Landlocked

This could have been taken as small talk. But they all knew each other far too well. They knew, almost before Anton had finished speaking, that Athen would go pale, would suffer, could be expected to lie awake that night, that tomorrow he would come to one or another of them and say: ‘But I couldn’t send the money home to my family. And it was not an expensive suit.’

And Martha, at least, knew that Anton was teasing Athen (as Anton would describe it), attacking Athen (as Athen would feel it), because he felt guilty over Millicent.

Suddenly Thomas got up saying: ‘I’ve got work. Matty, I want to see you. I’ll ring you at your office. I’ve got something to talk over with you. Solly’s up to something and Clive de Wet says he needs our help.’ Normally Thomas would have made a joke for Anton’s benefit: If your husband will give me permission – or something like that. But he nodded briefly at Anton, laid his hand on Athen’s shoulder as if to say: Take it easy, for heaven’s sake! smiled at Martha, then at Joss, and went out.

‘I suppose it’s one of his girls,’ said Anton.

‘No,’ said Joss. ‘He’s upset. A friend of his was with the troops that went into Belsen. He got a long letter. I read it.’

‘Oh well then, that’s different,’ said Anton, almost in the tone he would have used as a chairman, accepting someone’s excuse for leaving early.

Meanwhile Martha sat, registering the fact that Thomas’s going off had upset a pleasant tension: she had been sitting, equally weighted, so to speak, between Joss and Thomas.

Athen got up, saying: ‘I’m sorry, comrades, but I must leave you. I am sorry that tonight I am such bad company.’ He went off by himself.

Anton took the bill to pay at the cash desk. Joss and Martha, alone, turned towards each other.

‘You’re having an affair with Solly?’ said Joss, direct.

‘No.’

‘It looked as if you were.’

‘No.’

Now Joss examined her with the intimate frankness licensed by their long friendship, and then glanced at Anton’s tall, correct back.

‘You two not getting on too well, is that it?’

‘Not very.’

He said, in exactly the same tone of raillery as Solly: ‘Well, we did warn you, didn’t we? You just wouldn’t listen to us, that’s your trouble.’

Martha smiled, decided against telling him that the despised Solly had used almost the same words earlier, and said: ‘Yes, you did.’

‘Well,’ said Joss, practically. ‘It’s a pity I’ve got to love you and leave you. But when the authorities get around to letting me have the right bits of paper, I’m off up North.’

Here Anton came back. Joss said, rising: ‘Matty, can you have the office open for me tomorrow? I’ll ring you.’

He went off, as she nodded.

Now Anton and Martha walked together out of the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. She was thinking, as she sent glances at his pallor, the tension of his mouth: Is he upset because of Millicent or because of Germany? Last week he had sat silent on the edge of his bed, holding a small scrap of newsprint. Later she had found it in a drawer. It described how in a panic flight from Eastern Germany, away from the advancing Russian armies, women had left the train at the stops, carrying wrapped in newspaper the corpses of babies that had died of hunger. The women buried them in the snow by the side of the railway tracks. Famished dogs came afterwards, and dug up the half-buried babies. The mass bombings of German cities, the atrocities, the concentration camps, the frightful destruction of his country, the fact that his countrymen fled like guilty ghosts before the armies of half the world, the fact that they struggled and died and starved like animals – all of this, which surely must have reached the very essence of the man, was received by him with no more than the comment: They deserve a good hiding. But over this, the small scrap of newspaper about the babies wrapped in newspaper, he had sat and wept secretly, the tears running down his cheeks, then he had dried his cheeks carefully, with a large white handkerchief – then sat again, silent, crying.

Martha put her arm into her husband’s arm, and let it drop again as he said: ‘What does Thomas want to see you for?’

‘I don’t know.’

They found the car, an old Ford, parked among the lorries and wagons of the farmers who had been in the cinema, and began the half-mile drive back to the flat. They drove under banks of deep trees that were silvered by intermittent starlight, darkening and lifting into light as big clouds drove overhead. The tarmac shone white, like salt or like snow, then was very dark under the trees.

‘Well?’ said Anton at last: ‘What have you decided?’

Martha knew quite well that the right answer to this was that she should touch him, or kiss him. But she said stupidly: ‘What about?’

He let the car slide gently into a ditch filled with dry leaves, and neatly pulled on the brake before turning his pale eyes on her: ‘I want to know whether I should give you another chance or not.’

Martha raged with resentment at the phrase; she could not dispel it, even though she knew that phrases like ‘give you another chance’ or ‘give them a good hiding’ should be calls on her compassion rather than triggers for anger.

She walked quickly up the path away from him, listening to his crunch crunch behind her on the gravel. In the tiny room that was their bedroom, she switched on the lights and at once winged insects began circling around it, their wings rustling and clicking.

She was thinking: There’s something in this conflict with Anton that reminds me of the horrible cold arguments I have with my mother. She’s always in the right – and so am I. And Anton and I are both in the right. There’s something about being in the right … she felt positively sick with exasperation already – because of the banality of what they were going to say. Both Anton and she would be thinking quite sensible, even intelligent, thoughts – but what they said would be idiotic, and their bad temper, their unpleasantness, would be because both knew they could not express their sense in their words, let alone actions. Martha even felt as if this conversation or discussion (if the coming exchange could be dignified by such words) had taken place already and there was no point in going through with it again.

