Marjorie and Martha, exchanging glances, interpreted the situation as one which would be pleased to be rid of the possibility of their ironical comments on it. They said good night, as Mr Van, palely courteous as always, came into the drawing-room saying: ‘Well, ladies, I gather there’s the spirit of unrest abroad?’
‘Typical,’ said Marjorie, as the two young women separated to go to their homes. ‘When something does happen at last, where are we? Running around with Mrs Van and that awful Maynard female, and giving lectures on trade unionism to house servants.’
The avenues were quiet, but the street Martha lived in had groups of people sitting behind darkened windows, looking out. Presumably they had guns. As Martha approached her house, a young man with a gun bulging the khaki of his trousers stepped forward from under a tree where a group of young men had set themselves on guard. He said: ‘Excuse me, but I’m warning you, it’s not safe to walk around alone at night.’ ‘Oh, don’t be so damned silly,’ she said, noting that she sounded as dictatorial as Mrs Van, but they were all too far gone in their fantasies of heroism to understand this was a traitor, not merely a reckless citizen.
‘You get indoors quick,’ he said, ‘and don’t worry, sleep tight, we’ll be here standing guard all night. If the Government won’t do anything then we’ll have to, that’s all.’
Next morning the newspapers carried exhortations to keep calm and use moderation, under enormous headlines of Strike, Total Strike, National Strike, Threat, Danger, Alarm. And there was not a black face to be seen.
All the Africans were in their townships, because an order had gone forth that any African demanding admittance to a township must be let in, but that no African could be allowed out. The boundaries of the townships were patrolled by police and troops, and it was an offence for any white citizen to go near the townships. The second and third days were the same. People read the violent and exclamatory newspapers feeling expressed by them: while the radio, which continued to announce this national occasion like ‘a bloody old maid at a bloody tea party’, caused nothing but ill-feeling. In a house near Martha’s a man smashed his radio to express his emotions.
The telephones were worked overtime, not only with messages of consolation and support (white women did their own housework and looked after their own children for the first time in their lives) but for news. Which, however, tended to be the same, all over the country. When Mrs Huxtable’s cousin from the opposite end of the Colony to Jonathan Quest was telephoned he said: ‘All my kaffirs are at work, they don’t know what a strike is, and neither would yours if you didn’t educate them to read the newspapers.’ Farmers everywhere were for the most part untouched. For one thing, it was hard for men to strike from farm compounds from which they could be flushed like so many birds—unless they ran away, and many did. For another, the strike committees did not have the resources to travel thousands of miles from farm to farm. No, it was an affair of the towns, and of industry, proving finally those wiseacres to be right who had said that the good kaffirs were those who had not encountered the three Rs.
Martha rang Jack Dobie: he was delighted to be able to say that all his white trade unionists were furious at the efficiencies and discipline of a strike which proved that they, the white unions, could never again refuse membership to Africans because of the black man’s backwardness. ‘But they will, of course.’
Martha was telephoned by Solly, who had left the city for a friend’s house in a small town, because he was convinced he would be arrested by the authorities on account of his long career of seditious activity. He had sat waiting in his parents’ home for three days with everything packed ready for prison, but nothing happened. When he reached Braksdorp, he suddenly remembered it was only thirty miles from one of the largest mines in the Colony, where the strike was total. The authorities would imagine that Solly was responsible for the striking mineworkers, he thought. In which case, Martha would find, hidden under a stone urn in the Cohens’ garden, a full, documented account of his, Solly Cohen’s, work over the last seven years for the Africans. Martha was to hand this document to a suitable lawyer. ‘Very well, I shall. And how’s the strike with you?’ ‘Fine. Of course, the objectives are incorrectly formulated.’ ‘Oh, how should they be formulated?’ ‘But we can’t discuss that kind of thing over the telephone, the wires are probably tapped.’ ‘In that case, your document will have been filched from under the garden urn before I can get to it.’ ‘It doesn’t matter, because I’ve got copies of it here.’ ‘Cheer up, Solly, they’ll arrest you yet. I’d do it myself to make you happy.’
‘Very funny, I don’t think…’
On the fourth night, a telephone call from a friend of Maisie’s: Maisie did not have a telephone. Martha was to come at once. Mrs McGrew was so upset, she didn’t know what to do with herself.
