Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

For once he turned to look at me, and it was with the patient smile that expects no comprehension, knows that a familiar barrier has been reached. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to ‘get on.’ I’m happy where I am. All I want is the war to end so that I can get back here.”

“Shall you start up the chicken farm again?”

“It doesn’t much matter. Any sort of job would do so long as it brings in fifteen or twenty pounds a month. Just so’s mother and I can manage. She’s got a small income of her own.”

I was embarrassed by my own reaction. I knew that in my face and my silence I showed a deep sense of shock and a kind of disbelief that timidly tried to temper it. A struggle was set up in me; dimly I felt that the man acted according to some other law I did not know, and yet at the same time the law of my mother, the law of the people among whom I lived and by which I myself was beginning to live, made him outcast, a waster, a loafer, ambitionless; to be sighed over more than blamed, perhaps, like Pat Moodie, the son of one of the officials who had “wasted all his opportunities” and taken to drink. The phrases of failure came to my mind in response to the situation, because I had no others to fit it.

“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.