to the boarding-house; and Martha to the room she was renting in the house of the widow Carson which was very close, being opposite one of the gates of the park.
Martha said to herself: I must walk slowly and enjoy the moonlight. She was conscious that the moment she left the group she felt as let down as if a physical support had been removed. ‘I’m not alone enough – I should enjoy it when I am.’ But she was almost running across the park. As usual a demon of impatience was snapping at her heels, pushing her into the future. Her dissatisfaction at the evening, at Jackie Bolton, at the months of her life in the group had crystallized in the form of words Anton Hesse had used. They had been behaving like a bunch of amateurs. Well, the day after tomorrow some serious analysis would set them on the right path; as these words slid through her brain it was as if they rolled up the past months and pushed them away. Two days ago, walking through the park with Jasmine, the girls had agreed, as if talking about some period a long way behind them, that they had been very romantic and irresponsible when they had joined the group. That conversation with Jasmine now seemed a long time ago. So much experience and active learning had been crammed into each day of the four months since she had walked out of her husband’s house that she thought of herself as an entirely different person.
The white gates of widow Carson’s house gleamed just ahead. Now Martha did walk slowly. She knew that as soon as she got inside she would fall over on to her bed and sleep, and she had to think: she was thinking that she had been informed William was leaving, and she ought to be unhappy about it. But she was not. She was relieved. Two days ago William had come to her room to say that ‘he had reason to believe’ that Douglas, her husband, had put pressure on to the camp authorities to get him posted. More, that ‘he had evidence’ that Douglas was thinking of citing him as corespondent in a divorce case. Martha had listened to this, conscious of dislike for William. Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.
When Douglas had threatened her with the machinery of the law, she had shrugged and laughed. When William spoke of ‘getting legal advice’ and she understood that he was enjoying the idea of a fight with Douglas over the possession of her – then, for a few moments, she had seen the two men as one, and identical with the pompous, hypocritical and essentially male fabric of society. That was why she now felt relief at the idea of William’s going. Yet, in the eyes of this small town, ‘Matty Knowell had left her husband and a child for an airforce sergeant.’ She succeeded in suppressing her amazed dismay at this view of herself by the device of never thinking of the people who, so short a time ago, had made up her life. She lived in ‘the group’ and did not care about the judgments of anyone else. She felt as if she were invisible to anyone but the group.
Outside the Carson gates she stopped. This was because what she referred to as ‘coping with Mrs Carson’ was becoming more of a strain daily. So much of a strain in fact that now she abruptly swerved off so as to walk around the block and collect her energies for what might follow.
When Martha rented this room she had informed the widow that she intended to live with William Brown: she had spoken defiantly: for the moment Mrs Carson represented the society she despised. But Mrs Carson had merely seemed puzzled. The irregularities of behaviour under the outward forms of conformity in this small Colonial town might be more easily tolerated than in, let us say, a small town in Britain, but they did not take the shape Martha insisted on for herself. The widow Carson did once inquire if Martha was going to marry Sergeant Brown when the war was over, but Martha said, obviously irritated, that she didn’t know. Mrs Carson sighed and remarked that her own daughter, now happily married to a Johannesburg businessman, had been unhappy in her first two marriages. Martha did not seem to see any parallel. It had crossed Mrs Carson’s mind that perhaps Martha believed in free love? But the phrase had associations which did not fit in with Martha’s manner, which was alarmingly unfrivolous. She therefore ceased to think about it; she returned to her private preoccupations and was interested in Martha only in so far as the young woman would enter them with her.
The first night Martha was in Mrs Carson’s house, she had woken at two in the morning at a noise in the passage outside her door. She found the widow, a gaunt figure in a cretonne dressing-gown, her grey hair in draggle-tails around her bony grey face, with her ear bent to the keyhole of the door that led to the veranda. Mrs Carson had taken her arm between two trembling hands and demanded: ‘Did you hear a noise?’ Martha had recognized a form of neurosis only too familiar to her. The widow Carson’s life was a long drama played against fantasies about her servants. She never kept one longer than a month: they left for the most part in a state of bewilderment.
Mrs Carson had been left well-off by her husband and only let a room because she was afraid to be alone at night. She always sat up until Martha came home, alone or with William, then dragged heavy iron bars across the doors and fitted specially-made steel screens across the windows. She went to sleep in a fortress. Yet more than once Martha had seen Mrs Carson, late at night, standing motionless under the big jacaranda tree at the gate, watching the house. She was engaged in some dream of a black marauder breaking into the house in spite of all its bars and barricades and finding it empty. As for Martha, she slept as usual with her windows and doors open, but promised Mrs Carson to keep the door between her own room and the rest of the house locked.
Collecting herself to face Mrs Carson was not an effort, for charity’s sake, to sink herself in the sick woman’s private world, but rather an effort to test her own vision of the world against the other. Mrs Carson, she told herself, was the product of a certain kind of society, and the Mrs Carsons would cease to exist when that society came to an end. Her patience with the terrible obsessed woman was because she saw her as a variety of psychological dinosaur. But more than once, after sitting with Mrs Carson behind barred windows and doors, assuring her that no black man with evil intentions lurked outside, she had returned to her own room invaded by despair. The wings of elation had folded under her. She even caught herself thinking: Supposing she’s stronger than we are?
Therefore, before entering the big empty house at night, when she was by herself and not supported by William, she always hardened herself and strengthened the buttresses and arches of her own dream: over there, she thought, meaning in the Soviet Union – over there it’s all finished, race prejudice and anti-Semitism.
She made the trip around the block fast, shivering a little, for the moonlight lay cold everywhere, and she had no coat. She intended to go as silently as possible to her own room, but the front door stood slightly ajar, and she knew Mrs Carson waited just inside it. She cautiously pushed the door in on the darkened passage, and the widow said: ‘Oh, is that you, dear?’ Martha felt her arm encircled in a bony trembling grasp and said cheerfully: ‘Yes, it’s me.’ She switched on the light with her free hand, so that the passage showed its polished bare boards, its fading pink-flowered wallpaper, and a great glaring brass bowl on a wooden stand, filled with marigolds and zinnias. Mrs Carson wore her cretonne dressing-gown, and her head was covered over with curlers. ‘You didn’t see anything as you came in?’ she demanded, her face white and gaunt, her eyes gleaming dark in deep sockets.
‘Nothing. There really isn’t anything. You should go to bed now.’
‘Today Saul looked at me in a very strange way.’
‘I expect you imagined it.’
‘I’ll give him the sack in the morning. He’s got ideas in his head. I can see he has thoughts in his head.’
‘I’ll bar the door for you and then you go to bed,’ said Martha.
Mrs Carson said: ‘Thank you, dear.’ She sounded, as always, disappointed: Martha had not said what she wanted to hear. Suddenly she remarked, in an ordinary voice: ‘You’ve got a visitor.’
‘Who?’
‘Yes,
