The Lying Days (51 page)

At seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, long queues stood in the rain at every location bus terminus, waiting to go back to work. Within days, hours almost, the happening of the riots was absorbed into the life of the city again; the dead were buried, the wounded healed, and the hearings of those cases in which employers had arrested natives for striking went on in the abstract atmosphere of the courts. Paul pursued what he called the “lily-livered path” of the Department during his official working hours, worked (now that Sipho was dead) with Fanyana on the activities of the African Nationalists; and believed in the worth of neither. I do not think he could ever bring himself to forgive Fanyana for living while Sipho died; Fanyana who should have attracted violence because it was in him to mete it out; who was the opponent for a bullet, a man its own size—and Sipho, the man of peace, the disciple of Gandhi. But Sipho, without fear, in the knowledge of his own lack of threat toward anyone, had gone out to Alexandra on the night of May first, while Fanyana took care to stay at home. I think that the whole purpose of African Nationalism took on the twist of this incident, for Paul. He saw that in this incipient revolutionary movement, as in all others, the wrong people would die, the wrong people would be blamed, perhaps even the wrong people would inherit the reign of the ear of corn, when it came. Of course, he had accepted this always, in dialectic. What he did not know was that he had not accepted, and would never accept it in the real, the personal realm in which life is lived.

I stayed alone in the flat, most days. It was a beautiful May, that year, and though you could not see much sign of the lovely autumn that lingered, in the suburbs of the gardens farther out, and in the
Magaliesburg hills still farther, you could smell it in the air of the city. Up on the little balcony, I could smell it, that rich cool autumn. Most days I did not go out at all, and I got up later and later. I gave Paul breakfast in my dressing gown, and sometimes at ten o'clock I still was not dressed. I spent a great deal of time on the balcony, smoking and watching the building opposite going up, or not watching. Whether I looked or not, whether I saw or not, it went on getting itself finished. The white workmen shouted and twitted one another in a mixture of Afrikaans and English, as they worked; the Africans sang or laughed when they worked beside one another, were silent when they worked beside a white man, handing him up bricks to lay or mixing plaster for him to slap on. When the bell clanged for lunch hour, the scraping and hammering sounds stopped suddenly, and the voices were very clear, as if I were standing among them. The white men hung over the flat roof top, eating out of newspaper and drinking out of beer bottles from which the labels had been washed. One day one of them had a little mirror, which he used to flash the sun over into my face.

When the break was over the bell would clang again, and the white men would start shouting over the parapet to the Africans squatting below: “Come on, you bastards! Come on, what you think you doing down there!” And grumbling, sullen, laughing in unconscious imitation of the white men's raucous laughter, they would swarm up toward those grinning faces waiting, indolent and masterful.

I would go inside quickly, close the door, and lie down.

I slept a great deal. It did not seem to matter how late I got up; in the afternoon I would sleep again. And when I woke sometimes I would not bother to get up. Paul would come home and find me, still lying there. “Aren't you well?” he asked. But although I could not measure it, because I had no sense of well-being, I knew I was not ill. “Well, if you're sure …,” he said. “Oh, I'm not worried about
that!”
I understood suddenly what was in his mind. But although I reassured him at once, smiled even, the occurrence of the thought in his mind later began to take hold in my own. Suppose I am pregnant? Nothing had gone wrong, I had no known cause to fear this rather than any other month, and I had never feared before.
But now I began to be obsessed with the idea, to fear that by some devilish miracle it had happened, and for several days went about in that peculiar state of female dread which always had rather disgusted me in others. When a denial, irrefutable, unperturbed, the turn of a cycle, came from my body, and brought with it the immediate dissolution of the dread, I understood the nature of what I had felt. The dread of cheap little sensual innocents, who are afraid the casual eye that was attracted by them may “let them down”; the dread of women to whom love is an entertainment, like a visit to a cinema, and who do not want to be hampered in the pursuit of fresh entertainments.

The dread of an attachment to a man that can never be broken, by a woman who wants to be free of him.

