‘You don’t mind us plotting in your restaurant, but you won’t sell our newspapers?’
‘I can’t stop you plotting, but I won’t sell your newspapers.’
The private room at the back had a large table in its centre, covered with a very white damask cloth on which stood every imaginable variety of sauce and condiment. Solly was waiting.
‘I can’t sit down,’ said Martha, ‘because I’m late.’
‘Oh go on…’ Solly pushed forward a chair, and Martha sat, suddenly, closing her eyes, and scrabbling for a cigarette which Solly put between her lips already lit. ‘If you’ll take a cigarette from a dirty Trotskyist.’
‘I thought Joss was going to be here?’
‘Ah you’ll take a cigarette from a dirty Trotskyist if protected by a clean Stalinist?’
‘Oh Lord, Solly, I’ve only just come, have a heart.’
Here entered Johnny Capetenakis, smiling.
‘What have you got to eat? asked Solly.
‘Fried eggs, chips and sausages,’ said Johnny, wiping the glittering white of the cloth with another cloth.
‘I mean food.’
‘Ah, why didn’t you say so? A nice kebab? Saffron rice? Stuffed peppers?’
‘How about you, Matty?’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Everything you’ve got that’s food—twice. My brother’ll be here in a minute.’
‘Right, Mr Cohen.’
He stood smiling, but Joss had turned to Martha, and the Greek switched on a couple more lights and drew a curtain across panes that showed a sudden dark where the stars already blazed.
He stood looking out, his hand on the sill, an ageing man glad of a moment’s chance to rest. Solly turned to see why he was still there and said: ‘Sit with us a minute, Johnny?’
‘Thanks for inviting me, but I’m a cook short tonight.’
‘Heard anything from home?’
Johnny shook his head. ‘Nothing good for your side or for mine and nothing will be.’
‘There’ll be a communist government in Greece after the war,’ said Solly. ‘But I’m as much against it as you are.’
Johnny looked to see if he were joking; then he shrugged. ‘My brother was always the one for politics. It’s not for me. My brother’s wounded.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Martha, politely.
‘My cousin in Nyasaland got a letter but it was from last year, it came down from Cairo. My brother was wounded, but only in his leg.’
As Solly said nothing Martha said: ‘I’m sorry,’ again, and took Solly’s critical look with a smile.
‘Yes, Mrs Hesse, I suppose the good God knows what he is doing. But there’s not much left of my family, there’s not much left of Greece by the time the war ends. Communist or not communist. If the war ever does end.’ He nodded at them, sombre, and went out.
‘All right then,’ said Martha, ‘but then why do we use this place practically as another office?’
‘Get as much out of the dirty little fascists as we can, that’s why.’
‘Oh, is that it? Well, what did you get me here for?’
‘Don’t be in such a hurry.’
‘I am in a hurry.’ She got up, to prove it.
‘All right, all right. I’m in contact with some contacts in the Coloured quarter. As of course you know. There’s a group of decent types. The point is, they’ve got a study group going with some Africans. Joss and I met them.’
‘Joss?’ said Martha, disbelieving.
Here Joss came in, with a brief smiling nod at both of them. He sat down opposite his brother. He was in civilian clothes. The only sign he had been in the army was a red scar down his right hand—a gun had exploded in Somaliland last year and for him the war was already over. Four years in the army had burned out his youth. He had been an earnest student: now one could already see what he would look like in middle age. Except when you looked him straight in the eyes, you were looking at a Jewish business man.
Solly on the other hand had not changed at all: he was still like a student.
‘I’ve ordered,’ said Solly to his brother.
‘Good.’
Joss waited, smiling. Martha waited. Solly said nothing.
‘I’m in an awful hurry,’ Martha said.
‘OK, OK, so you’re in a hurry,’ said Solly.
She understood suddenly that this meeting was some sort of joke, or private triumph of Solly’s and that Joss did not know she was here ‘for a serious discussion’.
‘Oh it really is too bad,’ she said, and her voice shook, although she tried to make it ‘humorous’.
