The Lying Days

Chapter 5

I had a new bathing suit.

It lay on the bed in my room; “Why shouldn’t Nell go down to Alice’s place?” my father surprised himself by saying. My mother looked from one to the other: “—Well, I don’t know, would she like it—?”

I could not conjure up in myself a projection into any single moment — a meal, the sight of the sea, Mrs. Koch smiling from a veranda — ready to exist on a little farm on the South Coast of Natal. We had been invited many times; we had never gone. Alice Koch was my mother’s old friend, corresponded with regularly, but materializing only every two or three years, when she would telephone to say that she had arrived in Johannesburg on holiday, and would come out to the Mine to spend a week end or a day. I had always read her letters, and reading them, was easy with her; yet when she got out at the station she was different; a big woman, much older than my mother, with a gentle smile and a faint, refined dew of agitation touching cool from her upper lip as you kissed her. Once — dim with sand castles and a doll that had had its feet trailed in the edge of the water — there was the memory of staying at a place near where Mrs. Koch had lived and Mrs. Koch had come with her two daughters and their children to sit with us on a beach.

“On her own … would she …? — I couldn’t go.” Mother patted the yellow bathing suit.

“Oh, yes.” I looked up quickly; it seemed as if there had never been a pause. “I want to go; I’ll go.”

I was seventeen and I had been a year out of school. The year had been spent working at a temporary job in my father’s office; the Secretary’s daughter in the Secretary’s office of Atherton Mine.

The train put me down on the siding paved with coal grit and blew back a confetti of smuts as it screeched off slowly over the brilliance of rails. When I took my hand from my eyes I was receding rapidly, alone on the glittering black dust. With a honk the train was gone.

A double white sign, converging on a V, said, KATEMBI RIVER, 17 ft. above sea level, 57½ miles to Durban. A tin shed, delicately eroded by rust a foot up from the ground, said, GOODS. It was empty. At the end of the strip of coal grit, like a short carpet abruptly rolled, thick bush green and black green and hard with light reached up and closed in high, singing with hot intimacy far within and dead still to the eye.

A tremendous heat watched everything.

I was conscious of the feel of the sea on my left cheek, where it bumped and exploded white below the roll of green that fell away from that side of the track, but I was still as a lizard, breathing, it seemed, shallower even than the air, not moving my eyes.

The shaking of a human hand unseen broke the authority of the bush as it swayed with the passage of human bodies passing down a grudging pathway I could not see; and the quiet buzzle of two people talking that suggests to the stranger they are preparing to meet a side of themselves he will never know, that will have disappeared in hiding by the time they come forward on a smile, gave a queer misbeat to my heart. I was hot, a little sweat came out and clung my hair to my forehead as I urged smiling to meet them; Mrs. Koch pointing and shaking her head beneath a checked parasol, her feet in men’s sandals, and a man with her.

“—My dear! I’m so sorry … shame … what a way to arrive. …” The soft, damp kiss, the Eau-de-Cologne. I laughed, shaking my head, hotter, unbearably hot now in the relief of the moment of greeting over. The man — it was a young man, I now saw, in a sort of half-uniform, khaki shorts and an army shirt and sandals, but no cap — wore glasses and stood back looking down at us with the polite smile of a stranger watching emotion which he does not share. The smile pulled the corners of his mouth down and in a little. “It was Ludi, he would stop by at the old Plasketts’ on the way to say hullo — oh, there was plenty of time. I am so sorry. … What will your mother think of us?”—Her son, of course; with the German name; the guilty smile of nonrecognition faded comfortably on my face.

In the gaiety of arrival, exchanging questions we did not wait for each other to answer, we trudged up the steep pathway with cinders grinding away under our feet, a hand up to fend off the bush. The young man came up behind, with the luggage. The three of us were packed into the front of an old faded car and he drove away up and down a steep stony road that dipped now between flat-roofed trees where creepers dropped screens over bush secretive with a hidden trickle of stream, now through a cutting — black ooze and wet rock with a bunch of tough grasses stuffed in here and there as if to staunch the wound — rose and turned and discovered the river away below on the left and the sugar cane. As I talked to Mrs. Koch, my elbow crooked on the open window felt the pull of the sun and the sudden warm wet blow of the river. The river was drawn in a brown hank, shiny like the sheath of a muscle, through the soft hills of cane; one against the other they were folded, soft with deep cane, flattened like fur by the wind, down, silver-pale, up, green; sage and brilliant as the sun blew across.

The cane sang on either side of the road. We could not see beyond it. It was tall as a man and thick as tall grass to an ant. “Phew …,” said Mrs. Koch at the still heat, as if it were something she could never meet without faint astonishment. She moved her warm bulk to take out a small handkerchief and touch her cheek beneath her eyes, with the movement of wiping away tears. Ludi moved up a little, to give us more room; it was as if, although he did not speak, it was a gesture of having said something, allowing him to remain comfortably silent outside our conversation.

It was extraordinarily easy to talk to Mrs. Koch. She was the woman of the letters, the “Affectionately, my dear, Alice Koch,” sitting fat and comfortable with her feet in sandals and the little piece of cambric damply waving Eau-de-Cologne. I got out of the car before the white veranda faintly giddy with journey, smiling the mild happiness of having bridged space. It was all right; unknowing, the decision was made for me, and in my favor; the alternative that waits at all destinations — inescapable, a face in the crowd at the dock or the station you cannot avoid: the desolation of arrival — was not there for me. Unknowing of my escape, innocent even of relief, I stood laughing at my unsteadiness, seeing Black-eyed Susan embroidering the old veranda like gay, crude wool-work, ants trailing down a crumbling step—. I shut my eyes and opened them; two bushes that cast their shape again in pale fallen flowers instead of shade, palms on the breast of lawn cut out against the far-off drop of the river, the cane. Haze and glitter; the river looped through the arched body of a bridge. And there, there was the sea, stretching away, smeared off only into the sky.

In the house Mrs. Koch had prepared my room for me, and left me alone. There was no pressure, no effort demanded of me; I stood at the window in a pause between the open suitcase and the open wardrobe with a misty mirror, feeling the beat of the train in my blood, the cessation of the train’s noise in my ears. There was a withdrawal of sound like the tidal silence pulling away at the touch of a spiral shell to one’s ear; the sound of the sea.

The next day, the holiday did not begin because it rained. It seemed impossible, in the face of the existence of yesterday, blinding with brightness, that it should be raining. Yesterday nothing could be believed in but sun; today there was nothing but rain. I waited around the house with Mrs. Koch, getting to know the regarding stare of new rooms worn old long before I had ever come to them. I sat on the faded sofa on whose rubbed arms my hands now rested; groping for a hairpin, saw the strip of clear-printed design that lived on untouched down the hidden fold of the seat. I talked in the kitchen with Mrs. Koch while she made a cake, played with a rearrangement of the flowers on the back stoep. There were cats under my feet, dried-up saucers of milk they disdained. Three green budgereegahs chattered foolishly in a little cage with rolled-up blinds.

Ludi was gone all day, fishing in the rain. I stood at the window, watching it come down; if you turned away it did not exist, it was quite soundless. You could only know it was there if you looked, and saw it falling, falling, without the sound of falling. The garden and the sea were a flash, perhaps seen yesterday, no more permanent than scenes turned toward me, then away, along the railway line. The sight had not been grasped sufficiently to exist for me somewhere beneath the rain. “He’s only got three weeks, so he’ll fish in any weather,” said Mrs. Koch, smiling for him. Her voice hung about the most trivial mention of her son with a gentle, unashamed expansion of love. Just as she spoke with emotion over the old photograph albums which she brought out to show to me, waiting for the expected face, the group of her dead husband, some friends, a frowning tall girl who she said was my mother at a picnic; faces shying from a long-set light of the sun.

Mrs. Koch did not attempt to “understand young people”; she did not apologize for her views or preferences. But it also never occurred to her to fear loss of dignity in showing that she felt, that she cared, that she had not the detachment of her years. I was drawn to her because she gave access to herself in a way that I did not know anyone ever did. Tears were embarrassments swallowed back, stalked out of the room, love was private (my parents and I had stopped kissing each other except on birthdays); yet tears were bright in Mrs. Koch’s eyes and one could still look at her. That same morning she had moved Ludi’s military cap where it lay in the kitchen; “I have been so happy here with him. And it was what he liked.” And she smiled and in the middle of the morning, in the middle of peeling fruit, tears had run down her cheeks, taking their place and their moment.

It rained again often, muffling up from the hills over the clear sky suddenly after a blazing morning; but it was no longer a soft restraint holding me back from the holiday. I went about in it, warm, soft, drenching where the ribbon grasses and the stiff lace bracken swept their dripping brushes past my legs, tingling lightly into my cheeks and eyes like tiny bubbles breaking when my face turned against it. Mrs. Koch and I trudged down to the store through the heavy mud that formed so quickly, and broke away in soggy runnels from the mixture of sea sand everywhere in the soil. Somebody stopped and gave us a lift, and in the store, that smelled of mice and millet and tobacco, we had tea with the storekeeper and his wife, a retired British army major with the pointlessly handsome face of a man of sixty left over from his days in uniform.

On the way back we met Ludi coming along the road from Plasketts’ without a coat, barefoot, soaked through, and he scolded us for being out. I knew that it was his mother for whom he was concerned, but he was always kind, and the concern was accepted for me, too. Then the rain ceased; suddenly, in a hollow, the grass, the air, the undergrowth steamed. Far behind grayness, the sun showed yellow as a fog lamp. We were steaming inside our clothes; threw off raincoats, the scarves enveloping our heads. Ludi, with his wet shorts clinging strongly to his buttocks, said: “Well, what can I do …?” And smiling wryly, like a father being imposed upon by children, loaded himself with our wraps. A bird called out somewhere as if the day were beginning over; some white, delicate flowers splashed all over common dark bushes let go their sweet breath again.

But mostly the sun shone, only the sun existed. In the mornings just after breakfast, the three of us pottered about the garden and the chicken houses. Ludi and his mother had the endless little consultations, the need to draw each other’s attention to this detail or that, the need even merely to remark one to the other what the other already thought or well knew, that people have who have long had a life in common and now live apart. Before Ludi had joined the army, he had been running some sort of little chicken farm; for five or six years after he had left school he had apparently had jobs of various kinds in various places — sometimes Mrs. Koch would say: When you were in Johannesburg … but you remember, it was when you were at Klerksdorp — always returning intermittently to the coast and his mother. What he had done during those months, it was difficult to say. Then there had been the idea of the chicken farm, and Mrs. Koch had bought the chickens and the necessary equipment and Ludi had built the runs and the troughs and the perches and the incubation shed by himself, in his own time. Whether the chicken farming was ever a success or not, it was again difficult to say; now Ludi was in the army, and most of the chickens had been sold, or had died, because Mrs. Koch could not look after them by herself.

Yet Ludi spent a great deal of time down at the chicken houses. He was mending the sagging wires, and dismantling and reassembling the incubator, which had deteriorated in some way through lack of use. The few fowls that were left wandered about unscientifically round his squatting figure. The morning sun, testing out its mounting power, frizzled brightness on his bright gold hair, and now and then he paused, frowning, took off his glasses and put them back. He looked strange without his glasses; someone else. Mrs. Koch came to him and went away again, her voice trailing off as she went over to feel the pawpaws pendulous from the finely engraved totem of a young palm but still green, then rising to a question as she returned and stood with her hand on her hip, drawing away from the sun. “But what happens to them, I’d like to know. I have a look at them and they’re green. And then when I come back in a day or two when they should be ripe, they’re gone. Now there are more green ones getting ready. But I never seem to see them ripen.”

“Hey, Matthew, the missus wants to know why the pawpaws don’t get ripe—” Ludi screwed his eyes up weak against the sun, calling to the native who was trailing slowly across the grass to an outhouse, carrying a rusty tin bath. “I didn’t see it,” said the servant, continuing.

Ludi squatted wider, giving his blunt burned hand a steadier grip on the screwdriver. Without lifting his reddened neck, he laughed. “Matthew!”

The native slowly lowered the bath and stopped, regarding us. He stood there in the sun.

The screwdriver slipped; Ludi grunted and tried again. His mother bent over a little, with the anxious grimace of someone who does not know what it is that is being attempted and proving difficult.

“I myself I never see those pawpaw,” said Matthew.

“Matthew!” Ludi shook his head.

The native burst into laughter, shaking his head, stopping to gasp, swinging up the bath in a mirror-flash, walking on in a flurry of culpable innocence. He laughed back at Ludi; Ludi laughed after him.

Ludi had gone into the incubation house. There was the sound of something being wrenched away. “Mother, did Plasketts ever take those brackets they asked for? There were two, I think, in the garage. Or in the shed.” “Which were they, dear—?” and she was in the dark doorway after him. I went back to the house to write a letter; I had written one when I arrived, had one from home. I went onto the veranda, sat down on the old green-painted chair at the shaky wicker table. I sat pulling at a fraying braid on the table top, my eyes half-closed at the glare that made a bright palpable mist of the space climbing up from the sea. The cane was so live a green that it seemed to be growing visibly; the river a twist of metallic light. Blossoms dropped silently from the frangipani trees. I sat there waving my bare foot.

It was impossible to write the letter; did it exist, a here and there, at this same morning? What could I write to the Mine, to the house with the lights on, the red haze of hair bending over the letter, handing it across the vegetable dishes. For one second I smelled the cold brick of the passage at the Mine offices. But it was not enough to create the existence of the Mine, to make it possible at the other end of a space of which this was at one end.

“Are you finding it too quiet? — I hope not. I know there isn’t much life for young people there, but the sea and …”

An ugly crawling creature (the old house was alive with such creatures, its own and those of the undergrowth) came out the rotting crevice of the table and ran across my mother’s letter and the open writing pad. I went slithering my bare soles over the steps down to the grass.

Mrs. Koch did not normally go to the beach except at week ends or to accompany friends, but now she went with me most mornings. Ludi drove us down in the old car and left us to settle ourselves up on the dunes where the bush leaned a little shade and the sand was powder-soft and spiked with bits of leaf and twig; Mrs. Koch liked to sit there, with a sunshade over her legs and her shoes off. Then Ludi took his fishing rod and the stained canvas bag high with bait and was gone away up the beach, the jogging walk smaller and smaller, the old khaki shirt waving some signal of its own as a whip of breeze from the sea animated its loose tails; then gone round the rocks, slid in, it seemed, as if the cool smooth solidities had parted, like a stage-set, and closed behind him. If one could see, of course, there he would be, on the other side of the rocks, a khaki mark like a punctuation, drawing across the sands on the other side, and so on, and round the next bend, and the next, until he reached wherever his fishing ground might be.

The rocks held the scallop of beach. Mrs. Koch brought mending or a piece of knitting for one of the grandchildren; I had a book. We talked, but our words were tiny sounds lost in the space of the beach and the sea and the air; phrases torn fluttering rose to sound, sailed, fell to lost like the occasional birds lifted and dropped in the spaces of the air above the sea. We whispered in a great hall where our voices died away unechoed on the floor. We did not notice that we had stopped talking; Mrs. Koch knitted without looking, a fine sweat cooling her brow, her eyes absently retaining a look of gentle attention, as if she had forgotten that she was not listening to someone. Easily, like a satisfied dog that is so used to the limits of its own garden that it turns at the open gate and automatically goes back up the same path down which it has just trotted, her mind quietly rounded on the beach and the questioning of the silence and went again to examine the small businesses of her daily life.

In silence I got up and wandered down toward the sea. The sand was coarser, yellower; then here, where the tide had smoothed and smoothed it, spreading one layer evenly and firmly down over another, it dazzled with its cleanness, and the hardness of it thudded through my heels to my ears like the beat of my own heart in the heat. A thin film of water spread out to my feet; the sea touched me.

Sometimes I lay, the sharp bones of my hips meeting only the hardness of the sand, the sun puckering my skin. My eyes closed, I lost sense of which side the sea was, which side the land, and seemed to be alive only within my own body, beating with the heat. Water came with the rising tide, gentle and shocking. I jumped up with the pattern of the sand facets like the marks of rough bedclothes on my legs and cheek. Sometimes I went over to the rocks and dipped my hands in the lukewarm pools. Some of the rocks bristled with mussels and barnacles which agonized my feet; others, smooth and black and layered, shone slightly greasy with salt. Red-brown ones were dry and matt, swirled out into curves and hollows by the sea. They were warm and alive, like flesh. I sat back in an armchair of stone, resting the still-white undersides of my arms on the warmth. Sweat softened the hair in my armpits, and suddenly, across the scent of the wind and the sea, I was conscious of the smell of my own body.

I did not talk much to Ludi and yet between the three of us, Mrs. Koch and Ludi and myself, there was a sense of rest and familiarity when we sat together in the living room in the evenings. Perhaps it came partly from a physical tiredness, the tiredness of the muscle, the sun. Ludi in the white shorts and shirt that were his concession to dressing for dinner, still barelegged and wearing old sandshoes, lay on the divan and read, now and then saying something teasing to us, treating us as if we were of an age, seeing in his mother the heart of the young woman which had stayed, like a plant taken from the climate of its growth, static, since the time when his father had left her many years before. He had standards of his own, this Ludi, and the barriers of youth or age were artificial to him because he knew, as easily as the blind know the shape of things beneath the exterior they do not see, the secret contour of the self. Perhaps that was why the human exterior, the faces of the people he knew, interested him so little. He did not seem to know what people looked like; once I had mentioned meeting at the Post Office an old gentleman who I thought might be Dr. Patterson, a friend of the Koches’, and I asked Ludi whether Dr. Patterson was a fairish man with a large nose. He hardly seemed to know, and was a little irritated at my incredulity at his lack of observation. Yet places, beaches and rivers and the sea, he saw with all the sensuous intensity with which one might regard a beloved face. All the core of his human intimacy seemed, apart from his mother, to be centered in the large impersonal world of the natural, which in itself surely negates all intimacy; in its space and vastness and terrifying age, shakes off the little tentative human grasp as a leaf is dropped in the wind.

I felt this in the form of a kind of uneasy bewilderment that now and then rose up like a barrier of language between myself and the young man. I could not fit him into the inherited categories of my child’s experience, and this made me obscurely anxious. … Two days before his leave was up I was alone with him for perhaps only the second or third time since I had arrived. We walked into the village together on a dull afternoon to get our hair cut and he said to me suddenly on the way back: “I suppose you’re going to go back and live there? — That life on the Mine is the narrowest, most mechanical, unrewarding existence you could think of in any nightmare.”

I was so surprised, shocked, that I stammered as if I had been caught out in some reprehensible act. “Well, Ludi, of course. I mean I live there—!”

He shook his head, walking on.

I felt indignant and unhappy at the same time. “I’ve always lived on the Mine. — I know you don’t like towns, you hated working underground, you like to be at the sea, who wouldn’t—” But even as I said it I was aware that no one I knew would dream of wanting to live buried away on the South Coast, not working. Why? It was an existence at once desirable because of its strangeness, yet in some way shameful.

He made a noise of disgust. “Grubbing under the earth in the dark to produce something entirely useless, and coming up after eight hours to take your place in the damned cast-iron sacred hierarchy of the Mine, grinning and bowing all the way up to the godly Manager on top, and being grinned and bowed at by everyone below you — not that there ever was anyone below me, except the blacks and it’s no privilege to sit on them since anyone can.”

“Oh, Ludi I laughed. He laughed, too, his wry smile with the corners of his mouth turning down.

“You drink in the pubs together and you play tennis on Saturdays together and you go to dances organized by the ladies. You live by courtesy of the Mine, for the Mine, in the Mine. And to hell with Jack so long as I’m all right, so long as my promotion’s coming. And I’ll grin at the Underground Manager and I’ll slap the shift boss on the back—”

“But what are you going to do?” He had admitted me to a plane of adulthood that released the boldness to ask something I had wondered in silence.

For once he turned to look at me, and it was with the patient smile that expects no comprehension, knows that a familiar barrier has been reached. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to ‘get on.’ I’m happy where I am. All I want is the war to end so that I can get back here.”

“Shall you start up the chicken farm again?”

“It doesn’t much matter. Any sort of job would do so long as it brings in fifteen or twenty pounds a month. Just so’s mother and I can manage. She’s got a small income of her own.”

I was embarrassed by my own reaction. I knew that in my face and my silence I showed a deep sense of shock and a kind of disbelief that timidly tried to temper it. A struggle was set up in me; dimly I felt that the man acted according to some other law I did not know, and yet at the same time the law of my mother, the law of the people among whom I lived and by which I myself was beginning to live, made him outcast, a waster, a loafer, ambitionless; to be sighed over more than blamed, perhaps, like Pat Moodie, the son of one of the officials who had “wasted all his opportunities” and taken to drink. The phrases of failure came to my mind in response to the situation, because I had no others to fit it.

“No, thank you”—his voice was firm and serene—“I don’t want it. I don’t want the nice little job or the nice little family or the dreary little town or the petty little people. It doesn’t interest me”—he was looking at me rather shortsightedly through his glasses; he obviously did not expect or care for an answer or opinion from me—“and I have no desire whatever to get on with anything at all except living down here. — You should see the Pondoland Coast, you know, Helen. You people’ve no idea. … I go down there for a week or so to fish — some tinned stuff and my tackle, and sleep on the beaches. There are coral reefs there, under the deep water … you’ve never seen anything like it. Like some buried city of pink marble. And the fish!”

I looked at him curiously as he pushed a way for me through the wet bracken. Rain brushed off along the bleached hair on his red-brown arms, his bare legs had a curiously impersonal muscular beauty that would have astonished him if anyone had spoken of it: somehow his personal physical attributes existed in spite of him rather than as a conscious part of him, as a plant, being in its function of turning oxygen to sap, does not participate in the beauty of the flower which results and is blooming somewhere on it.

I tried to think of him in one of my father’s gray suits, in a shirt with arm bands to hold up the sleeves, like the men wore at the office. It did not seem possible. Suddenly the absurdity of it pleased me very much; I was laughing at the thought of the clerks at the office.

He was scrambling ahead of me up a bank and he half-turned at the sound. His hand went to the bright shaven hair at the nape of his neck. “It’s a bit of a mess, I suppose …?” he said, smiling. I shook my head, I was too out of breath to speak. “Mine too,” I gasped, catching up with him. The wet, the slither of the grass beneath our feet, and the sudden darkening of the air as the day ended unseen behind a muffling of cloud, filled us both with a kind of intoxication of energy. We tore home, ignoring the paths. I plunged with the child’s conscious craziness into every difficulty I could find, madly excited at myself. Sometimes I could not speak at all, but just stood, pointing at him and laughing.

The ten years between us were forgotten.

Ludi left on Saturday morning. In the day and a half between, I had felt rather than thought that he might say he would write to me. I kept out of the way of the mother and son almost unconsciously, leaving them to draw together before the fresh parting or, perhaps as unconsciously, they excluded me; but I felt all the time that the natural moment would arise when the only possible thing to say would be: I shall drop you a line when I get a chance, just to let you know what it’s like. Or: But of course you’ll tell me that when you write.

And it did seem to me that the moment came again and again, but Ludi smiled into the pause and did not even know that it was his. I watched this with the quiet, gradual disappointment of a child who has presumed too far upon the apparent understanding of a grownup for an imaginative game: suddenly, the ageless understanding being becomes simply an adult indulgently regarding rather than participating, and nothing, no dissimulation or protest, can deflect the child’s cold steady intuition of the fact. For the first time since I had left home, I felt lonely, but it was not for my mother and father or anything that I had left, but rather for something that I had not yet had, but that I believed was to come: a time of special intimate gaiety and friendship with some vague companion composed purely of an imaginative ideal of youth — an ideal that I would never formulate now, and that only later, when it had gone, would recognize as having existed all the time unnoticed in myself, because it was nothing concrete, but just the dreams, the uncertainty, the aspiration itself.

When Ludi had gone we came back to the house in a gentle companionable mood and sank into a kind of lull of feminine comfortableness; Mrs. Koch took up the curtains she had been making before her son came home, and the tea, set out with the one cracked cup that Matthew never failed to give us, was waiting in the living room. I lay reading with the damp cottony smell of the chintz cushion under my elbows and could not be bothered to go down to the sea. When it got cooler late in the afternoon, we went for a walk, at Mrs. Koch’s sedate pace, and on the flattest part of the road. If the obverse side of her son’s departure was the sharpness of love and lack, the reverse side was a certain relieved flatness, as if her body protested at the emotional tension of his temporary presence and found resignation more suited to its slowing vitalities.

We were having supper with the radio tuned in over-loudly to the B.B.C, news — the crackling, cultured voice talking of bombs and burning towns was an invariable accompaniment to the evening meal — when I thought I heard the slam of a car door outside, but did not remark upon it or even lift my head because the metallic monologue of the radio, so dehumanized by the great seas and skies that washed between, had the curious effect of making all immediate sounds seem far off and unreal. It was with the most dreamlike astonishment that I looked up from the white of the cloth and saw Ludi. He was closing the door behind himself, sagging from the shoulder with the weight of his kit in the other hand. For a moment I had a ridiculous start of guilt as if I had conjured him up. He smiled at me down his mouth and I saw that his cap, which he normally wore a little too far forward for my standards of attractiveness, was pushed up from his warm-looking forehead. I saw this as suddenly and distinctly as if a light had been turned on in a room that had waited ready in the dark.

All at once Mrs. Koch gave a little exclamation almost of dismay or annoyance, and then she was up and pushed the table away; he had her by the arm. “The bridge is down at Umkomaas. The rains last week, and it’s been slipping all the time, I suppose. We hung about and hung about, thinking—”

“You came back! Ludi! But what about your leave, won’t you get into trouble? Well, I can’t believe it!”

“The bridge is down. So what could I do? The trains aren’t running and I thought maybe I’d get a lift — but then it got late and I thought, what’s the use?”

They were both laughing, perhaps now because Mrs. Koch had seemed put out, and just to make sure he was really there, his mother had to ask him over again. “I can’t believe it.” This time he repeated the story with indignation, feeling in some way that although it could not be so in fact, the army, the hated regimentation that defeated itself again and again, was to blame. — After all, if it had not been for the army, he would not have had to be in a particular place at a particular time, and being prevented from getting there would not have mattered to him in the least.

While they were questioning and exclaiming, I stood up quite still in my place at the table, my napkin tight in my hand. Suddenly, like the moment after I had faced an examiner, a light shudder went over my neck and I began to tremble. The tighter I clenched the piece of linen the more my hand shook, and I could not control my bottom jaw. I was terrified they would notice me, and as the fear came so it attracted its object. Ludi gestured his mother’s attention toward me: “It’s taken away her appetite.”

As he spoke the trivial words, not even to me, the trembling lay down immediately inside me and an extraordinary happiness, utterly unspecific and somehow mindless, opened out in me. We gave Ludi supper; I moved about the room with a light confidence that came to me suddenly and for the first time, as if my body had slipped, between instant and instant, into the ease of balance, never to be unlearned, as a rider, clinging to the vertical insecurity of his bicycle, suddenly learns how and is easy between the supports of air and air. There was a family gaiety between the three of us that had never been between my parents and me; I was delighted with the timidity of Mrs. Koch’s response to the nearest that Ludi’s small dry humor could get to joking. They got quite excited discussing how long the unofficial extension of his leave could hope to last.

“I’ll get the incubator house fixed if I stay three days,” he said.

Mrs. Koch, with a conscious bold levity that made me want to touch her with affection, said: “Oh, to pot with the incubator. Matthew will do something to it.”

“You mean he’ll give it some thought — until my next leave.”

His mother was serious at once; her extraordinary gentleness toward all human beings made her suspect that the old servant’s feelings could be hurt by implied criticism, even out of his hearing. “Ludi, his sciatica’s got him bent double—”

We laughed at her, and soon she was laughing with us.

Ludi gathered up his kit with a gesture that closed the evening; always at some unexpected point he withdrew, firmly and without room for protest, into the preoccupation with a small task or a private commonplace errand of his own. If you followed him to his room, you would merely find him lying on his bed, reading, or tinkering with an improvement to his fishing tackle: yet he was withdrawn into the dignity of himself in these ordinary occupations as a sculptor or a scholar who, it is tacitly understood, will leave the company to rejoin the bright struggle that waits, as always, in the solitude at the top of the house. Like them, he was only loaned to other people; he must return to himself. His mother was long accustomed to this, but now nervousness made her trespass. She called, after a while, to his bedroom: “Ludi?”

His voice came, muffled as if he were pulling some clothes over his head. “I’m going for a swim.”

“But the tide’ll be right out—” she called, not wanting to let him go without a protest. We heard him padding down the passage with his steady, soft tread, like the tread of a native who is used to walking great distances. As he was going down the veranda steps, his mother suddenly opened the window and called after him, “Ludi! Why don’t you take Helen?”

He stood up to the window in the light. “Does she want to come? Of course.”

“She hasn’t been out all day.” Mrs. Koch was periodically seized with the fear that she neglected to entertain her young guest; then it seemed more important that she should arrange something for me to do than consult my wishes. I usually felt a little awkward if the plan involved Ludi, because I was afraid that I intruded on him, and that he felt he must agree out of a sense of duty. And often when he had been persuaded into some little jaunt, I had the feeling, disconcerting in a different way, that he was so little bothered by my presence that to have feared he might be was a piece of presumption, irritating and silly. Now he stood quite patiently in the window, waiting.

This time I was determined to show the decisiveness of an adult. “It’ll take me only a minute to change,” I questioned him.

Mrs. Koch shook her head. “No, you’re not going swimming at night. That’s all right for him. He knows how to look after himself in the sea.”

One did not argue with gentle Mrs. Koch. “Then I’m ready.” I smiled.

“—Then come on!” Ludi put both hands on the window sill.

Chapter 6

Lurching down the hills to the beach in the old car, I talked a great deal. The slight sense of adventure in the dark road and the attentive profile of the young man whom, sometimes, as now, I felt I knew very well (I imagined myself saying: Ludi Koch? Of course, he’s different when you know him. …) brought out in me a tendency to exaggerate and animate. Unconsciously I selected for him those anecdotes of the Mine and the town that presented certain aspects of the life as a little ridiculous, if not quite as reprehensible as he condemned it. There was even one story that showed my father as rather stuffy, rather circumscribed. … I could tell it with the child’s elderly amusement at the parent.

Then it seemed just as easy not to talk. We left the car and got down onto the dark beach giving short instructions to each other: Look out for that bush; all right now. … He disappeared into the dark.

I lay down on my back on the cool sand that held the cool of the night as it held the heat of the sun, deep down, far below the loose billowy surface, cool, cool all through. I kept the palm of my hand under my head to keep my hair free of sand, but soon I took my hand away and let the soft touch of my hair against my neck become indistinguishable from the touch of the sand. At first I was completely sunk in darkness. There was no sea, no earth, no sky. Even the sand I lay on was a tactile concept only. The sound of the sea was the flow of dark itself. Then, as I lay, a breaking wave turned back a glimmer of pale along the dark, and slowly, slowly, I made out a different, moving quality of the dark that was the sea. Flowing over his legs; I saw them undulating in the water dark, like fins that moved like fans. I might be lying on the air with the earth on top of me.

I did not know how long he was away. With nothing but the waves’ faint break in the darkness to measure the passing of time, I could not tell if it was ten minutes or half an hour, but suddenly he stepped into the enclosing dark about me and he was there, toweling his hair. A few drops of cold water shook from it onto my cheek. I sat up, and a faint slither of sand ran like a breeze down the back of my dress. I could hardly see him, yet he was there vigorously, his sharp breathing, the smell of damp towel, and as he bent, the fresh smell of khaki.

He said: “Where are you?”

“Here.”—I put up my hand, but he could not see it.

“Was it cold?”

“No. There’s a lot of seaweed about, tangling up your legs. Come—” he said.

I got up obediently. We began to walk slowly along the beach, quite far from the water, where the sand was dry and coldly heavy to walk in. All my being was concentrated in my left hand, which hung beside him as we walked. My whole body was poured into that hand as I waited for him to take it. It seemed to me that he must take it; I felt us walking up the beach together, with our hands clasped. In my head I listened and heard again him saying: “Come—”; so short, so intimate, and the strange pleasure of my obedience, as if the word itself drew me up out of the sand.

He began to talk, about the men with whom he lived in camp. He talked on and on. I answered yes or no: I was unable to listen, the way one cannot hear when one is preoccupied by distress of anger. He did not seem to notice. Now and then the uneven flow of the sand beneath our feet caused his shirt to brush my shoulder with the faint scratch of material; my hand, numb with the laxity of waiting, felt as if it had been jambed.

We had reached the lagoon, pouring silently down the channel it had cut for itself into the sea. “Shall we get back now?” he said and, with a little groan, lowered himself down to the sand; he squatted with his arms folded on his knees. I stood awkwardly, with what must have been an almost pettish attitude of offense innocently expressed in my stiff body. But as he made no move to get up, I sat down too, facing past the hump of his knees.

“But you know,” he said suddenly, as if it were the continuation of something we had discussed, “you’re really only a little girl. I wonder. I wonder if you are.” He took me by the elbows and drew me round, close against his knees and I saw his teeth, white for a moment, and knew that he had smiled. He enclosed my head and his knees in his arms and rocked them gently once or twice. The most suffocating joy took hold of me; I was terrified that he would stop, suddenly release me. So I kept as still as fear, my hands dangling against his shoes. He gave a curious sigh, as one who consents to something against his will. Then he bent to my face and lifted it with his own and kissed me, opening my tight pressing mouth, the child’s hard kiss with which I tried to express my eagerness as a woman. The idea of the kiss completely blocked out for me the physical sensation; I was intoxicated with the idea of Ludi kissing me, so that afterward it was the idea that I remembered, and not the feel of his lips. I buried my face on his knees again and the smell of khaki, of the ironed khaki drill of his trousers, came to me as the smell of love. … I remembered the Cluff brothers at the dance … the smell of khaki … my heart beat up at the excitement of contrasting myself then with myself at this moment.

Ludi was feeling gently down my bare arm, as if to find out how some curious thing was made.

“Well,” he said at last, “can’t you speak?”

“Ludi,” I asked, “do you really like me?”

Chapter 7

I do not know if I had ever been kissed before. Even if I had, it does not matter; it was as if it had never happened, the prim mouth of a frightened schoolboy dry on my lips, the social good-night kiss on the doorstep that would be smiled upon indulgently by Mine parents, the contact that was an end in itself, like a handshake. Now I lay in my bed in the high little room in Mrs. Koch’s house and kept my face away from the pillow because I wanted my lips free of any tactual distraction that might make it difficult for me to keep intact on my mouth the shape and sensation of Ludi’s kiss. I thought about it as something precious that had been shown to me; vivid, but withdrawn too quickly for me to be able to re-create every detail as my anxious memory willed. That anxious memory trembling eagerly to forget nothing; perhaps that is the beginning of desire, the end of a childhood? Wanting to remember becomes wanting: the recurring question that has no answer but its own eventual fading out into age, as it faded in from childhood.

Suddenly sleep, arbitrary, uncaring, melted my body away from me. I had just time to recognize myself going; and with only my mind still left to me, the idea of the kiss became complete in itself: I held it warmed in my heart as a child holds the imaginative world in the clasped body of a Teddy bear.

I woke late — by the standards of the Koch household — to a day of such heat that already by the time I had put on my clothes my heart was thumping with effort. Ludi was finishing a second cup of tea, chair half pushed away from the table. He was reading the paper, and on this, as on every other morning, his lifted head excused him from any further talk or attention. There was a whole small pawpaw on my plate instead of the usual segment scooped free of pips. I looked up to Mrs. Koch. “Matthew’s conscience offering,” she smiled. I cut it open; it was one of those with deep pink flesh and I knew it would have a special flavor, sharper, more perfumed than the yellow ones. The beautiful black pips beaded out under my spoon. I ate the whole fruit, very carefully, and it made me deeply hungry. Mrs. Koch went out to the kitchen to fetch my scrambled eggs and the toast Matthew was making for me.

Now. I turned my eyes slowly, as if their movement might have some equivalent of the creak of footsteps. His raised knee, crossed over the other, was in the line of my lowered vision, the slightly roughened skin of the kneecap, the big taut tendon underneath, the golden hairs over the calf muscle. He moved his toes a little inside the shabby sandshoe.

And now I lifted my head and looked at him, set face at an angle above the newspaper, thick bright lashes crowded round his narrowed eyes as he gave two quick blinks in succession, as though the print hurt them. The clean cheeks of a newly shaven blond man; a faint movement at the nostrils as he breathed deeply against the heat. The mouth. The thin mouth with the little uneven lift to the lip on the left side, the curious rim, like a raised line, outlining his lips which were the same color as his skin.

