“Oh, I see — you mean my clothes. Yes, I’d have to have somewhere to hang—”
She nodded. “Exactly. Well, I’ll have to take the groceries out of the bathroom one and put the junk out of this one in there.” “If the worst comes to the worst. ,” said John, hands on his hips, speaking slowly, “I could move those maps and other stuff of mine over to my father’s place.”
His wife giggled at him carelessly fondly: “Oh, no you couldn’t. Your mother’s acid about the stuff of ours they’ve got already—”
He had a way of raising his eyebrows exaggeratedly. “Is that so? We-e-ll. When, Jen? Did my father say anything—” And they got caught up in one of the wrangling personal exchanges that were always easily parenthetic to their participation in general conversation. Joel had his head in the cupboard, which John had o ened while he was talking, and he called out: “You’ve still got that archaeological data! Good Lord—” And started pulling out colored cardboard files. John dropped his discussion with his wife and went over to encourage him. Soon the floor was littered, and they sat in the middle of it. “It didn’t come to anything,” said John mildly. “I heard it was you, Jenny,” said Joel, with innuendo. “They tell me you put a stop to it.”
“Well, I like that!” she said. “Mickey backed out, and they didn’t have the money without him. All I did was say that I knew something like that would happen, that’s all.”
John pointed at her. “But she was pregnant and she couldn’t have gone!”
The two men laughed at her. I went over and sat down on the floor among the papers and photographs; they had the fascination of the practical details of something that had always been impressively remote: an archaeological expedition. While John and Joel explained and argued, she went about attending to the baby, dipping in and out the talk, competently. Once or twice the husband got up to help her with something; they laughed and pushed each other aside officiously over the child, like two people over a newfangled machine whose workings they do not quite get the hang of. “Look, put it this way—” “No, you idiot, they’re always supposed to be put down on the opposite side to the one they were lying on before.” The baby was like something they had bought for their own use and pleasure; a casual, forthright attitude quite different from the awe and flurry and worshipful subordination of normal life to a little sleeping mummy that I had known in homes on the Mine where babies were born. I had never cared for babies and I did not feel constrained to admire this one; even this small freedom appealed to me.
It was just as casually accepted that I should come and live with them. We had discussed little of what my mother would call the “details,” but when Joel and I were leaving, John said as if he had just remembered: “Well, look, when is she going to come?”—I noticed he had a way of addressing remarks to people in the third person, through his wife, as if he and she interpreted the world to each other, and again I felt drawn to them for their evidence of solidarity, what seemed to me an intimacy as simple as breathing. This was what had appealed to me in them the very first time I had seen them, at Isa’s flat. I felt in some obscure way that what they had was the basis of all the good things in life; from it like casements their minds opened naturally on beauty, compassion, and a clear honest acceptance. Now as we said good-by to them at the door, he leaning an arm on her shoulder, I felt a pang something like jealousy, but without bitterness, as for something which was still possible for me.
In the car I said to Joeclass="underline" “I like them.”
The intensity of the way I spoke must have struck him, and he said quickly: “Why …?”
“They love each other.”
I kept my head down in a kind of shyness for what I had said. He did not answer, but later, in the silence of a long, straight stretch of road on the way to Atherton, he did something he had never done before; I was gazing at the green summer veld threading past when I felt his hand on the nape of my neck, which was turned away from him. I turned back in confusion and surprise, as at a summons; Ludi’s hand had come down upon me once just like that. And Joel was looking at me with the look of a smile in his deep, cool eyes, wondering in understanding, moved and questioning.
The little thread of continuity showing against a relationship so far removed in time, in experience, seemed part of the sense of disturbance and unreality that the upheaval at home had cast like a glare: a milk jug becomes an urn from another age; the feeling of fear, resentment and longing that I hold against the angry voice of my mother somehow becomes the feeling I had, pressed against the door of my room after a hiding. With my mind only half there, I watched the profile of the man sitting beside me; the hand that had rested on my neck relaxed on the steering wheel. Joel will never handle me with love, not even that love of the moment, like Charles’, that deeply desired, faintly insulting recognition of the pure female, discounting me, making of me a creature of no name. Yet I said to myself, Why? And I saw him then for a moment not as Joel, but a young man alive and strange beside me, the curve of his ear, the full muscle of his neck, the indentation at the corner of his closed mouth, his thighs with the unconscious lordliness of any young male’s legs. A faint ripple of sensation went over me. And instantly I was ashamed, I felt I had lost Joel for that instant. That was why it could never be; if I get him to touch me he will never be Joel again, he will never look at me the way he did just now, but with the concupiscence of lovers.
This peculiar afternoon light of my upheaval lay upon everywhere I went, everything I did, during that time. I did not see Mary Seswayo to speak to until after I had been to the Marcuses. She had smiled at me, or rather conveyed with the expressive quick movements of her intense eyes the sympathy of strain across the examination room, where we had sat together writing, but in the abnormal, distracted atmosphere which disorganized the normal life of the University at examination time, we had continually missed meeting. When we did meet, we were both exhausted by a three-hour paper rather pompously headed “Classical Life and Thought.” We sat on the low stone balustrade feeling the lightness of the sunny air with the indolence of invalids.
I said to her: “I tried to get you somewhere decent to work. I wanted you to come home with me.”
She looked at me quickly.
“Yes. I suggested to my mother that I should bring you home for a week or so. I had it all planned out. We’ve got a room that isn’t inside and isn’t out. But they were afraid to have you, even there.”
Her face, that always waited, open, to receive the impress of what I was saying rather than to impose on me what she felt and thought, took on, for the first time since I had known her, something set. Set against me. Her eyes searched me, shocked, and her nostrils widened, her mouth settled in a kind of distressed annoyance. It was the expression that comes to the face of an older person when a young person does something the other had feared he might.
I gave a short uncomfortable laugh against it. But she continued to look at me. The palms of her hands went down firmly to lean against the stone. She seemed to be waiting for an explanation from me; I could feel the pressure of it as if I were being shaken to speak. Just as suspicion makes an innocent person falter like the guilty, so I was queerly upset by this displeasure I felt in her.