Читать книгу A Ripple from the Storm - Doris Lessing - Страница 10

In the morning Martha woke ill, but above all uneasy because of a weight of guilt: she was ill because she had been careless, and now her work would fall on other people. But the languor of fever was pleasant to her. She had been dreaming and she wished she might return to sleep, for the dreams had had the peculiarly nostalgic quality which she distrusted so much, and yet was so dangerously attractive to her. She had been dreaming of ‘that country’; a phrase she used to describe a particular region of sleep which she often visited, or which visited her – and always when she was overtired or sick. That country’ was pale, misted, flat; gulls cried like children around violet-coloured shores. She stood on coloured chalky rocks with a bitter sea washing around her feet and the smell of salt was strong in her nostrils.

Now she thought: Well, I suppose it’s England … but how can I be an exile from England when it has nothing to do with me? And do I really have to feel guilty about wanting to sleep when I never sleep enough? She dropped back into a hot sleep, and dreamed she was back in ‘the district’ standing at the edge of Mr McFarline’s great gold-eating pit. But it was abandoned. It had been abandoned centuries before. The enormous gulf in the soil had been worked by a forgotten race which she saw clearly in her dream: a copper-coloured, long-limbed, sharp-featured people, tied together like slaves under the whip of a black overseer. Centuries ago, these people had vanished, and the pit had fallen into disuse, and its sides were covered with a small scrub of bushes and a low rank grass. But near to where she stood was a projection into the pit, a jut of layered rock that spread at its base, like a firmly set animal’s foot.

She stood at the extreme edge of the pit, space beneath her, smelling the warm gritty smell of hot African sun on loose dry soil, examining the deep-layered rock. Fold after fold, the growth of the earth showed itself in the side of the pit, a warm red showing the living soil at the top, then the dead layers of rock beneath. She saw that the projection into the pit was not dead, but living. It was not an animal’s paw, but the head and the shoulders of an immense lizard, an extinct saurian that had been imprisoned a thousand ages ago, in the rock. It was petrified. The shape of the narrow head, the swell of the shoulders, was visible. A narrow ledge of rock along the grass-grown bottom of the pit was its dead foot. Martha looked again and saw that its eye was steadily regarding her with a sullen and patient query. It was a scaly ancient eye, filmed over with mine-dust, a sorrowful eye. It’s alive, she thought. It’s alive after so many centuries. And it will take centuries more to die. Perhaps I can dig it out?

But it seemed quite right that the vast half-fossilized extinct creature should be there, alive still in the massive weight of the earth. She looked down at the half-closed patient eye and thought: You must be too old even to see me.

She woke, all her limbs irritated by fever. Now she was awake the dream seemed frightening, but because of its distance from the cold salt-sprayed shores of ‘that country’. She thought: Next time I drop off to sleep I might go anywhere, it’s like a nightmare, not knowing what’s waiting for you … For the cold salt-sprayed shores and the deep sullen pit seemed to have nothing in common, not to be connected, and their lack of connection was a danger. She realized she was afraid to drop off to sleep again.

It was ten in the morning. Although she was weighted with guilt because of her responsibilities to the group which she would now not fulfil, she had only just remembered her duty to the office where she earned her living. She went to the telephone in the passage and rang Mrs Buss, who was at pains to explain to Martha that she was quite capable of running the office by herself indefinitely. As for herself, she had not had a day’s illness during the fifteen years she had been earning her living. Martha found Mrs Carson behind her, listening. ‘I’m sick,’ she said hastily, to avoid being involved in some new servant crisis. She went back to bed, followed by the white intense face and the dark obsessed eyes of Mrs Carson, who sat on the foot of the bed and told a long story of how once she had been alone on a farm in some remote district, and a whole pack of natives had surrounded the house trying to get in, but – seeing her with her shotgun waiting for them – had contented themselves with peering through the windows and jeering obscenities. Martha lay under piled untidy blankets, shivering, listening to this fantasy, repeating to herself over and over again: I must not lose my temper with her. I must not. She’s sick and she can’t help it. But finally she said, and was surprised that her voice cracked with tears when she spoke: ‘Mrs Carson, I’m ill.’

