The Golden Notebook Part 1

Doris Lessing.

The Golden Notebook.

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1.

Anna meets her friend Molly in the summer of 1957 after a separation.

THE two women were alone in the London flat. 'The point is,' said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, 'the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up.' Molly was a woman much on the telephone. When it rang she had just enquired: 'Well, what's the gossip?' Now she said, 'That's Richard, and he's coming over. It seems today's his only free moment for the next month. Or so he insists.' 'Well I'm not leaving,' said Anna. 'No, you stay just where you are.' Molly considered her own appearance-she was wearing trousers and a sweater, both the worse for wear. 'He'll have to take me as I come,' she concluded, and sat down by the window. 'He wouldn't say what it's about-another crisis with Marion, I suppose.' 'Didn't he write to you?' asked Anna, cautious. 'Both he and Marion wrote-ever such bonhomous letters. Odd, isn't it?' This odd, isn't it? was the characteristic note of the intimate conversations they designated gossip. But having struck the note, Molly swerved off with: 'It's no use talking now, because he's coming right over, he says.' 'He'll probably go when he sees me here,' said Anna, cheerfully, but slightly aggressive. Molly glanced at her, keenly, and said: 'Oh, but why?' It had always been understood that Anna and Richard disliked each other; and before Anna had always left when Richard was expected. Now Molly said: 'Actually I think he rather likes you, in his heart of hearts. The point is, he's committed to liking me, on principle-he's such a fool he's always got to either like or dislike someone, so all the dislike he won't admit he has for me gets pushed off on to you.' 'It's a pleasure,' said Anna. 'But do you know something? I discovered while you were away that for a lot of people you and I are practically interchangeable.' 'You've only just understood that?' said Molly, triumphant as always when Anna came up with-as far as she was concerned-facts that were self-evident. In this relationship a balance had been struck early on: Molly was altogether more worldly-wise than Anna who, for her part, had a superiority of talent. Anna held her own private views. Now she smiled, admitting that she had been very slow. 'When we're so different in every way,' said Molly, 'it's odd. I suppose because we both live the same kind of life- not getting married and so on. That's all they see.' 'Free women,' said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinising glance from her friend: 'They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.' 'Well, we do, don't we?' said Molly, rather tart. 'Well, it's awfully hard not to,' she amended, hastily, because of the look of surprise Anna now gave her. There was a short pause, during which the women did not look at each other but reflected that a year apart was a long time, even for an old friendship. Molly said at last, sighing: 'Free. Do you know, when I was away, I was thinking about us, and I've decided that we're a completely new type of woman. We must be, surely?' 'There's nothing new under the sun,' said Anna, in an attempt at a German accent. Molly, irritated-she spoke half a dozen languages well-said: 'There's nothing new under the sun,' in a perfect reproduction of a shrewd old woman's voice, German accented. Anna grimaced, acknowledging failure. She could not learn languages, and was too self-conscious ever to become somebody else: for a moment Molly had even looked like Mother Sugar, otherwise Mrs. Marks, to whom both had gone for psycho-analysis. The reservations both had felt about the solemn and painful ritual were expressed by the pet name, 'Mother Sugar'; which, as time passed, became a name for much more than a person, and indicated a whole way of looking at life-traditional, rooted, conservative, in spite of its scandalous familiarity with everything amoral. In spite of-that was how Anna and Molly, discussing the ritual, had felt it; recently Anna had been feeling more and more it was because of; and this was one of the things she was looking forward to discussing with her friend. But now Molly, reacting as she had often done in the past, to the slightest suggestion of a criticism from Anna of Mother Sugar, said quickly: 'All the same, she was wonderful, and I was in much too bad a shape to criticise.' 'Mother Sugar used to say, "You're Electra," or "You're Antigone," and that was the end, as far as she was concerned,' said Anna. 'Well, not quite the end,' said Molly, wryly insisting on the painful probing hours both had spent. 'Yes,' said Anna, unexpectedly insisting, so that Molly, for the third time, looked at her curiously. 'Yes. Oh I'm not saying she didn't do me all the good in the world. I'm sure I'd never have coped with what I've had to cope with without her. But all the same... I remember quite clearly one afternoon, sitting there-the big room, and the discreet wall lights, and the Buddha and the pictures and the statues.' 'Well?' said Molly, now very critical. Anna, in the face of this unspoken but clear determination not to discuss it, said: 'I've been thinking about it all during the last few months... no I'd like to talk about it with you. After all, we both went through it, and with the same person 'Well?' Anna persisted: 'I remember that afternoon, knowing I'd never go back. It was all that damned art all over the place.' Molly drew in her breath, sharp. She said, quickly: 'I don't know what you mean.' As Anna did not reply, she said, accusing: 'And have you written anything since I've been away?' 'No.' 'I keep telling you,' said Molly, her voice shrill, 'I'll never forgive you if you throw that talent away. I mean it. I've done it, and I can't stand watching you-I've messed with painting and dancing and acting and scribbling, and now... you're so talented, Anna. Why? I simply don't understand.' 'How can I ever say why, when you're always so bitter and accusing?' Molly even had tears in her eyes, which were fastened in the most painful reproach on her friend. She brought out with difficulty: 'At the back of my mind I always thought, well, I'll get married, so it doesn't matter my wasting all the talents I was born with. Until recently I was even dreaming about having more children-yes I know it's idiotic but it's true. And now I'm forty and Tommy's grown up. But the point is, if you're not writing simply because you're thinking about getting married...' 'But we both want to get married,' said Anna, making it humorous; the tone restored reserve to the conversation; she had understood, with pain, that she was not, after all, going to be able to discuss certain subjects with Molly. Molly smiled, drily, gave her friend an acute, bitter look, and said: 'All right, but you'll be sorry later.' 'Sorry,' said Anna, laughing, out of surprise. 'Molly, why is it you'll never believe other people have the disabilities you have?' 'You were lucky enough to be given one talent, and not four.' 'Perhaps my one talent has had as much pressure on it as your four?' 'I can't talk to you in this mood. Shall I make you some tea while we're waiting for Richard?' 'I'd rather have beer or something.' She added, provocative: 'I've been thinking I might very well take to drink later on.' Molly said, in the older sister's tone Anna had invited: 'You shouldn't make jokes, Anna. Not when you see what it does to people-look at Marion. I wonder if she's been drinking while I was away?' 'I can tell you. She has-yes, she came to see me several times.' 'She came to see you?' That's what I was leading up to, when I said you and I seem to be interchangeable.' Molly tended to be possessive-she showed resentment, as Anna had known she would, as she said: 'I suppose you're going to say Richard came to see you too?' Anna nodded; and Molly said, briskly, 'I'll get us some beer.' She returned from the kitchen with two long cold-beaded glasses, and said: 'Well you'd better tell me all about it before Richard comes, hadn't you?' Richard was Molly's husband; or rather, he had been her husband] Molly was the product of what she referred to as 'one of those 'twenties marriages.' Her mother and father had both glittered, but briefly, in the intellectual and bohemian circles that had spun around the great central lights of Huxley, Lawrence, Joyce, etc. Her childhood had been disastrous, since this marriage only lasted a few months. She had married, at the age of eighteen, the son of a friend of her father's. She knew now she had married out of a need for security ' and even respectability. The boy Tommy was a product bf this marriage. Richard at twenty had already been on the way to becoming the very solid businessman he had since proved himself: and Molly and he had stood their incompatibility for not much more than a year. He had then married Marion, and there were three boys. Tommy had remained with Molly. Richard and she, once the business of the divorce was over, became friends again. Later, Marion became her friend. This, then, was the situation to which Molly often referred as: 'It's all very odd, isn't it?' 'Richard came to see me about Tommy,' said Anna. 'What? Why?' 'Oh-idiotic! He asked me if I thought it was good for Tommy to spend so much time brooding. I said I thought it was good for everyone to brood, if by that he meant, thinking; and that since Tommy was twenty and grown up it was not for us to interfere anyway.' 'Well it isn't good for him,' said Molly. 'He asked me if I thought it would be good for Tommy to go off on some trip or other to Germany-a business trip, with him. I told him to ask Tommy, not me. Of course Tommy said no.' 'Of course. Well I'm sorry Tommy didn't go.' 'But the real reason he came, I think, was because of Marion. But Marion had just been to see me, and had a prior claim so to speak. So I wouldn't discuss Marion at all. I think it's likely he's coming to discuss Marion with you.' Molly was watching Anna closely. 'How many times did Richard come?' 'About five or six times.' After a silence, Molly let her anger spurt out with: 'It's very odd he seems to expect me almost to control Marion. Why me? Or you? Well, perhaps you'd better go after all. It's going to be difficult if all sorts of complications have been going on while my back was turned.' Anna said firmly: 'No, Molly. I didn't ask Richard to come and see me. I didn't ask Marion to come and see me. After all, it's not your fault or mine that we seem to play the same role for people. I said what you would have said-at least, I think so.' There was a note of humorous, even childish pleading in this. But it was deliberate. Molly, the older sister, smiled and said: 'Well, all right.' She continued to observe Anna narrowly; and Anna was careful to appear unaware of it. She did not want to tell Molly what had happened between her and Richard now; not until she could tell her the whole story of the last miserable year. 'Is Marion drinking badly?' 'Yes, I think she is.' 'And she told you all about it?' 'Yes. In detail. And what's odd is, I swear she talked as if I were you-even making slips of the tongue, calling me Molly and so on.' 'Well I don't know,' said Molly. 'Who would ever have thought? And you and I are different as chalk and cheese.' 'Perhaps not so different,' said Anna, drily; but Molly laughed in disbelief. She was a tallish woman, and big-boned, but she appeared slight, and even boyish. This was because of how she did her hair, which was a rough, streaky gold, cut like a boy's; and because of her clothes, for which she had a great natural talent. She took pleasure in the various guises she could use: for instance, being a hoyden in lean trousers and sweaters, and then a siren, her large green eyes made-up, her cheekbones prominent, wearing a dress which made the most of her full breasts. This was one of the private games she played with life, which Anna envied her; yet in moments of self-rebuke she would tell Anna she was ashamed of herself, she so much enjoyed the different roles: 'It's as if I were really different- don't you see? I even feel a different person. And there's something spiteful in it-that man, you know, I told you about him last week-he saw me the first time in my old slacks and my sloppy old jersey, and then I rolled into the restaurant, nothing less than a femme fatale, and he didn't know how to have me, he couldn't say a word all evening, and I enjoyed it. Well, Anna?' 'But you do enjoy it,' Anna would say, laughing. But Anna was small, thin, dark, brittle, with large black always-on-guard eyes, and a fluffy haircut. She was, on the whole, satisfied with herself, but she was always the same. She envied Molly's capacity to project her own changes of mood. Anna wore neat, delicate clothes, which tended to be either prim, or perhaps a little odd; and relied upon her delicate White hands, and her small, pointed white face to make an impression. But she was shy, unable to assert herself, and, she was convinced, easily overlooked. When the two women went out together, Anna deliberately effaced herself and played to the dramatic Molly. When they were alone, she tended to take the lead. But this had by no means been true at the beginning of their friendship. Molly, abrupt, straightforward, tactless, had frankly domineered Anna. Slowly, and the offices of Mother Sugar had had a good deal to do with it, Anna learned to stand up for herself. Even now there were moments when she should challenge Molly when she did not. She admitted to herself she was a coward; she would always give in rather than have fights or scenes. A quarrel would lay Anna low for days, whereas Molly thrived on them. She would burst into exuberant tears, say unforgivable things, and have forgotten all about it half a day later. Meanwhile Anna would be limply recovering in her flat. That they were both 'insecure' and 'unrooted,' words which dated from the era of Mother Sugar, they both freely acknowledged. But Anna had recently been learning to use these words in a different way, not as something to be apologised for, but as flags or banners for an attitude that amounted to a different philosophy. She had enjoyed fantasies of saying to Molly: We've had the wrong attitude to the whole thing, and it's Mother Sugar's fault-what is this security and balance that's supposed to be so good? What's wrong with living emotionally from hand-to-mouth in a world that's changing as fast as it is? But now, sitting with Molly talking, as they had so many hundreds of times before, Anna was saying to herself: Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel. The room they sat in was on the first floor, overlooking a narrow side street, whose windows had flower boxes and painted shutters, and whose pavements were decorated with three basking cats, a pekinese and the milk-cart, late because it was Sunday. The milkman had white shirt-sleeves, rolled up; and his son, a boy of sixteen, was sliding the gleaming white bottles from a wire basket on to the doorsteps. When he reached under their window, the man looked up and nodded. Molly said: 'Yesterday he came in for coffee. Full of triumph, he was. His son's got a scholarship and Mr. Gates wanted me to know it. I said to him, getting in before he could, "My son's had all these advantages, and all that education, and look at him, he doesn't know what to do with himself. And yours hasn't had a penny spent on him and he's got a scholarship." "That's right," he said, "that's the way of it." Then I thought, well I'm damned if I'll sit here, taking it, so I said: "Mr. Gates, your son's up into the middle-class now, with us lot, and you won't be speaking the same language. You know that, don't you?" "It's the way of the world," he says. I said, "It's not the way of the world at all, it's the way of this damned class-ridden country." He's one of those bloody working class tories, Mr. Gates is, and he said: "It's the way of the world, Miss Jacobs, you say your son doesn't see his way forward? That's a sad thing." And off he went on his milk-round, and I went upstairs and there was Tommy sitting on his bed, just sitting. He's probably sitting there now, if he's in. The Gates boy, he's all of a piece, he's going out for what he wants. But Tommy-since I came back three days ago, that's all he's done, sat on his bed and thought.' 'Oh Molly, don't worry so much. He'll turn out all right.' They were leaning over the sill, watching Mr. Gates and his son. A short, brisk, tough little man, and his son was tall, tough, and good-looking. The women watched how the boy, returning with an empty basket, swung out a filled one from the back of the milk-cart, receiving instructions from his father with a smile and a nod. There was perfect understanding there; and the two women, both of them bringing up children without men, exchanged a grimacing envious smile. 'The point is,' said Anna, 'neither of us were prepared to get married simply to give our children fathers. So now we must take the consequences. If there are any. Why should there be?' 'It's all very well for you,' said Molly, sour. 'You never worry about anything, you just let things slide.' Anna braced herself-almost did not reply, and then with an effort said: 'I don't agree, we try to have things both ways. We've always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule? That's what it amounts to.' 'There you are,' said Molly, antagonistic; 'but I'm not a theoretical type. You always do that-faced with something you start making up theories. I'm simply worried about Tommy.' Now Anna could not reply: her friend's tone was too strong. She returned to her survey of the street. Mr. Gates and his boy were turning the corner out of sight, pulling the red milk-cart behind them. At the opposite end of the street was a new interest: a man pushing a hand-cart. 'Fresh country strawberries,' he was shouting. 'Picked fresh this morning, morning-picked country strawberries...' Molly glanced at Anna, who nodded, grinning like a small girl. (She was disagreeably conscious that the little-girl smile was designed to soften Molly's criticism of her.) 'I'll get some for Richard too,' said Molly, and ran out of the room, picking up her handbag from a chair. Anna continued to lean over the sill, in a warm space of sunlight, watching Molly, who was already in energetic conversation with the strawberry seller. Molly was laughing and gesticulating, and the man shook his head and disagreed, while he poured the heavy red fruit on to his scales. 'Well you've no overhead costs,' Anna heard, 'so why should we pay just what we would in the shops?' 'They don't sell morning-fresh strawberries in the shops, miss, not like these.' 'Oh go on,' said Molly, as she disappeared with her white bowl of red fruit. 'Sharks, that's what you are!' The strawberry man, young, yellow, lean and deprived, lifted a snarling face to the window where Molly had already inserted herself. Seeing the two women together he said, as he fumbled with his glittering scales, 'Overhead costs, what do you know about it?' 'Then come up and have some coffee and tell us,' said Molly, her face vivid with challenge. At which he lowered his face and said to the street floor: 'Some people have to work, if others haven't.' 'Oh go on,' said Molly, 'don't be such a sourpuss. Come up and eat some of your strawberries. On me.' He didn't know how to take her. He stood, frowning, his young face uncertain under an over-long slope of greasy fairish hair. 'I'm not that sort, if you are,' he remarked, at last, off-stage, as it were. 'So much the worse for you,' said Molly, leaving the window, laughing at Anna in a way which refused to be guilty. But Anna leaned out, confirmed her view of what had happened by a look at the man's dogged, resentful shoulders, and said in a low voice: 'You hurt his feelings.' 'Oh hell,' said Molly, shrugging. 'It's coming back to England again-everybody so shut up, taking offence, I feel like breaking out and shouting and screaming whenever I set foot on this frozen soil. I feel locked up the moment I breathe our sacred air.' 'All the same,' said Anna, 'he thinks you were laughing at him.' Another customer had slopped out of the opposite house; a woman in Sunday comfort, slacks, loose shirt, and a yellow scarf around her head. The strawberry man served her, non-committal. Before he lifted the handles to propel the cart onwards, he looked up again at the window, and seeing only Anna, her small sharp chin buried in her forearm, her black eyes fixed on him, smiling, he said with grudging good-humour: 'Overhead costs, she says...' and snorted lightly with disgust. He had forgiven them. He moved off up the street behind the mounds of softly red, sun glistening fruit, shouting: 'Morning-fresh strawberries, picked this morning!' Then his voice was absorbed into the din of traffic from the big street a couple of hundred yards down. Anna turned and found Molly setting bowls of the fruit, loaded with cream, on the sill. 'I've decided not to waste any on Richard,' said Molly, 'he never enjoys anything anyway. More beer?' 'With strawberries, wine, obviously,' said Anna greedily; and moved the spoon about among the fruit, feeling its soft sliding resistance, and the slipperiness of the cream under a gritty crust of sugar. Molly swiftly filled glasses with wine and set them on the white sill. The sunlight crystallised beside each glass on the white paint in quivering lozenges of crimson and yellow light, and the two women sat in the sunlight, sighing with pleasure and stretching their legs in the thin warmth, looking at the colours of the fruit in the bright bowls and at the red wine. But now the door-bell rang, and both instinctively gathered themselves into more tidy postures. Molly leaned out of the window again, shouted: 'Mind your head!' and threw down the door-key, wrapped in an old scarf. They watched Richard lean down to pick up the key, without even a glance upwards, though he must know that at least Molly was there. 'He hates me doing that,' she said. 'Isn't it odd? After all these years? And his way of showing is simply to pretend it didn't happen.' Richard came into the room. He looked younger than his middle age, being well-tanned after an early summer holiday in Italy. He wore a tight yellow sports shirt, and new light trousers: every Sunday of his year, summer or winter, Richard Portmain wore clothes that claimed him for the open air. He was a member of various suitable golf and tennis clubs, but never played unless for business reasons. He had had a cottage in the country for years; but sent his family to it alone, unless it was advisable to entertain business friends for a week-end. He was by every instinct urban. He spent his week-ends dropping from one club, one pub, one bar, to the next. He was a shortish, dark, compact man, almost fleshy. His round face, attractive when he smiled, was obstinate to the point of sullenness when he was not smiling. His whole solid person-head poked out forward, eyes unblinking, had this look of dogged determination. He now impatiently handed Molly the key, that was loosely bundled inside her scarlet scarf. She took it and began trickling the soft material through her solid white fingers, remarking: 'Just off for a healthy day in the country, Richard?' Having braced himself for just such a jibe, he now stiffly smiled, and peered into the dazzle of sunlight around the white window. When he distinguished Anna, he involuntarily frowned, nodded stiffly, and sat down hastily across the room from both of them, saying: 'I didn't know you had a visitor, Molly.' 'Anna isn't a visitor,' said Molly. She deliberately waited until Richard had had the full benefit of the sight of them, indolently displayed in the sunshine, heads turned towards him in benevolent enquiry, and offered: 'Wine, Richard? Beer? Coffee? Or a nice cup of tea perhaps?' 'If you've got a Scotch, I wouldn't mind.' 'Beside you,' said Molly. But having made what he clearly felt to be a masculine point, he didn't move. 'I came to discuss Tommy.' He glanced at Anna, who was licking up the last of her strawberries. 'But you've already discussed all this with Anna, so I hear, so now we can all three discuss it.' 'So Anna's told you...' 'Nothing,' said Molly. "This is the first time we've had a chance to see each other.' 'So I'm interrupting your first heart to heart,' said Richard, with a genuine effort towards jovial tolerance. He sounded pompous, however, and both women looked amusedly uncomfortable, in response to it. Richard abruptly got up. 'Going already?' enquired Molly. 'I'm going to call Tommy.' He had already filled his lungs to let out the peremptory yell they both expected, when Molly interrupted with: 'Richard, don't shout at him. He's not a little boy any longer. Besides I don't think he's in.' 'Of course he's in.' 'How do you know?' 'Because he's looking out of the window upstairs. I'm surprised you don't even know whether your son is in or not.' 'Why? I don't keep a tab on him.' 'That's all very well, but where has that got you?' The two now faced each other, serious with open hostility. Replying to his: Where has that got you? Molly said: 'I'm not going to argue about how he should have been brought up. Let's wait until your three have grown up before we score points.' 'I haven't come to discuss my three.' 'Why not? We've discussed them hundreds of times. And I suppose you have with Anna too.' There was now a pause while both controlled their anger, surprised and alarmed it was already so strong. The history of these two was as follows: They had met in 1935. Molly was deeply involved with the cause of Republican Spain. Richard was also. (But, as Molly would remark, on those occasions when he spoke of this as a regrettable lapse into political exoticism on his part: Who wasn't in those days?) The Portmains, a rich family, precipitously assuming this to be a proof of permanent communist leanings, had cut off his allowance. (As Molly put it: My dear, cut him off without a penny! Naturally Richard was delighted. They had never taken him seriously before. He instantly took out a party card on the strength of it.) Richard who had a talent for nothing but making money, as yet undiscovered, was kept by Molly for two years, while he prepared himself to be a writer. (Molly; but of course only years later: Can you imagine anything more banal? But of course Richard has to be commonplace in everything. Everyone was going to be a great writer, but everyone! Do you know the really deadly skeleton in the communist closet-the really awful truth? It's that every one of the old party war horses-you know, people you'd imagine had never had a thought of anything but the party for years, everyone has that old manuscript or wad of poems tucked away. Everyone was going to be the Gorki or the Mayakovski of our time. Isn't it terrifying? Isn't it pathetic? Every one of them, failed artists. I'm sure it's significant of something, if only one knew what.) Molly was still keeping Richard for months after she left him, out of a kind of contempt. His revulsion against left-wing politics, which was sudden, coincided with his decision that Molly was immoral, sloppy and bohemian. Luckily for her, however, he had already contracted a liaison with some girl which, though short, was public enough to prevent him from divorcing her and gaining custody of Tommy, which he was threatening to do. He was then readmitted into the bosom of the Portmain family, and accepted what Molly referred to, with amiable contempt, as 'a job in the city.' She had no idea, even now, just how powerful a man Richard had become by that act of deciding to inherit a position. Richard then married Marion, a very young, warm, pleasant, quiet girl, daughter of a moderately distinguished family. They had three sons. Meanwhile Molly, talented in so many directions, danced a little-but she really did not have the build for a ballerina; did a song and dance act in a revue-decided it was too frivolous; took drawing lessons, gave them up when the war started when she worked as a journalist; gave up journalism to work in one of the cultural outworks of the communist party; left for the same reason everyone of her type did-she could not stand the deadly boredom of it; became a minor actress, and had reconciled herself, after much unhappiness, to the fact that she was essentially a dilettante. Her source of self-respect was that she had not-as she put it-given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage. And her secret source of uneasiness was Tommy, over whom she had fought a years-long battle with Richard. He was particularly disapproving because she had gone away for a year, leaving the boy in her house, to care for himself. He now said, resentful: 'I've seen a good deal of Tommy during the last year, when you left him alone...' She interrupted with: 'I keep explaining, or trying to-I thought it all out and decided it would be good for him to be left. Why do you always talk as if he were a child? He was over nineteen, and I left him in a comfortable house, with money, and everything organised.' 'Why don't you admit you had a whale of a good time junketting all over Europe, without Tommy to tie you?' 'Of course I had a good time, why shouldn't I?' Richard laughed, loudly and unpleasantly, and Molly said, impatient, 'Oh for God's sake, of course I was glad to be free for the first time since I had a baby. Why not? And what about you-you have Marion, the good little woman, tied hand and foot to the boys while you do as you like-and there's another thing. I keep trying to explain and you never listen. I don't want him to grow up one of these damned mother-ridden Englishmen. I wanted him to break free of me. Yes, don't laugh, but it wasn't good, the two of us together in this house, always so close and knowing everything the other one did.' Richard grimaced with annoyance and said, 'Yes, I know your little theories on this point.' At which Anna came in with: 'It's not only Molly-all the women I know-I mean, the real women, worry that their sons are going to grow up like... they've got good reason to worry.' At this Richard turned hostile eyes on Anna; and Molly watched the two of them sharply. 'Like what, Anna?' 'I would say,' said Anna, deliberately sweet, 'just a trifle unhappy about their sex lives? Or would you say that's putting it too strongly, hmmmm?' Richard flushed, a dark ugly flush, and turned back to Molly saying to her: 'All right, I'm not saying you deliberately did something you shouldn't.' 'Thank you.' 'But what the hell's wrong with the boy? He never passed an exam decently, he wouldn't go to Oxford, and now he sits around, brooding and...' Both Anna and Molly laughed out at the word brooding. 'The boy worries me,' said Richard. 'He really does.' 'He worries me,' said Molly reasonably. 'And that's what we're going to discuss, isn't it?' 'I keep offering him things. I invite him to all kinds of things where he'd meet people who'd do him good.' Molly laughed again. 'All right, laugh and sneer. But things being as they are, we can't afford to laugh.' 'When you said, do him good, I imagined good emotionally. I always forget you're such a pompous little snob.' 'Words don't hurt anyone,' said Richard, with unexpected dignity. 'Call me names if you like. You've lived one way, I've lived another. All I'm saying is, I'm in a position to offer that boy-well anything he liked. And he's simply not interested. If he were doing anything constructive with your lot, it'd be different.' 'You always talk as if I try to put Tommy against you.' 'If you mean, that I've always said what I thought about the way you live, your values, your success game, that sort of thing, of course I have. Why should I be expected to shut up about everything I believe in? But I've always said, there's your father, you must get to know that world, it exists, after all.' 'Big of you.' 'Molly's always urging him to see more of you,' said Anna. 'I know she has. And so have I.' Richard nodded impatiently, suggesting that what they said was unimportant. 'You're so stupid about children, Richard. They don't like being split,' said Molly. 'Look at the people he knows with me-artists, writers, actors and so on.' 'And politicians. Don't forget the comrades.' 'Well why not? He'll grow up knowing something about the world he lives in, which is more than you can say about your three-Eton and Oxford, it's going to be, for all of them. Tommy knows all kinds. He won't see the world in terms of the little fishpond of the upper class.' Anna said: 'You're not going to get anywhere if you two go on like this.' She sounded angry; she tried to right it with a joke: 'What it amounts to is, you two should never have married, but you did, or at least you shouldn't have had a child, but you did-' Her voice sounded angry again, and again she softened it, saying, 'Do you realise you two have been saying the same things over and over for years? Why don't you accept that you'll never agree about anything and be done with it?' 'How can we be done with it when there's Tommy to consider,' said Richard, irritably, very loud. 'Do you have to shout?' said Anna. 'How do you know he hasn't heard every word? That's probably what's wrong with him. He must feel such a bone of contention.' Molly promptly went to the door, opened it, listened. 'Nonsense, I can hear him typing upstairs.' She came back saying 'Anna you make me tired when you get English and tight-lipped.' 'I hate loud voices.' 'Well I'm Jewish and I like them.' Richard again visibly suffered. 'Yes-and you call yourself Miss Jacobs. Miss. In the interests of your right to independence and your own identity-whatever that might mean. But Tommy has Miss Jacobs for a mother.' 'It's not the miss you object to,' said Molly cheerfully. 'It's the Jacobs. Yes it is. You always were anti-Semitic' 'Oh hell,' said Richard, impatient. 'Tell me, how many Jews do you number among your personal friends?' 'According to you I don't have personal friends, I only have business friends.' 'Except your girl-friends of course. I've noticed with interest that three of your women since me have been Jewish.' 'For God's sake,' said Anna. 'I'm going home.' And she actually got off the window-sill. Molly laughed, got up and pushed her down again. 'You've got to stay. Be chairman, we obviously need one.' 'Very well,' said Anna, determined. 'I will. So stop wrangling. What's it all about, anyway? The fact is, we all agree, we all give the same advice, don't we?' 'Do we?' said Richard. 'Yes. Molly thinks you should offer Tommy a job in one of your things.' Like Molly, Anna spoke with automatic contempt of Richard's world, and he grinned in irritation. 'One of my things? And you agree, Molly?' 'If you'd give me a chance to say so, yes.' 'There we are,' said Anna. 'No grounds even for argument.' Richard now poured himself a whisky, looking humorously patient; and Molly waited, humorously patient. 'So it's all settled?' said Richard. 'Obviously not,' said Anna. 'Because Tommy has to agree.' 'So we're back where we started. Molly, may I know why you aren't against your precious son being mixed up with the hosts of mammon?' 'Because I've brought him up in such a way that-he's a good person. He's all right' 'So he can't be corrupted by me?' Richard spoke with controlled anger, smiling. 'And may I ask where you get your extraordinary assurance about your values-they've taken quite a knock in the last two years, haven't they?' The two women exchanged glances, which said: He was bound to say it, let's get it over with. 'It hasn't occurred to you that the real trouble with Tommy is that he's been surrounded half his life with communists or so-called communists-most of the people he's known have been mixed up in one way and another. And now they're all leaving the party, or have left-don't you think it might have had some effect?' 'Well, obviously,' said Molly. 'Obviously,' said Richard, grinning in irritation. 'Just like that-but what price your precious values-Tommy's been brought up on the beauty and freedom of the glorious Soviet fatherland.' 'I'm not discussing politics with you, Richard.' 'No,' said Anna, 'of course you shouldn't discuss politics.' 'Why not, when it's relevant?' 'Because you don't discuss them,' said Molly. 'You simply use slogans out of the newspapers.' 'Well can I put it this way? Two years ago you and Anna were rushing out at meetings and organising everything in sight 'I wasn't, anyhow,' said Anna. 'Don't quibble. Molly certainly was. And now what? Russia's in the doghouse and what price the comrades now? Most of them having nervous breakdowns or making a lot of money, as far as I can make out.' 'The point is,' said Anna, 'that socialism is in the doldrums in this country...' 'And everywhere else.' 'All right. If you're saying that one of Tommy's troubles is that he Was brought up a socialist and it's not an easy time to be a socialist-well of course we agree.' The royal we. The socialist we. Or just the we of Anna and Molly?' 'Socialist, for the purposes of this argument,' said Anna. 'And yet in the last two years you've made an about-turn.' 'No we haven't. It's a question of a way of looking at life.' 'You want me to believe that the way you look at life, which is a sort of anarchy, as far as I can make out, is socialist?' Anna glanced at Molly; Molly ever-so-slightly shook her head, but Richard saw it, and said, 'No discussion in front of the children, is that it? What astounds me is your fantastic arrogance. Where do you get it from, Molly? What are you? At the moment you've got a part in a masterpiece called The Wings of Cupid.' 'We minor actresses don't choose our plays. Besides, I've been bumming around for a year, not earning, and I'm broke.' 'So your assurance comes from the bumming round? It certainly can't come from the work you do.' 'I call a halt,' said Anna. 'I'm chairman-this discussion is closed. We're talking about Tommy.' Molly ignored Anna, and attacked. 'What you say about me may or may not be true. But where do you get your arrogance from? I don't want Tommy to be a businessman. You are hardly an advertisement for the life. Anyone can be a businessman, why, you've often said so to me. Oh come off it Richard, how often have you dropped in to see me and sat there saying how empty and stupid your life is?' Anna made a quick warning movement, and Molly said, shrugging, 'All right, I'm not tactful. Why should I be? Richard says my life isn't up to much, well I agree with him, but what's his? Your poor Marion, treated like a housewife or a hostess, but never as a human being. Your boys, being put through the upper-class mill simply because you want it, given no choice. Your stupid little affairs. Why am I supposed to be impressed?' 'I see that you two have after all discussed me,' said Richard, giving Anna a look of open hostility. 'No we haven't,' said Anna. 'Or nothing we haven't said for years. We're discussing Tommy. He came to see me and I told him he should go and see you, Richard, and see if he couldn't do one of those expert jobs, not business, it's stupid to be just business, but something constructive, like the United Nations or Unesco. He could get in through you, couldn't he?' 'Yes, he could.' 'What did he say, Anna?' asked Molly. 'He said he wanted to be left alone to think. And why not? He's twenty. Why shouldn't he think and experiment with life, if that's what he wants? Why should we bully him?' 'The trouble with Tommy is he's never been bullied,' said Richard. 'Thank you,' said Molly. 'He's never had any direction. Molly's simply left him alone as if he was an adult, always. What sort of sense do you suppose it makes to a child-freedom, make-up-your-own-mind, I'm-not-going-to-put-any-pressure-on-you; and at the same time, the comrades, discipline, self-sacrifice, and kow-towing to authority...' 'What you have to do is this,' said Molly. 'Find a place in one of your things that isn't just share-pushing or promoting or money-making. See if you can't find something constructive. Then show it to Tommy and let him decide.' Richard, his face red with anger over his too-yellow, too-tight shirt, held a glass of whisky between two hands, turning it round and round, looking down into it. 'Thanks,' he said at last, 'I will.' He spoke with such a stubborn confidence in the quality of what he was going to offer his son, that Anna and Molly again raised their eyebrows at each other, conveying that the whole conversation had been wasted, as usual. Richard intercepted this glance, and said: 'You two are so extraordinarily naive.' 'About business?' said Molly, with her loud jolly laugh. 'About big business,' said Anna quietly, amused, who had been surprised, during her conversations with Richard, to discover the extent of his power. This had not caused his image to enlarge, for her; rather he had seemed to shrink, against a background of international money. And she had loved Molly the more for her total lack of respect for this man who had been her husband, and who was in fact one of the financial powers of the country. 'Ohhh,' groaned Molly, impatient. 'Very big business,' said Anna laughing, trying to make Molly meet this, but the actress shrugged it off, with her characteristic big shrug of the shoulders, her white hands spreading out, palms out, until they came to rest on her knees. 'I'll impress her with it later,' said Anna to Richard. 'Or at least try to.' 'What is all this?' asked Molly. 'It's no good,' said Richard, sarcastic, grudging, resentful. 'Do you know that in all these years she's never been interested enough even to ask?' 'You've paid Tommy's school fees, and that's all I ever wanted from you.' 'You've been putting Richard across to everyone for years as a sort of-well an enterprising little businessman, like a jumped-up grocer,' said Anna. 'And it turns out that all the time he's a tycoon. But really. A big shot. One of the people we have to hate-on principle,' Anna added laughing. 'Really?' said Molly, interested, regarding her former husband with mild surprise that this ordinary and-as far as she was concerned-not very intelligent man could be anything at all. Anna recognised the look-it was what she felt-and laughed. 'Good God,' said Richard, 'talking to you two, it's like talking to a couple of savages.' 'Why?' said Molly. 'Should we be impressed? You aren't even self-made. You just inherited it' 'What does it matter? It's the thing that matters. It may be a bad system, I'm not even going to argue-not that I could with either of you, you are both as ignorant as monkeys about economics, but it's what runs this country.' 'Well of course,' said Molly. Her hands still lay, palms upward, on her knees. She now brought them together in her lap, in an unconscious mimicry of the gesture of a child waiting for a lesson. 'But why despise it?' Richard, who had obviously been meaning to go on, stopped, looking at those meekly mocking hands. 'Oh Jesus!' he said, giving up. 'But we don't. It's too-anonymous-to despise. We despise...' Molly cut off the word you, and as if in guilt at a lapse in manners, let her hands lose their pose of silent impertinence. She put them quickly out of sight behind her. Anna, watching, thought amusedly: If I said to Molly, you stopped Richard talking simply by making fun of him with your hands, she wouldn't know what I meant. How wonderful to be able to do that, how lucky she is... 'Yes I know you despise me, but why? You're a half-successful actress, and Anna once wrote a book?' Molly's hands instinctively lifted themselves from beside her, and fingers touching, negligent, on Molly's knee, said: Oh what a bore you are Richard. Richard looked at them, and frowned. 'That's got nothing to do with it,' said Molly. 'Indeed.' 'It's because we haven't given in,' said Molly, seriously. 'To what?' 'If you don't know we can't tell you.' Richard was on the point of exploding out of his chair- Anna could see his thigh muscles tense and quiver. To prevent a row she said quickly, drawing his fire: 'That's the point, you talk and talk, but you're so far away from-what's real, you never understand anything.' She succeeded. Richard turned his body towards her, leaning forward so that she was confronted with his warm smooth brown arms, lightly covered with golden hair, his exposed brown neck, his brownish-red hot face. She shrank back slightly with an unconscious look of distaste, as he said: 'Well Anna, I've had the privilege of getting to know you better than I did before, and I can't say you impress me with knowing what you want, what you think or how you should go about things.' Anna, conscious that she was colouring, met his eyes with an effort, and drawled deliberately: 'Or perhaps what it is you don't like is that I do know what I want, have always been prepared to experiment, never pretend to myself the second rate is more than it is, and know when to refuse. Hmmmm?' Molly, looking quickly from one to the other, let out her breath, made an exclamation with her hands, by dropping them apart, emphatically, on to her knees, and unconsciously nodded-partly because she had confirmed a suspicion and partly because she approved of Anna's rudeness. She said, 'Hey, what is this?' drawling it out arrogantly, so that Richard turned from Anna to her. 'If you're attacking us for the way we live again, all I can say is, the less you say the better, what with your private life the way it is.' 'I preserve the forms,' said Richard, with such a readiness to conform to what they both expected of him, that they both, at the same moment, let out peals of laughter. 'Yes darling, we know you do,' said Molly. 'Well, how's Marion? I'd love to know.' For the third time Richard said, 'I see you've discussed it,' and Anna said: 'I told Molly you had been to see me. I told her what I didn't tell you-that Marion had been to see me.' 'Well, let's have it,' said Molly. 'Why,' said Anna, as if Richard were not present, 'Richard is worried because Marion is such a problem to him.' 'That's nothing new,' said Molly, in the same tone. Richard sat still, looking at the women in turn. They waited; ready to leave it, ready for him to get up and go, ready for him to justify himself. But he said nothing. He seemed fascinated by the spectacle of these two, flashingly hostile to him, a laughing unit of condemnation. He even nodded, as if to say: Well, go on. Molly said: 'As we all know, Richard married beneath him-oh, not socially of course, he was careful not to do that, but quote, she's a nice ordinary woman unquote, though luckily with all those lords and ladies scattered around in the collateral branches of the family tree, so useful I've no doubt for the letter-heads of companies.' At this Anna let out a snort of laughter-the lords and ladies being so irrelevant to the sort of money Richard controlled. But Molly ignored the interruption and went on: 'Of course practically all the men one knows are married to nice ordinary dreary women. So sad for them. As it happens, Marion is a good person, not stupid at all, but she's been married for fifteen years to a man who makes her feel stupid s 'What would they do, these men, without their stupid wives,' sighed out Anna. 'Oh, I simply can't think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is. So there is stupid ordinary Marion. And of course Richard was faithful to her just as long as most men are, that is, until she went into the nursing home for her first baby.' 'Why do you have to go so far back?' exclaimed Richard involuntarily, as if this had been a serious conversation, and again both women broke into fits of laughter. Molly broke it, and said seriously, but impatiently, 'Oh hell Richard, why talk like an idiot? You do nothing else but feel sorry for yourself because Marion is your Achilles heel, and you say why go so far back?' She snapped at him, deadly serious, accusing: 'When Marion went into the nursing home.' 'It was thirteen years ago,' said Richard, aggrieved. 'You came straight over to me. You seemed to think I'd fall into bed with you, you were even all wounded in your masculine pride because I wouldn't. Remember? Now we free women know that the moment the wives of our men friends go into the nursing home, dear Tom, Dick and Harry come straight over, they always want to sleep with one of their wives' friends, God knows why, a fascinating psychological fact among so many, but it's a fact. I wasn't having any, so I don't know who you went to...' 'How do you know I went to anyone?' 'Because Marion knows. Such a pity how these things get round. And you've had a succession of girls ever since, and Marion has known about them all, since you have to confess your sins to her. There wouldn't be much fun in it, would there, if you didn't?' Richard made a movement as if to get up and go-Anna again saw his thigh muscles tense, and relax. But he changed his mind and sat still. There was a curious little smile pursing his mouth. He looked like a man determined to smile under the whip. 'In the meantime Marion brought up three children. She was very unhappy. From time to time you let it drop that perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if she got herself a lover-even things up a bit. You even suggested she was such a middle-class woman, so tediously conventional...' Molly paused at this, grinning at Richard. 'You are really such a pompous little hypocrite,' she said, in an almost friendly voice. Friendly with a sort of contempt. And again Richard moved his limbs uncomfortably, and said, as if hypnotised, 'Go on.' Then, seeing that this was rather asking for it, he said hastily: 'I'm interested to hear how you'd put it.' 'But surely not surprised?' said Molly. 'I can't remember ever concealing what I thought of how you treated Marion. You neglected her except for the first year. When the children were small she never saw you. Except when she had to entertain your business friends and organise posh dinner parties and all that nonsense. But nothing for herself. Then a man did get interested in her, and she was naive enough to think you wouldn't mind-after all, you had said often enough, why don't you get yourself a lover, when she complained of your girls. And so she had an affair and all hell let loose. You couldn't stand it, and started threatening. Then he wanted to marry her and take the three children, yes, he cared for her that much. But no. Suddenly you got all moral, rampaging like an Old Testament prophet.' 'He was too young for her, it wouldn't have lasted.' 'You mean, she might have been unhappy with him? You were worried about her being unhappy?' said Molly, laughing contemptuously. 'No, your vanity was hurt. You worked really hard to make her in love with you again, it was all jealous scenes and love and kisses until that moment she broke it off with him finally. And the moment you had her safe, you lost interest and went back to the secretaries on the fancy divan in your beautiful big business office. And you think it's so unjust that Marion is unhappy and makes scenes and drinks more than is good for her. Or perhaps I should say, more than is good for the wife of a man in your position. Well, Anna, is there anything new since I left a year ago?' Richard said angrily: 'There's no need to make bad theatre of it.' Now that Anna was coming in, and it was no longer a battle with his former wife, he was angry. 'Richard came to ask me if I thought it was justified for him to send Marion away to some home or something. Because she was such a bad influence on the children.' Molly drew in her breath. 'You didn't, Richard?' 'No. But I don't see why it's so terrible. She was drinking heavily about that time and it's bad for the boys. Paul-he's thirteen now, after all, found her one night when he got up for a drink of water, he found her unconscious on the floor, tight.' 'You were really thinking of sending her away?' Molly's voice had gone blank, empty even of condemnation. 'All right, Molly, all right. But what would you do? And you needn't worry-your lieutenant here was as shocked as you are, Anna made me feel as guilty as you like.' He was half-laughing again, though ruefully. 'And actually, when I leave you I ask myself if I really do deserve such total disapproval? You exaggerate so, Molly. You talk as if I'm some sort of Bluebeard. I've had half a dozen unimportant affairs. So do most of the men I know who have been married any length of time. Their wives don't take to drink.' 'Perhaps it would have been better if you had in fact chosen a stupid and insensitive woman?' suggested Molly. 'Or you shouldn't have always let her know what you were doing? Stupid! She's a thousand times better than you are.' 'It goes without saying,' said Richard. 'You always take it for granted that women are better than men. But that doesn't help me much. Now look here Molly, Marion trusts you. Please see her as soon as you can, and talk to her.' 'Saying what?' 'I don't know. I don't care. Anything. Call me names if you like, but see if you can stop her drinking.' Molly sighed, histrionically, and sat looking at him, a look of half-compassionate contempt around her mouth. 'Well I really don't know,' she said at last. 'It is really all very odd. Richard why don't you do something? Why don't you try to make her feel you like her, at least? Take her for a holiday or something?' 'I did take her with me to Italy.' In spite of himself, his voice was full of resentment at the fact he had had to. 'Richard,' said both women together. 'She doesn't enjoy my company,' said Richard. 'She watched me all the time-I can see her watching me all the time, for me to look at some woman, waiting for me to hang myself. I can't stand it.' 'Did she drink while you were on holiday?' 'No, but...' 'There you are then,' said Molly, spreading out her flashing white hands, which said, What more is there to say? 'Look here Molly, she didn't drink because it was a kind of contest, don't you see that? Almost a bargain-I won't drink if you don't look at girls. It drove me nearly around the bend. And after all, men have certain practical difficulties- I'm sure you two emancipated females will take this in your stride, but I can't make it with a woman who's watching me like a jailor... getting into bed with Marion after one of those lovely holiday afternoons was like an I'll-dare-you-to-prove-yourself contest. In short, I couldn't get a hard on with Marion. Is that clear enough for you? And we've been back for a week. So far she's all right. I've been home every evening, like a dutiful husband, and we sit and are polite with each other. She's careful not to ask me what I've been doing or who I've been seeing. And I'm careful not to watch the level in the whisky bottle. But when she's not in the room I look at the bottle, and I can hear her brain ticking over, he must have been with some woman because he doesn't want me. It's hell, it really is. Well all right,' he cried, leaning forward, desperate with sincerity, 'all right Molly. But you can't have it both ways. You two go on about marriage, well you may be right. You probably are. I haven't seen a marriage yet that came anywhere near what it's supposed to be. All right. But you're careful to keep out of it. It's a hell of an institution, I agree. But I'm involved in it, and you're preaching from some pretty safe sidelines.' Anna looked at Molly, very dry. Molly raised her brows and sighed. 'And now what?' said Richard, good humoured. 'We are thinking of the safety of the sidelines,' said Anna, meeting his good humour. 'Come off it,' said Molly. 'Have you got any idea of the sort of punishment women like us take?' 'Well,' said Richard, 'I don't know about that, and frankly, it's your own funeral, why should I care? But I know there's one problem you haven't got-it's a purely physical one. How to get an erection with a woman you've been married to fifteen years?' He said this with an air of camaraderie, as if offering his last card, all the chips down. Anna remarked, after a pause, 'Perhaps it might be easier if you had ever got into the habit of it?' And Molly came in with: 'Physical you say? Physical? It's emotional. You started sleeping around early in your marriage because you had an emotional problem, it's nothing to do with physical.' 'No? Easy for women.' 'No, it's not easy for women. But at least we've got more sense than to use words like physical and emotional as if they didn't connect.' Richard threw himself back in his chair and laughed. 'All right,' he said at last. 'I'm in the wrong. Of course. All right. I might have known. But I want to ask you two something, do you really think it's all my fault? I'm the villain as far as you are concerned. But why?' 'You should have loved her,' said Anna, simply. 'Yes,' said Molly. 'Good Lord,' said Richard, at a loss. 'Good Lord. Well I give up. After all I've said-and it hasn't been easy mind you...' he said this almost threatening, and went red as both women rocked off into fresh peals of laughter. 'No it's not easy to talk frankly about sex to women.' 'I can't imagine why not, it's hardly a great new revelation, what you've said,' said Molly. 'You're such a... such a pompous ass,' said Anna. 'You bring out all this stuff, as if it were the last revelation from some kind of oracle. I bet you talk about sex when you're alone with a popsy. So why put on this club-man's act just because there are two of us?' Molly said quickly: 'We still haven't decided about Tommy.' There was a movement outside the door, which Anna and Molly heard, but Richard did not. He said, 'All right Anna, I bow to your sophistication. There's no more to be said. Right. Now I want you two superior women to arrange something. I want Tommy to come and stay with me and Marion. If he'll condescend to. Or doesn't he like Marion?' Molly lowered her voice and said, looking at the door, 'You needn't worry. When Marion comes to see me, Tommy and she talk for hours and hours.' There was another sound, like a cough, or something being knocked. The three sat silent as the door opened and Tommy came in. It was not possible to guess whether he had heard anything or not. He greeted his father first, carefully: 'Hullo, father,' nodded at Anna, his eyes lowered against a possible reminder from her that the last time they met he had opened himself to her sympathetic curiosity, and offered his mother a friendly but ironic smile. Then he turned his back on them, to arrange for himself some strawberries remaining in the white bowl, and with his back still turned enquired: 'And how is Marion?' So he had heard. Anna thought that she could believe him capable of standing outside the door to listen. Yes, she could imagine him listening with precisely the same detached ironic smile with which he had greeted his mother. Richard, disconcerted, did not reply, and Tommy insisted: 'How is Marion?' 'Fine,' said Richard, heartily. 'Very well indeed.' 'Good. Because when I met her for a cup of coffee yesterday she seemed in a pretty bad way.' Molly raised swift eyebrows towards Richard, Anna made a small grimace, and Richard positively glared at both of them, saying the whole situation was their fault. Tommy, continuing not to meet their eyes, and indicating with every line of his body that they underestimated his comprehension of their situations and the implacability of his judgement on them, sat down, and slowly ate strawberries. He looked like his father. That is to say he was a closely-welded, round youth, dark, like his father, with not a trace of Molly's dash and vivacity. But unlike Richard, whose tenacious obstinacy was open, smouldering in his dark eyes and displayed in every impatient efficient movement, Tommy had a look of being buttoned in, a prisoner of his own nature. He was wearing, this morning, a scarlet sweat shirt and loose blue jeans, but would have looked better in a sober business suit. Every movement he ever made, every word he said, seemed in slow motion. Molly had used to complain, humorously, of course, that he sounded like someone who had taken an oath to count ten before he spoke. And she had complained, humorously, one summer when he had grown a beard, that he looked as if he had glued the rakish beard on to his solemn face. She had continued to make these loud, jolly complaints until Tommy had remarked: 'Yes, I know you'd rather I looked like you-been attractive I mean. But it's bad luck, I've got your character, and it should have been the other way around-well surely, if I'd had your looks and my father's character-well, his staying power, at any rate, it would have been better?'-he had persisted with it, doggedly, as he did when trying to make her see a point that she was being wilfully obtuse about. Molly had worried about this for some days, even ringing Anna up: 'Isn't it awful, Anna? Who would have believed it? You think something for years, and come to terms with it, and then suddenly, they come out with something and you see they've been thinking it too?' 'But surely you wouldn't want him to be like Richard?' 'No, but he's right about the staying power. And the way he came out with it-it's bad luck I've got your character, he said.' Tommy ate his strawberries until there were none left, berry after berry. He did not speak, and neither did they. They sat watching him eat, as if he had willed them to do this. He ate carefully. His mouth moved in the act of eating as it did in the act of speaking, every word separate, each berry whole and separate. And he frowned steadily, his soft dark brows knitted, like a small boy's over lessons. His lips even made small preliminary movements before a mouthful, like an old person's. Or like a blind man, thought Anna, recognising the movement; once she had sat opposite a blind man on the train. So had his mouth been set, rather full and controlled, a soft, self-absorbed pout. And so had his eyes been, like Tommy's even when he was looking at someone: as if turned inwards on himself. Though of course he was blind. Anna felt a small rising hysteria, as she had sitting opposite the blind man, looking at the sightless eyes that seemed as if they were clouded with introspection. And she knew that Richard and Molly felt the same; they were frowning and making restless nervous movements. He's bullying us all, thought Anna, annoyed; he's bullying us horribly. And again she imagined how he had stood outside the door, listening, probably for a long time; she was by now unfairly convinced of it, and disliking the boy, because of how he was willing them to sit and wait for his pleasure. Anna was just forcing herself, against a most extraordinary prohibition, emanating from Tommy, to say something, to break the silence, when Tommy laid down his plate, and the spoon neatly across it, and said calmly: 'You three have been discussing me again.' 'Of course not,' said Richard, hearty and convincing. 'Of course,' said Molly. Tommy allowed them both a tolerant smile, and said: 'You've come about a job in one of your companies. Well I did think it over, as you suggested, but I think if you don't mind I'll turn it down.' 'Oh Tommy,' said Molly, in despair. 'You're being inconsistent, mother,' said Tommy, looking towards her, but not at her. He had this way of directing his gaze towards someone, but maintaining an inward-seeming stare. His face was heavy, almost stupid-looking, with the effort he was making to give everyone their due. 'You know it's not just a question of taking a job, is it? It means I've got to live like them.' Richard shifted his legs and let out an explosive breath, but Tommy continued: 'I don't mean any criticism, father.' 'If it's not a criticism, what is it?' said Richard, laughing angrily. 'Not a criticism, just a value judgement,' said Molly, triumphant. 'Ah, hell,' said Richard. Tommy ignored them, and continued to address the part of the room in which his mother was sitting. 'The thing is, for better or for worse, you've brought me up to believe in certain things, and now you say I might just as well go and take a job in Portmain's. Why?' 'You: mean,' said Molly, bitter with self-reproach, 'Why don't I Offer you something better?' 'Perhaps there isn't anything better. It's not your fault- I'm not suggesting it is.' This was said with a soft, deadly finality, so that Molly frankly and loudly sighed, shrugged, and spread out her hands. 'I wouldn't mind being like your lot, it's not that. I've been around listening to your friends for years and years now, you all of you seem to be in such a mess, or think you are even if you're hot,' he said, knitting his brows, and bringing out every phrase after careful thought. 'I don't mind that, but it was an accident for you, you didn't say to yourselves at some point: I am going to be a certain kind of person. I mean, I think that for both you and Anna there was a moment when you said, and you were even surprised, Oh, so I'm that kind of person, am I?' Anna and Molly smiled at each other, and at him, acknowledging it was true. 'Well then,' said Richard jauntily. 'That's settled. If you don't want to be like Anna and Molly, there's the alternative.' 'No,' said Tommy. 'I haven't explained myself, if you can say that. No.' 'But you've got to do something,' cried Molly, not at all humorous, but sounding sharp and frightened. 'You don't,' said Tommy, as if it were self-evident. 'But you've just said you didn't want to be like us,' said Molly. 'It's not that I wouldn't want to be, but I don't think I could.' Now he turned to his father, in patient explanation. 'The thing about mother and Anna is this; one doesn't say, Anna Wulf the writer, or Molly Jacobs the actress-or only if you don't know them. They aren't-what I mean is-they aren't what they do; but if I start working with you, then I'll be what I do. Don't you see that?' 'Frankly, no.' 'What I mean is, I'd rather be...' he floundered, and was silent a moment, moving his lips together, frowning. 'I've been thinking about it because I knew I'd have to explain it to you.' He said this patiently, quite prepared to meet his parents' unjust demands. 'People like Anna or Molly and that lot, they're not just one thing, but several things. And you know they could change and be something different. I don't mean their characters would change, but they haven't set into a mould. You know if something happened in the world, or there was a change of some kind, a revolution or something...' He waited, a moment, patiently, for Richard's sharply irritated indrawn breath over the word revolution, to be expelled, and went on: 'they'd be something different if they had to be. But you'll never be different, father. You'll always have to live the way you do now. Well I don't want that for myself,' he concluded, allowing his lips to set, pouting, over his finished explanation. 'You're going to be very unhappy,' said Molly, almost moaning it. 'Yes, that's another thing,' said Tommy. 'The last time we discussed everything, you ended by saying, "Oh, but you're going to be unhappy." As if it's the worst thing to be. But if it comes to unhappiness, I wouldn't call either you or Anna happy people, but at least you're much happier than my father. Let alone Marion.' He added the last softly, in direct accusation of his father. Richard said, hotly, 'Why don't you hear my side of the story, as well as Marion's?' Tommy ignored this, and went on: 'I know I must sound ridiculous. I knew before I even started I was going to sound naive.' 'Of course you're naive,' said Richard. 'You're not naive,' said Anna. 'When I finished talking to you last time, Anna, I came home and I thought, Well, Anna must think I'm terribly naive.' 'No, I didn't. That's not the point. What you don't seem to understand is, we'd like you to do better than we have done.' 'Why should I?' 'Well perhaps we might still change and be better,' said Anna, with deference towards youth. Hearing the appeal in her own voice she laughed and said, 'Good Lord, Tommy, don't you realise how judged you make us feel?' For the first time Tommy showed a touch of humour. He really looked at them, first at her, and then at his mother, smiling. 'You forget that I've listened to you two talk all my life. I know about you, don't I? I do think that you are both rather childish sometimes, but I prefer that to...' He did not look at his father, but left it. 'It's a pity you've never given me a chance to talk,' said Richard, but with self-pity; and Tommy reacted by a quick, dogged withdrawal away from him. He said to Anna and Molly, 'I'd rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I'm not saying I'm choosing failure. I mean, one doesn't choose failure, does one? I know what I don't want, but not what I do want.' 'One or two practical questions,' said Richard, while Anna and Molly wryly looked at the word failure, used by this boy in exactly the same sense they would have used it. All the same, neither had applied it themselves-or not so pat and final, at least. 'What are you going to live on?' said Richard. Molly was angry. She did not want Tommy flushed out of the safe period of contemplation she was offering him by the fire of Richard's ridicule. But Tommy said: 'If mother doesn't mind, I don't mind living off her for a bit. After all, I hardly spend anything. But if I have to earn money, I can always be a teacher.' 'Which you'll find a much more straitened way of life than what I'm offering you,' said Richard. Tommy was embarrassed. 'I don't think you really understood what I'm trying to say. Perhaps I didn't say it right.' 'You're going to become some sort of a coffee-bar bum,' said Richard. 'No. I don't see that. You only say that because you only like people who have a lot of money.' Now the three adults were silent. Molly and Anna because the boy could be trusted to stand up for himself; Richard because he was afraid of unleashing his anger. After a time Tommy remarked: 'Perhaps I might try to be a writer.' Richard let out a groan. Molly said nothing, with an effort. But Anna exclaimed: 'Oh Tommy, and after all that good advice I gave you.' He met her with affection, but stubbornly: 'You forget Anna, I don't have your complicated ideas about writing.' 'What complicated ideas?' asked Molly, sharply. Tommy said to Anna: 'I've been thinking about all the things you said.' 'What things?' demanded Molly. Anna said: 'Tommy, you're frightening to know. One says something, and you take it all up so seriously.' 'But you were serious?' Anna suppressed an impulse to turn it off with a joke, and said: 'Yes, I was serious.' 'Yes, I know you were. So I thought about what you said. There was something arrogant in it.' 'Arrogant?' 'Yes, I think so. Both the times I came to see you, you talked, and when I put together all the things you said, it sounds to me like arrogance. Like a kind of contempt.' The other two, Molly and Richard, were now sitting back, smiling, lighting cigarettes, being excluded, exchanging looks. But Anna, remembering the sincerity of this boy's appeal to her, had decided to jettison even her old friend Molly, for the time being at least. 'If it sounded like contempt, then I don't think I can have explained it right.' 'Yes. Because it means you haven't got confidence in people. I think you're afraid.' 'What of?' asked Anna. She felt very exposed, particularly before Richard, and her throat was dry and painful. 'Of loneliness. Yes I know that sounds funny, for you, because of course you choose to be alone rather than to get married for the sake of not being lonely. But I mean something different. You're afraid of writing what you think about life, because you might find yourself in an exposed position, you might expose yourself, you might be alone.' 'Oh,' said Anna, bleakly. 'Do you think so?' 'Yes. Or if you're not afraid, then it's contempt. When we talked about politics, you said the thing you'd learned from being a communist was that the most terrible thing of all was when political leaders didn't tell the truth. You said that one small lie could spread into a marsh of lies and poison everything-do you remember? You talked about it for a long time... well then. You said that about politics. But you've got whole books you've written for yourself which no one ever sees. You said you believed that all over the world there were books in drawers, that people were writing for themselves-and even in countries where it isn't dangerous to write the truth. Do you remember, Anna? Well, that's a sort of contempt.' He had been looking, not at her, but directing towards her an earnest, dark, self-probing stare. Now he saw her flushed, stricken face, but he recovered himself, and said hesitantly: 'Anna you were saying what you really thought, weren't you?' 'Yes.' 'But Anna, you surely didn't expect me not to think about what you said?' Anna closed her eyes a moment, smiling painfully. 'I suppose I underestimated-how much you'd take me seriously.' 'That's the same thing. It's the same thing as the writing. Why shouldn't I take you seriously?' 'I didn't know Anna was writing at all, these days,' said Molly, coming in firmly. 'I don't,' said Anna, quickly. 'There you are,' said Tommy. 'Why do you say that?' 'I remember telling you that I'd been afflicted with an awful feeling of disgust, of futility. Perhaps I don't like spreading those emotions.' 'If Anna's been filling you full of disgust for the literary career,' said Richard, laughing, 'then I won't quarrel with her for once.' It was a note so false that Tommy simply ignored him, which he did by politely controlling his embarrassment and going straight on: 'If you feel disgust, then you feel disgust. Why pretend not? But the point is, you were talking about responsibility. That's what I feel too-people aren't taking responsibility for each other. You said the socialists had ceased to be a moral force, for the time, at least, because they wouldn't take moral responsibility. Except for a few people. You said that, didn't you-well then. But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that's not being responsible.' 'A very great number of people would say that it was irresponsible to spread disgust. Or anarchy. Or a feeling of confusion.' Anna said this half-laughing, plaintive, rueful, trying to make him meet her on this note. And he reacted immediately, by closing up, sitting back, showing she had failed him. She, like everyone else-so his patient, stubborn pose suggested, was bound to disappoint him. He retreated into himself, saying: 'Anyway, that's what I came down to say. I'd like to go on doing nothing for a month or two. After all it's costing much less than going to university as you wanted.' 'Money's not the point,' said Molly. 'You'll find that money is the point,' said Richard. 'When you change your mind, ring me up.' 'I'll ring you up in any case,' said Tommy, giving his father his due. 'Thanks,' said Richard, short and bitter. He stood for a moment, grinning angrily at the two women. 'I'll drop in one of these days, Molly.' 'Any time,' said Molly, with sweetness. He nodded coldly at Anna, laid his hand briefly on his son's shoulder, which was unresponsive, and went out. At once Tommy got up, and said: 'I'll go up to my room.' He walked out, his head poked forward, a hand fumbling at the door-knob, the door opened just far enough to take his width: he seemed to squeeze himself out of the room; and they heard his regular, thumping footsteps up the stairs. Well,' said Molly. 'Well,' said Anna, prepared to be challenged. 'It seems a lot of things have been going on while I was away.' 'For one thing, it seems I said things to Tommy I shouldn't.' 'Or not enough.' Anna said with an effort: 'Yes I know you want me to talk about artistic problems and so on. But for me it's not like that...' Molly merely waited, looking sceptical, and even bitter. 'If I saw it in terms of an artistic problem, then it'd be easy, wouldn't it? We could have ever such intelligent chats about the modern novel.' Anna's voice was full of irritation, and she tried smiling to soften it. 'What's in those diaries then?' 'They aren't diaries.' 'Whatever they are.' 'Chaos, that's the point.' Anna sat watching Molly's thick white fingers twist together and lock. The hands were saying: Why do you hurt me like this?-but if you insist then I'll endure it. 'If you wrote one novel, I don't see why you shouldn't write another,' said Molly, and Anna began to laugh, irresistibly, while her friend's eyes filled with sudden tears. 'I wasn't laughing at you.' 'You simply don't understand,' said Molly, determinedly muffling the tears. 'It's always meant so much to me that you should produce something, even if I didn't.' Anna nearly said, stubbornly, 'But I'm not an extension of you,' but knew it was something she might have said to her mother, so stopped herself. Anna could remember her mother very little; she had died so early; but at moments like these, she was able to form for herself the image of somebody strong and dominating, whom Anna had had to fight. 'You get so angry over certain subjects I don't know how to begin,' said Anna. 'Yes, I'm angry. I'm angry. I'm angry about all the people I know who fritter themselves away. It's not only you. It's lots of people.' 'While you were away something happened that interested me. Remember Basil Ryan-the painter, I mean.' 'Of course. I used to know him.' 'Well there was an announcement in the paper, he said he'd never paint again. He said, it was because the world is so chaotic art is irrelevant.' There was a silence, until Anna appealed: 'Doesn't that mean anything to you?' 'No. And certainly not from you. After all, you aren't someone who writes little novels about the emotions. You write about what's real.' Anna almost laughed again, and then said soberly, 'Do you realise how many of the things we say are just echoes? That remark you've just made is an echo from communist party criticism-at its worst moments, moreover. God knows what that remark means, I don't. I never did. If Marxism means anything, it means that a little novel about the emotions should reflect "what's real" since the emotions are a function and a product of a society...' She stopped, because of Molly's expression. 'Don't look like that Molly. You said you wanted me to talk about it, so I am. And there's something else. Fascinating, if it wasn't so depressing. Here we are, 1957, waters under bridges, etc. And suddenly in England, we have a phenomenon in the arts I'm damned if I'd foreseen-a whole lot of people, who've never had anything to do with the Party, suddenly standing up, and exclaiming, just as if they had just thought it out for themselves, that little novels or plays about the emotions don't reflect reality. The reality, it would surprise you to hear, is economics, or machine guns mowing people down who object to the new order.' 'Just because I can't express myself, I think it's unfair,' said Molly quickly. 'Anyway, I only wrote one novel.' 'Yes, and what are you going to do when the money from that stops coming in? You were lucky over that one, but it's going to stop some time.' Anna held herself quiet, with effort. What Molly had said was pure spite: she was saying, I'm glad that you are going to be subjected to the pressures the rest of us have to face. Anna thought, I wish I hadn't become so conscious of everything, every little nuance. Once I wouldn't have noticed: now every conversation, every encounter with a person seems like crossing a mined field; and why can't I accept that one's closest friends at moments stick a knife in, deep, between the ribs? She almost said, drily: You'll be glad to hear the money's only trickling in and I'll have to get a job soon. But she said, cheerfully, replying to the surface of Molly's words: 'Yes, I think I'll be short of money very soon, and I'll have to get a job.' 'And you haven't done anything while I was away.' 'I've certainly done a lot of complicated living.' Molly looked sceptical again, so Anna gave up. She said, humorous, light, plaintive: 'It's been a bad year. For one thing, I nearly had an affair with Richard.' 'So it would seem. It must have been a bad year for you even to think of Richard.' 'You know, there's a very interesting state of anarchy up there. You'd be surprised-why haven't you ever talked to Richard about his work, it's so odd.' 'You mean, you were interested in him because he's so rich?' 'Oh, Molly. Obviously not. No. I told you, everything's cracking up. That lot up there, they don't believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa-they used to say: "Well of course, the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years' time." They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, "We know that what we are doing is wrong." But it's turned out to be a good deal shorter than fifty years.' 'But about Richard.' 'Well he took me out to a posh dinner. It was an occasion. He had just bought a controlling interest in all the aluminium saucepans, or pot-cleaners, or aircraft propellers in Europe-something like that. There were four tycoons and four popsies. I was one of the popsies. I sat there and looked at those faces around the table. Good God, it was terrifying. I reverted to my most primitive communist phase-you remember, when one thinks all one has to do is to shoot the bastards- that is, before one learned their opposite numbers are just as irresponsible. I looked at those faces, I just sat and looked at those faces.' 'But that's what we've always said,' said Molly. 'So what's new?' 'It did rather bring it all home. And then the way they treat their women-all quite unconscious, of course. My God, we might have moments of feeling bad about our lives, but how lucky we are, our lot are at least half civilised.' 'But about Richard.' 'Oh yes. Well. It wasn't important. He was just an incident. But he brought me home all in his new Jaguar. I gave him coffee. He was all ready. I sat there and thought, Well he's no worse than some of the morons I've slept with.' 'Anna, what has got into you?' 'You mean you've never felt that awful moral exhaustion, what the hell does it matter?' 'It's the way you talk. It's new.' 'I daresay. But it occurred to me-if we lead what is known as free lives, that is, lives like men, why shouldn't we use the same language?' 'Because we aren't the same. That is the point.' Anna laughed. 'Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love...' 'Anna, what happened with Richard?' 'Nothing. You're making too much of it. I sat drinking coffee and looking at that stupid face of his and I was thinking, If I was a man I'd go to bed, quite likely simply because I thought he was stupid-if he were a woman, I mean. And then I was so bored, so bored, so bored. Then he felt my boredom and decided to reclaim me. So he stood up and said: Oh well I suppose I'd better be getting home to 16 Plane Avenue, or whatever it is. Expecting me to say, Oh no, I can't bear you to leave. You know, the poor married man, bound to wife and kiddies. They all do it. Please be sorry for me, I have to get home to 16 Plane Avenue and the dreary labour-saving house in the suburbs. He said it once. He said it three times-just as if he didn't live there, weren't married to her, as if it had nothing to do with him. The little house at 16 Plane Avenue and the missus.' 'As a matter of accuracy, a bloody great mansion with two maids and three cars at Richmond.' 'You must admit he radiates an atmosphere of the suburbs. Odd. But they all do-I mean those tycoons, they all did. One could positively see the labour-saving devices and the kiddies all in their slumber-wear, coming down to kiss daddy good night. Bloody complacent swine they all are.' 'You are talking like a whore,' said Molly; then looked conscious, smiling, because she was surprised she had used the word. 'Oddly enough it's only by the greatest effort of will I don't feel like one. They put so much effort-oh unconsciously, of course, and that's where they win, every time, into making one feel it. Well. Anyway. I said, "Good night, Richard, I'm so sleepy, and thank you so much for showing me all that high life." He stood there wondering if he shouldn't say, Oh dear, I've got to go home to my dreary wife, for the fourth time. He was wondering why that unimaginative woman Anna was so unsympathetic to him. Then I could see him thinking, of course, she's nothing but an intellectual, what a pity I didn't take one of my other girls. So then I waited-you know, for that moment, when they have to pay one back? He said: "Anna, you should take more care of yourself, you're looking ten years older than you should, you are getting positively wizened." So I said, "But Richard, if I'd said to you, Oh yes, do come into bed, at this very moment you'd be saying how beautiful I was. Surely the truth lies somewhere in between?" Molly was holding a cushion to her breasts, and hugging it and laughing. 'So he said: "But Anna, when you invited me up to coffee you surely must have known what it meant. I'm a very virile man," he said, "and I either have a relationship with a woman or I don't." So then I got tired of him, and said, "Oh do go away Richard, you're an awful bore..." so you can understand that there were bound to be-is the word I'm looking for tensions-between me and Richard today.' Molly stopped laughing and said: 'All the same, you and Richard, you must be mad.' 'Yes,' said Anna, completely serious. 'Yes, Molly, I think I've been not far off it.' But at this Molly got up, and said quickly: 'I'm going to make lunch.' The look she gave Anna was guilty and contrite. Anna got up too, and said "Then I'll come into the kitchen for a moment.' 'You can tell me the gossip.' 'Ohhh,' said Anna yawning, very casual. 'Come to think of it, what can I tell you that's new? Everything's the same. But exactly.' 'In a year? The Twentieth Congress. Hungary. Suez. And doubtless the natural progression of the human heart from one thing to another? No change?' The small kitchen was white, crammed with order, glistening from the surfaces of ranked coloured cups, plates, dishes; and from drops of steam condensing on the walls and ceiling. The windows were misted. The oven seemed to leap and heave with the energy of the heat inside it. Molly flung up the window and a hot smell of roasting meat rushed out over damp roofs and soiled back yards, as a waiting ball of sunlight leaped neatly over the sill and curled itself on the floor. 'England,' said Molly. 'England. Coming back this time was worse than usual. I felt the energy going out of me even on the boat. I walked into the shops yesterday and I looked at the nice, decent faces, everyone so kind, and so decent and so bloody dull.' She stared briefly out of the window, and then determinedly turned her back on it. 'We'd better accept the fact that we and everybody we know's likely to spend their lives grumbling about England. We are living in it, however.' 'I'm going to leave again soon. I'd go tomorrow if it wasn't for Tommy. Yesterday I was down rehearsing at the theatre. Every man in the cast is a queer but one, and he's sixteen. So what am I doing here? All the time I was away, everything came naturally, the men treat you like women, you feel good, I never remembered my age, I never thought about sex. I had a couple of nice gay affairs, nothing tormented, everything easy. But as soon as you set foot here, you have to tighten your belt, and remember, Now be careful, these men are Englishmen. Except for the rare exception. And you get all self-conscious and sex-conscious. How can a country so full of screwed up people be any good?' 'You'll have settled down in a week or two.' 'I don't want to settle down. I can feel resignation creeping up already. And this house. It ought to be painted again. I simply don't want to start-painting and putting up curtains. Why is everything such hard work here? It isn't in Europe. One sleeps a couple of hours a night and is happy. Here, one sleeps and makes an effort...' 'Yes, yes,' said Anna, laughing. 'Well, I'm sure we'll be making the same speech to each other for years, every time we come back from somewhere.' The house shook as a train went past, close, underground. 'And you ought to do something about that ceiling,' added Anna, looking up at it. The house, laid open by a bomb towards the end of the war, had stood empty for two years, receiving wind and rain through all its rooms. It had been patched up again. When the trains passed, grains of substance could be heard trickling behind clean surfaces of paint. The ceiling had a crack across it. 'Oh hell,' said Molly. 'I can't face it. But I suppose I shall. Why is it, it's only in this country everybody one knows seems to put a good face on things, everyone is bravely carrying a burden.' Tears were smudging her eyes, and she blinked them away and turned back to her oven. 'Because this is the country we know. The other countries are the places we don't think in.' 'That's not altogether true and you know it. Well. You'd better be quick with the news. I'm going to serve lunch in a minute.' It was now Molly's turn to exude an atmosphere of being alone, of not having been met. Her hands, pathetic and stoical, reproached Anna. As for Anna she was thinking: If I join in now, in a what's-wrong-with-men session, then I won't go home, I'll stay for lunch and all afternoon, and Molly and I will feel warm and friendly, all barriers gone. And when we part, there'll be a sudden resentment, a rancour-because after all, our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women... Anna nearly sat down, ready to submerge herself. But she did not. She thought: I want to be done with it all, finished with the men vs. women business, all the complaints and the reproaches and the betrayals. Besides, it's dishonest. We've chosen to live a certain way, knowing the penalties, or if we didn't we know now, so why whine and complain... and besides, if I'm not careful, Molly and I will descend into a kind of twin old-maidhood, where we sit around saying to each other, Do you remember how that man, what-was-his-name said that insensitive thing, it must have been in 1947 'Well, let's have it,' said Molly, very brisk, to Anna, who had stood silent for some time now. 'Yes. You don't want to hear about the comrades, I take it?' 'In France and Italy the intellectuals talk day and night about the Twentieth Congress and Hungary, the perspectives of and the lessons of and mistakes to be learned from.' 'In that case, since it's the same here, though thank God people are getting bored with it, I'll skip it.' 'Good.' 'But I think I'll mention three of the comrades-oh, only in passing,' added Anna hastily, as Molly grimaced. 'Three fine sons of the working class and trade union officials.' 'Who?' 'Tom Winters, Len Colhoun, Bob Fowler.' 'I knew them, of course,' said Molly quickly. She always knew, or had known, everyone. 'Well?' 'Just before the Congress, when there was all that disquiet in our circles, what with this plot and that, and Yugoslavia, etc., it so happened that I met them, in connection with what they naturally referred to as cultural matters. With condescension. At that time I and similar types were spending a lot of time fighting inside the Party-a naive lot we were, trying to persuade people it was much better to admit that things stank in Russia than to deny it. Well. I suddenly got letters from all three of them-independently, of course, they didn't know, any of them, the others had written. Very stern, they were. Any rumours to the effect that there was any dirty work in Moscow or ever had been or that Father Stalin had ever put a foot wrong were spread by enemies of the working class.' Molly laughed, but from politeness; the nerve had been touched too often. 'No, that isn't the point. The point is, these letters were interchangeable. Discounting handwriting of course.' 'Quite a lot to discount.' 'To amuse myself, I typed out all three letters-long ones at that, and put them side by side. In phraseology, style, tone, they were identical. You couldn't possibly have said, this letter was written by Tom, or that one by Len.' Molly said resentfully: 'For that notebook or whatever it is you and Tommy have a secret about?' 'No. To find out something. But I haven't finished.' 'Oh all right, I won't press you.' 'Then came the Congress and almost instantly I got three more letters. All hysterical, self-accusatory, full of guilt, self-abasement.' 'You typed them out again?' 'Yes. And put them side by side. They might have been written by the same person. Don't you see?' 'No. What are you trying to prove?' 'Well, surely the thought follows-what stereotype am I? What anonymous whole am I part of?' 'Does it? It doesn't for me.' Molly was saying: 'If you choose to make a nonentity of yourself, do, but don't stick that label on me.' Disappointed, because this discovery and the ideas that had followed from it were what she had been most looking forward to talking over with Molly, Anna said quickly: 'Oh all right. It struck me as interesting. And that's about all- there was a period of what may be described as confusion, and some left the Party. Or everyone left the Party- meaning those whose psychological time was up. Then suddenly, and in the same week-and that's what's so extraordinary Molly...' In spite of herself, Anna was appealing to Molly again-'In the same week, I got three more letters. Purged of doubt, stern and full of purpose. It was the week after Hungary. In other words, the whip had been cracked, and the waverers jumped to heel. Those three letters were identical too-I'm not talking about the actual words, of course,' said Anna impatiently, as Molly looked deliberately sceptical. 'I mean the style, the phrases, the way words were linked together. And those intermediary letters, the hysterical self-abasing letters, might never have been written. In fact I'm sure Tom, Len and Bob have suppressed the memory that they ever wrote them.' 'But you kept them?' 'Well I'm not going to use them in a court of law, if that's what you mean.' Molly stood slowly wiping glasses on a pink and mauve striped cloth, and holding each one up to the light before setting it down. 'Well I'm so sick of it all I don't think I want ever to bother with it again.' 'But Molly, we can't do that, surely? We were communists or near-communists or whatever you like for years and years. We can't suddenly say, Oh well, I'm bored.' 'The funny thing is I'm bored. Yes I know it's odd. Two or three years ago I felt guilty if I didn't spend all my free time organising something or other. Now I don't feel at all guilty if I simply do my job and laze around for the rest. I don't care any more, Anna. I simply don't.' 'It's not a question of feeling guilty. It's a question of thinking out what it all means.' Molly did not reply, so Anna went on quickly: 'Would you like to hear about the Colony?' The Colony was the name they gave to a group of Americans, all living in London for political reasons. 'Oh God no. I'm sick of them too. No, I'd like to know what happened to Nelson, I'm fond of him.' 'He's writing the American masterpiece. He left his wife. Because she was neurotic. Got himself a girl. Very nice one. Decided she was neurotic. Went back to his wife. Decided she was neurotic. Left her. Has got himself another girl who so far hasn't become neurotic' 'And the others?' 'In one way and another, ditto, ditto, ditto.' 'Well let's skip them. I met the American colony in Rome. Bloody miserable lot they are.' 'Yes. Who else?' 'Your friend Mr. Mathlong-you know, the African?' 'Of course I know. Well he's currently in prison so I suppose by this time next year he'll be Prime Minister.' Molly laughed. 'And there's your friend de Silva.' 'He was my friend,' said Molly laughing again, but resisting Anna's already critical tone. 'Then the facts are as follows. He went back to Ceylon with his wife-if you remember she didn't want to go. He wrote to me because he had written to you and got no reply. He wrote that Ceylon is marvellous and full of poetry and that his wife was expecting another child.' 'But she didn't want another child.' Suddenly Anna and Molly both laughed; they were suddenly in harmony. 'Then he wrote to say he missed London and all its cultural freedoms.' 'Then I suppose we can expect him any moment.' 'He came back. A couple of months ago. He's abandoned his wife, apparently. She's much too good for him, he says, weeping big tears, but not too big, because after all she is stuck with two kids in Ceylon and no money, so he's safe.' 'You've seen him?' 'Yes.' But Anna found herself unable to tell Molly what had happened. What would be the use? They'd end up, as she had sworn they would not, spending the afternoon in the dry bitter exchange that came so easily to them. 'And how about you Anna?' And now, for the first time, Molly had asked in a way which Anna could reply to, and she said at once: 'Michael came to see me. About a month ago.' She had lived with Michael for five years. This affair had broken up three years ago, against her will. 'How was it?' 'Oh, in some ways, as if nothing had happened.' 'Of course, when you know each other so well.' 'But he was behaving-how shall I put it? I was a dear old friend, you know. He drove me to some place I wanted to go. He was talking about a colleague of his. He said, "Do you remember Dick?" Odd, don't you think, that he couldn't remember if I remembered Dick, since we saw a lot of him then. Dick's got a job in Ghana he said. He took his wife. His mistress wanted to go too, said Michael. Very difficult these mistresses are, said Michael, and then he laughed. Quite genuinely, you know, the debonair touch. That was what was painful. Then he looked embarrassed, because he remembered that I had been his mistress, and went red and guilty.' Molly said nothing. She watched Anna closely. 'That's all, I suppose.' 'A lot of swine they all are,' said Molly cheerfully, deliberately striking the note that would make Anna laugh. 'Molly,' said Anna painfully, in appeal. 'What? It's no good going on about it, is it?' 'Well, I've been thinking. You know, it's possible we made a mistake.' 'What? Only one?' But Anna would not laugh. 'No. It's serious. Both of us are dedicated to the proposition that we're tough-no listen, I'm serious. I mean-a marriage breaks up, well, we say, our marriage was a failure, too bad. A man ditches us-too bad we say, it's not important. We bring up kids without men- nothing to it, we say, we can cope. We spend years in the communist party and then we say, Well, well, we made a mistake, too bad.' 'What are you trying to say,' said Molly, very cautious, and at a great distance from Anna. 'Well don't you think it's at least possible, just possible that things can happen to us so bad that we don't ever get over them? Because when I really face it I don't think I've really got over Michael. I think it's done for me. Oh I know, what I am supposed to say is, Well, well, he's ditched me-what's five years after all, on with the next thing.' 'But it has to be, on with the next thing.' 'Why do our lot never admit failure? Never. It might be better for us if we did. And it's not only love and men. Why can't we say something like this-we are people, because of the accident of how we were situated in history, who were so powerfully part-but only in our imaginations, and that's the point-with the great dream, that now we have to admit that the great dream has faded and the truth is something else- that we'll never be any use. After all Molly, it's not much loss is it, a few people, a few people of a certain type, saying that they've had it, they're finished. Why not? It's almost arrogant not to be able to.' 'Oh Anna! All this is simply because of Michael. And probably he'll come in again one of these days and you'll pick up where you left off. And if he doesn't, what are you complaining of? You've got your writing.' 'Good Lord,' said Anna softly. 'Good Lord.' Then after a moment, she forced the safe tone back: 'Yes, it's all very odd... well, I must be rushing home.' 'I thought you said Janet was staying with a friend?' 'Yes, but I've got things to do.' They kissed, briskly. That they had not been able to meet each other was communicated by a small, tender, even humorous squeeze of the hand. Anna went out into the street to walk home. She lived a few minutes' walk away, in Earls Court. Before she turned into the street she lived in she automatically cut out the sight of it. She did not live in the street, or even in the building, but in the flat; and she would not let the sight return to her eyes until her front door was shut behind her. The rooms were on two floors at the top of the house, five large rooms, two down and three up. Michael had persuaded Anna, four years before, to move into her own fiat. It was bad for her, he had said, to live in Molly's house, always under the wing of the big sister. When she had complained she could not afford it, he had told her to let a room. She had moved, imagining he would share this life with her; but he had left her shortly afterwards. For a time she had continued to live in the pattern he had set for her. There were two students in one big room, her daughter in another, and her own bedroom and living-room were organised for two people-herself and Michael. One of the students left, but she did not bother to replace him. She took a revulsion against her bedroom, which had been planned for Michael to share, and moved down to the living-room, where she slept and attended to her notebooks. Upstairs still lived the student, a youth from Wales. Sometimes Anna thought that it could be said she was sharing a flat with a young man; but he was a homosexual, and there was no tension in the arrangement. They hardly saw one another. Anna attended to her own life while Janet was at school, a couple of blocks away; and when Janet was home, devoted herself to her. An old woman came in once a week to clean the place. Money trickled in irregularly from her only novel, Frontiers of War, once a best-seller, which still earned just enough for her to live on. The flat was attractive, white painted, with bright floors. The balustrades and bannisters of the stairs made white patterns against red paper. This was the framework of Anna's life. But it was only alone, in the big room, that she was herself. It was an oblong room, recessed to take a narrow bed. Around the bed were stacked books, papers, a telephone. There were three tall windows in the outer wall. At one end of the room, near the fireplace, was a desk with a typewriter, at which she dealt with letters, and the book reviews and articles she sometimes, but infrequently, wrote. At the other end was a long trestle table, painted black. A drawer held the four notebooks. The top of this table was always kept clear. The walls and ceiling of the room were white, but shabbied by the dark air of London. The floor was painted black. The bed had a black cover. The long curtains were a dull red. Anna now passed slowly from one to another of the three windows, examining the thin and discoloured sunshine that failed to reach the pavements which were the floor of the rift between high Victorian houses. She covered the windows over, listening with pleasure to the intimate sliding sound of the curtain runners in their deep grooves, and to the soft swish, swish, swish of the heavy silk meeting and folding together. She switched the light on over the trestle table, so that the glossy black shone, mirroring a red gleam from the near curtain. She laid the four notebooks out, one after another, side by side. She used an old-fashioned music stool for this occupation, and she now spun it high, almost as high as the table itself, and sat, looking down at the four notebooks as if she were a general on the top of a mountain, watching her armies deploy in the valley below.

