The Lying Days (10 page)

Ludi and I lay face down in the sand a yard or two away from the women and children round a thermos flask—the squatting pattern, like a party game, that broke up and re-formed round Mrs. Koch sinking majestically to rest. Presently I got up and went back to the car to change into my bathing costume. It was difficult to get into, crouching on the floor, because it was still damp from morning. At last I wriggled and dragged my way into it and came out, feeling as if I were being held by tight clammy hands. From the short distance I could see Ludi, nearer the group now, explaining something with a rotating gesture of his hand as he talked. I walked over
the sand and stood near him. He finished his explanation, saying: “… Yes, yes, that's what I was saying. … It wouldn't matter which way you put it on, so long as that axle arrangement was at the right angle.” He paused a moment and closed his teeth on a match, and I thought he would speak to me, but he had merely paused to ponder something and suddenly he had it: “Of course you must understand that a thing like this isn't foolproof … not by any means. And I can't really say unless I see it.” And then with a sudden confidence: “But it should be all right, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be perfectly all right.”—He had a way of putting his head on one side and turning one hand up.

I did not even wonder what it was they were talking about. I simply stood there. Now Ludi lifted his head round to me. “Again?”

The curious inability to speak came over me. I nodded hard, smiling.

“That child hasn't been out the water the whole day,” said Mrs. Koch, interrupting her conversation with a little thin woman who was crocheting as she talked.

“Oh, well …,” said Ludi, getting out of his shorts. He gave a shrug and the half-lift of a smile to the man to whom he had been talking, as one acknowledges the necessity of pleasing a child. He pulled off his shirt and we went down toward the water together. But when the cool rill closed over our feet and the breath of the sea lifted to our faces, we began to walk along the water line. “You can't go anywhere without mother finding a friend,” Ludi said. “Leicester's got about as much mechanical sense as that shell. Stupidity of his questions—”

He seemed to lose interest in what he was saying. We walked right away up the beach and over some rocks and to another beach, a smaller one, where the sand was coarser and bright. I picked up a handful and saw that it was not sand at all, really, but the fragments of shells, pounded to a kind of meal by the pestle of the sea on a mortar of rocks. I showed it to Ludi and he looked at it and then blew it off my hand and dusted my hand and let it fall, in a gesture that suddenly seemed to me to express him, all that, in him, was exciting and wonderful to me. And just as the thought was bursting over me in a curious turmoil of feeling, a physical feeling,
like a kind of blush, that I had never felt before, he put his hand down on the nape of my neck. It caught my hair back from my head so that I had to walk stiffly, and, noticing this, seriously and capably as if he were adjusting something he had made, he slid his hand under my hair to free it.

Our feet were hurt by the coarse shingle and we wandered to the rocks and sat with our feet in the pools. We talked about the sea and the life of the sea around us, and I picked the tiny conical towers of winkles off the rock with my fingernail and threw them back into the water. I said: “Let's go in …?” He stretched himself backward against the rock and for answer, or rather as if he had forgotten to answer, looked at me slowly, smiling and yet not smiling, a look of regret, willing reluctance—a look that puzzled me. My greatest concern was to keep from him anything that might remind him that I was still a child, and so I did not want him to know that it puzzled me, that anything he did or said could puzzle me. I smiled as if in understanding. But the smile must have been too quick, too bright. He shook his head. I said: “Why do you do that over me?”—with the anxiousness which came up in me so quickly. He said with a little beckoning jerk of the chin: “Come here.” And very carefully I slid to my knees in the water, and arranged myself nearer to him and timidly put my hand, that jumped once, in reaction from the contact, on his knee. He kissed me as he had done the night before but this time I held my mouth slightly open though I kept very still. Then he breathed softly on my cheeks and kissed me again several times, and between the kisses I waited for him to kiss me again, while the tepid stagnant water of the pool touched with a terrible softness against the inner sides of my thighs. I think it was from the touch of the warm water that I suddenly stood up. Yet I wanted him to kiss me again, I wanted to prove to myself the reality of the feel of his lips, smooth and dry, the secret—so it seemed to me—of the deep, soft pressure of moisture, the astonishing warmth that, seeing his mouth move in talk, could never be guessed. I waited but, with the unexpectedness that quickened my pleasure with the continual threat of small disappointments, we went into the sea instead, though he did not swim away from me, but kept near, so that I could talk, shout to him, and we would bump against each other,
strangely buoyant with water, each feeling the touch of the other's limbs like the blunt contact of air-filled rubber shapes. There was a joy for me in tumbling about Ludi; I must have jumped around him like a puppy inviting play. But if he was not swimming seriously, he liked to float with his eyes closed, lonely on the water.

