At the other table, the woman had shifted her chair so that she sat alongside her husband, and was able to stare across at the man about whom she was hearing such shocking things. Her large, over-fed, good-natured face was sorrowful, troubled, because of what she was hearing.
‘It was arranged I’d lecture the men one afternoon a week. The point was, I had learned Shona, but Tressell didn’t know a word. Imagine the scene—I had two thousand men marched out from their quarters and on to the parade ground. I stood them at ease and addressed them in Shona. First I called Sergeant Tressell every name I could think of. There they stood, they all hated him, but not a muscle of their faces moved. Then I explained to them they were going short of food and their latrines always broke down because of Sergeant Tressell. Then I told them that if they wanted to be free of the Tressells, they needed some basic education, and I proposed to give it to them. I lectured them for half an hour on their wrongs—Lenin, so to speak, using a class of hygiene to address revolutionaries. There were two thousand men, and me explaining politics to them, and Sergeant Tressell, looking benevolent. So then I marched them off, and Sergeant Tressell said: “Hey, Stern, you didn’t say you were going to address these monkeys in Shona.” “But Sir, it’s all they understand,” I said. Now, he was supposed to learn Shona, but he was too lazy. “I hope you agreed with what I was saying,” I said. “Did you think I was on the right lines, Sir?”
‘“Seemed all right to me,” he said. So three Wednesdays went by. All the Africans lined up in companies on the square, at ease, in the sun, while I gave them lessons in elementary revolutionary tactics, and Sergeant Tressell stood listening.
‘Then one afternoon the CO came out. He’d heard of the lectures on hygiene. But he knew Shona. I had to give the lecture as promised on keeping water clean and washing behind the ears. The CO smelled rats by the dozen. He had me over to chess that evening. He said: “Stern, I’ve told you before, you’re letting your emotions override your common sense. Can’t have that, you know.” “No, Sir,” I said. I was never left alone with the men again, and then I was transferred. Just before I left, Tressell came into my hut. He said: “You think you’re clever, don’t you? Well, I’ll show you.” One of the Africans must have given me away. So we fought. Neither of us won. He’d land a blow on my chest and say: “That’s for you, Jew.” And I’d land my fist in his face and say: “That’s for my sister in the Ghetto.”
‘At one point he actually stopped and said: “We’re going to leave the ladies out of this, Stern!” “That’s right,” I said. “That’s for my mother,” and I landed a kick in his groin. We nearly killed each other. It was just after that I was posted and our beautiful relationship had to be postponed for so long.’
The woman with Tressell had stood up, and was urging him into some course of action. He shook his head, she insisted. Finally, he did what she wanted, and the two went into the room to dance, she giving Thomas as she went past a long look of sheer incredulity: Imagine that such men were allowed to walk the earth, she was thinking.
‘Were you going to fight again?’ she asked. ‘I mean, when you were near his table?’
‘No. I just saw his stupid, red face. He was looking at Anton and me playing the fool. I remembered the fight. I remembered how every time he landed a blow, he said: “That’s for you, kike. That’s for you, Jew.” Only two words in his vocabulary—very ill-educated. I suppose he thought I was going to attack him. He picked up the wine bottle by the neck and held it—I swear, Martha, it would be the greatest pleasure I could imagine, to kill that man.’
After a few moments he turned towards her, trying to smile. ‘Well, you made me tell you. But I shouldn’t have.’
‘Why not?’
‘There are things we should sit on, shut up about.’
She shrugged.
‘That’s right, that’s the only thing to do.’
‘If you can’t forget him, we’d better give up this evening.’
‘I can’t forget him and I don’t want to give up the evening. All right, all right, give it to me—I’ll drink.’
He seized a glass, filled it, drained it. He sat fidgeting and frowning in his chair, glancing at the door so as not to miss the reappearance of his enemy.
They were alone under the trees that seemed to stand above the music and the movements of people like plants growing out of water. The tops of the trees seemed infinitely remote. They stood in quiet starlight, moving their leaves in a small wind.
