The Lying Days (16 page)

I sat back gathering my own silence for a breath or two. But I would not let the moment glide by; in defiance to my mother, in response to the stirring that opposed her in me, I wanted to say something real, a short arrangement of words that would open up instead of gloss over. It came to me like the need to push through a pane and let in the air. I leaned forward. “Why do you treat me as if you know me?”

He looked up; there was that quick change of focus in his eyes: from print to a face. He said patiently: “Because I do.” And now it was easy and my boldness made me laugh. He was laughing too. “I've known you ever since I can remember. You used to wear a yellow tartan skirt with a big pin thing in it—I used to think you must have a pretty bad mother, if she wouldn't even sew up your dresses properly.”

“But it was supposed to be like that!”

“So I found out. Not for years though—” He shook his head. “I'd never seen anything like that.”

“But where? I don't know how it was you could have seen me, known me, if I don't know you.”

“In the bioscope, the town with your mother, passing in your father's car—for years. Ever since I can remember.”

I sat there, smiling, doubting. He nodded his head slowly at me, as if to say, yes, yes, it's true. “You used to have a little pale blond friend and you both used to carry white handbags. Like grown-up women.”

“Olwen. Olwen Taylor and I! But you've got an astonishing memory.” My deep interest in myself made the fact of a stranger's recollections of me remarkable; it was like being shown an old photograph, taken when one was not looking, a photograph of which one did not even know the existence until this moment. And yet there it is, the face one has sometimes caught unawares in a mirror.

“But I used to see you so often in the bus, too. Coming from school.”

“You were never in the bus—I should have remembered you. I can remember any child who traveled on that bus.” At once I was dubious.

“Not in it. I used to cycle home from school at about the same time, and we used to pass the bus—two or three other boys and I, it was a great thing to race it.”

I was filled with the delight of interest in myself. I asked a dozen questions. “I had a fringe? Did you know me when I had a fringe—awful, it was always too long, into my eyebrows. Or was it later, when I had plaits?”—I stopped in amazement again. “I remember all the phases,” he said.

In the pause an impulse of regret grew in me at not remembering him; I could turn back to so many faces, some I had never known, watched and never spoken to, and all the time the one that had been fixed on me had gone unnoticed. His look questioned me, dark, water-colored eyes, mottled and traced with an intricacy of lines and flecks, like markings of successive geological ages on the piece of polished quartz my father kept. “I was trying to imagine you seeing me, and I not knowing you were.” He laughed. I was curious again: “But what were you doing that way? You certainly didn't live on the Mine, that I'm sure.”

“At that time we were living out at the store—my father's store. Not in the town”—he anticipated the association—”The Concession stores just outside your property.” He went on explaining but now it was himself my attention was taking in and not what he was saying. Of course this was a different face. There was no place, no feature, no bone one could point to and say: Here, this is where it is; yet the face was different. The faces that had looked in at me when I was an infant, the faces I had fondled, the faces that had been around me all my life had differences, one from the other, but they were differences of style. This face was built on some other last.

I said: “Your name's Aaron?” not meaning it to sound, as it did, a conclusion.

But he said with that sweet reasonableness that he seemed to keep inside him the way some people keep strength, or touchiness: “Joel. My surname's Aaron.”

“I thought Ian Petrie said it was Aaron, that's why.”—Smiling, but I was thinking of a tortoise shell, a confused memory that brought up with it the faded camphor of a defiance, my mother, angry with me, in white tennis clothes. “There was one time I'll never forget.” He was laughing, with the relish of a story. “I was riding into Atherton to have two of my mother's hens killed—one under each arm, and balancing furiously—you were sitting at the back of a half-empty bus and you stood right up and watched me go by with such an expression on your face! I kept my head down and rode like hell.”

“D'you know I've only been down there once in my life … to
the stores. I couldn't have been more than ten. I was angry with my mother, so I went down all by myself one Saturday afternoon.” The tone of my voice showed that it was still an adventure to me.

