MODERN CLASSIC

The Four-Gated City

Doris Lessing

Book Five of the ‘Children of Violence’ series

Dedication

Once upon a time there was a fool who was sent to buy flour and salt. He took a dish to carry his purchases.

‘Make sure,’ said the man who sent him, ‘not to mix the two things – I want them separate.’

When the shopkeeper had filled the dish with flour and was measuring out the salt, the fool said: ‘Do not mix it with the flour; here, I will show you where to put it.’

And he inverted the dish, to provide, from its upturned bottom, a surface upon which the salt could be laid.

The flour, of course, fell to the floor.

But the salt was safe.

When the fool got back to the man who had sent him, he said: ‘Here is the salt.’

‘Very well,’ said the other man, ‘but where is the flour?’

‘It should be here,’ said the fool, turning the dish over.

As soon as he did that, the salt fell to the ground, and the flour, of course, was seen to be gone.

A dervish teaching story, from

The Way of the Sufi, by IDRIES SHAH

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Three

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Four

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Appendix

Author’s Notes

About the Author

By the same author

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

In its being and its meaning, this coast represents not merely an uneasy equilibrium of land and water masses; it is eloquent of a continuing change now actually in progress, a change being brought about by the life processes of living things. Perhaps the sense of this comes most clearly to one standing on a bridge between the Keys, looking out over miles of water, dotted with mangrove-covered islands to the horizon. This may seem a dreamy land, steeped in its past. But under the bridge a green mangrove seedling floats, long and slender, one end already beginning to show the development of roots, beginning to reach down through the water, ready to grasp and to root firmly in any muddy shoal that may lie across its path. Over the years the mangroves bridge the water gaps between the islands; they extend the mainland; they create new islands. And the currents that stream under the bridge, carrying the mangrove seedling, are one with the currents that carry plankton to the coral animals building the offshore reef, creating a wall of rocklike solidity, a wall that one day may be added to the mainland. So this coast is built.

RACHEL CARSON; The Edge of the Sea

Chapter One

In front of Martha was grimed glass, its lower part covered with grimed muslin. The open door showed an oblong of browny-grey air swimming with globules of wet. The shop fronts opposite were no particular colour. The lettering on the shops, once black, brown, gold, white, was now shades of dull brown. The lettering on the upper part of the glass of this room said Joe’s Fish and Chips in reverse, and was flaking like stale chocolate.

She sat by a rectangle of pinkish oilcloth where sugar had spilled, and on to it, orange tea, making a gritty smear in which someone had doddled part of a name: Daisy Flet … Her cup was thick whitey-grey, cracked. The teaspoon was a whitish plastic, so much used that the elastic brittleness natural to it had gone into an erosion of hair lines, so that it was like a kind of sponge. When she had drunk half the tea, a smear of grease appeared half-way down the inside of the cup: a thumb mark. How hard had some hand – attached to Iris, to Jimmy? – gripped the cup to leave a smear which even after immersion in strong orange tea was a thumbprint good enough for the police?

Across the room, by another pinkish rectangle, sat Joe’s mother Iris, a small, fattish, smeared woman. She was half asleep, catnapping. She wore an overall washed so often it had gone a greyish yellow. A tired soured smell came from her. The small fattish pale man behind the counter where the tea-urn dominated was not Joe, who had gone off to the war and had never returned home, having married a woman and her café in Birmingham. He was Jimmy, Joe’s mother’s partner. Jimmy wished to marry Iris, but she did not want to marry again. Once was enough she said. Meanwhile they lived together and proposed to continue to live together.

Although both were now ‘resting’, this being a slack time in the café, and had announced, as if they were turning a notice on a door to say CLOSED, that they were resting, both observed Martha. Or rather, their interest, what was alert of it, was focused on what she would do next, but they were too good mannered to let this appear. About an hour before she had asked if she might use the telephone. She had not yet done so. From time to time the two exchanged remarks with each other, as thickly indifferent as words coming out of sleep, sleep-mutters; but yet it was open to Martha to join in if she wished, to comment on weather and the state of Jimmy’s health, neither very good. Today he had a pain in his stomach. Really they wanted to be told, or to find out, why the telephone call was so important that Martha could not make it and be done. The air of the small steamy box which was the café vibrated with interest, tact, curiosity, sympathy – friendship, in short; all the pressures which for a blissful few weeks since Martha had been in England, rather, London, she had been freed from.

For a few weeks she had been anonymous, unnoticed, – free. Never before in her life had she known this freedom. Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one’s self behind a mask. Coming to a big city for those who have never known one means first of all, before anything else, and the more surprising if one has not expected it, that freedom: all the pressures are off, no one cares, no need for the mask. For weeks then, without boundaries, without definition, like a balloon drifting and bobbing, nothing had been expected of her.

But since she had taken the room upstairs over the café, had been accepted into the extraordinary kindness and delicacy of this couple, she had made a discovery: ‘Matty’ was reborn. And after how many years of disuse? ‘Matty’ now was rather amusing, outspoken, competently incompetent, free from convention, free to say what other people did not say: yet always conscious of, and making a burnt offering of, these qualities. ‘Matty’ gained freedom from whatever other people must conform to, not so much by ignoring it, but when the point was reached when conformity might be expected, gaining exemption in an act of deliberate clumsiness – like a parody, paying homage as a parody does to its parent-action. An obsequiousness in fact, an obeisance. Exactly, so she understood, had the jester gained exemption with his bladder and his bells; just so, the slave humiliated himself to flatter his master: as she had seen a frightened African labourer clown before her father. And so, it seems, certain occupants of recent concentration camps, valuing life above dignity, had made themselves mock those points of honour, self-respect, which had previously been the focus-points of their beings, to buy exemption from the camp commanders.

Between ‘Matty’ and such sad buffoons, the difference was one of degree. Somewhere early in her childhood, on that farm on the high veld, ‘Matty’ had been created by her as an act of survival. But why? In order to prevent herself from being – what? She could not remember. But during the last few years before leaving ‘home’ (now not where she was, England, previously ‘home’, of a sort, but that town she had left), ‘Matty’ had not existed, there had not been a need for her. Martha had forgotten ‘Matty’, and it was painful to give her house-room again. But here she was, just as if she had not been in abeyance for years, ready at the touch of a button to chatter, exclaim, behave with attractive outrageousness, behave like a foolish but lovable puppy. In this house. With Jimmy and Iris. (Not with Stella down the river, not at all.) Here. Why? For some days now Martha had been shut inside this person, it was ‘Martha’ who intruded, walked into ‘Matty’, not the other way about. Why? She was also, today, shut inside clothes that dressed, she felt, someone neither Martha, nor ‘Matty’.

For the weeks of her being in London the sun had shone. Strange enough that she could now see it like this. In a country where the sun is always so evident, forceful, present; clouds, storms, rain, briefly disguise the dominating, controlling presence of the sun; one does not say: ‘Today the sun shone,’ for it always does. But after a few weeks in England, she could say ‘The sun shone today’ and only by putting herself back on that other soil felt the truth that the sun never stopped shining. Even in the middle of the night, the sun blazed out, held in its blaze all planets and the earth and the moon, the earth having merely turned away its face, on its journey around away from light and back.

All the warnings of the seasoned about the hideousness of the English climate, had for those weeks, while the sun shone, seemed like the croakings of the envious, or like those exaggerated tales created to terrify greenhorns, by the experienced. The sun had shone, day in and day out, not with the splendid golden explosiveness of Africa, but had shone, regularly, from a blue high sky; not as deeply, as solemnly, as brazenly blue as the skies she had been bred under – but blue, and hot and almost cloudless. Martha had worn the brief bright dresses of that other wardrobe, which she had almost left behind altogether. She had worn brown bare arms, brown legs, and hair still burnt a rough gold from the other sun. Just as if she had not left home and its free-and-easiness for ever, she had been carried by that current of people, that tide, which always flows in and out of London through the home-owners, the rate-payers, the settled: people visiting, holidaying, people wondering if they should settle, people looking for their ancestors and their roots, the students, the travellers, the drifters, the tasters, the derelicts and the nonconformists who must have a big city to hide themselves in because no small one can tolerate them.

From room to room, cheap hotel to hotel, a bed in the flat of a man whose name she could not remember though she remembered him with warmth, nights spent walking with men and women as enjoyably vagrant and as footloose as she, nights with Jack – so she had lived, for hot blue sunny weeks, and then, suddenly – two days ago, the skies had descended in a greyish brown ooze of wet, and Martha wore a thick skirt, a sweater, stockings, and a black coat given to her before she left by Mrs Van der Bylt out of (so Martha accepted it) concern because of Martha’s refusal to believe just how terrible the English climate was. But really the old woman was giving Martha much more than a coat when she had handed the young woman about to leave, the thick black matronly garment which now hung over the back of a wood chair painted greasy daffodil colour in Joe’s café.

She had put it there an hour ago. She ought to get up and say to Jimmy and to Joe’s mother, Iris. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes. I want to go for a walk.’ Ought. She ought to make this statement, put on the coat, go out, walk for the sake of clearing her head into decisions, come back, telephone and then act on what she had decided. Ah yes, but to do what one ought – and then there was the enemy ‘Matty’ so very much stronger than she would have been prepared to believe.

Martha stood up, and at once two pairs of eyes, both pale blue, surfaced with non-committing goodwill, but inwardly hungry for sensation, fastened themselves on her. Martha said, putting on the heavy black coat which had encased Mrs Van through several Zambesian winters: ‘I am going for a short walk.’ At once the two bodies subtly froze: disappointment. Then, suspicion. Of course, and quite rightly: had not ‘Matty’ been here for weeks now, the freakishly ‘charming’ visitor from such different worlds, had not she even worked behind the counter to earn the rent for her room upstairs, and always half the buffoon, at least the willing-to-be-teased, self-confessedly inefficient if full of goodwill, always offering honesty about what she was doing, to these so gently avid hosts? They were now in the right to feel that she shut them out, rejected them, by saying, coldly – so they must feel it – ‘I am going for a walk.’ That would not do, now, after letting them have ‘Matty’ for so long. ‘It’s nice to tell other people your troubles,’ Iris had said, waiting to hear Martha’s – invented, or at least exaggerated, to please her.

Martha now said, with a small rueful laugh: ‘It’s all too much for me, I need a good think,’ and as she pushed back her chair she banged her leg and said, in a half groan ‘Oh damn it!’

‘Oh mind your nylons, dear,’ said Joe’s mother, softening at once, and even exchanging palliated glances with Jimmy as he leaned forward, smiling, to watch Martha rub her leg.

Martha continued to rub it, gasping with pain-infused laughter, until she was able to make her escape to the door, the fee having been paid, passing the telephone on the counter which, if she were to do as she ought, she had used before this.

Defeated, she went out. The dirty sky pressed down over the long street which one way led to South London, and the other to the river and the City. Terraces of two- and three-storey houses, all unpainted since before the war, all brownish, yellowish, greyish, despondent. Damp. Martha stood outside the café where Joe’s Fish and Chips was outlined by the hearse-dark of blackout material: Iris and Jimmy had not got round to taking it down. The shops which were the ground level of the long street mostly had dull black visible; and some windows of the upper rooms showed black above or beside the faded cretonnes and chintzes. The war had been over five years. The street itself was empty. Traffic had been diverted because of a great crater from which protruded the top halves of men attending to gas, or telephone, or electric cables; a great gaping jagged hole. Not war damage; but, according to Iris, ever since the bomb had dropped a couple of hundred yards down the road, the gas mains had been leaking into the earth, and the road was always being dug up, as now. The crater was roped off, and had red-eyed lanterns resting about its lip. Martha stood at its edge and watched a dozen or so men at work. One of them was a black man. He wore a whitish cotton singlet. The bottoms of his trousers were torn. He was a tall spindly fellow and his face was set into the no-expression of a man doing an unliked job of work – as were the faces of his white fellows. Muscles moved in rhythm under grey skin, under black skin. The muscles were great fruity lumps moving between the dull grimed skin and the bones. There was no body among them that might have been chosen to represent the human form in its aspect of beauty, since all were in some way deformed; and there was no face that did not carry marks of strain, weariness, or illness. All life, all health, the immediately recognizable spontaneity of energy was in the muscles. Spades and picks tore into a dull heavy damp soil. It was a yellowish soil. In it was embedded a system of clay pipes, iron pipes, knotted cables. No roots. No trees in this street, not one tree: therefore, no roots. Martha had never before seen soil that was dead, that had no roots. How long had this street been built? Iris thought about two hundred years, but she didn’t know. For two hundred years this soil had held no life at all? How long did roots live under a crust of air-excluding tarmac? There was a smell of gas from the crater, like the smell of decay, yet it had a mineral tang, not far off the stale smell of a mine-shaft a couple of hours after blasting.

Martha went on towards the river, passing shop fronts, each one the face of a low oblong room like Joe’s café: haberdasher, grocer, chemist, greengrocer, hardware, fishmonger, then all over again, chemist, grocer, hardware, grocer, laundry, a pub. All over London: millions of little shops, each one the ground floor of an old house. On either side of her the terraces: damp. Stained with damp. Under her feet, a damp concrete. Fitting down over the street, a low hat of grey sky.

The surface of water, moving, rippling, rearing, crashing is what we see when we say ‘Sea’ or ‘River’ or ‘Lake’. Standing in the water at waist or thigh level a skin of light separates wet from air. If one were to wade through earth in Africa, around one’s legs roots: tree roots, thick, buried branches; then sharper thinner vines from bushes, shrubs, then a thick clutch of grass roots – a mat of working life. Walking to one’s waist in an English lane, roots, such a thick mass of roots – tree and shrub and bush and grass. But walking here, it would be through unaired rootless soil, where electricity and telephone and gas tubes ran and knotted and twined.

Now the place where the bomb had fallen. That was how they spoke of it: ‘The Bomb’. Their bomb, out of the thousands that had fallen on London. About three acres lay flat, bared of building. Almost – it was a half-job; the place had neither been cleared, nor left. It was as if some great thumb had come down and rubbed out buildings, carelessly: and then the owner of the thumb had blown away bits of débris and rubble, but carelessly. All the loose rubble had gone, or been piled up against walls, or the fence; but pits of water marked old basements, and sharp bits of wall jutted, and a heap of girders rusted. The ground floor of a house stood, shacked over with iron, in the middle, and a single wall reared high up from it, intact, with fireplaces one above another. The place had a fence and a sign which said under crossbones and skull: Danger. No Children. Behind the ruin of the house a group of children squatted, spinning marbles off their thumbs across yellow earth. Seeing a woman in black outside the fence, they froze, betrayed like animals by their moving alerted eyes. Then they melted out of sight into walls, rubble. The door to this bomb site was a tall metal grille and it was held shut by a bolt or baulk of timber. This was about ten feet long and so thick that if her arms had been twice as long they could not have met around it. This object had been a tree. For some days now Martha had been pausing by it, trying to make it out. Because it was hard to imagine it as a tree. Its surface was not smooth: if it had ever been planed, that smooth skin had been worn away long ago. It was splintered, eaten, beaten, battered. Touching it was not touching wood, but nearer to water-eaten stone. It was almost spongy. Damp had swollen and filled every fibre. Wood had meant a hand on a trunk under which sap ran; wood had meant the smell of bark; wood had been the smell of oiled surfaces where grain showed patterns. Wood had never meant a great baulk of greyish-brown substance that smelled of wet, of damp, of rot, and of the gas which must have soaked everything in this street since everything smelled of it.

Iris had said that ‘they’ had pulled this great beam out of the river at some point: she remembered that they had. It had come in useful for a decade, having been used as a base for a stair into an area before the bomb had destroyed house, area and stair, though not the timber itself. So it was used to keep the gate shut against children. That was what it was meant to do, at least; though looking through the grille, it could be seen that the other side of the bomb site, a parallel street, had no fence at all, was open; had, merely, a sign with a skull and crossbones.

In the hulk of timber was a cleft, more like a crack in rock than a split in wood. Moss grew in it. Salt lay seamed in finer cracks, salt from the salty, tide-washed river. Iris said the timber was probably part of a ship once. She said a piece of wood that size must have been part of an old ship when ships were wood not metal: for what else could they have used a beam so enormous? Half a dozen men had been needed to lay it propped where it was now – she had watched them doing it.

Iris, Joe’s mother, knew about this timber, about the houses which had been bombed, about the people who had lived in the houses, and the people who now lived in the houses of the part of the street which stood intact: some of them were from this site of rubble and dust and mud. She knew everything about this area, half a dozen streets for about half a mile or a mile of their length; and she knew it all in such detail that when with her, Martha walked in a double vision, as if she were two people: herself and Iris, one eye stating, denying, warding off the total hideousness of the whole area, the other, with Iris, knowing it in love. With Iris, one moved here, in state of love, if love is the delicate but total acknowledgement of what is. Passing a patch of bared wall where the bricks showed a crumbling smear of mushroom colour, Iris was able to say: Mrs Black painted this wall in 1938, it was ever such a nice pink. Or: looking up at a lit window, the curtains drawn across under the black smear of the blackout material which someone had not got around to taking down: Molly Smith bought those curtains down at the market the first year of the war, before things got so scarce. Or, walking around a block in the pavement, she muttered that the workmen never seemed to be able to get that piece in square, she always stubbed her foot against it. Iris, Joe’s mother, had lived in this street since she was born. Put her brain, together with the other million brains, women’s brains, that recorded in such tiny loving anxious detail the histories of windowsills, skins of paint, replaced curtains and salvaged baulks of timber, there would be a recording instrument, a sort of six-dimensional map which included the histories and lives and loves of people, London – a section map in depth. This is where London exists, in the minds of people who have lived in such and such a street since they were born, and passing a baulk of timber remember, smiling, how it came rolling up out of the Thames on that Thursday afternoon it was raining, to lie on a pavement until it became the spine of a stairway – and then the bomb fell.

Martha walked on to the river, still invisible, though she saw the ponderous buildings across it which were The City. She had to walk across the river, walk into a decision; not loiter and dally until she found herself back at the café with a joke that was the currency of false pleading: she had caught herself thinking, I’ll go back to the café and take off this coat before I … the coat was too hot. Mrs Van had had it during the war, that is, when skirts were knee-high and shoulders thick. Pulled tight around Martha it gave her the tight waist of that year’s fashion and came half-way down her calves – the fashion. But the folds which had once snugged Mrs Van’s large bosom pouted over Martha’s, and the sleeves came to her knuckles. She must buy a new coat. But she had no money. There were five pounds left. Which was why decisions were imminent and responsibility inevitable. She must make that telephone call today: she was to telephone Marjorie’s sister Phoebe.

A telephone box stood ahead. It had been, would be again, a military scarlet: now it was a pinky-orange with a bloom of damp on the paint. But it was a colour – Martha went into it. She opened the coat, propped the door of the telephone box with her foot and breathed the cool wet air in relief. Marjorie’s sister’s number was in her bag. She did not look for it. Instead she told herself that while Marjorie’s sister and what she stood for could wait, Joe’s mother and Jimmy could not. If she did not do something now, in four or five days’ time of this enjoyable lazy drifting on her inclination through London, saying every hour: I should ring the café, she would do no such thing, but simply turn up, and at the last moment and when she had to, for her suitcase. Which would really be letting them down. Though of course, ringing up now, half an hour after leaving when she could have said what she had to say, was letting them down. It seemed that letting them down was inevitable. Why? Had she made promises, offered what she had not given? She was not ‘Matty’! Could they have been so kind to Martha, had she not offered them ‘Matty’? It was too late now to know. She dialled the café and Jimmy answered. People had come in for tea and margarined buns since she had left: slack time was over, she could hear voices and activity. ‘This is Martha, Jimmy.’ ‘Oh, is that you, love?’ ‘Yes.’ Now, you will not make a joke of it She wrestled with the need to exclaim, laughing, that she had been just taken with a whim, a folly, an urge, mad Matty, oh dear, what a fool she was … ‘Jimmy, I’ve decided to leave.’ A silence. ‘Well, if it’s like that, love.’ ‘I’m going to take a job next week.’

Through these two and their friends she had been offered three jobs, not to mention Iris’s cousin, Stanley, as a possible husband. He said nothing. ‘I’ll come and pick my case up soon.’ ‘Half a tick then, I’ll call Iris.’ A clatter and a long pause. The voices went on. It was jolly in the café; people coming in knew each other, knew Iris and Jimmy. They had shared, many of them, their childhoods, their lives; they had shared, most of them, the war. And they had opened their hearts to her. Iris now said: ‘Is that you, love?’ ‘Iris, if you want to let your room, go ahead.’ Now that room was not easy to let, being a tiny box over the café, always noisy, and smelling always of frying-fat, the steamy tea, the fish: Iris knew Martha knew letting that room was not the point. ‘Are you all right, love?’ she asked, anxious. ‘Look, Iris …’ No, no, she would not play for false advantage. ‘I’ll come and get my suitcase sometime soon.’ ‘As you like, then. Well if you’re late coming in tonight, give us a shout.’ ‘I’ll pick it up in a couple of days, Iris.’ And now the moment of real hurt, betrayal, the end. Martha was proposing to wander off ‘with nothing but what she stood up in’ to take her chances for the night, and possibly other nights. And she had said it without remembering even to soften it. Martha could do that. Iris could not. No law said Iris could not: ‘Matty’ had made a joke of travelling with her life in a suitcase: two changes of underwear, two dresses and a couple of skirts and sweaters and some papers. Even ‘Matty’ had been careful of saying too much of how she had washed around London on this tide or that. Sometimes Iris said: ‘I must go up the West End one of these days and have a look around now the war is done.’ She had not been ‘to the West End’, two miles away and half an hour’s bus ride, since V.E. Day. She, limpet on her rock, had known that Martha had drifted and eddied around this city which she would never visit, never know, but it had not been forced on her, that knowledge, as Martha had done by saying so finally: I’ll pick up my case sometime soon. And now off Martha went, from them, Iris and Jimmy, as casually as she had come, by chance flopping down in the café for a cup of tea, her legs having collapsed from hours of walking. Now, Martha, standing in the telephone box, a third of a mile from Iris, feeling the wires buzz with uncomprehending hurt, fought her last and final battle, swore she would not make up some funny story about freebooting around London, she would not buy forgiveness. ‘You’ll come for your case then?’ ‘Yes, I’m not sure when, though.’ Silence. ‘Iris, I’m sorry,’ said Martha, sudden, sincere and desperate. ‘That’s all right, love,’ said Iris, cool.

What would be the words used to sentence her? She did not know, and it did not matter: what people actually said in that café was the least of what they were able to convey. But she had done it, she had not clowned or apologized in the wrong way. She had done it, if she had done it badly. And Iris would be slowly replacing the receiver, pushing the telephone back into its niche, and saying to whoever was there that afternoon, in one of her repertoire of tones which made her sparse vocabulary so rich an instrument: ‘That was our young lady. She’s off.’ ‘She’s off, is she?’ And that would be that.

Well, that was one door shut behind her; which proved that she would find the strength of mind to shut the others. Martha retied the coat, while tears ran down her face, cool on hot. She went on, crying, to the river. A ginger-moustached cloth-capped man passed, with a sideways furtive look that became knowing, diagnosing exploitable weakness. She frowned at him, and wiped the tears off – he went on his way. A moment later a young head came out of yet another hole in the ground where repairs were being made to subterranean London and a young voice said: ‘Cheer up, love.’

‘I don’t see why I should,’ said Martha, and he leaped up out of his hole. Martha smiled, friendly. He was tall and gangly, raw in bone and finish. Using a yardstick discovered since she had come to England, she mentally fitted him into the uniform of an officer of the RAF. Impossible. Impossible even if he hadn’t spoken and revealed his status in his voice? Impossible. She fitted him into the uniform of an aircraftman – yes.

Ever since she had come, she had used memories of the two nations which had descended on Zambesia at the beginning of the war to fit men into their appropriate class. She had not been wrong often. What was it? Not only bad feeding – this one had deprivation bred into him; it was something in the way of standing, the gestures, the eyes. And as for him, if she hadn’t spoken and shown she was from abroad and therefore outside his system of tabus, he would not have climbed up out of his hole. He had rather raffish blue eyes; and a come-and-get-me-smile evolved for such occasions.

But all that was put on, he was a gentle and serious soul. ‘Come and have a cuppa?’ he suggested, chancing it. Nearly Martha said: ‘Yes, I’d like to,’ but – couldn’t, having decided on the end to such enjoyable chances. ‘I’d like to but I can’t,’ she said, straight. He looked carefully into her face, placing her according to some rules of his own. Liking each other they stood, about to part for ever. Then he said, ‘Right then, another time,’ and he nipped back into the earth.

‘Ta ta,’ he said, picking up his shovel.

‘Bye,’ said Martha, walking on.

Now, in front of her, the river. For Martha, the river was still the point of reference in the chaos of London. Lost several times a day, she made for the river.

A few days after her arrival in London she had been wandering among the wharfs and the docks, three, four miles lower down the South Bank, in a world of black greasy hulls, dark landing stages, dark warehouses, grey dirty water, gulls, and the smell of driven salt, when she had come on a landing stage where a mushroom shape of rusting iron held thick coils of rope which tethered a flat barge that had a lorry on it. On this she sat, until an official came from a shed and said she should not be there. She was about to leave when to her came Stella, a gipsy of a woman in a striped grey apron, with greying black hair falling in wisps over a sallow face which was all shrewd black eyes. This woman had been watching her through the windows of her house twenty yards away. Martha, in green linen, sandals and sunburn, had tickled the imagination of this watchdog of her clan, and she asked her to tea; and, nosing out inside a few minutes that Martha was ready to stay anywhere she was welcome, let her a room over her parlour.

Stella was the wife, mother and daughter of dockers: and in her kitchen Martha drank tea, ate chips and bacon and fried bread several times a day and listened to the talk of a race every moment of whose lives had to do with the landing and unloading of ships. They talked about the war and about the government – and about the war. They were fiercely and bitterly working-class, class conscious, and trade union. Labour Party? That remained to be seen, they did not love government and almost five years of a Labour Government had done nothing to win the trust of these people who trusted nothing. In that kitchen Martha suppressed any knowledge she might ever have had about politics; for she knew how amateur it would sound among these warriors for whom politics, in its defensive and bread-and-butter aspect, was breath. Besides, they, rather Stella, were not interested in Martha’s interest in England. Stella took Martha to her bosom because of an unfed longing for travel and experience which was titillated every moment by the river, by the ships that swung past her windows, by the talk of foreign countries. She said herself that her blood must run from some visiting sailor from a Southern place, Spanish she thought, Portuguese? – so strong a fancy did she have for those parts. And she read: all her life she had nosed out books, comics, magazines which might have a story or an article about the sea. Her sons and her husband teased her, there’d be no room for them soon, they said; she had old trunks crammed with sea-treasure. If there was a film about the sea, she went, might see the same film through a dozen times if it had ships or sails or mutinies or pirates; and when there was someone to go with her, visited the naval museum at Greenwich where she knew all the sailing ships, their histories and the men who had captained them. Well … so Stella wanted Martha to talk about foreignness; and Martha, feeling that nothing in her experience could match up to such an appetite for the marvellous, made a discovery: that it was enough to say, the sun shines so, the moon does thus, people get up at such an hour, eat so and so, believe such and such – and it was enough. Because it was different. Martha’s so ordinary experience was magicked by Stella’s hunger into wonders, and when her money had run so low she said she must get a job, Stella got for her a job in a pub, for she could not bear to lose her. The pub was Stella’s brother’s wife’s pub and it was a couple of hundred yards inland. So they talked of territory not immediately on the Thames’s banks. For a couple of weeks then, Martha had lived inside the area which was policed invisibly by the spirit of Stella, and under her protection. For instance, walking to work in the bar one evening, a group of men coming from loading a ship started the usual whistles and catcalls and Stella emerged from some kitchen where she was visiting, put her hands on her hips, and shouted across the street that this was Martha, her friend, and if they knew what was good for them … and a man who felt that Martha might make a suitable wife, approached Stella, as if Stella were Martha’s mother, to ask if she would approve the match. It was not until Martha left Stella, left the water’s edge, and had got to know the café people, that she was able to compare and ask questions. For instance, why had ‘Matty’ never once come to life with Stella and her clan? Admittedly another imposed personality had, the hip-swinging sexually gallant girl – or rather, had until Stella rescued her from the necessity of it. And again, why had she not felt bad about leaving Stella, though Stella had not wanted her to leave? She had not let her down, as she was letting the café people down. And then there was Stella herself, the matriarchal boss of her knot of streets, among the body-proud, work-proud men who earned their wages by physical strength and who judged everyone by strength and their capacity for work – was Stella the only Boadicea among the masculine communities of the river’s edges? And then, there was this business of ‘the working classes’, of ‘socialism’, which, before she had crossed the river had not been what interested Martha.

The newspapers never stopped, not for a moment, informing the nation and the world that Britain, in the grip of red-handed socialists, was being ruined, was being turned into a place of serfs without individuality or initiative and rotted by ease – in the tone of some pamphleteer at work while heads rolled under the guillotine. So irrelevant were these newspapers to anything she found she could not believe that anyone read them seriously, nor that anyone could be paid enough to write them. For what she had found on the other side of the river, let alone in the streets around the café and around the docks, was something not far off conditions described in books about the thirties. What had changed, that the public opinion men (who presumably believed what they wrote) could so write? Were Stella and her people poor? Very. They were better off, they said; but their demands were small and had not grown larger. Were Iris and Jimmy poor, though they owned their café on mortgage and ate well? Very: they expected so little. These were all people who had no right to expect much. Had the editors and journalists never met Iris and Jimmy and Stella, did they know nothing of what they could find out by getting on to a bus, crossing the river, and living for a week or so with Stella or with Iris? It seemed not. It was not credible – but no. But to read the newspapers, absorb the tone of the editorializing of that time – it was unreal, afflicted her with a sense of dislocation. And this was her real preoccupation, what absorbed her: this was a country absorbed in myth, doped and dozing and dreaming, because if there was one common fact or factor underlying everything else, it was that nothing was as it was described – as if a spirit of rhetoric (because of the war?) had infected everything, made it impossible for any fact to be seen straight. Nor would she, had she not by chance crossed the river some weeks before (during one of the looping bus-rides she had taken around, across, through, and over London – by the simple device of getting on buses and staying on them till they returned to their starting points) and stayed with first Stella and then Iris, now be able to pick up a newspaper or listen to the radio without feeling as if she were in the middle of the Russian revolution, or something not far from it in cataclysmic thoroughness. She would not have been able to hold on to the simple fact that, in essence, nothing much had changed in this country – you had only to listen to the people in the docks and in the café to know it hadn’t … which was why more than any other person it must be Phoebe, Marjorie’s sister, that she should telephone – when? Today. Yes.

The tide was out. Gulls squawked in their sea voices over the low marsh of water between smelling mud banks in search, not of fish in these polluted waters, but of refuse. White preened wings balanced over diluted chemical, between grey cement walls that held such a weight of building. And it was so ugly, so ugly: what race was this that filled their river with garbage and excrement and let it run smelling so evilly between the buildings that crystallized their pride, their history. Except – she could not say that now, she was here, one of them; and to stay. It was time she crossed the river. But it was hard to leave it. But she must leave it. She came so often to lean with elbows on damp concrete looking down at ebbing or racing or swelling or lurking waters because here she was able to feel most strongly – what she had been before she had left ‘home’ to come ‘home’. In a street full of strangers, on the top of a bus in a part of London all barren little houses and smoking chimneys – who was she? Martha? Certainly not ‘Matty’. She became lightheaded, empty, sometimes dizzy. But by the river, looking down at the moving water, she was connected still with – a feeling of being herself. She was able to see herself as if from a hundred yards up, a tiny coloured blob, among other blobs, on top of a bus, or in a street. Today she could see herself, a black blob, in Mrs Van’s coat, a small black blob beside a long grey parapet. A tiny entity among swarms: then down, back inside herself, to stand, arms on damp concrete: this was what she was, a taste or flavour of existence without a name. Who remembered. Who noted. And not much more.

A stranger last week had said: ‘What’s your name?’ Her mind dizzying, Martha had said: Phyllis Jones. For an afternoon and an evening she had been Phyllis Jones, with an imaginary history of war-time work in Bristol. And just as it was enough to offer to Stella phrases like ‘the sun is overhead at midday’ to evoke for her all the stimulation of a new country, so now it did not matter she had never been to Bristol, even when talking about it to a man who knew it well. Enough to say: Ships, terraces, and Yes, I know so and so, I’ve been to so and so. In such a conversation she was just as much Phyllis Jones as she was Martha with Stella. People filled in for you, out of what they wanted, needed, from – not you, not you at all, but from their own needs. Phyllis Jones, a young widow with a small boy, an object of great interest and compassion to Leslie Haddon, a clerk from Bristol, a man uncomfortably married and in search of a ‘congenial female companion’ – spoke through Martha’s mouth for some hours, until, pleading maternal duties and an inviolable memory of her dead husband, she left him in the pub. And left Phyllis Jones. And – interesting this – a week later, when another stranger, had said, What’s your name, she had nearly offered Phyllis Jones, but it was the wrong name. This person, a woman on a train, was wrong for Phyllis Jones, did not evoke her. So Martha had been someone called Alice Harris instead. Why not?

For a while at least. What difference did it make to her, the sense of identity, like a silent statement ‘I am here’, if she were called Phyllis or Alice, or Martha or Matty; or if her history were this or that? But for a while only. Because she knew that ringing up Phoebe was not only because now she must earn money, and become responsible to her fellow human beings. Something (a sense of self-preservation?) could not tolerate much longer her walking and riding and talking the time away under this name or that, this disguise or that; calling strange identities into being with a switch of clothes or a change of voice – until one felt like an empty space without boundaries and it did not matter what name one gave a stranger who asked: What is your name? Who are you?

Martha crossed the river, left it, moved among streets that looked as if they had just survived an earthquake, and came to the rubble of damage left by the bomb that had fallen on St Paul’s. To Iris, ‘where the bomb fell across the river’. She had been to visit the scene the day after. So had Stella and some of her men. City workers emerged everywhere from doorways, hurried off to buses and tubes. This day was ending – and where was she going to sleep tonight? Another telephone box, orangy-pink and faded, stood ahead. She went into it, to ring Phoebe. Soon, on the pile of telephone books, there were bits of paper with telephone numbers on them – Phoebe’s among them. And the café’s number. If she rang there now, saying, even as Martha, ‘I’m coming back tonight,’ Jimmy or Iris would say: ‘You’re coming back then, are you?’ And she would walk in, and, after a moment to judge whether she brought pain with her, a snub, they would smile. Extraordinarily kind they were; kindness was stronger than their anxious need to hold, to keep.

Iris felt for Martha, or rather Martha’s experience that enabled her to drop into the life of Joe’s Café like a migrating bird, exactly the same emotion as she felt for a baulk of timber hauled up out of the tides of the river or a yard of curtain material got off the ration, or teaspoons found among rubble after a bomb had dropped. Which was not to denigrate what she felt: not at all. Martha had been something extra, something given, something unearned – as the children playing on the bomb site had come running into the café with an old metal meat dish found under some broken bricks, used now for the week’s meat ration at Sunday midday. Treasure. And Martha to Stella was a heady wind from countries she would never visit.

Henry Matheson’s number, on a bus ticket: she had, also, to telephone Henry. She could sleep at Jack’s – that is, she could if he didn’t have another girl there, which was likely. She should ring Henry. Not wanting to ring Henry was quite a different reluctance from not wanting to ring Marjorie’s sister. Henry Matheson was a relation of Mrs Maynard. Mr Maynard had arrived to say good-bye to Martha at the station when she left, not oblivious to the fact that Martha did not want to say good-bye, or even to see him – but not caring. He was in the grip of that need with which Martha had become only too familiar seeing it at work in so many different people: it was to make sure that Martha did not escape from him, or rather, from what he represented. His wife’s cousins the Mathesons would be only too delighted to see her, said he, formidably present for a half-hour before the train steamed out of the station from which she, at last, after having seen so many people leave there for adventures in England, was leaving. Clearly her manner had not indicated strongly enough that she would be delighted to see the cousins, so Henry Matheson had been at the boat train to meet her. Martha felt no obligation to be grateful to the Maynards, who were not kind; but did feel she must at least be polite to Henry, who was. Henry, altogether charming, and delightful, had hovered, the eye of the Maynards, in the background of those weeks; and Martha had bought him off by offering – not ‘Matty’, too crude a persona for him, but a slaphappy, freebooting adventuress, cousin of ‘Matty’, who, she thought, was close enough to his secret fantasies about himself – he was the essence of conformity – to keep him quiet. She did not want letters from Henry to the Maynards of a kind which would cause Mrs Maynard to telephone her mother in the mountains near the Zambesi: ‘About that gal of yours, it would appear that The thing was, Henry had offered her a job in his firm: he was a lawyer, and she had legal experience. But she had refused it. Typical of anyone anywhere near the Maynards, thought Martha, that it had not been enough to refuse the job once: somewhere Henry was so convinced of his generosity and Martha’s luck that he could not believe she would be foolish enough to refuse it – must believe she was too green to know how good a job it was. Jobs as good as that one were short, she knew. The only way to convince him was to take another.

She rang Jack. ‘Jack, this is Martha.’ ‘Oh, Martha, just a moment …’ So he was not alone. She waited. Outside the glass-apertured box in which Martha stood, people jostled, heads down, under their low weeping sky. Like cattle rushing forward into the dip on the farm: it was the same blind impelled movement. On a barrow at the corner, fruit – apples mostly. A pile of waxy-green apples with rain on them. And, crowning a pile of apples, a single bunch of grapes, displayed proudly on a wad of fibre. A single bunch of green grapes. In Cape Town grapes had dripped, dangled, overflowed, from barrows, carts, shops, a wealth of grapes, from which one bunch had flown overseas to land on this cart by the rubble near St Paul’s. As she held the receiver and watched, a woman picked up the bunch, decided it was too expensive, replaced it, and a single grape rolled down off the cart on to the pavement, lying like a pale green jewel among trampling feet. The sales boy, who had been looking desperate, dived for the grape, retrieved it, and with a quick look, wiped it on a bit of newspaper and then was about to put it back on the crown of grapes when a small child buttoned into a hooded raincoat stared at the grapes from eye level. He had probably never seen grapes at all. The youth pressed the grape into the child’s mouth. Smiles: from young mamma to youth, from mamma urging child to smile, at last, from child to youth: thank you. Apples were bought and the child went off on mamma’s hand, looking back at the bunch of translucent wet green grapes. ‘Martha, I’m so glad you telephoned, man, but where have you been?’ He was South African, but his accent had been fined down by much war-travelling. ‘Jack, I haven’t got anywhere to sleep tonight?’ A pause for calculations. ‘Just a tick, Martha, I must just …’ Again the other end of the phone had gone silent, but receptive: Martha could hear voices off somewhere, Jack’s, a girl’s. Jack was telling a story of some kind to the girl who was there. Or the truth, who knew? He came back. ‘It’s like this, Martha, I’m going to have to work till midnight.’ She laughed. Then, so did he. ‘Midnight would suit me fine.’ ‘See you, Martha.’ ‘See you, Jack.’

If she did not now ring Henry, she would take a bus to Bayswater and spend the evening drifting in and out of the pubs with the other visitors, migrants, freebooters. They would talk about England. That is, for a lot of the time, about Henry Matheson and what he stood for; and Iris and Stella and what they stood for. Someone would have a newspaper that jittered about the advent of red socialism in Britain, and how the working classes grew fat and luxurious, and how the upper classes dwindled into poverty. The aliens would look at the newspaper and talk about Iris and Stella, whom it appeared literate natives did not meet.

She rang Henry’s office. He was, said the telephone girl, just about to leave. This girl’s voice was a careful London suburban (Martha could already place it) and was exactly why she, Martha, if she accepted that job, would be working, not where she dealt with people on the telephone, but in an office where her merits would be of benefit to her fellow-workers and not, or at least not immediately, to the public.

Henry came to the telephone. ‘But my dear Martha, where have you been? I was just about to send out a search party!’ She laughed; convivial buccaneer with secrets she was prepared to share; and calculated whether she would be able to get away with just saying, even if for the third time: Henry, I’ve decided I don’t want that job.

‘Henry, I was ‘phoning to say I’ve done some serious thinking and thanks ever so much, I don’t think I’ll take the job.’ A pause. The two ‘wrong’ phrases, carefully planted into this arrangement of words to emphasize what Henry must find so hard to take in her, were doing their work. ‘Well, Martha … if you’re sure, but we would be so pleased to have you.’ ‘Yes, I’m sure …’ and now she made a mistake, from nervousness. ‘I’ve been working, as a matter of fact …’ Too late to think of a satisfactory lie, she had to go on, ‘In a pub.’ Silence. ‘How very enterprising of you. You did promise to ring, Martha. Look, how about a bite and a sup. Have you time?’ ‘Yes, I’d love to.’

‘How about Baxter’s? Do you know it?’ This meant, as Martha knew perfectly well, are you properly dressed for it?

‘Of course, how should I not know? It’s in all those novels about the twenties?’

‘Is it? Dear me. How very well read you are – so much, better than I am. Well then, if you get there before I do, tell old Bertie – he’s the head man, you know, that you’re supping with me.’

‘I’ll do that. In about an hour?’

‘Yes, we can have a drink first and you can tell me all your adventures.’

It was now raining hard: a dirty rain. Martha would have stayed in the box, but a girl was knocking on the door. Martha opened it. The girl had a wet headscarf and a thick, damp mackintosh. Beneath this disguise she was a pretty dapple-cheeked English girl. ‘Did you want to get out of the rain, or to telephone?’ A short offended laugh. ‘Actually to telephone.’ ‘In that case, I’ll leave.’ Another, but an appeased laugh. She watched Martha, wary, offering her smile like a shield. These were people totally on the defensive. The war? Their nature? But Martha was so clearly an outsider, breaking the rules with a smile in an alien accent, that had she persisted, talked, broken barriers, the girl would have enjoyed it, would have been grateful to have the defences broken, but also resenting, also wary, like an animal accepting overtures but ready to bite at a clumsy movement.

It was pouring. Martha went into a cigarette shop. The woman behind the counter raised eyes to Martha’s face and then looked at Martha’s feet. Water dripped from Mrs Van’s coat to the floor, which was already smeared and wet.

And now Martha thought – although it meant she would have instantly to leave the shop and go out into the rain, asked: ‘Can I have a dozen boxes of matches?’

Sullen: ‘You can have one box.’

‘Oh, I’d like a dozen. Half a dozen?’

‘There’s been a war on, you know.’

Martha had asked for three boxes of matches in a kiosk during her first week. Since then, she had made a point of asking for a dozen, in kiosks in every area of London.

‘There’s been a war on, you know.’

And with what hostility, what resentment. And what personal satisfaction. ‘I’m sorry, I was forgetting.’ ‘I suppose some people can.’

Martha got one box of matches in return for her tuppence, and smiled into a frozenly angry face. But the face said she must leave, must get soaked in punishment for her heartless indifference to the sufferings of her nation.

Martha left. A bus looked as if it might have room. She jumped on, and the conductor said: Hold on then, love. She smiled, he smiled. Disproportionate relief! She had discovered, swapping notes with other aliens in pubs, that it was not only she who had to fight paranoia, so many invisible rules there were to break, rules invisible to those who lived by them, that was the point. Warming herself at the conductor’s smile, the journey was made up Fleet Street, invisible behind cold rain, past Trafalgar Square, where lions loomed in a cold grey steam, and up to Piccadilly Circus, where the conductor sent her on her way with smiles, a wink, and an injunction to look after herself and enjoy her holiday.

It was with Henry that she had first seen this place, on a clear gold evening, the sky awash with colour. She looked at the haphazard insignificance of it, and the babyish statue, and began to laugh.

‘My dear Martha?’

‘This,’ she tried to explain, ‘is the hub of the Empire.’

For him a part of London one passed through, he attempted her vision, and smiled his failure: ‘Isn’t that rather more your problem than it is ours?’

‘But, Henry, that’s so much the point, can’t you see?’ For this exchange seemed to sum up hours of their failure to meet on any sort of understanding; during which nagged the half memory of a previous failure – what, who, when? Yes, as a child, when her mother had laid down this attitude, this dogmatism, this ‘It’s right, it’s wrong’ and Martha, reacting, had examined, criticized, taken a stand, brought back a stand to the challenger – who had lost interest, was no longer there, had even forgotten.

‘Well, it’s quite a jolly little place, isn’t it?’ he inquired, uncomfortably facing her – but only just.

‘Well, I suppose it’s the war again,’ she said at last, ‘all that myth-making, all that shouting, the words – but you can’t say things like “jolly little place”.’

‘You’re a romantic,’ he said, sour.

‘Ah, but you’re having it both ways, always – having it both ways, sliding out …’ She had, for a moment, been unable to conceal a real swell of painful feeling, all kinds of half-buried, half-childish, myth-bred emotions were being dragged to the surface: words having such power! Piccadilly Circus, Eros, Hub, Centre, London, England … each tapped underground rivers where the Lord only knew what fabulous creatures swam! She tried to hide pain, Henry not being a person who knew how to share it.

She supposed she did hide it, for in a moment he was urging her into a pub, buying her drinks, talking about the war, and radiating relief that nothing was to be asked of him.

‘You know, Henry, after one’s been a week here, one simply wants to put one’s arms around you – oh no, not you personally.’

‘Oh dear, I was rather hoping …’ said he, laughing with relief that he would have to suffer no such demonstration. He had even involuntarily glanced around to see if there was anyone near that he knew.

‘No, the whole island, all of you.’

‘Oh but why? Do tell me!’

‘If I could, you see, there’d be no need to feel that.’

The exterior of Baxter’s was in no way more distinguished than that of Joe’s. A modest brown door had Baxter’s on it – just the word, nothing more. There was a window completely covered by white muslin that needed washing. Martha stood outside for a moment, holding this delicious moment known only to newcomers in a city: behind this door, which was just like so many others, what will there be? A southern courtyard with a lemon-tree beside a fountain and a masked Negro lute-player asleep? A man with a red blanket slung across his shoulder, stands by a black mule? A pale girl in sprigged muslin goes upstairs with a candle in her hand? Two old men in embroidered skullcaps play chess beside a fire? Why not? Since what actually does appear is so improbable. Last week she had opened a door by mistake on a staircase in Bayswater and a woman in a tight black waspwaisted corset, pearls lolling between two great naked breasts, stood by a cage made of gold wire the size of a fourposter bed, in which were a dozen or so brilliantly fringed and tinted birds. Martha said: ‘I’m sorry.’ The woman said: ‘If you are looking for Mr Pelham, he’s in Venice this week.’

She went in. A man in shabby dinner clothes and sleeked-down dandruffy hair came forward, already disapproving. Through his eyes, she saw a young woman with damp hair, a damp coat, and a stretched smile. For Martha was suddenly bloody-minded, because of this man’s automatic bad manners, though she knew they were the stuff of his life and what he earned his wages for. A subordinate man, a waiter, came to stand by the first, the headwaiter. Together they surveyed her with a cold skill that cracked her into speaking first. ‘I am meeting Mr Matheson,’ she said, awkward. The two conferred, in a long silence and a swift glance. The first man turned away, to other business; and the second, having not said a word, took her, without going through the main room, to a table which was turned to one side. He pulled out a chair in which she would face a wall. He had not asked her to take off her coat. She did so, shrugging it on to the back of her chair. A lean, elderly man, whose whole life had been dedicated to the service of such minutiae, he again flicked his eyes fast over her and again with an arrogance of bad manners that astounded her, so naked did it seem to her. Her sweater and skirt were adequate. But wrong? Why? She did not know, but he did. He left her to wait.

