When ejected from the coal-mine as unfit, he somehow got himself to Germany in the role of an educator. His German wife is very good for him, being practical and competent and a good nurse. Ted now needs looking after. He complains bitterly that the state of his lungs forces him to ‘hibernate’.

Even Ted was affected by the prevailing mood. He could not endure the wranglings and bitterness inside the Party group, and the split when it came was the last straw. ‘I’m obviously not a communist,’ he said to Willi, sombrely, with bitterness, ‘because all this hair-splitting seems to me nonsense.’ ‘No, you obviously are not,’ replied Willi, ‘I was wondering how long it’d take you to see it.’ Above all Ted was disquieted because the logic of the previous polemics had led him into the sub-group led by Willi. He thought the leader of the other group, a corporal from an aircamp and an old Marxist, ‘a dried-up bureaucrat’, but he preferred him as a human being to Willi. Yet he was committed to Willi … which leads me to something I’ve not before thought about. I keep on writing the word group. Which is a collection of people. Which one associates with a collective relationship — and it is true we met day after day for months, for hours every day. But looking back, looking back to really remember what happened, it is not at all like that. For instance I don’t think Ted and Willi ever really talked together - they jibed at each other occasionally. No, there was one time they made contact and that was in a flaming quarrel. It was on the verandah of the hotel at Mashopi, and while I can’t remember what the quarrel was about I remember Ted shouting: ‘You’re the sort of man who’d shoot fifty people before breakfast and then eat six courses. No, you’d order someone else to shoot them, that’s what you’d do.’ And Willi in reply: ‘Yes, if it were necessary I would …’ And so on, for an hour or more, and all this while the ox-wagons rolled by in the white dust of the sandveld, the trains rocked by on the way from the Indian Ocean to the capital, while the farmers drank in their khaki in the bar, and groups of Africans, in search of work, hung about under the jacaranda tree, hour after hour, waiting patiently for the moment when Mr Boothby, the big boss, would have time to come and interview them.

And the others? Paul and Willi together, talking about history — interminably. Jimmy in argument with Paul — usually about history; but in fact what Jimmy was saying, over and over again, was that Paul was frivolous, cold, heartless. But Paul and Ted had no connection with each other, they did not even quarrel. As for me, I played the role of ‘the leader’s girl-friend’ — a sort of cement, an ancient role indeed. And of course if any of my relationships with these people had had any depth, I would have been disruptive and not conciliatory. And there was Maryrose, who was the unattainable beauty. And so what was this group? What held it together? I think it was the implacable dislike and fascination for each other of Paul and Willi, who were so much alike, and bound to such different futures.