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Landlocked
Doris Lessing
The fourth book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.In the aftermath of the Second World War, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith with the communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement's leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in a love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness.



DORIS LESSING


Landlocked
Book Four of the
‘Children of Violence’ series




Contents
Cover (#u9e76db89-1cf2-5297-9c42-20c7ae407176)
Title Page (#ub6c4af82-7291-5a53-a175-ffdb323b329c)
Part One (#u9684c343-444c-578d-973a-2e172f871855)
Chapter One (#u588da70d-969f-5dfd-972d-560569007b9a)
Chapter Two (#u31353cad-87f0-59a1-b3ca-2ba49d94f239)
Chapter Three (#u8f135195-f0b3-5367-a0f8-c2f828c62852)
Chapter Four (#u2bd240dc-28e7-59d6-b925-640ca899eabe)
Part Two (#ub5a6ffef-fe27-5898-9040-7e22881fd0b9)
Chapter One (#u97cda29a-a7b7-5ee4-8f5f-db0385a110d5)
Chapter Two (#ub053b464-069c-54cc-aec5-0937321eab97)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)
The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)
The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)
Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Part One (#ulink_7f31b98d-73f6-5157-94fe-8bff3b014509)
The Mulla walked into a shop one day. The owner came forward to serve him.
‘First things fìrst,’ said Nasrudin; ‘did you see me walk into your shop?’
‘Of course.’
‘Have you ever seen me before?’
‘Never in my life.’
‘Then how do you know it is me?’
THE SUFIS; Idries Shah

