Piet said: ‘Oh no thanks, I couldn’t face all that all over again.’ He went off, and his wife followed him, having sent back a friendly, no-hard-feelings smile. Tommy Brown went after the de Preez couple. Marjorie, who was grasping Athen’s hands, in passionate approval of what he said, found her husband Colin at her side. ‘Yes, dear,’ said Colin, ‘I’m sure you’re right, but don’t forget we’ve got a babysitter waiting.’ ‘Isn’t it just typical!’ exclaimed Marjorie—but she went off with her husband. Johnny Lindsay was taken home by Flora and by Mrs Van and by the Professor, an old friend.
The lights went out in the hall, and by the time they reached the pavement, there remained Anton, Martha, Thomas Stern, and Athen.
Athen stood smiling bitterly as the others went into the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. Then he turned and said to the three friends: ‘Well, shall I make a speech just for us here?’
‘Why not?’ said Anton.
‘Ah,’ said Athen, in a low passionate tone, his face twisted with self-dislike, or so it seemed—pale with what he felt: ‘It is time I was at home. Every morning I wake up and I find myself here, and I ask myself, how long must I be away from my people?’
‘And how do you think I feel?’ said Anton. He sounded gruff, brusque, with how he felt. Yet such was the Greek’s power to impose an idea of pure, burning emotion that Anton seemed feeble beside him. Meanwhile, Thomas from Poland stood quietly by, watching. There they stood on the dark pavement. It was a hot night. A blue gum moved its long leaves dryly together over their heads. The air was scented with dust and with eucalyptus.
‘Look, Athen,’ said Martha, ‘why don’t you just come back and—I’ll make everyone bacon and eggs.’ She felt she had earned Athen’s reply: ‘Thank you, Martha, but no, I will not. Suddenly tonight I feel far from you all. And what will you all do now? You will sit and watch how the poor people of this country suffer, and you will do nothing? No, it is not possible.’
Thomas observed: ‘Athen, we’ll just have to cut our losses. That’s all there is to it.’
And now it was Thomas’s turn to appear inadequate—even ridiculous. Athen looked quietly at them all, one after another. Then he shrugged and walked off.
They stood, silent. Then Thomas said: ‘I’ll fix him, don’t worry.’ He ran after Athen. The two men stood in low-voiced gesticulating argument a few paces off, then Thomas led Athen back.
‘Athen has something to say,’ Thomas announced. He then stood back beside Martha and Anton, leaving Athen to face them. An audience of three waited for the speaker to begin. Presumably this is what Thomas intended to convey? Was he trying to make fun of Athen? Martha could not make out from Thomas’s serious listening face what he meant, then he nodded at her, feeling her inspection of him, that she must listen to Athen, who stood, his eyes burning, his fists raised, his dark face darker for the pale gleam of his elegant suit.
He was reminding them of the evening the Labour Party won the elections. The little office in Founders’ Street had been stocked with beer, and for hours people, mainly RAF, had streamed in, to sit on the floor, and outside in the corridor, and down the stairs. They were drinking beer, singing the Red Flag, finally dancing in the street. Athen had been there. Towards morning he had got up from where he had been sitting, very quiet, observing them all—the communists were celebrating with the others—from the bench under the window. He had said: ‘Good night, comrades. I hope that by the time the sun rises you will have remembered that you are Marxists.’
‘Is it possible that we are so far from each other—yet we all call ourselves communists? I do not understand you. Is it that you have forgotten what it means to be a socialist now? Yet when your Labour Party got into power, you were all as pleased as little children that night. I sometimes think of you all—just like little children. Such thoughts, they are understandable from the men in the RAF and in the army. They are poor men without real politics. When they are happy their Labour Party gets into power, then I am happy for them. But we know, as Marxists, that…’
It was grotesque, of course. This was a speech, they understood, that Athen had thought over, worked out, made part of himself. He had planned to deliver it—when and where? Certainly not on a dusty pavement after a public meeting that was almost a riot. Certainly not to Anton and Martha and Thomas. It was one of the statements, or manifestos, that we all work out, or rather are written for us on the urgent pressure of our heart’s blood, or so it feels, and always at three o’clock in the morning. When we finally deliver these burning, correct, true, just words, how differently will people feel our situation—and of course! theirs. But, alas, it is just these statements that never get made. Or if they do…
The three of them looked at Athen, embarrassed rather than not, and all of them wished to stop him.