Martha waited. Slowly the heat went out of Thomas and he sat back, relaxed. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’re right.’ He drank some more wine. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you must sit there and let me look at you.’
For hours, it seemed, Martha had been waiting for this: to be conscious of herself as a pretty young woman in a romantic, dark blue dress. She had wanted to sit, close to Thomas, feeling her firm, white breasts just under the defining dark folds of the dress, and her strong, white body upright in soft drifts of dark, transparent stuff. She would have thought: these arms, my strong thighs—they hold this strong man close in love. And this is what Thomas had wanted, when he made her change into this dress. But it had all gone wrong, spoiled by Sergeant Tressell.
She smiled at Thomas, sitting, as it were, for the portrait: pretty young woman in a lovely dress. She tried to be only that, nothing more, not to think of the rage that she knew quite well was pounding through Thomas even now. She tried not to remember Sergeant Tressell.
But her heart felt large and tender, it felt painful.
He smiled at her and said: ‘Ah, Martha, you don’t like me at all, not really.’
‘Stop it, Thomas, stop it, just for this evening.’
‘When I say that I want more than anything else in the world a dark night and a chance to murder Tressell, you don’t like it.’
‘No, I don’t.’ She sat, her heart painful, looking at the broad, brown face, at his eyes, so direct and clear and blue.
‘You’re so pretty tonight.’
‘I’m not pretty!’
‘Then I’m not a nice man who grows plants and gives housewives advice about their gardens. Martha, I was looking forward all day to sitting by you and thinking: This is a pretty woman, and not, this is the female I love. It’s easier.’
‘Am I the female you love?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, we run true to form,’ she said at last. ‘It’s at the Parklands Hotel that we use the word love. And you came all the way from Poland for it.’
He slowly poured long streams of pale wine into her glass and then into his. Past his shoulder, she saw the enemy come out of the dance room and sit down. She hardly noticed him, from which she understood she was tight. And Thomas did not turn his head.
‘Come and sit by me,’ he said.
Martha and Thomas sat side by side, hardly breathing—breathing, as it were, through each other. They did not look at each other, but felt Thomas, Martha, through their arms, their thighs, their stomachs. They sat side by side, a pretty young woman in a dark blue dress that showed white arms and shoulders, and a man with rough, blond hair and a broad, brown face, blue-eyed—a strong man, a peasant. They sat in these guises and felt life running through them. In front stood the fine, airy, balanced trees, silvered with starlight, and the rocky shapes of the rising hill. Behind them the dance music throbbed, and the flames hissed in the braziers. Martha felt the low, long, swooping movement of the flames, from the flame-light running warm on the rough tree trunks; she felt the firelight she sat in, a warm, low element far from the thin, cold light of the stars on the tree tops. Drunkenness made her alive, alert. She simultaneously felt each beat of the music, the texture of the pockets of shadow in the tree trunks, the dull, scratched metal of the table and the sharp cold coming from it, the light splintering in the matrix of a drop of spilled wine. She had twenty senses and a heart so filled with delight it held all the night and everything about her. She could even feel the minute, delightful, exas
perating sting from the individual hairs on the back of Thomas’s hand against her own. She sighed with pleasure and turned to smile at him as if waking from a sleep in his arms.
He felt it and turned to her smiling, and her heart fell into sorrow, remembering what had been beating at the edges of her consciousness for days now—a long time; that of course all this was going to end, and soon. Tonight, she and Thomas together, the six of them together—it was like the lift of a wave towards the sky before it breaks into a fragmented crest of flying white foam. She and Thomas would soon part, and soon this love (she could use the word, presumably, once it had been used at the Parklands Hotel), this love which had taught her what loving a man was, would have gone, been blown apart. Like a town in Europe, dark under a sky bursting with bits of flying flame and steel. And the Tressells, now sitting in a group of noisy friends at their table: their appearance this evening could have been foreseen. Martha felt as if she had known all her life that on this evening, this starry winter’s evening, she would sit by a man she loved with her whole heart, and look past flaring braziers at a red-faced, fattish man in a badly cut dinner suit, and know that he was an enemy too strong for her.
