Landlocked (35 page)

‘Look, mommy, my finger goes away.’

Rita held her finger in the magical dissolving light, and the two smiled at each other—close.

Mr Maynard looked at his wife and rose. She slowly got to her feet. Mr Maynard went out to the veranda, nodding at Maisie and at Mrs Gale. ‘He treats mom like a servant,’ Maisie complained afterwards—and snubbed him now by yawning as he went out. Mrs Maynard, with a smile partly wistful and partly peremptory, held out her hand to the little girl with the same impulsive, open-palmed gesture she had used for Mrs Van with the words: ‘a sensible person like you!’ She was offering the child, so to speak, her own defencelessness. Rita kept one forefinger in the pool of quivering lights, and almost offered her hand to the tall old woman bending over her. But she glanced quickly at her mother, and put her almost friendly hand behind her back. Mr Maynard, watching this incident from the veranda, let out a sort of bark or grunt, and said to Martha: ‘Martha, I’d like a word with you.’

Martha glanced at Maisie, Maisie shrugged. She went on fanning, fanning. Rita now tried to climb on her mother’s lap. ‘Oh, Rita,’ said Maisie, irritated; but then made herself
smile as the great lump of a child clambered awkwardly up. Maisie smiled sourly at the Maynards past Rita’s head; then Rita put her face down against her mother’s shoulder so that she, too, could receive the cool streams of air from the waving leaves.

‘Well?’ said Martha. Her dislike of the Maynards kept her face rigid. But she thought that only three days ago she had been a sort of aide to Mrs Maynard on the night the strike began. An unwilling, sour smile, like Maisie’s, came on to her lips: she could feel it there, and could not make it go away. She knew she was smiling from fear, as Maisie did. But Maisie was honest: ‘They scare me so much, Matty’ She, Martha, did not find it easy to admit how much these people frightened her. But—Lord! to be in the hands of these people, to be at the mercy of these great, charging, blundering…

Mr Maynard said to Martha: ‘It’s an absurd situation, impossible!’

‘How would
you
feel?’ demanded Mrs Maynard.

They were appealing to her, even commanding her, Martha: they, the Maynards, feeling themselves to be in the right, as they always were, stood confronting Martha, side by side, two great, strong, heavy-jowled people in their plated armours of thick, stiff cloth.

‘But whose fault is it, after all?’ Martha said, feebly, because she knew the futility of it.

‘But my dear…’

Mrs Maynard was smiling mistily at Martha, her lips quivered, and it was clear that she felt, and would always feel, that she was the victim of cruel circumstances.

Mr Maynard gazed past Martha into the room where mother and child sat together in the big chair. His eyes filled with tears and he turned and walked off the veranda. His wife followed, fumbling for the handkerchief which was hoisted, like a white flag, from the cuff of her sleeve.

In a moment they had been swallowed by the great car that stood waiting outside the rooming house.

‘They always park it in full view, just so everyone can
say: Judge Maynard’s visiting Maisie again,’ Maisie complained continually, in frenzies of resentment and annoyance.

‘Oh, my God!’ said Maisie, as the Maynards disappeared; and she heaved off Rita in a convulsive movement, as if the child had been smothering her. The heavy child scrambled down, and stood smiling in embarrassment for her uncouthness at her mother.

‘Oh,
God!
Christ. Damn them. Blast them. Oh, drat it! What shall I do
—oh!
’ Maisie spurted tears, while she patted the child’s shoulder with the hand that held the leaves. The frond caught in Rita’s black hair, tickled her face and made her sneeze. Then she, too, began to cry: it was a sort of double hysteria, in relief at the Maynards going at last.

Maisie said: ‘I’ve just remembered, Matty. Those silly idiots, they made me forget what I asked you for. The thing is, my friend that rang you up got what I said wrong. I didn’t want you to come here, I wanted you to telephone Mrs Van der Bylt with a message from Flora. Flora says, she’s got to see Mrs Van der Bylt on something urgent to do with the kaffirs and the strike. Johnny said she must tell Mrs Van der Bylt. But Flora can’t leave Johnny, he’s not too good today.’

‘Why don’t you ask Mr Maynard to take Flora up in the car?’ suggested Mrs Gale.

‘You couldn’t ask the Maynards to go to Johnny’s house, they’d die of shock, knowing that sort of house existed,’ said Maisie.

