‘Martha,’ said Thomas. ‘I’ll tell you something, because I feel like saying it. It isn’t true but if I was struck dead now I wouldn’t care.’
‘Of course,’ said Martha, laughing in her stomach, though her face was too stiff with sorrow to laugh. ‘Of course.’
Then it was very late and there was no music. People sat around the tables in a cold, late starlight. Now a small moon was half-risen behind the hill. The braziers revealed themselves to be cylinders of rusted iron punched with jagged holes, full of grey ash where a rosy gold glowed and dimmed as the wind came eddying down the hill past rocks and tree trunks.
The waiters stood yawning against the pillars of the verandas, tired, black men in dinner jackets and white aprons. The trees, like white birds tinted by dawn light or starlight, lifted their shadowed branches.
Millicent was lying with her wild, loosened hair spread over Anton’s chest. Martha watched, friendly and compassionate, how her husband gently, tenderly, lifted this half-drunk woman into a more comfortable position and looked down into her face. They all watched Anton, unconscious of himself and of them, as he smiled protectively at the woman sleeping against him. They all smiled at each other. No one wanted to go home. The tables were still full of people. The waiters stood and yawned in vain.
Martha had again discovered her hand. She sat opening and shutting her hand. It was monstrously, unbelievably ugly, like a weapon. Maisie had been crying. Her face was stretched with woe. It was a mask of dragging pain. One side of her mouth was pulled down, as if with pain or because it was paralysed. Her eyes were inflamed, they looked like little pig’s eyes. Then it seemed as if one eye was a great, red, scarred socket. Martha shook her head to clear her sight, and saw Maisie, a tired woman with a sad, smiling face looking at Athen. Martha’s hand provided fresh revelations. The shape made by her forefinger and thumb touching each other—it was like a revelation of brutality. Her hand was like a pair of pincers, the claw of a lobster, something cold and predatory. She looked at her left hand, astounded by its cruelty. Meanwhile her right was in the depths of Thomas’s hand, through which she received simple messages of warm health.
Her left hand, her hand—never had there been such an extraordinary thing as that circle of bone, lightly laid with flesh, like the beak of a bird, like a mouth opening and shutting, like…
Athen sat smiling. He said: ‘I’ll never forget tonight.’ Maisie turned her face towards him. Martha could only see the back of a coil of fair, loosened hair, a helpless-looking fat neck. Athen smiled gravely, from a distance, into the supplicating woman’s face.
Martha was full of pain for Maisie. She wanted to say to Athen—but what? Some kind of demand, a protest. Her mind worked fast, registered everything within miles—she felt everything together, the starlight thinning overhead, the charred smell of chilling iron from the braziers, stale, sour wine, cold metal from the table top. Thomas’s warm hand, the dark smell from the river. She was fused together and what she felt made it impossible that Athen should at last gravely bow to Maisie and go away from her to Greece.
She fought with her tongue, and at last said: ‘What about you?’ Incredible aggression had forced that question out, she had put behind it the energy of pure resentment. But it came out blurred; in spite of everything she felt her face set in a smile.
Athen looked at her courteously, distant.
He said: ‘Did you say something to me, Martha?’
‘Matty’s tight,’ said Anton.
‘Of course I’m tight,’ she said, clearly, smiling, proving that her tongue was not paralysed after all.
They went to the car. In a group of people behind them were Mr Tressell and Mrs Tressell—Sergeant Tressell and his wife. But Thomas did not look, he did not turn to look, it seemed he had forgotten his enemy, Sergeant Tressell. Behind them the hotel, apparently deserted, burned a hundred lights which went out, all at once. The stars had been absorbed into the thin grey of an early morning sky. But over the Indian Ocean the sun was rising, for a dark line of trees in the east marked a low horizon behind which a faint glow of rose pulsed strongly into pearl-grey cloud.
Before they started the car a bird had woken, tried its voice, and gone silent again.
Martha wanted to get into the back seat with Thomas, but order again prevailed, and she was in the front seat with Anton. Behind her, Millicent slept on Thomas’s shoulder, and Maisie sat bolt upright, her pale cheeks shaking with the movements of the car. In the centre of each cheek was a wild spot of pink, and her eyes were red with tears. Athen dozed. His head fell sideways on to Maisie’s shoulder. Martha saw the girl push her coat away from the bare skin of her shoulder, so that Athen’s head could lie on it.
So Maisie sat, hardly breathing, while Athen’s head lay shaking defenceless on her shoulder.
The others were all aware of Maisie and what she felt, and the car sped in silence across the hillsides under a reddening sky.
Chapter Four
Jack Dobie and Martha sat opposite each other in Dirty Dick’s. Jack, to please Martha, had asked Johnny Capetenakis to cook special food, and they were eating it; although Jack did not like this food, kebabs on saffron rice, and would rather have been eating eggs and chips with the other customers.
Jack had been appointed member of a Select Committee on the condition of urban Africans. There were few suitable statistics. He was engaged in collecting facts and figures, at his own expense, in his home town of Gotwe, and he wanted Martha to go down for a few days, to help him. Besides, he wanted to have an affair with her.
