even when talking about it to a man who knew it well. Enough to say: Ships, terraces, and Yes, I know so and so, I’ve been to so and so. In such a conversation she was just as much Phyllis Jones as she was Martha with Stella. People filled in for you, out of what they wanted, needed, from – not you, not you at all, but from their own needs. Phyllis Jones, a young widow with a small boy, an object of great interest and compassion to Leslie Haddon, a clerk from Bristol, a man uncomfortably married and in search of a ‘congenial female companion’ – spoke through Martha’s mouth for some hours, until, pleading maternal duties and an inviolable memory of her dead husband, she left him in the pub. And left Phyllis Jones. And – interesting this – a week later, when another stranger, had said, What’s your name, she had nearly offered Phyllis Jones, but it was the wrong name. This person, a woman on a train, was wrong for Phyllis Jones, did not evoke her. So Martha had been someone called Alice Harris instead. Why not?
For a while at least. What difference did it make to her, the sense of identity, like a silent statement ‘I am here’, if she were called Phyllis or Alice, or Martha or Matty; or if her history were this or that? But for a while only. Because she knew that ringing up Phoebe was not only because now she must earn money, and become responsible to her fellow human beings. Something (a sense of self-preservation?) could not tolerate much longer her walking and riding and talking the time away under this name or that, this disguise or that; calling strange identities into being with a switch of clothes or a change of voice – until one felt like an empty space without boundaries and it did not matter what name one gave a stranger who asked: What is your name? Who are you?
Martha crossed the river, left it, moved among streets that looked as if they had just survived an earthquake, and came to the rubble of damage left by the bomb that had fallen on St Paul’s. To Iris, ‘where the bomb fell across the river’. She had been to visit the scene the day after. So had Stella and some of her men. City workers emerged everywhere from doorways, hurried off to buses and tubes. This day was ending – and where was she going to sleep tonight? Another telephone box, orangy-pink and faded, stood ahead. She went into it, to ring Phoebe. Soon, on the pile of telephone books, there were bits of paper with telephone numbers on them – Phoebe’s among them. And the café’s number. If she rang there now, saying, even as Martha, ‘I’m coming back tonight,’ Jimmy or Iris would say: ‘You’re coming back then, are you?’ And she would walk in, and, after a moment to judge whether she brought pain with her, a snub, they would smile. Extraordinarily kind they were; kindness was stronger than their anxious need to hold, to keep.
Iris felt for Martha, or rather Martha’s experience that enabled her to drop into the life of Joe’s Café like a migrating bird, exactly the same emotion as she felt for a baulk of timber hauled up out of the tides of the river or a yard of curtain material got off the ration, or teaspoons found among rubble after a bomb had dropped. Which was not to denigrate what she felt: not at all. Martha had been something extra, something given, something unearned – as the children playing on the bomb site had come running into the café with an old metal meat dish found under some broken bricks, used now for the week’s meat ration at Sunday midday. Treasure. And Martha to Stella was a heady wind from countries she would never visit.
