The Lying Days (43 page)

The next day I was walking out of a theater booking office during my lunch hour when I came face to face with Joel Aaron: with a little start of horror, as if Atherton, the Mine, my mother, had suddenly opened before me in the Johannesburg street. I covered this recoil which even in the second that I knew it must be showing on my face shamed me, by pretending an exaggerated surprise.—That in itself was unconvincing, I realized as I feigned it, because why should I find it a shock to meet someone whom I knew to be fre
quently in town?—But one awkwardness leads to another, and I could only say with an effusiveness which did not belong with Joel, and did just exactly what I wished not to do: put him in the category of a stranger: “What are you doing now?—Why don't I ever see you!”

He stood there looking up and down my face as if he were measuring it, faintly smiling. He was getting heavier in the shoulders; he wore the kind of jacket he had always worn, shabby or merely nondescript, one could never decide. He said absently: “Drawing houses.”

“Joel! You graduated at the beginning of the month.” Shame and regret stunned me like a slap across the mouth. I did not know how to express it. I stood there turning the tickets in my hand. He shrugged, smiling.

“I should have been there. Oh, I wanted to come. …” But of course the notice of the graduation ceremony had been in the papers. He knew and I knew that I had known about it.

I kept saying, “… Oh, how could I have … I wanted to, really I
meant
to … I shouldn't have missed …”

He did not answer, but only went on smiling quietly, as if waiting for me to finish.

My protests petered out into silence between us. People passing jostled against our shoulders so that we seemed to be bobbing toward and away from one another. At once he said over this: “How do you like the work in the Welfare Department? Is it giving you some satisfaction?”

“It's not much, you know. Nothing more than a typist really. How did you know?”

“I was in the shop on Tuesday, and they told me you weren't working there any more.”

There was another silence. I pushed back a strand of hair that kept blowing down over my eye with a gesture that, I suppose, to someone who knew me well, was particularly my own: I have always liked my hair tight and smooth. I saw his eyes travel with my hand; come back to rest directly on my face again. I had the curious feeling that I was apparently always to have with him, no matter what distance of time or commitment to others came between our meetings,
that he saw in me what no one else did, things, even ordinary, trivial, physical differences of which only I myself was aware. For instance, I felt now that he noticed that I had not penciled my eyebrows that morning (they were heavy, for a red-haired person, but too light in color) and that under his eyes I was tautening the muscle at the left side of my mouth that would show where I had got the faint line, from cheek to mouth, that I had surprised on my face lately.

“It really isn't much of a job at all …,” I said again.

“Paul's must be pretty damnable now, though,” he said. It was a polite and sympathetic observation that anyone who read the papers and knew Paul might make. But again I had that feeling of the prescience of Joel; something disturbing, that I felt in some obscure way was a comfort, but that I was impelled to struggle against.

Now suddenly I was impatient to get away from him.

“With his temperament, it's likely to make him schizoid.” I turned the question into the exaggeration of a joke. We went on to talk inconsequentially for a few moments.—He must promise to come and see us (he wrote down the telephone number on a cigarette box; I wrote his—he was sharing a flat with Rupert Sack—on the theater tickets).—That was a good play; he had seen it on Saturday night. His job was in the nature of marking time. …—Oh, he didn't quite know yet: maybe Rhodesia, after all. Maybe Europe, and lately he'd been thinking seriously about Israel. …

“Well—” I made the little shrugging gesture of collecting myself to go. “Yes …” He pushed the cigarette box into his pocket and touched me momentarily, so lightly it might have been by mistake, on the elbow.

As I turned, and he was already a little distance from me, I suddenly called back: “I was there yesterday. I spent the week end. …”

He nodded. “Been away, I know. … See them about again now I suppose.” And he nodded again, deliberately, lingeringly, as if the nod were some message he must get to me silently over the distraction of the passing people.

