Landlocked

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Oh, my God!’ said Maisie, as the Maynards disappeared; and she heaved off Rita in a convulsive movement, as if the child had been smothering her. The heavy child scrambled down, and stood smiling in embarrassment for her uncouthness at her mother.

  ‘Oh, God! Christ. Damn them. Blast them. Oh, drat it! What shall I do—oh!’ Maisie spurted tears, while she patted the child’s shoulder with the hand that held the leaves. The frond caught in Rita’s black hair, tickled her face and made her sneeze. Then she, too, began to cry: it was a sort of double hysteria, in relief at the Maynards going at last.

  Maisie said: ‘I’ve just remembered, Matty. Those silly idiots, they made me forget what I asked you for. The thing is, my friend that rang you up got what I said wrong. I didn’t want you to come here, I wanted you to telephone Mrs Van der Bylt with a message from Flora. Flora says, she’s got to see Mrs Van der Bylt on something urgent to do with the kaffirs and the strike. Johnny said she must tell Mrs Van der Bylt. But Flora can’t leave Johnny, he’s not too good today.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Mr Maynard to take Flora up in the car?’ suggested Mrs Gale.

  ‘You couldn’t ask the Maynards to go to Johnny’s house, they’d die of shock, knowing that sort of house existed,’ said Maisie.

  ‘Wait,’ said Martha, and she ran after the Maynards’ car, which had just begun to move off. She said to Mrs Maynard through the window: ‘Could you ring Mrs Van der Bylt and tell her that her friend Johnny Lindsay has got urgent news for her? Maisie doesn’t have a telephone.’

  ‘Of course Maisie doesn’t have a telephone. Maisie doesn’t have anything an ordinary, sensible person would have,’ said Mrs Maynard, nodding emphatically. But she had been crying: her great, commanding face was all soft and appealing.

  When Martha got back, Maisie was lying down on the bed or divan under the window which overlooked the veranda. Rita sat timidly beside her mother, smiling awkwardly, as if she were at fault, or in some way lacking. The poor little girl’s size defeated her in this way too: everyone, including her mother, forgot how young she was, and expected from her the reactions of a ten-year-old. Now she wanted to do something for her mother, but she did not know what.

  ‘I shall have to get married, Matty,’ Maisie was saying, twisting her head from side to side. Water sparkled in the creases of her fat neck, water streamed down her red cheeks. Tendrils of her hair were matted on to the pillow. ‘Perhaps I should marry Jackie. But I don’t want to get married.’

  ‘But Maisie, if you did get married, what difference would that make?’

  Mrs Gale, sitting by the head of the divan, leaned over to fan her daughter. Rita sat swinging her large legs. She reached down to scratch inside a soiled white sock. She smiled apologetically, knowing in the fatal, helpless pain of a clumsy child, that she was bound to irritate. And sure enough, the energetic scratch of her fingernail on bare skin sounded loudly, and Maisie said: ‘Oh dear, Rita—don’t do that, and don’t crowd me, there’s a good girl, it’s so hot.’ She hastily smiled, to soften her complaint, and Rita smiled painfully. The grandmother watched, with her sharp, kind eyes, saying nothing. She fanned Maisie, and smiled at Rita. Suddenly Rita let her head droop, under the accumulated miseries of the evening. Tears squeezed under the thick, black lashes. Mrs Gale held out her hand. Rita flung herself at her grandmother, knocking the bed and Maisie’s bare arm. Too big to climb on the old woman’s lap, she stood pressed against Mrs Gale’s thighs, her thick arms around her neck, blubbering loudly.

  Maisie lay, her mouth half-open, breathing heavily, listening to the little girl cry, to her mother’s quiet: ‘There, girlie, there, it’s so hot, that’s what got into all of us.’ Maisie smiled resignedly at Martha, who said: ‘Well, I’ve got to go.’

  ‘There, there,’ said the old woman to the child. ‘Now don’t be upset. Perhaps you’ll come and stay with me in my little house in Gotwe, would you like that? Your mom’ll let you come and visit your gran, and you’ll like that.’

  ‘Well, it would keep the Maynards off me for a bit, that’d be something,’ said Maisie.

