Martha Quest
Martha Quest
Doris Lessing
The opening book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.When we first meet Martha Quest, she is a girl of fifteen living with her parents on a poor African farm. She is eager for life and resentful of the deadening narrowness of home, and escapes to take a job as a typist in the local capital. Here, in the ‘big city’, she encounters the real life she was so eager to know and understand. As a picture of colonial life, ‘Martha Quest’ succeeds by the depth of its realism alone; but always at its centre is Martha, a sympathetic figure drawn with unrelenting objectivity.Martha’s Africa is Doris Lessing’s Africa: the restrictive life of the farm; the atmosphere of racial fear and antagonism; the superficial sophistication of the city. And both Martha and Lessing are Children of Violence: the generation that was born of one world war and came of age in another, whose abrasive relationships with their parents, with one another, and with society are laid bare brilliantly by a writer who understands them better than any other.
Martha Quest
Doris Lessing
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u9d4c9f3b-f246-5141-846c-c6394d8b15c5)
Title Page (#ucec97c03-5655-57d6-bb43-116abcd2b0c9)
Part One (#u100ebef2-87ea-5454-a306-fa6f2345b8e1)
Chapter One (#u93818e59-f201-508e-855a-198b3d7513b5)
Chapter Two (#u50439c9c-3b7c-5146-86fa-274c7192b448)
Chapter Three (#ue2443815-cbde-59f8-98d3-09677ee3e26c)
Part Two (#udca2e38f-721c-5e5c-830b-c59468e77c3a)
Chapter One (#ub2a7fe2d-f739-5027-8f74-31cf7e4c7e40)
Chapter Two (#ud0039cc0-4ce3-5637-b7e9-85e32279f43a)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)
The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)
The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)
Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part One (#ulink_1bc479f3-7d21-5c64-aae0-7ac03a67f01b)
I am so tired of it, and also tired of the future before it comes
– OLIVE SCHREINER
Chapter One (#ulink_b030c388-2b7d-56be-9ef2-a0247e3f2262)
Two elderly women sat knitting on that part of the veranda which was screened from the sun by a golden shower creeper; the tough stems were so thick with flower it was as if the glaring afternoon was dammed against them in a surf of its own light made visible in the dripping, orangecoloured clusters. Inside this coloured barrier was a darkened recess, rough mud walls (the outer walls of the house itself) forming two sides, the third consisting of a bench loaded with painted petrol tins which held pink and white geraniums. The sun splashed liberal gold through the foliage, over the red cement floor, and over the ladies. They had been here since lunchtime, and would remain until sunset, talking, talking incessantly, their tongues mercifully let off the leash. They were Mrs Quest and Mrs Van Rensberg; and Martha Quest, a girl of fifteen, sat on the steps in full sunshine, clumsily twisting herself to keep the glare from her book with her own shadow.
She frowned, and from time to time glanced up irritably at the women, indicating that their gossip made it difficult to concentrate. But then, there was nothing to prevent her moving somewhere else; and her spasms of resentment when she was asked a question, or her name was used in the family chronicling, were therefore unreasonable. As for the ladies, they sometimes allowed their eyes to rest on the girl with that glazed look which excludes a third person, or even dropped their voices; and at these moments, she lifted her head to give them a glare of positive contempt; for they were seasoning the dull staple of their lives – servants, children, cooking – with a confinement or scandal of some kind; and since she was reading Havelock Ellis on sex, and had taken good care they should know it, the dropped voices had the quality of an anomaly. Or rather, she was not actually reading it: she read a book that had been lent to her by the Cohen boys at the station, while Ellis lay, like an irritant, on the top step, with its title well in view. However, there are certain rites in the talk of matrons and Martha, having listened to such talk for a large part of her life, should have learned that there was nothing insulting, or even personal, intended. She was merely expected to play the part ‘young girl’ against their own familiar roles.
At the other end of the veranda, on two deck-chairs planted side by side and looking away over the bush and the mealie fields, were Mr Quest and Mr Van Rensberg; and they were talking about crops and the weather and the native problem. But their backs were turned on the women with a firmness which said how welcome was this impersonal talk to men who lived shut into the heated atmosphere of the family for weeks at a time, with no refuge but the farmwork. Their talk was as familiar to Martha as the women’s talk; the two currents ran sleepily on inside her, like the movements of her own blood, of which she was not conscious except as an ache of irritation when her cramped position made her shift her long, bare and sunburnt legs. Then, when she heard the nagging phrases ‘the Government expects the farmers to …’ and ‘The kaffirs are losing all respect because …’ she sat up sharply; and the irritation overflowed into a flood of dislike for both her parents. Everything was the same; intolerable that they should have been saying the same things ever since she could remember; and she looked away from them, over the veld.
In the literature that was her tradition, the word farm evokes an image of something orderly, compact, cultivated; a neat farm-house in a pattern of fields. Martha looked over a mile or so of bush to a strip of pink ploughed land; and then the bush, dark green and sombre, climbed a ridge to another patch of exposed earth, this time a clayish yellow; and then, ridge after ridge, fold after fold, the bush stretched to a line of blue kopjes. The fields were a timid intrusion on a landscape hardly marked by man; and the hawk which circled in mile-wide sweeps over her head saw the house, crouched on its long hill, the cluster of grass huts which was the native compound huddled on a lower rise half a mile away; perhaps a dozen patches of naked soil – and then nothing to disturb that ancient, down-peering eye, nothing that a thousand generations of his hawk ancestors had not seen.
The house, raised high on its eminence into the blue and sweeping currents of air, was in the centre of a vast basin, which was bounded by mountains. In front, there were seven miles to the Dumfries Hills; west, seven miles of rising ground to the Oxford Range; seven miles east, a long swelling mountain which was named Jacob’s Burg. Behind, there was no defining chain of kopjes, but the land travelled endlessly, without limit, and faded into a bluish haze, like that hinterland to the imagination we cannot do without – the great declivity was open to the north.
Over it all curved the cloudless African sky, but Martha could not look at it, for it pulsed with light; she must lower her eyes to the bush; and that was so familiar the vast landscape caused her only the prickling feeling of claustrophobia.
She looked down at her book. She did not want to read it; it was a book on popular science, and even the title stiffened her into a faint but unmistakable resentment. Perhaps, if she could have expressed what she felt, she would have said that the calm factual air of the writing was too distant from the uncomfortable emotions that filled her; perhaps she was so resentful of her surroundings and her parents that the resentment overflowed into everything near her. She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen, but she was restless because this collection of interesting facts seemed to have so little to do with her own problems. She lifted her eyes and gazed speculatively at Mrs Van Rensberg who had had eleven children.
She was a fat, good-natured, altogether pleasant woman in a neat flowered cotton dress, which was rather full and long, and, with the white kerchief folded at the neck, gave her the appearance of a picture of one of her own grandmothers. It was fashionable to wear long skirts and tie a scarf loosely at the neck, but in Mrs Van Rensberg the fashion arranged itself obstinately into that other pattern. Martha saw this, and was charmed by it; but she was looking at the older woman’s legs. They were large and shapeless, veined purple under the mask of sunburn, and ended in green sandals, through which her calloused feet unashamedly splayed for comfort. Martha was thinking with repugnance, Her legs are like that because she has had so many children.
Mrs Van Rensberg was what is described as uneducated; and for this she might apologize, without seeming or feeling in the slightest apologetic, when a social occasion demanded it – for instance, when Mrs Quest aggressively stated that Martha was clever and would have a career. That the Dutchwoman could remain calm and good-natured on such occasions was proof of considerable inner strength, for Mrs Quest used the word ‘career’ not in terms of something that Martha might actually do, such as doctoring, or the law, but as a kind of stick to beat the world with, as if she were saying, ‘My daughter will be somebody, whereas yours will only be married.’ Mrs Quest had been a pretty and athletic-looking English girl with light-brown hair and blue eyes as candid as spring sunshine; and she was now exactly as she would have been had she remained in England: a rather tired and disappointed but decided matron, with ambitious plans for her children.
Both ladies had been living in this farming district for many years, seventy miles from the nearest town, which was itself a backwater; but no part of the world can be considered remote these days; their homes had the radio, and newspapers coming regularly from what they respectively considered as Home – Tory newspapers from England for the Quests, nationalist journals from the Union of South Africa for the Van Rensbergs. They had absorbed sufficient of the spirit of the times to know that their children might behave in a way which they instinctively thought shocking, and as for the book Martha now held, its title had a clinical sound quite outside their own experience. In fact, Martha would have earned nothing but a good-natured and traditional sigh of protest, had not her remaining on the steps been in itself something of a challenge. Just as Mrs Quest found it necessary to protest, at half-hourly intervals, that Martha would get sunstroke if she did not come into the shade, so she eventually remarked that she supposed it did no harm for girls to read that sort of book; and once again Martha directed towards them a profoundly scornful glare, which was also unhappy and exasperated; for she felt that in some contradictory way she had been driven to use this book as a means of asserting herself, and now found the weapon had gone limp and useless in her hands.
Three months before, her mother had said angrily that Epstein and Havelock Ellis were disgusting. ‘If people dug up the remains of this civilization a thousand years hence, and found Epstein’s statues and that man Ellis, they would think we were just savages.’ This was at the time when the inhabitants of the colony, introduced unwillingly through the chances of diplomacy and finance to what they referred to as ‘modern art’, were behaving as if they had been severally and collectively insulted. Epstein’s statues were not fit, they averred, to represent them even indirectly. Mrs Quest took that remark from a leader in the Zambesia News; it was probably the first time she had made any comment on art or literature for twenty years. Martha then had borrowed a book on Epstein from the Cohen boys at the station. Now, one of the advantages of not having one’s taste formed in a particular school is that one may look at work of an Epstein with the same excited interest as at a Michelangelo. And this is what Martha did. She felt puzzled, and took the book of reproductions to her mother. Mrs Quest was busy at the time, and had never found an opportunity since to tell Martha what was so shocking and disgusting in these works of art. And so with Havelock Ellis.
Now Martha was feeling foolish, even let down. She knew, too, that she was bad-tempered and boorish. She made resolutions day after day that from now on she would be quite different. And yet a fatal demon always took possession of her, so that at the slightest remark from her mother she was impelled to take it up, examine it, and hand it back, like a challenge – and by then the antagonist was no longer there; Mrs Quest was simply not interested.
‘Ach,’ said Mrs Van Rensberg, after a pause, ‘it’s not what you read that matters, but how you behave.’ And she looked with good-natured affection towards Martha, who was flushed with anger and with sunshine. ‘You’ll have a headache, my girl,’ she added automatically; and Martha bent stubbornly to her book, without moving, and her eyes filled with tears.
The two women began discussing, as was natural, how they had behaved when young, but with reservations, for Mrs Van Rensberg sensed that her own experience included a good deal that might shock the English lady; so what they exchanged were not the memories of their behaviour, but the phrases of their respective traditions, which sounded very similar – Mrs Van Rensberg was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church; the Quests, Church of England. Just as they never discussed politics, so they never discussed – but what did they discuss? Martha often reflected that their years-old friendship had survived just because of what had been left out, everything of importance, that is; and the thought caused the girl the swelling dislike of her surroundings which was her driving emotion. On the other hand, since one lady was conservative British and the other conservative Afrikaans, this friendship could be considered a triumph of tact and good feeling over almost insuperable obstacles, since they were bound, by those same traditions, to dislike each other. This view naturally did not recommend itself to Martha, whose standards of friendship were so high she was still waiting for that real, that ideal friend to present himself.
‘The Friend,’ she had copied in her diary, ‘is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas …’ And so down the page to the next underlined sentence: ‘There goes a rumour that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore.’ And the next: ‘Our actual friends are but distant relations of those to whom we pledged.’
And could Mrs Van Rensberg be considered even as a distant relation? Clearly not. It would be a betrayal of the sacred name of friendship.
Martha listened (not for the first time) to Mrs Van Rensberg’s long account of how she had been courted by Mr Van Rensberg, given with a humorous deprecation of everything that might be described (though not by Martha, instinctively obedient to the taboos of the time) as Romance. Mrs Quest then offered an equally humorous though rather drier account of her own engagement. These two heavily, though unconsciously, censored tales at an end, they looked towards Martha, and sighed, resignedly, at the same moment. Tradition demanded from them a cautionary moral helpful to the young, the fruit of their sensible and respectable lives; and the look on Martha’s face inhibited them both.
Mrs Van Rensberg hesitated, and then said firmly (the firmness was directed against her own hesitation), ‘A girl must make men respect her.’ She was startled at the hatred and contempt in Martha’s suddenly raised eyes, and looked for support towards Mrs Quest.
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Quest, rather uncertainly. ‘A man will never marry a girl he does not respect.’
Martha slowly sat up, closing her book as if it were of no more use to her, and stared composedly at them. She was now quite white with the effort of controlling that hatred. She got up, and said in a low tight voice, ‘You are loathsome, bargaining and calculating and …’ She was unable to continue. ‘You are disgusting,’ she ended lamely, with trembling lips. Then she marched off down the garden, and ran into the bush.
The two ladies watched her in silence. Mrs Quest was upset, for she did not know why her daughter thought her disgusting, while Mrs Van Rensberg was trying to find a sympathetic remark likely to be acceptable to her friend.
‘She’s so difficult,’ murmured Mrs Quest apologetically; and Mrs Van Rensberg said, ‘It’s the age, my Marnie’s just as bad.’ She did not know she had failed to find the right remark: Mrs Quest did not consider her daughter to be on a level with Marnie, whom she found in altogether bad taste, wearing grown-up clothes and lipstick at fifteen, and talking about ‘boys’. Mrs Van Rensberg was quite unconscious of the force of her friend’s feeling. She dismissed her strictness with Martha as one of those English foibles; and besides, she knew Marnie to be potentially a sensible woman, a good wife and mother. She continued to talk about Marnie, while Mrs Quest listened with the embarrassment due to a social gaffe, saying ‘Quite’ or ‘Exactly’, thinking that her daughter’s difficulty was caused by having to associate with the wrong type of child, meaning Marnie herself. But the Dutchwoman was unsnubbable, since her national pride was as deep as the Englishwoman’s snobbishness, and soon their conversation drifted back to servants and cooking. That evening, each would complain to her husband – one, with the English articulateness over matters of class, that Mrs Van Rensberg was ‘really so trying’, while the other, quite frankly, said that these rooineks got her down, they were all the same, they thought they owned the earth they walked on. Then, from unacknowledged guilt, they would ring each other up on the district telephone, and talk for half an hour or so about cooking and servants. Everything would continue as usual, in fact.
In the meantime, Martha, in an agony of adolescent misery, was lying among the long grass under a tree, repeating to herself that her mother was hateful, all these old women hateful, every one of these relationships, with their lies, evasions, compromises, wholly disgusting. For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.
After a short time, she grew more composed. A self-preserving nerve had tightened in her brain, and with it her limbs and even the muscles of her face became set and hardened. It was with a bleak and puzzled look that she stared at a sunlit and glittering bush which stood at her feet; for she did not see it, she was seeing herself, and in the only way she was equipped to do this – through literature. For if one reads novels from earlier times, and if novels accurately reflect, as we hope and trust they do, the life of their era, then one is forced to conclude that being young was much easier then than it is now. Did X and Y and Z, those blithe heroes and heroines, loathe school, despise their parents and teachers who never understood them, spend years of their lives fighting to free themselves from an environment they considered altogether beneath them? No, they did not; while in a hundred years’ time people will read the novels of this century and conclude that everyone (no less) suffered adolescence like a disease, for they will hardly be able to lay hands on a novel which does not describe the condition. What then? For Martha was tormented, and there was no escaping it.
Perhaps, she thought (retreating into the sour humour that was her refuge at such moments), one should simply take the years from, let us say, fourteen to twenty as read, until those happier times arrive when adolescents may, and with a perfectly clear conscience, again enjoy themselves? How lucky, she thought, those coming novelists, who would be able to write cheerfully, and without the feeling that they were evading a problem: ‘Martha went to school in the usual way, liked the teachers, was amiable with her parents, and looked forward with confidence to a happy and well-spent life!’ But then (and here she suffered a twisting spasm of spite against those cold-minded mentors who so persistently analysed her state, and in so many volumes), what would they have to write about?
That defensive spite released her, and it was almost with confidence that she again lay back, and began to consider herself. For if she was often resentfully conscious that she was expected to carry a burden that young people of earlier times knew nothing about, then she was no less conscious that she was developing a weapon which would enable her to carry it. She was not only miserable, she could focus a dispassionate eye on that misery. This detached observer, felt perhaps as a clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead, was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station, who had been lending her books for the last two years. Joss Cohen tended towards economics and sociology, which she read without feeling personally implicated. Solly Cohen was in love (there is no other word for it) with psychology; he passionately defended everything to do with it, even when his heroes contradicted each other. And from these books Martha had gained a clear picture of herself, from the outside. She was adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy; British, and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class; female, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past. She was tormented with guilt and responsibility and self-consciousness; and she did not regret the torment, though there were moments when she saw quite clearly that in making her see herself thus the Cohen boys took a malicious delight which was only too natural. There were moments, in fact, when she hated them.
But what they perhaps had not foreseen was that this sternly objective picture of herself merely made her think, no doubt unreasonably, Well, if all this has been said, why do I have to go through with it? If we know it, why do we have to go through the painful business of living it? She felt, though dimly, that now it was time to move on to something new, the act of giving names to things should be enough.
Besides, the experts themselves seemed to be in doubt as to how she should see herself. There was the group which stated that her life was already determined when she still crouched sightless in the womb of Mrs Quest. She grew through phases of fish and lizard and monkey, rocked in the waters of ancient seas, her ears lulled by the rhythm of the tides. But these tides, the pulsing blood of Mrs Quest, sang no uncertain messages to Martha, but songs of anger, or love, or fear or resentment, which sank into the passive brain of the infant, like a doom.
Then there were those who said it was the birth itself which set Martha on a fated road. It was during the long night of terror, the night of the difficult birth, when the womb of Mrs Quest convulsed and fought to expel its burden through the unwilling gates of bone (for Mrs Quest was rather old to bear a first child), it was during that birth, from which Martha emerged shocked and weary, her face temporarily scarred purple from the forceps, that her character and therefore her life were determined for her.
And what of the numerous sects who agreed on only one thing, that it was the first five years of life which laid an unalterable basis for everything that followed? During those years (though she could not remember them), events had occurred which had marked her fatally forever. For the feeling of fate, of doom, was the one message they all had in common. Martha, in violent opposition to her parents, was continually being informed that their influence on her was unalterable, and that it was much too late to change herself. She had reached the point where she could not read one of these books without feeling as exhausted as if she had just concluded one of her arguments with her mother. When a native bearer came hastening over the veld with yet another parcel of books from the Cohen boys, she felt angry at the mere sight of them, and had to fight against a tired reluctance before she could bring herself to read them. There were, at this very moment, half a dozen books lying neglected in her bedroom, for she knew quite well that if she read them she would only be in possession of yet more information about herself, and with even less idea of how to use it.
But if to read their books made her unhappy, those occasions when she could visit them at the store were the happiest of her life. Talking to them exhilarated her, everything seemed easy. She walked over to the kaffir store when her parents made the trip into the station; sometimes she got a lift from a passing car. Sometimes, though secretly, since this was forbidden, she rode in on her bicycle. But there was always an uneasiness about this friendship, because of Mrs Quest; only last week, she had challenged Martha. Being what she was, she could not say outright, ‘I don’t want you to know Jewish shopkeepers.’ She launched into a tirade about how Jews and Greeks exploited the natives worse than anyone, and ended by saying that she did not know what to do with Martha, who seemed bent on behaving so as to make her mother as unhappy as possible. And for the first time that Martha could remember, she wept; and though her words were dishonest, her emotion was not. Martha had been deeply disturbed by those tears.
Yesterday, Martha had been on the point of getting out her bicycle in order to ride in to the station, so badly did she need to see the Cohen boys; when the thought of another scene with her mother checked her. Guiltily, she left the bicycle where it was. And now, although she wanted more than anything else to tell them about her silly and exaggerated behaviour in front of Mrs Van Rensberg, so that they might laugh good-naturedly at it, and restore it to proportion, she could not make the effort to rise from under the big tree, let alone get out the bicycle and go secretly into the station, hoping she would not be missed. And so she remained under the tree, whose roots were hard under her back, like a second spine, and looked up through the leaves to the sky, which shone in a bronze clamour of light. She ripped the fleshy leaves between her fingers, and thought again of her mother and Mrs Van Rensberg. She would not be like Mrs Van Rensberg, a fat and earthy housekeeping woman; she would not be bitter and nagging and dissatisfied like her mother. But then, who was she to be like? Her mind turned towards the heroines she had been offered, and discarded them. There seemed to be a gap between herself and the past, and so her thoughts swam in a mazed and unfed way through her mind, and she sat up, rubbing her stiffened back, and looked down the aisles of stunted trees, over a wash of pink feathery grass, to the red clods of a field which was invisible from the house.
There moved a team of oxen, a plough, a native driver with his long whip, and at the head of the team a small black child, naked except for a loincloth, tugging at the strings which passed through the nostrils of the leaders of the team. The driver she did not like – he was a harsh and violent man who used that whip with too much zest; but the pity she refused herself flooded out and surrounded the black child like a protective blanket. And again her mind swam and shook, like clearing water, and now, instead of one black child, she saw a multitude, and so lapsed easily into her familiar daydream. She looked away over the ploughed land, across the veld to the Dumfries Hills, and refashioned that unused country to the scale of her imagination. There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and the stunted trees, a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its falling flower-bordered terraces. There were splashing fountains, and the sound of flutes; and its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together; and these groups of elders paused, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of the children – the blue-eyed, fair-skinned children of the North playing hand in hand with the bronze-skinned, dark-eyed children of the South. Yes, they smiled and approved these many-fathered children, running and playing among the flowers and the terraces, through the white pillars and tall trees of this fabulous and ancient city …
It was about a year later. Martha was seated beneath the same tree, and in rather the same position, her hands full of leaves which she was unconsciously rubbing to a green and sticky mess. Her head was filled with the same vision, only more detailed. She could have drawn a plan of that city, from the central market place to the four gates. Outside one of the gates stood her parents, the Van Rensbergs, in fact most of the people of the district, forever excluded from the golden city because of their pettiness of vision and small understanding; they stood grieving, longing to enter, but barred by a stern and remorseless Martha – for unfortunately one gets nothing, not even a dream, without paying heavily for it, and in Martha’s version of the golden age there must always be at least one person standing at the gate to exclude the unworthy. She heard footsteps, and turned her head to find Marnie picking her way down the native path, her high heels rocking over the stones.
‘Hey,’ said Marnie excitedly, ‘heard the news?’
Martha blinked her eyes clear of the dream, and said, rather stiffly, ‘Oh, hullo.’ She was immediately conscious of the difference between herself and Marnie, whose hair was waved, who wore lipstick and nail varnish, and whose face was forced into an effect of simpering maturity, which continually vanished under pressure from her innate good sense. Now she was excited she was like a healthy schoolgirl who had been dressing up for fun; but at the sight of the sprawling and undignified Martha, who looked rather like an overgrown child of eleven, with a ribbon tying her lanky blonde hair, and a yoked dress in flowered print, she remembered her own fashionable dress, and sat primly on the grass, placed her black heels together, and looked down at her silk-stockinged legs with satisfaction.
‘My sister’s getting married,’ she announced.
There were five sisters, two already married, and Martha asked, ‘Who, Marie?’ For Marie was next, according to age.
‘No, not Marie,’ said Marnie with impatient disparagement. ‘Marie’ll never get herself a man, she hasn’t got what it takes.’
At the phrase ‘get herself a man,’ Martha flushed, and looked away, frowning. Marnie glanced doubtfully at her, and met a glance of such scorn that she blushed in her turn, though she did not know what for.
‘You haven’t even asked who,’ she said accusingly, though with a timid note; and then burst out, ‘Man, believe it or not, but it’s Stephanie.’
Stephanie was seventeen, but Martha merely nodded.
Damped, Marnie said, ‘She’s doing very well for herself, too, say what you like. He’s got a V-8, and he’s got a bigger farm than Pop.’
‘Doing well for herself’ caused Martha yet another internal shudder. Then the thought flashed across her mind: I criticize my mother for being a snob, but despise the Van Rensbergs with a clear conscience, because my snobbishness is intellectual. She could not afford to keep this thought clear in her mind; the difficult, painful process of educating herself was all she had to sustain her. But she managed to say after a pause, though with genuine difficulty, ‘I’m glad, it will be nice to have another wedding.’ It sounded flat.
Marnie sighed, and she glanced down at her pretty fingernails for comfort. She would have so much liked an intimate talk with a girl of her own age. Or rather, though there were girls of her own age among the Afrikaans community growing up around her father’s farm, she would have liked to be friends with Martha, who she admired. She would have liked to say, with a giggle, that she was sixteen herself and could get a man, with luck, next year, like Stephanie. Finding herself confronted by Martha’s frowning eyes, she wished she might return to the veranda, where the two mothers would be discussing the fascinating details of the courtship and wedding. But it was a tradition that the men should talk to the men, women with women, and the children should play together. Marnie did not consider herself a child, though Martha, it seemed, did. She thought that if she could return by herself to the veranda, she might join the women’s talk, whereas if Martha came with her they would be excluded. She said, ‘My mom’s telling your mom.’
Martha said, with that unaccountable resentment, ‘Oh, she’ll have a wonderful time gossiping about it.’ Then she added quickly, trying to make amends for her ungraciousness, ‘She’ll be awfully pleased.’
‘Oh, I know your mom doesn’t want you to marry young, she wants you to make a career,’ said Marnie generously.
But again Martha winced, saying angrily, ‘Oh she’d love it if I married young.’
‘Would you like it, hey?’ suggested Marnie, trying to create an atmosphere where they might ‘have a good talk’.
Martha laughed satirically and said, ‘Marry young? Me? I’d die first. Tie myself down to babies and housekeeping …’
Marnie looked startled, and then abashed. She remarked defiantly, ‘Mom says you’re sweet on Joss Cohen.’ At the sight of Martha’s face she giggled with fright. ‘Well, he’s sweet on you, isn’t he?’
Martha gritted her teeth, and ground out, ‘Sweet on!’
‘Hell, he likes you, then.’
‘Joss Cohen,’ said Martha angrily.
‘He’s a nice boy. Jews can be nice, and he’s clever, like you.’
‘You make me sick,’ said Martha, reacting, or so she thought, to this racial prejudice.
Again Marnie’s good-natured face drooped with puzzled hurt, and she gave Martha an appealing look. She stood up, wanting to escape.
But Martha slid down a flattened swathe of long grass, and scrambled to her feet. She rubbed the back of her thighs under the cotton dress, saying, ‘Ooh, taken all the skin off.’
Her way of laughing at herself, almost clowning, at these graceless movements, made Marnie uncomfortable in a new way. She thought it extraordinary that Martha should wear such clothes, behave like a clumsy schoolboy, at sixteen, and apparently not mind. But she accepted what was in intention an apology, and looked at the title of the book Martha held – it was a life of Cecil Rhodes – and asked, was it interesting? Then the two girls went together up the native path, which wound under the low scrubby trees, through yellow grass that reached to their shoulders, to the clearing where the house stood.
It was built native style, with mud walls and thatched roof, and had been meant to last for two seasons, for the Quests had come to the colony after seeing an exhibition in London which promised new settlers that they might become rich on maize-growing almost from one year to the next. This had not happened, and the temporary house was still in use. It was a long oval, divided across to make rooms, and around it had been flung out projecting verandas of grass. A square, tin-roofed kitchen stood beside it. This kitchen was now rather tumble down, and the roof was stained and rusted. The roof of the house too had sagged, and the walls had been patched so often with fresh mud that they were all colours, from dark rich red through dulling yellow to elephant grey. There were many different kinds of houses in the district, but the Quests’ was original because a plan which was really suitable for bricks and proper roofing had been carried out in grass and mud and stamped dung.
The girls could see their mothers sitting behind the screen of golden shower; and at the point where they should turn to climb the veranda steps, Martha said hastily, ‘You go,’ and went off into the house, while Marnie thankfully joined the women.
Martha slipped into the front room like a guilty person, for the people on the veranda could see her by turning their heads. When the house was first built, there had been no verandas. Mrs Quest had planned the front of the house to open over the veld ‘like the prow of a ship,’ as she herself gaily explained. There were windows all around it, so that there had been a continuous view of mountains and veld lightly intersected by strips of wall, like a series of framed ‘views’. Now the veranda dipped over them, and the room was rather dark. There were chairs and settees, and a piano on one side, and a dining table on the other. Years ago, when the rugs and chintzes were fresh, this had been a pretty room, with cream-washed walls and smooth black linoleum under the rugs. Now it was not merely faded, but dingy and overcrowded. No one played the piano. The silver teatray that had been presented to Mrs Quest’s grandfather on retirement from his bank stood on the sideboard among bits of rock, nuts and bolts from the ploughs, and bottles of medicine.
When Mrs Quest first arrived, she was laughed at, because of the piano and the expensive rugs, because of her clothes, because she had left visiting cards on her neighbours. She laughed herself now, ruefully, remembering her mistakes.
In the middle of the floor was a pole of tough thornwood, to hold the end of the ridgepole. It had lain for weeks in a bath of strong chemical, to protect it from ants and insects; but now it was riddled with tiny holes, and if one put one’s ear to it there could be heard a myriad tiny jaws at work, and from the holes slid a perpetual trickle of faint white dust. Martha stood beside it, waiting for the moment when everyone on the veranda would be safely looking the other way, and felt it move rockingly on its base under the floor. She thought it typical of her parents that for years they had been reminding each other how essential it was to replace the pole in good time, and, now that the secretly working insects had hollowed it so that it sounded like a drum when tapped, remarked comfortingly, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, the ridgepole never really rested in the fork, anyway.’ And indeed, looking up at the thatch, one could see a clear two inches between the main spine of the roof and its intended support. The roof seemed to be held well enough on the web of light poles which lay under the thatch. The whole house was like this – precarious and shambling, but faithful, for it continued to remain upright against all probability. ‘One day it’ll fall on our heads,’ Mrs Quest would grumble when her husband said, as usual, that they could not afford to rebuild. But it did not fall.
At a suitable moment, Martha slipped into the second room. It was her parents’ bedroom. It was a large square, and rather dark, for there were only two windows. The furniture was of petrol and paraffin boxes nailed together and painted and screened by cretonne. The curtains, originally bought in London, had faded to a yellowish grey. On the thin web of the stuff, which hung limp against the glare, showed a tenacious dark outline of strutting peacocks. There were two large iron beds standing side by side on one wall, a dressing table facing them on the other. Habit had not dulled Martha into blindness of these things, of the shabby neglect of the place. But the family lived here without really living here. The house had been built as temporary, and was still temporary. Next year they would go back to England, or go into town. The crops might be good; they would have a stroke of luck and win the sweepstake; they would find a gold mine. For years Mr and Mrs Quest had been discussing these things; and to such conversations Martha no longer listened, for they made her so irritable she could not stand them. She had seen clearly, when she was about eleven or twelve, that her parents were deluding themselves; she had even reached the stage where she could say, if they really wanted to move, they would. But this cold, exasperated thought had never been worked out, and she still shared her parents’ unconscious attitude, although she repudiated their daydreaming and foolishness, that this was not really her home. She knew that to Marnie, to others of their neighbours, this house seemed disgracefully shabby, even sordid; but why be ashamed of something that one has never, not for a moment, considered as home?
When Martha was alone in this room, and had made sure the doors were closed, she moved carefully to the small square mirror that was nailed to the centre of the window, over the dressing table. She did not look at the things on the dressing table, because she disliked them. For many years, Mrs Quest had been describing women who used cosmetics as fast; then she saw that everyone else did, and bought herself lipstick and nail varnish. She had no instinct for them and they were the wrong colour. Her powder had a musty, floury smell, like a sweet, rather stale cake. Martha hastily put the lid on the box and slipped it into a drawer, so as to remove the smell. Then she examined herself in the mirror, leaning up on her toes, for it was too high; Mrs Quest was a tall woman. She was by no means resigned to the appearance her mother thought suitable. She spent much time at night, examining herself with a hand mirror; she sometimes propped the mirror by her pillow, and, lying beside it, would murmur like a lover, ‘Beautiful, you are so beautiful.’ This happened when Mrs Quest had made one of her joking remarks about Martha’s clumsiness, or Mr Quest complained that girls in this country matured so early.
She had a broad but shapely face, with a pointed chin, severe hazel eyes, a full mouth, clear straight dark brows. Sometimes she would take the mirror to her parents’ bedroom, and hold it at an angle to the one at the window, and examine herself, at this double remove, in profile; for this view of herself had a delicacy her full face lacked. With her chin tilted up, her loose blonde hair falling back, her lips carefully parted in an eager expectant look, she possessed a certain beauty. But it seemed to her that her face, her head, were something quite apart from her body; she could see herself only in sections, because of the smallness of the mirror. The dresses her mother made looked ugly, even obscene, for her breasts were well grown, and the yokes emphasized them, showing flattened bulges under the tight band of material; and the straight falling line of the skirt was spoiled by her full hips. Her mother said that girls in England did not come out until at the earliest sixteen, but better still eighteen, and girls of a nice family wore dresses of this type until coming out. That she herself had not ‘come out’, and that her family had not by many degrees reached that stage of niceness necessary to coming out, was not enough to deflect her. For on such considerations is the social life of England based, and she was after all quite right in thinking that if only she had married better, or if only their farming had been successful, it would have been possible to arrange with the prosperous branch of the family that Martha should come out. So Martha’s sullen criticisms of her snobbishness had no effect at all; and she would smooth the childish dresses down over Martha’s body, so that the girl stood hunched with resentment, and say with an embarrassed coyness, ‘Dear me, you are getting a pouter pigeon, aren’t you?’
Once, Mrs Van Rensberg, watching this scene, remarked soothingly, ‘But, Mrs Quest, Martha has a nice little figure, why shouldn’t she show it?’ But outwardly the issue was social convention, and not Martha’s figure; and if Mrs Van Rensberg said to her husband that Mrs Quest was going the right way to make Martha ‘difficult’ she could not say so to Mrs Quest herself.
This afternoon was a sudden climax after a long brooding underground rebellion. Standing before the mirror, she took a pair of scissors and severed the bodice from the skirt of her dress. She was trying to make the folds lie like Marnie’s, when the door suddenly opened, and her father came in. He stopped, with an embarrassed look at his daughter, who was naked, save for a tiny pair of pink drawers; but that embarrassment was having it both ways, for if Martha was still a child, then one could look at her naked.
He said gruffly, ‘What are you doing?’ and went to a long cupboard beside his bed, formed of seven petrol boxes, one above another, painted dark green, and covered by a faded print curtain. It was packed with medicine bottles, crammed on top of each other so that a touch might dislodge them into an avalanche. He said moodily, ‘I think I’ll try that new stuff, I’ve a touch of indigestion,’ and tried to find the appropriate bottle. As he held them up to the light of the window, one after another, his eyes fell on Martha, and he remarked, ‘Your mother won’t like you cutting her dresses to pieces.’
She said defiantly, ‘Daddy, why should I wear dresses like a kid of ten?’
He said resentfully, ‘Well, you are a kid. Must you quarrel all the time with your mother?’
Again the door swung in, banging against the wall, and Mrs Quest entered, saying, ‘Why did you run off, Martha, they wanted to tell you about Stephanie, it really is rude of you –‘ She stopped, stared, and demanded, ‘Whatever are you doing?’
‘I’m not wearing this kind of dress any more,’ said Martha, trying to sound calm, but succeeding only in her usual sullen defiance.
‘But, my dear, you’ve ruined it, and you know how badly off we are,’ said Mrs Quest, in alarm at the mature appearance of her daughter’s breasts and hips. She glanced at her husband, then came quickly across the room, and laid her hands on either side of the girl’s waist, as if trying to press her back into girlhood. Suddenly Martha moved backwards, and involuntarily raised her hand; she was shuddering with disgust at the touch of her own mother, and had been going to slap her across the face. She dropped her hand, amazed at her own violence; and Mrs Quest coloured and said ineffectually, ‘My dear …’
‘I’m sixteen,’ said Martha, between set teeth, in a stifled voice; and she looked towards her father, for help. But he quickly turned away, and measured medicine into a glass.
‘My dear, nice girls don’t wear clothes like this until –’
‘I’m not a nice girl,’ broke in Martha, and suddenly burst into laughter.
Mrs Quest joined her in a relieved peal, and said, ‘Really my dear, you are ridiculous.’ And then, on a more familiar note, ‘You’ve spoiled that dress, and it’s not fair to Daddy, you know how difficult it is to find money …’ She stopped again, and followed the direction of Martha’s eyes. Martha was looking at the medicine cupboard. Mrs Quest was afraid that Martha might say, as she had said to her, that there must be hundreds of pounds worth of medicines in that cupboard, and they had spent more on Mr Quest’s imaginary diseases than they had spent on educating her.
