Free A Ripple From the Storm by Doris Lessing

and stores which had agreed to sell it. Jasmine, who had been selling twelve copies of it for years, had handed over the organization to Martha, clearly feeling that she would do better to keep it in her own hands. Martha now sold fifty dozen. The glories of Stalingrad had created inexhaustible stores of goodwill and tolerance towards the inflammatory doctrines of The Watchdog in the bosoms of a couple of dozen penny-splitting shopkeepers. Martha had only to enter one of the Greek or Jewish cafés, or Indian stores with a bundle of Watchdogs whose headline was likely to be: Red Army Recaptures Rostov or The Heroic Defence of Kharkov, to find the proprietor smilingly agreeable at the idea of selling them for her. On this afternoon she set off on her bicycle as usual for the lower part of the town, going from one store to another. They were crowded with Africans. Their doorways were hung with bicycle frames and garlands of tyres, ropes of beads, garlic and lengths of bright cheap cotton. Each had a portable gramophone set on the pavement outside it, and the thin tinny jazz vibrated among the sunwaves which oiled and shimmered over the pavements and mingled with hot heady sweaty sun-fermented smells of the lower town. Sometimes a black man danced beside the gramophone, patting and feeling the pavement with his great cat’s feet, rolling his shoulders and his eyes and hips in a huge goodnature of enjoyment, while his eyes swivelled among the groups of passers-by, men and women, inviting them to join in, or at least to share his pleasure. Or he would look sombrely before him, nostalgic, Martha was convinced, for the veld. For she could never enter the lower town without being attacked by longing for the veld, and for her childhood. In each store she lingered a while at the counter among the bales of cottons and the jars of poisonous-bright sweets, sniffing in the smells of strong cheap dyes and sweat and soap, talking to the soft-faced smiling young Indian assistants, some of whom came regularly now to the Progressive Club meetings. Finally, her handbag heavy with small change, she directed her bicycle back towards the respectable part of the town, and with reluctance. On this afternoon it was nearly six when she had finished, and she was cycling past the station when she saw Mr Maynard at the wheel of a car parked outside the Magistrates’ Court. Beside him sat Mrs Talbot. Mrs Talbot was now cutting Martha; or rather, when her beautiful grey eyes happened to encounter hers one felt always by accident – they assumed an expression of stunned grief, and lowered themselves, while her face put on a look of sullen withdrawal. She was wearing a grey silk suit, and there was a bunch of dark violets at her throat, and her pale face glimmered through a mist of dark pink gauze which emanated from some point towards the top of her head, where there were more violets. Clearly she had been one of the assistants at a wedding where Mr Maynard had been officiating. The wedding guests, stiff in dark suits from which sunburned hands and faces incongruously protruded, or in floral silk dresses and unaccustomed gloves and hats, were still dispersing along shabby confetti-dappled pavements. Mrs Talbot must have climbed into the car, Martha felt, as fast as she could, to save the scene embarrassment because of her incongruity in being part of it. Now she had one agitated hand on Mr Maynard’s dark-clothed arm, and he was leaning forward, his heavy, dark-jowled face above hers. ‘She’s asking advice about investments again,’ Martha decided; for she had observed that Mrs Talbot was never so helplessly feminine as when doing this. She passed the car in such a way that Mrs Talbot would not have the irritation of having pointedly to ignore her existence; but Mr Maynard’s melancholy bloodhound’s eyes rolled towards her and he said through the open window: ‘Wait for me, I want a word with you, young woman.’ Martha nodded, annoyed because of