A Ripple From the Storm (5 page)
‘I’d like to go to sleep,’ she said.
He remained seated. ‘I’ll see the lawyers tomorrow and if it’s easier to cite William, I’ll let you know,’ he said.
He’s trying to make me plead with him not to involve William, she thought. He was watching her with a self-consciously wistful smile. She said nothing. His face swelled into hatred and he said: ‘It would serve him right.’
What for?’
‘Breaking up our marriage.’
But not even he could believe this. He hastily looked away, and said: ‘The lawyers will write to you. We must have no communication of any kind until the divorce is over.’
‘Of course.’
He lingered by the door, again wistful. She thought: I’ve lived with this grown-up schoolboy for four years, and we’ve had a child together. I ought to feel something that I don’t: I ought to feel degraded or ashamed or regretful – something like that. Well, I don’t. It simply didn’t concern me. While this thought went through her mind she felt her knees shaking again, and she understood she was terrified. His sideways glances at her were full of an avid hate: it was ludicrous, the effect of the ugly eyes in the formally sentimental and appealing face. She thought: If I don’t say the right thing, he’ll embrace me or hit me – it will be horrible. There’ll be a horrible scene. She said, ‘I’ll ring you up in a day or two and ask what the lawyers said.’ Her voice was casual and friendly. His face changed and became stiff. He nodded, and went out, carefully closing the door after him as if locking her in. And when she tested it she found that he had turned the key in her lock.
Now she wanted to cry. But she would not allow herself tears. Just as tenderness, moments of real emotion with William left her exposed to her need for Caroline, so did tears, even brief tears, open her to a feeling of deep, impersonal pain that seemed to be lying in wait for her moments of weakness like an enemy whose name she did not know, but whose shape and attributes she was learning because of its shadow, deepening steadily outside the bright shell she lived within.
She went to sleep at once, without thinking of Douglas.
These days she always woke early, and with delight, no matter how late she had been in getting to bed. For the first time in her life waking was not a painful process of adjustment. The shrilling and twittering of the birds who filled Mrs Carson’s garden every morning, or the roar of aircraft overhead, sank into her sleep like a premonition of the day’s excitements, and before she had opened her eyes she was already poised forward in spirit, thinking of the moment when she would rejoin the group and her friends.
Before she could join them, of course, she had to put in an obligatory eight hours in the office. She had returned as junior typist to Robinson, Daniel and Cohen, now reduced because of the war to Mr Robinson. Mr Max Cohen was two years dead of a heart attack. Mr Jasper Cohen was helping to run the army in North Africa. Mr Daniel was fighting in it. Mr Robinson’s young, lean, tightly-sprung body must conceal some weakness, for it was known he had tried to reach the war and failed. When Martha had applied for a job in her old firm she had done so thinking of the gentle kindliness of Mr Max Cohen. There was such a shortage of women workers for the offices that Mr Robinson was pleased enough to see her. That Martha disliked him as much now as she had always done seemed irrelevant, when her working life was irrelevant to her real interests. There were two women in the office now, herself and Mrs Buss. That two women were enough was because of the efficiency of Mrs Buss, who never let Mr Robinson or Martha forget this truth, which led to her salary being increased almost monthly. Neither Mr Robinson nor Martha begrudged her this: in fact Martha imagined that when he signed the pay cheques and handed hers to Mrs Buss he must feel embarrassed because he was paying for her entire life: her devoted, jealous watchful interest was concentrated on Mr Robinson, not as a man, but as the unworthy representative of the absent senior partners. Sometimes he remarked, almost resentfully, that there was no need for her to work at nights, or arrive at the office so early in the mornings. Whereupon she faced herself at him like a quarrelling little bird, and said: ‘Mr Robinson, I know my job. I had my training in Britain, not like these Colonial girls.’ ‘Oh well,’ he would say, escaping hastily, ‘I suppose it’s all right, if you don’t mind.’
