The Lying Days (28 page)

More and more I longed to leave the Mine and live in Johannesburg. The very comfort and safeness of home irked me. I felt I was muffled off from real life. I wanted the possibility of loneliness and the slight fear of the impersonality of living in a strange place
and a city; the Mine oppressed my restlessness like a hand pressed over a scream. Often I wanted to call out to my mother: Let me go and you will keep me! But it would have been no use; would only have started another cold argument of offense and hurt. Now my parents were planning a visit to England and Europe, the visit of a lifetime which every Mine official waits for, and it was assumed that we should all be going together. When I suggested that they should go, and that I should perhaps like to go alone, or with a student tour, less elaborately, later, gloom fell like a blow on our house. The pleasure had drained out of anticipation, for them. I became guiltily distressed at what I had done, and began to pretend that I wanted to go with them, after all; and all the time resentment that they should force me to feel guilty toward them grew to match my desire to show them love.

The simultaneous experience of a longing for warmth and closeness and a wild kicking irritation to be free bewildered me and made me moody. I seemed to have nowhere to lay my bundle of contradictions, and so I stood a kind of touchy guard over them. To my mother and father I seemed more and more withdrawn and self-willed. They pressed to themselves the sharp belief that I no longer needed them; my mother retaliated with the pretense that she no longer needed me, my father with a gentle sadness of self-blame, a kind of timidity at my distance, as if conceding me a right to it.

Yet with the peculiar power of the inadvertent, the innocent, it was to be Mary Seswayo who blew up this no man's land between my parents and me. Like a stray dog she ran across it and set off a mine field that threw up depths and plowed chasms which would be there forever.

It was toward the end of the year, when the heat and examinations came together. We all grumbled about the strain but I believe that in a way, I enjoyed it. It caught me up at least temporarily in a sense of urgency and purpose that discounted the strain, and it meant that at home I could shut myself up with
my books and, living apart from the household, be respected for it. I do not think there was a home anywhere that did not invest its student with a sense of importance and special consideration at this time.

That was why I said to Mary Seswayo one afternoon, “Why do you hang on here? I like to get home and get down to some real work as early as I can.”—There were no more lectures once examinations were about to start, and we simply came to University to use the library or discuss something with our tutors. But the African girl seemed always to be sitting over a desk somewhere, in the library or a deserted lecture theater, while everyone else was hurrying to get away.

She looked up with the dulled expression that, contradictorily, comes from concentration. “I'd rather work here.”

“Oh, would you?” I said in the polite tone of disagreement.

“The woman I stay with's got her children at home and you can't expect them to stay outside all the time. Then she takes in sewing and the books and papers get all mixed up. …” She smiled.

And then I remembered. I stood there looking at her with a kind of appeal of concern on my face and she smiled back at me with the reassurance of resignation. “So I'd rather work here.”

For once I forgot the tacit pretense I kept up in an attempt to spare her feelings, to make her feel less different from me. “It must be like hell. How do you manage at night? Can you get anything done?”

Suddenly we really were intimates at last. “How can I? I sleep in a room with the children. In the other room the man and woman sit and talk, there are always people. So I try early in the morning. But the children are up at dawn.” She laughed at the hopelessness of it.

I shook my head, not knowing what to say. “You couldn't go home to Natal?”

“No.”

We both knew there was no money for it.

“Isn't there anywhere else you could stay for a bit?”

She shrugged and moved her brown expressive eyes with their
bright whites, lingeringly from one side of the room to the other, as if to say, Where?

But then she said, to remind herself how privileged she was to be at the University at all. “But I can get a lot done here, you know, in the daytime.”

I made a little noise of impatient dismissal; conscious at the same time that this in itself was a luxury only a white person could afford.

