Читать книгу A Proper Marriage - Doris Lessing - Страница 11

Mrs Quest joyfully ran into the house and announced they were to have a grandchild.

Mr Quest lowered his newspaper and exclaimed, ‘What! Oh Lord!’

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said impatiently, ‘it’s the best thing that could happen, it’s so nice for her. It’ll settle her down, I’m so happy.’

He listened for some time to his wife’s cheerful planning of the child’s future; it was not until the young man was due for university that he remarked uncomfortably, ‘It’s all very well …’

But she swept on, illuminated by decision. The boy – he was to be named Jeffrey, after Mrs Quest’s father – was to be saved by a proper education from Martha’s unconformities; he would be, in fact, the child Mrs Quest had always longed for, the person her own two children had obstinately refused to become. Her eyes were wistful, her face soft. Mr Quest regarded it with increasing discomfort, for it could not but bear witness to what he hadn’t been able to do for her.

‘I think on the whole Sandhurst would be better,’ she concluded at last. ‘We’ll see that his name is put down in good time. I’ll write tomorrow. My father always wanted to go to Sandhurst, instead of Uncle Tony – it was the great disappointment of his life.’

Mr Quest removed his gaze from the Dumfries Hills, whose blue coils were wreathed in smoke – a veld fire had been raging there unchecked for some weeks – and turned his eyes incredulously on his wife. Then he flung down his newspaper, and let out a short laugh. ‘Damn it all!’ he protested.

Mrs Quest was gazing at the great blue buttresses of the mountain range. She heard his voice; her smile became a little tremulous. She swiftly glanced at him, and dropped her eyes.

‘One may presume the child’s parents will have something to say in the matter?’ he inquired. Then, dismayed by the pitiful incomprehension on her face, he suddenly put back his head and let out a roar of angry laughter.

‘But I mean to say,’ she protested, ‘you know quite well what she is, she’s bound to have all sorts of ideas …’

‘Oh, well,’ he commented at last, ‘you fight it out between you.’ He lifted his paper. ‘It will be time for my medicine in five minutes,’ he added abstractedly.

Mrs Quest continued to dream her dreams, while she watched the light change over the mountains. It was an hour of pure happiness for her. But her husband’s withdrawal began to affect her. Soon the wings of her joy had folded. She sat in silence through supper; and looked like a little girl checked in what she most wanted. After the meal, she went to old chests and cupboards, and took out baby clothes she had kept all these years and unfolded them, stroking them with remembering hands. Tears filled her eyes. Life is unfair, unfair! she was crying out in her heart, that lonely unassuaged heart that was aching now with its emptiness. For what her husband had said meant that, once again, she was to be cheated. She felt it. After a long time she carefully folded the clothes again, and put them away in their lavender and mothballs. It was time for bed. She went out in search of her husband to tell him so. He was not in the house. She looked out of the windows. Light streamed from them down the dark paths of the garden. The moon was rising over the Dumfries Hills. Mr Quest stood, a dark, still shape beyond the reach of the streaming yellow house lights, watching the moon. She left the house and walked through the rockeries, where geraniums were a low scent of dryness rising from around her feet. She put her arm in his; and they looked out together towards the Dumfries Hills, which were now lifted towards the pale transparent disc of the moon by chains of red fire, and swirling in masses of red-tinted vapour.

‘Beautiful,’ said Mr Quest, with satisfaction. Then, after a pause: ‘I’m going to miss this.’ It was a half-appeal. Mr Quest, who for years had been playing his part in framing the family’s daydreams for escape to England or to the city, was longing for some reprieve now that the move to the city was certain.

Mrs Quest said quickly, ‘Yes, but things will be much better in town.’

Their thoughts moved together for a few minutes; and then he remarked unwillingly, ‘You know, old girl – well, she is awfully young, damn it.’

Mrs Quest was silent. Now, instead of the charming young man Jeffrey, she could see nothing but the implacable face of Martha.

The drums were beating in the compound. A hundred grass huts, subdued among the trees, were illuminated by a high flaring bonfire. The drums came strongly across the valley on the wind. The taste of wood smoke was bitter on their tongues.

