A Ripple from the Storm. Doris Lessing

blankets, shivering, listening to this fantasy, repeating to herself over and over again: I must not lose my temper with her. I must not. She’s sick and she can’t help it. But finally she said, and was surprised that her voice cracked with tears when she spoke: ‘Mrs Carson, I’m ill.’

      Mrs Carson, reminded of Martha’s existence, slowly stood up, smoothing down her dress with bony hands, looking about the room as if something might be suggested to her. At last she rather helplessly drew the chintz curtains across and returned to stand beside the bed, frowning at Martha.

      ‘Perhaps I should telephone your mother?’ she suggested.

      Martha sat up in a panic. ‘No, no, please don’t.’

      Mrs Carson, unsurprised, but pleased that nothing was asked of her, said vaguely: ‘If you need anything let me know.’ She went out remarking: ‘It’s better with the curtains drawn; they can’t see in.’

      Martha went back to sleep and was woken instantly by bad nightmares which she could not remember but which drove her out of bed. She had undertaken to do certain things and she must do them. She dressed and rode downtown on her bicycle. It was only when she was balancing on waves of sickness on the rocking machine that she understood she was really sick, and had a right to be in bed. But she went to the group office, collected a list of addresses of businessmen who must be approached for donations to Medical Aid for Russia, and spent the day going from office to office. She was surprised to find that habit made it easy for her to switch on her ‘money-collecting personality’without effort. She despised this personality: cool, practical, rather flirtatious, humorous to order so as to take the sting out of the business of giving money to Russia. She got the promise of over three hundred pounds. She returned to the group office and left a note to the effect that some other comrade must take over her responsibilities, and climbed back, with difficulty, on to the bicycle. It was in the solemn heavy heat of mid-afternoon. Sun glinted off walls, off the metal of motor cars and bicycles, off the skin of Africans, off the eyes of people passing, off the leaves of trees. Everything hotly glittered. Light struck painfully into her skull through her eyes. She cycled slowly, knowing that cars were hooting at her. She thought: If I’m behaving oddly, then it will be a discredit to the group. I must cycle straight and look normal. If people think I’m drunk, the Party will be blamed for my behaviour.

      When she at last got herself into bed in the darkened room, she was thinking miserably: All over the world people are dying, people are being killed, they are suffering indescribably, and I’m being sick. I have no right to be sick.

      She slept and dreamed that she was among hordes of war-crushed people for whom she was responsible. She would half-awaken, her eyes closing again at the sight of the strong light on the limp chintz curtains, thinking: That’s France, yes – we’re holding there (for in her dream she, representing ‘the group’, had stemmed some flood of violence or act of terror), but there’s Germany, the people in the concentration camps in Germany, I’m forgetting them. And when she fell back into sleep, she was in Germany, holding back brutality there, but tormented that she was forgetting France, or Russia, or some other place for which she was responsible. She woke and slept, slept and woke, in a steadily increasing fervour of anxiety, repeatedly visiting in her dreams the chilly shallow shores of nostalgia, where no responsibility existed, or returned for glimpses into the dust-filled half-closed eye of the great petrified saurian.

      Once she woke and found a large tray covered by a fly-net by her bed. Mrs Carson, worried that she ought to be doing something for Martha, but unable to come far enough out of her obsession to think what, had arranged a three-course meal: soup, now cold and filmed with grease; roast beef and potatoes congealed in fat; and a slab of wet cold pie. Martha’s stomach turned, and she went to the bathroom to be sick. On the way she passed the kitchen where Mrs Carson was sitting in a cretonne wrapper that showed part of her wrinkled bosom, a fly-whisk in her hand, watching her new servant make cakes. She did not notice Martha, who returned to bed, where she dreamed she was responsible for Mrs Carson, and trying to explain to her ‘once and for all’ that ‘she had been on the wrong path’ and that ‘she should be happy and not waste her life dreaming’. In this dream she saw Mrs Carson as a jolly bouncing card-playing widow with a salacious and friendly wink, who said to Martha: Thank you dear for saving me. You are my true friend.

      This dream was so much a nightmare that she struggled out of it, gasping and crying out.

      The night passed. In the morning she woke to find Jasmine regarding her from the foot of the bed.

      ‘You OK?’ she inquired.

      ‘Of course,’ said Martha.

      ‘Want a doctor?’

      ‘Hell, no.’

      ‘Can’t stand them either. Well, I’m on my way to work. Give me a ring if you want nursing.’ Jasmine, demure and precise as always, her small neat body defined in bright blue flowered linen, frowned at Martha while she adjusted an ear-ring.

      ‘What’s going on in the group?’ asked Martha, who felt as if she had been exiled from it for several weeks.

      ‘Trouble,’ said Jasmine, rolling up her eyes and sighing. ‘There was a meeting last night. The RAF are suffering from severe infantile disorders. They want to make a revolution here and now. Jimmy wants us to march into the Location with a red flag, shouting: “Down with the white tyrants.”‘

      ‘Seriously?’

      ‘Seriously.’

      ‘Perhaps it’s not a bad idea at that,’ said Martha crossly.

      ‘You’d better stay where you are then,’ said Jasmine, ‘if you’re in a red-flag-waving mood too, then you’ll be more of a nuisance than a help.’

      ‘All the same, I’ve been thinking … we talk and talk and analyse and make formulations, but what are we doing? What are we changing?’ Her head ached, and she lay still, looking at the cool white ceiling.

      ‘If I were you I’d go to sleep.’

      ‘What else? What else has been happening?’

      ‘Well, the RAF say we are bourgeois.’

      ‘Obviously we are. What then?’

      ‘Because,’ said Jasmine composedly, ‘we wear lipstick and nail varnish.’ She put forward a small foot in a high-heeled blue sandal and examined her scarlet toe-nails with satisfaction. ‘They say our origins are betrayed by the way we dress.’

      ‘Who? All women, or just the group women?’

      ‘The women comrades. They say that we are corrupted by the emphasis capitalist society places on sex.’ Jasmine offered this last remark to Martha on a serious note of query.

      Martha considered it from the depths of her anxiety-ridden dissatisfaction with herself, which made her ready to range herself with anybody who criticized her. But the other side of her perpetual stern rejection of what she was now, was the image of what she wanted to be: to match this image with any of the men in the group was enough to make her reject them entirely. She was thinking: Any real man would be able to see what I could be and help me to become it, and all these tom-tiddlers in the group … She was dismayed that she was able to think of her male comrades thus, and said angrily: ‘Oh, they can talk …’

      ‘That’s what I said to Jimmy.’

      ‘Of course it was Jimmy, of course.’

      ‘Yes, I said to him, if you disapprove of make-up and high heels and so on, what were you doing in McGrath’s with that girl from the reception desk? Because she’s got dyed hair to start with. He said he was educating her.’

      Martha laughed. Jasmine smiled composedly and said: ‘Bloody hypocrites they all are. Every one. Well, so long, Matty, and look after yourself.’ She departed, slinging a satchel bag full of pamphlets over her shoulder.

      Next time Martha woke it was night, and Mrs Quest stood where Jasmine had stood earlier, at the foot of the bed.

      Tm