And I went home. The train had been standing in the full sun of three o'clock in the afternoon before it left Johannesburg station, and the leather seats were searingly hot to the touch. My clothes stuck to the leather and my body stuck to my clothes, and, with my legs crossed, tears of sweat ran helplessly from my thighs down the backs of my bare knees. The green blinds were down and the thick dusty light brought out the varnish smell of hot leather. I closed my eyes and sank into the sweat and staleness of myself (five wet prints showed where my hand had clutched my books), and the train seemed to pamper me in it, shaking yes, yes, lazily as a fat woman breathing. I saw the old motorcar tire with the fern straggling out of it; the children shouting; the flatness, the dust, the noise. I imagined the woman with the sewing machine stuttering and the bits of material everywhere. Probably she chattered while she sewed. No, probably that was wrong, too; native women are always far more gay or far more serious than white women, so one mustn't try to visualize their moods from one's experience of Europeans. They sing and shout in the street over nothing, and they are solemn under the weight of some task we shouldn't even feel. There was no way of knowing, no way of knowing. And sitting in the physical reality of the heat that tacked my mind down to consciousness of every part of my body, sweating or touching in discomfort against the encumbrance of cloth, I had an almost physical sensation of being a stranger in what I had always taken unthinkingly as the familiarity of home. I felt myself among strangers; I had grown up, all my life among strangers: the Africans, whose language in my ears had been like the barking of dogs or the cries of birds.

And this feeling seemed to transmute itself (perhaps by a trick
of the heat, altering the very sensibility of my skin) to the feeling Mary must have, trying to oppose the abstract concepts of her books against the overwhelming physical life crowding against her. What a stranger it must make of her. A stranger to herself. And then again how slight, how stupid, how useless it must all seem, how impossible to grasp, the structure of the English novel, the meaning of meaning, the elegance of exchanges between Beatrice and Benedict—with the woman making mealie porridge over the fire, the man carefully preserving the dirty bit of paper that is his pass, the children playing for a few years before they become nursegirls and houseboys.

When I got down from the train at the siding the Mine property lay like an encampment, dead in the heat. Atherton, just seen over the veld in a watery haze, was another. The horror of full light showed it for what it was. Inside there might be coolness, the illusion of shelter and color, the depth of books, the dignity of enclosed space in rooms, the symbols of fruitfulness in flowers and grapes; but the sun looked down on the bare, stolid huddle of tents that expressed nothing more than complacent survival. And all around, like a child's revenge of muddy footprints and dirty words scratched on a wall, the natives had fouled the niggling benefits of the white people's civilization. The siding was littered with bitten-out hunks of stale bread swarming with ants, filthy torn papers and rags clung to the boles of the gum trees, and the smell of stale urine, which had been there as long as I could remember, came up from the weeds along the road.

Inside our house, the dimness was overcome with heat. But it was absolutely quiet. In the vacuum of heat and quiet the work that I had to do had space to fill my mind entirely.

The heat and quiet and torpor of the Mine irritated me like the uselessness of a person who lies snoring in the sun. Why shouldn't Mary Seswayo come and work here for a week or ten days? No one would disturb her, she would bother no one. And there was the playroom—the little whitewashed lean-to built on the back of the house as a “cooler” before the days of electric refrigerators—that had been used to store my toys and was now a place for things that had no place. She could sleep there; it was neither inside the house nor out. I could clear it up and put a bed in.

The idea was so simple and practical that it gave me the particular satisfaction of an easy solution which has been overlooked. I vaguely thought my mother might raise some objections, but I felt that the “cooler” was the answer to those; I had the cooler all ready to produce, and there was all the rightness of it, for my mother, self-evident: neither inside the house, nor out in the yard with Anna, but something in between. And what would it matter to Mary how my mother looked at it; she would have peace and a place to herself.

My mother was secretary to some Mine charity committee that year, and just before supper she was sitting at the dining-room table addressing envelopes. She looked from the telephone directory to the writing under her hand with the air of determination and distaste with which she efficiently tackled tasks of this nature, and when she heard someone come in, said without looking up: “You must wait another few minutes, my girl.” She thought it was Anna, wanting to lay the table.

