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.