Читать книгу A Proper Marriage - Doris Lessing - Страница 7

When Martha woke, she knew she had slept badly. Several times she had half roused, with the urgent knowledge that she ought to be attending to something; and this anxiety seemed to be of the same quality as that suggested by the great dragging circle of lights, which continued to flicker through her sleep like a warning. The ceiling of the small bedroom spun with light until after midnight, when the wheel was stilled; then bars of yellow light lay deep over the ceiling, over the bed, across Douglas’s face, from a room opposite, where a man must be lying awake reading, or a woman keeping vigil with a sick child.

At six she was fully awake. The sky outside was chilly white-gold haze; winter was coming. She leaned on her elbow to look out at the wheel; in this small colourless light it rested motionless, insignificant, and the machinery of the fun fair beneath it seemed tawdry and even pathetic. It no longer had the power to move her; and the fact that it had so disturbed her sleeping was absurd. But Martha had been born – or so it seemed – with the knowledge that the hours of sleep were long and busy, and of the same texture as the hours of waking. She entered sleep cautiously, like an enemy country. She knew, too, however, that for most it was a sudden dropping of a dark curtain, and regarded this other family of mankind with a simple envy, the result of her upbringing so far away from the centres of sophistication, where she would have learned to use the word ‘neurotic’ as a label that would make any further thought on the subject unnecessary, or as a kind of badge guaranteeing a superior sensibility. She was in that primitive condition where she was able to pay healthy respect to – Douglas, for instance.

She looked at him now with a rather wistful curiosity. He lay on his back, easily outstretched among the sheets and blankets. He was handsome when he slept. His face was open and rather flushed. An outflung arm, as if it had just fallen loose from the act of throwing something, lay in a calm, beautiful line from waist to shoulder. The upper part of his body emerging from the clothes, was solid, compact, the flesh clear and healthy; a light sprinkling of freckles over white, bright skin. He looked stern and dignified, sealed away from her in his sleep, and restored to the authority of good sense. Martha’s respect for him was now deep and genuine. She thought, with a simplicity which was authorized and confirmed by the dignity of his face, I shall say we must stop being married; he won’t mind.

When he woke, everything would be explained and settled.

Waiting for him to wake, she sat up and looked out. The town, no less than the fun fair, looked small and mean after the hazy splendours of the night. The two big blocks of flats opposite rose white and solid, but rain had streaked their sides into dinginess. Their windows were dead and asleep. Beyond them, half a dozen business houses, their surfaces clean with paint, glossy with money; and beyond these again, the tin-roofed shanties of the Coloured town, which marked the confines of order; for on two sides of this organized centre stretched the locations, or straggling slums where the Africans were. From a single small window she could overlook at least three worlds of life, quite separate, apparently self-contained, apparently linked by nothing but hate …But these familiar ideas, sprung in her mind by the simple act of looking through a window, were too much of a burden this morning. First Douglas should wake, and then it would be time to look out of the window. She might suggest to him, for instance, that he should at once throw up his job, and they should go and ‘live among the people’.

She sprang out of bed, but noiselessly, and went next door to the living room. There, as she expected, lay a small heap of letters where Douglas had flung them down the night before. She carried them back to bed with her. Most were of that sort which people write to those getting married, in order that they may say with pride, ‘We have had so and so many letters of congratulation.’ At least, Martha could not yet see letters of politeness in any other way. She therefore tossed them aside, and took up one from her brother, now at the University of Cape Town. It was a good-humoured letter, full of determinedly humorous tolerance; their relations were always harmonious; in order that two people may quarrel they must have something in common to quarrel over.

The next, also from the university, was from Joss Cohen. She opened it with the most vivid delight; she even held it unopened for a moment, to delay the pleasure of reading it. What she expected from it was – but what did she not expect from Joss Cohen! At last she opened it. Four lines.

Dear Matty,

Your brother mentioned that you got married last week. I must admit this was something of a surprise. However, please accept my congratulations. I hope your marriage will be happy and prosperous.

Yours,

Joss

She put it down slowly, flushing with hurt anger. It was that word ‘prosperous’ which stung her. Then she reread it, trying to revive him as he really was, since these colourless lines could have no power to evoke him. She admitted at last that she felt abandoned because he had not thought her worth even the trouble of a sarcastic phrase. Very well, then: she dropped the letter into the pile of purely formal ones.

The third was from Marnie Van Rensberg, on blue paper with a pink rose in one corner.

Dear Matty,

Mom told me your news this morning. She heard it from your Mom at the station when she went in to get the mail. I am so happy Matty now we are both married. I hope you will be very happy. I am going to have a baby in January. The doctor says February, they think they know everything. I hope it will be a boy because Dirk wants a boy. I don’t mind what it is, but for my sake I hope it’s a girl really, but who would be a woman in this world. Ha. Ha.

Affectionately, your old pal,

Marnie

The fourth was from Solly Cohen, and from the moment Martha opened it she knew she would find in it everything Joss had refused.

Well, well, Martha Quest. I’m not surprised, you are a born marrier, and I always told Joss so when he insisted something might be done with you. I hear high civil service prospects, pension, and no doubt a big house in the suburbs. If not yet, it will come, it will come. Well, well, you’ll have to be a good girl now, no naughty ideas about the colour bar – no ideas of any kind, for that matter. If there is one thing you can’t afford, dear Matty, in the station of life into which you’ve chosen to marry, god help you, it is ideas.

Well, as you will see from the address, I’m not in Cape Town any more. The higher education, being nothing but sh—, is not for me, though Joss is apparently prepared to go through with it. I’m making an effort towards communal life in the Coloured quarters of our great metropolis, a small light in a naughty world. All the boorjoys are very shocked, of course. I shall naturally not be allowed to have visitors of your sort, but if at any time you feel like dropping a line from your exalted world of tea parties, sundowners and sound incomes, I shall be pleased to read it.

Yours,

Solly

(I am not supposed to have letters unless the whole group approves, but I shall explain that a certain amount is due to you as a victim of the system.)

At first Martha allowed herself to feel angry and hurt, but almost at once she laughed, with the insight of fellow feeling. She read it again, isolated the word ‘god’, with a small g, and then the word ‘boorjoys’. That’s what you are doing it for, she thought maliciously. At once Joss seemed infinitely better than his brother; Solly was nothing but a child beside him. But at the same time she was thinking of this communal household as a refuge for herself. She had decided she would go there at once, that very morning, and ask if she might join them. She yearned towards it – a life of simplicity, conversation and ideals. And in the Coloured quarters, too … she was about to leap out of bed to pack a suitcase which would be the most final of arguments against being married, when she saw there was another letter lying among the folds of the bedclothes. It was from her mother.

My dear Girl,

I do hope you enjoyed your honeymoon, and are not too tired after it. I am just writing to say that we have finally decided to sell the farm, we have had a good offer and shall settle in town. Somewhere near you, so that I can help you now that you are married and … (Here a line was carefully scratched out, but Martha made out the word ‘baby’, and went cold with anger.) At any rate, perhaps I can be of use.

No more now, affectionately,

Mother

This letter affected Martha like a strong drug. She threw herself on Douglas.

‘What’s the matter?’ he jerked out, as he woke. He looked at her closely, and at once sat up. He yawned a little, warm and easy with sleep, then he smiled and put his arm around her.

‘Douglas,’ she announced furiously, ‘do you know, I’ve had a letter from my mother, and do you know, they’re moving into town after me, just in order to run my life for me, that’s all it is, and – ’

‘Hold your horses,’ he demanded. He absorbed this information, and said at last, ‘Well, Matty, they were bound to move in sometime, what of it?’

She froze inwardly; and after a pause, moved away again. He moved after her, and began patting her shoulders rhythmically: he was calm, matter-of-fact, sensible.

‘Now look here,’ he went on. ‘I know you have a thing about this, but you seem to think fate’s got it in for you specially or something of the sort. All girls quarrel with their mothers, and mothers interfere – you should have seen my sister and my mother before Anne went to England. They were just like a couple of cats. Of course your mother’s a bit of a Tartar. Just don’t take any notice. And in any case’– there he laughed good-temperedly – ‘you’ll be just as bad at her age,’ he teased her.

