A Ripple From the Storm (33 page)
Back in the flat Martha found only the drunken pilot. He was a fair, slight, childish young man, his face flushed up with drink and sleep. He was lying on his side on the floor, a brandy bottle rolling empty beside him. Martha knelt by him to put a cushion under his head. She thought he must be hot in the thick jacket, tried to remove it, found the heavy limbs impossible to move, and left him, consciously suppressing a maternal love for him. So many of the pilots who had been near the group had been killed. This one too, most likely, she thought; in a few months’ time I’ll hear he’s dead. I can’t stand any more of these deaths and being unhappy afterwards. She shut out the thought of the pilot, and decided that since it was now ten o’clock, Anton would soon be home, and if she were to think about her position she had a very short time to do it in. The beginning of her thinking was to take from Anton’s handkerchief drawer the photograph of a young woman, which she studied carefully. This was Anton’s dead wife. He had never mentioned her until after his marriage to Martha. Since then he had talked of her constantly, until Martha had come to feel the dead woman was haunting her. She looked at this photograph often, with respect, with resentment, and with – oddly enough, envy. It was a lean, sad, dark-eyed face, full-lipped but severe. The dark hair was cut like a man’s, but she was not masculine, not at all. Martha felt drawn to this woman, but she could not imagine how she had married Anton. For the life of her she could not connect the two. It appeared that she had been among the first communists to be arrested by the Nazis and had died in the concentration camp. Anton and she had been married for three years, but had spent very little time together because of the demands of the Party. As Anton said: ‘She was a woman who had given herself to the Revolution. She did not care about herself at all.’
And was this a criticism of Martha? She did not think so. When Anton talked of his dead wife it was with a look of stoically regretful and at the same time puzzled pride. Grete had been a fine public speaker. She had great physical bravery. She had ‘a mind like a man’s’ – Martha made a note of this with a feeling that it said a good deal about Anton. Also, ‘the workers loved her.’ And why should the workers not love her? It seemed she was the daughter of a rich family and had left it for the cause. (That Anton, so bitterly proletarian, should have married a middle-class woman was another fact that Martha stored up for examination, feeling that it said something of importance about him.)
Evening after evening Anton talked of Grete, and Martha listened. The moment they were left alone it was the signal for the entry of Grete. Once Martha said impatiently: ‘But, Anton, why do you talk so much of Grete?’ and he replied, ‘But she was a fine comrade, Matty, a fine woman.’
At which Martha shrugged. The shrug said everything about the marriage. ‘Why should I bother when it’s not a marriage at all?’ (Yet outwardly she was affectionate and compliant with her husband.) The truth is, she concluded, he’s probably still married to Grete. She returned the photograph to its drawer, took off her dress, and lay on the bed, feeling the sweat crawl and prickle over her flesh. The bed was under the window. She looked straight up into a black, dry sky, clashing with barren thunder, split with dry lightning. Storms excited her sexually, and she was on the point of indulging in fantasies of the faceless man who waited in the wings of the future, waiting to free the Martha who was in cold storage – but she suppressed them. Anton would be coming soon. She had learned to protect herself against him sexually. She had consulted a book on sex which belonged to Marjorie and discovered that Anton was suffering from something called premature ejaculation. But she rejected the phrase. Anton’s combination of complacent pride with, as far as she was concerned, a total incapacity, expressed something in his personality and had nothing to do with Latin text-book phrases. The deepest of instincts taught her that it was wrong ever to let him suspect the depth of her disappointment with him, and she was becoming the most accomplished of sexual liars. But this was only possible if she were not moved by him, Martha was not a woman who could ever use such phrases as ‘the sexual side of marriage’. From the moment when she understood that ‘going to bed’ with Anton was something she regarded as apart from and subversive of what she felt for him, which was a dry and increasingly critical affection, she restored her own wholeness by resting in imagination on the man who would enter her life and make her be what she knew she could be. She felt this man, rather than saw him, a person perhaps rather in the line of a masculine counterpart to Grete. From the safety this man’s image gave her, she was kind to Anton. But there was always a bad moment or two before they went to bed. Luckily it was always very late, they were seldom alone together for longer than a few minutes, and in the mornings there were usually people in the flat who needed to be given breakfast. When the war is over, thought Martha, we will go our own ways. This was beginning to have desperation in it, because it occurred to her that Anton did not take it for granted, as she did, that they must separate.
