Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

This peculiar afternoon light of my upheaval lay upon everywhere I went, everything I did, during that time. I did not see Mary Seswayo to speak to until after I had been to the Marcuses. She had smiled at me, or rather conveyed with the expressive quick movements of her intense eyes the sympathy of strain across the examination room, where we had sat together writing, but in the abnormal, distracted atmosphere which disorganized the normal life of the University at examination time, we had continually missed meeting. When we did meet, we were both exhausted by a three-hour paper rather pompously headed “Classical Life and Thought.” We sat on the low stone balustrade feeling the lightness of the sunny air with the indolence of invalids.

I said to her: “I tried to get you somewhere decent to work. I wanted you to come home with me.”

She looked at me quickly.

“Yes. I suggested to my mother that I should bring you home for a week or so. I had it all planned out. We’ve got a room that isn’t inside and isn’t out. But they were afraid to have you, even there.”

Her face, that always waited, open, to receive the impress of what I was saying rather than to impose on me what she felt and thought, took on, for the first time since I had known her, something set. Set against me. Her eyes searched me, shocked, and her nostrils widened, her mouth settled in a kind of distressed annoyance. It was the expression that comes to the face of an older person when a young person does something the other had feared he might.

I gave a short uncomfortable laugh against it. But she continued to look at me. The palms of her hands went down firmly to lean against the stone. She seemed to be waiting for an explanation from me; I could feel the pressure of it as if I were being shaken to speak. Just as suspicion makes an innocent person falter like the guilty, so I was queerly upset by this displeasure I felt in her.

“I shouldn’t have told you. Perhaps it’s hurtful, after all. But I thought we’d got to the stage where it was better not to pretend. Then between us, between you and me, at least, you would know …”

But I saw it was not that. There was nothing in her of the person who has been slighted. She was not humiliated; in fact I had never seen her so confident, so forgetful of herself, of what she inherited in disabilities before the fact of me.

At last she spoke. “Your mother was angry,” she said.

A spasm of annoyance caught me. “You mind? You expect it? And you think it’s right?”

“You made trouble for nothing,” she said.

“ I don’t care about the trouble. It’s more important to me than the fear of offending. Even in my mother, what’s false is false. I won’t accept it. But you will. Where’s your self-respect? — Come to think of it, you should be hurt. Yes, you should. … — Or is it even worse — some sort of tribal nonsense coming up in you — what my father would call ‘the good old type from the kraal,’ full of ‘honor thy father and mother’ no matter how they think or what they do?”

She listened to me calmly. “I can see,” she said, “you’re upset. There was trouble. And for nothing. For nothing, Helen—” She made an appeal of it, shaking her head.

“Well, I don’t understand you. Either you think that because you’re black you’re not good enough to be a guest in my parents’ house, or you’re distressed at the idea of my disagreeing with my mother.”

She said dully: “That’s talk.” Her eyes moved in her brown face looking for fluency. “The fact that I’m good enough doesn’t mean that she’s got to want me. If I were a white girl she could say no, if she felt like it. But because I’m black she’s got to say yes. Don’t you see, if I am good enough, I’m good enough not to go where I’m not wanted?”

“You mean you wouldn’t have wanted to come?”

“No. How could I come? All the time I would have had to feel that they were letting me be there because of your — ideas—”

I said impatiently: “Yes, of course, I know that—”

“Never your friend staying with you. I would be forced on them. And how would it have been for them with their friends? And the native girl who works for you? — It would have been hard for her. How was she to speak to me? Call me ‘Miss’ like you? Bring me tea?”

“Yes, why not? Anna’s a domestic servant, you’re not. There’s no indignity in her bringing you tea. The fact that you’re both black is irrelevant.”

She thought a minute. “But there are so few of me. We’re still exceptions, not a class. To your mother and Anna, I belong with Anna.”

“So, must that always be considered first? Mustn’t I think of you as a girl and a human being because that will upset the very thing that must be upset, my mother’s and Anna’s prejudices?”

She gave me her big, quiet, serious smile. “You want to give a nice plump person to practicing cannibals and tell them they mustn’t eat him because it’s like eating themselves. But they’re used to eating people. They haven’t had their ideas of diet changed yet, like you have.”

I couldn’t help smiling at her choice of analogy, the memory of some Bantu folk tale, cast in the form of the Department of English. She smiled back at me gently, expansively, a patient smile. But the moment of ease went out again.

“I’m so sorry …,” she said after a silence.

I was sharp. “You don’t have to be. I’m not.” I wanted her to say: I hate your saintliness. Don’t be saintly. But we were not equal enough for that; for all my striving to rid myself of what was between us, I did not respect her, accept her enough to be able to quarrel with her. I still made a special consideration of her for that.

“You are quick,” she said, with a flourish of the head, the way Anna might have said it, “quick, quick.”

She leaned toward me, distressed, wanting me to understand. “If it had been your own house,” she said, “but you can’t expect to do it with the house of your mother. …”

“Mary,” I said, “that’s what she said. That’s just exactly what she said. No — No—” and I would not let her talk. I laughed angrily, shook off what she wanted to say, protesting. I felt in myself the brightness, the edge that is very near to tears. And so to change the subject and save myself I told her that I was going to live in Johannesburg.

She did not know then or ever that this had anything to do with of what we had been speaking. She rubbed her neat straight hands together to relieve the stiffness of leaning on them. “Oh, that will be better for you!” She was shyly pleased. “But you’ll miss them at home. I know. Like I miss mine.”

I used to wake up for the first time very early at the baby’s one strange sad cry for food. The night had just drained out of the room, and in the pale, hollowed space, a cave dimly gleaming after the tide, I lay with my body in sleep. In the next room, the soft dull sounds of Jenny moving about. Round the curtains that did not fit well, white edges of light; and quietly, deathly still, the books came out round me on the walls, a silent arpeggio of gleam ran across the case of the piano. Somebody’s coat rose on a chair. A beer bottle answered from a corner. The white curl of Jenny’s sketch propped against the wall; my dead roses black in the hanging vase.

I oared soundlessly away.

When I woke again in the noise and brightness of morning all the life of the night before was about me, where we had flung it down. I took it up again as I put on my clothes, dropped here and there on books, sheets of music, letters, a half-sewn romper for the baby. The flat was so small and the lives of Jenny and John so expansive that our possessions and our movements were hopelessly interlaced. The cupboard which had been cleared for me soon attracted back many of the objects which had been housed there before; John would forget and throw in a concert program he vaguely wanted to keep, the exposure meter for his camera would be put for safety on top of my silk blouses. As there was no mirror in the room, it was more convenient for me to keep my cosmetics in their room, where I could use Jenny’s mirror. Then the piano was in my room — or rather I was in the room where the piano was — so that meant that my shoes had to share space with John’s music. This elastic exchange went on all the time, and was managed with a thoughtless ease that at first, out of my mother’s conviction that life outside the facilities of a particular order was utterly unworkable, almost surprised me, in spite of myself. We were clean enough, fed enough, and it seemed to me a lot more comfortable, without making these necessities the whole business of living.