A Ripple From the Storm

  Anton said: ‘Since there is no group meeting, I consider it’s our duty to go and support Matty and Colin at the meeting on India.’

  ‘Duty or no duty,’ said Marie, fanning herself, eyes closed, ‘I’ve had it until it rains.’

  Marjorie, Andrew and Anton left her, and stood together on the veranda. Beyond the pillars the sky massed itself, darkly thunderous, lightning spurted and ran from one cloud mountain to another. The air was dry. For a week the clouds had been packing along the horizons, piling up, and thickening, but the rain held off. Tonight the air quivered and sang with the dry heat, and the dust shifted along dry earth under a small feverish wind.

  ‘Coming to the meeting?’ Anton said to Andrew.

  Andrew said, after hesitation, ‘I suppose so.’ But he was ashamed, for he added heartily: ‘Jack Dobie knows his stuff and we should support him.’

  When the car passed the flats where Marjorie lived she said apologetically: ‘I’m not feeling too good. This baby’s beginning to make itself felt.’

  They dropped her, and drove to the hall where the meeting was. It was full. Andrew said: ‘Not bad, three hundred people for a meeting on India in this weather. And for God’s sake,’ he added, ‘don’t say anything about the heroism of the Russians or I’ll leave you and go to the pictures.’

  Anton permitted himself to smile. They settled themselves, standing, against a wall, while Jack Dobie, an energetic little figure alone on the platform, worked himself up to his peroration: ‘Having bled India dry for hundreds of years it is our moral duty, etc’ Meanwhile a short, gingery, Cape-brandy-complexioned man jumped up and down and shouted: ‘Go back to the Clydeside. We don’t want you here.’ A group of local Indians, shopkeepers and teachers from the segregated Indian school, stood by themselves in a comer, kept their eyes fixed on the speaker, and from time to time muttered, ‘Shame, shame!’, shaking their heads sorrowfully. The body of the citizens listened in silence to the subversive views being put to them with the look of those prepared to keep an open mind about everything. The meeting, in short, was like all the meetings of that short epoch 1942 to 1945. The walls of the hall were still covered with posters from last night’s meeting, the Sympathizers of Russia’s Brains Trust on ‘Soviet Man – a New Species?’ Lenin, Stalin, and an assortment of Soviet generals gazed at each other over the heads of the crowd. Words like liberty, freedom, democracy, revolution drove one brave sentence into the next. If Lenin himself had appeared before these white-skinned petty-bourgeois, consigning them and their kind to the dust-heaps of history, invoking over their heads the masses of Africans (none were present that night, they were all safely asleep in the Location), he would have been immune from them, protected by the spirit of the time, and the image of a redstarred, hammered-and-sickled, frost-bitten, weary, bloodstained peasant. Along hundreds of miles of battle-front that stretched across dark and winter-bitten plains, the Red Army fought in choking snow and cold, and a breath of this cold air came into the hot and sultry little hall where men sweated in shirt-sleeves and the women fanned themselves with programmes emblazoned: ‘Let India Go Free!’ Jack Dobie marched from one end of the platform to the other, his Scots eyes blazing, shaking his fist at them and telling them they were blood-sucking imperialists and that freedom was indivisible.

  Anton looked along the upturned faces for Martha. She was not there and must have gone home. Andrew was thinking of Maisie: he had reasons to be with her tonight. But both men knew that because of their rivalry they would stay out the meeting to its end, and afterwards take Jack Dobie off for coffee. He had been officially pigeon-holed by the group as ‘sincere, but too much of an individualist, and needed guidance by Marxists’. Unless it rained and although the thunder rolled above the tin roof, often drumming out the sound of Jack’s voice, there was no sign of rain, there would be no excuse to go home.

