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Maisie said: ‘Funny, isn’t it, think of all the times you and I have been with the boys at parties. What I mean is it’s funny.’

Her shining, pink lips were parted in a smile asking Martha to express what, as usual, she could not. But Martha smiled and smiled. She had forgotten how to use her tongue. Meanwhile, from outside this scene, she watched a pretty young woman with bare shoulders smiling at a smiling fat woman. Then she saw this pretty girl look down at her hand, curiously. She was Martha, looking at her hand—extraordinary; it moved by itself, not on her will, but on its own—extraordinary, extraordinary, her hand, and very ugly, with its fingers like tools or talons.

Anton said, or had said recently: ‘Well, it’s not every night that we are going dancing.’ Martha heard these words and after a time looked around to connect the voice, if possible, with Anton. She saw a blond youth with a frighteningly direct, concentrated stare say these words—saw him, in a crowded beer hall lean forward to say (to some young edition of Millicent perhaps): ‘Well, comrade, it’s not every evening we have the time for going dancing.’ She
loved this correct, stiff boy, proudly taking out a girl (Grete perhaps—he was showing the rich girl the poor district he lived in?) and she smiled maternally at him where he sat disguised as Anton. And when Anton smiled at her, it was this boy who smiled. They, at least, liked each other, the stiff, dedicated boy and a Martha who understood his need for her and forgave it.

Then Anton and the red-headed woman had vanished and in their places were Maisie and Athen.

Where was Thomas? Martha tried to turn her head to find him but he had gone off somewhere.

Maisie was saying: ‘What do you think, Matty, tell Athen.’ Martha could not make out what she was supposed to tell Athen.

A small, dark Greek sat smiling, while light from the braziers flowed over him as if he sat in a red river.

Athen said: ‘Maisie, you must change your life.’

Martha saw how Maisie sat in her chair and laughed. Maisie shook with laughter, but Martha could not laugh outwardly, she could not even make her lips smile. But she laughed inwardly, she laughed and loved everything. She thought: I am good now. At this moment I
am
good. When I’m sober I must remember how I was good tonight. Meanwhile, she watched Maisie yell with laughter: a fat, yellow-haired woman with a red face, a wet-red-cheeked face, with minute broken veins in the skin, stretched her mouth laughing, and her inflamed blue eyes blinked tears. Her great, fat breasts shuddered with laughter. Martha looked at this gross Maisie and thought of the sweet-fleshed girl in the office of before the war: she thought of Maisie when she was a pregnant girl.

‘He keeps saying I should live differently,’ said Maisie, yelling with laughter.

‘I feel very sick,’ observed Martha.

‘Well, sit still, dear, and it will pass,’ said Maisie, transformed in a trice into a sensible ministrant behind a bar. Martha could see her breast resting in a reassuring white bulge on a slope of brown wood. Martha took a bite or two out of white, sweet flesh. Like blancmange. Insipid it was.
Boring. She smiled at Maisie and thought: If I said to Maisie, I’ve just taken a good bite out of your left breast, she’d say: That’s right, dear, well, have a drink of water, you’ll feel better. And Athen would say, But Martha, you must live differently.

She said, with difficulty, to Athen: ‘I’ve just taken a great bite out of Maisie’s breast.’ Concerned, he leaned forward, and his face came white out of the running red flame-light.

Then Maisie stood up, and she stood up. They took each other’s hands, and thus supported, they went unsteadily around the side of the building where a flower bed rested in a circle of raised stones around a tree. Here they were sick, and instantly they were both sober, resting side by side in cool starlight. Below them the valley, where an invisible stream sent up coiling white mist, a cold weight of dank water-smell, a smell of weedy, secretive dark river.

‘What am I going to do, Matty, what shall I do with my life?’ Martha heard these words, and wild sobs, and saw Maisie’s face, refined by starlight, with tears running down it. ‘What shall I do about my Rita? Binkie’s driving me mad and I don’t know what to do?’