This was, of course, an exaggeration. But it was strange that when Martha made these comments Mrs Quest began arguing about the worth of the medicines: ‘Nonsense, dear, you know quite well it can’t be hundreds of pounds.’ She did not say, ‘Your father is very ill.’ For Mr Quest was really ill, he had contracted diabetes three or four years before. And there was an episode connected with this that neither Martha nor Mrs Quest liked to remember. One day, Martha was summoned from her classroom at school in the city to find Mrs Quest waiting for her in the passage. ‘Your father’s ill,’ she exclaimed, and then, seeing that Martha’s face expressed only: Well, there’s nothing new in that, is there?, added hastily, ‘Yes, really, he’s got diabetes, he must go to the hospital and have tests.’ There was a long silence from Martha, who at length muttered, like a sleep-walker, ‘I knew it.’ Almost the moment these words were out, she flushed with guilt; and at once she hastened to the car, where her father sat, and both women fussed over him, while Mr Quest, who was very frightened, listened to their assurances.
When Martha remembered that phrase, which had emerged from her depths, as if it had been waiting for the occasion, she felt uneasy and guilty. Secretly, she could not help thinking, He wanted to be ill, he likes being ill, now he’s got an excuse for being a failure. Worse than this, she accused her mother, in her private thoughts, of being responsible.
The whole business of Mr Quest’s illness aroused such unpleasant depths of emotion between mother and daughter that the subject was left alone, for the most part; and now Mrs Quest said hastily, moving away to the window, ‘You’re upsetting your father, he worries about you.’ Her voice was low and nagging.
‘You mean you worry about me,’ said Martha coldly, unconsciously dropping her voice, with a glance at her father. In a half-whisper she said, ‘He doesn’t even notice we’re here. He hasn’t seen us for years …’ She was astounded to find that her voice shook, she was going to cry.
Mr Quest hastily left the room, persuading himself that his wife and daughter were not quarrelling, and at once Mrs Quest said in a normal voice, ‘You’re a worry to us. You don’t realize. The way you waste money and –‘
Martha cut it short, by walking out of the room and into her own. The door did not lock, or even fasten properly, for it hung crooked. It had been formed of planks, by a native carpenter, and had warped in the rainy seasons, so that to shut it meant a grinding push across a lumpy and swelling lintel. But though it did not lock, there were moments when it invisibly locked, and this was one of them. Martha knew her mother would not come in. She sat on the edge of her bed and cried with anger.
This was the pleasantest room of the house, a big square room, freshly whitewashed, and uncrowded. The walls rose clear to the roof, which slanted down on either side of the ridgepole in a gentle sweep of softly glistening thatch, which had turned a greyish gold with the years. There was a wide, low window that looked directly over a descent of trees to an enormous red field, and a rise on the other side, a fresh parklike bush – for it had never been cut to feed mine furnaces, as had most of the trees on the farm – and beyond this slope rose the big mountain, Jacob’s Burg. It was all flooded with evening sunlight. Sunset: the birds were singing to the day’s end, and the crickets were chirping the approach of night. Martha felt tired, and lay on her low iron bedstead, whose lumpy mattress and pillows had conformed comfortably to the shape of her body. She looked out past the orange-tinted curtains to the sky, which was flooded with wild colours. She was facing, with dubious confidence, what she knew would be a long fight. She was saying to herself, I won’t give in. I won’t; though it would have been hard for her to define what it was she fought.
And in fact the battle of the clothes had begun. It raged for months, until poor Mr Quest groaned and went out of the room whenever the subject was raised, which was continuously, since it had become a focus for the silent struggle between the women, which had nothing to do with clothes, or even with ‘niceness’.
Mr Quest thought of himself as a peace-loving man. He was tall and lean and dark, of slow speech and movement; he was handsome too, and even now women warmed to him, and to the unconscious look of understanding and complicity in his fine, dark eyes. For in that look was a touch of the rake; and at these moments when he flirted a little with Mrs Van Rensberg, he came alive; and Mrs Quest was uneasy, and Martha unaccountably rather sad, seeing her father as he must have been when he was young. His good looks were conventional, even dull, save for his moments of animation. And they were rare, for if Mr Quest was a rake, he did not know it.
When Mrs Quest said teasingly, but with an uneasy undertone, ‘Mrs Van Rensberg, poor soul, got quite flustered this afternoon, the way you flirted with her,’ Mr Quest said, rather irritated, ‘What do you mean, I flirted? I was only talking for politeness’ sake.’ And he really believed it.
What he liked best was to sit for hours on end in his deck-chair on the veranda, and watch the lights and shadows move over the hills, watch the clouds deploying overhead, watch the lightning at night, listen to the thunder. He would emerge after hours of silence, remarking, ‘Well, I don’t know, I suppose it all means something’; or ‘Life is a strange business, say what you like.’ He was calm, even cheerful, in his absent-minded way, as long as he was not disturbed, which meant these days, as long as he was not spoken to. At these moments he became suffused with angry irritation; and now both women were continually appealing for his support, and he would reply helplessly, ‘For heaven’s sake, what is there to quarrel for? There isn’t anything to quarrel about.’ When his wife came to him secretly, talking insistently until he had to hear her, he shouted in exasperation, ‘Well, if the child wants to make herself ridiculous, then let her, don’t waste your time arguing.’ And when Martha said helplessly, ‘Do talk to her, do tell her I’m not ten years old any longer,’ he said, ‘Oh, Lord, do leave me alone, and anyway, she’s quite right, you’re much too young, look at Marnie, she makes me blush wriggling around the farm in shorts and high heels.’ But this naturally infuriated Martha, who did not envisage herself in the style of a Marnie. But the women could not leave him alone, several times a day they came to him, flushed, angry, their voices querulous, demanding his attention. They would not leave him in peace to think about the war, in which he had lost his health, and perhaps something more important than health; they would not leave him to dream tranquilly about the future, when some miracle would transport them all into town, or to England; they nagged at him, as he said himself, like a couple of darned fishwives! Both felt that he let them down, and became irritable against him, so that at such times it was as if this very irritation cemented them together, and against him. But such is the lot of the peacemakers.
Chapter Two (#ulink_213ea73b-619e-58c9-a8f5-41bbedcad7a7)
Early in her sixteenth year, Martha was expected to pass the matric – it goes without saying, quite brilliantly. She did not even sit the examination; and it was not the first time she had withdrawn from a situation through circumstances which it occurred to no one, particularly Martha herself, to call anything but bad luck. At eleven, for instance, there had been just such a vital examination, and she had become ill the week before. She was supposed to be exceptionally musical, but by some fatality was always prevented from proving it by gaining the right number of marks. She was prepared for confirmation three times, and in the end the whole thing was allowed to drop, for it appeared that in the meantime she had become an agnostic. And now here was this important examination. For months Mrs Quest was talking about university and scholarships, while Martha listened, sometimes eagerly, but more often writhing with embarrassment. A week before the vital date, Martha got pink eye, which happened to be raging through the school. Not a very serious affliction, but in this case it appeared Martha’s eyes were weakened.
It was October, the month of heat and flowers, and dust and tension. October: the little town where Martha was at school was hung with flowers, as for a festival. Every street was banked with purple-blooming trees, the jacarandas held their airy clouds of blossom over every sidewalk and garden; and beneath them blew, like a descant, the pale pink-and-white bauhinias; and behind, like a deep note from the trumpet, the occasional splash of screaming magenta where a bougainvillaea unloaded its weight of colour down a wall. Colour and light: the town was bombarded by light, the heat beat down from a whitish sky, beat up from the grey and glittering streets, hung over the roofs in shimmering waves. The greens of the foliage were deep and solid and shining, but filmed with dust; like neglected water where debris gathers. As one walked past a tree, the light shifted glittering from facet to facet of a branch or leaf. How terrible October is! Terrible because so beautiful, and the beauty springs from the loaded heat, the dust, the tension; for everyone watches the sky, and the heavy trees along the avenues, and the sullen clouds, while for weeks nothing happens; the wind lifts an eddy of dust at a street corner, and subsides, exhausted. One cannot remember the smell of flowers without the smell of dust and petrol; one cannot remember that triumphant orchestra of colour without the angry, white-hot sky. One cannot remember … Afterwards Martha remembered that her eyes had ached badly, then they closed and festered, and she lay in half-darkness making jokes about her condition because she was so afraid of going blind. She was even more afraid of her fear, because nothing could have been more absurd, since half the girls in the school were similarly afflicted. It was merely a question of waiting till her eyes grew better. She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what? She sat and sniffed painfully at the weighted air, as if it were dealing her blows like an invisible enemy. Also, there was the examination to be taken; she always relied on intensive study during the last fortnight before an examination, for she was the kind of person with a memory that holds anything, almost photographically, for about a month; afterwards what she had learned disappeared as if she had never known it. Therefore, if she took the examination, she would probably pass, but in a mediocre way.
Mrs Quest was told that her daughter had pink eye. Then she got a letter from Martha, a very hysterical letter; then another, this time flat and laconic. Mrs Quest went into town, and took her daughter to an oculist, who tested her and said there was nothing wrong with the eyes. Mrs Quest was very angry and took her to another oculist; the anger was the same as that she directed towards those doctors who did not immediately accept her diagnoses of her husband’s condition. The second oculist was patient and ironical and agreed to everything Mrs Quest said.
Curious that Mrs Quest, whose will for years had been directed towards Martha distinguishing herself – curious that she should accept those damaged eyes so easily, even insist that they were permanently injured when Martha began to vacillate. For as soon as Mrs Quest arrived in town and took the situation in hand, Martha found herself swept along in a way she had not foreseen. If one can use the word ‘see’ in connection with anything so confused and contradictory. The end of it was that Martha went back to the farm – ‘to rest her eyes,’ as Mrs Quest explained to the neighbours, with a queer pride in the thing that made Martha uneasy.
So here was Martha at home, ‘resting her eyes’ but reading as much as ever. And how curious were the arguments between the two women over this illogical behaviour. For Mrs Quest did not say, ‘You are supposed to have strained your eyes, why are you reading?’ She made such remarks as ‘You do it on purpose to upset me!’ Or ‘Why do you have to read that kind of book?’ Or ‘You are ruining your whole life, and you won’t take my advice.’ Martha maintained a stubborn but ironical silence, and continued to read.
So here was Martha, at sixteen, idle and bored, and sometimes secretly wondering (though only for a moment, the thought always vanished at once) why she had not sat that examination, which she could have passed with such ease. For she had gone up the school head of her class, without even having to work. But these thoughts could not be clearly faced, so she shut them out. But why was she condemning herself to live on this farm, which more than anything in the world she wanted to leave? The matric was a simple passport to the outside world, while without it escape seemed so difficult she was having terrible nightmares of being tied hand and foot under the wheels of a locomotive, or struggling waist-deep in quicksands, or eternally climbing a staircase that moved backwards under her. She felt as if some kind of spell had been put on her.
Then Mrs Quest began saying that Marnie had just passed the matric, and she said it unpleasantly: Look, if she can pass it, why not you?
Martha did not want to see Marnie, and it was easy to avoid doing so, for the Van Rensbergs and the Quests were drifting apart. It was more than one of those inexplicable changes of feeling between neighbours; there was a good reason for it. Mr Van Rensberg was becoming violently nationalist, and Mrs Van Rensberg had an apologetic look on her face when she saw Mrs Quest at the station. And so, by a natural reaction, the Quests began saying, ‘These damned Afrikaners,’ although the two families had been friends, shelving the question of nationality for so many years.
Martha did not want to think of these things, she was turned in on herself, in a heavy trancelike state. Afterwards she was to think of this time as the worst in her life. What was so frightening was this feeling of being dragged, being weighted. She did not understand why she was acting against her will, her intellect, everything she believed. It was as if her body and brain were numbed.
There was nothing to do. The farm lay about her like a loved country which refused her citizenship. She repeated the incantatory names of childhood like a spell which had lost its force. The Twenty Acres, the Big Tobacco Land, the Field on the Ridge, the Hundred Acres, the Kaffir Patch, the Bush by the Fence, the Pumpkin Patch – these words became words; and, walking by herself across the Twenty Acres, which was bounded on three sides by a straggle of gum trees (a memory of her father’s afforestation phase), a patch of sloping land tinted pink and yellow, full of quartz reefs and loose white pebbles, she said to herself scornfully, Why Twenty Acres? It’s about twelve acres. Why the Hundred Acres, when it is only seventy-six? Why has the family always given large-sounding names to things ordinary and even shabby? For everything had shrunk for her. The house showed as if an unkind light had been shone on it. It was not only shabby, it was sordid. Everything decayed and declined, and leaned inwards.
And, worse, far worse, she was watching her father with horror, for he was coming to have, for her, a fatal lethargy of a dream-locked figure. He had the look of a person half claimed by sleep. He was middle-aged, she told herself, neither young nor old; he was in the long middle period of life when people do not change, but his changelessness was imposed, not by a resisting vigour but by – what? He was rising late in the morning, he dreamed over his breakfast, wandered off into the bedroom to test himself for his real disease and for various imaginary ones; returned early from the farmwork to lunch, slept after it, and for a longer time every day, and then sat immobile in his deck-chair, waiting for the sunset. After it, supper – a calculatedly healthy meal – and an early bed. Sleep, sleep, the house was saturated by it; and Mrs Quest’s voice murmured like the spells of a witch, ‘You must be tired, darling; don’t overtire yourself, dear.’ And when these remarks were directed at Martha, she felt herself claimed by the nightmare, as if she were standing beside her father; and, in fact, at the word ‘tired’ she felt herself tired and had to shake herself.
‘I will not be tired,’ she snapped to her mother, ‘it’s no good trying to make me tired’: extraordinary words; and even more extraordinary that Mrs Quest did not question them. Her face fell in patient and sorrowful lines, the eternal mother, holding sleep and death in her twin hands like a sweet and poisonous cloud of forgetfulness – that was how Martha saw her, like a baneful figure in the nightmare in which she herself was caught.
But sometimes their arguments were more sensible. ‘You are terribly unfair to your father,’ Mrs Quest complained. ‘He’s ill, he’s really ill.’
‘I know he’s ill,’ said Martha, miserably, feeling guilty. Then she roused herself to say, ‘Look at Mr Blank, he’s got it, too, he’s quite different.’ Mr Blank, over the other side of the district, had the same disease, and much more seriously than Mr Quest, and led an active life, as if this business of injecting oneself with substitute gland juices once a day was on the same level as cleaning one’s teeth or making a point of eating fruit for breakfast. But Mr Quest was completely absorbed in the ritual of being ill, he talked of nothing else – his illness and the war, the war and illness; it was as if a twin channel drove across his brain, and if his thoughts switched from one subject, they must enter the other, like a double track leading to the same destination.
It even seemed to Martha that her father was pleased that the Van Rensbergs no longer visited them, because with Mr Van Rensberg he talked about the farm, while with Mr McDougall, who took his place, he shared memories of the trenches.
Martha, coming down the veranda, a silent and critical figure, would see her father at one end, leaning back in his deck-chair like a contemplative philosopher, and hear his voice: ‘We were out in no man’s land, six of us, when the star shells went up, and we saw we weren’t three paces from the Boche trenches and …’
At the other end of the veranda, Mrs Quest was talking to Mrs McDougall. ‘That’s when we got the wounded in from Gallipoli and …’
Martha listened, absorbed in these twin litanies of suffering in spite of herself, for they been murmuring down her childhood as far back as she could remember, and were twined with her deepest self. She was watching, fearfully, the effect on herself of the poetry of suffering; the words ‘no man’s land’, ‘star shells’, ‘Boche’, touched off in her images like those of poetry; no man’s land was the black and wasted desert between the living forces; star shells exploded in coloured light, like fireworks, across her brain, drenched in reminiscence; Boche was fearful and gigantic, nothing human, a night figure; the tripping word ‘Gallipoli’ was like a heroic dance. She was afraid because of the power of these words, which affected her so strongly, who had nothing to do with what they stood for.
On one such afternoon, when she was standing on the steps, listening, her father called out to her, ‘Matty, did I ever tell you about –’ and she said ungraciously, but with discomfort, ‘Quite a thousand times, I should think.’
He jerked up his head and stared at her, and on to his face came that look of baffled anger. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ he said. ‘We came out of the trenches, and then suddenly the war was bad form. The Great Unmentionable, that’s what you called it.’
‘I didn’t call it anything,’ she remarked at last, sullenly humorous.
She moved away, but he called after her, ‘All you pacifists, there were pacifists before the last war, but when it started, you all fought. You’ll fight, too, you’ll see.’
Martha had never thought of herself as a pacifist, but it seemed she was one: she played this part against her father’s need, just as, for him, she was that group of people in the Twenties who refused to honour the war, although the Twenties were the first decade of her life, and she could hardly remember them. She was creating them, however, for herself, through reading, and because of this, the mere sound of the word young, which had apparently been some sort of symbol or talisman during that decade, sprung in her a feeling of defiance and recklessness.
Similarly, when Mr Quest complained about the international ring of Jews who controlled the world (which he had taken to doing lately, after reading some pamphlet sent to him through the post), Martha argued against him, in the most reasonable and logical manner; for one does not learn so young that against some things reason is powerless. And when Mrs Quest said that all the kaffirs were dirty and lazy and inherently stupid, she defended them. And when both parents said that Hitler was no gentleman, an upstart without principles, Martha found herself defending Hitler too; it was this which made her think a little and question her feeling of being used, her conviction that when her parents raised their voices and argued at her, on a complaining and irritable note, insisting that there was going to be another war with Germany and Russia soon (this was at a time when everyone was saying another war was impossible, because whom would it benefit?), this new war was in some way necessary to punish her, Martha, who talked of the last one so critically.
Jonathan Quest, the younger brother, came home for the holidays from his expensive school, like a visitor from a more prosperous world. For the first time, Martha found herself consciously resenting him. Why, she asked herself, was it that he, with half her brains, should be sent to a ‘good school’, why was it he should inevitably be given the advantages? There was something uneasy in this criticism, for she had been telling her mother fiercely that nothing would induce her to go to a snob school, even if her eyes did get better. She was becoming aware of several disconnected strands of her thinking. And this was brought to a climax by Jonathan himself. He was a simple, good-natured boy, very like his father to look at, who spent his holidays visiting the neighbouring farmers, riding in to the station to visit Socrates the Greek, and the Cohen family at the little kaffir store. He was on the best of terms with everyone. But it struck Martha as unjust that this brother of hers who despised the Afrikaners (or rather, who took up the orthodox British attitude towards them, which was the same thing) should spend the day at the Van Rensbergs’ house like a second son, and drop in for a chat with the Cohen brothers as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Martha asked him sarcastically. ‘How do you reconcile the Jews ruining the world with going to see Solly and Joss?’
Jonathan looked uncomfortable and said, ‘But we’ve known them all our lives.’
When she looked pointedly quizzical, he said, ‘But you never go and see them at all.’
‘That’s not because I feel the way you do.’
Jonathan was embarrassed, because he would not have said he felt any way rather than another; he merely repeated what his parents said, and what he had heard at school. ‘Well, if you think Hitler all right, how do you reconcile that?’
‘But I never said he was all right, all I said was –’ She stopped and blushed; and it was his turn to look quizzical. It was true that all she had said was that Hitler’s being an upstart was no criticism of his capabilities, but in this household it was as good as a defence.
She began a long rational argument; he refused to argue, merely teasing her, ‘Matty’s lost her temper, Matty’s lost her temper,’ singing it like a child.
‘You’re nothing but a baby,’ she concluded scornfully, which was how their arguments always ended, and she turned away. Now, that act of turning away implies something one turns towards – and she picked up a book, at random, from the bookcase. This was also a familiar act. How many times had she not simply reached for the nearest book, as if to remark, ‘I have authority for what I say’?
It occurred to her that the phrase ‘Martha is a great reader’ was being used by herself exactly as her mother used it, and with as little reason. For what was she reading? She read the same books over and over again, in between intervals of distracted daydreaming, in a trance of recognition, and in always the same place, under the big tree that was her refuge, through which the heat pumped like a narcotic. She read poetry, not for the sense of the words, but for the melodies which confirmed the rhythm of the moving grasses and the swaying of the leaves over her head, or that ideal landscape of white cities and noble people which lay over the actual vistas of harsh grass and stunted trees like a golden mirage.
She went through the house searching for something different. It was full of books. Her own room had shelves packed with fairy stories from her childhood, and with poetry. In the living room, her parents’ bookcases were filled with the classics, Dickens and Scott and Thackeray and the rest, inherited from prosperous Victorian households. These she had read years before, and she now read them again, and with a feeling of being starved. One might equate the small black child with Oliver Twist – but what then? There were also, lying everywhere, books on ‘politics’ in her parents’ sense of the word, such as the memoirs of Lloyd George, or histories of the Great War. None of these seemed to have any reference to the farm, to the gangs of native labour, to what was described in the newspapers, or even to Mein Kampf, which had started this restless condition of mind.
But one day, slipped behind the rows of dusty books, she found a volume of H G Wells, and, as she held it in her hand, was very conscious of a dull feeling of resistance, a disinclination. It was so strong that she nearly put it down and reached as usual for Shelley or for Whitman; then she became conscious of what she was doing and stood wondering at herself. For she had felt this before. She looked at the book again. It was the Concise History of the World, and the name on the flyleaf was ‘Joshua Cohen’. Now, she had dropped her childish friendship with the Cohen boys from the moment Marnie had said, ‘Joss Cohen is sweet on you.’ She missed them. And yet she could not face them. At first it was because the relief of escaping the barrage of criticism was so great: there was no longer any necessity to read their books, examine her own ideas. Recently it had been because of some obscure and unadmitted shame about her strained eyes. She took the book to her refuge, the tree, and read it through; and wondered why it was that she could read the most obscure and complicated poetry with ease, while she could not read the simplest sort of book on what she called ‘facts’ without the greatest effort to concentration. She brought herself to decide she would make an effort to renew that friendship with the Cohens, for there was no one else who could help her. She wanted them to tell her what she must read. For there are two ways of reading: one of them deepens and intensifies what one already knows; from the other, one takes new facts, new views to weave into one’s life. She was saturated with the first, and needed the second. All those books she had borrowed, two years before – she had read them, oh yes; but she had not been ready to receive them.
And now what was she to do? For she had behaved very badly to the Cohen boys. She saw them at the station sometimes. Now, to avoid seeing people one has known for years is something of a feat, and Martha achieved it by the simple device of saying to herself, They wouldn’t think that of me – ‘that’ being anti-Semitism – and smiling at them constrainedly, like an acquaintance. They nodded back, and left her alone, as she apparently desired.
The village held about fifty souls, and had sprung up untidily around the first store, owned by Socrates the Greek, who was known to the farmers as Sock. There was a garage, run by a Welshman; a farmers’ hall; the station beside the railway, a long tin-roofed shack on wooden piles; a ganger’s cottage; and a hotel, also owned by Socrates, in which there was a bar, which was the real social centre of the district. These buildings were scattered over a few acres of red dust; and along the railway line was a stretch of brownish water, where ducks swam until Mrs Socrates came out to catch one for the hotel dinner, and where the oxen from the farmers’ wagons were unyoked while the wagons were loaded, and stood knee-deep in green scum, raising their eyes tranquilly as the train thundered past over their heads. There were two trains a week, and twenty miles away was the end of the line, for beyond was the long ascent to the great escarpment at the verge of the Zambesi Valley. But there was a great deal of road traffic, and all day the cars stood in the dust outside the bar.
Years before, the Quests used to make the trip in to the station twice a week, for Mrs Quest was sociable; but Mr Quest disliked being disturbed so much that now they went once a month, and Mrs Quest must begin fighting with her husband at least a week before.
‘Alfred,’ she would say, with a sort of offhand defiance, ‘remember, we are going in to the station tomorrow.’
He did not hear. Or rather, he raised vaguely irritable eyes towards her, and dropped them again, hunching his shoulders against her voice.
‘Do listen, dear. I told you, we are out of flour, and the boys need new aprons, and the sugar’s practically finished.’
He kept his eyes lowered, and his face was stubborn.
‘Alfred!’ she shouted.
‘What is it?’ he demanded, and glared at her.
Startled by the glare, which nevertheless she had been provoking and facing with obdurate strength for years, she murmured, abashed but determined, ‘We must go to the station.’
‘We can send the wagon,’ he said hastily, getting up to escape.
‘No, Alfred, you know you always say you can’t spare the wagon, and it’s silly to send the wagon for two sacks of …’ He was at the door, on his way out; but she raised her voice after him: ‘Besides, I want to see if they’ve any nice materials: I’m really down to my last rag.’
And now he stopped, and gave her another glare, in which there was guilt and reproach, for she was using the weapon he dreaded most: she was saying, The very least you can do is to let me have a little trip once a month, when you’ve made me live on this awful farm, and we’re so poor, and my children have been dragged down to the level of the Van Rensbergs and …
‘Oh, all right, all right, have it your own way,’ he said, and sat down, reached for the newspaper, and covered himself with it.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We will go in after lunch, and Martha can help me get ready.’
Her husband’s defiant eyes were hidden by the newspaper, which nevertheless gave a small protesting shake; but Martha’s eyes were lifted towards her, with the sullen enquiry. ‘Why do we have to get ready for half an hour’s trip?’
‘Oh well – you know – with everything …’ Mrs Quest lapsed into confusion.
‘Good Lord,’ said Martha irritably, ‘to hear us talk, you’d think we were off to England or something.’
This was a familiar joke, and allowed Mrs Quest to give her girlish and rather charming laugh; though no one else laughed. ‘Well, with this family I’ve got, and no one lifts a finger but me …’ This was not a grumble, but an appeal that please, please, for pity’s sake, they should laugh, this irritable, resisting couple, and make things easier. She sighed, as Martha’s face remained glum and the newspaper was held firmly upright against her.
Next morning at breakfast she said, ‘Don’t forget we’re going to the station.’
Now he was resigned, ‘Must we?’
‘Yes, we must. Besides, you know you’ll enjoy it once we get there.’
This was a mistake. ‘I do not enjoy it. I loathe it. Besides, we haven’t any petrol.’
‘There’s a spare tin in the storeroom,’ said Mrs Quest firmly. And now there was no help for it; Mr Quest groaned, and accepted his fate; and as he went off to the garage he even looked interested; the cloud of introspection was lifting, and his eyes intently followed what his hands did. It always worried Martha, made her uneasy, to see how those brooding eyes must concentrate, force themselves outwards, watching his hands as if they were clumsy creatures that were separate from himself.
The garage was a roof of tin over two walls of plastered logs, open at each end; and he reversed the car slowly out into the bush, so that it bounced and jerked over the rough ground, and then forwards into an empty space. Then he got out, and stood frowning at the car. It was a very old Ford; the paint had gone; there were no side curtains – they had been lost somewhere; one door was tied with rope; and a part of the canvas hood, which had decayed into holes, was thatched over. He had bought it for thirty pounds, ten years before.
‘The engine’s as good as ever,’ he murmured proudly. And he called Martha to say, ‘It isn’t the body of a car that matters. Only fools pay good money for paint and varnish. What matters is the engine.’ He liked to have Martha there when he attended to the car; he would even send the servant to fetch her. Now, Martha did not mind about how cars looked; but she was irritated because of this one’s extreme slowness; so her face was as absent and dreamy as his own while he fetched water in a watering can, and fed the radiator, and took off the rope from the useless handle and retied it. Slowly, because he got no response to his remarks, he began glaring at her. ‘It’s all very well,’ he would begin, ‘it’s all very well for you …’ More often than not, the sentence was never finished, for a humorous look would come over her face, and their eyes met.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ she protested, grumbling, ‘why is it all very well, I haven’t said a word!’ Here she might begin edging away, with longing glances at the house. It was so hot; the heat and light glittered into her eyes from the battered old car. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, sounding offended; and she returned to sit on the running board, opening the book she had held in her hand. Now he was mollified, and he sounded cheerful, as he stroked the warm thatch on the roof, and said, ‘I always did like thatching, there’s something about the look of a nice piece of thatch. I remember my cousin George – he was an expert thatcher, back home. Of course, he knew his job, not like these damned niggers, they slam it on any old how. When you go back to England, Matty, the first thing you must do is go to Colchester and see if George’s kids are half the man their father was – if so, you’ll see a piece of thatching you’ll find nowhere else in the world. Matty!’ he shouted at her bent and absorbed head.
‘What?’ she asked, exasperated, lifting her eyes from the book.
‘You’re not listening.’
‘I am listening.’
‘It’s all very well for you,’ came the grumbling voice.
When he had fiddled with the car for an hour or so, he came back to the house, followed by Martha, and demanded tea. He would not go down the farm that day. And then, about twelve o’clock, he began worrying that the lunch was late and they would never get off that afternoon.
‘But Alfred,’ said poor Mrs Quest, ‘first you won’t go at all, and then you start fussing hours before –’
‘It’s all very well, you haven’t got to nurse a twenty-year-old car over these roads.’
Martha gritted her teeth in anger. Standing on the hill, one could see the other farmers’ cars racing through the trees, like tiny black beetles, the red dust spurting up behind them. Other people made the journey to the station in a few minutes.
After lunch, the anxious Mr Quest went to the car and again tested the radiator. It was likely to be empty; and then he would call for half a dozen eggs, and break them one after another into the cavity. The eggs would form a sticky sediment over the leaky bottom of the radiator. Once someone had suggested mealie meal, which he had tried immediately, with all the cautious enthusiasm of the scientific experimenter. ‘There must be something in it,’ he murmured as he poured handfuls of the white floury stuff into the car. But halfway along the track, the cap shot off with an explosion, and lumps of porridge flew all over the windscreen, so that the car came to a blind and sliding stop against a large tree. ‘Well,’ said Mr Quest thoughtfully, ‘that’s interesting. Perhaps if one used a finer grain it might …’
On the whole, eggs were more predictable; though it was important not to drive too fast, and to stop frequently, so that the engine might cool, as otherwise the water might boil the clotted egg off the bottom of the radiator, and then …
After lunch Mr Quest called peremptorily, ‘May! Matty! Come on, the engine’s started, we must go.’ And Mrs Quest, half laughing, half grumbling, ran to the car, adjusting her hat, while Martha followed unhurriedly, with a look of exhausted resignation.
The car was poised at the edge of a flattish space, on the brow of the hill. Mr Quest sat urgently forward, clasping the brake with one hand, hugging the steering wheel with the other.
‘Now!’ he exclaimed, letting go the brake. Nothing happened. ‘Oh, damn it all,’ he groaned, as if this were the last straw. ‘Come on, then.’ And he and Mrs Quest began swinging back and forth in their seats, so the car was joggled inch by inch over the edge, and slid precariously down the rutted pebbly road to the foot of the hill, where there was a great ditch. Into this it slid, and stopped. ‘Oh, damn it all,’ Mr Quest said again, on a final note, and looked around at his women in an aggrieved way.
He tried the starter, without much hope. It worked at once, and the car flew up over the edge of the ditch in a screeching bounce, and down the track between the mealie fields. The maize stood now in its final colouring, a dead silvery gold, dry as paper, and its whispering against the wind was the sound of a myriad fluttering leaves. Below this Hundred Acres Field lay the track, the old railroad track, and now Mr Quest stopped the car, got out, took off the radiator cap, and peered in. There was a squelchy bubbling noise, and a faintly rotten smell. ‘It’s all right so far,’ he said, with satisfaction, and off they went.
Halfway, they stopped again. ‘At three and a half miles, the petrol ought to show …’ murmured Mr Quest, looking at the petrol gauge. For it was seven miles to the station. Or rather, it was five and three-quarters; but just as it was seven miles to the Dumfries Hills (in fact, six) and seven to Jacob’s Burg (at least nine), so the distance to the station must be seven miles, for to have a house in the dead centre of a magically determined circle offers satisfaction beyond all riches, and even power. But a poetical seven miles is one thing, and to check one’s petrol gauge by it another; and Mr Quest frowned and said, ‘I’d better take the thing to the garage. I cannot understand – if these people can make an engine to last a lifetime, why is everything else so shoddy?’
At the station, Mrs Quest descended at Socrates’ with her shopping lists, and Mr Quest drove off to the garage. Martha lagged on the veranda until her mother had forgotten her in her eager talk with the other women at the counter, and then walked quickly to the belt of trees which hid the kaffir store. It was a large square brick erection, with a simple pillared veranda. Martha went through the usual crowd of native women with their babies on their backs, pushed aside the coloured bead curtain at the door, and was inside the store. It had a counter down the centre, and on it were jars of bright sweets, and rolls of cotton goods. There were sacks of grain and sugar around the walls, bicycles, cans of paraffin, monkey nuts. Over the counter, cheap beads, strips of biltong, mouth organs and glass bangles dangled and swung together. The smell was of sweat and cheap dyes and dust, and Martha sniffed it with pleasure.
Old Mr Cohen nodded at her, with a distance in his manner, and, having asked politely after her parents, who owed him fifty pounds, waited for an order.
‘Is Solly in?’ she asked rather too politely.
The old man allowed his eyebrows to lift, before replying, ‘He’s in, for anyone who wants to see him.’
‘I would like to see him,’ she said, almost stammering.
‘You used to know the way,’ he said laconically, and nodded at the closed flap of the counter, under which she had ducked as a child. She had expected him to lift it for her now; clumsily, she tried to move it, while he watched her. Then, taking his time, he lifted it, and moved aside so that she might go through.
She found herself saying, ‘You’re mistaken, I didn’t mean …’
His eyes snapped around at her, and he said sarcastically, ‘Didn’t mean what?’ He at once turned away to serve a native child, who was so red with dust from the road that his black skin had a rusty look, some acid-green sweets from a jar.
Martha walked into the back room, and found the Cohen boys reading, one in each of the two big easy chairs, which she privately thought in unpleasant taste, as was the whole room, which was very small, and crowded with glossy furniture and bright china ornaments; there was an effect of expensive ostentation, like the display window of a furniture store. And in this ugly and tasteless room sat Solly and Joss, the intellectuals, reading (as she took care to see) Plato and Balzac, in expensive editions.
After a startled look at her, they looked at each other, and after a long pause Solly remarked, ‘Look who’s here!’ while Joss returned, ‘Well, well!’ and they both waited, with blandly sarcastic faces, for her to speak.
She said, ‘I’ve brought back a book of yours,’ and held it out.
Solly said, ‘My grateful thanks,’ extended a hand, and took it.
Joss was pretending to read, and this annoyed her; for, as Mrs Van Rensberg had suggested, he had once been her particular friend. But it was also a relief, and she said, rather flirtatiously, to Solly, ‘May I sit down?’ and sat forthwith.
‘She’s got to be quite a smart girl, h’m?’ said Solly to Joss, as the boys openly and rudely examined her.
As a result of her quarrels with Mrs Quest, she was now making her own clothes. Also, she had starved herself into a fashionable thinness which, since she was plump by nature, was not to everyone’s taste. Apparently not to the Cohen boys’, for they continued, as if she were not present:
‘Yellow suits her, doesn’t it, Solly?’
‘Yes, Joss and that cute little slit down the front of the dress, too.’
‘But too thin, too thin, Solly, it comes of giving up that rich and unhealthy Jewish food.’
‘But better thin and pure, Joss, than fat and gross and contaminated by –’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, in discomfort; and they raised their eyebrows and shook their heads and sighed. ‘I know you think …’ she began, and once again found it hard to continue.
‘Think what?’ they demanded, almost together, and with precisely the keen, sarcastic intonation their father had used.
‘It isn’t so,’ she stammered, sincerely, looking at them in appeal; and for a moment thought she was forgiven, for Joss’s tone was quite gentle as he began: ‘Poor Matty, did your mummy forbid you to come and see us, then?’
The shock of the words, after the deceptively gentle tone, which reached her nerves before the sense, caused her eyes to fill with tears. She said, ‘No, of course she didn’t.’
‘Mystery,’ said Joss, beginning the game again, nodding at Solly; who sighed exaggeratedly and said, ‘We’re not to know, dear, dear.’
Suddenly Martha said not at all as she had intended, but with a mixture of embarrassment and coyness, ‘Mrs Van Rensberg was gossiping.’ She glanced at Joss, whose dark face slowly coloured; and he looked at her with a dislike that cut her.
‘Mrs Van Rensberg was gossiping,’ said Solly to Joss; and before the exchange could continue, she cut in: ‘Yes, and I suppose it was silly, but I couldn’t – take it.’ The defiant conclusion ended on a shortened breath; this interview was not as she had imagined.
‘She couldn’t take it,’ sighed Joss to Solly.
‘She couldn’t take it,’ Solly sighed back; and with the same movement, they picked up their books, and began to read.
She remained where she was, her eyes pleading with their averted faces, trying to subdue the flood of colour she could feel tingling to the roots of her hair, and when, after a long silence, Solly remarked in a detached voice, ‘She couldn’t take us, but she’s still here,’ Martha got up, saying angrily, ‘I’ve apologized, you’re making a mistake. Why do you have to be so thin-skinned?’ She went to the door.
Behind her back, they began laughing, a loud and unpleasant laughter. ‘She’s cut us dead for two years, and she says we’re thin-skinned.’
‘I didn’t cut you – why must you talk about me as if I weren’t here?’ she said, and stumbled out, past Mr Cohen. She found the flap of the counter down, and had to wait, speechless, for him to lift it, for she was on the verge of crying.
He looked at her with what she thought was a tinge of kindliness; but he opened the flap, nodded quietly, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Quest.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, with the effect of pleading, and walked back up the dusty path to the village, as the bead curtain swung and rattled into stillness behind her.
