The Lying Days (13 page)

In the damp change cubicle I put on my clothes and rolled my bathing suit in my towel. Looking at myself in the post card of mirror that was nailed to the wall brought two tears of loneliness into my eyes.

My mother was sitting behind the fly screen on the veranda when I got home. She was following a knitting pattern from a book, and the tray from her afternoon tea was on the ledge beside her. As I saw her the words seemed to come to me quite suddenly, as if someone had given me a push forward, “Mother, I've made up my mind I'm not going to University.” She said, after a pause, not looking up, “All right. I suppose you're old enough to know what you want. Nobody gave me the opportunity.” I pulled myself up on the ledge beside the tray and we sat in silence, rather heavily. After a while she said, “It'll disappoint your father,”—and went indoors.

My mother always had had the knack of filling me with apprehension by the meagerness of what she said, and the magnitude of what she left unspoken. Now, as I sat in her chair while the sun went down, the shape that she had hollowed for herself in the cushions, the warmth where she had leaned her back, seemed to speak on for her. I began to feel tense and nervous; in the heat, my hands were cold. I went down into the cooling garden and walked up and down, watching for my father. My heart was beating fast and I wanted to tell him at once. When he saw me hanging about the gate his tired, neat face lifted pleasurably into life and he gave a little signal as if to say, I'll be with you rightaway, but I did not even wait for him to put the car into the garage, but opened the door as he slowed down to enter the gate, and got in beside him. He said: “Give us a kiss,” and his cheek was faintly salty from the sweat of the day. “—Daddy, I've made up my mind I don't want to go to University.” As I said it we came to a halt in the dusty gloom of the tin garage.

“Well, I won't press you, my dear. It's very important that you should be happy about what you do—no making a success of anything unless you're happy in doing it. I must say I believe that. Not everyone has to go to a university to improve and open their mind, you could do a correspondence course—what about French? Always useful to learn a language. So long as one cultivates one's mind, it doesn't really matter—” He sat on in the car a minute or two and I watched his profile. But I could see he was not unhappy, he was absorbed, he had already set his mind on something else for me.

We strolled into the house together, with him talking sensibly, enthusiastically. I found I was not listening but was thinking of Ludi, seized up increasingly by thoughts of Ludi and what he would have said if I had really thought of going to the University. Getting on, the bright ambitious daughter of the Mine Secretary. I smiled to myself at the idea that I might have lent myself to it. Now I would be able to tell him; I lay in the sun somewhere, caring for nothing, and we refuted the University together. Now that I had decided, it seemed ridiculous that I had ever even considered the place. I felt that Ludi and I were proudly alone, and I was as happy in the knowledge of him as if he had been there. I felt he knew all that passed in me, and that only the things that he and I knew mattered. My tongue shaped his name over and over, an intoxication of Ludi, Ludi, Ludi. I was excited and happy. It overflowed. Suddenly I kissed my father, having heard almost nothing of what he had been saying to me. He said: “Not such an ununderstanding old father, after all, eh?” And stood looking at me with proud tenderness.

I went slowly up the passage to the bedroom, dreaming, hugging my arms, and I heard him in the kitchen: “—Why d'you do it? You know it makes your hair smell, and you grumble—” My mother was frying fish. I lay down on my bed with my eyes closed; I could see Ludi's walk, the startled way his eyes looked without glasses, the way he gave a little snort and his mouth curled up one side before he told me what he thought of something. I could have lain there all evening.

My father was calling me. I let him call three times before I answered: “What?”

“Look—I think this's for you—”

“What?”

“Come here, I can't shout.”