Henry Matheson’s number, on a bus ticket: she had, also, to telephone Henry. She could sleep at Jack’s – that is, she could if he didn’t have another girl there, which was likely. She should ring Henry. Not wanting to ring Henry was quite a different reluctance from not wanting to ring Marjorie’s sister. Henry Matheson was a relation of Mrs Maynard. Mr Maynard had arrived to say good-bye to Martha at the station when she left, not oblivious to the fact that Martha did not want to say good-bye, or even to see him – but not caring. He was in the grip of that need with which Martha had become only too familiar seeing it at work in so many different people: it was to make sure that Martha did not escape from him, or rather, from what he represented. His wife’s cousins the Mathesons would be only too delighted to see her, said he, formidably present for a half-hour before the train steamed out of the station from which she, at last, after having seen so many people leave there for adventures in England, was leaving. Clearly her manner had not indicated strongly enough that she would be delighted to see the cousins, so Henry Matheson had been at the boat train to meet her. Martha felt no obligation to be grateful to the Maynards, who were not kind; but did feel she must at least be polite to Henry, who was. Henry, altogether charming, and delightful, had hovered, the eye of the Maynards, in the background of those weeks; and Martha had bought him off by offering – not ‘Matty’, too crude a persona for him, but a slaphappy, freebooting adventuress, cousin of ‘Matty’, who, she thought, was close enough to his secret fantasies about himself – he was the essence of conformity – to keep him quiet. She did not want letters from Henry to the Maynards of a kind which would cause Mrs Maynard to telephone her mother in the mountains near the Zambesi: ‘About that gal of yours, it would appear that The thing was, Henry had offered her a job in his firm: he was a lawyer, and she had legal experience. But she had refused it. Typical of anyone anywhere near the Maynards, thought Martha, that it had not been enough to refuse the job once: somewhere Henry was so convinced of his generosity and Martha’s luck that he could not believe she would be foolish enough to refuse it – must believe she was too green to know how good a job it was. Jobs as good as that one were short, she knew. The only way to convince him was to take another.
She rang Jack. ‘Jack, this is Martha.’ ‘Oh, Martha, just a moment …’ So he was not alone. She waited. Outside the glass-apertured box in which Martha stood, people jostled, heads down, under their low weeping sky. Like cattle rushing forward into the dip on the farm: it was the same blind impelled movement. On a barrow at the corner, fruit – apples mostly. A pile of waxy-green apples with rain on them. And, crowning a pile of apples, a single bunch of grapes, displayed proudly on a wad of fibre. A single bunch of green grapes. In Cape Town grapes had dripped, dangled, overflowed, from barrows, carts, shops, a wealth of grapes, from which one bunch had flown overseas to land on this cart by the rubble near St Paul’s. As she held the receiver and watched, a woman picked up the bunch, decided it was too expensive, replaced it, and a single grape rolled down off the cart on to the pavement, lying like a pale green jewel among trampling feet. The sales boy, who had been looking desperate, dived for the grape, retrieved it, and with a quick look, wiped it on a bit of newspaper and then was about to put it back on the crown of grapes when a small child buttoned into a hooded raincoat stared at the grapes from eye level. He had probably never seen grapes at all. The youth pressed the grape into the child’s mouth. Smiles: from young mamma to youth, from mamma urging child to smile, at last, from child to youth: thank you. Apples were bought and the child went off on mamma’s hand, looking back at the bunch of translucent wet green grapes. ‘Martha, I’m so glad you telephoned, man, but where have you been?’ He was South African, but his accent had been fined down by much war-travelling. ‘Jack, I haven’t got anywhere to sleep tonight?’ A pause for calculations. ‘Just a tick, Martha, I must just …’ Again the other end of the phone had gone silent, but receptive: Martha could hear voices off somewhere, Jack’s, a girl’s. Jack was telling a story of some kind to the girl who was there. Or the truth, who knew? He came back. ‘It’s like this, Martha, I’m going to have to work till midnight.’ She laughed. Then, so did he. ‘Midnight would suit me fine.’ ‘See you, Martha.’ ‘See you, Jack.’
If she did not now ring Henry, she would take a bus to Bayswater and spend the evening drifting in and out of the pubs with the other visitors, migrants, freebooters. They would talk about England. That is, for a lot of the time, about Henry Matheson and what he stood for; and Iris and Stella and what they stood for. Someone would have a newspaper that jittered about the advent of red socialism in Britain, and how the working classes grew fat and luxurious, and how the upper classes dwindled into poverty. The aliens would look at the newspaper and talk about Iris and Stella, whom it appeared literate natives did not meet.
She rang Henry’s office. He was, said the telephone girl, just about to leave. This girl’s voice was a careful London suburban (Martha could already place it) and was exactly why she, Martha, if she accepted that job, would be working, not where she dealt with people on the telephone, but in an office where her merits would be of benefit to her fellow-workers and not, or at least not immediately, to the public.
Henry came to the telephone.