A Ripple From the Storm (37 page)
In short, the group was at an end. At this, Martha felt herself cut off from everything that had fed her imagination: until this moment she had been part of the grandeur of the struggle in Europe, part of the Red Army, the guerrillas in China, the French underground, and the partisans in Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece.
She was recalled from her sense of futility by the sound of Maisie’s heavy breathing: the girl was marching up and down the room with her heavy rolling gait, the sweat pouring off her face.
‘Maisie, it’s no use getting yourself all tensed up so soon,’ Martha said, but helplessly, remembering how she herself had tensed up and been unable to prevent it. ‘What exactly did the nurse say?’
‘She said there was no hurry,’ Maisie said sullenly. ‘The pains started, or I thought they did …’ Maisie lowered herself on to the edge of the bed, and sat limp, her slender arms dangling. In other words it was probably a false alarm.
‘You’d better sleep,’ said Martha, trying not to resent Maisie for keeping her from the Congress. Maisie obediently laid herself on her side and shut her eyes. Martha drew the curtains. A thin threaded glare of white light lay across the bed, across the heavy body. An aeroplane roared overhead, making the hot air throb.
‘Sleep,’ said Martha again. The childish lashes lying on Maisie’s fat cheeks were trembling with the effort to sleep.
Martha went upstairs to her flat. Anton was there. As she entered he said: ‘Well, my little one, I’m so happy you’re still here.’
She said dryly: ‘I should have thought you would have wanted me to be at the Congress.’
He said in the same fond voice: ‘Poor Maisie was so uncomfortable. I thought she would be happy to have you. And how is your patient?’ he added.
‘It seems it was a false alarm.’ She thought that very likely Anton had put it into Maisie’s head that her labour was starting. If so … She was acutely depressed. We’re all mad, she thought, trying to make it humorous. She recognized Marjorie’s dry and humorous tone, and thought: Why is it I listen for the echoes of other people in my voice and what I do all the time? The fact is, I’m not a person at all, I’m nothing yet – perhaps I never will be.
She sat on her bed under the window and looked up into the full, hot blue sky where, very high up, a couple of tiny silver insects glittered. Anton was watching her over the top of his book.
‘Piet’s just told me he and Marie are leaving the Party,’ she remarked.
He said: ‘So? It does not surprise me. I heard he’s becoming a builder on his own account – he’s going to be a boss now.’ He sounded full of contempt.
‘All the same,’ Martha said, in the same dry humorous tone: ‘there are three of us left now. It seems we ought to discuss whether or not we’ve been wrong.’
‘Yes, yes, as communists we ought always to admit our faults and correct them.’ There was a very long silence. Martha was thinking: That’s another two years of my life gone. The phrase two years seemed meaningless: they had been years of such hard work, excitement, happiness and learning that they seemed more important than all the time she had lived before. She thought: Well, that’s over. She wanted desperately to sleep, but she was following in her mind the car in which Piet, Mrs Van, Jack, and whoever Mrs Van had found to replace herself, were speeding towards the Congress.
She remarked: ‘I wonder which side is going to win?’
‘Yes, yes, thse social democrats always take themselves so seriously.’
After a pause he added: ‘I remember that joke Grete used to make – I remember she used to say …’
Martha found herself saying: ‘For God’s sake, will you shut up about Grete!’
He said with cold reproof: ‘She was a very good comrade.’
‘I dare say she was,’ said Martha.
He waited for her to apologize, but since she did not, lifted his book and shut her out with it.
Martha went downstairs to Maisie, who was asleep.
She came upstairs again, and waited out the long afternoon until the telephone rang. The Congress had come to a sudden end. The ‘Red’ faction having won on a vote, that the African Branch should remain, the losing side had there and then split off and formed a new party. In other words the ‘Left’, such as it was, was fragmented: there were two parties, the Social Democratic Party, representing, or at least giving tokens of goodwill towards, the Africans; and the newborn Labour Party, representing white Labour. Any chance of either defeating the Government at the next election was over.
