Jack Dobie and Martha sat opposite each other in Dirty Dick’s. Jack, to please Martha, had asked Johnny Capetenakis to cook special food, and they were eating it; although Jack did not like this food, kebabs on saffron rice, and would rather have been eating eggs and chips with the other customers.

Jack had been appointed member of a Select Committee on the condition of urban Africans. There were few suitable statistics. He was engaged in collecting facts and figures, at his own expense, in his home town of Gotwe, and he wanted Martha to go down for a few days, to help him. Besides, he wanted to have an affair with her.

Martha was refusing to go because she did not want to leave this town, which meant, now, the loft among the trees, or to miss any chance of seeing Thomas.

Jack sat with his scarcely touched plate in front of him, his chin aggressively stuck out, his eyes focused on his point, which was that he insisted on sensible explanations from Martha.

Martha ate Jack’s food as well as her own and laughed and said No, said No, said No, said she was sorry, but of course she would if only insuperable obstacles did not intervene.

This scene, occurring as often as it does in life, is too often overlooked in fiction in favour of the more explosive moments: Yes, I will go to Gotwe with you, but I am risking my marriage, yes, I will leave my husband if you will leave your wife, do you love me? I might have loved you if only…

Jack found Martha attractive; a man married to a woman who increasingly disapproved of everything he was and did (she was a socially ambitious girl who had never imagined herself as the wife of a crusading Member of Parliament); a man who would have, and probably already had, invited Marjorie or Betty or any other attractive woman to Gotwe, Jack did not really care whether Martha said Yes or not.

For her part she liked him, would do anything not to hurt his feelings short of going to bed, and would do that if not otherwise engaged; hoped he was not the sort of man to let vanity disrupt a pleasant working relationship—Martha found this scene irritating on the whole because she was so involved with Thomas.

Meanwhile, one part of her mind was thinking, while she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Jack: So, you think if I did go to bed with you, it would be just another charming experience, do you? Hmmmm, well, what a pity I can’t show you…And he was thinking: If only I could get her there, I’d show her a thing or two. In short, this scene of modern gallantry was running its usual course.

Meanwhile, Martha moved salt cellars and sauce bottles about, and thought that she and Thomas, their feeling for each other, their relationship—whatever was the right word for it—was in an altogether new dimension. They were in deep waters, both of them. And neither understood it, could not speak about it.

Together in the loft, they spoke less. They were in the loft less often. To be together was like—she could not say. It was true for Thomas, too, because when they looked at each other, the sensation of sinking deeper and deeper into light was stronger. Being together was, for both of them, a good deal more than Martha being with Thomas. Sometimes it was so intense, they could not stand it, and separated. Or the loft seemed too high, too fragile, too small, and they left it and walked very fast through the streets. But this could only happen at night, because of the danger of being seen. Sometimes when they made love it was so powerful they felt afraid, as if enormous forces were waiting to invade them. But they did not know what this meant.

‘What it amounts to,’ Jack was saying, ‘is that you are going to make the only progressive Member of Parliament apart from Mrs Van miss two days of the Parliamentary sessions because you won’t give up two days’ love-making with Thomas?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, when my turn comes, I shall insist on the same treatment.’

‘But that goes without saying!’

She told Anton she was going to Gotwe for a few days to do some work for Jack Dobie.

She had realized this could not be a casual announcement. Remarks dropped by Anton recently had told her that he was convinced her affair with Thomas was over and that she had a new lover. But why should he think this? Because, she realized, his affair with Millicent was ending or over. She thought: How extraordinary, Anton does not know, except with that part of himself that makes love to me on a compulsion of rivalry, though of course he would put other names to it, whether I’m with another man or not. His mind would not be able to say. But I know what kind of an evening he’s had with Millicent by looking at him.

They were in the little bedroom. It was cold. He wore thick, dark blue, flannel pyjamas, and she wore a white, frilled nightdress she had bought thinking of Thomas. She wore a quilted, red jacket over it. There they were, Anton and Martha, Mr and Mrs Hesse, side by side in their twin-bedded room.

She knew there was tension between them because muscles tightened in her lower stomach. She picked up a nail-file and began work on her nails.

His long, white hands lay on his knees. She watched his hands sideways over the flying bit of glinting metal that shaped her nails, and thought: If I look at Thomas’s hands, it is as if they were holding me, but Anton’s hands, they might belong to someone I’d just met.

