Iris had said that ‘they’ had pulled this great beam out of the river at some point: she remembered that they had. It had come in useful for a decade, having been used as a base for a stair into an area before the bomb had destroyed house, area and stair, though not the timber itself. So it was used to keep the gate shut against children. That was what it was meant to do, at least; though looking through the grille, it could be seen that the other side of the bomb site, a parallel street, had no fence at all, was open; had, merely, a sign with a skull and crossbones.
In the hulk of timber was a cleft, more like a crack in rock than a split in wood. Moss grew in it. Salt lay seamed in finer cracks, salt from the salty, tide-washed river. Iris said the timber was probably part of a ship once. She said a piece of wood that size must have been part of an old ship when ships were wood not metal: for what else could they have used a beam so enormous? Half a dozen men had been needed to lay it propped where it was now-she had watched them doing it.
Iris, joe’s mother, knew about this timber, about the houses which had been bombed, about the people who had lived in the houses, and the people who now lived in the houses of the part of the street which stood intact: some of them were from this site of rubble and dust and mud. She knew everything about this area, half a dozen streets for about half a mile or a mile of their length; and she knew it all in such detail that when with her, Martha walked in a double vision, as if she were two people: herself and Iris, one eye stating, denying, warding off the total hideousness of the whole area, the other, with Iris, knowing it in love. With Iris, one moved here, in state of love, if love is the delicate but total acknowledgement of what is. Passing a patch of bared wall where the bricks showed a crumbling smear of mushroom colour, Iris was able to say: Mrs. Black painted this wall in 1938, it was ever such a nice pink. Or: looking up at a lit window, the curtains drawn across under the black smear of the blackout material which someone had not got around to taking down: Molly Smith bought those curtains down at the market the first year of the war, before things got so scarce. Or, walking around a block in the pavement, she muttered that the workmen never seemed to be able to get that piece in square, she always stubbed her foot against it. Iris, Joe’s mother, had lived in this street since she was born. Put her brain, together with the other million brains, women’s brains, that recorded in such tiny loving anxious detail the histories of windowsills, skins of paint, replaced curtains and salvaged baulks of timber, there would be a recording instrument, a sort of six-dimensional map which included the histories and lives and loves of people, London-a section map in depth. This is where London exists, in the minds of people who have lived in such and such a street since they were born, and passing a baulk of timber remember, smiling, how it came rolling up out of the Thames on that Thursday afternoon it was raining, to lie on a pavement until it became the spine of a stairway-and then the bomb fell.
Martha walked on to the river, still invisible, though she saw the ponderous buildings across it which were The City. She had to walk across the river, walk into a decision; not loiter and dally until she found herself back at the café with a joke that was the currency of false pleading: she had caught herself thinking, I’ll go back to the café and take off this coat before I … the coat was too hot. Mrs. Van had had it during the war, that is, when skirts were knee-high and shoulders thick. Pulled tight around Martha it gave her the tight waist of that year’s fashion and came half-way down her calves-the fashion. But the folds which had once snugged Mrs. Van’s large bosom pouted over Martha’s, and the sleeves came to her knuckles. She must buy a new coat. But she had no money. There were five pounds left. Which was why decisions were imminent and responsibility inevitable. She must make that telephone call today: she was to telephone Marjorie’s sister Phoebe.