‘I’m going to miss it, aren’t you?’ he demanded savagely.

The sad knowledge of unfairness filled Mrs Quest again, and she cried out, ‘But we can’t die on this place, we can’t die here.’

Against this cry the drums thudded and the crickets chirped.

‘It’s time to go to bed,’ said Mrs Quest restlessly.

‘In a minute.’

They remained, arm in arm, looking out.

‘My eyes aren’t so bad, even now,’ he said. ‘I can see all the Seven Sisters.’

‘Well, you can still see them in town, can’t you?’ She added, It’s getting cold,’ as the night wind came sharp to their faces from a rustling glade of drying grass.

‘Oh, very well.’ They turned their backs to the moon and the blazing mountain, and went indoors. At the door he remarked, ‘All the same, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t more sensible for her not to have this baby.’

‘Oh, nonsense,’ she cried gaily. But she lay a long time in the dark, and now it was Martha’s face she saw, set stubborn and satirical against her own outpourings of joy.

In the morning she rang up the neighbours to see if it was possible to get a lift into town. Nothing was said between husband and wife as she left but ‘Do what you can, old girl, won’t you?’ And she: ‘Oh, very well, I suppose you’re right.’

Two days after Mrs Quest had heard the news from the bitter Martha, she marched into the flat to see her kneeling on the floor, surrounded by yards of white satin which she was fitting to a crib. Martha swept away her mother’s protests that it was absurd and impracticable to surround a baby with white satin, and in any case, why so soon? Martha had already bought flannel and patterns and had cut out nightdresses for the baby.

Mrs Quest ignored the small protesting image of her husband, and disapproved strongly of the pattern for the nightdresses. She finished by inquiring, ‘Why not blue for the crib?’

‘Oh, so it’s going to be a boy?’ inquired Martha.

Mrs Quest blushed. After a few minutes she conceded, ‘Why, are you going to have a girl, then?’

Martha said nothing, and Mrs Quest understood that she had again confirmed her daughter’s worst ideas of her. She said with an aggressive laugh, ‘Anyway, it’s no good making up your mind you want a girl. I was sure you were a boy. I’d even chosen the name – and then look what I got!’

‘I know, you mentioned it,’ said Martha coldly. She swiftly put satin, flannel, scissors and pins into a drawer, as if concealing them, and faced her mother like – the image came pat to Mrs Quest – an animal defending her cubs.

The older woman said, laughing, ‘Well, there’s no need to look like that. After all, I have had experience and you have had none.’

Again the vision of Mr Quest hovered between them. Mrs Quest, doing her duty, said like a lesson, ‘Your father says he thinks you are too young to have a baby, and you should consider what you’re doing.’

At this Martha flung herself into a chair, and laughed helplessly; and after a moment Mrs Quest joined her in an inquiring peal.

‘I’ll make tea,’ said Martha, springing up.

They drank it while Mrs Quest explained exactly how this child should be brought up. Martha said nothing. At the end of an hour she exclaimed abruptly, her voice seething with anger, ‘You know, this is my baby.’ At once Mrs Quest’s eyes filled with tears; she was the small girl who had been slapped for something she has not done. Martha felt guilty, and told herself that her mother could not help it. She said quickly, ‘You must stay and have lunch.’

Mrs Quest had planned to stay the day. But she rose and said unhappily that she had shopping to do. She left, filled again with the conviction of bitter injustice, her heart aching with love refused.

She went back to the farm and told Mr Quest that as usual he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, that Martha was quite wild with happiness. Then she went off into a long complaint of how Martha’s ideas about children were absurd and she was bound to ruin them.

After listening in silence for some time, Mr Quest rose and took out his writing things. ‘God knows why you two have to go on like this,’ he said bitterly. ‘Why? why? why?’ His words drifted out of the window and died among the noises of owl and cricket. He sat stiffly holding the pen between his fingers, staring out of the window to where the Seven Sisters burned low over the glare from the fireswept mountains, a pale smudge against that nearer conflagration which still sent wings of flame up into the great black starry vault of the sky. ‘One would think,’ he observed to this scene of splendour where his mind dwelt at ease, ‘that people would have some sense of proportion, considering the state the world’s in.’