The place was still half full, since it was early for dinner. The people were middle-aged, or gave an appearance of being so. She saw, glancing with difficulty backwards, that there were two young people, but their youth was damped into the staid middle-aged air of the atmosphere. They, and the waiters, fitted into the décor which was designed, according to unwritten invisible rules, to fit them. The place was muted, dingy, rather dark; and no single object had any sort of charm or beauty, but had been chosen for its ability to melt into this scene. And the people had no sort of charm or flair. Yet, looking closely, things were expensive: money had been spent obviously, and since the war, to keep the restaurant exactly as it had always been: in an expensive shabbiness, dowdiness. The girl – the only one present apart from Martha, wore a black crêpey dress. It was ugly. Martha recognized this dress because before leaving ‘home’ Marjorie had told her what she would need – she gave her a list of clothes she would need, not for utility or warmth, but for occasions. ‘A uniform!’ Martha had exclaimed. This dress was part of that uniform, relating to no standard of charm or sexuality; doing nothing for the girl who wore it: it was a black dress worn with pearls, and it had a cousinship with the restaurant, its furnishings, and the people in it, who, when you looked, were good-looking, even well-built, certainly well-fed and easy. But now Martha could see perfectly well why her clothes, every bit as expensive, and certainly more attractive, that is, if clothes are to be judged by what they can do for the appearance of who wears them, would not do, and why the black dress did: she was not in the right uniform.

The point was, not a word of what she thought could be told to Henry: he would not understand it: but when she met Jack tonight, she would only need to mention the girl’s dress, her pretty artless face and hair, the dull-flowering wall-paper, the men’s emphatically assured faces – and he would laugh and understand. And Jack would understand perfectly well when she said (though she would not need to say it) – The trouble is, you have to choose a slot to fit yourself to, you have to narrow yourself down for this stratum or that. Yet although the essence of Henry’s relation to me is that I should choose the right slot, find the right stratum, he would not understand me if I said that: he’d be embarrassed, irritated, if I said it.

Yes, because Jack had chosen a life that freed him, he would understand all this: but he could not understand her other preoccupation, and the trouble was, the only person she had so far met who did, was Marjorie’s sister – Phoebe.

Henry came in. Silent communications had already taken place between him and the headwaiter, because his face was prepared whimsically to accept her unsuitability for this restaurant. And all this because the weather had changed! A month ago, in another expensive dingy restaurant, she had been wearing, because of the heat, a slip-dress of black linen, and had been perfectly conformable – though much better dressed than anyone else in the restaurant, because they were over-dressed, being people who could not dress for the sun. Henry had been showing her off: slightly embarrassed, since her simplicity was challenging; and partly because, when the sun shines in England, a licence comes into power with it.

He sat down. ‘My dear Martha, how very well you look.’

‘I know that my hair is wet: but I was not asked if I wanted to use the ladies – if they’ve got one at all.’

This challenge caused him to send her a quick thoughtful look, before he looked past her head at some brown varnished wood and said: ‘I remember, about two years ago, my Aunt Maynard sent me a protégée – from Cape Town I think she was. She was very combative you know.’

‘My problem is, what part of Rome is one going to choose to combat?’

‘Hmm,’ he said.

‘And I had no idea Aunt Maynard’s fief extended as far as Cape Town.’ ‘Oh, one of those places.’

Martha sat checking herself like an engine: had she eaten, had she slept, was she over-tired – no, no, yes: because her flare of anger was really so very strong. That aspect of ‘Matty’ which was brought into being by Henry was pure childish aggression. If she chose and was in control enough not to be aggressive or show hostility, then ‘Matty’ was bumbling, charming – apologetic by implication. She preferred aggression: it was a step better than the infant clown.

Henry was looking past Martha at a man who had just come in. He was like Henry; all open good looks, charm, assurance. He smiled at Henry, and was about to come forward, but Henry smiled differently, and the man sat down behind a menu-sheet across the room.

‘Your partner?’

His look was very quick now: ‘Yes.’

‘You had asked him to look me over, but you find I’m not lookoverable at the moment, so you’ve radared him that you’d rather he didn’t?’

‘He was going to eat here in any case: why shouldn’t I want him to meet you?’

‘Ah, but why not now?’

Here came the waiter with the card which he held before Martha.

She ordered some pâté and the fish, but Henry said: ‘If you’ll take my advice, the coquille is excellent. Not, of course, that their pâté isn’t.’ Here he offered a small humorous grimace to the grey old waiter, who accepted it.

‘Of course,’ she said, and changed her order.

She asked for a dry sherry. The wine waiter brought a bottle of semi-sweet sherry, because in such places a lady would be expected to drink sweet sherry. Henry was given an Amontillado.

She drank hers. He drank his.

‘Martha, have you heard from your mother?’

Martha noted how this ancient goad to rage now had no effect on her at all: by putting several thousands of miles of sea between her and her mother she was saved? H’mmmm — possibly.

‘No, but I expect I shall.’

‘You said you thought of taking a job?’

‘I had one in a pub down by the docks.’

‘Ever such a lark of course – but not for long surely?’

‘I’ve also been offered the job as a secretary for a firm which hires out lorries.’ In one of the lorries Iris’s cousin worked: the man she had intended for Martha.

He waited. She would not help him.

‘You’d be living near your work?’

Almost she said: ‘Why not?’ But lost interest. What was the use?

Here came the scallop shells filled with lumps of cod covered with a cheese-coloured white sauce. That this was a restaurant where people ate, not to eat well, but to eat conformably she had understood from what she had seen on the plates near her; and she knew that when she tasted the fish it would be rather worse than she had been eating at Joe’s, with Iris and Jimmy.

‘It’s very nice,’ she said hastily; to Henry’s inquiring eyebrows.

‘Delicious,’ he affirmed, so that she could make a note of what was admirable.

She could fault, even as a housewife, a dozen points on this table: the bread rolls were not fresh; the tablecloth only just clean; the parsley on the fish limp; the peppermill was nearly empty; the roses sagged; everything was second-rate. But Henry did not care, he was at home, cosy with his kind.

Claustrophobia filled her like a fever; and she took herself in hand: Be quiet, steady – you’ll be out of it for good when this meal is over.

‘I really do see.’ he prompted, ‘what fun it must be, sl … experimenting, for a time.’

‘Ah, but you see, one has to be brought up in this country to be able to see it as slumming.’

He had coloured.

‘Now, look, Henry – you’re right. I couldn’t for long stay in those jobs – but for exactly the same reason that I couldn’t take yours, that’s what you ought to be able to see. Can’t you really understand that?’

‘Well, frankly, no.’

On the chair by him a folded evening newspaper; and even from where she was, she could see, peering over, that the headlines and editorials were to do with the red, socialist, classless, etc., Britain.

They had finished their fish. Henry had ordered some blanquette of veal for both of them. It wasn’t bad. The wine, however, was very good indeed, marvellous; and Martha was drinking it, although she knew that drinking it might lead to an exchange every word of which she could recite even before it happened. She smiled, offered him scraps of travellers’ tales from the strange land across the river, to which he listened, with the air of a potential traveller choosing possible landscapes for adventure.

At last he said: ‘If it’s a question of your being a restless sort of person, that you’d want to move on after a year or two, I think we do rather expect that from our staff, the war has unsettled people, including me, I’m afraid.’

‘No, it’s not a question of being restless.’

Determined that the tedious exchange, imminent, would not take place, she reached for her wine glass – and knocked it over. The waiter being away, she dabbed at the stain with her napkin. Then the imp took over.

‘I’d like another serviette,’ she said.

Henry called to the waiter with his eyes.

‘If you could bring another napkin,’ he said.

Martha suddenly laughed. He frowned incomprehension.

‘I don’t know why it is,’ he said, ‘but I do know that girls are so much cleverer than men at … picking things up. You could, you know, if you tried. For instance, we had a girl in our office. She was only … her father was under me during the war, a very good type of man … well, she came to us as a typist and inside a year she had picked up … now you really can hardly tell her from … she takes over on the switchboard for instance … for some reason men don’t do it so well, they aren’t so adaptable. But if you listened to how other people talk, you could learn very easily … that sort of thing.’

The gaps in this homily which had been delivered, half with irritation that he was being forced to verbalize his position even partially; half with genuine concern for her future, for which, the Lord knew why, he felt himself responsible, she now filled in, summing them all up.

‘I could learn to pass,’ she said.

He sat back in his chair, his handsome, fair, well-bred face all dark with annoyance.

It was not the slightest use. But the imp had control.

‘Henry, if I told you that this meal we are eating is going to cost you over £5, in spite of the fact you are supposed to be restricting yourself because of the war – and that the people I’ve been with don’t spend that on food in a week – and then ask you to look at that newspaper … oh, I don’t know, what is the use!’

‘Very poor, are they?’ he said quickly.

‘Very. But that isn’t the point.’

He leaned back. ‘Well, aren’t we all, these days?’

‘I should have said not.’

‘You weren’t here during the war,’ he said emotionally. ‘I’ve learned that, after that, there’s nothing to be said.’ ‘You must see, Martha, that it’s going to take time to get this poor old country on its feet again.’ ‘Of course.’

‘God knows we’re poor – but what more do you people want? You’ve got your Labour Government in, they’re not my thing, far from it. I’m more of a Liberal I suppose, though I vote Tory, but they’re in, they’re doing a job – you’ve got your socialism. Of course there are people who think that five years of Labour Party has ruined this country. I’m not one of those, but there is no class left in this country. What do you want?’

‘But, Henry – well, I really don’t know, how can you say – or believe … Henry, if those people I’ve been with – if they turned up here at this restaurant, they wouldn’t be admitted …’ He froze, attacked, undermined: here was precisely where he could not think or look, therefore it was in bad taste. ‘Not that they would turn up, of course, they know better. After all, I wouldn’t have been admitted, probably. They’d have said the place was full. It was only because I gave your name.’

‘If they did turn up, I for one’d be only too proud – the salt of the earth. We learned that in the war.’

‘Not to mention the other war.’

There now was rolled towards them the sweets trolley. Henry chose for her and for him, a trifle, though it had another name. Throughout the restaurant, people were eating nursery puddings, under French names.

‘I really don’t know what it is you people want,’ he said pettishly.

‘To have things called by their proper names, that’s all. Did you ever actually meet your Uncle Maynard?’

‘No, well of course, he was rather the black sheep, so one gathers.’

‘Justice Maynard? Well, I’ve been remembering something he said to me. Ten years ago, more. He said that he couldn’t stick England because no one called a spade a spade. So now he administers law and order in the colonies, where one can. I’ve only just recently understood what he was talking about.’

‘Hypocrites,’ said Henry quickly. ‘Of course, they’ve always called us that.’

‘No, no, if you were hypocrites that would be something. A hypocrite is somebody who maintains a virtuous position knowing it to be false. You all seem to me to be – you’re drugged, you’re hypnotized, you don’t seem to be able to see facts when they’re in front of you – you’re the victim of a lot of slogans.’

Here the wine waiter offered the lady a sweet liqueur and Henry brandy. The lady insisted on asking for brandy. The wine waiter offered Henry a look of commiseration, so far had complicity grown between them. But Henry frowned at him and told him to bring brandy. Martha and the brandy changed the note or current: Henry was able to let slide away any chance there was of their meeting on at least the possibility of there being something in what she said: Martha, gay buccaneer, adventuress, warmed by wine, enabled him to wave over his partner. There arrived at the table John Higham, as charming and as handsome as he, his face presented towards Martha in a look almost transparently eager to taste this phenomenon, who was outside the rules of ordinary politeness – for he examined her openly, boldly: exactly as the dockers, before being made to know by Stella that she was, temporarily, one of their women, were able to call across a street: Hello, darling. She had been outside their circle of humanity. Martha was outside John Higham’s. For a moment the two men sat, united, opposite Martha, eyeing her. It was ugly: behind them, the waiter, and behind him the headwaiter: very ugly. And again, she never would be able to explain why; they would not know what she meant. They were savages, masters and servants both.

‘Martha will have none of us, I’m afraid,’ said Henry, insolent, but smiling.

‘I’m sorry,’ said John Higham.

‘I simply cannot imagine, apart of course from the Maynards asking you to keep an eye on me, what you want me for?’

They even exchanged glances here, as if she were not able to see that glances were being exchanged – as if they were invisible. Extraordinary, extraordinary people: Iris and Jimmy, Stella and her man, had more delicacy, more consciousness of themselves.

‘You underestimate yourself,’ said John Higham. ‘You’ve done legal work, haven’t you? You’ve got experience. And I don’t know why it is, but while there are hundreds of girls on the market, there aren’t very many … experienced ones.’

‘It isn’t that we mind our girls getting married – far from it. We welcome it, they tend to stay,’ said Henry.

‘And a large part of our practice is out of this country – we’ve been doing a lot of work with refugees for instance. Tidying up after the war – that sort of thing. And we really do need someone with – a wider experience than most English girls have.’

Now Martha had to be silent. This last point reached her. And, besides, she was exactly in the same position here as she had been, still was, with Iris and Jimmy. She had promised, or had seemed to promise, without knowing she was doing it, more than she had ever meant. She had never, not for one moment, considered working for Henry, had said, in every way she knew: No, no, no. Yet both men now expected her to say yes: were in fact counting on her. A manner which was assumed as a mask, a defence, appearing to be a half-flirtatious consideration of possibilities, had been felt as so much more? Or was it that being in a situation at all, being involved with people, was a promise of more? That was more like it, that was the truth: oh yes, there was something intolerable, unforgivable, about the drifters, the testers, the samplers, she was only just beginning to see it. But it was unjust, unfair! She had been in this country for not much more than a quarter of a year, had seen it as time out of responsibility. She was not going to be allowed to taste and drift and knock about. The genuine feeling of betrayal shown by her friends of Joe’s café (though not by Stella of the docks – why not?), and the expectation shown by Henry and John, proved that she must have made promises implicitly; she, Martha, had something in her which forbade her to drift and visit and slide out. Other people might: she could not. Otherwise why, after such a very short time out of responsibility (what was four months after all?) were the nets closing in? Which was how she felt it. The net had been set from the moment she saw Henry’s politely charming face outside the Customs when she arrived. It was probably, though she did not want to recognize this, that her temperament shared more than she liked with Marjorie; and with Marjorie’s sister Phoebe, an earnestness, a readiness to be involved and implicated, and this temperament was in itself a promise, made promises and offered.

She could be weak and say something like: I’ll think it over. But she must not. And she must not buy forgiveness with ‘Matty’. With a great effort, she said (abruptly, and without grace, but she said it straight). ‘Look. Please believe me. I’m not taking the job. Thank you very much – but I don’t want it.’

‘What have you got lined up instead?’ asked John Higham. He was annoyed.

‘She’s thinking of being a barmaid,’ said Henry with a laugh to indicate, not that she would not, but that she was only too capable of it.

‘Really, are you?’ said John Higham. ‘Of course, it is a way of – getting around?’ he inquired. ‘One does see that.’

‘The thing is,’ said Martha, again furious, trying not to be: ‘I wouldn’t see the job as you do – as something extraordinary. You simply don’t understand – all of you, you talk of the people you call “the working class” as if they were – people from the moon. Not that you use words like “the working class” of course – Oh, I don’t know,’ she concluded, in real despair, ‘one can’t even talk about it with you.’

Glances were again exchanged between Henry and John, and again as if she were not present. ‘Well,’ said John, ‘that is precisely why we are so keen to have you – you see a great many of the people we deal with have had a rather rough time, and one does need someone to handle them who knows what they are talking about.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Martha, ‘having had a rough time as a refugee would include rather more than would be covered by having experience as a barmaid?’

She was now really angry. Really discouraged. Even frightened. After all, such people ran this country, no matter what the papers said. And when you came anywhere near the Maynards and their kind this is what happened. It was like talking to – well, the blind, people blinkered from birth. Which is what they were. What was the point of … one simply had to get out of their way.

The waiter was bringing the bill. The restaurant was full now, it was about ten o’clock, and had more than ever the atmosphere of a family, of people who were at one with each other. And they were off guard now, with a licensed childishness about them, as if, threatened outside, here they found refuge. Across the room, a man with a heightened colour and a rakish look flicked bread pellets at a girl in a fluffy pink sweater, who flicked them back, giggling, while waiters watched indulgently.

The bill was for six pounds.

‘Where are you going, can we lift you?’

‘Thank you, I’d like to walk.’

Henry pushed back his chair. The waiter had three people by him who wanted this table. Getting out and away fast, which was what she wanted, was easy for her.

She walked down Oxford Street; that is, eye-level goods confined behind lit glass moved past her: above were dark weights of masonry. The goods, clothes mostly, were as bad and as tasteless as everything else. This is the greatest city in the world, she kept saying, loitering, but not obviously so, among people window-shopping. The biggest city, the biggest, and this one of the streets whose name I’ve been brought up on, like Piccadilly Circus. The labels of these shops are covetable, sewn on clothes – there was not one object or article she would have cared to own. Of course, there had been a war on. Of course, even five years after such a war, buildings and streets must be propped and shored and patched and unpainted, and cloth must be thinned and impoverished. Of course. But even a yard of war-impoverished cloth can be woven with more sense or art. Good Lord, she found herself thinking, for the thousandth time, what kind of a race is this that chooses, inevitably and invariably, or so it seemed, the ugly, the graceless? Well, here she was and to stay.

The shops ended and sky opened above the trees of Hyde Park. Now here was something different, oh yes, when it came to trees and gardens, then everything was as it ought to be. She walked down the pavements of the Bayswater Road, with the park on one side, balances and patterns of leaf dramatically green where the street lights held them, retreating into mysterious shadow beyond, with the lit moving sky over them. On her right hand, the great ponderous houses that stood so assertively on damp soil. Great ugly grey houses. They were boarded up or empty or in makeshift use; no longer houses; all in a condition of transformation towards being hotels. And unpainted. Ugly. Even in this changing racing wild light, ugly. But she was under the trees that edged the pavement, and they seemed like an extension of the trees of the park, so that it was as if the traffic that poured down the street was riding through softly lit trees which ended here; the grey cliff of buildings on her right being the start of the city. There were now few people. There had begun, from the moment she had left Oxford Street and the shops, that heightened wary atmosphere which meant she must walk careful of her eyes, because in this stretch of the Bayswater Road, men prowled after women. Invisible boundaries, invisibly marked territories: just as, across the river a boundary could be marked by an old hulk of timber with riversalt in its seams, so that one side of it was the riverbank, the other a landlubber’s country, here the corner of a street, or the hour of day could say: Here a certain kind of order ends.

Martha now walked fast, protected by the thick ugliness of Mrs Van’s coat; but she was a ‘young woman’, category ‘young woman’ – yes, she must remember that she was, and that along these pavements, a category of being, ‘man’, prowled beside or behind her. That was what she must be for a few minutes, not Martha or ‘Matty’, only ‘young woman’. A man veered up beside her, muttered an anxious aggressive invitation and dropped behind when she presented to him her aloof lifted profile. He fell back, muttering words she was meant to hear. The greatest city in the world … if only I could understand that it’s a question of trying to see things steadily all the time, then perhaps I could understand it. Martha’s daytime brain had become detached, wary, watchful, on guard – to protect another part of it which had just started to wake, to listen, because of the fast walk through the moving, lit streets. And when this happened – and she never knew when it would – nothing mattered but to protect, to keep the irrelevant at bay. It was this business of having to divide off, make boundaries – it was such a strain. Jimmy and Iris’s café, the bombed streets, the river city where Stella was, this hunters’ street, the great stained damp houses where Henry Matheson’s and John Higham’s parents and grandparents might have lived, one family to a house: even to begin to understand it was … but one’s daytime brain was slotted, compartmented, pigeon-holed …

Now she slowed, almost stopped in surprise at a cool hard getaway look from a young woman who stood with her back to a hedge. Of course, she had passed another invisible boundary. From here until Queensway, the pavements were lined with prostitutes, standing singly or in pairs, dozens of them, along the pavements. But Martha was freer here than she had been in that other territory she had only just left, whose boundary was simply a bisecting street. She was protected precisely by the line of girls for sale, who knew she wasn’t one of their trade union and because their hostile warning faces that said go away, you shouldn’t be here, kept her safe from being accosted. Three kinds of animal here. The women, standing with their backs to the hedges, on sale. The ordinary traffic of the pavement – but a slight traffic, mostly couples hurrying past the marketplace, keeping close under the lights, looking embarrassed, as if they were here by a mistake, yet glancing furtively at the buying and bargaining. The customers, men of all ages, walking slowly past the women, or standing under the trees smoking, making choices. And across the street, policemen, spaced out with twenty or thirty yards between each couple, not looking directly at the haggling and dealing, but observing it sideways to make sure that it went on without incident. Martha walked more slowly than she had had to walk in the part of the street she had left. All the way down the street, by lit airy trees, they stood. Although it lightly drizzled, they wore summer dresses, bare necked, bare shouldered; and high thick sandals with bared insteps; and sometimes they held a jaunty umbrella. But there was no elegance here either. They weren’t well-dressed. They shared the national disposition towards gracelessness. There has been a war on. Suppose one of these men who was making up for the starvation of the war (like Jack, still obsessed by it), approached one of the girls saying: I’d like you to wear … whatever was his fantasy, would she snap back: There’s been a war on, you know? Yes, very probably … Martha found herself imagining rooms where furniture, curtains, objects had charm, had flair, and a girl with charm, flair, undressed slowly to show off wittily charming underclothes – a man’s fantasy? Perhaps in all this city it was only these girls’s rooms where there was anything attractive, gay, rightly made? Well, not from the way they were dressed as they stood on the pavement.

She had left the street of prostitutes behind. She was getting towards Notting Hill. And now, although she had headed this way with an intention to loiter and look, to spend time until midnight when she might safely reach Jack’s, she had to brace herself before turning off the main road into an area which was worse than anything. The little streets across the river had never been other than small and thin and poor. The ‘West End’ was a market only, with what was full-fed and comfortable in it hidden from the pavements. The enormous piles along the Bayswater Road had been and would be again, a climate of money. But the streets, from here to the canal, were depressing and lowering: irredeemable by fantasy.

She waited for glimpses of a scene created by light out of the dark that pressed houses into the soil, houses that were cracked and leaning and dirty and wet, streets and streets and streets of them, and among them, the boarded-up spaces full of rubble or water-filled craters, or damp earth cleared for re-building. She was walking along a long low street with dark trees along it, and low pools of yellowish light at intervals, consciously bracing herself against depression, when she understood that in fact that part of her mind whose intimations she courted had spread, was swallowing the rest: she was on the verge of a sensation – no, wrong word, but what words were right? – a state then, that had been in fact the surprise of her being in London, its real gift to her. She had learned that if she walked long enough, slept slightly enough to be conscious of her dreams, ate at random, was struck by new experience throughout the day, then her whole self cleared, lightened, she became alive and light and aware.

Her practical self checked her physical condition: the meal in the restaurant was the first proper meal for days; the wine the first alcohol for weeks; she had scarcely slept last night, because of the noise from the café downstairs, which closed at midnight and started again at about five. And she had been walking and alert all day: the conditions were right, then. First, before the lit space, a terror: but slight, nothing that could overwhelm, less fear than the reluctance to acknowledge her condition of being so alien, of walking always as a watchful critic. This was loneliness? Yes, she supposed so. But, if so, what else had she ever known? So that was a gift too: people said ‘loneliness’ speaking of an ultimate dread; and she had once said ‘loneliness’ meaning a blow of fate that might make her alone among her fellow creatures: something that in the future might claim her.

But no, since she had been in London, she had been alone, and had learned that she had never been anything else in her life. Far from being an enemy, it was her friend. This was the best thing she had known, to walk down streets interminably, to walk through mornings and afternoons and evenings, alone, not knowing where she was unless she walked beside the river: sometimes walking so long she did not even know what part of London she was in, her feet tired, but conscious of strength in their tiredness, her head cool, watchful, alert, waiting for the coming of the visitor, silence. And her heart … well, that was the point, it was always her heart that first fought off the pain of not belonging anywhere, and then, resisted, told to be quiet, it quietened and stilled. Her heart as it were came to heel: and after that, the current of her ordinary thought switched off. Her body was a machine, reliable and safe for walking; her heart and daytime mind were quiet.

This then was what she had discovered, had been given, rather; and was so reluctant to give up. This was why she did not want to choose this slot or that, this or that job, this or that person, to become a tactful assistant to Henry and John Higham; or an addition to the people across the river. If only she could go on like this, walking for ever through the interminable, damp, hostile street of this doomed city, all cracked and thinned and darkened by war – if only she could stay here, in this area of herself she had found … her mind was swinging slowly from light to dark, dark to light. Into it came impressions: a tree, an intensely variegated mass of light; a brick wall picked out in a flood of glowing orange by a slant of light from a window; a face that looked out briefly from behind glass before a curtain twitched across. Her mind was a soft dark empty space. That was what she was. ‘Matty’ was an intolerably tedious personage she could think of only with exhausted nausea and fear that she might ever again be afflicted by her. Martha – well, ordinary Martha too had moved away, could be looked at: she did well enough, was not important. As for ‘Hesse’, it was a name acquired like a bracelet from a man who had it in his possession to be given to a woman in front of lawyers at the time of the signing of the marriage contract. But who then was she behind the banalities of the day? A young woman? No, nothing but a soft dark receptive intelligence, that was all. And if she tried – but not too hard, a quick flash of effort, a light probe into a possibility, she could move back in time, annulling time, for the moment of the effort, and stand in another country, on another soil. Walking down damp smelling pavements under the wet London sky in the summer of five years after the war, she was (but really became, as if nothing had intervened), Martha Quest, a young girl sitting under the tree from where she could see a great hot landscape and a sky full of birds and clouds. But really, not in imagination – there she sat. Or she was the Martha who had pushed a small child under leafy avenues with the smell of roses coming off town gardens. But really, there she was: she was, nothing to do with Martha, or any other name she might have had attached to her, nothing to do with what she looked like, how she had been shaped. And if she were able to go on walking, as she was now, day after day, night after night, down this street, up that, past houses, houses, houses, passing them always, with their shuttered and curtained eyes behind which a dull light hid, if she were able only to do that …

And now, into the quiet, came something she had forgotten – one always did forget. She had forgotten what could happen when the dark deepened and one thought it would remain, being so strong. It was as if behind the soft space was a maniac ready to dance inwards with idiotic words and phrases. Words and phrases and fragments of music were niggling at the back of her mind somewhere. But she had really forgotten that this idiot was there, who accompanied the gift of the quiet swinging dark, and whose words did not seem to mean anything. They came out of dark, floated for a while on the space and went on into dark. Then the words of songs and tunes – yes, of course, during the past few weeks she had become familiar with this phase, or stage. First, the quiet empty space, behind which stood an observing presence. Then, into the quiet space, behind it, an enemy, a jiggling fool or idiot. Humiliating! Absurd! Again and again she had won, with such difficulty, the quiet; and then encountered this silliness. She had resisted it. Again and again she had descended from the quiet because of this silly enemy. Tonight, she did not resist: she was too tired. And besides, she was remembering that she had made a discovery, found a new thought – rather a thought had floated in with the silly words and bits of music: that somewhere in one’s mind was a wave-length, a band where music jigged and niggled, with or without words: it was simply a question of tuning in and listening. And she had made the discovery, and then forgotten it, that the words, or tunes, were not all at random: they reflected a state or an emotion. Because the words of the songs, or the phrases, had a relevance: one could learn from them, if one did not shy off, indignant, annoyed, because of the banality, the silliness, the jumble of this band of sound just behind (beside?) the empty space. For, as Martha had told the wave-length, or the station, before tonight (and had forgotten that she had), you have a very poor sense of humour, you have no taste at all. For instance, a couple of weeks before, walking by the river, first achieving the quiet, then reaching or being afflicted by the band of sound, she had discovered that far from not caring about having no money, and reaching the end of what she had, she was worried, frightened in fact, because the tune that jigged there was ‘the best things in life are free’ over and over and over again, like a sardonic, squalling baby, grinding into her day-time consciousness that she must stop now, must look for work, must get back a condition of earning money. And because night after night she had reached this place, and been informed over and over again by this appallingly frivolous and silly voice that she was in fact scared stiff, she had taken the decision to put her life into responsibility, to leave the drifting and floating. So why resent the method if the information was of use? How did she want useful information to be given? In crashing chords no doubt, or with trumpets? That particular part of her brain did not work like that, and if she resented it, shied off, fled away, made a decision to descend, resisted, she also lost information she needed. The most interesting discoverings were made through banalities. Now, jiggling away there on the edge of the empty space was the announcement that she was tired and wanted to go home. True: but her feet had been telling her that loudly for more than an hour. It was not her feet, her body that were tired – but another part of herself: she understood that in fact she was under great strain: and in a flash of foreseeing, realized the plunge into inert exhaustion that would follow this height. But who, what, was tired, that she needed to be told she was?

She walked on: in a few minutes she would be at Jack’s house. That is, she would be if she did not take a great loop through surrounding streets; she did not want to get to Jack’s place yet no matter what price she would have to pay for being, as she was now, at a height in herself. When she got to Jack’s, well, that would be a very different place in herself again; and once in it – but suddenly she understood that there was only one person she knew in London, who could allow her to go on living as she was now, rootless, untied, free. That was Jack. No pressures there. And she understood just why he lived as he did. She had ‘understood’ it before; but she understood it differently now that she was in that area of the human mind that Jack also inhabited. Yes. But in that case, why did she shy so strongly away from Jack, from what he stood for – or at least, with a good part of herself? That part whose name was Self-preservation. She knew that. He was paying too high a price for what he got. She knew that. What was the price? The jiggling wave-length was telling her: Jack fell down and broke his crown, Jack fell down and broke …

Yes. He could not go on as he was now, he’d fall. And so would she if she did not move out of this high stretch of herself. Ah, but not yet, please not yet: she could spend time with him, in his area, just a short time, before moving on to responsibility? Responsibility that is, to the normal, the usual – she had debts to pay, that was it. One could not move on before all debts were paid, the accounts made up. Terror struck, thinking of the debts she did have to pay: Caroline invaded her mind, the two men she had married so absurdly, her mother. Debts. They had to be paid. A great descent down, down, was before her. Then a wave would lift her up again (when?), to where she was now, on a height, and from where she could glimpse other perspectives. The tune said: Mother, must I go on dancing? Infuriating, ridiculous, banal, this had recently entered her listening mind as soon as she reached the boundary in it. Always. Mother, must I go on dancing? Yes, she knew only too well she had to go on dancing. She knew it, both now, when she was inside the empty space, away from ordinary living; and inside ordinary living, when the space seemed a very far country. She knew what she had to do – ring up Marjorie’s sister Phoebe. She could not stay with Jack, – even for as short a time as he would be able to live as he did – before he fell down and broke his crown. The words: Be Careful, were printed in black jagged letters across the empty space. She looked at them, as they faded in a fall of stars, like fireworks dropping through a dark night sky. Perhaps she should warn Jack? That thought, the housewife’s thought, told her she was sinking, she was coming down. After all, she could not maintain it for long, could not stay where the air was cool and where it was ridiculous to think ‘I must warn Jack’. Who am I to warn Jack? Responsibilities and commitments, she was sinking towards them, fast … She had to go on dancing … But Not Yet. With an effort, she shook, tightened, forced herself up, up through the quiet space and into the wave-length where, now it was not resisted but accepted, it crashed around her inner ears in a din of appalling sound, music, voices, screaming, the sounds of war – and, through it … even as she understood that she had reached, through acceptance, through not being afraid of or irritated by the silliness and jumble of this area, a state of quiet and distance as far removed from the state of quiet known up till now as that state was from the humdrum of ordinary life, she was already sinking away from it. Sinking, she said, remember, remember, don’t let it go, remember it’s there, please, please, don’t forget, you forget all the time, hold on to that even when … but once with Jack it would be hard to remember. She was sinking fast down, down: ahead there was a telephone box, a sentinel at the end of the street near a pub, now darkened. Yes, but remember the space you discovered today. It was gone, gone quite, not even a memory, and she sank down out of reach of the place where words, bits of music juggled and jangled and informed. And even the calm peace below (beside?), was going, it was a memory, a memory that was going. The thing was, memory was not possible. One could not remember. The knowledge of a certain condition belonged to one, when one was inside it. That was memory. No use to say: remember the lit space and its marvellous brother, the turn of the spiral above it when one had gone through the band of noise. Because, having left them behind, having sunk away, one was in a place with its own memories, its own knowledge. You could, perhaps, during the long day of work, responsibility, people, noise, have a flash of reminder: These places exist, but that was because the day had lifted you towards them, like a wave, for just a brief moment. You could think: I can reach it again when you were near it, not otherwise. Because for some reason the walls of the place you were in now had become thinned, and light came in from the other. That was why people did not remember. They could not. You remembered X with X, Y with Y. It was as simple as that: I must please please remember … she had reached the telephone box. A tall box under a tree which had black railings around it. She was going past. Why had she wanted to telephone now, this moment? It already seemed ridiculous that she had wanted to, decided to. But an urgency shook her: if you don’t ring Marjorie now, commit yourself, you’ll stay with Jack. Why on earth shouldn’t I stay with Jack? Had he ever indicated, even for a moment, that she should stay with him? Never. Ring Marjorie’s sister. Oh, don’t be so pompous and absurd. Tomorrow will do. Ring her now. When you see Jack, you won’t remember at all why you have to ring Marjorie’s sister. Mother, must I go on dancing? Yes, my darling daughter …

Martha had walked past the telephone box: she had walked past it fast, to get it behind her. It was as if hands took hold of her and turned her around. In the telephone box she rang Phoebe, whose voice came out of a world of tedious and ridiculous duties and responsibilities: it was nearly midnight and Phoebe was working on a report. Yes, Martha would meet her tomorrow. Tomorrow lunchtime? Mother, must I go on dancing? Tomorrow evening, Phoebe? Can’t you make lunch? said Phoebe, cross, saying with her voice that Martha had nothing to do with her time and should be prepared to fit herself in busy and responsible Phoebe’s life. Yes, I’ll meet you for lunch. Very well then, lunch at one, Martha. Phoebe rang off: she had another two hours of paper-work to get through before she could go to bed. Mother, must I go on dancing?

Martha went on, to Jack’s place.

Chapter Two

The street ran low and dark between dark terraces that were set back behind hedges. There was no light in the houses and the street light outside Jack’s house made a pool of yellowish haze about its hooded shaft. Between it and the next blur of yellowish haze a hundred yards down, was dark. The street was up, and a small red eye showed the edge of a crater. Behind the terrace was a canal, unused by commerce, where children swam. From its dirty waters that received old chairs, refuse, unwanted litters of kittens, mattresses, rose into the air of this area a foul clinging smell that no wind ever seemed strong enough to lift away. Behind the small hedge, near the front door, was a heap of brick and rubble from inside the house. A cat sat on the rubble, its eyes gleaming green at Martha, who put out a hand. But the cat slunk away. Looking up at the second floor, a chink of light showed at the window, so perhaps behind other walls of this black street, people were awake to tend a baby, or to make love, or to read.

Martha knocked, gently, and at once the front door opened inwards into a hall where a dull light showed bare boards, flaking walls, a cracking ceiling. There was an awful smell of rotting wood. A young man stared at Martha. A thin body like a coat-hanger held a dark blue dressing-gown from which lanky white legs protruded below, and a thin neck and a thin wild face above. He had black shock-hair, and black eyes.

‘I saw you through the shutter.’

‘Thanks, is Jack in?’

He laughed, but without sound, shaking his shoulders to mark that he laughed, watching for her reaction from anxiously serious eyes. She smiled, turning her face so that the heavy ceiling light could show her smile.

‘They come and go,’ he said.

Martha now felt afraid for the first time this night of walking alone through dark streets. She went slowly towards the stairs, feeling how he followed her, close.

‘Mind you. I’ve known worse places. During the war.’ He was right up against her back.

‘Are you a friend of Jack’s?’

‘I live here, don’t I?’

On the bottom stair she turned to offer him her smile; he stood grinning, his face on the level of hers.

‘I’ll show you my place.’ He tugged, grinning, at the sleeve of Mrs Van’s coat: Martha followed him into a room off the hall, which had once been a reception room. It was long, high, with the remains of some fine mouldings in the ceiling. The windows were shuttered; but there was a crack, and against the crack was set a chair: an observation post. There was a camp-bed, with dingy blankets, and against the wall a painter’s ladder, with hooks up the sides that held shirts, a jacket, and two pairs of shoes tied by their laces. There was a candle in a bottle near the camp-bed: and by it, a mess of comics.

‘They lived under the rubble in Germany,’ he said.

‘So I read.’

‘I was there.’

Now she looked at him, understanding his wildly grinning face, his staring eyes, his perpetual soundless laugh; it was quite simple, he was crazy.

‘In Poland they lived in the sewers.’

‘You were there too?’ she asked politely.

He laughed, shaking his shoulders, and his black eyes narrowed into a frenzy of suspicion. ‘I didn’t say so, did I?’ ‘No.’

‘I was. In the sewers. I fought.’

Martha now found that she was not only afraid, but tired. Her legs were stones under her. Her head was heavy. A very long way was she now from the light, easy-walking creature of only half an hour ago, whose head was like a lighthouse or a radio set. She thought: I must remember, I must, I must; but stood back, as the young man came a step nearer, grinning and staring. His hands had come out to grasp – not her, but her wandering attention. They were young, thin, sad hands, rather grubby.

‘If you are interested in other things, then I’m very, very sorry,’ he said. ‘Very!’

‘The thing is, I’m rather late.’

‘The other one left at eleven. I let her out. It is now one-nineteen precisely.’

‘In that case, I really must go up, Jack’ll be waiting.’

She smiled and turned and went out, feeling him immediately behind her, and his grin somewhere just behind her head. But she walked steadily up the stairs, saying as he turned into the landing: ‘Thanks for showing me your place.’

‘It’s all you need. With bell, book and candle. The church across the canal has a bell. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve heard it. Goodnight.’

She stood in a breathing dark, in front of her a door that had light behind it, while below she heard him shuffle back into his place. Martha knocked softly on the door. There was no answer. What she stepped into was a quiet room with fresh white walls, a glossy dark floor with rugs on it, and candles burning on the handsome mantelpiece. And it was warm: the heaters glimmered. On a large bed under the window, Jack lay sleeping. He was naked under a blanket, and was on his back, his cheek on his hand as if he were thinking. As he almost might be: he was lightly, alertly asleep. Martha slid off her shoes and into a chair to rest a moment; if she had not sat down then, she would have fallen; she was thinking, what nonsense, if I’d had to walk another five miles I would, and not been tired till the end of them. Now she sat; for a moment half-conscious. Her back was to the shutter that kept off the smells from the canal below. Above this floor, a floor was empty: rooms that had been open to the sky for a year, receiving wet and wind and snow, and letting the wet seep down, of course, to the white fresh ceiling she now stared at. It had been, Jack said, flaking and cracked, and crumbling and soaked a dark mouldy brown. Then Jack had mended the roof to keep the weather out, and removed the rubble. Below this floor was another, dry, unaffected by the war, but empty, unpainted for years and smelling of mice or rats. Below that, the room in which the young crazy man had made his camp. But on the side of the hall opposite him, a large empty room, beautiful, but the shell of its inside was flaking and falling away. And under the whole tall house, a basement which had had water in it for years. Then, when Jack had drained it, it had damp rubble and old boards. Now it was empty, slowly drying out, he hoped; but sending through the entire house an odour of old damp. But this room was all clean: the old blackout curtains had been left, to add to the theme of black and white. There were Jack’s pictures on the walls. Not many: enough, as he had said, to show he was a painter. And there was an easel and some painting things in a corner. The pictures were mostly abstract, and mostly black and white or grey or brown. Some of them had been made out of queer materials – bits of sack glued on to board; brick rubble mixed with paint smeared on board; paint mixed with sand. Jack had become a painter because at the end of the war he had not wanted to go back to a settled life. He needed a label. What was more respectable than to be a painter? Years before he would have had to fool himself that he was a painter, in order to live the life he wanted under that label. But the war had taught him that there wasn’t time for anything but essentials, he said. In the war he had learned that you must take what you wanted and then fight for it. If you were an artist you could get away with anything. You should either be very rich or an artist or a criminal. He had acquired some canvas and an easel and some paints, and had bought a lot of old pictures from a junkshop which he kept stacked about the walls for the sake of their atmosphere. He did a few days’ work with sand, rubble, bits of sack and some glue and some paint, and behold, he was an artist, with a label he could use on passports and forms.

In 1947, a sailor discharged from the purposes of war, he had been walking down this street in which he had found a room, and had seen this house, then a wreck, a ruin, a shell, with a collapsed roof. He had gone into the open door and to the top of the house. He had spent a day in the house, not really making plans or decisions, but it seemed they had been made without his knowing about it, for the next thing he knew was, he had gone out and brought back a bucket, a scrubbing brush, and soap. With the roof still open above him, he had cleared rubble and scrubbed until he felt rain on his back and realized the roof ought to be mended. He mended the roof. He was just finishing it when Garibaldi Vasallo the Maltese had come in. He was a large swarthy man who looked as if he ought to have gold rings in his ears. But he wore a striped businessman’s suit.

‘What are you doing, son?’

‘Mending the roof,’ said Jack.

‘It’s my house, do you know that?’

‘Well I’m living in it, aren’t I?’

Garibaldi Vasallo went down to the water-filled basement, inspected every floorboard and inch of plaster in the decaying place, and returned to under the roof, having decided to buy it. Previously he had decided it was in too bad a state to buy, like all the bomb-shaken houses of this terrace. But he watched Jack at work for a few minutes and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’

‘You can’t do that, I’m a protected tenant.’

‘How’s that?’

‘I live here.’

‘Since when?’

‘Have a cigarette.’

Jack came down from the roof and sat cross-legged on the damp floorboards, and Garibaldi Vasallo sat opposite him and they smoked and discussed the war. Garibaldi Vasallo had been in the Merchant Navy. Jack had been in a minesweeper. If Jack had been in a minesweeper throughout the war, then he could not have been living in this house as he continued to claim that he had. He continued to make this claim, affably, while he talked of his minesweeping years with Garibaldi Vasallo, who for his part, continued to say that this was his house. And so it went on for some hours, and then Garibaldi went off to buy the house. It cost him £450. He bought two others at the same time for £500 each. Then, lacking further capital for the time being, made it his business to sniff out possible other buyers (very few, the terrace being in such dilapidation), letting them know that ‘the blacks were moving in’. He now had no money at all. He dropped over to watch Jack’s work on the top floor of the house, and began work himself on the roof of one of his other houses. Meanwhile Jack had brought in his belongings, at that stage a camp-bed (now being used by the mad youth downstairs), and a candle in a bottle. He had about a thousand pounds from the war. So far he had spent none of it, and mending the roof had cost nothing, since he had borrowed tools and used available materials from near-by bombed houses. Now he cleaned and painted the second floor, and in the evenings Mr Garibaldi Vasallo dropped in to see what Jack was doing and how he did it. For while being in the Navy was a fine training in inventiveness and small skills, he knew nothing about building, and building had been one of the ways Jack had earned a living. When this floor was all painted out and clean, Jack bought a large bed, a chair, a chest of drawers and some rugs at a street market. Total cost, five pounds. Jack was now at home. But there was no electricity in the place and no plumbing. He used candles and went to the public bath-house and the lavatory at the old cinema at the corner, in payment for which he mended cracked windows for the proprietor.

Now Garibaldi asked Jack if he’d like to go into business, for Jack had seen that he knew about the thousand pounds. Garibaldi was desperate for even half that amount, a quarter: he could buy another bomb-damaged house, or do one up good enough to sell at double what he had paid for it: the thought of the thousand pounds made Garibaldi desperate.

‘Yes, well,’ said Jack, ‘but I think I’m happy as I am.’

And now Garibaldi stood in the middle of the newly black-painted floor, a stout Mediterranean man with hot Mediterranean eyes, and went off into a great storm of rage while Jack laughed and scraped old varnish off a chest of drawers. Laughing, Jack stormed and raged back, while the fat speculator threatened. At last Garibaldi shouted out what he had meant to ask, shrewdly, and as a probe. ‘And there isn’t any electricity here, it’s illegal.’

‘True, the whole place needs re-wiring,’ said Jack.

‘And the plumbing is disgusting, no one but an animal would live in a house without plumbing.’

Jack then offered to do the wiring and some plumbing, the minimum, for a half-share in the house, for two hundred and twenty-five pounds. At which Garibaldi raged and stormed again, and said that the house had already appreciated, it was worth double by now; and Jack shouting and laughing said that was only because he, Jack, had repaired it. Garibaldi went off, shouting to the front door, but was silent outside it: already too many of the people in the street knew about him, watched him, meant him harm.

Next time he came in, Jack had seen him through the window, and was at work on the wiring.

‘You give me five hundred pounds,’ said Garibaldi.

‘Two hundred and twenty-five pounds,’ said Jack.

After some weeks this agreement was come to, but it took another six months to get Garibaldi to the lawyers, of whom he was deadly afraid. ‘Oh don’t worry,’ said Jack, insisting on a respectable lawyer, with real offices, in the West End. ‘You’re all right with me. You’re nothing but a dirty little dago and a crook, but I’m a gentleman and they’ll know I’m all right.’

Which was how Jack had become half-owner of this great shattered house which now had some plumbing and some electricity, and where one floor, this one, was the kind of place Martha could enter and feel …

Yes, but that was an uncomfortable point. Down in Stella’s territory, or with Iris, or walking through streets she did not know, she was skinned, scaled, vulnerable, an alien, always fighting in herself that inner shrinking which was the result of surroundings that did not know her, until, fought, it became the strength which set free. She had only to walk in here, to be greeted by skins of white, of black paint, and instantly, she was at home. She was very definitely Martha: the dullness, the inertia, of being at home took over. And very far was she from the open-pored receptive being who hadn’t a name. People like her, for some reason, in this time, made rooms that were clean and bare and white: in them they felt at home, were safe and unchallenged. But she did not want to feel like this- in that case why had she rung Phoebe?

Jack still lay asleep. He breathed lightly but steadily: probably deeper asleep than she had thought. Well, of course, he’d spent the earlier part of the evening making love with the girl who had been let out at eleven. She should take off her clothes, very quietly, and get quietly under the blanket with him and sleep. Ah, but she was so tired, she would descend into a gulf of sleep and she did not want that. Sooner or later, she would have to. She stood up to take off her coat, and that small movement made Jack open his eyes. His head was turned towards her, but she wondered what he saw in the soft light of the candles: his face was hostile. ‘Who …?’ he began, and sat up, shaking his head free of sleep.

‘Martha. Hell, man – but …’ She had taken off Mrs Van’s coat, and now he smiled. ‘You looked like an old woman.’ He came over, naked, and putting two hands on her shoulders stared into her face. ‘Hell, Martha, but that gave me a scare.’ Now he kissed her cheek as if tasting it, and laid his face against hers. ‘Martha,’ he said, and went off to the spirit stove he used for cooking. ‘I’ll make some cocoa, hell you look tired, Martha.’

She stripped off her clothes, fast, knowing that by doing it she put herself farthest from what she had been, walking alert and alone in the streets. She sat on the foot of the bed, back in that area of herself where she was not much more than a warm easy body. She looked at Jack, his back turned, a tall, a very thin man, very white, with brown forearms like long gloves, and brown hair falling straight: he wore his hair rather long. When he turned with two mugs of cocoa, he came smiling across to the bed, stepping in big bounding strides, and sat close, smiling into her face. He was altogether delighted. ‘You’ve been walking again. I can see.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘God man, Martha, I do envy you, I do, when you first come to London, the whole place is yours, I don’t know how to explain it. I remember that, I think of it often, but now I’m a householder and that’s the end of that. I’m sorry. But believe you me, I like to think of you doing it.’ ‘Not for long,’ said Martha.

‘No. You go to a new place and for a while it’s fine, and then it gets you. You should move on then.’ ‘You’re not going to!’

