A Ripple From the Storm (10 page)

‘Och, we should listen to Anton now, he knows his stuff, he’s the real mackay,’ said Murdoch with sentimental earnestness, and Martha, irritated by the sentimentality, said: ‘But Anton doesn’t have to be right all the time, does he?’

A tall lanky figure approached along the dusty broken pavements, wearing clothes several sizes too small. It was Bill Bluett.

‘Wotcher,’ he said, lingering at a short distance. His face was stiffly serious, but he winked at Martha with a pantomimic sideways twist to his mouth. ‘Finished?’

Martha said: ‘There’s a man in there who’s ill and he won’t go to hospital.’ Bill Bluett responded to her agitated voice instantly, by saying with a soft jeer: ‘Dear me, naughty naughty. These people don’t trust hospitals. They should be taught for their own good.’

‘She’s right,’ said Murdoch, one airman to another. ‘He should be in hospital.’

‘Of course he should.’ The voice was still a soft jeer. Bill Bluett had cast Martha in the role of ‘middle-class comrade’ and never let her forget it.

She said to Bill: ‘Was it you who made friends with him? His mother said there was someone.’

‘Perhaps I have.’

‘But why be mysterious about it?’

Bill Bluett, patiently explaining to an imbecile, said: ‘These people don’t like going to the native hospital, being treated like that.’

‘Obviously not – on the other hand I don’t see it’s sensible to die before you need for a political principle on this level. He’s not going to hospital because the Coloured people don’t want to be treated as “Kaffirs”. They want their own hospital.’

Bill Bluett and Martha, natural antagonists since they first set eyes on each other, faced each other now, frowning.

‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘Nothing like an intellectual for reducing everything to its principles. But he won’t go, And that’s all. He’s one of the few around here with any political understanding at all. He influences quite a few of their lads. I’ve dropped in on their sessions once or twice. What would he do in hospital?’

‘Perhaps he wouldn’t die so quickly?’

All at once Bill decided he had sufficiently made his position clear, for he gave her a warm grin, and said:

‘OK, Matty, I’ll go and smooth his brow for you. But first there’s another little problem. There’s a bloke in the next street who’s going to have his furniture taken away if he can’t raise two pounds by six o’clock this evening. That’s half an hour from now. We’re quite a bunch of charity workers, aren’t we? Fork out.’ He pulled his trouser pockets out and picked out a sixpence from the lining of one. Murdoch found three shillings. Martha opened her handbag and found five.

‘That’s not going to keep the baby off the cold floor,’ said Bill Bluett. He nodded at the satchel over Martha’s shoulder and said: ‘Hand over.’

‘But that’s
The Watchdog
money.’

‘We’ll have to borrow from it, that’s all. We can make it up in collections from the group.’ He appropriated the satchel, and counted out two pounds in pennies and threepenny bits, tied the greasy mass of coin in a handkerchief, and said, ‘Ta. I’ll take this back to the poor bastard and go sick-visiting to please you afterwards. He’s four kids and another one coming.’

‘Perhaps you should start a birth-control clinic while you’re about it,’ said Martha, for he had spoken about the four children with dislike, as if they were a form of self-indulgence on the part of the ‘poor bastard’.

‘Now, now,’ said Bill, ‘I’m a clean-mouthed working lad, I don’t like sex talk like that.’

‘Oh go to hell,’ said Martha, finally losing her temper, and he laughed, gave her another solemn pantomimic wink and departed along the street.

‘You shouldn’t get upsides with Bill,’ said Murdoch, seriously. ‘He only tried to get a rise out of you.’

Martha shrugged irritably; every contact with Bill left her feeling bludgeoned and sore. She capitulated at last by saying: ‘Well, I suppose for a worker from Britain we must seem pretty awful.’

Murdoch said: ‘Worker, is it? He’s no more worker than you. He’s proper bourgeois, his father was a painter, a real painter, not what I’d call a painter, mind you.’

‘Then I’m getting tired of middle-class wolves in workers’ clothing.’

To which Murdoch responded with indignation: ‘He’s a fine lad.’ He added, sentimental again already: ‘The lads in the camp think the world of him.’

‘Oh let’s get back to the exhibition,’ she said, too confused and angry to want to think about it. ‘Why does he take it out on me if he doesn’t like being middle-class?’

‘Keep your hair on, Matty,’ he said earnestly, following her. ‘Keep your hair on.’

They were walking past the Indian store, where the assistant was locking the door for the night, He nodded at them and said shyly: ‘How’s the Red Army?’

‘Fine,’ said Martha, her irritation gone because of the reminder of what they all stood for.