We stayed in too long—perhaps I had been in the sea too often altogether, that day—for when I came out and lay on the rough sand I had the feeling of air pressing inside me against my collarbones, and a swinging in my head. Water kept closing over my hearing and as I got up to shake it out of my ear, Ludi lifted my wet hair up on top of my head and pushed me to him with his elbow. He began to kiss me again. This time he took the whole of my mouth into the warm wet membrane of his mouth and his tongue came into my mouth and was looking for something; went everywhere, shockingly, pushing my tongue aside, fighting my cheeks, resisting my teeth. I was afraid and I did not want him to stop. I clung to the flesh behind his shoulder as if I were in danger of slipping down somewhere and as we stood together in the sultry afternoon the cool film of water dried from our bodies, and the warmth of our skin came through, into contact. Against the bare patch between the brassière and the shorts of my bathing suit I felt the steamy wet wool of his trunks and in the hollow of my neck, the slight liveness, as if it was capable of certain limited movement, of the hair on his breastbone. A drop of cold water fell from his hair onto my warm back, and another, and in the soft bed of my belly, as if it were growing there, I became conscious of another warmth, a warmth that grew from Ludi, from a center of warmth that came to life between his thighs. Nobody told me love was warm. Such warmth—I seemed to remember it, it seemed like something forgotten by me since I was born. Nobody told me it was warmth. How can it be understood, accepted, cold? I should have remembered—how? from where?—that it was warmth. All the fires were here, and the warmth of my mother's bed long ago, and the deep heat of the sun.

By Monday afternoon a railway bus service was circumventing the fallen bridge and carrying passengers to meet the train at the next station. But Ludi didn't go. I seem to remember that it appeared to be Mrs. Koch's idea that he should apply for an extension of leave; perhaps it was the one time in all his devotion to her that he made use of her gentle blindness of love for him? At any rate, he stayed. He telegraphed to his Commanding Officer and was granted an additional week, until the following Monday.

This is a simple statement of fact to relate now, but like all reports, all accuracy of happenings in terms of comings and goings, dates and times, its bareness is not the bare truth. The truth about humans is always inaccurate, never bare; the nearest one can get to it is to remember its confusion, and complicatedness. It was not a telegram sent and an answer forthcoming; nor three people waiting. I only remember that I, alone, not yet eighteen and a novice to anguish, waited for the granting of that week in a state of longing anxiety that has never, even in real sorrow, in the fall of bitterness, in despair, even, been equaled in all my life. Nothing is more serious than this apparently laughable lack of the sense of proportion in the young. With the command of emotions like a stock of dangerous drugs suddenly to hand, there is no knowing from experience how little or how much will do; one will pitifully scald one's heart, over nothing. The nothing may be laughable, but the pain is not. For me those few days, granted or denied, were my share of life. Like a butterfly, who knows only one day, no other days seemed to exist for me.

Then the telegram came and I do not know how it was for Ludi and Mrs. Koch, but for me it was the silence that follows a maddening din. But just as one cannot enjoy the mere negative state of having no pain in the way in which one believes one shall while the pain is on, so I did not taste the pure joy of the telegram as the positive state I had imagined in longing. There was no time. There was scarcely time to dress, to eat, to sleep even. Certainly no time to read and no time to write letters. A letter came from my mother, but though I read it, quickly, line by line, I was vague about what
she had said; it seemed an uninteresting letter. One from a girl on the Mine whom I had begged to remember to write to me, I somehow never did open; I came across it long afterward one day at home, where it lay in an old chocolate box with a perished bathing cap and a broken necklace, and tore it up because it reminded me with a pang of the place and time in which it should have been read. It was not that the days were fuller in the active sense than they had been all through my holiday; it was that they were full of Ludi. If I was in my bedroom, changing a dress, I did not know what he was doing at that moment. Perhaps he was about to go for a walk? Perhaps his mother might be asking him to do an errand for her. He might go without me. I shook myself into the dress, vanity and urgency warred in a moment I saw myself startlingly in the mirror, saw that my hair stood out too much—but flew down the passage pressing it anxiously with the flat of my palm. And there he would be, lying with one leg hanging down from the old sofa.

