Читать книгу The Four-Gated City - Doris Lessing - Страница 8

She rode high in a red bus over streets tinted by damp sunlight, crossed a strongly ebbing river with gulls at eye-level – flashing white wings, seen through dull glass; and descended to earth or street-level as Big Ben said it was seven. But it would not do to reach Joe’s café before eight. That household had two starts to its day, one at about five, when Iris, Jimmy still asleep, rose to feed cornflakes, toast, scrambled powdered egg and tea to some young lorry drivers from a lodging house down the street whose landlady would not feed them so early; another at nine, when the side of the card that said OPEN was turned in invitation to the pavement. With the apprentice lorry drivers were a couple of older men, among them Iris’s cousin Stanley, whom she had fancied for Martha; and some charwomen, their early office-cleaning over, who dropped in for a cup of tea before going home to feed breakfast to their families. Between five and eight that café was a scene of bustling, steaming animation, of intimacy. If Martha were to go in now, unexpected, after two unexplained nights, she could only do so as ‘Matty’. And she was damned if she would. If Iget taken over by her, then I’ll have her riding me for the rest of the day, and I won’t have her around when I’m lunching with Phoebe.

Early sun flashed on a thousand windows and on the gulls’ wings. The great buildings on either side of the river stood waiting, empty; not empty: for at this hour an army of women were at work with their vacuum cleaners, making them hum and vibrate like beehives. They stopped to gossip along corridors where soon, but not for two hours yet, men still fighting for another few minutes’ sleep in surburban bedrooms ten, fifteen, twenty miles away, would come hurrying in, Good morning, good morning, good morning, diverging into rooms where the waste-paper baskets had been emptied. In they’d flow, to be flung out again by the sound of Big Ben striking five, as thousands of telephones went silent, all at once. Martha dawdled, lost her way in a mesh of little streets, and hit the street of the café a hundred yards down from the bombed site. Turning right, she greeted the slab or hulk of timber. In the less than two days since she had seen it, a minute yellow flower had emerged from a crevice. That great salty, sour, more-stone-than-wood monument had put out a coronet of green leaves and a flower. A small wind tugged at it, but the flower held firm, its roots being well dug in. Martha peered through a wire door that had the death’s head and No Children on it, and saw the lock was loose in its socket. She pushed and went in. Deserted: too early for the children. But no, a small girl wearing an ancient black jersey over a white dress that looked as if it had been starched for a party sat on a brick in the dust. She kept still. ‘Good morning,’ said Martha cheerfully and the child’s eyes concentrated in terror. Then she fled, jumping like a cat over a far wall into safety away from the woman in the black coat. If this were a ruined city, a poisoned city, what would the excavators a hundred years later deduce from what they saw here? Facing Martha, the surface of a jagged wall, three stories of it, rose up sharp from the low edges of rubble. There were three fireplaces, one above another. Each level of wall was tinted a different colour, as if by moss or lichen: wallpaper soaked and dried, soaked and dried, again and again. Pale green. Above that, pinkish shaggy brown. Above that dim yellow. Coming closer, it could be seen, where a long strip had been torn away off the green, that beneath was a darker green. Martha got up on to an edge of wall, and slid her fingernails under the edge of paper. A thick sog of paper: layers of it, now stuck together. Once each had been a loving and loved skin for the walls, which held the lives of people. But they were fused together, like a kind of felt. Martha pulled. A lump came away. Picking at the layers, she counted thirteen. Thirteen times had a man stood on trestles, or perhaps a table (these were small cheaply built houses, with low ceilings, and probably the kitchen table would have been high enough) and stretched new clean paper over the stains and dirts of the layer beneath. Thirteen times had a wife, or children said: Yes, that’s very nice, I like that, dad; or had said No, we chose wrong. The two papers at the very bottom were rather beautiful, judging from the inch or so she had to look at: they got progressively uglier as the decades slid by. The one at the top was hideous, must have been an acid green, with a bad jangling pattern. In the middle was a rather pretty sprigged pattern, like a Victorian young lady’s morning dress … voices from the street. Precisely as the little girl had done, Martha froze: authority! She ought not to be here. She sneaked down off the wall, pushing the wadge of coagulated paper into Mrs Van’s pocket; and hid behind a heap of bricks until it seemed safe to go out into the street.

Against the dim muslin that screened the café, shapes of bodies; the lively intimacy of the early morning session shed warmth on to the pavement. She was too early after all. Martha went around into the side street where, this house being on a corner, was a side door into a yard. The door was of slats of wood held with two cross-boards. It had been painted once, for there was crumbling greenish pigment in the cracks. But now it was a greyish colour. ‘From before the war,’ Iris had said. When Iris said something was from before the war, this meant, something that would have been replaced, or mended or painted, if there had not been a war. She would not, for instance, have said that the wall which was a single yellow brick’s thickness surmounted at the height of a tall man’s head by a litter of broken glass, was from before the war. Martha unlatched the door and was in – a neat, tended garden. Hidden behind these street fronts, tucked in among wastes of brick and cement, were gallant little gardens. This one, the size of a large room, had a pear tree, an old wooden bench recently painted a new bright green by Jimmy; and an ancient rose ambled over the back of the house. It was in full pink bloom and it scented all the air. In the corner of this patch of garden was a privy: the house did not have an indoor lavatory. It was like a little sentry box, and to it was a flagged path with musky plants growing in crevices. Beyond the window into the kitchen, Iris sat, at a table framed by pink roses. When she had finished with the early morning stint, she took what she said was a bit of a kip: she slumped in a tortoise condition, her hand stretched towards a flagon of tea, her eyes open, but not really seeing anything. Meanwhile Jimmy had got up and had taken over the café. He was not in the kitchen now. Martha pushed open the back door and was received by a sleepy stare from the surface of Iris’s eyes. Then, she said vaguely, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Martha sat down, and Iris gestured towards a brown teapot and yawned. ‘We’ve used your ration,’ she said. ‘You didn’t come, did you?’ Martha poured tea. Iris smiled: but she resented being made to wake up.

The kitchen was small. Along one wall was apparatus for the café: the frying machine for the fish and the chips; and an electric stove which Jimmy had filched from the ruins down the road after the bomb had fallen. There was also an old-fashioned wood stove, which was used as a cupboard, or larder.

‘So you’re off?’ said Iris.

‘Yes. I’ve come to get my things.’

‘They’re ready. And I’ve put your ration book and your coupons on your case. Upstairs.’ ‘Thank you, Iris.’

‘Stanley’s next door, if you want to see him.’ Martha had not wanted to see Stanley, evidence of her bad heart though this undoubtedly was; and Iris’s tone said that see him she ought, even if Stanley did not particularly want to see her. But now, since it was clearly up to her to go through and make her presence known to the man whom Iris had decided would suit her as a husband, Martha actually got as far as the door before rebelling. Why should she? Whatever debts she would leave behind her, Stanley was not one of them. She sat down again, in silence. The two women confronted each other: Martha determined not to apologize, plead guilty, or evade, Iris now awake, exuding a stubborn determination to suffer betrayal.

‘I don’t think Stanley and I are suited,’ said Martha.

‘Well, I suppose one of these days he’ll make his bed,’ said Iris, full of grievance.

‘Yes, but not with me,’ said Martha.

Iris measured herself a small sour glimmer in reply to this invitation to laugh; and then, against her will, laughed out, and slammed her hand palm down on the table.

