A Ripple From the Storm

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it.’ ‘No, you shouldn’t.’

  The silence after this became unbearable. He said stiffly: ‘Do you want me to sleep in your room? You needn’t move from here if you’d rather not.’

  ‘If you like,’ she said indifferently. He was about to go next door without another word when he saw her eyes were wet. He gave a contrite exclamation, tugged off his uniform. and got on to the rough hot blanket beside her. ‘You should get into your nighty,’ he said. ‘It’s too hot to be dressed.’

  Now she hastily flung off her clothes, noticing as she did so that he was careful not to look at her. A look of hurt came on to her face, and she slipped quickly under the sheet and lay with her back to him. He lay close behind her, as he had done recently at night, so that her head lay on his shoulder, and his arm, resting on the high curve of her stomach, supported her big loosened breasts. Suddenly he felt at ease.

  ‘Hullo, Maisie,’ he said thickly into her damp hair, and she snuggled back against him. He understood that the soft searching pressure of her buttocks meant she was trying to discover if he was big for her. They had made love easily since the beginning, adjusting themselves without thinking to her altering shape. Tonight he understood that his new physical distaste for her made it impossible for him to make love. He held the upper part of her body close to him, and kissed the side of her throat and said: ‘Maisie, we mustn’t quarrel.’

  She had gone tense. She said: ‘Quarrel? This isn’t a quarrel. You don’t love me any more.’

  ‘But I do, Maisie, I do.’

  She took his hand and directed it in a gentle stroking movement over her belly. He let her direct the massage for a moment, then her hand fell away from his, and he held it: her hand was friendly to him, but her body alien.

  They lay still, filled with dismay. Then she said: ‘I think I’d better sleep by myself tonight, I don’t feel comfortable.’

  This was the first time they had not lain together at night. He got quickly out of the bed without a word, and went into her bedroom next door. The photographs of her husbands were still on the walls. He gave them both an ironical nod of greeting, and thought: I suppose when Binkie comes back she’ll put my photograph up beside theirs. He forced himself to sleep, unwilling to face a night of wakeful misery, but even more afraid that Maisie might come in, for reassurance, lie beside him, and he should again betray his new, instinctive repulsion.

  Immediately above Andrew, through the thin ceiling, in a room identical in shape, lay Martha in a damp petticoat, watching the dry and rainless lightning flash among unbroken masses of cloud. She was smoking heavily, and was so tense with heat, irritation and exhaustion that she could not lie still. She felt guilty because she had so easily found a reason not to go to the group meeting. She felt worse because, having reached the meeting on India with Colin, she almost at once crept out again. She knew everything Jack Dobie was going to say, agreed with it, in fact might have made the same speech herself. And Colin irritated her. Having decided that he needed to ‘specialize’ in something, and chosen India, he had in his conscientious way immersed himself in the subject. He sat in the meeting beside her nodding or shaking his head with phlegmatic attention to Jack, and whispering asides to her if there was a small fact or a detail wrong. She soon apologized and went home, in search of solitude. She was in a fever to be alone. In the flat she found two RAF men from the Progressive Club. Ever since she and Anton had married, the focus of the group had shifted from the du Preez’ house to this flat. She had understood this when people had begun to drop in, and the pamphlets, books and files had begun to accumulate in the living-room. Naturally, since this was central, and the du Preez’ house was not; and since the du Preez were a family with children, and this had the flexibility of the young married couple’s flat. Once Martha had understood that she could always expect to find people asleep on the living-room floor, or even in the bath when she woke in the morning, and that people would drop in for meals, she accepted the fact and liked it. She knew she was pleased not to be alone too much with Anton.

