COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  He said that, speaking for himself, he could see no reason why the Help for Our Allies organization should not celebrate the revolution, which after all had contributed a great deal to the defenders of Stalingrad and Leningrad; on the other hand, the function of the committee was to raise money for medical supplies, and he was quite prepared to waive his personal feelings in the interests of harmony and good feeling. With this he sat down, crossed his legs, put his pipe back in his mouth and looked - as did everyone else - towards Mr Hesse.

  Who rose, in his stiff deliberate way, and said he agreed with the last speaker. He would like to add, however, that in his personal opinion it would be better if a vote was not taken. It was clear from the discussion that the majority of the committee were in favour of joining in the celebrations; if a vote were taken it might embarrass Mr Perr and those members who felt so strongly about it. Such embarrassments should be avoided wherever possible. He then sat down, and lit a cigarette, giving his full attention to the process.

  This caused a short silence. Mr Perr was agitated. Such was Mr Hesse’s manner that it was impossible to know whether he was being accurate and helpful or airily offensive. Mr Perr looked uncomfortably around the table, and suggested they should pass to the next item on the agenda. Once again the unpolitical members of the committee had been made to feel that there were unpleasant undercurrents which they ought to be understanding. They all proceeded to discuss how best to produce a pamphlet, while Mr Hesse smoked in silence, satisfied with the barb that he had left to rankle.

  It was noticeable that he and Corporal McGrew watched each other for the rest of the meeting; and that afterwards they left together, apparently fortuitously. At which Mr Perr said avidly to Mr Forester that that damned German got under his skin - he didn’t trust him an inch.

  The two men walked away in silence, each waiting for the other to speak. Then the Scotsman took the initiative by remarking, ‘I met a friend of yours in G—. He met you in London in 1938. Barry, the name was.’

  ‘I remember Barry - the Committee for Spain.’

  Andrew took his pipe from his mouth and remarked, ‘I was on the Northern Committee during that period.’

  ‘You were?’ This had a suggestion of stiff amusement.

  The two pairs of eyes met frankly, and both men grinned. All the same there was a small hesitation before Andrew took the plunge: ‘I take it you are in the Party?’

  ‘Since 1933,’ Anton said, and looked questioningly towards Andrew, who said, ‘I’ve been in since 1930.’

  There was a pause. Instinctively, the two men moved closer together as they walked down the pavement under the trees towards the business centre.

  ‘I’m not quite clear as to the situation here,’ observed Andrew. ‘I only came last week.’

  ‘There’s nothing here - we’re the only two members that I’ve discovered.’

  ‘There are a couple of dozen in the camp. But as to the local situation, I would appreciate it if you would clarify my mind a little.’

  They both stopped. It was at a street corner. The traffic fled past noisily in two streams.

  Anton narrowed his eyes, concentrated, began to speak. He spoke for about ten minutes, while the other listened. He concluded, ‘Taking these facts into consideration, I think it is correct to say that we have not the cadres for a party group.’

  Andrew nodded, but added, ‘I agree, more or less. But since I came I’ve been hearing nothing but rumours about a group. What is this group?’

  ‘There is no group. There’s a group of intellectuals - if you can call them that.’

  ‘Some of them seem quite promising.’

  Anton said, ‘I am in contact with Jasmine Cohen. She knows I am in the Party. Through her I know about the rest. They all do a lot of talking, but that doesn’t do any harm.’

  ‘It’s all very well,’ said Andrew, annoyed. ‘It does do harm.’

  ‘Look,’ said Anton. ‘Let’s analyse the position. There are about a dozen men in the Air Force who can address envelopes and make a speech occasionally, but they aren’t allowed to take part in politics. There are a handful of aliens and refugees - such as myself.’ He smiled with controlled bitterness. ‘Politics are naturally not supposed to interest us. Then there are a handful of girls who want love affairs and a bit of excitement. This is not the basis for a Communist group. Besides,’ he added, with finality, ‘the working people of this country are black.’

