Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

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.