THE NOTEBOOKS.

[The four notebooks were identical, about eighteen inches square, with shiny covers, like the texture of a cheap watered silk. But the colours distinguished them-black, red, yellow and blue. When the covers were laid back, exposing the four first pages, it seemed that order had not immediately imposed itself. In each, the first page or two showed broken scribblings and half-sentences. Then a title appeared, as if Anna had, almost automatically, divided herself into four, and then, from the nature of what she had written, named these divisions. And this is what had happened. The first book, the black notebook, began with doodlings, scattered musical symbols, treble signs that shifted into the sign and back again; then a complicated design of interlocking circles, then words:] black dark, it is so dark it is dark there is a kind of darkness here [And then, in a changed startled writing:] Every time I sit down to write, and let my mind go easy, the words, It is so dark, or something to do with darkness. Terror. The terror of this city. Fear of being alone. Only one thing stops me from jumping up and screaming or running to the telephone to ring somebody, it is to deliberately think myself back into that hot light... white light light closed eyes, the red light hot on the eyeballs. The rough pulsing heat of a granite boulder. My palm flat on it, moving over the lichens. The grain of the lichens. Tiny, like minute animals' ears, a warm rough silk on my palm, dragging insistently at the pores of my skin. And hot. The smell of the sun on hot rock. Dry and hot, and the silk of dust on my cheek, smelling of sun, the sun. Letters from the agent about the novel. Every time one of them arrives I want to laugh-the laughter of disgust. Bad laughter, the laughter of helplessness, a self-punishment. Unreal letters, when I think of a slope of hot pored granite, my cheeks against hot rock, the red light on my eyelids. Lunch with the agent. Unreal-the novel is more and more a sort of creature with its own life. Frontiers of War new has nothing to do with me, it is a property of other people. Agent said it should be a film. Said no. She was patient-her job to be. [A date was scribbled here-1951.] (1952) Had lunch with film man. Discussed cast for Frontiers. So incredible wanted to laugh. I said no. Found myself being persuaded into it. Got up quickly and cut it short, even caught myself seeing the words Frontiers of War up outside a cinema. Though of course he wanted to call it Forbidden Love. (1953) Spent all morning trying to remember myself back into sitting under the trees in the vlei near Mashopi. Failed. [Here appeared the title or heading of the notebook:]

THE DARK.

[The pages were divided down the middle by a neat black line, and the subdivisions headed:]

Source Money.

