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‘Oh, did you?’

‘Yes, he’s got sick-leave in Cairo, but he’s being sent to a hospital in England.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘He didn’t say.’

Jonathan had been wounded slightly in the leg at El Alamein, but recovered. Recently he had been wounded again in the arm, and the arm showed no signs of properly healing, much to everyone’s relief. As Mr Quest said: ‘If he gets out of it with nothing worse than a gammy arm, he’ll be doing quite well.’

‘Shhhhh,’ said Mrs Quest suddenly, as Caroline said from the window where she was swinging from the burglar bars: ‘Who’s that lady, Granny, who is that lady?’

Martha picked up her bicycle, jumped on it, and cycled fast through the bushes to the invisibility which would enable Mrs Quest to turn the child’s attention to something else. At a telephone box, Martha rang the
Piccadilly
. Johnny was happy to bring his compatriot to the telephone. Martha told Athen she could not see him that evening.

‘I’m sorry,’ came Athen’s voice, raised against the clatter
of a hundred eating humans. ‘Well then, I’ll see you in about a week, and in the meantime, will you please see my friend Clive de Wet?’

‘I met him this evening at Johnny’s. I don’t think he wants to see me. I’m sure of it.’

‘No, I spoke to him about you. He wants to see you.’

‘When did you speak to him?’

‘I’ve just been to his house, he was there and I spoke to him. He said he thought you were associated with Mrs Van.’

‘I don’t understand, he was reading to Johnny, doesn’t he approve of Johnny?’

‘He does, very much. But he does not trust Mrs Van, I think.’

‘That’s ridiculous—how can he like Johnny and not like Mrs Van?’

‘At any rate, it would be helpful if you explain things to him. They need much help—they have no books, and wish to be taught many things.’

‘Oh well, in that case…and I’ll see you next week.’

‘Yes. And give my greetings to your husband.’

And now, at last, she must go home to Anton. Home was a new place, half a flat, half a house—two little rooms, a bathroom and a shared kitchen that was really a screened-off veranda over a patch of shared dirty lawn. The woman they shared with was a Mrs Huxtable. Martha did not like her, but as there was never any time for cooking anyway, it didn’t matter.

Anton had telephoned her three times. Three times. The information had been received apprehensively by her nerves. Her emotions repeated, with monotony: It’s not fair, it’s not fair—meaning that this kind of demand, or reproach, was not in the bargain of her marriage with Anton. Meanwhile her brain was sending messages of warning that she was scared to listen to. For months now there had been a kind of equilibrium in the marriage. Having acknowledged it was a bad marriage, that they had made a mistake, that they would split up again as soon as the war ended, a sort of friendliness, even kindness, even—perhaps?—a tenderness was established. But while, for Martha, this new
relationship was welcome because it softened an intolerable strain; it seemed that for Anton it meant a new promise. At any rate, three different telephone calls in one afternoon was a language, a demand, Martha could not begin to answer.

Cycling past McGrath’s hotel, she remembered that after all she belonged to a world where people might sit drinking in large rooms, served by waiters; they might dance; they might even eat dinners (bad dinners, but formal, that was something) in restaurants. She would ring up Anton from the foyer and ask him to join her for a drink, and perhaps dinner. He would say humorously: ‘And what are we celebrating, Matty, have I forgotten your birthday?’

He would protest at having to come, but he would be pleased. They could drink for an hour or so, have dinner, listen to the band, and in this way both could forget (Martha hoped) the implications of the fact that practically everything he said, or did, these days, was really a reproach for her not doing, or being, what he now wanted her to be.