She walked over the railway tracks, which gleamed brightly in the hot sunlight, to the garage, where Mr Quest was in absorbed conversation with Mr Parry. He was repeating urgently, ‘Yes there’s going to be a war, it’s all very well for you people …’
Mr Parry was saying, ‘Yes, Captain Quest. No, Captain Quest.’ In the village, the war title was used, though Mr Quest refused it, saying it was not fair to the regular soldier. Martha used to argue with him reasonably, thus: ‘Are you suggesting that it is only the peace-time soldier who deserves his title? Do you mean that if civilians get conscripted and killed it’s on a different level from …’ and so on and so on – ah, how exasperating are the rational adolescents! For Mr Quest gave his irritable shrug of aversion and repeated, ‘I don’t like being Captain, it’s not fair when I haven’t been in the Army for so long.’ What Martha thought privately was, How odd that a man who thinks about nothing but war should dislike being Captain; and at this point, the real one, was of course never mentioned during those reasonable discussions.
Mr Parry was listening nervously to Mr Quest, while his eyes anxiously followed his native assistant, who was dragging an inner tube through the hot dust. At last he could not bear it, saying, ‘Excuse me, but …’ he darted forward and shouted at the native, ‘Look you, Gideon, how many times have I told you …’ He grabbed the tyre from the man’s hand, and took it over to a tub of water. Gideon shrugged, and went off to the cool interior of the garage, where he sat on a heap of outer tyres, and began making patterns on the dust with a twig. ‘Look you, Gideon …’ shouted Mr Parry; but Gideon wrinkled his brows and pretended not to hear. Mr Parry’s Welsh speech had lost nothing of its lilt and charm; but the phrases had worn slack; his ‘Look you’ sounded more like ‘Look ye’; and when he used the Welsh ‘whatever’, it came haphazard in his speech, with a surprised, uncertain note.
Mr Quest, disappointed of a listener, came to the car, climbed in, and said, ‘They don’t listen. I was telling him the Russians are going to join with the Germans and attack us. I know they are. Just after the war – my war – I met a man in a train who said he had seen with his own eyes the way the Russians were kidnapping German scientists and forcing them to work in their factories so they could learn how to make tanks to smash the British Empire. I said to Parry here …’
Martha heard these words somewhere underneath her attention, which was given to her own problems. Mr Quest looked over his shoulder at her, and said sarcastically, ‘But don’t let me bore you with the Great Unmentionable. Your time’ll come, and then I can say I told you so.’
Martha turned her face away; her lids stung with tears; she felt the most rejected and desolate creature in the world. It occurred to her that the Cohen boys might have felt like this when she (or so it had appeared) rejected them; but she dismissed the thought at once. The possessors of this particular form of arrogance may know its underside is timidity; but they seldom go on to reflect that the timidity is based on the danger of thinking oneself important to others, which necessitates a return of feeling. She was saying to herself that she could not imagine the clever and self-sufficient Cohen brothers caring about her one way or the other. But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles. For the first time, she said to herself that the Cohens were almost completely isolated in the district. The farmers nodded to them, offered remarks about the weather, but never friendship. The Greek family maintained a complicated system of friendship with the other Greeks from stores all along the railway line. The Cohens had relations in the city, no one nearer.
At last Mr Parry found a trail of bubbles sizzling up through the dirty water from the tube, and shouted to Gideon, ‘Come ye, now, you lazy black loafer, and do it quick whateffer you do, and listen well, now.’
Gideon indolently lifted himself and went to mend the puncture, while Mr Parry came back to the car in order to resume his conversation with Mr Quest.
‘Sorry, Captain, but if you want a good job, you do it yourself, whateffer else, it’s no good trusting the blacks, they’ve no pride in their work.’
‘As I was saying, you people have your heads buried in the sand. Anyone can see war is coming. If it’s not this year, it’ll be the next, as soon as they’re strong enough.’
‘You think the Jerries’ll have another shot at us?’ asked Mr Parry, polite but doubtful, and turned so that he might keep an eye on Gideon.
Another native came loping across the railway tracks and stopped by the car. ‘Baas Quest?’ he asked.
Mr Quest, once again interrupted, turned his darkly irritable eyes on him. But Martha recognized him: he was the Cohens’ cook; and she reached for the parcel he held.
‘For me,’ she said, and asked the man to wait. He went off to help Gideon with the tyre.
The parcel was a book from Joss, entitled The Social Aspect of the Jewish Question, and inside was a note: ‘Dear Matty Quest, This will be good for your soul, so do, do read it. Yours thin-skinnedly, Joss.’
She was filled with outrageous delight. It was forgiveness. She interrupted her father once again to borrow a pencil, and wrote: ‘Thanks for the book. As it happened, I borrowed it from you and of course agreed with it, three years ago. But I shall read it again and return it next time we come to the station.’ She was determined that would be very soon.
Next mail day she suggested that they should make the trip, but her father refused, with an air of being exploited.
‘Why do you want to go?’ asked Mrs Quest curiously; and Martha said, ‘I want to see the Cohen boys.’
‘You’re making friends with them?’ demurred Mrs Quest.
‘I thought we always were friends with them,’ said Martha scornfully; and since this put the argument on that hypocritical level where it was maintained that of course the Quests did not think Jews, or even shopkeepers, beneath them, and the only reason they did not continually meet was an inconvenience of some sort, Mrs Quest could not easily reply.
Martha telephoned the McDougalls to ask if they were going to the station. They were not. She asked the Van Rensbergs; Marnie said awkwardly that Pop didn’t often go to the station these days. Finally she telephoned Mr McFarline, the old miner from the small working in the Dumfries Hills; and he said yes, he was going to town tomorrow. She told her mother she would get a lift back (for ‘town’ in this case meant the city, not the station, as it sometimes did), and added, with the apparently deliberate exaggeration which was so infuriating, ‘If I don’t get a lift, I’ll walk.’ Which of course was absurd, infringed one of the taboos – ‘a young white girl walking alone’, etc. – and was calculated to provoke an argument. The argument immediately followed; and both women appealed to Mr Quest
‘Why shouldn’t she walk?’ demanded Mr Quest vaguely. ‘When I was a young man in England, I used to walk thirty miles an afternoon and think nothing of it.’
‘This isn’t England,’ said Mrs Quest tremulously, filled with horrid visions of what might happen to Martha if she encountered an evil native.
Martha came back with, ‘I walk miles and miles all over the farm, but that doesn’t matter for some reason. How can you be so illogical?’
‘Well, I don’t like it, and you promised not to go more than half a mile from the house.’
Martha laughed angrily, and chose this moment to say what until now she had been careful to keep dark: ‘Why, I often walk over to the Dumfries Hills, or even to Jacob’s Burg, I’ve been doing it for years.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mrs Quest helplessly. She had known quite well that Martha was doing this, but to be told so now was another thing. ‘What would happen if a native attacked you?’
‘I should scream for help,’ said Martha flippantly.
‘Oh, my dear …’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Martha angrily. ‘If a native raped me, then he’d be hung and I’d be a national heroine, so he wouldn’t do it, even if he wanted to, and why should he?’
‘My dear, read the newspapers, white girls are always being ra – attacked.’
Now, Martha could not remember any case of this happening; it was one of the things people said. She remarked, ‘Last week a white man raped a black girl, and was fined five pounds.’
Mrs Quest said hastily, ‘That’s not the point; the point is girls get raped.’
‘Then I expect they want to be,’ said Martha sullenly; and caught her breath, not because she did not believe the truth of what she said, but because of her parents’ faces: she could not help being frightened. For they were united for once, in genuine emotion, and began lecturing her on the consequences of her attitude. It ended with ‘and so they’ll drive us into the sea, and then the country will be ruined, what would these ignorant blacks do without us.’ And the usual inconsequent conclusion: ‘They have no sense of gratitude at all for what we do for them.’ It had all been said so often that it rang stale and false for both sides; and Martha remained silent in a way which they could take as an agreement, for comfort’s sake.
Next morning she was waiting down on the track, by the signpost in the long grass, for Mr McFarline; and they made the journey to the station in just over ten minutes.
Mr McFarline was a charming and wicked old Scotsman, who lived alone on his mine, which he worked in a way which cost him the very minimum in money, but a good deal in human life. There were always accidents on his mine. Also, his native compound was full of half-caste children, his own. He was extremely wealthy, and very popular. He gave generously to charity, and was about to stand for Parliament for one of the town constituencies. Because of the work in connection with getting himself elected, he often went into town.
As the car raced dangerously through the trees, he squeezed Martha’s knee in an experimental way and tried to put his hand up her skirt. She held the skirt down, and moved coolly away to the other side of the car, as if she had not noticed the action. So he took his hand away, and concentrated on showing her how nearly it was possible to escape death, with perfect sangfroid, at every bend of the road. He took the paint off his back mud-guard at the last raking turn; and they stopped before Sock’s store in a billowing cloud of dust. Martha’s heart was beating wildly for several reasons. No one had ever tried to put his hand up her skirt before, and she was petrified at the wild driving. She looked confused and alarmed; and the old Scotsman decided to see her as the little girl he had known for years. He took a ten-shilling note from his stuffed wallet, and gave it to her.
‘For when you go back to school,’ he said bluffly.
Martha almost handed it back; but was unable to partly because ten shillings was such a large sum for her, and partly because of a feeling which she described to herself as: If I refuse it, he will think it’s because of the way he tried to touch me. She thanked him politely for the lift, and he roared away over the railway track on the road to the city, singing, ‘You’re a bonny lassie …’
She had the book on the Jewish question (which she had not re-read, thinking it unnecessary to gild the already sound coinage of her opinions) under her arm. She went over to the kaffir store. Mr Cohen greeted her, and lifted the counter for her. He was a short, squat man; his hair was a close-growing, crinkling cap of black; his skin was pallid and unhealthy. He had, she thought secretly, the look of a toad, or something confined and light-shunning; and in fact he was hardly ever away from his counter; but the commercial look of the small shopkeeper was tempered in him by purpose and dignity, which was not only because of his ancient culture, but because this penniless immigrant from Central Europe had chosen such a barren place, such exile, for the sake of his brilliant sons. His eyes were black and wise and shrewd, and it was impossible not to like him. And yet Martha found him repulsive, and was guilty; it was strange that she could find the oily fatness of the Greek Socrates repulsive without any sense of guilt at all, but this question of anti-Semitism, this shrinking nerve, put her on guard against herself, so that her manner with Mr Cohen was always strained.
In the back room Martha found Solly, alone; and was pleased that the brotherly solid act could not be repeated. Besides, there was something uneasy and false in it, for there was a strong current of antagonism between the two brothers, a temperamental difficulty which expressed itself politically – Solly being a Zionist, while Joss was a Socialist. Solly was a lanky, tall youth, with a big head on a long thin neck, and big bony hands at the end of long arms; he was altogether knobbly and unintegrated, and his enormous, sombre black eyes brooded abstractedly on the world around him in a way that gave Martha a feeling of kinship to him; but this was perhaps not an altogether welcome relationship, reminding her, as it did, of her father. If she was to fight the morbid strain in herself, which was her father’s gift, then how could she admire Solly wholeheartedly, as she wished to do? On the whole, she was easier with Joss, who was short and compact and robust, with humorous direct eyes and a sarcastic practicality, as if he were always saying, ‘Well, and what’s the fuss about, it’s all quite easy!’
Solly took the book, without any sign of the hostility of the previous meeting; and no sooner had she sat down than Mrs Cohen came in with a tray. The older Cohens were strictly kosher, and the sons were lax. For years Mrs Cohen had been scrupulously sorting her crockery and cutlery, washing them herself, forbidding the native servants even to touch them; but at the table, Joss and Solly, usually deep in bitter argument, would reach for the wrong knives, and stack the plates carelessly about them, while Mrs Cohen scolded and pleaded. By now she had learned to say, ‘I’m too old to learn new ways,’ and with a sorrowful tolerance, she continued to wash and sort her things, but made no comment if her sons misused them. It was a compromise in which Martha could see no sense at all; if her own parents had been guilty of unreasonable behaviour, how irritably would she have argued with them! In Mrs Cohen, however, it merely struck her as charming. The mere sight of the plump old Jewish woman, with her fine, dark sad eyes, made her feel welcomed; and she at once accepted, enthusiastically, when she was bidden, ‘You’ll stay eat with us?’ In a few moments they were talking as if she had never absented herself from the family for two years.
Solly was leaving shortly to study medicine in Cape Town, and Mrs Cohen was urging him to live with her cousin there. But Solly wanted independence, a life of his own; and since this vital point was never mentioned, the argument went on endlessly about buses and transport and inconvenience; and it reminded Martha of her own home, where this kind of surface bickering was equally futile.
Joss came in, gave Martha an ambiguous look, and forbore to comment, in a way which made her voice rise to a jaunty brightness. He was intending to study law, but was staying at home with his parents until they could move into town, which they planned to do. The store was to be sold. This solicitude for his father and mother only struck Martha as a kind of betrayal to the older generation; she found it extraordinary; even more strange that he sided with his parents against Solly’s desire to fend for himself. He sounded more like an uncle than a brother.
They sat down to table, and Mrs Cohen asked, ‘And when are you going back to your studies, Matty? Your mother must be worrying herself.’
Martha replied awkwardly, ‘My eyes aren’t better yet,’ and lowered them towards her plate. When she raised them, she found Joss critically studying her in the way she had feared.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ he inquired bluntly. She gave an uncomfortable movement with her shoulders, as if to say, ‘Leave me alone.’ But in this family everything was discussed; and Joss said to Solly, ‘Her eyes are strained, well, well!’
Solly refused, this time, to make the alliance against her, and asked, ‘What’s it got to do with you?’
Joss raised his brows, and said, ‘Me? Nothing. She used to be such a bright girl. Pity.’
‘Leave her alone,’ said Mr Cohen unexpectedly, ‘she’s all right.’ Martha felt a rush of warmth towards him, which as usual she could not express, but dropped her eyes, and even looked sullen.
‘Of course she’s all right,’ said Joss carelessly; but there was a note in his voice …
Martha looked quickly at him, and at once interpreted his agreement as a reference to her own appearance; and this she half resented, and half welcomed. Since her incarnation as a fairly successful imitation of a magazine beauty, the Cohen boys were the first males she had tried herself against. But she had never said to herself that her careful make-up and the new green linen had been put on to impress them, and therefore she felt it as a false note that either should mention or even react to her appearance – a confusion of feeling which left her silent, and rather sulky. After the meal, Mr Cohen went back to the shop, and Mrs Cohen to her kitchen, with the mis-handled crockery; and the three young people were left together. Conversation was difficult, and soon Martha felt she should leave. But she lingered; and it was Solly who at last went out; and at once she and Joss were at ease, as she and Solly were, by themselves: it was three of them together that set up the jarring currents.
At once Joss inquired, ‘And now what’s all this about not going to university?’
The direct question, which she had never put to herself, left her silent; but he persisted. ‘You can’t hang about this dorp doing nothing.’
She said, ‘But you are at home, too.’
His look said that she must see this was no analogy; he tried not to sound bitter as he remarked, ‘My parents have no friends in the village. It’ll be different when they’re in town.’
Again she was silent, feeling apologetic for herself and for her parents. She got up and went to the bookcase, to see what was new in it; but this represented the family: the Jewish classics, books on Palestine, Poland and Russia; this was the source of the rapidly diverging streams which were Solly and Joss; and these new books would be in their shared bedroom. Into this room it was impossible to go, since she was now Miss Quest; and the glance she directed towards Joss was troubled.
He had been watching her, and, at the glance, he lifted from a table beside him a large pile of books and handed them to her. Again she felt that flush of delight; for he must have prepared them for her. He remarked calmly, ‘Take these, good for your soul.’
She looked at the titles, and was at once indignant, as a child might be if a teacher urged her to study subjects she had mastered the year before.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sardonically. ‘Not up your street?’
She said, ‘But I know all this.’ At once she wished the words unsaid, for they sounded conceited. What she meant was, ‘I agree with all the things these books represent.’
He studied her, gave an incredulous grimace, and then fired the following questions at her, in the offhand indifferent manner of the initiate to a breed utterly without the law:
‘You repudiate the colour bar?’
‘But of course.’
‘Of course,’ he said sardonically. And then: ‘You dislike racial prejudice in all its form, including anti-Semitism?’
‘Naturally’ – this with a touch of impatience.
‘You are an atheist?’
‘You know quite well that I am.’
‘You believe in socialism?’
‘That goes without saying,’ she concluded fervently; and suddenly began to laugh, from that sense of the absurd which it seemed must be her downfall as a serious person. For Joss was frowning at the laugh, and apparently could see nothing ridiculous in a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, sprung from an orthodox Jewish family, and an adolescent British girl, if possible even more conventionally bred, agreeing to these simple axioms in the back room of a veld store in a village filled with people to whom every word of this conversation would have the force of a dangerous heresy.
‘You sound as if you were asking a catechism,’ she explained, giggling irrepressibly.
He frowned again; and at once she felt indignant that he might be surprised because she had made the same intellectual journey he had. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ he demanded practically. Also, he sounded aggressive; she was beginning to feel childish and wrong for having laughed; she felt she had hurt him.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and there was an appeal in it. She raised her eye to his and waited. Because of the look on his face, she at once became conscious of the picture she presented, standing there in front of him, a young girl in a green linen frock that emphasized every line in her body.
‘I suppose you are all right,’ he conceded slowly, looking at her with approval; and she felt the unfairness of it. This was an intellectual discussion, wasn’t it? Why, then, that note in his voice?
Her look at him was now as aggressive as his had been. ‘It’s all very well for you, you’re a man,’ she said bitterly, and entirely without coquetry; but he said flippantly, even suggestively, ‘It will be all quite well for you too!’
He laughed, hoping she might laugh with him. But she stared at him in dismayed outrage, then muttered, ‘Oh, go to hell,’ and for the second time left that room, and went out into the glaring sunlight. No sooner had she gone than she understood she had been as touchy and thin-skinned as she had said he was, and almost went back. Pride forbade it; and she went into the village.
The place had a deserted look. Four in the afternoon: the sky was huge and cloudless, the sun loomed swollen through a reddish haze, and the tin roofs reflected a dulled and sombre light. It was likely to rain soon; but now the long brown pond had shrunk within lips of cracked mud to a narrow scummy puddle. Outside the bar stood half a dozen big cars, outside the station about twenty shabbier cars. Among them was the Van Rensbergs’; and they were packed with children of all ages.
What the British referred to as ‘the Afrikaans element’ had come in for their mail.
Now, it is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country’s social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it; and for Martha, who must have seen that sight dozens of times before, it was a moment of illumination, perhaps because she was feeling sore and rejected under Joss’s treatment of her; and there was something in that bearing and character of those people kin to what she felt.
On mail days there were cars of every degree of wealth, from the enormous American cars of the tobacco farmers down to eccentric creations like the Quests’, but the owners of these cars met together without any consciousness of degree. English and Scotch, Welsh and Irish, rich and poor, it was all backslapping and Christian names, a happy family atmosphere which had a touch of hysterical necessity in it, since the mail days, gymkhanas and dances were false tokens of community – for what is a community if not people who share their experience? The fact was, this district was divided into several separate communities, who shared nothing but Christian names, cards at Christmas, and a member of Parliament. The eastern part of the district, all along the flanks and slopes of Jacob’s Burg, was where the tobacco families lived, and here the common denominator was wealth; they were regarded by the rest with tolerance, for they went in for bottle parties, divorces, and modern restlessness. North and west of the Quests’ farm Scots families were settled, mostly related, hard-working, modest, sociable people who visited a great deal among themselves. Half a dozen Irish inhabited the slopes of the Oxford Range; but this was not a group; one cannot think of the Irish except as picturesque individualists. Near them were five farms where lived a collection of the English eccentrics who reach their richest bloom only in the colonies. Colonel Castairs, for instance, who lived by himself in a ranging stone mansion, sleeping all day and reading all night, preparing himself to write that history of melancholia through the ages which he would one day begin; he was now over seventy. There was Lord Jamie, who walked naked around his farm, and ate only fruit and nuts; and quarrelled bitterly with his wife because she clothed their children, for he held the view that even so much as a diaper on a baby was an insult to God who created Adam and Eve. There was a story that once he had come raking into the village on a great black horse, quite naked, with his wild red beard and his mane of red hair sparking fire in the sunlight, a great rough-cast man, whose fiercely innocent blue eyes stared out from the waving locks of his hair like the eyes of an inquiring savage. He dismounted from his horse, and went into the store to buy a pound of tobacco, a bottle of whisky, and the weekly newspaper; and it seemed that everyone in the store greeted him as casually as if he were as decently dressed as they. Then they began talking about the weather; and so it had never happened again; and the incident retreated into the fabulous past of kaffir wars, and pioneers, and violence. How exciting life must have been then, sighed the people in the district, remembering their distant origins – and yet the district had not been settled much more than thirty years. How wonderful if that wild man on the black horse appeared again in his scandalous glory! How wonderful if Commander Day walked into the store (as he had once, in the golden age) flanked by his two half-tamed leopards, with his three native concubines behind him – but alas, alas, he did not, they did not, the time for the creation of legends was past.
For many years, between this essential group of gentle maniacs and the Quests’ farm there had been hundreds of acres of empty ground, considered too poor to farm. On its verge, sharing a boundary with the Quests, were the Van Rensbergs, like the solitary swallow which would one day make a summer; for five years before another Afrikaans family arrived, rocking along the track in a hooded wagon, a vehicle which had, to this district, only literary associations from the Great Trek. Soon there came another family, and then another … And now, inside this district whose pattern of living was a large farm and two or three children, with a governess and maybe an assistant, grew up a close-knit, isolated community of Dutch people, who worked fifty and a hundred acres where the British used thousands, and made their farming pay; who bred healthy children, eight and ten to a family; who built their own hall, and a thatched church where they worshipped their angry God. And their speech had the rich cadences of a living religion.
They came to fetch their mail on a day when the village would be empty. Their cars drew up together outside Socrates’ store; moved away together to the garage across the railway track; returned together to the station building, one after another in a file, with the slow deliberation that suggested a team of covered wagons.
So it was today. There were eleven cars, standing behind each other; and from them had come enough people to populate a small village, men, women and children, talking, reading mail, playing in groups.
Martha stood on Socrates’ veranda among the grain sacks and looked at them, and tried to find what it was which gave these people their look of cohesion. Physically they were strong and broadly built, with the blunt open features of their Dutch ancestry; but the word ‘Dutch’ surely suggests a picture of fair skin and hair, blue eyes, and easy health? These people tended to be dark, as if the sun had fed a strain of resistance into defenceless light skin and the light hair that becomes dry and limp in the south. The older women wore black – here the colour of respectability, though in other cultures, other contexts, it may be the colour of mourning or sophistication. The younger women wore print frocks that were pretty rather than smart; some of the children wore the flapping sunbonnets of the tradition; the men were in the male uniform of the country, khaki shorts and open-necked shirts. No, the clothing here expressed only a restlessness, a movement, even uncertainty; for if it was true that the pretty sunbonnets could have been seen nowhere else, the little girls’ frocks were likely to have been made by a pattern from an English magazine; and if no one but a certain type of Dutchwoman would wear those black lace hats (so that, catching sight of one a hundred yards away, one might imagine the face under it, broad, practical, humorous, earthy), then the black dress she wore with it was probably mass-produced in America.
The closeness of this group expressed itself somewhere else, perhaps in the look of dogged self-sufficiency, the look of the inveterate colonizer; but in that case, they were colonizers in a country which considered itself past the colonizing stage. Not so easy to put flesh and blood on the bones of an intellectual conviction; Martha was remembering with shame the brash and easy way she had said to Joss that she repudiated race prejudice; for the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards. She stood on the veranda of Socrates’ store, and looked over the empty dusty space to the railway line, and thought of the different people who passed there: the natives, the nameless and swarming; the Afrikaans, whose very name held the racy poetic quality of their vigorous origins; the British, with their innumerable subgroupings, held together only because they could say, ‘this is a British country’ – held together by the knowledge of ownership. And each group, community, clan, colour, strove and fought away from the other, in a sickness of dissolution; it was as if the principle of separateness was bred from the very soil, the sky, the driving sun; as if the inchoate vastness of the universe, always insistent in the enormous unshrouded skies, the enormous mountain-girt horizons, so that one might never, not for a moment, forget the inhuman, relentless struggle of soil and water and light, bred a fever of self-assertion in its children like a band of explorers lost in a desert, quarrelling in an ecstasy of fear over their direction, when nothing but a sober mutual trust could save them. Martha could feel the striving forces in her own substance: the effort of imagination needed to destroy the words black, white, nation, race, exhausted her, her head ached and her flesh was heavy on her bones. She looked at the Van Rensbergs’ car, and thought that she had known them for years, and yet she was reluctant even to cross the dust and greet them. She walked off the veranda and towards the car, smiling rather queerly, for when it was too late to retreat it occurred to her that they might not wish to have their friendship with the Quests so publicly emphasized.
She came to a standstill at the car door, and said good afternoon to Mr Van Rensberg. He nodded at her, and went on reading the newspaper, having made a hunching movement with his shoulder towards the back of the car, where Marnie was sitting between two married sisters who held small babies. There was a young man beside Mr Van Rensberg, who greeted Martha, and she smiled at him hastily, thinking, This must be a cousin; for his face was the family face.
Marnie was smiling with constrained pleasure, and looked uncomfortably at her father’s back; and this made Martha wish she had not come. Over his shoulder, she could see the name of the most rabid nationalist journal from the south; while she did not know the language, there was hardly any need to, for the words and phrases of nationalism are the same in any tongue, but the knowledge that the brain behind the close-cropped black head beside her was agreeing with what was bound to be a violent complaint about the very existence of the British made her drop her voice like a guilty person as she said to Marnie, ‘Why don’t you come over and see me soon?’
‘I’d like to, man. I’d like to,’ agreed Marnie, in the same low tone, and with another glance at her father. ‘Your dress is the tops, Martha,’ she added. ‘May I have the pattern?’
‘Of course,’ said Martha, with an involuntary glance at Marnie’s matronly body. ‘Come over for the day …’ She had lowered her voice almost to a whisper; the absurdity of it made her angry. She and Marnie quickly said goodbye, smiling at each other like conspirators; she dropped another smile in the direction of the attentive young man in the front seat, and hastily retreated back to the store.
She had no lift home. She would have liked to walk; she intended to, but … She imagined that eyes would follow her, queerly, as she set off, on foot, along a road where a dozens cars might be expected to pass that afternoon. White girls do not … As she was hesitating on the veranda, she saw Joss approaching, and smiled with what was, had she known it, a tenderly amused appreciation of the figure he cut. He wore a respectable dark suit, he carried books under his arm, he moved in a careful, constrained way, eyes watching the direction of his feet, his shoulders a little hunched. He seemed, in fact, already the sober professional man he intended to become; he was altogether out of place among these khaki-clad, open-air people; and knew it, and approved. For these farmers, these men of the soil: when they approached, one saw first the exposed developed limbs, the body; one marked the hard muscled forearm perhaps, or the bronze knotted pillar of the thigh, or the stride, or the swing of the arms; they moved magnificently, at ease, slowly, to match the space and emptiness of the country – no suggestion here of limbs grown cautious and self-contained, against possible undesired contact. Yes, here one stands at a distance from a man, a woman, and sees them whole. First the way of walking, the stance of the body. Then lift your eyes to the face, and the first impression is confirmed: what fine, exposed, frank faces, wholesomely weathered, unafraid, open to every glance. And then (but lastly) the eyes, look straight at the eyes – which of course meet yours with the completest frankness. Nothing to hide here, they say; everything above-board, take it or leave it. But always, behind the friendly brown eyes, the welcoming blue ones, is the uneasiness; something not easily defined. but expressed best, perhaps, in a moment of laughter. The man laughs out loud, an infectious wholehearted laugh; but there is a faint sideways flickering movement of the eyes, the eyes are not altogether there, there is an absence, something blank and empty. Take, for instance, that contingent of fine young colonials marching down the Strand with their English cousins. What fine young men, what physique; a head taller than the rest, bronzed, muscled, strong as horses. Then look at the eyes. But the eyes seem to say, ‘What do you want with us? Aren’t our bodies enough for you?’ There is a pale and fretful look; the soft and luminous darkness that should lie behind the iris is simply not there. Something is missing.
And so it seems that one cannot have it both ways, one has to choose; and Joss chose, without any hesitation.
Martha, watching him approach, was conscious of the most perverse but definite feeling of pity. Why pity? She envied him almost to the point of bitterness, knowing exactly what he wanted, and how to get it. She saw how the compact, neat body, hidden under dark grey flannel, moved carefully across the sunlit, filthy dust, as if every nerve and muscle were connected direct to his will; she saw how his eyes were focused, steady and direct, the whole of himself behind them, so that it was only when one looked into his eyes that one saw him; she saw the great difference there was between Joss and these farmers, and she half envied, half pitied him. Pity? What for? One does not pity a person who knows what it is he chooses and why.
Martha was watching him in a way which would allow her to pretend, to herself at least, that she was not; she was afraid he might go past her with another of his formal nods. He came straight towards her, however, extended the books, and said brusquely, ‘I thought you’d like these.’
‘How did you know I was still here?’ – with feminine obliquity.
‘I can see the store through the trees.’
For a moment Martha was irrationally angry, as if she had been spied upon; then he asked, ‘How are you getting home?’ and she replied defiantly, ‘I’m walking.’ It seemed, however, that Joss could see no reason why she should not walk; and after a hesitation he merely said, ‘So long!’ and walked back across the dust. Martha was disappointed – he might have asked her back to his home, she thought. Then she understood that he was waiting for her to invite herself; and this confused her. She shrugged away the thought of Joss, who always made her feel deficient in proper feeling; and with the parcel of books under her arm, which gave her confidence, she walked away off Socrates’ veranda, and along the road home.
She had never made this journey on foot; always by car, or, as a child, perched on top of the hot hairy grain sacks on the wagon. During the first mile she was remembering the creaking sway of the old wagon, which seemed always as if it might spring apart between the dragging weight of the sacks and the forward-heaving oxen; there was a place towards the front of the wagon where it seemed that the tension was localized, and here she liked to sit, shuddering with excitement, because of the groaning timbers under her, which always were on the point of flying asunder, but never did, carrying their burden mile after slow and labouring mile. She was remembering the alarming way the sacks shifted under her; heavy sacks they were, but sliding and subsiding easily with the sway of the vehicle. She remembered the pleasurable warm smell of the cow droppings falling plop, plop in the red dust, and releasing, deliciously, the odours of fresh grass; so that, although the wagon wheels perpetually flung up rivers of red sand, and she travelled in a column of whirling ruddy dust, the sweet perfumes of newly cudded grass mingled with it, mile after mile, as if the four-divided stomachs of the great oxen were filled with nothing but concentrated memories of hours of grazing along the water heavy vleis.
Later, she hesitated outside the McDougall’s farm; for if she went in she would be given a wonderful Scotch tea of bannocks and griddle cakes and newly churned butter. But she did not go in, for the McDougalls had not yet noticed that she was now Miss Quest; they still treated her like a child, and this she could not bear.
She walked more slowly now, not wanting the journey to end; she was savouring freedom: the station far behind, where she was convinced everyone remarked her, commented on her; the house not yet in sight, where the mere existence of her parents was like a reminder that she must be wary, ready to resist. Now there was no one to mark her, not a soul in sight; and she dawdled along the track, skipping from one run to another, and pulling from their delicate green sheaths the long sweet-tasting grass stems that are as pleasant to chew along a dusty road as sticks of sugar cane. She was happy because she was, for the moment, quite free; she was sad because before long she would reach home; these two emotions deepened together, and it flashed across her mind that this intense, joyful melancholy was a state of mind she had known in the past and – But at once she dismissed the thought; it passed as lightly as the shadow of a wing of a bird, for she knew that the experience associated with that emotion was not to be courted. One did not lie in wait for it; it was a visitor who came without warning. On the other hand, even the fact that the delicious but fearful expectation had crossed her mind at all was enough to warn it away; the visitor liked the darkness, this Martha knew, and she hastened to think of something else. At the same time, she was thinking that she had associated the experience with what she now, rather scornfully, called her ‘religious phase’; and becoming an atheist, which she had done from one day to the next, as easily as dropping a glove, had been painful only because she imagined she must pay the price for intellectual honesty by bidding farewell to this other emotion, this fabulous visitor. It seemed, then, that no such price had been asked of her, it seemed that –
Martha caught herself up, already bad-tempered and irritable: she must not analyse, she must not be conscious; and here she was, watching the movements of her mind as if she were observing a machine. She noted, too, that she was walking very fast, quite blind to the beauties of the trees and grass. For it was evening, and very beautiful; a rich watery gold was lighting the dark greens of the foliage, the dark red of the soil, the pale blonde of the grass, to the solemn intensity of the sunset hour. She noted a single white-stemmed tree with its light cloud of glinting leaf rising abruptly from the solid-packed red earth of an anthill, all bathed in a magical sky-reflecting light, and her heart moved painfully in exquisite sadness. She consciously walked more slowly, consciously enjoyed the melancholy; and all at once found herself on a slight rise, where the trees opened across a wide reach of country; and the sight, a new one, caused her to forget everything else. She could see their house, crouched low on the green-shrouded hill, and between was an unbroken stretch of silver-gold mealies; it was perhaps five miles from where she stood to the Van Rensbergs’ boundary, a dark belt of trees behind which solemn blue sky rose like a wall. The mealies swayed and whispered, and the light moved over them; a hawk lay motionless on a current of blue air; and the confused and painful delirium stirred in her again, and this time so powerfully she did not fear its passing. The bush lay quiet about her, a bare slope of sunset-tinted grass moving gently with a tiny rustling sound; an invisible violet tree shed gusts of perfume, like a benediction; and she stood quite still, waiting for the moment, which was now inevitable. There was a movement at the corner of her eye, and she turned her head, cautiously, so as not to disturb what was swelling along her nerves, and saw a small buck, which had come from the trees and stood quietly, flicking its tail, a few paces away. She hardly dared to blink. The buck gazed at her, and then turned its head to look into the bush laying its ears forward. A second buck tripped out from the trees, and they both stood watching her; then they walked daintily across the ground, their hooves clicking sharp on the stones, the sun warm on their soft brown hides. They dropped their heads to graze, while their little tails shook from side to side impatiently, with flashes of white.
Suddenly the feeling in Martha deepened, and as it did so she knew she had forgotten, as always, that what she had been waiting for like a revelation was a pain, not a happiness; what she remembered, always, was the exultation and the achievement, what she forgot was this difficult birth into a state of mind which words like ecstasy, illumination, and so on could not describe, because they suggest joy. Her mind having been formed by poetic literature (and little else), she of course knew that such experiences were common among the religious. But the fact was, so different was ‘the moment’ from what descriptions of other people’s ‘moments’ led her to believe was common, that it was not until she had come to accept the experience as ordinary and ‘incidental to the condition of adolescence’ as she put it sourly, and with positive resentment, that it occurred to her. Why, perhaps it is the same thing, after all? But if so, they were liars, liars one and all; and that she could understand, for was it not impossible for her to remember, in between, how terrible an illumination it was?
There was certainly a definite point at which the thing began. It was not; then it was suddenly inescapable, and nothing could have frightened it away. There was a slow integration, during which she, and the little animals, and the moving grasses, and the sun-warmed trees, and the slopes of shivering silvery mealies, and the great dome of blue light overhead, and the stones of earth under her feet, became one, shuddering together in a dissolution of dancing atoms. She felt the rivers under the ground forcing themselves painfully along her veins, swelling them out in an unbearable pressure; her flesh was the earth, and suffered growth like a ferment; and her eyes stared, fixed like the eye of the sun. Not for one second longer (if the terms for time apply) could she have borne it; but then, with a sudden movement forwards and out, the whole process stopped; and that was ‘the moment’ which it was impossible to remember afterwards. For during that space of time (which was timeless) she understood quite finally her smallness, the unimportance of humanity. In her ears was an inchoate grinding, the great wheels of movement, and it was inhuman, like the blundering rocking movement of a bullock cart; and no part of that sound was Martha’s voice. Yet she was part of it, reluctantly allowed to participate, though on terms – but what terms? For that moment, while space and time (but these are words, and if she understood anything it was that words, here, were like the sound of a baby crying in a whirlwind) kneaded her flesh, she knew futility; that is, what was futile was her own idea of herself and her place in the chaos of matter. What was demanded of her was that she should accept something quite different; it was as if something new was demanding conception, with her flesh as host; as if it were a necessity, which she must bring herself to accept, that she should allow herself to dissolve and be formed by that necessity. But it did not last; the force desisted, and left her standing on the road, already trying to reach out after ‘the moment’ so that she might retain its message from the wasting and creating chaos of darkness. Already the thing was sliding backwards, becoming a whole in her mind, instead of a process; the memory was changing, so that it was with nostalgia that she longed ‘to try again’.
There had been a challenge that she had refused. But the wave of nostalgia made her angry. She knew it to be a falsity; for it was a longing for something that had never existed, an ‘ecstasy’, in short. There had been no ecstasy, only difficult knowledge. It was as if a beetle had sung. There should be a new word for illumination.
She saw that she was standing off the road in the grass, staring at the two little bucks, who indifferently flicked their tails and grazed their way off into the bush. Martha thought that she had often shot these little creatures, and that she would never do so again, since they had shared the experience with her. And even as she made the decision, she was as helplessly irritable as if she had caught herself out in a lie which was pointless. She felt, above all, irritable; not sad, merely flat and stale; the more because not five minutes after ‘the moment’ it had arranged itself in her mind as a blissful joy; it was necessary, apparently, to remember the thing as an extremity of happiness.
