Landlocked

‘Which of us has got a contact with this group?’ Joss asked Martha. She stared back in embarrassed amazement. Joss was asking her in front of Solly? Had Joss gone crazy? Or – was it possible? – had Joss, too, ‘gone bad’?

‘It is none other than Athen, your Greek comrade,’ said Solly, for Martha.

Here Johnny Capetenakis came in, with two plates balanced on his two held-out palms, his face offering them a gratified smile which preceded the food like its smell – a hot teasing aroma of garlic, lemon and oil. He set before Joss, before Solly, spikes stuck with glistening pieces of lamb, lightly charred onion rings, tiny half-tomatoes, their skins wrinkled and dimmed with heat and their flesh sprinkled with rosemary, smooth whole mushrooms, curls of bacon striped pink and white. These were displayed on large mounds of yellow rice.

‘Without you, we’d die of hunger,’ said Joss.

‘I’m still using the saffron from before the war,’ said the Greek. ‘When it’s finished, then I really don’t know.’

‘You’ll have to grow it,’ said Martha.

‘The war’s going to end, cheer up,’ said Joss.

Johnny stood smiling benevolently as the brothers began to eat. Then he went out.

‘Athen and Thomas Stern,’ said Solly.

‘Oh, is Thomas back in town, good,’ said Joss. He looked up for some bread and there was Martha, still standing and waiting. ‘I’m here,’ he excused himself, ‘to eat kebab with my little brother. I didn’t know there was anything else.’

‘Then I’m going.’

‘Yes. I’ll deal with my ever-loving brother for you.’

‘Obviously.’

‘What do you want me to do? If the Africans have started something – then about time too, and we should help them. And keep the nonsense out of it – the contradictions.’

He did not look up – his head was bent over his food. Martha stood watching the brothers eat. She was hungry, but she had promised to eat with her mother. Inside her opened up the lit space on to which, unless she was careful (this was not the moment for it), emotions would walk like actors and begin to speak without (apparently) any prompting from her. This empty lit space was because of the half-dozen rooms she had to run around, looking after. The tall lit space was not an enemy, it was where, at some time, the centre of the house would build itself. She observed, interested, that it was now, standing there looking at the Cohen boys, the antagonists, that the empty space opened out under its searchlights.

Feeling her silence, first Joss, then Solly, lifted their heads to look at her. She saw the two men, both with loaded forks in their hands, their heads turned sideways to look at her. She began to laugh.

‘She thinks we are funny,’ said Joss to Solly.

‘She’s laughing at us,’ said Solly to Joss.

‘Well, I’ll see you around, anyway,’ she said to Joss.

‘I don’t think you will.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m thinking of settling up North. I’m going up to spy out the land tomorrow.’

‘Ah, I see!’ Everything explained at last, Martha began to laugh again. She stopped, as she felt this laughter begin to burst up like flames, in the middle of the great empty space.

‘She sees,’ said Solly to Joss.

‘But what does she see?’ said Joss to Solly.

‘I might have known,’ said Martha. ‘Joss is leaving the country, and so of course he doesn’t care. And neither would I, in his place.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Joss, suddenly, not looking at her, but filling his mouth.

‘There won’t be anybody left in this place a week after the war ends. Off you all go, and the moment you leave, it’s just too bad about us.’ She left the intimate, odorous little room with the two men bent over their plates, pressed her way through the tables crammed with the RAF, said goodbye to Johnny at the entrance desk, and gained the fresh air and her bicycle. She was thinking: Damn Joss. Suddenly she remembered his ‘speak for yourself’. It occurred to her, for the first time, that perhaps he was there under false pretences too, and that in fact he was concerned to stop Solly knowing what he was up to? In which case, she was an idiot, had proved herself an utter … She bent to unlock her bicycle, and Solly’s arms came around her waist from behind.

A couple of weeks ago there was a meeting on the Allied invasion of France – ‘Second Front: At last!’ Solly had been there, heckling. He had waited outside afterwards, to heckle again, privately. He and Martha had walked through the emptying streets, in bitter argument, their antagonism fed by their ten years’ knowledge of each other. Outside Martha’s door they had embraced, violently, as if they had been flung together.

‘Sex,’ Solly had said, ‘the great leveller,’ and she had laughed, but not enough.

Now she turned, swiftly, putting the bicycle between herself and Solly. Grinning, he laid his hand on her shoulder, where it sent waves of sensation in all directions.

‘Surely, you’d admit there’s some meeting-ground?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘Liar.’

‘What did you have in mind, that we’d go rolling around over the pamphlets in the office, in between calling each other names like dirty Trotskyist?’

‘Dogmatic Stalinist, these things can always be managed, if there’s a will.’

‘But there isn’t.’

Martha knew she was smiling, direct into his smiling face. She could not stop. Their faces approached each other as if a hand behind either head pushed them together. They stood on the pavement, the bicycle between them, and a third of an inch of glass between them and the customers inside the Piccadilly. The bicycle pedal grazed Martha’s bare leg, and she said ‘Damn,’ and pulled herself away.

‘What a pity,’ said Solly softly.

‘Yes, I daresay.’

She got on her bicycle and pedalled off.

If she lived, precariously, in a house with half a dozen rooms, each room full of people (they being unable to leave the rooms they were in to visit the others, unable even to understand them, since they did not know the languages spoken in the other rooms) then what was she waiting for, in waiting for (as she knew she did) a man? Why, someone who would unify her elements, a man would be like a roof, or like a fire burning in the centre of the empty space. Why, then, was she allowing herself to respond to Solly as she had the other night, and would again, unless she made certain she wouldn’t meet him? What had she got in common with Solly – except sex, she added, but couldn’t laugh, for the truth was she was in a flaming, irritable, bad temper. She cycled like a maniac between lorries, cars, bicycles, the headlights dazzling, scarlet rear-lights winking. She did not like Solly, apart from not approving of him.

Two blocks down from the Piccadilly was an Indian grocer and over it the new office, held in the name of the departed Jasmine Cohen. It was used by half a dozen organizations who shared the rent. Martha let herself up dark unlit stairs, and opened, in the dark, a door, and turned the light on in a dingy little office which was the same as every political office she had ever seen. A small dark dapper man in the uniform of a Greek officer rose from a bench by the window. Athen smiled and said: ‘Matty, I’m glad it was you who came in.’

‘What are you doing sitting alone in the dark?’

He did not answer, she looked quickly at his face and went on: ‘I’ve come to pick up some books for Johnny Lindsay, and I’m late.’

‘But I must see you. When shall I see you?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘But I have to go back to camp tonight.’

‘After Johnny Lindsay I must go and see my father and then I suppose I’ve got to go home.’

She heard her own voice, desperate rather than angry, and raised her eyes to the grave judging eyes of the Greek.