Suddenly the Judge raised his voice to inquire how long Mr Dobie intended to speak. ‘Until I’ve made my case,’ said Jack.
‘Ah,’ said the Judge and allowed his cheek to return to rest against his palm.
A moment later Jack brought in the abolishment of illiteracy in the Soviet Union; whereupon the Judge raised himself to remark in an absent, almost dreamy tone, that he did not see what the Soviet Union had to do with India.
Jack, ready for this, raised his voice to claim that in his view it was perfectly relevant to compare the thirty years of Soviet rule over backward peoples with the British rule in India.
‘I’m afraid,’ drawled the Judge, ‘that I cannot agree.’
At this the whole tone of the case changed. The Left, delighted, sat up and took notice. The Defence, lawyers and laymen, nodded vigorous agreement with the Judge.
‘I must insist,’ said Jack. ‘I want to make the point that it is possible for backwardness to be abolished in a country if there is a will to abolish it.’
The Judge, without removing his interested gaze from the far end of the room, interrupted with: ‘My dear sir, I must absolutely forbid you to make Soviet propaganda in this Court.’ He added: ‘Or for that matter any sort of propaganda.’
‘Are you suggesting that I have been making propaganda?’ demanded Jack. His eyes encountered Mrs Van’s. They exchanged what might have been described as suppressed winks. Jack took it for granted he would lose the case, and regarded this as an opportunity to make propaganda for the cause. He therefore simultaneously felt indignation because he was stopped from making propaganda, amusement that he was able to make it here, and contempt for the arguments of the Defence – a sort of complicated relish, delight, and loathing of the whole proceeding, all of which was expressed, against his will, in his face and which of course annoyed his trade union critics as much as it was annoying the Defence. An irritable and gloomy impatience was being infused into the atmosphere: it was after twelve, Jack had been speaking for half an hour; at least half of the spectators wanted to leave for the Congress.
‘In that case,’ said Jack, ‘I shall rest my case.’ He did so, crossing one leg over the other, and pointing his sharp chin Judgewards. He had in any case finished his speech, but it was generally appreciated that he had chosen a good moment to sit down, giving an impression of being suppressed and silenced.
Now Mr Van began cross-examining the widow of the District Officer. Mottled with anger and with heat, she said that she had lived for forty years in India and that the relations between Indians and British were perfect, and that speaking for herself she had always kept her servants for years. ‘My Ayah was my closest friend,’ she exclaimed belligerently, ‘and my husband always used to say …’ The Judge gave something like a yawn and Mr Van hastened to interrupt. Martha imagined for a moment that perhaps Mr Van had undertaken to defend this case only to use his skill to make the Defence seem ridiculous, but she saw from Mrs Van’s face, which was severe and sorrowful, that she was wrong.
The good widow answered half a dozen questions from Mr Van from which it emerged that she always wrote to her Ayah at Christmas, that she had paid her cook ‘very fair wages for those days’ and that she had paid to send his eldest son to school ‘because they are quite improvident, and if we hadn’t educated them they would all be completely illiterate’. Also, in her opinion the climate of India was responsible for its poverty, because its inhabitants lacked energy, and the heat during the monsoon was impossible to imagine ‘and the poor things couldn’t get to the hills the way we did’.
She was thanked courteously by Mr Van who, it seemed, was pleased with her. He then called the businessman, who offered smiles of fellow-feeling across the Court to Jack, as if to say: Let the best man win.
In his opinion the conditions of poverty in India ‘which no one in their senses would deny’ were irrelevant, because true culture did not depend upon money, and as an authority upon the Upanishads – ‘purely on an amateur level of course’ he could say that India was probably the most cultured and spiritual nation in the world. (At this point the widow and the Major nearly died with indignation.) As a lover of India for nearly fifty years – he was happy to say he had been born in it, he could only say in reply to Counsel that while he had every sympathy with Mr Dobie’s point of view, it took no account of the most important question of all: Was it or was it not harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle? (Here he again smiled tolerantly at Jack as if to say: I have no real desire to make you appear like a gross materialist, but I am afraid Truth leaves me no alternative.)