The same. Exactly the same. Just as he was yesterday, the day I arrived. He had all the mystery of a stranger, unimpaired. Now I looked at his hands. He must have sensed the silent movement of my eyes. Bending the spine of the newspaper, he looked up and said: “Want to go swimming?” I felt his smile rest on me. It seemed to me that the moment was too intimate for speech; whatever he said to me now was intimate to me, nothing could be casual or commonplace, because every word, every gesture, I deciphered in the knowledge of last night, that lay always in my hand like a key to a code. I only nodded, hard and surely. I could see him running, very fast, through the shallows to the breakers, cutting the water in a wake like mercurial wings at his ankles.

“Too hot for the beach?” said Ludi to his mother. She put down my egg. “This morning?” Her eyes rested vaguely here and there upon the table, looking for a decision. “I was supposed to help Mrs. Plaskett with her re-covering. … Certainly too hot to bend about pinning and sewing. I felt a little dizzy when I got up, as it is.” She was smiling weakly at me, reluctant, ready to be swayed. My heart beat so fast with anxiety that each mouthful presented an obstacle to my throat. I cut off great mouthfuls of egg and toast and forced them into my mouth. A smile of great shame and brightness was turned to her out of my anxiety. I said, terrified, “At least there’ll be a breeze on the beach.” She hesitated still. “You could sit under the funeral tree.”—It was a dark and mournful tree that hung unexpectedly over a dune—. Trembling with the guilt of my desire to prevent her, I could have gone on finding reasons for her to come. Ludi seemed to have lost interest. “Well, then, shall we risk it, dear?” she assented to him.

The mouthful of food passed from one side of my mouth to the other. I could not swallow it and did not know what to do with it. I wished they would go out of the room so that I could spit it out into my hand, chewed and distasteful. Tears of chagrin came up against the age of Mrs. Koch; the age and blindness — the waste! Old people to whom nothing matters anymore, so they do not know how, unknowingly and careless, they waste the precious time of the young. And she was waiting for me, looking at me fondly because it was settled we were all going to the beach together as we had done before. I found I was smiling back at her; a smile that came to my mouth like a blow.

And yet when we got to the beach I was suddenly happy again as I had been the previous evening at supper. On Ludi and me the sun flowed, pressed, crawled like the tickling feet of some hair-legged millipede where the salt water dried. When I lay in the water, attacked by long rough breakers I wanted the warmth of the sun, drawing me up through the surface of my streaming skin; when I lay in the sun, full of the sun as a ripening fruit, I wanted the dowse of the cool water. And so the whole morning, in and out, the sea and the sun, dark and glare, with a delight in the energy that powered me, a pleasure in the firm shudder of the tight burned flesh above my knees as I ran. I left my bathing cap in the sand and went into the sea without it. First the tips of my hair got wet and touched cold fingers on my shoulders. Then the swell, lightly rising up my back, passed over my head like the cool tongue of a great dog. The membrane of water split and parted on my knotted hair, running off; the thickness of it, near my scalp, was still dry. Then I sank myself head first into a towering breaker and the great cold hands of the sea thrust in beneath my hair and I came up shocked, gasping, blinded by the heavy bands of liquid hair that flowed down my face and clung round my neck.

Ludi said: “You’ll never get a comb through that when it’s dry.”

At once I was afraid he might think I was showing off. I said, with the self-conscious casualness of a lie, “I’ve done it often before. It’ll be all right after a shower.” Mrs. Koch had lain back with the paper over her face, and was not awake innocently to contradict me. A little later Ludi and I went into the sea together, and again I let my hair into the water, dipping and spreading it in a solitary game. He swam away out, only his head rising and lost, gone and there, out where the breakers ended and the sea really began, an element as solid in depth as the earth, a thick glassy blue earth. I played in the water and thought of Ludi swimming back to me: it seemed to me, as I imagined a woman in the complacency of marriage, that it was wonderful to think of him removed from me, simply because he would come back. I lay on the sand with my head sheltered in the darkness of my arms and imagined a life with Ludi, long dialogues between us, dialogues between myself and others about Ludi; Ludi talking to someone about me. And whether he was in the sea, beyond sight, or lying a foot away from me across the silence, and whether his mother was there, or if she had been left at home, it did not matter to me. Just as on a distant nod of acknowledgment there are people who can construct the history of a friendship, so that you are astonished to hear that so-and-so speaks of you by your Christian name, so I spun out of Ludi’s one gesture of recognition to me as a woman the entry into the whole adult world of relationships between men and women, as it existed in my imagination. In this world unbounded by time, commonplace, and the hazards of human behavior, with, in fact, the scope of innocence, Ludi existed for me in an exclusive, all-possessive love that made the Ludi suddenly seen as I opened my eyes — he was blowing the sea water out of his nose and his eyes above the handkerchief glistened with effort — unreal and momentarily unrecognizable, like meeting someone whose photograph you have long been accustomed to.

All day this dreamlike state of mind persisted, and with it a softening that seemed physical, a phenomenon in my warm sea-soaked body that made everything and everyone around me dear and sympathetic. All the angular reticences of adolescence were resolved in the simple fact that cannot be forewarned or explained: the discovery of love. With the irrational changeability of emotions which commanded me and took advantage of my inexperience, I felt a dramatic welling of tenderness toward Mrs. Koch; infinite patience with her elderliness (love was past for her, gone down like a sun that dazzles the eyes no more); the homely face and the curly gray hair, her freckled hands, even, had for me something of the fascination of a neglected shrine: she was Ludi’s mother. Excitement at the thought of the three of us, in the car, at table, could bring sudden tears to my eyes; the faint shine of sweat, like the glisten of a dusting of talcum, on the white inner skin of my elbow filled me with the swift, intoxicating thought of my being alive. In my room I studied my face, fixed my hair this way and that with fingers that trembled with eagerness for a result that might change me entirely — with the instinct that gives a flower the bright petals that invite the insect, chose clothes that showed my waist and the small shapes of my breasts. I took off shorts and put on a skirt because in the tight trousers the curve of my belly filled me with disgust. I made my own eyes heavy with the fumes of the perfume that was usually kept for special occasions, I wore a bracelet and painted my nails to please a man who never noticed clothes and intensely disliked the artificial. But he was a man and not a child, as I was, and I believe he saw not the pathetic little artifice of the means, but the complete naturalness of the end, which was the desire to please.

After lunch, Ludi suggested that we drive out to Cruden’s Beach for the afternoon — the stare of the sun was completely shut off by thick cloud, but the heat came through, muffled and still.

“You certainly are taking a holiday,” Mrs. Koch said, gently teasing, questioning, “How is it you’re deserting the fish for us?” And in a conspiracy of possessiveness that was sweet to me, I allied myself with her in banter. Yet when I went along the passage to get my bathing suit, I could not walk: I wanted to run, jump, my hands were inept with happiness as I assembled my things — Ludi was spending his time with me, it was me for whom he stayed. Mrs. Koch’s innocent teasing, her “way” as Ludi would call it, gave me the assurance I could have had no other way, independent and unsuspecting testimony of something that could be truly interpreted only by my key. With my delight there was astonishment; I was content to be allowed to be with him, to watch him. My feeling was still so much a cherished compound of the imagination; that the adored object should show signs of wishing to come to life and take part was more than I could imagine.

I sat between Mrs. Koch and Ludi in the old swaying car and it seemed that all the time there was some kind of machine running inside me. It had started up and now it was humming secretly all the time, unbeknown to anyone. I watched fascinated the dance of my lax hands, jolting against my lap with the shake of the car. Sometimes I felt I must keep my head down to hide the excitement of happiness that I could feel in my face. Yet my joy could not be confined; the sight of the sea round a bend, a little native on a calf’s back, brought a cry of pleasure I could not hold back. On the great beach there were two or three little gatherings of people, not holiday-makers but residents from the district, stranded in the uncertain boredom of their Sunday afternoon. Of course a hand went up, like a pennant, as we sank from the path to the sand. Mrs. Koch knew somebody: “Why Ludi … it’s the Leicesters, I think.”

Ludi and I lay face down in the sand a yard or two away from the women and children round a thermos flask — the squatting pattern, like a party game, that broke up and re-formed round Mrs. Koch sinking majestically to rest. Presently I got up and went back to the car to change into my bathing costume. It was difficult to get into, crouching on the floor, because it was still damp from morning. At last I wriggled and dragged my way into it and came out, feeling as if I were being held by tight clammy hands. From the short distance I could see Ludi, nearer the group now, explaining something with a rotating gesture of his hand as he talked. I walked over the sand and stood near him. He finished his explanation, saying: “… Yes, yes, that’s what I was saying. … It wouldn’t matter which way you put it on, so long as that axle arrangement was at the right angle.” He paused a moment and closed his teeth on a match, and I thought he would speak to me, but he had merely paused to ponder something and suddenly he had it: “Of course you must understand that a thing like this isn’t foolproof … not by any means. And I can’t really say unless I see it.” And then with a sudden confidence: “But it should be all right, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be perfectly all right.”—He had a way of putting his head on one side and turning one hand up.

I did not even wonder what it was they were talking about. I simply stood there. Now Ludi lifted his head round to me. “Again?”

The curious inability to speak came over me. I nodded hard, smiling.

“That child hasn’t been out the water the whole day,” said Mrs. Koch, interrupting her conversation with a little thin woman who was crocheting as she talked.

“Oh, well …,” said Ludi, getting out of his shorts. He gave a shrug and the half-lift of a smile to the man to whom he had been talking, as one acknowledges the necessity of pleasing a child. He pulled off his shirt and we went down toward the water together. But when the cool rill closed over our feet and the breath of the sea lifted to our faces, we began to walk along the water line. “You can’t go anywhere without mother finding a friend,” Ludi said. “Leicester’s got about as much mechanical sense as that shell. Stupidity of his questions—”

He seemed to lose interest in what he was saying. We walked right away up the beach and over some rocks and to another beach, a smaller one, where the sand was coarser and bright. I picked up a handful and saw that it was not sand at all, really, but the fragments of shells, pounded to a kind of meal by the pestle of the sea on a mortar of rocks. I showed it to Ludi and he looked at it and then blew it off my hand and dusted my hand and let it fall, in a gesture that suddenly seemed to me to express him, all that, in him, was exciting and wonderful to me. And just as the thought was bursting over me in a curious turmoil of feeling, a physical feeling, like a kind of blush, that I had never felt before, he put his hand down on the nape of my neck. It caught my hair back from my head so that I had to walk stiffly, and, noticing this, seriously and capably as if he were adjusting something he had made, he slid his hand under my hair to free it.

Our feet were hurt by the coarse shingle and we wandered to the rocks and sat with our feet in the pools. We talked about the sea and the life of the sea around us, and I picked the tiny conical towers of winkles off the rock with my fingernail and threw them back into the water. I said: “Let’s go in …?” He stretched himself backward against the rock and for answer, or rather as if he had forgotten to answer, looked at me slowly, smiling and yet not smiling, a look of regret, willing reluctance — a look that puzzled me. My greatest concern was to keep from him anything that might remind him that I was still a child, and so I did not want him to know that it puzzled me, that anything he did or said could puzzle me. I smiled as if in understanding. But the smile must have been too quick, too bright. He shook his head. I said: “Why do you do that over me?”—with the anxiousness which came up in me so quickly. He said with a little beckoning jerk of the chin: “Come here.” And very carefully I slid to my knees in the water, and arranged myself nearer to him and timidly put my hand, that jumped once, in reaction from the contact, on his knee. He kissed me as he had done the night before but this time I held my mouth slightly open though I kept very still. Then he breathed softly on my cheeks and kissed me again several times, and between the kisses I waited for him to kiss me again, while the tepid stagnant water of the pool touched with a terrible softness against the inner sides of my thighs. I think it was from the touch of the warm water that I suddenly stood up. Yet I wanted him to kiss me again, I wanted to prove to myself the reality of the feel of his lips, smooth and dry, the secret — so it seemed to me — of the deep, soft pressure of moisture, the astonishing warmth that, seeing his mouth move in talk, could never be guessed. I waited but, with the unexpectedness that quickened my pleasure with the continual threat of small disappointments, we went into the sea instead, though he did not swim away from me, but kept near, so that I could talk, shout to him, and we would bump against each other, strangely buoyant with water, each feeling the touch of the other’s limbs like the blunt contact of air-filled rubber shapes. There was a joy for me in tumbling about Ludi; I must have jumped around him like a puppy inviting play. But if he was not swimming seriously, he liked to float with his eyes closed, lonely on the water.

We stayed in too long — perhaps I had been in the sea too often altogether, that day — for when I came out and lay on the rough sand I had the feeling of air pressing inside me against my collarbones, and a swinging in my head. Water kept closing over my hearing and as I got up to shake it out of my ear, Ludi lifted my wet hair up on top of my head and pushed me to him with his elbow. He began to kiss me again. This time he took the whole of my mouth into the warm wet membrane of his mouth and his tongue came into my mouth and was looking for something; went everywhere, shockingly, pushing my tongue aside, fighting my cheeks, resisting my teeth. I was afraid and I did not want him to stop. I clung to the flesh behind his shoulder as if I were in danger of slipping down somewhere and as we stood together in the sultry afternoon the cool film of water dried from our bodies, and the warmth of our skin came through, into contact. Against the bare patch between the brassière and the shorts of my bathing suit I felt the steamy wet wool of his trunks and in the hollow of my neck, the slight liveness, as if it was capable of certain limited movement, of the hair on his breastbone. A drop of cold water fell from his hair onto my warm back, and another, and in the soft bed of my belly, as if it were growing there, I became conscious of another warmth, a warmth that grew from Ludi, from a center of warmth that came to life between his thighs. Nobody told me love was warm. Such warmth — I seemed to remember it, it seemed like something forgotten by me since I was born. Nobody told me it was warmth. How can it be understood, accepted, cold? I should have remembered — how? from where? — that it was warmth. All the fires were here, and the warmth of my mother’s bed long ago, and the deep heat of the sun.

Chapter 8

By Monday afternoon a railway bus service was circumventing the fallen bridge and carrying passengers to meet the train at the next station. But Ludi didn’t go. I seem to remember that it appeared to be Mrs. Koch’s idea that he should apply for an extension of leave; perhaps it was the one time in all his devotion to her that he made use of her gentle blindness of love for him? At any rate, he stayed. He telegraphed to his Commanding Officer and was granted an additional week, until the following Monday.

This is a simple statement of fact to relate now, but like all reports, all accuracy of happenings in terms of comings and goings, dates and times, its bareness is not the bare truth. The truth about humans is always inaccurate, never bare; the nearest one can get to it is to remember its confusion, and complicatedness. It was not a telegram sent and an answer forthcoming; nor three people waiting. I only remember that I, alone, not yet eighteen and a novice to anguish, waited for the granting of that week in a state of longing anxiety that has never, even in real sorrow, in the fall of bitterness, in despair, even, been equaled in all my life. Nothing is more serious than this apparently laughable lack of the sense of proportion in the young. With the command of emotions like a stock of dangerous drugs suddenly to hand, there is no knowing from experience how little or how much will do; one will pitifully scald one’s heart, over nothing. The nothing may be laughable, but the pain is not. For me those few days, granted or denied, were my share of life. Like a butterfly, who knows only one day, no other days seemed to exist for me.

Then the telegram came and I do not know how it was for Ludi and Mrs. Koch, but for me it was the silence that follows a maddening din. But just as one cannot enjoy the mere negative state of having no pain in the way in which one believes one shall while the pain is on, so I did not taste the pure joy of the telegram as the positive state I had imagined in longing. There was no time. There was scarcely time to dress, to eat, to sleep even. Certainly no time to read and no time to write letters. A letter came from my mother, but though I read it, quickly, line by line, I was vague about what she had said; it seemed an uninteresting letter. One from a girl on the Mine whom I had begged to remember to write to me, I somehow never did open; I came across it long afterward one day at home, where it lay in an old chocolate box with a perished bathing cap and a broken necklace, and tore it up because it reminded me with a pang of the place and time in which it should have been read. It was not that the days were fuller in the active sense than they had been all through my holiday; it was that they were full of Ludi. If I was in my bedroom, changing a dress, I did not know what he was doing at that moment. Perhaps he was about to go for a walk? Perhaps his mother might be asking him to do an errand for her. He might go without me. I shook myself into the dress, vanity and urgency warred in a moment I saw myself startlingly in the mirror, saw that my hair stood out too much — but flew down the passage pressing it anxiously with the flat of my palm. And there he would be, lying with one leg hanging down from the old sofa.

“Where you off to, miss?”

I would never admit I was tired, never admit I had had enough. It was never too early for me to get up, never so late that I would want to go to bed. At night when Mrs. Koch had gone to her room, Ludi and I went out onto the veranda and talked in the dark. As it got later, the talk got easier, until it seemed to me that if one could go on talking and talking as the night went deeper one would finally get to the other person; just before morning I would find what Ludi really was. … But instead I would find myself going quietly past the closed doors of the passage in the settled silence of one o’clock, lying at last in my bed with all the disparate images of him flashing in and out like lights in my mind. Half-sentences that did not connect, this mouth opening to say something I lost …? And then, before sleep, a sudden desire to move, to turn face down on my breasts in the bed. And all night, under my sleep, an alertness for morning.

In my absorption, as if I moved in a trance of excitement, my eyes always on a vision of Ludi, I did not see and so believed that Mrs. Koch did not see any change in the air between Ludi and me. But of course this was not possible. Where for the first part of my stay, he had come and gone with his customary self-sufficiency, now he spent his time at home and wherever he went, took me with him. Yet she accepted this shift of emphasis in the relationship between the three of us with evident placidity; I believe now that she considered it only natural that I should become a disciple of her worship for Ludi, and that, partly out of kindness, partly out of an acceptance of his due, Ludi would let me worship him. She did not fear any woman in what she knew of Ludi, so she certainly feared nothing from so young a girl, a child in comparison with him. I think she was touched by what she saw in me; as someone who has been in the faith a long time is moved by the ecstatic face of the new convert.

“Did you enjoy yourself, Nell?” she would say to me. — We went to the beach in the morning on our own; perhaps because we hadn’t asked her, or because she had forestalled this by saying that she could not come. We had walked a long way, past the rocks where no one but Ludi himself came to fish, and he had unfastened the halter of my wet bathing suit and peeled it down from my breasts. Neither he, nor anyone else, had ever touched or seen me before. I let him do this in stillness, looking down at myself as if we made the discovery together. I thought the skin of my breasts too white against the brown of my neck and arms; damp and cold from the sea they turned out away from each other and the left one trembled jerkily with the nervous beat of my heart beneath. Round the nipples tiny fragments of shell and pebble, worn membrane-thin by the water, stuck, shiny, pinkish-pearly to the skin. I lay so still I might have been waiting for a dagger. But Ludi, with a tone of delight that astonished me, smiled, “Look, the sea has been here. … You’re all gritty.”

— Yet I found it perfectly easy to answer Mrs. Koch: “Lovely. It wasn’t so windy today. We saw that sister of Mrs. Meintjes’ on the road. She expects them sometime on Thursday, because the old father’s been ill, and Davey had a cold, and goodness knows what else. …” It was only when I took off my bathing suit to dress in my room that I paused, catching sight of myself in the greenish, watery mirror that fronted the old wardrobe, and thought, not with shame but with a sense of unreality, of Mrs. Koch’s question that was not a question and my answer that was not an answer. And I understood that almost all of my life at home, on the Mine, had been like that, conducted on a surface of polite triviality that was insensitive to the real flow of life that was being experienced, underneath, all the time, by everybody. The fascination of the gap between the two came to me suddenly; I remembered, even out of childhood, expressions on faces, the tone of a commonplace sentence spoken unimportantly, the look of a person’s back as he left on some unquestioned excuse. It was not the knowledge of a secret life beneath so much as the maintenance of the unruffled surface itself that was exciting. Now it seemed to me that every casual explanation might, not conceal, but simply float above, like the reflection of the sky which the water shows rather than its own depths, happenings as strange and wordless as the time I had just spent with Ludi.

Since he had caressed me, Ludi’s physical presence overcame me like a blast of scent; the smell of his freshly ironed shirt sleeve, as he leaned across me at the table, made me forget what I was saying to Mrs. Koch; the pulse beating beneath the warm look of the skin on his neck where there was no beard held my eyes; the contact of his bare leg against mine in the car almost choked me as something opened up inside my body, pressing against my heart and opening, opening. When somebody spoke to him my heart pounded slowly, as if the significance of talking to him was something they could not understand as I did. When Matthew called Master Ludi! Master Lu-di! across the garden, I smiled alone with warm pleasure. And I began to watch anxiously every young woman who knew the Kochs and who came to the house or was visited or merely met with in the village. I began to be terribly afraid that someone else might feel Ludi’s presence as suffocatingly as I did. I ran over names anxiously in my mind. I even began to worry about the things he wore. I noticed that he had two pairs of hand-knitted socks, and remembered that Mrs. Koch had told me that the one piece of knitting she would never attempt was the knitting of socks. I went to the trouble of planning and rehearsing a whole dialogue in my mind that would lead up naturally to the name of the giver of the socks. When I put it into practice, Mrs. Koch’s innocent digressions led the conversation away from instead of toward the subject of the socks, and I was left with the question unanswered and suddenly more urgent than ever. Ludi was putting water in the car. I went straight out to him. I walked round the car once and then stopped.

“Ludi, who made those socks for you?”

“What socks?”

I faltered—“You know. Your mother’s darning them, a sort of light blue pair, and some gray ones.”

“Why, what’s wrong with them? Mrs. Plaskett made them for old Plaskett and they were too big. What’s wrong about them?”

But to my dismay I found that the sense of security is something that is constantly in danger in love. A day later, when Ludi was clearing out an ottoman full of old clothes, he came upon a pullover that he had evidently believed lost. He came into the kitchen, holding it up. “Look what’s here. …”

Mrs. Koch left the tap running. “Maud’s pull-over! But where was it?”—Then it reminded her, she rubbed her wet hands reproachfully down her apron—“Ludi, you should have gone over there, you know. They would so like to have seen you. You really should. …”

“No harm came to it.” Ludi was holding the pull-over up to the light, carefully. “Not even a moth. I told you that stuff was jolly good, Mother. Look, it’s been in that ottoman mixed up with a lot of rubbish for months, and there’s not even a pinhole.” Now they went on to argue about the name of the insecticide that had been used to spray the ottoman, and the pull-over was forgotten. Later I said, as if I had just remembered: “What did you do with that pullover you found, Ludi?”—It was discovered that it was lost all over again, because he’d put it down in the kitchen and left it there. Then Matthew found it in the linen basket.

“How all the old ladies look after you,” I said. “Everyone seems to contribute to your wardrobe.”

“She’s not an old lady.”

“But your mother said, ‘Maud’s pull-over.’ ”

He gave a little grunt, half-amusement, half-chary. “Maud Harmel made it for a bet. She was wild about horses, never did anything but ride all day. I used to kid her, and she bet me she could do anything I’d name that any woman could do — you know, at home, the kind of thing most women do—. So I said, just like that, make a pull-over — and forgot about it. Anyway, she made it and this is it. But didn’t you meet the Harmels from Munster—? Oh, no, of course you couldn’t — I was forgetting we haven’t been over to see them this time. …”

My heart always sank a little at the casualness with which he remembered or forgot the facts of my presence, sometimes not remembering how long I had been staying with them, and vague about the places I had seen and things I had done during the first part of my stay. By contrast, I was almost ashamed of the minuteness of detail with which I remembered everything pertaining to him. Now I was so downcast by the small fact of Ludi’s not knowing whether or not I had met a certain group of their friends, that my interest in the maker of the pull-over was eclipsed.

I was too young to want that which I loved to be human. Even in the attraction of Ludi’s body, I wanted the ideal rather than the real. My idea of love had come to me through the symbols, the kiss, the vow, the clasped hands, and this child’s belief was bewildered even while it enjoyed the realities of heat, membrane, touch and taste. Though tears of ecstasy came to my eyes while I waited for Ludi to touch my breasts and look upon them, naked, the thought that he might want to see the rest of my body filled me with shame. I felt he could not know of the little triangle of springy hair that showed up against my white groins with their pale blue veins. I was terrified that if he saw me, he might be repulsed. I would lie in the bath looking down at myself with distaste, wishing I might be like the women in the romantic paintings I had seen, whose dimpled stomachs simply gave way to the encroaching curve of thighs.

The one time Ludi ever embarrassed me was when I was lying on the beach with my arms above my head and he asked me, tenderly, as one asks a child why she has scratched her knees, why I shaved my armpits. The blood of acute embarrassment fanned over me. That he knew that I grew hair under my arms! I said, muffled: “Everybody does it.”

“Women are silly. They’re very attractive, those little soft tufts of hair. But of course you shave it, and make it coarse, like an old man’s beard.”

I was so astonished at this view that I sat up, curious. And it became one of those intimate conversations that make people feel a delicious surrender of inconsequential confidence, very exciting to someone who discovers for the first time this special kind of talk that is released by physical intimacy.

Sometimes when we found ourselves unexpectedly alone but certain to be rejoined by the life of the household at any moment (even the appearance of one of the cats, stalking silently in about its own business, made me start) we would stand together kissing as if at a leave-taking, and he would flatten his hands down my back into the notch of my waist and then cup them round my buttocks. At once I would flinch away, almost crossly put myself out of the way of his hands. But he was not offended. Here in the sweet closeness of intimacy the ten years between us opened up a gulf. I lowered my eyelids, mouth pulled accusingly. But he looked at me gently, with a short catch and release of the breath, smiling comfortingly at me, only wishing to take care not to offend. Clinging to his hard, fast-beating chest, he knew that with my eyes shut tight I could not take that ten-years’ dark jump in one leap. With gentle, sensuous selfishness, he only wished to enjoy me as far as I was ready to go, and sometimes, indeed, after a still, absorbed minute of passion when he knew nothing, he would come to himself quite abruptly simply to prevent me from following a blind instinct of desire which later I would not understand and might even disgust me.

On Saturday afternoon Mrs. Koch had to go to a wedding. Ludi was leaving on Monday morning, and she did not want to go, but the obligation of being a very old friend of the bride’s mother was something that made an excuse out of the question for her. It was the first week in February and the first day of February heat, and when we had driven her to the MacVies’, who were to take her with them to the ceremony at a village twenty miles inland, we drove slowly back to the farm through heat without air, a heat that now burned silent and intense as the heart of a fire after it has seized crackling on all life — trees, grass, flowers. The house was preoccupied with the heat, and as I knelt on the sofa at the window, I saw, outside in the stillness, the very tops of the trees tremble slowly in anticipation of rain. For the first time we lay down together alone in the house. At once I struggled up again, as if I were fussing about the bed of an invalid. “Wait a minute, let’s get the cushion—” Ludi let his head be arranged with tugs at the cushion which turned it this way and that. Then I half lay down, but immediately got up to take off my shoes. Then I lay down beside him, moving my toes and sighing with my eyes shut. After a moment of sinking pleasure, I rose to wakefulness and opened them to see him looking at me, smiling under half-closed lids. I wondered how I looked at that angle, my cheek pushed by the pillow, and put up my hand to judge the distortion. But my hand came into contact with his jaw and I felt the wonderful shock of a burning warmth other than my own flesh; I rolled over to bury my face in the angle between his neck and the cushion.

I had a night of my own in there. The warm sweetness of the skin felt but unseen, breathing out a slight moisture from the afternoon heat, was the essence, the surrender of Ludi himself in darkness. I seemed to sink into it, it lay upon my eyelids and my lips like warm rain, and I fell through it, falling, falling as one does in the mazy stratosphere between consciousness and sleep. Then I suddenly became aware of another presence; something else came and stood beside me in the darkness. The damp, cottony smell of the cushion in its thin, soft, faded cover beneath my cheek, musty from the climate and faintly musky with the impress of the cats’ round bodies, was sharp and sad to my nostrils, like the sudden cold blow across water in a landscape waiting for rain. Tears pricked at my eyes with strange pleasure. The smell of the cushion was the distillation of the friendly house, of our lives moving about there with the animals and old Matthew, of our voices lingering about the rooms, our calls in the garden unanswered by the glitter of the sea, the whole transience of this time that seemed my life but that would set me down at some point (although it would be soon, it did not seem so) and continue, far off and spiced, after I had awoken and gone.

I stirred and lifted my head into the room again, now filled with the queer presaging yellow light of a storm taking place unheard somewhere between us and the hidden sun. But Ludi was not looking at me now. His eyes, lids tender-looking from the protection of glasses, were closed and his whole face was beautiful with the tension of inward concentration. The corner of his mouth relaxed and then pressed back white against his cheek. He tightened his arms around me but I felt that for him I was not there. And the light, deepening to the greenish gold of wine or pools far down from the sun, lay solemnly on his cheek, but he merely flickered the thin skin of one eyelid, not able to notice what it was that passed over him. He began to kiss me in this concentration and to caress me, and soon I was in it too. It held me and I kissed him and gripped him back and I felt I was trying with all the gathered distress of my body to get somewhere, to reach something. He lay on top of me and he was heavy and that was what I wanted. I wanted him to be more heavy. He could not be heavy enough. I did not know what I wanted, but that I wanted. All at once, an astonishing sensation startled me. As if I had turned my head only in time to see something whipped away, my eyes flew open—. Ludi was gone, lifted away from me; he stood in the shadowy corner by the sofa, shapeless in rumpled clothes, pressing the palms of his hands up behind his ears.

I cried sharply: “Ludi! Come back!”

I lay hysterically rigid, exactly as he had left me.

“Ludi!”

He came slowly over, almost lumbering, and stood at the foot of the sofa. “I can’t,” he said, gently.

“Ludi,” I said, not moving, “it was such a wonderful — so wonderful just now. Come back.”

He shook his head. “It’s impossible,” looking down at me.

I must have him back. I must find out. I must go back and find what I was about to feel. I felt my eyes terribly wide open, fixed on his.

He sat down on the edge of the sofa and gently bent my bare foot in his hand. At the same time I loved him desperately and I resented the lax gentleness expressed in his touch. “It’s physically impossible,” he explained, gently, reluctantly. He stood up again, smiling at me. “I must go and fix myself up. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I watched him go out, so untidy, with a curious, disturbed look at the back of his hair, and as I lay, not waiting, but simply lying, my body slowly let go. Now I became conscious of a need to move my leg to another position, and, beyond my slow, deep breathing, heard that it was raining. It must have been raining for some time because the rain had already found its rhythm. All the room was darkened with the shade cast by the rain.

Ludi came back with the air of brightness of people who have just washed their faces and combed their hair, and as he filled the doorway he seemed to be very big and heavy-shouldered and somehow not responsible for, signaling appealingly as a prisoner from, his heavy man’s frame. He lay down in the dimness beside me, quietly, hands behind his head. The warmth of his side made me sigh and smile. We lay a long while, perhaps five minutes. I was happy and sad, troubled and serene, bewildered and at rest. And I was thinking, vaguely, in snatches and dashes. And when I spoke, it was not of conscious intention, but like a sentence thrown out loud in sleep, the kind of accurate chance sum of thoughts and ideas not consciously computed in the mind.

“Ludi, have you ever slept with anyone?”

I think he knew what I was asking better than I knew myself. Ignoring the naïveté, the foolishness of the question, which he saw were not the question itself, he said, perfectly gravely, “Yes, miss, I have.”—He called me “miss” the way one flatters a little girl; it was his word of endearment for me.

A weak protest of pain flowed over me, as if the protective fluid of a blister somewhere inside me had been released. — Now when I put a finger on the spot it would be raw, unprotected by ignorance. I was silent.

Suddenly it did not seem ridiculous to him to be apologetic. He began to comfort me by excusing himself and I believe he really meant it. For the moment he really believed I had the right to complain of the ten years of life he had had while I dragged a toe in the dust of my childhood, disconsolate, waiting. He said the oldest, comforting words, that were new to me. “Always very perfunctory. It’s no good without any real feeling, any other relationship to back it. Honestly”—he was looking at me now, not seeing me properly in the dark of the rain, without his glasses, his close, bristly lashes that I secretly loved so much, showing bright as he narrowed his gaze—“It’s no good.” He put his arm under my head. I thought, he means it would be different with me. He means he loves me. I was suddenly utterly happy. I turned my head until I could rub my nose on the hairs of his forearm.

He said, with the stiff little preparatory swallow of surrender: “It happens about once a year, with me. One feels — and then afterward — I don’t know, I’m disgusted with the woman. Meaningless, really.” He thought a while. I wondered if he was remembering this strange act that I had never partnered but that I now understood. I felt a voluptuous tenderness toward him and wanted to take his head in my arms. He got up, slowly disentangling himself as one puts aside boughs, and stood, feet apart against the dizziness of standing upright. Reflectively, dismissing it, he swayed a little. “I assure you it’s been a long time, now. Oh, many months.” He smiled at me, his sour, confiding smile.

And then, as if he felt at the same instant my sudden desire for air, for the wet air of rain, he padded over to the window and opened it wide. It was sheltered by the veranda so that the rain did not come in, but the fresh, wild air did, rushing in as if the room drew a great breath. Drops like thick curved lenses distorted and magnified the brilliant green of the creeper shaking over the roof’s edge. Scent tanged with wet came up from the beaten petals of the frangipani. The veranda with the few unraveling cane chairs and the pot plants breathing the rain they could not feel had the green twilight of a conservatory. We stood with our nostrils lifted like animals, staring out into the falling rain, our arms lightly round each other.

Curiously, this time when he went away and I was not to see him again, I was not lost. Almost before he had gone I had given myself up to the assurance of his letters. The idea of the first letter from him filled me with excitement, so that I half-wished him to go, be gone so that I might get that letter the sooner. And I should be able to write to him; perhaps to make him something. If I thought about home at all, it was to imagine myself sitting making something for Ludi, in absorption, in completeness. Mrs. Koch was mostly silent during these last few days of my stay, speaking of Ludi, at long intervals, as “he” and “him” as if the silences between her remarks were merely times when the conversation continued somewhere in her out of earshot. She would come hurrying from another room to show me something connected with him; a special winder he had made for her wool, a bracket for a bedside lamp that needed only the right kind of screw to complete it.

Once she came in with a snapshot.

“This isn’t bad.” Her crinkly gray hair hung over her eyes as she peered closely at it. When she had had a good look she passed it to me. Ludi, who, like most shortsighted people, did not photograph well, stood scowling at the sun in the artificial camaraderie of a garden snapshot. Two little boys grinned cross-legged in the foreground, a dog was straining out of the arm of a young woman with a charming, quizzical smile that suggested that she was laughing at herself. A badly cut dress showed the outline of her knees and thighs, and with the arm that was not struggling with the dog, she had just made some checked gesture, probably to push back the strand of curly hair standing out at her temple, which the photograph recorded with a blur in place of her hand. I was instantly drawn to her. “Who’s this?” I pointed.

“Let me see — Oh, that’s Maud — Oscar — you’ve heard me talk of Oscar Harmel? — Oscar’s second wife. The old fool, we all thought; she’s young enough to be his granddaughter, almost. The two boys are his grandchildren, from his first marriage, of course. They love Maud. — Oh, she’s a sweet girl, a dear girl, no doubt about that. But of course it doesn’t work. She laughs a lot, but she’s not happy. She’s very dissatisfied with her life. Funny girl. Oscar’s not in this”—she lifted her eyebrows to see better, as if she had her glasses on and were peering over the top—”I wonder when it was taken? Oh, I know, last time Ludi was on leave, he went down there and stayed over. One of the little chaps had had a birthday, and got a camera for a present. — He brought me the picture specially, next time his mother — that’s Oscar’s eldest daughter, Dorrie — brought him to see me. …”

Quite suddenly, it came to me that I knew it was she. I looked at the girl half-laughing, half-struggling against the nonsense of having the photograph taken and I knew it had been she. This is the girl, I told the sullen Ludi, not looking at me, not looking at the sun. And in his refusal to meet the eye of the camera, in the obstinate stance of his legs — in the silence of that photograph of him — he confirmed it to the tingling of my half-pain, my curiosity.

Chapter 9

Behind my eyes, inside my sleeping body, I sensed the surface of day. Knew the breath of the warm sea that would be blowing in the window. The conversation of the fowls with the dust. Mrs. Koch squeezing oranges in the kitchen. The great brightness of morning that would leap at me, blinding, joyous, as I opened my eyes.

A dim, cool room. Silence. The call of a dove, curtains with a known pattern. Silence. High on the wall the lozenge-pattern of light filtered through the ventilator, the neatly spaced pale yellow crumpets of childhood, that moved round the room through days of sickness. And then my mother, rattling at the stiff lock of the hall cupboard with her keys. Missus, the butcher he send: Anna. I lay a minute, looking round the ceiling where every dent, every smudge was where I knew it to be, and then I got up, went to the wardrobe for my clothes, pulled the thin curtains back on the dusty, clipped jasmine bush, the patch of neat grass, the neighbor’s hedge.