‘Wait,’ said Martha, and she ran after the Maynards’ car, which had just begun to move off. She said to Mrs Maynard through the window: ‘Could you ring Mrs Van der Bylt and tell her that her friend Johnny Lindsay has got urgent news for her? Maisie doesn’t have a telephone.’

‘Of course Maisie doesn’t have a telephone. Maisie doesn’t have anything an ordinary, sensible person would have,’ said Mrs Maynard, nodding emphatically. But she had been crying: her great, commanding face was all soft and appealing.

When Martha got back, Maisie was lying down on the bed or divan under the window which overlooked the veranda.
Rita sat timidly beside her mother, smiling awkwardly, as if she were at fault, or in some way lacking. The poor little girl’s size defeated her in this way too: everyone, including her mother, forgot how young she was, and expected from her the reactions of a ten-year-old. Now she wanted to do something for her mother, but she did not know what.

‘I shall have to get married, Matty,’ Maisie was saying, twisting her head from side to side. Water sparkled in the creases of her fat neck, water streamed down her red cheeks. Tendrils of her hair were matted on to the pillow. ‘Perhaps I should marry Jackie. But I don’t want to get married.’

‘But Maisie, if you did get married, what difference would that make?’

Mrs Gale, sitting by the head of the divan, leaned over to fan her daughter. Rita sat swinging her large legs. She reached down to scratch inside a soiled white sock. She smiled apologetically, knowing in the fatal, helpless pain of a clumsy child, that she was bound to irritate. And sure enough, the energetic scratch of her fingernail on bare skin sounded loudly, and Maisie said: ‘Oh dear, Rita—don’t do that, and don’t crowd me, there’s a good girl, it’s so hot.’ She hastily smiled, to soften her complaint, and Rita smiled painfully. The grandmother watched, with her sharp, kind eyes, saying nothing. She fanned Maisie, and smiled at Rita. Suddenly Rita let her head droop, under the accumulated miseries of the evening. Tears squeezed under the thick, black lashes. Mrs Gale held out her hand. Rita flung herself at her grandmother, knocking the bed and Maisie’s bare arm. Too big to climb on the old woman’s lap, she stood pressed against Mrs Gale’s thighs, her thick arms around her neck, blubbering loudly.

Maisie lay, her mouth half-open, breathing heavily, listening to the little girl cry, to her mother’s quiet: ‘There, girlie, there, it’s so hot, that’s what got into all of us.’ Maisie smiled resignedly at Martha, who said: ‘Well, I’ve got to go.’

‘There, there,’ said the old woman to the child. ‘Now don’t be upset. Perhaps you’ll come and stay with me in my little house in Gotwe, would you like that? Your mom’ll let you come and visit your gran, and you’ll like that.’

‘Well, it would keep the Maynards off me for a bit, that’d be something,’ said Maisie.

‘I’ll telephone Mrs Van myself when I get home. Do you know what Flora wants to tell Mrs Van?’

‘I don’t know. It seems a kaffir got out of the location and came to tell Johnny they were being badly treated inside. But what can Johnny do? He’s on his last legs, Flora says.’

Martha cycled home, telephoned Mrs Van, was answered by Mr Van. Yes, Mrs Maynard had telephoned, but Mrs Van had not come in yet. He had put a message for her on the pad.

Martha thought: Perhaps I should go down and see Flora? But because she was tired, she remembered, again, ‘running around and about’. How ridiculous, how absurd, this business of always rushing off on someone else’s affairs. All over the town were people who automatically said: Ask Marjorie Black, ask Matty Hesse, if they needed anything. But nothing was changed, except that Marjorie and Martha felt important and that they understood life. Martha went to bed, and was dropping off to sleep, when Anton came in—for the first night since the strike began.

‘Well?’ she said, ‘and how is it going?’

Anton kissed her cheek, and said: ‘It’s nice to see you, Matty.’ They smiled, even held hands a minute. Then he began undressing. ‘They are sensible people, on the whole, when things are explained to them,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s a good thing, in the circumstances.’

Anton drawled humorously: ‘Yes, you could say that.’

‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘how very extraordinary everything is!’

‘Yes, you could say that too.’

The telephone rang. Anton answered it.

He said to Martha: ‘A friend of Maisie’s says I must tell you that Mrs McGrew says that Flora says she’s at Maisie’s. I hope that makes sense.’ He continued undressing.

‘I suppose I’d better just make sure…’ Again Martha rang the Van der Bylt house, and Mr Van, elaborately polite, said for the second time that a message was on the pad for
Mrs Van. ‘Could you please change it to say that Flora’s at Mrs McGrew’s?’ said Martha.