‘…is it true that you really believe that Britain will now be socialist and all men free? And tonight, do we have to be told by a Professor from Johannesburg that now the war is over, America and Britain will again try to harm the Soviet Union? Is not America now, as we stand here, pouring out her millions to destroy the communist armies in China? Yes, it has been easy for you to say, in the last years, that you are socialists. But we have been allowed to say it only because the Soviet Union has been crippling herself to kill fascism. And now it will be death and imprisonment again, just as it was before…’
At last he stopped, though they had not moved, or coughed, or made any sign of restlessness. He said: ‘Forgive me, comrades, I see that you are listening out of kindness. You would rather be in the Old Vienna Tea Rooms with the others.’ Again he walked off. This time no one stopped him. A few paces away he turned to say in a different voice—low, trembling, ashamed: ‘Perhaps I feel these things because of something I must be ashamed of. I hate you comrades, because for you it is already peace. Your countries are at peace. But mine is at war—full, full of war, still. Good night. Forgive me.’ He went.
Anton, Martha, Thomas.
Martha wished that Anton would now say: ‘Let us go and have a cup of coffee together.’ She would have preferred to be alone with Thomas, but this was not possible at the moment, it seemed.
She had hardly seen Thomas since the scene, months ago now, in the office. A few days after it, Thomas had been transferred abruptly to another city. The transfer was not only unexpected—there was more to it, because Thomas was morose, bitter. It was rumoured Thomas had had a fight in the camp, had beaten someone up. He had not said anything about the fight to her, though. Then off he had gone, a couple of hundred miles away. From the new camp he had written a humorous regretful letter—the fortunes of war, etc. As for Martha, she felt that she might have foreseen it. Since the war had started—friends, lovers, comrades, they appeared and vanished unpredictably. Of course Thomas was bound to be transferred that moment they agreed to love each other.
Once or twice he had come up for short visits. On one, she had taken the afternoon off, and he had come to the flat. But they had been unable to make love: the bedroom was hers and Anton’s. They felt constrained, and sat and talked instead. Besides, a quick hour snatched where they could was not what either of them had engaged for.
Thomas had set himself to amuse her by making a short speech in parody of the solemn group style: an ‘analysis’ of sex in war-time.
‘It is popularly supposed that the moment the guns start firing sex drives everyone into bed. But what war fosters, comrades, is not sex, but the frustrations of romance. What will we all remember of the war? I will tell you: the fact that one was never in one place long enough to make love with the same person twice. Partings and broken hearts, comrades—the war has given us back the pure essence of Romance. What are the ideal economic and social circumstances for sexual activity, comrades? I will tell you. It is a stable bourgeois society where the woman has servants to take the children off her hands. The husband goes to work or to visit his mistress, and the wife entertains her lover. No society has yet developed anything like this for satisfactio
n because not only do we get the comforts of—comfort, but just enough frustration to keep love alive. No, comrades, I tell you, when I was still a poor boy in my village, I understood perfectly well, from novels, just how things ought to be, and war—nonsense, it’s no use to us—but trust me, Matty. I’ll be discharged soon, and I’ve got a place in town that I’ll open up again for us.’
Meanwhile, he wrote sometimes. His erratic love life continued—so she heard. Knowing that she must hear he wrote: ‘I’m in an impossible position with you, Matty. Do you imagine that I don’t know what a woman feels when she is told that she is too special for casual affairs? Do you imagine I’d be such a fool as to say this to you? But if I’m careful not to say it, circumstances are saying it for me. But they tell me that this camp is being closed next month, and that means I’ll be with you soon.’
