Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Behind my eyes, inside my sleeping body, I sensed the surface of day. Knew the breath of the warm sea that would be blowing in the window. The conversation of the fowls with the dust. Mrs. Koch squeezing oranges in the kitchen. The great brightness of morning that would leap at me, blinding, joyous, as I opened my eyes.

A dim, cool room. Silence. The call of a dove, curtains with a known pattern. Silence. High on the wall the lozenge-pattern of light filtered through the ventilator, the neatly spaced pale yellow crumpets of childhood, that moved round the room through days of sickness. And then my mother, rattling at the stiff lock of the hall cupboard with her keys. Missus, the butcher he send: Anna. I lay a minute, looking round the ceiling where every dent, every smudge was where I knew it to be, and then I got up, went to the wardrobe for my clothes, pulled the thin curtains back on the dusty, clipped jasmine bush, the patch of neat grass, the neighbor’s hedge.

It was like this for a number of mornings; for an hour I would be quite dazed with the sense of having mislaid myself in sleep, or the half-will, half-suspicion that this was the dream and the awakening would be other. But soon it no longer happened; I knew before I woke that I was home on the Mine, in the bed, in the room that claimed me as their own.

Soon I would wake to myself in the mornings, but I was not secure for the whole day. I came slowly up the path after the anticlimax of the post — there was no letter for me — with the dry, windless highveld sun making my hair too hot and electric to touch and my mother’s voice over the preparation of lunch coming from the kitchen, and I was seized again with the unreliability of my own eyes, ears, and the utter conviction of my other senses, that made me smell and feel noon on the veranda above the sea, with the sway of the sea, from which I had newly arisen, in my blood as I stood. I waited at the window in the empty house of early evening for my father to come home, and turned to the room to look at, and even to make tentative movements to touch, all the objects, ornaments, carpets, disposition of furniture, photographs, vases, that in their very evidence of reality, and lifelong involvement with me, suddenly could not summon meaning and belonging. Even more strangely, I spent a morning shopping in Atherton with my mother, and the hurrying along the streets gossiping together, the matching of a piece of last year’s material, my mother’s uncertain look outside a shoeshop where she wanted my confirmation of a decision she had already made to buy a pair of new shoes — all this pleasant, familiar activity came to me as it might come to someone who has been ill, and is filled with the strangeness of standing upright in the sun again. When we stopped to talk to people, I had the smile that invalids summon.

“On Tuesday? Yes, that would be lovely, I think. — Helen, what about Tuesday?” I looked from my mother to the indulgent smile of the matron who was inviting us to tea, as if I had not taken in what my mother was asking. And the sight of the two of them, in their floral dresses and their veiled summer hats, small brown paper parcels from John Orrs’ and the Sewing Center and the seed merchant hanging from their white gloved hands, filled me with a kind of creeping dismay.

“Old Mrs. Barrow’s so fond of you—” my mother reproached later. “She’s always loved to have you, ever since you were a little girl. You can’t hurt her feelings—”

I said nothing, but resentment, motiveless and directionless, seemed to crowd out even my sight.

Less disturbing than all this was the habit I got into of disappearing into a re-creation of my time with Ludi whenever I was out with my parents among other people. At the cinema with them, I quickly learned not to see the film, but to use the darkness and the anonymous presence of people about me in the darkness, to create Ludi for myself more vividly than life. This was an intense and emotional experience, highly pleasurable in its longing, its secrecy. When I found myself at a tea party among the women in whose fondness I had basked, I could kill the troubled feelings of rejection and distaste by plunging into myself the fierce thrill of longing for Ludi, which would vibrate an intensity of emotion through me to the exclusion of everything else.

My mother was irritated by me. “In a trance. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. Alice certainly fattened her up, but she’s made her slow.”

“Dreaming.” My father smiled at me across the table. He had never forgotten his own youth, and mistook the memory of what he had been for an understanding of what I was.

I ignored him kindly; I preferred my mother’s irritation; it seemed a temerity for him to pretend to understand a bewilderment of which he was so important a part.

Then I knew what he was going to quote: What is this life, if full of care … — But he must have sensed my waiting for it, and he stopped himself this once and only said, with the inclined head of still more certain understanding, “It’s the time to dream. Later on she’ll be too busy.”

The University. Should I go up the shallow gray steps between gray columns like great petrified trees; carry books; wear the blue and yellow blazer? I did not want to talk about it. I wanted to put off talking of it.

“What’s happening, Helen?” Nothing stopped my mother. “You’ve got to make up your mind, you know. There’s barely a week left.”

“When is the enrollment day?” my father asked.

“Thursday, Mrs. Tatchett tells me. She’s going in with Basil.”

“Oh—?—That boy’ll never do any good. He hasn’t a brain. What’s he going to do?”

“Something to do with engineering. You know I don’t follow the different names of these things. Electro-something.”

“I still think a teacher’s degree would be the best.” My father turned to me. “You needn’t necessarily use it as such afterward.”

My mother, who saw deflection of purpose in the housewife’s sense of waste, immediately took this up. “Why not? What’s the sense of wasting four years becoming a teacher if you don’t teach?”

“I don’t know.” My father nodded his head to himself; he believed he had educated himself on the Home University Library, the British Encyclopaedia and “Know Thyself,” but that he would have achieved this and his Mine secretaryship ten years earlier had he started off his career as a university graduate instead of a junior clerk. “It’s a good general education.”

“You’ve got big ideas,” said my mother, “too big for your pocket. Helen must take up something that’ll fit her for the world.”

I sat through their talk with a growing inner obstinacy. Now that phrase of my mother’s that I had heard so often, that had always sounded strong and practical as my mother herself, came to me as a disturbing question. Fit me for what world? So long as there was only my mother’s world, so long as I knew no other, the phrase had the ring of order and action. The world of my mother and father, or Ludi’s world? And if there were two, there might be more. But my parents wanted to fit me for theirs. My interest, that like a timid, nosing animal edged back and lay down in dim lack of enthusiasm before the advance of their discussion, was again forgotten in a sense of distress and bewilderment.

My mother was tapping her front teeth with her fingernail, as she sometimes did in concern. But when she spoke, it was with her usual vigor. “Perhaps she’d be happier at home? If she didn’t go at all — Perhaps you could speak to Stanley Dicks about getting her into the Atherton library. She’s so keen about books, and there’s a nice type of girl there—”