He said, with the stiff little preparatory swallow of surrender: “It happens about once a year, with me. One feels — and then afterward — I don’t know, I’m disgusted with the woman. Meaningless, really.” He thought a while. I wondered if he was remembering this strange act that I had never partnered but that I now understood. I felt a voluptuous tenderness toward him and wanted to take his head in my arms. He got up, slowly disentangling himself as one puts aside boughs, and stood, feet apart against the dizziness of standing upright. Reflectively, dismissing it, he swayed a little. “I assure you it’s been a long time, now. Oh, many months.” He smiled at me, his sour, confiding smile.
And then, as if he felt at the same instant my sudden desire for air, for the wet air of rain, he padded over to the window and opened it wide. It was sheltered by the veranda so that the rain did not come in, but the fresh, wild air did, rushing in as if the room drew a great breath. Drops like thick curved lenses distorted and magnified the brilliant green of the creeper shaking over the roof’s edge. Scent tanged with wet came up from the beaten petals of the frangipani. The veranda with the few unraveling cane chairs and the pot plants breathing the rain they could not feel had the green twilight of a conservatory. We stood with our nostrils lifted like animals, staring out into the falling rain, our arms lightly round each other.
Curiously, this time when he went away and I was not to see him again, I was not lost. Almost before he had gone I had given myself up to the assurance of his letters. The idea of the first letter from him filled me with excitement, so that I half-wished him to go, be gone so that I might get that letter the sooner. And I should be able to write to him; perhaps to make him something. If I thought about home at all, it was to imagine myself sitting making something for Ludi, in absorption, in completeness. Mrs. Koch was mostly silent during these last few days of my stay, speaking of Ludi, at long intervals, as “he” and “him” as if the silences between her remarks were merely times when the conversation continued somewhere in her out of earshot. She would come hurrying from another room to show me something connected with him; a special winder he had made for her wool, a bracket for a bedside lamp that needed only the right kind of screw to complete it.
Once she came in with a snapshot.
“This isn’t bad.” Her crinkly gray hair hung over her eyes as she peered closely at it. When she had had a good look she passed it to me. Ludi, who, like most shortsighted people, did not photograph well, stood scowling at the sun in the artificial camaraderie of a garden snapshot. Two little boys grinned cross-legged in the foreground, a dog was straining out of the arm of a young woman with a charming, quizzical smile that suggested that she was laughing at herself. A badly cut dress showed the outline of her knees and thighs, and with the arm that was not struggling with the dog, she had just made some checked gesture, probably to push back the strand of curly hair standing out at her temple, which the photograph recorded with a blur in place of her hand. I was instantly drawn to her. “Who’s this?” I pointed.
“Let me see — Oh, that’s Maud — Oscar — you’ve heard me talk of Oscar Harmel? — Oscar’s second wife. The old fool, we all thought; she’s young enough to be his granddaughter, almost. The two boys are his grandchildren, from his first marriage, of course. They love Maud. — Oh, she’s a sweet girl, a dear girl, no doubt about that. But of course it doesn’t work. She laughs a lot, but she’s not happy. She’s very dissatisfied with her life. Funny girl. Oscar’s not in this”—she lifted her eyebrows to see better, as if she had her glasses on and were peering over the top—”I wonder when it was taken? Oh, I know, last time Ludi was on leave, he went down there and stayed over. One of the little chaps had had a birthday, and got a camera for a present. — He brought me the picture specially, next time his mother — that’s Oscar’s eldest daughter, Dorrie — brought him to see me. …”
Quite suddenly, it came to me that I knew it was she. I looked at the girl half-laughing, half-struggling against the nonsense of having the photograph taken and I knew it had been she. This is the girl, I told the sullen Ludi, not looking at me, not looking at the sun. And in his refusal to meet the eye of the camera, in the obstinate stance of his legs — in the silence of that photograph of him — he confirmed it to the tingling of my half-pain, my curiosity.
Chapter 9
Behind my eyes, inside my sleeping body, I sensed the surface of day. Knew the breath of the warm sea that would be blowing in the window. The conversation of the fowls with the dust. Mrs. Koch squeezing oranges in the kitchen. The great brightness of morning that would leap at me, blinding, joyous, as I opened my eyes.
A dim, cool room. Silence. The call of a dove, curtains with a known pattern. Silence. High on the wall the lozenge-pattern of light filtered through the ventilator, the neatly spaced pale yellow crumpets of childhood, that moved round the room through days of sickness. And then my mother, rattling at the stiff lock of the hall cupboard with her keys. Missus, the butcher he send: Anna. I lay a minute, looking round the ceiling where every dent, every smudge was where I knew it to be, and then I got up, went to the wardrobe for my clothes, pulled the thin curtains back on the dusty, clipped jasmine bush, the patch of neat grass, the neighbor’s hedge.
It was like this for a number of mornings; for an hour I would be quite dazed with the sense of having mislaid myself in sleep, or the half-will, half-suspicion that this was the dream and the awakening would be other. But soon it no longer happened; I knew before I woke that I was home on the Mine, in the bed, in the room that claimed me as their own.
Soon I would wake to myself in the mornings, but I was not secure for the whole day. I came slowly up the path after the anticlimax of the post — there was no letter for me — with the dry, windless highveld sun making my hair too hot and electric to touch and my mother’s voice over the preparation of lunch coming from the kitchen, and I was seized again with the unreliability of my own eyes, ears, and the utter conviction of my other senses, that made me smell and feel noon on the veranda above the sea, with the sway of the sea, from which I had newly arisen, in my blood as I stood. I waited at the window in the empty house of early evening for my father to come home, and turned to the room to look at, and even to make tentative movements to touch, all the objects, ornaments, carpets, disposition of furniture, photographs, vases, that in their very evidence of reality, and lifelong involvement with me, suddenly could not summon meaning and belonging. Even more strangely, I spent a morning shopping in Atherton with my mother, and the hurrying along the streets gossiping together, the matching of a piece of last year’s material, my mother’s uncertain look outside a shoeshop where she wanted my confirmation of a decision she had already made to buy a pair of new shoes — all this pleasant, familiar activity came to me as it might come to someone who has been ill, and is filled with the strangeness of standing upright in the sun again. When we stopped to talk to people, I had the smile that invalids summon.
“On Tuesday? Yes, that would be lovely, I think. — Helen, what about Tuesday?” I looked from my mother to the indulgent smile of the matron who was inviting us to tea, as if I had not taken in what my mother was asking. And the sight of the two of them, in their floral dresses and their veiled summer hats, small brown paper parcels from John Orrs’ and the Sewing Center and the seed merchant hanging from their white gloved hands, filled me with a kind of creeping dismay.