The Lying Days (8 page)

“No, thank you”—his voice was firm and serene—“I don't want it. I don't want the nice little job or the nice little family or the dreary little town or the petty little people. It doesn't interest me”—he was looking at me rather shortsightedly through his glasses; he obviously did not expect or care for an answer or opinion from me—“and I have no desire whatever to get on with anything at all except living down here.—You should see the Pondoland Coast, you know, Helen. You people've no idea. … I go down there for a week or so to fish—some tinned stuff and my tackle, and sleep on the beaches. There are coral reefs there, under the deep water … you've never seen anything like it. Like some buried city of pink marble. And the fish!”

I looked at him curiously as he pushed a way for me through the wet bracken. Rain brushed off along the bleached hair on his red-brown arms, his bare legs had a curiously impersonal muscular
beauty that would have astonished him if anyone had spoken of it: somehow his personal physical attributes existed in spite of him rather than as a conscious part of him, as a plant, being in its function of turning oxygen to sap, does not participate in the beauty of the flower which results and is blooming somewhere on it.

I tried to think of him in one of my father's gray suits, in a shirt with arm bands to hold up the sleeves, like the men wore at the office. It did not seem possible. Suddenly the absurdity of it pleased me very much; I was laughing at the thought of the clerks at the office.

He was scrambling ahead of me up a bank and he half-turned at the sound. His hand went to the bright shaven hair at the nape of his neck. “It's a bit of a mess, I suppose …?” he said, smiling. I shook my head, I was too out of breath to speak. “Mine too,” I gasped, catching up with him. The wet, the slither of the grass beneath our feet, and the sudden darkening of the air as the day ended unseen behind a muffling of cloud, filled us both with a kind of intoxication of energy. We tore home, ignoring the paths. I plunged with the child's conscious craziness into every difficulty I could find, madly excited at myself. Sometimes I could not speak at all, but just stood, pointing at him and laughing.

The ten years between us were forgotten.

Ludi left on Saturday morning. In the day and a half between, I had felt rather than thought that he might say he would write to me. I kept out of the way of the mother and son almost unconsciously, leaving them to draw together before the fresh parting or, perhaps as unconsciously, they excluded me; but I felt all the time that the natural moment would arise when the only possible thing to say would be: I shall drop you a line when I get a chance, just to let you know what it's like. Or: But of course you'll tell me that when you write.

And it did seem to me that the moment came again and again, but Ludi smiled into the pause and did not even know that it was
his.
I watched this with the quiet, gradual disappointment of a child who has presumed too far upon the apparent understanding of a grownup for an imaginative game: suddenly, the ageless understanding
being becomes simply an adult indulgently regarding rather than participating, and nothing, no dissimulation or protest, can deflect the child's cold steady intuition of the fact. For the first time since I had left home, I felt lonely, but it was not for my mother and father or anything that I had left, but rather for something that I had not yet had, but that I believed was to come: a time of special intimate gaiety and friendship with some vague companion composed purely of an imaginative ideal of youth—an ideal that I would never formulate now, and that only later, when it had gone, would recognize as having existed all the time unnoticed in myself, because it was nothing concrete, but just the dreams, the uncertainty, the aspiration itself.

When Ludi had gone we came back to the house in a gentle companionable mood and sank into a kind of lull of feminine comfortableness; Mrs. Koch took up the curtains she had been making before her son came home, and the tea, set out with the one cracked cup that Matthew never failed to give us, was waiting in the living room. I lay reading with the damp cottony smell of the chintz cushion under my elbows and could not be bothered to go down to the sea. When it got cooler late in the afternoon, we went for a walk, at Mrs. Koch's sedate pace, and on the flattest part of the road. If the obverse side of her son's departure was the sharpness of love and lack, the reverse side was a certain relieved flatness, as if her body protested at the emotional tension of his temporary presence and found resignation more suited to its slowing vitalities.

