The Lying Days (52 page)

“Bloody little clay figurines,” she said. “Very nice. Made out of Vaal River mud.—You know, I think I'll come in with you. I haven't seen the baby yet and you know how Jenny feels about things like that. Should I turn into Claim Street?”

She had offered to drive me to the Marcuses' house. “No, carry straight on, there's a shorter way. I'll show you.”

“There was something I wanted to tell you—I'm damned if I can remember what it was,” she said, pulling up at a robot. A man crossed the street before us, and she followed him with her eyes, as if he would remind her. He was young, with the dark, handsome animal surliness of some young Afrikaners and he looked back at
her. She forgot that she had been trying to remember something, in the little game of holding this young male with her eyes. We shot forward as the lights changed; “Doesn't matter—You leave on Tuesday, you say? Train or plane?”

“No, Wednesday. Plane. I'm going East Coast, that's why I'm boarding the ship at Durban.”

During the hour we spent at Jenny's house, we chattered about my plans; the job I had been promised in London; the things I must see, the people I must look up. “Don't forget Frederick at Sadler's Wells,” warned Isa again. “I did have the address of the flat or whatever it is where he lives, but I can't find it. The best thing to do is to send him a note to Sadler's Wells.” In my notebook I had a whole list of expatriate South Africans who were storming the theater, the ballet and the art studios with the talents which they believed had outgrown South Africa.

Before I left I dutifully asked if I could have a last look at the new baby, and was surprised when Jenny led us into the children's room and picked the little dangling creature nonchalantly out of his crib: when her first child was a baby, no one had been allowed to pick him up outside his specified play hours. But it appeared that she had changed her baby manual since then. This boy was being reared on the principle of what she called “the natural young animal”; he was hugged, carried about, and allowed to suckle at will, like a kitten. Jenny asked me whether I could find room in my luggage for a large photograph of him which she wanted to send to her mother in England. “Thanks, then. It won't take any room at all, really. You can put it flat on the bottom. It's being framed now, but I'll get John to drop it with you on Wednesday morning, on the way to work.”

Isa was leaning over the baby, like a child looking down into a fishpool. She had two children of her own, but the special quality of children seemed to dawn on her only through the children of other people. “Ah, that's it. Now I remember—it was about Joel Aaron I wanted to tell you, Helen. He's going to Israel. You must look out for him when you get to Durban. He must be there already. I think he's sailing about the same time as you. On one of those Italian boats, though.”

I turned to Isa with surprise, but while she was speaking, Gerald, Jenny's elder child, came skipping in the doorway and at once brought himself up short at the sight of visitors. Jenny was questioning Isa about Joel, but I heard no more of what they said. The little old toy the child had been carrying had dropped, and hung from his hand. It was the plush rabbit that had been hanging from Paul's hand the first day I saw him. Paul stood in the doorway of the Marcuses' flat and in one hand he held a bottle of wine, in the other he held this rabbit, hanging by the ears.

I think it was there and then that I parted from Paul; not later, when he kissed me with those hard, long kisses and pretended that this was a holiday on which I was going, a holiday from which I would come back. Certainly it was then that I wept, and had to move quickly over to kneel at the little boy's side, so that Jenny and Isa should not see the tears.

In no time at all when the plane comes out of the hills behind Durban, the green seems to melt and dissolve in a mist and then suddenly it is the sea, there below. It is the sea, greenish, like the grasslands, moving, like the grass beneath the wind.

As the engines cut out the air seems to cut out, too; a warm heat, liquid, fills your lungs. The plane comes down and there you are, the figure of yourself providing another facet for the brilliant, glittering, soaring light of sea level.