These sensible remarks struck her as the extreme of brutality; but no sooner had she felt a rush of emotional indignation than a sincere emotion took hold of her. What Douglas had said, phrase after phrase, struck straight at her deepest and most private terrors. For if she remained in the colony when she had wanted to leave it, got married when she wanted to be free and adventurous, always did the contrary to what she wanted most, it followed that there was no reason why at fifty she should not be just such another woman as Mrs Quest, narrow, conventional, intolerant, insensitive. She was cold and trembling with fear. She had no words to express this sense of appalling fatality which menaced everyone, her mother as well as herself. She wriggled off the bed, away from his warm and consoling hand, and went to the window. Outside, the sunlight was now warm and yellow, everything was activity.

‘Look,’ she said flatly, ‘it’s like this. Ever since I can remember, they’ve been on that farm, stuck in poverty like flies on flypaper. All the time, daydreams about all kinds of romantic escapes – for years I believed it all. And now suddenly everything becomes perfectly simple, and don’t you see, it was all for nothing. That’s the point – it was all for nothing.’

She heard her voice rising dramatically, and stopped, irritated with herself.

Douglas was watching her. There was a look in his eyes which struck her. She looked down at herself. She was wearing a thin nightgown. She saw that he was finding her attractive in this mood. She was completely furious. With a gesture of contempt she picked up a dressing gown and covered herself. Then she said flatly, ‘I can see I am being ridiculous.’ Then, since he looked hurt and shamefaced, she began hurriedly, in an impulse to share it with him, ‘The whole point is this: if it wasn’t the sweepstakes, it was a gold mine or a legacy. In the meantime, nothing but the most senseless poverty –’

But again she heard that dramatic note in her voice, and stopped short. That was not what she felt! She was unable to say what she meant in a way that sounded true. Silence – and she was filling with helpless exhaustion. Suddenly she thought, It’s all so boring. She felt obscurely that the whole thing was old-fashioned. The time for dramatic revolts against parent was past; it all had a stale air. How ridiculous Solly was, with his communal settlements, and throwing up university – for what? It had all been done and said already. She had no idea what was the origin of this appalling feeling of flatness, staleness and futility.

‘Oh, well,’ she began at last, in a cheerful hard voice, ‘it all doesn’t matter. Nothing one does makes any difference, and by the time we’re middle-aged we’ll be as stupid and reactionary as our parents – and so it all goes on, one might as well get used to it!’

‘Now Matty!’ protested Douglas, helplessly, ‘what on earth do you expect me to do about it? I’ll stand by you, of course, if that’s what you want.’ He saw her face, which wore an unconscious look of pure hopeless fear, and decided it was enough. He got out of bed, and came to her. ‘Now, don’t worry, I shall look after you, everything’s all right.’

At this Martha clung to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said brightly and falsely. ‘I’m an awful fool.’

He kissed her, patted her here and there in an affectionate and brotherly way, and then said, ‘For God’s sake, I shall be late for the office. You should have woken me before.’ He went whistling into the bathroom, and began shaving.

She went back to bed, propped a hand mirror on a ridge of blanket, and tried to brush her hair into shape. She did not want to be noticed, and each time Douglas came in to fetch something she hastily turned away. But when he at last came in fully dressed, he remarked, ‘Your hair doesn’t do too badly like that.’ He was now in very good spirits. He announced, rubbing his hands, that he must not be late. There would be some sort of show at the office for him – this was the first day he would be at work since his marriage. As he picked up some papers, and gave his usual efficient glance around to see what he might have forgotten, he remarked, ‘And don’t forget the sundowner party tonight at the Brodeshaws.’

Martha said quickly, ‘Douglas …’

He stopped on his way out. ‘I’m awfully late.’

‘Douglas, why can’t we go to England – or somewhere?’ she inquired resentfully. ‘After all, you said …’

But he cut in quickly, ‘There’s going to be a war, and we can’t take chances now.’

The newspaper was lying over the bedclothes – one glance at the headlines was enough. But she persisted. ‘But it would be much better there than here if the war comes – at least we would be really in it.’

‘Now look, Matty, I really am late.’ He went out, hastily.

For some time she remained where she was, surrounded by the lanky sheets of newsprint, by scraps of letter, by the hand mirror, the brush, a tangle of the new white wedding linen. The headlines on the newspaper filled her with nothing but the profoundest cynicism. Then she saw a small book lying open on the bed, and pulled it towards her. She saw it was Douglas’s engagement book, and left it; for it was certainly her strongest principle that, a wife who looked at her husband’s letters or pockets was the blackest sort of traitor to decency. But the little book still lay open, at arm’s length. It was, after all, only an engagement book; and these engagements would concern herself. Compromising with her principles by not actually touching it, she moved closer and read the entries for the next two weeks. There was not a day free of sundowner parties, dances, lunches. Most of the names she did not know. The little book, lying beside the crumpled newspaper with its frightening black headlines, provided the strongest comment on her situation. She saw Solly’s letter, with its emphatic scrawl of an address, foundering among billows of sheet. Her anxiety focused itself sharply with: I’ve got to get out of it all. She got up, and dressed rapidly. Her clothes were all crushed from packing; there was nothing to wear but the blue linen from yesterday. But what she looked like, she assured herself, would be quite irrelevant to Solly, who was now monastic and high-minded in his communal settlement. In a few minutes she had left the untidy flat behind, and was in the street.

And no sooner had she turned the corner which shut out the flats, than it seemed as if not only they but her marriage did not exist – so strong was her feeling of being free. She was regarding her marriage, the life she was committed to, with a final, horrified dislike. Everything about it seemed false and ridiculous, and that Matty who apparently was making such a success of it had nothing to do with herself, Martha, now walking at leisure down this street on a cool fine morning. It was only a short walk to the Coloured quarters, and she went slowly, loitering along the pavements under the trees, picking off leaves from the hedges, pulling at the long grass which forced itself up wherever there was a gap in the pavement.

What puzzled her most was that she was a success. The last few weeks, confused, hectic, hilarious, had one thread running through it: the delight of other people in this marriage. How many had not embraced her, and with the warmest emotion! Everyone was happy about it – and why? For – and this was surely the core of the matter? – how could they be so happy, so welcoming, when they didn’t know her? She, Martha, was not involved in it at all; and so in her heart she was convicting them of insincerity. They could not possibly mean it, she concluded at last, dismissing all these friends and acquaintances, the circle into which she was marrying. The whole thing was a gigantic social deception. From the moment she had said she would marry Douglas, a matter which concerned – and on this point she was determined – no one but their own two selves, some sort of machinery had been set in motion which was bound to involve more and more people. Martha could feel nothing but amazed despair at the thought of the number of people who were so happy on their account.

And now she began walking as quickly as she could, as if running away from something tangible. She was already, in mind, with Solly, who would most certainly help her, rescue her; she did not quite know what he would do, but the truth of her relations with the Cohen boys, difficult, sometimes, but at least based on what they really thought and felt, could not possibly betray her now.

The street he had chosen to live in was in the most squalid part of town. She could not help smiling sourly as the poverty deepened around her: nothing less than the worst would do for Solly! Once these houses had been built for the new settlers. They were small and unpretentious, simple shells of brick covered with corrugated iron. Now each house held half a dozen families. Each was like a little town, miserable ragged children everywhere, washing hanging across doorways, gutters running filthy water. Between two such concentrated slums was a small house high on its foundations, in the centre of a fenced patch of garden. There were no other gardens in the street, only untidy earth, littered with tins, bits of cloth, trodden grass. Here, inside the new fence, was rich dark earth, with neat rows of bright green vegetables. The gate was new, painted white, and on it was a large board which said ‘Utopia’. Martha laughed again: that touch of self-derision was certainly Solly’s, she thought.

She was opening the gate when she heard a voice. A youth with a watering can emerged from a small shed and demanded what she wanted.

‘I’ve come to see Solly Cohen,’ she said, with a touch of defiance, for she had not, until now, remembered those other members of the community who might forbid her.

He was very young, Jewish, and every inch of him an intellectual, though it appeared he wanted to look like a peasant. After a pause, he nodded reluctantly, and turned away.

