‘The divorce is nothing but a formality,’ said Martha. ‘I asked Mr Robinson.’
It cost Martha a good deal to say this—though of course the decisions had been made a long time ago.
Now Anton nodded; smiled, and said: ‘Yes, my researches into this subject confirm Mr Robinson’s view.’
The drawling tone he used for this, a kind of formal superciliousness, was not aimed at Martha, or at Mr Robinson, but at the processes of bureaucracy. Thus he had joked, drawling, about the little bits of paper.
‘If we start proceedings now, it will take about six months. Because there’s a long waiting list for divorces.’
‘Naturally. The war has held up civilized life long enough. Serious matters like divorce have had to wait.’
Martha laughed, quickly. This judicious humour of Anton’s, a creaking into irony, was new in him, a result, apparently, of his social life at the Forsters’: and she was grateful because of this Anton who could smile, laugh, even if with difficulty. There was a look of pride on his face at such moments, and he would glance at her as if to say: And you call me pompous!
‘One of us has to divorce the other,’ said Martha, continuing this conversation which they had had before. But not for some months—the arrival of the piece of paper, after years of waiting, had been a shock.
‘That’s logical enough.’
‘We can go on living in this flat because of the housing shortage, but one of us has to deny our bed to the other. I mean, we have to swear it in Court.’
And now Anton scrutinized his long hand, back and front, and a smile almost arranged itself on his face. And Martha thought: No, please don’t make a joke now, because I couldn’t laugh at it.
The point was, to use the language of the courts—conjugal relations had been resumed. A phrase which, as far as Martha was concerned, would do to sum it up. But for Anton it was not so simple—which was why this conversation was taking place. When Anton had gone into the bathroom, leaving her alone, she had known perfectly well that even now if she had put her arms around him, and murmured Anton, suppose we—then there would be no divorce.
As far as Martha was concerned, when they occasionally lay side by side in the narrow single bed, it was from good nature, from courtesy. But not long ago Anton had said: ‘We don’t do so badly, do we, Matty?’
And Martha could see that he really thought so.
She did not understand any of this, but it was because of Thomas. As far as she was able to sum it up, or even to think about it—which she tried not to do, because of the grief which accompanied thoughts of Thomas—her experience with Thomas had been so deep, in every way, that she was changed to the point that—but here it was that she was unable to go further.
Was she saying that because of the relationship she had had with Thomas, she was spoiled for anyone else? Surely not, it should be the other way around! But she did not know what had taken place between her and Thomas. Some force, some power, had taken hold of them both, and had made such changes in her—what, soul? (but she did not even know what words she must use) psyche? being?—that now she was changed and did not understand herself.
Surely she ought to have some inkling, be able to answer some of the questions? Here she was, Martha Quest—well, if you like, Martha Knowell, Martha Hesse (but she did not feel herself to be connected with any of these names) but here she was, a woman living now, many thousands of years after the human race had begun to think, to make statements about its condition, and surely she ought to be able to say: Such and such a thing has happened to me because I and Thomas loved each other.
But she could not use the word Love, for she did not know what it meant.
What did it mean that she had been married to Anton, when she knew quite well that when they parted, which would be soon, they would not even be able to hear what the other said, even for a short time.
So how could she say she had been married to Anton, and ‘in love’ with Thomas? Though of course she had never been ‘in love’ with Thomas; that particular fever, in its aspect either of sickness or of magic had had nothing to do with it. But what had been the essential quality of being with Thomas?
Well, she did not know. Something rather ordinary, perhaps? As if she had been eating superlatively good bread for some months, taking it for granted that of course one had good bread, and then, this marvellously simple good thing vanishing, she had looked around and found that after all there wasn’t much around. Yes, the best thing about being with Thomas (and this had been the essence of her self-deception and precisely what had prevented her from understanding the rarity of the combination Thomas, Martha) was that to be with Thomas was as natural as breathing. And even the long process of breaking-down—as they both learned to put it—for the other; of learning to expose oneself, was something they did together, acknowledging they had to do it. And to admit that it had been easy, because they were only putting into words each other’s thoughts. There had never been anything they could not say aloud, as soon as they thought it.
Last week she had walked into the office in Founders’ Street and there was Thomas. He was on the point of leaving for some village miles away. He had said to her: ‘Martha, do you ever think about when we loved each other?’
‘Well, what do you suppose?’
‘Yes, I know.’ He looked at her, frowning. Not at her—the frown was because he was having difficulty with finding thoughts. ‘You and I together—that wasn’t really what either of us expected, Martha.’
‘No. And all the time I was actually thinking—well, after all, I’m waiting to go to England, so this doesn’t really count.’
‘Yes. I know. And I used to think: this woman, she suits me better than any of the others—no, you’re smiling, you’re offended, you didn’t understand what I said!’
‘Yes, I did. Yes, that just about sums it up.’
‘I’ve been trying to think about it—something happened between us—I mean, not just loving each other.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘No one knows anything about that sort of thing, that’s what I’ve been thinking. We haven’t any idea about it really.’
