The Lying Days (9 page)

He began to talk, about the men with whom he lived in camp. He talked on and on. I answered yes or no: I was unable to listen, the way one cannot hear when one is preoccupied by distress of anger. He did not seem to notice. Now and then the uneven flow of the sand beneath our feet caused his shirt to brush my shoulder with the faint scratch of material; my hand, numb with the laxity of waiting, felt as if it had been jambed.

We had reached the lagoon, pouring silently down the channel it had cut for itself into the sea. “Shall we get back now?” he said and, with a little groan, lowered himself down to the sand; he squatted with his arms folded on his knees. I stood awkwardly, with what must have been an almost pettish attitude of offense innocently expressed in my stiff body. But as he made no move to get up, I sat down too, facing past the hump of his knees.

“But you know,” he said suddenly, as if it were the continuation of something we had discussed, “you're really only a little girl. I wonder. I wonder if you are.” He took me by the elbows and drew me round, close against his knees and I saw his teeth, white for a moment, and knew that he had smiled. He enclosed my head and his knees in his arms and rocked them gently once or twice. The most suffocating joy took hold of me; I was terrified that he would stop, suddenly release me. So I kept as still as fear, my hands dangling against his shoes. He gave a curious sigh, as one who consents to something against his will. Then he bent to my face and lifted it with his own and kissed me, opening my tight pressing mouth, the child's hard kiss with which I tried to express my eagerness as a woman. The idea of the kiss completely blocked out for me the physical sensation; I was intoxicated with the idea of Ludi kissing me, so that afterward it was the idea that I remembered, and not the feel of his lips. I buried my face on his knees again and the smell of khaki, of the ironed khaki drill of his trousers,
came to me as the smell of love. … I remembered the Cluff brothers at the dance … the smell of khaki … my heart beat up at the excitement of contrasting myself then with myself at this moment.

Ludi was feeling gently down my bare arm, as if to find out how some curious thing was made.

“Well,” he said at last, “can't you speak?”

“Ludi,” I asked, “do you really like me?”

I do not know if I had ever been kissed before. Even if I had, it does not matter; it was as if it had never happened, the prim mouth of a frightened schoolboy dry on my lips, the social good-night kiss on the doorstep that would be smiled upon indulgently by Mine parents, the contact that was an end in itself, like a handshake. Now I lay in my bed in the high little room in Mrs. Koch's house and kept my face away from the pillow because I wanted my lips free of any tactual distraction that might make it difficult for me to keep intact on my mouth the shape and sensation of Ludi's kiss. I thought about it as something precious that had been shown to me; vivid, but withdrawn too quickly for me to be able to re-create every detail as my anxious memory willed. That anxious memory trembling eagerly to forget nothing; perhaps that is the beginning of desire, the end of a childhood? Wanting to remember becomes wanting: the recurring question that has no answer but its own eventual fading out into age, as it faded in from childhood.

Suddenly sleep, arbitrary, uncaring, melted my body away from me. I had just time to recognize myself going; and with only my mind still left to me, the idea of the kiss became complete in itself: I held it warmed in my heart as a child holds the imaginative world in the clasped body of a Teddy bear.

I woke late—by the standards of the Koch household—to a day of such heat that already by the time I had put on my clothes my heart was thumping with effort. Ludi was finishing a second cup of tea, chair half pushed away from the table. He was reading the paper,
and on this, as on every other morning, his lifted head excused him from any further talk or attention. There was a whole small pawpaw on my plate instead of the usual segment scooped free of pips. I looked up to Mrs. Koch. “Matthew's conscience offering,” she smiled. I cut it open; it was one of those with deep pink flesh and I knew it would have a special flavor, sharper, more perfumed than the yellow ones. The beautiful black pips beaded out under my spoon. I ate the whole fruit, very carefully, and it made me deeply hungry. Mrs. Koch went out to the kitchen to fetch my scrambled eggs and the toast Matthew was making for me.

Now. I turned my eyes slowly, as if their movement might have some equivalent of the creak of footsteps. His raised knee, crossed over the other, was in the line of my lowered vision, the slightly roughened skin of the kneecap, the big taut tendon underneath, the golden hairs over the calf muscle. He moved his toes a little inside the shabby sandshoe.

