The Lying Days (56 page)

I said to him when we were dancing again: “What an odd place to talk like this in. Is it just a sort of softening in the maudlin atmosphere, d'you think, and we're letting down our hair and we'll be sorry?”

“No,” he said, “it's because we aren't anywhere, Helen, you and I. There's a time, before people go away, when although they still walk and talk among familiar things in a familiar way, they have already left. The ship has sailed, for you. You've left it all behind you already, all the things you want and fear and have thrust away from you.”

A kind of light sadness came over me, and translated itself into the terms of the shadowy, swaying place. It found expression in the small hoarse voice of the girl who sang with a melancholy intonation borrowed, like her accent, from America; in the smoke-wreathed privacy of the half-dark; and in the warm body of Joel, embodied all that I should put my arms about in leave-taking.

I felt I should apologize for it and said to him: “I think I do feel a little maudlin, after all.”

The yellow marble bird had a dribble of real water running from his beak. A band was playing on the dais. The yellow brocade settees were completely hidden by people; people sitting on the cushions and on the arms, people clustering round those who were sitting. The little bar was lively with people, and the Italian stewards raced briskly round.

The whole ship was like a stage-set where the lights and the curtain have at last gone up.

Joel and I had two little seats crammed against the bar on one side, and the side of the dais where the white piano was, on the other. The band played, unheeded, and over and over again, “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup” and a rather peculiar version of “Sarie Marais.” Joel said something, but I could not hear. “What's that?” He leaned over. “I said I understand that they double up as stewards, when they're not playing.” I nodded, smiling, smiling. The
atmosphere was curiously like that of a large midday wedding reception, where you are dazed by the heat and the crowd in their best clothes, the pageantry of the wedding retinue, which somehow seems to belong under electric light rather than the sun, and the intoxication of champagne drunk at a time when other people are banging hammers and pushing pens.

I leaned across and shouted: “It's hard to believe that this is something the ship experiences over and over again, year in and year out. It seems to take it as such an occasion.” He nodded fiercely, and shrugged at the impossibility of conversation. But a minute or two later some people got up from a group of chairs near the door and we pushed our way quickly toward them. We sat down promptly and those chairs we were not occupying were immediately whirled away over our heads with eager apologies. The band and the talk were no longer deafening; we were beside the doorway and could see the deck and feel the sharp heat of the day outside, instead of the stuffiness of perfume and wine. The four people whose table we had taken were being photographed against the rails by a press photographer. We watched them compose the instant at which they would be fixed in the social pages of the paper tomorrow, a Durban businessman and his family, the wife in her new hat and floral silk dress, chosen, no doubt by the daughters, the daughters holding their hats—one small and feathered, the other large and white—against the wind, with gloved hands. Just as the camera clicked the one could not resist, and did what she must always have been disciplining herself not to do: smiled too broadly and gave her too-prominent teeth a victory.

“What time is it?” I asked. “Another hour, still,” Joel said. He had a way of smiling at me, reassuringly, every time he felt me looking at him, as if I were the one who was about to sail, nervously excited at the departure.

“I'm rehearsing for Monday,” I said.

“But you'll have the other role, then,” he said. “It's easier to go than to be left behind. Shall we have another drink?”

“I don't think so. … I'm slightly dizzy already—the glare more than anything, I think.—You know that really does fit exceptionally.” He moved his shoulders in the new linen jacket we had chosen
for him in the town earlier in the morning; it is extraordinary how difficult it is to find something to do in the hour or two before a leave-taking.

I said to him, leaning forward on my elbows on the table: “I keep getting a feeling of urgency. My mind races. I'm afraid there are so many things I want to say to you that I'll only discover when you're gone. Don't you always feel like that when you're saying good-by to someone?”

“What things?”

I smiled and sank back. “When you ask me, I don't know. I'm just sure that when you're gone …”

“Write them to me.”