Martha bicycled down to Maisie’s, which was no longer over the bar, but a few streets away. She had a large room in a house which supplied food. But it was more informal than a boarding-house. Maisie and the little girl Rita lived in a large room off a veranda which was as large as a second room. Maisie had many parties, or rather, her life was a permanent party, for she never arranged anything, people—men and women—dropped in at all hours. There were a couple of unattached women in the same house who lived the same way. And sometimes Flora came, if there was someone to sit with old Johnny. Maisie had cheap drink from the bar where she worked and the landlady let her use the kitchen as she liked. There were all the ingredients for good times. Few evenings Maisie did not bring home friends from the bar, or find them there, when she got in. Few evenings failed to prolong themselves till dawn. Maisie rose late, dawdled about, made cups of tea, did her nails, washed her hair and invented new hair-styles. Meanwhile, her little girl watched her. This child, who had a bed on the veranda outside the room, joined in the parties when she was awakened by the noise, got up and went to bed according to the lazy impulses of Maisie, was petted by the innumerable people who came to the house, was fed by the landlady when Maisie had a hangover. Kind gentlemen asked her for kisses and took her for drives. The granddaughter of the Maynards was leading the life of a prostitute’s child. But Maisie was not a prostitute. ‘After all, Matty,’ she said, looking upset—someone had said something not very nice to her in the bar: ‘There’s no harm in what I do. I like having men around, that’s my trouble. But my rent gets paid by my wages from the bar. Sometimes one of my friends gives me a present, but I never take money. No, that’s always been my greatest principle, I never take money from people.’ But, according to report, Maisie, the most inefficient barmaid in the history of the trade, was given her high wages and allowed to be late and lazy because she attracted so much custom to the bar.
At any rate, there was Maisie—enjoying life, as she said. And there was Rita. Rita Maynard, as Martha could not help calling her, privately.
When Martha stepped off her bicycle in the big, moonlit garden which was filled with pawpaws, grenadilla vines, moon-flowers, from which the veranda, filled with more plants, was separated only by a wooden trellis, the little girl Rita stood on the steps, a lighted room behind her. Rita, now six years old, looked much older. She was unfortunate physically—a great lump of a girl with heavy limbs and a thick neck. ‘Just like Binkie, drat him,’ as Maisie said. ‘Imagine, Matty, when Binkie and I decided to have some fun that time, we didn’t even take it so seriously. I mean, it wasn’t worth it, because now…’ But she did not say in so many words Rita was not the child she would have chosen. Black-browed, self-consciously smiling, awkward, more like a ten-year-old than a child of six (Martha could not help comparing her with Caroline) Rita stood outside a door through which Martha could see Mr and Mrs Maynard—large, heavy, black-browed, red-faced.
They sat side by side on a sofa, and opposite them sat Maisie, languid and sulky, fanning herself with a frond of leaves. The ceiling light, dim, rather yellow (the garden outside seemed brighter with moonlight than this room), was as much a source
of heat as of light.
Maisie’s mother, who had been invited to come into town to help with Rita because of the lack of servants, sat smiling nervously in a corner.
Maisie looked fat and hot and distressed, but the slow movement of her white hand with the leaves on it asserted her independence. Her face was irritated, but her body, flagrant in damp, blue cotton, knew they would go soon, and then her life could go on.
The room seemed full of hot, stuffy shadows.
There was a sweet smell—oversweet, insistent. Unconsciously they all kept looking for the source of the smell—too much, in the airless room.
Mrs Gale, a run-down, heat-drained woman, the widow of a small mineworker in a remote town, sat holding a saucer with a blob of pink pudding in it, for Rita. The pudding was melting in red and white streaks and it was this which smelled. Mrs Gale’s face had a look of distaste, while she sat conscientiously holding the saucer trying to nod and smile Rita towards her supper.
