The Lying Days

Chapter 20

I used to wake up for the first time very early at the baby’s one strange sad cry for food. The night had just drained out of the room, and in the pale, hollowed space, a cave dimly gleaming after the tide, I lay with my body in sleep. In the next room, the soft dull sounds of Jenny moving about. Round the curtains that did not fit well, white edges of light; and quietly, deathly still, the books came out round me on the walls, a silent arpeggio of gleam ran across the case of the piano. Somebody’s coat rose on a chair. A beer bottle answered from a corner. The white curl of Jenny’s sketch propped against the wall; my dead roses black in the hanging vase.

I oared soundlessly away.

When I woke again in the noise and brightness of morning all the life of the night before was about me, where we had flung it down. I took it up again as I put on my clothes, dropped here and there on books, sheets of music, letters, a half-sewn romper for the baby. The flat was so small and the lives of Jenny and John so expansive that our possessions and our movements were hopelessly interlaced. The cupboard which had been cleared for me soon attracted back many of the objects which had been housed there before; John would forget and throw in a concert program he vaguely wanted to keep, the exposure meter for his camera would be put for safety on top of my silk blouses. As there was no mirror in the room, it was more convenient for me to keep my cosmetics in their room, where I could use Jenny’s mirror. Then the piano was in my room — or rather I was in the room where the piano was — so that meant that my shoes had to share space with John’s music. This elastic exchange went on all the time, and was managed with a thoughtless ease that at first, out of my mother’s conviction that life outside the facilities of a particular order was utterly unworkable, almost surprised me, in spite of myself. We were clean enough, fed enough, and it seemed to me a lot more comfortable, without making these necessities the whole business of living.

I moved in with the Marcuses after the Christmas vacation, at the beginning of my third academic year. John was a structural engineer and, like me, was out all day, but now, since the birth of the baby, Jenny was at home. In England, where she came from and where he had met her, she had been a designer of stage-sets attached to some repertory group, but although she had come out to South Africa with ideas of bringing professional creative competence to what was a semi-amateur field, where dress designers and students experimented happily, nothing much seemed to have come of her crusade since she had done the décor for a play I had seen before I knew her, and that had been unremarkable in its conventional startling unconventionality and literally rather shaky in execution, so that in one scene it did not hold together as it should. Still, there was a cardboard box of programs with the imprint of one of those particularly English-sounding names of a repertory company, crediting her with sets for Shaw, and Restoration comedy and Clifford Odets, and every week when the New Statesman came she would have something to say as she read down the column advertising experimental theater and lectures: “John, they’re doing some Italian thing!” or “I see they’re trying Lorca again — God, I’d give something to do that set for Yerma—” So it was accepted that the opportunities for her work were ridiculously limited in Johannesburg, and she must simply look on and mark time, smiling at the efforts of the dress designers and the technical college students. Before the birth of the baby she had done window dressing for a firm of commercial artists, and now she still managed an occasional free-lance job, for which the preparation could be made at home.

Their friends were all people whom I knew; a kind of distillation of the acquaintances I had been meeting over and over again for some time. Like a school of fish these people appeared at Isa Welsh’s, at Laurie Humphrey’s, disappearing into the confused stream of the city again, and then reappearing, quite unmistakably, known at once by the bond of specie which showed them unlike any other fish and like one another, although they were big fish and little, tame fish and savage, as if they had all worn a pale stripe round the tail or a special kind of dorsal fin. Now I was permitted to see what went on when they had whisked out of sight round the deep shelter of a dark rock; in this home water they swam more slowly and clustered, two or three, in a favorite shade.

I called them, along with John and Jenny, “our kind of people”; and certainly I felt myself more closely identified with them than I had with any others who had looked in upon my solitude. — First Ludi, then Joel, in their different ways, had stepped within its circle and been with me there, but this had not broken its transparent compass. It still had thrown me back like a sheet of glass that smashes a bird’s head with the illusion of freedom. Now, quite undramatically, it melted, was suddenly simply not there: the way of life that I wanted seemed to be lived by these people with the acceptance of commonplace. Nothing could have been more reassuring. I felt as a man must who finds himself in a country where the subversive doctrine he has believed in for years is actually the dignified practice of government. An almost physical expansion took place in me; I began to wear bolder clothes, I even sat and moved with an ease and assurance of my own. And the timidity fell away from my opinions; in the intoxication of company I spoke them, ill-considered or not, in emulation of the outspokenness of Isa. At University, too, a new alertness, a consciousness of belonging to a certain attitude, made me more critical and less ready to accept as superior judgments the valuations of my professors.

“My, but it’s become a keen little scout …,” Isa broke in on an argument I had been having, one evening. Her eyes, nimble as caged rodents, were too alive in the narrow pale freckled face that seemed to tighten and shrink when she was tired. On this night she was in a bad mood, which had the same effect. I blushed burningly before her tone, her look, rather than what she said, the implication of which was a little vague to me, anyway. But I was not really annoyed because I was confident in my new emergence, and the very fact that she should cross her sharp tongue with mine, even in derision, was evidence of it. And still over and above that, there was the thought that here, among “people our own kind,” a bad mood was accepted along with the other facts of life, publicly. Someone might growl at Isa: “Stop bitching,” but no one would seriously suggest that she should pretend to be other than she felt.

The next morning, a Sunday, when we slept late, I wandered into John and Jenny’s room and lay across the foot of their bed talking lazily. “Paul’s the one for her.” John was touching a mole on his wife’s shoulder, covering it with his finger, then looking at it again. Jenny laughed.

“Kittie Paul?” I asked. There was a man we knew who for some forgotten reason was nicknamed “Kittie.”

“No, Paul — Paul Clark.”

“Oh, the one from Rhodesia.” They often spoke of this Paul Clark, though I had not met him. Now, as so often happened with them, they had become absorbed in a little private tussle, a thing of protests and stifled monosyllables and laughter. I rescued the baby from between them — it started out the night in its own cubbyhole, but as soon as it cried one or the other brought it into their bed — and said, “Really? Why him?”

John looked vague, then remembered whom we had been talking about. “He would’ve shut her up,” he said knowingly to Jenny. She began to laugh and they would have set about each other again but I put the baby into his arms. “Here — I’m going to get my cigarettes.”

“Put some music on? While you’re there — there’s a good girl?” he yelled after me. “—And the kettle?” called Jenny. And so on this, as on most Sundays, we sat about in pajamas until twelve o’clock, Mozart or Bach flowing majestically through the flat, the energetic breath of coffee coming from an untidy kitchen. The African servant girl did not come in on Sundays, and Jenny and I did not trouble to clean up beyond emptying the ash trays and making the divans. She went leisurely about tending the baby, with his complication of sponges and cotton wool and his incense of talcum powder, her hair hanging and her pink English skin shining pleasantly. But I always have been one of those women who look pale and desperate in the morning, who drown in sleep and must be brought back to semblance of life again, and so I used to slip into the bathroom and wash my face with cold water and put on some lipstick. Then they would laugh at me and Jenny would say, as from some superior knowledge: “You ought to get married, Helen.”

Sometimes on fine Sundays we would go out into the country for the day — not the elaborate folding banquet of jellied tongue, sliced chicken and ice cream that I had known at home as a picnic, but a sudden enthusiasm at the sight of the sun clean and light on the pavement trees below the balcony, and a quick trip to the delicatessen shop in the old Jewish quarter which was the only food shop open in Johannesburg on a Sunday, and then out of the town to some farm where Jenny could ride a horse. She was given to moods of yearning craving for a kind of life that astonished me; a sudden assertion of her big fresh country-girl’s body that belonged a generation or two back to a small squire’s daughter in an English hunting county. Then she would whine and sulk and cajole to be taken where she could ride, while John, Jewish and deeply city-bred, seemed in the bewildered muscular inertia of his sedentary body, something completely removed and eternally stranger to her. I would hurry to help make plans that would make it easy for her to go, not, as it seemed, out of real sympathy or unselfish concern for someone else’s whims, but because I did not want to see even the lightest crack running down the surface of their relationship. Their closeness — he practicing the piano intently, having about him that fascination of the person whose absorption in what he is doing is pure interest, while she, more practically and closer to the world, yet also with a decent relish for the performance of her hands, worked on a design; the knowledge that often, discounting my existence entirely, they were making love in the next room; even the swift anticipation of each other’s wants (like breathless trapeze artists who know when this must be slapped into the palm of the other, that must be quickly swung past) with which they got through the business of dressing and breakfast on a working morning — was some sort of important proof to me. They were my beliefs, all miraculously coalesced into the lives of two people — or rather the indivisible life of two people: that was an essential part of the belief.

In the same way, I took a secret pride in the frugality of their living. Ever since I had begun to see the natives all around not as furniture, trees, or the casual landmarks of a road through which my life was passing, but as faces; the faces of old men, of girls, of children; ever since they had stepped up all around me, as they do, silently, at some point in the life of every white person who lives in South Africa, something had been working in me. The slow corrosive guilt, a guilt personal and inherited, amorphous as the air and particular as the tone of your own voice, which, admitted or denied, is in all white South Africans. The Nationalist farmers who kicked and beat their convict African laborers had it and it was in me. Like an obscure pain we can’t confess we clutch to it this counterirritant, or that. One pretense is kinder than another, that is all. With kicks and curses you may keep the guilt at a distance, with a show of the tenderness of my own skin, I may clasp it like a hair shirt.

The Marcuses had little choice to live otherwise, since they had little money, but they made it clear that they regarded it as only decent to keep one’s wants as few and simple as possible. They had a kind of amused detachment toward wants which exceeded their own, making friends at whose house a servant waited white-aproned at table feel somehow ridiculous, and raising their eyebrows at Laurie when he brought to the flat a girl innocently wearing a rather cheap fur coat. While they scorned a superfluity of possessions, they believed that almost any sacrifice was worth the possession of one or two really beautiful things, and their Japanese-cum-Swedish aesthetic of utility answered perfectly my own reaction against the overgrown knickknackery of the Mine.

But my response to the austerity of their living went deeper than that. It assuaged something in me which was nameless, which I scarcely consciously knew; that something working in me, eating at me, since the realization of those faces. It put me that much less of a remove from them, playing in the gutter when I had played in the garden; going to work in the silent dark while I slept; looking on at the armor of my white skin.

Of course, I realized that my participation in the Marcuses’ way of life was that of the privileged amateur. My father paid my University fees and my share of expenses at the flat, although I no longer took a dress or spending allowance from him. During the long summer vacation, when I still had been living at home, I had taken a job in a bookshop, and I determined that the money I had earned then should last me until the next vacation, when I would get another temporary job. I had fewer clothes, if more ingenious ones, than I ever had had before, and even then, when I was going out, I felt a little ashamed to parade my choice before Jenny, whose entire wardrobe, she was always eager to admit, took up four hangers. I found, however, that I was spending money on things I had never bought before. Toward the end of the month, when funds were low and we were all a little tired of subsisting on thin stews consisting mainly of green peppers, I sometimes brought home a small smelly box of frozen crayfish tails that, as they boiled, sent a tantalizing scent of the sea through the flat, or a punnet of strawberries and some cream. I also contributed heavily to our liquor stock — the two or three bottles of brandy and gin and the case of beer that seemed no sooner delivered than they went to join the dusty collection of empties on top of the kitchen dresser. Although they shrugged at the delicate, high-heeled American shoes I brought home with a defiance born of vanity (Jen couldn’t wear things like that, said John, she’s got the strong, heavily modeled feet of peasant women, feet made to dance and walk), they were not affronted by these other signs of my social dilettantism; when there was something good to eat, and a bottle of Nederburg Riesling I had picked up at the bottle store on the corner, we ate and drank together with gusto.

One Saturday morning something happened that surprised me. It was trivial and so overshadowed by the meeting that followed it that I did not really try to interpret it, yet its oddness, like something small, sharp and bright that is obviously part of a larger design, made me automatically put it away in my less immediate consciousness even while I forgot it.

I had been to town early and, on coming back, had thrown my parcels and coat and hat on John and Jenny’s bed. I went into the bathroom and when I came out and passed down the passage, I thought I saw, in the liquid flash of the mirror through the door, Jenny looking at herself. When I had been in the other room for the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette, her silence in the room next door roused a faint curiosity. I got up lazily and wandered in on her. She was silting on the edge of the bed with my hat on. With her back to me, she saw me first in the mirror, and in the mirror, smiled, and with a little noise of embarrassment pulled off the hat as she turned round.

“It suits you better than me,” I said ruefully. “But it shouldn’t be so straight.” And I put it on her again, at more of an angle. We both looked at her, a pretty girl in the red hat. She put up her hand and touched at the side. “The velvet’s so soft,” she said. “I saw a green one, not the same, but something like it, a dear, in town. So cheap, too. I’m dying to buy myself one, but John’d kill me.”

And she quickly pulled the hat off again and held it out to me, with a little shake, as if she wanted me to take it from her quickly. With that smile of guilty pleasure warming her face, I suddenly had the feeling that this was not Jenny; I had not been talking to her the way I would talk to Jenny.

She stood looking at the hat. “I wish I could persuade him. But I know he won’t.” She actually had lowered her voice, longingly.

“What about the money you got for the Graham display?”

She gave a little laugh and I really thought I saw her look at the door. “It’s not just that — he says — you know … only bourgeoise women wear hats.” She ran her first finger over the pile of my hat.

“He won’t”—I was going to say “allow” but stopped myself at what was quite an unthinkable word between John and Jenny—“he won’t let you wear a hat? Oh nonsense—” I had to laugh to convince myself it was some kind of loverlike game between them. And I stood there forcing her with the laughter of unbelief. This was not John, either. For a second it was as if I caught a glimpse of two people who seemed very like, but were not them, could not be them.

Before she could answer, the quiet of the flat was caught up with the creak and bang of the front door flung open in the assault that meant John was home. His voice was mingled with that of another man as he called along the passage: “Anyone home? Jenny, hi, look what I’ve brought—” At once he was in the doorway, a bag of eggs under one arm, a bunch of bananas in newspaper under the other, looking, as he always did when he had shopped, like a triumphant looter.

What he had brought was Paul Clark, standing behind him looking at us over the gasping, disjointed, excited monologue. He wore a pale green waistcoat and I remember I wondered what the Marcuses would have to say about that. In his small, slim, energetic hand with the watch just above the wristbone and the veins nervously enlacing the knuckles, he held a toy rabbit by the ears, and a bottle of wine by the neck. Jenny rushed up and kissed him.

— I stuffed away the curious glimpse of a moment or two before, like a scrap of paper with the address of the place where I had seen two faces and must return sometime to verify or refute the resemblance.

In the confusion of greetings that followed, the stranger said, looking at me, “It’s grown up awfully quickly … I thought it was only six months?”

“That’s not it, that’s Helen.” John was always a little wild when he brought friends home. “Here the thing is in its pram, you idiot.”

Chapter 21

The stranger. Paul the stranger. I have looked at that face as I shall never look upon another. There was a light in it for me that put something out; dazzled into black silence. So I shall never again answer with the vivid compulsion that made me watch the face of Paul, spelling it out feature by feature with my eyes, as if my finger traced it in the air and my lips moved about a name without sound.

So much has been written about the curious compelling fascination of the faces of some women, but I do not remember reading anywhere anything that would testify to the same innocent deadliness in the face of a man: a face such as Paul’s. Yet just as they do in women, these faces exist in men. It is as if a chance disposition of features, pleasant and ordinary enough in themselves, creates a proportion that is the magic cipher of power. The owners of these faces have only to look. They themselves cannot escape the power which is upon them; indeed some of them, a few men as well as many women, live their whole lives off it, making the world pay for a divine and lucky accident. Others, for whom it is not the only asset, are sometimes unaware of it, and even mistake the advantages it draws as due to some more responsible cause.

Paul was an enchanting talker. When he talked his body became a puppet animated by his mind; he mimicked, he made emotion graphic with his hands, his voice turned his anecdote this way and that in quick pleasure. From that first day, when we sat over the lunch which Jenny and I had opened out of tins, I felt that he took up attention in a special way: I found that while he talked I must watch him intently, and believed that this was because what he said and the way that he said it were so interesting. But in time I came to know that it was his face itself that held me, that face at which I could look and look so that sometimes the fascination would take me away entirely, and I would lose whole passages of what he was saying.

This angered me with myself then, and does still. My lip curls when I must admit that even had Paul not been what he was, had he been trivial, passionless and commonplace, I might still have loved him. The look of him never lost its power over me; even in anger and hurt it retained a higher authority that my whole self as a woman, deaf, dumb, blind, never failed to answer.

As it was, Paul was quick. Quick as opposed to dead in the most accurate sense, for in no one I have known could one have more clearly the sense of blood running, heart beating, impatient intelligence alight, even the attraction of his sex upon him like the gloss on the plumes of a male bird — a creature becoming rather than merely being. And all this he took as carelessly as if it were as common an evidence of life as the first gulp of breath we all draw with the same eagerness at the sharp moment of birth. In him, it seemed to me, most of the things the rest of us talked about or hazily aspired to, came to life. He had spent a magnificent childhood on the farm in Natal which had belonged to his father’s family since the middle of the nineteenth century, running wild with no consciousness of the loadliness of the life, riding horses and playing with young native boys of his own age and prowess. He spoke the two main Bantu languages, Zulu and Sesuto, with the colloquial familiarity among their formal difficulties that comes only when you have learned a language as you have learned to speak, and so, unlike the rest of us, he did not move half his life like a deaf man, among people whose speech and thought and laughter were closed to him. The almost feudal character of his life as a child included his parents’ odd English tradition of courtesy toward any difference that became evident as he grew up, between their ideas and his. His rejection of the farm for the study of law, and then his rejection of law in favor of social science, and a job in the offices of the Native Affairs Department in Johannesburg, they gently regarded as a matter of taste. When Paul spoke about them, you could not fail to feel the charm of the way in which they saw what Edna might have called a revulsion against a capitalist-imperialist outlook and way of life — the putting aside, in fact, of everything they had to offer — as a young person’s whim, in which it was parental and polite to show mild interest. So, unlike my parents and me, whose differences, like our lives, were on a closer, more suburban scale, Paul and the Clarks remained on affectionate terms.

When he came to the flat for the first time that day, he had just been home on a visit, and before that he had been in Rhodesia for four months. This was part of the six-months’ study leave he had been granted by the Department to write his Ph.D. thesis on “African Family Adjustments to Urban Environment.”

He was moving into a very small flat where the edge of the city raveled out into shabby suburbia — among the whores and the hoboes and the motor-spares business, he put it — and for a week was busy painting the one room and rearranging the intricacies of the cupboard-kitchen. — A dehydrated affair, he told us, open the doors, turn on the faucet and sprinkle — up comes the stove and the refrigerator. John and Jenny were amused but not particularly interested by his activity with the flat; I understood that he moved frequently, and they had gone through the whole reorganization process with him before.

He spent a great deal of time at the Marcuses’ flat and I gathered that he always had. He was also an intimate of most of their friends, and was almost always on his way from or to people we knew. Over lunch the first day there had been much talk of common friends, questions asked, news related. “Seen Isa yet?” John had said keenly. — Later I saw that there seemed to be a vying for the attention and company of Paul among his friends. Often Jenny would say severely, almost jealously, “Now don’t forget I expect you tonight. I’m making a pilaff and I don’t want you to turn up at eight full of Laurie’s beer and sardines.” Since we seldom made any special preparation for anybody, and certainly not for anyone who came as often as Paul, it was not the waste of dinner but the idea that he might prefer to eat with others which prompted her.

“Has she gone back to her book?” Paul asked. “There was a letter of hers supposed to be sent on to me from Luanshya, but it hasn’t come yet.”

John shrugged his lack of interest. “She wouldn’t be discussing it with me, anyway.”

“You should have heard her the other night,” said Jenny, warming to gossip, with an eager smile. “She simply snapped Helen up in one bite. One of her charming moods.”

When he had heard the story, Paul said, supplying the answer to a problem that didn’t puzzle him at all: “You were having an argument? A political argument with a man, and keeping your end up? Of course; Isa can’t stand intelligence in other women, don’t you know? She has the greatest respect for the views of an intelligent man, but she can’t listen to another woman talking sense. Oh, she’ll defend the equality of men and women all right, but God help the woman who’s equal to her.”

“Well, apparently she doesn’t think me intelligent enough,” said Jenny tartly, “because I’ve never had any trouble with her.”

In the laughter that followed, John hooked an arm round her neck, pulling her over to him, and said, “Never mind, Jen, Isa’s just sex and a brain and nothing in between.”

“John said that you would have been the one to deal with her,” I laughed to Paul. “He seemed to think you could defend the rights of women before the ardent feminist.”

But he only smiled slightly, politely in answer and lifted his eyes once to John, who was not looking at him, before giving his attention to choosing a ripe tomato from Jenny’s untidy bowl of salad.

“He likes her, eh?” said John to Jenny one evening after Paul had left us. He looked at me with the warning, smiling approval of the madam who sees one of her girls favored by a special client.

I looked from one to the other.

“You’ll see,” said John. “She’ll be the next.”

“Oh, John, you’re awful,” smiled Jenny in what we called her “hush” voice; the awed, slightly arch reaction that belonged somewhere back in her English nursery. The two of them had the habit of discussing the personal lives of their friends as if they were entomologists observing the mating patterns of beetles; it did not seem to occur to them that the bald facts of who went to bed with whom might have the same meaning and emotional commitment as their own prized relationship, which they held jealously and privately apart. At first I had seen this attitude as part of a desirable frankness and acceptance of people the way they were, life the way it was, part, in fact, of their honesty. But when I had noticed that they excluded themselves from this clinical valuation, I had begun to think that the manner in which they discussed their friends’ love affairs was unfair — I would not allow myself to consider that they were capable of the breach of human feeling that is bad taste.

But now that their cold and gleeful surveillance was turned on me, annoyance rose. I was still unsure and admiring enough of their grasp of life to wish to conceal it, and so only my tone belied the carelessness of my words when I said: “Do they go in strict rotation? Are there so many?”

They laughed. “One or two. There have been one or two, believe me. Women!” And John put on the face of knowing, reluctant bewilderment, contemplating the way they were attracted to Paul.

Jenny said suddenly: “I wish you’d offer to type his thesis for him, Helen—” And added: “Otherwise Isa will.” She looked at my face as if she were entreating me out of some threat to herself.

“Oh, yes.” John’s voice jumped to the eagerness of hers. “Go on, Helen. — Because she will, she will.”

My annoyance rose a spurt higher at what I saw as an obvious acceptance that I wished to bait Paul Clark’s interest, and that they, tickling the beetles along with a blade of grass, wanted to connive and watch. “Damn it, why should I? What an idea! I haven’t the slightest intention of spending my evenings over a typewriter for Paul or anybody else. …”

Yet I was baiting Paul’s interest, and I knew it. On some other level than speech or conscious connivance, and toward some other end than the social and sexual titillation of a new combination within our group, I was beckoning him with all the thunderous silence of the deep attraction between us. Every time he or I walked into the room where the other was, coming into relation with each other and others like figures in a group of sculpture, there was a tightening of this. Every time we talked, ate together, trooped off to a cinema or a concert, the design of the company shifted a little, re-formed with him and me closer, more apart from them and significant.

I felt a consciousness of my physical self — the attractiveness of my face as I turned my head and looked along my cheekline, the color of my loose red hair against a lilac-colored dress that created for me in combination a light of my own, fixed, like the light in which a painter has seen his picture — that I had not known since the time of the South Coast with Ludi. And as it had been with Ludi, the warm smell of Paul’s hair as he bent down in front of me to pick up something in the sun, the look of the skin of his arm as he rolled up a shirt sleeve, the damp look of his forehead when he had been running, had for me a pure fascination that needed only touch to become desire. It was difficult to believe that I had felt this before, for some other particular combination of flesh and spirit that makes every man a creature never to be matched, never to be repeated. … Yet it gave me a kind of simple sensual pride to understand out of experience the flow of this current. To wait, till it should take me up again; till I should lay myself down Ophelialike, and be carried by it.

There the comparison with Ludi ended. As a human being, Ludi was remote: no one could have been more involved with life than Paul. And with him, for those first few weeks, my relationship with the Marcuses was lifted into a new meaning, blazed briefly into something approaching the free, gay, competent intimacy which had been my illusion of adult life when I was an adolescent. My presence with the Marcuses was now balanced out; as a young woman, I had my opposite number, a young man, and the sexual attraction between us lightly underscoring the heavier emotional threat in our own private air corresponded to the sexual ease between John and his wife. We were four friends, and two pairs; also two men friends and two women friends. So I felt myself an equal in the Marcuses’ participation in life both public and personal. If there was a point in understanding at which by gesture or implication John and Jenny ducked beneath the surface to some life of their own out of sight, so I, too, had, in the certain instinct of Paul’s attraction to me, a place they could only guess at.

And they said no more about the chances of affection or an affair between us. I was sure that they speculated about it in private — was vain enough to wonder, when I heard the murmur of their voices in their room at night, whether they were discussing it — but the confrontation of us, in all the mystery and delicacy with which, though we used the stereotyped gestures of modern sophistication, the irony, the cool banter, the love of argument, we circled round each other in approach, made open comment impossible in spite of themselves.

When Paul had been back in Johannesburg for nearly three weeks, we spent a dull evening without him. He had had to go to the Welshs’ for dinner, and we had Herby and a friend coming. The friend proved to be a girl in a taffeta dress with a string of pearls round her neck of the graded kind that small girls are given on their ninth or tenth birthday, along with their first bottle of scent, and a lace-bordered handkerchief which she kept clutched in her hand all through dinner. By the time dinner was over it was obvious that conversation with this girl was not only impossible (she replied with yes or no, and dropped her eyes quickly) but that she was as inhibiting to conversation excluding her as a child who listens with round eyes to what she cannot understand but cannot help hearing. Jenny and I, going into the kitchen to help Hilda with the coffee, improvised a seemingly spontaneous dialogue that would bring up the idea of going to a cinema. John was quick to take the cue, and we went into town and saw an indifferent film which I, for one, had seen before. Herby was essentially a useful person; tolerated for this rather than his rather dull manner of presenting his sound ideas, and so, as his friends, we could not help feeling rather impatient at having been used ourselves, by him — for obviously he had been obliged in some way to take this girl out, and had shifted the impossibility of entertaining her onto us. So we felt as if it were only what was due to us, the least, in fact, he could do, to suggest, as he did when we came out of the cinema, this particular night to take us to Marcel’s Cellar.

Marcel’s Cellar was, as the name implies, the nostalgia of a group of restless young people for the Left Bank Paris of the brief experience of one or two and the imagination of the others. In the idea of the place there met, vaguely as could only happen thousands of miles away from the actuality, the garret of Mimi and Rudolph in the eighties and one of the cafés where Sartre characters talked. Even the name of the “owner” was in character, if out of date — but this was pure fortunate coincidence that Marcel du Toit’s name, common among Afrikaans South Africans with their mixed Huguenot-Dutch antecedents as Smith or Robinson among people of English descent, should be so appropriately romantic. He himself was a willowy, shady character, who with less pretensions would have been running a side show in a traveling fun fair, and, indeed, he presided over his cellar with an air of extreme languid dissipation that was clearly his underworldly bohemian version of the robust flourish he would have used for The Greatest Show on Earth.

How he had come by the place, no one seemed to know. As I have said, it was the idea of seven or eight young people who decided to find some cheap convenient place in town where they could be private from any but their own kind and sit talking and perhaps drinking a little cheap wine until one o’clock in the morning. Each would pay a share of the rent, and this levy would serve as a subscription, so that the whole thing would be a kind of club. They dragged in some old mattresses, lit up the cobwebs with a few candles in bottles, and were probably as cosy as children playing besieged Indians. Unfortunately, they enjoyed themselves so much that they told their friends, and their friends began to come along, too, and bring their friends’ friends, and in no time the original group found their mattresses and their Jeripigo taken over by medical students who had picked up with vaguely arty girls, young men who worked as window dressers or clerks and wanted to paint or write — the whole shoal of restless, vaguely Leftist, mostly innocent Johannesburg youth which escaped to another unreality from the neon and air-conditioned unreality of the cinemas and the shops of their daily lives. It must have been then that Marcel saw his opportunity, and, like the Wolf dressed up as the Grandmother, put on his velvet jacket and relieved the bewildered group of the responsibility for the rent.

The great thing about the place was that it really was a cellar. This was an inestimable advantage that Marcel must have been quick to see. Instead of driving out to a roadhouse or going to a shiny Greek tearoom or a plush-insulated hotel where a trio played blearily from Showboat, we drove down to the area of darkened warehouses. There, where the cement and the paving rang like iron beneath the street lights, almost opposite the central police station which was only a name or a vaguely disquieting joke to us in our white skins and middle-class security, was the old building which once had housed a wholesale liquor business. We went in through the old-fashioned door of an empty shop whose windows were hung with hessian and then down a rickety wooden stair for which a hole had been made in the rotting wooden floor, into the cellar.

It looked and smelled like the workshop of a garage, and we stood looking round with the suppressed giggles of curiosity while Herby was engaged in some sort of argument with an official-looking blonde sitting at a kitchen table. She was flanked by a couple of very young men who established their status as habitués by the extreme casual untidiness of their clothes — no one could be so haphazardly rumpled anywhere but at home. As the place had no license, no charge could be made for admission, but apparently this snag was circumvented by the rule that patrons had to pay a “subscription” which varied on the blonde’s assessment of what they looked as if they might pay. Even when Herby had put down a note and we were officially in, one of the young men sauntered up to the women of our party and said: “Wouldn’t any of you like to give us a donation—? Anything — a piece of your jewelry?” The girl froze terrified as if it had been suggested that she leave her virginity at the door, and Jenny and I burst out laughing at the idea of gravely presenting our “jewelry”—a Zulu bead collar she had bought for 5/6, and a pair of cheap oxidized silver earrings that I wore. “—She’ll leave her wedding ring with you on her way out—” said John, ushering Jenny past.

“Where’re we going to sit ourselves …?” Herby was looking briskly out over the dark, bare place where here and there a candle threw huge shadows on the rough whitewashed walls and the huddles of people with their voices lowered to the dark as if he were entering a restaurant where an obsequious maître d’hôtel would come up to lead us to a white-covered table. All the mattresses on the floor were fully occupied with murmurous burdens and the few wooden forms round the walls were clustered with people sitting and standing, so we all laughed at him. “It’s exactly like an air-raid shelter,” Jenny was saying. “If they’d ever lived in England it wouldn’t be their idea of pleasure. Exactly like a shelter, even the mattresses.” Herby had dashed on ahead and, the perfect host, found a vacant mattress for us, or rather an almost vacant mattress — someone’s coat claimed a corner of it but the owner was not there. As we settled ourselves down, the group around the radiogram near the stair broke away like a football scrum, and a French tango, scratchy, passionate, the musical equivalent of the breath of sweet wine and garlic, swung out.

At once I liked the place; it was ridiculous, self-conscious, pathetic in its attempt to be dramatically sordid, but it was fun: an amusing parody of a kind of life which did not exist in Johannesburg. I was watching the couples who were getting up all around us to dance on the part of the cracked concrete floor that was kept clear, and the tall figure that Herby had pointed out as Marcel, moving about with a way of arresting his head, lifted momentarily in the advantage of a flicker of light, so that you could see his pointed golden-colored beard and the curl of smoke round his head from the long holder in his mouth and the nimbus of his golden-brown velvet jacket. I saw that, rather pointlessly and harmlessly, since the place was so dark, people of diverse talents had been allowed to contribute some wall decorations — just behind our heads there was a horrifyingly emaciated Christ, represented as an African, with the half-finished background of the hovels of Shantytown, and over above the bunch of dancers, where a candle in a tin holder was hung on a nail, a tremendous female figure, bulbous in the magazine manner, covered half the wall. The radiogram, too, was magnificently vulgar and incongruous; a great thing of shiny veneered woods, zebra-striped in imitation of fancy grains — the kind of machine that can only be bought on hire purchase.

