A Ripple From the Storm (36 page)

Mr Van, as correct as a Court Order, continued to cross-examine the Major: ‘You would say that the causes of poverty in India are …’

At this interesting point, Martha noticed the agitated face of her servant in a side door left open to get a draught through the hot and stuffy Court. She left Mrs Van with an apology saying she would be back at once. The servant had a message from Anton saying she must come home.

‘But I told the Baas I was going down to the Congress.’

‘But the Baas said, you must come now.’

‘Very well, then, I’ll come.’

She lingered a moment at the door, listening. The Major was making a speech across the Court to Jack, about some occasion when his life had been saved by a Sikh, which proved that the Indians, far from hating the British, loved them. ‘Greater love has no man!’ he exclaimed angrily, ‘than to lay down his life for his friend.’

It seemed as if the case was drawing to an end. Groups of trade unionists were leaving. A couple went past Martha and she heard one of them say: ‘Well, I had a Zulu woman as a nurse when I was a kid and …’ They went off down the panelled corridors. It had not occurred to Martha that anyone could find the arguments of Mr Van’s defence anything but absurd, but it seemed he had known what he was doing.

She ran down the street towards the flat, her eyes on an aircraft that roared straight down over Main Street. She was imagining herself to be in a city in Europe, the plane an enemy plane, machine-gunning the street. This was because one of the pilots who came to the meetings – the boy who had got drunk that night a month before, had said that he hated this little town and the country so much that every time he flew over it he imagined he was ‘shooting the bloody place and the bloody white herrenvolk up’. Her ears, after the silence of the Court, which had held only the sound of arguing voices, were irritably resisting the roar of the aeroplane. She reached her flat almost in tears because of the noise, found it empty, and banged shut the windows of the small bedroom which was stuffy enough with them open. But two more planes turning in to land overhead made the air tremble, and she sat on the edge of her bed with her hands clenched across her ears. She longed to sleep. For the month before the Congress she had been woken every morning by the roar and grind of the aircraft overhead. Normally a person who slept like the dead, it occurred to her that for her sleep to be so light she must be very tired. She was being carried on the wave of a powerful driving exhaustion, which had reached a pitch where, before going to sleep, she was always filled with a terror that if she allowed herself to sleep too deeply she might not wake up for days; as if a deep sleep were an abyss into which she might fall and vanish. All that month she woke continually at night to see the winking landing lights, red and green, of the aircraft, like silver moths in the moonlight, and she felt the drum of the engines through her entire body in a pulse of irritation or of anger.

All that month Anton had not spoken a single word to her. For the first week she had appealed to him. ‘We can’t conceivably be quarrelling because I made a bad joke about Stalin!’ But he moved about the flat, ate, slept, as if she did not exist.

After that she also became silent, not from policy but from bewilderment, and flung herself into even more concentrated activity. But soon she saw that something very frightening was happening. The cold set distance of his body changed; she saw there was a dogged appeal in a glance or a movement of his shoulders. She understood that what she had to do was to put her arms around him and apologize. But she was fighting against the final collapse of her conception of him. She knew that the moment she put her arms about him, to coax him out of his silence, that creature in herself she despised would be born again: she would be capricious, charming, filial: to this compliant little girl Anton would be kind – and patronizing, as she repeated to herself over and over again, in a fierce resentment. But this would be a mask for his being dependent on her; she would not be his child, but he hers. She found herself saying: Why, he’s not a man at all – in anything!

Meanwhile she was dreaming persistently of that man who must surely be somewhere close and who would allow her to be herself.

It was Maisie who used the phrase which broke Martha’s determination.

Martha was spending all the free time she had with Maisie, who was alone. Maisie had refused to see Binkie again: at the end of two days’ fruitless efforts to see her he had cut short his leave and gone back to Italy. Andrew had been posted a week later, because of the intervention of Mrs Maynard who had told Mrs Van she had considered it her duty to ‘protect that stupid gal from herself. During that week Maisie and Andrew had been together, trying to reach each other in a way which Martha found painful. They were trying to regain the simple and tender gaiety of the time before Binkie came on leave. They made the same jokes and said the same things but across barriers of hurt and pride. The night before Andrew left they quarrelled. Martha heard the quarrel through the thin floor, and, locked in the frozen silence with Anton, envied them for the ability to quarrel. But next day Andrew was gone; and they had agreed to start divorce proceedings.