Anton, hearing the news, remarked: ‘Yes, the development in this country accurately reflects the same development in the Union of South Africa, and it is proof of the necessity for a communist party.’
‘But Anton, there are only three of us left.’ Martha was examining two very clear convictions that existed simultaneously in her mind. One, it was inevitable that everything should have happened in exactly the way it had happened: no one could have behaved differently. Two, that everything which had happened was unreal, grotesque, and irrelevant.
‘Yes, yes, but that is because of the objective political situation. We must make a fresh analysis of the position and begin again.’
But it’s not possible that both can be true, Martha thought. She was overwhelmed with futility. She lay down on the bed, her back to Anton, who was already freshly analysing the situation, and allowed herself to slide into sleep like a diver weighted with lead.
About the Author
D
ORIS
L
ESSING
was born of British parents in Persia in
1919
and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in
1949
and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. Doris Lessing lives in London.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
“There can’t, I suppose, be anyone left who reads modern fiction at all and isn’t aware of the importance of Doris Lessing’s work …. Lessing knows just what she is doing and a real, densely imagined, completely credible world emerges.”
—JOHN WAIN
Martha Quest, the embattled heroine of the Children of Violence series, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest fictional creations in the English language. In
A Ripple from the Storm,
Doris Lessing charts Martha Quest’s personal and political adventures in race-torn British Africa, following Martha through World War II, a grotesque second marriage, and an excursion into Communism. This wise and startling novel perceptively reveals the paradoxes, passions, and ironies rooted in the life of twentieth-century Anglo-Africa.
A Ripple from the Storm
is the third novel in Doris Lessing’s classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.
“I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do.” —B
ARBARA
K
INGSOLVER
“Doris Lessing, of all the postwar English novelists, is the foremost creative descendant of that ‘great tradition’ which includes George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence.’
—New
York Times Book Review
“Absorbing reading … Lessing conveys [with great clarity] the emotions, aspirations and constant self-questing of Martha Quest, her most powerful character.”
—Sunday Times
(London)
“She is a mature and valuable artist, adventurous in the mysteries of daily life, thoughtful, passionate, true.” —S
TANLEY
K
AUFFMANN
N
OVELS
The Gran Is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries of Jane Somers:
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
If the Old Could …
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
“C
ANOPUS IN
A
RGOS
: A
RCHIVES
”
SERIES
Re: Colonized Planet 5-Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
“C
HILDREN OF
V
IOLENCE
”
SERIES
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
S
HORT
S
TORIES
This Was the Old Chiefs Country
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories
Stories
African Stories
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches
O
PERA
The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight (Music by Philip Glass)
P
OETRY
Fourteen Poems
N
ONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
Particularly Cats … And Rufus
African Laughter
The Doris Lessing Reader
WORKS BY DORIS LESSING
Winner of the Nobel Prize
NONFICTION
AFRICAN LAUGHTER:
Four Visits to Zimbabwe
GOING HOME
IN PURSUIT OF THE ENGLISH:
A Documentary
PRISONS WE CHOOSE TO LIVE INSIDE
TIME BITES:
Views and Reviews
UNDER MY SKIN:
Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
WALKING IN THE SHADE:
Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962
FICTION
BEN, IN THE WORLD:
The Sequel to
The Fifth Child
THE CLEFT:
A Novel
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK
THE GRANDMOTHERS:
Four Short Novels
THE GRASS IS SINGING:
A Novel
LOVE AGAIN:
A Novel
MARA AND DANN:
An Adventure
THE REAL THING:
Stories and Sketches
THE STORY OF GENERAL DANN AND MARA’S DAUGHTER, GRIOT AND THE SNOW DOG:
A Novel
THE SWEETEST DREAM:
A Novel
THE CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE SERIES
MARTHA QUEST
A PROPER MARRIAGE
A RIPPLE FROM THE STORM
LANDLOCKED
THE FOUR-GATED CITY
