The Lying Days (25 page)

“Who's got my dirty mug?” Laurie Humphrey accused Isa.

“What mug?”

“I think I have.” I waved it at him.

“Oh, Laurie.” Isa held it up, twisting her head to read and slopping the coffee over. “It was the pride of my aunt's mantelpiece.”

“You have no Aunt Macloud.”

“Well it was the pride of somebody's aunt. We got it in that Claim Street junk shop, near the apfel-strudel place, you know. It was in a job lot that Gerda wanted because of an old straw-covered bottle. Isn't it nice? Everytime I used it I used to see Dowell on his
big day, beaming on the green in plus fours with freckles coming out on top of a shiny bald head. Now it looks like an Oscar designed for Henry Miller.”

I laughed along with the others, but I could see by the face of the young man on the divan that he knew I didn't know who Henry Miller was. He used it as a small blackmail between us. “Come and share my couch, Titian,” he said, “come on.” I sat on the end, near his feet, and he studied me. He was the kind who says, Don't tell me—and, appraising you, proceeds to answer his questions for himself. “You're Scotch, hey. Scotch red.” He indicated my hair. “When something rough touches your neck your skin gets all patchy and annoyed. And you're prim. Scotch prim.” He smiled at how right he was.

And curiously enough, I felt hypocritically prim. I seemed labeled, sitting there on the edge of the divan with my hands holding the sides of the cushion. “Half Scotch. Mostly on my mother's side. There's English and a dash of Welsh to water it down.”

We went on like this all through coffee. It was something like going to a fortuneteller, with the added titillation that this was a young man. The slightly scornful and detached summing-up extended to most other subjects; it is an attitude common to doctors and in particular to those who have specialized in some minutiae of the body—brain cells, or blood cells, or lymph glands—and accept their own and other people's knowledge in any other sphere with an amused reservation, like the antics of a clockwork toy to which they hold the key. This tinge of patronage sometimes extends even to the performance of life itself, so that there are some rather pathetically brilliant men who feel slightly superior to their own human desires.

But I only noticed the pleasing insolence of this person, and I could easily place that. “You're a medical student, of course.”

“Of course,” he agreed without interest. John Marcus was busy with the records again, and he stood, tense as if he had made the recording himself, until the voice of the oboe, a voice out of the marshes taking up an ancient tale, lifted and silenced.

And music fell upon the room. It seemed to fall like lava upon these people, making another Pompeii of their attitudes stayed wherever they sat or stood or leaned. For twenty minutes they were returned
deeper and deeper into themselves, and all the movement and speech that had blurred them, the exchange that made them shift and overlap in living, died out cold. Each now was contained in his own outline and none had anything to do with the other. Even that English girl, with her husband's baby somewhere in her body; she sat with her legs slightly spread at the knee and her feet flat on the floor, the attitude of a peasant or a pregnant woman, her eyes light, surface blue, her upper lip lifted a little to listen. With his back to her at the other end of the room, the husband had his arms on his humped knees, staring into the floor: as if the music had caught him looking into some campfire of his own. Backs of heads, and arms, and hands and shoes; all took on the sealed importance of limits; here, with these drooping fingers, with these small crooked toes with their painted nails showing through sandals, these heavy unhuman brown brogues, the person ends. He is shut up in there; she is shut up in there: you see them looking out at their eyes. But not at you, not at the room.

Laurie Humphrey, just across from me, slumped inside a loose gross body that made a rumpled rag of his collar and swallowed the division between his shirt and his trousers. His eyes closed in that big, coarse-textured face, the sagging ears and thick mouth (I could see the patches of dry skin, scaling on the lips) that he wore through his life like a disguise. And Joel's throat, near Isa. Sitting on the floor with his head hung back over some great book he had pulled down, so that there was his throat, like all that an animal offers of himself to the curious, the muscles spread, the end of the beard line, the beat of his blood widening and closing, widening and closing.