Mrs Carson, reminded of Martha’s existence, slowly stood up, smoothing down her dress with bony hands, looking about the room as if something might be suggested to her. At last she rather helplessly drew the chintz curtains across and returned to stand beside the bed, frowning at Martha.

‘Perhaps I should telephone your mother?’ she suggested.

Martha sat up in a panic. ‘No, no, please don’t.’

Mrs Carson, unsurprised, but pleased that nothing was asked of her, said vaguely: ‘If you need anything let me know.’ She went out remarking: ‘It’s better with the curtains drawn; they can’t see in.’

Martha went back to sleep and was woken instantly by bad nightmares which she could not remember but which drove her out of bed. She had undertaken to do certain things and she must do them. She dressed and rode downtown on her bicycle. It was only when she was balancing on waves of sickness on the rocking machine that she understood she was really sick, and had a right to be in bed. But she went to the group office, collected a list of addresses of businessmen who must be approached for donations to Medical Aid for Russia, and spent the day going from office to office. She was surprised to find that habit made it easy for her to switch on her ‘money-collecting personality’without effort. She despised this personality: cool, practical, rather flirtatious, humorous to order so as to take the sting out of the business of giving money to Russia. She got the promise of over three hundred pounds. She returned to the group office and left a note to the effect that some other comrade must take over her responsibilities, and climbed back, with difficulty, on to the bicycle. It was in the solemn heavy heat of mid-afternoon. Sun glinted off walls, off the metal of motor cars and bicycles, off the skin of Africans, off the eyes of people passing, off the leaves of trees. Everything hotly glittered. Light struck painfully into her skull through her eyes. She cycled slowly, knowing that cars were hooting at her. She thought: If I’m behaving oddly, then it will be a discredit to the group. I must cycle straight and look normal. If people think I’m drunk, the Party will be blamed for my behaviour.

When she at last got herself into bed in the darkened room, she was thinking miserably: All over the world people are dying, people are being killed, they are suffering indescribably, and I’m being sick. I have no right to be sick.

She slept and dreamed that she was among hordes of war-crushed people for whom she was responsible. She would half-awaken, her eyes closing again at the sight of the strong light on the limp chintz curtains, thinking: That’s France, yes – we’re holding there (for in her dream she, representing ‘the group’, had stemmed some flood of violence or act of terror), but there’s Germany, the people in the concentration camps in Germany, I’m forgetting them. And when she fell back into sleep, she was in Germany, holding back brutality there, but tormented that she was forgetting France, or Russia, or some other place for which she was responsible. She woke and slept, slept and woke, in a steadily increasing fervour of anxiety, repeatedly visiting in her dreams the chilly shallow shores of nostalgia, where no responsibility existed, or returned for glimpses into the dust-filled half-closed eye of the great petrified saurian.

Once she woke and found a large tray covered by a fly-net by her bed. Mrs Carson, worried that she ought to be doing something for Martha, but unable to come far enough out of her obsession to think what, had arranged a three-course meal: soup, now cold and filmed with grease; roast beef and potatoes congealed in fat; and a slab of wet cold pie. Martha’s stomach turned, and she went to the bathroom to be sick. On the way she passed the kitchen where Mrs Carson was sitting in a cretonne wrapper that showed part of her wrinkled bosom, a fly-whisk in her hand, watching her new servant make cakes. She did not notice Martha, who returned to bed, where she dreamed she was responsible for Mrs Carson, and trying to explain to her ‘once and for all’ that ‘she had been on the wrong path’ and that ‘she should be happy and not waste her life dreaming’. In this dream she saw Mrs Carson as a jolly bouncing card-playing widow with a salacious and friendly wink, who said to Martha: Thank you dear for saving me. You are my true friend.

This dream was so much a nightmare that she struggled out of it, gasping and crying out.

The night passed. In the morning she woke to find Jasmine regarding her from the foot of the bed.

‘You OK?’ she inquired.

‘Of course,’ said Martha.

‘Want a doctor?’

‘Hell, no.’

