Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

I cried sharply: “Ludi! Come back!”

I lay hysterically rigid, exactly as he had left me.

“Ludi!”

He came slowly over, almost lumbering, and stood at the foot of the sofa. “I can’t,” he said, gently.

“Ludi,” I said, not moving, “it was such a wonderful — so wonderful just now. Come back.”

He shook his head. “It’s impossible,” looking down at me.

I must have him back. I must find out. I must go back and find what I was about to feel. I felt my eyes terribly wide open, fixed on his.

He sat down on the edge of the sofa and gently bent my bare foot in his hand. At the same time I loved him desperately and I resented the lax gentleness expressed in his touch. “It’s physically impossible,” he explained, gently, reluctantly. He stood up again, smiling at me. “I must go and fix myself up. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I watched him go out, so untidy, with a curious, disturbed look at the back of his hair, and as I lay, not waiting, but simply lying, my body slowly let go. Now I became conscious of a need to move my leg to another position, and, beyond my slow, deep breathing, heard that it was raining. It must have been raining for some time because the rain had already found its rhythm. All the room was darkened with the shade cast by the rain.

Ludi came back with the air of brightness of people who have just washed their faces and combed their hair, and as he filled the doorway he seemed to be very big and heavy-shouldered and somehow not responsible for, signaling appealingly as a prisoner from, his heavy man’s frame. He lay down in the dimness beside me, quietly, hands behind his head. The warmth of his side made me sigh and smile. We lay a long while, perhaps five minutes. I was happy and sad, troubled and serene, bewildered and at rest. And I was thinking, vaguely, in snatches and dashes. And when I spoke, it was not of conscious intention, but like a sentence thrown out loud in sleep, the kind of accurate chance sum of thoughts and ideas not consciously computed in the mind.

“Ludi, have you ever slept with anyone?”

I think he knew what I was asking better than I knew myself. Ignoring the naïveté, the foolishness of the question, which he saw were not the question itself, he said, perfectly gravely, “Yes, miss, I have.”—He called me “miss” the way one flatters a little girl; it was his word of endearment for me.

A weak protest of pain flowed over me, as if the protective fluid of a blister somewhere inside me had been released. — Now when I put a finger on the spot it would be raw, unprotected by ignorance. I was silent.

Suddenly it did not seem ridiculous to him to be apologetic. He began to comfort me by excusing himself and I believe he really meant it. For the moment he really believed I had the right to complain of the ten years of life he had had while I dragged a toe in the dust of my childhood, disconsolate, waiting. He said the oldest, comforting words, that were new to me. “Always very perfunctory. It’s no good without any real feeling, any other relationship to back it. Honestly”—he was looking at me now, not seeing me properly in the dark of the rain, without his glasses, his close, bristly lashes that I secretly loved so much, showing bright as he narrowed his gaze—“It’s no good.” He put his arm under my head. I thought, he means it would be different with me. He means he loves me. I was suddenly utterly happy. I turned my head until I could rub my nose on the hairs of his forearm.

He said, with the stiff little preparatory swallow of surrender: “It happens about once a year, with me. One feels — and then afterward — I don’t know, I’m disgusted with the woman. Meaningless, really.” He thought a while. I wondered if he was remembering this strange act that I had never partnered but that I now understood. I felt a voluptuous tenderness toward him and wanted to take his head in my arms. He got up, slowly disentangling himself as one puts aside boughs, and stood, feet apart against the dizziness of standing upright. Reflectively, dismissing it, he swayed a little. “I assure you it’s been a long time, now. Oh, many months.” He smiled at me, his sour, confiding smile.

And then, as if he felt at the same instant my sudden desire for air, for the wet air of rain, he padded over to the window and opened it wide. It was sheltered by the veranda so that the rain did not come in, but the fresh, wild air did, rushing in as if the room drew a great breath. Drops like thick curved lenses distorted and magnified the brilliant green of the creeper shaking over the roof’s edge. Scent tanged with wet came up from the beaten petals of the frangipani. The veranda with the few unraveling cane chairs and the pot plants breathing the rain they could not feel had the green twilight of a conservatory. We stood with our nostrils lifted like animals, staring out into the falling rain, our arms lightly round each other.

Curiously, this time when he went away and I was not to see him again, I was not lost. Almost before he had gone I had given myself up to the assurance of his letters. The idea of the first letter from him filled me with excitement, so that I half-wished him to go, be gone so that I might get that letter the sooner. And I should be able to write to him; perhaps to make him something. If I thought about home at all, it was to imagine myself sitting making something for Ludi, in absorption, in completeness. Mrs. Koch was mostly silent during these last few days of my stay, speaking of Ludi, at long intervals, as “he” and “him” as if the silences between her remarks were merely times when the conversation continued somewhere in her out of earshot. She would come hurrying from another room to show me something connected with him; a special winder he had made for her wool, a bracket for a bedside lamp that needed only the right kind of screw to complete it.

Once she came in with a snapshot.

“This isn’t bad.” Her crinkly gray hair hung over her eyes as she peered closely at it. When she had had a good look she passed it to me. Ludi, who, like most shortsighted people, did not photograph well, stood scowling at the sun in the artificial camaraderie of a garden snapshot. Two little boys grinned cross-legged in the foreground, a dog was straining out of the arm of a young woman with a charming, quizzical smile that suggested that she was laughing at herself. A badly cut dress showed the outline of her knees and thighs, and with the arm that was not struggling with the dog, she had just made some checked gesture, probably to push back the strand of curly hair standing out at her temple, which the photograph recorded with a blur in place of her hand. I was instantly drawn to her. “Who’s this?” I pointed.

“Let me see — Oh, that’s Maud — Oscar — you’ve heard me talk of Oscar Harmel? — Oscar’s second wife. The old fool, we all thought; she’s young enough to be his granddaughter, almost. The two boys are his grandchildren, from his first marriage, of course. They love Maud. — Oh, she’s a sweet girl, a dear girl, no doubt about that. But of course it doesn’t work. She laughs a lot, but she’s not happy. She’s very dissatisfied with her life. Funny girl. Oscar’s not in this”—she lifted her eyebrows to see better, as if she had her glasses on and were peering over the top—”I wonder when it was taken? Oh, I know, last time Ludi was on leave, he went down there and stayed over. One of the little chaps had had a birthday, and got a camera for a present. — He brought me the picture specially, next time his mother — that’s Oscar’s eldest daughter, Dorrie — brought him to see me. …”

Quite suddenly, it came to me that I knew it was she. I looked at the girl half-laughing, half-struggling against the nonsense of having the photograph taken and I knew it had been she. This is the girl, I told the sullen Ludi, not looking at me, not looking at the sun. And in his refusal to meet the eye of the camera, in the obstinate stance of his legs — in the silence of that photograph of him — he confirmed it to the tingling of my half-pain, my curiosity.