At last he stopped, though they had not moved, or coughed, or made any sign of restlessness. He said: ‘Forgive me, comrades, I see that you are listening out of kindness. You would rather be in the Old Vienna Tea Rooms with the others.’ Again he walked off. This time no one stopped him. A few paces away he turned to say in a different voice –
low, trembling, ashamed: ‘Perhaps I feel these things because of something I must be ashamed of. I hate you comrades, because for you it is already peace. Your countries are at peace. But mine is at war – full, full of war, still. Good night. Forgive me.’ He went.
Anton, Martha, Thomas.
Martha wished that Anton would now say: ‘Let us go and have a cup of coffee together.’ She would have preferred to be alone with Thomas, but this was not possible at the moment, it seemed.
She had hardly seen Thomas since the scene, months ago now, in the office. A few days after it, Thomas had been transferred abruptly to another city. The transfer was not only unexpected – there was more to it, because Thomas was morose, bitter. It was rumoured Thomas had had a fight in the camp, had beaten someone up. He had not said anything about the fight to her, though. Then off he had gone, a couple of hundred miles away. From the new camp he had written a humorous regretful letter – the fortunes of war, etc. As for Martha, she felt that she might have foreseen it. Since the war had started – friends, lovers, comrades, they appeared and vanished unpredictably. Of course Thomas was bound to be transferred that moment they agreed to love each other.
Once or twice he had come up for short visits. On one, she had taken the afternoon off, and he had come to the flat. But they had been unable to make love: the bedroom was hers and Anton’s. They felt constrained, and sat and talked instead. Besides, a quick hour snatched where they could was not what either of them had engaged for.
Thomas had set himself to amuse her by making a short speech in parody of the solemn group style: an ‘analysis’ of sex in war-time.
‘It is popularly supposed that the moment the guns start firing sex drives everyone into bed. But what war fosters, comrades, is not sex, but the frustrations of romance. What will we all remember of the war? I will tell you: the fact that one was never in one place long enough to make love with the same person twice. Partings and broken hearts, comrades – the war has given us back the pure essence of Romance. What are the ideal economic and social circumstances for sexual activity, comrades? I will tell you. It is a stable bourgeois society where the woman has servants to take the children off her hands. The husband goes to work or to visit his mistress, and the wife entertains her lover. No society has yet developed anything like this for satisfaction because not only do we get the comforts of – comfort, but just enough frustration to keep love alive. No, comrades, I tell you, when I was still a poor boy in my village, I understood perfectly well, from novels, just how things ought to be, and war – nonsense, it’s no use to us – but trust me, Matty. I’ll be discharged soon, and I’ve got a place in town that I’ll open up again for us.’
Meanwhile, he wrote sometimes. His erratic love life continued – so she heard. Knowing that she must hear he wrote: ‘I’m in an impossible position with you, Matty. Do you imagine that I don’t know what a woman feels when she is told that she is too special for casual affairs? Do you imagine I’d be such a fool as to say this to you? But if I’m careful not to say it, circumstances are saying it for me. But they tell me that this camp is being closed next month, and that means I’ll be with you soon.’
This afternoon Thomas had said that the camp was not being closed – not for another two or three months.
There was nothing for it but to go on writing love letters.
‘I’d like to have a cup of coffee with you both,’ said Thomas. ‘But I’ve got to be off. I’m driving out to the farm tonight – I’ve got two days’ leave.’
‘Oh, do come and have a cup of coffee,’ Anton said. Both Martha and Thomas looked at him to see if the drawling emphasis he put into it meant anything special, but it seemed not.
‘Or perhaps you’d like to make a speech too?’ said Anton.
‘Why not?’ said Thomas, sounding abrupt. Martha could see that he longed, as she did, for Anton to be somewhere else. This not being possible, he was talking on, saying anything, so as not to go away at once.
‘Perhaps we could have a competition about whose country has suffered most?’ said Anton.
‘It’s as useful as most of things we do now, certainly,’ said Thomas.
‘I don’t agree,’ said Anton, suddenly angry – it was evident that he had been restraining himself, with Athen, but was quite ready now to have a real argument. Even perhaps, an ‘analysis of the situation’.
Thomas smiled, recognizing this. He said again: ‘I haven’t time – I must go.’ But he still didn’t go, stood in front of them, hands in his pockets, in his characteristic pose, frowning.
‘Then you haven’t time,’ said Anton.
‘It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?’ remarked Thomas.
‘That is certainly true,’ said Anton, on a questioning note: if you have anything to say, do say it?