So we both stood a moment arrested in the current of the pavement. And then he was gone and I turned quickly and hurried across the street walking fast in the kind of burst of release. The refrain
went foolishly inside me: I don't want to think of the place, I don't want to be reminded of it.

But when the relief of fast movement was checked and I stood, panting a little, in the lift going up to my desk in the Welfare offices, remorse, the real pain of wanting back the chance to do something left undone, that I do not think I had ever felt in my life before, filled me with distress; distress maddening and sad in its uselessness. I should have gone to his graduation, how was it I did not go when I had wanted to go so much: now I felt so much how I had wanted to go. How could I have ignored this—
forgotten.
Yes, I had forgotten. Now I could not believe what was true: that I had forgotten. The thought of it, like awareness of a lapse of memory, an aberration of which you have no recollection; as if there is discovered to be another person in you who mysteriously wrests you from yourself and takes over, thrusting you back to yourself in confusion when the fancy takes it—the thought of it made me sick with dismay. I had the instinct to clutch, searching at my life, like a woman suddenly conscious of some infinitesimal lack of weight about her person that warns her that something has gone, dropped—perhaps only a hairpin, a button—but maybe a jewel, a precious letter.

As I sat down before my typewriter, I thought: It's as if I haven't slept, it's as if since after lunch yesterday until now has been one continuous day, without the divisions of a normal day, on and on. …

The line of patient natives waiting to see Paul when he would come in later in the afternoon turned the yellow-whites of their eyes on me, and away again.

Sometimes when I came back to the flat earlier than Paul, I would go out onto the little balcony and sit balanced on the wall, my head against the partition which divided our flat from the one next door. Often I had not even troubled to wash
or to put my things away; I simply came in, dropped to the bed what I was holding, and wandered out.

In the late summer, this was the best hour of the day. And the day usually had been a monotonous one; the offices in the old shadowy building which seemed, as you looked in, as cool as a dairy, were damply stuffy, the odor of old documents tightly stored by vanished tenants coming out in the heat like an invisible stain reappearing on a wall; and the reports I typed, the letters I wrote were the mechanical reproduction of someone else's record of rigidly circumscribed methods of dealing with certain recurrent situations. The calm repetition of the work that came to my desk every day brought alive for me Paul's flat statement that no case was ever finished, except by death. They came once, they will come again. The poverty of the Africans was a wheel to which they were tied; turn, and it will run its weight over them again. So the same letter, the same reports. And if you cut them free of the wheel, that will be the end of white civilization, said some. … Anyway, white civilization is doomed, said others. …

Perhaps my job was more useful than the one I had had selling novels to leisured women.

I sat on the edge of the balcony, shut out even from the flat. It was like being in a cage suspended from the invisible ceiling of the sky, and what went on in the sky was at my level. If I did not look down I could forget altogether the existence of the street, and the human perspective which is the perspective of the street, and to which, once your feet are on the ground, you are fixed. The new flats going up opposite had reached only the second floor and the building was not yet high enough to block out my sky, to present, like a juggling act, a layer of human activity, figures moving about among chairs, tables, enclosures of light, hundreds of feet up in the air. But the life of the sky, leisured, awesome in the swift changes from calm to storm that human beings can only understand emotionally, in terms of anger and love, beauty and ugliness;—the life of the sky, analogous only to the sea, usually so far above our heads that we have given it to the gods, was suddenly discovered to me. Clouds took the place of trees, and the light, breaking up space in suffusion or
falling, falling, straight, sharp, swift, had an architecture of its own. Now and then a bird opened suddenly like a fan past my face. And the soft clouds moved plumped up on their flattened bases like the breasts of birds resting on water. Sometimes they piled into tableaux; held the last of the sun on their gleaming contours; dissolved, with something like lack of interest, into thinning wisps parted and reparted to nothing against the air.

Often, in twenty minutes, I saw the whole of a summer storm, enacted for me but not involving me.