But if that were true—why was her stomach tightening? Somewhere at the back of her consciousness the knowledge began to hammer, just how terrible a crime she had committed by marrying Anton, by marrying Douglas…against herself and against them. But how was she to have foreseen the world she would enter when she loved Thomas? Why had no one told her it existed in a way that she could believe it? How strange it was—marriage and love; one would think, the way newspapers, films, literature, the people who are supposed to express us talk, that we believe marriage, love, to be the desperate, important, deep experiences they say they are. But of course they don’t believe any such thing. Hardly anyone believes it. We want them to believe it. We want to believe it. Perhaps people will believe it again.

The way things are, for the second time Martha looked at a stranger across a bedroom and thought, how was it that no one made me feel that it could matter, marrying someone.

‘Matty?’ said Anton, suddenly, in a low voice.

She said: ‘Look, Anton, what’s the point?’

He came over, sat by her, put a long arm through which she could feel a lank, flat bone around the cage of her ribs, put his cheek against hers. She could feel the papery dryness of his lips moving against her cheek.

Her body, wrenched out of its loyalty to Thomas, instantly began to ache.

She said: ‘No, Anton, please not, it’s so silly.’

‘When we’ve both finished playing around, Matty.’

She said: ‘Anton, you know you and I are no good together…don’t be angry,’ she added weakly.

‘Angry. Well, that’s a funny way of putting it.’ He went off to the bathroom, angry, miserable. When he came back he got straight into bed, turned his back, switched off the light. Left sitting upright in the dark, she put aside her nail-file and lay down.

He said: ‘Well, if you’re going to play the fool like this, I’m going off for a few days myself.’

‘But Anton, believe me, I’m not having an affair with Jack.’

He was silent, waiting for her to go on.

She nearly said: ‘What’s happened with Millicent?’ But she waited, just as he waited.

At last he said: ‘Well, don’t imagine I’m going to be left on the shelf.’

She said, placating, soft, ‘humorously’, ‘But Anton, we did agree, didn’t we, that we’d leave each other free while we waited for a divorce.’ Even saying this made her muscles ache, so she knew it was all terrible nonsense. However, on this level they ‘got along’, so on this level they must continue.

He said: ‘Very well then, I know what to do.’

Next day he told her he was going to spend a few days with the Forsters, a rich businessman and his family. He had met Mr Forster one day when lunching with his superior in the railways. ‘He’s not a bad sort of type,’ he had said of him afterwards.

Meanwhile, she rang Thomas to make sure she would not miss one of his visits to town, and he said that since his farm was on the way to Gotwe, why didn’t she and Jack drop in for lunch?

‘You want me to come to the farm?’—meaning, You want me and your wife to meet?

‘Yes, yes. Why not? It means I’ll see you. Yes, I’d like you to come.’

Jack was pleased. He liked nothing more than visiting farms. His great grandparents had been small farmers, and when he retired he proposed to farm fruit himself. In his youth he was a shipworker on the Clyde. In this country he had been for decades a railway-worker and a Member of Parliament concerned with industrial matters. But how he really saw himself, he said, was as a farmer; his real life would begin when at fifty-five he tended pears and peaches on a plot which he had already bought, in the mountains.

This was how Martha visited Thomas’s farm, how she saw Thomas’s wife and the little girl. She never forgot that day. It was a heightened, painful day—not one she would have missed, far from it. But afterwards, when she had only to shut her eyes to see the picture of Thomas with his little girl, the day shifted its emphasis. The rest became blurred, a scene of magnificent mountains and somewhere off among the shrubs the sound of Thomas’s wife, laughing. But she kept seeing Thomas, stretching out his hands to the little girl.

Jack picked her up about ten in the morning, in his old lorry. He drove very fast. This long journey across two hundred miles of veld was something he had to do three, four times a week, when Parliament was sitting. Almost at once they were in open country. It was a cold, clear day, with white clouds driving fast overhead. In all directions swept the flattening dry-cold grass of winter, it was all miles of pale gold, then blue-green kopjes, then pale blue sky where the clouds swept. Everything was high, austere and in movement. Across empty miles poured the wind which battered against the lorry, so that it tugged and swerved to leave the road. She was exhilarated, and looked at Jack to share it. He felt her looking and smiled and said: ‘Here I am, mad with love for you, driving you to meet your lover.’

