The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  I put the copper medallions and the belt on again and went to the Compound Manager’s.

  There there were all the sweet things of my childhood that people like myself had lost taste for.—Usually we didn’t eat at all but were offered gin or beer or brandy the moment we walked in, and went on having our glasses filled up until, if it was a party, a big hot dish of curry or canelloni came in with bottles of wine or, if it wasn’t, coffee with confectioners’ biscuits. But here, on the little gazelle-legged tables that had awed me long ago, little flowered dishes of chocolates, toffees and peppermint buttons were put out. At a quarter-to-ten sharp we were led into the dining room and were sat down to the big table from which a shower of painted gauze the size of a bedspread was whipped, baring cake stands and silver lattice baskets filled with cakes and cream-topped scones and tarts, all made by the hostess, like the wide glass plate of sandwiches (for the men, I remembered; one of the axioms of the Mine was that men don’t care for sweet things), all precisely cut and decorated with streamers of lettuce and sprigs of parsley so well washed that here and there a drop of water still gleamed on the curly green. Most people drank two or three cups of tea from the thin, flowered cups which all matched (every Mine hostess had a “best” set that would enable her to serve a dozen or more without using odd cups) and it was not until eleven-fifteen and a quarter-of-an-hour before everyone would rise to go, countering the host’s “But it’s Sunday tomorrow …” with “We must have our beauty sleep …,” that a polished cabinet smelling of new green baize was opened and the men were offered whisky. They stood around sipping at cut-crystal glasses with a rose design, but the women were not offered anything. They drank only at sundowner time.

  The discrimination was not obvious or awkward because the women had grouped themselves apart from the men all evening. I, of course, was with them, sitting on a small spindly chair: You’re a young light one, Helen, we old ones with a middle-age spread need something more solid—and laughing they lowered their flowered or lace bulk into the deep soft chairs and the sofa. One or two took out their knitting; the hostess had a decorated felt bag from which came the fourth of a set of tapestry chair covers she was working. The others exclaimed that they wished they’d brought their knitting, or the hem of a child’s dress that had to be done by hand. That reminded another of a new way of hemming she had read about in a magazine. Oh—someone else thought she’d read that—was it in the Ladies’ Home Journal? No, the other didn’t get the Ladies’ Home Journal, it must be in some English magazine. “Well, I get all my knitting patterns from Good Needlework” said another. And at once they were all talking about the magazines and papers that they “took”; I recognized the names of the neat stacks of thin threepenny women’s papers I had been given to amuse me on visits to their houses fifteen years ago. “I’ve been a subscriber ever since we’ve been on the Mine,” old Mrs. Guff was saying, her head nodding agreement with each word she spoke. “What was that?” someone asked. “Home Chat”—she turned smiling and nodding—”I’ve been getting it for many years.” “I remember,” I said from my chair. “It used to have Nurse Carrie’s page in it. Excerpts from people’s letters were printed in italics, and then Nurse Carrie answered underneath in ordinary print.” They laughed indulgently—but I had got my first inklings about sex from that genteel page, poring over it on the floor of Mrs. Cluff’s sitting room when I was eight or nine.

  Sitting on the delicate chair, I heard again all the warm buzz of talk that had surrounded my childhood. It was as comfortable as the sound of bees; no clash of convictions, no passion, no asperity—unless this last was on a scale so domestically close-knit and contemporary that I could not catch it. Their talk flowed over me, flowed over me, all evening; one after the other, peppermint comfits dissolved in my mouth.

  When at last we rose to leave, I spoke to the men for the first time, although through the evening I had heard snatches of their talk, drifting across the path of my wondering attention. Mine gossip, it had been; and the shares they had been tipped off to buy in the Group’s newly opened Free State gold fields; and—hotly argued—the selection of the team to represent the Mine at an inter-provincial bowling tournament in Natal.