She said: ‘Please give me some more wine.’
He poured more wine, and for himself. Again for a long time they sat quiet, side by side. The others came back to the table, in an interval when the music was silent, but then they were no longer there. Her forearm rested in Thomas’s big hand. She could feel, through his hand, that he was restless, disturbed. He said: ‘I’ve got to move off a bit. I can’t stand it, it’s more than I can stand, sitting beside you like a stuffed horse at a fair.’
He went off down the side of the building towards where the mists came off the river. She let herself go into a condition of pure, delicious drunkenness. She was a space of knowledge inside a shell of swaying drunkenness, and she swung from dark to light, from light to dark—then she felt a dry warmth on the back of her neck and turned her head to see why the dank, secretive smell of river water seemed so close. Thomas’s hand lay on her neck. In front of her eyes was brown cloth beaded with a minute dew. She brushed it off and now her hand smelled of the river. Thomas said: ‘Martha’s drunk.’
The others were there, and sat around her like many-coloured ghosts of people she had known a thousand years ago, under the cool, light trees over which the stars stood—but differently, they had moved across the sky. Trunks rose into remote starlight from pools of music, firelight, faces.
They sat in silence. Martha could not have said anything, nor did she want to, and she knew that they were in the same state. She rested her head against Thomas’s cheek, feeling the warmth of his face against the cool, slippery surface of her hair. From this position she smiled at a tall, fair man called Anton Hesse, from Germany, and a fat, anxious woman with big, white breasts that bulged out of cornflower blue crêpe.
Maisie said: ‘Funny, isn’t it, think of all the times you and I have been with the boys at parties. What I mean is it’s funny.’
Her shining, pink lips were parted in a smile asking Martha to express what, as usual, she could not. But Martha smiled and smiled. She had forgotten how to use her tongue. Meanwhile, from outside this scene, she watched a pretty young woman with bare shoulders smiling at a smiling fat woman. Then she saw this pretty girl look down at her hand, curiously. She was Martha, looking at her hand—extraordinary; it moved by itself, not on her will, but on its own—extraordinary, extraordinary, her hand, and very ugly, with its fingers like tools or talons.
Anton said, or had said recently: ‘Well, it’s not every night that we are going dancing.’ Martha heard these words and after a time looked around to connect the voice, if possible, with Anton. She saw a blond youth with a frighteningly direct, concentrated stare say these words—saw him, in a crowded beer hall lean forward to say (to some young edition of Millicent perhaps): ‘Well, comrade, it’s not every evening we have the time for going dancing.’ She loved this correct, stiff boy, proudly taking out a girl (Grete perhaps—he was showing the rich girl the poor district he lived in?) and she smiled maternally at him where he sat disguised as Anton. And when Anton smiled at her, it was this boy who smiled. They, at least, liked each other, the stiff, dedicated boy and a Martha who understood his need for her and forgave it.
Then Anton and the red-headed woman had vanished and in their places were Maisie and Athen.
Where was Thomas? Martha tried to turn her head to find him but he had gone off somewhere.
Maisie was saying: ‘What do you think, Matty, tell Athen.’ Martha could not make out what she was supposed to tell Athen.
A small, dark Greek sat smiling, while light from the braziers flowed over him as if he sat in a red river.
Athen said: ‘Maisie, you must change your life.’
Martha saw how Maisie sat in her chair and laughed. Maisie shook with laughter, but Martha could not laugh outwardly, she could not even make her lips smile. But she laughed inwardly, she laughed and loved everything. She thought: I am good now. At this moment I am good. When I’m sober I must remember how I was good tonight. Meanwhile, she watched Maisie yell with laughter: a fat, yellow-haired woman with a red face, a wet-red-cheeked face, with minute broken veins in the skin, stretched her mouth laughing, and her inflamed blue eyes blinked tears. Her great, fat breasts shuddered with laughter. Martha looked at this gross Maisie and thought of the sweet-fleshed girl in the office of before the war: she thought of Maisie when she was a pregnant girl.
