A Ripple from the Storm

They all laughed and became, instantly, ‘the group’.

‘Anyway,’ said Jackie, ‘all those social democrats and Trotskyists are spying on us. I caught Boris sniffing around in Black Ally’s Café yesterday.’

The group tightened still further out of its units.

‘I brought you here,’ Jackie said, lowering his voice, ‘to say that I’ve found out that all of us service types are likely to be posted at any moment.’

‘What makes you think that?’ demanded Corporal McGrew. He was shaken; alone of the airforce men he liked his stay in the Colony and did not want to leave.

‘I got young Peters in the canteen and screwed it out of him,’ said Jackie. There was a chorus of contemptuous exclamations. A great many men from the camp attended the Progressive Club meetings. They were mostly aircraftsmen and of a type: this last was not clearly understood, however, until a certain Sergeant Peters began attending their meetings: he was so unlike the others that comparisons were forced on them. He was a clipped, almost mincing young man with a habit of leaning forward over a question, head on one side, a disagreeable smile on his small pink lips, saying: ‘Do I take it that you mean to imply … ?’ Jackie Bolton, whose particular genius it was to establish a swift persuasive intimacy with people, had gone home one night on the camp bus with this youth who was being querulous because Andrew McGrew had said across the floor at the meeting that he was a typical member of the corrupt petty bourgeoisie. Sergeant Peters was slightly drunk. He had told Jackie that he had been appointed by the camp commander to attend all the ‘Red’ meetings in town so as to take down the names of all the airmen present. He turned in a list of these names, with a short précis of what each had said, after every meeting. He was unaffected by Jackie’s jovial contempt for him; and a remarkable situation developed where, while informing on his fellows to the commander, this instinctive spy would then immediately go to Jackie Bolton and tell him everything he had said, for as he explained: ‘If the Labour Government gets in and you Reds take over, things might be quite different at Home and I don’t want to be on the wrong side.’

‘He told me that I and William are for the high jump. The CO’s got it into his head that we are extremely subversive.’

‘Judging from the way you went on tonight I’m not surprised,’ said Andrew.

‘Yes,’ said Jasmine firmly, bracing herself to criticize her man, although she was fighting down tears because he was leaving. ‘We’ve got to discuss your behaviour, Jackie.’

‘What it amounts to is this,’ said Martha. ‘That because you are leaving you don’t care what sort of difficulties you make for us.’

‘Oh, I can’t be bothered with all this small-town nonsense,’ said Jackie airily. And he got up from the grass and strolled off towards the pavilion, hands low in his pockets, whistling.

The six people who remained were silent: they were agreeing without words that since Comrade Bolton was leaving them, they would let it all drop.

Comrade Bolton was now strolling beside the clumps of moon-blotched lilies as if enjoying a pleasant evening walk.

Anton Hesse, who had not said a word until now, demanded: ‘Comrades, I must have permission to speak.’ He was coldly, contemptuously angry: his anger tautened their sense of responsibility.

‘Comrade Anton,’ said Andrew, with the small tinge of irony his manner always held when Anton was in question.

‘We have been behaving like a bunch of amateurs

‘I agree,’ interrupted Jasmine eagerly. Her eyes were following Jackie’s dark shape at the far end of a path; her face was contracted with pain, yet she was listening closely to the argument: ‘We’ve made every mistake we could make. We had decided, quite correctly, that the Aid for Our Allies should be kept respectable and unpolitical, that its task was to raise money for medical supplies for the Soviet Union and nothing else, and that it should be run by that bunch of social democrats – under our guidance, of course. Now, because of Comrade Bolton it will most likely lose all its sponsors; Trotskyist Krueger will have control of it because he’s in with Gates, unless Jasmine makes it a full-time job controlling it: Jasmine has allowed herself to be secretary again when she already has far too much to do.’

Here Jasmine said demurely: ‘Oh, I don’t mind. I can manage.’

‘No,’ said Anton sharply. ‘That is nonsense. The essence of good organization is never to do anything oneself that someone else can do as well.’ Here they all laughed, but Anton said, ‘Yes, yes, yes. You laugh. But you wouldn’t laugh if you had learned anything at all. The basic trouble is, we have neglected our theory. The sort of thing that happened tonight is a direct result of not seriously analysing the situation …’

Here they smiled: the phrase, analysing the situation, was peculiarly Anton’s.

‘Yes, comrades. Analysing the situation. And now. It will soon be eleven o’clock. The airforce comrades must get to their buses. But I propose that we convene a meeting to fundamentally reorganize the work of this group. Because things cannot continue like this.’

