We sat seriously through the film. Sometimes the young boy’s foot would touch mine by mistake — they had such big feet in shoes with thick rubber soles — and there was a ruffle of apologies. The one — the nicer one, actually — had a crenelation of incipient pimples perpetually lying in anger beneath the tender shaven skin along his jaw, to which, in the imagined privacy of the dark, I always saw, out of the corner of my eye, his fingers return feeling along as if reading the bumps in the tender, disgusting language of adolescence; curt, monosyllabic as obscenity, and as searching.
At this time, too, my father was teaching me to play golf. When the hooter went at half-past four I left my books open on the dining-room table and went into my room to put on rubber-soled shoes. My father came home with the air of expectancy of someone who is waiting to go out again immediately, and we were at the first tee just as the sun shifted its day-long gaze and glanced obliquely off the grass. Afterward I sat on the veranda full of Mine officials at the clubhouse, drinking my orange squash at a rickety wicker table, with my father sipping his beer. Our heads were continually turned to talk to people; often two or three men screeched chairs over the cement to sit with us, others would swing a leg against the table while they paused to talk in passing. Even if their talk veered to channels that slowly excluded me, leaving me at some point gently washed upon the limit of my comprehension or interest, I rested there comfortably, hearing their voices rather than what they said, lulled by the warm throbbing coming up in my scarlet, blistered palms. I lolled my head back, put my dusty feet up on the bar of the table; the sky, swept clear of the day, held only radiance, far up above the shade that rose like water steeping the trees and the drop of the grass. Over at the water hole, the whole world was repeated, upside down. It all seemed simple, as if a puzzle had dissolved in my hands. The half-questions would never be asked, dark fins of feeling that could not be verified in the face of my father, my mother, the Mine officials, would not show through the surface that every minute of every day polished. I rested, my foot dancing a little tune; the way the unborn rest between one stage of labor and the next, thinking, perhaps, that they have arrived.
Part Two. The Sea
Chapter 5
I had a new bathing suit.
It lay on the bed in my room; “Why shouldn’t Nell go down to Alice’s place?” my father surprised himself by saying. My mother looked from one to the other: “—Well, I don’t know, would she like it—?”
I could not conjure up in myself a projection into any single moment — a meal, the sight of the sea, Mrs. Koch smiling from a veranda — ready to exist on a little farm on the South Coast of Natal. We had been invited many times; we had never gone. Alice Koch was my mother’s old friend, corresponded with regularly, but materializing only every two or three years, when she would telephone to say that she had arrived in Johannesburg on holiday, and would come out to the Mine to spend a week end or a day. I had always read her letters, and reading them, was easy with her; yet when she got out at the station she was different; a big woman, much older than my mother, with a gentle smile and a faint, refined dew of agitation touching cool from her upper lip as you kissed her. Once — dim with sand castles and a doll that had had its feet trailed in the edge of the water — there was the memory of staying at a place near where Mrs. Koch had lived and Mrs. Koch had come with her two daughters and their children to sit with us on a beach.
“On her own … would she …? — I couldn’t go.” Mother patted the yellow bathing suit.
“Oh, yes.” I looked up quickly; it seemed as if there had never been a pause. “I want to go; I’ll go.”
I was seventeen and I had been a year out of school. The year had been spent working at a temporary job in my father’s office; the Secretary’s daughter in the Secretary’s office of Atherton Mine.
The train put me down on the siding paved with coal grit and blew back a confetti of smuts as it screeched off slowly over the brilliance of rails. When I took my hand from my eyes I was receding rapidly, alone on the glittering black dust. With a honk the train was gone.
A double white sign, converging on a V, said, KATEMBI RIVER, 17 ft. above sea level, 57½ miles to Durban. A tin shed, delicately eroded by rust a foot up from the ground, said, GOODS. It was empty. At the end of the strip of coal grit, like a short carpet abruptly rolled, thick bush green and black green and hard with light reached up and closed in high, singing with hot intimacy far within and dead still to the eye.
A tremendous heat watched everything.
I was conscious of the feel of the sea on my left cheek, where it bumped and exploded white below the roll of green that fell away from that side of the track, but I was still as a lizard, breathing, it seemed, shallower even than the air, not moving my eyes.
The shaking of a human hand unseen broke the authority of the bush as it swayed with the passage of human bodies passing down a grudging pathway I could not see; and the quiet buzzle of two people talking that suggests to the stranger they are preparing to meet a side of themselves he will never know, that will have disappeared in hiding by the time they come forward on a smile, gave a queer misbeat to my heart. I was hot, a little sweat came out and clung my hair to my forehead as I urged smiling to meet them; Mrs. Koch pointing and shaking her head beneath a checked parasol, her feet in men’s sandals, and a man with her.
“—My dear! I’m so sorry … shame … what a way to arrive. …” The soft, damp kiss, the Eau-de-Cologne. I laughed, shaking my head, hotter, unbearably hot now in the relief of the moment of greeting over. The man — it was a young man, I now saw, in a sort of half-uniform, khaki shorts and an army shirt and sandals, but no cap — wore glasses and stood back looking down at us with the polite smile of a stranger watching emotion which he does not share. The smile pulled the corners of his mouth down and in a little. “It was Ludi, he would stop by at the old Plasketts’ on the way to say hullo — oh, there was plenty of time. I am so sorry. … What will your mother think of us?”—Her son, of course; with the German name; the guilty smile of nonrecognition faded comfortably on my face.
In the gaiety of arrival, exchanging questions we did not wait for each other to answer, we trudged up the steep pathway with cinders grinding away under our feet, a hand up to fend off the bush. The young man came up behind, with the luggage. The three of us were packed into the front of an old faded car and he drove away up and down a steep stony road that dipped now between flat-roofed trees where creepers dropped screens over bush secretive with a hidden trickle of stream, now through a cutting — black ooze and wet rock with a bunch of tough grasses stuffed in here and there as if to staunch the wound — rose and turned and discovered the river away below on the left and the sugar cane. As I talked to Mrs. Koch, my elbow crooked on the open window felt the pull of the sun and the sudden warm wet blow of the river. The river was drawn in a brown hank, shiny like the sheath of a muscle, through the soft hills of cane; one against the other they were folded, soft with deep cane, flattened like fur by the wind, down, silver-pale, up, green; sage and brilliant as the sun blew across.