A telephone box stood ahead. It had been, would be again, a military scarlet: now it was a pinky-orange with a bloom of damp on the paint. But it was a colour-Martha went into it. She opened the coat, propped the door of the telephone box with her foot and breathed the cool wet air in relief. Marjorie’s sister’s number was in her bag. She did not look for it. Instead she told herself that while Marjorie’s sister and what she stood for could wait, Joe’s mother and Jimmy could not. If she did not do something now, in four or five days’ time of this enjoyable lazy drifting on her inclination through London, saying every hour: I should ring the café, she would do no such thing, but simply turn up, and at the last moment and when she had to, for her suitcase. Which would really be letting them down. Though of course, ringing up now, half an hour after leaving when she could have said what she had to say, was letting them down. It seemed that letting them down was inevitable. Why? Had she made promises, offered what she had not given? She was not ‘Matty’! Could they have been so kind to Martha, had she not offered them ‘Matty’? It was too late now to know. She dialled the café and Jimmy answered. People had come in for tea and margarined buns since she had left: slack time was over, she could hear voices and activity. ‘This is Martha, Jimmy.’ ‘Oh, is that you, love? ’ ‘Yes.’ Now, you will not make a joke of it. She wrestled with the need to exclaim, laughing, that she had been just taken with a whim, a folly, an urge, mad Matty, oh dear, what a fool she was … ‘Jimmy, I’ve decided to leave.’ A silence. ‘Well, if it’s like that, love.’ ‘I’m going to take a job next week.’
Through these two and their friends she had been offered three jobs, not to mention Iris’s cousin, Stanley, as a possible husband. He said nothing. ‘I’ll come and pick my case up soon.’ ‘Half a tick then, I’ll call Iris.’ A clatter and a long pause. The voices went on. It was jolly in the café; people coming in knew each other, knew Iris and Jimmy. They had shared, many of them, their childhoods, their lives; they had shared, most of them, the war. And they had opened their hearts to her. Iris now said: ‘Is that you, love? ’ ‘Iris, if you want to let your room, go ahead.’ Now that room was not easy to let, being a tiny box over the café, always noisy, and smelling always of frying-fat, the steamy tea, the fish: Iris knew Martha knew letting that room was not the point. ‘Are you all right, love? ’ she asked, anxious. ‘Look, Iris …’ No, no, she would not play for false advantage. ‘I’ll come and get my suitcase sometime soon.’ ‘As you like, then. Well if you’re late coming in tonight, give us a shout.’ ‘I’ll pick it up in a couple of days, Iris.’ And now the moment of real hurt, betrayal, the end. Martha was proposing to wander off ‘with nothing but what she stood up in’ to take her chances for the night, and possibly other nights. And she had said it without remembering even to soften it. Martha could do that. Iris could not. No law said Iris could not: ‘Matty’ had made a joke of travelling with her life in a suitcase: two changes of underwear, two dresses and a couple of skirts and sweaters and some papers. Even ‘Matty’ had been careful of saying too much of how she had washed around London on this tide or that. Sometimes Iris said: ‘I must go up the West End one of these days and have a look around now the war is done.’ She had not been ‘to the West End’, two miles away and half an hour’s bus ride, since V.E. Day. She, limpet on her rock, had known that Martha had drifted and eddied around this city which she would never visit, never know, but it had not been forced on her, that knowledge, as Martha had done by saying so finally: I’ll pick up my case sometime soon. And now off Martha went, from them, Iris and Jimmy, as casually as she had come, by chance flopping down in the café for a cup of tea. her legs having collapsed from hours of walking. Now, Martha, standing in the telephone box, a third of a mile from Iris, feeling the wires buzz with uncomprehending hurt, fought her last and final battle, swore she would not make up some funny story about free booting around London, she would not buy forgiveness. ‘You’ll come for your case then? ’ ‘Yes, I’m not sure when, though.’ Silence. ‘Iris, I’m sorry, ’ said Martha, sudden, sincere and desperate. ‘That’s all right, love, ’ said Iris, cool.
What would be the words used to sentence her? She did not know, and it did not matter: what
people actually said in that café was the least of what they were able to convey. But she had done it, she had not clowned or apologized in the wrong way. She had done it, if she had done it badly. And Iris would be slowly replacing the receiver, pushing the telephone back into its niche, and saying to whoever was there that afternoon, in one of her repertoire of tones which made her sparse vocabulary so rich an instrument: ‘That was our young lady. She’s off.’ ‘She’s off, is she? ’ And that would be that.