  But she was surprised to find Anton resented it. It seemed a new personality had been born in Anton with the marriage. To begin with he had doggedly, almost furtively, with a look of secret satisfaction, bought furniture for the two rooms which seemed to her ugly and conventional. She would have preferred rooms like Maisie’s bare living-room, a place to camp in, furnished with the help of friends and ingenuity. But Anton, when she had said so, told her in a new voice, also acquired since marriage, that she had bohemian tastes. The two rooms could now have gone on exhibition as a cosy suburban home and Martha hated them. Also, Anton had spent all his small savings on the furniture, and had several times reminded her of it. Martha said nothing, but had made a note that their ideas on money did not coincide. Further, Anton showed he had a talent for domesticity and expected it. She understood that he wanted his life divided carefully into three areas: the time he spent working as a clerk, working conscientiously and without interruption from his other lives; the time he spent at meetings or talking to people in the interests of communism; and the time he spent at home, into which politics or irregularity should not intrude.

  But it appeared that he was himself ashamed of this last trait, for although he would watch Martha talking, cooking, welcoming the people who dropped in, watch her closely and critically, he did no more than grumble that they were turning into an hotel. ‘I should have thought,’ Martha remarked, ‘that if we believe in comradeship and sharing things then we shouldn’t think of feeding people or giving them a place to sleep as being an hotel?’ This query was half genuinely indignant, and half uneasy, because she knew her motives were partly dishonest.

  ‘Yes, yes, but we can’t afford it.’

  At this Martha took a decision. Mr Robinson had been suggesting for some time that she might learn to do the firm’s books. She had refused, because she preferred to devote the time to her other interests. She now told Anton that her salary would be going up by ten pounds a month and that should cover the entertaining they did.

  On that evening she asked the two RAF men to go away, because she had to do some work. They said cheerfully that there was no need for her to worry, they would entertain themselves. She sat on her bed, listening to their loud voices through the thin wall and wishing she might have just this one evening to herself. Yet if she had done her duty she would be at one or other of two meetings, and here she sat, idle. There was plenty of work for her to do here. For instance, there was the work in connection with the campaign against Mrs Van. Ever since ‘the meeting in the Location’ the News had been printing several letters a day which described how tools of Moscow were fermenting revolution among the blacks. Mrs Van’s name was always used in such a way that she must be regarded as a leader of these activities. Further, there had been a spate of anonymous leaflets and pamphlets. There were two in particular, one describing ‘certain communist agitators among the Kaffirs’, a pamphlet full of personal innuendo; the other a factual account of Mrs Van’s work from a certain angle which, since she had been campaigning for many years for better conditions for the Africans, and had made several dozen speeches on the subject, could be made to sound as if she had never done anything else in her life. ‘We want public men and women who work for the benefit of all races,’ this pamphlet said, ‘not people who are interested only in the blacks.’ There was nothing offensive in this pamphlet from the point of view of libel: but since it had been delivered at the same time as the other on all the doorsteps of the town, they had been read together, and Mrs Van’s name must therefore be associated with the venom of the first.

  Martha had been given the task by Mrs Van of going through all her speeches, seeing if she had been correctly quoted, and making sure there was nothing libellous. She had finished checking the speeches. That afternoon she had finished the work in connection with the letters. This had involved an interview with the editor of the News. In all the weeks since t
he meeting in the Location, there had been precisely one letter supporting it, or rather inviting the citizens to keep their heads and a sense of proportion. But other letters had been written, as Martha knew, since she had been given the job of seeing that they should be written. Some time before, a sub-committee of the group had been set up to see that all reactionary letters in the News should be instantly replied to. This had needed so much time that the sub-committee (Martha and Marjorie) had been, so to speak, standing at ease. With the new crisis it hastily sprang to attention and some thirty people who regarded themselves as liberal agreed to write letters to the editor pointing out that the meeting in the Location had other aspects besides the subversive. But not one had been printed. Martha had therefore demanded an interview with Mr Haggerty which had taken place that afternoon.

  Mr Haggerty was a South African born and bred, and met Martha in the first few sentences with the information that he had no time for Kaffir-lovers. Almost at once it became an argument on principles.