But Jenny and John were regarding the place perfectly seriously; I could see that. They were looking around just as they did when by some chance they found themselves in a typical “nice” middle-class home in one of Johannesburg’s fashionable northern suburbs. “It’s hardly the sort of thing to interest progressive people — I mean, I should think that if they have any politics at all they’re likely to be anarchist and antisocial.” Jenny bent her head to me in the confidential deprecating tone with which she would point out a built-in cocktail cabinet or a baby crib hung with lace and ribbons. “… The obverse side of this is, of course, Houghton,” John was saying to Herby. As a Jew who, by marrying a Gentile girl from England, had completed his assimilation in a society that held as one of its basic tenets a complete absence of race-consciousness, he made his Jewish origin a guarantee of good faith which allowed him to speak of the Jews in a manner which would not have been considered acceptable in a Gentile with the “right ideas.” “These are the children of Market Street merchants, I’ll bet. Papa makes a hundred thousand in soft goods, there’s a swimming pool and a tennis court and two Buicks, and the kids start up this sort of thing. Petit Trianon of the bourgeois. But you’ll notice it’s not the rousing drinking songs, the lively dancing and the open-air eating places they try to re-create. Those are in their racial memory, too, but they want to forget them. Their fathers want to forget those; they’ve spent thirty or forty years piling up money to put them at a distance from everything that was in their lives when they were simple oppressed people in Europe. But their suppression of their working-class origin creates a guilt feeling in the kids which goes the usual way — it manifests itself somewhere else. Here it poisons their healthy fan tasy; when they want to play at being poor it’s not the vigorous, hopeful proletariat they ape, it’s the miserable, nihilistic café life of the dispossessed exile. Forgetting one bad memory, they ‘remember’ a worse one: they want the darkness, the instinct to hide away, to meet secretly and talk in whispers, of their brothers who survived concentration camps. — The concentration camps for which our Houghton friends have a certain moral responsibility because they were the product of a Fascist-Capitalist society much like the one in which they are making their money. …”

The girl whose coat had been lying on the mattress we had taken apparently noticed WC had commandeered her place, and came flying up to see if her coat was still there. She was a bright-haired girl unfashionably dressed in a print frock, and her rounded breasts, not divided and pressed into a uniform pointedness by the American brassière that was accepted as a decree of desirability by Johannesburg women of all classes, suggested a farm girl. She was panting and warm from the dance and the twist and pressure of her body against her rumpled belt and the seams of her sleeves as she caught up the coat had something of the sensuous emanation of the bodies of children sweaty with hard play. She seemed to make nonsense of what John was saying. Not because she was Afrikaans, obviously poor, and neither suffering from nor even sufficiently burdened with sophistication to know that there was such a thing as a guilt feeling, but because she was in a moment of completely unthinking living, and he, a young, good-looking man, was capable only of dry observation.

I felt again the sense of drift, of alienation from the abstractions coming out of people’s mouths — my own and others — that came to me sometimes at the highest point of a discussion. It would seem to me that the creaking ropes that attached talk to living raveled out with a thin snap and what I was listening to and saying with such intensity floated away as unconnected with my living being as a kite to the earth from which its string has been cut. Now I felt myself living and aware as part of the dank, dusty dark where contact with other men and women was the brush of a hand or the momentary warmth of a thigh bumped against you, rather than speech. The way they managed to dance on the rough floor, cavorting breathlessly, or pressed together, the girl’s head limp on the man’s shoulder, the man’s face turned to her hair, in the spell of concentration desire puts suddenly upon people, gave the tomblike place a contrast of warm-blooded life, a sort of human impudence which made the air sensual. I felt closer to the young Afrikaans girl than to the friends with whom I lived.

Herby, too, seemed slightly excited by the Cellar, and gave only a distracted half-attention to John. He had managed to get some wine. There were no glasses so we had to gulp it out of the bottle, and it became clear from the teasing way he pressed it upon me and kept asking me what I thought of the place, that he intended to neglect the girl friend and attach himself to me. When he pulled me up to dance I found myself looking at the line of his jowl, the thick skin uneven with shallow shining holes like the bubble holes in a slice of cheese, and noting without pity or regret his complete lack of attraction and the way my body automatically held well away from his and even my hand, loosely in his, kept a withdrawn formality of its own. He would think that we were dancing like this out of respect for me because I was not an “easy” girl and he would not believe that I would dance pressed close with my legs interlaced with a man’s like the people around us. He would go on for years thinking this about all the girls of his own world, all the girls who were proud and good-looking and able to talk on his own level of intelligence: that casual love-making was only to be had where he got it, from girls who were inferior and did not interest him outside the relief of sex.

While I was thinking this about him and we were dancing he was talking to me and I was answering with a certain exertion of charm which was a little unkind, but which the atmosphere brought out in me almost without my volition. Every time we danced near the stair he would crane his neck to see the people still coming in although the place was already crowded, and when this had happened several times he explained: “Isa’s having some friends and she said she might come along. I promised I’d keep a look out so’s I could get them in.”

It seemed a very long time before they came.

They won’t come, I kept telling myself, make up your mind they’re not coming. I never took my eyes off the stair, through the well of which people appeared feet first, so that sometimes they paused with only the bottom half of their bodies visible and I had to wait to make sure that those were not the thin calves of Isa, the brogues of Paul. Jenny said: “Oh good! Do keep a watch out, Herby? They may not see us in this dingy hole.” But I did not know whether I wanted them to come or not: in case Paul should be with another girl; in case he should see me in the context of dancing with Herby. Yet the fact that he might be coming was hardly the surprise of something unimagined, to me. He had been in my mind in the power of his absence all the evening; my sympathetic pleasure in the atmosphere of the place, my warmth toward the odd-looking young men and the cheap, yearning girls, was the softening toward all human frailty that comes from one’s own sudden involvement in wanting and loving. Even the cold appraisement of the accepted for the outsider which I had given poor Herby had been really a measure of Paul’s irresistibility, of the eagerness of my response to Paul rather than the nonexistence of my response to Herby.

When they did come it must have been at a moment when politeness had forced me to look away from the stair to answer someone, for suddenly the American boy whom I had seen once with Edna Schiller caught Herby by the shoulder and said exasperatingly: “Good God. — You’re a bloody fool, Herb? We been battling half an hour to get in without your fraternity pin.” Herby broke out in fusses and apologies like a hen flying up off the nest but before he could convince the American that we had been watching, the rest of the party pushed their way up headed by an Isa stimulated by the argument at the door and glinting sharply, in the dimness and her dark dress, with earrings and some kind of broad metal belt. Her quick eyes and the whiteness of her small face and hands caught the light in the same way as her jewelry; darkness did not put her out, make her a vague shape and scent like the other women. The whole force of her personality was defined against the softness, a little knife showing steely and keen in a wicked ripple on dark ground. With her was Paul and a big, beautiful blonde girl.

We looked at each other for a moment like people who look across the water between the deck of a ship and the quayside and then he came over to me and sat down next to me. I had made some sort of conventional laughing greeting to him as well as to the others, but though he had answered the rest with his usual fluent gaiety, he had said nothing to me. He leaned across me to speak to them and his hand pressed down firmly on my thigh as he did so. The gesture was not expedience. The grip of his thumb and his four fingers on my flesh made that clear.

When the music started again he got up and held out his hand for me. He edged a way for us through the groups of men who stood laughing, arguing for attention around slowly smiling girls, and neither resisted nor moved as you pushed past, and as we went through a gauze of thin light I saw a girl turn her head swiftly to look at him; a look that opened her lips and showed a glint of teeth, like the hidden pistil in the softness of a flower. We were buffeted by the soft, blind shapes on the floor; now and then a voice said lightly — sorry! All the ugly, mysterious place turned slowly round us; Christ, the bulbous nude, the candles in their tin holders, the vents high up on the wall that, as you passed beneath them, breathed the fresh night like a queer reminder. Men without girls stood watching the dancers, their hands hanging as if something had just fallen from them.

My one hand lightly touched against the texture of Paul’s jacket and the other held his, a warm hand, not thin, in which you felt the bones. He said: “I saw a friend of yours today. Joel Aaron.”

“Oh, where?” I asked with pleasure, hardly knowing what he said.

“Bumped him in town.” When he wanted to talk, he had to press his chin back and down away from me, looking at me along his small nose with the beautifully curved nostrils. “I didn’t know you knew him. But he seems to know all about you.”

I said: “He’s the best friend I’ve ever had—” It sounded lame and almost insincere. I arched back from Paul a little to give what I had put so poorly the emphasis of my look.

But he was looking at me, smiling, ignoring my look. “Is he, is he. …” he murmured, and drew me back to him.

“Yes …,” I said, and it no longer seemed to matter what we had been talking about. Under the flow of cold air from the vents he dropped his head and kissed me delicately and passionately.

We moved round and round, slowly, among the others. I was sunk in the voluptuous relief of leaning against his body: ah, how I wanted this, I kept saying to myself, how I waited for this from you. A kind of midnight frenzy was on the place now. Smoke made the dark mist and the candlelight radiance, and the lonely young men were a little drunk. Two traffic policemen had wandered in and, with some hazy notion of keeping in with the law, were being made much of. Marcel carried a demijohn of wine above the crush; the one policeman put his foot, with the calf gleaming militarily in its fine high boot, up on a bench. The other man stood jeering amorously with a girl who had put his peaked cap on her huge head of curls that danced like springs as she moved. As we passed we heard his deep voice speaking a coy Afrikaans, egging, insinuating.

Everyone looked at two girls who had begun to sway before each other, each holding the gaze of the other like cocks about to fight. A woman danced with her whole body droopingly suspended from her arms about a man’s neck, her face sunk and eyes closed.

I smiled to Paul in the dark half-jokingly: “We’re just like the rest.”

He said: “Of course.” And I was suddenly pleased; I felt a kind of loyal partisanship with the crude advances of the traffic policemen, the lonely determination for gaiety with which men without girls passed the metallic-tasting wine, the hoarse, sentimental voice of the gramophone — the whole half-pathetic, half-greedy demand of the place. It seemed to me that all we wanted was music, someone to hold, a little talk. It made all human beings seem so simple; it was the touch of love that sounded so impossible in books and speeches. The one touch of love, of regret for barriers erected, misunderstanding, sneers and indifference, without which all intentions came to nothing. But although it was needed there so badly, it was not a thing that always attended or even, paradoxically, survived the conscious efforts of human beings to reach one another. Look at Mary, I thought; I tried hard with Mary. They try with justice, with declarations of human rights, with the self-abnegation of Christ. Love one another. — It becomes nonsense when you decree it. An absolute, like black and white, that has no corresponding reality in the merging, changing outlines of living.

When it does come, it comes irrelevantly; out of the unworthy cheap atmosphere of a place like this; out of the deep receptivity of a personal emotion. But it doesn’t matter where it comes from. Gods come like that, not in the places prepared for them, but appearing suddenly among the rabble. I only wished it would last, that I could take it with me away from the warmth of Paul and these faces pitiful with the strange strength of the desire to assert life in pleasure.

We went up the stairs and into the quiet street. We could not even hear the music. The night was clear but the blue light of the police station showed as if it burned through a fog. His short, self-possessed profile fascinated me with its detachment. When he had kissed me he said: “I wanted to do that properly,” and we both swayed a little, like people who have just stepped out of some unfamiliar motion, a swing or a boat. I drew his head down and, in the street, kissed him again, pulling the flesh of his lower lip through my mouth with soft ferociousness. When I let him go he gripped my arms with a little shake of pride and gratification, smiling at me. And all his gaiety and restlessness swept back to him with a boast. “Let’s get them some hot dogs,” he cried. “Come, there’s a stand about two blocks away.” We ran as if the air were nipping our heels.

Back in the Cellar again, the warm exhausted air burned against our cool cheeks. The others were hungry and exaggeratedly delighted with the hot dogs. Isa held hers away from her dress as if its steamy heat were dripping and called to me: “You shouldn’t let Paul drag you around the streets. He could have gone on his own.” But I only said, with the swagger in my voice of the child who has been tumbling out in the cold to the grownup who huddles at the fire: “But it’s a beautiful night, really — I could have walked miles.”

Later I smelled her perfume and found she was beside me. I said: “Do you want another? There’s a half left here—” I felt her looking at me appraisingly in the dark. “Yes,” she said to me, “you’re the kind. You’re a giver. You’ll pile everything on the bonfire. But don’t marry him.” She was a little drunk, but I felt also that she had caught from the atmosphere of the place, as I had, a sympathy and a softening toward the pain and danger of being human. So I was not annoyed or offended at her presumption. I merely mumbled something foolish about a gypsy’s warning. “Cassandra,” she said irritably, on a rising note, “Cassandra tipping it straight from the horse’s mouth. …”

Herby had his head on the big blonde’s shoulder; he had to sit up very straight to get it there, because he was much shorter than she. Jenny was begging John in a low, insistent, reasonable voice to come home. And Paul was offering some wine to a straggling group of burly young men who had hailed him and now drew him admiringly into their midst with the air of showing off in the flesh someone about whom they often spoke among themselves. They were heavily built, and the two blond ones had beards on their broad faces. They listened with smiles of anticipatory pleasure while he spoke: he was repeating some anecdote, apparently at their request; now he was mimicking someone; he shook his head and gave a quick twist to his shoulders, tossing the plaudits of their laughter away like the butt of a cigarette.

I watched him and suddenly Isa’s idea of me excited me; the warning, if that was what it was, aroused in me in the desire to stake my whole life, gather up from myself everything I had stored against such a moment, and expend it all on Paul. Everything on the bonfire. I stood up. Our heads were still in the smoke, the music and the voices, but a stiffening cold was coming up from the cement floor of Marcel’s Cellar, the cold of the earth that comes with the early hours of morning.

Chapter 22

It was on a Sunday afternoon that we made love for the first time. I remember the deserted silence coming up from the streets where we had forgotten to pull the curtains; dawning on me slowly as I opened my eyes and saw, past the corner of the old eiderdown that covered us and the piece of feather that flattened every time I breathed, Paul’s room. I could see his shirt on the floor; one shoe. My skirt and the light heap of my stockings thrown down as only a man would handle them, irritated with their clinging substancelessness, snagging them on the wood of the chair. My sweater I had so often worn in our house in Atherton. Perhaps the last time I had had it on was there.

Paul’s head was buried in the heat of my neck beneath my hair as if he did not need to breathe. His arm lay across me like a spar. He might have been lying dead if it had not been for the little line of wetness that I felt him draw now and then with his tongue on my skin. I looked on his exhaustion with wonder; how far it was from the frenzy in which I had seen him snatched up — ten minutes ago, was it? And the squash racket behind the door, the alabaster ash tray — it was the kind of thing his mother must have given him — the three tomatoes ripening on the window sill, the calendar, the telephone: the casual disorder of our dropped clothes, lying there, provided the only link that related that unspeakable intensity, to these witnesses out of ordinary life. I remembered how when I was a child I had wondered how people could make love and then walk calmly in the streets, fit into rooms naturally among people and objects, with no revealing mark. …

I said to him: “I almost thought you were in pain.” He did not seem to hear. He lifted his heavy arm and put his hand up to draw my head down into the warmth, groping as if it were dark. I found with delight that his ears and his temples were still burning. “You seemed just as if you were in great pain. The way you arched your neck—” Now he smiled at the wonderment in my voice. I could not explain to him the blast of tender anguish that had come upon me, quite maddening and unbearable, at the astonishing onslaught of his passionate release. I could not believe myself, my body, the mesh against which he struggled like a creature meeting death: I once had seen a bird die wildly, like that, its wings magnificently caught up in some net you could not see. How often again I was to say that to him! Are you in pain? To grip him and beg him with a kind of savage insistent tenderness, even tears. What is it? What is it?

Now he opened his eyes dazedly with the slow smile of someone who hears something about himself he cannot know, and while I traced the soft brush of his mustache (it was younger and lighter than his hair, bleached, like the short hair at his temples, brighter than brown) he said with almost an element of curiosity in his voice: “This is nothing. You understand? It will be better for you next time. I promise you, it will be wonderful for you. I want to make it wonderful for you.”

I said: “You thought I’d made love before.”

“Well, yes, of course.”

I was silent. He kissed me.

“I was so ashamed. I wanted to invent lovers I’d had. But that would have been all right only so long as you didn’t make love to me. … Was I all right?” I suddenly felt that perhaps I had not pleased, that in my inexperience I was not a good lover.

He kept on kissing me. What I had said seemed to fill him with an anxiety of delight. “Oh, I adore you, adore you.” He stopped and looked at me with exasperation. “My little demi-vièrge.”

His words sent an afterglow of passive sensuality through me, his bright, tousled, roused face above me, the blood pulsing against the angle at which he held his neck, seemed to bring me to a marvelously full consciousness of being alive. Those empty moments of falling terror when the wings of life suddenly cease and drop and all the props of one’s effort cave in meaninglessness — not because they may fail, but because the end itself seems nothing — seemed secured against at last in this. This was the answer of reality to a phantom: perhaps the mystery of the end to which life is directed is simply the miracle of the means. With my arms about this other young human whom I had just taken symbolically and strangely into my body, I felt myself secure against the void of infinity.

So I, who had inherited no God, made my mystery and my reassurance out of human love; as if the worship of love in some aspect is something without which the human condition is intolerable and terrifying, and humans will fashion it for their protection out of whatever is in their lives as birds will use string and bits of wool to make a nest in the city where there are no reeds.

When it was nearly five and the city afternoon began to darken with winter outside, we sat at the bright-barred heater drinking coffee that Paul had made. I was dressed again, a little self-conscious in the identical order of my clothes with the way I had been before. I felt suddenly like a visitor, looking round at the cheap, yellowish walled room that had the public look of rooms where people never live for long, like the eyes of restaurant cashiers who continually watch comings and goings. Paul’s few things, so eloquent of him as a separate entity, filled me with curiosity. My eyes wandered over the desk with its files and piles of paper, the bottles of green and red ink and the open typewriter, the snapshot of two shy native babies, the good old tapestry chair with the sagging arm where someone made a habit of sitting with his legs slung over, even the rumpled divan where we had lately lain, with its faded blue eiderdown quilt that belonged to an unknown childhood. Here he lived and moved among things when I was not with him and before I had known him: that old quilt must have followed him to boarding school in his mother’s winter parcel and covered him on cold nights in the antiseptic, serge-redolent atmosphere of a boy’s dormitory, his little boy’s rough hands clenched under the cold sheet years away from the softness of my breasts.

He put off the old coat he had used as a dressing gown and got into his clothes, and I watched this strong tender body, so different from my own, take on, like a public manner, the anonymity of men’s clothing. Those thighs with their dark warm hair, that other hair that drew a crucifix on his breast and belly, the bare-looking triangle of bony white at the base of his spine; all this which was withdrawn and secret from his outward appearance to the world made me conscious with a kind of solemnity of what else must be hidden; behind his voice and his impulses, the life he chose and the men and women with whom he chose to live it: even me, and what he believed he had found in me — all the unknown forces of memory, conviction and desire from which his personality glanced off, like a light. And I think I started then that strangest of journeys which is never completed, the desire to understand another in his deepest being. And I knew already, even then, that love is only the little boat that beaches you over the jagged rocks; for the interior something more will be needed.

When we got back to the Marcuses’ flat I was somehow a little irritated to find that they were waiting supper for us. We had not said, when we went out, at what time we should be back, and there was the echo of something irksome in the way Jenny came to the door of the kitchen as we came through the front door: “Well, now I can heat the spaghetti — at last! What happened to you?” It seemed to me that although she was young, she too had forgotten already the liberation from time, the privileged suspension from all the practical mechanics of life into which it is really a device for plunging men and women deeper than ever, with which love begins. Momentarily there had already dropped across her young, passionate eye the film of the matron, who in suckling children has forgotten the other urgency. We went into the living room and Joel was there, with Laurie Humphrey and John.

“Was she putting grated cheese on it?” Laurie asked. “Did you tell her to put cheese on it?” and I said in a queerly put-out, startled voice: “When did you come? I didn’t know you were coming.” Joel seemed to know that the nervousness of this meaningless compulsion to say something was directed at him, and he lifted his familiar head (what a big, heavy head he had in comparison with Paul!) from the paper over which he and John were bent and said with a mock air of relief at finding someone who would be bound to know: “Now come on, Helen — who’s going to win in Calvinia—?” And because I was still in the startled moment of taking in the changed relationships with which the room was innocently charged, and so merely registered the convention of a question requiring thought instead of realizing what he had said, my expression of weighing consideration was unintentionally comic. The three men roared with laughter; John with a childlike, expansive delight in someone making a fool of himself, Joel with the gentle human amusement of sharing an absent moment with someone, Paul with a proprietary pleasure in the idiosyncrasy of someone over whom one has the ascendancy of possession in love. The Sunday paper was holding a competition in connection with the national election which was to take place in the coming week: a list was printed with the names of constituencies, the candidates and parties returned at the last election, and the candidates and parties standing for this election. The winner of the competition would be the person who predicted most accurately which party would come to power, and with what majority. Calvinia was a Nationalist stronghold and the seat of Dr. Malan himself, so there could be no possible doubt about who would win Calvinia.

We ate spaghetti and argued amiably about the election; none of us except Laurie considered that the Nationalists had a chance of coming to power. “The most they can get is a few more seats.” “Forces of reaction be damned — you can’t tell me people have forgotten the way the Nats cheered the Germans on during the war?” “The United Party is moribund.” Laurie drew the slippery strands into his big loose mouth, drooping his eyes sagely. “You can’t rely solely on the popular appeal of Smuts. Like a poor film counting on some idolized Face to put it over.” “Well there you are, Laurie — you fill in your entry predicting victory for the Nats. Dr. Malan our Prime Minister. Win a hundred pounds.” Laurie’s fat face creased into paunchy laughter. “Believe me I would, but somehow it seems a bit disloyal.”

Beneath the inconsequence of my part in the talk I was aware, as on another level, of the hollowed-out feeling within my body, a shaken newness hidden, yet like the trembling of one’s hands when they have been put to some delicate strained balance of muscle in the performance of an unfamiliar skill. Somewhere I was withdrawn in the consciousness of this, and I watched and listened, even talked, from something of the still center of the cat, blinking out of itself into a room, or pregnant women, who hold themselves secret and contemplative. I found myself watching Joel and Paul closely; Joel’s face when Paul was talking, Joel’s manner when he spoke to Paul. And when the certainty came to me: Joel likes him — I knew why I had been watching them. I had wanted Joel to like Paul. To admire him, even. When Joel gave me the opportunity by offering me a cigarette, he must have been puzzled by the depth of the smile I felt come into my eyes for him; grateful, appealing, confessing — the smile with which a woman presents her child, or her lover.

And so the strangely commonplace Sunday evening passed; I even spoke to my mother on the telephone, a polite, quietly pleasant conversation of inquiries and answers, and the promise that I would be home for the week end after next, if not the next.

The odd, self-conscious unreality of facing other people after making love with Paul passed so soon that I did not remember it had ever been. In the busyness of our lives and the casual proximity of John and Jenny our time alone together was limited and we grew increasingly reckless in our passion. Of course, we had whole long evenings together in Paul’s flat, but there were many nights when his work took him to meetings and he would come to the Marcuses’ to have coffee with me at eleven or twelve o’clock, and there were also nights when both he and I had work to do. If I took my books and went with him to his flat, we found that neither of us got anything done; we would lie on his bed in the dark, smoking and talking and drifting into a delicious slow love-making that left us exhausted and longing only to sleep where we lay. And then instead of sleeping, we would begin to make love all over again in order to stave off the horrible time when we would have to get up and go into the cold to take me home. The next day I would sit in a lecture theater with my head lightening to sleep with the low sound of the professor’s voice, and at lunchtime we would hear each other’s voices, faint and secret over the telephone, the clatter of a typewriter in the offices of the municipal Native Affairs Department at his end, and the enclosed echo of the public telephone booth at my end, somehow emphasizing the laughing, tender sympathy we had for each other’s weariness.

So we would resolve that I must work at the Marcuses’ flat. He would bring his reports to write up or he would read or talk to John and Jenny if they were in, and we should have the comfort of each other’s presence. But it was on these occasions that we found ourselves becoming more and more bold. The Marcuses would go to bed eventually and I would feel the edge of the electric light worrying my eyes like grit, and know that I was too tired to concentrate any longer. Paul would sprawl in his chair yawning again and again that quick young animal yawn, showing his teeth like a tiger weary of the cage, and say to himself: I must go. I must go home. Then we would rest on each other a moment in love and the desire for sleep. And the desire for each other, a strength beyond our tiredness, a freshness beyond our day-depleted energy would suddenly and desperately seize us, and with the fear that one of the Marcuses might come in for a book or something forgotten, at any moment, and the sweet inhibiting agony of withholding from each other those intimately known particular cries with which each found his pleasure intensified by the knowledge of the pleasure of the other, we made hasty and trembling love. Once the need came upon us irresistibly when the Marcuses had gone to have a bath, and we had promised to have coffee ready for them when they came out. With their voices a few yards away coming with the strip of light beneath the bathroom door, we lay on the floor, unable to resist as the salmon is unable to deny his death leap upstream. The inflamed bars of the ugly radiator burned over our heads, we smelled the city-ground dust of the carpet. Yet in our ignoring of the situation, with its threat of sordidness and embarrassment instead of danger, there was an element of the real, deep, dreadfully dignified moment of wild creatures, who accept their mating as compulsively and unconditionally as their birth or death. We could not postpone our need of each other for a more convenient place or a more socially acceptable time; we had not reduced love to the status of an appointment for tea. Although Paul was my first lover, and although, or perhaps because, I had been brought up in the world of the Mine where all human relationships were seen as social rather than personal, I had by some miracle grown up woman enough to recognize this proudly. I regretted nothing that I did with Paul, suffered none of the timid shames that sometimes come, despite reason and intellect, to women who have rejected the nurturing of a sterile gentility. And in the beginning of our relationship as lovers, I became aware, too, of the merging, in my love, of aspects of Paul which in any other human relationship would seem far removed from one another: my pleasure in his body and the work he had chosen to do, his involvement with the dreary, hidden life of the Africans, and his appetite for enjoyment, for dancing and drinking and talk, became one, each neither more precious nor even more intimate to me than the other.

Much later Paul was to say to me with hopelessness and fascination, as if he stared at something he could not see the end of: “We’re terribly involved with each other.” And I was to say, to avert his eyes and my own from it: “That sounds like Isa. The sort of thing she says, all dilated pupils.” But now, at the beginning, the total involvement, the man, the lover, the purpose, was only delight, a joy to be exclaimed over inside oneself.

The job that Paul did first interested then excited me. There was nothing romantic about it, except that it was poorly paid, a vocation rather than a profession. Yet it was the only kind of job, unless one was a priest working in a location mission, that could bring a white man deep into the life that went on behind the working faces of the Africans who surrounded us. Even a doctor working in a native hospital only touched the lives of his patients in one situation, that of hurt or illness. But as a welfare officer — first he had been a junior, now he was an assistant to the chief — Paul entered into the gamut of the Africans’ lives. Of course, he knew them chiefly in trouble, seldom in joy, but as he explained, the damnably wonderful thing about them was the way they scaled down their standards of expectation so that no matter how wretched and unlivable their lives were, there was always the possibility of some whiff off the abundance of life bellying momentarily the sails of their spirit. A joke, a good pinch of snuff, even a promise you might not be able to keep, brought out the living eagerness that ugliness and dreary dispossession stifled interminably but could not kill.

At this time Paul was handling what was officially termed “Poor Relief”—the work of the department was divided into two sections, the other headed “Housing.” The work that his section and in fact the whole department did was in principle the same as that done by similar municipal or government welfare organizations all over the world. Investigation into the homes of delinquent children, maintenance of deserted wives and families, some sort of succor for the extreme situations which breed out of poverty. All this is commonplace in America or Europe. Everywhere in big cities there is a human silt of misfortune, a percentage of waste that through weakness, disability and the inevitable pressure of urban life, is cast out by the city and yet by the city’s guilt and conscience is kept alive. But in South Africa there is one difference; a difference so great that the whole conception of charity must be changed. The people among whom Paul worked were not the normal human wastage of a big industrial city, but a whole population, the entire black-skinned population on whose labor the city rested, forced to live in slums because there was nowhere else for them to live, too poor to maintain themselves decently because no matter what their energy, their skill, their labor was not allowed value above subsistence level. So he spent his days taking to this gigantic artificial pauperdom the palliative measures designed by sociologists for the small percentage of a city’s poor.

He was intensely aware of this and sometimes the knowledge of it, incontrovertible fact kicking away the sense of achievement from beneath the dupe of a difficult day well managed, would throw him into a mood of restless depression. — I noticed that with him, unlike other people I knew, depression did not produce inertia; he would want to go out, tackle things with a kind of anxiety and leave them unfinished, constantly search for someone to talk to so that if you were alone with him he exhausted you with his compulsiveness. “What’s the good of handing them out blankets when they need votes—?” he’d say. “Edna and her crowd are right. I’m wasting my time. Truly. One step away from the dear old ladies of the church, distributing buttered buns and alms.” At this I grew indignant. “We can’t all live historically, and leave it at that. Very comforting if we could. What are you supposed to do, let them freeze or starve while they’re waiting for the millennium?”

“I’m an enemy of progress because I am helping to resign them to their lot. Two-pound-ten a month pension and a delightful hessian shelter, and you’ll be so enchanted with your life that you’ll prostrate yourself before the white man forever.”

“Well, I don’t see why one can’t do both — support their right to emancipation and make their lives a bit more bearable in the meantime. That seems to me the most admirable thing anyone can do.” Paul laughed at my championing of him, but perhaps more than my lover, or a credo, it was the personal myth by which I wanted to live and which I had now embodied in him, that I was defending so jealously.

Paul worked very hard and rarely within the limit of set hours. The fact that there were no telephones in the native townships except in official offices, clinics and schools made it necessary for the welfare workers to make all their visits to the people’s homes, even for the most trivial inquiry, personal ones, and he spent his mornings, at least, driving out on investigations. His life came to me as a perpetual journey through the lives of others; snatches of their personalities, their predicaments, came on his speech and the vividness of his face, and filled me with enthusiasm and the sense of a closeness to life which I had never before known. The Mine was unreal, a world which substituted rules for the pull and stress of human conflict which are the true conditions of life; and in another way, the University was unreal too: it gave one the respect for doubt, the capacity for logical analysis, and the choice of ideas on which this equipment could be used to decide one’s own values — but all this remained in one’s hand, like a shining new instrument that has not been put to its purpose. In my case I sometimes looked at its self-evident efficiency (Miss Shaw has written an intelligent and painstaking paper on the prosody of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This examination of the sources of group conflicts is an excellent piece of work, indicative of a grasp of her subject unusual in a student …) and wondered what the purpose was. What Joel had said once about belonging only to the crust, beneath which the real life lay, came back to me. Paul was rooted in that life, in the rural, slow-gestured past and, more important, the confused and mazelike city life of the present.

He burst into the flat one afternoon at about three o’clock. I was sitting at a space I had cleared for myself at the table piled with Jenny’s sewing, doing some work. He threw down his coat, came over to me with the cold hands and light face of someone who is stimulated by talking to people and driving through a city on a gray afternoon. He put his hands to warm into the hollow of my neck under my dress. “What’s addling your little brain now?”

I looked down at the half-typed sheet, the notebook with its scrawled points. Nineteenth-century English novelists. The kind of paper that thousands of students have written before me, thousands will write after me. The engraving of George Eliot with her massively intelligent horse face and her two bunches of ringlets staring up from an open book.

I felt stale and cramped, suddenly reminded of the woman who sat in the window of the invisible mender’s shop, crouched over old stockings. I dismissed myself. “And where have you come from so early?”

“Sophiatown. One of those erring husbands floored me this afternoon. I used all the classic arguments about responsibility and duty to persuade him to come back to his wife — the poor thing can’t seem to keep him home for more than ten days at a stretch. He’s one of those little men with wise monkey faces who make good craftsmen. He listened to me politely as if he understood it was my job and I had to get my piece over with. Then he said, producing something irrefutable, something we couldn’t fail to agree on—‘But she’s so ugly. Tell me, how can a man live with such a face?’” He shook his head. “—And, my God, she is a damned ugly woman; I couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for him.”

“So what did you say?”

He sat down in a chair and pushed his fingers through his hair. “You’re no oil painting yourself, I told him. — Couldn’t say a damn thing. She is ugly. — And he roared with laughter. We both did. We sat in my office laughing like two men in a pub.”

He laughed again at the thought of it, but I sat looking at my papers.

“Paul, what am I staying on at University for? Why don’t I get a job—?”

“But, my dear girl, you’re going to get a degree?” He knew what I meant, but he liked to test me.

I felt enormously disconsolate. Somehow Paul and the monkey-faced man laughing together in the office made me impatient with myself. “When I’ve got it, what’ll I do? I don’t want to teach. Any sort of academic life — I wouldn’t like it. I’ve never had any desire to write. So what’ll I be? A nicely educated young lady.”

“Darling, why do you ask me? If you want to leave University, if you want to get a job, for Christ’s sake why don’t you? I can’t stand you when you’re timid and uncertain. Damn it all, you’re not under Mummy’s wing now, are you?”

“But I am. So long as I stay at University and they keep me, of course I am.”

I went over to him and put my arms round his knees; he played with my hair, tugging it back behind my ears. “They’re looking for a house again,” I said, speaking of the Marcuses. “Jenny definitely pregnant?” “Almost certain.” We looked at each other as if to say, how can people let these things happen. “That’s the trouble with being married,” he said. I smiled. “But it can happen to any of us.” “Yes, but when you’re married the social sanction makes you careless. People say they won’t be, but they always are. You know … what does it matter, after all, if something should go wrong, we are married. … And there you are. Houses, families, necessity for money and more money, all the things you want to do pushed off into some vague future.” We held each other close in our agreement on this. The idea of domestic life came to me as a suction toward the life of the Mine, a horror of cosy atrophy beckoning, and it was becoming impossible for me to ignore the fact that even the marriage of John and Jenny had some disquieting elements for me.

