A Proper Marriage (53 page)

William then invited them to learn to read newspapers with more discrimination. He pointed out that until perhaps two months before there might have been twelve people in the whole colony - excluding the men of the Air Force, of course, he added involuntarily, causing a small chill to fall for a moment — who knew that Soviet tanks were not made of cardboard and that the Soviet people were not abject serfs. And these twelve people - he would say twelve for the sake of argument - were better informed not because they were in any way more intelligent than the ladies and gentlemen now seated before him, but because they had learned to treat the newspapers with the suspicion they deserved. As for the heroism of the Soviet people — but here the applause crashed out again, and he waited for it to stop, There were piles of books and pamphlets at the door, he concluded, and he invited them to buy them on their way out. With this he smiled, and retired from the platform by jumping lightly down from it to the floor, a feat which earned fresh handclapping and a few appreciative jeers from some men in uniform at the back. To which he responded with a half-mocking bow, and made his way to the table next to the door, where he seated himself behind barricades of literature.

Jasmine got up and thanked ‘our young friend from the Air Force’ for his contribution, and appealed for money to buy medical supplies ‘for our gallant allies’. In a few moments the sum of over a thousand pounds had been collected; bank notes and cheques appeared everywhere, and the air was thick with the sound of chinking silver.

The meeting was over. Martha, crushed in a jam of people by a pillar, saw Mr and Mrs Maynard go past. Mrs Maynard was saying, ‘I think one might drop a word in the right quarter.’

Martha squeezed through to the table, which was now nearly empty of its books and pamphlets, and heard one of the men in uniform, a tall, dark, hollow-faced man with a satirical look, remark, ‘Well, what a performance – but it was the wrong audience.’

‘Not for collecting money,’ returned Jasmine with a small satisfied smile. She turned and saw Martha, who was waiting to be gathered in then and there to the bosom of this group of people where she knew she belonged. But Jasmine merely said, ‘Well, what did you think? Not bad, considering.’

‘Oh, it was marvellous!’ said Martha indignantly. ‘Come and have some tea with me,’ she added hopefully.

‘I can’t, I have a meeting,’ said Jasmine at once. Then, as Martha looked disappointed, she said, I’ll ring you tomorrow.’

With this Martha had to be content. She was pushing her way out in the tail of the retreating crowd, when William came after her and said, ‘Can’t we sell you some lit?’

‘What’s lit?’ she asked.

‘We feel you should do some reading.’ And with this he handed her some books. ‘That will be twelve and sixpence.’

She found the money hastily and with difficulty, reflecting that to him she was rich: he was not likely to understand the god, middle age, for whose sake she was always short of money. Then she thanked him. Her look was such that he forgot for a moment that she was a soul to be saved.

He asked intimately, ‘Well, did you like it?’

‘Wonderful,’ she said again eagerly.

He smiled, and said, unexpectedly blushing, ‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow afternoon - if you’re free.’

She left, feeling like a child left out of a party, because they did not at once invite her to that meeting to which they would all now go. But the way William had blushed made
her feel it would not be long before she would be one of them.

At home she glanced cursorily into the nursery, where Caroline was asleep in her cot, and Alice beside her on the divan. Then she retired to her bed with the books. She read through them one after another; the dawn was coming up red behind the moonflowers when she had finished.

She had a very confused idea of what she had read; she was content to leave the mass of facts and figures until later. But behind these dull bricks of truth rose the glorious outline of a view of life she had not suspected. The emotion that gripped her was mostly rage: she was twenty-two; she had been born during that revolution, which, to say the least, had been important in the world’s development, and yet this was the first time she had been told anything about it. Her rage was even greater because she had been such a willing accomplice in this process of not thinking. For there had been plenty of moments when she might have fitted a few facts together to make a truth. She had not. Her upbringing, her education, her associates, the newspapers, had all conspired to bring her to the age of twenty-two, an adult, that is, without feeling more about what was going on in the socialist sixth of the world - which happened to be the title of one of the books - than a profound reluctance to think about it at all.