  In the first place, Martha demanded, was it democratic that there should be only one newspaper in the Colony, and that an offshoot of a chain of newspapers operating in the Union and connected with the Chamber of Mines? No, said Mr Haggerty, it was not, but there was nothing to stop another newspaper being started.

  Nothing but a lack of capital, said Martha.

  That was not his fault, said Mr Haggarty.

  Was it democratic, inquired Martha, that since there was only one newspaper, which should therefore be more than usually aware of its responsibilities, it should print only one letter supporting the meeting in the Location to several dozen against?

  Perfectly, said Mr Haggerty. According to his reckoning there might perhaps be fifty people in the Colony who might agree with such goings-on, and that fifty were more than represented by the single letter.

  Fifty white people, said Martha.

  That’s right, Mr Haggerty said, and then, seeing his impasse, explained that he regarded the News as a mouthpiece of black opinion as well as of white, but that he was convinced that the ‘mass of the blacks’ only wanted to be left alone. At this Martha laughed, and Mr Haggerty tapped his desk in irritation.

  She asked to be told how he, as an editor, would define the basic policy of his newspaper.

  He replied that it was the policy of the paper to support the existing government.

  And, inquired Martha, was that democratic?

  Of course, said Mr Haggerty: the Government was elected by the people and therefore it was democratic to support it.

  By the white people, said Martha, and proceeded to recite paragraphs from the American Declaration of Independence, quotations from Tom Paine, Milton, Jefferson, Shelley and Byron. To which Mr Haggerty, listening with suspicion, replied that he was not interested in communist propaganda. To which Martha, delighted, made suitable reply.

  To which Mr Haggerty said that if Jefferson, Paine or Milton had lived in a colony like this, they would have had more sense than to talk about liberty.

  To which Martha said he had no historical feeling at all.

  Liberty, said Mr Haggerty, having the last word, should be the property of the washed and the educated, and what the Kaffirs needed was discipline and hygiene.

  The interview then ended, with ill-feeling on both sides.

  Martha had tried to see Mrs Van that afternoon, but she was not in her office.

  Now she thought: I could go and see her at home. But to visit Mrs Van in her office was one thing, to visit her at home another. For ever since that day she got married there had been hostility between herself and Mrs Van. She did not understand why, since she knew she admired and liked the older woman.

  The roses had stood in the bedroom long after they should have been thrown away. Martha had watched the petals soften, crumple and fade, thinking: If I don’t want to throw them away, then I must have been touched that night. Yet she gave the roses to someone else, not to me, and so therefore it is all dishonest.

  Yet the roses remained, and Martha watched in herself the growth of an extraordinarily unpleasant and upsetting emotion, a self-mockery, a self-parody, as if she both allowed herself an emotion she did not approve of, allowed it and enjoyed it, but at the same time cancelled it out by the mockery. ‘How do I know what I feel and what I don’t? I’ve only to hear a boy scouts’ brass band on Sunday afternoon and tears come into my eyes. Anton has only to call me “little one” and a lump comes into my throat. Mrs Van gives me roses and I want to cry. It’s all dishonest. It’s as if somewhere inside me there was a big sack of greasy tears and if a pin were stuck into me they’d spill out

  Martha, having decided she would not go and see Mrs Van, lay down on her bed, tossed there for half an hour, and then found herself up and collecting the files and papers to take to Mrs Van.

  She went quietly through the front room. Now there were five people in it. ? young pilot who had just finished his course was getting himself drunk in a corner on Cape brandy. The two original RAF men had been joined by their girls, and they were all lying around on the floor, discussing what they would do after the war. They were agreeing in the half-wistful, half-jocular tone which was the note of the period (the jocularity Martha recognized as a cousin to her self-parody) that they would go to the Soviet Union, present themselves to Stalin, and demand some difficult and dangerous work. ‘After all,’ one of the girls was saying as Martha went past, ‘they can’t have achieved a perfect socialism yet. I’d like to help develop Siberia, something like that.’

  They greeted Martha as if she were a fellow-guest, and continued with their day-dreaming while Martha took her bicycle and went up to Mrs Van’s house in the avenues.