  Andrew nodded, but was thoughtful.

  ‘What do you know about Sergeant Bolton?’ went on Anton. ‘He keeps getting up at Help for Our Allies meetings and shouting for a revolution. He’ll split the thing if he isn’t stopped.’

  ‘Admittedly he’s a bit – overenthusiastic.’ Andrew added with apologetic humour, ‘The feeling in the camps is rather less indirect than it is in town.’

  But since Anton Hesse did not feel himself part of this town, he was able to say casually. ‘It is bound to be.’

  They began walking again under the trees, which still shed their purple rain.

  ‘It looks to me like this,’ observed Andrew at last. ‘I agree there is no basis for a group in existing conditions. But one is going to come into existence for all that. If so, we should be in on it.’

  Anton Hesse did not at once reply. The fair handsome face had a curious look of obstinacy, of reluctance. Andrew glanced sideways at him, but said nothing. He had heard that this man had worked in the underground against Hitler, done a spell in a concentration camp, survived torture, escaped; he respected him. But there is no law which says one Communist should like another, and he did not like him. His antipathy expressed itself thus: He’s not the sort of chap I’d like to spend an evening in the pub with.

  As for the German, he was conscious that his analysis of the situation had a factor in it that he ought to be ashamed of. He knew he did not want to take part in politics in this country. He had spent the last fifteen years in the political struggle in Europe, with the most sophisticated revolutionaries of his time. He had been a schoolboy when he first went to prison, and had been in and out of prison ever since. He had survived death when he had thought of himself as already dead. He had reached the backwater which he felt England to be, and had adjusted to it, only to be sent away from it to this country, where he had spent three years of such boredom and despair he had considered suicide. But Communists do not commit suicide. He loathed the empty, ill-educated, easygoing colonials; he despised the life of sundowners and good times. He hated everything down to the food and the drink. Above all, the political backwardness of the place depressed him. He dreamed of that moment when the war would be over and he would be free to go back home - to Germany. But that place in his soul, Germany, was an agonizing darkness where even his loyalties were shamed. His comrades were nearly all dead. His wife was dead. He had no romantic notions left about suffering and revolutions. He had had little sympathy with the revolutionaries - ‘so called’, as he invariably muttered to himself - of Britain, who seemed to him a pack of children. He shut himself up, shielding that raw place in himself by a shell of patience. He spent his time reading the Marxist classics and studying Russian. He was a man in cold storage for the future. To start work again here, in this half-baked country in the middle of this backward continent, and with a group of romantic amateurs - his pride revolted. There is such a thing as revolutionary snobbishness. But more than this, far deeper, was the reluctance to come out of his shell - to start feeling again. Yet, just as he had clung tight to that raft in the black sea of longing for death, the phrase ‘Communists do not commit suicide’, so now he said to himself, a Communist has the duty to work in whichever country he finds himself.

  He did not know how long that silence lasted, while he walked, cold-faced and stiff, down the street beside Andrew, who strolled patiently beside him, waiting.

  Then he said, ‘Let’s go to some quiet place and talk it over.’

  ‘I’ve got to go to a meeting in half an hour,’ said
Andrew. ‘Young William is addressing the schoolteachers on Hegel. I promised to go along and help him out.’

  ‘William Brown — on Hegel!’ Anton stopped dead. ‘What does he know about Hegel?’

  ‘More than the Zambesian Association of Schoolteachers, very likely,’ said Andrew good-humouredly. ‘Why don’t you come along, too?’

  There was a pause, ‘I might as well. Yes. Hegel - the Zambesian schoolteachers!’

  ‘There are some good people among them,’ said Andrew with definite reproach.

  The German coloured, and then said, admitting the reproof, ‘You’re quite right.’ After a pause he said, ‘I must find a telephone and ring up someone - I was going to dinner.’

  ‘Oh, if you’ve got another engagement, we can meet tomorrow.’