She walked slowly homewards, taking a short cut along the fence through the mealies. The ground was hard and packed, cracked across with drought under her feet, which ached, for her sandals were meant for show and not for use. She climbed the hill draggingly, and went to her room, so as to compose herself before meeting her parents, or rather, her mother, for to meet her father was rather like trying to attract the attention of an irritable spectre.
Alas for visions and decisions. In her bedroom she felt nothing but angry resentment: against the people in the district, against Mr McFarline, against Marnie, who would now ‘drop over’ and borrow patterns.
Her mother entered with the oil lamp, for it was dusk, and exclaimed, ‘My dear, I was worrying, and you don’t even tell me you’re home.’
‘Well, there’s no harm done, safe and sound and still a virgin.’
‘My dear –’ Mrs Quest checked herself, and hung the lamp on the wall. The flame vibrated bluely, then sent a pleasant yellow glow over the uneven plaster, and up to the thatch, where a strand of tarnished silver glistened among shadow. ‘How did you get back?’ asked Mrs Quest cautiously.
‘Walked,’ Martha said aggressively; and even felt disappointed because Mrs Quest did not protest.
‘Well, come on, we’re going to have supper now.’
Martha followed her mother obediently, and suddenly found herself saying, in a bright flippant voice, ‘That dirty old man, Mr McFarline, he tried to make love to me.’ She looked at her father but he was slowly crumbling his bread in time with his thoughts.
Mrs Quest said hastily, ‘Nonsense, you’re imagining it, he couldn’t have done.’
The suggestion that she was too young for such attentions made Martha say, ‘And then he had an attack of conscience, and offered me ten shillings.’ She giggled uncomfortably, with another glance at her abstracted father; and Mrs Quest said, ‘He knows better, he’s too nice.’
‘Nice,’ said Martha acidly, ‘with a compound full of his children.’
Mrs Quest said hastily, with a glance at the servant who was handing vegetables, ‘You shouldn’t listen to gossip.’
‘Everybody knows it, and besides, I heard you saying so to Mrs McDougall.’
‘Well, but that doesn’t mean – I don’t think …’
‘Damned hypocrisy,’ said Martha, ‘all this colour-bar nonsense, and Mr McFarline can sleep with whoever he likes and –’
‘My dear,’ said Mrs Quest, with a desperate look towards the impassive servant, ‘do think of what you’re saying.’
‘Yes, that’s all you think of, provided all the lies and ugliness are covered up.’
Mrs Quest raised her voice in anger, and the battle was on; mother and daughter said the things both had said so often before; not even waiting for the other to finish a sentence, until the noise caused Mr Quest to snap out, ‘Shut up, both of you.’
They looked at him immediately, and with relief; one might have supposed this was the result they intended. But Mr Quest said no more; after a baffled and exasperated glare, he dropped his eyes and continued to eat.
‘You hear what your father says?’ demanded Mrs Quest unfairly.
Martha was filled with frightened pain, at this alliance against her; and she exclaimed loudly, ‘Anything for peace, you and your Christianity, and then what you do in practice …’ But almost at once she became ashamed, because of the childishness of what she was saying. But the things we say are usually on a far lower level than what we think; it seemed to Martha that perhaps her chief grievance against her parents was this: that in her exchanges with them she was held down at a level she had long since outgrown, even on this subject, which, to her parents, was the terrifying extreme outpost of her development.
But her remark at least had had the power to pierce her father’s defences, for he raised his head and said angrily, ‘Well, if we’re so rotten, and you haven’t time for us, you can leave. Go on,’ he shouted, carried away by the emotions his words generated, ‘go on, then, get out and leave us in peace.’
Martha caught her breath in horror; on the surface of her mind she was pointing out to herself that her own father was throwing her out of her home – she, a girl of seventeen. Deeper down, however, she recognized this for what it was, an emotional release, which she should ignore. ‘Very well,’ she said angrily, ‘I will leave.’ She and her father looked at each other across the breadth of the table – her mother sat in her usual place at the head; and those two pairs of dark and angry eyes stared each other out.
It was Mr Quest who dropped his head and muttered, half-guiltily, ‘I simply cannot stand this damned fight, fight, fight!’ And he pettishly threw down his napkin. Immediately the servant bent and picked it up, and handed it to his master. ‘Thanks,’ said Mr Quest automatically, arranging it again across his lap.
‘My dear,’ said Mrs Quest, in a small appealing voice to her husband.
He replied grumblingly, ‘Well, fight if you like, but not when I’m around, for God’s sake.’
Now they all remained silent; and immediately after the meal Martha went to her bedroom, saying to herself that she would leave home at once, imagining various delightful rescues. The parcel of books lay unopened on her bed. She cut the string and looked at the titles, and her feeling of being let down deepened. They were all on economics. She had wished for books which might explain this confusion of violent feeling she found herself in.
Next day she rose early, and went out with the gun and killed a duiker on the edge of the Big Tobacco Land (where her father had grown tobacco during his season’s phase of believing in it). She called a passing native to carry the carcase home to the kitchen which, as it happened, was already full of meat.
But put this way it implies too much purpose. Martha woke early, and could not sleep; she decided to go for a walk because the sunrise was spread so exquisitely across the sky; she took the gun because it was her habit to carry it, though she hardly ever used it; she shot at the buck almost half-heartedly, because it happened to present itself; she was surprised when it fell dead; and when it was dead, it was a pity to waste the meat. The incident was quite different from actually planning the thing, or so she felt; and she thought half-guiltily, Oh, well what does it matter, anyway?
After breakfast she again looked at Joss’s books, skimming through them rapidly. They were written by clearly well-meaning people who disliked poverty. Her feeling was, I know this already; which did not only mean that she agreed with any conclusion which proved hopelessly unfair a system which condemned her, Martha Quest, to live on the farm, instead of in London with people she could talk to. She made this joke against herself rather irritably, for she knew it to be half true. What she felt was, Yes, of course poverty is stupid so why say it again? How do you propose to alter all this? And ‘all this’ meant the farm, the hordes of deprived natives who worked it, the people in the district, who assumed they had every right to live as they did and use the natives as they pleased. The reasonable persuasiveness of the books seemed merely absurd when one thought of violent passions ranged against them. She imagined the author of books like these as a clean, plump, suave gentleman, shut in a firelit study behind drawn curtains, with no sound in his ears but the movement of his own thoughts.
She kept the books a week, and then returned them on a mail day with the postboy. She also sent a note saying: ‘I wish you would let me have some books about the emancipation of women.’ It was only after the man had left that the request struck her as naive, a hopeless self-exposure; and she could hardly bear to open the parcel which was sent to her. Inside was the note she had expected: ‘I’m glad you have absorbed so much knowledge of economics in three days. What a clever girl you are. I enclose a helpful handbook on sexual problems. I could ask Solly, who has a fine collection of psychology, etc., but alas, he has gone off to “live his own life”, and our relations are not such that I could handle his books without asking him.’ The enclosed book was Engels’ Origin of the Family. Martha read it, and agreed with every word of it – or rather, with what she gained from it, which was a confirmation of her belief that the marriages of the district were ridiculous and even sordid, and most of all old-fashioned.
She sat under her tree, hugging her sun-warmed arms, feeling the firm soft flesh with approval, and the sight of her long and shapely legs made her remember the swollen bodies of the pregnant women she had seen, with shuddering anger, as at the sight of a cage designed for herself. Never, never, never, she swore to herself, but with a creeping premonition; and she thought of Solly’s books, now out of bounds, because he and Joss so unreasonably insisted on quarrelling; and she thought of Joss, for whom she was feeling a most irrational dislike. At one moment she scorned him because he had dared to treat her like an attractive young female; and the next because he had taken her at her word, and simply offered books; and the confusion hardened into a nervous repulsion: Well, she could do without Joss!
She returned Engels with such a formal note that no further word came from Joss, though she was waiting for one; and then melancholy settled over her, and she wandered around the farm like a girl under a spell of silence.
One morning she came on her father, seated on a log of wood at the edge of a field, watching the natives dig a furrow for storm water. Mr Quest held his pipe between his teeth, and slowly rolled plugs of rich dark tobacco between his palms, while his eyes rested distantly on his labourers.
‘Well, old son?’ he inquired, as Martha sat beside him; for he might call either his male or his female child ‘old son’.
Martha rested the rifle across her knees, pulled herself some chewing grass, and lapsed into his silence; for these two, away from Mrs Quest, were quite easy together.
But she could not maintain it; she had to worry at him for his attention; and soon she began to complain about her mother, while Mr Quest uneasily listened. ‘Yes, I daresay,’ he agreed, and ‘Yes, I suppose you are right’; and with every agreement his face expressed only the wish that she might remove this pressure on him to consider not only her position but his own. But Martha did not desist; and at last the usual irritability crept into his voice, and he said, ‘Your mother’s a good woman,’ and he gave her a look which meant ‘Now, that’s enough.’
‘Good?’ said Martha, inviting him to define the word.
‘That’s all very well,’ he said, shifting himself slightly away.
‘What do you mean by “good”?’ she persisted. ‘You know quite well she’s – I mean, if goodness is just doing what you want to do, behaving in a conventional way, without thinking, then goodness is easy enough to come by!’ Here she flung a stone crossly at the trunk of a tree.
‘I don’t see where you end, when you start like this,’ said Mr Quest, complainingly. For this was by no means the first time this conversation had taken place, and he dreaded it. They were both remembering that first occasion, when he had demanded angrily, ‘Well, don’t you love your mother, then?’ and Martha had burst into peals of angry laughter, saying ‘Love? What’s love got to do with it? She does exactly as she wants, and says, “Look how I sacrifice myself,” she never stops trying to get her own way, and then you talk about love.’
After a long silence, during which Mr Quest slowly slid away into his private thoughts, Martha said defiantly, ‘Well, I don’t see it. You just use words and – it’s got nothing to do with what actually goes on …’ She stopped, confused; though what she felt was clear enough; not only that people’s motives were not what they imagined them to be, but that they should be made to see the truth.
‘Oh Lord, Matty,’ said Mr Quest, suddenly bursting into that helpless anger, ‘What do you want me to do? The last year has been hell on earth, you never stop bickering.’
‘So you want me to go away?’ asked Martha pathetically and her heart sang at the idea of it.
‘I never said anything of the sort,’ said poor Mr Quest, ‘you’re always so extreme.’ Then, after a pause, hopefully: ‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it? You always say you’ve out-grown your mother, and I daresay you have.’
Martha waited, and it was with the same hopeful inquiry she had felt with Joss: she was wanting someone to take the responsibility for her; she needed a rescue. Mr Quest should have suggested some practical plan, and at once, very much to his surprise, he would have found an amenable and grateful daughter. Instead, the silence prolonged itself into minutes. He sighed with pleasure, as he looked over the sunlit field, the silent, heat-slowed bush; then he lowered his eyes to his feet, where there were some ants at work in an old piece of wood.
Suddenly he remarked, in a dreamy voice, ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it, seeing these ants? I wonder how they see us, like God, I shouldn’t be surprised? When that soil specialist was out last year, he said ants have a language, and a police force – that sort of thing.’
There was no reply from Martha. At last he shot her an apprehensive glance sideways, and met eyes that were half angry, half amused, but with a persistent criticism that caused him to rise to his feet, saying, ‘How about going up to the house and asking for some tea? Weather makes you thirsty.’
And in silence the father and daughter returned to the house on the hill.
Chapter Three (#ulink_ee041acc-fb1d-53ab-b335-7f57c310956c)
Mrs Quest watched her daughter and husband returning from the fields, with nervous anticipation. The night before, in the dark bedroom, she had demanded that he must speak to Martha, who wouldn’t listen to her own mother, she was ruining her future. Mr Quest’s cigarette glowed exasperatedly, illuminating his bent and troubled face; and at the sight of that face, Mrs Quest leaned over the edge of the bed towards him, and her voice rose into peevish insistence; for as long as the darkness allowed her to forget her husband’s real nature, she spoke with confidence. And what was he expected to say? he demanded. ‘Yes, yes, I daresay,’ and ‘I am quite sure you’re right,’ and ‘Yes, but, May, old girl, surely that’s putting it a bit strongly?’
Mrs Quest had lain awake most of the night, framing those angry complaints against him in her mind that she could not say aloud. Since it had always been understood that only bad luck and ill-health had brought the family to such irremediable if picturesque poverty, how could she say now what she thought: For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together, and run the farm properly, and then we can send Martha to a good school which will undo the bad effects caused by the Van Rensbergs and the Cohen boys?
She thought of writing to her brother; she even made this decision; then the picture of Martha in a well-regulated suburban London household, attending a school for nice English girls, entered her mind with uncomfortable force. She remembered, too, that Martha was seventeen; and her anger was switched against the girl herself; it was too late, it was much too late, and she knew it. Thoughts of Martha always filled her with such violent and supplicating and angry emotions that she could not sustain them; she began to pray for Martha: please help me to save her, please let her forget her silly ideas, please let her be like her brother. Mrs Quest fell asleep, soothed by tender thoughts of her son.
But it seemed that half an hour’s angry and urgent pleading last night had after all pricked Alfred into action. There was something in the faces of these two (they were both uncomfortable, and rather flushed) that made her hopeful. She called for tea and arranged herself by the tea table on the veranda, while Martha and Mr Quest fell into chairs, and each reached for a book.
‘Well, dear?’ asked Mrs Quest at last, looking at them both. Neither heard her. Martha turned a page; Mr Quest was filling his pipe, while his eyes frowningly followed the print on the pages balanced against his knee. The servant brought tea, and Mrs Quest filled the cups.
She handed one to Mr Quest, and asked again, ‘Well, dear?’
‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Mr Quest, without looking up.
Her lips tightened, and as she gave Martha her cup she demanded jealously, ‘Had a nice talk?’
‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Martha vaguely.
Mrs Quest regarded them both, and with a look of conscious but forgiving bitterness. Her husband was half hidden in a cloud of lazy blue smoke. He was the very picture of a hard-working farmer taking his repose. Martha, at first sight, might pass for that marriageable and accomplished daughter it seemed that Mrs Quest, after all, desired. In her bright-yellow linen dress, her face tinted carefully with cosmetics, she appeared twenty. But the dress had grass stains on it, was crumpled, she was smoking hungrily, and her fingers were already stained with nicotine, her rifle was lying carelessly across her lap, and on it was balanced a book which, as Mrs Quest could see, was called The Decay of the British Empire. That Martha should be reading this book struck her mother as criticism of herself; she began to think of the hard and disappointing life she had led since she came to the colony; and she lay back in her chair, and onto her broad square, rather masculine face came a look of patient regret; her small blue eyes clouded, and she sighed deeply.
The sigh, it appeared, had the power to reach where her words could not. Both Martha and Mr Quest glanced up, guiltily. Mrs Quest had forgotten them; she was looking through them at some picture of her own; she was leaning her untidy grey head against the mud wall of the house; she was twiddling a lock of that limp grey hair round and round one finger – a mannerism which always stung Mr Quest – while with the other hand she stroked her skirt, in a tired hard, nervous movement which affected Martha like a direct criticism of ingratitude.
‘Well, old girl?’ demanded Mr Quest, with guilty affection.
She withdrew her eyes from her private vision, and rested them on her husband. ‘Well?’ she returned, and with a different intonation, dry and ironic, and patient.
Martha saw her parents exchange a look which caused her to rise from her chair, in order to escape. It was a look of such sardonic understanding that she could not bear it, for it filled her with a violent and intolerable pity for them. Also, she thought, How can you be so resigned about it? and became fearful for her own future, which she was determined would never include a marriage whose only basis was that ironic mutual pity. Never, never, she vowed; and as she picked up her rifle and was moving towards the steps she heard a car approaching.
‘Visitors,’ she said warningly; and her parents sighed at the same moment, ‘Oh, Lord!’
But it was Marnie sitting beside one of her sisters’ husbands.
‘Oh, Lord,’ said Mr Quest again. ‘If she’s wearing those damned indecent shorts, then …’ He got up, and hastily escaped.
The car did not come close to the house, but remained waiting on the edge of the small plateau in front. Marnie approached. She was not wearing shorts, but a bright floral dress, with a bunch of flowers and lace at the neck. She was now very fat, almost as large as her mother; and her heavy browned arms and legs came out of the tight dyed crepe like the limbs of an imprisoned Brünhilde. Her hair was crimped into tight ridges around the good-natured housewife’s face.
‘I haven’t come to stay,’ she called from a distance, and quickened her steps. Martha waited for her, wishing that her mother also would go away; but Mrs Quest remained watchful above the teacups. So she walked down to meet Marnie, where they might both be out of earshot.
Marnie said hastily, ‘Listen, Matty, man, we’re having a dance, well, just friends, sort of, and would you like to come. Next Saturday?’ she looked apprehensively at Mrs Quest, past Martha’s shoulder.
Martha hesitated, and found herself framing excuses; then she agreed rather stiffly, so that Marnie coloured, as if she had been snubbed. Seeing this, Martha, with a pang of self-dislike, said how much she had been longing to dance, that in this district there was nothing to do – even that she was lonely. Her voice, to her own surprise, was emotional; so that she too coloured, as at a self-betrayal.
Marnie’s good heart responded at once to what must be an appeal, even a reproach, and she said, ‘But Matty, I’ve been wanting to ask you for ages, really, but I thought that …’ She stumbled over the unsayable truth, which was half a complaint against the snobbish English and half an explanation of her father’s attitude. She went on in a rush, falling back into the easy, suggestive raillery: ‘If you knew what my brother Billy thinks of you, oh, man! He thinks you’re the tops.’ She giggled, but Martha’s face stopped her.
The two girls, scarlet as poinsettias, were standing in silence, in the most confusing state of goodwill and hostility, when Mrs Quest came down the path. From a distance, they might have been on the point of either striking each other or falling into each other’s arms; but as she arrived beside them Martha turned and exclaimed vivaciously, ‘I’m going to dance at Marnie’s place on Saturday night!’
‘That’s nice, dear,’ she said doubtfully, after a pause.
‘It’s only just informal, Mrs Quest, nothing grand,’ and Marnie squeezed Martha’s arm. ‘Well, be seeing you, we’ll come and fetch you about eight.’ She ran off, calling back, ‘My mom says Matty can stay the night, if that’s all right.’ She climbed heavily into the car, sending back beaming smiles and large waves of the hand; and in a moment the car had slid down off the hill into the trees.
‘So you’re making friends with the Van Rensbergs,’ said Mrs Quest reproachfully, as if this confirmed all her worst fears; and a familiar note was struck for both of them when Martha said coldly, ‘I thought you and the Van Rensbergs had been friends for years?’
‘What’s all this about Billy?’ asked Mrs Quest, trying to disinfect sex, as always, with a humorous teasing voice.
‘What about him?’ asked Martha, and added, ‘He’s a very nice boy.’ She walked off towards her bedroom in such a state of exaltation that a voice within her was already inquiring, Why are you so happy? For this condition could be maintained only as long as she forgot Billy himself. She had not seen him for two or three years, but it occurred to her that he might have caught sight of her somewhere; for surely he could not have tender memories of their last encounter? Martha, on a hot, wet, steamy afternoon, had spent two hours wriggling on her stomach through the undergrowth to reach a point where she might shoot a big koodoo that was grazing in a corner of the Hundred Acres. Just as she rested the rifle to fire, a shot rang out, the koodoo fell, and Billy Van Rensberg walked out from the tree a few paces away, to stand over the carcase like a conqueror. ‘That’s my koodoo!’ said Martha shrilly. She was covered with red mud, her hair hung lank to her shoulders, her eyes trickled dirty tears. Billy was apologetic but firm, and made things worse by offering her half; for it was not the meat she cared about. He bestrode the carcase, and began stripping off the hide: a brown, shock-headed lad, who occasionally lifted puzzled blue eyes towards this girl who walked around and around him, crying with rage, and insisting, ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair!’ Finally she said, as the hot smell of blood reeked across the sunlight, ‘You’re no better than a butcher!’ With this, she marched away across the red clods of the field, trying to look indifferent. Martha had long since decided that this incident belonged to her childhood, and therefore no longer concerned her; and it made her uncomfortable that Billy might still be remembering it. Altogether the mere idea of Billy aroused in her an altogether remarkable resentment; and she chose not to think of him.
This was on a Wednesday. During the next day or two she could scarcely eat or sleep; she was in a condition of restless expectation that was almost unbearable. The Saturday dance seemed like an entrance into another sort of life, for she was seeing the Van Rensbergs’ house magnified, and peopled with youthful beings who had less to do with what was likely than with that vision of legendary cities which occupied so much of her imagination. The Quests were watching, with fearful amazement, a daughter who was no longer silent and critical, but bright-eyed and chattering and nervous: a proper condition for a girl going to her first dance.
Martha was agonized over what to wear, for Marnie, who had been wearing grown-up clothes since she was about thirteen, would of course have evening dresses. Mrs Quest hopefully offered a frilly pink affair which had belonged to a ten-year-old cousin, saying that it came from Harrods, which was a guarantee of good taste. Martha merely laughed, which was what Mrs Quest deserved for she was seeing her daughter as about twelve, with a ribbon in her hair, an Alice-in-Wonderland child, for this vision made the idea of Billy less dangerous. There was a quarrel: Martha began sarcastically to explain why it was that even if she had been twelve she could not have worn this pink frilled georgette to the Van Rensbergs’ house, since nice little English girls were not for export. At length, Mrs Quest withdrew, saying bitterly that Martha was only trying to be difficult, that she needn’t think they could afford to buy her a new one. She had the pink dress ironed and put on Martha’s bed; Martha quickly hid it, for she was really terrified at what the Van Rensbergs might say if they ever caught sight of that charming, coy, childish frock.
On the Friday morning she telephoned Mr McFarline, and was down at the turn-off waiting for him before nine in the morning.
Mr McFarline drove more slowly than usual to the station. He was nervous of Martha, who had accepted ten shillings from him, like a child, but who was now using him with the calm unscrupulousness of a good-looking woman who takes it for granted that men enjoy being used. She was looking, not at him, but out of the window at the veld; and he asked at last, ‘And what’s the great attraction at the station?’
‘I’m going to buy material for a dress,’ she announced.
He could think of no approach after that impersonal statement that might make it possible to joke with her, or even ask her for a kiss; and it occurred to him that the stern young profile, averted from him as if he were not there, was not that of a girl one might kiss. Mr McFarline was made to think, in fact, of his age, which was not usual for him. Two years before, this girl and her brother had come riding on their bicycles, over to his mine, eating chocolate biscuits, and listening to his tales of adventurous living, accepting his generous tips with an equally generous embarrassment. No more than two years ago, he had slapped Martha across the bottom, pulled her hair, and called her his lassie.
He said sentimentally, ‘Your father has no luck, but he’s got something better than money.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Martha politely.
He was driving along a piece of road that was dust between ruts, on a dangerous slant, and it was not for several seconds that he could turn his eye to her face. She was looking at him direct, with a slow quizzical gleam that made him redden. An outrageous idea occurred to him but he dismissed it at once, not because he was afraid of his neighbours knowing his life, but because Martha was too young to acknowledge that she knew: there was something in her face which made him think of his children in the compound, and even more of their mothers.
With a short, amused laugh, Martha again turned to the window.
He said gruffly, ‘It’s a fine thing for your father, a daughter like you. When I look at you, lassie, I wish I had married.’
Once again Martha turned to look at him, her eyebrows raised, her mouth most comically twisted. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you couldn’t marry them all, one can see that.’
They had reached the station, and he dragged at the brakes. His heavy, handsome face, with its network of tiny red veins, was now a uniform purple. Martha opened the door, got out and said, very politely, ‘Thanks for the lift.’ She turned away, then over her shoulder gave him a delightful amused smile, which at once infuriated Mr McFarline and absolved him of guilt. He watched her walk away, in her rather stiff awkward manner, to Socrates’ store; and he was swearing, Damn little … Then he, too, laughed and went off to town in the best of spirits, though at bottom he was very shocked; for when he was drunk he enjoyed thinking of himself as a sinner, and it was in these moods that the local charities were sent such generous cheques.
Martha went into the Greek store. It was empty. Socrates was behind the counter, as usual, reading a murder story. He greeted her as ‘Miss Quest’, and showed her what materials he had, apologizing for not having anything good enough for such a fine young lady. He was a short, plump man, with black eyes like raisins, and a pale, smooth skin, and a manner of suggesting that Mr Quest owed him a hundred pounds; and Martha said coldly, ‘No, I’m afraid you’re quite right, you have nothing very attractive, have you?’ She walked out, reluctantly, for there was a piece of green figured silk she would have liked to buy.
On the veranda she stood hesitating, before plunging into the glare of that dusty space, where the sunlight lashed up from tin roofs and from the shrinking pond. A dark greasy cloud held light like a vast sponge, for the sun rayed out whitely from behind it, like incandescent swords across the sky. She was thinking apprehensively, I hope he doesn’t get angry and send Daddy a bill. She was also thinking, Damned little dago; and checked herself, with guilt, for ‘dago’ was a word she had outlawed.
She narrowed her eyes to a slit of light, and walked out towards the Cohens’ store. She parted the bead curtain with relief, though blindly, and expected her eyes to clear on the sight of Mr Cohen; but it was Joss who stood there, palms down on the counter, like a veritable salesman, waiting for a native to make up his mind over a banjo. This man, seeing a white person enter, moved aside for her, but she saw Joss’s eyes on her, and said in kitchen kaffir, ‘No, when you’ve finished.’ Joss gave a small approving nod; and she watched the man finger the instrument, and then another, until at last he began counting sixpences and shillings from a piece of dirty cloth that was suspended from his neck. The banjo cost thirty shillings, which was two months’ wages to this farm-worker, and when he left, clutching the instrument with a childlike pleasure, she and Joss exchanged looks which left nothing to say. She even felt guilty that she was coming to buy anything so frivolous as an evening frock; and with this feeling was another, an older one: helpless anger that her father’s debt of a hundred pounds at Sock’s store was more than the farm-worker might earn in the whole of his short life.
Joss said, ‘And what can I do for you?’ and she watched him pull out the heavy rolls of stuff and stack them along the counter.
‘Why are you still here?’ she asked, acknowledging to herself that she had come to get some news of him.
‘Delay over the sale. Sock’s working a pretty point. He knows we’re keen to sell out.’
‘And so you can’t start university. I don’t see why you should sacrifice yourself,’ she said indignantly.
‘My, my, listen to the rebel who never leaves home,’ he remarked, raising his eyes to the fly-covered ceiling, while he competently slipped yards of pink cotton from hand to hand.
‘That isn’t why I don’t leave home,’ said Martha stiffly, as if he had been accusing her of wrong feelings.
‘You don’t say,’ he said, sarcastically; and then, more gently, when she lifted troubled eyes to his face: ‘Why don’t you be a brave girl and get into town, and learn a thing or two?’
She hesitated, and her look was appealing; and he said, ‘I know you’re very young, but you could get into a girls’ hostel, or share a flat with someone, couldn’t you?’
The idea of a girls’ hostel struck Martha before the kindness of his intention, and her eyebrows swiftly rose in derision.
He gave her a look which said plainly, ‘What the hell do you want then?’ and became impersonal. ‘I don’t think we have anything suitable, you’d better try Sock, he’s got a consignment of new materials.’
‘I’ve been to Sock,’ she said plaintively, feeling abandoned.
‘Then if he hasn’t, we certainly haven’t.’ He laid his palms downwards again, in the salesman’s gesture which annoyed her, like an affectation. But she still waited. Soon he let his hands fall from the counter, and looked at her seriously. He was relenting. ‘I’ll choose something for you,’ he said at last, and looked along the shelves. Martha, thinking of their tasteless back room, was momentarily alarmed, and ashamed of herself for the feeling; but he reached down a roll of white cotton, and said with a rough, unwilling tenderness, which touched her deeply, ‘White. Suitable for a young girl.’
She saw at once it would make an attractive dress, and said, ‘I’ll have six yards.’ And now his look seemed to say that she had agreed too quickly; and she fingered the crisp material to please him, while her mind already held a picture of how it would look made up. ‘I’m going to dance at the Van Rensbergs’,’ she remarked, with a confused intention; and his face stiffened, after a quick glance, and he cut the material without speaking.
‘Why don’t you come and dance with me?’ he asked with a challenge.
‘Why don’t you ask me?’ she replied quickly. But there was no response. He was folding the material, smoothing it in a way which kept her looking at his hands; and at last he tied it and handed it to her with a slightly sardonic bow. ‘On the account?’ he inquired.
‘No, I’m paying.’ She handed over the money, and waited for at least a look from him; but he said, ‘So long!’ and went quickly into the back part of the building, leaving the store quite empty. So she began the hot, wearying walk home, but this time was overtaken by the McDougalls before she had gone more than a few hundred yards.
As soon as she had reached her room, and spread the material on her bed, Mrs Quest entered, saying virtuously, ‘Oh my dear, we’ve been so worried …’ Then she saw the material, and reddened with anger. ‘How dare you waste your father’s money when you know we haven’t got it and we owe Sock so much money as it is?’
‘I paid for it myself,’ said Martha sullenly.
‘How could you pay for it yourself?’
‘There was the money from last Christmas, and the ten shillings Mr McFarline gave me.’
Mrs Quest hesitated, then chose a course and insisted, ‘The money wasn’t given to you to waste, and in any case …’
‘In any case, what?’ asked Martha coldly.
Again Mrs Quest hesitated; and at last her feelings expressed themselves in a voice that was uncertain with the monstrousness of what she was saying: ‘Until you’re twenty-one, you’ve no right to own money, and if we took it to court, the judge would … I mean, I mean to say …’ Martha was quite white, and unable to speak; it was her silence, the bitter condemnation in her eyes, which caused her mother to walk out of the room, saying unhappily: ‘Well, at least, I mean, I must speak to your father.’
Martha was exhausted with the violence of what she felt, and it was only the thought that this was midday Friday, and the dress must be ready tomorrow, that enabled her to go on sewing.
At suppertime Mrs Quest was bright and humorous, and there was an apology in her manner which Martha might have answered; but she was repeating to herself that the incident over the money was something she would never, never forget – it was to join the other incidents chalked up in her memory. Mr Quest ate his meal in peace, gratefully persuading himself that this unusual silence between his womenfolk was one induced by harmony and goodwill.
Immediately after supper Martha went to her room, and soon they heard the whirr of the sewing machine. Mrs Quest, in an agony of curiosity, timidly entered her daughter’s room, towards midnight, saying, ‘You must go to bed, Matty, I order you.’
Martha did not reply. She was sitting on the bed, surrounded by billowing folds of white. She did not even lift her head. Mrs Quest tugged the curtains across invading moonlight that flung a colder greener light over the warm dull lampshine, and said, ‘You’ll spoil your eyes.’
‘I thought my eyes were already spoiled,’ said Martha coldly; and for some reason Mrs Quest was unable to answer what seemed to be an accusation. She left the room, saying ineffectually, ‘You must go to bed at once, do you hear me?’
The machine whirred until nearly morning, an unusual undercurrent to the chirping crickets, the call of the owl. Mrs Quest woke her husband to complain that Martha would not obey her; but he said, ‘Well, if she wants to make a fool of herself let her,’ and turned over in bed with a clanging of the ancient springs. Martha heard both these voices, as she was meant to; and though she had been on the point of going to bed, since the sky was greying the square of the window and she was really very tired, she made a point of working on for another half hour.
She woke late, from a dream that she was wearing her white frock in a vast ballroom hung with glittering chandeliers, the walls draped with thick red crimson; and as she walked towards a group of people who stood rather above the floor, in long fluted gowns, like living statues, she noticed a patch of mud on her skirt and, looking down, saw that all her dress was covered with filth. She turned helplessly for flight, when Marnie and her brother came towards her, bent with laughter, their hands pressed over their mouths, gesturing to her that she must escape before the others, those beautiful and legendary beings at the end of the long hall, should catch sight of her.
She sat up in bed, and saw that the room was filled, not with sunlight, but with a baleful subdued glare reflected from clouds like still mountains. It was nearly midday, and if she was to finish her dress she must hurry. But the thought of it was no longer a pleasure; all the delight had gone from it while she slept. She decided, tiredly, that she would wear an ordinary dress; and it was only because Mrs Quest put her head around the door to say that lunch was ready, and Martha must come at once, that she replied she would not take lunch, she had to finish the dress.
Work on it restored the mood she had lost; and when it began to rain, her exultation was too great to be deepened – these were the first rains of the season; and she sat on the bed clicking her needle through the stiff material, and while overhead the old thatch rustled as the wet soaked in, as if it remembered still, after so many years, how it had swelled and lifted to the rain when it stood rooted and uncut. Soon it was soaked, and the wet poured off the edge of thatch in glittering stalactites, while the grey curtain of rain stood solid behind, so dense that the trees barely twenty paces away glimmered like faint green spectres. It was dark in the room, so Martha lit a candle, which made a small yellow space under the all-drenching blackness; but soon a fresh coloured light grew at the window, and, going to it, Martha saw the grey back of the storm already retreating. The trees were half emerged from the driving mists, and stood clear and full and green, dripping wet from every leaf; the sky immediately overhead was blue and sunlit, while only a few degrees away it was still black and impenetrable. Martha blew out the candle, and put the last stitches in her dress. It was only four in the afternoon, and the hours before she would be fetched seemed unbearable. At last, she went in to supper in her dressing gown; and Mrs Quest said nothing, for there was a dreamy, exalted look on her daughter’s face which put her beyond the usual criticisms.
Five minutes before eight o’clock, Martha came from her room, a candle in each hand, with her white dress rustling about her. To say she was composed would be untrue. She was triumphant; and that triumph was directed against her mother, as if she said, You can’t do anything about it now, can you? She did not look at Mrs Quest at all, but passed her steadily, her naked brown shoulders slightly tensed. Nor did her pose loosen, or she stand naturally, until she was before her father, where she waited, her eyes fixed on his face, in a look of painful inquiry. Mr Quest was reading a book printed by a certain society which held that God had personally appointed the British nation to rule the world in His Name, a theory which comforted his sense of justice; and he did not immediately raise his eyes, but contracted his brows in protest as the shadow fell over his book. When he did, he looked startled, and then gazed, in a long silence, at Martha’s shoulders, after a quick evasive glance at her demanding, hopeful eyes.
‘Well?’ she asked breathlessly at last.
‘It’s very nice,’ he remarked flatly, at length.
‘Do I look nice, Daddy?’ she asked again.
He gave a queer, irritable hunch to his shoulders, as if he disliked a pressure, or distrusted himself. ‘Very nice,’ he said slowly. And then, suddenly, in an exasperated shout: ‘Too damned nice, go away!’
Martha still waited. There was that most familiar division in her: triumph, since this irritation was an acknowledgment that she did in fact look ‘nice’; but also alarm, since she was now abandoned to her mother. And Mrs Quest at once came forward and began, ‘There you are, Matty, your father knows what is best, you really cannot wear that frock and …’
The sound of a car grew on their ears; and Martha said, ‘Well, I’m going.’ With a last look at her parents, which was mingled with scorn and appeal, she went to the door, carefully holding her skirts. She wanted to weep, an impulse she indignantly denied to herself. For at that moment when she had stood before them, it was in a role which went far beyond her, Martha Quest: it was timeless, and she felt that her mother, as well as her father, must hold in her mind (as she certainly cherished a vision of Martha in bridal gown and veil) another picture of an expectant maiden in dedicated white; it should have been a moment of abnegation, when she must be kissed, approved, and set free. Nothing of this could Martha have put into words, or even allowed herself to feel; but now, in order to regain that freedom where she was not so much herself as a creature buoyed on something that flooded into her as a knowledge that she was moving inescapably through an ancient role, she must leave her parents who destroyed her; so she went out of the door, feeling the mud sink around her slight shoes, and down the path towards a man who came darkly against stars which had been washed by rain into a profusely glittering background to her mood. Martha, who had known Billy Van Rensberg all her childhood, who had been thinking of him during the last half hour with suppressed resentment, as of something she must bypass, an insistent obstacle, found herself now going towards him half fainting with excitement. For she at once told herself this was not Billy; this man, whose face she could clearly see in the bright glow, might be a cousin of some kind, for he had a family likeness.
Martha found herself on the back seat of the car, on his knee, together with five other people, who were so closely packed together it was hard to know whose limbs were whose. Marnie’s half-smothered voice greeted her from the front seat. ‘Matty, meet – Oh, George, stop it, I’ve got to do the intros, oh, do stop it. Well, Matty, you’ll have to find out who everybody is.’ And she stopped in a smother of giggles.
While the car slid greasily down the steep road, and then skidded on its brakes through the mealie-fields, Martha lay stiffly on the strange man’s knee, trying to will her heart, which was immediately beneath his hand, to stop beating. His close hold of her seemed to lift her away from the others into an exquisite intimacy that was the natural end of days of waiting; and the others began to sing, ‘Horsey, keep your tail up, keep your tail up, keep your tail up’; and she was hurt that he at once joined in, as if this close contact which was so sweet to her was matter-of-fact to him. Martha also began to sing, since it appeared this was expected of her, and heard her uncertain voice slide off key; and at once Marnie said, with satisfaction, ‘Matty’s shocked!’