[Under the left word were fragments of sentences, scenes remembered, letters from friends in Central Africa gummed to the page. On the other side, a record of transactions to do with Frontiers of War, money received from translations, etc., accounts of business interviews and so on. After a few pages the entries on the left ceased. For three years the black notebook had in it nothing but business and practical entries which appeared to have absorbed the memories of physical Africa. The entries on the left began again opposite, a typed manifesto-like sheet gummed to the page, which was a synopsis of Frontiers of War, now changed to Forbidden Love, written by Anna with her tongue in her cheek, and approved by the synopsis desk in her agent's office:] Dashing young Peter Carey, his brilliant scholastic career at Oxford broken by World War II, is posted to Central Africa with the sky-blue-uniformed youth of the R. A. F. to be trained as a pilot. Idealistic and inflammable, young Peter is shocked by the go-getting, colour-ridden small-town society he finds, falls in with the local group of high-living lefts, who exploit his naive young radicalism. During the week they clamour about the injustices meted out to the blacks; weekends they live it up in a lush out-of-town hotel run by John-Bull-type landlord Boothby and his comely wife, whose pretty teen-age daughter falls in love with Peter. He encourages her, with all the thoughtlessness of youth; while Mrs. Boothby, neglected by her hard-drinking money-loving husband, conceives a powerful but secret passion for the good-looking youth. Peter, disgusted by the leftists' weekend orgies, secretly makes contact with the local African agitators, whose leader is the cook at the hotel. He falls in love with the cook's young wife, neglected by her politics-mad husband, but this love defies the taboos and mores of the white settler society. Mistress Boothby surprises them in a romantic rendezvous; and in her jealous rage informs the authorities of the local R. A. F. camp, who promise her Peter will be posted away from the Colony. She tells her daughter, unaware of her unconscious motive, which is to humiliate the untouched young girl whom Peter has preferred to herself and who becomes ill because of the insult to her white-girl's pride and announces she will leave home in a scene where the mother, frantic, screams: 'You couldn't even attract him. He preferred the dirty black girl to you.' The cook, informed by Mrs. Boothby of his young wife's treachery, throws her off, telling her to return to her family. But the girl, proudly defiant, goes instead to the nearest town, to take the easy way out as a woman of the streets. Heart-broken Peter, all his illusions in shreds, spends his last night in the Colony drunk, and by chance encounters his dark love in some shabby shebeen. They spend their last night together in each other's arms, in the only place where white and black may meet, in the brothel by the sullied waters of the town's river. Their innocent and pure love, broken by the harsh inhuman laws of this country and by the jealousies of the corrupt, will know no future. They talk pathetically of meeting in England when the war is over, but both know this to be a brave lie. In the morning Peter says good-bye to the group of local 'progressives'; his contempt for them clear in his grave young eyes. Meanwhile his dark young love is lurking at the other end of the platform in a group of her own people. As the train steams out she waves; he does not see her; his eyes already reflect thought of the death that awaits him-Ace Pilot that he is!-and she returns to the streets of the dark town, on the arm of another man, laughing brazenly to hide her sad humiliation. [Opposite this was written:] The man at the synopsis desk was pleased by this; began discussing how to make the story 'less upsetting' to the moneybags-for instance, the heroine should not be a faithless wife, which would make her unsympathetic, but the daughter of the cook. I said I had written it in parody whereupon, after a moment's annoyance, he laughed. I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, goodnatured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for instance, Comrade X, on the murder of three British communists in Stalin's prisons, looked exactly like this when he said: Well, but we've never made enough allowance for human nature) and he said: 'Well, Miss Wulf, you're learning that when you're eating with the devil the spoon has got to be not only a long one, but made of asbestos-it's a perfectly good synopsis and written in their terms.' When I persisted, he kept his temper and enquired, oh very tolerantly, smiling indefatigably, whether I didn't agree that in spite of all the deficiencies of the industry, good films got made. 'And even films with a good progressive message Miss Wulf?' He was delighted at finding a phrase guaranteed to pull me in, and showed it; his look was both self-congratulatory and full of cynical cruelty. I came home, conscious of a feeling of disgust so much more powerful than usual that I sat down and made myself read the novel for the first time since it was published. As if it had been written by someone else. If I had been asked to review it in 1951, when it came out, this is what I should have said: 'A first novel which shows a genuine minor talent. The novelty of its setting: a station in the Rhodesian veld with its atmosphere of rootless money-driving white settlers against a background of sullen dispossessed Africans; the novelty of its story, a love affair between a young Englishman thrown into the Colony because of the war and a half-primitive black woman, obscures the fact that this is an unoriginal theme, scantily developed. The simplicity of Anna Wulf's style is her strength; but it is too soon to say whether this is the conscious simplicity of artistic control, or the often deceptive sharpness of form which is sometimes arbitrarily achieved by allowing the shape of a novel to be dictated by a strong emotion.' But from 1954 on: "The spate of novels with an African setting continues. Frontiers of War is competently told, with a considerable vigour of insight into the more melodramatic sexual relationships. But there is surely very little new to be said about the black-white conflict. The area of colour-bar hatreds and cruelties has become the best documented in our fiction. The most interesting questions raised by this new report from the racial frontiers is: why, when the oppressions and tensions of white-settled Africa have existed more or less in their present form for decades, is it only in the late forties and fifties that they exploded into artistic form. If we knew the answer we would understand more of the relations between society and the talent it creates, between art and the tensions that feed it. Anna Wulf's novel has been sprung by little more than a warm-hearted indignation against injustice: good, but no longer enough...' During that period of three months when I wrote reviews, reading ten or more books a week, I made a discovery: that the interest with which I read these books had nothing to do with what I feel when I read-let's say-Thomas Mann, the last of the writers in the old sense, who used the novel for philosophical statements about life. The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know-Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel-the quality of philosophy. I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class has no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated. Those fishermen in Scotland were a different species from the coalminers I stayed with in Yorkshire; and both come from a different world than the housing estate outside London. Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist. I suffer torments of dissatisfaction and incompletion because of my inability to enter those areas of life my way of living, education, sex, politics, class bar me from. It is the malady of some of the best people of this time; some can stand the pressure of it; others crack under it; it is a new sensibility, a half-unconscious attempt towards a new imaginative comprehension. But it is fatal to art. I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can. When I said that to Mother Sugar she replied with the small nod of satisfaction people use for these resounding truths, that the artist writes out of an incapacity to live. I remember the nausea I felt when she said it; I feel the reluctance of disgust now when I write it: it is because this business about art and the artist has become so debased, the property of every sloppy-minded amateur that any person with a real connection with the arts wants to run a hundred miles at the sight of the small satisfied nod, the complacent smile. And besides, when a truth has been explored so thoroughly-this one has been the subject matter of art for this century, when it has become such a monster of a cliche, one begins to wonder, is it so finally true? And one begins to think of the phrases 'incapacity to live,' 'the artist,' etc., letting them echo and thin in one's mind, fighting the sense of disgust and the staleness, as I tried to fight it that day sitting before Mother Sugar. But extraordinary how this old stuff issued so fresh and magisterial from the lips of psychoanalysis. Mother Sugar, who is nothing if not a cultivated woman, a European soaked in art, uttered commonplaces in her capacity as witch-doctor she would have been ashamed of if she were with friends and not in the consulting room. One level for life, another for the couch. I couldn't stand it; that is, ultimately, what I couldn't stand. Because it means one level of morality for life, and another for the sick. I know very well from what level in my self that novel, Frontiers of War, came from. I knew when I wrote it. I hated it then and I hate it now. Because that area in myself had become so powerful it threatened to swallow everything else, I went off to the witch-doctor, my soul in my hands. Yet the healer herself, when the word Art cropped up, smiled complacently; that sacred animal the artist justifies everything, everything he does is justified. The complacent smile, the tolerant nod, is not even confined to the cultivated healers, or the professors; it's the property of the money-changers, the little jackals of the press, the enemy. When a film mogul wants to buy an artist-and the real reason why he seeks out the original talent and the spark of creativity is because he wants to destroy it, unconsciously that's what he wants, to justify himself by destroying the real thing-he calls the victim an artist. You are an artist, of course... and the victim more often than not, smirks, and swallows his disgust. The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, 'commitment' and so on is that they are rushing into a discipline, any discipline at all, which will save them from the poison of the word 'artist' used by the enemy. I remember very clearly the moment in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I could write. The 'subject' was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this-why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a 'story' which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a 'novel,' and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in 'being a writer' or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game-that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all-not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth? I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company; yet I know that what made the film company so excited about the possibilities of that novel as a film was precisely what made it successful as a novel. The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence. And I know that in order to write another, to write those fifty reports on society which I have the material to write, I would have to deliberately whip up in myself that same emotion. And it would be that emotion which would make those fifty books novels and not reportage. When I think back to that time, those weekends spent at the Mashopi Hotel, with that group of people, I have to first switch something off in me; now, writing about it, I have to switch it off, or 'a story' would begin to emerge, a novel, and not the truth. It is like remembering a particularly intense love affair, or a sexual obsession. And it is extraordinary how, as the nostalgia deepens, the excitement 'stories' begin to form, to breed like cells under a microscope. And yet it is so powerful, that nostalgia, that I can only write this, a few sentences at a time. Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And the people who read Frontiers of War will have had fed in them this emotion, even though they were not conscious of it. That is why I am ashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime. The group was composed of people thrown together by chance, and who knew they would not meet again as soon as this particular phase of the war was over. They all knew and acknowledged with the utmost frankness that they had nothing in common. Whatever fervours, beliefs, and awful necessities the war created in other parts of the world, it was characterised in ours, right from the start, by double-feeling. It was immediately evident that for us war was going to be a very fine thing. This wasn't a complicated thing that needed to be explained by experts. Material prosperity hit Central and South Africa tangibly; there was suddenly a great deal more money for everyone, and this was true even of the Africans, even in an economy designed to see that they had the minimum necessary to keep them alive and working. Nor were there any serious shortages of commodities to buy with the money. Not serious enough at least to interfere with the enjoyment of life. Local manufacturers began to make what had been imported before, thus proving in another way that war has two faces-it was such a torpid, slovenly economy, based as it was on the most inefficient and backward labour force, that it needed some sort of jolt from outside. The war was such a jolt. There was another reason for cynicism-because people began to be cynical, when they were tired of being ashamed, as they were, to start with. This war was presented to us as a crusade against the evil doctrines of Hitler, against racialism, etc., yet the whole of that enormous land-mass, about half the total area of Africa, was conducted on precisely Hitler's assumption-that some human beings are better than others because of their race. The mass of the Africans up and down the continent were sardonically amused at the sight of their white masters crusading off to fight the racialist devil-those Africans with any education at all. They enjoyed the sight of the white baases so eager to go off and fight on any available battle-front against a creed they would all die to defend on their own soil. Right through the war, the correspondence columns of the papers were crammed with arguments about whether it was safe to put so much as a pop-gun into the hands of any African soldier since he was likely to turn it against his white masters, or to use this useful knowledge later. It was decided, quite rightly, that it was not safe. Here were two good reasons why the war had for us, from the very beginnings, its enjoyable ironies. (I am again falling into the wrong tone-and yet I hate that tone, and yet we all lived inside it for months and years, and it did us all, I am sure, a great deal of damage. It was self-punishing, a locking of feeling, an inability or a refusal to fit conflicting things together to make a whole; so that one can live inside it, no matter how terrible. The refusal means one can neither change nor destroy; the refusal means ultimately either death or impoverishment of the individual.) I will try to put down the facts merely. For the general population the war had two phases. The first when things were going badly and defeat was possible; this phase ended, finally, at Stalingrad. The second phase was simply sticking it out until victory. For us, and I mean by us the left and the liberals associated with the left, the war had three phases. The first was when Russia disowned the war. This locked the loyalties of us all-the half hundred or hundred people whose emotional spring was a faith in the Soviet Union. This period ended when Hitler attacked Russia. Immediately there was a burst of energy. People are too emotional about communism, or rather, about their own communist parties, to think about a subject that one day will be a subject for sociologists. That is, the social activities that go on as a direct or indirect result of the existence of a communist party. People or groups of people who don't even know it have been inspired, or animated, or given a new push into life because of the communist party, and this is true of all countries where there has been even a tiny communist party. In our own small town, a year after Russia entered the war, and the left had recovered because of it, there had come into existence (apart from the direct activities of the party which is not what I am talking about) a small orchestra, readers' circles, two dramatic groups, a film society, an amateur survey of the conditions of urban African children which, when it was published, stirred the white conscience and was the beginning of a long-overdue sense of guilt, and half a dozen discussion groups of African problems. For the first time in its existence there was something like a cultural life in that town. And it was enjoyed by hundreds of people who knew of the communists only as a group of people to hate. And of course a good many of these phenomena were disapproved of by the communists themselves, then at their most energetic and dogmatic. Yet the communists had inspired them because a dedicated faith in humanity spreads ripples in all directions. For us, then (and this was true of all the cities up and down our part of Africa), a period of intense activity began. This phase, one of jubilant confidence, ended some time in 1944, well before the end of the war. This change was not due to an outside event, like a change in the Soviet Union's 'line'; but was internal, and self-developing, and, looking back, I can see its beginning almost from the first day of the establishment of the 'communist' group. Of course all the discussion clubs, groups, etc., died when the Cold War began and any sort of interest in China and the Soviet Union became suspect instead of fashionable. (The purely cultural organisations like orchestras, drama groups and so on continued.) But when 'left' or 'progressive' or 'communist' feeling- whichever word is right, and at this distance it's hard to say-was at its height in our town, the inner group of people who had initiated it were already falling into inertia, or bewilderment or at best worked out of a sense of duty. At the time, of course, no one understood it; but it was inevitable. It is now obvious that inherent in the structure of a communist party or group is a self-dividing principle. Any communist party anywhere exists and perhaps even flourishes by this process of discarding individuals or groups; not because of personal merits or demerits, but according to how they accord with the inner dynamism of the party at any given moment. Nothing happened in our small, amateur and indeed ludicrous group that hadn't happened right back with the Iskra group in London at the beginning of the century, at the start of organised communism. If we had known anything at all about the history of our own movement we would have been saved from the cynicism, the frustration, the bewilderment-but that isn't what I want to say now. In our case, the inner logic of 'centralism' made the process of disintegration inevitable because we had no links at all with what African movements there were-that was before the birth of any Nationalist movement, before any kind of trade union. There were then a few Africans who met secretly under the noses of the police but they didn't trust us, because we were white. One or two came to ask our advice on technical questions but we never knew what was really in their minds. The situation was that a group of highly militant white politicos, equipped with every kind of information about organising revolutionary movements were operating in a vacuum because the black masses hadn't begun to stir, and wouldn't for another few years. And this was true of the communist party in South Africa too. The battles and conflicts and debates inside our group which might have driven it into growth, had we not been an alien body, without roots, destroyed us very fast. Inside a year our group was split, equipped with subgroups, traitors, and a loyal hard core whose personnel, save for one or two men, kept changing. Because we did not understand the process, it sapped our emotional energy. But while I know that the process of self-destruction began almost at birth, I can't quite pinpoint that moment when the tone of our talk and behaviour changed. We were working as hard, but it was to the accompaniment of a steadily deepening cynicism. And our jokes, outside the formal meetings, were contrary to what we said, and thought we believed in. It is from that period of my life that I know how to watch the jokes people make. A slightly malicious tone, a cynical edge to a voice, can have developed inside ten years into a cancer that has destroyed a whole personality. I've seen it often, and in many other places than political or communist organisations. The group I want to write about became a group after a terrible fight in 'the party.' (I have to put it in inverted commas because it was never officially constituted, more a kind of emotional entity.) It split in two, and over something not very important-so unimportant I can't even remember what it was, only the horrified wonder we all felt that so much hatred and bitterness could have been caused by a minor question of organisation. The two groups agreed to continue to work together-so much sanity remained to us; but we had different policies. I want to laugh out of a kind of despair even now-it was all so irrelevant, the truth was the group was like a group of exiles, with exiles' fevered bitterness over trifles. And we were all-twenty or so of us, exiles; because our ideas were so far in advance of the country's development. Yes, now I remember that the quarrel was because one half of the organisation complained that certain members were not 'rooted in the country.' We split on these lines. And now for our small sub-group. There were three men from the aircamps, who had known each other first at Oxford-Paul, Jimmy and Ted. Then George Hounslow, who worked on the roads. Then Willi Rodde, the refugee from Germany. Myself. Maryrose who had actually been born in the country. I was the odd man out in this group because I was the only one who was free. Free in the sense that I had chosen to come to the Colony in the first place and could leave it when I liked. And why did I not leave it? I hated the place, and had done so since I first came to it in 1939 to marry and become a tobacco farmer's wife. I met Steven in London the year before, when he was on holiday. The day after I arrived on the farm I knew I liked Steven but could never stand the life. But instead of returning to London I went into the city and became a secretary. For years my life seems to have consisted of activities I began to do provisionally, temporarily, with half a heart, and which I then stayed with. For instance I became 'a communist' because the left people were the only people in the town with any kind of moral energy, the only people who took it for granted that the colour bar was monstrous. And yet there were always two personalities in me, the 'communist' and Anna, and Anna judged the communist all the time. And vice-versa. Some kind of lethargy I suppose. I knew the war was coming and it would be hard to get a passage home, yet I stayed. Yet I did not enjoy the life, I don't enjoy pleasure, but I went to sundowner parties and dances and I played tennis and enjoyed the sun. It seems such a long time ago that I can't feel myself doing any of these things. I can't 'remember' what it was like to be Mr. Campbell's secretary or to dance every night, etc. It happened to someone else. I can see myself though, but even that wasn't true until I found an old photograph the other day which showed a small, thin, brittle black-and-white girl, almost doll-like. I was more sophisticated than the colonial girls of course; but far less experienced-in a colony people have far more room to do as they like. Girls can do things there that I'd have to fight to do in England. My sophistication was literary and social. Compared with a girl like Maryrose, for all her apparent fragility and vulnerability, I was a baby. The photograph shows me standing on the Club steps, holding a racket. I look amused and critical; it's a sharp little face. I never acquired that admirable Colonial quality-good humour. (Why is it admirable? Yet I enjoy it.) But I can't remember what I felt, except that I repeated to myself every day, even after the war began, that now I must book my passage home. About then I met Willi Rodde and got involved with politics. Not for the first time. I was too young of course to have been involved with Spain, but friends had been; so communism and the left was nothing new to me. I did not like Willi. He did not like me. Yet we began to live together, or as much as is possible in a small town where everyone knows what you do. We had rooms in the same hotel and shared meals. We were together for nearly three years. Yet we neither liked nor understood each other. We did not even enjoy sleeping together. Of course then I was inexperienced, having slept only with Steven, and that briefly. But even then I knew, as Willi knew, that we were incompatible. Having learned about sex since, I know that the word incompatible means something very real. It doesn't mean, not being in love, or not being in sympathy, or not being patient, or being ignorant. Two people can be sexually incompatible who are perfectly happy in bed with other people, as if the very chemical structures of their bodies were hostile. Well, Willi and I understood this so well that our vanity wasn't involved. Our emotions were, about this point only. We had a kind of pity for each other; we were both afflicted permanently with a feeling of sad helplessness because we were unable to make each other happy in this way. But nothing stopped us from choosing other partners. We did not. That I did not isn't surprising, because of that quality in me I call lethargy, or curiosity, which always keeps me in the situation long after I should leave it. Weakness? Until I wrote that word I never thought of it as applying to me. But I suppose it does. Willi, however, was not weak. On the contrary he was the most ruthless person I have ever known. Having written that, I am astounded. What do I mean? He was capable of great kindness. And now I remember that all those years ago, I discovered that no matter what adjective I applied to Willi, I could always use the opposite. Yes. I have looked in my old papers. I find a list, headed Willi: Ruthless Kind Cold Warm Sentimental Realistic And so on, down the page; and underneath I wrote: 'From the process of writing these words about Willi I have discovered I know nothing about him. About someone one understands, one doesn't have to make lists of words.' But really what I discovered, though I didn't know it then, was that in describing any personality all these words are meaningless. To describe a person one says: 'Willi, sitting stiffly at the head of the table, allowed his round spectacles to glitter at the people watching him and said, formally, but with a gruff clumsy humour....' Something like that. But the point is, and it is the point that obsesses me (and how odd this obsession should be showing itself, so long ago, in helpless lists of opposing words, not knowing what it would develop into), once I say that words like good/bad, strong/ weak, are irrelevant, I am accepting amorality, and I do accept it the moment I start to write 'a story,' 'a novel,' because I simply don't care. All I care about is that I should describe Willi and Maryrose so that a reader can feel their reality. And after twenty years of living in and around the left, which means twenty years' preoccupation with this question of morality in art, that is all I am left with. So what I am saying is, in fact, that the human personality, that unique flame, is so sacred to me, that everything else becomes unimportant? Is that what I am saying? And if so, what does it mean? But to return to Willi. He was the emotional centre of our sub-group, and had been, before the split, the centre of the big group-another strong man, similar to Willi, was now leading the other sub-group. Willi was centre because of his absolute certainty that he was right. He was a master of dialectic; could be very subtle and intelligent in diagnosing a social problem, could be, even in the next sentence, stupidly dogmatic. As time went on, he became steadily more heavy-minded. Yet the odd thing was that people continued to revolve around him, people much subtler than he, even when they knew he was talking nonsense. Even when we had reached the stage when we could laugh, in front of him and at him, and at some monstrous bit of logic-chopping, we continued to revolve around and depend on him. It is terrifying that this can be true. For instance, when he first imposed himself and we accepted him, he told us that he had been a member of the underground working against Hitler. There was even some fantastic story about his having killed three S. S. men and secretly buried them and then escaped to the frontier and away to England. We believed it, of course. Why not? But even after Sam Kettner came up from Johannesburg, who had known him for years, and told us that Willi had never been anything more in Germany than a liberal, had never joined any anti-Hitler group, and had only left Germany when his age-group became eligible for the army, it was as if we believed it. Because we thought him capable of it? Well, I'm sure he was. Because, in short, a man is as good as his fantasies? But I don't want to write Willi's history-it was common enough for that time. He was a refugee from sophisticated Europe stuck for the duration of the war in a backwater. It is his character I want to describe-if I can. Well, the most remarkable thing about him was how he would sit down to work out everything that might conceivably happen to him in the next ten years, and then make plans in advance. There is nothing that most people find harder to understand than that a man can continuously scheme to meet all the contingencies that might occur five years ahead. The word used for this is opportunism. But very few people are genuinely opportunists. It takes not only clarity of mind about oneself, which is fairly common; but a stubborn and driving energy, which is rare. For instance, for the five years of the war Willi drank beer (which he hated) every Saturday morning with a C. I. D. man (whom he despised) because he had worked out that this particular man was likely to have become a senior official by the time Willi needed him. And he was right, because when the war ended, it was this man who pulled strings for Willi to get his naturalisation through long before any of the other refugees got theirs. And therefore Willi was free to leave the Colony a couple of years before they were. At it turned out he decided not to live in England, but to return to Berlin; but had he chosen England, then he would have needed British nationality-and so on. Everything he did had this quality of careful calculated planning. Yet it was so blatant that nobody believed it about him. We thought, for example, that he really liked the C. I. D. man as a person, but was ashamed of admitting he liked a 'class enemy.' And when Willi used to say: 'But he will be useful to me,' we would laugh affectionately as at a weakness that made him more human. For, of course, we thought him inhuman. He played the role of commissar, the communist intellectual leader. Yet he was the most middle-class person I have known. I mean by this that in every instinct he was for order, correctness and conservation of what existed. I remember Jimmy laughing at him and saying that if he headed a successful revolution on Wednesday, by Thursday he would have appointed a Ministry of Conventional Morality. At which Willi said he was a socialist and not an anarchist. He had no sympathy for the emotionally weak or deprived or for the misfits. He despised people who allowed their lives to be disturbed by personal emotion. Which didn't mean he wasn't capable of spending whole nights giving good advice to someone in trouble; but the advice tended to leave the sufferer feeling he was inadequate and unworthy. Willi had had the most conventional upper-middle-class upbringing imaginable. Berlin in the late twenties and thirties; an atmosphere which he called decadent, but of which he had been very much a part; a little conventional homosexuality at the age of thirteen; being seduced by the maid when he was fourteen; then parties, fast cars, cabaret singers; a sentimental attempt to reform a prostitute about which he was now sentimentally cynical; an aristocratic contempt for Hitler, and always plenty of money. He was-even in this Colony and when he was earning a few pounds a week, perfectly dressed; elegant in a suit made for ten shillings by an Indian tailor. He was of middle height, lean, stooped a little; wore a cap of absolutely smooth gleaming black hair which was rapidly receding; had a high pale forehead, extremely cold greenish eyes usually invisible behind steadily focused spectacles, and a prominent and authoritarian nose. He would listen patiently while people spoke, his lenses flashing, and then take off the glasses, exposing his eyes, which were at first weak and blinking from the adjustment, then suddenly narrowed and critical, and speak with a simplicity of arrogance that took everyone's breath away. That was Wilhelm Rodde, the professional revolutionary who later (after failing to get the good well-paid job in a London firm he had counted on) went to East Germany (remarking with his usual brutal frankness: I'm told they are living very well there, with cars and chauffeurs) and became an official with a good deal of power. And I am sure he is an extremely efficient official. I am sure he is humane, when it is possible. But I remember him at Mashopi; I remember us all at Mashopi-for now all those years of nights of talk and activity, when we were political beings, seem to me far less revealing of what we were than at Mashopi. Though of course, as I've said, that is true only because we were politically in a vacuum, without a chance of expressing ourselves in political responsibility. The three men from the camp were united by nothing but the uniform, although they had been friends at Oxford. They acknowledged that the end of the war would be the end of their intimacy. They would sometimes even acknowledge their lack of real liking for each other, in the light, hard, self-mocking voice which was common to us all during that particular phase-to all, that is, save Willi, whose concession to the tone or style of that time was to allow freedom to others. It was his way of participating in anarchy. At Oxford these three had been homosexuals. When I write the word down and look at it, I realise its power to disturb. When I remember the three, how they were, their characters, there is no shock, or moment of disturbance. But at the word homosexual, written-well, I have to combat dislike and disquiet. Extraordinary. I qualify the word by saying that already, only eighteen months later, they were making jokes about 'our homosexual phase,' and jibing at themselves for doing something simply because it had been fashionable. They had been in a loose group of about twenty, all vaguely left-wing, vaguely literary, all having affairs with each other in every kind of sexual combination. And again, put like that, it becomes too emphatic. It was the early part of the war; they were waiting to be called up; it was clear in retrospect that they were deliberately creating a mood of irresponsibility as a sort of social protest and sex was part of it. The most striking of the three, but only because of his quality of charm, was Paul Blackenhurst. He was the young man I used in Frontiers of War for the character of 'gallant young pilot' full of enthusiasm and idealism. In fact he was without any sort of enthusiasm, but he gave the impression of it, because of his lively appreciation of any moral or social anomaly. His real coldness was hidden by charm, and a certain grace in everything he did. He was a tall youth, well-built, solid, yet alert and light in his movements. His face was round, his eyes very round and very blue, his skin extraordinarily white and clear, but lightly freckled over the bridge of a charming nose. He had a soft thick shock of hair always falling forward on his forehead. In the sunlight it was a full light gold, in the shade a warm golden brown. The very clear eyebrows were of the same soft glistening brightness. He confronted everyone he met with an intensely serious, politely enquiring, positively deferential bright-blue beam from his eyes, even stooping slightly in his attempt to convey his earnest appreciation. His voice, at first meeting, was a low charming deferential murmur. Very few failed to succumb to this delightful young man so full (though of course against his will) of the pathos of that uniform. It took most people a long time to discover that he was mocking them. I've seen women, and even men, when the meaning of one of his cruelly quiet drawling statements came home to them, go literally pale with the shock of it; and stare at him incredulous that such open-faced candour could go with such deliberate rudeness. He was, in fact, extremely like Willi, but only in the quality of his arrogance. It was an upper-class arrogance. He was English, upper-middle-class, extremely intelligent. His parents were gentry; his father, Sir something or other. He had that absolute assurance of nerve and body that comes from being bred in a well-set-up conventional family without any money worries. The 'family'-and, of course, he spoke of it with mockery, were spread all over the upper reaches of English society. He would say, drawling: 'Ten years ago I'd have claimed that England belongs to me and I know it! Of course, the war'll do away with all that, won't it?' And his smile would convey that he believed in nothing of the sort, and hoped we were too intelligent to believe it. It was arranged that when the war was over, he would go into the City. He spoke of that, too, with mockery. 'If I marry well,' he'd say, only the corners of his attractive mouth showing amusement, 'I'll be a captain of industry. I have intelligence and the education and the background-all I need is the money. If I don't marry well I'll be a lieutenant- much more fun, of course, to be under orders, and much less responsibility.' But we all knew he would be a colonel at least. But what is extraordinary is that this sort of talk went on when the 'communist' group was at its most confident. One personality for the committee room; another for the cafe afterwards. And this is not as frivolous as it sounds; because if Paul had been caught up in a political movement that could have used his talents, he would have stayed with it; exactly as Willi, failing to reach his fashionable business consultant-ship (which he was born for) became a communist administrator. No, looking back I see that the anomalies and cynicisms of that time were only reflections of what was possible. Meanwhile he made jokes about 'the system.' He had no belief in it, that goes without saying, his mocking at it was genuine. But in his character of future lieutenant, he'd raise a clear blue gaze to Willi and drawl: 'I'm using my time usefully, wouldn't you say? By observing the comrades? I'll have a flying start over my rival lieutenants, won't I? Yes, I'll understand the enemy. Probably you, dear Willi. Yes.' At which Willi would give a small grudging appreciative smile. Once he even said: 'It's all very well for you, you've got something to go back to. I'm a refugee.' They enjoyed each other's company. Although Paul would have died rather than admit (in his role as future officer-in-industry) a serious interest in anything, he was fascinated by history, because of his intellectual pleasure in parodox-that is what history meant to him. And Willi shared this passion- for history, not for the paradoxical... I remember him saying to Paul: 'It's only a real dilettante who could see history as a series of improbabilities,' and Paul, replying: 'But my dear Willi, I'm a member of a dying class, and you'd be the first to appreciate that I can't afford any other attitude?' Paul, shut into the officers' mess with men who for the most part he considered morons, missed serious conversation, though of course he would never have said so; and I daresay the reason he attached himself to us in the first place was because we offered it. Another reason was that he was in love with me. But then we were all, at various times, in love with each other. It was, as Paul would explain, 'obligatory in the times we live in to be in love with as many people as possible.' He did not say this because he felt he would be killed. He did not believe for a moment he would be killed. He had worked out his chances mathematically; they were much better now than earlier, during the Battle of Britain. He was going to fly bombers, less dangerous than fighter planes. And besides, some uncle of his attached to the senior levels of the Air Force had made enquiries and determined (or perhaps arranged) that Paul would be posted, not to England, but to India, where the casualties were comparatively light. I think that Paul was truly 'without nerves.' In other words, his nerves, well cushioned since birth by security, were not in the habit of signalling messages of doom. They told me-the men who flew with him-that he was always cool, confident, accurate, a born pilot. In this he was different from Jimmy Mc Grath, also a good pilot, who suffered a hell of fear. Jimmy used to come into the hotel after a day's flying and say he was sick with nerves. He'd admit he hadn't slept for nights with anxiety. He would confide in me, gloomily, that he had a premonition he would be killed tomorrow. And he would ring me up from the camp the day after to say his premonition had been justified because in fact he had 'nearly pranged his kite,' and it was sheer luck he wasn't dead. His training was a continual torment to him. Yet Jimmy flew bombers, and apparently very well, over Germany right through the last phase of the war, when we were systematically laying the German cities in ruins. He flew continuously for over a year, and he survived. Paul was killed the last day before he left the Colony. He had been posted to India, so his uncle was right. His last evening was spent with us at a party. Usually he controlled his drinking, even when pretending to drink wild with the rest of us. That night he drank himself blind, and had to be put into a bath in the hotel by Jimmy and Willi and brought around. He went back to camp as the sun was coming up to say good-bye to his friends there. He was standing on the airstrip, so Jimmy told me later, still half-conscious with alcohol, the rising sun in his eyes-though of course, being Paul, he would not have shown the state he was in. A plane came in to land, and stopped a few paces away. Paul turned, his eyes dazzling with the sunrise, and walked straight into the propeller, which must have been an almost invisible sheen of light. His legs were cut off just below the crutch and he died at once. Jimmy was also middle-class; but Scotch, not English. There was nothing Scots about him, except when he got drunk, when he became sentimental about ancient English atrocities, like Glencoe. His voice was an elaborately affected Oxford drawl. This accent is hard enough to take in England, but in a Colony it is ludicrous. Jimmy knew it, and would emphasise it deliberately to annoy people he didn't like. For us, whom he did like, he would make apologies. 'But after all,' he would say, 'I know it's silly, but this expensive voice will be my bread and butter after the war.' And so Jimmy, like Paul, refused-at least on one level of his personality- to believe in the future of the socialism he professed. His family was altogether less impressive than Paul's. Or rather, he belonged to a decaying branch of a family. His father was an unsatisfactory retired Indian Colonel-unsatisfactory, as Jimmy emphasised, because, 'He isn't the real thing. He likes Indians and goes in for humanity and Buddhism-I ask you!' He was drinking himself to death, so Jimmy said; but I think this was put in simply to round off the picture; because he would also show us poems written by the old man; and he was probably secretly very proud of him. He was an only child, born when his mother, whom he adored, was already over forty. Jimmy was the same physical type as Paul-at first glance. A hundred yards off, they were recognisably of the same human tribe, hardly to be distinguished. But close to, their resemblances emphasised their total difference of fibre. Jimmy's flesh was heavy, almost lumpish; he carried himself heavily; his hands were large but podgy, like a child's hands. His features, of the same carved clear whiteness as Paul's, with the same blue eyes, lacked grace, and his gaze was pathetic and full of a childish appeal to be liked. His hair was pale and lightless, and fell about in greasy strands. His face, as he took pleasure in pointing out, was a decadent face. It was over-full, over-ripe, almost flaccid. He was not ambitious, and wanted no more than to be a Professor of History at some university, which he has since become. Unlike the others he was truly homosexual, though he wished he wasn't. He was in love with Paul whom he despised and who was irritated by him. Much later he married a woman fifteen years older than himself. Last year he wrote me a letter in which he described this marriage-it was obviously written when he was drunk and posted, so to speak, into the past. They slept together, with little pleasure on her side, and none on his-'though I did put my mind to it, I do assure you!'-for a few weeks. Then she got pregnant, and that was the end of sex between them. In short, a not uncommon English marriage. His wife, it appears, has no suspicion he is not a normal man. He is quite dependent on her and if she died I suspect he'd commit suicide, or retreat into drink. Ted Brown was the most original. A boy from a large working-class family, he had won scholarships all his life and finally to Oxford. He was the only genuine socialist of the three-I mean socialist in his instincts, in his nature. Willi used to complain that Ted behaved 'as if he lived in a full-blown communist society or as if he'd been brought up in some damned kibbutz.' Ted would look at him, genuinely puzzled: he could not understand why that should be a criticism. Then he'd shrug and choose to forget Willi in some new enthusiasm. He was a lively, slight, lank, black-shock-haired, hazel-eyed, energetic young man, always without money-he gave it away; with his clothes in a mess-he had no time for them, or gave them away; without time for himself, for he gave that away to everyone. He had a passion for music, about which he had taught himself a good deal, for literature, and for his fellow human beings whom he saw as victims with himself of a gigantic and almost cosmic conspiracy to deprive them of their true natures. Which of course were beautiful, generous, and good. He sometimes said he preferred being homosexual. This meant that he had a succession of proteges. The truth was he couldn't stand that other young men of his class hadn't had his advantages. He would seek out some bright mechanic in the camp; or, at the public meetings in town some youth who seemed to be there out of real interest and not because he had nothing better to do; seize hold of him, make him read, instruct him in music, explain to him that life was a glorious adventure, and come to us exclaiming that 'when one finds a butterfly under a stone one has to rescue it.' He was always rushing into the hotel with some raw, bemused young man, demanding that we should jointly 'take him on.' We always did. During the two years he was in the Colony, Ted rescued a dozen butterflies, all of whom had an amused and affectionate respect for him. He was collectively in love with them. He changed their lives. After the war, in England, he kept in touch, made them study, directed them into the Labour Party-by then he was no longer a communist; and saw to it that they did not, as he put it, hibernate. He married, very romantically and against every kind of opposition, a German girl, has three children, and teaches English at a school for backward children. He was a competent pilot, but it was typical of him that he deliberately made himself fail the final tests, because he was at the time wrestling with the soul of a young ox from Manchester who refused to be musical and insisted on preferring football to literature. Ted explained to us that it was more important to rescue a human being from darkness than to add another pilot to the war effort, fascism or no fascism. So he stayed on the ground, was sent back to England, and served in the coal-mines, which experience permanently affected his lungs. Ironically enough the young man for whom he did this was the only one he failed with. When ejected from the coal-mine as unfit, he somehow got himself to Germany in the role of an educator. His German wife is very good for him, being practical and competent and a good nurse. Ted now needs looking after. He complains bitterly that the state of his lungs forces him to 'hibernate.' Even Ted was affected by the prevailing mood. He could not endure the wranglings and bitterness inside the party group, and the split when it came was the last straw. 'I'm obviously not a communist,' he said to Willi, sombrely, with bitterness, 'because all this hair-splitting seems to me nonsense.' 'No, you obviously are not,' replied Willi, 'I was wondering how long it'd take you to see it.' Above all Ted was disquieted because the logic of the previous polemics had led him into the sub-group led by Willi. He thought the leader of the other group, a corporal from an aircamp and an old Marxist, 'a dried-up bureaucrat,' but he preferred him as a human being to Willi. Yet he was committed to Willi... which leads me to something I've not before thought about. I keep writing the word group. Which is a collection of people. Which one associates with a collective relationship-and it is true we met day after day for months, for hours every day. But looking back, looking back to really remember what happened, it is not at all like that. For instance I don't think Ted and Willi ever really talked together-they jibed at each other occasionally. No, there was one time they made contact and that was in a flaming quarrel. It was on the verandah of the hotel at Mashopi, and while I can't remember what the quarrel was about I remember Ted shouting: 'You're the sort of man who'd shoot fifty people before breakfast and then eat six courses. No, you'd order someone else to shoot them, that's what you'd do.' And Willi in reply: 'Yes, if it were necessary I would...' And so on, for an hour or more, and all this while the ox-wagons rolled by in the white dust of the sand-veld, the trains rocked by on the way from the Indian Ocean to the capital, while the farmers drank in their khaki in the bar, and groups of Africans, in search of work, hung about under the jacaranda tree, hour after hour, waiting patiently for the moment when Mr. Boothby, the big boss, would have time to come and interview them. And the others? Paul and Willi together, talking about history-interminably. Jimmy in argument with Paul- usually about history; but in fact what Jimmy was saying, over and over again, was that Paul was frivolous, cold, heartless. But Paul and Ted had no connection with each other, they did not even quarrel. As for me, I played the role of 'the leader's girl friend'-a sort of cement, an ancient role indeed. And of course if any of my relationships with these people had had any depth, I would have been disruptive and not conciliatory. And there was Maryrose, who was the unattainable beauty. And so what was this group? What held it together? I think it was the implacable dislike and fascination for each other of Paul and Willi, who were so much alike, and bound to such different futures. Yes. Willi, with his guttural, so-correct English, and Paul, with his exquisite, cool enunciation-the two voices, hour after hour, at night, in the Gainsborough hotel. That is what I remember most clearly of the group during the period before we went to Mashopi and everything changed. The Gainsborough hotel was really a boarding-house; a place people lived in for long stretches. The boarding-houses of the town were mostly converted private houses, more comfortable certainly, but uncomfortably genteel. I stayed in one for a week and left: the contrast between the raw Colonialism of the city, and the primness of the boarding-house full of English middle-class who might never have left England, was more than I could stand. The Gainsborough hotel was newly-built, a large, rattling, ugly place full of refugees, clerks, secretaries, and married people who couldn't find a house or a flat; the town was jostling full because of the war, and rents were soaring. It was typical of Willi that he had not been in the hotel a week before he had special privileges, and this in spite of being a German, and technically an enemy alien. Other German refugees pretended to be Austrians, or kept out of the way, but Willi's name in the hotel register was Dr Wilhelm Karl Gottlieb Rodde, ex-Berlin, 1939. Just like that. Mrs. James who ran the hotel was in awe of him. He had taken care to let her know his mother was a countess. In fact she was. She believed him to be a medical doctor, and he had not troubled to let her know what the word Doctor meant in Europe. 'It's not my fault she's stupid,' he said, when we criticised him for it. He gave her free advice about the law, patronised her, was rude when he did not get what he wanted and in short had her running around after him, as he said himself, 'like a frightened little dog.' She was the widow of a miner who had died in a fall of rock on the Rand; a woman of fifty, obese, harried, sweating and incompetent. She fed us stews, pumpkin and potatoes. Her African servants cheated her. Until Willi told her how to run the place, which he did without being asked, at the end of the first week he was there, she lost money. After his instructions she made a great deal-she was a rich woman by the time Willi left the hotel: with investments chosen by him in property all over the city. I had the room next to Willi. We ate at the same table. Our friends dropped in day and night. For us, the enormous ugly dining-room which closed finally at eight (dinner from seven to eight) was opened even after midnight. Or we made ourselves tea in the kitchens, and at the most Mrs. James might come down in her dressing-gown, smiling placatorily, to ask us to lower our voices. It was against the rules to have people in our rooms after nine o'clock at night; but we ran study classes in our rooms till four or five in the morning several nights a week. We did as we liked, while Mrs. James got rich, and Willi told her she was a silly goose without any business sense. She would say: 'Yes, Mr. Rodde,' and giggle and sit coyly on his bed to smoke a cigarette. Like a schoolgirl. I remember Paul saying: 'Do you really think it's right for a socialist to get what he wants by making a fool of an old woman?' 'I'm earning her a lot of money.' 'I was talking about sex,' said Paul, and Willi said: 'I don't know what you mean.' He didn't. Men are far more unconscious than women about using their sex in this way; far less honest. So the Gainsborough hotel was for us an extension of Left Club and the Party group; and associated, for us, with hard work. We went to the Mashopi hotel for the first time on an impulse. It was Paul who directed us to it. He was flying somewhere in the area; the aircraft was grounded because of a sudden storm; and he returned with his instructor by car, stopping off in the Mashopi hotel for lunch. He came into the Gainsborough that night in high spirits, to share his good humour with us. 'You'd never believe it-slammed right down in the middle of the bush, all surrounded by kopjes and savages and general exotica, the Mashopi hotel, and a bar with darts and a shove-halfpenny board, and steak and kidney pie served with the thermometer at ninety, and in addition to everything, Mr. and Mrs. Boothby-and they're the spitting bloody image of the Gatsbys-remember? The couple who ran the pub at Aylesbury? The Boothbys might never have set a foot outside England. And I swear he's an ex-sergeant-major. Couldn't be anything else.' 'Then she's an ex-barmaid,' said Jimmy, 'and they've got a comely daughter they want to marry off. Remember Paul, how that poor bloody girl couldn't keep her eyes off you in Aylesbury?' 'Of course you Colonials wouldn't appreciate the exquisite incongruity of it,' said Ted. For the purposes of such jokes, Willi and I were Colonials. 'Ex-sergeant-majors who might never have left England run half the hotels and bars in the country,' I said. 'As you might have discovered if you were ever able to tear yourselves away from the Gainsborough.' For the purposes of jokes like these, Ted, Jimmy and Paul despised the Colony so much they knew nothing about it. But of course, they were extremely well-informed. It was about seven in the evening, and dinner at the Gainsborough was imminent. Fried pumpkin, stewed beef, stewed fruit. 'Let's go down and have a look at the place,' said Ted. 'Now. We can have a pint and be back to catch the bus to camp.' He made the suggestion with his usual enthusiasm; as if the Mashopi hotel was certain to turn out the most beautiful experience life had yet offered us. We looked at Willi. There was a meeting that night, run by the Left Club, then at its zenith. We were all expected to be there. We had never, not once, defected from duty. But Willi agreed, casually, as if there were nothing remarkable in it: 'That's something we could very well do. Mrs. James' pumpkin can be eaten by someone else for this one night.' Willi ran a cheap fifth-hand car. We all five of us got into it and drove down to Mashopi, about sixty miles away. I remember it was a clear but oppressive night-the stars thick and low, with the heavy glitter of approaching thunder. We drove between kopjes that were piles of granite boulders, characteristic of that part of the country. The boulders were charged with heat and electricity, so that blasts of hot air, like soft fists, came on to our faces as we passed the kopjes. We reached the Mashopi hotel about eight-thirty, and found the bar blazing with light and packed with the local farmers. It was a small bright place, shining from polished wood, and the polished black cement floor. As Paul had said, there was a well-used darts board and a shove-halfpenny. And behind the bar stood Mr. Boothby, six feet tall, portly, his stomach protruding, his back straight as a wall, his heavy face with its network of liquor-swollen veins dominated by a pair of cool, shrewd prominent eyes. He remembered Paul from midday and enquired how the repairs to the aircraft were progressing. It had not been damaged; but Paul began on a long story how a wing had been struck by lightning and he had descended to the tree-tops by parachute, his instructor clutched under his arm-so manifestly untrue, that Mr. Boothby looked uneasy from the first word. And yet Paul told it with such earnest, deferential grace that until he concluded, 'Mine is not to reason why; mine is but to fly and die'-wiping away a mock-gallant tear, that Mr. Boothby let out a small reluctant grunt of laughter and suggested a drink. Paul had expected the drink to be on the house-a reward for a hero, so to speak; but Mr. Boothby held out his hand for the money with a long narrowed stare, as if to say: 'Yes, I know it's not a joke, and you'd have made a fool of me if you could. ' Paul paid with good grace and continued the conversation. He came over to us, beaming, a few minutes later to say that Mr. Boothby had been a sergeant in the B. S. A. Police; that he had married his wife on leave in England, and she had worked behind the bar in a pub; that they had a daughter aged eighteen, and they had been running this hotel for eleven years. 'And very admirably too, if I may say so,' we had heard Paul say. 'I very much enjoyed my lunch today.' 'But it's nine o'clock,' said Paul, 'and the dining-room is closing, and mine host didn't offer to feed us. So I've failed. We shall starve. Forgive me my failure.' 'I'll see what I can do,' said Willi. He went over to Mr. Boothby, ordered whisky, and within five minutes had succeeded in getting the dining-room opened, especially for us. I don't know how he did it. To begin with, he was such a bizarre note in this bar full of sun-burned khaki-clad farmers and their dowdy wives that the eyes of everyone had been returning to him, again and again, ever since he came in. He was wearing an elegant cream shantung suit, and his hair shone black under the strident lights, and his face was pale and urbane. He said, in his over-correct English, so unmistakably German, that he and his good friends had travelled all the way from town to taste the Mashopi food they had heard so much about, and he was sure that Mr. Boothby would not disappoint him. He spoke with exactly the same arrogant hidden cruelty that Paul had used in telling the story about the parachute descent, and Mr. Boothby stood silent, staring coldly at Willi, his great red hands unmoving on the bar-counter. Willi then calmly took out his wallet and produced a pound note. I don't suppose anyone had dared to tip Mr. Boothby for years. Mr. Boothby did not at once reply. He slowly and deliberately turned his head and his eyes became more prominent still as he narrowed them on the monetary possibilities of Paul, Ted and Jimmy, all standing with large tankards in their hands. He then remarked: 'I'll see what my wife can do,' and left the bar, leaving Willi's pound note on the counter. Willi was meant to take it back; but he left it there, and came over to us. 'There is no difficulty,' he announced. Paul had already engaged the attention of the daughter of a farmer. She was about sixteen, pretty, pudgy, wearing a flounced flowered muslin dress. Paul was standing in front of her, his tankard poised high in one hand, and he was remarking in his light pleasant voice: 'I've been wanting to tell you ever since I came into this bar, that I haven't seen a dress like yours since I was at Ascot three years ago.' The girl was hypnotised by him. She was blushing. But I think that in a moment she would have understood he was being insolent. But now Willi laid his hand on Paul's arm and said: 'Come on. All that will do later.' We went out onto the verandah. Across the road stood gum-trees, their leaves glistening with moonlight. A train stood hissing out steam and water onto the rails. Ted said in a low passionate voice: 'Paul you're the best argument I've ever known for shooting the entire upper-class to be rid of the lot of you.' I instantly agreed. This was by no means the first time this had happened. About a week before Paul's arrogance had made Ted so angry he had gone off, white and sick-looking, saying he would never speak to Paul again. 'Or Willi-you are two of a kind.' It had taken hours of persuasion on my part and Maryrose's to bring back Ted into the fold. Yet now Paul said, lightly: 'She's never heard of Ascot and when she finds out she'll be flattered,' and all Ted said was, after a long pause: 'No, she won't. She won't.' And then a silence, while we watched the rippling silver leaves, and then: 'What the hell. You'll never understand it as long as you live, either of you and I don't care.' The I don't care was in a tone I had never heard from Ted, almost frivolous. And he laughed. I had never heard him laugh like that. I felt bad, at sea-because Ted and I had always been allies in this battle, and now I was deserted. The main block of the hotel stood directly by the main road, and consisted of the bar and the dining-room with the kitchens behind it. There was a verandah along the front supported by wooden pillars, up which plants grew. We sat on benches in silence, yawning, suddenly exhausted and very hungry. Soon Mrs. Boothby, summoned from her own house by her husband, let us into the dining-room and shut the doors again so that travellers might not come in and demand food. This was one of the Colony's main roads, and always full of cars. Mrs. Boothby was a large, full-bodied woman, very plain, with a highly-coloured face and tightly-crimped colourless hair. She wore tight corsets, and her buttocks shelved out abruptly, and her bosom was high like a shelf in front. She was pleasant, kindly, anxious to oblige, but dignified. She apologised, that as we were so late, she could not serve a full dinner, but she would do her best. Then, with a nod and a good night, she left us to the waiter, who was sulky at being kept in so long after his proper hours. We ate plates of good thick roast beef, roast potatoes, carrots. And afterwards, apple pie and cream and the local cheese. It was English pub food, cooked with care. The big dining-room was silent. All the tables gleamed with readiness for tomorrow's breakfast. The windows and doors were hung with heavy floral linen. Headlights from the passing cars continually lightened the linen, obliterating the pattern, so that the reds and blues of the flowers glowed out very bright when the dazzle of light had swept on and up the road towards the city. We were all sleepy and not very talkative. But I felt better after a while, because Paul and Willi, as usual, were treating the waiter as a servant, ordering him about and making demands, and suddenly Ted came to himself, and began talking to the man as a human being-and with even more warmth than usual, so I could see he was ashamed of his moment on the verandah. While Ted made enquiries about the man's family, his work, his life, offering information about himself, Paul and Willi simply ate, as always on these occasions. They had made their position clear long ago. 'Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?' 'Yes,' Ted had said. Then I can't help you,' Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy was demanding more to drink. He was already drunk; he got drunk more quickly than anyone I've known. Soon Mr. Boothby came in and said that as travellers we were entitled to drink-making it plain why we had been allowed to eat so late in the first place. But instead of the hard drinks he wanted us to order, we asked for wine, and he brought us chilled white Cape wine. It was very good wine; and we did not want to drink the raw Cape brandy Mr. Boothby brought us but we did drink it, and then some more wine. And then Willi announced that we were all coming down next week-end, and could Mr. Boothby arrange rooms for us. Mr. Boothby said it was no trouble at all-offering us a bill that we had difficulty in raising the money to settle. Willi had not asked any of us if we were free to spend the week-end in Mashopi, but it seemed a good idea. We drove back through the now chilly moonlight, the mist lying cold and white along the valleys, and it was very late and we were all rather tight. Jimmy was unconscious. When we got into town it was too late for the three men to get back to camp; so they took my room at the Gainsborough, and I went into Willi's. On such occasions they used to get up very early, about four, and walk to the edge of the little town, and wait for a lift that would take them out to the camp where they all had to start flying about six, when the sun rose. And so the next week-end we all went down to Mashopi. Willi and myself. Maryrose. Ted, Paul and Jimmy. It was late on Friday night, because we had a party discussion on the 'line.' As usual it was how to draw the African masses into militant action. The discussion was acrimonious in any case because of the official split-which did not prevent us from considering ourselves a unit for this particular evening. There were about twenty people, and the end of it was that while we all agreed the existing 'line' was 'correct'-we also agreed we weren't getting anywhere. When we got into the car without suitcases or kitbags, we were all silent. We were silent all the way out of the suburbs. Then the argument about the 'line' began again-between Paul and Willi. They said nothing that hadn't been said at length, in the meeting, but we all listened, hoping, I suppose, for some fresh idea that would lead us out of the tangle we were in. The 'line' was simple and admirable. In a colour-dominated society like this, it was clearly the duty of socialists to combat racialism. Therefore, 'the way forward' must be through a combination of progressive white and black vanguards. Who were destined to be the white vanguard? Obviously, the trade unions. And who the black vanguard? Clearly, the black trade unions. At the moment there were no black trade unions, for they were illegal and the black masses were not developed yet for illegal action. And the white trade unions, jealous of their privileges, were more hostile to the Africans than any other section of the white population. So our picture of what ought to happen, must happen in fact, because it was a first principle that the proletariat was to lead the way to freedom, was not reflected anywhere in reality. Yet the first principle was too sacred to question. Black nationalism was, in our circles (and this was true of the South African communist party), a right-wing deviation, to be fought. The first principle, based as it was on the soundest humanist ideas, filled us full of the most satisfactory moral feelings. I see I am falling into the self-punishing, cynical tone again. Yet how comforting this tone is, like a sort of poultice on a wound. Because it is certainly a wound-I, like thousands of others can't remember our time in or near 'The Party' without a terrible dry anguish. Yet that pain is like the dangerous pain of nostalgia, its first cousin and just as deadly. I'll go on with this when I can write it straight, not in that tone. I remember Maryrose put an end to the argument by remarking: 'But you aren't saying anything that you didn't say earlier.' That stopped it. She often did this, she had a capacity for silencing us all. Yet the men patronised her, they thought nothing of her capacity for political thought. It was because she could not, or would not, use the jargon. But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi's, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself. Now she said: 'There must be something wrong somewhere, because if not, we wouldn't have to spend hours and hours discussing it like this.' She spoke with confidence; but now that the men did not reply-and she felt their tolerance of her, she grew uneasy and appealed: 'I'm not saying it right, but you see what I mean...' Because she had appealed, the men were restored, and Willi said benevolently: 'Of course you say it right. Anyone as beautiful as you can't say it wrong.' She was sitting near me, and she turned her head in the dark of the car to smile at me. We exchanged that smile very often. 'I'm going to sleep,' she said, and put her head on my shoulder and went off to sleep like a little cat. We were all very tired. I don't think people who have never been part of a left movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day out; year in, year out. After all, we all earned our livings, and the men in the camps, at least the men actually being trained, were under continuous nervous stress. Every evening we were organising meetings, discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not we were up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytising. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn't have it by temperament we had it on principle. All kinds of incidents come back-for instance Willi, who after some days of wondering what to do for a woman who was unhappy because her husband was unfaithful to her, decided to offer her the Golden Bough because, 'when one is personally unhappy the correct course is to take a historical view of the matter.' She returned the book, apologetically, saying it was above her head and that in any case she had decided to leave her husband because she had decided he was more trouble than he was worth. But she wrote to Willi regularly when she left our town, polite, touching, grateful letters. I remember the terrible words: 'I'll never forget that you were kind enough to take an interest in me.' (They didn't strike me at the time, though.) We had all been living at this pitch for over two years-I think it's possible we were all slightly mad out of sheer exhaustion. Ted began to sing, to keep himself awake; and Paul, in a completely different voice from the one he had used in the discussion with Willi, started on a whimsical fantasy about what would happen in an imaginary white-settled Colony when the Africans revolted. (This was nearly a decade before Kenya and the Mau Mau.) Paul described how 'two men and a half (Willi protested against the reference to Dostoievsky, whom he considered a reactionary writer) worked for twenty years to bring the local savages to a realisation of their position as a vanguard. Suddenly a halfeducated demagogue who had spent six months at the London School of Economics created a mass movement overnight, on the slogan: 'Out with the Whites.' The two-men-and-a-half, responsible politicians, were shocked by this, but it was too late-the demagogue denounced them as being in the pay of the whites. The whites, in a panic, put the demagogue and the two-men-and-a-half into prison on some trumped-up charge; and, left leaderless, the black masses took to the forests and the kopjes and became guerrilla fighters. 'As the black regiments were slowly defeated by the white regiments, dozens of nice clean-minded highly educated boys like us, brought all the way out from England to maintain law and order, slowly succumbed to black magic, and the witch-doctors. This nasty un-Christian behaviour very properly alienated all right-minded people away from the black cause, and the nice clean boys like us, in a fury of moral condemnation, beat them up, tortured them, and hanged them. Law and order won. The whites let the two-men-and-a-half out of prison, but hanged the demagogue. A minimum of democratic rights were announced for the black populace but the two-men-and-a-half, etc, etc., etc' We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognise it as frustrated idealism-now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It's the first time I've believed he was capable of it.) He went on: 'There is another possibility. Suppose that the black armies win? There's only one thing an intelligent nationalist leader can do, and that is to strengthen nationalist feeling and develop industry. Has it occurred to us, comrades, that it will be our duty, as progressives, to support nationalist states whose business it will be to develop those capitalist unegalitarian ethics we hate so much? Well, has it? Because I see it, yes, I can see it in my crystal ball-but we are going to have to support it all. Oh, yes, yes, because there'll be no alternative.' 'You need a drink,' Willi remarked at this point. The bars were all closed by this time in the road-side hotels, so Paul went to sleep. Maryrose was asleep. Jimmy was asleep. Ted remained awake beside Willi in the front seat, whistling some aria or other. I don't think he had been listening to Paul-when he whistled bits of music or sang it was always a sign of disapproval. Long afterwards, I remember thinking that in all those years of endless analytical discussion only once did we come anywhere near the truth (far enough off as it was) and that was when Paul spoke in a spirit of angry parody. When we reached the hotel it was all dark. A sleepy servant waited on the verandah to take us to our rooms. The bedroom block was built a couple of hundred yards from the dining-room and bar block, on a slope at the back. There were twenty rooms under a single roof, built back to back, verandahs on either side, ten rooms to a verandah. The rooms were cool and pleasant in spite of having no cross ventilation. There were electric fans and large windows. Four rooms had been allotted to us. Jimmy went in with Ted, I with Willi; and Maryrose and Paul had a room each. This arrangement was afterwards confirmed; or rather, since the Boothbys never said anything, Willi and I always shared a room at the Mashopi hotel. We, none of us, woke until long after breakfast. The bar was open and we drank a little mostly in silence, and had lunch, almost in silence, remarking from time to time how odd it was we should feel so tired The lunches at the hotel were always excellent, quantities of cold meats and every imaginable kind of salad and fruit. W all went to sleep again. The sun was already going down when Willi and I woke and had to wake the others. And we were in bed again half an hour after dinner was over. And the next day, Sunday, was almost at bad. That first week-end was, in fact, the most pleasant we spent there. We all were in a tranquillity of extreme fatigue. We hardly drank, and Mr. Boothby was disappointed in us. Willi was particularly silent. I think it was that week-end that he decided to withdraw from politics, or at least as far as he could, and devote himself to study. As for Paul, he was being genuinely simple and pleasant with everyone, particularly Mrs. Boothby, who had taken a fancy to him. We drove back to town very late on the Sunday because we did not want to leave the Mashopi hotel. We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I remember Ted saying: 'Look at us all sitting here with not a word to say. It's a dangerous place, Mashopi. We'll come here, week-end after week-end and hibernate in all this beer and moonlight and good food. Where will it all end, I ask you?' We did not return for a month. We had all understood how tired we were, and I think we were frightened what might happen if we let the tension of tiredness snap. It was a month of very hard work. Paul, Jimmy and Ted were finishing their training and flew every day. The weather was good. There was a great deal of peripheral political activity like lectures, study groups and survey work. But 'the Party' only met once. The other sub-group had lost five members. It is interesting that on the one occasion we all met we fought bitterly until nearly morning; but for the rest of the month we were meeting personally all the time, and with good feeling, to discuss details of the peripheral work we were responsible for. Meanwhile our group continued to meet in the Gainsborough. We made jokes about the Mashopi hotel and its sinister relaxing influence. We used it as a symbol for every sort of luxury, decadence and weak-mindedness. Our friends who had not been there, but who knew it was an ordinary road-side hotel, said we were mad. A month after our first visit there was a long week-end, from Thursday night to the following Wednesday-in the Colony they took their holidays seriously; and we made up a party to go again. It consisted of the original six and Ted's new protege, Stanley Lett from Manchester, for whose sake he later failed himself as a pilot. And Johnny, a jazz pianist, Stanley's friend. We also arranged that George Hounslow should meet us there. We got ourselves there by car and by train and by the time the bar closed on the Thursday night it was clear that this week-end would be very different from the last. The hotel was full of people for the long week-end. Mrs. Boothby had opened an annexe of an extra dozen rooms. There were to be two big dances, one public and one private, and already there was an air of pleasant dislocation of ordinary life. When our party sat down to dinner very late, a waiter was decorating the corners of the dining-room with coloured paper and strings of light bulbs; and we were served with an especial ice pudding made for the following night. And there was an emissary from Mrs. Boothby to ask if the 'airforce boys' would mind helping her decorate the big room tomorrow. The messenger was June Boothby, and it was clear she had come out of curiosity to see the boys in question, probably because her mother had talked of them. But it was equally clear she was not impressed. A good many Colonial girls took one look at the boys from England and dismissed them forever as sissy and wet and soft. June was such a girl. That evening she stayed just long enough to deliver the message and to hear Paul's over-polite delight in accepting 'on behalf of the airforce' her mother's kind invitation. She went out again at once. Paul and Willi made a few jokes about the marriageable daughter, but it was in the spirit of their jest about 'Mr. and Mrs. Boothby. the publican and his wife.' For the rest of that week-end and the succeeding week-ends they ignored her. They apparently considered her so plain that they refrained from mentioning her out of a sense of pity, or perhaps even-though neither of these men showed much sign of this emotion generally-a sense of chivalry. She was a tall, big-bodied girl, with great red clumsy arms and legs. Her face was high-coloured, like her mother's; she had the same colourless hair prinked around her full clumsy-featured face. She had not one feature or attribute with charm. But she did have a sulky bursting prowling sort of energy, because she was in that state so many young girls go through-a state of sexual obsession that can be like a sort of trance. When I was fifteen, still living in Baker Street with my father, I spent some months in that state, so that now I can't walk through that area without remembering, half amused, half embarrassed, an emotional condition which was so strong it had the power to absorb into it pavements, houses, shop windows. What was interesting about June was this: surely nature should have arranged matters so that the men she met must be aware of what afflicted her. Not at all. That first evening Maryrose and I involuntarily exchanged glances and nearly laughed out loud from recognition and amused pity. We did not, because we also understood that the so obvious fact was not obvious to the men and we wanted to protect her from their laughter. All the women in the place were aware of June. I remember sitting one morning on the verandah with Mrs. Lattimer, the pretty red-haired woman who flirted with young Stanley Lett, and June came into sight prowling blindly under the gum-trees by the railway lines. It was like watching a sleepwalker. She would take half a dozen steps, staring across the valley at the piled blue mountains, lift her hands to her hair, so that her body, tightly outlined in bright red cotton, showed every straining line and the sweat patches dark under the armpits-then drop her arms, her fists clenched at her sides. She would stand motionless, then walk on again, pause, seem to dream, kick at the cinders with the toe of high white sandal, and so on, slowly, till she was out of sight beyond the sun-glittering gum-trees. Mrs. Lattimore let out a deep rich sigh, laughed her weak indulgent laugh, and said: 'My God, I wouldn't be a girl again for a million pounds. My God, to go through all that again, not for a million million.' And Maryrose and I agreed. Yet, although to us every appearance of this girl was so powerfully embarrassing, the men did not see it and we took care not to betray her. There is a female chivalry, woman for woman, as strong as any other kind of loyalty. Or perhaps it was we didn't want brought home to us the deficiencies of imagination of our own men. June spent most of her time on the verandah of the Boothby house which was a couple of hundred yards to one side of the hotel. It was built on ten-foot-deep foundations away from the ants. Its verandah was deep and cool, white-painted, and had creepers and flowers everywhere. It was extraordinarily bright and pretty, and here June lay on an old cretonne-covered sofa listening to the portable gramophone, hour after hour, inwardly fashioning the man who would be permitted to deliver her from her sleep-walking state. And a few weeks later the image had become strong enough to create the man. Maryrose and I were sitting on the hotel verandah when a lorry stopped on its way down East, and out got a great lout of a youth with massive red legs and sun-heated arms the size of ox-thighs. June came prowling down the gravelled path from her father's house, kicking at the gravel with her sharp sandals. A pebble scattered to his feet as he walked to the bar. He stopped and gazed at her. Then, looking repeatedly over his shoulder, with a blank, almost hypnotised glance, he entered the bar. June followed. Mr. Boothby was serving Jimmy and Paul with gins-and-tonic and talking about England. He took no notice of his daughter, who sat in a corner and posed herself, looking dreamily out past Maryrose and myself into the hot morning dust and glitter. The youth took his beer and sat along the bench about a yard from her. Half an hour later, when he climbed back into his lorry, June was with him. Maryrose and I suddenly and at the same moment burst into fits of helpless laughter and we only stopped ourselves when Paul and Jimmy looked out of the bar to find out what the joke was. A month later June and the boy were officially engaged, and it was only then that everyone became aware that she was a quiet, pleasant and sensible girl. The look of drugged torpor had gone completely from her. It was only then that we realised how irritated Mrs. Boothby had been because of her daughter's state. There was something over-gay, over-relieved in the way she accepted her help in the hotel, became friends with her again, discussed plans for the wedding. It was almost as if she had felt guilty at how irritated she had been. And perhaps this long irritation was the part cause of her later losing her temper and behaving so unjustly. Shortly after June had left us on that first night, Mrs. Boothby came in. Willi asked her to sit down and join us. Paul hastened to add his invitation. Both spoke in what seemed to the rest of us an exaggeratedly, offensively polite way. Yet the last time she had been with Paul, on the week-end we had all been so tired, he had been simple and without arrogance, talking to her about his father and mother, about 'home.' Though of course his England and hers were two different countries. The joke among us was that Mrs. Boothby had a weakness for Paul. We, none of us, really believed it; if we had we wouldn't have joked-or I hope very much that we wouldn't. For at this early stage we liked her very much. But Mrs. Boothby was certainly fascinated by Paul. Yet she was also fascinated by Willi. And precisely because of the quality we hated in them both-the rudeness, the arrogance that underlay their cool good manners. It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I've seen it over and over again. If there was a woman the rest of us found difficult, whom we humoured, whom we made allowances for, Willi would say: 'You just don't know anything, what she needs is a damned good hiding.' (The 'good hiding' was a Colonial phrase, usually used by the whites thus: 'What that kaffir needs is a damned good hiding'-but Willi had appropriated it for general use.) I remember Maryrose's mother, a dominating neurotic woman who had sapped all the vitality out of the girl, a woman of about fifty, as vigorous and fussy as an old hen. For Maryrose's sake we were polite, we accepted her when she came bustling after her daughter into the Gainsborough. When she was there Maryrose sank into a state of listless irritation, a nervous exhaustion. She knew she ought to fight her mother, but did not have the moral energy. This woman, whom we were prepared to be bored by, to humour, Willi cured in half a dozen words. She had come into the Gainsborough one evening and found us all sitting around the deserted dining-room talking. She said loudly: 'So there you all are as usual. You ought to be in bed.' And she was just about to sit down and join us, when Willi, without raising his voice, but letting those spectacles of his glitter at her, said: 'Mrs. Fowler.' 'Yes, Willi? Is that you again?' 'Mrs. Fowler, why do you come here chasing after Maryrose and making such a nuisance of yourself?' She gasped, coloured, but remained standing by the chair she had been about to sit down in, staring at him. 'Yes,' said Willi, calmly. 'You are an old nuisance. You can sit down if you like, but you must keep quiet and not talk nonsense.' Maryrose turned quite white with fright and with pain on behalf of her mother. But Mrs. Fowler, after a moment's silence, gave a short flustered laugh and sat down and kept perfectly quiet. And after that, if she came into the Gainsborough she always behaved with Willi like a well-brought-up small girl in the presence of a bullying father. And it was not only Mrs. Fowler and the woman who owned the Gainsborough. Now it was Mrs. Boothby, who was not at all the bully who seeks a bully stronger than herself. Nor was she insensitive about intruding herself. And yet, even after she must have understood with her nerves, if not her intelligence-she was not an intelligent woman-that she was being bullied, she would come back again and again for more. She did not succumb into flustered satisfaction at having been 'given a hiding,' like Mrs. Fowler, or get coy and girlish like Mrs. James at the Gainsborough; she would listen patiently, and argue back, engage herself so to speak with the surface of the talk, ignoring the underlying insolence, and in this way she sometimes even shamed Willi and Paul back into courtesy. But in private I am sure she must sometimes have flushed up, clenching her fists, and muttering: 'Yes, I'd like to hit them. Yes, I should have hit him when he said that.' That evening Paul almost at once started on one of his favourite games-parodying the Colonial cliches to the point where the Colonial in question must become aware he or she was being made fun of. And Willi joined in. 'Your cook has, of course, been with you for years-would you like a cigarette?' 'Thank you, my dear, but I don't smoke. Yes, he's a good boy, I must say that for him, he's always been very loyal.' 'He's almost one of the family, I should think?' 'Yes, I think of him like that. And he's very fond of us, I'm sure. We've always treated him fair.' 'Perhaps not so much as a friend as a child?' (This was Willi.) 'Because they are nothing but great big children.' 'Yes, that's true. They're just children when you really understand them. They like to be treated the way you'd treat a child-firm, but right. Mr. Boothby and I believe in treating the blacks fair. It's only right.' 'But on the other hand, you mustn't let them take advantage of you,' said Paul. 'Because if you do, they lose all respect.' 'I'm glad to hear you say that, Paul, because most of you English boys have all kinds of fancy ideas about the kaffirs. But it's true. They have to know there's a line they must never step over.' And so on and so on and so on. It wasn't until Paul said-he was sitting in his favourite pose-tankard poised, his blue eyes fixed winningly on hers: 'And, of course, there's centuries of evolution between them and us, they're nothing but baboons really,' that she blushed and looked away. Baboons was a word already too crude for the Colony, although even five years before it was acceptable, and even in the newspaper leaders. (Just as the word kaffirs would have become, in its turn, too crude in ten years' time.) Mrs. Boothby could not believe that an 'educated young man from one of the best colleges in England' would use the word baboons. But when she again looked at Paul, her honest red face prepared for hurt, there he sat, his cherubic smile just as winningly attentive as it had been a month ago when he had been, undeniably, nothing more than a rather homesick boy glad to be mothered a little. She sighed abruptly, and got up, saying politely: 'And now if you'll excuse me I'll go and get the old man's supper. Mr. Boothby likes a late snack-he never gets time for his dinner, serving in the bar all evening.' She wished us good night, giving Willi, then Paul, a long, rather hurt, earnest inspection. She left us. Paul put back his head and laughed and said: 'They're incredible, they're fantastic, they are simply not true.' 'Aborigines,' said Willi, laughing. Aborigines was his word for the white people of the Colony. Maryrose said quietly: 'I don't see the point of that, Paul. It's just making fools of people.' 'Dear Maryrose. Dear beautiful Maryrose,' said Paul, chuckling into his beer. Maryrose was beautiful. She was a tiny slender girl, with waves of honey-coloured hair and great brown eyes. She had appeared on magazine covers in the Cape, had been a dress model for a while. She was entirely without vanity. She smiled patiently and insisted in her slow good-humoured way: 'Yes, Paul. After all, I've been brought up here. I understand Mrs. Boothby. I was like that too until people like you explained I was wrong. You won't change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.' Paul again gave his deep chuckle, and insisted: 'Maryrose, Maryrose, you're too good to be true too.' But later that evening she did succeed in making him ashamed. George Hounslow, a roads man, lived a hundred miles or so down the line in a small town with his wife, three children, and the four old parents. He was arriving at midnight in his lorry. He proposed to spend the evenings of the week-end with us, attending to his work along the main road in the daytime. We left the dining-room and went off to sit under the bunch of gum-trees near the railway line to wait for George. Under the trees was a rough wooden table and some wooden benches. Mr. Boothby sent down a dozen bottles of chilled Cape white wine. We were all mildly tight by then. The hotel was in darkness. Soon the lights in the Boothbys' house went out. There was a small light from the station building and a small gleam of lights from the bedroom block up the rise several hundreds of yards off. Sitting under the gum-trees with the cold moonlight sifting over us through the branches, and the night wind lifting and laying the dust at our feet, we might have been in the middle of the veld. The hotel had been absorbed into the wild landscape of granite-bouldered kopjes, trees, moonlight. Miles away the main road crossed a rise, a thin gleam of pale light between banks of black trees. The dry oily scent of the gum-trees, the dry irritating smell of dust, the cold smell of wine, added to our intoxication. Jimmy fell asleep, slumped against Paul, who had his arm around him. I was half-asleep, against Willi's shoulder. Stanley Lett and Johnnie, the pianist, sat side by side watching the rest of us with an amiable curiosity. They made no secret of the fact, now or at any other time, that we, not they, were on sufferance, and this on the clearly expressed grounds that they were working-class, would remain working-class, but they had no objection to observing at first-hand, because of the happy accidents of war, the behaviour of a group of intellectuals. It was Stanley who used the word, and he refused to drop it. Johnnie, the pianist, never talked. He did not use words, ever. He always sat near Stanley, allying himself in silence with him. Ted had already begun to suffer because of Stanley, the 'butterfly under a stone,' who refused to see himself as in need of rescue. To console himself he sat by Maryrose and put his arm around her. Maryrose smiled good-humouredly, and remained in the circle of his arm, but as if she detached herself from him and every other man. Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this were a fee they have to pay to Providence for being born beautiful. There is a tolerant smile which goes with a submission to the hands of men, like a yawn or a patient sigh. But there was more to it, in Maryrose's case. 'Maryrose,' said Ted, bluffly, looking down at the gleaming little head at rest on his shoulder, 'why don't you love any of us, why don't you let any of us love you?' Maryrose merely smiled, and even in this broken light, branch-and-leaf-stippled, her brown eyes showed enormous and shone softly. 'Maryrose has a broken heart,' observed Willi above my head. 'Broken hearts belong to old-fashioned novels,' said Paul. 'They don't go with the time we live in.' 'On the contrary,' said Ted. 'There are more broken hearts than there have ever been, just because of the times we live in. In fact I'm sure any heart we are ever likely to meet is so cracked and jarred and split it's just a mass of scar tissue. Maryrose smiled up at Ted, shyly, but gratefully, and said seriously: 'Yes, of course that's true.' Maryrose had had a brother whom she deeply loved They were close by temperament, but more important, they had the tenderest of bonds because of their impossible, bullying, embarrassing mother against whom they supported each other. This brother had been killed in North Africa the previous year. It happened that Maryrose was in the Cape at the time doing modelling. She was, of course, much in demand because of how she looked. One of the young men looked like her brother. We had seen a photograph of him-a slight, fair-moustached, aggressive young man. She fell instantly in love with him. She said to us-and I remember the sense of shock we felt, as we always did with her, because of her absolute but casual honesty: 'Yes, I know I fell in love with him because he looked like my brother, but what's wrong with that?' She was always asking, or stating: 'What's wrong with that?' and we could never think of an answer. But the young man was like her brother only in looks, and while he was happy to have an affair with Maryrose he did not want to marry her. 'It may be true,' said Willi, 'but it's very silly. Do you know what's going to happen to you, Maryrose, unless you watch out? You're going to make a cult of this boy-friend of yours, and the longer you do that the unhappier you'll be. You'll keep off all the nice boys you could marry, and eventually you'll marry someone for the sake of marrying, and you'll be one of these dissatisfied matrons we see all around us.' In parenthesis I must say that this is exactly what happened to Maryrose. For another few years she continued to be delectably pretty, allowed herself to be courted while she maintained her sweet smile that was like a yawn, sat patiently inside the circle of this man's arm or that; and finally and very suddenly married a middle-aged man who already had three children. She did not love him. Her heart had gone dead when her brother was crushed into pulp by a tank. 'So what do you think I should do?' she enquired, with her terrible amiability, across a patch of moonlight, to Willi. 'You should go to bed with one of us. As soon as possible. There's no better cure for an infatuation than that,' said Willi, in the brutally good-humoured voice he used when speaking out of his role as sophisticated Berliner. Ted grimaced, and removed his arm, making it clear that he was not prepared to ally himself with such cynicism, and that if he went to bed with Maryrose it would be out of the purest romanticism. Well, of course it would have been. 'Anyway,' observed Maryrose, 'I don't see the point. I keep thinking about my brother.' 'I've never known anyone be so completely frank about incest,' said Paul. He meant it as a kind of joke, but Maryrose replied, quite seriously, 'Yes, I know it was incest. But the funny thing is, I never thought of it as incest at the time. You see, my brother and I loved each other.' We were shocked again. I felt Willi's shoulder stiffen, and I remember thinking that only a few moments before he had been the decadent European; but the idea that Maryrose had slept with her brother plunged him back into his real nature, which was puritanical. There was a silence, then Maryrose observed: 'Yes, I can see why you are shocked. But I think about it often these days. We didn't do any harm, did we? And so I don't see what was wrong with it.' Silence again. Then Paul plunged in, gaily: 'If it doesn't make any difference to you, why don't you go to bed with me, Maryrose? How do you know, you might be cured?' Paul still sat upright, supporting the lolling child-like weight of Jimmy against him. He supported Jimmy tolerantly, just as Maryrose had allowed Ted to put his arm around her. Paul and Maryrose played the same roles in the group, from the opposite sides of the sex barrier. Maryrose said calmly: 'If my boy-friend in the Cape couldn't really make me forget my brother, why should you?' Paul said: 'What is the nature of the obstacle that prevents you from marrying this swain of yours?' Maryrose said: 'He comes from a good Cape family, and his parents won't let me marry him, because I'm not good enough.' Paul allowed himself his deep attractive chuckle. I'm not saying he cultivated this chuckle, but he certainly knew it was one of his attractions. 'A good family,' he said derisively. 'A good family from the Cape. It's rich, it really is.' This was not as snobbish as it sounds. Paul's snobbishness was expressed indirectly, in jokes, or in a play on words. Actually he was indulging his ruling passion, the enjoyment of incongruity. And I'm not in a position to criticise, for I daresay the real reason I stayed in the Colony long after there was any need was because such places allow opportunity for this type of enjoyment. Paul was inviting us all to be amused, as he had when he had discovered Mr. and Mrs. Boothby, John and Mary Bull in person, running the Mashopi Hotel. But Maryrose said quietly: 'I suppose it must seem funny to you, since you are used to good families in England, and of course I can see that's different from a good family in the Cape. But it comes to the same thing for me, doesn't it?' Paul maintained a whimsical expression which concealed the beginnings of discomfort. He even, as if to prove her attack on him was unjust, instinctively moved so that Jimmy's head fell more comfortably on his shoulder, in an effort to show a capacity for tenderness. 'If I slept with you, Paul,' stated Maryrose, 'I daresay I'd get fond of you. But you're the same as he is-my boy-friend from the Cape. You'd never marry me, I wouldn't be good enough. You have no heart.' Willi laughed gruffly. Ted said: 'That fixes you, Paul.' Paul did not speak. In moving Jimmy a moment before the young man's body had slipped so that Paul now had to sit supporting his head and shoulders across his knees. Paul cradled Jimmy like a baby; and for the rest of the evening he watched Maryrose with a quiet and rueful smile. And after that he always spoke to her gently, trying to woo her out of her contempt for him. But he did not succeed. At about midnight, the glare of a lorry's headlights swallowed the moonlight, and swung off the main road to come to rest in a patch of empty sand by the railway lines. It was a big lorry, loaded with gear; and a small caravan was hitched on behind it. This caravan was George Hounslow's home when he was superintending work along the roads. George jumped down from the driver's seat and came over to us, greeted by a full glass of wine held out to him by Ted. He drank it down, standing, saying in between gulps: 'Drunken sots, oafs, sodden sods, sitting here swilling.' I remember the smell of the wine, cool and sharp, as Ted tilted another bottle to refill the glass; the wine splashed over and hissed on the dust. The dust smelled heavy and sweet, as if it had rained. George came to kiss me. 