Wilhelm began saying that he had at last understood: Julia did not really want him there. ‘I have always loved you more than you have loved me.’ Julia had never thought about this love to weigh and measure it. Simply, it was what she relied on. Wilhelm was her support and her stay, and now she was getting old (which she felt she was, despite Doctor Lehman), she knew she could not manage without him. Did she not love him then? Well, certainly not, compared with Philip. How uncomfortable this line of thought was, she did not want to go on with it, nor to hear Wilhelm’s reproaches. She would have liked him to move in, if things hadn’t been so difficult, if only to soothe her conscience over that big under-used place of his. She was even prepared to contemplate cuddles and bedtime conversations in her once connubial bed. But she had only shared her bed with one man in her long life: too much was being asked of her–wasn’t it? Wilhelm’s reproaches became accusations and Julia cried and Wilhelm was remorseful.
• • •
Frances was planning to leave Julia’s. At last she would have her own place. Now that there were no school or university fees, she was actually saving money. Her own place, not Johnny’s, or Julia’s. And it would have to accommodate all her research materials and her books, now divided between The Defender and Julia’s. A large flat. What a pleasant thing it is to have a regular salary: only someone who has not enjoyed one can say this with the heartfelt feeling it deserves. Frances remembered freelancing and precarious little jobs in the theatre. But when she had achieved enough money for the substantial down-payment, then she would resign from what she felt as an increasingly false position at The Defender, and that would be the end of regular sums arriving in her bank account.
She had always done most of her work at home, had never felt herself to be part of the newspaper. That she just came and went was her colleagues’ complaint about her, as if her behaviour was a criticism of The Defender. It was. She was an outsider in an institution that saw itself as beleaguered, and by hostile hordes, reactionary forces, as if nothing had changed from the great days of the last century when The Defender stood almost alone as a bastion of wholesome open-hearted values: there had been no honest good cause The Defender had not defended. These days the newspaper championed the insulted and the injured, but behaved as if these were minority issues, instead of–on the whole–‘received opinions’.
Frances was no longer Aunt Vera (My little boy wets his bed, what shall I do?), but wrote solid, well-researched articles on issues like the discrepancy between women’s pay and men’s, unequal employment possibilities, nursery schools: nearly everything she wrote was to do with the difference between men’s situation and women’s.
The women journalists of The Defender were known in some quarters, mostly male (who saw themselves increasingly as beleaguered by hostile female hordes), as a kind of mafia, heavy, humourless, obsessed, but worthy. Frances was certainly worthy: all her articles had a second life as pamphlets and even as books, third lives as radio or television programmes. She secretly concurred with the view that her female colleagues were heavy-going, but suspected she could be accused of the same. She certainly felt heavy, weighed down with the wrongs of the world: Colin’s accusation had been true enough: she did believe in progress, and that a stubborn application in attacking unfairness would put things right. Well, didn’t it? At least sometimes? She had small triumphs to be proud of. But at least she had never flown off into the windy skies of the so fashionable feminism: she had never been capable, like Julie Hackett, of a fit of tearful rage when hearing on the radio that it was the female mosquito that is responsible for malaria. ‘The shits. The bloody fascist shits.’ When at last persuaded by Frances that this was a fact and not a slander invented by male scientists to put down the female sex–‘Sorry, gender’–she quietened into hysterical tears and said, ‘It’s all so bloody unfair.’ Julie Hackett continued dedicated to The Defender. At home she wore The Defender aprons, drank from The Defender mugs, used The Defender drying-up cloths. She was capable of angry tears if someone criticised her newspaper. She knew Frances was not as committed–a word she was fond of–as she was, and often delivered little homilies designed to improve her thinking. Frances found her infinitely tedious. Aficionados of the prankish tricks life gets up to will have already recognised this figure, which so often accompanies us, turning up at all times and places, a shadow we could do without, but there she is, he is, a mocking caricature of oneself, but oh yes, a salutary reminder. After all, Frances had fallen for Johnny’s windy rhetoric, been charmed out of her wits by the great dream, and her life had been set by it ever since. She simply had not been able to get free. And now she was working for two or three days a week with a woman for whom The Defender played the same role as the Party had done for her parents, who were still orthodox communists and proud of it.