Well, that was one door shut behind her; which proved that she would find the strength of mind to shut the others. Martha retied the coat, while tears ran down her face, cool on hot. She went on, crying, to the river. A ginger-moustached cloth-capped man passed, with a sideways furtive look that became knowing, diagnosing exploitable weakness. She frowned at him, and wiped the tears off-he went on his way. A moment later a young head came out of yet another hole in the ground where repairs were being made to subterranean London and a young voice said: ‘Cheer up, love.’
‘I don’t see why I should, ’ said Martha, and he leaped up out of his hole. Martha smiled, friendly. He was tall and gangly, raw in bone and finish. Using a yardstick discovered since she had come to England, she mentally fitted him into the uniform of an officer of the RAF. Impossible. Impossible even if he hadn’t spoken and revealed his status in his voice? Impossible. She fitted him into the uniform of an aircraftman-yes.
Ever since she had come, she had used memories of the two nations which had descended on Zambesia at the beginning of the war to fit men into their appropriate class. She had not been wrong often. What was it? Not only bad feeding-this one had deprivation bred into him; it was something in the way of standing, the gestures, the eyes. And as for him. if she hadn’t spoken and shown she was from abroad and therefore outside his system of tabus, he would not have climbed up out of his hole. He had rather raffish blue eyes; and a come-and-get-me-smile evolved for such occasions. But all that was put on, he was a gentle and serious soul. ‘Come and have a cuppa? ’ he suggested, chancing it. Nearly Martha said: ‘Yes, I’d like to, ’ but-couldn’t, having decided on the end to such enjoyable chances. ‘I’d like to but I can’t, ’ she said, straight. He looked carefully into her face, placing her according to some rules of his own. Liking each other they stood, about to part for ever. Then he said, ‘Right then, another time, ’ and he nipped back into the earth.
‘Ta ta, ’ he said, picking up his shovel.
‘Bye, ’ said Martha, walking on.
Now, in front of her, the river. For Martha, the river was still the point of reference in the chaos of London. Lost several times a day, she made for the river.
A few days after her arrival in London she had been wandering among the wharfs and the docks, three, four miles lower down the South Bank, in a world of black greasy hulls, dark landing stages, dark warehouses, grey dirty water, gulls, and the smell of driven salt, when she had come on a landing stage where a mushroom shape of rusting iron held thick coils of rope which tethered a flat barge that had a lorry on it. On this she sat, until an official came from a shed and said she should not be there. She was about to leave when to her came Stella, a gipsy of a woman in a striped grey apron, with greying black hair falling in wisps over a sallow face which was all shrewd black eyes. This woman had been watching her through the windows of her house twenty yards away. Martha, in green linen, sandals and sunburn, had tickled the imagination of this watchdog of her clan, and she asked her to tea; and, nosing out inside a few minutes that Martha was ready to stay anywhere she was welcome, let her a room over her parlour.
Stella was the wife, mother and daughter of dockers: and in her kitchen Martha drank tea, ate chips and bacon and fried bread several times a day and listened to the talk of a race every moment of whose lives had to do with the landing and unloading of ships. They talked about the war and about the government-and about the war. They were fiercely and bitterly working-class, class conscious, and trade union. Labour Party? That remained to be seen, they did not love government and almost five years of a Labour Government had done nothing to win the trust of these people who trusted nothing. In that kitchen Martha suppressed any knowledge she might ever have had about politics; for she knew how amateur it would sound among these warriors for whom politics, in its defensive and bread-and-butter aspect, was breath. Besides, they, rather Stella, were not interested in Martha’s interest in England. Stella took Martha to her bosom because of an unfed longing for travel and experience which was titillated every moment by the river, by the ships that swung past her windows, by the talk of foreign countries. She said herself that her blood must run from some visiting sailor from a Southern place, Spanish she thought, Portuguese? -so strong a fancy did she have for those parts. And she read: all her life she had nosed out books, comics, magazines which might have a story or an article about the sea. Her sons and her husband teased her, there’d be no room for them soon, they said; she had old trunks crammed with sea-treasure. If there was a film about the sea, she went, might see the same film through a dozen times if it had ships or sails or mutinies or pirates; and when there was someone to go with her, visited the naval museum at Greenwich where she knew all the sailing ships, their histories and the men who had captained them. Well… so Stella wanted Martha to talk about foreignness; and Martha, feeling that nothing in her experience could match up to such an appetite for the marvellous, made a discovery: that it was enough to say, the sun shines so, the moon does thus, people get up at such an hour, eat so and so, believe such and such-and it was enough. Because it was different. Martha’s so ordinary experience was magicked by Stella’s hunger into wonders, and when her money had run so low she said she must get a job, Stella got for her a job in a pub, for she could not bear to lose her. The pub was Stella’s brother’s wife’s pub and it was a couple of hundred yards inland. So they talked of territory not immediately on the Thames’s banks. For a couple of weeks then, Martha had lived inside the area which was policed invisibly by the spirit of Stella, and under her protection. For instance, walking to work in the bar one evening, a group of men coming from loading a ship started the usual whistles and catcalls and Stella emerged from some kitchen where she was visiting, put her hands on her hips, and shouted across the street that this was Martha, her friend, and if they knew what was good for them … and a man who felt that Martha might make a suitable wife, approached Stella, as if Stella were Martha’s mother, to ask if she would approve the match.
