The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  I said to the others: “He once said I looked prim. I was insulted.”

  Above Isa’s murmur, “Quite right, quite right to be,” he said firmly: “That wasn’t all. She remembers the rest.”

  “I worked in a bookshop, and now ‘I am an employee of the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department.’ “

  “Is it as bad as all that?” said Isa, suddenly putting on a social manner of concern.

  “Indeed?” Charles rocked back on his heels, took his drink from her.

  “Typist. Grade E, about. Salary scale, third from the bottom.” I did not know quite what it was that made me talk like this; there was something in Isa’s company that encouraged people to mock at themselves. In me it sounded rather feeble and a little silly. I said: “I’m going to chuck it up. I’m going to get out very soon.”

  “A job like that—you should be doing it for the love of it—” Charles had a way of fixing his look on you; that narrow, diagnostic look as difficult to avoid and as blank to meet as a squint.

  “How you preach, Charles!” Isa was delighted with her disgust. “So bloody sanctimonious about other people’s jobs. When you only cut people up because you love the cutting. So lucky suffering humanity needs to be cut up!—But really what made you get her a job like that, Paul, in the first place?”

  “Well, I wanted to be where he was—”

  “—And it’s the only kind of thing I could get for her there. She’s not trained.” Paul completed my explanation.

  There was a pause, so slight, so brief that I noticed it only because for a moment I heard the general noise of the room. “I see,” said Isa.

  And then I became acutely aware of the pause, which was already over, of the attention of the others, that was already turned from Paul and me in talk. … wanted to be where he was … The innocent way it had come to my tongue, blurting out the simple answer. And a minute before I had had their attention and their sympathy for the vehemence with which I had told them, I’m going to give it up, I’m going to get out soon.

  Depression came over me and drew me back from the other people in the room, so that being incapable of being involved with any of them, I seemed to see all the several groups at once, to watch their mouths shaping talk and their faces and bodies supplementing and contradicting what they said. I felt a dull envy for Isa, taking the small pleasure of the triumphs of her tongue. I thought almost with longing of the struggles she must have given up to content herself with the substitute of these things; and I wished for a moment that I were clever enough to be able to ignore their unreality and emptiness, or that I was another kind of person, a person for whom they could ever have some meaning. In that room full of people whom I knew well enough to fear their curiosity, I wanted to cry. In a bus, in a train, among strangers I would have cried, as people sometimes have to, cannot always wait to be alone. But here I dared not, and so all these people, my friends, became enemies.

  The Indian was talking to me about the dances of her country and bent her draped head over a book on Balinese dancing which Tom Welsh had laid in her lap; it sometimes happened at one of Isa’s parties that some beautiful gentle woman suddenly drew Tom to her side and kept him there the whole evening. They talked very low and no one ever joined them or interrupted, no one ever knew what the long, absorbed conversation had been about. Only Isa would look up, worried, now and then, at the head of the woman, and say good night to her when she left with an extra, compensatory fervor; she felt that the poor woman had been bored.

  Paul had had just enough brandy to key him up to his warmest charm; he wore it like a suit of clothes that has not been worn for a long time but fits as well as ever. His voice and Isa’s flashed back and forth across the room. The “music hall turn” was on between them.

  Arionte said: “I wish so to talk. I have been speaking English only one year now. …” And then he eyed me for a moment. “You say you like Mozart. Just now I play you … Some part the D Minor.”

  There was a relief in jealousy like a sudden scalding. It was something over which we could have an open argument. Paul said: “Helen you know this is ridiculous. What is it you really want to fight about?”

  But I grew afraid.

  I no longer wanted to touch that nervous mass which trembled between us.

  But it seemed to me for the first time that he knew. Later in the dark he said in a loud wakeful voice: “We’re terribly involved. Terribly involved with each other. …”

  And I tweaked at the pretense of jealousy again: “That sounds like Isa. The sort of thing she says, all dilated pupils.”

