The Lying Days (12 page)

He said, with the stiff little preparatory swallow of surrender: “It happens about once a year, with me. One feels—and then afterward—I don't know, I'm disgusted with the woman. Meaningless, really.” He thought a while. I wondered if he was remembering this strange act that I had never partnered but that I now understood. I felt a voluptuous tenderness toward him and wanted to take his head in my arms. He got up, slowly disentangling himself as one puts aside boughs, and stood, feet apart against the dizziness of standing upright. Reflectively, dismissing it, he swayed a little. “I assure you it's been a long time, now. Oh, many months.” He smiled at me, his sour, confiding smile.

And then, as if he felt at the same instant my sudden desire for air, for the wet air of rain, he padded over to the window and opened it wide. It was sheltered by the veranda so that the rain did not come in, but the fresh, wild air did, rushing in as if the room drew a great breath. Drops like thick curved lenses distorted and magnified the brilliant green of the creeper shaking over the roof's edge. Scent tanged with wet came up from the beaten petals of the frangipani. The veranda with the few unraveling cane chairs and the pot plants breathing the rain they could not feel had the green twilight of a conservatory. We stood with our nostrils lifted like animals, staring out into the falling rain, our arms lightly round each other.

Curiously, this time when he went away and I was not to see him again, I was not lost. Almost before he had gone I had given myself up to the assurance of his letters. The idea of the first letter from him filled me with excitement, so that I half-wished him to go, be gone so that I might get that letter the sooner. And I should be able to write to him; perhaps to make him something. If I thought about home at all, it was to imagine myself sitting making something for Ludi, in absorption, in completeness. Mrs. Koch was mostly silent during these last few days of my stay, speaking of Ludi, at long intervals, as “he” and “him” as if the silences between her remarks were merely times when the conversation continued somewhere in
her out of earshot. She would come hurrying from another room to show me something connected with him; a special winder he had made for her wool, a bracket for a bedside lamp that needed only the right kind of screw to complete it.

Once she came in with a snapshot.

“This isn't bad.” Her crinkly gray hair hung over her eyes as she peered closely at it. When she had had a good look she passed it to me. Ludi, who, like most shortsighted people, did not photograph well, stood scowling at the sun in the artificial camaraderie of a garden snapshot. Two little boys grinned cross-legged in the foreground, a dog was straining out of the arm of a young woman with a charming, quizzical smile that suggested that she was laughing at herself. A badly cut dress showed the outline of her knees and thighs, and with the arm that was not struggling with the dog, she had just made some checked gesture, probably to push back the strand of curly hair standing out at her temple, which the photograph recorded with a blur in place of her hand. I was instantly drawn to her. “Who's this?” I pointed.

“Let me see—Oh, that's Maud—Oscar—you've heard me talk of Oscar Harmel?—Oscar's second wife. The old fool, we all thought; she's young enough to be his granddaughter, almost. The two boys are his grandchildren, from his first marriage, of course. They love Maud.—Oh, she's a sweet girl, a dear girl, no doubt about that. But of course it doesn't work. She laughs a lot, but she's not happy. She's very dissatisfied with her life. Funny girl. Oscar's not in this”—she lifted her eyebrows to see better, as if she had her glasses on and were peering over the top—”I wonder when it was taken? Oh, I know, last time Ludi was on leave, he went down there and stayed over. One of the little chaps had had a birthday, and got a camera for a present.—He brought me the picture specially, next time his mother—that's Oscar's eldest daughter, Dorrie—brought him to see me. …”

Quite suddenly, it came to me that I knew it was she. I looked at the girl half-laughing, half-struggling against the nonsense of having the photograph taken and I knew it had been she. This is the girl, I told the sullen Ludi, not looking at me, not looking at the sun. And in his refusal to meet the eye of the camera, in the obstinate
stance of his legs—in the silence of that photograph of him—he confirmed it to the tingling of my half-pain, my curiosity.

Behind my eyes, inside my sleeping body, I sensed the surface of day. Knew the breath of the warm sea that would be blowing in the window. The conversation of the fowls with the dust. Mrs. Koch squeezing oranges in the kitchen. The great brightness of morning that would leap at me, blinding, joyous, as I opened my eyes.

