I went after her. “Why don’t you want me to go?”
Her tactics were common ones, and always the same: she went about a succession of household tasks with swift effort as if you were merely a distraction on the perimeter of her concentration of duty. When, as a child, I had wanted to be forgiven for some piece of naughtiness, I had had to follow her about the house like this, watching her hard, slender hands ignoring me. I asked her again:
“Why shouldn’t I go?”
She hated to answer. By withholding her complaints, her accusations, her arguments, she withheld also the risk of their refutation and kept for herself the cold power of the wronged.
So now she said tightly: “You wouldn’t go with Basil or the other one.”
I laughed. “Because I didn’t want to.”
“They’re not your type.” It was a quotation.
“No, they’re not. It doesn’t mean that because we happen to come from the Mine we’ve got to stick to one another at University. Basil’s never ever been a friend of mine — we’ve nothing in common.”
“And you have,” she stated, meaning Joel and me.
“We get on well. He’s intelligent, and well — nice, that’s all. …” It was almost an appeal; my tightening of irritation unwound into a desire to have my mother agree with me, to accept her. A feeling of tears coming in a longing for her approval, even if she was wrong, even if we were different.
She ignored it off the hard back of her understanding; it slid, harmless. …
“As I say, you certainly do have the queerest taste.” There was something indescribably insulting in the casualness with which she dissociated herself by this callow, mild cliché; she would not even give me the blunt words of her real objections, trouble herself with an examination of what she felt. The Petrie man and now the Jewish storekeeper’s son: Well, it’s so, isn’t it? her back turned on me said.
I believe that was the only dance Joel took me to; he had little money, many things he wanted to do, and as he was two or three years older than I was it was only the interruption of the war that made him an undergraduate when, in himself, the stage had already passed. And curiously, I did not mind. The one dance had somehow not been an entire success; Joel and I could not hold hands, dance with my cheek raised and his lowered like love-stalking birds. We could talk endlessly, spend more and more time together, meet each other’s faces above other people’s chatter with the sudden comfort of each other’s understanding; but this we could not do. Perhaps for dances something in me wanted the tall, fair-haired boys who could clown over beer bottles and flirt with me in the permissive code of gentlemen of my own blood. With one of them I did not have to meet the purposefully unremarking smiles of my classmates (we think nothing of it!) nor did I feel, as I did when Joel stopped to speak to a group of friends, the sudden insipidity of the blue organza dress my mother had made me, the locket on a chain round my neck, in contrast to the interesting dramatic clothes of the friendly Jewesses, bold in their ugliness, bold in their beauty, outdistancing me either way.
This need of mine existed not only outside but also in contradiction to the expansion of my confiding intimacy with Joel Aaron. Out of the silences that followed some minor confession — the silence that is really the rise of sudden floodwaters of words, blocking by pressure the trickling release of speech — came the real unburdening. I told him of my gradual suspension from the life of the Mine … my voice tailed off in what seemed tame and not quite the truth. We were silent, or spoke of something else. Then all of a sudden it came: I told him about Ludi. He himself seemed to impose the limitation of what I should tell him. “It’s a pity to give it away,” he said, combining, as usual in his manner, the immediate sympathy of a contemporary with the comforting, dispassionate remove of a much older person. “When you tell someone else about someone you have loved, you always have the misgiving afterward that you’ve given that much of it away.”
“You sound like a romantic.”—For him, at this time, it was a term of scorn and like a simple object that has been handled by the great, I was fascinated to be able to use it, for it belonged to the vocabulary of that group with the sense of self-ordainment to a sharper, warmer, ruthlessly honest life which exists in every university, and whom, through Joel, I was beginning to hear around me.
He spread out his dark hands stiffly in the pleasure of yawning.
“Only in love. Which is the right place.”
One subject that often brought us to near-argument was my mother. A curious kind of struggle seemed to go on between us at the alert of her name, a battle in the larger air above our heads, the clamor of which reached us only faintly in the reasonable sound of our two voices. She and I had argued again one evening about my going to live in Johannesburg, and after dinner I had heard her in the kitchen, behind the muffle of the door, discussing me with Anna. When Joel arrived to see me with a book he had found for me, I was withdrawn into irritation.
“—She’s been shut in the kitchen since dinner, discussing me over the dishes with the native servant.” We were sitting on the porch; moths and rose beetles from out the summer night beat a tattoo against the wire gauze that enclosed us in light. Joel sat, looking at but not seeing his hands hanging between his knees.
“Her opinion’s so valuable, you know — Naturally, she’s been absorbing my mother’s personal homespun philosophy for fifteen years — she’s the one person calculated never ever to disagree with a single word; and that’s how my mother likes it. It’s a wonder she doesn’t buy herself a parrot. That would be more dignified, anyway, than discussing me with a servant.”
Joel’s silence annoyed me because its questioning suggested the fear that somehow I might be in the wrong. I stared at him for answer, but he merely widened his nostrils as if he were stifling a sigh as one stifles a yawn. The blood trapped in his forgotten hands showed veins crossed and wound like tendrils of a creeper that has come to life round the fingers of a broken stone hand in a garden. Something in the heaviness of his look, a look passing like a river beneath the dark arches of his eyes, reminded me of his mother; of the way she sank, sometimes, out of the family talk; was her, despite her white shoes that were never cleaned, the big hairpins that fell out of her thin hair and smelled, when you picked them up, of the greenish tinge of metal and old frying. Suddenly I wanted to make him move; I said: “Joel?”—to do that, rather than to urge him to speak.
He said: “You discuss Professor Quail’s shortcomings with Mary Seswayo.” Mary Seswayo was the African girl I had seen in the cloakroom when first I went to the University, and to whom I had begun to speak lately.
I was angry. “Ah, you know it’s not that! — It wouldn’t matter if Anna were white, yellow — whatever she was — she’s a servant, an illiterate. It’s humiliating for a woman to discuss her private family affairs with a servant, someone who isn’t even capable of forming a judgment—”
“You don’t like the way your mother speaks about natives. You told me only the other day that it ‘made your blood boil’ when you heard her describe someone’s way of living as ‘worse than a native.’ To prove your enlightenment as opposed to her darkness, you pursue a poor frightened little native girl who happens to have passed English I, or whatever it is, round the Arts block, offering a rare tidbit of white acquaintanceship—”
“I want to talk to her as I might want to talk to any other student. I don’t see why I should be debarred by my white skin? Why, it’s from you yourself—”
“—And then when your mother puts aside considerations of status and color and talks — as one woman to another, mind — to Anna, your blood boils just as hard again.”