We were having supper with the radio tuned in over-loudly to the B.B.C, news—the crackling, cultured voice talking of bombs and burning towns was an invariable accompaniment to the evening meal—when I thought I heard the slam of a car door outside, but did not remark upon it or even lift my head because the metallic monologue of the radio, so dehumanized by the great seas and skies that washed between, had the curious effect of making all immediate sounds seem far off and unreal. It was with the most dreamlike astonishment that I looked up from the white of the cloth and saw Ludi. He was closing the door behind himself, sagging from the shoulder with the weight of his kit in the other hand. For a moment I had a ridiculous start of guilt as if I had conjured him up. He
smiled at me down his mouth and I saw that his cap, which he normally wore a little too far forward for my standards of attractiveness, was pushed up from his warm-looking forehead. I saw this as suddenly and distinctly as if a light had been turned on in a room that had waited ready in the dark.

All at once Mrs. Koch gave a little exclamation almost of dismay or annoyance, and then she was up and pushed the table away; he had her by the arm. “The bridge is down at Umkomaas. The rains last week, and it's been slipping all the time, I suppose. We hung about and hung about, thinking—”

“You came back! Ludi! But what about your leave, won't you get into trouble? Well, I can't believe it!”

“The bridge is down. So what could I do? The trains aren't running and I thought maybe I'd get a lift—but then it got late and I thought, what's the use?”

They were both laughing, perhaps now because Mrs. Koch had seemed put out, and just to make sure he was really there, his mother had to ask him over again. “I can't believe it.” This time he repeated the story with indignation, feeling in some way that although it could not be so in fact, the army, the hated regimentation that defeated itself again and again, was to blame.—After all, if it had not been for the army, he would not have had to be in a particular place at a particular time, and being prevented from getting there would not have mattered to him in the least.

While they were questioning and exclaiming, I stood up quite still in my place at the table, my napkin tight in my hand. Suddenly, like the moment after I had faced an examiner, a light shudder went over my neck and I began to tremble. The tighter I clenched the piece of linen the more my hand shook, and I could not control my bottom jaw. I was terrified they would notice me, and as the fear came so it attracted its object. Ludi gestured his mother's attention toward me: “It's taken away her appetite.”

As he spoke the trivial words, not even to me, the trembling lay down immediately inside me and an extraordinary happiness, utterly unspecific and somehow mindless, opened out in me. We gave Ludi supper; I moved about the room with a light confidence that came to me suddenly and for the first time, as if my body had slipped,
between instant and instant, into the ease of balance, never to be unlearned, as a rider, clinging to the vertical insecurity of his bicycle, suddenly learns how and is easy between the supports of air and air. There was a family gaiety between the three of us that had never been between my parents and me; I was delighted with the timidity of Mrs. Koch's response to the nearest that Ludi's small dry humor could get to joking. They got quite excited discussing how long the unofficial extension of his leave could hope to last.

“I'll get the incubator house fixed if I stay three days,” he said.

Mrs. Koch, with a conscious bold levity that made me want to touch her with affection, said: “Oh, to pot with the incubator. Matthew will do something to it.”

“You mean he'll give it some thought—until my next leave.”

His mother was serious at once; her extraordinary gentleness toward all human beings made her suspect that the old servant's feelings could be hurt by implied criticism, even out of his hearing. “Ludi, his sciatica's got him bent double—”

We laughed at her, and soon she was laughing with us.

Ludi gathered up his kit with a gesture that closed the evening; always at some unexpected point he withdrew, firmly and without room for protest, into the preoccupation with a small task or a private commonplace errand of his own. If you followed him to his room, you would merely find him lying on his bed, reading, or tinkering with an improvement to his fishing tackle: yet he was withdrawn into the dignity of himself in these ordinary occupations as a sculptor or a scholar who, it is tacitly understood, will leave the company to rejoin the bright struggle that waits, as always, in the solitude at the top of the house. Like them, he was only loaned to other people; he must return to himself. His mother was long accustomed to this, but now nervousness made her trespass. She called, after a while, to his bedroom: “Ludi?”

