Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [106]
Out of loneliness, out of pity too, perhaps, for this unhappy, graceless foreigner with her poor English, he invites Astrid out again. Afterwards, for no good reason, he persuades her to come back with him to his room. She is not yet eighteen, still has baby fat on her; he has never been with someone so young – a child, really. Her skin, when he undresses her, feels cold and clammy. He has made a mistake, already he knows it. He feels no desire; as for Astrid, though women and their needs are usually a mystery to him, he is sure she feels none either. But they have come too far, the two of them, to pull back, so they go through with it.
In the weeks that follow they spend several more evenings together. But time is always a problem. Astrid can come out only after her employers’ children have been put to bed; they have at most a hurried hour together before the last train back to Kensington. Once she is brave enough to stay the whole night. He pretends to like having her there, but the truth is he does not. He sleeps better by himself. With someone sharing his bed he lies tense and stiff all night, wakes up exhausted.
Eleven
Years ago, when he was still a child in a family trying its best to be normal, his parents used to go to Saturday night dances. He would watch while they made their preparations; if he stayed up late enough, he could interrogate his mother afterwards. But what actually went on in the ballroom of the Masonic Hotel in the town of Worcester he never got to see: what kind of dances his parents danced, whether they pretended to gaze into each other’s eyes while they did it, whether they danced only with each other or whether, as in American films, a stranger was allowed to put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and take her away from her partner, so that the partner would have to find another partner for himself or else stand in a corner smoking a cigarette and sulking.
Why people who were already married should go to the trouble of dressing up and going to a hotel to dance when they could have done it just as well in the living room, to music on the radio, he found hard to understand. But to his mother Saturday nights at the Masonic Hotel were apparently important, as important as being free to ride a horse or, when no horse was to be had, a bicycle. Dancing and horse riding stood for the life that had been hers before she married, before, in her version of her life-story, she became a prisoner (‘I will not be a prisoner in this house!’).
Her adamancy got her nowhere. Whoever it was from his father’s office who had given them lifts to the Saturday night dances moved house or stopped going. The shiny blue dress with its silver pin, the white gloves, the funny little hat that sat on the side of the head, vanished into closets and drawers, and that was that.
As for himself, he was glad the dancing had come to an end, though he did not say so. He did not like his mother to go out, did not like the abstracted air that came over her the next day. In dancing itself he saw no sense anyway. Films that promised to have dancing in them he avoided, repelled by the goofy, sentimental look that people got on their faces.
‘Dancing is good exercise,’ insisted his mother. ‘It teaches you rhythm and balance.’ He was not persuaded. If people needed exercise, they could do calisthenics or swing barbells or run around the block.
In the years that have passed since he left Worcester behind he has not changed his mind about dancing.