'Beautiful Anna, beautiful Anna- but I can't have you because of this bloody man Willi.' Then he ousted Ted, kissing Maryrose on her averted cheek, and said: 'All the beautiful women there are in the world, and we only have two of them here, it makes me want to cry.' The men laughed, and Maryrose smiled at me. I smiled back. Her smile was full of a sudden pain, and so I realised that mine was also. Then she looked uncomfortable, at having betrayed herself, and we quickly looked away from each other, from the exposed moment. I don't think either of us would have cared to analyse the pain we felt. And now George sat forward, holding a glass brimming with wine, and said: 'Sods and comrades, stop lolling about, the moment has come to tell me the news.' We stirred, became animated, forgot our sleepiness. We listened while Willi gave George information about the political situation in town. George was an extremely serious man. And he had a deep reverence for Willi-for Willi's brain. He was convinced of his own stupidity. He was convinced, and very likely had been all his life, of his general inadequacy and also of his ugliness. In fact he was rather good-looking, or at least women always responded to him, even when they were not aware of it. Mrs. Lattimore, for instance, the pretty red-head, who often exclaimed how repulsive she thought him, but could never take her eyes off him. He was quite tall, but looked shorter, because of his broad shoulders, which he carried stooped forward. His body narrowed fast from the broad shoulders to his flanks. He had a bull-like set to him, all his movements were stubborn, and abrupt with the subdued controlled irritation of power kept in leash and unwillingly so. It was because of his family life which was difficult. At home he was, and had had to be for many years, patient, self-sacrificing, disciplined. By nature I would say he was none of these things. Perhaps this was the reason for his need to run himself down, for his lack of belief in himself. He was a man who could have been much bigger than his life had given him room to be. He knew this, I think; and because he secretly felt guilty at being frustrated by his family circumstances, his self-denigration was a way of punishing himself. I don't know... or perhaps he punished himself in this way for his continual unfaithfulness to his wife? One has to be much older than I was then to understand George's relationship with his wife. He had a fierce loyal compassion for her, the compassion of one victim for another. He was one of the most lovable people I have ever known. He was certainly the funniest. He was spontaneously irresistibly funny. I've seen him keep a room full of people laughing helplessly from the time the bar closed until the sun rose. We lay about on the beds and on the floor laughing so that we couldn't move. Yet next day, remembering the jokes, they weren't particularly funny. Yet we were sick laughing-it was partly because of his face, which was handsome, but copy-book handsome, almost dull in its regularity, so that one expected him to talk to rule; but I think mostly because he had a very long narrow upper lip, which gave a look of wooden and almost stupid obstinacy to his face. Then out came the sad, self-punishing, irresistible stream of talk, and he watched us rolling with laughter, yet never laughed with his victims, but watched with positive astonishment, as if he were thinking: Well I can't be as hopeless as I think I am if I can make all these clever people laugh like this. He was about forty. That is, twelve years older than the oldest of us, Willi. We would never have thought of it, but he couldn't forget it. He was a man who would always watch each year slide past as if jewels were slipping one by one through his fingers into the sea. This was because of his feeling for women. His other passion was politics. Not the least of his burdens was that he had been brought up by parents who came from slap in the middle of the old socialist tradition in Britain-a nineteenth-century socialism-rationalist, practical, above all, religiously anti-religious. And such an upbringing was not calculated to make him fit in with the people of the Colony. He was an isolated and lonely man, living in a tiny, backward, isolated town. We, this group of people so much younger than he, were the first real friends he had in years. We all loved him. But I don't believe for a moment he knew it, or would allow himself to know it. His humility was too strong. In particular, his humility in relation to Willi. I remember once, exasperated because of the way he would sit, expressing reverence for Willi with every part of him, while Willi laid down the law about something or other, I said: 'For God's sake George, you're such a nice man, and I can't stand seeing you lick the boots of a man like Willi.' 'But if I had Willi's brain,' he replied and it was typical of him he didn't enquire how I could make such remarks about a man with whom, after all, I was living-'if I had his brain I'd be the happiest man in the world.' And then his upper lip narrowed in self-mockery: 'What do you mean nice! I'm a sod, you know I am. I tell you the things I do and then you say I'm nice.' He was referring to what he told Willi and me, but no one else, about his relations with women. I've thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course they mean nothing, when you start to think about them. A good man, one says; a good woman; a nice man, a nice woman. Only in talk of course, these are not words you'd use in a novel. I'd be careful not to use them. Yet of that group, I will say simply, without further analysis, that George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And furthermore, I'd bet that ten people picked at random off the street to meet them, or invited to sit in that party under the eucalyptus trees that night, would instantly agree with this classification-would, if I used the word good, simply like that, know what I meant. And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality.' Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I've even been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and re-create them in my memory, suddenly I know it's nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later, she'd make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she'd be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she 'broke down,' or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this talk, this anti-humanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at that point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create in memory some human being I've known. I sit down, and remember the smell of the dust and the moonlight, and see Ted handing a glass of wine to George, and George's over-grateful response to the gesture. Or I see, as in a slow-motion film, Maryrose turn her head, with her terrifyingly patient smile... I've written the word film. Yes. The moments I remember all have the absolute assurance of a smile, a look, a gesture, in a painting or a film. Am I saying then that the certainty I'm clinging to belongs to the visual arts, and not to the novel, not to the novel at all, which has been claimed by the disintegration and the collapse? What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing I so well the complexities behind them? Yet if I did not, I'd never be able to set a word down on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on my skin. And so I'll write again that George was a good man. And that I could not stand seeing him turn into an awkward schoolboy when he listened to Willi... that evening he I received the facts about the troubles in the left groups in town with humility, and a nod which said that he would think about them privately, and at length-because of course he was too stupid to make up his mind about anything without hours and hours of thought, even though the rest of us were so clever we didn't need it. We, all of us, considered that Willi had been cavalier in his analysis; he had spoken as if he had been in committee, had conveyed nothing of our new disquiet, the new tone of disbelief and mockery. And Paul, repudiating Willi, now chose to tell George, in his own way, of the truth. He began a dialogue with Ted. I remember watching Ted and wondering if he would respond to the light, whimsical challenge. Ted hesitated, looked uncomfortable, but joined in. And because it was not his character, it was against his deep beliefs, there was an exaggerated wild quality to his talk that jarred us more than listening to Paul. Paul had begun by describing a committee meeting with two-men-and-a-half deciding the whole fate of the African continent 'without, of course, any reference to the Africans themselves.' (This was, of course, treachery-to admit, in front of outsiders like Stanley Lett and Johnnie the pianist that we could have any doubts about our beliefs. George looked dubiously at the pair, decided that they must have joined us, because otherwise we'd never be so irresponsible, and gave a smile of pleasure because we had two new recruits.) And now Paul described how the two-men-and-a-half, finding themselves in Mashopi, would go about 'guiding Mashopi towards a correct line of action.' 'I would say that the hotel would be a convenient place to start, wouldn't you, Ted?' 'Near the bar, Paul, all modern conveniences.' (Ted was not much of a drinker, and George frowned at him, bewildered, as he spoke.) 'The trouble is, that it's not exactly a centre of the developing industrial proletariat. Of course, one could, and in fact we probably should, say the same of the whole country?' 'Very true, Paul. But on the other hand the district is plentifully equipped with backward and half-starving farm labourers.' 'Who only need a guiding hand from the said proletariat if only they existed.' 'Ah, but I have it. There are five poor bloody blacks working on the railway line here, all in rags and misery. Surely they'd do?' 'So all we have to do is to persuade them towards a correct understanding of their class position, and we'll have the whole district in a revolutionary uproar before we can say Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder.' George looked at Willi, waiting for him to protest. But that morning Willi had said to me that he intended to devote all his time to study, he had no further time for 'all these playboys and girls looking for husbands.' It was so easily that he dismissed the people he had taken seriously enough to work with for years. George was now deeply uneasy; he had sensed the pith of our belief was no longer in us, and this meant that his loneliness was confirmed. Now he spoke across Paul and Ted to Johnnie the pianist. 'They're talking a lot of cock, aren't they mate?' Johnnie nodded agreement-not to the words, I think he seldom listened to words, he only sensed if people were friendly to him or not. 'What's your name? I haven't run across you before, have I?' 'Johnnie.' 'You're from the Midlands?' 'Manchester.' 'You two are members?' Johnnie shook his head; George's jaw slowly dropped, then he passed his hand quickly across his eyes and sat slumped, in silence. Meanwhile Johnnie and Stanley remained side by side, observing. They were drinking beer. Now George, in a sudden desperate attempt to break down the barriers, leaped up and poised a wine bottle. 'Not much left, but have some,' he said to Stanley. 'Don't care for it,' said Stanley. 'Beer's for us.' And he patted his pockets and the front of his tunic, where beer bottles stuck out at all angles. Stanley's great genius was to unfailingly 'organise' supplies of beer for Johnnie and himself. Even when the Colony ran dry, which it did from time to time, Stanley would appear with crates of the stuff, which he had stored away in caches all over the city, and which he sold at a profit while the drought lasted. 'You're right,' said George. 'But we poor bloody Colonials have had our stomachs adjusted to Cape hogwash since we were weaned.' George loved wine. But even this gauge of amity had no softening effect on the couple. 'Don't you think these two ought to have their bottoms smacked?' George enquired, indicating Ted and Paul. (Paul smiled; Ted looked ashamed.) 'Don't care for all that stuff myself,' said Stanley. At first George thought he was still referring to the wine; but when he realised it was politics that were meant, he glanced sharply at Willi, for guidance. But Willi had sunk his head into his shoulders and was humming to himself. I knew he was suffering from homesickness. Willi had no ear, could not sing, but when he was remembering Berlin, he would tunelessly hum, over and over again, one of the tunes from Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Oh the shark has Wicked teeth dear And he keeps them Shining white... Years later it was a popular song, but I first heard it in Mashopi, from Willi; and I remember the sharp feeling of dislocation it gave me to hear the pop-song in London, after Willi's sad nostalgic humming of what he told us was 'A song we used to sing when I was a child-a man called Brecht, I wonder what happened to him, he was very good once.' 'What's going on, mates?' George demanded, after a long silence full of discomfort. 'I would say that a certain amount of demoralisation is setting in,' said Paul deliberately. 'Oh no,' said Ted, but checked himself and sat frowning. Then he jumped up and said: 'I'm going to bed.' 'We're all going to bed,' said Paul. 'So wait a minute.' 'I want my bed. I'm proper sleepy,' said Johnnie, a longer statement than we had yet heard from him. He got up unsteadily, and poised himself with a hand on Stanley's shoulder. It appeared that he had been thinking things over and now saw the necessity for some kind of a statement. 'It's like this,' he said to George. 'I came down to th'otel because I'm a mate of Stanley's. He said they've got a piano and a bit of a dance Saturday nights. But I don't go for the politics. You're George Hounslow. I've heard them talk of you. Pleased to meet you.' He held out his hand, and George shook it warmly. Stanley and Johnnie wandered off into the moonlight towards the bedroom block, and Ted got up and said: 'And me too, and I'll never come back here again.' 'Oh, don't be so dramatic,' said Paul coldly. The sudden coldness surprised Ted, who gazed around at us all, vaguely, hurt and embarrassed. But he sat down again. 'What the hell are those two chaps doing with us?' demanded George roughly. It was the roughness of unhappiness. 'Nice chaps I'm sure, but what are we doing talking about our problems in front of them?' Willi still did not respond. The thin mournful humming went on, a couple of inches above my ear: 'Oh the shark has, wicked teeth dear...' Paul said, deliberate and nonchalant to Ted: 'I think we've incorrectly assessed the class situation of Mashopi. We've overlooked the obvious key man. Here he is under our noses all the time-Mrs. Boothby's cook.' 'What the hell do you mean, the cook?' demanded George- much too roughly. He was standing up, aggressive and hurt, and he kept swilling his wine around his glass, so that it sloshed off into the dust. We all thought his belligerence was due, simply, to surprise at our mood. We hadn't seen him for some weeks. I think we were all measuring the depth of the change in us, because it was the first time we had seen ourselves reflected, so to speak, in our own eyes of so short a time ago. And because we felt guilty we resented George- resented him enough to want to hurt him. I remember very clearly, sitting there, looking at George's honest angry face, and saying to myself, Good Lord! I think he's ugly-I think he's ridiculous, I can't remember feeling that before. And then understanding why I felt like this. But, of course, it was only afterwards that we really came to understand the real cause of George's reaction to Paul's mentioning the cook. 'Obviously the cook,' said Paul deliberately, spurred on by his new desire to provoke and hurt George. 'He can read. He can write. He has ideas-Mrs. Boothby complains of it. Ergo, he is an intellectual. Of course he'll have to be shot later when ideas become a hindrance, but he'll have served his purpose. After all, we'll be shot with him.' I remember George's long puzzled look at Willi. Then how he examined Ted, who had his head back, his chin pointed up towards the boughs, as he inspected the stars glinting through the leaves. Then his worried stare at Jimmy who was still a sodden corpse in Paul's arms. Ted said briskly: 'I've had enough. We'll escort you to your caravan, George, and leave you.' It was a gesture of reconciliation and friendship, but George said sharply: 'No.' Because he reacted like that Paul immediately got up, dislodging Jimmy who collapsed on the bench, and said with cool insistence. 'Of course we'll take you to your bed.' 'No,' said George again. He sounded frightened. Then, hearing his own voice, he altered it. 'You silly buggers. You drunken sots, you'll trip all over the railway lines.' 'I said,' remarked Paul casually, 'that we'll come and tuck you in.' He swayed as he stood, but steadied himself. Paul, like Willi, could drink heavily and hardly show it. But he was drunk by now. 'No,' said George. 'I said no. Didn't you hear me?' And now Jimmy came to himself, staggering up off the bench, and hooking on to Paul for steadiness. The two young men swayed a moment, then went off in a rush towards the railway lines and George's caravan. 'Come back,' shouted George. 'Silly idiots. Drunken fools. Clods.' They were now yards away, balancing their bodies on fumbling legs. The shadows from the long sprawling legs cut sharp and black across the glittering sand almost to where George stood. They looked like small jerky marionettes, descending long black ladders. George stared, frowned, then swore deeply and violently and ran after them. Meanwhile the rest of us made tolerant grimaces at each other-What's wrong with George? George reached the two, grabbed their shoulders, spun them around to face him. Jimmy fell. There was a stretch of rough gravel by the lines and he slipped on the loose stones. Paul remained upright, stiff with the effort of keeping his balance. George was down in the dirt with Jimmy, trying to get him up again, trying to lift the heavy body in its thick felt-like case of uniform. 'You silly sod,' he was saying, roughly tender to the drunken boy. 'I told you to come back, didn't I? Well didn't I?' And he almost shook him with exasperation, though he checked himself, even while he was trying, and with the tenderest compassion, to raise him. By this time the rest of us had run down and stood by the others on the track. Jimmy was lying on his back, eyes closed. He had cut his forehead on the gravel, and the blood poured black across his white face. He looked asleep. His lank hair had for once achieved grace, and lay across his forehead in a full springing wave. The individual hairs gleamed. 'Oh hell,' said George, full of despair. 'Then why make such a fuss?' said Ted. 'We were only going to take you to your lorry.' Willi cleared his throat. It was always a rasping, rather clumsy sound. He did this frequently. It was never from nervousness, but sometimes as a tactful warning, and sometimes the statement: I know something you don't. I recognised that this time it meant the second, and he was saying that the reason why George didn't want anyone near his caravan was because there was a woman in it. Willi would never betray a confidence, even indirectly, when sober, so that meant he was drunk. To cover the indiscretion I whispered to Maryrose: 'We keep forgetting that George is older than us, we must seem like a pack of kids to him.' I spoke loudly enough for the others to hear. And George heard and gave me a wry grateful smile over his shoulder. But we still couldn't move Jimmy. There we all stood, looking down at him. It was now long after midnight, and the heat had gone from the soil, and the moon was low over the mountains behind us. I remember wondering how it was that Jimmy, who when in his senses could never seem anything but graceless and pathetic, had just this once, when he was lying drunk in a patch of dirty gravel, managed to appear both dignified and moving, with the black wound on his forehead. And I was simultaneously wondering who the woman could be-which of the tough farmers' wives, or marriageable daughters, or hotel guests we had drunk with in the bar that evening had crept down to George's caravan, trying to make herself invisible in the water-clear moonlight. I remember envying her. I remember loving George for just that moment with a sharp painful love, while I called myself all kinds of a fool. For I had turned him down often enough. At that time in my life, for reasons I didn't understand until later, I didn't let myself be chosen by men who really wanted me. At last we managed to get Jimmy on his feet. It took all of us, tugging and pulling. And we supported and pushed him up between the gum-trees and the long path between the flowerbeds to the hotel room. There he instantly rolled over, asleep, and stayed asleep while we sponged his cut. It was deep and full of gravel, and took a long time to stop the blood. Paul said he would stay up and watch beside Jimmy, 'though I hate myself in the role of a bloody Florence Nightingale.' No sooner had he sat down, however, than he fell asleep, and in the end it was Maryrose who sat up and watched beside both of them until morning. Ted departed to his room with a brief, almost angry good night. (Yet in the morning he would have swung over into a mood of self-mockery and cynicism. He was to spend months altering sharply between a guilty gravity and an increasingly bitter cynicism-later he was to say that this was the time in his life he was most ashamed of.) Willi, George and myself stood on the steps in the now dimming moonlight. 'Thanks,' said George. He looked hard and close into my face and then Willi's, hesitated, and did not say what he had been going to. Instead he added the gruffly obligatory jest: 'Do the same for you some time.' And he strode off down towards the lorry near the railway lines, while Willi murmured: 'He looks just like a man with an assignation.' He was back in his sophisticated role, drawling it, with a knowing smile. But I was envying the unknown woman too much to respond, and we went to sleep in silence. And we would have slept, very likely, until midday, if we had not been woken by the three airforce men, bringing in our trays. Jimmy had a bandage around his head, and looked ill. Ted was wildly and improbably gay, and Paul was radiating charm as he announced: 'We've already started undermining the cook, because he allowed us to cook your breakfast, darling Anna, and as an additional but necessary chore, Willi's.' He slid the tray before me with an air. 'The cook's at work on all the good things for tonight. Do you like what we've brought you?' They had brought food enough for us all, and we feasted on paw-paw and avocado pear, and bacon and eggs and hot fresh bread and coffee. The windows were open and the sunlight was hot outside, and wind coming into the room was warm and smelling of flowers. Paul and Ted sat on my bed and we flirted; and Jimmy sat on Willi's and was humble about being drunk the night before. But it was already late, and the bar was open, and we soon got dressed and walked down together through the flowerbeds that filled all the sunlight with the dry spicy-smelling tang of wilting and overheated petals, to the bar. The verandahs of the hotel were full of people drinking, the bar was full, and the party, as Paul announced, waving his tankard, had begun. But Willi had withdrawn himself. For one thing, he did not approve of such bohemianism as collective bedroom breakfasts. 'If we were married,' he had complained, 'it might be all right.' I laughed at him, and he said: 'Yes. Laugh. But there's sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.' He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. 'What position?'-I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. 'Yes, Anna, but things are different for men and for women. They always have been and they very likely always will be.' 'Always have been?'-inviting him to remember his history. 'For as long as it matters.' 'Matters to you-not to me.' But we had had this quarrel before; we knew all the phrases either was likely to use-the weakness of women, the property sense of men, women in antiquity, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. We knew it was a clash of temperament so profound that no words could make any difference to either of us-the truth was that we shocked each other in our deepest feelings and instincts all the time. So the future professional revolutionary gave me a stiff nod and settled himself on the hotel verandah with his Russian grammars. But he would not be left alone to study for long, for George was already striding up through the gum-trees, looking very serious. Paul greeted me with: 'Anna, come and see the lovely things in the kitchen.' He put his arm around me, and I knew Willi had seen, as I had intended him to, and we walked through the stone-floored passages to the kitchen, which was a large low room at the back of the hotel. The tables were loaded with food, and draped with netting against the flies. Mrs. Boothby was there with the cook, and clearly wondering how she had put herself into the position that we were such favoured guests we could wander in and out of the kitchen at will. Paul at once greeted the cook and enquired after his family. Mrs. Boothby didn't like this of course; this was the reason for Paul's doing it at all. Both the cook and his white employer responded to Paul in the same way-watchful, puzzled, slightly distrustful. For the cook was confused. Not the least of the results of having hundreds and thousands of airforce men in the Colony for five years was that a number of Africans had it brought home to them that it was possible -well, among other things, that a white man could treat a black man as a human being. Mrs. Boothby's cook knew the familiarity of the feudal relationship; he knew the crude brutality of the newer impersonal relationship. But he was now discussing his children with Paul on equal terms. There was a slight hesitation before each of his remarks, the hesitation of disuse, but the man's natural dignity, usually ignored, carried him quickly into the manner of someone in conversation with an equal. Mrs. Boothby listened for a few minutes, then cut it short by saying: 'If you really want to be of help, Paul, you and Anna can go into the big room and do some decorating.' She spoke in a tone which was meant to tell Paul that she had understood he had been making fun of her the night before. 'Certainly,' Paul said. 'With pleasure.' But he made a point of continuing his talk with the cook for a while. This man was unusually good-looking-a strong, well-set middle-aged man with a lively face and eyes; a great many of the Africans in this part of the Colony were poor specimens physically from ill-feeding and disease; but this one lived at the back of the Boothbys' house in a small cottage with his wife and five children. This was of course against the law, which laid down that black people should not live on white men's soil. The cottage was poor enough, but twenty times better than the usual African hut. There were flowers and vegetables around it, and chickens and guinea-fowl. I should imagine that he was very well content with his service at the Mashopi hotel. When Paul and I left the kitchen he greeted us as was customary: ' 'Morning, Nkos. 'Morning, Nkosikaas'-that is, Good morning Chief and Chieftainess. 'Christ,' said Paul, with irritation and anger, when we were outside the kitchen. And then, in the whimsical cool tone of his self-preservation: 'But it's strange I should mind at all. After all, it has pleased God to call me into the station of life which will so clearly suit my tastes and talents, so why should I care? But all the same...' We walked up to the big room through the hot sunlight, the dust warm and fragrant under our shoes. His arm was around me again and now I was pleased to have it there for other reasons than that Willi was watching. I remember feeling the intimate pressure of his arm in the small of my back, and thinking that, living in a group as we did, these quick flares of attraction could flare and die in a moment, leaving behind them tenderness, unfulfilled curiosity, a slightly wry and not unpleasant pain of loss; and I thought that perhaps it was above all the tender pain of unfulfilled possibilities that bound us. Under a big jacaranda tree that grew beside the big room, out of sight of Willi, Paul turned me around towards him and smiled down at me, and the sweet pain shot through me again and again. 'Anna,' he said, or chanted. 'Anna, beautiful Anna, absurd Anna, mad Anna, our consolation in this wilderness, Anna of the tolerantly amused black eyes.' We smiled at each other, with the sun stabbing down at us through the thick green lace of the tree in sharp gold needles. What he said then was a kind of revelation. Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young. But it was Paul who, alone among us, had 'amused eyes' and as we went into the big room hand in hand, I was looking at him and wondering if it were possible that such a self-possessed youth could conceivably be as unhappy and tormented as I was; and if it were true that I had, like him, 'amused eyes'-what on earth could that mean? I fell all of a sudden into an acute irritable depression, as in those days I did very often, and from one second to the next, and I left Paul and went by myself into the bay of a window. I think that was the most pleasant room I have been in in all my life. The Boothbys had built it because there was no public hall at this station, and they were always having to clear their dining-room for dances or political meetings. But they had built it from good-nature, as a gift to the district, and not for profit. It was as large as a big hall, but it looked like a living-room, with walls of polished red brick and a floor of dark red cement. The pillars-there were eight great pillars supporting the deep thatched roof-were of unpolished reddish-orange brick. The fireplaces at either end were both large enough to roast an ox. The wood of the rafters was thorn, and had a slightly bitter tang, whose flavour changed according to whether the air was dry or damp. At one end was a grand piano on a small platform, and at the other a radiogram with a stack of records. Each side had a dozen windows, one set showing the piled granite boulders behind the station, and the other miles across country to the blue mountains. Johnnie was playing the piano at the far end, with Stanley Lett and Ted beside him. He was oblivious of both. His shoulders and feet tapped and shrugged to the jazz, his rather puffy white face blank as he stared away to the mountains. Stanley did not mind that Johnnie was indifferent to him: Johnnie was his meal-ticket, his invitation to parties where Johnnie played, his passport to a good time. He made no secret of why he was with Johnnie-he was the frankest of petty crooks. In return he saw that Johnnie had plenty of 'organised' cigarettes, beer and girls, all for nothing. I said he was a crook, but this is nonsense of course. He was a man who had understood from the beginning that there is one law for the rich and one for the poor. This was purely theoretical knowledge for me until I actually lived in a working-class area in London. That was when I understood Stanley Lett. He had the profoundest instinctive contempt for the law; contempt, in short, for the State about which we talked so much. I suppose that was why Ted was intrigued with him? He used to say: 'But he's so intelligent!'-the inference being that if the intelligence were used, he could be harnessed to the cause. And I suppose Ted wasn't so far wrong. There is a type of trade union official like Stanley: tough, controlled, efficient, unscrupulous. I never saw Stanley out of a shrewd control of himself, used as a weapon to get everything he could out of a world he took for granted was organised for the profit of others. He was frightening. He certainly frightened me, with his big hard bulk, hard clear features, and cold analytical grey eyes. And why did he tolerate the fervent and idealistic Ted? Not, I think, for what he could get out of him. He was genuinely touched that Ted, 'a scholarship boy,' was still concerned about his class. At the same time he thought him mad. He would say: 'Look, mate, you've been lucky, got more brains than most of us. You use your chances and don't go mucking about. The workers don't give a muck for anyone but themselves. You know it's true. I know it's true.' 'But Stan,' Ted harangued him, his eyes flashing, his black hair in agitated motion all over his head: 'Stan if enough of us cared for the others, we could change it all-don't you see?' Stanley even read the books Ted gave him, and returned them saying: 'I've got nothing against it. Good luck to you, that's all I can say.' On this morning Stanley had stacked the top of the piano with ranks of beer mugs. In a corner was a packing case stacked with bottles. The air around the piano was thick with smoke, lit with stray gleams of reflected sunlight. The three men were isolated from the room in a haze of sun-lanced smoke. Johnnie played, played, played, quite oblivious. Stanley drank and smoked and kept an eye on the girls coming in who might do for himself or Johnnie. And Ted alternatively yearned after the political soul of Stanley and the musical soul of Johnnie. As I've said, Ted had taught himself music, but he could not play. He would hum snatches from Prokoviev, Mozart, Bach, his face agonised with impotent desire, forcing Johnnie to play. Johnnie played anything by ear, he played the airs as Ted hummed them, while his left hand hovered impatiently just above the keys. The moment the hypnotic pressure of Ted's concentration relaxed, the left hand broke into syncopation, and then both hands were furious in a rage of jazz, while Ted smiled and nodded and sighed, and tried to catch Stanley's eye in rueful amusement. But Stanley's returning smile was for mateyness only, he had no ear at all. These three stayed at the piano all day. There were about a dozen people in the hall but it was so large it looked empty. Maryrose and Jimmy were hanging paper garlands from the dark rafters, standing on chairs and assisted by about a dozen aircraftsmen who had come down from town by train having heard that Stanley and Johnnie were there. June Boothby was on a window sill, watching out of her private dream. When invited to help with the work she slowly shook her head and turned it to stare out of the window at the mountains. Paul stood to one side of the working group for a while, then came over to join me on my window sill, having commandeered some of Stanley's beer. 'Isn't that a sad sight, dear Anna?' said Paul, indicating the group of young men with Maryrose. 'There they are, every one positively hang-dog with sex frustration, and there she is, beautiful as the day, and with not a thought for anyone but her dead brother. And there's Jimmy, shoulder to shoulder with her, and he has no thought for anyone in the world but me. From time to time I tell myself I should go to bed with him, because why not? It would make him so happy. But the truth is, I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that not only I am not a homosexual, but that I never was. Because who do I yearn for, stretched on my lonely pillow? Do I yearn for Ted? Or even for Jimmy? Or for any of the gallant young heroes with whom I am so constantly surrounded? Not at all. I yearn for Maryrose. And I yearn for you. Preferably not both together of course.' George Hounslow came into the hall and went straight over to Maryrose. She was still on her chair, supported by her gallants. They gave way in all directions as he approached. Suddenly something frightening happened. George's approach to women was clumsy, over-humble, and he might even stammer. (But his stammer always sounded as if he were doing it on purpose.) Meanwhile his deep-set brown eyes would be fixed on the women with an almost bullying intentness. And yet his manner would remain humble, apologetic. Women got flustered or angry, or laughed nervously. He was a sensualist of course. I mean, a real sensualist, not a man who played the role of one, as so many do, for one reason or another. He was a man who really, very much, needed women. I say this because there aren't many men left who do. I mean civilised men, the affectionate non-sexual men of our civilisation. George needed a woman to submit to him, he needed a woman to be under his spell physically. And men can no longer dominate women in this way without feeling guilty about it. Or very few of them. When George looked at a woman he was imagining her as she would be when he had fucked her into insensibility. And he was afraid it would show in his eyes. I did not understand this then, I did not understand why I got confused when he looked at me. But I've met a few men like him since, all with the same clumsy impatient humility, and with the same hidden arrogant power. George was standing below Maryrose who had her arms raised. Her shining hair was down over her shoulders, and she wore a sleeveless yellow dress. Her arms and legs were a smooth gold-brown. The airforce men were almost stupefied with her. And George, for a moment, had the same look of stunned immobility. George said something. She let her arms drop, stepped slowly down off the chair and now stood below him, looking up. He said something else. I remember the look on his face-chin poked forward aggressively, eyes intent, and a stupidly abased expression. Maryrose lifted her fist and jabbed it up at his face. As hard as she could-his face jerked back and he even staggered a step. Then, without looking at him, she climbed back on her chair and continued to hang garlands. Jimmy was smiling at George with an eager embarrassment, as if he were responsible for the blow. George came over to us, and he was again the willing clown, and Maryrose's swains were back in their poses of helpless adoration. 'Well,' said Paul. 'I'm very impressed. If Maryrose would hit me like that, I'd believe I was getting somewhere.' But George's eyes were full of tears. 'I'm an idiot,' he said. 'A dolt. Why should a beautiful girl like Maryrose look at me at all?' 'Why indeed?' said Paul. 'I believe my nose is bleeding,' said George, so as to have an excuse to blow it. Then he smiled. 'I'm in trouble all around,' he said. 'And that bastard Willi is too busy with his bloody Russian to be interested.' 'We're all in trouble,' said Paul. He was radiating a calm physical well-being, and George said: 'I hate young men of twenty. What sort of trouble could you conceivably be in?' 'It's a hard case,' said Paul. 'First, I'm twenty. That means I'm very nervous and ill-at-ease with women. Second, I'm twenty. I have all my life before me, and frankly the prospect often appals me. Thirdly, I'm twenty, and I'm in love with Anna and my heart is breaking.' George gave me a quick look to see if this were true, and I shrugged. George drank down a full tankard of beer without stopping, and said: 'Anyway I've no right to care whether anyone's in love with anyone. I'm a sod and a bastard. Well, that would be bearable, but I'm also a practising socialist. And I'm a swine. How can a swine be a socialist, that's what I want to know?' He was joking, but his eyes were full of tears again, and his body was clenched and tense with misery. Paul turned his head with his characteristic indolent charm, and let his wide blue eyes rest on George. I could positively hear him thinking: Oh, Lord, here's some real trouble, I don't even want to hear about it... he let himself slide to the floor, gave me the warmest and tenderest of smiles, and said: 'Darling Anna, I love you more than my life, but I'm going to help Maryrose.' His eyes said: Get rid of this gloomy idiot and I'll come back. George scarcely noticed him going. 'Anna,' said George. 'Anna, I don't know what to do.' And I felt just as Paul had: I don't want to be involved with real trouble. I wanted to be off with the group hanging garlands, for now that Paul had become a member of it, it was suddenly gay. They were beginning to dance. Paul and Maryrose, even June Boothby, because there were more men than girls, and people were drifting up from the hotel, drawn by the dance music. 'Let's get out,' said George. 'All this youth and jollity. It depresses me unutterably. Besides, if you come too, your man will talk. It's him I want to talk to.' 'Thanks,' I said, without much grace. But I went with him to the hotel verandah which was rapidly losing its occupants to the dance room. Willi patiently laid down his grammar, and said: 'I suppose it's too much to expect, to be allowed to work in peace.' We sat down, the three of us, our legs stretched into the sun, the rest of our bodies in the shade. The beer in our long glasses was light and golden and had spangles of sunlight in it. Then George began talking. What he was saying was so serious, but he spoke with a self-mocking jocularity, so that everything seemed ugly and jarring, and all the time the pulse of music came from the dance room and I wanted to be there. The facts were these. I've said his family life was difficult. It was intolerable. He had a wife and two sons and a daughter. He supported his wife's parents and his own. I've been in that little house. It was intolerable even to visit. The young couple, or rather, the middle-aged couple who supported it, were squeezed out of any real life together by the four old people and the three children. His wife worked hard all day and so did he. The four old ones were all, in various ways, invalids and needed special care and diets and so on. In that living-room in the evening, the four played cards interminably, with much bickering and elderly petulance; they played for hours, in the centre of the room, and the children did their homework where they could, and George and his wife went to bed early, more often than not from sheer exhaustion, apart from the fact their bedroom was the only place they could have some privacy. That was the home. And then half the week George was off along the roads, sometimes working hundreds of miles away on the other side of the country. He loved his wife, and she loved him, but he felt permanently guilty because managing that household would by itself have been hard work for any woman, let alone having to work as a secretary as well. None of them had had a holiday in years, and they were all permanently short of money, and miserable bickering went on about sixpences and shillings. Meanwhile, George had his affairs. And he liked African women particularly. About five years before he was in Mashopi for the night and had been very much taken with the wife of the Boothbys' cook. This woman had become his mistress. 'If you can use such a word,' said Willi, but George insisted, and without any consciousness of humour: 'Well why not? Surely if one doesn't like the colour bar, she's entitled to the proper word, as a measure of respect, so to speak.' George often travelled through Mashopi. Last year he had seen the group of children and one of them was lighter than the others and looked like George. He had asked the woman, and she had said yes, she believed it was his child. She was not making an issue of it. 'Well?' said Willi, 'what's the problem?' I remember George's look of sheer, miserable incredulity. 'But Willi-you stupid clod, there's my child, I'm responsible for it living in that slum back there.' 'Well?' said Willi again. 'I'm a socialist,' said George. 'And as far as it's possible in this hellhole I try to be a socialist and fight the colour bar. Well? I stand on platforms and make speeches-oh, very tactfully of course, saying that the colour bar is not in the best interests of all concerned, and gentle Jesus meek and mild wouldn't have approved, because it's more than my job is worth to say it's inhuman and stinkingly immoral and the whites are damned to eternity for it. And now I propose to behave just like every other stinking white sot who sleeps with a black woman and adds another half-caste to the Colony's quota.' 'She hasn't asked you to do anything about it,' said Willi. 'But that isn't the point.' George sank his face on his flat palms, and I saw the wetness creep between his fingers. 'It's eating me up,' he said. 'I've known about it this last year and it's driving me crazy.' 'Which isn't going to help matters much,' said Willi, and George dropped his hands sharply, showing his tear-smeared face and looked at him. 'Anna?' appealed George, looking at me. I was in the most extraordinary tumult of emotion. First, I was jealous of the woman. Last night I had been wishing I was her, but it was an impersonal emotion. Now I knew who it was, and I was astounded to find I was hating George and condemning him-just as I had resented him last night when he made me feel guilty. And then, and this was worse, I was surprised to find I resented the fact the woman was black. I had imagined myself free of any such emotion, but it seemed I was not, and I was ashamed and angry-with myself, and with George. But it was more than that. Being so young, twenty-three or four, I suffered, like so many 'emancipated' girls, from a terror of being trapped and tamed by domesticity. George's house, where he and his wife were trapped without hope of release, save through the deaths of four old people, represented to me the ultimate horror. It frightened me so that I even had nightmares about it. And yet-this man, George, the trapped one, the man who had put that unfortunate woman, his wife, in a cage, also represented for me, and I knew it, a powerful sexuality from which I fled inwardly, but then inevitably turned towards. I knew by instinct that if I went to bed with George I'd learn a sexuality that I hadn't come anywhere near yet. And with all these attitudes and emotions conflicting in me, I still liked him, indeed loved him, quite simply, as a human being. I sat there on the verandah, unable to speak for a while, knowing that my face was flushed and my hands trembling. And I listened to the music and the singing from the big room up the hill and I felt as if George were excluding me by the pressure of his unhappiness from something unbelievably sweet and lovely. At that time it seemed I spent half my life believing I was being excluded from this beautiful thing; and yet I knew with my intelligence that it was nonsense-that Maryrose, for instance, envied me because she believed Willi and I had everything she wanted-she believed we were two people who loved each other. Willi had been looking at me, and now he said: 'Anna is shocked because the woman is black.' 'That's part of it,' I said. 'I'm surprised that I do feel like that though.' 'I'm surprised you admit it,' said Willi, coldly, and his spectacles flashed. 'I'm surprised you don't,' said George to Willi. 'Come off it. You're such a bloody hypocrite.' And Willi lifted his grammars and set them ready on his knee. 'What's the alternative, have you an intelligent suggestion?' enquired Willi. 'Don't tell me. Being George, you believe it's your duty to take the child into your house. That means the four old people will be shocked into their graves, apart from the fact no one will ever speak to them again. The three children will be ostracised at school. Your wife will lose her job. You will lose your job. Nine people will be ruined. And what good will that do your son, George? May I ask?' 'And so that's the end of it all?' I asked. 'Yes, it is,' said Willi. He wore his usual expression at such moments, obstinate and patient, and his mouth was set. 'I could make it a test case,' said George. 'A test case of what?' 'All this bloody hypocrisy.' 'Why use the word to me-you've just called me a hypocrite.' George looked humble, and Willi said: 'Who'd pay the price of your noble gesture? You've got eight people dependent on you?' 'My wife isn't dependent on me. I'm dependent on her. Emotionally that is. Do you imagine I don't know it?' 'Do you want me to put the facts again?' said Willi, over-patient, and glancing at his text-books. Both George and I knew that because he had been called a hypocrite he would never soften now, but George went on: 'Willi, isn't there anything at all? Surely, it can't be finished, just like that?' 'Do you want me to say that it's unfair or immoral or something helpful like that?' 'Yes,' said George, after a pause, dropping his chin on his chest. 'Yes, I suppose that's what I want. Because what's worse is that if you think I've stopped sleeping with her, I haven't. There might be another little Hounslow in the Boothby kitchen any day. Of course, I'm more careful than I was.' 'That's your affair,' said Willi. 'You are an inhuman swine,' said George after a pause. 'Thank you,' said Willi. 'But there's nothing to be done, is there? You agree, don't you?' 'That boy's going to grow up there among the pumpkins and the chickens and be a farm labourer or a half-arsed clerk, and my other three are going to get through to university and out of this bloody country if I have to kill myself paying for it.' 'What is the point?' said Willi. 'Your blood? Your sacred sperm, or what?' Both George and I were shocked. Willi saw it with a tightening of his face, and it remained angry as George said: 'No, it's the responsibility. It's the gap between what I believe in and what I do.' Willi shrugged and we were silent. Through the heavy midday hush came the sound of Johnnie's drumming fingers. George looked at me again, and I rallied myself to fight Willi. Looking back I want to laugh-because I automatically chose to argue in literary terms, just as he automatically answered in political terms. But at the time it didn't seem extraordinary. And it didn't seem extraordinary to George either, who sat nodding as I spoke. 'Look,' I said. 'In the nineteenth century literature was full of this. It was a sort of moral touchstone. Like Resurrection, for instance. But now you just shrug your shoulders and it doesn't matter?' 'I haven't noticed that I shrugged,' said Willi. 'But perhaps it is true that the moral dilemma of a society is no longer crystallised by the fact of an illegitimate child?' 'Why not?' I asked. 'Why not?' said George, very fierce. 'Well, would you really say the problem of the African in this country is summed up by the Boothbys' cook's white cuckoo?' 'You put things so prettily' said George angrily. (And yet he would continue to come to Willi humbly for advice, and revere him, and write to him self-abasing letters for years after he left the Colony.) Now he stared out into the sunlight, blinking away tears, and then he said: 'I'm going to get my glass filled.' He went off to the bar. Willi lifted his text-book, and said without looking at me: 'Yes, I know. But I'm not impressed by your reproachful eyes. You'd give him the same advice, wouldn't you? Full of ohs and ahs, but the same advice.' 'What it amounts to is that everything is so terrible that we've got calloused because of it and we don't really care.' 'May I suggest you stick to certain basic principles-such as abolishing what is wrong, changing what is wrong? Instead of sitting around crying about it?' 'And in the meantime?' 'In the meantime I'm going to study and you will go off and let George weep on your shoulder and be very sorry for him, which will achieve precisely nothing.' I left him and walked slowly back up to the big room. George was leaning against the wall, a glass in his hand, eyes closed. I knew I should go to him, but I didn't. I went into the big room. Maryrose was sitting by herself at a window and I joined her. She had been crying. I said: 'This seems to be a day for everyone to cry.' 'Not you,' said Maryrose. This meant that I was too happy with Willi to need to cry, so I sat down by her and said: 'What's wrong?' 'I was sitting here and watching them dance and I began thinking. Only a few months ago we believed that the world was going to change and everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won't.' 'Do we?' I said, with a kind of terror. 'Why should it?' she asked, simply. I didn't have the moral energy to fight it, and after a pause she said: 'What did George want you for? I suppose he said I was a bitch for hitting him?' 'Can you imagine George saying anyone is a bitch for hitting him? Well why did you?' 'I was crying about that too. Because of course the real reason I hit him was because I know someone Uke George could make me forget my brother.' 'Well perhaps you should let someone like George have a try?' 'Perhaps I should,' she said. She gave me a small, old smile, which said so clearly: What a baby you are!-that I said angrily: 'But if you know something, why don't you do something about it?' Again the small smile, and she said: 'No one will ever love me like my brother did. He really loved me. George would make love to me. And that wouldn't be the same thing, would it? But what's wrong with saying: I've had the best thing already and I'll never have it again, instead of just having sex. What's wrong with it?' 'When you say, what's wrong with it, like that, then I never know what answer to make, even though I know there's something wrong.' 'What, then?' She sounded really curious, and I said, even more angry: 'You just don't try, you don't try. You just give up.' 'It's all very well for you,' she said, meaning Willi again, and now I couldn't say anything. It was my turn to want to cry, and she saw it, and said out of her infinite superiority in suffering: 'Don't cry, Anna, there's never any point. Well I'm going to get washed for lunch.' And she went off. All the young men were now singing, around the piano, so I left the room too, and went to where I had seen George leaning. I clambered through nettles and blackjacks, because he had moved further around to the back, and was standing staring through a grove of paw-paw trees at the little shack where the cook lived with his wife and his children. There were a couple of brown children squatting in the dust among the chickens. I noticed that George's very sleek arm was trembling as he tried to light a cigarette, and he failed, and threw it impatiently away, unlit, and he remarked calmly: 'No, my bye-blow is not present.' A gong rang down at the hotel for lunch. 'We'd better go in,' I said. 'Stay here with me a minute.' He put his hand on my shoulder, and the heat of it burned through my dress. The gong stopped sending out its long metallic waves of sound, and the piano stopped inside. Silence, and a dove cooed from the jacaranda tree. George put his hand on my breast, and he said: 'Anna, I could take you to bed now-and then Marie, that's my black girl, and then go back to my wife tonight and have her, and be happy with all three of you. Do you understand that, Anna?' 'No,' I said, angry. And yet his hand on my breast made me understand it. 'Don't you?' he said, ironic. 'No?' 'No,' I insisted, lying on behalf of all women, and thinking of his wife, who made me feel caged. He shut his eyes. His black eyelashes made tiny rainbows as they trembled on his brown cheek. He said, without opening his eyes: 'Sometimes I look at myself from the outside. George Hounslow, respected citizen, eccentric of course, with his socialism, but that's cancelled out by his devotion to all the aged parents and his charming wife and three children. And beside me I can see a whacking great gorilla swinging its arms and grinning. I can see the gorilla so clearly I'm surprised no one else can.' He let his hand fall off my breast so that I was able to breathe steadily again and I said: 'Willi's right. You can't do anything about it so you must stop tormenting yourself.' His eyes were still shut. I didn't know I was going to say what I did, but his eyes flew open and he backed away, so it was some sort of telepathy. I said: 'And you can't commit suicide.' 'Why not?' he asked curiously. 'For the same reason you can't take the child into your house. You've got nine people to worry about.' 'Anna, I've been wondering if I'd take the child into my house if I had-let's say, only two people to worry about?' I didn't know what to say. After a moment he put his arm around me and walked me through the blackjacks and the nettles saying: 'Come down with me to the hotel and keep the gorilla off.' And now, of course, I was perversely annoyed that I had refused the gorilla and was in the role of sexless sister, and I sat by Paul at lunch and not by George. After lunch we all slept for a long time, and began to drink early. Although the dance that night was private, for 'the associated farmers of Mashopi and District,' by the time the farmers and their wives arrived in their big cars the dancing room was already full of people dancing. All of us, and a lot more airforce down from the city, and Johnnie was playing the piano and the regular pianist, who was not a tenth as good as Johnnie, had gone very willingly off to the bar. The master of ceremonies for the evening formalised matters by making a hasty and not very sincere speech about welcoming the boys in blue, and we all danced until Johnnie got tired, which was about five in the morning. Afterwards we stood about in groups under a clear cold star-frosted sky, and the moon made sharp black shadows around us. We all had our arms about each other and we were singing. The scent of the flowers was clear and cool again in the reviving night air, and they stood up fresh and strong. Paul was with me, we had been dancing together all evening. Willi was with Maryrose- he had been dancing with her. And Jimmy, who was very drunk, was stumbling around by himself. He had cut himself again somehow and was bleeding from a small wound over his eyes. And that was the end of our first full day, and it set the pattern for all the rest. The big 'general' dance next night was attended by all the same people, and the Boothbys' bar did well, the Boothbys' cook was overworked, and presumably his wife had assignations with George. Who was painfully, fruitlessly attentive to Maryrose. On that second evening Stanley Lett began his attentions to Mrs. Lattimer, the red-head, which ended in-but I was going to say disaster. That word is ridiculous. Because what is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then-we went on dancing. Stanley Lett's affair with Mrs. Lattimer only led to an incident that I suppose must have happened a dozen times in her marriage. She was a woman of about forty-five, rather plump, with the most exquisite hands and slender legs. She had a delicate white skin, and enormous soft periwinkle blue eyes, the hazy, tender, short-sighted, almost purple blue eyes that look at life through a mist of tears. But in her case it was alcohol as well. Her husband was a big bad-tempered commercial type who was a steady brutal drinker. He began drinking when the bar opened and drank all day, getting steadily more morose. Whereas drinking made her soft and sighing and tearful. I never, not once, heard him say anything to her that wasn't brutal. It appeared she didn't notice, or had given up caring. They had no children, but she was inseparable from her dog, the most beautiful red setter, the colour of her hair, with eyes as yearning and tearful as hers. They sat together on the hotel verandah, the red-haired woman and her feathery red dog, and received homage and supplies of drinks from the other guests. The three used to come to the hotel every week-end. Well, Stanley Lett was fascinated by her. She had no side, he said. She was a real good sort, he said. That second night of dancing she was squired by Stanley while her husband drank in the bar until it closed, when he stood swaying by the piano until at last Stanley gave him a final finishing-off drink, so that he stumbled off to bed, leaving his wife dancing. It seemed he did not care what she did. She spent her time with us, or with Stanley, who had 'organised' for Johnnie a woman on a farm two miles off whose husband had gone to the war. The four were having, as they repeatedly said, a fine good time. We danced in the big room; and Johnnie played, with the farmer's wife, a big high-coloured blonde from Johannesburg, sitting beside him. Ted had temporarily given up the battle for Stanley's soul. As he said himself, sex had proved too strong for him. All that long week-end-it was nearly a week, we drank and danced with the sound of Johnnie's piano perpetually in our ears. And when we got back to town we knew that, as Paul remarked, our holiday had not done us much good. Only one person had maintained any sort of self-discipline and that was Willi, who worked steadily a good part of every day with his grammars. Though even he had succumbed a little-to Maryrose. It had been agreed that we should all go back to Mashopi. We went, I think, about two week-ends later. This was different from the general holiday-the hotel was empty save for ourselves, the Lattimers and their dog and the Boothbys. We were greeted by the Boothbys with much civility. It was clear that we had been discussed, that our proprietary ways with the hotel were much disapproved of, but that we spent too much money to be discouraged. I don't remember much of that week-end, or the four or five weekends which succeeded it-at intervals of some weeks. We did not go down every week-end. It must have been about six or eight months after our first visit that the crisis, if it can be called a crisis, occurred. It was the last time we went to Mashopi. We were the same people as before: George and Willi and Maryrose and myself; Ted, Paul and Jimmy. Stanley Lett and Johnnie were now part of another group with Mrs. Lattimer and her dog and the farmer's wife. Sometimes Ted joined them, and sat silent, very much out of it, to return shortly afterwards to us, where he sat equally silent, smiling to himself. It was a new smile for him, wry, bitter, and self-judging. Sitting under the gum-trees we would hear Mrs. Lattimer's lazy musical voice from the verandah: 'Stan-boy, get me a drink? What about a cigarette for me, Stan-boy? Son, come here and talk to me.' And he called her Mrs. Lattimer, but sometimes, forgetting, Myra, at which she would droop her black Irish eyelashes at him. He was about twenty-two or twenty-three; there were twenty years between them, and they very much enjoyed publicly playing the mother-and-son roles, with the sexuality so strong between them that we would look around apprehensively when Mrs. Lattimer came near. Looking back at those week-ends they seem like beads on a string, two big glittering ones to start with, then a succession of small unimportant ones, then another brilliant one to end. But that is just the lazy memory, because as soon as I start to think about the last week-end, I realise that there must have been incidents during the intervening week-ends that led up to it. But I can't remember, it's all gone. And I get exasperated, trying to remember-it's like wrestling with an obstinate other-self who insists on its own kind of privacy. Yet it's all there in my brain if only I could get at it. I am appalled at how much I didn't notice, living inside the subjective highly-coloured mist. How do I know that what I 'remember' was what was important? What I remember was chosen by Anna, of twenty years ago. I don't know what this Anna of now would choose. Because the experience with Mother Sugar and the experiments with the notebooks have sharpened my objectivity to the point where (but this kind of observation belongs to the blue notebook, not this one). At any rate, although it seems now that the final week-end exploded into all kinds of dramas without any previous warning, of course this is not possible. For instance, Paul's friendship with Jackson must have become quite highly developed to provoke Mrs. Boothby as it did. I can remember the moment when she ordered Paul finally out of the kitchen-it must have been the week-end before the last. Paul and I were in the kitchen talking to Jackson. Mrs. Boothby came in and said: 'You know it's against the rules for hotel guests to come into the kitchen.' I remember quite clearly the feeling of shock, as at an unfairness, like children feel when grown-ups are being arbitrary. So that means we must have been running in and out of the kitchen all that time without protest from her. Paul punished her by taking her at her word. He would wait at the back door of the kitchen until the time Jackson was due to go off after lunch, and then ostentatiously walk with him across to the wire fence that enclosed Jackson's cottage, talking with his hand on the man's arm and shoulder. And this contact between black and white flesh was deliberate, to provoke any white person that might be watching. We didn't go near the kitchen again. And because we were in a mood of high childishness we would giggle and talk of Mrs. Boothby like children talking about a headmistress. It seems extraordinary to me that we were capable of being so childish, and that we didn't care that we were hurting her. She had become 'an aborigine' because she resented Paul's friendship with Jackson. Yet we knew quite well there wasn't a white person in the Colony who wouldn't have resented it, and in our political roles we were capable of infinite patience and understanding in explaining to some white person why their racial attitudes were inhuman. I remember something else-Ted reasoning with Stanley Lett about Mrs. Lattimer. Ted said that Mr. Lattimer was getting jealous and with good reason. Stanley was good-naturedly derisive: Mr. Lattimer treated his wife like dirt, he said, and deserved what he got. But the derision was really for Ted, for it was he who was jealous, and of Stanley. Stanley did not care that Ted was hurt. And why should he? When anyone is wooed on one level for the sake of another it is always resented. Always. Of course, Ted was primarily in pursuit of the 'butterfly under the stone' and his romantic emotions were well under control. But they were there all right, and Ted deserved that moment, which occurred more than once, when Stanley smiled his hard-lipped knowing smile, his cold eyes narrowed, and said: 'Come off it, mate. You know that's not my cup of tea.' And yet. Ted had been offering a book, or an evening listening to music. Stanley had become openly contemptuous of Ted. And Ted, instead of telling him to go to hell, allowed it. Ted was one of the most scrupulous people I've known, yet he would go off on 'organising expeditions' with Stanley, to get beer or filch food. Afterwards he would tell us he had only gone in order to get an opportunity to explain to Stanley that this was not, 'as he would come to see in time,' the right way to live. But then he would give us a quick, ashamed glance, and turn his face away, smiling his new bitterly self-hating smile. And then there was the affair of George's son. All the group knew about it. Yet George was by nature a discreet man and I'm sure during that year he was tormenting himself he had mentioned it to no one. Neither Willi nor I told anyone. Yet we all knew. I suppose that one night when we were half-drunk, George made some reference that he imagined was unintelligible. Soon we were joking about it in the way we now made joking despairing references to the political situation in the country. I remember that one evening George made us laugh until we were helpless with a fantasy about how one day his son would come to his house demanding work as a houseboy. He, George, would not recognise him, but some mystical link, etc., would draw him to the poor child. He would be given work in the kitchen and his sensitivity of nature and innate intelligence, 'all inherited from me of course,' would soon endear him to the whole household. In no time he would be picking up the cards the four old people dropped at the card-table and providing a tender undemanding friendship for the three children-'his half-siblings.' For instance, he would prove invaluable as a ball-boy when they played tennis. At last his patient servitude would be rewarded. Light would flash on George suddenly, one day, at the moment when the boy was handing him his shoes, 'very well-polished, of course.' 'Baas, is there anything more I can do?' 'My son!' 'Father. At last!' And so on and so on. That night we saw George sitting by himself under the trees, head in his hands, motionless, a despondent heavy shadow among the moving shadows of the glittering spearlike leaves. We went down to sit with him, but there was nothing that anyone could say. On that last week-end there was to be another big dance, and we arrived by car and by train, at various times through the Friday, and met in the big room. When Willi and I arrived Johnnie was already at the piano with his red-faced blonde beside him; Stanley was dancing with Mrs. Lattimer, and George was talking to Maryrose. Willi went straight over and ousted George, and Paul came over to claim me. Our relationship had remained the same, tender and half-mocking and full of promise. Outside observers might have, and probably did, think the link-up was Willi and Maryrose, Paul and myself. Though at moments they might have thought it was George and myself and Paul and Maryrose. Of course the reason why these romantic, adolescent relationships were possible was because of my relationship with Willi which was, as I've said, almost a sexual. If there is a couple in the centre of a group with a real full sexual relationship it acts like a catalyst for the others, and often, indeed, destroys the group altogether. I've seen many such groups since, political and unpolitical, and one can always judge the relationship of the central couple (because there is always a central couple) by the relationships of the couples around them. On that Friday there was trouble within an hour of our arrival. June Boothby came up to the big room to ask Paul and myself to come to the hotel kitchen and help her with food for the dinner that evening, because Jackson was busy with the party food for tomorrow. June had by then become engaged to her young man and had been released from her trance. Paul and I went with her. Jackson was mixing fruit and cream for an ice-pudding, and Paul at once began talking to him. They were discussing England, to Jackson such a remote and magical place that he would listen for hours to the simplest details about it-the underground system, for instance, or the buses, or Parliament. June and I stood together and made salads for the hotel evening meal. She was impatient to be free for her young man, who was expected at any moment. Mrs. Boothby came in, looked at Paul and Jackson, and said: 'I thought I told you I wouldn't have you in the kitchen?' 'Oh, Mom,' said June impatiently, 'I asked them. Why don't you get another cook, it's too much work for Jackson.' 'Jackson's been doing the work for fifteen years, and there's never been trouble till now.' 'Oh, Mom, there's no trouble. But since the war and all the airforce boys all the time, there's more work. I don't mind helping out, and neither does Paul and Anna.' 'You'll do as I tell you, June,' said her mother. 'Oh, Mom,' said June, annoyed but still good-natured. She grimaced at me: Don't take any notice. Mrs. Boothby saw her, and said: 'You're getting above yourself my girl. Since when have you given orders in the kitchen?' June lost her temper and walked straight out of the room. Mrs. Boothby, breathing heavily, her plain, always high-coloured face even redder than usual, looked in distress at Paul. If Paul had made some gentle remark, done anything at all to mollify her, she would have collapsed into her real good-nature at once. But he did as he had done before: nodded at me to go with him, and went calmly out of the back door saying to Jackson: 'I'll see you later when you've finished work. If you ever do finish work.' I said to Mrs. Boothby: 'We wouldn't have come if June hadn't asked us.' But she wasn't interested in appeals from me and made no reply. So I went back to the big room and danced with Paul. All this time we had been making jokes that Mrs. Boothby was in love with Paul. Perhaps she was, a little. But she was a very simple woman and a hard-working one. Very hardworking since the war, and the hotel which had once been a place for travellers to stop the night had become a week-end resort. It must have been a strain for her. And then there was June who had been transformed in the last few weeks from a sulking adolescent into a young woman with a future. Looking back I think it was June's marriage that was at the bottom of her mother's unhappiness. June must have been her only emotional outlet. Mr. Boothby was always behind the bar counter, and he was the kind of drinker that is hardest of all to live with. Men who drink heavily in bouts are nothing compared to the men who 'carry their drink well'-who carry a load of drink every day, every week, year in and year out. These steady hard-drinkers are very bad for their wives. Mrs. Boothby had lost June, who was going to live three hundred miles away. Nothing: no distance for the Colony, but she had lost her for all that. And perhaps she had been affected by the wartime restlessness. A woman who must have resigned herself, years ago, to not being a woman at all, she had watched for weeks now, Mrs. Lattimer who was the same age as herself, being courted by Stanley Lett. Perhaps she did have secret dreams about Paul. I don't know. But looking back I see Mrs. Boothby as a lonely pathetic figure. But I didn't think so then. I saw her as a stupid 'aborigine.' Oh, Lord, it's painful thinking of the people one has been cruel to. And she would have been made happy by so little-if we had invited her to come and drink with us sometimes, or talked to her. But we were locked in our group and we made stupid jokes and laughed at her. I can remember her face as Paul and I left the kitchen. She was gazing after Paul-hurt, bewildered; her eyes seemed frantic with incomprehension. And her sharp high voice to Jackson: 'You're getting very cheeky Jackson. Why are you getting so cheeky?' It was the rule that Jackson should have three to five off every afternoon, but like a good feudal servant, when things were busy, he waived this right. This afternoon it was not until about five that we saw him leave the kitchen and walk slowly towards his house. Paul said: 'Anna dear, I would not love you so much if I didn't love Jackson more. And by now it's a question of principle...' And he left me and walked down to meet Jackson. The two stood talking together by the fence, and Mrs. Boothby watched them from her kitchen window. George had joined me when Paul left. George looked at Jackson and said: 'The father of my child.' 'Oh, stop it,' I said, 'it doesn't do any good.' 'Do you realise Anna what a farce it all is? I can't even give that child of mine money? Do you realise how utterly bloodily bizarre-Jackson earns five quid a month. Admittedly, burdened down by children and the senile as I am, five quid a month is a lot to me-but if I gave Marie five pounds, just to get that poor kid some decent clothes, it would be so much money for them that... she told me, food for the Jackson family costs ten shillings a week. They live on pumpkin and mealiemeal and scraps from the kitchen.' 'Doesn't Jackson even suspect?' 'Marie thinks not. I asked her. Do you know what she said: "He's a good husband to me," she said. "He's kind to me and all my children"... do you know Anna, when she said that, I've never in all my life felt such a sod.' 'You're still sleeping with her?' 'Yes. Do you know, Anna, I love that woman, I love that woman so much that...' After a while we saw Mrs. Boothby come out of the kitchen and walk towards Paul and Jackson. Jackson went into his shack, and Mrs. Boothby, rigid with lonely anger, went to her house. Paul came in to us and told us she had said to Jackson: 'I don't give you time off to talk cheeky with white men who ought to know better.' Paul was too angry to be flippant. He said: 'My God, Anna, my God. My God.' Then, slowly recovering, he swung me off to dance again and said: 'What really interests me is that there are people, like you for instance, who genuinely believe that the world can be changed.' We spent the evening dancing and drinking. We all went to bed very late. Willi and I went to bed in a bad temper with each other. He was angry because George had been pouring out his troubles again and he was bored with George. He said to me: 'You and Paul seem to be getting on very well.' He could have said that any time during the last six months. I replied: 'And it's equally true that you and Maryrose are.' We were already in our twin beds on either side of the room. He had some book on the development of early German socialism in his hand. He sat there, all his intelligence concentrated behind his gleaming spectacles, wondering if it was worth while to quarrel. I think he decided it would only turn into our familiar argument about George... 'sloppy sentimentality' vs. 'dogmatic bureaucracy.' Or perhaps-for he was a man incredibly ignorant about his motives-he believed that he resented my relationship with Paul. And perhaps he did. Challenged then, I replied: 'Maryrose.' Challenged now, I would say that every woman believes in her heart that if her man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another. That is her first and strongest thought, regardless of how she might soften it later out of pity or expediency. But Willi and I were not together because of sex. And so? I write this and think how strong must have been that argumentative battling quality between us that even now I instinctively and out of sheer habit assess it in terms of rights or wrongs. Stupid. It's always stupid. We didn't quarrel that night. After a moment he began his lonely humming: Oh the shark has, wicked teeth dear... and he picked up his book and read and I went to sleep. Next day bad temper prickled through the hotel. June Boothby had gone to a dance with her fiance, and had not returned until morning. Mr. Boothby had shouted at his daughter when she came in and Mrs. Boothby had wept. The row with Jackson had permeated through the staff. The waiters were sullen with us all at lunch. Jackson went off at three o'clock according to the letter of the law, leaving Mrs. Boothby to do the food for the dance, and June would not help her mother because of how she had been spoken to the day before. And neither would we. We heard June shouting: 'If you weren't so mean you'd get another assistant cook, instead of making a martyr of yourself for the sake of five pounds a month.' Mrs. Boothby had red eyes, and again her face had the look of frantic disorganised emotion, and she followed June around, protesting. Because, of course, she was not mean. Five pounds was nothing to the Boothbys; and I suppose the reason why she didn't get an extra cook was because she didn't mind working twice as hard and thought there was no reason why Jackson shouldn't as well. She went off to her house to lie down. Stanley Lett was with Mrs. Lattimer on the verandah. The hotel tea was served at four by a waiter, but Mrs. Lattimer had a headache and wanted black coffee. I suppose there must have been some trouble with her husband, but we had come to take his complaisance so much for granted we didn't think of that until later. Stanley Lett went to the kitchen to ask the waiter to make coffee but the coffee was locked up, and Jackson, trusted family retainer, had the keys of the store cupboard. Stanley Lett went off to Jackson's cottage to borrow the keys. I don't think it occurred to him that this was tactless, in the circumstances. He was simply, as was his nature, 'organising' supplies. Jackson, who liked Stanley because he associated the R. A. F. with human treatment, came down from his cottage to open the cupboard and make black coffee for Mrs. Lattimer. Mrs. Boothby must have been seen all this from her bedroom windows, for now she came down and told Jackson that if he ever did such a thing again he would get the sack. Stanley tried to soothe her but it was no use, she was like a possessed woman, and her husband had to take her off to lie down again. George came to Willi and me and said: 'Do you realise what it would mean if Jackson got the sack? The whole family would be sunk.' 'You mean you would,' said Willi. 'No, you silly clot, for once I'm thinking of them. This is their home. Jackson'd never find another place where he could have his family with him. He'd have to get a job somewhere and the family would have to go back to Nyasaland.' 'Very likely,' said Willi. 'They'd be in the same position as the other Africans, instead of being in the minority of half of one per cent-if it's as much as that.' The bar opened soon after, and George went off to drink. He had Jimmy with him. It seems I've forgotten the most important thing of all-'Jimmy's having upset Mrs. Boothby. This had happened the week-end before. Jimmy in the presence of Mrs. Boothby had put his arms around Paul and kissed him. He was drunk at the time. Mrs. Boothby, an unsophisticated woman, was terribly shocked. I tried to explain to her that the virile conventions or assumptions of the Colony were not those of England, but afterwards she could not look at Jimmy without disgust. She had not minded the fact that he was regularly drunk, that he was unshaven and looked really unpleasant with the two half-healed scars showing through yellow stubble, that he slumped about in an unbuttoned uncollared uniform. All that was all right; it was all right for real men to drink and not to shave and to disregard their looks. She had even been rather maternal and gentle with him. But the word 'homosexual' put him outside her pale. 'I suppose he's what they call a homosexual,' she said, using the word as if it, too, were poisoned. Jimmy and George got themselves drunk in the bar and by the time the dance started they were maudlin and affectionate. The big room was full when they came in. Jimmy and George danced together, George parodying the thing, but Jimmy looking childishly happy. Once round the room- but it was enough. Mrs. Boothby was already there, looking like a seal in a black satin dress, her face flaming with distress. She went over to the couple and told them to take their disgusting behaviour somewhere else. No one else had even noticed the incident, and George told-her not to be a silly bitch, and began dancing with June Boothby. Jimmy stood open-mouthed and helpless, very much the small boy who has been smacked and doesn't know what for. Then he wandered off into the night by himself. Paul and I danced. Willi and Maryrose danced. Stanley and Mrs. Lattimer danced. Mr. Lattimer was in the bar and George kept leaving us to pay visits to his caravan. We were all more noisy and derisive about everything than we had ever been. I think we all knew it was our last week-end. Yet no decision had been made about not coming again; just as no formal decision had been made about coming in the first place. There was a feeling of loss; for one thing Paul and Jimmy were due to be posted soon. It was nearly midnight when Paul remarked that Jimmy had been gone a long time. We searched through the crowd in the big room, and no one had seen him. Paul and I went to look for him and met George at the door. Outside the night was damp and clouded. In that part of the country there is often two or three days' break in the regularly clear weather we took for granted, while a very fine rain or mist blows softly, like the small soft rain of Ireland. So it was now, and groups and couples stood cooling off, but it was too dark to see their faces, and we wandered among them trying to distinguish Jimmy by his shape. The bar had closed by then and he was not on the hotel verandah or in the dining-room. We began to worry, for more than once we had had to rescue him from a flowerbed or under the gum-trees, hopelessly drunk. We searched through the bedrooms. We searched slowly through the gardens, stumbling over bushes and plants, not finding him. We were standing at the back of the main hotel building, wondering where to look next, when the lights went on in the kitchen half a dozen paces in front of us. Jackson came into the kitchen, slowly, alone. He did not know he was being watched. I had never seen him other than polite and on guard; but now he was both angry and troubled-I remember looking at that face and thinking I had never really seen it before. His face changed-he was looking at something on the floor. We pressed forward to see, and there was Jimmy lying asleep or drunk or both on the floor of the kitchen. Jackson bent down to raise him and, as he did so, Mrs. Boothby came in behind Jackson. Jimmy awoke, saw Jackson and lifted his arms like a newly roused child and put them around Jackson's neck. The black man said: 'Baas Jimmy, Baas Jimmy, you must go to bed. You must not be here.' And Jimmy said: 'You love me Jackson, don't you, you love me, none of the others love me.' Mrs. Boothby was so shocked that she let herself slump against the wall, and her face was a greyish colour. By then we three were in the kitchen, lifting Jimmy up and away from his clinging grip around Jackson's neck. Mrs. Boothby said: 'Jackson, you leave tomorrow.' Jackson said: 'Missus, what have I done?' Mrs. Boothby said: 'Get out. Go away. Take your dirty family and yourself away from here. Tomorrow, or I'll get the police to you.' Jackson looked at us, his eyebrows knotting and unknotting, puckers of uncomprehending pain tightening the skin of his face and releasing it, so that his face seemed to clench and unclench. Of course, he had no idea at all why Mrs. Boothby was so upset. He said slowly: 'Missus, I've worked for you fifteen years.' George said: 'I'll speak to her, Jackson.' George had never before previously addressed a direct word to Jackson. He felt too guilty before him. And now Jackson turned his eyes slowly towards George and blinked slowly, like someone who has been hit. And George stayed quiet, waiting. Then Jackson said: 'You don't want us to leave, baas?' I don't know how much that meant. Perhaps Jackson had known about his wife all the time. It certainly sounded like it then. But George shut his eyes a moment, then stammered out something, and it sounded ludicrous, like an idiot talking. Then he stumbled out of the kitchen. We half lifted, half pushed Jimmy out of the kitchen, and we said: 'Good night, Jackson, thank you for trying to help Baas Jimmy.' But he did not answer. We put Jimmy to bed, Paul and I. As we came down from the bedroom block through the wet dark, we heard George talking to Willi a dozen paces away. Willi was saying: 'Quite so.' And 'Obviously.' And 'Very likely.' And George was getting more and more vehement and incoherent. Paul said in a low voice: 'Oh, my God, Anna, come with me, now.' 'I can't,' I said. 'I might leave the country any day now. I might never see you again.' 'You know I can't.' Without replying he walked off into the dark, and I was just going after him when Willi came up. We were close to our bedroom, and we went into it. Willi said: 'It's the best thing that can have happened. Jackson and family will leave and George will come to his senses.' 'This means, almost for certain, that the family will have to split up. Jackson won't have his family with him again.' Willi said: 'That's just like you. Jackson's been lucky enough to have his family. Most of them can't. And now he'll be like the others. That's all. Have you been weeping and wailing because of all the others without their families?' 'No, I've been supporting policies that should put an end to the whole bloody business.' 'Quite. And quite right.' 'But I happen to know Jackson and his family. Sometimes I can't believe you mean the things you say.' 'Of course you can't. Sentimentalists can never believe in anything but their own emotions.' 'And it's not going to make any difference to George. Because the tragedy of George is not Marie but George. When she goes there'll be someone else.' 'It might teach him a lesson,' said Willi, and his face was ugly as he said it. I left Willi in the bedroom and stood on the verandah. The mist had thinned to show a faint diffused cold light from a half-obscured sky. Paul was standing a few paces off looking at me. And suddenly all the intoxication and the anger and misery rose in me like a bomb bursting and I didn't care about anything except being with Paul. I ran down to him and he caught my hand and without a word we both ran, without knowing where we were running or why. We ran along the main road east, slipping and stumbling on the wet puddling tarmac, and swerved off on to a rough grass track that led somewhere, but we didn't know where. We ran along it, through sandy puddles we never saw, through the faint mist that had come down again. Dark wet trees loomed up on either side, and fell behind and we ran on. Our breath went, and we stumbled off the track into the veld. It was covered with a low invisible leafy growth. We ran a few paces, and fell side by side in each other's arms in the wet leaves while the rain fell slowly down, and over us low dark clouds sped across the sky, and the moon gleamed but and went, struggling with the dark, so that we were in the dark again. We began to tremble so hard that we laughed; our teeth were clattering together. I was wearing a thin crepe dance dress and nothing else. Paul took off his uniform jacket and put it round me, and we lay down again. Our flesh together was hot, and everything else was wet and cold. Paul, maintaining his poise even now, remarked: 'I've never done this before, darling Anna. Isn't it clever of me to choose an experienced woman like you?' Which made me laugh again. We were neither of us at all clever, we were too happy. Hours later the light grew clear above us and the distant sound of Johnnie's piano at the hotel stopped, and looking up we saw the clouds had swept away and the stars were out. We got up, and remembering where the sound of the piano had come from we walked in what we thought was the direction of the hotel. We walked, stumbling, through scrub and grass, our hands hot together, and the tears and the wet from the grass ran down our faces. We could not find the hotel: the wind must have been blowing the sound of the dance music off course. In the dark we scrambled and climbed and finally we found ourselves on the top of a small kopje. And there was a complete silent blackness for miles around under a grey glitter of stars. We sat together on a wet ledge of granite with our arms around each other, waiting for the light to come. We were so wet and cold and tired we did not talk. We sat cheek to cold cheek and waited. I have never, in all my life, been so desperately and wildly and painfully happy as I was then. It was so strong I couldn't believe it. I remember saying to myself, This is it, this is being happy, and at the same time I was appalled because it had come out of so much ugliness and unhappiness. And all the time, down our cold faces, pressed together, the hot tears were running. A long time later, a red glow came up into the dark in front of us, and the landscape fell away from it, silent, grey, exquisite. The hotel, unfamiliar from this height, appeared half a mile away, and not where we expected it. It was all dark, not a light anywhere. And now we could see that the rock we sat on was at the mouth of a small cave, and the flat rock wall at its back was covered with Bushman paintings. They were fresh and glowing even in this faint light, but badly chipped. All this part of the country was covered with these paintings, but most were ruined because white oafs threw stones at them, not knowing their value. Paul looked at the little coloured figures of men and animals all cracked and scarred and said: 'A fitting commentary to it all, dear Anna, though I'd be hard put to it to find the right words to explain why, in my present state.' He kissed me, for the last time, and we slowly climbed down through the tangles of sodden grass and leaves. My crepe dress had shrunk in the wet and was above my knees, and this made us laugh, because I could only take tiny steps in it. We walked very slowly along a track to the hotel, and then up to the bedroom block, and there on the verandah sat Mrs. Lattimer, crying. The door into the bedroom behind her was half-open, and Mr. Lattimer sat on the floor by the door. He was still drunk, and he was saying in a methodical, careful, drunken voice: 'You whore. You ugly whore. You barren bitch.' This had happened before, obviously. She lifted her ruin of a face to us, pulling at her lovely red hair with both hands, the tears dropping off her chin. Her dog crouched beside her, whining softly, its head in her lap, and the red feathery tail swept apologetically back and forth across the floor. Mr. Lattimer took no notice of us at all. His red ugly eyes were fixed on his wife: 'You lazy barren whore. You street girl. You dirty bitch.' Paul left me, and I went into the bedroom. It was dark and stuffy. Willi said: 'Where have you been?' I said: 'You know where.' 'Come here.' I went over to him, and he gripped my wrist and brought me down beside him. I remember lying there and hating him and wondering why the only time I could remember him making love to me with any conviction was when he knew I had just made love to someone else. That incident finished Willi and me. We never forgave each other for it. We never mentioned it again, but it was always there. And so a 'sexless' relationship was ended finally, by sex. Next day was Sunday and we assembled just before lunch under the trees by the railway lines. George had been sitting there by himself. He looked old and sad and finished. Jackson had taken his wife and his children and vanished in the night; they were now walking north to Nyasaland. The cottage or shack which had seemed so full of life had been emptied and made derelict overnight. It looked a broken-down little place, standing there empty beyond the paw-paw trees. But Jackson had been in too much of a hurry to take his chickens. There were some guinea-fowl, and some great red laying hens, and a handful of the wiry little birds called kaffir fowls, and a beautiful young cockerel in glistening brown and black feathers, black tail feathers iridescent in the sunlight, scratching at the dirt with his white young claws and crowing loudly. 'That's me,' said George to me, looking at the cockerel, and joking to save his life. Back in the hotel for lunch, Mrs. Boothby came to apologise to Jimmy. She was hurried and nervous, and her eyes were red, but although she could not even look at him without showing distaste, she was genuine enough. Jimmy accepted the apology with eager gratitude. He did not remember what had happened the night before and we never told him. He thought she was apologising for the incident on the dance floor with George. Paul said: 'And what about Jackson?' She said: 'Gone and good riddance.' She said it in a heavy uneven voice, that had an incredulous wondering sound to it. Obviously she was wondering what on earth could have happened to make her dismiss so lightly the faithful family servant of fifteen years. 'There are plenty of others glad to get his job,' she said. We decided to leave the hotel that afternoon, and we never went back. A few days later Paul was killed and Jimmy went off to fly his bombers over Germany. Ted shortly got himself failed as a pilot and Stanley Lett told him he was a fool. Johnnie the pianist continued to play at parties and remained our inarticulate, interested, detached friend. George tracked down, through the native commissioners, the whereabouts of Jackson. He had taken his family to Nyasaland, left them there, and was now cook at a private house in the city. Sometimes George sent the family money, hoping it would be believed it came from the Boothbys who, he claimed, might be feeling remorse. But why should they? Nothing had happened, as far as they were concerned, that they should be ashamed of. And that was the end of it all. That was the material that made Frontiers of War. Of course, the two 'stories' have nothing at all in common. I remember very clearly the moment I knew I would write it. I was standing on the steps of the bedroom block of the Mashopi hotel with a cold hard glittering moonlight all around me. Down beyond the eucalyptus trees on the railway lines a goods train had come in and was standing and hissing and clattering off clouds of white steam. Near the train was George's parked lorry, and behind it the caravan, a brown painted box of a thing that looked like a flimsy packing case. George was in the caravan at that moment with Marie-I had just seen her creep down and climb in. The wet cooling flowerbeds smelt strongly of growth. From the dance room came the drumming of Johnnie's piano. Behind me I could hear the voices of Paul and Jimmy talking to Willi, and Paul's sudden young laugh. I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility, of danger, the secret ugly frightening pulse of war itself, of the death that we all wanted, for each other and for ourselves. [A date, some months later.] I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see. [The second notebook, the red one, had been begun without any hesitations at all. The British Communist Party was written across the first page, underlined twice, and the date, Jan .3rd, 1950, set underneath:] Last week, Molly came up at midnight to say that the Party members had been circulated with a form, asking for their history as members, and there was a section asking them to detail their 'doubts and confusions.' Molly said she had begun to write this, expecting to write a few sentences, had found herself writing 'a whole thesis-dozens of bloody pages.' She seemed upset with herself. 'What is it I want-a confessional? Anyway, since I've written it, I'm going to send it in.' I told her she was mad. I said: 'Supposing the British Communist Party ever gets into power, that document will be in the files, and if they want evidence to hang you, they've got it-thousands of times over.' She gave me her small, almost sour smile-the smile she uses when I say things like this. Molly is not an innocent communist. She said: 'You're very cynical.' I said: 'You know it's the truth. Or could be.' She said: 'If you think in that way, why are you talking of joining the Party?' I said: 'Why do you stay in it, when you think in that way too?' She smiled again, the sourness gone, ironically, and nodded. Sat a while, thinking and smoking. 'It's all very odd, Anna, isn't it?' And in the morning she said: 'I took your advice, I tore it up.' On the same day I had a telephone call from Comrade John saying that he had heard I was joining the Party, and that 'Comrade Bill'-responsible for culture-would like to interview me. 'You don't have to see him of course, if you don't feel like it,' said John hastily, 'but he said he would be interested to meet the first intellectual prepared to join the Party since the cold war started.' The sardonic quality of this appealed to me and I said I'd see Comrade Bill. This although I had not, in fact, finally decided to join. One reason not to, that I hate joining anything, which seems to me contemptible. The second reason, that my attitudes towards communism are such that I won't be able to say anything I believe to be true to any comrade I know, is surely decisive? It seems not however, for in spite of the fact that I've been telling myself for months I couldn't possibly join an organisation that seems to me dishonest, I've caught myself over and over again on the verge of the decision to join. And always at the same moments-there are two of them. The first, whenever I meet, for some reason, writers, publishers, etc.- the literary world. It is a world so prissy, maiden-auntish; so class-bound; or if it's the commercial side, so blatant, that any contact with it sets me thinking of joining the Party. The other moment is when I see Molly, just rushing off to organise something, full of life and enthusiasm, or when I come up the stairs, and I hear voices from the kitchen-I go in. The atmosphere of friendliness, of people working for a common end. But that's not enough. I'll see their Comrade Bill tomorrow and tell him that I'm by temperament 'A fellow traveller,' and I'll stay outside. The next day. Interview at King Street, a warren of little offices behind a facade of iron-protected glass. Had not really noticed the place before though I've been past it often enough. The protected glass gave me two feelings-one of fear; the world of violence. The other, a feeling of protectiveness-the need to protect an organisation that people throw stones at. I went up the narrow stairs thinking of the first feeling: how many people have joined the British C. P. because, in England, it is difficult to remember the realities of power, of violence; the C. P. represents to them the realities of naked power that are cloaked in England itself? Comrade Bill turned out to be a very young man, Jewish, spectacled, intelligent, working-class. His attitude towards me brisk and wary, his voice cool, brisk, tinged with contempt. I was interested that, at the contempt, which he was not aware he was showing, I felt in myself the beginnings of a need to apologise, almost a need to stammer. Interview very efficient; he had been told I was ready to join, and although I went to tell him I would not, I found myself accepting the situation. I felt (probably because of his attitude of contempt), well, he's right, they're getting on with the job, and I sit around dithering with my conscience. (Though, of course, I don't think he's right.) Before I left, he remarked, out of the blue, 'In five years' time, I suppose you'll be writing articles in the capitalist press exposing us as monsters, just like all the rest.' He meant, of course, by 'all the rest'-intellectuals. Because of the myth in the Party that it's the intellectuals who drift in and out, when the truth is the turnover is the same in all the classes and groups. I was angry. I was also, and that disarmed me, hurt. I said to him: 'It's lucky that I'm an old hand. If I were a raw recruit I might be disillusioned by your attitude.' He gave me a long, cool, shrewd look which said: Well, of course I wouldn't have made that remark if you hadn't been an old hand. This both pleased me-being back in the fold, so to speak, already entitled to the elaborate ironies and complicities of the initiated; and made me suddenly exhausted. I'd forgotten of course, having been out of the atmosphere so long, the tight, defensive, sarcastic atmosphere of the inner circles. But at the moments when I've wanted to join it's been with a full understanding of the nature of the inner circles. All the communists I know-that is, the ones of any intelligence, have the same attitude towards 'the centre'-that the Party has been saddled with a group of dead bureaucrats who run it, and that the real work gets done in spite of the centre. Comrade John's remark for instance, when I first told him I might join: 'You're mad. They hate and despise writers who join the Party. They only respect those who don't.' They' being the centre. It was a joke of course, but fairly typical. On the underground, read the evening newspaper. Attack on Soviet Union. What they said about it seemed to me true enough, but the tone-malicious, gloating, triumphant, sickened me, and I felt glad I had joined the Party. Came home to find Molly. She was out, and I spent some hours despondent, wondering why I had joined. She came in and I told her, and said: 'The funny thing is I was going to say I wouldn't join but I did.' She gave her small sourish smile (and this smile is only for politics, never for anything else, there is nothing sour in her nature), 'I joined in spite of myself too.' She had never given any hint of this before, was always such a loyalist, that I must have looked surprised. She. said: 'Well now you're in, I'll tell you.' Meaning that to an outsider the truth could not be told. 'I've been around Party circles so long that...' But even now she couldn't say straight out 'that I knew too much to want to join.' She smiled, or grimaced instead. 'I began working in the Peace thing, because I believed in it. All the rest were members. One day that bitch Ellen asked me why I wasn't a member. I was flippant about it-a mistake, she was angry. A couple of days later she told me there was a rumour I was an agent, because I wasn't a member. I suppose she started the rumour. The funny thing is, obviously if I was an agent I'd have joined-but I was so upset, I went off and signed on the dotted line...' She sat smoking and looking unhappy. Then said again: 'All very odd, isn't it?' And went off to bed.