Martha said nothing. The roots of her tongue were stunned by sorrow and everything she might say would be ridiculous.

‘Binkie says to me he’s got a woman he wants to marry but he loves me best of all and I say I don’t love him and he says he will marry the woman she’s a widow with two children of her own from the war and I say well marry her and good luck that’s all I can say.’

‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow, Maisie.’

‘Yes, come and see me tomorrow, you are my good pal, Matty, I don’t care what anyone says. Pals are the best thing in life.’

Then they carefully went back to the table. They all sat around the table. In front of them tall, slender, greenish bottles, clouded with cold, a flicker of orange fire in their glass depths. Inside the building the saxophone lamented and the drums beat for war.

Martha saw Athen lean forward towards Maisie.

He was earnest, serious, his dark, burning eyes holding her tired, sweet, blue eyes, which were fastened on him in the simple statement, I love you, Athen. And her mouth was held in a foolish, patient smile.

Across from Martha sat Thomas, his elbows on spread knees, his head bent to rest on his fists, swaying a little. He was a strong man in a brown suit, and Martha looked at him like a stranger and wondered what he was remembering. He swayed, and looked at the paving-stones under his feet while the red light moved on his rough, brown head.

Maisie said in a loud, childish voice: ‘Isn’t it funny, this time next year, where will we be? Athen will be in Greece…’ she was ticking them all off on fat, white fingers ‘…and Anton will be in Germany, and Matty will be…’ She smiled, hesitating, because she did not know whether to say aloud that Martha would not be with Anton. ‘And here we’ll be left, me and Thomas and Millicent.’

‘Not me,’ said Thomas.

‘What?’ said Anton.

‘Not me,’ said Thomas, lifting his head off his fists to look at them and then past them at the tree-trunks, at rocks, at the lifting line of the hill. His eyes encountered the glitter of the stars, and he fell back in his chair and gazed up at the sky. ‘Not me,’ he said, or muttered, and then Martha was in Thomas’s arms, dancing. They whirled around and around the low-ceilinged, white room, which was swept with currents of air from the women’s dresses, that flung out their skirts around the tall pillars who were the men holding them. She rested in Thomas’s arms and whirled around. She was tired and she rested in Thomas’s arms. She might very well go to sleep then and there, on his broad chest, as it whirled her round and round on the shifting coloured lights, on the steady pulse of the drums. They passed, and passed, and passed again, the open doors to the veranda where the flames flickered low in the braziers and the trees lifted airy crowns of silvered leaf to the stars.

‘Martha,’ said Thomas. ‘I’ll tell you something, because I feel like saying it. It isn’t true but if I was struck dead now I wouldn’t care.’

‘Of course,’ said Martha, laughing in her stomach, though her face was too stiff with sorrow to laugh. ‘Of course.’

Then it was very late and there was no music. People sat around the tables in a cold, late starlight. Now a small moon was half-risen behind the hill. The braziers revealed themselves to be cylinders of rusted iron punched with jagged holes, full of grey ash where a rosy gold glowed and dimmed as the wind came eddying down the hill past rocks and tree trunks.

The waiters stood yawning against the pillars of the verandas, tired, black men in dinner jackets and white aprons. The trees, like white birds tinted by dawn light or starlight, lifted their shadowed branches.

Millicent was lying with her wild, loosened hair spread over Anton’s chest. Martha watched, friendly and compassionate, how her husband gently, tenderly, lifted this half-drunk woman into a more comfortable position and looked down into her face. They all watched Anton, unconscious of himself and of them, as he smiled protectively at the woman sleeping against him. They all smiled at each other. No one wanted to go home. The tables were still full of people. The waiters stood and yawned in vain.