This afternoon Thomas had said that the camp was not being closed—not for another two or three months.
There was nothing for it but to go on writing love letters.
‘I’d like to have a cup of coffee with you both,’ said Thomas. ‘But I’ve got to be off. I’m driving out to the farm tonight—I’ve got two days’ leave.’
‘Oh, do come and have a cup of coffee,’ Anton said. Both Martha and Thomas looked at him to see if the drawling emphasis he put into it meant anything special, but it seemed not.
‘Or perhaps you’d like to make a speech too?’ said Anton.
‘Why not?’ said Thomas, sounding abrupt. Martha could see that he longed, as she did, for Anton to be somewhere else. This not being possible, he was talking on, saying anything, so as not to go away at once.
‘Perhaps we could have a competition about whose country has suffered most?’ said Anton.
‘It’s as useful as most of things we do now, certainly,’ said Thomas.
‘I don’t agree,’ said Anton, suddenly angry—it was evident that he had been restraining himself, with Athen, but was quite ready now to have a real argument. Even perhaps, an ‘analysis of the situation’.
Thomas smiled, recognizing this. He said again: ‘I haven’t time—I must go.’ But he still didn’t go, stood in front of them, hands in his pockets, in his characteristic pose, frowning.
‘Then you haven’t time,’ said Anton.
‘It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?’ remarked Thomas.
‘That is certainly true,’ said Anton, on a questioning note: if you have anything to say, do say it?
Thomas remarked: ‘Today I read that the war damage in Germany is 400 milliard marks.’ He smiled. ‘Well then. Thirty-two milliard pounds. Does that make it any easier? I kept looking at the figures like a madman.’
Anton stood looking at Thomas. On his face was a small, cold smile.
‘Oh, all right, I won’t press that point then. How about the mass bombing of Germany then? We didn’t know what that involved did we?’
He came a step nearer and stood looking close into their faces—first Anton, then Martha. Now they understood that he was saying what he had been feeling, or thinking, while Athen made his speech.
‘There’s very little work to do in the camp now. That’s a bad thing—I have nothing to do but read. It’s like living in a bad nightmare—a thousand empty huts, because all the men are demobbed, but someone’s made a slip-up somewhere, and the camp’s being kept open. All the machinery is running—the mess is open, all the health people like me operating away at full efficiency, all the blacks standing at attention waiting to take orders. No one to give orders, no one to eat in the mess, no one in the hospital, no one using my fine, efficient latrines—it’s a ghost camp. And I sit in my fine, well-ventilated hut reading…for instance, I’ve got the latest about the concentration camps. We haven’t heard the truth about them, that’s obvious, it’s too terrible to tell, so we’ll get the truth in bits.’
Again he looked at them, waiting.
‘No comment? Well, I have the advantage over you, because you don’t sit all day on a bed in a ghost camp full of food that’s rotting in its cases because there’s no one to eat it. Well then, how about dropping the atom bombs on Japan, how about that?’
‘We discussed that at the time,’ Anton said. To begin with, the socialists had supported the bombs being dropped. Or rather, the thing had been accepted. It seemed that nothing much worse had happened than had been happening for years. Certainly Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the words they later became—symbols for the beginning of a new, frightful age. Nor had there been a special meeting or even a private discussion since about the atom bombs. Yet people’s minds had changed, were changing. Without anything formal being said, or decisions being taken, the incident of the atom bombs was isolating itself, growing in meaning and intensity. But some people still agreed that it was right the atom bomb should have been used—Anton for one.
‘What’s your point?’ said Anton. ‘That war isn’t the prettiest of human activities?’
Thomas looked steadily at Anton, then smiled at Martha. ‘Oh, I haven’t any point. That is the point. Anyway, I’ve got thirty miles to drive. And it has been storming over the mountains, my wife said, so the rivers will be up if I don’t get a move on.’
‘Well then,’ said Anton.
‘Yes. And there’s India. How about the famine in India? It’s all right, isn’t it—I say, how about the famine in India? But the famine in Germany—that’s not the same thing at all, is it?’
