This went on until the beginning of June. The autumn was suddenly gone; one morning the city came up out of the night as if it had been steeped in cold water: bright, clear, hard, it was winter. I walked out onto the balcony in a sweater, but I felt the air at my ears, and my hands were cold. I had been going to sew back the sleeve of my coat that had pulled away from the lining. I felt now it would be too chill to sit out there; there was a change. As I gathered up the coat and the cotton and scissors, I stopped, and saw that it was not only in the air. The building was finished. I had got so used to seeing the work going on over the way that it had existed in my mind as an end in itself. I had scarcely noticed that it was nearing completion, that it was no longer a framework gradually filling in with bricks and glass and paint, but a building, a place where people would live. Now it was finished. It blocked out much of the sky that I had sat and watched, some months back, after work in the evenings. It was quite finished, and the workmen were hauling down the material they had left on the roof. A lorry was being piled with the sand on the pavement, where the children had played.
The building was in front of me, five stories high, clean with fresh paint. On top, the chimney of the boiler room crooked a finger. A row of gleaming dustbins waited to be put into the kitchens. I thought, When I came here with Paul the first time that Sunday afternoon, they were just beginning the foundations, you could see right out over the hill, you could see the Magaliesburg.
And it came to me, quite simply, as if it had been there, all the time: I’ll go to Europe. That’s what I want. I’ll go away. Like a sail filling with the wind, I felt a sense of aliveness, a sweeping relief.
The lorry rolled down into the street and drove away.
Chapter 35
“Nothing left but all of Europe,” said Isa, putting her small, sharp-looking hands to warm round the teapot. She had met me in town, on my way to go and say good-by to Jenny Marcus, and had turned me off into a tearoom. “It’s a stage most of us get to. I wonder what the European equivalent is? Longing to get out to the wide open spaces, I suppose. Let us leave this damp and overcrowded England and go where the sun shines and men are men. Et cetera.”
She gave one of her little jumpy shrugs and picked up the bill. She pulled on her beautiful velvet coat, folded a scarf round her little throat, where you could always see the pulses through the thin skin; her head rose from her impressive clothes like the head of a bird from its plumage. She smiled with an unashamed acceptance of her own fascination, and said as if it followed out of my look: “You don’t have to worry about him and me. I’ve often meant to talk to you about it, but I don’t know … Now perhaps it doesn’t matter. — He’d never really want me because I’m too clever for him.” She laughed, raising her eyebrows and nodding her head to show me she meant it and must admit it, as we walked toward the door. She paid at the cashier’s grille and the door swung us out into the street, talking. “I’m too clever for him, and so I go in for debunking. I debunk him all the time, out of irritation mostly, because he can’t debunk me. Isn’t clever enough. If I could find a man who would have the brains and the guts to debunk me …” She moved her shoulders a little, under the flowing coat. “Because of this he couldn’t really love me, I mean it never could have been anything but an affair, even before the advent of you. You’re too clever for him, too — not with your head,” she added, as if she knew I couldn’t compare with her, “but in your emotions. I think you’re one of those women who have great talent for loving a man, but he’s not whole enough to have that love expended upon him. It’s too weighty for him. He likes to be all chopped up, a mass of contradictions, and he wants to believe they’re all right. He isn’t enough of a central personality to be able to accept the whole weight of a complete love: it’s integration, love is, and that’s the antithesis of Paul. You frighten him, I frighten him. Different ways, but all the same … And I couldn’t want him, not permanently. You need never have worried about that. Not that I flatter myself you did.”
We had reached her car and she unlocked the door for me. By the time she had gone round to the driver’s seat and got in beside me, her attention had been attracted back, with the brooding inevitability of a magnet, to herself. She said: “South African men. You can look and look. That’s the terrible thing for a clever woman here. She may find one who’s her equal — just. But she won’t find one who’s cleverer than she is, who can outtalk, outthink, beat her at it.” Her lips showed her teeth in a strange, lingering smile of pleasure that she abruptly dismissed, as one dismisses a daydream. “Unless he looks like something gestated in a bottle and brought up on ground book dust. But a real man; there’s always some point at which you feel them cave in. … Tom, Paul, even Arnold. …” She waved a hand in dissatisfaction at her husband and her lovers. “A woman like me needs the world. Like a boxer who can’t find any more opponents at home, he’s met ’em all. Match me — outside — away. I’d soon have the nonsense knocked out of me, they’d show me my place.” She turned to me, laughing.
I felt again the mixture of stirring antipathy and liking that I had always felt for Isa. I thought to myself, She’s a flirt, even with women, though with women the game is played differently. But today I warmed to her in another way; as she spoke I came to understand something about her, and so to feel the sympathy and even pity that divests others of the sense of their superiority that hardens us toward them. It was true; she was too clever; too clever for her own maddening primitive womanly instincts, the desire to be dominated and to look up to a man as a god. Household god. I smiled. “No household gods. That’s your trouble,” I said. I had forgotten the hostility and sense of distaste, almost, that had made me close away from her when she calmly took up discussion of what was to me my private and personal life, making it, as other people’s lives were, matter for social intercourse.
“Bloody little clay figurines,” she said. “Very nice. Made out of Vaal River mud. — You know, I think I’ll come in with you. I haven’t seen the baby yet and you know how Jenny feels about things like that. Should I turn into Claim Street?”
She had offered to drive me to the Marcuses’ house. “No, carry straight on, there’s a shorter way. I’ll show you.”
“There was something I wanted to tell you — I’m damned if I can remember what it was,” she said, pulling up at a robot. A man crossed the street before us, and she followed him with her eyes, as if he would remind her. He was young, with the dark, handsome animal surliness of some young Afrikaners and he looked back at her. She forgot that she had been trying to remember something, in the little game of holding this young male with her eyes. We shot forward as the lights changed; “Doesn’t matter — You leave on Tuesday, you say? Train or plane?”
“No, Wednesday. Plane. I’m going East Coast, that’s why I’m boarding the ship at Durban.”
During the hour we spent at Jenny’s house, we chattered about my plans; the job I had been promised in London; the things I must see, the people I must look up. “Don’t forget Frederick at Sadler’s Wells,” warned Isa again. “I did have the address of the flat or whatever it is where he lives, but I can’t find it. The best thing to do is to send him a note to Sadler’s Wells.” In my notebook I had a whole list of expatriate South Africans who were storming the theater, the ballet and the art studios with the talents which they believed had outgrown South Africa.