A harmlessness about the sitting Edna; the innocence of the ordinary suitcase from which the dangerous documents have been taken out. Her thighs crossed, a small soft rounded stomach let out under her dress. Isa with a broken look about her limbs, and her face become small. Dug up, dusted of ashes and put in a museum, not Isa the writer preserved, not gusto and wit and intellect, but a creature of sensual conflict, every little sticklike bone twisted in passion, the balked, lovewise curl to the mouth. Only the young man sharing the divan with me winked once, like a sardonic sphinx.

The concerto ended and at once movement and talk obscured them in a flickering gnat-dance zigzagging a tingling blur before the separateness of these, scribbling away the outlines of those. The English girl was shaking out her dress as if the music might have left crumbs. “Herby can get a lift with us,” her husband shouted over to the door. But Isa had suddenly put her arm round the old young man, with the blatant advance a woman can only show toward a man whom everyone can see is quite impossible for her. “No,” she said protectively, “he's staying here. I'm all alone and you know this is no country for a white woman.”

“How is it you never even get offered a beer here, any more,” Laurie yawned.

“Well you can all come on to my place,” someone offered, but no one took it up.

“—For the simple reason we're flat. Right out of everything. When Tom brought Ronny and Ben home on Sunday he had to go to the emergency dispensary and wheedle a bottle of invalid wine out of the chap.”

“Are you coming with tomorrow, John? Bring some food.”

“No. Not in your car, Laurie—hey, look out! I've got a baby in there!”

The room had broken up in the push to go home. I signaled good night to Joel across the room; he was spending the night with Laurie. I was going to sleep over at the house of an old friend of my mother's, the usual arrangement when I went out in Johannesburg at night. The house was on the north side of town, while Laurie lived on the east, so I had arranged a lift with someone going in my direction. But as I was getting into my coat the young man of the divan appeared and said: “Which way do you go?”

“Parkview, but the Arnolds are taking me.”

“That's my way, too. You come with me.” And he dragged me off, picking hairs from my coat collar. “Either don't wear a black coat, or buy yourself a clothesbrush. You're a sloppy kid, you know.” “But you said I was prim.” “That was the first time I looked. Anyway, I know that primness. You use it because you don't want to give yourself away. Not even to yourself. But you're there all right, just underneath, and don't think you can forget it.” I suddenly felt
that he saw me on the beach with Ludi, two years ago, looking at my own breasts against the sand. I laughed with embarrassment and misgiving. “Oh, yes,” he said. As I got into his small object-crowded car, Joel and Laurie came out of the building and I put up my hands and smiled to Joel. But the light of the foyer caged him in, and though he was looking right at me, he could not see beyond it.

I did ask Mary Seswayo to come to hear some music at the Welshs' flat, but somehow she never came. When I spoke of it to her she sat very seriously for a moment and then said as if she were replying to the question of an examiner: “The difficulty is how can I get home afterward.”

I said: “Oh, someone will take you.” Like a rope tied to one's ankle, the limits of their recognition in the ordinary life of the city constantly tripped one up in even the most casual attempt at a normal relationship with an African. Because I was white I continually forgot that Mary was not allowed here, could not use that entrance, must not sit on this bench. Like all urban Africans she had learned to walk warily between taboos as a child keeping on the squares and off the lines of paving. But everywhere had been mine to walk in, and out of sheer habit of freedom I found it difficult to restrict my steps to hers. I remember once going into town with her to buy some textbooks, and when I wanted to go to a cloakroom, realizing for the first time in my life that because she was black she couldn't even go to the lavatory if she wanted to. There simply was no public cloakroom for native men or women in the whole shopping center of Johannesburg. Now if she came to the Welshs' someone would have to take her home by car to the native township seven or eight miles out of town where she lived; their flat was nowhere near a native bus route, she could not travel on a European bus, and if she went home by train (even then someone would have to get her to the main station—there was no suburban underground in Johannesburg), there would be a dangerous walk between the halt and her home at the other end. These details were irksome and tedious and because I found them so I felt irritated with her for thinking of them first. It was not the music or the invitation that her inward eye looked to, but the business of getting from here to there.