She continued to laugh, laughter ebbing from her like water: it was like crying.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but a man’s a man, and when the war’s out of his blood, he’ll settle well enough.’

According to Iris, Stanley had been uprooted by war; which was why he had chosen the lorry run to Birmingham five days a week, and spent weekends doing labouring work – he couldn’t rest. Martha thought it was nothing to do with the war, it was his nature. And she knew, though Iris did not (for she and Stanley had come to an understanding, had made a pact against matchmakers) that there was a woman in Birmingham with whom he spent nights. He did not want to marry. Certainly not Martha. Though he liked her well enough to suggest a job as secretary to the firm he worked for.

Iris now got up, defying Martha, or, more likely, asserting her right to choose her cousin a wife; and called through the hatch: ‘She’s here!’

She sat down again, saying to Martha, ‘You’ll want to say goodbye, won’t you then?’

In a moment Stanley came in. He was about forty, a lean, narrow, slouching man with hard blue eyes.

‘I’m due to be off,’ Stanley said generally. ‘My mate’s already at the bus. So you’ve got yourself a job then, have you?’ He did not look at Martha but at his cousin: and towards her a warning, or a resentment, was directed. Not at Martha: he was a fair man and proud of it.

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Martha.

‘You’re all right then,’ said Iris, hostile.

‘See you some time,’ said Stanley, and, on his way out, turned to give her a good warm smile, snubbing Iris with a cool nod.

‘He’s a case,’ said Iris, grieving. ‘There was a girl at the laundry who fancied him, but not him no.’

‘How do you know he hasn’t got a girl of his own already?’

‘Well, if he’d do a thing like that!’ said Iris bitterly, highlighting for Martha some area of family grievance, bonds, or bondage, that she’d never now, with the time left, be able to understand. Tears were in Iris’s weak blue eyes, and she stirred her tea savagely.

In came Jimmy, wearing a striped apron, full of a contained reproach.

‘So you don’t want that job, then?’

‘She’s got a job,’ said Iris. ‘Up West.’

‘Up West is it?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Martha.

‘Then you don’t need any job we can get you, do you then?’ He took a big scrubbing brush and went back into the café, saying, ‘Want some breakfast, help yourself if you do.’

On the shelf over the old wood stove were set out the week’s rations. Each person’s separately: that week’s four ounces of butter, three times, the bacon and two eggs each, on a big dish. And tea. Martha’s had gone.

Iris watched Martha out of a practised interest in the unfairness of the world, to see if she would take eggs, butter, bacon. Martha did not like the butter anyway: a hard salty grease. But Iris had a large china bowl of dripping, the aromatic distillation of a dozen Sunday dinners.

‘Oh, you’re back to my dripping?’ said Iris, friendly again; and she smiled as Martha fried bread in the delicious crumbling scented fat, for herself, for Iris, and they sat eating and drinking tea while the sound of Jimmy’s scrubbing brush went on next door.

He did not come back in: he was not going to forgive her. Martha said good-bye to Iris; was invited to drop in when she felt inclined; and she went upstairs while Iris joined Jimmy in the café.

In the minute room which was already cleaned and impersonal, over the café, her case stood ready for her near the door, with the ration book on it. She took out a summer dress, bundled Mrs Van’s coat and the sweater and skirt into the case; and prepared for the summer day which it was fairly doubtful that the day would remain. She left through the little rose-scented garden.

In was ten in the morning. In the great buildings along the river that administered London, men and their secretaries arrived for work. In three hours, the feeling of the city had changed. The great market that was London had opened: a dispersed, scattered, diversified market, so that in every street was a corner, a block, a centre, where it seemed as if wealth had swum together just here, to offer concealed money, furs, carpets, silver, gold, robes, but like icebergs, only a fraction of them visible in a sign of the name of a banker, or the glass case full of embroideries, or luscious furs; for above all, it was a sense of hidden wealth: and walking over the damp grey pavements it was to feel that under one’s feet stretched invisible warehouses of luxury and richness and beauty – miles of them, caverns of them. And, to the dealers and merchants who owned them, it was not important to sell, or to display, or to offer. A secret city. A hidden city. And, if instead of walking past doors, showcases, the proffered sample, one pushed open a door, passed the rather inferior items for sale, or challenged an inner door, which only needed to be pushed, for so little did the owners expect temerity on the part of docile customers that there was no doorkeeper and – suddenly, hey presto! a great descending stairway to the underground city beneath London where were stored for miles and miles the most fabulous carpets and tapestries and silks in the world.

Martha ought to buy something to wear. Imagining she had a hundred pounds to spend, she stalked clothes up and down the rich streets in Knightsbridge. But if she had had a hundred pounds, she would not have been able to spend a penny of it. The point was, she understood at last, that she did not know for whom, for what, she was dressing. If she had stayed in the streets across the river with Jimmy, Iris, and Stanley, with Stella and her clan, there would have been no problem: the working girls had a style and dash of their own. But it was only necessary to imagine wearing, with Henry, what they wore, to see its impossibility: a tight skirt, a shirt, a sweater: no, no, on to his face would come the look that meant that here was something attractive, and licensed – outside his codes. Was he aware of it? Probably not. Or, she could choose the uniform of a lady: plenty of these, unmistakable, in shops that sold nothing else. But she did not ‘fancy’ as Iris would say, that particular uniform. What then? For there were streets full of clothes, ‘utility’ from the war, hideous and dull and tasteless. For whom? Who were the men, the women, who deliberately sat down, and on to drawing-boards sketched such clothes?

No, not if she had a thousand pounds to spend, was there anything to buy – until she knew what she was going to have to be. Her suitcase in her hand, she dawdled, wasting time until it was one o’clock and time for Phoebe.

The restaurant off the Strand was a lower-level version of Baxter’s; a large room dotted with small tables each with four Windsor chairs. There were dull floral curtains, and wallpaper of a pinkish floral design. The standard to which both related was the same; somewhere behind both was a country house, or a large farm house: the country, at any rate, with centuries of a certain kind of taste behind it. If Fanny’s and Baxter’s had to do without paint or new curtains for fifty years, they would still present themselves to the world with impermeable self-esteem. The menu of Fanny’s offered the same kind of food, but plainer, without sauces, and much cheaper.

When Phoebe arrived, she nodded at the waiter, who knew her; and had inspected Martha thoroughly before even sitting down, though from different standards to Henry’s. Martha’s failure to ring up immediately she had arrived in London: and then, her unreliability, had confirmed, if not frivolity, at least a more fortunate experience than hers, Phoebe’s. Martha’s appearance underlined it. Phoebe wore a skirt and a rather dull jersey, and pearls. Martha wore a linen sleeveless dress on a day which was only by courtesy a summer’s day; and her appearance paid no homage at all to service. Also, her suitcase stood by the chair, after so many weeks in London. Before Phoebe had even sat down, she had made it clear that Martha was a disappointment. She ordered, while Martha followed suit: chicken soup, tinned; boiled fish in an egg sauce; steamed jam pudding. There was a stain on the tablecloth. ‘And how are you finding London?’

