The Lying Days (7 page)

On the way back we met Ludi coming along the road from Plasketts' without a coat, barefoot, soaked through, and he scolded us for being out. I knew that it was his mother for whom he was concerned, but he was always kind, and the concern was accepted for me, too. Then the rain ceased; suddenly, in a hollow, the grass, the air, the undergrowth steamed. Far behind grayness, the sun showed yellow as a fog lamp. We were steaming inside our clothes; threw off raincoats, the scarves enveloping our heads. Ludi, with his wet shorts clinging strongly to his buttocks, said: “Well, what can I do …?” And smiling wryly, like a father being imposed upon by children, loaded himself with our wraps. A bird called out somewhere as if the day were beginning over; some white, delicate flowers splashed all over common dark bushes let go their sweet breath again.

But mostly the sun shone, only the sun existed. In the mornings just after breakfast, the three of us pottered about the garden and the chicken houses. Ludi and his mother had the endless little consultations, the need to draw each other's attention to this detail or that, the need even merely to remark one to the other what the other already thought or well knew, that people have who have long had a life in common and now live apart. Before Ludi had joined the army, he had been running some sort of little chicken farm; for five or six years after he had left school he had apparently had jobs of various kinds in various places—sometimes Mrs. Koch would say: When you were in Johannesburg … but you remember, it was when you were at Klerksdorp—always returning intermittently to the coast and his mother. What he had done during those months, it was difficult to say. Then there had been the idea of the chicken farm, and Mrs. Koch had bought the chickens and the necessary equipment and Ludi had built the runs and the troughs and the perches and the incubation shed by himself, in his own time. Whether the chicken farming was ever a success or not, it was again difficult to say; now Ludi was in the army, and most of the chickens had been sold, or had died, because Mrs. Koch could not look after them by herself.

Yet Ludi spent a great deal of time down at the chicken houses. He was mending the sagging wires, and dismantling and reassembling the incubator, which had deteriorated in some way through lack of use. The few fowls that were left wandered about unscientifically round his squatting figure. The morning sun, testing out its mounting power, frizzled brightness on his bright gold hair, and now and then he paused, frowning, took off his glasses and put them back. He looked strange without his glasses; someone else. Mrs. Koch came to him and went away again, her voice trailing off as she went over to feel the pawpaws pendulous from the finely engraved totem of a young palm but still green, then rising to a question as she returned and stood with her hand on her hip, drawing away from the sun. “But what happens to them, I'd like to know. I have a look at them and they're green. And then when I come back in a day or two when they should be ripe, they're gone. Now there are more green ones getting ready. But I never seem to see them ripen.”

“Hey, Matthew, the missus wants to know why the pawpaws don't get ripe—” Ludi screwed his eyes up weak against the sun, calling to the native who was trailing slowly across the grass to an outhouse, carrying a rusty tin bath. “I didn't see it,” said the servant, continuing.

Ludi squatted wider, giving his blunt burned hand a steadier grip on the screwdriver. Without lifting his reddened neck, he laughed. “Matthew!”

The native slowly lowered the bath and stopped, regarding us. He stood there in the sun.

The screwdriver slipped; Ludi grunted and tried again. His mother bent over a little, with the anxious grimace of someone who does not know what it is that is being attempted and proving difficult.

“I myself I never see those pawpaw,” said Matthew.

“Matthew!” Ludi shook his head.

The native burst into laughter, shaking his head, stopping to gasp, swinging up the bath in a mirror-flash, walking on in a flurry of culpable innocence. He laughed back at Ludi; Ludi laughed after him.

Ludi had gone into the incubation house. There was the sound of something being wrenched away. “Mother, did Plasketts ever take those brackets they asked for? There were two, I think, in the garage. Or in the shed.” “Which were they, dear—?” and she was in the dark doorway after him. I went back to the house to write a letter; I had written one when I arrived, had one from home. I went onto the veranda, sat down on the old green-painted chair at the shaky wicker table. I sat pulling at a fraying braid on the table top, my eyes half-closed at the glare that made a bright palpable mist of the space climbing up from the sea. The cane was so live a green that it seemed to be growing visibly; the river a twist of metallic light. Blossoms dropped silently from the frangipani trees. I sat there waving my bare foot.

