Walking in the Shade (7 page)

The difficulties between Joan and me were no more than were inevitable, with two females, both used to their independence, living in the same house. We got on pretty well. We sat often over her kitchen table, gossiping: people, men, the world, the comrades—this last increasingly critical. In fact, gossiping with Joan over the kitchen table is one of my pleasantest memories. We both cooked well; gentle competition went on over the meals we prepared. The talk was of the kind I later used in
The Golden Notebook
.

A scene: Joan said she wanted me to see something. ‘I'm not going to tell you; just come.' In a little house in a little street two minutes' walk away, we found ourselves in a little room crammed with valuable furniture and pictures and, too, people. Four people filled it, and Joan stood at the doorway, me just behind, and waved to a languorous woman lying on a chaise longue, dressed in a frothy peignoir. A man bent over her, offering champagne: he was a former husband. Another, a current lover, fondled her feet. A very young man, flushed, excited, adoring, was waiting his chance. No room for us, so we said goodbye, and she called, ‘Do come again, darlings, any time. I get so down all by myself here.' She was afflicted by a mysterious fatigue that kept her supine. It appeared that she was kept by two former husbands and the current lover. ‘Now, you tell me,' says Joan, laughing, as we walk home. ‘What are we doing wrong? And she isn't even all that pretty.' We returned, worrying, to our overburdened lives.

There we were, two or three times a week, discussing our own behaviour, and each other's, with Mrs. Sussman, but now all that rummaging about among the roots of our motives, then so painful and difficult, seems less important than, ‘I've just bought some croissants. Want to join me?' Or, ‘Have you heard the news—it's awful. Want a chat?' What I liked best was hearing her talk about the artists and writers she knew because of her father and of working in the Party. I used to be impressed by her worldly wisdom. For instance, about David Bomberg, who had painted her father; he was then ignored by the artistic establishment: ‘Oh, don't worry, they're always like this, but they'll see the error of their ways when he's dead.' Quite calm, she was, whereas I went in for indignation. And David Bomberg lived in poverty all his life, unrecognised, and then he died and it happened as she said. Or she would come from a party and say that Augustus John was there, and she'd told the young girls, ‘Better watch out, and don't let him talk you into sitting for him,' for by then Augustus John had become a figure of fun. Or she had been in the pub used by Louis MacNeice and George Barker, near the BBC, and she had been in the BBC persuading Reggie Smith, always generous to young writers, to take a look at this or that manuscript. She was one of the organisers of the Soho Square Fair in 1954, and they must have had a good time of it. I'd hear her loud jolly laugh and her voice up the stairs: ‘You'd never believe what's happened. I'll tell you tomorrow.'

It was Joan who persuaded me to perform my ‘revolutionary duty' in various ways. I organised a petition for the Rosenbergs, condemned to die in the electric chair for spying. As usual I was in a thoroughly false position. Everyone in the Communist Party believed, or said they did, that the Rosenbergs were innocent. I thought they were guilty, though I had no idea they were as important as spies as it turned out. Someone had told me this story: A woman living in New York, a communist, had got herself a job on
Time
magazine, then an object of vituperative hatred by communists everywhere because it ‘told lies' about the Soviet Union. A Party official, met casually, said she should keep her ears and eyes open and report to the Party about the goings-on inside
Time
. She agreed, quite casually. Then, suddenly, there was spy fever. It occurred to her that she could be described as a spy. At first she told herself, Nonsense, surely it can't be spying to tell a legal political party, in a democratic country, what is going on inside a newspaper. But the papers instructed her otherwise, and in a panic she left her job. In that paranoid atmosphere there could be no innocent communists. I thought the Rosenbergs had probably said, Oh yes, of course, we'll tell you if there's anything interesting going on.

Not only did I think they were guilty, but that the letters they were writing out of prison were mawkish, and obviously written as propaganda to appear in newspapers. Yet the comrades thought they were deeply moving, and these were people who, in any other context but a political one, would have had the discrimination to know they were false and hypocritical.

