Free The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer Page B

had left home, I felt lonely, but it was not for my mother and father or anything that I had left, but rather for something that I had not yet had, but that I believed was to come: a time of special intimate gaiety and friendship with some vague companion composed purely of an imaginative ideal of youth—an ideal that I would never formulate now, and that only later, when it had gone, would recognize as having existed all the time unnoticed in myself, because it was nothing concrete, but just the dreams, the uncertainty, the aspiration itself.
    When Ludi had gone we came back to the house in a gentle companionable mood and sank into a kind of lull of feminine comfortableness; Mrs. Koch took up the curtains she had been making before her son came home, and the tea, set out with the one cracked cup that Matthew never failed to give us, was waiting in the living room. I lay reading with the damp cottony smell of the chintz cushion under my elbows and could not be bothered to go down to the sea. When it got cooler late in the afternoon, we went for a walk, at Mrs. Koch’s sedate pace, and on the flattest part of the road. If the obverse side of her son’s departure was the sharpness of love and lack, the reverse side was a certain relieved flatness, as if her body protested at the emotional tension of his temporary presence and found resignation more suited to its slowing vitalities.
    We were having supper with the radio tuned in over-loudly to the B.B.C, news—the crackling, cultured voice talking of bombs and burning towns was an invariable accompaniment to the evening meal—when I thought I heard the slam of a car door outside, but did not remark upon it or even lift my head because the metallic monologue of the radio, so dehumanized by the great seas and skies that washed between, had the curious effect of making all immediate sounds seem far off and unreal. It was with the most dreamlike astonishment that I looked up from the white of the cloth and saw Ludi. He was closing the door behind himself, sagging from the shoulder with the weight of his kit in the other hand. For a moment I had a ridiculous start of guilt as if I had conjured him up. Hesmiled at me down his mouth and I saw that his cap, which he normally wore a little too far forward for my standards of attractiveness, was pushed up from his warm-looking forehead. I saw this as suddenly and distinctly as if a light had been turned on in a room that had waited ready in the dark.
    All at once Mrs. Koch gave a little exclamation almost of dismay or annoyance, and then she was up and pushed the table away; he had her by the arm. “The bridge is down at Umkomaas. The rains last week, and it’s been slipping all the time, I suppose. We hung about and hung about, thinking—”
    â€œYou came back! Ludi! But what about your leave, won’t you get into trouble? Well, I can’t believe it!”
    â€œThe bridge is down. So what could I do? The trains aren’t running and I thought maybe I’d get a lift—but then it got late and I thought, what’s the use?”
    They were both laughing, perhaps now because Mrs. Koch had seemed put out, and just to make sure he was really there, his mother had to ask him over again. “I can’t believe it.” This time he repeated the story with indignation, feeling in some way that although it could not be so in fact, the army, the hated regimentation that defeated itself again and again, was to blame.—After all, if it had not been for the army, he would not have had to be in a particular place at a particular time, and being prevented from getting there would not have mattered to him in the least.
    While they were questioning and exclaiming, I stood up quite still in my place at the table, my napkin tight in my hand. Suddenly, like the moment after I had faced an examiner, a light shudder went over my neck and I began to tremble. The tighter I clenched the piece of