‘Can’t stand them either. Well, I’m on my way to work. Give me a ring if you want nursing.’ Jasmine, demure and precise as always, her small neat body defined in bright blue flowered linen, frowned at Martha while she adjusted an ear-ring.

‘What’s going on in the group?’ asked Martha, who felt as if she had been exiled from it for several weeks.

‘Trouble,’ said Jasmine, rolling up her eyes and sighing. ‘There was a meeting last night. The RAF are suffering from severe infantile disorders. They want to make a revolution here and now. Jimmy wants us to march into the Location with a red flag, shouting: “Down with the white tyrants.”‘

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

‘Perhaps it’s not a bad idea at that,’ said Martha crossly.

‘You’d better stay where you are then,’ said Jasmine, ‘if you’re in a red-flag-waving mood too, then you’ll be more of a nuisance than a help.’

‘All the same, I’ve been thinking … we talk and talk and analyse and make formulations, but what are we doing? What are we changing?’ Her head ached, and she lay still, looking at the cool white ceiling.

‘If I were you I’d go to sleep.’

‘What else? What else has been happening?’

‘Well, the RAF say we are bourgeois.’

‘Obviously we are. What then?’

‘Because,’ said Jasmine composedly, ‘we wear lipstick and nail varnish.’ She put forward a small foot in a high-heeled blue sandal and examined her scarlet toe-nails with satisfaction. ‘They say our origins are betrayed by the way we dress.’

‘Who? All women, or just the group women?’

‘The women comrades. They say that we are corrupted by the emphasis capitalist society places on sex.’ Jasmine offered this last remark to Martha on a serious note of query.

Martha considered it from the depths of her anxiety-ridden dissatisfaction with herself, which made her ready to range herself with anybody who criticized her. But the other side of her perpetual stern rejection of what she was now, was the image of what she wanted to be: to match this image with any of the men in the group was enough to make her reject them entirely. She was thinking: Any real man would be able to see what I could be and help me to become it, and all these tom-tiddlers in the group … She was dismayed that she was able to think of her male comrades thus, and said angrily: ‘Oh, they can talk …’

‘That’s what I said to Jimmy.’

‘Of course it was Jimmy, of course.’

‘Yes, I said to him, if you disapprove of make-up and high heels and so on, what were you doing in McGrath’s with that girl from the reception desk? Because she’s got dyed hair to start with. He said he was educating her.’

Martha laughed. Jasmine smiled composedly and said: ‘Bloody hypocrites they all are. Every one. Well, so long, Matty, and look after yourself.’ She departed, slinging a satchel bag full of pamphlets over her shoulder.

Next time Martha woke it was night, and Mrs Quest stood where Jasmine had stood earlier, at the foot of the bed.

Tm glad to see you are getting an early night for once,’ she said in a sprightly way.

‘Yes.’

‘Have you heard from William?’

‘Who?’

‘That corporal or whoever he was.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard.’

‘If you’re going to let him down too I shall really wash my hands of you.’

‘Mother, I keep telling you, there’s no question of my marrying William.’

‘You left your husband for him.’

‘I did not. I left Douglas for …’ She stopped, knowing it was useless to explain to her mother why she left Douglas.

Meanwhile, Mrs Quest, cold-eyed and hostile, was examining Martha’s naked shoulders. She said: ‘That nightgown is indecent. If some of your friends come in …’

Martha, who at the first sight of her mother had thought: Thank goodness, she’ll look after me, now pulled the blankets up to her face, and said: ‘No one’s coming in. And I’m sleepy.’

Mrs Quest went to Martha’s dressing-table, examined what was on it, and said: ‘So you’re using rouge now. Well, if you’re going to jazz about the way you do, I suppose you’ll need rouge at your age. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ She returned to the foot of the bed and said: ‘Mrs Carson’s worried about you.’

‘In what way?’

‘She says that you don’t keep your curtains drawn and the garden boy hangs about to get a sight of you.’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ said Martha, understanding with dismay that she was able to take this sort of thing from Mrs Carson, but not from her mother, to whom surely she owed much more patience and understanding? Guilt set in about this too, and added to her sick fever.