‘What’s going on?’ said Joss. He spoke gently. He had understood, already, that she was on edge through one of the intuitive flashes of understanding by which human beings in fact understand and regulate their behaviour with each other. He, too, now lit a cigarette and handed it to her. ‘Keep your hair on and tell your Uncle Joss all about it.’
‘It’s so damned silly,’ said Martha. ‘For months and months, nothing happens. Suddenly it seems the Africans are really starting something at last. Then we hear that there is Solly, with his oar well in, having his say. Well, naturally I suppose.’
‘Naturally,’ said Solly.
‘Yes. But here you are, it seems you’re with Solly?’
‘God forbid,’ said Joss, humorous. But Martha kept her eyes on him and at last he said seriously: ‘If you’re asking my advice, I think the contradictions should be kept out of it.’ This word, contradictions, was shorthand in this time for everything the Soviet Union did which went against what might be expected of that nation in her socialist aspect. Which meant, of course, everything. Except winning the war.
‘Ah,’ said Martha thoughtfully, and looked at Joss with interest. He smiled, as if to say: Yes, I mean it.
‘Except that it’s not for you to keep the contradictions out of anything,’ said Solly. ‘You don’t even know who these Africans are.’
‘Then why did you ask Matty here at all?’ said Joss.
‘An interesting point,’ said Solly, grinning. She looked at him—at first incredulous, then reproachful, then, seeing nothing but triumph, angry. She was blushing.
‘Nonsense,’ she said energetically to Joss.
Joss had looked carefully at Solly, then at Martha, noting his brother’s air of triumph and Martha’s annoyance. He came to conclusions, and inwardly removed himself from the situation. ‘All that’s got nothing to do with me.’
‘Oh,’ said Martha, furious. ‘How absolutely—Solly said I was to come here because of some African group.’
‘Awfully touchy, isn’t she?’ said Solly to his brother, echoing, for Martha, a situation a decade old, and arousing in her a remembered confusion of bitterness that made her pick up her bag ready to go. She was white, and she trembled. Anybody would think something serious had happened.
‘Ah Matty, man,’ said Joss gently, ‘relax, take it easy. Don’t take any notice of my little brother. Everyone knows he’s just a troublemaker.’ With which he offered his brother an unsmiling smile: he stretched his mouth briefly across his face and let it fall into seriousness again. Solly sat and grinned, rocking his chair back and forth.
‘Look,’ said Martha direct to Joss, ‘I think your attitude is awfully…but I suppose you can’t help him being your brother. The point is this. Solly’s got this contact with an African group. But one of our people has a contact with it too, and he’s—Solly is—trying to blacken us. Well, I think he is,’ she added, fair at all costs, and even looking at Solly in a way which said: I hope I am not maligning you. Which look Joss noted, and so, Martha felt at once, misinterpreted.
‘Which of us has got a contact with this group?’ Joss asked Martha. She stared back in embarrassed amazement. Joss was asking her in front of Solly? Had Joss gone crazy? Or—was it possible?—had Joss, too, ‘gone bad’?
‘It is none other than Athen, your Greek comrade,’ said Solly, for Martha.
Here Johnny Capetenakis came in, with two plates balanced on his two held-out palms, his face offering them a gratified smile which preceded the food like its smell—a hot teasing aroma of garlic, lemon and oil. He set before Joss, before Solly, spikes stuck with glistening pieces of lamb, lightly charred onion rings, tiny half-tomatoes, their skins wrinkled and dimmed with heat and their flesh sprinkled with rosemary, smooth whole mushrooms, curls of bacon striped pink and white. These were displayed on large mounds of yellow rice.
‘Without you, we’d die of hunger,’ said Joss.
‘I’m still using the saffron from before the war,’ said the Greek. ‘When it’s finished, then I really don’t know.’
‘You’ll have to grow it,’ said Martha.
‘The war’s going to end, cheer up,’ said Joss.
Johnny stood smiling benevolently as the brothers began to eat. Then he went out.
