Landlocked. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ small neat hand enclosing her hot one.

      ‘My father’s dying. He lies and thinks of nothing but himself and his medicines. And Johnny’s dying – but he’s a good man, so he thinks of other people all the time.’

      ‘Well then, comrade Martha?’

      ‘Nothing. That’s all. My life’s always like this, it’s always been like that – very crude and ridiculous.’

      After a minute he took his hand away from hers and sat, straight, his two hands on his knees, looking at the wall. She felt rejected, but could not withdraw anything.

      ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘it’s time I went home. I live from day to day, waiting to be sent home. I am so much with my friends, in my mind, that perhaps I cannot be a good friend to my friends here.’

      ‘Haven’t you heard anything?’

      ‘They won’t send us back unless they have to – why should they send back six fully trained pilots when they know we’ll escape and join the communists the moment we get home? Of course not, if I were in their shoes I would keep us here too.’

      ‘I’m sorry, Athen. I suppose it’s the same for everyone – we just have to wait, that’s all.’

      ‘I want to talk with you about something important. If you have time when you have visited your father, then come to the Piccadilly.’

      ‘I’ll try. What is it?’

      ‘I’ve been talking to a man who lives in Sinoia Street. I want you to help him and his friends.’

      After a moment, she laughed. He waited, smiling, for her to explain.

      ‘You have been talking to a man who lives in Sinoia Street. I’ve just come from Solly and Joss. They told me about contacts in the Coloured Quarter with the right sort of ideas who have contacts with Africans.’

      ‘Well, perhaps I might have said that too,’ he said, laughing.

      ‘Oh no, oh no, you wouldn’t, and that’s the point. Anyway, I’m going.’ From the door she said: ‘I saw Maisie this afternoon.’

      ‘That reminds me, Martha. I would very much like to talk to you about Maisie.’ She could not prevent herself searching his face to find out what he felt about Maisie, but he quickly turned to the window, away from her gaze.

      She found the books Johnny wanted, and went out. In the street she looked up: the window was already dark, Athen had turned the light out again. A hand fell on her shoulder, which remembered Solly’s touch and knew that this solid pressure was not his. She turned to see a brown stout young man smiling at her. ‘What are you doing, Matty? I was wondering who’d be in the office, and here you are standing gazing up into the sky with your mouth open.’

      ‘My mouth wasn’t open! How are you? I heard you were back.’

      ‘Only for a week. It’s still my fate to be banished in W …’

      ‘Then that’s a pity. Your study group’s collapsed.’

      Thomas Stern had been in this city the year before, for a couple of months, during which short time his energy had created a state of activity not far from ‘the group’s’ achievements at its height. Study groups, lectures, etc., flourished for a few weeks, and stopped when he left.

      ‘If a study group’s dependent on one person, then it’s not worth anything.’

      This didacticism was so like him that she laughed, but said: ‘I’m late, Thomas.’

      ‘Naturally. But when you’re finished what you’re late for come and have supper at Dirty Dick’s?’

      ‘I can’t. But if you want company, then Athen’s sitting in the office all by himself.’ She cycled off, calling back: ‘Next time you come up, give me a ring.’ But he had already gone inside the building.

      In a few minutes she was there. In the squalid night of this part of the city, the little houses of the poor street Johnny lived in blazed out light, noise, music. Children ran about over the hardening mud ruts from the recently ended rainy season; or carried long loaves of bread to their mothers from the Indian shop where a portable gramophone stood jigging out thin music on an orange box outside the door. The gramophone was watched by a small and incredibly clean little Indian boy whose white shirt dazzled like a reproach in the dirty gloom.

      The veranda of the house was nothing but bricks laid straight into the dust with a few feet of tin propped over it. Martha chained her bicycle to the yard fence. The door from the veranda opened direct into a brightly lit room which had in it a great many books, a straw mat over a rough brick floor, a table with four chairs all loaded with papers and pamphlets, and a bed where Johnny Lindsay lay, very still, very white, his eyes closed, breathing noisily. Beside him on one side sat Mrs Van der Bylt, her large firm person held upright on a small wooden chair; on the other was Flora, knitting orange wool which was almost the colour of her flaming shiny hair. At the foot of the bed a young man of twenty-two or three sat reading aloud, from a long report in that day’s News about conditions in the mining industry.

      Flora, the pretty, blowzy middle-aged woman with whom the old miner had shared his life for ten years now, counted stitches and was obviously following her own thoughts. She smiled briefly at Martha, but it was Mrs Van who nodded at Martha to sit down. The young man, a teacher from the Coloured School, half-rose, and looked at Mrs Van whether to go on or not. Johnny opened his eyes to discover why the reading had stopped, saw Martha, filled labouring lungs and said: ‘Sit down, girlie,’ patting the bed. ‘They are making me stay in bed,’ he said, with the naughtiness of an invalid disobeying over-protective nurses. But in fact he was very ill, as Martha could see. She said: ‘Don’t talk. Look, here are the books.’ She laid them on the thin white counterpane, beside the old man’s very large hand where pain showed in the tense knuckles. Everything in this room was most familiar to Martha from her father’s sick-room: the smell of medicines, the attentive tactful people sitting around it, the invalid’s over-bright smile – and above all the look of shame in his eyes, the demand which said: This isn’t I – this humiliating noisily suffering body isn’t me.

      ‘Johnny, I’m terribly late, I must rush off.’

      Mrs Van frowned. Martha said: ‘I’m expected at my father’s,’ and Mrs Van smiled. Martha saw the fat old woman examining her – ‘like a headmistress’ she could not help thinking. The small, piercing blue eyes that rested their steady beam on her had missed nothing – not even the small smudge of oil from the bicycle chain on her leg.

      ‘Before you run off, I think Mr de Wet would like to meet you, Martha,’ said Mrs Van.

      The young man rose, as if he had been ordered – well, he had been, in fact. He smiled politely at Martha, but waited for Mrs Van to go on.

      ‘Clive has a contact, an African contact. He wants to start a study group of some kind and I thought it would be useful if he could discuss things with you – you could order books for them. And so on.’

      ‘We have started the study group,’ said Clive abruptly. He sounded annoyed, though he had not meant to. Mrs Van said quickly: ‘Well, in that case perhaps it’s all right.’

      Martha thought this all out: Clive was Clive de Wet, the ‘man СКАЧАТЬ