‘Oh, Matty’s all right,’ said the strange man, slightly increasing the pressure of his hand, and he laughed. But it was a cautious laugh, and he was holding her carefully, with an exact amount of pressure; and Martha slowly understood that if the intimacy of the young people in this car would have been shocking to Marnie’s mother, or at least to her own, it was governed by a set of rigid conventions, one of which was that the girls should giggle and protest. But she had been lifted away into a state of feeling where the singing and the giggles seemed banal; and could only remain silent, with the strange man’s cheek against hers, watching the soft bright trees rush past in the moonlight. The others continued to sing, and to call out, ‘Georgie, what are you doing to Marnie?’ or ‘Maggie, don’t let Dirk get you down,’ and when this attention was turned to Martha and her partner, she understood he was replying for her when he said again, ‘Oh, Matty’s all right, leave her alone.’ She could not have spoken; it seemed the car was rocking her away from everything known into unimaginable experience; and as the lights of her own home sank behind the trees, she watched for the light of the Van Rensbergs’ house as of the beacons on a strange coast. The singing and shouting were now a discordant din beneath the low roof of the car; and in their pocket of silence, the man was murmuring into Martha’s ear, ‘Why didn’t you look at me then, why?’ With each ‘why’ he modified his hold of her in a way which she understood must be a divergence from his own code; for his grip became compelling, and his breathing changed; but to Martha the question was expected and delightful, for if he had been looking for her, had she not for him? A glare of light swept across the inside of the car, the man swiftly released her, and they all sat up. The Van Rensbergs’ house was in front of them, transfigured by a string of coloured lights across the front of the veranda, and by the moonlit trees that stood about it.
They tumbled out of the car, and nine pairs of eyes stroked Martha up and down. She saw she was the only person in evening dress; but at once Marnie said, in breathless approval, ‘You look fine, Matty, can I have the pattern?’ She took Martha’s arm, and led her away from the others, ignoring the lad with whom she had been in the car. Martha could not help glancing back to see how he took what she felt as a betrayal, for she was dizzy and shocked; but George had already slipped his arm around another girl, and was leading her to the veranda. She looked round for her own partner, feeling that surely he must come forward and claim her from Marnie, but the young man, in a tight uncomfortable suit whose thick texture her fingers knew, and whose appearance had the strangest look of alienation, was bending, with his back to her, over the open engine of the car, reaching down into it with a spanner.
So she went forward with Marnie, on to the wide veranda, which was cleared for dancing. There were about a dozen people waiting. She knew them vaguely by sight, having seen them at the station, and she smiled in the manner of one who has been prevented from achieving friendship by all manner of obstacles. Marnie took her through the veranda and into the room behind, where Mr Van Rensberg was sitting in his shirt sleeves, reading a newspaper beside an oil lamp. He nodded, then raised his head again and stared rudely; and Martha began to feel ashamed, for of course her dress was too elaborate for the occasion; and it was only Marnie’s exclamations of delight and admiration that kept her mood from collapsing entirely.
Martha watched her friend rub lipstick on to protruding, smiling lips before the mirror, and waited on one side, for she did not want to see herself in the glass; but as they returned to the veranda she caught sight of herself in a windowpane; she did not know this aloof, dream-logged girl who turned a brooding face under the curve of loose blonde hair; so strange did it seem that she even glanced behind her to see if some other girl stood there in just such another white dress, and noticed her escort standing outside the door to the veranda.
‘You’re all right,’ he said impatiently, as if he had been kept waiting; and an old gramophone began to play from behind a window.
At once the space filled with couples; and Martha, lagging back to watch, to adjust herself, was dismayed by a savage discrepancy between what she had imagined and what was happening; for dancing may mean different things to different people, but surely (or so she felt) it could not mean this. Male and female, belly to belly, they jigged and bounced, in that shallow space between roof and floor of the veranda which projected out into the enormous night, in a good-natured slapdash acceptance of movement, one foot after another, across the floor, as if their minds owned no connection with what their bodies and limbs were doing, while the small tinny music came from the neat black box. It was a very mixed group – that is, it must appear so to an outsider, though Martha felt the partners were chosen according to certain invisible obligations. The one link missing was joy of any kind. The married couples walked themselves cheerfully around; partners of marked family resemblance stuck together as if their very features bound them; the only members of the party who seemed unbound by these invisible fetters were several small girls between nine or ten and fifteen, who danced together, politely adjusting their movements, while their eyes watched the older members of their society with patient envy, as if anticipating what must seem to them a delicious freedom. The women wore ordinary dresses, the young men stiff suits, in which they looked ugly, or the easy khaki of their farmwear, which made them into handsome peasants. Martha was again humiliated because of her dress, though there was no criticism, only detached curiosity, in the glances she received.
She looked instinctively towards her partner for support, feeling that his appreciation would sustain her. And this time she really looked at him, and not at the mental image created by the idea of dancing, of one’s ‘first dance’. He was a half-grown, lanky youth, with light hair plastered wetly across a low forehead, and the heavy muscles of shoulders and arms – too heavy for the still boyish frame – distorted the neat clerkly suit. He was regarding her with embarrassed pride, while he jerked her loosely around the dancing space, one stride after another, his arms pumping, with a check at each corner so that they might achieve a change of direction. The truth came into her mind, and at the same moment she stammered out, ‘I don’t know your name’, and he at first stretched his mouth into a polite laugh, as at a jest, and then stopped dead, and dropped his arms, and stood staring at her, while his blunt and honest face went crimson.
‘What’s my name?’ he asked; and then, to save them both: ‘You’ve got a funny sense of humour.’ Again he held her in a dancing position, while his limbs laboured through the movements dictated by his mind, and they continued self-consciously around the veranda.
‘Well, I haven’t seen you for so long,’ she apologized, and again, even as she spoke, understood that it was he who had sat beside his father at the station; she could not imagine how she had failed to see Billy in this young man.
‘Oh, all right, all right,’ he muttered; and then suddenly burst out singing, in Afrikaans, which was as good as saying, ‘We have nothing to say to each other.’
Others joined in; it was a folk tune, and the small jazzy tune stopped, and someone put on another record. Now all the people on the veranda had arranged themselves quickly into two long lines, facing each other, while they clapped their hands. Martha, who had never seen the old dances, shook her head and fell out, and, as soon as the dancing began, found the spontaneous joy of movement that had been lacking in the other. Everyone enjoyed himself, everyone smiled, and sang; for the few minutes the music lasted, every person on the veranda lost self-consciousness and became part of the larger whole, the group; their faces were relaxed, mindless, their eyes met those of the men and women they must meet and greet in the dance with an easy exchange. It was no longer their responsibility; the responsibility of being one person alone, was taken off them. And soon the music stopped, and the other, newer music, with its wailing complaint, took its place. But Martha had fled, to collect herself, into the kitchen, where Mrs Van Rensberg was arranging the supper.
Marnie ran after her, pulled her aside and said, ‘It’s all right. I’ve told him you didn’t mean it, you’re not stuck-up, you’re just shy.’
Martha was resentful that she had been thus discussed, but found herself being pushed forward into Billy’s arms, while Marnie patted them both encouragingly, saying, ‘That’s right, that’s the idea, don’t take offence, man, the night is yet young.’
Billy held her at arm’s length, and gave her troubled but pleading glances; and she chattered brightly, on a note she knew was false. But she felt cold, and nervous. She wished bitterly she had not come; and then that she was better able to adjust herself, and the small tight critical knot in her could dissolve, and she become one with this friendly noisy crowd of people. She set herself to be nice to Billy, and for this he was half grateful, or at least took it as better than nothing. As the night slowly went by, and they made repeated trips to the buffet inside, where there were ranks of bottles of Cape brandy, and ginger beer, another illusory haze formed itself, within which she was able to persuade herself that Billy was the culmination of the last few days of helpless waiting: even, indeed, that the white frock had been made for him.
By midnight the house was filled with singing and laughter and the thin churning gramophone music could be heard only in snatches. The crowd had a confined look; the rooms were too full, and couples continually moved to the veranda steps, laughing and hesitating, because outside the ground was churned to a thick red mud, and the moon shone on the puddles left by the storm. Some made a tentative step down, while the others shouted encouragement; then owned themselves beaten, and went to find a private corner in one of the busy rooms, or in the kitchen, where Mrs Van Rensberg stood, hour after hour, slicing the bread, piling cream and fruit on the cakes. Martha saw Marnie seated on the knee of a strange youth while both talked to Mrs Van Rensberg; and she wished enviously that her own mother might be as tolerant and generous. For while she watched Marnie, as a guide to how she might behave herself, she knew it was impossible for her to do the same: she was not so much shocked as dismayed at the way Marnie was with one young man after another, as if they were interchangeable. She saw, too, that it was not her formal dress but the fact that she was dancing only with Billy that set her apart from the others. Yet she could not have gone with anyone else; it would have driven across the current of feeling which said that Billy – or rather, what he represented – had claimed her for the evening; for alcohol had strengthened the power of that outside force which had first claimed her four days before, at the moment she agreed to go to the dance. She was not herself, she was obedient to that force, which wore Billy’s form and features; and to the others it seemed as if she was as helpless to move away from him as he was reluctant to let her go. This absorbed couple who moved in a private dream were felt to be upsetting; whichever room they entered was disturbed by them; and at length Mr Van Rensberg broke the spell by arresting Martha as she trailed past him on Billy’s arm, by pointing his pipestem at her and saying, ‘Hey, Matty, come here a minute.’ She faced him, blinking and visibly collecting herself. The soft look on her face disappeared and she became watchful, gazing straight at him.
Mr Van Rensberg was a short, strong, thickset man of about sixty, though his round bristling black head showed not a trace of grey and his weathered face was hardly lined. He wore a dark-red scarf twisted thick around his bull neck, though it was swelteringly hot; and over it the small black, mordant eyes were as watchful as hers.
‘So your father lets you come visiting us, hey?’ he demanded.
Martha coloured; and half laughed, because of this picture of her father; and after a hesitation she said, consciously winsome and deferential, ‘You used to come visiting us, not so long ago.’ She checked herself, with a quick glance at the others – for there were several people listening; she feared he might resent this reminder of his long friendship with the Quests.
But he did not take her up on this point. With a kind of deliberate brutality, he lifted his pipestem at her again, and demanded, Did she admit that the English behaved like brutes in the Boer War?
At this, she could not help laughing, it was (to her) such an irrelevance.
‘It’s not a funny matter to us,’ he said roughly.
‘Nor to me,’ said Martha, and then, diffidently: ‘It was rather a long time ago, wasn’t it?’
‘No!’ he shouted. Then he quietened, and insisted, ‘Nothing has changed. The English are arrogant. They are all rude and arrogant.’
‘Yes, I think that’s true,’ said Martha, knowing it was often true; and then could not prevent herself asking that fatally reasonable question, ‘If you dislike us so much, why do you come to a British colony?’
There was a murmur from the listening people. There seemed to be many more people in the room than before, they had been crowding in, and Martha found herself thinking how different was this man’s position in his household to her father’s: the silence was due to him as a spokesman, he was a patriarch in a culture where the feared and dominating father is still key to the family group; and Martha felt a twinge of fear, because she understood this was not to be taken as a personal conversation, she was being questioned as a representative. And she did not feel herself to be representative.
Mr Van Rensberg dropped his pipe in dramatic comment, with a nod at the others, and remarked heavily, ‘So! So!’
Martha said quickly, with the defensive humour which she could not prevent, though she knew he found it insulting, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t come, why shouldn’t you? As far as I am concerned, you’re welcome.’
There was a silence, he seemed to be waiting for more; then he said, ‘There should be equal rights, there should be rights for both languages.’
Martha was remembering, very ruefully, that other conversation, with Joss. She smiled and said firmly, with considerable courage, considering the nature of her audience, that she believed in equal rights for all people, regardless of race and –
Billy tugged at her from behind, and said in an urgent voice, ‘Hey, Matty, come and dance.’
Mr Van Rensberg, who had dismissed the improbable suspicion from his mind as soon as it appeared said, rather taken aback, ‘Well, that’s all right, then, that’s all right.’ Afterwards, he would call Martha a hypocrite, like all the English.
On the veranda, Billy called her one to her face, without knowing he was doing so. ‘Why don’t you learn to speak Afrikaans?’ he asked, as if this followed naturally from what he had heard her say.
But to Martha this was narrowing the problem away from its principles, and she said, half flippantly, ‘Well, if it’s a question of doing justice to majorities, one’d have to learn at least a dozen native languages as well.’
His hand tightened across her back. To him it was as if she put the Afrikaans language on a level with those of the despised kaffirs. It was a moment of hatred; but at last he gave a short, uncomfortable laugh, and bent his head beside hers, closing his eyes to the facts of her personality, wishing to restore this illusory unity. It was late, some of the people had already left, and Martha was dancing in his arms stiffly and unwillingly, frowning over the incident that had just occurred. He felt that dancing would no longer be enough – or rather, that it was too late to wait for the spell to settle over them again. He drew her to the veranda steps. The moon was now standing level with the tops of the trees, the mud of the clearing was glimmering with light. ‘Let’s go down for a minute,’ he said.
‘But it’s all muddy.’
‘Never mind,’ he said hastily, and pulled her down.
Once again the wet squelched around her shoe, and she picked her way from ridge to ridge of hardening mud, hanging on Billy’s arm, while he steered them both to the side of the house out of sight. She tried to hold her skirts clear of the mud, while he pinned her arms down with his, and kissed her. His mouth was hard, and ground her head back. She resented this hard intrusive mouth, even while from outside – always from outside – came the other pressure, which demanded that he should simply lift her and carry her off like booty – but to where? The red mud under the bushes? She pushed aside this practical and desecrating thought, and softened to the kiss; then she felt a clumsy and unpractised hand creeping down her thigh, and she jerked away, saying in a voice that annoyed her, because of its indignant coldness: ‘Stop it!’
‘Sorry,’ he said at once, and let her go, with a humility that made her loathe him.
She walked away in front, leaving him to follow as he wished, and walked confusedly up the steps, because the few couples that were watching them with derisive smiles, and none of the communal teasing that had been drawn by the other couples. Martha saw the eyes drop to her skirt, and looked down, and saw that the hem was dragging heavy wth red mud.
Marnie came running forward, exclaiming, ‘But Matty, your lovely dress, you’ve spoilt it …’ She clicked over Martha for a moment, then tugged her through the house on her hand, saying, ‘Come and wash it off, before it dries.’
Martha went, without so much as a glance at the unfortunate Billy, grateful for Marnie, who thus took her back into the group.
‘You’d better take that dress off,’ said Marnie. ‘You’re staying the night, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘I forgot my suitcase,’ said Martha awkwardly, leaving herself completely in Marnie’s hands. For she had forgotten to pack her night things; her imagination had reached no further forward than the dancing and the exaltation.
‘Doesn’t matter, I’ll lend my pyjamas.’
Mrs Van Rensberg came fussing in, pleasant and maternal, saying she would ring Mrs Quest. It seemed that Martha ruining her dress while making love to her son was the most natural thing in the world. She kissed Martha, and said she hoped she would sleep well, and she mustn’t worry, everything was all right. The warm and comfortable words made Martha want to cry, and she embraced Mrs Van Rensberg like a child, and like a child allowed herself to be led to her room, and left alone.
It was a larger room built to the back of the house, lit by two tall candles, one on either side of the vast double bed spread with white. The windows were open to the veld, which was already greying to the dawn, and the moon had a pallid, exhausted look. A sheet of silver, inclining at the end of the room, took Martha’s attention, and she looked again, and saw it was a mirror. She had never been alone in a room with a full-length mirror before, and she stripped off her clothes and went to stand before it. It was as if she saw a vision of someone not herself; or rather, herself transfigured to the measure of a burningly insistent future. The white naked girl with the high small breasts that leaned forward out of the mirror was like a girl from a legend; she put forward her hands to touch, then as they encountered the cold glass, she saw the naked arms of the girl slowly rise to fold defensively across those breasts. She did not know herself. She left the mirror, and stood at the window for a moment, bitterly criticizing herself for allowing Billy, that impostor, to take possession of her at all, even for an evening, even under another’s features.
Next day she took breakfast with the Van Rensbergs, a clan of fifteen, cousins and uncles and aunts, all cheerfully mingled.
She walked home through the bush, carrying the dress in a brown paper bag, and, halfway, took off her shoes for the pleasure of feeling the mud squeeze and mould around her feet. She arrived untidy and flushed and healthy, and Mrs Quest, in a flush of relief, kissed her and said she hoped she had enjoyed herself.
For a few days, Martha suffered a reaction like a dulling of all her nerves. She must be tired, murmured Mrs Quest, over and over again, you must be tired, you must sleep, sleep, sleep. And Martha slept, hypnotized.
Then she came to herself and began to read, hungrily, for some kind of balance. And more and more, what she read seemed remote; or rather, it seemed that through reading she created a self-contained world which had nothing to do with what lay around her; that what she believed was separated from her problems by an invisible wall; or that she was guided by a great marsh light – but no, that she could not afford, not for a moment, to accept. But not merely was she continuously being flooded by emotions that came from outside, or so it seemed; continuously other people refused to recognize the roles they themselves had first suggested. When Joss, for instance, or Mr Van Rensberg, posed their catechism, and received answers qualifying her for their respective brotherhoods, surely at that moment some door should have opened, so that she might walk in, a welcomed daughter into that realm of generous and freely exchanged emotion for which she had been born – and not only herself, but every human being; for what she believed had been built for her by the books she read, and those books had been written by citizens of that other country; for how can one feel exiled from something that does not exist?
She felt as if a phase of her life had ended, and that now a new one should begin; and it was about a fortnight after the Van Rensbergs’ dance that Joss wrote: ‘I heard there was a job going, at the firm of lawyers where my uncles are both partners. I spoke to them about you. Get a lift into town and interview Uncle Jasper. Do it quickly. You must get yourself out of this setup. Yours, Joss.’ This was hastily scribbled, as if in a hurry; and there followed a neat and sober postscript: ‘If I’m interfering, I’m sorry.’
She wrote back that she would at once apply for the job, and gratefully thanked him. She sent this letter by the cook, so urgent did it seem that he should at once know her reaction.
With Joss’s letter in her hand, she walked onto the veranda, and informed her parents, in a hasty way, that she was taking a job in town; and she hardly heard their startled queries. It all seemed so easy now. ‘But you can’t expect me to stay here for the rest of my life!’ she demanded incredulously, just as if she had not been ‘here’ for two years, apparently as if she considered there could be no possible end to it.
‘But why Joss – I mean, if you felt like this, we could ask our friends …’ protested poor Mrs Quest, helplessly.
She was thinking in terms of the future, something unpleasant to be faced, perhaps, next week; and when she heard that Martha intended to go into town, with Mr McFarline, the very next morning, she said she forbade it. Martha made no reply, and she suddenly announced she was coming into town with her.
‘Oh, no, you’re not,’ said Martha, in the deadly tone of unmistakable hatred which always disarmed Mrs Quest, who had never admitted that hatred inside a family was even possible.
Martha was not in the house that last afternoon, so Mrs Quest went into her bedroom, and looked helplessly around it for some kind of clue to her daughter’s state of mind. She found Joss’s note, which struck her unpleasantly; she found the soiled white dress, still crushed into the paper bag and already going green with mildew; she looked at the books on the table by the bed, with a feeling that they must be responsible; but they were Shelley and Byron and Tennyson and William Morris; and though she had not read them herself since she was a girl, she thought of them as too respectable to be in any way dangerous.
Martha, in the meantime, was consciously bidding farewell to her childhood. She visited the ant heap where she had knelt in ecstatic prayer during her ‘religious phase’; and she walked through the thick scrub to the quartz reef under which a spring came bubbling clear and cold, where she had lain thinking of the stream that must reach the sea hundreds of miles away; she walked through the compound, where she had secretly played with the native children against her mother’s orders. She paid a last visit to the big tree. It was all useless; her childhood, it seemed, had already said goodbye to her, nothing had power to move her.
Next day she went to town with Mr McFarline, who tried to impress her with the fact that he had just been elected member of Parliament for one of the city constituencies, but received only an abstracted politeness for his pains. She interviewed Mr Cohen, the uncle, got the job, and found herself a room before nightfall. Her parents expected her home. She sent them a wire saying would they please send on her books and clothes. ‘Do not worry, everything fine.’
And a door had closed, finally; and behind it was the farm, and the girl who had been created by it. It no longer concerned her. Finished. She could forget it.
She was a new person, and an extraordinary, magnificent, an altogether new life was beginning.
Part Two (#ulink_7af52eae-5c0a-5af4-8c2e-aead8e50847f)
The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her.
– BARON CORVO
Chapter One (#ulink_deb77f4c-1b26-5cde-849a-4bbb1db235f7)
The offices of Robinson, Daniel and Cohen were crushed into the top floor of a building on Founders’ Street, a thoroughfare which marked the division between that part of the town built in the 1890s and the centre, which was modern. From the windows one looked away left over the low tin roofs and shantylike structures which were now kaffir stores, Indian stores, and the slum of the coloured quarter. To the right rose gleaming white buildings fronted with glass, and at the end of the street was the rambling, pillared, balconied brown mansion known as McGrath’s Hotel, whose erection was remembered by old inhabitants as a sign of the triumph of progress: the first modern hotel in the colony. Founders’ Street was narrow and shabby; and although it was named to commemorate those adventurers who had come riding over the veld to plant the Union Jack, regardless of the consequences to themselves or to anybody else, it was now synonymous in the minds of the present citizens with dubious boardinghouses and third-rate shops. This building shared the doubtful quality. On the ground floor was a large wholesale business, so that as one mounted the central iron staircase, which spiralled up like an outsized corkscrew, it was to look down on a warren of little offices, each inhabited by a man in shirtsleeves, half buried in papers, or by a girl with a typewriter; while at the back was a narrow strip of counter where the ‘samples’ were stacked. With what relief did the romantic eye turn to that counter, past the hive of impersonal offices! For the half-dozen coloured blankets, the dozen rolls of material, which surely, from a practical point of view, were as good as useless, seemed to suggest that the owner, a brother of Mr Cohen upstairs, a cousin of Mr Cohen from the kaffir store, also felt a need to remind himself and others of the physical existence of machinery, textiles, and a thousand other fascinating things which were sold through this office by means of those little bits of paper. Perhaps Mr Cohen, who had made his fortune in another small native store just down the street, regretted those days when he handled beads and bicycles and stuffs, and kept that counter embedded among the desks and filing cabinets as a nostalgic reminder of personal trading, trade as it should be. On the counter were big tinted pictures of shipping, locomotives, the ports of the world. No one seemed to penetrate to it save old Mr Samuel Cohen himself, who might be observed (by someone climbing the iron staircase) handling the blankets and rearranging the pictures.
The first and second floors were let as rooms, and the less said about them, the better. Clients ascending to the sober legal offices above might catch sight of a woman in a dressing-gown hurrying (but aggressively, since she had paid her rent and had the right to it) to the bathroom. At night, working late the partners had been known to telephone the police to quell a brawl or eject an improper person. In fact, this layer of the building was altogether undignified and unsuitable; but, as the partners were waiting to rebuild, everything was allowed to remain. Martha discovered a familiar atmosphere almost at once when she heard Mr Cohen say to a client, ‘I must apologize for the surroundings, but we really aren’t responsible.’ This although the building was owned and controlled by him; because he planned a change, he could not be considered as really being here.
On the other hand, the very age of the place gave it dignity. People from older countries might think it strange to describe a building dated 1900 as old; but it had been the first to raise its three storeys above the bungalows and for this it was affectionately remembered, and one entered it with a comforting sense of antiquity – as in Spain one lifts one’s eyes from the guidebook murmuring reverently, ‘This was first built three centuries before Christ, think of that!’ and afterwards poverty and squalor seem merely picturesque.
This, the oldest legal firm in the city, was known as Robinson’s on account of the first Mr Robinson, now dead; for the young Mr Robinson gave precedence to both Mr Cohens, and to Mr Daniel when he was there, which was seldom, for he was a member of Parliament, and therefore very busy. But all this became clear to Martha slowly; for she was too confused, to begin with, to understand more than her own position, and even that was not so simple.
The partners each had a small room, reached by squeezing through the main room, which was packed tight with typewriters and filing cabinets and telephones; but though this main room at first sight looked like chaos, holding as it did fifteen women of varying ages, certain divisions soon became apparent. The chief one was that the four senior secretaries sat at one end, with telephones on their desks; but Martha was so ignorant of office routine she did not at first notice this. She arrived on the first morning in a state of keyed desire to show impossible heights of efficiency: arrived half an hour before anyone else, and sat waiting for the demands on her to begin. But the other girls drifted in, talked a little; and then came the partners; and still no one asked her for anything. She was left sitting until a slight, sparrowlike woman, with bright fringed hair and round blue eyes, came past and remarked warningly that she should keep her eyes open and learn the ropes. From which Martha gathered that she had already failed in her first duty, and opened them again from a vision of herself receiving quantities of illegible scrawl and transforming it, as if by magic, into sober and dignified legal documents of the kind Mrs Buss produced from her typewriter. She forced herself to watch what was going on around her.
At lunch hour she stayed at her desk, because she had ten shillings between herself and the end of the month, and told herself it would be good for her figure. She went from typewriter to typewriter to see what kind of work she would be asked to do, and felt dismayed in spite of her large intentions; for these legal documents – no, no, it was as if she, Martha, were being bound and straightened by the formal moribund language of legality.
Just before the others were due back, the door marked ‘Mr Jasper Cohen’ opened, and he came out, stopping in surprise when he saw her. He laid some documents on Mrs Buss’s desk and went back again. Almost at once a buzzer sounded, and then, while she confusedly looked for the right instrument, the door opened again and he said, ‘Never mind the telephone. You won’t mind my asking – have you any money, Miss Quest?’
For some reason she protested, ‘Oh, yes, quite a lot,’ and then blushed because it sounded so childish.
He looked at her dubiously, and said, ‘Come into my office for a moment,’ and she followed him. It was very small; he had to squeeze past the corner of the big desk to the corner he sat in. He told her to sit down.
Mr Jasper Cohen already owned her heart because of a quality one might imagine would make it impossible: he was hideously ugly. No, not hideously: he was fantastically ugly, so ugly the word hardly applied. He was short, he was squat, he was pale; but these were words one might as justly use for Joss, his nephew, or his brother, Max. His body was broad beyond squareness; it had a swelling, humped look. His head enormous; a vast, pale, domed forehead reached to a peak where the hair began, covering a white, damp scalp in faint oily streaks, and breaking above the ears into a black fuzz that seemed to Martha pathetic, like the tender, defenceless fuzz of a baby’s head. His face was inordinately broad, a pale, lumpy expanse, with a flat, lumpy nose, wide, mauvish lips, and ears rioting out on either side like scrolls. His hands were equally extraordinary: broad, deep palms puffed themselves into rolls of thick white flesh, ending in short, spatulate fingers almost as broad as long. They were the hands of a grotesque; and as they moved clumsily in a drawer, looking for something, Martha watched them in suspense, wishing she might offer to help him. She longed to do something for him; for this ugly man had something so tender and sweet in his face, together with the stubborn dignity of an afflicted person who intends to make no apologies or claims for something he cannot help, that she was asking herself, What is ugliness? She was asking it indignantly, the protest directed against nature itself; and perhaps for the first time in her life, she wondered with secret gratitude what it would be like to be born plain, born ugly, instead of into, if not the aristocracy, at least the middle classes of good looks.
He at last found what he wanted. It was a roll of notes, and he took five of them, sliding them free of each other with an awkward movement; and said, ‘You are only getting a small salary, and so …’ As Martha hesitated, he continued quickly, ‘It was my fault for not remembering you might be short of money, coming in from the farm like that. Besides, you are an old friend of my nephew.’ That clinched the thing for him; and Martha took the money, feeling guilty because she had not been a good friend to Joss. She thanked him with emotion, which seemed to upset him, and he said hurriedly, ‘In a day or two we’ll give you something to do. Just pick up what you can, it must be strange to you if you’ve never been in an office before.’
The interview was over. She went to the door and, as she opened it, heard him say, ‘I shall be pleased if you do not mention this to Mrs Buss. There is no reason why she should know.’ She glanced incredulously at him, for he sounded apprehensive; she was even ready to laugh. But he was looking at some papers.
She went out, and met the other Mr Cohen returning. She disliked him as much as she liked his brother. He was ordinary in appearance, smartly commonplace: a neat, pale, respectable Jewish-looking person, in a striped business suit, and his manner was snappy but formal, as if he tried to cover a natural ill-humour by the forms of good feeling. And where his brother swelled and protruded into large shapes, he seemed concerned to give the opposite impression. His hair lay in a smooth black cap; his hands were neatly moving, and weighted on either little finger with a heavy signet ring; his lie lay safely behind a narrow gold chain; a gold watch chain confined his neat little stomach.
Martha returned to her desk as the other girls came in, and spent the afternoon watching them. There was no need to be told (as Mrs Buss made a point of telling her) that this was an easy office to work in. There was no feeling of haste; and if they paused in what they were doing for a chat, or a cigarette, they did not pretend otherwise if one of the partners came through. When Mr Max Cohen entered with work for his secretary, he asked politely, ‘Would you mind doing this for me, when you’ve finished your tea?’ And his secretary finished her tea before even looking to see what he had brought her to do. All this was strange to Martha, although she had not known what she must expect. Perhaps she was remembering what her father had said of his days in an office in England, for it was to escape from that office that he had come farming: ‘I simply couldn’t stick it. Day in and day out, damned routine, and then, thank God, there was the war, and then, after that, going back to the office was nothing but purgatory, sitting at a desk like a mouse in a hole.’ So it may have been that Martha was unconsciously expecting a purgatory, and had now found this pleasant working place; but of course she had not yet so much as lifted her fingers to the typewriter.
Two incidents occurred that first afternoon. At a table near the door where the clients came in sat a young woman whose task it was to take money from debtors. They came in, one after another, white, black and coloured, to pay off small sums on what they owed. The young woman was strictly impersonal; and because of this, Martha’s first impulse towards pity was dulled. But almost immediately after the midday break a shabby woman entered, with a small child on either hand, and began to cry, saying she could not pay what was due and perhaps her creditor would let her off that month? The impersonal young woman argued with her in a warningly low voice, as if to persuade the shabby one to lower hers. But all the typists were watching, and Martha saw they glanced towards Mrs Buss.
Sure enough, it was not very long before the dues collector went to Mrs Buss and said, ‘Can you talk to Mr Cohen? You know, she really does have a hard time, and she’s having another kid, too.’
Mrs Buss said flatly, ‘Well, whose fault is it she has a new kid every year?’
‘But –’
‘I’m not going to ask Mr Cohen, he’ll give in to her again, and anyway she’s a fraud – she was drunk in McGrath’s last night, I saw her.’
The shabby woman began to cry. ‘Let me explain to Mr Cohen, just let me explain,’ she pleaded.
Mrs Buss kept her head stoically down over the typewriter and her fingers drummed angrily, until the door behind her opened and Mr Jasper Cohen came out.
‘What’s all this?’ he demanded mildly.
‘Nothing,’ said Mrs Buss indignantly, ‘nothing at all.’
Mr Cohen looked over the listening heads of his staff to the weeping woman.
‘Mr Cohen,’ she wept, ‘Mr Cohen, you’ve got a good heart, you know I try my best, you can put in a good word for me.’
‘You did promise, you know,’ said Mr Cohen, and then hastily: ‘Very well, don’t cry, I’ll write to our clients. Make a note of it, Mrs Buss.’ And he escaped quickly into his room.
The woman left the office, wiping her eyes, with a triumphant look at Mrs Buss; while Mrs Buss let her hands fall dramatically from her machine, like a pianist at the end of a piece, and exclaimed, ‘There, what did I tell you?’
The dues collector looked positively guilty under that blue and accusing stare, and murmured, ‘Well, he’s got a right to decide.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Buss tragically. ‘Yes, and that’s what always happens. I do my best to protect him, but … Well, when we get into the new offices this sort of thing won’t happen, believe me!’ And she lifted her hands to the keys again.
The second incident was similar. Charlie, the office-boy, came round with a tray of tea, and then went to speak to Mrs Buss, while she let those dedicated hands rest on the keys like someone not prepared to be interrupted.
‘No,’ she said loudly, ‘no, Charlie, it’s no good.’ And she began typing.
Charlie raised his voice over the noise; she typed faster; he cried, ‘Madam!’
She stopped suddenly, in a dramatic silence, glared at him, shouted ‘No!’ and at once rattled on.
Charlie gave an immense, good-natured shrug, and went out. Immediately, Mrs Buss rested her hands, looked around the office, and demanded breathlessly, ‘What do you think of that for cheek?’ The girls laughed sympathetically and, it seemed, did not need to be told why it was cheek.
Martha, who was at sea, looked closely at Charlie when he came back to collect the empty cups. He was a tall and handsome young man, with a dark bronze skin, a small toothbrush moustache, and careless eyes. He was whistling a dance tune under his breath.
Mrs Buss watched him over her jigging hands, and then protested sharply, ‘Charlie!’
‘Yes, madam?’ he answered at once, turning to her.
‘We know you’re a dancing champion, you don’t have to whistle like that,’ she said, without expecting an answer, for she tore a sheet of paper out of her machine and inserted another without looking at him.
Charlie stopped his muted whistle; and then, with his black and gallant eyes fixed on her, sidled past her towards Mr Cohen’s door.
‘It’s all right, I’ll get his cup,’ she said firmly, flushed with anger. She glared at him; he looked back with, it seemed, appreciation of the duel, for his eyes were snapping with amusement.
‘Charlie,’ she said furiously, ‘you’re not going to ask Mr Cohen for that money!’
‘No, madam,’ he agreed, and gave a large and fatalistic shrug. With a humorous look at her, he went out and began a shrill whistle just outside the door.
‘Did you ever see anything like it?’ asked Mrs Buss, faint with indignation. ‘He’d go past me, into Mr Cohen’s office, and ask for an advance!’
Suddenly Martha asked, ‘What does he earn?’ and knew at once she should not have asked, or at least not in that tone of voice.
Mrs Buss said aggressively, ‘He earns five pounds a month. It’s more than he’s worth, by about four pounds. Have you ever heard of an office-boy earning that much? Why, even the head cook at McGrath’s earns only seven! Mr Cohen’s so softhearted …’ She was overcome by inarticulate indignation, and continued to type like a demon.
Martha reflected uneasily that she herself was to earn twelve pounds ten shillings, and an altogether unreasonable protest was aroused in her; for if she supported the complete equality of all races, then she must applaud this small advance towards it. On the other hand, because of her upbringing, she was shocked. She asked the blonde young woman next to her what Charlie did in the office, and was told that he delivered letters by hand, sent others to the post, made the tea and ran errands for the girls in the office.
‘He’s a real character, Charlie is,’ the girl added good-humouredly.
‘Mr Cohen makes a joke. He says, “The two best-dressed men in town are my brother” – that’s Max, you know – “and my office-boy.”’ She looked at Martha to make sure she would laugh, and when Martha did she continued, ‘I like Charlie. He’s much better than most of the niggers, and that’s saying something, isn’t it?’
Martha agreed absent-mindedly that it was, while she argued with the voices of her upbringing. She had never heard of a native being paid more than twenty shillings a month. Her father’s boss-boy earned twenty, after ten years’ service. With half her emotions she commended Mr Cohen for his generosity, both to herself and to Charlie, and with the other she fought down an entirely new fear – new to her, that is: she could not help feeling afraid that the gap between her and Charlie was seven pounds and ten shillings, in hard cash.
At half past four something happened which cannot be described as an incident, since she understood it occurred every day. The girls were covering their typewriters when the door swung open and in came a tall, fair woman, who simply nodded at Mrs Buss and stood waiting. Mrs Buss lifted her telephone receiver.
‘Here’s our beauty,’ muttered the blonde girl to Martha. ‘I wouldn’t mind her clothes, would you? These Jews always give their wives everything they want.’
Well, of course; what could Mr Cohen’s wife be called, if not ‘beauty’? But Martha was troubled by something else – that she was not the only female creature prepared to overlook Mr Cohen’s appearance. It had never entered her head that there could be a Mrs Cohen; but almost immediately the balance was redressed by a fresh conviction of injustice. Mrs Cohen was not, Martha decided, in the least beautiful; whereas Mr Cohen was – in any sense that mattered. Conventionally, she might be called tall, slim and elegant; Martha preferred to describe her as bony, brassyhaired and over-dressed. She wore a clinging white crepe afternoon suit, a white cap with dangling black plumes, and a great deal of jewellery. The jewellery was sound, but colourful. When Mr Cohen came out in answer to Mrs Buss’s call, Martha was still able to feel sorry for him; but she was at once forced to examine this emotion when she understood that all the women around her were feeling the same thing.
‘Poor man,’ said Mrs Buss calmly, as she came pushing her own narrow hips this way and that around the sharp desks, and pulling on black suede gloves. ‘Poor man. Oh, well, it’s not my affair.’ And she went out, at a discreet distance from her employer and his wife, watching them jealously.
Chapter Two (#ulink_3fb564db-f1d0-5bc3-bc16-7a9d5f4df240)
When Martha arrived in the room she was prepared to call her home, her mother and father were there, and she was angry. She had not expected them for at least a week; it seemed to be monstrously unfair that she had been tormented for years by those terrible preparations for the excursions over a seventy-mile stretch of road, and now, it seemed, there was no more necessity for preparations. Mr and Mrs Quest, like anybody else, had ‘come in for the afternoon’. Mr Quest was talking about the Great War with Mrs Gunn, the landlady, when Mrs Quest gave him an opportunity, for she was concerned to get Mrs Gunn to agree that girls were headstrong and unsatisfactory. Martha could hear this talk going on in the back veranda, through the fanlight of her room, which opened on to it. She sulkily refused to join them, but sat on her bed, waiting for what she expected would be a battle.