It was like this for a number of mornings; for an hour I would be quite dazed with the sense of having mislaid myself in sleep, or the half-will, half-suspicion that this was the dream and the awakening would be other. But soon it no longer happened; I knew before I woke that I was home on the Mine, in the bed, in the room that claimed me as their own.

Soon I would wake to myself in the mornings, but I was not secure for the whole day. I came slowly up the path after the anticlimax of the post — there was no letter for me — with the dry, windless highveld sun making my hair too hot and electric to touch and my mother’s voice over the preparation of lunch coming from the kitchen, and I was seized again with the unreliability of my own eyes, ears, and the utter conviction of my other senses, that made me smell and feel noon on the veranda above the sea, with the sway of the sea, from which I had newly arisen, in my blood as I stood. I waited at the window in the empty house of early evening for my father to come home, and turned to the room to look at, and even to make tentative movements to touch, all the objects, ornaments, carpets, disposition of furniture, photographs, vases, that in their very evidence of reality, and lifelong involvement with me, suddenly could not summon meaning and belonging. Even more strangely, I spent a morning shopping in Atherton with my mother, and the hurrying along the streets gossiping together, the matching of a piece of last year’s material, my mother’s uncertain look outside a shoeshop where she wanted my confirmation of a decision she had already made to buy a pair of new shoes — all this pleasant, familiar activity came to me as it might come to someone who has been ill, and is filled with the strangeness of standing upright in the sun again. When we stopped to talk to people, I had the smile that invalids summon.

“On Tuesday? Yes, that would be lovely, I think. — Helen, what about Tuesday?” I looked from my mother to the indulgent smile of the matron who was inviting us to tea, as if I had not taken in what my mother was asking. And the sight of the two of them, in their floral dresses and their veiled summer hats, small brown paper parcels from John Orrs’ and the Sewing Center and the seed merchant hanging from their white gloved hands, filled me with a kind of creeping dismay.

“Old Mrs. Barrow’s so fond of you—” my mother reproached later. “She’s always loved to have you, ever since you were a little girl. You can’t hurt her feelings—”

I said nothing, but resentment, motiveless and directionless, seemed to crowd out even my sight.

Less disturbing than all this was the habit I got into of disappearing into a re-creation of my time with Ludi whenever I was out with my parents among other people. At the cinema with them, I quickly learned not to see the film, but to use the darkness and the anonymous presence of people about me in the darkness, to create Ludi for myself more vividly than life. This was an intense and emotional experience, highly pleasurable in its longing, its secrecy. When I found myself at a tea party among the women in whose fondness I had basked, I could kill the troubled feelings of rejection and distaste by plunging into myself the fierce thrill of longing for Ludi, which would vibrate an intensity of emotion through me to the exclusion of everything else.

My mother was irritated by me. “In a trance. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. Alice certainly fattened her up, but she’s made her slow.”

“Dreaming.” My father smiled at me across the table. He had never forgotten his own youth, and mistook the memory of what he had been for an understanding of what I was.

I ignored him kindly; I preferred my mother’s irritation; it seemed a temerity for him to pretend to understand a bewilderment of which he was so important a part.

Then I knew what he was going to quote: What is this life, if full of care … — But he must have sensed my waiting for it, and he stopped himself this once and only said, with the inclined head of still more certain understanding, “It’s the time to dream. Later on she’ll be too busy.”

The University. Should I go up the shallow gray steps between gray columns like great petrified trees; carry books; wear the blue and yellow blazer? I did not want to talk about it. I wanted to put off talking of it.

“What’s happening, Helen?” Nothing stopped my mother. “You’ve got to make up your mind, you know. There’s barely a week left.”

“When is the enrollment day?” my father asked.

“Thursday, Mrs. Tatchett tells me. She’s going in with Basil.”

“Oh—?—That boy’ll never do any good. He hasn’t a brain. What’s he going to do?”

“Something to do with engineering. You know I don’t follow the different names of these things. Electro-something.”

“I still think a teacher’s degree would be the best.” My father turned to me. “You needn’t necessarily use it as such afterward.”

My mother, who saw deflection of purpose in the housewife’s sense of waste, immediately took this up. “Why not? What’s the sense of wasting four years becoming a teacher if you don’t teach?”

“I don’t know.” My father nodded his head to himself; he believed he had educated himself on the Home University Library, the British Encyclopaedia and “Know Thyself,” but that he would have achieved this and his Mine secretaryship ten years earlier had he started off his career as a university graduate instead of a junior clerk. “It’s a good general education.”

“You’ve got big ideas,” said my mother, “too big for your pocket. Helen must take up something that’ll fit her for the world.”

I sat through their talk with a growing inner obstinacy. Now that phrase of my mother’s that I had heard so often, that had always sounded strong and practical as my mother herself, came to me as a disturbing question. Fit me for what world? So long as there was only my mother’s world, so long as I knew no other, the phrase had the ring of order and action. The world of my mother and father, or Ludi’s world? And if there were two, there might be more. But my parents wanted to fit me for theirs. My interest, that like a timid, nosing animal edged back and lay down in dim lack of enthusiasm before the advance of their discussion, was again forgotten in a sense of distress and bewilderment.

My mother was tapping her front teeth with her fingernail, as she sometimes did in concern. But when she spoke, it was with her usual vigor. “Perhaps she’d be happier at home? If she didn’t go at all — Perhaps you could speak to Stanley Dicks about getting her into the Atherton library. She’s so keen about books, and there’s a nice type of girl there—”

My father caught her with an accusing look, a kind of concentration of irritation, suspicion and wariness that comes from long observation, if not understanding, of someone’s methods and motives. It was as if he did not know what her next move would be, but he knew it should be prevented. He gave a curiously awkward fending gesture of the hand, and said, “Oh, the library—What sort of a career, pushing a barrow of heavy books about and stamping people’s names on cards! That’s no life for her. That’s not what I want for her.”

And then, with the inconsequence of daily life in the fluid of which are suspended all stresses, the jagged crystals of beauty, the small, sharp, rusted probes of love, the hate that glints and is gone like a coin in water, my mother said without change of tone, “You won’t forget about the lawn mower, will you? It’s Charlie’s day again tomorrow.” And with a little glance at his watch to recall him to himself, my father nodded and returned to his office for the afternoon’s work.

I went down to the Mine swimming bath. At first there was almost no one there; only the small boys, splashing and squealing hoarsely in their flapping wet rags of costumes. I lay looking at my shining brown legs; a stranger bearing the distinguishing marks of another land. Later some boys and girls of my own age came and dropped to the grass around me, gasping, fanning themselves after their bicycle ride. They exclaimed over me. You were away a long time! How long was it, Helen? My, she’s burned — look how she’s burned! They giggled and threw sweet-wrappers at one another, and every now and then, without a word, as if at some mysterious sign, a girl would tug at a boy’s ankle to trip him as he stood up, or a boy would pull the bow end of the strap that held a girl’s bathing suit, and suddenly they would be wrestling, chasing each other, shrieking round the pool, rolling and falling back into the middle of us, the girl screaming between laughter: No! No! Soon the grass around us was strewn with lemonade bottles and broken straws. A bright-haired girl, with the dimples she had had when she was four still showing when she smiled, carefully broke up a packet of chocolate so that it would go round. When I got up to swim, they all came flying, bouncing, chasing into the square tepid tank of water. Lorna Dufalette’s head broke through the surface beside me, water beading off her powdered forehead. “It’s not fair, those filthy Cunningham kids have got ringworm, and they come into the water. We might all get it.” I floated along amid used matches and dead grass. At last I pulled myself out by the shoulders and sat, feet dangling, on the side. One of the boys, at a loss for a moment, swam over to me, a bright challenging grin on his red face. His big teeth in the half-open mouth combed the water like a fish. “Come away to the lagoon with me, Tondelayo!” I had been watching the water streaming over his teeth and was startled when he suddenly appeared beside me. Saliva and water streaked his chin as he grinned, waiting my response. Apparently there was some film I had not seen that would have given it to me. Water poured from him and he laughed toward me. “Come on—” He slipped down into the water again and, at a howl from one of the others, turned his thick scarred neck and bellowed something back, then caught at my ankle. But with a quick slither I snatched my legs back and he was gone, threshing noisily after the jeer that had challenged him. I shifted away from the uneven puddle that marked where he had sat beside me.

In the damp change cubicle I put on my clothes and rolled my bathing suit in my towel. Looking at myself in the post card of mirror that was nailed to the wall brought two tears of loneliness into my eyes.

My mother was sitting behind the fly screen on the veranda when I got home. She was following a knitting pattern from a book, and the tray from her afternoon tea was on the ledge beside her. As I saw her the words seemed to come to me quite suddenly, as if someone had given me a push forward, “Mother, I’ve made up my mind I’m not going to University.” She said, after a pause, not looking up, “All right. I suppose you’re old enough to know what you want. Nobody gave me the opportunity.” I pulled myself up on the ledge beside the tray and we sat in silence, rather heavily. After a while she said, “It’ll disappoint your father,”—and went indoors.

My mother always had had the knack of filling me with apprehension by the meagerness of what she said, and the magnitude of what she left unspoken. Now, as I sat in her chair while the sun went down, the shape that she had hollowed for herself in the cushions, the warmth where she had leaned her back, seemed to speak on for her. I began to feel tense and nervous; in the heat, my hands were cold. I went down into the cooling garden and walked up and down, watching for my father. My heart was beating fast and I wanted to tell him at once. When he saw me hanging about the gate his tired, neat face lifted pleasurably into life and he gave a little signal as if to say, I’ll be with you rightaway, but I did not even wait for him to put the car into the garage, but opened the door as he slowed down to enter the gate, and got in beside him. He said: “Give us a kiss,” and his cheek was faintly salty from the sweat of the day. “—Daddy, I’ve made up my mind I don’t want to go to University.” As I said it we came to a halt in the dusty gloom of the tin garage.

“Well, I won’t press you, my dear. It’s very important that you should be happy about what you do — no making a success of anything unless you’re happy in doing it. I must say I believe that. Not everyone has to go to a university to improve and open their mind, you could do a correspondence course — what about French? Always useful to learn a language. So long as one cultivates one’s mind, it doesn’t really matter—” He sat on in the car a minute or two and I watched his profile. But I could see he was not unhappy, he was absorbed, he had already set his mind on something else for me.

We strolled into the house together, with him talking sensibly, enthusiastically. I found I was not listening but was thinking of Ludi, seized up increasingly by thoughts of Ludi and what he would have said if I had really thought of going to the University. Getting on, the bright ambitious daughter of the Mine Secretary. I smiled to myself at the idea that I might have lent myself to it. Now I would be able to tell him; I lay in the sun somewhere, caring for nothing, and we refuted the University together. Now that I had decided, it seemed ridiculous that I had ever even considered the place. I felt that Ludi and I were proudly alone, and I was as happy in the knowledge of him as if he had been there. I felt he knew all that passed in me, and that only the things that he and I knew mattered. My tongue shaped his name over and over, an intoxication of Ludi, Ludi, Ludi. I was excited and happy. It overflowed. Suddenly I kissed my father, having heard almost nothing of what he had been saying to me. He said: “Not such an ununderstanding old father, after all, eh?” And stood looking at me with proud tenderness.

I went slowly up the passage to the bedroom, dreaming, hugging my arms, and I heard him in the kitchen: “—Why d’you do it? You know it makes your hair smell, and you grumble—” My mother was frying fish. I lay down on my bed with my eyes closed; I could see Ludi’s walk, the startled way his eyes looked without glasses, the way he gave a little snort and his mouth curled up one side before he told me what he thought of something. I could have lain there all evening.

My father was calling me. I let him call three times before I answered: “What?”

“Look — I think this’s for you—”

“What?”

“Come here, I can’t shout.”

To humor him, I got off the bed in mild irritation and wandered into the kitchen, blinking as if from a sleep. He took a letter from out of the folded newspaper he had brought home. “Sent care of the Mine Secretary — it’s yours. …” I took the blue envelope from him and read my name in a handwriting I had never seen before but that I knew instantly. A wave of blood went through me, my hands shook. It was the simplest thing for me to leave the kitchen and walk back to my room, but all at once I did not know how to do it. I did not know how to walk out of the door, I did not know at whom or what to look. It was not necessary to say anything but suddenly I did not know what to say. “Well,” I said, “I’ll open it just now—” My father was taking beer bottles out of the refrigerator. “What are you doing that for?” my mother was complaining. “I thought I ordered two dozen? Where’re the other six?” “You’ll never get them in that way. I’ve just put them straight and now you’re upsetting everything—” I made my escape as if I had been a prisoner momentarily out of surveillance.

And in my room I tore open the envelope, took out the folded letter in that moment of perfect joy that comes just the second before realization; the mouth ready to be kissed, the possession lying ungrasped in the hand, the letter held unread.

Then I unfolded the sheets, saw that there were three, saw the beautiful handwriting, the words “thinking,” “knack”…

Barberton,

Saturday.

Dear Helen,

It’s difficult to find space or quiet to write in a great bedlam of a camp like this one. But it’s now close on midnight so I can be fairly certain not to be interrupted by anything worse than snores. I didn’t have a bad journey — but you’ll know that by the telegram I sent mother — except that it all seemed a bit unreal, the yap of the other men, etc., the usual army nonsense, after the last few days at home. I kept thinking about it, and as usual — only a bit more so this time, the two planes of existence just won’t dovetail. Not in me, anyway. Every time I come back to the army I am sickened all over again at the senselessness of the way we live here. Still, you’ve heard all this from me many times before, so enough.

Fortunately, there have been heavy rains and the dust isn’t so bad as it was. That chap Don Macloud I told you about is back in my tent again after all, and we have rigged up fairly comfortable beds for ourselves. As I told you, he’s really got a knack of making a home out of a fruit box and a bit of sacking, and is useful to have around. Also pleasant and inoffensive, and as unimpressed as I am by all this so-called army discipline. Also like me, has no wish to get a stripe or a pip up so that he can have a taste of inflicting it on others.

I’ve had two letters from mother, written since you’ve gone, and I can see she misses you. You can’t imagine what it meant to her to have you around; she really likes you, and you know exactly how to treat her. Particularly just after I’d left. I’m grateful, I can tell you, for the way you stayed on and kept her company. Of course I know you like her too, almost love her, really, and it was no penance to you, but just the same, a real thank you. She’s such an extraordinary person, so absolutely right to live with, but not everyone is capable of knowing her and finding that out.

Well, miss? And what about you? Have you settled down again? I hope you’ve decided what you’re going to do and that whatever it is you are happy in it. I don’t think we’ll be here much longer. All indications are that we shall be moving — soon. In a way, it’ll be a relief. I’m sick to death of the child’s game we’re playing here, even though I’ve little relish for the real thing. If I can manage a week end before we go, of course it’ll be spent in Atherton, if you and your people will have me? But there’s a rumor that all leave is to be canceled soon, so by the time my turn comes round, I doubt if there’ll be a chance.

Write when you feel like it. When I think of you, in this place, you don’t seem quite true, you know. Figment of the imagination! End of my candle, so I’d better turn in.

Ludi.

P.S. Lost the piece of paper with the house address on it, so am sending this to your dad’s office. My regards to him and to your mother. L.

I had not read it so much as flown through the lines, alighting on the word “you.” “Well, Miss? And what about you?”—What looked like an island, a beckoning palm top, was as uncertain as a piece of floating vegetation, rootless in the tide. I hovered, went on. And in the last paragraph, there it was. A small island, soon explored, but the place where my heart came down and beaked its feathers. I read it over, and again. “When I think.” He thinks about me. But “When” … that means it isn’t often. Yet it might be. “You don’t seem quite true.” Oh, the happiness of it! Now I am the woman and the princess and the dream. Now it is like a sign on my forehead. “You don’t seem quite true.” A dream. Something that’s over, then; can’t believe it happened. Just forgotten, an incident, like that?

I read the whole letter over again, searching through every word, through the commonplaces, the information of the way he was living, the time, the weather — pushing it all aside like so much rubble. Now I would pick up a word or a phrase, as one fingers a pebble. But no. The repetition of “as I told you” seemed an intimacy, perhaps? Yes. Yes, that I could keep. The bit about his mother. This puzzled me. Of course, it could mean a special kind of confidence in me; of course.

Some sentences I read over to myself a dozen times. Aloud, they sounded different; with another intonation, the meaning changed. Every word of the letter seemed ambiguous; happiness came and went like the color in the bird’s wing, showing and going out as it falls through the sun.

I sat on my bed with the three thin sheets and the envelope spread evidence about me. Well, I had a letter, anyway. I rested in that.

But strangely, the mood of exaltation, of closeness to Ludi, was gone. It was only when I was in bed that night, late and awake, thinking about him as I remembered him on the farm, as I had done when I lay dreaming before my father had called me, that it came back.

Chapter 10

It is amazing on how little reality one can live when one … is very young. It is only when one is beginning to approach maturity that achievement and possession have to be concrete in the hand to create each day; when you are young a whole livable present, elastic in its very tenuousness, impervious in its very independence of fact, springs up enveloping from a hint, a memory, an idea from a book. On this slender connection, like a tube of oxygen which feeds a man while he moves in an atmosphere not his own, it is possible to move and breathe as if your feet were on the ground. Through the autumn and into winter, this was the way I lived now. The quiet, steeped autumn days passed, as if the sun turned the earth lovingly as a glass of fine wine, bringing out the depth of glow, the fine gleam; the banks of wild cosmos opened like a wake, with the cream and pink and gilt of an early Florentine painting, on either side of the railway cutting from Atherton to Johannesburg and spattered, intoxicating bees with plenty in the bareness of flat veld and mine dumps, out of ditches and rubbish heaps; the last rains brought the scent of rot like a confession from leaves that had fallen and lain lightly as feathers; the cold wind of the highveld, edged with the cut of snow it had passed on the Drakensberg, blew round the house, blowing bare round the bare Mine, blowing the yellow cyanide sand into curling miasmas and mistrals over the road; the Mine boys walked with only their eyes showing over blankets. I did an afternoon’s duty at the soldier’s canteen in Atherton twice a week; I worked for three weeks in my father’s office again as a relief for someone away on leave. There it was chilly in the mornings; I noticed winter. Dressed in warm clothes, the distance of the summer came to me. I went nowhere, yet I took great care of my appearance, spending hours before my mirror in the poor light that always showed me shadowy. Sometimes while my parents were out at tennis (they were proud that they still made the second league) I would spend the whole Saturday afternoon arranging and rearranging my hair. In the evening I would not go out, but sat reading beneath an elaboration of shining whorls and curls, formal as a Gothic cornice. My dresses were chosen each day with hesitation and care, my hands were manicured. All these rites were performed alone in my bedroom, in silence, in a depth of dream that held me, deep, far away, as deafness holds someone still and serene in a room full of talk. Any faint temptation to enjoy the distractions of the Mine — a fete, a party, a concert — was paid for and nullified by the immediate feeling of estranging myself from Ludi, and what Ludi thought. The fact that he was in Italy, that the South Coast was months away, made no difference. Like God, to deny his tenets was to lose him.

The letters I wrote to Ludi became more important to me than those I received from him. In them, I assumed our world in common. His, full of descriptions of places I could not imagine, always written from the moment of the present, seemed to have less and less to do with the Ludi of the South Coast, the bright hair, the shortsighted look, the warm strange breast. In time, the infrequent letters were not the painful thrill, the charged token they had been. I could almost have done without them entirely. … For while believing that I was living Ludi’s way of life by keeping aloof from that of my home and the Mine, I had all the time been creating a third way of my own, as unconsciously as a spider salivates his thin silver lifeline of survival. The frailty of dreams, imagination and memory was changed and churned by some unsuspected emotional digestion into a vanity and cultivation of myself. Like most finished products, nothing could have resembled less the raw material of emotion from which it was processed. And also, like most survival changes, it was accomplished by personality, unrecognized and unrealized by the conscious mind.

I spent a great deal of time reading, and these were not books about which I would write to Ludi. I began to read poetry, Auden and T.S. Eliot, reading it always for the sound and feel of the words rather than for the meaning, which sometimes I sensed, but seldom knew with my intellect. Then I took Pepys’s diary out of the library, and Tobias Smollett. — There is a theory that, given the free choice to hand of various foods, babies who see them only as blurs of color and shape will instinctively choose those necessary for balanced sustenance; perhaps the same is true of a hungry mind. One book led me to another; a quotation from one author by another, a mention that a character was reading so-and-so, sent me to the source itself, so that I had Hemingway to thank for John Donne, and D. H. Lawrence to thank for Chekhov. But in nothing that I read could I find anything that approximated to my own life; to our life on a gold mine in South Africa. Our life was not regulated by the seasons and the elements of weather and emotion, like the life of peasants; nor was it expressed through movements in art, through music heard, through the exchange of ideas, like the life of Europeans shaped by great and ancient cities, so that they were Parisians or Londoners as identifiably as they were Pierre or James. Nor was it even anything like the life of Africa, the continent, as described in books about Africa; perhaps further from this than from any. What did the great rivers, the savage tribes, the jungles and the hunt for huge palm-eared elephants have to do with the sixty miles of Witwatersrand veld that was our Africa? The yellow ridged hills of sand, thrown up and patted down with the unlovely precision that marked them manufactured unmistakably as a sand castle; the dams of chemical-tinted water, more waste matter brought above ground by man, that stood below them, bringing a false promise of a river — greenness, cool, peace of dipping fronds and birds — to your nose as you sat in the train. The wreckage of old motorcar parts, rusting tin and burst shoes that littered the bald veld in between. The advertisement hoardings and the growing real-estate schemes, dusty, treeless, putting out barbed-wire fences on which the little brown mossies swung and pieces of torn cloth clung, like some forlorn file that recorded the passing of life in a crude fashion. The patches of towns, with their flat streets, tin-roofed houses, main street and red-faced town hall, “Palace” or “Tivoli” showing year-old films from America. We had no lions and we had no art galleries, we heard no Bach and the oracle voice of the ancient Africa did not come to us, was drowned, perhaps, by the records singing of Tennessee in the Greek cafés and the thump of the Mine stamp batteries which sounded in our ears as unnoticed as our blood.

Only what was secret in me, did not exist before my mother and father or the talk and activity that pursued life in our milieu, leaped to recognition in what I read. The power of love signaled to me like lightning across mountains of dark naïveté and ignorance; the sense of wonder at the pin speck of myself in a swirling universe, a creature perpetually surrounded by a perpetual growth, stars and earthworm, wind and diamond. Out of poetry and the cabalistic accident of someone’s syntax came the cold touch on my cheek: this. You. So that when my father pointed at the winter night sky, not the air-blue infinity of summer, but a roof far off as silence, hard blue as a mirror looking down on a dark room — when he pointed up and said: Orion … that’s the Southern Cross, and over there, on the left, see, I think it’s Saturn — I knew that to know the names is to know less than to know that there can be no names, are no names. The bat-squeak of a man’s voice in the enormous darkness could not explain the stars to me.

And so, too, when I lay in the bath looking down at my naked body, the sight of it suggesting the pleasures of which it was capable, it was not the touch of Ludi (like the thrilling of a bell that sends messengers running, doors opening, lights up) that I imagined any more, but only the pure sensation: the potentialities of loving that lay there. Constantly relived, Ludi’s love-making had worn transparent with recapitulation, so that now his image rubbed off entirely; but my body was real, and its knowledge.

Chapter 11

One afternoon in July I took a train to Johannesburg. I went in after an early lunch to book seats for a musical play which my parents wanted to see, but when I came out of Johannesburg station into the city I took a tram to the University instead. There I walked about beneath an expression of worried purpose, slightly amazed at myself. In the foyer of the main block, where the administrative and inquiry offices were, it was easy to stand before the boards reading faculty notices and posters advertising student dances and debates. But along the wide sloping passages that led down to common rooms and tearooms, the preoccupied faces of girls and young men seemed to me to be a continual challenge to produce my right and identity. Each pair of eyes that met mine seemed to precede a threat of the question: Yes? I stood at last in front of a boldly painted exhortation to support the Student’s Representative Council in some stand it was taking over the Color Bar, seeing nothing but a cigarette butt and a piece of crumpled paper near my left foot, and when a voice behind me spoke my name I melted in alarm as if an expected heavy hand had come down on my shoulder. It was Basil Tatchett, from the Mine. “So? You here too? I haven’t seen you before. Don’t you travel? — Are you staying at the hostel? My folks won’t let me—”

I did not know what to say—“No, actually I haven’t started yet, I’m just getting fixed up now.”

“But that’s a waste; they won’t let you take credit for half a year, will they? You’re doing Arts, I suppose.” He had his mother’s long, spade-shaped jaw and way of feeling it as he spoke, as if he were privately wondering whether he needed a shave. I do not think he had ever spoken to me before in his life, in that manly animosity which schoolboys bear toward schoolgirl daughters of their mother’s friends, but now he believed we shared the distinction of the University against the mediocrity of less fortunate Mine contemporaries. “John’s here — John Eagles — he’s with me. And Lester Beckett.” He stood talking for a few minutes of people who were names to me and then, with a shrug toward his bundle of books, was gone.

When he left me I felt calm, commanding, adventurous. It was as if all the tortuous calculations of a combination lock had been resolved accidentally by the careless twiddle of a passing hand. I did not know him and I had scarcely listened to what he had to say to me. But a door flew open. I knew exactly why I had come to Johannesburg on this particular afternoon, I knew that stepping on the tram had not been an impulse but the decision of the voices from my mother’s tea parties reaching me alone in my room, the aimless silence of the garden, the bent heads of my mother and father under the red beaded lampshade. I walked straight over to the inquiry office, and I did not need to look busy or purposeful.

There was a little difficulty in getting myself enrolled in the faculty of arts halfway through the academic year, and my father had to go into Johannesburg to interview the Dean, but it was done and I was a student. My mother was reassured that a B.A. graduate could command a number of good jobs and, unexpectedly, made quite a dining-out, or rather “afternoon,” tale of the way I had marched into the University without a word after refusing to go earlier in the year, telling the story with a shrug of the amused, victimized indulgence of those mothers who pride themselves in their children by seeming to discredit them. My father, of course, was delighted. He convinced himself that the eighteen-months’ break in my education between school and university was an intentional maturing process, a kind of parental system of his own. He told me continually of the advantages I should have over others who had gone straight from school.

Well, perhaps he was right, if not in the way he thought he was. Certainly I did not go now for the blazer or the prestige. I went out of doubt and boredom and a sense of wonder at life: the beginning of all seeking, the muddled start of the journey toward oneself. And I was unaware of this, and excited. I wanted to read and I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to bury myself in the great cool library where no one spoke, and where, on the day I had looked in, people had lifted their heads like deer lifting their heads over water, and in their eyes was the intense blank of concentration; running through them, the endless stream of questions, suggestions from books, a live current from last year or four hundred years back. I was absorbed from minute to minute in the busyness of working out my timetable of lectures, buying prescribed books, and my mother and I suddenly met warmly again in the fittings and discussion of the clothes I would need. Seeing her face hot-looking as she bent over the sewing machine, or anxiously looking up at me as she pinned a hem from the neat row she always kept stuck in the collar of her dress as she sewed, I remembered the smell of her warm from cooking, when I came home from school as a child.

And so in August I began the first of many hundreds of daily journeys from Atherton to Johannesburg by train. When the line left Atherton station, it ran out in the direction of the Mine, and there was a siding just outside the limits of the Mine property. Here the train stopped for a minute or two and here I boarded it, every morning, waiting with a handful of other people, poised like starters at a race for its screeching arrival, and getting off in the early winter dark in the evening, dropped from the day with a soft thud to the dust of the platform. The siding was a bare place of deep red dust and coal grit, where the wind fought torn newspapers and the tin ticket office seemed perpetually to be closed, the man in charge sat so far inside it, and the little bleary window had such a look of ignoring everything, like a closed eyelid. Where the platform ended, man-high khaki weed began. In the summer it was lurid khaki-green and bitter-smelling, and in autumn it bristled with seeds like black pins that fastened to anything that brushed by, and blew and seeded and found their way to every inch of bare soil, but now it stood in black, dead stooks, scratching through the wind. That was all there was to hear on winter mornings. A few natives, swathed in blankets as in the silence of a cocoon, waited around the ticket office. Sometimes it did not open at all before the train came in, and so they missed the train, but other times the little window would snatch up and I would see the face of the man behind it, hating the natives for the winter morning and the tin shed, hypnotizing them into fumbling timidity with his silence and his sudden shout: Yes? Yes?

Sometimes there was a native who sat on the ground, shrouded like a Mexican in his poncho, and from his hidden mouth beneath the blanket came the thin grandeur of a mouth organ, being played to himself. Around him two or three white men in business suits turned the morning paper awkwardly with gloved hands, a shopgirl clutched her knitting in a chiffon scarf. Basil Tatchett and his friends, who had just bought themselves pipes, stood comparing boles and tobacco pouches.

At night the siding was very dark. Only one lamp, high up, lifted the steel rails like streaks of water out of the dark, and often a stone was thrown at it and for a few days there would be no lamp at all. There were more natives about, sometimes a great many, and they shouted, carrying trunks on their heads, balancing their bicycles in and out. Plunging down through the khaki weed to get to the road, the evil smell of it was like the smell of a swamp, and the dark figures with their strong body-smell and their great knobkerries passed silently. Down in the ditch in the khaki weed the body of a Mine boy had once been found, with a knife in his back. He had lain there for a whole day before someone had tried him with a foot and found that he was not simply lying asleep and close to the ground in the sun, the way the Mine boys did.

My father was always there to meet me in the evenings; I would see the rim of light on his glasses turned to the carriages as the train drew in in the pale dusty radiance of its windows. Then with our coats drawn round us we would huddle off to the car parked at the roadside, walking quickly through the dark and the shouts of the black men for whom we were not there, so that they stumbled and bumped into us as if they stepped through the bodies of pale ghosts. Thinly and quickly the few white people dispersed, leaving the cries that in the dark and in a strange language sounded savage and the whiteness of eyes that in their dumbness seemed like the eyes of slow beasts in the darkness, beasts who are dreaming or preparing to charge, one cannot tell. And within a few hundred yards we were all home, in houses that smelled of food cooking, the radio was on, and the telephone kept up its regular spaced ring for the friends who choose mealtimes to make plans.

The same people traveled on the train every day. Most of them got in at Atherton and by the time I climbed into the carriage they were settled in what were their places rather than their seats: for everyone returned day after day to the carriage originally boarded by chance and made familiar by habit, and everyone disposed himself automatically in the seat, in the relation to the other occupants of the carriage, in which timidity, a taste for reading in solitude, looking out of a window, or the desire to sit where the view of the head of a particular girl — long since disappeared or forgotten — had dictated. When a new traveler, like myself, got into the train for the first time, certain circumstances and forces set to work immediately making a place for him too, though he might believe he had simply sat himself down in the nearest seat. I walked through the first carriage because that, I saw, was where Basil Tatchett and his friends gathered and, hesitating at the next, I passed through that one too because an old man with a thickly clouding pipe sat beside a determinedly closed window. In the second coach of the third carriage, I sat down. Eyes turned with a pretense of no curiosity on me, and later, when they were looking elsewhere, I turned mine on them. A pretty girl with sternly ridged blond hair bit her nails and read an Afrikaans novel beside me, two others knitted, the one hunched over the ceaseless bite of needles, the other talking low and confidentially in her ear, while her own knitting rested often in her lap. A young man stared into his window, a lunch tin dangling between his knees. A woman’s legs were crossed beneath a paper; the hands that showed holding it had long red nails, a beautiful ring that slipped round on a thin finger. Opposite me was another pipe-smoker; but he was young, with a pleasant bulldog face over a yellow muffler, and he was reading Anthony Trollope beside an open window.

Soon getting into the carriage every morning was like coming down to breakfast at a hotel where you have been staying for some time. Were they all there? Yes. There is the pattern of the Colonel eating his kipper, only the wife down at the young couple’s table, the six commercial travelers smoking expansively over coffee. And with an approving eye they all note you dropping into your place.

I had a great deal of reading to do in order to find the lectures I was attending intelligible, since I had missed the first half of the year, and so I had time each morning for only this quick glance of reassurance before disappearing into my book. The pipe-smoker and I now and then touched each other’s shoes by mistake, as we stirred over our reading, and we smiled and sometimes exchanged a comment. Another young man, whom I had seen getting in ahead of me one morning and whom I thought a casual traveler, strayed in for a single journey, was greeted aloud by the pipe-smoker and silently by the others, and was, I discovered as the make-up of our carriage became clear to me in the initiation of day by day, also one of us, although he caught the train only on alternate mornings, and sometimes did not appear for several days. When he was present, he sat beside the pipe-smoker with one stubby shoe crossed over the other and read from large brown-paper-covered books that were evidently borrowed, judging from the care with which he handled them. Nearly always he had a very sharp pencil in his hand, and he seemed to be making little drawings or sketches on the thin sheets he kept as a bookmark; sketches that sometimes he crumpled and stuffed in his pocket, other times folded and put in his case. He was evidently a student, too, for I used to see him disappearing upstairs in the tram as well, and then flying through the gates of the University far ahead of me, the belt of an old blue raincoat that he wore instead of a greatcoat trailing beside his shoe.

The second or third morning I dropped into my seat opposite him, I greeted him as I did any other of the carriage occupants whose eyes I happened to meet. But instead of the lip-service smile and murmur that one gives and gets from strangers, he lifted his head and looked at me, a slow smile lifting round his eyes and no answer — a curious smile, the smile of remembrance and recollection that you meet on the face of someone whom you yourself fail to remember. And as this look sets you searching yourself for the place, the year, where this face belongs, perhaps now even imagining some familiarity in the features, so for a moment or two I vaguely tried to find this face. … But now with a finger following the bone of his nose as he read, or his head turned toward the window as he lifted it to take in something, as a bird lifts its head to let each sip of water go down, there was obviously no place for it. And I did not think of it again, for he became familiar in any case, and this present recognition overlaid any shadow recollection that might have come to me. Every day I was exploring further into my own ignorance. What I did not know, what I had not heard of — this the University was teaching me. I was slightly dazed, the way one is from days of sight-seeing. Brought up on gossip and discussion of the mechanics of living, I had never heard talk that did not have an immediate bearing on the circumstances of our daily life on the Mine. Words were like kitchen utensils. “Ideas” were synonymous with “fancies.” “She’s getting ideas” was a phrase of scorn for a neighbor who bought a Persian carpet or invited the Mine Manager to dinner too often. Now I found myself with the daily evidence of semantics, philosophy, psychology; hearing the history of art and music when I had never seen a picture other than the water colors by a local schoolteacher which were up for sale in the tearoom at Atherton, never heard any music other than the combined pupils’ yearly concert of the Atherton piano teachers. I had dabbled in books like a child playing in the ripples at the water’s edge; now a wave of ideas threw me, gurgling in my ears, half-drowning and exhilarating. The place where I was washed up, alien, astonished, was as far from the daily talk of my parents as theirs was from that of Anna, sitting over her paraffin-tin brazier in the back yard.

I began to look at other students covertly, as the member of an underground political movement might watch for signs that would discover to him others of the same conviction. These mouths pursed round straws over pink ice-cream foam, these heads bent over notes on the grass, these eyes faraway with overheard talk of tennis or dresses for the Engineers’ Ball — were they feeling that they were living inside a half-inflated balloon which had suddenly been blown up to twice its size? Surely there must be someone for whom, too, it had slowly to shrink again every day as the train door slammed behind, the porch door waited, the mouths of home opened to speak. Yet as we talked of lecturers and grumbles and advice, of timetables and clothes, it did not seem so. Or I forgot to look. And it was only afterward, sitting in the train, that I would examine the said and unsaid, and find nothing.

But whether I knew it or not, I never ceased to be looking. This I found one day when I was in the cloakroom, excusing myself toward the washbasins past a knot of girls who hovered concentrically, like insects, attracted by the mirror. It bewildered me afresh to see them powdering and fluffing out their hair, eying themselves and looking without interest at the images of one another. And as I came through I saw on the other side of the washbasins an African girl drying her hands. She stood there in her nurse-girl’s beret and little dark dress looking at me quietly, half as if she expected a challenge of her right to be there, for the University was the one place in all Johannesburg and one of the few places in all South Africa where a black girl could wash her hands in the same place as a white girl, and this fact, so much more tellingly than the pronouncement that there was no color bar, took some getting used to for both the African students and the white. Yet as she saw me — perhaps it was something in my face, perhaps in my walk — the look changed. And I had the curious certainty, that one sometimes gets from the face of another, that what I saw on her face now was what was on my own. I recognized it; it was the sign I had been watching for, not knowing what it would be.