Martha had again discovered her hand. She sat opening and shutting her hand. It was monstrously, unbelievably ugly, like a weapon. Maisie had been crying. Her face was stretched with woe. It was a mask of dragging pain. One side of her mouth was pulled down, as if with pain or because it was paralysed. Her eyes were inflamed, they looked like little pig’s eyes. Then it seemed as if one eye was a great, red, scarred socket. Martha shook her head to clear her sight, and saw Maisie, a tired woman with a sad, smiling face looking at Athen. Martha’s hand provided fresh revelations. The shape made by her forefinger and thumb touching each other—it was like a revelation of brutality. Her hand was like a pair of pincers, the claw of a lobster, something cold and predatory. She looked at her left hand, astounded by its cruelty. Meanwhile her right was in the depths of Thomas’s hand, through which she received simple messages of warm health.

Her left hand,
her
hand—never had there been such an extraordinary thing as that circle of bone, lightly laid with flesh, like the beak of a bird, like a mouth opening and shutting, like…

Athen sat smiling. He said: ‘I’ll never forget tonight.’ Maisie turned her face towards him. Martha could only see the back of a coil of fair, loosened hair, a helpless-looking fat neck. Athen smiled gravely, from a distance, into the supplicating woman’s face.

Martha was full of pain for Maisie. She wanted to say to Athen—but what? Some kind of demand, a protest. Her mind worked fast, registered everything within miles—she felt everything together, the starlight thinning overhead, the charred smell of chilling iron from the braziers, stale, sour wine, cold metal from the table top. Thomas’s warm hand, the dark smell from the river. She was fused together and what she felt made it impossible that Athen should at last gravely bow to Maisie and go away from her to Greece.

She fought with her tongue, and at last said: ‘What about you?’ Incredible aggression had forced that question out, she had put behind it the energy of pure resentment. But it came out blurred; in spite of everything she felt her face set in a smile.

Athen looked at her courteously, distant.

He said: ‘Did you say something to me, Martha?’

‘Matty’s tight,’ said Anton.

‘Of course I’m tight,’ she said, clearly, smiling, proving that her tongue was not paralysed after all.

They went to the car. In a group of people behind them were Mr Tressell and Mrs Tressell—Sergeant Tressell and his wife. But Thomas did not look, he did not turn to look, it seemed he had forgotten his enemy, Sergeant Tressell. Behind them the hotel, apparently deserted, burned a hundred lights which went out, all at once. The stars had been absorbed into the thin grey of an early morning sky. But over the Indian Ocean the sun was rising, for a dark line of trees in the east marked a low horizon behind which a faint glow of rose pulsed strongly into pearl-grey cloud.

Before they started the car a bird had woken, tried its voice, and gone silent again.

Martha wanted to get into the back seat with Thomas, but order again prevailed, and she was in the front seat with Anton. Behind her, Millicent slept on Thomas’s shoulder, and Maisie sat bolt upright, her pale cheeks shaking with the movements of the car. In the centre of each cheek was a wild spot of pink, and her eyes were red with tears. Athen dozed. His head fell sideways on to Maisie’s shoulder. Martha saw the girl push her coat away from the bare skin of her shoulder, so that Athen’s head could lie on it.

So Maisie sat, hardly breathing, while Athen’s head lay shaking defenceless on her shoulder.

The others were all aware of Maisie and what she felt, and the car sped in silence across the hillsides under a reddening sky.

Jack Dobie and Martha sat opposite each other in Dirty Dick’s. Jack, to please Martha, had asked Johnny Capetenakis to cook special food, and they were eating it; although Jack did not like this food, kebabs on saffron rice, and would rather have been eating eggs and chips with the other customers.

Jack had been appointed member of a Select Committee on the condition of urban Africans. There were few suitable statistics. He was engaged in collecting facts and figures, at his own expense, in his home town of Gotwe, and he wanted Martha to go down for a few days, to help him. Besides, he wanted to have an affair with her.

Martha was refusing to go because she did not want to leave this town, which meant, now, the loft among the trees, or to miss any chance of seeing Thomas.

Jack sat with his scarcely touched plate in front of him, his chin aggressively stuck out, his eyes focused on his point, which was that he insisted on sensible explanations from Martha.