Mrs Buss tolerated Martha: it was because the Colonial spirit she despised was too strong for her. Martha had been married to one of the up and coming young men of the town, and would probably marry another. Society, it seemed, owed her this job as an interim support, and efficiency was scarcely demanded of her. Mrs Buss felt that Martha was one of the drones – ‘one of the marrying kind,’ as she put it, with kindly but critical titter, although not married at the moment. She, Mrs Buss, was not, although she had a husband. On this basis the two women enjoyed an amiable working relationship.
On that day Martha worked through the lunch-hour, not for Mr Robinson, but addressing envelopes for the Sympathizers of Russia. After lunch she was telephoned by Jasmine who said that Jackie Bolton had telephoned her; he and William were posted and leaving that night for some necessarily unnamed destination. They must all meet on the station for the farewell at six. The two girls consoled each other and agreed to meet at the group office after work. There they sat, smoking, for once idle, out of a feeling that their impending loss must be paid due to in some way. They were talking of how the four of them would meet after the war, and continue this friendship which was subordinate to the Revolution. They did not specify the country where they would meet: the world was open to them. As Jackie often remarked: When you’re a communist you can go to any country in the world and be with friends at once. When members of the group talked of the future, it was as if they were interchangeable with each other, one country the same as another: they were part of the great band of international brothers, and as they talked their eyes met, exchanging looks of infinite devotion and trust.
Now Jasmine and Martha leaned at the window looking down into the street, and both their minds were so occupied with visions of the future that the fact their lovers were leaving them in an hour seemed unimportant, even proof of their belief that the time was coming soon when pain would cease to exist.
A small ragged, barefooted black child, pot-bellied with malnutrition, hesitated on the opposite corner outside McGrath’s holding a note in his hand. He had been sent by his white mistress on some errand and could not find the right address. Martha and Jasmine smiled at each other, saying in the smile that because of them, because of their vision, he was protected and saved: the future they dreamed of seemed just around the corner; they could almost touch it. Each saw an ideal town, clean, noble and beautiful, soaring up over the actual town they saw, which consisted in this area of sordid little shops and third-rate cafés. The ragged child was already a citizen of this ideal town, cocitizens with themselves; they watched him out of sight around the corner smiling: it was as if they had touched him with their hands in friendship.
Soon, the entrances of McGrath’s were again clogged with people, this time because it was sundown hour, and they knew that if they were to be in time to see William and Jackie off they should leave for the station. At the station the train for the South already stood waiting. Down the long platform stood groups of men in uniform, waiting.
When the two men arrived, it was in separate groups, one of officers and one of airmen. They stowed their belongings away in the train, and slipped away to join Martha and Jasmine in a compartment where it could not be seen that the natural divisions of wartime organization were being flouted. The four of them sat laughing together, while the two men, half-sardonic, debated where they wished to be sent, like tourists choosing a holiday place. William settled for India; Jackie for the Mediterranean. In the next compartment a group of aircraftsmen were chanting in a variety of British voices:
Join the army and see the world.
The train whistle shrieked, but Martha and Jasmine, with a long experience of seeing trains off from platforms, did not move. They were both of them instinctively avoiding an emotional farewell. At last they leaped off the train when it was moving, and turned to see the faces of Jackie and William already absorbed into the mass of faces that crammed all the windows. The train trailed off, as they had seen it so often before, across the soiled and factory-littered veld, leaving a long smudge of wind-torn black smoke across the clear calm sunset sky.
Anton said: ‘Has anyone prepared an agenda?’ and Andrew remarked in reply: ‘It was you who convened the meeting, Comrade Anton.’