A pause. He turned his pen angrily between his fingers. Mrs Quest knitted behind him in silence; she had that evening begun on a jacket for the baby Jeffrey.

‘But I suppose it makes no difference one way or the other,’ he went on. Mrs Quest, clicked her tongue protestingly.

Mr Quest, with a final, confirming glance at the stars, the fiery mountain, the empty veld, murmured, ‘After all – those stars are millions of years away, so they say …’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Quest again, uneasily.

Mr Quest’s pen was motionless in mid-air. His eyes were wide at the sky. ‘So if one damned foolish girl wants to make a mess of her life …’ He lowered his pen carefully to the paper and began to write.

When her mother had left, Martha cupped her hands protectingly over her stomach, and murmured to the creature within that nothing would be allowed to harm it, no pressure would deform it, freedom would be its gift. She, Martha, the free spirit, would protect the creature from her, Martha, the maternal force; the maternal Martha, that enemy, would not be allowed to enter the picture. It was as one independent being to another that Martha spoke; and her hands on her flesh were light, as if even this pressure might be an unforgivable imposition.

To Douglas she forcibly outlined the things they must avoid in this child’s future. First, even to suggest that the child might be one sex rather than another might have deplorable results – to be born as it chose was its first inalienable right. Secondly they, the parents, must never try to form its mind in any way whatsoever. Thirdly, it must be sent to a progressive school, where it might survive the process of education unmutilated – for Martha felt, like so many others, that progressive schools were in some way outside society, vacuums of progress, as it were. If this last necessity involved their sending the child at an early age to a country where there was a progressive school, then so much the better; for a child without any parents at all clearly had a greater chance of survival as a whole personality.

To all this Douglas easily agreed. The ease with which he did agree disconcerted Martha slightly; for her convictions had after all come from the bitterest schooling, which he had escaped. He did remark at one point that the war might make it difficult to do as they liked about schools, but she waved this aside.

Douglas was very satisfied with Martha. There had been moments in the last few weeks when she had seemed unreasonable, but that had all vanished. She was now gay and amenable, and the whole business of having a baby was being made to appear as a minor incident, to be dealt with as practically as possible. Practicality was the essence of the business, they both agreed; and the completed cot, a mass of icy white satin and lace, was a frivolous note of contrast to the sternness of their approach. For Martha, who was prepared to spend infinite emotional energy on protecting the child from her emotions, it was a matter of principle that the physical requirements should be as simple as possible. She took one look at the lists of things supposed to be needed for a small baby, and dismissed them with derision, as Alice had already done. By the end of a fortnight after she knew she was pregnant, she already had everything necessary to sustain that child for the first six months of its life. They filled a small basket. The child might be born now, if it chose. Martha even had the feeling that the business was nearly over. For she was once more in the grip of a passionate need to hurry. Impatience to be beyond this milestone was a fever in her. The five months between now and the birth of the child were nothing—five months of ordinary living flashed by so fast they were unnoticeable, therefore it was possible to look forward to the birth as if it were nearly here. Almost, it seemed to Martha that strength of mind alone would be enough to rush her through those months; even her stomach might remain flat, if she were determined enough.

In the meantime, she continued to live exactly as she had done before. She would have scorned to abdicate in any way, and in this Alice agreed with her: the two women, meeting at some dance or drinking party in the evening, congratulated each other on not showing anything; retiring into comfortable distortion would have seemed a complete surrender to weakness.

Almost at once, however, and it seemed from one day to the next, the wall of Martha’s stomach pushed out in a hard curve, behind which moved the anonymous but powerful child, and Martha’s fingers, tentatively exploring the lump, received messages that strength of mind alone was not enough. Besides, while Alice and she, the centre of a group of approving and envious people, insisted gaily that no fuss whatsoever was to be made about these children, that they were not to be allowed to change their parents’ lives – and in their own interests at that – it was obvious that both were very jealous of their privacy. Husbands and friends found these women admirably unchanged; during the daytime they retired, and were irritable at being disturbed.