The room was large, and plainly furnished. The iron bed was low and spread with white, and reminded her of her own. There was simple brown coconut matting on the red cement floor, and a French door opened into a small garden filled with flowers. Beyond the garden lay a main road, and the noise was difficult for a country person who had learned not to hear only the din of thunder, the song of the frogs, the chirping crickets. As she sat waiting on her bed, Martha was conscious of strain. She understood that her eardrums, like separate beings, were making difficult and painful movements to armour themselves against the sound of traffic. There was a quivering sensitiveness inside her ears. A big lorry roaring down the tarmac ripped across tender flesh, or so it felt; the ching-ching of a bicycle bell came sharply, almost as if it were in the room. She sat listening and painfully attentive, and at the same time marked the progress of the conversation next door. Her father was winning Mrs Gunn’s attention; it was becoming a monologue.
‘Yes, that was two weeks before Passchendaele,’ she heard. ‘And I had foreknowledge of it, believe it or not. I wrote to my people, saying I expected to be killed. I felt as if there was a black cloud pressing down on me, as if I was inside a kind of black velvet hood. I was out inspecting the wire – and then the next thing I knew, I was on the hospital ship.’
That these words should be following her still made Martha feel not only resentful but afraid. In spite of herself, even as she isolated each traffic sound in a difficult attempt to assimilate it, even while she looked at the rough and hairy surface of the coconut matting, she was seeing, too, the landscape of devastation, shattered trees, churned and muddy earth, a tangle of barbed wire, with a piece of cloth fluttering from it that had once been part of a man’s uniform. She understood that the roar of a starting car outside had become the sound of an approaching shell, and tried to shake herself free of the compulsion. She was weighted with a terrible, tired, dragging feeling, like a doom. It was all so familiar, so horribly familiar, even to the exact words her father would use next, the exact tone of his voice, which was querulous, but nevertheless held a frightening excitement.
When the door opened and her parents came in, Martha rose to meet them with the energy of one prepared to face the extremities of moral and physical persuasion; but all she heard was a grumbling note in Mrs Quest’s voice as she said, ‘It wasn’t polite of you not to come and have tea when you were asked.’ It was exactly as she might complain of Martha’s rude behaviour to visitors on the farm; and Martha was surprised into silence. ‘Well, dear,’ continued Mrs Quest, briskly moving around the room as if it were her own, ‘I’ve unpacked your things and arranged them, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, and I moved the bed, it was in a draught, and you must be careful to sleep a lot.’ Noticing the look on Martha’s face, she hurried on: ‘And now Daddy and I must go back to the farm, we really hadn’t time to leave it, but you’re such a helpless creature, you look tired, do go to bed early.’
Martha, as usual, pushed away the invading feeling of tiredness and pointed out to herself that her sudden guilt was irrational, since she had not asked them to leave the farm and come in after her. She decided to leave this room at once for another which would be free of her mother’s atmosphere and influence.
Mr Quest was standing at the french door, his back to the women. ‘Mr Gunn must have been an interesting chap,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He was in the Somme country. Must have missed him by two weeks. Get Mrs Gunn to tell you about him some time, Matty, old chap. Died of gas from the war, she says. Pity those War Office blokes never understood that people could be ill because of the war, and it only showed afterwards. He got no compensation, she says. Damned unfair.’ He turned himself around, and his face had put on its absorbed, devoted look. He reached for a bottle in the skirts of his bush shirt – he always refused to change from his farm clothes when he came into town – and stood holding it, helplessly looking around. ‘A glass?’ he asked. Mrs Quest took it from him, measured his dose at the washstand, and he drank it down. ‘Well?’ he asked irritably, ‘it’s quite a way back, you know, with our old car.’
‘Coming,’ said Mrs Quest, guiltily, ‘coming.’ She moved Martha’s things on the dressing table to her own liking, and changed the position of a chair. Then she went across to Martha, who stood stiffly, in nervous hostility, and began patting her shoulders, her hair, her arms, in a series of fussy little pushes, as a bad sculptor might ineffectually push and pat a botched piece of work. ‘You look tired,’ she murmured, her voice sinking. ‘You look tired, you must sleep, you must go to bed early.’
‘May!’ exclaimed Mr Quest irritatedly, and Mrs Quest flew to join him. Martha watched them drive away, the thatched, rattling, string-bound machine jogging through the modern traffic. People turned and smiled indulgently at this reminder that it was a farming country – even, still, a pioneer country. Martha could not manage a smile. She stood tensely in the middle of the room and decided to leave at once.
Mrs Gunn knocked. The knock, a courtesy to which she was not accustomed, soothed Martha, and she said politely, ‘Come in.’
Mrs Gunn was a tall, large-framed woman with abundant loose flesh. She had faded reddish hair, pale, pretty blue eyes, and an air of tired good nature. ‘It was nice to speak to your mother,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t help wondering, a young thing like you by yourself.’
Martha was trying to frame words, which would convey, politely, that she was leaving, and that it was no fault of Mrs Gunn that she must. But Mrs Gunn talked on, and she found herself without the courage to say it.
’… your mother says you don’t eat, and I must make you. I said you were providing for yourself, but I’d do what I could.’
‘There’s no need, Mrs Van Rens –’ Martha stopped, confused. ‘I mean, Mrs Gunn. I eat like a horse.’
Mrs Gunn nodded comfortably. ‘You look as if you had a head on your shoulders. I told her, girls have sense these days. My Rosie was out and about two years before she married, and I never had to raise my voice to her. The thing is you must keep men in their place, so they know from the start they’re not getting something for nothing.’
Martha was ready to be sarcastic at this remark; but Mrs Gunn came over and kissed her, and she was warmed by gratitude into good humour.
‘If you want anything, just come to me. I know young things don’t want to be nagged at, but think of me like a mother.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Van R – Mrs Gunn,’ said Martha gratefully, and Mrs Gunn went out.
Martha gazed around the room with as much dislike as if it had been contaminated. She looked into her drawers, and every crease and fold of her clothing spoke of her mother’s will. But she had paid the rent till the end of the month, and she could not afford to move. She flung all the clothes out onto the floor, and then rearranged them to her own taste, though no outsider would have seen any difference; she pushed the bed back to what she imagined had been its old position, but she was unobservant and did not accurately know what that position had been. Having finished, she was very tired; and although it was early, she undressed, and stood by the door and watched the cars go racing past, while their lights spun over her in blotches and streaks of gold, and over the flowers in the garden, touching them into sudden colour. Beyond the garden and the street, there were black shapes of trees against a dim night sky. It was the park. And beyond, the city; but she imagined its delights in terms of what she had read of London and New York. She dreamed of the moment when she would be invited to join these pleasures, while her eyes remained on the trees and she unconsciously compared their shapes with those of the skyline on the farm; and soon it was as if the farm had stretched itself out, like a long and shadowy arm across the night, and at its end, as in the hollow of a large, enfolding palm, Martha stood like a pigmy and safely surveyed her new life. And when she awoke in the morning and saw the sunlight warm and yellow over the coconut matting, she wondered sleepily if the water-cart brakes had given, for it was making such a noise; and she sat up, while the new room rearranged itself about her; and now her ears had been informed by her brain that this was not the water-cart but a delivery van, they began to ache in protest.
At the office that day, she was left to ‘keep her eyes open’ until after the lunch hour. Then Mr Max Cohen brought her a document to copy. She was so nervous, she had to start afresh three time; and when he came to fetch it, all that had been achieved were the words ‘Memorandum of an Agreement of Sale’ typed raggedly across the top of the sheet. She shrank under his impatient assurance that it did not matter in the least, and she must take her time. Her fingers were heavy and trembling, and her head was thick. To type two pages of his small neat writing into something clean and pleasant to look at seemed to her, just then, an impossibly difficult task. He went home without coming to her desk again; and she flung a dozen sheets of paper into the wastepaper basket, and decided she would come early next morning and do it before anyone else arrived.
Mrs Buss, on her way out, asked, ‘Have you got any certificates?’ Martha said no, she had learned to type at home. Mrs Buss said nothing consoling, but merely nodded absent-mindedly, for her eyes were on the elegant Mrs Jasper Cohen.
Martha left the office so humiliated she could hardly see where she was going. She was filled with a violent revulsion against the law and everything connected with it. What she said to herself was, I won’t spend the rest of my life typing this stupid jargon.
She stood at the corner of the street, with Mr Jasper Cohen’s money – or rather what was left of it – in her handbag, and watched a crowd of carefree young people going into McGrath’s Hotel, and felt sick with envy. Then she crossed the street and went into the offices of the Zambesi News. She was going to see Mr Spur, an old journalist, whom she had known ‘as a child’ – that is to say, she had spent a month’s holiday with him and his wife about four years before. She was in the building about half an hour, and when she came out her face was hot with embarrassment. It had been so painful she could not bear to remember what had happened. What she must remember was that she had no qualifications whatsoever.
She understood, finally, the extent of the favour Mr Cohen was doing her; and next morning she was at her desk in a very chastened frame of mind. Her eyes were certainly opened, but she had no time to use them, for long before that first document was finished, several more arrived on her desk, and it was lunchtime before she knew it. She was very incompetent. She tried to persuade herself that the papers she sent in, neatly clipped and tied with green tape in the form of the exquisite, faultless documents Mrs Buss turned out with such ease, were satisfactory. Mr Max Cohen received them with a noncommittal glance and a nod; and later Martha saw Mrs Buss doing them again. She was given no more. For a whole day she sat idle at her desk, feeling sick and useless, wishing that she could run away, wondering what would happen.
The fair, plump girl, Miss Maisie Gale, who sat next to her said consolingly, ‘Don’t lose any sleep over it. Just do what you can get away with, that’s my motto.’
Martha was offended, and replied with a stiff smile. Later, she was told to go to Mr Jasper Cohen’s office, and she went, while her heart beat painfully.
The ugly man was waiting quietly in his chair. It seemed to Martha that the pale face was paler than ever, and the flat, brownish-mauve lips moved several times before any sound came out. Then he pulled himself together. He settled the ungainly body firmly back in his chair, lifted a pencil with that fat protuberant hand, and said gently, ‘Miss Quest, I think we were mistaken in putting you on to skilled work so soon. I thought you said you had learned to type.’
‘I thought I had,’ said Martha ruefully; and she was conscious that in using that tone she was again trading on the personal relation.
‘Well, well, it doesn’t matter; it couldn’t have been easy, learning by yourself, and I propose you take the following course. Will you go down to the Polytechnic and take lessons in shorthand and typing for a few months, and in the meantime you can work with Miss Gale. You must learn to file too, and it won’t be wasted, in the long run.’
Martha eagerly assented, and at the same time registered the fact that working with Miss Gale was beneath her. She was surprised and flattered, for all the women in the office seemed so immeasurably above her, in their self-assurance and skill, that she saw them through a glowing illusion. She understood, too, that Mr Cohen was now about to give her a lesson, very kindly and tactfully, and she must listen carefully.
‘You see, Miss Quest, you are very young – you won’t mind me saying that, I hope? It is obvious you are intelligent, and – well, if I may put it like this, you’re not considering getting married next week, are you?’ He was smiling, in the hopeful but uncertain way of a person who finds it hard to make amusing remarks; and Martha quickly laughed, and he gratefully joined in. ‘No. Of course not. At eighteen there’s plenty of time. You shouldn’t marry too quickly. In this country I think there’s a tendency – however, that’s not my affair. Well, most girls work in an office simply to pass the time until they get married – nothing wrong with that,’ he hastened to assure her. ‘But my policy – our policy – is, I think, rather unusual: that we do not believe married women make bad workers. Some firms dismiss women as soon as they marry, but you will have noticed that all our senior girls are married.’
Martha saw, with fresh humiliation, that she had been expected to notice things of this sort, and she had not.
‘My policy – our policy – is, that there is no reason why girls should not have a good time and work well too, but I would suggest to you that you don’t get into the way of some girls we have – oh, they’re very useful, and we couldn’t do without them, but they seem to think that because they will get married one day, that is all that can reasonably be expected of them.’ Here Martha glanced quickly at him; there was a resentful note that could have nothing to do with herself. Again Mr Cohen eased his great body in his chair, fingered the pencil, seemed to be on the point of speaking, and then said abruptly, ‘I think that’s all. You will forgive me for making these remarks. I feel, we feel – in short, you have undoubted capacities, Miss Quest, and I hope you will use them, for efficient secretaries are rare. Which is remarkable, when you think of it, since most women these days seem to train to be secretaries?’ On that query he paused and reflected and then said, ‘I hope you don’t feel that being a secretary is not a worth-while career?’
Martha assured him that she wanted to be an efficient secretary, even while she felt quite indignant; she felt herself capable of much more. She thanked him, went back to her desk, and once again sat idle. She was waiting for someone to direct her; then she understood she was now expected to direct herself, and went to Mrs Buss, asking for information about the Polytechnic.
Mrs Buss’s face cleared into a gratified relief that seemed to Martha offensive; and she took a piece of paper from her desk, with clear directions as to classes and times. Then she delivered herself – with a pause between each, for assent – of the following remarks: ‘I’m glad you’ve got some sense … You don’t want to get like these girls here, sitting with their eyes on the clock, just waiting till their boy friends fetch them at half past four, and out all night and then so tired next day they just sit yawning … There’s plenty of work here, believe me, for those with the intention to do it.’ And finally, her china-blue eyes fixed on Martha’s: ‘When you’ve got someone to work for as good as Mr Cohen, then you work your best?’ Martha said yes; but it was not enough. ‘I’ve worked for my living since I was fifteen, and in England till two years ago, and in England girls are expected to be efficient, it’s not like here, where they can get married for the asking, and I’ve never known anyone like Mr Cohen.’ Martha said yes; and Mrs Buss insisted challengingly, ‘He’s got a heart as big as his body,’ and this time Martha said yes with real feeling, and she was released.
And now Martha was able to understand – but only since it had been pointed out to her – the real division in this closely packed mass of women. When Miss Gale leaned over and whispered, like a schoolgirl, ‘Get off easily?’ she replied coldly, ‘I’m going to the Polytechnic,’ and Miss Gale shrugged and looked indifferently away, like one who does not intend to show she feels her cause has been deserted. But Martha looked away from this group she had been put into with envy and admiration for the four secretaries and for the two accountants who sat side by side over their big ledgers. She intended, in fact, to emulate the skilled; and her eyes, when she regarded the complacent Miss Gale, were scornful. These women had in common not that they were younger, or even more attractive, than the others, but a certain air of tolerance; they were paying fee to something whose necessity they entirely deplored.
After work, Martha walked the hundred yards or so to the Polytechnic, which was further down Founders’ Street. It was a low brown building, though now it swarmed with activity; and its front was barricaded by stacked bicycles. Martha, as usual doing nothing by halves, enrolled herself for classes which would take up every evening of her week, and walked home through the park, where the paths already glimmered pale among the darkening trees, her mind filled with visions of herself in Mrs Buss’s place, though they were certainly lit by the highly coloured experimental glow that had coloured earlier visions of herself as a painter, a ballet dancer or an opera singer, for like most people of her age and generation she had already tasted every profession, in mind at least.
When she reached her room, she imagined for a moment she had come to the wrong place, for through the light curtains across the french door she could see a shape she did not know. She hesitantly entered at last, and there stood a young man who asked, ‘Martha Quest? My mother had a letter from your mother and –’ He stopped, and looked appreciatively at Martha; for until then he had been speaking with a politeness that said quite plainly, ‘I’m doing this because I’ve been told to.’
He was a youth of about twenty. Martha, who had known only the physical, open-air men of the district, and the Cohen boys, who were all she had met of the student type, and her brother, who was a student because it was expected of him, found in Donovan Anderson something quite new. He was a rather tall, broad-framed handsome young man, wearing a sharply-cut light summer suit, and a heavy gold signet ring on one hand. She was not observant, but because of this impression of broad-shouldered masculinity she was instinctively looking for resemblances, and her eyes lingered on the way his shirt front caved inwards under the flowing blue tie; for if Billy or her brother had been wearing that suit it would have bulged out, and the sleeves would have been filled with muscle. Looking upwards from the hollow chest, she received from that correctly arranged healthily sunburned face – large nose, square jaw, open brow – an altogether incongruous impression of weakness.
He said gracefully, ‘We were expecting a nice girl from the wide-open spaces, we heard you were sporting and hunted big game.’
At first Martha started at the ‘we’; then she laughed, and averred that she loathed sport of any kind, as if this was a claim to grace in itself.
‘That’s a relief, because I’m ever such an indoor type, and I was expecting to have to take you to something energetic.’
Martha said spitefully that she was surprised he did as he was ordered; to which he returned a politely appreciative laugh, and said, ‘Well, then, I’ll take you to the pictures instead. You must come and meet my mamma. It is what both our mammas would expect.’
Martha agreed that she would like to do this, and it was arranged that it would all take place the following evening – which, incidentally, meant that she must postpone her first lesson in shorthand. They informed each other that they insisted on being called respectively Don and Matty. His mamma, said Donovan, called him Donny, but one knew what mammas were. He most elegantly shook her hand, and told her that she must not be late tomorrow, for if there was one thing he could not endure it was being kept waiting by girls. He then took his leave.
Martha wandered around her room in a state of breathless exhilaration, already picturing Donovan as a lover, but in an extraordinarily romantic light, considering the nature of the books she read. The time between the present and tomorrow evening must be lived through; she felt she could not bear it, and just as she had decided she would go to sleep, in order to dispose of as much of it as possible in oblivion, Mrs Gunn knocked and asked anxiously if she would like some supper. Martha refused, because of the anxious note, which automatically stiffened her resistance. Yet she had hardly eaten since she came to town; she had too little money to ‘waste on food’ – in other words, she was by no means finished with that phase of her life when she was continuously thinking about food, not because she intended to eat any, but because she meant to refuse it. She would think of the next meal due to her according to convention, assess it in terms of flesh, and then nervously pass her hands downwards over her hips, as if stroking their outlines smaller.
Before she went to bed that night, she ironed the dress she intended to wear the following evening. An instinct she did not know she possessed chose it from the point of view of a Donovan, and the same instinct made the downward-stroking movement over hips and thighs appreciative and satisfied. She had slimmed herself during the past two years so that the bones of her pelvis were prominent, and this gave her great pleasure; and she went to bed vowing she must not put on weight.
At the office next day she helped Miss Gale with the filing, and found that she liked her after all; for some reason, there was a flow of sympathy between them, and more than once Mrs Buss looked sharply towards them and they lowered their voices guiltily.
Half past four soon came, and Martha flew home to dress, though Donovan was not expected until six. She annointed and prepared herself with the aid of mirrors large and small, a bathroom next door, and no Mrs Quest likely to interrupt. She bathed, painted her fingernails and – for the first time, and with a delicious sense of sinfulness – her toenails, powdered her body, plucked her eyebrows, which did not need it, and arranged her hair; and all this under the power of that compulsion that seemed to come from outside, as if Donovan’s dark and languid eyes were dictating what she must do, even to the way her hair should lie on her shoulders. For the first time, she knew the delight of dressing for a man: her father never noticed what she wore, unless it was pointed out; her brother had not gone beyond the stage of defensive derision, or at least not with her; and a Billy Van Rensberg was likely to approve anything she wore.
But when Donovan arrived and she presented herself to him (still in the power of that outside necessity), he behaved in a way she had never imagined any man might behave. He looked at her, critically narrowed his eyes, and even walked around her thoughtfully, his head rather on one side. She could not resent it, for it was quite impersonal. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, ‘yes, but …’ He lifted her hair back from her face, studied her anew, then let it fall back, and nodded. To Martha it was an extraordinary sensation, as if he were not only receiving her appearance as an impact, but as if he were, for the moment, herself, and her clothing covered him, and he felt the shape and lines of her dress with the sympathy of his own flesh. It was like being possessed by another personality; it was disturbing, and left her with a faint but pronounced distaste.
Donovan emerged from this prolonged study, saying thoughtfully, ‘You know what this dress needs, my dear? What you need is …’ He went to the wardrobe as if he had been using it for years, flung it open, and searched for something that already existed in his mind. ‘You must buy a black patent belt tomorrow,’ he announced firmly. ‘About an inch and a half wide, with a small, flat buckle.’ And he was right, Martha saw that at once. ‘You must ask my mamma about clothes,’ he continued pleasantly. ‘She’s very good at them. Now come on, she doesn’t like being kept waiting.’ And he led the way to his car.
It was a small open car, dark green, shabby but highly polished and when he climbed into the front seat and sat languidly waiting for her to join him, the man and the car instantly became a unit. ‘Like it?’ he enquired indifferently. ‘Got it for twelve pounds ten last month. We junior civil servants must make do on other people’s leavings.’ Yet he was indifferent because he knew he might be quite satisfied with both himself and the car.
They drove a short way out of town; that is to say, when they had left behind them the avenues of old houses that had been built between 1900 and 1920, there was about half a mile of tree-lined dust track to cover before they came to a signboard which said ‘The Wellington Housing Estate’. Here they turned off on to another dust track which would one day be a street between houses, because the foundations of the houses were already lightly sketched, in cement, in the raw-surfaced earth; and piles of red brick lay everywhere.
‘We got in early and bought the first lot while it was dirt cheap, but it’s already expensive, this is going to be ever such a smart place to live,’ Donovan said; and she saw that he was politely pointing out what things she should admire, as he had done over the car. And so it was when they reached the house, the only completed house, which stood like a narrow brick box, spotted with round windows like portholes, and laced with a great deal of scrolled iron-work. ‘My mamma thought she would like a Spanish house,’ said Donovan, apparently meaning the iron; and again Martha knew she was being instructed.
Inside while they waited for Mrs Anderson, Martha was shown the ground-floor rooms, and found them smart and expensive, as Donovan said they were; and apparently he was satisfied with her response, for her politeness might easily be taken for the same thing as that negligence he was careful to maintain. Now, Martha was adapting herself to Donovan according to that outside pressure which said that she must; and yet this pliability was possible only because something was still informing her, in a small voice but a clear one, that this had nothing to do with her; in fact, it could be said she was so easy and comfortable with him just because of this fundamental indifference.
When they had finally settled in the big drawing room, an incident occurred which was final as far as Martha was concerned. She reached for a book from the big bookcase, to see what kind of people these were, as she always did in a new house, and heard Donovan say, ‘Oh, my dear, it’s no use looking at the books. We have nothing new in the place.’
Martha left her hand on the book, while she turned her stern, derisive eyes on Donovan as if she could not possibly have heard aright. ‘What do you mean, nothing new?’ she inquired, in a voice he had not heard from her and was not likely to, or at any rate, not yet.
‘My mamma forgot to send to England for the new books. All these are last year’s best sellers.’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/doris-lessing/martha-quest-39787545/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Doris Lessing
The opening book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.When we first meet Martha Quest, she is a girl of fifteen living with her parents on a poor African farm. She is eager for life and resentful of the deadening narrowness of home, and escapes to take a job as a typist in the local capital. Here, in the ‘big city’, she encounters the real life she was so eager to know and understand. As a picture of colonial life, ‘Martha Quest’ succeeds by the depth of its realism alone; but always at its centre is Martha, a sympathetic figure drawn with unrelenting objectivity.Martha’s Africa is Doris Lessing’s Africa: the restrictive life of the farm; the atmosphere of racial fear and antagonism; the superficial sophistication of the city. And both Martha and Lessing are Children of Violence: the generation that was born of one world war and came of age in another, whose abrasive relationships with their parents, with one another, and with society are laid bare brilliantly by a writer who understands them better than any other.
Martha Quest
Doris Lessing
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u9d4c9f3b-f246-5141-846c-c6394d8b15c5)
Title Page (#ucec97c03-5655-57d6-bb43-116abcd2b0c9)
Part One (#u100ebef2-87ea-5454-a306-fa6f2345b8e1)
Chapter One (#u93818e59-f201-508e-855a-198b3d7513b5)
Chapter Two (#u50439c9c-3b7c-5146-86fa-274c7192b448)
Chapter Three (#ue2443815-cbde-59f8-98d3-09677ee3e26c)
Part Two (#udca2e38f-721c-5e5c-830b-c59468e77c3a)
Chapter One (#ub2a7fe2d-f739-5027-8f74-31cf7e4c7e40)
Chapter Two (#ud0039cc0-4ce3-5637-b7e9-85e32279f43a)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)
The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)
The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)
Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part One (#ulink_1bc479f3-7d21-5c64-aae0-7ac03a67f01b)
I am so tired of it, and also tired of the future before it comes
– OLIVE SCHREINER
Chapter One (#ulink_b030c388-2b7d-56be-9ef2-a0247e3f2262)
Two elderly women sat knitting on that part of the veranda which was screened from the sun by a golden shower creeper; the tough stems were so thick with flower it was as if the glaring afternoon was dammed against them in a surf of its own light made visible in the dripping, orangecoloured clusters. Inside this coloured barrier was a darkened recess, rough mud walls (the outer walls of the house itself) forming two sides, the third consisting of a bench loaded with painted petrol tins which held pink and white geraniums. The sun splashed liberal gold through the foliage, over the red cement floor, and over the ladies. They had been here since lunchtime, and would remain until sunset, talking, talking incessantly, their tongues mercifully let off the leash. They were Mrs Quest and Mrs Van Rensberg; and Martha Quest, a girl of fifteen, sat on the steps in full sunshine, clumsily twisting herself to keep the glare from her book with her own shadow.
She frowned, and from time to time glanced up irritably at the women, indicating that their gossip made it difficult to concentrate. But then, there was nothing to prevent her moving somewhere else; and her spasms of resentment when she was asked a question, or her name was used in the family chronicling, were therefore unreasonable. As for the ladies, they sometimes allowed their eyes to rest on the girl with that glazed look which excludes a third person, or even dropped their voices; and at these moments, she lifted her head to give them a glare of positive contempt; for they were seasoning the dull staple of their lives – servants, children, cooking – with a confinement or scandal of some kind; and since she was reading Havelock Ellis on sex, and had taken good care they should know it, the dropped voices had the quality of an anomaly. Or rather, she was not actually reading it: she read a book that had been lent to her by the Cohen boys at the station, while Ellis lay, like an irritant, on the top step, with its title well in view. However, there are certain rites in the talk of matrons and Martha, having listened to such talk for a large part of her life, should have learned that there was nothing insulting, or even personal, intended. She was merely expected to play the part ‘young girl’ against their own familiar roles.
At the other end of the veranda, on two deck-chairs planted side by side and looking away over the bush and the mealie fields, were Mr Quest and Mr Van Rensberg; and they were talking about crops and the weather and the native problem. But their backs were turned on the women with a firmness which said how welcome was this impersonal talk to men who lived shut into the heated atmosphere of the family for weeks at a time, with no refuge but the farmwork. Their talk was as familiar to Martha as the women’s talk; the two currents ran sleepily on inside her, like the movements of her own blood, of which she was not conscious except as an ache of irritation when her cramped position made her shift her long, bare and sunburnt legs. Then, when she heard the nagging phrases ‘the Government expects the farmers to …’ and ‘The kaffirs are losing all respect because …’ she sat up sharply; and the irritation overflowed into a flood of dislike for both her parents. Everything was the same; intolerable that they should have been saying the same things ever since she could remember; and she looked away from them, over the veld.
In the literature that was her tradition, the word farm evokes an image of something orderly, compact, cultivated; a neat farm-house in a pattern of fields. Martha looked over a mile or so of bush to a strip of pink ploughed land; and then the bush, dark green and sombre, climbed a ridge to another patch of exposed earth, this time a clayish yellow; and then, ridge after ridge, fold after fold, the bush stretched to a line of blue kopjes. The fields were a timid intrusion on a landscape hardly marked by man; and the hawk which circled in mile-wide sweeps over her head saw the house, crouched on its long hill, the cluster of grass huts which was the native compound huddled on a lower rise half a mile away; perhaps a dozen patches of naked soil – and then nothing to disturb that ancient, down-peering eye, nothing that a thousand generations of his hawk ancestors had not seen.
The house, raised high on its eminence into the blue and sweeping currents of air, was in the centre of a vast basin, which was bounded by mountains. In front, there were seven miles to the Dumfries Hills; west, seven miles of rising ground to the Oxford Range; seven miles east, a long swelling mountain which was named Jacob’s Burg. Behind, there was no defining chain of kopjes, but the land travelled endlessly, without limit, and faded into a bluish haze, like that hinterland to the imagination we cannot do without – the great declivity was open to the north.
Over it all curved the cloudless African sky, but Martha could not look at it, for it pulsed with light; she must lower her eyes to the bush; and that was so familiar the vast landscape caused her only the prickling feeling of claustrophobia.
She looked down at her book. She did not want to read it; it was a book on popular science, and even the title stiffened her into a faint but unmistakable resentment. Perhaps, if she could have expressed what she felt, she would have said that the calm factual air of the writing was too distant from the uncomfortable emotions that filled her; perhaps she was so resentful of her surroundings and her parents that the resentment overflowed into everything near her. She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen, but she was restless because this collection of interesting facts seemed to have so little to do with her own problems. She lifted her eyes and gazed speculatively at Mrs Van Rensberg who had had eleven children.
She was a fat, good-natured, altogether pleasant woman in a neat flowered cotton dress, which was rather full and long, and, with the white kerchief folded at the neck, gave her the appearance of a picture of one of her own grandmothers. It was fashionable to wear long skirts and tie a scarf loosely at the neck, but in Mrs Van Rensberg the fashion arranged itself obstinately into that other pattern. Martha saw this, and was charmed by it; but she was looking at the older woman’s legs. They were large and shapeless, veined purple under the mask of sunburn, and ended in green sandals, through which her calloused feet unashamedly splayed for comfort. Martha was thinking with repugnance, Her legs are like that because she has had so many children.
Mrs Van Rensberg was what is described as uneducated; and for this she might apologize, without seeming or feeling in the slightest apologetic, when a social occasion demanded it – for instance, when Mrs Quest aggressively stated that Martha was clever and would have a career. That the Dutchwoman could remain calm and good-natured on such occasions was proof of considerable inner strength, for Mrs Quest used the word ‘career’ not in terms of something that Martha might actually do, such as doctoring, or the law, but as a kind of stick to beat the world with, as if she were saying, ‘My daughter will be somebody, whereas yours will only be married.’ Mrs Quest had been a pretty and athletic-looking English girl with light-brown hair and blue eyes as candid as spring sunshine; and she was now exactly as she would have been had she remained in England: a rather tired and disappointed but decided matron, with ambitious plans for her children.
Both ladies had been living in this farming district for many years, seventy miles from the nearest town, which was itself a backwater; but no part of the world can be considered remote these days; their homes had the radio, and newspapers coming regularly from what they respectively considered as Home – Tory newspapers from England for the Quests, nationalist journals from the Union of South Africa for the Van Rensbergs. They had absorbed sufficient of the spirit of the times to know that their children might behave in a way which they instinctively thought shocking, and as for the book Martha now held, its title had a clinical sound quite outside their own experience. In fact, Martha would have earned nothing but a good-natured and traditional sigh of protest, had not her remaining on the steps been in itself something of a challenge. Just as Mrs Quest found it necessary to protest, at half-hourly intervals, that Martha would get sunstroke if she did not come into the shade, so she eventually remarked that she supposed it did no harm for girls to read that sort of book; and once again Martha directed towards them a profoundly scornful glare, which was also unhappy and exasperated; for she felt that in some contradictory way she had been driven to use this book as a means of asserting herself, and now found the weapon had gone limp and useless in her hands.
Three months before, her mother had said angrily that Epstein and Havelock Ellis were disgusting. ‘If people dug up the remains of this civilization a thousand years hence, and found Epstein’s statues and that man Ellis, they would think we were just savages.’ This was at the time when the inhabitants of the colony, introduced unwillingly through the chances of diplomacy and finance to what they referred to as ‘modern art’, were behaving as if they had been severally and collectively insulted. Epstein’s statues were not fit, they averred, to represent them even indirectly. Mrs Quest took that remark from a leader in the Zambesia News; it was probably the first time she had made any comment on art or literature for twenty years. Martha then had borrowed a book on Epstein from the Cohen boys at the station. Now, one of the advantages of not having one’s taste formed in a particular school is that one may look at work of an Epstein with the same excited interest as at a Michelangelo. And this is what Martha did. She felt puzzled, and took the book of reproductions to her mother. Mrs Quest was busy at the time, and had never found an opportunity since to tell Martha what was so shocking and disgusting in these works of art. And so with Havelock Ellis.
Now Martha was feeling foolish, even let down. She knew, too, that she was bad-tempered and boorish. She made resolutions day after day that from now on she would be quite different. And yet a fatal demon always took possession of her, so that at the slightest remark from her mother she was impelled to take it up, examine it, and hand it back, like a challenge – and by then the antagonist was no longer there; Mrs Quest was simply not interested.
‘Ach,’ said Mrs Van Rensberg, after a pause, ‘it’s not what you read that matters, but how you behave.’ And she looked with good-natured affection towards Martha, who was flushed with anger and with sunshine. ‘You’ll have a headache, my girl,’ she added automatically; and Martha bent stubbornly to her book, without moving, and her eyes filled with tears.
The two women began discussing, as was natural, how they had behaved when young, but with reservations, for Mrs Van Rensberg sensed that her own experience included a good deal that might shock the English lady; so what they exchanged were not the memories of their behaviour, but the phrases of their respective traditions, which sounded very similar – Mrs Van Rensberg was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church; the Quests, Church of England. Just as they never discussed politics, so they never discussed – but what did they discuss? Martha often reflected that their years-old friendship had survived just because of what had been left out, everything of importance, that is; and the thought caused the girl the swelling dislike of her surroundings which was her driving emotion. On the other hand, since one lady was conservative British and the other conservative Afrikaans, this friendship could be considered a triumph of tact and good feeling over almost insuperable obstacles, since they were bound, by those same traditions, to dislike each other. This view naturally did not recommend itself to Martha, whose standards of friendship were so high she was still waiting for that real, that ideal friend to present himself.
‘The Friend,’ she had copied in her diary, ‘is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas …’ And so down the page to the next underlined sentence: ‘There goes a rumour that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore.’ And the next: ‘Our actual friends are but distant relations of those to whom we pledged.’
And could Mrs Van Rensberg be considered even as a distant relation? Clearly not. It would be a betrayal of the sacred name of friendship.
Martha listened (not for the first time) to Mrs Van Rensberg’s long account of how she had been courted by Mr Van Rensberg, given with a humorous deprecation of everything that might be described (though not by Martha, instinctively obedient to the taboos of the time) as Romance. Mrs Quest then offered an equally humorous though rather drier account of her own engagement. These two heavily, though unconsciously, censored tales at an end, they looked towards Martha, and sighed, resignedly, at the same moment. Tradition demanded from them a cautionary moral helpful to the young, the fruit of their sensible and respectable lives; and the look on Martha’s face inhibited them both.
Mrs Van Rensberg hesitated, and then said firmly (the firmness was directed against her own hesitation), ‘A girl must make men respect her.’ She was startled at the hatred and contempt in Martha’s suddenly raised eyes, and looked for support towards Mrs Quest.
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Quest, rather uncertainly. ‘A man will never marry a girl he does not respect.’
Martha slowly sat up, closing her book as if it were of no more use to her, and stared composedly at them. She was now quite white with the effort of controlling that hatred. She got up, and said in a low tight voice, ‘You are loathsome, bargaining and calculating and …’ She was unable to continue. ‘You are disgusting,’ she ended lamely, with trembling lips. Then she marched off down the garden, and ran into the bush.
The two ladies watched her in silence. Mrs Quest was upset, for she did not know why her daughter thought her disgusting, while Mrs Van Rensberg was trying to find a sympathetic remark likely to be acceptable to her friend.
‘She’s so difficult,’ murmured Mrs Quest apologetically; and Mrs Van Rensberg said, ‘It’s the age, my Marnie’s just as bad.’ She did not know she had failed to find the right remark: Mrs Quest did not consider her daughter to be on a level with Marnie, whom she found in altogether bad taste, wearing grown-up clothes and lipstick at fifteen, and talking about ‘boys’. Mrs Van Rensberg was quite unconscious of the force of her friend’s feeling. She dismissed her strictness with Martha as one of those English foibles; and besides, she knew Marnie to be potentially a sensible woman, a good wife and mother. She continued to talk about Marnie, while Mrs Quest listened with the embarrassment due to a social gaffe, saying ‘Quite’ or ‘Exactly’, thinking that her daughter’s difficulty was caused by having to associate with the wrong type of child, meaning Marnie herself. But the Dutchwoman was unsnubbable, since her national pride was as deep as the Englishwoman’s snobbishness, and soon their conversation drifted back to servants and cooking. That evening, each would complain to her husband – one, with the English articulateness over matters of class, that Mrs Van Rensberg was ‘really so trying’, while the other, quite frankly, said that these rooineks got her down, they were all the same, they thought they owned the earth they walked on. Then, from unacknowledged guilt, they would ring each other up on the district telephone, and talk for half an hour or so about cooking and servants. Everything would continue as usual, in fact.
In the meantime, Martha, in an agony of adolescent misery, was lying among the long grass under a tree, repeating to herself that her mother was hateful, all these old women hateful, every one of these relationships, with their lies, evasions, compromises, wholly disgusting. For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.
