gruffly annoyed, said: ‘What’s this, a poetry-reading?’
Anton Hesse, his rough pale hair as white as sand in the moonlight, his eyes glinting with white disapproval, said: ‘Why have you convened a meeting here? What is the reason for fetching us all up here and leaving the other meeting?’
Jackie said: ‘Because I thought it would be more pleasant to sit in the park than in that dirty little office.’
Jasmine said with determination: ‘We should elect a chairman.’ Her tone said plainly that she did not intend to be moved, by the poetry or by anything else, away from her determination to criticize Jackie.
‘Andrew,’ said Marjorie. They all agreed. They were now sitting in a circle on the grass.
‘Now, Comrade Jackie,’ Andrew said in blunt annoyance, ‘you convened this meeting. I should like to say first that if you really fetched us here because you wanted to admire the moonlight then I, for one, wish to pass a vote of censure.’ The formal chairman’s voice sounded so absurd here, in the spaces of the big park, that he added, smiling: ‘But only as a matter of form.’
They all laughed and became, instantly, ‘the group’.
‘Anyway,’ said Jackie, ‘all those social democrats and Trotskyists are spying on us. I caught Boris sniffing around in Black Ally’s Café yesterday.’
The group tightened still further out of its units.
‘I brought you here,’ Jackie said, lowering his voice, ‘to say that I’ve found out that all of us service types are likely to be posted at any moment.’
‘What makes you think that?’ demanded Corporal McGrew. He was shaken; alone of the airforce men he liked his stay in the Colony and did not want to leave.
‘I got young Peters in the canteen and screwed it out of him,’ said Jackie. There was a chorus of contemptuous exclamations. A great many men from the camp attended the Progressive Club meetings. They were mostly aircraftsmen and of a type: this last was not clearly understood, however, until a certain Sergeant Peters began attending their meetings: he was so unlike the others that comparisons were forced on them. He was a clipped, almost mincing young man with a habit of leaning forward over a question, head on one side, a disagreeable smile on his small pink lips, saying: ‘Do I take it that you mean to imply … ?’ Jackie Bolton, whose particular genius it was to establish a swift persuasive intimacy with people, had gone home one night on the camp bus with this youth who was being querulous because Andrew McGrew had said across the floor at the meeting that he was a typical member of the corrupt petty bourgeoisie. Sergeant Peters was slightly drunk. He had told Jackie that he had been appointed by the camp commander to attend all the ‘Red’ meetings in town so as to take down the names of all the airmen present. He turned in a list of these names, with a short précis of what each had said, after every meeting. He was unaffected by Jackie’s jovial contempt for him; and a remarkable situation developed where, while informing on his fellows to the commander, this instinctive spy would then immediately go to Jackie Bolton and tell him everything he had said, for as he explained: ‘If the Labour Government gets in and you Reds take over, things might be quite different at Home and I don’t want to be on the wrong side.’
‘He told me that I and William are for the high jump. The CO’s got it into his head that we are extremely subversive.’
‘Judging from the way you went on tonight I’m not surprised,’ said Andrew.
‘Yes,’ said Jasmine firmly, bracing herself to criticize her man, although she was fighting down tears because he was leaving. ‘We’ve got to discuss your behaviour, Jackie.’
‘What it amounts to is this,’ said Martha. ‘That because you are leaving you don’t care what sort of difficulties you make for us.’
‘Oh, I can’t be bothered with all this small-town nonsense,’ said Jackie airily. And he got up from the grass and strolled off towards the pavilion, hands low in his pockets, whistling.
The six people who remained were silent: they were agreeing without words that since Comrade Bolton was leaving them, they would let it all drop.
Comrade Bolton was now strolling beside the clumps of moon-blotched lilies as if enjoying a pleasant evening walk.
Anton Hesse, who had not said a word until now, demanded: ‘Comrades, I must have permission to speak.’ He was coldly, contemptuously angry: his anger tautened their sense of responsibility.
‘Comrade Anton,’ said Andrew, with the small tinge of irony his manner always held when Anton was in question.
‘We have been behaving like a bunch of amateurs
‘I agree,’ interrupted Jasmine eagerly. Her eyes were following Jackie’s dark shape at the far end of a path; her face was contracted with pain, yet she was listening closely to the argument: ‘We’ve made every mistake we could make. We had decided, quite correctly, that the Aid for Our Allies should be kept respectable and unpolitical, that its task was to raise money for medical supplies for the Soviet Union and nothing else, and that it should be run by that bunch of social democrats – under our guidance, of course. Now, because of Comrade Bolton it will most likely lose all its sponsors; Trotskyist Krueger will have control of it because he’s in with Gates, unless Jasmine makes it a full-time job controlling it: Jasmine has allowed herself to be secretary again when she already has far too much to do.’
Here Jasmine said demurely: ‘Oh, I don’t mind. I can manage.’
‘No,’ said Anton sharply. ‘That is nonsense. The essence of good organization is never to do anything oneself that someone else can do as well.’ Here they all laughed, but Anton said, ‘Yes, yes, yes. You laugh. But you wouldn’t laugh if you had learned anything at all. The basic trouble is, we have neglected our theory. The sort of thing that happened tonight is a direct result of not seriously analysing the situation …’
Here they smiled: the phrase, analysing the situation, was peculiarly Anton’s.
‘Yes, comrades. Analysing the situation. And now. It will soon be eleven o’clock. The airforce comrades must get to their buses. But I propose that we convene a meeting to fundamentally reorganize the work of this group. Because things cannot continue like this.’
Here Jackie Bolton returned to the group, and seated himself beside William instead of beside Jasmine. The two men already had a look of being distant from the rest. They all realized that Jackie had been making his farewells to the park and, in a way, to them all: he was already thinking of the next place the fortunes of war would drop him into.
‘Very well,’ said Andrew. ‘I agree with Comrade Anton.’ Andrew and Anton always agreed with each other although they could not address two words to each other without the hostility sounding in their voices. ‘We must have a special meeting. I take it everyone agrees. Tomorrow night there is the committee meeting of the Progressive Club. The night after there is a five o’clock meeting of the Sympathizers of Russia. At eight o’clock at our office there will be a special business meeting of the group. Attendance obligatory. No excuses will be accepted.’ He stood up, saying to the other two men from the camp: ‘We’ll miss our bus.’
The three airforce men became a group separate from the civilians, led by Jackie, who said in cockney: ‘Cerm on, mates, cerm on, get moving naow.’ They went off into the shadows under the trees. Anton and the three women remained. Anton nodded at them, formally, as was his way, and he departed in another direction,