‘What are you getting at?’ said Anton, his pale blue eyes like ice. ‘Are you telling me that I’m a German?’
‘No. Of course not. Well, I seem to be talking to myself.’ Off he went, walking fast. At the corner of the street he turned and half-shouted: ‘Did you read, they’re going to transfer one million people from East to West Germany?’
‘Come on,’ said Anton to Martha, impatiently. ‘Let’s get home.’
Thomas was saying, or shouting: ‘They walk. They put their belongings in handcarts and walk hundreds of miles guarded by soldiers. Like cattle.’ Now he did go off finally, and they saw him lift his hand and wave it, in a sort of mock salute.
‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘So now we all discover that the war has made a lot of mess everywhere. What is the use of such discoveries?’
He took Martha’s elbow to steer her safely through the people who were coming out of the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. ‘Good night, good night,’ they all said to each other.
Martha and Anton walked in silence to find the car. Amicably they drove back to their flat.
Their relations were admirable since Anton had a mistress. He believed that Martha had a lover.
Or apparently he did. Yet there was something odd about this, because while he would say to her: ‘I’m meeting Millicent after work,’ and she replied: ‘Oh, good, I’ll see you later then,’ she never said who she would be meeting or what she would be doing. It was assumed that she would be meeting somebody. Who? Once or twice Anton had joked it must be Solly, and he had never mentioned Thomas.
It occurred to Martha that this curious man both believed that she had a lover, because it was easy if they both had someone else, and yet knew she had not. She would never understand him.
They lay side by side in their twin beds in the little bedroom.
Anton remarked that in his opinion Professor Dickinson by no means exaggerated the future.
Martha agreed with him.
Anton said that he had again written letters to his family in Germany. Soon, surely, there must be some news. It wasn’t possible that everyone could have been killed.
Martha suggested it might be the moment to get their Member of Parliament to make enquiries.
‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘If I don’t hear soon, I shall have to approach the authorities. It will be a strange thing,’ he added, ‘living in Germany again. Sometimes I feel almost British.’ This last in a ‘humorous’ tone and Martha laughed with him.
Recently he had taken to saying humorously that he and Martha were having to stay together so long,
that they were getting into the habit of it—perhaps Martha would like to come with him back to Germany?
Martha laughed, appropriately, at such times. But she knew quite well that Anton would not at all mind being married to her. It was taking her a long time to understand that some people don’t really mind who they are married to—marriage is not really important to them. Martha, Millicent, Grete—it doesn’t matter, not really.
Martha thought, incredulously: We have nothing in common, we have never touched each other, not really, where it matters; we cannot make love with each other, yet it would suit Anton if I stayed with him and we called it a marriage. And that other marriage with Douglas—he thought it was a marriage. As far as he was concerned, that was a marriage!
What an extraordinary thing—people calling this a marriage. But they do. Now they’ve got used to it, they can’t see anything wrong with this marriage—not even my parents. They’ll be awfully upset when we get divorced.
She thought, as she went to sleep: When I get to England, I’ll find a man I can really be married to.
Part Two
Don’t make any mistake about this. Real love is a question of compromise, tolerance, shared views and tastes, preferably a common background of experience, the small comforts of day-to-day living. Anything else is just illusion and blind sex.
From an officially inspired handbook for young people on Sex, Love, Marriage.
Chapter One
Six inches of marred glass in a warped frame reflected beams of orange light into the loft, laid quivering green from the jacaranda outside over wooden planks and over the naked arm of a young woman who lay face down on a rough bed, dipping her arm in and out of the greenish sun-lanced light below her as if into water. At the same time she watched Thomas’s head a few feet below her through cracks in the floor: a roughly glinting brown head, recently clutched by fingers which now trailed through idling light, bent politely beside a large navy-blue straw hat. Thomas’s voice, warm from love-making, answered questions about roses put in a voice that said it was going to get as much attention from the expert as her visit warranted. The two heads moved out of her range of vision into the garden.