Читать книгу Landlocked - Doris Lessing - Страница 5

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.