The Lying Days (38 page)

Paul merely made a little movement of culpability that distorted his mouth; lifted his hand swiftly, palm open, questioning.

Somewhere parenthetic to my quickening of concern I was faintly stirred, fascinated by this momentary flash of his existence simply as a man; not my beloved, flesh with ways of its own, a mind, particular, sometimes puzzling—the whole computation of personality of which the essence is that which is always left out, cannot be classified—but simply a living being shaped by its maleness.

“I knew she was fond of you. … You talk well together.”

“Like a vaudeville act.”

The terse casualness of the summing-up fell lightly between us.

I looked at him.

And it came to me suddenly: I did not care. It mattered as little to me now as it did to him. The reaction, the revulsion I had waited for fearfully in myself was not there. I thought with a kind of pride of surrender to something painful and sweet in its dangerous completeness: Nothing matters. Nobody. Not even Isa.

I sat with my hands resting on the typewriter, looking at Paul.

“You look a little drunk,” he said. “That's rotten brandy of John's. It kicks you in the back of the head about two hours after you've forgotten drinking it.”

At the end of 1949 I went to live with Paul in the flat in Bruton Heights, Krause Street.

He had had a very bad infection of the throat during which I had gone every day to stay with him, and sometimes spent the night because it was difficult for me to get home alone after dark to Parkcrest—where I had moved, with the Marcuses, to their house. Then when the infection cleared, he had to have his tonsils removed, and I went home with him from the nursing home.

I sent a message to the bookshop to say that I was ill. All day long we were alone together in the hot bright little flat, Paul's pajamas that I had washed flapping on the balcony, our cigarette smoke blue in the sunlight round the bed, the collection of newspapers, books and lozenges littering the sheets. Walking up the street to the vegetable shop in the morning, I had no compunction about my job, really would not have cared if someone had seen me. In the shop I stood enjoying the little imposture of waiting among all the other housewives, middle-aged women who weighed out their own tomatoes—not too green, not too soft—and smart young women who dangled a car key on the index finger and pointed, without touching, at what they wanted. Back at the flat, Paul would mimic for me the funny, charming speech of the Portuguese market gardeners who both grew the vegetables and ran the shop. I cooked our food and read to him (he liked the sound of my voice reading something familiar, a translation of Stendhal, the poems of Donne) and at twelve we would eat together, the tray between us on the bed. Then I would push the windows as wide as they would go, and pull the curtains. The summer day seemed to curl up asleep outside; we would hear the sound of the native laborers' picks digging the foundations for a new block of flats on the other side of the street.

I lay down beside him (he had the warm puppy-smell of people who are in bed) and with his arm hooked around my neck, he read, very swiftly and silently, detective stories that, the moment I began to follow the lines from the angle at which I lay, sent me off into a kind of singing sleep, like the sound of cicadas rising in my head. Sometimes we made love. I would tease him: “But you're supposed
to be a weak convalescent. If you're strong enough for this you should be working.” “For some things,” he would say in the hoarse closed whisper which was the only way he could speak, “you don't need your voice.”

We would lie there quietly, spreading our limbs for coolness on the rumpled sheet. “Listen,” he would say, “everyone's away. Everyone's working. The whole town's reckoning and arguing and persuading and measuring up and putting down. Only us.” And there was a special pleasure in the sense of our desertion, our malingerers' possession of the hot quiet afternoon in the emptied building and the emptied street. We could still hear the picks, pitching dully and regularly into the earth.

When evening came—we could see nothing but the sky from where we sat, deepening green and now showing a star like a glistening drop of water, though the noise of homeward traffic beat and swirled below—he did not want me to go and I did not want to go. I would run down out into the street again to get a paper. We drank gin and lime juice to the mild intermingling of other people's radios, city equivalent of the cheeping of birds in the dusk. We did the crossword together in that desire to stretch one's concentration lazily—like making a muscle—that comes pleasurably from idleness. For half an hour, on the gay confidence of the gin, I felt entirely in command of the pots I set cooking, pans I set sizzling. Paul sat up in bed shelling peas. I shouted a running commentary to him from the kitchen as I cooked. And afterward he liked me to come to him smelling of talcum from the bath, my hair brushed out and the make-up washed off my face, and we lay together listening to records and hearing the roar of the traffic rise, far down, as other people went off to cinemas and visits. Quite late, because we talked so easily at night, circling out from the still center of ourselves to politics and death, the confidence with which we spoke of the uncertain future, the hesitancy with which we spoke of the certain past; gossip, impressions—we fell asleep, curled round each other like two cats in the narrow bed.

When we talked about the kind of life we should live together I would say: “I want to live with you in the greatest possible intimacy.” I said it with a deep earnest satisfaction that was at the same
time apprehensive, lying back on the pillow and looking at him. And I do not know that I knew exactly what it was that I meant; though I knew what it was that I did not mean. I did not want to belong to the women's camp while my husband belonged to the men's camp. I did not want to sit talking to women of things that “did not interest” men, while he sat with the men talking of things that “did not interest” women. I did not want him to be a scapegoat, hidden behind a newspaper: “I'll have to ask my husband,” “I don't know what my husband will think”—as if he were a kind of human reference work, a statute book on which the state of the household internally and in relation to society was based. … When Paul questioned me, I could only pause, and then say, like another question, an obstinate question rather than an answer: “… This, I want this. It must be like this.” I knew this warmth of physical intimacy—eating, bathing, sleeping, waking together—was not all of two human beings rooted in each other but free, yet it was all I had so far come to know of the state I imagined.