5th Feb., 1950.

It's as I foresaw, the only discussions I have about politics where I say what I think is with people who have been in the Party and have now left. Their attitude towards me frankly tolerant-a minor aberration, that I joined.

19th August, 1951.

Had lunch with John, the first time since I joined the Party. Began talking as I do with my ex-party friends, frank acknowledgement of what is going on in Soviet Union. John went into automatic defence of the Soviet Union, very irritating. Yet this evening had dinner with Joyce, New Statesman circles, and she started to attack Soviet Union. Instantly I found myself doing the automatic-defence-of-Soviet-Union act, which I can't stand when other people do it. She went on; I went on. For her, she was in the presence of a communist so she started on certain cliches. I returned them. Twice tried to break the thing, start on a different level, failed-the atmosphere prickling with hostility. This evening Michael dropped in. I told him about this incident with Joyce. Remarked that although she was an old friend, we probably wouldn't meet again. Although I had changed my mental attitudes about nothing, the fact I had become a Party member, made me, for her, an embodiment of something she had to have certain attitudes towards. And I responded in kind. At which Michael said: 'Well, what did you expect?' He was speaking in his role of East European exile, ex-revolutionary, toughened by real political experience, to me in my role as 'political innocent.' And I replied in that role, producing all sorts of liberal inanities. Fascinating-the roles we play, the way we play parts.

15th Sept., 1951.

The case of Jack Briggs. Journalist on Times. Left it at outbreak of war. At that time, unpolitical. Worked during the war for British intelligence. During this time influenced by communists he met, moved steadily to the left. After the war refused several highly-paid jobs on the conservative newspapers, worked for low salary on left paper. Or-leftish; for when he wanted to write an article on China, that pillar of the left, Rex, put him in a position where he had to resign. No money. At this point, regarded as a communist in the newspaper world, and therefore unemployable, his name comes up in the Hungarian Trial, as British agent conspiring to overthrow communism. Met him by accident, he was desperately depressed-a whispering campaign around the Party and near-party circles, that he was and had been 'A capitalist spy.' Treated with suspicion by his friends. A meeting of the writers' group. We discussed this, decided to approach Bill, to put an end to this revolting campaign. John and I saw Bill, said it was obviously untrue Jack Briggs could ever be an agent, demanded he should do something. Bill affable, pleasant. Said he would 'make enquiries,' let us know. We let the 'enquiries' pass; knowing this meant a discussion higher up the Party. No word from Bill. Weeks passed. Usual technique of Party officials-let things slide, in moments of difficulty. We went to see Bill again. Extremely affable. Said he could do nothing. Why not? 'Well in matters of this case when there might be doubt...' John and I angry, demanded of Bill if he, personally, thought it was conceivable Jack could ever have been an agent. Bill hesitated, began on a long, manifestly insincere rationalisation, about how it was possible that anyone could be an agent 'including me.' With a bright, friendly smile. John and I left, depressed, angry-and with ourselves. We made a point of seeing Jack Briggs personally, and insisting that others did, but the rumours and spiteful gossip continue. Jack Briggs in acute depression, and also completely isolated, from right and left. To add to the irony, three months after his row with Rex about the article on China, which Rex said was 'communist in tone,' the respectable papers began publishing articles in the same tone, whereupon Rex, the brave man, found it the right time to publish an article on China. He invited Jack Briggs to write it. Jack, in an inverted, bitter mood, would not. This story, with variations more or less melodramatic, is the story of the communist or near-communist intellectual in this particular time.

3rd Jan., 1952.

