Landlocked

‘But he doesn’t want to be a British citizen.’

‘Perhaps he does – I don’t know. Why do we have to talk about Anton?’

‘He’s your husband, that’s why.’

‘He’s not my husband. ‘

That rainy season, she spent nearly every afternoon in the loft, and most evenings. Then there were fewer evenings – Thomas’s work was suffering, he said. For a while Martha stayed at home when Thomas was not coming – but then returned to the loft. Every evening, after supper, she told Anton she must work, and she went to the loft.

Every afternoon Martha went to the loft, hoping she would see no one, hoping that Thomas’s brother’s wife would not see her. But the plump, watchful woman was nearly always sewing on her veranda. So Martha went openly across the back garden and into the shed. There she waited for Thomas. Sometimes he did not come, and she read, or simply did nothing, watching the green shadows from the tree ripple on the planks of the floor. Here she was ‘herself’, no one put pressure on her. Even when Thomas did not come, she returned happy, and – this was increasingly the point – armed, against Anton. It came to this: she began to go to the shed in the mornings, not because of the idle women, but because of Anton.

For her feelings about Anton had gone beyond anything she could understand. Like ‘the circle of women’, ‘her husband’ provoked in her only the enemy, feelings so ancient and, it seemed, autonomous, they were beyond her control.

For consider how irrational it was. First there had been the period of months when they, Anton and Martha, decided that they would ‘live their own lives’. During this time, when presumably Anton had pursued his affair with Millicent, and Martha had had nobody, but waited for Thomas, they lived together amicably – without any emotional contact, but certainly without strain.

This ease had ended, but at once, that day when Martha had first made love with Thomas. She had not expected anything to change. After all, had not Anton assumed, all this time, that she had a lover?

Yet the night after she had first made love with Thomas, Anton made love to her, and for the first time in months. Stranger still, although she was claimed by Thomas, absorbed by what she had discovered and knew she would discover, she went through the motions of compliance with Anton. Why? She did not have to. She did not even mean to. Yet she did. She despised herself for it, certainly, but that was hardly the point, compared with the knowledge that if Anton had come into her bed the night before (before making love with Thomas) she would have said No, or implied No – but of course Anton would not have come, he only made love to her because of Thomas.

Who, then, was this person in Martha who first of all signalled to her husband, her legal possessor (or some kind of possessor) that she had been unfaithful to him, and who then went on (without Martha knowing about it, let alone sanctioning it) to signal invitations to him, because apparently she had to buy this disliked husband’s compliance, even forgiveness. And by offering him her sex!

Martha lay awake after Anton’s making love to her, not because of Thomas about whom, even after the first time of making love with him, she had no doubts at all, but about Anton who had suddenly become a frightening unknown country.

She thought: Suppose I said to Anton: ‘You’ve made love to me tonight not even because you’re jealous, but because certain instincts have been touched, so that you have to reestablish possession of me’ – well, what would he say? He’d look at her outraged, even disgusted. What sort of conventional attitudes was she putting on him? And what instincts? Had she not had a lover, with his agreement, for months? And while his body had been aggressive, violent, even painful, his words had been that of a dear old friend or comrade, making love with an old bed-fellow out of a playfully freakish impulse! Rather pleasant, really, his wry but jaunty smile said, as he pulled up his pyjamas and tied their neat white cord, to make love to a wife with whom one has such civilized friendly arrangements – yes, civilized, that’s what his smile said he felt. And he neatly arranged his long, handsome limbs in bed, smiling at Martha as he turned out the light and turned a back which signalled in its own language, right across anything he might have felt: Very well then – but who owns you? I do! And Martha could feel her body wanting to assume a sort of silly, sly, giggling posture which said: Oh, so that’s what you think, is it?

It was all humiliating, ridiculous … she could not let it happen again. She had to cut Anton out of her consciousness, had to bring down a curtain in herself and shut him out. Otherwise she would get ill. There she was, sharing a flat with him, cooking his food, going out with him sometimes, lying in a twin bed every night in a shared bedroom. But she was not there: she had knotted her emotions tight with Thomas and shut Anton out.

Even so, she was on the edge all the time of being ill. It was never far off. This was not at all the vague, tight tension of before Thomas, which had been not so much the threat of illness as the illness itself: a perpetual dry inner trembling, a super-brightness, extra-attention, a lightness of her being – the stage on to which might walk, at any time, the disembodied emotions she could not give soil and roots to within herself.

No: this was something quite different, on a different level – directly physical. If she let her connection with Thomas weaken; if she let her – what? Body? (but what part of it?) remember Anton and that he was her husband, well, her nerves reacted at once and in the most immediately physical way. She vomited. Her bladder became a being in the flesh of her lower stomach, and told her it was there and on guard. It did not like what she was doing – did not like it at all. Her stomach, her intestines, her bladder complained that she was the wife of one man and they did not like her making love with another.

But of course, none of this could be told to Anton, or even mentioned to him. They were being civilized, he and she; they made civilized arrangements about marriage when it was not a success, and lived together like brother and sister, sharing single beds in a small bedroom, saying things like: ‘Did you have a good day, Anton?’

‘Yes, very good. I’m reorganizing that whole department. Yes, I may be an enemy alien and a damned German, but I’m organizing their freight department for them.’

‘And about time too, I’m sure.’

‘And I went to see Colonel Brodeshaw. After all, he is Member of Parliament for this constituency.’

‘Oh, good, can he help you?’

‘I think he wants to. I begin to think that Marxist theory underrates the role that the democratic consciousness plays in the British way of life. It is not only a mask for reaction, it is not just hypocrisy.’

‘Oh, you think not?’

‘No. Although he is a proper old Blimp, he is really very decent.’