‘Yes, that is so, that is so.’ He had been leaning back against the wall on the bench, arms folded, watching the others come in: Andrew, Martha, Jasmine, Marjorie. Now he unfolded himself upwards off the bench and into the chair behind the small white deal table, with the movement of a hinged knife opening and shutting. He watched them all in silence, waiting. The large electric bulb over his head cast a strong white light and made him even more fair and pale than usual, taking the colour from his ice-blue eyes. Recently the women had been remarking to each other: ‘I hope Anton looks after himself.’ Or, ‘He doesn’t look strong, does he?’ Yet he was a strong man: he had the strength of extreme control, and the contradictions in the face added to the impression. The structure of bone was firm, narrowing too sharply towards the small pointed chin, yet it was an Oustinate chin. The skin which covered the thin flesh was fragile, very white, and scored with dozens of minute dry lines which quivered into tense meshes around the eyes and mouth, particularly the mouth, which, though not small, added to the impression that the upper half of the face was too spacious for the lower. Yet it was a mouth continuously focused with the pressures of his self-discipline.
His contained intensity never failed to make people feel uncomfortable. Sometimes, after he had finished speaking, they might exchange a small grimace – not critical, they did not feel that – but as if they were confessing: ‘Heavens, we’ll never be able to live up to
that
!’ But if there was irony in it, it was a criticism of themselves and not of him who took upon himself a burden of self-discipline and thereby released them into the freedom to be comparatively irresponsible.
There was something of this quality of ironical admiration in the air now, as they waited for him to begin speaking. But it seemed he was in no hurry to do so, and Jasmine at last said demurely: ‘Comrade Anton will now analyse the situation.’
He lifted the icy shaft of his gaze at her, and said: ‘No, comrades, I will not. It seems to me that no one here’ – and now he looked with accusation at Andrew – ‘has ever considered what an analysis of the situation – a real, Marxist analysis of the situation means. At least, our situation in this country has never been analysed. Not once. We have been too busy to think. Yet a real communist never takes an action which does not flow from a comprehensive understanding of the economic situation in a given situation and the relation of the class forces. We have merely rushed into activity spurred on by revolutionary or so-called revolutionary phrases.’
The contempt in this, aimed at the absent Jackie Bolton, affected Jasmine, who looked wistfully towards the place where he had always sat, crouched in a gap between a cupboard and the wall, radiating calm sarcasm.
Martha was thinking uncomfortably: It’s all very well, but all this time Anton has been sitting here, listening and watching but he waited until Jackie actually left before exploding like this.
Andrew said comfortably: ‘You are quite right, comrade. But things have happened very quickly, and they’ve got out of hand. Now we must pull ourselves together. And I wish you would make a statement of some kind that we could use as a basis for discussion.’
‘Got out of hand,’ said Anton impatiently. He had a way of isolating an idiom, listening to it, and giving it back to them for consideration. ‘Got out of hand is correct. If things have ever been in our hands. We are running the progressive bodies in the town. But how? Why? Above all, how?’
‘Well, well,’ said Andrew gruffly. ‘Well, well, well.’
‘Perhaps, Comrade Anton, you could make an analysis and we could discuss it,’ said Marjorie hurriedly. Anton patently softened as he glanced at her. Marjorie’s small, fair fragility, her intense sincerity, seemed to put her, for Anton, outside ordinary criticism. They all felt it; so, obviously, did he, for now Comrade Anton collected himself from his moment of weakness, gave his cold circling glance around the room and said: ‘We are supposed to be communists. Yes, that I believe is what we call ourselves. I’m not going to analyse the situation, comrades. That is something which is serious and will take time and thought. But I am now going to explain what the word communist means, and we can then, if we consider it desirable, begin to analyse the situation.’ Again he collected them all into his concept of nobility by the circling sweep of his eyes. ‘A communist, comrades, is a person who is utterly, totally, dedicated to the cause of freeing humanity. A communist must consider himself a dead man on leave. A communist is hated, despised, feared and hunted by the capitalists of the world. A communist must be prepared to give up everything: his family, his wife, his children, at a word from the Party. A communist must be prepared to work eighteen hours a day, or twenty-four hours, if need be. A communist is continually educating himself. A communist knows that in himself he is nothing, but in so far as he represents the suppressed working people he is everything; but he is not worthy to represent the working people, unless every moment of his life is dedicated to becoming worthy of them. The working people of the world are the inheritors of all culture, all knowledge, all art, and it is our task to explain this to them, and they will not listen to us unless we ourselves are people they can respect.’