There was, in short, a well of desperation slowly filling below the attitude represented by a shrug of the shoulders. Anton was coming to depend on her, and in a way she did not like. He saw something in her that she did not recognize as being any part of herself. It had entered her mind more than once, listening to him talk of Grete, that if she died, Anton would talk to his next wife or woman of her, Martha, and in the same way: Martha and Grete would be not so much offered to this new woman as past experience, but stated, laid down, propositions, bits of property from Anton’s past. (The last phrase was definitely satirical – for Anton had a sense of property which Martha had not, yet he never ceased to condemn her middle-class attitudes.)
It followed then that she must wonder: Since I could not conceivably be presented to this future woman like Grete, who was a heroine, what qualities do I possess? He must have some idea of her to give him the complacent and uxorious look she hated. So what was it? At this point Martha would sometimes examine herself in the mirror. (On this evening of heat and thunder she examined herself, found herself ugly, and returned to her bed unable to care that she was ugly.) She was attractive, but not particularly so. She had not changed much. When she saw herself from outside there she was as she had always been, rather tense, over-critical, awkward and abrupt. Nothing to give Anton cause for pride. Yet he felt pride and showed it. In which case there was something she did not understand; she was being stupid, and probably, as usual, egotistical, and it was her duty …
When Anton came in rather late Martha was asleep. He switched the centre light on and began to undress. Martha woke and said Hullo. He did not respond. She realized he was angry and roused herself to listen to the lecture she felt she deserved for not going to the meetings, But he still did not speak, although she swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat waiting. After two or three questions from her which he answered abruptly, he began an attack on Jack Dobie which she had heard before: Jack was an old-fashioned socialist freebooter without discipline or any real understanding of politics. Martha was more bad-tempered than she knew, for she found herself, when she had decided to say nothing, remarking that he might be a weak-minded social democrat but that it was something of an achievement to get himself elected for one term after another by a collection of white trade unionists who disliked everything Jack stood for, but who respected his character so much they would vote for no one else.
Anton, as if he had been waiting for her to say this, turned a cold gaze on her and said: ‘Yes, yes, but it’s not our function to run around like a lot of schoolgirls admiring popular politicians.’
He was now moving around the bedroom in his pyjamas putting his things away. She had been interested to find that he bought expensive pyjamas and wore them carefully. He was very tidy. When he was ready for bed, the room once again looked as if it were on display in a shop: two neat little beds, two chests of drawers, a wardrobe, everything correct. Everything except me, Martha thought, knowing that Anton found it irritating that she should lie sprawling in her petticoat under the open window.
‘We’ve got to reorganize the group,’ Anton remarked. ‘We’ve got to take ourselves in hand. We arrange meetings and half the members don’t turn up. It’s got to stop.’
‘But, Anton, everyone was doing something important.’
‘The Party comes first,’ he said with finality. ‘The Party is always first.’ He sat on his bed and wound up his watch carefully. When he had finished he asked: ‘Aren’t you going to get undressed?’
‘But it’s so hot.’ However, she sprang up, hastily put on a nightdress, and laid herself down again.
For God’s sake, she thought, he’s not going to talk about Grete now? For that particular self-absorbed inward-looking frown meant he was back in the past.
‘Yes, Matty,’ he said at last, amicable but severe: ‘The Party is first, always. That is the first principle.’
She noted that his eyes had returned to the present and to her. Then I must be looking attractive tonight after all, she thought. But I hate the whole attitude: I’m attractive to him tonight, or I’m not attractive tonight. Yet he’s an attractive man, I suppose, tall, broad-shouldered and fair wavy hair it sounds like a description in a women’s magazine. But there’s something cynical about it all, and I don’t like it and it’s got nothing to do with me. At which point he arrived at her side and looked down at her with the small complacent smile she was used to seeing at such moments.
‘It’s terribly hot, Anton,’ she said, and took his hand quickly to soften the refusal. His face changed, he nodded at her stiffly and went back to his bed, which he got into without speaking.
Just as if the episode had not occurred he began again, but in a lecturing tone: ‘It is the correct organization and the discipline of the Party that matters above all. We must call the comrades at the earliest opportunity and completely reorganize ourselves.’
Martha remarked, with the intention of making a joke: ‘Well, discipline may be the highest goal of us all, but I gather Uncle Joe has his moments when he dispenses with it.’
He jerked up on his elbow and stared at her. ‘You are referring, I gather, to Comrade Stalin?’ ‘Anton, don’t be so solemn!’
‘There are some subjects which I consider sacred and on which I do not permit jokes.’ With which he lay flat again, reaching up his hand to switch off the light. They lay side by side, separated by the width of a room, which was now continuously and irregularly illuminated by lightning. It’s like the light from gunfire, Martha thought, her imagination returning to the Eastern Front.