  He said again, as if the thing was threshing itself about in his mind, showing, disappearing, ungraspable, distressing—“Involved …?” I had no answer.

  We quarreled again about Isa. I would pick up this petty weapon in my sense of weakness; a sudden spiral of irritation that blinded and smarted like a whirlwind; dying in a flurry of dust and dead leaves.

  “I cannot understand why you do this.” He had the exasperated look of an animal worried into anger. And when it had happened a number of times, goaded as I had goaded myself: “Yes, of course I like Isa! All the inadequacies she had as a lover are her virtues as a friend. Christ, she’s a grown-up person! I can talk to her. Yes, I can talk to her and she doesn’t expect me always to be consistent, every word that comes out of my mouth to fit into some idea she’s got about me! Every time I say something I have to watch your face measuring it up; I’ve got to see your eyes change or the expression round your mouth fade—”

  Then he, too, looking about for something to break the silences between us, instinctively felt for it, closed his hand round it. “I think you’re hankering after your mother and father. All this moodiness comes from a part of you that hasn’t grown up. You still wonder if you aren’t being a naughty girl, and it amuses me.” He stared at me obstinately, smiling. “It amuses me.

  “Why are you such a damned hypocrite?” He pressed me.

  Shortening the hem of an old skirt, or caught in the pause in which I sometimes lost the sense of what I was reading, nothing had been further from my thoughts than Atherton and my life there and my mother and father. In fact, the unvarying daily predictability of that life, in which the equal predictability of the life I had imagined had seemed just as assured, seemed as far from me as those curiously vivid anecdotes of babyhood which belong to pre-memory and that we have only come to know through being told by others.

  Yet he had found, as intimacy cruelly makes it impossible not to do, the one spot in my secret assessment of myself that had once been inflamed, and that reddened in tender shame from time to time. I trembled in hurt at this confirmation of what I had feared in myself with humiliation and disappointment. When he saw the roused hostility in my face he must have felt as I did when I was possessed by a drive to torment him, and saw that I had succeeded: the whole challenge died out of him listlessly in a kind of defiant shame; it was not what he meant, what he wanted, after all. And it left a burned-out loneliness in the very center of one’s love for the other.

  I had said: “I want to live with you in the greatest possible intimacy.” That was one of the things I had said so many times, with all the awkwardness in the shaping of the words that makes the things that lie deep and dominant in us so difficult to say.

  I saw this thing turn, like a flower, once picked, turning petals into bright knives in your hand. And it was so much desired, so lovely, that your fingers will not loosen, and you have only disbelief that this, of all you have ever known, should have the possibility of pain. All the time, you are seeing the blood trickling a red answer slowly down your hand.

  Chapter 30

  I left the welfare office at the end of April.

  On the Wednesday of my last week there, my father telephoned me. I went to the telephone expecting the voice of John, with a message from Jenny about some book on antenatal exercises I had promised to get her at the bookshop where I had once worked, and I heard one of the bright, i
nterchangeable voices of the Mine switchboard operators: “One moment. … Your call, Mr. Shaw, you’re through. …”

  Our conversation was not so much tense, as stilted with a kind of shyness. “I just wanted to know how you were, my dear. …”

  “And you? Everything all right?”

  “Oh, yes. Just as usual.—Well, I don’t want to keep you from your work, Helen—”

  “It’s all right. As it happens this is my second last day. I’m changing my job.”

  “Oh?” He wanted to show me how little he wanted to criticize or upset me, my father who had started as office boy and ended up as Secretary in the same office on the same Mine, and for whom a change of job would have been almost as great a disturbance as the transmigration of his soul. “Have you found something that suits you better? That’s very nice.”

  “Well, not yet. I’ve got one or two things in mind. The Belgian Consulate, for one. …” “That should be interesting; a chance to have contact with the wider world. Well, I hope you get it, my dear—”

  I sat down to my desk again: the call scarcely had been an interruption at all.