It was almost seven. Martha had been waiting since five. Waiting now being a condition of her life, like breathing, it scarcely mattered whether she waited for an interview or for when peace would be restored—the new phrase, which showed that the old one, ‘when the war ends’, had proved inadequate. She waited with the whole of herself, as other people might pray, yet with even prayer become something to be practised, kept in use merely, since it could be effective only with the beginning of a new life. Waiting for her life to begin, when she could go to England, she waited for ‘the contact from the African group’, and with the same ability to cancel out present time. She read half a pamphlet about Japanese atrocities with an irritated boredom with propaganda which did not mean she disbelieved what she read. She absorbed a column or so of statistics about African education but with the irritation of impotence. She filed her nails, brushed her hair as she never had time to do in her bedroom, ‘fifty strokes on each side’, tidied a cupboard full of pamphlets that dealt definitively with affairs in at least a hundred countries, and finally sat down with deliberately idle but restless hands, on a bench under the window over Founders’ Street.

The heat of a stormy day had drained into the scarlet flush that still spread, westwards, under bright swollen stars only intermittently visible. Hailstones from the recent storm scattered the street and lay on the dirty windowsill, and gusts of sharp cold air drove from racing clouds across the hot currents rising from the pavements. It would be winter soon, the ice seemed promise of it. Martha’s calves sweated slipperily against the wood of the bench, and she sucked a
bit of ice as an ally against heat, watching her smooth brown skin pucker under the gold down on her forearm into protest against cold. There was a blanket folded on top of the wooden cupboard. The blanket was because friends in the RAF sometimes slept here if they were too late for the last bus to camp. Martha now spread it on the bench against the unpleasant slipperiness of sweat, and wrapped her legs in it. The hailstones, even under a crust of dirt, sent forth their cool smell, and Martha twisted herself about to watch the sky from where the winds of a new storm already poured over the town. Sitting with her back turned, she did not see that Solly had come in, and missed the moment when she could judge why he was here. For a moment the two stared deeply at each other. She broke it by saying: ‘I’m waiting for a man to come from the African group.’ She had decided on this admission to save half an hour of fencing. A bad liar, she knew it, and had thus acquired the reputation: Matty is
such
a sincere person. Meanwhile, part of her mind juggled to find convincing lies to put him off.

‘It’s such a pleasure having dealings with you, Matty, always as honest as the day.’

‘It occurred to me recently there’s no point in being anything else, living in this—ant-nest.’ Her voice was shrill, and she set guards on herself; noting meanwhile that ‘enemy’ Solly ceased to be one when she thought of him as a fellow victim of the provinces. She smiled at him: as a cat which has been scampering about a crouching tom suddenly rolls over and lifts meek paws. Not quite, however. But the flash of seriousness on this young man’s face (whatever the reason for it) when he had first seen her under the window had after all weakened the force of her decision not to like him. So would he look into her face from a few inches’ distance
if
. But he was now saying, vibrant with sarcastic hostility: ‘You have a point, I grant you. Yesterday I met a comrade of yours from the camp who said, how was Matty? I said what did he mean? It seems our liaison is common gossip.’

‘What fun for you.’

‘Well, I do hope so, Matty.’

‘The thing is, I have to meet Athen at seven and it must be that now.’

‘Well, I would be only too happy to wait to seduce you until you had finished conferring with comrade Athen.’

He was on the bench beside her. His face grinned into hers from not six inches away. Luckily, however, not at all ‘serious’, far from it, so she was saved. She got up and began piling pamphlets about the Second Front (now unsaleable) into the cupboard.

‘Solly, are you seeing Clive de Wet?’

‘Why should I tell you, comrade Matty?’

‘Well, if you want to be childish.’

‘It’s you who are childish. This is Solly Cohen, the Trotskyist.’

‘But it looks as if the African group want help?’

‘There isn’t an African group.’

‘But a group of Africans?’

‘What can you do for them I can’t do?’

She shrugged and then laughed. The laughter was because of a picture so sharp to her imagination it was hard to believe it wasn’t in his also: ‘the African group’, like a small starving child, its hands held out for help, was being torn to pieces by a group of adults fighting for the right to help it.

At that moment came a knock on the door. Martha shouted ‘Come in’ and a small black boy came in, looking nervously from one to the other of the two white people.

‘Missus Mart,’ he said.

‘No Mrs Mart here,’ said Martha.

‘Idiot, it’s you.’

Solly was already grinning: he knew what was in the dingy envelope that the small boy held out.