I left Johannesburg on a cold, dusty July morning. The grit at the airport blew against me sharp as rime. When I landed in Durban less than two hours later, it was summer. The old airport on the Snell Parade was still in use then, and the taxi that took me to my hotel passed smoothly between the green of the airport with its fringe of umbrella trees on one side and the sea deep green behind a low bank of bush on the other. The sea was very calm and it turned onto the beach in slow coils, clear as spun glass. The very sight of the sea in this mood does something to one's breathing; I began to
breathe slowly and deeply, as if for months I had been wearing something tight that had now dropped away. And while I was being received into the big old cool hotel, while I signed the register and went up in the lift with the young Indian page whose dark forehead matched the polished panels, and wore, as if unable to forget the humidity of the summer months, a beading of sweat; while I hung a dress or two in the stiff old-fashioned wardrobe that smelled of cockroach repellent, and sat a moment in the soft, limp-smelling armchair, a kind of shaky happiness came over me. It was the kind of happiness that has little to do with one's mind.

A hotel, an airways service, have something in common with a hospital in that they reduce one's life to a program of needs, to which they minister. Handed a magazine at the start of a journey, summoned to dinner by a gong, this outer simplification of living tends to produce a corresponding inner one: Your life really does become simply that: a time for mild diversion, a time to eat, a time to sit on the chairs comfortably provided, and look at the sea, to which the hotel is thoughtfully turned. I thought that this mild assumption of one's needs would take care of me very well for the few days before my boat sailed.

When I had unpacked, and lunched, I walked down to the South Beach. It was not the fashionable beach—that was on the north side—and even so early in the afternoon, when most holiday people were having a siesta, there were family parties on the sand, the parents drowsing and the children, ignoring the seasons of the day, shrill and dripping. I took off my sandals and walked away up the beach toward the long arm of furzy green that curves round the entrance to the harbor; away to the right I could see cranes gesticulating above the hidden docks. I remembered my father, talking about the “bar.” Out over the bar. That calm, heavy-looking stretch of water on which the little lighthouse looked down; what would it be like when the ship slid through it? And as I watched, a ship did just that, came past the conglomeration of waving steel antennae, left the escort of tugs spinning vaguely in her wash, and, breasting, busy, silent, was out. There was a bleat. It came perhaps from her. (A bleat like the hooter at the Mine.) Her profile of orange-striped black funnels and up-curving bows moved slowly against the green
arm. I watched her, climbing up the sea to the horizon. And then she was a paper shape, a cutout, very clear, and apparently being pulled along like Lohengrin's swan in a theater, by strings off stage—straight along the straight line of the sea's horizon.

I came back slowly along the sand, and went up to the hotel for tea. Afterward I took a bus into the town (the plan of Durban is very simple and sensible: the visitors live in a long strip of hotels, spread for more than a mile along the beach front; the town lies immediately behind that, on either side of West Street which lifts up from the sea; the residents live behind that, up in the hills) and went to the shipping office. Again there was the calm assumption of one's needs. The young man across the mahogany counter showed me a plan of the ship: my cabin, here; my berth, this one. The ship would dock tomorrow and I must be on board by ten o'clock on Monday morning. Sailing time, four-thirty P.M. I wandered about the pleasant town, bought myself a cake of fine, hard, perfumed soap of an imported brand that was unobtainable in Johannesburg, and a green scarf to tie round my hair; it might be windy on deck. The afternoon was not too hot, and every now and then the usual city smell of petrol, stale sourness from bars, and stuffy sweetness from beauty parlors parted to a breath from the sea.

Back in my hotel room, I found some flowers on the bedside table.

The maid had put them in water for me, but she had left the cellophane wrapping and the card on my bed. On the card, a childish hand had copied out “WITH LOVE FROM BRUTON HEIGHTS, PAUL.” They were florist's roses, long-stemmed, denuded of leaves and thorns, the petals of the long buds a little crushed and crepy, though still beautiful, like the eyelids of a lovely woman who is no longer really young. I loosened them in the vase, but they still looked as if they belonged in the foyer of a cinema. WITH LOVE FROM BRUTON HEIGHTS. What was that, a reminder, a claim? A sudden perverse desire to put a hand on something because it was no longer there; an impulse to test out whether it really had gone; irresistible, just to make sure? But the flowers, ordered by telegram, the card, written by the hand of the junior shop assistant, defeated everything, as gifts that have to be made through the paid agency of others do
always, impartially, whether the original intention was merely a social gesture, or a desperate symbol of the deepest feeling. These flowers standing on the dressing table were somebody's work, carried out unperturbed and mechanically. I was safe from them.

