Jonathan had been wounded slightly in the leg at El Alamein, but recovered. Recently he had been wounded again in the arm, and the arm showed no signs of properly healing, much to everyone’s relief. As Mr Quest said: ‘If he gets out of it with nothing worse than a gammy arm, he’ll be doing quite well.’
‘Shhhhh,’ said Mrs Quest suddenly, as Caroline said from the window where she was swinging from the burglar bars: ‘Who’s that lady, Granny, who is that lady?’
Martha picked up her bicycle, jumped on it, and cycled fast through the bushes to the invisibility which would enable Mrs Quest to turn the child’s attention to something else. At a telephone box, Martha rang the Piccadilly. Johnny was happy to bring his compatriot to the telephone. Martha told Athen she could not see him that evening.
‘I’m sorry,’ came Athen’s voice, raised against the clatter of a hundred eating humans. ‘Well then, I’ll see you in about a week, and in the meantime, will you please see my friend Clive de Wet?’
‘I met him this evening at Johnny’s. I don’t think he wants to see me. I’m sure of it.’
‘No, I spoke to him about you. He wants to see you.’
‘When did you speak to him?’
‘I’ve just been to his house, he was there and I spoke to him. He said he thought you were associated with Mrs Van.’
‘I don’t understand, he was reading to Johnny, doesn’t he approve of Johnny?’
‘He does, very much. But he does not trust Mrs Van, I think.’
‘That’s ridiculous – how can he like Johnny and not like Mrs Van?’
‘At any rate, it would be helpful if you explain things to him. They need much help – they have no books, and wish to be taught many things.’
‘Oh well, in that case … and I’ll see you next week.’
‘Yes. And give my greetings to your husband.’
And now, at last, she must go home to Anton. Home was a new place, half a flat, half a house – two little rooms, a bathroom and a shared kitchen that was really a screened-off veranda over a patch of shared dirty lawn. The woman they shared with was a Mrs Huxtable. Martha did not like her, but as there was never any time for cooking anyway, it didn’t matter.
Anton had telephoned her three times. Three times. The information had been received apprehensively by her nerves. Her emotions repeated, with monotony: It’s not fair, it’s not fair – meaning that this kind of demand, or reproach, was not in the bargain of her marriage with Anton. Meanwhile her brain was sending messages of warning that she was scared to listen to. For months now there had been a kind of equilibrium in the marriage. Having acknowledged it was a bad marriage, that they had made a mistake, that they would split up again as soon as the war ended, a sort of friendliness, even kindness, even – perhaps? – a tenderness was established. But while, for Martha, this new relationship was welcome because it softened an intolerable strain; it seemed that for Anton it meant a new promise. At any rate, three different telephone calls in one afternoon was a language, a demand, Martha could not begin to answer.
Cycling past McGrath’s hotel, she remembered that after all she belonged to a world where people might sit drinking in large rooms, served by waiters; they might dance; they might even eat dinners (bad dinners, but formal, that was something) in restaurants. She would ring up Anton from the foyer and ask him to join her for a drink, and perhaps dinner. He would say humorously: ‘And what are we celebrating, Matty, have I forgotten your birthday?’
He would protest at having to come, but he would be pleased. They could drink for an hour or so, have dinner, listen to the band, and in this way both could forget (Martha hoped) the implications of the fact that practically everything he said, or did, these days, was really a reproach for her not doing, or being, what he now wanted her to be.
Chapter Two (#ulink_b9546ef4-43b0-504b-adc1-3d4eed9b393f)
It was almost seven. Martha had been waiting since five. Waiting now being a condition of her life, like breathing, it scarcely mattered whether she waited for an interview or for when peace would be restored – the new phrase, which showed that the old one, ‘when the war ends’, had proved inadequate. She waited with the whole of herself, as other people might pray, yet with even prayer become something to be practised, kept in use merely, since it could be effective only with the beginning of a new life. Waiting for her life to begin, when she could go to England, she waited for ‘the contact from the African group’, and with the same ability to cancel out present time. She read half a pamphlet about Japanese atrocities with an irritated boredom with propaganda which did not mean she disbelieved what she read. She absorbed a column or so of statistics about African education but with the irritation of impotence. She filed her nails, brushed her hair as she never had time to do in her bedroom, ‘fifty strokes on each side’, tidied a cupboard full of pamphlets that dealt definitively with affairs in at least a hundred countries, and finally sat down with deliberately idle but restless hands, on a bench under the window over Founders’ Street.