‘Not all that mad, I hope.’

‘And how long has it been?’

‘Has what been?’

‘You with Thomas?’

She had to think—‘Some months. A year. Something like that.’

‘I thought you and Athen were having a thing together.’

‘Well, give us all time, and I suppose we’d all have affairs with each other.’

‘He’s a fine laddie, that one.’

‘He’s going back to Greece next month.’

‘Is he now?’ Jack clicked his tongue. Never had so many hearts—in their political aspect—been broken so fast and so thoroughly as in the first few months of that Labour Government. Jack’s was the one worst hit. An old socialist, life-time Labour Party supporter, when the Labour Party got in in 1945, his oldest dream came true.

Now he was bitter. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if I were in Greece now I’d become a communist, just to show what I think of Labour—I couldn’t say fairer than that, could I?’

‘Athen had a letter saying he mustn’t go home, he’ll be arrested as he arrives. Last week they let all the collaborators out of prison, and they’re arresting the left. And a lot more of Athen’s friends have gone to the mountains.’

‘We’ve had some fine people through this country, with the war.’

Quite so: this country, her life, Jack’s life—everybody’s life, that was the point—empty spaces through which people blew like bits of paper.

She said: ‘Maisie’s in love with Athen. But I mean, really in love.’

He said at once in the bluff, no-nonsense voice which shouts disapproval: ‘Well, that young woman’s been in love often enough.’

She said, not by any means for the first time: ‘You forget, she’s been widowed twice.’

He was silent, but his mouth twisted in a small, knowledgeable smile.

She persisted: ‘Maisie’s the sort of girl who’d have stayed married to her first husband. But he was killed.’

‘Well, it’s not my affair.’

‘It’s funny though. We still talk about people, we make judgements just as if there hadn’t been five years of war. What sort of sense does it make, saying about Maisie—she’s been in love too often, when you think of what’s happened to her?’

Again the small, knowledgeable smile—an ugly smile, horrid, on whoever’s face it comes.

‘Don’t you see, it comes out of a different sort of thing altogether—talking like that. It really is funny how we’ve gone back to talking as if the war didn’t happen.’

‘I haven’t noticed we don’t talk about it!’

‘I don’t mean saying things about it—like the war has done a lot of damage, or it will take ten years to restore agriculture in the Ukraine or something, I mean, really feeling things are different.’

She saw she was repeating herself—yet as she spoke, she felt as if she were in the grip of a new kind of knowledge, a new insight. She understood what Athen had been trying to say outside Maisie’s bar. She had not understood Athen—she had merely made an assent to his words with her mind. It was the difference between hearing a phrase and thinking: Yes, that’s true, and forgetting it; and letting the real meaning of the words sink into one, become part of one—as if one had eaten them, swallowed them—‘digested’ them, in short. She knew Jack had heard what she had said and had assented: Yes, there have been five years of war, there’s been a lot of damage. But just as she had been irritated with Athen, impatient, because she wanted to enjoy the evening, so now Jack was annoyed, or at least impatient, because he was a man who worked very hard, and he had wanted to enjoy today.

After a mile or so of the fast, swerving journey through swaying grass, trees, he said: ‘I didn’t mean to run down Maisie, I didn’t know she was so much a friend of yours.’

She said: ‘It’s all right,’ but she was absorbed by the swooping movement through the high, sparkling air. The empty space was opening inside her, and she was gazing into it with passionate curiosity. Martha and Jack, two minute fragments of humanity, rattling in the machine across immensities of empty country, they were only two of the figures that moved, small and brightly lit, against the backdrop, while she watched. She saw Maisie, if there had not been a war: married to her first husband, producing a child, two children; the in-laws would very soon have said: Well, she’s a nice enough girl really. Soon she would have been a fat, middle-aged woman with reserves of lazy good nature, and spoiled children and a husband she protected and ordered about. Instead—well, Thomas said she was sleeping with men from the bar, and probably for money.