“Joel once suggested marriage as the career for me. I was indignant.”

“Did he? I wouldn’t want a woman to make a career of me. If being married turns into a career afterward, that’s too bad. But I’d want it to start off because whatever else she wanted to do, she wanted to do it living with me.”

I knew that I had not conveyed accurately what Joel had said and meant, but the small injustice to his perception seemed unimportant. I closed my eyes and was conscious with a kind of pleasurable fear that the whole world had narrowed itself down frighteningly into the possession of what I felt in my arms; my life had settled on Paul. “That’s what I want,” I said. “Whatever else I do, I want to do it living with you. The marriage part is incidental.” He dragged me up from the floor and kissed me as if I had something in my mouth he wanted to take from me. We had one of those moments of pure fascination in the absorption we had in each other. He said to me, studying my face with what was almost exasperation, “What is it in you? What are you, after all …? I ask myself that a million times. …” And he touched my face with a finger like a feather, and suddenly took my head in his hands and squeezed hard, as if he would crack a nut.

Later Jenny came back from a walk to the shop at the corner. She had the baby with her in his little cart, where he sat propped upright, his big head wavering in its knitted cap with the cat’s ears. As she wheeled him in she called sharply: “Throw something over the machine, quick!” But his gums had bared in the aghast silent preparation for a howl. She snatched him up and the scream came out, face down in her neck. “He’s terrified of the sewing machine,” she said to Paul. It seemed to me that she never entered the room these days without calling out some warning or instruction — The window, please, there’s a draft and he’s cutting his lower teeth. John, for God’s sake — those drawing pins. You know he puts everything into his mouth. Helen, put on a record with less brass, I think it makes him restless, it’s too loud. …

Paul was gently whirring the handle of the machine. “Look, old fellow, listen to the lovely noise. …” But Jenny covered it again authoritatively. “No, he’s too frightened. It must have some association for him we don’t understand.” And she repeated to Paul a theory from one of the books on child care in which she was increasingly absorbed. Then we went on to speak of the proposal to buy a house. Paul mentioned the house of an acquaintance at the office that possibly might be for sale. “It doesn’t matter about it being old,” she said, wiping the baby’s unwilling face with a napkin. “We couldn’t afford a new one, anyway. I’ve found that out in the week I’ve been round the agents. But how do the bedrooms face?” Paul had been there only once, and could not be sure. She stood listening to him with her head tilted seriously. “You see, children’s bedrooms should face east, so that they get the sun when they wake up in the morning.”

When John came in I said: “Paul’s got a house for you in Parkcrest.” Jenny and he looked at each other and her nose wrinkled—“Oh, is that where it is—”

“Why?”

“Well, we thought we’d like to stay on somewhere around Hillbrow — our friends are here, or most of them — and somehow all the progressive, less materialistic people seem to live here.”

“Parkcrest belongs so solidly to the small bourgeois with his wife and his children. …” added John.

I began to laugh. It was not the kind of laughter that draws others warmly in, even if they do not know its cause. I laughed on my own and could hear my own laughter, a woman’s high peal, coming down through the room the way one sometimes hears a laugh in a restaurant and turns to see where it comes from. Paul looked at me with the little bracket of a smile marking the corners of his mouth. “Hillbrow,” I said, “full of dear old ladies living in boarding houses — that’s all — it’s just the idea of Hillbrow being a Bloomsbury or Greenwich Village.”

When John and Jenny were annoyed, they had a way of discounting the perpetrator of the annoyance by pretending that they were too much occupied in the conduct of their own affairs to notice unimportant comment. Now they both had their eyes fixed on some point in the room that ignored me, and he said, not as casually and irrelevantly as it might seem, “I asked Nathoo Ram for Thursday, Jen. And I’ve put off the von Berheims.” “Oh, good. It’ll be the girl’s day off and that’s always better for tempers all round.”

“D’y’know, Paul,” he said, with a careless laugh, “we run the risk of getting kicked out of this building every time Nathoo Ram comes? There’s a clause in the lease that says no non-Europeans are allowed on the premises unless in the capacity of servants.”

Chapter 23

It always amazes me to notice the disproportion of feeling to action which human beings show in their lives. In theory, there is an abstract value put on event which has little basis in reality. It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women — a new job, a new town, a divorce — which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves. This gives a shifting quality to the whole surface of life; decisions made with reason and the tongue may never be made valid by the heart — a woman may continue to love her husband when all her friends agree she was perfectly right to rid herself of such a worthless creature. And it also gives rise to those small mysteries which affront us when what we consider the appropriate emotions fail to appear in people: his friends are shocked by the passive acceptance of his wife’s leath by a man who cannot explain, for he scarcely knows it himself, that her presence has been dead to him for several years.

The changes of the next few months of my life came about almost absently. I passed through them like someone pushing a way unseeing through a crowd, her eyes already on the figure she knows is on the other side. I left the University with less emotion than I had sometimes felt over giving up a dress that I no longer wore; I saw my mother and father off at the station when they left for England with the mildly stimulated response to their excitement that one catches from even the most casual of holiday farewells, and that disappears the moment the train pulls out and you turn into a café where the measureless fascination of your own life waits over coffee.

Because they were preoccupied with the imminence of their “trip,” as this crowning fulfillment of success, solidity and privilege was always referred to by Mine people, they were less upset by my leaving the University than they might have been. My father had for some time been drawn toward the trap of the parent who gives his child the education he himself endows with the mystical powers of what has been denied him: informed as he believed I must be with this power, must he not doubt all his opinions where they conflicted with mine? If I wanted to leave the University before getting my degree, might not the fostering independence of the University itself be proved in this …?

My mother said: “Of course it’s this man behind it. I’ve told you all girls are alike. It’s a waste of money sending them to a University. As soon as some man comes along they forget all about their great keenness to study. I knew we’d be throwing our money out.”

I had taken Paul home with me to the Mine once or twice, and although the Sunday with its elaborate dinner and lack of conversation was hardly a success (Paul was polite but endured the day by seeming not to be there, his tall freckled brow behind the newspaper, a boredom that agitated me expressed in the angle of his legs), my parents accepted him for what he sounded to be rather than what he was. The son of an old respected Natal family — the fact that the Clarks were wealthy was pleasant, but what really impressed my parents was that Paul’s father was a Justice of the Peace and that “Natal” was in itself a guarantee of pure English blood and allegiance to England, the distinction of an eternal Colonialism they desired above all else. Like most parents on the Mine, they feared to find themselves with a son-in-law with an Afrikaans name; if it happened, they would say: “He’s Afrikaans, you know, but very nice, so what does it matter?”—but the disappointment would never be swallowed. If one’s daughter went so far as to marry a Jew, at least one would get the awe and sympathy with which people regard aberration.

But Paul could not have sounded more suitable, with his solid Anglo-Saxon background, and along with the suitability they naturally assumed the satisfactory pattern of his relationship with me. The young people were going about together pretty steadily — nowadays parents are not expected to ask, of course, but still, one sees. … When his position improves (or some such inevitable delay is over) there will be an engagement, a wedding (a big one with all the old residents of Atherton and the Mine? Or perhaps a quiet one with just His Family …). Anyway, Helen would be comfortably settled, and that was all one could ask.

If my father was disappointed because I had not graduated, and my mother felt that money had been wasted on me, there was at the same time consolation for them, generated by my mother, in these indications that I was proving myself no less, if no more, than any other daughter of their world. In my mother’s softening toward me over the waste of my father’s money — she judged only by official results and it did not occur to her that although I did not have a degree I might have benefited by my years at the University — I could detect a curious note of satisfaction in seeing me caught by what she believed was rightly the inescapable; the ceremonial of engagement, marriage, a “nice little home.”

They were gone; my father with his bowling kit (he had at last given up tennis) and a letter of greeting from the Atherton Rotary Club to a Rotary Club in the south of England, my mother with the pigskin handbag presented by the ladies of the Mine. I was working temporarily in the bookshop that had employed me during vacations; Jenny and John had found a house at last, in the very suburb which they had scorned.

All this, though it affected its conduct from day to day, existed lightly on the perimeter of my life; nothing could touch me at this time but Paul. My love for him was at that extreme, exclusive, intensely selfish stage when nothing and nobody interested me unless connected with him. All the small pleasures I had enjoyed before were blocked out by the strong joy of him — the shop windows I had lingered before, the poetry I had murmured over, the half-heard conversations in busses — the immediacy of life streamed past me ignored: I was fixed only on him. Food was actually tasteless unless I ate with him, in music it seemed I heard the tenderness, the excitement and the sadness of our love-making. Like some surgical alteration to the structure of the brain that blocks out certain capacities of thought and action, passion paralyzed my responses to anything outside its own image.

Although Paul was gregarious by nature, we saw less and less of our friends. I did not want to share him with anyone, was largely oblivious of any company other than his own, and he was so caught up in his work and in me that there seemed to be little time to spare for others. When we went to a concert or a play we would be surprised to be reminded by friends met in the foyer that it was two or even three weeks since we had seen them. “Where have you been?” someone would say. And we would look vaguely apologetic, the air of two people who have gone to ground, lightly affronting the group by their lack of need of them, setting up the slight irritation of an envious curiosity. Sometimes they merely waved, faces turned toward us over the heads of the crowd in recognition of the separateness we had retired into. Once or twice it was Joel whose big dark head I saw (even from the back I always recognized him instantly in a crowd) and it did not seem strange that I should be content to smile and flutter my hand, and not make the effort to go up and talk to him, our old, deep, dependable understanding of no more claim than casual acquaintance before my preoccupation with Paul and myself.

Even the limited interest of my job did not trouble me. It was so far from the work demanding and transforming all my energies and imagination that I had hoped would present itself to me through the University that, had it had any real place in my life at the time, it would have filled me with frustration. But the days passed quickly among the smell of books, and I earned enough money to keep myself in Johannesburg. Paul’s was the job into which I projected all my pride and interest.

I was now typing the thesis to which I had so vehemently denied I would give any time. I looked forward to the hour or two I spent over it every evening after supper, watching the phrasing and the punctuation as if it were a piece of literature. One evening when we had had a little argument over syntax — How many times must I tell you, he said, I don’t want a ghost writer, I want a typist — and it had ended in laughter and my getting my way, I said to him as I picked up fresh carbon and paper: “You know when you first came back from Rhodesia the Marcuses wanted me to offer to do this for you.”

He smiled, and said through teeth clenched on an empty pipe, “And you didn’t?”

“No. I said why the hell should I.”

He stretched out his foot and gave me a prod on the thigh. “Hoighty-toighty. Well, if you hadn’t changed your mind eventually, it certainly never would have got done.”—In the lethargy which sometimes comes up in reaction against a piece of trying work accomplished, he had let his thesis lie unpresented for four months, simply because he could not bring himself to go to the trouble of having a fair copy made of it.

I said as I typed: “They annoyed me by making a sort of privilege out of it, like wiping the blackboard for teacher. They kept impressing me, if you don’t offer Isa will do it.”

“Oh that,” he said shortly. He leaned across to the table and took up my pen, made an alteration on the sheet he was reading over. “I suppose they lost no time in letting you know about that.”

“About what?”

“Isa.” He put the pen back. “They were always dead against it. I don’t know why. Some sort of antagonism they have against her. They were right, of course, it was a mess and a mistake from the beginning. But not for their reasons.”

I had stopped typing and I kept reading along the lines of keys; the letters, figures, hieroglyphics, a chip on the tail of the question mark. I felt I was waiting for something to happen inside me. “Paul, I didn’t know about anything. I mean Isa. You’ve had an affair with her?”

He looked up; half-surprise, half-concern, with the suggestion of accusation that comes from disbelief. The intensity of the expression gave his face the vividness that was his greatest attraction. I saw him most pointedly, it seemed, as accident sometimes arranges things, at the particular angle which was my personal vision of him, the turn of his face that I could see with my eyes shut; that I can see still.

I thought of Isa, willed the sight of her, crinkling up her eyes at me over a glass, oddly haggard with her hair hanging round her like a little girl, precociously young with her hair drawn up off her long head as if it were painted on. “You slept with her?” I wanted to make it real to myself. Isa ugly toward the end of the evening when she had had a lot to drink and was tired. Isa making someone like Herby purr in the joke of her attention like a cat.

Paul merely made a little movement of culpability that distorted his mouth; lifted his hand swiftly, palm open, questioning.

Somewhere parenthetic to my quickening of concern I was faintly stirred, fascinated by this momentary flash of his existence simply as a man; not my beloved, flesh with ways of its own, a mind, particular, sometimes puzzling — the whole computation of personality of which the essence is that which is always left out, cannot be classified — but simply a living being shaped by its maleness.

“I knew she was fond of you. … You talk well together.”

“Like a vaudeville act.”

The terse casualness of the summing-up fell lightly between us.

I looked at him.

And it came to me suddenly: I did not care. It mattered as little to me now as it did to him. The reaction, the revulsion I had waited for fearfully in myself was not there. I thought with a kind of pride of surrender to something painful and sweet in its dangerous completeness: Nothing matters. Nobody. Not even Isa.

I sat with my hands resting on the typewriter, looking at Paul.

“You look a little drunk,” he said. “That’s rotten brandy of John’s. It kicks you in the back of the head about two hours after you’ve forgotten drinking it.”

Chapter 24

At the end of 1949 I went to live with Paul in the flat in Bruton Heights, Krause Street.

He had had a very bad infection of the throat during which I had gone every day to stay with him, and sometimes spent the night because it was difficult for me to get home alone after dark to Parkcrest — where I had moved, with the Marcuses, to their house. Then when the infection cleared, he had to have his tonsils removed, and I went home with him from the nursing home.

I sent a message to the bookshop to say that I was ill. All day long we were alone together in the hot bright little flat, Paul’s pajamas that I had washed flapping on the balcony, our cigarette smoke blue in the sunlight round the bed, the collection of newspapers, books and lozenges littering the sheets. Walking up the street to the vegetable shop in the morning, I had no compunction about my job, really would not have cared if someone had seen me. In the shop I stood enjoying the little imposture of waiting among all the other housewives, middle-aged women who weighed out their own tomatoes — not too green, not too soft — and smart young women who dangled a car key on the index finger and pointed, without touching, at what they wanted. Back at the flat, Paul would mimic for me the funny, charming speech of the Portuguese market gardeners who both grew the vegetables and ran the shop. I cooked our food and read to him (he liked the sound of my voice reading something familiar, a translation of Stendhal, the poems of Donne) and at twelve we would eat together, the tray between us on the bed. Then I would push the windows as wide as they would go, and pull the curtains. The summer day seemed to curl up asleep outside; we would hear the sound of the native laborers’ picks digging the foundations for a new block of flats on the other side of the street.

I lay down beside him (he had the warm puppy-smell of people who are in bed) and with his arm hooked around my neck, he read, very swiftly and silently, detective stories that, the moment I began to follow the lines from the angle at which I lay, sent me off into a kind of singing sleep, like the sound of cicadas rising in my head. Sometimes we made love. I would tease him: “But you’re supposed to be a weak convalescent. If you’re strong enough for this you should be working.” “For some things,” he would say in the hoarse closed whisper which was the only way he could speak, “you don’t need your voice.”

We would lie there quietly, spreading our limbs for coolness on the rumpled sheet. “Listen,” he would say, “everyone’s away. Everyone’s working. The whole town’s reckoning and arguing and persuading and measuring up and putting down. Only us.” And there was a special pleasure in the sense of our desertion, our malingerers’ possession of the hot quiet afternoon in the emptied building and the emptied street. We could still hear the picks, pitching dully and regularly into the earth.

When evening came — we could see nothing but the sky from where we sat, deepening green and now showing a star like a glistening drop of water, though the noise of homeward traffic beat and swirled below — he did not want me to go and I did not want to go. I would run down out into the street again to get a paper. We drank gin and lime juice to the mild intermingling of other people’s radios, city equivalent of the cheeping of birds in the dusk. We did the crossword together in that desire to stretch one’s concentration lazily — like making a muscle — that comes pleasurably from idleness. For half an hour, on the gay confidence of the gin, I felt entirely in command of the pots I set cooking, pans I set sizzling. Paul sat up in bed shelling peas. I shouted a running commentary to him from the kitchen as I cooked. And afterward he liked me to come to him smelling of talcum from the bath, my hair brushed out and the make-up washed off my face, and we lay together listening to records and hearing the roar of the traffic rise, far down, as other people went off to cinemas and visits. Quite late, because we talked so easily at night, circling out from the still center of ourselves to politics and death, the confidence with which we spoke of the uncertain future, the hesitancy with which we spoke of the certain past; gossip, impressions — we fell asleep, curled round each other like two cats in the narrow bed.

When we talked about the kind of life we should live together I would say: “I want to live with you in the greatest possible intimacy.” I said it with a deep earnest satisfaction that was at the same time apprehensive, lying back on the pillow and looking at him. And I do not know that I knew exactly what it was that I meant; though I knew what it was that I did not mean. I did not want to belong to the women’s camp while my husband belonged to the men’s camp. I did not want to sit talking to women of things that “did not interest” men, while he sat with the men talking of things that “did not interest” women. I did not want him to be a scapegoat, hidden behind a newspaper: “I’ll have to ask my husband,” “I don’t know what my husband will think”—as if he were a kind of human reference work, a statute book on which the state of the household internally and in relation to society was based. … When Paul questioned me, I could only pause, and then say, like another question, an obstinate question rather than an answer: “… This, I want this. It must be like this.” I knew this warmth of physical intimacy — eating, bathing, sleeping, waking together — was not all of two human beings rooted in each other but free, yet it was all I had so far come to know of the state I imagined.

Paul delighted in it for itself; for him I think it was immediate and complete. There was a peculiar charm in loving a woman, a girl as young as I was, whose desire was to identify herself entirely with his being. Older women he had known had, I imagine, wanted to possess him; they took him to themselves. But I wanted to devote myself to him. He felt he owned me, and all the love and pleasure I could give him. It was a sort of young male’s kingdom into which he had come into his own after being the darling page boy of the court. When I put into words the way we spent our time together, he was quite maddened; he kissed me and caressed me and worried at me in enchantment with the way I was made and the things that I said.

I never went back to the Marcuses’. When the week was up and we both descended into the world, like two children who have made a suburban room their secret tower, we could not live apart again. It was senseless to see each other in snatches, to lie at night the distance across the town away from each other, to eat and talk with others. All that was senseless; the only thing that was right and simple was to stay together. It is curious how moral censure never seems applicable to oneself. I would say of others: “Aren’t they living together? — I heard he had some girl in his flat?”—But it never occurred to me that people might speak of Paul and me in the same casual tone, that I might be to them merely some girl who lived with a man. In any case we were as good as married; the marriage was a mere formality we had still to go through. We had wanted to marry at the end of the year, when we had saved a little money and could perhaps go to Europe. But now: “We’ll get married when they come back,” said Paul, speaking of my mother and father. “I want to shoot you down to Natal at Easter to show you to my people. We’ll go for the long week end and then I can take you to the Drakensberg, and we’ll climb.”

My mother and father, writing to me from Devonshire of the “real English Christmas and New Year” they had spent with my father’s stepsister, stood vaguely sentinel in my mind. I did not really think of them; yet they were there. I continued to write to them from the Marcuses’ address. …

Paul could not understand my deceit with them. That I should not want them to know that we were living together, because the knowledge would shock them, he could perhaps admit; it was simply expedient. But that I should be ashamed of my deceit, that I should “pull a guilty face about it”—that annoyed him. “Are you ashamed of living with me?”

“How can you ask?”

“Then if you’re not doing anything you’re ashamed of, what are you feeling so bad about?”

I could not answer.

“You know what you remind me of? A little girl who has been told God is watching her all the time. And if she does something God thinks is naughty, he will know, no matter where she is, no matter how she tries to hide it. … Just look at you.”

And I stood there, in the sudden descent of dismay that came with their letters; fingering the envelope, addressed in my father’s rather beautiful hand (its sweeping flow always suggested some freer, other side of him I had never seen, as the sight of his bare knees, in tennis shorts, suggested to me as a child another existence outside the known one as my father). My mother would sit down and write her pile of letters in her large wavering hand, where the tails of the y’s in one line looped through the crosses of the t’s on the one below, and then my father would address the envelopes for her, consulting the little pigskin notebook where the addresses were all set down. …

“It seems so mean …,” I said, not wanting to annoy him. I saw so clearly in the light of his presence, the set of his head, the small impatient movement of his foot, the childish stupidity of my scruples, that let me lie and yet made me whimper over the lying.

He knew I was troubled but though he wanted to be sympathetic he could not conceal his boredom with the reason; it came through the smile he gave me now. “—Then tell them if it’ll make you feel any better …?” He put on his hat with the air of getting back to the real business of life, picked up his cigarettes and the car key. He was the only young man I knew who wore a hat, and somehow it was part of his sense of vitality, that well-worn but smart and expensive hat clapped unerringly on his head as he went out. It was typical of Paul that his careless love of good clothes was accepted unquestioningly by people like the Marcuses, who would have scorned the manifestation as hopelessly materialistic in anyone else. He came over to me and kissed me before he went, lifting me tightly off the ground although he was not particularly tall, and then setting me down again.

For him the consciousness of being answerable to one’s parents for one’s moral actions was something he could not conceive of in me, even something slightly ridiculous; for to him I was an adult woman, answerable only to her own integrity. When he had gone I felt ashamed and disgusted with myself for being less than this. I had the horrible feeling that the Mine had laid a hand on me again; Atherton had gleefully claimed me as one of its own, lacking the moral courage to be anything else.

I put the letters into the back of the kitchen drawer behind the string and corkscrews and a broken top (how had it got there?) and went out. The flat boy interrupted a conversation on the entrance steps to turn and greet me with a little grunt of friendly pleasure preceding and tailing off after his “Mad-am …”; he was a tiny, big-headed Basuto, wearing, like the clothes of an elder brother, the white cotton kitchen suit provided for the god-bodied great Zulu who had preceded him. I reaped the geniality engendered by long conversations in Sesuto with Paul. Over the road two white men in workmen’s overalls watched me pass and, grinning, shouted something I did not hear because of the noise of the concrete mixer which two natives were feeding.

At the bus stop an enormously fat woman in black sat spread on the seat in the burning sun. She moved her feet a little, like a restless elephant. A woman with a shopping bag that bulged although it was empty, as though in exhaustion, joined us, jumped on and pawed at by a small boy. As I sat between them with my flimsy dress falling away from my bare legs and the scent of my own powder rising from my neck in the heat, I felt a sudden return of power. The pure arrogance of being young; free, risen every day from love, this was the long moment, limitless when you are living it, brief when it has passed or you have never had it, that was conferred upon me by the drab indifference of the women on either side.

Perhaps it is in moments like this, selfish as the laws of life itself, yet humble in the evidence of the flowerlike nature of human beings despite their brain and spirit, that happiness is sharpest. I know that it came to me then as sudden and delightful as a bird sheering up out of nowhere into the sky.

That summer was the second under Nationalist government. (The jokes of the Sunday afternoon when we had all talked over the election-forecast competition had, with the calm irony of event, become fact; Laurie was our prophet and not our clown.) As people always do when the unthinkable comes to pass, we had braced ourselves to the curious letdown of finding ourselves on the losing side, looking with a sense of unreality at the flat-faced, slit-mouthed Dr. Malan staring back from under the caption PRIME MINISTER, and had waited for calamity to come down.

Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. We wanted a quick shock, over and done with, but what we were going to get was something much slower, surer, and more terrible: an apparent sameness in the conduct of our lives, long periods when there was nothing more to hurt us than hard words in Parliament and talk of the Republic which we had laughed at for years; and, recurrently, a mounting number of weary battles — apartheid in public transport and buildings, the ban on mixed marriages, the suppression of Communism bill, the language ordinance separating Afrikaans and English-speaking children in schools, the removal of colored voters from the common electoral roll and the setting aside of the Supreme Court judgment that made this act illegal — passionately debated in Parliament with the United Party and Labor Party forming the Opposition, inevitably lost to the Government before the first protest was spoken.

When the impact on individual, personal lives is not immediate and actual, political change does not affect the real happiness or unhappiness of people’s lives, though they may protest that it does. If the change of government throws you into a concentration camp, then your preoccupation with politics will equal that you might normally have had with your wife’s fidelity or your own health. But if your job is the same, your freedom of movement is the same, the outward appearance of your surroundings is the same, the heaviness lies only upon the extension of yourself which belongs to the world of abstract ideas, which, although it influences them through practical expression of moral convictions, loses, again and again, to the overwhelming tug of the warm and instinctual. The people I knew were “politically conscious” and as liberals or left-wing sympathizers they knew more thoroughly and perhaps felt more deeply than the United Party conservatives the reactionary shade into which the country had passed simply by fact of the Fascist Nationalists coming to power. Yet although they talked gloomily, I did not see in anyone’s face the anxious concentration of concern I had seen come so quickly over the sickness of a child, or the haggard foreboding that kept pace with the disintegration of a love affair. In the private worlds where people secretly decide the success or failure of their attempt at life, the old battles made or broke; it was only very slowly, as the months and then the years went by, that the moral climate of guilt and fear and oppression chilled through to the bone, almost as if the real climate of the elements had changed, the sun had turned away from South Africa, bringing about actual personality changes that affected even the most intimate conduct of their lives.

In this Paul and I would probably have been much like the others; but our circumstances were different. Because of the nature of his work, Paul had always been as daily, hourly conscious as of his own aliveness of the silent condemnation of the Africans; that accusing condemnation which others were varyingly aware of, like a distant gaze on their backs. He lived in the midst of it. His life was a reversal of the life of the average Johannesburg person. They went about their own affairs, in a white world, vaguely intruded upon by the knowledge that beyond the city where they had their offices and the tree-hidden suburbs where they lived, there was a scattered outcast city from which the emissaries came — cleaned up to approximate to the white man’s standards of decency — and disappeared into again. He went about his affairs in a black world, in those townships (even the word was the white man’s generality for something he had not seen — some were the rows of houses the word comfortably suggests, others were huddles of tin and sacking, junk heaps animated by human beings) dumped outside the city, and for him it was the clean, prosperous, handsome white world that existed on the edge of consciousness. He never drove back to it without a sense of incredulity that this city — these girls in fancy shoes coming from offices, the men reversing into parking bays with hump-necked skill — could cut itself so pitilessly in two and close its eyes so completely to half its life. Sometimes he found himself looking with something almost as hot as hate at the white people in the streets, seeing even the most unknowing of them as despots in their very ignorance of what was wrong and terrible where they walked; but at other times he would tell me how he suddenly had the sense of Johannesburg as a beleaguered city, ringed about by all those smoking, wretched encampments which she herself had created. …

Paul began to say things like this now. He had never said them before, and now, although he still laughed and derided what he called the “Hysterical-Histrionical Friends of the Downtrodden African,” there were times when he seemed to struggle with a sense of drama? evil? that made him speak in spite of himself. At first I did not know what to make of it; I even felt half-amused, in a puzzled sort of way, at catching him out in the kind of highly colored fantasy of disgust from which he had so often brought me down to face the unpleasant facts at which my imagination had started up like a covey at the sound of a gun. But when I realized that these outbursts of his came not from the frightened shying away of a suddenly exacerbated sensibility, but out of a long working familiarity with the facing of ugly facts, I understood that something was changing in him.

The Africans had, of course, more to fear from the Nationalists than anybody. But they themselves felt that they had had so little to hope for under the Smuts Government that all the change had done was to substitute a negative despair for a positive one: lack of hope, for fear. The leaders said in the phrases leaders use, Now the velvet glove is off the iron hand, that’s all…; and the simple people who did not understand politics and could only understand the white animus against them if it was personified, as in their tribal days they had made power realizable in the carved image of an idol or a bunch of bones, shook their heads in apprehension of the “bad man” Malan. Paul told me how, in a way, the idea of Malan even became a comfort to them. If there was a shortage of meat: Malan doesn’t think we need to eat, they said. If there was no house for a man and his family: Malan wants us to live like animals on the veld, said the woman. Over all that had been wrong, and would continue to be wrong in their lives — This Malan …, they said.

But though in that first year of the Nationalist rule little changed for them materially, and the combination of shockingly sordid living conditions, poverty, and a kind of deeply felt inarticulate horror of their own subjection before everybody who was not a native, that resulted in curious, mad, apparently irrelevant bursts of rebellion, arose out of the years of benevolent United Party rule, the very fact that the Nationalists sat up there in authority humiliated the natives. In Parliament cabinet ministers spoke of them as “Kaffirs.” There was continual official talk about the preservation of the “purity of white races of South Africa” and the “sacred duty of the Afrikaner nation to keep itself unsullied.” The Africans had always been kept outcast; now they began to feel it, to feel themselves outcast in their very features and voices. In their bewildered or hostile or mocking eyes there was the self-search for the sores the white man saw upon them. Even the black children, aping the passing of a white woman in the street beneath our flat, expressed unconsciously in their skinny jeering bravado the attitude: Well what can you expect of me? I’m black, aren’t I?

Statutes and laws and pronouncements may pass over the heads of the people whom they concern, but shame does not need the medium of literacy. Humiliation goes dumbly home — a dog, a child too small to speak can sense it — and it sank right down through all the arid layers of African life in the city and entered the blood even of those who could not understand why they felt and acted as they did, or even knew that they felt or acted.

At this stage, when all that was done to implement the plans for apartheid — a carrying to the extremes of total segregation the division of the ordinary lives of white and black that had always existed, socially and economically — was little more than a tightening-up of discriminatory devices, it was often the way in which such things were done rather than the things themselves which was so offensive. When the Nationalists introduced the ban on mixed marriages and also made it punishable for white and black men and women to cohabit, there was something shameful in the manner in which the police hunted up their prosecutions, shining torches in upon the little room where an old colored woman lay asleep with the old white man with whom she had lived quietly for years; prying and spying upon what has always been the right of the poorest man to sleep in peace with his woman.

Other people read of these things in the newspaper, but Paul came face to face with such a happening. He had temporarily taken over Colored Poor Relief, which was administered separately from Native or Indian Poor Relief, when a couple was arrested in Vrededorp, a slum suburb of racial confusion. He knew the woman because it so happened that she had been to see him a few days previously about her brother, a slightly crazy old man for whom Paul was trying to get an old-age pension. The woman herself was one of those milky-eyed, still creatures, roused only to obedience and the cooking pot — more like a work-stunned old native woman than the shriller, more conscious colored. The man with whom she lived was very old, had never heard of the ban, and had lost touch many years before with the white race which he was defiling by lying in this creaking great bed of the poor with this bare-gummed creature whose slack skin had once been filled with a woman. — The people who lived in the room next door told Paul that when the police came she jumped out of the bed screaming and crawled beneath it. And when they tried to get her to come out, she kept screaming for her “Doek, my doek!” (the piece of cloth she wore round her head) and would not come out until someone had given it to her, and she had struggled to tie it on cramped under the sagging springs of the bed. The neighbors shrieked with laughter all over again at the telling of it.

“Can you imagine the two old things,” said Paul shortly, “a torch shining on their faces. Opening their eyes into it like those poor damn fool hares that get transfixed by the lights of your car on a dark road.”

Later he went to see the woman, because without the man (he had once been a railway worker and had some sort of pension) she was destitute and it seemed that Paul would have to try to get her a pension, too. She said to him: “What is wrong with this man? I stayed with two men before. The one ran away to Capetown. The other one died after thirteen years. Now this one is wrong?”

A kind of minor panic flew round among the colored people. Most of it was ridiculous and unfounded in danger, but its spark of actuality was the special distress and embarrassment that people feel when their sexual privacy is threatened, even by implication. People said to one another that they were afraid to go to sleep in the same room with their wives. The inevitable hooligans played the inevitable joke of climbing up to windows and waking people up by shining torches in their faces. One evening a colored clerk in Paul’s office confided, half afraid he would be laughed at, half afraid what he said should be taken seriously, “I used to be so proud of my wife’s European looks. You know she’s quite often been taken for a white girl? Now I’m wondering—” He stopped, wanting the assurance of Paul’s laughter that it was ridiculous to go on. And Paul laughed, but a moment later the thought forced itself up in the man again. “If anything like that happened to us, I’d do… I don’t know what—” He had the pleading, tense expression of abstraction that anticipates the doctor’s order for some too-intimate investigation. But of course Paul laughed again, and said to him, “For Christ’s sake, Robert, you know you and your wife are both colored, there’s nothing on earth to worry about. And anyway, they’ll only do this a few times. Just to satisfy the predikants and the Cabinet ministers.”

“Of course you can see a mile off his wife’s a colored girl. Only two or three shades lighter than he is,” Paul said to me. He smiled. “Out of a reversal of the very thing he fears now, he’s liked to think her that much nearer the distinction of whiteness.”

