Because they were preoccupied with the imminence of their “trip,” as this crowning fulfillment of success, solidity and privilege was always referred to by Mine people, they were less upset by my leaving the University than they might have been. My father had for some time been drawn toward the trap of the parent who gives his child the education he himself endows with the mystical powers of what has been denied him: informed as he believed I must be with this power, must he not doubt all his opinions where they conflicted with mine? If I wanted to leave the University before getting my degree, might not the fostering independence of the University itself be proved in this …?
My mother said: “Of course it’s this man behind it. I’ve told you all girls are alike. It’s a waste of money sending them to a University. As soon as some man comes along they forget all about their great keenness to study. I knew we’d be throwing our money out.”
I had taken Paul home with me to the Mine once or twice, and although the Sunday with its elaborate dinner and lack of conversation was hardly a success (Paul was polite but endured the day by seeming not to be there, his tall freckled brow behind the newspaper, a boredom that agitated me expressed in the angle of his legs), my parents accepted him for what he sounded to be rather than what he was. The son of an old respected Natal family — the fact that the Clarks were wealthy was pleasant, but what really impressed my parents was that Paul’s father was a Justice of the Peace and that “Natal” was in itself a guarantee of pure English blood and allegiance to England, the distinction of an eternal Colonialism they desired above all else. Like most parents on the Mine, they feared to find themselves with a son-in-law with an Afrikaans name; if it happened, they would say: “He’s Afrikaans, you know, but very nice, so what does it matter?”—but the disappointment would never be swallowed. If one’s daughter went so far as to marry a Jew, at least one would get the awe and sympathy with which people regard aberration.
But Paul could not have sounded more suitable, with his solid Anglo-Saxon background, and along with the suitability they naturally assumed the satisfactory pattern of his relationship with me. The young people were going about together pretty steadily — nowadays parents are not expected to ask, of course, but still, one sees. … When his position improves (or some such inevitable delay is over) there will be an engagement, a wedding (a big one with all the old residents of Atherton and the Mine? Or perhaps a quiet one with just His Family …). Anyway, Helen would be comfortably settled, and that was all one could ask.
If my father was disappointed because I had not graduated, and my mother felt that money had been wasted on me, there was at the same time consolation for them, generated by my mother, in these indications that I was proving myself no less, if no more, than any other daughter of their world. In my mother’s softening toward me over the waste of my father’s money — she judged only by official results and it did not occur to her that although I did not have a degree I might have benefited by my years at the University — I could detect a curious note of satisfaction in seeing me caught by what she believed was rightly the inescapable; the ceremonial of engagement, marriage, a “nice little home.”
They were gone; my father with his bowling kit (he had at last given up tennis) and a letter of greeting from the Atherton Rotary Club to a Rotary Club in the south of England, my mother with the pigskin handbag presented by the ladies of the Mine. I was working temporarily in the bookshop that had employed me during vacations; Jenny and John had found a house at last, in the very suburb which they had scorned.
All this, though it affected its conduct from day to day, existed lightly on the perimeter of my life; nothing could touch me at this time but Paul. My love for him was at that extreme, exclusive, intensely selfish stage when nothing and nobody interested me unless connected with him. All the small pleasures I had enjoyed before were blocked out by the strong joy of him — the shop windows I had lingered before, the poetry I had murmured over, the half-heard conversations in busses — the immediacy of life streamed past me ignored: I was fixed only on him. Food was actually tasteless unless I ate with him, in music it seemed I heard the tenderness, the excitement and the sadness of our love-making. Like some surgical alteration to the structure of the brain that blocks out certain capacities of thought and action, passion paralyzed my responses to anything outside its own image.
Although Paul was gregarious by nature, we saw less and less of our friends. I did not want to share him with anyone, was largely oblivious of any company other than his own, and he was so caught up in his work and in me that there seemed to be little time to spare for others. When we went to a concert or a play we would be surprised to be reminded by friends met in the foyer that it was two or even three weeks since we had seen them. “Where have you been?” someone would say. And we would look vaguely apologetic, the air of two people who have gone to ground, lightly affronting the group by their lack of need of them, setting up the slight irritation of an envious curiosity. Sometimes they merely waved, faces turned toward us over the heads of the crowd in recognition of the separateness we had retired into. Once or twice it was Joel whose big dark head I saw (even from the back I always recognized him instantly in a crowd) and it did not seem strange that I should be content to smile and flutter my hand, and not make the effort to go up and talk to him, our old, deep, dependable understanding of no more claim than casual acquaintance before my preoccupation with Paul and myself.
Even the limited interest of my job did not trouble me. It was so far from the work demanding and transforming all my energies and imagination that I had hoped would present itself to me through the University that, had it had any real place in my life at the time, it would have filled me with frustration. But the days passed quickly among the smell of books, and I earned enough money to keep myself in Johannesburg. Paul’s was the job into which I projected all my pride and interest.
I was now typing the thesis to which I had so vehemently denied I would give any time. I looked forward to the hour or two I spent over it every evening after supper, watching the phrasing and the punctuation as if it were a piece of literature. One evening when we had had a little argument over syntax — How many times must I tell you, he said, I don’t want a ghost writer, I want a typist — and it had ended in laughter and my getting my way, I said to him as I picked up fresh carbon and paper: “You know when you first came back from Rhodesia the Marcuses wanted me to offer to do this for you.”
He smiled, and said through teeth clenched on an empty pipe, “And you didn’t?”
“No. I said why the hell should I.”
He stretched out his foot and gave me a prod on the thigh. “Hoighty-toighty. Well, if you hadn’t changed your mind eventually, it certainly never would have got done.”—In the lethargy which sometimes comes up in reaction against a piece of trying work accomplished, he had let his thesis lie unpresented for four months, simply because he could not bring himself to go to the trouble of having a fair copy made of it.
I said as I typed: “They annoyed me by making a sort of privilege out of it, like wiping the blackboard for teacher. They kept impressing me, if you don’t offer Isa will do it.”