We both left the cloakroom at the same time, and in silence, without embarrassment, she stood back to let me go through the door first.

In the train in the mornings, the faces, the presence of the two students opposite were closed to me. The bulldog-faced one, smoking his pipe as if he were enjoyably cutting a tooth over it; the other, his eyes running a race with the printed page, sometimes meeting my eye with the slight smile that tells a child comfortingly that the grownup is there — there was no secret response from either of them to what was in me. Probably both came from places where university was merely a formal extension of an atmosphere in which they had learned to talk; I returned to my book.

In time I learned that the bulldog-faced one was in fact not a student at all. Sometimes, on the days when the other was not there, the empty seat beside him would seem to make him expansive, eager to talk, and in between deep draws at his pipe — as if he were coaxing a furnace — talk and smoke poured out together. No, he wasn’t a university student, though, like Aaron there — he gestured his head to the space beside him — he was an ex-serviceman. Who? I asked. Young Aaron, he told me, you know, who sits here usually.

His own name (I.P. on his briefcase) was Ian Petrie and he was a Londoner who had emigrated, fought with South Africans in Abyssinia and Egypt, and married an Atherton girl.

“D’you read him at all—” He indicated his Trollope.

I hadn’t yet. He talked about Trollope as people do of some delightful crank of a friend they would like you to meet. He smiled on the clenched pipe, an attractive smile showing uneven, smoke-tinted teeth. Even though I hadn’t read Trollope, I was prepared to like this man because he had. He said: “You’ve awed me with your George Eliot every morning,” and we laughed. (Meeting me on the siding Basil Tatchett had picked the book out of my hand, opened it, said, “Who’s he?” and not even waited for a reply.) When we had talked about books several mornings, he said to me: “I believe you might know my wife? Lindsay Theunissen?” I looked at him uncertainly. I did know her, but I felt there must be a mistake; there had been a wild-eyed girl at school, Lindsay Theunissen, very backward, as if the stammer of her excited voice kept her in too much agitation to be able to learn. One of those vague troubling rumors, half understood by children, said that her mother had “tried to get rid of her” and she had been born with some slight injury to the brain.

“Then you do know her?” He seemed satisfied and confidential.

“Long ago. At school. Then they went away, lived somewhere else, I think.”

He waved out a match. “You’d be surprised how she’s turned out. She’s really pretty, you know. Still got that wild look—” He smiled, liking it.

“I don’t think I’d know her—”

“Oh, yes you would.” He sat back, frankly, not letting me evade, smiling at me. “It’s not so surprising as you think. Of course I can’t talk to her, you know what I mean. She’s not interested in what I read, and I tell her a few snippets from the newspaper that she can use for conversation. But she’s got a kind of instinct for sport; I can’t explain it. She simply can’t help playing everything extraordinarily well, almost the way a hunting dog can’t help pointing at a scent. And I have an admiration for that sort of thing; I play a lot myself, with more calculation and less success, I can tell you. Lindsay’s really quite amazing that way. She’s got what one might call a physical intelligence. And let me tell you—” He leaned his elbows on his knees, dropped his voice. He had the air of giving advice rather than a confession, and I found myself listening as if I were accepting advice. “—It’s very important. I enjoy making love to her and I enjoy playing games with her. What is married life, really? You’re away at work eight hours a day. Half of what’s left you spend in bed, one way or another, and the other half you spend looking for some sort of recreation. — I can talk to other people, I can read on my own.”

I laughed and shook my head to myself; there was something about this man that set one at ease, as if a tight button had popped. He returned to Trollope, I to George Eliot, until he said, “Damn, we’re here just as I get comfortable, always …,” and I looked up and saw him stretching for his briefcase as the sooty, antiseptic scent of the city came in at the window.

“What time d’you say it leaves?”

“Half-past seven.”

“Well, it’s nothing. Only twenty minutes earlier than the one you usually get. I’m up at a quarter-to, anyway.” My mother was decorating a cake with candied violets. As I had always done, I put a petal on my tongue, let the sugar melt off, and stuck the tiny dab of bruised silk on my palm. “Don’t be a baby, Helen. I’ll be short.”

But I winced at the idea of getting up still earlier to get to a lecture which had altered my timetable. “You see, here’s the disadvantage of staying out of town. Anyone else can get up at eight o’clock.” I saw by my mother’s precision and arched neck that it would be better not to pursue this reasoning, so I said, as I remembered: “Oh …! I shall miss my early morning talk.”

She was not listening: “Who’s that?”

“You remember I told you about the student with the pipe opposite me? D’you know who he is? He’s married to the Theunissen girl, — Lindsay. I think she’s lucky. We’re quite friendly.”

“That awful man Petrie who was Belle Theunissen’s fancy man that she married off to her daughter—? I don’t know how you can talk to him.” She was making a green bow with strips of candied peel; the loops were exactly the same size, the ends were cut exactly level. I stood watching this. But she knew when she had annoyed or offended me, and she could say to my silence with the laugh of pretended innocence: “Huffed? Well, I can’t help it — I must say you have the most peculiar taste.”

The early train was crowded. Like huddled cattle holding their horns motionlessly clear, men balanced their papers above the press. Yet out of habit I pushed through to stand in the third carriage. “Come and sit down.” Among the strangers, the other young man was there; he got up slowly, waited while I climbed over legs to his seat. “—No protests necessary,” he said.

“Still, it’s very nice of you.”

Holding on to the window frame, he smiled down at me the same way again, the resting smile of long acquaintance. Suddenly I was going to ask him … what, I did not know. But the conductor came struggling down the corridor, drowning hand appearing in an appeal for tickets. When ours had been passed from hand to hand and returned, the young man bent to me and said: “Petrie and Trollope are left entirely to themselves now.” I smiled with the quick pleasure one feels when someone unexpectedly confirms something one has felt and been doubted for. “He’s pleasant company, isn’t he? The journey passes quickly with him.”

“He’s one of those people”—he was searching for exactly what he wanted to say—”one of those men whose presence makes — makes the air comfortable. It’s the only way I can put it. All those people rocking from here to there in the train every day; rocking back: he sits there like a sensible hand over the questions you’d pester yourself with.”

I wanted to interrupt with eagerness to agree. That was it. But the young man with the biblical name returned to his reading. When two or three stations had drawn off their workers and the level of heads in the carriage sank to normal, he sat down opposite me, arranging his legs carefully so that his shoes would not scuff mine. I leaned forward and said: “Thank you all the same for giving me the seat,” and he smiled and slid down in his seat spreading his knees comfortably with a faint air of puzzled surprise, as some close member of one’s family, used to the silent acceptance of intimacy, might be surprised by formal politeness.

I sat back gathering my own silence for a breath or two. But I would not let the moment glide by; in defiance to my mother, in response to the stirring that opposed her in me, I wanted to say something real, a short arrangement of words that would open up instead of gloss over. It came to me like the need to push through a pane and let in the air. I leaned forward. “Why do you treat me as if you know me?”

He looked up; there was that quick change of focus in his eyes: from print to a face. He said patiently: “Because I do.” And now it was easy and my boldness made me laugh. He was laughing too. “I’ve known you ever since I can remember. You used to wear a yellow tartan skirt with a big pin thing in it — I used to think you must have a pretty bad mother, if she wouldn’t even sew up your dresses properly.”

“But it was supposed to be like that!”

“So I found out. Not for years though—” He shook his head. “I’d never seen anything like that.”

“But where? I don’t know how it was you could have seen me, known me, if I don’t know you.”

“In the bioscope, the town with your mother, passing in your father’s car — for years. Ever since I can remember.”

I sat there, smiling, doubting. He nodded his head slowly at me, as if to say, yes, yes, it’s true. “You used to have a little pale blond friend and you both used to carry white handbags. Like grown-up women.”

“Olwen. Olwen Taylor and I! But you’ve got an astonishing memory.” My deep interest in myself made the fact of a stranger’s recollections of me remarkable; it was like being shown an old photograph, taken when one was not looking, a photograph of which one did not even know the existence until this moment. And yet there it is, the face one has sometimes caught unawares in a mirror.

“But I used to see you so often in the bus, too. Coming from school.”

“You were never in the bus — I should have remembered you. I can remember any child who traveled on that bus.” At once I was dubious.

“Not in it. I used to cycle home from school at about the same time, and we used to pass the bus — two or three other boys and I, it was a great thing to race it.”

I was filled with the delight of interest in myself. I asked a dozen questions. “I had a fringe? Did you know me when I had a fringe — awful, it was always too long, into my eyebrows. Or was it later, when I had plaits?”—I stopped in amazement again. “I remember all the phases,” he said.

In the pause an impulse of regret grew in me at not remembering him; I could turn back to so many faces, some I had never known, watched and never spoken to, and all the time the one that had been fixed on me had gone unnoticed. His look questioned me, dark, water-colored eyes, mottled and traced with an intricacy of lines and flecks, like markings of successive geological ages on the piece of polished quartz my father kept. “I was trying to imagine you seeing me, and I not knowing you were.” He laughed. I was curious again: “But what were you doing that way? You certainly didn’t live on the Mine, that I’m sure.”

“At that time we were living out at the store — my father’s store. Not in the town”—he anticipated the association—”The Concession stores just outside your property.” He went on explaining but now it was himself my attention was taking in and not what he was saying. Of course this was a different face. There was no place, no feature, no bone one could point to and say: Here, this is where it is; yet the face was different. The faces that had looked in at me when I was an infant, the faces I had fondled, the faces that had been around me all my life had differences, one from the other, but they were differences of style. This face was built on some other last.

I said: “Your name’s Aaron?” not meaning it to sound, as it did, a conclusion.

But he said with that sweet reasonableness that he seemed to keep inside him the way some people keep strength, or touchiness: “Joel. My surname’s Aaron.”

“I thought Ian Petrie said it was Aaron, that’s why.”—Smiling, but I was thinking of a tortoise shell, a confused memory that brought up with it the faded camphor of a defiance, my mother, angry with me, in white tennis clothes. “There was one time I’ll never forget.” He was laughing, with the relish of a story. “I was riding into Atherton to have two of my mother’s hens killed — one under each arm, and balancing furiously — you were sitting at the back of a half-empty bus and you stood right up and watched me go by with such an expression on your face! I kept my head down and rode like hell.”

“D’you know I’ve only been down there once in my life … to the stores. I couldn’t have been more than ten. I was angry with my mother, so I went down all by myself one Saturday afternoon.” The tone of my voice showed that it was still an adventure to me.

“Was it forbidden, then?” he asked.

“Oh yes. Quite forbidden; the natives, and unhealthy …” I did not think to pretend otherwise my mother’s distaste for the stores.

I was right; I did not need to. “We survived very well,” he laughed, as if he knew my mother, too. Perhaps, knowing me, shaped by my mother, he did.

“You certainly have,” I said with a little gesture of my face toward his books; I did not know why.

“Yes.” Now he was thoughtful.

I remembered something, seriously—”By the way, perhaps I should have said, but you seem to know so much—”

He smiled at me again, that expressive smile that had an almost nasal curve to it, gently. “Yes I know; it’s Helen. Helen of Atherton.”

It was a title. Perfectly sincerely, I could hear it was a title. And although the obvious reference that came to mind was ridiculous, it made me blush. Entirely without coquetry I suddenly wished I were better looking, beautiful. It was something I felt I should have had, like the dignity of an office.

Chapter 12

The Aarons did not live behind the Concession Store any more, but in a little suburban house in the town. There was a short red granolithic path from the front door to the gate, and the first time I went there a fowl was jerking cautiously along a row of dahlias. Joel said, opening the gate for me, the sun laying angles of shadow on his face: “I often thought about going into your house, but I never imagined bringing you to mine.”

It was a Saturday morning, and I had met him coming out of the stationer’s in the main street of Atherton, carrying a paper bag from which the head of a paintbrush protruded. “My builder’s supplies.” He waved the bag. I knew all about the model hospital he was making as part of his year’s work as an architectural student. He had explained the sketches for it to me in the train.

“Did you remember the ambulance for the front door?”

“—Come with me to buy it.”

The town had taken spring like a deep breath; it showed only in the bright pale brushes of grass that pushed up newly where there were cracks in the paving, the young leaves on the dark dry limbs of the trees round the Town Hall, but we felt it on our faces and I on my bare arms. There was a feeling of waking; as if a cover had been whipped off the glass shop fronts and the faded blinds. When we had been to the bazaar, he said: “You’ve wanted to see my hospital and you’ve heard so much about it — why don’t you come home with me now? If you’re doing nothing, it’s not far—” So we walked slowly to his home in the light glancing sun, talking past the bits of gardens where children scratched in the dust, women knitted on their verandas, a native girl beat a rug over a wire fence.

It was only when he spoke at the gate that our interested talk dropped lightly and suddenly. The faint sense of intrusion that quietens one when one is about to walk in on someone else’s most familiar witnesses came to me. It was suddenly between us that we really knew each other well; oddly, it seemed that a matter for laughter — Joel’s eyes silently on me from a distance — really had secreted a friendship that it had only been necessary for us to speak to discover. Since that morning on the train we had been companions on every journey, and with an ease that comes to relationships most often as a compensation for the dulling of years, very rarely with the immediacy of a streak of talent.

Yes, we knew each other well, the young to the young, a matching of the desire for laughter, meaning and discovery which boils up identically, clear of the different ties, tensions, habits and memories that separately brewed it. But this brown front door with the brush hairs held in the paint, an elephant-ear plant in a paraffintin pot below the bell, watched Joel Aaron every day. Inside; the walls, the people who made him what he was as the unseen powers of climate shape a landscape; force flowers, thick green, or a pale monotony of sand.

He lifted the mat made of rolled tire strips, looking for the key, and dropped it back. “Ma’s home, then.” He smiled, and the door gave way to his hand.

It was not spring inside the Aarons’ house. The air of a matured distilled indoor season, an air that had been folded away in cupboards with old newsprint and heavy linen, cooked in ten-years’ pots of favorite foods, burned with the candles of ten-years’ Friday nights, rested in the room with its own sure permeance, reaching every corner of the ceiling, passing into the dimness of passages with the persistence of a faint, perpetual smoke.

Joel was not aware of it as one cannot be aware of the skin-scent of one’s own body; he picked up some circulars that the postman had pushed under the door and threw them onto a chair. The house opened directly into the living room where there was a large dark table with a crocheted lace cloth, high-backed chairs set back against the wall, a great dark sideboard with two oval, convex-glassed pictures above it. A pair of stern, stupid eyes looked out from the smoky beard of an old photograph; the face of a foolish man in the guise of a patriarch. But next to him the high bosom, the high nose that seemed to tighten the whole face, slant the black eyes, came with real presence through a print that seemed to have evaporated from the paper: a woman presided over the room.

Past a green leatherette sofa with shiny portholes for ash trays in the arms, Joel led me through the white archway into the passage. A refrigerator stood against the wall as if in a place of honor; our footsteps were noisy on thin checkered linoleum that outlined the uneven spines of the floor boards beneath it like a shiny skin. In his room, Joel showed the self-conscious busyness that comes upon one in one’s own home. He put out the little rough dog that had been sleeping on the bed, kicked a pair of shoes out of sight, cleared one or two rolls of plans off the table that held his model.

To me the model was a cunning and delightful toy and I exclaimed over it with pleasure. I made him take the miniature ambulance out of its packet and place it under the portico.

“What I’m worried about, you see, is this—” He knew I could not detect the functional pitfalls of his design, yet he hoped for reassurance in itself, even the reassurance of ignorance. I tried to separate my intelligence from my fascination with the perfect little windows, the flower boxes made of cork. “I see. I see …”

He had a way of looking up penetratingly to see if the face of the person to whom he was speaking confirmed his words. It was quick, earnest, almost a request. “I’ll show you, here on the plan — somewhere here—” His long olive-skinned hands unrolled the paper on the bed, we knelt on it together, rumpling the blue taffeta cover that smelled of dog. The plan shot up again like a released blind. He picked it up, blew down it. He said calmly, as if the thing had dwindled to its proper small importance; “Well, there’ll be no problem getting it back again after it’s seen. I’ll take five minutes to break it up.” I protested, but he only smiled at me, swinging a leg. “You might want to look at this,” he said, “and these”—he was pulling books out of an old high case that stood by his bed—”Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright — the high priests—”

I bounced his bed. “It’s very soft.” I laughed, looking round. He shrugged, deprecating it. “Feather bed; from Russia. Look, Helen, what do you think about this?” And he brought a book of Danish furniture design to my lap.

I wandered slowly, curiously round his small room as if in a museum. The glossy books on modern architecture and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Yeats and Huxley, paper-backed John Stuart Mill and Renan’s Life of Jesus were stacked on the hand-crocheted mats which were spread on the chest of drawers, the bedside table and the top of the bookcase. A photograph of a school group hung on a brass wire, and a framed address in what looked like oriental characters and must be Hebrew hung at a lower level beside it. On the other wall a modern print had a frame that had evidently belonged to something else, and did not fit it. The only modern painter I had ever heard of was Van Gogh, from a novelized version of his life which I had taken from the Atherton library. “That’s not a Van Gogh, is it?”

“Seurat.”

“Oh.”

A Treasury of Folk Tales for Jewish Boys and Girls, How to Make It, The Wonder Adventure Book—and on top of this battered pile an army cap. It was easy to forget that Joel had been in the army.

“Joel, you’ve never told me, why were you discharged?”

“I got a mastoid and it did something queer to my middle ear. For about a year I couldn’t hear at all.”

I was curious. “Show me how you looked in uniform? — Oh, come on, you must have a picture somewhere?”

He was kneeling next to his model, adjusting something with precision, and the light of the window behind him glowed through his ears and made his teeth shine in contrast to the darkness that blurred the rest of his face. “You laughing in anticipation?”

“It’s the light through your ears — all red. — But put it on, then, if you won’t show me your picture.”

He came forward laughing, with the air of a good-natured dog that allows a ribbon to be put on its collar. “Wait — wait—” I was knighting him with the cap, and his hand, with the short movements of someone searching by touch, was feeling to arrange it, when a hoarse little voice said softly, like a reluctant question: “Joel …”

I turned round.

“No, sit down — you’ll excuse me — I just want to ask something, Joel, d’you know if Daddy’s coming home to lunch or he’s going straight to Colley? He’s coming?” A short round woman stood in the doorway; she held her hands in front of her in the attitude of someone coming for instructions. They were puffy hands with hardened flesh growing up round small, clean but unkempt nails, the ragged-cuticle nails of domestic workers or children. Her body in a cheap silk dress that had the remains of an elaboration of black cotton lace and fagoted trimming round the neck was the incredibly small-hipped, thickened body of Jewish women from certain parts of Europe, the swollen doll’s body from which it seems impossible that tall sons and daughters can, and do, come. The floral pattern of the apron she wore was rubbed away over the bulge of her breasts and her stomach. She looked at me from under the straggling, rather beautiful eyebrows you sometimes see on the faces of eagle-eyed old men, and beneath arches of fine, mauvish, shadowy skin, her lids remained level, half-shuttered. But the eyes were bright, liquid, water-colored.

I knew she must be Joel’s mother and I felt acutely the fact that I was sitting casually on the bed, in the house of strangers. This I felt in relation to her, and to Joel, the embarrassment he must feel at her accent, her whole foreignness before me.

But he answered her: “Colley? — Why should he go there first — Of course he’s coming home.”

At once I was alone and they were both strangers. Something in the way he spoke to her, something he took from her own voice, as one takes a key in music, put me outside of them. I sat very consciously on the bed; what had been unnoticeably comfortable was now precarious: I had to brace my legs to prevent myself from slipping off the coverlet.

I smiled at Mrs. Aaron timidly as if to excuse her to herself. But she did not feel the need to be forgiven; she gave herself time to look at me with frank curiosity, as one might stop to finger a piece of material in a shop. “Joel,” she bridled, “why don’t you bring the young lady into the lounge? Must she sit in the bedroom? — You must excuse him, he doesn’t think.” She drooped her head at him in an appraising, irritated smile. He made a little noise of smiling impatience. “No, it’s not nice she should be stuck in this room — It’s not so beautiful, believe me—” Suddenly she and I were both laughing; as usual, I had deserted, in a desire to be liked had aligned myself in a sudden swift turn with what embarrassed or frightened me. We were led back to the living room, his mother talking on as if he were absent: “It’s always like that. Anybody comes, he hides them away in his room. — Come sit down. Take a comfortable chair—”

“No, really, I’m quite all right—”

“Come on—” She made me move. All her own movements were slow, heavy and insistent as her voice, the movements of someone who has been on her feet a long time, like a horse who keeps up the plod of pulling a load even when he is set free in the field.

She went over to the sideboard with a kind of formal dignity, as if in spite of her wrinkled stockings and her feet which defied the shape of her shoes, her slip showing beneath the old afternoon dress as she bent, there was a grace of behavior that existed independently, as a tradition, no matter who performed it or how. Next to three packs of cards was a pink glass sweet dish filled with clusters of toffee-covered biscuit. “You’ll have something? Come on.” I took one, but when she saw it in my hand uncertainty came to her. “Perhaps she’ll rather have a sweet, Joel — Take my keys, and in the bedroom cupboard—” I protested and bit into the sticky biscuit. “—Go on, I’ve got some nice chocolates.”

I sat there eating my biscuit like a child who is being anxiously fattened.

“A bunch of grapes, perhaps? I got lovely grapes today from the market.”

Joel assured his mother that we did not want tea, lemonade or fruit.

She sat down near the door on a straight-backed chair and her swollen ankles settled on her shoes. We had been introduced, and after she had sat breathing heavily, thoughtfully, over her resting bosom for a moment (neither of us spoke; we could hear her) she said with polite, cautious inquiry, as if the reply would really give her an answer to something else: “Your father he’s something on the Atherton Mine — and mummy? Your mummy’s still alive?”

“Yes.” In an awkward burst I made some attempt to make my life real to her. “We’ve always lived there. My father’s Secretary. — I hate the Mine.”

She stirred slowly in her chair. “So? It’s your home, we all got to like our home.”

There was a pause. I was overcome with the theatrical way I had burst out ridiculously: I hate the Mine — and the even acceptance of this old woman’s reply. She got up slowly, stood looking round the room as if to make sure she had forgotten nothing. “Well, you’ll excuse me—” she said, as if I were not there, an air of apology that seemed to throw the onus of my presence on me, and went out slowly and suddenly both withdrawing and yet taking the field at the same time.

“Would you like to wash?” said Joel, getting up. “They leave you rather sticky, though my mother really does make them very well.” He put the dish of sweet biscuits away carefully in the sideboard.

I don’t know why he surprised me; Joel was continually surprising me by ease when there might have been strain, a word where there might have been a vacuum. He said what he thought and somehow it was never what I thought he was thinking: his nature had for mine the peculiar charm of the courage to be itself without defiance; I had always to be opposing myself in order to test the validity of my reactions, a moral “Who goes there?” to which my real feelings as well as those imposed from without and vaguely held suspect must be submitted in a confusion of doubt. And when I answered myself and acted, anxiousness sometimes made me mistake bravado for honesty.

Now I had been ready to make it easy for Joel; to show him that so far as I was concerned, he need not mind about his mother. This was quite a different thing from finding that he did not mind about his mother; that far from being apologetic of the peculiar sweetmeat which politeness had forced me to eat, he seriously commended her skill in preparing it.

Yet, as so often happened with him, what put me out momentarily, set me free as the expected reaction from him could not have done; it was not necessary to pretend anything, even understanding. I could be curious about the old portraits looking down on us. They were his father’s parents: “The old chap was supposed to be a Talmudic scholar. I don’t quite know what the Christian equivalent of that would be. … The Talmud — it’s a kind of book of religious philosophy. Somewhere in every Jewish family they’ve got a Talmudic scholar preserved, it’s a distinction none of us can afford to be without. Like ours, he’s usually dead, but there are stories about how during his life time he spent his days and nights poring over books of wisdom — you know, the Talmud’s rather like Shakespeare or Finnegans Wake now — hundreds of different interpretations of the text and scholastic arguments which die unsolved with their protagonists. — He doesn’t look much of a scholar, does he?”

We looked the old man in the eye.

I laughed. “She looks the brainy one.”

“She was the go-getter. These Talmudic scholars are nice for prestige, but mostly they don’t make a living. With him I really think it must just have been an excuse to get out of working and hang around the synagogue with his pals.”

“You make it sound like the men’s commonroom.”

He pulled his nose down sardonically, laughing. “Now you see where I get it from. The family glories in the education I’m getting myself, while really all I’m doing is learning to play a devastating hand at bridge. — But seriously, as soon as any member of a Jewish family shows any inclination even vaguely connected with learning — it could be stamp-collecting or pornography — everybody starts wagging their heads: he’s just like old Uncle so-and-so, so studious. … She took in dressmaking to keep the family.” Under her eyes, we wandered back to Joel’s room; she had the imagined power of the dead and alien to fasten her look far beyond the frame or carved limits of their presence; like the face of the idol whose symbolism you do not understand — is he to bring rain, corn or protection? — but whose jeweled eye you feel long after you have left the temple.

I left the house just before lunch with two of Joel’s books under my arm — one was always taking something from him, he was one of those people who give out of a sufficiency in themselves, welling up beautifully to a constant level no matter how often dipped into, and quite independent of material possession or the condescension of generosity. His father had come home but I did not see him, although I could hear, in the back of the house, a heavy tread and a moody voice speaking another language. Joel hung on the gate making a ridge of his brows against the sun. There was a fascination about the way he looked in the full sun; the fascination I had felt in the faces of Indian waiters serving food in Durban hotels. That steely darkness of black curly hair — perhaps it was just that his hair was like theirs. But their faces came up in the sun as his did. The quiet-colored faces and neutral hair among which I had grown up had a way of almost disappearing in bright sunlight, only a sear of gleam here and there traced their light-flattened contours, and they blinked laughter, as if the brightness were a hand pushed in their faces. Ludi was something else again; his brightness took on brightness, like metal.

One could not know whether it was the sun or thought that was making Joel frown. His hesitation made me wait. When we had already said good-by, he asked: “Shall I come to you, now?”

I felt I understood what he meant. One could have a friendship in a train that could exist for years outside one’s life as an entity, but once one met and talked at home instead of between here and there, one part of one’s life and another, the friend of the train moved in to one’s life. “Yes, what about one evening? Tuesday — no, that’s the night I get back late. Wednesday, then?”

But he said, as if it suddenly didn’t matter: “Oh, we don’t have to fix it now.” Then he smiled on an inner comment. “Right,” he said, dismissing it, very friendly, and with a little wave, turned up the path. When I looked back as I turned the corner, to take in a last curious impact of that little house, I saw he had not gone in but was still standing there, on the veranda steps, watching me go or staring at some object of his own.

Joel came to the Mine several times and my mother received him without remark. She spoke to him for a few minutes with the usual slightly arch pleasantness which she showed toward my contemporaries — her whole manner on a higher, soprano key, like an actress helping across some lines whose meaning she feels may not be clear — and then left us on the fly-screened porch that was full of the flowered cotton chair covers and embroidered cushions she had made, the sawdust-stuffed stocking cat that held the door open. At four o’clock she came out with a tea tray laid with fresh linen and, not the best cups, but a little twosome breakfast set that was not in common use. I recognized in Joel’s serious, careful manner that she was even pretty, with her thin, dry-skinned face and her red hair only slightly faded by the curls that the hairdresser steamed into it once a week, now that it was cut, and the almost antiseptic scent of lavender water that waved out of the flounces of her dress. She was even well dressed, in what I was now beginning to recognize was the Mine style: the flower-patterned, unobtrusive blues and pinks of English royalty.

My father spoke to Joel about “your people” and “the customs of your people” with the same air he used to surprise the Portuguese market gardener with a few words of Portuguese, or, when once we drove through Zululand, a Zulu tribesman with a brisk question in his own language. But though I sat in awkward silence, Joel answered with patient explanation, as the cultured native of a country ignores the visitor’s proud clumsy mouthing of a few words of vulgar patois, and returns patronage with the compliment of pretending to mistake it for real interest. “That’s a well-mannered boy,” my father informed me. “They know how to bring their children up to respect older people. And of course they’re clever, it goes without saying.”

Some weeks later I told my mother that Joel had asked me to go with him to a faculty dance. She put down an armful of clean laundry in alarm. “You wouldn’t go when Basil asked you! And the Blake boy.”

“So?”

She stood there looking at me. Her face had the fixed, sham steadiness of someone who does not know how to say the unexpected. The impact of her thoughts left a sort of stinging blankness on her cheeks. As usual, she took refuge in an unspecified umbrage, her suffering of a complaint against me for which I must bear the burden of guilt without knowing its cause. She buried herself in the counting of shirts, left my pile of underclothing and handkerchiefs abandoned on the kitchen chair and swept away with the rest of the bundle to the linen cupboard.

I went after her. “Why don’t you want me to go?”

Her tactics were common ones, and always the same: she went about a succession of household tasks with swift effort as if you were merely a distraction on the perimeter of her concentration of duty. When, as a child, I had wanted to be forgiven for some piece of naughtiness, I had had to follow her about the house like this, watching her hard, slender hands ignoring me. I asked her again:

“Why shouldn’t I go?”

She hated to answer. By withholding her complaints, her accusations, her arguments, she withheld also the risk of their refutation and kept for herself the cold power of the wronged.

So now she said tightly: “You wouldn’t go with Basil or the other one.”

I laughed. “Because I didn’t want to.”

“They’re not your type.” It was a quotation.

“No, they’re not. It doesn’t mean that because we happen to come from the Mine we’ve got to stick to one another at University. Basil’s never ever been a friend of mine — we’ve nothing in common.”

“And you have,” she stated, meaning Joel and me.

“We get on well. He’s intelligent, and well — nice, that’s all. …” It was almost an appeal; my tightening of irritation unwound into a desire to have my mother agree with me, to accept her. A feeling of tears coming in a longing for her approval, even if she was wrong, even if we were different.

She ignored it off the hard back of her understanding; it slid, harmless. …

“As I say, you certainly do have the queerest taste.” There was something indescribably insulting in the casualness with which she dissociated herself by this callow, mild cliché; she would not even give me the blunt words of her real objections, trouble herself with an examination of what she felt. The Petrie man and now the Jewish storekeeper’s son: Well, it’s so, isn’t it? her back turned on me said.

I believe that was the only dance Joel took me to; he had little money, many things he wanted to do, and as he was two or three years older than I was it was only the interruption of the war that made him an undergraduate when, in himself, the stage had already passed. And curiously, I did not mind. The one dance had somehow not been an entire success; Joel and I could not hold hands, dance with my cheek raised and his lowered like love-stalking birds. We could talk endlessly, spend more and more time together, meet each other’s faces above other people’s chatter with the sudden comfort of each other’s understanding; but this we could not do. Perhaps for dances something in me wanted the tall, fair-haired boys who could clown over beer bottles and flirt with me in the permissive code of gentlemen of my own blood. With one of them I did not have to meet the purposefully unremarking smiles of my classmates (we think nothing of it!) nor did I feel, as I did when Joel stopped to speak to a group of friends, the sudden insipidity of the blue organza dress my mother had made me, the locket on a chain round my neck, in contrast to the interesting dramatic clothes of the friendly Jewesses, bold in their ugliness, bold in their beauty, outdistancing me either way.

This need of mine existed not only outside but also in contradiction to the expansion of my confiding intimacy with Joel Aaron. Out of the silences that followed some minor confession — the silence that is really the rise of sudden floodwaters of words, blocking by pressure the trickling release of speech — came the real unburdening. I told him of my gradual suspension from the life of the Mine … my voice tailed off in what seemed tame and not quite the truth. We were silent, or spoke of something else. Then all of a sudden it came: I told him about Ludi. He himself seemed to impose the limitation of what I should tell him. “It’s a pity to give it away,” he said, combining, as usual in his manner, the immediate sympathy of a contemporary with the comforting, dispassionate remove of a much older person. “When you tell someone else about someone you have loved, you always have the misgiving afterward that you’ve given that much of it away.”

“You sound like a romantic.”—For him, at this time, it was a term of scorn and like a simple object that has been handled by the great, I was fascinated to be able to use it, for it belonged to the vocabulary of that group with the sense of self-ordainment to a sharper, warmer, ruthlessly honest life which exists in every university, and whom, through Joel, I was beginning to hear around me.

He spread out his dark hands stiffly in the pleasure of yawning.

“Only in love. Which is the right place.”

One subject that often brought us to near-argument was my mother. A curious kind of struggle seemed to go on between us at the alert of her name, a battle in the larger air above our heads, the clamor of which reached us only faintly in the reasonable sound of our two voices. She and I had argued again one evening about my going to live in Johannesburg, and after dinner I had heard her in the kitchen, behind the muffle of the door, discussing me with Anna. When Joel arrived to see me with a book he had found for me, I was withdrawn into irritation.

“—She’s been shut in the kitchen since dinner, discussing me over the dishes with the native servant.” We were sitting on the porch; moths and rose beetles from out the summer night beat a tattoo against the wire gauze that enclosed us in light. Joel sat, looking at but not seeing his hands hanging between his knees.

“Her opinion’s so valuable, you know — Naturally, she’s been absorbing my mother’s personal homespun philosophy for fifteen years — she’s the one person calculated never ever to disagree with a single word; and that’s how my mother likes it. It’s a wonder she doesn’t buy herself a parrot. That would be more dignified, anyway, than discussing me with a servant.”

Joel’s silence annoyed me because its questioning suggested the fear that somehow I might be in the wrong. I stared at him for answer, but he merely widened his nostrils as if he were stifling a sigh as one stifles a yawn. The blood trapped in his forgotten hands showed veins crossed and wound like tendrils of a creeper that has come to life round the fingers of a broken stone hand in a garden. Something in the heaviness of his look, a look passing like a river beneath the dark arches of his eyes, reminded me of his mother; of the way she sank, sometimes, out of the family talk; was her, despite her white shoes that were never cleaned, the big hairpins that fell out of her thin hair and smelled, when you picked them up, of the greenish tinge of metal and old frying. Suddenly I wanted to make him move; I said: “Joel?”—to do that, rather than to urge him to speak.

He said: “You discuss Professor Quail’s shortcomings with Mary Seswayo.” Mary Seswayo was the African girl I had seen in the cloakroom when first I went to the University, and to whom I had begun to speak lately.

I was angry. “Ah, you know it’s not that! — It wouldn’t matter if Anna were white, yellow — whatever she was — she’s a servant, an illiterate. It’s humiliating for a woman to discuss her private family affairs with a servant, someone who isn’t even capable of forming a judgment—”

“You don’t like the way your mother speaks about natives. You told me only the other day that it ‘made your blood boil’ when you heard her describe someone’s way of living as ‘worse than a native.’ To prove your enlightenment as opposed to her darkness, you pursue a poor frightened little native girl who happens to have passed English I, or whatever it is, round the Arts block, offering a rare tidbit of white acquaintanceship—”

“I want to talk to her as I might want to talk to any other student. I don’t see why I should be debarred by my white skin? Why, it’s from you yourself—”

“—And then when your mother puts aside considerations of status and color and talks — as one woman to another, mind — to Anna, your blood boils just as hard again.”

“You’re deliberately choosing to misconstrue. You know that’s just what I cannot stand about my mother’s attitude: making use of Anna as a friend and conveniently ignorant yes-woman, elevating her to the status of a confidante, and at the same time pushing her, along with her whole race, into a categorical sloth — of moral, spiritual — everything — inferiority. It’s a variation on the same old theme — you know; of course, you’re different, you’re my friend, it suits me to like you, even though you’re a Jew. Isn’t it the same, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. And so is your attitude, neatly inverted. Your mother succeeds in the personal relationship; she fails in words, in the theory. Your theory’s sound all right, but you betray it in the heat of personal involvement; your blood lets you down. In fact, it boils when it shouldn’t. You can’t recognize that your mother’s heart-to-heart talks with Anna are the real thing, the thing we’re all piously rolling our eyes to heaven for — a contact between a white and a black simply as human beings — nothing else.”

I felt moody. “Simply, nothing — it’s simply the Trusted Black Mammy situation, that’s all. And you know how much good that sort of good will has done for race relations.”

He gave a little patient smile at the term, hearing it new on my tongue, as one hears someone use the vogue-word of a particular set, and so knows where his affinities, like antennae, are taking him. He shrugged. “None at all. About as much good as those militant liberals who love humanity but can’t stand men and women.”

I was still young enough to lose my temper and be a little ridiculous when I felt I was losing ground. “I’m going to be one of them, I suppose?”