  The Compound Manager said, drawing in his cheeks at the dryness of his last swallow of his whisky: “Helen … So … it’s a long time since you’ve deserted us. You like the city, eh? I don’t think you’ve been to see us since your parents went overseas—?”

  “D’you know,” I said, smiling, “the last time I remember being in your house? The morning of the strike. A Sunday morning, when the Compound boys had a strike over their food, and I came with Daddy to see. They were standing about all over the garden, and we came inside—into this room—and Mrs. Ockert was giving everybody tea.”

  “Oh, no!” he laughed, astonished. “—D’you hear that, Mab—Helen says the last time she was here was that time when we had the strike.”

  “But that’s twelve—no, thirteen years ago,” objected Mr. Bellingan.

  “You were with us,” I said. “I remember you were with us.”

  “Heavens, Helen, you must have been here a number of times after that!” All the gentlemen laughed round me.

  “Well, that’s the last time I remember!”

  They all began to recollect the strike; like a performance of theatricals, taken earnestly at the time, that becomes amusing in the retelling. One had done this; the other had thought that. The Compound Manager put down his empty glass and, hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels, knowing, smiling, at a situation he had dealt with.

  “Ah, but things were still done decently in those days,” said the Reduction Officer. Old men, confronted with two world wars, jet aircraft and atom bombs, sometimes spoke like this of the Boer War, in which they had fought: the last gentlemanly war. “This kind of thing coming up on Monday—we didn’t have that then. But of course the mine boys have always been the good old type of kraal native, not these cheeky devils from the town, don’t know what they want themselves, half the time, except trouble.”

  And that was the one reference anyone there made to the May Day strike of African and colored workers which was only the duration of Sunday away from us.

  When I went back to Johannesburg that Sunday evening I caught a fast train that did not stop at the Atherton Mine siding and so my father had to drive me in to Atherton to the station. We went slowly down the main street, arrested at every block by the traffic lights. The town had changed a great deal since I was a child, slowly, of course, and I had seen it changing, so that while it was happening I had not seen the alteration of the whole structural face, but merely the pulling down of this old building, the filling up of that vacant square where the khaki weed used to grow and the dogs clustered round a poor little vagrant bitch in season. But this evening I had the shock of discovering that in my mind the idea of Atherton carried with it a complete picture of the town the way it must have been when I was nine or ten years old: it rose up in connotation like a perfectly constructed model, accurate in every detail. And I saw that now it really was nothing more than a model, because that town had gone. The vacant lots blocked in in concrete, the old one-story shops demolished; with them the town had gone. A department store was all glass and striped awnings where two tattered flags, a pale Union Jack and a pale Union flag, had waved above the old police barracks. A new bank with gray Ionic columns and a bright steel grille stood on the corner where my mother’s grocer had been; the grocer was now a limited company with a five-story building, delicatessen, crockery and hardware departments, further down the street. As I say, all this had happened gradually, but I saw it suddenly now; it did not match the Atherton alive in the eye of my mind. In the shadow of two buildings a tiny wood-and-iron cottage lived on; a faint clue. Here at least, the one Atherton fitted over the other, and in relation to this little house I could fade away the tall irregular buildings, and place the vanished landmarks where I had looked or lingered.

  Sitting besid
e my father while he changed gears and drew away as if the car were a live creature to be treated considerately, I felt queerly that it was as impossible for me ever to walk in and out the shops of this real Atherton as it was for me to walk again in the small village that had gone.

  On my lap I held the paper bag my mother had given me before I left. “Half the fruitcake,” she had said, and I knew that inside it would be wrapped in a neat sheet of grease-proof paper, the kind that had wrapped my school lunches. “No good my keeping it all, there’s no one to eat it. And if I give you the whole, it’s the same thing, isn’t it—” And she had stopped in cold embarrassment at her own voice, that had implied that I was alone, and so doing, had reminded both of us that I wasn’t, that someone would be there to help me eat my mother’s fruitcake. She had stiffened and answered with offended monosyllables the commonplaces, suitably removed from the subject, about which I went on talking to her. I suppose it was funny, really, and perhaps I should have been secretly amused. But I had only wanted to say to her—I don’t know why—: Mother, I haven’t changed. Look, this is me; you know me: just as I have always been, before I could walk and before I could speak and before I had loved a man and taken him into my body. And I thought, She will never recognize me, she will never know me again. Even if I could speak it would not alter it.