A dim, cool room. Silence. The call of a dove, curtains with a known pattern. Silence. High on the wall the lozenge-pattern of light filtered through the ventilator, the neatly spaced pale yellow crumpets of childhood, that moved round the room through days of sickness. And then my mother, rattling at the stiff lock of the hall cupboard with her keys. Missus, the butcher he send: Anna. I lay a minute, looking round the ceiling where every dent, every smudge was where I knew it to be, and then I got up, went to the wardrobe for my clothes, pulled the thin curtains back on the dusty, clipped jasmine bush, the patch of neat grass, the neighbor's hedge.

It was like this for a number of mornings; for an hour I would be quite dazed with the sense of having mislaid myself in sleep, or the half-will, half-suspicion that
this
was the dream and the awakening would be other. But soon it no longer happened; I knew before I woke that I was home on the Mine, in the bed, in the room that claimed me as their own.

Soon I would wake to myself in the mornings, but I was not secure for the whole day. I came slowly up the path after the anticlimax of the post—there was no letter for me—with the dry, windless highveld sun making my hair too hot and electric to touch and my mother's voice over the preparation of lunch coming from the kitchen, and I was seized again with the unreliability of my own eyes, ears, and the utter conviction of my other senses, that made me smell and feel noon on the veranda above the sea, with the sway of the sea, from which I had newly arisen, in my blood as I stood.
I waited at the window in the empty house of early evening for my father to come home, and turned to the room to look at, and even to make tentative movements to touch, all the objects, ornaments, carpets, disposition of furniture, photographs, vases, that in their very evidence of reality, and lifelong involvement with me, suddenly could not summon meaning and belonging. Even more strangely, I spent a morning shopping in Atherton with my mother, and the hurrying along the streets gossiping together, the matching of a piece of last year's material, my mother's uncertain look outside a shoeshop where she wanted my confirmation of a decision she had already made to buy a pair of new shoes—all this pleasant, familiar activity came to me as it might come to someone who has been ill, and is filled with the strangeness of standing upright in the sun again. When we stopped to talk to people, I had the smile that invalids summon.

“On Tuesday? Yes, that would be lovely, I think.—Helen, what about Tuesday?” I looked from my mother to the indulgent smile of the matron who was inviting us to tea, as if I had not taken in what my mother was asking. And the sight of the two of them, in their floral dresses and their veiled summer hats, small brown paper parcels from John Orrs' and the Sewing Center and the seed merchant hanging from their white gloved hands, filled me with a kind of creeping dismay.

“Old Mrs. Barrow's so fond of you—” my mother reproached later. “She's always loved to have you, ever since you were a little girl. You can't hurt her feelings—”

I said nothing, but resentment, motiveless and directionless, seemed to crowd out even my sight.

Less disturbing than all this was the habit I got into of disappearing into a re-creation of my time with Ludi whenever I was out with my parents among other people. At the cinema with them, I quickly learned not to see the film, but to use the darkness and the anonymous presence of people about me in the darkness, to create Ludi for myself more vividly than life. This was an intense and emotional experience, highly pleasurable in its longing, its secrecy. When I found myself at a tea party among the women in whose fondness I had basked, I could kill the troubled feelings of rejection
and distaste by plunging into myself the fierce thrill of longing for Ludi, which would vibrate an intensity of emotion through me to the exclusion of everything else.

My mother was irritated by me. “In a trance. I don't know what's the matter with her. Alice certainly fattened her up, but she's made her slow.”

“Dreaming.” My father smiled at me across the table. He had never forgotten his own youth, and mistook the memory of what he had been for an understanding of what I was.

I ignored him kindly; I preferred my mother's irritation; it seemed a temerity for him to pretend to understand a bewilderment of which he was so important a part.

Then I knew what he was going to quote: What is this life, if full of care …—But he must have sensed my waiting for it, and he stopped himself this once and only said, with the inclined head of still more certain understanding, “It's the time to dream. Later on she'll be too busy.”

The University. Should I go up the shallow gray steps between gray columns like great petrified trees; carry books; wear the blue and yellow blazer? I did not want to talk about it. I wanted to put off talking of it.

“What's happening, Helen?” Nothing stopped my mother. “You've got to make up your mind, you know. There's barely a week left.”

“When is the enrollment day?” my father asked.

“Thursday, Mrs. Tatchett tells me. She's going in with Basil.”

“Oh—?—That boy'll never do any good. He hasn't a brain. What's he going to do?”

“Something to do with engineering. You know I don't follow the different names of these things. Electro-something.”