Chapter One (#ulink_3d2dbf51-2e0a-5e96-9ef0-1633bb5ba5b9)
The afternoon sun was hot on Martha’s back, but not steadily so: she had become conscious of a pattern varying in impact some minutes ago, at the start of a telephone conversation that seemed as if it might very well go on for hours yet. Mrs Buss, the departing senior secretary, had telephoned for the fourth time that day to remind Martha, her probable successor, of things that must be done by any secretary of Mr Robinson, for the comfort and greater efficiency of Mr Robinson. Or rather, that is what she said, and possibly even thought, the telephone calls were for. In fact they expressed her doubt (quite justified, Martha thought) that Martha was equipped to be anybody’s secretary, and particularly Mr Robinson’s – who had been spoiled (as Martha saw it), looked after properly (as Mrs Buss saw it), for five years of Mrs Buss’s life.
Mrs Buss said: ‘And don’t forget the invoice on Fridays,’ and so on; while Martha, fully prepared to be conscientious within the limits she had set for herself, made notes of her duties on one, two, three, four sheets of foolscap. Meanwhile she studied the burning or warm or glowing sensation on her back. The window was two yards behind her, and it had a greenish ‘folkweave’ curtain whose edge, or rather, the shadow of whose edge, chanced to strike Martha’s shoulder and her hip. At first had chanced – Martha was now carefully maintaining an exact position. Areas of flesh glowed with chill, or tingled with it: behind heat, behind cold, was an interior glow, as if they were the same. Heat burned through the glass on to blade and buttock; the cool of the shadow burned too. But there was not only contrast between hot heat and hot chill (cold cold and cold heat?); there were subsidiary minor lines, felt as strokes of tepid sensation, where the shadow of the window frame cut diagonally. And, since the patches and angles of sunlight fell into the office for half of its depth, and had been so falling for three hours, everything was warmed – floors, desks, filing cabinets flung off heat; and Martha stood, not only directly branded by sunlight and by shadow, her flesh stinging precisely in patterns, but warmed through by a general irradiation. Which, however, was getting too much of a good thing. ‘Actually,’ she said to Mrs Buss, ‘I ought to be thinking of locking up.’ This was a mistake; it sounded like over-eagerness to be done with work, and earned an immediate extension of the lecture she was getting. She ought to have said: ‘I think Mr Robinson wants to make a call.’
At this moment Mr Robinson did in fact put his head out of his office and frown at Martha who was still on the telephone. He instantly vanished, leaving a sense of reproach. Martha just had time to offer him the beginnings of a placatory smile of which she was ashamed. She was not going to be Mr Robinson’s secretary, and she ought to have told him so before this.
She should have made up her mind finally weeks ago, and, having made up her mind, told him. She had not, because of her tendency – getting worse – to let things slide, to let things happen. It had needed only this: that she should walk into Mr Robinson’s office and say, pleasantly, absentmindedly almost, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Robinson, I’ve decided it would be better if I weren’t your secretary.’ At which he would nod, say: ‘Of course, Mrs Hesse, think no more about it.’
This unreal conversation was why Martha had not in fact gone in before now to make her stand on a refusal; and why she had spent so much of her time in the last week or so marvelling at the complexities behind such a simple act.
Mrs Buss’s husband had decided to take a job on the Copper Belt. Mrs Buss did not want to leave this job which fitted her soul like a glove, but being nothing if not an expert on what was right, knew it was right to follow her husband wheresoever he would go. Although she was not married to her husband but to her work, or rather, to her boss – for the past five years, Mr Robinson. This did not mean, far from it, that her relation with Mr Robinson was anything it should not be; her duty was to the idea of what was right from a secretary. In the Copper Belt, she would, after an agitated fortnight or so of writing letters to Martha telling her how to look after Mr Robinson, transfer herself to her new boss, whoever he was, and around him henceforward her life, her time, her being, would revolve.
As for Mr Robinson, he understood not the first thing about this phenomenon over which Martha pondered still, after years of working beside it.
What would he say, for instance, if Martha told him: Mr Robinson, did you know that Mrs Buss tells Mr Buss, on the nights when her shorthand book is full: ‘You know I can’t tonight, I’ve got two memorandums and a company agreement to type tomorrow morning.’ And Mr Buss understood his position in her life so well, that he knew (as Mrs Buss said, with a nod of satisfaction) where he got off. What would Mr Robinson say if told that Mrs Buss went to bed early refusing sundowners, the pictures, a dance, anything at all, on the nights before – an audit, a big court case where Mr Robinson would have to appear, or even a particularly heavy mail?
Well, Martha could not conceive of telling him, he simply would not believe it. He would go crimson, she knew that; the lean ‘likeable’ lawyer’s face would grow sulky while the blood darkened it. Because, of course, he would not understand how impersonal this passion was, and that, from two weeks’ time, in Lusaka, Mr Buss would be ‘told where he got off’ just as strongly but in relation to another job, another boss.
The door flung open again, and again Mr Robinson appeared, this time showing annoyance. Martha covered the mouthpiece, saying, ‘It’s Mrs Buss,’ relieved that Mrs Buss was definitely ‘office work’.
‘Does she want to speak to me?’
‘Do you want to speak to Mr Robinson?’
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t disturb him in his work,’ came the prompt, admonishing reply. ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow, Matty, in case we’ve forgotten anything.’
The door to Mr Robinson’s office was a plane of orange-coloured wood, unmarked by mouldings, grooves, panels, patterns, marked by nothing but the tree’s grain. It was teak, showing the – how many? – years of its growth in irregular concentric lines. With half-shut eyes, the orangey-brown became sand over which water had ebbed, leaving lines of foam, or debris. Stared at, unblinking, with concentration, the door seemed to come closer, became cliffs of weathered sandstone, weathered rock, eroded in patterns where water had run – or like the irregular concentric lines of growth in wood …
But all this was no use, for she had to go in and tell Mr Robinson she would not be his secretary. He was at this moment sitting behind his desk waiting for her to come in, and confirm it. Reasonably enough: it was a post much better (she agreed) than she deserved.
Martha, now released from the tether of the telephone wire, was standing behind her desk, not looking at the door. The sun was on her back, but the patterns of heat had shifted. A few minutes ago she was confirming: edge of window-curtain, window frame, glass, lines horizontal and diagonal, areas small and large. But now her flesh was confused. It had charted, most accurately, for some unvarying minutes, degrees of heat, of cold and now it was sulking. It was being asked to register too much too quickly – her whole back – and the backs of her thighs and arms, flamed at random with heat and with cold. As if she were in a fever. It occurred to Martha that perhaps she was – she might have burned herself. After all, glass could act like a burning-glass; perhaps a knot or a whorl had focused heat on to – she bent back her head, held forward her shoulder. It emerged smooth from a sleeveless pink cotton dress, but it was reddened. She was standing in a dislocated position, trying to see her own back down through the gap in pink cotton where it fell away from her shoulders, when Mr Robinson came in and caught her. He went red and so did she. With a muttered, ‘Like to see you, Mrs Hesse,’ he returned to his office. But now the door was open. A sweet grass-smelling air came wafting through from his office, his open windows – a smell of cool watered grass. This fresh smell mingled with the smell of hot glass, of heated metal, of hot paint, of warmed varnish – Martha put her palm on her own desk where the sun had been falling, and withdrew it quickly, as if away from a hot-plate. Following the smell of newly cut grass, more than her will, she went into Mr Robinson’s office. Beneath his windows, Rhodes Street, pouring with traffic, a jungle of warmed metal in movement. But beyond two roofs and an Indian store was a parking lot fringed with grass, where a black man scythed the loose fronds of jade-green grass, that was frothy with white grass-flowers, and the scent of it showered over all the lower town.
Martha put her left hand up, backwards, under her left armpit, and said, to explain her tortured position: ‘I think I’ve burned myself – from the window you know,’ she added. Then added again, still smiling, afraid now that this might sound like a complaint, because the main office was so exposed to the sun: ‘I’m an idiot.’
Mr Robinson let out a laugh, most false, except in his desire to show willingness to laugh, and said: ‘Do sit down, Mrs Hesse.’
Mrs Hesse sat, knowing that sitting in the clients’ chair was going to make it more difficult to refuse.
Now Mr Robinson offered her a cigarette, shooting out a brown athletic hand (he played golf or tennis and swam every Sunday) with the silver case at the end of it, in a level, piston-like movement. There he sat, smooth, well-tailored, healthy, intelligent, his lean, good-looking face waiting in a smile for Martha to make a formal acceptance of his offer that she would be his secretary.
These two human beings had shared all their working days for years, off and on, and they knew nothing about each other, had never had any real contact, and in fact, as Martha knew, did not like each other. He was asking her to remain as secretary because of an indolence that matched her own: better the devil one knows. At least she had been with him (as the phrase is) for all that time and presumably she would be irradiated with the reflected efficiency from Mrs Buss?
‘Look,’ she began awkwardly, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Robinson, but I can’t be your secretary.’ Already he had turned on her an affronted stare which caused her to stammer as she went on: ‘For one thing, there’s my father, he’s terribly ill, and it wouldn’t be fair, because I couldn’t give my whole attention to the job.’
He was red with annoyance, and also with heat – his office, sheltered from the evening sun by the outer office and a wall, nevertheless glittered and gleamed from every surface because the windows of the tall building opposite flashed red and gold rays into it. The heat in this room had a cooked composted smell of tobacco, of stale pipe ashes, of heated wood and metal and hot flesh.
‘Well, I don’t see that as an obstacle,’ he said. He was annoyed because Mr Quest’s illness had been incorporated, so to speak, into this office system already. Several times in the past few weeks Martha had had to leave precipitously, summoned to the sick-bed by Mrs Quest, who had taken to ringing up Martha with the announcement that she would not answer for it if Martha did not come at once.
And besides, what about that long period (past, but it had certainly existed) when half the telephone calls were for Martha, in her capacity as secretary of half a dozen ‘Red’ organizations? Mr Robinson had swallowed all that too, out of sheer decency, for in his capacity as future Member of Parliament, he denounced ‘communism’ with vigour. ‘I’m not going to have all you people upsetting our blacks’ – as he put it to Martha, from time to time.
Martha thought: I’ve made a hash of it already. Why can’t he see that we could never get on? Besides, I simply will not be a secretary – the essence of a good one being (and he most particularly will demand this from now on) that she should deliver herself to the work heart and soul. I’ll stay on as a typist or something, but that’s all.
Mr Robinson was still waiting for her to produce a more sensible excuse. By now he had understood she would not be his secretary, but was going to show his annoyance by insisting on ‘explanations’.
‘Damn that sun,’ he muttered, half-glancing at Martha to suggest she should draw the curtains. She had already risen, when he remembered that her sitting there before him, in the clients’ chair, meant she was temporarily in a different role. He jumped up and tugged oatmeal-coloured curtains across the whole wall; so now the sun showed in a thousand tiny lines of sharp yellow light criss-cross over darkish linen.
He sat down again, smiling a small quizzical smile. Martha noted it with dismay, noted she was softening: the smile said: Are you being difficult perhaps? Do you want to be persuaded into it? Do tell me …
She felt absurd, theatrical, ridiculous. She knew if she said ‘yes’ to this job it would be one of the bad, serious decisions of her life. She did not know why: it simply was so. Her life could be changed by it – in the wrong way. She knew this. And it was also pompous and melodramatic to refuse, and she felt silly.
‘Listen, Mrs Hesse: the war’s on its last legs, that’s obvious. The senior partners will be coming home any minute now. In a year from now this firm will have taken all this floor and the floor above – it will be the biggest legal firm in the city. There’ll be five working partners and that’ll mean five personal secretaries and I reckon about ten typists and a couple of accountants.’ His voice was full of pride. A long way was Mr Robinson from the shabby old building in Founders’ Street (still only four or five hundred yards away in space, however) the shabby old rooms, the half-dozen typists. And a long way was he in imagination from the present arrangement of two smart rooms filled by Mr Robinson, Mrs Buss, Mrs Hesse. No, he was already the conqueror of two large modern glass-spread floors filled to the brim with lawyers, accountants and secretaries: ‘the biggest legal firm in the city’.
And he wanted Martha to be thrilled with him. The trouble was, she was thrilled. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to give in.
‘I’m awfully sorry, Mr Robinson,’ she said, awkwardly, but firm enough. He looked at her, hurt. To hide the red that flamed over his face, he jumped up from his chair and began rooting in a filing cabinet. ‘I can’t find,’ he muttered, ‘the Condamine Mining Company file.’
Martha sat on a moment, looking at the Condamine file which was immediately in front of her on his desk. Then she stood up. ‘Look, Mr Robinson,’ she was beginning, when he bent down to pick up a paper lying on the floor. As he straightened again, he banged his head hard on the sharp corner of a projecting drawer.
The bang went through Martha in a wave of sickness. As for him, he stood gripping the drawer with both hands, swaying with faintness, his face white, his closed eyelids squeezing out tears of pain. Martha’s teeth clenched with the need to comfort, her arms were held in to her waist to stop them going around him – and she said nothing, not a word, nothing. She stood like a pillar of cold observation. At least, she thought, I must avert my eyes from … She turned herself, went to the window, twitched back a corner of the oatmeal linen, and looked out over the stream of cars and lorries, over roofs, over to the black man who steadily bent and straightened, bent and straightened, the sun glinting red on his black polished chest and back, and sliding red streaks along his scythe. The grass fell in jade-green swathes, frothy with white flowers, on either side of him, and the smell of cut grass wafted in over the thick sweet smells of tobacco, sweat, ash, heated wood – Martha heard Mr Robinson’s breathing steady and settle. She felt sick with his sickness, but could not think of anything to do. If he hated her for her detachment from his pain, he was right. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked at last, and he said, with difficulty, ‘Yes, thanks.’ Off he went, out of the office, striding with his long spring-like stride, and she thought: Of course, he’s gone to get himself some water, I should have thought of it.
When he came back, he gave her a look of cold dislike, which she knew she had earned.
‘Do you want to leave altogether?’ he asked, sliding himself back into his chair, and slamming in drawers everywhere around him. On his forehead was a red bump in the middle of which was a blackish contusion, oozing blood. He sat dabbing at it.
‘Not unless you want me to,’ she said, remaining where she was, by the curtains.
‘If you think I’m not offering you enough money, then I think you’re being unreasonable.’
Since he was offering her Mrs Buss’s salary, he was more than reasonable.
‘It’s not that – look, it’s like this, I don’t think you quite realize just how marvellous Mrs Buss is – was, I don’t think you’ve got any idea.’
He gave her one of his quick assessing glances, quick from shyness, not from acuity, and concluded that the awkwardness of her manner meant insincerity. He said coldly: ‘My dear Mrs Hesse, you aren’t suggesting I don’t know Mrs Buss’s worth, surely? I’ve never in my life had anyone like that working for me, and I’m sure I never will. But now she’s gone, I can confess in confidence that sometimes it was too much of a good thing. I mean, sometimes I didn’t feel good enough for her – as for being late in the morning, I wouldn’t have dared! …’ He gave a hopeful laugh; she joined him emphatically. ‘I’m not asking you to be Mrs Buss, believe you me!’ Here he began a hasty uncoordinated shoving about of his files and papers all over the big surface of his slippery desk, which meant, as Martha knew (with an increasing exasperation which was compounded strongly, against her will, with affection) look, this is what I want, I want to be looked after as Mrs Buss did, just look at the mess I’m getting into! The papers, pushed too hard, went fluttering off to the floor, and Martha bent to pick them up, feeling ridiculous, because now Mr Robinson got up and bent too, cautious of his head though, and even giving the dangerous drawer humorous glances for Martha’s benefit, just as she had put up her hand backwards to touch her shoulderblade, in a sort of explanation to him. For a few moments, these two bobbed up and down, like a couple of feeding hens, Martha thought, picking up the papers that lay everywhere in the most touching scene of mutual harmony and good will. Luckily the telephone in the outer office rang, and Martha was released to answer it. ‘Robinson, Daniel and Cohen,’ said Martha, into the black tube, and Mrs Quest said dramatically: ‘Matty, is that you? You must come at once!’
Martha sat down, enquired: ‘Is he ill again then?’ and drew towards her a sheet of paper, adding pennies to pennies, shillings to shillings, and – since this was one of the firm’s big accounts – hundreds of pounds to hundreds of pounds. Mrs Quest had already rung twice that day, first to say that Mr Quest was having a bad spell and Martha must be prepared to come at any moment; and again to say that Mr Quest had turned the corner.
Martha was thinking that something had been forgotten in the interview with Mr Robinson: she was being paid an extra ten pounds a month to do the books. But now there would be accountants, and he would be entirely in the right to deduct ten pounds from her salary.
‘Matty, are you there?’
‘Of course I’m here.’
‘I’m waiting for the doctor.’
‘Oh, are you?’
‘Well, if you’ve got things to do, do them quickly, because you did say you’d come, and what with one thing and another I’m run off my feet. And I suppose you haven’t had any lunch again either.’
The sheer lunacy of this conversation went no deeper than the surface of Martha’s sensibilities. ‘I’ll be over on the dot,’ she said soothingly, and would have continued to soothe, if Mr Robinson had not abruptly arrived in the central office exclaiming: ‘Mrs Hesse!’ before he saw she was still on the telephone. Martha covered the mouthpiece and said: ‘Yes, Mr Robinson?’
‘When you’ve finished,’ he said, and went back in.
The sun was burning Martha’s burned shoulder. She drew the curtains right across, as Mrs Quest said: ‘And so he can’t keep anything down at all, so the doctor says it will be a question of rectal feeding soon. Did you enjoy yourself last night at the pictures?’
‘I didn’t go to the pictures. What did you ring me for?’
‘Oh by the way,’ said Mrs Quest, after a confused pause, her breath coming quick, ‘I thought I should tell you Caroline is here for the afternoon and so you should be careful she doesn’t see you.’
Of course! thought Martha. That’s it. I should have guessed. ‘Since I told you earlier I couldn’t get to you until eight, and since Caroline will have gone home long before that, I don’t see the point.’
‘Well, you might have come now, you bad girl, if you weren’t so busy.’ Mrs Quest now sounded playful, even coy, and to forestall anger, Martha said quickly: ‘Tell my father I’ll be there at eight, goodbye, mother.’ She put down the receiver, trembling with rage.
This situation had arisen: Mrs Quest had taken to appropriating her granddaughter several times a week for the day, or for the afternoon. The little girl played in the big garden with her nurse while Mrs Quest supervised from the windows of the room where Mr Quest lay ill. And why not? Martha considered it reasonable that the Quests should have their grandchild, while she, the child’s mother, who had forfeited all right to her, should be excluded. It was quite right she should never be seen by the child; it would upset Caroline, who was now ‘used to’, as everyone said, Elaine Talbot, now Elaine Knowell, the new mother. All this Martha agreed to, accepted, saw the justice of. But on the afternoons Caroline was with her grandmother, Mrs Quest invariably telephoned Martha to say: Caroline’s here, I can see her playing near the fish-pond, she does look pretty today. Or: Be careful not to drop in, Matty, Caroline’s here.
And Martha said, Yes mother. No mother. And never once had she said what her appalled, offended heart repeated over and over again, while she continued to say politely: ‘Yes,’ and ‘Of course’: You’re enjoying this – you love punishing me. This is a victory for you, being free to see the child when I am not – sadistic woman, cruel sadistic woman … So Martha muttered to herself, consumed with hatred for her mother, but consumed ridiculously, since the essence of Martha’s relationship with her mother must be, must, apparently, for ever be, that Mrs Quest ‘couldn’t help it’. Well, she couldn’t.
Now Martha sat, rigid, trembling, seething with thoughts she was ashamed of, knew were unfair and ridiculous, but could not prevent: ‘And now my father’s ill, really ill at last, and so I have to go to that house, and she’s got me just where she wants me, I’m helpless.’
Mr Robinson came out of his office.
‘Mr Robinson?’
‘I was going to say: advertise for a new secretary, you know the sort of thing we want.’
‘I’ll put it in the paper tomorrow. And about that ten pounds?’
‘What ten pounds?’
‘If we’re going to have proper accountants, then …’
For the hundredth time that day (it seemed) he went red and so did she.
‘Forget it,’ he muttered. Then, afraid he had sounded abrupt, he smiled hastily. She smiled brightly back. ‘Thanks,’ she said. He rushed out of the office, slamming the door. Doors slammed all down the centre of the building and then a car roared into movement.
Martha now shut drawers, doors; opened curtains again, exposing yards of heated glass; threw balls of paper into the baskets. The telephone began ringing. It was five minutes after time, so she left the instrument ringing in the hot, glowing room, and walked down the stairs, round and round the core of the building after her employer – probably now several miles away, at the speed he drove. The washroom was empty. Six basins and six square mirrors and a lavatory bowl stood gleamingly clean. The old man who was the building’s ‘boy’ had just finished cleaning. He went out as Martha came in, saying, ‘Good night, missus.’ Martha stood in front of a mirror, and lifted brown arms to her hair, then held them there, looking with a smile at the smooth, perfect flesh, at the small perfect crease in her shoulder.
The smile, however, was dry: she wiped it off her face. It was there too often, and too often did she have to push it away, and make harmless the attitude of mind it came from. She had to survive, she knew that; this phase of her life was sticking it out, waiting, keeping herself ready for when ‘life’ would begin. But that smile … there was a grimness in it that reminded her of the set of her mother’s face when she sat sewing, or was unaware she was being observed.
Martha made up her face, smoothed down pink cotton over hips and thighs, combed her hair. She could not prevent, this time, as she leaned forward into the mirror, a pang of real pain. She was twenty-four years old. She had never been, probably never would be again, as attractive as she was now. And what for? – that was the point. From now, four-thirty on a brilliant March afternoon until midnight, when she would receive Anton’s kiss on her cheek, she would be running from one place to another, seeing one set of people after another, all of them greeting her in a certain way, which was a tribute to – not only her looks at this time – but a quality which she could not define except as it was expressed in reverse, so to speak, by their attitude. Yet she remained locked in herself, and … what a damned waste, she ended these bitter thoughts, as she turned to examine her back view. To the waist only, the mirror was set too high. Because of all the ‘running around’ – Anton’s phrase for it; because her life at this time was nothing but seeing people, coping with things, dealing with situations and people, one after another, she was thin, she was ‘in a thin phase’, she was again ‘a slim blonde’. Well, almost: being blonde is probably more a quality of texture than of colour: Martha was not sleek enough to earn the word blonde.
And besides, what was real in her, underneath these metamorphoses of style or shape or – even, apparently – personality, remained and intensified. The continuity of Martha now was in a determination to survive – like everyone else in the world, these days, as she told herself; it was in a watchfulness, a tension of the will that was like a small flickering of light, like the perpetual tiny dance of lightning on the horizon from a storm so far over the earth’s curve it could only show reflected on the sky. Martha was holding herself together – like everybody else. She was a lighthouse of watchfulness; she was a being totally on the defensive. This was her reality, not the ‘pretty’ or ‘attractive’ Martha Hesse, a blondish, dark-eyed young woman who smiled back at her from the mirror where she was becomingly set off in pink cotton that showed a dark shadow in the angle of her hips. Yet it was the ‘attractive’ Matty Hesse she would take now to see Maisie; and it was necessary to strengthen, to polish, to set off the attractive Matty, the shell, because above all Maisie always understood by instinct what was going on underneath everybody’s false shells, and this was why Martha loved being with Maisie, but knew at the same time she must protect herself … there were fifteen minutes before Maisie expected her. Martha lit a cigarette, propped herself on the edge of a washbasin, shut her eyes, and let bitter smoke drift up through her teeth. She felt the smoke’s touch on the down of her cheek, felt it touch and cling to her lashes, her brows.
She must keep things separate, she told herself.
Last Saturday morning she had spent with Maisie, relaxed in a good-humoured grumbling gossip, a female compliance in a pretence at accepting resignation. And what had been the result of that pleasure, the delight of being off guard? Why, the situation she was now in with Maisie, a false situation. She had not kept things separate, that was why.
Martha’s dreams, always a faithful watchdog, or record, of what was going on, obligingly provided her with an image of her position. Her dream at this time, the one which recurred, like a thermometer, or gauge, from which she could check herself, was of a large house, a bungalow, with half a dozen different rooms in it, and she, Martha (the person who held herself together, who watched, who must preserve wholeness through a time of dryness and disintegration), moved from one room to the next, on guard. These rooms, each furnished differently, had to be kept separate – had to be, it was Martha’s task for this time. For if she did not – well, her dreams told her what she might expect. The house crumbled dryly under her eyes into a pile of dust, broken brick, a jut of ant-eaten rafter, a slant of rusting iron. And then, while she watched, the ruin changed: it was the house of the kopje, collapsed into a mess of ant-tunnelled mud, ant-consumed grass, where red ant-made tunnels wove a net, like red veins, over the burial mound of Martha’s soul, over the rotting wood, rotting grass, subsiding mud; and bushes and trees, held at bay so long (but only just, only very precariously) by the Quests’ tenancy, came striding in, marching over the fragments of substance originally snatched from the bush, to destroy the small shelter for the English family that they had built between teeming earth and brazen African sky.
Yes, she knew that – Martha knew that, if she could not trust her judgement, or rather, if her judgement of outside things, people, was like a light that grew brighter, harsher, as the area it covered grew smaller, she could trust with her life (and with her death, these dreams said) the monitor, the guardian, who stood somewhere, was somewhere in this shell of substance, smooth brown flesh so pleasantly curved into the shape of a young woman with smooth browny-gold hair, alert dark eyes. The guardian was to be trusted in messages of life and death; and to be trusted too when the dream (the Dream, she was beginning to think of it, it came in so many shapes and guises, and so often) moved back in time, or perhaps forward – she did not know; and was no longer the shallow town house of thin brick, and cement and tin, no longer the farm house of grass and mud; but was tall rather than wide, reached up, stretched down, was built layer on layer, but shadowy above and below the shallow mid-area comprising (as they say in the house agents’ catalogues) ‘comprising six or so rooms’ for which this present Martha was responsible, and which she must keep separate.
Keeping separate meant defeating, or at least holding at bay, what was best in her. The warm response to ‘the biggest legal firm in the city’; the need to put her arms around Mr Robinson when he hurt himself so cruelly on the drawer; the need to say Yes, to comply, to melt into situations; the pleasant relationship with Maisie – well, all this wouldn’t do, she must put an end to it. She had simply to accept, finally, that her role in life, for this period, was to walk like a housekeeper in and out of different rooms, but the people in the rooms could not meet each other or understand each other, and Martha must not expect them to. She must not try and explain, or build bridges.
Between now and twelve tonight, she would have moved from the office and Mr Robinson, up-and-coming lawyer, future Member of Parliament, with his wife, his two children, and his house in the suburbs, to Maisie; from Maisie to Joss and Solly Cohen; from them, the Cohen boys, to old Johnny Lindsay; from the old miner’s sick-bed to her father’s, nursed by her mother; from the Quests’ house to Anton. None of these people knew each other, or could meet with understanding. Improbably (almost impossibly, she thought) Martha was the link between them. And, a more violently discordant association than any of these, there was Mr Maynard. Mr Maynard was after Maisie, he was on the scent after Maisie, through her, Martha – which brought her back to her immediate preoccupation.
It was her duty to explain to Maisie, to warn Maisie … the cigarette was finished, and she must leave. She left the washroom door swinging softly behind her, and ran down the wide bare steps, and into the clanging, shouting, sun-glittering street. Her bicycle was in the rack on the pavement. She dropped it into the river of traffic, slid up on to it, and was off down the street, but turned sideways to detour past the parking lot whose edges were now loaded with great mounds of jade-green frothing grass, like waves with white foam on them, past the gum trees whose trunks shed loose coils of scented bark; past the Indian stores and then back in a great curve into Founders’ Street. It was, in fact, as the crow flew (or as a young woman might choose to bicycle straight along the street, instead of detouring past grass verges where midges danced in a swoon of grass-scent and eucalyptus) only a few hundred yards from Robinson, Daniel and Cohen’s new offices to where Maisie lived. Founders’ Street had not changed. On the very edge of the new glittering modern centre, it remained low and shabby, full of odorous stores, cheap cafés, wholesale warehouses, small grass lots with bits of rusted iron and dark-skinned children playing, full of the explosive vitality of the unrespectable. There was a bar called Webster’s on a corner, which Martha had never been in, since women did not go into the bars of the city, and besides it was ugly, and besides it usually had groups of men standing about outside it, with the violent look of men waiting for bars to open, or hanging about in frustration because a bar has closed. But Maisie now lived over this place, in two rooms directly above the bar, and she worked in Webster’s as a barmaid.
Martha came to rest at the kerb, lifted the bicycle up on to the pavement, then left it leaning, locked with a chain like a tethered dog, while she squeezed back against the wall past a dark glass window that had Webster’s on it in scratched white paint. Half a dozen Africans lifted crates of beer from a lorry, which had the name of the city’s brewery on its side, to the pavement, and from the pavement to the open door of the bar. It was nearly opening time, and a couple of youths in khaki, farm assistants, from the look of them, hung smoking by the open door, watching the crates being shouldered in past a red-sweaty-faced, paunchy man in shirt sleeves who frowned his concentration that the beer-handlers should not crash or damage the great bottle-jammed crates. As Martha went past him to the small side door that led to Maisie’s rooms, a violent crash, a splintering of glass, angry shouts from the red-faced man, who was presumably Mr Webster? and complaints, expostulations, even a laugh from the watching farm assistants. A sudden sour reek of beer across the sun-baked street. Martha ascended dark wooden stairs fast, away from the beer stench. She knocked on Maisie’s door and heard: ‘Is that you, Matty? Come in then.’ She entered on a scene of a small child being put to bed for the night.
The two rooms, small and crammed, but very bright, had in them Maisie, a black nurse-girl, and the baby girl Rita, now about a year old. The child did not want to go to bed. She was fighting the nurse. ‘I-don’t-want-nursie, I-don’t-want,’ while the girl, indefatigably good-humoured, was trying to push windmilling arms and legs into scarlet pyjamas. ‘There Miss Rita, there now Miss Rita.’
Maisie surveyed this scene from the doorway between the rooms, smoking; the soft blue of her cotton dress pushed out in a great bulge by the hip she rested her weight on. She wore a white wool jacket, and as Martha came in, dusted ash off it with one hand, while she raised her eyes with the same cosmos-questioning gesture and shrug she had once used for: ‘And who’d be a woman, hey?’ But now she was saying: ‘Well, Matty, who’d be a mother, man? Just look at her.’
Nevertheless, she smiled, and the nurse-girl smiled, having safely accomplished the task of getting all four dissident little limbs disposed in the scarlet arms and legs of the pyjamas. Now Rita stuck her thumb in her mouth and blinked great black eyes, fighting each heavy blink, blink, with an obstinate tightening of her face. She was fighting sleep. Peace. Silence. The black girl smiled at Maisie, and began picking up garments from all over the room. Rita was scooped up by her mother, where she stood to attention, as it were, in her arms. Maisie tried to rock and cradle the child, but Rita would not go limp. A little stubborn bulldog, she tightened her lips in a determination not to sleep. Meanwhile Maisie, a cigarette hanging from her lips, blew smoke out above the small head. Suddenly, the child went limp, she was half-asleep. Maisie looked down into the child’s face, thoughtful, frowning. Martha came up close to look too. Martha did not touch the child. Last Saturday, when Rita had put her arms around the knees of her mother’s friend, Maisie had called her away and said: ‘Yes, I can see it must be hard for you, when you’ve not got your own kid, I can see that.’ Maisie was winding a piece of Rita’s black hair around her finger. But the hair was straight, and simply fell loose again. Maisie stood with a cigarette in her mouth, Rita cradled in one arm, trying with her free hand to make ringlets in Rita’s hair. Then she put up her hand to wind a strand of her own fair hair around her forefinger. It sprang off in a perfect ringlet. Ash scattered on the red pyjamas, and Martha rescued the cigarette. ‘Thanks, Matty, you’re a pal.’ The child sucked her thumb noisily, the small pink lips working around the white wet thumb. She blinked, blinked. Maisie gave up the attempt to make the heavy black hair curl, and took a cautious step towards the small bed beside her big one. The child opened her eyes and started up, struggling to stand in her mother’s arms.
‘Let me,’ said Martha, and nodded in response to Maisie’s quick look of enquiry. Rita went into Martha’s arms, staring in solemn curiosity into the new face close to hers.
‘She’s old for her age,’ said Maisie. ‘Do you know what, Matty? I think they’re born older than they used to be. Sometimes Rita just gives me the creeps, watching me, you’d think she knew everything already.’ Certainly it was a serious and knowledgeable look. Martha did not feel she held a tiny child in her arms, and it made things easier, for this was the first time she had held a baby since she had left her own. She held the solid heavy little girl, while Maisie stripped off her dress and said: ‘Poor Matty, but perhaps one of these days you’ll have another baby and then you’ll forget all your sorrow.’
‘Yes, I expect I will,’ said Martha. She sat on Maisie’s bed, holding the child carefully. Rita was at last going to sleep, at last she seemed a baby – small, warm, confiding. Maisie stood in her pink satin petticoat, her strong white legs planted firmly, and frowned into a mirror, while she wet her eyebrows with a forefinger. The nurse came in and said: ‘Can I go home now, missus?’ ‘Yes, you go home, nursie.’ ‘I’ll do Miss Rita’s washing in the morning.’ ‘Yes, that’s fine.’ ‘Good night, Miss Maisie.’ ‘Good night, nursie.’ The girl nodded at Martha, with a quick unconscious smile of love for the sleeping child, and went out.
‘She’s a good girl,’ said Maisie. ‘She’s got two kids of her own, she leaves them with her mom in the Location. I tell her she’s lucky to have her mom near her, I wish I did.’ She frowned, stretching her mouth to take lipstick. ‘Her husband, or so she calls him, has gone to the mines in Jo’burg, well, I tell her she’s lucky to be rid of him, men are more trouble than they are worth.’
Now she put on a cocktail dress, suitable for her calling as a barmaid. It was a bright blue crêpe, tight over the big hips, pleated and folded marvellously over the breasts, showing large areas of solid white neck and white shoulder. She put on diamanté ear-rings, a diamanté brooch. She inspected herself, then used thumb and forefinger to crimp her pale hair into waves around her face. Martha thought: I wonder what Andrew would say if he could see Maisie now, and this apparently communicated itself to Maisie, for she turned from the mirror, smiling unpleasantly, to say, ‘If Andrew could see me, he’d have a fit. Well, that’s his funeral, isn’t it?’ She now came over to Martha, lifted the baby, and slid her under the covers of the little bed. Off went the light. The room, dimmed, seemed larger. Except for the child’s bed, it was exactly the same as the bedroom in the flat where Maisie had lived with Andrew. The same plump blue shining quilt, the same trinkets and pictures. A girl’s bedroom. But no photographs – not a sign of them: Binkie and Maisie’s three husbands were not here.
‘Have you heard from Andrew yet?’
‘Yes, strangely enough. He said would I come to England to live. But I can’t see myself. Of course you want to go to England and I can see that it takes all sorts.’
She now sat near Martha on the bed, offered her a cigarette, lit one herself, and said: ‘Everything’s nuts. When the war was bad, well, we used to think, the war will be over soon, and so will our troubles. But it just goes on. Well, they say it’s going to be over soon but why should it? I mean, they had a war for a hundred years once, didn’t they? But Athen says it will be over soon.’
‘Have you seen Athen?’
Maisie’s face changed to an expression Martha had seen there before, when Athen was mentioned. A new look – resentment. ‘He came in to see me last week. Well, he’s too good for this world, I can tell you that!’ Then she sighed, lost her bitterness and said: ‘Yes, it’s a fact, he’s not long for this world.’ At Martha’s look she nodded and insisted: ‘Yes, it’s true when they say the good people go first. Look at my two first husbands, they’re dead, aren’t they?’ ‘And Andrew’s bad just because he’s still alive?’ said Martha, smiling.
At this Maisie jumped up and said: ‘We’ll wake Rita if we natter in here.’ She pushed open the window and instantly the room reeked from the spilt beer on the pavement just below. She shut the window again, saying: ‘Well, lucky it’ll be winter soon, I can have the windows shut. Sometimes I can’t stand the smell, and then the men from the bar start fighting and being sick so I can’t sleep sometimes.’
She went into the other room and Martha followed.
‘I’m late for the bar,’ said Maisie, and sat down calmly, to smoke. ‘Athen says he wants to see you, Matty.’
‘Well, I’m always happy to see him.’
‘Yes, he’s one of the people …’ Again resentment, a sighing, puzzled resentment. ‘All the same, Matty. He said I shouldn’t be working in a bar. I said to him: “All right then, you find me a job where I can have my baby, just above my work all the time, you find me that job and I’ll take it.” And then he went on and on, so I said: “And what about your mom and your sisters? Didn’t you tell me the things they had to do because they were poor? They had to do bad things. And your sister married a man she didn’t love because he said he’d pay your mom’s debts. Well, you said that didn’t you?” And he said: “Yes, but they were poor and you aren’t.” Well, Matty, that made me so mad …’ Her voice was shaking, her eyes full of tears. ‘Excuse me a sec, Matty.’ She went to the bedroom to fetch a handkerchief, and came back saying: ‘Well, who’d be a woman, eh?’ exactly as she used to; and Martha saw the old, maidenly, fighting Maisie in the fat barmaid dressed garishly for her work.
Martha said, with difficulty: ‘You know, Maisie, I used to think you could love Athen if …’
Maisie gave Martha a look, first conscious, then defiant. ‘Love. That’s right. Well, he’s the best man I’ve ever known in my life, I’ll grant you that much. But what would he do with me in Greece? He doesn’t even know when they’re sending him back. There are six Greeks hanging about here, all trained to the ears to be pilots, but they don’t send them to Greece. Athen says it’s because of politics. Well, but he won’t be a pilot after the war, and he used to be a newspaper seller. But anyway, I wouldn’t be good enough for him, would I? I told you, he’s too good for this world and I told him that too.’
‘So he’s coming to see me?’
‘He’s got a message about something. Something political about the blacks, I think it was. He told me but I forgot. He said he’d come this week so expect him. And you can tell him from me I’m not a bad girl just because I work in a bar.’
‘Well, Maisie, I don’t believe he really thinks so.’
‘He says it, doesn’t he?’ Maisie lit a new cigarette, said again: ‘I should go down,’ but remained where she was: ‘There’s some brandy in the cupboard if you like, but I can’t stand drinking myself any more, after having to smell it every night down there.’ Martha got herself a brandy, and did not offer Maisie any; but when the bottle was put back, Maisie got up, went to the cupboard, poured herself a large brandy, and stood holding the glass between two hands against her breasts. The light fell through the rocking golden liquid and made spangles on the white flesh, and Maisie looked down, smiled. A great fat girl peered over a double chin and giggled because of the spinning lights from the liquid.