  Five hundred yards away in a small bright hot room, Maisie Gale, briefly Maisie York, briefly Maisie Denham, now Maisie McGrew, a girl of twenty-four in the full of her pregnancy, sat with her belly resting on her sweaty thighs on the bed which was in the dayime a divan, and hollowed her hands around a small highly-coloured globe, her eyes fixed on the sandy-coloured area which represented the Sudan. Opposite her on a stiff chair sat Athen the Greek, his small brown muscular hands resting on his khaki knees, watching her with a brotherly and patient concern. At eight o’clock, under the impression the group meeting was at the Hesses’ flat above this one, he had knocked and found it empty, descended to this room to make inquiries about where the group was meeting, and found Maisie moving fast and clumsy about the small room, holding her stomach away from the sharp corners of chairs and tables, her fair babyhair glued to her head with sweat so that her face lengthened beneath it into a heavy, yellowish, stiff-staring mass of unhappiness. She had offered him tea, coffee, beer, told him to cook himself supper if he were hungry, sat down, got up, sighed, stood staring out of the window into the electriccrackling darkness, and finally informed him in a voice full of resentment that Andrew had gone to a meeting, but she hoped he would be back soon.

  That morning Mrs Maynard had opened the door without knocking and informed the girl in a curt but at the same time obsequious way that Binkie had been given compassionate leave and would be in the town tomorrow. Since Maisie had said nothing at all, Mrs Maynard had left again, with a dignity that suggested a patient readiness to suffer injustice.

  Then Maisie collapsed. She had ignored letters, telephone calls and even telegrams from the Maynards, but the actual presence of the black-browed and peremptory matron who was Binkie’s mother, whom Binkie so much resembled, had forced her to think: Binkie is coming. And then: The father of my child is coming. He will be here tomorrow.

  Now she sat with one white, pudgy, rather grubby forefinger on the pink splodge that was Italy, and the other on the tiny black dot which was the city she lived in. She let her gaze move down across the blue of the Mediterranean where at that moment a naval battle was in progress, across the yellow of Egypt and the sands of the Sudan, down over Abyssinia, down across the great crack in the earth which was the Rift Valley, across the lakes and forests of Nyasaland and the empty dryness of Northern Rhodesia which produced copper, wasted in war, south to where she sat now in the small, shallow, heat-filled room. Then back her frowning puzzled eyes moved to Italy. Perhaps Binkie had not yet left? Perhaps he had been held up and she could have a few days’ grace? But most likely he was now somewhere in the air above Egypt, the Sudan, Abyssinia, travelling down over the curve of the earth, south and away from the cold of the war in Italy which was tilted darkwards away from the sun, south over the belly of Africa thrust forward into the sun, thrust into summer, where she sat and sweated and waited. She saw a tiny fly-like aeroplane move down over the earth’s curve, the sunlight deepening on its wings, and she lifted her eyes to Athen and said miserably: ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong.’ Athen said for the tenth time that evening: ‘But Maisie, you knew he would come some time. You knew that.’

  ‘I didn’t know I would feel so bad when I saw him.’

  ‘You haven’t seen him yet,’ he said, smiling gently.

  ‘And when I told Andrew that Binkie was coming, all he said was: Well, see him, tell him where he stands and get it over.’

  ‘That was very sensible,’ said Athen, noting the look of hostility on her face as she mentioned her husband. Every time his name had occurred that evening her face had put on that same look of hurt, angry resentment.

  ‘You love Andrew,’ he said, grave and reproachful.

  ‘I was married twice before.’

  ‘But now you are married to Andrew.’

  ‘They were both killed.’

  Athen leaned forward, his two burned muscular thin hands gripping his knees. Maisie watched his hands with the same puzzled frown. ‘Maisie, you loved them, and they were killed, but it is not your fault.’

  ‘Love,’ she said sullenly. ‘Some
times I wonder what it means.’

  ‘Do you think of them?’

  She made an impatient movement with her shoulders.

  ‘But it is no disloyalty to Andrew to think of them. It is bad not to think of people who are dead when you have loved them.’

  ‘But why are you talking about them? I don’t see why?’

  ‘I had good comrades killed,’ he said, still leaning forward, still searching her face. ‘I think of them often. Don’t you see, Maisie, if someone loves you he loves you for everything you have been. Therefore it is right to think of those two men, if you loved them, and they were good honest men.’

  Her whole body stiffened. ‘Why do you keep on about them? It’s Binkie I’m thinking about. I wish this baby was Andrew’s baby. And do you know what I was thinking this afternoon? I was thinking if Binkie was killed it would make everything easier.’ She looked at him defiantly.