“Oh, it's you. I've promised to get these wretched things out by tomorrow. I sent them all out last week, and now at this afternoon's meeting they want something added. I've got to do it over again.”

I felt suddenly shy of her, I didn't know why. Instead of saying quite simply what I wanted to say, I wandered around the table for a moment or two, picking up and reading an envelope here and there. Mrs. W. J. Corbett, President, L.S.C., P.O. Box 127, Atherton. Mrs. J. Dale-Smith, c/o Manager's House, Basilton Levels … And when I did speak, I began in a roundabout way almost as if I were making a charity appeal. “Mother, I was thinking just now—working in my room I can get such a lot done, nobody to bother me. … Really, if one can't get through under conditions like this … But I was thinking, there's a young African girl in my group, she's really a bright girl and it's so important for her to pass. She lives in this awful location place, with people milling around all the time. She was telling me, she doesn't get a chance to work at all. And so I thought, at least I thought just now, couldn't she come home here for a while? Just for, say, ten days. Until we start writing.”

“A native girl?”

“Yes, an educated native girl, of course.” Every time I spoke
my voice came out with more humility. I felt I stood there like a beggar.

“But where would she sleep?” my mother brought out at last, as if she had found what she wanted in the pause: the unanswerable.

I had it ready: “In the cooler. It'd be quite all right. I'll fix it up for her.”

I began to make light of it, sensing that if I spoke of Mary as an inferior my mother might be edged to a position where it would seem that she herself and I stood together. “She's as clean as a white person and she'd do her own room and so on. It's just to give her somewhere to work.”

“Yes …,” said my mother. “Where will she wash? And where's she going to have her meals? That's something. I don't fancy her using my bath.”

“Oh, she'll wash outside. She'll eat in her room. Or she and I'll eat together.”

“You'll
eat …”

I made a gesture of quick dismissal. “She won't care where she eats.”

Anna came in from the kitchen with the tablecloth over her arm and a faggot of knives and forks in her hand. “I'm sorry, missus,” she said determinedly. “All right, all right, I'm off,” said my mother, scooping up her things. She put them on the sideboard. “Look, Anna, don't use those mats Miss Julie gave me. The old ones are good enough for under the meat dishes.”

I did not say anything but stood and watched her. She could not ignore me as she left the room. “Well, I don't know,” she said. “I'll have to speak to your father.”

That was what she always said when she did not know whether or not she wanted to do something. I had heard her say it in shops hundreds of times, when she suspected that she might get what she wanted elsewhere, or that she was being overcharged: “I'll have to speak to my husband.” Yet I knew that she had never sought my father's advice in her whole life, and he had never cared to have any authority over her, or questioned any decision of hers. It was her way of playing for time to go into consultation with herself.

Now I accepted the lie with a show of respect. I sat on the veranda letting the insipid music of the radio flow over me, and soon my father came home and let himself down into one of the creaking chairs to read the paper. As he grew older the sprightliness of small, thin men was intensified in him and his face grew smaller behind his glasses. Fits of dizziness and weakness had been diagnosed as anemia, and he was no longer allowed to discipline himself with the dietary fads that he had adopted from time to time. So he had gone from the stomach to the psyche. Now he had a little shelf of books of popular psychiatry, and adopted the theory of psychosomasis as wholly as he had once believed in the doctrine of Christian Science or the Hay Diet. He was also one of the many people who confuse eccentricity with culture, and he saw my modest and hopeful attempts to expand myself as on a level with his blind belief in the elixir of the moment or, rather, the latest book of the month for hypochondriacs. “This'll interest you, Helen!” He held up a new one.
The Subconscious You.
A popular, concise explanation for laymen written by an eminent American psychiatrist. Two million copies sold. “It seems it's all up here,” he said, putting a finger to his forehead. “No matter where you feel it, it's all up here. Look somewhere toward the middle, there—there's a chapter on how to study, that's something for you now, eh?”