But what did it matter? The two pictures of Maisie stood side by side on the empty space—and cancelled each other out. Both were true. Both were untrue. Yesterday someone had written from England: one of the young men who had visited the Hesses in their old flat was badly wounded and in hospital. He had been in hospital for nearly a year. His leg had been cut off. He was the fair young man who used to sleep on the floor when he was too late to catch a camp bus. Much to Anton’s annoyance. But how could the two things fit together: a man in hospital with a leg cut off, and the boy asleep on the floor with the sun on him. Why, she had only to shut her eyes to see him there, rather flushed, his hair untidy—a flushed, defenceless-looking boy asleep in the morning sun. She could see him clearer than she had in life. And Athen—Athen was going back to Greece any day now. If he wasn’t arrested first, he would be with the partisans in the mountains very soon. ‘Mine is the only country in Europe that still destroys itself.’ But it was as if someone flicked a scene off a cinema screen and put on a new one. ‘Greece is still at war.’ ‘Greece is at peace.’ Turn the scene back two years: Europe was crawling with tiny ants, murdering each other. Turn it forwards: Europe was at peace, bandaging wounds, clearing away rubble. Asia was ‘at peace’ again, though in China great armies still fought. But in Europe the armies were quiet, though millions of people were hungry, the newspaper had said that morning; and next winter would be famine again. Turn the scene forward—how many years? No ruins left, no hungry people?

The empty space swelled up to the great, wind-scoured skies: it was the size of the great landscape, this enormous stretch of country lifted high, high, under a high, pale-blue, cloud-swept sky.

And soon the car would come to Thomas’s farm. She and Thomas loved each other. Whatever that meant. And whatever it meant, it was the most sure, the most real thing that happened to her. But blur the scene slightly, and Thomas did not exist—almost he had not left Poland at all. If he had not—well, none of his family was left alive, several dozen brothers, sisters, cousins, relations—they were all dead, they had died in the gas ovens, on the gallows, in the prisons and the concentration camps in those years of our Lord, 1939–1945. But here Thomas was alive. And all her life Martha would say to herself—whatever else had been untrue, whatever else had not existed, this had been true: this was true, she must hold on to it, even though, when she touched Thomas it was with an anxiety that related not to Thomas now and here, but to the scene which she could create by a slight dislocation in her mind: Thomas very nearly had not left Poland.

Up hillsides that hissed and tossed with the long movement of wind, and down again; it was a world floored with immensities of tossing, pale gold grass, roofed with depths of pale blue—turn her upside down, she would be floating on pale blue depths where white foam flowers hissed and died, looking up at a great bubble of pale gold, where the movements of wind showed in mile-long currents of whitening light.

Perhaps, when Thomas and she touched each other, in that touch cried out the murdered flesh of the millions of Europe—the squandered flesh was having its revenge, it cried out through the two little creatures who were fitted for much smaller loves, the touch only of a hand on a shoulder, simple hungers, and the kindness of sleep. Instead—it was all much too painful, and they had to separate.

Last week Thomas had said: ‘Why should I stay in this country? I’ll tell you something, I’ve just understood it—when you’ve left one country, then you’ve left all countries, for ever. I’m a wandering Jew, like my fathers were. So why should I stay here?’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I don’t know.’

Meanwhile, Jack and she were going to ‘drop in’ to Thomas’s farm for lunch. Though ‘dropping in’ here meant a ten-mile drive off the main road, and then ten miles back on to it. And she, Martha, would meet Thomas’s wife Rachel, and his little girl Esther. And then she, Martha, would be driven on to Gotwe by Jack Dobie, expert on the wrongs of India, ex-agitator from the Clyde, the Colony’s most energetic kaffir-lover, who wished to have an affair with her; leaving behind Thomas, whom she loved, and who this week was occupied, he said, with preparing new seedbeds. Nothing fitted, ridiculous facts jostled with important ones, if one only knew which was which, and the empty space dazzled with its growing distances—she wished very much she had not said they would ‘drop in’ for lunch; suddenly everything was unbearable and she wished she was back in the refuge of the loft, reading, or already in Gotwe with Jack, working. But here they already were, Jack and she, half-way along the rough farm road to the house. And the empty space not only contained her and Jack, two tiny ant-like figures, she contained the space—she was the great bell of space, and through it crawled little creatures, among them, herself.