“Was it forbidden, then?” he asked.

“Oh yes. Quite forbidden; the natives, and unhealthy …” I did not think to pretend otherwise my mother's distaste for the stores.

I was right; I did not need to. “We survived very well,” he laughed, as if he knew my mother, too. Perhaps, knowing me, shaped by my mother, he did.

“You certainly have,” I said with a little gesture of my face toward his books; I did not know why.

“Yes.” Now he was thoughtful.

I remembered something, seriously—”By the way, perhaps I should have said, but you seem to know so much—”

He smiled at me again, that expressive smile that had an almost nasal curve to it, gently. “Yes I know; it's Helen. Helen of Atherton.”

It was a title. Perfectly sincerely, I could hear it was a title. And although the obvious reference that came to mind was ridiculous, it made me blush. Entirely without coquetry I suddenly wished I were better looking, beautiful. It was something I felt I should have had, like the dignity of an office.

The Aarons did not live behind the Concession Store any more, but in a little suburban house in the town. There was a short red granolithic path from the front door to the gate, and the first time I went there a fowl was jerking cautiously along a row of dahlias. Joel said, opening the gate for me, the sun laying angles of shadow on his face: “I often thought about going into your house, but I never imagined bringing you to mine.”

It was a Saturday morning, and I had met him coming out of the stationer's in the main street of Atherton, carrying a paper bag from which the head of a paintbrush protruded. “My builder's supplies.” He waved the bag. I knew all about the model hospital he was
making as part of his year's work as an architectural student. He had explained the sketches for it to me in the train.

“Did you remember the ambulance for the front door?”

“—Come with me to buy it.”

The town had taken spring like a deep breath; it showed only in the bright pale brushes of grass that pushed up newly where there were cracks in the paving, the young leaves on the dark dry limbs of the trees round the Town Hall, but we felt it on our faces and I on my bare arms. There was a feeling of waking; as if a cover had been whipped off the glass shop fronts and the faded blinds. When we had been to the bazaar, he said: “You've wanted to see my hospital and you've heard so much about it—why don't you come home with me now? If you're doing nothing, it's not far—” So we walked slowly to his home in the light glancing sun, talking past the bits of gardens where children scratched in the dust, women knitted on their verandas, a native girl beat a rug over a wire fence.

It was only when he spoke at the gate that our interested talk dropped lightly and suddenly. The faint sense of intrusion that quietens one when one is about to walk in on someone else's most familiar witnesses came to me. It was suddenly between us that we really knew each other well; oddly, it seemed that a matter for laughter—Joel's eyes silently on me from a distance—really had secreted a friendship that it had only been necessary for us to speak to discover. Since that morning on the train we had been companions on every journey, and with an ease that comes to relationships most often as a compensation for the dulling of years, very rarely with the immediacy of a streak of talent.

Yes, we knew each other well, the young to the young, a matching of the desire for laughter, meaning and discovery which boils up identically, clear of the different ties, tensions, habits and memories that separately brewed it. But this brown front door with the brush hairs held in the paint, an elephant-ear plant in a paraffintin pot below the bell, watched Joel Aaron every day. Inside; the walls, the people who made him what he was as the unseen powers of climate shape a landscape; force flowers, thick green, or a pale monotony of sand.

He lifted the mat made of rolled tire strips, looking for the key,
and dropped it back. “Ma's home, then.” He smiled, and the door gave way to his hand.

It was not spring inside the Aarons' house. The air of a matured distilled indoor season, an air that had been folded away in cupboards with old newsprint and heavy linen, cooked in ten-years' pots of favorite foods, burned with the candles of ten-years' Friday nights, rested in the room with its own sure permeance, reaching every corner of the ceiling, passing into the dimness of passages with the persistence of a faint, perpetual smoke.

