“Which beach?”
“North or South, as you like.”
He opened his eyes, which he had shut for a moment against the sun. “How would you like to go to a real beach, all to yourself, along the Coast?”
“Oh, I wish we could. To Amanzimtoti or somewhere. Would a train be an awful fag?—I’d like to?”
“Would you really? Good. Because I’ve got a surprise.”
I laughed. “Another one?”
He sat forward, enjoying my curiosity. “A car,” he said.
“But how?”
“I remembered a friend of Max’s. I telephoned him, I talked nicely to him. Oh, it’s a very smart car. He calls it a ‘cabriolet’—know what that is?” We both giggled our ignorance. “Anyway, it’ll be here at ten. He’s sending it along with his driver. Then it’s ours. We can go out for the whole morning, the day, if you want to.”
To anyone else I should have burst out gaily: Joel, you darling. But somehow, even now, I could not show a flippant affection toward him. I said instead, standing up: “Joel, there isn’t anything I’d rather do today. I’ll fly and get ready.” Perhaps this was worse, because it seemed to embarrass him. “Be careful you don’t lose that toe,” he said reflectively, as I moved off.—The little toe of my left foot always slipped the thin strap on those particular sandals.
The car was a new Citroën. We were disappointed because the hood didn’t come down, but, as Joel put it, we gave ourselves the illusion of an open car by “opening all the windows and driving very fast with our eyes closed.” We drove out along the South Coast road past Congella where we could see, away below, ships clustered against the wharves like leaves drifted to the sides of a pond. We came up through the sugar cane to the cliff that rounds above the sea just before the village of Amanzimtoti, we hooted our way through the litter of shops, fruit stalls and Indian children which impinges upon the narrow road near Isipingo, and we drove along the dipping and rising sea road in long patches of warm silence, broken, now—it seemed—by the sight of a little yellow beach, now by desultory talk. All semblance of city life dropped behind us. Each tiny village, in the faces of the holiday children or the slow walk of the retired residents to the post office or the general store, proclaimed the pace of the sea and the green bush. The cane sang with our speed as we passed; the sea drowned our voices where it broke on rocks. There was a hotel above a deserted beach where we had lunch, and men and women came tramping in from the golf course which belonged to the place, the fairways buried among sugar cane as if a barber had run his clippers through the long waving green. We bathed on another beach that was not a “place” at all, and drank ugly red minerals that dyed our tongues, at a village near by, because we were burningly thirsty and the village had nothing else to offer.
As usual, when people are enjoying having no fixed destination, this nameless beach was the one which pleased us most, and we were sorry we had not come to it earlier. “Whatever happened to Ludi Koch?” Joel asked suddenly, while we lay there.
“Got a store, the last I heard, somewhere near where they lived before.” I rolled over. “Were you thinking of Ludi Koch, now?” I smiled, curiously, indicating the setting.
“Funny, I suppose the combination of you and this, put it into my mind. What you’d told me, I mean.”
I giggled and began smoothing the dry sand off my legs, with pleasure; I could feel, like a secret flaw, the bristle of the reddish-fair hairs which I depilated. “Love in the sun.” I laughed at myself at this distance, remembering for the time nothing of the pain, the intensity; perhaps I was even boasting a little. I think we dozed a while, after that. I woke because a fly was tickling its way along my leg; at least, that was what it felt like: I brushed at it, but there was nothing there but more sand. Joel’s eyes fluttered open but for the moment he was still asleep; I do not think he knew I was there. And then I saw from the movement of his mouth as he swallowed that he was awake, and looking up at the sky. What was he thinking, this closed and bone-familiar being breathing beside me? Was he really there at all, can a person be said to be present to one when it is to be only for a few days, a time so short it could be computed in hours, and human beings are apprehended only in flashes, over a long evenness of years. I don’t remember Ludi, I thought tranquilly. Perhaps I shall again at another time; but I don’t now. The tranquillity trod firmly down on it: I don’t think of Paul. What I do remember, I don’t think of.