‘But I tell you, Martha, when I saw that old woman sitting in that chair, it gave me a scare, I thought, who’s that old woman in my room?’

‘Then that’s why it’s over for me,’ said Martha, ‘I’ve got to get a job so I can get a coat so you won’t think I’m an old woman.’

They were sitting so their knees touched: prickles of electricity ran from one to another, while they smiled, drinking cocoa, and looking with pleasure into each other’s faces. Now, after a questioning look, which she answered, to find out if it was time, he looked, smiling at her centre, so that it livened and became the centre of herself. Slowly he let the pressure of his eyes go up to her stomach, then wait, then to one breast, and wait, then to the other – her breasts lifted and tightened, and he laughed. Now she looked, smiling, at his genitals: they tightened and began to lift. She put out a hand to touch him; he touched her; then they joined these hands, so that current ran through them, through knees and hands. Now, set together in rising rhythm, they could sit and talk, or be silent, for a half hour, an hour, or through the night, and everything they said, or their silences, would flow up into the moment when they began to make love. If they touched too soon, then it was too strong, set a too urgent current. The looking, slow and pleasurable, was like the perfect meshing of the right gears.

‘I haven’t seen you for so long, Martha – what is it, it seems weeks? And I’ve been thinking about you.’

This, ‘I’ve been thinking about you’ was true. He thought, deliberately, about his girls, maintaining that in this way he kept them connected to him. But he said it because of a necessity he felt to keep, hold, reassure, be reassured. He meant, in spite of the other girls, I think of you. ‘What have you been doing, Martha?’

‘I’ve discovered that I’ve got to get a job.’

But this went past him. Women had jobs, but for him that was not important. Women got jobs to buy clothes, to make themselves pretty for him, for themselves, for their men. It did not matter what jobs they had. What lives they had outside this room, he did not care, provided they came back. He wasn’t serious, not really!

‘I was thinking a lot about how it was the last time: I swear it, Martha, that with you there’s something I haven’t with the others.’

She was delighted. If he said it, it was true; but it didn’t matter: he felt like saying it.

‘Who was the girl who was let out at eleven?’ She said this deliberately, in order to see if she would feel jealous. All kinds of emotions she had considered hers had retreated during the last few weeks. For instance, Henry mentioning her mother: in the past, what resentment, what fear had flared up, taken hold. But now, it didn’t touch her. And a slight pang of jealousy faded at once: they were emotions without force behind them, like jets of water without pressure.

‘He’s a bit crazy, Martha. He’s got a thing about time. He’s got a chart: he marks every day off in hours and crosses off every hour.’

And now, his face hardened and clenched: for he above all had time riding him: suddenly he lifted her hand and pressed it tight to his eyes: she could feel the round pressure of his eyeball against the ball of her thumb.

‘Is that why he’s here?’

‘Yes, you’re right, I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s why. I was saying to myself it was because – well for one thing it tests Vasallo. And for another, if the police pick him up again he’ll be back in the loony bin.’

He sat quiet, eyes shut, holding her hand so tight the bones hurt. He was sitting inside his living breathing body, assuring himself of it. Jack had done four years in the minesweeper and had been in continual danger. He had been sunk twice. Once he had spent twelve hours in the water. What he had been left with was an awe of the flesh. The existence of his body now was a miracle: he never ceased to feel it. Time bled away from him in every pulse beat. Thomas had had that too.

She was thinking of Thomas. Again? With Jack, she found herself thinking of Thomas. She did not think of her two husbands, Knowell and Hesse, she thought of Thomas.

Thomas Stern. Thomas. Who was Thomas that she had to go on thinking of him?

Thomas was a soldier. Thomas was a gardener. Thomas was a tradesman. He was the husband of his wife and the father of his little daughter. He was an exile, Thomas Stern, Polish Jew from Sochaczen, tossed out of Europe and into Africa by a movement of war. When they put his name on documents to make him part of the Medical Corps, Zambesia, they wrote: Thomas Stern, Pole, alien. When the Germans killed his family in the Warsaw Ghetto, they might have written (did they keep records?) ‘Sarah Stern, Abraham Stern, Hagar Stern, Reuben Stern, Deborah Stern, Aaron Stern …’ Thomas was the son and the brother of these dead people. Thomas was a man who killed another man deliberately because he had gone mad and chosen to believe in revenge for revenge’s sake. Thomas was a man who had chosen to live with some particularly ‘backward’ Africans on the edge of the Zambesi River in a tract of land now covered feet deep by the waters of the Kariba Dam. These Africans (now dispersed to other areas chosen by the white man and dead as a tribe) had thought of Thomas Stern: A crazy white man with a good heart who lives with us and who sits in his hut scribbling words on paper. Martha had thought of Thomas who was her lover and not her husband: ‘With this man I am always at home.’ Martha Quest (then Martha Knowell, then Martha Hesse) had thought, still thought of Thomas.

Thomas had lived inside his body as if it were an always dissolving reforming shell or shape with many different names and times. At the end, Thomas’s way of living, or being, had wrenched his body from large blonde solidity into a lean dark bitterness of purpose. Thomas’s flesh breathed time and death; but his mind and his memory moved along another line parallel to it.

That was why she had been with Thomas.

That’s why she was with Jack?

I couldn’t be with a man who hadn’t got it: time moving in one’s breath. I suppose once you’ve entered into some kind of knowledge, then you can’t go back on it …

Suddenly she saw something: all Jack’s girls had it. Of course, that was how he chose them, while he thought he was choosing a smile or the promise of a body.

‘What’s she like, this new one?’

‘She’s lovely, a little fair thing, whitey-gold all over, her hair, skin, everything. She sits on my bed like a little whitey-gold statue. I wish you could see her.’

‘Well, who knows, perhaps I will.’

A couple of weeks ago Martha and Jack had been sitting as they were now when a girl walked in. She was tall and fair, with solemn brown eyes. She wore an elegant camel coat, in spite of the heat, and had long silk-covered English legs. She had seen the two of them as she came in and turned around slowly to close the door to give herself time to know what she wanted to do. Then her face came back into view with a smile on it, and she advanced smiling to the bed. Martha, introduced, nodded and smiled. Jack said: ‘Joanna, come and join us.’

‘Not altogether, if you don’t mind,’ said Joanna, with a short amused laugh. Composed, she pulled up a hard chair and sat quite close. The three smiled at each other.

‘I was passing,’ she said; at which Jack and Martha laughed, and then, after a while, she laughed too, for this was not an area where she could possibly have been passing.

‘I wanted to set eyes on one of the others,’ she said, gruff and abrupt, making a confession with difficulty.

‘Well, here I am.’

Joanna gave Martha a slow once-over.

‘You’re very pretty,’ she said.

‘I’m sure that I’d think the same of you!’

Meanwhile Jack sat, not at all embarrassed, or amused, or annoyed. He was pleased and interested. He was never amused, never ironic, never felt a shock of improbability. He was delighted, pleased – or so unhappy he could not move but lay face down on his bed suffering till a weight lifted off him.

‘Shall I make you some cocoa?’ he asked.

She shook her head, smiling.

‘The thing is, Jack, either we both have to get dressed, or Joanna has to be undressed.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ said Joanna in her brisk fair English way. Jack wanted Joanna to get undressed. Afterwards he had said to Martha: the tears positively drowning his eyes: ‘If she had trusted me so much: if she had taken her clothes off – then I swear, I’d have been so happy, I can’t make you feel how happy I’d have been. But not yet. She will though. I am sure she will.’

He left it to them, the two women, to decide when to trust him. Martha began to dress. That had been during the heatwave, and she had put on, but not too fast, while they watched, bra, pants, slip and a narrow blue linen dress. Joanna had admired the dress. Then Jack had got dressed and they had all gone out to eat lunch at the Indian restaurant.

Joanna was engaged to a second cousin who had been in the Guards and who had a big house in the country. She intended to marry him although he had not done more than kiss her aggressively when taking her home after the theatre once. He had been rather drunk. She came to Jack, once or twice a week, to make love. She was not young: that is, she was not a girl, for she had the war behind her. From the war she had got one thing, a need for security. The security was the cousin. Jack was for her.

‘I was too close to it in the war,’ she had said to Martha, not feeling that she needed to explain. ‘And love doesn’t last, does it?’

‘Love may not last, but sex does,’ said Jack, when Martha reported what Joanna had said. And he rang up Joanna in the country to say the same to her. ‘I’ll be here, always,’ he said. ‘Remember that.’

For Joanna ‘it’ was poverty. That was the edge she was afraid of.

For Jack? He had spent the whole war, he said, dreaming about women. And so here he was, receiving girls, one, two, three a day, making love for hours every day. And he painted. For instance he had painted a picture while Garibaldi watched him. He was only serious about sex.

But he’s not serious, thought Martha. He can’t spend the rest of his life … but why shouldn’t he? Why on earth not? Considering the way most people did spend their lives.

The boy downstairs was mad. About time? Death. And Jack was mad. About women. Death. Joanna was mad – she proposed to spend her life with a man she didn’t much like because she was afraid of – poverty? And she, Martha – but she would be lunching with Phoebe tomorrow. In a few hours, now.

‘If I asked her to meet you, would you come?’

‘Would she?’

‘If she actually met you … if I could get her to do that … when women are jealous, I’ve discovered, they aren’t when they’ve actually met the girl they’ve been thinking all those thoughts about. But men don’t realize that, do they?’

That’s only because you aren’t serious, Jack. We don’t take you seriously. Why not?

‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Martha?’

‘I was very, not now.’

He looked at her again: centre, breasts, back down to her thighs, back up to her eyes – smiling. But the smile dimmed. ‘You’re not with me, you’re not …’ He nearly touched her breasts, but withdrew his hand and enclosed hers again with it. ‘Martha, I won’t mind if you say yes – but have you been with another man?’

‘No-really not!’

‘Because if that’s it, tell me, and we’ll try something else. I’ve noticed with my girls, when they’ve been with a man, even their husband, this one doesn’t work – something gets switched off. Then you just have to start again, you have to have a good ordinary fuck to make the contact again. But that’s not as good as when you can let it slowly build up like this …’ He was in a fever of anxiety, as he leaned forward, explaining to her, comrade in the fields of love: his expertise was all urgency; he looked as if something might be taken away from him, had been taken away. Did he know that she had thought: I won’t be coming back again?

‘This little one tonight, Jane, she was with a man this afternoon, and I was sitting with her like this, and she said to me, all wide-eyed and wanting to know: Jack, I don’t feel for you the way I did last Thursday, what’s wrong with me. I don’t want you to touch me.’

‘She’d been making love?’ ‘Yes. All afternoon.’

She laughed; then so did he, to keep her company.

‘But not me, I haven’t.’

‘Well then, we’ll wait until it’s right.’

‘Who is she – Jane?’

‘She’s English – a sweet, gentle, wide-eyed little English girl. You know.’

‘Indeed yes. There was one in the restaurant I was in tonight. She was so pretty. And she wore that black dress, that uniform, you know it? The little crêpe dress. With an awful brooch. Just there, you know – the whole thing, so wrong, so ugly, so nastily smart …’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’ he said, delighted, laughing.

‘There was no relationship between that dress and that girl. And then another came in. They knew each other. And she had a black little dress with a little square of white neck. Like plump little Teddy bears. Everyone was playing nurseries. It was an upper-middleclass restaurant – I’m coming on, I can tell the difference. And I looked at those girls and they broke my heart, and I thought: well at least I can tell Jack, he’ll understand!’

‘To hell with it, Martha, you’re sad, I don’t like that.’

She rested on his smooth naked shoulder. But it was not a shoulder for comfort, not a body for support: it was a body for love. She rested against him, for his sake. On the arm that did not hold her, but lay on his knee, she saw the fine gold hairs stand up, each in a pucker of flesh. Then his body, an instrument more sensitive that any she had known, shivered. Then she knew why: it had started to rain, to rain heavily, and the roof was sounding with it. The house was an empty shell reverberating to the rain: his thin lithe body was alert and anxious, like an animal’s, and he put back his head and sniffed, like an animal when there is rain or smoke on the wind. They rolled over, together, and lay side by side, both shivering in the warm room because of the booming rain, looking at each other. Now as he looked, and she looked, began the ceremony for whose sake he had put all the passion of his life into women: for here was where he fought with time, wrestled with it, held it, understood it: here, the gates were held.

The two bodies lay face to face, held loosely together by arms and legs; one long and white, all narrow bone and muscle, one solidly fleshed; these two separate organisms were connected by a steady interchanging gaze, eye to eye. Now he waited for her fingers to touch and annul the long scar on his neck. Diving off a ship that slanted into the water, he had slid past, under the heave of a wave, something jagged which had ripped away from his shoulder, a flap of flesh. This, while treading water and holding on to a floating baulk of timber, he had found drifting in the water, with a hand numbed by the loss of blood, and thought it was weed or debris, to be pushed away. ‘Think of it, Martha – there I was, holding on with one hand. I told that hand hold on, hold on there man, that’s what I said to it, and then I swear I forgot that hand, I didn’t think of it again, it just went on holding on without my thinking of it again. And the other hand kept coming on a bit of weed or something. It irritated me, and then I looked and there was a sort of flap lying in the water. Like a bit of filleted fish. There was my shoulder, the shoulder bones I was looking at white bone with some gristle on it and I thought: that’s like a bone a dog’s been at and left, and then I realized, it’s my shoulder bone. And the bit of weed or something was the flesh of my shoulder. It was nothing – skin with some red blood vessels inside – hell, but I’d never known before how thin I was, it scared me. That’s why I eat so much. I eat and eat, because of that flap of skin. I made the swimming hand bend up and hold the flap down on my neck, and pressed down to stop the blood all going into the sea. The funny thing was. I had no feeling in that hand, but I made it do what I wanted. And the hand which was holding on to the bit of timber – that held on too, but it was numb – dead. That’s where I learned about the body, you can make it do what you want, and it’s where I first learned about sex. That’s funny, isn’t it. You can tell your body what to do and it does it. There I was for a whole day, watching the sun go right across the sky and down, and the water was red all round me. Sometimes I passed out and then I came to myself and there was the sun, filling the sky, everything hot and glittering, and I thought I was dead already, because there was no sensation in my body anywhere. Then I thought of sharks, coming for us, because all the sea was full of red. But there was so much meat in the sea that day I suppose they didn’t need me. And when I was picked up they had to force my arm back away from holding my shoulder flesh in place: it was bent and set hard in a crook.’

This scar was a long white weal that slanted down into the armpit. Martha stroked it with her fingers while he remembered that afternoon in a sea full of rubbish and the dead and the dying: she stroked and thought of it with him. Then he, having kissed the fingers that held the memory, contained it, ran his fingers along the minute marks on her groin and upper thighs made by pregnancy, tiny silver marks on white skin, and she thought of a small baby, any baby born to any woman, and its absolute perfection. That is why women cry when their children fall for the first time and scar a knee or an elbow: that perfect body, with not a mark on it, well, now it is claimed by the world – that is the moment when a woman cedes her child away from her, to time. She thought of Caroline, the perfect little female body that had issued from her body which now held and always would the scars of pregnancy, and it was hard to tell whether she was Martha, or her mother who had given birth to her, or Caroline, who would give birth; and meanwhile Jack touched and understood the scars, lifting his head to look at them, and on his face was the awe of his love of the flesh and his terror at what ate it.

She lay and watched the strong bony boy’s face with the boy’s brown eyes just above hers, and the face dissolved into time: his hard straight mouth and the eyes were those of the little tyrant, his father; his nose, his falling brown hair, his mother’s, the frightened farm girl’s; and when he smiled, letting his head fall back on the pillow beside hers, she slid down her hand to the back of thighs which under the pads of her fingers were grooved and marred, and his brown eyes narrowed into a tension of memory. He was the son of a farmer in the Orange Free State, a small poor farmer with a large family: two sons, a cowed wife, and three daughters whom he adored and terrorized, and (so Jack claimed) had raped, just once, all three of them. The marks he had left on Jack and the other boy were across the backs of their thighs. He whipped them with his leather thong all through their childhood, and the moment Jack got free of him was when he went to the local Indian store and bought a pair of long khaki trousers: man’s trousers. He was twelve, and he had to roll up the bottoms more than a foot. Then he had gone to the veranda where his father was sitting at sundown with his silent wife, and had stood there – a man. And when the father had stood up, anger swelling in the veins of his neck, Jack had picked up a big stone from the earth outside the house, and had stood there, stone poised at shoulder level ready to throw. Not one word had been said. There he had stood, a thin child in a man’s long trousers that hid the scarred backs of his thighs for ever from his father; the setting sun was hot on his back and made for a long shadow right across the sand to the brick veranda where the man his father stood up to go inside and fetch his whip. But he stopped, because as he moved, the stone in the boy’s hand moved while the narrowed brown eyes (replicas of his own) took aim. The man had sat down. He had not beaten the older son again, but went on beating the younger. He did this until Jack took the eleven-year-old into the local store and with money he had stolen from the tobacco bag hidden under his father’s mattress, bought him a pair of man’s trousers. The two boys had confronted the father together. And again, not a word. Never a word spoken while the two boys stood side by side at evening looking in at the veranda where their parents sat drinking coffee. The mother had gone indoors, unable to stand it: and four females had stood in the room behind, watching the scene outside, too afraid even to cry.

A year later Jack left the farm early one morning when the sun was coming up over the edges of the sand, taking with him money he had stolen from under the mattress. He boarded the train to Port Elizabeth. ‘And there I suddenly understood, Martha – I was mad. I’d been mad all my life, ever since I could remember being a little kicker. I had spent every moment of my life hating my father. I stood on the edge of the sea, and that was something, the sea, for the first time. I had hardly known the sea existed. No one ever mentioned it, not really. God it makes you want to cry, man, sometimes it does make me cry, all the little kickers black and white all over the Fatherland, and they’ve never seen the sea, and Port Elizabeth and Cape Town and Durban and Johannesburg are the big cities. I stood throwing stones at the sea and crying. Because I’d understood – my father was nothing. It made me feel like nothing. All my life spent hating a poor little tyrant on a few morgen of poor soil, and he’d never known anything else. I knew I had to beat hating him. I knew if I went back to the farm I’d be finished, I’d kill him, I knew I would. I had spent most of my childhood working out ways how to kill the old man. So I said I was eighteen and got a job on the docks. But the hatred – it’s there. It comes back into me when I don’t expect it. It’s my enemy. I can’t hate that poor little nothing of a backveld farmer, how can I, what am I hating? But I do … I can’t help it.’

So Martha stroked the backs of his thighs, following with her fingers marks made by an oxhide whip held by a little tyrant now dead and lying under a thorn tree under the red sand, while Jack closed his eyes, and let hatred rise in him so that he could hold it and control it. He lay trembling with the force of his hatred, his lashes pressed hard against his cheek, until, with a gasp, the tension held, he opened his eyes and he smiled into her face.

Her face which was – whose? For her eyes were her father’s, and her mouth too; and her nose and the shape of her face and even where the lines showed how they would fall, and a mole, her mother’s. Yet it was Martha who lay now, endowed with these features which were not hers at all, merely from stock, the storehouse of the race, and smiled at Jack? Who smiled? Who smiled back, who, what? – When Martha smiled at Jack, Jack at Martha, in these shapes of flesh that had come together as if a sculptor had flung noses, eyes, hands, mouths together. And was it Jack then, who bent her head back so that he could see where the thirty years of her life were written into the soft place just under her chin. Just there and nowhere else on her body did the wear of time show. He touched with soft fingers the soft crinkling place, and kissed it, tears in his eyes because of the anguish of time eating. Jack comforted Martha. Martha took comfort from Jack.

And now, the ritual was complete. They lay, taut with power held and controlled. Ready. But if things had not gone right, if the hatred had built up and exploded, as sometimes it did, so that he gasped and jumped away from her, to beat his fists on the wall, swearing and crying and trembling; if he had gone white and cold remembering the terror of his being in the sea with his blood leaking away; if she had let herself go away from him into the anonymity of an ancient femaleness, something indifferent to men, even hostile, self-sufficiently female; if she had let herself go into the great indifference of sorrow, thinking how soon her body would sag down over her bones in a gutter of flesh, so that what delight there could be now was not worth the making of it, since it so soon would be in the past – if they went away from each other off a finely achieved and held point, then Jack would kiss her, jump up and say: Well, that’s not right, it’s not working this time – and make them both cocoa. This achievement of control which was so hard, could not tolerate a second best, or a falling away: sex that was an explosion of force, or a weakening of it, was not possible, or too damaging to let happen.

‘Martha, do you know what I’ve discovered – making love? I understood what hating is. You say all your life “I hate” “I love”. But then you discover hatred is a sort of wavelength you can tune into. After all, it’s always there, hatred is simply part of the world, like one of the colours of the rainbow. You can go into it, as if it were a place. Well, right at the beginning when I was using sex to beat me hating my father, then I suddenly understood. If you can get beyond “I hate” – then you find – there is hatred, always there. You can say I am going into hatred now, it’s just a force. That’s all, it’s not anything, not good or bad. You go into it. But man! – you have to come out again fast, it’s too strong, it’s too dangerous. But it’s like a thousand volts of electricity. And sex. Well, Martha, I don’t have to tell you. But that’s what I discovered. Do you know what I mean?’

Listening to him, listening to his words, had not been any use to her at first: since it had not been something she had discovered for herself. But, listening to him, she thought back – but no man apart from Thomas had been relevant. Making love with Thomas – that had been sometimes ‘the thousand volts’, but that had shattered, they had not been able to stand it; they had sometimes broken away from each other and sat talking, hardly touching, or even had not met for a couple of days. Somewhere there, Martha and Thomas had stumbled on to something, near some knowledge, but had not been able to use it, benefit.

But some instinct, or some accident or experience, a coming into knowledge, had made this man, Jack, an embodiment of something she had not ever experienced, nor had she imagined existed. She had come near it, merely, but failed to understand. Sex, with Jack, was never an explosive, or the simple satisfying of a need, or rather, if that is what it became, because of tiredness, or failure of control, then it was a failure, and he shrugged his shoulders and waited for and prepared for the next time. Sex was the slow building up, over hour after hour, from the moment of meeting the woman he was to make love with – a power, a force, which when held and controlled, took both up and over and away from any ordinary consciousness into an area where no words could be of use.

Now, this night, with the rain still enclosing the empty softly drumming house, in this long white room with the candles burning down low, the two bodies on the bed lay in a state of high relaxed control, and Martha, looking at his face, the country boy’s face, knew from its absorbed concentration that now they could go on, reach for the next stage: tonight there was no need to confess failure, make sex for the sake of satisfaction, break off, for a new attempt. He joined with her and they lay still, sensing and aware of the different rhythms at work in their bodies, the pulse of the blood – blood washing back and forth; the breath, and its movement; the two movements at first out of tune with each other, till they adjusted themselves and became one, first in each separate body and then across the boundaries of separate flesh, the two bodies together. Then, slow, slow, a building up till a different rhythm, a high, fine beat of nerves took over, took control. All the time quite still, not a movement, but lying absolutely still, in a high alert tension, eyes closed, while the separate rhythms emphasized their separateness with a high strong emphasis, till they flowed into higher more powerful rhythm. So that the first movement of body in body was not a willed one, from his side or from hers, but came from, was impelled by, was on, the rhythm of blood-beat and breath. Eyes closed, listening, almost, to their bodies, slow. And now Martha distinguished, through the high tension of the superior rhythm, the different centres of her body – and through hers, Jack’s. Sex: sensation pulsing on the currents of blood and breath. Heartbeat – heart: separate. Heart with its emotion, ‘love’, but isolated and looked at like this, a small thing, a pulse of little feeling, like an animal impulse towards another, a warmth. Sex, heart, the currents of the automatic body were one now, together: and above these, her brain, cool and alert, watching and marking. Body, a surge like the sea, but the mind above not yet swung up, absorbed into the whole. And then mind dimmed and went, and Martha was swung up and away: and as she went she thought, trying to hold a flash of it before it did go: Good God, yes, I had forgotten, why is it we don’t remember, with Jack there’s this special place: nothing to do with Jack the person, he’s the instrument that knows how to reach it: but you can’t ‘remember’ it. Yes, exactly, like walking down the street in a high vibrating place: you can’t ‘remember’ it – it’s the same place … Her mind cleared, emptied, little thoughts like small trains darting across a vast landscape went by. An empty dark mind: pictures were flashing across her eyes, in front of her eyelids, extraordinary scenes, or perhaps ordinary ones made extraordinary by the solemn intensity and emphasis of their presentation to her: places she had not been to, faces she had never seen, gardens, rivers, the flash of a city she had never been in, then voices came into the empty dark place where her mind was. The vibration shifted and heightened: all her body was in a fine high vibration like a wire at very high tension: as she shifted up into this other state, she saw in front of her eyelids a picture of a man and a woman, walking in a high place under a blue sky holding children by the hand, and with them all kinds of wild animals, but they were not wild at all: a lion, a leopard, a tiger, deer, lambs, all as tame as house-pets walking with the man and the woman and the lovely children, and she wanted to cry out with loss: but it was a loss there was no focus to, there was no holding it. And then, out of the pain of loss, came another picture accompanied by a shift of mood or place: she saw a large layered house, not foreign or out of another climate, but London, it had a London feel to it, and it was full of children, not children, half-grown people, and their faces as they turned them towards her were tortured and hurt, and she saw herself, a middle-aged woman, thickened and slowed, with the face of a middle-aged woman. An anxious face, a face set to endure, to hold on – there was such pain in this vision, such hurt, and she heard herself crying: she had dropped back fast through layers of herself to find Jack holding her, the movements of their love-making stopped. Martha, Martha, Martha. Wake up, Martha, what is it, you are crying – come back what’s wrong?

He was holding her as if she were a child in a nightmare, comforting her. She was back in herself, with the man comforting her, in a room where it was now dark: the candles had burned right down; and beyond the lowered blackout curtain a greying of light – morning.

‘Oh God, Jack, it was like a nightmare,’ she wept in his arms. ‘What, tell me, what was it?’ ‘Do you see pictures, Jack? Do you hear voices?’ ‘I see scenes sometimes – do you mean the pictures like scenes from a film?’

‘Yes, but, oh my God, Jack, this time it really was awful.’ ‘Tell me then, tell me, tell me …’

But the house had gone with its load of half-grown children and the woman who was responsible for it, for them. She could not ‘remember’ it: she only knew it had been there, because of the fearful sadness that filled her now.

‘I don’t know. It’s all gone. And it was silly …’ She sat up, Jack with her, she was back in her day-time self and it was silly. She was soaked with her tears. All her face and her breasts were wet with tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘You gave me such a scare, Martha. I was right away, and then I heard you crying, and I wondered, who’s that crying? And then it came to me, yes, it must be Martha. So I brought us down again.’

They sat side by side on the crumpled hot bed. Behind the blackout curtains, the light was already stronger: the sun must be up over the roofs and treetops of London.

‘Look, Martha, you were terribly tired last night, you were upset. Perhaps this was really just a time for us both to come and then off to sleep. Shall I make you come properly, Martha, and then we’ll sleep a bit?’

‘Oh, Jack, I feel so sad, there was something awful, but I’ve just remembered, there was something lovely as well: a lovely picture, like the golden age, men and women and animals and children all together walking along. I want to cry.’

When she woke up, he was making coffee at the spirit stove. He stood naked with his back to her. A tall thin man – a body. A woman lying on the bed, a body.

She knew from the alert concentration with which he turned with the cups in his hands that he was adjusting the tension that now lay slack between them for a new curve upwards. It was about seven in the morning. She had five hours before meeting Phoebe for lunch. They sat by each other, and slowly, without talking, let the wheel carry them up and over. This time, when her mind finally clicked off, went beyond the pictures and the voices, she did not retain any memory of it; was aware again only as she made the slow descent. The different rhythms disengaged and she entered normality: which was, she understood now, a condition of disparateness. She had never really seen before how the separate parts of herself went on working individually, by themselves, not joining: that was the condition of being ‘normal’ as we understand it. Breath flows on, blood beats on, separately from each other; my sex lives on there, responding, or not; my heart feels this and that, and my mind up here goes working on, quite different from the heart; yet when the real high place of sex is reached, everything moves together, it is just that moment when everything does move together that makes the gears shift up. Yet people regarded sex as the drainer, the emptier, instead of the maker of energy. They did not know. But why was it that people didn’t know? There was a knowledge that was no part of our culture, hinted at merely; you could come across references. Or you could stumble on it. Like Jack, who had said to a hand numbed by a loss of blood and cold: hold on, and it held on because it had been given orders, for twelve hours. A moment of extremity in war had taught Jack a simple law about his own body. Supposing he had not had that chance, could Jack have become one of the men who regard sex as a kind of currency to be measured out. Well, whatever Jack could have been, it had to be an extreme, that was certain. Jack could as easily have been a sex-hating bigot, he could have been as violently afraid of sex as he now passionately pursued the knowledge of its laws, of its control and understanding. He would have been violent and extreme whatever course he had taken – or been set on, by the accidents of his experience.

But now, Jack and Martha, having made love for hours, came to themselves light and easy, and as if they had been washed through and through by currents of energy. She felt as if she had been connected to a dynamo, the centre of her life. But Jack could not be the centre of her life – he would not be the centre of any woman’s life. Why not? And as she came around again to this warning thought, she opened her eyes, smiling, to hide that she was thinking it. They lay there washed up side by side, smiling and delighted and rested.

At half past twelve she rang Phoebe to say she could not make lunch that day, it would have to be tomorrow: and heard Phoebe’s gruff but business-like reproaches knowing that she had earned them. And he rang Joanna to say that he could not see her today, but he would love to see her tomorrow. ‘You see, Joanna, Martha’s here, and we don’t want to stop yet.’ The conversation went on, amiable and brotherly on his side; but Martha could not make out from the tones of Joanna’s voice what she was feeling: she probably didn’t know herself.

‘She’ll come tomorrow,’ said Jack with satisfaction.

They began to dress, so as to go out and eat. ‘You are an extraordinary man,’ she said, and he kissed her gratefully. But she was thinking: Then, why don’t we take you seriously? But this thought, when with him she was initiated into so much knowledge about the capacities of her own body, kept her silent and pondering; while he was silent, because he was so hungry he felt almost crazy with it. Hunger hit Jack like a mania, a fever: when he had to eat it was, he said, as if he were being eaten alive by a nestful of ants. He cut a hunk of bread and gnawed it, feeding hunger, while she finished dressing and thought: Is it because for Jack it is an end in itself, is that it? But she could not go on with this – for what ought to be an end then? She had gone way out past any buoys, lighthouses, or charted points in her knowledge of herself: and that meant that moments of criticism must be resisted, they would probably be nervous reactions, that was all.

They walked out into the ugly street, where now workmen clustered around a crater in the road; and went up the channel between flaking dingy houses which was Rogers Street in the daytime, until they came to a new Indian restaurant about a mile away, spent an hour or so eating a great deal, for they were both very hungry, and then strolled back to his house again. They hardly spoke. They had reached a condition that made speaking irrelevant. Yet for her it was not a contented silence. For now, as she and Jack returned to his room for another afternoon and night of making love, she began to feel bad about letting Phoebe down; she ought to have gone to lunch! All this was a delaying, a putting-off of something she had to do. She could spend weeks in Jack’s country and still at the end of it she must go to Phoebe and whatever it was she represented. If she had gone to lunch with Phoebe then she would not now be facing with Jack – but what? Why was she so uneasy? Tired? No. Flat? No – this condition of light well-being was not anywhere near that. But anguish lay somewhere just beneath the surface and threatened to well up: it was the pain that had accompanied the scene of the London house and the sad children. There had been the lovely picture of the golden age, the golden man, the woman and their children and animals; but the joy which had accompanied that was not as strong as the pain that came with the other. Oh, if she wasn’t careful she was going to cry and cry – and that wouldn’t do, not this afternoon when she had to be so strong. A decision or something of the kind lay ahead, she could feel it.

Back in the white and black room, new candles were lit. They were quite alone in the big house. The room was stark and bare now, the bed had a brown blanket stretched over it. There was only one chair; so Martha and Jack sat on a rug by the bed, leaning against it. He seemed nervous. ‘What’s the matter, Martha?’

‘I don’t think I’m going to be a good partner for you today. Perhaps you should have let Joanna come.’

‘Joanna’s gone off racing with her cricketer. What’s the matter? I can see there is something wrong. Perhaps it’s my fault. I’ve had a thought in my mind all this time and I didn’t tell you. If you’re with a woman and you are holding some thought back, then it breaks the contact. That’s why you keep going away from me.’

‘Perhaps.’ But Martha had in her mind a hundred thoughts she could not share with Jack. He really was a boy, after all. He sat there, his strong face above his brown sweater, brown eyes anxious, intense; a boy with a boy’s fear that he’s not strong enough to keep what he holds. He was nearly thirty-five. Yet she could have believed him to be twenty-five. Meeting him somewhere for the first time, she would have thought: a strong, simple boy, rather naive. That’s what she had thought, allowing herself to be picked up by him on the underground. Everything he knew was in his body: it never reached his face, which was stiff with the fear that she would not accept the thought he wanted to share with her: with Thomas they had not set out to ‘share’ thoughts. With Jack, you set up a simple communion of the flesh, and then your mind went off by itself – that was all right, what was wrong with it? If she couldn’t have Thomas … do you know what you’ve done, said Martha to herself in despair: I’ve become one of those women that used to frighten me! I’ve got a dead man. Like my mother. Like Mrs Talbot. Like Maisie. I say to myself ‘Thomas’ as if that were the end of it! What does it mean? I say ‘Thomas’ and – play with Jack! Except you can’t possibly use the word play, for anyone as desperately singleminded as Jack. All right then – imagine Jack dead, would I then be saying ‘Oh Jack!’ and playing with someone else? No. I took Thomas seriously. I don’t take Jack seriously. Why? It doesn’t matter why.

‘Martha, I don’t know how to tell you what I’ve been thinking. I don’t know how you’ll take it. Why don’t you come and live here. No, don’t say no, think about it – there’s the floor under this one. You could live there. The wiring’s done, and the plumbing and the telephone’s in.’

‘You mean, live with you? But how?’

‘Well, why not?’ he muttered, already rejected, sullen. ‘You ask it as if – you don’t trust me, that’s it, that’s what I was afraid of.’

‘But what would Garibaldi Vasallo make of it?’ – trying to joke.

‘What could he say? You don’t understand. I’ve got the whip-hand. He didn’t want to give me a half-share of this house at all. But he did – I made him. Besides, he knows I know how he operates, with all his dirty tricks.’

‘Blackmail?’

His face darkened, clenched, was ugly. ‘Blackmail! That’s a word you use for decent people, not a dirty little dago.’

‘I hate that word.’ She was discouraged: all her energy had leaked away; she wished now that she could wrap a blanket around her head, like an African, and turn her face to the wall and sleep. ‘When I left home I really thought I’d be free of the race thing. Isn’t that funny? There’s no end to our being stupid. One’s always making up day-dreams about places somewhere else. But since I’ve been here – things are just as ugly as they are back home, but people don’t know, it’s all hidden. And now you start talking about dagoes.’

‘That’s not racialism! That’s just – accurate. That’s what he is, a nasty little dago. A crook. You deal with crooks in their own coin. If he plays me up, I’ll go to the police with what I know about him. I’m not taking anything from him that isn’t fair. By the time I’ve finished with this house it will be a real house, and it’ll have cost him nothing. If he’d paid a builder, it would have cost hundreds – he knows that. So why is what I’m doing wrong? This house is my house. When I came into it that day and saw it, and started work on it – I knew it was mine. It’s my house because I’ve worked on it.’

Every word of this being true, why did Martha feel uneasy: the intensity Jack put into his pleas, exactly as if it were a false case, was that it? ‘Why didn’t you simply go and buy it? He bought it for £500. You’ve got £1,000 tucked away.’

‘No, I’m not going to waste that. It’s my future. I’ve got to have that money. And this is my house. I’m in my rights if I say you can come and live here.’

‘But, Jack – you’ll live up here on this floor, and I’ll live on the floor beneath?’

And now he was crying: the fearful intensity of his need was wringing his body, making tears spill from his brown eyes. ‘What’s wrong with that? You don’t trust me, Martha.’

‘Look, Jack, you must see it’s one thing coming here – by appointment, to make love – but surely you wouldn’t want me or any woman just beneath you? What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over!’

‘Oh, I hate that. I hate that attitude. That’s what I mean by not trusting me. I’d not tell lies to any girls who came here. I don’t tell lies. Well, not unless I’ve got to – only if there’s a girl who wouldn’t come to me if I didn’t – they’d know that you lived here.’

‘A sort of senior wife?’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that. You don’t want to get married, do you? I mean not really married.’

‘No. I don’t think I do.’ She nearly asked: ‘And what about children?’ But the nightmare vision of the house with the children and herself in it came back, and she shivered.

‘You’re cold, Martha. I’ll start the heaters.’ He got up, glad to be able to take his tears away; and she was glad to have the pressure farther away for a few moments.

He knelt by the paraffin heaters, first one, and then the other. His back was to her. From the set of his shoulders she knew something important was coming: what had gone before was not after all what mattered: the tears, the apprehension were for what he was about to say now.

‘There’s something else, Martha. I can’t say it easily though. Give me a minute. There – we’ll be warm. Listen Martha – oh, hell man, I’m afraid of saying because I don’t want you to take it wrong. But would you like to have a baby? I mean, let me give you a baby?’

And now she was silent because she was shocked. That she ought to be, if not flattered, at least warmed, she knew. But he had taken flight somewhere away from any kind of reality she understood. Because this was the point. His point. She had not expected it.

‘Why not, Martha? You could bring the baby up here. You could get some sort of job. Some job or other.’

‘Babies need fathers,’ said Martha, her voice coming dry despite herself. His body froze, was set in a tension of anger, his back was still turned to her.

‘I could kill you for that, Martha.’ It came out between teeth clenched in anger. She remained still. He came back to the bed and sat on it, close, looking right into her face from a face that had gone a bluey-white. His eyes were small and black.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t only me, is it? You’d like to give all your girls babies, wouldn’t you? That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Put cuckoos in nests?’ ‘Yes.’

Now they were hating each other. But as he brought his face up against hers, black with hate, a wave of anguish swept from him to her: she refused to give way, to soften, and he flung himself face down on the bed, arms outstretched, stiff: in agony. So she had seen him before. This was the shape his black moods set him in, rigid; and how he might lie for hours, without moving.

‘Listen, Jack. When I left my little girl, Caroline, do you know what I was thinking? I thought, I’m setting you free, I’m setting you free …’

‘Well all right, I’m not talking about mothers, a child needs a mother, that’s what I’m saying, isn’t it? But fathers, no, I won’t inflict myself on any child. I won’t. I couldn’t. I’m scared – scared, of my old man, I tell you, that’s what scares me. I don’t suppose he thought when he put me into my mother that he’d hate me, and then my brother, and have to screw my sisters.’

‘I had a sort of silent pact with that child,’ Martha went on. ‘As if she were the only person who understood why I was doing it. I was setting her free. From me. From the family.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ came from the bed. ‘It’s true.’

‘No, it was so terribly not true. I was mad.’

‘You were right, Martha. Don’t go back on it now.’

‘I was mad. So how can I say to you now: You’re mad? I know how you feel. But it was such nonsense, when I think of it now …’ And Martha began to cry, but silently, so that he wouldn’t turn around again. ‘All of us lot, we were communists, we felt the same …’

‘Everyone was a communist,’ came the muffled angry voice from the bed. ‘What’s that got to do with it? I was one, for a time in the war. It was all that stuff about the Atlantic Charter – it turned us up, we were reds, what of it?’

‘Oh, sometimes I think communism, for people who weren’t in communist countries, it was a kind of litmus paper, a holdall – you took from it what you wanted. But for us it went without saying that the family was a dreadful tyranny, a doomed institution, a kind of mechanism for destroying everyone. And so …’ Martha was crying uncontrollably, but trying to make the roughness in her voice sound like deliberate ‘humour’: ‘And so we abolished the family. In our minds, and when the war was over and there was communism everywhere, the family would be abolished. You know – by decree. Clause 25 of a new Magna Carta. “We decree the family at an end.” And then there would be the golden age, no family, no neurosis. Because the family was the source of neurosis. The father would be a stud and the mother an incubator, and the children handed at birth to an institution: for their own good, you understand, to save them from the inevitability of their corruption. All perfectly simple. We were all corrupted and ruined, we knew that, but the children would be saved.’ Now her voice cracked, and she wept, loudly and violently. He did not move. He lay in his face-down position, listening.

When she had stopped, he said: ‘You were right.’

‘We were not right. Isn’t it funny? Do you know how many people have become communists simply because of that: because communism would do away with the family? But communism has done no such thing, it’s done the opposite.’

‘I want you to have my baby. And I want Joanna to marry her guardsman and I’ll give her a baby. She can tell him, I don’t care. I wouldn’t mind in his place: what does it matter who puts a baby into a woman? And I want the little Jane to have a baby. We can get married if she likes. And I want Nancy and Joan and Melinda to have my babies. I’ll see them, I’ll give them presents. But I won’t be a father. I wouldn’t do that to any human being.’

There was now a very long silence. Martha cried a little, feebly out of helplessness. He lay silent, his face hidden. On the black of the curtains rough edges of light. Outside this long black and white room where small candles burned, was an afternoon blazing with sunlight. Briefly: when she looked again, the glow behind the black had faded. She had once felt something that was wrong so violently! She had acted from the feeling – what point now in saying what she ought to have done? She would probably do the same again, in the same position. So what did it matter what one felt? Or believed? It was the action that mattered. And now Jack felt this so strongly that if she wished, she could have a baby: and if he later felt, ‘I was wrong then, my feelings were wrong’ – what difference would that make? There would be the child.

At last she said: ‘There isn’t any family I’ve ever seen that doesn’t seem to me all wrong. But what right have I to feel like that? Where do I get the idea from that something better is possible? I keep thinking and thinking about it – why? Perhaps it’s always like this, it has always been like that? Ugly. But that’s how I do see things. I used to worry and nag at myself: there’s something wrong with me that I do see what’s going on as ugly. As if I were the only person awake and everyone else in a kind of bad dream, but they couldn’t see that they were. That’s how I felt on the ship coming over – you know, pleasure. Several hundred people “living it up”, “whooping it up” – enjoying themselves. Of course, you know ships from a different angle, you’ve worked on them, that’s different. But that voyage – it was like being in a nightmare. People who had saved up money. From all over Africa. Just for that trip – years of saving. Pleasure – eating three times a day like pigs, no five times a day, getting drunk, always just a little drunk, just to make this tolerable. Flirting, sex for titillation. There wasn’t one person on that boat – except for one girl. And she was ill. She was coming to England for treatment. We used to sit by ourselves and watch. They called us spoil-sports. It was like watching a lot of people who had been hypnotized.’

From Jack nothing. He might be asleep. She went on: ‘For some reason, I’ve had that all my life. What’s the use of thinking there must be something wrong with me? One’s got to stand by what one is, how one sees things. What else can you do? And I’ve had the other thing too, the mirror of it: all my life I’ve believed that somewhere, sometime, it wasn’t like that, it needn’t be like this. But why should I? Last night again – the nightmare. But at the same time, the marvellous family walking with their friendly animals. The golden age. Why? But I’ve been thinking, Jack. What’s the use of imagining impossibly marvellous ways of living, they aren’t anywhere near us, are they? You’ve got to accept … parents have no choice but to be the world for their children. And if the world is ugly and bad for that time, then parents have to take that burden on themselves, they are ugly and bad too.’ She started crying again. This time it was hysteria: it would be easy for her now to switch over into being ‘Matty’, then to make fun of herself, apologize … ‘Matty’ had always been an aspect of hysteria? She steadied herself to finish: ‘Babies are born into this, what there is. A baby is born with infinite possibilities for being good. But there’s no escaping it, it’s like having to go down into a pit, a terrible dark blind pit, and then you fight your way up and out: and your parents are part of it, of what you fight out of. The mistake is, to think there is a way of not having to fight your way out. Everyone has to. And if you don’t, then it’s too bad, no one’s going to cry for you, it’s no loss, only to yourself, it’s up to you …’ Hysteria arose again in a great wave: she was trembling, shaking with it. She was saying what she really believed and it was to a man who was asleep. She laughed and she cried, trembling. At last she stopped. Silence. Jack had turned his head: his face was visible. He was listening, with his eyes closed. The hand that lay stretched out was in a tight fist and it trembled.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sober. ‘I know you hate – fuss.’ Jack did not say anything. ‘But in a way it’s a compliment. I could have chosen not to be hysterical. But I’ve discovered something, Jack. About hysteria. It can be a sort of – rehearsal.’ She was thinking of last night, walking. She could not ‘remember’ the lit, alive space; though she knew it had been there; but she could remember the approach to it: something giggly, silly, over-receptive – hysterical. ‘When you get to a new place in yourself, when you are going to break into something new, then it sometimes is presented to you like that; giggling and tears and hysteria. It’s things you’ll understand properly one day – being tested out. First you have to accept them like that – silly and giggly … Jack?’ She knelt close up to him. ‘Jack?’ She had to stop herself saying: ‘Are you angry?’ like a little girl-like ‘Matty’.

‘I’ve been listening,’ he said. ‘And do you know what I was thinking? Is this just Martha’s way of being a woman, of getting her own way over being married and having a child. But I can see it wasn’t that.’ He sat up. He looked beat: pale, ill, and under his eyes, dark bruises. ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t follow what you were saying. It didn’t mean anything to me. I know you mean it for yourself and that’s good enough for me.’ He got off the bed. He was shivering. ‘Martha, I’m so hungry I’ve got to eat.’

They had been to eat very late at midday; and it was not yet six in the evening. ‘I was lying on the bed, feeling all my bones. Sometimes when I lie still like that, I’m a skeleton: I can’t feel the flesh anywhere, just bones. I’ve got to get some flesh on me.’

They went back to the Indian restaurant, through late afternoon streets. A meagre sunlight; people rushing back from work along the ugly street. In the restaurant, the Indian who had served them their lunch, was still on duty. He was from Calcutta, had been sent for by an uncle who owned another, much smarter restaurant, in Earl’s Court. This was a new, small restaurant, the bottom floor of an old house. The Indian from Calcutta, working for a pittance in a cold foreign country to escape from his family’s poverty, welcomed them with white-teethed affability, and for the second time that day, served them with enormous quantities of food. Then they returned to Jack’s house. They were both sad and low, and gentle with each other. When they went in, the door was open into the room where the grinning boy lived. He was sitting with his back to the wall, cross-legged, playing patience with a candle alight beside him. He nodded and grinned and waved. They nodded, leaving his smile behind to fade on the dark stuffy air of the stairs.

They lay on the bed with their arms around each other.

‘You won’t come and live here, Martha?’

‘No. I can’t, Jack.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t. I suppose that’s why I was afraid to bring it up – I didn’t want to hear you say no.’ ‘Somebody else will, I expect.’

‘Yes. But I would have liked it if you could have trusted me.’ He was nearly crying again.

‘Have you ever thought – we make decisions all the time: but how? It’s always in reference to – we make them in obedience to something we don’t know anything about?’

‘No. I make decisions!’

‘Ah, you’re master of your fate.’

But one did not tease Jack, he could not be teased.

‘Don’t laugh at me, Martha!’

‘I’m not. But looking back, we think we’ve made decisions – it’s something else that makes them.’

‘Ah, Martha,’ he said suddenly, rough: ‘You’re not coming back to me, you aren’t going to stay with me!’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No? I don’t know why, but that’s what I thought you were saying.’ ‘No.’

‘You’ve got to believe I want you to. I know what you’re thinking – you’re a woman! He’s got so many girls, he doesn’t care. But it’s not true. I’m not promiscuous, I don’t like changing and having new girls. I want girls who’ll always come back, the same girls. I’m very faithful, Martha, you’ve got to believe me.’