  When Mrs Van seated herself opposite Martha, composed and straight-backed as always, she said she was pleased to see her and in a way which suggested she should have seen her before. Martha felt hurt, and gave an account of her stewardship – the interview with the editor, details of the interview with a lawyer about possible libel, the extracts from the speeches. Mrs Van listened, extracting the core of the situation at once, which was that she had no legal redress, and that her political reputation was probably permanently damaged. She dismissed this with a tranquil nod, and went on to say: ‘And now I have to discuss the question of Saturday’s committee. I’m not at all satisfied with the attitude of you people. There’s this major crisis developing, and I wonder if you realize it’

  ‘But Mrs Van, we spend hours of our time discussing what is the right thing to do.’

  Mrs Van said coldly: ‘I dare say you do, but I do not recognize the rights of the communists to decide policy separately.’

  Martha instinctively got up, as if to leave. She was now angry as well as hurt. Why then, she wanted to ask, did you arrange things so that we should be on the committee? You made use of us, and now you say ‘the communists’ in that tone of voice. She noted that Mrs Van’s large working hands were engaged in a movement she knew: agitatedly smoothing down the stuff of her dress over her thighs. She knew, from her mother, that this meant distress. Mrs Van had not meant lo say that; she was expressing some sort of private irritation, So she sat down again and waited.

  Mrs Van, controlling herself, said in a different voice, which was genial and quizzical: ‘I should be glad to know what line you’ve agreed on?’

  ‘Yours,’ said Martha. ‘But the fact is, we’re bothered by a question of principle. There’s something fundamentally undemocratic about an African Branch and …’

  But she could not finish. Again Mrs Van exploded out of her private irritation: ‘It really is extraordinary how you communists always tend to side with the right wing …’ But she again stopped herself, sighed and said patiently: ‘I’m sorry, but I’m worried about a number of things. Of course it’s undemocratic. I’m always surprised how often in this country progressives have to fight on bad moral grounds. You might remember’, she added smiling, ‘that white trade unionism has kept the Africans of South Africa and this
country out of skilled work for generations on the sound moral argument that it is unfair for black workers to be paid less than white workers … well?’

  ‘Well, we’ve decided to support you, but all the same, there’s something wrong about the whole thing.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that we are being so sensible,’ said Mrs Van, returning without apology to an extreme, irritated dryness.

  Martha again got up. This time she sat down because of Mrs Van’s peremptory nod towards a chair. Martha sat and listened for some minutes while Mrs Van gave her views on the ‘line’ she expected the communist faction to adopt. Martha found it humorous that she was expected to be a messenger from Mrs Van to the group, but she knew that Mrs Van did not find it so. She listened, assured Mrs Van they would all be there on Saturday, assured her of their support, rose to go, and saw that Mrs Van was disappointed.

  There was a moment of hesitation. Mrs Van offered her a drink. Martha drank and listened while Mrs Van talked about marriage, trying to discover what lesson was being offered to her. At last she saw that Mrs Van was talking to herself. It upset her, that the composure of this woman could be destroyed. It had been. Her voice was harsh and it trembled. Marriage, she kept repeating, was a question of compromise. Marriage was a matter of tolerance. Yet there were times when one wondered if one should compromise on a principle … She went on to talk of the law, of court cases, of her husband’s attitude towards the law.

  She was disturbed by something her husband had done? But why now? And why was she talking of it to Martha?

  Martha only knew that the solidity of this older woman was necessary to her and that to see her as she was now was deeply painful. And surely it would be painful to her, afterwards, remembering the scene? Mrs Van did not look at Martha at all. She talked on in a harsh wondering voice. Her small blue eyes moved from one article of furniture to another and her hands plucked at her dress until at last the servant came in with the announcement that Baas wanted to see the Missus at once, at which Mrs Van sighed, sat still a moment, then rose and thanked Martha for coming in her usual kindly and formal way.