“Yes, I know.” But I could not rid myself of this acute consciousness of time; time, which was like a growing volume of sound in my ears; and would cease. Every movement in the people who crowded the lounge and passed and repassed across the deck, every time a man swallowed from his glass, or a woman turned to touch the cheek of a child, gestured time that length further on. Joel fetched two more glasses of gin and lime for us and then we sauntered aimlessly about the deck, where everyone stood about as we did, and groups burst into small explosions of excited laughter. The sun and the gin seemed to clash in my head; we made quite thankfully for the lounge again, and found a seat for ourselves.

“And yet it seems much longer?” I appealed. He nodded consideringly. “—You couldn't credit it's really only two days since Thursday?”

He smiled. “Timeless, I told you. Because we aren't anywhere.”

“Oh, there is something,” I said, remembering. To ask him something, anything, would still this feeling I had of being unable to shape questions that were vital to
myself,
that would, in some way I could not articulate or understand, help me to read my bearings if the desire to drift on a current should prove more confining than freedom of choice. “When I asked you, the other night, why you didn't try to give me some sort of inkling of the disillusion I was heading for with John and Jenny and the others—you said you'd tell me another time.”

The casual piece of curiosity—what did it matter, now, when that part of my life which it affected was past, lived through; it had
scarcely more importance than the idle disinterment of a lost summer: what did you really do (one may ask) that week you were so keen to come to the mountains, and then made some feeble excuse that obviously wasn't true, anyway?—This casual piece of curiosity dropped stillness over Joel's broad, browned face, shiny with the heat. His eyes, pebbles deep in a stream, moved. To escape them, or give them escape, I followed quickly the shape of his head, and saw, like a wire of light against the black, one white hair. It followed the exact curve of the others, away from the forehead across toward the crown. “Oh, that,” he said. “You know about that.”

I looked at him.

“We were talking about it last night. Or part of it. Two things could have happened to you, once in that set. You could have been entirely taken in by them, for the rest of your life. Or you could have seen through them, and been hurt and disappointed, as you were. If the first had happened, I don't think I'd ever have forgiven myself for introducing you to them.” He paused and looked at my hands, drawing my attention to the fact that I had spread them, like starfish, on the table. “Very selfish of me. But the second—I couldn't warn you about them because I loved you.” He spread his own hand to match mine, as if he were giving me credit for a certain background knowledge before passing on to the further points in a discussion. “You know that. I loved you very much and I didn't think, for reasons we discussed last night, it could ever come to anything. So I couldn't offer you any—disinterested advice, Helen. How could you have believed me? How could I have believed myself? How could it have seemed, perhaps even been, anything but a desire to keep you for myself.”

I sat looking at him across the table and my eyes slowly filled with tears. I felt it happen, and he saw it, the pinkening of blood, the brightening of the pupil, the brimming I could not control.

He said, gently, still looking at me: “But you've known always, Helen.” And after a pause, “There's nothing to be surprised about.”

But he could not possibly know what was going through my mind. I said to myself, It's the heat, the excitement, the drink and the stirring awareness of the occasion. Everyone here feels it in some way or another, that is why they laugh so much, are too talkative,
or keep touching and fussing at their clothes. People only rise to the surface of their lives when there is to be change, a threat. You only say: I'm alive, when you see death. You only say: I'm here, when you're about to go. But I could not calm the trembling that astonished me all through my body; I felt for a moment that my whole consciousness, resting since I was born, on one side, had suddenly turned over, like a great stone on the bed of the sea, and shown an unknown world, a shining unseen surface, different, different utterly, alive with waving weeds and startled creatures pulsating on the coral.

I could not speak at all for a moment and then I burst out suddenly in a taut and trembling voice: “There's a white hair. I've just seen it, let me take it out.” And I leaned over and plucked it, bending his head with my other hand.

Soon there was a warning bell; a further wave of discreet gaiety took the ship. The band swung into a song which was taken up, somewhere in the room, by a phrase from a throbbing Italian voice. Joel and I talked and laughed as fast as the rest; a telegram boy raced up the gangway with a last-minute batch of telegrams. One was from me to Joel (I had thought it would not be delivered to his cabin until after the boat had sailed) and with amusement we tore it open and read it together. The officer with the brooding eyes, moving crisply now, kept coming into the lounge and looking over the heads of the crowd toward the bar, like a host discreetly indicating to the servants that the dispensation of refreshments should cease; it was time for the guests to be going.