A single sheet of exercise paper said:

‘Dear Mrs Martha,

I apologize for not coming this afternoon, I have been prevented by unavoidable circumstances. Hoping I may have the pleasure of your acquaintance at another time.

Yours sincerely,
Signature illegible.’

Probably purposely so.

‘Who sent you?’

The little boy shifted his feet and his eyes and said: ‘Don’t know, missus.’

Martha gave him a shilling and he started to run off. She said: ‘Please tell whoever sent you that I will be here tomorrow afternoon at the same time.’

‘Yes, missus.’

He vanished and Solly jeered: ‘Ever faithful Matty, waiting day after day in pursuance of duty. But he won’t come, I’ve seen to it.’

‘Luckily you’re not the only influence abroad. There’s Athen and Thomas as well.’

He grinned. ‘Dear Matty. What makes you think it’s the same group?’

‘Oh, isn’t it? Well, never mind, I’m late for Athen.’

‘May I have the pleasure of walking you to Dirty Dick’s?’

‘How do you know it’s Dirty Dick’s?’

‘Where else?’

On the pavement large drops of warm rain fell all about them. She wriggled her shoulders inside damp cotton. The warm wet was lashed by cold. Overhead, miles overhead, very likely, air masses had shifted, had clashed, and here spears of acid-cold water mingled with fat warm drops from a lower region of sky. Lightning splurged across the dark, and Solly pulled Martha under an awning. He put his hot arms about her, and dropped a hot cheek close to hers, while ice from the clouds bounced around their feet.

‘But Solly, there’s absolutely no point in it.’

‘Look where all this highmindedness has got you. The arms of Anton Hesse. Not to mention the divorced arms of Douglas Knowell. Why didn’t you listen to Joss and me? We told you, didn’t we, and you’d never listen.’

‘All right. But I’m late for Athen.’

The Piccadilly was empty. Rather, it had half a dozen civilians in it. Unpredictably the RAF flowed in and out of the town, and tonight the tide was out: not a uniform in sight. The big oblong room, with its shiny yellow walls, that were usually hung with hundreds of caps, jackets, coats; its
hundred tables tightly massed with grey-blue uniforms, was empty. At the end of the room, a neat dark little man in a light suit rose to meet them. Athen himself. Martha had never seen him out of uniform and she examined him while Solly said to Johnny: ‘Where are all our gallant boys?’ But Johnny spread out his palms, empty of information, and shrugged.

‘Any news from home?’ Martha asked politely, as usual.

‘It’ll soon be over now. We’ve offered them…’ here he nodded towards Athen, ‘…an amnesty. Yes, Elas and Elam will give themselves up now, you’ll see.’

Athen watched Martha approach and smiled. But he saw Solly and his face went on guard. Athen despised Solly. Not for being a Trotskyist: Solly was not a serious person, said Athen. Before taking a person’s beliefs seriously, he must be worthy to have beliefs. At any rate, when Solly was mentioned he simply shrugged. As for Solly, since it was not possible to despise Athen, he regarded him as the dupe of Stalin. Martha was angry with herself for letting Solly be here. It was going to be another awful evening, another among hundreds. It was her fault. She could never remember that because she ‘got on’ with people, it didn’t mean they should ‘get on’ with each other. She was always creating situations full of discordant people. It did not flatter her that she could: on the contrary. If such tenuous ties she had with people, easy contact, surface friendship, yet had the strength to bring them together, what did that fact say about them, about her, and—she would not be Martha if she did not go on—about associations, groups, friendships generally? And it was no quality to be admired in herself that made her a focus. She was, at this time, available. That was all. If not her, it would be someone else—just as, before her, it had been the du Preez’ and before them Jasmine Cohen.