This, since it was Phoebe who asked it, was a serious question. Martha deliberated. To whom in the world could she say what she had found in London? Jack – perhaps. A little. And now, because it was Phoebe who sat there, opposite, the past weeks changed their aspect and presented ‘London’ to Martha as a series, containing dockland Stella, the café and Iris; Jack; Henry; and the people in the streets and pubs. Fragments. This was a country where people could not communicate across the dark that separated them. She opened her mouth to say: I am thinking a good deal about class … and shut it again, though Phoebe had seen her about to speak and still waited. It was nothing to do with class. In Africa, as a white, she was so and so; and if she had been black, must be such and such. There was something in the human mind that separated, and divided. She sat, looking at the soup in front of her, thinking: if I eat, if I start this routine of meals, sleep, order, the fine edge on which I’m living now is going to be dulled and lost. For the insight of knowledge she now held, of the nature of separation, of division (for any number of different sets of words would serve to state it, none being of any real use), was clear and keen – she understood, sitting there, while the soup sent a fine steam of appetite up to her nostrils, understood really (but in a new way, was in the grip of a vision), how human beings could be separated so absolutely by a slight difference in the texture of their living that they could not talk to each other, must be wary, or enemies.

Phoebe waited. She had never travelled out of England. Martha was a traveller. She wanted to know.

Class? Phoebe was dedicated to its abolition, presumably, as a stalwart of the Labour Party.

Martha picked up her spoon and started on the soup. ‘I think a great deal about food, for one thing,’ she temporized: feeling strongly that Phoebe deserved better than that.

Phoebe, let down, said, on a fine edge of rebuke: ‘Not very surprising, in the circumstances.’

The war having appeared in the wings of their meeting, it moved off again: Martha felt guilty. She had heard that Phoebe had had a bad time during the war. Her husband had been mostly away, except for leaves when the two little girls were conceived. The marriage had broken up. One of the little girls had been very ill. Phoebe had held a job in a government office, had fire-watched, had looked after the children, had been ill herself … One could not imagine Phoebe as anything less than admirable. Martha kept quiet.

‘I have just the right job for you,’ announced Phoebe at last, since Martha the traveller was silent. She was making a good many things plain in this one announcement. She was left-wing labour: but not so left that she did not regard some well-known left-wingers, her ex-husband for one, as ‘extreme’. She was bound by her position, to regard all communists with a greater hatred and suspicion than she would a Tory. Her sister Marjorie was – from her point of view – a communist; she was dangerous, dogmatic, wrongheaded. But this was the role that Marjorie had always played for elder sister Phoebe. Martha was a friend of Marjorie’s. But Mrs Van der Bylt in correspondence, in constant touch with a dozen of the organizations which Phoebe committee’d or secretaried or manned, had written offering Martha as a valuable recruit for the cause. Which meant that Martha’s degree of redness had been defined as tolerable – not only personally, as what Mrs Van and presumably Phoebe could stand, as people; but what others might be expected to stand. In an inflammable time. Not altogether complimentary that: Martha was not altogether sure she liked being so safe. Besides, whatever else she had learned in London, she was sure of one thing: anything her communist friends had told her of the poverty of the working people; of the blind selfishness of the middle classes (she hadn’t met the aristocracy, irrelevant, probably), was true. More than true. If she were going to have to be political, communism was nearer her mark than ‘Labour’ in its various degrees. Yet for days now she had been coming towards Phoebe, and knowing quite well that in doing so she was choosing her future. Her immediate future, at least. Well, one thing was certain. She was bound to be in a false position of one kind or another. That couldn’t be avoided. To what extent?

‘What kind of a job, Phoebe?’

‘We are going to start an organization for freeing the colonies, that sort of thing. A society or organization here, with the progressive movements there. And we need a secretary.’

‘I see.’

Martha considered Phoebe’s ‘We’. She was not in a position to define it.

‘A fairly broadly based thing.’

‘I see. Anyone who would support the objectives?’

Phoebe hesitated, coloured, gave Martha an acute but wary glance, and lowered her gaze to her soup. ‘There would have to be limits. You know, of course, that communists are proscribed in the Labour Party – and other organizations?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Martha, bland out of irritation. The irritation was unreasonable. Phoebe was doing her duty. As she, Martha, would do in her position.

Phoebe now waited for Martha to say clearly where she stood. Martha was damned if she would – besides, she didn’t know herself. Mrs Van’s recommendations were going to have to do.

Phoebe, annoyed, spooned in soup. Martha did the same.

‘We do need someone with real experience of the colonies – someone who knows the conditions, experience with the natives.’

‘For a start you can’t use that word any longer – natives.’

‘Oh! No? Well there you are, that’s why one needs …’

‘But I don’t think I want to do that sort of job.’

‘Well of course the money wouldn’t be very good,’ said Phoebe, making it clear that in her eyes this was no reason to refuse any job. ‘But there would be compensations.’ She meant, the society of people like herself; the interest of the work; above all, knowing oneself to be of use – exactly as Martha would in her position.

‘The thing is, I don’t want to be in that atmosphere. When I came to England, it was to get out of it.’

And now Phoebe was bound to be disappointed in Martha. For one thing – why had she wasted her, Phoebe’s time? What other kind of job did she expect?

‘I see,’ she said, tightening her lips, and looking for the waiter to take away her soup and bring the fish. She was busy, had no more time to waste.

If Marjorie had sat there, she would have cried out, all emotion and affectionate indignation: Well, Matty, if you’re going to take that line! If you’re going to be like that! Well then!

But Phoebe was not Marjorie. And Martha was not ‘Matty’, was refusing ‘Matty’ entrance. In order not to be ‘Matty’ she had to be cool, brisk – hard. As hard as Phoebe.

Martha now ate gluey fish in silence, thinking of Phoebe, of Marjorie. For this was the real experience of the meal, what she would take away from it. Phoebe was physically like Marjorie. Coming on Phoebe suddenly, without warning, Martha would have embraced her, lovable and absurd Marjorie, the younger sister. She had known Marjorie for how long? Over ten years! They had seen each other nearly every day. Marjorie had appeared, before the war, in the colony, as ‘immigrant’ – a girl from England. The people who worked with her all had the same attitude to her – an affection, almost an amusement. ‘Marjorie’ they had said, meaning her quality of charm, desperate enthusiasm, earnestness. But what had they known? Only this: Marjorie the younger sister. And an arrangement of eyes, nose, hair, pretty English skin. Here they were in front of Martha now, as Phoebe.

What had made Marjorie was this: a doctor in a country town in England with bookish tastes and an interest in politics, had brought up two daughters, his wife having died when they were children. They were very alike: pretty, fair, lively, English girls. Phoebe, the elder, was bossy and downright, with Marjorie, the girl five years her junior. Eventually Marjorie had escaped from Phoebe, had had to, to gain herself. But: sitting opposite Phoebe, who spoke in Marjorie’s voice, who was so like Marjorie, how could one not wonder: who was Marjorie? She was not her voice; not her face; not her body; not her eyes or her hair. Her manner then? But Marjorie’s breathless, defensive, agitated charm – that was all younger-sister. So had she won breathing space from Phoebe through their childhood. Marjorie was just – the younger sister? Of course not.

But who, what? Martha had no idea.

Martha sat opposite the brisk, pretty efficient Englishwoman, who was Phoebe, consciously preventing herself from talking to Marjorie. She was ashamed. She had never known Marjorie. As always, she had been lazy, unimaginative: she had never done more than talk to the younger sister. Well, if she wasn’t careful, she wouldn’t do more than talk to the older sister! For that manner was so strong in Phoebe, it was hard to imagine one could get past it.