An important, not to say basic, point is illustrated here. Here we were, committed to every kind of murder and mayhem by definition: you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Yet at any suggestion that dirty work was going on, most communists reacted with indignation.
Of course
So-and-so wasn't really a spy;
of course
the Party did not take gold from Moscow;
of course
this or that wasn't a cover-up. The Party represented the purest of humankind's hopes for the future—
our
hopes—and could not be anything other than pure.

My attitude to the Rosenbergs was simple. They had small children and should not be executed, even if guilty. The letters I got back from writers and intellectuals mostly said that they did not see why they should sign a petition for the Rosenbergs when the Party refused to criticise the Soviet Union for its crimes.

I did not see the relevance: it was morally wrong to execute Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I was again in the position of public and embattled communist; I was getting hate letters and anonymous telephone calls. In times of violent political emotion, issues like the Rosenbergs attract so much anger and hate that soon it is hard to remember that under all this noise and propaganda is a simple choice of right and wrong. And after all these years, there is still something inexplicable about this case. Soon there would be many spies exposed in Britain and America, some of them betraying their country for money, some sending dozens of fellow citizens to their deaths, yet not one of them was hanged or sent to the chair. The Rosenbergs' crime was much less, and they were parents with young children. Some people think it was because they were Jewish. Others—I among them—wonder if their condemners got secret pleasure from the idea of a young, plump woman being ‘fried'. There are issues that are very much more than the sum of their parts, and this was one.

Another ‘duty' I undertook at Joan's behest was the Sheffield Peace Conference. My job was to go around to houses and hand out leaflets, extolling this festival. I was met at every door with a sullen, cold rejection. The newspapers were saying that the festival was Soviet inspired and financed—and of course it was, but we indignantly denied it and believed our denials. It was a truly nasty experience, perhaps the worst of my revolutionary duties. It was cold, it was grey, no one could describe Sheffield as beautiful, and I had not yet experienced the full blast of British citizens' hostility to anything communist.
*

 

With Jack I went on two trips to Paris. The little story ‘Wine' sums up one. We sat in a café on the Boulevard St.-Germain and watched mobs of students surge shouting past, overturning cars. What was their grievance? Overturning cars is a peculiarly French means of self-expression: Jack had seen the same thing before the war, and I saw it again on a much later visit.

Another incident, the same trip, another café: We are sitting on the pavement, drinking coffee. Towards us comes, or sweeps, a wonderfully dressed woman, with her little dog. She is a
poule
, luxurious, perfect, and no, you don't see prostitutes looking like that in Paris now. Jack is watching her, full of regret and admiration. He says to me in a low voice, ‘God, just look, only the French…' Coming level with us, she pauses long enough to stare with contempt at Jack and say, ‘
Vous êtes très mal élevé, monsieur
.' You are very ill-bred, sir. Or, You are a boor. And she sweeps past.

‘But why present yourself like that if you don't want to be noticed?' says Jack. (This is surely a question of much wider relevance.) ‘But if one did have the money for a woman like that, would one dare to touch her? I might upset her hairdo.'

On the second visit, we were in a dark cellar-like room, where a reverent audience, all French, watched a pale woman in a long black dress with a high collar, unmade up except for tragic black-rimmed eyes, sing ‘Je ne regrette rien' and other songs that now seem the essence of that time. (This style would shortly become the fashion.) What it sounded like was a defiant lament for the war, for the Occupation. On the streets of Paris then you kept coming on a pile of wreaths, or bunches of flowers on a pavement, under bullet holes, and a notice: Such and such young men were shot here by the Germans. And you stopped, too, in an anguish of fellow feeling, not unpoisoned by a pleasurable relish in the drama of it.