After a short time, she grew more composed. A self-preserving nerve had tightened in her brain, and with it her limbs and even the muscles of her face became set and hardened. It was with a bleak and puzzled look that she stared at a sunlit and glittering bush which stood at her feet; for she did not see it, she was seeing herself, and in the only way she was equipped to do this – through literature. For if one reads novels from earlier times, and if novels accurately reflect, as we hope and trust they do, the life of their era, then one is forced to conclude that being young was much easier then than it is now. Did X and Y and Z, those blithe heroes and heroines, loathe school, despise their parents and teachers who never understood them, spend years of their lives fighting to free themselves from an environment they considered altogether beneath them? No, they did not; while in a hundred years’ time people will read the novels of this century and conclude that everyone (no less) suffered adolescence like a disease, for they will hardly be able to lay hands on a novel which does not describe the condition. What then? For Martha was tormented, and there was no escaping it.
Perhaps, she thought (retreating into the sour humour that was her refuge at such moments), one should simply take the years from, let us say, fourteen to twenty as read, until those happier times arrive when adolescents may, and with a perfectly clear conscience, again enjoy themselves? How lucky, she thought, those coming novelists, who would be able to write cheerfully, and without the feeling that they were evading a problem: ‘Martha went to school in the usual way, liked the teachers, was amiable with her parents, and looked forward with confidence to a happy and well-spent life!’ But then (and here she suffered a twisting spasm of spite against those cold-minded mentors who so persistently analysed her state, and in so many volumes), what would they have to write about?
That defensive spite released her, and it was almost with confidence that she again lay back, and began to consider herself. For if she was often resentfully conscious that she was expected to carry a burden that young people of earlier times knew nothing about, then she was no less conscious that she was developing a weapon which would enable her to carry it. She was not only miserable, she could focus a dispassionate eye on that misery. This detached observer, felt perhaps as a clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead, was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station, who had been lending her books for the last two years. Joss Cohen tended towards economics and sociology, which she read without feeling personally implicated. Solly Cohen was in love (there is no other word for it) with psychology; he passionately defended everything to do with it, even when his heroes contradicted each other. And from these books Martha had gained a clear picture of herself, from the outside. She was adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy; British, and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class; female, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past. She was tormented with guilt and responsibility and self-consciousness; and she did not regret the torment, though there were moments when she saw quite clearly that in making her see herself thus the Cohen boys took a malicious delight which was only too natural. There were moments, in fact, when she hated them.
But what they perhaps had not foreseen was that this sternly objective picture of herself merely made her think, no doubt unreasonably, Well, if all this has been said, why do I have to go through with it? If we know it, why do we have to go through the painful business of living it? She felt, though dimly, that now it was time to move on to something new, the act of giving names to things should be enough.
Besides, the experts themselves seemed to be in doubt as to how she should see herself. There was the group which stated that her life was already determined when she still crouched sightless in the womb of Mrs Quest. She grew through phases of fish and lizard and monkey, rocked in the waters of ancient seas, her ears lulled by the rhythm of the tides. But these tides, the pulsing blood of Mrs Quest, sang no uncertain messages to Martha, but songs of anger, or love, or fear or resentment, which sank into the passive brain of the infant, like a doom.
Then there were those who said it was the birth itself which set Martha on a fated road. It was during the long night of terror, the night of the difficult birth, when the womb of Mrs Quest convulsed and fought to expel its burden through the unwilling gates of bone (for Mrs Quest was rather old to bear a first child), it was during that birth, from which Martha emerged shocked and weary, her face temporarily scarred purple from the forceps, that her character and therefore her life were determined for her.
And what of the numerous sects who agreed on only one thing, that it was the first five years of life which laid an unalterable basis for everything that followed? During those years (though she could not remember them), events had occurred which had marked her fatally forever. For the feeling of fate, of doom, was the one message they all had in common. Martha, in violent opposition to her parents, was continually being informed that their influence on her was unalterable, and that it was much too late to change herself. She had reached the point where she could not read one of these books without feeling as exhausted as if she had just concluded one of her arguments with her mother. When a native bearer came hastening over the veld with yet another parcel of books from the Cohen boys, she felt angry at the mere sight of them, and had to fight against a tired reluctance before she could bring herself to read them. There were, at this very moment, half a dozen books lying neglected in her bedroom, for she knew quite well that if she read them she would only be in possession of yet more information about herself, and with even less idea of how to use it.
But if to read their books made her unhappy, those occasions when she could visit them at the store were the happiest of her life. Talking to them exhilarated her, everything seemed easy. She walked over to the kaffir store when her parents made the trip into the station; sometimes she got a lift from a passing car. Sometimes, though secretly, since this was forbidden, she rode in on her bicycle. But there was always an uneasiness about this friendship, because of Mrs Quest; only last week, she had challenged Martha. Being what she was, she could not say outright, ‘I don’t want you to know Jewish shopkeepers.’ She launched into a tirade about how Jews and Greeks exploited the natives worse than anyone, and ended by saying that she did not know what to do with Martha, who seemed bent on behaving so as to make her mother as unhappy as possible. And for the first time that Martha could remember, she wept; and though her words were dishonest, her emotion was not. Martha had been deeply disturbed by those tears.
Yesterday, Martha had been on the point of getting out her bicycle in order to ride in to the station, so badly did she need to see the Cohen boys; when the thought of another scene with her mother checked her. Guiltily, she left the bicycle where it was. And now, although she wanted more than anything else to tell them about her silly and exaggerated behaviour in front of Mrs Van Rensberg, so that they might laugh good-naturedly at it, and restore it to proportion, she could not make the effort to rise from under the big tree, let alone get out the bicycle and go secretly into the station, hoping she would not be missed. And so she remained under the tree, whose roots were hard under her back, like a second spine, and looked up through the leaves to the sky, which shone in a bronze clamour of light. She ripped the fleshy leaves between her fingers, and thought again of her mother and Mrs Van Rensberg. She would not be like Mrs Van Rensberg, a fat and earthy housekeeping woman; she would not be bitter and nagging and dissatisfied like her mother. But then, who was she to be like? Her mind turned towards the heroines she had been offered, and discarded them. There seemed to be a gap between herself and the past, and so her thoughts swam in a mazed and unfed way through her mind, and she sat up, rubbing her stiffened back, and looked down the aisles of stunted trees, over a wash of pink feathery grass, to the red clods of a field which was invisible from the house.
There moved a team of oxen, a plough, a native driver with his long whip, and at the head of the team a small black child, naked except for a loincloth, tugging at the strings which passed through the nostrils of the leaders of the team. The driver she did not like – he was a harsh and violent man who used that whip with too much zest; but the pity she refused herself flooded out and surrounded the black child like a protective blanket. And again her mind swam and shook, like clearing water, and now, instead of one black child, she saw a multitude, and so lapsed easily into her familiar daydream. She looked away over the ploughed land, across the veld to the Dumfries Hills, and refashioned that unused country to the scale of her imagination. There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and the stunted trees, a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its falling flower-bordered terraces. There were splashing fountains, and the sound of flutes; and its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together; and these groups of elders paused, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of the children – the blue-eyed, fair-skinned children of the North playing hand in hand with the bronze-skinned, dark-eyed children of the South. Yes, they smiled and approved these many-fathered children, running and playing among the flowers and the terraces, through the white pillars and tall trees of this fabulous and ancient city …
It was about a year later. Martha was seated beneath the same tree, and in rather the same position, her hands full of leaves which she was unconsciously rubbing to a green and sticky mess. Her head was filled with the same vision, only more detailed. She could have drawn a plan of that city, from the central market place to the four gates. Outside one of the gates stood her parents, the Van Rensbergs, in fact most of the people of the district, forever excluded from the golden city because of their pettiness of vision and small understanding; they stood grieving, longing to enter, but barred by a stern and remorseless Martha – for unfortunately one gets nothing, not even a dream, without paying heavily for it, and in Martha’s version of the golden age there must always be at least one person standing at the gate to exclude the unworthy. She heard footsteps, and turned her head to find Marnie picking her way down the native path, her high heels rocking over the stones.
‘Hey,’ said Marnie excitedly, ‘heard the news?’
Martha blinked her eyes clear of the dream, and said, rather stiffly, ‘Oh, hullo.’ She was immediately conscious of the difference between herself and Marnie, whose hair was waved, who wore lipstick and nail varnish, and whose face was forced into an effect of simpering maturity, which continually vanished under pressure from her innate good sense. Now she was excited she was like a healthy schoolgirl who had been dressing up for fun; but at the sight of the sprawling and undignified Martha, who looked rather like an overgrown child of eleven, with a ribbon tying her lanky blonde hair, and a yoked dress in flowered print, she remembered her own fashionable dress, and sat primly on the grass, placed her black heels together, and looked down at her silk-stockinged legs with satisfaction.
‘My sister’s getting married,’ she announced.
There were five sisters, two already married, and Martha asked, ‘Who, Marie?’ For Marie was next, according to age.
‘No, not Marie,’ said Marnie with impatient disparagement. ‘Marie’ll never get herself a man, she hasn’t got what it takes.’
At the phrase ‘get herself a man,’ Martha flushed, and looked away, frowning. Marnie glanced doubtfully at her, and met a glance of such scorn that she blushed in her turn, though she did not know what for.
‘You haven’t even asked who,’ she said accusingly, though with a timid note; and then burst out, ‘Man, believe it or not, but it’s Stephanie.’
Stephanie was seventeen, but Martha merely nodded.
Damped, Marnie said, ‘She’s doing very well for herself, too, say what you like. He’s got a V-8, and he’s got a bigger farm than Pop.’
‘Doing well for herself’ caused Martha yet another internal shudder. Then the thought flashed across her mind: I criticize my mother for being a snob, but despise the Van Rensbergs with a clear conscience, because my snobbishness is intellectual. She could not afford to keep this thought clear in her mind; the difficult, painful process of educating herself was all she had to sustain her. But she managed to say after a pause, though with genuine difficulty, ‘I’m glad, it will be nice to have another wedding.’ It sounded flat.
Marnie sighed, and she glanced down at her pretty fingernails for comfort. She would have so much liked an intimate talk with a girl of her own age. Or rather, though there were girls of her own age among the Afrikaans community growing up around her father’s farm, she would have liked to be friends with Martha, who she admired. She would have liked to say, with a giggle, that she was sixteen herself and could get a man, with luck, next year, like Stephanie. Finding herself confronted by Martha’s frowning eyes, she wished she might return to the veranda, where the two mothers would be discussing the fascinating details of the courtship and wedding. But it was a tradition that the men should talk to the men, women with women, and the children should play together. Marnie did not consider herself a child, though Martha, it seemed, did. She thought that if she could return by herself to the veranda, she might join the women’s talk, whereas if Martha came with her they would be excluded. She said, ‘My mom’s telling your mom.’
Martha said, with that unaccountable resentment, ‘Oh, she’ll have a wonderful time gossiping about it.’ Then she added quickly, trying to make amends for her ungraciousness, ‘She’ll be awfully pleased.’
‘Oh, I know your mom doesn’t want you to marry young, she wants you to make a career,’ said Marnie generously.
But again Martha winced, saying angrily, ‘Oh she’d love it if I married young.’
‘Would you like it, hey?’ suggested Marnie, trying to create an atmosphere where they might ‘have a good talk’.
Martha laughed satirically and said, ‘Marry young? Me? I’d die first. Tie myself down to babies and housekeeping …’
Marnie looked startled, and then abashed. She remarked defiantly, ‘Mom says you’re sweet on Joss Cohen.’ At the sight of Martha’s face she giggled with fright. ‘Well, he’s sweet on you, isn’t he?’
Martha gritted her teeth, and ground out, ‘Sweet on!’
‘Hell, he likes you, then.’
‘Joss Cohen,’ said Martha angrily.
‘He’s a nice boy. Jews can be nice, and he’s clever, like you.’
‘You make me sick,’ said Martha, reacting, or so she thought, to this racial prejudice.
Again Marnie’s good-natured face drooped with puzzled hurt, and she gave Martha an appealing look. She stood up, wanting to escape.
But Martha slid down a flattened swathe of long grass, and scrambled to her feet. She rubbed the back of her thighs under the cotton dress, saying, ‘Ooh, taken all the skin off.’
Her way of laughing at herself, almost clowning, at these graceless movements, made Marnie uncomfortable in a new way. She thought it extraordinary that Martha should wear such clothes, behave like a clumsy schoolboy, at sixteen, and apparently not mind. But she accepted what was in intention an apology, and looked at the title of the book Martha held – it was a life of Cecil Rhodes – and asked, was it interesting? Then the two girls went together up the native path, which wound under the low scrubby trees, through yellow grass that reached to their shoulders, to the clearing where the house stood.
It was built native style, with mud walls and thatched roof, and had been meant to last for two seasons, for the Quests had come to the colony after seeing an exhibition in London which promised new settlers that they might become rich on maize-growing almost from one year to the next. This had not happened, and the temporary house was still in use. It was a long oval, divided across to make rooms, and around it had been flung out projecting verandas of grass. A square, tin-roofed kitchen stood beside it. This kitchen was now rather tumble down, and the roof was stained and rusted. The roof of the house too had sagged, and the walls had been patched so often with fresh mud that they were all colours, from dark rich red through dulling yellow to elephant grey. There were many different kinds of houses in the district, but the Quests’ was original because a plan which was really suitable for bricks and proper roofing had been carried out in grass and mud and stamped dung.
The girls could see their mothers sitting behind the screen of golden shower; and at the point where they should turn to climb the veranda steps, Martha said hastily, ‘You go,’ and went off into the house, while Marnie thankfully joined the women.
Martha slipped into the front room like a guilty person, for the people on the veranda could see her by turning their heads. When the house was first built, there had been no verandas. Mrs Quest had planned the front of the house to open over the veld ‘like the prow of a ship,’ as she herself gaily explained. There were windows all around it, so that there had been a continuous view of mountains and veld lightly intersected by strips of wall, like a series of framed ‘views’. Now the veranda dipped over them, and the room was rather dark. There were chairs and settees, and a piano on one side, and a dining table on the other. Years ago, when the rugs and chintzes were fresh, this had been a pretty room, with cream-washed walls and smooth black linoleum under the rugs. Now it was not merely faded, but dingy and overcrowded. No one played the piano. The silver teatray that had been presented to Mrs Quest’s grandfather on retirement from his bank stood on the sideboard among bits of rock, nuts and bolts from the ploughs, and bottles of medicine.
When Mrs Quest first arrived, she was laughed at, because of the piano and the expensive rugs, because of her clothes, because she had left visiting cards on her neighbours. She laughed herself now, ruefully, remembering her mistakes.
In the middle of the floor was a pole of tough thornwood, to hold the end of the ridgepole. It had lain for weeks in a bath of strong chemical, to protect it from ants and insects; but now it was riddled with tiny holes, and if one put one’s ear to it there could be heard a myriad tiny jaws at work, and from the holes slid a perpetual trickle of faint white dust. Martha stood beside it, waiting for the moment when everyone on the veranda would be safely looking the other way, and felt it move rockingly on its base under the floor. She thought it typical of her parents that for years they had been reminding each other how essential it was to replace the pole in good time, and, now that the secretly working insects had hollowed it so that it sounded like a drum when tapped, remarked comfortingly, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, the ridgepole never really rested in the fork, anyway.’ And indeed, looking up at the thatch, one could see a clear two inches between the main spine of the roof and its intended support. The roof seemed to be held well enough on the web of light poles which lay under the thatch. The whole house was like this – precarious and shambling, but faithful, for it continued to remain upright against all probability. ‘One day it’ll fall on our heads,’ Mrs Quest would grumble when her husband said, as usual, that they could not afford to rebuild. But it did not fall.
At a suitable moment, Martha slipped into the second room. It was her parents’ bedroom. It was a large square, and rather dark, for there were only two windows. The furniture was of petrol and paraffin boxes nailed together and painted and screened by cretonne. The curtains, originally bought in London, had faded to a yellowish grey. On the thin web of the stuff, which hung limp against the glare, showed a tenacious dark outline of strutting peacocks. There were two large iron beds standing side by side on one wall, a dressing table facing them on the other. Habit had not dulled Martha into blindness of these things, of the shabby neglect of the place. But the family lived here without really living here. The house had been built as temporary, and was still temporary. Next year they would go back to England, or go into town. The crops might be good; they would have a stroke of luck and win the sweepstake; they would find a gold mine. For years Mr and Mrs Quest had been discussing these things; and to such conversations Martha no longer listened, for they made her so irritable she could not stand them. She had seen clearly, when she was about eleven or twelve, that her parents were deluding themselves; she had even reached the stage where she could say, if they really wanted to move, they would. But this cold, exasperated thought had never been worked out, and she still shared her parents’ unconscious attitude, although she repudiated their daydreaming and foolishness, that this was not really her home. She knew that to Marnie, to others of their neighbours, this house seemed disgracefully shabby, even sordid; but why be ashamed of something that one has never, not for a moment, considered as home?
When Martha was alone in this room, and had made sure the doors were closed, she moved carefully to the small square mirror that was nailed to the centre of the window, over the dressing table. She did not look at the things on the dressing table, because she disliked them. For many years, Mrs Quest had been describing women who used cosmetics as fast; then she saw that everyone else did, and bought herself lipstick and nail varnish. She had no instinct for them and they were the wrong colour. Her powder had a musty, floury smell, like a sweet, rather stale cake. Martha hastily put the lid on the box and slipped it into a drawer, so as to remove the smell. Then she examined herself in the mirror, leaning up on her toes, for it was too high; Mrs Quest was a tall woman. She was by no means resigned to the appearance her mother thought suitable. She spent much time at night, examining herself with a hand mirror; she sometimes propped the mirror by her pillow, and, lying beside it, would murmur like a lover, ‘Beautiful, you are so beautiful.’ This happened when Mrs Quest had made one of her joking remarks about Martha’s clumsiness, or Mr Quest complained that girls in this country matured so early.
She had a broad but shapely face, with a pointed chin, severe hazel eyes, a full mouth, clear straight dark brows. Sometimes she would take the mirror to her parents’ bedroom, and hold it at an angle to the one at the window, and examine herself, at this double remove, in profile; for this view of herself had a delicacy her full face lacked. With her chin tilted up, her loose blonde hair falling back, her lips carefully parted in an eager expectant look, she possessed a certain beauty. But it seemed to her that her face, her head, were something quite apart from her body; she could see herself only in sections, because of the smallness of the mirror. The dresses her mother made looked ugly, even obscene, for her breasts were well grown, and the yokes emphasized them, showing flattened bulges under the tight band of material; and the straight falling line of the skirt was spoiled by her full hips. Her mother said that girls in England did not come out until at the earliest sixteen, but better still eighteen, and girls of a nice family wore dresses of this type until coming out. That she herself had not ‘come out’, and that her family had not by many degrees reached that stage of niceness necessary to coming out, was not enough to deflect her. For on such considerations is the social life of England based, and she was after all quite right in thinking that if only she had married better, or if only their farming had been successful, it would have been possible to arrange with the prosperous branch of the family that Martha should come out. So Martha’s sullen criticisms of her snobbishness had no effect at all; and she would smooth the childish dresses down over Martha’s body, so that the girl stood hunched with resentment, and say with an embarrassed coyness, ‘Dear me, you are getting a pouter pigeon, aren’t you?’
Once, Mrs Van Rensberg, watching this scene, remarked soothingly, ‘But, Mrs Quest, Martha has a nice little figure, why shouldn’t she show it?’ But outwardly the issue was social convention, and not Martha’s figure; and if Mrs Van Rensberg said to her husband that Mrs Quest was going the right way to make Martha ‘difficult’ she could not say so to Mrs Quest herself.
This afternoon was a sudden climax after a long brooding underground rebellion. Standing before the mirror, she took a pair of scissors and severed the bodice from the skirt of her dress. She was trying to make the folds lie like Marnie’s, when the door suddenly opened, and her father came in. He stopped, with an embarrassed look at his daughter, who was naked, save for a tiny pair of pink drawers; but that embarrassment was having it both ways, for if Martha was still a child, then one could look at her naked.
He said gruffly, ‘What are you doing?’ and went to a long cupboard beside his bed, formed of seven petrol boxes, one above another, painted dark green, and covered by a faded print curtain. It was packed with medicine bottles, crammed on top of each other so that a touch might dislodge them into an avalanche. He said moodily, ‘I think I’ll try that new stuff, I’ve a touch of indigestion,’ and tried to find the appropriate bottle. As he held them up to the light of the window, one after another, his eyes fell on Martha, and he remarked, ‘Your mother won’t like you cutting her dresses to pieces.’
She said defiantly, ‘Daddy, why should I wear dresses like a kid of ten?’
He said resentfully, ‘Well, you are a kid. Must you quarrel all the time with your mother?’
Again the door swung in, banging against the wall, and Mrs Quest entered, saying, ‘Why did you run off, Martha, they wanted to tell you about Stephanie, it really is rude of you –‘ She stopped, stared, and demanded, ‘Whatever are you doing?’
‘I’m not wearing this kind of dress any more,’ said Martha, trying to sound calm, but succeeding only in her usual sullen defiance.
‘But, my dear, you’ve ruined it, and you know how badly off we are,’ said Mrs Quest, in alarm at the mature appearance of her daughter’s breasts and hips. She glanced at her husband, then came quickly across the room, and laid her hands on either side of the girl’s waist, as if trying to press her back into girlhood. Suddenly Martha moved backwards, and involuntarily raised her hand; she was shuddering with disgust at the touch of her own mother, and had been going to slap her across the face. She dropped her hand, amazed at her own violence; and Mrs Quest coloured and said ineffectually, ‘My dear …’
‘I’m sixteen,’ said Martha, between set teeth, in a stifled voice; and she looked towards her father, for help. But he quickly turned away, and measured medicine into a glass.
‘My dear, nice girls don’t wear clothes like this until –’
‘I’m not a nice girl,’ broke in Martha, and suddenly burst into laughter.
Mrs Quest joined her in a relieved peal, and said, ‘Really my dear, you are ridiculous.’ And then, on a more familiar note, ‘You’ve spoiled that dress, and it’s not fair to Daddy, you know how difficult it is to find money …’ She stopped again, and followed the direction of Martha’s eyes. Martha was looking at the medicine cupboard. Mrs Quest was afraid that Martha might say, as she had said to her, that there must be hundreds of pounds worth of medicines in that cupboard, and they had spent more on Mr Quest’s imaginary diseases than they had spent on educating her.
This was, of course, an exaggeration. But it was strange that when Martha made these comments Mrs Quest began arguing about the worth of the medicines: ‘Nonsense, dear, you know quite well it can’t be hundreds of pounds.’ She did not say, ‘Your father is very ill.’ For Mr Quest was really ill, he had contracted diabetes three or four years before. And there was an episode connected with this that neither Martha nor Mrs Quest liked to remember. One day, Martha was summoned from her classroom at school in the city to find Mrs Quest waiting for her in the passage. ‘Your father’s ill,’ she exclaimed, and then, seeing that Martha’s face expressed only: Well, there’s nothing new in that, is there?, added hastily, ‘Yes, really, he’s got diabetes, he must go to the hospital and have tests.’ There was a long silence from Martha, who at length muttered, like a sleep-walker, ‘I knew it.’ Almost the moment these words were out, she flushed with guilt; and at once she hastened to the car, where her father sat, and both women fussed over him, while Mr Quest, who was very frightened, listened to their assurances.
When Martha remembered that phrase, which had emerged from her depths, as if it had been waiting for the occasion, she felt uneasy and guilty. Secretly, she could not help thinking, He wanted to be ill, he likes being ill, now he’s got an excuse for being a failure. Worse than this, she accused her mother, in her private thoughts, of being responsible.
The whole business of Mr Quest’s illness aroused such unpleasant depths of emotion between mother and daughter that the subject was left alone, for the most part; and now Mrs Quest said hastily, moving away to the window, ‘You’re upsetting your father, he worries about you.’ Her voice was low and nagging.
‘You mean you worry about me,’ said Martha coldly, unconsciously dropping her voice, with a glance at her father. In a half-whisper she said, ‘He doesn’t even notice we’re here. He hasn’t seen us for years …’ She was astounded to find that her voice shook, she was going to cry.
Mr Quest hastily left the room, persuading himself that his wife and daughter were not quarrelling, and at once Mrs Quest said in a normal voice, ‘You’re a worry to us. You don’t realize. The way you waste money and –‘
Martha cut it short, by walking out of the room and into her own. The door did not lock, or even fasten properly, for it hung crooked. It had been formed of planks, by a native carpenter, and had warped in the rainy seasons, so that to shut it meant a grinding push across a lumpy and swelling lintel. But though it did not lock, there were moments when it invisibly locked, and this was one of them. Martha knew her mother would not come in. She sat on the edge of her bed and cried with anger.
This was the pleasantest room of the house, a big square room, freshly whitewashed, and uncrowded. The walls rose clear to the roof, which slanted down on either side of the ridgepole in a gentle sweep of softly glistening thatch, which had turned a greyish gold with the years. There was a wide, low window that looked directly over a descent of trees to an enormous red field, and a rise on the other side, a fresh parklike bush – for it had never been cut to feed mine furnaces, as had most of the trees on the farm – and beyond this slope rose the big mountain, Jacob’s Burg. It was all flooded with evening sunlight. Sunset: the birds were singing to the day’s end, and the crickets were chirping the approach of night. Martha felt tired, and lay on her low iron bedstead, whose lumpy mattress and pillows had conformed comfortably to the shape of her body. She looked out past the orange-tinted curtains to the sky, which was flooded with wild colours. She was facing, with dubious confidence, what she knew would be a long fight. She was saying to herself, I won’t give in. I won’t; though it would have been hard for her to define what it was she fought.
And in fact the battle of the clothes had begun. It raged for months, until poor Mr Quest groaned and went out of the room whenever the subject was raised, which was continuously, since it had become a focus for the silent struggle between the women, which had nothing to do with clothes, or even with ‘niceness’.
Mr Quest thought of himself as a peace-loving man. He was tall and lean and dark, of slow speech and movement; he was handsome too, and even now women warmed to him, and to the unconscious look of understanding and complicity in his fine, dark eyes. For in that look was a touch of the rake; and at these moments when he flirted a little with Mrs Van Rensberg, he came alive; and Mrs Quest was uneasy, and Martha unaccountably rather sad, seeing her father as he must have been when he was young. His good looks were conventional, even dull, save for his moments of animation. And they were rare, for if Mr Quest was a rake, he did not know it.
When Mrs Quest said teasingly, but with an uneasy undertone, ‘Mrs Van Rensberg, poor soul, got quite flustered this afternoon, the way you flirted with her,’ Mr Quest said, rather irritated, ‘What do you mean, I flirted? I was only talking for politeness’ sake.’ And he really believed it.
What he liked best was to sit for hours on end in his deck-chair on the veranda, and watch the lights and shadows move over the hills, watch the clouds deploying overhead, watch the lightning at night, listen to the thunder. He would emerge after hours of silence, remarking, ‘Well, I don’t know, I suppose it all means something’; or ‘Life is a strange business, say what you like.’ He was calm, even cheerful, in his absent-minded way, as long as he was not disturbed, which meant these days, as long as he was not spoken to. At these moments he became suffused with angry irritation; and now both women were continually appealing for his support, and he would reply helplessly, ‘For heaven’s sake, what is there to quarrel for? There isn’t anything to quarrel about.’ When his wife came to him secretly, talking insistently until he had to hear her, he shouted in exasperation, ‘Well, if the child wants to make herself ridiculous, then let her, don’t waste your time arguing.’ And when Martha said helplessly, ‘Do talk to her, do tell her I’m not ten years old any longer,’ he said, ‘Oh, Lord, do leave me alone, and anyway, she’s quite right, you’re much too young, look at Marnie, she makes me blush wriggling around the farm in shorts and high heels.’ But this naturally infuriated Martha, who did not envisage herself in the style of a Marnie. But the women could not leave him alone, several times a day they came to him, flushed, angry, their voices querulous, demanding his attention. They would not leave him in peace to think about the war, in which he had lost his health, and perhaps something more important than health; they would not leave him to dream tranquilly about the future, when some miracle would transport them all into town, or to England; they nagged at him, as he said himself, like a couple of darned fishwives! Both felt that he let them down, and became irritable against him, so that at such times it was as if this very irritation cemented them together, and against him. But such is the lot of the peacemakers.
Chapter Two (#ulink_213ea73b-619e-58c9-a8f5-41bbedcad7a7)
Early in her sixteenth year, Martha was expected to pass the matric – it goes without saying, quite brilliantly. She did not even sit the examination; and it was not the first time she had withdrawn from a situation through circumstances which it occurred to no one, particularly Martha herself, to call anything but bad luck. At eleven, for instance, there had been just such a vital examination, and she had become ill the week before. She was supposed to be exceptionally musical, but by some fatality was always prevented from proving it by gaining the right number of marks. She was prepared for confirmation three times, and in the end the whole thing was allowed to drop, for it appeared that in the meantime she had become an agnostic. And now here was this important examination. For months Mrs Quest was talking about university and scholarships, while Martha listened, sometimes eagerly, but more often writhing with embarrassment. A week before the vital date, Martha got pink eye, which happened to be raging through the school. Not a very serious affliction, but in this case it appeared Martha’s eyes were weakened.
It was October, the month of heat and flowers, and dust and tension. October: the little town where Martha was at school was hung with flowers, as for a festival. Every street was banked with purple-blooming trees, the jacarandas held their airy clouds of blossom over every sidewalk and garden; and beneath them blew, like a descant, the pale pink-and-white bauhinias; and behind, like a deep note from the trumpet, the occasional splash of screaming magenta where a bougainvillaea unloaded its weight of colour down a wall. Colour and light: the town was bombarded by light, the heat beat down from a whitish sky, beat up from the grey and glittering streets, hung over the roofs in shimmering waves. The greens of the foliage were deep and solid and shining, but filmed with dust; like neglected water where debris gathers. As one walked past a tree, the light shifted glittering from facet to facet of a branch or leaf. How terrible October is! Terrible because so beautiful, and the beauty springs from the loaded heat, the dust, the tension; for everyone watches the sky, and the heavy trees along the avenues, and the sullen clouds, while for weeks nothing happens; the wind lifts an eddy of dust at a street corner, and subsides, exhausted. One cannot remember the smell of flowers without the smell of dust and petrol; one cannot remember that triumphant orchestra of colour without the angry, white-hot sky. One cannot remember … Afterwards Martha remembered that her eyes had ached badly, then they closed and festered, and she lay in half-darkness making jokes about her condition because she was so afraid of going blind. She was even more afraid of her fear, because nothing could have been more absurd, since half the girls in the school were similarly afflicted. It was merely a question of waiting till her eyes grew better. She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what? She sat and sniffed painfully at the weighted air, as if it were dealing her blows like an invisible enemy. Also, there was the examination to be taken; she always relied on intensive study during the last fortnight before an examination, for she was the kind of person with a memory that holds anything, almost photographically, for about a month; afterwards what she had learned disappeared as if she had never known it. Therefore, if she took the examination, she would probably pass, but in a mediocre way.
Mrs Quest was told that her daughter had pink eye. Then she got a letter from Martha, a very hysterical letter; then another, this time flat and laconic. Mrs Quest went into town, and took her daughter to an oculist, who tested her and said there was nothing wrong with the eyes. Mrs Quest was very angry and took her to another oculist; the anger was the same as that she directed towards those doctors who did not immediately accept her diagnoses of her husband’s condition. The second oculist was patient and ironical and agreed to everything Mrs Quest said.
Curious that Mrs Quest, whose will for years had been directed towards Martha distinguishing herself – curious that she should accept those damaged eyes so easily, even insist that they were permanently injured when Martha began to vacillate. For as soon as Mrs Quest arrived in town and took the situation in hand, Martha found herself swept along in a way she had not foreseen. If one can use the word ‘see’ in connection with anything so confused and contradictory. The end of it was that Martha went back to the farm – ‘to rest her eyes,’ as Mrs Quest explained to the neighbours, with a queer pride in the thing that made Martha uneasy.
So here was Martha at home, ‘resting her eyes’ but reading as much as ever. And how curious were the arguments between the two women over this illogical behaviour. For Mrs Quest did not say, ‘You are supposed to have strained your eyes, why are you reading?’ She made such remarks as ‘You do it on purpose to upset me!’ Or ‘Why do you have to read that kind of book?’ Or ‘You are ruining your whole life, and you won’t take my advice.’ Martha maintained a stubborn but ironical silence, and continued to read.
So here was Martha, at sixteen, idle and bored, and sometimes secretly wondering (though only for a moment, the thought always vanished at once) why she had not sat that examination, which she could have passed with such ease. For she had gone up the school head of her class, without even having to work. But these thoughts could not be clearly faced, so she shut them out. But why was she condemning herself to live on this farm, which more than anything in the world she wanted to leave? The matric was a simple passport to the outside world, while without it escape seemed so difficult she was having terrible nightmares of being tied hand and foot under the wheels of a locomotive, or struggling waist-deep in quicksands, or eternally climbing a staircase that moved backwards under her. She felt as if some kind of spell had been put on her.
Then Mrs Quest began saying that Marnie had just passed the matric, and she said it unpleasantly: Look, if she can pass it, why not you?
Martha did not want to see Marnie, and it was easy to avoid doing so, for the Van Rensbergs and the Quests were drifting apart. It was more than one of those inexplicable changes of feeling between neighbours; there was a good reason for it. Mr Van Rensberg was becoming violently nationalist, and Mrs Van Rensberg had an apologetic look on her face when she saw Mrs Quest at the station. And so, by a natural reaction, the Quests began saying, ‘These damned Afrikaners,’ although the two families had been friends, shelving the question of nationality for so many years.
Martha did not want to think of these things, she was turned in on herself, in a heavy trancelike state. Afterwards she was to think of this time as the worst in her life. What was so frightening was this feeling of being dragged, being weighted. She did not understand why she was acting against her will, her intellect, everything she believed. It was as if her body and brain were numbed.
There was nothing to do. The farm lay about her like a loved country which refused her citizenship. She repeated the incantatory names of childhood like a spell which had lost its force. The Twenty Acres, the Big Tobacco Land, the Field on the Ridge, the Hundred Acres, the Kaffir Patch, the Bush by the Fence, the Pumpkin Patch – these words became words; and, walking by herself across the Twenty Acres, which was bounded on three sides by a straggle of gum trees (a memory of her father’s afforestation phase), a patch of sloping land tinted pink and yellow, full of quartz reefs and loose white pebbles, she said to herself scornfully, Why Twenty Acres? It’s about twelve acres. Why the Hundred Acres, when it is only seventy-six? Why has the family always given large-sounding names to things ordinary and even shabby? For everything had shrunk for her. The house showed as if an unkind light had been shone on it. It was not only shabby, it was sordid. Everything decayed and declined, and leaned inwards.
And, worse, far worse, she was watching her father with horror, for he was coming to have, for her, a fatal lethargy of a dream-locked figure. He had the look of a person half claimed by sleep. He was middle-aged, she told herself, neither young nor old; he was in the long middle period of life when people do not change, but his changelessness was imposed, not by a resisting vigour but by – what? He was rising late in the morning, he dreamed over his breakfast, wandered off into the bedroom to test himself for his real disease and for various imaginary ones; returned early from the farmwork to lunch, slept after it, and for a longer time every day, and then sat immobile in his deck-chair, waiting for the sunset. After it, supper – a calculatedly healthy meal – and an early bed. Sleep, sleep, the house was saturated by it; and Mrs Quest’s voice murmured like the spells of a witch, ‘You must be tired, darling; don’t overtire yourself, dear.’ And when these remarks were directed at Martha, she felt herself claimed by the nightmare, as if she were standing beside her father; and, in fact, at the word ‘tired’ she felt herself tired and had to shake herself.
‘I will not be tired,’ she snapped to her mother, ‘it’s no good trying to make me tired’: extraordinary words; and even more extraordinary that Mrs Quest did not question them. Her face fell in patient and sorrowful lines, the eternal mother, holding sleep and death in her twin hands like a sweet and poisonous cloud of forgetfulness – that was how Martha saw her, like a baneful figure in the nightmare in which she herself was caught.
But sometimes their arguments were more sensible. ‘You are terribly unfair to your father,’ Mrs Quest complained. ‘He’s ill, he’s really ill.’
‘I know he’s ill,’ said Martha, miserably, feeling guilty. Then she roused herself to say, ‘Look at Mr Blank, he’s got it, too, he’s quite different.’ Mr Blank, over the other side of the district, had the same disease, and much more seriously than Mr Quest, and led an active life, as if this business of injecting oneself with substitute gland juices once a day was on the same level as cleaning one’s teeth or making a point of eating fruit for breakfast. But Mr Quest was completely absorbed in the ritual of being ill, he talked of nothing else – his illness and the war, the war and illness; it was as if a twin channel drove across his brain, and if his thoughts switched from one subject, they must enter the other, like a double track leading to the same destination.
It even seemed to Martha that her father was pleased that the Van Rensbergs no longer visited them, because with Mr Van Rensberg he talked about the farm, while with Mr McDougall, who took his place, he shared memories of the trenches.
