‘Well then, comrade Martha?’
‘Nothing. That’s all. My life’s always like this, it’s always been like that—very crude and ridiculous.’
After a minute he took his hand away from hers and sat, straight, his two hands on his knees, looking at the wall. She felt rejected, but could not withdraw anything.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘it’s time I went home. I live from day to day, waiting to be sent home. I am so much with my friends, in my mind, that perhaps I cannot be a good friend to my friends here.’
‘Haven’t you heard anything?’
‘They won’t send us back unless they have to—why should they send back six fully trained pilots when they know we’ll escape and join the communists the moment we get home? Of course not, if I were in their shoes I would keep us here too.’
‘I’m sorry, Athen. I suppose it’s the same for everyone—we just have to wait, that’s all.’
‘I want to talk with you about something important. If you have time when you have visited your father, then come to the Piccadilly.’
‘I’ll try. What is it?’
‘I’ve been talking to a man who lives in Sinoia Street. I want you to help him and his friends.’
After a moment, she laughed. He waited, smiling, for her to explain.
‘You have been talking to a man who lives in Sinoia Street. I’ve just come from Solly and Joss. They told me about contacts in the Coloured Quarter with the right sort of ideas who have contacts with Africans.’
‘Well, perhaps I might have said that too,’ he said, laughing.
‘Oh no, oh no, you wouldn’t, and that’s the point. Anyway, I’m going.’ From the door she said: ‘I saw Maisie this afternoon.’
‘That reminds me, Martha. I would very much like to talk to you about Maisie.’ She could not prevent herself searching his face to find out what he felt about Maisie, but he quickly turned to the window, away from her gaze.
She found the books Johnny wanted, and went out. In the street she looked up: the window was already dark, Athen had turned the light out again. A hand fell on her shoulder, which remembered Solly’s touch and knew that this solid pressure was not his. She turned to see a brown stout young man smiling at her. ‘What are you doing, Matty? I was wondering who’d be in the office, and here you are standing gazing up into the sky with your mouth open.’
‘My mouth wasn’t open! How are you? I heard you were back.’
‘Only for a week. It’s still my fate to be banished in W…’
‘Then that’s a pity. Your study group’s collapsed.’
Thomas Stern had been in this city the year before, for a couple of months, during which short time his energy had created a state of activity not far from ‘the group’s’ achievements at its height. Study groups, lectures, etc., flourished for a few weeks, and stopped when he left.
‘If a study group’s dependent on one person, then it’s not worth anything.’
This didacticism was so like him that she laughed, but said: ‘I’m late, Thomas.’
‘Naturally. But when you’re finished what you’re late for come and have supper at Dirty Dick’s?’
‘I can’t. But if you want company, then Athen’s sitting in the office all by himself.’ She cycled off, calling back: ‘Next time you come up, give me a ring.’ But he had already gone inside the building.
In a few minutes she was there. In the squalid night of this part of the city, the little houses of the poor street Johnny lived in blazed out light, noise, music. Children ran about over the hardening mud ruts from the recently ended rainy season; or carried long loaves of bread to their mothers from the Indian shop where a portable gramophone stood jigging out thin music on an orange box outside the door. The gramophone was watched by a small and incredibly clean little Indian boy whose white shirt dazzled like a reproach in the dirty gloom.
The veranda of the house was nothing but bricks laid straight into the dust with a few feet of tin propped over it. Martha chained her bicycle to the yard fence. The door from the veranda opened direct into a brightly lit room which had in it a great many books, a straw mat over a rough brick floor, a table with four chairs all loaded with papers and pamphlets, and a bed where Johnny Lindsay lay, very still, very white, his eyes closed, breathing noisily. Beside him on one side sat Mrs Van der Bylt, her large firm person held upright on a small wooden chair; on the other was Flora, knitting orange wool which was almost the colour of her flaming shiny hair. At the foot of the bed a young man of twenty-two or three sat reading aloud, from a long report in that day’s News about conditions in the mining industry.