Soon he fell asleep. She was not sleepy. She lay holding his body, the long thin cage of bones, over which such a light shelter of flesh lay breathing. She felt how he was alert, ready to wake at a sound or a touch, even though he seemed to be deeply asleep. She would have got up and dressed and gone, if she could have done it without waking him. But she knew he would start up if she so much as slid her arm away from beneath his head. Her hand lay on his back, feeling the bones branch off from the central column of bone. Past his shoulder she looked into the recess where the window was that had to be kept shuttered because of the odours from the canal. Beneath that window, a scene of littered back garden, unkept hedges, rubbish bins, a slope of dirty soil to a low weed-grown canal. On a hot afternoon during the vanished heatwave, she had sat in the window watching children brown from six weeks of that sun, dive and swim like water-rats among the weeds. From time to time a woman shrieked from a window: Tommy! Annie! Where are you? You’re not to swim in that water! The children cowered in the water, looking up at the windows. The women knew that the children were in the water, and that there was no way of stopping them: they had swum there themselves when they were sleek brown rats among water-weeds.

The candle on the floor near this window sunk, shook wildly and went out. The man in Martha’s arms slept, his face, a boy’s face, tear-marked, a few inches from hers. The candles on the mantelpiece burned for a while longer. Then the room was a pit of dark. Then Martha herself dropped into the pit. She dreamed. That picture, or vision, she had seen behind her eyes of the house with the sad children, came again but now it was not a sharp image, a ‘still’, or a series of ‘stills’; but a long moving dream. A large London house – but not this one. There was traffic outside it, but also the presence of trees. Full of people. Children. Half-grown children. Sad. It was a sad, sad dream. But not a nightmare: no fear came with it. Martha was in the dream, she was responsible for the children. She was worried, anxious: but she held the fort, she manned defences.

They woke very early, having slept so early. It was just light – about five. Jack cooked them breakfast on his spirit stove. Then she kissed him and left. The door off the hall was still open, and in the low grey light, the mad youth lay asleep on the floor beside the candle that had burned itself out. Outside, a young morning, with a low wet sun. With luck, it would be a fine day. Martha set off towards Iris and Jimmy across the river, locked inside Mrs Van’s coat.

Chapter Three

She rode high in a red bus over streets tinted by damp sunlight, crossed a strongly ebbing river with gulls at eye-level – flashing white wings, seen through dull glass; and descended to earth or street-level as Big Ben said it was seven. But it would not do to reach Joe’s café before eight. That household had two starts to its day, one at about five, when Iris, Jimmy still asleep, rose to feed cornflakes, toast, scrambled powdered egg and tea to some young lorry drivers from a lodging house down the street whose landlady would not feed them so early; another at nine, when the side of the card that said OPEN was turned in invitation to the pavement. With the apprentice lorry drivers were a couple of older men, among them Iris’s cousin Stanley, whom she had fancied for Martha; and some charwomen, their early office-cleaning over, who dropped in for a cup of tea before going home to feed breakfast to their families. Between five and eight that café was a scene of bustling, steaming animation, of intimacy. If Martha were to go in now, unexpected, after two unexplained nights, she could only do so as ‘Matty’. And she was damned if she would. If Iget taken over by her, then I’ll have her riding me for the rest of the day, and I won’t have her around when I’m lunching with Phoebe.

Early sun flashed on a thousand windows and on the gulls’ wings. The great buildings on either side of the river stood waiting, empty; not empty: for at this hour an army of women were at work with their vacuum cleaners, making them hum and vibrate like beehives. They stopped to gossip along corridors where soon, but not for two hours yet, men still fighting for another few minutes’ sleep in surburban bedrooms ten, fifteen, twenty miles away, would come hurrying in, Good morning, good morning, good morning, diverging into rooms where the waste-paper baskets had been emptied. In they’d flow, to be flung out again by the sound of Big Ben striking five, as thousands of telephones went silent, all at once. Martha dawdled, lost her way in a mesh of little streets, and hit the street of the café a hundred yards down from the bombed site. Turning right, she greeted the slab or hulk of timber. In the less than two days since she had seen it, a minute yellow flower had emerged from a crevice. That great salty, sour, more-stone-than-wood monument had put out a coronet of green leaves and a flower. A small wind tugged at it, but the flower held firm, its roots being well dug in. Martha peered through a wire door that had the death’s head and No Children on it, and saw the lock was loose in its socket. She pushed and went in. Deserted: too early for the children. But no, a small girl wearing an ancient black jersey over a white dress that looked as if it had been starched for a party sat on a brick in the dust. She kept still. ‘Good morning,’ said Martha cheerfully and the child’s eyes concentrated in terror. Then she fled, jumping like a cat over a far wall into safety away from the woman in the black coat. If this were a ruined city, a poisoned city, what would the excavators a hundred years later deduce from what they saw here? Facing Martha, the surface of a jagged wall, three stories of it, rose up sharp from the low edges of rubble. There were three fireplaces, one above another. Each level of wall was tinted a different colour, as if by moss or lichen: wallpaper soaked and dried, soaked and dried, again and again. Pale green. Above that, pinkish shaggy brown. Above that dim yellow. Coming closer, it could be seen, where a long strip had been torn away off the green, that beneath was a darker green. Martha got up on to an edge of wall, and slid her fingernails under the edge of paper. A thick sog of paper: layers of it, now stuck together. Once each had been a loving and loved skin for the walls, which held the lives of people. But they were fused together, like a kind of felt. Martha pulled. A lump came away. Picking at the layers, she counted thirteen. Thirteen times had a man stood on trestles, or perhaps a table (these were small cheaply built houses, with low ceilings, and probably the kitchen table would have been high enough) and stretched new clean paper over the stains and dirts of the layer beneath. Thirteen times had a wife, or children said: Yes, that’s very nice, I like that, dad; or had said No, we chose wrong. The two papers at the very bottom were rather beautiful, judging from the inch or so she had to look at: they got progressively uglier as the decades slid by. The one at the top was hideous, must have been an acid green, with a bad jangling pattern. In the middle was a rather pretty sprigged pattern, like a Victorian young lady’s morning dress … voices from the street. Precisely as the little girl had done, Martha froze: authority! She ought not to be here. She sneaked down off the wall, pushing the wadge of coagulated paper into Mrs Van’s pocket; and hid behind a heap of bricks until it seemed safe to go out into the street.

Against the dim muslin that screened the café, shapes of bodies; the lively intimacy of the early morning session shed warmth on to the pavement. She was too early after all. Martha went around into the side street where, this house being on a corner, was a side door into a yard. The door was of slats of wood held with two cross-boards. It had been painted once, for there was crumbling greenish pigment in the cracks. But now it was a greyish colour. ‘From before the war,’ Iris had said. When Iris said something was from before the war, this meant, something that would have been replaced, or mended or painted, if there had not been a war. She would not, for instance, have said that the wall which was a single yellow brick’s thickness surmounted at the height of a tall man’s head by a litter of broken glass, was from before the war. Martha unlatched the door and was in – a neat, tended garden. Hidden behind these street fronts, tucked in among wastes of brick and cement, were gallant little gardens. This one, the size of a large room, had a pear tree, an old wooden bench recently painted a new bright green by Jimmy; and an ancient rose ambled over the back of the house. It was in full pink bloom and it scented all the air. In the corner of this patch of garden was a privy: the house did not have an indoor lavatory. It was like a little sentry box, and to it was a flagged path with musky plants growing in crevices. Beyond the window into the kitchen, Iris sat, at a table framed by pink roses. When she had finished with the early morning stint, she took what she said was a bit of a kip: she slumped in a tortoise condition, her hand stretched towards a flagon of tea, her eyes open, but not really seeing anything. Meanwhile Jimmy had got up and had taken over the café. He was not in the kitchen now. Martha pushed open the back door and was received by a sleepy stare from the surface of Iris’s eyes. Then, she said vaguely, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Martha sat down, and Iris gestured towards a brown teapot and yawned. ‘We’ve used your ration,’ she said. ‘You didn’t come, did you?’ Martha poured tea. Iris smiled: but she resented being made to wake up.

The kitchen was small. Along one wall was apparatus for the café: the frying machine for the fish and the chips; and an electric stove which Jimmy had filched from the ruins down the road after the bomb had fallen. There was also an old-fashioned wood stove, which was used as a cupboard, or larder.

‘So you’re off?’ said Iris.

‘Yes. I’ve come to get my things.’

‘They’re ready. And I’ve put your ration book and your coupons on your case. Upstairs.’ ‘Thank you, Iris.’

‘Stanley’s next door, if you want to see him.’ Martha had not wanted to see Stanley, evidence of her bad heart though this undoubtedly was; and Iris’s tone said that see him she ought, even if Stanley did not particularly want to see her. But now, since it was clearly up to her to go through and make her presence known to the man whom Iris had decided would suit her as a husband, Martha actually got as far as the door before rebelling. Why should she? Whatever debts she would leave behind her, Stanley was not one of them. She sat down again, in silence. The two women confronted each other: Martha determined not to apologize, plead guilty, or evade, Iris now awake, exuding a stubborn determination to suffer betrayal.

‘I don’t think Stanley and I are suited,’ said Martha.

‘Well, I suppose one of these days he’ll make his bed,’ said Iris, full of grievance.

‘Yes, but not with me,’ said Martha.

Iris measured herself a small sour glimmer in reply to this invitation to laugh; and then, against her will, laughed out, and slammed her hand palm down on the table.

She continued to laugh, laughter ebbing from her like water: it was like crying.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but a man’s a man, and when the war’s out of his blood, he’ll settle well enough.’

According to Iris, Stanley had been uprooted by war; which was why he had chosen the lorry run to Birmingham five days a week, and spent weekends doing labouring work – he couldn’t rest. Martha thought it was nothing to do with the war, it was his nature. And she knew, though Iris did not (for she and Stanley had come to an understanding, had made a pact against matchmakers) that there was a woman in Birmingham with whom he spent nights. He did not want to marry. Certainly not Martha. Though he liked her well enough to suggest a job as secretary to the firm he worked for.

Iris now got up, defying Martha, or, more likely, asserting her right to choose her cousin a wife; and called through the hatch: ‘She’s here!’

She sat down again, saying to Martha, ‘You’ll want to say goodbye, won’t you then?’

In a moment Stanley came in. He was about forty, a lean, narrow, slouching man with hard blue eyes.

‘I’m due to be off,’ Stanley said generally. ‘My mate’s already at the bus. So you’ve got yourself a job then, have you?’ He did not look at Martha but at his cousin: and towards her a warning, or a resentment, was directed. Not at Martha: he was a fair man and proud of it.

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Martha.

‘You’re all right then,’ said Iris, hostile.

‘See you some time,’ said Stanley, and, on his way out, turned to give her a good warm smile, snubbing Iris with a cool nod.

‘He’s a case,’ said Iris, grieving. ‘There was a girl at the laundry who fancied him, but not him no.’

‘How do you know he hasn’t got a girl of his own already?’

‘Well, if he’d do a thing like that!’ said Iris bitterly, highlighting for Martha some area of family grievance, bonds, or bondage, that she’d never now, with the time left, be able to understand. Tears were in Iris’s weak blue eyes, and she stirred her tea savagely.

In came Jimmy, wearing a striped apron, full of a contained reproach.

‘So you don’t want that job, then?’

‘She’s got a job,’ said Iris. ‘Up West.’

‘Up West is it?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Martha.

‘Then you don’t need any job we can get you, do you then?’ He took a big scrubbing brush and went back into the café, saying, ‘Want some breakfast, help yourself if you do.’

On the shelf over the old wood stove were set out the week’s rations. Each person’s separately: that week’s four ounces of butter, three times, the bacon and two eggs each, on a big dish. And tea. Martha’s had gone.

Iris watched Martha out of a practised interest in the unfairness of the world, to see if she would take eggs, butter, bacon. Martha did not like the butter anyway: a hard salty grease. But Iris had a large china bowl of dripping, the aromatic distillation of a dozen Sunday dinners.

‘Oh, you’re back to my dripping?’ said Iris, friendly again; and she smiled as Martha fried bread in the delicious crumbling scented fat, for herself, for Iris, and they sat eating and drinking tea while the sound of Jimmy’s scrubbing brush went on next door.

He did not come back in: he was not going to forgive her. Martha said good-bye to Iris; was invited to drop in when she felt inclined; and she went upstairs while Iris joined Jimmy in the café.

In the minute room which was already cleaned and impersonal, over the café, her case stood ready for her near the door, with the ration book on it. She took out a summer dress, bundled Mrs Van’s coat and the sweater and skirt into the case; and prepared for the summer day which it was fairly doubtful that the day would remain. She left through the little rose-scented garden.

In was ten in the morning. In the great buildings along the river that administered London, men and their secretaries arrived for work. In three hours, the feeling of the city had changed. The great market that was London had opened: a dispersed, scattered, diversified market, so that in every street was a corner, a block, a centre, where it seemed as if wealth had swum together just here, to offer concealed money, furs, carpets, silver, gold, robes, but like icebergs, only a fraction of them visible in a sign of the name of a banker, or the glass case full of embroideries, or luscious furs; for above all, it was a sense of hidden wealth: and walking over the damp grey pavements it was to feel that under one’s feet stretched invisible warehouses of luxury and richness and beauty – miles of them, caverns of them. And, to the dealers and merchants who owned them, it was not important to sell, or to display, or to offer. A secret city. A hidden city. And, if instead of walking past doors, showcases, the proffered sample, one pushed open a door, passed the rather inferior items for sale, or challenged an inner door, which only needed to be pushed, for so little did the owners expect temerity on the part of docile customers that there was no doorkeeper and – suddenly, hey presto! a great descending stairway to the underground city beneath London where were stored for miles and miles the most fabulous carpets and tapestries and silks in the world.

Martha ought to buy something to wear. Imagining she had a hundred pounds to spend, she stalked clothes up and down the rich streets in Knightsbridge. But if she had had a hundred pounds, she would not have been able to spend a penny of it. The point was, she understood at last, that she did not know for whom, for what, she was dressing. If she had stayed in the streets across the river with Jimmy, Iris, and Stanley, with Stella and her clan, there would have been no problem: the working girls had a style and dash of their own. But it was only necessary to imagine wearing, with Henry, what they wore, to see its impossibility: a tight skirt, a shirt, a sweater: no, no, on to his face would come the look that meant that here was something attractive, and licensed – outside his codes. Was he aware of it? Probably not. Or, she could choose the uniform of a lady: plenty of these, unmistakable, in shops that sold nothing else. But she did not ‘fancy’ as Iris would say, that particular uniform. What then? For there were streets full of clothes, ‘utility’ from the war, hideous and dull and tasteless. For whom? Who were the men, the women, who deliberately sat down, and on to drawing-boards sketched such clothes?

No, not if she had a thousand pounds to spend, was there anything to buy – until she knew what she was going to have to be. Her suitcase in her hand, she dawdled, wasting time until it was one o’clock and time for Phoebe.

The restaurant off the Strand was a lower-level version of Baxter’s; a large room dotted with small tables each with four Windsor chairs. There were dull floral curtains, and wallpaper of a pinkish floral design. The standard to which both related was the same; somewhere behind both was a country house, or a large farm house: the country, at any rate, with centuries of a certain kind of taste behind it. If Fanny’s and Baxter’s had to do without paint or new curtains for fifty years, they would still present themselves to the world with impermeable self-esteem. The menu of Fanny’s offered the same kind of food, but plainer, without sauces, and much cheaper.

When Phoebe arrived, she nodded at the waiter, who knew her; and had inspected Martha thoroughly before even sitting down, though from different standards to Henry’s. Martha’s failure to ring up immediately she had arrived in London: and then, her unreliability, had confirmed, if not frivolity, at least a more fortunate experience than hers, Phoebe’s. Martha’s appearance underlined it. Phoebe wore a skirt and a rather dull jersey, and pearls. Martha wore a linen sleeveless dress on a day which was only by courtesy a summer’s day; and her appearance paid no homage at all to service. Also, her suitcase stood by the chair, after so many weeks in London. Before Phoebe had even sat down, she had made it clear that Martha was a disappointment. She ordered, while Martha followed suit: chicken soup, tinned; boiled fish in an egg sauce; steamed jam pudding. There was a stain on the tablecloth. ‘And how are you finding London?’

This, since it was Phoebe who asked it, was a serious question. Martha deliberated. To whom in the world could she say what she had found in London? Jack – perhaps. A little. And now, because it was Phoebe who sat there, opposite, the past weeks changed their aspect and presented ‘London’ to Martha as a series, containing dockland Stella, the café and Iris; Jack; Henry; and the people in the streets and pubs. Fragments. This was a country where people could not communicate across the dark that separated them. She opened her mouth to say: I am thinking a good deal about class … and shut it again, though Phoebe had seen her about to speak and still waited. It was nothing to do with class. In Africa, as a white, she was so and so; and if she had been black, must be such and such. There was something in the human mind that separated, and divided. She sat, looking at the soup in front of her, thinking: if I eat, if I start this routine of meals, sleep, order, the fine edge on which I’m living now is going to be dulled and lost. For the insight of knowledge she now held, of the nature of separation, of division (for any number of different sets of words would serve to state it, none being of any real use), was clear and keen – she understood, sitting there, while the soup sent a fine steam of appetite up to her nostrils, understood really (but in a new way, was in the grip of a vision), how human beings could be separated so absolutely by a slight difference in the texture of their living that they could not talk to each other, must be wary, or enemies.

Phoebe waited. She had never travelled out of England. Martha was a traveller. She wanted to know.

Class? Phoebe was dedicated to its abolition, presumably, as a stalwart of the Labour Party.

Martha picked up her spoon and started on the soup. ‘I think a great deal about food, for one thing,’ she temporized: feeling strongly that Phoebe deserved better than that.

Phoebe, let down, said, on a fine edge of rebuke: ‘Not very surprising, in the circumstances.’

The war having appeared in the wings of their meeting, it moved off again: Martha felt guilty. She had heard that Phoebe had had a bad time during the war. Her husband had been mostly away, except for leaves when the two little girls were conceived. The marriage had broken up. One of the little girls had been very ill. Phoebe had held a job in a government office, had fire-watched, had looked after the children, had been ill herself … One could not imagine Phoebe as anything less than admirable. Martha kept quiet.

‘I have just the right job for you,’ announced Phoebe at last, since Martha the traveller was silent. She was making a good many things plain in this one announcement. She was left-wing labour: but not so left that she did not regard some well-known left-wingers, her ex-husband for one, as ‘extreme’. She was bound by her position, to regard all communists with a greater hatred and suspicion than she would a Tory. Her sister Marjorie was – from her point of view – a communist; she was dangerous, dogmatic, wrongheaded. But this was the role that Marjorie had always played for elder sister Phoebe. Martha was a friend of Marjorie’s. But Mrs Van der Bylt in correspondence, in constant touch with a dozen of the organizations which Phoebe committee’d or secretaried or manned, had written offering Martha as a valuable recruit for the cause. Which meant that Martha’s degree of redness had been defined as tolerable – not only personally, as what Mrs Van and presumably Phoebe could stand, as people; but what others might be expected to stand. In an inflammable time. Not altogether complimentary that: Martha was not altogether sure she liked being so safe. Besides, whatever else she had learned in London, she was sure of one thing: anything her communist friends had told her of the poverty of the working people; of the blind selfishness of the middle classes (she hadn’t met the aristocracy, irrelevant, probably), was true. More than true. If she were going to have to be political, communism was nearer her mark than ‘Labour’ in its various degrees. Yet for days now she had been coming towards Phoebe, and knowing quite well that in doing so she was choosing her future. Her immediate future, at least. Well, one thing was certain. She was bound to be in a false position of one kind or another. That couldn’t be avoided. To what extent?

‘What kind of a job, Phoebe?’

‘We are going to start an organization for freeing the colonies, that sort of thing. A society or organization here, with the progressive movements there. And we need a secretary.’

‘I see.’

Martha considered Phoebe’s ‘We’. She was not in a position to define it.

‘A fairly broadly based thing.’

‘I see. Anyone who would support the objectives?’

Phoebe hesitated, coloured, gave Martha an acute but wary glance, and lowered her gaze to her soup. ‘There would have to be limits. You know, of course, that communists are proscribed in the Labour Party – and other organizations?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Martha, bland out of irritation. The irritation was unreasonable. Phoebe was doing her duty. As she, Martha, would do in her position.

Phoebe now waited for Martha to say clearly where she stood. Martha was damned if she would – besides, she didn’t know herself. Mrs Van’s recommendations were going to have to do.

Phoebe, annoyed, spooned in soup. Martha did the same.

‘We do need someone with real experience of the colonies – someone who knows the conditions, experience with the natives.’

‘For a start you can’t use that word any longer – natives.’

‘Oh! No? Well there you are, that’s why one needs …’

‘But I don’t think I want to do that sort of job.’

‘Well of course the money wouldn’t be very good,’ said Phoebe, making it clear that in her eyes this was no reason to refuse any job. ‘But there would be compensations.’ She meant, the society of people like herself; the interest of the work; above all, knowing oneself to be of use – exactly as Martha would in her position.

‘The thing is, I don’t want to be in that atmosphere. When I came to England, it was to get out of it.’

And now Phoebe was bound to be disappointed in Martha. For one thing – why had she wasted her, Phoebe’s time? What other kind of job did she expect?

‘I see,’ she said, tightening her lips, and looking for the waiter to take away her soup and bring the fish. She was busy, had no more time to waste.

If Marjorie had sat there, she would have cried out, all emotion and affectionate indignation: Well, Matty, if you’re going to take that line! If you’re going to be like that! Well then!

But Phoebe was not Marjorie. And Martha was not ‘Matty’, was refusing ‘Matty’ entrance. In order not to be ‘Matty’ she had to be cool, brisk – hard. As hard as Phoebe.

Martha now ate gluey fish in silence, thinking of Phoebe, of Marjorie. For this was the real experience of the meal, what she would take away from it. Phoebe was physically like Marjorie. Coming on Phoebe suddenly, without warning, Martha would have embraced her, lovable and absurd Marjorie, the younger sister. She had known Marjorie for how long? Over ten years! They had seen each other nearly every day. Marjorie had appeared, before the war, in the colony, as ‘immigrant’ – a girl from England. The people who worked with her all had the same attitude to her – an affection, almost an amusement. ‘Marjorie’ they had said, meaning her quality of charm, desperate enthusiasm, earnestness. But what had they known? Only this: Marjorie the younger sister. And an arrangement of eyes, nose, hair, pretty English skin. Here they were in front of Martha now, as Phoebe.

What had made Marjorie was this: a doctor in a country town in England with bookish tastes and an interest in politics, had brought up two daughters, his wife having died when they were children. They were very alike: pretty, fair, lively, English girls. Phoebe, the elder, was bossy and downright, with Marjorie, the girl five years her junior. Eventually Marjorie had escaped from Phoebe, had had to, to gain herself. But: sitting opposite Phoebe, who spoke in Marjorie’s voice, who was so like Marjorie, how could one not wonder: who was Marjorie? She was not her voice; not her face; not her body; not her eyes or her hair. Her manner then? But Marjorie’s breathless, defensive, agitated charm – that was all younger-sister. So had she won breathing space from Phoebe through their childhood. Marjorie was just – the younger sister? Of course not.

But who, what? Martha had no idea.

Martha sat opposite the brisk, pretty efficient Englishwoman, who was Phoebe, consciously preventing herself from talking to Marjorie. She was ashamed. She had never known Marjorie. As always, she had been lazy, unimaginative: she had never done more than talk to the younger sister. Well, if she wasn’t careful, she wouldn’t do more than talk to the older sister! For that manner was so strong in Phoebe, it was hard to imagine one could get past it.

‘Of course, I’d be prepared to advise,’ said Martha.

‘There are always plenty of people ready to do that,’ said Phoebe at once; then, seeing that she contradicted herself, looked irritated, and suddenly very tired. ‘We do need help,’ she said.

‘Phoebe, have you felt caged, shut inside an atmosphere?’

‘Well, frankly yes,’ said Phoebe, meaning the war again.

‘No I didn’t mean the war,’ said Martha, clumsily, for Phoebe’s reproach was so strong.

‘I can’t imagine myself not working for what I believe in – frankly, I can’t.’

‘Does one actually have to work in some organization! Well I can see why you are annoyed. You’re not an employment agency! I don’t know why I imagined.’

Phoebe’s glance at the words ‘employment agency’ betrayed that that was exactly what she had been thinking.

‘Well, I do always seem to know of jobs that need filling … let me see then.’

‘I suppose what it comes to – I’ve had enough of organized politics for the time being.’

Phoebe was silent for some time. Martha knew why. Without Mrs Van’s recommendations, Phoebe would have set her down as one of the people whose reforming energies had come out of passionate identification with Russia, the pure and the perfect: just another red with a broken heart, a weak reed, a neurotic, a washout. But Mrs Van had said differently. Therefore Phoebe sat, eating jammy sponge with a teaspoon, her eyebrows drawn together. She looked so like Marjorie that Martha experienced a variety of awe, or panic. It seemed inconceivable that she could not say: Marjorie! and that the person opposite would respond out of ten years of – friendship?

‘Mrs Van Bylt said you had done research – that kind of thing?’ ‘Yes. Tell me, Phoebe, do you and Marjorie ever write to each other?’

‘We are neither of us very good correspondents. How is she? She’s had another baby, she said. That’s four now?’

In her voice the shadow of a pain, something personal, ‘And I’ve never met her husband of course.’

‘He’s a nice man. A quiet kind of man. He’s a civil servant.’

‘So she said,’ said Phoebe, making it clear what she thought of civil servants: reminding Martha that she herself had married a crusading firebrand from the left. She lifted her face and smiled at Martha: who felt as she had that morning with Iris and her Stanley: an area of family emotion had been highlit, touched on.

Suppose I said to her: ‘Your sister’s a very unhappy woman. She’s bored with her nice reliable husband. She had children out of a compulsion. She’s living in a permanent nervous breakdown’ – no, of course she could not say this. This woman did not understand despair – or rather, the admission of it. And besides, such information, if it were not diagnosed – and it would be – as a symptom of Martha’s own identification with the neurotic weakness of this world, would be confirmation of the younger sister’s always expected failure.

‘Is it a success – that sort of thing?’

‘Well, yes; I think the four small children are a bit of a handful at the moment.’

‘I don’t see that. After all, you have plenty of servants out there, don’t you?’ She snapped this out, her face in high colour, and said everything about her own life, which was doing a hard poorly paid job, and being responsible, and bringing up two small girls without a father – without help, without servants.

‘I think I know something for you,’ said Phoebe, pushing aside the personal, while her face still flamed red, and her fingers clutched her purse. ‘There’s my brother-in-law. My ex-brother-in-law. He wants some help. He’s a writer. Of a kind, of course. It’s a hobby really. He’s got some sort of a business or other.’

‘What sort of a writer?’

A silence. Phoebe took a mouthful of weak coffee while Martha registered an old atmosphere: oh yes, she had been here before, and very much so. ‘He did get a book published.’ Another sip. ‘It got quite good reviews.’ One could see that the good reviews were not only a surprise, but a disappointment. She disliked the man, or disliked the book? No, the atmosphere was so strong that Martha waited for the next phrase with confidence. ‘I haven’t any time for books that aren’t about something real, have you?’

So Marjorie might have said; or Anton. Among a selection of similar phrases, she could also have used: I’m not interested in ivory tower writing. No, that would probably be too literary a choice of words for Phoebe.

Martha tried: ‘What was it about?’ ‘Oh, just personal emotions.’ ‘Well, I need a job.’

Here Phoebe looked, lips tight, at Martha’s suitcase. ‘Where have you left your luggage?’

Almost Martha let ‘Matty’ say for her, humorous, deprecating, charming: All I’ve got in the world! ‘That’s my luggage.’

‘You must be a very efficient packer,’ said Phoebe, making a virtue of poor material.

‘What sort of help does he want? What’s the job?’

‘Oh, I don’t know – he’s always running about, you know, he’s got so many irons in the fire. He lives rather near here, actually. I was thinking, we could drop in if you’ve time?’

‘Yes. Good.’

‘Dropping in’, so much not what Martha had experienced of London – that is, the London where people actually lived in houses, had organized lives, as distinct from the wanderers and campers – meant that Phoebe had a special relation with this man?

‘I’ll telephone,’ said Phoebe.

One didn’t ‘drop in’ without telephoning first.

Phoebe went across to the waiter, conferred, and disappeared into a door marked ‘Private’. She came back to say: ‘Mark says we can come round. He’ll be free at two-thirty for an hour.’

Yes, that was more like it: one was free by appointment for an hour. What made the difference? Of course, servants! With servants, plentiful and cheap, one could drop in, drop by, stay for meals, develop large casual acquaintanceships.

Around the corner meant Bloomsbury.

Martha’s arms were both wrenched by the suitcase to a condition of permanent ache. She suggested a taxi. Phoebe never used taxis. They went by bus.

The house was not part of one of the famous squares, but nearly so: from the front door, it seemed as if the trees and plants of the square claimed the house. Tall, narrow, formal, it was like the houses of the squares; and the whole neighbourhood, now that the different shades of ‘white’ chosen by their owners before the war had dimmed into an unremarkable but uniform grey, had the unity of its original design: houses, terraces, grassy squares full of old trees. Here, in short, one thought of the beauty of London, not of its ugliness. Standing in the hall of the house, which had Persian rugs on a dark floor, and a minimum of old furniture. Martha knew that for the first time in her life she was in a setting where, if she chose to stay, there would be no doubt at all of how she ought to behave, to dress. She had always resisted such a setting, or the thought of it. If she took this job, then it must be for a very short time. She felt attacked by the house – claimed. Besides, she was out of place. And so, she noted, was Phoebe, who was dowdy, seemed clumsy, where she, Martha, was strident.

A man came down the stairs, half-seen until he turned on a light. He was dark, and of middle-height; but he was strongly built, and his face strongly featured, so that he gave, at once, an impression of force and of height. A presence: a strong one. But then he spoke, and what came over was anxiety, worry, even annoyance.

‘How very good of you … let me …’ here he took Phoebe’s coat over his arm, and Martha’s suitcase from her hand. ‘Now let me see. Really, Phoebe, it is so very kind of you to take so much trouble.’ He was giving them no more than the courtesy he felt that he should. Either something had happened since Phoebe had telephoned half an hour before, or he had taken a dislike to Martha on sight. At which Martha reacted – and saw herself doing it – with the childish: All right then, I don’t think much of you either! For she didn’t. The colonial in her named his politeness insincerity, since he was so clearly angry about something; and the worry that he radiated was alerting her nerves for flight. She wondered how quickly she could make excuses, while Phoebe reclaimed her coat, saying she had work to do and must leave at once.

‘No, do stay, do, Phoebe,’ he almost cried, his face anguished in his effort to smile. ‘Let me see now, where …’ He opened a door off the hall, displaying a drawing-room. ‘I’m sure Margaret wouldn’t mind my using …’

Martha understood that she was about to be interviewed, by a man who had no taste, either for her, or for interviews, she could not decide which, and he was trying to decide on an appropriate place for it.

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Phoebe, reproving his lack of faith in her busy-ness. ‘Let me know how things go,’ she said to Martha. ‘Because if you and Mark don’t suit each other, then I’m sure there’s plenty of work that needs to be done.’ She went.

Martha and Mark Coldridge stood in the hall, left to their own decisions.

‘You aren’t the young lady from Birmingham?’ ‘No, should I be?’

‘Oh, well then …’ He held the door open and she entered the long, subdued, beautiful room which looked as if no one had been in it for months.

‘For some weeks now Phoebe has been urging me on to some protégée of hers from Birmingham. Labour Party or something.’

He was looking at her more closely. She stood, to be inspected; examining him. But all she felt was: here are claims. Not only from him, the man, very strong ones, though she did not know how to define them; but from the house, the furniture – even this area of London.

‘Look,’ said Martha, almost becoming ‘Matty’ in her desperation to escape. ‘There’s been a mistake. You’re in a false position. I’m so sorry – I’ll leave.’ And she was on her way to the door.

‘No. Wait. We’ll go upstairs,’ he said, thus making it clear that Margaret’s room, whoever Margaret was, had been chosen probably to put off, or intimidate, the young lady from Birmingham, or Phoebe – at any rate, the room was seen as a kind of no-man’s land or defensive area. She followed him upstairs to a small room on the first floor, which being full of books and papers and comfortable clutter, made it easier for Martha to sit down.

‘Who are you then?’

She replied, giving him minimum information, resisting impulses to reply as she had done to other strangers, I’m Patty Jones, I’m Joan Baker, I’m the mother of twins or the sister of a sailor who …

‘And what kind of job did Phoebe say it was? What are you expecting?’

This so far away from the suavity which was one of his inbuilt attributes, indicated so much anxiety, defensiveness, that again she was on the point of running away. She examined his face before replying: a dark, strong, well-featured face. Handsome? As handsome as it did: it was all clenched up with watchful tension.

‘You needed some sort of help with a book, but I don’t really think …’

‘I see.’ He was more relaxed. He smiled. ‘Well, but don’t go. Because I do.’ ‘What sort of help?’

And now a look which, if he had not been a man to whom such devices were foreign, if he had been anybody else, Martha would have said was cunning. No: but here was something hidden, tucked away.

‘Well. I’ve a deadline – that’s the word they use for it. And I’ve got to …’ He let all that drift away. Sitting half-way on to a writing-table, his legs held up, as if they rested on a stool, or chair – but they rested on air, he looked at her as if around a corner. Everything was out of scale, disproportionate – discordant. Martha understood she was repelled, not by him, whom she could say she liked; but by a situation. There was one. Anything here, in this house, she understood, would be the absolute opposite of everything she had hoped to find.

She rallied and said firmly: ‘I am looking for a job for a limited period. I don’t want to be tied down to anything. And I did hope, regular hours.’

His face had remained steady during the first condition, but it definitely darkened at her last.

‘Oh, very reasonable of course. But I was rather hoping … you see I work irregularly myself. Mostly at nights. I’ve got an office to go to in the day …’

Here there was a commotion outside, as of an entrance being set or arranged: then a firm knock, and then, before Mark could say anything, there came in a lady, holding a small boy by the hand.

‘Ah!’ said Mark, hopelessly. He got off the desk. To the small boy he said: ‘Well old chap?’ and the child, a round, dark, very pale boy with extraordinarily defensive dark eyes pathetically smiled. He looked around for somewhere appropriate to sit, and sat, while the woman watched to see if he did it right.

‘This is my mother,’ said Mark. ‘Margaret Patten. And this is my son, Francis. And this is Mrs Hesse.’

Martha felt that she knew the lady only too well; since she was large, light, buoyant, and seemed much younger than she must be to be this man’s mother. She wore an ample flowered silk dress and carried gloves, which she now laid down on Mark’s desk and, without looking at them, patted and fitted into a finger-matching pair one above the other, as if they still lay on a display counter, or as if she wished they did. Meanwhile she took in a variety of physical facts about Martha, age, dress, presence, style, and could be heard thinking loudly: Hesse? German? A German name? She’s not German, no. But she’s not English either … Mark looked increasingly annoyed.

‘Well, I do so hope that you’ve found someone at last,’ she announced. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ she said to the child, who had got up, to come closer to his father. He sat again, promptly, his feet side by side, watching the hostile grown-up world from which, so those eyes said so terribly clearly, he could expect nothing that wasn’t painful. Martha found her heart was aching. That little boy Francis was unbearably painful. Meanwhile, Mrs Patten was most frankly summing her up; while her son Mark watched her do it and resented it.

‘Mrs Hesse has only just this moment arrived and we have not agreed about anything at all.’

‘Oh,’ said Margaret Patten, smiling at Martha across her son, as if behind his back.

‘In fact we are engaged in a sort of mutual interview.’

‘Oh well then, we must leave you to it, mustn’t we, Francis?’ She held out her hand and Francis instantly rose to grasp it.

‘If she does stay,’ said Mrs Patten, ‘it’s lucky the big room will be empty for a bit – that is, if dear Sally can bear to keep away!’

He said nothing. Martha said nothing. She was angry for a variety of reasons: mostly pressures from the past, and strong ones. She resented Mrs Patten on her own account and on Mark’s. And on the child’s. Francis now offered his father a smile, which Mark returned: like prisoners of fate they were, condoling briefly before inevitable parting. Then Mrs Patten removed him from the room.

There was a pause while Mark recovered himself. Then: ‘She’s left her gloves, damn it.’ He picked them up and carried them to the door where he saw them into his mother’s hand. Good-byes were said again. He came back.

‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘My wife’s in a mental hospital.’ He paused, not looking at her, while it sank in. ‘My mother’s had the brunt of Francis for quite a bit and she feels that if there were a woman in the house, it would make it easier – during school holidays, for instance.’

There was so much information here that Martha remained silent, digesting it, while he waited for her. And as she thought it out, she saw before her eyes the child’s face as he turned to leave: it was a long, curious, hopeful look.

Oh no, said Martha to herself. Oh no, no, no!

At last she looked at Mark and waited and he said: ‘But you mustn’t think that if you did work for me – for a while, you’d be in any way responsible for Francis, or that you’d have to live here.’

‘Who does live here?’

‘A good question,’ he said, laughing at last. ‘Yes. Well, I should have told you before. The thing is, it’s often hard to know. Well, I do, basically. And my wife – when she’s well …’ A long pause. ‘That’s not likely to be … she’s not very … it doesn’t look as if she’ll be home for some time. Or if she is, she’s not … My mother has the use of the room you saw downstairs. She sometimes likes to entertain in town. And there are the rooms upstairs. They all seem to belong to someone. Or did. We are a large family. We were.’

‘I see’.

‘Yes, I supposed that you had.’ This was an appeal as well as an apology. Martha felt as if she were being swept fast over an edge, and by her own emotions; for the first time since she came to London, she was unfree. She wanted to run out of the house – anywhere. She was extraordinarily upset. So was he.

‘The job itself,’ he said at last. ‘It is pretty straightforward. But you see, my difficulty is, I’ve got to have someone who isn’t going to be upset by – tricky situations.’

She saw very clearly. Martha was thinking: She had no money left. If she were to go to a hotel or find a room she must ask Mark Coldridge for an advance on salary (not yet mentioned). The room upstairs (who was Sally?) would be a godsend, until she could find a place of her own. But that would mean landing herself even deeper in this terrible involving situation which had already involved her; the child’s face haunted her. Why had she been so stupid to leave herself without any money? To work here, living somewhere else – that would be safe enough, probably. (Would it?) She could borrow money. Who? Jack. She must ask Jack.

‘Can I think it over?’ she said; and he said, cold with disappointment, interpreting it, as she almost meant, as a polite refusal: ‘Of course, you’re quite right.’

‘It’s not that I don’t like the idea of working with you … it’s just that …’

‘I do understand.’

And that moment could have been the end of it: she might have walked away and been free. But she said, unable to prevent herself: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I am really so desperately sorry.’

‘Look, you could either live – anywhere, where you please. Or here. But there’s nearly always someone else here. It wouldn’t be a question of being alone with me. Sally’s so often here. Sally’s my brother’s wife. But in either case it wouldn’t have to be a question of hours you didn’t like. But I’d pay you twelve pounds a week, whether you lived in or out.’

His tone was saying that this was generous – and indeed it was; much more than the market rate.

Martha got up. So much emotion was now swilling around the room that she couldn’t stand it. ‘I’ll let you know before today’s out. Will that do?’

His face was suddenly alive: friendly, delighted.

‘Oh good, good,’ he said. ‘I do so hope … but I don’t want to put any pressure on you. And you mustn’t mind – you see, for some weeks, now, I’ve been beset by Phoebe’s choices, and most of the time they are so very definitely not mine.’

‘She’s very forceful, certainly.’

Smiling over Phoebe’s so useful force, they went down the stairs, while Martha remembered how people had smiled over Marjorie: a different smile. Odd: one could never smile, for Phoebe, the smile one used for Marjorie!

Martha left him, resisting his suggestion that she should leave the suitcase and pick it up later.

Where could she go while she made a decision?

Where was there for her to go, but Jack’s? And now, walking down through the lovely square, where the summery trees waved their branches in a cool air, she was free of that house, of that man, of that haunted child. She would go to Jack’s and ask if she could, after all, live in the floor beneath his. Just for the time at least. She went to the telephone to ring Jack.

When he heard it was Martha, the voice of his first impulse was a rise into a warm relief: ‘Oh, Martha, I’m so happy – I really did think I’d never hear from you again. I don’t know why I did.’ Then a pause, and the judicious voice, low, of his present situation. Joanna was with him. He offered Martha this fact, waiting for her to see that Joanna, put off twice for Martha, had earned the preference now. Martha saw it. ‘Look, Jack, can you lend me some money? I need about ten pounds. Five would do.’ And now a very long pause. At last: ‘Well. Martha, you see, I don’t keep money here.’ He was silent, waiting for her to think of another resource. Martha found herself taken over by the thought: Of course, he’s so mean … and with such violence that she discarded the judgement. All the same, he did keep money there: like the old farmers of his tradition, in a bag under the mattress. Quite a lot of it. Then she understood that this demand for money meant in fact that she didn’t want to be in the rooms beneath him, she wanted to go to a hotel: she was asking Jack for money to escape from any pressure he might put on her. And he felt it: he was feeling it.

‘Perhaps Joanna could lend me some money?’ said Martha; urgent, her voice on a high pitch of desperation.

‘Wait a minute, Martha.’

Martha stood in the telephone box, watching the people pass outside: it was the rush hour again, and the sky held the dark of imminent rain. She was in a panic. Funk. This was a danger-point in her life: she was being taken over. Had been taken over? Jack’s voice again measured: ‘If you come over now, Martha, then we could talk about it, hey?’

‘Good. Thank you. Thank Joanna.’

‘Are you coming by taxi, or walking?’

‘Bus.’

‘See you.’

He had been asking: How long have we, Joanna and I, got before you come? All the talents for minute organization of a talented housewife went into the organization of his women … Martha was raging with spite against him. She had known before that Jack was careful about money – if that was the word for it. But she had judged him generously: he was guarding the thousand pounds that were his freedom. Never before had she felt dislike or repulsion for him or his way of life. Now she felt both. And also for the household she had been in that afternoon – a parcel of sickly neurotics, and Phoebe a humourless bigot … hatred burned through her veins. She had to stop it – had to, must … she boarded a bus headed west, in a jostle of people who smelled sour with sweat this muggy afternoon. She was tired. The weeks of not sleeping, not eating enough, the restless walking, had caught up: she was ready to collapse finally into tears. She wished she could be in a dark room and pull covers up over her. The bus was charging down the Bayswater Road. A couple of nights ago, here Martha had walked light and easy and alert. That was the night when, walking, she had understood … but she could not remember now what it was she had understood. And she had a violent reaction against that too – posturing around, she thought; making yourself important, imagining all kinds of great truths when all it was really … well of course, if you’re going to not-sleep and not-eat properly and then make love for hours and hours with a bloody … she saw herself, a young woman in a matron’s black coat, walking through the dark dirty streets with an idiotic smile on her face: but somewhere at the back of her mind the thought held: it was here, it was here, it was – just because you can’t get anywhere near it now, that doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist. She got off the bus, her legs weak, and almost staggered with the heavy case past the canal where children splashed in a dull sunlight. She arrived at Jack’s door to lean against it, breathing deeply, to recover herself. In the street men in singlets dug up the street, standing to their waists in a greasy yellow earth.

The door was opened, before she had rung, by the grinning youth: he had been watching through the panes.

‘There’s one up there already,’ he said, delighted.

‘Yes, I know. Thanks.’ She went past, hearing his idiot’s chuckle. Good Lord, she couldn’t possibly live in this house with an idiot and a … Jack came smiling down the stairs to meet her. And at the sight of him her revulsion dissolved into simple affection. Everything she had felt was the result of exhaustion and she was not to be trusted. A young man in sloppy blue trousers and a heavy blue pull-over chosen to disguise the thinness which was his shame and his terror, he took her case, and pulled her close inside the circle of bone that was his arm. He kissed her and said: ‘Hey there, Martha, what’s up?’

She shook her head, nearly crying, and went before him into the black and white room where Joanna sat, dressed, on the chair near the window. Either she had not undressed, or she had dressed for Martha. She wore her perfect clothes: a beige well-hung skirt, beige pull-over, long legs in silk, not nylon, and highly polished low brown shoes. Her camel-hair coat was folded over the back of another chair. She looked as neat and shiny as a newly-washed child. Smiling, she nodded at Martha. ‘Would you like to lie down?’ Still held inside the bony circlet, she was being urged towards the bed.

‘No. I don’t want to sleep – not yet.’

There was only one decent chair, and Joanna was on it. She got up and sat on the bed, and Martha took the chair. Jack turned his back to make coffee on the spirit stove: he was leaving it to them, to the two women, to define the situation, to handle it.

‘Was the job no good?’ he inquired, as neither spoke.

And suddenly Matty exploded through Martha’s mouth in a storm of half-giggling tears. ‘Oh yes, it’s just my style. Just up my street …’ Her voice rose in a wail of laughter. ‘You’d be surprised, it’s tailor-made for me. I tell you, it’s been sitting there waiting for me for years – everything as sick and neurotic and hopeless as you can imagine … and a dominating mamma over all, and a wife in a mental hospital, and a man just sitting waiting for some sucker like me to cope with everything.’

Jack’s blue back was still bent over his cups and spoons: he was alertly waiting. And behind the cool little face of Joanna’s upbringing was dislike and upset. And the cool Martha, who watched giggling tearful Matty with as much detachment as either Jack or Joanna, knew that it was Jack who would earn Joanna’s dislike of this situation – not Martha. This thought pulled her together. She sniffed, wiped her hands across her eyes and cheeks, for she had no handkerchief, and sat silent, recovering.

‘There’s plenty of jobs in London,’ commented Jack, turning with three filled mugs – black, black, coffee. On the farms of his tradition, great black cauldrons stood always simmering on the back of wood stoves, with coffee grounds in them inches deep, coffee being added daily to make a brew which depth-charged the nervous system at first sip. This black liquid in the cup Martha held would be too much in her present state. She sat holding the cup.

‘Anyone who wants to live in London …’ said Joanna; ‘What for? Why don’t you live in the country. You can live there like a human being.’

‘Joanna can lend you some money, Martha. A fiver?’

‘Yes,’ said Joanna. ‘But if I were you I’d get on to the first train out of London.’

‘But you look all in. Man – why don’t you lie down on the bed and sleep a little. Joanna and I can go out for some supper – Joanna?’

‘I’ve got to go,’ said Joanna, sipping her thick black coffee and watching Martha.

Martha thought: neither of them heard what I said. Joanna dislikes Jack now because she’s been subjected to my being hysterical, and Jack is feeling: Martha’s upset.

Jack now lowered himself to the floor. First he put his cup down on it, and then felt the floor, as it were greeted earth: the way an African villager might touch the earth with one hand, assessing it, before squatting down. Jack squatted, his hand flat on the floor beside him. Martha thought: If he and I were alone, we would make love, and what I said, what I felt, would be answered with how he made love. This seemed to her an extraordinary discovery.

‘What sort of work do you want?’ said Joanna.

‘It’s not the work as such I care about. But I do know exactly what I want.’ For she did. In the last few minutes, something had happened, a balance had shifted. She knew.

‘I want,’ said Martha, ‘to live in such a way that I don’t just – turn into a hypnotized animal.’

Jack, smiling with affectionate hope that he would soon know what Martha was so excited about, kept his palm flat on the floor – earth. But Joanna was saying with abrupt hostility: ‘Oh no. I had quite enough of all that during the war.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Jack, turning the antennae of his sensitivity towards Joanna.

‘I know what I mean. And I’ve had enough of it. I simply won’t have any more,’ said Joanna.