The life of the hotel swirled up round me; people were up and down the corridors, in and out the lift; doors banged, bath water ran, there was the ring of telephones and laughter in the rooms as people dressed. In the dining room Indian waiters were in and out, up and down; I saw myself, in the mirror walls, looking at the Buddhalike headwaiter, red-sashed and watching above folded arms. People drank coffee afterward in the lounge and on the wide veranda. A ricksha boy came whooping past among the stream of cars, joggling two small boys and waving his feathered head, like the tail of a peacock put on in the wrong place, “… see one once in a blue moon. And I believe the municipality isn't issuing any new licenses to them, so they'll all be gone soon,” someone at the next table was saying disgustedly.

“Yes, it's true, they give you the idea that that's the normal form of transport in Durban. It just shows you how much you can believe about the travel posters you see of other countries. Come to beautiful Austria …”

“… kills them before they're forty. The strain on the heart.”

And on the other side a family argument was going on between a young girl and her mother. “You know what those beach things are like. And this is a wonderful film, really, Mummy. I don't want to hear the same old man singing that thing about Ireland. Or wherever it was,—They do, they do, they always have him.”

“He had a trial gallop on the beach this morning. …”

“All right, tomorrow then. But you must get the desk to ring you before seven. …”

They ebbed out, into the town and the cinema and the night clubs. They trailed upstairs and trailed down again with wraps, ready to drive out to roadhouses. I went to my room early, looking out at the bobbing lights on the harbor for a moment before I got into the big, soft, anonymous hotel bed. And the next morning I watched them go, all the holiday-makers, down to the beach after breakfast, with a kind of indulgence. A young man who had spoken to me in
the lift appeared in a shirt patterned with hula girls. “See you …,” he said, waving a towel toward the beach, and I smiled and shook my head. He was so careless of the response he elicited (there were hundreds of girls and no doubt he signaled to them all that he would meet them on the beach) that he mistook my meaning and waved back enthusiastically.

Just before lunch, I saw my ship come in. An old gentleman stretched, yawned, put his paper down. “That must be the
Pretoria Castle”
he said to his wife.

“What?”

He pointed to the horizon. “There. That grayish white thing. I just saw in the paper that she's due in this morning.”

“I haven't got my glasses,” said his wife.

Although I wasn't going aboard until Monday, I decided that I must go down to the docks after lunch to have a look at the ship. In any case, it was as good a way as any of passing away the afternoon. I always had loved wandering about the docks, even as a child, and now that I myself actually was going to sail away in one of the ships, I felt I should find a whiff of the promise of the places I was going to, as well as the fascination of those I probably should never see. I found myself dressing up for this ship; I cleaned my white shoes and put on a frock that suited me particularly well, and a big linen hat. I even opened one of my suitcases and took out a pair of new gloves (farewell present from Laurie).

I picked my way among the trucks and the coils of greasy rope to the wharf where a harbor policeman had told me she was berthed. And quite a long way before I reached her I could see her, a big gray wall of a ship, parked as solidly as a building. Smaller ships on either side looked too small for people to live in, by comparison. Or alternatively, she looked too big to float. The companionway was down, opening surprisingly into her towering gray side and showing, inside this flap of ship, a wide stairway and a great bank of flowers before a mirrored wall. But I was not allowed to go up; an official-looking man in white explained that this was the period, directly after the disembarkation of passengers, when they “gave her a spring clean, and so on.” He grinned in a matey fashion, and I could not resist telling him—someone—that I should be a passenger myself,
in a day or two. “Then you'll have plenty of time to see her,” he said, smiling indulgently. “But you can pop along tomorrow if you like. She'll be all open then.”