The moment Douglas had gone to the office, Martha drifted to the divan, where she sat, with listening hands, so extraordinarily compelling was the presence of the stranger in her flesh. Excitement raced through her; urgency to hurry was on her. Yet, after a few minutes, these emotions sank. She had understood that time, once again, was going to play tricks with her. At the end of the day, when Douglas returned from the office, she roused herself with difficulty, dazed. To her it was as if vast stretches of time had passed. Inside her stomach the human race had fought and raised its way through another million years of its history; that other time was claiming her; she understood the increasing vagueness of Alice’s eyes; it was becoming an effort to recognize the existence of anything outside this great central drama.

Into it, like noises off, came messages from the ordinary world.

For instance, from her father. A few lines in his careful hand, dated three weeks back – clearly he had forgotten to post it.

My dear Matty,

I understand you are going to have a baby. I suppose this is a good thing? Naturally, it is for you to say. Your mother is very pleased. What I wanted to say was, if there is anything I can do, I shall be glad. Children have a tendency not to be what you expect. But why should they be? Some damned kaffir has let a fire start on the Dumfries Hills. Extraordinarily pretty it is. We have been watching it at nights.

And then the careful close, the basic forms of the letters shaped and formed, with the capital letters all flourishes: ‘You affectionate Father.’ After this, hasty and expostulating, one rapid sentence which said all that he had failed to get into his letter: ‘Damn it all, Matty, it’s so damned inconsistent!’

Martha felt helpless with tenderness for him. She could see him writing it: the pen hovering before each word and dipped so reluctantly into the wells of feeling because duty demanded it of him; his mouth set in duty; and all the time his eyes straying towards the landscape outside. She wrote him a flippant letter saying she was apparently doomed to be inconsistent; she was terribly happy to be having a baby; she couldn’t imagine why she had not wanted one!

And there was politics, in the shape of a twenty-page letter from Solly. Solly had been betrayed. The communal settlement, only three months old, had been blown into fragments by the Stalin-Hitler pact. Having read it twice, Martha pushed it aside, with every intention of writing to assuage the unhappiness it revealed. But after a day or so she was left not with the impression of unhappiness: she saw, rather, a dramatic figure on a stage. She did not understand it. If, however, she had remembered that with no personal memory of the Twenties she had succeeded in imaginatively experiencing the atmosphere of the decade from people who had, she might have looked forward to the time when the Thirties would be similarly reconstructed for her. As it was, she could only shrug. Solly – vociferous, exclamatory, bitter, had gone into the Cohen store as ‘the lowest-paid clerk’, which, he seemed to feel, served history right. Also, he had taken a packing case to the market square where the Africans bought their vegetables, stood on it and harangued them for an hour on how they had been betrayed, they now stood alone, on their own efforts would their future depend.

Apparently this throng of illiterate servants and casual labourers had listened with respect for his efforts, but without understanding, as they should instantly have done, the nature of the revelations being made to them. Solly had been taken off in a police van and – final insult – fined ten shillings for being drunk and disorderly. ‘As you know, I consider alcohol degrading.’ It all went to show the incredible stupidity of the authorities in not understanding their real enemies, personified by Solly.

Solly stood before the magistrate – as it happened, Mr Maynard – and delivered a fine speech on the historical development of liberty. Mr Maynard, interested but at sea, had suggested practically that it was a pity he didn’t finish at the university; such talents should not be wasted. This was the final blow to Solly’s pride.

Martha got a letter from Mr Maynard, giving his version of the affair.

… A friend of yours, apparently? I took him out to lunch after the case, because of my insatiable interest in the vagaries of the young. His vagaries, however, do seem to me to be out of ‘historical context’ – a phrase I learned from him. Surely behaviour more appropriate for England or Europe? One feels it is wasted on us. It would appear that he feels there is no hope for the world at all; I find it enviable that people should still care that this should be so. At my age, I take it for granted. He says he is now a Trotskyist. I said that I was sure this would be a great blow to Stalin, but that I would infinitely prefer my own son to be a Trotskyist rather than the town buffoon, it at least shows an interest in public affairs. This annoyed your friend exceedingly. He feels I should have sent him to prison for six months. If I had only known, I would have obliged him. Why not? But, as I pointed out to him, since the sons of our Chief Citizens think nothing of spending their nights in the custody of the police – Binkie was given a ‘shakedown’, as he calls it, the other night in the company of some of the ‘lads’ – the hands of the police are hardly the place for conscientious intellectuals. They wouldn’t appreciate him, either.