Giggling she said: ‘Well, let’s have it, Martha. It’s no good us sitting here and chatting about this and that just because we don’t like thinking about it.’
‘It’ was Mr Maynard, the Maynards, and their pressure on Maisie.
Some weeks before, Mr Maynard had telephoned Martha, demanding an interview. Martha had said that, since she had been told it was the Maynards who had arranged for Andrew, Maisie’s husband, to be posted from the Colony, she never wanted to see or hear of the Maynards again. And had put down the telephone.
Mr Maynard was waiting for her on the pavement when she left the office that evening. She tried to walk past him, but found her path blocked by a large, black-browed urbane presence who said: ‘My dear Martha, how very melodramatic, I am extremely surprised.’
He then proceeded to talk, or rather, inform, while she stood, half-listening, wishing to escape. When he had finished she said: ‘What you mean is, you want me to go down to Maisie’s, spy on her, find something wrong, and then come back and tell you so that you can persecute her.’
‘My dear Martha, the mother of my grandchild is working as a barmaid. You can’t expect me to like that. My grandchild is being brought up in one of the most sordid bars in the city. I’m not going to stand for it.’
‘The only thing is, it isn’t your grandchild.’
At which he said, calm, forceful, his handsome dark face compressed with determination: ‘That child was fathered by my son. She is my granddaughter.’
Martha could not stand up to him. She said, ‘I’ve got to go’ – and literally ran away from him. That evening she had come to Maisie’s rooms late, when the bar was closed, to tell her that Mr Maynard was still on the scent.
Some hours later, waking at five in the morning, she realized, appalled at her’s and Maisie’s readiness to be bullied, that there was one simple way of defeating Mr Maynard – and that was to take no notice of him. She had telephoned Maisie that morning to say so. Maisie said she had written the old bastard a letter which would put him in his place for ever. ‘But Maisie, that’s just where we make our mistake, that’s what I’m telephoning for. You shouldn’t have written because he has no right to a letter, that’s the whole point.’
‘Oh don’t worry, Matty, I said what was right.’
The letter Mr Maynard got read:
‘Dear Mr Maynard,
My friend, Mrs Martha Hesse told me what you said. Please don’t worry, my Rita is being brought up properly. Just as well as Binkie would, I’m sure of that. Binkie had his chance and lost it. And there is another thing I want to say. I know who it was who had my husband Corporal Andrew McGrew sent away to England. And I wish to have nothing to do with you or with Binkie either. Please tell him so when he comes home.
Yours truly,
MAISIE McGREW’
This letter, written at white-heat, was pondered by the Maynards for some days. Mr Maynard then again waylaid Martha outside her office.
‘Well, Martha, you seem to be playing some kind of double game.’
‘What do you mean? You know I’m with Maisie.’ She knew it was a mistake to say this; she should simply have walked past him. Now he smiled.
She said: ‘Mr Maynard, you haven’t got any legal right to that child. You haven’t got a moral right either.’
He smiled again, the commanding face presented to her so that she could feel the full pressure of its assurance. Again she walked off, thinking: There wasn’t anything he wanted to say, there was nothing new to say, so what was he waiting there for? At last she understood: Of course, he wants to know whether I can be bullied. And I can be. And so can Maisie.
She had therefore gone down to spend an afternoon with Maisie. It was a Saturday. They had walked in the park with the child, then gone back to the rooms and played with her. When she went off to sleep, they talked. Mr Maynard seemed remote. They laughed a great deal and said how ridiculous the Maynards were, pushing people around and thinking they could get away with it.
And again it had been only afterwards, waking in the night, that Martha understood the whole pleasant easy afternoon was in fact another victory for Mr Maynard. For one thing, his name, the Maynard name, had scarcely been off their tongues. Yet the essence of defeating Mr Maynard was to forget him.
And Martha’s being here now with Maisie was because Mr Maynard telephoned yesterday; ‘How’s my grandchild?’ ‘She’s not your grandchild, Mr Maynard.’
‘Maisie, the Maynards haven’t a legal right, they haven’t even a moral right to Rita. You’ve got to see it.’
‘They didn’t have a legal right or a moral right to send my husband away from this country. But they did it, didn’t they?’
‘That was because Mrs Maynard’s a cousin of the Commanding Officer.’
‘You know what I am saying, Matty, and it’s true.’
‘Yes, I know. But look, what do you suppose the Maynards could do? They can’t do a damned thing.’
‘After I posted that letter to Mr Maynard, I saw I’d put it into print.’
‘But Maisie, when you married Andrew, he became Rita’s father. The Maynards are out.’
‘But I’m divorced from Andrew.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘So you say. All I know is, the Maynards do as they like. And he’s a magistrate too. I lay awake last night thinking …’ Maisie stood in the middle of the little room, holding the glass of rocking liquid against her breasts, smiling, smiling nervously, while her serious blue eyes stared ahead, sombre with fear. She sipped the brandy nervously, held the glass against her breasts; sipped, smiled, pressed the glass against her flesh so that the white and gold and green lights made jewels on her flesh above the glitter of the diamanté brooch: she talked on, obsessively: ‘When Binkie gets back I’m going to see him and ask him to stop his parents driving me mad. He’s a decent kid, he’ll know it isn’t right. After all, it’s not his fault he’s got those old bastards for parents, he’ll tell them off, when I ask him.’
‘What’ll happen if Binkie still wants you back?’
‘He’s a decent kid, he’s not their kind, he’ll see right done. And anyway, he won’t be back for ages yet. Perhaps years. How do we know how long the war’ll go on? Perhaps he’ll be killed, how do we know? Anyway, I’ve got to get down to work. My boss will be flaming mad as it is. You’re a pal, helping me like this, and I don’t like turning you out, but money’s got to be earned, when all’s said and done.’
Martha got up, the two young women kissed, and Martha went out, saying: ‘Yes of course,’ in reply to Maisie’s anxious: ‘If Mr Maynard comes after you again, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’
In every city of the world there is a café or a third-rate restaurant called Dirty Dick’s. Or Greasy Joe’s; or – In this case Dirty Dick’s was called so because Black Ally’s, beloved of the RAF, had closed down last year and there had to be somewhere to feel at home. The old one had been run by a good-humoured Greek who served chips and eggs and sausages and allowed the local Reds to put newspapers and pamphlets on the counter for sale to anyone interested. This restaurant was run by a small, sad, grey-haired man who was going home to Salonika when the war was over, and who would not allow his counter to be used as a bookshop because, as he said, he had a brother fighting against the communists in Greece at that very moment – and where was the sense in it? No hard feelings against you personally, Mrs Hesse …
When he knew that his place was called Dirty Dick’s, his sound commercial sense exulted and he at once made plans for taking the floor over his present one; which second restaurant, to be on an altogether smarter level than this, would be called ‘Mayfair’ to distinguish it from ‘Piccadilly’, the name which was painted in gold on the glass frontages that faced a waste lot where second-hand cars were sold.
He nodded at Martha as she came into the large room, recently a warehouse, which had one hundred tables arranged in four lines. Every table was occupied by the RAF, so that the place looked like a refectory or mess for the armed forces. ‘Mr Cohen is in the back room,’ he said.
‘You don’t mind us plotting in your restaurant, but you won’t sell our newspapers?’
‘I can’t stop you plotting, but I won’t sell your newspapers.’
The private room at the back had a large table in its centre, covered with a very white damask cloth on which stood every imaginable variety of sauce and condiment. Solly was waiting.
‘I can’t sit down,’ said Martha, ‘because I’m late.’
‘Oh go on …’ Solly pushed forward a chair, and Martha sat, suddenly, closing her eyes, and scrabbling for a cigarette which Solly put between her lips already lit. ‘If you’ll take a cigarette from a dirty Trotskyist.’
‘I thought Joss was going to be here?’
‘Ah you’ll take a cigarette from a dirty Trotskyist if protected by a clean Stalinist?’
‘Oh Lord, Solly, I’ve only just come, have a heart.’
Here entered Johnny Capetenakis, smiling.
‘What have you got to eat?’ asked Solly.
‘Fried eggs, chips and sausages,’ said Johnny, wiping the glittering white of the cloth with another cloth.
‘I mean food.’
‘Ah, why didn’t you say so? A nice kebab? Saffron rice? Stuffed peppers?’
‘How about you, Matty?’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Everything you’ve got that’s food – twice. My brother’ll be here in a minute.’
‘Right, Mr Cohen.’
He stood smiling, but Joss had turned to Martha, and the Greek switched on a couple more lights and drew a curtain across panes that showed a sudden dark where the stars already blazed.
He stood looking out, his hand on the sill, an ageing man glad of a moment’s chance to rest. Solly turned to see why he was still there and said: ‘Sit with us a minute, Johnny?’
‘Thanks for inviting me, but I’m a cook short tonight.’
‘Heard anything from home?’
Johnny shook his head. ‘Nothing good for your side or for mine and nothing will be.’
‘There’ll be a communist government in Greece after the war,’ said Solly. ‘But I’m as much against it as you are.’
Johnny looked to see if he were joking; then he shrugged. ‘My brother was always the one for politics. It’s not for me. My brother’s wounded.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Martha, politely.
‘My cousin in Nyasaland got a letter but it was from last year, it came down from Cairo. My brother was wounded, but only in his leg.’
As Solly said nothing Martha said: ‘I’m sorry,’ again, and took Solly’s critical look with a smile.
‘Yes, Mrs Hesse, I suppose the good God knows what he is doing. But there’s not much left of my family, there’s not much left of Greece by the time the war ends. Communist or not communist. If the war ever does end.’ He nodded at them, sombre, and went out.
‘All right then,’ said Martha, ‘but then why do we use this place practically as another office?’
‘Get as much out of the dirty little fascists as we can, that’s why.’
‘Oh, is that it? Well, what did you get me here for?’
‘Don’t be in such a hurry.’
‘I am in a hurry.’ She got up, to prove it.
‘All right, all right. I’m in contact with some contacts in the Coloured quarter. As of course you know. There’s a group of decent types. The point is, they’ve got a study group going with some Africans. Joss and I met them.’
‘Joss?’ said Martha, disbelieving.
Here Joss came in, with a brief smiling nod at both of them. He sat down opposite his brother. He was in civilian clothes. The only sign he had been in the army was a red scar down his right hand – a gun had exploded in Somaliland last year and for him the war was already over. Four years in the army had burned out his youth. He had been an earnest student: now one could already see what he would look like in middle age. Except when you looked him straight in the eyes, you were looking at a Jewish business man.
Solly on the other hand had not changed at all: he was still like a student.
‘I’ve ordered,’ said Solly to his brother.
‘Good.’
Joss waited, smiling. Martha waited. Solly said nothing.
‘I’m in an awful hurry,’ Martha said.
‘OK, OK, so you’re in a hurry,’ said Solly.
She understood suddenly that this meeting was some sort of joke, or private triumph of Solly’s and that Joss did not know she was here ‘for a serious discussion’.
‘Oh it really is too bad,’ she said, and her voice shook, although she tried to make it ‘humorous’.
‘What’s going on?’ said Joss. He spoke gently. He had understood, already, that she was on edge through one of the intuitive flashes of understanding by which human beings in fact understand and regulate their behaviour with each other. He, too, now lit a cigarette and handed it to her. ‘Keep your hair on and tell your Uncle Joss all about it.’
‘It’s so damned silly,’ said Martha. ‘For months and months, nothing happens. Suddenly it seems the Africans are really starting something at last. Then we hear that there is Solly, with his oar well in, having his say. Well, naturally I suppose.’
‘Naturally,’ said Solly.
‘Yes. But here you are, it seems you’re with Solly?’
‘God forbid,’ said Joss, humorous. But Martha kept her eyes on him and at last he said seriously: ‘If you’re asking my advice, I think the contradictions should be kept out of it.’ This word, contradictions, was shorthand in this time for everything the Soviet Union did which went against what might be expected of that nation in her socialist aspect. Which meant, of course, everything. Except winning the war.
‘Ah,’ said Martha thoughtfully, and looked at Joss with interest. He smiled, as if to say: Yes, I mean it.
‘Except that it’s not for you to keep the contradictions out of anything,’ said Solly. ‘You don’t even know who these Africans are.’
‘Then why did you ask Matty here at all?’ said Joss.
‘An interesting point,’ said Solly, grinning. She looked at him – at first incredulous, then reproachful, then, seeing nothing but triumph, angry. She was blushing.
‘Nonsense,’ she said energetically to Joss.
Joss had looked carefully at Solly, then at Martha, noting his brother’s air of triumph and Martha’s annoyance. He came to conclusions, and inwardly removed himself from the situation. ‘All that’s got nothing to do with me.’
‘Oh,’ said Martha, furious. ‘How absolutely – Solly said I was to come here because of some African group.’
‘Awfully touchy, isn’t she?’ said Solly to his brother, echoing, for Martha, a situation a decade old, and arousing in her a remembered confusion of bitterness that made her pick up her bag ready to go. She was white, and she trembled. Anybody would think something serious had happened.
‘Ah Matty, man,’ said Joss gently, ‘relax, take it easy. Don’t take any notice of my little brother. Everyone knows he’s just a troublemaker.’ With which he offered his brother an unsmiling smile: he stretched his mouth briefly across his face and let it fall into seriousness again. Solly sat and grinned, rocking his chair back and forth.
‘Look,’ said Martha direct to Joss, ‘I think your attitude is awfully … but I suppose you can’t help him being your brother. The point is this. Solly’s got this contact with an African group. But one of our people has a contact with it too, and he’s – Solly is – trying to blacken us. Well, I think he is,’ she added, fair at all costs, and even looking at Solly in a way which said: I hope I am not maligning you. Which look Joss noted, and so, Martha felt at once, misinterpreted.
‘Which of us has got a contact with this group?’ Joss asked Martha. She stared back in embarrassed amazement. Joss was asking her in front of Solly? Had Joss gone crazy? Or – was it possible? – had Joss, too, ‘gone bad’?
‘It is none other than Athen, your Greek comrade,’ said Solly, for Martha.
Here Johnny Capetenakis came in, with two plates balanced on his two held-out palms, his face offering them a gratified smile which preceded the food like its smell – a hot teasing aroma of garlic, lemon and oil. He set before Joss, before Solly, spikes stuck with glistening pieces of lamb, lightly charred onion rings, tiny half-tomatoes, their skins wrinkled and dimmed with heat and their flesh sprinkled with rosemary, smooth whole mushrooms, curls of bacon striped pink and white. These were displayed on large mounds of yellow rice.
‘Without you, we’d die of hunger,’ said Joss.
‘I’m still using the saffron from before the war,’ said the Greek. ‘When it’s finished, then I really don’t know.’
‘You’ll have to grow it,’ said Martha.
‘The war’s going to end, cheer up,’ said Joss.
Johnny stood smiling benevolently as the brothers began to eat. Then he went out.
‘Athen and Thomas Stern,’ said Solly.
‘Oh, is Thomas back in town, good,’ said Joss. He looked up for some bread and there was Martha, still standing and waiting. ‘I’m here,’ he excused himself, ‘to eat kebab with my little brother. I didn’t know there was anything else.’
‘Then I’m going.’
‘Yes. I’ll deal with my ever-loving brother for you.’
‘Obviously.’
‘What do you want me to do? If the Africans have started something – then about time too, and we should help them. And keep the nonsense out of it – the contradictions.’
He did not look up – his head was bent over his food. Martha stood watching the brothers eat. She was hungry, but she had promised to eat with her mother. Inside her opened up the lit space on to which, unless she was careful (this was not the moment for it), emotions would walk like actors and begin to speak without (apparently) any prompting from her. This empty lit space was because of the half-dozen rooms she had to run around, looking after. The tall lit space was not an enemy, it was where, at some time, the centre of the house would build itself. She observed, interested, that it was now, standing there looking at the Cohen boys, the antagonists, that the empty space opened out under its searchlights.
Feeling her silence, first Joss, then Solly, lifted their heads to look at her. She saw the two men, both with loaded forks in their hands, their heads turned sideways to look at her. She began to laugh.
‘She thinks we are funny,’ said Joss to Solly.
‘She’s laughing at us,’ said Solly to Joss.
‘Well, I’ll see you around, anyway,’ she said to Joss.
‘I don’t think you will.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m thinking of settling up North. I’m going up to spy out the land tomorrow.’
‘Ah, I see!’ Everything explained at last, Martha began to laugh again. She stopped, as she felt this laughter begin to burst up like flames, in the middle of the great empty space.
‘She sees,’ said Solly to Joss.
‘But what does she see?’ said Joss to Solly.
‘I might have known,’ said Martha. ‘Joss is leaving the country, and so of course he doesn’t care. And neither would I, in his place.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Joss, suddenly, not looking at her, but filling his mouth.
‘There won’t be anybody left in this place a week after the war ends. Off you all go, and the moment you leave, it’s just too bad about us.’ She left the intimate, odorous little room with the two men bent over their plates, pressed her way through the tables crammed with the RAF, said goodbye to Johnny at the entrance desk, and gained the fresh air and her bicycle. She was thinking: Damn Joss. Suddenly she remembered his ‘speak for yourself’. It occurred to her, for the first time, that perhaps he was there under false pretences too, and that in fact he was concerned to stop Solly knowing what he was up to? In which case, she was an idiot, had proved herself an utter … She bent to unlock her bicycle, and Solly’s arms came around her waist from behind.
A couple of weeks ago there was a meeting on the Allied invasion of France – ‘Second Front: At last!’ Solly had been there, heckling. He had waited outside afterwards, to heckle again, privately. He and Martha had walked through the emptying streets, in bitter argument, their antagonism fed by their ten years’ knowledge of each other. Outside Martha’s door they had embraced, violently, as if they had been flung together.
‘Sex,’ Solly had said, ‘the great leveller,’ and she had laughed, but not enough.
Now she turned, swiftly, putting the bicycle between herself and Solly. Grinning, he laid his hand on her shoulder, where it sent waves of sensation in all directions.
‘Surely, you’d admit there’s some meeting-ground?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘Liar.’
‘What did you have in mind, that we’d go rolling around over the pamphlets in the office, in between calling each other names like dirty Trotskyist?’
‘Dogmatic Stalinist, these things can always be managed, if there’s a will.’
‘But there isn’t.’
Martha knew she was smiling, direct into his smiling face. She could not stop. Their faces approached each other as if a hand behind either head pushed them together. They stood on the pavement, the bicycle between them, and a third of an inch of glass between them and the customers inside the Piccadilly. The bicycle pedal grazed Martha’s bare leg, and she said ‘Damn,’ and pulled herself away.
‘What a pity,’ said Solly softly.
‘Yes, I daresay.’
She got on her bicycle and pedalled off.
If she lived, precariously, in a house with half a dozen rooms, each room full of people (they being unable to leave the rooms they were in to visit the others, unable even to understand them, since they did not know the languages spoken in the other rooms) then what was she waiting for, in waiting for (as she knew she did) a man? Why, someone who would unify her elements, a man would be like a roof, or like a fire burning in the centre of the empty space. Why, then, was she allowing herself to respond to Solly as she had the other night, and would again, unless she made certain she wouldn’t meet him? What had she got in common with Solly – except sex, she added, but couldn’t laugh, for the truth was she was in a flaming, irritable, bad temper. She cycled like a maniac between lorries, cars, bicycles, the headlights dazzling, scarlet rear-lights winking. She did not like Solly, apart from not approving of him.
Two blocks down from the Piccadilly was an Indian grocer and over it the new office, held in the name of the departed Jasmine Cohen. It was used by half a dozen organizations who shared the rent. Martha let herself up dark unlit stairs, and opened, in the dark, a door, and turned the light on in a dingy little office which was the same as every political office she had ever seen. A small dark dapper man in the uniform of a Greek officer rose from a bench by the window. Athen smiled and said: ‘Matty, I’m glad it was you who came in.’
‘What are you doing sitting alone in the dark?’
He did not answer, she looked quickly at his face and went on: ‘I’ve come to pick up some books for Johnny Lindsay, and I’m late.’
‘But I must see you. When shall I see you?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘But I have to go back to camp tonight.’
‘After Johnny Lindsay I must go and see my father and then I suppose I’ve got to go home.’
She heard her own voice, desperate rather than angry, and raised her eyes to the grave judging eyes of the Greek.
‘Your father is very ill,’ he said, in rebuke.
‘I know that.’
‘And how is your husband?’
He had said your husband, instead of Anton, deliberately, and she smiled, freeing herself from his judgement. ‘Ah, Athen,’ she said affectionately, ‘you know, meeting you I’m always reminded …’
He smiled and nodded, and did not ask what she had been going to say. People know what their roles are, the parts they play for others. They can fight them, or try to change; they can find their roles a prison or a support: Athen approved his role. Possibly he had even chosen it. He was a conscience for others. He burned always, a severe, self-demanding steady flame, at which people laughed, but always with affection; from which they took their bearings.
‘Sometimes you seem to me almost impossibly naïve,’ she said apologetically, and he went on smiling, looking closely at her.
‘Naïve? Because I remind you of your marriage with Anton?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘Martha, are you well?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, irritable. But his look refused this and she said: ‘I may be well, but I’m certainly in a very odd state. I don’t think I understand anything.’ Tears filled into her eyes, frightening her because they came so often.
Athen took her by the hand, sat her on the wooden bench by the wall, sat by her, stroked her hand. ‘Martha, dear comrade Martha, do you know something strange? I was thinking just as you came in, you know when I was a poor boy selling newspapers on the street in Athens, if someone had told me then that a white person in Africa could be a socialist and that I would be the comrade of such a person, then I should have laughed.’
‘Well, you would have been right to laugh.’
‘Why do you say that? You have many bad thoughts, Martha.’
‘Is that a bad thought? Why? When the war’s over, you’ll go back and sell newspapers and you’ll live on tuppence-halfpenny. You’ll be poor again. Suppose I never leave this country, suppose I never can get out? Well, what do you imagine we’d have in common then?’
‘Martha, Martha. Why do you suppose this and that? After the war we will fight till we have communism in Greece, and then you will come to visit me in Greece and be my friend.’
‘Perhaps so.’
‘I wanted to see you and talk. Now you have to go.’
‘Yes. I’m late. I always seem to be late.’
‘How is Johnny Lindsay?’
‘He’s very ill. I do nothing but run from one sick-bed to another. And I hate it and resent it, I hate illness.’
Athen sat smiling, his small neat hand enclosing her hot one.
‘My father’s dying. He lies and thinks of nothing but himself and his medicines. And Johnny’s dying – but he’s a good man, so he thinks of other people all the time.’
‘Well then, comrade Martha?’
‘Nothing. That’s all. My life’s always like this, it’s always been like that – very crude and ridiculous.’
After a minute he took his hand away from hers and sat, straight, his two hands on his knees, looking at the wall. She felt rejected, but could not withdraw anything.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘it’s time I went home. I live from day to day, waiting to be sent home. I am so much with my friends, in my mind, that perhaps I cannot be a good friend to my friends here.’
‘Haven’t you heard anything?’
‘They won’t send us back unless they have to – why should they send back six fully trained pilots when they know we’ll escape and join the communists the moment we get home? Of course not, if I were in their shoes I would keep us here too.’
‘I’m sorry, Athen. I suppose it’s the same for everyone – we just have to wait, that’s all.’
‘I want to talk with you about something important. If you have time when you have visited your father, then come to the Piccadilly.’
‘I’ll try. What is it?’
‘I’ve been talking to a man who lives in Sinoia Street. I want you to help him and his friends.’
After a moment, she laughed. He waited, smiling, for her to explain.
‘You have been talking to a man who lives in Sinoia Street. I’ve just come from Solly and Joss. They told me about contacts in the Coloured Quarter with the right sort of ideas who have contacts with Africans.’
‘Well, perhaps I might have said that too,’ he said, laughing.
‘Oh no, oh no, you wouldn’t, and that’s the point. Anyway, I’m going.’ From the door she said: ‘I saw Maisie this afternoon.’
‘That reminds me, Martha. I would very much like to talk to you about Maisie.’ She could not prevent herself searching his face to find out what he felt about Maisie, but he quickly turned to the window, away from her gaze.
She found the books Johnny wanted, and went out. In the street she looked up: the window was already dark, Athen had turned the light out again. A hand fell on her shoulder, which remembered Solly’s touch and knew that this solid pressure was not his. She turned to see a brown stout young man smiling at her. ‘What are you doing, Matty? I was wondering who’d be in the office, and here you are standing gazing up into the sky with your mouth open.’
‘My mouth wasn’t open! How are you? I heard you were back.’
‘Only for a week. It’s still my fate to be banished in W …’
‘Then that’s a pity. Your study group’s collapsed.’
Thomas Stern had been in this city the year before, for a couple of months, during which short time his energy had created a state of activity not far from ‘the group’s’ achievements at its height. Study groups, lectures, etc., flourished for a few weeks, and stopped when he left.
‘If a study group’s dependent on one person, then it’s not worth anything.’
This didacticism was so like him that she laughed, but said: ‘I’m late, Thomas.’
‘Naturally. But when you’re finished what you’re late for come and have supper at Dirty Dick’s?’
‘I can’t. But if you want company, then Athen’s sitting in the office all by himself.’ She cycled off, calling back: ‘Next time you come up, give me a ring.’ But he had already gone inside the building.
In a few minutes she was there. In the squalid night of this part of the city, the little houses of the poor street Johnny lived in blazed out light, noise, music. Children ran about over the hardening mud ruts from the recently ended rainy season; or carried long loaves of bread to their mothers from the Indian shop where a portable gramophone stood jigging out thin music on an orange box outside the door. The gramophone was watched by a small and incredibly clean little Indian boy whose white shirt dazzled like a reproach in the dirty gloom.
The veranda of the house was nothing but bricks laid straight into the dust with a few feet of tin propped over it. Martha chained her bicycle to the yard fence. The door from the veranda opened direct into a brightly lit room which had in it a great many books, a straw mat over a rough brick floor, a table with four chairs all loaded with papers and pamphlets, and a bed where Johnny Lindsay lay, very still, very white, his eyes closed, breathing noisily. Beside him on one side sat Mrs Van der Bylt, her large firm person held upright on a small wooden chair; on the other was Flora, knitting orange wool which was almost the colour of her flaming shiny hair. At the foot of the bed a young man of twenty-two or three sat reading aloud, from a long report in that day’s News about conditions in the mining industry.
Flora, the pretty, blowzy middle-aged woman with whom the old miner had shared his life for ten years now, counted stitches and was obviously following her own thoughts. She smiled briefly at Martha, but it was Mrs Van who nodded at Martha to sit down. The young man, a teacher from the Coloured School, half-rose, and looked at Mrs Van whether to go on or not. Johnny opened his eyes to discover why the reading had stopped, saw Martha, filled labouring lungs and said: ‘Sit down, girlie,’ patting the bed. ‘They are making me stay in bed,’ he said, with the naughtiness of an invalid disobeying over-protective nurses. But in fact he was very ill, as Martha could see. She said: ‘Don’t talk. Look, here are the books.’ She laid them on the thin white counterpane, beside the old man’s very large hand where pain showed in the tense knuckles. Everything in this room was most familiar to Martha from her father’s sick-room: the smell of medicines, the attentive tactful people sitting around it, the invalid’s over-bright smile – and above all the look of shame in his eyes, the demand which said: This isn’t I – this humiliating noisily suffering body isn’t me.
‘Johnny, I’m terribly late, I must rush off.’
Mrs Van frowned. Martha said: ‘I’m expected at my father’s,’ and Mrs Van smiled. Martha saw the fat old woman examining her – ‘like a headmistress’ she could not help thinking. The small, piercing blue eyes that rested their steady beam on her had missed nothing – not even the small smudge of oil from the bicycle chain on her leg.
‘Before you run off, I think Mr de Wet would like to meet you, Martha,’ said Mrs Van.
The young man rose, as if he had been ordered – well, he had been, in fact. He smiled politely at Martha, but waited for Mrs Van to go on.
‘Clive has a contact, an African contact. He wants to start a study group of some kind and I thought it would be useful if he could discuss things with you – you could order books for them. And so on.’
‘We have started the study group,’ said Clive abruptly. He sounded annoyed, though he had not meant to. Mrs Van said quickly: ‘Well, in that case perhaps it’s all right.’
Martha thought this all out: Clive was Clive de Wet, the ‘man in Sinoia Street’ mentioned by Athen, the ‘contact’ mentioned by Solly. He also knew Thomas Stern. Mrs Van could not know he was already the happy recipient of so much attention. The fact that he had not told Mrs Van he already had at least three white people ready to supply ‘books and so on’ meant that he did not trust her? Certainly he did not trust her, Martha, since Solly would have seen to it that he did not.
Martha said to Clive: ‘If you want to see me at any time, here is my telephone number.’ She scribbled her office number on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. He took it with a tiny hesitation which said that Martha had been quite right in diagnosing a dislike of so much interest.
She noted Mrs Van’s shrewd face accurately marking and analysing all these tiny events and knew that she could expect from Mrs Van, not later than lunchtime tomorrow, a telephone call enquiring: ‘Well, Matty, and what is going on with that study group? Why haven’t I been told?’
Martha, Clive de Wet, Mrs Van were watching each other, thinking about each other, all as alert as circling hawks. Meanwhile Johnny lay, eyes closed, on his pillows, and Flora clicked her needles. She was quite absorbed in her orange wool, and would have understood nothing of this scene.
Martha finally nodded and smiled at Mrs Van, nodded at Clive de Wet, and tiptoed to the door over the slippery grass of the mat.
In the street the children were swooping and darting like so many swallows through the dusk and the little Indian boy was winding up his gramophone, which played Sarie Marais.
Now she must visit her father and then, thank goodness, she could go to bed early.
She made the transition from one world to another in fifteen minutes, arriving in the gardened avenues as they filled with cars headed for the eight o’clock cinemas. Everything dazzled and spun under racing headlights, but the Quests’ place had trees all around it. It had always been a garden which accommodated a house, rather than a house with a garden. The stiff, fringed, lacy, fanning and sworded shapes of variegated foliage, shadowed or bright, hid the bricks and painted iron of an ordinary, even ugly house from whose windows light spilled in dusty yellow shafts through which moths fluttered. The strong shafts from the busy headlights swept across the tops of bushes, the boughs of trees. But at walking level, everything was dark, quiet.
Martha dumped her bicycle on gravel and ran up shallow steps where geranium spilled scented trails. No one on the veranda, but from a window which opened off it the sound of a child’s voice: ‘Granny, Granny, I don’t want pudding.’
Martha’s heart went small and tight; she fixed her smile neatly across her face, and went into the living-room, on tip-toe. It was empty but the radio was on, the gramophone played the Emperor at full blast, and a small white dog rose to yap pointlessly, its tail frantically welcoming. Martha shushed the dog, turned off the gramophone, and received news of the war in Europe: Starvation was killing off the Dutch people. The Allies had made 70,000 prisoners. The Düsseldorf bridges had been blown up. Only forty sorties were flown by our Tactical Air Forces today, though medium bombers made a successful attack through ten-tenths cloud on a marshalling yard at Burgsteinfurt. The Germans’ sense of war-guilt was growing, and their nerves were ‘shot’ as a result of the bombing. Behaviour of German civilians in the Rhineland was so servile that words like ‘cringing’ were frequently and not unjustifiably used. Tommies and GIs alike were developing the deepest contempt for the ‘Herrenvolk’. Life had almost stopped. Fields where corn should be growing were deeply marked by the tracks of manoeuvring tanks or were pitted by thousands of shell and bomb holes. It would need four years to get the Ukraine, our gallant ally’s granary, going again. Never before in this war had the Allies had such favourable weather before a major operation. The vastly superior number of Allied tanks and armoured vehicles, once across the Rhine, should find good going on the hard dry plains of the Northern Ruhr. A Liberator pilot said today: ‘Hundreds of fighters were strafing and diving below over what was the most tremendous battle I ever hope to see.’ There were still hundreds and thousands of Germans living among the ruins of Cologne. The whole central part of the city was a chaos of debris. There were riots in Czechoslovakia.
Perhaps she could see her father before her mother knew she was there?
She went quietly down the passage to the room at the back of the house, and knocked gently. No reply. Inside, a scene of screened lights and the smell of medicines.
An old, neat, white-haired man lay on low pillows, his head fallen rather sideways, and his mouth open. His teeth were in a glass of water by the bed, and his jaw had a collapsed graveyard look.
Martha said, softly: ‘Father,’ but he did not move, so she went out again.
Mrs Quest came down the passage with her hands full of ironed white things. There was a hot clean smell of ironing.
‘Oh there you are,’ she began, ‘you’re late, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry.’
‘Just as well really, because I’ve only just this moment got Caroline off to sleep.’
‘I thought you said she was going home?’ said Martha, automatically joining battle.
‘Yes, but she looked a bit peaky, and I thought a bit of proper looking after would do her good.’
The monstrous implications of the sentence caused Martha to flush with anger, but Mrs Quest had already gone on to worse: ‘Better be quiet, keep your voice down sort of thing, because she doesn’t know you are here.’
Martha went straight past her mother, containing futile anger, to the living-room. Again the little white dog leaped down off a chair, and began bounding like a rubber ball around Martha, yapping incessantly.
‘God help us,’ shouted Martha, at last finding a safe target for anger. ‘That damned dog has seen me most days for three years and it still barks.’
‘Down Kaiser, down Kaiser, down!’ Mrs Quest’s fond voice joined the symphony of yaps, and a little girl’s voice said outside: ‘Granny, Granny, why is Kaiser barking?’
‘Out of sight!’ commanded Mrs Quest dramatically.
Martha turned a look on her mother which caused the old woman to drop her eyes a moment, and then sigh, as if to say: I’m being blamed again! She whisked out of the room, and Martha heard: ‘Oh Caroline, you wicked girl, what are you doing out of bed?’
But Mrs Quest’s voice, with the child, had the ease of love and Caroline’s voice came confidently: ‘I’d like it better if I could have Kaiser in my room, Granny.’
‘Well, we’ll see.’
Do you suppose, Martha wondered, that when I was little she talked to me like that? Is it possible she liked me enough?
The telephone rang, Mrs Quest came bustling in to answer it, the cook announced from the door that the meat was cooked, and from the end of the house sounded the small bell that meant Mr Quest was awake and needed something. Martha was on her way to her father, when Mrs Quest came past her at a run, and the door to the sick-room opened and closed on her father’s voice: ‘Oh there you are. What time is it?’
Martha went back to the darkened veranda, and peered into the room which held her daughter. A small dark girl squatted in the folds of a scarlet rug, fondling the ears of the white dog. ‘Your name is Kaiser,’ she was saying. ‘Did you know that? Your name is King Kaiser Wilhelm the First. Isn’t that a funny name for a pooh dog?’ The dog rolled adoring eyes, and flickered a pink tongue at the child’s face. Martha heard her mother charging down the passage, and she withdrew from the window.
‘I’m sorry about that, Matty, but I gave him a washout earlier, and as I thought, he wanted the bedpan.’
‘Oh, it’s really all right. I’ll see him tomorrow.’
‘I really don’t know what I’m going to do if it goes on like this. It’s been five days without any real result and I gave him two washouts yesterday alone. Yes, cook?’
‘Missus, the meat’s ready, missus.’
‘Well, I think you’d better try to keep it hot. The doctor’s coming, he might like some supper.’
Martha tried not to show her relief. ‘But mother, I can’t wait for supper for hours.’
‘I wasn’t expecting you to,’ said Mrs Quest, hoity-toity, but triumphant. ‘Anton has telephoned me three times, he was expecting you hours ago.’
‘Then he must have misunderstood.’
‘One of us certainly did, because I got in a beautiful bit of sirloin, and now it’s going to be wasted, unless the doctor eats it.’
‘I’ll get home then,’ said Martha. She almost ran down the steps to her bicycle, with Mrs Quest after her: ‘I had a letter from Jonathan today.’
‘Oh, did you?’
‘Yes, he’s got sick-leave in Cairo, but he’s being sent to a hospital in England.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘He didn’t say.’
Jonathan had been wounded slightly in the leg at El Alamein, but recovered. Recently he had been wounded again in the arm, and the arm showed no signs of properly healing, much to everyone’s relief. As Mr Quest said: ‘If he gets out of it with nothing worse than a gammy arm, he’ll be doing quite well.’
‘Shhhhh,’ said Mrs Quest suddenly, as Caroline said from the window where she was swinging from the burglar bars: ‘Who’s that lady, Granny, who is that lady?’
Martha picked up her bicycle, jumped on it, and cycled fast through the bushes to the invisibility which would enable Mrs Quest to turn the child’s attention to something else. At a telephone box, Martha rang the Piccadilly. Johnny was happy to bring his compatriot to the telephone. Martha told Athen she could not see him that evening.
‘I’m sorry,’ came Athen’s voice, raised against the clatter of a hundred eating humans. ‘Well then, I’ll see you in about a week, and in the meantime, will you please see my friend Clive de Wet?’
‘I met him this evening at Johnny’s. I don’t think he wants to see me. I’m sure of it.’
‘No, I spoke to him about you. He wants to see you.’
‘When did you speak to him?’
‘I’ve just been to his house, he was there and I spoke to him. He said he thought you were associated with Mrs Van.’
‘I don’t understand, he was reading to Johnny, doesn’t he approve of Johnny?’
‘He does, very much. But he does not trust Mrs Van, I think.’
‘That’s ridiculous – how can he like Johnny and not like Mrs Van?’
‘At any rate, it would be helpful if you explain things to him. They need much help – they have no books, and wish to be taught many things.’
‘Oh well, in that case … and I’ll see you next week.’
‘Yes. And give my greetings to your husband.’
And now, at last, she must go home to Anton. Home was a new place, half a flat, half a house – two little rooms, a bathroom and a shared kitchen that was really a screened-off veranda over a patch of shared dirty lawn. The woman they shared with was a Mrs Huxtable. Martha did not like her, but as there was never any time for cooking anyway, it didn’t matter.
Anton had telephoned her three times. Three times. The information had been received apprehensively by her nerves. Her emotions repeated, with monotony: It’s not fair, it’s not fair – meaning that this kind of demand, or reproach, was not in the bargain of her marriage with Anton. Meanwhile her brain was sending messages of warning that she was scared to listen to. For months now there had been a kind of equilibrium in the marriage. Having acknowledged it was a bad marriage, that they had made a mistake, that they would split up again as soon as the war ended, a sort of friendliness, even kindness, even – perhaps? – a tenderness was established. But while, for Martha, this new relationship was welcome because it softened an intolerable strain; it seemed that for Anton it meant a new promise. At any rate, three different telephone calls in one afternoon was a language, a demand, Martha could not begin to answer.
Cycling past McGrath’s hotel, she remembered that after all she belonged to a world where people might sit drinking in large rooms, served by waiters; they might dance; they might even eat dinners (bad dinners, but formal, that was something) in restaurants. She would ring up Anton from the foyer and ask him to join her for a drink, and perhaps dinner. He would say humorously: ‘And what are we celebrating, Matty, have I forgotten your birthday?’
He would protest at having to come, but he would be pleased. They could drink for an hour or so, have dinner, listen to the band, and in this way both could forget (Martha hoped) the implications of the fact that practically everything he said, or did, these days, was really a reproach for her not doing, or being, what he now wanted her to be.