But Mrs Gale’s face was not only tired with the heat, it was strained because of her distrust of these two formidable people, the Maynards, and altogether she looked, because of her variety of expressions, as if she might either cackle with laughter, sneeze, or begin to cry. But the way she sat, the ease of it, the way her small feet in neat shoes were placed before her, the relationship between her hand and the saucer it held, came out of a different level of existence from anything in her face. Maisie and she were mother and daughter, the fat, blonde woman and the greying old one were, unmistakably, the same flesh. And Maisie’s irritation was probably partly due to the fact that inviting her mother here, to ‘show’ the Maynards, very likely, how unnecessary they were to Rita, had made things worse by emphasizing, by pushing down everyone’s throat, the extraordinary, fantastic, cruel facts of inheritance. For whose child was Rita? Maisie’s? No. Nor was she the grandchild of Mrs Gale. Perhaps Rita’s daughter might inherit this smiling ease of the flesh, but Rita, as she stood on the veranda trying to ignore the sweet, smelly pudding, smiling at her mother, examining the lady and the gentlemen who were such frequent and such upsetting visitors—she was a Maynard.
What bad luck, how savage! For if the genes had not fallen so, in such a pattern, how much easier to refuse the Maynards, to send them away when they came—so unbearably often, and more and more often, separately and together. And Maisie would have forgotten Binkie, have been able to accept, perhaps, another father for Rita, than the ghost of Athen.
In Maisie’s room, full of pictures of dogs, kittens and pretty ladies, there was no sign now of her dead husbands or of Binkie or of divorced Andrew. On a table all by itself, with a perky black ribbon pinned to its corner by a black-headed pin, was a Christmas card from Greece. Printed in the United States, this card had on it the picture of an Evzone, the Greek soldier in his kilt-like skirt and fancy pose. Like something out of a chorus, the Evzone smiled and said in Greek and in English: A Happy Christmas. Inside were the words: Dear Friend, thank you for your letters to Athen. I am told to instruct you: Athen was arrested the summer he came to his home. He died of an illness in the prison. His friends Themos, Manolis, Christis Melas had illness in prison at the same time as Athen.
There was no signature to this message.
This was all Maisie or Martha or any of them ever heard in reply to their many letters to Greece. Everyone who came to Maisie’s room was told about Athen. ‘Yes,’ Maisie had been heard to say: ‘if he hadn’t got sick in prison, then I would have gone to Greece to marry him.’ Sometimes late at night visitors saw Maisie pick up the card: she wept, in a moment of abstraction from the party which went on around her. They looked at each other, and poured her another drink. ‘Cheer up, Maisie,’ someone would say, ‘tears don’t bring back the dead.’ ‘You’re right,’ she said, as she sat letting the tears dry themselves on her cheeks, ‘but sometimes when I think of him my sorrow gets too much.’
In short, Athen was officially Maisie’s dead man and now she need never marry.
When Mr Maynard had picked up the card to enquire: ‘And who is this deceased gentleman?’ Maisie had held out her hand for it, looking him proudly in the face. ‘It’s nothing you would understand,’ she said.
The Maynards had descended on Maisie tonight because of the strike: if all the servants were locked in the townships, then Rita was without a nursemaid. ‘This is Mom,’ Maisie repeated. ‘This is my mom, she’s here to help with Rita.’
‘Of course,’ said Mrs Maynard, ‘it’s asking for trouble, having the child sleeping on the veranda, and even all through the rainy season.’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Maisie, and yawned.
After a moment, Maisie’s mother remarked, smiling politely, but stirring the melting pink blob around and around and around: ‘Maisie always slept on the veranda when she was little. She said she liked to see the stars.’
Mrs Maynard let out an explosive breath that sounded like Pah!
‘Surely she ought to be in bed, it’s after nine,’ Mr Maynard said.
‘It’s her bedtime when I say it is,’ said Maisie. Her irritation exploded in: ‘Mom, if Rita’s going to eat that jelly, but if not, it’s making me nervous.’
Mrs Gale held out the saucer to Rita, who unhappily smiled a refusal. The little girl was on the point of tears. Mrs Gale got up and took the saucer out of the room. When she came back, she had a piece of iced pink cake, which the child began cramming fast into her mouth, making crumbs everywhere. It was evident she was hungry.
‘Doesn’t Rita get a proper supper?’ said Mrs Maynard.
