The Lying Days (42 page)

“You're living with a man, living with a man as if you were married to him.” She stopped. “Living with this man and lying, writing letters and lying—What do you want? To end up on the street?”

I thought with a rising distress of panic, I knew she'd do this; it's ridiculous—she's making it a tragedy, terrible, world-comedown, hateful. She's twisting it up into hysteria. But she had done it already; I was in it, shaking before her horror of myself.

I said: “It's not like that. Don't be silly, we're going to get married anyway. People now—”

“Yes, they've got no respect for anything, you've got no respect for yourself. And what kind of a person is he, to behave like that with a girl from a decent home. … Women who must have a man to sleep with. Women who can't live without a man. A university education to live with a man. How can women be such filthy beasts?”

All the time she had never taken her eyes off me.

She began to weep, and I saw that now that she was older she cried like other women; it was no longer hard for her to cry, and so it no longer had any more meaning than the simple relief of other women's tears. I cannot explain the strong strain of peculiar joy that seized me, apparently so irrelevantly, as I understood this, so that I could say quite commandingly, “Don't cry, if Daddy hears you cry he'll be alarmed.”

“I don't want to see you,” she said, and already it seemed in her face that she no longer saw me, “I don't want you in this house again. You understand that?”

The peculiar joy swept into hatred. I hated her for leaving me, for blaming me, for making me care that she did. I trembled with hatred that for a moment made me want to laugh and weep and
abuse; and that left me hot and cold at the escape of knowing that that was what she wanted: that that was how she wanted me to behave.

My father came in and the whole scene was gone through again, but in myself I was stubborn; it was over. I was sitting it out.

We even had tea before my father took me to the station. In silence as if someone had died. While we were sitting at the dining-room table drinking, the smell of the room when I bent over the table painting from my color box as a child came to me, immediate, complete, unaltered. The print-smell of the pile of English newspapers, the oil-smell of furniture polish, the cool dark fruit-smell from the dish on the sideboard; and the smell of ourselves, us three people, my father, my mother and me, with which everything in the house was impregnated like objects in a sandalwood box, and that, when I took out something from home in the atmosphere of the flat or the Marcuses' house, gave me the queer feeling of momentarily being aware of myself as a stranger.

As soon as I got into the train I dropped back my head and closed my eyes: Paul. Paul; Paul. I know that I should have liked to have said the name aloud, but opposite me in the empty carriage was a very young Afrikaans girl with a daughter of four or five years old, curled and hatted and hung about with trinkets, like her mother. Like her mother she was utterly composed, silent, absorbed in the trance of her Sunday best. She played with a little bangle engraved “Cecilia,” and stared at me without curiosity, as if she were measuring what I thought of her.

When the train jerked into motion I thought: Now; I shall soon be there. And my desire to say Paul's name, as the little girl had to feel the shape of her bangle, I turned into a little movement of a smile with my lips.

I scarcely opened my eyes again until we reached Johannesburg. In the peculiar bright confusion that comes down with the felty blood-darkness of one's eyelids, the clear images of the afternoon
that had passed, the whole two days, were pushed away in a jumble, like the swept-up bits of a broken mirror. I hung to the thought of Paul that swelled, image, word and sound the way one's last conscious thought looms and expands before sleep or anesthesia. In that darkness he was my one reality. It seemed that he must be thousands of miles away, unattainable in yearning. I could not believe that in less than an hour I should be standing in an ordinary call box hearing his voice matter of fact and that I should see him walking down the platform looking for me. …

When we got to Johannesburg station I was trembling and sweating as I jumped down from the train and pushed my way through the people, murmuring nervous apologies and holding my head high and anxious. The telephone in the first box was dead and I rushed into the next one. It smelled bad and I dropped my handbag and parcels and week-end case on the dirty floor and lifted the receiver in anxiety. The dry, snoring sound came back. I dialed and could hear my own breathing, harsh in that small space.

