The Lying Days (53 page)

I stood a moment, following the sweep of her, up, up. The huge anchor, hooked with vanity, like an ornament, on her side. Runnels of rust streaming down from it over the pale paint, like seaweed she had forgotten to flick off. Down between the edge of the dock on which I stood and the lower limits of the bulk of her, a foot or two of dirty water slapped, afloat with matchsticks and the shapeless, ugly humps of dead jellyfish, like the torn-out eyeballs of sea monsters. I wandered along, looking up at docks of ships on which men were at work, or sailors, with the disheveled, careless air of women discovered in curlers and slippers, hung over the rails in vest and pants, talking lazily to someone below and flicking cigarette butts into the domesticated water. I wished, now, I had asked what the name of Joel's ship was, and where he was staying until he embarked. Yet somehow I felt Isa wouldn't have known that, anyway. But it should be easy enough to find out about the ship, from the Lloyd-Triestino people. That was the Italian line, and there were only two ships, as far as I knew, on the route. Joel … It would be odd to see him again, here. I was not sure whether I wanted to; actually the whole idea seemed so improbable that I felt indifferent. At this point I stepped aside to avoid some sort of unpleasant-looking mess that had been spilled on the dock, and almost bumped into a man in a vaguely nautical outfit—tight serge pants and a polo-necked cotton jersey. We dodged back and forth before each other for a moment, and then he stopped, smiled, and gestured me past. We both mumbled, “Sorry!” and on impulse I said: “I wonder—d'you know if there's an Italian ship in now?” “You've just passed her. The
Ostia.
She's over there, beside the
Pretoria Castle.”
He pointed back over my shoulder. I turned to look again at the squat white hen of a ship almost under the prow of the huge mail ship. So that was it. I walked back and had a look:
Ostia
—I had read the name when I passed before, but it had seemed to me vaguely Scandinavian; I did not connect it with Italy.

The smallness of the ship beside the
Pretoria Castle
fascinated me. A dumpy little thing, riddled with portholes and hung about
with rickety-looking decks. Joel in this, I in the immense creature next door. The hen and the elephant. It seemed perfectly ridiculous; I saw us, firmly fixed, in Atherton, walking along under the pines in front of the Mine Recreation Hall.

The companionway was down, here, too. There was no one to stop me at the foot, so I went up, swaying slowly on my too-high heels. A uniformed man at the top watched me with a considering air, as if I were being given an audition for something. “May I come up?” I asked, already there. He looked at me broodingly. His eyes were so heavily liquid dark that he seemed to have difficulty in shifting the focus of his gaze. He shook his head. “Unless you know someone passenger. You must go to the office, get a card for permission.” I was annoyed that he had let me climb up for nothing. “You mean from Lloyd-Triestino? But where is the office?” He told me the name of the street. “Look,” I said, as if I had not understood properly, “but I do know someone—” There was a chance that Joel's name might be on the passenger list, even if he was not yet aboard, and if it was not, then I should know that either he had sailed already, or was going on a later ship. In any case, I might as well take a chance: I was curious to look over this fat little
Ostia.

The man took me to the purser's cabin, down a step from the deck into a dim stuffy passage, into a biscuit tin of a room crammed with a vast desk. He consulted with the man behind it, over a passenger list, and at last said in English, “Ah-ron. Mister J. Ah-ron. Is second class, number 197,” and ushering me back into the passage, left me to the ship. I did not know whether he meant that Joel was already aboard, or whether he was merely confirming the fact that the name I had told him was, indeed, on the passenger list. As I stumbled about the curious, narrow intricacies of the ship's internal disposition, I thought it less and less likely that Joel was aboard; no one else seemed to be; at least no one who looked as if he might be a passenger, although in one or two of the cabins into which I peeped, I saw a sort of homely disorder, as if people recently had lain on the bunks. But the whole ship seemed to be in a state of semidesertion, hazy untidiness. It was dark and unbearably stuffy, and a smell of cooking faithfully followed all the convolutions, stairs, doors, hatches and barriers of the various classes, of which there
was a bewildering number. I knocked against an insect spray and a broom, picked my way round pieces of canvas-covered baggage, and once found myself brought up short in the darkest, smallest lavatory I had ever seen. Outside in the comparatively brightly lit passage—one bleary globe burned in the ceiling—there was a notice suggesting that passengers should wear a woolen band round the stomach, as a precaution against stomach troubles prevalent in East African ports.

