A sneer. The communist sneer. Indistinguishable of course from a sneer of any kind. But melodramatic, improbable. Particularly on this face, in this quiet study, in this house. And in Radlett Street, Bloomsbury, London.
‘Or don’t you read the newspapers?’
‘Well, really,’ he said, with a laughing sneer.
‘All right then, ask the comrades-you just ask them if you can go to an Embassy and say: I want to get a visa to let me travel to Russia so I can find my brother who has defected East because …"
‘Because he’s a spy? He’s not a spy. I tell you it’s not possible.’
‘You’ve just said your brother james was.’
‘That’s
not
… if you can’t tell the difference, then …’
‘Probably what happened was Colin got a visit from somebody like Hilary Marsh and he got into a panic.’
‘Colin is not the kind to scare easily.’
‘Then he was a fool not to be scared. You were scared. So was I. I’m scared now.’
‘I’ve got a lot of time for you, Martha, you know that. But when you start talking like the gutter Press, then I’m sorry.’
‘Have you actually asked any of the comrades about it? Why don’t you? ’
‘I shall. Goodnight.’ And he dismissed the enemy.
She remained the enemy for some weeks. Night after night he asked his friends in, or went to their homes. She was not introduced to them: they met on the stairs with nods and smiles. Then, as a result of Mark’s inquiries, Patty Samuels came to the house, on a proper, formal interview, to see Mark. They were together for an hour or more. Martha inquired what the advice had been.
Mark said, briefly, that ‘on the whole it was considered inadvisable’. Then, with an apologetic laugh and glance: ‘What a war-horse!’
But he had liked her, or had been intrigued by her. She came again, became one of the people who dropped in, by herself, or with others, in the evenings. She was a lively vital woman in her early thirties, and a veteran of the Party, absolutely unlike anyone Mark had ever met, but like dozens Martha had met-and like what she herself had been for a brief period.
Patty was the opposite, in every way, of Lynda.
And this time, Martha was able to foresee what would happen.
While Mark developed an affair with Patty, Lynda, in the basement, had a relapse, a falling back. For a time it was touch and go whether she would have to go back to hospital.
Dorothy came up to Martha, a few days after the incident of the photograph, to ask if Martha would come down to see Lynda, who was asking for her.
Lynda was in bed, crying hysterically that she was no good, she was useless, she had ruined Mark, and she didn’t understand why Mark didn’t kill her. She wished Mark had killed her. If Mark did not kill her, she would kill herself.
Martha wanted to call in Dr Lamb, who, after all, both women visited regularly, for drugs and for advice. But Dorothy, weeping, begged Martha not to do this. Dr Lamb would send Lynda back to the hospital; they would both have to go back to the hospital. Lynda added her tears and pleas to Dorothy’s. Why, then, had Lynda asked for Martha to come down?
Then Martha saw that she was Mark’s deputy. Lynda could not face Mark himself. But she could say to Martha what she was afraid of saying to Mark. Lynda did not mean to kill herself. These bitter tears and self-reproaches were a way of announcing to Mark, through Martha, and to Dorothy, and perhaps to herself, her sorrow at not being able to be Mark’s wife, and her intention of refusing to be. It was also a reproach to Mark: look, you are making me ill by asking so much of me. Mark, hearing that Lynda was ill, appeared in the basement but Lynda shrieked at him to go away. He went.
Lynda wept that she was a beast and unfit to live; but there was relief in it. Mark did not, for a while, go near the basement. But Martha was admitted, and reported to him.
For some weeks Lynda remained low, and weepy. Nothing, it seemed, could break her misery. Then Paul came home for a month’s holiday, and he made her better.
Lynda and Paul together-it was charming, delightful; they were like two children. Dorothy watched, indulgent: Lynda’s mother, she now became Paul’s as well. For Lynda still could not bear being touched. So Paul sat on Dorothy’s large, steamy, sad lap, and was hugged and given sweets. With Lynda, he played. Martha made excuses to go down and watch. She was seeing Sally-Sarah again. Yes, there she was, in her child, a bright exuberant vivid creature, all charm and peremptory emotional demand, who cuddled up to Dorothy, and flung his arms around Martha’s neck, and sat very quiet, by Lynda’s side, his hands in his lap, while he smiled and listened to her fantastic stories.