Paul delighted in it for itself; for him I think it was immediate and complete. There was a peculiar charm in loving a woman, a girl as young as I was, whose desire was to identify herself entirely with his being. Older women he had known had, I imagine, wanted to possess
him;
they took him to themselves. But I wanted to devote myself to him. He felt he owned me, and all the love and pleasure I could give him. It was a sort of young male's kingdom into which he had come into his own after being the darling page boy of the court. When I put into words the way we spent our time together, he was quite maddened; he kissed me and caressed me and worried at me in enchantment with the way I was made and the things that I said.

I never went back to the Marcuses'. When the week was up and we both descended into the world, like two children who have made a suburban room their secret tower, we could not live apart again. It was senseless to see each other in snatches, to lie at night the distance across the town away from each other, to eat and talk with others. All that was senseless; the only thing that was right and simple was to stay together. It is curious how moral censure never seems applicable to oneself. I would say of others: “Aren't they
living together?—I heard he had some girl in his flat?”—But it never occurred to me that people might speak of Paul and me in the same casual tone, that I might be to them merely some girl who lived with a man. In any case we were as good as married; the marriage was a mere formality we had still to go through. We had wanted to marry at the end of the year, when we had saved a little money and could perhaps go to Europe. But now: “We'll get married when they come back,” said Paul, speaking of my mother and father. “I want to shoot you down to Natal at Easter to show you to my people. We'll go for the long week end and then I can take you to the Drakensberg, and we'll climb.”

My mother and father, writing to me from Devonshire of the “real English Christmas and New Year” they had spent with my father's stepsister, stood vaguely sentinel in my mind. I did not really think of them; yet they were there. I continued to write to them from the Marcuses' address. …

Paul could not understand my deceit with them. That I should not want them to know that we were living together, because the knowledge would shock them, he could perhaps admit; it was simply expedient. But that I should be ashamed of my deceit, that I should “pull a guilty face about it”—that annoyed him. “Are you ashamed of living with me?”

“How can you ask?”

“Then if you're not doing anything you're ashamed of, what are you feeling so bad about?”

I could not answer.

“You know what you remind me of? A little girl who has been told God is watching her all the time. And if she does something God thinks is naughty, he will know, no matter where she is, no matter how she tries to hide it. … Just look at you.”

And I stood there, in the sudden descent of dismay that came with their letters; fingering the envelope, addressed in my father's rather beautiful hand (its sweeping flow always suggested some freer, other side of him I had never seen, as the sight of his bare knees, in tennis shorts, suggested to me as a child another existence outside the known one as my father). My mother would sit down and write her pile of letters in her large wavering hand, where the tails of the
y's in one line looped through the crosses of the t's on the one below, and then my father would address the envelopes for her, consulting the little pigskin notebook where the addresses were all set down. …

“It seems so mean …,” I said, not wanting to annoy him. I saw so clearly in the light of his presence, the set of his head, the small impatient movement of his foot, the childish stupidity of my scruples, that let me lie and yet made me whimper over the lying.

He knew I was troubled but though he wanted to be sympathetic he could not conceal his boredom with the reason; it came through the smile he gave me now. “—Then tell them if it'll make you feel any better …?” He put on his hat with the air of getting back to the real business of life, picked up his cigarettes and the car key. He was the only young man I knew who wore a hat, and somehow it was part of his sense of vitality, that well-worn but smart and expensive hat clapped unerringly on his head as he went out. It was typical of Paul that his careless love of good clothes was accepted unquestioningly by people like the Marcuses, who would have scorned the manifestation as hopelessly materialistic in anyone else. He came over to me and kissed me before he went, lifting me tightly off the ground although he was not particularly tall, and then setting me down again.

For him the consciousness of being answerable to one's parents for one's moral actions was something he could not conceive of in me, even something slightly ridiculous; for to him I was an adult woman, answerable only to her own integrity. When he had gone I felt ashamed and disgusted with myself for being less than this. I had the horrible feeling that the Mine had laid a hand on me again; Atherton had gleefully claimed me as one of its own, lacking the moral courage to be anything else.

I put the letters into the back of the kitchen drawer behind the string and corkscrews and a broken top (how had it got there?) and went out. The flat boy interrupted a conversation on the entrance steps to turn and greet me with a little grunt of friendly pleasure preceding and tailing off after his “Mad-am …”; he was a tiny, big-headed Basuto, wearing, like the clothes of an elder brother, the white cotton kitchen suit provided for the god-bodied great Zulu
who had preceded him. I reaped the geniality engendered by long conversations in Sesuto with Paul. Over the road two white men in workmen's overalls watched me pass and, grinning, shouted something I did not hear because of the noise of the concrete mixer which two natives were feeding.

At the bus stop an enormously fat woman in black sat spread on the seat in the burning sun. She moved her feet a little, like a restless elephant. A woman with a shopping bag that bulged although it was empty, as though in exhaustion, joined us, jumped on and pawed at by a small boy. As I sat between them with my flimsy dress falling away from my bare legs and the scent of my own powder rising from my neck in the heat, I felt a sudden return of power. The pure arrogance of being young; free, risen every day from love, this was the long moment, limitless when you are living it, brief when it has passed or you have never had it, that was conferred upon me by the drab indifference of the women on either side.

Perhaps it is in moments like this, selfish as the laws of life itself, yet humble in the evidence of the flowerlike nature of human beings despite their brain and spirit, that happiness is sharpest. I know that it came to me then as sudden and delightful as a bird sheering up out of nowhere into the sky.

That summer was the second under Nationalist government. (The jokes of the Sunday afternoon when we had all talked over the election-forecast competition had, with the calm irony of event, become fact; Laurie was our prophet and not our clown.) As people always do when the unthinkable comes to pass, we had braced ourselves to the curious letdown of finding ourselves on the losing side, looking with a sense of unreality at the flat-faced, slit-mouthed Dr. Malan staring back from under the caption PRIME MINISTER, and had waited for calamity to come down.