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 d
ead, 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.’
The Four-Gated City Page 14