Martha went on up the path. There was a smell of hot sun on hot earth, the smell of evaporating water. Small bunches of brilliant green lettuce studded the dark earth, drops of water hung glistening in their leaves. They had just been watered; she could hear the deep soft drinking sound of water being sucked into dry soil. She walked slowly, for the pleasure of hearing it. She remembered how on the farm, after a storm, the tiny mealie plants held in their centres a single round, perfect drop of glittering water … But she was being observed, and by someone who resented her being there. She hurriedly climbed the steps. Whatever squalor had been here was cleaned away. The veranda, a small patch of dark-red cement between low grey walls, was polished and gleaming. The front door was newly painted a bright, strong blue. New paint, and cleanliness, and the windows were sparkling! She opened the blue door and found herself in the living room. It was empty. It was not a large room, but looked so because it had so little in it. The red cement floor had a piece of striped purple-and-yellow matting on it. There were half a dozen low wooden chairs, painted yellow. The walls had books all round them. That was all. To find this room in this street … But at this moment, a door was pushed open and Solly entered. His face showed blank surprise; then he hastily adjusted his expression.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked unwillingly.

Martha sat down without being asked. ‘Do you mind my coming to see you?’ she asked. It sounded rather aggressive.

He could only reply that he did not. He sat down himself, with the air of one being polite against his will. Martha looked to see how he might have changed. Since she had seen him last, he had been to the university, quarrelled with his family, made a trip to England, almost got to Spain, had a love affair, returned, thrown up university for good. None of this showed on his face. He was exactly as he had been, tall, very thin, with a loose knobbly look about his movements. His face was sharp-featured and bony, with the look of the young intellectual Jew: lively and critical, but with an additional sarcastic hostility about him. His clothes were different, however. He wore very short dark-blue shorts and a rusty-brown shirt, falling loose. He was tanned a dark brown.

‘I like the name you’ve chosen for your communal settlement,’ said Martha, ready to laugh with him.

‘We didn’t choose it. It was the name before.’

‘Oh!’ Then: ‘Do you mean the Coloured people called it Utopia?’ she asked, dismayed and touched.

‘That’s right. Stoo-pid, isn’t it?’

She saw he was jeering at her, and came back with ‘I thought you had the grace to laugh at yourselves, at least.’

But he was not prepared to be provoked. In any case Martha blurted out, ‘Can I come and live here, too?’

He looked at her, first grinning, then grave. ‘Well, well,’ he commented at last. Then, cautiously: ‘I thought you’d just got married?’

‘I have. But I want …’ But it was impossible to make explanations. ‘I shouldn’t have got married, anyway. I would like to come and live here. Why shouldn’t I?’ she demanded like a child.

Here Solly, who had been preparing some gestures of amazement or amusement, simply shrugged.

‘But you can’t do that,’ he said reproachfully at last.

Martha was indignant. ‘Why did you write me that letter, then?’ she asked naïvely.

‘But, Matty …’ Here he relapsed into his old manner. He was going to be simple and natural. ‘But, Matty, you can’t go getting married one week and throwing it up the next.’ He was looking at her inquiringly; his face showed an intelligent comprehension – but not kindness.

Martha’s spirits were sinking lower and lower. She saw she had been extremely foolish. However, she continued lamely, ‘You mean, everyone feels like this, it’s like measles, one just has to go through with it?’

‘Having never been married myself …’ he began portentously, but dropped the manner at once. ‘What did you get married for?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Martha ruefully.

‘Anyway, you can’t live here,’ he announced at last. ‘For one thing, there aren’t any women.’

Martha felt herself blushing, and was furious. For the first time it occurred to her that Solly might be taking this as a personal interest in himself. It was intolerable! She exclaimed belligerently, ‘You keep out women?’

At once Solly recovered his jaunty manner. ‘We did ask some girls. Unfortunately none of you can be torn away from your bright lights and your clothes. I suppose you understand that here everything is in common – books, money, everything. And we don’t smoke and we don’t drink.’

‘And you are all celibate?’ she inquired sarcastically.

‘Naturally.’ Then he added, ‘But marriage is allowed.’

But now she laughed scornfully. ‘Anyone’d see that married couples would wreck it.’

‘Luckily we are none of us intending to get married, so that’s all right.’ She was sitting upright in her chair, eyes bright with anger, face flushed – he deliberately lounging in his, with an appearance of conscious ease. ‘And you’re not Jewish either,’ he said. He sounded embarrassed.

This was something she had not thought of; and she saw at once it was unpardonable of her. She flushed deeper; her face was burning steadily, so that she would have liked to hide it. She wanted to say something like ‘So now you’re being exclusive,’ but an awkward guilt stopped her. ‘Well, that’s certainly final,’ she said, trying to sound light and casual. And then, seeing that he was still a little embarrassed, she went on: ‘How many of you?’

‘Four, at the moment. We are modelling ourselves on the settlements in Israel.’

‘Israel?’

‘Palestine to you,’ and he could not help a sudden savage grin.

‘But what will you do when the war starts?’ she asked awkwardly.

‘When the old men have finished their diplomatic fiddling and we can see what they’re up to, we’ll decide. I shall be a conscientious objector if they turn the war against the Soviet Union, and I shall fight if it’s against Hitler.’

She felt very small beside this enviable clarity of mind. ‘How nice to have everything so tidily planned, how nice to be so sure about everything.’ She tried to jeer at him, but it sounded thin.

‘There’s nothing to stop you,’ he said.

She got up, and with a familiar gesture turned to look at the bookshelves. She had only the time to see the names of books she had not heard of, authors that were new, when he said, trying to make a joke of it, ‘No, Matty, you can’t borrow books here. It’s a joint library.’

‘I wasn’t going to.’ She moved towards the door. ‘Well, I’ll go back home, then.’

But now he was obviously contrite. ‘You don’t have to run away. We won’t eat you.’

After hesitation, she returned to her chair. They were now warm with friendship for each other. They were both remembering how often they had sat thus, in a small room filled with books, at the station; outside, the ox waggons rolled heavily through clouds of red dust, and the farmers in their loose working khaki hurried from store to garage, from garage to post office, with their letters and groceries; outside, the black people swarmed around the door of the store, fingering their bits of money and talking excitedly about the bargains they would make. Martha looked out of the window: a mass of dirty little houses, swarms of brown-skinned, poverty-ridden children; but under the window a Jewish youth was hoeing a patch of potatoes.

‘You have no servants?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Well, I don’t see what you’re going to achieve by it,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Except, of course, you’ll have a lovely time yourselves.’ Her tone suggested that this was an aim she was prepared to approve of; but his black eyes watched her sarcastically as from an inner truth she could not be expected to see.

Silence, and the hoe rose and fell in the soft earth outside, with a thud, thud, thud. Someone turned a tap on somewhere close inside the house; the water rushed loudly, then it was cut off – silence again.

‘You study all day, you discipline yourselves, you work hard?’ Martha attempted again.

‘That’s right.’

‘You might just as well be – up in the white town. Why do you have to come and live here?’

‘We have contacts with the local people,’ he said defensively; it seemed this was a weak point.

‘You could have classes for them?’ she said excitedly.

But at this he laughed heavily. ‘That’s right, so we could. As for you, you’ll be dishing out charity to the poor from your lofty position in the civil service, inside five years.’

She shrugged this off impatiently, untouched by the gibe.

‘What sort of – contacts?’ She used the stiff, impersonal word with difficulty, trying to make it into a picture: Solly and his friends, talking, in this room, with some of the poor Coloured people she could see out of the window.

‘Actually,’ he announced briskly, ‘the Coloured community are a waste of time. In their position halfway between the blacks and the white Herrenvolk, they are bound to be unstable, they are petty bourgeois to the core, all of them.’

He was jettisoning them all! Martha, very shocked, said feebly, ‘They are human beings, after all.’

‘So they are,’ he said with his brisk jeer, his black eyes snapping scorn. ‘So they are. We are all human beings, and everyone is as good as everyone else, all born equal in the sight of God.’

‘Well, you brought in God, I didn’t. What’s God got to do with it?’

They were now as awkward with hostility as they had been a few moments before with friendship.