Here Jackie Bolton returned to the group, and seated himself beside William instead of beside Jasmine. The two men already had a look of being distant from the rest. They all realized that Jackie had been making his farewells to the park and, in a way, to them all: he was already thinking of the next place the fortunes of war would drop him into.

‘Very well,’ said Andrew. ‘I agree with Comrade Anton.’ Andrew and Anton always agreed with each other although they could not address two words to each other without the hostility sounding in their voices. ‘We must have a special meeting. I take it everyone agrees. Tomorrow night there is the committee meeting of the Progressive Club. The night after there is a five o’clock meeting of the Sympathizers of Russia. At eight o’clock at our office there will be a special business meeting of the group. Attendance obligatory. No excuses will be accepted.’ He stood up, saying to the other two men from the camp: ‘We’ll miss our bus.’

The three airforce men became a group separate from the civilians, led by Jackie, who said in cockney: ‘Cerm on, mates, cerm on, get moving naow.’ They went off into the shadows under the trees. Anton and the three women remained. Anton nodded at them, formally, as was his way, and he departed in another direction, without offering to see any of them home. Now the girls separated: Jasmine to her home where she would be met by silence; Marjorie to the boarding-house; and Martha to the room she was renting in the house of the widow Carson which was very close, being opposite one of the gates of the park.

Martha said to herself: I must walk slowly and enjoy the moonlight. She was conscious that the moment she left the group she felt as let down as if a physical support had been removed. ‘I’m not alone enough – I should enjoy it when I am.’ But she was almost running across the park. As usual a demon of impatience was snapping at her heels, pushing her into the future. Her dissatisfaction at the evening, at Jackie Bolton, at the months of her life in the group had crystallized in the form of words Anton Hesse had used. They had been behaving like a bunch of amateurs. Well, the day after tomorrow some serious analysis would set them on the right path; as these words slid through her brain it was as if they rolled up the past months and pushed them away. Two days ago, walking through the park with Jasmine, the girls had agreed, as if talking about some period a long way behind them, that they had been very romantic and irresponsible when they had joined the group. That conversation with Jasmine now seemed a long time ago. So much experience and active learning had been crammed into each day of the four months since she had walked out of her husband’s house that she thought of herself as an entirely different person.

The white gates of widow Carson’s house gleamed just ahead. Now Martha did walk slowly. She knew that as soon as she got inside she would fall over on to her bed and sleep, and she had to think: she was thinking that she had been informed William was leaving, and she ought to be unhappy about it. But she was not. She was relieved. Two days ago William had come to her room to say that ‘he had reason to believe’ that Douglas, her husband, had put pressure on to the camp authorities to get him posted. More, that ‘he had evidence’ that Douglas was thinking of citing him as corespondent in a divorce case. Martha had listened to this, conscious of dislike for William. Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

When Douglas had threatened her with the machinery of the law, she had shrugged and laughed. When William spoke of ‘getting legal advice’ and she understood that he was enjoying the idea of a fight with Douglas over the possession of her – then, for a few moments, she had seen the two men as one, and identical with the pompous, hypocritical and essentially male fabric of society. That was why she now felt relief at the idea of William’s going. Yet, in the eyes of this small town, ‘Matty Knowell had left her husband and a child for an airforce sergeant.’ She succeeded in suppressing her amazed dismay at this view of herself by the device of never thinking of the people who, so short a time ago, had made up her life. She lived in ‘the group’ and did not care about the judgments of anyone else. She felt as if she were invisible to anyone but the group.

Outside the Carson gates she stopped. This was because what she referred to as ‘coping with Mrs Carson’ was becoming more of a strain daily. So much of a strain in fact that now she abruptly swerved off so as to walk around the block and collect her energies for what might follow.

When Martha rented this room she had informed the widow that she intended to live with William Brown: she had spoken defiantly: for the moment Mrs Carson represented the society she despised. But Mrs Carson had merely seemed puzzled. The irregularities of behaviour under the outward forms of conformity in this small Colonial town might be more easily tolerated than in, let us say, a small town in Britain, but they did not take the shape Martha insisted on for herself. The widow Carson did once inquire if Martha was going to marry Sergeant Brown when the war was over, but Martha said, obviously irritated, that she didn’t know. Mrs Carson sighed and remarked that her own daughter, now happily married to a Johannesburg businessman, had been unhappy in her first two marriages. Martha did not seem to see any parallel. It had crossed Mrs Carson’s mind that perhaps Martha believed in free love? But the phrase had associations which did not fit in with Martha’s manner, which was alarmingly unfrivolous. She therefore ceased to think about it; she returned to her private preoccupations and was interested in Martha only in so far as the young woman would enter them with her.