The bell rang only once and in the middle of the second ring Paul answered it and I heard his hello. I don't know what I had expected, but even though the fact of its ringing on unanswered would have meant nothing more than that he was out at one of two or three places where I could easily have got him, I knew the moment I heard his voice that if there had been no answer the ringing of the telephone would have dropped me into a fearful despair. There was a second's shudder at what I might have felt and as my face crinkled in relief at the sound of his voice, I saw the magnifying line of tears lifted in my eyes. Through them the scratched walls of the call box came alive.

“For God's sake come and fetch me. Quick. I'm in an awful public telephone thing that smells.”

“Well”—he was questioning the excitement in my voice—“well, so you're here. Why didn't you phone, may I ask?”

“I did. On Saturday. But you weren't there—”

“You knew I'd be at Jabavu.”

“Yes—I forgot. And then I couldn't.—I can't explain now. I'll come to the front entrance. Eloff Street.”

“No, come to the side.”

“The baggage drive-in side? All right. … But be quick!”

I saw him. He seemed to grow along the street out of my watching. I dropped my things all over the seat and the floor of the car and pulled his head down in my arms and kissed him. It was all very awkward with my one knee on the seat and the end of my handbag sticking into my side. But I felt his warm mouth (I could taste fruit on it) and I dug my fingers into his linen jacket and I shut my eyes for a moment against those eyes and that high freckled forehead and that beautiful nose that I loved more than ever now that I knew its one secret fault, a displacement of the septum that at a certain angle spoiled its line. He pressed his hand tightly into my back, surprised but ready.

“You've been eating a naartje,” I said.

We both saw him, lying on the bed dropping the curls of fruit skin on the floor.

“Cursing like hell because you didn't come home.”

Quite suddenly we did not know what to say; he feeling the obligation of my smile, that smile of relief and wonder that holds your face with the intensity of a frown and that you are powerless to control.

So he drove us home to the flat rather fast and the great need to talk, to tell him, became curiously not urgent, but something that could rest in the surety that it could be told at any time; I did not want to speak at all. He swirled down into the basement garage and, in the gloom pungent of petrol, pulled me over to him and kissed me passionately. “Was it bad—? Me, too. …” I kissed him back in the dissimulation—not something you do not feel, but something that you do not feel at the particular time when perhaps the other does—that webs over the great spaces between the moments of identity which create love. And out of the knowledge, half guilt, half regret, that it had not been possible to miss him in this way during the week end, all the irritation and anger and resentment of the very things that had made it impossible, that pushed it out in the much stronger need of something else from him, burst up urgently in me again.

I said: “Oh, Paul, do you know what she said when I told her—”

He was leaning into the back of the car, where we had thrown the parcels. “Told her what? What's all this loot?”

“Told her about us. She said I was disgusting. She said: ‘You're a filthy beast.' “The ring of my own voice came back from the low concrete girders of the dark place … thy beast.

There was a snort from the car. He slammed the door, looked over the parcels, laughing explosively. “Oh, Christ, no! Did she? Did she call you a Magdalen, Jezebel? Did she? Did she really—?”

His laughter came back, too, rings of sound thrown smaller and smaller until they closed in on my ears again. He jerked his chin over the parcels to urge me up the steps. “Come on, what's the matter with you—?”

He said, walking where I could feel him, just behind me up the dingy narrow flight: “Hell, that tickles me. … Didn't you want to laugh in her face?”

“Yes,” I said.

I felt, like some secret horror walled up inside me, beating on the walls with cries that nobody but I should ever hear, the panic and anger of being under my mother's eyes. I saw her gaze hardening over me. … (The minute before, she had called to the bird, and the bird had answered her. …) Woman who … Filthy beasts.

I said, in that tone of laying something before the other which one uses when one no longer knows what one is saying will mean to him: “She says she doesn't want me in the house again.”

