A Ripple From the Storm (4 page)

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 nicelooking 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.

He brought out, self-consciously bitter: ‘William might have been here.’

‘Well, obviously,’ said Martha coldly. She sat down across the room from him. Her knees were trembling and this annoyed her. It had taken her a long time to admit that she was physically frightened of Douglas, but admitting it made things worse, not better.

She had seen him three times since leaving his house.

The first, about a fortnight after leaving him, he had come one Sunday morning to ask her to go for a drive with him. His manner had been simple and pleasant and she found herself liking him. She would have accepted if it were not that she had a group meeting that morning. After he had left her, she was thinking of returning to him. For some days she was very unhappy: the simple friendliness of his manner had made it possible for her to think of the child. Most of the time she was very careful not to allow herself to think of Caroline. Once, missing Caroline, she had borrowed Jasmine’s car and driven several times up and down past the house, to watch the little girl playing in the garden with the nurse-girl. The sight had confused her, for she had not felt as unhappy as she had expected. She had continued to drive up and down past the house until she saw a female figure through a window and believed she recognized Elaine Talbot. Afterwards, the thought of Caroline caused her acute pain. A cold shell she had been careful to build around her heart was gone. She longed for her daughter, and was on the point a dozen times of telephoning Douglas to say she would come back. During this time she was more in love with William than she had ever been. She was rocked by violent and conflicting emotions, vulnerable to a tone in William’s voice, or the sight of a small child playing on the grass verges of a street.

This period of misery had come to a sudden end when about three weeks later Douglas had rung up from the office to demand an interview. As soon as she heard his voice she felt herself harden. She went to his office where he had gone through a scene which she had recognized from the first word as something he was acting out for his own benefit. He questioned her with a fervid cunning about what he referred to as ‘her activities’, watching her all the time with widened glaring eyes, and finally informed her that he was only ‘checking up’ since he had a full report on her behaviour from a private detective. This was so much more dramatic than she had expected, that she was sorry for him, and said, almost humorously, that surely a detective was unnecessary since she would be only too pleased to tell him everything she was doing. ‘After all,’ she pointed out, ‘I have told you everything, haven’t I?’ He ground his teeth at her, but it was as a matter of form: the whole scene had the rehearsed quality she had expected as soon as she had heard the ‘official’ tone on the telephone.

The third time he descended abruptly at eight in the morning and she knew that this was the result of a sleepless night thinking about her. He informed her that in the year before she had left him, she had bought goods to the value of £20 at the shops, and as he was incurring a great deal of extra expense due to her having left him, he felt ‘it was the least she could do’ to pay it back. He produced an account like a shopkeeper’s on a sheet of stiff paper: Item one pair of shoes; Item one sweater, 25s; and so on, handing it to her with a sentimental and appealing smile. His lips trembled; he was nearly in tears.

She took the account and said she would let him have the money as soon as she could. She was earning at that time £15 a month. He continued to gaze at her appealingly, and she said, suddenly very angry: ‘I’ll pay it off at a pound a month,’ and looked to see if he would be ashamed. But he again gave her the sad trembling smile and said: ‘Yes, Matty, that-that-that would-would be a-a help.’ The stammer told her that all this was part of a pre-imagined scene.

When she had told Jasmine about it, the girl’s look of amused discomfort made her feel angry with herself: she knew she should have told Douglas to go to hell; and by acting in the way she had she had made herself part of his hysteria.

‘But Matty, you couldn’t have agreed to pay it? He earns so much money.’

‘Well, yes, I did.’

‘Then you’re mad too.’ Jasmine gave her the twenty pounds, told her to pay Douglas and be done with it. Martha sent Douglas the money, got a stiff but sentimental letter of thanks back, and because of Jasmine’s reaction to the incident, and her own shame, promised herself ‘when she had time’ to examine the emotion she called pride.

This, then, was the first meeting since she had sent him the twenty pounds.

‘What did you want to see me for?’

‘There’s this question of divorce.’

‘Yes?’

‘I intend to cite William as co-respondent.’

For a moment she was frightened: then she understood she was not frightened, her heart was beating out of anger. She had become skilled in listening to her instinctive responses to Douglas: If I’m not frightened, she told herself, then it means he is lying. I don’t believe him. Why don’t I? After a time she was able to see it: Of course he wouldn’t cite William – he would never admit publicly that his wife had left him for a sergeant in the airforce – that’s the way his mind works. So he’s trying to find out something else. What is it?

‘Of course you must cite William,’ she said. ‘It would be much quicker that way.’

He went red, and blurted out: ‘Of course if he were posted suddenly it would make divorce proceedings difficult.’

‘Yes, I suppose it would.’

‘Desertion is quick and civilized. But if you contested it, then it would be difficult.’

‘I deserted you,’ she remarked; reminded herself that there was something she ought to be understanding; considered, and finally said to herself: That’s it. He’s afraid I’d divorce him for that girl in Y—But how could I? I didn’t condone it - or did I? I couldn’t have condoned it, legally, or he wouldn’t be afraid.

Again she was dismayed by the depth of her contempt for him. She got up and said: ‘If you divorce me for desertion, I won’t contest it. Why should I? I don’t care about it one way or the other.’

He remained seated, staring, his fat lips trembling. She saw that he had imagined this scene differently. He had gained what he wanted, but not as he had wanted it.