The Lying Days (30 page)

“Ah, but if they'd let you go while they still had you—” he said.

As he got up to go over to the little counter of cakes to pay, I laughed. “—You talk as if I'm leaving for ever.”

A week later I telephoned him to tell him that Isa had promised to find me somewhere to live in Johannesburg.

There was a pause. “Well, if that's the case you might as well go to Jenny and John. The Marcuses.”

“Why?” I was intrigued at the suggestion.

“Yes, they're a bit hard up and they want someone to help out with the rent of the flat.”

“But why didn't you tell me before? I think that'd be a wonderful idea. Can I phone them?” The Marcuses had attracted me immediately the few times I had met them, and I was at once excited by the coincidence by which they wanted someone to share their flat, and I wanted somewhere to live. I badgered Joel with questions. “The flat's very small—” he said dubiously.

“I shan't be kept in the manner to which I'm accustomed—shame!”

“Well, you wait and see. The best thing will be for me to take you there. I have to see John on Thursday. I'll have Max's car so I'll pick you up after four.”

After I had rung off I sat a moment or two on the little telephone stool, in the restless inertia of eagerness that must be curbed. Suddenly I wanted to telephone Joel again to tell him to be sure the Marcuses made no arrangement with anyone else in the meantime. I was trembling with excited urgency to have it all decided at once. For at the mention of the Marcuses, something lifted in me; I felt that here I might be about to come out free at last; free of the staleness and hypocrisy of a narrow, stiflingly conventional life. I would get out of it as palpably as an overelaborate dress that had pampered me too long.

When I went to the flat for the first time that Thursday Jenny Marcus sat up very straight on a divan with her bare breasts white and heavy and startling. Like some strange fruit unpeeled they stood out on her body below the brown limit of a
summer tan. She wore a skirt and a gay cotton shirt was hung round her shoulders, and face-down over her knees a baby squirmed feebly. As we came in behind her husband the baby belched, and, smiling brilliantly, calling out to us, she turned it over and wiped its mouth.

They lived on the sixth floor of a building on the first ridge that lifts back from the city itself. The building took the look of a tower from the immense washes of summer light, luminous with a pollen of dust, that filled up the chasms and angles of the city as the blinding eye of the sun was lowered; like eyelids, first this building then that was drawn over it; its red glare struck out again fiercely; came; went; was gone. As I got out of the car I had looked round me like a traveler set down in a foreign square; prepared to be pleased with everything he sees.

Inside, the building put aside the slippery marbled pretensions of the foyer and there was the indigenous smell, that I was soon to know so well, of fried onions and soot, and behind the door on which Joel and I rapped and walked in, Jenny in an unexpected splendor.

What is meant by love at the first sight is really a capture of the imagination; and I do not think that it is confined to love. It happens in other circumstances, too, and it happened to me then. My imagination was captured; something which existed in my mind took a leap into life. I saw the bright, half-bare room, the books all round, the open piano and some knitted thing of the baby's on a pile of music, a charcoal drawing tacked on the wall, a pineapple on a wooden dish and the girl with her bare breasts over the baby. Something of it remains with me to this day, in spite of everything; just as in love, after years of marriage that was nothing like one expected it to be, the moment of the first capture of the imagination can be recalled intact, though the face of the person who is now wife or husband has become the face of an enchanting stranger one never came to know. It was a room subordinate to the force of its occupants; the first of its kind that I was to live in.

“We really wanted a
man”
Jenny explained, while her husband wandered about the room looking tousled and vague, pushing his shirt into his trousers. “They're less trouble, we thought.”

“Ah, it doesn't matter,” he said. “She'll be able to sit with the
baby. You'll see, Jen, she'll be useful to you.” And we all laughed.

