When Joel came I did not say anything to him of what had happened, after all. My express intention seemed suddenly not to matter and I found myself saying: “I don’t seem to have seen you properly for such a long time. I thought it would be nice to get away from work and talk.” And we did. We discussed the people we knew and the things we had seen and done with all the space of the ground that was always so easy between us, and by the time the “pot of tea, 6d.” had been reached, I found that my numbness was coming alive, with a rush of gratitude I felt I was being taken back into human life again. The pain of the house on the Mine shrank to one pin point in a whole world; outside, other airs existed. So I was able to say quite easily: “There’s been a terrible row at home. It’s no good.”
When I told him, he said: “Did I crop up at all?”
“No,” I said, pouring his tea. And added because the shortness of my reply left a pause for doubt, “Why should you?”
“I don’t know — I’ve always felt I should, some day. — Of course the row wasn’t really about Mary Seswayo.”
“No, I know.”
“—So you’ll get away after all. You’ll get what you wanted.”
For a moment I had a return of the feeling that there was nothing that I wanted. “But I didn’t want it this way—” I appealed.
“Things keep on happening that way. — Did you want to see me to tell me?”
I smiled.
He drank slowly, deliberately, his eyes moving about the room. “No, it wouldn’t be much good letting it blow over and waiting for next time. Because it’s obvious there’s going to be a next time.” He shook his head with a half-smile to himself. “It’s a pity for them.”
“And what about me?” I felt impatiently it was something Jewish in him, this softening he had toward my parents.
“For you, too,” he said, not retracting the other.
“All this fuss about a girl going to live somewhere else. Hundreds of people never live at home after they’re grown up. The way we talk about it, you’d think—”
“Ah, but if they’d let you go while they still had you—” he said.
As he got up to go over to the little counter of cakes to pay, I laughed. “—You talk as if I’m leaving for ever.”
A week later I telephoned him to tell him that Isa had promised to find me somewhere to live in Johannesburg.
There was a pause. “Well, if that’s the case you might as well go to Jenny and John. The Marcuses.”
“Why?” I was intrigued at the suggestion.
“Yes, they’re a bit hard up and they want someone to help out with the rent of the flat.”
“But why didn’t you tell me before? I think that’d be a wonderful idea. Can I phone them?” The Marcuses had attracted me immediately the few times I had met them, and I was at once excited by the coincidence by which they wanted someone to share their flat, and I wanted somewhere to live. I badgered Joel with questions. “The flat’s very small—” he said dubiously.
“I shan’t be kept in the manner to which I’m accustomed — shame!”
“Well, you wait and see. The best thing will be for me to take you there. I have to see John on Thursday. I’ll have Max’s car so I’ll pick you up after four.”
After I had rung off I sat a moment or two on the little telephone stool, in the restless inertia of eagerness that must be curbed. Suddenly I wanted to telephone Joel again to tell him to be sure the Marcuses made no arrangement with anyone else in the meantime. I was trembling with excited urgency to have it all decided at once. For at the mention of the Marcuses, something lifted in me; I felt that here I might be about to come out free at last; free of the staleness and hypocrisy of a narrow, stiflingly conventional life. I would get out of it as palpably as an overelaborate dress that had pampered me too long.
Chapter 19
When I went to the flat for the first time that Thursday Jenny Marcus sat up very straight on a divan with her bare breasts white and heavy and startling. Like some strange fruit unpeeled they stood out on her body below the brown limit of a summer tan. She wore a skirt and a gay cotton shirt was hung round her shoulders, and face-down over her knees a baby squirmed feebly. As we came in behind her husband the baby belched, and, smiling brilliantly, calling out to us, she turned it over and wiped its mouth.
They lived on the sixth floor of a building on the first ridge that lifts back from the city itself. The building took the look of a tower from the immense washes of summer light, luminous with a pollen of dust, that filled up the chasms and angles of the city as the blinding eye of the sun was lowered; like eyelids, first this building then that was drawn over it; its red glare struck out again fiercely; came; went; was gone. As I got out of the car I had looked round me like a traveler set down in a foreign square; prepared to be pleased with everything he sees.
Inside, the building put aside the slippery marbled pretensions of the foyer and there was the indigenous smell, that I was soon to know so well, of fried onions and soot, and behind the door on which Joel and I rapped and walked in, Jenny in an unexpected splendor.
What is meant by love at the first sight is really a capture of the imagination; and I do not think that it is confined to love. It happens in other circumstances, too, and it happened to me then. My imagination was captured; something which existed in my mind took a leap into life. I saw the bright, half-bare room, the books all round, the open piano and some knitted thing of the baby’s on a pile of music, a charcoal drawing tacked on the wall, a pineapple on a wooden dish and the girl with her bare breasts over the baby. Something of it remains with me to this day, in spite of everything; just as in love, after years of marriage that was nothing like one expected it to be, the moment of the first capture of the imagination can be recalled intact, though the face of the person who is now wife or husband has become the face of an enchanting stranger one never came to know. It was a room subordinate to the force of its occupants; the first of its kind that I was to live in.
“We really wanted a man” Jenny explained, while her husband wandered about the room looking tousled and vague, pushing his shirt into his trousers. “They’re less trouble, we thought.”
“Ah, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “She’ll be able to sit with the baby. You’ll see, Jen, she’ll be useful to you.” And we all laughed.
“Of course I’ll move all the baby’s things out of here.”—She drubbed her stiff dark nipple at the little creature’s nose and with a blind movement of frenzy it snatched it into its mouth. I was fascinated by the look of her breasts; the skin with the silky shine of a muscle sheath over the whiteness of flesh, and the intricate communication of prominent blue veins. They did not seem recogenizable as a familiar feature of my own body, so changed were they from the decorative softness of my own sentient breasts. As she moved about settling the baby when he had fed, they swung buoyantly with the strong movements of her arms; she was a big girl with the slight look of rawness about the tops of her arms you sometimes see in English women. Still talking rather breathlessly — that was her way — she wriggled into a brassière and buttoned the blouse. “We must take the other room, John? Because of the porch. — We’ve rigged up a kind of little room for the baby on the porch, and the door leads from the other room — We’re going to start putting him out there to sleep. It’s not healthy to have him in with us. And you’ll have this divan — the only thing is the cupboard.” She caught her lip and laughed, waving toward the door of a built-in cupboard. “That’s why we wanted a man — they take up less space somehow.”