Making feeble elderly jokes of this kind had the opposite effect to that I intended. He remarked darkly that the Revolution (which?) took too little heed of the differences in the degree of consciousness of the ruling classes. He said there was nothing he despised more than a reactionary who imagined himself a liberal. Could this mean me? He went on to say I was making a mistake to underrate him. I took this to mean that there must be a vast conspiracy under our noses among the blacks.

My information, however, is that this is not the case. An interesting similarity, this; between the good ladies of the city, who are moaning with horror over their bridge tables about your friend Solomon’s exploit, and your friend Solomon himself, whose imagination is no less romantic. However, I was writing to say that I am delighted you are having a baby. Since you are probably still bathed in the sweats of the honeymoon, you will not agree with me when I say that children are the only justification of marriage. I should like to be godfather to your (I hope) daughter. Naturally, I hasten to say, without the benefit of religion. If I’m not mistaken, this would be against your principles? I should like, however, to be ‘in’ on it. I wanted a daughter more than anything.

This last sentence touched Martha deeply, coming as it did after the painful self-punishments of the rest of the letter. It was to the writer of that sentence she sent an affectionate reply, ignoring the rest.

Almost at once various other letters arrived, and, her nose being as acute as it was to sense any form of spiritual invasion, she was becoming aware that the people who are sucked irresistibly into the orbit of marriage are by no means the same as those who respond to the birth of a child. Mr Maynard, for instance, could be witty about marriage, but not about daughters. Mrs Talbot was never anything but tender about daughters, sighed continually over the children she had not had, sent a charming note of congratulation to Martha, but for some weeks saw very little of the young couple, for she had become absorbed in the wedding of a friend of Elaine’s, who needed all her attention. Various elderly ladies, scarcely known to Martha, rushed into her flat, folded her in their arms, offered her their friendship, and lingered, talking about their own children with the wistful, discouraged look which always made Martha feel so lacking.

Above all, the elder Mrs Knowell, who had done no more than send sprightly telegrams of congratulation from the other end of the colony about the wedding, suddenly arrived in person. That creature in Martha which was the animal alert for danger against her cub waited tensely for the arrival of a possible enemy; and the other raw nerve was sounding a warning: this woman was likely to be a forecast of her own fate. For – she had worked it out with mathematical precision – since men were bound to marry their mothers, then she, in the end, would become Douglas’s mother. But she was committed to be like her own mother. And if the two women were not in the least alike? That did not matter; in its own malevolent way, fate would adjust this incompatibility too, and naturally to Martha’s disadvantage.

As Mrs Knowell entered the room, Martha’s defences went down. They had been erected in the wrong quarter. She had been expecting something gay, jolly, with the self-conscious eccentricity of the letters and telegrams. Mrs Knowell stood hesitating, kissed Martha carefully, and took her seat like a visitor. At once she took out a cigarette. Martha unconsciously curled out of sight her own stained fingers, and looked at the big, rather nervous hands, soaked in nicotine. This was something altogether different from what she had been waiting for! Mrs Knowell was a tall woman, big in the bone, yet with thick flesh loose about her. She had heavy brown eyes, the whites stained yellow; she wore a mass of faded yellow hair in a big untidy bun. Her skin was sallow, and as a concession to what was expected of her she had put a hasty rub of yellowish lipstick across a full sad mouth. She wore a yellowish-brown dress. Nervous exhaustion came from her like a breath of stale air. She watched Martha as she made the tea, and made conversation, in a way which said clearly that she had come prepared not to interfere or infringe. It positively made Martha nervous. Her talk quite contradicted the heavy watchful eyes: it was gay and amusing; this was the personality which enabled her friends from what she herself referred to as her ‘palmy’ days to entertain her with a warm amused affection as a persistent enfant terrible. That gay old child, flitting erractically from one house to another, dropping in on a bridge game from a town seventy miles away, or suddenly taking flight in the middle of a two-week visit on an irresistible impulse to see a friend at the other end of the colony, was a creation of such tact that Martha found herself undermined by pity and admiration.

