Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“D’you read him at all—” He indicated his Trollope.

I hadn’t yet. He talked about Trollope as people do of some delightful crank of a friend they would like you to meet. He smiled on the clenched pipe, an attractive smile showing uneven, smoke-tinted teeth. Even though I hadn’t read Trollope, I was prepared to like this man because he had. He said: “You’ve awed me with your George Eliot every morning,” and we laughed. (Meeting me on the siding Basil Tatchett had picked the book out of my hand, opened it, said, “Who’s he?” and not even waited for a reply.) When we had talked about books several mornings, he said to me: “I believe you might know my wife? Lindsay Theunissen?” I looked at him uncertainly. I did know her, but I felt there must be a mistake; there had been a wild-eyed girl at school, Lindsay Theunissen, very backward, as if the stammer of her excited voice kept her in too much agitation to be able to learn. One of those vague troubling rumors, half understood by children, said that her mother had “tried to get rid of her” and she had been born with some slight injury to the brain.

“Then you do know her?” He seemed satisfied and confidential.

“Long ago. At school. Then they went away, lived somewhere else, I think.”

He waved out a match. “You’d be surprised how she’s turned out. She’s really pretty, you know. Still got that wild look—” He smiled, liking it.

“I don’t think I’d know her—”

“Oh, yes you would.” He sat back, frankly, not letting me evade, smiling at me. “It’s not so surprising as you think. Of course I can’t talk to her, you know what I mean. She’s not interested in what I read, and I tell her a few snippets from the newspaper that she can use for conversation. But she’s got a kind of instinct for sport; I can’t explain it. She simply can’t help playing everything extraordinarily well, almost the way a hunting dog can’t help pointing at a scent. And I have an admiration for that sort of thing; I play a lot myself, with more calculation and less success, I can tell you. Lindsay’s really quite amazing that way. She’s got what one might call a physical intelligence. And let me tell you—” He leaned his elbows on his knees, dropped his voice. He had the air of giving advice rather than a confession, and I found myself listening as if I were accepting advice. “—It’s very important. I enjoy making love to her and I enjoy playing games with her. What is married life, really? You’re away at work eight hours a day. Half of what’s left you spend in bed, one way or another, and the other half you spend looking for some sort of recreation. — I can talk to other people, I can read on my own.”

I laughed and shook my head to myself; there was something about this man that set one at ease, as if a tight button had popped. He returned to Trollope, I to George Eliot, until he said, “Damn, we’re here just as I get comfortable, always …,” and I looked up and saw him stretching for his briefcase as the sooty, antiseptic scent of the city came in at the window.

“What time d’you say it leaves?”

“Half-past seven.”

“Well, it’s nothing. Only twenty minutes earlier than the one you usually get. I’m up at a quarter-to, anyway.” My mother was decorating a cake with candied violets. As I had always done, I put a petal on my tongue, let the sugar melt off, and stuck the tiny dab of bruised silk on my palm. “Don’t be a baby, Helen. I’ll be short.”

But I winced at the idea of getting up still earlier to get to a lecture which had altered my timetable. “You see, here’s the disadvantage of staying out of town. Anyone else can get up at eight o’clock.” I saw by my mother’s precision and arched neck that it would be better not to pursue this reasoning, so I said, as I remembered: “Oh …! I shall miss my early morning talk.”

She was not listening: “Who’s that?”

“You remember I told you about the student with the pipe opposite me? D’you know who he is? He’s married to the Theunissen girl, — Lindsay. I think she’s lucky. We’re quite friendly.”

“That awful man Petrie who was Belle Theunissen’s fancy man that she married off to her daughter—? I don’t know how you can talk to him.” She was making a green bow with strips of candied peel; the loops were exactly the same size, the ends were cut exactly level. I stood watching this. But she knew when she had annoyed or offended me, and she could say to my silence with the laugh of pretended innocence: “Huffed? Well, I can’t help it — I must say you have the most peculiar taste.”

The early train was crowded. Like huddled cattle holding their horns motionlessly clear, men balanced their papers above the press. Yet out of habit I pushed through to stand in the third carriage. “Come and sit down.” Among the strangers, the other young man was there; he got up slowly, waited while I climbed over legs to his seat. “—No protests necessary,” he said.

“Still, it’s very nice of you.”

Holding on to the window frame, he smiled down at me the same way again, the resting smile of long acquaintance. Suddenly I was going to ask him … what, I did not know. But the conductor came struggling down the corridor, drowning hand appearing in an appeal for tickets. When ours had been passed from hand to hand and returned, the young man bent to me and said: “Petrie and Trollope are left entirely to themselves now.” I smiled with the quick pleasure one feels when someone unexpectedly confirms something one has felt and been doubted for. “He’s pleasant company, isn’t he? The journey passes quickly with him.”

“He’s one of those people”—he was searching for exactly what he wanted to say—”one of those men whose presence makes — makes the air comfortable. It’s the only way I can put it. All those people rocking from here to there in the train every day; rocking back: he sits there like a sensible hand over the questions you’d pester yourself with.”

I wanted to interrupt with eagerness to agree. That was it. But the young man with the biblical name returned to his reading. When two or three stations had drawn off their workers and the level of heads in the carriage sank to normal, he sat down opposite me, arranging his legs carefully so that his shoes would not scuff mine. I leaned forward and said: “Thank you all the same for giving me the seat,” and he smiled and slid down in his seat spreading his knees comfortably with a faint air of puzzled surprise, as some close member of one’s family, used to the silent acceptance of intimacy, might be surprised by formal politeness.

I sat back gathering my own silence for a breath or two. But I would not let the moment glide by; in defiance to my mother, in response to the stirring that opposed her in me, I wanted to say something real, a short arrangement of words that would open up instead of gloss over. It came to me like the need to push through a pane and let in the air. I leaned forward. “Why do you treat me as if you know me?”

He looked up; there was that quick change of focus in his eyes: from print to a face. He said patiently: “Because I do.” And now it was easy and my boldness made me laugh. He was laughing too. “I’ve known you ever since I can remember. You used to wear a yellow tartan skirt with a big pin thing in it — I used to think you must have a pretty bad mother, if she wouldn’t even sew up your dresses properly.”

“But it was supposed to be like that!”

“So I found out. Not for years though—” He shook his head. “I’d never seen anything like that.”

“But where? I don’t know how it was you could have seen me, known me, if I don’t know you.”

“In the bioscope, the town with your mother, passing in your father’s car — for years. Ever since I can remember.”