Joel was looking away, up into the sky, seeing nothing. That time when I opened my eyes, I thought, he was looking at me and I was sure he had been looking at me a long time.—I watched him a moment longer, but he was not aware of it.
So I rolled back onto the sand, and lay there, in the warmth of it. I was aware in my mouth of the want of a cigarette and in my hand, of the movement that would touch Joel’s arm and get it for me. At this point he said: “Cigarette?” and while still I had not moved, it was coming to me. “I was asleep,” he said. I felt myself smiling at him indulgently. He yawned with the daze—“What was I saying, before?” I smiled again and shook my head, as if to say “Nothing. No matter.” “Talk must have been in my dream,” he said.
“I’m so happy where I am,” I said.
When we were driving back to Durban I found myself doing a curious thing. “I was looking at you when you were asleep just now,” I lied deliberately. “I was thinking how much like your mother you are, just around the eyes.” He murmured some casual, politely questioning assent—“Yes?” or “Really …?”; but I think he understood perhaps better than I did myself, that I was trying to say I feared I might have hurt him by some of the things I had said the night before; and that I accepted him, humbly, wholly.
We went to dance that night. In the pleasant, spurious, sentimental atmosphere of a night club that had so little to do with Joel Aaron, I talked to him as I have never talked to any living being: as I have talked to this pen and this paper. Perhaps more truthfully, for here I have myself to contend with, and Joel took away from me the burden of my ego, just as Paul had once lifted from me the burden of my sex.
I remember some of the things we talked of: Joel saying, “It’s not only your own failure with Paul you’re running away from, it’s also what you conceive to be Paul’s failure with himself. It’s what I spoke of yesterday; you can’t bear anything to be less than the creation you’ve made of it in your mind.”
And at some point, myself saying, “In a way, it seems right that one shouldn’t be happy in South Africa, the way things are here. It seems to me to be that as well; a kind of guilt that although you may come to a compromise with your own personal life, you can’t compromise about the larger things ringed outside it. It’s like—like having a picnic in a beautiful graveyard where the people are buried alive under your feet. I always think locations are like that: dreary, smoking hells out of Dante, peopled with live men and women.—I can’t stand any more of it. If I can’t be in it, I want to be free of it. Let it be enough for me to contend with myself.”
He did not answer, and what I said seemed to stand in the air, with a guilty defiance. And it seemed to take point, if not quite the way I should have wished it, from the warm sham twilight of the night club; outside this tepid and muted-lit enclosure, where the weird and useless aspects of civilization, like the extra fins on effete tropical fish, were kept alive under special conditions, there was the beautiful city cleaned and fed and planted by the Indians who originally had been imported as indentured laborers, and were hated; and the natives, who had been there before the white men, and were feared. And outside the city were some of the worst slums in the world, where all these people who were another color lived; and beyond that the reserves, where an old order of life had died, and a new order presented a slammed door; and beyond that still, the gold mines which had made the white man rich and the black man wretched.
We danced easily in this bubble blown up precariously, even a little sadly, above the reality. He said, smiling down at me: “Those Uni
versity dances we used to go to weren’t ever much of a success, were they?”
“Well, we only went to one, I think.—I wonder why?—I always felt so stiff with you. Not exactly physically, I mean. You always became so serious.”
“I know. So did you, I felt. Not in anything you said—”
“No, I know. That’s what I meant.—A kind of solemnity in the body.”
“In the presence of your body, that is. I used to watch you with other people, and marvel at how calmly they took your weight and presence.” He looked at me and smiled.
“And now it’s so easy. I suppose we’re older.”
When the music trailed off and we were making our way back to the dim little sofa, I said chattily: “Joel, do you really think it might have been because you are a Jew and I’m a Gentile?” The idea of this distinction, at this stage in my life, made me laugh a little. He nodded, pouring me a drink. “Of course.”