‘Anyway, there are a few hundred Coloureds, and several million Africans – what’s the point of it?’

‘We’d have lived in the location, but it’s against the law. So we chose the next best thing.’

‘Rubbish, you only came to live here because people’d be shocked, that’s all.’

He tapped the long bony fingers on the arm of his chair and yawned. It was not for some seconds that she realized the yawn was deliberate. At once she got up and said, ‘I’ll go. I’ve got things to do.’

‘Your housewifely duties?’ he asked sarcastically.

She stood behind her chair, looking regretfully at this pleasant room, the books, feeling the atmosphere of dedicated freedom, feeling herself an exile. But she felt something else too: a deep pity for him. He seemed all at once very young and absurd.

‘Well,’ she said flatly, ‘when the war comes, that’ll be the end of it. But it’ll be nice while it lasts.’

He regarded her in silence, apparently considering whether she was worth the trouble he might decide to take. Then he said, ‘Now, listen, Matty, I shall now give you a short lecture on the international situation.’ He grinned savagely, and she smiled back gratefully. She noted at the same time, half consciously, that he, unlike his brother, could take nothing seriously. That was how she felt it: the jaunty self-consciousness, the invisible quotation marks around his phrases, the drawled ‘situ-a-tion’, gave her a strong feeling of disbelief.

She stood, however, behind her chair and listened. He spoke for some ten minutes, as if he were delivering a lecture, but in the harsh, flat language of controlled cynicism, which chimed in very well with what she felt herself. And although the picture he presented of what was happening in Europe was cold, simple and logical, that harshness and cynicism could only feed her own. So that when he had finished she said drily, ‘Well, whichever way it goes, there’ll be a war, won’t there?’

‘Well?’

She shrugged, avoiding the hard aggressiveness of that black stare.

He began to jeer again. ‘Yes, poor Matty, life is hard, life isn’t easy. People get killed, the cows get into the rose garden, violence keeps popping up its ugly head.’

She remarked irrelevantly, ‘My father was in the last war. He talks about it.’

He stared. ‘Well?’ Then, in a flat, angry voice, quite different from any she had heard from him – for the first time carrying the conviction of deep personal feeling: ‘And the Jews are in the concentration camps. Who cares? Do you? If the British Government wanted, they could stop it all in a month – if they wanted. As for you,’ and here he mimicked her doubting, hesitant voice, ‘all you say is, Don’t let’s have any nastiness, please let everything be comfortable.’

She was now so confused by all this hostility – for it was clear that she had become for him the enemy he hated most – that she could only say, ‘Well, Solly …’ and tailed off into silence.

He was now waiting for her to go. She asked, ‘What do you hear from Joss?’

‘We don’t write.’

She went towards the door.

‘He’s joined the Communist Party,’ she heard.

‘Well, I thought he was a Communist anyway.’

‘He’s joined it, that’s quite different from talking.’

There was such spite in his voice that she turned and inquired, ‘Why, do you mind him joining?’ Then she saw it was directed against herself. He picked up a newspaper from beside him and handed it to her. It was a thin, limp paper. She looked at it dubiously. It was called The Watchdog. The headlines, large and strident, assaulted her mind. She heard him laugh, and saw that she was holding the thing as if it might explode in her face. She smiled ruefully.

‘Nasty crude paper,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be seen with it. What would your friends say? Let alone your nice husband.’

Since she did not feel at all identified with her husband or his circle, she let this pass. She looked down again at the paper. The exclamatory style, the hectoring language, affected her uncomfortably, as if her whole system had been injected by some powerful irritating substance that it must throw off. But she looked at it steadily and saw that what it was saying was no more than Solly’s just-concluded lecture on the international situation.

He summed up her thought by saying, ‘It’s all right if you hear it all said in nice intellectual language in a nice comfortable room, but it’s quite different like that, isn’t it?’

She laid it down on a chair and looked at him. She needed to wound him as he was wounding her. She asked, ‘Why don’t you join the Communist Party, then?’ He simply maintained his steady grin; she realized that he must have joined it, otherwise he would not look so satirical. After a moment, she tried another tack: ‘Who’s paying for this house and this quiet intellectual existence?’ He reddened; and she persisted, ‘Your four fathers, no doubt. So your share of it comes from the profits made out of the kaffir store in the district. I don’t see that you are any better than I am, if it comes to that.’ He was waiting for a chance to get in at her, but she went on hastily, delighted with her advantage: ‘So I’ll leave you to your independence, until the bull gets into this rose garden.’

She quickly shut the door behind her, and walked rapidly down the garden. All vegetables, of course, she thought, trying to be spiteful, but on the verge of tears. No flowers for the high-minded, naturally! While she had been inside, the earth around the little green clumps of lettuce had dried. Small granules of grey earth lay evenly over the base of wet dark richness. The youth was steadily hoeing potatoes at the far end of the garden. He did not lift his head as she came past. Then she heard her name called: Solly stood on the veranda.

‘Matty – would you like to come to a meeting here tonight?’

She hesitated, then called back sardonically, ‘Unfortunately I have a sundowner party – ’ But she was unable to finish. Solly was doubled up in a pantomime of laughter.

She turned her back on him and walked away under the trees that shaded the pavement. It was some minutes before she was able to smile at herself and at him, her regret at having to leave was so strong. She felt forsaken; and nothing but the memory of Solly’s savage farewell laughter prevented her from hurrying back and saying that of course she would come to the meeting. When she reached the flat, she occupied herself with altering a dress to fit her for the sundowner party that night, and with an ironical consciousness of how Solly would see this proceeding. But there was something much stronger, a feeling of Well, then, I’ll show him! The showing him consisted in making the dress and herself as attractive as she knew how. It was not until she realized this that she remembered the moment when she had felt he might be thinking that she had come to him as a man, and not as a person in that romantic thing, a communal settlement. She burned with embarrassment; she could not forgive him. Now, looking back at the meeting, she could see the thing in no other way; everything they had said was permeated with this other emotion; to it she attributed his aggressiveness and that sarcastic stare. She was hating him quite vividly. In a short while, the memory of that interview had become quite unbearable; and she was putting stitches into the fabric of her dress with strong stabs of the needle, while she muttered incoherently, Idiot! Conceited idiot! And even: Can’t they ever see us differently?

When Douglas returned that afternoon, he was welcomed by an extremely cheerful young woman, who proceeded to amuse him with a satirical account of how she had rushed down to see Solly – all intelligent in blue trousers and sunburn – and how she had wanted to join the settlement. Because, as everyone knows, we girls go through these moments of not wanting to be married.

‘And me too,’ confessed Douglas, apologetically, kissing her with a rueful laugh. This mutual confession delighted them. They were back together in the warmest affection, which almost at once led to the bed – there was half an hour to fill in, as he pointed out. The half-hour was hilarious. In a mood of tearing gaiety, they experimented with a couple of new positions sanctioned by the book, and were freshly delighted with their efficiency. Then, seeing the time, six o’clock, that hour sacred to sundowner parties, they hastened off the bed and got dressed. They drove off to the party with the look of competent unconcern that they had both already learned to wear in public.

Colonel Brodeshaw’s house was in the part of the town which had been the most fashionable before the new suburbs began to spread. There were several avenues of big sprawling shady houses in big gardens – these were the nearest approach to an individual architecture the colony had achieved. They had been built for comfort, for the climate, by people with money and enough self-confidence not to need the extra boost of that kind of smart house which was now being built. They were the natural expression, in fact, of the type of English person whose families have been in the habit of administering this part or that of the British Empire, accustomed to making themselves comfortable in a difficult climate. Comfort was their keynote. The servants’ quarters, built in a row along the end of the back garden, and reminiscent of stables, were vast – not because these people intended to make their servants comfortable, but because they meant to have plenty of servants. The rooms were large and cool, the verandas enormous; whatever these houses might look like from outside, sprawling, shapeless, often shabby, they were a delight to live in.