To humor him, I got off the bed in mild irritation and wandered into the kitchen, blinking as if from a sleep. He took a letter from out of the folded newspaper he had brought home. “Sent care of the Mine Secretary—it's yours. …” I took the blue envelope from him and read my name in a handwriting I had never seen before but that I knew instantly. A wave of blood went through me, my hands shook. It was the simplest thing for me to leave the kitchen and walk back to my room, but all at once I did not know how to do it. I did not know how to walk out of the door, I did not know at whom or what to look. It was not necessary to say anything but suddenly I did not know what to say. “Well,” I said, “I'll open it just now—” My father was taking beer bottles out of the refrigerator. “What are you doing that for?” my mother was complaining. “I thought I ordered two dozen? Where're the other six?” “You'll never get them in that way. I've just put them straight and now you're upsetting everything—” I made my escape as if I had been a prisoner momentarily out of surveillance.

And in my room I tore open the envelope, took out the folded letter in that moment of perfect joy that comes just the second before realization; the mouth ready to be kissed, the possession lying ungrasped in the hand, the letter held unread.

Then I unfolded the sheets, saw that there were three, saw the beautiful handwriting, the words “thinking,” “knack”…

Barberton,
Saturday.

Dear Helen,

It's difficult to find space or quiet to write in a great bedlam of a camp like this one. But it's now close on midnight so I can be fairly certain not to be interrupted by anything worse than snores. I didn't have a bad journey—but you'll know that by the telegram I sent mother—except that it all seemed a bit unreal, the yap of the other men, etc., the usual army nonsense, after the last few days at home. I kept thinking about it, and as usual—only a bit
more so this time, the two planes of existence just won't dovetail. Not in me, anyway. Every time I come back to the army I am sickened all over again at the senselessness of the way we live here. Still, you've heard all this from me many times before, so enough.

Fortunately, there have been heavy rains and the dust isn't so bad as it was. That chap Don Macloud I told you about is back in my tent again after all, and we have rigged up fairly comfortable beds for ourselves. As I told you, he's really got a knack of making a home out of a fruit box and a bit of sacking, and is useful to have around. Also pleasant and inoffensive, and as unimpressed as I am by all this so-called army discipline. Also like me, has no wish to get a stripe or a pip up so that he can have a taste of inflicting it on others.

I've had two letters from mother, written since you've gone, and I can see she misses you. You can't imagine what it meant to her to have you around; she really likes you, and you know exactly how to treat her. Particularly just after I'd left. I'm grateful, I can tell you, for the way you stayed on and kept her company. Of course I know you like her too, almost love her, really, and it was no penance to you, but just the same, a real thank you. She's such an extraordinary person, so absolutely right to live with, but not everyone is capable of knowing her and finding that out.

Well, miss? And what about you? Have you settled down again? I hope you've decided what you're going to do and that whatever it is you are happy in it. I don't think we'll be here much longer. All indications are that we shall be moving—soon. In a way, it'll be a relief. I'm sick to death of the child's game we're playing here, even though I've little relish for the real thing. If I can manage a week end before we go, of course it'll be spent in Atherton, if you and your people will have me? But there's a rumor that all leave is to be canceled soon, so by the time my turn comes round, I doubt if there'll be a chance.

Write when you feel like it. When I think of you, in this
place, you don't seem quite true, you know. Figment of the imagination! End of my candle, so I'd better turn in.

Ludi.

P.S. Lost the piece of paper with the house address on it, so am sending this to your dad's office. My regards to him and to your mother. L.

I had not read it so much as flown through the lines, alighting on the word “you.” “Well, Miss? And what about you?”—What looked like an island, a beckoning palm top, was as uncertain as a piece of floating vegetation, rootless in the tide. I hovered, went on. And in the last paragraph, there it was. A small island, soon explored, but the place where my heart came down and beaked its feathers. I read it over, and again. “When I think.” He thinks about me. But “When” … that means it isn't often. Yet it might be. “You don't seem quite true.” Oh, the happiness of it! Now I am the woman and the princess and the dream. Now it is like a sign on my forehead. “You don't seem quite true.” A dream. Something that's over, then; can't believe it happened. Just forgotten, an incident, like that?

