A Ripple From the Storm (31 page)

‘I didn’t know I would feel so bad when I saw him.’

‘You haven’t seen him yet,’ he said, smiling gently.

‘And when I told Andrew that Binkie was coming, all he said was: Well, see him, tell him where he stands and get it over.’

‘That was very sensible,’ said Athen, noting the look of hostility on her face as she mentioned her husband. Every time his name had occurred that evening her face had put on that same look of hurt, angry resentment.

‘You love Andrew,’ he said, grave and reproachful.

‘I was married twice before.’

‘But now you are married to Andrew.’

‘They were both killed.’

Athen leaned forward, his two burned muscular thin hands gripping his knees. Maisie watched his hands with the same puzzled frown. ‘Maisie, you loved them, and they were killed, but it is not your fault.’

‘Love,’ she said sullenly. ‘Sometimes I wonder what it means.’

‘Do you think of them?’

She made an impatient movement with her shoulders.

‘But it is no disloyalty to Andrew to think of them. It is bad not to think of people who are dead when you have loved them.’

‘But why are you talking about them? I don’t see why?’

‘I had good comrades killed,’ he said, still leaning forward, still searching her face. ‘I think of them often. Don’t you see, Maisie, if someone loves you he loves you for everything you have been. Therefore it is right to think of those two men, if you loved them, and they were good honest men.’

Her whole body stiffened. ‘Why do you keep on about them? It’s Binkie I’m thinking about. I wish this baby was Andrew’s baby. And do you know what I was thinking this afternoon? I was thinking if Binkie was killed it would make everything easier.’ She looked at him defiantly.

‘That is very bad,’ he pronounced gravely, and, as if she had been waiting for this, she let her body slump and sighed.

‘I know it is bad. And after that I thought: Well, if Andrew got killed I’d be a widow for the third time.’

‘Maisie, why do you have to kill these men? You have to decide which you want, that is all.’

‘I’ve been thinking. When Andrew talks about how he lives in England, then I can’t see myself.’

‘He expects you to go with him to England after the war?’

‘After the war! It might be years and years. Sometimes I think there’ll be a hundred years’ war like there was once before. Sometimes we say things like: When we are in London, but it’s not serious.’

‘It’s serious for him, Maisie.’

‘No,’ she said with unexpected firmness. ‘I don’t think he’s ever really thought. It all just happened. He was kind and he’d marry me to give the baby a name, and then – we grew fond of each other.’ She said this last with a touch of the sullenness he had come to expect.

‘Maisie, you aren’t deciding between the two men, you are deciding between two different ways of living. If you go back to your child’s father, you will be the wife of a rich man …’

‘
Rich
?’

‘For me such a life would be rich,’ he said with a small smile. ‘Maisie, the white people of this country live like only a few of the people in the world live. Don’t you know that? You take it for granted. You will be a comfortable wife with servants. But if you go with Andrew you will be the wife of a communist and you will have a hard life and a good one.’

‘Communism,’ she said. ‘You know, there’s something silly about it. Oh I know it’s all right for you. You are a poor man, you said you sold newspapers on the streets in Athens. So there’s some sense in you being a communist. But sometimes I want to laugh, seeing Matty and Marjorie and the rest of them – and besides, communism would be bad for the blacks, say what you like.’

He smiled again, gravely, at this phrase resurrected from her life before she joined the group.

Her answering smile was sour but determined. ‘Oh I know you are thinking that I should know better now than to say things like that. But that isn’t the point, don’t you see? What I keep thinking about is this: If I stayed married to Andrew, then I’ll be a communist. But if I take Binkie, then I’d never think about it again. Well, and so it makes me feel as if I’m nothing in myself.’

‘But, Maisie, how nothing? You are you. You aren’t just the wife of a man.’

She said resentfully: ‘Andrew talks, you know how he talks, I might be a child.’

‘That isn’t true, Maisie.’

‘Yes, and he’s always right, always, no one can ever be right but him.’

Athen said with authority: ‘Maisie, do you know what you are doing? You want an excuse to blame him for something, you want to dislike him, and so you are making up reasons for it.’

She resumed her restless progress about the room. She looked clumsy and distressed. From shoulders to thighs her big body was the anonymous body of a pregnant woman. But her young arms and brown legs were a girl’s; and her steady puzzled blue eyes were maidenly and severe; as severe as his dark; stern, judging eyes. She drifted to the divan, sat on it, laid her arms over the globe and her head down on her arms and began to cry.

