We ate spaghetti and argued amiably about the election; none of us except Laurie considered that the Nationalists had a chance of coming to power. “The most they can get is a few more seats.” “Forces of reaction be damned — you can’t tell me people have forgotten the way the Nats cheered the Germans on during the war?” “The United Party is moribund.” Laurie drew the slippery strands into his big loose mouth, drooping his eyes sagely. “You can’t rely solely on the popular appeal of Smuts. Like a poor film counting on some idolized Face to put it over.” “Well there you are, Laurie — you fill in your entry predicting victory for the Nats. Dr. Malan our Prime Minister. Win a hundred pounds.” Laurie’s fat face creased into paunchy laughter. “Believe me I would, but somehow it seems a bit disloyal.”
Beneath the inconsequence of my part in the talk I was aware, as on another level, of the hollowed-out feeling within my body, a shaken newness hidden, yet like the trembling of one’s hands when they have been put to some delicate strained balance of muscle in the performance of an unfamiliar skill. Somewhere I was withdrawn in the consciousness of this, and I watched and listened, even talked, from something of the still center of the cat, blinking out of itself into a room, or pregnant women, who hold themselves secret and contemplative. I found myself watching Joel and Paul closely; Joel’s face when Paul was talking, Joel’s manner when he spoke to Paul. And when the certainty came to me: Joel likes him — I knew why I had been watching them. I had wanted Joel to like Paul. To admire him, even. When Joel gave me the opportunity by offering me a cigarette, he must have been puzzled by the depth of the smile I felt come into my eyes for him; grateful, appealing, confessing — the smile with which a woman presents her child, or her lover.
And so the strangely commonplace Sunday evening passed; I even spoke to my mother on the telephone, a polite, quietly pleasant conversation of inquiries and answers, and the promise that I would be home for the week end after next, if not the next.
The odd, self-conscious unreality of facing other people after making love with Paul passed so soon that I did not remember it had ever been. In the busyness of our lives and the casual proximity of John and Jenny our time alone together was limited and we grew increasingly reckless in our passion. Of course, we had whole long evenings together in Paul’s flat, but there were many nights when his work took him to meetings and he would come to the Marcuses’ to have coffee with me at eleven or twelve o’clock, and there were also nights when both he and I had work to do. If I took my books and went with him to his flat, we found that neither of us got anything done; we would lie on his bed in the dark, smoking and talking and drifting into a delicious slow love-making that left us exhausted and longing only to sleep where we lay. And then instead of sleeping, we would begin to make love all over again in order to stave off the horrible time when we would have to get up and go into the cold to take me home. The next day I would sit in a lecture theater with my head lightening to sleep with the low sound of the professor’s voice, and at lunchtime we would hear each other’s voices, faint and secret over the telephone, the clatter of a typewriter in the offices of the municipal Native Affairs Department at his end, and the enclosed echo of the public telephone booth at my end, somehow emphasizing the laughing, tender sympathy we had for each other’s weariness.
So we would resolve that I must work at the Marcuses’ flat. He would bring his reports to write up or he would read or talk to John and Jenny if they were in, and we should have the comfort of each other’s presence. But it was on these occasions that we found ourselves becoming more and more bold. The Marcuses would go to bed eventually and I would feel the edge of the electric light worrying my eyes like grit, and know that I was too tired to concentrate any longer. Paul would sprawl in his chair yawning again and again that quick young animal yawn, showing his teeth like a tiger weary of the cage, and say to himself: I must go. I must go home. Then we would rest on each other a moment in love and the desire for sleep. And the desire for each other, a strength beyond our tiredness, a freshness beyond our day-depleted energy would suddenly and desperately seize us, and with the fear that one of the Marcuses might come in for a book or something forgotten, at any moment, and the sweet inhibiting agony of withholding from each other those intimately known particular cries with which each found his pleasure intensified by the knowledge of the pleasure of the other, we made hasty and trembling love. Once the need came upon us irresistibly when the Marcuses had gone to have a bath, and we had promised to have coffee ready for them when they came out. With their voices a few yards away coming with the strip of light beneath the bathroom door, we lay on the floor, unable to resist as the salmon is unable to deny his death leap upstream. The inflamed bars of the ugly radiator burned over our heads, we smelled the city-ground dust of the carpet. Yet in our ignoring of the situation, with its threat of sordidness and embarrassment instead of danger, there was an element of the real, deep, dreadfully dignified moment of wild creatures, who accept their mating as compulsively and unconditionally as their birth or death. We could not postpone our need of each other for a more convenient place or a more socially acceptable time; we had not reduced love to the status of an appointment for tea. Although Paul was my first lover, and although, or perhaps because, I had been brought up in the world of the Mine where all human relationships were seen as social rather than personal, I had by some miracle grown up woman enough to recognize this proudly. I regretted nothing that I did with Paul, suffered none of the timid shames that sometimes come, despite reason and intellect, to women who have rejected the nurturing of a sterile gentility. And in the beginning of our relationship as lovers, I became aware, too, of the merging, in my love, of aspects of Paul which in any other human relationship would seem far removed from one another: my pleasure in his body and the work he had chosen to do, his involvement with the dreary, hidden life of the Africans, and his appetite for enjoyment, for dancing and drinking and talk, became one, each neither more precious nor even more intimate to me than the other.
Much later Paul was to say to me with hopelessness and fascination, as if he stared at something he could not see the end of: “We’re terribly involved with each other.” And I was to say, to avert his eyes and my own from it: “That sounds like Isa. The sort of thing she says, all dilated pupils.” But now, at the beginning, the total involvement, the man, the lover, the purpose, was only delight, a joy to be exclaimed over inside oneself.
The job that Paul did first interested then excited me. There was nothing romantic about it, except that it was poorly paid, a vocation rather than a profession. Yet it was the only kind of job, unless one was a priest working in a location mission, that could bring a white man deep into the life that went on behind the working faces of the Africans who surrounded us. Even a doctor working in a native hospital only touched the lives of his patients in one situation, that of hurt or illness. But as a welfare officer — first he had been a junior, now he was an assistant to the chief — Paul entered into the gamut of the Africans’ lives. Of course, he knew them chiefly in trouble, seldom in joy, but as he explained, the damnably wonderful thing about them was the way they scaled down their standards of expectation so that no matter how wretched and unlivable their lives were, there was always the possibility of some whiff off the abundance of life bellying momentarily the sails of their spirit. A joke, a good pinch of snuff, even a promise you might not be able to keep, brought out the living eagerness that ugliness and dreary dispossession stifled interminably but could not kill.