  ‘I’ll telephone Mrs Van myself when I get home. Do you know what Flora wants to tell Mrs Van?’

  ‘I don’t know. It seems a kaffir got out of the location and came to tell Johnny they were being badly treated inside. But what can Johnny do? He’s on his last legs, Flora says.’

  Martha cycled home, telephoned Mrs Van, was answered by Mr Van. Yes, Mrs Maynard had telephoned, but Mrs Van had not come in yet. He had put a message for her on the pad.

  Martha thought: Perhaps I should go down and see Flora? But because she was tired, she remembered, again, ‘running around and about’. How ridiculous, how absurd, this business of always rushing off on someone else’s affairs. All over the town were people who automatically said: Ask Marjorie Black, ask Matty Hesse, if they needed anything. But nothing was changed, except that Marjorie and Martha felt important and that they understood life. Martha went to bed, and was dropping off to sleep, when Anton came in—for the first night since the strike began.

  ‘Well?’ she said, ‘and how is it going?’

  Anton kissed her cheek, and said: ‘It’s nice to see you, Matty.’ They smiled, even held hands a minute. Then he began undressing. ‘They are sensible people, on the whole, when things are explained to them,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s a good thing, in the circumstances.’

  Anton drawled humorously: ‘Yes, you could say that.’

  ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘how very extraordinary everything is!’

  ‘Yes, you could say that too.’

  The telephone rang. Anton answered it.

  He said to Martha: ‘A friend of Maisie’s says I must tell you that Mrs McGrew says that Flora says she’s at Maisie’s. I hope that makes sense.’ He continued undressing.

  ‘I suppose I’d better just make sure…’ Again Martha rang the Van der Bylt house, and Mr Van, elaborately polite, said for the second time that a message was on the pad for Mrs Van. ‘Could you please change it to say that Flora’s at Mrs McGrew’s?’ said Martha.

  ‘My wife is to go to Mrs McGrew’s place when she comes in?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  Next morning, when Mrs Van telephoned, it was to say that Johnny was dead.

  What had happened was this:

  An African had somehow got out of the main township past the troops and made his way to Johnny Lindsay’s. The strike was four days old, and there was hardly any food left in the locations, and none was being brought in. The troops would not allow people out to get food. ‘All the people had to eat were the fine words of the strike-leaders and the children were all crying,’ said the African.

  Johnny told him that he did not think he could do anything about it, but that he would tell Mrs Van. Meanwhile, the man said he wanted to hide in Johnny’s house. Johnny pointed out that he, Johnny, the old socialist, the old trade unionist, was being put in an impossible position—how could he hide strikers who ought by rights to be with their comrades? The man had said that surely ordinary rules could go by the board when troops, not pickets, disciplined strikers. Johnny had agreed, his last recorded words being (in an unfinished memorandum addressed to Mrs Van): ‘The damn fools lock up every black man inside the townships: one per cent of the Africans knew what a strike was before, now there isn’t an African in the cities who hasn’t had a week’s course in the theory and practice of trade unionism. And if an African actually tries to run away from this home-course in strike tactics, the authorities drag him back and make him listen.’

  Flora asked this man to stay and watch Johnny while she went off to Maisie’s, to get Maisie’s friend to ring up Mrs Van. But when she got there, she and Maisie decided it was too difficult to ring Mrs Van. For one thing, a message had already been sent once, by the Maynards. For another, they couldn’t face telephoning that house because that ‘old nanny goat, Mr Van’ was enough to put anybody off.

  So Maisie’s friend
had gone back to her place, and telephoned Martha and got Anton, who told Martha who rang Mr Van for the second time.

  Normally, of course, a servant would have been sent up to Mrs Van with a note, and none of this running around and about would have been necessary.

  Meanwhile, a patrolling policeman had caught a glimpse of a black man in Johnny’s room. When he arrived at the sick man’s bedside, there was only Johnny, apparently asleep: the African had run out of the house on seeing the policeman, and had hidden himself. The policeman searched, but did not find him. Half an hour later he came back to lecture Johnny for ‘harbouring the enemy’ as he put it to the coroner. ‘Didn’t Johnny know,’ he had planned to say, ‘that there was a strike on?’

