Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

The discrimination was not obvious or awkward because the women had grouped themselves apart from the men all evening. I, of course, was with them, sitting on a small spindly chair: You’re a young light one, Helen, we old ones with a middle-age spread need something more solid — and laughing they lowered their flowered or lace bulk into the deep soft chairs and the sofa. One or two took out their knitting; the hostess had a decorated felt bag from which came the fourth of a set of tapestry chair covers she was working. The others exclaimed that they wished they’d brought their knitting, or the hem of a child’s dress that had to be done by hand. That reminded another of a new way of hemming she had read about in a magazine. Oh — someone else thought she’d read that — was it in the Ladies’ Home Journal? No, the other didn’t get the Ladies’ Home Journal, it must be in some English magazine. “Well, I get all my knitting patterns from Good Needlework” said another. And at once they were all talking about the magazines and papers that they “took”; I recognized the names of the neat stacks of thin threepenny women’s papers I had been given to amuse me on visits to their houses fifteen years ago. “I’ve been a subscriber ever since we’ve been on the Mine,” old Mrs. Guff was saying, her head nodding agreement with each word she spoke. “What was that?” someone asked. “Home Chat” —she turned smiling and nodding—”I’ve been getting it for many years.” “I remember,” I said from my chair. “It used to have Nurse Carrie’s page in it. Excerpts from people’s letters were printed in italics, and then Nurse Carrie answered underneath in ordinary print.” They laughed indulgently — but I had got my first inklings about sex from that genteel page, poring over it on the floor of Mrs. Cluff’s sitting room when I was eight or nine.

Sitting on the delicate chair, I heard again all the warm buzz of talk that had surrounded my childhood. It was as comfortable as the sound of bees; no clash of convictions, no passion, no asperity — unless this last was on a scale so domestically close-knit and contemporary that I could not catch it. Their talk flowed over me, flowed over me, all evening; one after the other, peppermint comfits dissolved in my mouth.

When at last we rose to leave, I spoke to the men for the first time, although through the evening I had heard snatches of their talk, drifting across the path of my wondering attention. Mine gossip, it had been; and the shares they had been tipped off to buy in the Group’s newly opened Free State gold fields; and — hotly argued — the selection of the team to represent the Mine at an inter-provincial bowling tournament in Natal.

The Compound Manager said, drawing in his cheeks at the dryness of his last swallow of his whisky: “Helen … So … it’s a long time since you’ve deserted us. You like the city, eh? I don’t think you’ve been to see us since your parents went overseas—?”

“D’you know,” I said, smiling, “the last time I remember being in your house? The morning of the strike. A Sunday morning, when the Compound boys had a strike over their food, and I came with Daddy to see. They were standing about all over the garden, and we came inside — into this room — and Mrs. Ockert was giving everybody tea.”

“Oh, no!” he laughed, astonished. “—D’you hear that, Mab — Helen says the last time she was here was that time when we had the strike.”

“But that’s twelve — no, thirteen years ago,” objected Mr. Bellingan.

“You were with us,” I said. “I remember you were with us.”

“Heavens, Helen, you must have been here a number of times after that!” All the gentlemen laughed round me.

“Well, that’s the last time I remember!”

They all began to recollect the strike; like a performance of theatricals, taken earnestly at the time, that becomes amusing in the retelling. One had done this; the other had thought that. The Compound Manager put down his empty glass and, hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels, knowing, smiling, at a situation he had dealt with.

“Ah, but things were still done decently in those days,” said the Reduction Officer. Old men, confronted with two world wars, jet aircraft and atom bombs, sometimes spoke like this of the Boer War, in which they had fought: the last gentlemanly war. “This kind of thing coming up on Monday — we didn’t have that then. But of course the mine boys have always been the good old type of kraal native, not these cheeky devils from the town, don’t know what they want themselves, half the time, except trouble.”

And that was the one reference anyone there made to the May Day strike of African and colored workers which was only the duration of Sunday away from us.

When I went back to Johannesburg that Sunday evening I caught a fast train that did not stop at the Atherton Mine siding and so my father had to drive me in to Atherton to the station. We went slowly down the main street, arrested at every block by the traffic lights. The town had changed a great deal since I was a child, slowly, of course, and I had seen it changing, so that while it was happening I had not seen the alteration of the whole structural face, but merely the pulling down of this old building, the filling up of that vacant square where the khaki weed used to grow and the dogs clustered round a poor little vagrant bitch in season. But this evening I had the shock of discovering that in my mind the idea of Atherton carried with it a complete picture of the town the way it must have been when I was nine or ten years old: it rose up in connotation like a perfectly constructed model, accurate in every detail. And I saw that now it really was nothing more than a model, because that town had gone. The vacant lots blocked in in concrete, the old one-story shops demolished; with them the town had gone. A department store was all glass and striped awnings where two tattered flags, a pale Union Jack and a pale Union flag, had waved above the old police barracks. A new bank with gray Ionic columns and a bright steel grille stood on the corner where my mother’s grocer had been; the grocer was now a limited company with a five-story building, delicatessen, crockery and hardware departments, further down the street. As I say, all this had happened gradually, but I saw it suddenly now; it did not match the Atherton alive in the eye of my mind. In the shadow of two buildings a tiny wood-and-iron cottage lived on; a faint clue. Here at least, the one Atherton fitted over the other, and in relation to this little house I could fade away the tall irregular buildings, and place the vanished landmarks where I had looked or lingered.

Sitting beside my father while he changed gears and drew away as if the car were a live creature to be treated considerately, I felt queerly that it was as impossible for me ever to walk in and out the shops of this real Atherton as it was for me to walk again in the small village that had gone.

On my lap I held the paper bag my mother had given me before I left. “Half the fruitcake,” she had said, and I knew that inside it would be wrapped in a neat sheet of grease-proof paper, the kind that had wrapped my school lunches. “No good my keeping it all, there’s no one to eat it. And if I give you the whole, it’s the same thing, isn’t it—” And she had stopped in cold embarrassment at her own voice, that had implied that I was alone, and so doing, had reminded both of us that I wasn’t, that someone would be there to help me eat my mother’s fruitcake. She had stiffened and answered with offended monosyllables the commonplaces, suitably removed from the subject, about which I went on talking to her. I suppose it was funny, really, and perhaps I should have been secretly amused. But I had only wanted to say to her — I don’t know why—: Mother, I haven’t changed. Look, this is me; you know me: just as I have always been, before I could walk and before I could speak and before I had loved a man and taken him into my body. And I thought, She will never recognize me, she will never know me again. Even if I could speak it would not alter it.