Even now, as she sat there, still dressed, on the edge of her bed, she had two clear and distinct pictures of that other part of the world - one noble, creative and generous, the other ugly, savage and sordid. There was no sort of connection between the two pictures. As she looked at one, she wanted to fling herself into the struggle, to become one of the millions of people who were creating a new world; as she looked at the other, she felt stateness, futility.

What, then, was the cynicism that certainly afflicted all the people around her who thought at all? It no longer seemed even mildly attractive. With one sudden movement of her whole being she discarded it, and committed herself to the other. It was as if her eyes had been opened and her
ears made to hear; it was like a rebirth. For the first time in her life she had been offered an ideal to live for.

But the immediate political emotion of anyone shaken suddenly into thinking is anger: she was filled with rage at having been cheated; she felt as if she had been lied to, led by the nose, made a fool of, all her life. She was as angry with herself as she was with the people whom she saw in this beautiful naïve moment of awakening as an organized and cynical group who consciously devoted themselves to deceiving her and her generation out of their birthright. What she wanted, in short, was some sort of revenge: if the first political emotion of people like Martha is anger, the second is blind anarchy; if anyone had asked her in that moment to take a gun in her hand and go out to destroy those people who had been making a fool of her, she would have gone without a second thought. Luckily, however, there was no one to make any such demand.

Instead she went to the front veranda, where the day’s
News
had been flung down, and opened the paper to find the report of last night’s meeting. It merely said that a large sum of money had been collected for our gallant allies at a well-attended meeting. She threw it aside, and went to Caroline. She bathed her, fed her, despatched her to the garden with Alice, and waited for Jasmine to ring her. Time went past and Jasmine did not ring. Martha therefore rang Jasmine. The small quiet voice said that she could not come to see Martha, because she had a meeting. It was then ten in the morning.

In the last twelve hours, the banal and tired sound of the word ‘meeting’ had quite vanished for Martha; and she sat and thought wistfully of those adventurous gatherings from which she was shut out. She saw Jasmine on the platform yesterday, so efficient, so self-effacing, devoted. Nothing could have appeared more glamorous than such a role.

The outward form of her day was untroubled by the violence of her impatience. She looked after Caroline and attended to the housework as usual; she felt herself to be a completely different person. Later she remembered that William was coming. She did not want to see William. She
wanted Jasmine, who had, like herself, been brought up in this country, fed on the colour bar and race hatred. For William things seemed altogether too easy; he had been born, or so it seemed, with pamphlets in his hand and clear convictions in his head.

When he arrived, she offered him tea like a hostess, quite determined to say nothing to him of what she felt; besides, he was nothing but a boy. He shed packets of books and papers on to chairs, removed his jacket, flung down his cap. He would never be anything but a civilian. He was one of the thousands of British soldiers who went through the war out of intellectual conviction: it was a war against fascism and it was his duty to fight. But he never felt anything but a civilian dressed up. The difference between men like William and the passionate soldiers of the war could be seen the moment those other groups entered the colony to train as pilots - the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, the French, the Poles.

As things were, William had an afternoon off between doing clerk’s work for the Air Force and addressing a meeting on Hegel, and he was prepared to take an interest in Martha.

In the camp it was said, with the mixed pride and contempt appropriate for occupation forces, that the women in the town were a pushover. His tone towards Martha was of a tentative gallantry, but Martha at once reacted against it. She felt that this commonplace flirtatiousness was nothing less than an insult to the revolution itself. She was cold and polite. He instantly became - as she put it - sensible, and she was able to like him again.

He began talking of the meeting last night — not a bad show at all he considered; but she interrupted him. ‘Look, I want to know …’ Her tone was warm and eager, startling in contrast to the coldness of only a minute before. ‘I’ve been thinking - well, if there’s something going on, I want to be part of it.’