And now I lifted my head and looked at him, set face at an angle above the newspaper, thick bright lashes crowded round his narrowed eyes as he gave two quick blinks in succession, as though the print hurt them. The clean cheeks of a newly shaven blond man; a faint movement at the nostrils as he breathed deeply against the heat. The mouth. The thin mouth with the little uneven lift to the lip on the left side, the curious rim, like a raised line, outlining his lips which were the same color as his skin.

The same. Exactly the same. Just as he was yesterday, the day I arrived. He had all the mystery of a stranger, unimpaired. Now I looked at his hands. He must have sensed the silent movement of my eyes. Bending the spine of the newspaper, he looked up and said: “Want to go swimming?” I felt his smile rest on me. It seemed to me that the moment was too intimate for speech; whatever he said to me now was intimate to me, nothing could be casual or commonplace, because every word, every gesture, I deciphered in the knowledge of last night, that lay always in my hand like a key to a code. I only nodded, hard and surely. I could see him running, very fast, through the shallows to the breakers, cutting the water in a wake like mercurial wings at his ankles.

“Too hot for the beach?” said Ludi to his mother. She put down
my egg. “This morning?” Her eyes rested vaguely here and there upon the table, looking for a decision. “I was supposed to help Mrs. Plaskett with her re-covering. … Certainly too hot to bend about pinning and sewing. I felt a little dizzy when I got up, as it is.” She was smiling weakly at me, reluctant, ready to be swayed. My heart beat so fast with anxiety that each mouthful presented an obstacle to my throat. I cut off great mouthfuls of egg and toast and forced them into my mouth. A smile of great shame and brightness was turned to her out of my anxiety. I said, terrified, “At least there'll be a breeze on the beach.” She hesitated still. “You could sit under the funeral tree.”—It was a dark and mournful tree that hung unexpectedly over a dune—. Trembling with the guilt of my desire to prevent her, I could have gone on finding reasons for her to come. Ludi seemed to have lost interest. “Well, then, shall we risk it, dear?” she assented to him.

The mouthful of food passed from one side of my mouth to the other. I could not swallow it and did not know what to do with it. I wished they would go out of the room so that I could spit it out into my hand, chewed and distasteful. Tears of chagrin came up against the age of Mrs. Koch; the age and blindness—the waste! Old people to whom nothing matters anymore, so they do not know how, unknowingly and careless, they waste the precious time of the young. And she was waiting for me, looking at me fondly because it was settled we were all going to the beach together as we had done before. I found I was smiling back at her; a smile that came to my mouth like a blow.

And yet when we got to the beach I was suddenly happy again as I had been the previous evening at supper. On Ludi and me the sun flowed, pressed, crawled like the tickling feet of some hair-legged millipede where the salt water dried. When I lay in the water, attacked by long rough breakers I wanted the warmth of the sun, drawing me up through the surface of my streaming skin; when I lay in the sun, full of the sun as a ripening fruit, I wanted the dowse of the cool water. And so the whole morning, in and out, the sea and the sun, dark and glare, with a delight in the energy that powered me, a pleasure in the firm shudder of the tight burned flesh above my knees as I ran. I left my bathing cap in the sand and went
into the sea without it. First the tips of my hair got wet and touched cold fingers on my shoulders. Then the swell, lightly rising up my back, passed over my head like the cool tongue of a great dog. The membrane of water split and parted on my knotted hair, running off; the thickness of it, near my scalp, was still dry. Then I sank myself head first into a towering breaker and the great cold hands of the sea thrust in beneath my hair and I came up shocked, gasping, blinded by the heavy bands of liquid hair that flowed down my face and clung round my neck.

Ludi said: “You'll never get a comb through that when it's dry.”