There was Thomas’s house. It was nothing special: like a thousand others, it was a brick bungalow under corrugated iron. But it spread attractively, and the pillars and the verandas of warm brick supported flowers and foliage. All around were gardens; they had driven through maize fields that surrounded the homestead, bare fields now, light red earth where the plough had turned furrows of darker red and everywhere patches of glinting gold leafage marked where the mealie stocks had been. Then there were banks of shrubs to break the winds which swept across leagues of country from the circling mountains, then roses, it seemed acres of roses, gold and scarlet and white, drenching the sharp winter air with their scent. Then lawns, studded with poinsettias, and beyond the house and working beds where Thomas grew plants for selling in town.

On the veranda stood a fair, young woman holding a blonde little girl by the hand. Behind them a dark, bearded man of middle age who nodded and smiled, indicating that his English was poor. And Thomas came in from the garden, wearing his khaki shorts rolled up to the top of his thighs. He was brown and polished by wind and sun. And he was shy, nodding awkwardly at Martha, but putting the warmth he felt for her into his greeting for Jack.

They went into lunch. There was a long room, windowed at either end, showing descending hillsides covered with roses and flowering shrubs and, a long way off, blue mountains. In the middle of the room, a long trestle table made by Thomas, with salads and fruit and pickled fish prepared by Rachel.

They were Thomas and Rachel, Esther, who was about two or three, and Jack and Martha and the silent, bearded man who was a professor of something or other.

Martha eyed Thomas’s wife who examined her.

Rachel at first sight was not pretty at all, but then extremely pretty, though that was too banal a word.

She was slender, but strong; she was white-skinned, with the solid, white skin that browns well. Her hair was a curling light brown—almost gold. She was all clear colours: healthy, brown cheeks, very white teeth, blue eyes with clear whites to them, and warm, golden hair curling around her face. She had the combination of a fine robustness and delicacy of a Leonardo woman, which is what Martha was reminded of, as Rachel smiled and talked like a hostess, protesting that they did not often have company. But soon she fell silent, leaving the business of entertaining to her husband, while she sat beside her little girl, quietly directing her in Polish about spoons and forks. Esther was newly admitted to the grown-up table, it seemed, and was watching her mother to learn how she should behave. Meanwhile, Thomas and Jack argued about Zionism, and Martha thought of Caroline, now five years old, and watched the delightful little girl who sat beside her mother, and glanced up continually to see how she must handle a spoon or convey a piece of bread to her mouth. The two, mother and daughter, had the most marvellous freshness and delicacy; they glowed in the dark, cool depths of the dining-room as they sat together at the end of the table.

Meanwhile, Jack was indignantly reproaching Thomas for being a Zionist, for how could a Marxist be a Zionist? Not that he, Jack, was a Marxist, he was just concerned that the proper categories of thought should be maintained. And Thomas was saying: ‘Logically you are right. A Marxist is not a Zionist. But I am a Marxist. And with every day I became more of a Zionist. I see British soldiers allowing refugees from Europe to drown rather than land in Israel, and I am a Zionist.’

Meanwhile, they ate stuffed aubergine and sour, black bread, baked on the farm; and Thomas, interrupting a sentence about the Labour Party and its policy in Europe, said something to his wife in Polish, and she instantly clapped her hands. A servant came in, and took away the plates. He brought in clear soup. It was to be a real feast, and there would be no moving away from the table for hours yet. Not once had Thomas looked at Martha—or not really, as she put it. Then, briefly, he did look at her, and Martha felt the touch of his warm, blue eyes on her face, so strongly, that she understood why he did not look at her. She felt that Rachel must have sensed the look and what it meant. But if so, she made no sign, and went on chattering to the little girl in Polish or Yiddish, and to the servant when he came in, in Shona, and to her guests in charming broken English.

The long meal went on. The sunlight sparkled on the cold windowpanes; the petals of the poinsettias, scarlet and pink and yellow, fluttered in the wind; the roses scattered their petals on the brown earth. How many times had Martha sat, at lunch in a farm house on the veld, looking through windows at mountains? And how many hours had she heard discussed, the colour bar, war, politics, the ‘native problem’, communism, oh, my God, for ever, it seemed, she had sat talking or listening, and here she was again and now it was Zionism.

Zionism in the middle of the veld, in the middle of mealie fields scooped out of the bush, and beautiful Rachel from Cracow, and Thomas from Sochaczen, and herself, and the dark, silent professor, and Jack from the Clyde. Jack was positively sending out sparks of rage in all directions, he was almost dancing in his seat with exasperation, because of the total inconsistency of Thomas.