Mr Van dismissed his second witness with the same politeness and called his third, the Major, on whom he obviously set great store.
The Major exploded into the witness-box like a bursting shell, and had to be called to order by the Judge at the end of the first sentence.
‘I must remind the witness that this is a court of law,’ he remarked, without taking his gaze off the far wall, or removing his tired cheek from his hand.
‘Well, that damned fellow has been making speeches for an hour,’ said the Major.
‘I dare say,’ said the Judge. ‘I dare say. But I do so hope that you aren’t going to.’
Mr Van leaned over to whisper to his witness, who said loudly: ‘Oh very well, damn it, but I’m going to have my say.’
He said that as everyone knew who ‘understood anything whatsoever about India’ the cause of poverty in that continent ‘was obvious to the meanest intelligence’. It was that the women spent all their money on jewellery. If they had the sense to invest it, instead of hanging it in their noses or wrapping it around their arms or their necks, they could accumulate capital and …
Here Jack remarked, grinning, that the annual average income was a few shillings a year.
The trade unionists had started to smile. A friendly current of feeling had set in between Jack and them, on account of this natural enemy of them both: the fat, red-faced, vowel-twisting damn-you-all major.
Martha and Mrs Van were both shaking with laughter.
The Judge smiled, very gravely, at the wall.
Mr Van, as correct as a Court Order, continued to cross-examine the Major: ‘You would say that the causes of poverty in India are …’
At this interesting point, Martha noticed the agitated face of her servant in a side door left open to get a draught through the hot and stuffy Court. She left Mrs Van with an apology saying she would be back at once. The servant had a message from Anton saying she must come home.
‘But I told the Baas I was going down to the Congress.’
‘But the Baas said, you must come now.’
‘Very well, then, I’ll come.’
She lingered a moment at the door, listening. The Major was making a speech across the Court to Jack, about some occasion when his life had been saved by a Sikh, which proved that the Indians, far from hating the British, loved them. ‘Greater love has no man!’ he exclaimed angrily, ‘than to lay down his life for his friend.’
It seemed as if the case was drawing to an end. Groups of trade unionists were leaving. A couple went past Martha and she heard one of them say: ‘Well, I had a Zulu woman as a nurse when I was a kid and …’ They went off down the panelled corridors. It had not occurred to Martha that anyone could find the arguments of Mr Van’s defence anything but absurd, but it seemed he had known what he was doing.
She ran down the street towards the flat, her eyes on an aircraft that roared straight down over Main Street. She was imagining herself to be in a city in Europe, the plane an enemy plane, machine-gunning the street. This was because one of the pilots who came to the meetings – the boy who had got drunk that night a month before, had said that he hated this little town and the country so much that every time he flew over it he imagined he was ‘shooting the bloody place and the bloody white herrenvolk up’. Her ears, after the silence of the Court, which had held only the sound of arg
uing voices, were irritably resisting the roar of the aeroplane. She reached her flat almost in tears because of the noise, found it empty, and banged shut the windows of the small bedroom which was stuffy enough with them open. But two more planes turning in to land overhead made the air tremble, and she sat on the edge of her bed with her hands clenched across her ears. She longed to sleep. For the month before the Congress she had been woken every morning by the roar and grind of the aircraft overhead. Normally a person who slept like the dead, it occurred to her that for her sleep to be so light she must be very tired. She was being carried on the wave of a powerful driving exhaustion, which had reached a pitch where, before going to sleep, she was always filled with a terror that if she allowed herself to sleep too deeply she might not wake up for days; as if a deep sleep were an abyss into which she might fall and vanish. All that month she woke continually at night to see the winking landing lights, red and green, of the aircraft, like silver moths in the moonlight, and she felt the drum of the engines through her entire body in a pulse of irritation or of anger.