Now Athen gently pushed her back on the bed so that she lay stretched on Andrew’s army blankets, lifted a pillow, made her raise her knees, put the pillow under her knees and sat beside her. ‘That is how I did my sister when she was sick and having a baby. Is it comfortable?’

‘Yes.’

He laid his thin brown hand on the mound of her stomach. She tensed up and then lay still.

‘There now,’ he said. That is good. I can feel your child. I like it.’

She lay still, looking up at the ceiling, frowning, feeling the little man’s hand lying on her stomach. Her face began to ease out of its yellow tension.

‘You are perhaps a woman for whom the man is not so important. That is not a bad thing. So what you must think of, it is what is good for the child. You must bring him up to be a good man, with knowledge of the world, a man who will fight for justice and for peace.’

‘He!’

‘Is this child a girl then?’

‘Who’d be a woman?’

‘So you insist on a girl, because you need a companion in all your suffering?’

She laughed out, and as if ashamed of it, thrust the side of her hand into her mouth and bit it.

‘You are not yourself tonight, Maisie.’ He began gently to stroke the mound of her stomach. His own face was extraordinarily gentle, and his eyes were full of a fierce joy. ‘So now ask yourself: Which of these two men will bring up your son or your daughter to be a good person, understanding the world and living to make it better? That is all you must ask yourself.’

‘Go on doing that,’ said Maisie. ‘It makes me feel good.’ After a pause she said: ‘If it had been you – you might have married me to do me a good turn, and then we should have loved – we should have had a good time for a while.’

‘Loved,’ said Athen. ‘You should not now say to yourself you have not loved Andrew. If you have loved someone even for a short time, then it is a good thing, and you should know it and say it and not pretend to yourself it wasn’t so.’

‘Love,’ said Maisie lazily, in her normal easy voice. ‘Love. Sometimes I think it doesn’t exist.’ She lifted her plump and childish hand from the pillow beside her and yawned against it. Athen turned off the big light; the room was now dimly lit. ‘You must try now to be still, and perhaps to sleep, and remember you are a person, you must find out what you want for yourself and not blame other people for your weaknesses.’ She yawned again, let her hand fall back beside her face, smiled at him and let her eyes close, Athen continued to sit by her, stroking the big swollen lumpy mound of her stomach until her breathing changed. Then he quietly went out, switching off the lights.

Half an hour later Andrew came in, switched on the ceiling light, saw Maisie lying asleep, switched it off, tiptoed clumsily to the bed, and turned on the small lamp. He sat where Athen had sat, beside the sleeping girl. He was full of apprehension. That morning Maisie had told him Mrs Maynard had been and that Binkie was coming. All afternoon, which he had arranged with considerable difficulty to have free from the camp, she had been evasive, nervous, guilty and silent. All evening, at the meeting, and afterwards drinking coffee with Anton and Jack Dobie, he had been half-dreading, half-longing for this moment when he might, as he put it to himself, ‘be with’ Maisie again. It seemed to him that all that afternoon she had been a stranger. Now she opened her eyes and smiled at him, and his heart eased into a comfortable warm beat – he realized it had been pounding with anxiety. Then her face changed, she gave a hasty yawn, and turned over on her side.

‘And how’s the little bugger tonight?’ he said in the gruff and humorous voice he always used for this routine query.

‘OK,’ she said, not responding, and added politely: ‘How was the meeting?’

‘Not bad.’

She was staring into the room over the curve of the pillow. He examined her and found with surprise that her swollen body was repulsive to him. He remembered that earlier that day, when she said Binkie was coming, he had had the same feeling: he looked across at her, finding her hideous.

He had lived with the growth and the change of her body, hardly noticing it, burying his face at night thankfully in her warm full shoulders, greeting the child under her flesh with his hands, never thinking that it was not his own. Now, because Binkie was coming, he kept thinking: This is not my child, and her pregnancy was strange and distasteful. Maisie reached out her hand for his wrist, and laid his hand on her stomach. There was the stiffness of reluctance in his arm, he let his hand lie a moment, and it fell away. Maisie gave him a deep, blue, reproachful look.

His anxiety exploded against his will into the question: ‘Still worrying about Binkie?’

‘Well, it’s natural I should, isn’t it?’ She was looking through her lashes at his big clumsy hand resting beside her body on the blanket. He said with a clumsy attack: ‘Look, Maisie, I’ve got to get this straight, I want to know where I stand with you, it seems to me you turned against me from the moment you knew Binkie was coming.’