Martha ate Jack’s food as well as her own and laughed and said No, said No, said No, said she was sorry, but of course she would if only insuperable obstacles did not intervene.

This scene, occurring as often as it does in life, is too often overlooked in fiction in favour of the more explosive moments: Yes, I will go to Gotwe with you, but I am risking my marriage, yes, I will leave my husband if you will leave your wife, do you love me? I might have loved you if only…

Jack found Martha attractive; a man married to a woman
who increasingly disapproved of everything he was and did (she was a socially ambitious girl who had never imagined herself as the wife of a crusading Member of Parliament); a man who would have, and probably already had, invited Marjorie or Betty or any other attractive woman to Gotwe, Jack did not really care whether Martha said Yes or not.

For her part she liked him, would do anything not to hurt his feelings short of going to bed, and would do that if not otherwise engaged; hoped he was not the sort of man to let vanity disrupt a pleasant working relationship—Martha found this scene irritating on the whole because she was so involved with Thomas.

Meanwhile, one part of her mind was thinking, while she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Jack: So, you think if I
did
go to bed with you, it would be just another charming experience, do you? Hmmmm, well,
what
a pity I can’t show you…And he was thinking: If only I could get her there, I’d show her a thing or two. In short, this scene of modern gallantry was running its usual course.

Meanwhile, Martha moved salt cellars and sauce bottles about, and thought that she and Thomas, their feeling for each other, their relationship—whatever was the right word for it—was in an altogether new dimension. They were in deep waters, both of them. And neither understood it, could not speak about it.

Together in the loft, they spoke less. They were in the loft less often. To be together was like—she could not say. It was true for Thomas, too, because when they looked at each other, the sensation of sinking deeper and deeper into light was stronger. Being together was, for both of them, a good deal more than Martha being with Thomas. Sometimes it was so intense, they could not stand it, and separated. Or the loft seemed too high, too fragile, too small, and they left it and walked very fast through the streets. But this could only happen at night, because of the danger of being seen. Sometimes when they made love it was so powerful they felt afraid, as if enormous forces were waiting to invade them. But they did not know what this meant.

‘What it amounts to,’ Jack was saying, ‘is that you are
going to make the only progressive Member of Parliament apart from Mrs Van miss two days of the Parliamentary sessions because you won’t give up two days’ love-making with Thomas?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, when my turn comes, I shall insist on the same treatment.’

‘But that goes without saying!’

She told Anton she was going to Gotwe for a few days to do some work for Jack Dobie.

She had realized this could not be a casual announcement. Remarks dropped by Anton recently had told her that he was convinced her affair with Thomas was over and that she had a new lover. But why should he think this? Because, she realized, his affair with Millicent was ending or over. She thought: How extraordinary, Anton does not know, except with that part of himself that makes love to me on a compulsion of rivalry, though of course he would put other names to it, whether I’m with another man or not. His
mind
would not be able to say. But I know what kind of an evening he’s had with Millicent by looking at him.

They were in the little bedroom. It was cold. He wore thick, dark blue, flannel pyjamas, and she wore a white, frilled nightdress she had bought thinking of Thomas. She wore a quilted, red jacket over it. There they were, Anton and Martha, Mr and Mrs Hesse, side by side in their twin-bedded room.

She knew there was tension between them because muscles tightened in her lower stomach. She picked up a nail-file and began work on her nails.

His long, white hands lay on his knees. She watched his hands sideways over the flying bit of glinting metal that shaped her nails, and thought: If I look at Thomas’s hands, it is as if they were holding me, but Anton’s hands, they might belong to someone I’d just met.

But if that were true—why was her stomach tightening? Somewhere at the back of her consciousness the knowledge began to hammer, just how terrible a crime she had committed by marrying Anton, by marrying Douglas…against
herself and against them. But how was she to have foreseen the world she would enter when she loved Thomas? Why had no one told her it existed in a way that she could believe it? How strange it was—marriage and love; one would think, the way newspapers, films, literature, the people who are supposed to express us talk, that we believe marriage, love, to be the desperate, important, deep experiences they say they are. But of course they don’t believe any such thing. Hardly anyone believes it. We want them to believe it. We want to believe it. Perhaps people will believe it again.