The first night Martha was in Mrs Carson’s house, she had woken at two in the morning at a noise in the passage outside her door. She found the widow, a gaunt figure in a cretonne dressing-gown, her grey hair in draggle-tails around her bony grey face, with her ear bent to the keyhole of the door that led to the veranda. Mrs Carson had taken her arm between two trembling hands and demanded: ‘Did you hear a noise?’ Martha had recognized a form of neurosis only too familiar to her. The widow Carson’s life was a long drama played against fantasies about her servants. She never kept one longer than a month: they left for the most part in a state of bewilderment.

Mrs Carson had been left well-off by her husband and only let a room because she was afraid to be alone at night. She always sat up until Martha came home, alone or with William, then dragged heavy iron bars across the doors and fitted specially-made steel screens across the windows. She went to sleep in a fortress. Yet more than once Martha had seen Mrs Carson, late at night, standing motionless under the big jacaranda tree at the gate, watching the house. She was engaged in some dream of a black marauder breaking into the house in spite of all its bars and barricades and finding it empty. As for Martha, she slept as usual with her windows and doors open, but promised Mrs Carson to keep the door between her own room and the rest of the house locked.

Collecting herself to face Mrs Carson was not an effort, for charity’s sake, to sink herself in the sick woman’s private world, but rather an effort to test her own vision of the world against the other. Mrs Carson, she told herself, was the product of a certain kind of society, and the Mrs Carsons would cease to exist when that society came to an end. Her patience with the terrible obsessed woman was because she saw her as a variety of psychological dinosaur. But more than once, after sitting with Mrs Carson behind barred windows and doors, assuring her that no black man with evil intentions lurked outside, she had returned to her own room invaded by despair. The wings of elation had folded under her. She even caught herself thinking: Supposing she’s stronger than we are?

Therefore, before entering the big empty house at night, when she was by herself and not supported by William, she always hardened herself and strengthened the buttresses and arches of her own dream: over there, she thought, meaning in the Soviet Union – over there it’s all finished, race prejudice and anti-Semitism.

She made the trip around the block fast, shivering a little, for the moonlight lay cold everywhere, and she had no coat. She intended to go as silently as possible to her own room, but the front door stood slightly ajar, and she knew Mrs Carson waited just inside it. She cautiously pushed the door in on the darkened passage, and the widow said: ‘Oh, is that you, dear?’ Martha felt her arm encircled in a bony trembling grasp and said cheerfully: ‘Yes, it’s me.’ She switched on the light with her free hand, so that the passage showed its polished bare boards, its fading pink-flowered wallpaper, and a great glaring brass bowl on a wooden stand, filled with marigolds and zinnias. Mrs Carson wore her cretonne dressing-gown, and her head was covered over with curlers. ‘You didn’t see anything as you came in?’ she demanded, her face white and gaunt, her eyes gleaming dark in deep sockets.

‘Nothing. There really isn’t anything. You should go to bed now.’

‘Today Saul looked at me in a very strange way.’

‘I expect you imagined it.’

‘I’ll give him the sack in the morning. He’s got ideas in his head. I can see he has thoughts in his head.’

‘I’ll bar the door for you and then you go to bed,’ said Martha.

Mrs Carson said: ‘Thank you, dear.’ She sounded, as always, disappointed: Martha had not said what she wanted to hear. Suddenly she remarked, in an ordinary voice: ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

‘Who?’

‘Yes, you’ve got a visitor.’ Then, her voice returning to the dragging insistent note of her obsession: ‘You won’t forget to lock your door tonight?’

‘No, I promise.’

Mrs Carson knew that Martha slept with the door open, but as long as she heard in words that it was locked, she was satisfied, apparently.

‘I’ll sack Saul in the morning. There was quite a nice-looking boy who came around this afternoon looking for work. I’ll give him a try.’

Martha’s visitor was her husband.

Douglas was sitting with his back to the window in such a way that he could watch both doors. From his attitude, which was tense and suspicious, Martha saw that he must have been there some time, and that while he was waiting he had, as she put it, ‘been working himself up into a state’. His face had the swollen reddened look which meant she could not take anything he said seriously.

He said: ‘I’m sorry if this is an inconvenient time to call.’

She said nothing, so he insisted: ‘It might have been inconvenient.’

‘Not at all,’ she said, falling automatically into meaningless politeness.