Here the three women looked towards Andrew who was after all just as much of a communist as Anton. He was leaning comfortably back on his bench, pipe in his mouth, contemplating Anton and nodding from time to time.
‘A communist,’ Anton said, ‘must remember that if he has personal weaknesses, it will be laid at the door of the Party. A communist must always order his private life in such a way that the Party cannot be blamed for it. A communist must so respect himself that when he goes to the workers he is not afraid to look them in the eyes.’
The word communist, repeating itself through Anton’s sentences, was a reiteration of responsibility and goodness; and Martha could feel the exaltation that seemed to be the natural air of this small dirty room heighten. At the same time there was something lacking. It was, after all, a very empty room with Jackie Bolton and William gone. They were not, tonight, ‘the group’. They were five people.
Marjorie said hurriedly: ‘Comrade Anton, I think we ought to recruit more comrades because it seems to me – I mean, the things you are saying … there ought to be more of us.’
Comrade Hesse smiled gently at her confusion, but at once collected himself. ‘It does not matter how many we are. When Lenin began, there were probably no more than we are here.’
Instantly they were transported into the very heart of their vision: during the last few decades when people in the West have suddenly become communists, they have always been contemporaries of Lenin. They felt themselves to be in a vast barbaric country (though not their own) sunk in the sloth of centuries, members of a small band of men and women with rifles in their hands, prepared to die for the future. They pictured themselves, moving fugitive from one hiding-place to another; saw the mob of ragged workers storming the Winter Palace; heard Lenin say: ‘Comrades, we will now proceed to build socialism.’
Andrew said gruffly: ‘I don’t mean any disrespect to anyone if I say that no one here is Lenin.’
They laughed and the mood was broken.
Anton did not laugh. His face tightened, and he said: ‘If two communists find themselves together on a desert island, or in a city where no other communists exist, then their duty is to work together, to analyse the situation, to decide on the basis of their analysis what is to be done.’
‘We are all in agreement with you,’ said Marjorie excitedly, looking for confirmation at the others, who nodded.
‘But I do think we should recruit more people,’ said Jasmine. ‘We all know people who are ripe.’
‘You can’t recruit just any Tom, Dick or Harry,’ said Anton.
They felt awkward. They were sitting here now because they had been touched by that great world conflagration which was
the Revolution
; they might just as well, they felt, have been unlucky and not met people who could have inspired them into understanding. There must be dozens, hundreds of other people waiting for the touch of the holy fire. But if Anton did not share the feeling, did it mean he thought they, too, were unworthy to be sitting here at all? What else could it mean?
Andrew said with the gruff disapproval that told the others he was in total disagreement with Anton: ‘We have obviously got to recruit more people. We can’t run a communist group with five people.’ He took in half a dozen breaths of smoke from his pipe, let it out through clenched teeth, and said: ‘I know a couple of lads from the camp who’ll muck in.’ He then occupied himself with tapping, examining, handling his pipe, giving all his attention to it. They had come to understand this was his way of controlling his temper; and now knew that he was more than usually irritated with Anton.
Martha said hastily: ‘We all know people, don’t we?’ – glancing with apprehension at Anton, as they all did, who remarked: ‘Before bringing anyone here, they must first be discussed and approved of by the whole group.’
‘The whole group,’ said Andrew, ‘five people. Of whom one, myself, is in the RAF and an outsider; one an enemy alien; one’ – he smiled affectionately at Marjorie – ‘a newcomer from Britain, and we all know that our Colonials regard everyone from Britain as wrong-headed. One’ – here he gave a comradely nod at Martha – ‘has recently behaved in what people regard as a scandalous manner. In fact the only person here who is absolutely sound, respectable and without blemish is Jasmine. I think we should bring some more people in, see how things go, and then make a decision.’