Chapter Two (#ulink_b9546ef4-43b0-504b-adc1-3d4eed9b393f)
It was almost seven. Martha had been waiting since five. Waiting now being a condition of her life, like breathing, it scarcely mattered whether she waited for an interview or for when peace would be restored – the new phrase, which showed that the old one, ‘when the war ends’, had proved inadequate. She waited with the whole of herself, as other people might pray, yet with even prayer become something to be practised, kept in use merely, since it could be effective only with the beginning of a new life. Waiting for her life to begin, when she could go to England, she waited for ‘the contact from the African group’, and with the same ability to cancel out present time. She read half a pamphlet about Japanese atrocities with an irritated boredom with propaganda which did not mean she disbelieved what she read. She absorbed a column or so of statistics about African education but with the irritation of impotence. She filed her nails, brushed her hair as she never had time to do in her bedroom, ‘fifty strokes on each side’, tidied a cupboard full of pamphlets that dealt definitively with affairs in at least a hundred countries, and finally sat down with deliberately idle but restless hands, on a bench under the window over Founders’ Street.
The heat of a stormy day had drained into the scarlet flush that still spread, westwards, under bright swollen stars only intermittently visible. Hailstones from the recent storm scattered the street and lay on the dirty windowsill, and gusts of sharp cold air drove from racing clouds across the hot currents rising from the pavements. It would be winter soon, the ice seemed promise of it. Martha’s calves sweated slipperily against the wood of the bench, and she sucked a bit of ice as an ally against heat, watching her smooth brown skin pucker under the gold down on her forearm into protest against cold. There was a blanket folded on top of the wooden cupboard. The blanket was because friends in the RAF sometimes slept here if they were too late for the last bus to camp. Martha now spread it on the bench against the unpleasant slipperiness of sweat, and wrapped her legs in it. The hailstones, even under a crust of dirt, sent forth their cool smell, and Martha twisted herself about to watch the sky from where the winds of a new storm already poured over the town. Sitting with her back turned, she did not see that Solly had come in, and missed the moment when she could judge why he was here. For a moment the two stared deeply at each other. She broke it by saying: ‘I’m waiting for a man to come from the African group.’ She had decided on this admission to save half an hour of fencing. A bad liar, she knew it, and had thus acquired the reputation: Matty is such a sincere person. Meanwhile, part of her mind juggled to find convincing lies to put him off.
‘It’s such a pleasure having dealings with you, Matty, always as honest as the day.’
‘It occurred to me recently there’s no point in being anything else, living in this – ant-nest.’ Her voice was shrill, and she set guards on herself; noting meanwhile that ‘enemy’ Solly ceased to be one when she thought of him as a fellow victim of the provinces. She smiled at him: as a cat which has been scampering about a crouching tom suddenly rolls over and lifts meek paws. Not quite, however. But the flash of seriousness on this young man’s face (whatever the reason for it) when he had first seen her under the window had after all weakened the force of her decision not to like him. So would he look into her face from a few inches’ distance if. But he was now saying, vibrant with sarcastic hostility: ‘You have a point, I grant you. Yesterday I met a comrade of yours from the camp who said, how was Matty? I said what did he mean? It seems our liaison is common gossip.’
‘What fun for you.’
‘Well, I do hope so, Matty.’
‘The thing is, I have to meet Athen at seven and it must be that now.’
‘Well, I would be only too happy to wait to seduce you until you had finished conferring with comrade Athen.’
He was on the bench beside her. His face grinned into hers from not six inches away. Luckily, however, not at all ‘serious’, far from it, so she was saved. She got up and began piling pamphlets about the Second Front (now unsaleable) into the cupboard.
‘Solly, are you seeing Clive de Wet?’
‘Why should I tell you, comrade Matty?’
‘Well, if you want to be childish.’
‘It’s you who are childish. This is Solly Cohen, the Trotskyist.’
‘But it looks as if the African group want help?’
‘There isn’t an African group.’
‘But a group of Africans?’
‘What can you do for them I can’t do?’
She shrugged and then laughed. The laughter was because of a picture so sharp to her imagination it was hard to believe it wasn’t in his also: ‘the African group’, like a small starving child, its hands held out for help, was being torn to pieces by a group of adults fighting for the right to help it.
At that moment came a knock on the door. Martha shouted ‘Come in’ and a small black boy came in, looking nervously from one to the other of the two white people.
‘Missus Mart,’ he said.
‘No Mrs Mart here,’ said Martha.
‘Idiot, it’s you.’
Solly was already grinning: he knew what was in the dingy envelope that the small boy held out.
A single sheet of exercise paper said:
‘Dear Mrs Martha, I apologize for not coming this afternoon, I have been prevented by unavoidable circumstances. Hoping I may have the pleasure of your acquaintance at another time. Yours sincerely, Signature illegible.’

