A Ripple From the Storm (29 page)

The door opened again with violence. Another young man came in, who nodded professionally at Mr Roberts and at once took out a notebook. People exchanged glances and put themselves on the alert. This was a senior sub-editor, a tough and ambitious young man, quite a different proposition from the still unhardened Roberts. Mrs Van said to him: ‘Mr du Plessis, if you’re looking for me I’m here on personal business, and I’m not ready to be interviewed.’

Mr du Plessis stiffened. He was thin and wiry, with a hard and pushing face and his eyes had the combative stare of an enemy never off guard.

‘Mrs Van der Bylt, I’d like to interview you about your Party’s activities in the Location this afternoon. I have half an hour before it must go to the printers.’

‘I sent the editor a report.’

‘I’d like to ask you some questions. I’ve been chasing you since five o’clock this afternoon,’ he added with open hostility.

‘These people are having a party,’ she said. ‘I really do think you might have asked before coming in.’

‘Were all the people in this room in the Location this afternoon?’

‘A full list of the names of the people present has been given to the editor.’

Mr du Plessis examined, one after another, the faces of the people around him, lingering on Piet du Preez.

‘I understand you were making speeches about trade unionism,’ he remarked. ‘Trade unionism and political organization.’

‘And women’s rights,’ remarked Martha, suddenly laughing. At the sound of the laugh Mrs Van turned her attention to her, noting that the laugh seemed to break the young woman’s face up: the lower half seemed to grimace while the dark eyes remained serious and watchful. Mrs Van involuntarily looked down at the still water-fresh roses. But scarlet petals had already scattered on to the bare boards beside her sturdy brown shoes.

Mr du Plessis, bursting into open combat before he had intended to, because of the general laugh which had followed Martha’s, said: ‘Mrs Van, if you will not answer any questions you can take the consequences.’

‘If there are any inaccuracies in the paper tomorrow the Party’s lawyers will see to it,’ she replied emphatically, and turned her back on him.

Mr du Plessis shut his notebook and nodded peremptorily at Roberts, who was embarrassed because of his colleague’s behaviour: he had been standing silent against the wall, with an ashamed smile, glancing in appeal at the young people sitting on the beds, as if to say: ‘Don’t blame me for it!’ Now he gave another appealing glance around, said: ‘So long!’ and followed du Plessis out.

Mrs Van said: ‘Poor boy,’ sounding maternally contemptuous.

Instantly Jack said: ‘Poor boy my foot. He’s half an inch from being as bad as du Plessis. Don’t you start wasting your sympathy on that bunch of vultures.’

Again everyone laughed; and Mrs Van smiled patiently until she was able to remark: ‘All the same, he’s not a bad boy. He’s ignorant, but he’s learning.’

‘Learning what?’ said Jack. ‘He doesn’t resign when the editor re-writes his pieces for him and that’s enough for me.’

At this Mrs Van and Johnny exchanged the loving glances of tolerant people for a hot-headed intransigent, although both of them in the past had played the role of intolerant while the others smiled.

Mrs Van’s eyes again came to rest on the roses while she wondered how best to present them. She observed that Martha was pale and withdrawn, sitting against the wall with her arms locked around her knees. Anton was watching her with a look of fond pride. Mrs Van saw how Martha, in response to a whisper from Anton, first tightened herself in an involuntary movement towards isolation, and then turned to him, smiling. She took Anton’s hand and held it.

All the same, thought Mrs Van, it’s not right at all. Suddenly very tired, and unaccountably sorrowful, she thought: I’ll take Johnny and Jack with me, we can have a drink somewhere.

Johnny said: ‘What do you think of these two? They got married this morning and told no one. Jack and I heard it by accident and dropped over to congratulate them.’

This was a signal for laughter and joking all around, and Mrs Van, nodding and agreeing that these young people took life altogether too seriously, saw that Martha flashed up into vivacity in response to the teasing, joked with old Johnny, told Jack (but with a certain dry self-punishing irony) that ‘we communists haven’t got time for all this middle-class self-indulgence,’ while the others of the group cried out that she should speak for herself; laughed, flirted and played the part of a spoiled bride for just so long as she was the centre of attention, after which she lapsed back into listless withdrawal. Meanwhile, as the older woman noted with a lightening of her heart, she clung to Anton’s hand as if it were a lifebuoy.