But that was in the basement. In the rest of the house, Paul was a cool, shrewd clever little boy (‘too clever by half!’ as one teacher had let drop), whom no one would dare to touch or pet or fondle.
Then, the holidays ended and Paul went back to school, and Lynda remained well.
There was a new balance in the house. Upstairs Mark was absorbed in his developing affair with Patty Samuels. It seemed
that he no longer expected anything from Lynda. He saw very little of Martha, and did not speak at all about the search for his brother.
In the basement the two sick women were trying to expand their lives, to become like ordinary people. Dorothy now started to go out of the flat, which she had not wanted to do before. She shopped, sometimes went to the cinema, talked of getting a job. But Lynda did not leave the flat. They had visitors, women for the most part. When this happened Lynda made an effort to dress, and to be beautiful again. Once they invited Martha down. It turned out to be a seance. A couple of men, and half a dozen women had arrived. In the heavy curtained room, with its air that smelled of drugs and anxiety, the lights were turned low and a woman called Mrs. Mellendip invoked spirits: successfully, as far as some of those present were concerned. After that, Martha tried not to go down unless the two were alone. Otherwise it was an atmosphere of inordinate tea-drinking, palm-reading, fortune-telling. They would sit through entire afternoons and evenings laying the cards again and again and again for guidance on matters like buying a new handbag or having a hairdo. They worked out the horoscopes of themselves, their friends, their doctors, and public persons. Mrs. Mellendip earned her living by doing horoscopes, but did not charge Lynda or Dorothy. Without being asked, she did Martha’s. It turned out to be more of a character reading, and was very shrewd indeed. Martha said it was, but that she had not learned anything about herself she did not already know. To which Mrs. Mellendip, a large, forceful, handsome woman in her middle fifties, returned: ‘Well, dear, I could tell you more if you knew it.’ Which remark was very much the note or tone of these gatherings. For when the tea-leaves or the cards confirmed what a person already knew, this was not a sign of failure, but of success, and added to Mrs. Mellendip’s confidence in herself, and her powers.
Martha told Lynda she did not care much for her new friends, which Lynda accepted, in her way of tolerating the unenlightened. Thereafter she would telephone Martha to say: ‘Have you time for a visit to the condemned cell? ’-or some such joke.
Martha was much alone, in the doldrums, her life becalmed. She was doing her job, that was all. The house was running, the children’s lives organized, Mark’s affairs attended to. But what was she really doing? What ought she to be doing? She did not know. She sat in her room and watched the structure of the sycamore tree
disappear in spring green. Spring moved futilely in her veins. She watched. She was a person who watched other people in a turmoil of living. Could that be true? When Mark, or Lynda, or even Mrs. Mellendip looked at her, did they see a woman who watched and waited-passive?
For what? For the bad time to be over? It was like waiting for the end of the war. Worse: war was easier, it had a form, one knew what one was supposed to be feeling, even if one didn’t conform to it. The last war, after all, had been easy: one’s head and one’s heart had moved together. By and large and for better or for worse, she, and everyone she knew, had been able to identify with their country, with their side: and now, with all the slogans and the speeches and the propaganda in perspective, all the accounts done, they could still say, ‘Yes, we were right, fascism was worse than anything.’
But now? If a new war started now, spreading out from Korea; if, to use the political shorthand of the time ‘America dropped the bomb on Russia before Russia could develop the bomb’ - then what would she feel? No use to sit here thinking,
it won’t happen
, because it might very well, and it was now that she should decide what to do. To decide that, meant deciding or deciphering what she felt. This country would be allied with America, that could be assumed. She could not support America; she could not support communism. She would have to support one or the other. No matter what form the war took this time, and it wouldn’t be remotely like the last, but probably all slow spreading poisons and panic and hysteria and terror at the unknown, she would have to be a traitor, not only from the point of view of society-her country, and the point of view of her ‘side’ - socialism, but from her own. Because there would be no middle place. Well then, she would be a patriot and a coward, rather than a traitor and a coward … she was immensely tired. A lethargy like an invisible poison filled her. Sitting through the darkening evenings, she looked out into the street, at the lively tree, and she began to think of death, of suicide. If the war started, that is what she would do, kill herself.