Some people have come to think that our–the human being’s–greatest need is to have something or somebody to hate. For decades the upper classes, the middle class, had fulfilled this useful function, earning (in communist countries) death, torture and imprisonment, and in more equable countries like Britain, merely obloquy, or irritating obligations, like having to acquire a cockney accent. But now this creed showed signs of wearing thin. The new enemy, men, was even more useful, since it encompassed half the human race. From one end of the world to the other, women were sitting in judgement on men, and when Frances was with The Defender women, she felt herself to be part of an all-female jury that has just passed a unanimous verdict of Guilty. They sat about, in leisure moments, solidly in the right, telling little anecdotes of this man’s crassness or that man’s delinquency, they exchanged glances of satirical comment, they compressed their lips and arched their brows, and when men were present, they watched for evidence of incorrect thought and then they pounced like cats on sparrows. Never have there been smugger, more self-righteous, unself-critical people. But they were after all only a stage in this wave of the women’s movement. The beginning of the new feminism in the Sixties resembled nothing so much as a little girl at a party, mad with excitement, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes glazed, dancing about shrieking, ‘I haven’t got any knickers on, can you see my bum?’ Three years old, and the adults pretend not to see: she will grow out of it. And she did. ‘What me? I never did things like that . . . oh, well, I was just a baby.’
Soberness soon set in, and if the price to be paid for solid worth was an irritating self-righteousness, then surely it was a small price for such serious, scrupulous research, the infinitely tedious rooting about in facts, figures, government reports, history, the work that changes laws and opinions and establishes justice.
And this stage, in the nature of things, would be succeeded by another.
Meanwhile Frances had to conclude that working for The Defender was not unlike being Johnny’s wife: she had to shut up and think her own thoughts. This was why she had always taken so much work home. Keeping one’s counsel, after all, takes it out of you, wears you down, it had taken her much longer to see that many of the journalists working for The Defender were the offspring of the comrades, though one had to know them a while before the fact emerged. If one had a Red upbringing, then one shut up about it–too complicated to explain. But when others were in the same boat? But it was not only The Defender. Amazing how often one heard, ‘My parents were in the Party, you know.’ A generation of Believers, now discredited, had given birth to children who disowned their parents’ beliefs, but admired their dedication, at first secretly, then openly. What faith! What passion! What idealism! But how could they have swallowed all those lies? As for them, the offspring, they owned free and roving minds, uncontaminated by propaganda.
But the fact was, the atmosphere of The Defender and other liberal organs had been ‘set’ by the Party. The most immediately visible likeness was the hostility to people not in agreement. The left-wing or liberal children of parents they might describe as fanatics maintained intact inherited habits of mind. ‘If you are not with us, you are agai
nst us.’ The habit of polarisation, ‘If you don’t think like us, then you are a fascist.’
And, like the Party in the old days, there was a plinth of admired figures, heroes and heroines, usually not communists these days, but Comrade Johnny was a prominent figure, a grand old man, one of the Old Guard, to be pictured as standing eternally on a platform shaking his clenched fist at a reactionary sky. The Soviet Union still held hearts, if not minds. Oh, yes, ‘mistakes’ had been made, and ‘mistakes’ had been admitted to, but that great power was defended, for the habit of it had gone too deep.
There were people in the newspaper that were whispered about: they must be CIA spies. That the CIA had spies everywhere could not be in doubt, so they must be here too: no one ever said that the KGB had its Soviet fingers in this pie, manipulating and influencing, though that was the truth, not to be admitted for twenty years. The USA was the main enemy: this was the unspoken and often loudly asserted assumption. It was a fascist militaristic state, and its lack of freedom and true democracy was attacked continually in articles and speeches by people who went there for holidays, sent their children to American universities, and took trips across ‘the pond’ to take part in demos, riots, marches and meetings.