Very well then, it seemed that for this period of her life, her role was to—well, this evening for instance, there was a group consisting of Athen and Solly and herself; and then these three (unless she could shed Solly and there seemed no likelihood of that) and Anton and Joss and
Thomas Stern would all go to the pictures. And afterwards everyone would come home to their flat (Anton’s and hers) and she would cook eggs for them. This was friendship. She reminded herself that ten years before she had been saying critically, in such different circumstances: This is friendship! and made herself pay attention to her present scene. Solly was looking at her, very close, across the table, reminding her with his eyes why he was here. And Athen was standing by his chair, face to face with Johnny Capetenakis, and the two men spoke low and fast in bitter Greek, their eyes burning hatred. Martha had never seen this Athen, and she thought that if these two men were now, this evening, standing in the same way on their mother soil, it would be to kill each other. Athen’s eyes blazed murder; Johnny’s eyes blazed back. Athen’s fist trembled as it hung by his side. Johnny Capetenakis spat out a last low volley of hate and turned and went off to his desk by the door of the restaurant.

Athen sat down. ‘He says our people should give themselves up to the amnesty, they would be safe. I told him, it’s not the first time. There’s a clause, criminals will be shot. I told him, we know who these criminals will turn out to be. He tells me I am a traitor to my country.’

He sat, sombre, looking about him with dislike, then he said: ‘I cannot stay here, I am sorry, but it is too much to sit here, in this man’s place.’

‘Well, we’re late for the pictures anyway.’

Martha led the way out, greeting Johnny at the desk, not knowing whether she should feel disloyal for doing so or not. But she noted that Athen nodded at Johnny, and that Johnny nodded briefly back.

The rain had gone, the stars were washed clean, steam rose from the tarmac that shone like dark water, reflecting rose and blue and gold. It was nearly eight. Main Street was filled with groups of civilians moving towards the cinema. No RAF, absolutely none.

‘It might just as well be peacetime,’ said Martha.

‘There is a big man coming tomorrow,’ said Athen. ‘Everyone has to polish their buttons tonight.’

‘What big man?’

‘From England. An Air Vice-Marshal.’

‘Why are you allowed out then?’

‘All the Greeks have got week-end leave, all of us. They have worked it out: the Greeks are all communists, and the communists are anti-British, therefore the communists will try to assassinate the Air Vice-Marshal.’

Athen sounded bitter, and Martha, who had been going to laugh, stopped herself.

‘What are you complaining about,’ said Solly, ‘if you’ve got the week-end?’

Martha had never seen Athen like this: the gentle controlled little man was beyond himself, he was flushed with anger, he looked humiliated and his hands shook.

‘This proves what I always said about the reactionaries. They always know
facts
. They always know who is a member of what. They know who has written letters to who. They know who has attended this meeting, that meeting. They know who is a man’s relatives and who can be made to talk. This they know because of their spies. But they can never interpret these facts, because they put their own bad minds into our minds.’

Athen stood bitterly on the pavement, talking—not to them. Martha and Solly stood on one side waiting.

‘I used to say to our comrades in the mountains. If it is a question of fact, they will know. Yes. Be frightened of that, and guard against it. But if it is a question of intention—if they interrogate you and say: “You mean this, you want this”, then keep your mouths shut and do not worry. They know nothing. They are too stupid. Their Air Vice-Marshal is safe from us,’ said Athen, his white teeth showing in bitterness.

‘Athen,’ said Martha gently, but he was going on. Probably, she thought (since he spoke often of that time) he was in a freezing cave above a pass as narrow as Thermopylae. Tomorrow, or next week, they—he and his soldiers—would roll boulders down bare brown hillsides patched with snow to crush one hundred and fifty of their countrymen who, in British uniforms and British-officered, were hunting them
out. ‘I tell them,’ Athen said softly, ‘I tell them always: Remember who you are, comrades. Now we are like criminals hunted over the mountains, but soon that will end, and we will be men.’

‘We are going to be late,’ said Solly. He went on ahead, having decided to take the others on the offensive of his effrontery. Martha heard him say: ‘Good evening, comrades, one and all! And good evening, brother Joss!’

Athen had taken Martha’s hand. ‘Martha, I have to ask you something serious.’

From fifty yards off, Solly, then Joss, called: ‘Come on, you two, it’s late.’

‘Have you noticed a change in me?’

‘Yes, I have.’