I write very little in this notebook. Why? I see that everything I write is critical of the Party. Yet I am still in it. Molly too. Three of Michael's friends hanged yesterday in Prague. He spent the evening talking to me-or rather to himself. He was explaining, first, why it was impossible that these men could be traitors to communism. Then he explained, with much political subtlety, why it was impossible that the Party should frame and hang innocent people; and that these three had perhaps got themselves, without meaning to, into 'objectively' anti-revolutionary positions. He talked on and on and on until finally I said we should go to bed. All night he cried in his sleep. I kept jerking awake to find him whimpering, the tears wetting the pillow. In the morning I told him that he had been crying. He was angry-with himself. He went off to work looking an old man, his face lined and grey, giving me an absent nod-he was so far away, locked in his miserable self-questioning. Meanwhile I help with a petition for the Rosenbergs. Impossible to get people to sign it, except party and near-party intellectuals. (Not like France. The atmosphere of this country has changed dramatically in the last two or three years, tight, suspicious, frightened. It would take very little to send it off balance into our version of Mc Carthyism.) I am asked, even by people in the Party, let alone the 'respectable' intellectuals, why do I petition on behalf of the Rosenbergs but not on behalf of the people framed in Prague? I find it impossible to reply rationally, except that someone has to organise an appeal for the Rosenbergs. I am disgusted-with myself, with the people who won't sign for the Rosenbergs; I seem to live in an atmosphere of suspicious disgust. Molly began crying this evening, quite out of the blue-she was sitting on my bed, chatting about her day, then she began crying. In a still, helpless way. It reminded me of something, could not think of what, but of course it was Maryrose, suddenly letting the tears slide down her face sitting in the big room at Mashopi, saying: 'We believed everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won't.' Molly cried like that. Newspapers all over my floor, about the Rosenbergs, about the things in Eastern Europe. The Rosenbergs electrocuted. Felt sick all night. This morning I woke asking myself: why should I feel like this about the Rosenbergs, and only feel helpless and depressed about the frame-ups in communist countries? The answer an ironical one. I feel responsible for what happens in the West,, but not at all for what happens over there. And yet I am in the Party. I said something like this to Molly, and she replied, very brisk and efficient (she's in the middle of a hard organising job), 'All right, I know, but I'm busy.' Koestler. Something he said sticks in my mind-that any communist in the West who stayed in the Party after a certain date did so on the basis of a private myth. Something like that. So I demand of myself, what is my private myth? That while most of the criticisms of the Soviet Union are true, there must be a body of people biding their time there, waiting to reverse the present process back to real socialism. I had not formulated it so clearly before. Of course there is no Party member I could say this to, though it's the sort of discussion I have with ex-party people. Suppose that all the Party people I know have similarly incommunicable private myths, all different? I asked Molly. She snapped: 'What are you reading that swine Koestler for?' This remark is so far from her usual level of talk, political or otherwise, I was surprised, tried to discuss it with her. But she's very busy. When she's on an organising job (she is doing a big exhibition of art from Eastern Europe) she's too immersed in it to be interested. She's in another role altogether. It occurred to me today, that when 1 talk to Molly about politics, I never know what person is going to reply-the dry, wise, ironical political woman, or the Party fanatic who sounds, literally, quite maniacal. And I have these two personalities myself. For instance, met Editor Rex in the street. That was last week. After the greetings were exchanged, I saw a spiteful, critical look coming on to his face, and I knew it was going to be a crack about the Party. And I knew if he made one, I'd defend it. I couldn't bear to hear him, being spiteful, or myself, being stupid. So I made an excuse and left him. The trouble is, what you don't realise when you join the Party, soon you meet no one but communists or people who have been communists who can talk without that awful dilettantish spite. One becomes isolated. That's why I shall leave the Party, of course. I see that I wrote yesterday, I would leave the Party. I wonder when, and on what issue? Had dinner with John. We meet rarely-always on the verge of political disagreement. At the end of the dinner, he said: 'The reason why we don't leave the Party is that we can't bear to say good-bye to our ideals for a better world.' Trite enough. And interesting because it implies he believes, and that I must, only the communist party can better the world. Yet we neither of us believe any such thing. But above all, this remark struck me because it contradicted everything he had been saying previously. (I had been arguing that the Prague affair was obviously a frame-up and he was saying that while the Party made 'mistakes' it was incapable of being so deliberately cynical.) I came home thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind when I joined the Party was a need for wholeness, for an end to the split, divided, unsatisfactory way we all live. Yet joining the Party intensified the split-not the business of belonging to an organisation whose every tenet, on paper, anyway, contradicts the ideas of the society we live in; but something much deeper than that. Or at any rate, more difficult to understand. I tried to think about it, my brain kept swimming into blankness, I got confused and exhausted. Michael came in, very late. I told him what I was trying to think out. After all, he's a witch-doctor, a soul-curer. He looked at me, very dry and ironic, and remarked: 'My dear Anna, the human soul, sitting in a kitchen, or for that matter, in a double bed, is quite complicated enough, we don't understand the first thing about it. Yet you're sitting there worrying because you can't make sense of the human soul in the middle of a world revolution?' And so I left it, and I was glad to, but I was nevertheless feeling guilty because I was so happy not to think about it. I went to visit Berlin with Michael. He in search of old friends, dispersed in the war, might be anywhere. 'Dead, I expect,' he said in his new tone of voice, which is flat with a determination not to feel. Dates from the Prague trial, this voice. East Berlin terrifying place, bleak, grey, ruinous, but above all the atmosphere, the lack of freedom like an invisible poison continually spreading everywhere. The most significant incident this one: Michael ran into some people he knew from before the war. They greeted him with hostility- so that Michael, having run forward, to attract their attention, saw their hostile faces and shrank into himself. It was because they knew he had been friendly with the hanged men in Prague, or three of them, they were traitors, so that meant he was a traitor too. He tried, very quiet and courteous, to talk. They were like a group of dogs, or animals, facing outward, pressing against each other for support against fear. I've never experienced anything like that, the fear and hate on their faces. One of them, a woman with flaming angry eyes, said: 'What are you doing, comrade, wearing that expensive suit?' Michael's clothes are always off the peg, he spends nothing on clothes. He said: 'But Irene, it's the cheapest suit I could buy in London.' Her face snapped shut into suspicion, she glanced at her companions, then a sort of triumph. She said: 'Why do you come here, spreading that capitalist poison? We know you are in rags and there are no consumer goods.' Michael was at first stunned, then he said, still with irony, that even Lenin had understood the possibility that a newlyestablished communist society might suffer from a shortage of consumer goods. Whereas England which, 'as I think you know, Irene,' is a very solid capitalist society, is quite well-equipped with consumer goods. She gave a sort of grimace of fury, or hatred. Then she turned on her heel and went off, and her companions went with her. All Michael said was: 'That used to be an intelligent woman.' Later he made jokes about it, sounding tired and depressed. He said for instance: 'Imagine Anna, that all those heroic communists have died to create a society where Comrade Irene can spit at me for wearing a very slightly better suit than her husband has.' Stalin died today. Molly and I sat in the kitchen, upset. I kept saying, 'We are being inconsistent, we ought to be pleased. We've been saying for months he ought to be dead.' She said: 'Oh, I don't know, Anna, perhaps he never knew about all the terrible things that were happening.' Then she laughed and said: 'The real reason we're upset is that we're scared stiff. Better the evils we know.' 'Well, things can't be worse.' 'Why not? We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who's to stop it-us?' When Michael came in later, I told him what Molly had said-about Stalin's not knowing; because I thought how odd it was we all have this need for the great man, and create him over and over again in the face of all the evidence. Michael looked tired and grim. To my surprise he said: 'Well, it might be true, mightn't it? That's the point-anything might be true anywhere, there's never any way of really knowing the truth about anything. Anything is possible-everything's so crazy, anything at all's possible.' His face looked disintegrated and flushed as he said this. His voice toneless, as it is these days. Later he said: 'Well, we are pleased he is dead. But when I was young and politically active, he was a great man for me. He was a great man for all of us.' Then he tried to laugh, and he said: 'After all, there's nothing wrong, in itself, in wanting there to be great men in the world.' Then he put his hand over his eyes in a new gesture, shielding his eyes, as if the light hurt him. He said: 'I've got a headache, let's go to bed, shall we?' In bed we didn't make love, we lay quietly side by side, not talking. He was crying in his sleep; I had to wake him out of a bad dream. By-election. North London. Candidates-Conservative, Labour, Communist. A Labour seat, but with a reduced majority from the previous election. As usual, long discussions in C. P. circles about whether it is right to split the Labour vote. I've been in on several of them. These discussions have the same pattern. No, we don't want to split the vote; it's essential to have Labour in, rather than a Tory. But on the other hand, if we believe in C. P. policy, we must try to get our candidate in. Yet we know there's no hope of getting a C. P. candidate in. This impasse remains until emissary from Centre comes in to say that it's wrong to see the C. P. as a kind of ginger group, that's just defeatism, we have to fight the election as if we were convinced we were going to win it. (But we know we aren't going to win it.) So the fighting speech by the man from Centre, while it inspires everyone to work hard, does not resolve the basic dilemma. On the three occasions I watched this happen, the doubts and confusions were solved by-a joke. Oh yes, very important in politics, that joke. This joke made by the man from Centre himself: It's all right, comrades, we are going to lose our deposit, we aren't going to win enough votes to split the Labour vote. Much relieved laughter, and the meeting splits up. This joke, completely contradicting everything in official policy, in fact sums up how everyone feels. I went up to canvass, three afternoons. Campaign H. Q. in the house of a comrade living in the area; campaign organised by the ubiquitous Bill, who lives in the constituency. A dozen or so housewives, free to canvass in the afternoons-the men come in at night. Everyone knew each other, the atmosphere I find so wonderful-of people working together for a common end. Bill, a brilliant organiser, everything worked out to the last detail. Cups of tea and discussion about how things were going before we went out to canvass. This is a working-class area. 'Strong support for the Party around here,' said one woman, with pride. Am given two dozen cards, with the names of people who have already been canvassed, marked 'doubtful. ' My job to see them again, and talk them into voting for the C. P. As I leave the campaign H. Q., discussion about the right way to dress for canvassing-most of these women much better dressed than the women of the area. 'I don't think it's right to dress differently than usual,' says one woman, 'it's a kind of cheating. ' 'Yes, but if you turn up at the door too posh, they get on the defensive. ' Comrade Bill, laughing and good-natured-the same energetic good nature as Molly, when she's absorbed in detailed work, says: 'What matters is to get results. ' The two women chide him for being dishonest. 'We've got to be honest in everything we do, because otherwise they won't trust us. ' The names I am given are of people scattered over a wide area of working streets. A very ugly area of uniform, small, poor houses. A main station half a mile away, shedding thick smoke all around. Dark clouds, low and thick, and the smoke drifting up to join them. The first house has a cracked fading door. Mrs. C, in a sagging wool dress and apron, a worn-down woman. She has two small boys, well-dressed and kept. I say I am from the C. P.; she nods. I say: 'I understand you are undecided whether to vote for us?' She says: 'I've got nothing against you.' She's not hostile, but polite. She says: 'The lady who came last week left a book.' (A pamphlet.) Finally she says: 'But we've always voted Labour, dear.' I mark the card Labour, crossing out the Doubtful, and go on. The next, a Cypriot. This house even poorer, a young man looking harassed, a pretty dark girl, a new baby. Scarcely any furniture. New in England. It emerges that the point they are 'doubtful' about is whether they are entitled to the vote at all. I explain that they are. Both very good-natured, but wanting me to leave, the baby is crying, an atmosphere of pressure and harassment. The man says he doesn't mind the communists but he doesn't like the Russians. My feeling is they won't trouble to vote, but I leave the card 'doubtful' and go on to the next. A well-kept house, with a crowd of teddy-boys outside. Wolf-whistles and friendly jibes as I arrive. I disturb the housewife, who is pregnant and has been lying down. Before letting me in, she complains to her son that he said he was going to the shops for her. He says he will go later: a nice-looking, tough, well-dressed boy of sixteen or so-all the children in the area well-dressed, even when their parents are not. 'What do you want?' she says to me. 'I'm from the C. P. '-and explain. She says: 'Yes, we've had you before. ' Polite, but indifferent. After a discussion during which it's hard to get her to agree or disagree with anything, she says her husband has always voted Labour, and she does what her husband says. As I leave she shouts at her son, but he drifts off with a group of his friends, grinning. She yells at him. But this scene has a feeling of good nature about it: she doesn't really expect him to go shopping for her, but shouts at him on principle, while he expects her to shout at him, and doesn't really mind. At the next house, the woman at once and eagerly offers a cup of tea, says she likes elections, 'people keep dropping in for a bit of a talk. ' In short, she's lonely. She talks on and on about her personal problems on a dragging, listless harassed note. (Of the houses I visited this was the one which seemed to me to contain the real trouble, real misery.) She said she had three small children, was bored, wanted to go back to work, her husband wouldn't let her. She talked and talked and talked, obsessively, I was there nearly three hours, couldn't leave. When I finally asked her if she was voting for the C. P., she said: 'Yes, if you like dear'-which I'm sure she had said to all the canvassers. She added that her husband always voted Labour. I changed the 'doubtful' to Labour, and went on. At about ten that night I went back, with all the cards but three changed to Labour, and handed them in to Comrade Bill. I said: 'We have some pretty optimistic canvassers.' He flicked the cards over, without comment, replaced them in their boxes, and remarked loudly for the benefit of other canvassers coming in: 'There's real support for our policy, we'll get our candidate in yet. ' I canvassed three afternoons in all, the other two not 'doubtfuls' but going into houses for the first time. Found two C. P. voters, both Party members, the rest all Labour. Five lonely women going mad quietly by themselves, in spite of husband and children or rather because of them. The quality they all had: self-doubt. A guilt because they were not happy. The phrase they all used: 'There must be something wrong with me. ' Back in the campaign H. Q. I mentioned these women to the woman in charge for the afternoon. She said: 'Yes, whenever I go canvassing, I get the heeby-jeebies. This country's full of women going mad all by themselves. ' A pause, then she added, with a slight aggressiveness, the other side of the self-doubt, the guilt shown by the women I'd talked to: 'Well, I used to be the same until I joined the Party and got myself a purpose in life. ' I've been thinking about this-the truth is, these women interest me much more than the election campaign. Election Day: Labour in, reduced majority. Communist candidate loses deposit. Joke. (In campaign H. Q. Maker of joke, Comrade Bill.) 'If we'd got another two thousand votes, the Labour majority would have been on a knifeedge. Every cloud has a silver lining.' Jean Barker. Wife of minor Party official. Aged thirty-four. Small, dark, plump. Rather plain. Husband patronises her. She wears, permanently, a look of strained, enquiring good-nature. Comes around collecting Party dues. A born talker, never stops talking, but the most interesting kind of talker there is, she never knows what she is going to say until it is out of her mouth, so that she is continually blushing, catching herself up short, explaining just what it is she has meant, or laughing nervously. Or she stops with a puzzled frown in the middle of a sentence, as if to say: 'Surely I don't think that!" So while she talks she has the appearance of someone listening. She has started a novel, says she hasn't got time to finish it. I have not yet met one Party member, anywhere, who has not written, half-written, or is planning to write a novel, short stories, or a play. I find this an extraordinary fact, though I don't understand it. Because of her verbal incontinence, which shocks people, or makes them laugh, she is developing the personality of a clown, or a licensed humourist. She has no sense of humour at all. But when she hears some remark she makes pretend that surprises her, she knows from experience that people will laugh, or be upset, so she laughs herself, in a puzzled nervous way, then hurries on. She has three children. She and her husband very ambitious for them, goad them through school, to get scholarships. Children carefully educated in the Party 'line,' conditions in Russia, etc. They have the defensive closed-in look with strangers of people knowing themselves to be in a minority. With communists, they tend to show off their Party know-how, while their parents look on, proud. Jean works as a manager of a canteen. Long hours. Keeps her flat and her children and herself very well. Secretary of local Party branch. She is dissatisfied with herself. 'I'm not doing enough, I mean the Party's not enough, I get fed up, just paper work, like an office, doesn't mean anything.' Laughs, nervously. 'George-' (her husband) 'says that's the incorrect attitude, but I don't see why I should always have to bow down. I mean, they're wrong often enough, aren't they?' Laughs. 'I decided to do something worthwhile for a change.' Laughs. 'I mean, something different. After all, even the leading comrades are talking about sectarianism aren't they... well of course the leading comrades should be the first to say it...' Laughs. 'Though that's not what seems to happen... anyway, I decided to do something useful for a change.' Laughs. 'I mean, something different. So now I have a class of backward children on Saturday afternoons. I used to be a teacher you know. I coach them. No, not Party children, just ordinary children.' Laughs. 'Fifteen of them. It's hard work. George says I'd be better occupied making Party members, but I wanted to do something really useful...' And so on. The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren't really political at all, but who have a powerful sense of service. And then there are those who are lonely, and the Party is their family. The poet, Paul, who got drunk last week and said he was sick and disgusted with the Party, but he joined it in 1935, and if he left it, he'd be leaving 'his whole life.' [The yellow notebook looked like the manuscript of a novel, for it was called The Shadow of the Third. It certainly began like a novel:] Julia's voice came loud up the stairs: 'Ella, aren't you going to the party? Are you going to use the bath? If not, I will.' Ella did not answer. For one thing, she was sitting on her son's bed, waiting for him to drop off to sleep. For another, she had decided not to go to the party, and did not want to argue with Julia. Soon she made a cautious movement off the bed, but at once Michael's eyes opened, and he said: 'What party? Are you going to it?' 'No,' she said, 'go to sleep.' His eyes sealed themselves, the lashes quivered and lay still. Even asleep he was formidable, a square-built, tough four-year-old. In the shaded light his sandy hair, his lashes, even a tiny down on his bare forearm gleamed gold. His skin was brown and faintly glistening from the summer. Ella quietly turned off the lights-waited; went to the door- waited; slipped out-waited. No sound. Julia came brisk up the stairs, enquiring in her jolly off-hand voice: 'Well, are you going?' 'Shhhh, Michael's just off to sleep.' Julia lowered her voice and said: 'Go and have your bath now. I want to wallow in peace when you're gone.' 'But I said I'm not going,' said Ella, slightly irritable. 'Why not?' said Julia, going into the large room of the flat. There were two rooms and a kitchen, all rather small and low-ceilinged, being right under the roof. This was Julia's house, and Ella lived in it, with her son Michael, in these three rooms. The larger room had a recessed bed, books, some prints. It was bright and light, rather ordinary, or anonymous. Ella had not attempted to impose her own taste on it. Some inhibition stopped her: this was Julia's house, Julia's furniture; somewhere in the future lay her own taste. It was something like this that she felt. But she enjoyed living here and had no plans for moving out. Ella went after Julia and said: 'I don't feel like it.' 'You never feel like it,' said Julia. She was squatting in an armchair sizes too big for the room, smoking. Julia was plump, stocky, vital, energetic, Jewish. She was an actress. She had never made much of being an actress. She played small parts, competently. They were, as she complained, of two kinds: 'Stock working-class comic, and stock working-class pathetic' She was beginning to work for television. She was deeply dissatisfied with herself. When she said: 'You never feel like it,' it was a complaint partly against Ella, and partly against herself. She always felt like going out, could never refuse an invitation. She would say that even when she despised some role she was playing, hated the play, and wished she had nothing to do with it, she nevertheless enjoyed what she called 'flaunting her personality around.' She loved rehearsals, theatre shop and small talk and malice. Ella worked for a woman's magazine. She had done articles on dress and cosmetics, and of the getting-and-keeping-a-man kind, for three years, hating the work. She was not good at it. She would have been sacked if she had not been a friend of the woman editor. Recently she had been doing work she liked much better. The magazine had introduced a medical column. It was written by a doctor. But every week several hundred letters came in and half of them had nothing to do with medicine, and were of such a personal nature that they had to be answered privately. Ella handled these letters. Also she had written half a dozen short stories which she herself described satirically as 'sensitive and feminine,' and which both she and Julia said were the kind of stories they most disliked. And she had written part of a novel. In short, on the face of it there was no reason for Julia to envy Ella. But she did. The party tonight was at the house of the doctor under whom Ella worked. It was a long way out, in North London. Ella was lazy. It was always an effort for her to move herself. And if Julia had not come up, she would have gone to bed and read. 'You say,' said Julia, 'that you want to get married again, but how will you ever, if you never meet anybody?' 'That's what I can't stand,' said Ella, with sudden energy. 'I'm on the market again, so I have to go off to parties.' 'It's no good taking that attitude-that's how everything is run, isn't it?' 'I suppose so.' Ella, wishing Julia would go, sat on the edge of the bed (at the moment a divan and covered with soft-green-woven stuff), and smoked with her. She imagined she was hiding what she felt, but in fact she was frowning and fidgety. 'After all,' said Julia, 'you never meet anyone but those awful phonies in your office.' She added, 'Besides your decree was absolute last week.' Ella suddenly laughed, and after a moment Julia laughed with her, and they felt at once friendly to each other. Julia's last remark had struck a familiar note. They both considered themselves very normal, not to say conventional women. Women, that is to say, with conventional emotional reactions. The fact that their lives never seemed to run on the usual tracks was because, so they felt, or might even say, they never met men who were capable of seeing what they really were. As things were, they were regarded by women with a mixture of envy and hostility, and by men with emotions which-so they complained-were depressingly banal. Their friends saw them as women who positively disdained ordinary morality. Julia was the only person who would have believed Ella if she had said that for the whole of the time while she was waiting for the divorce she had been careful to limit her own reactions to any man (or rather, they limited themselves) who showed an attraction for her. Ella was now free. Her husband had married the day after the divorce was final. Ella was indifferent to this. It had been a sad marriage; no worse than many, certainly; but then Ella would have felt a traitor to her own self had she remained in a compromise marriage. For outsiders, the story went that Ella's husband George had left her for somebody else. She resented the pity she earned on this account, but did nothing to put things right, because of all sorts of complicated pride. And besides, what did it matter what people thought? She had the child, her self-respect, a future. She could not imagine this future without a man. Therefore, and of course she agreed that Julia was right to be so practical, she ought to be going to parties and accepting invitations. Instead she was sleeping too much and was depressed. 'And besides, if I go, I'll have to argue with Dr West, and it does no good.' Ella meant that she believed Dr West was limiting his usefulness, not from lack of conscientiousness, but from lack of imagination. Any query which he could not answer by advice as to the right hospitals, medicine, treatment, he handed over to Ella. 'I know, they are absolutely awful.' By they, Julia meant the world of officials, bureaucrats, people in any kind of office. They, for Julia, were by definition middle-class-Julia was a communist, though she had never joined the Party, and besides she had working-class parents. 'Look at this,' said Ella excitedly, pulling a folded blue paper from her handbag. It was a letter, on cheap writing paper, and it read: 'Dear Dr. Allsop. I feel I must write to you in my desperation. I get my rheumatism in my neck and head. You advise other sufferers kindly in your column. Please advise me. My rheumatism began when my husband passed over on the 9th March, 1950, at 3 in the afternoon at the Hospital. Now I am getting frightened, because I am alone in my flat, and what might happen if my rheumatism attacked all over and then I could not move for help. Looking forward to your kind attention, yours faithfully. (Mrs.) Dorothy Brown.' 'What did he say?' 'He said he had been engaged to write a medical column, not to run an out-patients for neurotics.' 'I can hear him,' said Julia, who had met Dr West once and recognised him as the enemy at first glance. 'There are hundreds and thousands of people, all over the country, simmering away in misery and no one cares.' 'No one cares a damn,' said Julia. She stubbed out her cigarette and said, apparently giving up her struggle to get Ella to the party, 'I'm going to have my bath.' And she went downstairs with a cheerful clatter, singing. Ella did not at once move. She was thinking: If I go, I'll have to iron something to wear. She almost got up to examine her clothes, but frowned and thought: If I'm thinking of what to wear, that means that I really want to go? How odd. Perhaps I do want to go? After all, I'm always doing this, saying I won't do something, then I change my mind. The point is, my mind is probably already made up. But which way? I don't change my mind. I suddenly find myself doing something when I've said I wouldn't. Yes. And now I've no idea at all what I've decided. A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The death of a young man who had not known he was going to commit suicide until the moment of death, when he understood that he had in fact been preparing for it, and in great detail, for months. The point of the novel would be the contrast between the surface of his life, which was orderly and planned, yet without any long-term objective, and an underlying motif which had reference only to the suicide, which would lead up to the suicide. His plans for his future were all vague and impossible, in contrast with the sharp practicality of his present life. The undercurrent of despair or madness or illogicalness would lead on to, or rather, refer back from, the impossible fantasies of a distant future. So the real continuity of the novel would be in the at first scarcely noticed substratum of despair, the growth of the unknown intention to commit suicide. The moment of death would also be the moment when the real continuity of his life would be understood-a continuity not of order, discipline, practicality, commonsense, but of unreality. It would be understood at the moment of death that the link between the dark need for death, and death, itself, had been the wild, crazy fantasies of a beautiful life; and that the commonsense and the order had been (not as it had seemed earlier in the story) symptoms of sanity, but intimations of madness. The idea for this novel had come to Ella at a moment when she found herself getting dressed to go out to dine with people after she had told herself she did not want to go out. She said to herself, rather surprised at the thought: This is precisely how I would commit suicide. I would find myself just about to jump out of an open window or turning on the gas in a small closed-in room, and I would say to myself, without any emotion, but rather with the sense of suddenly understanding something I should have understood long before: Good Lord! So that's what I've been meaning to do. That's been it all the time! And I wonder how many people commit suicide in precisely this way? It is always imagined as some desperate mood, or a moment of crisis. Yet for many it must happen just like that-they find themselves putting their papers in order, writing farewell letters, even ringing up their friends, in a cheerful, friendly way, almost with a feeling of curiosity... they must find themselves packing newspapers under the door, against window-frames, quite calmly and efficiently, remarking to themselves, quite detached: Well, well! How very interesting. How extraordinary I didn't understand what it was all about before! Ella found this novel difficult. Not for technical reasons. On the contrary, she could imagine the young man very clearly. She knew how he lived, what all his habits were. It was as if the story were already written somewhere inside herself, and she was transcribing it. The trouble was, she was ashamed of it. She had not told Julia about it. She knew her friend would say something like: 'That's a very negative subject, isn't it?' Or: 'That's not going to point the way forward...' Or some other judgment from the current communist armoury. Ella used to laugh at Julia for these phrases, yet at the bottom of her heart it seemed that she agreed with her, for she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it. And besides being surprised and ashamed of its subject, she was sometimes frightened. She had even thought: Perhaps I've made a secret decision to commit suicide that I know nothing about? (But she did not believe this to be true.) And she continued to write the novel, making excuses such as: 'Well, there's no need to get it published, I'll just write it for myself.' And in speaking of it to friends, she would joke: 'But everyone I know is writing a novel.' Which was more or less true. In fact her attitude towards this work was the same as someone with a passion for sweet-eating, indulged in solitude, or some other private pastime, like acting out scenes with an invisible alter ego, or carrying on conversation with one's image in the looking-glass. Ella had taken a dress out of the cupboard and set out the ironing-board, before she said: So, I'm going to the party after all, am I? I wonder at what point I decided that? While she ironed the dress, she continued to think about her novel, or rather to bring into the light a little more of what was already there, waiting, in the darkness. She had put the dress on and was looking at herself in the long glass before she finally left the young man to himself, and concentrated on what she was doing. She was dissatisfied with her appearance. She had never very much liked the dress. She had plenty of clothes in her cupboard, but did not much like any of them. And so it was with her face and hair. Her hair was not right, it never was. And yet she had everything to make her really attractive. She was small, and small-boned. Her features were good, in a small, pointed face. Julia kept saying: 'If you did yourself up properly you'd be like one of those piquant French girls, ever so sexy, you're that type.' Yet Ella always failed. Her dress tonight was a simple black wool which had looked as if it ought to be 'ever so sexy' but it was not. At least, not on Ella. And she wore her hair tied back. She looked pale, almost severe. 'But I don't care about the people I'm going to meet,' she thought, turning away from the glass. 'So it doesn't matter. I'd try harder for a party I really wanted to go to.' Her son was asleep. She shouted to Julia outside the bathroom door: 'I'm going after all.' To which Julia replied with a calm triumphant chuckle: 'I thought you would.' Ella was slightly annoyed at the triumph, but said: 'I'll be back early.' To which Julia did not reply directly. She said: 'I'll keep my bedroom door open for Michael. Good night.' To reach Dr West's house meant half an hour on the underground, changing once, and then a short trip by bus. One reason why Ella was always reluctant to drag herself out of Julia's house was because the city frightened her. To move, mile after mile, through the weight of ugliness that is London in its faceless peripheral wastes made her angry; then the anger ebbed out, leaving fear. At the bus-stop, waiting for her bus, she changed her mind and decided to walk, to punish herself for her cowardice. She would walk the mile to the house, and face what she hated. Ahead of her the street of grey mean little houses crawled endlessly. The grey light of a late summer's evening lowered a damp sky. For miles in all directions, this ugliness, this meanness. This was London- endless streets of such houses. It was hard to bear, the sheer physical weight of the knowledge because-where was the force that could shift the ugliness? And in every street, she thought, people like the woman whose letter was in her handbag. These streets were ruled by fear and ignorance, and ignorance and meanness had built them. This was the city she lived in, and she was part of it, and responsible for it... Ella walked fast, alone in the street, hearing her heels ring behind her. She was watching the curtains at the windows. At this end, the street was working-class, one could tell by the curtains, of lace and flowered stuffs. These were the people who wrote in the terrible unanswerable letters she had to deal with. But now things suddenly changed, because the curtains at the windows changed-here was a sheen of peacock blue. It was a painter's house. He had moved into the cheap house and made it beautiful. And other professional people had moved in after him. Here were a small knot of people different from the others in the area. They could not communicate with the people further down the street, who could not, and probably would not, enter these houses at all. Here was Dr West's house-he knew the first-comer, the painter, and had bought the house almost opposite. He had said: 'Just in time, the values are rising already.' The garden was untidy. He was a busy doctor with three children and his wife helped him with his practice. No time for gardens. (The gardens further down the street had been mostly well-tended.) From this world, thought Ella, came no letters to the oracles of the women's magazines. The door opened in on the brisk, kindly face of Mrs. West. She said: 'So here you are at last,' and took Ella's coat. The hall was pretty and clean and practical-Mrs. West's world. She said: 'My husband tells me you've been having another brush with him over his lunatic fringe. It's good of you to take so much trouble over these people.' 'It's my job,' said Ella. 'I'm paid for it.' Mrs. West smiled, with a kindly tolerance. She resented Ella. Not because she worked with her husband-no, this was too crude an emotion for Mrs. West. Ella had not understood Mrs. West's resentment until one day she had used the phrase: You career girls. It was a phrase so discordant, like 'lunatic fringe' and 'these people' that Ella had been unable to reply to it. And now Mrs. West had made a point of letting her know that her husband discussed his work with her, establishing wifely rights. In the past, Ella had said to herself: But she's a nice woman, in spite of everything. Now, angry, she said: She's not a nice woman. These people are all dead and damned, with their disinfecting phrases, lunatic fringe and career girls. I don't like her and I'm not going to pretend I do... She followed Mrs. West into the living-room, which held faces she knew. The woman for whom she worked at the magazine, for instance. She was also middle-aged, but smart and well-dressed, with bright curling grey hair. She was a professional woman, her appearance part of her job, unlike Mrs. West, who was pleasant to look at, but not at all smart. Her name was Patricia Brent, and the name was also part of her profession-Mrs. Patricia Brent, editress. Ella went to sit by Patricia, who said: 'Dr West's been telling us you've been quarrelling with him over his letters.' Ella looked swiftly around, and saw people smiling expectantly. The incident had been served up as party fare, and she was expected to play along with it a little, then allow the thing to be dropped. But there must not be any real discussion, or discordance. Ella said smiling: 'Hardly quarrelling.' She added, on a carefully plaintive-humorous note, which was what they were waiting for: 'But it's very depressing, after all, these people you can't do anything for.' She saw she had used the phrase, these people, and was angry and dispirited. I shouldn't have come, she thought. These people (meaning, this time, the Wests and what they stood for) only tolerate you if you're like them. 'Ah, but that's the point,' said Dr West. He said it briskly. He was an altogether brisk, competent man. He added, teasing Ella: 'Unless the whole system's changed of course. Our Ella's a revolutionary without knowing it.' 'I imagined,' said Ella, 'that we all wanted the system changed.' But that was altogether the wrong note. Dr West involuntarily frowned, then smiled. 'But of course we do,' he said. 'And the sooner the better.' The Wests voted for the Labour Party. That Dr West was 'Labour' was a matter of pride to Patricia Brent, who was a Tory. Her tolerance was thus proved. Ella had no politics, but she was also important to Patricia, for the ironical reason that she made no secret of the contempt she felt for the magazine. She shared an office with Patricia. The atmosphere of this office, and all the others connected with the magazine, had the same atmosphere, the atmosphere of the magazine-coy, little-womanish, snobbish. And all the women working there seemed to acquire the same tone, despite themselves, even Patricia herself, who was not at all like this. For Patricia was kind, hearty, direct, full of a battling self-respect. Yet in the office she would say things quite out of character, and Ella, afraid for herself, criticised her for it. Then she went on to say that while they were both in a position where they had to earn their livings, they didn't have to lie to themselves about what they had to do. She had expected, even half-wished, that Patricia would tell her to leave. Instead she had been taken out to an expensive lunch where Patricia defended herself. It turned out that for her this job was a defeat. She had been fashion editress of one of the big smart woman's magazines, but apparently had not been considered up to it. It was a magazine with a fashionable cultural gloss, and it was necessary to have an editress with a nose for what was fashionable in the arts. Patricia had no feeling at all for the cultural band-waggon, which, as far as Ella was concerned, was a point in her favour, but the proprietor of this particular group of woman's magazines had shifted Patricia over to Women at Home, which was angled towards working-class women, and had not even a pretence of cultural tone. Patricia was now well-suited for her work, and it was this which secretly chagrined her. She had wistfully enjoyed the atmosphere of the other magazine which had fashionable authors and artists associated with it. She was the daughter of a county family, rich but philistine; her childhood had been well supported by servants, and it was this, an early contact with 'the lower-classes'-she referred to them as such, inside the office, coyly; outside, unself-consciously-that gave her her shrewd direct understanding of what to serve her readers. Far from giving Ella the sack, she had developed the same wistful respect for her that she had for the glossy magazine she had had to leave. She would casually remark that she had working for her someone who was a 'highbrow'-someone whose stories had been published in the 'highbrow papers.' And she had a far warmer, more human understanding of the letters which came into the office than Dr West. She now protected Ella by saying: 'I agree with Ella. Whenever I take a look at her weekly dose of misery, I don't know how she does it. It depresses me so I can't even eat. And believe me, when my appetite goes, things are serious.' Now everybody laughed, and Ella smiled gratefully at Patricia who nodded, as if to say: 'It's all right, we weren't criticising you.' Now the talk began again and Ella was free to look around her. The living-room was large. A wall had been broken down. In the other, identical little houses of the street, two minute ground-floor rooms served as kitchen- full of people and used to live in, and parlour, used for company. This room was the entire ground-floor of the house, and a staircase led up to the bedrooms. It was bright, with a good many different colours-sharp blocks of contrasting colour, dark green, and bright pink and yellow. Mrs. West had no taste, and the room didn't come off. In five years' time, Ella thought, the houses down the street will have walls in solid bright colours, and curtains and cushions in tune. We are pushing this phase of taste on them-in Women at Home, for instance. And this room will be-what? Whatever is the next thing, I suppose... but I ought to be more sociable, this is a party, after all... Looking around again she saw it was not a party, but an association of people who were there because the Wests had said: 'It's time we asked some people around,' and they had come saying: 'I suppose we've got to go over to the Wests.' I wish I hadn't come, Ella thought, and there's all that long way back again. At this point a man left his seat across the room and came to sit by her. Her first impression was of a lean young man's face, and a keen, nervously critical smile which, as he talked, introducing himself (his name was Paul Tanner and he was a doctor) had moments of sweetness, as it were against his will, or without his knowledge. She realised she was smiling back, acknowledging these moments of warmth, and so she looked more closely at him. Of course, she had been mistaken, he was not as young as she had thought. His rather rough black hair was thinning at the crown, and his very white, slightly freckled skin was incised sharply around his eyes. These were blue, deep, rather beautiful; eyes both combative and serious, with a gleam in them of uncertainty. A nerve-hung face, she decided, and saw that his body was tensed as he talked, which he did well, but in a self-watchful way. His self-consciousness had her reacting away from him, whereas only a moment ago she had been responding to the unconscious warmth of his smile. These were her first reactions to the man she was later to love so deeply. Afterwards he would complain, half-bitter, half-humorous: 'You didn't love me at all, to begin with. You should have loved me at first sight. If just once in my life a woman would take one look at me and fall in love, but they never do.' Later still, he would develop the theme, consciously humorous now, because of the emotional language: 'The face is the soul. How can a man trust a woman who falls in love with him only after they have made love? You did not love me at all.' And he would maintain a bitter, humorous laugh, while Ella exclaimed: 'How can you separate love-making off from everything else? It doesn't make sense.' Her attention was going away from him. She was aware she was beginning to fidget, and that he knew it. Also that he minded: he was attracted to her. His face was too intent on keeping her; she felt that somewhere in all this was pride, a sexual pride which would be offended if she did not respond, and this made her feel a sudden desire to escape. This complex of emotions, all much too sudden and violent for comfort, made Ella think of her husband George. She had married George almost out of exhaustion, after he had courted her violently for a year. She had known she shouldn't marry him. Yet she did; she did not have the will to break with him. Shortly after the marriage she had become sexually repelled by him, a feeling she was unable to control or hide. This redoubled his craving for her, which made her dislike him the more-he even seemed to get some thrill or satisfaction out of her repulsion for him. They were apparently in some hopeless psychological deadlock. Then, to pique her, he had slept with another woman and told her about it. Belatedly she had found the courage to break with him that she lacked before: she took her stand, dishonestly, in desperation, on the fact he had broken faith with her. This was not her moral code, and the fact she was using conventional arguments, repeating endlessly because she was a coward, that he had been unfaithful to her, made her despise herself. The last few weeks with George were a nightmare of self-contempt and hysteria, until at last she left his house, to put an end to it, to put a distance between herself and the man who suffocated her, imprisoned her, apparently took away her will. He then married the woman he had made use of to bring Ella back to him. Much to Ella's relief. She was in the habit, when depressed, to worry interminably over her behaviour during this marriage. She made many sophisticated psychological remarks about it; she denigrated both herself and him; felt wearied and soiled by the whole experience, and worse, secretly feared that she might be doomed, by some flaw in herself, to some unavoidable repetition of the experience with another man. But after she had been with Paul Tanner for only a short time, she would say, with the utmost simplicity: 'Of course, I never loved George.' As if there were nothing more to be said about it. And as far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to be said. Nor did it worry her at all that all the complicated psychological attitudes were hardly on the same level as: 'Of course I never loved him,' with its corollary that: 'I love Paul.' Meanwhile she was restless to get away from him and felt trapped-not by him, by the possibilities of her past resurrecting itself in him. He said: 'What was the case that sparked off your argument with West?' He was trying to keep her. She said: 'Oh, you're a doctor too, they're all cases, of course.' She had sounded shrill and aggressive, and now she made herself smile and said: 'I'm sorry. But the work worries me more than it should, I suppose.' 'I know,' he said. Dr West would never have said: 'I know,' and instantly Ella warmed to him. The frigidity of her manner, which she was unconscious of, and which she could never lose except with people she knew well, melted away at once. She fished in her handbag for the letter, and saw him smile quizzically at the disorder she revealed. He took the letter, smiling. He sat with it in his hand, unopened, looking at her with appreciation, as if welcoming her, her real self, now open to him. Then he read the letter and again sat holding it, this time opened out. 'What could poor West do? Did you want him to prescribe ointments?' 'No, no, of course not.' 'She's probably been pestering her own doctor three times a week ever since-' he consulted the letter, '-the 9th of March, 1950. The poor man's been prescribing every ointment he can think of.' 'Yes, I know,' she said. 'I've got to answer it tomorrow morning. And about a hundred more.' She held out her hand for the letter. 'What are you going to say to her?' 'What can I say? The thing is, there are thousands and thousands, probably millions of them.' The word millions sounded childish, and she looked intently at him, trying to convey her vision of a sagging, dark weight of ignorance and misery. He handed her the letter and said: 'But what are you going to say?' 'I can't say anything she really needs. Because what she wanted, of course, was for Dr. Allsop himself to descend on her, and rescue her, like a knight on a white horse.' 'Of course.' 'That's the trouble. I can't say, Dear Mrs. Brown, you haven't got rheumatism, you're lonely and neglected, and you're inventing symptoms to make a claim on the world so that someone will pay attention to you. Well, can IT 'You can say all that, tactfully. She probably knows it herself. You could tell her to make an effort to meet people, join some organisation, something like that.' 'It's arrogant, me telling her what to do.' 'She's written for help, so it's arrogant not to.' 'Some organisation, you say! But that's not what she wants. She doesn't want something impersonal. She's been married for years and now she feels as if half of herself's torn away.' At this he regarded her gravely for some moments, and she did not know what he was thinking. At last he said: 'Well, I expect you're right. But you could suggest she write to a marriage bureau.' He laughed at the look of distaste that showed on her face, and went on: 'Yes, but you'd be surprised how many good marriages I've organised myself, through marriage bureaux.' 'You sound like-a sort of psychiatric social worker,' she said, and as soon as the words were out, she knew what the reply would be. Dr West, the sound general practitioner, with no patience for 'frills,' made jokes about his colleague, 'the witch-doctor,' to whom he sent patients in serious mental trouble. This, then, was 'the witch-doctor.' Paul Tanner was saying, with reluctance: 'That's what I am, in a sense.' She knew the reluctance was because he did not want from her the obvious response. What the response was she knew because she had felt a leap inside herself of relief and interest, an uneasy interest because he was a witch-doctor, possessed of all sorts of knowledge about her. She said quickly: 'Oh, I'm not going to tell you my troubles.' After a pause during which, she knew, he was looking for the words which would discourage her from doing so, he said: 'And I never give advice at parties.' 'Except to widow Brown,' she said. He smiled, and remarked: 'You're middle-class, aren't you?' It was definitely a judgement. Ella was hurt. 'By origin,' she said. He said: 'I'm working-class, so perhaps I know rather more about widow Brown than you do.' At this point Patricia Brent came over, and took him away to talk to some member of her staff. Ella realised that they had made an absorbed couple, in a party not designed for couples. Patricia's manner had said that they had drawn attention. So Ella was rather annoyed. Paul did not want to go. He gave her a look that was urgent, and appealing, yet also hard. Yes, thought Ella, a hard look, like a nod of command that she should stay where she was until he was free to come back to her. And she reacted away from him again. It was time to go home. She had only been at the Wests an hour, but she wanted to get away. Paul Tanner was now sitting between Patricia and a young woman. Ella could not hear what was being said but both the women wore expressions of half-excited, half-furtive interest, which meant they were talking, obliquely or directly, about Dr Tanner's profession, and as it illuminated themselves, while he maintained a courteous but stiff smile. He's not going to get free of them for hours, Ella thought; and she got up and made her excuses to Mrs. West, who was annoyed with her for leaving so soon. She nodded at Dr West, whom she would meet tomorrow over a pile of letters, and smiled at Paul, whose blue eyes swung up, very blue and startled, at the news that she was leaving. She went into the hall to put on her coat, and he came out, hurriedly, behind her, offering to take her home. His manner was now off-hand, almost rude, because he had not wanted to be forced into such a public pursuit. Ella said: 'It's probably out of your way.' He said: 'Where do you live?' and when she told him, said firmly it was not out of his way at all. He had a small English car. He drove it fast and well. The London of the car-owner and taxi-user is a very different city from that of the tube and bus-user. Ella was thinking that the miles of grey squalor she had travelled through were now a hazy and luminous city blossoming with lights; and that it had no power to frighten her. Meanwhile, Paul Tanner darted at her sharp enquiring glances and asked brief practical questions about her life. She told him, meaning to challenge his pigeon-holing of her, that she had served throughout the war in a canteen for factory women, and had lived in the same hostel. That after the war she had contracted tuberculosis, but not badly, and had spent six months on her back in a sanatorium. This was the experience that had changed her life, changed her much more deeply than the war years with the factory women. Her mother had died when she was very young, and her father, a silent, hardbitten man, an ex-army officer from India, had brought her up. 'If you could call it a bringing-up-I was left to myself, and I'm grateful for it,' she said, laughing. And she had been married, briefly and unhappily. To each of these bits of information, Paul Tanner nodded; and Ella saw him sitting behind a desk, nodding at the replies to a patient's answers to questions. 'They say you write novels,' he said, as he slid the car to a standstill outside Julia's house. 'I don't write novels,' she said, annoyed as at an invasion of privacy, and immediately got out of the car. He quickly got out of his side and reached the door at the same time she did. They hesitated. But she wanted to go inside, away from the intentness of his pursuit of her. He said brusquely: 'Will you come for a drive with me tomorrow afternoon?' As an after-thought, he gave a hasty glance at the sky, which was heavily clouded, and said: 'It looks as if it will be fine.' At this she laughed, and out of the good feeling engendered by the laugh, said she would. His face cleared into relief-more, triumph. He's won a kind of victory, she thought, rather chilled. Then, after another hesitation, he shook hands with her, nodded, and went off to his car, saying he would pick her up at two o'clock. She went indoors through the dark hall, up dark stairs, through the silent house. A light showed under Julia's door. It was very early, after all. She called: 'I'm back, Julia,' and Julia's full clear voice said: 'Come in and talk.' Julia had a large comfortable bedroom, and she lay on massed pillows in a large double bed, reading. She wore pyjamas, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. She looked good-natured, shrewd and very inquisitive. 'Well, how was it?' 'Boring,' said Ella, making this a criticism of Julia for forcing her to go-by her invisible strength of will. 'I was brought home by a psychiatrist,' she added, using the word deliberately, to see appear on Julia's face the look she had felt on her own, and seen on the faces of Patricia and the young woman. When she saw it, she felt ashamed and sorry she had said it-as if she had deliberately committed an act of aggression towards Julia. Which I have, she thought. 'And I don't think I like him,' she added, relapsing into childishness, playing with the scent bottles on Julia's dressing-table. She rubbed scent into the flesh of her wrists, watching Julia's face in the looking-glass, which was now again sceptical, patient and shrewd. She thought: Well, of course Julia's a sort of mother-image, but do I have to play up to it all the time?-And besides, most of the time I feel maternal towards Julia, I have a need to protect her, though I don't know from what. 'Why don't you like him?' enquired Julia. This was serious, and Ella would now have to think seriously. Instead she said: 'Thanks for looking after Michael,' and went upstairs to bed, giving Julia a small, apologetic smile as she went. Next day sunlight was settled over London, and the trees in the streets seemed not to be part of the weight of the buildings, and of pavements, but an extension of fields and grass and country. Ella's indecision about the drive that afternoon swung into pleasure as she imagined sunshine on grass; and she understood, from the sudden flight upwards of her spirits, that she must recently have been more depressed than she had realised. She found herself singing as she cooked the child's lunch. It was because she was remembering Paul's voice. At the time she had not been conscious of Paul's voice, but now she heard it-a warm voice, a little rough where the edges of an uneducated accent remained. (She was listening, as she thought of him, rather than looking at him.) And she was listening, not to the words he had used, but to tones in which she was now distinguishing delicacy, irony, and compassion. Julia was taking Michael off for the afternoon to visit friends, and she left early, as soon as lunch was over, so that the little boy would not know his mother was going for a drive without him. 'You look very pleased with yourself, after all,' said Julia. Ella said: 'Well, I haven't been out of London for months. Besides, this business of not having a man around doesn't suit me.' 'Who does it suit?' retorted Julia. 'But I don't think any man is better than none.' And having planted this small dart, she departed with the child, in good humour. Paul was late, and from the way he apologised, almost perfunctorily, she understood he was a man often late, and from temperament, not only because he was a busy doctor with many pressures on him. On the whole she was pleased he was late. One look at his face, that again had the cloud of nervous irritability settled on it, reminded her that last night she had not liked him. Besides, being late meant that he didn't really care for her, and that eased a small tension of panic that related to George, and not to Paul. (She knew this herself.) But as soon as they were in the car and heading out of London, she was aware that he was again sending small nervous glances towards her; she felt determination in him. But he was talking and she was listening to his voice, and it was every bit as pleasant as she remembered it. She listened, and looked out of the window, and laughed. He was telling how he came to be late. Some misunderstanding between himself and the group of doctors he worked with at his hospital, 'No one actually said anything aloud, but the upper-middle-classes communicate with each other in inaudible squeaks, like bats. It puts people of my background at a terrible disadvantage.' 'You're the only working-class doctor there?' 'No, not in the hospital, just in that section. And they never let you forget it. They're not even conscious of doing it.' This was good-humoured, humorous. It was also bitter. But the bitterness was from old habit, and had no sting in it. This afternoon it was easy to talk, as if the barrier between them had been silently dissolved in the night. They left the ugly trailing fringes of London behind, sunlight lay about them, and Ella's spirits rose so sharply that she felt intoxicated. Besides, she knew that this man would be her lover, she knew it from the pleasure his voice gave her, and she was full of a secret delight. His glances at her now were smiling, almost indulgent, and like Julia he remarked: 'You look very pleased with yourself.' 'Yes, it's getting out of London.' 'You hate it so much?' 'Oh, no, I like it, I mean, I like the way I live in it. But I hate-this.' And she pointed out of the window. The hedges and trees had again been swallowed by a small village. Nothing left here of the old England, it was new and ugly. They drove through the main shopping street, and the names on the shops were the same as they had driven past repeatedly, all the way out of London. 'Why?' 'Well, obviously, it's so ugly.' He was looking curiously into her face. After a while he remarked: 'People live in it.' She shrugged. 'Do you hate them as well?' Ella felt resentful: it occurred to her that for years, anyone she was likely to meet would have understood without explanation why she hated 'all this'; and to ask her if she 'hated them as well,' meaning ordinary people, was off the point. Yet after thinking it over, she said, defiant: 'In a way, yes. I hate what they put up with. It ought to be swept away-all of it.' And she made a wide sweeping movement with her hand, brushing away the great dark weight of London, and the thousand ugly towns, and the myriad small cramped lives of England. 'But it's not going to be, you know,' he said, with a small smiling obstinacy. 'It's going to go on-and there'll be more chain shops, and television aerials, and respectable people. That's what you mean, isn't it?' 'Of course. But you just accept it. Why do you take it all for granted?' 'It's the time we live in. And things are better than they were.' 'Better!' she exclaimed, involuntarily, but checked herself. For she understood she was setting against the word better a personal vision that dated from her stay in hospital, a vision of some dark, impersonal destructive force that worked at the roots of life and that expressed itself in war and cruelty and violence. Which had nothing to do with what they argued. 'You mean,' she said, 'better in the sense of no unemployment and no one being hungry?' 'Strangely enough, yes, that's what I do mean.' He said it in such a way that it put a barrier between them-he was from the working-people, and she was not, and he was of the initiated. So she kept silence until he insisted: 'Things are much better, much much better. How can you not see it? I remember...' And he stopped-this time, not because (as Ella put it) he was 'bullying' her, from superior knowledge, but from the painfulness of what he remembered. So she tried again: 'I can't understand how anyone can see what's happening to this country and not hate it. On the surface everything's fine-all quiet and tame and suburban. But underneath it's poisonous. It's full of hatred and envy and people being lonely.' 'That's true of everything, everywhere. It's true of any place that has reached a certain standard of living.' 'That doesn't make it any better.' 'Anything's better than a certain kind of fear.' 'You mean, real poverty. And you mean, of course, that I'm not equipped to understand that at all.' At this he glanced at her quickly, in surprise at her persistence-and, as Ella felt, out of a certain respect for it. There was no trace in that glance of a man assessing a woman for her sexual potentialities, and she felt more at ease. 'So you'd like to put a giant bulldozer over it all, over all England?' 'Yes.' 'Leaving just a few cathedrals and old buildings and a pretty village or two?' 'Yes.' 'And then you'd bring the people back into fine new cities, each one an architect's dream, and tell everyone to like it or lump it.' 'Yes.' 'Or perhaps you'd like a merrie England, beer, skittles, and the girls in long homespun dresses?' She said, angry: 'Of course not! I hate all the William Morris stuff. But you're being dishonest. Look at you-I'm sure you've spent most of your energy simply getting through the class barrier. There can't be any connection at all between how you live now and the way your parents lived. You must be a stranger to them. You must be split into two parts. That's what this country is like. You know it is. Well I hate it, I hate all that. I hate a country so split up that-I didn't know anything about it until the war and I lived with all those women.' 'Well,' he said at last, 'they were right last night-you're a revolutionary after all.' 'No, I'm not. Those words don't mean anything to me. I'm not interested in politics at all.' At which he laughed, but said, with an affection that touched her: 'If you had your way, building the new Jerusalem, it would be like killing a plant by suddenly moving it into the wrong soil. There's a continuity, some kind of invisible logic to what happens. You'd kill the spirit of people if you had your way.' 'A continuity isn't necessarily right, just because it's a continuity.' 'Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is.' This was so personal, that it was her turn to glance, surprised, at him, and decide to say nothing. He is saying, she thought, that the split in himself is so painful that sometimes he wonders if it was worth it... and she turned away to look out of the window again. They were passing through another village. This was better than the last: there was an old centre, of mellow rooted houses, warm in the sunshine. But around the centre, ugly new houses and even in the main square, a Woolworth's, indistinguishable from all the others, and a fake Tudor pub. There would be a string of such villages, one after another. Ella said: 'Let's get away from the villages, where there isn't anything at all.' This time his look at her, which she noted, but did not understand until afterwards, was frankly startled. He did not say anything for a time, but when a small road appeared, wandering off through deep sun-lit trees, he turned off into it. He asked: 'Where's your father living?' 'Oh,' she said, 'I see what you're getting at. Well he's not like that at all.' 'Like what? I didn't say anything.' 'No, but you imply it all the time. He's ex-Indian army. But he isn't like the caricatures. He got unfit for the army and was in the administration for a time. And he's not like that either.' 'So what is he like?' She laughed. The sound held affection which was spontaneous and genuine, and a bitterness which she did not know was there. 'He bought an old house when he left India. It's in Cornwall. It's small and isolated. It's very pretty. Old-you know. He's an isolated man, he always has been. He reads a lot. He knows a lot about philosophy and religion-like Buddha, for instance.' 'Does he like you?' 'Like me?' The question was startling to Ella. Not once had she asked herself whether her father liked her. She turned to Paul in a flash of recognition, laughing: 'What a question. But you know, I don't know?' And added, in a small voice: 'No, come to think of it, and I never have, I don't believe he does, not really.' 'Of course he does,' said Paul over-hastily, clearly regretting he had asked. 'There's no of course about it,' and Ella sat silent, thinking. She knew that Paul's glances at her were guilty and affectionate, and she liked him very much for his concern for her. She tried to explain: 'When I go home for week-ends, he's pleased to see me-I can see that. He never complains that I don't go more often though. But when I'm there it doesn't seem to make any difference to him. He has a routine. An old woman does the house. The meals are just so. He has a few things to eat he always has, like red beef and steak and eggs. He drinks one gin before lunch, and two or three whiskys after dinner. He goes for a long walk every morning after breakfast. He gardens in the afternoon. He reads every night until very late. When I'm there, it's all just the same. He doesn't even talk to me.' She laughed again. 'It's what you said earlier-I'm not on the wavelength, he has one very close friend, a colonel, and they look alike, both lean and leathery with fierce eyebrows, and they communicate in high, inaudible squeaks. They sometimes sit opposite each other for hours and never say a word, just drink whisky, or they sometimes make short references to India. And when my father is alone, I think he communicates with God or Buddha or somebody. But not with me. Usually if I say something, he sounds embarrassed, or talks about something else.' Ella fell silent thinking that was the longest speech she had made to him, and it was odd it should be so, since she seldom spoke of her father, or even thought of him. Paul did not take it up, but instead asked abruptly: 'How's this?' The rough track had come to an end in a small hedged-in field. 'Oh,' said Ella. 'Yes. This morning I was hoping you'd take me to a small field, just like this.' She got quickly out of the car, just conscious of his startled glance; but she did not remember it until later, when she was searching her memory to find out how he had felt about her that day. She wandered for a time through the grasses, fingering them, smelling them, and letting the sun fall on her face. When she drifted back to him, he had spread a rug on the grass and was sitting on it, waiting. His look of waiting destroyed the ease that had been created in her by the small freedom of the sun-lit field, and set up a tension. She thought, as she flung herself down, he's set on something, good Lord, is he going to make love to me so soon? Oh, no, he wouldn't, not yet. All the same, she lay near him, and was happy, and was content to let things take their course. Later-and not so much later, he would say, teasing her, that she had brought him here because she had decided she wanted him to make love to her, that she had planned it. And she always got furiously indignant, and then as he persisted, set cold towards him. And then she would forget it. And then he came back to it, and because she knew it was important to him, the little recurring wrangle left a poisoned spot which spread. It was not true. In the car she had known he would be her lover, because of the quality of his voice, which she trusted. But at some time, it didn't matter when. He would know the right time, she felt. And so if the right time was then, that first afternoon alone, it must be right. 'And what do you suppose I would have done if you hadn't made love to me?' she would ask, later, curious and hostile. 'You'd have been bad-tempered,' he replied, laughing but with a curious undertone of regret. And the regret, which was genuine, drew her to him, as if they were fellow-victims of some cruelty in life neither could help. 'But you arranged it all,' she would say. 'You even brought out a rug for the purpose. I suppose you always take a rug in the car for afternoon jaunts, just in case.' 