The whole month went by and still I made no effort to find another job for myself. By the time I had telephoned the Consulate for an interview, they had already engaged someone else. Later on, tomorrow, next week—I told myself—I shall go and speak to the man Laurie mentioned. I shall go and see the woman publisher John suggested; the advertising man Paul used to know in the army. I did not even go into town more than once. And when I did, I did not seem to know how to fill the time, although sometimes, when I had been working, I had longed for a whole free day to shop and stroll about. Somehow the shops did not offer any connection with my life; I saw them as one glances at the things in the shop windows of a strange town in which one finds oneself with half an hour to spare between trains: this hat, this piece of flowered silk, this gadget for sharpening knives—they will not be seen on, or belong in the houses of, any people I know; I shall not be here long enough to need to sharpen knives, buy a new hat, or choose material for another season's dress.

So I stayed in the flat. As the traveler might decide for the station waiting room, after all. I find it difficult to remember how I passed the days, because I know I did so little to fill them. I don't think I even read, except the daily papers. I would open the papers and read the “Readers' Views” page and “Letters to The Editor”: letters about the riots, which were still coming in, still being published. “What sort of a country are we building where the gaps between the
white Haves and the black Have-nots are shamelessly widened every day? Those people who, out of fear for their own precious skins, made the greatest talk and fuss about the Rand riots three weeks ago have now comfortably settled back into safety of their homes again, perfectly content to close their eyes to the disgusting squalor, poverty and frustration that gave rise to the riots and which exist, unchanged. Do they ever stop to think how, with the approach of winter …” “… must urge a stricter police control of the locations. Could not some system be devised whereby both native men and women would carry identity, or residents', cards, which they would have to produce on entering a township? This would force hundreds of loafers and troublemakers to stay in their own homes at night, and get rid of a large shifting population that would then have to go back to the country. …” “… May I ask your correspondent how yet another card, pass, what-have-you, could be expected to be tolerated by a people already so restricted that they might as well be enemy aliens instead of being so indisputably an indigenous people in their own country that even Dr. Malan (supposing they were white instead of black, of course) would have to admit them to the first class of the pure-blood South African hierarchy?” The paper would blow about in the sun, slithering to the dusty corners of the balcony, and I would hear the voices of the workmen floating up from over the way: Hurry up, there, you bastard! Franz, you bastard, bring me the flat paint—d'you hear me—ahh, voetsak, go on, hurry up!—I never knew what the black men said back, when they talked among themselves in their own language; for that belonged to their own world, and I, I supposed—I must go along with the workmen.

The old sense of unreality would come down upon me again. A calm, listless loneliness, not the deep longing loneliness of night, but the loneliness of daylight and sunshine, in the midst of people; the loneliness that is a failure to connect. I would pick up, in my mind, Atherton, Paul, Johannesburg, my mother and father; Paul. Like objects taken out of a box, put back. But in the end there was only myself, watching everything, the street, the workmen, life below; a spectator.

This went on until the beginning of June. The autumn was suddenly gone; one morning the city came up out of the night as if it
had been steeped in cold water: bright, clear, hard, it was winter. I walked out onto the balcony in a sweater, but I felt the air at my ears, and my hands were cold. I had been going to sew back the sleeve of my coat that had pulled away from the lining. I felt now it would be too chill to sit out there; there was a change. As I gathered up the coat and the cotton and scissors, I stopped, and saw that it was not only in the air. The building was finished. I had got so used to seeing the work going on over the way that it had existed in my mind as an end in itself. I had scarcely noticed that it was nearing completion, that it was no longer a framework gradually filling in with bricks and glass and paint, but a building, a place where people would live. Now it was finished. It blocked out much of the sky that I had sat and watched, some months back, after work in the evenings. It was quite finished, and the workmen were hauling down the material they had left on the roof. A lorry was being piled with the sand on the pavement, where the children had played.