I read the whole letter over again, searching through every word, through the commonplaces, the information of the way he was living, the time, the weather—pushing it all aside like so much rubble. Now I would pick up a word or a phrase, as one fingers a pebble. But no. The repetition of “as I told you” seemed an intimacy, perhaps? Yes. Yes, that I could keep. The bit about his mother. This puzzled me. Of course, it could mean a special kind of confidence in me; of course.

Some sentences I read over to myself a dozen times. Aloud, they sounded different; with another intonation, the meaning changed. Every word of the letter seemed ambiguous; happiness came and went like the color in the bird's wing, showing and going out as it falls through the sun.

I sat on my bed with the three thin sheets and the envelope spread evidence about me. Well, I had a letter, anyway. I rested in that.

But strangely, the mood of exaltation, of closeness to Ludi, was
gone. It was only when I was in bed that night, late and awake, thinking about him as I remembered him on the farm, as I had done when I lay dreaming before my father had called me, that it came back.

It is amazing on how little reality one can live when one … is very young. It is only when one is beginning to approach maturity that achievement and possession have to be concrete in the hand to create each day; when you are young a whole livable present, elastic in its very tenuousness, impervious in its very independence of fact, springs up enveloping from a hint, a memory, an idea from a book. On this slender connection, like a tube of oxygen which feeds a man while he moves in an atmosphere not his own, it is possible to move and breathe as if your feet were on the ground. Through the autumn and into winter, this was the way I lived now. The quiet, steeped autumn days passed, as if the sun turned the earth lovingly as a glass of fine wine, bringing out the depth of glow, the fine gleam; the banks of wild cosmos opened like a wake, with the cream and pink and gilt of an early Florentine painting, on either side of the railway cutting from Atherton to Johannesburg and spattered, intoxicating bees with plenty in the bareness of flat veld and mine dumps, out of ditches and rubbish heaps; the last rains brought the scent of rot like a confession from leaves that had fallen and lain lightly as feathers; the cold wind of the highveld, edged with the cut of snow it had passed on the Drakensberg, blew round the house, blowing bare round the bare Mine, blowing the yellow cyanide sand into curling miasmas and mistrals over the road; the Mine boys walked with only their eyes showing over blankets. I did an afternoon's duty at the soldier's canteen in Atherton twice a week; I worked for three weeks in my father's office again as a relief for someone away on leave. There it was chilly in the mornings; I noticed winter. Dressed in warm clothes, the distance of the summer came to me. I went nowhere, yet I took great care of my appearance, spending hours before my mirror in the poor
light that always showed me shadowy. Sometimes while my parents were out at tennis (they were proud that they still made the second league) I would spend the whole Saturday afternoon arranging and rearranging my hair. In the evening I would not go out, but sat reading beneath an elaboration of shining whorls and curls, formal as a Gothic cornice. My dresses were chosen each day with hesitation and care, my hands were manicured. All these rites were performed alone in my bedroom, in silence, in a depth of dream that held me, deep, far away, as deafness holds someone still and serene in a room full of talk. Any faint temptation to enjoy the distractions of the Mine—a fete, a party, a concert—was paid for and nullified by the immediate feeling of estranging myself from Ludi, and what Ludi thought. The fact that he was in Italy, that the South Coast was months away, made no difference. Like God, to deny his tenets was to lose him.

The letters I wrote to Ludi became more important to me than those I received from him. In them, I assumed our world in common. His, full of descriptions of places I could not imagine, always written from the moment of the present, seemed to have less and less to do with the Ludi of the South Coast, the bright hair, the shortsighted look, the warm strange breast. In time, the infrequent letters were not the painful thrill, the charged token they had been. I could almost have done without them entirely. … For while believing that I was living Ludi's way of life by keeping aloof from that of my home and the Mine, I had all the time been creating a third way of my own, as unconsciously as a spider salivates his thin silver lifeline of survival. The frailty of dreams, imagination and memory was changed and churned by some unsuspected emotional digestion into a vanity and cultivation of myself. Like most finished products, nothing could have resembled less the raw material of emotion from which it was processed. And also, like most survival changes, it was accomplished by personality, unrecognized and unrealized by the conscious mind.