A Ripple From the Storm (28 page)

Now she sat, hands folded, in front of him, telling him about the meeting in which he was quite uninterested, listened to his variations on the theme that he might be losing the sight of one eye, agreed with him that the dust this year was particularly bad and the grandchildren might expect to suffer from stomach complaints because of it, and did not move until he said: ‘Well, my dear, I expect you have more interesting things than me to attend to.’ At which she rose, carefully, for her back hurt her, kissed his cheek, said that they would meet for dinner in half an hour, and went to her living-room. In the few seconds it took her to reach it she had considered all the reasons that might have brought Mrs Maynard to her, and decided it must be something to do about rehousing the Coloured community, a question they agreed on. They hardly ever agreed about anything.

But as soon as she saw Mrs Maynard, who rose quickly at her entrance, a long rope of pearls sliding over her black-lace-shrouded bosom, her face flushed, her dark eyes sombre and agitated, she knew there was something else, something she had not made allowances for. She offered Mrs Maynard a drink, and Mrs Maynard said violently: ‘Yes, a stiff one, please.’ Mrs Van rang for the servant, ordered the drinks to be brought in, and the two women sat facing each other, inquiring about each other’s husbands until the servant made himself scarce so they could get down to business.

These two women had been working together on the city’s committees for many years, respected each other’s capacities, and disapproved of each other utterly.

But there was something more. During interminable committee meetings, at which they nearly always took opposite viewpoints, they would sometimes watch each other with a private and rather uneasy speculation.

For here was Mrs Van, radical by conviction, known to everyone as ‘a Kaffir-lover’, a socialist and a libertarian. And yet surely she was deeply conservative by nature and by temperament? The pattern of her life showed it, with its ranks of solid, unradical children, its complement of well-brought-up grandchildren, its comfort and its order.

And here was Mrs Maynard, conservative by conviction, unegalitarian, aristocratic. Yet surely there was something romantically anarchistic in her that was shown by her cabinet of wire-pulling ladies, and her passion for intrigue and even her handsome husband with his discreet but of course gossiped-about liaisons – particularly his longstanding affair with Mrs Talbot, who had been hovering in the wings of Mrs Maynard’s life for so long, beautiful, outrageous and victorious. Then there was the one son in contrast to Mrs Van’s well-founded family, the unsatisfactory Binkie. And no grandchildren at all. When Mrs Maynard came to the Van der Bylt house, there were grandchildren playing on the veranda or in the garden, but in her own home, only the bridge-playing women, the committees of self-appointed vigilantes of public order. No grandchildren, and no sign of any grandchildren.

Mrs Maynard had made a hundred attempts to win Mrs Van over to become a member of her ‘cabinet’, partly because of her rival’s ability, partly out of her curiosity about the hidden anomaly which both matched and contradicted her own.

But Mrs Van, the radical, would have nothing to do with the secret processes of private government. She rested herself on the processes of democratic government: committee work, agenda-balancing and election. She preferred to do solid boring detailed work in an organization for seven years in order to prove that she was worthy of election at the end of them. Mrs Van, the socialist, did everything by the book, according to the rules, and in the open.

This then was the contradiction which made them watch each other and reflect about themselves. It was this contradiction which was going to show itself now. Both knew it and showed that they knew it by the way they waited for the servant to leave the room and close the door behind him.

‘Well, Mrs Maynard?’ said Mrs Van, nodding as if she were a chairman giving a signal to speak.

‘Look here, my dear,’ said Mrs Maynard, brusquely. ‘I’ve got to ask you something. And it’s something pretty tricky.’

Mrs Van merely nodded.

‘You know that gal Maisie Gale? She’s one of the communists. At least, they’ve got hold of her. Something like that. ‘

Mrs Van reviewed a dozen faces in her memory, and shook her head.

‘But you must know. She runs around with them. At any rate, this is the thing. She was engaged to my son Binkie. She got herself in the family way. Instead of coming to us about it like a sensible gal, the next thing we heard was she married one of the airmen, a sergeant I believe, or something like that.’

Mrs Van noted that Mrs Maynard was almost incoherent with spite.

‘This girl Maisie, didn’t she tell your son she was pregnant?’

‘Not a word,’ said Mrs Maynard dramatically. ‘And when my husband went to see her she was abominably rude.’