  I said good-by to Daddy on the platform. There was a tranquillity in him, as if he were seeing his daughter off to school after a week end at home; there is the certainty that there will be many other week ends when she will be coming home. As I kissed his cool shaven cheek, the cheek of an aging man with little tendrils of broken vein under the thin skin, I had again the queer feeling I had had in the main street of Atherton. I would keep coming; but the way I came would never be coming back.

  The train rocked into speed, clacked through the Mine siding without stopping. The tin shelter marked EUROPEANS ONLY, the fading shout of Mine natives jumping back exaggeratedly as we passed, the dark, ragged gum plantation that hid the Mine, the Recreation Hall, the rows of houses and my parents’ house itself. A single dusty light burned already above the siding, although it was not yet dark.

  There were a great many natives on all the stations, but that was nothing unusual for a Sunday night. Neither was the air of excitement, which one like myself, deaf to the meaning of the words, found in their voices. Sunday clothes, beer, and the still greater intoxication of leisure commonly accounted for that. At one of the larger stations I noticed several men wearing rosettes. The train jolted them away; the outcrop of the gold reef which ran along under the ground began to pass my window again: shaft heads, old untidy mine dumps with the cyanide weirdly hardened and fissured by years of rain, new dumps geometrically exact as the pyramids, towns like Atherton, brickfields, smoking locations, mines, clumps of native stores on the veld—the windows wired over for Sunday—another dump, another mine, another Atherton. Everywhere, gradually sparsened by the increase of human rubble, the cosmos which sprang up every autumn. Even when first I had started traveling to University, they had been a thick wake in the path of the train, in many places. Now they showed pink and white among the khaki weed which was stifling them out; when the train stopped at a small station I could smell it, rank on the cooling air and the smell of water. Below the station was one of the dams that chemical infiltration from the Mine colored mother-of-pearl, making, by incidental artifice and a strange reversal of the usual results of man’s interference with nature, something beautiful that was not.

  At this little station a newsbill stood against the wire fence, though apparently the paper boy had sold out his stock of papers and left. It was rucked up under the wire frame that held it to a board: STRIKE SITUATION: POLICE PREPARED FOR TOMORROW. Of course not—those were not rosettes: no wonder the men weren’t dressed like a football team. Freedom Day badges. Yet I could not feel anything about the strike that was coming tomorrow, the. strike that, the whole of the previous week in Johannesburg, we had talked of. Neither fear nor apprehension nor curiosity at the nearness of this threat—to ourselves? to the Africans themselves?—that would soon be here; soon now. Tomorrow something might get up on its feet that was being fed for such a moment every day. Nobody knew what it would be like, what it could do; this thing to the Africans a splendid creature of their own power, to the white men a monster of terror. Even people like Paul, Laurie, Isa, myself, had to say to ourselves: Maybe this will be the day when the patient hands will come down in blows, when our mouths will be stopped for the things we have not said.

  But seeing the bill, the station, the dam, the cows which stood up to their knees in the painted water, begin to move past, none of that was real to me. I thought, The last time, the last time I came back from Atherton, I sat with my eyes closed all the way. I remembered how, the last time, I had kept my eyes closed to block out the distance between myself and Paul, to get to him faster. I had lain against the seat saying inside myself, Paul, Paul. I closed my eyes again for a second to remember it.

  But it was not there in the dark.

