Landlocked. Doris Lessing
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with Athen.’
‘When it comes to women and love, then I have nothing to say. Yes, she needs a husband. If I wasn’t married, I’d offer myself, if it would make you happy.’
‘Well, I’m not going to tell Maisie that she should be a shop assistant or something. Why don’t you, or Athen, tell her, instead of getting at me about it?’
Thomas regarded her very seriously for some moments. Then he smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Martha.’
‘What?’
‘You’re thinking: This Thomas, what a damned peasant.’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Well, I am. I’m a peasant. I’m a Polish peasant. I’m a Jewish Polish peasant.’
‘Well then?’
‘You’re looking even thinner and sicker than before. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Everything, everything, everything. And besides, it has only just recently occurred to me that I’m a neurotic, and I don’t like the idea.’
‘Well, of course, all women in the West are neurotic.’
Now Martha started to laugh. She loved Thomas because with him, there was nothing for it but to laugh.
‘And you find me attractive because I’m all thin and tense and difficult?’
‘Of course. When I was a boy in our village, all us clever young men, we used to go to town to see American films and look at the women. We knew what was wrong with them. We understood Western women absolutely. We used to make jokes.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Yes. Just like Africans now. They look at white women in exactly the same way we used to look at women in the films or in the magazines. So of course I’m delighted to see you all tensed up and decadent, comrade Martha. It’s the fulfilment of my favourite fantasy.’
Martha laughed again. All the same, part of her was saying: But this isn’t what I want. For one thing, I’ll be going to England soon.
‘And your wife?’ she said.
Thomas’s hands dropped like stone. ‘Yes, Martha,’ he said, looking dejected. ‘You’re right to ask but there’s nothing I can say. I don’t know.’ He got up, went across the room, fiddled with the door of the pamphlet cupboard, then turned back to face her.
‘The thing is, Martha, I have affairs all the time, you know that.’
She waited, merely looking at him curiously. She thought: I didn’t want to have an affair with Solly because he’s so childish. He’s an idiot. Now I’m afraid to have an affair with Thomas because he’s not childish.
But in any case, what’s the point, if I’m leaving.
Thomas came back, sat close to her, and put his two large hands on her shoulders, where they spread slow, calm areas of warmth.
‘This evening I said to myself: I’ll find Martha, then I’ll take her for a drive or something. Then I thought: No, that’s not for us, we don’t need that kind of thing. But in any case, I have to go back to the farm because my little girl isn’t well.’
They sat looking at each other, with a soft curiosity.
‘Listen, Martha. I’ve got a week’s leave, so I’m going to the farm for a week. Then I’ll be back in town.’
He spoke as if everything was settled. They had never even kissed, but it was as if they had already loved each other. He did not kiss her now. He got up and said: ‘Well, Martha …’
She smiled, she supposed, but could not say anything. She had understood that to be with Thomas would be more serious than anything yet in her life, yet she did not know how she knew this, and she was not sure it was what she wanted. A few weeks ago she had thought: Thomas, or Joss – a man. Now here was Thomas and he was sucking her in to an intensity of feeling simply by standing there and claiming her.
From the door he smiled and nodded: ‘I’ll ring you when I get back into town.’
He went out. Athen did not come, so Martha cycled home through the streets full of drunks where the National Anthem still sounded from every other building. Anton and Millicent, both dressed up, were just about to go out to one of the hotels. They all greeted each other with smiling amiability: they had agreed they were to be ‘civilized’ and even, if possible, friends. Martha was invited to join them at McGrath’s: as Millicent said, a war doesn’t end every day. But on the whole she thought not: they went out, and she went to bed.
‘Public opinion changes.’
A couple of decades, a decade, in these rapid days even a year, demonstrate how suddenly the season of a belief can turn. Into its own opposite, the rule seems to be – or at least, often enough to make it safe to ignore the exceptions.
This was Martha’s first experience of it. Last time there had been a change, she had changed with it. Four years before, the present ‘politically conscious’ Martha had been born, out of – that’s what it amounted to – The Battle of Stalingrad. How odd that ‘a busybody who ran around all the time’ (Anton had said it again only last night) could be born out of a great battle thousands of miles away. Which was a ridiculous thought: Martha found herself sitting with a smile on her face, when the speaker on the platform was in the middle of a sentence about people starving to death in Europe.
But the hall was half full, and the audience were restless, not because they were bored, far from it, but because they were angry with the speaker. Martha ought to be making up with her appreciation for their lack of it. The chair she sat in had a hard edge which cut across the back of her thighs. It was very hot. When she stood up, her pink dress would be marked by a wet line, unless she – she wriggled forward on her seat, and Anton gave her a look – do be still!
This winter, Professor Dickinson was saying, millions of people in Europe would be without enough to eat; the children would be marked for life by what happened to them; thousands would die. Yet international capitalism was quite prepared to … A man shouted: ‘Cut out the gramophone record and let’s have facts.’
‘Yes, yes,’ shouted several people.
It was the most extraordinary thing, being part of this audience. Everything was suddenly different. At the beginning of this same year, 1945, the war still gripped half the world, and when people said: It will soon be over, they did not really believe it. One had only to mention the Soviet Union to create a feeling of warm participation with a mighty strength used for the good and the true. Germany was a sub-human nation so brutalized, so sadistic in its very essence, that it could only expect ‘to work its passage back to membership of the civilized world’ by long, slow degrees. Japan was not far behind in villainy. All these were major axioms. A minor change: six months ago the Tories had governed Britain and, it seemed, always would. But Labour had won the election after all. As for this country, this enormous tract of land nevertheless made unimportant by the fewness of the people it supported – well, its long prosperity, because of the war, was threatened. Its own soldiers returned from various battlefronts, mostly in small numbers, while the RAF left daily in thousands. But if to be in this country was to feel like being churned in a whirlpool, it was no more than what happened everywhere: all over the world human beings were shifting in great masses from one country, one continent, to another: myriads of tiny black seeds trickled from side to side of a piece of paper shifted about in the casually curious hand.
As for ‘the group’, that ridiculous little organism, it did not exist – which was proved by the fact that most of its former members were here tonight, friendly enough, if wary, towards each other.
This was ‘a big meeting’ and therefore