The way things are, for the second time Martha looked at a stranger across a bedroom and thought, how was it that no one made me feel that it could matter, marrying someone.

‘Matty?’ said Anton, suddenly, in a low voice.

She said: ‘Look, Anton, what’s the point?’

He came over, sat by her, put a long arm through which she could feel a lank, flat bone around the cage of her ribs, put his cheek against hers. She could feel the papery dryness of his lips moving against her cheek.

Her body, wrenched out of its loyalty to Thomas, instantly began to ache.

She said: ‘No, Anton, please not, it’s so silly.’

‘When we’ve both finished playing around, Matty.’

She said: ‘Anton, you know you and I are no good together…don’t be angry,’ she added weakly.

‘Angry. Well, that’s a funny way of putting it.’ He went off to the bathroom, angry, miserable. When he came back he got straight into bed, turned his back, switched off the light. Left sitting upright in the dark, she put aside her nail-file and lay down.

He said: ‘Well, if you’re going to play the fool like this, I’m going off for a few days myself.’

‘But Anton, believe me, I’m not having an affair with Jack.’

He was silent, waiting for her to go on.

She nearly said: ‘What’s happened with Millicent?’ But she waited, just as he waited.

At last he said: ‘Well, don’t imagine I’m going to be left on the shelf.’

She said, placating, soft, ‘humorously’, ‘But Anton, we did agree, didn’t we, that we’d leave each other free while we waited for a divorce.’ Even saying this made her muscles ache, so she knew it was all terrible nonsense. However, on this level they ‘got along’, so on this level they must continue.

He said: ‘Very well then, I know what to do.’

Next day he told her he was going to spend a few days with the Forsters, a rich businessman and his family. He had met Mr Forster one day when lunching with his superior in the railways. ‘He’s not a bad sort of type,’ he had said of him afterwards.

Meanwhile, she rang Thomas to make sure she would not miss one of his visits to town, and he said that since his farm was on the way to Gotwe, why didn’t she and Jack drop in for lunch?

‘You want me to come to the farm?’—meaning, You want me and your wife to meet?

‘Yes, yes. Why not? It means I’ll see you. Yes, I’d like you to come.’

Jack was pleased. He liked nothing more than visiting farms. His great grandparents had been small farmers, and when he retired he proposed to farm fruit himself. In his youth he was a shipworker on the Clyde. In this country he had been for decades a railway-worker and a Member of Parliament concerned with industrial matters. But how he really saw himself, he said, was as a farmer; his real life would begin when at fifty-five he tended pears and peaches on a plot which he had already bought, in the mountains.

This was how Martha visited Thomas’s farm, how she saw Thomas’s wife and the little girl. She never forgot that day. It was a heightened, painful day—not one she would have missed, far from it. But afterwards, when she had only to shut her eyes to see the picture of Thomas with his little girl, the day shifted its emphasis. The rest became blurred, a scene of magnificent mountains and somewhere off among the shrubs the sound of Thomas’s wife, laughing. But she
kept seeing Thomas, stretching out his hands to the little girl.

Jack picked her up about ten in the morning, in his old lorry. He drove very fast. This long journey across two hundred miles of veld was something he had to do three, four times a week, when Parliament was sitting. Almost at once they were in open country. It was a cold, clear day, with white clouds driving fast overhead. In all directions swept the flattening dry-cold grass of winter, it was all miles of pale gold, then blue-green kopjes, then pale blue sky where the clouds swept. Everything was high, austere and in movement. Across empty miles poured the wind which battered against the lorry, so that it tugged and swerved to leave the road. She was exhilarated, and looked at Jack to share it. He felt her looking and smiled and said: ‘Here I am, mad with love for you, driving you to meet your lover.’

