Before I left I dutifully asked if I could have a last look at the new baby, and was surprised when Jenny led us into the children’s room and picked the little dangling creature nonchalantly out of his crib: when her first child was a baby, no one had been allowed to pick him up outside his specified play hours. But it appeared that she had changed her baby manual since then. This boy was being reared on the principle of what she called “the natural young animal”; he was hugged, carried about, and allowed to suckle at will, like a kitten. Jenny asked me whether I could find room in my luggage for a large photograph of him which she wanted to send to her mother in England. “Thanks, then. It won’t take any room at all, really. You can put it flat on the bottom. It’s being framed now, but I’ll get John to drop it with you on Wednesday morning, on the way to work.”
Isa was leaning over the baby, like a child looking down into a fishpool. She had two children of her own, but the special quality of children seemed to dawn on her only through the children of other people. “Ah, that’s it. Now I remember — it was about Joel Aaron I wanted to tell you, Helen. He’s going to Israel. You must look out for him when you get to Durban. He must be there already. I think he’s sailing about the same time as you. On one of those Italian boats, though.”
I turned to Isa with surprise, but while she was speaking, Gerald, Jenny’s elder child, came skipping in the doorway and at once brought himself up short at the sight of visitors. Jenny was questioning Isa about Joel, but I heard no more of what they said. The little old toy the child had been carrying had dropped, and hung from his hand. It was the plush rabbit that had been hanging from Paul’s hand the first day I saw him. Paul stood in the doorway of the Marcuses’ flat and in one hand he held a bottle of wine, in the other he held this rabbit, hanging by the ears.
I think it was there and then that I parted from Paul; not later, when he kissed me with those hard, long kisses and pretended that this was a holiday on which I was going, a holiday from which I would come back. Certainly it was then that I wept, and had to move quickly over to kneel at the little boy’s side, so that Jenny and Isa should not see the tears.
Chapter 36
In no time at all when the plane comes out of the hills behind Durban, the green seems to melt and dissolve in a mist and then suddenly it is the sea, there below. It is the sea, greenish, like the grasslands, moving, like the grass beneath the wind.
As the engines cut out the air seems to cut out, too; a warm heat, liquid, fills your lungs. The plane comes down and there you are, the figure of yourself providing another facet for the brilliant, glittering, soaring light of sea level.
I left Johannesburg on a cold, dusty July morning. The grit at the airport blew against me sharp as rime. When I landed in Durban less than two hours later, it was summer. The old airport on the Snell Parade was still in use then, and the taxi that took me to my hotel passed smoothly between the green of the airport with its fringe of umbrella trees on one side and the sea deep green behind a low bank of bush on the other. The sea was very calm and it turned onto the beach in slow coils, clear as spun glass. The very sight of the sea in this mood does something to one’s breathing; I began to breathe slowly and deeply, as if for months I had been wearing something tight that had now dropped away. And while I was being received into the big old cool hotel, while I signed the register and went up in the lift with the young Indian page whose dark forehead matched the polished panels, and wore, as if unable to forget the humidity of the summer months, a beading of sweat; while I hung a dress or two in the stiff old-fashioned wardrobe that smelled of cockroach repellent, and sat a moment in the soft, limp-smelling armchair, a kind of shaky happiness came over me. It was the kind of happiness that has little to do with one’s mind.
A hotel, an airways service, have something in common with a hospital in that they reduce one’s life to a program of needs, to which they minister. Handed a magazine at the start of a journey, summoned to dinner by a gong, this outer simplification of living tends to produce a corresponding inner one: Your life really does become simply that: a time for mild diversion, a time to eat, a time to sit on the chairs comfortably provided, and look at the sea, to which the hotel is thoughtfully turned. I thought that this mild assumption of one’s needs would take care of me very well for the few days before my boat sailed.
When I had unpacked, and lunched, I walked down to the South Beach. It was not the fashionable beach — that was on the north side — and even so early in the afternoon, when most holiday people were having a siesta, there were family parties on the sand, the parents drowsing and the children, ignoring the seasons of the day, shrill and dripping. I took off my sandals and walked away up the beach toward the long arm of furzy green that curves round the entrance to the harbor; away to the right I could see cranes gesticulating above the hidden docks. I remembered my father, talking about the “bar.” Out over the bar. That calm, heavy-looking stretch of water on which the little lighthouse looked down; what would it be like when the ship slid through it? And as I watched, a ship did just that, came past the conglomeration of waving steel antennae, left the escort of tugs spinning vaguely in her wash, and, breasting, busy, silent, was out. There was a bleat. It came perhaps from her. (A bleat like the hooter at the Mine.) Her profile of orange-striped black funnels and up-curving bows moved slowly against the green arm. I watched her, climbing up the sea to the horizon. And then she was a paper shape, a cutout, very clear, and apparently being pulled along like Lohengrin’s swan in a theater, by strings off stage — straight along the straight line of the sea’s horizon.
I came back slowly along the sand, and went up to the hotel for tea. Afterward I took a bus into the town (the plan of Durban is very simple and sensible: the visitors live in a long strip of hotels, spread for more than a mile along the beach front; the town lies immediately behind that, on either side of West Street which lifts up from the sea; the residents live behind that, up in the hills) and went to the shipping office. Again there was the calm assumption of one’s needs. The young man across the mahogany counter showed me a plan of the ship: my cabin, here; my berth, this one. The ship would dock tomorrow and I must be on board by ten o’clock on Monday morning. Sailing time, four-thirty P.M. I wandered about the pleasant town, bought myself a cake of fine, hard, perfumed soap of an imported brand that was unobtainable in Johannesburg, and a green scarf to tie round my hair; it might be windy on deck. The afternoon was not too hot, and every now and then the usual city smell of petrol, stale sourness from bars, and stuffy sweetness from beauty parlors parted to a breath from the sea.
Back in my hotel room, I found some flowers on the bedside table.
The maid had put them in water for me, but she had left the cellophane wrapping and the card on my bed. On the card, a childish hand had copied out “WITH LOVE FROM BRUTON HEIGHTS, PAUL.” They were florist’s roses, long-stemmed, denuded of leaves and thorns, the petals of the long buds a little crushed and crepy, though still beautiful, like the eyelids of a lovely woman who is no longer really young. I loosened them in the vase, but they still looked as if they belonged in the foyer of a cinema. WITH LOVE FROM BRUTON HEIGHTS. What was that, a reminder, a claim? A sudden perverse desire to put a hand on something because it was no longer there; an impulse to test out whether it really had gone; irresistible, just to make sure? But the flowers, ordered by telegram, the card, written by the hand of the junior shop assistant, defeated everything, as gifts that have to be made through the paid agency of others do always, impartially, whether the original intention was merely a social gesture, or a desperate symbol of the deepest feeling. These flowers standing on the dressing table were somebody’s work, carried out unperturbed and mechanically. I was safe from them.