His voice came, muffled as if he were pulling some clothes over his head. “I'm going for a swim.”

“But the tide'll be right out—” she called, not wanting to let him go without a protest. We heard him padding down the passage with his steady, soft tread, like the tread of a native who is used to walking great distances. As he was going down the veranda steps,
his mother suddenly opened the window and called after him, “Ludi! Why don't you take Helen?”

He stood up to the window in the light. “Does she want to come? Of course.”

“She hasn't been out all day.” Mrs. Koch was periodically seized with the fear that she neglected to entertain her young guest; then it seemed more important that she should arrange something for me to do than consult my wishes. I usually felt a little awkward if the plan involved Ludi, because I was afraid that I intruded on him, and that he felt he must agree out of a sense of duty. And often when he had been persuaded into some little jaunt, I had the feeling, disconcerting in a different way, that he was so little bothered by my presence that to have feared he might be was a piece of presumption, irritating and silly. Now he stood quite patiently in the window, waiting.

This time I was determined to show the decisiveness of an adult. “It'll take me only a minute to change,” I questioned him.

Mrs. Koch shook her head. “No, you're not going swimming at night. That's all right for him. He knows how to look after himself in the sea.”

One did not argue with gentle Mrs. Koch. “Then I'm ready.” I smiled.

“—Then come on!” Ludi put both hands on the window sill.

Lurching down the hills to the beach in the old car, I talked a great deal. The slight sense of adventure in the dark road and the attentive profile of the young man whom, sometimes, as now, I felt I knew very well (I imagined myself saying: Ludi Koch? Of course, he's different when you know him. …) brought out in me a tendency to exaggerate and animate. Unconsciously I selected for him those anecdotes of the Mine and the town that presented certain aspects of the life as a little ridiculous, if not quite as reprehensible as he condemned it. There was even one story that
showed my father as rather stuffy, rather circumscribed. … I could tell it with the child's elderly amusement at the parent.

Then it seemed just as easy not to talk. We left the car and got down onto the dark beach giving short instructions to each other: Look out for that bush; all right now. … He disappeared into the dark.

I lay down on my back on the cool sand that held the cool of the night as it held the heat of the sun, deep down, far below the loose billowy surface, cool, cool all through. I kept the palm of my hand under my head to keep my hair free of sand, but soon I took my hand away and let the soft touch of my hair against my neck become indistinguishable from the touch of the sand. At first I was completely sunk in darkness. There was no sea, no earth, no sky. Even the sand I lay on was a tactile concept only. The sound of the sea was the flow of dark itself. Then, as I lay, a breaking wave turned back a glimmer of pale along the dark, and slowly, slowly, I made out a different, moving quality of the dark that was the sea. Flowing over his legs; I saw them undulating in the water dark, like fins that moved like fans. I might be lying on the air with the earth on top of me.

I did not know how long he was away. With nothing but the waves' faint break in the darkness to measure the passing of time, I could not tell if it was ten minutes or half an hour, but suddenly he stepped into the enclosing dark about me and he was there, toweling his hair. A few drops of cold water shook from it onto my cheek. I sat up, and a faint slither of sand ran like a breeze down the back of my dress. I could hardly see him, yet he was there vigorously, his sharp breathing, the smell of damp towel, and as he bent, the fresh smell of khaki.

He said: “Where are you?”

“Here.”—I put up my hand, but he could not see it.

“Was it cold?”

“No. There's a lot of seaweed about, tangling up your legs. Come—” he said.

I got up obediently. We began to walk slowly along the beach, quite far from the water, where the sand was dry and coldly heavy to walk in. All my being was concentrated in my left hand, which
hung beside him as we walked. My whole body was poured into that hand as I waited for him to take it. It seemed to me that he must take it; I felt us walking up the beach together, with our hands clasped. In my head I listened and heard again him saying: “Come—”; so short, so intimate, and the strange pleasure of my obedience, as if the word itself drew me up out of the sand.