But later that same evening when we were sitting in a cinema, I had the feeling one learns to pick up so quickly from someone one loves, that his mind was not going along with the diversion of the film. He stirred in his seat now and then as people do when they come to the turning point of their own thoughts and then go back to the beginning all over again. Once he hesitated and then putting his mouth to my hair said: “The funny thing is, he’s always seemed — you know, I could talk to him without any mumbo jumbo, the way people like us talk among ourselves.” I nodded vehemently, my eyes still on the film, like a hostess who continues to give polite attention to her guests, while she tries to catch the gist of the urgent confidence someone is pressing upon her in whispers.

When we came out we were both in a rather passive mood — the film had turned out to be bad in a dulling way — and we drank our coffee comfortably, but without speaking much. Once we got home something that often happened suddenly happened again. The sheer pleasure of coming home together alone to sleep in the same bed, the same room, turned our passive mood inside out. Paul got into my bath with me and we fought and laughed and criticized each other’s washing technique. In their desire to know each other minutely, lovers return quite seriously to those dull questions to which children give so much weight: Do you wash your face first or last? Do you stand up when you do your legs or sit down and hold them up out of the water? Paul finished his performance, when I was already drying myself, by disappearing head and all under the water in the way that he knew horrified me. He came up laughing and lay there, water streaming from his hair, all his body broken up into wavering and ripples, magnified and distorted. As I gave him a cigarette, Auden’s line came to me, “… the bridegroom, lolling there, beautiful.” We got into bed half-damp and made love so ecstatically and swiftly that I murmured something about …” only over too soon …” and at once Paul began to make love to me again. We lay there with my hand on him lax the way I liked to keep it after he had parted from my body, on the edge of making love a third time or going to sleep, each possibility as delightful as the other. Neither asleep nor making love, we lay there in the balance between the two, our eyes open, not speaking. The lights of cars we could not hear, turning the bend at the top of the hill, perhaps, traveled over us faintly, one after the other, a long pause, then another and another, slipping down the window and the wall and across the floor and over the bed — where each saw the other’s face come up silvered and the peaks of the bedclothes like a fold of hills — then up the other wall and over the ceiling into darkness.

I took my hand away.

I took it away instinctively, in answer to some other withdrawal. Paul did not move, but with each wash of light I felt come into my mind through his own, the real pain and strangeness of that conversation with the man Robert, and even the jokes of the others. And I knew Paul was thinking of it; feeling for himself the impossibility of a white man understanding these things out of his own security.

Just as I went off to sleep I had one of those curious starts in my mind — the mental equivalent of the jump of a leg or an arm momentarily jerking your body back to wakefulness — that flips up a piece of past consciousness. I did not remember that incident of the Sunday afternoon I went with Joel to Macdonald’s Kloof; for a moment I was there. The sun was down and the air smelled of dust and eucalyptus. I walked past the old Afrikaner packing up baskets and rugs. I called to Joel, Wait, there’s something stuck to my shoe — and he picked up a little piece of twig and scraped at my heel. And the torn thing was there.

The only difference was that this time, unlike the real time that it happened, we were not safe from disgust. We got into the car full of shame and I kept my face turned away from Joel, although I seemed to see his face all the same, as you do in a dream. And perhaps it was here that it all really became a dream, and I was asleep.

Chapter 25

I often ask myself now whether I was ever really happy at this time; and I find I must believe that I was. My measure of happiness so far — it changes all through life, like one’s idea of what age is getting old — is the intensity of my identification with living; those periods when I have known myself to be crawling through summer and winter like a slug falling listlessly from leaf to leaf have been the seasons of misery. And by this standard I was happy, though perhaps it was the kind of happiness that you can stand only once, and when you are very young.

The revelation of being well loved in the body is an astounding experience. It carried me along, buffeting through everything else that weighed in on me or harassed me, even the practical worries attendant upon itself. And there is no experience that gives one a closer feeling of being in life; in fact it is like an explanation without words that turns an abstraction into possessed reality.

Then, too, not only was Paul the source of this joy, he was also at grips with the huge central problem of our country in our time, something that had oppressed me not only in my intellect since I had grown old enough to have a concept of man’s freedom, but in my blood. What he could do was pitifully little and pitifully inadequate, but I was at that stage in idealism when the gesture was satisfying in itself. I believed then that the only way for a man to fulfill himself in South Africa was to pit himself against the oppression of the Africans. It did not matter in what way he did it; the thing was so sinister that there was hardly a job or profession where it was not implicit and the question did not come up, if not in so many words, a dozen times a day: Are you for them? Or will you add your weight against them, along with all the others? — And I believe this still, although I understand now the consequences of such a way of life, as I certainly did not do then; something that makes all the difference between one’s right to hold such a belief, and one’s unfitness to do so.

It seemed to me utterly satisfying that Paul should have chosen this job of his — hopelessly limited as it was by the whole framework in which it functioned — rather than some profession whose prizes and successes were really only relevant to the world of Europe where a man did not start off with the immediate advantage of a white skin. The fact that he was so small and the thing he put himself against so enormous and tangled gave me a peculiar pride in my love for him. — It gave our relationship something of the quality that heightens the excitement of love during a war; I do not mean the quickened urge to mate in the threat of death, which you may feel whether or no you believe in the war, but the more complicated sense of the passionate integrity for what you both believe, in which your lover exists in the midst of the heedless crashing hostility that comes from both sides, sometimes his own as well as the enemy’s.

Of course, I could never express to Paul this concept of himself. He would have laughed it out of existence and have been exasperated with and even ashamed of me; he would not have said so, but I should have felt he was thinking again: the Mine, the Mine, showing itself in the excessive reaction from a life without a single real idea, to the extremes of romantic idealism. And I should have been conscious again of the dowdy unsuitability of the way I wore some of my convictions; like a woman accepted in fashionable circles who sometimes gives away her forgotten provincialism in her choice of hats.

But often, when I looked at Paul without his knowledge, a queer swelling excitement came up in the back of my throat, I wanted to grip tightly the arms of the chair I sat in: I had it all; there …

Most of the time Paul came home very late and very tired. Out of the official work of the Department had grown a whole extension of activity that almost doubled it; the impatience of people like Paul with the inadequacy, sometimes the total unsuitability, of what the Department offered the African townships made them try to supply something of what was missing, out of themselves. It was impossible, for anyone who saw the Africans as men and women with the same wants and hopes as anyone else, to be satisfied to hand out food or clothes or money to those who lacked the basic necessities, and ignore all those other nagging and endless and less easily satisfied needs that showed everywhere, in every street and every face. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no hope of change. The young boys kicking a stone along the gutter because they have no ball and know no game. The schoolteachers and young clerks borrowing books from the little library (a charity handout of the discarded books of white people) and reading in the paper of the plays they can never see, the concerts they can never hear.

Paul and a few other people in the Department helped with the organization of discussion groups, supplied a portable player and the loan of records for a music society; found journalists and lawyers and actors to go out to the bare solemn rooms at the Community Center to lecture. They commandeered bats and rackets from the cupboards of their friends to give some purpose to the one or two open pieces of ground that the Department listed on its reports under “Sports Facilities.” And they became expert at filling in applications for Departmental funds in such a way as to avoid their narrow stringency and stretch their validity to cover expenditure that was officially “beyond the Department’s scope.” “But I’ll wangle it somehow,” I have often heard Paul say, telling me of some scheme for which money or facilities were not available. He would narrow his eyes and lift his chin while he thought what lie, what approach, would be best. And though he laughed at his own craftiness that had developed so efficiently out of necessity, there was in his eyes at these times he afterward mocked a concentration of determination, blank, grim, that he did not see.

One Friday night early in January we were coming home from a Brains Trust which had been held in one of the native townships. Gathered in the hall there had been the usual small group of subdued, expectant people; the air of awkwardness about them coming from the lack of group consciousness, the unfamiliarity of identifying himself with anyone that marks the intellectual who lives in a backward society and is accustomed to being the lone, the self-excluded. The joy of finding themselves among their own kind could not come to them as spontaneously as it did to the dancers of jive who filled the hall on other nights. When I came in, I felt a pang of anxiousness for the meagerness, the curious tameness of the whole show — something that, I knew by now, inexplicably vitiates efforts of this nature just as it does those occasions of genteel patronage when white people distribute prizes and shake their heads over the charm of black babies, or the skill of black handiwork. Paul dashed across the stage (six chairs were set out behind a long table, there was a carafe and a glass at one end) and I thought in a burst of irritation, Christ, why do they have to treat him as if he were a city councilor deigning to be present — why can’t they give him the due of thinking him a man, like themselves.

But the people whom Paul had asked to sit on the “Trust” were black as well as white, all interesting speakers and all public personalities in one way or another, and when the discussions got started and the surface of the audience’s solemn attention was broken up by the pleasure of interest, a buzz of murmur or dissent, and often — for one or two of the speakers were really witty — by laughter, audience and speakers forgot themselves in one another, and in this perfectly natural relationship between human beings, the whole thing became a success. It was obvious, too, that Paul’s personality had a lot to do with this. Here, as always among people, he had the instinct of giving them what they wanted and then taking fresh stimulation from the giving. And then he had the advantage of being, in himself, as perfectly at ease with both Africans and Europeans as any white man could be in our time; he knew most of the audience, the individual foible or special point of view, and when opinions from the floor were called for, he could look out over the heads and bring in a response by resting his eyes in a knowing, smiling, challenging way on the very person who would be likely to have strong feelings on the subject under discussion. I watched him, sitting and listening to the speakers between the times when he would have to rise and sum up the “Trust’s” opinion; his mouth opening a little with a quick intake of breath now and then when some comment on or disagreement with what was being said almost moved him to interrupt, his body curled up like a spring, one leg over the other, elbow in the palm of the hand of the arm that was tightly across his chest, fingers of the other hand, that pushed against his cheek, twirling a strand of hair at his temple. Once he screwed up his eyes and looked out quickly over the heads at me with the abstracted following air of someone who feels the attention of another like a reminder. I had the queer moment of seeing him look at me for a second as it must be when he looked at a stranger; and then he winked, the purposefully lewd batting of an eyelid that he sometimes used in a very different situation.

So coming home in the car I felt, over the slight uneasy excitement that the thought of the morning, nearer now, claimed me (my parents had arrived back from Europe on Wednesday; I was going to spend my first week end with them), animated by flashes of the evening on the surface of my mind. I chattered about it; what this one had said, how that one could possibly hold such-and-such an opinion — but did not have much response from Paul. He leaned forward a little as he drove, with a silencing movement. It was only then that, quite taken up with my own talk, I felt he had not been listening, or rather had been resisting what I said.

“—What is it—?”

He frowned. And after a moment when we both listened, I not knowing for what: “It’s nothing. That ticking again. Must be something in the mechanism of the clock, that vibrates at a certain speed.” He settled back and after a short silence the dusty bright hall began to light up in my mind again. “It must be a hell of a surprise to a man like Carter Belham to find himself answering awkward questions on the methods of the press, to old Fube. And Fube was at him and at him, with his, I’d like to ask you further, and There’s just one more point. … Did you see. Once or twice Belham simply blustered. There just wasn’t anything he could say.” My voice sank into my thoughts. Carter Belham, the big, brandy-suave editor of one of the newspapers belonging to a powerful conservative group, nipped into discomfiture by the dry voice of the native schoolteacher (the kind of “decent” scholarly African he was accustomed to pleasing by calling him “Mister”) asking if he could tell him if any directive was given to newspapermen reporting affairs affecting Africans? — The editor trying to turn the advantage to himself by putting on that air of good-natured helplessness which is intended to suggest the bulldog worried at by something small and sharp-toothed: the bulldog restrained in his very possession of his own invincible jaw. “I’ll bet he would never have come if he’d known it was going to be like that?”

But Paul seemed suddenly very tired and he let my talk drop. In a little while he said, out of silence: “Half of them weren’t there. Sipho and Fanyana and the others. The ones who count weren’t there.”

“Oh, I don’t know. How can you say that—”

He lifted his hands off the wheel in a slight shrug. “You get all enthusiastic. The reign of the ear of corn.” (He was referring to the line of a poem by Lorca that I liked—“a black boy to announce to the gold-minded whites the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn.”) “But they don’t come any more. And they’re the ones who count, the ones who’ve really got something. Without them the others don’t get anywhere, their ideas will remain where they were. It’s always like that; there are a few who … you know, you see the same thing among ourselves, in a crowd like Isa’s. The hangers-on and the boys whose heads move somewhere. The hangers-on can only go so far as the heads take them.” He said after a moment: “Sipho would have asked some questions, all right. Belham and Dr. Lettica would have heard some calm cold logic from that black boy. … That look of making allowances for the poor inarticulate savage — the way Belham looked encouraging every time anyone black got up to speak — by God, that would have dropped off his red face as if Sipho’d suddenly taken a rabbit out of his own mouth. — Hell, if they’d been there. — I wanted a chap like Belham to see that his conception of the thinking African is out of date and third hand, bears as much relation to the real thing as a circus-trained ape to a man.”

“But wasn’t Sipho at the debate last week?”

“I’ve told you, they don’t come any more.” There was a growing movement, among the Africans, of non-co-operation with the whites. It had started with the policy of the Communists and the leaders of African Nationalism as a semiofficial affair, but now it was spreading and becoming something quite different: a kind of distaste, even in those Africans who had European friends with whom they could mix on decent dignified terms, for anything that was inspired or assisted by white people. Sipho was a friend of Paul’s; it was he who (in his person and what he told) in the first place showed Paul the refinement of frustration that comes to the educated African. He had asked Paul to help him arrange lectures and music recitals for the small group of his own kind who were starved for some sort of diversion in a society where the only pleasures allowed to Africans were old Wild West films (specially chosen as suitable for the primitive mind), all-night jive sessions on what was imagined to be the Harlem pattern, and illicit drinking dens.

“Well, he’s cutting off his nose to spite his face.”

“He’s right — he’s perfectly right—” Paul’s profile was closed against me. He spoke as if he were impatient with himself. “Anyone with any guts must do the same.”

The ticking noise — which was not the running of the clock, for that had stopped at fourteen minutes to five some day long before I had even met Paul — was the only consciousness we shared for the rest of the way. It was somehow impossible for us to go on talking of Sipho because we sensed it would not really be talk of Sipho, but a dragging up and examination of what we had settled to live by: Paul in the job he did every day, I in the symbol I had made of him for myself. Shut off from each other by this, something else that was unshareable, but this time for different reasons, took me up and washed me that much further away from this loved person whose familiar head, like a beautiful shell from which the inhabiting creature is absent, was only a little higher than mine in the dark, and whose elbow, as he changed gear, touched against my arm unnoticed. A light sick nervousness for tomorrow flowed back to me from where it had been waiting. Anything connected with home always brought up with it the emotional reactions of childhood, so that if I thought of something pleasurable related to Atherton and my parents, I would not feel the mild, easy sense of the pleasant with which I would be impressed by a pleasure on the same level arising out of my adult, independent life, but the high-flown excitement with which a child invests the trivial. Now, when I was entirely independent of my parents and their mores, the thought of going home to Atherton tomorrow and explaining that I was living with Paul reduced me to the feeling of chilly hollowness, damp-palmed and with my stomach tightened inside me, that I had known the day before a music examination. The fact that I was ashamed of this feeling, and could refute it utterly over and over in my reason, did not shift it. It remained sitting there inside my body like some old genie, released by the word “Atherton” to possess me.

And I could not speak of it to Paul. It did not belong with our life and I did not want to show it to him. It could only show him a girl I might have been whom he could not have loved; whom he would never have bothered to know — whom, in fact, he would never have met.

From the corner of the car into which I had curled myself I looked at him, tightening and releasing the corner of his mouth at his thoughts. Of Sipho. Of the evening. If he thought about my silence at all, thinking it to be the same as his own. As we came through the town (people were winding out of the cinemas, breaking up like confused ants round the parked cars) an astonishing loneliness came out of me. I say came out of me because that was how I became aware of it: as the thin-drawn music of a street musician comes out of the noise of a street. You lift up your head as if all the clamor had been silence and this sound is the first you have heard for a long time.

In the lift I said to him: “What are you going to do tomorrow?” and he looked up and smiled and then looked inquiring for a moment and said: “—Oh, of course—! You won’t be here. Well, then, I think I’ll ring John in the morning and see if they’d like to see a picture. Have to be a late show.”

“Why, what’s happening in the afternoon?”

“I’m going to plant grass. Really. The new sports field at Jabavu.”

We eyed each other in the distorting greenish light of the lift and we both laughed, as people do when they have not forgotten a quarrel. In the morning we woke very early and I began to talk as I could never resist doing when I knew he was awake, no matter what the time. He slid his thigh between mine and scratched my neck with his beard. “Hell, darling, why do you have to go for a whole week end?” I began to kiss him and caress him with a desire born of reluctance; of the empty excited nausea that was back with me again the moment I wakened, making my very presence there with him unreal. Yet there was the familiar miracle I could never take for granted — how, from sleeping so close together, when we wakened our bodies were always both at exactly the same temperature of gentle warmth, so that for a few drowsy minutes it was difficult to tell the touch of your own limbs, one against the other, from the touch of the other’s.

The character of that warmth changed in him now.

I said dubiously—“I ought to get something.” “Oh, damn.” I loved the way he looked at me, glittering, demanding. At times like this when my whole body suddenly began to flow in desire for him, there was a moment of perfect tension, of balance before the terrifying slither down the sheer. And in that balance, the sight of a state that exists only between the here and now, and the measureless streaming of time from which we take up the little scoopfuls of here and now, I expressed my snatch at it, empty-aired, dissolving, in the wildly emotional compulsion to caress Paul’s face and head, that, though passion and the knowledge of being wanted made joyful, had something in it of the way a woman falls upon the face of someone dead; seeking to possess what is beyond the reach of lips, the touch of hands.

We exist on so many levels at once.

At the same time I was aware of the faint smell of soap round Paul’s ears; the ringing of an alarm clock in the flat below that came through in dull vibration, like a shudder; and the half-threat of fear that would come back to exact its due, almost superstitiously, for my practical carelessness.

Chapter 26

I did not say anything to my mother until Sunday afternoon.

I had intended to tell her quite simply and flatly as soon as I got home, but I went through the whole of Saturday and Saturday night and Sunday morning and Sunday lunch with the words in my mouth, while at the same time all the things I did say and the whole manner of behavior in which I let myself get more and more involved, made them more impossible to be spoken. On Saturday when I arrived there was the present-opening — they had brought me a great many, and they produced the really beautiful things (there was an Italian silk shawl of the kind I had always wanted, and a wonderful hat made entirely of peacock feathers) and the hideous things (a set of “souvenir” wall plaques of London, made out of pottery molded in relief, a thistle brooch from Scotland with “Weel ye no come back again?” engraved round it) with a puzzling impartiality of triumph. Then at five o’clock there were “a few friends over a drink” and I found myself bending about, in the “good” frock I had fortunately brought with me, offering the plates of decorated biscuits and hot sausage rolls I had helped my mother prepare earlier. The arch tone of this gathering — the Cluffs, the Bellingans, the Compound Manager and his wife, and one or two other officials, who were accustomed to keeping in mind the occasion of a “party” rather than merely enjoying eating and drinking and company for their own sake — extended to include me. I was being “welcomed back” too, if only from Johannesburg; I had not been seen on the Mine during the six months my parents were in Europe. When I was chaffed, usually by the men who had “seen me grow up,” I responded with the same smile of deprecating my own sense of privilege that my mother was showing, near me, as she chatted and answered questions about her holiday, conscious of the new clothes and the obviously English shoes at which she could feel the other woman looking. Old Mrs. Cluff had her arm round me as she rose to go. “She’s grown into a lovely girl, Jess. — You were always my little lass, weren’t you? — That’s right. I used to tell you, didn’t I, Jess, there’s nothing like a daughter.” And my mother — she had put on weight in England, and had had her hair cut in a new way, so that on the animation of two or three drinks, her face seemed to have changed from the way it was when I was a child, rather than got older — saw us suddenly in the relationship that the old lady created, and paused in her high-pitched amiability to say with sudden emotion: “Yes, and I suppose I’ll be losing her soon.” The old lady shook her head like one of those big benevolent figures that nod in shop windows at Christmas. “A son’s a son till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all her life. …”

On Sunday morning I heard my mother up early and from the called consultations with Anna between the other rooms of the house and the kitchen, I knew that one of those total reorganizations of cupboards which had always followed our return from a holiday ever since I could remember was in energetic progress. This time, because she had been away so long and brought back a fair number of new things, the upheaval was on a larger scale than usual; standing beside her, directed to put this there and hand her that, with my father looking on, I thought: She is making space in their life for the fact of having been to England.

My father had not put on any weight. Thin, but more bright-skinned than usual, whether from the cold in Europe or the heat of the latter half of the passage home, I did not know, he did not keep away from us in some reading or other occupation of his own, as he used to do, but hung about on the edge of my mother’s activity. Once or twice he ventured a mild protest: “What are you doing with that, Jess?”—My mother ignored him and threw onto the pile of things to be discarded the old golf umbrella with the broken spoke. She had a peculiar venom, as if they were conscious enemies, for things which she suddenly decided had outlived their margin of possible usefulness, and were therefore occupying her cupboard unlawfully. “The whole lot’ll do fine for the jumble sale. If they’re still holding them the third Tuesday of every month, I won’t have it cluttering up the garage too long.” (It fascinated me to see how quickly and unthinkingly she was taking up the order of her life from the Mine again; the six months among other peoples, in other countries, sucked smoothly in, passed along and assimilated by the Mine like a lump, rather larger than usual, taken in by a snake.)

But mostly my father “fed” my mother as if they were partners in an act. “Wouldn’t mind being there now, eh?”—he pointed his pipe at a little painted wooden gypsy caravan they had bought in St. Ives to give to Maureen Eliot’s small boy. “Oh that creamed trout! And the view from our window …!” She shook her head as she sprinkled moth killer on a shelf of spare blankets. She twisted her head round to him. “Tell Helen about the fisherman who thought you had your own gold mine.”

And my father told the story, taken up here and there and expanded by my mother, and then handed back to him again while she waited, smiling, for the well-known point—“Co on, you go on.”

It seemed to me that in this unconscious pantomime of acting as a foil for each other, they oddly achieved a kind of intimacy that I had never seen between them before.

At lunch we had a bottle of red wine — because they thought I should like it, I knew. “—It may be cheap there,” said my mother, “but you can’t get a decent cup of tea anywhere in Italy.” I drank it although I dislike red wine and I talked all the time I ate, about how hot it had been at Christmas, and the muddle-up there had been at the post office about a cable they had sent me before they left, and the way the piece of chiffon my mother wanted to know about had turned out when it was made up. I talked about the camping week end that Jenny and John and Paul and I had planned for what proved to be the wettest week end for five years … and, warming to it, my heart beating fast at the horrible homeliness of my duplicity, I told my mother that Jenny was expecting another baby, and … “Well, she’s quite right. They’re young people, and I suppose he’s doing quite nicely now; they might as well have their family while they’re young.”

After lunch my father went to lie down. He said the wine had turned sour on his stomach, but he had that hazy pleasant look of wanting to drop down somewhere and doze that goes with wine that has agreed with one almost too well. My mother and I went to sit on the veranda, where it was cool. She was knitting; some special wool she had bought herself in Scotland. Her chatter died away, perhaps also because of the wine. I sat there with my heart beating up faster and faster. After a few minutes of sunny, warm silence she said to the bird dangling in his cage: “Chrr-ip, chrr-ip, eh? Chrrip!” and looked back to her knitting.

I said: “Mother, I should have told you I’m not living with the Marcuses any more, I’m living with Paul.”

Her face suddenly came alive out of its content of food and relaxation. She looked at me with the quick intense suspicion of an adult hearing from the mouth of a child something it cannot possibly know.

Then her glance stumbled; it was like a nervous tic catching a face unaware.

“What do you mean?”

And while she spoke coldness hardened into her face, it became something I have never known in the face of anyone else, possibly because the face of no one else could make that impression on me: stern.

“I’ve been living with him in his flat ever since he was sick.”

“You’re living with a man, living with a man as if you were married to him.” She stopped. “Living with this man and lying, writing letters and lying — What do you want? To end up on the street?”

I thought with a rising distress of panic, I knew she’d do this; it’s ridiculous — she’s making it a tragedy, terrible, world-comedown, hateful. She’s twisting it up into hysteria. But she had done it already; I was in it, shaking before her horror of myself.

I said: “It’s not like that. Don’t be silly, we’re going to get married anyway. People now—”

“Yes, they’ve got no respect for anything, you’ve got no respect for yourself. And what kind of a person is he, to behave like that with a girl from a decent home. … Women who must have a man to sleep with. Women who can’t live without a man. A university education to live with a man. How can women be such filthy beasts?”

All the time she had never taken her eyes off me.

She began to weep, and I saw that now that she was older she cried like other women; it was no longer hard for her to cry, and so it no longer had any more meaning than the simple relief of other women’s tears. I cannot explain the strong strain of peculiar joy that seized me, apparently so irrelevantly, as I understood this, so that I could say quite commandingly, “Don’t cry, if Daddy hears you cry he’ll be alarmed.”

“I don’t want to see you,” she said, and already it seemed in her face that she no longer saw me, “I don’t want you in this house again. You understand that?”

The peculiar joy swept into hatred. I hated her for leaving me, for blaming me, for making me care that she did. I trembled with hatred that for a moment made me want to laugh and weep and abuse; and that left me hot and cold at the escape of knowing that that was what she wanted: that that was how she wanted me to behave.

My father came in and the whole scene was gone through again, but in myself I was stubborn; it was over. I was sitting it out.

We even had tea before my father took me to the station. In silence as if someone had died. While we were sitting at the dining-room table drinking, the smell of the room when I bent over the table painting from my color box as a child came to me, immediate, complete, unaltered. The print-smell of the pile of English newspapers, the oil-smell of furniture polish, the cool dark fruit-smell from the dish on the sideboard; and the smell of ourselves, us three people, my father, my mother and me, with which everything in the house was impregnated like objects in a sandalwood box, and that, when I took out something from home in the atmosphere of the flat or the Marcuses’ house, gave me the queer feeling of momentarily being aware of myself as a stranger.

Chapter 27

As soon as I got into the train I dropped back my head and closed my eyes: Paul. Paul; Paul. I know that I should have liked to have said the name aloud, but opposite me in the empty carriage was a very young Afrikaans girl with a daughter of four or five years old, curled and hatted and hung about with trinkets, like her mother. Like her mother she was utterly composed, silent, absorbed in the trance of her Sunday best. She played with a little bangle engraved “Cecilia,” and stared at me without curiosity, as if she were measuring what I thought of her.

When the train jerked into motion I thought: Now; I shall soon be there. And my desire to say Paul’s name, as the little girl had to feel the shape of her bangle, I turned into a little movement of a smile with my lips.

I scarcely opened my eyes again until we reached Johannesburg. In the peculiar bright confusion that comes down with the felty blood-darkness of one’s eyelids, the clear images of the afternoon that had passed, the whole two days, were pushed away in a jumble, like the swept-up bits of a broken mirror. I hung to the thought of Paul that swelled, image, word and sound the way one’s last conscious thought looms and expands before sleep or anesthesia. In that darkness he was my one reality. It seemed that he must be thousands of miles away, unattainable in yearning. I could not believe that in less than an hour I should be standing in an ordinary call box hearing his voice matter of fact and that I should see him walking down the platform looking for me. …

When we got to Johannesburg station I was trembling and sweating as I jumped down from the train and pushed my way through the people, murmuring nervous apologies and holding my head high and anxious. The telephone in the first box was dead and I rushed into the next one. It smelled bad and I dropped my handbag and parcels and week-end case on the dirty floor and lifted the receiver in anxiety. The dry, snoring sound came back. I dialed and could hear my own breathing, harsh in that small space.

The bell rang only once and in the middle of the second ring Paul answered it and I heard his hello. I don’t know what I had expected, but even though the fact of its ringing on unanswered would have meant nothing more than that he was out at one of two or three places where I could easily have got him, I knew the moment I heard his voice that if there had been no answer the ringing of the telephone would have dropped me into a fearful despair. There was a second’s shudder at what I might have felt and as my face crinkled in relief at the sound of his voice, I saw the magnifying line of tears lifted in my eyes. Through them the scratched walls of the call box came alive.

“For God’s sake come and fetch me. Quick. I’m in an awful public telephone thing that smells.”

“Well”—he was questioning the excitement in my voice—“well, so you’re here. Why didn’t you phone, may I ask?”

“I did. On Saturday. But you weren’t there—”

“You knew I’d be at Jabavu.”

“Yes — I forgot. And then I couldn’t. — I can’t explain now. I’ll come to the front entrance. Eloff Street.”

“No, come to the side.”

“The baggage drive-in side? All right. … But be quick!”

I saw him. He seemed to grow along the street out of my watching. I dropped my things all over the seat and the floor of the car and pulled his head down in my arms and kissed him. It was all very awkward with my one knee on the seat and the end of my handbag sticking into my side. But I felt his warm mouth (I could taste fruit on it) and I dug my fingers into his linen jacket and I shut my eyes for a moment against those eyes and that high freckled forehead and that beautiful nose that I loved more than ever now that I knew its one secret fault, a displacement of the septum that at a certain angle spoiled its line. He pressed his hand tightly into my back, surprised but ready.

“You’ve been eating a naartje,” I said.

We both saw him, lying on the bed dropping the curls of fruit skin on the floor.

“Cursing like hell because you didn’t come home.”

Quite suddenly we did not know what to say; he feeling the obligation of my smile, that smile of relief and wonder that holds your face with the intensity of a frown and that you are powerless to control.

So he drove us home to the flat rather fast and the great need to talk, to tell him, became curiously not urgent, but something that could rest in the surety that it could be told at any time; I did not want to speak at all. He swirled down into the basement garage and, in the gloom pungent of petrol, pulled me over to him and kissed me passionately. “Was it bad—? Me, too. …” I kissed him back in the dissimulation — not something you do not feel, but something that you do not feel at the particular time when perhaps the other does — that webs over the great spaces between the moments of identity which create love. And out of the knowledge, half guilt, half regret, that it had not been possible to miss him in this way during the week end, all the irritation and anger and resentment of the very things that had made it impossible, that pushed it out in the much stronger need of something else from him, burst up urgently in me again.

I said: “Oh, Paul, do you know what she said when I told her—”

He was leaning into the back of the car, where we had thrown the parcels. “Told her what? What’s all this loot?”

“Told her about us. She said I was disgusting. She said: ‘You’re a filthy beast.’ “The ring of my own voice came back from the low concrete girders of the dark place … thy beast.

There was a snort from the car. He slammed the door, looked over the parcels, laughing explosively. “Oh, Christ, no! Did she? Did she call you a Magdalen, Jezebel? Did she? Did she really—?”

His laughter came back, too, rings of sound thrown smaller and smaller until they closed in on my ears again. He jerked his chin over the parcels to urge me up the steps. “Come on, what’s the matter with you—?”

He said, walking where I could feel him, just behind me up the dingy narrow flight: “Hell, that tickles me. … Didn’t you want to laugh in her face?”

“Yes,” I said.

I felt, like some secret horror walled up inside me, beating on the walls with cries that nobody but I should ever hear, the panic and anger of being under my mother’s eyes. I saw her gaze hardening over me. … (The minute before, she had called to the bird, and the bird had answered her. …) Woman who … Filthy beasts.

I said, in that tone of laying something before the other which one uses when one no longer knows what one is saying will mean to him: “She says she doesn’t want me in the house again.”

“Naturally. Even the turn of phrase — not ‘want you in the house’—Come here, beast”—he caught me by my hair and, putting his head round over my shoulder, kissed me clumsily, a little roughly, not quite finding my mouth in the semi-dark. Amused, he whispered to me some private little formula of endearment, the kind of thing that can only be spoken and never written down.

Tears came up in my eyes, and when we came to the light of the ground floor and the lift, I held my eyes very wide and glassy so that he should not see.

But already he was talking of something else, and as I put my things down in the flat, hesitantly touching at this and that, I roused myself to what he was saying—“So what did you do after that?”—He had just said that the grass-planting had gone on until after six.

“Guess where I had supper?” The ridge of his nose was burned, he looked at me challenging, smiling.

I don’t know why — out of weariness, out of depression, perhaps, it flew into my mind: “Isa’s.”

He laughed impatiently. “With Sipho.”

“Oh? How did that happen?”

“He turned up at the field at about half-past five — just happened to be strolling by, of course. … Came straight over to talk to me, but we couldn’t really talk there, so I went home with him.”

“But isn’t he against the field?”