A certain naive youth, joining The Defender because of his admiration for its great and honourable history of free and fair thought, rashly argued that it was a mistake to call Stephen Spender a fascist for campaigning against the Soviet Union and trying to make people accept ‘the truth’–which phrase meant the opposite of what the communists meant by it. This young man argued that since everyone knew about the rigged elections, the show trials, the slave camps, the use of prison labour, and that Stalin was demonstrably worse than Hitler, then surely it was right to say so. There was shouting, screaming, tears, a scene that almost came to blows. The youth left and was described as a CIA plant.
Frances was not the only one who longed to leave this prickly dishonest place. Rupert Boland, her good friend, was another. Their secret dislike of the institution they worked for was what first united them, and then when both could have left to get work on other newspapers, they stayed–because of the other. Which neither knew, for it was not confessed for a long time. Frances had found she was in danger of loving this man, but then when it was too late, she did. And why not? Things progressed in an unhurried but satisfying way. Rupert wanted to live with Frances. ‘Why not move in with me?’ he said. He had a flat in Marylebone. Frances said that once in her life she wanted her own home. She would have enough money in a year or so. He said, ‘But I’ll lend you the money to make the difference.’ She baulked and made excuses. It would not be entirely her place, the spot on the earth where she could say, This is mine. He did not understand and was hurt. Despite these disagreements their love prospered. She went to his flat for nights, not too often, because she was afraid of upsetting Julia, afraid of Colin. Rupert said, ‘But why? You’re over twenty-one?’
When you are getting on there occur often enough those moments when whole tangles of bruised and bleeding history simply wrap themselves up and take themselves off. She did not feel she could explain it to him. And she didn’t want to: let it all rest. Basta. Finis. Rupert was not going to understand. He had been married and there were two children, who were with their mother. He saw them regularly, and now so did Frances. But he had not been through the savage impositions of adolescence. He said, just like Wilhelm, ‘But we aren’t teenagers, hiding from the grown-ups.’ ‘I don’t know about that. But in the meantime–it’s fun.’
There was something that could have been a problem, but wasn’t. He was ten years younger than she was. She was nearly sixty, he ten years younger! After a certain age ten years here or there don’t make much difference. Quite apart from sex, which she was remembering as a pleasant thing, he was the best of company. He made her laugh, something she knew she needed. How easy it was to be happy, they were both finding, and with an incredulity they confessed. How could it be that things were so easy that had been difficult, wearisome, painful?
Meanwhile, there seemed to be no accommodation for this love, which was of the quotidian, daily-bread sort, not at all a teenagers’ romp.
***
The crowds for the celebration of the Independence of Zimlia spilled from the hall on to the steps and the pavements and threatened to clog the streets, as had earlier jamborees for Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Northern Zimlia. Probably the larger part of these celebrants had been at all the earlier festivities. Every kind of victorious emotion was here, from the quiet satisfaction of people who had worked for years, to the grinning inflated elation of those who get as intoxicated on crowds as they do on love, or hate, or football. Frances was here because Franklin had telephoned. ‘I must have you there. No, you must come. All my old friends.’ It was very flattering. ‘And where is Miss Sylvia? She must come too, please ask her.’ That was why Sylvia was with Frances, pushing through crowds, though Sylvia had said, and kept on saying, ‘Frances, I have to talk to you about something. It’s important.’
Someone was tugging at Frances’s sleeve. ‘Mrs Lennox? You’re Mrs Lennox?’ An urgent young woman with red hair as rough as a rag doll’s and an air of general disorientation: ‘I need your help.’
Frances stopped, Sylvia just behind her. ‘What is it?’ Frances shouted.
‘You were so wonderful with my sister. She owes you her life. Please I must come and see you.’ She was shouting too.
Light did dawn, but slowly. ‘I see. But I think you must be wanting the other Mrs Lennox, Phyllida.’
Wild suspicion, frustration, then dismay contorted those features. ‘You won’t? You can’t? You aren’t . . .’