Flora, the pretty, blowzy middle-aged woman with whom the old miner had shared his life for ten years now, counted stitches and was obviously following her own thoughts. She smiled briefly at Martha, but it was Mrs Van who nodded at Martha to sit down. The young man, a teacher from the Coloured School, half-rose, and looked at Mrs Van whether to go on or not. Johnny opened his eyes to discover why the reading had stopped, saw Martha, filled labouring lungs and said: ‘Sit down, girlie,’ patting the bed. ‘They are making me stay in bed,’ he said, with the naughtiness of an invalid disobeying over-protective nurses. But in fact he was very ill, as Martha could see. She said: ‘Don’t talk. Look, here are the books.’ She laid them on the thin white counterpane, beside the old man’s very large hand where pain showed in the tense knuckles. Everything in this room was most familiar to Martha from her father’s sick-room: the smell of medicines, the attentive tactful people sitting around it, the invalid’s over-bright smile—and above all the look of shame in his eyes, the demand which said: This isn’t I—this humiliating noisily suffering body isn’t me.
‘Johnny, I’m terribly late, I must rush off.’
Mrs Van frowned. Martha said: ‘I’m expected at my father’s,’ and Mrs Van smiled. Martha saw the fat old woman examining her—‘like a headmistress’ she could not help thinking. The small, piercing blue eyes that rested their steady beam on her had missed nothing—not even the small smudge of oil from the bicycle chain on her leg.
‘Before you run off, I think Mr de Wet would like to meet you, Martha,’ said Mrs Van.
The young man rose, as if he had been ordered—well, he had been, in fact. He smiled politely at Martha, but waited for Mrs Van to go on.
‘Clive has a contact, an African contact. He wants to start a study group of some kind and I thought it would be useful if he could discuss things with you—you could order books for them. And so on.’
‘We have started the study group,’ said Clive abruptly. He sounded annoyed, though he had not meant to. Mrs Van said quickly: ‘Well, in that case perhaps it’s all right.’
Martha thought this all out: Clive was Clive de Wet, the ‘man in Sinoia Street’ mentioned by Athen, the ‘contact’ mentioned by Solly. He also knew Thomas Stern. Mrs Van could not know he was already the happy recipient of so much attention. The fact that he had not told Mrs Van he already had at least three white people ready to supply ‘books and so on’ meant that he did not trust her? Certainly he did not trust her, Martha, since Solly would have seen to it that he did not.
Martha said to Clive: ‘If you want to see me at any time, here is my telephone number.’ She scribbled her office number on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. He took it with a tiny hesitation which said that Martha had been quite right in diagnosing a dislike of so much interest.
She noted Mrs Van’s shrewd face accurately marking and analysing all these tiny events and knew that she could expect from Mrs Van, not later than lunchtime tomorrow, a telephone call enquiring: ‘Well, Matty, and what is going on with that study group? Why haven’t I been told?’
Martha, Clive de Wet, Mrs Van were watching each other, thinking about each other, all as alert as circling hawks. Meanwhile Johnny lay, eyes closed, on his pillows, and Flora clicked her needles. She was quite absorbed in her orange wool, and would have understood nothing of this scene.
Martha
finally nodded and smiled at Mrs Van, nodded at Clive de Wet, and tiptoed to the door over the slippery grass of the mat.
In the street the children were swooping and darting like so many swallows through the dusk and the little Indian boy was winding up his gramophone, which played Sarie Marais.
Now she must visit her father and then, thank goodness, she could go to bed early.
She made the transition from one world to another in fifteen minutes, arriving in the gardened avenues as they filled with cars headed for the eight o’clock cinemas. Everything dazzled and spun under racing headlights, but the Quests’ place had trees all around it. It had always been a garden which accommodated a house, rather than a house with a garden. The stiff, fringed, lacy, fanning and sworded shapes of variegated foliage, shadowed or bright, hid the bricks and painted iron of an ordinary, even ugly house from whose windows light spilled in dusty yellow shafts through which moths fluttered. The strong shafts from the busy headlights swept across the tops of bushes, the boughs of trees. But at walking level, everything was dark, quiet.
Martha dumped her bicycle on gravel and ran up shallow steps where geranium spilled scented trails. No one on the veranda, but from a window which opened off it the sound of a child’s voice: ‘Granny, Granny, I don’t want pudding.’