And we went to the theatre, to see Brecht's company, the Berliner Ensemble, put on
Mother Courage
. No German company had yet dared to put a play on in Paris. Jack said he thought there would be a riot: Germans so soon; surely that was too much of a risk; but we should go. It would be a historical occasion. After all, it was Brecht. The first night: the theatre was packed, people standing, and outside there were too many policemen. Things did not go smoothly. There had been time only for an inadequate rehearsal. That story of war, so apt for the time and place, unfolded in silence. No one stirred. There was a hitch with the props, and still no one moved. No interval, because everything was dragging on so late. Soon the silence became unbearable: Did it mean they hated it? that the audience would go rioting onto the stage for some sort of reprisal or revenge? When the play ended, with the words ‘Take me with you, take me with you,' and the disreputable old woman, stripped of everything, again tried to follow the army, there was something like a groan from the French. Silence, silence, no one moved, it went on—and then the audience were on their feet, roaring, shouting, applauding, weeping, embracing, and the actors stood on the stage and wept. It all went on for a good twenty minutes. About halfway through, that demonstration stopped being spontaneous and became Europe conscious of itself, defeated and disgraced Germany crying out to Europe, Take me with you, take me with you.

I've never had an experience like that in the theatre, and it taught me once and for all that a play can have its perfect occasion, as if it had been written for that performance alone. I've seen other productions of
Mother Courage
since.

Later the Canadian writer Ted Allan told me that when Brecht was a refugee in California, he was baby-sitting for the Allans. He asked Ted to read the just completed
Mother Courage
, and Ted did, and told Brecht it was promising but needed this and that. Helene Weigel was indignant. ‘It's a masterpiece,' she said. Ted used to tell this story against himself, polishing it, as befits a real storyteller. His criticisms of Brecht became more crass, a parody of Hollywood film-makers. ‘Get rid of that old bitch. You've got to sex it up. You need a babe there. I've got it—how about a nun. No, a novice, real young. Let's see…Lana Turner…Vivien Leigh…'

One trip with Jack was to Spain for a month. This was our longest yet. My mother stayed with Peter for part of it, Joan had him for a week, he was with the Eichners for the rest. We had very little money. Jack was not a senior doctor, and he had a family to keep. Could we each manage twenty-five pounds? The trip, with expenses for the car, travel, cost us fifty pounds. We ate bread and sausage and green peppers and tomatoes and grapes. I can't smell green peppers that still have the heat of the sun in them without being encompassed by memories of that trip. As you crossed the frontier from France, it was to go back into the nineteenth century. This was before tourism started. As we drove into the towns, like Salamanca, Avila, Burgos, crowds pressed forward to see the foreigners. Ragged boys competed to guard the car: sixpence for a day or a night. When we did actually eat in a cheap restaurant, hungry children pressed their faces against the glass. For Jack, we were driving through ghostly memories of the Spanish Civil War: he had lived, in his imagination, through every stage of every battle. He had suffered because of the betrayal of the elected Spanish government by Britain and France: for him and people like him, that was when World War II had begun. Now he was suffering over the hungry children, remembering his own childhood. He was angry to see the streets full of black-robed fat priests and the police in their black uniforms, with their guns. Spain was so poor then it broke your heart, just like Ireland.

And yet…We slept wrapped in blankets out in a field, in the open because of the stars. One morning, already hot, though the sun was just rising, we sat up in our blankets to see two tall dark men on tall black horses, each wearing a red blanket like a serape, riding past us and away across the fields, the hot blue sky behind them. They lifted their hands in greeting, unsmiling.

We ate our bread and olives and drank dark-red wine under olive trees or waited out the extreme heat of midday in some little church, where I had to be sure my arms were covered, and my head too.

We went to a bullfight, where Jack wept because of the six sacrificed bulls. He was muttering, Kill him, kill him, to the bulls.

In Madrid beggar women sat on the pavements with their feet in the gutters, and we gave them our cakes and ordered more for them.

We felt in the Alhambra that this was our place—the Alhambra affects people strongly: they hate it or adore it.

We quarrelled violently, and often. It is my belief and my experience that energetic and frequent sex breeds sudden storms of antagonism. Tolstoy wrote about this. So did D. H. Lawrence. Why should this be? We made love when we stopped the car in open and empty country, in dry ditches, in forests, in vineyards, in olive groves. And quarrelled. He was jealous. This was absurd, because I loved him. In a town in Murcia, where it was so hot we simply stopped for a whole day to sit in a café, in the shade if not the cool, he was convinced I was making eyes at a handsome Spaniard. This quarrel was so terrible that we went to a hotel for the night, because Jack, the doctor, said that our diet and lack of sleep was getting to us.