Paul sat down in the big chair. He said with an air of grudging pride: “They’re going to boycott the field. Nobody will use it. They held a meeting afterward — on the field. Sipho spoke damn well. And the colored man from Newclare I told you about. But I don’t trust him, he’s too glib, he’s already picked up all the catch phrases of international politics. Inevitable rogue getting on the band wagon. But there were a lot of simple blokes in the crowd — good crowd — and they just blinked back at him the way they do. Sipho — I don’t know how to explain it — he’s got compassion, that’s it, real compassion. He can afford to say simply what he feels because he really does feel. And you can’t fool a crowd like that. They seemed to smell out the truth in him. Not that he isn’t clever, too; but he does the dramatic thing instinctively, not calculating its effect. Like the field. The field just naturally handed to him the perfect example of the useless good will — the good old Christian kindness, the pat on the head to reconcile the dog to the kind master holding the chain (pretty good? that’s Sipho’s own) — that is no longer any good to the African. ‘We don’t want kindness, we must have freedom. …’ “He fell into restless silence, his glance wavering from object to object in the room, composing an horizon of its own out of the shapes of my parcels (that peak contained the plaques of London); the drop to the floor where the shoes that I had kicked off lay; the jagged rise past the desk to the window. There was an irritation in him, waiting for me to say: so you were planting grass for the field one hour and applauding its boycott the next. …

Bewilderment and a sense of confusion close to fear came to me so strongly that I stood there, unable to go through even the mechanical motions of hanging away my clothes, finding something for supper. This feeling, like an overwhelming lethargy, seemed to come from the room itself; all the ordinary things I had used, taken and put down thoughtlessly in my happiness, filled me with depression. The lamp, the faded quilt, the yellow cushion I had bought, the Egyptian cotton hanging, the ebony mask from the Congo in whose mouth there hung the flower I had stuck there last week, now dead, dangling like a cigarette stub. Where is he? How will one half of him spend his life working at what the other half opposes? How will he do it? How can you do it? Where will he be himself, all the time? The mask. The quilt. Calendar ringed in red (last month’s date so that I shall make no mistake this month). Stitched Egyptians with their long cold eyes. Plant in pot that didn’t let anything grow. Nothing has anything to do with anything else, I thought. How can he do it. What will become of him, while he does …

And at the same time, my mother’s mouth saying, Filthy beasts. The living room with the cushions plumped and the curtains drawn and the clock striking alone, like a sleeper speaking suddenly in a dream.

Nothing fits, I repeated to myself. Ridiculous, one side; horrible, hurtful, the other. But of course it was ridiculous. I could see my mother and me in that scene now and of course it was ridiculous, flinging about like puppets. Of course it was ridiculous. …

Paul said, with the attention of his eye, his mind sunk deeply somewhere else: “What is in there, anyway.”

I looked at the parcels. “Some things they brought me. Put them on top of the bathroom cupboard.” I felt I should never open them.

The next day I was walking out of a theater booking office during my lunch hour when I came face to face with Joel Aaron: with a little start of horror, as if Atherton, the Mine, my mother, had suddenly opened before me in the Johannesburg street. I covered this recoil which even in the second that I knew it must be showing on my face shamed me, by pretending an exaggerated surprise. — That in itself was unconvincing, I realized as I feigned it, because why should I find it a shock to meet someone whom I knew to be fre quently in town? — But one awkwardness leads to another, and I could only say with an effusiveness which did not belong with Joel, and did just exactly what I wished not to do: put him in the category of a stranger: “What are you doing now? — Why don’t I ever see you!”

He stood there looking up and down my face as if he were measuring it, faintly smiling. He was getting heavier in the shoulders; he wore the kind of jacket he had always worn, shabby or merely nondescript, one could never decide. He said absently: “Drawing houses.”

“Joel! You graduated at the beginning of the month.” Shame and regret stunned me like a slap across the mouth. I did not know how to express it. I stood there turning the tickets in my hand. He shrugged, smiling.

“I should have been there. Oh, I wanted to come. …” But of course the notice of the graduation ceremony had been in the papers. He knew and I knew that I had known about it.

I kept saying, “… Oh, how could I have … I wanted to, really I meant to … I shouldn’t have missed …”

He did not answer, but only went on smiling quietly, as if waiting for me to finish.

My protests petered out into silence between us. People passing jostled against our shoulders so that we seemed to be bobbing toward and away from one another. At once he said over this: “How do you like the work in the Welfare Department? Is it giving you some satisfaction?”

“It’s not much, you know. Nothing more than a typist really. How did you know?”

“I was in the shop on Tuesday, and they told me you weren’t working there any more.”

There was another silence. I pushed back a strand of hair that kept blowing down over my eye with a gesture that, I suppose, to someone who knew me well, was particularly my own: I have always liked my hair tight and smooth. I saw his eyes travel with my hand; come back to rest directly on my face again. I had the curious feeling that I was apparently always to have with him, no matter what distance of time or commitment to others came between our meetings, that he saw in me what no one else did, things, even ordinary, trivial, physical differences of which only I myself was aware. For instance, I felt now that he noticed that I had not penciled my eyebrows that morning (they were heavy, for a red-haired person, but too light in color) and that under his eyes I was tautening the muscle at the left side of my mouth that would show where I had got the faint line, from cheek to mouth, that I had surprised on my face lately.

“It really isn’t much of a job at all …,” I said again.

“Paul’s must be pretty damnable now, though,” he said. It was a polite and sympathetic observation that anyone who read the papers and knew Paul might make. But again I had that feeling of the prescience of Joel; something disturbing, that I felt in some obscure way was a comfort, but that I was impelled to struggle against.

Now suddenly I was impatient to get away from him.

“With his temperament, it’s likely to make him schizoid.” I turned the question into the exaggeration of a joke. We went on to talk inconsequentially for a few moments. — He must promise to come and see us (he wrote down the telephone number on a cigarette box; I wrote his — he was sharing a flat with Rupert Sack — on the theater tickets). — That was a good play; he had seen it on Saturday night. His job was in the nature of marking time. … — Oh, he didn’t quite know yet: maybe Rhodesia, after all. Maybe Europe, and lately he’d been thinking seriously about Israel. …

“Well—” I made the little shrugging gesture of collecting myself to go. “Yes …” He pushed the cigarette box into his pocket and touched me momentarily, so lightly it might have been by mistake, on the elbow.

As I turned, and he was already a little distance from me, I suddenly called back: “I was there yesterday. I spent the week end. …”

He nodded. “Been away, I know. … See them about again now I suppose.” And he nodded again, deliberately, lingeringly, as if the nod were some message he must get to me silently over the distraction of the passing people.

So we both stood a moment arrested in the current of the pavement. And then he was gone and I turned quickly and hurried across the street walking fast in the kind of burst of release. The refrain went foolishly inside me: I don’t want to think of the place, I don’t want to be reminded of it.

But when the relief of fast movement was checked and I stood, panting a little, in the lift going up to my desk in the Welfare offices, remorse, the real pain of wanting back the chance to do something left undone, that I do not think I had ever felt in my life before, filled me with distress; distress maddening and sad in its uselessness. I should have gone to his graduation, how was it I did not go when I had wanted to go so much: now I felt so much how I had wanted to go. How could I have ignored this—forgotten. Yes, I had forgotten. Now I could not believe what was true: that I had forgotten. The thought of it, like awareness of a lapse of memory, an aberration of which you have no recollection; as if there is discovered to be another person in you who mysteriously wrests you from yourself and takes over, thrusting you back to yourself in confusion when the fancy takes it — the thought of it made me sick with dismay. I had the instinct to clutch, searching at my life, like a woman suddenly conscious of some infinitesimal lack of weight about her person that warns her that something has gone, dropped — perhaps only a hairpin, a button — but maybe a jewel, a precious letter.

As I sat down before my typewriter, I thought: It’s as if I haven’t slept, it’s as if since after lunch yesterday until now has been one continuous day, without the divisions of a normal day, on and on. …

The line of patient natives waiting to see Paul when he would come in later in the afternoon turned the yellow-whites of their eyes on me, and away again.

Chapter 28

Sometimes when I came back to the flat earlier than Paul, I would go out onto the little balcony and sit balanced on the wall, my head against the partition which divided our flat from the one next door. Often I had not even troubled to wash or to put my things away; I simply came in, dropped to the bed what I was holding, and wandered out.

In the late summer, this was the best hour of the day. And the day usually had been a monotonous one; the offices in the old shadowy building which seemed, as you looked in, as cool as a dairy, were damply stuffy, the odor of old documents tightly stored by vanished tenants coming out in the heat like an invisible stain reappearing on a wall; and the reports I typed, the letters I wrote were the mechanical reproduction of someone else’s record of rigidly circumscribed methods of dealing with certain recurrent situations. The calm repetition of the work that came to my desk every day brought alive for me Paul’s flat statement that no case was ever finished, except by death. They came once, they will come again. The poverty of the Africans was a wheel to which they were tied; turn, and it will run its weight over them again. So the same letter, the same reports. And if you cut them free of the wheel, that will be the end of white civilization, said some. … Anyway, white civilization is doomed, said others. …

Perhaps my job was more useful than the one I had had selling novels to leisured women.

I sat on the edge of the balcony, shut out even from the flat. It was like being in a cage suspended from the invisible ceiling of the sky, and what went on in the sky was at my level. If I did not look down I could forget altogether the existence of the street, and the human perspective which is the perspective of the street, and to which, once your feet are on the ground, you are fixed. The new flats going up opposite had reached only the second floor and the building was not yet high enough to block out my sky, to present, like a juggling act, a layer of human activity, figures moving about among chairs, tables, enclosures of light, hundreds of feet up in the air. But the life of the sky, leisured, awesome in the swift changes from calm to storm that human beings can only understand emotionally, in terms of anger and love, beauty and ugliness;—the life of the sky, analogous only to the sea, usually so far above our heads that we have given it to the gods, was suddenly discovered to me. Clouds took the place of trees, and the light, breaking up space in suffusion or falling, falling, straight, sharp, swift, had an architecture of its own. Now and then a bird opened suddenly like a fan past my face. And the soft clouds moved plumped up on their flattened bases like the breasts of birds resting on water. Sometimes they piled into tableaux; held the last of the sun on their gleaming contours; dissolved, with something like lack of interest, into thinning wisps parted and reparted to nothing against the air.

Often, in twenty minutes, I saw the whole of a summer storm, enacted for me but not involving me.

In a patch of dark suffusion over the outskirts of Johannesburg that I could not see, I could hear thunder prowling; now and then striking out at the sky with a vicious claw that drew lightning. Torn somewhere, the dark cloud slowly emptied itself of a queer dark ragged streak of rain that fell awkwardly, sideways, and did not not seem to reach down to the earth at all. It was difficult to believe that this was what was happening when I crossed the street sometimes in a brassy, threatening light between city buildings, and suddenly felt the warm wet drops splotching my arms. But from up here I saw the rain peter out, like a tap drizzling off as it is tightened. And soon there was only a lavender-gray haze where the storm had been, or where it moved off, a mixture of the benign and malignant, to come down again somewhere else.

If I had had to give a name to what I was doing when I sat out there alone and idle for half an hour, an hour, I suppose I should have said I was waiting for Paul. Yet I did not think of him. When I came out I shut the glass balcony door behind me; with a twitch of recollection, I might catch sight of my hands, carbon-grimed along the sides of the fingers. But I did not think of him, of his closed face haughty with irritableness, or talking with a burst of expansiveness, swagger and exaggeration too tense to be funny, after two or three brandies had put a match to his weariness. I did not think of him; or of my father, from whom I had had a letter; or of my mother, from whom I had heard nothing and whose silence had become visual for me: her chin pressed back to her neck and her nostrils whitening; or the half-funny, half — I did not know quite what — difference between the picture of my life that they resented and were shocked by, and my life as it really seemed to be. Or the drifting gap between the way I myself believed I was living, and the way the days themselves passed. I did not think of any of this. The shuttle of my mind was still. In the unhuman context of the airscape there was nothing to set it going again, endlessly crossing this with that in terrible industry that had none of the anarchic freedom of confusion, but the inescapable determinism of a complicated pattern. Even my eyes moved slowly among the large movements of the clouds, that melted, merged, altered without the human quality of will without which people cannot change. If I felt anything at all (unconscious of the brick hard under my thighs and the building behind me, the body which by the differences in the desires and vanities in it gauges for one what the mind, which lives differently, does not always know: whether one is a child, young or old) — if I felt anything at all, it was something nearest to, but not the same as, the feeling that had closed softly down upon me as a child, when I had gone out under the fir trees or the gum plantation in the early morning or late afternoon, or when I had lain down suddenly in long uncut grass, and the physical change of discarding balance seemed to change me instantly and magically and everything was drained from my consciousness except the movement of blood in my head that made me believe I could feel the earth turning, and myself curved close against it, not falling off. …

When I heard the front door bang, at once very far off and narrowing to the immediate, somewhere behind me, I would swing my legs down, jump. He’s here. For a moment, the glass door in front of me. My heart beat up slowly, as if with effort. For another moment, I did not open the door.

But the minute the door was flung carelessly, he stood there;—it was all right. It was as if I waited for someone who, 0 relief, had not come. And every day it was repeated, this anticipation like dread, that was instantly foolish and nonexistent once I saw him. For he was Paul, of course. It was as if this was something I had forgotten. Paul with his freckled brow — and see, the things we said, the ordinary, warm commonplace things. (Why don’t they dust off your ears properly? — He runs his nail along the rim of his ear, where the barber has left a scattering of hair cuttings. I turn his head round as if I were looking at a vase. Well, at least it’s not too short at the back this time. No, well, the usual man’s away this week. Then why don’t you change and always go to this one? Oh, I can’t — their feelings are easily hurt. And I like him. He’s gone to Ganzbaai to fish and it’s only the second time he’s seen the sea. When he was seventeen he went to Durban on a motorcycle.)

“What’s the matter with your behind?” he noticed one evening.

I was rubbing where the wall had cut into my thigh and now the blood was pricking back. “Gone to sleep,” was all I said. He went to the kitchen for a bottle of soda. I took it from him to open while I held it out the window, because he was bad at opening bottles and always let them fizzle out over the floor. “Hell, Helen, you’re becoming a rotten wife. You might have put food on.” He had seen the empty stove.

“I was tired.”

“If that job tires you …” He smiled, sighing, pouring out our drinks.

I took my glass in silence.

“Oh, don’t start, now, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “I can’t even joke. If you’re that bored, you can change it. The Department will go on without you. There probably isn’t anything it couldn’t go on without, that Department. It matters so little whether it goes on or not, and whether it goes forward or backward. … — You wanted it badly enough. You pestered me to get it for you, and I told you at the time—” He stopped, looking at me over his drink with annoyance that I felt was more at himself than at me.

Yet I said, watching the way he always sat, one shoe rolled over underneath the sprawl of his leg: “I’m not bored.”

“Disappointed. Well, I’m sorry. I told you it’d be as dull as ditchwater. You might as well sit and knock out brewery orders. Sell ladies’ underwear.”

We said nothing.

His eyes traveled round the room for the ash tray which he expected not to be, and was not, there; he dropped two dead matches into the neck of the empty soda bottle. I stood against the window sill, taking my drink in regular gulps, like medicine.

At last he said suddenly, as if he was giving in to an insistent importunity he had refused to hear: “Oh, come on. Come here—” And his voice was impatient, sullen and pleading, all at once. He drew me down to him awkwardly, pulling at my arm, and we kissed anxiously. When we kissed out of longing his mouth was warm and firm, drawing me in softly; now he tried to impress the kiss upon me so hard that it was not a kiss, but a distinct awareness of certain separate things, his lips, the wetness of his saliva, the sharp edges of his teeth. Yet his eyes were a little dazed, as when we had been kissing in passion, although he looked at me keenly, almost suspiciously, as if to dare the appearance of something he was watching out for. Close to his face, I gazed at him unashamedly, watching him watch me, and the alien quality of this moment between us, the incongruity of it, a moment so detached, lonely and critical that it had no place in the merging exchanges of love, surprised us both in quick guilt at the same instant, as if one, resigning himself to his own untrustworthiness with the regret because of the unquestioned integrity of the other, went to steal a treasure known to both and found the other in the act of stealing it. … He slid his hand over the smooth material that covered my thigh, and smiled with the corner of his mouth. “Pins and needles? Shame. Shame. … I’ll wake it up, this little rump. … These bloody Indians. I spent an hour and a half trying to persuade a Diagonal Street fruit merchant to let a colored family stay on in his house in Vrededorp. He’s got an eviction against them and they can’t find anywhere else to go. After seven years or so. Says he wants the place to turn it into workrooms for his brother who’s a tailor. He can’t find anywhere.” He was looking at his hand on my thigh with close attention, his eyelashes showing against his cheek, his nostrils drawn down toward his mouth, the way an artist regards a composition assembled for a painting. He pressed his fingers gently into the flesh, watching his nails whiten, then slowly relax into pink again. “Quite true of course. Where can an Indian get a shop? He was sorry, but family must come first. If we can find his brother a shop … Swine. Wouldn’t give them even another month.”

After a moment he shook his head and said: “See …?”—placing himself before himself and me.

I knew what he meant; how he had caught himself out, thinking, almost by infection, the way that he fought all day against people thinking. He was annoyed with the landlord because he was being hard and unreasonable: the fact that the man was an Indian had no bearing on the hardness or the unreasonableness.

I gently detached myself from him — I could never bring myself to move away from Paul’s lightest caress abruptly; it was as if I feared always to break something that might never be made intact again — and went to the kitchen. Steak in the refrigerator, two tomatoes, half an avocado pear. Paul had balanced the pip on matchstick supports over a marmalade jar filled with water. The steak looked bright red, tough, long fibered. As I pounded it with the handle of the bread knife to soften it, I saw that the pip had already parted and let one pale string of root down into the water. Nearly half-past seven. You’re a rotten wife, Helen.

As I cooked and all the small noises of cooking rose up around me in the little dark kitchen that smelled always of curry, I thought, It’s funny, we hardly ever talk about marriage now. Neither of us has mentioned it for months. We were going to get married when my parents came back.

Yet I could not imagine it. Moving with mechanical deftness that was not without a certain pleasure in the doing of a number of simple things at once — turning the steak, freeing the eggs from the edge of the pan, keeping an eye on the toast — I said to myself, Feel it; just like this, yet you would be married. Another name; I smiled at this schoolgirl realization of it. The first thing it implies is some sort of common future. And that was what stopped me. I know how we are now, I can go into the next room and put my hands on Paul’s shoulders, speak to him (and at this point I called out absently, Shall I lay the table, or put it on a tray? — No, it’s too hot. On a tray. We can eat outside), but we seem to be living a kind of interim period. I caught my breath in a little gesture of distress to myself, for the difficulty of understanding this feeling that was more knowledge than feeling. How to explain this feeling of not having started; of something in oneself crying in excuse: Wait! We are nowhere, not ready, so many things to be settled, so many things taking our attention, swerving out lives this way and that. … Yet how can human beings wait? Wait to live until an atom bomb explodes, a government is overthrown, a white man knows a black man to be just such another as himself?

Then there would be no world. Human beings cannot wait for historical processes, I thought with dismay and anger. Then why must we. … But the cry comes out, a head lifted from the preoccupation of confusion — Wait! Please wait! Paul throws himself more and more violently into a job in which he believes less and less. So where does that lead? Where does that find a future? It has only a now; it cancels itself out.

It cancels itself out! — I was afraid of this thought I had stumbled on. I was appalled at the frame of it in words.

My mind sought to distract itself from the contemplation of our state; this place where we wished to stay in order to convince ourselves that so much that was in us and our circumstances was temporary, to be overthrown, and then …

He should give it up, I said resentfully. Give it up. Nobody can go on doing something he believes is fruitless. And now I felt like an angry child who wants to kick something, to kick something and spill over with angry tears.

Then what would he do? How live, then, with himself?

— Then he must accept what he does now for what it is. My job is this that and the other. It will not give a single African an education, a skilled job, a voice in the way his people are to be disposed of, or even the right to build a house for himself when he hasn’t anywhere to live. But he can’t go on struggling and arguing and conniving to give his job the scope it hasn’t got, all day, and sneering at and deriding everything he’s done, the moment he pauses.

I told myself, putting the plates and cutlery quickly on the tray: I will tell him this. The statement had the air of an ultimatum. I will tell him this. It was not a piece of advice; people so close to each other cannot give advice, any more than one can advise oneself.

And so we ate our supper, out on the little balcony. The fat clumsy moths fell against the lamp and taxied lamely between the plates. Paul searched up and down the theater page of the paper, irritable for somewhere to go. I ate slowly, and often paused; but my hand went out for my glass of water; I drank; went on eating.

He threw the paper aside. “Nothing—”—but already indifferent to whether he went out or not. The moon was not up yet and outside the dusty edges of the lamplight the summer night was thickly dark. We put out the lamp to get rid of the insects, and from where I sat, smoking, I saw down away to the left the still darker bulk of buildings, solid as mountains of rock, become fragile as shells, brittle and delicate towers of tracery as the lights went on, hollowing them out, chipping out rectangles and oblongs. Now if you had flicked them with your thumb and finger they would have given back the flat airy sound of fretwork infinitely fine and thin. If you leaned over and picked one up you would be startled by the lightness of it, like picking up a teaspoon made of tin. …

He said: “I saw Edna Schiller today.”

“Did you?”

“She’s not in the second batch, either, though Hugo is.”

“I think she’s disappointed. She gives me the impression of being distinctly peeved. She feels she’s been done down.” The bill for the suppression of Communism had been passed in Parliament, and several of the people we knew had been “named” and informed that they would be charged under the new act. Edna, who had lived on a fantasy of danger for so long, was now apparently to be denied this first real martyrdom: so far her name had not appeared on the lists. When I had spoken to her I could not help feeling that she regarded this omission as a real slight.

“You’re developing a brand of venom all your own, you know. Polite and peculiarly nasty. And always for people like Edna. Perhaps it takes some courage to take the risk of turning out merely to look ridiculous,” he said wearily.

The sudden defense of Edna was sheer perversity of mood; he had laughed about her a hundred times, joined with Isa in the baiting of Edna’s secretive pomposity. But the silence into which his words sank said something quite different. After it was said, his last sentence echoed between us as a comment purely on himself. With it he had chosen to take my attitude toward Edna on himself; snatching up the amusement, the mild scorn in a compulsive determir ition to spare himself nothing. He was determined to make me feel that I had been ridiculing him. I was infuriated with the unfairness of the guilt he was making me feel; a guilt which he was inventing, for which I was not culpable, a piece of twisted interpretation for which he wanted me to give him the pleasure of my inflicting pain.

There was real enmity between us in the darkness. I was glad of the dark because I should not have wanted him to see my face as I felt it was and could not have made it otherwise, stiff with resistant anger, I would not even light another cigarette, although I wanted one, because I could not trust the light of a match, showing my face.

After a long time I burst out: “Why do we all live in a perpetual state of crisis? — ‘This is not my real life, of course, it’s just the way we live now.’—But it’s nonsense. We should all see it’s nonsense. However you live day after day is your real life. You can’t keep the substance of it intact meanwhile — like a child saving a sweet whole to be eaten under special conditions.”

He was interested. He flickered out of his listless restlessness. “The times aren’t good enough to merit the expenditure of our living. That sort of feeling, I suppose.”

I said: “Isn’t it idiotic? We know that life doesn’t keep. Yet we all have the feeling that the present is something to be got over with, and then … How long have the Nats been in power? Nearly two years. So for two years now everyone who isn’t a Nationalist has been going around in the kind of released state of disaster. Going around saying, Well, until this is over and we get them out again, or: Perhaps we won’t stay to see what happens — what about going to Rhodesia? Or Kenya? — Even if they haven’t the slightest intention of going anywhere, it doesn’t matter: the state of mind is the same. If you are waiting for something to alter, something to happen, if you possibly may be going to go away and live somewhere else, your whole life now becomes a state of suspension. It is like disaster: the same feeling of urgency, putting aside of normal incentives, making do temporarily with what you can. But the big thing about a disaster—”

“What exactly do you mean by disaster? Politically, the Nationalist regime is a disaster all right.”

“Not the way I mean. — A flood, say. Or an earthquake. The big thing about a disaster like that is that it passes. You are existing temporarily, you will begin to live again when it is over. But with us the state of mind of disaster is becoming permanent. At this rate it can go on for years. We could sit for twenty years, like flies paralyzed but not killed by a spider, so long as the Nats stay in power. An unfortunate interruption. Shelving this, shelving that, because ‘things are so uncertain here,’ ‘we never know what will happen.’ “

“There’s an election every five years, you know. There’s just a chance they might get thrown out.”

I moved impatiently in my chair. “—Well five years, then. A year, ten months, if you like. It makes no difference. The state of mind’s still fraud, a piece of self-delusion. This is our life and it is being lived out now the way we don’t like it. This is not time out.”

“Ah, that’s true,” he said slowly, “that’s true.” Then he said, in the quick tone of remembering a point he had wanted to question: “To go back a minute — the fly and spider business. — You talk as if everyone’s resigned himself to Nat rule. And you know that’s not so; you talk as if we weren’t kicking like hell.”

“Oh politically, yes. I grant that politically we’re protesting madly. Even in ordinary private talk we’re protesting. But you know that wasn’t what I was talking about. It’s inside. Inside ourselves in the — what’s the word I want — the nonpolitical, the individual consciousness of ourselves in possession of our personal destiny: it’s that which we’ve put aside, laid away in lavender; postponed.”

I took a deep breath and we both laughed suddenly at my vehemence. I was roused by what I had been saying and I felt, for a few minutes, a glow, a relief of talk that was like the satisfaction of something accomplished.

But in a short while it faded.

That was all I had said. The relief, the satisfaction came to me spuriously, out of stimulation; they belonged to the conclusion of the saying of what I had not said. I had meant to say, but had not said.

Chapter 29

I suppose that that night, like so many others, we went to bed and buried ourselves in each other in the silent, intense love-making that was all we had now. For it was as if where once we had had many different landscapes, many different meeting places; dreamy encounters in the sun, gentle meetings in a shade, the closeness and laughter and excitement of clinging together in a high and windy place — we had now only a strange deepening descent into steeped darkness, like a heavy silent river closing over our heads. We made love too often and I found that I kept my eyes closed tightly, even in the darkness. When it was over I would open them and lie there staring into the dark. When it was over; it ended now, with the ending of the act. So many nights I lay there, still, and noted my own lack of peace, my heavy possession of myself, with a mind as aridly wakeful as I sometimes had had when I was at the University, and had gone to bed after studying too late. Where was that mazy warmth, that lulling completeness, easy, already halfway over into sleep — the one real moment of freedom from self a human being knows? I told myself that love cannot be always the same; there are times when it is not so good as others. I even took comfort in my lack of experience, my youth, and told myself that perhaps it always changed after a time, was like that for everybody, and would change back again. …

And on other nights in the sharpness of my mind afterward I suddenly became aware of and seemed to see again my own greed for my satisfaction, which had just been enacted; I saw the way in which I had performed every caress, every intimacy with my will fixed savagely only on the attainment of that final physical crucifixion of pleasure. For that spasm I would have pierced Paul’s flesh with my nails, forgotten his existence entirely in the determination to have him exact it from me; he, who gave it to me always so beautifully, without any thought from me except my love for him. I saw myself struggling like a beetle or an animal. A horror of myself came upon me; I was disgusted. I hated my inert, sated body, still now, like a drunken thing. And at the same time some other part of my mind started up in fear lest the whole of love-making, that fearful joy I felt with strong instinct I had already only won for myself against some threat which might have withheld it from me for ever, might be tainted with this disgust, and lost. I would turn to Paul and press my cheek against his back and put my hand up to feel the line of his hair, the outline of his gently breathing lips and the warm, beating surface of his neck, as if to assure myself that he was beautiful, desirable, that no shred of disgust could adhere here. …

Yet we made love too often, and while my mind said with dismay, We are not in this wholly, this is bullying something fragile that cannot stand it, like a well-trained animal my body ignored me and mechanically obeyed the summons. When I looked at Paul, reading or shaving or sitting beside me in the car, it was in disbelief; it could not be he; and at the same time a tacitly ignored collusion of guilt made a silence between us on another level than that of speech.

It did not help, either, this love-making. Whatever he hoped to wring out of it, and I, half-reluctant collaborator, must have half-hoped for, too, the tight-stretched fabric of that late summer only tautened and faded. Paul was bewilderingly difficult to live with. He had been put in charge of the housing section, a piece of office machinery which, nightmarelike, existed to administer something which literally did not exist, and all day long he heard the pleading, argument, cajolery, resentment of thousands of Africans desperate for homes — all quite useless; there were 1,100 houses for 20,000 families. “They try everything,” he said. “It’s as if they feel that if only they could find the way to outwit me, the secret, the magic word — there the house would be. When people persist in investing you with a certain power, you begin to believe after a while that you’ve really got it. … I have to keep in mind that there are no houses. …”

The shortage of housing for Africans was not, like the mild difficulties being encountered by white people looking for flats or houses, due to the interruption and material shortages of the war. No new houses for Africans had been built in Johannesburg for seventeen years. The old “locations,” long ago filled to bursting point, simply went on overflowing onto the veld in squatters’ encampments of scrap iron and mud. The government and local authority kept handing the responsibility for providing housing back and forth to each other in horror; recently there had begun a move to make the industrialists, whose expanding need for labor had brought thousands of Africans to town, catch some of the weight. This provided a third set of protests, a third shrug of shoulders, a wider base for stalling and deadlock.

Paul went through the farce of his work and, at the same time, doggedly made notes, collected facts, did what he called his own “snooping” and obstinately presented reports, surveys and suggestions that he was always told were “very interesting.” Very interesting — and the councilors and the officials took them away with that air of brave, sober, sad determination which had become the face to be worn, like the special face people keep for funerals, at the mention of African housing. And Paul knew that it was all a waste of time, a waste of breath, a waste of their sincerity or their false concern: no money would be found for sub-economic housing, the Africans did not earn enough to afford economic housing, and in any case, there was no part of the white city, east, west, north, south, that would not raise an uproar at the proposal of a new African township going up anywhere near its borders.

Then at night and at week ends he was involved with the African Nationalists whose edict was non-co-operation, and who, sickened with the neglect of their people under all governments and all intentions, good and bad, mistrusted and refuted even practical good will. For them I saw him sitting over books and tracts about the methods of passive resistance that Gandhi and Nehru had used in India. For them he sent home for his law books and questioned and requestioned Laurie over obscure legal points that he himself did not understand. Twice already his activity with African Nationalists — all lumped together as “Communists” by the government and the police, although the African radicals and rebels were of all kinds: Communist, Nationalist, plain opportunist — had been gently questioned by the head of his department. Employees of the Council’s Native Affairs Department were, naturally, not allowed to involve themselves in the Africans’ internal politics.

In time, it was clear, Paul would lose his job. Perhaps that would not have mattered; perhaps, one could argue, it would be best. But I saw that it would matter, that far from being best, it would be disastrous to him, because he put himself as passionately into his job as he did into his unofficial work for the radical Africans. Equally, if he kept his job by giving up the other association, that would be disastrous, too. He would despise himself either way.

For Paul had made up his mind to do the impossible. I watched him and it was in his face and the way he walked and the way he performed the most trivial of daily actions. To make up one’s mind to do the impossible as a gesture of defiance to a society that has blocked the outlet of one’s energies in the attainable is a catharsis that may have some sour satisfaction. But Paul was not doing it like this. For him it was not a gesture; it was a way of life he had set for himself, a deliberate attempt to treat his own capacities in terms of a man who backs all the horses in a race, contending his hopes and his loyalties and his preferential partisanships one against the other. He cannot lose, and he cannot win. He scarcely knows any more what to hope for. It was more and more difficult to talk to Paul because whatever you said incensed or irritated him somewhere. If I railed, as I did, against the maddening futility of much of the Department’s work, he would fly to defend it from what he sarcastically called the easy attack of ignorance; after all, he knew only too well its limited funds and its scope rigidly circumscribed by the policy of the country as a whole. If, after some uselessly reckless or stupid or arrogant piece of behavior on the part of Fanyana and his crowd, I criticized their lack of plain human consideration, he was angry because he knew them to be as pricked full of hurts every day as a bull inflamed by the picador’s darts, and one small example of careless rudeness toward himself merely provided the instance that showed up the intact and unmarred surface of the white man’s skin.

This calm analysis is clear and easy now. But the facts, before they were sorted in retrospect, were not clear or easy to live with. It did not seem like this to me then. My behavior toward Paul kept me in a spell of anxiety which never left me; I loved Paul and part of my loving him was my belief and pride in the work he had chosen: how was it possible, then, that the difficulties of this work, affecting him, should throw our relationship out of balance? What was the matter with me? Why couldn’t I manage? Why couldn’t I give him what he needed? — why, I didn’t even know what it was, couldn’t find out. … This situation, unimagined at the outset of our relationship, like most of the situations that arise to confound two people (I had sometimes looked at, fingered with a thrill of fear in my mind, the things which I believed happened to men and women: the lover grown fat and coarse-handed; divorce; the jealousy of a woman who is afraid of losing her man), was something for which I had no preparation, even by the precedence of others.

