Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

But he only smiled slightly, politely in answer and lifted his eyes once to John, who was not looking at him, before giving his attention to choosing a ripe tomato from Jenny’s untidy bowl of salad.

“He likes her, eh?” said John to Jenny one evening after Paul had left us. He looked at me with the warning, smiling approval of the madam who sees one of her girls favored by a special client.

I looked from one to the other.

“You’ll see,” said John. “She’ll be the next.”

“Oh, John, you’re awful,” smiled Jenny in what we called her “hush” voice; the awed, slightly arch reaction that belonged somewhere back in her English nursery. The two of them had the habit of discussing the personal lives of their friends as if they were entomologists observing the mating patterns of beetles; it did not seem to occur to them that the bald facts of who went to bed with whom might have the same meaning and emotional commitment as their own prized relationship, which they held jealously and privately apart. At first I had seen this attitude as part of a desirable frankness and acceptance of people the way they were, life the way it was, part, in fact, of their honesty. But when I had noticed that they excluded themselves from this clinical valuation, I had begun to think that the manner in which they discussed their friends’ love affairs was unfair — I would not allow myself to consider that they were capable of the breach of human feeling that is bad taste.

But now that their cold and gleeful surveillance was turned on me, annoyance rose. I was still unsure and admiring enough of their grasp of life to wish to conceal it, and so only my tone belied the carelessness of my words when I said: “Do they go in strict rotation? Are there so many?”

They laughed. “One or two. There have been one or two, believe me. Women!” And John put on the face of knowing, reluctant bewilderment, contemplating the way they were attracted to Paul.

Jenny said suddenly: “I wish you’d offer to type his thesis for him, Helen—” And added: “Otherwise Isa will.” She looked at my face as if she were entreating me out of some threat to herself.

“Oh, yes.” John’s voice jumped to the eagerness of hers. “Go on, Helen. — Because she will, she will.”

My annoyance rose a spurt higher at what I saw as an obvious acceptance that I wished to bait Paul Clark’s interest, and that they, tickling the beetles along with a blade of grass, wanted to connive and watch. “Damn it, why should I? What an idea! I haven’t the slightest intention of spending my evenings over a typewriter for Paul or anybody else. …”

Yet I was baiting Paul’s interest, and I knew it. On some other level than speech or conscious connivance, and toward some other end than the social and sexual titillation of a new combination within our group, I was beckoning him with all the thunderous silence of the deep attraction between us. Every time he or I walked into the room where the other was, coming into relation with each other and others like figures in a group of sculpture, there was a tightening of this. Every time we talked, ate together, trooped off to a cinema or a concert, the design of the company shifted a little, re-formed with him and me closer, more apart from them and significant.

I felt a consciousness of my physical self — the attractiveness of my face as I turned my head and looked along my cheekline, the color of my loose red hair against a lilac-colored dress that created for me in combination a light of my own, fixed, like the light in which a painter has seen his picture — that I had not known since the time of the South Coast with Ludi. And as it had been with Ludi, the warm smell of Paul’s hair as he bent down in front of me to pick up something in the sun, the look of the skin of his arm as he rolled up a shirt sleeve, the damp look of his forehead when he had been running, had for me a pure fascination that needed only touch to become desire. It was difficult to believe that I had felt this before, for some other particular combination of flesh and spirit that makes every man a creature never to be matched, never to be repeated. … Yet it gave me a kind of simple sensual pride to understand out of experience the flow of this current. To wait, till it should take me up again; till I should lay myself down Ophelialike, and be carried by it.

There the comparison with Ludi ended. As a human being, Ludi was remote: no one could have been more involved with life than Paul. And with him, for those first few weeks, my relationship with the Marcuses was lifted into a new meaning, blazed briefly into something approaching the free, gay, competent intimacy which had been my illusion of adult life when I was an adolescent. My presence with the Marcuses was now balanced out; as a young woman, I had my opposite number, a young man, and the sexual attraction between us lightly underscoring the heavier emotional threat in our own private air corresponded to the sexual ease between John and his wife. We were four friends, and two pairs; also two men friends and two women friends. So I felt myself an equal in the Marcuses’ participation in life both public and personal. If there was a point in understanding at which by gesture or implication John and Jenny ducked beneath the surface to some life of their own out of sight, so I, too, had, in the certain instinct of Paul’s attraction to me, a place they could only guess at.

And they said no more about the chances of affection or an affair between us. I was sure that they speculated about it in private — was vain enough to wonder, when I heard the murmur of their voices in their room at night, whether they were discussing it — but the confrontation of us, in all the mystery and delicacy with which, though we used the stereotyped gestures of modern sophistication, the irony, the cool banter, the love of argument, we circled round each other in approach, made open comment impossible in spite of themselves.

When Paul had been back in Johannesburg for nearly three weeks, we spent a dull evening without him. He had had to go to the Welshs’ for dinner, and we had Herby and a friend coming. The friend proved to be a girl in a taffeta dress with a string of pearls round her neck of the graded kind that small girls are given on their ninth or tenth birthday, along with their first bottle of scent, and a lace-bordered handkerchief which she kept clutched in her hand all through dinner. By the time dinner was over it was obvious that conversation with this girl was not only impossible (she replied with yes or no, and dropped her eyes quickly) but that she was as inhibiting to conversation excluding her as a child who listens with round eyes to what she cannot understand but cannot help hearing. Jenny and I, going into the kitchen to help Hilda with the coffee, improvised a seemingly spontaneous dialogue that would bring up the idea of going to a cinema. John was quick to take the cue, and we went into town and saw an indifferent film which I, for one, had seen before. Herby was essentially a useful person; tolerated for this rather than his rather dull manner of presenting his sound ideas, and so, as his friends, we could not help feeling rather impatient at having been used ourselves, by him — for obviously he had been obliged in some way to take this girl out, and had shifted the impossibility of entertaining her onto us. So we felt as if it were only what was due to us, the least, in fact, he could do, to suggest, as he did when we came out of the cinema, this particular night to take us to Marcel’s Cellar.

Marcel’s Cellar was, as the name implies, the nostalgia of a group of restless young people for the Left Bank Paris of the brief experience of one or two and the imagination of the others. In the idea of the place there met, vaguely as could only happen thousands of miles away from the actuality, the garret of Mimi and Rudolph in the eighties and one of the cafés where Sartre characters talked. Even the name of the “owner” was in character, if out of date — but this was pure fortunate coincidence that Marcel du Toit’s name, common among Afrikaans South Africans with their mixed Huguenot-Dutch antecedents as Smith or Robinson among people of English descent, should be so appropriately romantic. He himself was a willowy, shady character, who with less pretensions would have been running a side show in a traveling fun fair, and, indeed, he presided over his cellar with an air of extreme languid dissipation that was clearly his underworldly bohemian version of the robust flourish he would have used for The Greatest Show on Earth.