The Golden Notebook (10 page)

put in the language he would use himself. Now she said: 'There must be something wrong somewhere, because if not, we wouldn't have to spend hours and hours discussing it like this.' She spoke with confidence; but now that the men did not reply-and she felt their tolerance of her, she grew uneasy and appealed: 'I'm not saying it right, but you see what I mean...' Because she had appealed, the men were restored, and Willi said benevolently: 'Of course you say it right. Anyone as beautiful as you can't say it wrong.' She was sitting near me, and she turned her head in the dark of the car to smile at me. We exchanged that smile very often. 'I'm going to sleep,' she said, and put her head on my shoulder and went off to sleep like a little cat. We were all very tired. I don't think people who have never been part of a left movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day out; year in, year out. After all, we all earned our livings, and the men in the camps, at least the men actually being trained, were under continuous nervous stress. Every evening we were organising meetings, discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not we were up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytising. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn't have it by temperament we had it on principle. All kinds of incidents come back-for instance Willi, who after some days of wondering what to do for a woman who was unhappy because her husband was unfaithful to her, decided to offer her the Golden Bough because, 'when one is personally unhappy the correct course is to take a historical view of the matter.' She returned the book, apologetically, saying it was above her head and that in any case she had decided to leave her husband because she had decided he was more trouble than he was worth. But she wrote to Willi regularly when she left our town, polite, touching, grateful letters. I remember the terrible words: 'I'll never forget that you were kind enough to take an interest in me.' (They didn't strike me at the time, though.) We had all been living at this pitch for over two years-I think it's possible we were all slightly mad out of sheer exhaustion. Ted began to sing, to keep himself awake; and Paul, in a completely different voice from the one he had used in the discussion with Willi, started on a whimsical fantasy about what would happen in an imaginary white-settled Colony when the Africans revolted. (This was nearly a decade before Kenya and the Mau Mau.) Paul described how 'two men and a half (Willi protested against the reference to Dostoievsky, whom he considered a reactionary writer) worked for twenty years to bring the local savages to a realisation of their position as a vanguard. Suddenly a halfeducated demagogue who had spent six months at the London School of Economics created a mass movement overnight, on the slogan: 'Out with the Whites.' The two-men-and-a-half, responsible politicians, were shocked by this, but it was too late-the demagogue denounced them as being in the pay of the whites. The whites, in a panic, put the demagogue and the two-men-and-a-half into prison on some trumped-up charge; and, left leaderless, the black masses took to the forests and the kopjes and became guerrilla fighters. 'As the black regiments were slowly defeated by the white regiments, dozens of nice clean-minded highly educated boys like us, brought all the way out from England to maintain law and order, slowly succumbed to black magic, and the witch-doctors. This nasty un-Christian behaviour very properly alienated all right-minded people away from the black cause, and the nice clean boys like us, in a fury of moral condemnation, beat them up, tortured them, and hanged them. Law and order won. The whites let the two-men-and-a-half out of prison, but hanged the demagogue. A minimum of democratic rights were announced for the black populace but the two-men-and-a-half, etc, etc., etc' We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognise it as frustrated idealism-now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It's the first time I've believed he was capable of it.) He went on: 'There is another possibility. Suppose that the black armies win? There's only one thing an intelligent nationalist leader can do, and that is to strengthen nationalist feeling and develop industry. Has it occurred to us, comrades, that it will be our duty, as progressives, to support nationalist states whose business it will be to develop those capitalist unegalitarian ethics we hate so much? Well, has it? Because I see it, yes, I can see it in my crystal ball-but we are going to have to support it all. Oh, yes, yes, because there'll be no alternative.' 'You need a drink,' Willi remarked at this point. The bars were all closed by this time in the road-side hotels, so Paul went to sleep. Maryrose was asleep. Jimmy was asleep. Ted remained awake beside Willi in the front seat, whistling some aria or other. I don't think he had been listening to Paul-when he whistled bits of music or sang it was always a sign of disapproval. Long afterwards, I remember thinking that in all those years of endless analytical discussion only once did we come anywhere near the truth (far enough off as it was) and that was when Paul spoke in a spirit of angry parody. When we reached the hotel it was all dark. A sleepy servant waited on the verandah to take us to our rooms. The bedroom block was built a couple of hundred yards from the dining-room and bar block, on a slope at the back. There were twenty rooms under a single roof, built back to back, verandahs on either side, ten rooms to a verandah. The rooms were cool and pleasant in spite of having no cross ventilation. There were electric fans and large windows. Four rooms had been allotted to us. Jimmy went in with Ted, I with Willi; and Maryrose and Paul had a room each. This arrangement was afterwards confirmed; or rather, since the Boothbys never said anything, Willi and I always shared a room at the Mashopi hotel. We, none of us, woke until long after breakfast. The bar was open and we drank a little mostly in silence, and had lunch, almost in silence, remarking from time to time how odd it was we should feel so tired The lunches at the hotel were always excellent, quantities of cold meats and every imaginable kind of salad and fruit. W all went to sleep again. The sun was already going down when Willi and I woke and had to wake the others. And we were in bed again half an hour after dinner was over. And the next day, Sunday, was almost at bad. That first week-end was, in fact, the most pleasant we spent there. We all were in a tranquillity of extreme fatigue. We hardly drank, and Mr. Boothby was disappointed in us. Willi was particularly silent. I think it was that week-end that he decided to withdraw from politics, or at least as far as he could, and devote himself to study. As for Paul, he was being genuinely simple and pleasant with everyone, particularly Mrs. Boothby, who had