It was impossible to write the letter; did it exist, a here and there, at this same morning? What could I write to the Mine, to the house with the lights on, the red haze of hair bending over the letter, handing it across the vegetable dishes. For one second I smelled the cold brick of the passage at the Mine offices. But it was not enough to create the existence of the Mine, to make it possible at the other end of a space of which
this
was at one end.

“Are you finding it too quiet?—I hope not. I know there isn't much life for young people there, but the sea and …”

An ugly crawling creature (the old house was alive with such creatures, its own and those of the undergrowth) came out the rotting crevice of the table and ran across my mother's letter and the open writing pad. I went slithering my bare soles over the steps down to the grass.

Mrs. Koch did not normally go to the beach except at week ends or to accompany friends, but now she went with me most mornings. Ludi drove us down in the old car and left us to settle ourselves up on the dunes where the bush leaned a little shade and the sand was powder-soft and spiked with bits of leaf and twig; Mrs. Koch liked to sit there, with a sunshade over her legs and her shoes off. Then Ludi took his fishing rod and the stained canvas bag high with bait and was gone away up the beach, the jogging walk smaller and smaller, the old khaki shirt waving some signal of its own as a whip
of breeze from the sea animated its loose tails; then gone round the rocks, slid in, it seemed, as if the cool smooth solidities had parted, like a stage-set, and closed behind him. If one could see, of course, there he would be, on the other side of the rocks, a khaki mark like a punctuation, drawing across the sands on the other side, and so on, and round the next bend, and the next, until he reached wherever his fishing ground might be.

The rocks held the scallop of beach. Mrs. Koch brought mending or a piece of knitting for one of the grandchildren; I had a book. We talked, but our words were tiny sounds lost in the space of the beach and the sea and the air; phrases torn fluttering rose to sound, sailed, fell to lost like the occasional birds lifted and dropped in the spaces of the air above the sea. We whispered in a great hall where our voices died away unechoed on the floor. We did not notice that we had stopped talking; Mrs. Koch knitted without looking, a fine sweat cooling her brow, her eyes absently retaining a look of gentle attention, as if she had forgotten that she was not listening to someone. Easily, like a satisfied dog that is so used to the limits of its own garden that it turns at the open gate and automatically goes back up the same path down which it has just trotted, her mind quietly rounded on the beach and the questioning of the silence and went again to examine the small businesses of her daily life.

In silence I got up and wandered down toward the sea. The sand was coarser, yellower; then here, where the tide had smoothed and smoothed it, spreading one layer evenly and firmly down over another, it dazzled with its cleanness, and the hardness of it thudded through my heels to my ears like the beat of my own heart in the heat. A thin film of water spread out to my feet; the sea touched me.

Sometimes I lay, the sharp bones of my hips meeting only the hardness of the sand, the sun puckering my skin. My eyes closed, I lost sense of which side the sea was, which side the land, and seemed to be alive only within my own body, beating with the heat. Water came with the rising tide, gentle and shocking. I jumped up with the pattern of the sand facets like the marks of rough bedclothes on my legs and cheek. Sometimes I went over to the rocks and dipped my hands in the lukewarm pools. Some of the rocks bristled
with mussels and barnacles which agonized my feet; others, smooth and black and layered, shone slightly greasy with salt. Red-brown ones were dry and matt, swirled out into curves and hollows by the sea. They were warm and alive, like flesh. I sat back in an armchair of stone, resting the still-white undersides of my arms on the warmth. Sweat softened the hair in my armpits, and suddenly, across the scent of the wind and the sea, I was conscious of the smell of my own body.