'Of course, nothing like a nice warm rug on the grass.' At which she would laugh. And later still she would think, chilled: 'I suppose he had taken other women to that field, it was probably just a habit of his.' Yet at the time she was perfectly happy. The weight of the city was off her, and the scent of the grasses and the sun delicious. Then she became aware of his half-ironical smile and sat up, on the defensive. He began to talk, consciously ironical, about her husband. She told him what he wanted to know, briefly, since she had offered the facts last night. And then she told him, also briefly, about the child; but this time she was cursory because she felt guilty because she was here, in the sun, and Michael would have enjoyed the drive and the warm field. She understood that Paul had said something about his wife. It took some moments for this to sink in. He also said he had two children. She felt a shock, but did not let it disturb her confidence in the moment. The way he spoke of his wife, which was hurried and almost irritable, told Ella he did not love her. She was using the word 'love' already, and with a naivety quite foreign to her normal way of analysing relationships. She even imagined he must be separated from his wife, if he could speak of her so casually. He made love to her. Ella thought, 'Well he's right, it is the right moment, here, where it's beautiful.' Her body held too many memories of her husband for her to lack tensions. But soon she gave herself up, and in confidence, because their bodies understood each other. (But it was only later, she would use a phrase like 'our bodies understood each other.' At the time, she was thinking: We understand each other.) Yet once, opening her eyes, she saw his face, and it held a hard, almost ugly look. And she shut her eyes not to see it, and was happy in the movements of love. Afterwards, she saw his face turned away, and the hard look again. She instinctively moved away from him, but his hand on her belly held her down. He said, half-teasing: 'You're much too thin.' She laughed, without hurt, because the way his hand lay on her flesh told her he liked her as she was. And she liked herself, naked. It was a frail, slight body, with sharp edges to the shoulders and the knees, but her breasts and stomach glistened white, and her small feet were delicate and white. Often she had wanted to be different, had longed to be larger, fuller, rounder, 'more of a woman,' but the way his hand touched her cancelled all that and she was happy. He kept his hand's soft pressure on her vulnerable stomach for some moments, then suddenly withdrew it and began to dress. She, feeling abandoned, began to dress also. She was suddenly unaccountably close to tears, and her body again seemed too thin and light. He asked: 'How long since you slept with a man?' She was confused, wondering: George, he means? But he didn't count, I didn't love him. I hated him touching me. 'I don't know,' she said, and as she spoke understood he meant that she had slept with him out of hunger. Her face began to burn and she got quickly up off the rug, turning her face away, and then said, in a voice which sounded ugly to herself: 'Not since last week. I picked up a man at a party and brought him home with me.' She was looking for words from her memories of the girls at the canteen, during the war. She found them, and said: 'A nice piece of flesh, he was.' She got into the car, slamming the door. He threw the rug into the back of the car, got hastily in, and began the business of reversing the car back and forth so as to get it facing out of the field. 'You make a habit of it, then?' he enquired. His voice was sober, detached. She thought that whereas a moment ago he was asking on his own account, as a man; now he was again talking 'like a man behind a desk.' She was thinking that she only wanted the drive home to be over so that she could go home and cry. The love-making was now linked in her mind with memories of her husband, and the shrinking of her body from George's, because she was shrinking away in spirit from this new man. 'Do you make a habit of it?' he asked again. 'Of what?' She laughed. 'Oh, I see.' And she looked at him incredulously, as if he were mad. At the moment he seemed to her slightly mad, his face tense with suspicion. He was not at all, now, the 'man behind a desk,' but a man hostile to her. Now she was quite set against him, and she laughed angrily, and said: 'You're very stupid after all.' They did not speak again until they reached the main road, and joined the stream of traffic slowly congealed along the way back to the city. Then he remarked, in a different voice, companionable, a peace-offering: 'I'm not in a position to criticise, after all. My love life could hardly be described as exemplary.' 'I hope you found me a satisfactory diversion.' He looked puzzled. He seemed stupid to her because he was not understanding. She could see him framing words and then discarding them. And so she gave him no chance to talk. She felt as if she had been dealt, deliberately, one after the other, blows which were aimed at some place just below her breasts. She was almost gasping at the pain of these blows. Her lips were trembling, but she would rather have died than cry in front of him. She turned her face aside, watching a country-side now falling into shadow and cold, and began to talk herself. She could, when she set herself to it, be hard, malicious, amusing. She entertained him with sophisticated gossip about the magazine office, the affairs of Patricia Brent, etc. etc., while she despised him for accepting this counterfeit of herself. She talked on and on, while he was silent; and when they reached Julia's house, she got fast out of the car, and was in the doorway before he could follow her. She was fumbling with the key in the lock when he came up behind her and said: 'Would your friend Julia put your son to bed tonight? We could go to a play if you'd like it. No, a film, it's Sunday.' She positively gasped with surprise: 'But I'm not going to see you again, surely you don't expect me to?' He took her shoulders with his hands from behind and said: 'But, why not? You liked me, it's no good pretending you didn't.' To this, Ella had no answer, it was not her language. And she could not remember, now, how happy she had been with him in the field. She said: 'I'm not seeing you again.' 'Why not?' She furiously wriggled her shoulders free, put the key in the door, turned it, and said: 'I haven't slept with anyone at all for a long time. Not since an affair I had for a week, two years ago. It was a lovely affair...' She saw him wince and felt pleasure because she was hurting him, and because she was lying, it had not been a lovely affair. But, telling the truth now, and accusing him with every atom of her flesh, she said: 'He was an American. He never made me feel bad, not once. He wasn't at all good in bed, I'm sure that's one of your phrases, isn't it? But he didn't despise me.' 'Why are you telling me this?' 'You're so stupid,' she said, in a gay scornful voice. And she felt a hard bitter gaiety rise in her, destructive of him and of herself. 'You talk about my husband. Well what's he got to do with it? As far as I'm concerned I never slept with him at all...' He laughed, incredulously and bitterly, but she went on: 'I hated sleeping with him. It didn't count. And you say, how long is it since you slept with another man? Surely it's all perfectly simple. You're a psychiatrist, you say, a soul-doctor, and you don't understand the simplest things about anyone.' With which she went into Julia's house, and shut the door, and put her face to the wall and began to cry. From the feeling of the house she knew it was still empty. The bell rang, almost in her ear: Paul trying to make her open the door. But she left the sound of the bell behind, and went up through the dark well of the house to the bright little flat at the top, slowly, crying. And now the telephone rang. She knew it was Paul, in the telephone box across the street. She let it ring, because she was crying. It stopped and started again. She looked at the compact, impersonal black curves of the instrument and hated it; she swallowed her tears, steadied her voice and answered. It was Julia. Julia said she wanted to stay to supper with her friends; she would bring the child home with her later and put him to bed, and if Ella wanted to go out she could. 'What's the matter with you?' came Julia's voice, full and calm as usual, across two miles of streets. 'I'm crying.' 'I can hear you are, what for?' 'Oh, these bloody men, I hate them all.' 'Oh well, if it's like that, but better go off to the pictures then, it'll cheer you up.' Immediately Ella felt better, the incident was less important, and she laughed. When the telephone rang half-an-hour later, she answered it, not thinking of Paul. But it was he. He had waited in his car, he said, to telephone again. He wanted to talk to her. 'I don't see what we'll achieve by it,' said Ella, sounding cool and humorous. And he, sounding humorous and quizzical, said: 'Come to the pictures, and we won't talk.' So she went. She met him with ease. This was because she had told herself she would not make love with him again. It was all finished. Her going out with him was because it seemed melodramatic not to. And because his voice on the telephone had no connection at all with the hardness of his face above her in the field. And because they now would return to their relationship in the car driving away from London. His attitude to having had her in the field had simply cancelled it out. It hadn't happened, if that was the way he felt about it! Later he would say: 'When I telephoned you, after you had flounced indoors-you just came, you just needed persuading.' And he laughed. She hated the tone of the laugh. At such moments he would put on a rueful, and self-consciously rueful, rake's smile, playing the part of a rake so that he could laugh at himself. Yet he was having it both ways, Ella felt, for his complaint was genuine. And so at such moments she would first smile with him, at his parody of the rake; and then quickly change the subject. It was as if he had a personality at these moments not his. She was convinced it was not his. It was on a level that not only had nothing to do with the simplicity and ease of their being together; but betrayed it so completely that she had no alternative but to ignore it. Otherwise she would have had to break with him. They did not go to the pictures, but to a coffee bar. Again he told stories about his work at the hospital. He had two posts, at two different hospitals. At one he was a consultant psychiatrist. At the other he was doing a reorganising job. As he put it: 'I'm trying to change a snake-pit into something more civilised. And who do I have to fight? The public? Not at all, it's the old-fashioned doctors...' His stories had two themes. One the stuffed-shirt pomposity of the middle level of the medical establishment. Ella realised that all his criticisms were from the simplest class viewpoint; implicit in what he said, though he didn't say it, was that stupidity and lack of imagination were middle-class characteristics, and that his attitude, progressive and liberating, was because he was working-class. Which of course was how Julia talked; and how Ella herself criticised Dr West. And yet several times she found herself stiffening in resentment, as if it were she who was being criticised; and when this happened she fell back on her memories of the years in the canteen, and thought that if she had not had that experience she would not be able now to see the upper class of this country, from beneath, through the eyes of the factory girls, like so many bizarre fish viewed through the glass bottom of an aquarium. Paul's second theme was the reverse side of the first, and marked by a change of his whole personality when he touched on it. Telling his critical stories he was full of a delighted malicious irony. But talking of his patients he was serious. His attitude was the same as hers to the 'Mrs. Browns' -they were already referring to her petitioners in this collective way. He spoke of them with an extraordinary delicacy of kindness, and with an angry compassion. The anger was for their helplessness. She liked him so much now that for her it was as if the episode in the field had not happened. He took her home and came into the hall after her, still talking. They went up the stairs, and Ella was thinking: I suppose we'll have some coffee and then he'll go. She was quite genuine in this. And yet, when he again made love to her, she again thought: Yes, it's right, because we've been so close together all evening. Afterwards, when he complained: 'Of course you knew I'd make love to you again,' she would reply: 'Of course I didn't. And if you hadn't it wouldn't have mattered.' At which he would either reply: 'Oh, what a hypocrite!' Or: 'Then you've no right to be so unconscious of your motives.' Being with Paul Tanner, that night, was the deepest experience Ella had with a man; so different from anything she had known before that everything in the past became irrelevant. This feeling was so final, that when, towards early morning, Paul asked: 'What does Julia think about this sort of thing?' Ella replied vaguely: 'What sort of thing?' 'Last week, for instance. You said you brought a man home from a party.' 'You're mad,' she said, laughing comfortably. They lay in the dark. She turned her head to see his face; a dark line of cheek showed against the light from the window; there was something remote and lonely about it, and she thought: He's got into the same mood he was in earlier. But this time it did not disturb her, for the simplicity of the warm touch of his thigh against hers made the remoteness of his face irrelevant. 'But what does Julia say?' 'What about?' 'What will she say in the morning?' 'Why should she say anything at all?' 'I see,' he said briefly; and got up and added: 'I'll have to go home and shave and get a clean shirt.' That week he came to her every night, late, when Michael was asleep. And he left early every morning, to 'pick up a clean shirt.' Ella was completely happy. She drifted along on a soft tide of not-thinking. When Paul made a remark from 'his negative personality,' she was so sure of her emotions that she replied: 'Oh, you're so stupid, I told you, you don't understand anything.' (The word negative was Julia's, used after a glimpse of Paul on the stairs: 'There's something bitter and negative about that face.') She was thinking that soon he would marry her. Or perhaps not soon. It would be at the right time, and he would know when that was. His marriage must be no marriage at all, if he could stay with her, night after night, going home at dawn, 'for a clean shirt.' On the following Sunday, a week after their first excursion into the country, Julia again took the little boy off to friends, and this time Paul took Ella to Kew. They lay on the grass behind a hedge of sheltering rhododendrons, trees above them, the sun sifting over them. They held hands. 'You see,' said Paul, with his small rake's grimace, 'we're like an old married couple already-we know we're going to make love in bed tonight, so now we just hold hands.' 'But what's the matter with it?' asked Ella, amused. He was leaning over, looking into her face. She smiled up at him. She knew that he loved her. She felt a perfect trust in him. 'What's the matter with it?' he said with a sort of humorous desperation. 'It's terrible. Here you and I are...' How they were was reflected in his face and eyes, which were warm on her face-'and look what it would be like if we were married.' Ella felt herself go cold. She thought, Surely he's not saying that as a man does, warning a woman? He's not so cheap, surely? She saw an old bitterness on his face, and thought: No, he's not, thank God, he's carrying on some conversation with himself. And the light inside her was relit. She said: 'But you aren't married at all. You can't call that being married. You never see her.' 'We got married when we were both twenty. There should be a law against it,' he added, with the same desperate humour, kissing her. He said, with his mouth on her throat: 'You're very wise not to get married, Ella. Be sensible and stay that way.' Ella smiled. She was thinking: And so I was wrong after all. That's exactly what he's doing, saying: You can expect just so much from me. She felt completely rejected. And he still lay with his hands on her arms, and she could feel the warmth of them right through her body, and his eyes, warm and full of love for her, were a few inches above hers. He was smiling. That night in bed, making love to him was a mechanical thing, she went through the motions of response. It was a different experience from the other nights. It seemed he did not know it; and they lay afterwards as usual close in each other's arms. She was chilled and full of dismay. The day after she had a conversation with Julia, who had been silent all this time about Paul's staying the nights. 'He's married,' she said. 'He's been married thirteen years. It's a marriage so that it doesn't matter if he doesn't go home at nights. Two children.' Julia made a non-committal grimace and waited. 'The thing is, I'm not sure at all... and there's Michael.' 'What's his attitude to Michael?' 'He's only seen him once, for a moment. He comes in late-well you know that. And he's gone by the time Michael wakes up. To pick up a clean shirt from home.' At which Julia laughed, and Ella laughed with her. 'An extraordinary woman she must be,' said Julia. 'Does he talk about her?' 'He said, they got married too young. And then he went off to the wars, and when he came back, he felt a stranger to her. And as far as I can make out, he's done nothing but have love affairs ever since.' 'It doesn't sound too good,' said Julia. 'What do you feel for him?' At the moment, Ella felt nothing but a cold hurt despair. For the life of her she could not reconcile their happiness and what she called his cynicism. She was in something like a panic. Julia was examining her, shrewdly. 'I thought, the first time I saw him, he's got such a tight miserable face.' 'He's not at all miserable,' said Ella quickly. Then, seeing her instinctive and unreasoning defence of him, she laughed at herself and said: 'I mean, yes, there is that in him, a sort of bitterness. But there's his work and he likes it. He rushes from hospital to hospital, and tells marvellous stories about it all, and then the way he talks about his patients-he really cares. And then with me, at night, and he never seems to need to sleep.' Ella blushed, conscious that she was boasting. 'Well, it's true,' she said, watching Julia's smile. 'And then off he rushes in the morning, after practically no sleep, to pick up a shirt and presumably have a nice little chat with his wife about this and that. Energy. Energy is not being miserable. Or even bitter, if it comes to that. The two things aren't connected.' 'Oh, well,' said Julia. 'In that case you'd better wait and see what happens, hadn't you?' That night Paul was humorous and very tender. It's as if he's apologising, Ella thought. Her pain melted. In the morning she found herself restored to happiness. He said, as he dressed: 'I can't see you tonight, Ella.' She said, without fear: 'Well, that's all right.' But he went on, laughing: 'After all, I've got to see my children sometime.' It sounded as if he were accusing her of having deliberately kept him from them. 'But I haven't stopped you,' said Ella. 'Oh, yes you have, you have,' he said, half-singing it. He kissed her lightly, laughing, on the forehead. That's how he kissed his other women, she thought, when he left them for good. Yes. He didn't care about them, and he laughed and kissed them on the forehead. And suddenly a picture came into her mind, at which she stared, astonished. She saw him putting money on to a mantelpiece. But he was not-that she knew, the sort of man who would pay a woman. Yet she could see him, clearly, putting money on a mantelpiece. Yes. It was somewhere implicit in his attitude. And to her, Ella, but what's that got to do with all these hours we've been together, when every look and move he's made told me he loved me? (For the fact that Paul had told her, again and again, that he loved her, meant nothing, or rather would have meant nothing if it had not been confirmed by how he touched her, and the warmth of his voice.) And now, leaving, he remarked, with his small bitter grimace: 'And so you'll be free tonight, Ella.' 'What do you mean, free?' 'Oh... for your other boy-friends; you've been neglecting them, haven't you?' She went to the office, after leaving the child at his nursery school, feeling as if cold had got into her bones, into her backbone. She was shivering slightly. Yet it was a warm day. For some days she had not been in connection with Patricia, she had been too absorbed in her happiness. Now she easily came close to the older woman again. Patricia had been married for eleven years; and her husband had left her for a younger woman. Her attitude towards men was a gallant, good-natured, wisecracking cynicism. This jarred on Ella; it was something foreign to her. Patricia was in her fifties, lived alone, and had a grown-up daughter. She was, Ella knew, a courageous woman. But Ella did not like to think too closely about Patricia; to identify with her, even in sympathy, meant she might be cutting off some possibility for herself. Or so she felt. Today Patricia made some dry comment about a male colleague who was separating from his wife, and Ella snapped at her. Later she came back into the room, and apologised, for Patricia was hurt. Ella always felt at a disadvantage with the older woman. She did not care for her as much as she knew Patricia did for her. She knew she was some sort of symbol for Patricia, a symbol perhaps of her own youth? (But Ella would not think about that, it was dangerous.) Now she made a point of staying with Patricia and talking and making jokes, and saw, with dismay, tears in her employer's eyes. She saw, very sharply, a plump, kindly, smart, middle-aged woman, with clothes from the fashion magazines that were like a uniform, and her gallant mop of tinted greying curls; and her eyes-hard for her work, and soft for Ella. While she was with Patricia, she was telephoned by the editor of one of the magazines that had published a story of hers. He asked if she were free to lunch. She said she was, listening in her mind to the word free. For the last ten days she had not felt free. Now she felt, not free, but disconnected, or as if she floated on someone else's will- Paul's. This editor had wanted to sleep with her, and Ella had rejected him. Now she thought that very likely she would sleep with him. Why not? What difference did it all make? This editor was an intelligent, attractive man, but the idea of his touching her repelled her. He had not one spark of that instinctive warmth for a woman, liking for a woman, which was what she felt in Paul. And that was why she would sleep with him; she could not possibly have let a man touch her now, whom she found attractive. But it seemed Paul did not care one way or the other; he made jokes about the 'man she had taken home from the party,' almost as if he liked her for it. Very well, then; very well-if that's what he wanted, she didn't care at all. And she took herself off to lunch, carefully made-up, in a mood of sick defiance of the whole world. The lunch was as usual-expensive; and she liked good food. He was amusing; and she liked his talk. She was eased into her usual intellectual rapport with him, and meanwhile watched him and thought it was inconceivable that she could make love with him. Yet why not? She liked him, didn't she? Well then? And love? But love was a mirage, and the property of the women's magazines; one certainly couldn't use the word love in connection with a man who didn't care whether one slept with other men or not. But if I'm going to sleep with this man, I'd better do something about it. She did not know how to; she had rejected him so often he took the rejection for granted. When lunch was over, and they were on the pavement, Ella was suddenly released: what nonsense, of course she wasn't going to sleep with him, now she would go back to the office and that would be that. Then she saw a couple of prostitutes in a doorway, and she remembered her picture of Paul that morning; and when the editor said: 'Ella, I do so wish that...' she interrupted with a smile and said: 'Then take me home. No, to your place, not to mine.' For she could not have borne to have any man but Paul in her own bed now. This man was married, and he took her to his bachelor flat. His home was in the country, he was careful to keep his wife and children there, and he used this flat for adventures like these. All the time she was naked with this man, Ella was thinking of Paul. He must be mad. What am I doing with a madman? He really imagines I could sleep with another man when I'm with him? He can't possibly believe it. Meanwhile, she was being as nice as she could be to this intelligent comrade of her intellectual lunches. He was having difficulties, and Ella knew this was because she did not really want him, and so it was her fault, though he was blaming himself. And so she set herself to please, thinking there was no reason for him to feel bad, simply because she was committing the crime of sleeping with a man she did not care tuppence for... and when it was all over, she simply discounted the whole incident. It had meant nothing at all. She was left, however, vulnerable, quivering with the need to cry, and desperately unhappy. She was yearning, in fact, towards Paul. Who rang her next day to say that he couldn't come that night either. And now Ella's need for Paul was so great that she told herself it didn't matter in the slightest, of course he had to work, or to go home to his children. The next evening they met full of defences on either side. A few minutes later they had all vanished, and they were together again. Some time that night he remarked: 'Odd isn't it, it really is true that if you love a woman sleeping with another woman means nothing.' At the time she did not hear this-somewhere in her a mechanism had started to work which would prevent her hearing him when he made remarks that might make her unhappy. But she heard it next day, the words suddenly came back into her mind and she listened to them. So during those two nights he had been experimenting with someone else, and had had the same experience as she. So now she was full of confidence again, and of trust in him. Then he began to question her about what she had done during those two days. She said she had had lunch with an editor who had published one of her stories. 'I've read one of your stories. It was rather good.' He said this with pain, as if he had rather the story were bad. 'Well, why shouldn't it be good?' she asked. 'I suppose that was your husband, George?' 'Partly, not altogether.' 'And this editor?' For a moment she thought of saying: 'I've had the same experience you've had.' Then she thought: If he's capable of being upset by things that never happened, what would he say if I told him I did sleep with that man? Though I didn't, it didn't count, it was not the same thing at all. Afterwards Ella judged that their 'being together' (she never used the word affair) started from that moment- when they had both tested their responses to other people and found that what they felt for each other made other people irrelevant. That was the only time she was to be unfaithful to Paul, though she did not feel it mattered. Yet she was miserable she had done it because it became a sort of crystallisation of all his later accusations of her. After that he came to her nearly every night, and when he could not come she knew it was not because he did not want to. He would come in late, because of his work, and because of the child. He helped her with her letters from 'Mrs. Brown,' and this was a very great pleasure to her, working together over these people for whom she could sometimes do something. She did not think of his wife at all. At least, not at the beginning. Her only worry, at the beginning, was Michael. The little boy had loved his own father, now married again and living in America. It was natural for the child to turn with affection to this new man. But Paul would stiffen when Michael put his arms around him, or when he rushed at him in welcome. Ella watched how he instinctively stiffened, half-laughed, and then his mind (the mind of the soul-doctor, considering how best to deal with the situation) started to work. He would gently put down Michael's arms, and talk to him gently, as if he were grown-up. And Michael responded. It hurt Ella to see how the little boy, denied this masculine affection, would respond by being grown-up, serious, answering serious questions. A spontaneity of affection had been cut off in him. He kept it for her, warm and responsive in touch and in speech, but for Paul, for the men's world, he had a responsible, calm, thoughtful response. Sometimes Ella, panicked a little: I'm doing Michael harm, he is going to be harmed. He'll never again have a natural warm response to a man. And then she would think: But I don't really believe it. It must be good for him that I'm happy, it must be good for him that I'm a real woman at last. And so Ella did not worry for long, her instincts told her not to. She let herself go into Paul's love for her, and did not think. Whenever she found herself looking at this relationship from the outside, as other people might see it, she felt frightened and cynical. So she did not. She lived from day to day, and did not look ahead. Five years. If I were to write this novel, the main theme, or motif, would be buried, at first, and only slowly take over. The motif of Paul's wife-the third. At first Ella does not think about her. Then she has to make a conscious effort not to think about her. This is when she knows her attitude towards this unknown woman is despicable: she feels triumph over her, pleasure that she has taken Paul from her. When Ella first becomes conscious of this emotion she is so appalled and ashamed that she buries it, fast. Yet the shadow of the third grows again, and it becomes impossible for Ella not to think. She thinks a great deal about the invisible woman to whom Paul returns (and to whom he will always return), and it is now not out of triumph, but envy. She envies her. She slowly, involuntarily, builds up a picture in her mind of a serene, calm, unjealous, unenvious, undemanding woman, full of resources of happiness inside herself, self-sufficient, yet always ready to give happiness when it is asked for. It occurs to Ella (but much later, about three years on) that this is a remarkable image to have developed, since it does not correspond to anything at all Paul says about his wife. So where does the picture come from? Slowly Ella understands that this is what she would like to be herself, this imagined woman is her own shadow, everything she is not. Because by now she knows, and is frightened of, her utter dependence on Paul. Every fibre of herself is woven with him, and she cannot imagine living without him. The mere idea of being without him causes a black cold fear to enclose her, so she does not think of it. And she is clinging, so she comes to realise, to this image of the other woman, the third, as a sort of safety or protection for herself. The second motif is in fact part of the first, though this would not be apparent until the end of the novel-Paul's jealousy. The jealousy increases, and is linked with the rhythm of his slow withdrawal. He accuses her, half-laughing, half-serious, of sleeping with other men. In a cafe he accuses her of making eyes at a man she has not even noticed. To begin with, she laughs at him. Later she grows bitter, but always suppresses bitterness, it is too dangerous. Then, as she comes to understand the image she has created of the other serene, etc., woman, she wonders about Paul's jealousy, and comes to think-not from bitterness, but to understand it, what it really means. It occurs to her that Paul's shadow, his imagined third, is a self-hating rake, free, casual, heartless. (This is the role he sometimes plays, self-mockingly, with her.) So what it means is, that in coming together with Ella, in a serious relationship, the rake in himself has been banished, pushed aside, and now stands in the wings of his personality, temporarily unused, waiting to return. And Ella now sees, side by side with the wise, serene, calm woman, her shadow, the shape of this compulsive self-hating womaniser. These two discordant figures move side by side, keeping pace with Ella and Paul. And there comes a moment (but right at the end of the novel, its culmination) when Ella thinks: Paul's shadow-figure, the man he sees everywhere, even in a man I haven't even noticed, is this almost musical-comedy libertine. So that means that Paul with me is using his 'positive' self. (Julia's phrase.) With me he is good. But I have as a shadow a good woman, grown-up and strong and un-asking. Which means that I am using with him my 'negative' self. So this bitterness I feel growing in me, against him, is a mockery of the truth. In fact, he's better than I am, in this relationship. These invisible figures that keep us company all the time prove it. Subsidiary motifs. Her novel. He asks what she is writing and she tells him. Reluctantly, because his voice is always full of distrust when he mentions her writing. She says: 'It's a novel about suicide.' 'And what do you know about suicide?' 'Nothing, I'm just writing it.' (To Julia she makes bitter jokes about Jane Austen hiding her novels under the blotting paper when people come into the room; quotes Stendhal's dictum that any woman under fifty who writes, should do so under a pseudonym.) During the next few days he tells her stories about his patients who are suicidal. It takes her a long time to understand he is doing this because he thinks she is too naive and ignorant to write about suicide. (And she even agrees with him.) He is instructing her. She begins to hide her work from him. She says she doesn't care about 'being a writer, she just wants to write the book, to see what will happen.' This makes no sense to him, it seems, and soon he begins to complain that she is using his professional knowledge to get facts for the novel. The motif of Julia. Paul dislikes Ella's relationship with Julia. He sees it as a pact against him, and makes professional jokes about the Lesbian aspects of this friendship. At which Ella says that in that case, his friendships with men are homosexual? But he says she has no sense of humour. At first Ella's instinct is to sacrifice Julia for Paul; but later their friendship does change, it becomes critical of Paul. The conversations between the two women are sophisticated, full of critical insight, implicitly critical of men. Yet Ella does not feel this is disloyalty to Paul, because these conversations come from a different world; the world of sophisticated insight has nothing to do with her feeling for Paul. The motif of Ella's maternal love for Michael. She is always fighting to get Paul to be a father to the child and always failing. And Paul says: 'You'll come to be glad yet, you'll see I was right.' Which can only mean: When I've left you, you'll be glad I didn't form close ties with your son. And so Ella chooses not to hear it. The motif of Paul's attitude to his profession. He is split on this. He takes his work for his patients seriously, but makes fun of the jargon he uses. He will tell a story about a patient, full of subtlety and depth, but using the language of literature and of emotion. Then he will judge the same anecdote in psychoanalytical terms, giving it a different dimension. And then, five minutes later, he will be making the most intelligent and ironical fun of the terms he has just used as yardsticks to judge the literary standards, the emotional truths. And at each moment, in each personality-literary, psychoanalytical, the man who distrusts all systems of thought that consider themselves final-he will be serious and expect Ella to accept him, fully for that moment; and he resents it when she attempts to link these personalities in him. Their life together becomes full of phrases, and symbols. 'Mrs. Brown' means his patients and her women who ask for help. 'Your literary lunches,' is his phrase for her infidelities, used sometimes humourously, sometimes seriously. 'Your treatise on suicide.' Her novel, his attitude to it. And another phrase which becomes more and more important, though when he uses it first she does not understand how deep an attitude in him it reflects. 'We are both boulder-pushers.' This is his phrase for what he sees as his own failure. His fight to get out of his poor background, to win scholarships, to get the highest medical degrees, came out of an ambition to be a creative scientist. But he knows now he will never be this original scientist. And this defect has been partly caused by what is best in him, his abiding, tireless compassion for the poor, the ignorant, the sick. He has always, at a point when he should have chosen the library or the laboratory, chosen the weak instead. He will never now be a discoverer or a blazer of new paths. He has become a man who fights a middle-class, reactionary medical superintendent who wants to keep his wards locked and his patients in strait jackets. 'You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents, into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. We push the boulder. I sometimes wish I had died before I got this job I wanted so much-I thought of it as something creative. How do I spend my time? Telling Dr Shackerly, a frightened little man from Birmingham who bullies his wife because he doesn't know how to love a woman, that he must open the doors of his hospital, that he must not keep poor sick people shut in a cell lined with buttoned white leather in the dark, and that straitjackets are stupid. That is how I spend my days. And treating illness that is caused by a society so stupid that... And you, Ella. You tell the wives of workmen who are all just as good as their masters to use the styles and furnishings made fashionable by businessmen who use snobbery to make money. And you tell poor women who are slaves of everyone's stupidity to go out and join a social club or to take up a healthful hobby of some kind, to take their minds off the fact they are unloved. And if the healthful hobby doesn't work, and why should it, they end up in my Out-patients... I wish I had died, Ella. I wish I had died. No, of course you don't understand that, I can see from your face you don't...' Death again. Death come out of her novel and into her life. And yet death in the form of energy, for this man works like a madman, out of a furious angry compassion, this man who says he wishes he were dead never rests from work for the helpless. It is as if this novel were already written and I were reading it. And now I see it whole I see another theme, of which I was not conscious when I began it. The theme is, naivety. From the moment Ella meets Paul and loves him, from the moment she uses the word love, there is the birth of naivety. And so now, looking back at my relationship with Michael (I used the name of my real lover for Ella's fictitious son with the small over-eager smile with which a patient offers an analyst evidence he has been waiting for but which the patient is convinced is irrelevant), I see above all my naivety. Any intelligent person could have foreseen the end of this affair from its beginning. And yet I, Anna, like Ella with Paul, refused to see it. Paul gave birth to Ella, the naive Ella. He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety. Now, when I am drawn to a man, I can assess the depth of a possible relationship with him by the degree to which the naive Anna is re-created in me. Sometimes when I, Anna, look back, I want to laugh out loud. It is the appalled, envious laughter of knowledge at innocence. I would be incapable now of such trust. I, Anna, would never begin an affair with Paul. Or Michael. Or rather, I would begin an affair, just that, knowing exactly what would happen; I would begin a deliberately barren, limited relationship. What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety. The end of the affair. Though that was not the word that Ella used then. She used it afterwards, and with bitterness. Ella first understands that Paul is withdrawing from her at the moment when she realises he is not helping her with the letters. He says: 'What's the use? I deal with widow Brown all day at the hospital. I can't do any good, not really. I help one here and there. Ultimately the boulder-pushers don't really help anything. We imagine we do. Psychiatry and welfare work, it's putting poultices on unnecessary misery.' 'But Paul, you know you help them.' 'All the time I'm thinking, we are all obsolete. What sort of a doctor is it who sees his patients as symptoms of a world sickness?' 'If it were true you really feel like that, you wouldn't work so hard.' He hesitated, then delivered this blow: 'But Ella, you're my mistress, not my wife. Why do you want me to share all the serious business of life with you?' Ella was angry. 'Every night you lie in my bed and tell me everything. I am your wife.' As she said it, she knew she was signing the warrant for the end. It seemed a terrible cowardice that she had not said it before. He reacted with a small offended laugh, a gesture of withdrawal. Ella finishes her novel and it is accepted for publication. She knows it is a quite good novel, nothing very startling. If she were to read it she would report that it was a small, honest novel. But Paul reads it and reacts with elaborate sarcasm. He says: 'Well, we men might just as well resign from life.' She is frightened, and says: 'What do you mean?' Yet she laughs, because of the dramatic way he says it, parodying himself. Now he drops his self-parody and says with great seriousness: 'My dear Ella, don't you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution-they're nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.' 'But Paul, that doesn't mean anything to me.' 'I saw a film last week, I went by myself, I didn't take you, that was a film for a man by himself.' 'What film?' 'Did you know that a woman can now have children without a man?' 'But what on earth for?' 'You can apply ice to a woman's ovaries, for instance. She can have a child. Men are no longer necessary to humanity.' At once Ella laughs, and with confidence. 'But what woman in her senses would want ice applied to her ovaries instead of a man?' Paul laughs too. 'For all that Ella, and joking apart, it's a sign of the times.' At which Ella cries out: 'My God, Paul, if at any time during the last five years you'd asked me to have a baby, I'd have been so happy.' The instinctive, startled movement of withdrawal from her. Then the deliberate careful answer, laughing: 'But, Ella, it's the principle of the thing. Men are no longer necessary.' 'Oh, principles,' says Ella, laughing. 'You're mad. I always said you were.' At which he says, soberly: 'Well, maybe you're right. You are very sane, Ella. You always were. You say I'm mad. I know it. I get madder and madder. Sometimes I wonder why they don't lock me up instead of my patients. And you get saner and saner. It's your strength. You'll have ice applied to your ovaries yet.' At which she cries out, so hurt that she doesn't care any longer how she sounds to him: 'You are mad. Let me tell you I'd rather die than have a child like that. Don't you know that ever since I've known you I've wanted to have your child? Ever since I've known you everything has been so joyful that...' She sees his face, which instinctively rejects what she has just said. 'Well, all right then. But supposing that is why you'll ultimately turn out to be unnecessary- because you haven't got any faith in what you are...' His face is now startled and sad, but she is in full flood and doesn't care. 'You've never understood one simple thing-it's so simple and ordinary that I don't know why you don't understand. Everything with you has been happy and easy and joyful, and you talk about women putting ice on their ovaries. Ice. Ovaries. What does it mean? Well, if you want to sign yourselves off the face of the earth then do it, I don't care.' At which he says, opening his arms. 'Ella. Ella! Come here.' She goes to him, he holds her, but in a moment he teases her: 'But you see, I was right-when it comes to the point you openly admit it, you'd push us all off the edge of the earth and laugh.' Sex. The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. Women deliberately choose not to think about technical sex. They get irritable when men talk technically, it's out of self-preservation: they want to preserve the spontaneous emotion that is essential for their satisfaction. Sex is essentially emotional for women. How many times has that been written? And yet there's always a point even with the most perceptive and intelligent man, when a woman looks at him across a gulf: he hasn't understood; she suddenly feels alone; hastens to forget the moment, because if she doesn't she would have to think. Julia, myself and Bob sitting in her kitchen gossiping. Bob telling a story about the breakup of a marriage. He says: 'The trouble was sex. Poor bastard, he's got a prick the size of a needle.' Julia: 'I always thought she didn't love him.' Bob, thinking she hadn't heard: 'No, it's always worried him stiff, he's just got a small one.' Julia: 'But she never did love him, anyone could see that just by looking at them together.' Bob, a bit impatient now: 'It's not their fault, poor idiots, nature was against the whole thing from the start.' Julia: 'Of course it's her fault. She should never have married him if she didn't love him.' Bob, irritated because of her stupidity, begins a long technical explanation, while she looks at me, sighs, smiles, and shrugs. A few minutes later, as he persists, she cuts him off short with a bad-tempered joke, won't let him go on. As for me, Anna, it was a remarkable fact that until I sat down to write about it, I had never analysed how sex was between myself and Michael. Yet there was a perfectly clear development during the five years, which shows in my memory like a curving line on a graph. When Ella first made love with Paul, during the first few months, what set the seal on the fact she loved him, and made it possible for her to use the word, was that she immediately experienced orgasm. Vaginal orgasm that is. And she could not have experienced it if she had not loved him. It is the orgasm that is created by the man's need for a woman, and his confidence in that need. As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical-a man wouldn't use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalised sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants all her response. Everything else is a substitute and a fake, and the most inexperienced woman feels this instinctively. Ella had never experienced clitoral orgasm before Paul, and she told him so, and he was delighted. 'Well, you are a virgin in something, Ella, at least.' But when she told him she had never experienced what she insisted on calling 'a real orgasm' to anything like the same depth before him, he involuntarily frowned, and remarked: 'Do you know that there are eminent physiologists who say women have no physical basis for vaginal orgasm?' 'Then they don't know much, do they?' And so, as time went on, the emphasis shifted in their love-making from the real orgasm to the clitoral orgasm, and there came a point when Ella realised (and quickly refused to think about it) that she was no longer having real orgasms. That was just before the end, when Paul left her. In short, she knew emotionally what the truth was when her mind would not admit it. It was just before the end, too, that Paul told her something which (since in bed he preferred her having clitoral orgasm) she simply shrugged away as another symptom of this man's divided personality-since the tone of the story, his way of telling it, contradicted what she in fact was experiencing with him. 'Something happened at the hospital today that would have amused you,' he said. They were sitting in the dark parked car outside Julia's. She slid across to be near him, and he put his arm around her. She could feel his body shaking with laughter. 'As you know, our august hospital gives lectures every fortnight for the benefit of the staff. Yesterday it was announced that Professor Bloodrot would lecture us on the orgasm in the female swan.' Ella instinctively moved away, and he pulled her back, and said: 'I knew you were going to do that. Sit still and listen. The hall was full-I don't have to tell you. The professor stood up, all six foot three of him, like a buckled foot-rule, with his little white beard wagging, and said he had conclusively proved that female swans do not have an orgasm. He would use this useful scientific discovery as a basis for a short discussion on the nature of the female orgasm in general.' Ella laughed. 'Yes, and I knew you would laugh at just that point. But I haven't finished. It was noticeable that at this point there was a disturbance in the hall. People were getting up to leave. The venerable professor, looking annoyed, said that he trusted that this subject would not be found offensive to anyone. After all, research into sexuality, as distinct from superstition about sex, was being conducted in all hospitals of this type throughout the world. But still, people were leaving. Who was leaving? All the women. There were about fifty men, and about fifteen women. And every one of those lady doctors had got up and were going out as if they had been given an order. Our professor was very put out. He stuck out his little beard in front of him, and said that he was surprised his lady colleagues, for whom he had such a respect, were capable of such prudery. But it was no use, there wasn't a woman in sight. At which our professor cleared his throat and announced he would continue his lecture, despite the deplorable attitude of the female doctors. It was his opinion, he said, based on his researches into the nature of the female swan, that there was no physiological basis for a vaginal orgasm in women... no, don't move away, Ella, really women are most extraordinarily predictable. I was sitting next to Dr Penworthy, father of five, and he whispered to me that it was very strange- usually the professor's wife, being a lady of great public-mindedness, was present at her husband's little talks, but she had not come that day. At this point I committed an act of disloyalty to my sex. I followed the women out of the hall. They had all vanished. Very strange, not a woman in sight. But at last I found my old friend Stephanie, drinking coffee in the canteen. I sat down beside her. She was definitely very withdrawn from me. I said: 'Stephanie, why have you all left our great professor's definitive lecture on sex?" She smiled at me very hostile and with great sweetness and said: "But my dear Paul, women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex." It took me half an hour's hard work and three cups of coffee to make my friend Stephanie like me again.' He was laughing again, holding her inside his arm. He turned to look at her face, and said: 'Yes. Well don't be angry with me too, just because I am the same sex as the professor-that's what I said to Stephanie too.' Ella's anger dissolved and she laughed with him. She was thinking: Tonight he'll come up with me. Whereas until recently he had spent nearly every night with her, now he went home two or three nights a week. He said, apparently at random: 'Ella, you're the least jealous woman I've ever known.' Ella felt a sudden chill, then panic, then the protective mechanism worked fast: She simply did not hear what he had said, and asked: 'Are you coming up with me?' He said: 'I'd decided not to. But if I had really decided I wouldn't be sitting here, would I?' They went upstairs, holding hands. He remarked: 'I wonder how you and Stephanie would get on?' She thought that his look at her was strange, 'as if he's testing something.' Again the small panic, while she thought, he talks a great deal about Stephanie these days, I wonder if... Then her mind went dim, and she said: 'I've got some supper ready if you'd like it.' They ate, and he looked over at her and said: 'And you're such a good cook too. What am I going to do with you, Ella?' 'What you are doing now,' she said. He was watching her, with a look of desperate, despairing humour that she saw very often now. 'And I've not succeeded in changing you in the slightest. Not even your clothes or the way you do your hair.' This was a recurrent battle between them. He would move her hair this way and that about her head, pull the stuff of her dress into a different line, and say: 'Ella, why do you insist on looking like a rather severe school-mistress? God knows, you're not remotely like that.' He would bring her a blouse cut low, or show her a dress in a shop window, and say: 'Why don't you buy a dress like that?' But Ella continued to wear her black hair tied back, and refused the startling clothes he liked. At the back of her mind was the thought: He complains now that I'm not satisfied with him and I want another man. What would he think if I started to wear sexy clothes? If I made myself very glamorous he'd not be able to bear it. It's bad enough as it is. She once said, laughing at him: 'But Paul, you bought me that red blouse. It's cut to show the top of my breasts. But when I put it on, you came into the room, and came right over and buttoned it up-you did it instinctively.' Tonight he came over to her and untied her hair and let it fall loose. Gazing close into her face, frowning, he teased out fronds of hair over her forehead, and arranged it around her neck. She allowed him to do as he liked, remaining quiet under the warmth of his hands, smiling at him. Suddenly she thought: He's comparing me with someone, he's not seeing me at all. She moved away from him, quickly, and he said: 'Ella, you could be a really beautiful woman if you would let yourself be.' She said: 'So you don't think I'm beautiful then?' He half-groaned, half-laughed, and pulled her down on to the bed. 'Obviously not,' he said. 'Well then,' she said, smiling and confident. It was that night that he remarked, almost casually, that he had been offered a job in Nigeria, and was thinking of going. Ella heard him, but almost absentmindedly; accepting the off-hand tone he imposed on the situation. Then she realised a pit of dismay had opened in her stomach and that something final was happening. Yet she insisted on thinking, Well it will solve everything. I can go with him. There's nothing to keep me here. Michael could go to some kind of school there. And what have I here to keep me? It was true. Lying in the darkness, inside Paul's arms, she thought that those arms had slowly, over the years, shut out everyone else. She went out very little, because she did not enjoy going out by herself, and because she had accepted, very early on, that to go out together into company meant more trouble than it was worth. Either Paul was jealous, or he said he was odd-man-out among her literary friends. At which Ella would say: 'They aren't friends, they are acquaintances.' She had no vital connection with anyone but her son, Paul, and Julia. Julia would keep, it was a friendship for life. So now she said: 'I can come with you, can't I?' He hesitated, and said, laughing: 'But you don't want to give up all your exciting literary goings-on in London?' She told him he was quite crazy, and began making plans to go. One day she went with him to his home. His wife and children were away on holiday. It was after a film they had just seen together, and he had said he wanted to pick up a clean shirt. He pulled his car up outside a small house, in a row of identical houses in a suburb off to the north of Shepherd's Bush. Children's toys lay abandoned over a small patch of neat garden. 'I keep telling Muriel about the kids,' he said, irritated. They really can't leave their things lying about like this.' This was the moment that she understood this was his home. 'Well, come in a moment,' he said. She did not want to go inside, but she followed him. The hall had a conventional flowered wallpaper and a dark sideboard and a strip of pretty carpet. For some reason it comforted Ella. The living-room came from a different epoch of taste: it had three different wallpapers and discordant curtains and cushions. Evidently it had just been done up; it still had the look of being on show. It was depressing, and Ella followed Paul into the kitchen on his search for the clean shirt, on this occasion a medical journal he needed. The kitchen was the used room of the house, and was shabby. But one wall had been covered with red wallpaper, so it seemed that this room, too, was in the process of being transformed. On the kitchen table were stacked dozens of copies of Women at Home. Ella felt she had been delivered a direct blow; but told herself that after all she worked for this nasty snobbish magazine, and what right had she to sneer at people who read it? She told herself that she knew no one who was absorbed heart and soul in the work they did; everyone seemed to work reluctantly, or with cynicism, or with a divided mind, so she was no worse than everyone else. But it was no use; there was a small television set in a corner of the kitchen, and she imagined the wife sitting here, night after night, reading Women at Home or looking at the television set and listening for the children upstairs. Paul saw her standing there, fingering the magazines and examining the room, and remarked, with his familiar grim humour: 'This is her house, Ella. To do as she likes in. It's surely the least I can do.' 'Yes, it's the least.' 'Yes. It must be upstairs,' and Paul left the kitchen and started upstairs, saying over his shoulder: 'Well come up, then?' She wondered: Is he showing me his home in order to demonstrate something? Because he wants to tell me something? He doesn't know I hate being here? But she again obediently followed him up and into the bedroom. This room was different again, and had evidently been exactly as it was now for a long time. It had twin beds, on either side of a neat little table on which was a big framed photograph of Paul. The colours were green and orange and black, with a great many restless zebra stripes-the 'jazz' era in furnishing, twenty-five years after its birth. Paul had found his magazine, which was on the bedside table, and was ready to leave again. Ella said: 'One of these days I'll get a letter, handed on by Dr West. "Dear Dr Allsop. Please tell me what to do. Lately I can't sleep at nights. I've been drinking hot milk before going to bed and trying to keep a relaxed mind, but it doesn't help. Please advise me, Muriel Tanner. P. S. I forgot to mention, my husband wakes me early, about six o'clock, coming in from working late at the hospital. Sometimes he doesn't come home all week. I get low in my spirits. This has been going on five years now." ' Paul listened, with a sober, sad face. 'It's been no secret to you,' he said at last, 'that I'm not exactly proud of myself as a husband.' 'For God's sake, why don't you put an end to it then?' 'What!' he exclaimed, half-laughing already, and back in his role as a rake, 'abandon the poor woman with two children?' 'She might get herself a man who cared for her. Don't tell me you'd mind if she did. Surely you don't like the idea of her living like this?' He answered seriously: 'I've told you, she's a very simple woman. You always assume other people are like you. Well they aren't. She likes watching television and reading Women at Home and sticking bits of wallpaper on the walls. And she's a good mother.' 'And she doesn't mind not having a man?' 'For all I know she has, I've never enquired,' he said, laughing again. 'Oh well, I don't know!' said Ella, completely dispirited, following him downstairs again. She left the discordant little house thankfully, as if escaping from a trap; and she looked down the street and thought that probably they were all like this, all in fragments, not one of them a whole, reflecting a whole life, a whole human being; or, for that matter, a whole family. 'What you don't like,' said Paul, as they drove off, 'is that Muriel might be happy living like this.' 'How can she be?' 'I asked her some time ago, if she'd like to leave me. She could go back to her parents, if she wanted. She said no. Besides, she'd be lost without me.' 'Good Lord!' said Ella, disgusted and afraid. 'It's true, I'm a sort of father, she depends on me completely.' 'But she never sees you.' 'I'm nothing if not efficient,' he said, shortly. 'When I go home I deal with everything. The gas heaters, and the electricity bill and where to buy a cheap carpet, and what to do about the children's school. Everything.' When she did not reply he insisted: 'I've told you before, you're a snob, Ella. You can't stand the fact that maybe it's how she likes to live.' 'No, I can't. And I don't believe it. No woman in the world wants to live without love.' 'You're such a perfectionist. You're an absolutist. You measure everything against some kind of ideal that exists in your head, and if it doesn't come up to your beautiful notions then you condemn it out of hand. Or you pretend to yourself that it's beautiful even when it isn't.' Ella thought: He means us; and Paul was already going on: 'For instance-Muriel might just as well say of you: Why on earth does she put up with being my husband's mistress, what security is there in that? And it's not respectable.' 'Oh, security!' 'Oh, quite so. You say, scornfully, Oh, security! Oh, respectability! But Muriel wouldn't. They're very important to her. They're very important to most people.' It occurred to Ella that he sounded angry and even hurt. It occurred to her that he identified himself with his wife (and yet all his tastes, when he was with her, Ella, were different) and that security and respectability were important to him also. She was silent, thinking: If he really likes living like that, or at least, needs it, it would explain why he's always dissatisfied with me. The other side of the sober respectable little wife is the smart, gay, sexy mistress. Perhaps he really would like it if I were unfaithful to him and wore tarty clothes. Well I won't. This is what I am, and if he doesn't like it he can lump it. Later that evening he said, laughing, but aggressive: 'It would do you good, Ella, to be like other women.' 'What do you mean?' 'Waiting at home, the wife, trying to keep your man against the other woman. Instead of having a lover at your feet.' 'Oh, is that where you are?' she said, ironically. 'But why do you see marriage as a kind of fight? I don't see it as a battle.' 'You don't!' he said, ironical in his turn. And after a pause: 'You've just written a novel about suicide.' 'What's that got to do with it?' 'All that intelligent insight...' He checked himself and sat looking at her, rueful and critical and-Ella thought, condemning. They were up in her little room, high under the roof, the child sleeping next door, the remains of the meal she had cooked on the low table between them, as they had been a thousand times. He turned a glass of wine between his fingers and said, in pain: 'I don't know how I'd have got through the last months without you.' 'What's happened particularly the last few months?' 'Nothing. That's the point. It all goes on and on. Well, in Nigeria I won't be patching up old sores, wounds on a mangy lion. That's my work, putting ointment on the wounds of an old animal that hasn't the vitality any more to heal itself. At least in Africa I'll be working for something new and growing.' He went to Nigeria with unexpected suddenness. Unexpected, at least, to Ella. They were still talking of it as something that would happen in the future when he came in to say he was leaving next day. The plans for how she would join him were necessarily vague, until he knew the conditions there. She saw him off at the airport, as if she would be meeting him again in a few weeks. Yet after he had kissed her good-bye, he turned with a small bitter nod and a twisted smile, a sort of a painful grimace of his whole body, and suddenly Ella felt the tears running down her face, and she was cold with loss in every nerve. She was unable to stop crying, to prevent the cold that made her shiver, steadily, for days afterwards. She wrote letters, and made plans, but it was from inside a shadow that slowly deepened over her. He wrote once, saying it was impossible to say definitely yet how she and Michael could come out to join him; and then there was silence. One afternoon she was working with Dr West, over a pile of the usual letters, and he remarked: 'I had a letter from Paul Tanner yesterday.' 'Did you?' Dr West, so far as she knew, did not know of her relationship with Paul. 'Sounds as if he's liking it out there, so I suppose he'll take his family out.' He carefully clipped some letters together for his own pile, and went on: 'Just as well he went, I gather. He told me just before he left he'd got himself involved with a pretty flighty piece. Heavily involved, it sounded. She didn't sound much good to me.' Ella made herself breathe normally, examined Dr West, and decided that this was just casual gossip about a mutual friend, and not meant to wound her. She took up a letter he had handed her, which began: 'Dear Dr Allsop, I'm writing to you about my little boy who is walking in his sleep...' and said: 'Dr West, surely this is your province?' For this amiable battle had continued, unchanged, for all the years they had worked together. 'No, Ella, it is not. If a child walks in its sleep, it's no good my prescribing medicines, and you'd be the first to blame me if I did. Tell the woman to go to the clinic and suggest tactfully that it's her fault and not the child's. Well, I don't have to tell you what to say.' He took up another letter and said: 'I told Tanner to stay out of England as long as possible. These things are not always easy to break off. The young lady was pestering him to marry her. A not-so-young lady, actually. That was the trouble. I suppose she'd got tired of a gay life and wanted to settle down.' Ella made herself not-think about this conversation until she had completed the division of letters with Dr West. Well, I've been naive, she decided at last. I suppost he was having an affair with Stephanie at the hospital. At least, he never mentioned anyone but Stephanie, he was always talking about her. But he never spoke of her in that tone, 'flighty piece.' No that's the Wests' language, they use idiotic phrases like flighty piece and getting tired of a gay life. How extraordinarily common these respectable middle-class people are. Meanwhile she was deeply depressed; and the shadow that she had been fighting off since Paul had left engulfed her completely. She thought about Paul's wife: she must have felt like this, this complete rejection, when Paul lost interest in her. Well at least she, Ella, had had the advantage of being too stupid to realise that Paul was having an affair with Stephanie. But perhaps Muriel had also chosen to be stupid- had chosen to believe that Paul spent so many nights at the hospital? Ella had a dream which was unpleasant and disturbing. She was in the ugly little house, with its little rooms that were all different from each other. She was Paul's wife, and only by an effort of will could she prevent the house disintegrating, and flying off in all directions because of the conflict between the rooms. She decided she must furnish the whole house again, in one style, hers. But as soon as she hung new curtains or painted a room out, Muriel's room was re-created. Ella was like a ghost in this house and she realised it would hold together, somehow, as long as Muriel's spirit was in it and it was holding together precisely because every room belonged to a different epoch, a different spirit. And Ella saw herself standing in the kitchen, her hand on the pile of Women at Home; she was a 'sexy piece' (she could hear the words being said, by Dr West) with a tight coloured skirt and a very tight jersey and her hair was cut fashionably. And Ella realised that Muriel was not there after all, she had gone to Nigeria to join Paul, and Ella was waiting in the house until Paul came back. When Ella woke after this dream she was crying. It occurred to her, for the first time, that the woman from whom Paul had had to separate himself, for whom he had gone to Nigeria, because he had at all costs to separate himself from her, was herself. She was the flighty piece. She understood alsp that Dr West had spoken deliberately, perhaps because of some phrase in Paul's letter to him; it was a warning from the respectable world of Dr West, protecting one of its members, to Ella. Strangely enough, the shock was enough, for a while at least, to break the power of the depressive mood that had held her for months now in its dark grip. She swung over into a mood of bitter, angry defiance. She told Julia that Paul had 'ditched her,' and that she had been a fool not to see it before (and Julia's silence said she agreed with Ella completely). She said that she had no intention of sitting around and crying about it. Without knowing that she had been unconsciously planning to do this, she went out and bought herself new clothes. They were not the 'sexy' clothes Paul had urged on her, but they were different from any clothes she had worn before, and fitted her new personality, which was rather hard, casual, and indifferent-or at least, so she believed. And she had her hair cut, so it was in a soft provocative shape around her small pointed face. And she decided to leave Julia's house. It was the house she had lived in with Paul, and she could no longer stand it. Very cool, clear and efficient, she found herself a new flat and settled into it. It was a large flat, much too large for the child and herself. It was only after she had settled in it she understood the extra space was for a man. For Paul, in fact, and she was still living as if he were returning to her. Then she heard, quite by chance, that Paul had returned to England for leave and had been here already for two weeks. On the night of the day she heard this news, she found herself dressed and made-up, her hair carefully done, standing at the window looking down into the street, and waiting for him. She waited until long after midnight, thinking: His work at the hospital might easily keep him as late as this, I mustn't go to bed too early, because he'll see the lights are out, and not come up, for fear of waking me. She stood there, night after night. She could see herself standing there, and said to herself: This is madness. This is being mad. Being mad is not being able to stop yourself doing something that you know to be irrational. Because you know Paul will not come. And yet she continued to dress herself and to stand for hours at the window, waiting, every night. And, standing there and looking at herself, she could see how this madness was linked with the madness that had prevented her from seeing how the affair would inevitably end, the naivety that had made her so happy. Yes, the stupid faith and naivety and trust had led, quite logically, into her standing at the window waiting for a man whom she knew, quite well, would never come to her again. After some weeks, she heard from Dr West, apparently casually, though with a hidden triumphant malice, that Paul had gone back to Nigeria again. 'His wife wouldn't go with him,' said Dr West. 'She doesn't want to uproot herself. Perfectly happy where she is, apparently.' The trouble with this story is that it is written in terms of analysis of the laws of dissolution of the relationship between Paul and Ella. I don't see any other way to write it. As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern. And the pattern of an affair, even one that has lasted five years and has been as close as a marriage, is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn't think like that at all. Supposing I were to write it like this: two full days, in every detail, one at the beginning of the affair, and one towards the end? No, because I would still be instinctively isolating and emphasising the factors that destroyed the affair. It is that which would give the thing its shape. Otherwise it would be chaos, because these two days, separated by many months in time, would have no shadow over them, but would be records of a simple unthinking happiness with perhaps a couple of jarring moments (which in fact would be reflections of the approaching end but would not be felt like that at the time) but moments swallowed in the happiness. Literature is analysis after the event. The form of that other piece, about what happened in Mashopi, is nostalgia. There is no nostalgia in this piece, about Paul and Ella, but the form is a kind of pain. To show a woman loving a man one should show her cooking a meal for him or opening a bottle of wine for the meal, while she waits for his ring at the door. Or waking in the morning before he does to see his face change from the calm of sleep into a smile of welcome. Yes. To be repeated a thousand times. But that isn't literature. Probably better as a film. Yes, the physical quality of life, that's living, and not the analysis afterwards, or the moments of discord or premonition. A shot in a film: Ella slowly peeling an orange, handing Paul yellow segments of the fruit, which he takes, one after another, thoughtfully, frowning: he is thinking of something else. [The blue notebook began with a sentence:] 'Tommy appeared to be accusing his mother.' [Then Anna had written:] I came upstairs from the scene between Tommy and Molly and instantly began to turn it into a short story. It struck me that my doing this-turning everything into fiction-must be an evasion. Why not write down, simply, what happened between Molly and her son today? Why do I never write down, simply, what happens? Why don't I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself. Today it was so clear: sitting listening to Molly and Tommy at war, very disturbed by it; then coming straight upstairs and beginning to write a story without even planning to do it. I shall keep a diary.