Maisie was bitter, puzzled, hurt. She said: ‘They neither of them cared about me, not really. They talked about each other more than me.’ She was standing in the middle of her small room, a body of massive swollen flesh, from which her two mild and maidenly eyes looked forth, untouched. She passed her hands over her great body again and again, and said: ‘What I can’t understand, Matty, is this – suddenly it wasn’t me any more that either of them was fond of. But
I
feel just the same.’ This was the nearest Martha was ever to get to what had so hurt Maisie: ‘Do you know, Matty, I suddenly felt that Andrew hated me?’

‘But, Maisie, how could he hate you? It made us all happy to see you two together. He loved you.’

Maisie repeated obstinately, her eyes clouding with remembered pain: ‘No, suddenly he didn’t like me. You can always tell, Matty, even if they pretend. I can’t stand pretence. I felt insulted,
I
was just the same all the time, but suddenly he wasn’t.’

She was in the last month of her pregnancy, suffering with the heat and with the pride of her loneliness. She saw no one but Martha. Athen, of whom she spoke often, had been sent to another camp three hundred miles away for some part of his training. The other members of the group were hostile to her; Martha defended her, even more heatedly because she felt the same hostility. But she knew why: she was mourning as if a happiness of her own had collapsed.

When Maisie’s had her baby, and she’s in two parts, she’ll need a man again – then she’ll be different. But who? I believe she loves Athen, but that’s no good …

For some reason Martha preferred to think of Maisie as she was now, fiercely self-sufficient, and self-absorbed. But not as self-absorbed as Martha thought, for one day she remarked, as if this were part of something they had discussed, as if they were continuing a thought they shared: ‘And it must be hard for Anton, all this. I always thought that if he cracked up, he’d take it badly.’

Offered the information that Anton was cracking up, Martha at first rejected it. She examined the pale closed face of this man she had inexplicably married, and thought him as self-sufficient as a fortress: ‘a petty-bourgeois interested only in his furniture’. But her heart had begun to ache for him. The night before the Saturday of the Congress she had slipped into bed beside him, and he murmured: ‘My little one, so you’re sorry for being so silly?’

It was going to be a marriage after all. She accepted the fact with a mixture of dismay and of protective tenderness. It could not last longer than the war – on that point she was determined, but while it lasted she would be open to feeling.

Above all it was going to be a fight because she had understood it would please him if she became less of a communist. That morning he had said reproachfully: ‘So you’re going to the Congress and leaving me behind?’ She had not expected it; had never imagined it possible that this formidable revolutionary from Europe possessed by memories of a wife who had above all been a political being, could wish her to fold her hands and become passive. She understood that he did not know this himself, for when she remonstrated that she had been elected a delegate and must go, he had agreed that of course she must, but in a tone which said clearly that he would have agreed as easily if she had said she would allow her alternate delegate to go instead.

Now the message from Anton had made her fearful that he was going to prevent her from leaving with the others for the Congress.

He was not in the flat. The servant had gone for his midday meal. Soon it would be one o’clock and she ought to be at the High Court. She continued to sit on the edge of the bed, waiting for him, fighting against the need to sleep. At last she caught sight of a piece of paper pinned to the pillow: My little one, Maisie is not well. I thought she would like to see you before you left.

At first Martha felt gratitude that Anton had at last come to like Maisie; then she saw that this was a means to stop her going. This second fact she repressed – it made her too angry.

She ran downstairs to Maisie’s flat, and saw a group of three people in the entrance, black against the glare of the street. They were Mrs Van, Piet and Jack. Martha ran down to where she could see their faces. They were angry but they had been laughing together on the pavement.

‘You’ve lost the case,’ Martha exclaimed.

‘£150 costs. The law’s an expensive ass,’ Jack commented. In spite of his annoyance he could not prevent his eyes lighting up at the memory of the droning farcical scene in the Court.

Mrs Van said: ‘It seems that the judge found the Major’s argument about the Indian women wasting the national income on jewellery unanswerable.’ She choked with laughter, leaning against the wall of the entrance. Her fat body shook all over, and Piet and Jack, on either side of her, took her by the arms, smiling at each other and at her, with the delicate amused respect that her friends always gave Mrs Van at these moments when the girl imprisoned in the great body laughed out in irrepressible enjoyment.