Mrs Quest had retreated into apologetic embarrassment, and retreated hastily with: ‘Well, perhaps she’s got it wrong. I won’t disturb your beauty sleep any longer.’ She went to the door, exaggeratedly quiet. As she went out she said: ‘I hear Caroline isn’t well, poor little girl.’

The image of Caroline rose to confront Martha, who said to herself tormentedly: I can’t think of her now, I really can’t. She sternly pushed Caroline into a region of her mind marked No Admittance. Yet as soon as she slept, Caroline emerged from this forbidden place, and confronted Martha: sometimes charming and childish, sometimes sick and plaintive, sometimes hostile to Martha her mother. Martha kept waking, afraid for the first time of the loneliness of this dark shabby hired room, despising herself for being afraid, hating her mother for evoking the image of Caroline.

Another night passed and a slow hot morning. Flies buzzed against the curtains through which the glare beat in threads of yellow. Martha was thinking: If my mother would come in again, and just be kind, instead of hating me so much … the weak listlessness of this frightened her again. She thought: Just because I’m sick, I start crying for mother. And I’m probably not sick at all, just trying to get out of something? But what am I trying to get out of? I simply must not give in. And she got limply out of bed, brushed her hair and made up her face. She lay tidily back on her pillows thinking: If I make up my mind to it, I needn’t be sick. But almost at once she was back in sleep, and nightmare-ridden delirium.

In the late afternoon she woke to see Anton seated by her bed. The sight of him was an exquisite relief.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘If people don’t look after themselves, they get sick.’ He held her wrist tightly: it was partly a brotherly caress and partly because of the necessity for taking her pulse.

‘So,’ he commented. ‘And what does the doctor say?’

‘I don’t need a doctor.’

‘So you don’t need a doctor. That may be so, but you must excuse me: I shall telephone your doctor and he will come and visit you.’

He sat smiling at her. Martha could scarcely recognize him. She said to herself: Suddenly he’s human. She was also thinking: Suppose he is in love with me? The thought was half-exciting, half pure panic. Oh my God! she thought involuntarily, it’s just as bad as the others – just an accident, falling in love, if you can call it that. All the same, a pulse of excitement was beating in her. She looked through her fever at the stiff controlled face, now softened with a small paternal smile, and thought: He may not know it himself, but he’s attracted to me.

And now Anton lifted himself up to his height, and stooping, kissed her on the forehead. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘And now you will lie quite still and the doctor will come.’ For a moment they were both embarrassed because of that kiss, and he said quickly: ‘I will come in again this evening and see you. It is Dr Stern, isn’t it? I will make the arrangements.’ And he went out on tiptoe stiffly, like a lean high-stepping bird.

When I’m with him I feel safe? she wondered, remembering how he had said: women’s problems are not sufficiently considered, and how she had responded to the promise of understanding. Yes, he’s kind, she decided.

Now she was looking forward to the doctor’s coming. If Anton took the responsibility for this act of weakness, the act of admitting one was ill, then it was all right, it was off her shoulders.

She lay facing the door, where Dr Stern would come in. When she woke it was to see Jimmy, entering with the same exaggerated caution as Anton had used in leaving, absorbed in his caution. He carried a big bunch of pink zinnias in his large red hand and, thinking Martha was asleep, was looking for some place to put them. He went out again, leaving the door open, and Martha heard him talking to the servant in the kitchen. He was speaking with earnest friendliness, but the man was being nervously evasive: the contrast between Jimmy and Mrs Carson was too much for him. Jimmy returned with the stiff flowers stuck in a big ornamented green vase. Martha could see that he liked the vase, from the proud way he regarded it. She consciously suppressed a wince of disapproval at his bad taste, thinking: That’s snobbish, they are right to call us names, middle-class and the rest … When he had set the vase down beside her, he found her awake and smiled self-consciously when she thanked him.

Although the sunlight on the curtains was now a pale yellow, and the heat no longer beat into the room, it was stuffy and Jimmy’s large bony face was scarlet. He was wearing the thick clumsy uniform issued for winter use.

‘Why don’t you take off your jacket?’ she asked, and all at once was embarrassed. She remembered her mother had said her nightgown was indecent; and she pulled the sheet up high to her chin thinking: I wasn’t conscious of it at all when Anton was here, but I am with Jimmy.