‘See how things go,’ said Anton, handing the phrase back to them. ‘That is what we have been doing, and look at the results. We must do either one thing or the other – have a properly organized communist group, with rules and discipline, or we should stop this play-acting.’ He spoke with impatient contempt.
‘We can’t have a properly organized group without people to organize,’ said Jasmine. Anton was silent, and they understood that he would rather the group were disbanded.
‘But we’ve got all these organizations on our hands,’ said Martha. ‘We’re irresponsible to suggest dropping them.’
‘No one’s suggested dropping them,’ said Anton. ‘If you’re referring to Aid for Our Allies, Sympathizers of Russia and the Progressive Club, then all we need is to have a coordinating discussion once a week. We don’t need an apparatus of organization for that.’
‘But you’re talking as if we have to decide whether or not there is a communist party? But the vote was taken last year. This is a communist party.’
‘We’ve just been running around like a lot of chickens – without discipline, without analysis, like chickens.’
‘We’ve been meeting, we’ve been discussing, we’ve taken decisions,’ said Marjorie, sounding positively tearful.
‘Decisions? We’ve taken decisions and no one has obeyed them. We’ve been a bunch of anarchists.’
‘The way to end anarchy,’ said Jasmine, ‘is not to abandon organization, but to strengthen it.’
‘I must say that that is my opinion,’ said Andrew. ‘I cannot see how Comrade Anton can suggest a new vote or decision now. We voted once before. Formally this is a communist group. Now let us make it one.’
Anton was silent. At last he said: ‘Very well.’ He was silent again, and said: ‘We have a committee. I suggest the committee meet. Jackie’s gone …’ His expression said plainly how pleased he was that this was the case. ‘But there’s Andrew, myself and Jasmine.’
‘But there are three committee members for five people,’ said Martha. Anton shot her an angry glance.
‘The committee’s silly,’ said Marjorie. She blushed at her own agitation, while Anton smiled towards her. ‘I consider it is not correct to have a committee while there are so few of us,’ she said in a responsible way. The others smiled at each other, with fondness.
‘Very well,’ said Anton, ‘but first, before recruiting cadres – that is, if we do recruit them, we’ve got to reorganize our existing responsibilities. We have to do something about the Aid for Our Allies.’
‘We’ve got control of it in our hands,’ said Jasmine. It was the last time she was to speak in Jackie Bolton’s voice. The ghost of Jackie Bolton was exorcized, and for ever, by the way Anton said: ‘Yes, yes, yes, we have control of it.’
The triple ‘yes’, was the nearest he ever got to humour: it was in fact an ironic, critical deadly assent that always made people shrink inwardly. ‘That’s nothing to congratulate ourselves about. There’s nothing easier than to get control of organizations. Any fool can do it. It’s a question of understanding the psychology of a crowd, or a public meeting. If a drunken fool wants to make himself important and play the revolutionary, it’s not a matter to congratulate ourselves on.’
Jasmine’s face was burning. At moments when Marjorie showed distress, Anton seemed almost to protect her until she had recovered, but it appeared he felt no such chivalry for Jasmine. He continued to stare at her, while he said: ‘I think it is likely that
Comrade
Bolton has wrecked that organization. It remains to be seen whether he has completely wrecked it. It will certainly never be the same again. We have to see what we can do. The first thing is that there must be a respectable secretary.’
When anyone but Anton used the word ‘respectable’, it was with a small smile like a jeer; Anton used it like a measure of status. ‘The former committee was ideal, Perr, Forester, and Pyecroft were the right officials.
Comrade
Bolton saw fit to force their resignation against the unanimous decision of this group.’
‘But now that Trotskyist Boris Krueger is in control – and he will be, since he’s a friend of that old fuddy-duddy Gates, we’ll have to get it out of his hands,’ said Marjorie.
Anton said: ‘Yes, yes, yes.’
Jasmine asked at last: ‘Have you reassessed Boris’s character, Comrade Anton?’