When Ludi had gone we came back to the house in a gentle companionable mood and sank into a kind of lull of feminine comfortableness; Mrs. Koch took up the curtains she had been making before her son came home, and the tea, set out with the one cracked cup that Matthew never failed to give us, was waiting in the living room. I lay reading with the damp cottony smell of the chintz cushion under my elbows and could not be bothered to go down to the sea. When it got cooler late in the afternoon, we went for a walk, at Mrs. Koch’s sedate pace, and on the flattest part of the road. If the obverse side of her son’s departure was the sharpness of love and lack, the reverse side was a certain relieved flatness, as if her body protested at the emotional tension of his temporary presence and found resignation more suited to its slowing vitalities.
We were having supper with the radio tuned in over-loudly to the B.B.C, news — the crackling, cultured voice talking of bombs and burning towns was an invariable accompaniment to the evening meal — when I thought I heard the slam of a car door outside, but did not remark upon it or even lift my head because the metallic monologue of the radio, so dehumanized by the great seas and skies that washed between, had the curious effect of making all immediate sounds seem far off and unreal. It was with the most dreamlike astonishment that I looked up from the white of the cloth and saw Ludi. He was closing the door behind himself, sagging from the shoulder with the weight of his kit in the other hand. For a moment I had a ridiculous start of guilt as if I had conjured him up. He smiled at me down his mouth and I saw that his cap, which he normally wore a little too far forward for my standards of attractiveness, was pushed up from his warm-looking forehead. I saw this as suddenly and distinctly as if a light had been turned on in a room that had waited ready in the dark.
All at once Mrs. Koch gave a little exclamation almost of dismay or annoyance, and then she was up and pushed the table away; he had her by the arm. “The bridge is down at Umkomaas. The rains last week, and it’s been slipping all the time, I suppose. We hung about and hung about, thinking—”
“You came back! Ludi! But what about your leave, won’t you get into trouble? Well, I can’t believe it!”
“The bridge is down. So what could I do? The trains aren’t running and I thought maybe I’d get a lift — but then it got late and I thought, what’s the use?”
They were both laughing, perhaps now because Mrs. Koch had seemed put out, and just to make sure he was really there, his mother had to ask him over again. “I can’t believe it.” This time he repeated the story with indignation, feeling in some way that although it could not be so in fact, the army, the hated regimentation that defeated itself again and again, was to blame. — After all, if it had not been for the army, he would not have had to be in a particular place at a particular time, and being prevented from getting there would not have mattered to him in the least.
While they were questioning and exclaiming, I stood up quite still in my place at the table, my napkin tight in my hand. Suddenly, like the moment after I had faced an examiner, a light shudder went over my neck and I began to tremble. The tighter I clenched the piece of linen the more my hand shook, and I could not control my bottom jaw. I was terrified they would notice me, and as the fear came so it attracted its object. Ludi gestured his mother’s attention toward me: “It’s taken away her appetite.”
As he spoke the trivial words, not even to me, the trembling lay down immediately inside me and an extraordinary happiness, utterly unspecific and somehow mindless, opened out in me. We gave Ludi supper; I moved about the room with a light confidence that came to me suddenly and for the first time, as if my body had slipped, between instant and instant, into the ease of balance, never to be unlearned, as a rider, clinging to the vertical insecurity of his bicycle, suddenly learns how and is easy between the supports of air and air. There was a family gaiety between the three of us that had never been between my parents and me; I was delighted with the timidity of Mrs. Koch’s response to the nearest that Ludi’s small dry humor could get to joking. They got quite excited discussing how long the unofficial extension of his leave could hope to last.
“I’ll get the incubator house fixed if I stay three days,” he said.
Mrs. Koch, with a conscious bold levity that made me want to touch her with affection, said: “Oh, to pot with the incubator. Matthew will do something to it.”
“You mean he’ll give it some thought — until my next leave.”
His mother was serious at once; her extraordinary gentleness toward all human beings made her suspect that the old servant’s feelings could be hurt by implied criticism, even out of his hearing. “Ludi, his sciatica’s got him bent double—”
We laughed at her, and soon she was laughing with us.
Ludi gathered up his kit with a gesture that closed the evening; always at some unexpected point he withdrew, firmly and without room for protest, into the preoccupation with a small task or a private commonplace errand of his own. If you followed him to his room, you would merely find him lying on his bed, reading, or tinkering with an improvement to his fishing tackle: yet he was withdrawn into the dignity of himself in these ordinary occupations as a sculptor or a scholar who, it is tacitly understood, will leave the company to rejoin the bright struggle that waits, as always, in the solitude at the top of the house. Like them, he was only loaned to other people; he must return to himself. His mother was long accustomed to this, but now nervousness made her trespass. She called, after a while, to his bedroom: “Ludi?”
His voice came, muffled as if he were pulling some clothes over his head. “I’m going for a swim.”
“But the tide’ll be right out—” she called, not wanting to let him go without a protest. We heard him padding down the passage with his steady, soft tread, like the tread of a native who is used to walking great distances. As he was going down the veranda steps, his mother suddenly opened the window and called after him, “Ludi! Why don’t you take Helen?”
He stood up to the window in the light. “Does she want to come? Of course.”
“She hasn’t been out all day.” Mrs. Koch was periodically seized with the fear that she neglected to entertain her young guest; then it seemed more important that she should arrange something for me to do than consult my wishes. I usually felt a little awkward if the plan involved Ludi, because I was afraid that I intruded on him, and that he felt he must agree out of a sense of duty. And often when he had been persuaded into some little jaunt, I had the feeling, disconcerting in a different way, that he was so little bothered by my presence that to have feared he might be was a piece of presumption, irritating and silly. Now he stood quite patiently in the window, waiting.
This time I was determined to show the decisiveness of an adult. “It’ll take me only a minute to change,” I questioned him.
Mrs. Koch shook her head. “No, you’re not going swimming at night. That’s all right for him. He knows how to look after himself in the sea.”
One did not argue with gentle Mrs. Koch. “Then I’m ready.” I smiled.
“—Then come on!” Ludi put both hands on the window sill.
Chapter 6