It was true that he was frowning with hot disapproval of her. He undid the top button of his jacket, and set himself to improve her situation: having studied her face he said: ‘You don’t look too good, and that’s a fact.’

With which he scientifically studied the arrangement of her bed until he had decided what should be done. ‘Now hold it a minute. I’m the boy for this.’ He put his hand under her head, lifted it, adjusted her pillows, pulled off a thick wodge of blankets which Martha was not aware were too heavy for her, and said with authority: ‘Now lie easy. No good twisting yourself up like that.’ Martha obediently unknotted all her limbs.

‘That’s better. You can take it from me. I’ve had it myself.’

‘Had what?’

‘I was in the san for ten months before the war. I know all the gen about being sick.’

‘You’re cured?’ she asked, looking how the red flared on his great bony cheeks.

‘I’m in the RAF, so I’m cured.’

She laughed, but he did not. ‘That is why I came to see you. You should sweat. You have a temperature.’

He was possessed by his role of nurse. ‘You’ve got a drop of something here? Brandy? Then I’ll wrap you up in the blankets and that’ll do the trick.’

‘But Jimmy, the doctor’s coming.’

He said: ‘You don’t want to trust them. Pack you full of poison and lies when nature can cure.’

‘But Dr Stern is coming.’

He said stiffly: ‘Oh well, if you feel like that.’ He was so offended that he buttoned his jacket again, and made a move towards the door.

‘Jimmy, you’re surely not going to be cross because I’ve called the doctor when I’m sick?’ Her voice came plaintive, and she frowned, thinking: Well, if I’m going to strike that note, then … He had already weakened into a smile and sat down by the bed. ‘While I’m here I’ll give you the gen about The Watchdog round. I’ve been doing it for you with Murdoch and Bill.’ He gave her a report, an almost house-by-house report, and she lay watching the so deeply serious face, silent until he said: ‘We’ve fixed Ronald. He’s OK. There’s nothing for you to worry about.’

‘Ronald? The man dying of …’ She stopped herself.

‘Dying? He’s not dying. Let me tell you, comrade, what he needs is some good food and rest. There’s no such thing as TB.’

‘Well, what have you done?’

‘We took a collection among the lads and we’ve fed him up. We’ve given him a good feed and paid his rent. These sicknesses are just poverty. That’s all, poverty. You wouldn’t know, with your class background, but believe you me, when the doctors talk about TB and cancer and all that caper, they’re just helping the capitalists. They’d be out of work without poverty.’

Martha’s head ached. She said: ‘Jimmy, for all that, he’s so sick he should be in hospital.’

‘Sick? Of course he’s sick. He’ll be better in a week, with us lads looking after him. And now there’s you. How long have you been in bed?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why doesn’t that old woman look after you?’

‘Oh, she’s too busy being neurotic about the natives.’

‘What do you mean neurotic? What’s that kind of talk?’

‘If you like it better, she’s got the African problem on her mind.’

‘You’re full of bourgeois talk, comrade, do you know that?’

She said flippantly: ‘I’m middle-class to the backbone,’ and thought: Now he’ll lose his temper, and then laugh.

But his deep-socketed eyes were too indignant for anger.

‘If you weren’t sick, I’d have it out with you, I would straight. Look at you, comrade, lying here alone in bed with lipstick on. What sort of caper is that?’

‘I’m not alone,’ she said, ‘you’re here.’ And grinned at him. But he went dark red and said: ‘There you are. Listen. Believe you me, there’s a lot of rottenness in you you’ve got to lose before you’re a good comrade.’

‘Oh God,’ said Martha, suddenly angry, ‘you’re such a bloody prig.’

‘And your language. I don’t like to hear girls using that kind of language.’

Martha, prickling all over with exasperation, moved angrily about in her bed. Quite unconsciously he reached out his large hand to adjust the covers, as if he were saying: ‘Be still.’

‘You bourgeois girls, you need a wood working-class husband to teach you a thing or two. When I see you bourgeois girls I think of my mother and what she had to take from her life, and believe you me you could learn a thing or two from her.’