‘Athen and Thomas Stern,’ said Solly.
‘Oh, is Thomas back in town, good,’ said Joss. He looked up for some bread and there was Martha, still standing and waiting. ‘I’m here,’ he excused himself, ‘to eat kebab with my little brother. I didn’t know there was anything else.’
‘Then I’m going.’
‘Yes. I’ll deal with my ever-loving brother for you.’
‘Obviously.’
‘What do you want me to do? If the Africans have started something—then about time too, and we should help them. And keep the nonsense out of it—the contradictions.’
He did not look up—his head was bent over his food. Martha stood watching the brothers eat. She was hungry, but she had promised to eat with her mother. Inside her opened up the lit space on to which, unless she was careful (this was not the moment for it), emotions would walk like actors and begin to speak without (apparently) any prompting from her. This empty lit space was because of the half-dozen rooms she had to run around, looking after. The tall lit space was not an enemy, it was where, at some time, the centre of the house would build itself. She observed, interested, that it was now, standing there looking at the Cohen boys, the antagonists, that the empty space opened out under its searchlights.
Feeling her silence, first Joss, then Solly, lifted their heads to look at her. She saw the two men, both with loaded forks in their hands, their heads turned sideways to look at her. She began to laugh.
‘She thinks we are funny,’ said Joss to Solly.
‘She’s laughing at us,’ said Solly to Joss.
‘Well, I’ll see you around, anyway,’ she said to Joss.
‘I don’t think you will.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m thinking of settling up North. I’m going up to spy out the land tomorrow.’
‘Ah, I see!’ Everything explained at last, Martha began to laugh again. She stopped, as she felt this laughter begin to burst up like flames, in the middle of the great empty space.
‘She sees,’ said Solly to Joss.
‘But what does she see?’ said Joss to Solly.
‘I might have known,’ said Martha. ‘Joss is leaving the country, and so of course he doesn’t care. And neither would I, in his place.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Joss, suddenly, not looking at her, but filling his mouth.
‘There won’t be anybody left in this place a week after the war ends. Off you all go, and the moment you leave, it’s just too bad about us.’ She left the intimate, odorous little room with the two men bent over their plates, pressed her way through the tables crammed with the RAF, said goodbye to Johnny at the entrance desk, and gained the fresh air and her bicycle. She was thinking: Damn Joss. Suddenly she remembered his ‘speak for yourself’. It occurred to her, for the first time, that perhaps he was there under false pretences too, and that in fact he was concerned to stop Solly knowing what he was up to? In which case, she was an idiot, had proved herself an utter…She bent to unlock her bicycle, and Solly’s arms came around her waist from behind.
A couple of weeks ago there was a meeting on the Allied invasion of France—‘Second Front: At last!’ Solly had been there, heckling. He had waited outside afterwards, to heckle again, privately. He and Martha had walked through the emptying streets, in bitter argument, their antagonism fed by their ten years’ knowledge of each other. Outside Martha’s door they had embraced, violently, as if they had been flung together.
‘Sex,’ Solly had said, ‘the great leveller,’ and she had laughed, but not enough.
Now she turned, swiftly, putting the bicycle between herself and Solly. Grinning, he laid his hand on her shoulder, where it sent waves of sensation in all directions.
‘Surely, you’d admit there’s some meeting-ground?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘Liar.’
‘What did you have in mind, that we’d go rolling around over the pamphlets in the office, in between calling each other names like dirty Trotskyist?’
‘Dogmatic Stalinist, these things can always be managed, if there’s a will.’
‘But there isn’t.’
Martha knew she was smiling, direct into his smiling face. She could not stop. Their faces approached each other as if a hand behind either head pushed them together. They stood on the pavement, the bicycle between them, and a third of an inch of glass between them and the customers inside the Piccadilly. The bicycle pedal grazed Martha’s bare leg, and she said ‘Damn,’ and pulled herself away.
‘What a pity,’ said Solly softly.
‘Yes, I daresay.’
She got on her bicycle and pedalled off.
