‘Look, Athen,’ she said, hurried and even off-hand because of her affection for him, and because she was conscious of futility, brother to incongruity, the pleasures of which she could not prevent herself from looking forward to—the six that evening!—what a collection of people, how ridiculous, how absurd! And how enjoyable. ‘Look, Athen, you’re taking it all much too seriously. Every time you start, I think you can’t really mean it.’ The face he raised to her, sombre with feeling, made her words ridiculous, but she said, with an uncomfortable laugh: ‘Can’t you see how absurd it is to be so unhappy because you’ve spent a few pounds on a suit?’
He said nothing so they continued up the pavement side by side. So now of course he was thinking about it—and probably would for days. She was filled with irritation, also with remorse—he was going any day now, and that would be that. Athen and Martha—they had known each other three years; they were friends; she trusted him; she could not think of him without warmth. That was love, wasn’t it?
Last night she had dreamed badly. She was on a high, dry, rocky place and around it washed long, shoreless seas. Across this sea, which she could not reach, no matter how much she leaned and stretched out her hands, sailed people she had known. All these people she knew. Among them was Athen. And, as she noted when she woke up, Thomas.
Martha and Athen had arrived at Maisie’s bar, which had groups of young men lounging outside it, waiting for something to interest them. They held glasses in their hands, and some of them were tight.
‘Pick Maisie up and come to our place, right?’ said Martha.
But he said: ‘No, wait, Martha, I must say something.’
‘Oh, no, no, Athen,’ she protested, ‘no!’
He looked at her seriously.
‘Athen, you’ve demanded a light-hearted evening. For the Lord’s sake then, let’s have one.’
He remained serious. She began to laugh—but with discomfort. The lounging youths were all absorbed in this scene and making comments on it.
‘Martha, why are you laughing?’
‘Because I simply will not be serious, just for once.’
‘When you said that, Martha, I was thinking: well, she’s right, what does it matter if for a few months in his life a poor man from Greece lives like a rich man? Of course it does not. But Martha…’ He took her hand, and one of the young men let out a shrill whistle. ‘I tell you, for the last few months everything has been wrong with me. When the war ended, I told myself, now comrade, you must have a wide view. Your country is still at war. But it is a small country and not important. But if they would only send me home, that’s what’s wrong with me.’
‘Well, I’m glad they are keeping you here.’
‘Then you’re not a real friend, Martha, because with every day I get further from myself.’
‘Better than being killed,’ said Martha, obstinate.
‘No, Martha, it is not.’
Apparently the little man’s intensity had the power to subdue anyone: the group of young men watched, probably even listened, in silence. He had dropped her hand, now he took it again and came a step nearer. ‘Tell me, Martha, have you thought at all—have you thought about this war?’
‘Obviously not, when you ask like that!’
‘No, I can see you do not think. That is the most terrible thing of all—people are not thinking any longer. The newspapers, books—everything. And now you say the same.’
She said nothing. He held her hand and looked close into her face. ‘The last five years, Martha, I tell you I can’t grasp it. I lie awake at night and I repeat just small things. I say: “There are two million people in Europe now without homes.” People like you and me, Martha. I keep trying to imagine it.’
One of the young men said, or rather suggested, in an amiable, interested way: ‘That’s right, give it stick, Romeo!’
‘We are corrupted people, Martha.’
A window above the bar shot up, light spilled over the pavement, over Athen and Martha, who were lit as if on a stage.
Martha moved out of the light, pulling Athen by the hand, and the group of youths said: ‘Ai, ai, ai!’ and made raspberries. Athen, of course, was quite oblivious of the bar and the men outside it.
‘It’s not possible for us to understand,’ he said. ‘I tell you, if one dead person lay here on the pavement, well, we could not take that in, not what it meant. But suddenly human beings have to understand—in the last five years millions and millions of people have been killed. I read yesterday, it’s forty-four millions. The human race killed forty millions of its own people—you hear me, Martha? I leave four millions and what difference does it make?’
Maisie’s head appeared in the lighted window. ‘Hey, Matty, is that you? Athen—both of you come up, I’m not dressed.’
One of the young men said: ‘Some people have it laid on.’