The young Knowells drove through several avenues filled with such houses, and were able to feel a pleasant regret for the past. They murmured that it was a pity people did not build like that these days. They parked the car with a dozen others in the ditch outside a flaring hibiscus hedge, and walked up a narrow drive that was like a green tunnel. Through gaps in the foliage, hoses could be seen playing on a smooth green lawn, and beyond that the garden was bounded by a warm red-brick wall draped with morning glory, a vivid sky blue which was beginning – the sun was setting – to show edges of white. Soon it would be as if scraps of limp dirty-white linen hung among the green. A few steps further, and the front veranda was in sight, a garden inside a garden, for it was filled with painted tubs of flowering plants, and festooned with golden shower. People too, of course; but the veranda was as big as a large room, and able to absorb large numbers of people among the columns of brick and tubs of flowers.

From outside, Martha caught a glimpse of faces she knew, and felt a stab of disappointment: she could not rid herself of the belief that being married would introduce her to something new and exciting. She could see Donovan, and Ruth Manners; and was looking for others, when Douglas remarked, ‘Mr Player is going to be here, I believe.’ He tried to sound casual, but could not prevent a note of pleased deference.

Martha was looking for Mr Player, when they arrived at the top of the steps and were met by Colonel Brodeshaw and Mrs Brodeshaw. The Colonel was a tall, thin, bent man, with a small dark moustache and mahogany skin, so much the colonel in manner and appearance that it must save Martha the effort of looking for further individuality. His wife was competently dispensing hospitality in a black-and-white flowered dress, a colonel’s lady, clipped, brisk and smiling.

Martha had not taken two steps before she was absorbed into the warm embrace of Mrs Talbot, and welcomed with a warm but timid smile by Mrs Talbot’s daughter. Martha knew that of all the people who were being made happy by this marriage, Mrs Talbot was perhaps the happiest. She had received no less than three charming notes from her in the last week, welcoming her into – what? And now she was putting her arm around Martha’s shoulders, turning her away from other groups on the veranda, and leading her to a chair beside her own. Over her shoulder she smiled and murmured to Douglas, ‘You really must allow me to deprive you of Matty for just a few minutes.’ And Douglas, smiling and touched, seemed prepared to wait.

Mrs Talbot was, above all, a lady of charm. In each movement, each tone of her voice, was this suggestion of deferential murmuring grace; and as she seated herself beside Martha she did so with a hurried, almost apologetic movement of her hindquarters, as if even this personal necessity was something deplorable because it detracted from the wholehearted attention she was determined to bestow upon Martha. Both she and her daughter then leaned towards her, smiling with warm friendship, and proceeded to tell her how happy they were that Douggie was married at last, how wonderful, how suitable, how … As one woman arrived at the end of a breathless phrase, searching for the superlatives that could not express what she felt, the other took it up; and it was a duet of self-immolation towards Martha.

Martha seated, smiling a little awkwardly, looked from one to the other, trying to see them, for she felt herself in danger of being smothered by this perfumed attack. She was able at last to see Mrs Talbot as a tall, fair-haired woman, slight, pliant, with a smooth oval face tinted uniformly pink, like a fine breathing enamel. Everything, hair, face, dress, was so smoothly perfect, so exquisitely created, that one felt impelled to look at the daughter to find the raw materials from which this work of art had been begun. Elaine was like her mother, a slight graceful creature, but the oval face, the large grey eyes, showed signs of strain and ill-health. The skin was pale, flawed; there were faint blue shadows under the eyes. Martha looked from one to the other, noting the looks of affectionate reassurance that continually passed between them, and thought only that for a girl of eighteen to be so close to her mother must in itself be perverse. She felt herself menaced by it. But since there was no need for her to say anything but ‘Thank you’ and ‘How very kind of you’, she allowed her attention to pass to that other problem which was so much her preoccupation. For the spiritual hangers-on which every marriage attracts must certainly expect to suggest the question, What is it they themselves have found, or lack, in marriage? Since Mrs Talbot and her daughter could not be delighted that it was Martha who had married Douglas – they did not know her, as Martha reminded herself – it must be the idea of marriage that fed this delight? Martha tried to form some sort of image of Mr Talbot, and it was only then that she realized that she did not even know whether there was one. She had heard a great deal about Mrs Talbot during the past weeks, but it was always ‘Mrs Talbot and Elaine’, ‘Elaine and Mrs Talbot’ – that was how the world spoke of the Talbot family. Together they enveloped Martha in caressing affection, and together they rose, after a long, smiling, intimate look at her which – even in this small matter of agreeing that it was time to release Martha – overflowed into a glance of understanding between them. The young Knowells were invited to spend the evening very soon with Mrs Talbot and Elaine, and (for of course he was so happy about the marriage, too) Mr Talbot – if he wasn’t out (‘He always has so much to do’); and the two women withdrew into chairs further away, where they proceeded to allow their reservoirs of charm to overflow on to Douglas.

Martha was therefore left alone for a moment, looking down the great veranda, which was like a room with three walls of green leaves. The last rays of sunlight fell through the leaves, patterning the faces of the guests. Perhaps forty people were sitting, with glasses in their hands, in this green-dappled glow. Martha could see Donovan poised on the edge of his chair, addressing Ruth Manners. ‘But, my dear, it was the funniest thing you ever saw,’ she heard his light voice say, before he let it drop and leaned forward to continue the sentence in a lower key; it was a bit of gossip: the discreetly malicious smile on Ruth’s face showed it. Beside Ruth sat a young man whom Martha had not seen before. She immediately recognized him as being fresh from England, because of his pink-faced, cautious look of one on trial. From the way he and Ruth smiled at each other, it was clear they were a couple.

Far down the veranda, in a well of green shadow, Mr Maynard was surveying the guests with his look of sardonic but controlled contempt. Beside him was that formidable lady his wife, who in a high, firm, commanding voice was saying the last word about something she felt strongly: ‘And so I said to her, “It is quite out of the question!”’ She turned to look at her husband, commanding agreement; but Mr Maynard continued to gaze in front of him, lightly flipping his fingers against the glass he held. The clink, clink, clink, came travelling softly down among the voices and laughter, like irritation made audible; and Martha looked at this black-browed energetic woman, and remembered, with a strong feeling of incongruity, that sick headaches were her weapon of choice. She was convicting Mrs Maynard of having no sense of period, when she saw Mr Anderson, sitting not far from his son, a small dapper man radiating bad temper because it was necessary to be here at all and to make conversation. He was making it, Martha saw with surprise, to Mrs Anderson, who sat near him. The fact that Mr Anderson could be persuaded to leave his solitude reminded Martha that this was an important sundowner party, and she searched for Mr Player. Remembering a brief glimpse of a large, red-faced man, she searched in vain – he could not have arrived.

The chair beside her was still empty. Donovan rose from his place and joined her, remarking gaily, ‘Well, Matty, so here you are nicely settled at last.’ This reference to her marriage she let pass; she was looking to see if there was anything in his face which might suggest that he remembered the ugliness of their last meeting. But it seemed not. He proceeded to entertain her with a scandalous story about their hostess. To which Martha replied that the moment he left her he would undoubtedly make a spitefully funny story about her marriage. He giggled gracefully and said that he had been dining out on stories about her for the last week. ‘Really, Matty, why do you waste such an occasion for being on show? Now, look at Ruth, she’s got herself engaged, and she’s having a nice engagement party, and we’ll all give her expensive presents, and everything’s so satisfactory for her and her friends.’

‘On the other hand, there won’t be any funny stories about her wedding,’ she pointed out. ‘You can’t have it both ways.’

‘True,’ he conceded, ‘true.’

He was looking among the guests to see if there might be someone to inspire an anecdote, when Martha inquired, ‘What’s Ruth’s young man like?’

‘On the way up. Secretary to the secretary of Mr Player. Money, family, everything.’ Then with his usual gay spite: ‘One could hardly expect less of Ruth, after all, considering what’s been done for her.’

‘Yes, but what’s he like?’ inquired Martha naïvely, looking at the neat little English face, all the features correctly in place, the small fair moustache, the sober clothes that succeeded in suggesting only what the limbs and body must be like underneath – correct, controlled, adequate.

Donovan grinned pleasantly; then he said in a soft lowered voice which for the first time allowed that they did, after all, know each other quite well, ‘Really, Matty, you’ll never learn! Surely that’s enough!’