Mrs Knowell was not of the first generation of pioneering women. She had ridden in covered waggons in the months-long journey from the south, but without need to take cover against hostile tribes. She had lived in the remote parts of the country, but the rifle which leaned against the wall was against wild animals and not a native rising. Her husband had been farmer, miner, policemen, businessman, as opportunity offered; he had made several fortunes and lost them in the casual way which was then customary. She had borne eight children, and kept two alive. The daughter in England was married to a small-town solicitor; they kept up a bright and entertaining correspondence.

Mrs Knowell had succeeded in imposing on everyone who knew her this gallant and independent old lady, the jolly old girl; yet, if that heavy yellow stare, that tight defensive set of her limbs, that tired dry undercurrent to her voice meant anything, it was that her battles had been fought not against lions and flooded rivers or the accidents of a failing gold reef. She was in every way of the second generation; and Martha, impulsively ignoring the ‘amusing’ remarks, as if she were insulted that such a fraud should be offered to her, spoke direct to what she felt was the real woman, out of her deepest conviction that anything less than the truth was the worst of betrayals, and more – that this truth should be an acknowledgment of some kind of persistent dry cruelty feeding the roots of life. Nothing else would do.

Mrs Knowell responded slowly, with a nervous gratitude. She tentatively mentioned the baby; Martha talked of it without defences. Mrs Knowell, released by this new baby into her memories of her own, spoke of them as she had obviously intended not to do. She began talking of the way they had died – blackwater, malaria, a neglected appendix. She began telling a long story, in a heavy, slow, tired voice, of an occasion when she had found herself alone on a farm, fifty miles from anywhere, her husband having gone to buy some cattle. She had been pregnant with her second child, her first having died. She had slept each night with locked and barricaded doors, a revolver under her pillow. In the day she had been frightened to move away from the house. Martha could imagine it, the lonely farmhouse, blistering in the heat, the empty veld stretching for miles all around. ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Knowell, smiling drily, ‘I never told Philip I was lonely.’ Into this loneliness had come riding a young policeman on his rounds. ‘He was so kind to me, Matty – he was so kind.’ Martha, who had been expecting the story to continue, found it had reached its conclusion. Mrs Knowell stirred herself, and remarked, ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I never talk about it.’ Martha, who was triumphant at that admission, which it was her need, for some reason, to gain, replayed, as it were, in her head, like a recording, that story of the weeks of loneliness, in the light of that final ‘He was so kind to me’ – and found it enough.

She was being very kind to Mrs Knowell. She liked her enormously, and knew Mrs Knowell liked her. It was understood that Mrs Knowell would stay to lunch, would spend the afternoon with Martha, and in the evening the three of them would go out somewhere. Into this scene burst Douglas, cheerfully rubbing his hands, and embraced his mother with the words, ‘Well, Mater, what have you been up to?’

There was a short pause, while the currents changed, and Mrs Knowell visibly rallied the bright old lady. She offered some hilarious stories about the people she had just been staying with. Her weeks in that house had been one long picnic of jam-making, bottling, pickling. She had cut her finger—she wagged it before them, laughing. Now she was departing south, and had taken the opportunity to drop in and see the dear children.

Douglas invited his mother to admire Martha’s health and attractiveness. She did so. Both Douglas and Martha became offhandedly practical about the whole affair; Douglas began to tease his mother about her preoccupation with such old-lady-like things as embroidered pillowcases and lace-edged dresses. Mrs Knowell preserved her amused sprightliness for a while, but became noticeably silent, while Martha chattered brightly, in a hard voice, about unhygienic sentimentality – this was not at all as she had been alone with her.

After a while Mrs Knowell suggested wistfully that it was such fun to make things for a new baby; and saw them exchanging glances in tolerant silence.