Thoughts of death slowly filled the room. When she came into it, it was to enter a region where death waited. While spring slowly crammed London with flowers and greenery, she allowed herself to be taken over … and then, one afternoon when she had been down to see Lynda, she thought how strange it was … a few weeks
ago it was in the basement that people, or rather, Lynda, talked of death, of suicide, of killing. Now, with no outside circumstance changed, the basement was alive again, and futures were possible and talked about-even if they were no more than a dress or that Dr Lamb’s horoscope promised he would be in a good mood for next week’s monthly visit. Death had moved up to Martha’s room on the second floor.
It seemed as if her capacity to think this, see this, had the power to shift the fog in the room, start a fresh current.
She was able to move outside the listless woman who sat hour after hour looking through a window.
She had a glimpse into a view of life where the house and the people in it could be seen as a whole, making a whole. It was not a glimpse or insight which could be easily brought down into an ordinary air: it came late at night, and afterwards Martha remembered that the phrase, ‘Having something in common’, had had, for the time the condition lasted, a real meaning. They, in this house, had something in common, made up something …
Mark and the comrades, all furious energy and defence; Lynda and her Dorothy in the twilight of their basement; Martha, all passivity; the two sad children, who were the pasts and the futures of the adult people: but an onlooker, someone looking into this house as if it were a box whose lid could be taken off, would be struck by a curious fact. Martha, defeated by the house, by the currents of personality in it, was the one person in it who had no reason at all to be suffering, to be weighed down: yet she was the only person who (at that time, during that particular spring) was weighed down, was suffering, who thought of death.
Martha was suddenly (not easily, but after effort) able to look down into the house, achieve that viewpoint. As she did so, the heavy atmosphere of death in her room cleared, thinned, and went.
There she was, in her room, empty, at peace. She watched other people developing their lives. And she? In every life there is a curve of growth, or a falling away from it; there is a central pressure, like sap forcing up a trunk, along a branch, into last year’s wood, and there, from a dead-looking eye, or knot, it bursts again in a new branch, in a shape that is inevitable but known only to itself until it becomes visible. Yet here she sat, watching the sap pressing up in other people, feeling none in herself.
One of the observers, or critics, who might be imagined looking
down through that roof would say: a man. This is a young woman, and she wants a man. Martha had been here for nearly three years now, and she had put aside thoughts of a man, of marriage, and even, foi most of the time, sex. She had been dormant.
Now she was invaded by sex. One had only to think: a man, I need a man, and sex invades in its battalions. Mark? She wanted Mark? She had only to think this, and she did. Yet she had not. She found herself, all at once, jealous of Patty Samuels. Then, soon, furiously, self-pityingly jealous of Lynda who had kept Mark’s love for years
without having done anything to deserve it
. This last, for a time, did not strike her as absurd. She was possessed. Waves of vicious emotion washed in and out of her.
The room, a few weeks before fogged by the listlessness of a drift to death, was now all sexual fantasy, anger, hatred.
On the stairs she passed men on their way to and from Mark’s study. She looked at men: sex. This one? That one? She nodded a greeting to Patty Samuels and hated her. She was unable to go down to the basement: she hated Lynda.
In this condition she telephoned, again, the house by the canal. Jack answered. He said he would love to see Martha.
In this condition she made the trip across London to visit a memory.
The terrace of houses, since she had been here before, had been partly done up. Some houses were still corpses, with leprous faces, others were clean and had jolly coloured doors. In Jack’s house, she entered a hall which was carpeted, and softly lit. The door into the room where the mad youth had camped was open. It was now somebody’s drawing-room, a pleasant room with sofas and chairs and books. A young woman carried a baby out of this room, and with a smile, disappeared into the room on the other side of the hall.
Martha, already half-sober, ascended the stairs. Jack’s door was opened by a plump blonde girl who said, in a low voice: ‘Come in-you’re Martha? He’s asleep.’