At first I clutched at anything I thought might hold together the torn and tearing garment of our relationship; but while I snatched the edges together with a comfort or a promise to myself in one place, the seams burst, the thread raveled out somewhere else. So in the end I did what so many other women, all through time, have done in situations beyond them. I became afraid to move inside that garment. It was torn in so many places, the seams strained so frailly everywhere, that it seemed that only by keeping quite still, scarcely breathing, would it hold together.

From somewhere a long way back, from the blood that came down to me from my mother perhaps; the blood which ran narrowly and which I hated because it had survived and always would survive by so doing, by draining off the real torrents which bear along human lives into neat ditches of domestic and social habit — from this blood came the instinct to go quiet; shut off the terrible expenditure of my main responses; take, trancelike, into the daily performance of commonplace the bewilderment, the failure. Because this blood was not all of me, but only a kind of instinctive female atavism, this does not mean that I was resigned, that I accepted. Only that my hands took over the command of themselves, taking into the action of pressing peas out of a pod, or moving a pawn on the chessboard (we had begun to play chess when we were alone together; ostensibly because I always had wanted to learn: when we played we did not have to talk), the fears, like an invasion of strangers, which now, never left me.

We saw a great deal of our friends again.

We went very often to the Marcuses, and to Laurie, and particularly to Isa Welsh, because there the same people always would be leavened by new people; Isa liked to expose herself and her friends to unfamiliar opinions and faces, the way people who cultivate the body seek to expose themselves to the sun. We appeared among them all as unremarked as a young couple who, after the self-sufficiency of the engagement and honeymoon period, by the habit of marriage are released again to seek diversion.

In Lourenço Marques Isa had met a young Italian pianist who was about to do a concert tour of the Union, and who knew Moravia, and she had him to stay for a week or two. He was a soft-fleshed young man with the curious combination of a dark, sallow face and very white plump hands, and he was obviously completely bemused by her. She moved in his company with the air of pique and dissatisfaction which showed in her when she knew herself desired and admired by someone who didn’t interest her; I believe she felt it a waste. She only wanted to talk to him about Moravia. At the same time she had a young Indian couple, a trade representative and his beautiful wife, who were not actually staying with her, but with whom she was so enchanted that she kept making occasions, inviting people to the flat to hear Arionte play, to eat a real Indian curry prepared under the advice of the diplomat’s lady, in order to be able to have them there too.

“Aren’t they beautiful—” She came up, ignoring with the authority of her enthusiasm her interruption of the conversation of Paul and myself with Arionte and Jenny. “Really, they make the rest of us look bilious. Oh, it’s not that I’m just enamored of any color but my own — there are millions of Indians more hideous than we’re monotonous. But they’re just two lovely people, and their color happens to suit them perfectly … (—Have you talked to him?” she asked Paul. “You must go and talk to him, he’s got a mind as incisive as a knife, a pearl-handled silver one—) like you, Jenny. When you first came from England. Your color suited you perfectly.”

“And don’t you think it suits me any more?” said Jenny crossly, although the rest of us were laughing. She had developed a touchiness toward all women who were not, like herself, somewhere in the process of creating a family. She had made up her mind in this, as in every other stage of her life, that the stage in which she happened to be involved was the only decent and worth-while way to live. So at present, unless a woman was pregnant, suckling a child, or pondering the psychological mysteries of toddlers, Jenny regarded her with a mixture of irritation and self-righteousness.

“I’ve told you; it suits you admirably. But you haven’t got it any more. You’ve taken on the protective coloring of the country; can’t distinguish you from any other Johannesburger, today.”

She was moving off (Isa never waits to see where the arrow falls, whether it goes home or not. … — D’you notice? — Paul had once said to me — I’ve never been able to decide whether it’s callous or vaguely honorable, in a chivalrous kind of way …?) when she was stopped by a young man who had come up behind her.

“I just walked in. Could have walked out again for all the notice you take of me—” It was Charles Bessemer.

“Hullo, Charlie — ah, you smell nasty. Is it the perfume only brave men dare wear?” She drew him round to us.

“Nuit de Gastrectomy,” he said, sniffing at the cold smell of ether which clung about his clothes.

“You still use the same old kind?” I said.

“Oh, hul-lo.” He turned.

“You know Helen. … And this is her Paul. Jenny you know; and this is Arionte, we don’t call him by his surname because he gets preferential treatment here, or because we can’t say Guiseppe, but because he’s on the way to being a Solomon or a Schnabel—”

A kind of extra shininess came to the pianist’s smooth forehead, in place of the blush of pleasure impossible to anyone of his complexion. His shy quick look was the laying before of us of the fact: you see? the wonderful way she is?

The “And this is her Paul” was one of Isa’s little experimental darts, tossed just for fun, in the course of more important preoccupations; I caught the faint quirk of the side of her mouth, like a private wink to me, careless and not malicious, as she said it. It was for Charles, who she knew had once been interested in me (Was there a twitch? No? Well then, the thing just glanced harmlessly off), and to tease Paul, who continually told her how disgraceful it was that Tom had no designation other than “Isa’s husband.”

Charles thought a moment and then said to me unexpectedly: “What happened to your friend from Mariastad?”—Isa was not really disappointed; she poured him a drink from the little stained table loaded with bottles, beside us.

“You mean Mary? I don’t know really. She’s teaching somewhere; I haven’t seen her for ages.”

“And you, too? — Teaching?”

Paul laughed as I said: “Do I look as if I am?”

Charles said, looking straight at me with his faint sharp smile: “You look like I always told you.”

I said to the others: “He once said I looked prim. I was insulted.”

Above Isa’s murmur, “Quite right, quite right to be,” he said firmly: “That wasn’t all. She remembers the rest.”

“I worked in a bookshop, and now ‘I am an employee of the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department.’ “

“Is it as bad as all that?” said Isa, suddenly putting on a social manner of concern.

“Indeed?” Charles rocked back on his heels, took his drink from her.

“Typist. Grade E, about. Salary scale, third from the bottom.” I did not know quite what it was that made me talk like this; there was something in Isa’s company that encouraged people to mock at themselves. In me it sounded rather feeble and a little silly. I said: “I’m going to chuck it up. I’m going to get out very soon.”

“A job like that — you should be doing it for the love of it—” Charles had a way of fixing his look on you; that narrow, diagnostic look as difficult to avoid and as blank to meet as a squint.

“How you preach, Charles!” Isa was delighted with her disgust. “So bloody sanctimonious about other people’s jobs. When you only cut people up because you love the cutting. So lucky suffering humanity needs to be cut up! — But really what made you get her a job like that, Paul, in the first place?”

“Well, I wanted to be where he was—”

“—And it’s the only kind of thing I could get for her there. She’s not trained.” Paul completed my explanation.

There was a pause, so slight, so brief that I noticed it only because for a moment I heard the general noise of the room. “I see,” said Isa.

And then I became acutely aware of the pause, which was already over, of the attention of the others, that was already turned from Paul and me in talk. … wanted to be where he was … The innocent way it had come to my tongue, blurting out the simple answer. And a minute before I had had their attention and their sympathy for the vehemence with which I had told them, I’m going to give it up, I’m going to get out soon.

Depression came over me and drew me back from the other people in the room, so that being incapable of being involved with any of them, I seemed to see all the several groups at once, to watch their mouths shaping talk and their faces and bodies supplementing and contradicting what they said. I felt a dull envy for Isa, taking the small pleasure of the triumphs of her tongue. I thought almost with longing of the struggles she must have given up to content herself with the substitute of these things; and I wished for a moment that I were clever enough to be able to ignore their unreality and emptiness, or that I was another kind of person, a person for whom they could ever have some meaning. In that room full of people whom I knew well enough to fear their curiosity, I wanted to cry. In a bus, in a train, among strangers I would have cried, as people sometimes have to, cannot always wait to be alone. But here I dared not, and so all these people, my friends, became enemies.

The Indian was talking to me about the dances of her country and bent her draped head over a book on Balinese dancing which Tom Welsh had laid in her lap; it sometimes happened at one of Isa’s parties that some beautiful gentle woman suddenly drew Tom to her side and kept him there the whole evening. They talked very low and no one ever joined them or interrupted, no one ever knew what the long, absorbed conversation had been about. Only Isa would look up, worried, now and then, at the head of the woman, and say good night to her when she left with an extra, compensatory fervor; she felt that the poor woman had been bored.

Paul had had just enough brandy to key him up to his warmest charm; he wore it like a suit of clothes that has not been worn for a long time but fits as well as ever. His voice and Isa’s flashed back and forth across the room. The “music hall turn” was on between them.

Arionte said: “I wish so to talk. I have been speaking English only one year now. …” And then he eyed me for a moment. “You say you like Mozart. Just now I play you … Some part the D Minor.”

There was a relief in jealousy like a sudden scalding. It was something over which we could have an open argument. Paul said: “Helen you know this is ridiculous. What is it you really want to fight about?”

But I grew afraid.

I no longer wanted to touch that nervous mass which trembled between us.

But it seemed to me for the first time that he knew. Later in the dark he said in a loud wakeful voice: “We’re terribly involved. Terribly involved with each other. …”

And I tweaked at the pretense of jealousy again: “That sounds like Isa. The sort of thing she says, all dilated pupils.”

He said again, as if the thing was threshing itself about in his mind, showing, disappearing, ungraspable, distressing—“Involved …?” I had no answer.

We quarreled again about Isa. I would pick up this petty weapon in my sense of weakness; a sudden spiral of irritation that blinded and smarted like a whirlwind; dying in a flurry of dust and dead leaves.

“I cannot understand why you do this.” He had the exasperated look of an animal worried into anger. And when it had happened a number of times, goaded as I had goaded myself: “Yes, of course I like Isa! All the inadequacies she had as a lover are her virtues as a friend. Christ, she’s a grown-up person! I can talk to her. Yes, I can talk to her and she doesn’t expect me always to be consistent, every word that comes out of my mouth to fit into some idea she’s got about me! Every time I say something I have to watch your face measuring it up; I’ve got to see your eyes change or the expression round your mouth fade—”

Then he, too, looking about for something to break the silences between us, instinctively felt for it, closed his hand round it. “I think you’re hankering after your mother and father. All this moodiness comes from a part of you that hasn’t grown up. You still wonder if you aren’t being a naughty girl, and it amuses me.” He stared at me obstinately, smiling. “It amuses me.

“Why are you such a damned hypocrite?” He pressed me.

Shortening the hem of an old skirt, or caught in the pause in which I sometimes lost the sense of what I was reading, nothing had been further from my thoughts than Atherton and my life there and my mother and father. In fact, the unvarying daily predictability of that life, in which the equal predictability of the life I had imagined had seemed just as assured, seemed as far from me as those curiously vivid anecdotes of babyhood which belong to pre-memory and that we have only come to know through being told by others.

Yet he had found, as intimacy cruelly makes it impossible not to do, the one spot in my secret assessment of myself that had once been inflamed, and that reddened in tender shame from time to time. I trembled in hurt at this confirmation of what I had feared in myself with humiliation and disappointment. When he saw the roused hostility in my face he must have felt as I did when I was possessed by a drive to torment him, and saw that I had succeeded: the whole challenge died out of him listlessly in a kind of defiant shame; it was not what he meant, what he wanted, after all. And it left a burned-out loneliness in the very center of one’s love for the other.

I had said: “I want to live with you in the greatest possible intimacy.” That was one of the things I had said so many times, with all the awkwardness in the shaping of the words that makes the things that lie deep and dominant in us so difficult to say.

I saw this thing turn, like a flower, once picked, turning petals into bright knives in your hand. And it was so much desired, so lovely, that your fingers will not loosen, and you have only disbelief that this, of all you have ever known, should have the possibility of pain. All the time, you are seeing the blood trickling a red answer slowly down your hand.

Chapter 30

I left the welfare office at the end of April.

On the Wednesday of my last week there, my father telephoned me. I went to the telephone expecting the voice of John, with a message from Jenny about some book on antenatal exercises I had promised to get her at the bookshop where I had once worked, and I heard one of the bright, interchangeable voices of the Mine switchboard operators: “One moment. … Your call, Mr. Shaw, you’re through. …”

Our conversation was not so much tense, as stilted with a kind of shyness. “I just wanted to know how you were, my dear. …”

“And you? Everything all right?”

“Oh, yes. Just as usual. — Well, I don’t want to keep you from your work, Helen—”

“It’s all right. As it happens this is my second last day. I’m changing my job.”

“Oh?” He wanted to show me how little he wanted to criticize or upset me, my father who had started as office boy and ended up as Secretary in the same office on the same Mine, and for whom a change of job would have been almost as great a disturbance as the transmigration of his soul. “Have you found something that suits you better? That’s very nice.”

“Well, not yet. I’ve got one or two things in mind. The Belgian Consulate, for one. …” “That should be interesting; a chance to have contact with the wider world. Well, I hope you get it, my dear—”

I sat down to my desk again: the call scarcely had been an interruption at all.

An hour later I suddenly asked the girl at the switchboard to get me the Mine number. I heard my father hold back the surprise in his voice as, in his bewilderment with me, he suppressed any show of emotion in case it should be the wrong one in my eyes. “Daddy, do you think I could come home this week end? What do you think—”

“No, of course, Helen. It will be all right. Your mother won’t say anything, I’m sure. Only don’t say anything to her. Just let it be as if nothing had happened. She’ll be very glad.”—he paused—“Sometimes she’s hasty. And afterward she can’t — it’s not in her nature …”

“I know. Good, then. I won’t phone her. You tell her and I’ll come. On Saturday. In the morning, most probably.”

I told Paul that my father had telephoned me and that I was going to Atherton at the week end. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “‘Never darken my doorstep again.’ And how long is it — six weeks?”

We were having lunch in the basement cafeteria round the corner from the offices, where the smoke and sizzling of hamburgers thickened the noise of the crush, and the hands of the Indian waiters flashed like conjurers’ as they raced to serve too many people at once.

I shrugged.

He flicked the two little marbles of butter, buried in a lettuce leaf like pearls in an oyster, onto my roll, and leaned over and took the butter dish belonging to the next table, where two fat young men and an ogling girl were just rising. “Next they’ll be asking tenderly after me. I’ll be coming along for the week end, too. And they’ll be secretly planning their grandchildren.”

At home where a thousand times we were alone and the tension between us urged it, there was a space cleared for it, it had never been spoken. But now I said: “We’ll never be married.” It was spoken quite simply and flatly, from some part of me that was not aware of mutations of which his easy, half-flippant mood and the restless, food-murky den were one.

He put his paper napkin down slowly under his hand. It was a gesture halting everything. “Why do you say that?”

I said, far away, looking at him a long way across the crowded little table: “Because it’s so.”

“But what makes you say that—” He had the little twitching nervous smile of the onset of strong fear or anger. “You can’t just say it — Why? Why do you?”

“You know it,” I said again.

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

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

“D’you feel like anything—”

“What about you? If you do, then.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discrimination was not obvious or awkward because the women had grouped themselves apart from the men all evening. I, of course, was with them, sitting on a small spindly chair: You’re a young light one, Helen, we old ones with a middle-age spread need something more solid — and laughing they lowered their flowered or lace bulk into the deep soft chairs and the sofa. One or two took out their knitting; the hostess had a decorated felt bag from which came the fourth of a set of tapestry chair covers she was working. The others exclaimed that they wished they’d brought their knitting, or the hem of a child’s dress that had to be done by hand. That reminded another of a new way of hemming she had read about in a magazine. Oh — someone else thought she’d read that — was it in the Ladies’ Home Journal? No, the other didn’t get the Ladies’ Home Journal, it must be in some English magazine. “Well, I get all my knitting patterns from Good Needlework” said another. And at once they were all talking about the magazines and papers that they “took”; I recognized the names of the neat stacks of thin threepenny women’s papers I had been given to amuse me on visits to their houses fifteen years ago. “I’ve been a subscriber ever since we’ve been on the Mine,” old Mrs. Guff was saying, her head nodding agreement with each word she spoke. “What was that?” someone asked. “Home Chat”—she turned smiling and nodding—”I’ve been getting it for many years.” “I remember,” I said from my chair. “It used to have Nurse Carrie’s page in it. Excerpts from people’s letters were printed in italics, and then Nurse Carrie answered underneath in ordinary print.” They laughed indulgently — but I had got my first inklings about sex from that genteel page, poring over it on the floor of Mrs. Cluff’s sitting room when I was eight or nine.

Sitting on the delicate chair, I heard again all the warm buzz of talk that had surrounded my childhood. It was as comfortable as the sound of bees; no clash of convictions, no passion, no asperity — unless this last was on a scale so domestically close-knit and contemporary that I could not catch it. Their talk flowed over me, flowed over me, all evening; one after the other, peppermint comfits dissolved in my mouth.

When at last we rose to leave, I spoke to the men for the first time, although through the evening I had heard snatches of their talk, drifting across the path of my wondering attention. Mine gossip, it had been; and the shares they had been tipped off to buy in the Group’s newly opened Free State gold fields; and — hotly argued — the selection of the team to represent the Mine at an inter-provincial bowling tournament in Natal.

The Compound Manager said, drawing in his cheeks at the dryness of his last swallow of his whisky: “Helen … So … it’s a long time since you’ve deserted us. You like the city, eh? I don’t think you’ve been to see us since your parents went overseas—?”

“D’you know,” I said, smiling, “the last time I remember being in your house? The morning of the strike. A Sunday morning, when the Compound boys had a strike over their food, and I came with Daddy to see. They were standing about all over the garden, and we came inside — into this room — and Mrs. Ockert was giving everybody tea.”

“Oh, no!” he laughed, astonished. “—D’you hear that, Mab — Helen says the last time she was here was that time when we had the strike.”

“But that’s twelve — no, thirteen years ago,” objected Mr. Bellingan.

“You were with us,” I said. “I remember you were with us.”

“Heavens, Helen, you must have been here a number of times after that!” All the gentlemen laughed round me.

“Well, that’s the last time I remember!”

They all began to recollect the strike; like a performance of theatricals, taken earnestly at the time, that becomes amusing in the retelling. One had done this; the other had thought that. The Compound Manager put down his empty glass and, hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels, knowing, smiling, at a situation he had dealt with.

“Ah, but things were still done decently in those days,” said the Reduction Officer. Old men, confronted with two world wars, jet aircraft and atom bombs, sometimes spoke like this of the Boer War, in which they had fought: the last gentlemanly war. “This kind of thing coming up on Monday — we didn’t have that then. But of course the mine boys have always been the good old type of kraal native, not these cheeky devils from the town, don’t know what they want themselves, half the time, except trouble.”

And that was the one reference anyone there made to the May Day strike of African and colored workers which was only the duration of Sunday away from us.

When I went back to Johannesburg that Sunday evening I caught a fast train that did not stop at the Atherton Mine siding and so my father had to drive me in to Atherton to the station. We went slowly down the main street, arrested at every block by the traffic lights. The town had changed a great deal since I was a child, slowly, of course, and I had seen it changing, so that while it was happening I had not seen the alteration of the whole structural face, but merely the pulling down of this old building, the filling up of that vacant square where the khaki weed used to grow and the dogs clustered round a poor little vagrant bitch in season. But this evening I had the shock of discovering that in my mind the idea of Atherton carried with it a complete picture of the town the way it must have been when I was nine or ten years old: it rose up in connotation like a perfectly constructed model, accurate in every detail. And I saw that now it really was nothing more than a model, because that town had gone. The vacant lots blocked in in concrete, the old one-story shops demolished; with them the town had gone. A department store was all glass and striped awnings where two tattered flags, a pale Union Jack and a pale Union flag, had waved above the old police barracks. A new bank with gray Ionic columns and a bright steel grille stood on the corner where my mother’s grocer had been; the grocer was now a limited company with a five-story building, delicatessen, crockery and hardware departments, further down the street. As I say, all this had happened gradually, but I saw it suddenly now; it did not match the Atherton alive in the eye of my mind. In the shadow of two buildings a tiny wood-and-iron cottage lived on; a faint clue. Here at least, the one Atherton fitted over the other, and in relation to this little house I could fade away the tall irregular buildings, and place the vanished landmarks where I had looked or lingered.

Sitting beside my father while he changed gears and drew away as if the car were a live creature to be treated considerately, I felt queerly that it was as impossible for me ever to walk in and out the shops of this real Atherton as it was for me to walk again in the small village that had gone.

On my lap I held the paper bag my mother had given me before I left. “Half the fruitcake,” she had said, and I knew that inside it would be wrapped in a neat sheet of grease-proof paper, the kind that had wrapped my school lunches. “No good my keeping it all, there’s no one to eat it. And if I give you the whole, it’s the same thing, isn’t it—” And she had stopped in cold embarrassment at her own voice, that had implied that I was alone, and so doing, had reminded both of us that I wasn’t, that someone would be there to help me eat my mother’s fruitcake. She had stiffened and answered with offended monosyllables the commonplaces, suitably removed from the subject, about which I went on talking to her. I suppose it was funny, really, and perhaps I should have been secretly amused. But I had only wanted to say to her — I don’t know why—: Mother, I haven’t changed. Look, this is me; you know me: just as I have always been, before I could walk and before I could speak and before I had loved a man and taken him into my body. And I thought, She will never recognize me, she will never know me again. Even if I could speak it would not alter it.

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

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

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

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

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

But it was not there in the dark.

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

Chapter 31

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said to the flat boy: “Did you hear if there was any trouble this morning in the locations?”

He sat back on his knees like an amiable zoo bear and laughed. It was a deep, phlegm-roughened laugh, because he smoked a lot — his pipe stuck out of the pocket of his “kitchen boy” suit even now. He said, with the tolerant grin at a blood sport which didn’t interest him: “Nobody say. I didn’t see nobody. But plenty boys come to town last night, sleep all night where they work.” He lived with the other flat boys next to the boiler rooms on top of the building, leaning over the parapet on warm nights to twang his guitar above the concrete.

Another one of the good old-fashioned kind.

I tried to rouse myself to do something. Sitting on the balcony smoking in the sun, I thought, I am like an invalid: between the illness and the cure. Sitting weakly in the sun. It was the state of suspension I had spoken about so heatedly to Paul that night when I had wanted to tell him something else: what am I waiting for, why don’t I go and phone up the Consulate, write a letter about that broadcasting research job? It seemed to me that the strike had something to do with my inertia: waiting for something to happen. (Can’t do anything because you’re waiting for this, that, or the other. — That state of suspension, today in its acute form.) Yet I knew that I was not even really thinking of the strike at all.

Toward lunchtime I telephoned the office. I don’t know why I was surprised to find that Paul was there, the voice of the girl at the switchboard just as usual. “What’s it like in town?”—My voice had the subdued, hesitant tone of someone tacitly atoning for a piece of shaming disregard; a woman who has ignored some indisposition of her husband’s may speak in just that tone when next she sees him, and if he answers, as he will, as if her concern for him had been consistent, they can both successfully make her lapse nonexistent.

“Haven’t you been out? It’s all quiet. You know. The rural peace of Johannesburg—” I heard a man’s muffled laugh: someone must be in the office with him.

“And at the busses this morning?”—We had expected trouble at the location bus and train termini, where we knew there would be pickets.

“Nothing, so far as we’ve heard.”

“So if the police can keep their hands to themselves—” I felt awkward as if I were suggesting an aspirin.

“Yes, we must wait and see.” There was a pause.

“—But they must be itching on their batons—” I tried again.

“I haven’t been out in any of the townships yet today,” he said shortly. “Did you phone the Consulate?”

“No. Perhaps this afternoon. If I don’t fall asleep. You’ve no idea how odd it is, being in the flat in the morning.”

“Of course I have — when I was sick? Don’t you remember?” His voice chided me in a guarded intimacy, perhaps because of the presence of the other person. At once I revived, stung to naturalness: “Oh, but that was quite different. That’s why I didn’t even think of it.”

“Look, I must go now, darling.”

“Are you going to be late — Because if not—” I was eager.

“I can’t say. I don’t think so. Because there are a lot of things I should do this afternoon that I won’t be able to. Oh, and Isa phoned; she wants us to eat there. So if I’m late I’ll go straight there. If I’m not home by half-past five, say … And you can go up when you feel like it, she’ll be home all afternoon, she said.”

“Oh, tonight” I said.

“Why, we weren’t doing anything?”

“No. All right.” I’m not sure that I feel like Isa, I wanted to say.

I did fall asleep. I lay down on our bed with the blue quilt over my feet and thought: When I get up in about half an hour I’ll phone her and tell her we can’t come, I’d already made some other arrangement, and then I’ll phone him and tell him. The sun, filtering through the net curtains, warmed the crown of my head through my hair; the woman next door had turned off the radio and a warm space of silence hung above the surge of traffic.

Chapter 32

When I awoke it was five o’clock. The sun, moved away from the room round to the west, had left five heavy drops of honey trembling on the wall below the ventilator brick. Opening my eyes on these I had the familiar confusion that follows a spell of sleep at an unaccustomed hour, felt all the rooms where I had slept rush past my mind before I could seize and steady myself into this one, and then jumped up with a sense of panic. I had the telephone receiver in my hand before I remembered whom I had to ring up and why.

Well, it was too late to put her off now. A little sick and dazed from getting up too quickly, the nausea transposed itself into a reaction against the thought of going to Isa’s that evening. I thought: I’ll phone Paul now and work out some way of getting out of it.

“He’s left, I’m afraid. He went out about half an hour ago.” It was a new voice; must be the girl who had taken my job.

“Have you any idea where he went?” I asked.

“Just a minute—” She was eager to please, in her newness. “Someone says he said he was going to the Community Center.”

“Which one?”

“The Richardson.”

“Thank you very much.” I was just thinking, Now is the number 52-8529 or 92, when the telephone jangled under my hand. Instantly, I was sure it was Paul. Urgently I said: “Hullo—”

Laurie’s mild, slow voice, the voice of a fat man, answered. “Helen — hullo …” We exchanged pleasantries, commented on the uneventful way the day had passed off. “Is your man there? I want a word in his ear.”

“I was just about to phone him. He’s at the Richardson Center.”

“Oh, blast him. I want to speak to him right away.”

“Well, why don’t you phone him there?” I said. “I was going to.

“No, I can’t,” Laurie said, “I can’t explain. … But I can’t tell him what I want to tell, over the phone. I was going to come over to your flat, if he’d been home.” He laughed. “Don’t think I’m crazy.”

For some reason, I felt vaguely embarrassed. “Well, I don’t know what to suggest. I don’t know when he’ll be back. And if I can’t get him before he leaves the Richardson, he’ll go straight to Isa’s. We’re supposed to be eating there. — You could drop in there later, and see.”

“No,” he laughed again, a little irritated at having to keep up a mystery. “It’ll be too late. Might be, even now, as he’s already in the township. — Well I’ll have to take a chance on saying what I have to say in some sort of guarded way over the phone. Give me the number, will you? And you don’t mind waiting five minutes so that I can ring him first? I’ll tell him to ring you, if you like.”

“Yes, do that. The number’s 52-8529.” I was suddenly sure of this. We both rang off. I was tingling with a vaguely alarmed curiosity. But although he had made it clear that it was not from me, but from the telephone, that he was withholding an explanation of the message he wanted to give Paul, I, too, was irritated by the mystery. — He’s getting like Edna and all the rest, creating for himself the importance of dark secrets. Paul won’t thank him for it anyway; he’ll laugh.

The telephone rang again almost immediately. “Look—” said Laurie, “there’s no reply from the place.” “Of course. The switchboard must be closed. Operator keeps ordinary office hours, there,” I remembered. Laurie said: “D’you think he might still be there?”

“Very likely.”

“Or he might be on his way home?”

I laughed. “Sound deduction!” But Laurie ignored it. “I think I’ll take a chance and go out there,” he said. “That’s if I ever find the place.”

“Oh, it’s easy, you can’t miss it. When you turn off the main road you keep turning to the left, three times, and then once right past the Apostolic Faith church, it’s a funny little place with a silver-painted roof.” I stopped myself suddenly. “Laurie, take me with you. Please. Come and pick me up? I’ve been in all day and I’ve nothing to do till Paul comes. I wasn’t going to Isa’s anyway, that’s what I want to talk to him about.”

“Well, at least you know where this place is,” he said. “—All right. If you really want to. But be ready. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Laurie’s car was a long narrow English model, very beautifully cared-for. His fat body sat in it as incongruously as a sack of potatoes dumped in a boudoir. “Just give it a gentle tug,” he said as I pulled the door in behind me; the door closed with an oiled click. I felt suddenly the pleasant relief of being out, anywhere at all, in the air and the moving streets, after the confines of the flat. “It’s about Fanyana, of course,” he apologetically confided at once, as if he was sure he was only confirming what I must have guessed. “I heard today on good authority that they’re watching him. They have to be able to lay their hands on a few ‘inciters to public violence’ when they need ’em, to prove what an efficient police force they are. And Fanyana’s one. He’s only got to wiggle his little finger.” Laurie demonstrated, moving free of the steering wheel a white, dry-skinned hand blotted with the brownish marks of some liver ailment. “If Paul’s got any sense, he must keep away from him. It’d be a much more serious thing for Paul if he were arrested as the inciter of an inciter—” He laughed, moving his shoulders which overflowed the curved back of the seat. “You know how they are — they make up their minds you’re an inciter, so you’re an inciter — What can you do? You could have been teaching Fanyana how to embroider. … You’re an inciter. So. Go and argue with them.”

“Oh, but it’s all right,” I said, “nothing’s happened. There haven’t been any incidents to be blamed on anyone.”

“No, but I think Paul shouldn’t be seen even talking to Fanyana today.”

I shrugged. “He’s probably doing that now.” I couldn’t help feeling that Laurie was getting excited over something that would be no news to Paul; he knew that the police were interested in Fanyana, and had been for some time.

“By the way, d’you think they’ll let us in?” Laurie asked.

“At the location? Oh, yes. They know me, I’ll fix it.” For a moment I had not realized what he meant; the strike had already taken on the character of an alarum that had never gone off, and the ban on the entry of Europeans to native townships which would certainly be included in police security methods seemed as nominal as had been the posters illustrating air-raid precautions in our country which had never known a raid. Yet the reminder gave a slight fillip to our little expedition. The fact that I felt Paul would consider Laurie’s urgency a piece of dramatics added to this something of the pleasurable illusion of adventure with which children invest some unnecessary action by pretending to believe it vitally important. We were quite gay, and passing the Criterion Bar, Laurie said: “When we’ve collected Paul we’ll come back and have a drink somewhere.”

As we shed the city, dusk was falling.

“At dusk, reports of bloodshed and violence followed in rapid succession. At Orlando, Sophiatown, Alexandra, Moroka, Jabavu, White City, Mariastad. … It was the start of a night of terror after twenty-four hours’ tension.”

This was how it was described in the papers next day. While we were driving through the dusk that thickened like pollen about the street lights, the trains were going home, some in the direction we took, some toward other townships, carrying workers who had defied the strike and who were being escorted from work by the police to assure their safety. The stones that were to be thrown and were to draw back bullets were lying ready to hand in the unmade streets and the vacant lots filled with rubbish. The men were already restless in the streets, the voices of the women shrill before the dark houses. That was what we understood when we read about it.

That night, rioters stoned a police squad at Alexandra. The police fired into the mob. A bus queue shelter was demolished, coffee stalls overturned, shops looted and gutted, and a cinema burned to the ground. A crowd attacked the bus depot, and another police squad, hurrying to the scene, met with a road block and was stoned. The police got out of their cars and fired. At Orlando trains were stoned. On the Reef, at Brakpan, a thousand demonstrated outside the location, screaming and shouting, and were dispersed by a baton charge of a hundred police. At Atherton location, a large crowd defied the ban on public meetings, refused to disperse, and were charged by the police with fixed bayonets. Then the police fired, and three people were killed on the spot. Everywhere in the townships there were “disturbances” of one sort or another; stones were thrown. Stones were thrown, and one way or another, drew blood. Later that week, one of the Native Representatives (there were three and they were all Europeans) moved the adjournment of the Parliamentary debate then in session, so that the May Day riots could be discussed in the House. The leader of the Opposition, General Smuts, did not support the motion. Letters were published condemning the brutality of the police, praising them for courage, accusing them of incitement; hailing the dead rioters as martyrs, expressing satisfaction at the dispatch of dangerous hooligans, urging black and white to make “this tragic and bitter clash” a basis for the return to Christian tolerance. There was a report of how, over the week end, when the ban on public gatherings in African townships was already in force, a wedding party had been broken up by the police; a group of mourners, sitting in the small yard of a bereaved house after a funeral, as is the custom with Africans, were intruded upon by the police and ordered to go home. An elderly African who had been one of the group said: “They treat us like wild animals. Perhaps after all we can get nothing by peaceable means.” Still later, a commission of inquiry set up to investigate the cause of the riots, said that the anti-police attitude of the Africans was due to liquor and pass raids on their homes in the early hours of the morning, and the treatment of native prisoners by young policemen. This attitude, the commission stated, was not racial — black and white policemen were equally hated, resulting in “a complete disregard of authority of any kind.”