‘But it is!’ she cried out. ‘I’d love to have the chance of making little things again.’

‘Now come off it, Mater,’ said Douglas cheerfully. ‘We’re not going to have any of that.’

After a while she got up and remarked that as she was going to play bridge with Mrs Talbot that afternoon she must hurry away.

Douglas, relieved, teased her about being a frivolous old woman. She bravely announced that she had taken one shilling and sixpence off Mrs Talbot the last time she had played with her.

In a flurry of jokes, kisses, promises to meet soon, she departed. Martha was left with the memory of those yellowing tired eyes resting on her in hurt disappointment. She felt a traitor. And yet, by themselves, they had understood each other so well!

Douglas was speaking with grateful enthusiasm about his mother’s capacity for enjoying herself so much at her age – Martha reminded herself that, after all, Mrs Knowell was only fifty. Douglas went on to remark practically that at least they needn’t expect any interference from her, she always had far too much on her own plate to bother about other people. Martha was on the point of repudiating this comfortable evasion of the truth, but let the moment go.

Mrs Knowell departed from the city that evening, after sending a small parcel by Mrs Talbot’s houseboy, containing a dozen long muslin dresses, exquisitely embroidered and tucked, with a note saying; ‘These were Douglas’s when he was a baby. I offered them to my daughter, but she said they were not practicable. But if you can’t use them, then they’ll do as dusters. I really haven’t time to see you dear children again, I must get off to the Valley, they’re having a picnic on Sunday, and I wouldn’t miss that for worlds.’

Later, Mrs Talbot remarked that Mrs Knowell had been as erratic as ever: she had promised to stay a week, and left after half a day. She was really so wonderful for her age.

Martha was sitting down the next morning to write a nice letter to the old lady, to make some amends for the unpleasant way she knew she had behaved, when a native messenger arrived from Douglas’s office. There was a note saying: ‘Well, we’re off! War’s just been declared.’ After the signature, the words, ‘Matters appear extremely serious.’

Martha tried to feel that matters were extremely serious. Outside, however, a serene sunlight, and the pleasant bustle of an ordinary morning. She switched the wireless on – silence. Then the telephone rang. Alice, in tears, repeating angrily, ‘And now Willie’s bound to go and I’ll be alone.’ Then Stella, who also wept: the situation demanded no less.

But, having put the receiver down, she stood listening to the silence as if there was something more, some other word that needed to be said; she heard now that same dissatisfaction in the voices of the two women who had ceased speaking, and were doubtless engaged in busily telephoning others to find whatever it was they all needed. ‘They say that war has been declared, Matty?’ It was this incredulous query which floated in her inner ear. She was extremely restless. She looked at the blue squares of park and sky which opened the walls of the flat, and it seemed menacing that nothing had changed. She went out into the streets. There, surely, the war would be visible? But everything was the same. A knot of people in sober argument stood on the pavement’s edge. She approached them and found them talking about the prices of farm implements. She walked through the streets, listening for a voice, any voice, speaking of the war, so that it might seem real. After a while she found herself outside the offices of the newspaper. There clustered a small crowd, faces lifted towards windows where could be seen the large indistinct shapes of machinery. They were hushed and apprehensive; here danger could be felt. But Martha saw after a minute that they were all older people; she did not belong with them.

She went home to the wireless set, which was playing dance music. It was now lunchtime, and she wished Douglas might come home. At the end of half an hour she was disgusted to find herself making angry speeches of reproach to him in her mind – a conventional jailer wife might do no less! Nothing, she told herself, was more natural than that he should find the bars and meeting places of the city more exciting than coming home to her. She would do the same in his place. And so she waited until afternoon in a mood of impatient expectancy; and when the door at last opened, and he came in, she flew at him and demanded, ‘What’s the news? What’s happened?’ For surely something must have!

