Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

I moved in with the Marcuses after the Christmas vacation, at the beginning of my third academic year. John was a structural engineer and, like me, was out all day, but now, since the birth of the baby, Jenny was at home. In England, where she came from and where he had met her, she had been a designer of stage-sets attached to some repertory group, but although she had come out to South Africa with ideas of bringing professional creative competence to what was a semi-amateur field, where dress designers and students experimented happily, nothing much seemed to have come of her crusade since she had done the décor for a play I had seen before I knew her, and that had been unremarkable in its conventional startling unconventionality and literally rather shaky in execution, so that in one scene it did not hold together as it should. Still, there was a cardboard box of programs with the imprint of one of those particularly English-sounding names of a repertory company, crediting her with sets for Shaw, and Restoration comedy and Clifford Odets, and every week when the New Statesman came she would have something to say as she read down the column advertising experimental theater and lectures: “John, they’re doing some Italian thing!” or “I see they’re trying Lorca again — God, I’d give something to do that set for Yerma —” So it was accepted that the opportunities for her work were ridiculously limited in Johannesburg, and she must simply look on and mark time, smiling at the efforts of the dress designers and the technical college students. Before the birth of the baby she had done window dressing for a firm of commercial artists, and now she still managed an occasional free-lance job, for which the preparation could be made at home.

Their friends were all people whom I knew; a kind of distillation of the acquaintances I had been meeting over and over again for some time. Like a school of fish these people appeared at Isa Welsh’s, at Laurie Humphrey’s, disappearing into the confused stream of the city again, and then reappearing, quite unmistakably, known at once by the bond of specie which showed them unlike any other fish and like one another, although they were big fish and little, tame fish and savage, as if they had all worn a pale stripe round the tail or a special kind of dorsal fin. Now I was permitted to see what went on when they had whisked out of sight round the deep shelter of a dark rock; in this home water they swam more slowly and clustered, two or three, in a favorite shade.

I called them, along with John and Jenny, “our kind of people”; and certainly I felt myself more closely identified with them than I had with any others who had looked in upon my solitude. — First Ludi, then Joel, in their different ways, had stepped within its circle and been with me there, but this had not broken its transparent compass. It still had thrown me back like a sheet of glass that smashes a bird’s head with the illusion of freedom. Now, quite undramatically, it melted, was suddenly simply not there: the way of life that I wanted seemed to be lived by these people with the acceptance of commonplace. Nothing could have been more reassuring. I felt as a man must who finds himself in a country where the subversive doctrine he has believed in for years is actually the dignified practice of government. An almost physical expansion took place in me; I began to wear bolder clothes, I even sat and moved with an ease and assurance of my own. And the timidity fell away from my opinions; in the intoxication of company I spoke them, ill-considered or not, in emulation of the outspokenness of Isa. At University, too, a new alertness, a consciousness of belonging to a certain attitude, made me more critical and less ready to accept as superior judgments the valuations of my professors.

“My, but it’s become a keen little scout …,” Isa broke in on an argument I had been having, one evening. Her eyes, nimble as caged rodents, were too alive in the narrow pale freckled face that seemed to tighten and shrink when she was tired. On this night she was in a bad mood, which had the same effect. I blushed burningly before her tone, her look, rather than what she said, the implication of which was a little vague to me, anyway. But I was not really annoyed because I was confident in my new emergence, and the very fact that she should cross her sharp tongue with mine, even in derision, was evidence of it. And still over and above that, there was the thought that here, among “people our own kind,” a bad mood was accepted along with the other facts of life, publicly. Someone might growl at Isa: “Stop bitching,” but no one would seriously suggest that she should pretend to be other than she felt.

The next morning, a Sunday, when we slept late, I wandered into John and Jenny’s room and lay across the foot of their bed talking lazily. “Paul’s the one for her.” John was touching a mole on his wife’s shoulder, covering it with his finger, then looking at it again. Jenny laughed.

“Kittie Paul?” I asked. There was a man we knew who for some forgotten reason was nicknamed “Kittie.”

“No, Paul — Paul Clark.”

“Oh, the one from Rhodesia.” They often spoke of this Paul Clark, though I had not met him. Now, as so often happened with them, they had become absorbed in a little private tussle, a thing of protests and stifled monosyllables and laughter. I rescued the baby from between them — it started out the night in its own cubbyhole, but as soon as it cried one or the other brought it into their bed — and said, “Really? Why him?”

John looked vague, then remembered whom we had been talking about. “He would’ve shut her up,” he said knowingly to Jenny. She began to laugh and they would have set about each other again but I put the baby into his arms. “Here — I’m going to get my cigarettes.”

“Put some music on? While you’re there — there’s a good girl?” he yelled after me. “—And the kettle?” called Jenny. And so on this, as on most Sundays, we sat about in pajamas until twelve o’clock, Mozart or Bach flowing majestically through the flat, the energetic breath of coffee coming from an untidy kitchen. The African servant girl did not come in on Sundays, and Jenny and I did not trouble to clean up beyond emptying the ash trays and making the divans. She went leisurely about tending the baby, with his complication of sponges and cotton wool and his incense of talcum powder, her hair hanging and her pink English skin shining pleasantly. But I always have been one of those women who look pale and desperate in the morning, who drown in sleep and must be brought back to semblance of life again, and so I used to slip into the bathroom and wash my face with cold water and put on some lipstick. Then they would laugh at me and Jenny would say, as from some superior knowledge: “You ought to get married, Helen.”

Sometimes on fine Sundays we would go out into the country for the day — not the elaborate folding banquet of jellied tongue, sliced chicken and ice cream that I had known at home as a picnic, but a sudden enthusiasm at the sight of the sun clean and light on the pavement trees below the balcony, and a quick trip to the delicatessen shop in the old Jewish quarter which was the only food shop open in Johannesburg on a Sunday, and then out of the town to some farm where Jenny could ride a horse. She was given to moods of yearning craving for a kind of life that astonished me; a sudden assertion of her big fresh country-girl’s body that belonged a generation or two back to a small squire’s daughter in an English hunting county. Then she would whine and sulk and cajole to be taken where she could ride, while John, Jewish and deeply city-bred, seemed in the bewildered muscular inertia of his sedentary body, something completely removed and eternally stranger to her. I would hurry to help make plans that would make it easy for her to go, not, as it seemed, out of real sympathy or unselfish concern for someone else’s whims, but because I did not want to see even the lightest crack running down the surface of their relationship. Their closeness — he practicing the piano intently, having about him that fascination of the person whose absorption in what he is doing is pure interest, while she, more practically and closer to the world, yet also with a decent relish for the performance of her hands, worked on a design; the knowledge that often, discounting my existence entirely, they were making love in the next room; even the swift anticipation of each other’s wants (like breathless trapeze artists who know when this must be slapped into the palm of the other, that must be quickly swung past) with which they got through the business of dressing and breakfast on a working morning — was some sort of important proof to me. They were my beliefs, all miraculously coalesced into the lives of two people — or rather the indivisible life of two people: that was an essential part of the belief.