Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

He said seriously: “You had to be kissed.”

I looked at him steadily across the table. “Yes.”

“When I took you home,” he said, “I knew it. When I went to your home. I try to explain it to myself; I think I can, now. The difference of nationality — between us — as it existed in the minds and emotions of our parents, mind, not as we conceived it — was a kind of unconscious taboo. Friendship was all right, it took place in the mind, in the interchange of speech and the world; but touch, an embrace between you and me — emotional contact reaches back into the family. It’s very old, very deep, very senseless; and harder than you think, to overcome.”

I said to him when we were dancing again: “What an odd place to talk like this in. Is it just a sort of softening in the maudlin atmosphere, d’you think, and we’re letting down our hair and we’ll be sorry?”

“No,” he said, “it’s because we aren’t anywhere, Helen, you and I. There’s a time, before people go away, when although they still walk and talk among familiar things in a familiar way, they have already left. The ship has sailed, for you. You’ve left it all behind you already, all the things you want and fear and have thrust away from you.”

A kind of light sadness came over me, and translated itself into the terms of the shadowy, swaying place. It found expression in the small hoarse voice of the girl who sang with a melancholy intonation borrowed, like her accent, from America; in the smoke-wreathed privacy of the half-dark; and in the warm body of Joel, embodied all that I should put my arms about in leave-taking.

I felt I should apologize for it and said to him: “I think I do feel a little maudlin, after all.”

The yellow marble bird had a dribble of real water running from his beak. A band was playing on the dais. The yellow brocade settees were completely hidden by people; people sitting on the cushions and on the arms, people clustering round those who were sitting. The little bar was lively with people, and the Italian stewards raced briskly round.

The whole ship was like a stage-set where the lights and the curtain have at last gone up.

Joel and I had two little seats crammed against the bar on one side, and the side of the dais where the white piano was, on the other. The band played, unheeded, and over and over again, “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup” and a rather peculiar version of “Sarie Marais.” Joel said something, but I could not hear. “What’s that?” He leaned over. “I said I understand that they double up as stewards, when they’re not playing.” I nodded, smiling, smiling. The atmosphere was curiously like that of a large midday wedding reception, where you are dazed by the heat and the crowd in their best clothes, the pageantry of the wedding retinue, which somehow seems to belong under electric light rather than the sun, and the intoxication of champagne drunk at a time when other people are banging hammers and pushing pens.

I leaned across and shouted: “It’s hard to believe that this is something the ship experiences over and over again, year in and year out. It seems to take it as such an occasion.” He nodded fiercely, and shrugged at the impossibility of conversation. But a minute or two later some people got up from a group of chairs near the door and we pushed our way quickly toward them. We sat down promptly and those chairs we were not occupying were immediately whirled away over our heads with eager apologies. The band and the talk were no longer deafening; we were beside the doorway and could see the deck and feel the sharp heat of the day outside, instead of the stuffiness of perfume and wine. The four people whose table we had taken were being photographed against the rails by a press photographer. We watched them compose the instant at which they would be fixed in the social pages of the paper tomorrow, a Durban businessman and his family, the wife in her new hat and floral silk dress, chosen, no doubt by the daughters, the daughters holding their hats — one small and feathered, the other large and white — against the wind, with gloved hands. Just as the camera clicked the one could not resist, and did what she must always have been disciplining herself not to do: smiled too broadly and gave her too-prominent teeth a victory.

“What time is it?” I asked. “Another hour, still,” Joel said. He had a way of smiling at me, reassuringly, every time he felt me looking at him, as if I were the one who was about to sail, nervously excited at the departure.

“I’m rehearsing for Monday,” I said.

“But you’ll have the other role, then,” he said. “It’s easier to go than to be left behind. Shall we have another drink?”

“I don’t think so. … I’m slightly dizzy already — the glare more than anything, I think. — You know that really does fit exceptionally.” He moved his shoulders in the new linen jacket we had chosen for him in the town earlier in the morning; it is extraordinary how difficult it is to find something to do in the hour or two before a leave-taking.

I said to him, leaning forward on my elbows on the table: “I keep getting a feeling of urgency. My mind races. I’m afraid there are so many things I want to say to you that I’ll only discover when you’re gone. Don’t you always feel like that when you’re saying good-by to someone?”

“What things?”

I smiled and sank back. “When you ask me, I don’t know. I’m just sure that when you’re gone …”

“Write them to me.”

“Yes, I know.” But I could not rid myself of this acute consciousness of time; time, which was like a growing volume of sound in my ears; and would cease. Every movement in the people who crowded the lounge and passed and repassed across the deck, every time a man swallowed from his glass, or a woman turned to touch the cheek of a child, gestured time that length further on. Joel fetched two more glasses of gin and lime for us and then we sauntered aimlessly about the deck, where everyone stood about as we did, and groups burst into small explosions of excited laughter. The sun and the gin seemed to clash in my head; we made quite thankfully for the lounge again, and found a seat for ourselves.

“And yet it seems much longer?” I appealed. He nodded consideringly. “—You couldn’t credit it’s really only two days since Thursday?”

He smiled. “Timeless, I told you. Because we aren’t anywhere.”

“Oh, there is something,” I said, remembering. To ask him something, anything, would still this feeling I had of being unable to shape questions that were vital to myself, that would, in some way I could not articulate or understand, help me to read my bearings if the desire to drift on a current should prove more confining than freedom of choice. “When I asked you, the other night, why you didn’t try to give me some sort of inkling of the disillusion I was heading for with John and Jenny and the others — you said you’d tell me another time.”

The casual piece of curiosity — what did it matter, now, when that part of my life which it affected was past, lived through; it had scarcely more importance than the idle disinterment of a lost summer: what did you really do (one may ask) that week you were so keen to come to the mountains, and then made some feeble excuse that obviously wasn’t true, anyway? — This casual piece of curiosity dropped stillness over Joel’s broad, browned face, shiny with the heat. His eyes, pebbles deep in a stream, moved. To escape them, or give them escape, I followed quickly the shape of his head, and saw, like a wire of light against the black, one white hair. It followed the exact curve of the others, away from the forehead across toward the crown. “Oh, that,” he said. “You know about that.”