  Anton had been conducting a love affair for the last two years with an Austrian refugee, a charming woman of a silliness quite phenomenal - it was as if he took a perverse pleasure in the dullness of the relationship.

  ‘It’s not in the least important,’ he said, as he went towards a telephone booth.

  In the meantime, William had seen Jasmine. She informed him under a bond of secrecy that there were real Communists in the town - they could do nothing without their sanction. She was prepared, however, to meet Sergeant Bolton again; he had struck her as being a valuable person.

  Chapter Three

  About a week after these events, Mr Maynard, who was on his way to dispense justice in the Courts, heard his wife’s voice calling him from the drawing room. He was in the passage outside. He turned his bulk around in a half-circle, took a step forward and was in the doorway.

  Mrs Maynard was giving orders to the cook for the day’s menus. She stood in front of the empty fireplace, feet planted wide, arms linked behind her back. The cook - white drill, red fez, white sandshoes – was making notes in a small book.

  ‘… and French pancakes. I think that’s all, Elijah.’

  He said: ‘Yes, madam,’ and retired, begging Mr Maynard’s pardon as he came past. Mr Maynard moved a couple of inches to one side to accommodate him.

  Mrs Maynard stood silent, head slightly bent, separating her real interests from thoughts of eggs and butter.

  She was wearing a greenish silk dress, loose about massive thighs and hips which, as Mr Maynard remembered, were always encased in heavy pink brocade from waist to knee. Above was prescribed no such repression: her full low bosom rocked just above the belt, and over green folds were suspended loops of pink coral. Mr Maynard remembered wondering what intricacies of conscience made her feel indecent without that corset even in a dressing gown, whereas to wear a brassière would have seemed to her even more indecent. Never had cloth, or even lace, confined those full, loose, empty breasts, which shook and rolled unchecked. The neat greying hair, the straight brows, seemed one with the lower half of her body - that tight mass of controlled flesh. But the upper femininity, so naïve-looking and exposed, seemed in harmony with certain moods of hers, when she was eager after an enthusiasm. Sometimes she looked almost girlish. Mr Maynard remembered a stubborn but charming girl.

  This was one of the moods. She was flushed and animated. She raised her head, let her arms fall to her sides, and began abruptly, ‘You remember my Coloured Committee.’

  ‘You mentioned it.’

  ‘Well …’ She contracted her brows, and appeared to be summoning some point which she wished to present to him. For the first time she looked at him, twisting the coral around her fingers. ‘It’s going very well. A good response.’

  ‘I congratulate you on its composition. You seem to have got all your black sheep harnessed satisfactorily.’

  ‘I’m in a hurry,’ she said impatiently – meaning that she was prepared to be teased at another time. ‘Now, this is the point. I think some younger people would be a good thing. One might get some of the Left Group, Russian Sympathizers - whatever they call themselves.’

  ‘I think they are fully occupied in raising money for Russia, my dear.’

  ‘A good thing, too - those poor things obviously need medical supplies.’ For she had taken away any unpleasantness there was in the thought of being allied to the Soviet Union by clasping the whole nation to her bosom as suitable objects for her charity. ‘But if they are so enthusiastic about Russia, then they can spare some time for their own unfortunates.’

  ‘I rather imagine they would ask you why you confine your sympathy to the half-castes and ignore the blacks.’

  ‘I am in a hurry,’ she said again. ‘No, I’ve got Mrs Perr and Mrs Forester - quite reasonable women, really. But I feel one might go further.’

  ‘What’s your first step?’

  ‘We are having a concert next week to raise money. In the Brazen Hall. By the children.’

  He raised his brows. ‘Coloured children play to white audiences?’

  ‘It’ll be a nice change for everybody. Besides, Bishop White is sponsoring it. And the Roman Catholics are being co-operative. For a change.’

  ‘And having raised the money?’

  ‘We’ll see afterwards.’

  ‘I feel that you are underestimating the idealistic enthusiasm abroad at the moment.’