“Don’t be a coy bluestocking,” he said aside, smiling. “—I hope not—” he commented, as if he feared it was something he might be responsible for.

Somehow one of the hard, round-backed beetles had got in. It hit the reflections of light wavering like smoke rings on the ceiling, slithered down the brittle burning surface of the globe itself, and dropped onto Joel’s head. With the calmness of the male, who distinguishes between the biters and the harmless hateful, he scooped it absently into his hand and threw it onto the floor. I put my heel down on it; like crunching a nut. We were in the unsatisfactory listless state of people who have argued about something other than the argument’s cause. I had the sudden impatient feeling that all this talk that I sought after and felt was so important at the time of talking was nothing, was of no interest to me: all that I really cared about was what happened directly to myself; there was nothing and no one in the world beyond the urgent importance of me, of a burning, selfish grasp of what would happen to me, alone. This feeling held me glowering, like a fit of sulks.

After a few minutes Joel began to tell me of a mix-up on the telephone in which he had been involved with his married sister, Colley, but though I accepted the amusing way he told the story, I ignored the change of mood, and flung out, like a challenge and an excuse for a return to disagreeableness: “Joel, why do you always side with my mother against me?” It was spoken as pettishly as it was phrased.

He looked as if he had been expecting it. Again he became heavy, wary. “Do I?”

I waved it aside. “You know what I mean. If I tell you anything about her — not disparaging, exactly, but anything to which one might expect you would agree was unreasonable on her part — you shut up like a clam. I don’t understand it.”

“Look, Helen, I don’t side with her—”

“But so often she’s wrong, quite wrong, and you’ll never give me the satisfaction of admitting it!”

“Of course I know she’s wrong; difficult, anyway. But it doesn’t matter. You can’t do anything about it, so it doesn’t matter. You can’t change them, her or your father, you can’t make them over the way you think — we think — they ought to be or the way we believe we’d like to have them.”

He saw the dissatisfaction in my eyes. “But you can’t get rid of them, either.”

I was shocked, at myself rather than his words. “—What a way to put it.”

“Making them over would be getting rid of them as they are. Well, you can’t do it. You can’t do it by going to live somewhere else, either. You can’t even do it by never seeing them again for the rest of your life. There is that in you that is them, and it’s that unkillable fiber of you that will hurt you and pull you off balance wherever you run to — unless you accept it. Accept them in you, accept them as they are, even if you yourself choose to live differently, and you’ll be all right. Funnily enough, that’s the only way to be free of them. You’ll see — really, I know.”

I protested. “But I tell you I don’t want to ‘get away’ in that sense. I don’t want to change them, really. … I just want them to be a little more understanding … to let me think my way. To have some respect for the things I want to do, the things I think are important.” I was amazed to have put these reasons to Joel, with whom I had discovered the extent of the gulf between the life of my parents and the life I wanted for myself. Joel, with whom I was hearing live music for the first time in my life; who said, Come on, I’ve got something to show you — and, between lectures, pushed me before him onto a tram to town to see exhibitions of painting and sculpture, showed me the inside of the municipal art gallery that all my life till now had been a gray stone exterior from which one might take one’s bearings, like the magistrates’ courts, or a fire station. Joel, from whose books and whose talk I was even beginning to see that the houses we lived in in Atherton and on the Mine did not make use of space and brightness and air, but, like a woman with bad features and a poor complexion who seeks to distract with curls and paint, had their defects smothered in lace curtains and their dark corners filled with stands of straggling plants which existed for these awkward angles between wall and wall, as one evil exists simply for another.

“Still in the Second League. Been in the Second League, every year for twelve years. My mother tells everybody who comes. Soon it’ll be awful; the way all the Mine people repeat to one another with awe: the Compound Manager’s wonderful old mother! That wonderful old Mrs. Ockert! And why is she wonderful? Because she’s eighty-two. …”

Joel smiled.

I said: “I suppose I make them seem …” He nodded. I looked at his hands with their sensitive-tipped fingers that always moved a little on the surface on which they rested, as the nose of a sensitive animal responds constantly to the mere fact of being alive; his broad, European peasant body, the curious, patient, implied shrug of his people: he had eyes that one could never imagine closed, like a light that is never put out.

It was as if I had blundered into the fact of his parents; I felt as if I had suddenly said, aloud, There! — and produced them, bewildered, ignorant, embarrassing, blinking like moles brought up into the unaccustomed light of Joel’s world of books and music and houses clean, sharp as beautiful paper shapes. He had said: I know. I sat staring at my own silence hardening around me; a person who suddenly remembers that the illness of which he has been talking with unsparing clinical thoroughness is the very one from which his companion must be suffering.

Chapter 13

Getting to know Mary Seswayo was like gently coaxing a little shy animal to edge forward to your hand.

There was, as Joel had inferred, something of a collector’s suppressed eagerness in the trembling bait I held out to her from time to time; and we were afraid of each other, she of the lion-mask of white mastery that she saw superimposed on my face, I of the mouse-mask of black submission with which I obscured hers. Yet there was the moment in the cloakroom; a meeting of inherited enemies in the dark in which they mistake one another for friends. And it is never forgotten: not the fact that enemy could be mistaken for friend, but the shared bewilderment of the darkness each recognized in the other’s eye. That is a moment of fusion that cannot be taken back and discussed with one’s own side, for it is a moment for which they too are the enemy. It has none of the sentiment of the armed truce, the soldiers of warring armies drinking beer together on Christmas Day and going back to killing one another on Boxing Day, but is more in the nature of an uncomfortable secret.

When after almost six months at the University I started my first year proper, I found myself in an English tutorial group that included two Africans. One was a fat, pompous teacher-priest “continuing his studies,” the other was Mary Seswayo. When she came in, walking with her head down to the back of Room 325, we knew each other, though I did not look up as she passed the desk at which I was already seated. The native girl from across the washbasin that day. (”African” was an acquired word, preferred by non-Europeans and liberals not only because it was a more accurate designation, but rather because it was as yet clean of the degrading contexts in which the other had been dyed more deeply than with color — in the unself-conscious privacy of my thoughts I still used the old inherited word.) I felt that now and then she looked at me; felt the gentle, curious glance of her recognition touching my back.

She never spoke in class discussions, but the priest did. He used his old manner of the preacher to the layman for the new purpose of the black man to the white man: hearty, hand-rubbing, bright. We are all God’s children; let’s make the best of it. Sometimes there was the suspicion that he half-clowned his unctuous jolliness, wood-touching for the temerity of his equality, that he snatched with a conjurer’s patter and glee while his white audience was being amused, and his own people, in the know, demonstrated his superiority to them in their inability to follow his sleight of hand. So he apologized beforehand for any offense your whiteness might, with its awesome sensitivity, take from the innocuous, like litmus paper mysteriously turning red with immersion. And it seemed to him he got away with it; a trick kind of equality, in a trick kind of way, but still, an equality. “How are we this morning, how are we? — And is our Dr. East not ‘on time’?” He would swing round the door and pile his books on a desk in the front row, beaming at the class through polishing gestures with which he swept his hot face with a handkerchief as someone cleans a pair of spectacles preparatory to settling to work.

He did wear spectacles, but these were permanently misted by the heat of his hands, and he took them on and off as he sat, face poised beneath Dr. East like a seal waiting for the keeper’s fish to land in his mouth. The instant Dr. East paused to invite discussion, the preacher rose to it. (The subject of discussion, on one occasion I remember, was Thackeray’s discursive muse.) “Sir, well, I should like to say — in my humble opinion that is — I don’t know how my fellow students are feeling about it — but this bad habit of Thackeray’s, it makes it very difficult for the student. It is hard for him to know what is the story, if you know what I mean, and in examination it may be that you are asked a question about the story, and you know the book too well and put in what is not the story?” He smiled round the class with a slowly widening gesture, as a conductor acknowledges applause by taking it for his whole orchestra.

Dr. East had faded ginger hair and colorless eyes that had the cold snap of a pair of scissors, impatiently cutting off irrelevancies and idiocies with a look, before they could rise to articulation. After giving the preacher two or three commentless hearings, with the allowance of attention in the face of irritation which would be accorded to any foreigner, he refused any further concession. Yet he was not quite so hard on the African as he would have been on a European student: the viper-flicker of his sarcasm he kept in his mouth. “Just a moment, Mr. Thabo—” He would signal him down and raise his eyes at some other student who was struggling with the desire to speak.

The girl, as I have said, did not speak at all. She listened with the painful intentness of someone who is always balanced on the edge of noncomprehension, and she wrote things down when one could not imagine what had been said that was worth noting. Dr. East had a peculiar affection for those who did not offer dissent or opinion; probably he was grateful to be spared the risk of hearing more banalities. Yet at the same time he had the endearing quality of literary men — those in the exact sciences are much less hopeful — the belief that perhaps something fresh and intelligent is being muffled by timidity. Particularly in the unexplored country — jungle profusion? sweet grassland? silence of rock? — of the other race’s intellectual innocence. His compressed lips that twitched at the fly of impatience suddenly opened in his surprising smile; a friendly smile on big even false teeth that altered the whole set of his face and seemed to flatten his ears and his forehead with the look of pleasure that comes to the head of an animal when you stroke it. “Miss Seswayo, wouldn’t you perhaps like to say something about this?” He lifted his head courteously to the back of the room.

She would get up slowly, moving her notebook, putting down the pencil, resting her palms on the desk ledge. She shook her head carefully as she spoke, after a pause in which everyone was silent, “No. … No, thank you.”—Dr. East made a small noise of regret—“Yes, now what is it, Mr. Alder?”—and talk broke again upon the room.

Once or twice, when I happened to sit at the back of the room in line with her, I tried to see what it was that she wrote down so purposefully. But I only caught a glimpse of lines of copybook handwriting, a child’s at its most careful, with great round stops and hooked commas. One of these times a paper with the text of a literary-appreciation test was handed out round the room, one for every two students, and as she was my neighbor I moved to share mine with her. Sitting over the same printed sheet, I could see the brown, shiny plate of her breast, moving a little fast with her breathing beneath a necklace of white china beads that she always wore. I could see the very texture of her skin, sliding over the ridge of her collarbone as she lifted her arms. The top of her arm, in a brown coat sleeve, slowly sent its warmth through to where my arm touched against it.

It must have been fifteen years since I had been in such close contact with an African; not since that other breast, longer ago than I could remember, the breast of my native nanny, had I casually felt human warmth, life, coming to me from a black body.

The following afternoon I stopped to speak to her where she sat in a window embrasure in one of the wide corridors, reading a key to Chaucer whose edges were worn round as a stone. I made the usual banal overtures about our work and she answered in the faint, stilted English of the European-educated African woman, out of whom all the buoyancy, music and spontaneity that is in the voices of nursemaids and servants seem to have been hushed by responsibility.

An obstinacy of shyness made it very difficult to talk to her, but the reassurance of repeated casual meetings slowly thawed her silent, wide-eyed greeting as she hurried past into a smile. We met again in the cloakroom. Alone, this time, in the litter of lipstick-streaked tissues and balls of crumpled paper like cabbages, she was repacking her things on the floor — she always carried about with her a complication of coats, books, notes that she watched and counted with the poor peasant’s anxiety for his possessions. The tap frothed out over my dirty hands and I said: “You are loaded up. …”

It was not easy for her to speak lightly. “Sometimes I cannot seem to get it all in. It seems to get bigger and heavier as the day goes on.”

To anyone else I could have said: “But why on earth do you carry all that stuff about, anyway — but with her I could not. “You know, you frighten me with the notes you take; every time my mind’s wandering at a lecture, I see you writing away and I get an awful feeling that I’ve just missed hearing something very important.”

She smiled, and this time it was the sudden, quick, surrendering smile of the piccanin caddies at the golf course. It seemed ridiculous that here was I, talking to a little native girl about lecture notes at a University.

“Well, it is a lot …,” she admitted with the shy acceptance of a commendation, “especially with Dr. East. Everyone in the class always has so much to argue about. — The expense of all the paper is something, too.”

She takes down everything that anyone says. She struggles to get down the commonplace inaccuracies, the embarrassed critical shots in the dark, the puerile fumblings toward an opinion. — I was so appalled that I looked at her with the polite daze of someone who has not quite heard, really listened. …

“Do you — do you live here, I mean in Johannesburg itself?” It was not a question I had meant to ask, but I snatched it up as the first thing to hand.

She answered dutifully. “I have a room with a family in Sophiatown. I was at the hostel and then at Alexandra, but I moved.”

“Oh, I live at home — that is, in Atherton, on the Mine.” Questioning her about where she lived suddenly seemed too much like a mistress expecting to be decently answered by a servant, and I looked for some way to put it right.

“It’s a long way,” she said.

“An hour by train every morning.” I always said it with some sort of distasteful pride in the hardness of it.

But to her, living in a native township where people got up at five o’clock to queue for busses in order to get to work by eight, it was nothing to commiserate about. She nodded politely.

“I have to go.” She smiled, with her bundles on her arm, as if she did not want to. She stood like a neat schoolgirl, feet together.

I said: “Bye now. …”—But no airiness could take from that quiet, serious little figure the consciousness of privilege that sent it, alone, down the corridors and down the flanking steps and through the gardens out into the street; into Johannesburg, to be swept aside with errand boys and cooks and street cleaners, still alone.

A susurration of voices — now and then a phrase would land, shrill on our table: “tastes like soap!” … “his FINAL YEAR, I said”—the warmed-over humidity of canteen foods, and the grinding, bursting effort of a box apoplectic with colored lights to release the snarling of a swing band — stood between Joel and his friend, and me.

“Big attraction of this tearoom, now.” The light-haired young man indicated the juke box.

“Big attraction of the other one is no juke box,” said Joel. “Let’s go.”

There nothing moved but a lethargic tearoom fly, feeling over the sugar bowl. “What happened to you?” said Joel in the hush, referring to my lateness.

“Joel, I was talking to that girl, the African girl. I discovered she takes down everything that is said. She sits at tuts taking down miles of notes. All the rubbish that everyone talks.” I sat back in my chair, looking at him.

He pursed his lips. “Just a minute—” He went up to the counter and came back with our lunch balanced; the steady, heavy approach of his legs, a thoughtful, nervous walk that I watched for assurance.

“Did you tell her, though?”

“Well, no — it was so difficult to know where to begin. If I knew her a bit better … I don’t know how not to be officious about it.”

“Showing the poor savage the ropes.”

“Yes, that’s just it.”

Joel took a long drink of cold water that made him gasp. He looked as if he had just come up from a swim under water, and somewhere, parenthetically, there was a smile in me that did not reach my face. “Still, it’s a damned shame, someone should tell her. The confusion behind it—”

“You mean it’s not the waste of effort so much, it’s that it means she doesn’t know what to take and what to leave?”

“That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole unwieldy thing.” He looked from one hand to the other as if he saw it, did not know what to do with it, lying amorphous on the table, in the air, between us. “We see only one little corner of it — this native girl needs to be told that one abstracts from lectures, discussions, what-have-you, only what is useful, relevant, illuminating. So then you find that you’ve solved nothing for her; you’ve simply twitched up and caught hold of one corner of a dilemma that shifts continually beneath everything she does here. It’s the most difficult thing in the world for her to discern simply because she has no comparative values. It’s the African’s problem all the way up through all struggles with a white man’s world. On a higher level, it’s the problem of Colley’s servant girl, who gives the cat milk out of a saucer from the best tea set, or the old kitchen one, quite impartially. She doesn’t know it is a best tea set; she simply never has known such a sufficiency of utensils that there could be gradations of use—”

“What’s this? The evils of property?” Rupert Sack, whom we had lost between one tearoom and the other, rejoined us. He had dark, theatrical eyebrows that confirmed the suspicion that the bleached streaks of his hair were dyed: perhaps his one gesture of allegiance, if a rather misplaced one, to the art of architecture, since he was sure to leave before completing his course, in favor of his father’s business, pleasantly knowledgeable about cantilevers and clear-story lighting for the rest of his life. He was intelligent but his mind wandered. He sat looking elaborately at me, one eyebrow raised in his own convention of idiotic admiration.

“And she’s never known a sufficiency of ideas?”

“From where?” Joel answered me with a question. “The life of an African — especially of her generation, pressed into a sort of ghetto vacuum between the tribal life that is forgotten and the white man’s life that is guessed at — it’s the practical narrow life of poverty. All the kinds of poverty there are: money, privacy, ideas. Even suppose she didn’t grow up in a two-room shack in a fenced location where her father couldn’t go out without a pass from his baas — she probably went to a mission school, at best. In some ways, at worst. Because in a location, in a room in somebody’s back yard, she might get some sort of idea of white people’s context. But in a mission, shut away in some peaceful white-walled place in the hills, God, her idea of the white world would be the Standard Six reader and Galilee nearly two thousand years ago.”

“Hell, that’s true, you know, Joel—” Rupert was suddenly attracted into the conversation. “It’s funny, I was talking about the same thing last night — at my sister’s place. With that chap Goddard, a pathologist I think he is; he’d been taking some medicals for some oral examinations—”

“A viva.”

“Yes — He was saying that it’s bloody difficult with these natives. Bloody difficult for them. No matter how clever they are, there’s just that lack of common background knowledge — you know, there’s nothing to back up what they’ve learned out of books. So some white fellow who messes around half the time playing poker has a better chance of bluffing his way through than the poor devil of a native who’s worked — well — like a black. …” He laughed at the lameness of his own joke.

“And that’s a purely scientific collection of subjects, medicine. Imagine how much more difficult where nothing is certain, everything’s a matter of opinion, judgment—” My voice lost itself in the prospect of the rich ambiguity of language and the vast choices of literature.

“Look, if you’re a native,” Joel was saying, “you have to be exceptional to do ordinary things. You have to be one of four in ten who go to school at all, in the first place. You have to be able to concentrate on an empty stomach because you haven’t had any breakfast, you have to resist the temptation to nip off and do a bit of caddying for pocket money you never get given to you, you have to persuade your parents, who can’t afford to keep you, to go on keeping you after you’re twelve or thirteen and could be a houseboy or a nanny and keep yourself. And that’s only the beginning. That’s what you’ve got to do to get to the point at which white kids only start off making an effort. Just to get through an ordinary schooling you’ve got to be a very exceptional kid. And from then on you’ve just got to be more and more exceptional, although in your school life you’ve used up enough determination and effort to put a white boy right through to qualification in a profession. That’s how it is.” He sat back, looking at us.

“Okay-okay,” said Rupert, staring at his coffee. He had listened with the subdued attention that comes over a shady character in the presence of a person of authority.

Joel began to eat. “Butter, please — Helen and I, here, we never had a chance to hear any music when we were small. You don’t, in a little mining place like Atherton. Or you might, if your parents knew about it. But my folks were poor, and in any case they haven’t had any education at all — neither of them can even write English. And Helen’s — well, they like a bit of musical comedy, but that’s all. So now when Helen and I go to a concert we like everything, good, bad, indifferent. We like the noise. The suits the orchestra wear. … You see?” He laughed.

I knew it wasn’t true of Joel, but it pleased me not to have to bear my ignorance on my own. “We do not! I don’t even have to be stopped from clapping between movements any more!”

“You should hold her hand,” said Rupert. “That’s the way to teach her.”

“I should do just that,” said Joel, seriously.

We ate in silence for a few moments, lapsing into that abstracted service to necessity that breaks up the surface of attention. We burrowed away off into our separate thoughts.

I shook my head without knowing.

“What?” said Joel, apologetic, as if he thought I had spoken and he had not listened.

“Nothing—” Suddenly I was embarrassed to speak. “She said something about the expense of the paper—” The little fact, so bald and paltry, a matter of sixpence or a shilling, was silencing in a different way. It seemed to grow in the dignity, the reality, the harshness of a need, something felt instead of thought, experienced instead of spoken.

“Of course,” said Joel. “Nothing’s happened. Just talk. You’re right.”

Chapter 14

My parents had gone to a braaivleis on a West Rand a West Rand mine, fifteen miles the other side of Johannesburg. My excuse was work. “That’s all very well,” said my mother, fastening her pearls. “But you don’t get out and meet people.”

“Isn’t she meeting people all the time at the University?” My father patronized her a little, smiling at me.

My mother settled the pearls on her neck. She looked herself over in the mirror, shook out her gloves, looked again, herself and her mirror self challenging each other for correctness. “I mean her own kind of people.”

They would be standing under the trees, the corseted women, the thin, gracious women who always dressed as if for a garden party, the satellite young daughters in pastel frocks. Where the drinks were, the men would be, faces red from golf and bowls, voices loud, laughing and expansive in departmental allusions as cosy as family jokes; the older men spry or corpulent with position, the up-and-coming younger men showing here a hinted thickness of neck, there a knee peaking up bony that assured that when the first lot died off, the second would be ready to replace them identically. As the darkness tangled with the trees, and the boys “borrowed” from the office or Compound brought the braziers to the right stage of glow, the daughters and the young sons would stand well away to avoid splashing their light frocks and blue suits and patent-leather shoes while they roasted lamb chops stuck on long forks. The smell of hair oil and lavender water would come out in the heat, mixed with the smoke and acridity of burning fat. They would giggle and lick their fingers, eating with the small bites of mice. And run over the lawns back to the house to wash their hands and come back, waving handkerchiefs freshly charged with lavender water. I had been there many times. I knew what it was like; a small child in white party shoes that made my feet big and noisy, tearing in and out among the grownups, wild with the excitement of the fire and the smoky dark; and then grown-up myself, standing first on one foot, then the other, drawing patterns with my toe on the ground, feebly part of the feebleness of it all, the mawkish attempts of the boys to entertain, the inane response of the girls: the roasting of meat to be torn apart by hands and teeth made as feeble as a garden party. That was what these people did to everything in life; enfeebled it. Weddings were the appearance of dear little girls dressed up to strew rose petals, rather than matings; death was the speculation about who would step up to the dead man’s position; dignity was the chain of baubles the mayor wore round his neck.

“Anna’ll stay in the yard. I’ve told her. She’ll take Wednesday off instead. But if you go out at all lock up the front in any case. A drunk boy came over from the stores last week right up to Mrs. Ockert’s dining-room window; she got the fright of her life. — It’s terrible, you’re no safer on the Mine than in the town, anymore—” my mother complained to my father.

“I’ve told you, you should let me get out my Browning.”

“No, no, there are too many accidents with those things. Only the other day, I saw in the paper — little boy of five lost his arm.”

“Yes, but where there are no small children.”

“I wish they’d do away with those stores. — All the flies come from there, too. … — George, you’ve got hair on your collar, wait a minute — Don’t forget, Helen?”

With one of those curious looks that mothers give their children — the same look, whether they are babies or grown men and women — half-abstracted, mind on the outing, half-smitten with the pang that is all that is left of remembrance of a time when the child was in the body and an accompaniment of all ventures, sleeping and waking — they were gone. I wished I could have gone with them; wished I could have wanted to go. My other life, my life at the University, turned me loose at week ends. And I wandered about, wondering what I had been sent back for, for everything that I picked up seemed a relic, sometimes pleasant and loved, but outside the direction of my life, washed up on the bank. The face of our house, of our whole row of houses following every bend and bush of my memory behind the pines, reproached me like the gentle expression of some forgotten person whom you have come back to see but find you have nothing to say to. I opened my mother’s accounts drawer, which as a child had been my safekeeping place, and found at the back some gilt transfers that had been saved for some occasion that had never come, and the little crocheted hat, a thimble cover, that I remembered Mrs. Mitcham giving me when I was about ten. In the front of the drawer was Ludi’s Christmas card of many months back. “Are you married yet, miss?” his beautiful handwriting said on the inside corner.

No, I hadn’t written. At the end of the war, the Kochs had bought a little store in the village, I had heard through my mother; lending library one side, fishing tackle and hardware the other. I thought, with love and guilt of neglect which both would come to nothing, of Mrs. Koch. And sitting on the cool floor where I could see beneath the dresser the stencil of quiet dust with which Anna defeated my mother, of Ludi. Again the dumb pressure of his breast, that was driven, and the informed pressure of his thighs, rose to the surface in my body. More than eighteen months ago. My body was ready, mistook signals, was deluded into stillness. I thought again, with a catch of deep pleasure that was like a hook, buried deep in my entrails and forgotten, now pulled, so that it moved queerly, disturbingly all the secret inertia of flesh gathered about it, how his tongue reached into my throat and the wetness on our mouths seemed to come neither from him nor from me. … — This capacity for feeling had become buried under so much; like leaves, the days, little and big, fluttered down upon it. Yet though they were piled so high, like leaves, there was no substance to them: lean on them heavily and sharply once, and the whole pile flattened lightly away — there it was, alive.

My eyes must have closed as I hunched there, for when the telephone began to ring through the house, I shot up startled and bumped into a chair, rocked my own photograph off the dresser. I had the sudden guilty fear that it might be anybody; anybody. But it was Joel. Joel’s voice, as unsuspected, as reassuring — Would I do him a favor? Would I take a parcel of working drawings to University for him tomorrow morning? — He wouldn’t be going in as he had to drive his father to the Free State on business.

When we had concluded the arrangement there was a little pause, in which there seemed nothing to say; when we spoke to each other from our two separate homes, across the mile of veld that held the Mine apart from the town, there was always slight constraint. One did not know in what atmosphere the other stood: who was talking around, what sort of things they were saying. When I thought about the Aarons privately, alone in their own family, they became two curious wooden dolls whom I could not make speak the casual exchange of Mine intelligence, the mild gossip, the reiterated opinions that occupied us round our table. Whenever I met Joel’s parents they seemed to lapse into a kind of heaviness, sitting about as if they did not know where to put themselves. I could not imagine them more at ease, any more than I could imagine the demeanor of the lion I saw blinking behind bars, back in its own jungle.

“So?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you doing with yourself?” In his voice there was the suggestion of an afternoon being passed, pleasantly enough, out of his sphere.

“I mean nothing. All on my own … my people went off to a braaivleis.”

He was genuinely surprised. “Well then come out into the country. Really. I’ve got my brother-in-law’s car for tomorrow. Will you? We’ll go out into the veld—” We laughed.

“All right. Come and fetch me. … I said I was going to work.”

When Joel came he looked different. He slammed the car door and bounded up the path, rat-tatting knuckles in a summons on the porch. He wore an old pair of gray flannels and an old-fashioned fugi silk shirt, washed thin, open at the neck. There were drops of water on the shining ends of his hair, where he had pulled a wet comb quickly through it; still it was glossy as a black horse’s flank. His face was newly burned, with the slick of health that the South African sun dabs on in an hour. He had the delighted look of someone who surprises.

“Bernie said to me at lunchtime, you can have the car this afternoon. Most amazing thing! You know how often I get an offer like that. And I said there was nowhere I wanted to go, so we’d decided to go to Cloete’s Farm.”

I went about locking the front of the house, as I had been told. “What’s that?”

“Not a tea place. It’s a training farm for young Jews who want to go to Palestine — or at least it used to be; now we’re at war they secretly train them to use guns.”

I nodded. The way he had said “we’re at war” drew from me the momentary silence of respect for one who is involved by allegiance: it seemed odd to hear him say it; to me, the war between the Jews and the Arabs and the war in Indonesia were pieces of deplorableness equally remote. “—I must go and tell Anna.” He followed me to the back yard, where, despite the rich autumn warmth with which the sun brimmed the enclosure of grass and bright, thinning fruit trees, Anna sat formally in her dim little room with an old black man in vaguely clerical garb and two fat women who wore shoes and stockings for Sunday. She ducked out of the dimness, a bossy figure in the dirty jersey and overalls worn colorless across the behind and frayed over the breasts, in which she would never have dared appear before my mother. My mother had seen to it that she had proper false teeth made, and written a note to the dentist so that she would be fitted with the same care as a white person, but Anna never wore the bottom plate and had developed the busybody jaw of a very old man. “Miss Helen?”

When I told her I was going out she looked at Joel as one eyes an enemy to whom one has not been introduced, and said: “Where you going?”

“Out with the young master—” I gestured.

“And when you’ll be back?” She was shrill; she gave me up, grumbling. “If the missus she comes, what I’m going to tell her? She tell me I must stay in, you’ll be here—” She ignored the presence of Joel, hostile in proxy for her mistress. It came to me that perhaps my mother really did disapprove of and dislike Joel; I had not until then believed that her uncommunicativeness about him meant anything more than her usual distrust of the unfamiliar.

We left Anna grumbling and went back through the house to the car, Joel stopping a moment in the dark passage to look at an old photograph of a blazered team with my father cross-legged near the trophy. “I thought it was some school thing of yours,” said Joel. And added, interested, “Is your father there?” I pointed him out, ashamed, and said: “Come on—” closing the front door finally behind us.

When we were settled in the car, I could see his mood of enthusiasm lying upon him. “Really.” He smiled, shaking his head at the dashboard. “It’s the strangest way it happened—”

“You look different today,” I said. “You look like an Indian, you know.”

“Yes, I know I’m black.”

“No, an Indian in a hotel we used to go to in Durban. He used to bend over the menu, a really lovely head, such black hair, and a skin that looked liquid, like some kind of metal that had just been poured smoothly over the bones—”

“Right. I’m greasy, too.”

“No, I don’t mean that—” We laughed at the impossibility of getting it clear, and as we turned the corner past the Recreation Hall, I saw a group of young men and girls from the Mine office walking along in their tennis clothes, and waved so warmly that they turned in the road to see whom I was with and I saw the curiosity and blankness with which people recognize, however fleetingly, the set of a stranger’s head.

We drove a long way, to where one end of the Reef of gold mines and their attendant towns petered out. Here a low range of hills that lifted your eyes like mountains after the flatness of veld broken only by shaft heads and dumps of yellow sand, hid a deep, gradual ravine. It was as if the earth, ugly, drab, concealing great riches for sixty miles, suddenly regained innocence where it no longer had anything to conceal, and flowered to the surface. All down the inner sides of the ravine low trees and bushes were curly green. At the bottom, where perhaps once a great river had spread, the municipality of the near-by village — it was a real village, not a Reef town, a village with a peaked church raising a finger, little bridges interrupting the roadway where willows closed over streams — had built a swimming pool and fenced it in with wire. This gave the place a name: Macdonald’s Kloof, named by Afrikaans-speaking farmers after a Scotsman who was connected with it in some way by local legend. Lorries were parked in the dusty cleared earth round the fence, and children ran about in makeshift bathing costumes, shouting in Afrikaans; as usual, there was a Sunday-school picnic or orphanage treat clustered there.

But the sides of the Kloof remained uncultivated, and people could climb up leisurely and lose themselves in the scraggly foliage and the rusty-looking boulders, finding a level to sit in the sun where it was quiet with the quiet of high places, and the occasional human voice floating up from below in a scarf of wind sounded more like the cry of a bird. It was not a beautiful place, but the broken planes and rather tame wildness that it offered our eyes forever resting on the level and the treeless, made it seem so to us, or gave us pleasure by reminding, in its poor way, how beautiful the country could be. Joel said: “I wouldn’t mind being at the Cape, now.”

We left the car at the bottom and clung and slithered up. The dry season was beginning, and although the leaves were still fleshy and bright, the barks of the trees were scaly as the lichened rocks, and warm dust fluffed round our feet and seemed part of the sunlight. It was a dust that smelled of eucalyptus and now and then of some mauvish herb-bush that reverberated with bees. We grunted as we pulled each other up, breathing earnestly. “What are you looking for?” he asked. “No flowers,” I said, disappointed. “—You should know the Transvaal.”

But there was a big lizard, moving off as if a streak of the rock had liquefied. We stopped and felt disinclined to go on. Lifting our heads after the concentration on footholds, we came out clear above the lorries and the children and the valley, clear above half the fall of treetops. “Ah — hh.” Joel was satisfied to sit down on the lizard’s rock, and I sank down, too. He unrolled himself onto his back after a moment or two and had on his face the strange smile of people who look up at the sun. Everything seemed to sheer off into the space, the emptiness; my mind drained clear. The steady winter sun hunched my shoulders the way the warmth of a low-burning fire does. Then thoughts began to trickle back, unconnected by logic, but by links that I did not inquire or bother to understand. Mary Seswayo at the washbasin: a tingle of feeling toward her; what? — She is a girl, the discovery came, like me. It was not the rather ridiculous statement of an obvious fact, but a real discovery, a kind of momentary dissolving of obvious facts, when the timid, grasping, protesting life of my own organism spoke out, and I recognized its counterpart in her, beneath the beret and my kindness and her acceptance. Then my mother. She would say, “Helen had such a pile of studying to do;—yes, very hard,” proud as she could never feel in my presence, with its reminder of all I was not. For a fanciful second I saw her at the braaivleis, tried to turn her face toward me and could not. You are a very clean people, of course. Who said that? Daddy to Joel, the first time. A clean little woman, clean little place, my mother would say seriously; it came before godliness with her. Of course, all Jews are circumcised; but my father hadn’t meant that. How embarrassing for Joel if he thought it. … But that was months ago. …

“Did you ever speak to the girl about her notes?” He spoke suddenly.

“D’y’know, I was just thinking about her!”

“Did you, though?”

“I thought I told you? On Friday. I showed her some other notes — not mine, they’re too scrappy — but someone else’s I borrowed.”

After a moment I said: “She was horribly grateful. I felt like a bossy missionary presenting a Bible to a little savage who has no shoes and chronic hookworm.”

“She’s going to teach?”

“Of course.”

“Helen, what are you going to do?” He knew I planned a librarianship or perhaps some job of vaguely imagined interest in a consulate, but the question cut past that.

“I don’t know … I sometimes wonder what I’m doing it all for — Other people want to teach … and it’s not as if I write. All this reading; just for pleasure and curiosity, really.”

“Not that. You really have the honest itch to know.”

I lay back, too; we spoke dreamily, the kind of parenthetic exchange people have on the edge of sleep. The rock offered us to the sky, Joel Aaron and me, side by side, but not touching. “But what?”

“That’s it.” He turned the question into an answer, as if it were satisfactory.

“Sometimes I think I should have done social science. …”

“You’ll take too much in from other people,” he said to the sky. “That’ll be your trouble. You’ll bolt it all. …”

I wanted an answer: “I think I should have done social science. I could still do it.”

“Helen, perhaps you should get married, I mean sometimes there are women with a kind of — how can I put it — vivid feeling for life. They push it into things that waste it; activities that could run on something colder. So it’s lost; they change. Because it’s something for between men and women.” He became vague: “If you cut it up, parcel it out …” He shook his head at himself.

I felt queerly hurt, indignant. It was as if I discovered in the expression of someone’s face some defect in myself that I was not aware of. “So that’s all you think I’m good for. Married. But I’ll marry as well …” There was a silence. I said, still half-offended, “Joel, I don’t understand you. You’ve done more than anyone to get me out of my rut — I’ve always felt we were escaping Atherton together; you understood because you were stuck in it, too, and when I talked to you I found someone who was struggling out of a kind of comfortable mediocrity that I was dimly aware of wanting to break — and that made it possible for me to put my finger on it. I’ve learned to look, to hear. … Now you say a thing like that.”

Whatever he had been thinking, he had put it aside, out of my sight. He lifted his head from the rock, straining his neck to smile at me. “It’s just the way Jews are. There, it comes out in me, too; we really only want girls to marry. — It’s like my Indian hair — You don’t lack the brains, my girl, it’s not that.”

I smiled, as I always did, apologetically, when he became aware of his Jewishness.

“Helen,” he said after a pause, “do you mind my being a Jew?”

I sat up, with the smile again. “Why? You know—”

“No.” His hand twitched where it lay on the rock. “I mean really. And your people. Does your mother say anything?”

I lay down again. The rock had the comfort of spareness, resisting the spine firmly, like lying on the floor. I said, timidly, “No. Sometimes you make me feel — ginger. Just because you’re dark.”

“No, even if I were ginger, too, it’d be just the same.”

“My mother never says anything. Daddy neither.”

There was no answer, and when I twisted my head to look at him, I saw that his eyes were closed.

I was still looking at him when he opened them after quite a long while, and I could see them, veined with the gray and green of stones under water, slowly bringing me into focus after the dark of his eyelids. I had the curious feeling that he saw me as nobody else had ever seen me; like when he had said “Helen of Atherton” on the train that day. We lay a moment, looking at each other, and nothing moved but the very corners of his eyes, where his eyelashes lifted together as if they smiled on their own.

A great bird waved across the sky. The sinking sun spread up a fan of radiance; light sprang about the high air like singing spray.

Still we lay there. I sat up, with my cheek on my knees, and Joel rolled round onto his elbow. With his finger he was tracing out something on the surface of the rock, gently absent. I looked, too. Weather had layered the ancient surface away in a wavering relief. The sidelong glance of the sun caught along the edges, showing them up dark, but within the outline, the warmth of other suns, the wash of rains fallen and sucked up, fallen and sucked up, endlessly, was fixed with delicate, smudged color: ocher into green, rose into gray.