She did not move, lying big and clumsy and swollen, and he felt physical distaste like a sickness. She said breathlessly: ‘So I changed did I? I changed? I said he was coming and you looked at me and I felt like dirt.’

He was silent, thinking: She surely couldn’t have noticed how I felt then? He said aggressively: ‘The moment you knew he was coming, it started.’

She said: ‘He is the father of the baby.’

‘So much so that I had to marry you to give the little bugger a name. ‘

She sat up and stared at him. She was thinking: It would have been fair to say that if he had just married me and said good-bye afterwards. But not after we’d loved each other. (She had been going to say, had a good time together, but because of Athen, used the word love.) So now he has no right to say that, she concluded, lying down again, this time turned away from him. ‘No one made you marry me. You offered.’

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it.’ ‘No, you shouldn’t.’

The silence after this became unbearable. He said stiffly: ‘Do you want me to sleep in your room? You needn’t move from here if you’d rather not.’

‘If you like,’ she said indifferently. He was about to go next door without another word when he saw her eyes were wet. He gave a contrite exclamation, tugged off his uniform. and got on to the rough hot blanket beside her. ‘You should get into your nighty,’ he said. ‘It’s too hot to be dressed.’

Now she hastily flung off her clothes, noticing as she did so that he was careful not to look at her. A look of hurt came on to her face, and she slipped quickly under the sheet and lay with her back to him. He lay close behind her, as he had done recently at night, so that her head lay on his shoulder, and his arm, resting on the high curve of her stomach, supported her big loosened breasts. Suddenly he felt at ease.

‘Hullo, Maisie,’ he said thickly into her damp hair, and she snuggled back against him. He understood that the soft searching pressure of her buttocks meant she was trying to discover if he was big for her. They had made love easily since the beginning, adjusting themselves without thinking to her altering shape. Tonight he understood that his new physical distaste for her made it impossible for him to make love. He held the upper part of her body close to him, and kissed the side of her throat and said: ‘Maisie, we mustn’t quarrel.’

She had gone tense. She said: ‘Quarrel? This isn’t a quarrel. You don’t love me any more.’

‘But I do, Maisie, I do.’

She took his hand and directed it in a gentle stroking movement over her belly. He let her direct the massage for a moment, then her hand fell away from his, and he held it: her hand was friendly to him, but her body alien.

They lay still, filled with dismay. Then she said: ‘I think I’d better sleep by myself tonight, I don’t feel comfortable.’

This was the first time they had not lain together at night. He got quickly out of the bed without a word, and went into her bedroom next door. The photographs of her husbands were still on the walls. He gave them both an ironical nod of greeting, and thought: I suppose when Binkie comes back she’ll put my photograph up beside theirs. He forced himself to sleep, unwilling to face a night of wakeful misery, but even more afraid that Maisie might come in, for reassurance, lie beside him, and he should again betray his new, instinctive repulsion.

Immediately above Andrew, through the thin ceiling, in a room identical in shape, lay Martha in a damp petticoat, watching the dry and rainless lightning flash among unbroken masses of cloud. She was smoking heavily, and was so tense with heat, irritation and exhaustion that she could not lie still. She felt guilty because she had so easily found a reason not to go to the group meeting. She felt worse because, having reached the meeting on India with Colin, she almost at once crept out again. She knew everything Jack Dobie was going to say, agreed with it, in fact might have made the same speech herself. And Colin irritated her. Having decided that he needed to ‘specialize’ in something, and chosen India, he had in his conscientious way immersed himself in the subject. He sat in the meeting beside her nodding or shaking his head with phlegmatic attention to Jack, and whispering asides to her if there was a small fact or a detail wrong. She soon apologized and went home, in search of solitude. She was in a fever to be alone. In the flat she found two RAF men from the Progressive Club. Ever since she and Anton had married, the focus of the group had shifted from the du Preez’ house to this flat. She had understood this when people had begun to drop in, and the pamphlets, books and files had begun to accumulate in the living-room. Naturally, since this was central, and the du Preez’ house was not; and since the du Preez were a family with children, and this had the flexibility of the young married couple’s flat. Once Martha had understood that she could always expect to find people asleep on the living-room floor, or even in the bath when she woke in the morning, and that people would drop in for meals, she accepted the fact and liked it. She knew she was pleased not to be alone too much with Anton.