“Of course I'll move all the baby's things out of here.”—She drubbed her stiff dark nipple at the little creature's nose and with a blind movement of frenzy it snatched it into its mouth. I was fascinated by the look of her breasts; the skin with the silky shine of a muscle sheath over the whiteness of flesh, and the intricate communication of prominent blue veins. They did not seem recogenizable as a familiar feature of my own body, so changed were they from the decorative softness of my own sentient breasts. As she moved about settling the baby when he had fed, they swung buoyantly with the strong movements of her arms; she was a big girl with the slight look of rawness about the tops of her arms you sometimes see in English women. Still talking rather breathlessly—that was her way—she wriggled into a brassière and buttoned the blouse. “We must take the other room, John? Because of the porch.—We've rigged up a kind of little room for the baby on the porch, and the door leads from the other room—We're going to start putting him out there to sleep. It's not healthy to have him in with us. And you'll have this divan—the only thing is the cupboard.” She caught her lip and laughed, waving toward the door of a built-in cupboard. “That's why we wanted a man—they take up less space somehow.”

“Oh, I see—you mean my clothes. Yes, I'd have to have somewhere to hang—”

She nodded. “Exactly. Well, I'll have to take the groceries out of the bathroom one and put the junk out of this one in there.” “If the worst comes to the worst. . ,” said John, hands on his hips, speaking slowly, “I could move those maps and other stuff of mine over to my father's place.”

His wife giggled at him carelessly fondly: “Oh, no you couldn't. Your mother's acid about the stuff of ours they've got already—”

He had a way of raising his eyebrows exaggeratedly. “Is that so? We-e-ll. When, Jen? Did my father say anything—” And they got caught up in one of the wrangling personal exchanges that were always easily parenthetic to their participation in general conversation. Joel had his head in the cupboard, which John had o ened while he was talking, and he called out: “You've still got that archaeological data! Good Lord—” And started pulling out colored
cardboard files. John dropped his discussion with his wife and went over to encourage him. Soon the floor was littered, and they sat in the middle of it. “It didn't come to anything,” said John mildly. “I heard it was you, Jenny,” said Joel, with innuendo. “They tell me you put a stop to it.”

“Well, I like that!” she said. “Mickey backed out, and they didn't have the money without him. All I did was say that I knew something like that would happen, that's all.”

John pointed at her. “But she was pregnant and she couldn't have gone!”

The two men laughed at her. I went over and sat down on the floor among the papers and photographs; they had the fascination of the practical details of something that had always been impressively remote: an archaeological expedition. While John and Joel explained and argued, she went about attending to the baby, dipping in and out the talk, competently. Once or twice the husband got up to help her with something; they laughed and pushed each other aside officiously over the child, like two people over a newfangled machine whose workings they do not quite get the hang of. “Look, put it this way—” “No, you idiot, they're always supposed to be put down on the
opposite
side to the one they were lying on before.” The baby was like something they had bought for their own use and pleasure; a casual, forthright attitude quite different from the awe and flurry and worshipful subordination of normal life to a little sleeping mummy that I had known in homes on the Mine where babies were born. I had never cared for babies and I did not feel constrained to admire this one; even this small freedom appealed to me.

It was just as casually accepted that I should come and live with them. We had discussed little of what my mother would call the “details,” but when Joel and I were leaving, John said as if he had just remembered: “Well, look, when is she going to come?”—I noticed he had a way of addressing remarks to people in the third person, through his wife, as if he and she interpreted the world to each other, and again I felt drawn to them for their evidence of solidarity, what seemed to me an intimacy as simple as breathing. This was what had appealed to me in them the very first time I had seen them, at Isa's flat. I felt in some obscure way that what they
had was the basis of all the good things in life; from it like casements their minds opened naturally on beauty, compassion, and a clear honest acceptance. Now as we said good-by to them at the door, he leaning an arm on her shoulder, I felt a pang something like jealousy, but without bitterness, as for something which was still possible for me.

In the car I said to Joel: “I like them.”

The intensity of the way I spoke must have struck him, and he said quickly: “Why …?”

“They love each other.”