She tried to catch Johnny’s and Jack’s attention: she had understood that these two men, dropping in on an impulse as she had done, had interrupted a communist meeting and now these young people wanted them to leave. Jack and Johnny both met her glances with a slight dryness which said simultaneously that while they disliked communism utterly, they liked these communists personally, agreed that they had the right to hold meetings if they wished, but that they disagreed totally with an ethic which allowed a young woman to spend her wedding night at a political meeting.

The two men got up as Mrs Van rose from her suitcase, making jokes because of the stiffness of her back.

‘We’ll leave you to your deliberations and have some of our own,’ said Mrs Van, with a calculated stiffness in her manner which was designed to let the group know she was aware they were having a meeting. She was still holding the roses.

She said to Martha: ‘Is there a kitchen? Have you something I can put these in?’ Martha noticed the flowers – until that moment it had not occurred to her they were for her, and now she felt inadequate because she had not – scrambled down off the bed, and accompanied Mrs Van next door, where there was a small stove in a tiny room.

Mrs Van said: ‘Well, my dear, it’s not much of a wedding present, but it was the best I could do at a moment’s notice.’

Martha went pink, her eyes filled with tears and she frowned.

Mrs Van, seeing the tears, nodded, as if to say, Yes, that’s right, and at the sight of it Martha’s eyes widened in incredulity, as if at a cruelty.

Mrs Van thought hurriedly: She ought to cry, it’s right she should. She’s too – hard, almost. But at the same time she knew she was feeling something she ought not.

Martha stood grasping the prickly bunch of roses whose red petals fell slowly on to the pale wood of the table, and thought: She’s given me flowers, it was kind of her, so why am I disliking her so much? And why should she, when I scarcely know her? And Jack and old Johnny drop in to congratulate me, why? Just because it’s a marriage, I suppose. But what has it got to do with me?

It seemed to her that the smile on Mrs Van’s face was complacent, and she thought confusedly: There she is, with that dry old husband of hers, and all those children, every one of them a pillar of society, and grandchildren by the half-dozen, and everything tidy and safe and nothing painful anywhere. So then, why the roses? The pain of the thorny stems in Martha’s hands seemed like a warning. She concluded: But her life can’t have anything to do with mine, she could never understand all this in a million years. (By
all
this
Martha meant something dark and unhappy and essentially driven, something essentially foreign to everything Mrs Van was and ever could be.) She can’t understand me, so she is not giving the roses to me, she’s giving them to somebody else.

Mrs Van said gently: ‘My dear, I was so touched when I heard you’d come to our meeting after you got married this morning.’ She stopped. Martha had turned pale. Mrs Van searched Martha’s face with a severe but tranquil gaze. She had understood that she wanted Martha to break down and cry; she was telling herself that if Martha wept, flinging herself on to her for comfort and support, then it would be good for her, good for the marriage.

At that moment there flashed into her mind a memory of the occasion which she always referred to as ‘that night’. She did not remember any of the emotions of that night, she saw it at a long distance, like a shot from a film: a young girl lying awake in a small dark bedroom beside her husband. This girl was crying, but without a sound; the cold tears had run down over her cheeks all night. Her cold bare arm lay at a skin’s distance from her husband’s muscular arm. But she did not move her arm; it lay still and trembled with the effort not to move it, while she thought: He wants me to let my arm touch his, but if I do, he will see it as a kind of an apology, a promise. He will forgive me.

Now, after all those years, Mrs Van remembered the image that had filled the girl’s mind through those long hours while she lay awake by a man who also lay awake, waiting for her to turn to him. The image was of something deep, soft, dark and vulnerable, and of a very sharp sword stabbing into it, again and again. She had not moved, and not let her arm relax into contact with her husband’s, and so the sword had not stabbed into her, never again, the soft dark painful place which she felt to be somewhere under her heart had remained untouched. She had remained herself.

For the flash of an instant Mrs Van felt the pain of that night, so that the small bright harmless picture was radiant with a real feeling. Mrs Van abruptly turned away from Martha. She said gruffly: ‘My dear, I know all these things are very difficult, they are all very difficult …’ Her voice shook, and she said hastily: ‘My dear, I hope you will be very happy.’ This conventional remark released Martha, who turned to her and thanked her, smiling, laying the roses down on the table.