If she lived, precariously, in a house with half a dozen rooms, each room full of people (they being unable to leave the rooms they were in to visit the others, unable even to understand them, since they did not know the languages spoken in the other rooms) then what was she waiting for, in waiting for (as she knew she did) a man? Why, someone who would unify her elements, a man would be like a roof, or like a fire burning in the centre of the empty space. Why, then, was she allowing herself to respond to Solly as she had the other night, and would again, unless she made certain she wouldn’t meet him? What had she got in common with Solly—except sex, she added, but couldn’t laugh, for the truth was she was in a flaming, irritable, bad temper. She cycled like a maniac between lorries, cars, bicycles, the headlights dazzling, scarlet rear-lights winking. She did not like Solly, apart from not approving of him.
Two blocks down from the Piccadilly was an Indian grocer and over it the new office, held in the name of the departed Jasmine Cohen. It was used by half a dozen organizations who shared the rent. Martha let herself up dark unlit stairs, and opened, in the dark, a door, and turned the light on in a dingy little office which was the same as every political office she had ever seen. A small dark dapper man in the uniform of a Greek officer rose from a bench by the window. Athen smiled and said: ‘Matty, I’m glad it was you who came in.’
‘What are you doing sitting alone in the dark?’
He did not answer, she looked quickly at his face and went on: ‘I’ve come to pick up some books for Johnny Lindsay, and I’m late.’
‘But I must see you. When shall I see you?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘But I have to go back to camp tonight.’
‘After Johnny Lindsay I must go and see my father and then I suppose I’ve got to go home.’
She heard her own voice, desperate rather than angry, and raised her eyes to the grave judging eyes of the Greek.
‘Your father is very ill,’ he said, in rebuke.
‘I know that.’
‘And how is your husband?’
He had said your husband, instead of Anton, deliberately, and she smiled, freeing herself from his judgement. ‘Ah, Athen,’ she said affectionately, ‘you know, meeting you I’m always reminded…’
He smiled and nodded, and did not ask what she had been going to say. People know what their roles are, the parts they play for others. They can fight them, or try to change; they can find their r
oles a prison or a support: Athen approved his role. Possibly he had even chosen it. He was a conscience for others. He burned always, a severe, self-demanding steady flame, at which people laughed, but always with affection; from which they took their bearings.
‘Sometimes you seem to me almost impossibly naïve,’ she said apologetically, and he went on smiling, looking closely at her.
‘Naïve? Because I remind you of your marriage with Anton?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘Martha, are you well?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, irritable. But his look refused this and she said: ‘I may be well, but I’m certainly in a very odd state. I don’t think I understand anything.’ Tears filled into her eyes, frightening her because they came so often.
Athen took her by the hand, sat her on the wooden bench by the wall, sat by her, stroked her hand. ‘Martha, dear comrade Martha, do you know something strange? I was thinking just as you came in, you know when I was a poor boy selling newspapers on the street in Athens, if someone had told me then that a white person in Africa could be a socialist and that I would be the comrade of such a person, then I should have laughed.’
‘Well, you would have been right to laugh.’
‘Why do you say that? You have many bad thoughts, Martha.’
‘Is that a bad thought? Why? When the war’s over, you’ll go back and sell newspapers and you’ll live on tuppence-halfpenny. You’ll be poor again. Suppose I never leave this country, suppose I never can get out? Well, what do you imagine we’d have in common then?’
‘Martha, Martha. Why do you suppose this and that? After the war we will fight till we have communism in Greece, and then you will come to visit me in Greece and be my friend.’
‘Perhaps so.’
‘I wanted to see you and talk. Now you have to go.’
‘Yes. I’m late. I always seem to be late.’
‘How is Johnny Lindsay?’
‘He’s very ill. I do nothing but run from one sick-bed to another. And I hate it and resent it, I hate illness.’
Athen sat smiling, his small neat hand enclosing her hot one.
‘My father’s dying. He lies and thinks of nothing but himself and his medicines. And Johnny’s dying—but he’s a good man, so he thinks of other people all the time.’