Here she laughed with him, in genuine appreciation of that wit which, however, he was determined should never be more than socially agreeable. But he went on, with the astounding frankness with which he said what he really felt: ‘Anyway, Matty, if a girl marries a man with money and so on, what more can she want?’ He sounded really aggrieved. She let out a snort of laughter; saw him flush, and then he rose gracefully. ‘Well, Matty, I shall now leave you.’ His smile was cold; their eyes met unpleasantly; then he sailed, in a way which was reminiscent of his mother, across the veranda to another empty chair.

Martha’s glass was refilled for her. She was becoming depressed as the alcohol took effect. She was disappointed that there was anyone here that she knew; and looked back to her first weeks in town, when the people she met seemed like glorious and disconnected phenomena, meteors and rockets that went shooting across her vision, only to disappear. But certainly not tamely connected in social circles. That Donovan, Ruth, even Mr Maynard, should be brought to this veranda on this evening by a mysterious connection gave her a feeling of oppression. She could feel the nets tightening around her. She thought that she might spend the rest of her life on this veranda, or others like it, populated by faces she knew only too well. It was at this point, and for the first time, that she found herself thinking, The war will break it up, it won’t survive the war. Then she was sincerely dismayed and ashamed. She said it must be her own fault that she could see no face, hear no voice, which could make her happy at the idea of being here.

Half a dozen chairs away, Mrs Talbot and Elaine were discussing with a third lady a new method of cutting sandwiches, and, Martha noted, with precisely the same allowance of deferential charm that they had given her marriage. Opposite them, two ladies were arguing – what else? the iniquities of their servants. Mrs Maynard, at the other end of the veranda, and at the top of her confident voice, was discussing hers. Mr Maynard, from the depths of his resigned boredom, took up the theme with a slow, deliberate account of a case he had judged that morning. A native youth had stolen some clothes from his employer; the question before him, the magistrate, had been: Should the sentence be prison or an official beating? He told his story with a calm objectivity that sounded brutal. But Martha, as she watched that heavy and handsome face, saw the full, authoritative eyes move slightly from one face to another, saw suddenly that he was using this audience, which, after all, was not so arbitrarily associated, as a sort of sounding board.

Everyone was listening now, waiting to jump into the discussion with their own opinions; for certainly this was a subject, the subject, on which they were all equipped to speak. But Mr Maynard was not yet ready to throw the ball out for play. Having concluded with the bare facts of the case, he turned to a similarly large and authoritative gentleman in a neighbouring chair, and remarked, ‘It is a question, of course, of whether a sentence should be regarded as a punishment or a deterrent. Until that is decided – and they certainly haven’t decided it even in England – I can hardly be expected to have any opinions?’

The half-dozen people who had been leaning forward, mouths half open, ready to say what they thought, were taken aback by the depths of intellectuality into which they were expected to plunge. They waited. One lady muttered, ‘Nonsense, they should all be whipped!’ But she turned her eyes, with the rest, towards the gentleman appealed to.

He appeared to be thinking it over. He sat easily in his chair, an impressive figure, his body and face presenting a series of wide smooth surfaces. His corpulence was smoothly controlled by marvellous suiting, the fat pink areas of cheek and chin seemed scarcely interrupted by the thin pink mouth, the small eyes. When he lifted his eyes, however, in a preliminary circling glance before speaking, it was as if the bulk of ordinary flesh, commonplace cheeks, took an unimportant position behind the cold and deliberate stare. Those eyes were not to be forgotten. It was as if the whole personality of this man struggled to disguise itself behind the appearance of a man of business who was devoted to good, but good-natured, living – struggled and failed, for the calculating, clever eyes betrayed him. He said in a casual voice that in his opinion the whole legal system as affecting the Africans was ridiculously out of date and should be radically overhauled.

One could hear the small suppressed gasp of dismay from his listeners. But Mr Maynard kept his full prompting eyes fixed on the cold grey ones, and merely nodded; whether in agreement or not, he intended to convey, was quite unimportant, for it was his task to administer the law and not to change it. Martha was expecting an outburst from these people; she had not spent the greater part of her nineteen years listening to talk about the native problem for nothing. She was astounded that they remained silent.

It was Mrs Maynard who spoke for them; it was the politeness of her disagreement that told Martha that this fat pig of a man must be Mr Player. She could not easily believe it; a man cannot become a legend without certain penalties, and it seemed to her altogether too simple that people so inevitably become like the caricatures that their worst enemies make of them; besides, it was hard to connect the groomed pink face with that large hot red one she had once caught a glimpse of on a racecourse. Mrs Maynard was announcing firmly that it was obvious the natives were better served by being whipped than being sent to prison, for they didn’t mind prison, it was no disgrace to them. They were nothing but children, after all. At this a dozen ladies angrily flung out their agreement. Martha listened with tired familiarity – this was something one could always be sure of. One after another, it was stated in varying ways that the natives should be kept in their place – and then Martha lost a few remarks, because she was considering something she had just realized. Two familiar words had not been used: nigger and kaffir; either this was an evolution in opinion or this circle of people were different and less brutal than those she had been used to.

There was a silence in progress when Martha became attentive again. Then the second camp made itself heard. It was Mrs Talbot who said, with a breathless air of defiance, that the poor things shouldn’t be whipped, everyone should be kind to everyone else. Her daughter murmured agreement, and was rewarded by a glance of grateful affection from her mother, who was flushed by her own daring. For while ‘poor things’ was certainly not a new note, the suggestion that poor things and children should not be whipped for their own good, was.

At this point, the young man from England, the secretary of the secretary, gave it as his opinion, with a quick and rather nervous glance towards Mr Player, that public opinion in the colony was behind the times. The silence that followed was a delicate snub to the newcomer because of the burden of problems that they all carried. Ruth remarked in a detached voice that progressive people thought that whipping only made people worse. The word ‘progressive’ was allowed to pass; she was very young, and had been educated largely in England. Then Douglas stoutly averred, with the slight stammer which Martha was only just beginning to see could be a delicate compliment to superiors, that what was needed in the colony was good housing and good feeding, and the colony could never move forward while the bulk of the population was so backward. A silence again, during which Martha looked with grateful affection towards him; and everyone looked towards Mr Player.

The great man nodded affably towards Douglas, and said, ‘I quite agree.’ Again he allowed a pause for considered thought, and that slow, circling grey stare. Then he began to speak; and Martha heard with amazement the liberal point of view expressed by this pillar of reaction, this man who was a symbol of ‘the Company’. It was a shock to everything she had believed possible. And now many people who had been silent came in. Martha looked from face to face and tried to see what connected the champions of progress. At first she failed. Then she saw that mostly they were ‘business’ as opposed to ‘civil service’. The talk went on, and it was not until she had heard the phrases ‘greater efficiency’, ‘waste of labour’, etc., etc., often enough, that she understood.

What she had understood was finally crystallized by Mr Player’s summing up. He said that the whites were ruining their own interests; if the blacks (Martha noted that his use of the emotional word was calculated) were not to revolt, they must be fed and housed; and he, Mr Player, blamed above all the Editors of the Zambesia News, for persistently feeding the public with nonsense. For the last ten years, said Mr Player, ignorance had been pandered to by a policy that could only be described as monstrously stupid; any expression of a desire for improvement on the part of the natives was immediately described as impertinence, or sedition, or even worse. We were, after all, living in the twentieth century, concluded Mr Player, while he directed his grey stare towards a man halfway down the veranda.

Following the searchlight of that stare, Martha saw at the end of it an uncomfortable, flushed gentleman angrily clutching at a glass of whisky. Since it was obvious that Mr Player did nothing casually, it followed that this gentleman must be connected with the press. As soon as Mr Player had finished, he remarked aggressively that the press was not concerned with fostering the interests of any particular section of the population. His look at Mr Player was pure defiance.

Mr Player stared back. Then he said that it was in no one’s interest that the blacks (this time the word was a small concession to the press) should be ill-fed and ill-housed into a condition where they weren’t fit for work. He paused and, having narrowed his eyes for a final stab, said, ‘For instance, I hear that on the Canteloupe Mine a policy of proper feeding and housing is gaining quite remarkable results.’ He elaborated this policy for some time. It occurred to Martha belatedly that this same mine was almost certain to be connected with the Company, and that Mr Player himself had originated this enlightened policy. Mr Player redirected his stare towards him, and remarked, ‘Some people might wonder why something that is after all an experiment is not considered newsworthy by a paper which claims to represent everybody?’