  An hour later I suddenly asked the girl at the switchboard to get me the Mine number. I heard my father hold back the surprise in his voice as, in his bewilderment with me, he suppressed any show of emotion in case it should be the wrong one in my eyes. “Daddy, do you think I could come home this week end? What do you think—”

  “No, of course, Helen. It will be all right. Your mother won’t say anything, I’m sure. Only don’t say anything to her. Just let it be as if nothing had happened. She’ll be very glad.”—he paused—“Sometimes she’s hasty. And afterward she can’t—it’s not in her nature …”

  “I know. Good, then. I won’t phone her. You tell her and I’ll come. On Saturday. In the morning, most probably.”

  I told Paul that my father had telephoned me and that I was going to Atherton at the week end. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “‘Never darken my doorstep again.’ And how long is it—six weeks?”

  We were having lunch in the basement cafeteria round the corner from the offices, where the smoke and sizzling of hamburgers thickened the noise of the crush, and the hands of the Indian waiters flashed like conjurers’ as they raced to serve too many people at once.

  I shrugged.

  He flicked the two little marbles of butter, buried in a lettuce leaf like pearls in an oyster, onto my roll, and leaned over and took the butter dish belonging to the next table, where two fat young men and an ogling girl were just rising. “Next they’ll be asking tenderly after me. I’ll be coming along for the week end, too. And they’ll be secretly planning their grandchildren.”

  At home where a thousand times we were alone and the tension between us urged it, there was a space cleared for it, it had never been spoken. But now I said: “We’ll never be married.” It was spoken quite simply and flatly, from some part of me that was not aware of mutations of which his easy, half-flippant mood and the restless, food-murky den were one.

  He put his paper napkin down slowly under his hand. It was a gesture halting everything. “Why do you say that?”

  I said, far away, looking at him a long way across the crowded little table: “Because it’s so.”

  “But what makes you say that—” He had the little twitching nervous smile of the onset of strong fear or anger. “You can’t just say it—Why? Why do you?”

  “You know it,” I said again.

  His hands made a flurry of picking up a spoon and fork; faltered beneath his gaze and mine and took up instead the teaspoon needed to stir his coffee. He drank. “Mad,” he said to himself, “things that come to you.”

  The waiter jerked his head for our attention as if he were putting it impatiently round a door. “Sweets, miss?”

  “D’you feel like anything—”

  “What about you? If you do, then.”

  “Well it’s five past already, and you said you wanted to go down to the framer’s. … We might as well go straight off.” He stood up to let me edge past the table in front of him.

  The paper napkin lay in a tight ball beside his plate.

  I lay on the lawn at the side of our house under my bedroom window. The bottom of the jasmine hedge had thinned with age and through it I could see the front garden and the doves which flopped down, every now and then, in the dust and the red leaves blown from the Virginia creeper. Our house was shedding its shaggy summer coat; the leaves had turned bright and brittle, and there were patches where the brick showed under a light tracery of bare tendrils. The cement had worn away with years of rain, and the edges of the bricks were rounded, crumbling.

  Under my head was one of the cushions from the veranda. Don’t take one of the good ones; take an old one from the veranda. Yet who will ever wear out the good ones? What was the occasion for which everything had always been saved?

  I lay letting my eyes follow the line of upended bricks that marked the border of the path and the crescents and circles of the flower beds; so had I followed them with my feet when I was a child, balancing myself against the mild sunny boredom of a summer afternoon. (Where had I read it: It is always summer when you remember childhood. …) The week end was already half over and it all had passed at the tempo of this midmorning. Soon my mother would call out (she knew she would not be clearly heard and so a minute or two after Anna would come slowly round the side of the house, coming right up to me and saying suddenly: The missus says tea, Miss Helen) just as she had called for breakfast this morning and dinner last night. The hours flowed in and out between the beacons of meals, and there was nothing else to divide up the day.