I went from first to third class and back to first again, quite inexplicably, but on the way I saw a dining room decorated with sporting painted dolphins to distract the passengers' attention from the scrubbed wooden boards at which they were evidently to sit, and a lounge furnished with brocade settees, a little yellow marble fountain in the form of a bird gargling into a shell, some potted ferns, a dais with a white piano and some music stands, and a neat little bar at which a solitary man sat, working out something on a piece of paper. A fat woman (she must have been a stewardess) smiled “Scusi” as we edged past each other into another passage and I found at last that I was suddenly in the second-class section. All the cabins seemed to be empty and the doors were open, except one, which was closed, and from behind which there came a low growling and a high-pitched giggle. The door of 197 was open, too, at the same angle as all the others, but I put my head in, just to see what Joel's particular cabin was like. He was lying there on the bunk and the sight of him, Joel, unmistakable, real, gave me a ridiculous start of fright.

He got up in slow astonishment. Frowning, he said: “No. Helen?” We collided with each other in the tiny space and we kissed, quite simply, as if we had always done it, for the first time in our lives. I never could have imagined I should be so happy to see him. And because it was Joel, I could say it to him: “I never could have believed it would be so wonderful to find you here. You don't know how glad I am. I don't know myself how glad I am.” He was standing back from me, looking at me and shaking his head, smiling. “I can't imagine why you're here. … I don't know what you're doing here.”

I felt excited, soaring. The whole excitement of the fact of my
going away, the loneness, the strangeness, suddenly made me drunk, like a potent liquor that requires certain conditions before it begins to show its effects. I boasted about my progress over the ship and puzzled and amused him by references to the woolen band I hoped he was wearing round his belly, and though he was eager to ask, he was content to wait for an explanation of my presence. He sat down on the edge of his bunk as if it were all a little too much for him, and listened to me.—There it was again, instantly, the way it always had been; nobody ever listened to me quite the way Joel did. Some part of me noted this even while I was chattering; he sat there with his knees spread and a little tuft of dark hair showing through his half-buttoned shirt, his broad dark face resting its gaze on me. He loves to hear me talk. So I talk better. I have more to say, it comes out of me more succinct and livelier.

I was so animated now that I did not sit down, and as I moved about the tiny cabin, I had to steady my big hat with one hand. He smiled at this, very slowly, gently, not to offend, the warmth of the smile bringing a glow to his face which was sunburned too dark, and giving to his eyes, by contrast, a clear liquid lightness which seemed to take color, from the line of green water showing through the porthole. (His cabin was not on the dock side of the ship, but faced across the harbor.) I broke off as if to consider myself in his eyes. “Very elegant,” he said, smiling. We both laughed. “But a bit too garden party,” I admitted. “—No, don't take it off. We're not going to stay in this little pen. I'll try and dress up to match and then perhaps you'll consent to be seen in the town with me.”

“Joel,” I said, “I'm going to England.”

“Ah, of course, that explains it. You're going to be presented in that hat. Miss Helen Shaw, one of the South African debutantes seen leaving Buckingham Palace after the presentation to the King and Queen yesterday afternoon. She is the daughter of Mr. George Shaw, for many years an official of the Albion-African Group.

“So you're going to England.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

I gestured with my head. “In the one next door. The
Pretoria Castle.
Sails on Monday.”

“Mine sails Saturday. What's today, Thursday?—Come on, Helen, you don't want to hang about here, do you? I can hardly offer to show you over the
Ostia,
you've seen her from port to starboard, bow to prow. Let's go and have some tea.”

Now I sat down on the bunk and watched him, while he scooped the trickle of cold water from the tap over his face, found a stiff, starched towel with
Ostia
embroidered in red along the border, put on a tie and a linen jacket that was hanging behind the door. “Who told you I'd be here?” “Well, Isa, in a way. She said you were going to Israel in an Italian ship.” And talking we went along the passages and up out into the sun of the deck in no time at all, now that I had someone to show me the way. The officer at the top of the companionway watched us go down, as moodily as he had seen me come up.