“Where you off to, miss?”

I would never admit I was tired, never admit I had had enough. It was never too early for me to get up, never so late that I would want to go to bed. At night when Mrs. Koch had gone to her room, Ludi and I went out onto the veranda and talked in the dark. As it got later, the talk got easier, until it seemed to me that if one could go on talking and talking as the night went deeper one would finally get to the other person; just before morning I would find what Ludi really was. … But instead I would find myself going quietly past the closed doors of the passage in the settled silence of one o'clock, lying at last in my bed with all the disparate images of him flashing in and out like lights in my mind. Half-sentences that did not connect, this mouth opening to say something I lost …? And then, before sleep, a sudden desire to move, to turn face down on my breasts in the bed. And all night, under my sleep, an alertness for morning.

In my absorption, as if I moved in a trance of excitement, my eyes always on a vision of Ludi, I did not see and so believed that Mrs. Koch did not see any change in the air between Ludi and me. But of course this was not possible. Where for the first part of my stay, he had come and gone with his customary self-sufficiency, now
he spent his time at home and wherever he went, took me with him. Yet she accepted this shift of emphasis in the relationship between the three of us with evident placidity; I believe now that she considered it only natural that I should become a disciple of her worship for Ludi, and that, partly out of kindness, partly out of an acceptance of his due, Ludi would let me worship him. She did not fear any woman in what she knew of Ludi, so she certainly feared nothing from so young a girl, a child in comparison with him. I think she was touched by what she saw in me; as someone who has been in the faith a long time is moved by the ecstatic face of the new convert.

“Did you enjoy yourself, Nell?” she would say to me.—We went to the beach in the morning on our own; perhaps because we hadn't asked her, or because she had forestalled this by saying that she could not come. We had walked a long way, past the rocks where no one but Ludi himself came to fish, and he had unfastened the halter of my wet bathing suit and peeled it down from my breasts. Neither he, nor anyone else, had ever touched or seen me before. I let him do this in stillness, looking down at myself as if we made the discovery together. I thought the skin of my breasts too white against the brown of my neck and arms; damp and cold from the sea they turned out away from each other and the left one trembled jerkily with the nervous beat of my heart beneath. Round the nipples tiny fragments of shell and pebble, worn membrane-thin by the water, stuck, shiny, pinkish-pearly to the skin. I lay so still I might have been waiting for a dagger. But Ludi, with a tone of delight that astonished me, smiled, “Look, the sea has been here. … You're all gritty.”

—Yet I found it perfectly easy to answer Mrs. Koch: “Lovely. It wasn't so windy today. We saw that sister of Mrs. Meintjes' on the road. She expects them sometime on Thursday, because the old father's been ill, and Davey had a cold, and goodness knows what else. …” It was only when I took off my bathing suit to dress in my room that I paused, catching sight of myself in the greenish, watery mirror that fronted the old wardrobe, and thought, not with shame but with a sense of unreality, of Mrs. Koch's question that was not a question and my answer that was not an answer. And I understood that almost all of my life at home, on the Mine, had been
like that, conducted on a surface of polite triviality that was insensitive to the real flow of life that was being experienced, underneath, all the time, by everybody. The fascination of the gap between the two came to me suddenly; I remembered, even out of childhood, expressions on faces, the tone of a commonplace sentence spoken unimportantly, the look of a person's back as he left on some unquestioned excuse. It was not the knowledge of a secret life beneath so much as the maintenance of the unruffled surface itself that was exciting. Now it seemed to me that every casual explanation might, not conceal, but simply float above, like the reflection of the sky which the water shows rather than its own depths, happenings as strange and wordless as the time I had just spent with Ludi.