‘It was on the boat. I understood on the boat,’ said Martha.

‘Martha didn’t like the trip over,’ Jack explained to Joanna. ‘But all the same, Martha, it must have been all right, just sitting there with your girl friend and watching everyone. When I came back as a passenger it was the same …’ Now he was talking like a host, soothing Martha’s smarts away. ‘But I spent all my time in the gym. I wasn’t going to mix myself up.’

‘Oh, but I did, I did, and that’s the point.’

‘You said you sat with that sick girl and watched – it’s always awful, a lot of people crammed together, just animals.’

‘No.’ Martha was in the grip of a necessity to explain, even to claim an ally in Joanna, and in the face of Joanna’s hostile negation of her, Martha’s, vital discovery. ‘Before I left … home? I used to dream about the sea. All the time. It was an obsession. When I got off the train at Cape Town, I thought, the sea, but we were put straight on to the boat, and the sea was harbour water full of ships.

And the boat – I swear everything was designed to make you forget the sea was anywhere near. And if you stood at night on the deck and looked at it, or walked around the deck, someone would say, Moon-gazing! Or: I’ve got to get my weight down too. You know … hundreds of people, some of them had been waiting the whole war for this trip. There was this girl. She was sick. Dying I think. A blood disease. She was a pale thin girl – sickly. We teamed up. But she didn’t accept me. I was healthy, you see. I kept catching her eye on me, sceptical and hostile – like you sometimes, Joanna.’ ‘I wasn’t aware of it.’

‘Yes. Yes. Where was I, yes. We two were a challenge to the men, not joining in. She thought that’s why I was doing it. Well, and perhaps – or put it around the other way, it was that that dragged me back in again, so perhaps she was right. In a way. But all the time she was polite, and rather cynical, watching to see how long I’d stick it out with her, instead of joining with the others.’

Joanna said: ‘You should have locked yourself in your cabin.’ She said it fierce and angry.

‘I was sharing a cabin with four others. Not everyone can afford private cabins – oh damn it, that’s childish.’

‘Yes it is,’ said Joanna.

‘I know how Martha feels,’ said Jack. ‘There’s been times in my life I could have killed you for your money. And that’s the truth. There were times in Port Elizabeth I used to look at the rich tourists and I tell you, if I could have killed you safely I would.’

‘But I wasn’t there,’ said Joanna, almost amused.

‘On that boat I used to think that for millions of people I was a rich person. All over Africa, there are people who know that a trip on a passenger boat is heaven – always beyond them. Imagine that. Because I’d only been on the boat a couple of days and I realized that really everyone was hating it. I used to wake early and watch the other three women wake up – lying half asleep, not wanting to wake up, then groaning awake and reaching for cigarettes. Bodies on bunks, wishing they could sleep all day, but the day had started. The whole ship full of groaning people not really wanting to get up, and shaved and washed and dressed. And the holiday clothes. The women had spent months or fortunes on those clothes, just for that trip. Then breakfast. Everyone eating enormous meaty breakfasts, making jokes about greed. They didn’t want to eat it, but they had to, because it was there and they had paid for it. The stewards running around after us like a lot of nursemaids, and people making jokes, you know, about the stewards earning so little. The one thing South Africans, all of us from down there, understand – it’s making jokes defensively and throwing money at people. After breakfast, people making jokes as they went down to the lavatories. And an hour later, around came the stewards with soup. And everyone had soup. Then the real drinking started: at last they could begin to drug themselves. They were knocked over the head already by all that food, but now the alcohol. And then lunch: two hours of food, everyone eating and eating and drinking. And then down to sleep. Thank God they could get rid of two hours of being alive in sleep. But some of them were running around in the sun playing games and making jokes about keeping their weight down. And then tea. People coming up from their bunks in different clothes. Tea and masses of cakes. And then dark came and the sexing up and the drinking. All over the boat, people sexing it up and not liking their partners much because what they were doing didn’t come up to the months and months of fantasies about the trip. And music coming out of every pore of the ship. Everyone on the boat but the crew drugged with food and drink and sex. And then bed. But going to bed very fast, either because you were sexing it up with someone or because you were a bit drunk. Back to the pyjamas and the nightdresses. Back to oblivion – thank God.’

‘Well?’ said Joanna, in a fine, steady anger. Her eyes shone, her cheeks glowed very pink.

‘I spent my time in the gym,’ said Jack.

‘Yes. But it was like a – I can’t explain. Everything was just like ordinary life, only more so. It was a nightmare, sitting with that girl. Her name was Lily Maxwell and she came from one of the mining suburbs outside Johannesburg. I swear we were the only two people among the passengers who weren’t – hypnotized. We sat and watched. But for me, it was a new feeling, and for her – she had lived with it for a long time. She was dying. I think so, anyway. She was sitting looking at living people. She was quite alone, all the time, you see. And I was with her, but she was waiting for me to crack. Cynically. She knew I would. She sat very quietly, watching me looking at the men, and the men looking at me. So then that was it. It took four days. A nice farmer from the Orange Free State. Oh everything very civilized and in order. And I was permanently heavy and dead and gone with food, alcohol and sex.’

‘I don’t see the point of that,’ said Joanna.

‘Oh yes, you do,’ said Martha rudely. ‘I know you do. But I wasn’t quite lost, because all the time I was hanging on to just one thought: that I was drugged and hypnotized and that I didn’t have to be. And above all that I mustn’t be afraid of being – obvious.’

‘Well it is, isn’t it?’ said Joanna. She got up. She wanted to leave.

‘Yes. But what then? Quite so. I want to be sunk in the obvious. It seems to me that there’s a sort of giant conspiracy, and it’s all our fault. There are people who know quite well that they are drugged and asleep, but there’s a weapon against that – you mustn’t be obvious. It’s a cliché. Oh I know perfectly well that there’s nothing new in what I said, but I felt it new then and I feel it now. But I’m not going to be laughed out of it by people who are afraid of words like cliché, or obvious, or banal. I learned that before. Funny, where was it? Who? Somebody – I’ve forgotten. We keep learning things and then forgetting them and so we have to learn them again.’

‘You just want to be a bohemian,’ said Joanna, ‘to be different. Well, I watched all that during the war.’

‘No. The opposite. I remember finding out some time before – that that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way. But there’s a pressure on us all the time to go on to something that seems new because there are new words attached to it. But I want to take words as ordinary as bread. Or life. Or death. Clichés. I want to have my nose rubbed in clichés.’

Joanna was swinging her shoulder bag over her handsome camel coat. She wanted to leave. Jack was standing near her, watching her. He was afraid he had lost her. Martha thought that he probably had. He had not ‘heard’ what she had said. Not with his mind. But Martha knew that with his body he could have answered her. And that understanding, really a new one, that there were people who simply did not operate or function through their minds, was as if Jack had stepped towards her from dark to light. She knew that if they had been free to make love now, it would be in a different way, because Jack had caught, sensed, felt, what she had said. But if he were now asked to put into words what Martha had said, he would answer: Martha’s tired, she’s upset. People were really so very different from each other. She was always forgetting it. Jack’s way of experiencing the world, and hers, they did not touch.

Except when they made love. He understood, and communicated, through the body.

A ring from downstairs. Jack’s face had for one second the look of someone caught out: both women saw it, and even exchanged small ironic glances, so strong is the force of custom. Because neither really felt it. Jack went running downstairs, and they were alone.

Joanna said: ‘I know what you are saying, but what’s the point of all that? There’s nothing we can do, is there? So what’s the use?’

Voices on the stairs in energetic exchange and Jack entered first, saying: ‘It’s Jane!’ with a look of appeal at them both. Now Martha and Joanna asked each other silently if both knew about Jane: both did. And they knew the rules of the game said they should leave. They nodded at Jack, who went out, and came back with a pretty little blonde thing who, however, had the stormy, sparkling, reddened look of a baby who has been crying enjoyably from temper. Some grief of love had struck her into a splendidly tempestuous need, and she hardly saw Jack’s two women visitors who stood ready to leave.

They left together, side by side, and were let out by the crazy youth who grinned his congratulations that they were in such numerous and desirable company.

The two walked down the streets where Joanna would never have set foot if it had not been for Jack. Her clean, impeccable country clothes made a space all around her.

‘I think I’ll take the train home,’ remarked Joanna. ‘I’ve had enough of interesting experiences for the time being.’ She was still very hostile.

‘Are you coming to Jack again?’ For it seemed to Martha that Joanna would not.

‘I don’t know. It’s not what I bargained for. I simply don’t want things to be all – interesting and dramatic.’

‘I’m sorry for my part of it, then.’

‘It’s partly my fault. I shouldn’t have come in that time – curiosity. It serves me right.’

Deepening her accent, making her manner frank and easy, because the colonial could ask personal questions a fellow Englander could not, Martha inquired, risking a snub: ‘Will you go on sleeping with Jack after you are married?’

‘I expect so. Perhaps. I don’t see why not.’ This with a short gruff laugh. ‘But not if I’m going to get involved in … I’m not interested in Jack as a person.’

Martha risked it and said: ‘You talk about Jack as men talk about prostitutes.’

‘Really? I don’t think I’ve ever discussed prostitution with a man. Well, what’s wrong with it? I hate sex,’ she went on coolly. ‘I mean, I can’t stand all the fuss and bother. During the war, there was nothing but sex and people being desperate for each other. But I like being satisfied, I suppose.’

And now Martha had to be silent, because being satisfied was not how she was able to think about sex with Jack. Joanna said: ‘We’re just animals, that’s all. Why pretend anything different? Jack satisfies me. It’s simple and quick and it’s all over with. That’s what I like.’

‘I see.’

‘Well,’ said she, with her short gruff laugh, ‘you’re not going to tell me you love him or something piffling like that, are you?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Martha, laughing equally. The question then was: ‘Did Jack say to himself, I give Joanna satisfaction, short and simple and quick, because that’s what she wants, and I give Martha – whatever were the words he used for it; or did he respond simply out of his marvellous sure instinct?

They had reached the bus stop. They stood together in the half-light of the summer evening. ‘Anyway,’ said Joanna, ‘that’s that. I want to get married, have children, and lots of money and never have to think again about – all that. And if you’d been here during the war you’d know. It seems to me that a lot of people who weren’t in the war, like Jack and you, you are trying to be part of it, you felt you missed something.’

‘Jack wasn’t in the war? He was minesweeping, didn’t you know? He was sunk.’

‘Oh yes, but I didn’t mean that. I mean, being here, in England. That was different.’ ‘I see.’

Here the bus arrived. Joanna smiled cool and formal at Martha, and stepped quietly on to the bus, from where she remarked: ‘I expect we may meet again one of these days.’ The bus went off. Martha now remembered that all of them, Jack, Joanna and herself, had forgotten the money that she needed. Quite right: money was not what she had gone to Jack’s for. But she now had about two pounds. She could go to a cheap hotel, the suitcase being her passport, and ring up Mark in the morning to make an appointment to confirm terms, in the English manner.

But she was too tired. Besides, she remembered those moments when they had understood each other – oh yes, only too well, and thought: what’s the point? I know perfectly well I’m going to move in. She went to a telephone box. It was about nine o’clock.

When Martha arrived, the house seemed to have nobody in it. Then at last he came down the stairs. He was working, he said. He supposed that Martha would rather wait until tomorrow before starting work, otherwise he’d be only too pleased … But she was too tired for anything but bed. He carried her suitcase up to the second floor, and into a large quiet room. He had made the bed. Or somebody had. He left her saying that the kitchen was downstairs if she wanted to make herself coffee in the night – as he often did.

She closed her eyes on a room whose presence was so strong, so confident, that she was saying as she went to sleep: I’ll stay for just a while, just a short time. A couple of months …

Chapter Four

She was rising towards light, through layers of sleep, fighting against being sucked down again by the backwash. Light was on her eyelids. She opened them. The room was full of pure brittle sunlight. The black branches of the tree across the street held a glitter of water. A cold black tree, framed by domestic curtains, grey and pink: a tree on a stage. A white counterpane dazzled. On the white, near the window, the black cat sat in the sunlight, washing its face. On the opposite corner, a black fly cleaned its head with its arms. Cat and fly used the same movements. Cautious, so as to frighten neither, Martha reached out for a brush, sat up, brushed her hair. Behind her, a shadow on the white wall attended to its head. Fly, cat, woman, their images were shaped in no-light. The cat’s shadow was a steady movement of dark on white. On the side of the fly away from the window a small darkening, but the movement of the fly’s working forelegs was not visible. If she were fly-size, would she then be able to observe the working shadow from those energetic hairy arms? The cat was watching its moving shadow as it cleaned its face with its paw. Was the fly looking at its shadow as it cleaned itself?

Sunlight in London brought an emphasis: shadow. For the most part a day was clear, sunless light, like water, that contained objects: houses, trees, a stone, people. But in hot countries, everything was underlined, everything had its image. The light was draining away off the counterpane back through the window. The cat, jetty-black in sunlight, now showed the variations of colour in its fur. It was dark brown, with a gloss of black, and it had white hairs on its chin. The fly seemed weightless. The white wall behind Martha showed its need for repainting. The black tree stood sodden; it had lost its glitter. And the sky was grey.

There was no need to get up. Not for hours yet, if she felt like staying in bed. While every moment of her attention was claimed by Mark, her employer, from lunchtime onwards, which was when he returned from his factory, often until two, three, in the morning, he would not have her working in the morning: he said it lessened his guilt. Nor would he have her doing anything about the house, which badly needed it. This morning for instance she knew that there were no eggs, no butter, and that the plumber should be summoned to the water-taps. But she could do none of these things. This was part, not of protecting Martha, but of protecting Mark against his family.

She thought: Well I’m leaving so soon anyway. If I broke the rules just for one day? For that matter, if I spent the two weeks before I leave just getting everything fixed up, would it matter? The housewife in her yearned to do it. She had not told Mark that she was leaving. He knew she wanted to. To leave just before Christmas! That was heartless – yet she intended to, she had to, she must … Good Lord, she cried to herself, had been exhorting herself for weeks now, there is no reason in the world why you should feel guilty. None. It’s not rational. It’s not your responsibility, it never was.

Mark was hoping, though of course he would never say so, that she would stay until after Christmas. Because of Francis. If Martha stayed, then the child could come for the holidays. Possibly they would let Lynda out of the hospital. There would be a sort of a Christmas, enough to use the word to Francis. Otherwise, Mark would take Francis to his mother, which he most passionately did not want to do.

I’ve got to go, I must. Now. Or I’ll never be able to leave this.

This, particularly, was the room, which had become, in the last six months, her home. The moment of greatest pleasure in every day was waking in it, beneath the window, which framed the tree whose leaves she had seen stand in solid leaf, then thin, then fall. It was a sycamore tree. The cat slept on her bed. Which was how she saw it: but the cat always slept on that bed, he did not care who was in it. The cat saw the bed and room as his. When she left, the cat would sleep just there, on the corner of the bed nearest the window; would wash itself, just there, watching its shadow or the birds in the tree; would roll over on its back in sunlight, a black plush cat, all purring warmth.

A terrible pang – a real pain. Oh no, she must go, and fast, Christmas or no Christmas, particularly as a good part of her fear of going was that London had no more space in it for her now, as it had had months ago, when she had arrived. She did have some money now though, thanks to Mark – over two hundred pounds. She never seemed to have anything to spend her salary on. She would leave – in the next days, take a room, or a small flat, and risk her chances with all the other waifs and strays of London who had no family at Christmas. Waifs and strays! Once she could not have thought of herself like that – oh no, she had got soft, and badly so, it was time to move on, even though she would never live in such a room again. The whole house was like it, of a piece, a totality: yet no one could set out to create a house like it. It had grown like this, after being furnished by Mark’s grandmother at the end of the last century by what Martha would have called when she first came as ‘antiques’. Nor was this room assertive or bullying as she had first thought: on the contrary, it was quiet, it had tact, it served. But it certainly absorbed. Money? For weeks when first here she had moved around the room, the house, like a cat, feeling for corners, and essences, and odours and memories, trying to isolate just that quality which no other place she had ever been in had had. Solidity? Every object, surface, chair, piece of material, or stuff, or paper had – solidity. Strength. Nothing could crack, fray, fall apart. A chair might break, but if so it would be put together as a surgeon does a body. The curtains had a weight in your hands. The carpet and the rugs lay thick on the boards of the floor which were beautiful enough to lie bare, if there were not so many rugs and carpets. Nothing in this house believed in the possibility of destruction. Imagine being brought up in such a house, to be the child of it … a child’s voice sounded across the passage. It was Sally’s little boy. Martha had the room Sally used, when she came to stay but Sally, here for a few nights, had not thought it worth dispossessing Martha from it. She was in James’s room, used as a spare room because James was dead.

The door opened and Paul wriggled in, smiling shyly. The cat jumped down to wind around his legs and the fly buzzed away. He was five, or six, a small lively dark boy all charm and warmth.

‘Paul!’ came his mother’s peremptory voice: ‘Paul, you are not to worry Martha!’

Paul grinned at Martha and sidled to the bed, glancing at the door where his mother was due to appear. And now Sally’s beautiful dark head showed around the door. She gave a great dramatic sigh of ‘Oh!’ at the sight of the disobedient child; and then she curled herself into an armchair. She was in a striped purple and yellow silk dressing-gown. Her hair hung down on either side of her small apricot-tinted face in black braids. Her soft black eyes shone. She was, as the family never said, but never ceased to make evident, Jewish. That is, if put down anywhere near the Mediterranean, she would seem at home. In this room she seemed almost perversely an exotic. Now she put out a small hand towards the child who ran to her, climbed on her lap, and cuddled. She sniffed him, with pleasure. Wound together, they breathed contentment. Almost she licked him like an animal with her cub.

‘I’m going to make breakfast,’ she announced.

‘I don’t eat breakfast.’

‘Well then, some tea?’ She wanted company downstairs.

‘I don’t get up yet,’ said Martha. This was partly to obey Mark: he feared Sally’s encroachment even more than he did his mother’s. ‘And besides, I like this time of the day here.’

‘Ah yes, the room,’ cried Sally. ‘When I came into it, after there, you understand?’ Martha understood. And Sally knew that she did. They shared the knowledge of outsiders. Sally had been Sarah Koenig ten years ago, when she was a refugee from Germany. This being the kind of family which served, had civic responsibility, and took on burdens – at its height, it had been that above all – naturally they put up refugees. Sarah had come, with half a dozen other refugees, from Europe. Here she had met Colin, Mark’s brother: and here she had married him.

‘Are you going to stay here for Christmas?’ she asked, going straight to the point as always. ‘I want to know. Because Mark could come to stay with us. With Francis. That would be nice for Paul.’ Here she squeezed Paul, with a chiding pouting downwards glance, to make him agree. He buried his face in her silken bosom.

Mark said that Francis and Paul did not get on. Mark would never go for Christmas to his brother Colin: not because he didn’t like Colin, but because of Sally. She did not seem to know this; or if she did, conducted her life from standards which made it irrelevant. For one thing, when she had married Colin, she married the family: she had no family of her own. In terms of Anton’s grim definition, her Jewishness was absolute: she had no relatives alive. So this was her family: the Coldridges. Therefore she loved them and they must love her. They did not dislike her so much as they were pleased when she was somewhere else. Nor would any of them have said that it was a pity Colin had married her: particularly as not only Colin, but Mark too had made a marriage that was so palpably a pity. But they were upset by her. Which Martha could understand: she was upset by Sally, who always lived inside her own emotional climate with apparently never a suspicion that there might be others.

She said: ‘And a family Christmas would be good, I have told him, instead of all this nonsense about spies! Politics and communism – nonsense!’

Colin was a physicist. He worked at Cambridge on something to do with the bomb. The man he worked under had been arrested and charged with spying. Colin was naturally under suspicion. The family was behaving as if this was – well, not far from a joke. Of course, if one lived in such houses, filled with such furniture, knowing ‘everybody’ in England, then spying was – a joke. Or rather, the idea that they could be suspected of it. Colin was a communist, they said; though from the words Mark used of him Martha could recognize nothing of communism as she had experienced it: but then of course she knew nothing about England. She found it disagreeable that they talked about his communism as a kind of eccentricity, but tolerable because it was his, a Coldridge’s – as if he stammered, or bred pythons. They had a big family’s possessiveness to it, everyone had their funny ways, their traits, and that was Colin’s. This was not true of Mark, who loved his brother and was with him against the family. The two brothers were isolated in this: and Sally-Sarah was excluded, and suffered and had been complaining Mark hated her … There she sat in the great warm chair, a colourful little beauty with her pretty little boy, all warm tactlessness, warm claims, warm insistence, a challenge to the Coldridges who had seemed never to do much more about her than to insist on calling her ‘Sally’. Well, if she was tactless, they were intolerable, arrogant: when she made a scene that they ‘had stolen her name from her’ they had only laughed; and her husband still called her Sally.

And it was all Martha could do not to call her, sometimes, Stella, she was so like that other warm-shored beauty of ten years before who, however, had been transformed by matrimony and right living into a pillar of good works and righteousness.

And in due time, Sally-Sarah too would become a handsome and portly matron?

Meanwhile she suffered and everyone in the family had to suffer with her. ‘Is Colin worried?’

‘No, not he,’ said Sally-Sarah scornfully. ‘Not he. I keep telling him, Darling, you are mad. Why communism? Communism for the English? They know nothing at all. Isn’t that so? You agree with me?’

‘Yes,’ said Martha.

‘Yes. It is so. Playing. Little games. I tell him, you’re like a little boy.’

Colin, Mark’s elder brother, the eldest son now that James was dead, killed in the war, was a solid, serious, painstaking man. Dedicated. According to his brother Mark, the only serious member of the family, meaning by this, a single-mindedness; meaning, too, a criticism of his own many-sidedness. Colin, devoted to science, was devoted to communism because for him communism meant internationalism, meant the sharing of science. Colin had decided that science was his destiny at the age of eleven and had thought of nothing else, ever since. Except, perhaps occasionally, for Sally-Sarah? He could not have relished being told he was a little boy playing games.

‘I tell him, Colin, if you knew anything about what politics can do – like I do, oh yes I do, Martha, believe me, do you believe me? …’ Since she was not likely to go on until Martha had said she did. Martha said she did, and Sally-Sarah then continued: ‘But if you did, Colin, I say, then you would not play with fire.’

She was crying. Curled in the great chair, a small, dark girl wept, her face all frail white terror. And in her arms, her son unhappy now and crying too, sucking his thumb like a baby.

‘Mark says it will be all right,’ said Martha. ‘After all, they must have cleared Colin by now, or they would have arrested him too.’

‘Mark. What does he know! What? He’s a literary man. And he plays with his electric machines. They are always playing these people. The police often do not arrest until later. Meanwhile they watch and lay traps.’

‘Well, but I don’t think …’

‘You think! What do you think? I know. You’re like them all, it doesn’t happen here? Yes! But it is happening here, isn’t it? They are looking for traitors in the civil service – a purge. It happens now. They dismiss people from shops if they might be a communist. And in the BBC – no communists.’

‘Yes. I know, but I don’t think it’s as bad as …’

‘Bad? What do you know! You talk like them. People losing jobs for politics. I know that. A purge in the civil service. I know that. A purge among the teachers I know that. You think it makes it different to call it by another name? No. It is no different. It is the same. People are afraid. I know that too, I know it.’

She buried her face in her child’s hair, and shook with sobs. The little boy was weeping noisily.

‘I’ll make you some breakfast,’ Martha said.

‘No. I don’t want breakfast. I want nothing, only that at last there is an end to … but no, there is no end to it. Never. But thank you, Martha.’ She got up and carried the child out of the room.

Doors slammed. Drawers slammed. A few moments later her voice chided the child, as they descended to the kitchen on the ground floor. From her bed, Martha followed the progress of breakfast being made: well, let’s hope that Mark was at the factory today and not being disturbed by it.

I shall tell Mark that I’m leaving. Today. I don’t want to be involved in all this … She meant, this atmosphere of threat, insecurity and illness. Who would have thought that coming to this house meant – having her nose rubbed in it! Yes, but that wasn’t what she had meant, when she had demanded from life that she must have her nose rubbed in it. Something new, surely, not what she had lived through already, was what she ought to be doing? Why was she here at all? If you start something, get on a wave-length of something, then there’s no getting off, getting free, unless you’ve learned everything there is to be learned – have had your nose rubbed in it? There was something really terrifyingly creepy, about the fact that the job heard about from Phoebe at a lunch designed to hook her into quite another job had led her here, back into what she already knew so very, very well! No, she would leave, probably in about a week, certainly before Christmas, and approach Phoebe for a job. She might very well take that secretary’s job in ‘the thing for the liberation of the colonies’. If politics were inescapable, and they seemed to be, then let her at least be practical, on the simplest day-to-day level. Besides, hearing the English – and that included people like Phoebe, well-informed as she was, talk about African politics, was enough to tell her how very useful she could be. She felt as Sally-Sarah must feel when listening to the people of these islands talk about invasion, or the loss of national identity. There was no substitute for experience. Put Phoebe in Africa, in what she called ‘a progressive movement’, and in five minutes she’d be suspected as an enemy not because of her opinions, but because of the tone of her voice. And as for Sally-Sarah’s terrible knowledge, nowhere in London, not even in suspicious dockland, or in the poor streets, or among the waifs and strays, had she met one person who understood, as Sally-Sarah understood, insecurity. These people still lived inside the shadow of their war, they were still rationed, their buildings were still thinned or ruinous, men had been killed, men had not come back from fighting: but that face which Sally-Sarah lifted from the chair where she sat clutching her child as if she were the child and he some kind of shield or support, that frail terrorized face with great dark eyes – well, Britain, did not understand that face. And Sally-Sarah was quite right; anything, anything at all that made it possible, was a mistake. There ought to be one country in the world without that experience. This house should be treasured because in it such experience was inconceivable. Yet it was from this house that Colin had come, at this moment under threat of being considered a spy. And Mark’s identification with his brother was a drive to understand, to participate?

Mark was the one among the four brothers to have had an unconventional education. Their father, Henry, had been a conservative member of Parliament: he was conservative by tradition, it was in the blood, as Mark emphasized, to make Martha understand that there were two kinds of Tory, those like his father constitutionally incapable of understanding that the country could be run by anybody else; and the Tories by intellectual conviction, whom Mark found intolerable. But he had loved and admired his father. The four sons had been brought up here, in this house, and in a house in the country, sold at the father’s death because of duties. This house belonged to the sons. Margaret Coldridge had then married for love (Mark claimed she had not loved his father, but had been married off to him), Oscar Enroyde, a financier; and for the four years the marriage lasted Margaret had inhabited the world of international money, which it seemed had been an unpleasant surprise to her. Not because she disapproved of it, but because she was indefatigably English, and was hardly ever able to be in England. The sons, being educated, were for the most part in England, while their mother was mostly in America. She described her second marriage’s break-up as: ‘I couldn’t stand dear Oscar’s friends.’ Mark said his mother was fundamentally a hostess, and one of a certain kind: she needed to attract, then domineer, guests. Married to Oscar Enroyde, she had found her guest-list already established, and she spent most of her energies heading people off one of the world’s very rich men. And besides, she was a woman of multifarious talents, none of them now useful. If a chair, for instance, was broken, she knew just that one little man, in Kent, who understood that kind of chair, and she liked to take it herself, and exchange talk with minute professionalism about the chair’s history, condition and needs. She hated being waited on.

During the war James was killed. There was a daughter, Elizabeth, now absorbed into the wife’s second marriage. This girl, about fourteen now, sometimes came to stay.

After the war Margaret married again – improbably to everyone but Mark. Her third husband was an amiable country gentleman, an amateur of the arts, vaguely a publisher, who served on a sort of semi-official body to do with the arts. He adored Margaret. Oscar Enroyde had not adored Margaret, she had adored him. Now Margaret entertained a good deal. Mark said his mother had an infallible instinct, unrecognized even by herself, for what was the next thing, what was in the air, and this marriage proved that the arts would soon be fashionable: unlikely as this seemed in grey, colourless, restricted post-war Britain.

Mark neither liked nor disliked this husband, John Patten, but he violently disliked him in his role of patron of the arts. This was a tension between son and a mother who wished that Mark, now that he was a ‘writer’, not only potential but published, would attend her weekend parties or at least an occasional dinner-table. If Mark had to go down for Christmas, he would hate it. But he would go, because of his concern for the child, for Francis’s Christmas. Yes, but that was not Martha’s affair. Unless the mere fact that she was here, had arrived here by what seemed such a slight chance, made it her affair? Had she ever, by any hint, or lapse of behaviour made it seem likely (to Mark, to Margaret) that she felt it was her affair? Yesterday Margaret had telephoned, apparently about some set of spare curtains, but really to find out if Martha intended to be there for Christmas. It appeared from her tone, gaily casual, that she both wished that Martha would not be there, so that Mark would be available for a Boxing Day Party, and wished that Martha would be there looking after Francis, because there would be no other children at the Pattens, and she, Margaret, was afraid the little boy would be lonely among so many adults. Margaret had not mentioned Lynda, so much in both her and Martha’s thoughts. She had, however, said she hoped that supplies would be laid in for Christmas because if she, Martha, did not attend to it, who would?

Martha now decided that she should get up. Downstairs was quiet. Sally-Sarah would have gone out shopping. Margaret was right, she, Martha, should arrange for food and supplies before she left: not to do so was positively neurotic. Today however, she would be careful not to notice the absence of butter and eggs.

For the first week of her being here Mark had been stubbornly resistant to her doing any housekeeping at all. But when she had understood the situation, and said that she did, they had established a defensive pact against the whole family. Who wished that Mark would divorce his wife Lynda and marry again. Not, of course, Martha, equally unsuitable. But Martha in the house, housekeeping, being kind to the little boy, was a kind of bridge from Mark’s previous condition of total womanlessness to the possibility of a new marriage. Because before this he had always refused to have any sort of woman around at all, even a secretary. For he was married to Lynda. The house was ready for her return. She was only temporarily away, temporarily in the hands of the doctors. She would – perhaps not soon, return to a house kept empty and waiting for her and to a child waiting for his mother.

This had been going on for three, four years.

Francis had been sent to a boarding-school, though Mark did not approve of boarding-schools; and spent an orphan’s life with his grandmother, who found the little boy a burden; with Sally-Sarah and Paul (Colin was always working, he was seldom at home); with the other brother’s family. Arthur’s – Arthur was Phoebe’s ex-husband, now re-married. And sometimes he stayed with Phoebe. Sometimes he was alone with Mark in this house.

There were photographs of Lynda in his room and in Mark’s room. Lynda’s clothes hung in Mark’s cupboards. It was all wrong – the family were right. It had that stamp of excessiveness, of unreality which – indicated a passion. Indicated, in short, the growing-point, that focus in a person’s life which so few people are ever equipped to see, and which is why lives remain, even to the nearest and dearest, so often dark, obscure; lit only by these flashes of what seems an unhealthy-gleaming light: a passion. But if Martha were the family she would do the same, feel the same, and try every way fair or foul, to make Mark see that he could not spend the rest of his life as if he were married to Lynda. Who, it was clear, was unmarriageable. The family were right about that. Lynda had never been a wife, never been a mother. She could not be, Mark ought never to have made her either – so said the family. And here it was that a close secret nerve ached and nagged in Martha: she had not met Lynda, save through improbably beautiful photographs, but she knew her, oh yes, very well, though she and Martha were not alike, and could not be, since Martha was not ‘ill’ and in the hands of the doctors. But for a large variety of reasons, Lynda Coldridge, who was in a very expensive mental hospital because she could not stand being Mark’s wife, and Francis’s mother, came too close to Martha. Which was why Martha had to leave this house, and soon.

She went down to the kitchen. A note on the table said in green pencil; ‘Martha! No eggs! No butter! The left tap is leaking! I shall bring back food when I come. Love. Sarah.’ She submitted – for what alternative did she have? – to being Sally in this family, but she always signed herself, Sarah.

There was a letter on the table. A child’s hand. It was from that nasty school – a cold, heartless military camp of a school.

Dear Martha, How are you? I am very well. I need football boots. I don’t like football. But I do like cricket. I hope you will be there for Christmas. With sincere greetings. Francis. P.S. Please tell Daddy about the boots. Last time he got the wrong size. I want a chemistry set for Christmas. A real one, not a baby’s one, please tell Granny I want a real one. With sincere greetings, Francis. See you at Christmas, what a hope, ha ha!

Now Mark came into the room in his dressing-gown. He seemed annoyed: he had been disturbed by Sally-Sarah? He looked at the note on the table: eggs, butter, tap. He was helplessly annoyed.

‘I’ll have coffee,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll make it.’

Martha handed him his son’s note. When he had read it she said: ‘I’ll stay for Christmas. But I must go afterwards.’ They looked at each other.

‘It would be good of you to stay,’ he said, appealing, and hating himself for it.

‘No. I want to. But, Mark, after Christmas I’ve got to go.’ ‘Of course. You are absolutely right. Absolutely.’

Six weeks later, on a bitter day, Martha was dressed in layers of sweaters, clearing and arranging the basement. This was for the housekeeper that Mark had at last agreed he should have. The business of the basement had been going on since Christmas, a groundbass to so many apparently pre-eminent themes, apparently a minor thing, an annoyance, a question of organization merely. In fact she could see now that it had been the most important, it was the one theme that had possibilities of development, of movement: a growing point in this stagnant mess. Before Christmas she had gone to Mark’s study, late, braving his reluctance ever to be confronted, and pointed out that a housekeeper would give him all the advantages of a Martha, and none of the disadvantages. He did not want to see it. He liked her, he said: how was he to know he would like this housekeeper? – He wouldn’t until he had engaged her!

He did not want a strange person! – Yes, but she, Martha, had been strange until she arrived.

Where was she to live, this housekeeper? – Why, where Martha lived of course, why not?

Yes, but – There was the basement, why not use that? It was simply a question of …

Yes, yes, yes, he muttered, he would. But first he must just …

He had been unable to stand any more. Martha could see that, and went down to survey the basement. It had been used as an overflow depot for years, both from upstairs, and from the house in the country, when that was sold. It was stacked with furniture, carpets, pictures. Some of it had to be sold; Mark could not bear, he said, to see the furniture of his childhood carted off to salerooms; but there was no help for it. He came briefly down, indicated the pieces that were valuable and should be kept, and for the rest, a dealer had come and taken things away. And now Martha was to arrange the place as she pleased, since they were not to know the taste of the future housekeeper, who would be getting a luxury flat when she came. The walls had been done for damp; cupboards had been put in; a bathroom and a kitchen were ready – almost, since although they were employing a firm which charged high prices for efficiency, it was impossible to get anything done well. Meanwhile, since workmen were in, workmen might as well attend to the rest of the house. As Martha was leaving, had actually put down a deposit on a flat, she felt free to take the house in hand. It was in a dreadful state beneath its surface of order. If it hadn’t been built to stand attrition, it would have been a slum. Mark having done no more than engage in a holding operation (his phrase) since Lynda’s illness. Workmen dug everywhere into floors and walls and filled the place with the smell of new colour. The roof was mended – or would be, these things took time. Carpets and curtains were cleaned – patience, there had been a war on.

Martha dealt with men and their employers, while the people whose home this was were clutched in such fearful anxiety, and it seemed to her that yet again she had walked on to that stage where two or three different types of plays were running together, for it did not seem possible that such discordant events could be sharing a texture of time or place, except in a dream-like capacity to change into something else, like the flamingoes into croquet sticks. Margaret, for instance, took to storming in, rather regally, in order to drop well-chosen words about if-a-thing’s-worth-doing-at-all-it-is-worth-doing-well, like a white housewife to her black ‘boy’, while the workman so addressed would put on that act of a humble yet self-respecting servant deferring to his better. Then Margaret would depart. Martha was a foreigner, and not a member of the British ruling classes, and besides she knew one of the useful languages, the dialect of trades unionism, and therefore the workmen did not bother to put a show on for her. Not one of them was prepared to do a minute’s more work than he had to, or do it better than he could get away with, for the most basic of reasons; he would get nothing out of it if he did, while the people who employed him were interested only in making money, which it was their business to do. And besides there had been a war on. There wasn’t one job these men did that wouldn’t have to be done again and very soon, so badly was it done and so poor the materials. There were frightful, but good-natured battles of wills, since both sides knew the limits of such battles, and Martha cajoled and argued and bargained and made small gains. Meanwhile newspapers flooded into the house which trumpeted the destruction of Britain by socialism (internal, the Labour Party) and by communism (external), as manifested by people like Colin Coldridge’s colleague, working for Russia.

Meanwhile, Mark spending his days for the most part with his brother, or in his factory, since he could not endure to see his home under attack, spent his nights talking to Martha in his study, mostly about his childhood and about Lynda. He was not a person who found it easy to talk, she discovered; but it had been easier since Christmas, which had laid so much open.

Christmas had been dreadful. First, Lynda, allowed home by her doctors on condition she was returned to them the moment she showed signs of strain. Then, Francis home from his school – to spend Christmas with his father and mother. So he had been told by his house-master. ‘I’d like that,’ he said, or quoted, cautiously, in his way of testing out phrases, words, used by others about his situation. ‘I must be careful,’ he went on, his wide painful eyes fixed on Martha’s face so that she could confirm or deny: ‘My mother isn’t very well, you see. I mustn’t upset her.’

An awful school. A couple of hundred little boys, guarded by men. ‘The little ones’ (Francis’s description of the boys younger than himself) had a matron, but ‘the big ones’ had men. They all slept in dormitories, were made to play games, were bullied by those older than themselves, exactly as these institutions have been described, mostly by their victims, for decades. It all went on, as things do, out of the inertia of what is in existence. Francis wore a tight grey flannel suit, with a tie and a collar; he was obsessed with his shoe-laces, which were always getting themselves untied, and his brown wide eyes were always on the alert, for fear he might be doing something he should not.

Three days before Christmas Sally telephoned to ask if she could come with her child for the holiday, her husband being ‘impossible, Martha! He’s as stubborn as a horse. I’m not going to stay where I’m not wanted!’ His impossibility apparently, was that he would not talk to his wife about what preoccupied him. He was spending all his waking time with his superiors, being cross-examined about his possible links with international espionage, and his relationship with his friend and superior, now awaiting trial. The police were making visits too. He would not talk to his wife; but he came to London to talk to Mark. The brothers had spent all afternoon together; and then Martha joined them for dinner and the evening.

Colin announced almost immediately that he was ‘not a communist but a marxist’.

Martha kept sounding notes to which he could not help responding if – he were not trying to hide something? Not a man numbed by terror. How to account for this lack of resonance? Unless, of course, he was not a communist and never had been one. But she had not before met this type of person who, because he admires a certain communist country, or a communist achievement, or to annoy Aunt Authority, will call himself, herself, a communist or a marxist without ever going near the communist party. They are pretty common at times when the heat is off and to admire communism not dangerous – during the war, for instance, or during the later ‘fifties and the ‘sixties. But this kind of platonic admiration, at the height of the Cold War was quixotic or simply – crazy. Unless to be a Coldridge absolved one from the necessity for caution, which is what Martha was beginning to believe.

For Colin did not seem to be frightened in the least. Of course, in Mark’s calm, storm-excluding study, it was hard to believe in danger. Nor did he seem to want to conceal anything. On the contrary, he talked all evening about his principal, now awaiting trial, whom he had visited frequently, obviously despising (or ignorant of?) the danger of doing this, and in spite of the entreaties of his wife who had begged and wept. The man was his friend, he had said; just as Mark was to say later: Colin is my brother.

It was, obviously, a relief to get away from his wife – not that he said so, of course. But Sally-Sarah was present throughout the evening, in silences and looks exchanged by the two men; and afterwards Martha saw that it was on this evening that they had decided, without actually saying so, that she must be here for Christmas.

When she came, she spent her time in James’s room, with her child, weeping or sleeping. The little boy came downstairs from time to time, his face still wan from hours of tears, to say: ‘Mummy’s asleep.’ When Martha went up with tea, coffee, she found Sally-Sarah curled up under an eiderdown, thumb in her mouth, like a child, but not asleep. She stared at the wall, or traced out the pattern on the wallpaper with a finger. ‘I wish I was dead,’ she said to Martha. ‘I do. I wish I was dead.’

Lynda arrived on Christmas Eve. The photographs said she was beautiful. Martha knew, too, that she would have beautiful clothes, because the bills for her clothes were enormous: one of the points of self-respect, return towards normality, was that she must always be perfectly dressed. Mark willingly paid the bills.

Lynda arrived in Margaret’s chauffeured car, and stepped into her home like a visitor. She smiled, cool, at her husband and was about to smile, cool, at her son, when she reminded herself, and kissed the child’s cheek, murmuring: ‘Darling!’ as he froze in pain and embarrassment. She was tall, very thin with a face strained by the effort of not being ‘upset’. She smiled steadily, while great grey eyes stared out of brownish hollows. But she was staring inward at the place where she kept her balance. She was enveloped in a great pale fur coat. Her hands, long and white and lovely, ended in nails bitten to the quick: there were rusty stains around the cuticle. Her hair, just done, was a soft gleaming gold: all her health seemed to be in her hair. At once she asked to be taken to her room – to wash, she said; but she stayed there all evening.

The room had been a problem. Since this Christmas occasion was designed, primarily, for Francis, for normality; and since mother and father shared a room, or at least should appear to share one, Lynda was put into the married room, Mark’s own, on the first floor. But Mark had a bed put into the dressing-room, because as he told Martha, curt, giving necessary information, Lynda could not stand having him near her. It would be necessary, if she were not to upset, that the door between the bedroom and dressing-room should be locked. They had to have a new lock made.

The Christmas Eve dinner was eaten by Mark, silent, but smiling a determination to present normality to his son; Sally-Sarah, miserable, and making no attempt to hide it; her son, near tears; Francis, his wide anxious eyes on his father’s face; and Martha. During the meal, Paul had climbed on to his mother’s lap and the two had sat enwrapping each other, her cheek on his head. Francis watched: he was looking at a mother and her little boy. After dinner he shook his father’s hand goodnight. Later still, Martha heard him crying. His room was next to hers. She went in to comfort him. He held his breath, held back tears, while she put her arms around him. He would not respond. As she shut the door she heard the great burst of breath and tears and Go away and leave me alone. Christmas dinner was the same, a kind of endurance test. Lynda sat at the foot of the table, serving the food cooked by Martha: her son watched her. Colin, exhorted by his wife that ‘It was the least he could do’ came for just that meal, and sat grimly through it, while Sally-Sarah kept her great dark eyes on him in tearful reproach, and spoke reproach to him through his son. He left the moment it was finished.

‘We’ve got that over, thank God,’ said Mark to Martha, as he helped her clear uneaten food into the refrigerators.

There was another week of getting it over, spent by Martha for the most part with workmen, and in the basement with dealers. Meanwhile the family suffered in separate rooms of the house and Martha felt the ridiculousness of furniture, leaking roofs and plumbing. It felt almost as if an underground guerrilla war went on, the fabric of the house as battleground, while amiably incompetent men came and went, carpets vanished and appeared, the sounds of banging and hammering shook walls and floors. She invited Mark to inspect the future housekeeper’s flat; but he left it to her. Lynda should not know about the basement, the sale of the furniture, he said. Yet one afternoon, when Martha was in the basement with a dealer, Lynda had appeared in her pale furs, and was competent about values and prices: seeing her thus, Martha found it hard to believe she was ill. This would be a nice flat, Lynda had said; she wouldn’t mind living in it herself. She had retired up the stairs with the remark that Martha must not tell Mark that she, Lynda, had been doing this. ‘I don’t think he’d like it,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t, you know.’

One afternoon, Lynda spent with her son. They sat in ‘Margaret’s room’, the drawing-room, on a big sofa. She asked him questions, gentle, detached, about his school. She was answered by a child who measured everything he said against the minutest signs, the tiniest reactions, of his mother’s face; as if a word, a phrase, from him, could harm, or ‘upset’ her. And indeed, at the end of this interview (for that was what it seemed) Lynda announced, suddenly, she felt ill and must lie down, and Francis sat alone, near a Christmas tree with coloured bulbs alight on it. Mark and Martha, across the passage in the dining-room, heard muffled crying.

Mark burst out: ‘I can’t stand it, it’s a mistake – we’ve got to get her back to the hospital. Or is this better than nothing?’

‘Perhaps it is, I suppose so.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, of course I’m not sure!’ And now Martha wept, or nearly did, understanding exactly how Francis must feel: one did not weep, show strain, with people who were so palpably suffering much more than she could.

‘I’m sorry,’ pleaded Mark – she must not cry, he was saying silently. ‘But there’s no way of doing anything right, is that the point?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. Isn’t this better than not having a mother at all?’

‘Or a wife?’ said Mark. ‘But that isn’t what you think, is it?’ ‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’ ‘It isn’t what they think!’ ‘I know that!’

‘My mother hasn’t been near us. It’d make her happy if Lynda was committed.’ ‘Probably.’

‘Oh all right, all right – you’re leaving. I keep forgetting.’

Unfairly, outrageously, she felt – this was all ironical reproach. So, doing what she could, where so little could be done, she continued with taps, cupboards, floorboards.

Every night she heard Francis crying. She would creep to the door, open it – try to force herself to go in, in another attempt at comfort … where there could be no comfort. Once he felt her there and sat up: ‘Who’s that?’ he said. Martha knew he hoped it was his mother.

‘It’s Martha. Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly all right, thank you very much.’ And he laid himself down, silent, to endure: exactly as he would in that dormitory of his where he would not be able to cry without being overheard by a couple of dozen little boys.

A couple of nights before Lynda was due to leave, Martha, unable to stand the sound of the muffled weeping from the next door, went down to the kitchen to make coffee. It was about three in the morning. Lynda sat at the big kitchen table, with a spread of cards in front of her. In a little heap to one side of the cards were some pills. Lynda wore an old-fashioned high-necked nightdress, all lace and tucks and frills. She saw Martha and ignored her, went on playing cards humming a small sad tune to herself. Martha made some coffee and sat down at the other end of the table. Lynda had not been to the hairdresser during the last week, and her hair hung in lank colourless strands. She seemed all great staring eyes and skull. The illness, or the pills she took so many of, made her sweat a lot: she smelled sour. Nowhere in this sick creature could Martha find the competent woman who had assisted her planning the basement. She drank coffee, silently, while Lynda sat swaying and humming.

‘You’re going, you think,’ she remarked.

‘Yes. In March.’

‘No, you’re not,’ said Lynda, rude as a child. Now she peered into her cards, and said: ‘It’s coming out!’ Angry, she pushed the cards together: apparently her own internal rules would be broken if the patience came out.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she now demanded.

Martha handed her a packet. Lynda took one, then scooped out three more with a bland sly smile and laid them side by side, near the pills.

‘If I take these now, I shall have to go back to the hospital tomorrow, not the day after, because I won’t have enough pills,’ she explained. Smiling, challenging Martha, or some authority, she separated a couple of pills from the heap, a small yellow one, and a big yellow one.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she announced, looking up and smiling at Martha – direct now, personal, charming. Oh yes, one could see how beautiful she was or could be. ‘Well, you’re right. But what’s the use of being right?’

Martha said nothing.

Lynda pushed the two pills back into the heap. ‘I’ll stay over the other day. But what for?’ She put her head into her hands, and sat swaying and humming. A pause. ‘No,’ she said, violently, and sat up. ‘It’s not true, I couldn’t come out and try. How could I?’

Martha said nothing.

Lynda was now leaning forward and peering into Martha’s face, as if listening.

‘Why can’t you accept it? Some people are just no good. Useless! No good. Not for ordinary life. I keep telling you. I told Mark when he married me. I told him. Why do you want to make everyone like yourselves? I know what I know!’