‘My wife is to go to Mrs McGrew’s place when she comes in?’

‘So it seems.’

Next morning, when Mrs Van telephoned, it was to say that Johnny was dead.

What had happened was this:

An African had somehow got out of the main township past the troops and made his way to Johnny Lindsay’s. The strike was four days old, and there was hardly any food left in the locations, and none was being brought in. The troops would not allow people out to get food. ‘All the people had to eat were the fine words of the strike-leaders and the children were all crying,’ said the African.

Johnny told him that he did not think he could do anything about it, but that he would tell Mrs Van. Meanwhile, the man said he wanted to hide in Johnny’s house. Johnny pointed out that he, Johnny, the old socialist, the old trade unionist, was being put in an impossible position—how could he hide strikers who ought by rights to be with their comrades? The man had said that surely ordinary rules could go by the board when troops, not pickets, disciplined strikers. Johnny had agreed, his last recorded words being (in an unfinished memorandum addressed to Mrs Van): ‘The damn fools lock up every black man inside the townships: one per cent of the Africans knew what a strike was before, now there isn’t an African in the cities who hasn’t had a week’s course in the theory and practice of trade unionism. And if an African actually tries to run away from this home-course in strike tactics, the authorities drag him back and make him listen.’

Flora asked this man to stay and watch Johnny while she went off to Maisie’s, to get Maisie’s friend to ring up Mrs Van. But when she got there, she and Maisie decided it was too difficult to ring Mrs Van. For one thing, a message had already been sent once, by the Maynards. For another, they couldn’t face telephoning that house because that ‘old nanny goat, Mr Van’ was enough to put anybody off.

So Maisie’s friend had gone back to her place, and telephoned Martha and got Anton, who told Martha who rang Mr Van for the second time.

Normally, of course, a servant would have been sent up to Mrs Van with a note, and none of this running around and about would have been necessary.

Meanwhile, a patrolling policeman had caught a glimpse of a black man in Johnny’s room. When he arrived at the sick man’s bedside, there was only Johnny, apparently asleep: the African had run out of the house on seeing the policeman, and had hidden himself. The policeman searched, but did not find him. Half an hour later he came back to lecture Johnny for ‘harbouring the enemy’ as he put it to the coroner. ‘Didn’t Johnny know,’ he had planned to say, ‘that there was a strike on?’

But Johnny was asleep.

‘And how was I to know he was so ill?’

‘Didn’t you see the oxygen tanks?’

‘But it was my duty to round up any kaffirs I saw and take them back to the townships. It wasn’t my duty to nurse sick people.’

At Maisie’s place Flora had quite a good bit to drink. Maisie was still upset by the Maynards’ visit, and Flora was worn out by nights of sitting up with the sick man. Flora dropped off to sleep, and woke up about 2
A.M.
, sober. She wanted to go back home, but while it was only a short way from Maisie’s place to Johnny’s house, it was a rough area of town, and the strike made her nervous. Flora consoled herself by thinking that it was all right, Johnny wasn’t alone, he had the black man from the location with him. And more than likely Mrs Van would have made her way to him by now. She tried to doze off again in a big armchair, but it was no use—‘something kept tugging at me, and I decided to go home.’ But she was frightened. Mrs Gale made her coffee and offered to walk with her: she had spent all her life in tough places, she said, what was half a mile’s walk even in rough streets compared to what she was used to? But Maisie said she would be nervous without her mother. Then a policeman, seeing the lights on, had appeared and asked if
everything was all right. It was three in the morning. Flora asked him to walk with her back to her home. He did, and when they reached it, no one was there. There was no Johnny in the bed, the sheets and blankets were anyhow, and an oxygen tube lay on the pillow, and the oxygen tank was quite empty.

‘Oh God, oh God, forgive me,’ sobbed Flora, clutching the policeman.

She tried to console herself by thinking Mrs Van might have taken Johnny home with her. But why should she have done? She had often sat a night through with Johnny in this room, and the old man had not been out of bed for weeks. As it happened, Mrs Van knew nothing about all this: coming in late and tired, she had glanced at the messages on the pad, but not thoroughly: the two messages about Johnny, or rather, Maisie, were on the back of a sheet.

Flora and the policeman began running through the streets around the house. They had seen some blood on the doorstep. At last they found Johnny face down on the doorstep of an Indian shop a few hundred yards away. He was dead, and had been dead, so the doctor said, for three or four hours.