Athen said: ‘You must think about it, you must think. We do not think enough about what these things mean.’
He went into the building, Martha waved to Maisie. A plump, dark little girl appeared in the lit window and cried: ‘Aunty Matty, Aunty Matty!’ and was hauled in again, protesting. Martha cycled home. In the front room, Anton, in a suit, was talking to Millicent who wore a white evening dress. Here was a problem already: Maisie had been told they were not wearing evening dress. She was not allowed telephone calls when the bar was open. She would come in an ordinary dress. Who was Martha to support, so to speak? Well, obviously, Maisie. Martha put on a short dress in black crêpe. When Martha came out of the bedroom, Thomas had arrived. Millicent was saying she could not possibly be odd woman out. Anton took her home to change.
Thomas and Martha sat in the front room of the flat, waiting for the others. Thomas wore a suit. She did not like him in it. And he did not like her black dress either, it seemed.
They sat several feet from each other, and smiled. Yesterday afternoon they had been in the loft for several hours. They were embarrassed because they had forgotten what it was like to be in company.
‘You see what an ivory tower we’ve made ourselves, Matty? Now, I don’t like being with you when other people are around.’ He picked up books, looked at their spines, put them down, fidgeted.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Ah yes, you see, you sleep with a woman and she knows what you are thinking, that’s the price you pay.’ He smiled, but he was serious. ‘You’re right. I’ve been quarrelling with my brother. He thinks I’m not serious enough about the business of making money. And of course he’s right. If one doesn’t make money in this paradise for business men, one is a fool. He wants me to set up a real gardening shop in the Main Street. He would sell there. I’d grow the things. And his wife’s brother would run the sports shop. So there would be two businesses run by the Stern family. So you see how hard it is to escape one’s fate, Martha? In Poland, middle-men, money-makers—the Stern Brothers. And here? My brother’s a rich man already, and we left Poland with what we had on our backs, eight years ago.’
‘Let’s have a drink, let’s both have drinks, let’s get tight.’
He went on, without responding, or apparently even hearing: ‘And there’s my wife. The farm—it was given to her by her old aunt. Now that was a woman who understood the times she lived in. She left Poland before the First World War. Very intelligent, that was. She married a man who’s rich as Rothschild out of property in Johannesburg. The farm in this country—well, it was just a little item in a parcel of land her husband picked up. Imagine the scene. Aunt Rosa from Sochaczen hears that her favourite sister’s daughter has arrived in Africa, the continent of opportunity. She goes to her husband: “Boris,” she says, “give me a little plot of land for my favourite sister’s child.” So my wife, who had forgotten even the existence of her Aunty Rosa, suddenly got two thousand acres of fine tobacco-growing land in the Machopi district.’
‘Why don’t you want a drink?’
‘If you offer me one I’ll have one.’
She
got him one. He sat watching her, frowning. ‘My sister-in-law’s getting restive,’ he said. ‘It’s time Thomas was caught and punished for his fornications. She wants the shed as a playroom for her children, she says. Oh, she hates you, Martha, you’d never believe it.’
‘Oh, yes, I would.’
‘But for the time being we are safe, because my brother doesn’t want me in a bad mood, he wants me to become half of the Stern Brothers, merchants. So he tells his wife to be quiet, it will be time to take the shed for her children when Thomas has signed his name to all the documents.’
He came over to her, took her in his arms, and let her go again. ‘No, I can’t do anything here, it is Anton’s territory.’
‘Well, I live here too.’
‘No, that’s no good, Martha. You talk nonsense. And tonight is all no good. You are looking at me, suddenly you see Thomas as he is, and you don’t like him.’
‘Well, then, what is Thomas?’
‘If I’d stayed in Poland, I’d look like I do this evening. I’d wear a respectable brown suit. But my nose would be more red, I think. I’d be drinking quite a bit of vodka. I’d be neither a peasant nor would I be a tradesman. Something in between. A middleman. I told you, you can’t escape your fate. Perhaps I’d have been a corn merchant, supported to begin with on loans from my brother peasants, who trusted me to be one per cent more honest than the other corn merchants. That’s how my Uncle Caleb started.’