‘All of you,’ she said, ‘all of you working-class men have this damned sentimental thing about your mothers.’

‘Sentimental, is it? Let me tell you, it’s the working-class woman that takes the rap every time.’

‘I imagined that was why we wanted to change things.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said hotly. He was leaning forward, sweat-covered, scarlet-faced. She was sitting up, clutching the blankets to her, her face running with sweat.

She said, in a change of mood, grimly: ‘We’ll abolish poverty, and give women freedom and then they’ll simmer and boil, sacrificing themselves for everyone – like my mother.’ She laughed at the look of bewildered anger on his face. ‘There’s no good your talking to me about women sacrificing themselves for their families – I’ve had that one. And I don’t want to talk about it either,’ she added, as the explosion of his emotion reached his eyes in a hot stare of protest.

‘What do you mean, you don’t want to talk about it? I’m going to talk you out of this one, believe you me. Women are the salt of the earth. I’m telling you. My mother was the salt of the earth. My dad died when I was ten and she brought up me and my two sisters on what she got by cleaning offices until I went to work and helped her out.’

‘Good, then let’s arrange things so that women have to work eighteen hours a day and die at fifty, worn out so that you can go on being sentimental about us.’

She collapsed back, shaking with weakness.

He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re saying, comrade, and that’s a fact.’ He stretched out his hand again to pull the sheet up to her neck. ‘And you should be keeping still. I keep telling you, keep still. When my mum was ill once I nursed her three months day and night – you should lie still and let nature take its way. The doctors couldn’t do anything for my mum, but I could. They gave her this and they gave her that, but I kept her in bed warm and still for three months. It was the rest she needed and the rest she got, with me helping her. You should let the powers of nature flow through you, comrade. It’s a fact.’

‘That may be so, but the doctor’s coming now – I can hear him.’

She could hear Dr Stern and Anton talking in the passage. Jimmy got up, saying: ‘Then I’ll make my way outside and wait until he’s gone.’ He went out through the doors on to the veranda. She could see his big patient shape through the curtains against the red of the setting sun.

Good Lord, she thought, he’s taken me over. He’s responsible for me. And through the wall on the other side Anton was talking her over with Dr Stern. An old feeling of being hemmed in and disposed of prickled through her. I hate it all, she thought wildly, not knowing what she hated or why she was imprisoned. I wish to God everyone would leave me alone. She had a nightmare feeling of sliding helpless into danger.

When Dr Stern came in, bland and weary as always, she rememebered she had not seen him since she left her husband, and sat up, thinking: He’ll disapprove of me and show it, and I’ll pretend not to see it. Besides, there’s the bill. I’d forgotten – I simply can’t afford to be sick.

But his eyes were professional. ‘Well, Mrs Knowell,’ he asked, as she heard him so often: ‘And what can I do you for?’

She laughed obediently at the joke and lay down as he held her wrist.

‘You should have called me in before,’ he remarked. ‘Who’s looking after you?’

‘My landlady.’

‘I think we’ll find a bed for you in hospital.’

‘Oh, no.’ Martha sat up again, in an impulse to escape the whole situation. Dr Stern held her by the shoulder and said: ‘If it’s a question of paying, then don’t worry. There are times when people can pay and times when they can’t. You’re an old patient of mine, aren’t you?’

Martha’s eyes filled with tears and she turned away to hide them. But her voice shook as she thanked him.

‘Yes, Mrs Knowell, and you’ve been here all these days with a high temperature letting things ride – and you’re a sensible girl, so I’ve always thought.’

‘Perhaps I’m not sensible,’ she muttered. ‘Dr Stern, I really don’t want to go to hospital.’

‘And who will nurse you?’

‘I have friends.’ She thought: If he understands this then he’s a real doctor and not just a medicine man. He let his eyes rest on her face for some time: her lips were trembling. At last he nodded and said; ‘Mrs Knowell, there are times when we all find life too much for us.’

Oh Lord, she thought, he’s trying to make me cry.

‘I understand the divorce is going through between yourself and Douglas. Well, that’s not my affair. And you must be missing your daughter.’