A voice echoed over a loud-speaker system, enunciating with great precision: “Will all nonpassengers please leave the ship.
Tutti i non passeggeri sono pregati di lasciare la nave.”

The groups began to disintegrate, these pulled away from those; it appeared that the woman in the elaborately veiled hat, carrying a pigskin cosmetic case, was not a passenger, whereas the girl in gray trousers and a pink head-scarf was. We kissed, and found, with the rest, that we had said good-by too soon; a kind of pause settled on the passengers, staying behind, the visitors getting up to go. Then the voice urged again:
“Tutti i non passeggeri sono pregati di lasciare la nave.
” A bell clanged. There is something about the knell of a
bell; it is as old and as universal in its summons as a battle cry. We stood at the rail watching the people go down the companionway. Joel had his hand on the nape of my neck, just under the hair, where it was a little damp. I did not want to be the last to leave the ship, so in a little while we embraced again, holding each other hand by the shoulders, and I left him and made my way down behind a woman who kept looking back at someone she had left on the deck, and a man who pulled her gently toward the dock below. The companionway was not very steady and I had to watch the placing of my feet as the dock came up to meet me.

And then I was standing on the dock and there was Joel, up there, watching me. He had taken out a cigarette while I was going down, and now it was in his hand, the thin waver of smoke passing before his face, I waved and felt foolish. He smiled back, never taking his eyes off me; I could see his hands so clearly, I remember, rather broad and the fingers spread on the white rail. A man was unhooking the companionway. It swayed off, the people on the dock backed, it was wheeled away. The ship was free, Joel leaned over and shouted: “Is it four o'clock?” And I ran to the edge of the dock and yelled back: “Yes. Don't forget.”—That was the hour at which the
Pretoria Castle
would sail on Monday. I looked down again to steady my balance. There was a long curl of orange peel, swaying on the dirty water. As I looked the water slowly began to widen. I stepped backward, back to the protection of the waving crowd, from whom a long murmur had come.

More and more water washed up between the dock and the ship. The people hanging over the rails had the look in their faces of children who feel a slide giving way beneath them. There were fluttering hands, calls. It was a long moment, very hot, twelve o'clock on a Durban dock.

And then it hapened to the ship; she was no longer something breaking awy from the land, a part of the life of the people standing watching her go. The water glittered up, foreshortening her, and she was just another ship seen from, the hotel verandas on the beach front, flecked with colors and movement that must be unimagined people, saying unimagined things in an unimaginable, unheard pursuance of life.

I took a taxi back to the hotel, and when I got there, I saw the
Ostia
once more, a squat white shape, slowly pulling the horizon over her head.

Perhaps this story should end there. Perhaps all the thoughts that came to me alone in the hotel that long afternoon were inevitable; perhaps they were not even the truths they seemed then to be, but were merely one of those flashes generated by the stress of an unfamiliar emotional experience on a mind already keyed-up, like a fire springing from the friction of two sticks. Perhaps I could never have loved Joel, anywhere but on a ship due to sail in an hour; no matter how much I wanted to. I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

But I thought that afternoon that perhaps I had always loved him, always wanted him, and merely made do, with others. With him, I believed, I might have achieved the synthesis of most of the things in which I believed. Of lovers and friends, he seemed the only one who had not discarded everything and found nothing. Unlike me, he loved his parents enough to accept their deep differences from him, and so he had not suffered the guilt of breaking the unreasoning ties of the blood. He had not placed upon any relationship with human beings the burden of the proof of an ideal. And now, he had the purpose and the hope of realizing a concrete expression of his creative urge, in doing his work in a society which in itself was the live process of emergence, instead of decay. All this came to me in shock and turbulence, not the way I have written it here, but in a thousand disconnected images, in the piecing together of a thousand things said and felt and half-remembered.