Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

I had a new bathing suit.

It lay on the bed in my room; “Why shouldn’t Nell go down to Alice’s place?” my father surprised himself by saying. My mother looked from one to the other: “—Well, I don’t know, would she like it—?”

I could not conjure up in myself a projection into any single moment — a meal, the sight of the sea, Mrs. Koch smiling from a veranda — ready to exist on a little farm on the South Coast of Natal. We had been invited many times; we had never gone. Alice Koch was my mother’s old friend, corresponded with regularly, but materializing only every two or three years, when she would telephone to say that she had arrived in Johannesburg on holiday, and would come out to the Mine to spend a week end or a day. I had always read her letters, and reading them, was easy with her; yet when she got out at the station she was different; a big woman, much older than my mother, with a gentle smile and a faint, refined dew of agitation touching cool from her upper lip as you kissed her. Once — dim with sand castles and a doll that had had its feet trailed in the edge of the water — there was the memory of staying at a place near where Mrs. Koch had lived and Mrs. Koch had come with her two daughters and their children to sit with us on a beach.

“On her own … would she …? — I couldn’t go.” Mother patted the yellow bathing suit.

“Oh, yes.” I looked up quickly; it seemed as if there had never been a pause. “I want to go; I’ll go.”

I was seventeen and I had been a year out of school. The year had been spent working at a temporary job in my father’s office; the Secretary’s daughter in the Secretary’s office of Atherton Mine.

The train put me down on the siding paved with coal grit and blew back a confetti of smuts as it screeched off slowly over the brilliance of rails. When I took my hand from my eyes I was receding rapidly, alone on the glittering black dust. With a honk the train was gone.

A double white sign, converging on a V, said, KATEMBI RIVER, 17 ft. above sea level, 57 ½ miles to Durban. A tin shed, delicately eroded by rust a foot up from the ground, said, GOODS. It was empty. At the end of the strip of coal grit, like a short carpet abruptly rolled, thick bush green and black green and hard with light reached up and closed in high, singing with hot intimacy far within and dead still to the eye.

A tremendous heat watched everything.

I was conscious of the feel of the sea on my left cheek, where it bumped and exploded white below the roll of green that fell away from that side of the track, but I was still as a lizard, breathing, it seemed, shallower even than the air, not moving my eyes.

The shaking of a human hand unseen broke the authority of the bush as it swayed with the passage of human bodies passing down a grudging pathway I could not see; and the quiet buzzle of two people talking that suggests to the stranger they are preparing to meet a side of themselves he will never know, that will have disappeared in hiding by the time they come forward on a smile, gave a queer misbeat to my heart. I was hot, a little sweat came out and clung my hair to my forehead as I urged smiling to meet them; Mrs. Koch pointing and shaking her head beneath a checked parasol, her feet in men’s sandals, and a man with her.

“—My dear! I’m so sorry … shame … what a way to arrive. …” The soft, damp kiss, the Eau-de-Cologne. I laughed, shaking my head, hotter, unbearably hot now in the relief of the moment of greeting over. The man — it was a young man, I now saw, in a sort of half-uniform, khaki shorts and an army shirt and sandals, but no cap — wore glasses and stood back looking down at us with the polite smile of a stranger watching emotion which he does not share. The smile pulled the corners of his mouth down and in a little. “It was Ludi, he would stop by at the old Plasketts’ on the way to say hullo — oh, there was plenty of time. I am so sorry. … What will your mother think of us?”—Her son, of course; with the German name; the guilty smile of nonrecognition faded comfortably on my face.

In the gaiety of arrival, exchanging questions we did not wait for each other to answer, we trudged up the steep pathway with cinders grinding away under our feet, a hand up to fend off the bush. The young man came up behind, with the luggage. The three of us were packed into the front of an old faded car and he drove away up and down a steep stony road that dipped now between flat-roofed trees where creepers dropped screens over bush secretive with a hidden trickle of stream, now through a cutting — black ooze and wet rock with a bunch of tough grasses stuffed in here and there as if to staunch the wound — rose and turned and discovered the river away below on the left and the sugar cane. As I talked to Mrs. Koch, my elbow crooked on the open window felt the pull of the sun and the sudden warm wet blow of the river. The river was drawn in a brown hank, shiny like the sheath of a muscle, through the soft hills of cane; one against the other they were folded, soft with deep cane, flattened like fur by the wind, down, silver-pale, up, green; sage and brilliant as the sun blew across.

The cane sang on either side of the road. We could not see beyond it. It was tall as a man and thick as tall grass to an ant. “Phew …,” said Mrs. Koch at the still heat, as if it were something she could never meet without faint astonishment. She moved her warm bulk to take out a small handkerchief and touch her cheek beneath her eyes, with the movement of wiping away tears. Ludi moved up a little, to give us more room; it was as if, although he did not speak, it was a gesture of having said something, allowing him to remain comfortably silent outside our conversation.

It was extraordinarily easy to talk to Mrs. Koch. She was the woman of the letters, the “Affectionately, my dear, Alice Koch,” sitting fat and comfortable with her feet in sandals and the little piece of cambric damply waving Eau-de-Cologne. I got out of the car before the white veranda faintly giddy with journey, smiling the mild happiness of having bridged space. It was all right; unknowing, the decision was made for me, and in my favor; the alternative that waits at all destinations — inescapable, a face in the crowd at the dock or the station you cannot avoid: the desolation of arrival — was not there for me. Unknowing of my escape, innocent even of relief, I stood laughing at my unsteadiness, seeing Black-eyed Susan embroidering the old veranda like gay, crude wool-work, ants trailing down a crumbling step—. I shut my eyes and opened them; two bushes that cast their shape again in pale fallen flowers instead of shade, palms on the breast of lawn cut out against the far-off drop of the river, the cane. Haze and glitter; the river looped through the arched body of a bridge. And there, there was the sea, stretching away, smeared off only into the sky.

In the house Mrs. Koch had prepared my room for me, and left me alone. There was no pressure, no effort demanded of me; I stood at the window in a pause between the open suitcase and the open wardrobe with a misty mirror, feeling the beat of the train in my blood, the cessation of the train’s noise in my ears. There was a withdrawal of sound like the tidal silence pulling away at the touch of a spiral shell to one’s ear; the sound of the sea.

The next day, the holiday did not begin because it rained. It seemed impossible, in the face of the existence of yesterday, blinding with brightness, that it should be raining. Yesterday nothing could be believed in but sun; today there was nothing but rain. I waited around the house with Mrs. Koch, getting to know the regarding stare of new rooms worn old long before I had ever come to them. I sat on the faded sofa on whose rubbed arms my hands now rested; groping for a hairpin, saw the strip of clear-printed design that lived on untouched down the hidden fold of the seat. I talked in the kitchen with Mrs. Koch while she made a cake, played with a rearrangement of the flowers on the back stoep. There were cats under my feet, dried-up saucers of milk they disdained. Three green budgereegahs chattered foolishly in a little cage with rolled-up blinds.