to find a job, and she worried that he might lose it because of her. ‘Aren’t you going?’ she insisted.
He shook his head. ‘I’ve telephoned and now you must not worry at all, you must sleep.’
For three days Anton sat by her, scarcely leaving her, taking instructions from the doctor and dealing with Mrs Carson with a gentle ironical patience that she would never have expected from him. Slowly her hands lost size. There was a moment she looked at them, small and thin, and began to cry. Anton took her in his arms and kissed her.
She murmured: ‘What about Toni Mandel?’ He said: ‘Yes, yes, everything has its end. You must not worry about Mrs Mandel.’
Anton was not there when Jimmy came in again, bristling with hostility. He made some remarks about the sale of The Watchdog, told her that Ronald was completely cured, and then said: ‘I have to tell you, comrade, that I must criticize you for your attitude.’
‘What attitude?’
‘I don’t like lies. I don’t mind the truth but I don’t like lies.’
‘What lies?’
‘You and Anton.’
‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’
He was again red and angry, very hostile.
She thought: Well, it’s true that it might just as well have been Jimmy. Yet the feeling between her and Anton had now grown so that their being together seemed right and inevitable; she could not imagine that any accident (she thought of her sickness and Anton’s looking after her as an accident) would bring her and Jimmy together.
‘And in any case, comrade, I’d like to tell you straight, I’ve found a better woman.’
‘Well, I’m glad,’ she said flatly.
‘Yes. I have. A fine working-class woman, like my own kind. You and I wouldn’t have done at all.’
I’m very pleased.’ She wondered who he meant. There were no working-class girls in the group. She thought: The receptionist from McGrath’s? Then he’ll have to stop her using lipstick and dyeing her hair.
He said: ‘She’s a woman who can take hardship, who knows how to suffer. Yes, those girls down in the Coloured Quarter know how to take life.’
Martha’s brain informed her that any reaction she would have to this would be ‘white settler’ and therefore suspect. All the same, she had to say something. And he was waiting for her to speak, waiting with his whole body expressing challenge and readiness to fight.
‘Jimmy, you’ll get yourself posted.’
‘I’m not taking orders from any bloody colour-minded fascists.’
‘You won’t be allowed to marry her.’
‘The war won’t last for ever.’
‘And besides, we took a decision that the RAF must not have personal relations with the Coloured women, because it would give the reactionaries a stick to beat us with.’
That was what he had been waiting to hear. He turned the full force of his resentment on her and said: ‘Who took decisions? I’m not bound by any colour-minded decisions. If Comrade Anton wants to have colour prejudice, then he should be ashamed, but I’m not bound by it.’
‘You know it’s not a question of colour prejudice.’
‘Is it not then? For me it is. And if you ask me, Comrade Anton should examine his attitudes. I don’t like them at all.’
‘Then why didn’t you say so in the group meeting?’
‘There’s a lot wrong with the group,’ he said.
‘Then why don’t you say so in the group? It’s no use saying so outside.’
‘I’ll say my mind any place I want to say it. I’m not going to be told what I’m to say or where. I’m telling you, comrade, there’s altogether too many middle-class ideas in this group for my taste. And for the taste of the lads from the camp.’
He left the room suddenly, letting the door crash behind him. Martha lay still, arranging in her mind the words she would use to describe the scene to Anton. Instinctively she softened it. She had an impulse not to say anything: ‘Jimmy’s personal feelings are his own affair.’ But they were not his own affair. It was her duty to tell Anton.
She said to Anton that Jimmy seemed to be in an emotional state, and should be ‘handled’. Then she reported what he had said.
At this, Anton’s personality changed: the gentleman who had sat by her as a nurse vanished. He became the chairman: stern and cold, with compressed lips and judging eyes.
‘There can’t be one set of rules for one person and another set for another. A decision was taken, and until the decision is changed by a majority vote of the group, then Comrade Jimmy will have to abide by it.’
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you,’ she asked herself, and Anton. To which he replied: ‘It is the duty of a comrade to report infringements of discipline. It is our duty to aid and support each other.’
She felt him to be logically right; she felt him to be inhuman and wrong. There was no way for her to make these two feelings fit together. She was still weak and sick, and she let the problem slide away from her.
Soon she was convalescent; and the members of the group came in to see her, at lunch-hour, or in the intervals of meetings. The RAF, however, did not come: Jasmine reported that they were in a bad mood about something.
It was now accepted that Martha and Anton were a couple.
Mr Maynard and his wife took breakfast at the opposite ends of the big table which was fully furnished with white damask, silver and cut-glass dishes displaying the yellows, browns, and golds of five different types of marmalade. Mrs Maynard took a cup of coffee and half a piece of toast; Mr Maynard a cup of tea. The problem which occupied the two minds behind the large, dark jowled faces did not reach words: the native servant stood at attention throughout the meal by the sideboard.
Mr Maynard said: ‘I have to be at the Magistrates’ Court in forty minutes.’ Mrs Maynard said: ‘I believe the living-room is empty.’ Mr Maynard waited by the door of the living-room, watching the morning sun quiver on the glossy leaves of the veranda plants. Mrs Maynard, tucking a white handkerchief into the bosom of her stiff navy-blue dress, where it stood up like a small stiff fan, came to a stop beside him, remarking: ‘I think you had better let me see the girl.’ She said ‘gal’.
He said: ‘I saw her last time, and she was quite amenable to persuasion.’
‘It’s a woman’s thing,’ she said, but without force.
‘How much are we prepared to go to?’
‘I