‘When you’ve finished that cake, Rita,’ Maisie said to the child, ignoring Mrs Maynard, ‘you must go with gran and have your bath.’
This was not the first time Martha had been a witness of this impasse which, as everyone knew, would go on for years yet. She hesitated on the veranda, no one knowing she was there, for some moments. But Rita had seen her: she must go in. She smiled socially at Mrs Maynard, nodded as coldly as she knew how at Mr Maynard, kissed Maisie’s damp, hot cheek, shook Mrs Gale by the hand. She sat beside Mrs Gale to make a demonstration of her loyalties.
‘Well, I suppose we might as well go?’ enquired Mr Maynard, of his wife, but Maisie said: ‘Please yourself.’ She sat fanning, fanning. The air from the moving frond of leaves quivered a tendril of hair on her fat neck under her ear, and shook the surface of a glass of water on the table. Globules of coloured light on the table top shook too. Rita, forgetting the grown-ups, was slowly drawn towards these patterns of light. She stood by her mother’s knees, and put her forefinger into the light, where it dissolved into a watery gold and rose. She took out her finger—behold, there it was! She put it into the light—it was gone. She smiled with pleasure and looked up at her mother. Maisie saw what she was doing, and smiled with her.
‘Look, mommy, my finger goes away.’
Rita held her finger in the magical dissolving light, and the two smiled at each other—close.
Mr Maynard looked at his wife and rose. She slowly got to her feet. Mr Maynard went out to the veranda, nodding at Maisie and at Mrs Gale. ‘He treats mom like a servant,’ Maisie complained afterwards—and snubbed him now by yawning as he went out. Mrs Maynard, with a smile partly wistful and partly peremptory, held out her hand to the little girl with the same impulsive, open-palmed gesture she had used for Mrs Van with the words: ‘a sensible person like you!’ She was offering the child, so to speak, her own defencelessness. Rita kept one forefinger in the pool of quivering lights, and almost offered her hand to the tall old woman bending over her. But she glanced quickly at her mother, and put her almost friendly hand behind her back. Mr Maynard, watching this incident from the veranda, let out a sort of bark or grunt, and said to Martha: ‘Martha, I’d like a word with you.’
Martha glanced at Maisie, Maisie shrugged. She went on fanning, fanning. Rita now tried to climb on her mother’s lap. ‘Oh, Rita,’ said Maisie, irritated; but then made herself smile as the great lump of a child clamber
ed awkwardly up. Maisie smiled sourly at the Maynards past Rita’s head; then Rita put her face down against her mother’s shoulder so that she, too, could receive the cool streams of air from the waving leaves.
‘Well?’ said Martha. Her dislike of the Maynards kept her face rigid. But she thought that only three days ago she had been a sort of aide to Mrs Maynard on the night the strike began. An unwilling, sour smile, like Maisie’s, came on to her lips: she could feel it there, and could not make it go away. She knew she was smiling from fear, as Maisie did. But Maisie was honest: ‘They scare me so much, Matty’ She, Martha, did not find it easy to admit how much these people frightened her. But—Lord! to be in the hands of these people, to be at the mercy of these great, charging, blundering…
Mr Maynard said to Martha: ‘It’s an absurd situation, impossible!’
‘How would you feel?’ demanded Mrs Maynard.
They were appealing to her, even commanding her, Martha: they, the Maynards, feeling themselves to be in the right, as they always were, stood confronting Martha, side by side, two great, strong, heavy-jowled people in their plated armours of thick, stiff cloth.
‘But whose fault is it, after all?’ Martha said, feebly, because she knew the futility of it.
‘But my dear…’
Mrs Maynard was smiling mistily at Martha, her lips quivered, and it was clear that she felt, and would always feel, that she was the victim of cruel circumstances.
Mr Maynard gazed past Martha into the room where mother and child sat together in the big chair. His eyes filled with tears and he turned and walked off the veranda. His wife followed, fumbling for the handkerchief which was hoisted, like a white flag, from the cuff of her sleeve.
In a moment they had been swallowed by the great car that stood waiting outside the rooming house.
‘They always park it in full view, just so everyone can say: Judge Maynard’s visiting Maisie again,’ Maisie complained continually, in frenzies of resentment and annoyance.