At once I was afraid he might think I was showing off. I said, with the self-conscious casualness of a lie, “I've done it often before. It'll be all right after a shower.” Mrs. Koch had lain back with the paper over her face, and was not awake innocently to contradict me. A little later Ludi and I went into the sea together, and again I let my hair into the water, dipping and spreading it in a solitary game. He swam away out, only his head rising and lost, gone and there, out where the breakers ended and the sea really began, an element as solid in depth as the earth, a thick glassy blue earth. I played in the water and thought of Ludi swimming back to me: it seemed to me, as I imagined a woman in the complacency of marriage, that it was wonderful to think of him removed from me, simply because he would come back. I lay on the sand with my head sheltered in the darkness of my arms and imagined a life with Ludi, long dialogues between us, dialogues between myself and others about Ludi; Ludi talking to someone about me. And whether he was in the sea, beyond sight, or lying a foot away from me across the silence, and whether his mother was there, or if she had been left at home, it did not matter to me. Just as on a distant nod of acknowledgment there are people who can construct the history of a friendship, so that you are astonished to hear that so-and-so speaks of you by your Christian name, so I spun out of Ludi's one gesture of recognition to me as a woman the entry into the whole adult world of relationships between men and women, as it existed in my imagination. In this world unbounded by time, commonplace, and the hazards of human behavior, with, in fact, the scope of innocence, Ludi existed for me in an exclusive, all-possessive love that made the Ludi suddenly seen
as I opened my eyes—he was blowing the sea water out of his nose and his eyes above the handkerchief glistened with effort—unreal and momentarily unrecognizable, like meeting someone whose photograph you have long been accustomed to.

All day this dreamlike state of mind persisted, and with it a softening that seemed physical, a phenomenon in my warm sea-soaked body that made everything and everyone around me dear and sympathetic. All the angular reticences of adolescence were resolved in the simple fact that cannot be forewarned or explained: the discovery of love. With the irrational changeability of emotions which commanded me and took advantage of my inexperience, I felt a dramatic welling of tenderness toward Mrs. Koch; infinite patience with her elderliness (love was past for her, gone down like a sun that dazzles the eyes no more); the homely face and the curly gray hair, her freckled hands, even, had for me something of the fascination of a neglected shrine: she was Ludi's mother. Excitement at the thought of the three of us, in the car, at table, could bring sudden tears to my eyes; the faint shine of sweat, like the glisten of a dusting of talcum, on the white inner skin of my elbow filled me with the swift, intoxicating thought of my being alive. In my room I studied my face, fixed my hair this way and that with fingers that trembled with eagerness for a result that might change me entirely—with the instinct that gives a flower the bright petals that invite the insect, chose clothes that showed my waist and the small shapes of my breasts. I took off shorts and put on a skirt because in the tight trousers the curve of my belly filled me with disgust. I made my own eyes heavy with the fumes of the perfume that was usually kept for special occasions, I wore a bracelet and painted my nails to please a man who never noticed clothes and intensely disliked the artificial. But he was a man and not a child, as I was, and I believe he saw not the pathetic little artifice of the means, but the complete naturalness of the end, which was the desire to please.

After lunch, Ludi suggested that we drive out to Cruden's Beach for the afternoon—the stare of the sun was completely shut off by thick cloud, but the heat came through, muffled and still.

“You certainly are taking a holiday,” Mrs. Koch said, gently teasing, questioning, “How is it you're deserting the fish for us?”
And in a conspiracy of possessiveness that was sweet to me, I allied myself with her in banter. Yet when I went along the passage to get my bathing suit, I could not walk: I wanted to run, jump, my hands were inept with happiness as I assembled my things—Ludi was spending his time with me, it was me for whom he stayed. Mrs. Koch's innocent teasing, her “way” as Ludi would call it, gave me the assurance I could have had no other way, independent and unsuspecting testimony of something that could be truly interpreted only by my key. With my delight there was astonishment; I was content to be allowed to be with him, to watch him. My feeling was still so much a cherished compound of the imagination; that the adored object should show signs of wishing to come to life and take part was more than I could imagine.

I sat between Mrs. Koch and Ludi in the old swaying car and it seemed that all the time there was some kind of machine running inside me. It had started up and now it was humming secretly all the time, unbeknown to anyone. I watched fascinated the dance of my lax hands, jolting against my lap with the shake of the car. Sometimes I felt I must keep my head down to hide the excitement of happiness that I could feel in my face. Yet my joy could not be confined; the sight of the sea round a bend, a little native on a calf's back, brought a cry of pleasure I could not hold back. On the great beach there were two or three little gatherings of people, not holiday-makers but residents from the district, stranded in the uncertain boredom of their Sunday afternoon. Of course a hand went up, like a pennant, as we sank from the path to the sand. Mrs. Koch knew somebody: “Why Ludi … it's the Leicesters, I think.”