Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“Aren’t they beautiful—” She came up, ignoring with the authority of her enthusiasm her interruption of the conversation of Paul and myself with Arionte and Jenny. “Really, they make the rest of us look bilious. Oh, it’s not that I’m just enamored of any color but my own — there are millions of Indians more hideous than we’re monotonous. But they’re just two lovely people, and their color happens to suit them perfectly … (—Have you talked to him?” she asked Paul. “You must go and talk to him, he’s got a mind as incisive as a knife, a pearl-handled silver one—) like you, Jenny. When you first came from England. Your color suited you perfectly.”

“And don’t you think it suits me any more?” said Jenny crossly, although the rest of us were laughing. She had developed a touchiness toward all women who were not, like herself, somewhere in the process of creating a family. She had made up her mind in this, as in every other stage of her life, that the stage in which she happened to be involved was the only decent and worth-while way to live. So at present, unless a woman was pregnant, suckling a child, or pondering the psychological mysteries of toddlers, Jenny regarded her with a mixture of irritation and self-righteousness.

“I’ve told you; it suits you admirably. But you haven’t got it any more. You’ve taken on the protective coloring of the country; can’t distinguish you from any other Johannesburger, today.”

She was moving off (Isa never waits to see where the arrow falls, whether it goes home or not. … — D’you notice? — Paul had once said to me — I’ve never been able to decide whether it’s callous or vaguely honorable, in a chivalrous kind of way …?) when she was stopped by a young man who had come up behind her.

“I just walked in. Could have walked out again for all the notice you take of me—” It was Charles Bessemer.

“Hullo, Charlie — ah, you smell nasty. Is it the perfume only brave men dare wear?” She drew him round to us.

“Nuit de Gastrectomy,” he said, sniffing at the cold smell of ether which clung about his clothes.

“You still use the same old kind?” I said.

“Oh, hul -lo.” He turned.

“You know Helen. … And this is her Paul. Jenny you know; and this is Arionte, we don’t call him by his surname because he gets preferential treatment here, or because we can’t say Guiseppe, but because he’s on the way to being a Solomon or a Schnabel—”

A kind of extra shininess came to the pianist’s smooth forehead, in place of the blush of pleasure impossible to anyone of his complexion. His shy quick look was the laying before of us of the fact: you see? the wonderful way she is?

The “And this is her Paul” was one of Isa’s little experimental darts, tossed just for fun, in the course of more important preoccupations; I caught the faint quirk of the side of her mouth, like a private wink to me, careless and not malicious, as she said it. It was for Charles, who she knew had once been interested in me (Was there a twitch? No? Well then, the thing just glanced harmlessly off), and to tease Paul, who continually told her how disgraceful it was that Tom had no designation other than “Isa’s husband.”

Charles thought a moment and then said to me unexpectedly: “What happened to your friend from Mariastad?”—Isa was not really disappointed; she poured him a drink from the little stained table loaded with bottles, beside us.

“You mean Mary? I don’t know really. She’s teaching somewhere; I haven’t seen her for ages.”

“And you, too? — Teaching?”

Paul laughed as I said: “Do I look as if I am?”

Charles said, looking straight at me with his faint sharp smile: “You look like I always told you.”

I said to the others: “He once said I looked prim. I was insulted.”

Above Isa’s murmur, “Quite right, quite right to be,” he said firmly: “That wasn’t all. She remembers the rest.”

“I worked in a bookshop, and now ‘I am an employee of the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department.’ “

“Is it as bad as all that?” said Isa, suddenly putting on a social manner of concern.

“Indeed?” Charles rocked back on his heels, took his drink from her.

“Typist. Grade E, about. Salary scale, third from the bottom.” I did not know quite what it was that made me talk like this; there was something in Isa’s company that encouraged people to mock at themselves. In me it sounded rather feeble and a little silly. I said: “I’m going to chuck it up. I’m going to get out very soon.”

“A job like that — you should be doing it for the love of it—” Charles had a way of fixing his look on you; that narrow, diagnostic look as difficult to avoid and as blank to meet as a squint.

“How you preach, Charles!” Isa was delighted with her disgust. “So bloody sanctimonious about other people’s jobs. When you only cut people up because you love the cutting. So lucky suffering humanity needs to be cut up! — But really what made you get her a job like that, Paul, in the first place?”

“Well, I wanted to be where he was—”

“—And it’s the only kind of thing I could get for her there. She’s not trained.” Paul completed my explanation.

There was a pause, so slight, so brief that I noticed it only because for a moment I heard the general noise of the room. “I see,” said Isa.

And then I became acutely aware of the pause, which was already over, of the attention of the others, that was already turned from Paul and me in talk. … wanted to be where he was … The innocent way it had come to my tongue, blurting out the simple answer. And a minute before I had had their attention and their sympathy for the vehemence with which I had told them, I’m going to give it up, I’m going to get out soon.

Depression came over me and drew me back from the other people in the room, so that being incapable of being involved with any of them, I seemed to see all the several groups at once, to watch their mouths shaping talk and their faces and bodies supplementing and contradicting what they said. I felt a dull envy for Isa, taking the small pleasure of the triumphs of her tongue. I thought almost with longing of the struggles she must have given up to content herself with the substitute of these things; and I wished for a moment that I were clever enough to be able to ignore their unreality and emptiness, or that I was another kind of person, a person for whom they could ever have some meaning. In that room full of people whom I knew well enough to fear their curiosity, I wanted to cry. In a bus, in a train, among strangers I would have cried, as people sometimes have to, cannot always wait to be alone. But here I dared not, and so all these people, my friends, became enemies.

The Indian was talking to me about the dances of her country and bent her draped head over a book on Balinese dancing which Tom Welsh had laid in her lap; it sometimes happened at one of Isa’s parties that some beautiful gentle woman suddenly drew Tom to her side and kept him there the whole evening. They talked very low and no one ever joined them or interrupted, no one ever knew what the long, absorbed conversation had been about. Only Isa would look up, worried, now and then, at the head of the woman, and say good night to her when she left with an extra, compensatory fervor; she felt that the poor woman had been bored.

Paul had had just enough brandy to key him up to his warmest charm; he wore it like a suit of clothes that has not been worn for a long time but fits as well as ever. His voice and Isa’s flashed back and forth across the room. The “music hall turn” was on between them.

Arionte said: “I wish so to talk. I have been speaking English only one year now. …” And then he eyed me for a moment. “You say you like Mozart. Just now I play you … Some part the D Minor.”