Thomas remarked: ‘Today I read that the war damage in Germany is 400 milliard marks.’ He smiled. ‘Well then. Thirty-two milliard pounds. Does that make it any easier? I kept looking at the figures like a madman.’
Anton stood looking at Thomas. On his face was a small, cold smile.
‘Oh, all right, I won’t press that point then. How about the mass bombing of Germany then? We didn’t know what that involved did we?’
He came a step nearer and stood looking close into their faces – first Anton, then Martha. Now they understood that he was saying what he had been feeling, or thinking, while Athen made his speech.
‘There’s very little work to do in the camp now. That’s a bad thing – I have nothing to do but read. It’s like living in a bad nightmare – a thousand empty huts, because all the men are demobbed, but someone’s made a slip-up somewhere, and the camp’s being kept open. All the machinery is running – the mess is open, all the health people like me operating away at full efficiency, all the blacks standing at attention waiting to take orders. No one to give orders, no one to eat in the mess, no one in the hospital, no one using my fine, efficient latrines – it’s a ghost camp. And I sit in my fine, well-ventilated hut reading … for instance, I’ve got the latest about the concentration camps. We haven’t heard the truth about them, that’s obvious, it’s too terrible to tell, so we’ll get the truth in bits.’
Again he looked at them, waiting.
‘No comment? Well, I have the advantage over you, because you don’t sit all day on a bed in a ghost camp full of food that’s rotting in its cases because there’s no one to eat it. Well then, how about dropping the atom bombs on Japan, how about that?’
‘We discussed that at the time,’ Anton said. To begin with, the socialists had supported the bombs being dropped. Or rather, the thing had been accepted. It seemed that nothing much worse had happened than had been happening for years. Certainly Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the words they later became – symbols for the beginning of a new, frightful age. Nor had there been a special meeting or even a private discussion since about the atom bombs. Yet people’s minds had changed, were changing. Without anything formal being said, or decisions being taken, the incident of the atom bombs was isolating itself, growing in meaning and intensity. But some people still agreed that it was right the atom bomb should have been used – Anton for one.
‘What’s your point?’ said Anton. ‘That war isn’t the prettiest of human activities?’
Thomas looked steadily at Anton, then smiled at Martha. ‘Oh, I haven’t any point. That is the point. Anyway, I’ve got thirty miles to drive. And it has been storming over the mountains, my wife said, so the rivers will be up if I don’t get a move on.’
‘Well then,’ said Anton.
‘Yes. And there’s India. How about the famine in India? It’s all right, isn’t it – I say, how about the famine in India? But the famine in Germany – that’s not the same thing at all, is it?’
‘What are you getting at?’ said Anton, his pale blue eyes like ice. ‘Are you telling me that I’m a German?’
‘No. Of course not. Well, I seem to be talking to myself.’ Off he went, walking fast. At the corner of the street he turned and half-shouted: ‘Did you read, they’re going to transfer one million people from East to West Germany?’
‘Come on,’ said Anton to Martha, impatiently. ‘Let’s get home.’
Thomas was saying, or shouting: They walk. ‘They put their belongings in handcarts and walk hundreds of miles guarded by soldiers. Like cattle.’ Now he did go off finally, and they saw him lift his hand and wave it, in a sort of mock salute.
‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘So now we all discover that the war has made a lot of mess everywhere. What is the use of such discoveries?’
He took Martha’s elbow to steer her safely through the people who were coming out of the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. ‘Good night, good night,’ they all said to each other.
Martha and Anton walked in silence to find the car. Amicably they drove back to their flat.
Their relations were admirable since Anton had a mistress. He believed that Martha had a lover.
Or apparently he did. Yet there was something odd about this, because while he would say to her: ‘I’m meeting Millicent after work,’ and she replied: ‘Oh, good, I’ll see you later then,’ she never said who she would be meeting or what she would be doing. It was assumed that she would be meeting somebody. Who? Once or twice Anton had joked it must be Solly, and he had never mentioned Thomas.
It occurred to Martha that this curious man both believed that she had a lover, because it was easy if they both had someone else, and yet knew she had not. She would never understand him.
They lay side by side in their twin beds in the little bedroom.
Anton remarked that in his opinion Professor Dickinson by no means exaggerated the future.
Martha agreed with him.
Anton said that he had again written letters to his family in Germany. Soon, surely, there must be some news. It wasn’t possible that everyone could have been killed.
Martha suggested it might be the moment to get their Member of Parliament to make enquiries.
‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘If I don’t hear soon, I shall have to approach the authorities. It will be a strange thing,’ he added, ‘living in Germany again. Sometimes I feel almost British.’ This last in a ‘humorous’ tone and Martha laughed with him.
