I – this humiliating noisily suffering body isn’t me.
‘Johnny, I’m terribly late, I must rush off.’
Mrs Van frowned. Martha said: ‘I’m expected at my father’s,’ and Mrs Van smiled. Martha saw the fat old woman examining her – ‘like a headmistress’ she could not help thinking. The small, piercing blue eyes that rested their steady beam on her had missed nothing – not even the small smudge of oil from the bicycle chain on her leg.
‘Before you run off, I think Mr de Wet would like to meet you, Martha,’ said Mrs Van.
The young man rose, as if he had been ordered – well, he had been, in fact. He smiled politely at Martha, but waited for Mrs Van to go on.
‘Clive has a contact, an African contact. He wants to start a study group of some kind and I thought it would be useful if he could discuss things with you – you could order books for them. And so on.’
‘We have started the study group,’ said Clive abruptly. He sounded annoyed, though he had not meant to. Mrs Van said quickly: ‘Well, in that case perhaps it’s all right.’
Martha thought this all out: Clive was Clive de Wet, the ‘man in Sinoia Street’ mentioned by Athen, the ‘contact’ mentioned by Solly. He also knew Thomas Stern. Mrs Van could not know he was already the happy recipient of so much attention. The fact that he had not told Mrs Van he already had at least three white people ready to supply ‘books and so on’ meant that he did not trust her? Certainly he did not trust her, Martha, since Solly would have seen to it that he did not.
Martha said to Clive: ‘If you want to see me at any time, here is my telephone number.’ She scribbled her office number on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. He took it with a tiny hesitation which said that Martha had been quite right in diagnosing a dislike of so much interest.
She noted Mrs Van’s shrewd face accurately marking and analysing all these tiny events and knew that she could expect from Mrs Van, not later than lunchtime tomorrow, a telephone call enquiring: ‘Well, Matty, and what is going on with that study group? Why haven’t I been told?’
Martha, Clive de Wet, Mrs Van were watching each other, thinking about each other, all as alert as circling hawks. Meanwhile Johnny lay, eyes closed, on his pillows, and Flora clicked her needles. She was quite absorbed in her orange wool, and would have understood nothing of this scene.
Martha finally nodded and smiled at Mrs Van, nodded at Clive de Wet, and tiptoed to the door over the slippery grass of the mat.
In the street the children were swooping and darting like so many swallows through the dusk and the little Indian boy was winding up his gramophone, which played Sarie Marais.
Now she must visit her father and then, thank goodness, she could go to bed early.
She made the transition from one world to another in fifteen minutes, arriving in the gardened avenues as they filled with cars headed for the eight o’clock cinemas. Everything dazzled and spun under racing headlights, but the Quests’ place had trees all around it. It had always been a garden which accommodated a house, rather than a house with a garden. The stiff, fringed, lacy, fanning and sworded shapes of variegated foliage, shadowed or bright, hid the bricks and painted iron of an ordinary, even ugly house from whose windows light spilled in dusty yellow shafts through which moths fluttered. The strong shafts from the busy headlights swept across the tops of bushes, the boughs of trees. But at walking level, everything was dark, quiet.
Martha dumped her bicycle on gravel and ran up shallow steps where geranium spilled scented trails. No one on the veranda, but from a window which opened off it the sound of a child’s voice: ‘Granny, Granny, I don’t want pudding.’
Martha’s heart went small and tight; she fixed her smile neatly across her face, and went into the living-room, on tip-toe. It was empty but the radio was on, the gramophone played the Emperor at full blast, and a small white dog rose to yap pointlessly, its tail frantically welcoming. Martha shushed the dog, turned off the gramophone, and received news of the war in Europe: Starvation was killing off the Dutch people. The Allies had made 70,000 prisoners. The Düsseldorf bridges had been blown up. Only forty sorties were flown by our Tactical Air Forces today, though medium bombers made a successful attack through ten-tenths cloud on a marshalling yard at Burgsteinfurt. The Germans’ sense of war-guilt was growing, and their nerves were ‘shot’ as a result of the bombing. Behaviour of German civilians in the Rhineland was so servile that words like ‘cringing’ were frequently and not unjustifiably used. Tommies and GIs alike were developing the deepest contempt for the ‘Herrenvolk’. Life had almost stopped. Fields where corn should be growing were deeply marked by the tracks of manoeuvring tanks or were pitted by thousands of shell and bomb holes. It would need four years to get the Ukraine, our gallant ally’s granary, going again. Never before in this war had the Allies had such favourable weather before a major operation. The vastly superior number of Allied tanks and armoured vehicles, once across the Rhine, should find good going on the hard dry plains of the Northern Ruhr. A Liberator pilot said today: ‘Hundreds of fighters were strafing and diving below over what was the most tremendous battle I ever hope to see.’ There were still hundreds and thousands of Germans living among the ruins of Cologne. The whole central part of the city was a chaos of debris. There were riots in Czechoslovakia.
Perhaps she could see her father before her mother knew she was there?
She went quietly down the passage to the room at the back of the house, and knocked gently. No reply. Inside, a scene of screened lights and the smell of medicines.
An old, neat, white-haired man lay on low pillows, his head fallen rather sideways, and his mouth open. His teeth were in a glass of water by the bed, and his jaw had a collapsed graveyard look.
Martha said, softly: ‘Father,’ but he did not move, so she went out again.
Mrs Quest came down the passage with her hands full of ironed white things. There was a hot clean smell of ironing.
‘Oh there you are,’ she began, ‘you’re late, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry.’
‘Just as well really, because I’ve only just this moment got Caroline off to sleep.’
‘I thought you said she was going home?’ said Martha, automatically joining battle.
‘Yes, but she looked a bit peaky, and I thought a bit of proper looking after would do her good.’
The monstrous implications of the sentence caused Martha to flush with anger, but Mrs Quest had already gone on to worse: ‘Better be quiet, keep your voice down sort of thing, because she doesn’t know you are here.’
Martha went straight past her mother, containing futile anger, to the living-room. Again the little white dog leaped down off a chair, and began bounding like a rubber ball around Martha, yapping incessantly.
‘God help us,’ shouted Martha, at last finding a safe target for anger. ‘That damned dog has seen me most days for three years and it still barks.’
‘Down Kaiser, down Kaiser, down!’ Mrs Quest’s fond voice joined the symphony of yaps, and a little girl’s voice said outside: ‘Granny, Granny, why is Kaiser barking?’
‘Out of sight!’ commanded Mrs Quest dramatically.
Martha turned a look on her mother which caused the old woman to drop her eyes a moment, and then sigh, as if to say: I’m being blamed again! She whisked out of the room, and Martha heard: ‘Oh Caroline, you wicked girl, what are you doing out of bed?’
But Mrs Quest’s voice, with the child, had the ease of love and Caroline’s voice came confidently: ‘I’d like it better if I could have Kaiser in my room, Granny.’
‘Well, we’ll see.’
Do you suppose, Martha wondered, that when I was little she talked to me like that? Is it possible she liked me enough?
The telephone rang, Mrs Quest came bustling