A Ripple from the Storm

But his eyes were professional. ‘Well, Mrs Knowell,’ he asked, as she heard him so often: ‘And what can I do you for?’

She laughed obediently at the joke and lay down as he held her wrist.

‘You should have called me in before,’ he remarked. ‘Who’s looking after you?’

‘My landlady.’

‘I think we’ll find a bed for you in hospital.’

‘Oh, no.’ Martha sat up again, in an impulse to escape the whole situation. Dr Stern held her by the shoulder and said: ‘If it’s a question of paying, then don’t worry. There are times when people can pay and times when they can’t. You’re an old patient of mine, aren’t you?’

Martha’s eyes filled with tears and she turned away to hide them. But her voice shook as she thanked him.

‘Yes, Mrs Knowell, and you’ve been here all these days with a high temperature letting things ride – and you’re a sensible girl, so I’ve always thought.’

‘Perhaps I’m not sensible,’ she muttered. ‘Dr Stern, I really don’t want to go to hospital.’

‘And who will nurse you?’

‘I have friends.’ She thought: If he understands this then he’s a real doctor and not just a medicine man. He let his eyes rest on her face for some time: her lips were trembling. At last he nodded and said; ‘Mrs Knowell, there are times when we all find life too much for us.’

Oh Lord, she thought, he’s trying to make me cry.

‘I understand the divorce is going through between yourself and Douglas. Well, that’s not my affair. And you must be missing your daughter.’

The reference to Caroline dried Martha’s tears at the source. She said: ‘Dr Stern, I’ll do anything you say, but please make it possible for me to stay here.’

He was annoyed, and – as Martha knew, not because she wouldn’t go to hospital, but because she had closed against him. He said coldly: ‘Very well. I can’t take the consequences. I’ll have the medicines made up. I’ll come to see you tomorrow. Does a sensible girl like you have to behave like an uneducated person who is afraid of hospital? You’re like my native patients, who think they’re going to die in hospital.’

Martha felt as she had with Mr Maynard: Dr Stern, in using such an argument, was so infinitely removed from her that it was as if he had moved back into the past. He stood at the foot of the bed waiting to see if she would react; when she did not he said: ‘Very well,’ and went out. Again she heard Anton talking to him in the passage. She realized that Anton would be looking after her. When he came in, she had succumbed to being ill; for the first time she was gone under waves of sickness. She was aware that he had again kised her forehead and hot nausea came with the thought: Well, that means now Anton and I will be together. She did not define how they would be together. He sat by her a few minutes, then said he would go to collect the medicines. She did not hear him leave; nor hear Jimmy enter. She opened her eyes to see Jimmy large and looming over her. His attitude expressed something hostile to her.

‘Well, comrade, and are you sick?’

‘The doctor says so.’

‘And he’s going to fill you up with medicines?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I’ll get them for you. I can go on my bycicle.’

‘Anton’s gone already.’

‘I saw him here, I saw him,’ he said, accusingly. As she did not reply: ‘Tell me, have you and Anton got an agreement?’

‘An agreement?’ She was angry because he assumed he had the right to ask. It was clear he felt he did have the right. He even looked as if he had been betrayed. ‘I mean, are you and Anton getting together?’

‘Not as far as I know.’ She kept her eyes shut and when she opened them again he had gone.

She was deeply anxious: her stomach was twisting with anxiety. She thought: I’ve been irritated because of the way these men just fall for us, from one minute to the next, but what’s the difference between that and me and Anton getting involved? Because it seems to me we are involved. If I’d responded to Jimmy or Murdoch over a glass of beer or selling pamphlets, then it would have seemed to me quite right, inevitable, even romantic. Her anxiety rose to a climax, and she felt caged by Anton. But it happens to be Anton … why? Is it because he’s the leader of the group? But that’s despicable. And actually what do we have in common?

These muddled, dismaying thoughts were too much for her, and she went off into a semi-delirium. Her body had taken over from her mind. She lay feeling every pulse of pain, every sensation of heat and cold. Her body, precisely defined in areas of heat and cold, lay stretched out among sheets that felt gritty and sharp, as if she were lying on sand, or on moving ants. But her hands were not hers. They seemed to have swelled. Her hands were enormous, and she could not control their size. At the end of her arms she could feel them, giant’s hands, as if she compressed the world inside them. Everything she was had gone into her hands. She moved them, to see if she could shrink them back to size. For a moment they were her own hands again, then out they swelled, and, lying with eyes shut, she felt the tips of her fingers touch the vast balls of her thumbs as if girders had been laid across a ravine. The world lay safe inside her hands. Tenderness filled her. She thought: Because of us, everyone will be saved. She thought: I am holding the world safe, and no one will be hurt and unhappy ever again.

Anton came in later, and lifted her up to take her medicines. She kept her hands away from him: she had to keep them away because of their immense power: he might get hurt if he touched them.

She woke in the dark once to see him sitting by her in the chair, asleep. When she drifted off again, holding humanity safe in her powerful tender hands, she held him too, close and safe: the protector protected; the power-dealer made harmless.

In the morning the fever had gone down because of the drugs and Anton still sat there, smiling at her.

‘Aren’t you going to work?’ He did some kind of clerk’s work in an export and import firm. As an enemy alien it was not easy for him to find a job, and she worried that he might lose it because of her. ‘Aren’t you going?’ she insisted.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve telephoned and now you must not worry at all, you must sleep.’

For three days Anton sat by her, scarcely leaving her, taking instructions from the doctor and dealing with Mrs Carson with a gentle ironical patience that she would never have expected from him. Slowly her hands lost size. There was a moment she looked at them, small and thin, and began to cry. Anton took her in his arms and kissed her.

She murmured: ‘What about Toni Mandel?’ He said: ‘Yes, yes, everything has its end. You must not worry about Mrs Mandel.’

Anton was not there when Jimmy came in again, bristling with hostility. He made some remarks about the sale of The Watchdog, told her that Ronald was completely cured, and then said: ‘I have to tell you, comrade, that I must criticize you for your attitude.’

‘What attitude?’

‘I don’t like lies. I don’t mind the truth but I don’t like lies.’

‘What lies?’

‘You and Anton.’

‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’

He was again red and angry, very hostile.

She thought: Well, it’s true that it might just as well have been Jimmy. Yet the feeling between her and Anton had now grown so that their being together seemed right and inevitable; she could not imagine that any accident (she thought of her sickness and Anton’s looking after her as an accident) would bring her and Jimmy together.

‘And in any case, comrade, I’d like to tell you straight, I’ve found a better woman.’

‘Well, I’m glad,’ she said flatly.

‘Yes. I have. A fine working-class woman, like my own kind. You and I wouldn’t have done at all.’

I’m very pleased.’ She wondered who he meant. There were no working-class girls in the group. She thought: The receptionist from McGrath’s? Then he’ll have to stop her using lipstick and dyeing her hair.

He said: ‘She’s a woman who can take hardship, who knows how to suffer. Yes, those girls down in the Coloured Quarter know how to take life.’

Martha’s brain informed her that any reaction she would have to this would be ‘white settler’ and therefore suspect. All the same, she had to say something. And he was waiting for her to speak, waiting with his whole body expressing challenge and readiness to fight.

‘Jimmy, you’ll get yourself posted.’

‘I’m not taking orders from any bloody colour-minded fascists.’