So we drank our coffee and she kept turning back her sheaf of papers and reading a line or two, slowly. She was continually preoccupied with her work as I, in my work, was preoccupied with other things. She had now a friend who worked in a city bookshop (an enlightened tradition seemed to go with the books and it was one of the very few businesses where an African could be something more than an errand boy; he did what was known as “white man's work” in the stockrooms). Today she had another handbook with her, this time called
Effective English,
that I guessed he had lent her.

Watching her opening it the hesitant, expectant way she opened a lecture-room door or the door of the library, and her eyes unraveling its mystery of print as if they were unwrapping a parcel that just might contain something miraculous, final, I suddenly wished for her that she was less harassed and flattened. And that she would not keep hoping for this miracle, finality. As usual, there was nothing I could say. I went on sipping the sweet coffee and her face hung transfixed over the book like a pool in which she would never see herself. She was very dark skinned—there is a theory, probably originating with the Africans themselves, that when they are well fed and fat they are lightest, and it was certain that she was not particularly well fed—and she had the small, good and also slightly projecting teeth of many African girls. Also the lovely round smooth forehead. She took a gulp out of her cup and as she put it down I wondered, Would I drink out of that cup? At home, as in most households, the Africans had eating utensils kept separate from the common family pool. Don't take that—it's the girl's cup. My mother had often stopped some stranger, fetching himself a drink of water.

But it was a stupid thought I had caught myself out in, and I was learning to recognize them. I was beginning to find that in friendship with an African, a white person is inclined to submit his sincerity to tests by which he would not dream of measuring good will or affection toward another white person. Would I particularly like drinking out of anyone's cup, for that matter?

She went off to the library, and I wandered down to the grassy amphitheater in which the swimming pool lay, still and cold with winter, although the sun was hot. It was one of those immense highveld
days when the buildings and trees of Johannesburg are all mountaintops, lifting up into a dazzling colorless sky, distanceless, dazing as air that has shaken itself free of the earth and rises just out of reach of the last aspiring finger of rock. It is impossible to look into such a sky. I struggled a little with some Italian. Then lay back on the dead grass. A native gardenboy silently looped strands out of the pool with a long hook; then he stretched out with an old torn stained hat over his face. The hoarse voices of two students in shorts and rugby boots were gruff near me. It was the afternoon the young man of the divan was to take me to tea before I caught my train home. The suggestion had interested me enough at the time it was made, on the impetus of the evening at Isa's, but the days that had elapsed in between had returned the young man to the haziness of a stranger, and I wondered, as I had before about such enthusiasms gone cold on me, why I had agreed.

But at four when the shadows of the buildings made chasms of chill I dutifully came out of the cloakrooms with my lips freshly drawn and my hair smoothed with water at the temples, and he was waiting in his black car. At once the inside of it was familiar, the assortment of odd shapes in the darkness appearing in the frankness of afternoon as ampule boxes, a couple of battered instrument cases, and piles of theater programs, empty cigarette boxes and dusty pamphlets put out by drug manufacturers. When he turned to talk to me, he breathed ether like a dragon breathing fire. “Exotic,” he said, “and it's cheaper than standing a round of drinks.” I saw with a sense of justification that he was attractive, after all, and my mood lifted. We were going down the hill in the gaiety that sometimes springs up between people who are attracted but know each other very slightly when he swerved to avoid a native girl carrying a large brown paper parcel, and I interrupted—“Just a moment”—and turned to make sure.

I thought I had recognized the coat and beret. It was Mary, even more burdened than usual, so that she could only smile and had no free hand to wave. Charles had pulled to the curb. “Oh, I didn't mean you to stop,” I said unconvincingly. “Well? What's wrong? You practically flung yourself out the window.”

“It's a girl—an African I'm friendly with. We nearly knocked her over. There she is, just behind—”