‘It’s all very well,’ said Mrs Van reprovingly to herself. ‘But it’s a serious matter.’ Being serious she said to Martha: ‘Are you ready? We must hurry.’

The door of Maisie’s flat opened and Maisie came out, her face glistening with sweat. ‘Oh, Matty,’ she said, clasping Martha’s arm, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. Anton said you would.’

‘Your baby’s started?’ said Martha.

She knew she was going to miss the Congress. She looked towards Mrs Van as if she could find a way out of this conflict of loyalties. But Mrs Van was a mother and a grandmother first.

‘Of course Matty’s staying with you. We’ll take her alternate.’

‘I’ve sent for the nurse,’ said Maisie, and burst into tears.

Big Piet instinctively took command, helping Maisie back into her flat, saying: ‘Now take it easy, settle yourself down, crying’s not going to get the little brat into the light of day.’ He held Maisie around her shoulders, receiving floods of tears on his arm; he was showing an awkward, warm, tender gallantry that made them all like him.

Also, Martha was feeling that for the first time since her marriage Mrs Van was liking her. Why? She thought: She’s been feeling hostile to me; it’s the same sort of hostility I’ve been feeling for Maisie – well, then, does that mean I let her down in some way: she wanted my getting married to mean something, and it didn’t. Martha put this thought away for later examination: it meant there was something in Mrs Van’s life she did not understand.

For a few minutes the four of them stood about, fussing over Maisie until she wiped her eyes and said: ‘I’m sorry to be such a fool, I was alone and I got scared.’

Mrs Van said to Martha: ‘Your alternate’s Marjorie, isn’t it? Well, she’s due to have her baby too. This is all nonsense: I’ll appoint an alternate myself, it’s quite regular!’

Jack and Piet laughed at her; Martha was too disappointed to laugh. Seeing how she felt, Mrs Van turned at the door and said they would ring her that night from G—to tell her how the voting went.

‘I expect Anton’d be interested to hear too,’ added Mrs Van with a detachment that told Martha how much Mrs Van disapproved of Anton.

The sound of Anton’s name made Piet’s face change. He said abruptly to Martha: ‘I’d like a word with you.’ Martha followed him into the hallway. Mrs Van and Jack went ahead with a tact which showed they knew what Piet had planned to say.

Piet said: ‘Look here, Matty, I meant to do this formally, but there’s no time like the present, and I’ve got to the point where the less I see of your old man the better. ‘

‘Oh, Piet, why don’t you think it over?’ She had been expecting for some days that Piet and Marie would leave the group.

‘I’ve had enough,’ said Piet. His face was flaming with anger and with embarrassment. ‘It’s a bloody farce. Communists we call ourselves. The truth is, ordinary people wouldn’t even understand the language we speak. I’m telling you, when I go to one of the union meetings from one of our meetings, I’m scared stiff I might use some of the bloody jargon by accident – they’d think I’d gone off my rocker. There’s half a dozen of us, slaving ourselves to death, we could do exactly the same things if we weren’t group members at all.’

‘If you disapprove of party policy, the correct way is to stay inside and change it,’ said Martha, with earnestness.

‘Oh to hell,’ said Piet. ‘We’ve got to the point where we spend more time calling each other names than we do on real work. I’ve had it. Anyway, that’s all. And that goes for Marie too.’ A car hooted outside. ‘No hard feelings,’ he said, going out. ‘You’re going to take a formal decision I’m a fascist traitor, but no hard feelings as far as I’m concerned.’

Martha went back to Maisie, who was now walking up and down the room, frowning with concentration.

Maisie had lapsed from the group without any formal announcement. Marie and Piet had left, which meant that Tommy would too. Of the RAF men there was only Athen, and he would be leaving the Colony soon. Jasmine had gone to Johannesburg. The Communist Party of Southern Zambesia now consisted of Anton, Marjorie, herself and Colin. Colin had been warned by the head of his Department that he would not hold his job if he did not break his connection with the communists. He had said he could continue to consider himself a communist but he would no longer attend meetings.