She waited, while he frowned, moved about the little room, picked up books, set them down again, took large swallows of his beer, looked steadily more unhappy.
‘You’re a gardener,’ she said at last.
‘There you are, something in between. Neither town nor country. If I were of the soil, I’d be running my wife’s farm. But I don’t live there and I don’t live in town. I bring things into the towns to sell. And I meet a woman in my brother’s wife’s garden shed.’
She remained silent, sitting on the corner of the sofa. She thought: Well, so he dislikes me tonight. I’ll simply have to get through tonight somehow.
After a while he looked at her, smiling tightly. His blue eyes were not kind. ‘All this is because I can’t stand the way you look, Matty. In that dress you are recognizably the same genus as my brother’s wife.’
‘It’s only a formal dress, that’s all.’
‘Why can’t you wear a dance dress—I saw you in one once. I was looking forward to seeing you all evening in a real dance dress…yes, yes, of course, dance dresses were no part of my life, so I take them seriously. But apart from that, in that black thing you look like one of my sisters dressed up for a funeral…’ Suddenly his face closed up, and he sat down, and he said: ‘Well, serves her right for wanting to be respectable, and Uncle Caleb too.’ This referred to most of his family dying in the Warsaw Ghetto: he had recently got letters telling him so. ‘Do I have to go to this damned dance?’
‘You said you would. It was Athen’s idea.’
‘Well, can’t you put a dance dress on then?’
‘Millicent’s gone off to change out of her dance dress.’
‘Oh, then you mustn’t upset Millicent.’
‘Seriously, I don’t think I should.’
‘Right. Then that’s settled!’
She remained where she was. but then, feeling the distance between them, she quietly got up and went to the bedroom. Her evening dresses were neglected: when did they ever have time to dance? At the back of the cupboard she remembered was a dress of dark blue material she had pushed there and never worn. A couple of years ago, she had seen a romantic dark blue dance dress, with bare neck and shoulders, and full skirts glinting with sequins. She had bought it on impulse. It was too formal for tonight’s dance, but she decided she would wear it, because Thomas would like it.
She came out to him smiling. His face warmed to a smile and he lifted her hand and held it against his cheek: ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘thank you.’
Soon Athen arrived with Maisie, who wore a tight cornflower blue crêpe dress. An evening dress. She had misunderstood. And then Anton returned with Millicent in the short dress she had changed into. A great crisis, a real scene, with Millicent almost in tears, but putting a good face on it, Maisie apologizing, as if everything were her fault, and Martha sitting tight, determined only that she would keep this dress on for Thomas.
At last they all got into Anton’s car and drove to Millicent’s, so that she could change again. Millicent did not have as much time as she needed for changing, and she was flustered and resentful, and she too kept apologizing all round although she was the only one in the right. Particularly did she apologize to Martha: her guilt at sleeping with Martha’s husband showed thus: that she was positively weeping with guilt because she had to change her dress twice, Martha being at fault. And she would not sit in the front near Anton, where Martha wanted her to sit, and where she wanted to sit.
So Martha had to sit by Anton, wife and husband, on the front seat, while the others crowded in behind. Maisie fitted her large hips into one corner. Thomas sat in the other. Athen was in the middle, and Millicent was neither on Thomas’s lap nor on Athen’s, but disposed across both, with many flutters and cries of how much she hoped she was not heavy.
Martha sat in silence, listening to all the fuss. Anton’s last woman (apart from herself) was just such another flutterer and exclaimer. And both had pretty, vivacious faces and both had sombre eyes in dry meshes of tired skin. Toni Mandel, the Austrian refugee, had blue eyes. Millicent had green eyes. Both tended to flutter their lashes and peer up into men’s faces with alluring sideways glances. Martha let these thoughts slip through her mind, disliking herself for their uncharitableness, their dryness—but she was listening to her old enemy, the hound Repetition, snapping at her heels. Toni Mandel had announced the entrance of her, Martha, on to the scene. Whom did Millicent herald? Because while Anton seemed to have been genuinely fond (his word) of Toni, was ‘fond’, he said, of Millicent, apparently it had never occurred to him to marry either. Would Anton always fall in love with desperate women being gay girls at all costs, but then leave them for—whatever quality it was he had married Martha for? Presumably, he even made love with Toni and with Millicent? Why would a perfectly presentable young woman of thirty or thirty-five choose to have an affair with a married exile from Germany without a penny and with no future until he could return to—of all dubious places from her point of view—East or West Germany? After all, this was a country where women could pick and choose. Millicent had chosen Anton. Because she enjoyed being lectured on politics? (Martha had come on a scene of Anton lecturing Millicent on world politics.) Well, Martha doubted it.
