Free The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer Page A

to some other law I did not know, and yet at the same time the law of my mother, the law of the people among whom I lived and by which I myself was beginning to live, made him outcast, a waster, a loafer, ambitionless; to be sighed over more than blamed, perhaps, like Pat Moodie, the son of one of the officials who had “wasted all his opportunities” and taken to drink. The phrases of failure came to my mind in response to the situation, because I had no others to fit it.
    â€œNo, thank you”—his voice was firm and serene—“I don’t want it. I don’t want the nice little job or the nice little family or the dreary little town or the petty little people. It doesn’t interest me”—he was looking at me rather shortsightedly through his glasses; he obviously did not expect or care for an answer or opinion from me—“and I have no desire whatever to get on with anything at all except living down here.—You should see the Pondoland Coast, you know, Helen. You people’ve no idea. … I go down there for a week or so to fish—some tinned stuff and my tackle, and sleep on the beaches. There are coral reefs there, under the deep water … you’ve never seen anything like it. Like some buried city of pink marble. And the fish!”
    I looked at him curiously as he pushed a way for me through the wet bracken. Rain brushed off along the bleached hair on his red-brown arms, his bare legs had a curiously impersonal muscularbeauty that would have astonished him if anyone had spoken of it: somehow his personal physical attributes existed in spite of him rather than as a conscious part of him, as a plant, being in its function of turning oxygen to sap, does not participate in the beauty of the flower which results and is blooming somewhere on it.
    I tried to think of him in one of my father’s gray suits, in a shirt with arm bands to hold up the sleeves, like the men wore at the office. It did not seem possible. Suddenly the absurdity of it pleased me very much; I was laughing at the thought of the clerks at the office.
    He was scrambling ahead of me up a bank and he half-turned at the sound. His hand went to the bright shaven hair at the nape of his neck. “It’s a bit of a mess, I suppose …?” he said, smiling. I shook my head, I was too out of breath to speak. “Mine too,” I gasped, catching up with him. The wet, the slither of the grass beneath our feet, and the sudden darkening of the air as the day ended unseen behind a muffling of cloud, filled us both with a kind of intoxication of energy. We tore home, ignoring the paths. I plunged with the child’s conscious craziness into every difficulty I could find, madly excited at myself. Sometimes I could not speak at all, but just stood, pointing at him and laughing.
    The ten years between us were forgotten.
    Ludi left on Saturday morning. In the day and a half between, I had felt rather than thought that he might say he would write to me. I kept out of the way of the mother and son almost unconsciously, leaving them to draw together before the fresh parting or, perhaps as unconsciously, they excluded me; but I felt all the time that the natural moment would arise when the only possible thing to say would be: I shall drop you a line when I get a chance, just to let you know what it’s like. Or: But of course you’ll tell me that when you write.
    And it did seem to me that the moment came again and again, but Ludi smiled into the pause and did not even know that it was
his.
I watched this with the quiet, gradual disappointment of a child who has presumed too far upon the apparent understanding of a grownup for an imaginative game: suddenly, the ageless understandingbeing becomes simply an adult indulgently regarding rather than participating, and nothing, no dissimulation or protest, can deflect the child’s cold steady intuition of the fact. For the first time since I