The heat of a stormy day had drained into the scarlet flush that still spread, westwards, under bright swollen stars only intermittently visible. Hailstones from the recent storm scattered the street and lay on the dirty windowsill, and gusts of sharp cold air drove from racing clouds across the hot currents rising from the pavements. It would be winter soon, the ice seemed promise of it. Martha’s calves sweated slipperily against the wood of the bench, and she sucked a bit of ice as an ally against heat, watching her smooth brown skin pucker under the gold down on her forearm into protest against cold. There was a blanket folded on top of the wooden cupboard. The blanket was because friends in the RAF sometimes slept here if they were too late for the last bus to camp. Martha now spread it on the bench against the unpleasant slipperiness of sweat, and wrapped her legs in it. The hailstones, even under a crust of dirt, sent forth their cool smell, and Martha twisted herself about to watch the sky from where the winds of a new storm already poured over the town. Sitting with her back turned, she did not see that Solly had come in, and missed the moment when she could judge why he was here. For a moment the two stared deeply at each other. She broke it by saying: ‘I’m waiting for a man to come from the African group.’ She had decided on this admission to save half an hour of fencing. A bad liar, she knew it, and had thus acquired the reputation: Matty is such a sincere person. Meanwhile, part of her mind juggled to find convincing lies to put him off.
‘It’s such a pleasure having dealings with you, Matty, always as honest as the day.’
‘It occurred to me recently there’s no point in being anything else, living in this – ant-nest.’ Her voice was shrill, and she set guards on herself; noting meanwhile that ‘enemy’ Solly ceased to be one when she thought of him as a fellow victim of the provinces. She smiled at him: as a cat which has been scampering about a crouching tom suddenly rolls over and lifts meek paws. Not quite, however. But the flash of seriousness on this young man’s face (whatever the reason for it) when he had first seen her under the window had after all weakened the force of her decision not to like him. So would he look into her face from a few inches’ distance if. But he was now saying, vibrant with sarcastic hostility: ‘You have a point, I grant you. Yesterday I met a comrade of yours from the camp who said, how was Matty? I said what did he mean? It seems our liaison is common gossip.’
‘What fun for you.’
‘Well, I do hope so, Matty.’
‘The thing is, I have to meet Athen at seven and it must be that now.’
‘Well, I would be only too happy to wait to seduce you until you had finished conferring with comrade Athen.’
He was on the bench beside her. His face grinned into hers from not six inches away. Luckily, however, not at all ‘serious’, far from it, so she was saved. She got up and began piling pamphlets about the Second Front (now unsaleable) into the cupboard.
‘Solly, are you seeing Clive de Wet?’
‘Why should I tell you, comrade Matty?’
‘Well, if you want to be childish.’
‘It’s you who are childish. This is Solly Cohen, the Trotskyist.’
‘But it looks as if the African group want help?’
‘There isn’t an African group.’
‘But a group of Africans?’
‘What can you do for them I can’t do?’
She shrugged and then laughed. The laughter was because of a picture so sharp to her imagination it was hard to believe it wasn’t in his also: ‘the African group’, like a small starving child, its hands held out for help, was being torn to pieces by a group of adults fighting for the right to help it.
At that moment came a knock on the door. Martha shouted ‘Come in’ and a small black boy came in, looking nervously from one to the other of the two white people.
‘Missus Mart,’ he said.
‘No Mrs Mart here,’ said Martha.
‘Idiot, it’s you.’
Solly was already grinning: he knew what was in the dingy envelope that the small boy held out.
A single sheet of exercise paper said:
‘Dear Mrs Martha, I apologize for not coming this afternoon, I have been prevented by unavoidable circumstances. Hoping I may have the pleasure of your acquaintance at another time. Yours sincerely, Signature illegible.’
Probably purposely so.
‘Who sent you?’
The little boy shifted his feet and his eyes and said: ‘Don’t know, missus.’
Martha gave him a shilling and he started to run off. She said: ‘Please tell whoever sent you that I will be here tomorrow afternoon at the same time.’
‘Yes, missus.’
He vanished and Solly jeered: ‘Ever faithful Matty, waiting day after day in pursuance of duty. But he won’t come, I’ve seen to it.’
