Martha did not care. She stripped off her clothes, flung them on to the floor, and got under heavy blankets. The dry sunlight came in, the foliage from the tall trees showed light and dry through the pane, the scents from the garden all had a tang of brisk chill and dryness.
Soon she heard a lorry stop, then Thomas’s voice calling across the lawns to his sister-in-law: ‘How are you, Sarah? That’s fine. Good.’
Then she heard his voice beneath: ‘Martha?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you undressed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
She waited. He came up, serious, leaned over her, kissed her, serious, sat looking at her—serious, serious.
‘Thomas, what’s the matter?’
‘First we make love.’
‘Oh, goodness, Thomas, you look so desperate.’
‘Yes, and you’re thinking: I came here to be with my lover, and not with this madman!’
‘So that’s what I’m thinking?’
‘Yes. More and more often I look at you and you are thinking: How did I land myself with this maniac?’
He was making love as if she were a blanket to pull over his head, or a dream he wanted to lose himself in.
Later he lay beside her, quiet, holding her hand over his eyes with his own. She could feel his lashes moving against her fingers as he stared up into the darkness her hand made.
‘First, I must say something, Matty.’
‘Oh, Thomas, can’t we not say anything!’
‘No.’
He took her hand off his eyes and lay holding it against his neck.
‘I’m sorry I asked you to come to the farm. But you should have said no.’
‘Yes, I know I should. And what did your wife say?’
They were silent for a time.
Then he said: ‘Martha, have you ever been in a situation—no, that’s the wrong word.’ Again he lay thinking.
‘What, then?’
‘You see, I can’t even describe it. It’s as bad as that. Have you ever felt at the end of something—I don’t mean just unhappy or somebody going away, not that.’ She could not help reacting to his ‘somebody going away’ but he did not notice it. ‘I would never have believed once, if someone had told me, there are things you can’t do something about, you come to the end of things in yourself. Once I believed that one had only to make up one’s mind to do anything.’
‘You mean,’ said Martha, ‘you feel something for your—family, and they don’t return it, is that it?’
‘I suppose something like that.’
Now he did not say anything for a long time, and when Martha looked, his eyes were shut, and she thought he had gone to sleep.
At last he said: ‘My wife was the daughter of a university professor. We only met because I was a communist and she was wondering if she should be one. She came to a lecture a friend of mine was giving.’
‘And then you fell in love?’
‘I like the way you say that, fall in love—so simple. Well, that’s how we saw it then, simple. And I knew the war was coming. She and her circles did not think there would be war. We Marxists have many advantages—for instance, we knew the war was coming.’ In this last sentence was the mechanical irony that goes with failure; and her laugh was as mechanical.
‘I made all arrangements to get her out of the country with me. But her father and her sister would not believe me. She believed me but they didn’t. So we married and left Poland. They were left behind. So they’re dead.’
He was trying so hard to explain something to her, but she had no idea what.
‘If there wasn’t a war, I’d never have met her—a professor’s daughter. And as for me, Martha, as far as they were concerned, I was just a peasant.’
‘But she did marry you.’
‘Yes.’
Against Martha’s closed lids she saw descending miles of sunlit country, the blue mountains beyond, and, in the foreground, the big man squatting, holding out a pleading hand to the little girl.
She kept her eyes shut and looked at this picture: it explained what he was not able to say.
‘And Michel?’ she said.
‘The joke of it is, I used to despise Michel. I thought he was nothing, just a word-spinner, a schoolteacher with good manners. You know, Martha, I tell you—it’s something when you look at something, your whole self gives way, and you want just to give yourself up. And it’s not that she doesn’t accept it, or she hates you, or anything like that. It’s just that there’s something like seventy per cent of you she leaves out of account.’
‘Seventy-five per cent,’ said Martha, trying to make him laugh.
‘No, Martha. No, you must listen to me—you love her so much, and she says Yes, Thomas, you’re a nice man, and thank you for being kind, but you’re too rough and clumsy and—so seventy per cent of you doesn’t exist. Not hatred, or she doesn’t love me, but I don’t exist. Because she never really liked what I am. Once I tried to change myself. That was a joke, Martha—believe me, now when I remember it I laugh. But at the time I was too serious. I told myself I’d forget the village, the dried herring and the sour milk and the potatoes. I forgot how to haggle over a horse or choose a bit of cheese. I was stupid. I didn’t understand a damned thing. I really imagined that—because the point was, she was quite prepared to like me, but she had to forget me to do it, you understand, Martha? Well, so that’s it. I used to think: Well, I’ll make her like me. After all, I’m not a bad man. I’m kind. I don’t beat women. And I’m a good gardener. And I know how to study.’
‘How to what?’ she said, surprised.
‘How to study,’ he said, seriously. Then he turned and looked at her. ‘That’s the point. It took me years to understand why you said that, in that tone. I used to say to myself: “I can learn anything, if I set my mind to it.” I learned French in one month because she knew French and I thought she’d love me for it. There was a time when every day I said I’ll learn something new today, for her.’
Martha kept her cheek pressed to his and said nothing.