‘Of course, I’d be prepared to advise,’ said Martha.

‘There are always plenty of people ready to do that,’ said Phoebe at once; then, seeing that she contradicted herself, looked irritated, and suddenly very tired. ‘We do need help,’ she said.

‘Phoebe, have you felt caged, shut inside an atmosphere?’

‘Well, frankly yes,’ said Phoebe, meaning the war again.

‘No I didn’t mean the war,’ said Martha, clumsily, for Phoebe’s reproach was so strong.

‘I can’t imagine myself not working for what I believe in – frankly, I can’t.’

‘Does one actually have to work in some organization! Well I can see why you are annoyed. You’re not an employment agency! I don’t know why I imagined.’

Phoebe’s glance at the words ‘employment agency’ betrayed that that was exactly what she had been thinking.

‘Well, I do always seem to know of jobs that need filling … let me see then.’

‘I suppose what it comes to – I’ve had enough of organized politics for the time being.’

Phoebe was silent for some time. Martha knew why. Without Mrs Van’s recommendations, Phoebe would have set her down as one of the people whose reforming energies had come out of passionate identification with Russia, the pure and the perfect: just another red with a broken heart, a weak reed, a neurotic, a washout. But Mrs Van had said differently. Therefore Phoebe sat, eating jammy sponge with a teaspoon, her eyebrows drawn together. She looked so like Marjorie that Martha experienced a variety of awe, or panic. It seemed inconceivable that she could not say: Marjorie! and that the person opposite would respond out of ten years of – friendship?

‘Mrs Van Bylt said you had done research – that kind of thing?’ ‘Yes. Tell me, Phoebe, do you and Marjorie ever write to each other?’

‘We are neither of us very good correspondents. How is she? She’s had another baby, she said. That’s four now?’

In her voice the shadow of a pain, something personal, ‘And I’ve never met her husband of course.’

‘He’s a nice man. A quiet kind of man. He’s a civil servant.’

‘So she said,’ said Phoebe, making it clear what she thought of civil servants: reminding Martha that she herself had married a crusading firebrand from the left. She lifted her face and smiled at Martha: who felt as she had that morning with Iris and her Stanley: an area of family emotion had been highlit, touched on.

Suppose I said to her: ‘Your sister’s a very unhappy woman. She’s bored with her nice reliable husband. She had children out of a compulsion. She’s living in a permanent nervous breakdown’ – no, of course she could not say this. This woman did not understand despair – or rather, the admission of it. And besides, such information, if it were not diagnosed – and it would be – as a symptom of Martha’s own identification with the neurotic weakness of this world, would be confirmation of the younger sister’s always expected failure.

‘Is it a success – that sort of thing?’

‘Well, yes; I think the four small children are a bit of a handful at the moment.’

‘I don’t see that. After all, you have plenty of servants out there, don’t you?’ She snapped this out, her face in high colour, and said everything about her own life, which was doing a hard poorly paid job, and being responsible, and bringing up two small girls without a father – without help, without servants.

‘I think I know something for you,’ said Phoebe, pushing aside the personal, while her face still flamed red, and her fingers clutched her purse. ‘There’s my brother-in-law. My ex-brother-in-law. He wants some help. He’s a writer. Of a kind, of course. It’s a hobby really. He’s got some sort of a business or other.’

‘What sort of a writer?’

A silence. Phoebe took a mouthful of weak coffee while Martha registered an old atmosphere: oh yes, she had been here before, and very much so. ‘He did get a book published.’ Another sip. ‘It got quite good reviews.’ One could see that the good reviews were not only a surprise, but a disappointment. She disliked the man, or disliked the book? No, the atmosphere was so strong that Martha waited for the next phrase with confidence. ‘I haven’t any time for books that aren’t about something real, have you?’

So Marjorie might have said; or Anton. Among a selection of similar phrases, she could also have used: I’m not interested in ivory tower writing. No, that would probably be too literary a choice of words for Phoebe.

Martha tried: ‘What was it about?’ ‘Oh, just personal emotions.’ ‘Well, I need a job.’

Here Phoebe looked, lips tight, at Martha’s suitcase. ‘Where have you left your luggage?’

Almost Martha let ‘Matty’ say for her, humorous, deprecating, charming: All I’ve got in the world! ‘That’s my luggage.’

‘You must be a very efficient packer,’ said Phoebe, making a virtue of poor material.

‘What sort of help does he want? What’s the job?’

‘Oh, I don’t know – he’s always running about, you know, he’s got so many irons in the fire. He lives rather near here, actually. I was thinking, we could drop in if you’ve time?’

‘Yes. Good.’

‘Dropping in’, so much not what Martha had experienced of London – that is, the London where people actually lived in houses, had organized lives, as distinct from the wanderers and campers – meant that Phoebe had a special relation with this man?

‘I’ll telephone,’ said Phoebe.

One didn’t ‘drop in’ without telephoning first.

Phoebe went across to the waiter, conferred, and disappeared into a door marked ‘Private’. She came back to say: ‘Mark says we can come round. He’ll be free at two-thirty for an hour.’

Yes, that was more like it: one was free by appointment for an hour. What made the difference? Of course, servants! With servants, plentiful and cheap, one could drop in, drop by, stay for meals, develop large casual acquaintanceships.

Around the corner meant Bloomsbury.

Martha’s arms were both wrenched by the suitcase to a condition of permanent ache. She suggested a taxi. Phoebe never used taxis. They went by bus.

The house was not part of one of the famous squares, but nearly so: from the front door, it seemed as if the trees and plants of the square claimed the house. Tall, narrow, formal, it was like the houses of the squares; and the whole neighbourhood, now that the different shades of ‘white’ chosen by their owners before the war had dimmed into an unremarkable but uniform grey, had the unity of its original design: houses, terraces, grassy squares full of old trees. Here, in short, one thought of the beauty of London, not of its ugliness. Standing in the hall of the house, which had Persian rugs on a dark floor, and a minimum of old furniture. Martha knew that for the first time in her life she was in a setting where, if she chose to stay, there would be no doubt at all of how she ought to behave, to dress. She had always resisted such a setting, or the thought of it. If she took this job, then it must be for a very short time. She felt attacked by the house – claimed. Besides, she was out of place. And so, she noted, was Phoebe, who was dowdy, seemed clumsy, where she, Martha, was strident.

A man came down the stairs, half-seen until he turned on a light. He was dark, and of middle-height; but he was strongly built, and his face strongly featured, so that he gave, at once, an impression of force and of height. A presence: a strong one. But then he spoke, and what came over was anxiety, worry, even annoyance.

‘How very good of you … let me …’ here he took Phoebe’s coat over his arm, and Martha’s suitcase from her hand. ‘Now let me see. Really, Phoebe, it is so very kind of you to take so much trouble.’ He was giving them no more than the courtesy he felt that he should. Either something had happened since Phoebe had telephoned half an hour before, or he had taken a dislike to Martha on sight. At which Martha reacted – and saw herself doing it – with the childish: All right then, I don’t think much of you either! For she didn’t. The colonial in her named his politeness insincerity, since he was so clearly angry about something; and the worry that he radiated was alerting her nerves for flight. She wondered how quickly she could make excuses, while Phoebe reclaimed her coat, saying she had work to do and must leave at once.