‘Not all that mad, I hope.’

‘And how long has it been?’

‘Has what been?’

‘You with Thomas?’

She had to think—‘Some months. A year. Something like that.’

‘I thought you and Athen were having a thing together.’

‘Well, give us all time, and I suppose we’d all have affairs with each other.’

‘He’s a fine laddie, that one.’

‘He’s going back to Greece next month.’

‘Is he now?’ Jack clicked his tongue. Never had so many hearts—in their political aspect—been broken so fast and so thoroughly as in the first few months of that Labour Government. Jack’s was the one worst hit. An old socialist, life-time Labour Party supporter, when the Labour Party got in in 1945, his oldest dream came true.

Now he was bitter. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if I were in Greece now I’d become a communist, just to show what I think of Labour—I couldn’t say fairer than that, could I?’

‘Athen had a letter saying he mustn’t go home, he’ll be arrested as he arrives. Last week they let all the collaborators
out of prison, and they’re arresting the left. And a lot more of Athen’s friends have gone to the mountains.’

‘We’ve had some fine people through this country, with the war.’

Quite so: this country, her life, Jack’s life—everybody’s life, that was the point—empty spaces through which people blew like bits of paper.

She said: ‘Maisie’s in love with Athen. But I mean, really in love.’

He said at once in the bluff, no-nonsense voice which shouts disapproval: ‘Well, that young woman’s been in love often enough.’

She said, not by any means for the first time: ‘You forget, she’s been widowed twice.’

He was silent, but his mouth twisted in a small, knowledgeable smile.

She persisted: ‘Maisie’s the sort of girl who’d have stayed married to her first husband. But he was killed.’

‘Well, it’s not my affair.’

‘It’s funny though. We still talk about people, we make judgements just as if there hadn’t been five years of war. What sort of sense does it make, saying about Maisie—she’s been in love too often, when you think of what’s happened to her?’

Again the small, knowledgeable smile—an ugly smile, horrid, on whoever’s face it comes.

‘Don’t you see, it comes out of a different sort of thing altogether—talking like that. It really is funny how we’ve gone back to talking as if the war didn’t happen.’

‘I haven’t noticed we don’t talk about it!’

‘I don’t mean saying things about it—like the war has done a lot of damage, or it will take ten years to restore agriculture in the Ukraine or something, I mean, really feeling things are different.’

She saw she was repeating herself—yet as she spoke, she felt as if she were in the grip of a new kind of knowledge, a new insight. She understood what Athen had been trying to say outside Maisie’s bar. She had not understood Athen—she had merely made an assent to his words with her mind.
It was the difference between hearing a phrase and thinking: Yes, that’s true, and forgetting it; and letting the real meaning of the words sink into one, become part of one—as if one had eaten them, swallowed them—‘digested’ them, in short. She knew Jack had heard what she had said and had assented: Yes, there have been five years of war, there’s been a lot of damage. But just as she had been irritated with Athen, impatient, because she wanted to enjoy the evening, so now Jack was annoyed, or at least impatient, because he was a man who worked very hard, and he had wanted to enjoy today.

After a mile or so of the fast, swerving journey through swaying grass, trees, he said: ‘I didn’t mean to run down Maisie, I didn’t know she was so much a friend of yours.’

She said: ‘It’s all right,’ but she was absorbed by the swooping movement through the high, sparkling air. The empty space was opening inside her, and she was gazing into it with passionate curiosity. Martha and Jack, two minute fragments of humanity, rattling in the machine across immensities of empty country, they were only two of the figures that moved, small and brightly lit, against the backdrop, while she watched. She saw Maisie, if there had not been a war: married to her first husband, producing a child, two children; the in-laws would very soon have said: Well, she’s a nice enough girl really. Soon she would have been a fat, middle-aged woman with reserves of lazy good nature, and spoiled children and a husband she protected and ordered about. Instead—well, Thomas said she was sleeping with men from the bar, and probably for money.