Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

I said: “Mother, I should have told you I’m not living with the Marcuses any more, I’m living with Paul.”

Her face suddenly came alive out of its content of food and relaxation. She looked at me with the quick intense suspicion of an adult hearing from the mouth of a child something it cannot possibly know.

Then her glance stumbled; it was like a nervous tic catching a face unaware.

“What do you mean?”

And while she spoke coldness hardened into her face, it became something I have never known in the face of anyone else, possibly because the face of no one else could make that impression on me: stern.

“I’ve been living with him in his flat ever since he was sick.”

“You’re living with a man, living with a man as if you were married to him.” She stopped. “Living with this man and lying, writing letters and lying — What do you want? To end up on the street?”

I thought with a rising distress of panic, I knew she’d do this; it’s ridiculous — she’s making it a tragedy, terrible, world-comedown, hateful. She’s twisting it up into hysteria. But she had done it already; I was in it, shaking before her horror of myself.

I said: “It’s not like that. Don’t be silly, we’re going to get married anyway. People now—”

“Yes, they’ve got no respect for anything, you’ve got no respect for yourself. And what kind of a person is he, to behave like that with a girl from a decent home. … Women who must have a man to sleep with. Women who can’t live without a man. A university education to live with a man. How can women be such filthy beasts?”

All the time she had never taken her eyes off me.

She began to weep, and I saw that now that she was older she cried like other women; it was no longer hard for her to cry, and so it no longer had any more meaning than the simple relief of other women’s tears. I cannot explain the strong strain of peculiar joy that seized me, apparently so irrelevantly, as I understood this, so that I could say quite commandingly, “Don’t cry, if Daddy hears you cry he’ll be alarmed.”

“I don’t want to see you,” she said, and already it seemed in her face that she no longer saw me, “I don’t want you in this house again. You understand that?”

The peculiar joy swept into hatred. I hated her for leaving me, for blaming me, for making me care that she did. I trembled with hatred that for a moment made me want to laugh and weep and abuse; and that left me hot and cold at the escape of knowing that that was what she wanted: that that was how she wanted me to behave.

My father came in and the whole scene was gone through again, but in myself I was stubborn; it was over. I was sitting it out.

We even had tea before my father took me to the station. In silence as if someone had died. While we were sitting at the dining-room table drinking, the smell of the room when I bent over the table painting from my color box as a child came to me, immediate, complete, unaltered. The print-smell of the pile of English newspapers, the oil-smell of furniture polish, the cool dark fruit-smell from the dish on the sideboard; and the smell of ourselves, us three people, my father, my mother and me, with which everything in the house was impregnated like objects in a sandalwood box, and that, when I took out something from home in the atmosphere of the flat or the Marcuses’ house, gave me the queer feeling of momentarily being aware of myself as a stranger.

As soon as I got into the train I dropped back my head and closed my eyes: Paul. Paul; Paul. I know that I should have liked to have said the name aloud, but opposite me in the empty carriage was a very young Afrikaans girl with a daughter of four or five years old, curled and hatted and hung about with trinkets, like her mother. Like her mother she was utterly composed, silent, absorbed in the trance of her Sunday best. She played with a little bangle engraved “Cecilia,” and stared at me without curiosity, as if she were measuring what I thought of her.

When the train jerked into motion I thought: Now; I shall soon be there. And my desire to say Paul’s name, as the little girl had to feel the shape of her bangle, I turned into a little movement of a smile with my lips.

I scarcely opened my eyes again until we reached Johannesburg. In the peculiar bright confusion that comes down with the felty blood-darkness of one’s eyelids, the clear images of the afternoon that had passed, the whole two days, were pushed away in a jumble, like the swept-up bits of a broken mirror. I hung to the thought of Paul that swelled, image, word and sound the way one’s last conscious thought looms and expands before sleep or anesthesia. In that darkness he was my one reality. It seemed that he must be thousands of miles away, unattainable in yearning. I could not believe that in less than an hour I should be standing in an ordinary call box hearing his voice matter of fact and that I should see him walking down the platform looking for me. …

When we got to Johannesburg station I was trembling and sweating as I jumped down from the train and pushed my way through the people, murmuring nervous apologies and holding my head high and anxious. The telephone in the first box was dead and I rushed into the next one. It smelled bad and I dropped my handbag and parcels and week-end case on the dirty floor and lifted the receiver in anxiety. The dry, snoring sound came back. I dialed and could hear my own breathing, harsh in that small space.

The bell rang only once and in the middle of the second ring Paul answered it and I heard his hello. I don’t know what I had expected, but even though the fact of its ringing on unanswered would have meant nothing more than that he was out at one of two or three places where I could easily have got him, I knew the moment I heard his voice that if there had been no answer the ringing of the telephone would have dropped me into a fearful despair. There was a second’s shudder at what I might have felt and as my face crinkled in relief at the sound of his voice, I saw the magnifying line of tears lifted in my eyes. Through them the scratched walls of the call box came alive.

“For God’s sake come and fetch me. Quick. I’m in an awful public telephone thing that smells.”

“Well”—he was questioning the excitement in my voice—“well, so you’re here. Why didn’t you phone, may I ask?”

“I did. On Saturday. But you weren’t there—”

“You knew I’d be at Jabavu.”

“Yes — I forgot. And then I couldn’t. — I can’t explain now. I’ll come to the front entrance. Eloff Street.”

“No, come to the side.”

“The baggage drive-in side? All right. … But be quick!”

I saw him. He seemed to grow along the street out of my watching. I dropped my things all over the seat and the floor of the car and pulled his head down in my arms and kissed him. It was all very awkward with my one knee on the seat and the end of my handbag sticking into my side. But I felt his warm mouth (I could taste fruit on it) and I dug my fingers into his linen jacket and I shut my eyes for a moment against those eyes and that high freckled forehead and that beautiful nose that I loved more than ever now that I knew its one secret fault, a displacement of the septum that at a certain angle spoiled its line. He pressed his hand tightly into my back, surprised but ready.

“You’ve been eating a naartje,” I said.

We both saw him, lying on the bed dropping the curls of fruit skin on the floor.

“Cursing like hell because you didn’t come home.”

Quite suddenly we did not know what to say; he feeling the obligation of my smile, that smile of relief and wonder that holds your face with the intensity of a frown and that you are powerless to control.