“A map,” Joel was saying. He spoke out of the sky, yet his voice was human; it was lost to the dust, the rocks, the dusty bushes with their little pebbles of animal droppings, like an offering, left under the leaves, but it came to me. I should have heard it even if he had not spoken: the way creatures of the same kind instinctively communicate their identity of presence when they are lost in the enormousness of landscape and sky.

“Here’s a continent, and provinces — the biggest river. There the mountain range, and the sea. An ocean. Some islands … And a long way”—his finger traveled the seas—”another country. This is a small one, latitude due north, a cold one. Snow and seals on this rocky coast, but down here — just about here, the dolphins begin. Here’s a whole group of islands, with a warm current wrapped round them, so they’re the coconut-palm kind. The people sing (you would find out that they’ve got hookworm) and they sail about — all over here — in the hollowed-out barks of trees, with figureheads like ugly sea monsters. Over this side is a huge, rich country, an Africa and America rolled into one, with a bit of Italy thrown in for charm—”

He made up the world, and threw into it all the contradictions, the gradations and clashes of race and face and geography, rearranged to suit ourselves; but it seemed that the physical plan of it, a trial universe idly scratched down by season and chemical in a time before time when the world was actually taking shape, sinking and rising from the sea, exploding volcanically, shifting in landslides, really was preserved there on the rock: an abandoned cosmos, the idle thought of a god. …

Joel paid me the tribute of making a game out of it for me, but there was a tinge of wonder to it. We played with the discovering pleasure of children, ignored and watched by the Kloof and the sky. Quite suddenly, but with authority, the Kloofs own shadow fell upon us. Enough, it decreed. It had closed like an eyelid over the sun. The rock faded; we felt our elbows and hipbones sore. Under the shadow, that was a little chill, but missed the treetops so that they remained alight in the sun, we came down. Joel’s warm brown hand helped me; below every rock he waited, the hand, palm up, receiving me. Its warmth in my own had the comfort of a renewed contact; yet we had not touched each other up on the rock. I felt a vague sadness that was not unhappy. I did not know why. … We were coming down the side of the hill like two people who have kissed and held each other. The elderly Afrikaner packing rugs and empty beer bottles into the boot of his car looked up and saw us that way. We walked past the bitten-out rinds of watermelon, the eggshells and torn paper, back to the car.

Something had stuck to my shoe—”Just a minute—” I held on to the door handle of the car, balancing on one leg, laughing. “Here”—Joel snapped off a twig and pried at the mess on my heel. It fell away and it was a rubber contraceptive, perished and dusttrodden, relic of some hurried encounter behind the trees, inconsequent and shabby testimony. But between us at this moment it was like a crude word, suddenly spoken aloud. In dismay more than embarrassment, we ignored the happening, jumped quickly into the car. Joel, encouraging the reluctant kick-over of the engine, his hand over the gear knob, the frown with which men pay attention to engines drawing down his eyebrows, was my reassurance. The finger of disgust had hovered, but could not make its smudge on us. Again, I did not know why.

Joel began talking of his plans with the cut-and-dried assessment of the future with which people eye their lives after some decision has been made, something has become clear. It was as if he said: Ah, well — and deliberately turned to what remained to be maneuvered, what was malleable, obedient. “If I could get a job in London for say a year—” He was talking of post-graduation. “Then I could walk, hitchhike back, over Europe, down Italy …”—Yet I had the feeling he was thinking of something else.

“You’d want to come back?”

“Yes … Sooner or later, everyone gets the feeling he wants to come back. I don’t know why it should be, for people like us, really: no roots in the real Africa — you can’t belong to the commercial crust thrown up by the gold mines. If you look at it honestly, my roots in the land must be away somewhere in a place I’ve never seen or known, where my parents come from. In Latvia. Or somewhere else, even further back. That’s where they must be”—he smiled—“though I can’t say I feel them. I was born here, right. But on the surface, on the superimposed Africa, this rickety thing, everybody’s makeshift Europe. These Reef towns are hardly more than putting up a shack and making it look like home in some other country. And then the temporary dwelling becomes permanent, is thirty or forty years old (Atherton must be about that? When did the coal mines open up—1900?) and never loses its makeshift character. Our little six-story skyscrapers in Atherton, our little bit of makeshift America — they’re made of reinforced concrete but they look like shoe boxes. It’s hardened into the character of the place — contemporary makeshift.”

“I belong to it, too; I’m only a second-generation South African. — You mean people who’re descended from the 1820 settlers — people whose great-grandfathers trekked, and so on …?”

He nodded as he drove. “Anyone who’s lived directly out of the land; even one generation. If my people had come out here and farmed; if I’d been born on the land that’d be different.”

I had never thought of it: “Never occurred to me that I might not belong in that way.”

He smiled. “I think about it often. It comes up whenever I think of going away, and coming back to Africa. … I correct myself; not Africa, 129 Fourth Street, Atherton.”

“You won’t go on living here, that’s certain,” I said, thinking of myself.

“Well, not quite Atherton, I don’t suppose. Helen, come and have supper with us? Your people won’t be back till late.” Again there was something disconnected, smothered, about the way he spoke, though the words came out ordinary enough; it was as if he had suddenly swerved back through the distraction of his own talk. Yet the look in which he held me seemed to stay any response, keeping me in that sad-happy mood, a kind of self-hypnosis, that falls like a trick of the light on people who are young, sensual, and still in the state where life is imagined and apprehended rather than lived. I smiled, that was all.

“Are you sure?” I questioned inconvenience, but had already taken my acceptance for granted.

“Better get some milk on the way,” said Joel, remembering a chronic Sunday-night shortage. He stopped at the first corner Greek shop when we reached Atherton, and smiled at me through the plate glass as he stood inside waiting to be served. Even in the car, there was a companionable silence that seemed to be of his making; I waited for him to come back. The blinds were down over the pavements: Garter’s THE Tobacconist, Wedding Gifts and Novelties for all Occasions; B.B. Bazaar, 3d. 6d. 1/—; Suliman Ismail Patel, Grocery, Provisions, Fancy Goods; Paris Modes for Latest in High-Class Ladies Wear. And in the empty sawdust arena of the butcher’s shop, a striped fat cat sat like an owl in the window. A woman with an arm about each of two little girls whose skinny legs gave them the look of walking on tiptoe moved slowly along the shop fronts; a way behind, the father in the miner’s Sunday white shirt and blazer came along without interest. One of the little girls broke away. “Oooh, Pappie, ek hou van daardie—” She skipped between the mother and father, in love with something she had seen in a window. “That’s the one I want—” She used a mixture of English and Afrikaans to express the delight of her desire. The mother and father turned their heads blankly above her, neither responding nor refusing, as if her pleasure were something complete and dependent upon them or circumstance neither for denial nor gratification. It was something she would grow out of, as they had grown out of all expectation; they were placid in that.

“—D’you know what’s wrong with Atherton?” I grumbled to Joel as he came back. “Not one splendid thing about it. Every place should have one splendid thing — a fountain, one building, a wide street, even. We haven’t even got a real tree.”

“Poor old Atherton,” he said affectionately.

As soon as I walked into the Aarons’ house I saw that Sunday-night supper was an occasion with them. They were all already at table, under the bright yellow lights that were used in every room, high up on the ceiling, glittering on the shabbiness, the peeled, stained, worn or tawdry. Joel’s sister Colley and her husband were there, with their nine-year-old girl, and an old relation who looked like Mr. Aaron and was given the courtesy title of Auntie. There was another relation, a very thin old man whose flesh was knotted and twisted stringily over his features and his hands, and who, as he stared at us when we came into the room, looked as if he were going to whistle, because his mouth had sucked in over toothlessness.

“I told Helen we’d have enough supper for her,” said Joel, flourishing me in.

But no one took up his tone. Mrs. Aaron got up in some bewilderment, pushing the others along, urging them to make room (she snatched up the cutlery in front of the thin old man and moved it for him) and began apologizing dubiously: “Will you eat a piece of nice brisket? I’m sorry, I haven’t got something … A piece of chicken, if I had … — Joel, what’s about I make a piece of haddock …?”

The father, who had been talking animatedly over a mouthful, died out and, not taking much notice, nodded at me, looked about as if he thought he should move, but left it to the others. While the adjustments were being made he hunched sullenly over his plate, now and then grunting for pickles or salt. The sister, Colley, smiled, signaling to establish the ease of contemporaneity in the old-fashioned parental atmosphere, and her husband, not quite happy in the fat that begins to build up round many young Jewish men when they are thirty-five and in business, nodded a conventional acknowledgment, more for Joel than for me: I was young once myself, with an eye for Gentile girls. … Joel and I were seated between him and the aunt. The table was spread with an untidy abundance of delicatessen foods, mostly things I had seen in shops, but never eaten: my parents had a horror of what they called “made-up” foods and we always ate simple, fresh things, home-cooked; on Sunday evenings we had ham-and-tomato sandwiches, eaten with milk (beer for my father) on the veranda in summer, or with cocoa before the fire in winter. Mrs. Aaron did not seem to sit down again at all, although everyone kept urging her: “What’sa matter with you, why do you keep running about?” “For goodness’ sake, Mommie—” “What is it”—and was now out in the passage at the refrigerator, now pushing past the backs of our chairs with some new offering. Horse-radish sauce and fish paste filled up the few empty spaces on the tablecloth. Not all the attention was for me; she pressed a confusion of tastes on her grandchild, and when the little girl accepted something, bent over and pressed the child’s round cheek to her side: “Oh, she’s a lovely girl! Oh, bless her!”

The aunt showed the formal overtures of the intensely curious. If Joel’s mother and father drew away into a shell at the sight of me, she was the kind that bristled out. There were touches of worldliness about her; her body, of the homely shape of Mrs. Aaron, was corseted, and she wore an American teen-ager’s brooch that was something between a mouse and a rabbit, where I would have expected to find a cameo. “Go on—” She offered sardines, still holding the mold of the tin. Her eyes were carefully turned away from me, giving a pained look to her weighty cheek. She gestured with her mouth full; when she had swallowed she said to Joel, drawing back from me: “The young lady, your … perhaps she wants a tomato? Lily, haven’t you got such a thing as a tomato?”

“But you had—?”

“Well, it’s finished. Five or six people, y’know; it doesn’t go so far.” There was the inference that she knew how to do things. “The young lady — you must excuse me, I didn’t catch the name. …” It was true I had not been introduced to those who had not already met me before; there was the feeling that I was known indirectly, through discussion.

Joel waved it away, as though he were clearing a troublesome fly from my plate. “All right. We’ll have beetroot instead. Colley, ask Ma for the beetroot—”

The awkwardness of my being there did not melt; it became accepted. The table re-formed itself, irresistibly, over me, the room itself took up again the sounds and gestures of people talking and eating that belonged there with Sunday night. There was the feeling that perhaps they should not talk in front of me — not that there was anything said too personal for me to hear, but out of half-shyness, half-irritation. Between them and me was uncertain ground; they did not know what would be familiar and normal to me, and what strange; among more sophisticated and less genuine people, there would have been little joking remarks made to me about the food, and one or two unusual habits, such as the old relative’s way of sweetening his tea by sucking it up through a spoonful of jam, might have been explained, forcing me into the position of a tourist. But as it was, their naturalness came in gusts that swept over me and made them forget all these considerations. I remained, ignored but intact. Now and then in a drop in the talk, I would appear, like a stranger in the parting of a crowd; their forgetful, vivacious exchange of food and talk faltered — and then someone would ask a question that set them off again.

Only the thin old man, receding from all that was immediate except the food before him on his plate, was as vague about my presence as about that of anyone who had not belonged to the clear hard times of the Russian village he had left forty years before; when he saw the faces of Mrs. Aaron or her husband, brightness came into his small eyes (they were two tears on his face) like recognition in the face of an old dog. But I was no more alien to him than all the other sons and daughters whom he was supposed to know.

At last Mrs. Aaron had wedged herself back into the circle and was spreading a mess of gray wet fish (it was marinated herring) on a roll. Sometimes her uncertain eye fell upon me, not hostile, but with an uneasy appraisement in passing: Do you really want to be here? The family evidently had been to a party that afternoon, and she called out to Joel with real pleasure: “What a lovely affair. Really very nice.”

“Did you stay late?”

“They wouldn’t let us go. I’m telling you, we still could have been there.”

Her daughter reproached her: “Why didn’t you stay? Couldn’t we have eaten at home for once?”

The old woman smiled and shrugged at the unthinkable. “Joel, what does it mean, an F.R.C …? After the wedding, the young couple’s going to England, he’s going to study something else there … I don’t know.”

“F.R.C.S., Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Is Maurice’s girl nice?”

“Pretty girl,” said the aunt. “No question.”

Mr. Aaron roused from his food. “Maurice’s a fine boy.” He shook his head in fatherly pride that such a person could exist, no blood of his own, but a matter for pride that he, closely confined to interest in the welfare of his own family, only knew how to show as a fatherly reaction.

No, it was not merely that. They were proud of this boy, whoever he might be, because he was one of themselves: they all broke in, in a hesitant enthusiasm that at once generated its own spontaneity.

“Already he’s got a partnership. Mrs. Marks, you know, his mother’s sister — she was sitting next to me and she was telling me. …”

“No, it’s the promise of a partnership when he comes back. Now he’s just working with Dr. Bailey, but even then, it’s very good — he’s only twenty-two. …”—Joel’s sister offered facts that seemed corrective but were actually the wonder which she could not allow herself to express with the simple awe of the old and ignorant, but could not altogether forbear. “He was always a clever boy.” The father brushed aside aggressively. He had a hoarse, coarse voice, as if the words caught on invisible snags.

“No question, no question.” The aunt’s throat trembled with praise. “And didn’t they work hard enough to give it to him? Mrs. Berman built up that business. I remember when the children were little things, she used to be there, running between the shop and the house.”

Mr. Aaron ignored her, particularly when she agreed with him. To Mrs. Aaron’s face there came, quickly, slightly, a smile like the drop of a pause. “Well,” she excused in a low voice, as if covering over some breach of taste with weary sympathy, “it’s nothing, everyone knows Meyer got no brains. It’s all right, what she did, she did. Plenty others the same.”

The aunt whipped the talk back to enthusiasm again. “Anyway, today they’ve got pleasure from their children, thank God.”

Mrs. Aaron smiled. “Really, a wonderful boy,” she said, as if she were in love.

“The fiancée’s a research chemist — I think she’s from Capetown,” Colley was telling Joel.

“I don’t know what. But they’ll go everywhere, they’ll be in Europe, they’ll do what they like. …” Mrs. Aaron, sawing off another slice of bread in answer to some unintelligible sounds from the old relative, was defiant with the freedom of the two young people. Her body woke up to the swiftness it might have had. “Here.” She gestured the bread on the point of her fork. “Anybody else wants?”

“Joel,” said the aunt, with the coy smile of someone venturing a question she pretends not to remember having asked several times before. “I wonder why you didn’t study doctor. You know, I often say—”

“He could have done it. Just the same as Maurice.” Mr. Aaron — he reminded me of some heavy, thick-skinned animal, a rhinoceros or boar, rising reluctantly and powerfully to the prick of words — flew into an aggressive assurance, staring at Joel. “You could have been like Maurice?”

“Of course. I know.” Joel spoke to him with assurance of another kind. “You let me do what I wanted. I’m not sorry.”

“There you are! It just shows you,” said the aunt, not saying what.

“He’ll also go to Europe, to America,” Mrs. Aaron said. “No, no, sit down—” She gestured her daughter, going round to gather the dirty plates herself.

“Was Hilda Marks at the party, Ma?” Colley wiped her child’s mouth with the firm, hard movements of a cat’s tongue.

“No, I told you, only her mother.”

“I hear they’ve got a stand near ours, they’ve started building already.”

“Is that so?”

“You’re going to build a house?” Again I had the feeling that the aunt’s surprise was feigned; she was one of those women who so intensely enjoy the affairs of others that they can savor being told a dozen times and versions, by a dozen different people. I felt quite sure she already knew the answer to her query. “Where?”

Colley’s irritated smile confirmed my suspicion. “But surely you knew? I mean we bought the ground from Dave … and I’m sure he would be the first to run and tell you.”

“My dear, unless you tell me yourself, it’s not for me to say I know.” She turned to Mrs. Aaron, more at ease. “Where’s it, here in the township?”

Mrs. Aaron drew her mouth up and shook her head. “Here? What for? Who lives here now? It’s in a lovely neighborhood, you know there by the dam, open—”

Her daughter supplied the name of the new suburb, an English county name that the estate agent had taken from an overseas magazine.

“But it’s so near the mine dump, there, isn’t it? Mrs. Friedman would have bought there, only she told me the dump’s stuck in middle …”

So they bridled and argued, their voices rose and fell, cutting one across the other, and tea came round, already poured out into the cups in the kitchen and slopping over into the saucers. It reminded me of my mother, for whom this served as a standard for hotels and people; if she got her tea served in her own teapot, then the hotel was a real hotel and not a glorified boardinghouse, the woman whom she was visiting was at least a social equal by personal habit — the most reassuring and revealing gauge. Telepathically, Joel said to me: “Aren’t you going to phone? They might be home by now, and wondering.” I excused myself — nobody heard me — and went to the telephone, which was in the passage, fixed to the wall, as in a public call box. I had not put the light on, and only the wash from the light room where they all sat made watermarks along the nobbly linoleum. I could hear their voices and the click and clatter of the table, while down the telephone, I heard the bell ringing in my mother’s house; heard it as I did from my own room. It stopped. My mother’s voice said challengingly, faint: “Hullo?”

“Mummy—”

“Daddy was getting worried. Where are you?”

“Have you been back long? I’m sorry. Didn’t Anna tell you?”

“Something about you’d gone out with a young man, but it’s half-past nine—” Her voice became muffled, she had turned away from the mouthpiece; then came clear again. “No, that was Daddy. — What? I don’t know. — He says did you take the key.”

“No, it’s under the sword fern on the stoep.”

“All right. The big one or the new one?”

“The old one.”

“I’ve put away something for you. We didn’t feel like having any more to eat.”

“It’s all right, I’m having supper here.”

“Supper? Where?”

“At Joel’s. With the Aarons.”

“With the Aarons?” There was a pause.

“Did you enjoy the braaivleis? How are the Mackenzies?”

“Very nice,” she said, without attention. “How will you get in when you come home—?” It was a voice ignoring a profession of taste that simply could not be understood; not condemned, but quite incomprehensible.

“Leave the key for me where I put it before.”

“All right, then—”

“I won’t be late,” I weakened. But our voices had crossed; she said good-by and hung up.

I stood there a moment. On a small table under the telephone was the outline of a vase of paper flowers, crazily angular with the look of lifeless things, even in the half-dark. I touched one out of curiosity or compassion for the ugliness I could not see, and a smell of dust came away with my hand. The refrigerator shook away at the top of the passage. There was a different smell about the narrow place, like the passage outside the bedrooms of an old country hotel where you have stopped for one night.

I went back into the living room and nodded to Joel under the talk. “Rubbish! Rubbish!” Colley’s husband was shouting. “They couldn’t do without us here, and they know it. Think Malan doesn’t know it?”

“Nothing’s indispensable in South Africa but the Chamber of Mines and native labor.” Joel smiled.

They ignored him. “Look at medicine, law — even the farmers. The whole economy would collapse.”

“But that’s what they say, Max, that’s what they say. The Jews in everything, they don’t want it. …”

The women were clearing the table, and when it was done the older people remained sitting round it, arms resting on the scratched and ringed surface, under the beat of the light. The mother and father sat with their hands loosely in front of them, the way people do who do not read or amuse themselves in their leisure, but take it as inactivity between labor and labor. Joel was kneeling with the little girl over her collection of sample breakfast foods and patent medicines, spread on the carpet.

The business of eating, which in common with a crisis or danger brings heterogenous incompatibles comfortably together, was over and now suddenly we were all fallen apart. The heaviness, the sense of patiently waiting for me to be gone so that they could resume their life, came over the old Aarons again as I had noticed it when I had been in their house at other times. No one seemed to have anything to say. Mrs. Aaron got up and fetched a dish of preserves from the sideboard; but everyone turned his head away. Even Joel was silent, stretched on the floor with his head against a little stool with a broken riem seat; it seemed that sometimes he was aware of me, and sometimes he was aware of them, but never was he present to all of us together.

I sat alone on the sofa, smiling when someone smiled at me.

Soon he got up suddenly, and raised his eyebrows at me. I said my good-bys and thanks and in an atmosphere of sterile politeness, we left, our footsteps very loud on the boards behind us.

Joel drove me home. It seemed to me it was because I was tired, with that sense of tiredness that keeps one floating just above the surface of reality, but we did not speak. In place of communication there was between us a speechless ease that I have never forgotten. It was as if we had ducked through a crowd and found ourselves alone in a small quiet place.

When the car died out quiet at our gate under the pines, he sat a moment. I said, “Good night …,” gently, to rouse him, and he looked up slowly, coming awake.

“Don’t come in,” I said. And then: “I’ll be all right.”

He nodded. Smiled, waiting for me to go.

I got out, but a curious sensation overcame me, a physical sensation of distress prickling over my skin. I stood with a kind of helplessness on the muffled feel of thick pine needles. I felt with distress that there was something that I must say now; no, that there was something that had passed unsaid, and that now was too late. … A great bird waves across the sky: look! — but you have not seen it; when you lifted your head it was gone. Something in me clutched: What is it? What is it?

It was dark; Joel could not see my face. There was a moment when we both waited.

I said: “I’ve got the drawings …,” held them up.

The feeble commonplace flung across a bridge. “Good night,” we said, warmly, gently. And by the time I reached the porch door I heard the car, gone.

As I took the key from under the fern and let myself into our house, with the silence and scents and disposition of furniture that flowed into me with the sense of an animal feeling its way back into its own nest, the urgency that had cut me off in pain began to melt, to flow away in my blood like a clot that dissolves. Yet I was weak, empty with the relief. It had been, I thought suddenly, as I took off my clothes, put on a nightgown that slid loosely over my body, as if I had been told without warning that I was never going to see someone again. A hollow premonition of loss.

And how ridiculous, since I should see Joel on Tuesday morning, and in any case, he would be the sort of friend one would have all one’s life.

Chapter 15

I did see him again on Tuesday, and for many other Tuesdays.

A whole year passed, unremarkable, one of those periods of consolidation in change when one is growing and filling out into the spaces of a life the shape of which has been set but not yet seen: the time will come to stop short, and look, up and around at the walls, the ceilings, the staircases leading from here to there, that one has built around oneself out of daily dabs of mud. Or the year was like a ship; inside it seems much the same town you have always lived in — restaurants, shops, the hairdresser, the cocktail bar and the library. But beneath the patterned carpet oceans are moving past your feet; and you yourself have determined this with a ticket you bought months back.

I continued to travel in and out of Johannesburg to the University. I did my work with pleasure, if a certain lack of conviction. The vague, luring promise of childhood persisted, like a whiff of smoke on the horizon, become now the uninvestigated idea that, since the need was there, something would come to coil up my energies like a spring. I should find the people and the life where all that was in me would be released into action. Joel still said to me sometimes: Any ideas? Thought about what you’re going to do? But now I always replied, rather tartly: You remember — I’m going to get married.

Through him I continually met people who seemed to me to put a finger of confirmation on my vague sense of promise. A girl and her husband, both medical students, who talked proudly, with what was almost a sense of adventure, about the clinic they were going to set up in one of the squatters’ townships of African workers outside Johannesburg; another girl who talked of nothing but the literacy campaign on which she was working among the thousands of “wash-Annies” and cookboys and houseboys who had never been to school at all; the young man who was a journalist on a conservative paper but spent most of his leisure helping the gentle, revolutionary-minded wife of a University professor to bring out a liberal weekly that didn’t pay.

And, of course, Joel himself. But Joel’s commitment was not so easily nor so satisfactorily defined. Joel’s raison d’être eluded one. To borrow the definitions of faith, if the others were monotheistic in their grasp of life, he was pantheistic. He worked at his architecture with enthusiasm and a detached seriousness — there were plans about that: an experiment in mass-produced cottages for Africans he was working on privately with the progressive Town Engineer of one of the Reef towns, and that might come to something. The tentative offer of a particularly interesting job with an architect (a friend of his who had been with UNRRA in Europe and now wanted to go back and take Joel walking with him through France and Italy) in Rhodesia. And, most tempting, the chance he might get to work under one of England’s most original and brilliant men on a reconstruction project in London.

All these things he kept calmly in consideration. And yet at the same time he sometimes spoke, with the practical evaluation of plans and not the dash and sweep of dreams, of joining his mother’s brother on a recently acquired citrus farm, or working only part time as an architect when he qualified, so that he could go back to the University to do a course on soil conservation. Looking back on it now, I can see that he could have done any of these, or perhaps several at different times in his life, and that if one had failed he would not, like so many other people, have been lost, because his sense of his own potentialities was so broadly based, and his aliveness was not confined to any narrow aspect, but to the whole of aliveness itself: with everything that grew, that inquired, that illuminated instead of merely perpetuating the human state.

Of course, this did not seem so to me then. I only saw that Joel stood in many rooms, talked or lapsed into the silence of familiar understanding with many different people, but belonged, somehow, not with one group or the other, but with them all. This amounted in the end to belonging only to himself; a puzzling position that was quite the opposite of loneliness. Often he introduced me to a little circle by which I was taken up so that a friendship was formed from which he was excluded and they became my friends rather than his. Yet he did not seem to mind. He almost literally stood at the door of interest, diversion, stimulation, and watched me go in: quietly, inwardly ablaze with pleasure and curiosity.

Most of these people moved in or about the fringe of the life of the University, though many had never been students there. Whatever the diversity of their true interests, or the variation of their sincerity, they had one common condition: all were young people who had overflowed the group, race or class to which they belonged. The sons of Jewish merchants who wanted to paint instead of make money, the daughter of a Nationalist farmer who worked for the establishment of native trade-unions, the boy who incurred all the scorn of a country of tough pioneer stock turned tougher businessmen because he wanted to dance in the ballet, the fiercely intellectual young Afrikaans poets who had more in common with Baudelaire than Paul Kruger — they formed the only society where all the compartments of South African life ran into one another. Even the barbed wire of wealth was down; the sons of the poor found that a certain lack of money was honorable, the sons of the rich escaped the confines of luxury. Loosely attached to the arts and learning at one end, and to politics and social reform at the other, this society is a common phenomenon all over the world. The important difference was that in South Africa, a young, fanatically materialist country with virtually no tradition of literature or art, and, in the problem position of a white minority predominant over a black majority, a socio-political preoccupation that is closer to obsession than to mild academic discussion, this society had far greater responsibility than its counterparts in older countries. Lopsided — tethered to a thin line of culture from Europe on one side, dragged down toward an enormous, weighty racial tangle on the other — they had only the tantalization of recorded music, imported books, reproductions of pictures; but ate, slept, worked and breathed in the presence of the black man, like the child’s monster of inherited guilt always at his back. The desires to which these facts gave rise consequently tended to be even more confused than those of young people in other countries, so that a young man’s passionate eagerness to win the music he was denied hearing in the comfortable torpidity of his home jumped like a little flame from a grass stalk to a great, dry crackling mass of a whole nation of black people denied so much that he had taken for granted. So, if his social conscience was not pure, if in some other country where his parents’ money and cultural standards would have been more equitable he would not have concerned himself with the cry of the dispossessed, in South Africa a quick sympathy from his own small struggle struck out and identified itself with the vast one. There were many others like him, who, wanting something for themselves, suddenly found understanding for the yawning want of the Africans — not the clamor of the few leaders and rebellious papers who were articulate for them, but the plain, unremarked want of food, of clothes, of houses, of recognition and friendship that was silently in the thousands of ordinary black people who went about the life of the city.

Of course, this society which excited me much and quite impartially was made up to a large extent of people for whom it was only a stage in the process of becoming placid, conventional citizens. As you have to be fish before fetus, so for a time they were liberal before conformist. They flirted a little with the vague stirrings of a sense of beauty, just as the fetus remembers a prehuman life in the sea, and then put away the Bach Chaconne and the Mozart Mass like toys outgrown, and turned to the real business of having babies and bridge afternoons. They put Balzac and Dante and Martin Buber where they looked impressive in the bookcase, and became family men concentrated on the fluctuations of the stock exchange and the relative merits of Buicks and Cadillacs. Men and women, when they reached forty-five, they would sometimes like to mention that they had gone in for that sort of thing once; they had also had measles or mumps and had at one time thought of going on the stage — this with a kind of helpless, satisfied smile at the children produced and the elegant house apparently grown up round them as unavoidably as a tortoise grows its shell.

They were unimportant. So were a great many others, who would never be writers, never be painters, never bring the legitimate stage to South Africa, or dance at Sadler’s Wells, although they lived, talked and worked in what they believed was the manner of people who did these things. In fact, this set of eager, intense, earnest and gay people consisted mainly of the intelligent pseudo, the hangers-on who at the time were quite indistinguishable from the few who were something: the few who were of them and in their midst and were in reality to become the writers, the painters, the actors, the dancers and even the leaders all believed themselves to be.

I do not think there was anything at the time to suggest that Leo Castle, the dark boy with the spotty forehead (he was working as a window dresser in a department store then, and ate the wrong food irregularly), had any more chance of becoming a ballet dancer instead of a window dresser who danced in the chorus of visiting musical-comedy shows once a year than his friend John Frederic, who did the same. Yet a year or two later he was dancing Comus in London, and The Rake’s Progress in New York, and in time a little book about him came out, showing him invested with all the satyrlike beauty of the male dancer at his best, in the company of people like Balanchine and Fonteyn. And Isa Welsh, always talking to some young man, with the tip of her tongue touching the corners of her mouth now and then as if she were a bashful adolescent. — Who would have believed that the book she was supposed to be writing would get finished and that she would divorce Tom and become one of the four or five important writers, writing intensely indigenous South African books from the self-imposed exile of England, America or Italy. Or Phil Hersh, wearing the same rather fluffy beard and haggard slouch as André, William Otter, or Hugo Uys; who would have marked him out for the painter of an epic of Africa as shocking and famous as Picasso’s “Guernica”?

I have said that all the barriers were down, and so saying have slipped into a South African habit of thought more national than any ideology; more difficult to outgrow than love or loyalty.

— I spoke as if European society were all of Africa. I spoke with the subconscious sense of the whole overwhelming Bantu race, waiting in submission outside the concepts of the white man. I spoke from our house on Atherton Mine, with Anna in her room in the back yard.

Among these people with whom I moved, the last great barrier was not down in the practical sense. How could it be? But it was coming down in their heads, an expansion in them was bursting through it. And even when it was achieved in the mind, in the moral sense and the sense of dignity, there remained the confusing pull of habit and use as well as the actual legal confines.

We were all like sleepers, coming awake from a long lull of acceptance. I know that I, who for all my childhood had lived surrounded by natives who simply attended our lives in one function or another — Anna, the gardenboys, above all, the stream of bare-breasted underground workers between the Compound and the shaft of the Mine — found with a real consciousness of strangeness and wonderment that I was beginning to think of them as individually human. They had passed before me almost as remote if not as interesting as animals in a zoo. I would not have been physically unkind to them because it was part of the strict pride of my upbringing that civilized people — what my parents would call “nice” people — were smug in their horror of squashing so much as a bug. If a hungry native came to our door, he was given food or even a sixpence. “At least they can’t go and spend it in a bar,” my mother, who would not give money to white tramps for this reason, would say. Anna, who by qualification of long years of working for us, was known as being “almost like a white person,” might be granted some concern over her family, but as a general rule, emotion was denied them and personal relationships were suspect. They have half-a-dozen husbands; every girl off the street’s a “sister.”—So they were casually denied love, jealousy, concern; everything that made us human. They were also denied entertainment (no swimming pools, libraries, radios), friendship—”I won’t have my back yard made into a location,” Atherton women boasted. “I’ve told her, no friends hanging about the room, you can meet them outside if you want them”—and personal pride: we children would be called out to be amused by the sight of the servant going out dressed up in her Sunday best. — In fact, everything that made our human state pleasant. And we white children had grown up innocently accepting and perpetuating this until now, when slowly we began to turn on ourselves, slowly we began to unravel what was tightly knit in us, to change the capacity of our hearts, the cast of our sense of humor, the limits of our respect. It was as painful and confusing as the attempt to change what has grown up with the flesh always is. And unlike the analyst, prizing down for the significant incident on which the complex and the cure are based, we could not triumph and say: There — it was everywhere, in the memory and the eye, the hand and the laugh.

It had begun for me with Joel and Mary Seswayo; I did not know which. Now when, the second or third time I went to the Welshs’ flat, Isa said, “Would that African girl of yours like to come along next time, d’you think?” I felt as I did so often in the slightly uncomfortable, impermanent-looking homes of these young people, a sudden sense of my own climate blowing upon me. The way someone from an American city or a Scandinavian seaport comes in the course of a summer cruise to some unimportant little foreign island he has never heard of before and suddenly recognizes the warm breath off the beach more deeply than the streets of Chicago or Copenhagen. “Or do you think music’d be a bit much for her?”

The high English laugh of Jenny Marcus sailed out, a girl commanding attention in the pinkness and assertion of shape and flesh that sometimes precedes the ugly stage of pregnancy quite dazzlingly. “It’s all right for you, Isa, you haven’t got a servant. Whenever John wants to bring Nathoo Ram home for dinner I have to let Hilda go off. And he’s only an Indian, that’s not so bad. But the next day I always feel her looking at me in contempt; she knows he’s been there. Nothing infuriates your own servant more than the idea that you’ve lowered yourself to eat with a non-European.”

“And Nathoo Ram, too.” Her husband turned his head from his own talk. “I always see him look anxiously into the kitchen and see with relief old Jen battling there. …”

“Well, I’ll ask her—” I said to Isa.

A little man of twenty-four behind curly balding hair and glasses thick as bottle ends, said: “It’s a confusion of social and color barriers, surely? To Africans, if you entertain an African, you’re entertaining a houseboy or a cook. You see? Nathoo Ram’s not a lawyer, he’s the vegetable hawker known by the generic of ‘Sammy.’” But the young man was someone whom Isa “allowed” to be in her flat, one of those persons who fail to catch the imagination and so to whom no one listens. They ignored from him suggestions that, coming from someone else, would have provoked an evening’s wrangling. Now they were already talking of something else. He was left, as often, with the subject on his hands, discarded just when he had something to say on it. I should have liked to have heard him further, because what he had begun to say was a change of focus of the kind that interested me. But he was not interested in carrying on for me; already he was sitting silent and following the zigzag swerve of their new discussion with the quick eyes of a fan at a tennis match.

“Aren’t we going to hear the Couperin?” John Marcus was asking from among the records. Only his wife seemed to hear him, and pulled a face at him across the room. With a tremendous shrug he put the record down and squatted at her side. She bent, hanging her hair over their faces, and they whispered and laughed into each other’s ears and necks. Her mouth changing and her eyes crinkling with the look of someone being tickled, she looked out into the room but took no notice of it while he cupped his hand round her ear and she kept screwing up her face and saying, What? What?

I was still being talked about by two people behind me. Or rather my acquaintance with Mary Seswayo was being used by the resourcefulness of Edna Schiller to illustrate her Communist argument. She was a good-looking Jewess with an intensely reasonable manner and eyebrows that raised up a little at their inner limits, inquiringly, like the puffy eyebrows of a puppy. Her attractive clothes and the large collection of earrings that she wore seemed an abstraction; you could not imagine her among hairpins and lipstick, choosing which she would wear, before a mirror. There was the feeling that somebody else dressed her. It was the same with the young man she had with her, a handsome young American who despite a yellow pull-over and a pair of veldschoen had his big head and neck set with the dummy like perfection of Hollywood. Some other Edna must find time for him, too.

Now she was talking of me as if I were not in the room at all. “She befriends this girl, but what does it mean? — Like you and your sports grounds and recreation centers and sewing classes. A waste of effort on charity. That’s all it is, a useless palliative charity, useless in the historical sense. It’s damaging, even. The simple African who is not yet politically conscious is lulled into another year or so of accepting things as they are—”

“But this native girl probably is politically conscious. She’s seeking education, and the two go together. She may be one of the potential leaders you people are always looking for.”

Edna, once she had discovered the shortest distance from any subject to her own — and she had only one — was not to be deflected. “Unlikely. She will become a teacher and a bourgeoise and feel herself a little nearer to the whites instead of closer to the blacks. African leaders will come from the people.”

“Funny, in practice I thought that revolutionary leaders had usually come from the middle class?”