As soon as it did, she felt not so much guilty as dismayed: squabbling and pettiness, and men being killed – she lay in an ugly little room, thousands of miles away from where the future of the world was decided, full of anger about nothing.
She said: ‘Anton, we aren’t seriously going to quarrel becuase I called Stalin Uncle Joe – which everyone does?’
He said: ‘Your way of speaking betrays an attitude of mind. It betrays a dangerous way of looking at things. You should be careful, Matty.’
You
should be careful
was like a threat. Martha considered it for a while, then said: ‘Oh, good night, I’m not going to quarrel about it even if you are.’
But in the morning Anton would not speak to her. Before going to work he said that he expected her to see that all the group members should be present that night at seven o’clock sharp for a group meeting. Then he left, stepping past the still sleeping pilot, who lay sprawled under the window in the full hot morning sunlight, with a look of sharp impatient distaste.
It was not until lunch-hour that Martha was free to round up the group members. Jasmine was not in her own office. Martha ran across the street to the group office and found her there with Mr Matushi. For some days they had been meeting at lunch-time, at his request, so she might give him lectures in political organization, but these had turned into lessons in English. Mr Matushi, who spoke four African dialects, and spoke and read English passably well, considered himself illiterate. When Martha entered, Jasmine was correcting the grammar of a letter he had written to the editor of the
News
about the meeting in the Location. It had not been published, and Mr Matushi was under the impression it was due to his incorrect use of the language.
Jasmine was secured, and Marjorie came next. Martha found her in bed sick, but she said she would tell Colin the group meeting that night had ‘first priority’. Maisie was sitting by the window fanning herself. She listened to Martha indifferently, said she had troubles just now and could not come. Would she tell Andrew? ‘But, Matty, I told you I’ve got troubles. Binkie’s coming today, and Andrew and I are having trouble.’
‘Well, you get rid of Binkie,’ said Martha. ‘He’s no right to bother you now anyway.’
‘That’s right,’ said Maisie.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘They all make me sick.’
Martha laughed, and left, but as she ran fast down the street she felt insecurity grip her stomach. She thought: If Andrew and Maisie are going to allow themselves to be messed about by that idiot Binkie … She was extraordinarily dismayed, and protected herself by allowing herself to feel a small contempt for Maisie, an onset of distaste. To the extent to which the happiness between a man and a woman has been a symbol for others, they can expect a corresponding disapproval when that happiness collapses. Martha was thinking: There was Mrs Van last night, and now Maisie and Andrew … she did not conclude her thought, which was: Then there’s no hope for me. She was almost in tears.
Martha tried to telephone Athen at the camp, failed to reach him. She tried the du Preez house. Marie was not home. It was half-past one. She cycled to the outskirts of the town where Piet was at work on a building site. Midday, and the sky was loaded from horizon to horizon with the massive, solemn, rolling cloud mountains that still had no promise of rain. The sun broke through the cloud-masses here and there over the plain in indirect spasmodic shafts of light. It was a heavy, orange, ominous sunlight, and the air was pricklingly dry. On the top of a half-finished wall Piet sat straddled, setting bricks into place which were handed up to him by a black man. The rule was that Africans might mix mortar, collect bricks, hand mortar and bricks to the white men, but they might not set the bricks into place, which was skilled work reserved for the white men. Piet saw Martha and, annoyed, gave her a hasty nod.
‘I’m sorry, Piet,’ she said, standing ten feet below him, looking up into the great sweat-running red face of the white man, and into the lively sweat-dewed black face beside it, ‘but Anton says there must be a group meeting tonight.’
‘Oh he does, does he?’ Piet slapped bricks down, one after another, while the African leaned over with the trowel to smooth off the rough edges of the mortar. He continued this work without looking down until Martha said: ‘Piet, look, he insists we’ve all got to be there.’
‘I’ve got a trade union meeting.’
‘Anton says it’s important.’
Piet wiped his forehead with the flapping sleeve of his khaki shirt, and said: ‘Matty, I’m on the mat again with my mates. I’m in trouble. At five o’clock. You tell our old man that all this is getting a bit much. And besides, how am I to get from the Trades Hall to the flat? If you think I’m going to go running around in all this heat, you can think again.’
‘I’ll get Jasmine’s car and pick you up.’
‘If I’m through. Which I doubt.’ He fitted another brick into place, nodded at the black man and said: ‘Hey, you, hurry up.’ Martha thought: Six months ago I would have considered it my duty to criticize Piet for the way he speaks to Africans!
‘You’d better tell Marie,’ she said. ‘I can’t find her.’