Martha’s heart went small and tight; she fixed her smile neatly across her face, and went into the living-room, on tip-toe. It was empty but the radio was on, the gramophone played the Emperor at full blast, and a small white dog rose to yap pointlessly, its tail frantically welcoming. Martha shushed the dog, turned off the gramophone, and received news of the war in Europe: Starvation was killing off the Dutch people. The Allies had made 70,000 prisoners. The Düsseldorf bridges had been blown up. Only forty sorties were flown by our Tactical Air Forces today, though medium bombers made a successful attack through tentenths cloud on a marshalling yard at Burgsteinfurt. The Germans’ sense of war-guilt was growing, and their nerves were ‘shot’ as a result of the bombing. Behaviour of German civilians in the Rhineland was so servile that words like ‘cringing’ were frequently and not unjustifiably used. Tommies and GIs alike were developing the deepest contempt for the ‘Herrenvolk’. Life had almost stopped. Fields where corn should be growing were deeply marked by the tracks of manoeuvring tanks or were pitted by thousands of shell and bomb holes. It would need four years to get the Ukraine, our gallant ally’s granary, going again. Never before in this war had the Allies had such favourable weather before a major operation. The vastly superior number of Allied tanks and armoured vehicles, once across the Rhine, should find good going on the hard dry plains of the Northern Ruhr. A Liberator pilot said today: ‘Hundreds of fighters were strafing and diving below over what was the most tremendous battle I ever hope to see.’ There were still hundreds and thousands of Germans living among the ruins of Cologne. The whole central part of the city was a chaos of debris. There were riots in Czechoslovakia.
Perhaps she could see her father before her mother knew she was there?
She went quietly down the passage to the room at the back of the house, and knocked gently. No reply. Inside, a scene of screened lights and the smell of medicines.
An old, neat, white-haired man lay on low pillows, his head fallen rather sideways, and his mouth open. His teeth were in a glass of water by the bed, and his jaw had a collapsed graveyard look.
Martha said, softly: ‘Father,’ but he did not move, so she went out again.
Mrs Quest came down the passage with her hands full of ironed white things. There was a hot clean smell of ironing.
‘Oh there you are,’ she began, ‘you’re late, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry.’
‘Just as well really, because I’ve only just this moment got Caroline off to sleep.’
‘I thought you said she was going home?’ said Martha, automatically joining battle.
‘Yes, but she looked a bit peaky, and I thought a bit of proper looking after would do her good.’
The monstrous implications of the sentence caused Martha to flush with anger, but Mrs Quest had already gone on to worse: ‘Better be quiet, keep your voice down sort of thing, because she doesn’t know you are here.’
Martha went straight past her mother, containing futile anger, to the living-room. Again the little white dog leaped down off a chair, and began bounding like a rubber ball around Martha, yapping incessantly.
‘God help us,’ shouted Martha, at last finding a safe target for anger. ‘That damned dog has seen me most days for three years and it still barks.’
‘Down Kaiser, down Kaiser, down!’ Mrs Quest’s fond voice joined the symphony of yaps, and a little girl’s voice said outside: ‘Granny, Granny, why is Kaiser barking?’
‘Out of sight!’ commanded Mrs Quest dramatically.
Martha turned a look on her mother which caused the old woman to drop her eyes a moment, and then sigh, as if to say: I’m being blamed again! She whisked out of the room, and Martha heard: ‘Oh Caroline, you wicked girl, what are you doing out of bed?’
But Mrs Quest’s voice, with the child, had the ease of love and Caroline’s voice came confidently: ‘I’d like it better if I could have Kaiser in my room, Granny.’
‘Well, we’ll see.’
Do you suppose, Martha wondered, that when I was little she talked to me like that? Is it possible she liked me enough?
The telephone rang, Mrs Quest came bustling in to answer it, the cook announced from the door that the meat was cooked, and from the end of the house sounded the small bell that meant Mr Quest was awake and needed something. Martha was on her way to her father, when Mrs Quest came past her at a run, and the door to the sick-room opened and closed on her father’s voice: ‘Oh there you are. What time is it?’
