The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer

crenelation of incipient pimples perpetually lying in anger beneath the tender shaven skin along his jaw, to which, in the imagined privacy of the dark, I always saw, out of the corner of my eye, his fingers return feeling along as if reading the bumps in the tender, disgusting language of adolescence; curt, monosyllabic as obscenity, and as searching.
    At this time, too, my father was teaching me to play golf. When the hooter went at half-past four I left my books open on the dining-room table and went into my room to put on rubber-soled shoes. My father came home with the air of expectancy of someone who is waiting to go out again immediately, and we were at the first tee just as the sun shifted its day-long gaze and glanced obliquely off the grass. Afterward I sat on the veranda full of Mine officials at the clubhouse, drinking my orange squash at a rickety wicker table, with my father sipping his beer. Our heads were continually turned to talk to people; often two or three men screeched chairs over the cement to sit with us, others would swing a leg against the table while they paused to talk in passing. Even if their talk veered to channels that slowly excluded me, leaving me at some point gently washed upon the limit of my comprehension or interest, I rested there comfortably, hearing their voices rather than what they said, lulled by the warm throbbing coming up in my scarlet, blistered palms. I lolled my head back, put my dusty feet up on the bar of the table; the sky, swept clear of the day, held only radiance, far up above the shade that rose like water steeping the trees and the drop of the grass. Over at the water hole, the whole world was repeated, upside down. It all seemed simple, as if a puzzle had dissolved in my hands. The half-questions would never be asked, darkfins of feeling that could not be verified in the face of my father, my mother, the Mine officials, would not show through the surface that every minute of every day polished. I rested, my foot dancing a little tune; the way the unborn rest between one stage of labor and the next, thinking, perhaps, that they have arrived.

Chapter 5
    I had a new bathing suit.
    It lay on the bed in my room; “Why shouldn’t Nell go down to Alice’s place?” my father surprised himself by saying. My mother looked from one to the other: “—Well, I don’t know, would she like it—?”
    I could not conjure up in myself a projection into any single moment—a meal, the sight of the sea, Mrs. Koch smiling from a veranda—ready to exist on a little farm on the South Coast of Natal. We had been invited many times; we had never gone. Alice Koch was my mother’s old friend, corresponded with regularly, but materializing only every two or three years, when she would telephone to say that she had arrived in Johannesburg on holiday, and would come out to the Mine to spend a week end or a day. I had always read her letters, and reading them, was easy with her; yet when she got out at the station she was different; a big woman, much older than my mother, with a gentle smile and a faint, refined dew of agitation touching cool from her upper lip as you kissed her. Once—dim with sand castles and a doll that had had its feet trailed in the edge of the water—there was the memory of staying at a place near where Mrs. Koch had lived and Mrs. Koch had come with her two daughters and their children to sit with us on a beach.
    â€œOn her own … would she …?—I couldn’t go.” Mother patted the yellow bathing suit.
    â€œOh, yes.” I looked up quickly; it seemed as if there had never been a pause. “I want to go; I’ll go.”
    I was seventeen and I had been a year out of school. The year had been spent working at a temporary job in my father’s office; the Secretary’s daughter in the Secretary’s office of Atherton Mine.
    The train put me down on the siding paved with coal grit and