Martha was refusing to go because she did not want to leave this town, which meant, now, the loft among the trees, or to miss any chance of seeing Thomas.
Jack sat with his scarcely touched plate in front of him, his chin aggressively stuck out, his eyes focused on his point, which was that he insisted on sensible explanations from Martha.
Martha ate Jack’s food as well as her own and laughed and said No, said No, said No, said she was sorry, but of course she would if only insuperable obstacles did not intervene.
This scene, occurring as often as it does in life, is too often overlooked in fiction in favour of the more explosive moments: Yes, I will go to Gotwe with you, but I am risking my marriage, yes, I will leave my husband if you will leave your wife, do you love me? I might have loved you if only…
Jack found Martha attractive; a man married to a woman who increasingly disapproved of everything he was and did (she was a socially ambitious girl who had never imagined herself as the wife of a crusading Member of Parliament); a man who would have, and probably already had, invited Marjorie or Betty or any other attractive woman to Gotwe, Jack did not really care whether Martha said Yes or not.
For her part she liked him, would do anything not to hurt his feelings short of going to bed, and would do that if not otherwise engaged; hoped he was not the sort of man to let vanity disrupt a pleasant working relationship—Martha found this scene irritating on the whole because she was so involved with Thomas.
Meanwhile, one part of her mind was thinking, while she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Jack: So, you think if I did go to bed with you, it would be just another charming experience, do you? Hmmmm, well, what a pity I can’t show you…And he was thinking: If only I could get her there, I’d show her a thing or two. In short, this scene of modern gallantry was running its usual course.
Meanwhile, Martha moved salt cellars and sauce bottles about, and thought that she and Thomas, their feeling for each other, their relationship—whatever was the right word for it—was in an altogether new dimension. They were in deep waters, both of them. And neither understood it, could not speak about it.
Together in the loft, they spoke less. They were in the loft less often. To be together was like—she could not say. It was true for Thomas, too, because when they looked at each other, the sensation of sinking deeper and deeper into light was stronger. Being together was, for both of them, a good deal more than Martha bei
ng with Thomas. Sometimes it was so intense, they could not stand it, and separated. Or the loft seemed too high, too fragile, too small, and they left it and walked very fast through the streets. But this could only happen at night, because of the danger of being seen. Sometimes when they made love it was so powerful they felt afraid, as if enormous forces were waiting to invade them. But they did not know what this meant.
‘What it amounts to,’ Jack was saying, ‘is that you are going to make the only progressive Member of Parliament apart from Mrs Van miss two days of the Parliamentary sessions because you won’t give up two days’ love-making with Thomas?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, when my turn comes, I shall insist on the same treatment.’
‘But that goes without saying!’
She told Anton she was going to Gotwe for a few days to do some work for Jack Dobie.
She had realized this could not be a casual announcement. Remarks dropped by Anton recently had told her that he was convinced her affair with Thomas was over and that she had a new lover. But why should he think this? Because, she realized, his affair with Millicent was ending or over. She thought: How extraordinary, Anton does not know, except with that part of himself that makes love to me on a compulsion of rivalry, though of course he would put other names to it, whether I’m with another man or not. His mind would not be able to say. But I know what kind of an evening he’s had with Millicent by looking at him.
They were in the little bedroom. It was cold. He wore thick, dark blue, flannel pyjamas, and she wore a white, frilled nightdress she had bought thinking of Thomas. She wore a quilted, red jacket over it. There they were, Anton and Martha, Mr and Mrs Hesse, side by side in their twin-bedded room.
She knew there was tension between them because muscles tightened in her lower stomach. She picked up a nail-file and began work on her nails.
His long, white hands lay on his knees. She watched his hands sideways over the flying bit of glinting metal that shaped her nails, and thought: If I look at Thomas’s hands, it is as if they were holding me, but Anton’s hands, they might belong to someone I’d just met.
But if that were true—why was her stomach tightening? Somewhere at the back of her consciousness the knowledge began to hammer, just how terrible a crime she had committed by marrying Anton, by marrying Douglas…against herself and against them. But how was she to have foreseen the world she would enter when she loved Thomas? Why had no one told her it existed in a way that she could believe it? How strange it was—marriage and love; one would think, the way newspapers, films, literature, the people who are supposed to express us talk, that we believe marriage, love, to be the desperate, important, deep experiences they say they are. But of course they don’t believe any such thing. Hardly anyone believes it. We want them to believe it. We want to believe it. Perhaps people will believe it again.
The way things are, for the second time Martha looked at a stranger across a bedroom and thought, how was it that no one made me feel that it could matter, marrying someone.
‘Matty?’ said Anton, suddenly, in a low voice.
She said: ‘Look, Anton, what’s the point?’
He came over, sat by her, put a long arm through which she could feel a lank, flat bone around the cage of her ribs, put his cheek against hers. She could feel the papery dryness of his lips moving against her cheek.
Her body, wrenched out of its loyalty to Thomas, instantly began to ache.
She said: ‘No, Anton, please not, it’s so silly.’
‘When we’ve both finished playing around, Matty.’
She said: ‘Anton, you know you and I are no good together…don’t be angry,’ she added weakly.