Martha said nothing and drank coffee. The big kitchen was like a ruin. Curtains, taken down to be washed, were bundled on top of a step-ladder. Floorboards had been taken up and pipes lay exposed near the wall. The tiles behind the sink had been ripped away; but the man had forgotten to put them back – he would have to be telephoned in the morning. Last morning he had arrived at eight o’clock to be paid: putting the tiles back was not his job, he had said, but somebody else’s. The argument had woken Mark. Mark’s dressing-room was over the kitchen. Was Mark awake over their heads now?

‘Mark’s asleep,’ said Lynda. ‘When Mark’s asleep he sleeps. I am happy when he’s asleep; then I know I’m not tormenting him. Sometimes I want to kill him, because if he was dead then I’d know he wasn’t unhappy because of me. Do you see? When I came down to the kitchen now I went to look at him. I like looking at him when he’s asleep. When I was married to him, I used to wake up at night so that I could see him asleep.’

‘You are married to him now,’ said Martha.

‘There’s no need to say anything,’ said Lynda. ‘You said that because you thought you ought. If I were asleep now, you wouldn’t have to say anything, would you? That’s why I like sleeping. I wish I could sleep all my life. But they won’t give me enough pills. I tell them, all right, if you won’t let me have what I know, why can’t I sleep? What’s the difference between being kept silly, because they keep you silly, you see, and being asleep? I’m no use to anyone, so I might as well be asleep. You see,’ she said, once again offering her intimate, enchanting smile, all of her there for a moment, ‘I’d kill myself, but I’m afraid. After all, we don’t know, do we? It might be worse there than it is here. You don’t believe in God, do you?’

‘It’s a word,’ said Martha.

‘Yes, but the devil is a word too. I know there’s a devil. He talks to me.’

One of Lynda’s symptoms was, she heard voices. But the doctors had told Mark that this symptom had abated. Which was why Lynda was allowed out for Christmas.

Now Lynda screwed up her face, so that she suddenly looked like a malevolent old witch, and leaned forward to peer at Martha.

‘Don’t tell them I said so. I keep quiet about what I know. I have to, you see.’ She sat swaying back and forth, back and forth. Then: ‘That’s freedom, isn’t it? Everyone has a bit of freedom, a little space …’ She traced a small circle on the wood of the table, about an inch in diameter. She looked down, peered close. ‘That wood is nice, isn’t it? I chose that table, did Mark tell you? I got it off a street market in Guildford. It cost ten shillings. An old kitchen table, yes, like the one we had at home. It was in the kitchen. The servants ate off it. Nicer than ours. The grain of this wood – look.’ Martha came nearer to look at whorls of hard grain around which the soft fleshy part of the wood had been worn or scrubbed away. They looked at the cross-cut of a spiral that had once been a growing-point in the wood. Lynda sat tracing it with her finger – contented. That is freedom,’ she said. ‘That’s mine. It’s all they let me have. They wouldn’t let me keep that if they knew how to take it away. But if I say to them: I don’t hear voices, you’ve cured me, the voices have gone … they can’t prove anything. That’s my freedom. But I suppose they’ll develop machines – they always do, you know. They won’t be able to stand that, that amount of freedom. So they’ll make a machine and clamp it to our heads and they’ll be able to say: You’re lying, we can measure the shape of the voices on this machine. What are you trying to hide? What do you hear? …’ She swayed, swayed back and forth, in an increasingly rapid rhythm. ‘But they haven’t made that machine yet. I’m still free. I know what I know. You do believe me, don’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Martha.

Threatening, Lynda leaned forward, ready to hit or to strike; her white grubby hand was clenched around an imaginary knife. ‘Yes, but what do you believe, Martha?’

Her eyes shifted past Martha to the door behind. Martha turned. Mark stood in the door. He looked weary and frightened.

She cackled: ‘Look at him. He wants me in prison. He doesn’t want me to have my freedom. He wants me cured.’

‘Lynda,’ he said desperate – and all wrong. A man, a husband, all warm and responsible, he said: ‘Lynda, this is Mark!’

At this pressure on her she smiled, became evasive, went inside herself and stood up. Her hand went out to the pills. She was smiling like a disobedient schoolgirl. She pretended to put the pills in her mouth, then let her hand drop and stood shaking with laughter. ‘You’ve persuaded me,’ she said to Martha. ‘You’re right.’ She now carefully, neatly, soberly, filled a glass with water, swallowed two pills, and put the rest into a cup, with the cigarettes. This she held before her, and went out of the kitchen, carrying the cup with the pills and the cigarettes as if it were a candle. In her old-fashioned frilly nightdress, she looked like a good child going up to bed.

Mark went after her, giving Martha a hasty goodnight.

Lynda stayed over an extra day, but Francis did not see her again. He was taken off by his grandmother in the big chauffeured car for the other week of his holidays. He took with him a chemistry set, a proper grown-up one, from Martha; a foot ball from his father; and a great heap of toys from his mother, ordered by her on the telephone from Harrods.

Before Lynda went back to hospital, she made another visit to the basement. Martha found her there, telling a workman who was about to put in a cupboard, that he was using the wrong kind of wood. If he had any pride in his work, she was saying, he would refuse to use the wood supplied by the foreman, which anyone could see was going to warp inside a year, because it hadn’t been properly seasoned. The workman was saying yes, he knew that, but he was only being paid to do the job, it wasn’t for him to reason why.

Martha took over the altercation from Lynda; tackled the foreman, who said it was not his fault if the firm chose to do a bad job, then the owners of the firm, who said it was the fault of the workman. As a result of this, and many similar battles, the basement, by the end of January, was at least within sight of being occupiable. Who was going to live in this basement? What the situation needed was some kind of sensible ‘body’ – a young one rather than an old one; but Martha could not see Mark choosing such a one. Phoebe, he said, was sure to come up with somebody: Martha could give Phoebe a ring perhaps?

Martha did no such thing. For, now the flat was ready – well, nearly; and Martha’s departure only four weeks off, she was concerned to see that the woman who did come would be good for Francis. Because if one thing was essential, it was to see that Francis left that school of his. He would not be able to do this if there were not the right kind of woman in the house. The housekeeper should be a good deal more than a housekeeper. The flat must be properly tenanted. Martha was imagining how Francis, returning from his sensible, human day-school, would come down to this flat to the woman who would live here, for talk, supper, homework – warmth. It was simply a question of getting Mark to see …

She faced Mark with it. Or tried to. He countered with being busy, with needing his attention for his work, with irritation, with embarrassment – then finally, in a great burst of explanation, the first time he had been able to say this to anyone, apparently, of how all his childhood he had felt different from other people and he did not want to inflict discomfort on his son.

As has been said, he was the only one of the four not educated normally for his class. The other three boys had gone to public school and university. Mark had been odd man out, a silent, watchful, uncomfortable child – this by nature; and Margaret, currently under the influence of friends who were educational reformers, had sent him to Neill’s school. Not for long: it was too extreme, she had decided. Mark remembered enjoying the school, but finding it painful, adjusting that world to his own when he went for holidays. Margaret had then sent him to a ‘progressive’ school, based on Neill’s lines, but less ‘extreme’. There Mark had found his two worlds more easily aligned; but he was still cut off from his brothers; who thought him and his school (any kind of school but their own being beyond the pale) odd, a challenge to them. He tended to go for his holidays, when he could, to school friends. He was seldom at home. Then his father died, the country house was sold, and Margaret married her financier. Mark spent holidays in America. It was there that he had got to know his brother Colin and the two had become friends. Mark had not gone to university. His education, his experience, had put him at an angle to his class. Now he said he did not want this for Francis, who already had too much to bear.

And he turned his back, picked up a book, and stood looking at the book, his taut back saying simultaneously that he wished Martha to go on, but proposed to resist what she said. She braced herself, and went on, there being no way of bringing up fraught subjects with Mark without barging in, breaking in, battering. Never had she known a man so armoured, so defensive. As pain-laden subjects came near him, his dark face, whose predominant expression was, in fact, one of dogged inquiry, a need to know, to find out – closed up, his mouth tightened, and he turned away.

To his back Martha cried out: ‘But, Mark, what sort of logic or common sense is it! Let alone any decent ordinary humanity! You say you are pleased you weren’t sent to a public school, you say being sent to America was the best thing that happened to you – you carry on about the upper classes like a socialist in Hyde Park – and now you are sending Francis through that mill. What for?’

His back still turned he said: ‘They have some kind of a strength. I haven’t got it. I want him to have it.’

What strength? Who has it?’

‘Oh … some of them. Oh I dare say it’s a kind of narrowness. They’re blinkered. If you like. But it is a strength. One’s got to have something.’

His dead brother (and Mark was the last person, as his writing proved, to see a death in war as arbitrary, unconnected with what a person was), had been, when war broke out, on the point of throwing up his job, or jobs, as chairman of companies, to go farming in Kenya. Hardly an evidence of unconformity to his own type, but his reason for wanting to do this was that England was no longer a place to bring children up in, people cared for nothing but making money. The second brother was Colin. Then Mark. Then Arthur, left-winger and regarded by the Coldridge family as not much better than a street agitator.

‘Well, all right then,’ said Mark. His back was still firmly turned to her. ‘Take Arthur. He talks red revolution all right. But put him beside that communist party scum and you see the difference.’

‘What scum?’

‘I wouldn’t trust that lot farther than I could kick them. But Arthur – well, if he says a thing, you know that’s it. You understand? You can trust him.’

And now Martha could not reply: he was saying that Arthur was a gentleman.

Unable to reply, she sat down, and waited. As usual, it was long after midnight, and the street outside was quiet. This room was quiet. It had two focuses, or areas of interest. One was the desk with piles of notes, notebooks, a typewriter. The other was a table on which stood all kinds of models, and prototypes, stacks of diagrams and blueprints, to do with the machines made in the factory. Mark’s business, started by him after the war, manufactured electronic devices used in hospitals, in medical work generally. He worked with a man called Jimmy Wood. The money made on one or two regular lines was used by them in experimenting and inventing and paying for how the two men seemed to spend most of their time: sitting in the office in the factory talking their way to new ideas.

At last Mark did turn around. It was with an effort. And when he sat down, facing her, he had to make himself.

‘I suppose I’m inconsistent?’

‘I just keep thinking of Francis crying half the night.’

‘He’s never going to have the ordinary thing, a mother, that kind of thing? So he could have the other thing to hold on to?’

‘You couldn’t compromise?’ she suggested, ‘humorous’, through necessity. ‘I mean, do you have to choose a school that’s like a caricature? Aren’t there any that aren’t like that?’

‘My brothers went there.’

‘Then that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

‘Margaret’s on your side. She wanted me to send him to my old place.’ ‘Why didn’t you?’

Now he hastily got up and went to the window, to examine the curtains. They had been cleaned. Last time he had made that movement, to evade an emotional point, he had muttered: ‘They need cleaning.’ Then he had turned to say: ‘I have a talent for tragic love affairs.’ For he had had a couple of hopeless passions before Lynda.

The reason why Mark did not want Francis to go to his own school, the compromise progressive school where, after all, he had been happy, was that in his own mind he was a failure: or so Martha worked out was likely. Mark felt he had let his educators down; exactly as he might have felt, had he gone to Eton like his older brother James, if he had embezzled funds. His school was dedicated to emotional balance and maturity – etc. Well, he had not made that grade. If he sent Francis there, Francis would go as the son of a failure – it seemed that Mark felt something like this.

But that talk did bear fruit; for Mark went to see his mother, who came to see Martha. The meeting took place in ‘Margaret’s room’; and Margaret sat on the edge of one of her pretty chairs with her gloves in her hand, and smiled at Martha.

‘But you’ve been so good for Mark. What a pity you have to go off like this!’

‘I dare say. But I do have to.’

‘Of course. What did you say you had to do? I forget.’

To withstand this kind of accomplished insolence it was necessary to have had the kind of education Mark was now providing for Francis. To withstand it gracefully, that is. Ungracefully, Martha held out.

‘What is Mark writing at the moment?’ ‘You should ask him.’

‘Has he done any work since you’ve been here?’

‘But he always does work hard.’

‘I meant, a new book. Anyone can play about with those electric toys.’

‘I don’t think he sees them like that.’

‘Hmm. Well. I do hope you’re not going to go off when he’s in the middle of something. People will be asking if that book was just a flash in the pan.’

Knowing very well that her silence now must look like a kind of sulk – Martha kept silent.

‘Very well then. Let’s see what you’ve been doing with the basement.’

Martha was very pleased to see Margaret in the basement flat. For even when it was polished, dusted and arranged, it did not look at all like the rest of the house. It was charming; it was comfortable – and it had no life in it. For rooms to look like those upstairs, it was necessary that a person, after feeling (for months, perhaps) that there was something wrong with that chair, that table, should move it two inches, just there, where it would catch the light, just so, or stand in an exact relation to a rug, a cornice? Martha half expected that Margaret’s being in the flat, walking around it, would supply its missing quality.

But Margaret said: ‘Yes, very nice. It needs to be lived in.’ And went upstairs again.

Before leaving she said: ‘Do see that he’s not left in too much of a muddle, there’s a good girl.’

These words, so much more offensive than others she had used, were in fact the most appealing: of such importance is a tone of voice. But they missed the point of what Mark in fact needed from a ‘secretary’; what his relationship to his work was; and what Martha could contribute to it.

When Martha first came to be his ‘secretary’ and waited for typing work, something of that sort, she found that they were sitting in his study, talking. It took time for her to understand that he was trying to define his own attitudes through other people’s – hers, since here she was. Nor did she easily understand how hard it was for him to talk. He prompted and prodded her into words, listened, came back with comments, though sometimes not for days. Partly, this was a way of talking about his life: it seemed he had never had people to talk to. Not at school? Well, yes, but he had had no close friends. Not since? Well, there had been Colin.

And of course there had been Lynda and others. ‘But one doesn’t talk to the people one is in love with, does one?’ All this Martha found hard, her experience, as good as a dozen universities, having been in the talking shops of socialism.

Mark had asked Martha to read his novel; and it was typical of him that he had not expected her to have read it, and to have thought about it. He had, he said, just re-read it himself.

This novel, a short one, had been published in 1948. But it had been written in 1946, while Mark was waiting to be demobilized with the occupation forces in Austria. The book had been, as they say, widely noticed. This was because, Mark said, giving the fact without emphasis, he was a Coldridge. Exploring this (unfair! she judged it, in the face of his amusement that she should) it became clear that the literary editors, the reviewers, the people who ran the arts in England at that time, had been at school, or at university with – not Mark, but his brothers, and ‘knew’ Margaret, or at least all knew each other. No literature-fed person comes from outside Britain without expecting to find some marvellous free marketplace of the arts, internationally fed, high-minded, maintained by disinterested devotees drawn from wherever they can be found. All that excellence, the high standards – surely they were not maintained by Tom and Dick and Harry who had gone to school with Mark’s brothers and who ‘knew’ Margaret? Well, why not? Mark demanded, when he finally saw that what he took for granted, she took with incredulity. Why not? If it works?

Mark had sent the manuscript from Austria, to Jack, a friend of Colin’s, once a guest of Margaret’s: he was now a partner in a publishing firm. He had taken it for granted that the book would be ‘noticed’; would not vanish, scarcely mentioned, as do half of the novels published in Britain. No, what troubled him was the note, or tone of the reviews: cold, disliking, even hostile. He did not understand the reason for it.

‘I suppose they were hedging their bets,’ he said, scornful. ‘They never condemn a dark horse – a cowardly lot!’

One reviewer complained that the book had been written as if the war had been over a hundred years instead of in its miserable aftermath. It was fatalistic, they said. It was pessimistic, it was deterministic. It had no compassion and it was cold.

‘It’s because you aren’t indignant. You aren’t shocked.’

‘What about?’

‘Look at the writing that’s come out of this war – there isn’t much of it as yet of course. And that’s pretty unforgivable in itself – getting a novel out before the guns have even stopped firing. Positively callous!’

‘I didn’t have anything to do. None of us did.’

‘But in what has been written, there’s a note – protest. Disgust.’

‘I don’t see protest. Things happen.’

‘And the novels from the First World War, elegies for lost paradises, or anger.’

‘Well what’s the point of still feeling like that?’

‘But you ought to be able to see why other people are offended!’

The novel’s attitude was as if humanity (the earth and its people) were a variety of living organism, a body, and war was a boil breaking out on it – and could be expected to break out. It was written out of the attitude, implicit, not described, that war was bound to happen, that nothing could have prevented it, and that forms of war would erupt again. This was not at all the atmosphere of the late ‘forties when governments, politicians and the Press talked, not only as if war, the next one, was preventable, but as if the actions they were engaged in would prevent it.

But Mark saw the activities of Press, politicians, and generals as the dust games of children. As he had thrown away in a couple of paragraphs, as being too obvious to need more, throughout the ‘thirties the coming war had been organized, planned for, expected; the nations had intrigued and aligned and deployed and bargained – but the salient fact of that war, the one which had shaped it, no one had foreseen, which was that Bolshevik Russia would be fighting alongside Britain and America. This although the powerful energies of the most powerful groups in our nation and in America, had been working in the opposite direction. No need even to develop that: it was so obvious. It had not mattered what they planned, since human beings were the prisoners of events. Yet, the moment the war had worked its way to its end, as a disease runs its course, governments, generals, newspapers, again started making plans, authoritative statements, and prognostications, proving that they were incapable of seeing the most obvious fact when it was in front of their noses. They were not to be taken seriously.

And Mark could not see that this attitude, at that time, was likely to offend. For him it was all self-evident. And Martha, explaining, came to represent that naïvety, that inability to draw conclusions from obvious facts, that he found so hard to understand.

Meanwhile, Martha was making a discovery – unexpected. ‘Matty’ was being summoned back into existence. ‘Matty’ had not been in evidence in this house, she had made no appearance. Another person had: and it took time to see that this was merely an aspect of the hydra, Matty. This was – at first Martha christened her ‘The Communist’ but had to widen it to ‘The Defender’, since it was a mask shared, for instance, by Marjorie’s sister Phoebe. This person got shrill, exclamatory, didactic, hectoring, and went off at a word into long speeches. ‘I’m not interested in speeches!’ Mark had said, early on in his relationship with this orator. Martha had not been aware she made speeches. Between the clumsy self-denigrating clown, and ‘The Defender’ was a link: Martha was beginning to see it. She had plenty of opportunity for study of it, since the novel stung ‘The Defender’ into such lively existence.

At Mark’s statement that in a hundred years’ time (if anyone was alive in a hundred years’ time), people would not describe the Second World War as people did in 1950 – the year that had just started, Martha said: ‘Well, of course not.’

But they would not judge it as a victory of good over evil, they would not see Hitler’s armies as worse than those they fought. They would say, only: war expressed itself thus and thus in the years between 1939 and 1945. Moralizing was never more than the justification of willing belligerents.

But here Martha suffered. Mark had, during the last year of the war, seen one of the concentration camps opened – just as Thomas’s friend had done, writing Thomas a letter which had been the cause of Thomas’s subsequent development. Or so it had seemed.

‘What am I supposed to say?’ Mark inquired. ‘Those bloody Huns? Or what?’

‘Well what do you say?’ demanded Martha.

‘If I go on and say something about Russia, we’ll swap atrocities. I can’t stand that conversation! You say, gas chambers. I say, collectivization of the peasants. You say, master race. I say, Purges. You say, Freedom. I say, Freedom. What is the point?’

At which ‘The Defender’, night after night, had argued, quoted figures, emphasized, while he sat listening. ‘So there’s no progress, it doesn’t matter what attitudes one takes up, one might just as well have fought for Hitler?’

‘If one is going to draw up a balance sheet of atrocities – of course.’ ‘What then?’ ‘That’s all.’

‘Ah no. I’ve been here before. When? I must have been twenty – not much more. Nothing mattered, a tale told by an idiot. That was a man called Mr Maynard.’

‘We’ve got some second cousins called Maynard. Was he from Wiltshire?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know fighting him was the best thing I ever did.’

‘Fighting,’ said Mark with distaste.

‘Well then, if that’s true why bother about Colin?’

But here it was Mark turned away, fiddled with drawers, pencils, the lamp-switch, became angry, bitter. Watching her own enemy personalities at war, she was easier able to see his.

One, that cool observer who was able to see events as they might appear a hundred years from now. Always? Mark had gone through that war able to see it like that? Hmmm – possibly.

And, at the mention of his brother, a cold angry man, the brother to ‘The Defender’.

‘Progress,’ muttered this angry man – hardly to Martha, more to himself, a conversation with himself possibly, of the kind one has alone, when other people are asleep. ‘That’s not my thing. I don’t care about it. If things do improve, then it’s not because one nation fancies itself better or more humane than another. That’s a farce – it always was. The way people see themselves – that’s for children. Look what’s going on now! The Cold War! What a phrase. What kind of thinking is it? The tune changes, from one year to the next – well why not, it always does – but am I expected to take it seriously? Is Colin? Colin’s stand is that he was an ally of the Soviet Union for years and during all that time he was fighting to share scientific information – they all were, the scientists ‘Because the governments of this country and America were doing everything not to share it, because they hated being allied to Russia.’

‘Granted. Of course. But the same went for the Russians. But Colin is a scientist. He’s not a politico. He stands for the internationalism of science. So, the tune has changed and suddenly he’s a traitor. Well, I stand by my brother.’

‘Then it’s childish to be upset about words like traitor.’

‘Upset! I’m scared stiff. I never thought that would be possible – in this country. As far as I can see Colin isn’t scared. As far as he is concerned it’s all perfectly clear – they are in the right and that’s that.’ By ‘they’ Mark meant Colin and his superior, the man now awaiting trial. ‘They say America wants to start a war with Russia. America wants to destroy Russia. Before Russia gets the atom bomb. Well, of course America wants to destroy Russia, you’ve only to read the newspapers. Colin says, it’s about communism. I think, nations need to go to war. If it wasn’t Russia it would be another country. But if they were able to supply Russia with information about the bomb, so they could make one, Russia would get equal with America, and then America would be afraid to start a war.’

‘Is that what Colin says he’s been doing? Because if so you should keep quiet about it.’

‘No, it’s not what he says he has done. It’s what he says is logical. It’s his point of view. He’s entitled to it.’

‘All the same, you’d better keep quiet.’

‘Why? This is my country. Or I used to think so. But what scares me is – that I’m scared stiff. I think words like traitor and treason and all that stuff are childish. Rubbish. They’ve never been anything but stuff to scare the populace into behaving. Suddenly I’m scared. I read the newspapers from the States – well, they’re always going in for pogroms over there, it’s part of their thing. But it’s starting here. I read our newspapers and see the word Traitor in big black letters and I realize I’m cold – literally cold with fright. What about you?’

‘Yes.’ He had never asked her if she would, in Colin’s position, hand over information about the bomb to the Russians. He talked around it, and about, coming back to this point where he looked at her, as if waiting for her to clarify where she stood. She had been frightened to: reading the newspapers which she did, every morning, for hours, left her without courage.

‘What it amounts to is, thank God, thank anything you like, that I’m not in Colin’s position, believing that it is my duty to give Russia information. I don’t think I’d have that much guts.’

‘Yes. That’s about it. There but for the grace of … but he’s my brother. I’ll back him through anything.’ And, saying this, he was all bitter, locked determination.

Another person came into existence when his mother entered the house. Again a man who turned away – but, Martha judged, some years younger. When Margaret, having telephoned – she never arrived unannounced, because, as she would announce, loudly: one ought not to drop into one’s grown-up children’s houses without warning – emerged from her car, for lunch, tea or dinner, Mark who had not been able to work before she came, seemed to shrink, and grow younger. He was rude to her, or abrupt. She, these days, came to discuss Colin: who was always too busy to see her, she complained. And Mark would say: ‘I don’t know, I have no idea. Well, then, why don’t you ask him?’ Meanwhile he watched her, with a helpless fascinated look, as if there was a force which no act, or word of his could propitiate. He behaved, in fact, as if he were about fifteen, a boy newly defending his manhood against his family.

And Margaret complained to Martha that Mark was as stubborn as a mule, as close as a clam. No, she had no intention of putting Martha in any false positions, but that reviewer had put his finger on it – dear Bertie. Martha knew Bertie Worth perhaps? No? He used to visit the old house before it was sold. But Bertie had said in The Times that Mark had no moral sense. He lacked a feeling for essential values. And she departed, emphatically.

To return, less emphatically, indeed, with a curious evasiveness, to say she had just the right person to live in the basement. She was a Mrs Ashe, the widow of a Major Ashe, ex-Indian Army. It turned out she was nearly seventy and difficult. The right person to run that house, to give Francis what he needed? Put thus, Margaret cried out that she was really such a dear old thing. She looked quite extraordinarily guilty. She’s up to something – again. Mark said. What?

Margaret retired. Temporarily. Telephone calls and visits pursued the cause of Mrs Ashe. Why? There was something odd about it, something wrong. They could not define it. Particularly as everything, the texture of life itself seemed wrong, ugly, with so much hinted at and hidden – waiting to explode. Yes, they were waiting. They were sitting time out. Or, Mark was: Martha only until she must leave.

Before she left, she could at least try and do something about Mark’s finances: he asked her to ‘make suggestions’. Mark’s father had left money, but not much. The upkeep of this house, which belonged jointly to the three brothers, was paid by Mark, who lived in it. He spent nothing on himself, but Lynda and Francis cost a great deal. And so did Martha and her salary, as she pointed out. But that would not be for long.

The publisher who had been a friend of the family had signed with Mark a contract that conceded nothing to friendship. There had been an advance of one hundred and fifty pounds and he had earned not much more than that on the war novel before it had stopped selling. He had contracted for three more books on the same terms. A ridiculous contract, which he should not have signed. But he had no agent. A second novel had been begun and abandoned: he had ideas for others. He said he was not particularly interested in writing another book. He was not a writer, he said. He supposed, one day, he would write another book.

The factory made money on the machines for hospitals. It could make more. But Mark said he was not interested in the business from that point of view. If he could not use the profits for what he called ‘having fun with new ideas’ then he wouldn’t bother with the factory at all.

If he were able to sell the war novel in America?

An American agent arrived to see Mark, who received her in his study. She was a woman of about thirty-five, well turned-out, full of professional friendliness. For her benefit (indeed, one could do no less) Mark offered ‘the writer’ and ‘the writer’s secretary’ – Martha.

Miss Sayers sat at ease, conducting with relaxed efficiency this interview which was only one, after all, in a tour of British writers. She said she liked Mark’s novel, for what it was, but that kind of thing, the protest novel, was dated.

She saw his novel as a protest novel?

War was not a good thing, and therefore a novel about war was a protest novel – her mind seemed to work in this way. Or perhaps she had not read it? At least she was able to use with familiarity the name of the chief character.

Perhaps she was one of the people who don’t know how to read. Very few do, after all.

However that was, she explained that the war novel was hard to sell in her country at that time. But she was interested in Mark’s second. That was why she was here: she would be so very privileged to think she could handle Mark’s second book which she was sure would be an advance on his first. And what was his new book about?

‘Life,’ said Mark, bland, intending to be rude. ‘Well,’ she cried, gaily, ‘of course, it is bound to be.’ But if Mark could give her some idea, she would then be in a position to … ‘You are an agent, you say?’

‘Yes, that is so. And I think you’ll find one of the best known.’

‘I see. Well perhaps it would be better to wait until the book is finished? Otherwise I might find myself altering it in the hope that you might handle it?’

‘Well, now, Mark. I really wouldn’t like you to think that I’d be capable of putting any pressure at all on my authors, but it is true that I feel myself a friend to my authors, I do like to think they take my advice.’

‘And what might that be?’

Here she began a short lecture, frowning, like a teacher concerned to remember words from notes made. It was a lecture given, that was clear, many times already.

What Mark should understand, said she, was that only second-rate writers dealt with social conditions, or politics, or concerned themselves in any way at all with public affairs or …

‘Oh I don’t know … there was Tolstoy, and Balzac, and Dickens and …’

Her face glazed, at the effort of associating these names, ‘classics’ (she had read them?), with her subject.

‘All that kind of thing,’ she insisted with authority. ‘The real great artist creates truth and beauty from within himself, he deals with the eternal truths …’ And so on.

It took about fifteen minutes. Mark and Martha listened, in silence, fascinated, to the opinion currently in vogue in America, being put so trippingly in this alien tongue.

Finally she asked if Mark would be prepared to sign a document giving her first refusal of his new book, when finished. She was not prepared to pay anything for this: his return would be, that he had an agent and a friend.

She left, having asked if she could use the telephone: she needed to check if her interview with her next author, a young man from Wales about whom she asked if the opinion (it was Mark’s opinion too, she supposed) that he was the finest poet since Auden, was still viable.

This visit raised interesting questions … One was: if Mark’s novel had been published now, instead of 1948, what reception would it have got? Two, three years, had changed the climate completely. ‘Out’ was the humanitarianism, warmth, protest, anger. What was ‘in’ was the point of view put by the able Miss Sayers. Why? Very simple indeed. The ‘cold war’ was spreading, had already spread, from politics, to the arts. Any attitude remotely associated with ‘communism’ was suspect, indeed, dangerous. Few intellectuals had not been associated with the left, in some form of it, during the ‘thirties and the ‘forties. Precisely these intellectuals were now running, in one way and another, the arts. Tom, Dick and Harry, they were now peddling, for all they were worth, a point of view summed up by the slogan: The Ivory Tower. This was admirable, subtle, adult, good, and above all, artistic. Its opposite was crude, childish, bad, inartistic.

In America a period of political reaction can be foretold as much when publishers and agents and editors, those most sensitive of barometers, talk about Art in capital letters as when panels of psychoanalysts issue statements that political rebellion on the part of the youth is a sign of emotional immaturity. In Britain hard times are on the way when there are rashes of articles on Jane Austen and Flaubert. ‘Jane Austen vs. Thomas Hardy’; ‘Flaubert the Master, Zola the Journalist.’

‘Besides Sappho, Jane Austen and Firbank, who could be deemed fit inhabitants of that Ivory Tower which …’

If the war novel had been published now, it would have fitted neatly inside the Ivory Tower.

It might even have made some money?

As things were, Mark had an overdraft of a thousand pounds, his bank manager protesting; and large unpaid bills for Lynda’s hospital and Francis’s school.

Something ought to be done.

Not knowing what, they talked. To good effect, so it turned out.

On a crucial evening they were in his study. It was after twelve. The curtains were drawn on a cold and sodden night. The light was low. Mark, wearing slacks and sweater, lay on his couch – his place. Martha sat at the desk – hers. They were drinking brandy, were a little tipsy, felt safe for the time, the sense of threat shut out. This was, after all, a warm, gay room. Once it had been a warm and gay house. Mark, seen thus, could be imagined as a warm, easily responsive young man. Even now his face was relaxed, and was smiling as he teased Martha.

‘Well, how do you want to live then? Everything you say, all the time, implies there is another way to live? Did you know that?’

‘There isn’t then? Everything has to go on and on, as it does. Nothing better is possible?’

‘Very well then. But you haven’t said, you know.’

‘I don’t want to have to split myself up. That’s all …’ He maintained a quizzical smile. ‘Yes. Any sort of life I’ve been offered in London – I’d have had to put half of myself into cold storage. Pretend part of me didn’t exist.’

‘And here?’

And now it was necessary to evade, sidestep. Because it was fantastic he could ask it all: a measure of how much of himself was shut away, or, more accurately, put into cold storage with Lynda.

It would not have been necessary to have this conversation with Thomas, she could not prevent herself thinking.

Several times, late, after one of these evenings of talk and friendship, sex had approached – of course. But not straightforwardly, honestly. Slightly tight, they would have got into bed, enjoyed themselves or not, and in the morning, there would have been a note of apology, even of embarrassment. The point being, that they would have made love because they were a man and a woman sometimes alone in this house. Well, that would have been right with some men. But not with Mark. He did not see this, rather, feel it?

One evening, before Christmas, she had telephoned Jack. A voice she did not know said that Jack was in hospital somewhere in the north. He had trouble with his lungs. No, he did not want his address known. He did not want letters forwarded. Of course not: Jack, all his pride in his body would not wish to do anything but crawl into a dark hidden place, until it got better.

‘Well,’ he said, and again with the unfair reproach: ‘You’re going off. You’re right.’

‘I’m not what’s needed here!’

‘Yes, but what is! Oh, very well – I don’t want to … so you’re going off to find … do you know what it is you’re really wanting, Martha?’

And he proceeded to tell her. She was seeking, without knowing it for the mythical city, the one which appeared in legends and in fables and fairy stories, and (here he laughed at her, but affectionately) it was a hierarchic city, which is why she refused even to consider it. He proceeded to describe it, as clearly as if he had lived there; and she, laughing affectionately at him, who knew this archetypal city so well yet said he believed in nothing but a recurring destruction and disorder joined him in a long, detailed, fantastic reconstruction which, by the time they had finished, was as good as a blueprint to build.

Great roads approached the city, from north and south, east and west. When they had fairly entered it, they divided into arcs, making a circling street, inside which were smaller ones: a web of arcs intersected by streets running in to a centre. All these streets were wide, paved with stone, lined by trees. The centre was planted with trees and had buildings in the trees. These were schools and libraries and marketplaces, but their functions were not over-defined. People might teach in the market; and in what looked like a temple, or a place of worship, goods could be bought or bartered for. Carpets for instance, or jewellery, or poems. There was no central building to the city, yet the people maintained that somewhere in it was such a lode-place or nodal point – under the city perhaps; perhaps in some small not apparently significant room in one of the libraries, or off a market. Or it could have been that the common talk about this room was another way of putting their belief that there existed people, in this city, who formed a kind of centre, almost a variety of powerhouse, who had no particular function or title, but who kept it in existence. The city had been planned as a whole once, long ago: had been built as a whole. It had not grown into existence, haphazard, as we are accustomed to think of cities doing. Every house in it had been planned, and who would live in each house. Every person in the city had a function and a place; but there was nothing static about this society: people could move out and up and into other functions, if they wished to. It was a gardened city. A great number of the inhabitants spent their lives on the gardens, and the fountains and parks. Even the trees and plants were known for their properties and qualities and grown exactly, in a relation to other plants, and to people and buildings; and it was among the gardeners, so the stories went, that could be found, if only one could recognize them, most of the hidden people who protected and fed the city.

‘And all this,’ said Mark, stating his position, ‘went on for thousands of years – until, one day, there was an accident, something as senseless and stupid as an earthquake which swallowed the city, or a meteor from space.’

‘Oh no,’ said Martha, stating her position, ‘around that city, just like all the cities we know, like Johannesburg for instance, grew up a shadow city of poverty and beastliness. A shanty town. Around that marvellous ordered city, another one of hungry and dirty and short-lived people. And one day the people of the outer city overran the inner one, and destroyed it.’

Next day Mark did not go to the factory. He sat in his study, and by evening had produced a short story, a sketch merely, of this city. It was for Martha. He was excited by it and so was she. They thought it should be longer. He took back the pages, and went to work.

The second version was quite long – longer than a short story. In the first version sudden dust storms had buried the city. In the second, outside the central gardened city rose the encircling shadow city of people who looked enviously in at the privileged one. They always talked of attacking it. But they were afraid to – they didn’t know why. Centuries passed. The outer city was growing rich and strong. It was even built on the plan of the inner city, in emulation of it. It had gardens and fountains and – a temple, with a hierarchy of priests. But the outer city was not like the inner one, no matter how often or loudly it claimed it was. Inside was harmony, order – joy. Outside people fought for power and money and recognition, they were soldiers, and a constant growing and overthrowing of dynasties based on the army. Then, one of the ruling families, wanting an advantage over the others, sent envoys into the centre, asking to buy their secret. But the reply came back that the secret could not be sold, or taken: it could only be earned, or accepted as a gift. The rulers of the outer city were angry: they did not understand this answer. They overran the inner city, killing everyone. They looked for the hidden people, of whom the legends had reached the outer city. They could not find them. When the sacking of the city was complete, a story started, they said among the soldiers, that someone had indeed found an octagonal white room under a library. Something about this room, no one could say what, had made an impression. They tore down the roof, pulled up the floor – but there was nothing there. It was empty.

Now the new rulers announced that everything would go on as before: this was the magical city, it was open to everyone. They were going to run it, with their priests and their soldiers.

But of course, they hadn’t the secret, and now the old city of the legend became exactly as the outer city had been. But it was from this time that the city in fact reached history – before that it had not been known, except to the people who lived in it and around it. Now it reached a great climax of fame and power; and it spread out into a kingdom and then an empire, which attacked other cities and countries. It had a fine literature, and an art of its own, and was envied for its richness and achievements. And a whole branch of its learning was to do with the history, based on legends which persisted, of the old lost city; and this particular aspect of its culture was in the hands of a priesthood.

In this version the original city was built in a desert, in North Africa perhaps, or in Asia. Nothing but hundreds of miles of sand under a blazing sun. Then the oases became more frequent. Then, starting in the desert, so that the great roads running inwards began, literally, in sand, was the city.

Travellers coming in from the desert found it hard to say when the exact moment was when their feet found the right road. Then trees appeared, on either side; then in the distance, the first houses of the city. For leagues of hot dusty travelling, a silent yellow sand, and then the white city, with its sharp black shadows and its shaded gardens, and over it, a blue sky where birds wheeled, into which rose domes and spires and the sounds of voices.

Mark was pleased with the second version, and Martha began to type it. Then he asked her to stop. He wanted to do more work on it. It turned out that he planned to turn it into a kind of novel: something much more worked out, detailed. But she was leaving in less than a fortnight.

She heard that the flat on which she had paid a deposit was not ready. It was in a big new block of flats built on a bombed area near Notting Hill Gate. It was not going to be ready for at least another month.

Francis was going to be home for a half-term. It would be nice if Martha could be there.

Martha suggested that she should stay on another month. It was agreed that at the end of March, she would leave.

Meanwhile it was still February. There wasn’t very much for her to do. She wrote some business letters, dealt with accounts, kept the house, put linen and cutlery and so on into the basement. A great deal of her time was spent in her room, with the black cat whose attitude so clearly was, as he arched his back under her hand, and settled at the foot of her bed, that she was a visitor, in this, his home.

She was waiting again! Always waiting for something! – so she discovered herself muttering crossly.

On the whole it seemed that her job was to protect Mark – from journalists, from people ringing up on this or that pretext – from anybody who didn’t understand the pressure Mark was under.

Which was why she protested when Margaret rang up to say she planned an election party: an election was due in a couple of weeks.

Martha said: ‘I don’t think Mark would feel up to it,’ and stopped herself from saying: ‘But don’t tell him I said so.’

‘I dare say,’ said Margaret, ‘but I do feel that we ought to try and behave normally, don’t you?’

Which left Martha to think it over that in this family behaving normally meant holding election parties, for it appeared that Margaret always had them. Then why didn’t she hold a party in her own home? As Mark demanded, angrily, when told of the plan. But Margaret felt it would be nicer to have it in London, where people could drop in and out on their way to and from election stations, voting stations, parties at hotels, etc. etc. But this was not the real reason. She had bought a television set, a new toy, and it was not working well in Sussex, unfortunately. She proposed to watch the election on television in Mark’s house.

This was to be the first real television election.

Margaret arrived with the set and an engineer to install it. Mark was in Cambridge.

Martha stayed in her room, listening to Margaret’s loud and capable voice giving instructions to the engineer. Then she watched the man depart along the pavement below her window. She braced herself, for she knew what was going to happen.

There were steps on the stairs – firm steps. Then a knock on the door – a confident knock. In came Margaret, smiling. The trouble was, Martha rather liked her, once she had got past that enemy: the capable middle-aged matron coping with everything by sheer force of long experience.

‘Oh, how hard it is to be a middle-aged woman, who has to stand in for everyone’s difficult mother, and who has to take – and return – looks from younger women examining their futures, exactly as one used to do oneself, and who are thinking, what a short time I’ve got left. Oh how tiresome – and how tiring! – to be the target for such complicated emotions, none of which has anything to do with oneself.

Margaret sat on the foot of the bed before remembering that she ought to ask Martha if she could. Remembering too late, she decided to say nothing. But she looked defiant as she stroked the old cat. ‘Poor old Starkie,’ she said. ‘Well, you look pleased with yourself. Really, you are a spoiled beast.’

Martha had sat herself on a chair across the room.

‘Where’s Mark?’ demanded Margaret.

‘He’s in Cambridge.’

‘He always did this you know – he gets himself involved.’ She was talking as if Colin, her son, were less than a son than Mark?

Continuing, she said: ‘After all, if Colin is going to insist on being silly, then he shouldn’t expect one to – why should he stand up for that man? What’s-his-name? He was only working with him wasn’t he?’ Here she waited to see if Martha could tell her anything. Martha couldn’t. ‘And, of course, Mark has to get on a high horse over it. He always did. Mark’s stubborn. So’s Colin. In different ways. And, of course, there’s Arthur – he’s not likely to be a spy for Russia, that’s something, when he hates them so much. So one is thankful for small mercies.’

Margaret had once been a fine-boned graceful English beauty like Lynda. She was now a tall, handsome, grey-eyed woman with elegant hands. Martha watched the subtlety of the hands as they caressed the cat. The cat started to purr loudly. Margaret picked the animal up and put her ear to it, like a child, to listen to the purring. But the cat didn’t like being picked up, and stopped purring.

‘What do you feel about Mark?’ demanded Margaret.

And now Martha could not help laughing – out of annoyance, really. Also, she supposed, from affection. Margaret smiled a strained readiness to be told why Martha laughed. She put the cat down, who rolled over and began purring. Margaret stroked the cat. She had tears in her eyes.

The tears were very weakening. ‘Listen. Margaret. There’s just one thing that none of you seem able to see. Mark loves Lynda. I do understand why you all – but there it is.’

‘But it’s ridiculous. It always has been. And before Lynda there was an American, a cousin of Oscar’s. Hopeless – a hopeless girl. And she cared nothing about Mark, and he ran around after her like a little dog.’

‘Well, haven’t you ever loved anyone ridiculous and hopeless?’

The cat had moved off, and sat licking its ruffled fur to rights.

The grey look Martha now got from Margaret held irritation. Martha recognized it easily as that emotion one feels when another hasn’t seen that truth obvious to oneself.

‘Yes, I have. I was in love with Oscar. I adored him. But one has to live, you know – one has to. I do know. I could have stayed married to Oscar. But I don’t like – suffering, I suppose. I hate it. Some people enjoy being treated badly. I wasn’t Oscar’s first wife and I won’t be his last – by a long chalk. I’m told the woman he’s going to marry is getting the treatment. Just as I did. Look, Martha dear – I really must – haven’t you any influence at all with Mark?’

The tears poured out, and, as Martha could see, were unchecked because Margaret had noticed Martha was influenced by tears. Martha was now very angry. Months of resentment came pouring out.

‘I know you are much older than me, and ever so experienced, and you’ve always been able to do exactly as you like. But you seem to me like a little girl. You can’t always have your own way. You always have had it, haven’t you? You can’t stop people doing things just because you think it’s no good for them.’

Margaret stared at Martha, not so much surprised, as wary. Then she turned away her wet face and dabbed at it. Martha looked at a reassuring calm back. Martha had even more strongly the feeling that she was an instrument being played upon. When that face was turned to her again, what look would be placed upon it?

No, she was being unfair. Probably Margaret was acting out of instinct – if that made it any better!

Once again, Martha was sitting in the presence of a strong elderly woman, herself a seethe of conflicting emotions, which she could not control. Some time she was going to have to learn to control them.

Margaret turned to her a quiet sobered face.

‘I don’t agree with you,’ she said. ‘If someone’s doing something that’s simply silly, you try and stop them. I wish you’d try and stop Mark. He ought to leave the country for a bit. He could take Francis. He might fall in love with someone that’s some use.’

Martha laughed with resentment. ‘You can’t see that he could never do it? It’s not the kind of thing he could do?’

‘No. I wish you’d try.’

‘No. I’ve got no right – one hasn’t. Not unless you get right into something and – get your hands dirty too. Only if you fight.’

‘And you won’t?’

‘Why should I? It’s not my mess!’

‘You want to get married again I suppose?’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ Martha was becoming incoherent. ‘I don’t want to get married for the sake of it! You talk like a – fortune-teller or something.’

‘Oh! I don’t see why? Why not, if that’s what you want?’

‘Well one doesn’t say, I want to get married and then go out looking – isn’t that what you meant?’

Margaret was almost smiling: she was humouring Martha.

Who now stood up, confronting Margaret. Who stood up, ready to leave. The women were furious with each other.

‘If Mark divorced Lynda, it wouldn’t make any difference. He’d either go pining after Lynda, or he’d be in love with someone else ridiculous and hopeless. Or you’d think she was. Can’t you see that?’

‘Well no,’ drawled Margaret. ‘Frankly, I don’t. But I must bow to your superior wisdom.’

At the door she said: ‘The man’s got the television to work. It’ll be rather fun, watching it on television.’ She laughed, and apparently genuinely. She was looking forward to the evening. ‘In the old days, when I had an election party I had to be careful to keep the left and the right apart – now it’s the left and the left. I suppose Colin wouldn’t come – he can’t, with the case just starting?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh well, if you just lump people into a room, they’ll have to behave. But I must say, if Colin’s coming, then it will be tricky with Phoebe and Arthur and Arthur’s wife. I really can’t imagine why they hate the bolshies so much when they’ve got precisely the same aims. If they had their way, this country’d be as bad as Russia – it’s not so far off as it is.’

With this, she went downstairs again, to arrange drinks and food for her party.

By evening the big room, which Martha had only seen as dead and shrouded in enveloping dust-sheets, was full of flowers, and it had a buffet at one end, the television set at the other. Now it presented itself, discreetly festive, as a setting for parties. People started coming early, the attraction being the television set, as much as the election. Most had not got one, or refused to get one, or might get one if this seemed satisfactory. The set was, in short, the focus of the party, almost its chief guest. Margaret was the only person who adored it. Most people seemed apprehensive: in fact one could more or less work out someone’s political bias from the attitude he took towards television.

By ten or so there must have been fifty people in the room in an atmosphere rather like a sweepstake, or the races; and although outside this room, which imposed a truce, they stood for violent antagonisms. Bets were being made, victories and defeats were cheered or booed, everything went on in the greatest good humour.

The Tories were represented by Margaret herself, and by a man who made an appearance early, a formally good-mannered quiet man who was taken down by Margaret to see the basement. Another tenant for it who she thought would be suitable? The man, Mr Hilary Marsh, was easily overlooked and not remarked much by Martha: afterwards she wished she had paid more attention. There was also strongly present the spirit of Margaret’s first husband; and for her sake even opponents hoped that the Conservative who now held his seat would continue to hold it: he did. The Conservative people held the view that five years of Labour Government had ruined the country by the introduction of red and ruinous socialism, but the electors (they hoped this evening) would see their mistake and where their ingratitude towards their natural governors had led them, and reintroduce the Conservatives.

That section of the Labour Party which actually held the reins (a couple of Ministers were present) was represented by Margaret’s present husband, John, a pleasant man, without much force but with nothing to dislike about him either. He was smilingly attentive to the guests (Margaret’s rather than his, one could not help feeling) and kept the television set working. There was something about him damped down, held back, kept in check – whatever he was, there was a slight uneasiness, hard to put your finger on. Martha felt it: he presented to her the surface merely of an extraordinary control, while he asked the politest kind of question about Mark’s well-being, about Colin. She was pleased when he moved on.

These, the Labour incumbents, held the view that the country had been in such a bad condition after the war, and particularly after years of Tory rule, that they could not have been expected to do better than they had: and that most of their election pledges had remained unfulfilled through no fault of theirs: ‘The Country’ (a phrase that resounded all evening) would understand this and return them to power with a larger majority than before.