There was a groan from a young man lying on the divan near them. “For Christ’s sake, don’t start that. …”

“What it amounts to, then, is that you don’t approve of ordinary, nonpolitical friendship between black and white individuals?”

“Approve, nothing,” said Edna, coming forward in her seat. “It’s quite immaterial who your friends are, or what color. What I’m saying is, that even if they’re black, it’s unimportant to the struggle of the blacks against white supremacy.”

The young man sat up suddenly, with the dazed look of someone changing too quickly from the horizontal. “Christ, must everything be important to the struggle! Can’t I sleep with a girl, get drunk …” He fell back and muffled his face in the cushion.

Edna used the same degree of intensity to bring home a small point in a casual discussion as she did faced with the defense of a whole doctrine before the snap of a dozen shrewd dissenters. Her zeal released her like liquor and she did not seem to know the rise of her own voice or the persistence of her vehemence. “If people would take a look at what is to be done. The work that a handful of us have to do. You can’t tackle it in terms of soup kitchens. But, of course, I suppose people are afraid; can’t blame them. But you get used to it, it’s amazing. I know my telephone’s tapped. Twice last week there was a man asking questions in our building, some excuse about a survey, but we’re so used to it now. As Hester Claasen says (Hester Claasen was a trade-union leader of great courage and the cachet of toughness), you can smell a dick a mile off.”

Isa, who was easily bored, and so had a reputation for sharpness, came wheeling a tea wagon from the kitchen. “Edna,” she asked, bending down to pick up a spoon, “exactly what is it you do? I mean, I know you hold meetings and so forth.” She stood up looking at Edna with a rather childish expression of simple inquiry.

“Do,” said Edna, “how do you mean? One can’t answer a question like that offhand. It’s difficult to know where to start. Assuming you know what we want to do—”

“Ah, yes,” Isa interrupted as if she had suddenly remembered the answer for herself, “I thought so. You sell three dozen copies of the Guardian in a native township once a week. Yes, Mike told me, you are pretty good as a newspaperboy, you sell at least three dozen. …” And she proceeded to hand round coffee in an assortment of containers from beer mugs to nursery beakers. I got a tarnished silver-plated one, inscribed DOWELL MACLOUD BETTER BALL FOURSOME ROYAL JOHANNESBURG CLUB 1926, with an unprintable comment scratched by pin underneath.

“She’s intelligent, but she has no grasp whatever of politics, and that infuriates her.”—Edna was stirring her coffee and, with a flicker smile at her American, was now asking her companion if she was aware of what was really happening in China, and in the Indies? Like all Edna’s questions, it was rhetorical.

“Who’s got my dirty mug?” Laurie Humphrey accused Isa.

“What mug?”

“I think I have.” I waved it at him.

“Oh, Laurie.” Isa held it up, twisting her head to read and slopping the coffee over. “It was the pride of my aunt’s mantelpiece.”

“You have no Aunt Macloud.”

“Well it was the pride of somebody’s aunt. We got it in that Claim Street junk shop, near the apfel-strudel place, you know. It was in a job lot that Gerda wanted because of an old straw-covered bottle. Isn’t it nice? Everytime I used it I used to see Dowell on his big day, beaming on the green in plus fours with freckles coming out on top of a shiny bald head. Now it looks like an Oscar designed for Henry Miller.”

I laughed along with the others, but I could see by the face of the young man on the divan that he knew I didn’t know who Henry Miller was. He used it as a small blackmail between us. “Come and share my couch, Titian,” he said, “come on.” I sat on the end, near his feet, and he studied me. He was the kind who says, Don’t tell me — and, appraising you, proceeds to answer his questions for himself. “You’re Scotch, hey. Scotch red.” He indicated my hair. “When something rough touches your neck your skin gets all patchy and annoyed. And you’re prim. Scotch prim.” He smiled at how right he was.

And curiously enough, I felt hypocritically prim. I seemed labeled, sitting there on the edge of the divan with my hands holding the sides of the cushion. “Half Scotch. Mostly on my mother’s side. There’s English and a dash of Welsh to water it down.”

We went on like this all through coffee. It was something like going to a fortuneteller, with the added titillation that this was a young man. The slightly scornful and detached summing-up extended to most other subjects; it is an attitude common to doctors and in particular to those who have specialized in some minutiae of the body — brain cells, or blood cells, or lymph glands — and accept their own and other people’s knowledge in any other sphere with an amused reservation, like the antics of a clockwork toy to which they hold the key. This tinge of patronage sometimes extends even to the performance of life itself, so that there are some rather pathetically brilliant men who feel slightly superior to their own human desires.

But I only noticed the pleasing insolence of this person, and I could easily place that. “You’re a medical student, of course.”

“Of course,” he agreed without interest. John Marcus was busy with the records again, and he stood, tense as if he had made the recording himself, until the voice of the oboe, a voice out of the marshes taking up an ancient tale, lifted and silenced.

And music fell upon the room. It seemed to fall like lava upon these people, making another Pompeii of their attitudes stayed wherever they sat or stood or leaned. For twenty minutes they were returned deeper and deeper into themselves, and all the movement and speech that had blurred them, the exchange that made them shift and overlap in living, died out cold. Each now was contained in his own outline and none had anything to do with the other. Even that English girl, with her husband’s baby somewhere in her body; she sat with her legs slightly spread at the knee and her feet flat on the floor, the attitude of a peasant or a pregnant woman, her eyes light, surface blue, her upper lip lifted a little to listen. With his back to her at the other end of the room, the husband had his arms on his humped knees, staring into the floor: as if the music had caught him looking into some campfire of his own. Backs of heads, and arms, and hands and shoes; all took on the sealed importance of limits; here, with these drooping fingers, with these small crooked toes with their painted nails showing through sandals, these heavy unhuman brown brogues, the person ends. He is shut up in there; she is shut up in there: you see them looking out at their eyes. But not at you, not at the room.

Laurie Humphrey, just across from me, slumped inside a loose gross body that made a rumpled rag of his collar and swallowed the division between his shirt and his trousers. His eyes closed in that big, coarse-textured face, the sagging ears and thick mouth (I could see the patches of dry skin, scaling on the lips) that he wore through his life like a disguise. And Joel’s throat, near Isa. Sitting on the floor with his head hung back over some great book he had pulled down, so that there was his throat, like all that an animal offers of himself to the curious, the muscles spread, the end of the beard line, the beat of his blood widening and closing, widening and closing.

A harmlessness about the sitting Edna; the innocence of the ordinary suitcase from which the dangerous documents have been taken out. Her thighs crossed, a small soft rounded stomach let out under her dress. Isa with a broken look about her limbs, and her face become small. Dug up, dusted of ashes and put in a museum, not Isa the writer preserved, not gusto and wit and intellect, but a creature of sensual conflict, every little sticklike bone twisted in passion, the balked, lovewise curl to the mouth. Only the young man sharing the divan with me winked once, like a sardonic sphinx.

The concerto ended and at once movement and talk obscured them in a flickering gnat-dance zigzagging a tingling blur before the separateness of these, scribbling away the outlines of those. The English girl was shaking out her dress as if the music might have left crumbs. “Herby can get a lift with us,” her husband shouted over to the door. But Isa had suddenly put her arm round the old young man, with the blatant advance a woman can only show toward a man whom everyone can see is quite impossible for her. “No,” she said protectively, “he’s staying here. I’m all alone and you know this is no country for a white woman.”

“How is it you never even get offered a beer here, any more,” Laurie yawned.

“Well you can all come on to my place,” someone offered, but no one took it up.

“—For the simple reason we’re flat. Right out of everything. When Tom brought Ronny and Ben home on Sunday he had to go to the emergency dispensary and wheedle a bottle of invalid wine out of the chap.”

“Are you coming with tomorrow, John? Bring some food.”

“No. Not in your car, Laurie — hey, look out! I’ve got a baby in there!”

The room had broken up in the push to go home. I signaled good night to Joel across the room; he was spending the night with Laurie. I was going to sleep over at the house of an old friend of my mother’s, the usual arrangement when I went out in Johannesburg at night. The house was on the north side of town, while Laurie lived on the east, so I had arranged a lift with someone going in my direction. But as I was getting into my coat the young man of the divan appeared and said: “Which way do you go?”

“Parkview, but the Arnolds are taking me.”

“That’s my way, too. You come with me.” And he dragged me off, picking hairs from my coat collar. “Either don’t wear a black coat, or buy yourself a clothesbrush. You’re a sloppy kid, you know.” “But you said I was prim.” “That was the first time I looked. Anyway, I know that primness. You use it because you don’t want to give yourself away. Not even to yourself. But you’re there all right, just underneath, and don’t think you can forget it.” I suddenly felt that he saw me on the beach with Ludi, two years ago, looking at my own breasts against the sand. I laughed with embarrassment and misgiving. “Oh, yes,” he said. As I got into his small object-crowded car, Joel and Laurie came out of the building and I put up my hands and smiled to Joel. But the light of the foyer caged him in, and though he was looking right at me, he could not see beyond it.

I did ask Mary Seswayo to come to hear some music at the Welshs’ flat, but somehow she never came. When I spoke of it to her she sat very seriously for a moment and then said as if she were replying to the question of an examiner: “The difficulty is how can I get home afterward.”

I said: “Oh, someone will take you.” Like a rope tied to one’s ankle, the limits of their recognition in the ordinary life of the city constantly tripped one up in even the most casual attempt at a normal relationship with an African. Because I was white I continually forgot that Mary was not allowed here, could not use that entrance, must not sit on this bench. Like all urban Africans she had learned to walk warily between taboos as a child keeping on the squares and off the lines of paving. But everywhere had been mine to walk in, and out of sheer habit of freedom I found it difficult to restrict my steps to hers. I remember once going into town with her to buy some textbooks, and when I wanted to go to a cloakroom, realizing for the first time in my life that because she was black she couldn’t even go to the lavatory if she wanted to. There simply was no public cloakroom for native men or women in the whole shopping center of Johannesburg. Now if she came to the Welshs’ someone would have to take her home by car to the native township seven or eight miles out of town where she lived; their flat was nowhere near a native bus route, she could not travel on a European bus, and if she went home by train (even then someone would have to get her to the main station — there was no suburban underground in Johannesburg), there would be a dangerous walk between the halt and her home at the other end. These details were irksome and tedious and because I found them so I felt irritated with her for thinking of them first. It was not the music or the invitation that her inward eye looked to, but the business of getting from here to there.

So we drank our coffee and she kept turning back her sheaf of papers and reading a line or two, slowly. She was continually preoccupied with her work as I, in my work, was preoccupied with other things. She had now a friend who worked in a city bookshop (an enlightened tradition seemed to go with the books and it was one of the very few businesses where an African could be something more than an errand boy; he did what was known as “white man’s work” in the stockrooms). Today she had another handbook with her, this time called Effective English, that I guessed he had lent her.

Watching her opening it the hesitant, expectant way she opened a lecture-room door or the door of the library, and her eyes unraveling its mystery of print as if they were unwrapping a parcel that just might contain something miraculous, final, I suddenly wished for her that she was less harassed and flattened. And that she would not keep hoping for this miracle, finality. As usual, there was nothing I could say. I went on sipping the sweet coffee and her face hung transfixed over the book like a pool in which she would never see herself. She was very dark skinned — there is a theory, probably originating with the Africans themselves, that when they are well fed and fat they are lightest, and it was certain that she was not particularly well fed — and she had the small, good and also slightly projecting teeth of many African girls. Also the lovely round smooth forehead. She took a gulp out of her cup and as she put it down I wondered, Would I drink out of that cup? At home, as in most households, the Africans had eating utensils kept separate from the common family pool. Don’t take that — it’s the girl’s cup. My mother had often stopped some stranger, fetching himself a drink of water.

But it was a stupid thought I had caught myself out in, and I was learning to recognize them. I was beginning to find that in friendship with an African, a white person is inclined to submit his sincerity to tests by which he would not dream of measuring good will or affection toward another white person. Would I particularly like drinking out of anyone’s cup, for that matter?

She went off to the library, and I wandered down to the grassy amphitheater in which the swimming pool lay, still and cold with winter, although the sun was hot. It was one of those immense highveld days when the buildings and trees of Johannesburg are all mountaintops, lifting up into a dazzling colorless sky, distanceless, dazing as air that has shaken itself free of the earth and rises just out of reach of the last aspiring finger of rock. It is impossible to look into such a sky. I struggled a little with some Italian. Then lay back on the dead grass. A native gardenboy silently looped strands out of the pool with a long hook; then he stretched out with an old torn stained hat over his face. The hoarse voices of two students in shorts and rugby boots were gruff near me. It was the afternoon the young man of the divan was to take me to tea before I caught my train home. The suggestion had interested me enough at the time it was made, on the impetus of the evening at Isa’s, but the days that had elapsed in between had returned the young man to the haziness of a stranger, and I wondered, as I had before about such enthusiasms gone cold on me, why I had agreed.

But at four when the shadows of the buildings made chasms of chill I dutifully came out of the cloakrooms with my lips freshly drawn and my hair smoothed with water at the temples, and he was waiting in his black car. At once the inside of it was familiar, the assortment of odd shapes in the darkness appearing in the frankness of afternoon as ampule boxes, a couple of battered instrument cases, and piles of theater programs, empty cigarette boxes and dusty pamphlets put out by drug manufacturers. When he turned to talk to me, he breathed ether like a dragon breathing fire. “Exotic,” he said, “and it’s cheaper than standing a round of drinks.” I saw with a sense of justification that he was attractive, after all, and my mood lifted. We were going down the hill in the gaiety that sometimes springs up between people who are attracted but know each other very slightly when he swerved to avoid a native girl carrying a large brown paper parcel, and I interrupted—“Just a moment”—and turned to make sure.

I thought I had recognized the coat and beret. It was Mary, even more burdened than usual, so that she could only smile and had no free hand to wave. Charles had pulled to the curb. “Oh, I didn’t mean you to stop,” I said unconvincingly. “Well? What’s wrong? You practically flung yourself out the window.”

“It’s a girl — an African I’m friendly with. We nearly knocked her over. There she is, just behind—”

“Nonsense, we didn’t nearly knock anyone down. Where is she?”

I turned to look through the rear window at Mary coming hesitantly toward us, unsure if we had stopped on her account, and she should approach, or for some other reason, when she would have the embarrassment of answering a signal that was not for her. I nodded my head vigorously at her.

But Charles suddenly reversed the car with a rush that brought us level with her and almost knocked her down again.

“Are you mad?”

“Well, it’s quicker for us to go backward than for her to go forward.”

Mary stood at the window, smiling at his air of impulsive calm. Before her, I immediately felt a kind of pride in this young man; my indignation took on the purpose of showing him off. “I hope you don’t always drive like this. Really! — Mary, why are you walking with all those parcels?”

“It’s the dry cleaning for the people where I stay. I went down to the shop to get it, and when I got back I couldn’t find my bus money.” She was smiling in apology.

“So what’d’you think you’re going to do? Walk home?”

“I’m going into town to see if I can find my cousin at the factory where he works. He will lend me bus fare.”

“Where is this place?” said Charles. He had the patient, practical, uninterested tone of the white person willing to help a native with money or authority, so long as he is not expected to listen to any human details of the predicament.

“But I’ll give you the money,” I said, and at once became flustered because I felt I should have said “lend.” “I mean, it’s silly to go into town — He may not be there …? Charles—”

“Where does she live?” he asked again.

“Oh, in Mariastad—”

“Well, come on then. Hop in.”

“It’s seven miles,” Mary told him first, quite simply, not getting into the car because she expected the distance would change his mind.

“I know where it is. Get in.”

And now I began to urge her too, feeling a mild intoxication of possession of the young man and his car.

We went off with another roar, and she settled herself, very quietly as if anxious not to disturb, among the dust and rubbish in the back, clearing a space for herself carefully, and bending down to pick up a pile of pamphlets that had slid to the floor. We drove along one of the big highways that lead out of the city to the north and south, hemmed in with thousands of other cars, the faces of people drawing level behind glass, then snatched away as the lights changed. On the left hundreds of bicycles skidded through, Africans riding home with the yells and something of the exhilaration of skiers, and along every second or third block native bus queues lay like grayish caterpillars. Then there were villas on either side, the cars thinned, a roadhouse took some of them, and we passed our escort of bicycles, panting and riding hard now on the long stretch.

Many South Africans have never been inside a native location, but I had been with my mother to the Atherton one as a child, when the Mine held its yearly jumble sale of old clothes there, and I had also been with Joel to see the shantytown at Moroka and the experimental housing scheme near by, where the houses looked like sections of outsize concrete pipe and smelled cold as tunnels. One native location is much like another. Mariastad was one of those which are not fenced, but the approach to the place was the familiar one: a jolt off the smooth tarmac onto a dirt road that swerved across the veld; orange peel and rags, newspaper and bits of old cars like battered tin plates, knock-kneed donkeys staring from tethers. All around the veld had been burned and spread like a black stain. And all above the crust of vague, close, low houses, smoke hung, quite still as if it had been there forever; and shouts rose, and it seemed that the shout had been there forever, too, many voices lifted at different times and for different reasons that became simply a shout, that never began and never ended.

It was something I had known before and yet this time, with Mary Seswayo in the back of the car, it came to me as if the other times I had not seen it. As we bumped down into the township Charles and I stopped talking, as people do when they feel they may have lost their way; animation died into awkwardness. Along the road, he had talked to me but not to Mary (I had turned every now and then to draw her into our chatter) but now he began to try and speak naturally to her, as you do when there is something you do not want a person to notice. The effort was not much of a success, and everytime he got an answer from her he seemed not to know what to do with it.

The car went slowly through the streets. It seemed to descend into noise that sealed us up inside it. Children changed the outline of the street, grouping in the gutters, skittering over the road, running alongside the car in a fluttering pennant of rags. When there are so many of them, they lose human value; you could have put out your arm and brushed them off, back into the road.

First we passed the administrative offices, orthodox and red brick in official decency beneath the shabbiness that had washed against them from all around, weathering them to the corrosion of poverty. Chipped brick, dirt and litter disguised the solidity and professional proportions of the place like the ivy a villa pulls over its glaring newness in a stately suburb. A flag clung round a pole, and two fat native policemen stood arguing with an angry man on a bicycle. Then the usual small street of shops, homemade and pushed tightly one against the other so that you felt that if the first were taken away, the whole lot would slowly keel over and collapse. Most were one-eyed, and the pocked whitewash was covered with signs, advertisements and exhortations, but one or two had crooked verandas — mud or homemade brick under the whitewash — and the shoemaker sat outside. The fish-and-chip shop had a proper shop front, and young natives hung about it, city hats pushed back on their heads, drinking Coca-Cola. After the shops there was an empty space covered with ashes, mealie cobs, dogs and children, and at the far end, a tiny church that was the utter simplification of all that has accreted round the architectural idea of a church through the ages: a peaked tin roof, a rounded wooden door, a horizontal bar across two poles with a piece of old railway sleeper suspended from it, and a smaller piece of iron dangling to clang it with.

We followed Mary’s directions past decent little houses, each as big as a tool shed with a tin chimney throbbing out the life of the house in smoke. In many of them the door was open and a sideboard or a real dining table in varnished wood showed. Outside their bare walls were ballasted with lean-tos made of beaten-out paraffin tins, homemade verandas like the shoemaker’s and porches made of boxwood, chicken wire and runner beans. Each had two or three yards of ground in front, fenced with a variety of ingenuity, and inside mealies hung their silk tassels from the pattern of straight stalk and bent leaf. Some grew flowers instead; as it was winter, rings and oblongs of white stones marked out like graves the place where they would come up again. And some grew only children, crawling and huddling in the dust with only eyes looking out of dust.

Every third or fourth house there was a communal tap from which everyone fetched his water, and which no one troubled to turn off properly. A muddy stream trickled from the tap’s soggy perimeter out into the street, and we felt it squelch beneath the tires.

Mary said: “Here it is—” and with quiet and insistent thanks was gone into one of these houses and the car was taking us past again before I had realized that this was the place in which she lived, the house that was individual because one of its components touched my own life. I looked with confusion at the other houses of the row, passing; all alike in the limitations of their humble differentiation. Into a house like this she disappeared: there was a chair on the veranda, I had at least seen, and a sword fern growing in half an old tire, painted silver and hanging from a wire. Inside there might be four chairs round a table on a piece of clean linoleum, pressed for space against a high bed with a white crocheted cover — like this house. Or this one — a kitchen dresser, one or two chairs, something tall and dark with a flash of white — could it be a piano? It might be, without incongruity, for there were not enough of these rooms for each to serve one designation: dining room, bedroom, kitchen — they were all simply living rooms in the plainest sense, whether you must work or cook or sleep or make love. I had suddenly a great regret and curiosity for the room of Mary Seswayo that I had not seen; I wanted to make it up for myself out of the raw material which I saw in flashes in the other houses all about me. Essentially, it could not be any different from my imagining, because there was nothing else, in a place like Mariastad, of which it could have been composed. All else it could contain could be the little pile of books and notes from the University; and those I could supply, too. Just at this point we turned the corner and passed another tap, and there was a neat girl with an ordinary white enamel jug, fetching some water for herself. And at this the grasp of my imagination — that was really more like the entrance into another life through a re-creation of atmosphere, like an archaeologist restoring the arms, trinkets and drinking vessels to the excavated city, so that all that is needed is his own human step through the streets, and it will be as it was again — let go. She, too, came with a jug for water to a tap in the mud. So in how many other commonplaces that I take for granted in my own life shall I be wrong in hers? The thousand differences in the way she is compelled to dress, wash, eat — they piled up between us and I could scarcely see her, over the top. Sitting in the car I was conscious of a kind of helplessness, as if it were taking me away, further and further away, not only in distance. The car that at night must occupy a garage as big as these houses. The house Mary lives in. The bench she can’t sit on, the water that must be fetched from the tap in the street, the physical closeness of her life to the lives of others; these differences in the everyday living out of our lives — could they end there? Or out of them did we love, want and believe, and so could the formula of our loving, wanting, believing, be the same? Further and further. I thought of her eyes into which I seemed not to have looked hard enough. I tried to remember them so that I could try again.

The young man Charles said: “I’m damned if I know how to get out.” And certainly, although he had turned and turned again, we were not leaving Mariastad the way we came in. We were now rocking and bumping through the rutted streets of what must have been the oldest part of the location. The closeness of the place, the breath-to-breath, wall-to-wall crowding, had become so strained that it had overflowed and all bounds had disappeared. The walls of the houses pressed on the pavement, the pavement trampled into the street, there were no fences and few windows. Fires in old paraffin tins burned everywhere, and women stood over them among the screaming children, cooking and shouting. I was accustomed to seeing Africans in ill-fitting clothes that had belonged to white people first, but these people were in rags. These were clothes that had been made of the patches of other clothes, and then those patches had been replaced by yet others. They must have been discarded by a dozen owners, each poorer than the last, and now, without color or semblance of what they had been, they hung without warmth, fraying in the fierce flicker of flames that seemed greedy to eat them up, return them at last to the nothing their frailty had almost reached. The children were naked beneath one garment cast off by a grownup; streaming noses and gray bellies to show that under the old army jacket there was something alive instead of a cross of sticks to frighten birds.

All movement seemed violent here. The lift of a woman’s elbow, stirring a pot. Their red eyes when they looked up. Their enormous, yelling laughter above the smoke. The grip of their bare feet on earth worn thin as the rags they wore. The men went about as if they were drunk, and perhaps some of them were; the strong, fermented smell of kaffir beer fought with the smoke.

“Christ, what a place,” said the young man, annoyed with himself for losing his way. Some of the people stared curiously through the smoky confusion as we passed, and children yelled, Penny! Penny! jeeringly. Behind the crooked outline of their mean roofs held down with stones and pumpkins a magnificent winter sky turned green and bejeweled, and as it arched away from their gathering darkness the hovels seemed to crawl closer to the earth beneath it, and their tins of fire became the crooked eyes of beasts showing. I was afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of in the people, no menace in their shouts or their looks: like their shacks, their bodies, they were simply stripped of gentleness, of reserve, all their bounds were trampled down, and they only moved or cried out in one need or another, like beasts. Yet I was afraid. The awfulness of their life filled me with fear.

He said: “What a noisy lot of devils they are, eh?”

But I did not answer and he was so busy peering his way through the unlighted streets that he did not notice. On the banks of a trickle of stream that smelled of soda and rotting vegetables, and that, in the light of the car, showed the earth caked with dried soap scum, Mariastad petered out. We followed a man on a swaying bicycle over a bridge and drove up a rise to the main road.

“Light me a cigarette,” he said. I found the packet and some matches and lit the cigarette in my mouth. As I handed it to him I looked back over my shoulder and saw Mariastad, a mile away. It rose in smoke and the pale changing light of fire like a city sacked and deserted behind us.

Presently he put his hand lightly on my thigh, just above the knee, and squeezed it gently once or twice as if he were trying a fruit. Then with an air of calm decision he stopped the car at the side of the road, right under a street light, and kissed me with deliberate passion. I felt, as I always did when someone kissed me for the first time, what a stranger he was, and how far, in our mingled lips and saliva, we were from each other. We sat back in our own corners of the car and he said: “Can’t you stay over in town tonight? It’s so late as it is.”

I looked uncertain; I did not know what I wanted to do.

“Let’s go and have dinner and we could see a show.”

“—Well, I suppose I could. I could phone home. But I’ll have to find out if the woman I usually stay with can have me.”

So we drove quickly into town and when I had done my telephoning I found him already seated at the bright little table of the hotel restaurant. For the first time, he looked young and nervous. As I passed the bowing maître d’hôtel and the pianist who played as if she were asleep and her music was a sentimental dream, and the buffet where the turkey wore frills, the ham was the delicate pink of petals, and the lobsters lay ornate in silky bouquets of lettuce, I felt a kind of voluptuous thrill at the chanciness and irreconcilable contrasts thrown up to me in Johannesburg. The guilt, the desire to assume my part of the human responsibility for it all, sharpened the assertion of my self opposing greedy claims for pleasure, love and admiration. I ate whatever looked prettiest and drank some sour white wine that made me feel so full that I had to unfasten the hook of my skirt. We sat through the cinema holding hands, with our knees and calves touching, and afterward struggled together in the car. I was shocked and fascinatedly excited by the way his stranger’s hand went firmly under my clothes as if it were a live thing in itself, an animal finding its burrowing way. And the hand was cold, from the steering wheel and the winter night air, on my warm sheltered skin. I had never believed love-making could be such a casual thing for me. When I went into the house and crept into the room where I was to sleep, I found that beneath my coat all my clothes were unbuttoned, unfastened, ready to take off. But I did not feel ashamed and instead laughed, suppressing the laugh with my hand, and flung the coat to a chair in a kind of independent satisfaction.

Chapter 16

During all this time my position at home was slowly changing. What had at first been clashes of opinion, the quick flare of defiance and disapproval that springs from the very closeness of parents and children beneath the difference of age, became something colder, silent and unexpressed. My mother and father and I now lived in the intimacy of estrangement that exists between married couples who have nothing left in common but their incompatibility.

“Helen lives her own life,” my mother told people briskly, as if it were something she and my father had decreed out of a superior and enlightened judgment. It was curious, in fact, how in her relations with other people she now often expressed views and even acted in accordance with ideas that were mine, though these same ideas were part of the way of life that was taking me away from her, and to which, in me, she was bitterly hostile. Suddenly she had begun to grumble about the backwardness of Atherton; of course, here we never get the chance to see a decent play or hear a concert, she would say with a curl of the lip, as if in some other life somewhere else she had been accustomed to these things. She would sneer, too, at some of the innocent diversions she had once enjoyed so much. You can go, she would say to my father, who was a little put out by her lack of enthusiasm over the Pioneers’ Dinner to be given by the mayor of Atherton; I don’t want to be among all those old fossils, thank you. And she had even begun to take a brandy and soda if they went out or had friends to visit in the evening. — It’s ridiculous to be old-fashioned, she said. These days girls of Helen’s age take a drink.

But her casual, almost boastful acceptance of me before strangers had too much determination behind it. At home long despairing silences fell between us when she knitted and looked away when our eyes met, because she was thinking about me, and I read down the page of my book and did not know what I had read. She wandered alone into this strange tract of country with a gun, vague about what she might find while looking for me; and, at a word, there we were seized with the confrontation of each other, I motionless, self-conscious beside a palm tree, she feeling a little foolish at the gun.

“Would you like a peach?” she would ask suddenly. “I went to the market with Mrs. Cluff this afternoon and we shared a box. They’re Cape peaches, big as a soup plate. When I think that I pay Sammy sixpence each for those hard sour little things. Really, I feel I should go more often.” And we would talk politely about the price and quality of fruit for a few minutes, while her interest quickened and mine flagged until she noticed it and the subject died. We were silent again. I thought of how, when I was a little girl, we used to go to the market together on Saturday mornings, I holding on to her arm and carrying the basket, excited among the slippery vegetable leaves and the pushing crowd and the smell of earth. Now she was counting stitches, her lips moving as if she were telling beads. I began to read, starting from the top of the page again. Soon she got up, rolled the knitting neatly away and said brusquely, “Helen, please clear your papers and things away now. Your father’s bringing Mr. Mackenzie from the Group home.” And so, from long habit, I collected my notes and books and helped to make our living room look as if no one had ever done any living there. My mother did not like living to show; all evidence of the casual, straggling warmth of human activity was put out of sight before the advent of visitors as if it were peculiar and private to us, and did not exist in their lives, their homes as well. I noticed now how we were presented to visitors in our own home as creatures without continuity, without a life put down and ready to take up again, like actors placed in a stage-set. And I thought with relief and longing of the way in which one entered into, but did not interrupt, the life of people like Isa Welsh; there were no preparations for your coming, you drank out of the same cups as your hosts did every day, and if they were cleaning their shoes or eating dinner, or having an argument, for the time that you were there, you were part of their stream of activity. My mother, again, liked to have “everything nice” for visitors, and was greatly put out and irritated if someone dropped in unexpectedly or at a time unusual for callers. She could not enjoy their company if my father had his old slippers on and there was only a piece of stale cake in the house.

One of the greatest sources of pain and contention between us was the fact that I did not “bring my friends home.” My father suggested often: “Why don’t you let Helen have a little party, Jess? — You could have some of your friends from the University out one Saturday evening, and you could dance if you wanted to … mother would prepare you some sandwiches, and you could have beer. …”

My mother shrugged as if she didn’t care. “She doesn’t want it. We’re not good enough for these friends of hers, my dear. Don’t you know that? Her head’s turned by fine houses in Johannesburg.”

How could I explain that what was the matter was that everything would be too good for my friends? That they would leave wet rings on the furniture and put their feet up on the sofa, and perhaps use somebody else’s towel in the bathroom (towels were sacred personal possessions in our house). I could imagine exactly the kind of evening my father visualized; I had been to them in the houses of other sons and daughters of Mine people. My mother would work all day preparing homemade sausage rolls and round water biscuits spread with cheese and potted relish, and when the evening came would have everything set out on a table in the living room, under an embroidered net. A dozen bottles of lemonade and a dozen bottles of beer would be stacked in one corner. All the lights would be on, the two silver vases filled with flowers, and not a piece of thread, a newspaper or a used ash tray would betray the fact that the room had ever been used before. Into this overawing atmosphere of preparedness the guests would come, clattering over the bared expanse of floor which instantly killed the spontaneity of the desire to dance, and very soon, quite unable to keep away, my mother would appear as if by accident at the door, dressed in her best frock and smiling confusedly, and in no time my father would have set himself up jocularly in shirt sleeves to act as barman. And they would both hang about, like parents at a children’s birthday party, protesting all the while that they “did not want to disturb the young people.” An inverted snobbery made me burn with shame at the idea. I could not face the picture of the people I knew with their uncluttered lives in flats and rooms, suddenly finding themselves in this church tea-party atmosphere.

The same kind of situation arose over the men who took me out. Charles Bessemer was a good example. My mother and father were vaguely disquieted when, as I did the night he took Mary Seswayo to Mariastad, I telephoned unexpectedly from Johannesburg to say that I would not be coming home. Because I went to places they did not know and with people whom they had not met, I think it was as if, when I put down the telephone, they felt me swallowed up into an anonymity of city streets. Though they would have been astounded at the suggestion, the principles of their code of behavior toward young men were entirely sexual, the elders of the tribe measuring the daughter’s choice of mates against the background of her own home, the young male assessing the worth of the family and consequently the girl whom he was considering. This was the way it was always done on the Mine and in Atherton in general, where as soon as a young man became interested in a girl, and long before there was any talk of marriage, he was taken about everywhere with the family, to cinemas and social gatherings, so that if and by the time marriage resulted, he was already inculcated in the kind of life the girl’s family had led and which, without question, he would be expected to lead with her, trooping off as ants go to set up another ant heap exactly like the one they have left.

Joel came to the house, of course, but the fact that he was a Jew gave him a position of peculiar if wary privilege, like a eunuch. But this young man Charles Bessemer affected them conventionally. I had made a point of mentioning him to them although I had not spoken of others, unconsciously, I believe, as a kind of compensation: he was a Protestant Gentile, like themselves, and in addition, a doctor. — This I had discovered from Isa; it was typical of him that he should have preferred to let me go on thinking he was a medical student. — I offered him as the only thing I had that might please. He must have roused hopes in them that my withdrawal from the life and opportunities of the Mine was not a deviation after all, or if it had been, was merely the clever short cut to a life on the same safe pattern, but a higher level. A doctor from Johannesburg. I could see that the possibilities of this pleased them. And for the first time I saw a similarity between them and Joel’s parents, whom I had long ago resigned myself to accept as irreconcilable strangers to everything in my mother and father. But now I saw that the idea of a doctor in the family pleased them in exactly the same way as it would have done the Aarons. I recognized in their questions the tone of the discussion when it had been suggested, that night at Aarons’, that Joel might have studied medicine.

Now there was no cold pretended lack of interest expressing disapproval when I said I was going here with Charles, or there with Charles. “Did you have a good time?” my father would beam, as if there could be no doubt about it. (I often wondered what he visualized when he said this — the Masonic dances of his youth, I am sure, with young ladies dangling silk-tasseled pencils from their little programs.) “I’d give you my pendant,” said my mother, “but I know you wouldn’t wear it. …”—The women I knew longed for the strange, monolithic rings and heavy beaten silver jewelry made in the style of Berlin in the thirties by a German refugee, and because they could not afford his work, wore Zulu beadwork that in its primitive gaiety gave them the look of peasants.

My excuse for not bringing Charles home was the demands of his job. How he would have thrown his head back and laughed his explosive laugh if he had known. And how horrified he would have been at their picture of him as a rising suburban G.P. in a blue suit; Charles who wanted so much to be free (of quite what, he did not know) that the moment his good work — and he was good at his work — brought him promotion or the chance of permanency in a hospital, he resigned and went somewhere else. “What does he do, is he in private practice…?” my father asked. I told them that he was assistant medical officer at the big tuberculosis hospital outside Johannesburg. My mother got the look on her face she had had when there had been a whooping-cough outbreak at school. “Well, I hope he’s careful,” she said, “but I don’t suppose you could get it, just going about with him.”

I felt suddenly forlorn. I had a sudden flash of this young man and me, lost in each other’s mouths, utterly mindlessly mixed in the drunken secretions of love-making, our faces faintly sweaty and smeared with passion like a bee mazed and messed with pollen. And as I looked at my mother and father I seemed to see them as if they were actually receding from me, in the blur and strain of irrevocable distance. It was a floating, drifting feeling, with the powerlessness of dreams.

Our life at home went on, touching at fewer and fewer points. Charles Bessemer, like the hope of a sail, passed. They regretted him more than I did, I am sure. After a few weeks he moved on, whether because of a new job or a new girl I no longer remember, or perhaps never knew. I think he must have tired of me because the promise of my passion in our encounters in his car came to nothing; when he began to consider where we might go to conclude our love-making, he saw me brought up short, like an animal galloping toward an abyss. In my eyes he saw the contradiction between my headlong passion and a prohibitive fear that survived the moral code of my parents which I believed I had rejected. To satisfy both sides of my nature, I contrived to cheat them both. By denying myself the final act of love, I kept to the letter of the moral prohibition, and by allowing myself all intimacies short of the act itself, gave a kind of freedom to my natural self. He was probably disgusted with me. In any case it did not matter; there were others. The important thing was the knowledge of being desired that brought me to a consciousness of myself as a woman among the women I knew, that looking around me among my friends, made me feel myself received into the fullness of life, the revealed, and the hidden.