‘You have the wrong Mrs Lennox.’ And Frances walked on, with Sylvia holding to her arm. That Phyllida was to be seen in this light–it needed time to take in. ‘That was Phyllida she was talking about,’ Frances said. ‘I know,’ said Sylvia.
At the door into the hall it could be seen it was crammed and there was no chance of getting in but Rose was a steward and so was Jill, both with rosettes the size of plates, in Zimlian colours. Rose cried out with enthusiasm on seeing Frances, and shouted into her inclined ear, ‘It’s like old family night, everyone’s here.’ But now she saw Sylvia and her face twisted into indignation. ‘I don’t see why you think you’re going to get a place. I’ve never seen you at any of our demos.’
‘You haven’t seen me either,’ said Frances. ‘But I hope that doesn’t mean I’m a black sheep too.’
‘Black sheep,’ sneered Rose. ‘Wouldn’t you know it.’
But she stood aside for Frances, and then, of necessity, Sylvia, but said, ‘Frances, I must speak to Franklin.’
‘Hadn’t you better apply to Johnny? Franklin stays with him when he’s in London.’
‘Johnny doesn’t seem to remember me–but I was part of the family, wasn’t I–for ages?’
A roar went up. The speakers were pushing on to the platform, about twenty of them, Johnny among them, with Franklin, and other black men. Franklin saw Frances, who had pushed her way up to the front, and leaped down off the platform, laughing, almost crying, rubbing his hands: he was dissolving in joy. He embraced Frances and then looked around and said, ‘Where’s Sylvia?’
Franklin was staring at a thin young woman, with straight fair hair tied back off a pale face, in a high-necked black sweater. His gaze left her, wandered off, came back, in doubt.
‘But here is Sylvia,’ shouted Sylvia above the din of the clapping and shouting. On the platform just above them the speakers stood waving their arms, clasping their hands above their heads, and shaking them, giving the clenched fist salute to some entity apparently just above the heads of the audience. They were smiling and laughing, absorbing the crowd’s love and sending it back in hot rays that could positively be seen.
‘Here I am. You’ve forgotten me, Franklin.’
Never has a man looked more disappointed than Franklin did then. For years he had held in his mind tha
t little fluffy girl, like a new yellow chick, as sweet as the Virgin and the female saints on the Holy Pictures at the mission. This severe unsmiling girl hurt him, he didn’t want to look at her. But she came from behind Frances, and hugged him, and smiled, and for a moment he was able to think, Yes this is Sylvia . . .
‘Franklin,’ they were shouting from the platform.
At this moment up came Rose, and insisted on embracing him. ‘Franklin. It’s me. It’s Rose. Do you remember?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Franklin, whose memories of Rose were ambiguous.
‘I have to see you,’ said Rose.
‘Yes, but I have to go up now.’
‘I’ll wait for you after the meeting. It’s to your advantage, remember.’
He climbed up, and was now a shiny smiling black face among the others, and next to Johnny Lennox, who was like a mangy old lion, but dignified with it, greeting his followers down in the audience with a shake of his fist. But still Franklin’s eyes roamed the hall, as if somewhere down there the old Sylvia was, and then when he stared, forlornly for that moment, at where the real Sylvia was, in a front seat, Sylvia waved at him and smiled. His own face burst out again into happiness, and he opened his arms, embracing the crowd, but really it was her.
Victory celebrations after a war do not have much to say about the dead soldiers, or rather, they say a good deal or even sing about the dead comrades ‘who made this victory possible’, but the acclamations and the noisy singing are designed to make the victors forget about the bones lying in a cleft of rock on a kopje, or in a grave so shallow the jackals have got there, scattering ribs, fingers, a skull. Behind the noise there is an accusing silence, soon to be filled with forgetfulness. In the hall that night were few people–they were mostly white–who had lost sons and daughters to a war, or who had fought in one, but the men on the platform, some of them, had been in an army, or had visited the fighters. There were also men who had been trained for political war, or for guerilla war, in the Soviet Union, or in camps set up by the Soviet Union, in Africa. And in that audience a good few had known various bits of Africa ‘in the old days’. Between them and the activists were gulfs, but they were all cheering.
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