“I still think a teacher's degree would be the best.” My father turned to me. “You needn't necessarily use it as such afterward.”

My mother, who saw deflection of purpose in the housewife's sense of waste, immediately took this up. “Why not? What's the sense of wasting four years becoming a teacher if you don't teach?”

“I don't know.” My father nodded his head to himself; he believed
he had educated himself on the Home University Library, the British Encyclopaedia and “Know Thyself,” but that he would have achieved this and his Mine secretaryship ten years earlier had he started off his career as a university graduate instead of a junior clerk. “It's a good general education.”

“You've got big ideas,” said my mother, “too big for your pocket. Helen must take up something that'll fit her for the world.”

I sat through their talk with a growing inner obstinacy. Now that phrase of my mother's that I had heard so often, that had always sounded strong and practical as my mother herself, came to me as a disturbing question. Fit me for what world? So long as there was only my mother's world, so long as I knew no other, the phrase had the ring of order and action. The world of my mother and father, or Ludi's world? And if there were two, there might be more. But my parents wanted to fit me for theirs. My interest, that like a timid, nosing animal edged back and lay down in dim lack of enthusiasm before the advance of their discussion, was again forgotten in a sense of distress and bewilderment.

My mother was tapping her front teeth with her fingernail, as she sometimes did in concern. But when she spoke, it was with her usual vigor. “Perhaps she'd be happier at home? If she didn't go at all—Perhaps you could speak to Stanley Dicks about getting her into the Atherton library. She's so keen about books, and there's a nice type of girl there—”

My father caught her with an accusing look, a kind of concentration of irritation, suspicion and wariness that comes from long observation, if not understanding, of someone's methods and motives. It was as if he did not know what her next move would be, but he knew it should be prevented. He gave a curiously awkward fending gesture of the hand, and said, “Oh, the
library
—What sort of a career, pushing a barrow of heavy books about and stamping people's names on cards! That's no life for her. That's not what I want for her.”

And then, with the inconsequence of daily life in the fluid of which are suspended all stresses, the jagged crystals of beauty, the small, sharp, rusted probes of love, the hate that glints and is gone like a coin in water, my mother said without change of tone, “You
won't forget about the lawn mower, will you? It's Charlie's day again tomorrow.” And with a little glance at his watch to recall him to himself, my father nodded and returned to his office for the afternoon's work.

I went down to the Mine swimming bath. At first there was almost no one there; only the small boys, splashing and squealing hoarsely in their flapping wet rags of costumes. I lay looking at my shining brown legs; a stranger bearing the distinguishing marks of another land. Later some boys and girls of my own age came and dropped to the grass around me, gasping, fanning themselves after their bicycle ride. They exclaimed over me. You were away a long time! How long was it, Helen? My, she's burned—look how she's burned! They giggled and threw sweet-wrappers at one another, and every now and then, without a word, as if at some mysterious sign, a girl would tug at a boy's ankle to trip him as he stood up, or a boy would pull the bow end of the strap that held a girl's bathing suit, and suddenly they would be wrestling, chasing each other, shrieking round the pool, rolling and falling back into the middle of us, the girl screaming between laughter: No! No! Soon the grass around us was strewn with lemonade bottles and broken straws. A bright-haired girl, with the dimples she had had when she was four still showing when she smiled, carefully broke up a packet of chocolate so that it would go round. When I got up to swim, they all came flying, bouncing, chasing into the square tepid tank of water. Lorna Dufalette's head broke through the surface beside me, water beading off her powdered forehead. “It's not fair, those filthy Cunningham kids have got ringworm, and they come into the water. We might all get it.” I floated along amid used matches and dead grass. At last I pulled myself out by the shoulders and sat, feet dangling, on the side. One of the boys, at a loss for a moment, swam over to me, a bright challenging grin on his red face. His big teeth in the half-open mouth combed the water like a fish. “Come away to the lagoon with me, Tondelayo!” I had been watching the water streaming over his teeth and was startled when he suddenly appeared beside me. Saliva and water streaked his chin as he grinned, waiting my response. Apparently there was some film I had not seen that would have given it to me. Water poured from him and he laughed
toward me. “Come on—” He slipped down into the water again and, at a howl from one of the others, turned his thick scarred neck and bellowed something back, then caught at my ankle. But with a quick slither I snatched my legs back and he was gone, threshing noisily after the jeer that had challenged him. I shifted away from the uneven puddle that marked where he had sat beside me.