A Ripple from the Storm

‘Hell, no.’

‘Can’t stand them either. Well, I’m on my way to work. Give me a ring if you want nursing.’ Jasmine, demure and precise as always, her small neat body defined in bright blue flowered linen, frowned at Martha while she adjusted an ear-ring.

‘What’s going on in the group?’ asked Martha, who felt as if she had been exiled from it for several weeks.

‘Trouble,’ said Jasmine, rolling up her eyes and sighing. ‘There was a meeting last night. The RAF are suffering from severe infantile disorders. They want to make a revolution here and now. Jimmy wants us to march into the Location with a red flag, shouting: “Down with the white tyrants.”‘

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

‘Perhaps it’s not a bad idea at that,’ said Martha crossly.

‘You’d better stay where you are then,’ said Jasmine, ‘if you’re in a red-flag-waving mood too, then you’ll be more of a nuisance than a help.’

‘All the same, I’ve been thinking … we talk and talk and analyse and make formulations, but what are we doing? What are we changing?’ Her head ached, and she lay still, looking at the cool white ceiling.

‘If I were you I’d go to sleep.’

‘What else? What else has been happening?’

‘Well, the RAF say we are bourgeois.’

‘Obviously we are. What then?’

‘Because,’ said Jasmine composedly, ‘we wear lipstick and nail varnish.’ She put forward a small foot in a high-heeled blue sandal and examined her scarlet toe-nails with satisfaction. ‘They say our origins are betrayed by the way we dress.’

‘Who? All women, or just the group women?’

‘The women comrades. They say that we are corrupted by the emphasis capitalist society places on sex.’ Jasmine offered this last remark to Martha on a serious note of query.

Martha considered it from the depths of her anxiety-ridden dissatisfaction with herself, which made her ready to range herself with anybody who criticized her. But the other side of her perpetual stern rejection of what she was now, was the image of what she wanted to be: to match this image with any of the men in the group was enough to make her reject them entirely. She was thinking: Any real man would be able to see what I could be and help me to become it, and all these tom-tiddlers in the group … She was dismayed that she was able to think of her male comrades thus, and said angrily: ‘Oh, they can talk …’

‘That’s what I said to Jimmy.’

‘Of course it was Jimmy, of course.’

‘Yes, I said to him, if you disapprove of make-up and high heels and so on, what were you doing in McGrath’s with that girl from the reception desk? Because she’s got dyed hair to start with. He said he was educating her.’

Martha laughed. Jasmine smiled composedly and said: ‘Bloody hypocrites they all are. Every one. Well, so long, Matty, and look after yourself.’ She departed, slinging a satchel bag full of pamphlets over her shoulder.

Next time Martha woke it was night, and Mrs Quest stood where Jasmine had stood earlier, at the foot of the bed.

Tm glad to see you are getting an early night for once,’ she said in a sprightly way.

‘Yes.’

‘Have you heard from William?’

‘Who?’

‘That corporal or whoever he was.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard.’

‘If you’re going to let him down too I shall really wash my hands of you.’

‘Mother, I keep telling you, there’s no question of my marrying William.’

‘You left your husband for him.’

‘I did not. I left Douglas for …’ She stopped, knowing it was useless to explain to her mother why she left Douglas.

Meanwhile, Mrs Quest, cold-eyed and hostile, was examining Martha’s naked shoulders. She said: ‘That nightgown is indecent. If some of your friends come in …’

Martha, who at the first sight of her mother had thought: Thank goodness, she’ll look after me, now pulled the blankets up to her face, and said: ‘No one’s coming in. And I’m sleepy.’

Mrs Quest went to Martha’s dressing-table, examined what was on it, and said: ‘So you’re using rouge now. Well, if you’re going to jazz about the way you do, I suppose you’ll need rouge at your age. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ She returned to the foot of the bed and said: ‘Mrs Carson’s worried about you.’

‘In what way?’

‘She says that you don’t keep your curtains drawn and the garden boy hangs about to get a sight of you.’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ said Martha, understanding with dismay that she was able to take this sort of thing from Mrs Carson, but not from her mother, to whom surely she owed much more patience and understanding? Guilt set in about this too, and added to her sick fever.

Mrs Quest had retreated into apologetic embarrassment, and retreated hastily with: ‘Well, perhaps she’s got it wrong. I won’t disturb your beauty sleep any longer.’ She went to the door, exaggeratedly quiet. As she went out she said: ‘I hear Caroline isn’t well, poor little girl.’

The image of Caroline rose to confront Martha, who said to herself tormentedly: I can’t think of her now, I really can’t. She sternly pushed Caroline into a region of her mind marked No Admittance. Yet as soon as she slept, Caroline emerged from this forbidden place, and confronted Martha: sometimes charming and childish, sometimes sick and plaintive, sometimes hostile to Martha her mother. Martha kept waking, afraid for the first time of the loneliness of this dark shabby hired room, despising herself for being afraid, hating her mother for evoking the image of Caroline.

Another night passed and a slow hot morning. Flies buzzed against the curtains through which the glare beat in threads of yellow. Martha was thinking: If my mother would come in again, and just be kind, instead of hating me so much … the weak listlessness of this frightened her again. She thought: Just because I’m sick, I start crying for mother. And I’m probably not sick at all, just trying to get out of something? But what am I trying to get out of? I simply must not give in. And she got limply out of bed, brushed her hair and made up her face. She lay tidily back on her pillows thinking: If I make up my mind to it, I needn’t be sick. But almost at once she was back in sleep, and nightmare-ridden delirium.

In the late afternoon she woke to see Anton seated by her bed. The sight of him was an exquisite relief.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘If people don’t look after themselves, they get sick.’ He held her wrist tightly: it was partly a brotherly caress and partly because of the necessity for taking her pulse.

‘So,’ he commented. ‘And what does the doctor say?’

‘I don’t need a doctor.’

‘So you don’t need a doctor. That may be so, but you must excuse me: I shall telephone your doctor and he will come and visit you.’

He sat smiling at her. Martha could scarcely recognize him. She said to herself: Suddenly he’s human. She was also thinking: Suppose he is in love with me? The thought was half-exciting, half pure panic. Oh my God! she thought involuntarily, it’s just as bad as the others – just an accident, falling in love, if you can call it that. All the same, a pulse of excitement was beating in her. She looked through her fever at the stiff controlled face, now softened with a small paternal smile, and thought: He may not know it himself, but he’s attracted to me.

And now Anton lifted himself up to his height, and stooping, kissed her on the forehead. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘And now you will lie quite still and the doctor will come.’ For a moment they were both embarrassed because of that kiss, and he said quickly: ‘I will come in again this evening and see you. It is Dr Stern, isn’t it? I will make the arrangements.’ And he went out on tiptoe stiffly, like a lean high-stepping bird.

When I’m with him I feel safe? she wondered, remembering how he had said: women’s problems are not sufficiently considered, and how she had responded to the promise of understanding. Yes, he’s kind, she decided.

Now she was looking forward to the doctor’s coming. If Anton took the responsibility for this act of weakness, the act of admitting one was ill, then it was all right, it was off her shoulders.