Chapter 8
By Monday afternoon a railway bus service was circumventing the fallen bridge and carrying passengers to meet the train at the next station. But Ludi didn’t go. I seem to remember that it appeared to be Mrs. Koch’s idea that he should apply for an extension of leave; perhaps it was the one time in all his devotion to her that he made use of her gentle blindness of love for him? At any rate, he stayed. He telegraphed to his Commanding Officer and was granted an additional week, until the following Monday.
This is a simple statement of fact to relate now, but like all reports, all accuracy of happenings in terms of comings and goings, dates and times, its bareness is not the bare truth. The truth about humans is always inaccurate, never bare; the nearest one can get to it is to remember its confusion, and complicatedness. It was not a telegram sent and an answer forthcoming; nor three people waiting. I only remember that I, alone, not yet eighteen and a novice to anguish, waited for the granting of that week in a state of longing anxiety that has never, even in real sorrow, in the fall of bitterness, in despair, even, been equaled in all my life. Nothing is more serious than this apparently laughable lack of the sense of proportion in the young. With the command of emotions like a stock of dangerous drugs suddenly to hand, there is no knowing from experience how little or how much will do; one will pitifully scald one’s heart, over nothing. The nothing may be laughable, but the pain is not. For me those few days, granted or denied, were my share of life. Like a butterfly, who knows only one day, no other days seemed to exist for me.
Then the telegram came and I do not know how it was for Ludi and Mrs. Koch, but for me it was the silence that follows a maddening din. But just as one cannot enjoy the mere negative state of having no pain in the way in which one believes one shall while the pain is on, so I did not taste the pure joy of the telegram as the positive state I had imagined in longing. There was no time. There was scarcely time to dress, to eat, to sleep even. Certainly no time to read and no time to write letters. A letter came from my mother, but though I read it, quickly, line by line, I was vague about what she had said; it seemed an uninteresting letter. One from a girl on the Mine whom I had begged to remember to write to me, I somehow never did open; I came across it long afterward one day at home, where it lay in an old chocolate box with a perished bathing cap and a broken necklace, and tore it up because it reminded me with a pang of the place and time in which it should have been read. It was not that the days were fuller in the active sense than they had been all through my holiday; it was that they were full of Ludi. If I was in my bedroom, changing a dress, I did not know what he was doing at that moment. Perhaps he was about to go for a walk? Perhaps his mother might be asking him to do an errand for her. He might go without me. I shook myself into the dress, vanity and urgency warred in a moment I saw myself startlingly in the mirror, saw that my hair stood out too much — but flew down the passage pressing it anxiously with the flat of my palm. And there he would be, lying with one leg hanging down from the old sofa.
“Where you off to, miss?”
I would never admit I was tired, never admit I had had enough. It was never too early for me to get up, never so late that I would want to go to bed. At night when Mrs. Koch had gone to her room, Ludi and I went out onto the veranda and talked in the dark. As it got later, the talk got easier, until it seemed to me that if one could go on talking and talking as the night went deeper one would finally get to the other person; just before morning I would find what Ludi really was. … But instead I would find myself going quietly past the closed doors of the passage in the settled silence of one o’clock, lying at last in my bed with all the disparate images of him flashing in and out like lights in my mind. Half-sentences that did not connect, this mouth opening to say something I lost …? And then, before sleep, a sudden desire to move, to turn face down on my breasts in the bed. And all night, under my sleep, an alertness for morning.
In my absorption, as if I moved in a trance of excitement, my eyes always on a vision of Ludi, I did not see and so believed that Mrs. Koch did not see any change in the air between Ludi and me. But of course this was not possible. Where for the first part of my stay, he had come and gone with his customary self-sufficiency, now he spent his time at home and wherever he went, took me with him. Yet she accepted this shift of emphasis in the relationship between the three of us with evident placidity; I believe now that she considered it only natural that I should become a disciple of her worship for Ludi, and that, partly out of kindness, partly out of an acceptance of his due, Ludi would let me worship him. She did not fear any woman in what she knew of Ludi, so she certainly feared nothing from so young a girl, a child in comparison with him. I think she was touched by what she saw in me; as someone who has been in the faith a long time is moved by the ecstatic face of the new convert.
“Did you enjoy yourself, Nell?” she would say to me. — We went to the beach in the morning on our own; perhaps because we hadn’t asked her, or because she had forestalled this by saying that she could not come. We had walked a long way, past the rocks where no one but Ludi himself came to fish, and he had unfastened the halter of my wet bathing suit and peeled it down from my breasts. Neither he, nor anyone else, had ever touched or seen me before. I let him do this in stillness, looking down at myself as if we made the discovery together. I thought the skin of my breasts too white against the brown of my neck and arms; damp and cold from the sea they turned out away from each other and the left one trembled jerkily with the nervous beat of my heart beneath. Round the nipples tiny fragments of shell and pebble, worn membrane-thin by the water, stuck, shiny, pinkish-pearly to the skin. I lay so still I might have been waiting for a dagger. But Ludi, with a tone of delight that astonished me, smiled, “Look, the sea has been here. … You’re all gritty.”
— Yet I found it perfectly easy to answer Mrs. Koch: “Lovely. It wasn’t so windy today. We saw that sister of Mrs. Meintjes’ on the road. She expects them sometime on Thursday, because the old father’s been ill, and Davey had a cold, and goodness knows what else. …” It was only when I took off my bathing suit to dress in my room that I paused, catching sight of myself in the greenish, watery mirror that fronted the old wardrobe, and thought, not with shame but with a sense of unreality, of Mrs. Koch’s question that was not a question and my answer that was not an answer. And I understood that almost all of my life at home, on the Mine, had been like that, conducted on a surface of polite triviality that was insensitive to the real flow of life that was being experienced, underneath, all the time, by everybody. The fascination of the gap between the two came to me suddenly; I remembered, even out of childhood, expressions on faces, the tone of a commonplace sentence spoken unimportantly, the look of a person’s back as he left on some unquestioned excuse. It was not the knowledge of a secret life beneath so much as the maintenance of the unruffled surface itself that was exciting. Now it seemed to me that every casual explanation might, not conceal, but simply float above, like the reflection of the sky which the water shows rather than its own depths, happenings as strange and wordless as the time I had just spent with Ludi.