Probably purposely so.
‘Who sent you?’
The little boy shifted his feet and his eyes and said: ‘Don’t know, missus.’
Martha gave him a shilling and he started to run off. She said: ‘Please tell whoever sent you that I will be here tomorrow afternoon at the same time.’
‘Yes, missus.’
He vanished and Solly jeered: ‘Ever faithful Matty, waiting day after day in pursuance of duty. But he won’t come, I’ve seen to it.’
‘Luckily you’re not the only influence abroad. There’s Athen and Thomas as well.’
He grinned. ‘Dear Matty. What makes you think it’s the same group?’
‘Oh, isn’t it? Well, never mind, I’m late for Athen.’
‘May I have the pleasure of walking you to Dirty Dick’s?’
‘How do you know it’s Dirty Dick’s?’
‘Where else?’
On the pavement large drops of warm rain fell all about them. She wriggled her shoulders inside damp cotton. The warm wet was lashed by cold. Overhead, miles overhead, very likely, air masses had shifted, had clashed, and here spears of acid-cold water mingled with fat warm drops from a lower region of sky. Lightning splurged across the dark, and Solly pulled Martha under an awning. He put his hot arms about her, and dropped a hot cheek close to hers, while ice from the clouds bounced around their feet.
‘But Solly, there’s absolutely no point in it.’
‘Look where all this highmindedness has got you. The arms of Anton Hesse. Not to mention the divorced arms of Douglas Knowell. Why didn’t you listen to Joss and me? We told you, didn’t we, and you’d never listen.’
‘All right. But I’m late for Athen.’
The Piccadilly was empty. Rather, it had half a dozen civilians in it. Unpredictably the RAF flowed in and out of the town, and tonight the tide was out: not a uniform in sight. The big oblong room, with its shiny yellow walls, that were usually hung with hundreds of caps, jackets, coats; its hundred tables tightly massed with grey-blue uniforms, was empty. At the end of the room, a neat dark little man in a light suit rose to meet them. Athen himself. Martha had never seen him out of uniform and she examined him while Solly said to Johnny: ‘Where are all our gallant boys?’ But Johnny spread out his palms, empty of information, and shrugged.
‘Any news from home?’ Martha asked politely, as usual.
‘It’ll soon be over now. We’ve offered them …’ here he nodded towards Athen, ‘… an amnesty. Yes, Elas and Elam will give themselves up now, you’ll see.’
Athen watched Martha approach and smiled. But he saw Solly and his face went on guard. Athen despised Solly. Not for being a Trotskyist: Solly was not a serious person, said Athen. Before taking a person’s beliefs seriously, he must be worthy to have beliefs. At any rate, when Solly was mentioned he simply shrugged. As for Solly, since it was not possible to despise Athen, he regarded him as the dupe of Stalin. Martha was angry with herself for letting Solly be here. It was going to be another awful evening, another among hundreds. It was her fault. She could never remember that because she ‘got on’ with people, it didn’t mean they should ‘get on’ with each other. She was always creating situations full of discordant people. It did not flatter her that she could: on the contrary. If such tenuous ties she had with people, easy contact, surface friendship, yet had the strength to bring them together, what did that fact say about them, about her, and – she would not be Martha if she did not go on – about associations, groups, friendships generally? And it was no quality to be admired in herself that made her a focus. She was, at this time, available. That was all. If not her, it would be someone else – just as, before her, it had been the du Preez’ and before them Jasmine Cohen.
Very well then, it seemed that for this period of her life, her role was to – well, this evening for instance, there was a group consisting of Athen and Solly and herself; and then these three (unless she could shed Solly and there seemed no likelihood of that) and Anton and Joss and Thomas Stern would all go to the pictures. And afterwards everyone would come home to their flat (Anton’s and hers) and she would cook eggs for them. This was friendship. She reminded herself that ten years before she had been saying critically, in such different circumstances: This is friendship! and made herself pay attention to her present scene. Solly was looking at her, very close, across the table, reminding her with his eyes why he was here. And Athen was standing by his chair, face to face with Johnny Capetenakis, and the two men spoke low and fast in bitter Greek, their eyes burning hatred. Martha had never seen this Athen, and she thought that if these two men were now, this evening, standing in the same way on their mother soil, it would be to kill each other. Athen’s eyes blazed murder; Johnny’s eyes blazed back. Athen’s fist trembled as it hung by his side. Johnny Capetenakis spat out a last low volley of hate and turned and went off to his desk by the door of the restaurant.
Athen sat down. ‘He says our people should give themselves up to the amnesty, they would be safe. I told him, it’s not the first time. There’s a clause, criminals will be shot. I told him, we know who these criminals will turn out to be. He tells me I am a traitor to my country.’
He sat, sombre, looking about him with dislike, then he said: ‘I cannot stay here, I am sorry, but it is too much to sit here, in this man’s place.’
‘Well, we’re late for the pictures anyway.’
Martha led the way out, greeting Johnny at the desk, not knowing whether she should feel disloyal for doing so or not. But she noted that Athen nodded at Johnny, and that Johnny nodded briefly back.
The rain had gone, the stars were washed clean, steam rose from the tarmac that shone like dark water, reflecting rose and blue and gold. It was nearly eight. Main Street was filled with groups of civilians moving towards the cinema. No RAF, absolutely none.
‘It might just as well be peacetime,’ said Martha.
‘There is a big man coming tomorrow,’ said Athen. ‘Everyone has to polish their buttons tonight.’
‘What big man?’
‘From England. An Air Vice-Marshal.’
‘Why are you allowed out then?’
‘All the Greeks have got week-end leave, all of us. They have worked it out: the Greeks are all communists, and the communists are anti-British, therefore the communists will try to assassinate the Air Vice-Marshal.’
Athen sounded bitter, and Martha, who had been going to laugh, stopped herself.
‘What are you complaining about,’ said Solly, ‘if you’ve got the week-end?’
Martha had never seen Athen like this: the gentle controlled little man was beyond himself, he was flushed with anger, he looked humiliated and his hands shook.
‘This proves what I always said about the reactionaries. They always know facts. They always know who is a member of what. They know who has written letters to who. They know who has attended this meeting, that meeting. They know who is a man’s relatives and who can be made to talk. This they know because of their spies. But they can never interpret these facts, because they put their own bad minds into our minds.’
Athen stood bitterly on the pavement, talking – not to them. Martha and Solly stood on one side waiting.
‘I used to say to our comrades in the mountains. If it is a question of fact, they will know. Yes. Be frightened of that, and guard against it. But if it is a question of intention – if they interrogate you and say: “You mean this, you want this”, then keep your mouths shut and do not worry. They know nothing. They are too stupid. Their Air Vice-Marshal is safe from us,’ said Athen, his white teeth showing in bitterness.
‘Athen,’ said Martha gently, but he was going on. Probably, she thought (since he spoke often of that time) he was in a freezing cave above a pass as narrow as Thermopylae. Tomorrow, or next week, they – he and his soldiers – would roll boulders down bare brown hillsides patched with snow to crush one hundred and fifty of their countrymen who, in British uniforms and British-officered, were hunting them out. ‘I tell them,’ Athen said softly, ‘I tell them always: Remember who you are, comrades. Now we are like criminals hunted over the mountains, but soon that will end, and we will be men.’
‘We are going to be late,’ said Solly. He went on ahead, having decided to take the others on the offensive of his effrontery. Martha heard him say: ‘Good evening, comrades, one and all! And good evening, brother Joss!’
Athen had taken Martha’s hand. ‘Martha, I have to ask you something serious.’
From fifty yards off, Solly, then Joss, called: ‘Come on, you two, it’s late.’
‘Have you noticed a change in me?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Thank you for saying so. It is true.’
‘Athen, have you seen Maisie?’
Athen let Martha’s hand go and frowned. ‘I know why you ask me that, Martha.’
More shouts from outside the cinema.
‘I must talk about this with you, Martha.’
They ran towards the cinema and the waiting group.
There was a girl in the group – a red-haired girl in a white dress. Whose? Not Solly’s, this evening; so that meant she must be Joss’s, or Thomas Stern’s. Probably Thomas’s – he liked thin girls. As Martha decided this, Thomas took both her hands – Martha’s, announced that she looked terrible, very pale, and much too thin, and that while he was always her slave on principle, tonight, because of her irresistible look of illness – she was irresistible. So she must be Joss’s girl? No time to find out, no time even to be introduced – Martha and the red-haired girl smiled goodwill, and then the group joined the crowd that was being sucked into the cinema, quickening as it went, like bathwater into a hole. The manager stood by the box office, his smile benign, but not enough to conceal his disappointment at the absence of his best customers. He kept darting glances at the entrance in case at the last minute the familiar blue-grey uniforms would appear, and all his seats be filled. But there were, after all, many RAF present, in ordinary clothes, like Athen, and soon the manager was smiling and urging his flock into the dark with smiles, a pressure of the hand, a pat on the shoulder. To Martha, who after all he had been welcoming for five or six years now, he said jovially: ‘And how are you these days, Mrs …?’ But he was unable to remember her current married name.
The programme had started. Across the screen that was lifted high in the big dark space over the crowded floor, moved a file of soldiers which, seen in the confusion, the jerking about of finding seats, then sitting, then finding places for handbags and jackets, looked like the columns which, in one Allied uniform or another, had marched, flown, parachuted across that screen for the last five years. But suddenly they understood the great, staring hollow-cheeked face they looked at was a German, and the uniform he wore, which was worn into rags, was a German uniform. The announcer’s voice had a note they had not heard before. It was jeering: ‘And so here he is, the Ubermensch, the Superman, the ruler of the world, here he is, and take a good look at him.’ The German on the screen was eighteen? A starved twenty-year-old? A bit of rag fluttered wildly on his shoulder, and he shivered so that it seemed as if the whole cinema shivered with him. He stared into the cinema-crowd with eyes quite empty of expression. So he had stared a few days ago into the camera which took pictures of the defeated armies – he had stared probably not knowing what the machine was doing there or what it wanted. He stared, his cheek-bones speaking of death, into the faces of a thousand full-fed people, his victorious enemies, in a little town in the centre of Africa.
The cinema was very silent. They were shocked, or in a state of mild shock, for a few moments. Then they began to realize, slowly. For the five years of the war, they had seen the faces of the enemy at a distance – and seen aircraft spinning down in flames and smoke; seen corpses like photographs in the newspaper – pictures of corpses; seen the posturing faces of enemy leaders, seen massed troops, massed tanks, armies, men in the mass, men on the move in columns, men in uniforms. Now they saw this face, close, close; and it was a shock, because the minds of the men who organized newsreels, war films, ‘propaganda’ had taken care that this face, the face of a shocked, frightened boy, should not stare, as close as a lover, into the face of a cinema audience.
‘Yes, take a good look,’ went on the commentator in the same calculatingly sneering sarcastic tone, ‘you’ll not see anything like this again in your lives. The allies have fought this bitter terrible war so that it will be impossible, ever again, for Germany to threaten the world. So look closely at victorious Germany, look at the Superman.’
The Horst Wessel song, played fragmentarily and in leering, jeering, sliding discord, accompanied the newsman’s voice that went on, with its bought sarcasm, while the small whirling beams of light from the projectionist’s cabin created on the blank uplifted wall of the cinema men, defeated men, men in the last extremity of hunger, cold and defeat, thousands and thousands of hollow-cheeked ghosts, a ghost army, limping, their feet in rags; rags binding hands, shoulders, heads; bits of cloth fluttering in the cold, cold wind of that frigid spring at the end of the European war. They limped slowly, in a frightful ominous silence strong enough to drown the ugly voice of the commentator. They drifted slowly across dark air while a thousand or so of their victorious enemies watched in absolute silence.
‘Take a good look, ladies and gentlemen, we have fought the good fight and we have won. Take a look and never forget: here they are, the Herrenvolk, the master-race, the rulers of the world.’
And the frozen defeated men limped away across the war-torn countryside of Europe, their eyes black with pain and with shock. ‘Yes, that’s the end of it, that’s the end of the dream. That’s the end of the conquest of the world. You have paid for this victory in blood, sweat, tears and suffering. Take a good look for that’s the last you’ll ever see of Germany, and the menace of Germany in Europe. We have fought the good fight together and we have won – the free countries of the world.’
Beside Martha Thomas Stern shifted about in his seat and said steadily under his breath, ‘Bastards, bastards, bastards.’ On the other side, Solly Cohen very softly whistled the Internationale between his teeth. Leaning forward, Martha looked for Anton. How did he feel, the German, looking at his ghost-like countrymen, listening to the cheap easy sneer? His regular profile, like one on a coin, showed beside the pretty upturned profile of the red-head. Neither face said anything, they were people at a cinema, and so, presumably, was she, Martha, though she raged with useless protest which expressed itself: ‘I bet that commentator was making his voice say three cheers for Chamberlain at Munich, I bet he was.’
‘Well of course,’ said Solly, and whistled the Internationale, more loudly. Joss leaned forward to ask Martha: ‘Whose idea was it to bring my little brother to the pictures?’ And Solly laughed aloud as Martha said: ‘Mine.’
‘Shhh,’ said someone in front; and someone else let out a sudden loud raspberry – the whole cinema seethed frustration, anger, resentment, discomfort. Suddenly, from somewhere at the back, there was a shrill whistle, and then a shout: ‘Up the RAF!’
‘Trust them,’ said Joss approvingly, as the tension broke.
‘We shall miss you,’ said Solly loudly to the RAF, invisible tonight in their mufti.
A scuffle. The manager appeared, an outraged presence; torches swung agitatedly; the whole cinema turned to watch a couple of men, their faces the broad you-aren’t-fooling-me faces of the North English, being escorted to the door. ‘All right, I can walk, thank you very much!’ Then a last muffled shout: ‘The RAF for ever, I don’t think.’
When everyone again turned to see what was going on, a small dark aircraft sped, turned, soared across skies lit with fire, while tiny dark eggs spilled into a dark city which flung up great showers of spark and flame.
Solly said, loudly copying the practised jeer of the announcer (who was, however, saying in a voice unctuous with victory that the city – which? – was not without water supplies, sewage or railways as a result of this successful bombing raid) – ‘And see how they run, the filthy vermin, away from the cleansing bombs of our gallant boys.’
A man turned around from the front and said: ‘If you haven’t got any patriotic feelings why don’t you go home where you came from?’
‘Thanks,’ said Solly, ‘I will.’ He unwound his long thin person from the discomfort of the seat and made his way out, whistling the Internationale. ‘Jesus,’ said Joss, moving up to fill Solly’s seat near to Martha, ‘I suppose one day he’ll grow up.’ He was embarrassed for his brother. ‘I don’t know,’ said Martha, ‘I felt the same.’
On the other side of Martha, Thomas Stern sat, silent. But his hands gripping the arm-rests vibrated with tension. He muttered, steadily, ‘Bastards, bastards, bastards.’
When Martha turned to look at him, he said: ‘And you shut up. All of you shut up. You can keep out of it.’
Martha said: ‘Who?’
Joss’s restraining hand came on her forearm and he said: ‘Better leave Thomas alone. A friend of his was with the people who entered Belsen, he had a letter today.’
On the screen now appeared shots of jungle – a lush scene, which might have done for a musical. But flames engulfed it. Flames from a flame-thrower seared the flesh of men, the substance of trees and plants. Black ash crumbled where men, trees, and plants had been, and drifted across the screen in greasy smoke which could almost be smelt in the cinema. An island in the Pacific. After all, it was only ‘the war in Europe’ that was due to end any day. ‘The war in the Pacific’ was being fought from island to island still, while Europe crumbled in famine, cold, and ruined cities. Which island was this? But Martha had missed its name, she would never know which island she had watched being scorched by the flamethrowers, just as she would never know which German city she had seen being pulverized to ruins.
This was the main film now. A thick slow tune began to pulse through the cinema. It was music easy and sexual which would, in a moment, have welded the thousand people in the cinema into a whole. A heavy velvet curtain swirled across the screen and back again, and there appeared the apparently naked back of a blonde woman. She stood in a doorway over which was a sign in electric lights: Stage Door, and when she turned to smile at a group of soldiers (American) and at the audience (in central Africa) it became evident that she was not as naked as it had at first appeared: her dress was held up in the front by a ribbon which tied it around her neck. Sequins flashed and glittered as the flames had flickered a moment before, and her great friendly mascaraed eyes were as close as the hollowed staring eyes of the frozen German soldiers. Her homely breasts bulged almost into the teeth of the audience, and the music intensified as half a dozen GIs filed grinning shyly past the naked shoulders and sequined breasts of a famous film star (acting as hostess for the sake of the war effort) into the club.
‘I thought we were seeing The Seventh Cross?’ said Thomas. ‘For crying out loud. I’ve got work to do.’
It was Martha’s fault – she had brought them to the wrong film. Thomas had already stood up and was on his way out. Joss followed. Anton got up, with the red-headed girl. In a moment they were all on their way out, and people shushed and said: ‘What did you come for then?’
They assured the manager they had only come for the news, so upset was he that six patrons were leaving all at once, and found Solly still on the pavement. Apparently he had known all the time that the main film was bound to send them out of the cinema, and he had been waiting for them.
The seven stood on the pavement. The Cohen boys, Solly and Joss, both finished with uniform, both about to start life in peacetime. Athen the Greek: far from being finished with war, his life was consciously planned for years of war, civil war, revolution. Thomas Stern, frowning on one side of the group, obviously wanting to leave it and be alone with his anger. He saw Martha looking at him. He said in a low violent voice: ‘All right, Martha. But I tell you, I’d torture every one of them myself, with my own hands.’
She said: ‘Some of them looked about fifteen.’
‘Well? They should simply be stamped out – they should be wiped out, like vermin.’ But as he stood, sombre, apart from them, he made himself smile and said: ‘All right then. I’ll shut up. I’ll shut up for now, anyway.’
Anton, the German, who waited day by day for the moment he could go home to Germany, was talking to the red-haired girl. She was looking up at him with self-conscious glances of admiration.
And suddenly Martha understood that this girl was Anton’s girl. For Anton was self-conscious about her, was flattered that this girl, or woman (she was vivacious rather than pretty, with green eyes too quick and wary for youth), had publicly claimed him. She was now taking his arm. Just so, Martha thought, a young man publicly announced, without saying it in words, ‘this is my girl’. He stood smiling, while the others looked on, not looking at Martha. And Anton did not look at Martha. The girl did, however. Not more, though, than she did at the others: she included Martha in her rapid self-conscious glances, while she kept laughing up towards Anton’s pale and handsome face.
Martha felt, as she knew she was bound to feel, a pang. But she suppressed it: I don’t want him, I don’t enjoy him, but if someone else takes him then I start crying! She was thinking: Well, and so the conversation we had last week was meant to be taken seriously, was it? He really does mean to get himself a woman? Well, good for him.
The group was drifting across the street to a tea-room. Martha was introduced, at last, to Millicent; Millicent, Martha. Hello, how are you?
Martha thought: Thomas and Solly and Joss are going to feel sorry for me because Anton has a girl! This caused Martha genuine pain, genuine resentment. She was furious with herself.
Outside the tea-room, the group hesitated, not knowing whether it would remain a unit for another hour, or allow itself to separate into its parts. Martha arranged a smile and looked towards her husband and Millicent. But their arms were no longer linked. Anton stood on one side, apparently embarrassed. Solly bent over the girl, or woman, who stared straight up at the tall young man, her face almost flat under the white lights of the tea-room entrance, as if she had had a tuck taken in the back of her neck, or as if her head had been cut off and carelessly laid on her shoulders. At any rate, what with her red beads, and her agonized smile (from which Martha gathered that she had not known until now that Anton was married, or at least had not known that Martha, so very much present, was his wife) and a white pleated dress which carried out the same innocent sacrificial theme, she looked like a victim. Anton stood quietly apart, smiling, smiling. But socially – just as if nothing had happened, as if he had not been on show with a young woman not his wife. Solly’s face was ecstatic with jeering triumph: it shouted to everyone: ‘Look, this old stick Anton’s got a girl.’ And, of course: ‘Martha’s free!’ for his eyes were alive with dramatic intention, playing over Millicent’s face, darting sideways at Martha, to see how she took it, swivelling to the others, to make sure they understood. ‘You can’t go yet,’ he said to Millicent. ‘What is all this? The night’s yet young.’ She protested and said that she must. Her eyes were almost closed in the energy of her outstretched painful smile which pride forced her to maintain. Anton stood silently by, waiting for Solly to put an end to it. Athen, Joss, Thomas Stern, stood watching. Athen as usual looked from a distance: it was not for him to criticize, his attitude said. Thomas Stern, disapproving, juggled objects in the pockets of his khaki shorts – uniform shorts still, they would be for months yet. Joss stared at his brother as Martha felt he must have been doing all his life, with an affectionate but bitter smile of criticism. During the few moments of this cruel scene under the white harsh lights of the Old Vienna Tea Room, Martha repudiated Solly for ever: his ‘childishness’, his open jeering triumph, and above all, his humiliation of the unfortunate girl, lost him any possibility (if there had been one! Martha defended herself, hastily) of ever, at any time, having an affair with Martha. Then Joss put out his hand, laid it on Martha’s shoulder, and said with a smile clumsily tactful: ‘Well Matty, and what are we all going to do with you, taking us to the wrong film?’
He took Martha into the tea-room with him, and by the time they sat side by side, the group had come in after them. Millicent was not with them. Anton sat opposite Martha, giving her a smile both triumphant and apologetic. Athen sat near Anton, and began talking to him: which was his way of saying he did not propose to pass any judgment on what had been happening. Thomas Stern sat on the other side of Martha and he said again: ‘Well Matty, I always thought you were attractive, but not for me, man. I’m a peasant myself, and so are you. But now you’re sick, you’ve got everything – as far as I am concerned, I’m telling you, you can have me any time!’
They all laughed, even Athen. But there sat Thomas, leaning forward to look into Martha’s face, absolutely serious. Martha thought that he spoke as if they had been alone. Her nerves were telling her he meant what he said.
She said, joking to lessen the tension: ‘So I’m a peasant?’
‘Yes,’ he said, still with the same straight pressure of his strong blue eyes. ‘Yes. But don’t you get well too quickly, I like you all strange and delicate.’
‘It’s the first time I’ve heard that Matty is ill,’ Anton said, on a ‘humorous’ grumbling note that restored normality.
‘Where’s Solly?’ asked Martha quickly, to stop them examining her.
‘I told him to get lost,’ said Joss.
‘Who was eating all those kebabs with him last week?’
‘Look,’ said Joss, suddenly very serious – with an intensity not far off that which Thomas had shown a few minutes before. ‘Listen. He’s my brother – for my sins. I see him for meals. Etcetera. For my sins. After all, when he’s at home we even live in the same house. But I tell you, keep clear of him! He’s one of the people to keep clear of.’
Martha said, after a moment: ‘Well, well!’ meaning to remind him of what he had said about ‘contradictions’.
Again he looked at her, straight and intent, determined to make her accept what he was saying. ‘He’s the kind of person things go wrong for. Always. If you tell him to bring a tray in from the kitchen, he drops it. If he drives a car to the garage, he’ll take the wrong turning. I tell you, better watch out, I’m warning you.’
They all began to laugh, because of his intensity, because they thought: families! Joss maintained his calm while they laughed, and when they had finished: ‘All right. But remember I said so when I’ve gone.’
Of course, Joss was going: Martha had forgotten. The fact that she was disappointed was announced by her flesh, which had been relaxing in the most pleasant of understandings with Joss. Good Lord! she said to herself. Quite obviously I’m determined to have an affair with somebody. And I’ve only this very moment realized it. Well – if Joss is going, then it’s a pity, because this is the first time since we’ve known each other that he’s actually been attracted to me I can feel he is.
‘And now,’ remarked Athen, ‘we shall all eat cream cakes and drink real coffee.’ He meant to remind them of the newsreel they had just seen. They looked towards Anton, towards the fair and handsome German. The waitress, a pretty woman in a frilled lace pinafore and a frilled mob cap designed to remind customers of the films they had all seen of Old Vienna, stood smiling by their table, and Anton said: ‘Coffee, with cream, and cakes.’ Having made his point, he looked at his friends, and made it again: ‘I’m not going to starve myself for them. They deserve a good hiding, and that’s what they are getting.’
‘It’s natural you should feel like that, comrade,’ said Athen, in gentle, sorrowful rebuke.
Thomas Stern said: ‘If we all ate fifty cream cakes each, what difference would it make to them?’ His them were the victims of the concentration camps, and as the plate of cakes descended between them from the manicured hand of the waitress, he took an éclair, making a public statement, and instantly bit a large piece out of it. Anton took a cake, so did Joss, so did Martha. But Athen shook his head and sat frowning, suffering.
‘Have a heart,’ said Thomas. ‘You’re making us feel terrible.’
Athen hesitated, then he said: ‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry for it. But recently I understood: these days, after being with you, I find myself thinking, this wine is bad, or this wine is good, I can’t eat this meat, this is a bad meal. I find myself going into a good restaurant.’
‘Cheer up,’ said Joss. ‘There aren’t any good restaurants. You couldn’t corrupt yourself if you tried.’
They all laughed, wanting to laugh. They were irritated by Athen, and ashamed that they were. And, now that he was forcing such thoughts on them, they sat and looked at him, elegant in his new cream-coloured suit.
Anton said, smiling, reaching for another cake: ‘I see you have found yourself a tailor, comrade Athen.’
This could have been taken as small talk. But they all knew each other far too well. They knew, almost before Anton had finished speaking, that Athen would go pale, would suffer, could be expected to lie awake that night, that tomorrow he would come to one or another of them and say: ‘But I couldn’t send the money home to my family. And it was not an expensive suit.’
And Martha, at least, knew that Anton was teasing Athen (as Anton would describe it), attacking Athen (as Athen would feel it), because he felt guilty over Millicent.
Suddenly Thomas got up saying: ‘I’ve got work. Matty, I want to see you. I’ll ring you at your office. I’ve got something to talk over with you. Solly’s up to something and Clive de Wet says he needs our help.’ Normally Thomas would have made a joke for Anton’s benefit: If your husband will give me permission – or something like that. But he nodded briefly at Anton, laid his hand on Athen’s shoulder as if to say: Take it easy, for heaven’s sake! smiled at Martha, then at Joss, and went out.
‘I suppose it’s one of his girls,’ said Anton.
‘No,’ said Joss. ‘He’s upset. A friend of his was with the troops that went into Belsen. He got a long letter. I read it.’
‘Oh well then, that’s different,’ said Anton, almost in the tone he would have used as a chairman, accepting someone’s excuse for leaving early.
Meanwhile Martha sat, registering the fact that Thomas’s going off had upset a pleasant tension: she had been sitting, equally weighted, so to speak, between Joss and Thomas.
Athen got up, saying: ‘I’m sorry, comrades, but I must leave you. I am sorry that tonight I am such bad company.’ He went off by himself.
Anton took the bill to pay at the cash desk. Joss and Martha, alone, turned towards each other.
‘You’re having an affair with Solly?’ said Joss, direct.
‘No.’
‘It looked as if you were.’
‘No.’
Now Joss examined her with the intimate frankness licensed by their long friendship, and then glanced at Anton’s tall, correct back.
‘You two not getting on too well, is that it?’
‘Not very.’
He said, in exactly the same tone of raillery as Solly: ‘Well, we did warn you, didn’t we? You just wouldn’t listen to us, that’s your trouble.’
Martha smiled, decided against telling him that the despised Solly had used almost the same words earlier, and said: ‘Yes, you did.’
‘Well,’ said Joss, practically. ‘It’s a pity I’ve got to love you and leave you. But when the authorities get around to letting me have the right bits of paper, I’m off up North.’
Here Anton came back. Joss said, rising: ‘Matty, can you have the office open for me tomorrow? I’ll ring you.’
He went off, as she nodded.
Now Anton and Martha walked together out of the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. She was thinking, as she sent glances at his pallor, the tension of his mouth: Is he upset because of Millicent or because of Germany? Last week he had sat silent on the edge of his bed, holding a small scrap of newsprint. Later she had found it in a drawer. It described how in a panic flight from Eastern Germany, away from the advancing Russian armies, women had left the train at the stops, carrying wrapped in newspaper the corpses of babies that had died of hunger. The women buried them in the snow by the side of the railway tracks. Famished dogs came afterwards, and dug up the half-buried babies. The mass bombings of German cities, the atrocities, the concentration camps, the frightful destruction of his country, the fact that his countrymen fled like guilty ghosts before the armies of half the world, the fact that they struggled and died and starved like animals – all of this, which surely must have reached the very essence of the man, was received by him with no more than the comment: They deserve a good hiding. But over this, the small scrap of newspaper about the babies wrapped in newspaper, he had sat and wept secretly, the tears running down his cheeks, then he had dried his cheeks carefully, with a large white handkerchief – then sat again, silent, crying.
Martha put her arm into her husband’s arm, and let it drop again as he said: ‘What does Thomas want to see you for?’
‘I don’t know.’
They found the car, an old Ford, parked among the lorries and wagons of the farmers who had been in the cinema, and began the half-mile drive back to the flat. They drove under banks of deep trees that were silvered by intermittent starlight, darkening and lifting into light as big clouds drove overhead. The tarmac shone white, like salt or like snow, then was very dark under the trees.
‘Well?’ said Anton at last: ‘What have you decided?’
Martha knew quite well that the right answer to this was that she should touch him, or kiss him. But she said stupidly: ‘What about?’
He let the car slide gently into a ditch filled with dry leaves, and neatly pulled on the brake before turning his pale eyes on her: ‘I want to know whether I should give you another chance or not.’
Martha raged with resentment at the phrase; she could not dispel it, even though she knew that phrases like ‘give you another chance’ or ‘give them a good hiding’ should be calls on her compassion rather than triggers for anger.
She walked quickly up the path away from him, listening to his crunch crunch behind her on the gravel. In the tiny room that was their bedroom, she switched on the lights and at once winged insects began circling around it, their wings rustling and clicking.
She was thinking: There’s something in this conflict with Anton that reminds me of the horrible cold arguments I have with my mother. She’s always in the right – and so am I. And Anton and I are both in the right. There’s something about being in the right … she felt positively sick with exasperation already – because of the banality of what they were going to say. Both Anton and she would be thinking quite sensible, even intelligent, thoughts – but what they said would be idiotic, and their bad temper, their unpleasantness, would be because both knew they could not express their sense in their words, let alone actions. Martha even felt as if this conversation or discussion (if the coming exchange could be dignified by such words) had taken place already and there was no point in going through with it again.
However, she stood drawing striped cotton over the windows, thereby shutting out a sky where the storm clouds still swept and piled in great, dramatic silver masses, and folded back the thin white covers of the two beds in which both were going to sleep so badly. Meanwhile, Anton untied his tie before a glass and watched his young wife in it, his face hard.
‘Well, Matty, I’m waiting.’
‘What for?’
‘There was a discussion, if you’ll be good enough to search your memory.’
‘It looked to me this evening as if you’ve already made up your mind,’ Martha said casually. She was pulling off her dress. The solid brown curves of her legs, her arms, thus revealed, suddenly spoke to her, and with a total authority. Thomas Stern said she was a peasant, did he? She looked at her fine strong body, smelled the delightful warm odours of her armpits, her hair, and thought: So he thinks I am a peasant, does he?
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You know quite well what I mean. What’s the red-head’s other name?’
‘I’m not going to deny that I find Millicent attractive, Matty!’
‘Well, I should hope not.’
Anton, a tall, over-thin man, his flesh glistening fair, his blond head gleaming, the fine hair on his thighs and belly shining gold, stood naked before stooping to pull up his pyjama trousers.
That’s my husband, thought Martha. What nonsense! She watched the fair fine flesh of her husband vanishing behind dark green cotton and her flesh said: He’s got nothing to do with me, that man.
Aloud she said: ‘We agreed that if I – ‘ she had been going to say, took a lover, but that was too literary, even though he had used the phrase first. Very European you are, she had said to herself, derisively: take a lover! Good Lord, who do you think I am? Madame Bovary? Well, I wish we had her problems. And it was not possible with Anton, for some reason, to say: get myself a man, find myself a man – that would be a sort of insult to him. ‘We decided that if I decided to be unfaithful to you then I should be honest with you, and you would take a mist … get yourself a girl – at any rate, we’d both get other people?’
‘Quite correct,’ said Anton, standing upright, startlingly handsome in his admirable dark green pyjamas. He was tying the cord of his pyjama trousers.
This was the moment when Martha should go to him, naked as she nearly was, and put her arms around him. That was what he was waiting for, and why he tied his pyjama cord so slowly. If she did this, if she played her role properly, as a good wife should, then by midnight, or at the very latest, tomorrow morning, Millicent the red-head would have become one of the little married jokes that act as such a delightful lubricant. Too bad for Millicent, too bad for whatever expectations she might, at this moment, be cherishing of Anton. If things went one way, she might reasonably hope to be Anton’s mistress, girl-friend, at any rate, have an affair with him. If Martha now played her part properly, all warm and feminine and coaxing (Martha could see herself, and shuddered with disgust) then very soon Millicent would be ‘the red-head, Anton!’ – and greeted with an understanding smile by Martha, a rather proud, self-conscious little grin by Anton. She would be a married joke, a little joke to smooth the wheels of matrimony. Lord, how repulsive! How unpleasant the little jokes, the hundred dishonest little lies, the thousand sacrifices like Millicent (or like Solly if it had come to that) which marriage demands.
If Martha played her role one way, then tomorrow or the next day Millicent, throwing away her pride to ring Anton, or to run into him in the street, would be encountered with: ‘Hello Millicent, how are things, all right?’ ‘Fine, Anton, how are you?’ ‘See you sometime, Millicent.’ If Martha went on behaving as she was now, obedient to her peremptory and at least entirely honest body, Millicent could confidently expect a probably very romantic and satisfactorily painful affair.
Anton stood upright, his head bent as he examined his fingernails. Martha discovered she was feeling uncomfortable – it was because she was standing naked in front of him. She did not belong to him! She pulled off her brassière, her back to him, delighting in a quick glimpse of her shoulder, at the fine curves with the perfect crease and dimple between them. Hastily she tugged on a nightdress. She went quickly into the bathroom to clean her teeth. She was crawling with shame because of the stupid scene they had just enacted. At the same time her flesh was exulting because next day she would see Joss – damn it, he was going to leave soon. But how lucky Joss was, she thought, sensing all of herself, her whole delightful sweet-smelling person.
She could not go back to the bedroom yet. Anton would still be waiting for her to come back. Perhaps he was sitting on the edge of the bed reading that bit of newsprint about the women burying their dead babies in newspaper in the snow? Oh God, if he was, then there’d be no help for it, she would have to put her arms around him, comfort him … she simply would not go back to the bedroom yet.
After a great deal of splashing and drying and brushing of her hair – for the second time that day it got the old-fashioned fifty strokes on each side – she went back to find Anton in bed, his bed-light off, his back to her.
She turned off her light. The room, in the dark, was not dark. It seemed that through the thin curtains, even through the walls, fell the cool brilliance of starlight, which shifted, lightened, darkened, as the clouds drove overhead. For a few minutes the insects maintained their circles around the dark focus of the light, then there was an interval of small uncoordinated hangings, slidings, fallings-away. The moth and insect noises stopped altogether. Martha knelt up in bed to look past the edges of the curtain at the dark pillars of the veranda. A black sky. Black trees, in pools of black shade. Ghostly white lilies in dark shade. Fragments of white gravel. Leaves turning and tossing under starlight in a rippling silver movement.
Tomorrow she would see Joss. No, it was Thomas she was going to see. From the sinking of her exultation she knew she would prefer Joss – safer, he would be. What on earth did she mean by that? – safer! There was no doubt the thought of Thomas confronted her uncomfortably, peremptorily. All right then, not Thomas. But somebody, and it would be soon.

