Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

In the same way, I took a secret pride in the frugality of their living. Ever since I had begun to see the natives all around not as furniture, trees, or the casual landmarks of a road through which my life was passing, but as faces; the faces of old men, of girls, of children; ever since they had stepped up all around me, as they do, silently, at some point in the life of every white person who lives in South Africa, something had been working in me. The slow corrosive guilt, a guilt personal and inherited, amorphous as the air and particular as the tone of your own voice, which, admitted or denied, is in all white South Africans. The Nationalist farmers who kicked and beat their convict African laborers had it and it was in me. Like an obscure pain we can’t confess we clutch to it this counterirritant, or that. One pretense is kinder than another, that is all. With kicks and curses you may keep the guilt at a distance, with a show of the tenderness of my own skin, I may clasp it like a hair shirt.

The Marcuses had little choice to live otherwise, since they had little money, but they made it clear that they regarded it as only decent to keep one’s wants as few and simple as possible. They had a kind of amused detachment toward wants which exceeded their own, making friends at whose house a servant waited white-aproned at table feel somehow ridiculous, and raising their eyebrows at Laurie when he brought to the flat a girl innocently wearing a rather cheap fur coat. While they scorned a superfluity of possessions, they believed that almost any sacrifice was worth the possession of one or two really beautiful things, and their Japanese-cum-Swedish aesthetic of utility answered perfectly my own reaction against the overgrown knickknackery of the Mine.

But my response to the austerity of their living went deeper than that. It assuaged something in me which was nameless, which I scarcely consciously knew; that something working in me, eating at me, since the realization of those faces. It put me that much less of a remove from them, playing in the gutter when I had played in the garden; going to work in the silent dark while I slept; looking on at the armor of my white skin.

Of course, I realized that my participation in the Marcuses’ way of life was that of the privileged amateur. My father paid my University fees and my share of expenses at the flat, although I no longer took a dress or spending allowance from him. During the long summer vacation, when I still had been living at home, I had taken a job in a bookshop, and I determined that the money I had earned then should last me until the next vacation, when I would get another temporary job. I had fewer clothes, if more ingenious ones, than I ever had had before, and even then, when I was going out, I felt a little ashamed to parade my choice before Jenny, whose entire wardrobe, she was always eager to admit, took up four hangers. I found, however, that I was spending money on things I had never bought before. Toward the end of the month, when funds were low and we were all a little tired of subsisting on thin stews consisting mainly of green peppers, I sometimes brought home a small smelly box of frozen crayfish tails that, as they boiled, sent a tantalizing scent of the sea through the flat, or a punnet of strawberries and some cream. I also contributed heavily to our liquor stock — the two or three bottles of brandy and gin and the case of beer that seemed no sooner delivered than they went to join the dusty collection of empties on top of the kitchen dresser. Although they shrugged at the delicate, high-heeled American shoes I brought home with a defiance born of vanity (Jen couldn’t wear things like that, said John, she’s got the strong, heavily modeled feet of peasant women, feet made to dance and walk), they were not affronted by these other signs of my social dilettantism; when there was something good to eat, and a bottle of Nederburg Riesling I had picked up at the bottle store on the corner, we ate and drank together with gusto.

One Saturday morning something happened that surprised me. It was trivial and so overshadowed by the meeting that followed it that I did not really try to interpret it, yet its oddness, like something small, sharp and bright that is obviously part of a larger design, made me automatically put it away in my less immediate consciousness even while I forgot it.

I had been to town early and, on coming back, had thrown my parcels and coat and hat on John and Jenny’s bed. I went into the bathroom and when I came out and passed down the passage, I thought I saw, in the liquid flash of the mirror through the door, Jenny looking at herself. When I had been in the other room for the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette, her silence in the room next door roused a faint curiosity. I got up lazily and wandered in on her. She was silting on the edge of the bed with my hat on. With her back to me, she saw me first in the mirror, and in the mirror, smiled, and with a little noise of embarrassment pulled off the hat as she turned round.

“It suits you better than me,” I said ruefully. “But it shouldn’t be so straight.” And I put it on her again, at more of an angle. We both looked at her, a pretty girl in the red hat. She put up her hand and touched at the side. “The velvet’s so soft,” she said. “I saw a green one, not the same, but something like it, a dear, in town. So cheap, too. I’m dying to buy myself one, but John’d kill me.”

And she quickly pulled the hat off again and held it out to me, with a little shake, as if she wanted me to take it from her quickly. With that smile of guilty pleasure warming her face, I suddenly had the feeling that this was not Jenny; I had not been talking to her the way I would talk to Jenny.

She stood looking at the hat. “I wish I could persuade him. But I know he won’t.” She actually had lowered her voice, longingly.

“What about the money you got for the Graham display?”

She gave a little laugh and I really thought I saw her look at the door. “It’s not just that — he says — you know … only bourgeoise women wear hats.” She ran her first finger over the pile of my hat.

“He won’t”—I was going to say “allow” but stopped myself at what was quite an unthinkable word between John and Jenny—“he won’t let you wear a hat? Oh nonsense—” I had to laugh to convince myself it was some kind of loverlike game between them. And I stood there forcing her with the laughter of unbelief. This was not John, either. For a second it was as if I caught a glimpse of two people who seemed very like, but were not them, could not be them.

Before she could answer, the quiet of the flat was caught up with the creak and bang of the front door flung open in the assault that meant John was home. His voice was mingled with that of another man as he called along the passage: “Anyone home? Jenny, hi, look what I’ve brought—” At once he was in the doorway, a bag of eggs under one arm, a bunch of bananas in newspaper under the other, looking, as he always did when he had shopped, like a triumphant looter.

What he had brought was Paul Clark, standing behind him looking at us over the gasping, disjointed, excited monologue. He wore a pale green waistcoat and I remember I wondered what the Marcuses would have to say about that. In his small, slim, energetic hand with the watch just above the wristbone and the veins nervously enlacing the knuckles, he held a toy rabbit by the ears, and a bottle of wine by the neck. Jenny rushed up and kissed him.

— I stuffed away the curious glimpse of a moment or two before, like a scrap of paper with the address of the place where I had seen two faces and must return sometime to verify or refute the resemblance.

In the confusion of greetings that followed, the stranger said, looking at me, “It’s grown up awfully quickly … I thought it was only six months?”