As we turned onto the dock, Joel said to me: “You are alone, here—Helen?” And I said, my face hidden by the hat: “Oh, yes, quite alone.”

We spent an afternoon of happy inconsequence. Our long easy intimacy in the past, unconnected—because we had seen each other so rarely and then not at all, during the past eighteen months—with that period of my life which lay so perilously close behind me; the pleasant anonymity of a background strange to both; the complete severance of the present from the burden of the future, because, for both of us, a journey intervened—made us gay. We sat drinking tea in the curiously decorous atmosphere of the tearoom of a Durban department store, and then we walked slowly, and with many stops to look at things—I remember a bookshop, a florist's window magnificently splotched with poinsettias, a native curio shop hung with masks from the Congo, and Zulu shields—all the way down West Street to the sea, and the Marine Parade, where my hotel was. We discussed each other's plans, mine for England and Europe, his for Israel, but in a purely practical fashion; we did not touch upon reasons or motives, his or mine.

When we sat on the hotel veranda drinking beer to cool ourselves, I said to him: “Stay and have dinner with me. Just as you are. There's no need to go back to the ship.” But he wanted to shower and change, and he insisted on going. We got the Indian
page to call a taxi for him, and he promised to be back within an hour. I leaned on the still-warm stone of the balustrade, calling after him: “Be quick, if you're a resident you can get whisky between six and eight!”—and smiled, because I knew (it was a trait that puzzled me often in young Jews, who all exhibited in some form or another the loneliness of a rejected people, and who, of all people, one should think would be glad of the comradely bolster of alcohol) that he did not care whether he drank water or whisky, and since he knew neither the pleasure nor the need of it, probably did not know, either, that at that time it was under import control and extremely difficult to get.

Because I was to have a visitor, I was at once no longer a stranger to the hotel. I told the maître d'hôtel I should be wanting a table for two, and I bathed and dressed quickly.

But while I was putting the finishing touches to my dress I realized something that put an edge of self-consciousness on my pleasure. I was assuming a right to Joel's time and attention which would follow from a similar claim on his behalf for mine in the normal course of our lives in Johannesburg. But this had not been so. We had not seen each other; I had let him drop out of my life when it suited me—now when it suited me to take him back into it again, I calmly did so. I remembered the acute shame that had swept over me that day outside the theater booking office, when I had met him and realized that I had forgotten his graduation.

When he came into the lounge where I was sitting waiting for him, I was subdued. He came the length of the room between tables and flowers and people with the air of quiet, steady warmth about which he did not know and which was peculiarly his; he is the only person I have ever known who was entirely without self-consciousness, when he entered a room he saw only the person for whom he was making, did not feel, as people like Paul and I did, the eyes of others like vibrating tendrils.

I smiled and patted the chair beside me, and he sank into it with a little flourish of relief, but I saw in his face that he sensed the drop in my mood. Pouring soda into our drinks, he said: “And why are you looking at me so reproachfully?”

“Am I? Well, I don't mean to. Thank you—” I took my glass from him. And when I had made the gesture of taking a sip, I said: “At least, the reproach wasn't meant for you. Joel, I've been thinking, while I was upstairs—”

“Yes, Helen,” he prompted me, gently attentive. He was sitting back with his glass in his hand, in no hurry to drink.

For a moment I looked back into his inquiring eyes in discomfiture. “I've got an awful nerve. I greeted you this afternoon as if nothing had ever happened. I mean here I am, taking up your time as if it belonged to me. Just as if nothing had ever happened. I realized it suddenly while I was dressing—here I am, gaily dressing because you're coming to eat with me—” (As I spoke I seemed to see in his eyes the recognition of the odd little verbal taboos which had overlaid my own way of expressing myself, and of which, perhaps, I should never be able to rid myself now, though the desire for emulation which had led me to assume them had lost its gods; in the circles of John and Jenny the middle-class indulgence of a regular nightly meal cooked and served by a servant was given the romantic aestheticism of wine and garlic salad in a Left Bank café and the decent frugality of a workman's bread and cheese by the simple expedient of never saying “come to dinner” but “come and eat with us.”)