When we sat on the hotel veranda drinking beer to cool ourselves, I said to him: “Stay and have dinner with me. Just as you are. There’s no need to go back to the ship.” But he wanted to shower and change, and he insisted on going. We got the Indian page to call a taxi for him, and he promised to be back within an hour. I leaned on the still-warm stone of the balustrade, calling after him: “Be quick, if you’re a resident you can get whisky between six and eight!”—and smiled, because I knew (it was a trait that puzzled me often in young Jews, who all exhibited in some form or another the loneliness of a rejected people, and who, of all people, one should think would be glad of the comradely bolster of alcohol) that he did not care whether he drank water or whisky, and since he knew neither the pleasure nor the need of it, probably did not know, either, that at that time it was under import control and extremely difficult to get.
Because I was to have a visitor, I was at once no longer a stranger to the hotel. I told the maître d’hôtel I should be wanting a table for two, and I bathed and dressed quickly.
But while I was putting the finishing touches to my dress I realized something that put an edge of self-consciousness on my pleasure. I was assuming a right to Joel’s time and attention which would follow from a similar claim on his behalf for mine in the normal course of our lives in Johannesburg. But this had not been so. We had not seen each other; I had let him drop out of my life when it suited me — now when it suited me to take him back into it again, I calmly did so. I remembered the acute shame that had swept over me that day outside the theater booking office, when I had met him and realized that I had forgotten his graduation.
When he came into the lounge where I was sitting waiting for him, I was subdued. He came the length of the room between tables and flowers and people with the air of quiet, steady warmth about which he did not know and which was peculiarly his; he is the only person I have ever known who was entirely without self-consciousness, when he entered a room he saw only the person for whom he was making, did not feel, as people like Paul and I did, the eyes of others like vibrating tendrils.
I smiled and patted the chair beside me, and he sank into it with a little flourish of relief, but I saw in his face that he sensed the drop in my mood. Pouring soda into our drinks, he said: “And why are you looking at me so reproachfully?”
“Am I? Well, I don’t mean to. Thank you—” I took my glass from him. And when I had made the gesture of taking a sip, I said: “At least, the reproach wasn’t meant for you. Joel, I’ve been thinking, while I was upstairs—”
“Yes, Helen,” he prompted me, gently attentive. He was sitting back with his glass in his hand, in no hurry to drink.
For a moment I looked back into his inquiring eyes in discomfiture. “I’ve got an awful nerve. I greeted you this afternoon as if nothing had ever happened. I mean here I am, taking up your time as if it belonged to me. Just as if nothing had ever happened. I realized it suddenly while I was dressing — here I am, gaily dressing because you’re coming to eat with me—” (As I spoke I seemed to see in his eyes the recognition of the odd little verbal taboos which had overlaid my own way of expressing myself, and of which, perhaps, I should never be able to rid myself now, though the desire for emulation which had led me to assume them had lost its gods; in the circles of John and Jenny the middle-class indulgence of a regular nightly meal cooked and served by a servant was given the romantic aestheticism of wine and garlic salad in a Left Bank café and the decent frugality of a workman’s bread and cheese by the simple expedient of never saying “come to dinner” but “come and eat with us.”)
“Not that I wasn’t pleased.”—I made another start. “That’s the whole thing. Because I was pleased. I realized that I have no right to be. In fact, it’s an awful cheek. I haven’t seen you for months and months and it was all my fault that I haven’t, I know. I’ve greeted you at a concert as if you were someone I’d met casually somewhere. I didn’t come to your graduation and I fumbled for words like a fool when I met you in the street. … And when I meet you this afternoon I’ve got the cool nerve to assume I’ll be treated as if nothing has happened.”
He had been looking at me quite seriously, as if he were listening to an anecdote about two other people, but now he smiled. “And you were.”—He made a last attempt to keep up the casual surface intimacy of the afternoon. There was a moment when I might have taken up the cue of an easy, slangy, social patter; have said, using the old privileges of arch femininity which have become the frank gambits of sex: “Then I’m forgiven?” And if I had, we might have passed the following two days together using each other as pure distraction, have danced and drunk and perhaps slept together like cut flowers blooming in water — no one, not even ourselves, need have noticed that the stems were severed, that there was no plant beneath from whose root and dirt and drought we had taken shape, and from which, still, all growth must come.
But I said: “I had a dreadful feeling that morning I met you in front of the theater. I’ve never forgotten it.”
He said very slowly: “Why?” And he tasted his drink.
“When I left you, I got into a sort of panic. I can’t explain it. I saw how I had wanted to go to your graduation, I really had wanted to very badly, and yet I didn’t. There was nothing to stop me. But I didn’t go. I forgot. It seemed to me that some other person had forgotten. Myself — but some other person. And I felt I didn’t know who I was — bewildered. Of course you didn’t know, but I’d had a ghastly scene in Atherton with my mother the Sunday before. Over Paul. Over living with Paul. And all the time coming back to Johannesburg in the train, I had managed to fight the-the feeling of this scene — the things it made me feel, I mean — with the thought that the person who felt these things was no longer me; the real me was the one with Paul. I was flying back to her. And when I got back and found that for Paul this really was so—he discounted my Atherton self — he laughed at the scene as if it had been something that couldn’t have touched me — I understood at once that it had. That creature in Atherton shouting at her mother was me. It all switched round horribly, and the person who lived with Paul only thought she was real. I slept and pushed it away, the way one does, and then meeting you like that the next day started it all up again, only worse. There was another twist. How can I put it? I subdivided again. I saw this smiling, nodding, gaping, oblivious creature talking to you, apologizing with insulting graciousness for something that couldn’t be apologized for. Something that had nothing whatever to do with her. It belonged to the person she had supplanted. That’s the only word for it. Supplanted, that’s what I felt. And then that person seemed to me to be me, a creature come to life again with such distress at what had been done and left undone in her name.”
When once you have spoken like this there is no ending. Sitting forward on my chair in the hotel lounge with my hand tightly round the base of my glass, I did not know for a moment what I had begun by talking about; knew only that everything that was heaving up in my mind, apparently disparate, unconnected by chronology or subject, was relevant to and belonged indisputably with it.
When Joel spoke it was unexpected. “It was a tossup with me whether I’d speak to you or not that day,” he said. The pinkish light of the room swimming with talk hooded his eyes. Now that he was older, I saw that they resembled his mother’s, that remote old woman coming to life only when she was serving or preparing food for others, that old woman sitting in the corner with her shabby shoes crossed, watching me. “When I saw you I was angry. I suddenly wanted to tell you to go to hell.”