‘No, do stay, do, Phoebe,’ he almost cried, his face anguished in his effort to smile. ‘Let me see now, where …’ He opened a door off the hall, displaying a drawing-room. ‘I’m sure Margaret wouldn’t mind my using …’

Martha understood that she was about to be interviewed, by a man who had no taste, either for her, or for interviews, she could not decide which, and he was trying to decide on an appropriate place for it.

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Phoebe, reproving his lack of faith in her busy-ness. ‘Let me know how things go,’ she said to Martha. ‘Because if you and Mark don’t suit each other, then I’m sure there’s plenty of work that needs to be done.’ She went.

Martha and Mark Coldridge stood in the hall, left to their own decisions.

‘You aren’t the young lady from Birmingham?’ ‘No, should I be?’

‘Oh, well then …’ He held the door open and she entered the long, subdued, beautiful room which looked as if no one had been in it for months.

‘For some weeks now Phoebe has been urging me on to some protégée of hers from Birmingham. Labour Party or something.’

He was looking at her more closely. She stood, to be inspected; examining him. But all she felt was: here are claims. Not only from him, the man, very strong ones, though she did not know how to define them; but from the house, the furniture – even this area of London.

‘Look,’ said Martha, almost becoming ‘Matty’ in her desperation to escape. ‘There’s been a mistake. You’re in a false position. I’m so sorry – I’ll leave.’ And she was on her way to the door.

‘No. Wait. We’ll go upstairs,’ he said, thus making it clear that Margaret’s room, whoever Margaret was, had been chosen probably to put off, or intimidate, the young lady from Birmingham, or Phoebe – at any rate, the room was seen as a kind of no-man’s land or defensive area. She followed him upstairs to a small room on the first floor, which being full of books and papers and comfortable clutter, made it easier for Martha to sit down.

‘Who are you then?’

She replied, giving him minimum information, resisting impulses to reply as she had done to other strangers, I’m Patty Jones, I’m Joan Baker, I’m the mother of twins or the sister of a sailor who …

‘And what kind of job did Phoebe say it was? What are you expecting?’

This so far away from the suavity which was one of his inbuilt attributes, indicated so much anxiety, defensiveness, that again she was on the point of running away. She examined his face before replying: a dark, strong, well-featured face. Handsome? As handsome as it did: it was all clenched up with watchful tension.

‘You needed some sort of help with a book, but I don’t really think …’

‘I see.’ He was more relaxed. He smiled. ‘Well, but don’t go. Because I do.’ ‘What sort of help?’

And now a look which, if he had not been a man to whom such devices were foreign, if he had been anybody else, Martha would have said was cunning. No: but here was something hidden, tucked away.

‘Well. I’ve a deadline – that’s the word they use for it. And I’ve got to …’ He let all that drift away. Sitting half-way on to a writing-table, his legs held up, as if they rested on a stool, or chair – but they rested on air, he looked at her as if around a corner. Everything was out of scale, disproportionate – discordant. Martha understood she was repelled, not by him, whom she could say she liked; but by a situation. There was one. Anything here, in this house, she understood, would be the absolute opposite of everything she had hoped to find.

She rallied and said firmly: ‘I am looking for a job for a limited period. I don’t want to be tied down to anything. And I did hope, regular hours.’

His face had remained steady during the first condition, but it definitely darkened at her last.

‘Oh, very reasonable of course. But I was rather hoping … you see I work irregularly myself. Mostly at nights. I’ve got an office to go to in the day …’

Here there was a commotion outside, as of an entrance being set or arranged: then a firm knock, and then, before Mark could say anything, there came in a lady, holding a small boy by the hand.

‘Ah!’ said Mark, hopelessly. He got off the desk. To the small boy he said: ‘Well old chap?’ and the child, a round, dark, very pale boy with extraordinarily defensive dark eyes pathetically smiled. He looked around for somewhere appropriate to sit, and sat, while the woman watched to see if he did it right.

‘This is my mother,’ said Mark. ‘Margaret Patten. And this is my son, Francis. And this is Mrs Hesse.’

Martha felt that she knew the lady only too well; since she was large, light, buoyant, and seemed much younger than she must be to be this man’s mother. She wore an ample flowered silk dress and carried gloves, which she now laid down on Mark’s desk and, without looking at them, patted and fitted into a finger-matching pair one above the other, as if they still lay on a display counter, or as if she wished they did. Meanwhile she took in a variety of physical facts about Martha, age, dress, presence, style, and could be heard thinking loudly: Hesse? German? A German name? She’s not German, no. But she’s not English either … Mark looked increasingly annoyed.

‘Well, I do so hope that you’ve found someone at last,’ she announced. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ she said to the child, who had got up, to come closer to his father. He sat again, promptly, his feet side by side, watching the hostile grown-up world from which, so those eyes said so terribly clearly, he could expect nothing that wasn’t painful. Martha found her heart was aching. That little boy Francis was unbearably painful. Meanwhile, Mrs Patten was most frankly summing her up; while her son Mark watched her do it and resented it.

‘Mrs Hesse has only just this moment arrived and we have not agreed about anything at all.’

‘Oh,’ said Margaret Patten, smiling at Martha across her son, as if behind his back.

‘In fact we are engaged in a sort of mutual interview.’

‘Oh well then, we must leave you to it, mustn’t we, Francis?’ She held out her hand and Francis instantly rose to grasp it.

‘If she does stay,’ said Mrs Patten, ‘it’s lucky the big room will be empty for a bit – that is, if dear Sally can bear to keep away!’

He said nothing. Martha said nothing. She was angry for a variety of reasons: mostly pressures from the past, and strong ones. She resented Mrs Patten on her own account and on Mark’s. And on the child’s. Francis now offered his father a smile, which Mark returned: like prisoners of fate they were, condoling briefly before inevitable parting. Then Mrs Patten removed him from the room.

There was a pause while Mark recovered himself. Then: ‘She’s left her gloves, damn it.’ He picked them up and carried them to the door where he saw them into his mother’s hand. Good-byes were said again. He came back.

‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘My wife’s in a mental hospital.’ He paused, not looking at her, while it sank in. ‘My mother’s had the brunt of Francis for quite a bit and she feels that if there were a woman in the house, it would make it easier – during school holidays, for instance.’

There was so much information here that Martha remained silent, digesting it, while he waited for her. And as she thought it out, she saw before her eyes the child’s face as he turned to leave: it was a long, curious, hopeful look.

Oh no, said Martha to herself. Oh no, no, no!

At last she looked at Mark and waited and he said: ‘But you mustn’t think that if you did work for me – for a while, you’d be in any way responsible for Francis, or that you’d have to live here.’

‘Who does live here?’

‘A good question,’ he said, laughing at last. ‘Yes. Well, I should have told you before. The thing is, it’s often hard to know. Well, I do, basically. And my wife – when she’s well …’ A long pause. ‘That’s not likely to be … she’s not very … it doesn’t look as if she’ll be home for some time. Or if she is, she’s not … My mother has the use of the room you saw downstairs. She sometimes likes to entertain in town. And there are the rooms upstairs. They all seem to belong to someone. Or did. We are a large family. We were.’

‘I see’.

‘Yes, I supposed that you had.’ This was an appeal as well as an apology. Martha felt as if she were being swept fast over an edge, and by her own emotions; for the first time since she came to London, she was unfree. She wanted to run out of the house – anywhere. She was extraordinarily upset. So was he.