  But Johnny was asleep.

  ‘And how was I to know he was so ill?’

  ‘Didn’t you see the oxygen tanks?’

  ‘But it was my duty to round up any kaffirs I saw and take them back to the townships. It wasn’t my duty to nurse sick people.’

  At Maisie’s place Flora had quite a good bit to drink. Maisie was still upset by the Maynards’ visit, and Flora was worn out by nights of sitting up with the sick man. Flora dropped off to sleep, and woke up about 2 A.M., sober. She wanted to go back home, but while it was only a short way from Maisie’s place to Johnny’s house, it was a rough area of town, and the strike made her nervous. Flora consoled herself by thinking that it was all right, Johnny wasn’t alone, he had the black man from the location with him. And more than likely Mrs Van would have made her way to him by now. She tried to doze off again in a big armchair, but it was no use—‘something kept tugging at me, and I decided to go home.’ But she was frightened. Mrs Gale made her coffee and offered to walk with her: she had spent all her life in tough places, she said, what was half a mile’s walk even in rough streets compared to what she was used to? But Maisie said she would be nervous without her mother. Then a policeman, seeing the lights on, had appeared and asked if everything was all right. It was three in the morning. Flora asked him to walk with her back to her home. He did, and when they reached it, no one was there. There was no Johnny in the bed, the sheets and blankets were anyhow, and an oxygen tube lay on the pillow, and the oxygen tank was quite empty.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, forgive me,’ sobbed Flora, clutching the policeman.

  She tried to console herself by thinking Mrs Van might have taken Johnny home with her. But why should she have done? She had often sat a night through with Johnny in this room, and the old man had not been out of bed for weeks. As it happened, Mrs Van knew nothing about all this: coming in late and tired, she had glanced at the messages on the pad, but not thoroughly: the two messages about Johnny, or rather, Maisie, were on the back of a sheet.

  Flora and the policeman began running through the streets around the house. They had seen some blood on the doorstep. At last they found Johnny face down on the doorstep of an Indian shop a few hundred yards away. He was dead, and had been dead, so the doctor said, for three or four hours.

  Had he been trying to go for help? To find Mrs Van to tell her about the situation in the townships? Of course, no one would ever really know, but Flora knew. She confided to Mrs Van that he must have been worried about her, Flora: he had gone to look for her. He had not been able to let Flora out of his sight that last week or so. He kept calling, even if she was out of the room for a few moments: ‘Where are you, Flora, where are you, my love?’

  The strike lasted a few more days. It was not ‘broken’ by hunger; because some food did get into the townships, though not enough. Perhaps it was the absurdity of the situation that ended it. There the Africans all were, up and down the Colony, locked in because the authorities were frightened about what the white people might do.

  Things got more ridiculous every day. Car loads of white people went down to the boundaries of the locations to shout insults in at the Africans, and then began shouting at the white and black guards too. In the townships, many Africans sat waiting gloomily for death: at last, they said, the white people had got them where they wanted them—all locked up, weakened with hunger, and helpless. Soon, they said, the troops would move in and slaughter them. The ghost of Lobengula had been seen, it was claimed, with his impis. A few Africans got out somehow from behind fences and cordons and had run away to join earlier fugitives in the veld.

  The strike leaders, still invisible, continued to issue orders for discipline, order, restraint. They claimed their authority was absolute, and probably it was; but how was this to be proved when it was white troops who played the role of pickets?

  Meanwhile, everyone waited with nerves on edge for something to happen which would spark off real trouble.

  The strike came to an end, both sides claiming victory, though the strikers’ main demand, namely that a law should be passed insisting on a minimum wage of three pounds a month, was not gained.

  The day after the strike, Johnny was buried. There had been no graves dug for some days because the grave diggers were all locked up in the townships, and the first labourers emerging from the gates of the townships as the strike ended were commandeered by the authorities for that by now most essential service: to dig graves which would be filled as they were completed.