Martha went back to the darkened veranda, and peered into the room which held her daughter. A small dark girl squatted in the folds of a scarlet rug, fondling the ears of the white dog. ‘Your name is Kaiser,’ she was saying. ‘Did you know that? Your name is King Kaiser Wilhelm the First. Isn’t that a funny name for a pooh dog?’ The dog rolled adoring eyes, and flickered a pink tongue at the child’s face. Martha heard her mother charging down the passage, and she withdrew from the window.
‘I’m sorry about that, Matty, but I gave him a washout earlier, and as I thought, he wanted the bedpan.’
‘Oh, it’s really all right. I’ll see him tomorrow.’
‘I really don’t know what I’m going to do if it goes on like this. It’s been five days without any real result and I gave him two washouts yesterday alone. Yes, cook?’
‘Missus, the meat’s ready, missus.’
‘Well, I think you’d better try to keep it hot. The doctor’s coming, he might like some supper.’
Martha tried not to show her relief. ‘But mother, I can’t wait for supper for hours.’
‘I wasn’t expecting you to,’ said Mrs Quest, hoity-toity, but triumphant. ‘Anton has telephoned me three times, he was expecting you hours ago.’
‘Then he must have misunderstood.’
‘One of us certainly did, because I got in a beautiful bit of sirloin, and now it’s going to be wasted, unless the doctor eats it.’
‘I’ll get home then,’ said Martha. She almost ran down the steps to her bicycle, with Mrs Quest after her: ‘I had a letter from Jonathan today.’
‘Oh, did you?’
‘Yes, he’s got sick-leave in Cairo, but he’s being sent to a hospital in England.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘He didn’t say.’
Jonathan had been wounded slightly in the leg at El Alamein, but recovered. Recently he had been wounded again in the arm, and the arm showed no signs of properly healing, much to everyone’s relief. As Mr Quest said: ‘If he gets out of it with nothing worse than a gammy arm, he’ll be doing quite well.’
‘Shhhhh,’ said Mrs Quest suddenly, as Caroline said from the window where she was swinging from the burglar bars: ‘
Who’s that lady, Granny, who is that lady?’
Martha picked up her bicycle, jumped on it, and cycled fast through the bushes to the invisibility which would enable Mrs Quest to turn the child’s attention to something else. At a telephone box, Martha rang the Piccadilly. Johnny was happy to bring his compatriot to the telephone. Martha told Athen she could not see him that evening.
‘I’m sorry,’ came Athen’s voice, raised against the clatter of a hundred eating humans. ‘Well then, I’ll see you in about a week, and in the meantime, will you please see my friend Clive de Wet?’
‘I met him this evening at Johnny’s. I don’t think he wants to see me. I’m sure of it.’
‘No, I spoke to him about you. He wants to see you.’
‘When did you speak to him?’
‘I’ve just been to his house, he was there and I spoke to him. He said he thought you were associated with Mrs Van.’
‘I don’t understand, he was reading to Johnny, doesn’t he approve of Johnny?’
‘He does, very much. But he does not trust Mrs Van, I think.’
‘That’s ridiculous—how can he like Johnny and not like Mrs Van?’
‘At any rate, it would be helpful if you explain things to him. They need much help—they have no books, and wish to be taught many things.’
‘Oh well, in that case…and I’ll see you next week.’
‘Yes. And give my greetings to your husband.’
And now, at last, she must go home to Anton. Home was a new place, half a flat, half a house—two little rooms, a bathroom and a shared kitchen that was really a screened-off veranda over a patch of shared dirty lawn. The woman they shared with was a Mrs Huxtable. Martha did not like her, but as there was never any time for cooking anyway, it didn’t matter.
Anton had telephoned her three times. Three times. The information had been received apprehensively by her nerves. Her emotions repeated, with monotony: It’s not fair, it’s not fair—meaning that this kind of demand, or reproach, was not in the bargain of her marriage with Anton. Meanwhile her brain was sending messages of warning that she was scared to listen to. For months now there had been a kind of equilibrium in the marriage. Having acknowledged it was a bad marriage, that they had made a mistake, that they would split up again as soon as the war ended, a sort of friendliness, even kindness, even—perhaps?—a tenderness was established. But while, for Martha, this new relationship was welcome because it softened an intolerable strain; it seemed that for Anton it meant a new promise. At any rate, three different telephone calls in one afternoon was a language, a demand, Martha could not begin to answer.
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