The Lying Days (47 page)

“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.

His hands made a flurry of picking up a spoon and fork; faltered beneath his gaze and mine and took up instead the teaspoon needed
to stir his coffee. He drank. “Mad,” he said to himself, “things that come to you.”

The waiter jerked his head for our attention as if he were putting it impatiently round a door. “Sweets, miss?”

“D'you feel like anything—”

“What about you? If you do, then.”

“Well it's five past already, and you said you wanted to go down to the framer's. … We might as well go straight off.” He stood up to let me edge past the table in front of him.

The paper napkin lay in a tight ball beside his plate.

I lay on the lawn at the side of our house under my bedroom window. The bottom of the jasmine hedge had thinned with age and through it I could see the front garden and the doves which flopped down, every now and then, in the dust and the red leaves blown from the Virginia creeper. Our house was shedding its shaggy summer coat; the leaves had turned bright and brittle, and there were patches where the brick showed under a light tracery of bare tendrils. The cement had worn away with years of rain, and the edges of the bricks were rounded, crumbling.

Under my head was one of the cushions from the veranda. Don't take one of the good ones; take an old one from the veranda. Yet who will ever wear out the good ones? What was the occasion for which everything had always been saved?

I lay letting my eyes follow the line of upended bricks that marked the border of the path and the crescents and circles of the flower beds; so had I followed them with my feet when I was a child, balancing myself against the mild sunny boredom of a summer afternoon. (Where had I read it: It is always summer when you remember childhood. …) The week end was already half over and it all had passed at the tempo of this midmorning. Soon my mother would call out (she knew she would not be clearly heard and so a minute or two after Anna would come slowly round the side of the house, coming right up to me and saying suddenly: The missus says tea, Miss Helen) just as she had called for breakfast this morning and dinner last night. The hours flowed in and out between the beacons of meals, and there was nothing else to divide up the day.

It had all been so easy in such a matter-of-fact, flaccid way, like the expected resistance of a muscle that is discovered to be atrophied. My mother, who never had the strength to give in, could always evade. She did it this time by creating an atmosphere of convalescence in the house; she treated my father and me, and even herself, as if we were all recovering, shaken, from an illness we did not speak about. We did not speak much at all, in fact; she made it seem as if this was to be expected when one must conserve one's strength.

So I lay on the lawn on Saturday afternoon, I lay on the lawn all Sunday morning. I don't believe I thought at all; just flicked over images in my mind, people and places I had not remembered for years blowing suddenly bright in the darkness behind my eyes the way the wind ruffles and arrests the pages of a picture book. Olwen; the dark settling on the shuffling children in the Atherton cinema on a Saturday afternoon; Mrs. Koch, her veined, elderly feet freed in the sand; myself, standing on the dining-room table while my mother evened the hem of a new dress; the Dufalettes I used to watch through the hedge, so that I could tell them apart more accurately by their feet than by their faces. I was not asleep but I preferred to keep my eyes closed. When they opened involuntarily it was as if something split; the light seared in; then I could see the angle of the house, the hedge, the garden; and, if I rolled half onto my back, on the perimeter of my sky the tops of some of the old fir trees which soughed about the Mine over the faint rough pant of the stamp batteries like the sea drowning the subterranean cries of its monsters. And, just seen behind the Dufalettes' chimney, the derrick of the shaft head itself. The house, the hedge, the garden, the shaft head: it all said: I am. But when I let my eyelids drop darkness again, nothing was; there were rents, tears, sudden fadings in the vividness of what I saw that proved the nonexistence of these faces, these places: harmless, by being past. Even a threatening image carried reassurance in its ephemerality; nothing more than a fist shaken in the distance by a hand that will never be near enough to strike again.

The evening before, I had spent what I suppose was an incredible evening at the house of the Compound Manager. D'you think
this is all right? Or should I take off the flower?—My mother came into my room in the convention of seeking reassurance about her appearance, as she had done a thousand times before. She wore a green crepe dress with a string of pearls and an artificial tea rose, the outfit that, with well-defined variations, would be worn by every other Mine woman there. She smelled, as she always had done, of lavender water. (As a child this weak sweet scent had been a means of social discrimination for me; once when my mother had been puzzled by the identity of a woman who had called in her absence and left no name, and my mother had asked me to describe her, I had answered: She smelled like a nice lady.)

When she had gone out of my room, repinning the velvet rose, I looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror. I looked very different from my mother, though we were both tall, and I had her red hair. The forehead which she would have “softened” with a few curls I kept bare and prominent, the back hair which she would have cut and permanently waved, I had as long as it would grow, and wound round thickly into a sort of tight little crown. Yellow shantung dress with a peasant-style skirt, bodice tight to show off my breasts. Belt and heavy earrings made of copper medallions (we had tired of native beadwork, and it was beginning to appear among the artificial pearls and American costume jewelry in department stores). Unrouged face, brilliantly painted lips. Short unpainted fingernails with the large heavy dark ring Paul had saved to have made for me by the German refugee. (But that's a man's ring, my mother had said, holding out a hand with fingernails of opaque mauvish-pink and her gold-and-diamond engagement ring which was always a little dimmed by the pastry dough that got stuck in the well at the back of the setting.)

The outfit, the face, that any one of the women I knew at Isa's or the Marcuses' might be wearing at this moment. I dragged the earrings down the lobes of my ears; unclasped the belt. But there was nothing else, in the old chocolate box full of jewelry which I took everywhere with me, that I could wear. Porcelain horses that were faultily made and wouldn't stay on my ears, silver gypsy hoops Isa had once given me; the native beadwork; round pink cabbage roses made of glued seashells which my mother had bought me from
some woman who made them because her husband had abandoned her and she had even less talent for making a living any other way.

I put the copper medallions and the belt on again and went to the Compound Manager's.

There there were all the sweet things of my childhood that people like myself had lost taste for.—Usually we didn't eat at all but were offered gin or beer or brandy the moment we walked in, and went on having our glasses filled up until, if it was a party, a big hot dish of curry or canelloni came in with bottles of wine or, if it wasn't, coffee with confectioners' biscuits. But here, on the little gazelle-legged tables that had awed me long ago, little flowered dishes of chocolates, toffees and peppermint buttons were put out. At a quarter-to-ten sharp we were led into the dining room and were sat down to the big table from which a shower of painted gauze the size of a bedspread was whipped, baring cake stands and silver lattice baskets filled with cakes and cream-topped scones and tarts, all made by the hostess, like the wide glass plate of sandwiches (for the men, I remembered; one of the axioms of the Mine was that men don't care for sweet things), all precisely cut and decorated with streamers of lettuce and sprigs of parsley so well washed that here and there a drop of water still gleamed on the curly green. Most people drank two or three cups of tea from the thin, flowered cups which all matched (every Mine hostess had a “best” set that would enable her to serve a dozen or more without using odd cups) and it was not until eleven-fifteen and a quarter-of-an-hour before everyone would rise to go, countering the host's “But it's Sunday tomorrow …” with “We must have our beauty sleep …,” that a polished cabinet smelling of new green baize was opened and the men were offered whisky. They stood around sipping at cut-crystal glasses with a rose design, but the women were not offered anything. They drank only at sundowner time.

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.