The Lying Days (48 page)

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.

I said good-by to Daddy on the platform. There was a tranquillity in him, as if he were seeing his daughter off to school after a week end at home; there is the certainty that there will be many other week ends when she will be coming home. As I kissed his cool shaven cheek, the cheek of an aging man with little tendrils of broken vein under the thin skin, I had again the queer feeling I had had in the main street of Atherton. I would keep coming; but the way I came would never be coming back.

The train rocked into speed, clacked through the Mine siding without stopping. The tin shelter marked EUROPEANS ONLY, the fading shout of Mine natives jumping back exaggeratedly as we passed, the dark, ragged gum plantation that hid the Mine, the Recreation Hall, the rows of houses and my parents' house itself. A single dusty light burned already above the siding, although it was not yet dark.

There were a great many natives on all the stations, but that was nothing unusual for a Sunday night. Neither was the air of excitement, which one like myself, deaf to the meaning of the words, found in their voices. Sunday clothes, beer, and the still greater intoxication of leisure commonly accounted for that. At one of the larger stations I noticed several men wearing rosettes. The train jolted them away; the outcrop of the gold reef which ran along under the ground began to pass my window again: shaft heads, old untidy mine dumps with the cyanide weirdly hardened and fissured by years of rain,
new dumps geometrically exact as the pyramids, towns like Atherton, brickfields, smoking locations, mines, clumps of native stores on the veld—the windows wired over for Sunday—another dump, another mine, another Atherton. Everywhere, gradually sparsened by the increase of human rubble, the cosmos which sprang up every autumn. Even when first I had started traveling to University, they had been a thick wake in the path of the train, in many places. Now they showed pink and white among the khaki weed which was stifling them out; when the train stopped at a small station I could smell it, rank on the cooling air and the smell of water. Below the station was one of the dams that chemical infiltration from the Mine colored mother-of-pearl, making, by incidental artifice and a strange reversal of the usual results of man's interference with nature, something beautiful that was not.

At this little station a newsbill stood against the wire fence, though apparently the paper boy had sold out his stock of papers and left. It was rucked up under the wire frame that held it to a board: STRIKE SITUATION: POLICE PREPARED FOR TOMORROW. Of course not—those were not rosettes: no wonder the men weren't dressed like a football team. Freedom Day badges. Yet I could not feel anything about the strike that was coming tomorrow, the. strike that, the whole of the previous week in Johannesburg, we had talked of. Neither fear nor apprehension nor curiosity at the nearness of this threat—to ourselves? to the Africans themselves?—that would soon be here; soon now. Tomorrow something might get up on its feet that was being fed for such a moment every day. Nobody knew what it would be like, what it could do; this thing to the Africans a splendid creature of their own power, to the white men a monster of terror. Even people like Paul, Laurie, Isa, myself, had to say to ourselves: Maybe this will be the day when the patient hands will come down in blows, when our mouths will be stopped for the things we have not said.

But seeing the bill, the station, the dam, the cows which stood up to their knees in the painted water, begin to move past, none of that was real to me. I thought, The last time, the last time I came back from Atherton, I sat with my eyes closed all the way. I remembered how, the last time, I had kept my eyes closed to block out
the distance between myself and Paul, to get to him faster. I had lain against the seat saying inside myself, Paul, Paul. I closed my eyes again for a second to remember it.

But it was not there in the dark.

I sat like a person who is physically tired, letting the movement of the train shudder my hand against the window ledge, letting the landscape slide by under my eyes. I might have been looking down upon it from a plane; it was so familiar, this repetition of mine, town, dump and veld I had known so long, from so many journeys; and so far away. As far from me as the first stars, seeming to catch the light rather than give it off, like the turn of a woman's ring faintly flashing a prismatic gleam.

Nothing happened on Monday. I know. Not only because it was true in fact, the papers said so; but because I felt in the anticlimactic calm of that day a kind of guilty reflection of my own state. It seemed to me that the fact that nothing happened justified my lack of interest, made it excusable.

It was my first day—I will not say of leisure, it was not that, but of lack of work.

Paul had been out when I arrived back at the flat the evening before. I had made myself some Russian tea and gone to bed (how the Mine fed one to extinction, truly to extinction—all the blood comfortably deflected from one's doubting brain to one's satisfied stomach). Much later he had come home. The light was already out and I listened to him moving softly about the room, not telling him I was awake. When he slid into bed beside me I put out my hand as one might do in sleep; he put his hand on my waist as one comforts a child who stirs. I did not ask him where he had been. Neither of us spoke. We lay, he with his meeting in some location shack that I guessed he must have been to, I with the pleasantries and best china cups of the Compound Manager's lounge, like people who do some highly secret work and so even in intimacy are alone, each with an aura unpenetrated and unquestioned by the other. At
last he put his hand up round my breast and shifted his body close along the length of my back, the way he had slept always since our first night together. Or perhaps, out of habit, and halfway to sleep, I only thought I felt him there.