taken a fancy to him. We drove back to town very late on the Sunday because we did not want to leave the Mashopi hotel. We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I remember Ted saying: 'Look at us all sitting here with not a word to say. It's a dangerous place, Mashopi. We'll come here, week-end after week-end and hibernate in all this beer and moonlight and good food. Where will it all end, I ask you?' We did not return for a month. We had all understood how tired we were, and I think we were frightened what might happen if we let the tension of tiredness snap. It was a month of very hard work. Paul, Jimmy and Ted were finishing their training and flew every day. The weather was good. There was a great deal of peripheral political activity like lectures, study groups and survey work. But 'the Party' only met once. The other sub-group had lost five members. It is interesting that on the one occasion we all met we fought bitterly until nearly morning; but for the rest of the month we were meeting personally all the time, and with good feeling, to discuss details of the peripheral work we were responsible for. Meanwhile our group continued to meet in the Gainsborough. We made jokes about the Mashopi hotel and its sinister relaxing influence. We used it as a symbol for every sort of luxury, decadence and weak-mindedness. Our friends who had not been there, but who knew it was an ordinary road-side hotel, said we were mad. A month after our first visit there was a long week-end, from Thursday night to the following Wednesday-in the Colony they took their holidays seriously; and we made up a party to go again. It consisted of the original six and Ted's new protégé, Stanley Lett from Manchester, for whose sake he later failed himself as a pilot. And Johnny, a jazz pianist, Stanley's friend. We also arranged that George Hounslow should meet us there. We got ourselves there by car and by train and by the time the bar closed on the Thursday night it was clear that this week-end would be very different from the last. The hotel was full of people for the long week-end. Mrs. Boothby had opened an annexe of an extra dozen rooms. There were to be two big dances, one public and one private, and already there was an air of pleasant dislocation of ordinary life. When our party sat down to dinner very late, a waiter was decorating the corners of the dining-room with coloured paper and strings of light bulbs; and we were served with an especial ice pudding made for the following night. And there was an emissary from Mrs. Boothby to ask if the 'airforce boys' would mind helping her decorate the big room tomorrow. The messenger was June Boothby, and it was clear she had come out of curiosity to see the boys in question, probably because her mother had talked of them. But it was equally clear she was not impressed. A good many Colonial girls took one look at the boys from England and dismissed them forever as sissy and wet and soft. June was such a girl. That evening she stayed just long enough to deliver the message and to hear Paul's over-polite delight in accepting 'on behalf of the airforce' her mother's kind invitation. She went out again at once. Paul and Willi made a few jokes about the marriageable daughter, but it was in the spirit of their jest about 'Mr. and Mrs. Boothby. the publican and his wife.' For the rest of that week-end and the succeeding week-ends they ignored her. They apparently considered her so plain that they refrained from mentioning her out of a sense of pity, or perhaps even-though neither of these men showed much sign of this emotion generally-a sense of chivalry. She was a tall, big-bodied girl, with great red clumsy arms and legs. Her face was high-coloured, like her mother's; she had the same colourless hair prinked around her full clumsy-featured face. She had not one feature or attribute with charm. But she did have a sulky bursting prowling sort of energy, because she was in that state so many young girls go through-a state of sexual obsession that can be like a sort of trance. When I was fifteen, still living in Baker Street with my father, I spent some months in that state, so that now I can't walk through that area without remembering, half amused, half embarrassed, an emotional condition which was so strong it had the power to absorb into it pavements, houses, shop windows. What was interesting about June was this: surely nature should have arranged matters so that the men she met must be aware of what afflicted her. Not at all. That first evening Maryrose and I involuntarily exchanged glances and nearly laughed out loud from recognition and amused pity. We did not, because we also understood that the so obvious fact was not obvious to the men and we wanted to protect her from their laughter. All the women in the place were aware of June. I remember sitting one morning on the verandah with Mrs. Lattimer, the pretty red-haired woman who flirted with young Stanley Lett, and June came into sight prowling blindly under the gum-trees by the railway lines. It was like watching a sleepwalker. She would take half a dozen steps, staring across the valley at the piled blue mountains, lift her hands to her hair, so that her body, tightly outlined in bright red cotton, showed every straining line and the sweat patches dark under the armpits-then drop her arms, her fists clenched at her sides. She would stand motionless, then walk on again, pause, seem to dream, kick at the cinders with the toe of high white sandal, and so on, slowly, till she was out of sight beyond the sun-glittering gum-trees. Mrs. Lattimore let out a deep rich sigh, laughed her weak indulgent laugh, and said: 'My God, I wouldn't be a girl again for a million pounds. My God, to go through all that again, not for a million million.' And Maryrose and I agreed. Yet, although to us every appearance of this girl was so powerfully embarrassing, the men did not see it and we took care not to betray her. There is a female chivalry, woman for woman, as strong as any other kind of loyalty. Or perhaps it was we didn't want brought home to us the deficiencies of imagination of our own men. June spent most of her time on the verandah of the Boothby house which was a couple of hundred yards to one side of the hotel. It was built on ten-foot-deep foundations away from the ants. Its verandah was deep and cool, white-painted, and had creepers and flowers everywhere. It was extraordinarily bright and pretty, and here June lay on an old cretonne-covered sofa listening to the portable gramophone, hour after hour, inwardly fashioning the man who would be permitted to deliver her from her sleep-walking state. And a few weeks later the image had become strong enough to create the man. Maryrose and I were sitting on the hotel verandah when a lorry stopped on its way down East, and out got a great lout of a youth with massive red legs and sun-heated arms the size of ox-thighs. June came prowling down the gravelled path from her father's house, kicking at the gravel with her sharp sandals.