‘I’ve collected seventeen shillings for your newspaper.’

‘Coming to the exhibition?’

‘You let us in?’

‘Of course,’ said Martha.

‘Of course,’ he said, ironical but friendly. ‘The first time in our fine city Indians can enter an exhibition like that, and you say, “Of course, of course.’”

‘We don’t believe in race prejudice.’

He kept his ironical smile, nodded, and said: ‘So the Reds don’t believe in race prejudice, and so race prejudice is at an end in our city?’ He dropped his irony, and said simply, smiling: ‘You are good people, we know who are our friends.’ He got on to his bicycle and went off towards the railway lines.

Martha and Murdoch walked along the bicycle-crammed street towards the centre of the town. Murdoch’s expression had changed and he was looking steadily sideways at Martha. Martha, responding, thought: If
he
does it too, then …

‘Let’s drop in for a beer at McGrath’s,’ he said sentimentally.

‘But we’re half an hour late.’

‘Being a Red’s as bad as the army,’ he said ruefully.

‘But we have to have discipline.’

‘Not even one wee drappie of beer? Well, you’re right. You’re right enough.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a fine thing,’ he said, ‘to see a girl like you giving up everything for the working-class.’

‘I don’t see that I’m giving up anything.’

‘I suppose you can take it that way. I admire you for it, and that’s a fact.’

They were pushing their way along crowded pavements, separated at every moment by the press of people. Martha thought: I’ve delivered
Watchdogs
with him half a dozen times, and sat in the same room with him at meetings. We have nothing in common. Surely it isn’t possible …

He said: ‘What do you say if we get married?’

Martha said: ‘But, Murdoch, we hardly know each other.’

‘You’re a fine comrade,’ he said sentimentally. ‘And you’re an attractive lass too.’ As she said nothing, frowning, he added, on his familiar weakly humorous note: ‘There’s no harm asking, is there?’

‘But, Murdoch, how can you go around getting married just like that?’

‘There’s not much time for courting in the Party.’ He said resentfully: ‘I can see a working-man’s life is not much to tempt you. Specially for you white girls out here – never had to lift a finger for yourselves in your lives. Believe me, you’d make a fine wife for a working-man!’

‘Then why ask me?’

‘Forget it,’ he said, and began to whistle. They walked on, hostile to each other.

‘No beer?’ he asked, as they passed McGrath’s.

‘But I would if we weren’t so late.’

‘Aye, I’ll bet you would. Waste five minutes of Party time–not you!’ He went off towards the office at Black Ally’s, saying: ‘I’ll change back into my jail-clothes. See you later.’

They had rented a showroom on Main Street for the exhibition which was called: ‘Twenty-six years with the Red Army.’

The large room was filled with light movable screens that had posters and photographs pinned all over them. At the table near the door, Jasmine sat with Tommy Brown. He had a book open in front of him, and she was looking over his shoulder.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Martha.

‘You
are
late,’ said Jasmine, formally, speaking as group secretary. Changing her tone, she said: ‘Hey, Matty, what’ve you done with Murdoch? You haven’t let him go, have you–he’ll get tight again.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Martha, furious.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jasmine examined Martha calmly, nodded to Tommy to stay where he was, and followed Martha out to the pavement. ‘What’s eating you?’

Martha said laughing, but in genuine despair: ‘Murdoch has just proposed to me.’

‘Well, he proposed to me last week. And he proposed to Marjorie the day before yesterday and went and got drunk when she said she was going to marry Colin.’

‘They’re all mad,’ said Martha. ‘That means that all the RAF members have proposed to us all in the last month.’

‘Oh well,’ said Jasmine.

‘It obviously doesn’t matter to them who they marry.’ Martha was laughing but she was filled with dismay and discouragement. She was relieved when Jasmine rolled up her eyes and said sedately, ‘It’s the spirit of the times.’ Jasmine always made such remarks as if they were being made for the first time. Martha felt: Well, it is the spirit of the times, and laughed, and Jasmine departed to a hall down-town, where she was helping to organize a public meeting.

Tommy Brown was taking admittance money from a group of girls just out of their offices. They went to examine the posters and photographs of the Civil War that had the look of stills from an old film. Martha recognized the look on their faces, which was an idle, rather startled interest: it represented the feeling she had had herself, a year ago, when the ‘Russian Revolution’ was offered to her for the first time. She thought: But they’ll all be married inside a year, so what’s the point?

She sat beside Tommy, who was waiting for her with one finger marking the place in his book. She said: ‘It would have been better if this exhibition had been about this war, about the Red Army in this war, instead of the Revolution as well.’