  It had all been so easy in such a matter-of-fact, flaccid way, like the expected resistance of a muscle that is discovered to be atrophied. My mother, who never had the strength to give in, could always evade. She did it this time by creating an atmosphere of convalescence in the house; she treated my father and me, and even herself, as if we were all recovering, shaken, from an illness we did not speak about. We did not speak much at all, in fact; she made it seem as if this was to be expected when one must conserve one’s strength.

  So I lay on the lawn on Saturday afternoon, I lay on the lawn all Sunday morning. I don’t believe I thought at all; just flicked over images in my mind, people and places I had not remembered for years blowing suddenly bright in the darkness behind my eyes the way the wind ruffles and arrests the pages of a picture book. Olwen; the dark settling on the shuffling children in the Atherton cinema on a Saturday afternoon; Mrs. Koch, her veined, elderly feet freed in the sand; myself, standing on the dining-room table while my mother evened the hem of a new dress; the Dufalettes I used to watch through the hedge, so that I could tell them apart more accurately by their feet than by their faces. I was not asleep but I preferred to keep my eyes closed. When they opened involuntarily it was as if something split; the light seared in; then I could see the angle of the house, the hedge, the garden; and, if I rolled half onto my back, on the perimeter of my sky the tops of some of the old fir trees which soughed about the Mine over the faint rough pant of the stamp batteries like the sea drowning the subterranean cries of its monsters. And, just seen behind the Dufalettes’ chimney, the derrick of the shaft head itself. The house, the hedge, the garden, the shaft head: it all said: I am. But when I let my eyelids drop darkness again, nothing was; there were rents, tears, sudden fadings in the vividness of what I saw that proved the nonexistence of these faces, these places: harmless, by being past. Even a threatening image carried reassurance in its ephemerality; nothing more than a fist shaken in the distance by a hand that will never be near enough to strike again.

  The evening before, I had spent what I suppose was an incredible evening at the house of the Compound Manager. D’you think this is all right? Or should I take off the flower?—My mother came into my room in the convention of seeking reassurance about her appearance, as she had done a thousand times before. She wore a green crepe dress with a string o
f pearls and an artificial tea rose, the outfit that, with well-defined variations, would be worn by every other Mine woman there. She smelled, as she always had done, of lavender water. (As a child this weak sweet scent had been a means of social discrimination for me; once when my mother had been puzzled by the identity of a woman who had called in her absence and left no name, and my mother had asked me to describe her, I had answered: She smelled like a nice lady.)

  When she had gone out of my room, repinning the velvet rose, I looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror. I looked very different from my mother, though we were both tall, and I had her red hair. The forehead which she would have “softened” with a few curls I kept bare and prominent, the back hair which she would have cut and permanently waved, I had as long as it would grow, and wound round thickly into a sort of tight little crown. Yellow shantung dress with a peasant-style skirt, bodice tight to show off my breasts. Belt and heavy earrings made of copper medallions (we had tired of native beadwork, and it was beginning to appear among the artificial pearls and American costume jewelry in department stores). Unrouged face, brilliantly painted lips. Short unpainted fingernails with the large heavy dark ring Paul had saved to have made for me by the German refugee. (But that’s a man’s ring, my mother had said, holding out a hand with fingernails of opaque mauvish-pink and her gold-and-diamond engagement ring which was always a little dimmed by the pastry dough that got stuck in the well at the back of the setting.)

  The outfit, the face, that any one of the women I knew at Isa’s or the Marcuses’ might be wearing at this moment. I dragged the earrings down the lobes of my ears; unclasped the belt. But there was nothing else, in the old chocolate box full of jewelry which I took everywhere with me, that I could wear. Porcelain horses that were faultily made and wouldn’t stay on my ears, silver gypsy hoops Isa had once given me; the native beadwork; round pink cabbage roses made of glued seashells which my mother had bought me from some woman who made them because her husband had abandoned her and she had even less talent for making a living any other way.