Mrs Van said suddenly: ‘Your mother came to see me tonight.’

‘I didn’t know you knew her.’

‘I think you should have told her you were getting married.’

Martha’s eyebrows went up, as if to say: And what’s it got to do with you?

Mrs Van, regretting she had mentioned Mrs Quest, said with severity: ‘All the same, you should have told her.’

Martha exclaimed: ‘Do you imagine I wanted to make all this bloody farce even worse?’

Mrs Van positively started. Then she walked out of the kitchen with a gesture that repudiated Martha completely.

The main room was silent and held a new element. This was Mrs Quest, who had just entered, and had stopped inside the door, whatever she had been going to say swallowed by the surprise of seeing so many people. She could not see Martha, and as her daughter came into view behind Mrs Van, she said in a friendly and even sprightly voice: ‘Oh, so there you are.’

Mrs Quest, who had vowed never to speak to her daughter again, had in the interval since she had seen Mrs Van whipped herself up into a mood of violent anger. All kinds of scenes of reproach, recrimination and reconciliation had been passing through her mind. In the midst of her anger, Mr Roberts, in pursuit of Mrs Van, had approached her to find out where Martha could be found, and dropped the information that Martha had that afternoon been ‘inciting the blacks to revolution’. Martha said helplessly: ‘Well, mother?’ – and began the business of introduction. But she gave it up.

Mrs Quest demanded: ‘Where’s my son-in-law?’ Five minutes before she had been pursuing a fantasy where she announced to him that with the co-operation of the authorities she would have him deported from the Colony, but now she sounded no more than humorously grieved.

Anton extricated himself from the mess of people on the bed, held out his hand, and found that he was being kissed by an elderly British matron on whom he had never set eyes before, gave her a stiff and awkward nod, said he was very pleased to make her acquaintance, and then, feeling that more was being asked of him, bent to give her a courtly kiss on the hand. ‘Gnädige Frau!’ he murmured.

Mrs Quest blushed and cried out to Martha that if she were having a party to celebrate the wedding the least she could do was to invite her father, who would be very hurt indeed when he heard.

Martha was still helpless in the middle of the room. She was looking with apprehension at a wad of paper in Mrs Quest’s hand. Everyone was watching the scene, most with half-suppressed grins on their faces. Mrs Van was stem with disapproval.

‘But it isn’t a party, it’s a meeting,’ Martha said, her voice harsh with humour. She was feeling as if farce, the spirit of total incongruity that seemed to lie in wait for her behind everything she did, had finally overwhelmed her.

‘A meeting,’ cried Mrs Quest. This revived her anger. Looking around for means to express it, her eyes discovered the papers in her hands. These she thrust energetically into the hands of the people closest to her. In a moment, the heads of everyone in the room were bent over cuttings from the
Zambesia News.

Mrs Quest was in the habit of cutting from the
News
all the letters signed White Settler, Old Hand, or Fair Play, most of which began: ‘After forty years of handling the native, etc’

Jack Dobie read out aloud, very seriously, his face expressing the queerest mixture of amusement and anger: ‘It is my opinion that the cheek and the insolence of the Kaffirs is largely due to the propaganda of certain liberals in this town, and Britain’s greatest mistake is her belief in equality: let charity begin at home, and let her take her hands off our natives.’

He handed the cutting back to Mrs Quest, with a polite: ‘Thanks.’

Mrs Quest now handed the cutting to Martha: ‘You see,’ she said, ‘the Kaffirs are getting out of hand.’ But she was smiling. Her anger, contained in the bits of newspaper, was now distributed around the room, and she wanted to be invited to join the party. She was looking at the bottles of wine on the floor. Martha took the cutting, and poured her mother out a glass of wine. But there was nowhere for her to sit down.

Besides, the meeting, which had been due to start at eight, was now two hours delayed. ‘The group’ were handing bits of paper from hand to hand with delighted and satirical smiles.

Mrs Van, whose instinct for saving a situation was always stronger than any other, said: ‘Those cuttings will be very useful for my collection.’ She had a file headed: ‘White settler imbecilities’, filled with articles and letters of a similar tone, which she sent to newspapers and magazines overseas as evidence of the deplorable state of affairs in Zambesia.