The victim grew redder, resisted for a moment, then said clumsily, ‘Well, of course, we are always ready to print genuine news.’

At once Mr Player removed his gaze and elaborated his theme in a different key for a while, then passed to another. He did not look towards the News again. They all listened in silence – the Service, business, two members of Parliament, the press – while Mr Player continued to express views which ninety per cent of the white population would consider dangerous and advanced. Obstinate, even ironical faces seemed to suggest that it was all very well for Mr Player, who did not have to answer to this same ninety per cent, but only to investors overseas. One felt that no slighter provocation than this could have provoked them even to think of these investors, particularly as such thoughts were likely to be followed by others – such as, that the Company indirectly owned a large part of the News and most of the businesses who used its advertising space.

A telephone rang inside the long room which could be glimpsed through the open French windows. A native servant emerged, anonymous in his white ducks and red fez, to say Mr Player was wanted on the telephone. The secretary of the secretary made a movement towards rising; and subsided as Mr Player rose with a sharp look at him. He sat stiffly beside Ruth, discomfited. There was a long silence, while they listened to the voice inside. Then Mrs Brodeshaw remarked with a smile that Mr Player had a horse running in a race in England. There was a burst of relieved, admiring laughter.

Martha was looking at Mr Maynard, who did not laugh, but appeared bored and indulgent. Her persistent, speculative stare had its effect, for he got heavily to his feet and came down towards her. He sat down, saying, ‘If you young women will change your hair styles every day, what can you expect?’

‘I cut it,’ said Martha awkwardly – everyone had watched him coming to join her. Then Mrs Brodeshaw mentioned her roses, and conversation began again.

‘Did Binkie come back?’

‘He returned last night,’ said Mr Maynard. A glance at him showed his face momentarily clenched; a second, blandly indifferent. ‘His mother is a different woman as a result,’ he remarked; but at this point Mr Player returned. Everyone looked expectantly prepared to triumph or commiserate over the horse in England, but Mr Player sat down, and leaned over to murmur something to the young secretary. He was pink with importance.

Mr Maynard watched the scene, holding his glass between two loosely cupped hands, and said, ‘That is a very pretty young man.’

‘Oh, very!’ she agreed scornfully.

‘Have you noticed that the type of immigrant is changing? The era of the younger sons is passing. A pity – I am a firm believer in younger sons. Now we have what the younger sons, such as myself, for instance, left England to escape from.’ The idea of Mr Maynard as a younger son made Martha laugh; and he gave her a quizzical look. ‘Now, in the old days – but you wouldn’t remember that.’ He glanced at her and sighed. Martha felt she was being dismissed. He did not continue. Instead he asked, in a casual but intimate voice that referred to yesterday’s encounter, ‘Well, what do you make of it all?’ He glanced around the long veranda and then at her.

Martha blurted out at once, ‘Awful. It’s all awful!’

He gave her another glance and remarked, ‘So I thought. I have been looking at you and thinking that if you must feel so strongly you’d better learn to hide it. If I may give you advice from the height of my – what? fifty-six years.’

‘Why should I hide it?’ she demanded.

‘Well, well,’ he commented. ‘But it won’t do, you know!’

‘You didn’t even know it was me, you didn’t recognize me,’ she accused him.

‘I have noticed,’ he swerved off again, ‘that at your age women are really most extraordinarily unstable in looks. It’s not till you’re thirty or so that you stay the same six months together. I remember my wife …’ He stopped frowning.

There was a conversation developing at the bottom of the veranda. Martha heard the words ‘the war’, and sat up.

‘Mr Player must naturally be concerned with the international situation,’ remarked Mr Maynard. ‘A man who controls half the minerals in the central plateau can hardly be expected to remain unmoved at the prospect of peace being maintained.’

Martha digested this; what he was saying had, to her, the power to blast everyone in this house off into a limbo of contempt. It was more difficult for her to understand that for him it was enough to say it. She could find nothing polite enough to express what she felt. He looked at her again, and it disconcerted her because he saw so clearly what she would have liked to say.

‘My dear Mrs Knowell, if I may advise you – ’But again he checked himself, and said, ‘Why should I? You’ll do as you like, anyway.’

‘What advice?’ she asked, genuinely.

But now he fidgeted his large and powerful dark-clad limbs in his chair, and said with the gruffness which was his retreat, ‘Let’s leave it at this: that I’m profoundly grateful I’m nearly sixty.’ He paused and added scathingly, ‘I can leave it all safely in the hands of Binkie.’

‘There are other people,’ she remarked awkwardly; she was thinking of Joss and Solly. Suddenly it occurred to her that there was an extraordinary resemblance between this dignified man and the rebel in the settlement in the Coloured quarters. Of course! It was their savage and destructive ways of speaking.

But now he remarked, ‘I daresay one attaches too much importance to one’s own children.’ He sounded tired and grim. She was immediately sorry for him. She was trying to find words to express it, when he nodded down towards the end of the veranda to direct her attention there.

Colonel Brodeshaw was speaking.’ … a difficult problem,’ she heard. ‘If we conscript the blacks, the question of arming them arises. It’ll come up before the House in due course …’ Once again, this gathering was being used as a sounding board. This time there was no doubt, no cleavage of opinion, no need even for discussion. From one end of the veranda to the other, there was a murmur of ‘Obviously not. Out of the question.’ It was so quickly disposed of that Colonel Brodeshaw had the look of an orator on a platform who has been shouted at to sit down in the middle of a speech. He murmured, ‘Well, it’ll not be settled as easily as all that.’ People looked towards Mr Player; it appeared he had no views on the matter. Mrs Maynard announced finally, ‘If they learn to use arms, they can use them on us. In any case, this business of sending black troops overseas is extremely shortsighted. They are treated as equals in Britain, even by the women.’ There was no need to say more.

Mr Maynard remarked, ‘One of the advantages of living in a society like this, though I don’t expect you’ll appreciate it yet, is that things can be said. Now, in Britain it would take a very stupid person to talk in such a tone. In the colonies there is an admirable frankness which makes politics child’s play in comparison.’

‘It’s revolting,’ she said angrily.

‘Well,’ he said, flipping his forefinger against his glass again, ‘well, when this colony has reached the stage where a gathering like this talks about uplifting the masses of the people, you’ll find that politics will be much more complicated than they are now.’

‘Mr Player has just been talking about it.’

‘But with what engaging truth, with what disarming frankness. Enlightened self-interest – it has taken us long enough to reach it. Why, only a year ago, I remember, the suggestion by dieticians that Africans were not conveniently equipped by nature to subsist healthily on mealie meal and nothing else was treated as the voice of revolution itself. We advance, we advance! Now, in my youth, my “class” – as you so refreshingly have no inhibitions in putting it – were for the most part outspokenly engaged in putting the working classes in their place. But when I paid a visit to England last year, how different things were! The working classes were undoubtedly just where they used to be, but everyone of my “class” seemed concerned only to prove not only that they were entitled to a good life, but that they had already achieved it. Further, it was almost impossible to hold a conversation with my friends and relations, because their speech was full of gaps, pauses, and circumlocutions where words used to be. With what relief did I return to this country, where a spade is still called a spade and I can use the vocabulary that I was taught to use during my admirable education. I can no longer say, ‘The kaffirs are getting out of hand’, that is true. But I can say, ‘The blacks need firm treatment.’ That’s something. I am grateful for it.’

Martha did not know what to say. She could not make out from this succession of smooth and savage sentences which side he was on. As she put it, with a straightforwardness which she imagined he would commend, ‘If you think it’s terrible, then why do you …?’

‘But I didn’t say I thought it was terrible. On the contrary, if there’s one thing my generation has learned it is that the more things change, the more they remain the same.’

Martha reached out her hand to take his glass. ‘You’re going to break it,’ she warned. He had in fact broken it – there was a mess of wet glass in his hand. He glanced at it, with raised brows, then reached for a handkerchief. Martha was looking around to see if the incident had been noticed. But everyone was listening to Mrs Brodeshaw, who was explaining how she was forming a women’s organization in preparation for the war.