Chapter Three (#ulink_bca55f88-d02a-55ab-9ace-6e451220c0ec)
On the morning peace was celebrated (or, as Mrs Quest saw it in her mind’s eye), Victory Morning, she was up before six. In order, she told herself, to have plenty of time to get Mr Quest ready for the Victory Parade. But she had slept badly, waking confused, every muscle tensed and painful, and with an aching head. It was not until she had gone out into the exquisite morning to pick up the newspaper where it had been flung by the delivery boy on the veranda steps, that she remembered the dream which had woken her.
The sun on that May morning rose from wisps of rosy vapour and shone on Mrs Quest where she stood in her flowered cotton wrapper on her steps, in the middle of a garden shrill with bird song. She shivered, for while the great red ball was presumably pumping out heat on other parts of the world, here it was winter. The air, the sky, each leaf and flower, had a cool sharp clarity. The garden was steeped in cold. Frosty water gemmed the lawn. Dewdrops hung from the roses and from the jacaranda boughs until shaken free in bright showers by the birds who swooped from bird bath to branch, from shrub to lawn.
Mrs Quest noted with satisfaction that the newspaper confirmed her sense of what was right by stating it was VICTORY DAY in Europe, and the black print was six inches deep. She had dreamed, hadn’t she? Oh yes, and her head ached from it. It had been a terrible dream.
Her nights were always tense, peopled with regrets, fitfully menacing, unless she drugged herself. She had years ago justified the pills she took by the claim that she slept badly; her doses grew heavier, and still she slept badly – worse, she was convinced, than Mr Quest, who was her patient.
Oh what a dream, what a dream! Mrs Quest turned her back on her garden, and went into the fusty living-room, where the little dog leaped on to her lap. Dear Kaiser, there there, Kaiser, she whispered to the animal’s pricked ears and wet muzzle. She let him out into the veranda, and walked around it into the kitchen. The servants were not in yet. Mrs Quest made herself tea, keeping her mind occupied with cups, water, sugar, planning: if I dress now, then I might get dirty again, if I have to do something for him – but surely not, I’ve got everything ready; yes, it would be more sensible to dress for the Parade now. The tea was ready, and the decision to dress taken. But Mrs Quest returned to the living-room, and switched on a coil of red electricity, and sat by it, shivering. Her old face was set with unhappiness. The little white dog bounded back – he knows how I feel, thought Mrs Quest, fondling the silky ears. She bent her face to the warmth of the dog’s fat back and remembered the dream.
Her mother, reaching down from a high place which Mrs Quest knew was heaven, handed her three red roses … the old lady was crying, thinking of her mother, who had died young. She had not known her. All through her childhood and youth her mother had been mysterious, not only with the brutal pathos of her death in childbirth, but because of a quality that for a long time the young girl had sensed as dangerous. There was something about her mother never explained, never put into words, but there always, like a sweet and reckless scent hidden in old dresses, old cupboards. Some things had been said. She was pretty, for instance. She was clever, too, and gay. She was brave – had ridden to the hounds on a great chestnut horse, jumping fences where no one would follow her. Had been strong – she went to balls and danced all night, and then teased her husband to walk home with her through the dawn while the carriage came behind. But she had died, after all, leaving not only three small children, not only the sting of resentment earned by those who die with all their qualities intact but – what was the thing that no one put into words but which the young girl felt so strongly?
Grown up at last, she understood that her mother had been beautiful. Not pretty. The grudging little word made her look again at the tall, cold, disciplined house she had been brought up in. Long-concealed pictures came to light and the dead woman was revealed to be beautiful, and with the sort of beauty not easily admitted by that house whose chief virtue had been respectability, described as a ‘sense of proportion’, as ‘healthy’.
Did that mean her mother had been ‘morbid’, ‘selfish’, ‘wrong-headed’? The girl decided this must have been the case, even while she remembered that as a small girl she had started up in bed from a nightmare screaming: ‘They wanted her to die,’ and to the servant who came scolding in with a candle shielded behind a hand that smelled of hot dripping from the kitchen: ‘You all wanted her to die.’
She knew, when she put her hair up, deciding that she would not be a Victorian young lady, but must fight her stern father so that she could be a nurse (which no real lady was, in spite of Florence Nightingale) that her childhood had lacked something which she craved. Beauty, she told herself it was, clinging to that word, refusing ‘morbid’ and ‘selfish’ and ‘right-minded’.
But her life had gone – nursing. She had got her way, had fought her father who would not speak to her for months, had won her battles. She had nursed – as a young woman, then through the war, and then her husband. She had nursed all her life. But never had she known ‘beauty’. It seemed that her mother had taken this quality with her when she had died, selfishly – it was all her own fault, they said, because she had insisted on dancing all night when she was five months pregnant.
And now Mrs Quest’s mother had handed Mrs Quest three crimson roses to which the old lady’s memory added the crystal drops of a winter’s morning. The beautiful young woman had leaned down, smiling, from heaven, and handed the daughter she had scarcely known three red roses, fresh with bright water. Mrs Quest, weeping with joy, her heart opening to her beautiful mother, had looked down and seen that in her hand the roses had turned into – a medicine bottle.
Yes, the dream had the quality of sheer brutality. Nothing was concealed, nothing glossed over for kindness’ sake. Mrs Quest, an old lady, for the first time in her life gave a name to that thing her mother had possessed, which no one had spoken of, and which she herself had described as ‘beauty’. The beautiful woman had been unkind. Yes, that was it. She had been pretty and reckless – and unkind. She had had charm and a white skin and long black hair, but she was unkind. She would dance in memory always like a light burning or like the sunlight on the glossy skin of her wild chestnut horse. But she was unkind.
Mrs Quest put her withered face close to her little dog who still shivered from the garden’s frost, and wept. She wept at the cruelty of the dream. Medicine bottles, yes; that was her life, given her by a cruel and mocking mother.
Three days ago, on to the polished cement of the veranda had slid an official letter, bidding Mr Quest to the Victory Celebrations for the Second World War (in Europe) as a representative of the soldiers of the First World War. Mr Quest had been in a drugged sleep when the letter came. Mrs Quest, long before he had woken up, had worked out a long and careful plan that would make it possible for her husband to attend. She yearned to be there, on that morning of flags and bands, her invalid husband – the work of so many years of devotion – beside her, his illnesses officially recognized as the result of the First World War. But she had been afraid he would refuse. In the past, he had always laughed, with a bitter contempt that had hurt her terribly. Or, if he had gone, it had been (or so it seemed) only for the sake of the angry nihilism he could use on the occasion after it was over.
In 1922 (was it?) she had stood by the Cenotaph in Whitehall with the handsome man who was her husband, and her soul had melted with the drums and the fifes and the flags of Remembrance Day. Afterwards Mr Quest had indulged in days of vituperation about the generals and the Government and the type of mind that organized Remembrance Days and handed out white feathers – he had been handed a white feather on the day he had put off his uniform after the final interview with the doctors who said he would never be himself again. ‘We are afraid you will never really be yourself again, Captain.’ He mocked everything that fed the tender soul of Mrs Quest, who had always needed the comfort of anniversaries, ceremonies, ritual, the proper payment of respect where it was due.
But – and here comes something odd that Mrs Quest was quite aware of herself. There was something in her that liked her husband’s mockery, that needed it. Something older, more savage, more knowledgeable in the tidily hatted matron who let her eyes fill with tears at The Last Post waited for and needed the old soldier’s ribaldry. Three days ago, when she had taken the official letter to him, she had expected him to laugh.
But he had lowered faded eyes to the government letter, and remained silent, his lips folding and refolding as if he was tasting something from the past. Then he looked up at his wife with a face adjusted to an appropriate humility (a look which appalled Mrs Quest, so unlike him was it) and said in a voice false with proper feeling: ‘Well, perhaps if I wrap up, how about it?’
Mrs Quest had been shaken to her depths. Perhaps for the first time she really felt what the nurse in her had always known, that her husband really was not ‘himself’. Not even intermittently, these days, was he himself, and for hours they had discussed in every painful detail how it could be possible for him to attend the ceremony, while his face preserved the terrifyingly unreal expression of a man who has given his all for his country and now submits in modesty to his country’s thanks.
There were two main questions involved. One was, sleep or the absence of it. The other: Mr Quest’s bowels. But the problem was the same, in effect: it was impossible to predict anything. The point was, Mr Quest’s body had been so wrenched and twisted by every variety of drug, that drugs themselves had become like symptoms, to be discussed and watched. It was not a question of Mr Quest’s having taken so many grains of – whatever it was, which would have a certain effect. A sleeping draught, an aperient, might ‘work’ or it might not, and if it did work, then it was unpredictably and extraordinarily, and information must be saved for the doctor, who would be interested scientifically in what surely must be unprecedented, from the medical point of view?
The Parade was at eleven, and would be over by twelve. During this hour Mr Quest would be in a wheel-chair with his medals pinned to his dressing-gown – permission had been obtained for him to appear thus. But he must not fall asleep. And he must not …
They had discussed the exact strength of the dose appropriate to make Mr Quest sleep all night yet wake alert enough to face the ceremony. It had been decided that seven-tenths of his usual dose would be right, if the doctor would agree to give a stimulant at ten o’clock. As for the bowels – well, that was more difficult. An enema at about nine-thirty would probably do the trick.
So it all had been planned and decided. And Mrs Quest, last night, kissing her husband’s cheek as he sank off to sleep already in the power of the drug that would keep him unconscious till nine next morning, had looked young for a moment, fresh – tomorrow she would be at the Parade, and she would be taken by Mrs Maynard, who had been so kind as to offer them a lift.
For this, the Maynards’ offer, Mr Quest had been duly grateful, and had not made one critical comment. Yet he did not like Mrs Maynard, he said she put the fear of God into him, with her committees and her intrigues.
Mrs Quest had noted, but not digested, her husband’s compliance. She had told Mrs Maynard that they would be ready at ten-thirty. Mrs Maynard had been ‘infinitely kind’ about drugs and arrangements.
To get Mr Quest to the Victory in Europe Parade had taken the formidable energies of one matron, and the readiness to be infinitely kind of another. But of course he wasn’t there yet. He was still asleep.
Seven in the morning. Mrs Quest, having decided that she might as well get into her best clothes – did nothing of the kind. She dressed rapidly in an old brown skirt and pink jersey. The bedroom she still shared with her husband was dim, and smelt of medicines, and he lay quite still, absolutely silent, while she banged drawers and rummaged in the wardrobe and brushed her hair and clattered objects on the dressing table. Partly, she was deaf, and did not know what noise she made. Partly, it was because it did not matter, ‘he would sleep through a hurricane when he had enough drugs inside him’. Partly, this noise, this roughness of movement, was a protest against the perpetually narrowing cage she lived in.
When she was inside her thick jersey, and she felt warm and more cheerful, she went into the kitchen for the second time and told the cook to make some more tea. Letters lay on the kitchen table. Mrs Quest trembled with excitement and took up the letter from her son in England and went back to the veranda. The sun was above the trees now, and sharp, cool shadows lay across the lawns.
Mrs Quest read the letter smiling. Before the end she had to rise to pin back a trail of creeper that waved too freely, unconfined, off a veranda pillar. She had to express her pleasure, her joy, in movement of some kind.
Jonathan, the young man convalescing in a village in Essex, had written a pleasantly filial letter, saying nothing of his deep feelings. He had been very ill with his smashed arm, had been frightened he would lose it. He did not want to worry his mother by telling her this, and so he chatted about the village, which was charming, he said; and the doctors and nurses in the hospital, who were so kind; and the village people – ‘really good types’. He allowed his own emotions to appear for half a sentence, but in reverse, as it were ‘Perhaps I might settle here, I could do worse!’ What this meant was that he had a flirtation with the doctor’s daughter in the village, and for an occasional sentimental half-hour thought of marrying her and living for ever in this quiet ancient place that in fact spoke to nothing real in him. For he longed for Africa, and for a farm where he would have space ‘to be myself’ – as he felt it.
But before Mrs Quest had read the letter twice, old daydreams had been revived. She had worked it all out: they – Mr Quest and herself – would go to England and take a little cottage in the village where Jonathan would settle with his wife – for of course he had a girl, perhaps even a fiancée, the letter could mean no less! – and she and Mr Quest would be done for ever with this country where the family had known nothing but disappointment and illness. Besides, the English climate would be better for Mr Quest, it might even cure him.
The servant brought tea, and found Mrs Quest smiling out at her shrubs and lawns. ‘Nice morning,’ he ventured. She did not hear, at first, then she smiled: she was already far away from Africa, in a village full of sensible people where she would never see a black face again. ‘Yes, but it’s cold,’ she said, rather severely, and he went back in silence to his kitchen.
When Mr Quest woke up, she would tell him about going to England. She ached with joy. She had forgotten about the ugly dream, and the three days of miserable planning for the Parade. She was free of the patronage of Mrs Maynard (now she was free, she acknowledged that Mrs Maynard was patronizing). She would find her old friends and ‘when something happened’ (which meant when her husband died – the doctor said it was a miracle she had kept him alive for so long) she would live with her old school friend Alice and devote herself to Jonathan’s children.
At which point Mrs Quest remembered the existence of her grand-daughter Caroline. Well, she could come and spend long holidays in England with her, Mrs Quest; perhaps she should even live there, because the education was so much better there than in this country where there were no standards … as for Martha, she said she was going to England too.
Her wings were beginning to drag. She remembered the dream. Her face set, though she had no idea of it, though she was planning happily for the Parade, into lines of wary resignation. She ought to go and dress properly. She stayed where she was, an old lady with a sad set face looking into a beautiful garden where a small dog pranced around a dry white bone. She sat, shivering slightly, for the cold was sharp, and thought – that she would give anything in this world for a cigarette.
The longing came on her suddenly, without warning. At the beginning of the war, when her son went into danger with the armies up North, Mrs Quest gave up smoking. ‘As a sacrifice for Jonathan’s getting through the war safely.’ Mrs Quest did nothing if not ‘live on her nerves’ and smoking was a necessity for her. It had been for many years. To give up smoking was more painful than she could have imagined. Yet, having once made the bargain with God, she stuck to it. She had not smoked, except for five anguished days when he was first wounded, and they had not been told how badly. Then no cigarettes for days, weeks, months. Today was Victory Day, the war was over (in Europe, anyhow) and she was now free to smoke? No, for the bargain she had made with God was that she would not smoke until he was safely home. Yes, but in this letter he had said he might stay in England for good? Therefore she was free, released from her part of the bargain? No, her conscience told her she was not. And besides, an old mine, or floating explosive of some kind might blow up the ship Jonathan came home in. She must not smoke yet.
Mrs Quest went into the living-room where a carved wooden box held cigarettes for visitors, and her hand went out to the lid. The small bell tinkled which meant that her husband was awake.
Immediately her spirits lifted into expectation: yes, it was just right. Eight o’clock in the morning, that meant she could talk, and gossip and coax him into wakefulness in good time for the car’s arrival at ten-thirty.
When she reached the bedroom, it seemed that he was asleep again, his hand around the little silver bell. She fussed around for a while, looking at her watch, trying to make out from his face in the darkened room how he would feel when he woke.
Then he started awake, on a groan, and wildly stared around the room. ‘Lord!’ he said, ‘that was a dream and a half!’
‘Well, never mind,’ said Mrs Quest, briskly.
She moved to straighten the covers and help him sit up.
‘Lord!’ he exclaimed again, watching his dream retreat. ‘What time is it?’
‘It’s after eight.’
‘But it’s early, isn’t it?’ he protested. He had already turned over to sleep again, but she said swiftly: ‘What would you like for breakfast?’
He lay seriously thinking about it: ‘Well, I had a boiled egg yesterday, and I don’t think the fat if I had a fried egg … how about a bit of haddock?’
‘We haven’t got any haddock,’ she said. She realized he had forgotten all about the Parade, and from her spirits’ slow fall into chill and resignation, knew more than that, though she had not admitted it yet. She said brightly: ‘Well, if you remember, we had decided it would be better if you just had a bit of dry toast and some tea?’
He stared at her, blank. Then, horror came on to the empty face. Then it showed the purest dismay. Then came cunning. These expressions followed each other, one after another, each as clean and unmixed as those on masks for an actors’ school. Mr Quest, totally absorbed in himself, never thinking how he appeared to others, utterly unselfconscious in the way a child is – was as transparent as a child.
He said in a voice which he allowed to become weak and trembling: ‘Oh dear, I don’t think I really feel up to all that.’
‘Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter,’ she said. But her eyes were wet, her lips shook, and so she went out of the room so as not to upset him. Of course he was not going. He had never really been ready to go. How could she have been so ridiculous as to think he would? For three days she had allowed herself to be taken in … she stood in the stuffy little living-room, trembling now with disappointment, her whole nature clamouring because of its long deprivation of everything she craved: the fullness of life, warmth, people, things happening … her body ached with lack and with loss. She had lit a cigarette before she knew it. She stood drawing in long streams of the acrid fragrance, eyes shut, feeling the delicious smoke trickle through her. But her eyes were shut, holding in tears, and she put down one hand to pat the head of the little dog. ‘There Kaiser, there Kaiser.’
She thought: I’m breaking my bargain with God. Almost, she put out the cigarette, but did not. She went back into the bedroom where her husband was dozing. She looked quietly at the grey-faced old man, with his grey, rather ragged moustache, his grey eyebrows, his grey hair. A small, faded, shrunken invalid, that was her handsome husband. He opened his eyes and said in a normal, alert voice: ‘I smell burning.’
‘It’s all right, go to sleep.’
‘But I do smell burning.’
‘It’s my cigarette.’
‘Oh. That’s all right then.’ And he shut his eyes again.
Wild self-pity filled his wife. She had not smoked through the war, except for those five days – could it be that Jonathan’s arm had taken so long to heal because – no, God could not be so unkind, she knew that. She felt it. Yet now her husband, whose every mood, gesture, pang, look she knew, could interpret, could sense and foresee before it happened – this man knew so little, cared so little for her, that he did not even remark when she had started to smoke again.
There was a long silence. She sat on the bottom of her unmade bed, smoking deliciously, while her foot jerked restlessly up and down, and he lay, eyes shut.
He said, eyes shut: ‘I’m sorry, old girl, I know you are disappointed about the Victory thing.’
She said, moved to her depths: ‘It’s all right.’
He said: ‘But they’re damned silly, aren’t they, I mean, Victory Parades … in the Great Unmentionable, medals, that sort of thing, it was all just … I don’t think I’ll risk haddock, old girl. Just let me have a boiled egg.’
She immediately rose to attend to it.
‘Well, don’t rush off so. You’re always rushing about. And you’ve forgotten my injection.’
‘No, I haven’t. I’ve had a letter from Jonathan.’
‘Oh, have you?’
‘Yes. He says his arm is clearing up at last.’ She could not bring herself to say: He’ll be coming home soon, thus putting an end to her brief, and after all, harmless dream, about England.
‘He’s a good kid. Nice to have him back again,’ said Mr Quest, drowsily. He would be asleep again, unfed, if she did not hurry.
‘When is Matty coming?’
‘She was here last night, but you were asleep.’
She boiled the egg, four minutes, took the tray in, gave him his injection, sat with him while he ate, chatted about Jonathan, gave him a cigarette and sat by while he smoked it, then settled him down for his morning’s sleep.
She then telephoned Mrs Maynard: so sorry, but he isn’t well enough. Mrs Maynard said it was too bad, but reminded Mrs Quest that there was a committee meeting tomorrow night to consider the problems arising from Peace, and she did so hope Mrs Quest could attend. Mrs Quest’s being again sprang into hopeful delight at the idea of going to the meeting. She had managed to attend two of them: the atmosphere of appropriately dressed ladies, all devoted to their fellow human beings, ‘the right kind of’ lady, banded together against – but there was no need to go into what right-minded people were against – was just what she needed. But on the other evenings she had been invited, her husband had been ill, and she could not go.
Mrs Maynard now said: ‘And how’s that girl of yours, what’s her name again?’
‘You mean Martha?’ said Mrs Quest, as if there might be other daughters.
‘Yes, Martha. Martha Knowell, Hesse, whatever she calls herself now – would she like to join us, what do you think?’
This was casual, thrown away. And Mrs Quest did not at once reply. That her daughter was noticed, singled out, by the great Mrs Maynard, well that was pleasant, it was a compliment to herself. But that her daughter should be invited to work on this committee, with ‘the right sort of people’ – well it was cruel. It was crueller than ever Mrs Maynard could guess. For one thing, it was likely Matty would treat this invitation with the sort of ribald scorn that – well, which Mr Quest, in the days when he was more himself, would have used to greet invitations to Remembrance Days. But Mrs Quest did not wish to make this comparison. And for another thing, Mrs Quest felt with every instinct that the committee in Mrs Maynard’s silken drawing-room was a bastion against everything that Martha represented. She could not say this, of course, to Mrs Maynard, but she might perhaps hint …
She said half-laughing, on a rueful note, one mother commiserating with another about the charming peccadilloes of the young: ‘Of course, Matty’s awfully scatterbrained, awfully wrong-headed.’
Mrs Maynard said briskly: ‘All the more reason she should be given something useful to do, don’t you think? Well, I hope to see one or another of you, if not both, tomorrow.’ She rang off, leaving Mrs Quest with the most improbable suspicion which she could not make head or tail of – that Mrs Maynard would be even happier to see Martha than to see herself. It was unfair. It was brutal. Yes, it was really cruel – like the dream. It had the gratuitous, unnecessary cruelty of her dream. Mrs Quest, who had decided that the cigarette would be the last until Jonathan’s safe homecoming, now lit another, and sat by the radio patting the little white dog. On the flowered rug, which slipped about crookedly over polished green linoleum, lay the fragment of white bone. The little dog lay with his nose to it, in wistful remembrance of better bones, juicier morsels.
‘Disgusting,’ said Mrs Quest, in real revulsion from the clean, bleached fragment of skeleton. She said in a softer ‘humorous’ voice: ‘Really, Kaiser, you don’t bring bones into drawing-rooms!’ She flipped it out of the window with a look of disgust. The little dog rushed after it and brought it back, playfully, to lie at his mistress’s feet. But she, in a rush of anger, threw it right out of the window and over the veranda wall. This time the animal sensed that he, or at least his precious bone, was not wanted, and he vanished with it behind a shrub. Mrs Quest sat alone, listening to the radio. It seemed to her that for years, for all her life, she had sat, forced to be quiet, listening to history being made. She, whose every instinct was for warm participation, was never allowed to be present. Somewhere else people danced all night, revolving in a great flower-decked room, watching the Dancer revolve, her cruel smile concealed behind the mask of a beautiful young woman. Somewhere else, unreachably far away, a great chestnut horse rose like an arrow over the dangerous fences of half a dozen leafy English counties, and on the horse’s back was the masked Rider. Three red roses, three perfect red roses, with the dew fresh on them … Mrs Quest went to the bedroom to see if her husband was awake. He lay in a dead sleep, although he had had no drug since last night. Just as well he had not gone to the Victory Parade. The servants were cleaning silver, scrubbing potatoes, sweeping steps, snipping dead blooms off rose bushes. The big house, with its many rooms, was all ready for people, for the business of life; and yet in it was a dying man, his nurse, and the two black men and the black child who looked after them. Well, soon Jonathan would come home, and then he would get married, and his children could come and stay and fill these rooms. Or perhaps Martha would have another baby and she would need … Mrs Maynard wanted her on the committee.
On the radio, the first stirrings of the Victory occasion could be heard. Horses’ hooves. Drums – real drums, not a tom-tom. The commentator spoke of the brilliant day, and of the slow approach of the Governor and his wife.
Mrs Quest heard this, saw it even, with a smile that already had the softness of nostalgia. This little town, this shallow little town, that was set so stark and direct on the African soil – it could not feed her, nourish her … an occasion where the representatives of Majesty were only ‘the Governor and the Governor’s wife’ – no, it wouldn’t do. And the troops would have black faces, or at least, some of them would be black, and the dust clouds that eddied about the marching feet of the bands would be red … Mrs Quest was no longer in Africa, she was in Whitehall, by the Cenotaph, and beside her stood the handsome man who was her husband, and the personage who bent to lay the wreath was Royal.
The short hour of ritual was too short. Mrs Quest came back to herself, to this country she could never feel to be her own, empty and afraid. Now she must go and wake her husband – because he couldn’t be allowed to sleep all the time, he must be kept awake for an hour or so. He must be washed, and fed again and soon the doctor would come. And for the rest of that day, so it would be, and the day after, and the day after – she would not get to Mrs Maynard’s committee tomorrow night, and in any case, Mrs Maynard did not want her, she wanted Martha.
Mrs Quest went to the telephone and told Martha that Mr Quest had been asking after his daughter, and why didn’t she care enough for her father to come and visit him?
‘But I was there last night.’
‘Well, if you haven’t got time for your own father, that’s another thing,’ said Mrs Quest, and heard her own rough voice with dismay. She had not meant to be impatient with Martha. She reached for the box of cigarettes with one hand. The box was empty. She had smoked twenty or more that morning. If Jonathan’s arm did not heal well, or if he was sunk coming home, then it would be her fault.
‘I had a letter from Jonathan,’ said Mrs Quest. ‘I think we might very well go and live in England now that the war is over. He’s talking of settling in Essex.’
Nothing, not a sound from Martha. But Mrs Quest could hear her breathing.
The servant came into the room to say that it was time to cook lunch, what would she like? Mrs Quest gestured to the empty box and pushed some silver towards him, with a pantomime that he must go and buy some cigarettes. Now, the nearest shop was half a mile away, and she was being unreasonable, and she knew it. She had never done this before.
She said loudly to Martha: ‘I said, did you hear me, we might go and settle in England?’
‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Martha at last, and Mrs Quest, furious with the girl, looked at the servant, holding the silver in his palm.
‘See you tonight without fail,’ said Mrs Quest, putting down the telephone. ‘What is it?’ she said sharply to the man.
‘Perhaps missus telephone the shop, I want to clean the veranda,’ said the servant.
‘No, missus will not telephone the shop, don’t be so damned lazy, do as I tell you,’ said Mrs Quest.
She could not bear to wait for the hour, two hours, three hours, before the shop could deliver. She had smoked not at all for five years, except for the few days when Jonathan was wounded, but now she would not wait an hour for a cigarette. ‘Take the young master’s bicycle and go quickly,’ she ordered.
‘Yes, missus.’
That evening, Martha arrived to find her mother sitting on the veranda, hunched inside a jersey with a rug around her knees, smoking. Mrs Quest had spent the afternoon in a long fantasy about how Martha joined Mrs Maynard’s ladies, but had to be expelled. Martha cycled up the garden at that moment when in her mother’s mind she was leaving the Maynard drawing-room in disgrace.
Mrs Quest’s mind ground to a stop. Actually faced with Martha she yearned for her affection. It was not that she forgot the nature of her thoughts; it was rather that it had never occurred to her that thoughts ‘counted’.
In short, Mrs Quest was like ninety-nine per cent of humanity: if she spent an afternoon jam-making, while her mind was filled with thoughts envious, spiteful, lustful – violent; then she had spent the afternoon making jam.
She smiled now, rather painfully, and thought: Perhaps we can have a nice talk, if he doesn’t want me for anything.
She saw a rather pale young woman who seemed worried. But there was something else: Martha was wearing a white woollen suit, and it disturbed Mrs Quest. It’s too tight, she thought. She did not think of Martha having a body. What she saw was ‘a white suit’, as if in a fashion advertisement. And there were disturbing curves and shapes from which her mind shrank because of a curiosity she could not own.
Martha thought that the old woman who sat in the dusk on the veranda looked tired. Feeling guilty about something, from the look of her.
Mrs Quest said: ‘You look tired.’
‘I am tired.’
‘And you’re much too thin.’
‘It’s one of my thin phases,’ said Martha vaguely. Flames of rage leaped unexpectedly in Mrs Quest … ‘one of my thin phases’… so like her, cold, unfeeling, just like her!
‘Then why don’t you eat more?’ said Mrs Quest with an angry titter.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll just get fat again by myself.’
Martha sat down and lit a cigarette. Light from the door fell over her mother. Martha saw, under the rug, a brownish skirt, and a pink woollen jersey. Martha looked incredulously at the jersey. How was it possible for a woman, for any woman at all, to wear such a hideous salmon-coloured thing? Why, to touch it must be positively painful.
‘I had a letter from Jonathan.’
‘Oh, good. You said so actually.’
‘He’s getting better. Of course his arm will never be what it was.’
‘Of course not,’ said Martha, with an unpleasant intention Mrs Quest was sure of but chose not to analyse.
‘I’ve been talking things over with your father. He quite agrees with me that it would be wise to go and live in England near Jonathan. If he decides to live there.’
‘Oh, then my father’s better?’ Martha got up, ready to go in. But at her mother’s gesture, she sat down again.
‘The doctor was here, he said perhaps your father has turned the corner. He wasn’t feeling up to the Victory Parade this morning, but he’s been quite rested all day, and in fact he slept all afternoon without drugs.’
‘Good.’
Again Martha got up, ready to go in.
‘I’ve gone back to smoking,’ said Mrs Quest pathetically, almost demanding that her daughter should congratulate her on her long self-sacrifice.
‘Well, you were quite marvellous to give it up,’ said Martha politely. ‘I simply can’t think how you do it.’ She had turned herself away, mostly from the salmon-pink sweater. It seemed to her that everything impossible about her mother was summed up by the sheer insensitivity, the hideousness, of that thick, rough, pink object.
‘Mrs Maynard was very disappointed we could not go to the Victory thing. She’s starting a committee for the problems of Peace, and she says she wants you on it. I can’t imagine why, when you’re such a flibberty-gibbet.’ Mrs Quest brought out this last sentence with a nervous titter, simultaneously looking at her daughter in appeal. She knew quite well that Martha was far from being a flibberty-gibbet, but the phrase had come, because of Mrs Quest’s nervousness, her unhappiness on the point of Mrs Maynard, from battles in Martha’s childhood.
Martha stared at the pink jersey. She was quite white, raging inside with the need to say a thousand wounding things. With an unbelievable effort, she managed to stay silent, smiling painfully, thinking: I hope she has the sense to shut up now, because otherwise …
Mrs Quest went on: ‘Well, surely you can say something, it’s quite an honour to be asked to Mrs Maynard’s things!’
Martha began: ‘Mrs Maynard wants me on the committee because of …’ She stopped herself just in time from saying: Because of Maisie.
‘What were you going to say?’ said Mrs Quest, wanting to know so badly that her casualness about it grated. Suspicion was flaming through her: there was something odd about Mrs Maynard’s wanting Martha in the first place; and now there was something odd about Martha’s manner.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Martha. ‘Don’t worry. She doesn’t really want me, you know.’
The words ‘don’t worry’ made Mrs Quest sit straight up saying: ‘What do you mean, why should I care if Mrs Maynard wants you!’
Martha escaped, saying with a vague bright smile: ‘I’ll just go and see if …’ On the way to the bedroom Martha was muttering: ‘They’ll do for me yet, between them, they’ll get me yet if I don’t watch out.’ The smells of medicine and stool filled her nostrils. Her father had just had an enema and the whole house knew it. Martha allowed herself to think, for a few short moments, of her mother’s life, the brutal painfulness of it – but could not afford to think for long. It made her want to run away now, this minute – out of this house and away, before ‘it’ could get her, destroy her.
In the bedroom, a small, grey man was asleep, against pillows.
‘Father,’ said Martha, in a low voice, bending down.
‘Is that you, old chap?’ said Mr Quest, in the voice which meant that he didn’t want to wake up.
‘How are you?’
‘Oh, much the same, I suppose.’
She stayed there a few moments, but he kept his eyes shut. Anguish, the enemy, appeared: but no, she was not going to weep, feel pain, suffer. If she did, they would get her, drag her down into this nightmare house like a maze where there could be only one end, no matter how hard one ran this way, that way, like a scared rabbit.
‘Did you get to that Victory thing?’ asked the old man in a normal voice, as she straightened herself to leave.
‘No. Well, is it likely?’
‘She wanted me to go.’
‘So I hear.’
Mr Quest’s lips moved: he planned a humorous remark. Martha waited. But he lost interest and said: ‘Well, good night, old chap.’
‘Good night.’
‘He’s asleep,’ said Martha to her mother on the veranda, just as she had done the night before. She went to the bicycle and slid herself on the seat.
‘I don’t know how you can bicycle decently in a skirt as tight as that.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about bicycling decently,’ said Martha, sullenly. Then she smiled. Mrs Quest smiled too. ‘And where are you gallivanting off to now?’
Martha sat on her bicycle, with one foot on the wall of the steps. She smiled steadily. She was thinking she might say: Well, as it happens, I’ve got to meet Athen – he’s a communist newspaper-seller from Greece. Maisie’s on the thorny path to hell, he thinks. Maisie? Well, she’s the mother of Binkie Maynard’s by-blow. Yes, I did say Binkie Maynard. And the reason why Mrs Maynard wants me in her gang is so she can get her hooks into Maisie. And that’s why she’s being nice to you – if that’s the word for it. Yes, and Athen wants me to give Maisie a helpful lecture of a moral nature … The sheer imbecility of this caused Martha to smile even more brightly. She said: ‘See you soon,’ and bicycled off. At the foot of the garden she turned briefly to take a last look at the pink jersey which from here seemed a small, pathetic blob which said: Help me, help me, help me.
Mrs Quest went in to her supper, alone. She had ordered enough for two, had even cooked some jam tart. Martha is so fond of it, she had thought. Though she knew quite well Martha never ate sweets of any kind. Imagining the scene, where she put a slice of tart, with its trickles of sweet cream, before Martha, but she shook her head, Mrs Quest’s eyes filled with rejected tears.
She ate a good deal, though she was not hungry, and smoked several cigarettes. Then she listened to the nine o’clock news. All over Europe people danced among ruins, danced in a frenzy of joy because of the end of the war. Mrs Quest sat imagining the scenes in London. As a small girl she had been taken by her father to join the rioting crowds on Mafeking night. She re-created those memories and filled London with them in her mind. Then, the radio ceased to talk of victory, the day was over. Mrs Quest ‘settled her husband for the night’ – which meant, this evening, since he was half-asleep and did not want to be awakened, giving him an injection and another sedative, in case he woke in the early dawn, which is what he dreaded more than anything. Mrs Quest patted her little white dog, went to the kitchen to find him a tit-bit from the refrigerator, then she went to bed herself. Her powerful unused energies surged through her, and soon she was again lying wakeful, thinking in hatred of her daughter. The fantasy of expulsion from Mrs Maynard’s drawing-room had gone a stage further. Mrs Maynard had arranged for Martha’s arrest for ‘communist activities’. Martha was in front of judge and jury. Mrs Quest, chief witness, was testifying that Martha had always been difficult: ‘She’s as stubborn as a mule, your honour!’ But with careful handling, she would become a sensible person. Martha was let off, by the judge, on condition that she lived in her mother’s house, in her mother’s custody.
Mrs Quest drifted towards sleep. The scent of roses came in through the window, and she smiled. This time they remained in her hand – three crimson roses. The brutal woman, her beautiful mother, remained invisible in her dangerous heaven. The painful girl, Martha, was locked in her bedroom, under orders from Court and Judge. Mrs Quest had become her own comforter, her own solace. Having given birth to herself, she cradled Mrs Quest, a small, frightened girl, who lay in tender arms against a breast covered in the comfort of bright salmon-pink, home-knitted wool.
Martha bicycled through streets which tried to create Victory night. Knots of people walked about with feather blowers and balloons. In the hotels they were dancing. Sometimes a car went past with its hooter screeching. But it was no good. Hard enough for most of these people to feel the war; how then were they to feel the peace? Besides, the Colony’s men were still up North, or in Burma, or in England, or in prison camps.
In the office was evidence of a just-concluded political meeting. The ash-trays were filled with mess, and the air was foul. Whose meeting? Probably one of the African groups. There were two or three now. But there was a new African leader, so it was rumoured, called Mr Zlentli, and he had nothing to do with the white sympathizers, so he would not have been here.
Martha sat down, doing nothing about tidying the place, simply submitting to the fug and the mess. She was waiting to argue with Athen. It was Athen’s contention that she, Martha, should make Maisie leave her job as barmaid, and take what he called ‘a job for a nice girl’. It was Martha’s contention that if Athen did not want to take on Maisie himself, then he should not interfere. Last time he had raised the question, Martha said: ‘Athen, if you’re so concerned, then why don’t you save Maisie by marrying her?’
To which he had replied by nodding and saying: ‘Yes, I had thought of it. She is a good girl and she needs a man to look after her. But I think it would not be a good thing for Maisie to be made a widow again.’
When the door opened, it was Thomas Stern who came in. He wore the uniform of the medical corps, and carried in his hand a bundle of civilian clothes. He smiled at Martha and said: ‘You’ll excuse me, but I’m going to change.’ He proceeded to do so, while she turned her back and looked out over the dark town. The National Anthem seemed to be oozing from a dozen different sources, played at different rates and in different manners.
‘Tonight is more than I can take,’ said Thomas Stern. ‘Otherwise I would offer to escort you around the celebrations.’ He arrived beside her, on the bench.
He now wore a thick brown sweater. His broad face was scarcely less brown. He smiled at Martha from six inches’ distance and she smiled back. There was a total lack of haste, of urgency, in this exchange. They regarded each other steadily, then he took her hand and held it against his cheek.
‘What a pity I have to go back to the farm tonight.’
‘And that I have to see Athen!’
‘Are you having an affair with Athen?’
‘Good heavens, no!’
He now held her hand pressed down with his on his warm knee.
‘Why shouldn’t you?’
‘Have you seen Athen’s new suit?’
‘Of course.’
‘Has he talked to you about it?’
‘Martha, I tell you, there are some things spoiled people like you don’t understand.’
‘Rubbish. But I believe that Athen has sentenced himself to death because he is ashamed of liking nice wine and looking beautiful in his new suit.’
Thomas regarded her steadily. Her hand, between his hot knee and his large hand, seemed to be melting into his flesh. He was waiting for her to stop being childish.
‘Just imagine all the people today who are secretly sorry the war is over because now they have to start living.’
‘Yes, but Athen is not one of them. Why are you so angry with him? I agree with him. There’s nothing wrong with being a barmaid, but it’s not for Maisie. It’s not good for her. I went into the bar to see her. Athen is right.’
‘What she needs is a husband, so what’s the use of …’ Martha’s voice grew steadily more angry. ‘She’s in love with Athen.’
‘When it comes to women and love, then I have nothing to say. Yes, she needs a husband. If I wasn’t married, I’d offer myself, if it would make you happy.’
‘Well, I’m not going to tell Maisie that she should be a shop assistant or something. Why don’t you, or Athen, tell her, instead of getting at me about it?’
Thomas regarded her very seriously for some moments. Then he smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Martha.’
‘What?’
‘You’re thinking: This Thomas, what a damned peasant.’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Well, I am. I’m a peasant. I’m a Polish peasant. I’m a Jewish Polish peasant.’
‘Well then?’
‘You’re looking even thinner and sicker than before. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Everything, everything, everything. And besides, it has only just recently occurred to me that I’m a neurotic, and I don’t like the idea.’
‘Well, of course, all women in the West are neurotic.’
Now Martha started to laugh. She loved Thomas because with him, there was nothing for it but to laugh.
‘And you find me attractive because I’m all thin and tense and difficult?’
‘Of course. When I was a boy in our village, all us clever young men, we used to go to town to see American films and look at the women. We knew what was wrong with them. We understood Western women absolutely. We used to make jokes.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Yes. Just like Africans now. They look at white women in exactly the same way we used to look at women in the films or in the magazines. So of course I’m delighted to see you all tensed up and decadent, comrade Martha. It’s the fulfilment of my favourite fantasy.’
Martha laughed again. All the same, part of her was saying: But this isn’t what I want. For one thing, I’ll be going to England soon.
‘And your wife?’ she said.
Thomas’s hands dropped like stone. ‘Yes, Martha,’ he said, looking dejected. ‘You’re right to ask but there’s nothing I can say. I don’t know.’ He got up, went across the room, fiddled with the door of the pamphlet cupboard, then turned back to face her.
‘The thing is, Martha, I have affairs all the time, you know that.’
She waited, merely looking at him curiously. She thought: I didn’t want to have an affair with Solly because he’s so childish. He’s an idiot. Now I’m afraid to have an affair with Thomas because he’s not childish.
But in any case, what’s the point, if I’m leaving.
Thomas came back, sat close to her, and put his two large hands on her shoulders, where they spread slow, calm areas of warmth.
‘This evening I said to myself: I’ll find Martha, then I’ll take her for a drive or something. Then I thought: No, that’s not for us, we don’t need that kind of thing. But in any case, I have to go back to the farm because my little girl isn’t well.’
They sat looking at each other, with a soft curiosity.
‘Listen, Martha. I’ve got a week’s leave, so I’m going to the farm for a week. Then I’ll be back in town.’
He spoke as if everything was settled. They had never even kissed, but it was as if they had already loved each other. He did not kiss her now. He got up and said: ‘Well, Martha …’
She smiled, she supposed, but could not say anything. She had understood that to be with Thomas would be more serious than anything yet in her life, yet she did not know how she knew this, and she was not sure it was what she wanted. A few weeks ago she had thought: Thomas, or Joss – a man. Now here was Thomas and he was sucking her in to an intensity of feeling simply by standing there and claiming her.
From the door he smiled and nodded: ‘I’ll ring you when I get back into town.’
He went out. Athen did not come, so Martha cycled home through the streets full of drunks where the National Anthem still sounded from every other building. Anton and Millicent, both dressed up, were just about to go out to one of the hotels. They all greeted each other with smiling amiability: they had agreed they were to be ‘civilized’ and even, if possible, friends. Martha was invited to join them at McGrath’s: as Millicent said, a war doesn’t end every day. But on the whole she thought not: they went out, and she went to bed.