‘The job itself,’ he said at last. ‘It is pretty straightforward. But you see, my difficulty is, I’ve got to have someone who isn’t going to be upset by – tricky situations.’

She saw very clearly. Martha was thinking: She had no money left. If she were to go to a hotel or find a room she must ask Mark Coldridge for an advance on salary (not yet mentioned). The room upstairs (who was Sally?) would be a godsend, until she could find a place of her own. But that would mean landing herself even deeper in this terrible involving situation which had already involved her; the child’s face haunted her. Why had she been so stupid to leave herself without any money? To work here, living somewhere else – that would be safe enough, probably. (Would it?) She could borrow money. Who? Jack. She must ask Jack.

‘Can I think it over?’ she said; and he said, cold with disappointment, interpreting it, as she almost meant, as a polite refusal: ‘Of course, you’re quite right.’

‘It’s not that I don’t like the idea of working with you … it’s just that …’

‘I do understand.’

And that moment could have been the end of it: she might have walked away and been free. But she said, unable to prevent herself: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I am really so desperately sorry.’

‘Look, you could either live – anywhere, where you please. Or here. But there’s nearly always someone else here. It wouldn’t be a question of being alone with me. Sally’s so often here. Sally’s my brother’s wife. But in either case it wouldn’t have to be a question of hours you didn’t like. But I’d pay you twelve pounds a week, whether you lived in or out.’

His tone was saying that this was generous – and indeed it was; much more than the market rate.

Martha got up. So much emotion was now swilling around the room that she couldn’t stand it. ‘I’ll let you know before today’s out. Will that do?’

His face was suddenly alive: friendly, delighted.

‘Oh good, good,’ he said. ‘I do so hope … but I don’t want to put any pressure on you. And you mustn’t mind – you see, for some weeks, now, I’ve been beset by Phoebe’s choices, and most of the time they are so very definitely not mine.’

‘She’s very forceful, certainly.’

Smiling over Phoebe’s so useful force, they went down the stairs, while Martha remembered how people had smiled over Marjorie: a different smile. Odd: one could never smile, for Phoebe, the smile one used for Marjorie!

Martha left him, resisting his suggestion that she should leave the suitcase and pick it up later.

Where could she go while she made a decision?

Where was there for her to go, but Jack’s? And now, walking down through the lovely square, where the summery trees waved their branches in a cool air, she was free of that house, of that man, of that haunted child. She would go to Jack’s and ask if she could, after all, live in the floor beneath his. Just for the time at least. She went to the telephone to ring Jack.

When he heard it was Martha, the voice of his first impulse was a rise into a warm relief: ‘Oh, Martha, I’m so happy – I really did think I’d never hear from you again. I don’t know why I did.’ Then a pause, and the judicious voice, low, of his present situation. Joanna was with him. He offered Martha this fact, waiting for her to see that Joanna, put off twice for Martha, had earned the preference now. Martha saw it. ‘Look, Jack, can you lend me some money? I need about ten pounds. Five would do.’ And now a very long pause. At last: ‘Well. Martha, you see, I don’t keep money here.’ He was silent, waiting for her to think of another resource. Martha found herself taken over by the thought: Of course, he’s so mean … and with such violence that she discarded the judgement. All the same, he did keep money there: like the old farmers of his tradition, in a bag under the mattress. Quite a lot of it. Then she understood that this demand for money meant in fact that she didn’t want to be in the rooms beneath him, she wanted to go to a hotel: she was asking Jack for money to escape from any pressure he might put on her. And he felt it: he was feeling it.

‘Perhaps Joanna could lend me some money?’ said Martha; urgent, her voice on a high pitch of desperation.

‘Wait a minute, Martha.’

Martha stood in the telephone box, watching the people pass outside: it was the rush hour again, and the sky held the dark of imminent rain. She was in a panic. Funk. This was a danger-point in her life: she was being taken over. Had been taken over? Jack’s voice again measured: ‘If you come over now, Martha, then we could talk about it, hey?’

‘Good. Thank you. Thank Joanna.’

‘Are you coming by taxi, or walking?’

‘Bus.’

‘See you.’

He had been asking: How long have we, Joanna and I, got before you come? All the talents for minute organization of a talented housewife went into the organization of his women … Martha was raging with spite against him. She had known before that Jack was careful about money – if that was the word for it. But she had judged him generously: he was guarding the thousand pounds that were his freedom. Never before had she felt dislike or repulsion for him or his way of life. Now she felt both. And also for the household she had been in that afternoon – a parcel of sickly neurotics, and Phoebe a humourless bigot … hatred burned through her veins. She had to stop it – had to, must … she boarded a bus headed west, in a jostle of people who smelled sour with sweat this muggy afternoon. She was tired. The weeks of not sleeping, not eating enough, the restless walking, had caught up: she was ready to collapse finally into tears. She wished she could be in a dark room and pull covers up over her. The bus was charging down the Bayswater Road. A couple of nights ago, here Martha had walked light and easy and alert. That was the night when, walking, she had understood … but she could not remember now what it was she had understood. And she had a violent reaction against that too – posturing around, she thought; making yourself important, imagining all kinds of great truths when all it was really … well of course, if you’re going to not-sleep and not-eat properly and then make love for hours and hours with a bloody … she saw herself, a young woman in a matron’s black coat, walking through the dark dirty streets with an idiotic smile on her face: but somewhere at the back of her mind the thought held: it was here, it was here, it was – just because you can’t get anywhere near it now, that doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist. She got off the bus, her legs weak, and almost staggered with the heavy case past the canal where children splashed in a dull sunlight. She arrived at Jack’s door to lean against it, breathing deeply, to recover herself. In the street men in singlets dug up the street, standing to their waists in a greasy yellow earth.

The door was opened, before she had rung, by the grinning youth: he had been watching through the panes.

‘There’s one up there already,’ he said, delighted.

‘Yes, I know. Thanks.’ She went past, hearing his idiot’s chuckle. Good Lord, she couldn’t possibly live in this house with an idiot and a … Jack came smiling down the stairs to meet her. And at the sight of him her revulsion dissolved into simple affection. Everything she had felt was the result of exhaustion and she was not to be trusted. A young man in sloppy blue trousers and a heavy blue pull-over chosen to disguise the thinness which was his shame and his terror, he took her case, and pulled her close inside the circle of bone that was his arm. He kissed her and said: ‘Hey there, Martha, what’s up?’

She shook her head, nearly crying, and went before him into the black and white room where Joanna sat, dressed, on the chair near the window. Either she had not undressed, or she had dressed for Martha. She wore her perfect clothes: a beige well-hung skirt, beige pull-over, long legs in silk, not nylon, and highly polished low brown shoes. Her camel-hair coat was folded over the back of another chair. She looked as neat and shiny as a newly-washed child. Smiling, she nodded at Martha. ‘Would you like to lie down?’ Still held inside the bony circlet, she was being urged towards the bed.

‘No. I don’t want to sleep – not yet.’

There was only one decent chair, and Joanna was on it. She got up and sat on the bed, and Martha took the chair. Jack turned his back to make coffee on the spirit stove: he was leaving it to them, to the two women, to define the situation, to handle it.

‘Was the job no good?’ he inquired, as neither spoke.