The Labour left was represented by Phoebe, by Phoebe’s ex-husband Arthur, and by his present wife, Mary. Phoebe arrived early with her little girls, pretty blonde creatures excited by being up late for the first time in their lives. His wife came early with the two little children from the new family. Phoebe and Mary, who were great friends, and had been for many years, together greeted Arthur who arrived late with a great mass of supporters. He had kept his seat in South London, with a reduced majority. They were all very excited, and he was a hero that evening. Martha wondered if yet again she would be faced with a shape of flesh like one already known – Mark, Colin, the picture of their dead father – whose spirit was yet utterly different; but Arthur did not look like his brothers, or his father. He was a vigorous-looking man, with an open face, blue eyes open to inquiry, a rocky, rugged, craggy man. An agitator. An orator. A troublemaker. His half-hour’s visit did in fact cause some tension in the general well-being, and people seemed pleased when he left, taking with him his wife, his children; and his previous wife and her children. These, the Labour left, all believed that a Labour Government in power after such a war and after years of Tory misrule, needed to be what it was accused of being by people like Margaret and practically the entire Press – vigorously socialist. They despised the larger part of the party they belonged to for cowardice, pusillanimity, for being unsocialist. They believed, however, that the electorate would vote back the Labour Party, because of the existence, in the Labour Party, of people like Arthur, who might yet force it to be what it should be.

Mark was not there. Colin was not there. Invisibly and very strongly present that night was ‘communism’ – a threat. Everyone knew that Mark was with his brother and that his brother was in bad trouble. People either asked sympathetically after them, or – mostly – did not mention them at all.

If Mark and Colin represented communism, then they represented the view that the Labour Party had always been, would always be, could never be anything else but, a function of capitalism, the force, or trend, in the British nation which made capitalism work, saved it, bolstered it – and could be no more than that even if the Labour Party were composed entirely of Arthurs. (Who, of course, hated the communists, local and international with a bitter passion.) The Labour Party had got in because capitalism (The Tories) being in a jam after the war, it was the right time for it to get in. It had fulfilled none of its election pledges because it could not possibly do so – only a communist government was in a position to change anything radically. And here presented itself an interesting paradox, or political anomaly. For a century at least communism had defined socialist non-communism as bound to fulfil this function; the fatalism, the determinism, which is so oddly rooted in that revolutionary party’s heritage must have it that Labour, or social democracy, by its nature could do no more than what capitalism would allow it do. Q.E.D. Why, then, so much abuse, the gutter criticism, the emotionalism – why such a crying out against the inevitably-behaving and conditioned function, the Labour Party? One might almost believe it a form of love, or of hope; as if, rooted right there, at the heart of an ‘inevitability’, of something determined, there had always been, in fact, half a hope, that perhaps, after all – the Labour Party could be socialist.

Among the guests there was also, but not for long (politics bored him he said) Jimmy Wood, Mark’s partner. He was a short, fair man. Wispy. He had soft baby’s hair on his large head. He had a carefully kept, almost scared, smile. He moved about, with a glass of whisky in his hand, listening, and looking, always on the edge of a group, always with his half-smile. He did not look at the television set, only at the other guests, and as if he were a stranger doomed to be one. He talked briefly to Martha, smiling, or rather, grinning and clutching his glass. He wore strong spectacles. Behind them were small, strained-looking eyes. Mark said he was a variety of scientific genius.

Half through the evening Mark called from Cambridge to say that Martha should get James’s room ready for Sally: she was coming back with him. Paul too.

Martha therefore was away from the party for some time. When she came back, they were saying that even if Labour did get back, it must be with a reduced majority. Margaret and some Tory friends who had come in from a near-by hotel drank to the defeat of the Reds (Labour). Those ‘Reds’ near them drank an opposition toast – everything was very jolly. Mark had sounded harried, even rather frightened. Jimmy Wood went, on hearing that Mark would not be there for at least two hours. Mark said that Jimmy and he talked – days at a time. Mark said Jimmy was a lonely man; and so little given to talking about personal affairs, he did not know to this day if he were married.

In the room were two new people. Young men. One was Graham Patten, John’s son by a former marriage. He had a friend with him. Both were in their last year at Oxford. They stood on the side of the noisy scene and despised it. They were also at pains to despise television. Politics were unfashionable among the undergraduates of Britain at that time: Graham and Andrew thought politics were derisory. Dandyism was fashionable: they wore embroidered waistcoats and would not surrender their cloaks, one black lined with scarlet, one scarlet lined with leopard skin. They both maintained supercilious smiles, until someone, unable to stand their frustration, went up to them, when they delivered themselves of a great many observations on a large variety of subjects. They were a bit better when they got drunk, if not very endearing.

Margaret was heard to apologize for them: they would grow out of it, she said.

Mark had told Martha that he would take Sally and the child straight up to the room. She listened for him to come in, and went quietly out into the hall when he did. But Margaret was there seeing some guests out. Afterwards Martha kept the clearest picture of that brief scene.

At the door were a group of noisily tipsy people on their way back to the hotel where they proposed to celebrate Labour’s so greatly reduced majority. Margaret was saying ‘Good-bye! Goodbye!’ to them; but she was watching Mark, who stood on the stairs with Sally-Sarah, who had Paul in her arms. By Margaret was Hilary Marsh, observing them all – a quietly smiling, unnoticed man. Sally-Sarah looked ill. The little boy had his thumb in his mouth and stared over his mother’s shoulder with large, blank, shocked eyes. The two were wrapped in a travelling rug Mark had taken from the car. In this cheerful din (the noise from the big room was shattering, when one listened to it from outside) they had the look of refugees, of people in flight.

Mark summoned Martha with his eyes. She went to Sally-Sarah, while Margaret came forward saying: ‘Sally! Is Colin here? What’s the matter?’

Martha led the two up and away from Margaret and her party, while Mark stayed. Sally-Sarah was quite passive. She was trembling. In the big bedroom on the second floor, she stood until Martha suggested she might sit; and sat, staring until Martha said she might like to get into bed. Martha took the child and undressed him. Sally-Sarah was undressing herself like an automaton. Offered tea, coffee, milk, she did not hear. Martha put them both in the same bed.

When she left them, Sally-Sarah had not said one word.

Downstairs the big room was emptying fast, because of Mark’s presence. He stood with his back to a wall, grave, anxious, looking past the two undergraduates who stood in front of him. It was now clear why they had come to this party: to meet the writer. It appeared that some tutor or teacher had said that Mark’s novel was influenced by Kierkegaard. Andrew had his clever young face, now rather flushed by drink, close to Mark’s, and he was unloading a series of observations: he did not agree with the tutor, it seemed. He was explaining to Mark why the novel was to be compared with Stendhal’s The Red and The Black. Mark was not listening. Close to this group Hilary Marsh stood, observing. Martha went forward to rescue Mark. She listened while the two young men, unwillingly accepting her as substitute, continued their ingenious literary game, their eyes not on her, but past her, on Mark. Hilary Marsh was expressing concern, to Mark about his brother Colin. After a few moments Mark said: ‘Yes. Yes. Excuse me …’ and went out of the room.

It now occurred to the two young men that Mark might be upset about his brother Colin whose name had been all over the newspapers that day. When Martha left the party finally they were being witty about spies to Hilary Marsh, who, it seemed, was quite prepared to listen to them.

Upstairs Martha found Mark in Sally-Sarah’s room. She was not asleep. She was curled up in bed, like a child, her child asleep beside her. Her eyes were shocked.

She said, ‘Thank you. Thank you. You are very kind. Thank you. Thank you.’ Mark and Martha left her.

‘I’ll tell you in the morning,’ said Mark, ‘I must get rid of …’ He went downstairs.

Colin’s principal, the man with whom he had worked for years, had been sentenced to fourteen years in prison for giving scientific information to the Russians. Next day Mark stayed in his room. Sally stayed in her room. Martha kept buying newspapers. Late that afternoon it was announced that Colin Coldridge son of – etc. etc., brother of the writer Mark Coldridge, and of Arthur Coldridge the well-known left-wing member of Parliament, had fled the country, presumably to Russia, leaving behind his wife and his son.

Martha took the newspaper to Mark. ‘Did you know?’ she asked. ‘I knew he was going to.’ ‘Are we to look after Sally?’ ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’ ‘Didn’t he say anything about her?’

‘I didn’t see him yesterday. I couldn’t get hold of him. I had a telephone call from him in the hotel. He was in a call box. All he said was, that he would be away for a time. He rang off.’

Sally-Sarah came down to supper with her little boy. She wore her purple and gold striped dressing-gown. On the whole she seemed composed. The telephone rang continuously from Mark’s study, but they were not answering it. Outside the house, newspapermen stood in groups. They did not tell Sally-Sarah this, but after supper she went to a window and looked out at the group of men in their raincoats, with their cameras and their notebooks.

She then asked Mark and Martha if they would look after Paul for a day. She wanted to go back to Cambridge to fetch some things. They dissuaded her: she must not go by herself they said. She appeared to agree. Late that night, going up to see if she needed anything, they found she had slipped out of the house, though it was hard to see how she had done it without alerting the newspapermen.

In the morning Martha got Paul and told him stories. His mother had gone back to fetch something; his father had gone for some work somewhere. Paul was not concerned about his father; he had seen so little of him. He asked once or twice about his mother, but on the whole played quite happily.

When Sally did not come back by lunchtime, Mark telephoned the flat in Cambridge. There was no reply. Shortly afterwards, as Mark was preparing to go to Cambridge to find her, the police telephoned. Sally-Sarah had gone to the flat, and gassed herself. She had left no message – nothing.

And now, though there was no need at all to say it, Mark said: ‘You can’t go, Martha. I don’t see how you can.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘I don’t think Colin intends to come back. He never said anything – not directly. But I understand some things I didn’t at the time.’

Martha rang up the estate agent to say she would not be taking the flat, now nearly ready. The churlish gracelessness that was the spirit of the time spoke through him as he said: ‘Well, if you don’t want the flat, there are plenty that do. You do realize your deposit isn’t returnable?’

Life frayed into a series of little copings-with; dealings-with; details, details, journalists; newspapers; telephone calls; threatening letters.

Paul had to be looked after, Francis had to be told – something. What?

One thing became clear at once. Mark was going to be isolated. By refusing to condemn his brother, or inform, or to ‘co-operate’ with the police – very insistent they were that he should – he was tarred with Colin – a traitor.

Margaret rang up. Having inquired about Paul she then started talking about the flat downstairs. Mark said his mother must have become unhinged by the crisis. She wanted Mrs Ashe, the widow from India, to live in the flat. She wanted this, apparently, so much, that she was prepared to bring Mrs Ashe herself, and settle her in. She went on ringing up about Mrs Ashe and the basement, until Mark lost his temper.

She then wrote a letter about Mrs Ashe. It was an extraordinary letter, entreaty, threat, apology – Martha was ready to agree that Margaret was temporarily off balance. But they did not have time to worry about Margaret.

Mark said: ‘I think it’s going to be a bad time.’

It was already a bad time, all muddle and misery and suspicion and doubt.

Part Two

However, the Man Without Qualities was now thinking. From this the conclusion may be drawn that it was at least partly not a personal matter. What then was it? The world going in and out, aspects of the world falling into shape inside a head … Nothing in the least important had occurred to him. After he had been dealing with water by way of example, nothing else occurred to him but that water is something three times as great as land, even if one takes into account only what everyone recognizes as water – rivers, seas, lakes, and springs. It was long believed to be akin to air. The great Newton believed this, and most of his ideas are nevertheless still quite up to date. In the Greek view the world and life originated from water. It was a god, Okeanos. Later water-sprites, elves, mermaids and nymphs were invented. Temples and oracles were founded on its banks and shores. But were not the cathedrals of Hildesheim, Paderborn and Bremen built over springs – and here these cathedrals were to this day. And was not water still used for baptism? And were there not water-lovers and apostles of nature-cures whose souls had a touch of peculiarly sepulchral health? So there was somewhere in the world something like a blurred spot, or grass trodden flat. And of course the Man Without Qualities also had modern knowledge somewhere in his consciousness, whether he happened to be thinking about it or not. And there now was water, a colourless liquid, blue only in dense layers, odourless and tasteless (as one had repeated in school so often that one could never forget it again) although physiologically it also included bacteria, vegetable matter, air, iron, calcium sulphate and calcium bicarbonate, and this archetype of all liquids was, physically speaking, fundamentally not a liquid at all but, according to circumstances, a solid body, a liquid or a gas. Ultimately the whole thing dissolved into systems of formulae that were all somehow connected with each other, and in the whole wide world there were only a few dozen people who thought alike about even as simple a thing as water; all the rest talked about it in languages that were at home somewhere between today and several thousands of years ago. So it must be said that if a man just starts thinking a bit he gets into what one might call pretty disorderly company.

ROBERT MUSIL; The Man Without Qualities

Chapter One

A bad time is announced by an event. A woman gasses herself because her will to survive is exhausted. This event is different in quality from previous events. It is surprising. But it should not have been surprising. It could have been foreseen. One’s imagination had been working at half-pressure … Martha had been here before.

When a bad time starts, it is as if on a smooth green lawn a toad appears; as if a clear river suddenly floats down a corpse. Before the appearance of the toad, the corpse, one could not imagine the lawn as anything but delightful, the river as fresh. But lawns can always admit toads, and rivers corpses … Martha had been here before.

When Sally said she was going back to her flat for a day or so, leaving her little boy, that was so unlike her, so improbable, that if Martha had been alert, she would have – but what? Called the police? The doctors? There was no set of words which Martha could imagine herself using. ‘Sally, you’re not thinking of …? Oh, please don’t! – You’ll feel better in a few days … Lie down for a little and we’ll get you a sedative. Sally, you’re a coward! How can you think of … And what about your little boy, he won’t be able to live without you –’

(People are infinitely expendable, feel themselves to be, or feel themselves to be now.)

‘Sally, we’ll lock you up until you come to your senses!’

Sally had gone back to her flat to become Sarah. What had she really felt when the family which had taken her in, had done so only under the passport of Sally? ‘They’ve always called me Sally,’ she said, once, exchanging with Martha a look which the family itself could not be expected to understand. If she had refused to be Sally, had insisted on remaining Sarah, would she then have had to make the journey alone to her empty home where she could turn on the gas?

Before that double event; Colin’s departure, Sally’s death, the quality of life was different; seemed almost, looking back on it as – no, not happiness. Happiness, unhappiness, these were not words that could be used anywhere near this family, every member of which held the potentiality for – disaster? But that had been true before the double event. How then had it been possible for Martha to feel that ‘the holding operation’ could in fact hold off what had been so loudly heralded? Something had been bound to give. Yet to look back from the day after Sally’s death, to even the day before it, it was as if a bomb had gone off.

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality into which warlike events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains. Events and the life in which they are embedded have the same quality. But since it is not possible that events are not part of the life they occur in – it is not possible that a bomb should explode into a texture of life foreign to it – all that means is that one has not understood, one has not been watching.

And, the bomb having exploded, the heralding (or so it seems) event having occurred, even then the mind tries to isolate, to make harmless. It was Martha’s concern, and Mark’s, to try and minimize the double event as if they felt it to be an isolated thing, without results, as it had had no causes. Or at least, that was what it seemed they felt; for with the little boy Paul playing upstairs, his mother dead, his father gone, they were discussing how to soften and make harmless. ‘How to break it’ – as Mark put it.

Paul was going to be six next week. He had plans for his birthday. His mother had talked of a party. Some sort of a party there must be.

‘Is my mother going to be here?’ asked Paul.

‘I expect so,’ said Mark – and turned away from the child’s acutely-fearful black eyes. Paul had never been separated from his mother, not even for one day. And now his uncle said: ‘I expect so.’ Paul became very gay, manic. He rushed all over the big house, bouncing on the beds, teasing the cat, standing to look out of all the windows, one after another. Through one of them, he would see his mother come. He turned, saw Mark and Martha watching him; and pulled the heavy curtains so that he was hidden from them. He took the black cat to bed with him, where he hugged and kissed the beast, which suffered it. But he did not like Martha touching him, nor Mark. Particularly not Mark. He was not used to contact with a man; his father having been kindly, but concerned (he had even said so) to make up for the emotionalism of the unfortunate Sally-Sarah by being cordial, but restrained.

Mark and Martha were prisoners in the house, because the reporters patrolled outside. Paul asked to go for a walk. He did not say that he hoped to catch a glimpse of his mother in the streets. He was told that no one was going for walks. Through the windows he saw men trying to peer in; and asked who they were. He tried to slip out of the back door, but found a smiling man on the doorstep, listening to Martha answering the telephone. No, Mr Coldridge was not in; no, he could not come to the telephone; no there was no comment about Mr Coldridge’s brother.

‘Is Mr Coldridge’s brother my daddy?’ he inquired.

The exchange was asked to alter the number. This was done; and for a couple of days there was peace. But then a reporter got the new number from Jimmy Wood at the factory. Jimmy Wood had been asked not to give it. In explanation he said that the man sounded ‘as if he really wanted it’. The number was changed again. Jimmy was again asked not to give it. But he did: he thought, he explained, the man asking for it was an electronics expert. After all, he had said he was. Jimmy’s part through the long siege was simply – not ever to understand it. Mark asked Jimmy to come to the house, so it could all be explained to him. He must be careful of the journalists, he was told. He arrived at the front door, and was enclosed by a group of news-hungry men. To them, smiling, he told everything he knew. Not much, not more than Mark knew; but affable and willing, he chatted, and entered the house, still smiling. But then, he always smiled. Some time in his life he had decided that life must be faced with his smile, and he never switched it off. A defence? An explanation? Who knew? But this small, wispy man with his great head covered in baby hair – smiled, as if he could not help it. They said to him: Please be careful, please don’t expose us, please don’t talk to the Press, and he smiled. Almost at once he began talking about affairs at the factory. It seemed he could not see the necessity for all this fuss.

But he agreed, not so much impatiently, as with tolerance, not to give the telephone number to anyone at all.

For a while, then, it was quiet. But Margaret telephoned from her country home. She had not been near them since the election party. She was concerned about Francis. ‘You ought to get him back home,’ she said. ‘He must be having a dreadful time at that beastly school.’

‘But it would be worse here with the journalists.’ ‘You think so? I don’t know. Mark could get rid of them, easily, if he wanted to.’ ‘Yes, but I don’t think he’d want to do that.’ ‘You ought to make him.’ ‘Perhaps you’d like to talk to him?’

‘No. No. I really haven’t got any more patience with … have you let the basement?’ ‘The basement!’ ‘Mrs Ashe still wants it.’ ‘But, Margaret, for God’s sake …’

Margaret had sounded embarrassed, about the basement. Now she hurried on: ‘But he always was so wrong-headed. Always.’

‘I think you ought to be discussing that with him.’

‘Well, yes, but – and don’t forget about Mrs Ashe, I must really ring off, I’m really very …’ She rang off.

This was so odd, struck such a discordant note, that Martha was unable to think about it, forgot to tell Mark.

It was Mark who took the next call from his mother.

Margaret had telephoned Francis’s school, and the headmaster said Francis was all right. As far as he knew the news had not reached the school. ‘But he’s such a fool,’ Margaret said. ‘I asked him if he banned the newspapers there, and he said, he was sure his boys understood the meaning of esprit de corps.’

‘Perhaps you could take Francis for a week or two?’

‘Oh, I don’t know – anyway, I’m off to America next week.’

‘You could take him until then, couldn’t you?’

‘I don’t really think …’

She then went on to talk about Mrs Ashe.

Mark said he really hadn’t time to worry about being a landlord, and rang off. It was so extraordinary of Margaret that Mark, like Martha, let it slide.

Paul had listened to this from outside the study door.

‘Why should Francis go and live with his granny?’ he asked.

‘She’s your granny too.’

‘No. She isn’t. She doesn’t like my mummy.’

‘Well, it would only be for a little time.’

She tried to pick him up. He was a heap of heavy limbs. The black frightened eyes, already lit by cunning, held Martha’s face, while he held himself rigid in her arms. She put him down.

‘I don’t want Francis’s granny to come to my party.’

‘She’s not coming.’

His birthday was the day after the next.

‘I want my party. I want my party,’ he sobbed, from the floor. He was saying, I want my mother.

Next morning, Martha put on a headscarf, and Mrs Van’s old coat, and got out of the house by eight in the morning, by the back door. Only two journalists had arrived, and they were at the front of the house. She went across London to Harrods, and bought a cake and presents for the party. When she arrived at the back door, it looked unoccupied. But before she could get in, a man ran up.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

‘I work for Mr Coldridge. I do the cleaning.’

She had the key in the door, but she was gripped by her other arm which clutched parcels.

His face was alive with suspicion, but also with the delights of the chase.

‘What’s going on in there?’

‘I work for Mr Coldridge. I do the cleaning.’

The clothes were right, but her voice was not. His face was hard, self-righteous. He was a man seeking to unmask evil. He took five pounds from his pocket. He hesitated. Five pounds was more than enough for a charwoman, but not for a friend or mistress or fellow-conspirator of Mark Coldridge. Hesitating, he lost his force of purpose; Martha slipped her arm away, and shot indoors, scattering parcels on to the floor of the kitchen. Through the back window his face appeared, in an angry teeth-bared scowl. Framed thus, emphasized, it was almost yes, funny. He looked like a bad actor in a melodrama: my prey has escaped.

One of the aspects of a bad time, before one has entered into its spirit, is that everything has a feel of parody, or burlesque. Martha stood in the kitchen, looking at the ugly, threatening face, and had to suppress laughter. Nervous laughter, certainly, and when he shook his fist at her, it was ugly and she was afraid. That evening, among the pile of newspapers that came from the newsagent, brought past the reporters by the newsagent’s boy, was one which carried a story about a mysterious woman, who had entry to Mr Coldridge’s house, and who would not give her name.

Next day was the birthday. In the morning Paul was given presents which he opened. Mark and Martha watching. He tore through them, throwing them aside, one after another: he was looking for evidences of his mother. He had not mentioned his mother for some days. Clearly the birthday had become for him the talisman which could produce his mother. The presents had not, but there was still the party.

After breakfast he went to Mark’s study and stood by the desk watching Mark pretending to work. By now they were waiting for him to ask: Where is my mother, so that they could tell him the truth. Which they should have done before. But the right time had gone past, and they did not know what to do. Everything was wrong, the ‘party’ absurd, the presents a mistake.

But now they did not know how not to have the party.

Martha laid a party-spread on the table in the dining-room. But Paul demanded that it should be in the kitchen. Nothing came in the front door, only sheaves of newspapers, falling through the letter-slot. But the back door could admit. It was through the back door that he expected his mother.

Martha spread out the cake, with its six candles on the kitchen table, and some biscuits and little cakes. While Martha moved about in these pathetic preparations, Paul stood just inside the kitchen door, watching them: Mark, trying to engage Paul’s attention, played with a wooden train on the floor. From time to time the two grown-up people exchanged glances of helplessness, and of shame, because things could have been allowed to reach this point.

There was a heavy knock on the back door; and the little boy, crying ‘There she is! There’s my mummy!’ rushed to open it. Two men stood there. One was the journalist of yesterday, looking angrily sullen. The other was a large smiling man.

‘Where’s my mummy?’ shouted Paul.

The two looked at each other, then studied Martha, arranging cakes, and Mark, playing trains.

The large man said: ‘Take it easy, son, take it easy. Your mummy’s not coming, you know.’

‘Why not, why not?’ screamed Paul, and flung himself down. Lying face down, he banged his head hard on the floor while his face exploded tears.

‘Is this Colin Coldridge’s boy?’ asked the sullen man, bending to examine him for describable details.

Mark now scrambled up off his knees, and advanced on the journalists. Yesterday’s man was suspiciously angry. The large man was smiling, ingratiating. The child continued to bang his head, crying noisily. Mark, with his eyes wide, his mouth open, his face white, appeared comic.

‘Take it easy,’ said the large man again, and backed away, in a parody of fear: he was making fun of Mark.

The self-righteous man was now making mental notes about the kitchen. Having done this, he returned his attention to Paul, who was writhing at his feet, and said accusingly: ‘Why didn’t you tell the boy about his mother?’

At which Paul shot off the floor and grasped his uncle around the knees, so violently that Mark staggered and leaned sideways to catch hold of a chair-back. ‘Tell me what?’ screamed Paul.’ Where’s my mummy?’

‘Your mummy’s …’ The journalist stopped; unable to say ‘dead’ to the child’s face.

With a mutter of inarticulate disgust, he backed out of the door. The goodfellow, smiling deprecatingly, said: ‘Here’s my card.’ He laid a piece of card on the table by the cake. Miles Tangin. The Daily – ‘If you’d co-operate, Mr Coldridge,’ he suggested, ‘then it would be better.’

‘I’ll complain to your editor,’ said Mark over Paul’s head. The child was sobbing noisily, and gripping Mark’s knees, so that Mark had to hold himself upright with one hand on the chair-back while with the other he tried to soothe Paul.

‘You do that,’ said the first man, all contemptuous bitterness.

The two went out together.

Mark carried the sobbing child up to bed.

In bed he was quieter, whimpering a little, while he watched them both. He was waiting.

‘Where’s my mummy?’ he asked at last. Martha said: ‘She’s dead, Paul.’

Paul took it. It was a fact which marched with the events of the last week. ‘And is my daddy dead too?’

‘No,’ said Mark, with emphasis. But both he and Martha knew that of course he would not believe them. They had been lying to him: they were probably lying again.

‘He’s away,’ said Martha. ‘He’ll come back.’

Paul said nothing. He lay staring at them, with his black, untrusting eyes. Then he turned his face to the wall, and shut them out. They stayed with him. Hour after hour passed. He was not asleep. He kept dropping off, but he whimpered in his sleep, and this woke him. It was nearly morning when at last he fell into a deep sleep.

Their days were now spent with Paul, the child who could not trust them. He had gone silent, evasive, listless. He spent hours curled in a chair in the kitchen, sucking his thumb. He usually did not answer when Martha or Mark spoke to him. This did not look as if he were trying to be a baby again, wanting to be fed; but as if he really could not take in the existence of food, of mealtimes. He would sit listening, or apparently listening, if they read to him or told him stories. He sat quietly for the children’s programmes on the radio. Put to bed, he slept. When he looked out of the back windows, the front windows, and saw the groups of reporters waiting there, he examined them, then looked at Mark and Martha for explanations. It seemed he was afraid to ask questions. But they wouldn’t have known how to answer.

In the evenings, the two sat in Mark’s study. Mark’s white face had acquired a staring mask-like look; as if wide-eyed at the incredible, the impossible. He did not believe what was happening. This was because he was Mark Coldridge, to whom such things could not happen.

Yet he was also Mark Coldridge who had written that book about war which came from the heart of an understanding of how such things happened – must happen. Martha was waiting to talk to the man who had written that book: but he was not there.

Mark was saying things like: ‘We must get Paul to school so that he can get over it.’ Or: ‘When it’s blown over, I’ll take Francis and Paul for a holiday somewhere.’

He was still talking in terms of a situation normal enough to blow over. He could not bear to see that a deep harm had been done; and that they, or at least, he, must expect the results of it, and that the results were for life.

But how could Martha blame Mark when she caught herself thinking several times a day: Before Sally killed herself, before Colin went away – the double event which her nerves, geared to laziness, still felt as a water-shed. And it was as much her fault as Mark’s that Paul had not been told the truth (as much truth as could be told to a child of six) so that now he trusted no one; it was as much her fault that the affair had been handled so that the truth had come through journalists scavenging for news.

And what was the use of feeling guilt, blaming herself and Mark, when they still did not know how to act, still sat night after night in the quiet book-lined study, with a decanter of old brandy on the desk, and when they did act, absurdity or worse came of it. For they had lost a sense of the ordinary machinery of life.

One afternoon they had watched through the windows a couple of Press men rummaging through their dustbins in search of incriminating documents.

One of them was Miles Tangin. Mark telephoned the editor to protest, could not get through, left a message that he would like to be rung back, was rung back by – Miles Tangin. The telephone number then had to be changed again.

Martha suggested that he should ask the police to guard front and back entrance, to keep the journalists off.

Mark was furious. ‘I’m not being guarded by police in my own house in my own country because of a lot of … I’ll get Margaret to tell the editor what’s going on. She must know him.’

He rang his mother’s home in the country. It was only when it had been ringing for some minutes that they realized it was after two in the morning. After a long wait, John came to the telephone. He was polite of course. Mark spoke to the colourless husband of his mother, a man whom he despised, though of course, he had never been anything less than polite to him. Martha sat on an old brown sofa, feeling velvet rub soft under her fingers. She was watching Mark clutch the telephone as if the machine itself could come up with sense, or protection. In the last couple of weeks he had lost over a stone. His clothes were hanging on him. His fingers were stained with nicotine to the knuckles. He looked half crazy.

John said that Margaret was asleep after a hard day. The Press had been out to the house, and the telephone was never silent.

‘I want to speak to her,’ said Mark.

‘I’ll tell her in the morning that you rang.’

‘Then tell her to get hold of those editors and call off their dogs,’ said Mark.

A short affronted laugh.

‘Perhaps if you were prepared to make some sort of announcement to the Press? suggested Margaret’s husband.

‘What announcement would you suggest?’

Another short laugh. ‘As things stand, your mother, my wife, is the mother of a man who has escaped behind the Iron Curtain, suspected of being a spy, and of another who refuses to dissociate himself from him.’

‘But he happens to be my brother,’ said Mark. Again, he sounded incredulous. It was precisely here: what he could not believe was happening, or could happen – to him.

‘But what can they expect me to do?’ he asked Martha again. And he listened with his wide fascinated look as if this time he might understand what previously he had failed to understand.

She said, again: ‘They expect you to make a public announcement that you repudiate your brother and all his works. And to make a public affirmation of loyalty to this country.’

‘But good God,’ he said softly, ‘I mean – but they can’t – but this is this country, it’s not … I mean, the Americans or the Russians or people like that, but not He was looking at her with dislike.

‘Don’t tell me that’s what you think I should do! He’s my brother,’ he insisted. As if it were she who was his enemy. ‘You keep asking me what they want.’

His eyes were hot and dark with refusal. He sat locked in himself. Then he understood he was making an enemy of an ally, smiled, though stiffly, and poured her a brandy.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Next morning Margaret rang. It was very early. Mark was half-asleep. He came up to Martha’s room to say that he thought his mother had gone mad. She had telephoned about the basement and about Mrs Ashe.

They could not understand it. Martha said that this was perhaps Margaret’s way of preserving normality. She was probably right: to worry about letting basements was better than what they were all doing. It was even reassuring of her.

As they spoke, the telephone rang again. Mark went to it. Mark did not come back, so Martha went down to him. He was sitting, looking very white, by the telephone.

Margaret’s second call was hysterical. She had shouted that Mark was ruining her life. The very least he could do was to have Mrs Ashe. On being asked please, to explain Mrs Ashe, Margaret had muttered, after a silence, something about Hilary Marsh – restoring confidence in that quarter. And at last it had all become clear to Mark, but so suddenly that he had simply put down the receiver.

Hilary Marsh, the correct unnoticed gentleman from the election party, had been Margaret’s friend for many years. He was in the Foreign Office. Weeks ago he had been to Margaret, to ask what she knew about her son Colin’s connections. Margaret knew nothing. She had said that Mark did, but Mark would never talk to her, he was always so wrong-headed, always had been. Hilary Marsh had suggested that it might be a good idea if a very old friend of his, Mrs Ashe, lived in the basement. She was a sensible sort of woman, and could keep an eye on Mark for both of them.

Mark having digested this, he rang back his mother to ask how she proposed to explain this attempt to spy on him. She said, cold: ‘You have no right to talk to me about spying!’ Then, as he remained silent, she had screamed: ‘You’ve ruined my life. You’ve ruined John’s career!’ And had rung off.

It turned out that John Patten, in his capacity as representative of British Culture, had been going on a lecture tour to America. But the Americans had not been happy about this, since he was the husband of the woman who had given birth to Colin Coldridge. They had made unofficial and tactful representations to the body who employed John Patten. This body had been excessively apologetic and had quite understood America’s feelings in the matter. After a long committee meeting, someone had suggested that it would be better if nothing were made public, but that the lecture tour on Contemporary British Literature might be postponed. Everyone agreed. The chairman telephoned John Patten while the meeting was still in progress. He asked them to wait while he thought it over – which would only take a few minutes. He asked Margaret what she thought. Margaret rang her old friend Hilary Marsh, who thought this procedure would be best for everyone concerned.

Mark offered these facts to Martha; sat waiting for her to explain them. He looked extremely ill. He was trembling. He kept dropping his cigarettes. The gap between what a Coldridge believed was possible, and what was happening, had widened to the point that he was in a kind of collapse. Martha suggested he should go back to bed and stay there that day. He went.

It was time to get Paul up. He was sitting cross-legged on his pillow, waiting for her. He said: ‘Am I going to live here now?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to, Paul.’ This was almost cool: her mind was with Mark, so near a breakdown. It was not a tone anyone had used with Paul before.

He gave her a very long thoughtful stare. Then he got out of bed. Sally’s child had not been good at dressing himself. He dressed himself, slowly but competently, while she sat and watched.

‘Now we’ll have breakfast,’ she said. Obedient, he came down to the kitchen. He sat, obedient, while she cooked. He was looking at the window, which showed nothing. Martha went to see if the attendant journalists were there. But no, only a box of groceries left on the step by the delivery people.

She was about to open the door to fetch them in when Paul said: ‘I want to go for a walk.’

‘We can’t go for walks yet,’ said Martha.

‘You don’t want them to tell me my daddy is dead,’ he said. Then he pushed the plate of eggs off the table, laughed as it crashed, and ran upstairs crying to his bedroom.

Martha opened the door to get in the groceries, and found Miles Tangin there.

‘Good morning,’ he said affably.

She tried to shut the door, but his foot was in it.

‘Nothing new to tell me?’ he inquired.

‘Nothing.’

‘May I ask who you are?’

‘Certainly, I’m working for Mr Coldridge.’

‘Living here?’ he inquired. There were two expressions on his face, superimposed, as it were. At any rate, he managed to convey simultaneously a camaraderie of understanding for her situation: he was a man of the world, after all! – and the salaciousness with which he proposed to tell the story to the public. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Find out. It’ll give you something to do.’

‘Come, come,’ he said. ‘You’re not in any position to use that tone, you know.’

He was now propped against the door-frame, holding the door open. He was looking past her at the mess of broken eggs and bits of china on the floor.

‘His wife’s in a loony-bin, I hear?’

She remembered that on the stove was the frying-pan, with hot fat in it. She fetched the frying-pan and stood facing him.

‘In your face if you don’t get out,’ she said.

‘Temper, temper, temper!’ he said softly. He was arranging on his face the smile that says: I admire a woman of spirit. Then, seeing she meant it, he looked ugly. She came nearer, with the pan poised.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘while you’ve been chasing this juicy story, have you ever thought of that child?’

And now a great wash of sentiment: the blond, goodfellow’s face was all soft and sad. ‘But I’m only doing my job,’ he said. ‘But I can tell you, that poor little chap keeps me awake at nights.’

‘And I shall do mine if you don’t get out.’

He went, and she locked the door.

That evening the Coldridge story acquired a new element, in a piece by Miles Tangin. The previously mentioned sinister female figure now appeared as some sort of watchdog or guardian of Mark Coldridge. There were links, hinted at, with the Soviet Embassy. She had a foreign accent. She was under orders of silence. For some days, the vigilance of the reporters was redoubled: it had shown signs of slackening off. Martha had to be careful to move around the house so that she could not be seen from the windows.

Upstairs in one room Paul lay on his bed, playing with the cat. She brought food to him there. And in another room, Mark lay in the dark, smoking and thinking. After a while he got up, went down to the study and very carefully read all the newspapers from the start of the affair until the present time. There were several weeks of them; and they included the serious newspapers, the popular Press, and the high-class magazines that were studying the subject of treason in depth, and in articles that had a very high intellectual tone.

When he had done this, Mark said that he had finally understood the meaning of the old saying that the last refuge of a scoundrel was patriotism.

He sounded rather cool about it. He was still ill though, or at least, looked ill. But he was in possession of himself. And he had made a decision. He was going down to the country, to stay with his old nurse, who had looked after himself and Colin, and he would take Paul with him.

‘And what about Francis, it’s going to be holidays again in a month?’

‘He can come to Nanny Butts’s too – it’ll be quiet there. And perhaps things will have blown over.’

When he and Paul were ready, suitcases packed, he said: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to be a decoy.’

Martha put on a coat, made herself seem indifferent, and walked openly out of the front door. A group of men waiting there at first seemed stunned. At her impertinence, at daring them? At any rate, she had gone several yards before they chased after her. One of them offered her a hundred pounds for the story. She smiled. He put it up to two hundred. She smiled again. She went around the corner and into a café. They all came in with her. She kept them there, discussing the possible sale of her revelations about the Coldridge household, until she judged Mark and Paul had got well away. Then she walked back to the front door. The car had gone. Mark Coldridge had gone. ‘Nice work,’ said one of them, laughing. But others, professionally hating, scowled and muttered, like parodies of journalists in a bad film, or in a comedy.

Inside the house, was now only Martha. She went openly in and out, smiling politely at two hopeful journalists who remained. Then at one. But he went too. Then, peace, until Miles Tangin knocked at the front door and asked to be admitted. He had a proposition, he said. She was angry. He was affable. His manner was that of a wronged man concerned to give explanations. There was a genuine reproach for her lack of understanding. She should have retired to sharpen her anger, and set it on guard. But she let him in. Curiosity had a lot to do with it. Curious, she sat listening while he offered her one thousand pounds for the story of Mark’s mistress. He accepted her refusal with the remark that everyone had their price, but that the story was not worth more. He seemed to expect she would feel belittled by this; he even made a consoling remark: If Mark had a larger reputation, then more than one thousand pounds would have been forthcoming. Of course, if there were any justice, his reputation would be larger. It turned out that he admired Mark for having written the best novel for his money – Miles Tangin’s – since All Quiet On The Western Front. If he, Miles Tangin, were a critic, that would be put right, but for his sins, he was a journalist. Only for the time being: he was writing a novel. He also admired Mark for (he hoped Martha would not take this amiss) his taste. The house must be empty, if Mark was away? He did not think Martha ought to take it like that, all was fair in love and war. Anyway, he’d be making the suggestion again later: she was his cup of tea, all right. Meanwhile he was busy, he was off to the country to find Mark Coldridge. There’s a lot of Britain,’ said Martha.

‘No, dear, there isn’t. When one of these upper-class types go to the ground he’s at an old teacher’s, or nanny. I know how their minds work.’

He left, affable.

She telephoned Mark, to warn him. But a journalist had already appeared at Nanny Butts’s cottage. Mark was coming back to London.

He came that evening. He had been to his old school, explained the situation to the headmaster, and Paul was already installed.

And now, said Mark, they are welcome to me. He dictated a short piece for the Press saying that he stood wholeheartedly behind his brother in whatever action he had seen fit to take. Asked if he was a communist, he said he was, if that made him one.

And now, silence.

Mark was in his study. He stayed there. What sort of a state he was in, she did not know. His manner was cold, abrupt, but agitated.

She was in her room trying to see what was likely to happen next, trying not to be taken by surprise by events. The immediate facts were that Francis would be home soon, after what must be an awful time; Mark had been writing the usual weekly letters, but had not mentioned the sensational news which every paper had carried for weeks: Francis must surely have seen the newspapers. Paul, in a state of shock, had been dumped in a school which, ‘progressive’ or not, was still a boarding-school. Mark, as far as she could see, was in a state of shock. He certainly wasn’t dealing with the problem, now pressing, of finance.

The bills for Lynda’s hospital were unpaid. There was Francis’s school – very expensive, and there would now be Paul’s school. Ideally, Mark ought to find, in the next month, a couple of thousand pounds. He could not find so many shillings.

The factory? But she did not like to interfere with something she understood nothing about. Then Jimmy Wood arrived one afternoon to see Mark. Mark’s door was locked. Martha therefore talked to Jimmy.

Or she tried to. They were in the kitchen, and they drank tea and ate cake – everything that was normal and reassuring. There he sat, smiling, as usual. And there she sat, opposite him, trying to understand him. She had seen that he was a human being constructed on a different model from most, but this did not help. Making contact with Jimmy, or trying to, one understood how one meshed with others. They were angry, they were pleased, they were sad, they were shocked. They might be several things in the course of an afternoon, but at any given moment one talked to an angry man, a frightened man, etc.; one contacted a state, an emotion. But Jimmy Wood? There he sat, smiling, while he heartily ate cake and asked for more, and even got up to refill the kettle and put it on the ring. All this went on, the activity of a man enjoying his tea. He had come to this house because he wanted to say something. Mark not being available he was saying it to Martha. But what? He was disturbed about something. His movements were those of an agitated man. His eyes were hidden behind the great spectacles and his mouth, a thin, pink, curved mouth, smiled.

He was upset by Mark calling himself a communist? Martha tried this note – but no. There was no resonance. Yes, that was what was throwing her off balance: where other people resounded, he did not. He wanted to leave the factory and find work elsewhere. But he said this without emotion – it was a fact that emerged after an hour or so. Why? He talked about two contracts that had not been renewed. Did he know why? – He thought it was because of the ‘fuss about Mark in the papers’. But that was not his point. Did he think the factory was going to have to shut down? No, not necessarily. They could coast along for months, even a year or so. But there was a job that would suit him in a factory in Wales. Martha suggested that Mark would be upset if he, Jimmy, left. They had worked together for years. From what she could make out of the mask-face, this embarrassed Jimmy. She pressed on: ‘He’s very fond of you,’ and was faced by the great baby-head and the round glinting spectacles, and the pink smiling mouth. She felt extremely uncomfortable. He poured himself more tea, and energetically dotted up loose currants on the end of a wetted forefinger.

Martha sat, going back in her mind over the various points that had come up. Not politics – no. To him, the greatest of irrelevancies. Not money – the business would survive temporary difficulties. At random she said: ‘I expect Mark will be back at work in a few days. Perhaps sooner.’ And now, just as if Jimmy had not said he would leave, he began talking about a machine he and Mark had planned to start making. It was as if she touched a switch, which had caused him to work again. From his remarks, all random, even disconnected, a picture emerged of Mark and him, spending days at a time in the office at the factory, with blueprints and scientific papers and their own imaginations – talking. Was it that, some sort of machine himself (or so she could not help feeling), he needed this, had been deprived of it, had felt deprived of something, but he did not know what – and now, knowing that this need to talk would at some time in the near future be met, was prepared to go on as before? At any rate, after three hours or so he left, smiling, with the remark that the foreman had said he’d like to see Mark sometime, to give him his assurance that he and the men thought he had been shockingly treated – they were going to stand by him.

Martha wrote on a piece of paper: ‘I don’t understand your Jimmy Wood. But he says the foreman wants to stand by you. I think Jimmy will leave if you don’t go and talk to him soon.’ This she pushed under the door of the study.

The financial problems had not been solved.

One thing could be done at once: which was to let the basement.

Martha pushed another note under the door saying that Mark must at once write to Lynda’s hospital asking for time to pay: the last account had been peremptory.

Mark telephoned. The doctor suggested that perhaps Mrs Coldridge might come home for the week-end: she had a plan for her future which would involve Mark’s co-operation, and which might help Mark financially. For his part, said Dr Lamb, he was prepared to say Lynda was better; not cured, but better.

Lynda came home for the week-end. She was like a guest. Mark came out of his study and was like a host. She said she wanted to leave the hospital, and live in the basement. No, she was not well enough to be by herself but she could share it with a friend from the hospital. She said with a laugh that she did not think Mark would like her friend, who was called Dorothy. Sometimes she didn’t like her either. But they got on.

Mark said he would of course do anything she wanted.

A moment later she took up her little box of pills and went up to bed.

Later, when Martha was ready for bed, her sense of things that were waiting to be said was strong enough to send her down to the kitchen. There sat Lynda in her dressing-gown with a spread of cards in front of her.

‘If I came to live here,’ said Lynda, continuing the conversation, ‘it wouldn’t cost so much, would it? Oh – I don’t mean I want to be Mark’s wife, I couldn’t be that. But if I were here in the house, then it would be better, wouldn’t it? Then they couldn’t say you were taking him away from me?’

‘Why, are people saying that?’

‘They are bound to be saying something, aren’t they?’

‘I suppose so. We’ve been too busy about this other thing.’

‘Oh, politics. Oh well, I don’t care about that. That’s just nothing at all. But Dorothy’s got some money of her own. She could pay some rent. It would help, wouldn’t it?’

She shuffled the cards, humming cheerfully for a time. ‘Of course, there’s Francis. But he hasn’t a mother anyway. I thought it would be better to have me in the house, than not at all – for what he has to say to his friends, I mean.’

More shuffling of cards, more humming.

‘And about clothes. I’ve all that money for clothes in my bank account. You must make him take it. That’s what he wants you see – that I shall be beautiful all the time.’

‘Yes, but I don’t think he’d take it.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if he divorced me. I know that would be best really. But he wouldn’t ever divorce me. I know that.’ ‘No, he wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t care about all that – all that’s not what I care about.’

And now she looked, very close, at Martha, studied her. She leaned forward, her chin in her hand, looking. As if she were trying to find out something? Was it that she wanted to know if Martha could guess what she did care about? She looked disappointed. She even sighed, and made a small pettish gesture of disappointment as she returned to the cards.

‘You can go to bed, if you like,’ she said. ‘I’m all right by myself, you know.’

That was on the Friday. Next morning early Paul’s new headmaster telephoned to say that he would consider it a good thing if the child came home for the week-end: he and the staff thought it might help him.

His name was Edwards. He sounded very competent. He sounded in control. Martha felt that he and the staff would have every reason not to feel in control, with Paul in the state he was. She felt he might well have been entitled to say more than, ‘Paul seems rather confused.’

Paul was put on the train at the village station fifty miles away, and was met by Mark. When Paul got out of the car, a pale, spiky, black-eyed waif, he was already in the uniform of a progressive school – jeans and sweater. He came into the drawing-room where Lynda sat, like a visitor in her pale fur coat, smoking and guarding her little box of pills.

She studied Paul, for a while, while he wriggled about in a chair opposite her. Then she smiled at him, her wide, beautiful smile. He, slowly, smiled back, a rather tentative offering. Slowly he approached Lynda, sidled around her, then tried to climb on her lap. But she held him off.

‘I don’t like being touched,’ she said. ‘But you can sit here.’ She indicated the patch of sofa beside her. He sat close, snuggling, as he would have done with his mother. But Lynda, at the touch, shrank from him. He felt it, and moved away, examining her face as a guide to how far he must go. Side by side they sat, a space between them.

Martha and Mark were busy with tea things. This ought probably not to happen at all. But then nothing of this ought to be happening.

‘Why don’t you like being touched?’

‘Because I’m ill.’

‘My mother liked it.’

‘But I’m not like your mother.’ ‘She’s dead.’

‘She killed herself,’ said Lynda. ‘Why did she?’

‘Some people don’t like living.’ ‘Didn’t she like me?’ ‘Very much,’ said Lynda.

‘I don’t think she liked me. Or she wouldn’t have killed herself.’

‘That doesn’t follow.’ ‘Yes it does.’

Lynda had moved where she sat, so that she was looking at Paul with a direct, cool smile. And he was leaning forward, gazing up into her truth-telling face.

‘Didn’t my daddy like living?’

‘You say that because you think he is dead.’

‘Yes, he’s dead.’

‘No, I don’t think he’s dead.’

‘He is! He is! I know he is!’

Tears were imminent, but Lynda made no attempt to stop them. ‘No. Perhaps he is, but we don’t think so. And he may come back.’

‘He won’t come back, because he doesn’t like me.’

‘You are making yourself much too important,’ said the sick woman to the desperate child. ‘Your daddy had work to do. It was important. If he went away it wasn’t because of you and your mother.’

‘Did my mother kill herself because he went away?’ ‘No. He went away and she killed herself – the two things at the same time.’ ‘How did she kill herself?’ ‘She made herself stop breathing.’ ‘Could I?’

