The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer

Author:Nadine Gordimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2002-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

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

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

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

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