone like Herby purr in the joke of her attention like a cat.
Paul merely made a little movement of culpability that distorted his mouth; lifted his hand swiftly, palm open, questioning.
Somewhere parenthetic to my quickening of concern I was faintly stirred, fascinated by this momentary flash of his existence simply as a man; not my beloved, flesh with ways of its own, a mind, particular, sometimes puzzling—the whole computation of personality of which the essence is that which is always left out, cannot be classified—but simply a living being shaped by its maleness.
“I knew she was fond of you. … You talk well together.”
“Like a vaudeville act.”
The terse casualness of the summing-up fell lightly between us.
I looked at him.
And it came to me suddenly: I did not care. It mattered as little to me now as it did to him. The reaction, the revulsion I had waited for fearfully in myself was not there. I thought with a kind of pride of surrender to something painful and sweet in its dangerous completeness: Nothing matters. Nobody. Not even Isa.
I sat with my hands resting on the typewriter, looking at Paul.
“You look a little drunk,” he said. “That’s rotten brandy of John’s. It kicks you in the back of the head about two hours after you’ve forgotten drinking it.”
Chapter 24
At the end of 1949 I went to live with Paul in the flat in Bruton Heights, Krause Street.
He had had a very bad infection of the throat during which I had gone every day to stay with him, and sometimes spent the night because it was difficult for me to get home alone after dark to Parkcrest—where I had moved, with the Marcuses, to their house. Then when the infection cleared, he had to have his tonsils removed, and I went home with him from the nursing home.
I sent a message to the bookshop to say that I was ill. All day long we were alone together in the hot bright little flat, Paul’s pajamas that I had washed flapping on the balcony, our cigarette smoke blue in the sunlight round the bed, the collection of newspapers, books and lozenges littering the sheets. Walking up the street to the vegetable shop in the morning, I had no compunction about my job, really would not have cared if someone had seen me. In the shop I stood enjoying the little imposture of waiting among all the other housewives, middle-aged women who weighed out their own tomatoes—not too green, not too soft—and smart young women who dangled a car key on the index finger and pointed, without touching, at what they wanted. Back at the flat, Paul would mimic for me the funny, charming speech of the Portuguese market gardeners who both grew the vegetables and ran the shop. I cooked our food and read to him (he liked the sound of my voice reading something familiar, a translation of Stendhal, the poems of Donne) and at twelve we would eat together, the tray between us on the bed. Then I would push the windows as wide as they would go, and pull the curtains. The summer day seemed to curl up asleep outside; we would hear the sound of the native laborers’ picks d
igging the foundations for a new block of flats on the other side of the street.
I lay down beside him (he had the warm puppy-smell of people who are in bed) and with his arm hooked around my neck, he read, very swiftly and silently, detective stories that, the moment I began to follow the lines from the angle at which I lay, sent me off into a kind of singing sleep, like the sound of cicadas rising in my head. Sometimes we made love. I would tease him: “But you’re supposed to be a weak convalescent. If you’re strong enough for this you should be working.” “For some things,” he would say in the hoarse closed whisper which was the only way he could speak, “you don’t need your voice.”
We would lie there quietly, spreading our limbs for coolness on the rumpled sheet. “Listen,” he would say, “everyone’s away. Everyone’s working. The whole town’s reckoning and arguing and persuading and measuring up and putting down. Only us.” And there was a special pleasure in the sense of our desertion, our malingerers’ possession of the hot quiet afternoon in the emptied building and the emptied street. We could still hear the picks, pitching dully and regularly into the earth.
When evening came—we could see nothing but the sky from where we sat, deepening green and now showing a star like a glistening drop of water, though the noise of homeward traffic beat and swirled below—he did not want me to go and I did not want to go. I would run down out into the street again to get a paper. We drank gin and lime juice to the mild intermingling of other people’s radios, city equivalent of the cheeping of birds in the dusk. We did the crossword together in that desire to stretch one’s concentration lazily—like making a muscle—that comes pleasurably from idleness. For half an hour, on the gay confidence of the gin, I felt entirely in command of the pots I set cooking, pans I set sizzling. Paul sat up in bed shelling peas. I shouted a running commentary to him from the kitchen as I cooked. And afterward he liked me to come to him smelling of talcum from the bath, my hair brushed out and the make-up washed off my face, and we lay together listening to records and hearing the roar of the traffic rise, far down, as other people went off to cinemas and visits. Quite late, because we talked so easily at night, circling out from the still center of ourselves to politics and death, the confidence with which we spoke of the uncertain future, the hesitancy with which we spoke of the certain past; gossip, impressions—we fell asleep, curled round each other like two cats in the narrow bed.
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