‘Yes, if you wanted to.’ ‘Do you want to?’ ‘Sometimes.’ ‘Are you going to?’ ‘No.’

‘Why aren’t you?’

‘Because every time I think I will, then I decide to stay alive and see what happens next. It is interesting.’

He gave a scared laugh, and snuggled closer. His hand, meeting hers, felt hers go away. He put his two hands carefully on his knees.

‘At the school, the other children have mothers and fathers for the holidays.’ ‘Well, you haven’t.’ ‘Why haven’t I?’ ‘I’ve told you.’

They observed that his face had gone red, and his mouth was pinched up.

Lynda slapped him. ‘Stop it. You don’t die by holding your breath.’ ‘I shall if I want.’

‘Anyway, it’s silly. You’re unhappy now. But later you might be happy, who knows?’ ‘Am I unhappy?’ ‘Yes, you’re very unhappy.’ ‘I don’t want to be.’ ‘I dare say. But you are.’

She smiled, and got up. At the tea-tray she took a cup of tea, and sugared it. She went towards the door, with the cup. ‘Why are you going? Can I come too?’ ‘No. I can’t be with people for long. I’m ill, you see.’ ‘What sort of ill?’

And now a bad, twisted moment, a jar. ‘I have to be careful. I have to be on guard,’ she said, ‘so that’s why I’m ill.’ He had rushed to her, stood near, looking up. She bent down and widened her eyes at him, smiling secretly, straight into his face: ‘I know things, you see. They don’t like it.’

He looked afraid, shrank. The small boy stood, pathetic, staring up at the tall woman. And she felt that she had made a mistake. Her smile faded. She looked sick and anxious.

But he needed her too badly to be afraid of her. Before she got out of the door, he was after her. Careful not to touch, he stood as close as he could get.

‘Lynda. Lynda. Are you my mother now?’

‘No. You have no mother.’

‘Are you Francis’s mother?’

‘Yes. No. I suppose so. Not really. I’m not much good at being that kind of person. Some people aren’t.’

He drooped away, his finger in his mouth.

‘But, Paul, I’m your friend. Do you want that?’

He nodded, merely, not looking at her. Then he gave her a scared glance, and saw her wonderful smile. He smiled, slowly.

She went to her room. Later that day, Paul went to her, was admitted. He was there for about half an hour. They did not know what was said, or felt; but Paul was cheerful through his supper, and he asked Mark to tell him a story. When that was over, he said he would like to go back to the school next morning.

Mark took him back in the car. When he arrived back at the house he found Lynda establishing herself in the basement.

He telephoned the hospital.

Mark said to her: ‘They say you’ve made a remarkable recovery.’

He was watching Lynda and Martha arrange the bed for Lynda. What he was really saying was: You still might get quite better and be my wife again.

But Lynda smiled at him and said: ‘What awful fools they are. What fools! Well, thank God, they are.’ She laughed, was scornful. She continued to smile, scornfully, during the evening, but muttered once or twice: ‘But I must be careful though.’

She did not feel able to stay alone in the basement. Martha moved down, and slept in the living-room for a couple of nights. But then Dorothy, Lynda’s friend, came to live with her. She was a Mrs Quentin, but it seemed that her husband was living with another woman somewhere in Ireland. She was a large, dark, slow-moving woman, anxiously watchful of the impression she might be giving, with a tendency to make jocular remarks. She had a large quantity of jackdaw possessions, which she set out all over the flat before even unpacking her clothes. She was not the person either Mark or Martha could associate easily with Lynda.

But Lynda was pleased to have her there, did not mind the embroidered velvet hearts, the magazine covers tacked to the walls, the dolls; did not mind her friend’s possessiveness. It seemed that she liked Dorothy telling her to do this, and to do that; liked it when Dorothy said to Mark: ‘I think it’s time Lynda went to bed now.’

Mark did not like it. There was a moment when Lynda, being ordered to take her pills by Dorothy, looked across at Mark’s hostile face and openly laughed. It was in a kind of triumph.

Lynda wanted Dorothy here as a protection against Mark, against having to be Mark’s wife.

When Mark, or Martha, descending to the basement to offer help, or their company, the two women became a defensive unit, which excluded everybody. They exchanged private jokes, and made references to the hospital. There was something about them of two schoolgirls engaged in a world-hating friendship.

In short, having Lynda back in the basement, with a friend who had money and would pay some rent, would make a difference to the finances of the household; but not to much else.

Chapter Two

The bad time had been going on for – but one of the qualities of a bad time is that it seems endless. Certainly everything that happened, the events, had long ago ceased to stand out as unpleasant incidents, or harbingers. The texture of life was all heaviness, nastiness, fear. When Martha tried to put her mind back into places, times, when things had been normal (but what did she mean by that?) she could not. Her memory was imprisoned by now. And when she tried to look forward, because after all, this was going to change, since everything changed, she could see nothing ahead but a worsening. The poisoned river would plunge down, yes, explode over a fall of rocks – but not into any quiet place. There was probably going to be war again. Yet that she could think like this at all meant she had learned nothing at all from the war so recently finished. A war was going on, at that moment, in yet another place no one had heard of before there was a war. Korea. A nasty war. If she were a Korean she would not now be saying: there is going to be a war. And if she were in America – well, from there England would seem all sun and sanity. In America she would have certainly lost her job, would probably be in prison. She would be wanting to emigrate, that is, if she could get a passport, which was doubtful. To a liberal country like England. Which so many Americans were finding such a refuge.

But they were not in houses like this one.

There was nothing to stop Martha leaving. She had only to pack her cases and go. Well, why didn’t she? She couldn’t – any more than she could not have come here in the first place. Besides, where was she to go to? For instance, several times she had been to Mark’s old nurse’s home in the country, to visit Francis, or to take him there, or to bring him back home. That house, in its old village, with its quiet people, was England, as one had always imagined it. Except that ten miles away was a war place where new atomic weapons were being developed, in secret; and forty miles away in another direction was a factory for the manufacture of gases and poisons for use in war. Mary Butts and Harold Butts, gardened, grew vegetables, kept chickens, made presents of fresh eggs and flowers to Francis to take back to the big city London: which they disliked, it was too noisy, they said. They were a couple in their fifties. Harold Butts had always been a gardener; for many years with Margaret. Mary Butts had always been a children’s nurse. They had served the Coldridges while they worked, and served them still in their retirement. They were infinitely kind and good people. To Martha, a friend of young Mark’s, they were kind, and they asked her to stay. In a little cottage bedroom that smelled all through the summer of the flowers Harold Butts grew, Martha lay and thought, yes, this is England, this was what they meant when they said England. This is what my father meant: he grew up in a place like this. The Butts never mentioned the death factories so close to them. For one thing, England is not a small country for those who have never left it, and ten miles, forty miles, are large distances. For another, these were people who did not understand … what? Harold Butts had fought in the First World War. In France. But horror, anarchy, happened in other countries, not in England.

If Martha had lived in that cottage, she could not have forgotten those factories. Lying awake in a flower-scented bedroom, the Butts gently asleep past one wall, and Francis asleep past another, she was made to think of the difference between herself and them. Being what she was, it would make no difference if she stayed with the Butts, found work in the pretty village. She might as well go back to the house in London. The Butts were a refuge, reminders that sanity could exist. Nastiness simply bounced off them. Very early in the bad time, they had been visited by a man called Mr Bartlett. They had been distressed by the visit. Mary Butts had written a letter to Mark: ‘He seemed a nice enough gentleman, but Mr Butts thought it was not his place to ask questions about you behind your back. Mr Butts said to him, you should be asking Mr Coldridge such things. He said it to him straight. Our love to little Francis. Yours respectfully, Mary Butts.’

Before this letter reached Mark, he had already been visited by Mr Bartlett who used the ordinary forms of social life to arrive for tea in the drawing-room. He said he had been an old friend of James, the dead brother. Mark, offering tea, and cake, talked to a man who had known James at Cambridge. He had also visited Margaret. He was an old chum of Margaret’s – well, who was not? Ottery Bartlett talked of recent meetings with Margaret, and Mark, who was not by nature a suspicious man, waited for him to come to the point. He was interested in literature perhaps? Needed help with a book he had written? Mr Bartlett talked about Colin. They discussed pleasantly, for some time, the gap between the way Colin was being seen, as a spy, and the way Colin saw what he had done (if he had), which was a proper exchange of scientific information between colleagues.

Tea-time passed into a drinks-time, which soon was dinner-time. Martha cooked and served an informal kind of dinner, and was present. She was preoccupied with other things, and did not think about Mr Bartlett except that it was nice for Mark that at least one of the old friends of the family was prepared to visit him. For Mark was obviously touched by it: his warmth with Mr Bartlett told Martha how much he had been feeling his isolation. During dinner they talked about Sally-Sarah and Mark’s relation to Paul. Mr Bartlett was sympathetic about Lynda – he had known her, long ago; and was sympathetically interested in Martha’s presence in the house. After dinner Martha left the two men with their brandy. Late that night Mark burst into her room, when she was nearly in bed, demanding that she must come down to the study at once. It had just dawned on him: it had just made sense. He, Mark, was the most incredible fool: a hundred times during the afternoon and evening he could have seen what Ottery Bartlett was, if he had been awake. He now needed Martha to retrace the conversation with him. He had gone past ordinary anger into a state of sick quivering rage where he kept bursting into inarticulate exclamation and protests. They could not follow any train of thought. They could not discuss anything that night: Mark drank himself silly. What was upsetting Mark worst was that the man had used James, the family, to come here.

Next day, came the letter from Nanny Butts, and fresh anger. When this cooled, they were able to discuss what had happened.

The man was probably from the Foreign Office, but could be from any one of the six or so secret services that operate in Britain. He had mentioned Hilary Marsh once, but that proved nothing. Anyway, it was not important. They (who?) thought that Mark knew where his brother was. If not, that he was at least in contact with him. And that he was probably a secret member of the Communist Party. If so, he might drop useful information about the Communist Party. (And if he had been he certainly would have done, so incredibly obtuse Mark had been for the whole of an afternoon and an evening.) Finally, Mark, if handled right, might be prepared to become an agent for Britain, whether a member of the Communist Party or not. This last point was not reached by Mark and Martha for some days. But, going over and over the talk of that day, they could put their fingers on a dozen moments where it had been reached – very delicately of course, only hinted at. ‘A spy!’ said Mark. ‘Me! A spy!’

And so, Martha could see, Colin had probably reacted, when with his version of Ottery Bartlett: What! me! Colin Coldridge! A spy!

And for some hours, Mark went over and over, back and around that incredible fact: Hilary Marsh, Ottery Bartlett, were gentlemen. Yet they were prepared to do such work. He could not believe it. He certainly did not understand it.

It was this incident that sent him off into another week of silent misery in his study, with bottle after bottle of cognac. And it was that incident, the visit of Ottery Bartlett, that had given birth to a new personality. Before that, he had been Mark Coldridge as Martha had first known him – under stress of course; miserable, out of his depth, but himself.

There is a certain kind of Englishman who, on learning that his country (like every other) employs spies; or (like every other) taps telephones, opens letters and keeps dossiers on its citizens; or (like every other) employs policemen who take bribes, beat up suspects, plant information etc. – has a nervous breakdown. In extreme cases, such a man goes into a monastery, or suffers a sudden conversion to whatever is available.

An Englishman of this type has of course been the subject of amused and indeed affectionate speculation among other countries for generations. Though sometimes not so amused, or affectionate.

During the course of that week, Martha went into the study, where Mark, red-eyed and half-drunk, was walking up and down and around and around, to tell him the following story which had once come her way.

Sometime in the course of the Second World War, a certain member of a certain British Secret Service had been instructed to go to (let us say) Istanbul to find out the probable intentions of the Russians in regard to something or other. The place where he would most likely get this information, he was told, was the bed of the wife of a British official. She had proved in the past a mine of information, being indiscreet as well as beautiful. For she could never resist a Russian. The hero of this anecdote departed to the city in question in pursuance of duty, but did not return when expected. He was summoned. Back in London, interviewed by his principals, he confessed that he had learned nothing. Yes, the lady was beginning to attract him, he said. But he found her morals distasteful, and besides he had known her husband for years.

Mark did not find this amusing. ‘He was quite right,’ he said. And went back to his brandy, his anger – and his illness. He was having migraines, for the first time in his life.

Martha returned to her consideration of Mark’s character. When Hilary Marsh had come to the election party, he had done so using old friendship – to be a spy. Mark had been angry, but more with his mother than with Hilary Marsh. When Hilary Marsh had used his mother and old friendship to try and install the widow Ashe in Mark’s basement, to spy on Mark – Mark had been angry. But it had taken the actual visit of Ottery Bartlett, using old friendship, to Mark’s house – to make him more than angry.

Supposing Ottery Bartlett had not come, had not been to see the Butts, would Mark have remained Mark, talking sardonically about ‘the comrades’, whom he couldn’t trust farther than he could kick them? Very likely.

After a week or so of being ill, and semi-drunk, he rang up a man who had been a friend of his brother Colin, a communist. He went to see him, for a long week-end. The week-end after, Freddie Postings came to stay, and several of his friends spent Sunday afternoon and evening in Mark’s study. Martha was not present. She was being treated with cool friendliness. Mark had suffered a conversion, sudden and dramatic, and Martha was able to follow it through its rapid stages, since it was identical as far as she could see, with the one she had undergone ten years before. As if scales had fallen from his eyes, Mark was looking at defects in his own country that previously he had not noticed, minimized, or thought could not exist. His previous self he was regarding as hypocritical, or wilfully blind and certainly as callous to the sufferings of others. He had a new viewpoint, a new vocabulary, new friends. He was undergoing in his own person, through his own experience, that process which can affect nations or parties, or people, when everything that is good in oneself is identified with a cause, and everything bad identified with the enemy. But the interesting thing about Mark’s conversion was that this was not the time to see the cause as perfect; nor, judging from the little Martha saw of the half-dozen or so men and women now visiting the house, were they the kind of communist likely so to see it. Yet Mark was, when they met over breakfast, over conversations about Lynda or the children, using language identical with hers of ten years ago. He had walked into a personality; or, if you like, a state of mind, and he was inhabiting it.

And, just as if he had never protested to Martha that he could not stand political over-simplifications, or the taking of sides, as if he had never written the novel in which what was represented by Hilary Marsh and Ottery Bartlett was taken for granted – he had become ‘The Defender’. Martha saw that this aspect of herself, already weakened when she came to this house, then brought briefly to life in discussions with Mark, had been taken over by him. She looked, when she looked at him, at herself of the past: hot-eyed, angry, violent, unable to listen.

They had changed roles.

During the time, some months, when Mark was in this condition, she was, minimally, his secretary; she kept the house; she tried, inadequately, to befriend the children; and was able to save the novel about the city in the desert from being destroyed.

He wanted to tear it up. He could not understand how he had written such ‘ivory tower rubbish’.

Martha went over the manuscript. He had achieved a final version before ‘The Defender’ had come into the picture. It was a cool, detached account, like a history, of the existence of the city, and the principles on which it was run; and of the alien envious growth outside which eventually overran it, destroyed it, and set up the debased copy of what had been destroyed. This needed some minor tidying up, nothing very much. But recently ‘The Defender’ had been making some additions. These were rough, and wild, and emotional, written in snatches, and inserted into the typed pages in the form of handwritten additions. He had taken episodes from the story and enlarged them, giving certain characters a psychological depth. ‘I tried to put some life into the damned thing,’ said he to Martha, ‘the damned thing didn’t have any guts.’ The trouble was, ‘life’ not to mention ‘guts’ had no place in that story, or at least not in this form. Reading the story, with its recent additions, was like watching a battle between two personalities, one trying to take over another.

She said this to Mark and he said: ‘I’m not interested in subjective criticism.’ This phrase meant nothing, in this context; it was a phrase in use around left-wing circles at this time: by Phoebe as much as, let’s say, Stalin.

Now Martha remembered that other old manuscript, or heap of ant-eaten notes which she had brought to England because she could not think of anything else to do with it. It had been lying in a suitcase in the loft. She took it down, and laid it beside the manuscript of A City in the Desert. Thomas’s last testament. Mark’s book. And what was interesting was this: the insertions into the original manuscript made by Mark, the clumsy hot emotionalism of them, were the same in ‘feel’ as a good part of Thomas’s writing. They had come from the same place, the same wavelength. Somewhere, those two extraordinarily different people, Mark, Thomas, inhabited the same place, made contact there. A small place perhaps: because the sardonic anger, the nihilism, that was Thomas’s strongest trait, was not in Mark. Mark’s insertions, which were going to have to be thrown out, because of fidelity to a whole, were in scrawled red ink. Thomas’s additions and riders, in red pencil. From here, this place, Thomas had gone down into madness and to death. Mark? Well, this was one kind of a descent, of an entering in. To write books like A City in the Desert, or the war book, cool, abstract, detached, one had to earn that; one had to be that kind of person. Mark was not. Not yet, at least. Probably, next, he would write a clumsy raw kind of book. When people open up a new area in themselves, start doing something new, then it must be clumsy and raw, like a baby trying to walk … Here a nerve of memory sounded: she had thought this before, when? Or something like it. Jack; she was reminded of Jack. She had been walking somewhere – to Jack? She had understood once before that the new, an opening up, had to be through a region of chaos, of conflict. There was no other way of doing it.

She said to Mark that unless he specifically forbade her to send the manuscript to the publishers, she would do so, having removed the clumsy additions first.

He did not, merely muttered that he supposed it was no worse than most, and so she sent it off. She had expected him not to want to be involved in the business of proofs, details of publication, etc.; but he did this work himself, and apparently with interest. Certainly, with the furious energy that he brought to everything through the bad time. For months, he scarcely slept. He was up every morning by five, to read and study. He was appallingly ignorant, he said: he knew nothing. He studied economics and that kind of history which is still unofficial history, that is to say, still vital – not yet taught, or quoted or represented by a school of academic thought. His study was full of books by journalists, the novels that are reportage, newspapers, statistics arranged from a certain point of view, and those documents, usually badly cyclostyled or typed, put out by political groups whose viewpoints are not popular. And, as Martha had done, a decade before, he was acquiring a grasp of recent history which was the shadow, or reverse side of what was taught – what had been taught, even, at his own school, ‘progressive’ as it was.

At the same time, during the hours while everyone else was still asleep, he was trying to find a subject to write a new novel about – one that he could approve of. ‘I want to write about something real!’ he said, fierce, to Martha. With antagonism: for she was the enemy within the gates who was responsible for the ‘unreal’ book A City in the Desert, the proofs of which he was correcting with such energy. With Martha, the enemy, he discussed possible subjects. He was thinking about a novel which had Mary and Harold Butts as a theme. For he was seeing them as victims of the oppressing Coldridges. But after a week-end with the Butts and his son Francis, he came back saying there was no point in writing about such damned feudalistic rubbish: this was an industrial country. He was spending his mornings at the factory with Jimmy, partly in the talk which was the oil for Jimmy’s inventive genius, but also in considering his employees. He was convinced that he had never considered them before. One morning he saw the foreman and the six workmen who had been with him since the business started, and thanked them for their class solidarity. Jimmy, recounting this tale to Martha, in his smiling way, did so, as she could see, not so much because he wanted to be enlightened, but because he wanted to be reassured. For him, Mark’s new preoccupation was a waste of time; and anyway, Mark’s speech had not been correctly understood: the support given to him by the foreman and the men was not because of his socialist allegiances, but because they liked Mark. Mark saw this – and with regret: feudalism again, he said. He spent hours walking around the streets near the factory, which was in a slummy area in North London. It was not that he hadn’t seen them before; not that he had not recognized the existence of poverty; he hadn’t imagined it, hadn’t felt part of it. He did now, and for a while thought of a novel set in those grim streets. His new friends, however, discouraged him by pointing out that such novels, produced by the hundred in and near the socialist parties, were exactly what that current in the communist movement which they represented, were trying to get away from: the proletarian novel was dead. Mark, in the grip of early conviction when everything was new, argued against them. He even wrote a couple of chapters. The purest logic said he should. The and, and, and; therefore, therefore, therefore; a,b,c,d, of communist logic is always irrefutable because while that particular Person, Personality, absorbs, to shoot out facts, figures, convictions, like a machine, its substance is in fact all emotion. And timeless, or within the bounds, let’s say, of 1917 and – but we don’t yet know its end. Half a dozen decades of impassioned socialist polemicizing about Art went for nothing: click, click, click, went the machine, oiled by anger, therefore, therefore, therefore – out comes The Proletarian Novel.

Out came two chapters of Mark’s working-class novel called, Working Hands. Neither the new friends nor Martha had to tell him they were appalling. And, late at night, after the friends had gone, he came to Martha, ready to talk still, to talk until morning if she were ready to stay up. But while he was driven direct from that source of emotional power which is all pure, perfect conviction, Martha was all lethargy. The bad time for her was a slump into exhaustion. She slept too long, she ate too much, she was all heaviness and division: and watched Mark as if she were watching her own young self. And came to realize something she had not before: her memory had gone cloudy. Only ten years ago – and what was ten years? But it was as if her past had become fused with Mark’s present. Almost, or as if Mark was herself, or she Mark. Saying to herself: Yes, I did that, I thought that, I read that book too, I used exactly that vocabulary – she was not able to put herself back there, in that place in herself where she had been; for that place was inhabited by Mark.

In Mark, now, there were at least half a dozen different people, all operating apparently with perfect efficiency, side by side, and not recognizing the existence of the others. For ‘The Defender’ did not, after all, prevent him from talking to the enemy Martha, even taking her advice. It did not prevent him visiting Harold and Mary Butts, where he behaved as he always had: feudally. It did not prevent him talking for hours every day with Jimmy, in the way that Jimmy needed, the humorous, fanciful, creative play which resulted, extraordinarily, in the models of this or that machine which littered Mark’s study. Nor was he less patiently Lynda’s potential or past husband, in cold storage though that person was. Yet neurosis, mental trouble of any kind, was by definition, at that time, in the communist party, reactionary and bourgeois.

And he tried, patiently, clumsily, indeed, pathetically, to be Francis’s father, even while he said to Martha, in language she knew she had used, that the family was doomed.

He tried, too, to be a father to Paul: but Paul would have none of him. The child came home for holidays, and spent his time with Lynda, his friend. Two years of being an orphan had changed Paul into a lively, aggressive, self-contained little boy who was clever at school, but, as the school reports said, ‘made inadequate social relationships’. He certainly had no relationship with Mark; it really was as if Mark did not exist for him. Mark would offer visits to the zoo, walks in the park, a story: Paul did not seem to hear him. Mark said that sometimes he felt as if he were invisible. For it was not rudeness. Paul looked through him, or said to Martha: ‘Can I go down to Lynda now?’

When Paul was at home, the house was open, the door to the basement always ajar. Never when he was not: then the basement became a separate, almost secret establishment.

But Francis was a different matter. His mother was ‘at home’ – and not in a mental hospital, which was helpful at his school, as Lynda had said. But he did not bring his friends home.

The very first holidays after Paul’s mother’s death, Francis came home after a bad time at school. He had changed. Previously silent, serious, watchful, he had suddenly become – something Martha recognized, with pain. He was the clown. In a reaction to what had been brutal teasing, if not worse, his father being a traitor and his uncle under a cloud; accused of being a communist, a red, a commy – he clowned being one. He had joked; adopted, jokingly, communist phrases which he had got out of the papers. Well, there was the mechanism, for Martha to see: yet in herself she could not remember what had created ‘Matty’. ‘Matty’ had joked, claimed exemption by clumsiness, made fun of herself; Francis joked, guyed, bought himself off by a boisterous clownishness. In this condition, he visited his mother and the watchful friend of his mother, in the basement. He was noisy; he racketed about the basement: he badly tired the two sick women.

Then came the time, and very soon, when he returned home to find his father’s friends all communists. They were not figures of fun, but people. His clowning communism stuttered and failed. There were wild scenes of rage, temper, hysteria. It was after that period of holidays that the school reported his work was suddenly very bad, he was at the bottom of the class. Not being a ‘progressive’ school, they said he was lazy and bad-mannered. His father ought to give him a talking to. Mark went to the school to talk to Francis, but the child was locked in a silent hostility, very polite, saying yes Sir, no Sir.

When the time came around again for holidays, Francis said he wanted to spend them with Nanny Butts. Since then, that is where he always went. Mark visited him there, returning to say painfully to Martha: ‘He’s like me – I could never bear coming home either.’

At the Butts’s, Francis was able to be the clown, without conflict: his school personality and his holiday personality were one. Nanny Butts was not upset. She wrote: ‘Francis is a very cheerful little boy, always having his fun. It’s a blessing, when you think of his poor mother.’

But once, when Martha was down in the village, for she was to take Francis back to school, there was a glimpse of another Francis.

It was late evening, summer, and time for Francis to go to bed. Martha went out, through the cottage garden, into the long field beyond, which sloped down to a stream. Francis was walking up towards her, with a little girl. He was still a short stocky boy, his black head on the level of the frothy white of the half-ripe oats. He held the little girl’s hand, and was bending towards her with the gentle protectiveness an adult uses towards a child. A path led through a birch wood to a half-seen cottage. Francis led the child to the path, and there she ran away home, looking back to wave at Francis. He stood to wave at her smiling. The smile faded. He turned, and walked slowly along the edge of the field, serious, thoughtful, running one hand along the feathery tops of the oats. Then he saw Martha was waiting there. A moment when you could see the mechanism work: a startled defensiveness, then the smile fitting down on to the face: Francis raced up to Martha, hilarious, grinning, and as he reached her, shouted: ‘Supper, jolly good!’ and cartwheeled up through the garden into the cottage.

In between Paul’s visits, when the door to the basement was shut, the two upstairs had learned not to go down, unless asked. It was Lynda who telephoned from one part of the house to the other, to ask if they would like a cup of coffee. And she never asked Mark by himself. This meant, when you thought about it, that she must be watching through the windows to see how people came in and out. Also, when you thought about it, that the invitation was the result of some conflict with Dorothy. For on these occasions Dorothy would sit silent, rather apart, watching. And Lynda would slide her small defiant, guilty looks, like a girl who has won a victory over her parents. Mark was polite to Dorothy. It was not that he wished her ill, or even wished her away: if Lynda wanted her there, then that is what Lynda should have. But there was no connection between himself and Dorothy: he was courteous to his wife’s friend. The emotional reality of Dorothy and Lynda, whatever that was, was not real for him. He was Lynda’s husband, tenderly protective, attentive to Lynda. The four of them would sit for an hour or so in the extraordinary room, which now had an incongruity built into its very substance. The beautiful furniture, every piece of which was a museum-keeper’s dream, the rugs, Lynda’s small belongings, a favourite lamp from her own home, books – this was one world, Lynda’s. But every inch of the walls, every surface, was crammed with Dorothy – a magpie schoolgirl who had crushes on Royalty and film stars. The curtains were always drawn: they lived in artificial light. There was a low stuffy smell of sickness and drugs. The four sat drinking coffee, and Mark talked to Lynda, while Martha tried to talk to Dorothy; who, however, never took her sad anxious gaze off Lynda.

A tension that was all anxiety slowly built and built. Lynda smoked furiously, scattering ash. Then Mark would jump up, and say: ‘How about drawing the curtains for a bit?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Lynda would most eagerly assent, but with a hasty glance towards Dorothy – to reassure her that they would soon be alone again.

Mark drew back the curtains, and let in the cold day. There sat two ill women, exposed, smiling their fortitude.

Lynda’s fur coat, her handbag, a scarf, dark glasses, lay at random on chairs.

‘Lynda, wouldn’t it be better if …’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘Yes, Mark …’ And she hung up the coat in the hall, and rushed off the other items into the bedroom, which, glimpsed through the open door, was a total disorder. She shut the door on the mess and sat smiling pathetically. By now they longed for him to leave.

Once, after they left, they heard how the two women started a violent quarrel before they had even got up the stairs. Then, weeping. Whose? They could not make out.

But Mark did not give up. For a while he asked them up to dinner once or twice a week. On these nights his new friends did not come, and Martha and he took trouble over the food.

There sat Lynda and Dorothy, with their handbags near them, on their best behaviour.

Mark remained a husband. All of his best qualities, qualities he had not known until then he possessed, had gone into Lynda, when he discovered he had married a sick woman: for months, then years, while Lynda fell to pieces, he had used a loving strength which (and this was the point) he simply could not believe she did not need now. But she had not been able to stand it then and she could not stand it now.

At the end of one of these dinner parties she said, suddenly, in a low fierce voice, but smiling still, so afraid was she of her own violence: ‘Leave me alone, Mark. You’re killing me.’

And she ran off down to the basement in tears, Dorothy lumbering after her.

Throughout all of this, were incidents of a different kind: but there had to be three or four of them before they were seen as a pattern.

Dorothy had taken over the management of the flat, though Mark and Martha had offered to run it with the house. Dorothy was, or had been, an efficient woman. During the war she had managed a factory that made parts of bombs: she had had about forty women working under her. Becoming normal, for Dorothy, meant once more learning to be competent. It was she who got in a charwoman, ordered food, sometimes went shopping – managed. Then something went wrong, a little thing, like a tap, or the telephone. Dorothy contacted the machinery of the outside world. A week or so later, Martha would find one of the women carrying water downstairs in a bucket, or coming up to use the telephone. When the affair finally came into her hands, or Mark’s, Dorothy would supply a piece of paper on which was written something like this:

Friday evening. | Lynda said the tap was dripping. I rang five plumbers. Three didn’t answer. This in spite of the fact they advertised to ring after six. The fourth said he would come at nine. He never came at all. The fifth said he would come on Saturday morning at ten.
Saturday morning. | We waited for the plumber. When he had not turned up by twelve, I went out shopping. Lynda went to sleep. The man came while I was out. I telephoned him that afternoon. There was no reply.
Saturday evening. | I telephoned him. His wife answered. She said it was the week-end. Her husband did not work over week-ends. She suggested I ring Mr Black of Canonbury. His wife said he worked at week-ends. I left a message.
Sunday morning. | I rang Mr Black. He was out. His wife said she would try to get him to come in the afternoon. I stayed up instead of going to sleep.
Sunday afternoon. | Mr. Black telephoned. He said if it wasn’t urgent he would come on Monday. I told him off. I told him if he was so slack he wouldn’t be any good as a workman.
Monday morning. | I telephoned the first plumber. His wife said he would come that afternoon.
Monday afternoon | He did not come.
By then the tap was leaking badly. I turned off the main.

The question is: are we in a position to sue for loss of time and damage and inconvenience? When he turned up at last on Wednesday afternoon, he had the nerve to say he was going to send in an account for the first visit (see under Saturday morning), so I told him where he got off.

This, or something like it, happened fairly often, as it does in every household. Dorothy was always in the right. Each time she got herself into a state of furious, helpless irritation which ended in her having to go to bed, where Lynda nursed her.

Mark dealt with each new crisis, and this brought him into contact with Lynda for several days, while Dorothy was ill. The reason why Dorothy would never, until some situation was desperate – no water, no gas, no electricity – come for help upstairs, was that it meant bringing in Mark, or Mark’s deputy, Martha. It meant that she, Dorothy, had failed Lynda. It meant a collapse into inadequacy in a dark bedroom, and oblivion in drugs.

Mark and Lynda, with Dorothy asleep in her bedroom, achieved some hours of companionship, even gaiety.

The telephone, or tap, restored to normal – Lynda went back to the basement and the door was locked.

Mark made a visit to Martha’s room. When he did this it meant something of importance, something he found hard to talk about; which, perhaps, he had been working himself up to talk about all that day, or even, several days.

She had been sitting in the dark, looking out of the window at the ragged sycamore tree, thinned by late autumn. The knock on the door was abrupt, but soft.

‘Do you mind if I come in?’ He switched on the light, and saw, as he always did, a succession of rooms in this one, back to where young children played in it, he among them.

He took hold of the present, where a woman in a red house-coat, with untidy hair, sat by a dark window, looking out, a cat asleep beside her.

The cat woke, stalked across to him, looked up into his face, and miaowed. He sat down, the cat on his knee. He was in his dressing-gown. They were like an old married couple, or a brother and sister.

This thought passed from her to him, and he said: ‘This is no sort of life for you.’ ‘Or for you.’

‘Don’t you ever think of marrying?’

‘Yes. Sometimes.’ The worry on his face was to do with her: not what he had come about. ‘People have been saying I’m after you?’

He coloured up at once, changed position: the cat jumped down, annoyed. ‘Yes. Do you mind?’ ‘No. Yes, a little. Not much.’

‘It was stupid of me. I’d forgotten completely that – well, what with everything else ‘You shouldn’t let yourself listen to them.’ As she spoke she knew she was saying more: Why are you letting yourself be influenced? He heard this, gave her an acute look, acknowledging it. In a different mood he might have become ‘The Defender’. But not tonight. He was Lynda’s husband.

‘I want to ask you something. I get so involved in – I know I’m not seeing something. It’s Lynda. Why do I upset her so much? Do you know?’

‘You always ask too much of her.’

‘But how is she ever going to get well if … I mean, what was the point of her coming home at all?’

She could not bring herself to say what she was thinking.

‘You mean, it was just to get out of the hospital? I mean, it couldn’t just have been that – I am here, after all!’

‘She didn’t have much choice.’

‘She could have gone off and shared a flat with that … what was to stop her?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘She came here, where I am.’ ‘And Francis.’

‘He’s never here. She never sees him.’

‘Perhaps she wants to. I don’t know, Mark. How should I know?’

‘Do you think they are Lesbians?’ He found it difficult to say this. He had gone white now, was all dark hot eyes in a white face. One mask, or look, does for several different emotions. So Mark looked when contemplating his mother’s connivance with Hilary Marsh, or the affair of Ottery Bartlett. That was anger. This was misery.

‘I don’t know. A bit, perhaps. I’ve never known any. But I shouldn’t imagine that’s the point. It’s probably more that they make allowances for each other.’

‘A dreadful woman, dreadful, dreadful.’

‘Well … I don’t know.’

‘You wouldn’t choose to share your life with her!’ ‘Well, no. But I’m not ill.’

Lynda had been diagnosed by a large variety of doctors: there had been a large variety of diagnoses. She was depressed; she was a manic-depressive; she was paranoic; she was a schizophrenic. Most frequently, the last. Also, in another division, or classification, she was neurotic; she was psychotic. Most frequently, the latter.

‘They said she was better. Well, I don’t see it.’ ‘She is managing out of hospital.’

‘Yes but … when we were married, it never came easily to her – sex, I mean. It wasn’t that – I mean, she’s normal enough. What’s normal? But how do I know? It’s not as if I had had all that experience when we were married. It’s not as if I can make vast comparisons. But I remember it striking me always, it was as if being able to sleep with me was a proof to herself – do you understand?’

‘How can I? One could say that of lots of people these days. Sex is a kind of yardstick, one’s got to succeed. Were you her first lover?’

‘Yes. Well, yes, I am sure I was. But sometimes it was like making love to a drowning person.’ ‘She wanted to be saved?’

‘Yes. Yes! Exactly that!’ He was excited because she saw it. ‘Sometimes I thought, my God, am I murdering this woman! Did you hear that, when she said, Mark, you’re killing me.’

‘Yes, but that …’

‘No. That meant something. It made sense. She used to say, “Save me, Mark, save me!” Well, I had a jolly good try!’ ‘Yes.’

‘And now what? What is one supposed to do? Just let her – drown?’

He sat, white, stiff, his eyes full of tears.

With this man one could not easily use the ancient balm of arms, warmth, easy comfort. She pulled a chair near his, took his hand, held it. The tears ran down his face.

‘Mark, listen. She’s not going to be your wife. She’s not ever going to be. Sometime, you’ve got to see it.’

‘You mean, I should look for another wife? Oh, I’ve had plenty of that sort of advice recently, I assure you. They’ve even said, I should marry you!’

‘Well, God knows I’m not one to say that one should marry for the sake of being married. But, Mark, you’ve got to give up Lynda. I mean, you’ve got to stop waiting for her to be different.’

‘If I can’t have her, I don’t want anybody.’

‘All right. Then you’ll have nobody.’

‘But why? The other afternoon, when that dreadful woman was not there, it was as if – it was like when we were first married.’ After a long time, when she did not say anything, his taut hand went loose in hers, and he stood up. The look he gave her was hurt: she had not helped him, not said what he wanted to hear.

Next day, he asked Lynda if she would go away with him for a week-end, to stay at Mary and Harold Butts’s. She had always loved Nanny Butts.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Lynda. ‘I’d love to. What a lovely idea.’

They were to leave by car on Friday afternoon. In the morning there were voices shouting in anger from the basement, screams that wailed off into tears. Objects crashed against walls, doors slammed.

Mark packed a suitcase, and went downstairs at the time he had appointed, to fetch his wife. Lynda was sitting on her bed in a dressing-gown, with a desperate trembling smile that was directed generally, not at Mark, but at life. Dorothy sat knitting in the other room. She was making a tea-cosy, of purple and red wool. Lynda’s clothes were on the floor, in a heap beside the suitcase.

Then Lynda stood up, still smiling, walked out of the bedroom, and went up the stairs, with her husband following her. In Mark’s bedroom, on the table by his bed, stood a photograph of a radiant young beauty who smiled back at the soiled, ill, sour-smelling Lynda.

The sick woman ground her teeth with rage, picked up the photograph, looked at it with hatred, then flung it down to break into a mess of glass and wood. Then she went into the study. On a long table against one wall stood Jimmy’s models of possible electronic machines. One of them was a development of existing machines that could chart the human brain in terms of electric impulses. These machines she systematically smashed. Then she went downstairs again, locking the door into the basement behind her.

Late that night Martha, on her way up to bed, saw the study door open. Mark was sitting by his desk, and the face he lifted was the white black-eyed mask.

‘Martha, will you get rid of that – picture? I can’t.’

She went to the bedroom, swept up the glass and the bits of frame, and took up the photograph of young Lynda – undamaged. It was hard to tear up that beautiful face, but she tore it up, and disposed of it all in the rubbish bin.

As she passed the study for the second time, Mark called her in.

‘I’m going to see if I can find my brother,’ he said.

This could have been foreseen, if she had been awake? Possibly. It was a shock. She sat down, opposite his challenger’s face, to challenge him.

‘You can’t.’

‘I’m going to.’

‘What did you have in mind? That you’d turn up in Moscow and say, “Where is my brother?”?’ ‘Yes.’

‘But he might be anywhere – not necessarily Russia. And you wouldn’t get a visa.’

‘I know people during the war who got in and out of Nazi Germany. My brother James did once. He was on some sort of secret mission.’

‘Your brother James was working for a secret service?’

‘Well, that was the war. A lot of people did.’

‘If you get killed then Francis won’t have a father. And what will happen to Paul?’

The white face and the black bitter eyes seemed all there was of him. Then a switch turned somewhere, and he went red, and he said: ‘Capitalist propaganda. You’re an ex-communist. That’s how you are bound to talk.’

‘Never mind about communism and capitalism for the moment. But if you go bouncing about behind the Iron Curtain being a nuisance, you’ll find yourself in jug. Or worse.’

A sneer. The communist sneer. Indistinguishable of course from a sneer of any kind. But melodramatic, improbable. Particularly on this face, in this quiet study, in this house. And in Radlett Street, Bloomsbury, London.

‘Or don’t you read the newspapers?’

‘Well, really,’ he said, with a laughing sneer.

‘All right then, ask the comrades – you just ask them if you can go to an Embassy and say: I want to get a visa to let me travel to Russia so I can find my brother who has defected East because …’

‘Because he’s a spy? He’s not a spy. I tell you it’s not possible.’ ‘You’ve just said your brother James was.’ ‘That’s not … if you can’t tell the difference, then …’ ‘Probably what happened was Colin got a visit from somebody like Hilary Marsh and he got into a panic.’ ‘Colin is not the kind to scare easily.’

‘Then he was a fool not to be scared. You were scared. So was I. I’m scared now.’

‘I’ve got a lot of time for you, Martha, you know that. But when you start talking like the gutter Press, then I’m sorry.’

‘Have you actually asked any of the comrades about it? Why don’t you?’

‘I shall. Goodnight.’ And he dismissed the enemy.

She remained the enemy for some weeks. Night after night he asked his friends in, or went to their homes. She was not introduced to them: they met on the stairs with nods and smiles. Then, as a result of Mark’s inquiries, Patty Samuels came to the house, on a proper, formal interview, to see Mark. They were together for an hour or more. Martha inquired what the advice had been.

Mark said, briefly, that ‘on the whole it was considered inadvisable’. Then, with an apologetic laugh and glance: ‘What a war-horse!’

But he had liked her, or had been intrigued by her. She came again, became one of the people who dropped in, by herself, or with others, in the evenings. She was a lively vital woman in her early thirties, and a veteran of the Party, absolutely unlike anyone Mark had ever met, but like dozens Martha had met – and like what she herself had been for a brief period.

Patty was the opposite, in every way, of Lynda.

And this time, Martha was able to foresee what would happen.

While Mark developed an affair with Patty, Lynda, in the basement, had a relapse, a falling back. For a time it was touch and go whether she would have to go back to hospital.

Dorothy came up to Martha, a few days after the incident of the photograph, to ask if Martha would come down to see Lynda, who was asking for her.

Lynda was in bed, crying hysterically that she was no good, she was useless, she had ruined Mark, and she didn’t understand why Mark didn’t kill her. She wished Mark had killed her. If Mark did not kill her, she would kill herself.

Martha wanted to call in Dr Lamb, who, after all, both women visited regularly, for drugs and for advice. But Dorothy, weeping, begged Martha not to do this. Dr Lamb would send Lynda back to the hospital; they would both have to go back to the hospital. Lynda added her tears and pleas to Dorothy’s. Why, then, had Lynda asked for Martha to come down?

Then Martha saw that she was Mark’s deputy. Lynda could not face Mark himself. But she could say to Martha what she was afraid of saying to Mark. Lynda did not mean to kill herself. These bitter tears and self-reproaches were a way of announcing to Mark, through Martha, and to Dorothy, and perhaps to herself, her sorrow at not being able to be Mark’s wife, and her intention of refusing to be. It was also a reproach to Mark: look, you are making me ill by asking so much of me. Mark, hearing that Lynda was ill, appeared in the basement but Lynda shrieked at him to go away. He went.

Lynda wept that she was a beast and unfit to live; but there was relief in it. Mark did not, for a while, go near the basement. But Martha was admitted, and reported to him.

For some weeks Lynda remained low, and weepy. Nothing, it seemed, could break her misery. Then Paul came home for a month’s holiday, and he made her better.

Lynda and Paul together – it was charming, delightful; they were like two children. Dorothy watched, indulgent: Lynda’s mother, she now became Paul’s as well. For Lynda still could not bear being touched. So Paul sat on Dorothy’s large, steamy, sad lap, and was hugged and given sweets. With Lynda, he played. Martha made excuses to go down and watch. She was seeing Sally-Sarah again. Yes, there she was, in her child, a bright exuberant vivid creature, all charm and peremptory emotional demand, who cuddled up to Dorothy, and flung his arms around Martha’s neck, and sat very quiet, by Lynda’s side, his hands in his lap, while he smiled and listened to her fantastic stories.

But that was in the basement. In the rest of the house, Paul was a cool, shrewd clever little boy (‘too clever by half!’ as one teacher had let drop), whom no one would dare to touch or pet or fondle.

Then, the holidays ended and Paul went back to school, and Lynda remained well.

There was a new balance in the house. Upstairs Mark was absorbed in his developing affair with Patty Samuels. It seemed that he no longer expected anything from Lynda. He saw very little of Martha, and did not speak at all about the search for his brother.

In the basement the two sick women were trying to expand their lives, to become like ordinary people. Dorothy now started to go out of the flat, which she had not wanted to do before. She shopped, sometimes went to the cinema, talked of getting a job. But Lynda did not leave the flat. They had visitors, women for the most part. When this happened Lynda made an effort to dress, and to be beautiful again. Once they invited Martha down. It turned out to be a seance. A couple of men, and half a dozen women had arrived. In the heavy curtained room, with its air that smelled of drugs and anxiety, the lights were turned low and a woman called Mrs Mellendip invoked spirits: successfully, as far as some of those present were concerned. After that, Martha tried not to go down unless the two were alone. Otherwise it was an atmosphere of inordinate tea-drinking, palm-reading, fortune-telling. They would sit through entire afternoons and evenings laying the cards again and again and again for guidance on matters like buying a new handbag or having a hairdo. They worked out the horoscopes of themselves, their friends, their doctors, and public persons. Mrs Mellendip earned her living by doing horoscopes, but did not charge Lynda or Dorothy. Without being asked, she did Martha’s. It turned out to be more of a character reading, and was very shrewd indeed. Martha said it was, but that she had not learned anything about herself she did not already know. To which Mrs Mellendip, a large, forceful, handsome woman in her middle fifties, returned: ‘Well, dear, I could tell you more if you knew it.’ Which remark was very much the note or tone of these gatherings. For when the tea-leaves or the cards confirmed what a person already knew, this was not a sign of failure, but of success, and added to Mrs Mellendip’s confidence in herself, and her powers.

Martha told Lynda she did not care much for her new friends, which Lynda accepted, in her way of tolerating the unenlightened. Thereafter she would telephone Martha to say: ‘Have you time for a visit to the condemned cell?’ – or some such joke.

Martha was much alone, in the doldrums, her life becalmed. She was doing her job, that was all. The house was running, the children’s lives organized, Mark’s affairs attended to. But what was she really doing? What ought she to be doing? She did not know. She sat in her room and watched the structure of the sycamore tree disappear in spring green. Spring moved futilely in her veins. She watched. She was a person who watched other people in a turmoil of living. Could that be true? When Mark, or Lynda, or even Mrs Mellendip looked at her, did they see a woman who watched and waited – passive?

For what? For the bad time to be over? It was like waiting for the end of the war. Worse: war was easier, it had a form, one knew what one was supposed to be feeling, even if one didn’t conform to it. The last war, after all, had been easy: one’s head and one’s heart had moved together. By and large and for better or for worse, she, and everyone she knew, had been able to identify with their country, with their side: and now, with all the slogans and the speeches and the propaganda in perspective, all the accounts done, they could still say, ‘Yes, we were right, fascism was worse than anything.’

But now? If a new war started now, spreading out from Korea; if, to use the political shorthand of the time ‘America dropped the bomb on Russia before Russia could develop the bomb’ – then what would she feel? No use to sit here thinking, it won’t happen, because it might very well, and it was now that she should decide what to do. To decide that, meant deciding or deciphering what she felt. This country would be allied with America, that could be assumed. She could not support America; she could not support communism. She would have to support one or the other. No matter what form the war took this time, and it wouldn’t be remotely like the last, but probably all slow spreading poisons and panic and hysteria and terror at the unknown, she would have to be a traitor, not only from the point of view of society – her country, and the point of view of her ‘side’ – socialism, but from her own. Because there would be no middle place. Well then, she would be a patriot and a coward, rather than a traitor and a coward … she was immensely tired. A lethargy like an invisible poison filled her. Sitting through the darkening evenings, she looked out into the street, at the lively tree, and she began to think of death, of suicide. If the war started, that is what she would do, kill herself.

Thoughts of death slowly filled the room. When she came into it, it was to enter a region where death waited. While spring slowly crammed London with flowers and greenery, she allowed herself to be taken over … and then, one afternoon when she had been down to see Lynda, she thought how strange it was … a few weeks ago it was in the basement that people, or rather, Lynda, talked of death, of suicide, of killing. Now, with no outside circumstance changed, the basement was alive again, and futures were possible and talked about – even if they were no more than a dress or that Dr Lamb’s horoscope promised he would be in a good mood for next week’s monthly visit. Death had moved up to Martha’s room on the second floor.

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