His round eyes searched her face. His face had a look of strain. There was a pause while he thought over what she said. Five minutes with Tommy always made Martha feel frivolous, because of the depths of attention which he offered to all the older members of the group.

‘You mean, we shouldn’t push communism down their throats?’ he asked. He frowned. ‘But that’s what we are for.’

‘Oh I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’

Outside the door a group of dark-skinned people hesitated, and Martha looked, wondering: Indians? Coloureds? She saw the assistant from the Indian store and smiled. They came in, with nervous glances at the group of white girls who were making their way around the exhibition.

‘OK?’ said the assistant.

‘OK,’ said Martha. The group of Indian youths started at the other end of the exhibition from the girls, with an air of wary self-respect, as if to say: We’d prefer not to come here at all if it means trouble.

‘Oh hell,’ said Martha, suddenly utterly depressed, and instantly felt that to let go into private moods was irresponsible with Tommy.

He said, blushing scarlet: ‘I don’t think that I can be a communist. I mean to say, I feel bad things all the time. I know it’s the way I’m brought up. But when I see Coloured people or Indians in a place like this, then I think of them as different from us, and that’s wrong, isn’t it?’

‘We can’t help the way we were brought up.’

‘And it’s not only that. I mean, sitting here selling tickets, I mean selling tickets to anyone, it makes me feel funny. I feel self-conscious. That’s snobbish, isn’t it?’

‘Well, I felt like that to start with.’

‘I mean, ever since I joined the group I feel funny. I don’t know what I feel, half the things I feel seem to be wrong but I feel them. I know they are wrong but I can’t help it.’ He ended, very defiant, his honest urchin’s face hot with confusion.

‘But, Tommy, it’s because we’re both brought up in this country. We’ve got bad attitudes to people with a different colour. We’ve just got to change our attitudes.’

‘But it’s so hard to change. Today on the job I did something very bad. I was fitting a pipe with my mate. And one of the Kaffirs brought the wrong pipe and I shouted at him. But if I did different, then the blokes on the job’d think I was mad. I’m just an apprentice, and it’s hard to be different from the grown-ups. And there’s Piet. I saw him today on the job with some Kaffirs unloading stuff and he was talking to them just the way he always does – and listen to me, I use the word Kaffir and I shouldn’t, it just slips out.’ He ended in despair, almost in tears.

The group of white girls, having finished their tour, went out. Slowly the group of Indians scattered out of their defensiveness and began wandering around the exhibition at their ease.

‘The point is,’ said Tommy, ‘it’s easy for you, because you’re better educated.’

She laughed in astonishment. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘Well, it is, I’m telling you.’

His finger, insistent on a point in the page, drew Martha’s attention. The book was
War and Peace.

‘Did Jasmine tell you to read this?’

‘She said it was the greatest novel ever written. Is that right?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘But man, it takes such a long time to read. I thought this was the whole book but there are two others when I’ve finished this.’

On the open page half a dozen phrases had been underlined in pencil, with definitions scribbled opposite.

‘Your
eloquence would have taken the king of Prussia’s consent by storm,’
she read. And in pencil: ‘eloquence: the power of speaking with grace.’

‘I don’t even understand half the words,’ he said.

‘But Tommy, you shouldn’t read books unless you really want to.’

‘I’ve never read books before, except just adventure stories. Jasmine said this book explained why there was a Russian Revolution; she said if I read this I would understand about Russia before the Revolution. But perhaps there’s a shorter book somewhere?’

‘Don’t you enjoy it?’

His eyes lit into enthusiasm. ‘Oh yes, I do. But you don’t see what I’m saying, Matty. I watched Jasmine the other day, reading. I thought about the way she reads books. It was just another book to her. Because she’s read so many books, don’t you see? I asked her about the book she was reading and she said: It’s a useful description of reactionary circles in Paris. Then she said: But it’s a bad book. Don’t you see, I wouldn’t know if it was bad or not. It’s just a book. When I read this stuff here, I mean about all these generals and maids-in-waiting and the courtiers, it makes me feel …’ He hesitated, looking angry and stubborn. ‘What I mean is, I couldn’t say: This is a useful description.’ He was suddenly scarlet with anger. ‘Don’t you see, it’s just snobbish when you and Jasmine say things like that, Well, anyway, that’s what I think. All the time I’m reading this, I feel – mixed up in it. I mean to say, if I were there, I’d be thinking just what all these generals and old ladies think. I’d be the same as them. And that makes me confused. Because they were all a bunch of reactionaries, weren’t they? And this girl, Natasha, I like her.’