‘He keeps saying I should live differently,’ said Maisie, yelling with laughter.
‘I feel very sick,’ observed Martha.
‘Well, sit still, dear, and it will pass,’ said Maisie, transformed in a trice into a sensible ministrant behind a bar. Martha could see her breast resting in a reassuring white bulge on a slope of brown wood. Martha took a bite or two out of white, sweet flesh. Like blancmange. Insipid it was. Boring. She smiled at Maisie and thought: If I said to Maisie, I’ve just taken a good bite out of your left breast, she’d say: That’s right, dear, well, have a drink of water, you’ll feel better. And Athen would say, But Martha, you must live differently.
She said, with difficulty, to Athen: ‘I’ve just taken a great bite out of Maisie’s breast.’ Concerned, he leaned forward, and his face came white out of the running red flame-light.
Then Maisie stood up, and she stood up. They took each other’s hands, and thus supported, they went unsteadily around the side of the building where a flower bed rested in a circle of raised stones around a tree. Here they were sick, and instantly they were both sober, resting side by side in cool starlight. Below them the valley, where an invisible stream sent up coiling white mist, a cold weight of dank water-smell, a smell of weedy, secretive dark river.
‘What am I going to do, Matty, what shall I do with my life?’ Martha heard these words, and wild sobs, and saw Maisie’s face, refined by starlight, with tears running down it. ‘What shall I do about my Rita? Binkie’s driving me mad and I don’t know what to do?’
Martha said nothing. The roots of her tongue were stunned by sorrow and everything she might say would be ridiculous.
‘Binkie says to me he’s got a woman he wants to marry but he loves me best of all and I say I don’t love him and he says he will marry the woman she’s a widow with two children of her own from the war and I say well marry her and good luck that’s all I can say.’
‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow, Maisie.’
‘Yes, come and see me tomorrow, you are my good pal, Matty, I don’t care what anyone says. Pals are the best thing in life.’
Then they carefully went back to the table. They all sat around the table. In front of them tall, slender, greenish bottles, clouded with cold, a flicker of orange fire in their glass depths. Inside the building the saxophone lamented and the drums beat for war.
Martha saw Athen lean forward towards Maisie.
He was earnest, serious, his dark, burning eyes holding
her tired, sweet, blue eyes, which were fastened on him in the simple statement, I love you, Athen. And her mouth was held in a foolish, patient smile.
Across from Martha sat Thomas, his elbows on spread knees, his head bent to rest on his fists, swaying a little. He was a strong man in a brown suit, and Martha looked at him like a stranger and wondered what he was remembering. He swayed, and looked at the paving-stones under his feet while the red light moved on his rough, brown head.
Maisie said in a loud, childish voice: ‘Isn’t it funny, this time next year, where will we be? Athen will be in Greece…’ she was ticking them all off on fat, white fingers ‘…and Anton will be in Germany, and Matty will be…’ She smiled, hesitating, because she did not know whether to say aloud that Martha would not be with Anton. ‘And here we’ll be left, me and Thomas and Millicent.’
‘Not me,’ said Thomas.
‘What?’ said Anton.
‘Not me,’ said Thomas, lifting his head off his fists to look at them and then past them at the tree-trunks, at rocks, at the lifting line of the hill. His eyes encountered the glitter of the stars, and he fell back in his chair and gazed up at the sky. ‘Not me,’ he said, or muttered, and then Martha was in Thomas’s arms, dancing. They whirled around and around the low-ceilinged, white room, which was swept with currents of air from the women’s dresses, that flung out their skirts around the tall pillars who were the men holding them. She rested in Thomas’s arms and whirled around. She was tired and she rested in Thomas’s arms. She might very well go to sleep then and there, on his broad chest, as it whirled her round and round on the shifting coloured lights, on the steady pulse of the drums. They passed, and passed, and passed again, the open doors to the veranda where the flames flickered low in the braziers and the trees lifted airy crowns of silvered leaf to the stars.