All that month Anton had not spoken a single word to her. For the first week she had appealed to him. ‘We can’t conceivably be quarrelling because I made a bad joke about Stalin!’ But he moved about the flat, ate, slept, as if she did not exist.
After that she also became silent, not from policy but from bewilderment, and flung herself into even more concentrated activity. But soon she saw that something very frightening was happening. The cold set distance of his body changed; she saw there was a dogged appeal in a glance or a movement of his shoulders. She understood that what she had to do was to put her arms around him and apologize. But she was fighting against the final collapse of her conception of him. She knew that the moment she put her arms about him, to coax him out of his silence, that creature in herself she despised would be born again: she would be capricious, charming, filial: to this compliant little girl Anton would be kind – and patronizing, as she repeated to herself over and over again, in a fierce resentment. But this would be a mask for his being dependent on her; she would not be his child, but he hers. She found herself saying: Why, he’s not a man at all – in anything!
Meanwhile she was dreaming persistently of that man who must surely be somewhere close and who would allow her to be herself.
It was Maisie who used the phrase which broke Martha’s determination.
Martha was spending all the free time she had with Maisie, who was alone. Maisie had refused to see Binkie again: at the end of two days’ fruitless efforts to see her he had cut short his leave and gone back to Italy. Andrew had been posted a week later, because of the intervention of Mrs Maynard who had told Mrs Van she had considered it her duty to ‘protect that stupid gal from herself. During that week Maisie and Andrew had been together, trying to reach each other in a way which Martha found painful. They were trying to regain the simple and tender gaiety of the time before Binkie came on leave. They made the same jokes and said the same things but across barriers of hurt and pride. The night before Andrew left they quarrelled. Martha heard the quarrel through the thin floor, and, locked in the frozen silence with Anton, envied them for the ability to quarrel. But next day Andrew was gone; and they had agreed to start divorce proceedings.
Maisie was bitter, puzzled, hurt. She said: ‘They neither of them cared about me, not really. They talked about each other more than me.’ She was standing in the middle of her small room, a body of massive swollen flesh, from which her two mild and maidenly eyes looked forth, untouched. She passed her hands over her great body again and again, and said: ‘What I can’t understand, Matty, is this – suddenly it wasn’t me any more that either of them was fond of. But I feel just the same.’ This was the nearest Martha was ever to get to what had so hurt Maisie: ‘Do you know, Matty, I suddenly felt that Andrew hated me?’
‘But, Maisie, how could he hate you? It made us all happy to see you two together. He loved you.’
Maisie repeated obstinately, her eyes clouding with remembered pain: ‘No, suddenly he didn’t like me. You can always tell, Matty, even if they pretend. I can’t stand pretence. I felt insulted, I was just the same all the time, but suddenly he wasn’t.’
She was in the last month of her pregnancy, suffering with the heat and with the pride of her loneliness. She saw no one but Martha. Athen, of whom she spoke often, had been sent to another camp three hundred miles away for some part of his training. The other members of the group were hostile to her; Martha defended her, even more heatedly because she felt the same hostility. But she knew why: she was mourning as if a happiness of her own had collapsed.
When Maisie’s had her baby, and she’s in two parts, she’ll need a man again – then she’ll be different. But who? I believe she loves Athen, but that’s no good …
For some reason Martha preferred to think of Maisie as she was now, fiercely self-sufficient, and self-absorbed. But not as self-absorbed as Martha thought, for one day she remarked, as if this were part of something they had discussed, as if they were continuing a thought they shared: ‘And it must be hard for Anton, all this. I always thought that if he cracked up, he’d take it badly.’
Offered the information that Anton was cracking up, Martha at first rejected it. She examined the pale closed face of this man she had inexplicably married, and thought him as self-sufficient as a fortress: ‘a petty-bourgeois interested only in his furniture’. But her heart had begun to ache for him. The night before the Saturday of the Congress she had slipped into bed beside him, and he murmured: ‘My little one, so you’re sorry for being so silly?’