‘Or about anything else, if it comes to that.’
‘Ah, well, now—but I can’t afford to admit that, Martha, no, I can’t. I spend all my time shouting at poor, bloody half-savages: plant this, plant that, dig boreholes, clean your teeth, wash your children. I wouldn’t be able to do that if I was thinking: I don’t know anything.’
A few days ago Martha had visited Maisie. ‘Isn’t it funny, Matty? Now I go to bed with people and you know, I don’t really care? I mean, I like it, don’t get me wrong. I like enjoying myself for them, but it’s quite different. I feel quite different, as if I’m in another room. Do you know what I mean, Matty? I mean, perhaps it’s because of my husbands being killed and then Andrew turning against me like that?’
Well, Martha knew what she meant, or thought she did—for how could one be sure if one knew what other people meant? It was the phrase, in another room. Yes, that was it. A couple of weeks ago, being alone in a small town with Jack Dobie, she had spent the night with him. Now, as far as he was concerned, they were having an affair and he was madly in love. His phrase. But Martha, ‘enjoying herself’ well enough, and even thinking—Good Lord, what sort of a fool is it who does without sex, even for a day, had been, was, in another room.
‘Do you know, Matty, I’ve discovered something. The reason why they like me, they like sleeping with me—’ Maisie, offering these intimate facts to Martha, would not use the words that went with them; she could say, they like me, but not, like sleeping with me, without a quick, frowning look at Martha to see how she was taking it. ‘The reason they like sleeping with me, if you know what I mean, it’s because I can do it so well because I feel as if I was somewhere else. I mean, when I think of Andrew, before he turned against me, I mean to say!’
It is likely, Martha said to herself, drawling it, as Anton drawled out t
he words he found so hard: ‘there is evidence to suggest’ that Thomas, when he went off to Israel, took a good part of me with him. A cliché. How many other clichés are there that I’ve been using all my life and never thought they meant something, after all? Because it is as if some part of me has died. What part? Or it is in another room, looking on. Yes. And the joke is, I’m going off to England (I am going to the sea, oh, soon, soon, because I shall go crazy soon if I can’t reach the sea), I’m going off to ‘begin life’ all over again, but how can one begin life, begin anything, when a part of oneself is Thomas’s prisoner saying, with him, that no one knows anything about anything?
‘The point is,’ said Martha, ‘Mr Robinson says the judges are all quite sensible and human these days. Because where could we desert each other to, if we decided to move out? One of us has to swear on oath that we have dramatically moved our bed into another room. We’re lucky to have another room, the way things are…We don’t actually have to move our bed, we just have to swear to it.’
A long silence. Martha and Anton sat on either side of the tiny room—so small their legs almost met in the middle. They looked at each other. They were both of them embarrassed at this sudden intrusion of the law (long-expected though it was) into their precarious balances. They had not expected this embarrassment, this pain for the other’s situation.
After all, they had been married for four years. According to their lights they had nothing to reproach themselves with. It had almost been an arranged marriage, could almost be described as a marriage of convenience. Here they sat after four years of it, and at least they had given each other space to find consolation, they had not quarrelled—not destructively, at least; had not done each other damage. Martha had behaved well, by waiting until Anton was naturalized; Anton had behaved well, by taking it for granted that she would behave well. They had both of them behaved in what both would describe as a civilized way. So while they were not married, nor ever had been, there was nothing to be ashamed of. And they felt for each other a kind of dry, patient compassion—well, that was something.
‘Let’s toss for it,’ said Martha.
She expected Anton to say she was frivolous. Instead, he smiled, took out a coin and said: ‘Heads or tails?’
‘Tails.’
He won. And would therefore next day instruct his lawyer to sue Martha for divorce unless she immediately restored conjugal rights.
Meanwhile, they separated to attend to other business; Martha to find out how soon she could get a passage to England, and he to visit the Forsters, who expected him to lunch. He had not said anything at all about going to Germany.
Her life was again full of runnings-about and around—it was not only a question of being divorced and going to England.
Marjorie, who had taken over Martha’s role as general dogsbody, was run down, the doctor said, and needed to take things easy. Marjorie came to Martha: ‘Of course, if you don’t believe in anything any more, then you must just say so!’
‘But I’m not going to be here for long.’
‘But Matty, you’ve said that for years!’
‘Look, Marjorie, I’ll help you, of course.’
‘I can see you don’t want to—nobody cares, nobody cares about anything. I suppose it’s because of that book. Well, I think the book should have the opposite effect, not making everybody destructive and lazy!’
