Landlocked by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online

there was Martha, still standing and waiting. ‘I’m here,’ he excused himself, ‘to eat kebab with my little brother. I didn’t know there was anything else.’
    ‘Then I’m going.’
    ‘Yes. I’ll deal with my ever-loving brother for you.’
    ‘Obviously.’
    ‘What do you want me to do? If the Africans have started something—then about time too, and we should help them. And keep the nonsense out of it—the contradictions.’
    He did not look up—his head was bent over his food. Martha stood watching the brothers eat. She was hungry, but she had promised to eat with her mother. Inside her opened up the lit space on to which, unless she was careful (this was not the moment for it), emotions would walk like actors and begin to speak without (apparently) any prompting from her. This empty lit space was because of the half-dozen rooms she had to run around, looking after. The tall lit space was not an enemy, it was where, at some time, the centre of the house would build itself. She observed, interested, that it was now, standing there looking at the Cohen boys, the antagonists, that the empty space opened out under its searchlights.
    Feeling her silence, first Joss, then Solly, lifted their heads to look at her. She saw the two men, both with loaded forks in their hands, their heads turned sideways to look at her. She began to laugh.
    ‘She thinks we are funny,’ said Joss to Solly.
    ‘She’s laughing at us,’ said Solly to Joss.
    ‘Well, I’ll see you around, anyway,’ she said to Joss.
    ‘I don’t think you will.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I’m thinking of settling up North. I’m going up to spy out the land tomorrow.’
    ‘Ah, I see!’ Everything explained at last, Martha began to laugh again. She stopped, as she felt this laughter begin to burst up like flames, in the middle of the great empty space.
    ‘She sees,’ said Solly to Joss.
    ‘But what does she see?’ said Joss to Solly.
    ‘I might have known,’ said Martha. ‘Joss is leaving the country, and so of course he doesn’t care. And neither would I, in his place.’
    ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Joss, suddenly, not looking at her, but filling his mouth.
    ‘There won’t be anybody left in this place a week after the war ends. Off you all go, and the moment you leave, it’s just too bad about us.’ She left the intimate, odorous little room with the two men bent over their plates, pressed her way through the tables crammed with the RAF, said goodbye to Johnny at the entrance desk, and gained the fresh air and her bicycle. She was thinking: Damn Joss. Suddenly she remembered his ‘speak for yourself’. It occurred to her, for the first time, that perhaps he was there under false pretences too, and that in fact he was concerned to stop Solly knowing what he was up to? In which case, she was an idiot, had proved herself an utter…She bent to unlock her bicycle, and Solly’s arms came around her waist from behind.
    A couple of weeks ago there was a meeting on the Allied invasion of France—‘Second Front: At last!’ Solly had been there, heckling. He had waited outside afterwards, to heckle again, privately. He and Martha had walked through the emptying streets, in bitter argument, their antagonism fed by their ten years’ knowledge of each other. Outside Martha’s door they had embraced, violently, as if they had been flung together.
    ‘Sex,’ Solly had said, ‘the great leveller,’ and she had laughed, but not enough.
    Now she turned, swiftly, putting the bicycle between herself and Solly. Grinning, he laid his hand on her shoulder, where it sent waves of sensation in all directions.
    ‘Surely, you’d admit there’s some meeting-ground?’
    ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
    ‘Liar.’
    ‘What did you have in mind, that we’d go rolling around over the pamphlets in the office, in between calling each other names like dirty Trotskyist?’
    ‘Dogmatic Stalinist, these things can always be managed, if there’s a