Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

While they were questioning and exclaiming, I stood up quite still in my place at the table, my napkin tight in my hand. Suddenly, like the moment after I had faced an examiner, a light shudder went over my neck and I began to tremble. The tighter I clenched the piece of linen the more my hand shook, and I could not control my bottom jaw. I was terrified they would notice me, and as the fear came so it attracted its object. Ludi gestured his mother’s attention toward me: “It’s taken away her appetite.”

As he spoke the trivial words, not even to me, the trembling lay down immediately inside me and an extraordinary happiness, utterly unspecific and somehow mindless, opened out in me. We gave Ludi supper; I moved about the room with a light confidence that came to me suddenly and for the first time, as if my body had slipped, between instant and instant, into the ease of balance, never to be unlearned, as a rider, clinging to the vertical insecurity of his bicycle, suddenly learns how and is easy between the supports of air and air. There was a family gaiety between the three of us that had never been between my parents and me; I was delighted with the timidity of Mrs. Koch’s response to the nearest that Ludi’s small dry humor could get to joking. They got quite excited discussing how long the unofficial extension of his leave could hope to last.

“I’ll get the incubator house fixed if I stay three days,” he said.

Mrs. Koch, with a conscious bold levity that made me want to touch her with affection, said: “Oh, to pot with the incubator. Matthew will do something to it.”

“You mean he’ll give it some thought — until my next leave.”

His mother was serious at once; her extraordinary gentleness toward all human beings made her suspect that the old servant’s feelings could be hurt by implied criticism, even out of his hearing. “Ludi, his sciatica’s got him bent double—”

We laughed at her, and soon she was laughing with us.

Ludi gathered up his kit with a gesture that closed the evening; always at some unexpected point he withdrew, firmly and without room for protest, into the preoccupation with a small task or a private commonplace errand of his own. If you followed him to his room, you would merely find him lying on his bed, reading, or tinkering with an improvement to his fishing tackle: yet he was withdrawn into the dignity of himself in these ordinary occupations as a sculptor or a scholar who, it is tacitly understood, will leave the company to rejoin the bright struggle that waits, as always, in the solitude at the top of the house. Like them, he was only loaned to other people; he must return to himself. His mother was long accustomed to this, but now nervousness made her trespass. She called, after a while, to his bedroom: “Ludi?”

His voice came, muffled as if he were pulling some clothes over his head. “I’m going for a swim.”

“But the tide’ll be right out—” she called, not wanting to let him go without a protest. We heard him padding down the passage with his steady, soft tread, like the tread of a native who is used to walking great distances. As he was going down the veranda steps, his mother suddenly opened the window and called after him, “Ludi! Why don’t you take Helen?”

He stood up to the window in the light. “Does she want to come? Of course.”

“She hasn’t been out all day.” Mrs. Koch was periodically seized with the fear that she neglected to entertain her young guest; then it seemed more important that she should arrange something for me to do than consult my wishes. I usually felt a little awkward if the plan involved Ludi, because I was afraid that I intruded on him, and that he felt he must agree out of a sense of duty. And often when he had been persuaded into some little jaunt, I had the feeling, disconcerting in a different way, that he was so little bothered by my presence that to have feared he might be was a piece of presumption, irritating and silly. Now he stood quite patiently in the window, waiting.

This time I was determined to show the decisiveness of an adult. “It’ll take me only a minute to change,” I questioned him.

Mrs. Koch shook her head. “No, you’re not going swimming at night. That’s all right for him. He knows how to look after himself in the sea.”

One did not argue with gentle Mrs. Koch. “Then I’m ready.” I smiled.

“—Then come on!” Ludi put both hands on the window sill.

Lurching down the hills to the beach in the old car, I talked a great deal. The slight sense of adventure in the dark road and the attentive profile of the young man whom, sometimes, as now, I felt I knew very well (I imagined myself saying: Ludi Koch? Of course, he’s different when you know him. …) brought out in me a tendency to exaggerate and animate. Unconsciously I selected for him those anecdotes of the Mine and the town that presented certain aspects of the life as a little ridiculous, if not quite as reprehensible as he condemned it. There was even one story that showed my father as rather stuffy, rather circumscribed. … I could tell it with the child’s elderly amusement at the parent.

Then it seemed just as easy not to talk. We left the car and got down onto the dark beach giving short instructions to each other: Look out for that bush; all right now. … He disappeared into the dark.

I lay down on my back on the cool sand that held the cool of the night as it held the heat of the sun, deep down, far below the loose billowy surface, cool, cool all through. I kept the palm of my hand under my head to keep my hair free of sand, but soon I took my hand away and let the soft touch of my hair against my neck become indistinguishable from the touch of the sand. At first I was completely sunk in darkness. There was no sea, no earth, no sky. Even the sand I lay on was a tactile concept only. The sound of the sea was the flow of dark itself. Then, as I lay, a breaking wave turned back a glimmer of pale along the dark, and slowly, slowly, I made out a different, moving quality of the dark that was the sea. Flowing over his legs; I saw them undulating in the water dark, like fins that moved like fans. I might be lying on the air with the earth on top of me.

I did not know how long he was away. With nothing but the waves’ faint break in the darkness to measure the passing of time, I could not tell if it was ten minutes or half an hour, but suddenly he stepped into the enclosing dark about me and he was there, toweling his hair. A few drops of cold water shook from it onto my cheek. I sat up, and a faint slither of sand ran like a breeze down the back of my dress. I could hardly see him, yet he was there vigorously, his sharp breathing, the smell of damp towel, and as he bent, the fresh smell of khaki.

He said: “Where are you?”

“Here.”—I put up my hand, but he could not see it.

“Was it cold?”

“No. There’s a lot of seaweed about, tangling up your legs. Come—” he said.

I got up obediently. We began to walk slowly along the beach, quite far from the water, where the sand was dry and coldly heavy to walk in. All my being was concentrated in my left hand, which hung beside him as we walked. My whole body was poured into that hand as I waited for him to take it. It seemed to me that he must take it; I felt us walking up the beach together, with our hands clasped. In my head I listened and heard again him saying: “Come—”; so short, so intimate, and the strange pleasure of my obedience, as if the word itself drew me up out of the sand.

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.