him. Besides, she was persistently tipsy as much from excitement as from alcohol; for the wave of elation which rose as the sun went down was as much the expectation of another brilliant, festive dancing night where the braziers burned steadily into the dawn. So Martha shifted the load of worry about how uneasy and unpredictable she felt on to how she was behaving, which she would have been the first to describe as idiotic. But then, it would not last long: the very essence of those exciting weeks was nostalgia for something doomed.
The town was restless with rumour. The voice of authority, the Zambesia News, faithfully reflecting the doubts and confusions of the unfortunate British Government, left ordinary people with no resource but to besiege the men in the know with questions. Everyone had some such person to whom they repaired for information. The young Knowells, for instance, had Colonel Brodeshaw; everyone knew a minor member of Parliament or a big businessman. Whenever Douglas returned from the world of offices, bars and clubs, it was with some final and authoritative statement, such as that conscription was imminent, or that people wouldn’t stand for it; or that the British Government was about to declare war on Hitler the next weekend, or that – and this was very persistent during those weeks of June and July – Hitler and the British Government would together attack Stalin, thus ridding the world of what was clearly its main enemy.
But alas for the glamour and glory of great public events, their first results, regardless of how one may see them afterwards, ‘in perspective’, as the phrase is, tend to show themselves in the most tawdry and insignificant ways. In this case, the business of collecting the latest news proved so fascinating that young husbands preferred the bars and clubs of the city to returning home for lunch with their wives.
These three young wives reacted to this state of affairs according to their respective temperaments. Alice, after three or four days of nervous speculation over her apologetic Willie, arranged that she would meet him every day at one o’clock, and go with him on his rounds; which meant, of course, that the specifically male establishments were now out of bounds. But it was not her fault, she remarked, with her vague good-natured giggle, if men were so silly as to exclude women. As for Stella, it was all at once made evident to everyone that she had a mother. A rich widow, she was living in the suburbs. Stella, like all these young women, had fought the good fight for independence, had routed her mother from her affairs as a question of principle, no less; but now, like the heroine of a music-hall joke, she rushed back to her. At five in the evening, when Andrew went home to find his wife so that they might start on the evening round of dancing and drinking, she was not there; he had to drive out to the suburbs, where he found these two antagonists drinking tea and treating him with a calculated coolness, a weapon taken from Stella’s mother’s armoury of weapons against men. But this time it did not work. After some days, Andrew remarked with calm Scotch common sense; ‘Well, Stella, it’s not a bad idea, your having lunch with your mother. It means you’re not alone all day.’ Stella was doomed to a life always much less dramatic than she felt it was entitled to be.
As for Martha, whose first fierce tenet in life was hatred for the tyranny of the family, naturally she was barred from these contemptible female ruses. It was she who, after Douglas had rung up twice at lunchtime to say that he was just running off with the boys for a drink, and did she mind if he was a little late, suggested that it would be more interesting for him if he did not come home at all. He was surprised and grateful that his wife set no bounds to his freedom. It was an additional reason to be proud of his acquisition. But later in the evening, when he came home, there was perhaps a slightly resentful look on his face, as Martha inquired where he had gone, and whom he had met – of course with the friendliest interest and without any suspicion of jealousy. She would then listen intently, making him retrace his conversations and arguments by the sheer force of her interest in them. It was almost as if she had been there in his place; almost as if she were putting the words into his mouth for future conversations. Tyranny, it seems, is not so easily legislated against.
Besides, Douglas, like all these other young men with wives, wore during these weeks a steady, if faint, look of guilt. It had become known that a dozen of the richer young men of the city had flown Home to England to offer their services to the Air Force. Douglas, Willie and Andrew, late at night, made reckless with alcohol, discussed hopelessly how they might do the same. But if it turned out there would be no war after all? They would be without jobs, without money; they were not the sons of rich fathers. But of course, if they had been free – if they had no responsibilities … Even alcohol, even the relaxed and intimate hour of four in the morning by the coffee stalls, could not release that thought into words. But the wives, listening with consciously sardonic patience, heard the sigh after lost freedom in every gap in the conversation.
‘Men,’ remarked Stella to Martha, with charged womanly scorn, ‘are nothing but babies.’
Martha disliked her own most intimate voice in Stella’s mouth. But she was wrestling with a degree of contempt for Douglas that dismayed her. She could not afford it. She pushed it away. These young men, so eagerly discussing the prospects of being in at the kill, seemed to her like lumpish schoolboys. She despised them quite passionately: the nightly-recurring sight of Douglas, Willie and Andrew behaving like small boys wistful after adventure made her seethe with impatient contempt.
To Stella she said angrily, ‘If they knew they were going to fight for something, if they cared at all …’
To which Stella replied indignantly, after the briefest possible pause, switching course completely in a way which could hardly strike her as odd, since it was no more than the authorities did from day to day, ‘But it’s our duty to squash Communism.’
The Mathews’ man in the know was an upper secretary in the establishment of Mr Player; fed from this source, Stella was a well of good reasons why Communism should be instantly suppressed. It had flickered into Martha’s mind that Andrew had talked of getting a job in the Player offices. She instantly dismissed the suspicion. It was one of her more pleasant but less efficient characteristics that she was unable to believe in that degree of cynicism from anyone. For naturally she persisted in believing that people should be conscious of their motives. Someone has remarked that there is no such thing as a hypocrite. In order to believe that, one must have reached the age to understand how persistently one has not been a hypocrite oneself.
Martha devoted herself to explaining to Stella how intolerable it was that she as a Jewess should have a good word to say for Hitler; while Stella, torn between persistent suspicions that there might be something in the rumours that Hitler ill-treated Jews and her terror that Andrew might not conform to Mr Player’s qualifications for a minor administrator, defended the Third Reich as an ally for Britain. That is, she continued to do so more or less consistently, interspersed with short periods when someone else’s man in the know had supplied other authoritative information sufficiently persuasive.
It had reached the end of July. A second batch of young men left for England. It caused an extraordinary resentment. That there were no class distinctions of any sort in this society was an axiom; one was not envious of people who sent their children to university, or even – in extreme cases – to finishing schools in Europe; it was all a question of luck. But for some days now the young men who could not afford air fares, or to gamble with their jobs, spoke with a rancour which was quite new. Opinion seethed, and brought forth a scheme by which a sufficient number of young men should besiege their heads of department and employers to give them time off, so that they should be ready and trained for instant service when war started. This admirable scheme came to nothing, because the authorities in Britain had not yet made up their minds how the colonies were to be used. There was only one principle yet decided, and this was that the men from the colonies were clearly all officer material, because of lives spent in ordering the black population about. The phrase used was, ‘They are accustomed to positions of authority.’ It would be a waste for Douglas, Willie and Andrew to take the field as mere cannon fodder. But although the wave of determination disintegrated against various rocks of this nature, for at least a week the young men in question thought and spoke of