It was not until Martha left Stella, left the water’s edge, and had got to know the café people, that she was able to compare and ask questions. For instance, why had ‘Matty’ never once come to life with Stella and her clan? Admittedly another imposed personality had, the hip-swinging sexually gallant girl-or rather, had until Stella rescued her from the necessity of it. And again, why had she not felt bad about leaving Stella, though Stella had not wanted her to leave? She had not let her down, as she was letting the café people down. And then there was Stella herself, the matriarchal boss of her knot of streets, among the body-proud, work-proud men who earned their wages by physical strength and who judged everyone by strength and their capacity for work-was Stella the only Boadicea among the masculine communities of the river’s edges? And then, there was this business of ‘the working classes’, of ‘socialism’, which, before she had crossed the river had not been what interested Martha.
The newspapers never stopped, not for a moment, informing the nation and the world that Britain, in the grip of red-handed socialists, was being ruined, was being turned into a place of serfs without individuality or initiative and rotted by ease-in the tone of some pamphleteer at work while heads rolled under the guillotine. So irrelevant were these newspapers to anything she found she could not believe that anyone read them seriously, nor that anyone could be paid enough to write them. For what she had found on the other side of the river, let alone in the streets around the café and around the docks, was something not far off conditions described in
books about the thirties. What had changed, that the public opinion men (who presumably believed what they wrote) could so write? Were Stella and her people poor? Very. They were better off, they said; but thêir demands were small and had not grown larger. Were Iris and Jimmy poor, though they owned their café on mortgage and ate well? Very: they expected so little. These were all people who had no right to expect much. Had the editors and journalists never met Iris and Jimmy and Stella, did they know nothing of what they could find out by getting on to a bus, crossing the river, and living for a week or so with Stella or with Iris? It seemed not. It was not credible-but no. But to read the newspapers, absorb the tone of the editorializing of that time-it was unreal, afflicted her with a sense of dislocation. And this was her real preoccupation, what absorbed her: this was a country absorbed in myth, doped and dozing and dreaming, because if there was one common fact or factor underlying everything else, it was that nothing was as it was described-as if a spirit of rhetoric (because of the war?) had infected everything, made it impossible for any fact to be seen straight. Nor would she, had she not by chance crossed the river some weeks before (during one of the looping bus-rides she had taken around, across, through, and over London-by the simple device of getting on buses and staying on them till they returned to their starting points) and stayed with first Stella and then Iris, now be able to pick up a newspaper or listen to the radio without feeling as if she were in the middle of the Russian revolution, or something not far from it in cataclysmic thoroughness. She would not have been able to hold on to the simple fact that, in essence, nothing much had changed in this country-you had only to listen to the people in the docks and in the café to know it hadn’t … which was why more than any other person it must be Phoebe, Marjorie’s sister, that she should telephone-when? Today. Yes.