‘One of the kids is sick and she’s taken him to hospital.’
‘And where’s Tommy, can you tell him?’
‘He’s over there.’ Piet inclined his head sideways towards another part of the building site, and then forwards to the African, who handed him another brick.
Martha walked over the rough, hot, brick-littered earth past another white man with his attendant African, to where apprentice Tommy stood by a tangle of piping with a spanner in his hand, being instructed by an older white man. Both were attended by a group of six Africans who were supposed to fetch and carry for them.
Tommy was embarrassed to see Martha. He came across to her, wiping the flat of his hands against his thighs. He said shyly: ‘Hey, Matty, what’re you doing here?’ with an uneasy glance back at the watching men.
Martha gave her message. Tommy said he had plans for that evening.
‘Well, we all had plans, didn’t we?’ Martha heard her voice becoming peremptory, disliked herself, and said: ‘Please, Tommy, come if you can, and I’ve got to get back to my office.’
She was late back at the office, and Mrs Buss said tartly: ‘Mr Robinson says he wants that Memorandum typed out even if you have to stay late. ‘
The Memorandum was not finished until six. Martha, irritable with hunger, a condition she had become so used to she was beginning to wonder secretly if she had some illness, met Jasmine at Black Ally’s where the smell of food informed her she had not eaten that day. She bought a bag of sausage rolls, which she ate hastily, sitting beside Jasmine who was driving. Jasmine was talking about Mr Matushi who, she said, needed a lot of working on. Perhaps Martha would take over Mr Matushi since she was going away. Martha did not take this in until she realized that Jasmine had announced she was going to Johannesburg where ‘her political development would be advanced by wider experience’.
Martha snapped: ‘You can’t leave a town without permission from the group,’ heard for the second time that day the hectoring note in her voice, and was depressed into silence by the suspicion that she was becoming a shrew.
Jasmine said: ‘I feel the group would not be within its rights to refuse permission.’ She added that she had bought the train ticket.
Martha, feeling good temper return as the chemical results of the sausage rolls reached her bloodstream, said with a sigh that she envied Jasmine, but there wasn’t going to be much left of the group if this went on.
At the Trades Hall Jasmine announced she would fetch Piet from his meeting. Martha said it would embarrass him. Jasmine said that this was too bad, and departed inside the hall. Martha reflected that a week ago Jasmine would not have said it: like everyone else, as soon as she was due to leave the Colony she betrayed her real opinion of its importance. Jasmine emerged a moment later saying: ‘Piet’s getting it hot.’ She added: ‘Bloody silly little country, every little incident gets blown up into a major drama.’
They waited for nearly an hour. Then Piet came out saying: ‘Well, comrades, that’s a bright bit of behaviour – you two are known all over the dorp as a pair of flaming Reds, and Jasmine comes right into the room ordering me to come out, and you sit here in the car in full view, and I’m falling over backwards trying to be respectable. ‘
‘Keep your hair on,’ said Jasmine, but Piet went on: ‘I’ve got the whole pack at my throat for subverting the blacks. I’ve tried to keep them sweet and easy about me being a Red, and you have to push it down their bloody throats.’ He was too angry to allow himself to say more. They drove in silence back to the flat.
Anton, Marjorie and Marie were waiting in the Hesse living-room.
Marie was looking wearily humorous. Marjorie was wrapped in a blanket in spite of the heat, for she was shivering and sick. Anton was grimly silent.
‘Well?’ said Piet. ‘Let’s get a move on.’
‘There are other comrades to come,’ said Anton. ‘And it’s nearly eight. The meeting was convened for seven.’
Marjorie said: ‘Anton, I told you Colin can’t come.’
‘Colin must come.’
Marjorie appealed to the others past Anton: ‘There’s trouble over Jack Dobie’s meeting last night. One of the men from the printers’ union went to Jack and told him that there are a lot more anonymous pamphlets being printed – Jack is spreading seditious propaganda about the British Empire. And Colin is with Jack, working out what to do. What’s the use,’ she demanded plaintively, ‘of Colin’s making himself an expert on India if he can’t use it in a crisis?’
‘There’s no excuse,’ said Anton. To Martha, whom he had not seen since that morning, he said: ‘And where are Andrew and Athen?’
‘You know they can’t be reached easily at the camp.’
‘They should be here.’
‘Perhaps you should have given people longer notice?’
Marie backed Martha up with: ‘Yes, comrade, it’s not reasonable to expect full attendance with such short notice.’
Piet said impatiently: ‘For God’s sake, let’s get cracking.’
Ignoring him, Anton said to Martha: ‘And where’s Tommy?’