Joel was not aware of it as one cannot be aware of the skin-scent of one's own body; he picked up some circulars that the postman had pushed under the door and threw them onto a chair. The house opened directly into the living room where there was a large dark table with a crocheted lace cloth, high-backed chairs set back against the wall, a great dark sideboard with two oval, convex-glassed pictures above it. A pair of stern, stupid eyes looked out from the smoky beard of an old photograph; the face of a foolish man in the guise of a patriarch. But next to him the high bosom, the high nose that seemed to tighten the whole face, slant the black eyes, came with real presence through a print that seemed to have evaporated from the paper: a woman presided over the room.

Past a green leatherette sofa with shiny portholes for ash trays in the arms, Joel led me through the white archway into the passage. A refrigerator stood against the wall as if in a place of honor; our footsteps were noisy on thin checkered linoleum that outlined the uneven spines of the floor boards beneath it like a shiny skin. In his room, Joel showed the self-conscious busyness that comes upon one in one's own home. He put out the little rough dog that had been sleeping on the bed, kicked a pair of shoes out of sight, cleared one or two rolls of plans off the table that held his model.

To me the model was a cunning and delightful toy and I exclaimed over it with pleasure. I made him take the miniature ambulance out of its packet and place it under the portico.

“What I'm worried about, you see, is this—” He knew I could not detect the functional pitfalls of his design, yet he hoped for reassurance in itself, even the reassurance of ignorance. I tried to
separate my intelligence from my fascination with the perfect little windows, the flower boxes made of cork. “I see. I see …”

He had a way of looking up penetratingly to see if the face of the person to whom he was speaking confirmed his words. It was quick, earnest, almost a request. “I'll show you, here on the plan—somewhere here—” His long olive-skinned hands unrolled the paper on the bed, we knelt on it together, rumpling the blue taffeta cover that smelled of dog. The plan shot up again like a released blind. He picked it up, blew down it. He said calmly, as if the thing had dwindled to its proper small importance; “Well, there'll be no problem getting it back again after it's seen. I'll take five minutes to break it up.” I protested, but he only smiled at me, swinging a leg. “You might want to look at this,” he said, “and these”—he was pulling books out of an old high case that stood by his bed—”Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright—the high priests—”

I bounced his bed. “It's very soft.” I laughed, looking round. He shrugged, deprecating it. “Feather bed; from Russia. Look, Helen, what do you think about this?” And he brought a book of Danish furniture design to my lap.

I wandered slowly, curiously round his small room as if in a museum. The glossy books on modern architecture and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Yeats and Huxley, paper-backed John Stuart Mill and Renan's
Life of Jesus
were stacked on the hand-crocheted mats which were spread on the chest of drawers, the bedside table and the top of the bookcase. A photograph of a school group hung on a brass wire, and a framed address in what looked like oriental characters and must be Hebrew hung at a lower level beside it. On the other wall a modern print had a frame that had evidently belonged to something else, and did not fit it. The only modern painter I had ever heard of was Van Gogh, from a novelized version of his life which I had taken from the Atherton library. “That's not a Van Gogh, is it?”

“Seurat.”

“Oh.”

A Treasury of Folk Tales for Jewish Boys and Girls, How to Make It, The Wonder Adventure Book
—and on top of this battered pile an army cap. It was easy to forget that Joel had been in the army.

“Joel, you've never told me, why were you discharged?”

“I got a mastoid and it did something queer to my middle ear. For about a year I couldn't hear at all.”

I was curious. “Show me how you looked in uniform?—Oh, come on, you must have a picture somewhere?”

He was kneeling next to his model, adjusting something with precision, and the light of the window behind him glowed through his ears and made his teeth shine in contrast to the darkness that blurred the rest of his face. “You laughing in anticipation?”

“It's the light through your ears—all red.—But put it on, then, if you won't show me your picture.”

He came forward laughing, with the air of a good-natured dog that allows a ribbon to be put on its collar. “Wait—wait—” I was knighting him with the cap, and his hand, with the short movements of someone searching by touch, was feeling to arrange it, when a hoarse little voice said softly, like a reluctant question: “Joel …”