On that night, eighteen natives were killed, thirty wounded. Two of the dead had suffocated in the burning cinema, sixteen were shot by the police.

When Laurie and I got to the township entrance, there was no official in sight. Laurie slowed the car, swaying to the side of the sandy road which had no curb. “Do we go straight through?”

“No, we might get stopped farther on, and I want to be able to say we’ve got permission to be here.” I knew the native policemen who did duty at the entrance; I might not know those whom we were likely to meet inside. Laurie hooted, a serene, smoothly accented bleat that was what one would have expected to come from a car like his, and the familiar, fat, light-colored police boy came out of the administrative building with a sort of slow-motion skipping movement, exaggerating his concern at being found absent from his post. He greeted me, grinning with excitement. “We’re a bit out of order here today,” he said, proud of his English. “May we go in?” I said. His eyes took up the reflection of the car lights, which, with the smokiness of the location atmosphere added to the gathering darkness, Laurie had suddenly found it necessary to switch on. “Well — you’re from the Welfare, isn’t it? Mr. Clark, he’s nearly a resident here!”—he was delighted with his own humor. “Of course, we’ve got instructions, no Europeans, and so on. … But for you it’s all right.” “We’re going straight to the Center, Mr. Clark’s there waiting for us,” I agreed, and he saluted us on.

It is always surprising to find how much darker an African township is at night; far darker than anywhere else where there are houses, and people are living. In a European quarter, even if there is a street where the lamps are sparse and most of the houses happen to be in darkness, there is a general lightening diffusion from all the other lights in the city, so that you forget how thick darkness really is. Already that thick dark was curling up and wrapping about the small low houses; lighted windows showed irregularly on either side like cigarette tips glowing. The first street we drove along seemed quieter than was usual at this hour, but when we turned left again into another street as dim and quiet, I noticed a paraffin-tin fire outside one of the houses. The cooking pot on it was boiling over and over, bubbling and streaming down into the coals. The house was closed and quite dark; a fan of red light from the fire wavered over it. Farther on there was a strange pale low light that seemed to breathe rather than burn. When we drew level, it was a candle alight behind a rag of curtain in another dark closed house. As I looked at it with a momentary pleasure — the light of a candle was something else one didn’t really know — a corner of the rag was looped back by a very small black hand and the faces of two African children watched us go past.

When we came to the Apostolic Faith church, we seemed to have reached the normal evening location clamor, the rising, muffled blare of shouts, talk, yells and laughter which was faded and far off above the streets we had left.

And then we were in the heart of it. That is the only way I can describe it, the way I shall always remember it. Shocking, splitting, like the explosion of maniacal loudness that assaults you when you turn a radio volume full on by mistake. The awful heart of that endless shout which rises from the throat of a location at night.

Not thirty yards away a crowd was bellowing round a telephone booth, the only telephone booth in the whole township. They butted and screamed, the whole solid wall of their bodies — solid and writhing as a bank of fish in a net — caving forward. Seconds before I saw, before I understood, at the instant at which that sound smashed on our heads, I snatched at Laurie’s arm with such clawing horror that the car swerved to the side and stalled. He turned on me, astonished. My roughness seemed to have startled him more than what was happening. “What are you doing, what are you doing?” he shouted, but his voice was faint against the din. Above the mass of the crowd things were waving, poles or bars, I shall never know, but heavy things that were being held upright with difficulty, drunkenly, and that fisted down on the little conical tin roof of the booth so that it tore and fell in like a piece of silver paper. The crowd seized on the booth as if it could be shaken into speech. A high-pitched yell sent them back; something that might have been a railway sleeper heaved into the air and then bricks and plaster gave way and fell into the bellowing. The telephone box with the receiver swinging flew out over heads. Part of the door — some of the glass panes must still have been unbroken because in the instant of its passage through the air, I saw a watery zigzag — broke up as it hit the wall of a house. And then a short man in big white shoes (I can see those shoes now, I could almost describe the shape, the rather pointed toes, though I know it seems impossible that I really could have seen them so clearly) shot out of the crowd and picked up the telephone. Yelling, he held it aloft like a head on a pike and he raced over to the small municipal building — it was the depot where milk was sold at special rates — and smashed it against the wall. An accolade of stones followed his action in horrible applause. The windows of the place smashed, the door was kicked in. At the same time one of the stones missed its mark and pricked the bubble of the only street light.

Laurie was sitting with his great heavy arm stretched out pressed back against me like a barrier, as if he were restraining me from jumping out of the car. Behind it I breathed like an animal that has been caught and is being held down for branding. I thought I should burst with horror. I do not think I was afraid, I had no room for fear because I was so mad with horror. Again I was overwhelmed by an emotion whose existence I had not ever thought about, every bursting blood vessel pushed full with a racing blood I had not counted in the emotional scope of my life. Everyone fears fear; but horror — that belongs to second-hand experience, through books and films.

Even while the darkness doused the crowd a new light came up, and with it an ecstatic shrill scream, a note out of the normal range of the human voice. The crowd drowned it hoarsely, cutting across it with rasping throats: the municipal office was burning. People were running past us all the time now, summoned by the success and passion of the flames. The firelight ran excitedly all over them. And I saw that the owner of the scream was a woman who stood out in the road apart, a woman with a hump that must be a baby tied on her back. She leaned forward with her hands on her thighs and sometimes the scream was only a contortion of her face, sometimes it jetted out against the massive bellowing. Other sounds, too, came in flashes of lucidity out of the confusion. The deep panting of the shapes which ran past us. I felt a cringed stiffening in Laurie’s arm and the side of his body that was pressed against my side, every time this sound was flung to us — so personal as opposed to the anonymity of the bellowing, in passing. Laurie was afraid. He was not horrified, he was only terribly afraid. I do not mean that he was cowardly, but that he had been in a war, he knew what men were like, and it was not what was shown to be in them that affected him, but the practical calculation and fear of what this might threaten toward others. “All right. It’s all right,” I remember he kept saying. “All right. It’s all right.”

I don’t know which way they came, whether it was from behind the crowd or from behind us — it is strange how in confusion a large, important happening, that you must have seen clearly, is sometimes impossible to remember, while a minute detail survives perfectly, like a tiny ornament left standing after an earthquake — but suddenly the police were there. They came like a tidal wave churning through the crowd. And the crowd smashed and boiled back against them. The woman was screaming without stopping now; I heard her distinctly. Stones hailed down. A man wriggled out of the turmoil of the crowd and darted waveringly across the road, pausing every now and then to snatch up a stone. I saw him clearly for a moment, isolated, his collection of stones held in the pouch he had made of the corner of his jacket, his face at the downward, intent angle of a child on a beach gathering shells. Just at that instant there was a kind of scuffle in the midst of the struggling mass of people; a shot cracked like a whip above their heads. There were more shots, shots and their echo, clearing a split second of silence in the space of the retort. The man with the stones looked up with a movement of surprise, as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder. Then he fell, the stones spilling before him. I knew I had never seen anyone fall like that before.

That was the last thing I saw. All that happened from that moment on — the police who came angrily to the car and questioned us, escorted us out of the location; the screams, the running, shouting, gaping people; the way Laurie tried and tried to start the car, the engine leaping into life and dying out again — all this was a dragging backward from the sight of the man in the road. I was pulled away with my eyes still fixed on the only thing that I saw: the man lying in the road. Perhaps they picked him up, perhaps they took him away, perhaps they trampled him where he lay; for me he will remain forever, quite still in the midst of them, lying in the road.

And that was all. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes. We were out on the road back to the city, we were still in the big English car, we were unhurt. Not even the dust raised by the feet of the rioters or the flying ashes from the burning building had touched us, protected by the closed windows of the car. We drove straight to the nearest hotel, and sitting in a close, dingy bar lounge, with a dry old palm crackling in the draft every time the door opened, we smiled at each other with a ghastly strangeness, like people who have just been dragged up out of the water.

I suddenly began to shudder as I drank my brandy. I shuddered so violently that I could not swallow. “Violence”—the word burst upon my mind like a shell—“Violence.” “Laurie, it’s the most terrible thing in the whole world. Nothing, nothing like it. …” All at once I was terrified, I was chattering with fear.

“Come. I’ll hold it for you, you drink.” Laurie did not look at me, but kept his eyes lowered down his heavy face as he held the glass to my lips.

Chapter 33

Paul spoke about it afterward as my “adventure.” “Helen’s adventure at the barricades,” he called it. Laurie and I were in considerable demand at the homes of our friends; people saw to it that we were invited at the same time so that we both might be present when the tale was told; and told it always was. Laurie developed quite a technique in the telling; I got to know the exact points at which he would drop his voice, “throw away” an aside, pause, and place the emphasis of hesitancy on a particular sentence. After the first two or three times the progression of the story came to me to be the unvarying order of this delivery; it was his technique only that I heard. Had he related some other incident in its place, but raised and lowered, quickened and slowed his voice at the same intervals, I should not have noticed the difference.

One night when Paul said again something about Laurie’s having told someone “your adventure,” I said, after a little while: “I don’t know why you always say that. — It wasn’t. I feel as if I never was there at all. Only that I saw a man killed. And what was real about that was only the unreality.” At the mention of a man killed, there came a look into Paul’s face that made me feel, more than ever, isolated; even that real death, dropping on its victim before my eyes, seemed unreal to me because it was not my idea of death; even in the midst of a brutal reality, I was not involved, I remained lost, attached to the string of a vanished idea. I looked at Paul out of this lostness, like someone who is too far away to make himself heard and must rely on the mute appeal of his tense body. But he only nodded, as if to say: “That’s reasonable enough”—feeling along the rim of his ear with absent fingers.

On the night of the riots he had not come home at all. The anxiety for him which had flooded into me after the relaxation into fear in the hotel lounge had not waited long for reassurance. When Laurie and I walked into the flat the telephone was ringing. It was Paul, speaking from the Mission School near the Richardson Center, and he had been ringing and ringing for me, at Isa’s and at the flat. He was breathless, only his voice was there, and he did not give me time to explain. “Someone’s hurt,” he said, “There’s been some trouble. I’m going along to Baragwanath.”

He telephoned again later, from the Baragwanath Native Hospital, but he did not come in until nearly seven the next morning. It was raining softly. I got up when I heard him at the door, but he walked slowly, quietly, almost awkwardly past me, standing there in my thin rumpled nightgown, and lay down on the bed, where the covers were still flung back from where I had risen. After a moment he sat up, pulled off his shoes, and lay back again. His eyes closed, flickered, closed again. In his stillness, they would not be still.

I could not lie down on that bed. He was alone there. He said, putting his hand over his eyes: “I heard about you.” He shook his head slowly. I stood there. After a while, I said: “Are you terribly tired …?” His mouth looked weary, sulky, set; even under the haggardness of the beard which painted it with dirty shadows, his face had its peculiar beauty; it will have it always, I suppose, even when he is old.

“How did he get on?” I said, remembering.

“He’s dead,” said the voice from the bed. “He died at ten-to-six.”

Paul had spent that night at the hospital with Sipho. Sometimes he sat beside his bed and sometimes he stood outside in the hospital corridor. Sipho had a bullet in his hip but he was dying from the fractured skull he had got when he fell; from the increasing pressure of blood that was flooding his brain and making his breathing slower and more porcine all night, until at last, it ceased altogether.

Chapter 34

At seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, long queues stood in the rain at every location bus terminus, waiting to go back to work. Within days, hours almost, the happening of the riots was absorbed into the life of the city again; the dead were buried, the wounded healed, and the hearings of those cases in which employers had arrested natives for striking went on in the abstract atmosphere of the courts. Paul pursued what he called the “lily-livered path” of the Department during his official working hours, worked (now that Sipho was dead) with Fanyana on the activities of the African Nationalists; and believed in the worth of neither. I do not think he could ever bring himself to forgive Fanyana for living while Sipho died; Fanyana who should have attracted violence because it was in him to mete it out; who was the opponent for a bullet, a man its own size — and Sipho, the man of peace, the disciple of Gandhi. But Sipho, without fear, in the knowledge of his own lack of threat toward anyone, had gone out to Alexandra on the night of May first, while Fanyana took care to stay at home. I think that the whole purpose of African Nationalism took on the twist of this incident, for Paul. He saw that in this incipient revolutionary movement, as in all others, the wrong people would die, the wrong people would be blamed, perhaps even the wrong people would inherit the reign of the ear of corn, when it came. Of course, he had accepted this always, in dialectic. What he did not know was that he had not accepted, and would never accept it in the real, the personal realm in which life is lived.

I stayed alone in the flat, most days. It was a beautiful May, that year, and though you could not see much sign of the lovely autumn that lingered, in the suburbs of the gardens farther out, and in the Magaliesburg hills still farther, you could smell it in the air of the city. Up on the little balcony, I could smell it, that rich cool autumn. Most days I did not go out at all, and I got up later and later. I gave Paul breakfast in my dressing gown, and sometimes at ten o’clock I still was not dressed. I spent a great deal of time on the balcony, smoking and watching the building opposite going up, or not watching. Whether I looked or not, whether I saw or not, it went on getting itself finished. The white workmen shouted and twitted one another in a mixture of Afrikaans and English, as they worked; the Africans sang or laughed when they worked beside one another, were silent when they worked beside a white man, handing him up bricks to lay or mixing plaster for him to slap on. When the bell clanged for lunch hour, the scraping and hammering sounds stopped suddenly, and the voices were very clear, as if I were standing among them. The white men hung over the flat roof top, eating out of newspaper and drinking out of beer bottles from which the labels had been washed. One day one of them had a little mirror, which he used to flash the sun over into my face.

When the break was over the bell would clang again, and the white men would start shouting over the parapet to the Africans squatting below: “Come on, you bastards! Come on, what you think you doing down there!” And grumbling, sullen, laughing in unconscious imitation of the white men’s raucous laughter, they would swarm up toward those grinning faces waiting, indolent and masterful.

I would go inside quickly, close the door, and lie down.

I slept a great deal. It did not seem to matter how late I got up; in the afternoon I would sleep again. And when I woke sometimes I would not bother to get up. Paul would come home and find me, still lying there. “Aren’t you well?” he asked. But although I could not measure it, because I had no sense of well-being, I knew I was not ill. “Well, if you’re sure …,” he said. “Oh, I’m not worried about that!” I understood suddenly what was in his mind. But although I reassured him at once, smiled even, the occurrence of the thought in his mind later began to take hold in my own. Suppose I am pregnant? Nothing had gone wrong, I had no known cause to fear this rather than any other month, and I had never feared before. But now I began to be obsessed with the idea, to fear that by some devilish miracle it had happened, and for several days went about in that peculiar state of female dread which always had rather disgusted me in others. When a denial, irrefutable, unperturbed, the turn of a cycle, came from my body, and brought with it the immediate dissolution of the dread, I understood the nature of what I had felt. The dread of cheap little sensual innocents, who are afraid the casual eye that was attracted by them may “let them down”; the dread of women to whom love is an entertainment, like a visit to a cinema, and who do not want to be hampered in the pursuit of fresh entertainments.

The dread of an attachment to a man that can never be broken, by a woman who wants to be free of him.

The whole month went by and still I made no effort to find another job for myself. By the time I had telephoned the Consulate for an interview, they had already engaged someone else. Later on, tomorrow, next week — I told myself — I shall go and speak to the man Laurie mentioned. I shall go and see the woman publisher John suggested; the advertising man Paul used to know in the army. I did not even go into town more than once. And when I did, I did not seem to know how to fill the time, although sometimes, when I had been working, I had longed for a whole free day to shop and stroll about. Somehow the shops did not offer any connection with my life; I saw them as one glances at the things in the shop windows of a strange town in which one finds oneself with half an hour to spare between trains: this hat, this piece of flowered silk, this gadget for sharpening knives — they will not be seen on, or belong in the houses of, any people I know; I shall not be here long enough to need to sharpen knives, buy a new hat, or choose material for another season’s dress.

So I stayed in the flat. As the traveler might decide for the station waiting room, after all. I find it difficult to remember how I passed the days, because I know I did so little to fill them. I don’t think I even read, except the daily papers. I would open the papers and read the “Readers’ Views” page and “Letters to The Editor”: letters about the riots, which were still coming in, still being published. “What sort of a country are we building where the gaps between the white Haves and the black Have-nots are shamelessly widened every day? Those people who, out of fear for their own precious skins, made the greatest talk and fuss about the Rand riots three weeks ago have now comfortably settled back into safety of their homes again, perfectly content to close their eyes to the disgusting squalor, poverty and frustration that gave rise to the riots and which exist, unchanged. Do they ever stop to think how, with the approach of winter …” “… must urge a stricter police control of the locations. Could not some system be devised whereby both native men and women would carry identity, or residents’, cards, which they would have to produce on entering a township? This would force hundreds of loafers and troublemakers to stay in their own homes at night, and get rid of a large shifting population that would then have to go back to the country. …” “… May I ask your correspondent how yet another card, pass, what-have-you, could be expected to be tolerated by a people already so restricted that they might as well be enemy aliens instead of being so indisputably an indigenous people in their own country that even Dr. Malan (supposing they were white instead of black, of course) would have to admit them to the first class of the pure-blood South African hierarchy?” The paper would blow about in the sun, slithering to the dusty corners of the balcony, and I would hear the voices of the workmen floating up from over the way: Hurry up, there, you bastard! Franz, you bastard, bring me the flat paint — d’you hear me — ahh, voetsak, go on, hurry up! — I never knew what the black men said back, when they talked among themselves in their own language; for that belonged to their own world, and I, I supposed — I must go along with the workmen.

The old sense of unreality would come down upon me again. A calm, listless loneliness, not the deep longing loneliness of night, but the loneliness of daylight and sunshine, in the midst of people; the loneliness that is a failure to connect. I would pick up, in my mind, Atherton, Paul, Johannesburg, my mother and father; Paul. Like objects taken out of a box, put back. But in the end there was only myself, watching everything, the street, the workmen, life below; a spectator.

This went on until the beginning of June. The autumn was suddenly gone; one morning the city came up out of the night as if it had been steeped in cold water: bright, clear, hard, it was winter. I walked out onto the balcony in a sweater, but I felt the air at my ears, and my hands were cold. I had been going to sew back the sleeve of my coat that had pulled away from the lining. I felt now it would be too chill to sit out there; there was a change. As I gathered up the coat and the cotton and scissors, I stopped, and saw that it was not only in the air. The building was finished. I had got so used to seeing the work going on over the way that it had existed in my mind as an end in itself. I had scarcely noticed that it was nearing completion, that it was no longer a framework gradually filling in with bricks and glass and paint, but a building, a place where people would live. Now it was finished. It blocked out much of the sky that I had sat and watched, some months back, after work in the evenings. It was quite finished, and the workmen were hauling down the material they had left on the roof. A lorry was being piled with the sand on the pavement, where the children had played.

The building was in front of me, five stories high, clean with fresh paint. On top, the chimney of the boiler room crooked a finger. A row of gleaming dustbins waited to be put into the kitchens. I thought, When I came here with Paul the first time that Sunday afternoon, they were just beginning the foundations, you could see right out over the hill, you could see the Magaliesburg.

And it came to me, quite simply, as if it had been there, all the time: I’ll go to Europe. That’s what I want. I’ll go away. Like a sail filling with the wind, I felt a sense of aliveness, a sweeping relief.

The lorry rolled down into the street and drove away.

Chapter 35

“Nothing left but all of Europe,” said Isa, putting her small, sharp-looking hands to warm round the teapot. She had met me in town, on my way to go and say good-by to Jenny Marcus, and had turned me off into a tearoom. “It’s a stage most of us get to. I wonder what the European equivalent is? Longing to get out to the wide open spaces, I suppose. Let us leave this damp and overcrowded England and go where the sun shines and men are men. Et cetera.”

She gave one of her little jumpy shrugs and picked up the bill. She pulled on her beautiful velvet coat, folded a scarf round her little throat, where you could always see the pulses through the thin skin; her head rose from her impressive clothes like the head of a bird from its plumage. She smiled with an unashamed acceptance of her own fascination, and said as if it followed out of my look: “You don’t have to worry about him and me. I’ve often meant to talk to you about it, but I don’t know … Now perhaps it doesn’t matter. — He’d never really want me because I’m too clever for him.” She laughed, raising her eyebrows and nodding her head to show me she meant it and must admit it, as we walked toward the door. She paid at the cashier’s grille and the door swung us out into the street, talking. “I’m too clever for him, and so I go in for debunking. I debunk him all the time, out of irritation mostly, because he can’t debunk me. Isn’t clever enough. If I could find a man who would have the brains and the guts to debunk me …” She moved her shoulders a little, under the flowing coat. “Because of this he couldn’t really love me, I mean it never could have been anything but an affair, even before the advent of you. You’re too clever for him, too — not with your head,” she added, as if she knew I couldn’t compare with her, “but in your emotions. I think you’re one of those women who have great talent for loving a man, but he’s not whole enough to have that love expended upon him. It’s too weighty for him. He likes to be all chopped up, a mass of contradictions, and he wants to believe they’re all right. He isn’t enough of a central personality to be able to accept the whole weight of a complete love: it’s integration, love is, and that’s the antithesis of Paul. You frighten him, I frighten him. Different ways, but all the same … And I couldn’t want him, not permanently. You need never have worried about that. Not that I flatter myself you did.”

We had reached her car and she unlocked the door for me. By the time she had gone round to the driver’s seat and got in beside me, her attention had been attracted back, with the brooding inevitability of a magnet, to herself. She said: “South African men. You can look and look. That’s the terrible thing for a clever woman here. She may find one who’s her equal — just. But she won’t find one who’s cleverer than she is, who can outtalk, outthink, beat her at it.” Her lips showed her teeth in a strange, lingering smile of pleasure that she abruptly dismissed, as one dismisses a daydream. “Unless he looks like something gestated in a bottle and brought up on ground book dust. But a real man; there’s always some point at which you feel them cave in. … Tom, Paul, even Arnold. …” She waved a hand in dissatisfaction at her husband and her lovers. “A woman like me needs the world. Like a boxer who can’t find any more opponents at home, he’s met ’em all. Match me — outside — away. I’d soon have the nonsense knocked out of me, they’d show me my place.” She turned to me, laughing.

I felt again the mixture of stirring antipathy and liking that I had always felt for Isa. I thought to myself, She’s a flirt, even with women, though with women the game is played differently. But today I warmed to her in another way; as she spoke I came to understand something about her, and so to feel the sympathy and even pity that divests others of the sense of their superiority that hardens us toward them. It was true; she was too clever; too clever for her own maddening primitive womanly instincts, the desire to be dominated and to look up to a man as a god. Household god. I smiled. “No household gods. That’s your trouble,” I said. I had forgotten the hostility and sense of distaste, almost, that had made me close away from her when she calmly took up discussion of what was to me my private and personal life, making it, as other people’s lives were, matter for social intercourse.

“Bloody little clay figurines,” she said. “Very nice. Made out of Vaal River mud. — You know, I think I’ll come in with you. I haven’t seen the baby yet and you know how Jenny feels about things like that. Should I turn into Claim Street?”

She had offered to drive me to the Marcuses’ house. “No, carry straight on, there’s a shorter way. I’ll show you.”

“There was something I wanted to tell you — I’m damned if I can remember what it was,” she said, pulling up at a robot. A man crossed the street before us, and she followed him with her eyes, as if he would remind her. He was young, with the dark, handsome animal surliness of some young Afrikaners and he looked back at her. She forgot that she had been trying to remember something, in the little game of holding this young male with her eyes. We shot forward as the lights changed; “Doesn’t matter — You leave on Tuesday, you say? Train or plane?”

“No, Wednesday. Plane. I’m going East Coast, that’s why I’m boarding the ship at Durban.”

During the hour we spent at Jenny’s house, we chattered about my plans; the job I had been promised in London; the things I must see, the people I must look up. “Don’t forget Frederick at Sadler’s Wells,” warned Isa again. “I did have the address of the flat or whatever it is where he lives, but I can’t find it. The best thing to do is to send him a note to Sadler’s Wells.” In my notebook I had a whole list of expatriate South Africans who were storming the theater, the ballet and the art studios with the talents which they believed had outgrown South Africa.

Before I left I dutifully asked if I could have a last look at the new baby, and was surprised when Jenny led us into the children’s room and picked the little dangling creature nonchalantly out of his crib: when her first child was a baby, no one had been allowed to pick him up outside his specified play hours. But it appeared that she had changed her baby manual since then. This boy was being reared on the principle of what she called “the natural young animal”; he was hugged, carried about, and allowed to suckle at will, like a kitten. Jenny asked me whether I could find room in my luggage for a large photograph of him which she wanted to send to her mother in England. “Thanks, then. It won’t take any room at all, really. You can put it flat on the bottom. It’s being framed now, but I’ll get John to drop it with you on Wednesday morning, on the way to work.”

Isa was leaning over the baby, like a child looking down into a fishpool. She had two children of her own, but the special quality of children seemed to dawn on her only through the children of other people. “Ah, that’s it. Now I remember — it was about Joel Aaron I wanted to tell you, Helen. He’s going to Israel. You must look out for him when you get to Durban. He must be there already. I think he’s sailing about the same time as you. On one of those Italian boats, though.”

I turned to Isa with surprise, but while she was speaking, Gerald, Jenny’s elder child, came skipping in the doorway and at once brought himself up short at the sight of visitors. Jenny was questioning Isa about Joel, but I heard no more of what they said. The little old toy the child had been carrying had dropped, and hung from his hand. It was the plush rabbit that had been hanging from Paul’s hand the first day I saw him. Paul stood in the doorway of the Marcuses’ flat and in one hand he held a bottle of wine, in the other he held this rabbit, hanging by the ears.

I think it was there and then that I parted from Paul; not later, when he kissed me with those hard, long kisses and pretended that this was a holiday on which I was going, a holiday from which I would come back. Certainly it was then that I wept, and had to move quickly over to kneel at the little boy’s side, so that Jenny and Isa should not see the tears.

Chapter 36

In no time at all when the plane comes out of the hills behind Durban, the green seems to melt and dissolve in a mist and then suddenly it is the sea, there below. It is the sea, greenish, like the grasslands, moving, like the grass beneath the wind.

As the engines cut out the air seems to cut out, too; a warm heat, liquid, fills your lungs. The plane comes down and there you are, the figure of yourself providing another facet for the brilliant, glittering, soaring light of sea level.

I left Johannesburg on a cold, dusty July morning. The grit at the airport blew against me sharp as rime. When I landed in Durban less than two hours later, it was summer. The old airport on the Snell Parade was still in use then, and the taxi that took me to my hotel passed smoothly between the green of the airport with its fringe of umbrella trees on one side and the sea deep green behind a low bank of bush on the other. The sea was very calm and it turned onto the beach in slow coils, clear as spun glass. The very sight of the sea in this mood does something to one’s breathing; I began to breathe slowly and deeply, as if for months I had been wearing something tight that had now dropped away. And while I was being received into the big old cool hotel, while I signed the register and went up in the lift with the young Indian page whose dark forehead matched the polished panels, and wore, as if unable to forget the humidity of the summer months, a beading of sweat; while I hung a dress or two in the stiff old-fashioned wardrobe that smelled of cockroach repellent, and sat a moment in the soft, limp-smelling armchair, a kind of shaky happiness came over me. It was the kind of happiness that has little to do with one’s mind.

A hotel, an airways service, have something in common with a hospital in that they reduce one’s life to a program of needs, to which they minister. Handed a magazine at the start of a journey, summoned to dinner by a gong, this outer simplification of living tends to produce a corresponding inner one: Your life really does become simply that: a time for mild diversion, a time to eat, a time to sit on the chairs comfortably provided, and look at the sea, to which the hotel is thoughtfully turned. I thought that this mild assumption of one’s needs would take care of me very well for the few days before my boat sailed.

When I had unpacked, and lunched, I walked down to the South Beach. It was not the fashionable beach — that was on the north side — and even so early in the afternoon, when most holiday people were having a siesta, there were family parties on the sand, the parents drowsing and the children, ignoring the seasons of the day, shrill and dripping. I took off my sandals and walked away up the beach toward the long arm of furzy green that curves round the entrance to the harbor; away to the right I could see cranes gesticulating above the hidden docks. I remembered my father, talking about the “bar.” Out over the bar. That calm, heavy-looking stretch of water on which the little lighthouse looked down; what would it be like when the ship slid through it? And as I watched, a ship did just that, came past the conglomeration of waving steel antennae, left the escort of tugs spinning vaguely in her wash, and, breasting, busy, silent, was out. There was a bleat. It came perhaps from her. (A bleat like the hooter at the Mine.) Her profile of orange-striped black funnels and up-curving bows moved slowly against the green arm. I watched her, climbing up the sea to the horizon. And then she was a paper shape, a cutout, very clear, and apparently being pulled along like Lohengrin’s swan in a theater, by strings off stage — straight along the straight line of the sea’s horizon.

I came back slowly along the sand, and went up to the hotel for tea. Afterward I took a bus into the town (the plan of Durban is very simple and sensible: the visitors live in a long strip of hotels, spread for more than a mile along the beach front; the town lies immediately behind that, on either side of West Street which lifts up from the sea; the residents live behind that, up in the hills) and went to the shipping office. Again there was the calm assumption of one’s needs. The young man across the mahogany counter showed me a plan of the ship: my cabin, here; my berth, this one. The ship would dock tomorrow and I must be on board by ten o’clock on Monday morning. Sailing time, four-thirty P.M. I wandered about the pleasant town, bought myself a cake of fine, hard, perfumed soap of an imported brand that was unobtainable in Johannesburg, and a green scarf to tie round my hair; it might be windy on deck. The afternoon was not too hot, and every now and then the usual city smell of petrol, stale sourness from bars, and stuffy sweetness from beauty parlors parted to a breath from the sea.

Back in my hotel room, I found some flowers on the bedside table.

The maid had put them in water for me, but she had left the cellophane wrapping and the card on my bed. On the card, a childish hand had copied out “WITH LOVE FROM BRUTON HEIGHTS, PAUL.” They were florist’s roses, long-stemmed, denuded of leaves and thorns, the petals of the long buds a little crushed and crepy, though still beautiful, like the eyelids of a lovely woman who is no longer really young. I loosened them in the vase, but they still looked as if they belonged in the foyer of a cinema. WITH LOVE FROM BRUTON HEIGHTS. What was that, a reminder, a claim? A sudden perverse desire to put a hand on something because it was no longer there; an impulse to test out whether it really had gone; irresistible, just to make sure? But the flowers, ordered by telegram, the card, written by the hand of the junior shop assistant, defeated everything, as gifts that have to be made through the paid agency of others do always, impartially, whether the original intention was merely a social gesture, or a desperate symbol of the deepest feeling. These flowers standing on the dressing table were somebody’s work, carried out unperturbed and mechanically. I was safe from them.

The life of the hotel swirled up round me; people were up and down the corridors, in and out the lift; doors banged, bath water ran, there was the ring of telephones and laughter in the rooms as people dressed. In the dining room Indian waiters were in and out, up and down; I saw myself, in the mirror walls, looking at the Buddhalike headwaiter, red-sashed and watching above folded arms. People drank coffee afterward in the lounge and on the wide veranda. A ricksha boy came whooping past among the stream of cars, joggling two small boys and waving his feathered head, like the tail of a peacock put on in the wrong place, “… see one once in a blue moon. And I believe the municipality isn’t issuing any new licenses to them, so they’ll all be gone soon,” someone at the next table was saying disgustedly.

“Yes, it’s true, they give you the idea that that’s the normal form of transport in Durban. It just shows you how much you can believe about the travel posters you see of other countries. Come to beautiful Austria …”

“… kills them before they’re forty. The strain on the heart.”

And on the other side a family argument was going on between a young girl and her mother. “You know what those beach things are like. And this is a wonderful film, really, Mummy. I don’t want to hear the same old man singing that thing about Ireland. Or wherever it was, — They do, they do, they always have him.”

“He had a trial gallop on the beach this morning. …”

“All right, tomorrow then. But you must get the desk to ring you before seven. …”

They ebbed out, into the town and the cinema and the night clubs. They trailed upstairs and trailed down again with wraps, ready to drive out to roadhouses. I went to my room early, looking out at the bobbing lights on the harbor for a moment before I got into the big, soft, anonymous hotel bed. And the next morning I watched them go, all the holiday-makers, down to the beach after breakfast, with a kind of indulgence. A young man who had spoken to me in the lift appeared in a shirt patterned with hula girls. “See you …,” he said, waving a towel toward the beach, and I smiled and shook my head. He was so careless of the response he elicited (there were hundreds of girls and no doubt he signaled to them all that he would meet them on the beach) that he mistook my meaning and waved back enthusiastically.

Just before lunch, I saw my ship come in. An old gentleman stretched, yawned, put his paper down. “That must be the Pretoria Castle” he said to his wife.

“What?”