The reference to Caroline dried Martha’s tears at the source. She said: ‘Dr Stern, I’ll do anything you say, but please make it possible for me to stay here.’

He was annoyed, and – as Martha knew, not because she wouldn’t go to hospital, but because she had closed against him. He said coldly: ‘Very well. I can’t take the consequences. I’ll have the medicines made up. I’ll come to see you tomorrow. Does a sensible girl like you have to behave like an uneducated person who is afraid of hospital? You’re like my native patients, who think they’re going to die in hospital.’

Martha felt as she had with Mr Maynard: Dr Stern, in using such an argument, was so infinitely removed from her that it was as if he had moved back into the past. He stood at the foot of the bed waiting to see if she would react; when she did not he said: ‘Very well,’ and went out. Again she heard Anton talking to him in the passage. She realized that Anton would be looking after her. When he came in, she had succumbed to being ill; for the first time she was gone under waves of sickness. She was aware that he had again kised her forehead and hot nausea came with the thought: Well, that means now Anton and I will be together. She did not define how they would be together. He sat by her a few minutes, then said he would go to collect the medicines. She did not hear him leave; nor hear Jimmy enter. She opened her eyes to see Jimmy large and looming over her. His attitude expressed something hostile to her.

‘Well, comrade, and are you sick?’

‘The doctor says so.’

‘And he’s going to fill you up with medicines?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I’ll get them for you. I can go on my bycicle.’

‘Anton’s gone already.’

‘I saw him here, I saw him,’ he said, accusingly. As she did not reply: ‘Tell me, have you and Anton got an agreement?’

‘An agreement?’ She was angry because he assumed he had the right to ask. It was clear he felt he did have the right. He even looked as if he had been betrayed. ‘I mean, are you and Anton getting together?’

‘Not as far as I know.’ She kept her eyes shut and when she opened them again he had gone.

She was deeply anxious: her stomach was twisting with anxiety. She thought: I’ve been irritated because of the way these men just fall for us, from one minute to the next, but what’s the difference between that and me and Anton getting involved? Because it seems to me we are involved. If I’d responded to Jimmy or Murdoch over a glass of beer or selling pamphlets, then it would have seemed to me quite right, inevitable, even romantic. Her anxiety rose to a climax, and she felt caged by Anton. But it happens to be Anton … why? Is it because he’s the leader of the group? But that’s despicable. And actually what do we have in common?

These muddled, dismaying thoughts were too much for her, and she went off into a semi-delirium. Her body had taken over from her mind. She lay feeling every pulse of pain, every sensation of heat and cold. Her body, precisely defined in areas of heat and cold, lay stretched out among sheets that felt gritty and sharp, as if she were lying on sand, or on moving ants. But her hands were not hers. They seemed to have swelled. Her hands were enormous, and she could not control their size. At the end of her arms she could feel them, giant’s hands, as if she compressed the world inside them. Everything she was had gone into her hands. She moved them, to see if she could shrink them back to size. For a moment they were her own hands again, then out they swelled, and, lying with eyes shut, she felt the tips of her fingers touch the vast balls of her thumbs as if girders had been laid across a ravine. The world lay safe inside her hands. Tenderness filled her. She thought: Because of us, everyone will be saved. She thought: I am holding the world safe, and no one will be hurt and unhappy ever again.

Anton came in later, and lifted her up to take her medicines. She kept her hands away from him: she had to keep them away because of their immense power: he might get hurt if he touched them.

She woke in the dark once to see him sitting by her in the chair, asleep. When she drifted off again, holding humanity safe in her powerful tender hands, she held him too, close and safe: the protector protected; the power-dealer made harmless.

In the morning the fever had gone down because of the drugs and Anton still sat there, smiling at her.

‘Aren’t you going to work?’ He did some kind of clerk’s work in an export and import firm. As an enemy alien it was not easy for him to find a job, and she worried that he might lose it because of her. ‘Aren’t you going?’ she insisted.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve telephoned and now you must not worry at all, you must sleep.’