Now they ate cold chicken. It was very good, and they watched white and black and golden-brown chickens run scratching among the shrubs outside.

Martha felt a current running strongly between herself and Thomas. He had hardly glanced at her again. Several times he got up and went abruptly out of the room and Martha thought of how he had said at the dance: I can’t sit beside you like a stuffed horse at a fair.

They ate apple cake and then nuts and fruit and drank strong Turkish coffee. It was four in the afternoon. Then Rachel laughed and said that Martha and Jack must not leave before having tea. Thomas said: ‘But they have to get to Gotwe before it’s dark.’ And she said, laughing: ‘Then they must drive in the dark, it won’t hurt them!’ Suddenly Thomas walked off, by himself, around the side of the house, crushing a handful of leaves between his fingers. All the air was pungent with the smell of the crushed leaves. Jack, oblivious of all these currents, said he wanted to see the gardens. He had no time these days for gardens, but he wanted to pick up tips for when he started to grow fruit. They went off to see the gardens, in a group. Coming around the side of the house, they saw a long bed in which were clumps of shining green leaves and by it Thomas, squatting on his heels, his bare knees brown and shining. But in front of him stood Esther, the tiny child, and these two were looking at each other, in silence. Thomas did not know the others were there, but Esther did; she glanced, very serious, as if apologizing or explaining, past her father’s shoulder at her mother and the professor and the guests, and then she looked back at her father, in the way someone waits out of politeness.

Rachel said: ‘Come on, we must go this way.’ Rachel and Jack and the professor went on, and Martha stood still a moment, watching Thomas, twelve paces off. She could see he had been crying. His cheeks had red stains on them. He was half-turned away, his shoulder was presented to her, as he stared into the face of his child.

There Esther stood, as light and airy as if she could blow away, in a minute yellow dress that fluttered around her thin knees, her fair wisps of hair blowing about her head. She looked steadily at her father. Thomas held out his hands to her, but the child did not respond.

‘Esther,’ he said, coaxingly, then said something in Yiddish. But she would not. She stood frowning, the sun dazzling in her moving wisps of hair.

Thomas let his hands drop—in a rough, desperate gesture. Then gently, gently, he lifted his right hand and held it out to the child. It was this gesture that did for Martha, made her understand—but what? Here she felt was something she should know, should have known, about Thomas. She sensed that the real being of Thomas spoke out in that gesture—the big, strong hand going out so gently, delicately, to the child. Thomas squatted there, holding out his strong, brown arm where the hairs glinted gold, but held it as if it cost him very heavily to plead so. He did not touch Esther, he was giving her the opportunity to accept him. It was the way one offers a hand to a cat to sniff, to accept or reject as it wants. Esther looked doubtfully at the big, brown arm held out to her, at the pleading hand at the end of it—and then, slowly, she backed away. She was not coquetting, she simply backed herself away, and her face frowned. She looked in a kind of distaste at her father’s hand, held out to her. It trembled, very slightly. Then she lifted her serious blue eyes at her father and the little face showed a puzzled disapproval, even a dislike. Certainly a ‘go away, don’t touch me’. Then she stood still for a moment, the yellow cotton blowing about the ridiculously small brown legs, her hair whipping in the wind—then she turned and ran off towards her mother. And in her movement, the way she ran off, was a wild relief, as if she had been released from an oppression. She was running away from what was too heavy. Her father was a weight on her.

Martha watched Thomas lower his hand. He let it rest on its knuckles on the earth, among the clumps of glistening leaves. His cheek, half-turned to her, was wet. The others were out of sight. Rachel’s voice, light and laughing, chattered in Polish to her child. The professor’s voice said something in Yiddish. Rachel’s laugh came ringing across the sunlight.

Thomas had turned his head and seen Martha. He nodded at her. ‘Hello, Martha,’ he said. He wiped tears off his face with the back of his hand, unconcerned that she saw him.

He said: ‘You’d better get to the others.’ Then, as she obediently went, she heard him say, low and fierce: ‘Don’t forget, you must be in our house the day after tomorrow, you must, please.’

This comforted her, and she held the thought of his needing her as she went with the others around bushes and across lawns, and admired vistas of veld and river and mountains. It was a beautiful place, and the gardens were superb. Thomas lived in a beautiful place surrounded by gardens which he had made. But he would not stay there. Soon he would go away.

