— It’s not what she knows. She’s never known anything about us. But they won’t believe that! They’ll go on interrogating her—
— Don’t you think they’ll soon discover it — that she’s never known anything that would matter to them?—
His slow voice was the anchor from which she bobbed frantically. Suddenly her anger spilled in another direction. — What the hell got into him? What did Robbie go there for? How could he dare go to that house? How could he possibly not know that there, of all places, would be where they’d pick him up! The idiocy! The self-indulgence! What did he want, a home-cooked meal? I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the Movement, how they can let people behave so undisciplinedly, so childishly… How can we ever hope to see the end, if that’s how they behave… The idiot! Handed over—yes do come in and meet my mother and sister—quite a social occasion in the family, all ready to be carted off to prison together. I hope he realizes what he’s done. Some revolution, left to people like him… how could he go near that house—
They did not call each other by the endearments used commercially by every patronizing saleswoman and every affected actress—‘love’ and ‘darling’—but had their own, in his language. — Min lille loppa, we don’t know what his reasons might have been—
His ‘little flea’ beat the pillows with her fist, frightening her dog off the bed. — There can’t be any reason. Except she ruined them all, for everything, for the revolution too — he’s no different from the other brothers, in the end. He goes crawling back under mummy’s skirt — You don’t know those people, that family—
He went to the kitchen and brought her a glass of hot milk at four in the morning. While the milk was heating on the stove he stood at the kitchen window and put his palm on the pane, feeling the dark out there, the hour of the end of night into which, forty-eight hours before, mother, brother and sister had come, led to police cars.
In the morning, she didn’t go to work. She was soiled and blurred by helplessness. He had been in that family house only a few awkward times over their seven years together, but he saw for the first time that she would resemble her mother if she were ever to grow old and afraid. With her lips drawn back in pain, her teeth looked long — the face of a victim. Distraught, her beauty dragged out of shape, there was the reversion to physical type that comes with age; some day he would become the listing old Scandinavian hulk who was his father or his uncle. He begged her to take one of his tranquillizers but she wouldn’t — she had a horror of drugs, of drink, anything she had seen give others power over the individual personality; he had always privately thought this came subconsciously from her background, where people of one colour were submitted to the will of those of another.
He went to the Institute for an hour to set his team the tasks of the day and explain why both would be absent — she was employed there, too, in a humbler capacity, having had the opportunity, through their marriage and his encouragement, to satisfy her longing for some form of scientific education. When his colleagues asked what he was going to do he realized he didn’t know. If it turned out that Teresa’s family were detained under Section 29 they would have no access to lawyers or relatives. Between his colleagues’ expressions of sympathy and support were (he saw) the regarding silences shared by them: they could have predicted this sort of disaster, inconceivable in their own lives, as a consequence of his kind of marriage.
He found her talking on the telephone. She was clutching the receiver in both hands, her feet were bare and wet, and the dog — the dog had undergone a change, too, shrunk to a bony frame plastered with fringes of wet fur.
She had bathed the dog? On this day?
She saw his face but was hysterically concentrated on what she was hearing; signalled, don’t interrupt, be quiet! He put his arm round her and her one hand left the earpiece and groped up for his and held it tightly. She was cutting into the gabble on the other end — But I must be able to reach you! Isn’t there anywhere I can phone? If I don’t hear from you, who will tell me what’s happening? … Listen Jimmy, Jimmy, listen, I’m not blaming you… But if I can’t phone you at work, then… No! No! That isn’t good enough, d’you hear me, Jimmy—
There was a moment when he tried to hold steady the shifting gaze of her eyes. She put down the phone. — Call box. And I’ve forgotten the number he just gave me. I’ve been waiting the whole morning for him to call back, and now… I didn’t know how to get myself away from sitting here looking at that phone… do anything, anything… He phoned just after you left and said he had a lawyer friend-of-a-friend, someone I’ve never heard of, he was going to find out details, something about approaching a magistrate—
The phone sprang alive again and she stared at it; he picked it up: there was the voice of her brother, hesitant, stumbling — Ma and them, they in under Section 29.—
She sat at the phone while he tried to activate the house as if it were a stopped clock. To keep them going there would have to be lunch (he cooked it), later the lights switched on, the time for news on television. But she couldn’t eat not knowing if her mother was able to eat what there would be in a plate pushed through a cell door, she couldn’t read by lamplight because there was darkness in a cell, and the news — there was no news when people were detained under Section 29. She telephoned friends and could not remember what they had said. She telephoned a doctor because she suddenly had the idea her mother had low blood pressure or high blood pressure — not sure which — and she wanted to know whether her mother could have a stroke and die, from the one, or collapse, from the other, in a prison? She did not want to go to bed. She brought out a small cracked photograph of her mother holding a baby (Robbie, she identified) with a cross-looking tiny girl standing by (herself). A piece of a man’s coatsleeve showed where the rest of the photograph had been roughly cut off. The missing figure was her father. Exhausted, the two of them were up again until after midnight while she talked to him about her mother, was filled with curiosity and flashes of understanding about her mother, the monotony and smallness of her mother’s life. — And it has to be this: the only big thing that’s ever happened to her has to be this. — Her whole face trembled. He suffered with her. He was aware that it is a common occurrence that people talk with love about one they have despised and resented, once that person is dead. And to be in prison under Section 29, no one knows where, was to be dead to the world where one did not deserve to be loved.
In bed, she would not (of course) take a sleeping pill but they had each other. He made love to her while her tears smeared them both, and that put her blessedly to sleep. Now and then she gave the hiccuping sigh of a comforted child, and he woke at once and lifted his head, watching over her. There was a smell of clean dog-fur in the bed that third night.
Teresa.
He woke to find she was already bathed and dressed. She turned her head to him from the bedroom doorway when he spoke her name; her hair was drawn away tightly from her cheekbones and ears, held by combs. Again something had happened to her in his absence; this time while she was beside him, but they were parted in sleep. She was ready to leave the house long before it was time to go to work: going first to see an Indian woman lawyer whom they’d heard speak at protest meetings against detention without trial. He agreed it was a good idea. That was what must have come to her overnight, among these other things: if she was right about her mother’s high tension (or whatever it was) Jimmy must contact the doctor who treated her and get a statement from him confirming a poor state of health — that might get her released or at least ensure special diet and treatment, inside. And something must be done about that house — it would be rifled in a week, in that neighbourhood. Somebody responsible must be found to go there and see that it was properly locked up — and tidy up, yes, the police would have turned everything upside down; if they arrest, they also search the scene of arrest.