‘What makes you think anything is going on?’ he inquired.

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said crossly.

He reflected for a moment, perched on the arm of a chair,
and seemed embarrassed. After a while he suggested, ‘You could join the committee of Help for Our Allies.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ protested Martha.

‘But it’s very important work.’ Then he confirmed her instinct that there were further degrees of initiation, by remarking, ‘How about Sympathizers of Russia?’

She felt snubbed. ‘Look,’ she said, direct, humorous, but resentful. ‘You don’t have to - flannel, like this. If there’s a Communist group, I want to join it.’ She leaned forward eagerly, as if expecting to be absorbed into it that very instant.

‘But there isn’t one,’ he said.

She did not believe him. Seeing her disappointment, he said, ‘There really isn’t. I can’t go into it all now, but it’s not as easy as that.’

She was remembering the group of people against the wall the night before; they had the appearance of a welded whole, with their exchanged glances and shared understanding.

‘Besides,’ he went on, in a light but uncomfortable voice, ‘what would the old man say?’

‘Old man?’ she said stiffly.

‘Wives of civil servants really can’t do this sort of thing.’

‘You talk as if he were an idiot,’ she said angrily. ‘He’s progressive. He - reads the
New Statesman,’
she concluded triumphantly.

But at this he let out an involuntary and delighted chuckle, and got up, with the unmistakable air of a man escaping from a situation.

‘Don’t go,’ she said quickly.

He sat down again slowly, looking at her very seriously. He had half hoped to have a casual affair with her - though without any intention of being disappointed if he did not. He was a very practical young man, and he understood quite well that this warmth, this eagerness — she was looking at him now with an earnestness that he found quite delightful - would make anything casual impossible. But he had sized up the state of affairs in the colony within a week of arriving in it, and he had no intention of getting involved in this mess of broken marriages and passionate love affairs. His
plans for the future were definite, and did not include burdening himself with a spoilt colonial woman.

But she was attractive; and that eager sincerity was warming him out of common sense. He was on the point of being in love with her.

As for Martha, she had understood that he was not at all a mere boy, a child. On the contrary, compared with Douglas it was he who was the man. He was not like the immature young men that emerge from the universities, he was not like the boys of the Club. He had come from something quite different: a small, decent, upper-working-class family with roots in the labour movement. He had gone steadily and sensibly through school, and afterwards taken courses at night schools to study what he needed to know while he learned printing. The war had given him leisure, which he devoted to philosophy and physics. He was not ambitious, but he knew what he wanted. Which was to get through the war, take a few more courses, and qualify for what interested him - he wanted to be an engineer. In due course he would make a sensible marriage.

Martha asked, in that eager way which invited him to share with her the exquisite and unique experience which was his life, ‘Tell me, I want to know, how did you join the Communist Party?’

‘I was never a member of the Party,’ he said at once.

She wilted away from her eagerness as if finally disillusioned. She appeared critical.

He found himself piqued; unpleasant to lose this approval so soon! He set himself to explain. ‘I didn’t approve of the Party’s policy during the phony war. So I didn’t join. I had reservations.’

The way he said ‘the Party’ struck her as comical. Not for the first time. After all, at least half the reporters, writers, civil servants, etc. - the intellectuals, in short - have at some time or another been in, around, or near the Communist Party, and ever afterwards they refer to it as ‘the Party’ as if there could never be another, even while most passionately engaged in pretending they know nothing of it. But William might say ‘the Party’ in that familiar, easy way; he was not
in it. Her vision of him had collapsed. From being a wholehearted crusader, he had become a cautious dealer in reservations. She had been regarding the alert, intelligent young face topped by the metal-bright hair as if it had been the face of the revolution itself; now she listened to a quiet analysis of the Stalin-Hitler pact and the phony war and heard a note she knew far too well; it was this: if William had been in charge of policy during that period, it would not have been as inefficient, clumsy and inadequate as it had been with other people in charge.