  Johnny did not have a religious service, although Flora wanted one. Mrs Van spoke an address ‘as a humanist and a socialist’. Half a dozen services were in progress that afternoon: all over the cemetery groups of people stood above open graves, with white-robed priests and censer-swinging little boys.

  Flora stayed alone in the little house for some days. Then she moved into Maisie’s rooming house in the next room along the veranda from Maisie. Rita had gone with her grandmother to Gotwe for a prolonged stay—there was talk of her going to school there.

  ‘They get on very well together,’ Maisie said. ‘After all, my mom never knew Binkie, so she doesn’t have to get all upset, being reminded about him. And that fixes the Maynards. They can’t go running out to Gotwe every time they’ve got nothing better to do. It’s nearly two hundred miles.’

  Chapter Four

  For some months everything dawdled and delayed. The divorce had to be postponed because an unexpected letter from Poland said that Grete had been heard of, still alive, in a Russian prison camp. If this was true, then Anton and Martha had never been married. The lawyers decided the safest thing was to conclude that Anton was still married to Grete, and to make some suitable formula for a divorce so that he could marry Bettina. Anton did not tell the Forsters about this complication. He discussed it with Martha—or rather, talked, while she listened. ‘After all, Bettina has had a sheltered life in many respects, and there are many things she does not understand. I don’t want her to be upset unnecessarily.’ Then a further letter, which said the first had been a mistake: the woman heard of as Grete was someone else, and in any case, she had died in Siberia. The divorce with Martha was on again. Anton and Martha continued to live in the minute flat, treated each other with increasing courtesy, and wished only that they could part. But they could not, the lawyers said so. If Anton, living by himself in a room or a flat was caught with Bettina, then Martha could sue on the grounds of adultery. Anton swore she would not. Was it likely?—Martha exclaimed, exasperated, to a legal gentleman who maintained a whimsically detached look. Martha might turn nasty, he told Anton, who apologized: ‘What can I do? I can’t suck a sensible legal system out of my fingers!’

  As usual, nobody’s fault; but the irritation of it all did nothing to soften the fact that the ship she had booked on was suddenly taken out of commission because of necessary repairs to war damage. She was given another sailing date. These dates, that of her leaving the country, and that of the divorce, were within a week of each other. If something happened to upset the divorce again, then it might mean expensive and difficult legal processes from England. Better, perhaps, to postpone the sailing date? In the end, she and Anton decided to take a chance, but the uncertainty of it all made them increasingly prickly, and i
t was difficult to maintain the tolerance towards each other which was a question of self-respect now for both of them.

  Meanwhile, she worked on Johnny Lindsay’s memoirs. This meant running about to see people who had known Johnny in the old days; and long discussions with Mrs Van about political difficulties. Mrs Van said it would be useful to have the two views ‘labour’ and ‘communist’ about the book. But it turned out that it was their temperaments, and not their politics, which dictated their differences. Unless these two strands could be considered to have met when Mrs Van complained that Martha ‘like all communists’ was getting very reactionary? ‘You all go on as if the Russians were the whole human race. Just because they’ve made a mess of things, you behave as if socialism itself has failed.’

  ‘Well, but you must admit, it’s all very discouraging. That is, if all these books are true.’

  ‘Why should you need all these nasty, spiteful books at all? All you had to do was to listen to your elders and betters. No, I’ve been fighting you communists all my life, and you are romantics, every one. You exaggerate, you have no sense of proportion, you think anything is justified if enough people die for it. No, I’ve no patience with you.’

  Thus Mrs Van, with a queenly nod, to her old enemy: everything that was not sane, disciplined, reasonable. But then, having softened her statement with a maternal smile, she bent her head over the manuscript where she encountered the enemy again. For her old comrade Johnny Lindsay’s life had been full of the qualities she distrusted so much, impeccably ‘labour’ though he had always been.

  ‘Do you really think we ought to leave this in, Matty?’

  ‘Why not, Mrs Van?’

  ‘It’s not exactly the sort of thing it gives one pleasure to read!’

  ‘You mean, he behaved foolishly?’

  ‘No. And if he did, it’s no more than one expects from everyone. It’s that he describes these terrible things with such gusto—as if he enjoyed it.’