I bounced his bed. “It’s very soft.” I laughed, looking round. He shrugged, deprecating it. “Feather bed; from Russia. Look, Helen, what do you think about this?” And he brought a book of Danish furniture design to my lap.
I wandered slowly, curiously round his small room as if in a museum. The glossy books on modern architecture and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Yeats and Huxley, paper-backed John Stuart Mill and Renan’s Life of Jesus were stacked on the hand-crocheted mats which were spread on the chest of drawers, the bedside table and the top of the bookcase. A photograph of a school group hung on a brass wire, and a framed address in what looked like oriental characters and must be Hebrew hung at a lower level beside it. On the other wall a modern print had a frame that had evidently belonged to something else, and did not fit it. The only modern painter I had ever heard of was Van Gogh, from a novelized version of his life which I had taken from the Atherton library. “That’s not a Van Gogh, is it?”
“Seurat.”
“Oh.”
A Treasury of Folk Tales for Jewish Boys and Girls, How to Make It, The Wonder Adventure Book—and on top of this battered pile an army cap. It was easy to forget that Joel had been in the army.
“Joel, you’ve never told me, why were you discharged?”
“I got a mastoid and it did something queer to my middle ear. For about a year I couldn’t hear at all.”
I was curious. “Show me how you looked in uniform? — Oh, come on, you must have a picture somewhere?”
He was kneeling next to his model, adjusting something with precision, and the light of the window behind him glowed through his ears and made his teeth shine in contrast to the darkness that blurred the rest of his face. “You laughing in anticipation?”
“It’s the light through your ears — all red. — But put it on, then, if you won’t show me your picture.”
He came forward laughing, with the air of a good-natured dog that allows a ribbon to be put on its collar. “Wait — wait—” I was knighting him with the cap, and his hand, with the short movements of someone searching by touch, was feeling to arrange it, when a hoarse little voice said softly, like a reluctant question: “Joel …”
I turned round.
“No, sit down — you’ll excuse me — I just want to ask something, Joel, d’you know if Daddy’s coming home to lunch or he’s going straight to Colley? He’s coming?” A short round woman stood in the doorway; she held her hands in front of her in the attitude of someone coming for instructions. They were puffy hands with hardened flesh growing up round small, clean but unkempt nails, the ragged-cuticle nails of domestic workers or children. Her body in a cheap silk dress that had the remains of an elaboration of black cotton lace and fagoted trimming round the neck was the incredibly small-hipped, thickened body of Jewish women from certain parts of Europe, the swollen doll’s body from which it seems impossible that tall sons and daughters can, and do, come. The floral pattern of the apron she wore was rubbed away over the bulge of her breasts and her stomach. She looked at me from under the straggling, rather beautiful eyebrows you sometimes see on the faces of eagle-eyed old men, and beneath arches of fine, mauvish, shadowy skin, her lids remained level, half-shuttered. But the eyes were bright, liquid, water-colored.
I knew she must be Joel’s mother and I felt acutely the fact that I was sitting casually on the bed, in the house of strangers. This I felt in relation to her, and to Joel, the embarrassment he must feel at her accent, her whole foreignness before me.
But he answered her: “Colley? — Why should he go there first — Of course he’s coming home.”
At once I was alone and they were both strangers. Something in the way he spoke to her, something he took from her own voice, as one takes a key in music, put me outside of them. I sat very consciously on the bed; what had been unnoticeably comfortable was now precarious: I had to brace my legs to prevent myself from slipping off the coverlet.
I smiled at Mrs. Aaron timidly as if to excuse her to herself. But she did not feel the need to be forgiven; she gave herself time to look at me with frank curiosity, as one might stop to finger a piece of material in a shop. “Joel,” she bridled, “why don’t you bring the young lady into the lounge? Must she sit in the bedroom? — You must excuse him, he doesn’t think.” She drooped her head at him in an appraising, irritated smile. He made a little noise of smiling impatience. “No, it’s not nice she should be stuck in this room — It’s not so beautiful, believe me—” Suddenly she and I were both laughing; as usual, I had deserted, in a desire to be liked had aligned myself in a sudden swift turn with what embarrassed or frightened me. We were led back to the living room, his mother talking on as if he were absent: “It’s always like that. Anybody comes, he hides them away in his room. — Come sit down. Take a comfortable chair—”
“No, really, I’m quite all right—”
“Come on—” She made me move. All her own movements were slow, heavy and insistent as her voice, the movements of someone who has been on her feet a long time, like a horse who keeps up the plod of pulling a load even when he is set free in the field.
She went over to the sideboard with a kind of formal dignity, as if in spite of her wrinkled stockings and her feet which defied the shape of her shoes, her slip showing beneath the old afternoon dress as she bent, there was a grace of behavior that existed independently, as a tradition, no matter who performed it or how. Next to three packs of cards was a pink glass sweet dish filled with clusters of toffee-covered biscuit. “You’ll have something? Come on.” I took one, but when she saw it in my hand uncertainty came to her. “Perhaps she’ll rather have a sweet, Joel — Take my keys, and in the bedroom cupboard—” I protested and bit into the sticky biscuit. “—Go on, I’ve got some nice chocolates.”
I sat there eating my biscuit like a child who is being anxiously fattened.
“A bunch of grapes, perhaps? I got lovely grapes today from the market.”
Joel assured his mother that we did not want tea, lemonade or fruit.
She sat down near the door on a straight-backed chair and her swollen ankles settled on her shoes. We had been introduced, and after she had sat breathing heavily, thoughtfully, over her resting bosom for a moment (neither of us spoke; we could hear her) she said with polite, cautious inquiry, as if the reply would really give her an answer to something else: “Your father he’s something on the Atherton Mine — and mummy? Your mummy’s still alive?”
“Yes.” In an awkward burst I made some attempt to make my life real to her. “We’ve always lived there. My father’s Secretary. — I hate the Mine.”
She stirred slowly in her chair. “So? It’s your home, we all got to like our home.”
There was a pause. I was overcome with the theatrical way I had burst out ridiculously: I hate the Mine — and the even acceptance of this old woman’s reply. She got up slowly, stood looking round the room as if to make sure she had forgotten nothing. “Well, you’ll excuse me—” she said, as if I were not there, an air of apology that seemed to throw the onus of my presence on me, and went out slowly and suddenly both withdrawing and yet taking the field at the same time.
“Would you like to wash?” said Joel, getting up. “They leave you rather sticky, though my mother really does make them very well.” He put the dish of sweet biscuits away carefully in the sideboard.
I don’t know why he surprised me; Joel was continually surprising me by ease when there might have been strain, a word where there might have been a vacuum. He said what he thought and somehow it was never what I thought he was thinking: his nature had for mine the peculiar charm of the courage to be itself without defiance; I had always to be opposing myself in order to test the validity of my reactions, a moral “Who goes there?” to which my real feelings as well as those imposed from without and vaguely held suspect must be submitted in a confusion of doubt. And when I answered myself and acted, anxiousness sometimes made me mistake bravado for honesty.