Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

There was a relief in jealousy like a sudden scalding. It was something over which we could have an open argument. Paul said: “Helen you know this is ridiculous. What is it you really want to fight about?”

But I grew afraid.

I no longer wanted to touch that nervous mass which trembled between us.

But it seemed to me for the first time that he knew. Later in the dark he said in a loud wakeful voice: “We’re terribly involved. Terribly involved with each other. …”

And I tweaked at the pretense of jealousy again: “That sounds like Isa. The sort of thing she says, all dilated pupils.”

He said again, as if the thing was threshing itself about in his mind, showing, disappearing, ungraspable, distressing—“Involved …?” I had no answer.

We quarreled again about Isa. I would pick up this petty weapon in my sense of weakness; a sudden spiral of irritation that blinded and smarted like a whirlwind; dying in a flurry of dust and dead leaves.

“I cannot understand why you do this.” He had the exasperated look of an animal worried into anger. And when it had happened a number of times, goaded as I had goaded myself: “Yes, of course I like Isa! All the inadequacies she had as a lover are her virtues as a friend. Christ, she’s a grown-up person! I can talk to her. Yes, I can talk to her and she doesn’t expect me always to be consistent, every word that comes out of my mouth to fit into some idea she’s got about me! Every time I say something I have to watch your face measuring it up; I’ve got to see your eyes change or the expression round your mouth fade—”

Then he, too, looking about for something to break the silences between us, instinctively felt for it, closed his hand round it. “I think you’re hankering after your mother and father. All this moodiness comes from a part of you that hasn’t grown up. You still wonder if you aren’t being a naughty girl, and it amuses me.” He stared at me obstinately, smiling. “It amuses me.

“Why are you such a damned hypocrite?” He pressed me.

Shortening the hem of an old skirt, or caught in the pause in which I sometimes lost the sense of what I was reading, nothing had been further from my thoughts than Atherton and my life there and my mother and father. In fact, the unvarying daily predictability of that life, in which the equal predictability of the life I had imagined had seemed just as assured, seemed as far from me as those curiously vivid anecdotes of babyhood which belong to pre-memory and that we have only come to know through being told by others.

Yet he had found, as intimacy cruelly makes it impossible not to do, the one spot in my secret assessment of myself that had once been inflamed, and that reddened in tender shame from time to time. I trembled in hurt at this confirmation of what I had feared in myself with humiliation and disappointment. When he saw the roused hostility in my face he must have felt as I did when I was possessed by a drive to torment him, and saw that I had succeeded: the whole challenge died out of him listlessly in a kind of defiant shame; it was not what he meant, what he wanted, after all. And it left a burned-out loneliness in the very center of one’s love for the other.

I had said: “I want to live with you in the greatest possible intimacy.” That was one of the things I had said so many times, with all the awkwardness in the shaping of the words that makes the things that lie deep and dominant in us so difficult to say.

I saw this thing turn, like a flower, once picked, turning petals into bright knives in your hand. And it was so much desired, so lovely, that your fingers will not loosen, and you have only disbelief that this, of all you have ever known, should have the possibility of pain. All the time, you are seeing the blood trickling a red answer slowly down your hand.

I left the welfare office at the end of April.

On the Wednesday of my last week there, my father telephoned me. I went to the telephone expecting the voice of John, with a message from Jenny about some book on antenatal exercises I had promised to get her at the bookshop where I had once worked, and I heard one of the bright, interchangeable voices of the Mine switchboard operators: “One moment. … Your call, Mr. Shaw, you’re through. …”

Our conversation was not so much tense, as stilted with a kind of shyness. “I just wanted to know how you were, my dear. …”

“And you? Everything all right?”

“Oh, yes. Just as usual. — Well, I don’t want to keep you from your work, Helen—”

“It’s all right. As it happens this is my second last day. I’m changing my job.”

“Oh?” He wanted to show me how little he wanted to criticize or upset me, my father who had started as office boy and ended up as Secretary in the same office on the same Mine, and for whom a change of job would have been almost as great a disturbance as the transmigration of his soul. “Have you found something that suits you better? That’s very nice.”

“Well, not yet. I’ve got one or two things in mind. The Belgian Consulate, for one. …” “That should be interesting; a chance to have contact with the wider world. Well, I hope you get it, my dear—”

I sat down to my desk again: the call scarcely had been an interruption at all.

An hour later I suddenly asked the girl at the switchboard to get me the Mine number. I heard my father hold back the surprise in his voice as, in his bewilderment with me, he suppressed any show of emotion in case it should be the wrong one in my eyes. “Daddy, do you think I could come home this week end? What do you think—”

“No, of course, Helen. It will be all right. Your mother won’t say anything, I’m sure. Only don’t say anything to her. Just let it be as if nothing had happened. She’ll be very glad.”—he paused—“Sometimes she’s hasty. And afterward she can’t — it’s not in her nature …”

“I know. Good, then. I won’t phone her. You tell her and I’ll come. On Saturday. In the morning, most probably.”

I told Paul that my father had telephoned me and that I was going to Atherton at the week end. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “‘Never darken my doorstep again.’ And how long is it — six weeks?”

We were having lunch in the basement cafeteria round the corner from the offices, where the smoke and sizzling of hamburgers thickened the noise of the crush, and the hands of the Indian waiters flashed like conjurers’ as they raced to serve too many people at once.

I shrugged.

He flicked the two little marbles of butter, buried in a lettuce leaf like pearls in an oyster, onto my roll, and leaned over and took the butter dish belonging to the next table, where two fat young men and an ogling girl were just rising. “Next they’ll be asking tenderly after me. I’ll be coming along for the week end, too. And they’ll be secretly planning their grandchildren.”

At home where a thousand times we were alone and the tension between us urged it, there was a space cleared for it, it had never been spoken. But now I said: “We’ll never be married.” It was spoken quite simply and flatly, from some part of me that was not aware of mutations of which his easy, half-flippant mood and the restless, food-murky den were one.

He put his paper napkin down slowly under his hand. It was a gesture halting everything. “Why do you say that?”

I said, far away, looking at him a long way across the crowded little table: “Because it’s so.”

“But what makes you say that—” He had the little twitching nervous smile of the onset of strong fear or anger. “You can’t just say it — Why? Why do you?”

“You know it,” I said again.