Jan .7th, 1950.

Tommy was seventeen this week. Molly has never put pressure on him to make up his mind about his future. In fact, recently she told him to stop worrying and to go off to France for a few weeks to 'broaden his mind.' (This phrase irritated him when she used it.) Today he came into the kitchen on purpose to quarrel-both Molly and I knew it as soon as he walked in. He has been in a mood of hostility to Molly for some time. This started after his first visit to his father's house. (At the time we didn't realise how deeply the visit affected him.) It was then he began to criticise his mother for being a communist and 'bohemian.' Molly laughed it off, and said that country houses full of landed gentry and money were fun to visit but he was damned lucky not to have to live that life. He paid a second visit a few weeks later, and returned to his mother over-polite, full of hostility. At which point I intervened: told him, which Molly was too proud to do, about the history of Molly and his father-the way he bullied her financially to make her go back to him, then the threats to tell her employers she was a communist, etc., so that she might lose her job-the whole long ugly story. Tommy at first didn't believe me; no one could be more charming than Richard over a long week-end, I should imagine. Then he believed me, but it didn't help. Molly suggested he should go down to his father's for the summer in order (as she put it to me) that the glamour should have time to wear off. He went. For six weeks. Country house. Charming conventional wife. Three delightful little girls. Richard at home for week-ends, bringing business guests, etc. The local gentry. Molly's prescription worked like a charm. Tommy announced that 'week-ends were long enough.' She was delighted. But too soon. Today's quarrel like a scene from a play. He came in, ostensibly on the grounds that he had to decide about his National Service: he was clearly expecting Molly to say he should be a conscientious objector. Molly would, of course, like him to be; but said it was his decision. He began by arguing that he should do his National Service. This became an attack on her way of life, her politics, her friends-everything she is. There they sat, on either side of the kitchen table, Tommy's dark obstinate muzzled face pointed at her, she sitting all loose and at ease, half her attention on the food cooking for lunch, continually rushing off to the telephone on Party business- he patiently, angrily, waiting through each telephone call until she came back. And at the end of the long fight, he had talked himself into a decision that he should be a conscientious objector; and now his attack on her was linked with this position-the militarism of the Soviet Union, etc. When he went upstairs, announcing, as if this came naturally from what went before, that he intended to marry very young and have a large family, Molly let herself go limp into exhaustion and then began to cry. I came upstairs to give Janet her lunch. Disturbed. Because Molly and Richard make me think of Janet's father. As far as I am concerned this was a highly neurotic stupid involvement of no importance. No amount of repeating phrases like: the father of my child, can make me feel different about it. One day Janet is going to say: 'My mother was married to my father for a year, then they divorced.' And when she is older and I've told her the truth: 'My mother lived with my father for three years; then they decided to have a baby and married so I should not be illegitimate, then divorced.' But these words will have no connection with anything that I feel to be true. Whenever I think about Max, I am overcome with helplessness. I remember the feeling of helplessness made me write about him before. (Willi in the black notebook.) But the moment the baby was born, the silly empty marriage seemed to be cancelled out. I remember thinking, when I first saw Janet: Well, what does it matter, love, marriage, happiness, etc. Here's this marvellous baby. But Janet won't understand that. Tommy doesn't. If Tommy could feel that, he'd stop resenting Molly for leaving his father. I seem to remember starting a diary once before, before Janet was born. I'll look for it. Yes, here is the entry I vaguely remembered.

9th October, 1946.

I came in last night from work into that horrible hotel room. Max lying on the bed, silent. I sat on the divan. He came over, put his head in my lap and his arms around my waist. I could feel his despair. He said: 'Anna, we have nothing to say to each other, why not?' 'Because we aren't the same kind of person.' 'What does that mean, the same kind of person?' he asked, injecting the automatic irony into his voice-a sort of willed, protective, ironic drawl. I felt chilled, thinking, perhaps it doesn't mean anything, but I held tight on to the future, and said: 'But surely it means something, being the same kind of person?' Then he said: 'Come to bed.' In bed, he put his hand on my breast and I felt sexual revulsion and said: 'What's the use, we aren't any good for each other and never have been?' So we went to sleep. Towards morning, the young married couple in the next room made love. The walls were so thin in that hotel we could hear everything. Listening to them made me unhappy; I've never been so unhappy. Max woke and said: 'What's the matter?' I said: 'You see, it's possible to be happy, and we should both hold on to that.' It was very hot. The sun was rising, and the couple next door were laughing. There was a faint warm stain of pink light on the wall from the sun. Max lay beside me, and his body was hot and unhappy. The birds were singing, very loud, then the sun got too hot and quenched them. Suddenly. One minute they were making a shrill lively discordant noise, then silence. The couple were talking and laughing and then their baby woke and began to cry. Max said: 'Perhaps we should have a baby?' I said: 'You mean, having a baby would bring us together?' I said it irritably, and hated myself for saying it; but his sentimentality grated on me. He looked obstinate, and repeated: 'We should have a baby.' Then I suddenly thought: Why not? We can't leave the Colony for months yet. We haven't the money. Let's have a baby-I'm always living as if something wonderful is going to crystalise some time in the future. Let's make something happen now... and so I turned to him and we made love. That was the morning Janet was conceived. We married the following week in the registry office. A year later, we separated. But this man never touched me at all, never got close to me. But there's Janet... I think I shall go to a psycho-analyst.

January 10th, 1950.

Saw Mrs. Marks today. After the preliminaries, she said: 'Why are you here?' I said: 'Because I've had experiences that should have touched me and they haven't.' She was waiting for more, so I said: 'For instance, the son of my friend Molly-last week he decided to become a conscientious objector, but he might just as well have decided not to be. That's something I recognise in myself.' 'What?' 'I watch people-they decide to be this thing or that. But it's as if it's a sort of dance-they might just as well do the opposite with equal conviction.' She hesitated, then asked: 'You have written a novel?' 'Yes.' 'Are you writing another?' 'No, I shall never write another.' She nodded. I already knew that nod, and I said: 'I'm not here because I'm suffering from a writer's block.' She nodded again and I said: 'You'll have to believe that if...' This hesitation was awkward and full of aggression and I said with a smile I knew to be aggressive: '... if we're going to get on.' She smiled, drily. Then: 'Why don't you want to write another book?' 'Because I no longer believe in art.' 'So you don't believe in art?'-isolating the words, and holding them up for me to examine. 'No.' 'So.'

Jan .14th, 1950.

I dream a great deal. The dream: I am in a concert hall. A doll-like audience in evening dress. A grand-piano. Myself, dressed absurdly in Edwardian satin, and a choker of pearls, like Queen Mary, seated at the piano. I am unable to play a note. The audience waits. The dream is stylised, like a scene in a play or an old illustration. I tell Mrs. Marks this dream, and she asks: 'What is it about?' I reply: 'About lack of feeling.' And she gives her small wise smile which conducts our sessions like a conductor's baton. Dream: Wartime in Central Africa. A cheap dance-hall. Everyone drunk, and dancing close for sex. I wait at the side of the dance-floor. A smooth doll-like man approaches me. I recognise Max. (But he has a literary quality from what I wrote in the notebook about Willi.) I walk into his arms, doll-like, freeze, can't move. Once again the dream has a grotesque quality. It's like a caricature. Mrs. Marks asks: 'What is that dream about?' The same thing, lack of feeling. I was frigid with Max.' 'So you are frightened about being frigid?' 'No, because he was the only man I have been frigid with.' She nods. Suddenly I start to worry: Shall I be frigid again?

Jan .19th, 1950.

This morning I was in my room under the roof. Through the wall a baby was crying, I was reminded of that hotel room in Africa, where the baby would wake us crying in the morning, then he would be fed and start gurgling and making happy noises while his parents made love. Janet was playing on the floor with her bricks. Last night Michael asked me to drive with him and I said I couldn't because Molly was going out, so I couldn't leave Janet. He said, ironically: 'Well, the cares of motherhood must ever come before lovers.' Because of the cold irony, I reacted against him. And this morning I felt enclosed by the repetitive quality-the baby crying next door, and my hostility to Michael. (Remembering my hostility towards Max.) Then a feeling of unreality-couldn't remember where I was-here, in London, or there, in Africa, in that other building, where the baby cried through the wall. Janet looked up from the floor and said: 'Come and play, mummy.' I couldn't move. I forced myself up out of the chair after a while and sat on the floor beside the little girl. I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: 'Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a 'young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph. I told Mrs. Marks about this and she said: 'So?' I said: 'It's the same as the dreams, only suddenly in real life.' She waited, and I said: 'It was because I felt hostility towards Michael- and that froze everything.' 'You are sleeping with him?' 'Yes.' She waited and I said, smiling: 'No, I'm not frigid.' She nodded. A waiting nod. I didn't know what she was expecting me to say. She prompted: 'Your little girl asked you to come and play?' I didn't understand. She said: 'To play. To come and play. You couldn't play.' Then I was angry, understanding. For the last few days I've been brought again and again, and so skilfully, to the same point; and every time I've been angry; and always my anger is made to seem a defence against the truth. I said: 'No, that dream was not about art. It was not.' And trying to joke: 'Who dreamed that dream, you or I?' But she wouldn't laugh at the joke: 'My dear, you wrote that book, you are an artist.' She said the word artist with a gentle, understanding, reverent smile. 'Mrs. Marks, you must believe me, I don't care if I never write another word.' 'You don't care,' she said, meaning me to hear behind the don't care my words: Lack of feeling. 'Yes,' I insisted, 'I don't care.' 'My dear, I became a psychotherapist because I once believed myself to be an artist. I treat a great many artists. How many people have sat where you are sitting, because they are blocked, deep in themselves, unable to create any longer.' 'But I am not one of them.' 'Describe yourself.' 'How?' 'Describe yourself as if you were describing someone else.' 'Anna Wulf is a small dark thin spiky woman, over-critical and on the defensive. She is thirty-three years old. She was married for a year to a man she didn't care for and has a small daughter. She is a communist.' She smiled. I said: 'No good?' 'Try again: for one thing, Anna Wulf wrote a novel which was praised by the critics and did so well she is still in fact living on the money it earned.' I was full of hostility. 'Very well: Anna Wulf is sitting in a chair in front of a soul-doctor. She is there because she cannot deeply feel about anything. She is frozen. She has a great many friends and acquaintances. People are pleased to see her. But she only cares about one person in the world, her daughter, Janet.' 'Why is she frozen?' 'She is afraid.' 'What of?' 'Of death.' She nodded, and I broke in across the game and said: 'No, not of my death. It seems to me that ever since I can remember anything the real thing that has been happening in the world was death and destruction. It seems to me it is stronger than life.' 'Why are you a communist?' 'At least they believe in something.' 'Why do you say they, when you are a member of the Communist Party?' 'If I could say we, really meaning it, I wouldn't be here, would I?' 'So you don't care, really, about your comrades?' 'I get on easily with everyone, if that's what you mean?' 'No, that's not what I mean.' 'I told you, the only person I really care about, really, is my daughter. And that's egotism.' 'You don't care about your friend, Molly?' 'I'm fond of her.' 'And you don't care about your man, Michael?' 'Supposing he dropped me tomorrow, how long would I remember that-I like sleeping with him?' 'You've known him how long-three weeks? Why should he drop you?' I couldn't think of a reply, in fact I was surprised I had said it at all. Our time was up. I said good-bye and as I went out she said: 'My dear, you must remember the artist has a sacred trust.' I could not help laughing. 'Why do you laugh?' 'Doesn't it strike you as funny-art is sacred, a majestic chord in C Major?' 'I will see you the day after tomorrow as usual, my dear.'

January 31st, 1950.

I took dozens of dreams to Mrs. Marks today-all dreamed over the last three days. They all had the same quality of false art, caricature, illustration, parody. All the dreams were in marvellous fresh vivid colour, that gave me great pleasure. She said: 'You are dreaming a great deal.' I said: 'As soon as I close my eyes.' She: 'And what are all these dreams about?' I smile, before she can; at which she looks at me sternly, ready to take a strong line. But I say: 'I want to ask you something. Half those dreams were nightmares, I was in real terror, sweating when I woke up. And yet I enjoyed every minute of them. I enjoy dreaming. I look forward to sleep because I am going to dream. I wake myself up in the night, again and again, to enjoy the knowledge of my dreaming. In the morning I feel as happy as if I've built cities in my sleep. Well? But yesterday I met a woman who has been in psychoanalysis for ten years-an American naturally.' Here Mrs. Marks smiled. 'This woman told me with a sort of bright sterilised smile that her dreams were more important to her than her life, more real to her than anything that happened in the day-time with her child and her husband.' Mrs. Marks smiled. 'Yes, I know what you are going to say. And it's true-she told me she once believed herself to be a writer. But then I've never met anyone anywhere or any class, colour or creed, who hasn't at some time believed themselves to be writers, painters, dancers or something. And that is probably a more interesting fact than anything else we've discussed in this room-after all a hundred years ago it would never have crossed most people's minds to be artists. They recognised the station in life it had pleased God to call them to. But-isn't there something wrong with the fact that my sleep is more satisfying, exciting, enjoyable than anything that happens to me awake? I don't want to become like that American woman.' A silence, her conducting smile. 'Yes, I know you want me to say that all my creativity is going into my dreams.' 'Well, isn't it true?' 'Mrs. Marks, I'm going to ask if we can ignore my dreams for a time.' She says drily: 'You come to me, a psychotherapist, and ask if we can ignore your dreams?' 'Isn't it possible at least that my dreaming so enjoy-ably is an escape away from feeling.' She sits quiet thinking. Oh, she is a most intelligent wise old woman. She makes a small gesture, asking me to be quiet while she thinks whether this is sensible or not. And in the meantime I look at the room we are sitting in. It is tall, long, darkened, quietened. It has flowers everywhere. The walls are covered with reproductions of masterpieces and there are statues. It is almost like an art gallery. It is a dedicated room. It gives me pleasure, like an art gallery. The point is, that nothing in my life corresponds with anything in this room-my life has always been crude, unfinished, raw, tentative; and so have the lives of the people I have known well. It occurred to me, looking at this room, that the raw unfinished quality in my life was precisely what was valuable in it and I should hold fast to it. She came out of her brief meditation and said: 'Very well, my dear. We'll leave your dreams for a while, and you will bring me your waking fantasies.' On that day, the last entry, I stopped dreaming as if a magic wand had been waved. 'Any dreams?' she asks casually, to find out if I'm ready to forget my absurd evasion of her. We discuss the nuances of my feeling for Michael. We are happy together most of the time, then suddenly I have feelings of hatred and resentment for him. But always for the same reasons: when he makes some crack about the fact I have written a book-he resents it, makes fun of my being 'an authoress'; when he is ironical about Janet, that I put being a mother before loving him; and when he warns me he does not intend to marry me. He always makes this warning after he has said he loves me and I am the most important thing in his life. I get hurt and angry. I said to him, angrily: 'Surely that's a warning one need only make once,' then he teased me out of my bad temper. But that night I was frigid with him for the first time. When I told Mrs. Marks, she said: 'Once I treated a woman for three years for frigidity. She was living with a man she loved. But she never in all those three years had an orgasm. On the day they married she had an orgasm for the first time.' Having told me this she nodded, emphatically, as if to say: There you are, you see! I laughed, and said: 'Mrs. Marks, do you realise what a pillar of reaction you are?' She said, smiling: 'And what does that word mean, my dear?' 'It means a great deal to me,' I said. 'And yet on the night after your man says he won't marry you, you are frigid?' 'But he has said it or implied it other times and I haven't been frigid.' I was conscious of dishonesty, so I admitted: 'It's true my response in bed is in relation to how he accepts me.' 'Of course, you are a real woman.' She uses this word, a woman, a real woman, exactly as he does artist, a true artist. An absolute. When she said, 'you are a real woman,' I began to laugh, helplessly, and after a while she laughed too. Then she said, why are you laughing and I told her. She was on the point of using the occasion to bring in the word 'art'-which neither of us has mentioned since I stopped dreaming. But instead she said: 'Why do you never mention your politics to me?' I thought it out, and said: 'About the C. P.-I swing from fear and hatred of it to a desperate clinging to it. Out of a need to protect it and look after it-do you understand that?' She nodded, so I went on: 'And Janet-I can resent her existence violently because she prevents me doing so many things I want to do, and love her at the same time. And Molly. I can hate her one hour for her bossiness and protectiveness and love her the next. And Michael-it's the same thing. So we can obviously confine ourselves to one of my relationships and be dealing with my whole personality?' Here she smiled, drily. 'Very well,' she said, 'let's confine ourselves to Michael.'

15th March, 1950.

I went to Mrs. Marks and said that while I was happier with Michael than I have ever been in my life, something was happening that I did not understand. I would go to sleep in his arms, dissolved and happy, and wake in the morning hating and resenting him. At which she said: 'Well, my dear, so perhaps it is time you started dreaming again?' I laughed, and she waited for me to stop laughing, so I said, 'You always win.' Last night I began to dream again as if I had been ordered to dream.

27th March, 1950.

I am crying in my sleep. All I can remember when I wake is that I have been crying. When I told Mrs. Marks, she said: 'The tears we shed in our sleep are the only genuine tears we shed in our lives. The waking tears are self-pity.' I said: 'That's very poetic, but I can't believe you mean it.' 'And why not?' 'Because when I go to sleep knowing I am going to cry, there's pleasure in it.' She smiles; I wait for it-but by now she is not going to help me. 'You aren't going to suggest,' I say, ironical, 'that I am a masochist?' She nods: of course. 'There's pleasure in pain,' I say, sounding the trumpet for her. She nods. I say: 'Mrs. Marks, that sad nostalgic pain that makes me cry is the same emotion I wrote that damned book out of.' She sits up, straight, shocked. Because I could describe a book, art, that noble activity, as damned. I say: 'All you've done is to bring me, step by step, to the subjective knowledge of what I knew before anyway, that the root of that book was poisoned.' She says: 'All self-knowledge is knowing, on deeper and deeper levels, what one knew before.' I say: 'But that isn't good enough.' She nods and sits thinking. I know something is coming but I don't know what. Then she says: 'Do you keep a diary?' 'Off and on.' 'Do you write in it what happens here?' 'Sometimes.' She nods. And I know what is in her mind. It is that the process, writing a diary, is the beginning of what she thinks of as unfreezing, the releasing of the 'block' that stops me writing. I felt so angry, so resentful, that I couldn't say anything. I felt as if, in mentioning the diary, in making it part of her process, so to speak, she was robbing me of it. [At this point the diary stopped, as a personal document. It continued in the form of newspaper cuttings, carefully pasted in and dated.]

March, 50.

The modeller calls this the 'H-Bomb Style,' explaining that the 'H' is for peroxide of hydrogen, used for colouring. The hair is dressed to rise in waves as from a bomb-burst, at the nape of the neck. Daily Telegraph July 13th, 50 There were cheers in Congress today when Mr. Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat, urged that President Truman should tell the North Koreans to withdraw within a week or their towns would be atom-bombed. Express July 29th, 50 Britain's decision to spend 100 millions more on Defence means, as Mr. Attlee has made clear, that hoped-for improvements in living standards and social services must be postponed. New Statesman Aug .3, 50 America is to go right ahead with the H Bomb, expected to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atom bombs. Express Aug .5th, 50 Basing its conclusions on the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as to the range of blast, heat-flash, radiation, etc., it assumes that one atom bomb might kill 50,000 people in a British built-up area. But, leaving out the Hydrogen Bomb, it is surely unsafe to assume that... New Statesman 24th Nov., 50 MAC ARTHUR PUTS IN 100,000 TROOPS IN AN OFFENSIVE TO END THE WAR IN KOREA. Express 9th Dec, 50 KOREA PEACE TALKS OFFERED BUT ALLIES WOULD NOT APPEASE. Express 16th Dec, 50 U. S. 'IN GRAVE DANGER. ' Emergency call today. President Truman tonight told Americans that the U. S. is in 'grave danger' created by the rulers of the Soviet Union.

13th Jan., 51.

Truman yesterday set vast targets for the U. S. Defence effort involving sacrifices for all Americans. Express 12th March, 51 A-BOMBS BY EISENHOWER. I would use them at once if I thought it would bring sufficient destruction to the enemy. Express April 6th, 51 WOMAN ATOM SPY TO DIE. Husband too sent to Electric Chair. Judge: You Caused Korea.

May 2nd.

KOREA: 371 KILLED, WOUNDED OR MISSING.

9th June, 51.

The U.S. Supreme Court has sustained the conviction of the eleven leaders of the American Communist Party for conspiracy to teach the violent overthrow of the Government. The sentences of five years in prison and individual fines of $10,000 will now be enforced. Statesman 16th June, 51 Sir: The Los Angeles Times of June 2, states: 'In Korea it is estimated that some 2 million civilians, the greater part of them children, have been killed or have died of exposure since the start of the war. More than ten million are homeless and destitute.' Dong Sung Kim, special envoy of the Republic of Korea, reported June 1st here: 'In just one night, there were 156 villages burned. The villages were in the path of an enemy advance. So, of course, the U.N. planes had to destroy them. And all the old people and children who were still there because they were unable to heed the evacuation orders were killed.' New Statesman 13th July, 51 Truce Talks Held Up-because the Reds refuse to allow 20 Allied reporters and photographers into Kaesong. Express July 16th 10,000 in oil-land riots. Troops use tear-gas. Express July 28th Rearmament has up till now brought no sacrifice to the American people. On the contrary, consumption is still rising. New Statesman 1st Sept., 51 The technique of quick-freezing germ-cells and keeping them indefinitely can mean a complete change in the significance of time. At present it applies to the male sperm, but it might also be adapted to the female ovum. A man alive in 1951 and a woman alive in 2,051 might be 'mated' in 2,251 to produce a child by a pre-natal foster-mother. Statesman Oct .17, 51 MOSLEM WORLD FLARES. More troops for Suez. Express Oct .20 ARMY SEALS OFF EGYPT. Express 16th Nov., 51 12,790 Allied war prisoners and 250,000 South Korean civilians have been murdered by Reds in Korea. Express 24th Nov., 51 Within the lifetime of some of our children the world's population may be expected to reach 4,000 millions. How shall we work the miracle of feeding the 4,000 millions? Statesman 24th Nov., 51 No one knows how many people were executed, imprisoned, sent to labour camps or died during months of interrogation in the great Soviet purge of 1937-39, nor whether a million or twenty million people are engaged in forced labour in Russia today. Statesman RUSSIA BUILDS A-BOMBER. Fastest in the World. Express 1st Dec, 51 The U. S. is riding the greatest boom in history. Though its spending on armaments and on overseas economic aid alone is now larger than the entire pre-war Federal Budget. Statesman 29th Dec, 51 This was the first peace-time year in British history when we had eleven divisions overseas and consumed ten per cent of our national income in armaments. Statesman 29th Dec, 51 There are signs that Mc Carthy and his friends may at last have gone too far in the United States. Statesman 12th Jan, 1952 When President Truman told the world, early in 1950, that the U.S. would accelerate efforts to produce the H-bomb- which would have, according to the scientists, an explosive effect 1,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, or equal to twenty million tons of T.N.T.-Albert Einstein pointed out quietly that there 'emerges, more and more distinctly, the spectre of general annihilation.' Statesman 1st March, 1952 Just as hundreds of thousands of innocent people were condemned as witches in the Middle Ages, so multitudes of Communists and Russian patriots were purged for mythical counter-revolutionary activities. Indeed, it was precisely because there was nothing to uncover that the arrests reached such fantastic proportions (by a most ingenious method, Mr. Weissberg calculates that eight million innocent people probably passed through the prisons between 1936 and 1939). Statesman 22nd March, 1952 The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane. Statesman April 15th, 52 Roumanian Communist Government has ordered mass deportation of 'unproductive people' from Bucharest. They number 200,000 or one-fifth of the city. Express 28th June, 52 It is impossible to establish the number of Americans who have had their passports restricted or denied, but known cases reveal that a wide range of individuals of different backgrounds, beliefs and political persuasions have been affected. The list includes... Statesman 5th July, 52 Most important of all, the effect of the American witchhunt is to produce a general level of conformity, a new orthodoxy from which a man dissents at his economic peril. Statesman 2nd Sept., 52 The Home Secretary said that although grave damage must be caused by an accurately delivered atom bomb, it is sometimes wildly exaggerated. Express I am well aware that you cannot carry out a revolution with rosewater; my query was whether, in order to defeat the danger of war from Formosa, it was necessary to execute a million and a half, or whether to disarm them might not have been adequate. Statesman Dec .13th, 1952 JAPANESE DEMAND ARMS. Express Dec .13th Title II of the Mc Carran Act specifically provides for the establishment of so-called detention centres. Far from directing the creation of such centres, the law authorises the Attorney-General of the U. S. to apprehend and detain 'in such places of detention as may be prescribed by him... all persons as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe that such persons probably will engage in or probably will conspire with others to engage in acts of espionage and sabotage.'

Oct .3rd, 52.

OUR BOMB GOES OFF. First British atomic weapon exploded successfully. Express 11th Oct., 52 MAU MAU SLASH COLONEL. Express 23rd Oct., 52 BIRCH THEM. Lord Goddard, Chief Justice. Express 25th Oct., 52 Colonel Robert Scott, Commanding Officer of the American Air Base at Furstenfeldbruck: 'The preliminary treaty between America and Germany has been signed. I earnestly hope that your fatherland will soon stand as a full-fledged member of the N. A. T. O. forces... I impatiently wait with you for the day when we will stand shoulder to shoulder as friends and brothers to resist the threat of Communism. I hope and pray that the moment will soon come when either I or some other American commander will turn this fine Air Base over to some German Wing Commander with the beginning of Germany's new Luftwaffe.' Statesman 17th Nov., 52 U. S. TRIES OUT H. BOMB. Express 1st Nov., 52 Korea: Total casualties since the truce talks started including civilians, will soon be getting close to the number of prisoners whose status has become the main obstacle to the truce. Statesman 27th Nov., 52 Kenya's Government announced tonight that as collective punishment for the murder of Commander Jack Meiklejohn last Saturday, 750 men and 2,200 women and children have been evacuated from their homes. Express 8th Nov. In recent years it has been fashionable to denounce the critics of Mc Carthyism as dyspeptic 'anti-Americans.' Statesman 22nd Nov., 52 It is only two years since President Truman gave the word 'Go' on the H-Bomb programme. Forthwith a billion-dollar plant was put under construction at Savannah River, South Carolina, to produce tritium (triple-atom-hydrogen); by the end of 1951, the B-bomb industry had become an industrial undertaking comparable only with U.S. Steel and General Motors. Statesman 22nd Nov., 52 But the first shot of the present campaign was fired-most conveniently to coincide with the hectic climax of a Republican election campaign which had made all possible capital out of Alger Hiss's 'contamination' of the State Department- by the Republican Senator, Alexander Wiley, of Wisconsin in his disclosure that he had demanded an investigation of the 'extensive infiltration' of the U.N. Secretariat by American Communists... Then the Senate Sub-Committee on Internal Security proceeded to cross-examine its first twelve victims in the new drive, all of them high officials... yet the refusal of the 12 witnesses to testify about any Communist affiliations did not save them from... But the witch-hunting Senators were clearly out for bigger fry than the twelve against whom the only evidence of subversion and espionage adduced was their silence. Statesman Nov .29th, 52 The Czech Sabotage Trial, though it follows the standard pattern of political justice in the People's Democracies, is of unusual interest. In the first place, Czechoslovakia was the only country in the Eastern Bloc which possessed a deeply rooted democratic way of life, including full civil liberties and an independent judiciary. Statesman Dec .3rd, 52 DARTMOOR MAN FLOGGED. Thug gets 12 lashes with the Cat. Express Dec .17th, 1952 11 COMMUNIST LEADERS HANGED IN PRAGUE. Capitalist Spies Claims Czech Government.

29th Dec, 1952.

A new 10,000 atom factory designed to double Britain's output of atomic weapons. Express 13th January, 53 SOVIET MURDER-PLOT SHOCK. Moscow radio accused early today a group of Terrorist Jewish doctors of trying to assassinate Russian leaders-including some of the top Soviet military men and an atomic scientist. Express 6th March, 1953 STALIN DIES. Express 23rd March, 1953 2,500 MAU MAU ARRESTS. Express 23rd March, 1953 AMNESTY IN RUSSIA FOR PRISONERS. Express 1st April, 1953 WHAT COULD PEACE IN KOREA MEAN TO YOU? Express 7th May, 1953 PEACE HOPES RISING IN KOREA. Express 8th May, 1953 America is discussing possible United Nations action 'to curb Communist aggression in S. E. Asia.' And she is sending large quantities of planes, tanks and ammunition to Indochina. Express 13th May ATROCITIES IN EGYPT. Express 18th July, 1953 BERLIN NIGHT BATTLE .15,000 People of East Berlin were fighting a division of Soviet tanks and infantry in the dark streets early this morning. Express REVOLT IN ROUMANIA. Express 10th July, 53 BERIA TRIED AND SHOT. Express 27th July, 1953 KOREAN CEASE-FIRE. Express 7th August, 1953 MASS P.O.W. RIOT. Mass rioting by 12,000 North Korean p.o.w. was put down by U.N. guards using tear-gas and small arms fire. Express 20th Aug., 1953 300 dead in coup. Persia. Express 19th Feb., 1954 Britain has A-bomb stock-pile now. Express 27th March, 1954 2nd H-BOMB IS DELAYED-Isles still too hot from blast No .1. Express 30th March 2nd H-BOMB EXPLODED. Express [And now the personal entries began again.]

2nd April, 1954.

I realised today that I was beginning to withdraw from what Mrs. Marks calls my 'experience' with her; and because of something she said; she must have known it for some time. She said: 'You must remember that the end of an analysis does not mean the end of the experience itself.' 'You mean, the yeast goes on working?' She smiled and nodded.

4th April, 1954.