“But we were so close. Such good friends.”
“Not close,” he said, “just good friends. You were closer to Danny McLeod, who danced with his cheek on your hair the first time he met you.”
“Did he?” I laughed with mock indignation. “I don’t remember him.—Anyway that’s not fair; just because he had a Scottish name and you know my mother’s Scotch—”
“Still—”
“You thought at the time that that was Danny what’s-’is-name’s advantage—I thought you weren’t attracted to me. I think I was a little hurt. No—disappointed.”
He handed me my drink. He watched me a moment, his mouth curved in what was not quite a smile, gentle, but a little wry.
“Yes, I suppose I was a fool. What I feared would offend”—he stopped and made an appealing gesture of confession—“was exactly what was needed.”
“I wanted to be loved,” I admitted, still feeling it in the nature of confession, half-ashamed, because it was to Joel that it was being made. “I wanted to be touched and kissed as well as talked to. D’you think that was bad?”
“Bad,” he said. “Bad. What would the Isa Welsh intelligentsia have to say if they heard you say a thing like that?” But when our laughter died away, he said: “Often and often, I used to feel, now I’m going to kiss her, now I’m going to lift up that hair and kiss the nape of her neck—Many times; but I never did.”
“That’s just exactly what I felt. Sometimes I felt myself making you want to kiss me, and then I’d stop myself, because I was afraid. I had the idea it would never be the same again. … So”—I suddenly became a little embarrassed, and was flippant to cover it—“other people kissed me.”
He said seriously: “You had to be kissed.”
I looked at him steadily across the table. “Yes.”
“When I took you home,” he said, “I knew it. When I went to your home. I try to explain it to myself; I think I can, now. The difference of nationality—between us—as it existed in the minds and emotions of our parents, mind, not as we conceived it—was a kind of unconscious taboo. Friendship was all right, it took place in the mind, in the interchange of speech and the world; but touch, an embrace between you and me—emotional contact reaches back into the family. It’s very old, very deep, very senseless; and harder than you think, to overcome.”
I said to him when we were dancing again: “What an odd place to talk like this in. Is it just a sort of softening in the maudlin atmosphere, d’you think, and we’re letting down our hair and we’ll be sorry?”
“No,” he said, “it’s because we aren’t anywhere, Helen, you and I. There’s a time, before people go away, when although they still walk and talk among familiar things in a familiar way, they have already left. The ship has sailed, for you. You’ve left it all behind you already, all the things you want and fear and have thrust away from you.”
A kind of light sadness came over me, and translated itself into the terms of the shadowy, swaying place. It found expression in the small hoarse voice of the girl who sang with a melancholy intonation borrowed, like her accent, from America; in the smoke-wreathed privacy of the half-dark; and in the warm body of Joel, embodied all that I should put my arms about in leave-taking.
I felt I should apologize for it and said to him: “I think I do feel a little maudlin, after all.”
Chapter 37
The yellow marble bird had a dribble of real water running from his beak. A band was playing on the dais. The yellow brocade settees were completely hidden by people; people sitting on the cushions and on the arms, people clustering round those who were sitting. The little bar was lively with people, and the Italian stewards raced briskly round.
The whole ship was like a stage-set where the lights and the curtain have at last gone up.
Joel and I had two little seats crammed against the bar on one side, and the side of the dais where the white piano was, on the other. The band played, unheeded, and over and over again, “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup” and a rather peculiar version of “Sarie Marais.” Joel said something, but I could not hear. “What’s that?” He leaned over. “I said I understand that they double up as stewards, when they’re not playing.” I nodded, smiling, smiling. The atmosphere was curiously like that of a large midday wedding reception, where you are dazed by the heat and the crowd in their best clothes, the pageantry of the wedding retinue, which somehow seems to belong under electric light rather than the sun, and the intoxication of champagne drunk at a time when other people are banging hammers and pushing pens.