He pointed to the horizon. “There. That grayish white thing. I just saw in the paper that she’s due in this morning.”

“I haven’t got my glasses,” said his wife.

Although I wasn’t going aboard until Monday, I decided that I must go down to the docks after lunch to have a look at the ship. In any case, it was as good a way as any of passing away the afternoon. I always had loved wandering about the docks, even as a child, and now that I myself actually was going to sail away in one of the ships, I felt I should find a whiff of the promise of the places I was going to, as well as the fascination of those I probably should never see. I found myself dressing up for this ship; I cleaned my white shoes and put on a frock that suited me particularly well, and a big linen hat. I even opened one of my suitcases and took out a pair of new gloves (farewell present from Laurie).

I picked my way among the trucks and the coils of greasy rope to the wharf where a harbor policeman had told me she was berthed. And quite a long way before I reached her I could see her, a big gray wall of a ship, parked as solidly as a building. Smaller ships on either side looked too small for people to live in, by comparison. Or alternatively, she looked too big to float. The companionway was down, opening surprisingly into her towering gray side and showing, inside this flap of ship, a wide stairway and a great bank of flowers before a mirrored wall. But I was not allowed to go up; an official-looking man in white explained that this was the period, directly after the disembarkation of passengers, when they “gave her a spring clean, and so on.” He grinned in a matey fashion, and I could not resist telling him — someone — that I should be a passenger myself, in a day or two. “Then you’ll have plenty of time to see her,” he said, smiling indulgently. “But you can pop along tomorrow if you like. She’ll be all open then.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So you’re going to England.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not that I wasn’t pleased.”—I made another start. “That’s the whole thing. Because I was pleased. I realized that I have no right to be. In fact, it’s an awful cheek. I haven’t seen you for months and months and it was all my fault that I haven’t, I know. I’ve greeted you at a concert as if you were someone I’d met casually somewhere. I didn’t come to your graduation and I fumbled for words like a fool when I met you in the street. … And when I meet you this afternoon I’ve got the cool nerve to assume I’ll be treated as if nothing has happened.”

He had been looking at me quite seriously, as if he were listening to an anecdote about two other people, but now he smiled. “And you were.”—He made a last attempt to keep up the casual surface intimacy of the afternoon. There was a moment when I might have taken up the cue of an easy, slangy, social patter; have said, using the old privileges of arch femininity which have become the frank gambits of sex: “Then I’m forgiven?” And if I had, we might have passed the following two days together using each other as pure distraction, have danced and drunk and perhaps slept together like cut flowers blooming in water — no one, not even ourselves, need have noticed that the stems were severed, that there was no plant beneath from whose root and dirt and drought we had taken shape, and from which, still, all growth must come.

But I said: “I had a dreadful feeling that morning I met you in front of the theater. I’ve never forgotten it.”

He said very slowly: “Why?” And he tasted his drink.

“When I left you, I got into a sort of panic. I can’t explain it. I saw how I had wanted to go to your graduation, I really had wanted to very badly, and yet I didn’t. There was nothing to stop me. But I didn’t go. I forgot. It seemed to me that some other person had forgotten. Myself — but some other person. And I felt I didn’t know who I was — bewildered. Of course you didn’t know, but I’d had a ghastly scene in Atherton with my mother the Sunday before. Over Paul. Over living with Paul. And all the time coming back to Johannesburg in the train, I had managed to fight the-the feeling of this scene — the things it made me feel, I mean — with the thought that the person who felt these things was no longer me; the real me was the one with Paul. I was flying back to her. And when I got back and found that for Paul this really was so—he discounted my Atherton self — he laughed at the scene as if it had been something that couldn’t have touched me — I understood at once that it had. That creature in Atherton shouting at her mother was me. It all switched round horribly, and the person who lived with Paul only thought she was real. I slept and pushed it away, the way one does, and then meeting you like that the next day started it all up again, only worse. There was another twist. How can I put it? I subdivided again. I saw this smiling, nodding, gaping, oblivious creature talking to you, apologizing with insulting graciousness for something that couldn’t be apologized for. Something that had nothing whatever to do with her. It belonged to the person she had supplanted. That’s the only word for it. Supplanted, that’s what I felt. And then that person seemed to me to be me, a creature come to life again with such distress at what had been done and left undone in her name.”

When once you have spoken like this there is no ending. Sitting forward on my chair in the hotel lounge with my hand tightly round the base of my glass, I did not know for a moment what I had begun by talking about; knew only that everything that was heaving up in my mind, apparently disparate, unconnected by chronology or subject, was relevant to and belonged indisputably with it.

When Joel spoke it was unexpected. “It was a tossup with me whether I’d speak to you or not that day,” he said. The pinkish light of the room swimming with talk hooded his eyes. Now that he was older, I saw that they resembled his mother’s, that remote old woman coming to life only when she was serving or preparing food for others, that old woman sitting in the corner with her shabby shoes crossed, watching me. “When I saw you I was angry. I suddenly wanted to tell you to go to hell.”

There was a twinge of hurt in me at his words. They were casual enough in themselves; a natural reaction from hurt or irritation which would have brought a confessedly sympathetic smile from me, spoken by anyone else. But it was as if, for that moment in the street months ago, Joel had looked for something common, ordinary, blunted by use on everybody and anybody, with which to strike me, to show me by the choice of weapon rather than the blow the extent of my worth.

“I was angry. I was hurt … I suppose that’s why. And you stood there all smiles, effusive, looking just as you always did.” He paused, bent a match in two and fizzed his whisky and soda. We were both seeing me again, standing on the pavement in Commissioner Street, tilting my head at him. “But as you kept on standing about and playing with those theater tickets you had, I noticed something about your face — I don’t know what it was, really. You seemed to be — put together too consciously. Does that sound silly?” He looked at me, seeing me now, not then. “I didn’t want to say it any more.”

There was a moment’s pause, and we both drank. “You had your hair drawn back then,” he said, and I knew he was remembering the piece that had blown down against my lips, and that I had kept pushing away. Somewhere inside me this was handed to me as a slip of paper on which is written a word of power; but the chastening of a minute or two before kept me humble.

Looking round at the people about us who were rising to go into dinner, I had a moment of dark illumination, far from Durban and the pleasant anticipatory buzz and the hushing of the night sea outside. I said fearfully: “I don’t know what would have happened then, if you had. Told me to go to hell, I mean. Cast me off.”

“Why?” he said.

I looked for words. “I think I should have screamed. Oh, I don’t mean then and there, in the street. But inside myself. I should have lost control.”

Later we stood on the jetty, leaning over the rail. Under the planks beneath our feet, we could feel the sea flinging its weight again and again. But it was too dark to see the water; a night without a moon. Looking back, there was the bright claw of Durban, reaching into the black. I could smell the hissing water down below, prickling up air to my cheeks like the sizzling of soda water.

“How do they feel about it?” I said, speaking of Joel’s parents and of what he had just admitted, that in Israel he would be more likely to be planting potatoes than designing buildings.

“They wouldn’t be too happy, if they realized it, I think. They would think it a waste—”

I smiled down to the dark sea. “A waste.”

“—But, fortunately, they don’t realize it. The idea of Israel dazzles out everything else. They see me going home.”

I said after a minute: “You know, Joel, I think you might have gone anyway. Even if you hadn’t been a Jew.”

He looked round at me in the dark though I couldn’t see his face. “Yes, maybe. — I suppose that’s true.”

“D’you remember what you said once, about belonging only to the crust in South Africa.”

He laughed softly. “That Sunday outing.”

The sea, drawing back its immensity of waters like a great sigh, poised a moment of silence.

As it burst forward, I began to speak again. “I don’t feel even that any more. Even that night in the township — at the time it was terrible and immediate and I was there, in the thick of it. But afterward the worst thing about it for me was the fact that I was in it was only by physical accident. It happened around me, not to me. Even the death of a man; behind a wall of glass. …” The water lapped back at me, took my words away. “I envy you. A new country. Oh, I know it’s poor, hard, but a beginning. Here there’s only the chaos of a disintegration. And where do people like us belong. Not with the whites screaming to hang onto white supremacy. Not with the blacks — they don’t want us. So where? To land up like Paul with a leg and an arm nailed to each side? Oh, I envy you, Joel. And I envy you your Jewishness.”

At this he made a little noise of astonishment. “Why that, for God’s sake?”

“Because now I’m homeless and you’re not. The wandering Jew role’s reversed. South Africa’s a battleground; you can’t belong on a battleground. So the accident of your Jewish birth gives you the excuse of belonging somewhere else.”

Joel had turned his back to the rail and was leaning on his elbows. In the dark I could feel him looking at me, I felt he was looking somewhere other than my outward self, he saw penetratingly, with a kind of powerful instinct, where light was not needed. So he said, without a trace of irrelevancy: “Your people. You’ve finished with them, for good?”

“Oh, yes. I see that. … And yet when I went back there, that last time, I found a kind of comfort in those old ladies with their knitting and those men all comfortably notched on the official scale. Like letting the moss slide over your head in a stagnant pool. It’s terrible to find yourself reduced to taking comfort from the thing you despise.”

“Despise is a hard word,” he said.

“Yes, I know. John and Jenny and Isa”—I avoided the inclusion of Paul’s name. “But I shouldn’t put the blame on them. Anyway, I can’t ever go back to the thing I cast off in favor of what they had to offer — Atherton makes me shudder. But you, it beats me how you’ve done it. You’ve lived just as you wished, you do as you must, and you’ve managed to hang on and hurt nobody. And yet your people are as far from your kind of life as mine are from mine — if I can be said to have a kind of life. …”

Joel said, in a tone of voice I had heard from him before, long ago: “Helen, they did seem pretty impossible to you, didn’t they? — My mother and father.”

There was a second’s hesitation before I answered. “Yes,” I said. “Impossible for you.”

“You mean the store and the things that make up their life and the way they look?”

“Yes-yes, I suppose so. I have to admit that’s what I really mean. You’re so different. Money is their standard. — No, that’s not it — Money is their civilization.”

“And what do you think mine is?”

“Yours isn’t anything so ready-made. I should say it was the full exercise of human faculties.”

“Good, good,” he said, of the phrase. And then in a wary, half-bantering, questioning voice: “The good life … eh?”

“The good life,” I said. “Don’t say that. The good life.”

“You thought Jenny and John and the others had it. Now you think I have.”

“I don’t say you’ve achieved it. But I believe you know what it is.”

“Don’t you?”

“Not any more. I’m not sure. Anyway, I know what it isn’t. It isn’t the hypocrisy of considering that something has been done to right wrongs because you yourself act as if they have been righted. The color bar isn’t down because you’ve invited an Indian to dinner; you haven’t struck a blow for the working classes because, like Jenny Marcus, you don’t wear a hat.”—I laughed with him. “Oh, yes, it’s true. I think for me that was the beginning of the end, with the Marcuses. Jenny actually told it to me. John wouldn’t let her wear a hat, because the bourgeoise women do. — That was the choice I’d made for myself. The life of honesty and imagination and courage.”

“The full exercise of human faculties.”

“Yes. I’ve got all the phrases, haven’t I? But the things I’ve fobbed off on myself, under those names … Whatever I think about seems to bring me back to that dead native in the location: the good life and the thing that’s actually lived, the idea of death and the actuality of the man potted down so quietly in all that racket. … There’s the same hiatus there. Joel”—it was getting cold now, in a rising wind off the water, and my hands were stiff in the pockets of my coat—“why does it trouble me so much, this awful feeling I have of being at a remove from everything?”

He did not answer.

“Even over the riots. Paul and I had talked about the strike. It was something that belonged right in our lives, it wasn’t a piece we’d read in the papers or a mild interest justifying someone’s pretensions to liberalism. But that Monday I felt nothing at all; really nothing. No concern, scarcely any interest. All I thought about was Paul and the week end in Atherton.”

Joel said: “D’you remember Brabantio? — Neither my place, nor aught I heard of business hath rais’d me from my bed; nor doth the general care take hold on me; for my particular grief is of so floodgate and overbearing nature, that it engluts and swallows other sorrows, and it is still itself.”

The wind blew away the words and I had to ask him to repeat it.

“And what do you mean by that? What I think about myself — that in the end I’m too small-minded to have the capacity to feel for anything outside the sticky mess of my own sordid little emotions?”

“Only that it’s a simple human fallibility to put one’s own affairs — specially love affairs — first. In fact, it’s one of the things that helps to ensure the survival of the human race. — You always set yourself such a terribly high standard, Helen, that’s the trouble. You’re such a snob, when it comes to emotion. Only the loftiest, the purest, will do for you. Sometimes I’ve thought that it’s a kind of laziness, really. If you embrace something that seems to embody all this idealism, you feel you yourself have achieved the loftiest, the purest, the most real.”—He felt that his choice of adjectives had missed the dual goal of my aspirations and added the two last with emphasis.

I said, rather painfully: “My own high-falutin’ version of Jenny’s little flirtation with the hat.” I looked down again at the water, which I could not see. I seemed to be talking to a voice out of the darkness; Joel was so still and dim beside me, and the sharp salt wind stiffened my cheeks. Of course it was Paul whom he meant. Or whom, out of their truth, the words made him mean. But I did not want to bring Paul out into this exchange of thoughts in the dark. An odd loyalty (to what it would be disloyal to put the thought of him into words, I did not know; there are blind loyalties of the blood which are slow to conform to changes in the mind and emotions) made me keep silent. The wind seemed to ruffle the lights on the shore, so that they glittered once, as I looked, like scales. “I’m cold,” I said, and as we turned to walk back to the land, “Joel, you were never taken in by the John and Jenny crowd. Were you? And yet you spent a great deal of time with them. Well, they were your friends — it was you who took me there. But you didn’t swallow it all, the way I did. Yet I think you wanted just as much as I did”—I italicized it half-sadly, half-mockingly—” ‘the good life.’”

“Oh, yes, I want it,” he said. “Just as much. Too much, Helen, to expect to find it, first shot, just like that.”

I went in front of him down the wooden steps back onto the promenade. “Joel”—I rounded on him with a sudden accusing discovery, curious—“why didn’t you ever warn me about them — tell me. You could have told me.” I paused as if to coax him. “I might even have listened.” We were under the looped lights of the promenade now, and met with each other’s faces. He hesitated a moment beneath a lamppost, checking our progress, so that we must have looked like two people who pause to decide on their direction. “No …,” he said, looking at me rather hard. His eyes were in the shadow of his brows, but I saw his cheeks move, as if he screwed up his eyes against a harsh light. “No. Not now. Perhaps some other time. It’s a long story.”

I laughed. “But there isn’t much other time. It’s Thursday night — pretty late Thursday night, too, I should imagine — and the Ostia sails on Saturday.”

The next morning he arrived at the hotel soon after breakfast. He had walked all the way from the docks, because it was such a lovely day, and he was carrying a small parcel. Inside it was a carved ebony head I had admired in the window of the native curio shop the day before. “It’s from the Congo, they told me,” he said, as I set it down with delight amid the string and paper on one of the hotel veranda tables. “Joel, it’s beautiful! I love it!” And he was as much pleased at my pleasure.

There is something about the spontaneous exchange of a gift that creates a special kind of ease between people; that Friday morning in Durban it seemed part of the general freshness and good temper of the day. We sat on the veranda with the rich and lazy assumption of the whole day before us. The waves lifted their shining backs and paused a moment, fixed in their own reflections, before rolling evenly to the sand; the whole sea glittered and hung, alive and beautiful behind the cars and busses and the clipped green spaces of the Marine Parade. I stretched out over the balustrade and twisted my neck up to the tall buildings which seemed to disappear, toward the top, in the bright air. “Makes you dizzy”

He came and hung out, too. “Terrific sweep of horizontal”—his hand went out over the sea—“contrasted with sheer vertical. Makes you really see what modern architecture is getting at.”

“Or what the sea is getting at!” We both laughed. “Shall we go to the beach?” I said, wiggling my toes in my sandals.

“Which beach?”

“North or South, as you like.”

He opened his eyes, which he had shut for a moment against the sun. “How would you like to go to a real beach, all to yourself, along the Coast?”

“Oh, I wish we could. To Amanzimtoti or somewhere. Would a train be an awful fag? — I’d like to?”

“Would you really? Good. Because I’ve got a surprise.”

I laughed. “Another one?”

He sat forward, enjoying my curiosity. “A car,” he said.

“But how?”

“I remembered a friend of Max’s. I telephoned him, I talked nicely to him. Oh, it’s a very smart car. He calls it a ‘cabriolet’—know what that is?” We both giggled our ignorance. “Anyway, it’ll be here at ten. He’s sending it along with his driver. Then it’s ours. We can go out for the whole morning, the day, if you want to.”

To anyone else I should have burst out gaily: Joel, you darling. But somehow, even now, I could not show a flippant affection toward him. I said instead, standing up: “Joel, there isn’t anything I’d rather do today. I’ll fly and get ready.” Perhaps this was worse, because it seemed to embarrass him. “Be careful you don’t lose that toe,” he said reflectively, as I moved off. — The little toe of my left foot always slipped the thin strap on those particular sandals.

The car was a new Citroën. We were disappointed because the hood didn’t come down, but, as Joel put it, we gave ourselves the illusion of an open car by “opening all the windows and driving very fast with our eyes closed.” We drove out along the South Coast road past Congella where we could see, away below, ships clustered against the wharves like leaves drifted to the sides of a pond. We came up through the sugar cane to the cliff that rounds above the sea just before the village of Amanzimtoti, we hooted our way through the litter of shops, fruit stalls and Indian children which impinges upon the narrow road near Isipingo, and we drove along the dipping and rising sea road in long patches of warm silence, broken, now — it seemed — by the sight of a little yellow beach, now by desultory talk. All semblance of city life dropped behind us. Each tiny village, in the faces of the holiday children or the slow walk of the retired residents to the post office or the general store, proclaimed the pace of the sea and the green bush. The cane sang with our speed as we passed; the sea drowned our voices where it broke on rocks. There was a hotel above a deserted beach where we had lunch, and men and women came tramping in from the golf course which belonged to the place, the fairways buried among sugar cane as if a barber had run his clippers through the long waving green. We bathed on another beach that was not a “place” at all, and drank ugly red minerals that dyed our tongues, at a village near by, because we were burningly thirsty and the village had nothing else to offer.

As usual, when people are enjoying having no fixed destination, this nameless beach was the one which pleased us most, and we were sorry we had not come to it earlier. “Whatever happened to Ludi Koch?” Joel asked suddenly, while we lay there.

“Got a store, the last I heard, somewhere near where they lived before.” I rolled over. “Were you thinking of Ludi Koch, now?” I smiled, curiously, indicating the setting.

“Funny, I suppose the combination of you and this, put it into my mind. What you’d told me, I mean.”

I giggled and began smoothing the dry sand off my legs, with pleasure; I could feel, like a secret flaw, the bristle of the reddish-fair hairs which I depilated. “Love in the sun.” I laughed at myself at this distance, remembering for the time nothing of the pain, the intensity; perhaps I was even boasting a little. I think we dozed a while, after that. I woke because a fly was tickling its way along my leg; at least, that was what it felt like: I brushed at it, but there was nothing there but more sand. Joel’s eyes fluttered open but for the moment he was still asleep; I do not think he knew I was there. And then I saw from the movement of his mouth as he swallowed that he was awake, and looking up at the sky. What was he thinking, this closed and bone-familiar being breathing beside me? Was he really there at all, can a person be said to be present to one when it is to be only for a few days, a time so short it could be computed in hours, and human beings are apprehended only in flashes, over a long evenness of years. I don’t remember Ludi, I thought tranquilly. Perhaps I shall again at another time; but I don’t now. The tranquillity trod firmly down on it: I don’t think of Paul. What I do remember, I don’t think of.

Joel was looking away, up into the sky, seeing nothing. That time when I opened my eyes, I thought, he was looking at me and I was sure he had been looking at me a long time. — I watched him a moment longer, but he was not aware of it.

So I rolled back onto the sand, and lay there, in the warmth of it. I was aware in my mouth of the want of a cigarette and in my hand, of the movement that would touch Joel’s arm and get it for me. At this point he said: “Cigarette?” and while still I had not moved, it was coming to me. “I was asleep,” he said. I felt myself smiling at him indulgently. He yawned with the daze—“What was I saying, before?” I smiled again and shook my head, as if to say “Nothing. No matter.” “Talk must have been in my dream,” he said.

“I’m so happy where I am,” I said.

When we were driving back to Durban I found myself doing a curious thing. “I was looking at you when you were asleep just now,” I lied deliberately. “I was thinking how much like your mother you are, just around the eyes.” He murmured some casual, politely questioning assent—“Yes?” or “Really …?”; but I think he understood perhaps better than I did myself, that I was trying to say I feared I might have hurt him by some of the things I had said the night before; and that I accepted him, humbly, wholly.

We went to dance that night. In the pleasant, spurious, sentimental atmosphere of a night club that had so little to do with Joel Aaron, I talked to him as I have never talked to any living being: as I have talked to this pen and this paper. Perhaps more truthfully, for here I have myself to contend with, and Joel took away from me the burden of my ego, just as Paul had once lifted from me the burden of my sex.

I remember some of the things we talked of: Joel saying, “It’s not only your own failure with Paul you’re running away from, it’s also what you conceive to be Paul’s failure with himself. It’s what I spoke of yesterday; you can’t bear anything to be less than the creation you’ve made of it in your mind.”

And at some point, myself saying, “In a way, it seems right that one shouldn’t be happy in South Africa, the way things are here. It seems to me to be that as well; a kind of guilt that although you may come to a compromise with your own personal life, you can’t compromise about the larger things ringed outside it. It’s like — like having a picnic in a beautiful graveyard where the people are buried alive under your feet. I always think locations are like that: dreary, smoking hells out of Dante, peopled with live men and women. — I can’t stand any more of it. If I can’t be in it, I want to be free of it. Let it be enough for me to contend with myself.”

He did not answer, and what I said seemed to stand in the air, with a guilty defiance. And it seemed to take point, if not quite the way I should have wished it, from the warm sham twilight of the night club; outside this tepid and muted-lit enclosure, where the weird and useless aspects of civilization, like the extra fins on effete tropical fish, were kept alive under special conditions, there was the beautiful city cleaned and fed and planted by the Indians who originally had been imported as indentured laborers, and were hated; and the natives, who had been there before the white men, and were feared. And outside the city were some of the worst slums in the world, where all these people who were another color lived; and beyond that the reserves, where an old order of life had died, and a new order presented a slammed door; and beyond that still, the gold mines which had made the white man rich and the black man wretched.

We danced easily in this bubble blown up precariously, even a little sadly, above the reality. He said, smiling down at me: “Those University dances we used to go to weren’t ever much of a success, were they?”

“Well, we only went to one, I think. — I wonder why? — I always felt so stiff with you. Not exactly physically, I mean. You always became so serious.”

“I know. So did you, I felt. Not in anything you said—”

“No, I know. That’s what I meant. — A kind of solemnity in the body.”

“In the presence of your body, that is. I used to watch you with other people, and marvel at how calmly they took your weight and presence.” He looked at me and smiled.

“And now it’s so easy. I suppose we’re older.”

When the music trailed off and we were making our way back to the dim little sofa, I said chattily: “Joel, do you really think it might have been because you are a Jew and I’m a Gentile?” The idea of this distinction, at this stage in my life, made me laugh a little. He nodded, pouring me a drink. “Of course.”

“But we were so close. Such good friends.”

“Not close,” he said, “just good friends. You were closer to Danny McLeod, who danced with his cheek on your hair the first time he met you.”

“Did he?” I laughed with mock indignation. “I don’t remember him. — Anyway that’s not fair; just because he had a Scottish name and you know my mother’s Scotch—”

“Still—”

“You thought at the time that that was Danny what’s-’is-name’s advantage — I thought you weren’t attracted to me. I think I was a little hurt. No — disappointed.”

He handed me my drink. He watched me a moment, his mouth curved in what was not quite a smile, gentle, but a little wry.

“Yes, I suppose I was a fool. What I feared would offend”—he stopped and made an appealing gesture of confession—“was exactly what was needed.”

“I wanted to be loved,” I admitted, still feeling it in the nature of confession, half-ashamed, because it was to Joel that it was being made. “I wanted to be touched and kissed as well as talked to. D’you think that was bad?”

“Bad,” he said. “Bad. What would the Isa Welsh intelligentsia have to say if they heard you say a thing like that?” But when our laughter died away, he said: “Often and often, I used to feel, now I’m going to kiss her, now I’m going to lift up that hair and kiss the nape of her neck — Many times; but I never did.”

“That’s just exactly what I felt. Sometimes I felt myself making you want to kiss me, and then I’d stop myself, because I was afraid. I had the idea it would never be the same again. … So”—I suddenly became a little embarrassed, and was flippant to cover it—“other people kissed me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 37

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m rehearsing for Monday,” I said.

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

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

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

“What things?”

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

“Write them to me.”

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at him.

“We were talking about it last night. Or part of it. Two things could have happened to you, once in that set. You could have been entirely taken in by them, for the rest of your life. Or you could have seen through them, and been hurt and disappointed, as you were. If the first had happened, I don’t think I’d ever have forgiven myself for introducing you to them.” He paused and looked at my hands, drawing my attention to the fact that I had spread them, like starfish, on the table. “Very selfish of me. But the second — I couldn’t warn you about them because I loved you.” He spread his own hand to match mine, as if he were giving me credit for a certain background knowledge before passing on to the further points in a discussion. “You know that. I loved you very much and I didn’t think, for reasons we discussed last night, it could ever come to anything. So I couldn’t offer you any — disinterested advice, Helen. How could you have believed me? How could I have believed myself? How could it have seemed, perhaps even been, anything but a desire to keep you for myself.”

I sat looking at him across the table and my eyes slowly filled with tears. I felt it happen, and he saw it, the pinkening of blood, the brightening of the pupil, the brimming I could not control.

He said, gently, still looking at me: “But you’ve known always, Helen.” And after a pause, “There’s nothing to be surprised about.”

But he could not possibly know what was going through my mind. I said to myself, It’s the heat, the excitement, the drink and the stirring awareness of the occasion. Everyone here feels it in some way or another, that is why they laugh so much, are too talkative, or keep touching and fussing at their clothes. People only rise to the surface of their lives when there is to be change, a threat. You only say: I’m alive, when you see death. You only say: I’m here, when you’re about to go. But I could not calm the trembling that astonished me all through my body; I felt for a moment that my whole consciousness, resting since I was born, on one side, had suddenly turned over, like a great stone on the bed of the sea, and shown an unknown world, a shining unseen surface, different, different utterly, alive with waving weeds and startled creatures pulsating on the coral.

I could not speak at all for a moment and then I burst out suddenly in a taut and trembling voice: “There’s a white hair. I’ve just seen it, let me take it out.” And I leaned over and plucked it, bending his head with my other hand.

Soon there was a warning bell; a further wave of discreet gaiety took the ship. The band swung into a song which was taken up, somewhere in the room, by a phrase from a throbbing Italian voice. Joel and I talked and laughed as fast as the rest; a telegram boy raced up the gangway with a last-minute batch of telegrams. One was from me to Joel (I had thought it would not be delivered to his cabin until after the boat had sailed) and with amusement we tore it open and read it together. The officer with the brooding eyes, moving crisply now, kept coming into the lounge and looking over the heads of the crowd toward the bar, like a host discreetly indicating to the servants that the dispensation of refreshments should cease; it was time for the guests to be going.

A voice echoed over a loud-speaker system, enunciating with great precision: “Will all nonpassengers please leave the ship. Tutti i non passeggeri sono pregati di lasciare la nave.”

The groups began to disintegrate, these pulled away from those; it appeared that the woman in the elaborately veiled hat, carrying a pigskin cosmetic case, was not a passenger, whereas the girl in gray trousers and a pink head-scarf was. We kissed, and found, with the rest, that we had said good-by too soon; a kind of pause settled on the passengers, staying behind, the visitors getting up to go. Then the voice urged again: “Tutti i non passeggeri sono pregati di lasciare la nave.” A bell clanged. There is something about the knell of a bell; it is as old and as universal in its summons as a battle cry. We stood at the rail watching the people go down the companionway. Joel had his hand on the nape of my neck, just under the hair, where it was a little damp. I did not want to be the last to leave the ship, so in a little while we embraced again, holding each other hand by the shoulders, and I left him and made my way down behind a woman who kept looking back at someone she had left on the deck, and a man who pulled her gently toward the dock below. The companionway was not very steady and I had to watch the placing of my feet as the dock came up to meet me.

And then I was standing on the dock and there was Joel, up there, watching me. He had taken out a cigarette while I was going down, and now it was in his hand, the thin waver of smoke passing before his face, I waved and felt foolish. He smiled back, never taking his eyes off me; I could see his hands so clearly, I remember, rather broad and the fingers spread on the white rail. A man was unhooking the companionway. It swayed off, the people on the dock backed, it was wheeled away. The ship was free, Joel leaned over and shouted: “Is it four o’clock?” And I ran to the edge of the dock and yelled back: “Yes. Don’t forget.”—That was the hour at which the Pretoria Castle would sail on Monday. I looked down again to steady my balance. There was a long curl of orange peel, swaying on the dirty water. As I looked the water slowly began to widen. I stepped backward, back to the protection of the waving crowd, from whom a long murmur had come.

More and more water washed up between the dock and the ship. The people hanging over the rails had the look in their faces of children who feel a slide giving way beneath them. There were fluttering hands, calls. It was a long moment, very hot, twelve o’clock on a Durban dock.

And then it hapened to the ship; she was no longer something breaking awy from the land, a part of the life of the people standing watching her go. The water glittered up, foreshortening her, and she was just another ship seen from, the hotel verandas on the beach front, flecked with colors and movement that must be unimagined people, saying unimagined things in an unimaginable, unheard pursuance of life.

I took a taxi back to the hotel, and when I got there, I saw the Ostia once more, a squat white shape, slowly pulling the horizon over her head.

Chapter 38

Perhaps this story should end there. Perhaps all the thoughts that came to me alone in the hotel that long afternoon were inevitable; perhaps they were not even the truths they seemed then to be, but were merely one of those flashes generated by the stress of an unfamiliar emotional experience on a mind already keyed-up, like a fire springing from the friction of two sticks. Perhaps I could never have loved Joel, anywhere but on a ship due to sail in an hour; no matter how much I wanted to. I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

But I thought that afternoon that perhaps I had always loved him, always wanted him, and merely made do, with others. With him, I believed, I might have achieved the synthesis of most of the things in which I believed. Of lovers and friends, he seemed the only one who had not discarded everything and found nothing. Unlike me, he loved his parents enough to accept their deep differences from him, and so he had not suffered the guilt of breaking the unreasoning ties of the blood. He had not placed upon any relationship with human beings the burden of the proof of an ideal. And now, he had the purpose and the hope of realizing a concrete expression of his creative urge, in doing his work in a society which in itself was the live process of emergence, instead of decay. All this came to me in shock and turbulence, not the way I have written it here, but in a thousand disconnected images, in the piecing together of a thousand things said and felt and half-remembered.

Yet I believe that although no part of one’s life can be said to come to an end except in death, nothing can be said to be a beginning but birth, life flows and checks itself, overlaps, flows again; and it is in these pauses that a story is taken up, in these pauses that there comes the place at which it is inevitable to set it down. And for this, my story, it seems to me that place comes not on the afternoon on which Joel sailed, but a little later, a matter of hours, in fact.

I must have been very tired that night and, my mind throbbing with exhaustion, had fallen asleep early and slept deeply. I woke to hear soft rain; to smell it. I lay quite still a minute and then I got up and went over to the open window. It was, I suppose, about midnight, and although there were still cars on the Marine Parade, they were muted by the rain and their feelers of light were mistily dowsed. The sea was entirely gone behind the rain. As I stood there, putting my hands out into the surprising warmth of it, I heard a faint sound beneath its own soft sounding, and I thought it was the ringing of my own ears. But it came nearer, clearer, and it was the drowned jingle of a tambourine against small sad voices. I saw in the street below the huddled figures of some little native minstrels, singing as they padded along in the rain. The song was a popular dance tune of a few years before, “Paper Doll,” but they made it infinitely mournful, infinitely longing. I stood there quite still, for a minute or more. I shall never forget how I felt. A feeling of extraordinary calm possessed me; I felt I could stand there in full possession of this great calmness forever. It did not seem to me that it would ever go.

My mind was working with great practicalness, and I thought to myself: Now it’s all right. I’m not practicing any sort of self-deception any longer. And I’m not running away. Whatever it was I was running away from — the risk of love? the guilt of being white? the danger of putting ideals into practice? — I’m not running away from now because I know I’m coming back here.

I was twenty-four and my hands were trembling with the strong satisfaction of having accepted disillusion as a beginning rather than an end: the last and most enduring illusion; the phoenix illusion that makes life always possible.

For a long time after I had lain down in my bed again, I could hear the native children, still singing and shaking their tambourine as they were washed away, fainter and fainter, into the soft rain and the dark.