  ‘Well! Surely they ought to be glad to do something for those unfortunate people!’ She was genuinely indignant. Mr Maynard was again enabled to see her as an enthusiastic girl - even as a rebel. For it is by no means an accident that people find themselves in the colonies. Mrs Maynard, as a girl, had infuriated her family by refusing to get married at the right time. Instead, she had become a crusader for better housing in Whitechapel. She had been prevented from marrying a penniless clergyman who was similarly devoted only by the greatest effort on the part of her relations. As a revenge she had married Mr Maynard; Africa had seemed to her both romantic and suitably exasperating to her family. She had seen herself ministering to grateful savages. And Mr Maynard had left England because he found it insular. They had both been rebels, of a kind. Perhaps the strongest strand in their relationship was the feeling that they were rebels against tradition - even now, when their first concern was to uphold it.

  For that matter, there is no white person in the colonies who has not arrived there for some similar reason: they are crusaders against tyranny to a man. Which accounts for that shrill note of protest when the world suggests that it is both stupid and old-fashioned to suppress native populations: for when these same colonials are passionately engaged in fighting against a minimum wage of one pound a month, or advocating the sjambok as a means of guidance for the uncivilized, they are always, in the bottom of their hearts, quite convinced that this too is part of their character as rebels against the tyranny and conservatism of the mother country which they left as adventurers into a free world.

  Mrs Maynard was quite genuine in her cry that these young people must feel with her in helping the unfortunate half-castes; that they should not, must kill her idea of herself as a fearless and progressive person.

  Mr Maynard watched the flushed and agitated face and felt a pang of reminiscent affection. But to the matron who was his wife he remarked drily, ‘Well, my dear, I’ll do what I can, but if my information is correct you’re wasting your time. Whom do you want, particularly?’

  ‘There’s the secretary – Cohen, I think. Jewish, of course.’

  A brief pause while things were left unsaid.

  ‘She seems rather efficient. And there’s your friend Quest, Knowell, whatever her name is. And various girls of that kind. Also there’s a batch of refugees. We should get hold of them. If I had my way they’d all be interned, anyway.’

  ‘You can’t intern refugees from Hitler - they’re on our side, so to speak.’

  She shrugged this off and said irritably, ‘All the same, I hear that - but it might be rumour. But after the war they’ll go back to wherever they came from, and the Air Force will go, and we’ve our own people to think of.’

  ‘I’m late,’ said Mr Maynard. ‘Give me the details of this con
cert of yours.’

  He left his wife in her pose before the fireplace, hands behind her back, rocking back and forth from heel to toe. The beautiful quiet room with its green-and-rose silks, its flowery carpet, was almost identical with the one in Chelsea from which he had plucked her thirty years before.

  On his way downtown, he passed the Knowells’ house and asked to see Martha. The cook said she was out. For some time he stood watching Caroline at play under the trees, allowing himself to dream of the daughter he had so badly wanted. Then he pulled himself away, and hurried off to the Courts. At the third attempt to find Martha, he met her on the pavement outside the house, files packed under her arm, hurrying past him. He had to catch her arm to make her see him. She was looking animated and eager. He knew the look.

  Having put the proposition - briefly, since she was impatient of it from the first word - he waited rather ironically.

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ said Martha. ‘You want Jasmine Cohen and myself and Boris and Betty Krueger to come and help your wife run a concert to raise money for the Coloureds?’ She sounded fully as derisive as he had expected.

  He instinctively made a mental note of the names for future use, and inquired, mildly, ‘Why not?’

  ‘It is not,’ said Martha, ‘the nineteenth century.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Charity,’ said Martha aggressively, ‘has always been an expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.’

  Thus confirmed in his diagnosis of intellectual influences not Zambesian, he inquired casually, ‘You know a man called Hesse?’

  She looked at him suspiciously. They were standing facing each other under the tree outside her gate. She was angry and earnest. That quality of sincere enthusiasm sanctioned his own youth, and he said suddenly, ‘You know, my dear, I’m very fond of you.’