And suddenly Matty exploded through Martha’s mouth in a storm of half-giggling tears. ‘Oh yes, it’s just my style. Just up my street …’ Her voice rose in a wail of laughter. ‘You’d be surprised, it’s tailor-made for me. I tell you, it’s been sitting there waiting for me for years – everything as sick and neurotic and hopeless as you can imagine … and a dominating mamma over all, and a wife in a mental hospital, and a man just sitting waiting for some sucker like me to cope with everything.’

Jack’s blue back was still bent over his cups and spoons: he was alertly waiting. And behind the cool little face of Joanna’s upbringing was dislike and upset. And the cool Martha, who watched giggling tearful Matty with as much detachment as either Jack or Joanna, knew that it was Jack who would earn Joanna’s dislike of this situation – not Martha. This thought pulled her together. She sniffed, wiped her hands across her eyes and cheeks, for she had no handkerchief, and sat silent, recovering.

‘There’s plenty of jobs in London,’ commented Jack, turning with three filled mugs – black, black, coffee. On the farms of his tradition, great black cauldrons stood always simmering on the back of wood stoves, with coffee grounds in them inches deep, coffee being added daily to make a brew which depth-charged the nervous system at first sip. This black liquid in the cup Martha held would be too much in her present state. She sat holding the cup.

‘Anyone who wants to live in London …’ said Joanna; ‘What for? Why don’t you live in the country. You can live there like a human being.’

‘Joanna can lend you some money, Martha. A fiver?’

‘Yes,’ said Joanna. ‘But if I were you I’d get on to the first train out of London.’

‘But you look all in. Man – why don’t you lie down on the bed and sleep a little. Joanna and I can go out for some supper – Joanna?’

‘I’ve got to go,’ said Joanna, sipping her thick black coffee and watching Martha.

Martha thought: neither of them heard what I said. Joanna dislikes Jack now because she’s been subjected to my being hysterical, and Jack is feeling: Martha’s upset.

Jack now lowered himself to the floor. First he put his cup down on it, and then felt the floor, as it were greeted earth: the way an African villager might touch the earth with one hand, assessing it, before squatting down. Jack squatted, his hand flat on the floor beside him. Martha thought: If he and I were alone, we would make love, and what I said, what I felt, would be answered with how he made love. This seemed to her an extraordinary discovery.

‘What sort of work do you want?’ said Joanna.

‘It’s not the work as such I care about. But I do know exactly what I want.’ For she did. In the last few minutes, something had happened, a balance had shifted. She knew.

‘I want,’ said Martha, ‘to live in such a way that I don’t just – turn into a hypnotized animal.’

Jack, smiling with affectionate hope that he would soon know what Martha was so excited about, kept his palm flat on the floor – earth. But Joanna was saying with abrupt hostility: ‘Oh no. I had quite enough of all that during the war.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Jack, turning the antennae of his sensitivity towards Joanna.

‘I know what I mean. And I’ve had enough of it. I simply won’t have any more,’ said Joanna.

‘It was on the boat. I understood on the boat,’ said Martha.

‘Martha didn’t like the trip over,’ Jack explained to Joanna. ‘But all the same, Martha, it must have been all right, just sitting there with your girl friend and watching everyone. When I came back as a passenger it was the same …’ Now he was talking like a host, soothing Martha’s smarts away. ‘But I spent all my time in the gym. I wasn’t going to mix myself up.’

‘Oh, but I did, I did, and that’s the point.’

‘You said you sat with that sick girl and watched – it’s always awful, a lot of people crammed together, just animals.’

‘No.’ Martha was in the grip of a necessity to explain, even to claim an ally in Joanna, and in the face of Joanna’s hostile negation of her, Martha’s, vital discovery. ‘Before I left … home? I used to dream about the sea. All the time. It was an obsession. When I got off the train at Cape Town, I thought, the sea, but we were put straight on to the boat, and the sea was harbour water full of ships.

And the boat – I swear everything was designed to make you forget the sea was anywhere near. And if you stood at night on the deck and looked at it, or walked around the deck, someone would say, Moon-gazing! Or: I’ve got to get my weight down too. You know … hundreds of people, some of them had been waiting the whole war for this trip. There was this girl. She was sick. Dying I think. A blood disease. She was a pale thin girl – sickly. We teamed up. But she didn’t accept me. I was healthy, you see. I kept catching her eye on me, sceptical and hostile – like you sometimes, Joanna.’ ‘I wasn’t aware of it.’

‘Yes. Yes. Where was I, yes. We two were a challenge to the men, not joining in. She thought that’s why I was doing it. Well, and perhaps – or put it around the other way, it was that that dragged me back in again, so perhaps she was right. In a way. But all the time she was polite, and rather cynical, watching to see how long I’d stick it out with her, instead of joining with the others.’

Joanna said: ‘You should have locked yourself in your cabin.’ She said it fierce and angry.

‘I was sharing a cabin with four others. Not everyone can afford private cabins – oh damn it, that’s childish.’

‘Yes it is,’ said Joanna.

‘I know how Martha feels,’ said Jack. ‘There’s been times in my life I could have killed you for your money. And that’s the truth. There were times in Port Elizabeth I used to look at the rich tourists and I tell you, if I could have killed you safely I would.’

‘But I wasn’t there,’ said Joanna, almost amused.

‘On that boat I used to think that for millions of people I was a rich person. All over Africa, there are people who know that a trip on a passenger boat is heaven – always beyond them. Imagine that. Because I’d only been on the boat a couple of days and I realized that really everyone was hating it. I used to wake early and watch the other three women wake up – lying half asleep, not wanting to wake up, then groaning awake and reaching for cigarettes. Bodies on bunks, wishing they could sleep all day, but the day had started. The whole ship full of groaning people not really wanting to get up, and shaved and washed and dressed. And the holiday clothes. The women had spent months or fortunes on those clothes, just for that trip. Then breakfast. Everyone eating enormous meaty breakfasts, making jokes about greed. They didn’t want to eat it, but they had to, because it was there and they had paid for it. The stewards running around after us like a lot of nursemaids, and people making jokes, you know, about the stewards earning so little. The one thing South Africans, all of us from down there, understand – it’s making jokes defensively and throwing money at people. After breakfast, people making jokes as they went down to the lavatories. And an hour later, around came the stewards with soup. And everyone had soup. Then the real drinking started: at last they could begin to drug themselves. They were knocked over the head already by all that food, but now the alcohol. And then lunch: two hours of food, everyone eating and eating and drinking. And then down to sleep. Thank God they could get rid of two hours of being alive in sleep. But some of them were running around in the sun playing games and making jokes about keeping their weight down. And then tea. People coming up from their bunks in different clothes. Tea and masses of cakes. And then dark came and the sexing up and the drinking. All over the boat, people sexing it up and not liking their partners much because what they were doing didn’t come up to the months and months of fantasies about the trip. And music coming out of every pore of the ship. Everyone on the boat but the crew drugged with food and drink and sex. And then bed. But going to bed very fast, either because you were sexing it up with someone or because you were a bit drunk. Back to the pyjamas and the nightdresses. Back to oblivion – thank God.’

‘Well?’ said Joanna, in a fine, steady anger. Her eyes shone, her cheeks glowed very pink.

‘I spent my time in the gym,’ said Jack.