More and more I longed to leave the Mine and live in Johannesburg. The very comfort and safeness of home irked me. I felt I was muffled off from real life. I wanted the possibility of loneliness and the slight fear of the impersonality of living in a strange place and a city; the Mine oppressed my restlessness like a hand pressed over a scream. Often I wanted to call out to my mother: Let me go and you will keep me! But it would have been no use; would only have started another cold argument of offense and hurt. Now my parents were planning a visit to England and Europe, the visit of a lifetime which every Mine official waits for, and it was assumed that we should all be going together. When I suggested that they should go, and that I should perhaps like to go alone, or with a student tour, less elaborately, later, gloom fell like a blow on our house. The pleasure had drained out of anticipation, for them. I became guiltily distressed at what I had done, and began to pretend that I wanted to go with them, after all; and all the time resentment that they should force me to feel guilty toward them grew to match my desire to show them love.

The simultaneous experience of a longing for warmth and closeness and a wild kicking irritation to be free bewildered me and made me moody. I seemed to have nowhere to lay my bundle of contradictions, and so I stood a kind of touchy guard over them. To my mother and father I seemed more and more withdrawn and self-willed. They pressed to themselves the sharp belief that I no longer needed them; my mother retaliated with the pretense that she no longer needed me, my father with a gentle sadness of self-blame, a kind of timidity at my distance, as if conceding me a right to it.

Yet with the peculiar power of the inadvertent, the innocent, it was to be Mary Seswayo who blew up this no man’s land between my parents and me. Like a stray dog she ran across it and set off a mine field that threw up depths and plowed chasms which would be there forever.

Chapter 17

It was toward the end of the year, when the heat and examinations came together. We all grumbled about the strain but I believe that in a way, I enjoyed it. It caught me up at least temporarily in a sense of urgency and purpose that discounted the strain, and it meant that at home I could shut myself up with my books and, living apart from the household, be respected for it. I do not think there was a home anywhere that did not invest its student with a sense of importance and special consideration at this time.

That was why I said to Mary Seswayo one afternoon, “Why do you hang on here? I like to get home and get down to some real work as early as I can.”—There were no more lectures once examinations were about to start, and we simply came to University to use the library or discuss something with our tutors. But the African girl seemed always to be sitting over a desk somewhere, in the library or a deserted lecture theater, while everyone else was hurrying to get away.

She looked up with the dulled expression that, contradictorily, comes from concentration. “I’d rather work here.”

“Oh, would you?” I said in the polite tone of disagreement.

“The woman I stay with’s got her children at home and you can’t expect them to stay outside all the time. Then she takes in sewing and the books and papers get all mixed up. …” She smiled.

And then I remembered. I stood there looking at her with a kind of appeal of concern on my face and she smiled back at me with the reassurance of resignation. “So I’d rather work here.”

For once I forgot the tacit pretense I kept up in an attempt to spare her feelings, to make her feel less different from me. “It must be like hell. How do you manage at night? Can you get anything done?”

Suddenly we really were intimates at last. “How can I? I sleep in a room with the children. In the other room the man and woman sit and talk, there are always people. So I try early in the morning. But the children are up at dawn.” She laughed at the hopelessness of it.

I shook my head, not knowing what to say. “You couldn’t go home to Natal?”

“No.”

We both knew there was no money for it.

“Isn’t there anywhere else you could stay for a bit?”

She shrugged and moved her brown expressive eyes with their bright whites, lingeringly from one side of the room to the other, as if to say, Where?

But then she said, to remind herself how privileged she was to be at the University at all. “But I can get a lot done here, you know, in the daytime.”

I made a little noise of impatient dismissal; conscious at the same time that this in itself was a luxury only a white person could afford.

And I went home. The train had been standing in the full sun of three o’clock in the afternoon before it left Johannesburg station, and the leather seats were searingly hot to the touch. My clothes stuck to the leather and my body stuck to my clothes, and, with my legs crossed, tears of sweat ran helplessly from my thighs down the backs of my bare knees. The green blinds were down and the thick dusty light brought out the varnish smell of hot leather. I closed my eyes and sank into the sweat and staleness of myself (five wet prints showed where my hand had clutched my books), and the train seemed to pamper me in it, shaking yes, yes, lazily as a fat woman breathing. I saw the old motorcar tire with the fern straggling out of it; the children shouting; the flatness, the dust, the noise. I imagined the woman with the sewing machine stuttering and the bits of material everywhere. Probably she chattered while she sewed. No, probably that was wrong, too; native women are always far more gay or far more serious than white women, so one mustn’t try to visualize their moods from one’s experience of Europeans. They sing and shout in the street over nothing, and they are solemn under the weight of some task we shouldn’t even feel. There was no way of knowing, no way of knowing. And sitting in the physical reality of the heat that tacked my mind down to consciousness of every part of my body, sweating or touching in discomfort against the encumbrance of cloth, I had an almost physical sensation of being a stranger in what I had always taken unthinkingly as the familiarity of home. I felt myself among strangers; I had grown up, all my life among strangers: the Africans, whose language in my ears had been like the barking of dogs or the cries of birds.

And this feeling seemed to transmute itself (perhaps by a trick of the heat, altering the very sensibility of my skin) to the feeling Mary must have, trying to oppose the abstract concepts of her books against the overwhelming physical life crowding against her. What a stranger it must make of her. A stranger to herself. And then again how slight, how stupid, how useless it must all seem, how impossible to grasp, the structure of the English novel, the meaning of meaning, the elegance of exchanges between Beatrice and Benedict — with the woman making mealie porridge over the fire, the man carefully preserving the dirty bit of paper that is his pass, the children playing for a few years before they become nursegirls and houseboys.

When I got down from the train at the siding the Mine property lay like an encampment, dead in the heat. Atherton, just seen over the veld in a watery haze, was another. The horror of full light showed it for what it was. Inside there might be coolness, the illusion of shelter and color, the depth of books, the dignity of enclosed space in rooms, the symbols of fruitfulness in flowers and grapes; but the sun looked down on the bare, stolid huddle of tents that expressed nothing more than complacent survival. And all around, like a child’s revenge of muddy footprints and dirty words scratched on a wall, the natives had fouled the niggling benefits of the white people’s civilization. The siding was littered with bitten-out hunks of stale bread swarming with ants, filthy torn papers and rags clung to the boles of the gum trees, and the smell of stale urine, which had been there as long as I could remember, came up from the weeds along the road.

Inside our house, the dimness was overcome with heat. But it was absolutely quiet. In the vacuum of heat and quiet the work that I had to do had space to fill my mind entirely.

The heat and quiet and torpor of the Mine irritated me like the uselessness of a person who lies snoring in the sun. Why shouldn’t Mary Seswayo come and work here for a week or ten days? No one would disturb her, she would bother no one. And there was the playroom — the little whitewashed lean-to built on the back of the house as a “cooler” before the days of electric refrigerators — that had been used to store my toys and was now a place for things that had no place. She could sleep there; it was neither inside the house nor out. I could clear it up and put a bed in.

The idea was so simple and practical that it gave me the particular satisfaction of an easy solution which has been overlooked. I vaguely thought my mother might raise some objections, but I felt that the “cooler” was the answer to those; I had the cooler all ready to produce, and there was all the rightness of it, for my mother, self-evident: neither inside the house, nor out in the yard with Anna, but something in between. And what would it matter to Mary how my mother looked at it; she would have peace and a place to herself.

My mother was secretary to some Mine charity committee that year, and just before supper she was sitting at the dining-room table addressing envelopes. She looked from the telephone directory to the writing under her hand with the air of determination and distaste with which she efficiently tackled tasks of this nature, and when she heard someone come in, said without looking up: “You must wait another few minutes, my girl.” She thought it was Anna, wanting to lay the table.

“Oh, it’s you. I’ve promised to get these wretched things out by tomorrow. I sent them all out last week, and now at this afternoon’s meeting they want something added. I’ve got to do it over again.”

I felt suddenly shy of her, I didn’t know why. Instead of saying quite simply what I wanted to say, I wandered around the table for a moment or two, picking up and reading an envelope here and there. Mrs. W. J. Corbett, President, L.S.C., P.O. Box 127, Atherton. Mrs. J. Dale-Smith, c/o Manager’s House, Basilton Levels … And when I did speak, I began in a roundabout way almost as if I were making a charity appeal. “Mother, I was thinking just now — working in my room I can get such a lot done, nobody to bother me. … Really, if one can’t get through under conditions like this … But I was thinking, there’s a young African girl in my group, she’s really a bright girl and it’s so important for her to pass. She lives in this awful location place, with people milling around all the time. She was telling me, she doesn’t get a chance to work at all. And so I thought, at least I thought just now, couldn’t she come home here for a while? Just for, say, ten days. Until we start writing.”

“A native girl?”

“Yes, an educated native girl, of course.” Every time I spoke my voice came out with more humility. I felt I stood there like a beggar.

“But where would she sleep?” my mother brought out at last, as if she had found what she wanted in the pause: the unanswerable.

I had it ready: “In the cooler. It’d be quite all right. I’ll fix it up for her.”

I began to make light of it, sensing that if I spoke of Mary as an inferior my mother might be edged to a position where it would seem that she herself and I stood together. “She’s as clean as a white person and she’d do her own room and so on. It’s just to give her somewhere to work.”

“Yes …,” said my mother. “Where will she wash? And where’s she going to have her meals? That’s something. I don’t fancy her using my bath.”

“Oh, she’ll wash outside. She’ll eat in her room. Or she and I’ll eat together.”

“You’ll eat …”

I made a gesture of quick dismissal. “She won’t care where she eats.”

Anna came in from the kitchen with the tablecloth over her arm and a faggot of knives and forks in her hand. “I’m sorry, missus,” she said determinedly. “All right, all right, I’m off,” said my mother, scooping up her things. She put them on the sideboard. “Look, Anna, don’t use those mats Miss Julie gave me. The old ones are good enough for under the meat dishes.”

I did not say anything but stood and watched her. She could not ignore me as she left the room. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll have to speak to your father.”

That was what she always said when she did not know whether or not she wanted to do something. I had heard her say it in shops hundreds of times, when she suspected that she might get what she wanted elsewhere, or that she was being overcharged: “I’ll have to speak to my husband.” Yet I knew that she had never sought my father’s advice in her whole life, and he had never cared to have any authority over her, or questioned any decision of hers. It was her way of playing for time to go into consultation with herself.

Now I accepted the lie with a show of respect. I sat on the veranda letting the insipid music of the radio flow over me, and soon my father came home and let himself down into one of the creaking chairs to read the paper. As he grew older the sprightliness of small, thin men was intensified in him and his face grew smaller behind his glasses. Fits of dizziness and weakness had been diagnosed as anemia, and he was no longer allowed to discipline himself with the dietary fads that he had adopted from time to time. So he had gone from the stomach to the psyche. Now he had a little shelf of books of popular psychiatry, and adopted the theory of psychosomasis as wholly as he had once believed in the doctrine of Christian Science or the Hay Diet. He was also one of the many people who confuse eccentricity with culture, and he saw my modest and hopeful attempts to expand myself as on a level with his blind belief in the elixir of the moment or, rather, the latest book of the month for hypochondriacs. “This’ll interest you, Helen!” He held up a new one. The Subconscious You. A popular, concise explanation for laymen written by an eminent American psychiatrist. Two million copies sold. “It seems it’s all up here,” he said, putting a finger to his forehead. “No matter where you feel it, it’s all up here. Look somewhere toward the middle, there — there’s a chapter on how to study, that’s something for you now, eh?”

I paged through the book and caught one chapter head as it flipped by: “How you think with your blood: The problem of prejudice.” I smiled.

I went back to my room to look over my work, but spent one of those timelessly vague half-hours that young women fall into now and then, combing and recombing my hair, looking at my figure in the mirror, moving about among the clothes in my wardrobe. Anna came to call me to dinner and my mother was already carving the leg of lamb. As soon as she saw me she said, carelessly and finally, like the inevitable dismissal of something quite ridiculous. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to have that native girl here. Best cut it out.” Obviously she had made up her mind, and simply told my father that I had made the suggestion and she had repudiated it.

I don’t know whether it was the result of the kind of self-hypnosis induced by my passionate absorption with myself in my room just before, but an intense arrogant irritation shot into me. “I knew it. I knew it.” I gave her a look of summing up, smiling, unpleasant.

“How do you mean you knew it?” she said, rising to it. Nothing angered her more than suspected patronage because she believed that in some obscure way I had some advantage from which to patronize her. The knife squeaked through the thin slices of meat; she carved excellently.

“I just knew it.”

She countered her fear of patronage with a kind of smugness. Calmly helping my father and me to cauliflower, she said with a little warning laugh, “When you’ve got a home of your own, you can do what you like. But while you live in my house… I don’t see why your father and I should pander to one of your fads. It’s just another idea you’ve got into your head, like all the others.”

I cannot explain how her tone affected me. Perhaps it was because I was so uncertain of the validity of much that attracted me and that I believed in, and this small help that I wanted to give was one of the few things that had come so spontaneously and simply to me that there was no possibility that it was part of a pose or an attitude, something within the context of what I wanted to be rather than what I really was. To question it, to lump it with all the rest was like doubting my own reality. That the questioning should come from my mother was painful and frightening. It was as if she had said: Have I really got a child? Is she there? And in the end, no authority could speak above hers.

She had no idea of the enormous power to hurt that she retained. I could not have told her, I could not have explained. She would only have laughed again, missing the point: Of course, my opinion matters so much to you!

I felt sick with the impossibility of getting her, anyone, to understand what she did to me. I sat there trembling with a frustration like suppressed desire. And my voice went on, irrelevant and out of control. “You let Anna have her cousin here while she was looking for work.”

“Look, I’ve said no and that’s the finish of it.”

“You haven’t really thought about it at all,” I said, sitting back slowly from my plate. “You’re simply terrified of anything I ask you, no matter what it is, if it’s something I ask, you must say no on principle. Because it’s bound to be wicked, crackpot, not respectable. You wouldn’t really mind having the girl here at all. But I ask it, so, no, no — it must be suspect.”

My mother said, noticing my agitation: “That’s right, you were always good at turning on the drama.”

“Look,” said my father, “must we argue at the table?” Of course, he was thinking of one of the tenets of his latest theory: Digestion is impaired by emotion.

My mother climbed slowly and mightily into her anger like a knight putting on his vestments before mounting for battle. “Of course, you let her do as she likes. And grumble to me afterward. Well I won’t have it. I’ve had enough. I don’t know her friends and their ways and I don’t want to. Nobody’s good enough for my daughter here. How do you think it looks, her keeping herself aloof from the Mine, never wanting to do the things other young people do? I’m ashamed, always making excuses—” She stopped, breathing hard at us. But once it was released, all that she had not said for months, all the preserve of her cold silences, her purposeful ignoring, could not be checked.

It pushed up against her throat and she had to say it; it seized her and poured out of her with something of the uncontrolled violence of the emotional babble that comes out of a person under gas. “What do you think people think of you? The girls you went to school with, you won’t look at. Of course not. They’re content with their jobs and the decent people they’ve known since they were children. And I have to have Mrs. Tatchett saying to me, What’s wrong with Basil? — Yes, I’m telling you, she came to me the other day and asked me straight out, and I admire her for it. What’s wrong with my Basil, she said, that Helen stayed at home rather than go to the Halloween dance with him and she never came to the cocktail party we had for his graduation? After all, he goes to the University the same as she does, why doesn’t she consider him good enough?”

“Good enough,” I flashed out. “That’s all they ever think of, the petty snobs. The only reason why one should be friendly with anyone is because they’re good enough.”

My mother turned on me. “No, you like to roll in the mud. Anything so long as it’s not what any other reasonable person likes. You’d rather be seen running about with the son of a Jew from the native stores, that’s much nicer, someone brought up among all the dirt and the kaffirs. He must be a finer person, of course, than anyone decently brought up by people of our own standing.”

A kind of thrill of getting to grips with real issues went through me. “Ah, I thought that would come. You’ve had that on your chest a long time. And you’ve always pretended to be so polite to Joel. And all the time you’re as bigoted as the rest. Worried because all the old crows of the Mine saw your daughter out with a Jew. Well, you can tell them to mind their own damn business, I’ll be friendly with whom I choose. And I’m not interested in their standards or who they think would be suitable for me. You can tell them.”

“We’ve got nothing against the boy,” said my father. “No one’s saying anything against the boy. But why him, rather than anyone else?”

“Why?”—I was almost laughing with excitement. “Because he’s alive, that’s why. Because he’s a real, live, thinking human being who’s making his own life instead of taking it ready-made like all your precious little darlings of sons on the Mine.”

“Have him,” said my mother shrilly. The venom between us seemed like a race that we were shouting on. “Why don’t you marry him? That would be nice. You can sit on a soapbox outside the store and shout at the natives. That’ll be nice for your father, after he’s worked himself up to a decent position to give you a background.”

I looked at her. “It would kill you, wouldn’t it? It would kill you to have the Manager ask after your daughter, who married the Jew from the Concession store. Well, don’t worry. He wouldn’t have me. He can find something better than the half-baked daughter of a petty official on a gold mine. He’ll want a richer life than a person with my background can give him.” I did not knaw where this came from in me, but all at once it was there, and it seemed to become true in the saying.

“After all, Helen, be reasonable,” my father was insisting, on the perimeter of this. “How can you have a native staying in the house? I’ve got to think of my position too, you know. It’s our bread and butter. What does it look like? I can’t do things like that. I’ve got a responsibility, my girl. Next thing is it will be going round the Group that I’m a Communist.”

“You disgust me. You both disgust me,” I said fiercely, half-weeping, half-laughing in shame at the shrill crescendo of pettiness of the scene that, inescapably, caught us all up for what we were. Like a certain shape of nose or tone of skin it showed in all of us. I had it, too. I burned for the dignity and control my blood betrayed. “Do you hear? You disgust me.”

“That’s all right,” said my mother. Her anger seemed to tremble meltingly through her, like a fire lambently consuming a bush. “That’s all right.” It was as if I had handed my words to her like a knife. The danger of them seized us both, but it was done. She would not give it back to me; I could not take it from her.

At that moment Anna walked in with the sweet, and her detached and servile presence, a kind of innocence of ignorance, showed up by contrast the peculiar horror that was in the room. She came in on her sloppy, shuffling slippers, and went out again, looking at no one. In the sudden, mid-air silencing of her presence, the intensity of the room was like that of a room enclosed by a hurricane. And all the stolid evidence of ordinary things, the familiar furniture, the food on our plates, the crocheted cover with the shells over the water jug, took on the awful quality of unknowing objects in a room where violence has been done.

When she had gone the silence remained.

My mother began to ladle stewed fruit into the three bowls. Suddenly she burst into weeping and ran from the room.

She cried like a man; it had always been hard for her to cry.

Chapter 18

I went to Joel. I had not seen much of him lately, but I went to him with an instinctive selection of the one person I needed to counter the situation at home. I telephoned him in the morning and we arranged to meet for lunch at Atherton’s one tearoom. Over breakfast and the business of dressing our household went about in silence, a kind of shame which made everything secretive and perfunctory, like the trembling hand and dizzy air that harks back from a hang-over to the excess that reeled behind it. My mother did not speak to me. But as I made ready to leave the house I heard her complaining to Anna behind the closed kitchen door, the familiar plaint of the mother who has “done all she can” for a callously wrong-headed child. The door was closed to exclude me, but her voice was as heedless of my being able to hear it as if I had been a child too small to understand anything except the tone. I could also hear the murmur of agreement from Anna like the hum of responses from a chapel congregation.

The tearoom was not a good place to meet because it was always full of Atherton women and women from the Mine, dropping in for tea between shopping. At eleven o’clock, too, the lawyers came over for the recess from the courthouse near by, and sat at two large tables to themselves, their heads together, very conscious of their serious purpose as compared with that of the women. Now it was school holidays in addition, and many women whom I knew gave me the smile of patronizing frankness used by married women toward young girls, as they trailed children in like strings of sausages, holding hands and straggling behind. I sat and waited for Joel in the atmosphere that smelled of warm scones and lavender water. The waitress said: “How’s your mother?” and dusted crumbs importantly off the table before me. Other women came up and spoke to me. Say hello to Helen, dear. — Won’t you? Oh, the cat’s got away with her tongue. That’s it, you know. Helen, the cat’s got away with her tongue. Laughter from the woman and myself. Well, remember me to your mother, dear? Daddy all right?

In between I sat in a kind of listless daze, as if I were not there at all. I kept thinking: I want to go away. But there was no indignation, no strength in the idea any more. I did not want to be at home, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be, either. Often since then I have known the same grogginess of the spirit, that comes from emotional excess and, like any other bankruptcy, has no choice but to be passive. Sitting in the Atherton tearoom that hot day in November, I knew for the first time the distaste of no-feeling, the incredible conviction one hasn’t the strength to discover with anything more than a listless horror like nausea that not to care about the love that agonized you is more agonizing than the agony itself; to have lost the motive of anger is worse than living anger was.

When Joel came I did not say anything to him of what had happened, after all. My express intention seemed suddenly not to matter and I found myself saying: “I don’t seem to have seen you properly for such a long time. I thought it would be nice to get away from work and talk.” And we did. We discussed the people we knew and the things we had seen and done with all the space of the ground that was always so easy between us, and by the time the “pot of tea, 6d.” had been reached, I found that my numbness was coming alive, with a rush of gratitude I felt I was being taken back into human life again. The pain of the house on the Mine shrank to one pin point in a whole world; outside, other airs existed. So I was able to say quite easily: “There’s been a terrible row at home. It’s no good.”

When I told him, he said: “Did I crop up at all?”

“No,” I said, pouring his tea. And added because the shortness of my reply left a pause for doubt, “Why should you?”

“I don’t know — I’ve always felt I should, some day. — Of course the row wasn’t really about Mary Seswayo.”

“No, I know.”

“—So you’ll get away after all. You’ll get what you wanted.”

For a moment I had a return of the feeling that there was nothing that I wanted. “But I didn’t want it this way—” I appealed.

“Things keep on happening that way. — Did you want to see me to tell me?”

I smiled.

He drank slowly, deliberately, his eyes moving about the room. “No, it wouldn’t be much good letting it blow over and waiting for next time. Because it’s obvious there’s going to be a next time.” He shook his head with a half-smile to himself. “It’s a pity for them.”

“And what about me?” I felt impatiently it was something Jewish in him, this softening he had toward my parents.

“For you, too,” he said, not retracting the other.

“All this fuss about a girl going to live somewhere else. Hundreds of people never live at home after they’re grown up. The way we talk about it, you’d think—”

“Ah, but if they’d let you go while they still had you—” he said.

As he got up to go over to the little counter of cakes to pay, I laughed. “—You talk as if I’m leaving for ever.”

A week later I telephoned him to tell him that Isa had promised to find me somewhere to live in Johannesburg.

There was a pause. “Well, if that’s the case you might as well go to Jenny and John. The Marcuses.”

“Why?” I was intrigued at the suggestion.

“Yes, they’re a bit hard up and they want someone to help out with the rent of the flat.”

“But why didn’t you tell me before? I think that’d be a wonderful idea. Can I phone them?” The Marcuses had attracted me immediately the few times I had met them, and I was at once excited by the coincidence by which they wanted someone to share their flat, and I wanted somewhere to live. I badgered Joel with questions. “The flat’s very small—” he said dubiously.

“I shan’t be kept in the manner to which I’m accustomed — shame!”

“Well, you wait and see. The best thing will be for me to take you there. I have to see John on Thursday. I’ll have Max’s car so I’ll pick you up after four.”

After I had rung off I sat a moment or two on the little telephone stool, in the restless inertia of eagerness that must be curbed. Suddenly I wanted to telephone Joel again to tell him to be sure the Marcuses made no arrangement with anyone else in the meantime. I was trembling with excited urgency to have it all decided at once. For at the mention of the Marcuses, something lifted in me; I felt that here I might be about to come out free at last; free of the staleness and hypocrisy of a narrow, stiflingly conventional life. I would get out of it as palpably as an overelaborate dress that had pampered me too long.

Chapter 19

When I went to the flat for the first time that Thursday Jenny Marcus sat up very straight on a divan with her bare breasts white and heavy and startling. Like some strange fruit unpeeled they stood out on her body below the brown limit of a summer tan. She wore a skirt and a gay cotton shirt was hung round her shoulders, and face-down over her knees a baby squirmed feebly. As we came in behind her husband the baby belched, and, smiling brilliantly, calling out to us, she turned it over and wiped its mouth.

They lived on the sixth floor of a building on the first ridge that lifts back from the city itself. The building took the look of a tower from the immense washes of summer light, luminous with a pollen of dust, that filled up the chasms and angles of the city as the blinding eye of the sun was lowered; like eyelids, first this building then that was drawn over it; its red glare struck out again fiercely; came; went; was gone. As I got out of the car I had looked round me like a traveler set down in a foreign square; prepared to be pleased with everything he sees.

Inside, the building put aside the slippery marbled pretensions of the foyer and there was the indigenous smell, that I was soon to know so well, of fried onions and soot, and behind the door on which Joel and I rapped and walked in, Jenny in an unexpected splendor.

What is meant by love at the first sight is really a capture of the imagination; and I do not think that it is confined to love. It happens in other circumstances, too, and it happened to me then. My imagination was captured; something which existed in my mind took a leap into life. I saw the bright, half-bare room, the books all round, the open piano and some knitted thing of the baby’s on a pile of music, a charcoal drawing tacked on the wall, a pineapple on a wooden dish and the girl with her bare breasts over the baby. Something of it remains with me to this day, in spite of everything; just as in love, after years of marriage that was nothing like one expected it to be, the moment of the first capture of the imagination can be recalled intact, though the face of the person who is now wife or husband has become the face of an enchanting stranger one never came to know. It was a room subordinate to the force of its occupants; the first of its kind that I was to live in.

“We really wanted a man” Jenny explained, while her husband wandered about the room looking tousled and vague, pushing his shirt into his trousers. “They’re less trouble, we thought.”

“Ah, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “She’ll be able to sit with the baby. You’ll see, Jen, she’ll be useful to you.” And we all laughed.

“Of course I’ll move all the baby’s things out of here.”—She drubbed her stiff dark nipple at the little creature’s nose and with a blind movement of frenzy it snatched it into its mouth. I was fascinated by the look of her breasts; the skin with the silky shine of a muscle sheath over the whiteness of flesh, and the intricate communication of prominent blue veins. They did not seem recogenizable as a familiar feature of my own body, so changed were they from the decorative softness of my own sentient breasts. As she moved about settling the baby when he had fed, they swung buoyantly with the strong movements of her arms; she was a big girl with the slight look of rawness about the tops of her arms you sometimes see in English women. Still talking rather breathlessly — that was her way — she wriggled into a brassière and buttoned the blouse. “We must take the other room, John? Because of the porch. — We’ve rigged up a kind of little room for the baby on the porch, and the door leads from the other room — We’re going to start putting him out there to sleep. It’s not healthy to have him in with us. And you’ll have this divan — the only thing is the cupboard.” She caught her lip and laughed, waving toward the door of a built-in cupboard. “That’s why we wanted a man — they take up less space somehow.”

“Oh, I see — you mean my clothes. Yes, I’d have to have somewhere to hang—”

She nodded. “Exactly. Well, I’ll have to take the groceries out of the bathroom one and put the junk out of this one in there.” “If the worst comes to the worst. ,” said John, hands on his hips, speaking slowly, “I could move those maps and other stuff of mine over to my father’s place.”

His wife giggled at him carelessly fondly: “Oh, no you couldn’t. Your mother’s acid about the stuff of ours they’ve got already—”

He had a way of raising his eyebrows exaggeratedly. “Is that so? We-e-ll. When, Jen? Did my father say anything—” And they got caught up in one of the wrangling personal exchanges that were always easily parenthetic to their participation in general conversation. Joel had his head in the cupboard, which John had o ened while he was talking, and he called out: “You’ve still got that archaeological data! Good Lord—” And started pulling out colored cardboard files. John dropped his discussion with his wife and went over to encourage him. Soon the floor was littered, and they sat in the middle of it. “It didn’t come to anything,” said John mildly. “I heard it was you, Jenny,” said Joel, with innuendo. “They tell me you put a stop to it.”

“Well, I like that!” she said. “Mickey backed out, and they didn’t have the money without him. All I did was say that I knew something like that would happen, that’s all.”

John pointed at her. “But she was pregnant and she couldn’t have gone!”

The two men laughed at her. I went over and sat down on the floor among the papers and photographs; they had the fascination of the practical details of something that had always been impressively remote: an archaeological expedition. While John and Joel explained and argued, she went about attending to the baby, dipping in and out the talk, competently. Once or twice the husband got up to help her with something; they laughed and pushed each other aside officiously over the child, like two people over a newfangled machine whose workings they do not quite get the hang of. “Look, put it this way—” “No, you idiot, they’re always supposed to be put down on the opposite side to the one they were lying on before.” The baby was like something they had bought for their own use and pleasure; a casual, forthright attitude quite different from the awe and flurry and worshipful subordination of normal life to a little sleeping mummy that I had known in homes on the Mine where babies were born. I had never cared for babies and I did not feel constrained to admire this one; even this small freedom appealed to me.

It was just as casually accepted that I should come and live with them. We had discussed little of what my mother would call the “details,” but when Joel and I were leaving, John said as if he had just remembered: “Well, look, when is she going to come?”—I noticed he had a way of addressing remarks to people in the third person, through his wife, as if he and she interpreted the world to each other, and again I felt drawn to them for their evidence of solidarity, what seemed to me an intimacy as simple as breathing. This was what had appealed to me in them the very first time I had seen them, at Isa’s flat. I felt in some obscure way that what they had was the basis of all the good things in life; from it like casements their minds opened naturally on beauty, compassion, and a clear honest acceptance. Now as we said good-by to them at the door, he leaning an arm on her shoulder, I felt a pang something like jealousy, but without bitterness, as for something which was still possible for me.

In the car I said to Joel: “I like them.”

The intensity of the way I spoke must have struck him, and he said quickly: “Why …?”

“They love each other.”

I kept my head down in a kind of shyness for what I had said. He did not answer, but later, in the silence of a long, straight stretch of road on the way to Atherton, he did something he had never done before; I was gazing at the green summer veld threading past when I felt his hand on the nape of my neck, which was turned away from him. I turned back in confusion and surprise, as at a summons; Ludi’s hand had come down upon me once just like that. And Joel was looking at me with the look of a smile in his deep, cool eyes, wondering in understanding, moved and questioning.

The little thread of continuity showing against a relationship so far removed in time, in experience, seemed part of the sense of disturbance and unreality that the upheaval at home had cast like a glare: a milk jug becomes an urn from another age; the feeling of fear, resentment and longing that I hold against the angry voice of my mother somehow becomes the feeling I had, pressed against the door of my room after a hiding. With my mind only half there, I watched the profile of the man sitting beside me; the hand that had rested on my neck relaxed on the steering wheel. Joel will never handle me with love, not even that love of the moment, like Charles’, that deeply desired, faintly insulting recognition of the pure female, discounting me, making of me a creature of no name. Yet I said to myself, Why? And I saw him then for a moment not as Joel, but a young man alive and strange beside me, the curve of his ear, the full muscle of his neck, the indentation at the corner of his closed mouth, his thighs with the unconscious lordliness of any young male’s legs. A faint ripple of sensation went over me. And instantly I was ashamed, I felt I had lost Joel for that instant. That was why it could never be; if I get him to touch me he will never be Joel again, he will never look at me the way he did just now, but with the concupiscence of lovers.

This peculiar afternoon light of my upheaval lay upon everywhere I went, everything I did, during that time. I did not see Mary Seswayo to speak to until after I had been to the Marcuses. She had smiled at me, or rather conveyed with the expressive quick movements of her intense eyes the sympathy of strain across the examination room, where we had sat together writing, but in the abnormal, distracted atmosphere which disorganized the normal life of the University at examination time, we had continually missed meeting. When we did meet, we were both exhausted by a three-hour paper rather pompously headed “Classical Life and Thought.” We sat on the low stone balustrade feeling the lightness of the sunny air with the indolence of invalids.

I said to her: “I tried to get you somewhere decent to work. I wanted you to come home with me.”

She looked at me quickly.

“Yes. I suggested to my mother that I should bring you home for a week or so. I had it all planned out. We’ve got a room that isn’t inside and isn’t out. But they were afraid to have you, even there.”

Her face, that always waited, open, to receive the impress of what I was saying rather than to impose on me what she felt and thought, took on, for the first time since I had known her, something set. Set against me. Her eyes searched me, shocked, and her nostrils widened, her mouth settled in a kind of distressed annoyance. It was the expression that comes to the face of an older person when a young person does something the other had feared he might.

I gave a short uncomfortable laugh against it. But she continued to look at me. The palms of her hands went down firmly to lean against the stone. She seemed to be waiting for an explanation from me; I could feel the pressure of it as if I were being shaken to speak. Just as suspicion makes an innocent person falter like the guilty, so I was queerly upset by this displeasure I felt in her.

“I shouldn’t have told you. Perhaps it’s hurtful, after all. But I thought we’d got to the stage where it was better not to pretend. Then between us, between you and me, at least, you would know …”

But I saw it was not that. There was nothing in her of the person who has been slighted. She was not humiliated; in fact I had never seen her so confident, so forgetful of herself, of what she inherited in disabilities before the fact of me.

At last she spoke. “Your mother was angry,” she said.

A spasm of annoyance caught me. “You mind? You expect it? And you think it’s right?”

“You made trouble for nothing,” she said.

“I don’t care about the trouble. It’s more important to me than the fear of offending. Even in my mother, what’s false is false. I won’t accept it. But you will. Where’s your self-respect? — Come to think of it, you should be hurt. Yes, you should. … — Or is it even worse — some sort of tribal nonsense coming up in you — what my father would call ‘the good old type from the kraal,’ full of ‘honor thy father and mother’ no matter how they think or what they do?”

She listened to me calmly. “I can see,” she said, “you’re upset. There was trouble. And for nothing. For nothing, Helen—” She made an appeal of it, shaking her head.

“Well, I don’t understand you. Either you think that because you’re black you’re not good enough to be a guest in my parents’ house, or you’re distressed at the idea of my disagreeing with my mother.”

She said dully: “That’s talk.” Her eyes moved in her brown face looking for fluency. “The fact that I’m good enough doesn’t mean that she’s got to want me. If I were a white girl she could say no, if she felt like it. But because I’m black she’s got to say yes. Don’t you see, if I am good enough, I’m good enough not to go where I’m not wanted?”

“You mean you wouldn’t have wanted to come?”

“No. How could I come? All the time I would have had to feel that they were letting me be there because of your — ideas—”

I said impatiently: “Yes, of course, I know that—”

“Never your friend staying with you. I would be forced on them. And how would it have been for them with their friends? And the native girl who works for you? — It would have been hard for her. How was she to speak to me? Call me ‘Miss’ like you? Bring me tea?”

“Yes, why not? Anna’s a domestic servant, you’re not. There’s no indignity in her bringing you tea. The fact that you’re both black is irrelevant.”

She thought a minute. “But there are so few of me. We’re still exceptions, not a class. To your mother and Anna, I belong with Anna.”

“So, must that always be considered first? Mustn’t I think of you as a girl and a human being because that will upset the very thing that must be upset, my mother’s and Anna’s prejudices?”

She gave me her big, quiet, serious smile. “You want to give a nice plump person to practicing cannibals and tell them they mustn’t eat him because it’s like eating themselves. But they’re used to eating people. They haven’t had their ideas of diet changed yet, like you have.”

I couldn’t help smiling at her choice of analogy, the memory of some Bantu folk tale, cast in the form of the Department of English. She smiled back at me gently, expansively, a patient smile. But the moment of ease went out again.

“I’m so sorry …,” she said after a silence.

I was sharp. “You don’t have to be. I’m not.” I wanted her to say: I hate your saintliness. Don’t be saintly. But we were not equal enough for that; for all my striving to rid myself of what was between us, I did not respect her, accept her enough to be able to quarrel with her. I still made a special consideration of her for that.

“You are quick,” she said, with a flourish of the head, the way Anna might have said it, “quick, quick.”

She leaned toward me, distressed, wanting me to understand. “If it had been your own house,” she said, “but you can’t expect to do it with the house of your mother. …”

“Mary,” I said, “that’s what she said. That’s just exactly what she said. No — No—” and I would not let her talk. I laughed angrily, shook off what she wanted to say, protesting. I felt in myself the brightness, the edge that is very near to tears. And so to change the subject and save myself I told her that I was going to live in Johannesburg.

She did not know then or ever that this had anything to do with of what we had been speaking. She rubbed her neat straight hands together to relieve the stiffness of leaning on them. “Oh, that will be better for you!” She was shyly pleased. “But you’ll miss them at home. I know. Like I miss mine.”