I kept my head down in a kind of shyness for what I had said. He did not answer, but later, in the silence of a long, straight stretch of road on the way to Atherton, he did something he had never done before; I was gazing at the green summer veld threading past when I felt his hand on the nape of my neck, which was turned away from him. I turned back in confusion and surprise, as at a summons; Ludi's hand had come down upon me once just like that. And Joel was looking at me with the look of a smile in his deep, cool eyes, wondering in understanding, moved and questioning.

The little thread of continuity showing against a relationship so far removed in time, in experience, seemed part of the sense of disturbance and unreality that the upheaval at home had cast like a glare: a milk jug becomes an urn from another age; the feeling of fear, resentment and longing that I hold against the angry voice of my mother somehow becomes the feeling I had, pressed against the door of my room after a hiding. With my mind only half there, I watched the profile of the man sitting beside me; the hand that had rested on my neck relaxed on the steering wheel. Joel will never handle me with love, not even that love of the moment, like Charles', that deeply desired, faintly insulting recognition of the pure female, discounting me, making of me a creature of no name. Yet I said to myself, Why? And I saw him then for a moment not as Joel, but a young man alive and strange beside me, the curve of his ear, the full muscle of his neck, the indentation at the corner of his closed mouth, his thighs with the unconscious lordliness of any young male's legs. A faint ripple of sensation went over me. And instantly I was ashamed, I felt I had lost Joel for that instant. That was why
it could never be; if I get him to touch me he will never be Joel again, he will never look at me the way he did just now, but with the concupiscence of lovers.

This peculiar afternoon light of my upheaval lay upon everywhere I went, everything I did, during that time. I did not see Mary Seswayo to speak to until after I had been to the Marcuses. She had smiled at me, or rather conveyed with the expressive quick movements of her intense eyes the sympathy of strain across the examination room, where we had sat together writing, but in the abnormal, distracted atmosphere which disorganized the normal life of the University at examination time, we had continually missed meeting. When we did meet, we were both exhausted by a three-hour paper rather pompously headed “Classical Life and Thought.” We sat on the low stone balustrade feeling the lightness of the sunny air with the indolence of invalids.

I said to her: “I tried to get you somewhere decent to work. I wanted you to come home with me.”

She looked at me quickly.

“Yes. I suggested to my mother that I should bring you home for a week or so. I had it all planned out. We've got a room that isn't inside and isn't out. But they were afraid to have you, even there.”

Her face, that always waited, open, to receive the impress of what I was saying rather than to impose on me what she felt and thought, took on, for the first time since I had known her, something set. Set against me. Her eyes searched me, shocked, and her nostrils widened, her mouth settled in a kind of distressed annoyance. It was the expression that comes to the face of an older person when a young person does something the other had feared he might.

I gave a short uncomfortable laugh against it. But she continued to look at me. The palms of her hands went down firmly to lean against the stone. She seemed to be waiting for an explanation from me; I could feel the pressure of it as if I were being shaken to speak. Just as suspicion makes an innocent person falter like the guilty, so I was queerly upset by this displeasure I felt in her.

“I shouldn't have told you. Perhaps it's hurtful, after all. But I
thought we'd got to the stage where it was better not to pretend. Then between us, between you and me,
at least,
you would know …”

But I saw it was not that. There was nothing in her of the person who has been slighted. She was not humiliated; in fact I had never seen her so confident, so forgetful of
herself,
of what she inherited in disabilities before the fact of me.

At last she spoke. “Your mother was angry,” she said.

A spasm of annoyance caught me. “You mind? You expect it? And you think it's right?”

“You made trouble for nothing,” she said.

“
I
don't care about the trouble. It's more important to me than the fear of offending. Even in my mother, what's false is false. I won't accept it. But you will. Where's your self-respect?—Come to think of it, you
should
be hurt. Yes, you should. …—Or is it even worse—some sort of tribal nonsense coming up in you—what my father would call ‘the good old type from the kraal,' full of ‘honor thy father and mother' no matter how they think or what they do?”