A Ripple From the Storm (13 page)
‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ said Bill airily, moving to the door. The other two RAF men followed him.
The remaining people said they would continue the meeting without them, but all at once Anton got up, nodded to them, and said he had to leave. He went, leaving the group headless.
‘Surely he’s not upset at being criticized?’ said Marie.
‘Of course not,’ said Jasmine. ‘He’s an old comrade and knows how to take criticism. Let us continue the meeting.’ But here Martha, who had been shivering spasmodically throughout the meeting, shivered so deeply that her teeth chattered. They all looked at her, and exclaimed that she was sick. The meeting broke up on this. Marie and Piet du Preez took Martha home and put her into her bed. Martha was thinking feebly that to get sick was an act of irresponsibility and disloyalty to the whole group. She was also thinking that it would be pleasant to be ill for a day or two, to have time to think, and even – this last thought gave her a severe spasm of guilt – to be alone for a little, not always to be surrounded by people.
In the morning Martha woke ill, but above all uneasy because of a weight of guilt: she was ill because she had been careless, and now her work would fall on other people. But the languor of fever was pleasant to her. She had been dreaming and she wished she might return to sleep, for the dreams had had the peculiarly nostalgic quality which she distrusted so much, and yet was so dangerously attractive to her. She had been dreaming of ‘that country’; a phrase she used to describe a particular region of sleep which she often visited, or which visited her – and always when she was overtired or sick. ‘That country’ was pale, misted, flat; gulls cried like children around violet-coloured shores. She stood on coloured chalky rocks with a bitter sea washing around her feet and the smell of salt was strong in her nostrils.
Now she thought: Well, I suppose it’s England … but how can I be an exile from England when it has nothing to do with me? And do I really have to feel guilty about wanting to sleep when I never sleep enough? She dropped back into a hot sleep, and dreamed she was back in ‘the district’ standing at the edge of Mr McFarline’s great goldeating pit. But it was abandoned. It had been abandoned centuries before. The enormous gulf in the soil had been worked by a forgotten race which she saw clearly in her dream: a copper-coloured, long-limbed, sharp-featured people, tied together like slaves under the whip of a black overseer. Centuries ago, these people had vanished, and the pit had fallen into disuse, and its sides were covered with a small scrub of bushes and a low rank grass. But near to where she stood was a projection into the pit, a jut of layered rock that spread at its base, like a firmly set animal’s foot. She stood at the extreme edge of the pit, space beneath her, smelling the warm gritty smell of hot African sun on loose dry soil, examining the deep-layered rock. Fold after fold, the growth of the earth showed itself in the side of the pit, a warm red showing the living soil at the top, then the dead layers of rock beneath. She saw that the projection into the pit was not dead, but living. It was not an animal’s paw, but the head and the shoulders of an immense lizard, an extinct saurian that had been imprisoned a thousand ages ago, in the rock. It was petrified. The shape of the narrow head, the swell of the shoulders, was visible. A narrow ledge of rock along the grass-grown bottom of the pit was its dead foot. Martha looked again and saw that its eye was steadily regarding her with a sullen and patient query. It was a scaly ancient eye, filmed over with mine-dust, a sorrowful eye. It’s alive, she thought. It’s alive after so many centuries. And it will take centuries more to die. Perhaps I can dig it out?
But it seemed quite right that the vast half-fossilized extinct creature should be there, alive still in the massive weight of the earth. She looked down at the half-closed patient eye and thought: You must be too old even to see
She woke, all her limbs irritated by fever. Now she was awake the dream seemed frightening, but because of its distance from the cold salt-sprayed shores of ‘that country’. She thought: Next time I drop off to sleep I might go anywhere, it’s like a nightmare, not knowing what’s waiting for you … For the cold salt-sprayed shores and the deep sullen pit seemed to have nothing in common, not to be connected, and their lack of connection was a danger. She realized she was afraid to drop off to sleep again.
It was ten in the morning. Although she was weighted with guilt because of her responsibilities to the group which she would now not fulfil, she had only just remembered her duty to the office where she earned her living. She went to the telephone in the passage and rang Mrs Buss, who was at pains to explain to Martha that she was quite capable of running the office by herself indefinitely. As for herself, she had not had a day’s illness during the fifteen years she had been earning her living. Martha found Mrs Carson behind her, listening. ‘I’m sick,’ she said hastily, to avoid being involved in some new servant crisis. She went back to bed, followed by the white intense face and the dark obsessed eyes of Mrs Carson, who sat on the foot of the bed and told a long story of how once she had been alone on a farm in some remote district, and a whole pack of natives had surrounded the house trying to get in, but – seeing her with her shotgun waiting for them – had contented themselves with peering through the windows and jeering obscenities. Martha lay under piled untidy blankets, shivering, listening to this fantasy, repeating to herself over and over again: I must not lose my temper with her. I must not, She’s sick and she can’t help it. But finally she said, and was surprised that her voice cracked with tears when she spoke: ‘Mrs Carson, I’m ill.’