I did not talk much to Ludi and yet between the three of us, Mrs. Koch and Ludi and myself, there was a sense of rest and familiarity when we sat together in the living room in the evenings. Perhaps it came partly from a physical tiredness, the tiredness of the muscle, the sun. Ludi in the white shorts and shirt that were his concession to dressing for dinner, still barelegged and wearing old sandshoes, lay on the divan and read, now and then saying something teasing to us, treating us as if we were of an age, seeing in his mother the heart of the young woman which had stayed, like a plant taken from the climate of its growth, static, since the time when his father had left her many years before. He had standards of his own, this Ludi, and the barriers of youth or age were artificial to him because he knew, as easily as the blind know the shape of things beneath the exterior they do not see, the secret contour of the self. Perhaps that was why the human exterior, the faces of the people he knew, interested him so little. He did not seem to know what people looked like; once I had mentioned meeting at the Post Office an old gentleman who I thought might be Dr. Patterson, a friend of the Koches', and I asked Ludi whether Dr. Patterson was a fairish man with a large nose. He hardly seemed to know, and was a little irritated at my incredulity at his lack of observation. Yet places, beaches and rivers and the sea, he saw with all the sensuous intensity with which one might regard a beloved face. All the core of his human intimacy seemed, apart from his mother, to be centered in the large impersonal world of the natural, which in itself surely negates all intimacy; in its space and vastness and terrifying age, shakes off the little tentative human grasp as a leaf is dropped in the wind.

I felt this in the form of a kind of uneasy bewilderment that now
and then rose up like a barrier of language between myself and the young man. I could not fit him into the inherited categories of my child's experience, and this made me obscurely anxious. … Two days before his leave was up I was alone with him for perhaps only the second or third time since I had arrived. We walked into the village together on a dull afternoon to get our hair cut and he said to me suddenly on the way back: “I suppose you're going to go back and live there?—That life on the Mine is the narrowest, most mechanical, unrewarding existence you could think of in any nightmare.”

I was so surprised, shocked, that I stammered as if I had been caught out in some reprehensible act. “Well, Ludi, of course. I mean I live there—!”

He shook his head, walking on.

I felt indignant and unhappy at the same time. “I've always lived on the Mine.—I know you don't like towns, you hated working underground, you like to be at the sea, who wouldn't—” But even as I said it I was aware that no one I knew would dream of wanting to live buried away on the South Coast, not working. Why? It was an existence at once desirable because of its strangeness, yet in some way shameful.

He made a noise of disgust. “Grubbing under the earth in the dark to produce something entirely useless, and coming up after eight hours to take your place in the damned cast-iron sacred hierarchy of the Mine, grinning and bowing all the way up to the godly Manager on top, and being grinned and bowed at by everyone below you—not that there ever was anyone below me, except the blacks and it's no privilege to sit on them since anyone can.”

“Oh,
Ludi
I laughed. He laughed, too, his wry smile with the corners of his mouth turning down.

“You drink in the pubs together and you play tennis on Saturdays together and you go to dances organized by the ladies. You live by courtesy of the Mine, for the Mine, in the Mine. And to hell with Jack so long as I'm all right, so long as my promotion's coming. And I'll grin at the Underground Manager and I'll slap the shift boss on the back—”

“But what are you going to do?” He had admitted me to a plane
of adulthood that released the boldness to ask something I had wondered in silence.

For once he turned to look at me, and it was with the patient smile that expects no comprehension, knows that a familiar barrier has been reached. “Look,” he said, “I don't want to ‘get on.' I'm happy where I am. All I want is the war to end so that I can get back here.”

“Shall you start up the chicken farm again?”

“It doesn't much matter. Any sort of job would do so long as it brings in fifteen or twenty pounds a month. Just so's mother and I can manage. She's got a small income of her own.”

I was embarrassed by my own reaction. I knew that in my face and my silence I showed a deep sense of shock and a kind of disbelief that timidly tried to temper it. A struggle was set up in me; dimly I felt that the man acted according to some other law I did not know, and yet at the same time the law of my mother, the law of the people among whom I lived and by which I myself was beginning to live, made him outcast, a waster, a loafer, ambitionless; to be sighed over more than blamed, perhaps, like Pat Moodie, the son of one of the officials who had “wasted all his opportunities” and taken to drink. The phrases of failure came to my mind in response to the situation, because I had no others to fit it.