In a patch of dark suffusion over the outskirts of Johannesburg that I could not see, I could hear thunder prowling; now and then striking out at the sky with a vicious claw that drew lightning. Torn somewhere, the dark cloud slowly emptied itself of a queer dark ragged streak of rain that fell awkwardly, sideways, and did not not seem to reach down to the earth at all. It was difficult to believe that this was what was happening when I crossed the street sometimes in a brassy, threatening light between city buildings, and suddenly felt the warm wet drops splotching my arms. But from up here I saw the rain peter out, like a tap drizzling off as it is tightened. And soon there was only a lavender-gray haze where the storm had been, or where it moved off, a mixture of the benign and malignant, to come down again somewhere else.

If I had had to give a name to what I was doing when I sat out there alone and idle for half an hour, an hour, I suppose I should have said I was waiting for Paul. Yet I did not think of him. When I came out I shut the glass balcony door behind me; with a twitch of recollection, I might catch sight of my hands, carbon-grimed along the sides of the fingers. But I did not think of him, of his closed face haughty with irritableness, or talking with a burst of expansiveness, swagger and exaggeration too tense to be funny, after two or three brandies had put a match to his weariness. I did not think of him; or of my father, from whom I had had a letter; or of my mother, from whom I had heard nothing and whose silence had become visual for me: her chin pressed back to her neck and her nostrils whitening; or the half-funny, half—I did not know quite what—difference between the picture of my life that they resented and were shocked by, and my life as it really seemed to be. Or the
drifting gap between the way I myself believed I was living, and the way the days themselves passed. I did not think of any of this. The shuttle of my mind was still. In the unhuman context of the airscape there was nothing to set it going again, endlessly crossing this with that in terrible industry that had none of the anarchic freedom of confusion, but the inescapable determinism of a complicated pattern. Even my eyes moved slowly among the large movements of the clouds, that melted, merged, altered without the human quality of will without which people cannot change. If I felt anything at all (unconscious of the brick hard under my thighs and the building behind me, the body which by the differences in the desires and vanities in it gauges for one what the mind, which lives differently, does not always know: whether one is a child, young or old)—if I felt anything at all, it was something nearest to, but not the same as, the feeling that had closed softly down upon me as a child, when I had gone out under the fir trees or the gum plantation in the early morning or late afternoon, or when I had lain down suddenly in long uncut grass, and the physical change of discarding balance seemed to change me instantly and magically and everything was drained from my consciousness except the movement of blood in my head that made me believe I could feel the earth turning, and myself curved close against it, not falling off. …

When I heard the front door bang, at once very far off and narrowing to the immediate, somewhere behind me, I would swing my legs down, jump. He's here. For a moment, the glass door in front of me. My heart beat up slowly, as if with effort. For another moment, I did not open the door.

But the minute the door was flung carelessly, he stood there;—it was all right. It was as if I waited for someone who, 0 relief, had not come. And every day it was repeated, this anticipation like dread, that was instantly foolish and nonexistent once I saw him. For he was Paul, of course. It was as if this was something I had forgotten. Paul with his freckled brow—and see, the things we said, the ordinary, warm commonplace things. (Why don't they dust off your ears properly?—He runs his nail along the rim of his ear, where the barber has left a scattering of hair cuttings. I turn his head round as if I were looking at a vase. Well, at least it's not too
short at the back this time. No, well, the usual man's away this week. Then why don't you change and always go to this one? Oh, I can't—their feelings are easily hurt. And I like him. He's gone to Ganzbaai to fish and it's only the second time he's seen the sea. When he was seventeen he went to Durban on a motorcycle.)

“What's the matter with your behind?” he noticed one evening.

I was rubbing where the wall had cut into my thigh and now the blood was pricking back. “Gone to sleep,” was all I said. He went to the kitchen for a bottle of soda. I took it from him to open while I held it out the window, because he was bad at opening bottles and always let them fizzle out over the floor. “Hell, Helen, you're becoming a rotten wife. You might have put food on.” He had seen the empty stove.