In the morning he did not say anything about where he had been. As I trailed about in my dressing gown—since I did not have to go out to work I had not bothered to dress—I thought how odd it was; by pulling so hard the other way, one always seems to find oneself, at some point or other, arrived at precisely that condition of life from which one shied so violently. The women of the Mine, making a virtue of what was really the comfortable expedient of the kitchen and the workbasket, rather than accept the real, vital meaning of living with a man. Jenny, this first woman I had ever known who had kept her own identity, and left that of her husband uncrushed—now so enamored of her reproductive processes that she habitually mouthed John's opinions rather than allow the interruption of thinking out her own; had apparently shelved as thankfully as any shopgirl leaving the cheese counter for the escape of marriage, the stage designing in which she had once been so passionately interested; and preserved her radical views in suburban moth balls.

Here I was, back where they were, cooking a man's breakfast and keeping my mouth shut. Not for the same reasons—but what consolation was there in that? Turning the egg over because that's the way he likes it, done on both sides. Even my hair, hanging uncombed, seemed to confirm the picture. When we both worked—and that was only last week—we had snatched our breakfast together, feeding each other like birds, at the kitchen table. But this Monday morning, the first of May, I stood about while Paul sat down and ate; plenty of time for me to breakfast.

It was a beautiful morning; the sun sloped down past the balcony. I went out and looked over. The buildings were pale in the early light, the rising hum came from the city.

“Well, what d'you expect to see?” he said with a smile.

I stood at the side of the table, putting my hands down on it awkwardly. “I don't know. … It seems just the same. There should be
something,
I somehow feel.” He went on eating, his gaze following my words out the open glass doors, where he could see nothing but
the morning air. He doesn't talk to me about the strike any more, I thought, he doesn't tell me what he's thinking of what he knows and fears out of what he learned last night. He treats me as if it were something out of my ken; the week end at Atherton he hasn't asked me about has put it out of my ken. We never used to have things that were outside each other's ken.

“What are you going to do with yourself?” he said.

“Oh, I've got lots of little things,” I said with the conviction of someone who has no idea how her time is to be made to pass. He ruffled my hair as he got up to get his hat and a cigarette: a father who cannot be expected to tell a child what he is going to do in the world this morning. “No—” I said, turning my cheek, “not on my mouth—I haven't cleaned my teeth yet.”

He had no sooner gone than I flew out onto the balcony with a fastbeating heart; but there was the little car, coming out from under the building, turning into the street and away. He could not even see me.

When I turned back into the flat I found myself feeling almost self-conscious. I had never before been alone there in the morning; the room looked at me like a servant surprised by an employer in the performance of some work that is always done when the people of the house are out of the way. I saw the room, a disparate collection of inanimate objects, for the first time; in the normal course of my life with Paul it had been nothing but a background for our talk and activity, our sleep and our waking. It had handed things silently and I had taken them without thinking. Now it confronted me and I thought that not only was it like a slightly put-out servant, it was like a servant who didn't recognize my authority, anyway. This was Paul's room, these were Paul's things among which I had been living. In spite of the stockings on a chair, the jar of face cream beside the bed, the mask and the cushions, I had made no mark, no claim on this room. These things which were mine could be packed away just as a hotel room is cleared of the few personal belongings of each successive guest, remaining adequately equipped with all the necessary accouterments of a room and always retaining its own character.

I made the bed and stacked the dishes in the sink for the flat
boy to wash (we had an arrangement with him) and bathed and dressed. I thought of slacks but that would have made it feel too much like Sunday, so I put on a dress instead, noting, as I always did when I fastened a belt, as if it were some relieved discovery that I must keep making, that I was young, that my shape was good. My hips are too narrow, but I'm tall and my breasts are nice. I wonder where I get them from? My father's side of the family? My mother has no breasts; as if she had forgotten about them.—For a moment I was completely absorbed in this timeless preoccupation. Shut up in this little room in a great city where factories were silent, shops were without messengers or cleaners, and the streets were suspicious of their normality, I contemplated something that would never change, that when it left me, would already be coming to life in others.

I took the tea and the slice of toast I had made myself out onto the balcony, perhaps to evade the room. Opposite, the half-finished block of flats was empty and silent; the builder, one of the prudent employers I had read about in the paper, must have told his employees not to come to work, because even the white workers were not there. I sat out on the tiny balcony half the morning, and later two little silent children with bare feet and shabby dungarees came to play on the builder's sand. Perhaps they came from the building in which I was sitting; I realized as I sat there that the tall shabby walls, the brown-painted corridors and the stale, boxed air of the lift did not have an existence solely about Paul and me, but were seen in the same function by a number of other people, all very different from us and one another, whose lives now signaled for recognition. There was the sound of a duster being shaken out on the balcony of the flat below, the bumbling rise and fall of a crooner's voice, and then the terse nasal barks, very loud, of a radio play recorded in America, coming from a window on the right. I heard a telephone ring for several minutes; stop, ring again, and then cut off abruptly.

The sun shone steadily on the two small boys: they had found a sifter now, and were busy piling it with sand, letting the sand run through, and then shoveling the same sand into it all over again. The flat boy came in, greeted my explanation of my presence with
apparent pleasure at the idea of my being there, whatever the reason, and breathed a song to himself as he rubbed the floor, just as if he had been alone. And over to the left, Johannesburg opened its mouth in its usual muffled roar. I could detect no note of panic—in any case, had there been screams, the howls of the monster at last risen staggering to its feet, they would have been blocked out for me by the indestructible brisk cheeriness of the radio next door.