For three days Anton sat by her, scarcely leaving her, taking instructions from the doctor and dealing with Mrs Carson with a gentle ironical patience that she would never have expected from him. Slowly her hands lost size. There was a moment she looked at them, small and thin, and began to cry. Anton took her in his arms and kissed her.

She murmured: ‘What about Toni Mandel?’ He said: ‘Yes, yes, everything has its end. You must not worry about Mrs Mandel.’

Anton was not there when Jimmy came in again, bristling with hostility. He made some remarks about the sale of The Watchdog, told her that Ronald was completely cured, and then said: ‘I have to tell you, comrade, that I must criticize you for your attitude.’

‘What attitude?’

‘I don’t like lies. I don’t mind the truth but I don’t like lies.’

‘What lies?’

‘You and Anton.’

‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’

He was again red and angry, very hostile.

She thought: Well, it’s true that it might just as well have been Jimmy. Yet the feeling between her and Anton had now grown so that their being together seemed right and inevitable; she could not imagine that any accident (she thought of her sickness and Anton’s looking after her as an accident) would bring her and Jimmy together.

‘And in any case, comrade, I’d like to tell you straight, I’ve found a better woman.’

‘Well, I’m glad,’ she said flatly.

‘Yes. I have. A fine working-class woman, like my own kind. You and I wouldn’t have done at all.’

I’m very pleased.’ She wondered who he meant. There were no working-class girls in the group. She thought: The receptionist from McGrath’s? Then he’ll have to stop her using lipstick and dyeing her hair.

He said: ‘She’s a woman who can take hardship, who knows how to suffer. Yes, those girls down in the Coloured Quarter know how to take life.’

Martha’s brain informed her that any reaction she would have to this would be ‘white settler’ and therefore suspect. All the same, she had to say something. And he was waiting for her to speak, waiting with his whole body expressing challenge and readiness to fight.

‘Jimmy, you’ll get yourself posted.’

‘I’m not taking orders from any bloody colour-minded fascists.’

‘You won’t be allowed to marry her.’

‘The war won’t last for ever.’

‘And besides, we took a decision that the RAF must not have personal relations with the Coloured women, because it would give the reactionaries a stick to beat us with.’

That was what he had been waiting to hear. He turned the full force of his resentment on her and said: ‘Who took decisions? I’m not bound by any colour-minded decisions. If Comrade Anton wants to have colour prejudice, then he should be ashamed, but I’m not bound by it.’

‘You know it’s not a question of colour prejudice.’

‘Is it not then? For me it is. And if you ask me, Comrade Anton should examine his attitudes. I don’t like them at all.’

‘Then why didn’t you say so in the group meeting?’

‘There’s a lot wrong with the group,’ he said.

‘Then why don’t you say so in the group? It’s no use saying so outside.’

‘I’ll say my mind any place I want to say it. I’m not going to be told what I’m to say or where. I’m telling you, comrade, there’s altogether too many middle-class ideas in this group for my taste. And for the taste of the lads from the camp.’

He left the room suddenly, letting the door crash behind him. Martha lay still, arranging in her mind the words she would use to describe the scene to Anton. Instinctively she softened it. She had an impulse not to say anything: ‘Jimmy’s personal feelings are his own affair.’ But they were not his own affair. It was her duty to tell Anton.

She said to Anton that Jimmy seemed to be in an emotional state, and should be ‘handled’. Then she reported what he had said.

At this, Anton’s personality changed: the gentleman who had sat by her as a nurse vanished. He became the chairman: stern and cold, with compressed lips and judging eyes.

‘There can’t be one set of rules for one person and another set for another. A decision was taken, and until the decision is changed by a majority vote of the group, then Comrade Jimmy will have to abide by it.’

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you,’ she asked herself, and Anton. To which he replied: ‘It is the duty of a comrade to report infringements of discipline. It is our duty to aid and support each other.’

She felt him to be logically right; she felt him to be inhuman and wrong. There was no way for her to make these two feelings fit together. She was still weak and sick, and she let the problem slide away from her.

Soon she was convalescent; and the members of the group came in to see her, at lunch-hour, or in the intervals of meetings. The RAF, however, did not come: Jasmine reported that they were in a bad mood about something.

It was now accepted that Martha and Anton were a couple.