Mrs Carson, reminded of Martha’s existence, slowly stood up, smoothing down her dress with bony hands, looking about the room as if something might be suggested to her. At last she rather helplessly drew the chintz curtains across and returned to stand beside the bed, frowning at Martha.
‘Perhaps I should telephone your mother?’ she suggested.
Martha sat up in a panic. ‘No, no, please don’t.’
Mrs Carson, unsurprised, but pleased that nothing was asked of her, said vaguely: ‘If you need anything let me know.’ She went out remarking: ‘It’s better with the curtains drawn; they can’t see in.’
Martha went back to sleep and was woken instantly by bad nightmares which she could not remember but which drove her out of bed. She had undertaken to do certain things and she must do them. She dressed and rode down-town on her bicycle. It was only when she was balancing on waves of sickness on the rocking machine that she understood she was really sick, and had a right to be in bed. But she went to the group office, collected a list of addresses of businessmen who must be approached for donations to Medical Aid for Russia, and spent the day going from office to office. She was surprised to find that habit made it easy for her to switch on her ‘money-collecting personality’ without effort. She despised this personality: cool, practical, rather flirtatious, humorous to order so as to take the sting out of the business of giving money to Russia. She got the promise of over three hundred pounds. She returned to the group office and left a note to the effect that some other comrade must take over her responsibilities, and climbed back, with difficulty, on to the bicycle. It was in the solemn heavy heat of mid-afternoon. Sun glinted off walls, off the metal of motor cars and bicycles, off the skin of Africans, off the eyes of people passing, off the leaves of trees. Everything hotly glittered. Light struck painfully into her skull through her eyes. She cycled slowly, knowing that cars were hooting at her. She thought: If I’m behaving oddly, then it will be a discredit to the group. I must cycle straight and look normal. If people think I’m drunk, the Party will be blamed for my behaviour.
When she at last got herself into bed in the darkened room, she was thinking miserably; All over the world people are dying, people are being killed, they are suffering indescribably, and I’m being sick. I have no right to be sick.
She slept and dreamed that she was among hordes of warcrushed people for whom she was responsible. She would half-awaken, her eyes closing again at the sight of the strong light on the limp chintz curtains, thinking: That’s France, yes – we’re holding there (for in her dream she, representing ‘the group’, had stemmed some flood of violence or act of terror), but there’s Germany, the people in the concentration camps in Germany, I’m forgetting them. And when she fell back into sleep, she was in Germany, holding back brutality there, but tormented that she was forgetting France, or Russia, or some other place for which she was responsible. She woke and slept, slept and woke, in a steadily increasing fervour of anxiety, repeatedly visiting in her dreams the chilly shallow shores of nostalgia, where no responsibility existed, or returned for glimpses into the dust-filled half-closed eye of the great petrified saurian.
Once she woke and found a large tray covered by a fly-net by her bed. Mrs Carson, worried that she ought to be doing something for Martha, but unable to come far enough out of her obsession to think what, had arranged a three-course meal: soup, now cold and filmed with grease; roast beef and potatoes congealed in fat; and a slab of wet cold pie. Martha’s stomach turned, and she went to the bathroom to be sick. On the way she passed the kitchen where Mrs Carson was sitting in a cretonne wrapper that showed part of her wrinkled bosom, a fly-whisk in her hand, watching her new servant make cakes. She did not notice Martha, who returned to bed, where she dreamed she was responsible for Mrs Carson, and trying to explain to her ‘Once and for all’ that ‘she had been on the wrong path’ and that ‘she should be happy and not waste her life dreaming’. In this dream she saw Mrs Carson as a jolly bouncing card-playing widow with a salacious and friendly wink, who said to Martha: Thank you dear for saving me. You are my true friend.
This dream was so much a nightmare that she struggled out of it, gasping and crying out.
The night passed. In the morning she woke to find Jasmine regarding her from the foot of the bed.
‘You OK?’ she inquired.
‘Of course,’ said Martha.
‘Want a doctor?’
‘Hell, no.’
‘Can’t stand them either. Well, I’m on my way to work. Give me a ring if you want nursing.’ Jasmine, demure and precise as always, her small neat body defined in bright blue flowered linen, frowned at Martha while she adjusted an ear-ring.
‘What’s going on in the group?’ asked Martha, who felt as if she had been exiled from it for several weeks.