Meanwhile, they drove fast through the bush in the direction of Portuguese East Africa and the Indian Ocean. For a while suburbs, then nothing, just bush and kopjes. Sometimes as the car lights swung over dark scrub, green eyes stared low towards this hurtling bit of black machinery—a beast had raised its eyes from where it grazed. It might be, even now, wild—a buck, or wild pig, a jackal. Even, not impossibly, a lion—a lion had been shot on these hills last season. But more likely it was a domestic cow, for this was good grazing land under tall, branchy trees, and milk and butter came from these acres to feed the city.
The road curved, shot up hill, curved down, drove across low, misted valleys. The moon was away somewhere, but stars stood solid in a glitter of cold. In the car, the windows steamed, the women covered bare shoulders with wool or fur, and the men were glad of the women’s warmth.
It was twelve miles’ fast driving, and when the lights of the hotel appeared in a brilliant cluster on a rise, they were the only lights for miles and miles of dark bush spread over rising and falling ground. Over this country, fifty, sixty years ago, had been fought the last fearful battles of the Mashona Rebellion. All this earth had been piled with the corpses of black warriors and a few of the corpses had been white, with names that appeared in history books and on monuments.
So hea
vy with memories was this land that people building houses here had been known to run away from them. They were unable to forget the painted warriors who walked for all to see with assegais and shields through the dark hours. The hotel, Parklands Hotel, had been such a house, a fine spreading homestead deserted by its first builders, sold and sold and sold again and finally bought by the hotel company. For ghosts would not walk, so it was felt, where casual company dined and danced. But another house, across the valley, was being sold now, at this very moment, because its lady could no longer stand being awakened nightly to see the impis march across her verandas.
As usual there was a long line of about fifty cars, although it was mid-week. It was just as well the six had booked a table.
The hotel was half-way up a sharp hill. In front the ground fell away to a small river from which rose a wraith of white mist and a smell of stagnant water. The building was long and low, across the hill. All its front was glassed in to make dining space. Behind this, was a long, low-ceilinged room with a platform for an orchestra. Very different, this place, from those where Martha had danced, in another epoch, five years before. Then, the city’s young people moved from place to place, as if they owned them all; everybody knew each other, and the managers knew them and greeted them by name. Now, as the six went through the dining tables, and then stood waiting for a moment to cross the dance room, there was no face they knew. The men’s clothes were again civilian, save for a few RAF officers who were here to supervise the final closing of the training camps. One or two of the men with wives looked familiar: they were probably the old wolves of the sports club bewitched into good husbands and neighbours. But, strangers, they looked at this party of six, and, as strangers, the six looked back. Meanwhile, the band, once mostly made up of amateurs playing for the fun of the thing as much as for the money, were now professionals allowing just so much music, to the minute, in return for just so much money.
It was quite early. Most people were still eating. The big dance room had a few couples in it. Anton gallantly bowed to Millicent and danced across it with her, his elbows stiff, back straight, as he would have danced in a hall in the poor district of Berlin where he had been a boy. And Millicent, clutching her fur piece to her shoulder with a hand that already had a beaded evening bag in it, smiled up at him as he whirled her in a flurry of white skirts around and out the other door. Athen walked across, with Maisie on his arm: a small, dark, dapper man, holding himself upright beside a big, fair, lazily moving woman. Then came Martha and Thomas, not touching: it was enough to walk beside each other across the sprung wooden floor that sent up a smell of wood and fresh beeswax. As they emerged on to the far veranda, Thomas put out a hand and just touched her bare shoulder and said softly: ‘I’m happy, Martha, do you hear me? I’m happy tonight with you.’