It was ‘the book’ which was the reason for the new (though brief) period of activity. What was ‘the book’?—they all referred to it like this, not by the title or by the author’s name, as if it did not matter what it was. And in a way it did not, there were so many of them by now. This one had been written by a Russian peasant who had been caught up in the 1917 Revolution and become a minor official. He had come under the eyes of the authorities as early as the late ’twenties, and for some years had suffered imprisonment, persecution, etc. Having escaped, he was in America, writing books like this one, which was the first to reach the group—or what remained of it. Marjorie read it first—in tears. She had given it to Colin, but he said he was too busy. Being pressed by Marjorie: ‘This is really important, dear,’ he had read a chapter and said it was badly written. Marjorie took it to Betty Krueger who said she was sure it had been written by the FBI and that Timofy Gangin did not exist. Boris said he did not have time for bad journalism. Besides, where had Marjorie got this book? It had been sent to her through the post, she suspected it had come from Solly—well, of course, then, what else did one expect? That dirty…
Martha read it. If this was true, then everything she had been saying for the last seven years was a lie. But perhaps it was exaggerated?—after all, a man imprisoned unjustly was bound to be bitter and to exaggerate? That word, exaggerate…it rang false, it belonged to a different scale of truth. Reading this book, these books, it was her first experience, though a clumsy, unsure one, of using a capacity she had not known existed. She thought: I feel the book is true—although it is badly written, crude, sensational. Well, what does that mean, to feel something is true, as if I’m not even reading the words of the book, but responding to something else. She thought, vaguely: if this book were not on this subject, but about something else, well, the yardsticks I use would say: yes, this is true. One has an instinct one trusts, yes…
Martha gave the book to Anton. At first he said: ‘I’m not going to read this trash.’ But he read it, dropping, as he did so, sarcastic remarks about the author’s character—an unpleasant one, he said. Then he became silent. Well, nothing new about that. Martha waited, while the book lay on the table, apparently discarded. Then Anton said: ‘After all, they aren’t saints, they were bound to make mistakes.’ And off he went to the Forsters, just as if he were not aware of the enormity of this remark. He did not mention the book again—and was not talking at all about Germany.
The book, in fact, most sharply raised the question of Anton. What role, then, did Anton, bitter and experienced old-guard communist from the heyday of the Communist Party in Germany, present himself to the Forsters, who were, after all, rich capitalists—to describe them as Anton did himself.
Martha had met people who were visitors at the Forster home. Apparently Anton was a great success. ‘Treated just like a son,’ one woman had said, with the intention of annoying Martha. ‘Or like a son-in-law?’ Martha had replied.
Granted that Anton’s efficiency had transformed a whole department administered by a friend of Mr Forster—granted that it appeared no decisions could be made without him: but how did Mr Forster deal with the fact that Anton was a German, and a well-known Red? Well, the fact that he was a German was no problem at all. Anton in the Forster house was, or had been, ‘the good German’ for as long as being German had been a difficulty. It was no longer. After all, our gallant ally, Russia, had been transformed again into a nation of serfs groaning under the tyrant Stalin, just as if the war had not occurred; and Mr Forster had done business with Germany before the war and was making arrangements to do business again. He found the Germans reliable, efficient, and good company, and the German cities were clean—it was the only country in Europe whose water he had been prepared to drink straight from the tap. Many a pleasant evening he had had with German businessmen in their beer cellars before that unfortunate business, the war, had taken place. He thought the sooner Germany was again united as a bastion against communism the better; he was most interested to hear about Anton’s political experiences in the ’thirties…and the fact that he had been a communist? Well, what more natural, if he had had a hard time as a child? Mr Forster had been a socialist himself, at university. And the fact that Anton was working class by origin? It turned out this was a point in Anton’s favour too. Mr Forster’s father had been a poor boy in Scotland, and he was disposed to approve of people getting to the top by their own ability, which was why he, Richard Forster, was in Zambesia: he was impatient of the class system of his own country.
So what it amounted to was: Anton was almost a son of the house,
because, not in spite of the fact, of his past. Everything that had made him, everything that had been his deepest experience, had become salt to the Forsters’ pie.
And Bettina Forster, the daughter who (as Martha was naturally predisposed to see it) was likely to have something in common with Martha? How did she see Anton, this man who was, after all, a clerk in the railways, even if her father’s closest friend did say that he couldn’t run the department without him? In what way was this woman (described as pretty, intelligent, neurotic) the successor to Grete and to Martha? It seemed she was a liberal of some kind, she thought something ought to be done about the natives, and she might even go into Parliament or the Town Council. So Anton Hesse was going to be the son-in-law of a big businessman whose rebellion against society had been exhausted after he had said he would not submit himself to the class nonsense in the old country, whose wife said he was a poor, dear, brave boy, and whose daughter would find his political experience absolutely invaluable in getting a seat on the Council or in Parliament.
And he refused to attend a meeting summoned by, or at least caused by, Solly Cohen; on the grounds that ‘he didn’t want to have anything to do with Trotskyist traitors, thanks very much!’
Solly had sent verbal invitations through Marjorie to anyone who was still interested, to meet himself and an African contact. Which African? Oh no, they must wait and see!
But Marjorie had become for all of them the source, or at least the spreading-point, of the disquiet caused by ‘the book’.