Piet said: ‘I told Tommy he needn’t come. There’s a bright lad on the building site, a black from Nyasaland, and Tommy’s made a friend of him …’ Anton began to speak, but Piet steadily spoke him down: ‘Yes, it’s not easy for a boy like Tommy, a fine member of the herrenvolk, to become friends with a black, and it’s more important he should keep his date with this lad than come to this meeting.’
Anton said: ‘Who made this decision?’
Piet said: ‘Who made the decision to have this meeting? You did. It was not a group decision.’
Anton said: ‘I’m chairman, and have a right to convene emergency meetings, And now since this is all we can expect tonight, we can begin.’
‘It’s not all,’ said Marjorie. ‘There’s Maisie.’
‘I do not think we will suffer from the absence of
Comrade
Maisie,’ said Anton, with such naked contempt that they all glanced at each other, taking sides against him. There was a mutter of critical exclamations. He sat stubbornly silent, waiting. Then, seeing how the others were looking at him, said impatiently to Martha: ‘Then run along downstairs and see what Maisie is doing.’
Martha was angry at his tone, but she nevertheless went downstairs. Maisie’s door was shut. She knocked on it, knocked again. At last it opened. Maisie was there, and beyond her stood a tall broad-shouldered young man – Binkie. The war had thinned him, apparently made him taller, straightened him, given him a look of responsibility. Martha would not have recognized him. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Martha, and retreated. It seemed she had interrupted some speech or declaration by Maisie, for before the door shut again Maisie, having nodded an impatient greeting at Martha, went on: ‘And so you see, Binkie, that’s how things are, and you’ve got to face up to it.’
Martha ran back upstairs, thinking delightedly: ‘So Andrew and Maisie are all right after all.’ She burst into the living-room with the exclamation: ‘It’s all right – Maisie’s standing up to Binkie.’
‘I’m glad to hear about Maisie’s matrimonial problems,’ said Anton, ‘but I suggest we now start work.’
‘First,’ said Piet. ‘I told the lads I’d be back by nine. They’re dealing with other business in the meantime. I’ve got twenty minutes.’
Anton said: ‘This is a communist party meeting and you’ll stay until it’s finished.’
Marie gave her husband a startled glance, and clicked her tongue: Tch, tch, tch. She laughed, saying to Anton: ‘Oh come off it. And I’ve got to go too. My kid’s sick and the cook’s looking after him. Tell us what’s important and then we’ll push off.’
Anton now began his planned speech: ‘Comrades, it is urgently necessary that we should recover our sense of discipline. We are communists. Last night and tonight have shown us to what a distance we have moved from communist behaviour …’
Piet broke in with: ‘Cut the cackle. What have you brought us here for?’
Anton said: ‘My concrete proposal is that we have a series of lectures on the history of the communist party.’
Marie again glanced with humorous concern towards her husband, whose mouth had literally fallen open. After a moment he said blankly: ‘Do you mean to say you’ve got us all together to say that?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Anton.
Piet got up, Marie rose and stood beside him.
Piet said: ‘Comrade Anton, if you want us to agree formally to a series of lectures on party history, I’m in favour. But I want to say this: You’re just out of touch with reality. Or you’ve got a touch of the sun. What is the position? We’re all neck-deep in trouble. My trade union, unless things are handled carefully, is in danger of passing a racist resolution that might stand for years – and I’m fighting to stop it. I’m in danger of losing my position on the Trades Council. The Social Democratic Party is facing a crisis – it might split if things aren’t handled properly. We’ve all of us worked so hard that we’ve got positions of responsibility in the town and we have influence out of all proportion to our numbers. Yet we’re expected to drop everything and run along here to …’ He was so angry he could not finish.
Marie said in a conciliatory voice: ‘Have a heart, Comrade Anton. Sometimes I think you’re just a little nuts, if you want to know.’
Anton said steadily: ‘I’m not interested in your personal opinions as to my character, I now formally propose that we start our series of lectures tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow if you’re all so busy you can’t find time for the Party.’
‘The day after tomorrow is the Social Democratic Executive.’
‘It ends at six,’ said Anton.
‘But you know quite well that the most important part of these meetings is the discussion that goes on afterwards in the pubs.’
‘I’m sorry to hear you say so. Comrade Piet. Sorry, but I must say, not surprised,’ said Anton.
Piet said: ‘Oh muck it.’ And went out. Marie with a final humorously appealing glance at Anton followed him.
Marjorie got up and said: ‘I’m really sick, Anton. I must go. The doctor said I shouldn’t be out of bed at all.’