Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Joel came to the Mine several times and my mother received him without remark. She spoke to him for a few minutes with the usual slightly arch pleasantness which she showed toward my contemporaries — her whole manner on a higher, soprano key, like an actress helping across some lines whose meaning she feels may not be clear — and then left us on the fly-screened porch that was full of the flowered cotton chair covers and embroidered cushions she had made, the sawdust-stuffed stocking cat that held the door open. At four o’clock she came out with a tea tray laid with fresh linen and, not the best cups, but a little twosome breakfast set that was not in common use. I recognized in Joel’s serious, careful manner that she was even pretty, with her thin, dry-skinned face and her red hair only slightly faded by the curls that the hairdresser steamed into it once a week, now that it was cut, and the almost antiseptic scent of lavender water that waved out of the flounces of her dress. She was even well dressed, in what I was now beginning to recognize was the Mine style: the flower-patterned, unobtrusive blues and pinks of English royalty.

My father spoke to Joel about “your people” and “the customs of your people” with the same air he used to surprise the Portuguese market gardener with a few words of Portuguese, or, when once we drove through Zululand, a Zulu tribesman with a brisk question in his own language. But though I sat in awkward silence, Joel answered with patient explanation, as the cultured native of a country ignores the visitor’s proud clumsy mouthing of a few words of vulgar patois, and returns patronage with the compliment of pretending to mistake it for real interest. “That’s a well-mannered boy,” my father informed me. “They know how to bring their children up to respect older people. And of course they’re clever, it goes without saying.”

Some weeks later I told my mother that Joel had asked me to go with him to a faculty dance. She put down an armful of clean laundry in alarm. “You wouldn’t go when Basil asked you! And the Blake boy.”

“So?”

She stood there looking at me. Her face had the fixed, sham steadiness of someone who does not know how to say the unexpected. The impact of her thoughts left a sort of stinging blankness on her cheeks. As usual, she took refuge in an unspecified umbrage, her suffering of a complaint against me for which I must bear the burden of guilt without knowing its cause. She buried herself in the counting of shirts, left my pile of underclothing and handkerchiefs abandoned on the kitchen chair and swept away with the rest of the bundle to the linen cupboard.

I went after her. “Why don’t you want me to go?”

Her tactics were common ones, and always the same: she went about a succession of household tasks with swift effort as if you were merely a distraction on the perimeter of her concentration of duty. When, as a child, I had wanted to be forgiven for some piece of naughtiness, I had had to follow her about the house like this, watching her hard, slender hands ignoring me. I asked her again:

“Why shouldn’t I go?”

She hated to answer. By withholding her complaints, her accusations, her arguments, she withheld also the risk of their refutation and kept for herself the cold power of the wronged.

So now she said tightly: “You wouldn’t go with Basil or the other one.”

I laughed. “Because I didn’t want to.”

“They’re not your type.” It was a quotation.

“No, they’re not. It doesn’t mean that because we happen to come from the Mine we’ve got to stick to one another at University. Basil’s never ever been a friend of mine — we’ve nothing in common.”

“And you have,” she stated, meaning Joel and me.

“We get on well. He’s intelligent, and well — nice, that’s all. …” It was almost an appeal; my tightening of irritation unwound into a desire to have my mother agree with me, to accept her. A feeling of tears coming in a longing for her approval, even if she was wrong, even if we were different.

She ignored it off the hard back of her understanding; it slid, harmless. …

“As I say, you certainly do have the queerest taste.” There was something indescribably insulting in the casualness with which she dissociated herself by this callow, mild cliché; she would not even give me the blunt words of her real objections, trouble herself with an examination of what she felt. The Petrie man and now the Jewish storekeeper’s son: Well, it’s so, isn’t it? her back turned on me said.

I believe that was the only dance Joel took me to; he had little money, many things he wanted to do, and as he was two or three years older than I was it was only the interruption of the war that made him an undergraduate when, in himself, the stage had already passed. And curiously, I did not mind. The one dance had somehow not been an entire success; Joel and I could not hold hands, dance with my cheek raised and his lowered like love-stalking birds. We could talk endlessly, spend more and more time together, meet each other’s faces above other people’s chatter with the sudden comfort of each other’s understanding; but this we could not do. Perhaps for dances something in me wanted the tall, fair-haired boys who could clown over beer bottles and flirt with me in the permissive code of gentlemen of my own blood. With one of them I did not have to meet the purposefully unremarking smiles of my classmates (we think nothing of it!) nor did I feel, as I did when Joel stopped to speak to a group of friends, the sudden insipidity of the blue organza dress my mother had made me, the locket on a chain round my neck, in contrast to the interesting dramatic clothes of the friendly Jewesses, bold in their ugliness, bold in their beauty, outdistancing me either way.

This need of mine existed not only outside but also in contradiction to the expansion of my confiding intimacy with Joel Aaron. Out of the silences that followed some minor confession — the silence that is really the rise of sudden floodwaters of words, blocking by pressure the trickling release of speech — came the real unburdening. I told him of my gradual suspension from the life of the Mine … my voice tailed off in what seemed tame and not quite the truth. We were silent, or spoke of something else. Then all of a sudden it came: I told him about Ludi. He himself seemed to impose the limitation of what I should tell him. “It’s a pity to give it away,” he said, combining, as usual in his manner, the immediate sympathy of a contemporary with the comforting, dispassionate remove of a much older person. “When you tell someone else about someone you have loved, you always have the misgiving afterward that you’ve given that much of it away.”

“You sound like a romantic.”—For him, at this time, it was a term of scorn and like a simple object that has been handled by the great, I was fascinated to be able to use it, for it belonged to the vocabulary of that group with the sense of self-ordainment to a sharper, warmer, ruthlessly honest life which exists in every university, and whom, through Joel, I was beginning to hear around me.

He spread out his dark hands stiffly in the pleasure of yawning.

“Only in love. Which is the right place.”

One subject that often brought us to near-argument was my mother. A curious kind of struggle seemed to go on between us at the alert of her name, a battle in the larger air above our heads, the clamor of which reached us only faintly in the reasonable sound of our two voices. She and I had argued again one evening about my going to live in Johannesburg, and after dinner I had heard her in the kitchen, behind the muffle of the door, discussing me with Anna. When Joel arrived to see me with a book he had found for me, I was withdrawn into irritation.