Chapter Four (#ulink_763cb3e5-6145-506f-bb49-7d6cf23ef6e1)
‘Public opinion changes.’
A couple of decades, a decade, in these rapid days even a year, demonstrate how suddenly the season of a belief can turn. Into its own opposite, the rule seems to be – or at least, often enough to make it safe to ignore the exceptions.
This was Martha’s first experience of it. Last time there had been a change, she had changed with it. Four years before, the present ‘politically conscious’ Martha had been born, out of – that’s what it amounted to – The Battle of Stalingrad. How odd that ‘a busybody who ran around all the time’ (Anton had said it again only last night) could be born out of a great battle thousands of miles away. Which was a ridiculous thought: Martha found herself sitting with a smile on her face, when the speaker on the platform was in the middle of a sentence about people starving to death in Europe.
But the hall was half full, and the audience were restless, not because they were bored, far from it, but because they were angry with the speaker. Martha ought to be making up with her appreciation for their lack of it. The chair she sat in had a hard edge which cut across the back of her thighs. It was very hot. When she stood up, her pink dress would be marked by a wet line, unless she – she wriggled forward on her seat, and Anton gave her a look – do be still!
This winter, Professor Dickinson was saying, millions of people in Europe would be without enough to eat; the children would be marked for life by what happened to them; thousands would die. Yet international capitalism was quite prepared to … A man shouted: ‘Cut out the gramophone record and let’s have facts.’
‘Yes, yes,’ shouted several people.
It was the most extraordinary thing, being part of this audience. Everything was suddenly different. At the beginning of this same year, 1945, the war still gripped half the world, and when people said: It will soon be over, they did not really believe it. One had only to mention the Soviet Union to create a feeling of warm participation with a mighty strength used for the good and the true. Germany was a sub-human nation so brutalized, so sadistic in its very essence, that it could only expect ‘to work its passage back to membership of the civilized world’ by long, slow degrees. Japan was not far behind in villainy. All these were major axioms. A minor change: six months ago the Tories had governed Britain and, it seemed, always would. But Labour had won the election after all. As for this country, this enormous tract of land nevertheless made unimportant by the fewness of the people it supported – well, its long prosperity, because of the war, was threatened. Its own soldiers returned from various battlefronts, mostly in small numbers, while the RAF left daily in thousands. But if to be in this country was to feel like being churned in a whirlpool, it was no more than what happened everywhere: all over the world human beings were shifting in great masses from one country, one continent, to another: myriads of tiny black seeds trickled from side to side of a piece of paper shifted about in the casually curious hand.
As for ‘the group’, that ridiculous little organism, it did not exist – which was proved by the fact that most of its former members were here tonight, friendly enough, if wary, towards each other.
This was ‘a big meeting’ and therefore everyone had turned out, responsible to the end towards something they had begun and which now was ending. They sat along the back of the Brazen Hall, which was even scruffier and dingier than before, a dozen or so people. There were present Anton Hesse and his wife, Piet du Preez and Marie, Athen from Greece, Thomas Stern from Poland, Solly Cohen, Marjorie and Colin Black, Boris Krueger and his wife, young Tommy Brown, and Johnny Lindsay who looked very ill, but was being supported by Flora.
As for the dozens of others, comrades, friends, lovers, who everyone thought about tonight, because of their sense of an occasion which marked an end, they were all over the world – in England, and Scotland, in America and in Israel. Nearer home, Joss had settled ‘up North’; and Jasmine was living ‘down South’ in Johannesburg.
Coming into the hall, Marjorie had said: ‘Isn’t it awful, when you think …’ And big Piet had said: ‘Man, it gives me the skriks, I can tell you that!’ And Solly had said: ‘O?, so I’m a traitor – but how about closing the ranks just for tonight!’
What could more sharply epitomize the general change than that ‘a big meeting’ should be taking place here, in this dirty little hall, even though the speaker was the famous Professor Dickinson from Johannesburg? Only six months before, it would have been enough to ask the authorities for the big State Hall, to be given it. But permission had been mysteriously delayed until Mrs Van, asking for the reason in person, had been give the verbal explanation that ‘it was not considered desirable that the State Hall should be used for such purposes.’ The letter of refusal had of course been bland: the hall was booked for all the nights they had asked for it. Acting on the sound old principle that ‘they should never be allowed to get away with anything’, Marjorie Black had written in offering the authorities twenty more dates supplied by the obliging Professor. But this letter had earned an exact repetition of the first; the hall was booked for all the mentioned dates. Again Mrs Van, respected Town Councillor, enquired ‘off the record’. And off the record she was told that ‘the Reds’ need not think they would ever get the State Hall again – a decision had been taken and was written into the minutes. And how, Mrs Van had demanded to know, was ‘a Red’ defined these days? Anyone who was a member of the following organizations, she was told.
And what, she asked, had happened to make these organizations unsafe which for at least four years had been respectable? A decision had been taken by whom?
At this tempers had been lost, and voices raised. A chill wind blew – that was all. The atmosphere had changed. ‘Public opinion had changed.’ What people were afraid of – that is what had changed. Fear had shifted its quarters.
Another difference: Mrs Van had said that obviously Thomas Stern could not be chairman. Now during the war, or at least since the end of ‘the phoney war’, the atmosphere had been such that of course a corporal from the Health Corps could chair a public meeting, of course a twenty-year-old aircraftsman could address five hundred solid citizens on revolutionary poetry – one needed no other credentials than one’s enthusiasm.
But Mrs Van had put Mr Playfair into the chair – he who had once been reserved for the most tricky of ‘respectable’ meetings. She had said to Marjorie Black: ‘Really, dear, now that everything’s changed, you must have more sense.’
The hall was less than half full. The faces were all familiar, of course. These were the public who had made so many activities possible, had raised money, given it, bought pamphlets, and applauded every variety of left-wing sentiment. And here they sat, their faces for the most part stiff and hostile. And where were the others?
Well, public opinion had changed, that was all.
Professor Dickinson was a lively, handsome little man, even more vigorous than usual tonight because he thrived on opposition. What he was saying was no more than what had been said up and down these platforms for four years. The Soviet Union had been allowed a truce by the capitalist powers for the duration of the war, since it was taking the brunt of the war against Hitler (who of course had been if not created, at least supported, by the said capitalist powers as an anti-communist insurance) but that now the Soviet Union was exhausted, bled white, had lost its usefulness, the capitalist powers would revert to type and do everything to destroy the socialist country, taking up where they had left off in 1940. The war need never have taken place if Britain had responded to the Soviet Union’s invitation to make a pact against Hitler: the war had suited certain financial interests extremely well, millions of people had died because finance capital was more interested in making profits than in …
This thesis, which until a few months ago would have been greeted by everybody with the over-loud, over-quick laugh of public approval which greets sentiments that have been, or might again be, dangerous, and then with storms of clapping and cries of Yes! Yes! – was now being listened to in sullen silence.
The Professor was saying that within two or three years, Germany the outcast, Germany the fascist beast, Germany the murderer would be the bastion of the capitalist defences in Europe against the Soviet Union, just as Hitler had been during the Thirties. The proof? Already the capitalists, particularly American, poured money into German industry. Why? Out of compassion for the starving Germans? No, because it was necessary that Germany was the strongest country in Europe, divided or not, and he would even go as far as to predict that within five years German troops and American troops and British troops would be marching under the same banners … but he could get no further. The whole audience had risen and were shouting at him ‘Red! Communist! Go back to Moscow!’ Mrs Van der Bylt rose from her place beside Mr Playfair, and since he was not doing more than smile earnestly at the angry audience he was supposed to be controlling, she banged authoritatively on the table with an empty glass.
But no one took any notice.
‘Just like the good old days,’ said Solly, with a loud laugh, and people turned sharply to stare at the group of ‘Reds’ who looked back, with incredulous half-embarrassed smiles. In spite of everything, they could not believe that these people, who had been to all their meetings, who were positively old friends, could now be standing there gazing at them with such uneasy, hostile, frightened faces.
But they had to believe it.
They were beginning to understand what they were in for.
It was during those few minutes while the hall seethed with angry shouting people that ‘the group’ finally realized how little they had achieved during their years of hard work.
For one thing, where were the Africans? There was not a black face in the hall – not even a brown one. The Africans, the Coloured people, the Indians – none were here. Yet when ‘the group’ started work, it was axiomatic that it was on behalf of the Africans above all that they would run their study groups and their meetings.
Tonight the mysterious Mr Zlentli, the nationalist leader about whom the white people fearfully gossiped, was running a study group for his associates. So Clive de Wet had told Athen earlier in the afternoon, when Athen had suggested that since the white audience was likely to be unappreciative of the famous Professor from Johannesburg, it might be a good thing if the other groups came. But Clive de Wet had said he did not see the point of their risking their jobs and homes for the sake of communism and the Russians.
So in fact their work had been done for the white people; hundreds of white citizens had been pleased to play with ‘the left’ while the war lasted, and now it was all over. And what had happened? The Zambesia News had changed the tone and style of its editorials, that was all. Or at least, there were no other influences ostensibly at work.
The meeting was breaking up. People streamed from both exits, not looking at the platform, where the Professor and Mrs Van der Bylt and Mr Playfair sat smiling philosophically.
Solly shouted: ‘That’s right, go quickly, got to be careful now, haven’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ said Marjorie fiercely: ‘The heat’s turned on, so back they scuttle to their little holes, out of harm’s way.’
Athen said seriously: ‘But comrades, this means a new policy must be made – I suggest we go to the office to discuss it.’
For the moment silence; then people laughed, uncomfortably, for who were ‘the comrades’ now?
‘Yes,’ said Athen, ‘but that is not good, it is not enough that we just go home. We have a responsibility.’
They stood, looking at the fierce little man who was gazing into their faces one after another, insisting that they should agree, become welded together, forget all their old differences. But of course it was not possible.
Piet said: ‘Oh no thanks, I couldn’t face all that all over again.’ He went off, and his wife followed him, having sent back a friendly, no-hard-feelings smile. Tommy Brown went after the de Preez couple. Marjorie, who was grasping Athen’s hands, in passionate approval of what he said, found her husband Colin at her side. ‘Yes, dear,’ said Colin, ‘I’m sure you’re right, but don’t forget we’ve got a babysitter waiting.’ ‘Isn’t it just typical!’ exclaimed Marjorie – but she went off with her husband. Johnny Lindsay was taken home by Flora and by Mrs Van and by the Professor, an old friend.
The lights went out in the hall, and by the time they reached the pavement, there remained Anton, Martha, Thomas Stern, and Athen.
Athen stood smiling bitterly as the others went into the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. Then he turned and said to the three friends: ‘Well, shall I make a speech just for us here?’
‘Why not?’ said Anton.
‘Ah,’ said Athen, in a low passionate tone, his face twisted with self-dislike, or so it seemed – pale with what he felt: ‘It is time I was at home. Every morning I wake up and I find myself here, and I ask myself, how long must I be away from my people?’
‘And how do you think I feel?’ said Anton. He sounded gruff, brusque, with how he felt. Yet such was the Greek’s power to impose an idea of pure, burning emotion that Anton seemed feeble beside him. Meanwhile, Thomas from Poland stood quietly by, watching. There they stood on the dark pavement. It was a hot night. A blue gum moved its long leaves dryly together over their heads. The air was scented with dust and with eucalyptus.
‘Look, Athen,’ said Martha, ‘why don’t you just come back and – I’ll make everyone bacon and eggs.’ She felt she had earned Athen’s reply: ‘Thank you, Martha, but no, I will not. Suddenly tonight I feel far from you all. And what will you all do now? You will sit and watch how the poor people of this country suffer, and you will do nothing? No, it is not possible.’
Thomas observed: ‘Athen, we’ll just have to cut our losses. That’s all there is to it.’
And now it was Thomas’s turn to appear inadequate – even ridiculous. Athen looked quietly at them all, one after another. Then he shrugged and walked off.
They stood, silent. Then Thomas said: ‘I’ll fix him, don’t worry.’ He ran after Athen. The two men stood in low-voiced gesticulating argument a few paces off, then Thomas led Athen back.
‘Athen has something to say,’ Thomas announced. He then stood back beside Martha and Anton, leaving Athen to face them. An audience of three waited for the speaker to begin. Presumably this is what Thomas intended to convey? Was he trying to make fun of Athen? Martha could not make out from Thomas’s serious listening face what he meant, then he nodded at her, feeling her inspection of him, that she must listen to Athen, who stood, his eyes burning, his fists raised, his dark face darker for the pale gleam of his elegant suit.
He was reminding them of the evening the Labour Party won the elections. The little office in Founders’ Street had been stocked with beer, and for hours people, mainly RAF, had streamed in, to sit on the floor, and outside in the corridor, and down the stairs. They were drinking beer, singing the Red Flag, finally dancing in the street. Athen had been there. Towards morning he had got up from where he had been sitting, very quiet, observing them all – the communists were celebrating with the others – from the bench under the window. He had said: ‘Good night, comrades. I hope that by the time the sun rises you will have remembered that you are Marxists.’
‘Is it possible that we are so far from each other – yet we all call ourselves communists? I do not understand you. Is it that you have forgotten what it means to be a socialist now? Yet when your Labour Party got into power, you were all as pleased as little children that night. I sometimes think of you all – just like little children. Such thoughts, they are understandable from the men in the RAF and in the army. They are poor men without real politics. When they are happy their Labour Party gets into power, then I am happy for them. But we know, as Marxists, that …’
It was grotesque, of course. This was a speech, they understood, that Athen had thought over, worked out, made part of himself. He had planned to deliver it – when and where? Certainly not on a dusty pavement after a public meeting that was almost a riot. Certainly not to Anton and Martha and Thomas. It was one of the statements, or manifestos, that we all work out, or rather are written for us on the urgent pressure of our heart’s blood, or so it feels, and always at three o’clock in the morning. When we finally deliver these burning, correct, true, just words, how differently will people feel our situation – and of course! theirs. But, alas, it is just these statements that never get made. Or if they do …
The three of them looked at Athen, embarrassed rather than not, and all of them wished to stop him.
‘… is it true that you really believe that Britain will now be socialist and all men free? And tonight, do we have to be told by a Professor from Johannesburg that now the war is over, America and Britain will again try to harm the Soviet Union? Is not America now, as we stand here, pouring out her millions to destroy the communist armies in China? Yes, it has been easy for you to say, in the last years, that you are socialists. But we have been allowed to say it only because the Soviet Union has been crippling herself to kill fascism. And now it will be death and imprisonment again, just as it was before …’
At last he stopped, though they had not moved, or coughed, or made any sign of restlessness. He said: ‘Forgive me, comrades, I see that you are listening out of kindness. You would rather be in the Old Vienna Tea Rooms with the others.’ Again he walked off. This time no one stopped him. A few paces away he turned to say in a different voice –
low, trembling, ashamed: ‘Perhaps I feel these things because of something I must be ashamed of. I hate you comrades, because for you it is already peace. Your countries are at peace. But mine is at war – full, full of war, still. Good night. Forgive me.’ He went.
Anton, Martha, Thomas.
Martha wished that Anton would now say: ‘Let us go and have a cup of coffee together.’ She would have preferred to be alone with Thomas, but this was not possible at the moment, it seemed.
She had hardly seen Thomas since the scene, months ago now, in the office. A few days after it, Thomas had been transferred abruptly to another city. The transfer was not only unexpected – there was more to it, because Thomas was morose, bitter. It was rumoured Thomas had had a fight in the camp, had beaten someone up. He had not said anything about the fight to her, though. Then off he had gone, a couple of hundred miles away. From the new camp he had written a humorous regretful letter – the fortunes of war, etc. As for Martha, she felt that she might have foreseen it. Since the war had started – friends, lovers, comrades, they appeared and vanished unpredictably. Of course Thomas was bound to be transferred that moment they agreed to love each other.
Once or twice he had come up for short visits. On one, she had taken the afternoon off, and he had come to the flat. But they had been unable to make love: the bedroom was hers and Anton’s. They felt constrained, and sat and talked instead. Besides, a quick hour snatched where they could was not what either of them had engaged for.
Thomas had set himself to amuse her by making a short speech in parody of the solemn group style: an ‘analysis’ of sex in war-time.
‘It is popularly supposed that the moment the guns start firing sex drives everyone into bed. But what war fosters, comrades, is not sex, but the frustrations of romance. What will we all remember of the war? I will tell you: the fact that one was never in one place long enough to make love with the same person twice. Partings and broken hearts, comrades – the war has given us back the pure essence of Romance. What are the ideal economic and social circumstances for sexual activity, comrades? I will tell you. It is a stable bourgeois society where the woman has servants to take the children off her hands. The husband goes to work or to visit his mistress, and the wife entertains her lover. No society has yet developed anything like this for satisfaction because not only do we get the comforts of – comfort, but just enough frustration to keep love alive. No, comrades, I tell you, when I was still a poor boy in my village, I understood perfectly well, from novels, just how things ought to be, and war – nonsense, it’s no use to us – but trust me, Matty. I’ll be discharged soon, and I’ve got a place in town that I’ll open up again for us.’
Meanwhile, he wrote sometimes. His erratic love life continued – so she heard. Knowing that she must hear he wrote: ‘I’m in an impossible position with you, Matty. Do you imagine that I don’t know what a woman feels when she is told that she is too special for casual affairs? Do you imagine I’d be such a fool as to say this to you? But if I’m careful not to say it, circumstances are saying it for me. But they tell me that this camp is being closed next month, and that means I’ll be with you soon.’
This afternoon Thomas had said that the camp was not being closed – not for another two or three months.
There was nothing for it but to go on writing love letters.
‘I’d like to have a cup of coffee with you both,’ said Thomas. ‘But I’ve got to be off. I’m driving out to the farm tonight – I’ve got two days’ leave.’
‘Oh, do come and have a cup of coffee,’ Anton said. Both Martha and Thomas looked at him to see if the drawling emphasis he put into it meant anything special, but it seemed not.
‘Or perhaps you’d like to make a speech too?’ said Anton.
‘Why not?’ said Thomas, sounding abrupt. Martha could see that he longed, as she did, for Anton to be somewhere else. This not being possible, he was talking on, saying anything, so as not to go away at once.
‘Perhaps we could have a competition about whose country has suffered most?’ said Anton.
‘It’s as useful as most of things we do now, certainly,’ said Thomas.
‘I don’t agree,’ said Anton, suddenly angry – it was evident that he had been restraining himself, with Athen, but was quite ready now to have a real argument. Even perhaps, an ‘analysis of the situation’.
Thomas smiled, recognizing this. He said again: ‘I haven’t time – I must go.’ But he still didn’t go, stood in front of them, hands in his pockets, in his characteristic pose, frowning.
‘Then you haven’t time,’ said Anton.
‘It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?’ remarked Thomas.
‘That is certainly true,’ said Anton, on a questioning note: if you have anything to say, do say it?
Thomas remarked: ‘Today I read that the war damage in Germany is 400 milliard marks.’ He smiled. ‘Well then. Thirty-two milliard pounds. Does that make it any easier? I kept looking at the figures like a madman.’
Anton stood looking at Thomas. On his face was a small, cold smile.
‘Oh, all right, I won’t press that point then. How about the mass bombing of Germany then? We didn’t know what that involved did we?’
He came a step nearer and stood looking close into their faces – first Anton, then Martha. Now they understood that he was saying what he had been feeling, or thinking, while Athen made his speech.
‘There’s very little work to do in the camp now. That’s a bad thing – I have nothing to do but read. It’s like living in a bad nightmare – a thousand empty huts, because all the men are demobbed, but someone’s made a slip-up somewhere, and the camp’s being kept open. All the machinery is running – the mess is open, all the health people like me operating away at full efficiency, all the blacks standing at attention waiting to take orders. No one to give orders, no one to eat in the mess, no one in the hospital, no one using my fine, efficient latrines – it’s a ghost camp. And I sit in my fine, well-ventilated hut reading … for instance, I’ve got the latest about the concentration camps. We haven’t heard the truth about them, that’s obvious, it’s too terrible to tell, so we’ll get the truth in bits.’
Again he looked at them, waiting.
‘No comment? Well, I have the advantage over you, because you don’t sit all day on a bed in a ghost camp full of food that’s rotting in its cases because there’s no one to eat it. Well then, how about dropping the atom bombs on Japan, how about that?’
‘We discussed that at the time,’ Anton said. To begin with, the socialists had supported the bombs being dropped. Or rather, the thing had been accepted. It seemed that nothing much worse had happened than had been happening for years. Certainly Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the words they later became – symbols for the beginning of a new, frightful age. Nor had there been a special meeting or even a private discussion since about the atom bombs. Yet people’s minds had changed, were changing. Without anything formal being said, or decisions being taken, the incident of the atom bombs was isolating itself, growing in meaning and intensity. But some people still agreed that it was right the atom bomb should have been used – Anton for one.
‘What’s your point?’ said Anton. ‘That war isn’t the prettiest of human activities?’
Thomas looked steadily at Anton, then smiled at Martha. ‘Oh, I haven’t any point. That is the point. Anyway, I’ve got thirty miles to drive. And it has been storming over the mountains, my wife said, so the rivers will be up if I don’t get a move on.’
‘Well then,’ said Anton.
‘Yes. And there’s India. How about the famine in India? It’s all right, isn’t it – I say, how about the famine in India? But the famine in Germany – that’s not the same thing at all, is it?’
‘What are you getting at?’ said Anton, his pale blue eyes like ice. ‘Are you telling me that I’m a German?’
‘No. Of course not. Well, I seem to be talking to myself.’ Off he went, walking fast. At the corner of the street he turned and half-shouted: ‘Did you read, they’re going to transfer one million people from East to West Germany?’
‘Come on,’ said Anton to Martha, impatiently. ‘Let’s get home.’
Thomas was saying, or shouting: They walk. ‘They put their belongings in handcarts and walk hundreds of miles guarded by soldiers. Like cattle.’ Now he did go off finally, and they saw him lift his hand and wave it, in a sort of mock salute.
‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘So now we all discover that the war has made a lot of mess everywhere. What is the use of such discoveries?’
He took Martha’s elbow to steer her safely through the people who were coming out of the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. ‘Good night, good night,’ they all said to each other.
Martha and Anton walked in silence to find the car. Amicably they drove back to their flat.
Their relations were admirable since Anton had a mistress. He believed that Martha had a lover.
Or apparently he did. Yet there was something odd about this, because while he would say to her: ‘I’m meeting Millicent after work,’ and she replied: ‘Oh, good, I’ll see you later then,’ she never said who she would be meeting or what she would be doing. It was assumed that she would be meeting somebody. Who? Once or twice Anton had joked it must be Solly, and he had never mentioned Thomas.
It occurred to Martha that this curious man both believed that she had a lover, because it was easy if they both had someone else, and yet knew she had not. She would never understand him.
They lay side by side in their twin beds in the little bedroom.
Anton remarked that in his opinion Professor Dickinson by no means exaggerated the future.
Martha agreed with him.
Anton said that he had again written letters to his family in Germany. Soon, surely, there must be some news. It wasn’t possible that everyone could have been killed.
Martha suggested it might be the moment to get their Member of Parliament to make enquiries.
‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘If I don’t hear soon, I shall have to approach the authorities. It will be a strange thing,’ he added, ‘living in Germany again. Sometimes I feel almost British.’ This last in a ‘humorous’ tone and Martha laughed with him.
Recently he had taken to saying humorously that he and Martha were having to stay together so long, that they were getting into the habit of it – perhaps Martha would like to come with him back to Germany?
Martha laughed, appropriately, at such times. But she knew quite well that Anton would not at all mind being married to her. It was taking her a long time to understand that some people don’t really mind who they are married to – marriage is not really important to them. Martha, Millicent, Grete – it doesn’t matter, not really.
Martha thought, incredulously: We have nothing in common, we have never touched each other, not really, where it matters; we cannot make love with each other, yet it would suit Anton if I stayed with him and we called it a marriage. And that other marriage with Douglas – he thought it was a marriage. As far as he was concerned, that was a marriage!
What an extraordinary thing – people calling this a marriage. But they do. Now they’ve got used to it, they can’t see anything wrong with this marriage – not even my parents. They’ll be awfully upset when we get divorced.
She thought, as she went to sleep: When I get to England, I’ll find a man I can really be married to.