They all had tea on the veranda, while the little girl chattered to the dark, bearded man who now had a white panama hat on his head, tilted forward because of the glare. The professor was called Michel Pevsner, and he was free to touch Esther, to stroke her hair, and to hold her on his knee. But her own father was not. Thomas watched Esther with Michel, and addressed remarks to the two of them, as if they were a unit. He did not say anything more to Esther. Esther prattled with her mother, flirted with the professor, and looked at her father as if he were an unpleasant fact in her life which she had to accept.

Soon Jack and Martha had to leave. There were another 150 miles to cover before they reached Gotwe.

Martha found an hotel in Gotwe, and Jack and she were very efficient about collecting figures. Meanwhile, she kept seeing Thomas and the tiny girl together. She would not think about it, however. She saw it, saw the scene, against her lids—every time she shut her eyes, or so it seemed. But she would not think about it. And she kept hearing Rachel’s light laughter; she heard it, but she would not think about her either.

The afternoon she got back into the city from Gotwe she slowly climbed the ladder to the loft, above the rising odours of damp foliage from the tins of seedlings on the floor.

Thomas’s brother’s wife, Sarah, had been standing on the veranda, hands on her solid, young-married-woman’s hips, watching, as Martha came in at the gate. That gesture, the finality of disapproval in the hands on the large hips, told Martha that soon Sarah would see to it that this shed would be needed for something else. Perhaps Sarah was so angry that she would simply come into the shed and up the ladder and make a scene? Why not?

Martha did not care. She stripped off her clothes, flung them on to the floor, and got under heavy blankets. The dry sunlight came in, the foliage from the tall trees showed light and dry through the pane, the scents from the garden all had a tang of brisk chill and dryness.

Soon she heard a lorry stop, then Thomas’s voice calling across the lawns to his sister-in-law: ‘How are you, Sarah? That’s fine. Good.’

Then she heard his voice beneath: ‘Martha?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you undressed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

She waited. He came up, serious, leaned over her, kissed her, serious, sat looking at her—serious, serious.

‘Thomas, what’s the matter?’

‘First we make love.’

‘Oh, goodness, Thomas, you look so desperate.’

‘Yes, and you’re thinking: I came here to be with my lover, and not with this madman!’

‘So that’s what I’m thinking?’

‘Yes. More and more often I look at you and you are thinking: How did I land myself with this maniac?’

He was making love as if she were a blanket to pull over his head, or a dream he wanted to lose himself in.

Later he lay beside her, quiet, holding her hand over his eyes with his own. She could feel his lashes moving against her fingers as he stared up into the darkness her hand made.

‘First, I must say something, Matty.’

‘Oh, Thomas, can’t we not say anything!’

‘No.’

He took her hand off his eyes and lay holding it against his neck.

‘I’m sorry I asked you to come to the farm. But you should have said no.’

‘Yes, I know I should. And what did your wife say?’

They were silent for a time.

Then he said: ‘Martha, have you ever been in a situation—no, that’s the wrong word.’ Again he lay thinking.

‘What, then?’

‘You see, I can’t even describe it. It’s as bad as that. Have you ever felt at the end of something—I don’t mean just unhappy or somebody going away, not that.’ She could not help reacting to his ‘somebody going away’ but he did not notice it. ‘I would never have believed once, if someone had told me, there are things you can’t do something about, you come to the end of things in yourself. Once I believed that one had only to make up one’s mind to do anything.’

‘You mean,’ said Martha, ‘you feel something for your—family, and they don’t return it, is that it?’

‘I suppose something like that.’

Now he did not say anything for a long time, and when Martha looked, his eyes were shut, and she thought he had gone to sleep.

At last he said: ‘My wife was the daughter of a university professor. We only met because I was a communist and she was wondering if she should be one. She came to a lecture a friend of mine was giving.’

‘And then you fell in love?’

‘I like the way you say that, fall in love—so simple. Well, that’s how we saw it then, simple. And I knew the war was coming. She and her circles did not think there would be war. We Marxists have many advantages—for instance, we knew the war was coming.’ In this last sentence was the mechanical irony that goes with failure; and her laugh was as mechanical.

‘I made all arrangements to get her out of the country with me. But her father and her sister would not believe me. She believed me but they didn’t. So we married and left Poland. They were left behind. So they’re dead.’