  I sat like a person who is physically tired, letting the movement of the train shudder my hand against the window ledge, letting the landscape slide by under my eyes. I might have been looking down upon it from a plane; it was so familiar, this repetition of mine, town, dump and veld I had known so long, from so many journeys; and so far away. As far from me as the first stars, seeming to catch the light rather than give it off, like the turn of a woman’s ring faintly flashing a prismatic gleam.

  Chapter 31

  Nothing happened on Monday. I know. Not only because it was true in fact, the papers said so; but because I felt in the anticlimactic calm of that day a kind of guilty reflection of my own state. It seemed to me that the fact that nothing happened justified my lack of interest, made it excusable.

  It was my first day—I will not say of leisure, it was not that, but of lack of work.

  Paul had been out when I arrived back at the flat the evening before. I had made myself some Russian tea and gone to bed (how the Mine fed one to extinction, truly to extinction—all the blood comfortably deflected from one’s doubting brain to one’s satisfied stomach). Much later he had come home. The light was already out and I listened to him moving softly about the room, not telling him I was awake. When he slid into bed beside me I put out my hand as one might do in sleep; he put his hand on my waist as one comforts a child who stirs. I did not ask him where he had been. Neither of us spoke. We lay, he with his meeting in some location shack that I guessed he must have been to, I with the pleasantries and best china cups of the Compound Manager’s lounge, like people who do some highly secret work and so even in intimacy are alone, each with an aura unpenetrated and unquestioned by the other. At last he put his hand up round my breast and shifted his body close along the length of my back, the way he had slept always since our first night together. Or perhaps, out of habit, and halfway to sleep, I only thought I felt him there.

  In the morning he did not say anything about where he had been. As I trailed about in my dressing gown—since I did not have to go out to work I had not bothered to dress—I thought how odd it was; by pulling so hard the other way, one always seems to find oneself, at some point or other, arrived at precisely that condition of life from which one shied so violently. The women of the Mine, making a virtue of what was really the comfortable expedient of the kitchen and the workbasket, rather than accept the real, vital meaning of living with a man. Jenny, this first woman I had ever known who had kept her own identity, and left that of her husband uncrushed—now so enamored of her reproductive processes that she habitually mouthed John’s opinions rather than allow the interruption of thinking out her own; had apparently shelved as thankfully as any shopgirl leaving the cheese counter for the escape of marriage, the stage designing in which she had once been so passionately interested; and preserved her radical views in suburban moth balls.

  Here I was, back where they were, cooking a man’s breakfast and keeping my
mouth shut. Not for the same reasons—but what consolation was there in that? Turning the egg over because that’s the way he likes it, done on both sides. Even my hair, hanging uncombed, seemed to confirm the picture. When we both worked—and that was only last week—we had snatched our breakfast together, feeding each other like birds, at the kitchen table. But this Monday morning, the first of May, I stood about while Paul sat down and ate; plenty of time for me to breakfast.

  It was a beautiful morning; the sun sloped down past the balcony. I went out and looked over. The buildings were pale in the early light, the rising hum came from the city.

  “Well, what d’you expect to see?” he said with a smile.

  I stood at the side of the table, putting my hands down on it awkwardly. “I don’t know. … It seems just the same. There should be something, I somehow feel.” He went on eating, his gaze following my words out the open glass doors, where he could see nothing but the morning air. He doesn’t talk to me about the strike any more, I thought, he doesn’t tell me what he’s thinking of what he knows and fears out of what he learned last night. He treats me as if it were something out of my ken; the week end at Atherton he hasn’t asked me about has put it out of my ken. We never used to have things that were outside each other’s ken.

  “What are you going to do with yourself?” he said.

  “Oh, I’ve got lots of little things,” I said with the conviction of someone who has no idea how her time is to be made to pass. He ruffled my hair as he got up to get his hat and a cigarette: a father who cannot be expected to tell a child what he is going to do in the world this morning. “No—” I said, turning my cheek, “not on my mouth—I haven’t cleaned my teeth yet.”