“Naturally.
Even the turn of phrase—not ‘want you in the house'——Come here, beast”—he caught me by my hair and, putting his head round over my shoulder, kissed me clumsily, a little roughly, not quite finding my mouth in the semi-dark. Amused, he whispered to me some private little formula of endearment, the kind of thing that can only be spoken and never written down.

Tears came up in my eyes, and when we came to the light of the ground floor and the lift, I held my eyes very wide and glassy so that he should not see.

But already he was talking of something else, and as I put my things down in the flat, hesitantly touching at this and that, I roused myself to what he was saying—“So what did you do after that?”—
He had just said that the grass-planting had gone on until after six.

“Guess where I had supper?” The ridge of his nose was burned, he looked at me challenging, smiling.

I don't know why—out of weariness, out of depression, perhaps, it flew into my mind: “Isa's.”

He laughed impatiently. “With Sipho.”

“Oh? How did that happen?”

“He turned up at the field at about half-past five—just happened to be strolling by, of course. … Came straight over to talk to me, but we couldn't really talk there, so I went home with him.”

“But isn't he against the field?”

Paul sat down in the big chair. He said with an air of grudging pride: “They're going to boycott the field. Nobody will use it. They held a meeting afterward—on the field. Sipho spoke damn well. And the colored man from Newclare I told you about. But I don't trust him, he's too glib, he's already picked up all the catch phrases of international politics. Inevitable rogue getting on the band wagon. But there were a lot of simple blokes in the crowd—good crowd—and they just blinked back at him the way they do. Sipho—I don't know how to explain it—he's got compassion, that's it, real compassion. He can afford to say simply what he feels because he really does feel. And you can't fool a crowd like that. They seemed to smell out the truth in him. Not that he isn't clever, too; but he does the dramatic thing instinctively, not calculating its effect. Like the field. The field just naturally handed to him the perfect example of the useless good will—the good old Christian kindness, the pat on the head to reconcile the dog to the kind master holding the chain (pretty good? that's Sipho's own)—that is no longer any good to the African. ‘We don't want kindness, we must have freedom. …' “He fell into restless silence, his glance wavering from object to object in the room, composing an horizon of its own out of the shapes of my parcels (that peak contained the plaques of London); the drop to the floor where the shoes that I had kicked off lay; the jagged rise past the desk to the window. There was an irritation in him, waiting for me to say: so you were planting grass for the field one hour and applauding its boycott the next. …

Bewilderment and a sense of confusion close to fear came to me
so strongly that I stood there, unable to go through even the mechanical motions of hanging away my clothes, finding something for supper. This feeling, like an overwhelming lethargy, seemed to come from the room itself; all the ordinary things I had used, taken and put down thoughtlessly in my happiness, filled me with depression. The lamp, the faded quilt, the yellow cushion I had bought, the Egyptian cotton hanging, the ebony mask from the Congo in whose mouth there hung the flower I had stuck there last week, now dead, dangling like a cigarette stub. Where is he? How will one half of him spend his life working at what the other half opposes? How will he do it? How can you do it? Where will
he
be himself, all the time? The mask. The quilt. Calendar ringed in red (last month's date so that I shall make no mistake this month). Stitched Egyptians with their long cold eyes. Plant in pot that didn't let anything grow. Nothing has anything to do with anything else, I thought. How can he do it. What will become of
him,
while he does …

And at the same time, my mother's mouth saying, Filthy beasts. The living room with the cushions plumped and the curtains drawn and the clock striking alone, like a sleeper speaking suddenly in a dream.

Nothing fits, I repeated to myself. Ridiculous, one side; horrible, hurtful, the other. But of course it was ridiculous. I could see my mother and me in that scene now and of course it was ridiculous, flinging about like puppets. Of course it was ridiculous. …

Paul said, with the attention of his eye, his mind sunk deeply somewhere else: “What is in there, anyway.”

I looked at the parcels. “Some things they brought me. Put them on top of the bathroom cupboard.” I felt I should never open them.