He was trying so hard to explain something to her, but she had no idea what.

‘If there wasn’t a war, I’d never have met her—a professor’s daughter. And as for me, Martha, as far as they were concerned, I was just a peasant.’

‘But she did marry you.’

‘Yes.’

Against Martha’s closed lids she saw descending miles of sunlit country, the blue mountains beyond, and, in the foreground, the big man squatting, holding out a pleading hand to the little girl.

She kept her eyes shut and looked at this picture: it explained what he was not able to say.

‘And Michel?’ she said.

‘The joke of it is, I used to despise Michel. I thought he was nothing, just a word-spinner, a schoolteacher with good manners. You know, Martha, I tell you—it’s something when you look at something, your whole self gives way, and you want just to give yourself up. And it’s not that she doesn’t accept it, or she hates you, or anything like that. It’s just that there’s something like seventy per cent of you she leaves out of account.’

‘Seventy-five per cent,’ said Martha, trying to make him laugh.

‘No, Martha. No, you must listen to me—you love her so much, and she says Yes, Thomas, you’re a nice man, and thank you for being kind, but you’re too rough and clumsy and—so seventy per cent of you doesn’t exist. Not hatred, or she doesn’t love me, but I don’t exist. Because she never really liked what I am. Once I tried to change myself. That was a joke, Martha—believe me, now when I remember it I laugh. But at the time I was too serious. I told myself I’d forget the village, the dried herring and the sour milk and the potatoes. I forgot how to haggle over a horse or choose a bit of cheese. I was stupid. I didn’t understand a damned thing. I really imagined that—because the point was, she was quite prepared to like me, but she had to forget me to do it, you understand, Martha? Well, so that’s it. I used to think: Well, I’ll make her like me. After all, I’m not a bad man. I’m kind. I don’t beat women. And I’m a good gardener. And I know how to study.’

‘How to what?’ she said, surprised.

‘How to study,’ he said, seriously. Then he turned and looked at her. ‘That’s the point. It took me years to understand why you said that, in that tone. I used to say to myself: “I can learn anything, if I set my mind to it.” I learned French in one month because she knew French and I thought she’d love me for it. There was a time when every day I said I’ll learn something new today, for her.’

Martha kept her cheek pressed to his and said nothing.

‘And then there was the child. It’s the same with her. Well, you saw how it was.’

Martha did not know what to say. She wanted to comfort him. She said at last: ‘Well, now it’s peace perhaps things will be better.’

‘What do you mean?’

She had not meant anything much, and she already felt foolish, but she said, trying to laugh: ‘Well, in peacetime professors’ daughters don’t marry handsome peasants and run off to Africa with them.’

He said, fierce, lonely, disappointed: ‘You didn’t think when you said that. Sometimes I forget—you’re very young. I mean, you are young in your self, because your experience has been to keep you safe.’

‘Is that what matters, being safe?’

‘There are two kinds of people—those who know how easy it is to be dead, and those who think death can’t happen to me…I told you, everything’s changed. I’m the norm now. I told you, the elm tree and safety’s finished. Who is the freak, the unusual person? The man who is born in X, who goes to school in X, who marries a person from X, or perhaps from Y, and who dies in his bed in X. All that’s over. My mother’s first husband was killed in the First World War. Her second husband was an old man, and she didn’t love him, but she was right to marry him—a woman needs a husband and all the young men were dead in our village. And she had seven children. And her whole life was a struggle to feed us. But it was all a waste of effort, because all her children are dead, except me and my brother. That’s what normal is now. My family’s all dead and I’m in exile. And my wife’s family are dead and she’s an exile…’ He was going to say something more, but he stopped.

Martha said: ‘You were going to say something about going away?’

‘Was I?’

‘Yes.’

For a time he lay still, stroking her arm. Then he turned over and held her near to him. ‘Well, Martha, never mind, let’s not think of it now.’

‘You are seriously asking me not to think about it?’

‘Yes, I am. Seriously.’

‘All right,’ she said, after a time. ‘I’ll try not to.’

But soon they talked about it. He wanted to go to Palestine. ‘No, for my sake, Israel, Martha, not Palestine.’ He wanted to go to Israel. Not necessarily for good, no. Perhaps for a visit. He did not know why he wanted so much to go, but he did.