However, she stood drawing striped cotton over the windows, thereby shutting out a sky where the storm clouds still swept and piled in great, dramatic silver masses, and folded back the thin white covers of the two beds in which both were going to sleep so badly. Meanwhile, Anton untied his tie before a glass and watched his young wife in it, his face hard.

‘Well, Matty, I’m waiting.’

‘What for?’

‘There was a discussion, if you’ll be good enough to search your memory.’

‘It looked to me this evening as if you’ve already made up your mind,’ Martha said casually. She was pulling off her dress. The solid brown curves of her legs, her arms, thus revealed, suddenly spoke to her, and with a total authority. Thomas Stern said she was a peasant, did he? She looked at her fine strong body, smelled the delightful warm odours of her armpits, her hair, and thought: So he thinks I am a peasant, does he?

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You know quite well what I mean. What’s the red-head’s other name?’

‘I’m not going to deny that I find Millicent attractive, Matty!’

‘Well, I should hope not.’

Anton, a tall, over-thin man, his flesh glistening fair, his blond head gleaming, the fine hair on his thighs and belly shining gold, stood naked before stooping to pull up his pyjama trousers.

That’s my husband, thought Martha. What nonsense! She watched the fair fine flesh of her husband vanishing behind dark green cotton and her flesh said: He’s got nothing to do with me, that man.

Aloud she said: ‘We agreed that if I – ‘ she had been going to say, took a lover, but that was too literary, even though he had used the phrase first. Very European you are, she had said to herself, derisively: take a lover! Good Lord, who do you think I am? Madame Bovary? Well, I wish we had her problems. And it was not possible with Anton, for some reason, to say: get myself a man, find myself a man – that would be a sort of insult to him. ‘We decided that if I decided to be unfaithful to you then I should be honest with you, and you would take a mist … get yourself a girl – at any rate, we’d both get other people?’

‘Quite correct,’ said Anton, standing upright, startlingly handsome in his admirable dark green pyjamas. He was tying the cord of his pyjama trousers.

This was the moment when Martha should go to him, naked as she nearly was, and put her arms around him. That was what he was waiting for, and why he tied his pyjama cord so slowly. If she did this, if she played her role properly, as a good wife should, then by midnight, or at the very latest, tomorrow morning, Millicent the red-head would have become one of the little married jokes that act as such a delightful lubricant. Too bad for Millicent, too bad for whatever expectations she might, at this moment, be cherishing of Anton. If things went one way, she might reasonably hope to be Anton’s mistress, girl-friend, at any rate, have an affair with him. If Martha now played her part properly, all warm and feminine and coaxing (Martha could see herself, and shuddered with disgust) then very soon Millicent would be ‘the red-head, Anton!’ – and greeted with an understanding smile by Martha, a rather proud, self-conscious little grin by Anton. She would be a married joke, a little joke to smooth the wheels of matrimony. Lord, how repulsive! How unpleasant the little jokes, the hundred dishonest little lies, the thousand sacrifices like Millicent (or like Solly if it had come to that) which marriage demands.

If Martha played her role one way, then tomorrow or the next day Millicent, throwing away her pride to ring Anton, or to run into him in the street, would be encountered with: ‘Hello Millicent, how are things, all right?’ ‘Fine, Anton, how are you?’ ‘See you sometime, Millicent.’ If Martha went on behaving as she was now, obedient to her peremptory and at least entirely honest body, Millicent could confidently expect a probably very romantic and satisfactorily painful affair.

Anton stood upright, his head bent as he examined his fingernails. Martha discovered she was feeling uncomfortable – it was because she was standing naked in front of him. She did not belong to him! She pulled off her brassière, her back to him, delighting in a quick glimpse of her shoulder, at the fine curves with the perfect crease and dimple between them. Hastily she tugged on a nightdress. She went quickly into the bathroom to clean her teeth. She was crawling with shame because of the stupid scene they had just enacted. At the same time her flesh was exulting because next day she would see Joss – damn it, he was going to leave soon. But how lucky Joss was, she thought, sensing all of herself, her whole delightful sweet-smelling person.

She could not go back to the bedroom yet. Anton would still be waiting for her to come back. Perhaps he was sitting on the edge of the bed reading that bit of newsprint about the women burying their dead babies in newspaper in the snow? Oh God, if he was, then there’d be no help for it, she would have to put her arms around him, comfort him … she simply would not go back to the bedroom yet.

After a great deal of splashing and drying and brushing of her hair – for the second time that day it got the old-fashioned fifty strokes on each side – she went back to find Anton in bed, his bed-light off, his back to her.

She turned off her light. The room, in the dark, was not dark. It seemed that through the thin curtains, even through the walls, fell the cool brilliance of starlight, which shifted, lightened, darkened, as the clouds drove overhead. For a few minutes the insects maintained their circles around the dark focus of the light, then there was an interval of small uncoordinated hangings, slidings, fallings-away. The moth and insect noises stopped altogether. Martha knelt up in bed to look past the edges of the curtain at the dark pillars of the veranda. A black sky. Black trees, in pools of black shade. Ghostly white lilies in dark shade. Fragments of white gravel. Leaves turning and tossing under starlight in a rippling silver movement.