It was going to be a marriage after all. She accepted the fact with a mixture of dismay and of protective tenderness. It could not last longer than the war – on that point she was determined, but while it lasted she would be open to feeling.
Above all it was going to be a fight because she had understood it would please him if she became less of a communist. That morning he had said reproachfully: ‘So you’re going to the Congress and leaving me behind?’ She had not expected it; had never imagined it possible that this formidable revolutionary from Europe possessed by memories of a wife who had above all been a political being, could wish her to fold her hands and become passive. She understood that he did not know this himself, for when she remonstrated that she had been elected a delegate and must go, he had agreed that of course she must, but in a tone which said clearly that he would have agreed as easily if she had said she would allow her alternate delegate to go instead.
Now the message from Anton had made her fearful that he was going to prevent her from leaving with the others for the Congress.
He was not in the flat. The servant had gone for his midday meal. Soon it would be one o’clock and she ought to be at the High Court. She continued to sit on the edge of the bed, waiting for him, fighting against the need to sleep. At last she caught sight of a piece of paper pinned to the pillow: My little one, Maisie is not well. I thought she would like to see you before you left.
At first Martha felt gratitude that Anton had at last come to like Maisie; then she saw that this was a means to stop her going. This second fact she repressed – it made her too angry.
She ran downstairs to Maisie’s flat, and saw a group of three people in the entrance, black against the glare of the street. They were Mrs Van, Piet and Jack. Martha ran down to where she could see their faces. They were angry but they had been laughing together on the pavement.
‘You’ve lost the case,’ Martha exclaimed.
‘£150 costs. The law’s an expensive ass,’ Jack commented. In spite of his annoyance he could not prevent his eyes lighting up at the memory of the droning farcical scene in the Court.
Mrs Van said: ‘It seems that the judge found the Major’s argument about the Indian women wasting the national income on jewellery unanswerable.’ She choked with laughter, leaning against the wall of the entrance. Her fat body shook all over, and Piet and Jack, on either side of her, took her by t
he arms, smiling at each other and at her, with the delicate amused respect that her friends always gave Mrs Van at these moments when the girl imprisoned in the great body laughed out in irrepressible enjoyment.
‘It’s all very well,’ said Mrs Van reprovingly to herself. ‘But it’s a serious matter.’ Being serious she said to Martha: ‘Are you ready? We must hurry.’
The door of Maisie’s flat opened and Maisie came out, her face glistening with sweat. ‘Oh, Matty,’ she said, clasping Martha’s arm, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. Anton said you would.’
‘Your baby’s started?’ said Martha.
She knew she was going to miss the Congress. She looked towards Mrs Van as if she could find a way out of this conflict of loyalties. But Mrs Van was a mother and a grandmother first.
‘Of course Matty’s staying with you. We’ll take her alternate.’
‘I’ve sent for the nurse,’ said Maisie, and burst into tears.
Big Piet instinctively took command, helping Maisie back into her flat, saying: ‘Now take it easy, settle yourself down, crying’s not going to get the little brat into the light of day.’ He held Maisie around her shoulders, receiving floods of tears on his arm; he was showing an awkward, warm, tender gallantry that made them all like him.
Also, Martha was feeling that for the first time since her marriage Mrs Van was liking her. Why? She thought: She’s been feeling hostile to me; it’s the same sort of hostility I’ve been feeling for Maisie – well, then, does that mean I let her down in some way: she wanted my getting married to mean something, and it didn’t. Martha put this thought away for later examination: it meant there was something in Mrs Van’s life she did not understand.
For a few minutes the four of them stood about, fussing over Maisie until she wiped her eyes and said: ‘I’m sorry to be such a fool, I was alone and I got scared.’
Mrs Van said to Martha: ‘Your alternate’s Marjorie, isn’t it? Well, she’s due to have her baby too. This is all nonsense: I’ll appoint an alternate myself, it’s quite regular!’