Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

I sat there, smiling, doubting. He nodded his head slowly at me, as if to say, yes, yes, it’s true. “You used to have a little pale blond friend and you both used to carry white handbags. Like grown-up women.”

“Olwen. Olwen Taylor and I! But you’ve got an astonishing memory.” My deep interest in myself made the fact of a stranger’s recollections of me remarkable; it was like being shown an old photograph, taken when one was not looking, a photograph of which one did not even know the existence until this moment. And yet there it is, the face one has sometimes caught unawares in a mirror.

“But I used to see you so often in the bus, too. Coming from school.”

“You were never in the bus — I should have remembered you. I can remember any child who traveled on that bus.” At once I was dubious.

“Not in it. I used to cycle home from school at about the same time, and we used to pass the bus — two or three other boys and I, it was a great thing to race it.”

I was filled with the delight of interest in myself. I asked a dozen questions. “I had a fringe? Did you know me when I had a fringe — awful, it was always too long, into my eyebrows. Or was it later, when I had plaits?”—I stopped in amazement again. “I remember all the phases,” he said.

In the pause an impulse of regret grew in me at not remembering him; I could turn back to so many faces, some I had never known, watched and never spoken to, and all the time the one that had been fixed on me had gone unnoticed. His look questioned me, dark, water-colored eyes, mottled and traced with an intricacy of lines and flecks, like markings of successive geological ages on the piece of polished quartz my father kept. “I was trying to imagine you seeing me, and I not knowing you were.” He laughed. I was curious again: “But what were you doing that way? You certainly didn’t live on the Mine, that I’m sure.”

“At that time we were living out at the store — my father’s store. Not in the town”—he anticipated the association—”The Concession stores just outside your property.” He went on explaining but now it was himself my attention was taking in and not what he was saying. Of course this was a different face. There was no place, no feature, no bone one could point to and say: Here, this is where it is; yet the face was different. The faces that had looked in at me when I was an infant, the faces I had fondled, the faces that had been around me all my life had differences, one from the other, but they were differences of style. This face was built on some other last.

I said: “Your name’s Aaron?” not meaning it to sound, as it did, a conclusion.

But he said with that sweet reasonableness that he seemed to keep inside him the way some people keep strength, or touchiness: “Joel. My surname’s Aaron.”

“I thought Ian Petrie said it was Aaron, that’s why.”—Smiling, but I was thinking of a tortoise shell, a confused memory that brought up with it the faded camphor of a defiance, my mother, angry with me, in white tennis clothes. “There was one time I’ll never forget.” He was laughing, with the relish of a story. “I was riding into Atherton to have two of my mother’s hens killed — one under each arm, and balancing furiously — you were sitting at the back of a half-empty bus and you stood right up and watched me go by with such an expression on your face! I kept my head down and rode like hell.”

“D’you know I’ve only been down there once in my life … to the stores. I couldn’t have been more than ten. I was angry with my mother, so I went down all by myself one Saturday afternoon.” The tone of my voice showed that it was still an adventure to me.

“Was it forbidden, then?” he asked.

“Oh yes. Quite forbidden; the natives, and unhealthy …” I did not think to pretend otherwise my mother’s distaste for the stores.

I was right; I did not need to. “We survived very well,” he laughed, as if he knew my mother, too. Perhaps, knowing me, shaped by my mother, he did.

“You certainly have,” I said with a little gesture of my face toward his books; I did not know why.

“Yes.” Now he was thoughtful.

I remembered something, seriously—”By the way, perhaps I should have said, but you seem to know so much—”

He smiled at me again, that expressive smile that had an almost nasal curve to it, gently. “Yes I know; it’s Helen. Helen of Atherton.”

It was a title. Perfectly sincerely, I could hear it was a title. And although the obvious reference that came to mind was ridiculous, it made me blush. Entirely without coquetry I suddenly wished I were better looking, beautiful. It was something I felt I should have had, like the dignity of an office.

The Aarons did not live behind the Concession Store any more, but in a little suburban house in the town. There was a short red granolithic path from the front door to the gate, and the first time I went there a fowl was jerking cautiously along a row of dahlias. Joel said, opening the gate for me, the sun laying angles of shadow on his face: “I often thought about going into your house, but I never imagined bringing you to mine.”

It was a Saturday morning, and I had met him coming out of the stationer’s in the main street of Atherton, carrying a paper bag from which the head of a paintbrush protruded. “My builder’s supplies.” He waved the bag. I knew all about the model hospital he was making as part of his year’s work as an architectural student. He had explained the sketches for it to me in the train.

“Did you remember the ambulance for the front door?”

“—Come with me to buy it.”

The town had taken spring like a deep breath; it showed only in the bright pale brushes of grass that pushed up newly where there were cracks in the paving, the young leaves on the dark dry limbs of the trees round the Town Hall, but we felt it on our faces and I on my bare arms. There was a feeling of waking; as if a cover had been whipped off the glass shop fronts and the faded blinds. When we had been to the bazaar, he said: “You’ve wanted to see my hospital and you’ve heard so much about it — why don’t you come home with me now? If you’re doing nothing, it’s not far—” So we walked slowly to his home in the light glancing sun, talking past the bits of gardens where children scratched in the dust, women knitted on their verandas, a native girl beat a rug over a wire fence.

It was only when he spoke at the gate that our interested talk dropped lightly and suddenly. The faint sense of intrusion that quietens one when one is about to walk in on someone else’s most familiar witnesses came to me. It was suddenly between us that we really knew each other well; oddly, it seemed that a matter for laughter — Joel’s eyes silently on me from a distance — really had secreted a friendship that it had only been necessary for us to speak to discover. Since that morning on the train we had been companions on every journey, and with an ease that comes to relationships most often as a compensation for the dulling of years, very rarely with the immediacy of a streak of talent.

Yes, we knew each other well, the young to the young, a matching of the desire for laughter, meaning and discovery which boils up identically, clear of the different ties, tensions, habits and memories that separately brewed it. But this brown front door with the brush hairs held in the paint, an elephant-ear plant in a paraffintin pot below the bell, watched Joel Aaron every day. Inside; the walls, the people who made him what he was as the unseen powers of climate shape a landscape; force flowers, thick green, or a pale monotony of sand.

He lifted the mat made of rolled tire strips, looking for the key, and dropped it back. “Ma’s home, then.” He smiled, and the door gave way to his hand.