I leaned across and shouted: “It’s hard to believe that this is something the ship experiences over and over again, year in and year out. It seems to take it as such an occasion.” He nodded fiercely, and shrugged at the impossibility of conversation. But a minute or two later some people got up from a group of chairs near the door and we pushed our way quickly toward them. We sat down promptly and those chairs we were not occupying were immediately whirled away over our heads with eager apologies. The band and the talk were no longer deafening; we were beside the doorway and could see the deck and feel the sharp heat of the day outside, instead of the stuffiness of perfume and wine. The four people whose table we had taken were being photographed against the rails by a press photographer. We watched them compose the instant at which they would be fixed in the social pages of the paper tomorrow, a Durban businessman and his family, the wife in her new hat and floral silk dress, chosen, no doubt by the daughters, the daughters holding their hats—one small and feathered, the other large and white—against the wind, with gloved hands. Just as the camera clicked the one could not resist, and did what she must always have been disciplining herself not to do: smiled too broadly and gave her too-prominent teeth a victory.
“What time is it?” I asked. “Another hour, still,” Joel said. He had a way of smiling at me, reassuringly, every time he felt me looking at him, as if I were the one who was about to sail, nervously excited at the departure.
“I’m rehearsing for Monday,” I said.
“But you’ll have the other role, then,” he said. “It’s easier to go than to be left behind. Shall we have another drink?”
“I don’t think so. … I’m slightly dizzy already—the glare more than anything, I think.—You know that really does fit exceptionally.” He moved his shoulders in the new linen jacket we had chosen for him in the town earlier in the morning; it is extraordinary how difficult it is to find something to do in the hour or two before a leave-taking.
I said to him, leaning forward on my elbows on the table: “I keep getting a feeling of urgency. My mind races. I’m afraid there are so many things I want to say to you that I’ll only discover when you’re gone. Don’t you always feel like that when you’re saying good-by to someone?”
“What things?”
I smiled and sank back. “When you ask me, I don’t know. I’m just sure that when you’re gone …”
“Write them to me.”
“Yes, I know.” But I could not rid myself of this acute consciousness of time; time
, which was like a growing volume of sound in my ears; and would cease. Every movement in the people who crowded the lounge and passed and repassed across the deck, every time a man swallowed from his glass, or a woman turned to touch the cheek of a child, gestured time that length further on. Joel fetched two more glasses of gin and lime for us and then we sauntered aimlessly about the deck, where everyone stood about as we did, and groups burst into small explosions of excited laughter. The sun and the gin seemed to clash in my head; we made quite thankfully for the lounge again, and found a seat for ourselves.
“And yet it seems much longer?” I appealed. He nodded consideringly. “—You couldn’t credit it’s really only two days since Thursday?”
He smiled. “Timeless, I told you. Because we aren’t anywhere.”
“Oh, there is something,” I said, remembering. To ask him something, anything, would still this feeling I had of being unable to shape questions that were vital to myself, that would, in some way I could not articulate or understand, help me to read my bearings if the desire to drift on a current should prove more confining than freedom of choice. “When I asked you, the other night, why you didn’t try to give me some sort of inkling of the disillusion I was heading for with John and Jenny and the others—you said you’d tell me another time.”
The casual piece of curiosity—what did it matter, now, when that part of my life which it affected was past, lived through; it had scarcely more importance than the idle disinterment of a lost summer: what did you really do (one may ask) that week you were so keen to come to the mountains, and then made some feeble excuse that obviously wasn’t true, anyway?—This casual piece of curiosity dropped stillness over Joel’s broad, browned face, shiny with the heat. His eyes, pebbles deep in a stream, moved. To escape them, or give them escape, I followed quickly the shape of his head, and saw, like a wire of light against the black, one white hair. It followed the exact curve of the others, away from the forehead across toward the crown. “Oh, that,” he said. “You know about that.”
The Lying Days Page 43