‘Angry. Well, that’s a funny way of putting it.’ He went off to the bathroom, angry, miserable. When he came back he got straight into bed, turned his back, switched off the light. Left sitting upright in the dark, she put aside her nail-file and lay down.
He said: ‘Well, if you’re going to play the fool like this, I’m going off for a few days myself.’
‘But Anton, believe me, I’m not having an affair with Jack.’
He was silent, waiting for her to go on.
She nearly said: ‘What’s happened with Millicent?’ But she waited, just as he waited.
At last he said: ‘Well, don’t imagine I’m going to be left on the shelf.’
She said, placating, soft, ‘humorously’, ‘But Anton, we did agree, didn’t we, that we’d leave each other free while we waited for a divorce.’ Even saying this made her muscles ache, so she knew it was all terrible nonsense. However, on this level they ‘got along’, so on this level they must continue.
He said: ‘Very well then, I know what to do.’
Next day he told her he was going to spend a few days with the Forsters, a rich businessman and his family. He had met Mr Forster one day when lunching with his superior in the railways. ‘He’s not a bad sort of type,’ he had said of him afterwards.
Meanwhile, she rang Thomas to make sure she would not miss one of his visits to town, and he said that since his farm was on the way to Gotwe, why didn’t she and Jack drop in for lunch?
‘You want me to come to the farm?’—meaning, You want me and your wife to meet?
‘Yes, yes. Why not? It means I’ll see you. Yes, I’d like you to come.’
Jack was pleased. He liked nothing more than visiting farms. His great grandparents had been small farmers, and when he retired he proposed to farm fruit himself. In his youth he was a shipworker on the Clyde. In this country he had been for decades a railway-worker and a Member of Parliament concerned with industrial matters. But how he really saw himself, he said, was as a farmer; his real life would begin when at fifty-five he tended pears and peaches on a plot which he had already bought, in the mountains.
This was how Martha visited Thomas’s farm, how she saw Thomas’s wife and the little girl. She never forgot that day. It was a heightened, painful day—not one she would have missed, far from it. But afterwards, when she had only to shut her eyes to see the picture of Thomas with his little girl, the day shifted its emphasis. The rest became blurred, a scene of magnificent mountains and somewhere off among the shrubs the sound of Thomas’s wife, laughing. But she kept seeing Thomas, stretching out his hands to the little girl.
Jack picked her up about ten in the morning, in his old lorry. He drove very fast. This long journey across two hundred miles of veld was something he had to do three, four times a week, when Parliament was sitting. Almost at once they were in open country. It was a cold, clear day, with white clouds driving fast overhead. In all directions swept the flattening dry-cold grass of winter, it was all miles of pale gold, then blue-green kopjes, then pale blue sky where the clouds swept. Everything was high, austere and in movement. Across empty miles poured the wind which battered against the lorry, so that it tugged and swerved to leave the road. She was exhilarated, and looked at Jack to share it. He felt her looking and smiled and said: ‘Here I am, mad with love for you, driving you to meet your lover.’
‘Not all that mad, I hope.’
‘And how long has it been?’
‘Has what been?’
‘You with Thomas?’
She had to think—‘Some months. A year. Something like that.’
‘I thought you and Athen were having a thing together.’
‘Well, give us all time, and I suppose we’d all have affairs with each other.’
‘He’s a fine laddie, that one.’
‘He’s going back to Greece next month.’
‘Is he now?’ Jack clicked his tongue. Never had so many hearts—in their political aspect—been broken so fast and so thoroughly as in the first few months of that Labour Government. Jack’s was the one worst hit. An old socialist, life-time Labour Party supporter, when the Labour Party got in in 1945, his oldest dream came true.
Now he was bitter. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if I were in Greece now I’d become a communis
t, just to show what I think of Labour—I couldn’t say fairer than that, could I?’
‘Athen had a letter saying he mustn’t go home, he’ll be arrested as he arrives. Last week they let all the collaborators out of prison, and they’re arresting the left. And a lot more of Athen’s friends have gone to the mountains.’
‘We’ve had some fine people through this country, with the war.’
Quite so: this country, her life, Jack’s life—everybody’s life, that was the point—empty spaces through which people blew like bits of paper.
She said: ‘Maisie’s in love with Athen. But I mean, really in love.’
He said at once in the bluff, no-nonsense voice which shouts disapproval: ‘Well, that young woman’s been in love often enough.’
She said, not by any means for the first time: ‘You forget, she’s been widowed twice.’
He was silent, but his mouth twisted in a small, knowledgeable smile.
She persisted: ‘Maisie’s the sort of girl who’d have stayed married to her first husband. But he was killed.’
‘Well, it’s not my affair.’
‘It’s funny though. We still talk about people, we make judgements just as if there hadn’t been five years of war. What sort of sense does it make, saying about Maisie—she’s been in love too often, when you think of what’s happened to her?’
Again the small, knowledgeable smile—an ugly smile, horrid, on whoever’s face it comes.
‘Don’t you see, it comes out of a different sort of thing altogether—talking like that. It really is funny how we’ve gone back to talking as if the war didn’t happen.’
‘I haven’t noticed we don’t talk about it!’