Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

The character of that warmth changed in him now.

I said dubiously—“I ought to get something.” “Oh, damn.” I loved the way he looked at me, glittering, demanding. At times like this when my whole body suddenly began to flow in desire for him, there was a moment of perfect tension, of balance before the terrifying slither down the sheer. And in that balance, the sight of a state that exists only between the here and now, and the measureless streaming of time from which we take up the little scoopfuls of here and now, I expressed my snatch at it, empty-aired, dissolving, in the wildly emotional compulsion to caress Paul’s face and head, that, though passion and the knowledge of being wanted made joyful, had something in it of the way a woman falls upon the face of someone dead; seeking to possess what is beyond the reach of lips, the touch of hands.

We exist on so many levels at once.

At the same time I was aware of the faint smell of soap round Paul’s ears; the ringing of an alarm clock in the flat below that came through in dull vibration, like a shudder; and the half-threat of fear that would come back to exact its due, almost superstitiously, for my practical carelessness.

I did not say anything to my mother until Sunday afternoon.

I had intended to tell her quite simply and flatly as soon as I got home, but I went through the whole of Saturday and Saturday night and Sunday morning and Sunday lunch with the words in my mouth, while at the same time all the things I did say and the whole manner of behavior in which I let myself get more and more involved, made them more impossible to be spoken. On Saturday when I arrived there was the present-opening — they had brought me a great many, and they produced the really beautiful things (there was an Italian silk shawl of the kind I had always wanted, and a wonderful hat made entirely of peacock feathers) and the hideous things (a set of “souvenir” wall plaques of London, made out of pottery molded in relief, a thistle brooch from Scotland with “Weel ye no come back again?” engraved round it) with a puzzling impartiality of triumph. Then at five o’clock there were “a few friends over a drink” and I found myself bending about, in the “good” frock I had fortunately brought with me, offering the plates of decorated biscuits and hot sausage rolls I had helped my mother prepare earlier. The arch tone of this gathering — the Cluffs, the Bellingans, the Compound Manager and his wife, and one or two other officials, who were accustomed to keeping in mind the occasion of a “party” rather than merely enjoying eating and drinking and company for their own sake — extended to include me. I was being “welcomed back” too, if only from Johannesburg; I had not been seen on the Mine during the six months my parents were in Europe. When I was chaffed, usually by the men who had “seen me grow up,” I responded with the same smile of deprecating my own sense of privilege that my mother was showing, near me, as she chatted and answered questions about her holiday, conscious of the new clothes and the obviously English shoes at which she could feel the other woman looking. Old Mrs. Cluff had her arm round me as she rose to go. “She’s grown into a lovely girl, Jess. — You were always my little lass, weren’t you? — That’s right. I used to tell you, didn’t I, Jess, there’s nothing like a daughter.” And my mother — she had put on weight in England, and had had her hair cut in a new way, so that on the animation of two or three drinks, her face seemed to have changed from the way it was when I was a child, rather than got older — saw us suddenly in the relationship that the old lady created, and paused in her high-pitched amiability to say with sudden emotion: “Yes, and I suppose I’ll be losing her soon.” The old lady shook her head like one of those big benevolent figures that nod in shop windows at Christmas. “A son’s a son till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all her life. …”

On Sunday morning I heard my mother up early and from the called consultations with Anna between the other rooms of the house and the kitchen, I knew that one of those total reorganizations of cupboards which had always followed our return from a holiday ever since I could remember was in energetic progress. This time, because she had been away so long and brought back a fair number of new things, the upheaval was on a larger scale than usual; standing beside her, directed to put this there and hand her that, with my father looking on, I thought: She is making space in their life for the fact of having been to England.

My father had not put on any weight. Thin, but more bright-skinned than usual, whether from the cold in Europe or the heat of the latter half of the passage home, I did not know, he did not keep away from us in some reading or other occupation of his own, as he used to do, but hung about on the edge of my mother’s activity. Once or twice he ventured a mild protest: “What are you doing with that, Jess?”—My mother ignored him and threw onto the pile of things to be discarded the old golf umbrella with the broken spoke. She had a peculiar venom, as if they were conscious enemies, for things which she suddenly decided had outlived their margin of possible usefulness, and were therefore occupying her cupboard unlawfully. “The whole lot’ll do fine for the jumble sale. If they’re still holding them the third Tuesday of every month, I won’t have it cluttering up the garage too long.” (It fascinated me to see how quickly and unthinkingly she was taking up the order of her life from the Mine again; the six months among other peoples, in other countries, sucked smoothly in, passed along and assimilated by the Mine like a lump, rather larger than usual, taken in by a snake.)

But mostly my father “fed” my mother as if they were partners in an act. “Wouldn’t mind being there now, eh?”—he pointed his pipe at a little painted wooden gypsy caravan they had bought in St. Ives to give to Maureen Eliot’s small boy. “Oh that creamed trout! And the view from our window …!” She shook her head as she sprinkled moth killer on a shelf of spare blankets. She twisted her head round to him. “Tell Helen about the fisherman who thought you had your own gold mine.”

And my father told the story, taken up here and there and expanded by my mother, and then handed back to him again while she waited, smiling, for the well-known point—“Co on, you go on.”

It seemed to me that in this unconscious pantomime of acting as a foil for each other, they oddly achieved a kind of intimacy that I had never seen between them before.

At lunch we had a bottle of red wine — because they thought I should like it, I knew. “—It may be cheap there,” said my mother, “but you can’t get a decent cup of tea anywhere in Italy.” I drank it although I dislike red wine and I talked all the time I ate, about how hot it had been at Christmas, and the muddle-up there had been at the post office about a cable they had sent me before they left, and the way the piece of chiffon my mother wanted to know about had turned out when it was made up. I talked about the camping week end that Jenny and John and Paul and I had planned for what proved to be the wettest week end for five years … and, warming to it, my heart beating fast at the horrible homeliness of my duplicity, I told my mother that Jenny was expecting another baby, and … “Well, she’s quite right. They’re young people, and I suppose he’s doing quite nicely now; they might as well have their family while they’re young.”

After lunch my father went to lie down. He said the wine had turned sour on his stomach, but he had that hazy pleasant look of wanting to drop down somewhere and doze that goes with wine that has agreed with one almost too well. My mother and I went to sit on the veranda, where it was cool. She was knitting; some special wool she had bought herself in Scotland. Her chatter died away, perhaps also because of the wine. I sat there with my heart beating up faster and faster. After a few minutes of sunny, warm silence she said to the bird dangling in his cage: “Chrr-ip, chrr-ip, eh? Chrrip!” and looked back to her knitting.