‘Trouble,’ said Jasmine, rolling up her eyes and sighing. ‘There was a meeting last night. The RAF are suffering from severe infantile disorders. They want to make a revolution here and now. Jimmy wants us to march into the Location with a red flag, shouting: “Down with the white tyrants.”’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’
‘Perhaps it’s not a bad idea at that,’ said Martha crossly.
‘You’d better stay where you are then,’ said Jasmine. ‘If you’re in a red-flag-waving mood too, then you’ll be more of a nuisance than a help.’
‘All the same, I’ve been thinking … we talk and talk and analyse and make formulations, but what are we doing? What are we changing?’ Her head ached, and she lay still, looking at the cool white ceiling.
‘If I were you I’d go to sleep.’
‘What else? What else has been happening?’
‘Well, the RAF say we are bourgeois.’
‘Obviously we are. What then?’
‘Because,’ said Jasmine composedly, ‘we wear lipstick and nail varnish.’ She put forward a small foot in a high-heeled blue sandal and examined her scarlet toe-nails with satisfaction. ‘They say our origins are betrayed by the way we dress.’
‘Who? All women, or just the group women?’
‘The women comrades. They say that we are corrupted by the emphasis capitalist society places on sex.’ Jasmine offered this last remark to Martha on a serious note of query.
Martha considered it from the depths of her anxietyridden dissatisfaction with herself, which made her ready to range herself with anybody who criticized her. But the other side of her perpetual stern rejection of what she was now, was the image of what she wanted to be: to match this image with any of the men in the group was enough to make her reject them entirely. She was thinking: Any
real
man would be able to see what I could be and help me to become it, and all these tom-tiddlers in the group … She was dismayed that she was able to think of her male comrades thus, and said angrily: ‘Oh, they can talk …’
‘That’s what I said to Jimmy.’
‘Of course it was Jimmy, of course.’
‘Yes, I said to him, if you disapprove of make-up and high heels and so on, what were you doing in McGrath’s with that girl from the reception desk? Because she’s got dyed hair to start with. He said he was educating her.’
Martha laughed. Jasmine smiled composedly and said: ‘Bloody hypocrites they all are. Every one. Well, so long, Matty, and look after yourself.’ She departed, slinging a satchel bag full of pamphlets over her shoulder.
Next time Martha woke it was night, and Mrs Quest stood where Jasmine had stood earlier, at the foot of the bed.
‘I’m glad to see you are getting an early night for once,’ she said in a sprightly way.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you heard from William?’
‘Who?’
‘That corporal or whoever he was.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard.’
‘If you’re going to let him down too I shall really wash my hands of you.’
‘Mother, I keep telling you, there’s no question of my marrying William.’
‘You left your husband for him.’
‘I did not. I left Douglas for …’ She stopped, knowing it was useless to explain to her mother why she left Douglas.
Meanwhile. Mrs Quest, cold-eyed and hostile, was examining Martha’s naked shoulders. She said: ‘That nightgown is indecent. If some of your friends come in …’
Martha, who at the first sight of her mother had thought: Thank goodness, she’ll look after me, now pulled the blankets up to her face, and said: ‘No one’s coming in. And I’m sleepy.’
Mrs Quest went to Martha’s dressing-table, examined what was on it, and said: ‘So you’re using rouge now. Well, if you’re going to jazz about the way you do, I suppose you’ll need rouge at your age. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ She returned to the foot of the bed and said: ‘Mrs Carson’s worried about you.’
‘In what way?’
‘She says that you don’t keep your curtains drawn and the garden boy hangs about to get a sight of you.’
‘Oh, do shut up,’ said Martha, understanding with dismay that she was able to take this sort of thing from Mrs Carson, but not from her mother, to whom surely she owed much more patience and understanding? Guilt set in about this too, and added to her sick fever.
Mrs Quest had retreated into apologetic embarrassment, and retreated hastily with: ‘Well, perhaps she’s got it wrong. I won’t disturb your beauty sleep any longer.’ She went to the door, exaggeratedly quiet. As she went out she said: ‘I hear Caroline isn’t well, poor little girl.’
The image of Caroline rose to confront Martha, who said to herself tormentedly: I can’t think of her now, I really can’t. She sternly pushed Caroline into a region of her mind marked No Admittance. Vet as soon as she slept, Caroline emerged from this forbidden place, and confronted Martha: sometimes charming and childish, sometimes sick and plaintive, sometimes hostile to Martha her mother. Martha kept waking, afraid for the first time of the loneliness of this dark shabby hired room, despising herself for being afraid, hating her mother for evoking the image of Caroline.