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But Willi had withdrawn himself. For one thing, he did not approve of such bohemianism as collective bedroom breakfasts. 'If we were married,' he had complained, 'it might be all right.' I laughed at him, and he said: 'Yes. Laugh. But there's sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.' He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. 'What position?'-I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. 'Yes, Anna, but things are different for men and for women. They always have been and they very likely always will be.' 'Always have been?'-inviting him to remember his history. 'For as long as it matters.' 'Matters to you-not to me.' But we had had this quarrel before; we knew all the phrases either was likely to use-the weakness of women, the property sense of men, women in antiquity, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. We knew it was a clash of temperament so profound that no words could make any difference to either of us-the truth was that we shocked each other in our deepest feelings and instincts all the time. [...]
We walked up to the big room through the hot sunlight, the dust warm and fragrant under our shoes. His arm was around me again and now I was pleased to have it there for other reasons than that Willi was watching. I remember feeling the intimate pressure of his arm in the small of my back, and thinking that, living in a group as we did, these quick flares of attraction could flare and die in a moment, leaving behind them tenderness, unfulfilled curiosity, a slightly wry and not unpleasant pain of loss; and I thought that perhaps it was above all the tender pain of unfulfilled possibilities that bound us. Under a big jacaranda tree that grew beside the big room, out of sight of Willi, Paul turned me around towards him and smiled down at me, and the sweet pain shot through me again and again. 'Anna,' he said, or chanted. 'Anna, beautiful Anna, absurd Anna, mad Anna, our consolation in this wilderness, Anna of the tolerantly amused black eyes.' We smiled at each other, with the sun stabbing down at us through the thick green lace of the tree in sharp gold needles. What he said then was a kind of revelation. Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young. But it was Paul who, alone among us, had 'amused eyes' and as we went into the big room hand in hand, I was looking at him and wondering if it were possible that such a self-possessed youth could conceivably be as unhappy and tormented as I was; and if it were true that I had, like him, 'amused eyes'-what on earth could that mean? I fell all of a sudden into an acute irritable depression, as in those days I did very often, and from one second to the next, and I left Paul and went by myself into the bay of a window.
[...] He was genuinely touched that Ted, 'a scholarship boy,' was still concerned about his class. At the same time he thought him mad. He would say: 'Look, mate, you've been lucky, got more brains than most of us. You use your chances and don't go mucking about. The workers don't give a muck for anyone but themselves. You know it's true. I know it's true.' 'But Stan,' Ted harangued him, his eyes flashing, his black hair in agitated motion all over his head: 'Stan if enough of us cared for the others, we could change it all-don't you see?' Stanley even read the books Ted gave him, and returned them saying: 'I've got nothing against it. Good luck to you, that's all I can say.'
[...] Being so young, twenty-three or four, I suffered, like so many 'emancipated' girls, from a terror of being trapped and tamed by domesticity. George's house, where he and his wife were trapped without hope of release, save through the deaths of four old people, represented to me the ultimate horror. It frightened me so that I even had nightmares about it. And yet-this man, George, the trapped one, the man who had put that unfortunate woman, his wife, in a cage, also represented for me, and I knew it, a powerful sexuality from which I fled inwardly, but then inevitably turned towards. I knew by instinct that if I went to bed with George I'd learn a sexuality that I hadn't come anywhere near yet. And with all these attitudes and emotions conflicting in me, I still liked him, indeed loved him, quite simply, as a human being. I sat there on the verandah, unable to speak for a while, knowing that my face was flushed and my hands trembling. And I listened to the music and the singing from the big room up the hill and I felt as if George were excluding me by the pressure of his unhappiness from something unbelievably sweet and lovely. [...]
[...] Challenged now, I would say that every woman believes in her heart that if her man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another. That is her first and strongest thought, regardless of how she might soften it later out of pity or expediency. [...]
I left Willi in the bedroom and stood on the verandah. The mist had thinned to show a faint diffused cold light from a half-obscured sky. Paul was standing a few paces off looking at me. And suddenly all the intoxication and the anger and misery rose in me like a bomb bursting and I didn't care about anything except being with Paul. I ran down to him and he caught my hand and without a word we both ran, without knowing where we were running or why. We ran along the main road east, slipping and stumbling on the wet puddling tarmac, and swerved off on to a rough grass track that led somewhere, but we didn't know where. We ran along it, through sandy puddles we never saw, through the faint mist that had come down again. Dark wet trees loomed up on either side, and fell behind and we ran on. Our breath went, and we stumbled off the track into the veld. It was covered with a low invisible leafy growth. We ran a few paces, and fell side by side in each other's arms in the wet leaves while the rain fell slowly down, and over us low dark clouds sped across the sky, and the moon gleamed but and went, struggling with the dark, so that we were in the dark again. We began to tremble so hard that we laughed; our teeth were clattering together. I was wearing a thin crepe dance dress and nothing else. Paul took off his uniform jacket and put it round me, and we lay down again. Our flesh together was hot, and everything else was wet and cold. [...]
I have never, in all my life, been so desperately and wildly and painfully happy as I was then. It was so strong I couldn't believe it. I remember saying to myself, This is it, this is being happy, and at the same time I was appalled because it had come out of so much ugliness and unhappiness. [...]
I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Koestler. Something he said sticks in my mind-that any communist in the West who stayed in the Party after a certain date did so on the basis of a private myth. Something like that. So I demand of myself, what is my private myth? That while most of the criticisms of the Soviet Union are true, there must be a body of people biding their time there, waiting to reverse the present process back to real socialism. I had not formulated it so clearly before. Of course there is no Party member I could say this to, though it's the sort of discussion I have with ex-party people. Suppose that all the Party people I know have similarly incommunicable private myths, all different? I asked Molly. She snapped: 'What are you reading that swine Koestler for?' [...]
[...] Ella was now free. Her husband had married the day after the divorce was final. Ella was indifferent to this. It had been a sad marriage; no worse than many, certainly; but then Ella would have felt a traitor to her own self had she remained in a compromise marriage. For outsiders, the story went that Ella's husband George had left her for somebody else. She resented the pity she earned on this account, but did nothing to put things right, because of all sorts of complicated pride. And besides, what did it matter what people thought?
Her attention was going away from him. She was aware she was beginning to fidget, and that he knew it. Also that he minded: he was attracted to her. His face was too intent on keeping her; she felt that somewhere in all this was pride, a sexual pride which would be offended if she did not respond, and this made her feel a sudden desire to escape. This complex of emotions, all much too sudden and violent for comfort, made Ella think of her husband George. She had married George almost out of exhaustion, after he had courted her violently for a year. She had known she shouldn't marry him. Yet she did; she did not have the will to break with him. Shortly after the marriage she had become sexually repelled by him, a feeling she was unable to control or hide. This redoubled his craving for her, which made her dislike him the more-he even seemed to get some thrill or satisfaction out of her repulsion for him. They were apparently in some hopeless psychological deadlock. Then, to pique her, he had slept with another woman and told her about it. Belatedly she had found the courage to break with him that she lacked before: she took her stand, dishonestly, in desperation, on the fact he had broken faith with her. This was not her moral code, and the fact she was using conventional arguments, repeating endlessly because she was a coward, that he had been unfaithful to her, made her despise herself. The last few weeks with George were a nightmare of self-contempt and hysteria, until at last she left his house, to put an end to it, to put a distance between herself and the man who suffocated her, imprisoned her, apparently took away her will. He then married the woman he had made use of to bring Ella back to him. Much to Ella's relief.