‘And then there was the child. It’s the same with her. Well, you saw how it was.’
Martha did not know what to say. She wanted to comfort him. She said at last: ‘Well, now it’s peace perhaps things will be better.’
‘What do you mean?’
She had not meant anything much, and she already felt foolish, but she said, trying to laugh: ‘Well, in peacetime professors’ daughters don’t marry handsome peasants and run off to Africa with them.’
He said, fierce, lonely, disappointed: ‘You didn’t think when you said that. Sometimes I forget—you’re very young. I mean, you are young in your self, because your experience has been to keep you safe.’
‘Is that what matters, being safe?’
‘There are two kinds of people—those who know how easy it is to be dead, and those who think death can’t happen to me…I told you, everything’s changed. I’m the norm now. I told you, the elm tree and safety’s finished. Who is the freak, the unusual person? The man who is born in X, who goes to school in X, who marries a person from X, or perhaps from Y, and who dies in his bed in X. All that’s over. My mother’s first husband was killed in the First World War. Her second husband was an old man, and she didn’t love him, but she was right to marry him—a woman needs a husband and all the young men were dead in our village. And she had seven children. And her whole life was a struggle to feed us. But it was all a waste of effort, because all her children are dead, except me and my brother. That’s what normal is now. My family’s all dead and I’m in exile. And my wife’s family are dead and she’s an exile…’ He was going to say something more, but he stopped.
Martha said: ‘You were going to say something about going away?’
‘Was I?’
‘Yes.’
For a time he lay still, stroking her arm. Then he turned over and held her near to him. ‘Well, Martha, never mind, let’s not th
ink of it now.’
‘You are seriously asking me not to think about it?’
‘Yes, I am. Seriously.’
‘All right,’ she said, after a time. ‘I’ll try not to.’
But soon they talked about it. He wanted to go to Palestine. ‘No, for my sake, Israel, Martha, not Palestine.’ He wanted to go to Israel. Not necessarily for good, no. Perhaps for a visit. He did not know why he wanted so much to go, but he did.
Part Three
My God, in what a century have you caused me to live!
SAINT POLYCARP: A.D. 156
Chapter One
A year had gone round and it was winter again. In Europe the worst winter in decades was over, and their Northern summer was healing, it was to be hoped, some of the scars of cold and hunger. But at that moment there was famine in Greece, famine in China—in both countries accompanying civil war; famine in India, in Yugoslavia, in…Martha had just come from Mrs Van’s office where the old woman was engaged in bringing her news cuttings up to date. She was surrounded by great piles of newspapers from countries all over the world, and the heaps of cuttings in front of her destined to go into the drawer marked ‘Food shortage’ was higher than any other.
Martha and Thomas sat in the Piccadilly. There was a letter from Joss lying on the stained tablecloth near a cruet which looked like the Albert Memorial and had seven different kinds of vinegar and pickle, apart from the usual salt, pepper, mustard. Joss wrote that the economic conditions in Northern Rhodesia were so and so, the political situation such and such, and that he had had a letter from his brother Solly: it looks to me as if someone politically mature ought to be keeping an eye on him, what are you people all up to? With comradely greetings.
This letter, having passed from Marjorie—the energetic one these days, but she was having another baby—to Betty, to Marie, had arrived at Martha with the query: how had it come about we have to hear about Solly from Joss, who isn’t even in the country?
Well, they could make what explanations they liked, but the truth was…Martha’s word for what had happened during the past year was that everyone had become silent.
There was Anton, who, three, even two years ago, was certain to greet any situation with a speech or the demand for one: now he and Martha did not exchange more than half a dozen phrases a day. Did he ‘make analyses of the situation’ for anyone? Not with Millicent, whom he no longer saw. Perhaps for the Forsters, where he now visited most evenings. Mr Forster was employed by a large oil company, as a kind of technical adviser. They lived in the newly built West suburb, surrounded by tennis courts, swimming pools, servants. There were three sons and two daughters—one a war widow. So much Martha had discovered from Anton’s reticences. But he was embarrassed by his liking the Forsters; he enjoyed playing chess with Mr Forster, he said. Two or three times a week Anton went to the Government office where his papers were manipulated, in a process which would eventually lead to his being a British citizen. He said he proposed to go back to Germany the moment he had his passport. Suppose he wanted to leave Germany again for a holiday or a visit? Who knew how long Germany would be occupied by foreign armies—not that Germany didn’t deserve it, he said. But living in a British country had given him a taste for freedom. He hoped Martha would understand that he was using the word in its relative or bourgeois sense.
Martha and he sat at meals together—silent. They went a great deal to the pictures.