The building was in front of me, five stories high, clean with fresh paint. On top, the chimney of the boiler room crooked a finger. A row of gleaming dustbins waited to be put into the kitchens. I thought, When I came here with Paul the first time that Sunday afternoon, they were just beginning the foundations, you could see right out over the hill, you could see the Magaliesburg.

And it came to me, quite simply, as if it had been there, all the time: I'll go to Europe. That's what I want. I'll go away. Like a sail filling with the wind, I felt a sense of aliveness, a sweeping relief.

The lorry rolled down into the street and drove away.

“Nothing left but all of Europe,” said Isa, putting her small, sharp-looking hands to warm round the teapot. She had met me in town, on my way to go and say good-by to Jenny Marcus, and had turned me off into a tearoom. “It's a stage most of us get to. I wonder what the European equivalent is? Longing to get out to the wide open spaces, I suppose. Let us leave this damp and
overcrowded England and go where the sun shines and men are men. Et cetera.”

She gave one of her little jumpy shrugs and picked up the bill. She pulled on her beautiful velvet coat, folded a scarf round her little throat, where you could always see the pulses through the thin skin; her head rose from her impressive clothes like the head of a bird from its plumage. She smiled with an unashamed acceptance of her own fascination, and said as if it followed out of my look: “You don't have to worry about him and me. I've often meant to talk to you about it, but I don't know … Now perhaps it doesn't matter.—He'd never really want me because I'm too clever for him.” She laughed, raising her eyebrows and nodding her head to show me she meant it and must admit it, as we walked toward the door. She paid at the cashier's grille and the door swung us out into the street, talking. “I'm too clever for him, and so I go in for debunking. I debunk him all the time, out of irritation mostly, because he can't debunk me. Isn't clever enough. If I could find a man who would have the brains and the guts to debunk me …” She moved her shoulders a little, under the flowing coat. “Because of this he couldn't really love me, I mean it never could have been anything but an affair, even before the advent of you. You're too clever for him, too—not with your head,” she added, as if she knew I couldn't compare with her, “but in your emotions. I think you're one of those women who have great talent for loving a man, but he's not whole enough to have that love expended upon him. It's too weighty for him. He likes to be all chopped up, a mass of contradictions, and he wants to believe they're all right. He isn't enough of a central personality to be able to accept the whole weight of a complete love: it's integration, love is, and that's the antithesis of Paul. You frighten him, I frighten him. Different ways, but all the same … And I couldn't want him, not permanently. You need never have worried about that. Not that I flatter myself you did.”

We had reached her car and she unlocked the door for me. By the time she had gone round to the driver's seat and got in beside me, her attention had been attracted back, with the brooding inevitability of a magnet, to herself. She said: “South African men. You can look and look. That's the terrible thing for a clever woman here.
She may find one who's her equal—just. But she won't find one who's cleverer than she is, who can outtalk, outthink, beat her at it.” Her lips showed her teeth in a strange, lingering smile of pleasure that she abruptly dismissed, as one dismisses a daydream. “Unless he looks like something gestated in a bottle and brought up on ground book dust. But a real man; there's always some point at which you feel them cave in. … Tom, Paul, even Arnold. …” She waved a hand in dissatisfaction at her husband and her lovers. “A woman like me needs the world. Like a boxer who can't find any more opponents at home, he's met 'em all. Match me—outside—away. I'd soon have the nonsense knocked out of me, they'd show me my place.” She turned to me, laughing.

I felt again the mixture of stirring antipathy and liking that I had always felt for Isa. I thought to myself, She's a flirt, even with women, though with women the game is played differently. But today I warmed to her in another way; as she spoke I came to understand something about her, and so to feel the sympathy and even pity that divests others of the sense of their superiority that hardens us toward them. It was true; she was too clever; too clever for her own maddening primitive womanly instincts, the desire to be dominated and to look up to a man as a god. Household god. I smiled. “No household gods. That's your trouble,” I said. I had forgotten the hostility and sense of distaste, almost, that had made me close away from her when she calmly took up discussion of what was to me my private and personal life, making it, as other people's lives were, matter for social intercourse.