A servant came forward to remove the bits of glass.

‘We old men,’ Mr Maynard said apologetically, ‘are full of unaccountable emotions.’

‘I know,’ said Martha at once. ‘You’re like my father – what upset you was the 1914 war, wasn’t it?’

He looked exceedingly uncomfortable, but assented.

‘You really seemed to think it was going to change things, didn’t you?’

‘We did attach a certain importance to it at the time.’

She heard her name called. Donovan was grinning at her with a gay spite which warned her. ‘You don’t agree, Matty dear, do you?’ he was calling down the veranda.

‘I wasn’t listening.’

Mrs Talbot came out with apologetic charm, ‘Donovan was telling us that you were a pacifist. I don’t blame you, dear, war is so utterly dreadful.’ She broke off with a confused look around her.

‘But I’m not a pacifist,’ said Martha stubbornly.

Mr Maynard broke in quickly with ‘All my generation were pacifists – until 1914.’

There was a burst of relieved laughter. Donovan looked at Martha; she looked back angrily. He turned back to Ruth with a gay shrug.

Martha saw that Mr Maynard had been protecting her. She said in a low voice, ‘I don’t see why one shouldn’t say what one thinks.’

‘Don’t you? Oh, well, I’m sorry.’

This depth of irony succeeded in making her feel very young and inadequate. It was a snub to those real feelings she was convinced she must share with everybody, nothing less would do! After a moment she said, ‘All the same, everyone here is planning for the war, and we don’t know yet who the war is going to be fought against.’

She had spoken rather more loudly than she had meant; the gentleman from the press had heard her. He said irritably, ‘You’d agree, I hope, that one must be prepared for a war?’ This was the substance of the leader in that morning’s News.

Mr Maynard answered for her, in a smooth voice, ‘I daresay the younger generation, who will have the privilege of being killed, are entitled to know what for?’ He had acquired another glass, and was engaged in flipping this one too with his fingernail. The journalist’s look was caught by the gesture; he watched it for a moment; then some women sitting near asked him deferentially for his opinion on the international situation. He proceeded to give it. Martha listened to his string of platitudes for a few moments, then heard Mr Maynard again: ‘Another of life’s little disillusionments: you’ll find the newspapermen are as stupid as they sound. One reads what they say, when young, with admiration for the accomplished cynicism they display; when one gets older one discovers they really mean what they write. A terrible blow it was to me, I remember. I had been thinking of becoming one myself. But I was prepared to be a knave, not a fool.’

He had meant her to laugh, but she was unable to. She wanted to protest. Fear of his contempt for her clumsiness kept her silent. She was prepared to be thought wrong-headed, but not naive. He was using much more powerful weapons than she was to understand for a very long time.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘let me fill up your glass.’ It was her third, and she was beginning to be lifted away from herself.

‘Tell me,’ he inquired, having refilled his own, ‘if it is not too indiscreet, that is: What decided you to get married at the age of – what is it? Seventeen?’

‘Nineteen,’ said Martha indignantly.

‘I do apologize.’

She laughed. She hesitated a moment. She was feeling the last three months as a bewildering chaos of emotion, through which she had been pulled, will-less, like a fish at the end of a string, with a sense of being used by something impersonal and irresistible. She hesitated on the verge of an appeal and a confession; an attempt, at the very least, to explain what it had been like. She glanced at him, and saw him lounging there beside her, very large, composed, armed by his heavy sarcastic good looks.

‘If I may say so,’ he remarked with a pleasantly pointed smile which was like a nudge to proceed, ‘ninety-nine people out of a hundred haven’t the remotest idea why they got married – in any case you are under the illusion that you are a special case.’

With this encouragement, she took a sip from her brandy and ginger beer and began. She was pleasantly surprised that her voice was no less cool, amused and destructive than his own. She noted, also, that words, phrases, were isolated in deprecating amusement – as Solly had used the language that morning. It was as if she were afraid of the power of language used nakedly. ‘Well,’ she began, ‘not to get married when it is so clearly expected of us was rather more of an act of defiance than I was prepared to commit. Besides, you must know yourself, since you spend most of your time marrying us, that getting married is our first occupation – the international situation positively demands it. Who one marries is obviously of no importance at all. After all, if I’d married Binkie, for instance, I’m sure that everyone – with the exception of your wife, of course – would have been just as delighted …’

He laughed: ‘Go on.’

‘Though it would have been no less potentially disastrous than the marriage I’m committed to. Love,’ she noted how she isolated the word, throwing it away, as it were, ‘as you would be the first to admit, is merely a question of …’ ‘In short,’ she concluded, after some minutes of light-hearted description of the more painful experiences of the last few weeks, ‘I got married because there’s going to be a war. Surely that’s a good enough reason.’ There was not even an undertone of dismay to be heard in her voice.

‘Admirable,’ he commented. Then: ‘Entirely admirable. If I may give you some advice.’

‘Oh, I do assure you that I’ve taken the point.’

He looked at her straight. ‘And I assure you that you will find it much more tolerable this way.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ she said angrily.

He was on the point of making some further attempt, when she felt a hand on her arm. It was Douglas. He looked rather nervous, first because he was disturbing her conversation with Mr Maynard, secondly because she was looking so guilty. She felt very guilty. She jumped up quickly as he said, ‘Matty, we should be going.’

Mr Maynard released her courteously, and returned to his chair beside his wife. They stood at the door shaking hands with Colonel Brodeshaw and his wife. Mrs Brodeshaw took the opportunity to ask, ‘My dear, I wonder if you would like to help on the committee for organizing the ladies …’ It took Martha by surprise, and Mrs Brodeshaw swiftly went on: ‘Though of course, my dear, you don’t want to be worried by all this sort of thing yet, do you? It’s not fair, when you’re just married. We’ll leave you in peace for the time being,’ she promised, smiling. Then she added, ‘There’s a suggestion of starting a committee to investigate the conditions of the Coloured –’

‘I was down there this morning,’ remarked Martha.

Mrs Brodeshaw looked startled, then said, ‘Oh, yes, we know you are interested.’

Douglas came quickly in with ‘Perhaps we can fix it later, when we’re more settled.’

Again Mrs Brodeshaw retreated gracefully. They said goodbye. Douglas and Martha went to the car in silence. She saw he looked annoyed, and wondered why.

‘You know, Matty, I think you might have been a bit more pleasant about it.’

‘Charity?’ said Martha angrily.

‘It’s not such a bad idea, you know.’ He was referring to her being ‘in’ with the Brodeshaws.

‘Charity,’ she said finally. It dismayed her that he might even consider it possible. Then she felt sorry for him – he looked utterly taken aback.

‘But, Matty …’

She took his arm. She was now lifted on waves of alcohol: she was recklessly happy.

‘Mr Maynard was having a long talk with you?’ he inquired.

‘Yes. Let’s go and dance, Douglas.’

‘The Club? What? With the gang?’

‘The gang,’ she mocked. ‘We’ve put up with them for long enough, haven’t we?’

‘Let’s have a night by ourselves.’

But by now she could not bear to go tamely back to the flat. There was something in the talk with Mr Maynard which had unsettled her, made her restless – she needed to dance. Besides, she was instinctively reluctant to go now, in this mood of disliking him, which she did unaccountably, to spend an evening with Douglas.

‘Come on – come on,’ she urged, tugging at him.

‘All right, then, we’ll go and beat up Stella and Andy – and let’s get Willie and Alice. We’d better buy some brandy …’

She was hardly listening. She was wildly elated, she could feel that she was very attractive to him in this mood; it intoxicated her and deeply disturbed her that he should find her desirable when she was engaged in despising him. ‘Come on, come on,’ she called impatiently, and ran off down the path through the bushes to the car. He followed, running heavily behind her. It was dark now. The gateposts reflected a white gleam back to a large low white moon. The town had lost its ramshackle shallowness. A mile of roofs shone hard and white like plates of white salt, amid acres of softly glinting leaves. The road lay low and grey, with a yellow glimmer of light from the street lamps.