‘How did you get to know she was pregnant?’

Mrs Maynard said quickly: ‘We heard it. But the point is Binkie is heart-broken. He’s got compassionate leave. He will be here in a month. And of course it’s impossible to get the gal to see reason.’

‘You say she has married someone else?’

‘Oh some ridiculous person, a man from the camp.’

Mrs Van said nothing. She filled Mrs Maynard’s empty glass and sat waiting.

‘You have influence,’ said Mrs Maynard. ‘You know them. And there’s that Quest girl. She’s a friend of Maisie’s.’

‘I know Mrs Knowell of course.’

‘Mrs Hesse now. She married that German.’

Mrs Van said, surprised: ‘Really, when?’

‘My husband married them this morning – absurd. But that’s not the point. It’s Binkie’s child. And that gal Maisie will not answer my letters or even see my husband.’

Mrs Van thought: She got married this morning and was at the meeting this afternoon. She was touched for a thousand private reasons. Yet she disapproved of Martha. To leave a husband was pardonable although – as she had herself proved, hardly necessary. To leave a child was unforgivable. Yet she was moved, deeply, and where she did not want to be touched at all.

She came out of private reflections to hear Mrs Maynard say: ‘And so I would be very grateful if you’d undertake to talk to that Maisie creature, or get the Quest gal to talk to her.’

Mrs Van said: ‘But, Mrs Maynard, I really don’t understand you. The girl’s presumably of age. She married this man of her own free will. It’s her affair.’ She added, since Mrs Maynard showed complete incredulity: ‘It’s not my affair. And it’s not yours either. If she’s married she’s married. Are you suggesting she should divorce this man again to marry your son?’

‘But it’s all a mistake. It’s all a terrible terrible mistake,’ Mrs Maynard cried out, and her eyes were full of tears. She directed them hopefully at her antagonist, realized that completely divergent principles were in conflict and stood up saying: ‘These RAF – they should never have been allowed into the country.’

‘But my dear, they are here after all because of the war.’

Mrs Maynard, with a wistful glance at a small table on which stood framed photographs of half a dozen small children, said: ‘I’m sorry to have taken up your time,’ and departed in an energetic wave of black lace.

Mrs Van had not yet had a chance to ring for dinner when the servant announced yet another ‘missus’ and a woman she did not know came hurriedly into the room saying: ‘I’m sorry to disturb you but I simply must ask you …’ Mrs Van urged her to sit down – but she would not; offered her a drink, but she refused it. She was Mrs Quest, she said, and she simply had to know …

Mrs Quest, in a severe tailored dress and a severe dark hat, was almost as girlishly agitated as Mrs Maynard had been. Mrs Van, whose thoughts had already returned to housing estates and public meetings, again recognized personal crises, and again in a matron as old as herself – at an age, that is, to be past them.

Mrs Quest cried out that her daughter had married a German, had not even told her parents, and perhaps Mrs Van could … she burst into tears, dried them with a look of annoyance, and said briskly: ‘Perhaps if you could talk to her she would see reason.’

For the second time that evening Mrs Van said: ‘But she’s married, isn’t she?’ as if saying all there could possibly be said.

Mrs Van felt herself divided. One half she was a mother disapproving of a daughter who had behaved badly. But the other was occupied with brooding, almost wistful thoughts which hovered on the border of a region of her mind marked Danger. Mrs Van’s common-sensical self soothed Mrs Quest, made her take a drink, murmured that young people these days had no standards, but it was due to the war and the unsettled times we lived in. At the same time she was thinking: She got married this morning, but she came to the meeting this afternoon, she cares so much about that she put it before getting married … but there’s something wrong somewhere.

Mrs Quest left at last, as flurried as when she had come, saying that she had no intention of going anywhere near Martha until the girl had come to her parents and apologized for her behaviour. Mrs Van gave her husband his dinner, ate sensibly herself, although she was not hungry, talked about the prices of copper and the rise in copper shares, and saw to it that Mr Van was settled comfortably for the evening.

