Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“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.