  ‘That is very bad,’ he pronounced gravely, and, as if she had been waiting for this, she let her body slump and sighed.

  ‘I know it is bad. And after that I thought: Well, if Andrew got killed I’d be a widow for the third time.’

  ‘Maisie, why do you have to kill these men? You have to decide which you want, that is all.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking. When Andrew talks about how he lives in England, then I can’t see myself.’

  ‘He expects you to go with him to England after the war?’

  ‘After the war! It might be years and years. Sometimes I think there’ll be a hundred years’ war like there was once before. Sometimes we say things like: When we are in London, but it’s not serious.’

  ‘It’s serious for him, Maisie.’

  ‘No,’ she said with unexpected firmness. ‘I don’t think he’s ever really thought. It all just happened. He was kind and he’d marry me to give the baby a name, and then – we grew fond of each other.’ She said this last with a touch of the sullenness he had come to expect.

  ‘Maisie, you aren’t deciding between the two men, you are deciding between two different ways of living. If you go back to your child’s father, you will be the wife of a rich man …’

  ‘Rich?’

  ‘For me such a life would be rich,’ he said with a small smile. ‘Maisie, the white people of this country live like only a few of the people in the world live. Don’t you know that? You take it for granted. You will be a comfortable wife with servants. But if you go with Andrew you will be the wife of a communist and you will have a hard life and a good one.’

  ‘Communism,’ she said. ‘You know, there’s something silly about it. Oh I know it’s all right for you. You are a poor man, you said you sold newspapers on the streets in Athens. So there’s some sense in you being a communist. But sometimes I want to laugh, seeing Matty and Marjorie and the rest of them – and besides, communism would be bad for the blacks, say what you like.’

  He smiled again, gravely, at this phrase resurrected from her life before she joined the group.

  Her answering smile was sour but determined. ‘Oh I know you are thinking that I should know better now than to say things like that. But that isn’t the point, don’t you see? What I keep thinking about is this: If I stayed married to Andrew, then I’ll be a communist. But if I take Binkie, then I’d never think about it again. Well, and so it makes me feel as if I’m nothing in myself.’

  ‘But, Maisie, how nothing? You are you. You aren’t just the wife of a man.’

  She said resentfully: ‘Andrew talks, you know how he talks, I might be a child.’

  ‘That isn’t true, Maisie.’

  ‘Yes, and he’s always right, always, no one can ever be right but him.’

  Athen said with authority: ‘Maisie, do you know what you are doing? You want an excuse to blame him for something, you want to dislike him, and so you are making up reasons for it.’

  She resumed her restless progress about the room. She looked clumsy and distressed. From shoulders to thighs her big body was the anonymous body of a pregnant woman. But her young arms and brown legs were a girl’s; and her steady puzzled blue eyes were maidenly and severe; as severe as his dark; stern, judging eyes. She drifted to the divan, sat on it, laid her arms over the globe and her head down on her arms and began to cry.

  Now Athen gently pushed her back on the bed so that she lay stretched on Andrew’s army blankets, lifted a pillow, made her raise her knees, put the pillow under her knees and sat beside her. ‘That is how I did my sister when she was sick and having a baby. Is it comfortable?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He laid his thin brown hand on the mound of her stomach. She tensed up and then lay still.

  ‘There now,’ he said. That is good. I can feel your child. I like it.’

  She lay still, looking up at the ceiling, frowning, feeling the little man’s hand lying on her stomach. Her face began to ease out of its yellow tension.

  ‘You are perhaps a woman for whom the man is not so important. That is not a bad thing. So what you must think of, it is what is good for the child. You must bring him up to be a good man, with knowledge of the world, a man who will fight for justice and for peace.’

  ‘He!’

  ‘Is this child a girl then?’

  ‘Who’d be a woman?’

  ‘So you insist on a girl, because you need a companion in all your suffering?’

  She laughed out, and as if ashamed of it, thrust the side of her hand into her mouth and bit it.