Athen was silent because he had gone back to Greece. Shortly after the evening at the Parklands Hotel, he had arrived in the Hesses’ flat, but not alone. Five other Greeks came with him. They had all been eating their hearts out to get back to their real allegiances. The six men had fitted themselves somehow into the little room. Martha had understood how partially she had seen Athen. Two or three times a week he had come to visit her, or Maisie. But for all those years of waiting, what had his real life been? Certainly not the evenings in town. No, it had been with these men who, affable but silent, had come with Athen to say goodbye to his friends. It was agreed that if no word came from Athen, either by post (within three months) or by word of mouth through friends (within six) then he must be considered dead. And this was true for all of them, they agreed, smiling and nodding. Things could not be worse, in Greece, for their side. The anti-Royalist armies still fought from the mountains, but the Royalists were in power, put there by Britain and America. Over 4,000 Resistance men were in exile in the Islands, in spite of a hundred promises that the old fighters would not be arrested at all. These six men all planned to make their way to the mountains. They joked that they expected to be very hungry soon: there was a new policy, deliberately not to cultivate certain areas so as to starve the guerillas out. But after so much good eating in this country, they said—smiling, smiling, to show that they were joking—it would not hurt them, they all needed to lose weight. They gave Martha a list of ruled writing paper on which were their six names and the addresses of people who could be trusted. Then they shook her by the hand, one after another, and departed. Athen held her hand a moment as he left, and said: ‘Martha, I will think of you all, all my good friends, for all of my life.’ That had been nearly a year ago.
Thomas above all was silent. The change between them was partly because Thomas’s brother’s wife had got her way over the shed, which was now a playroom for Thomas’s nephews and nieces. Four of them: a new baby had been born at Christmas—as a result, Thomas claimed, of the quarrelling between husband and wife over taking the shed away from Thomas. Thomas’s lorry was easily adapted for love-making, but it was not the same, although they saw each other often. Thomas would ring Martha to say: ‘I’ve got a couple of hours free.’ They would meet at the Old Vienna, or at Dirty Dick’s, and sit together for the most part in silence. Or, the nights being very cold, since it was winter, they went to the pictures and sat in the back row like schoolchildren, their cheeks pressed together, holding hands.
Thomas said: ‘We always make a great mistake, Martha. We always make our calculations based on the fact that Sarah will not take away our shed, because she has enough rooms already and because it would be spiteful of her. But the truth is, she always does. Because she is too stupid to know that she is spiteful.’
Thomas had agreed to his brother’s plans. There was a shop in the Main Street called Stern Bros. Everything For Your Garden. Thomas was a sort of consultant there. He did not sell things, his brother did that, but he advised people about their gardens and how to lay them out. He had not yet gone to Israel—his wife had decided to go first, with the little girl, to visit relations. The farm was being run by Michel.
So Thomas was in town a good deal. Thomas, waiting to go to Israel, Martha, waiting to go to England—they felt like people filling in time before trains on a station platform.
Martha was no longer ‘running around and about’. What was the point, when she was going away at any moment? She would not organize things, she would not go to meetings—not that there were many, these days. So what good was it to give her the letter about Solly?
Besides, it had been decided they would do more harm than good, working with the Africans. Individually and collectively, they were Reds, communists, traitors, spies—the atmosphere was such that people they had known for years looked embarrassed when they met, or hostile, or made a point of coming over to greet them.
‘The Africans have got enough problems, without being called communist,’ Marjorie had said.
‘But they’re called communist anyway!’
‘Yes, but no one can prove anything.’
‘Since when did they need to prove anything? And besides, look at Solly, running around down there, he doesn’t worry about the Africans being called Reds.’
‘But he’s a Trotskyist!’
‘Yes, but they don’t know the difference.’
This conversation, at Marjorie’s house, had the force of hours of discussion at one of the old meetings, because its effect had been that they did not approach the Afr
icans.
Who in any case were not, it seemed, keen on being approached. Mrs Van’s weekly meetings had dwindled from fifty, sixty people, to five or six. It had happened suddenly. Marjorie had heard that in Solly’s group it was said that Mrs Van despised the Africans. She thought they were brutal savages who would kill the opposition when they came to power. Attempts had been made to find out the exact words which Mrs Van was supposed to have used, but they were irrelevant. Mrs Van der Bylt had congealed, and she knew it herself, into a figure, a set of words: she was a ‘reactionary paternalist, who meant well’. This might be temporary, it might be permanent, but Mrs Van said that there were times when there was no point in trying to do anything, the tide ran too strongly; the only thing was to sit tight and wait.
So much for Mrs Van. So much too for Johnny Lindsay, who was still slowly dying but who received African friends every Wednesday. But since Africans came to his house every day, in the natural course of events, why were the Wednesdays special? They had become a symbol of some kind, that was clear, for Mr Matushi came to sit by the old man every Wednesday, talking himself, tactfully, because Johnny did not have enough breath to talk. Mr Matushi said that Solly’s group—no, it was not the same as Mr Zlentli’s group, he had been told—was too extreme. All those groups, they were extreme. They were nationalists, not socialists, and they talked of throwing all the whites into the sea. So Mr Matushi heard, but he had not been at the meetings, so perhaps all that was just malicious gossip.
What was Martha supposed to do or say when she had contacted Solly—or his group, or Mr Zlentli? She did not even know how to contact Solly, who was not living at home.
Thomas said: ‘Well, tell them they can get help from us if they want it.’
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