Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

When she had gone the silence remained.

My mother began to ladle stewed fruit into the three bowls. Suddenly she burst into weeping and ran from the room.

She cried like a man; it had always been hard for her to cry.

I went to Joel. I had not seen much of him lately, but I went to him with an instinctive selection of the one person I needed to counter the situation at home. I telephoned him in the morning and we arranged to meet for lunch at Atherton’s one tearoom. Over breakfast and the business of dressing our household went about in silence, a kind of shame which made everything secretive and perfunctory, like the trembling hand and dizzy air that harks back from a hang-over to the excess that reeled behind it. My mother did not speak to me. But as I made ready to leave the house I heard her complaining to Anna behind the closed kitchen door, the familiar plaint of the mother who has “done all she can” for a callously wrong-headed child. The door was closed to exclude me, but her voice was as heedless of my being able to hear it as if I had been a child too small to understand anything except the tone. I could also hear the murmur of agreement from Anna like the hum of responses from a chapel congregation.

The tearoom was not a good place to meet because it was always full of Atherton women and women from the Mine, dropping in for tea between shopping. At eleven o’clock, too, the lawyers came over for the recess from the courthouse near by, and sat at two large tables to themselves, their heads together, very conscious of their serious purpose as compared with that of the women. Now it was school holidays in addition, and many women whom I knew gave me the smile of patronizing frankness used by married women toward young girls, as they trailed children in like strings of sausages, holding hands and straggling behind. I sat and waited for Joel in the atmosphere that smelled of warm scones and lavender water. The waitress said: “How’s your mother?” and dusted crumbs importantly off the table before me. Other women came up and spoke to me. Say hello to Helen, dear. — Won’t you? Oh, the cat’s got away with her tongue. That’s it, you know. Helen, the cat’s got away with her tongue. Laughter from the woman and myself. Well, remember me to your mother, dear? Daddy all right?

In between I sat in a kind of listless daze, as if I were not there at all. I kept thinking: I want to go away. But there was no indignation, no strength in the idea any more. I did not want to be at home, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be, either. Often since then I have known the same grogginess of the spirit, that comes from emotional excess and, like any other bankruptcy, has no choice but to be passive. Sitting in the Atherton tearoom that hot day in November, I knew for the first time the distaste of no-feeling, the incredible conviction one hasn’t the strength to discover with anything more than a listless horror like nausea that not to care about the love that agonized you is more agonizing than the agony itself; to have lost the motive of anger is worse than living anger was.

When Joel came I did not say anything to him of what had happened, after all. My express intention seemed suddenly not to matter and I found myself saying: “I don’t seem to have seen you properly for such a long time. I thought it would be nice to get away from work and talk.” And we did. We discussed the people we knew and the things we had seen and done with all the space of the ground that was always so easy between us, and by the time the “pot of tea, 6d.” had been reached, I found that my numbness was coming alive, with a rush of gratitude I felt I was being taken back into human life again. The pain of the house on the Mine shrank to one pin point in a whole world; outside, other airs existed. So I was able to say quite easily: “There’s been a terrible row at home. It’s no good.”

When I told him, he said: “Did I crop up at all?”

“No,” I said, pouring his tea. And added because the shortness of my reply left a pause for doubt, “Why should you?”

“I don’t know — I’ve always felt I should, some day. — Of course the row wasn’t really about Mary Seswayo.”

“No, I know.”

“—So you’ll get away after all. You’ll get what you wanted.”

For a moment I had a return of the feeling that there was nothing that I wanted. “But I didn’t want it this way—” I appealed.

“Things keep on happening that way. — Did you want to see me to tell me?”

I smiled.

He drank slowly, deliberately, his eyes moving about the room. “No, it wouldn’t be much good letting it blow over and waiting for next time. Because it’s obvious there’s going to be a next time.” He shook his head with a half-smile to himself. “It’s a pity for them.”

“And what about me?” I felt impatiently it was something Jewish in him, this softening he had toward my parents.

“For you, too,” he said, not retracting the other.

“All this fuss about a girl going to live somewhere else. Hundreds of people never live at home after they’re grown up. The way we talk about it, you’d think—”

“Ah, but if they’d let you go while they still had you—” he said.

As he got up to go over to the little counter of cakes to pay, I laughed. “—You talk as if I’m leaving for ever.”

A week later I telephoned him to tell him that Isa had promised to find me somewhere to live in Johannesburg.

There was a pause. “Well, if that’s the case you might as well go to Jenny and John. The Marcuses.”

“Why?” I was intrigued at the suggestion.

“Yes, they’re a bit hard up and they want someone to help out with the rent of the flat.”

“But why didn’t you tell me before? I think that’d be a wonderful idea. Can I phone them?” The Marcuses had attracted me immediately the few times I had met them, and I was at once excited by the coincidence by which they wanted someone to share their flat, and I wanted somewhere to live. I badgered Joel with questions. “The flat’s very small—” he said dubiously.

“I shan’t be kept in the manner to which I’m accustomed — shame!”

“Well, you wait and see. The best thing will be for me to take you there. I have to see John on Thursday. I’ll have Max’s car so I’ll pick you up after four.”

After I had rung off I sat a moment or two on the little telephone stool, in the restless inertia of eagerness that must be curbed. Suddenly I wanted to telephone Joel again to tell him to be sure the Marcuses made no arrangement with anyone else in the meantime. I was trembling with excited urgency to have it all decided at once. For at the mention of the Marcuses, something lifted in me; I felt that here I might be about to come out free at last; free of the staleness and hypocrisy of a narrow, stiflingly conventional life. I would get out of it as palpably as an overelaborate dress that had pampered me too long.

When I went to the flat for the first time that Thursday Jenny Marcus sat up very straight on a divan with her bare breasts white and heavy and startling. Like some strange fruit unpeeled they stood out on her body below the brown limit of a summer tan. She wore a skirt and a gay cotton shirt was hung round her shoulders, and face-down over her knees a baby squirmed feebly. As we came in behind her husband the baby belched, and, smiling brilliantly, calling out to us, she turned it over and wiped its mouth.

They lived on the sixth floor of a building on the first ridge that lifts back from the city itself. The building took the look of a tower from the immense washes of summer light, luminous with a pollen of dust, that filled up the chasms and angles of the city as the blinding eye of the sun was lowered; like eyelids, first this building then that was drawn over it; its red glare struck out again fiercely; came; went; was gone. As I got out of the car I had looked round me like a traveler set down in a foreign square; prepared to be pleased with everything he sees.