Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Inside our house, the dimness was overcome with heat. But it was absolutely quiet. In the vacuum of heat and quiet the work that I had to do had space to fill my mind entirely.

The heat and quiet and torpor of the Mine irritated me like the uselessness of a person who lies snoring in the sun. Why shouldn’t Mary Seswayo come and work here for a week or ten days? No one would disturb her, she would bother no one. And there was the playroom — the little whitewashed lean-to built on the back of the house as a “cooler” before the days of electric refrigerators — that had been used to store my toys and was now a place for things that had no place. She could sleep there; it was neither inside the house nor out. I could clear it up and put a bed in.

The idea was so simple and practical that it gave me the particular satisfaction of an easy solution which has been overlooked. I vaguely thought my mother might raise some objections, but I felt that the “cooler” was the answer to those; I had the cooler all ready to produce, and there was all the rightness of it, for my mother, self-evident: neither inside the house, nor out in the yard with Anna, but something in between. And what would it matter to Mary how my mother looked at it; she would have peace and a place to herself.

My mother was secretary to some Mine charity committee that year, and just before supper she was sitting at the dining-room table addressing envelopes. She looked from the telephone directory to the writing under her hand with the air of determination and distaste with which she efficiently tackled tasks of this nature, and when she heard someone come in, said without looking up: “You must wait another few minutes, my girl.” She thought it was Anna, wanting to lay the table.

“Oh, it’s you. I’ve promised to get these wretched things out by tomorrow. I sent them all out last week, and now at this afternoon’s meeting they want something added. I’ve got to do it over again.”

I felt suddenly shy of her, I didn’t know why. Instead of saying quite simply what I wanted to say, I wandered around the table for a moment or two, picking up and reading an envelope here and there. Mrs. W. J. Corbett, President, L.S.C., P.O. Box 127, Atherton. Mrs. J. Dale-Smith, c/o Manager’s House, Basilton Levels … And when I did speak, I began in a roundabout way almost as if I were making a charity appeal. “Mother, I was thinking just now — working in my room I can get such a lot done, nobody to bother me. … Really, if one can’t get through under conditions like this … But I was thinking, there’s a young African girl in my group, she’s really a bright girl and it’s so important for her to pass. She lives in this awful location place, with people milling around all the time. She was telling me, she doesn’t get a chance to work at all. And so I thought, at least I thought just now, couldn’t she come home here for a while? Just for, say, ten days. Until we start writing.”

“A native girl?”

“Yes, an educated native girl, of course.” Every time I spoke my voice came out with more humility. I felt I stood there like a beggar.

“But where would she sleep?” my mother brought out at last, as if she had found what she wanted in the pause: the unanswerable.

I had it ready: “In the cooler. It’d be quite all right. I’ll fix it up for her.”

I began to make light of it, sensing that if I spoke of Mary as an inferior my mother might be edged to a position where it would seem that she herself and I stood together. “She’s as clean as a white person and she’d do her own room and so on. It’s just to give her somewhere to work.”

“Yes …,” said my mother. “Where will she wash? And where’s she going to have her meals? That’s something. I don’t fancy her using my bath.”

“Oh, she’ll wash outside. She’ll eat in her room. Or she and I’ll eat together.”

“You’ll eat …”

I made a gesture of quick dismissal. “She won’t care where she eats.”

Anna came in from the kitchen with the tablecloth over her arm and a faggot of knives and forks in her hand. “I’m sorry, missus,” she said determinedly. “All right, all right, I’m off,” said my mother, scooping up her things. She put them on the sideboard. “Look, Anna, don’t use those mats Miss Julie gave me. The old ones are good enough for under the meat dishes.”

I did not say anything but stood and watched her. She could not ignore me as she left the room. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll have to speak to your father.”

That was what she always said when she did not know whether or not she wanted to do something. I had heard her say it in shops hundreds of times, when she suspected that she might get what she wanted elsewhere, or that she was being overcharged: “I’ll have to speak to my husband.” Yet I knew that she had never sought my father’s advice in her whole life, and he had never cared to have any authority over her, or questioned any decision of hers. It was her way of playing for time to go into consultation with herself.

Now I accepted the lie with a show of respect. I sat on the veranda letting the insipid music of the radio flow over me, and soon my father came home and let himself down into one of the creaking chairs to read the paper. As he grew older the sprightliness of small, thin men was intensified in him and his face grew smaller behind his glasses. Fits of dizziness and weakness had been diagnosed as anemia, and he was no longer allowed to discipline himself with the dietary fads that he had adopted from time to time. So he had gone from the stomach to the psyche. Now he had a little shelf of books of popular psychiatry, and adopted the theory of psychosomasis as wholly as he had once believed in the doctrine of Christian Science or the Hay Diet. He was also one of the many people who confuse eccentricity with culture, and he saw my modest and hopeful attempts to expand myself as on a level with his blind belief in the elixir of the moment or, rather, the latest book of the month for hypochondriacs. “This’ll interest you, Helen!” He held up a new one. The Subconscious You. A popular, concise explanation for laymen written by an eminent American psychiatrist. Two million copies sold. “It seems it’s all up here,” he said, putting a finger to his forehead. “No matter where you feel it, it’s all up here. Look somewhere toward the middle, there — there’s a chapter on how to study, that’s something for you now, eh?”

I paged through the book and caught one chapter head as it flipped by: “How you think with your blood: The problem of prejudice.” I smiled.

I went back to my room to look over my work, but spent one of those timelessly vague half-hours that young women fall into now and then, combing and recombing my hair, looking at my figure in the mirror, moving about among the clothes in my wardrobe. Anna came to call me to dinner and my mother was already carving the leg of lamb. As soon as she saw me she said, carelessly and finally, like the inevitable dismissal of something quite ridiculous. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to have that native girl here. Best cut it out.” Obviously she had made up her mind, and simply told my father that I had made the suggestion and she had repudiated it.

I don’t know whether it was the result of the kind of self-hypnosis induced by my passionate absorption with myself in my room just before, but an intense arrogant irritation shot into me. “I knew it. I knew it.” I gave her a look of summing up, smiling, unpleasant.

“How do you mean you knew it?” she said, rising to it. Nothing angered her more than suspected patronage because she believed that in some obscure way I had some advantage from which to patronize her. The knife squeaked through the thin slices of meat; she carved excellently.