Landlocked

‘Your father is very ill,’ he said, in rebuke.

‘I know that.’

‘And how is your husband?’

He had said your husband, instead of Anton, deliberately, and she smiled, freeing herself from his judgement. ‘Ah, Athen,’ she said affectionately, ‘you know, meeting you I’m always reminded …’

He smiled and nodded, and did not ask what she had been going to say. People know what their roles are, the parts they play for others. They can fight them, or try to change; they can find their roles a prison or a support: Athen approved his role. Possibly he had even chosen it. He was a conscience for others. He burned always, a severe, self-demanding steady flame, at which people laughed, but always with affection; from which they took their bearings.

‘Sometimes you seem to me almost impossibly naïve,’ she said apologetically, and he went on smiling, looking closely at her.

‘Naïve? Because I remind you of your marriage with Anton?’

‘I’m not married.’

‘Martha, are you well?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, irritable. But his look refused this and she said: ‘I may be well, but I’m certainly in a very odd state. I don’t think I understand anything.’ Tears filled into her eyes, frightening her because they came so often.

Athen took her by the hand, sat her on the wooden bench by the wall, sat by her, stroked her hand. ‘Martha, dear comrade Martha, do you know something strange? I was thinking just as you came in, you know when I was a poor boy selling newspapers on the street in Athens, if someone had told me then that a white person in Africa could be a socialist and that I would be the comrade of such a person, then I should have laughed.’

‘Well, you would have been right to laugh.’

‘Why do you say that? You have many bad thoughts, Martha.’

‘Is that a bad thought? Why? When the war’s over, you’ll go back and sell newspapers and you’ll live on tuppence-halfpenny. You’ll be poor again. Suppose I never leave this country, suppose I never can get out? Well, what do you imagine we’d have in common then?’

‘Martha, Martha. Why do you suppose this and that? After the war we will fight till we have communism in Greece, and then you will come to visit me in Greece and be my friend.’

‘Perhaps so.’

‘I wanted to see you and talk. Now you have to go.’

‘Yes. I’m late. I always seem to be late.’

‘How is Johnny Lindsay?’

‘He’s very ill. I do nothing but run from one sick-bed to another. And I hate it and resent it, I hate illness.’

Athen sat smiling, his small neat hand enclosing her hot one.

‘My father’s dying. He lies and thinks of nothing but himself and his medicines. And Johnny’s dying – but he’s a good man, so he thinks of other people all the time.’

‘Well then, comrade Martha?’

‘Nothing. That’s all. My life’s always like this, it’s always been like that – very crude and ridiculous.’

After a minute he took his hand away from hers and sat, straight, his two hands on his knees, looking at the wall. She felt rejected, but could not withdraw anything.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘it’s time I went home. I live from day to day, waiting to be sent home. I am so much with my friends, in my mind, that perhaps I cannot be a good friend to my friends here.’

‘Haven’t you heard anything?’

‘They won’t send us back unless they have to – why should they send back six fully trained pilots when they know we’ll escape and join the communists the moment we get home? Of course not, if I were in their shoes I would keep us here too.’

‘I’m sorry, Athen. I suppose it’s the same for everyone – we just have to wait, that’s all.’

‘I want to talk with you about something important. If you have time when you have visited your father, then come to the Piccadilly.’

‘I’ll try. What is it?’

‘I’ve been talking to a man who lives in Sinoia Street. I want you to help him and his friends.’

After a moment, she laughed. He waited, smiling, for her to explain.

‘You have been talking to a man who lives in Sinoia Street. I’ve just come from Solly and Joss. They told me about contacts in the Coloured Quarter with the right sort of ideas who have contacts with Africans.’

‘Well, perhaps I might have said that too,’ he said, laughing.

‘Oh no, oh no, you wouldn’t, and that’s the point. Anyway, I’m going.’ From the door she said: ‘I saw Maisie this afternoon.’

‘That reminds me, Martha. I would very much like to talk to you about Maisie.’ She could not prevent herself searching his face to find out what he felt about Maisie, but he quickly turned to the window, away from her gaze.

She found the books Johnny wanted, and went out. In the street she looked up: the window was already dark, Athen had turned the light out again. A hand fell on her shoulder, which remembered Solly’s touch and knew that this solid pressure was not his. She turned to see a brown stout young man smiling at her. ‘What are you doing, Matty? I was wondering who’d be in the office, and here you are standing gazing up into the sky with your mouth open.’

‘My mouth wasn’t open! How are you? I heard you were back.’

‘Only for a week. It’s still my fate to be banished in W …’

‘Then that’s a pity. Your study group’s collapsed.’

Thomas Stern had been in this city the year before, for a couple of months, during which short time his energy had created a state of activity not far from ‘the group’s’ achievements at its height. Study groups, lectures, etc., flourished for a few weeks, and stopped when he left.

‘If a study group’s dependent on one person, then it’s not worth anything.’

This didacticism was so like him that she laughed, but said: ‘I’m late, Thomas.’

‘Naturally. But when you’re finished what you’re late for come and have supper at Dirty Dick’s?’

‘I can’t. But if you want company, then Athen’s sitting in the office all by himself.’ She cycled off, calling back: ‘Next time you come up, give me a ring.’ But he had already gone inside the building.

In a few minutes she was there. In the squalid night of this part of the city, the little houses of the poor street Johnny lived in blazed out light, noise, music. Children ran about over the hardening mud ruts from the recently ended rainy season; or carried long loaves of bread to their mothers from the Indian shop where a portable gramophone stood jigging out thin music on an orange box outside the door. The gramophone was watched by a small and incredibly clean little Indian boy whose white shirt dazzled like a reproach in the dirty gloom.

The veranda of the house was nothing but bricks laid straight into the dust with a few feet of tin propped over it. Martha chained her bicycle to the yard fence. The door from the veranda opened direct into a brightly lit room which had in it a great many books, a straw mat over a rough brick floor, a table with four chairs all loaded with papers and pamphlets, and a bed where Johnny Lindsay lay, very still, very white, his eyes closed, breathing noisily. Beside him on one side sat Mrs Van der Bylt, her large firm person held upright on a small wooden chair; on the other was Flora, knitting orange wool which was almost the colour of her flaming shiny hair. At the foot of the bed a young man of twenty-two or three sat reading aloud, from a long report in that day’s News about conditions in the mining industry.

Flora, the pretty, blowzy middle-aged woman with whom the old miner had shared his life for ten years now, counted stitches and was obviously following her own thoughts. She smiled briefly at Martha, but it was Mrs Van who nodded at Martha to sit down. The young man, a teacher from the Coloured School, half-rose, and looked at Mrs Van whether to go on or not. Johnny opened his eyes to discover why the reading had stopped, saw Martha, filled labouring lungs and said: ‘Sit down, girlie,’ patting the bed. ‘They are making me stay in bed,’ he said, with the naughtiness of an invalid disobeying over-protective nurses. But in fact he was very ill, as Martha could see. She said: ‘Don’t talk. Look, here are the books.’ She laid them on the thin white counterpane, beside the old man’s very large hand where pain showed in the tense knuckles. Everything in this room was most familiar to Martha from her father’s sick-room: the smell of medicines, the attentive tactful people sitting around it, the invalid’s over-bright smile – and above all the look of shame in his eyes, the demand which said: This isn’t I – this humiliating noisily suffering body isn’t me.

‘Johnny, I’m terribly late, I must rush off.’