create the many-coloured poisonous web of talk, was why they all felt exhausted after such mornings. Just like the frivolous, non-progressive women of the avenues, they spent their days over cups of tea, and went home in a sort of dragging, rather peevish dissatisfaction, while in their heads still ran on, like a gramophone record that could not be turned off, the currents of their gossip: The trouble with Betty is, she is mother-fixated, her headaches are obviously of psychological origin, and Martha’s trouble is, she is unstable, and Marjorie’s trouble is, she is a masochist, why have another baby when she’ll only complain at the extra work, and Mrs Van – well, she’s marvellous, but she’s awfully conventional really, and Jack Dobie is not doing the progressive cause much good, if he hadn’t framed that Bill in such an aggressive way, he’d have got it through the House, but he has a father-complex, which makes it necessary for him to challenge authority.
Because she could not work in the mornings, Martha would say to Anton, on the evenings when Thomas was not in town: ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to work after supper.’ Most evenings Martha worked, and Anton read or might go out – presumably to see Millicent.
‘You don’t feel any guilt about telling your husband you want to work, but you do when the women come around to gossip?’
‘He’s not my husband.’
‘Of course not. And this work, typing out reports for Jack Dobie about his trade unionists – that’s important?’
‘It’s better than talking about the du Preez’s children’s psychological problems and Piet du Preez’s power complex.’
‘Is it? Then if you feel it is, it is.’
Martha said: ‘When I’m here and you say it, of course, it’s ridiculous. But afterwards it’s all very serious.’
‘Only because you let it be serious.’
Martha said: ‘All these things that drive us crazy, when you put them into words, they sound silly. But it is important.’
‘All you have to do is to come here every morning when Anton goes to work and work here.’
They sat on the low bed, side by side. It was in the evening, before he had to go back to his farm. A single, small bulb laid shadow and light about them. They were enclosed in a small, sweet-smelling world of wood and foliage. He was making white marks on her thigh with the pressure of his fingers, lifting them to let the blood flow in, then pressing down again. Both watched, absorbed, this life of the flesh which flourished in its own laws under their eyes.
‘You were going to say something about when I go away, Martha. There’s a look on your face which means that.’
‘Yes, that’s what I was thinking.’
‘I know you were. Well, you’re right. Look, I’m not disputing it, believe me.’
‘Disputing what? I haven’t said anything.’
‘You get a look on your face. That means I should shut up. You are claiming your right to make safeguards.’
‘For when I go away?’
‘That’s below the belt, it really is, Martha. You mean, because I don’t marry you, then you have to sit around all morning gossiping and complaining afterwards?’
‘Who said anything about marrying?’
‘You’re in the right to mention it.’
‘I didn’t mention it at all.’
‘Ah, my God, you’ll drive me mad. Then we’ll discuss your serious problems. Look then. You say you wouldn’t have left that office job except for me? Look how easy that was. When Mr Robinson got in the way of serious things, like a lover, then you changed your life at once. Now you say the women waste your time in the mornings – then come here, so they don’t know where you are.’
‘Ah yes, but it’s all very well, you’ll go away. And heaven knows how long I’ll have to stay here, years very likely. Anton hasn’t heard a word from Germany yet.’
‘Just leave him!’
‘But you know I can’t. If I do then it makes him unrespectable and he’ll never be made a British citizen.’
‘But he doesn’t want to be a British citizen.’
‘Perhaps he does – I don’t know. Why do we have to talk about Anton?’
‘He’s your husband, that’s why.’
‘He’s not my husband. ‘
That rainy season, she spent nearly every afternoon in the loft, and most evenings. Then there were fewer evenings – Thomas’s work was suffering, he said. For a while Martha stayed at home when Thomas was not coming – but then returned to the loft. Every evening, after supper, she told Anton she must work, and she went to the loft.
Every afternoon Martha went to the loft, hoping she would see no one, hoping that Thomas’s brother’s wife would not see her. But the plump, watchful woman was nearly always sewing on her veranda. So Martha went openly across the back garden and into the shed. There she waited for Thomas. Sometimes he did not come, and she read, or simply did nothing, watching the green shadows from the tree ripple on the planks of the floor. Here she was ‘herself’, no one put pressure on her. Even when Thomas did not come, she returned happy, and – this was increasingly the point – armed, against Anton. It came to this: she began to go to the shed in the mornings, not because of the idle women, but because of Anton.
For her feelings about Anton had gone beyond anything she could understand. Like ‘the circle of women’, ‘her husband’ provoked in her only the enemy, feelings so ancient and, it seemed, autonomous, they were beyond her control.
For consider how irrational it was. First there had been the period of months when they, Anton and Martha, decided that they would ‘live their own lives’. During this time, when presumably Anton had pursued his affair with Millicent, and Martha had had nobody, but waited for Thomas, they lived together amicably – without any emotional contact, but certainly without strain.
This ease had ended, but at once, that day when Martha had first made love with Thomas. She had not expected anything to change. After all, had not Anton assumed, all this time, that she had a lover?
Yet the night after she had first made love with Thomas, Anton made love to her, and for the first time in months. Stranger still, although she was claimed by Thomas, absorbed by what she had discovered and knew she would discover, she went through the motions of compliance with Anton. Why? She did not have to. She did not even mean to. Yet she did. She despised herself for it, certainly, but that was hardly the point, compared with the knowledge that if Anton had come into her bed the night before (before making love with Thomas) she would have said No, or implied No – but of course Anton would not have come, he only made love to her because of Thomas.
Who, then, was this person in Martha who first of all signalled to her husband, her legal possessor (or some kind of possessor) that she had been unfaithful to him, and who then went on (without Martha knowing about it, let alone sanctioning it) to signal invitations to him, because apparently she had to buy this disliked husband’s compliance, even forgiveness. And by offering him her sex!
Martha lay awake after Anton’s making love to her, not because of Thomas about whom, even after the first time of making love with him, she had no doubts at all, but about Anton who had suddenly become a frightening unknown country.
She thought: Suppose I said to Anton: ‘You’ve made love to me tonight not even because you’re jealous, but because certain instincts have been touched, so that you have to reestablish possession of me’ – well, what would he say? He’d look at her outraged, even disgusted. What sort of conventional attitudes was she putting on him? And what instincts? Had she not had a lover, with his agreement, for months? And while his body had been aggressive, violent, even painful, his words had been that of a dear old friend or comrade, making love with an old bed-fellow