‘Yes. But it was like a – I can’t explain. Everything was just like ordinary life, only more so. It was a nightmare, sitting with that girl. Her name was Lily Maxwell and she came from one of the mining suburbs outside Johannesburg. I swear we were the only two people among the passengers who weren’t – hypnotized. We sat and watched. But for me, it was a new feeling, and for her – she had lived with it for a long time. She was dying. I think so, anyway. She was sitting looking at living people. She was quite alone, all the time, you see. And I was with her, but she was waiting for me to crack. Cynically. She knew I would. She sat very quietly, watching me looking at the men, and the men looking at me. So then that was it. It took four days. A nice farmer from the Orange Free State. Oh everything very civilized and in order. And I was permanently heavy and dead and gone with food, alcohol and sex.’

‘I don’t see the point of that,’ said Joanna.

‘Oh yes, you do,’ said Martha rudely. ‘I know you do. But I wasn’t quite lost, because all the time I was hanging on to just one thought: that I was drugged and hypnotized and that I didn’t have to be. And above all that I mustn’t be afraid of being – obvious.’

‘Well it is, isn’t it?’ said Joanna. She got up. She wanted to leave.

‘Yes. But what then? Quite so. I want to be sunk in the obvious. It seems to me that there’s a sort of giant conspiracy, and it’s all our fault. There are people who know quite well that they are drugged and asleep, but there’s a weapon against that – you mustn’t be obvious. It’s a cliché. Oh I know perfectly well that there’s nothing new in what I said, but I felt it new then and I feel it now. But I’m not going to be laughed out of it by people who are afraid of words like cliché, or obvious, or banal. I learned that before. Funny, where was it? Who? Somebody – I’ve forgotten. We keep learning things and then forgetting them and so we have to learn them again.’

‘You just want to be a bohemian,’ said Joanna, ‘to be different. Well, I watched all that during the war.’

‘No. The opposite. I remember finding out some time before – that that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way. But there’s a pressure on us all the time to go on to something that seems new because there are new words attached to it. But I want to take words as ordinary as bread. Or life. Or death. Clichés. I want to have my nose rubbed in clichés.’

Joanna was swinging her shoulder bag over her handsome camel coat. She wanted to leave. Jack was standing near her, watching her. He was afraid he had lost her. Martha thought that he probably had. He had not ‘heard’ what she had said. Not with his mind. But Martha knew that with his body he could have answered her. And that understanding, really a new one, that there were people who simply did not operate or function through their minds, was as if Jack had stepped towards her from dark to light. She knew that if they had been free to make love now, it would be in a different way, because Jack had caught, sensed, felt, what she had said. But if he were now asked to put into words what Martha had said, he would answer: Martha’s tired, she’s upset. People were really so very different from each other. She was always forgetting it. Jack’s way of experiencing the world, and hers, they did not touch.

Except when they made love. He understood, and communicated, through the body.

A ring from downstairs. Jack’s face had for one second the look of someone caught out: both women saw it, and even exchanged small ironic glances, so strong is the force of custom. Because neither really felt it. Jack went running downstairs, and they were alone.

Joanna said: ‘I know what you are saying, but what’s the point of all that? There’s nothing we can do, is there? So what’s the use?’

Voices on the stairs in energetic exchange and Jack entered first, saying: ‘It’s Jane!’ with a look of appeal at them both. Now Martha and Joanna asked each other silently if both knew about Jane: both did. And they knew the rules of the game said they should leave. They nodded at Jack, who went out, and came back with a pretty little blonde thing who, however, had the stormy, sparkling, reddened look of a baby who has been crying enjoyably from temper. Some grief of love had struck her into a splendidly tempestuous need, and she hardly saw Jack’s two women visitors who stood ready to leave.

They left together, side by side, and were let out by the crazy youth who grinned his congratulations that they were in such numerous and desirable company.

The two walked down the streets where Joanna would never have set foot if it had not been for Jack. Her clean, impeccable country clothes made a space all around her.

‘I think I’ll take the train home,’ remarked Joanna. ‘I’ve had enough of interesting experiences for the time being.’ She was still very hostile.

‘Are you coming to Jack again?’ For it seemed to Martha that Joanna would not.

‘I don’t know. It’s not what I bargained for. I simply don’t want things to be all – interesting and dramatic.’

‘I’m sorry for my part of it, then.’

‘It’s partly my fault. I shouldn’t have come in that time – curiosity. It serves me right.’

Deepening her accent, making her manner frank and easy, because the colonial could ask personal questions a fellow Englander could not, Martha inquired, risking a snub: ‘Will you go on sleeping with Jack after you are married?’

‘I expect so. Perhaps. I don’t see why not.’ This with a short gruff laugh. ‘But not if I’m going to get involved in … I’m not interested in Jack as a person.’

Martha risked it and said: ‘You talk about Jack as men talk about prostitutes.’

‘Really? I don’t think I’ve ever discussed prostitution with a man. Well, what’s wrong with it? I hate sex,’ she went on coolly. ‘I mean, I can’t stand all the fuss and bother. During the war, there was nothing but sex and people being desperate for each other. But I like being satisfied, I suppose.’

And now Martha had to be silent, because being satisfied was not how she was able to think about sex with Jack. Joanna said: ‘We’re just animals, that’s all. Why pretend anything different? Jack satisfies me. It’s simple and quick and it’s all over with. That’s what I like.’

‘I see.’

‘Well,’ said she, with her short gruff laugh, ‘you’re not going to tell me you love him or something piffling like that, are you?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Martha, laughing equally. The question then was: ‘Did Jack say to himself, I give Joanna satisfaction, short and simple and quick, because that’s what she wants, and I give Martha – whatever were the words he used for it; or did he respond simply out of his marvellous sure instinct?

They had reached the bus stop. They stood together in the half-light of the summer evening. ‘Anyway,’ said Joanna, ‘that’s that. I want to get married, have children, and lots of money and never have to think again about – all that. And if you’d been here during the war you’d know. It seems to me that a lot of people who weren’t in the war, like Jack and you, you are trying to be part of it, you felt you missed something.’

‘Jack wasn’t in the war? He was minesweeping, didn’t you know? He was sunk.’

‘Oh yes, but I didn’t mean that. I mean, being here, in England. That was different.’ ‘I see.’

Here the bus arrived. Joanna smiled cool and formal at Martha, and stepped quietly on to the bus, from where she remarked: ‘I expect we may meet again one of these days.’ The bus went off. Martha now remembered that all of them, Jack, Joanna and herself, had forgotten the money that she needed. Quite right: money was not what she had gone to Jack’s for. But she now had about two pounds. She could go to a cheap hotel, the suitcase being her passport, and ring up Mark in the morning to make an appointment to confirm terms, in the English manner.

But she was too tired. Besides, she remembered those moments when they had understood each other – oh yes, only too well, and thought: what’s the point? I know perfectly well I’m going to move in. She went to a telephone box. It was about nine o’clock.

When Martha arrived, the house seemed to have nobody in it. Then at last he came down the stairs. He was working, he said. He supposed that Martha would rather wait until tomorrow before starting work, otherwise he’d be only too pleased … But she was too tired for anything but bed. He carried her suitcase up to the second floor, and into a large quiet room. He had made the bed. Or somebody had. He left her saying that the kitchen was downstairs if she wanted to make herself coffee in the night – as he often did.

She closed her eyes on a room whose presence was so strong, so confident, that she was saying as she went to sleep: I’ll stay for just a while, just a short time. A couple of months …