But it appeared that nothing had happened. In both their minds was a picture of London laid in ruins, smoking and littered with corpses. But it seemed that while they thought of London, of England, the imaginations of most were moving far nearer home. Douglas announced ruefully that women were already sitting shuddering in their homes, convinced that Hitler’s armies might sweep down over Africa in ‘a couple of days’, and more – the natives were on the point of rising. In any colony, a world crisis is always seen first in terms of native uprising. In fact it seemed that the dark-skinned people had only the vaguest idea that the war had started, and the authorities’ first concern was to explain to them through wireless and loudspeaker why it was their patriotic task to join their white masters in taking up arms against the monster across the seas in a Europe they could scarcely form a picture of, whose crimes consisted of invading other people’s countries and forming a society based on the conception of a master race.

Douglas was stern, subdued, authoritative. Martha was only too ready to find this impressive. Almost, she found her dissatisfactions fed. But it was soon clear that Douglas too was waiting for that word, that final clinching of emotion. He moved about the flat as if it was confining him, and suggested they should drop across to the Burrells. They met the Burrells and the Mathews coming in. They went in a body up to the Sports Club, where several hundred young people were waiting for the wireless to shape what they felt into something noble and dramatic.

By evening, the hotels were full. To dance would be heartless and unpatriotic; but to stay at home was out of the question. The bands were playing ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ to packed, silent masses of people who seemed to find it not enough. They stood waiting. They were waiting for the King’s speech, and with a nervous hunger that began to infect Martha. The pillars of the long, low white dance room were wreathed in flags; when the band struck up ‘God Save the King’ the wind of the music seemed to stir the Union Jacks hanging bunched over their heads. When the slow, diffident voice floated out over the crowd, it was noticeable that a stern, self-dedicated look was deepening on all the faces around her. Douglas, she saw, was standing to attention, his face set and proud. So were Willie and Andrew. Alice, however, appeared miserable; and Stella, whose facial muscles were set into a mould of devoted service, was steadily tapping her small gold-covered foot, not impatiently, but as if preserving some rhythm of her own. As for Martha, she found these three young men, stiff as ramrods, with their fists clenched down by their sides, rather ridiculous. After all, she was pointing out to herself, even while her throat muscles tightened irritably against an unaccountable desire to weep – she resented very much that her emotions were being roused by flags, music and solemnity against her will—after all, if any of these young men were to be asked what they thought about the monarchy, their attitude would rather be one of indulgent allowance towards other people’s weaknesses. She glanced sideways towards Alice, and Stella; involuntarily they glanced back, and, not for the first time or last time, acknowledged what they felt by a small, humorous tightening of the lips.

The speech was over. The enormous crowd breathed out a sigh. But they remained there, standing, in silence. The courtyards were packed, the bars crammed, the big room itself jammed tight. For some people it was clear that the word had been said – they were released. A few groups disengaged themselves from the edges of the crowd and went home: mostly elderly people. Everyone else was waiting. The band again struck up ‘Tipperary’. Then it slid into a dance tune. No one moved. Stern glances assailed the manager, who stood in acute indecision by the pillar. He made a gesture to the band. Silence. But they could not stand there indefinitely; nor could they go home. Soon people were standing everywhere, glasses in their hands, in the dance room itself, the verandas, the bars, the courts. The band remained on its platform, benevolently regarding the crowd, their instruments at rest. At last they began playing music which was neutral and inoffensive; selections from The Merry Widow and The Pirates of Penzance. And still no one went home. The manager stood watching his patrons with puzzled despair. Clearly he should be giving them something else. At last he approached a certain visiting general from England, who was standing at the bar. This gentleman climbed up beside the band, and began to speak. He spoke of 1914. The date, and the words Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme, were like a bell tolling, and led to the conclusion of the speech, which was: ‘ … this day, September the third, 1939.’ Heightened and solemn it was; and the hours they had been living through, so formless and unsatisfactory, achieved their proper shape, and became a day they would remember always; it could be allowed to slide back into the past, and become another note of the solemn bell pealing the black dates of history.

There was nothing more to be said. The general, with a long, half-appealing look at his audience, as if to say ‘I’ve done my best,’ climbed from the platform, hastily adjusting his tunic. The band rose and gathered their instruments. Now they could all go home.

As the Knowells, the Burrells, and the Mathews reached the pavement, Stella remarked in a humorous, apologetic voice that she thought she was going to have a baby. It fell flat.