  ‘You are not yourself tonight, Maisie.’ He began gently to stroke the mound of her stomach. His own face was extraordinarily gentle, and his eyes were full of a fierce joy. ‘So now ask yourself: Which of these two men will bring up your son or your daughter to be a good person, understanding the world and living to make it better? That is all you must ask yourself.’

  ‘Go on doing that,’ said Maisie. ‘It makes me feel good.’ After a pause she said: ‘If it had been you – you might have married me to do me a good turn, and then we should have loved – we should have had a good time for a while.’

  ‘Loved,’ said Athen. ‘You should not now say to yourself you have not loved Andrew. If you have loved someone even for a short time, then it is a good thing, and you should know it and say it and not pretend to yourself it wasn’t so.’

  ‘Love,’ said Maisie lazily, in her normal easy voice. ‘Love. Sometimes I think it doesn’t exist.’ She lifted her plump and childish hand from the pillow beside her and yawned against it. Athen turned off the big light; the room was now dimly lit. ‘You must try now to be still, and perhaps to sleep, and remember you are a person, you must find out what you want for yourself and not blame other people for your weaknesses.’ She yawned again, let her hand fall back beside her face, smiled at him and let her eyes close, Athen continued to sit by her, stroking the big swollen lumpy mound of her stomach until her breathing changed. Then he quietly went out, switching off the lights.

  Half an hour later Andrew came in, switched on the ceiling light, saw Maisie lying asleep, switched it off, tiptoed clumsily to the bed, and turned on the small lamp. He sat where Athen had sat, beside the sleeping girl. He was full of apprehension. That morning Maisie had told him Mrs Maynard had been and that Binkie was coming. All afternoon, which he had arranged with considerable difficulty to have free from the camp, she had been evasive, nervous, guilty and silent. All evening, at the meeting, and afterwards drinking coffee with Anton and Jack Dobie, he had been half-dreading, half-longing for this moment when he might, as he put it to himself, ‘be with’ Maisie again. It seemed to him that all that afternoon she had been a stranger. Now she opened her eyes and smiled at him, and his heart eased into a comfortable warm beat – he realized it had been pounding with anxiety. Then her face changed, she gave a hasty yawn, and turned over on her side.

  ‘And how’s the little bugger tonight?’ he said in the gruff and humorous voice he always used for this routine query.

  ‘OK,’ she said, not responding, and added politely: ‘How was
the meeting?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  She was staring into the room over the curve of the pillow. He examined her and found with surprise that her swollen body was repulsive to him. He remembered that earlier that day, when she said Binkie was coming, he had had the same feeling: he looked across at her, finding her hideous.

  He had lived with the growth and the change of her body, hardly noticing it, burying his face at night thankfully in her warm full shoulders, greeting the child under her flesh with his hands, never thinking that it was not his own. Now, because Binkie was coming, he kept thinking: This is not my child, and her pregnancy was strange and distasteful. Maisie reached out her hand for his wrist, and laid his hand on her stomach. There was the stiffness of reluctance in his arm, he let his hand lie a moment, and it fell away. Maisie gave him a deep, blue, reproachful look.

  His anxiety exploded against his will into the question: ‘Still worrying about Binkie?’

  ‘Well, it’s natural I should, isn’t it?’ She was looking through her lashes at his big clumsy hand resting beside her body on the blanket. He said with a clumsy attack: ‘Look, Maisie, I’ve got to get this straight, I want to know where I stand with you, it seems to me you turned against me from the moment you knew Binkie was coming.’

  She did not move, lying big and clumsy and swollen, and he felt physical distaste like a sickness. She said breathlessly: ‘So I changed did I? I changed? I said he was coming and you looked at me and I felt like dirt.’

  He was silent, thinking: She surely couldn’t have noticed how I felt then? He said aggressively: ‘The moment you knew he was coming, it started.’

  She said: ‘He is the father of the baby.’

  ‘So much so that I had to marry you to give the little bugger a name. ‘

  She sat up and stared at him. She was thinking: It would have been fair to say that if he had just married me and said good-bye afterwards. But not after we’d loved each other. (She had been going to say, had a good time together, but because of Athen, used the word love.) So now he has no right to say that, she concluded, lying down again, this time turned away from him. ‘No one made you marry me. You offered.’