kaffirs are getting out of hand’, that is true. But I can say, ‘The blacks need firm treatment.’ That’s something. I am grateful for it.’
Martha did not know what to say. She could not make out from this succession of smooth and savage sentences which side he was on. As she put it, with a straightforwardness which she imagined he would commend, ‘If you think it’s terrible, then why do you …?’
‘But I didn’t say I thought it was terrible. On the contrary, if there’s one thing my generation has learned it is that the more things change, the more they remain the same.’
Martha reached out her hand to take his glass. ‘You’re going to break it,’ she warned. He had in fact broken it – there was a mess of wet glass in his hand. He glanced at it, with raised brows, then reached for a handkerchief. Martha was looking around to see if the incident had been noticed. But everyone was listening to Mrs Brodeshaw, who was explaining how she was forming a women’s organization in preparation for the war.
A servant came forward to remove the bits of glass.
‘We old men,’ Mr Maynard said apologetically, ‘are full of unaccountable emotions.’
‘I know,’ said Martha at once. ‘You’re like my father – what upset you was the 1914 war, wasn’t it?’
He looked exceedingly uncomfortable, but assented.
‘You really seemed to think it was going to change things, didn’t you?’
‘We did attach a certain importance to it at the time.’
She heard her name called. Donovan was grinning at her with a gay spite which warned her. ‘You don’t agree, Matty dear, do you?’ he was calling down the veranda.
‘I wasn’t listening.’
Mrs Talbot came out with apologetic charm, ‘Donovan was telling us that you were a pacifist. I don’t blame you, dear, war is so utterly dreadful.’ She broke off with a confused look around her.
‘But I’m not a pacifist,’ said Martha stubbornly.
Mr Maynard broke in quickly with ‘All my generation were pacifists – until 1914.’
There was a burst of relieved laughter. Donovan looked at Martha; she looked back angrily. He turned back to Ruth with a gay shrug.
Martha saw that Mr Maynard had been protecting her. She said in a low voice, ‘I don’t see why one shouldn’t say what one thinks.’
‘Don’t you? Oh, well, I’m sorry.’
This depth of irony succeeded in making her feel very young and inadequate. It was a snub to those real feelings she was convinced she must share with everybody, nothing less would do! After a moment she said, ‘All the same, everyone here is planning for the war, and we don’t know yet who the war is going to be fought against.’
She had spoken rather more loudly than she had meant; the gentleman from the press had heard her. He said irritably, ‘You’d agree, I hope, that one must be prepared for a war?’ This was the substance of the leader in that morning’s News.
Mr Maynard answered for her, in a smooth voice, ‘I daresay the younger generation, who will have the privilege of being killed, are entitled to know what for?’ He had acquired another glass, and was engaged in flipping this one too with his fingernail. The journalist’s look was caught by the gesture; he watched it for a moment; then some women sitting near asked him deferentially for his opinion on the international situation. He proceeded to give it. Martha listened to his string of platitudes for a few moments, then heard Mr Maynard again: ‘Another of life’s little disillusionments: you’ll find the newspapermen are as stupid as they sound. One reads what they say, when young, with admiration for the accomplished cynicism they display; when one gets older one discovers they really mean what they write. A terrible blow it was to me, I remember. I had been thinking of becoming one myself. But I was prepared to be a knave, not a fool.’
He had meant her to laugh, but she was unable to. She wanted to protest. Fear of his contempt for her clumsiness kept her silent. She was prepared to be thought wrong-headed, but not naive. He was using much more powerful weapons than she was to understand for a very long time.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘let me fill up your glass.’ It was her third, and she was beginning to be lifted away from herself.
‘Tell me,’ he inquired, having refilled his own, ‘if it is not too indiscreet, that is: What decided you to get married at the age of – what is it? Seventeen?’
‘Nineteen,’ said Martha indignantly.
‘I do apologize.’
She laughed. She hesitated a moment. She was feeling the last three months as a bewildering chaos of emotion, through which she had been pulled, will-less, like a fish at the end of a string, with a sense of being used by something impersonal and irresistible. She hesitated on the verge of an appeal and a confession; an attempt, at the very least, to explain what it had been like. She glanced at him, and saw him lounging there beside her, very large, composed, armed by his heavy sarcastic good looks.
‘If I may say so,’ he remarked with a pleasantly pointed smile which was like a nudge to proceed, ‘ninety-nine people out of a hundred haven’t the remotest idea why they got married – in any case you are under the illusion that you are a special case.’
With this encouragement, she took a sip from her brandy and ginger beer and began. She was pleasantly surprised that her voice was no less cool, amused and destructive than his own. She noted, also, that words, phrases, were isolated in deprecating amusement – as Solly had used the language that morning. It was as if she were afraid of the power of language used nakedly. ‘Well,’ she began, ‘not to get married when it is so clearly expected of us was rather more of an act of defiance than I was prepared to commit. Besides, you must know yourself, since you spend most of your time marrying us, that getting married is our first occupation – the international situation positively demands it. Who one marries is obviously of no importance at all. After all, if I’d married Binkie, for instance, I’m sure that everyone – with the exception of your wife, of course – would have been just as delighted …’
He laughed: ‘Go on.’
‘Though it would have been no less potentially disastrous than the marriage I’m committed to. Love,’ she noted how she isolated the word, throwing it away, as it were, ‘as you would be the first to admit, is merely a question of …’ ‘In short,’ she concluded, after some minutes of light-hearted description of the more painful experiences of the last few weeks, ‘I got married because there’s going to be a war. Surely that’s a good enough reason.’ There was not even an undertone of dismay to be heard in her voice.
‘Admirable,’ he commented. Then: ‘Entirely admirable. If I may give you some advice.’
‘Oh, I do assure you that I’ve taken the point.’
He looked at her straight. ‘And I assure you that you will find it much more tolerable this way.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ she said angrily.
He was on the point of making some further attempt, when she felt a hand on her arm. It was Douglas. He looked rather nervous, first because he was disturbing