Part Two (#ulink_9ba80161-da6e-58fd-9ab7-9bffc8e51030)
Don’t make any mistake about this. Real love is a question of compromise, tolerance, shared views and tastes, preferably a common background of experience, the small comforts of day-to-day living. Anything else is just illusion and blind sex.
From an officially inspired handbook for young people on Sex, Love, Marriage.

Chapter One (#ulink_1d73d0c1-1d0c-573b-a188-45b12c31ff3f)
Six inches of marred glass in a warped frame reflected beams of orange light into the loft, laid quivering green from the jacaranda outside over wooden planks and over the naked arm of a young woman who lay face down on a rough bed, dipping her arm in and out of the greenish sun-lanced light below her as if into water. At the same time she watched Thomas’s head a few feet below her through cracks in the floor: a roughly glinting brown head, recently clutched by fingers which now trailed through idling light, bent politely beside a large navy-blue straw hat. Thomas’s voice, warm from love-making, answered questions about roses put in a voice that said it was going to get as much attention from the expert as her visit warranted. The two heads moved out of her range of vision into the garden.
Martha turned on her back to stretch her body’s happiness in cool, leaf-smelling warmth. Through the minute window the tree blazed out its green against violent sun-soaked blue, against black, thunderous clouds which at any moment would break and empty themselves.
A deep forest silence. This shed had been built at the bottom of a large garden to hold tools and seedlings. The house (it was in the avenues, a couple of hundred yards from the Quests’ house) now belonged to Thomas’s brother and his wife. During the war Thomas had appropriated the shed and had built a loft across one half of it, half-inch boards on gum poles, as flimsy a construction as a child makes for himself in a tree. But it was strong enough, for it held a bed and even books and could be locked. The brick floor of the shed below was covered with divided petrol tins full of seedlings. Thomas, based on the farm where his wife lived, was also a nurseryman in the city. During the war he had kept an eye on the farm while he moved about the Colony from one camp to another. Now he moved back and forth from the farm to the town, bringing in lorry-loads of shrubs, flowers, young trees grown on the farm to sell here. ‘Thomas Stern’s Nursery’ it said on a board on the gate, which was the back gate of Mr and Mrs Joseph Stern’s garden.
Here Martha came most afternoons and some evenings to make love, or simply to turn a key on herself and be alone.
She had complained that her life had consisted of a dozen rooms, each self-contained, that she was wearing into a frazzle of shrill nerves in the effort of carrying herself, each time a whole, from one ‘room’ to the other. But adding a new room to her house had ended the division. From this centre she now lived – a loft of aromatic wood from whose crooked window could be seen only sky and the boughs of trees, above a brick floor hissing sweetly from the slow drippings and wellings from a hundred growing plants, in a shed whose wooden walls grew from lawns where the swinging arc of a water-sprayer flung rainbows all day long, although, being January, it rained most afternoons.
Once upon a time, so it is said, people listened to their dreams as if bending to a door beyond which great figures moved; half-human, speaking half-divine truths. But now we wake from sleep as if our fingers have been on a pulse: ‘So that’s it! That’s how matters stand!’ Martha’s dreams registered a calmly beating pulse, although she knew that loving Thomas must hold its own risks, and that this was as true for him as for her.
When he came back into the shed below, Martha turned over again on her stomach to watch him. He did not at once come up the ladder, but bent over green leaves to adjust a label. His face was thoughtful, held the moment’s stillness that accompanies wonder – which in itself is not far off fear. ‘No joke, love,’ as he had said, in joke, more than once; for these two had not said they loved each other, nor did it seem likely now that they would. But what Martha saw now, on Thomas’s face, as he bent, one hand at work on a twist of rusty wire, was what she felt in the few moments each time before she was actually in his presence: no, it was too strong, it was not what she wanted, it was too much of a wrench away from what was easy: much easier to live deprived, to be resigned, to be self-contained. No, she did not want to be dissolved. And neither did he: smiling, Martha – her teeth lightly clenching the flesh of her forearm, her nose accepting the delicious odours of her skin – watched Thomas straighten to come up the ladder, his broad, brown face, his blue eyes serious, serious – then slowly warming with smiles. Up the ladder slowly mounted a brown, sturdy man, with a brown, broad face and blue eyes that seemed full of sunlight. He wore his working khaki from the farm, and his limbs emerged from it no differently than they had from the khaki of his uniform during the war. Slowly he came up the ladder, and Martha’s stomach shrank, turned liquid, and her shoulders, breasts, thighs (apparently on orders from Thomas, since her body no longer owed allegiance to her) shrank and waited for his touch.
Thomas sat down on the bottom of the bed, or pallet. It was made of strips of hide over a wooden frame. It had on it a thin mattress and a rough blanket. He looked, smiling, at the naked woman lying face downwards, who then, because his gaze at her was apparently unbearable, turned over on her back. But her hand, obeying this other creature in Martha who was Thomas’s, covered up the centre of her body, while her mind thought: Look at that, how very extraordinary! For now that her body had become a newly discovered country with laws of its own, she studied it with passionate curiosity.
Thomas sat quiet, looking at the naked woman whose right hand was held in the gesture of modesty celebrated in art (and at which both were by temperament likely to smile) and she lay looking back at him. They forced themselves to remain quiet and look at each other’s faces now, having confessed that they could hardly bear it, and that it was something they must learn to do. For while the word ‘love’ was something apparently tabooed, for both of them, and they had confessed that this experience was something unforeseen, and therefore by definition not entirely desired? – when they looked at each other, seriousness engulfed them, and questions arose which they both would rather not answer.
For instance, this was a woman twice married (though she had not been really married, she knew) and with a lover or so besides. As for him, he was married to a woman he adored. One could say, in Thomas’s voice, apparently in reply to his own thoughts, since Martha did not mention it: ‘I have to love women, Martha, and that’s no joke, believe you me.’ Or, as Thomas answered Martha: ‘Yes, Martha, of course. God knows what men do with women in this part of the world, but every time I have a woman, well, nearly every time, I realize that her old man doesn’t know what he’s at. God knows what it’s all about, but let me tell you, in Poland when I had a woman I had a woman, here I take it for granted I’m going to be faced with a virgin … but for all that, Martha, every time a woman likes a man in bed, then he is her first lover. And who am I to dispute the tactful arrangements of nature?’
But for Martha, every other experience with a man had become the stuff of childhood. Poor Anton – well, it was not his fault. And poor Douglas.
But that was not honest either. For by no means easily had she become what Thomas insisted she must be. Of course, her real nature had been put into cold storage for precisely this, but when what she had been waiting for happened at last, then she discovered that that creature in her self whom she had cherished in patience was fighting and reluctant. To be dissolved so absolutely – yes, but what was going to happen to her when Thomas – she could not say ‘when Thomas loves someone else’, or ‘if Thomas goes back to his wife’, and so she said: When Thomas goes away.
‘Why do you say that, Martha?’
‘Say what?’
‘You say, I’m going away?’
‘But, Thomas, you are always going away somewhere.’
‘Yes, but that’s not what you mean.’
‘Well, something like that.’
‘But it’s you who are going away, you’re going to England.’
‘Ah, yes, but even if I didn’t go to England.’
A silence while they looked at each other – serious. ‘Yes, I know,’ said Thomas.
‘Well then?’
‘But in the meantime, I’m here.’
A command, this last – for Thomas, or the creature in him who corresponded to the Martha he had created, demanded that she should give herself to him completely and that she must not listen to the warning: What shall I do when Thomas goes away?
And in any case, what was this absolute giving up of herself, and his need for it? What was the prolonged almost unbearable look at each other, as if doors were being opened one after another inside their eyes as they looked? – how was it that she was driven by him back and back into regions of herself she had not known existed, when in any case, she had judged him at the time he had first approached her as: ‘No, he’s not the right one’? But then, of course, she was not the right one for him either, his wife was that: he said so. Or rather, that he wished she was.
She lay still, looking at his face. Her flesh was both relaxed, because of its contentment, and yet fearful because his large hand lay an inch from her knee, on the blanket. He was calmly looking her over, then into her face; looking at her hand, her knee, her breast, then into her eyes.
She said, unable to bear it after all: ‘It’s a tragedy, you’ve made me all happy, and so I’m no longer thin and interesting.’
She had put on flesh again. She was again a strong, young woman. But she searched for and loved, every frail or delicate line in herself as he did. She wished herself as fragile as a bird’s skeleton for him who loved so much what he was not – the qualities of delicacy, grace.
He said: ‘You’re a fine girl.’ He smiled gently, his face lit again with the almost-wonder of the moment she had surprised through the slits in the floor. ‘You think I’m nothing but a peasant, Martha?’ He laid his hand on her knee; it shrank like a horse’s skin, then she felt, through her knee-cap, the warm strength of his hand. ‘You think: there’s Thomas, a peasant from Sochaczen. A fine, strong, healthy fellow, not a sick thought in him – you think that?’
He bent over her. His face was desperate with what he was trying to make her accept from him. ‘Martha, do you see this line here?’ He ran a finger up the inside of her upper arm: the flesh shrank, then waited.
‘See that?’
Martha, serious; Thomas, serious; looked at the curve of flesh, a line as mortal as that made by a raindrop sliding down glass; they looked as if their futures depended on looking.
‘I tell you, I want to die when I see that.’ He crushed her upper arm in a great fist, and his face grimaced with the pain he felt for her. ‘Do you understand? No, you don’t understand. But I tell you, Matty, when I see that line, that curve, I want to cut my throat, I couldn’t ever be that, don’t you see?’
His face lay, desperate, against the warmth of her upper arm; the ‘line’ that tormented him, was for Martha merely a surface of sensation. ‘Ah God, Martha, I can’t stand it, I tell you, I’m insane. You think I don’t care for you when I say this to you?’
She smiled, her eyes filled with tears. She let her fingertips, sensitized beyond pleasure, rub gently up the rough surface of his turned cheek. His breath sent warmth over her arm.
‘I know you do.’
‘Yes, I do. But, Martha, I don’t understand it myself – I’d give the whole of you and everything I am for that line there, and for where your cheek lifts when you smile. That’s something I’m not. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘But perhaps they aren’t what I am either?’
‘Yes, yes, maybe. But I can’t help it.’ He was in a rage of despair. Tears ran down her face, she could feel a hot wetness travelling, with edges of chill, down to her chin. What was she to think, to feel – if Thomas loved, to such lengths, the temporary delicacy of a curve of flesh, if he had singled out, with the eye of an insane artist, two, perhaps three ‘lines’ which had purity, had delicacy, the kind of absolute perfection that kept even her, their supposed owner or possessor or creator, in awed appreciation of them – well, why choose a woman who was shaped, as he always said, half-groaning, half-pleased, ‘like a healthy peasant’?
She said: ‘But Thomas, why not get yourself a thin woman then?’
He said, rubbing his head backwards and forwards over her shoulder, as if he was trying to rub out the ‘line’, ‘But I care for you, I keep telling you.’
‘Well, then, I don’t know, I give up.’
He turned her towards him like a doll and said: ‘I once saw a woman, it was in the Cape – she was shaped like a flamingo. She was like a canary, I tell you. I put the energy into getting her that could have won the war two years earlier, but Matty, I didn’t care for her.’
Martha laughed and thought: Well, what about his wife? The photograph of her showed a slight, fair woman with a delightful smile. Yes, but how could she, Martha, say: Your wife’s like a flamingo, she’s as fragile as a handful of canaries, and obviously that’s why you married her?
‘Not to have this here, I can’t stand it.’
‘What do you mean, have it.’
‘That’s the point.’ His face was full of real anguish, the pain of his mind. ‘Don’t humour me, Martha, don’t be maternal – I’ll kill you, I tell you, if you go maternal on me.’
Their love-making was short – he had to go back to his farm, and she had to visit her father and then run errands for Johnny Lindsay. It was short, too, because of the violence of this emotion.
‘I tell you, Martha, there are times when I’m sorry we started, it’s all too much for me, I can tell you.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘So you do!’
They lay smiling at each other from half an inch’s distance, eye to eye.
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Wait, I’ll take you.’
Suddenly a noise as if gravel was being flung about everywhere. It was raining in loud, splashing drops through a strong, orange evening sunlight. The six inches of glass ran in a streaked gold light. Thunder cracked, but a bird safe in a bunch of warm leaves repeated a long, slow, liquid phrase over and over again.
A handful of rain, blown in by a hard gust of wind, scalded them with cold. They leaped out of bed and stood below the tiny window, through which rods of strong wet drove and stung their strong, fresh, satiated bodies.
They opened their mouths and let the wet run in, and watched the greenish reflections from the deep tree outside, and the orange lights from the window-glass, run and slide on their polished skins. They laughed and rubbed the freezing water from the sky over each other’s shoulders and breasts. They felt as if they might never see each other again after this afternoon, and that while they touched each other, kissed, they held in that moment everything the other was, had been, ever could be. They felt half-savage with the pain of loss.
Then a shrill voice from the back veranda of the house. Thomas’s brother’s wife, Sarah, was shouting at her husband, her servant, or her children, through the din of rain. Which stopped as if she had ordered it to stop, in a crash of thunder. And Martha and Thomas laughed, it was so sad and so comical.
They stood on tip-toe to see through the minute window a plump woman in a too-tight white dress shrilly agitating on a dripping veranda. Five years ago, she had been a pretty girl, and now – ‘God!’ said Thomas, in a sudden, deep sincerity, ‘she’s a good girl, they’re all good people, these householders, but when I see them, I want to run and jump into the lake and that’s the truth.’
And Martha deepened her vow that she would never be the mistress of a household in a bad temper because … but they did not know why the plump woman on the veranda was so angry. She was too far off for her actual words to be heard; but her body, the set of her head, the edge of her scolding voice said: ‘I’m in a rage, I’m beside myself with rage.’
The two crept down the ladder and stood on the red, rough, warm-smelling brick, looking out into the garden, seeing the strong, brown trunk of the jacaranda whose lacy masses had waved above their naked bodies which still stung pleasantly with memories of the lashing rain. All around them were soaked, sparkling lawns, dripping boughs, a welter of wet flowers. Everything was impossibly brilliant in the clear, washed light. And the bird sang on from its invisible perch. Martha was faint with happiness and with sadness, and Thomas’s face told her he was in the same condition. The woman in the white dress went inside her house and Thomas said: ‘All right now, Martha.’ They ran over squelching grass to his lorry.
Martha asked: ‘What does she think, your sister-in-law?’
Thomas frowned.
Martha could have left it, but she pressed: ‘Well, doesn’t she say anything?’
‘She said something to my brother, he told her it wasn’t her business.’
Martha thought this over: she could imagine the scene – the uncomfortable husband, guilty because he was supporting his brother’s freedom to do as he liked, the insistent woman in a dress that was too tight, the husband finally making a stand with vehemence (and she knew it) for reasons neither of them could afford to say out loud.
There was an unpleasant taste in Martha’s mouth, which she knew she ought to ignore. Thomas had started the lorry and they were moving off.
She said: ‘I suppose it’s the place Thomas brings his girls to, is that it?’
Thomas gave her a discouraged look, and said: ‘If you want to make it like that, you can.’
She nearly said: ‘But I haven’t made it like that, have I?’ But she didn’t. She was sorry she had said anything. Besides, no one but she, Martha, went to the loft these days, and in fact it had been closed while Thomas was in W——, waiting to be demobilized. All the same, she thought of Sarah Stern, watching Thomas emerge from the shed with other girls, and for a moment she could not bear it. They drove a couple of blocks in silence, and both felt they were a long way from the simplicities of their being together in the loft.
‘We’d better stop here,’ said Martha, before they reached her mother’s gate.
Thomas stopped, and sat with his hand on the gear lever, while the engine throbbed. The whole lorry shook, and they shook with it. They began to laugh. ‘I’ll be in town the day after tomorrow,’ Thomas said. ‘I don’t know whether early afternoon or late, but if you want to go to the shed and read or something …’
They kissed, smiling, holding themselves steady, with difficulty, against the vibrations of the lorry. Then she said: ‘See you soon,’ and went up the path to her mother’s veranda, deliberately annulling the time between now and the day after tomorrow.
The other house, from whose garden she had just come, was almost identical with this. Both gardens, large, deeply foliaged, full of flowers and birds, seemed miles from the streets that ran just outside them. One held the young Jewish couple with their children, a unit dedicated to virtues which would make them honoured members of their community and prosper their shop: Thomas’s brother sold sports equipment from a smart shop in the centre of the city. In the Quests’ house, everything had changed in the last few months: Jonathan had come home. As Martha came up the path she saw him sitting on the veranda reading a magazine: a handsome, fair young man, with a small, fair moustache and Mrs Quest’s innocent blue eyes.
Two catastrophes, either of which might have killed him – one, a shell exploding beside him, another, a tank going up in flames – had apparently not marked him, except for the arm, which was in plaster, and about which he was attractively diffident.
The arm still gave him a good deal of pain, and he had to attend the local hospital several times a week for treatment. Otherwise he would already be on his farm, which was waiting for him ‘up North’. This time, ‘up North’ meant a couple of hundred miles beyond the Quests’ old farm, near the Zambesi Valley.
His mother was a woman with a new lease of life. She cooked, she entertained, she smiled and made plans.
Mr Quest was better. No one had expected him ever to leave his bed again, but now he sat long hours in a deep grass chair on the veranda. He was neither altogether drugged, nor quite free of drugs. His waking condition was like a light sleep, Martha thought. He would see what was going on, without seeming to watch his surroundings, and he might comment on something, but usually some time afterwards. He would let out words, phrases, exclamations, that came out of his thoughts, but he did not know when he had done this. Sometimes he talked to people from the past, usually from ‘the old war’. There was a man called Ginger, whom Martha had never heard of. Well, Mr Quest talked a good deal to Ginger. They were in the trenches, it seemed, and Ginger was having some sort of brain-storm or nervous collapse. Mr Quest would urge Ginger to pull himself together and be a man. Sometimes Mr Quest would call out in terror – thick, mumbling, protesting phrases: a shell was going to burst near him, something was going to explode. Or the water in the trench was too high up his legs, which were cold, or he was out in no man’s land and could not see his comrades. Then Martha, or Mrs Quest, or whoever was near, would sit by him, and talk him gently awake, as one does with a child having a bad dream.
Everyone came to congratulate Mr Quest on his recovery, just as they enquired after Jonathan’s arm. Everyone behaved, Martha thought, as if the long illness, the damaged arm, were matters for pride – even for envy. Martha knew she was childish, she disliked the deep, useless rage she felt, and yet she could not bring herself to enquire lengthily after the wounded arm and the painful treatments it needed, or after her father’s health. She came in every day and sat a little while with ‘my two war casualties’ as Mrs Quest now called them, with a fond, proud little laugh.
This afternoon Jonathan was not alone. Two young men played ping-pong on a side veranda, while the little white dog snapped at the ball and jumped up and down and generally made a nuisance of himself. In the front room were two girls. These days, the Quests’ house was full of young men and young women. The men were all back from the war, and the girls, as Martha noted with complicated feelings, were a new generation of girls aged eighteen, nineteen, who apparently had sprung into existence during the last year. At any rate, they were not at all interested in the war as such, but they regarded these young men, delivered to their bosoms fresh from the world’s battlefields, as escorts and future husbands satisfactorily seasoned by experience.
Martha smiled at her brother, waved at the ping-pong players and at the girls, for all of whom she was ‘the Quests’ married daughter’ and ‘a Red with ideas about the kaffirs’, and went around the corner of the veranda to see if her father was awake. He sat with his back to a screen of morning glory, whose brilliant but fragile blue trumpets were dwindling into limp rags of dirty white. His magazine had slipped to the floor and he was dozing.
Martha sat down to wait. She had not been moved to such thoughts by the presence of her brother and the young men whose little-boy faces had put them out of court in such matters, but now she remembered that half an hour ago she had been lying in the loft with Thomas. She wondered if her father would sense it.
When he opened his eyes with a start, she saw that he was not really there that afternoon.
‘How are you?’
‘Much as usual. And you’re all right?’
‘Fine.’
That’s good.’
She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that the garden looked beautiful, and the weather was lovely, and the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey’s wedding, half storm, half sunshine.
‘That’s good,’ he said again, and sat drowsing.
She thought of how often she had sat by this half-conscious man. Where did he go to, her father, while the elderly, shrunken grey man sat dozing? She stared at him, stared, as if the pressure of her eyes could suddenly materialize him, her father, Mr Quest, the vigorous, irascible man who knew, when he chose, so much about her. She felt as if he were there all the time – as if this invalid were an impostor, a mask. But really her father was there – and if so she was in communion with him? Where was he? She looked at the old, sick head slipping sideways and at the half-open mouth and demanded in silent and futile rage: Well, talk to me, where have you got to? Meanwhile her heart ached. It ached.
Inside, her mother was bustling enjoyably about. Soon Martha went in to see her. These days, now her son was home and she was released into vigour, cooking supper for a dozen young people, running the big house, organizing parties and excursions, Mrs Quest was good-tempered again. Now the nursing of her husband was only one of many things she had to do, not the reason for her existence. These days she did not complain that Martha was a bad daughter. In fact the two women enjoyed seeing each other.
They kissed.
‘Well, where are you gadding off to now?’ asked Mrs Quest, good-humouredly.
‘I’m going to a meeting on current affairs,’ said Martha, offering the absurd phrase to her mother in an invitation to laugh.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Quest, energetically folding towels, ‘I suppose there’s no harm in it, but I should have thought we had enough of them. And when are you going to see Mrs Maynard – bad girl, she keeps asking after you.’
‘I’m sure she does!’
The ghost of ill-humour appeared, but vanished again, because of the full, strong physical well-being of the two women. Almost, Martha was cold and irritable, and Mrs Quest cold and unjust.
‘What’s all this about someone called Maisie? She keeps talking about a girl called Maisie something or other.’
‘You might very well ask!’ ‘But I’m not supposed to, is that it?’ Martha laughed, so did her mother, and again they kissed, before Martha went off to Johnny Lindsay’s.

Chapter Two (#ulink_a016d957-d06f-5878-bd60-af9b0f69d5e4)
Martha had given up her job with Mr Robinson. Otherwise she could not have the afternoons with Thomas. The day after Thomas had said to her: ‘Well then, what are you earning, what’s keeping you there?’ Martha, on the simplicity of will that was Thomas’s gift to her, walked into Mr Robinson’s office and gave notice. By herself it would have taken weeks of thinking, I should do this or that, and then a drift into a decision. But now she lived from this new centre, the room she shared with Thomas, a room that had in it, apparently, a softly running dynamo, to which, through him, she was connected. Everything had become easy suddenly.
Or nearly everything. For of course, there were new problems. Martha ‘worked at home’. Or, as she told everyone, with an apparently firm intention: ‘I’m using the flat as an office.’ It was no good: as far as others were concerned, Matty had given up her job, and was free in the daytime.
She had told Mrs Van she wanted typing work; and now the Members of Parliament who were Mrs Van’s friends, and Mrs Van herself, brought work to Martha. The hours she sat before her typewriter every day were a third as long as before, and she earned twice as much. If the seriousness of ‘work’ is measured by what one earns for it, then Martha was working twice as hard as she did in Mr Robinson’s office. As Thomas pointed out.
It was the same as when she was the wife of Douglas Knowell – the cast had changed, the play was the same. Now came, every morning, Marjorie Black, Maisie McGrew, Betty Krueger, Mrs Quest – even Mrs Van.
Every morning, as Martha sat at her typewriter, transforming scribbled sheets into piles of ordered black print, there would come a knock on the half-open door. (Why don’t you lock your door then? said Thomas – But it’s so hot!) Into the room would come one or several of these women, each exclaiming that they did not wish to waste Martha’s time, that they had work to do of their own in any case, but they had just dropped in. (Why don’t you tell them to go away, Martha? Just say, you’re sorry, you’re working.)
And why did Martha not ask them to go away?
Thomas said: ‘You never go to them, to their houses, do you?’
‘No.’
‘There you are. It never even occurs to you. It’s not something you do. So they come to you.’
‘Well?’
‘So you have to become a woman who is not to be disturbed in the daytime, because it’s not something you do.’
‘Ah, but it’s not so easy.’
‘Perfectly easy, if you decide to do it.’
To serve tea, to sit talking, being sympathetic, charming (etc., etc., ad nauseam) creating a web of talk which (she knew quite well and so did they) had no relation to the events and people they discussed but which seemed to have a validity of its own – there was the most powerful attraction in it. She could positively see, after the women left, the soft, poisonous, many-coloured web of comment and gossip they had created, hanging there in the smoky air of the little room.
But of course these were ‘intelligent’ people; some of them even ‘educated’; even – though this was a word they used with an increasingly humorous grimness, ‘progressive’ people. Yet what had changed in the talk, since Martha had chafed at the talk at the women’s tea-parties in the avenues? These women did not complain about their servants; they deplored, instead, that they had servants, wished they could do without them, and often indeed, took decisions to give them up. And they did not complain about their husbands, but about ‘society’, which made marriage unsatisfactory. They did not talk scandal in the sense of have you heard that so and so has left her husband? They discussed people’s characters, with all the dispassionate depth offered them by their familiarity with ‘psychology’. Why anybody ever did anything was immediately obvious to these psychologically educated females, and people’s motives were an open book to them, their own included. Recipes they exchanged – to talk about food was not reactionary, though to discuss clothes for too long was frivolous, if not reactionary. As for politics, there were two kinds of politics, neither needing much comment. Local politics, which meant, here, the situation of the black man – well, one can reach a degree of sophistication which means one has only to glance at a newspaper and exclaim bitterly: Of course, what would one expect! – to have said everything necessary. As for world politics, the manifestations of ‘the cold war’, a recently christened phenomenon, made it impossible for this tiny group of people to communicate easily, since they represented between them every variety of ‘left’ opinion, each grade of it needing the most incredible tact and forbearance with the others.
And, of course, there was a horrible fascination, the dark attraction of Martha’s secret fears, in the fact that of the younger women there was not one who hadn’t sworn, ten years ago: I will not get like that! I won’t be dragged in. They all felt it, acknowledged it. Perhaps this knowledge, that none of them was strong enough to resist the compulsion to create the many-coloured poisonous web of talk, was why they all felt exhausted after such mornings. Just like the frivolous, non-progressive women of the avenues, they spent their days over cups of tea, and went home in a sort of dragging, rather peevish dissatisfaction, while in their heads still ran on, like a gramophone record that could not be turned off, the currents of their gossip: The trouble with Betty is, she is mother-fixated, her headaches are obviously of psychological origin, and Martha’s trouble is, she is unstable, and Marjorie’s trouble is, she is a masochist, why have another baby when she’ll only complain at the extra work, and Mrs Van – well, she’s marvellous, but she’s awfully conventional really, and Jack Dobie is not doing the progressive cause much good, if he hadn’t framed that Bill in such an aggressive way, he’d have got it through the House, but he has a father-complex, which makes it necessary for him to challenge authority.
Because she could not work in the mornings, Martha would say to Anton, on the evenings when Thomas was not in town: ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to work after supper.’ Most evenings Martha worked, and Anton read or might go out – presumably to see Millicent.
‘You don’t feel any guilt about telling your husband you want to work, but you do when the women come around to gossip?’
‘He’s not my husband.’
‘Of course not. And this work, typing out reports for Jack Dobie about his trade unionists – that’s important?’
‘It’s better than talking about the du Preez’s children’s psychological problems and Piet du Preez’s power complex.’
‘Is it? Then if you feel it is, it is.’
Martha said: ‘When I’m here and you say it, of course, it’s ridiculous. But afterwards it’s all very serious.’
‘Only because you let it be serious.’
Martha said: ‘All these things that drive us crazy, when you put them into words, they sound silly. But it is important.’
‘All you have to do is to come here every morning when Anton goes to work and work here.’
They sat on the low bed, side by side. It was in the evening, before he had to go back to his farm. A single, small bulb laid shadow and light about them. They were enclosed in a small, sweet-smelling world of wood and foliage. He was making white marks on her thigh with the pressure of his fingers, lifting them to let the blood flow in, then pressing down again. Both watched, absorbed, this life of the flesh which flourished in its own laws under their eyes.
‘You were going to say something about when I go away, Martha. There’s a look on your face which means that.’
‘Yes, that’s what I was thinking.’
‘I know you were. Well, you’re right. Look, I’m not disputing it, believe me.’
‘Disputing what? I haven’t said anything.’
‘You get a look on your face. That means I should shut up. You are claiming your right to make safeguards.’
‘For when I go away?’
‘That’s below the belt, it really is, Martha. You mean, because I don’t marry you, then you have to sit around all morning gossiping and complaining afterwards?’
‘Who said anything about marrying?’
‘You’re in the right to mention it.’
‘I didn’t mention it at all.’
‘Ah, my God, you’ll drive me mad. Then we’ll discuss your serious problems. Look then. You say you wouldn’t have left that office job except for me? Look how easy that was. When Mr Robinson got in the way of serious things, like a lover, then you changed your life at once. Now you say the women waste your time in the mornings – then come here, so they don’t know where you are.’
‘Ah yes, but it’s all very well, you’ll go away. And heaven knows how long I’ll have to stay here, years very likely. Anton hasn’t heard a word from Germany yet.’
‘Just leave him!’
‘But you know I can’t. If I do then it makes him unrespectable and he’ll never be made a British citizen.’
‘But he doesn’t want to be a British citizen.’
‘Perhaps he does – I don’t know. Why do we have to talk about Anton?’
‘He’s your husband, that’s why.’
‘He’s not my husband. ‘
That rainy season, she spent nearly every afternoon in the loft, and most evenings. Then there were fewer evenings – Thomas’s work was suffering, he said. For a while Martha stayed at home when Thomas was not coming – but then returned to the loft. Every evening, after supper, she told Anton she must work, and she went to the loft.
Every afternoon Martha went to the loft, hoping she would see no one, hoping that Thomas’s brother’s wife would not see her. But the plump, watchful woman was nearly always sewing on her veranda. So Martha went openly across the back garden and into the shed. There she waited for Thomas. Sometimes he did not come, and she read, or simply did nothing, watching the green shadows from the tree ripple on the planks of the floor. Here she was ‘herself’, no one put pressure on her. Even when Thomas did not come, she returned happy, and – this was increasingly the point – armed, against Anton. It came to this: she began to go to the shed in the mornings, not because of the idle women, but because of Anton.
For her feelings about Anton had gone beyond anything she could understand. Like ‘the circle of women’, ‘her husband’ provoked in her only the enemy, feelings so ancient and, it seemed, autonomous, they were beyond her control.
For consider how irrational it was. First there had been the period of months when they, Anton and Martha, decided that they would ‘live their own lives’. During this time, when presumably Anton had pursued his affair with Millicent, and Martha had had nobody, but waited for Thomas, they lived together amicably – without any emotional contact, but certainly without strain.
This ease had ended, but at once, that day when Martha had first made love with Thomas. She had not expected anything to change. After all, had not Anton assumed, all this time, that she had a lover?
Yet the night after she had first made love with Thomas, Anton made love to her, and for the first time in months. Stranger still, although she was claimed by Thomas, absorbed by what she had discovered and knew she would discover, she went through the motions of compliance with Anton. Why? She did not have to. She did not even mean to. Yet she did. She despised herself for it, certainly, but that was hardly the point, compared with the knowledge that if Anton had come into her bed the night before (before making love with Thomas) she would have said No, or implied No – but of course Anton would not have come, he only made love to her because of Thomas.
Who, then, was this person in Martha who first of all signalled to her husband, her legal possessor (or some kind of possessor) that she had been unfaithful to him, and who then went on (without Martha knowing about it, let alone sanctioning it) to signal invitations to him, because apparently she had to buy this disliked husband’s compliance, even forgiveness. And by offering him her sex!
Martha lay awake after Anton’s making love to her, not because of Thomas about whom, even after the first time of making love with him, she had no doubts at all, but about Anton who had suddenly become a frightening unknown country.
She thought: Suppose I said to Anton: ‘You’ve made love to me tonight not even because you’re jealous, but because certain instincts have been touched, so that you have to reestablish possession of me’ – well, what would he say? He’d look at her outraged, even disgusted. What sort of conventional attitudes was she putting on him? And what instincts? Had she not had a lover, with his agreement, for months? And while his body had been aggressive, violent, even painful, his words had been that of a dear old friend or comrade, making love with an old bed-fellow out of a playfully freakish impulse! Rather pleasant, really, his wry but jaunty smile said, as he pulled up his pyjamas and tied their neat white cord, to make love to a wife with whom one has such civilized friendly arrangements – yes, civilized, that’s what his smile said he felt. And he neatly arranged his long, handsome limbs in bed, smiling at Martha as he turned out the light and turned a back which signalled in its own language, right across anything he might have felt: Very well then – but who owns you? I do! And Martha could feel her body wanting to assume a sort of silly, sly, giggling posture which said: Oh, so that’s what you think, is it?
It was all humiliating, ridiculous … she could not let it happen again. She had to cut Anton out of her consciousness, had to bring down a curtain in herself and shut him out. Otherwise she would get ill. There she was, sharing a flat with him, cooking his food, going out with him sometimes, lying in a twin bed every night in a shared bedroom. But she was not there: she had knotted her emotions tight with Thomas and shut Anton out.
Even so, she was on the edge all the time of being ill. It was never far off. This was not at all the vague, tight tension of before Thomas, which had been not so much the threat of illness as the illness itself: a perpetual dry inner trembling, a super-brightness, extra-attention, a lightness of her being – the stage on to which might walk, at any time, the disembodied emotions she could not give soil and roots to within herself.
No: this was something quite different, on a different level – directly physical. If she let her connection with Thomas weaken; if she let her – what? Body? (but what part of it?) remember Anton and that he was her husband, well, her nerves reacted at once and in the most immediately physical way. She vomited. Her bladder became a being in the flesh of her lower stomach, and told her it was there and on guard. It did not like what she was doing – did not like it at all. Her stomach, her intestines, her bladder complained that she was the wife of one man and they did not like her making love with another.
But of course, none of this could be told to Anton, or even mentioned to him. They were being civilized, he and she; they made civilized arrangements about marriage when it was not a success, and lived together like brother and sister, sharing single beds in a small bedroom, saying things like: ‘Did you have a good day, Anton?’
‘Yes, very good. I’m reorganizing that whole department. Yes, I may be an enemy alien and a damned German, but I’m organizing their freight department for them.’
‘And about time too, I’m sure.’
‘And I went to see Colonel Brodeshaw. After all, he is Member of Parliament for this constituency.’
‘Oh, good, can he help you?’
‘I think he wants to. I begin to think that Marxist theory underrates the role that the democratic consciousness plays in the British way of life. It is not only a mask for reaction, it is not just hypocrisy.’
‘Oh, you think not?’
‘No. Although he is a proper old Blimp, he is really very decent.’

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Дорис Лессинг

Тип: электронная книга

Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература

Язык: на английском языке

Издательство: HarperCollins

Дата публикации: 16.04.2024

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О книге: The fourth book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.In the aftermath of the Second World War, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith with the communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement′s leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in a love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness.

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