Afterwards she stood on her dark veranda, observing the moonlight that flooded her garden. The garden boy had left the sprinkler on. Fine gleams of light played over a sparkling dark lawn. The dark trees that edged the road stood massively still. An earthy, cold and secret perfume came again and again to her face: she turned herself towards it. It was from her rose garden which, catching a wide-flung spray of water from the sprinkler, glistened distantly under the trees. Mrs Van took a pair of secateurs from a shelf on the veranda, went swiftly into her garden and cut a great bunch of roses that, as she gathered them together, flung drops of water off into the grass where they lay glinting like small hard jewels. She carried the prickling bunch of roses in her arms to the car, laid them carefully on the seat, and drove herself off down-town towards the flat where Mrs Quest had said Martha had moved that day. She drove fast and even recklessly through the stream of cars that were pouring towards the cinemas. She was full of an uneasy emotion which she did not recognize, for she felt it so seldom – guilt. She was guilty because of what she felt about that girl, Mrs Quest’s daughter; and now the full soft perfume of the roses, loosening and warming in the car, irritated her so that she rolled down a window to let the cool air in.

When she knocked on the door of that flat there was a noise of laughter and voices and she thought: I’m glad there’s a wedding party, I’ll stay five minutes and leave the roses.

The room was full of faces she knew, but little furniture. There were two narrow beds, not yet made up, both loaded with people. On one perched her old friends Johnny Lindsay and Jack Dobie, as well as Jasmine, and Marie and Piet du Preez. On the floor sat a large pretty fair girl who held the hand of a man in uniform. Mrs Van gave this couple a swift second glance and as it were inwardly nodded: Yes, that’ll do, they respect each other. She did not say of young couples: They’re in love. When her daughters had brought their young men to the house she had diagnosed: She respects him. Or: She does not respect him, and took up an attitude accordingly. Now she saw the warm trustful look on the pregnant girl’s face, liked Andrew, and thought: I hope that Maynard woman’ll leave them alone. I’d like him for a son-in-law.

Beside Maisie sat Tommy. Mrs Van greeted this youth with an especial smile: he had come, inarticulate with emotion, into her office the day before to demand advice as to whether he should ‘throw everything up’ and ‘make his way somehow, I’ll find a way, you’ll see’ – to China, where he proposed to fight with the Chinese Red Army. Mrs Van had advised him against this, had suggested various books to read, notably a history of the British Labour Movement. He returned her smile with the abashed and earnest blush of a boy.

On the other bed were Anton Hesse and Martha and several men in uniform. On an up-ended suitcase on the floor was a young South African journalist from the
News.
Mrs Van allowed him to rise and offer her the suitcase on which she sat, spreading full skirts. He stood against the empty wall and said: ‘Mrs Van, we’ve been trying to reach you all evening. Your husband said you were out.’

‘I was out. And then I was busy,’ she returned, her hands still full of the roses, which no one had remarked on. She felt put out because she was back in her usual role: she noted that even her dear friends and allies Jack and Johnny were sitting back and ready to let her do battle for them. ‘And now,’ she said, smiling towards the Hesse couple, ‘I’m here for a wedding celebration. I’m off duty.’

‘But I say!’ said the journalist, ‘that’s not good enough, you know. And you’ll blame us if we get our facts wrong tomorrow.’

At this everyone burst into a loud and spontaneous laughter, while the journalist frowned, and remained frowning.

But the atmosphere was friendly enough. They all knew him. He was fresh on the job of attending their meetings. He took them aside afterwards to say that he sympathized with their ideas and they were not to blame him if the editor ordered him sometimes to alter the wording of his reports.

Mrs Van said smiling: ‘But Mr Roberts, I sent in a report of the meeting to the editor this afternoon. Didn’t he get it?’

‘He sent me out to see you,’ said Mr Roberts, who was both embarrassed and aggressive. ‘Mr Dankwertz’ – this was the Location Superintendent – ‘rang us up to say that it was a very important occasion.’

‘In that case Mr Dankwertz needs to be spoken to,’ said the Town Councillor. ‘It is not his job to give reports to the press.’

‘Come on, man, have a drink,’ said Jack Dobie, his small face crinkled up with a mixture of disgust and amusement: his expression whenever faced with any representative of what he always referred to as the capitalist press.

Two bottles of Cape wine stood on the bare boards of the floor. Anton Hesse unfolded himself from his place in the corner, poured red wine into a cheap tumbler, and handed it to the journalist. Mrs Van thought: He looks pleased with himself. She looked at Martha and thought: No, she does not respect him.