Martha, coming down the veranda, a silent and critical figure, would see her father at one end, leaning back in his deck-chair like a contemplative philosopher, and hear his voice: ‘We were out in no man’s land, six of us, when the star shells went up, and we saw we weren’t three paces from the Boche trenches and …’
At the other end of the veranda, Mrs Quest was talking to Mrs McDougall. ‘That’s when we got the wounded in from Gallipoli and …’
Martha listened, absorbed in these twin litanies of suffering in spite of herself, for they been murmuring down her childhood as far back as she could remember, and were twined with her deepest self. She was watching, fearfully, the effect on herself of the poetry of suffering; the words ‘no man’s land’, ‘star shells’, ‘Boche’, touched off in her images like those of poetry; no man’s land was the black and wasted desert between the living forces; star shells exploded in coloured light, like fireworks, across her brain, drenched in reminiscence; Boche was fearful and gigantic, nothing human, a night figure; the tripping word ‘Gallipoli’ was like a heroic dance. She was afraid because of the power of these words, which affected her so strongly, who had nothing to do with what they stood for.
On one such afternoon, when she was standing on the steps, listening, her father called out to her, ‘Matty, did I ever tell you about –’ and she said ungraciously, but with discomfort, ‘Quite a thousand times, I should think.’
He jerked up his head and stared at her, and on to his face came that look of baffled anger. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ he said. ‘We came out of the trenches, and then suddenly the war was bad form. The Great Unmentionable, that’s what you called it.’
‘I didn’t call it anything,’ she remarked at last, sullenly humorous.
She moved away, but he called after her, ‘All you pacifists, there were pacifists before the last war, but when it started, you all fought. You’ll fight, too, you’ll see.’
Martha had never thought of herself as a pacifist, but it seemed she was one: she played this part against her father’s need, just as, for him, she was that group of people in the Twenties who refused to honour the war, although the Twenties were the first decade of her life, and she could hardly remember them. She was creating them, however, for herself, through reading, and because of this, the mere sound of the word young, which had apparently been some sort of symbol or talisman during that decade, sprung in her a feeling of defiance and recklessness.
Similarly, when Mr Quest complained about the international ring of Jews who controlled the world (which he had taken to doing lately, after reading some pamphlet sent to him through the post), Martha argued against him, in the most reasonable and logical manner; for one does not learn so young that against some things reason is powerless. And when Mrs Quest said that all the kaffirs were dirty and lazy and inherently stupid, she defended them. And when both parents said that Hitler was no gentleman, an upstart without principles, Martha found herself defending Hitler too; it was this which made her think a little and question her feeling of being used, her conviction that when her parents raised their voices and argued at her, on a complaining and irritable note, insisting that there was going to be another war with Germany and Russia soon (this was at a time when everyone was saying another war was impossible, because whom would it benefit?), this new war was in some way necessary to punish her, Martha, who talked of the last one so critically.
Jonathan Quest, the younger brother, came home for the holidays from his expensive school, like a visitor from a more prosperous world. For the first time, Martha found herself consciously resenting him. Why, she asked herself, was it that he, with half her brains, should be sent to a ‘good school’, why was it he should inevitably be given the advantages? There was something uneasy in this criticism, for she had been telling her mother fiercely that nothing would induce her to go to a snob school, even if her eyes did get better. She was becoming aware of several disconnected strands of her thinking. And this was brought to a climax by Jonathan himself. He was a simple, good-natured boy, very like his father to look at, who spent his holidays visiting the neighbouring farmers, riding in to the station to visit Socrates the Greek, and the Cohen family at the little kaffir store. He was on the best of terms with everyone. But it struck Martha as unjust that this brother of hers who despised the Afrikaners (or rather, who took up the orthodox British attitude towards them, which was the same thing) should spend the day at the Van Rensbergs’ house like a second son, and drop in for a chat with the Cohen brothers as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Martha asked him sarcastically. ‘How do you reconcile the Jews ruining the world with going to see Solly and Joss?’
Jonathan looked uncomfortable and said, ‘But we’ve known them all our lives.’
When she looked pointedly quizzical, he said, ‘But you never go and see them at all.’
‘That’s not because I feel the way you do.’
Jonathan was embarrassed, because he would not have said he felt any way rather than another; he merely repeated what his parents said, and what he had heard at school. ‘Well, if you think Hitler all right, how do you reconcile that?’
‘But I never said he was all right, all I said was –’ She stopped and blushed; and it was his turn to look quizzical. It was true that all she had said was that Hitler’s being an upstart was no criticism of his capabilities, but in this household it was as good as a defence.
She began a long rational argument; he refused to argue, merely teasing her, ‘Matty’s lost her temper, Matty’s lost her temper,’ singing it like a child.
‘You’re nothing but a baby,’ she concluded scornfully, which was how their arguments always ended, and she turned away. Now, that act of turning away implies something one turns towards – and she picked up a book, at random, from the bookcase. This was also a familiar act. How many times had she not simply reached for the nearest book, as if to remark, ‘I have authority for what I say’?
It occurred to her that the phrase ‘Martha is a great reader’ was being used by herself exactly as her mother used it, and with as little reason. For what was she reading? She read the same books over and over again, in between intervals of distracted daydreaming, in a trance of recognition, and in always the same place, under the big tree that was her refuge, through which the heat pumped like a narcotic. She read poetry, not for the sense of the words, but for the melodies which confirmed the rhythm of the moving grasses and the swaying of the leaves over her head, or that ideal landscape of white cities and noble people which lay over the actual vistas of harsh grass and stunted trees like a golden mirage.
She went through the house searching for something different. It was full of books. Her own room had shelves packed with fairy stories from her childhood, and with poetry. In the living room, her parents’ bookcases were filled with the classics, Dickens and Scott and Thackeray and the rest, inherited from prosperous Victorian households. These she had read years before, and she now read them again, and with a feeling of being starved. One might equate the small black child with Oliver Twist – but what then? There were also, lying everywhere, books on ‘politics’ in her parents’ sense of the word, such as the memoirs of Lloyd George, or histories of the Great War. None of these seemed to have any reference to the farm, to the gangs of native labour, to what was described in the newspapers, or even to Mein Kampf, which had started this restless condition of mind.
But one day, slipped behind the rows of dusty books, she found a volume of H G Wells, and, as she held it in her hand, was very conscious of a dull feeling of resistance, a disinclination. It was so strong that she nearly put it down and reached as usual for Shelley or for Whitman; then she became conscious of what she was doing and stood wondering at herself. For she had felt this before. She looked at the book again. It was the Concise History of the World, and the name on the flyleaf was ‘Joshua Cohen’. Now, she had dropped her childish friendship with the Cohen boys from the moment Marnie had said, ‘Joss Cohen is sweet on you.’ She missed them. And yet she could not face them. At first it was because the relief of escaping the barrage of criticism was so great: there was no longer any necessity to read their books, examine her own ideas. Recently it had been because of some obscure and unadmitted shame about her strained eyes. She took the book to her refuge, the tree, and read it through; and wondered why it was that she could read the most obscure and complicated poetry with ease, while she could not read the simplest sort of book on what she called ‘facts’ without the greatest effort to concentration. She brought herself to decide she would make an effort to renew that friendship with the Cohens, for there was no one else who could help her. She wanted them to tell her what she must read. For there are two ways of reading: one of them deepens and intensifies what one already knows; from the other, one takes new facts, new views to weave into one’s life. She was saturated with the first, and needed the second. All those books she had borrowed, two years before – she had read them, oh yes; but she had not been ready to receive them.
And now what was she to do? For she had behaved very badly to the Cohen boys. She saw them at the station sometimes. Now, to avoid seeing people one has known for years is something of a feat, and Martha achieved it by the simple device of saying to herself, They wouldn’t think that of me – ‘that’ being anti-Semitism – and smiling at them constrainedly, like an acquaintance. They nodded back, and left her alone, as she apparently desired.
The village held about fifty souls, and had sprung up untidily around the first store, owned by Socrates the Greek, who was known to the farmers as Sock. There was a garage, run by a Welshman; a farmers’ hall; the station beside the railway, a long tin-roofed shack on wooden piles; a ganger’s cottage; and a hotel, also owned by Socrates, in which there was a bar, which was the real social centre of the district. These buildings were scattered over a few acres of red dust; and along the railway line was a stretch of brownish water, where ducks swam until Mrs Socrates came out to catch one for the hotel dinner, and where the oxen from the farmers’ wagons were unyoked while the wagons were loaded, and stood knee-deep in green scum, raising their eyes tranquilly as the train thundered past over their heads. There were two trains a week, and twenty miles away was the end of the line, for beyond was the long ascent to the great escarpment at the verge of the Zambesi Valley. But there was a great deal of road traffic, and all day the cars stood in the dust outside the bar.
Years before, the Quests used to make the trip in to the station twice a week, for Mrs Quest was sociable; but Mr Quest disliked being disturbed so much that now they went once a month, and Mrs Quest must begin fighting with her husband at least a week before.
‘Alfred,’ she would say, with a sort of offhand defiance, ‘remember, we are going in to the station tomorrow.’
He did not hear. Or rather, he raised vaguely irritable eyes towards her, and dropped them again, hunching his shoulders against her voice.
‘Do listen, dear. I told you, we are out of flour, and the boys need new aprons, and the sugar’s practically finished.’
He kept his eyes lowered, and his face was stubborn.
‘Alfred!’ she shouted.
‘What is it?’ he demanded, and glared at her.
Startled by the glare, which nevertheless she had been provoking and facing with obdurate strength for years, she murmured, abashed but determined, ‘We must go to the station.’
‘We can send the wagon,’ he said hastily, getting up to escape.
‘No, Alfred, you know you always say you can’t spare the wagon, and it’s silly to send the wagon for two sacks of …’ He was at the door, on his way out; but she raised her voice after him: ‘Besides, I want to see if they’ve any nice materials: I’m really down to my last rag.’
And now he stopped, and gave her another glare, in which there was guilt and reproach, for she was using the weapon he dreaded most: she was saying, The very least you can do is to let me have a little trip once a month, when you’ve made me live on this awful farm, and we’re so poor, and my children have been dragged down to the level of the Van Rensbergs and …
‘Oh, all right, all right, have it your own way,’ he said, and sat down, reached for the newspaper, and covered himself with it.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We will go in after lunch, and Martha can help me get ready.’
Her husband’s defiant eyes were hidden by the newspaper, which nevertheless gave a small protesting shake; but Martha’s eyes were lifted towards her, with the sullen enquiry. ‘Why do we have to get ready for half an hour’s trip?’
‘Oh well – you know – with everything …’ Mrs Quest lapsed into confusion.
‘Good Lord,’ said Martha irritably, ‘to hear us talk, you’d think we were off to England or something.’
This was a familiar joke, and allowed Mrs Quest to give her girlish and rather charming laugh; though no one else laughed. ‘Well, with this family I’ve got, and no one lifts a finger but me …’ This was not a grumble, but an appeal that please, please, for pity’s sake, they should laugh, this irritable, resisting couple, and make things easier. She sighed, as Martha’s face remained glum and the newspaper was held firmly upright against her.
Next morning at breakfast she said, ‘Don’t forget we’re going to the station.’
Now he was resigned, ‘Must we?’
‘Yes, we must. Besides, you know you’ll enjoy it once we get there.’
This was a mistake. ‘I do not enjoy it. I loathe it. Besides, we haven’t any petrol.’
‘There’s a spare tin in the storeroom,’ said Mrs Quest firmly. And now there was no help for it; Mr Quest groaned, and accepted his fate; and as he went off to the garage he even looked interested; the cloud of introspection was lifting, and his eyes intently followed what his hands did. It always worried Martha, made her uneasy, to see how those brooding eyes must concentrate, force themselves outwards, watching his hands as if they were clumsy creatures that were separate from himself.
The garage was a roof of tin over two walls of plastered logs, open at each end; and he reversed the car slowly out into the bush, so that it bounced and jerked over the rough ground, and then forwards into an empty space. Then he got out, and stood frowning at the car. It was a very old Ford; the paint had gone; there were no side curtains – they had been lost somewhere; one door was tied with rope; and a part of the canvas hood, which had decayed into holes, was thatched over. He had bought it for thirty pounds, ten years before.
‘The engine’s as good as ever,’ he murmured proudly. And he called Martha to say, ‘It isn’t the body of a car that matters. Only fools pay good money for paint and varnish. What matters is the engine.’ He liked to have Martha there when he attended to the car; he would even send the servant to fetch her. Now, Martha did not mind about how cars looked; but she was irritated because of this one’s extreme slowness; so her face was as absent and dreamy as his own while he fetched water in a watering can, and fed the radiator, and took off the rope from the useless handle and retied it. Slowly, because he got no response to his remarks, he began glaring at her. ‘It’s all very well,’ he would begin, ‘it’s all very well for you …’ More often than not, the sentence was never finished, for a humorous look would come over her face, and their eyes met.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ she protested, grumbling, ‘why is it all very well, I haven’t said a word!’ Here she might begin edging away, with longing glances at the house. It was so hot; the heat and light glittered into her eyes from the battered old car. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, sounding offended; and she returned to sit on the running board, opening the book she had held in her hand. Now he was mollified, and he sounded cheerful, as he stroked the warm thatch on the roof, and said, ‘I always did like thatching, there’s something about the look of a nice piece of thatch. I remember my cousin George – he was an expert thatcher, back home. Of course, he knew his job, not like these damned niggers, they slam it on any old how. When you go back to England, Matty, the first thing you must do is go to Colchester and see if George’s kids are half the man their father was – if so, you’ll see a piece of thatching you’ll find nowhere else in the world. Matty!’ he shouted at her bent and absorbed head.
‘What?’ she asked, exasperated, lifting her eyes from the book.
‘You’re not listening.’
‘I am listening.’
‘It’s all very well for you,’ came the grumbling voice.
When he had fiddled with the car for an hour or so, he came back to the house, followed by Martha, and demanded tea. He would not go down the farm that day. And then, about twelve o’clock, he began worrying that the lunch was late and they would never get off that afternoon.
‘But Alfred,’ said poor Mrs Quest, ‘first you won’t go at all, and then you start fussing hours before –’
‘It’s all very well, you haven’t got to nurse a twenty-year-old car over these roads.’
Martha gritted her teeth in anger. Standing on the hill, one could see the other farmers’ cars racing through the trees, like tiny black beetles, the red dust spurting up behind them. Other people made the journey to the station in a few minutes.
After lunch, the anxious Mr Quest went to the car and again tested the radiator. It was likely to be empty; and then he would call for half a dozen eggs, and break them one after another into the cavity. The eggs would form a sticky sediment over the leaky bottom of the radiator. Once someone had suggested mealie meal, which he had tried immediately, with all the cautious enthusiasm of the scientific experimenter. ‘There must be something in it,’ he murmured as he poured handfuls of the white floury stuff into the car. But halfway along the track, the cap shot off with an explosion, and lumps of porridge flew all over the windscreen, so that the car came to a blind and sliding stop against a large tree. ‘Well,’ said Mr Quest thoughtfully, ‘that’s interesting. Perhaps if one used a finer grain it might …’
On the whole, eggs were more predictable; though it was important not to drive too fast, and to stop frequently, so that the engine might cool, as otherwise the water might boil the clotted egg off the bottom of the radiator, and then …
After lunch Mr Quest called peremptorily, ‘May! Matty! Come on, the engine’s started, we must go.’ And Mrs Quest, half laughing, half grumbling, ran to the car, adjusting her hat, while Martha followed unhurriedly, with a look of exhausted resignation.
The car was poised at the edge of a flattish space, on the brow of the hill. Mr Quest sat urgently forward, clasping the brake with one hand, hugging the steering wheel with the other.
‘Now!’ he exclaimed, letting go the brake. Nothing happened. ‘Oh, damn it all,’ he groaned, as if this were the last straw. ‘Come on, then.’ And he and Mrs Quest began swinging back and forth in their seats, so the car was joggled inch by inch over the edge, and slid precariously down the rutted pebbly road to the foot of the hill, where there was a great ditch. Into this it slid, and stopped. ‘Oh, damn it all,’ Mr Quest said again, on a final note, and looked around at his women in an aggrieved way.
He tried the starter, without much hope. It worked at once, and the car flew up over the edge of the ditch in a screeching bounce, and down the track between the mealie fields. The maize stood now in its final colouring, a dead silvery gold, dry as paper, and its whispering against the wind was the sound of a myriad fluttering leaves. Below this Hundred Acres Field lay the track, the old railroad track, and now Mr Quest stopped the car, got out, took off the radiator cap, and peered in. There was a squelchy bubbling noise, and a faintly rotten smell. ‘It’s all right so far,’ he said, with satisfaction, and off they went.
Halfway, they stopped again. ‘At three and a half miles, the petrol ought to show …’ murmured Mr Quest, looking at the petrol gauge. For it was seven miles to the station. Or rather, it was five and three-quarters; but just as it was seven miles to the Dumfries Hills (in fact, six) and seven to Jacob’s Burg (at least nine), so the distance to the station must be seven miles, for to have a house in the dead centre of a magically determined circle offers satisfaction beyond all riches, and even power. But a poetical seven miles is one thing, and to check one’s petrol gauge by it another; and Mr Quest frowned and said, ‘I’d better take the thing to the garage. I cannot understand – if these people can make an engine to last a lifetime, why is everything else so shoddy?’
At the station, Mrs Quest descended at Socrates’ with her shopping lists, and Mr Quest drove off to the garage. Martha lagged on the veranda until her mother had forgotten her in her eager talk with the other women at the counter, and then walked quickly to the belt of trees which hid the kaffir store. It was a large square brick erection, with a simple pillared veranda. Martha went through the usual crowd of native women with their babies on their backs, pushed aside the coloured bead curtain at the door, and was inside the store. It had a counter down the centre, and on it were jars of bright sweets, and rolls of cotton goods. There were sacks of grain and sugar around the walls, bicycles, cans of paraffin, monkey nuts. Over the counter, cheap beads, strips of biltong, mouth organs and glass bangles dangled and swung together. The smell was of sweat and cheap dyes and dust, and Martha sniffed it with pleasure.
Old Mr Cohen nodded at her, with a distance in his manner, and, having asked politely after her parents, who owed him fifty pounds, waited for an order.
‘Is Solly in?’ she asked rather too politely.
The old man allowed his eyebrows to lift, before replying, ‘He’s in, for anyone who wants to see him.’
‘I would like to see him,’ she said, almost stammering.
‘You used to know the way,’ he said laconically, and nodded at the closed flap of the counter, under which she had ducked as a child. She had expected him to lift it for her now; clumsily, she tried to move it, while he watched her. Then, taking his time, he lifted it, and moved aside so that she might go through.
She found herself saying, ‘You’re mistaken, I didn’t mean …’
His eyes snapped around at her, and he said sarcastically, ‘Didn’t mean what?’ He at once turned away to serve a native child, who was so red with dust from the road that his black skin had a rusty look, some acid-green sweets from a jar.
Martha walked into the back room, and found the Cohen boys reading, one in each of the two big easy chairs, which she privately thought in unpleasant taste, as was the whole room, which was very small, and crowded with glossy furniture and bright china ornaments; there was an effect of expensive ostentation, like the display window of a furniture store. And in this ugly and tasteless room sat Solly and Joss, the intellectuals, reading (as she took care to see) Plato and Balzac, in expensive editions.
After a startled look at her, they looked at each other, and after a long pause Solly remarked, ‘Look who’s here!’ while Joss returned, ‘Well, well!’ and they both waited, with blandly sarcastic faces, for her to speak.
She said, ‘I’ve brought back a book of yours,’ and held it out.
Solly said, ‘My grateful thanks,’ extended a hand, and took it.
Joss was pretending to read, and this annoyed her; for, as Mrs Van Rensberg had suggested, he had once been her particular friend. But it was also a relief, and she said, rather flirtatiously, to Solly, ‘May I sit down?’ and sat forthwith.
‘She’s got to be quite a smart girl, h’m?’ said Solly to Joss, as the boys openly and rudely examined her.
As a result of her quarrels with Mrs Quest, she was now making her own clothes. Also, she had starved herself into a fashionable thinness which, since she was plump by nature, was not to everyone’s taste. Apparently not to the Cohen boys’, for they continued, as if she were not present:
‘Yellow suits her, doesn’t it, Solly?’
‘Yes, Joss and that cute little slit down the front of the dress, too.’
‘But too thin, too thin, Solly, it comes of giving up that rich and unhealthy Jewish food.’
‘But better thin and pure, Joss, than fat and gross and contaminated by –’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, in discomfort; and they raised their eyebrows and shook their heads and sighed. ‘I know you think …’ she began, and once again found it hard to continue.
‘Think what?’ they demanded, almost together, and with precisely the keen, sarcastic intonation their father had used.
‘It isn’t so,’ she stammered, sincerely, looking at them in appeal; and for a moment thought she was forgiven, for Joss’s tone was quite gentle as he began: ‘Poor Matty, did your mummy forbid you to come and see us, then?’
The shock of the words, after the deceptively gentle tone, which reached her nerves before the sense, caused her eyes to fill with tears. She said, ‘No, of course she didn’t.’
‘Mystery,’ said Joss, beginning the game again, nodding at Solly; who sighed exaggeratedly and said, ‘We’re not to know, dear, dear.’
Suddenly Martha said not at all as she had intended, but with a mixture of embarrassment and coyness, ‘Mrs Van Rensberg was gossiping.’ She glanced at Joss, whose dark face slowly coloured; and he looked at her with a dislike that cut her.
‘Mrs Van Rensberg was gossiping,’ said Solly to Joss; and before the exchange could continue, she cut in: ‘Yes, and I suppose it was silly, but I couldn’t – take it.’ The defiant conclusion ended on a shortened breath; this interview was not as she had imagined.
‘She couldn’t take it,’ sighed Joss to Solly.
‘She couldn’t take it,’ Solly sighed back; and with the same movement, they picked up their books, and began to read.
She remained where she was, her eyes pleading with their averted faces, trying to subdue the flood of colour she could feel tingling to the roots of her hair, and when, after a long silence, Solly remarked in a detached voice, ‘She couldn’t take us, but she’s still here,’ Martha got up, saying angrily, ‘I’ve apologized, you’re making a mistake. Why do you have to be so thin-skinned?’ She went to the door.
Behind her back, they began laughing, a loud and unpleasant laughter. ‘She’s cut us dead for two years, and she says we’re thin-skinned.’
‘I didn’t cut you – why must you talk about me as if I weren’t here?’ she said, and stumbled out, past Mr Cohen. She found the flap of the counter down, and had to wait, speechless, for him to lift it, for she was on the verge of crying.
He looked at her with what she thought was a tinge of kindliness; but he opened the flap, nodded quietly, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Quest.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, with the effect of pleading, and walked back up the dusty path to the village, as the bead curtain swung and rattled into stillness behind her.
She walked over the railway tracks, which gleamed brightly in the hot sunlight, to the garage, where Mr Quest was in absorbed conversation with Mr Parry. He was repeating urgently, ‘Yes there’s going to be a war, it’s all very well for you people …’
Mr Parry was saying, ‘Yes, Captain Quest. No, Captain Quest.’ In the village, the war title was used, though Mr Quest refused it, saying it was not fair to the regular soldier. Martha used to argue with him reasonably, thus: ‘Are you suggesting that it is only the peace-time soldier who deserves his title? Do you mean that if civilians get conscripted and killed it’s on a different level from …’ and so on and so on – ah, how exasperating are the rational adolescents! For Mr Quest gave his irritable shrug of aversion and repeated, ‘I don’t like being Captain, it’s not fair when I haven’t been in the Army for so long.’ What Martha thought privately was, How odd that a man who thinks about nothing but war should dislike being Captain; and at this point, the real one, was of course never mentioned during those reasonable discussions.
Mr Parry was listening nervously to Mr Quest, while his eyes anxiously followed his native assistant, who was dragging an inner tube through the hot dust. At last he could not bear it, saying, ‘Excuse me, but …’ he darted forward and shouted at the native, ‘Look you, Gideon, how many times have I told you …’ He grabbed the tyre from the man’s hand, and took it over to a tub of water. Gideon shrugged, and went off to the cool interior of the garage, where he sat on a heap of outer tyres, and began making patterns on the dust with a twig. ‘Look you, Gideon …’ shouted Mr Parry; but Gideon wrinkled his brows and pretended not to hear. Mr Parry’s Welsh speech had lost nothing of its lilt and charm; but the phrases had worn slack; his ‘Look you’ sounded more like ‘Look ye’; and when he used the Welsh ‘whatever’, it came haphazard in his speech, with a surprised, uncertain note.
Mr Quest, disappointed of a listener, came to the car, climbed in, and said, ‘They don’t listen. I was telling him the Russians are going to join with the Germans and attack us. I know they are. Just after the war – my war – I met a man in a train who said he had seen with his own eyes the way the Russians were kidnapping German scientists and forcing them to work in their factories so they could learn how to make tanks to smash the British Empire. I said to Parry here …’
Martha heard these words somewhere underneath her attention, which was given to her own problems. Mr Quest looked over his shoulder at her, and said sarcastically, ‘But don’t let me bore you with the Great Unmentionable. Your time’ll come, and then I can say I told you so.’
Martha turned her face away; her lids stung with tears; she felt the most rejected and desolate creature in the world. It occurred to her that the Cohen boys might have felt like this when she (or so it had appeared) rejected them; but she dismissed the thought at once. The possessors of this particular form of arrogance may know its underside is timidity; but they seldom go on to reflect that the timidity is based on the danger of thinking oneself important to others, which necessitates a return of feeling. She was saying to herself that she could not imagine the clever and self-sufficient Cohen brothers caring about her one way or the other. But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles. For the first time, she said to herself that the Cohens were almost completely isolated in the district. The farmers nodded to them, offered remarks about the weather, but never friendship. The Greek family maintained a complicated system of friendship with the other Greeks from stores all along the railway line. The Cohens had relations in the city, no one nearer.
At last Mr Parry found a trail of bubbles sizzling up through the dirty water from the tube, and shouted to Gideon, ‘Come ye, now, you lazy black loafer, and do it quick whateffer you do, and listen well, now.’
Gideon indolently lifted himself and went to mend the puncture, while Mr Parry came back to the car in order to resume his conversation with Mr Quest.
‘Sorry, Captain, but if you want a good job, you do it yourself, whateffer else, it’s no good trusting the blacks, they’ve no pride in their work.’
‘As I was saying, you people have your heads buried in the sand. Anyone can see war is coming. If it’s not this year, it’ll be the next, as soon as they’re strong enough.’
‘You think the Jerries’ll have another shot at us?’ asked Mr Parry, polite but doubtful, and turned so that he might keep an eye on Gideon.
Another native came loping across the railway tracks and stopped by the car. ‘Baas Quest?’ he asked.
Mr Quest, once again interrupted, turned his darkly irritable eyes on him. But Martha recognized him: he was the Cohens’ cook; and she reached for the parcel he held.
‘For me,’ she said, and asked the man to wait. He went off to help Gideon with the tyre.
The parcel was a book from Joss, entitled The Social Aspect of the Jewish Question, and inside was a note: ‘Dear Matty Quest, This will be good for your soul, so do, do read it. Yours thin-skinnedly, Joss.’
She was filled with outrageous delight. It was forgiveness. She interrupted her father once again to borrow a pencil, and wrote: ‘Thanks for the book. As it happened, I borrowed it from you and of course agreed with it, three years ago. But I shall read it again and return it next time we come to the station.’ She was determined that would be very soon.
Next mail day she suggested that they should make the trip, but her father refused, with an air of being exploited.
‘Why do you want to go?’ asked Mrs Quest curiously; and Martha said, ‘I want to see the Cohen boys.’
‘You’re making friends with them?’ demurred Mrs Quest.
‘I thought we always were friends with them,’ said Martha scornfully; and since this put the argument on that hypocritical level where it was maintained that of course the Quests did not think Jews, or even shopkeepers, beneath them, and the only reason they did not continually meet was an inconvenience of some sort, Mrs Quest could not easily reply.
Martha telephoned the McDougalls to ask if they were going to the station. They were not. She asked the Van Rensbergs; Marnie said awkwardly that Pop didn’t often go to the station these days. Finally she telephoned Mr McFarline, the old miner from the small working in the Dumfries Hills; and he said yes, he was going to town tomorrow. She told her mother she would get a lift back (for ‘town’ in this case meant the city, not the station, as it sometimes did), and added, with the apparently deliberate exaggeration which was so infuriating, ‘If I don’t get a lift, I’ll walk.’ Which of course was absurd, infringed one of the taboos – ‘a young white girl walking alone’, etc. – and was calculated to provoke an argument. The argument immediately followed; and both women appealed to Mr Quest
‘Why shouldn’t she walk?’ demanded Mr Quest vaguely. ‘When I was a young man in England, I used to walk thirty miles an afternoon and think nothing of it.’
‘This isn’t England,’ said Mrs Quest tremulously, filled with horrid visions of what might happen to Martha if she encountered an evil native.
Martha came back with, ‘I walk miles and miles all over the farm, but that doesn’t matter for some reason. How can you be so illogical?’
‘Well, I don’t like it, and you promised not to go more than half a mile from the house.’
Martha laughed angrily, and chose this moment to say what until now she had been careful to keep dark: ‘Why, I often walk over to the Dumfries Hills, or even to Jacob’s Burg, I’ve been doing it for years.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mrs Quest helplessly. She had known quite well that Martha was doing this, but to be told so now was another thing. ‘What would happen if a native attacked you?’
‘I should scream for help,’ said Martha flippantly.
‘Oh, my dear …’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Martha angrily. ‘If a native raped me, then he’d be hung and I’d be a national heroine, so he wouldn’t do it, even if he wanted to, and why should he?’
‘My dear, read the newspapers, white girls are always being ra – attacked.’
Now, Martha could not remember any case of this happening; it was one of the things people said. She remarked, ‘Last week a white man raped a black girl, and was fined five pounds.’
Mrs Quest said hastily, ‘That’s not the point; the point is girls get raped.’
‘Then I expect they want to be,’ said Martha sullenly; and caught her breath, not because she did not believe the truth of what she said, but because of her parents’ faces: she could not help being frightened. For they were united for once, in genuine emotion, and began lecturing her on the consequences of her attitude. It ended with ‘and so they’ll drive us into the sea, and then the country will be ruined, what would these ignorant blacks do without us.’ And the usual inconsequent conclusion: ‘They have no sense of gratitude at all for what we do for them.’ It had all been said so often that it rang stale and false for both sides; and Martha remained silent in a way which they could take as an agreement, for comfort’s sake.
Next morning she was waiting down on the track, by the signpost in the long grass, for Mr McFarline; and they made the journey to the station in just over ten minutes.
Mr McFarline was a charming and wicked old Scotsman, who lived alone on his mine, which he worked in a way which cost him the very minimum in money, but a good deal in human life. There were always accidents on his mine. Also, his native compound was full of half-caste children, his own. He was extremely wealthy, and very popular. He gave generously to charity, and was about to stand for Parliament for one of the town constituencies. Because of the work in connection with getting himself elected, he often went into town.
As the car raced dangerously through the trees, he squeezed Martha’s knee in an experimental way and tried to put his hand up her skirt. She held the skirt down, and moved coolly away to the other side of the car, as if she had not noticed the action. So he took his hand away, and concentrated on showing her how nearly it was possible to escape death, with perfect sangfroid, at every bend of the road. He took the paint off his back mud-guard at the last raking turn; and they stopped before Sock’s store in a billowing cloud of dust. Martha’s heart was beating wildly for several reasons. No one had ever tried to put his hand up her skirt before, and she was petrified at the wild driving. She looked confused and alarmed; and the old Scotsman decided to see her as the little girl he had known for years. He took a ten-shilling note from his stuffed wallet, and gave it to her.
‘For when you go back to school,’ he said bluffly.
Martha almost handed it back; but was unable to partly because ten shillings was such a large sum for her, and partly because of a feeling which she described to herself as: If I refuse it, he will think it’s because of the way he tried to touch me. She thanked him politely for the lift, and he roared away over the railway track on the road to the city, singing, ‘You’re a bonny lassie …’
She had the book on the Jewish question (which she had not re-read, thinking it unnecessary to gild the already sound coinage of her opinions) under her arm. She went over to the kaffir store. Mr Cohen greeted her, and lifted the counter for her. He was a short, squat man; his hair was a close-growing, crinkling cap of black; his skin was pallid and unhealthy. He had, she thought secretly, the look of a toad, or something confined and light-shunning; and in fact he was hardly ever away from his counter; but the commercial look of the small shopkeeper was tempered in him by purpose and dignity, which was not only because of his ancient culture, but because this penniless immigrant from Central Europe had chosen such a barren place, such exile, for the sake of his brilliant sons. His eyes were black and wise and shrewd, and it was impossible not to like him. And yet Martha found him repulsive, and was guilty; it was strange that she could find the oily fatness of the Greek Socrates repulsive without any sense of guilt at all, but this question of anti-Semitism, this shrinking nerve, put her on guard against herself, so that her manner with Mr Cohen was always strained.
In the back room Martha found Solly, alone; and was pleased that the brotherly solid act could not be repeated. Besides, there was something uneasy and false in it, for there was a strong current of antagonism between the two brothers, a temperamental difficulty which expressed itself politically – Solly being a Zionist, while Joss was a Socialist. Solly was a lanky, tall youth, with a big head on a long thin neck, and big bony hands at the end of long arms; he was altogether knobbly and unintegrated, and his enormous, sombre black eyes brooded abstractedly on the world around him in a way that gave Martha a feeling of kinship to him; but this was perhaps not an altogether welcome relationship, reminding her, as it did, of her father. If she was to fight the morbid strain in herself, which was her father’s gift, then how could she admire Solly wholeheartedly, as she wished to do? On the whole, she was easier with Joss, who was short and compact and robust, with humorous direct eyes and a sarcastic practicality, as if he were always saying, ‘Well, and what’s the fuss about, it’s all quite easy!’
Solly took the book, without any sign of the hostility of the previous meeting; and no sooner had she sat down than Mrs Cohen came in with a tray. The older Cohens were strictly kosher, and the sons were lax. For years Mrs Cohen had been scrupulously sorting her crockery and cutlery, washing them herself, forbidding the native servants even to touch them; but at the table, Joss and Solly, usually deep in bitter argument, would reach for the wrong knives, and stack the plates carelessly about them, while Mrs Cohen scolded and pleaded. By now she had learned to say, ‘I’m too old to learn new ways,’ and with a sorrowful tolerance, she continued to wash and sort her things, but made no comment if her sons misused them. It was a compromise in which Martha could see no sense at all; if her own parents had been guilty of unreasonable behaviour, how irritably would she have argued with them! In Mrs Cohen, however, it merely struck her as charming. The mere sight of the plump old Jewish woman, with her fine, dark sad eyes, made her feel welcomed; and she at once accepted, enthusiastically, when she was bidden, ‘You’ll stay eat with us?’ In a few moments they were talking as if she had never absented herself from the family for two years.
Solly was leaving shortly to study medicine in Cape Town, and Mrs Cohen was urging him to live with her cousin there. But Solly wanted independence, a life of his own; and since this vital point was never mentioned, the argument went on endlessly about buses and transport and inconvenience; and it reminded Martha of her own home, where this kind of surface bickering was equally futile.
Joss came in, gave Martha an ambiguous look, and forbore to comment, in a way which made her voice rise to a jaunty brightness. He was intending to study law, but was staying at home with his parents until they could move into town, which they planned to do. The store was to be sold. This solicitude for his father and mother only struck Martha as a kind of betrayal to the older generation; she found it extraordinary; even more strange that he sided with his parents against Solly’s desire to fend for himself. He sounded more like an uncle than a brother.
They sat down to table, and Mrs Cohen asked, ‘And when are you going back to your studies, Matty? Your mother must be worrying herself.’
Martha replied awkwardly, ‘My eyes aren’t better yet,’ and lowered them towards her plate. When she raised them, she found Joss critically studying her in the way she had feared.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ he inquired bluntly. She gave an uncomfortable movement with her shoulders, as if to say, ‘Leave me alone.’ But in this family everything was discussed; and Joss said to Solly, ‘Her eyes are strained, well, well!’
Solly refused, this time, to make the alliance against her, and asked, ‘What’s it got to do with you?’
Joss raised his brows, and said, ‘Me? Nothing. She used to be such a bright girl. Pity.’
‘Leave her alone,’ said Mr Cohen unexpectedly, ‘she’s all right.’ Martha felt a rush of warmth towards him, which as usual she could not express, but dropped her eyes, and even looked sullen.
‘Of course she’s all right,’ said Joss carelessly; but there was a note in his voice …
Martha looked quickly at him, and at once interpreted his agreement as a reference to her own appearance; and this she half resented, and half welcomed. Since her incarnation as a fairly successful imitation of a magazine beauty, the Cohen boys were the first males she had tried herself against. But she had never said to herself that her careful make-up and the new green linen had been put on to impress them, and therefore she felt it as a false note that either should mention or even react to her appearance – a confusion of feeling which left her silent, and rather sulky. After the meal, Mr Cohen went back to the shop, and Mrs Cohen to her kitchen, with the mis-handled crockery; and the three young people were left together. Conversation was difficult, and soon Martha felt she should leave. But she lingered; and it was Solly who at last went out; and at once she and Joss were at ease, as she and Solly were, by themselves: it was three of them together that set up the jarring currents.
At once Joss inquired, ‘And now what’s all this about not going to university?’
The direct question, which she had never put to herself, left her silent; but he persisted. ‘You can’t hang about this dorp doing nothing.’
She said, ‘But you are at home, too.’
His look said that she must see this was no analogy; he tried not to sound bitter as he remarked, ‘My parents have no friends in the village. It’ll be different when they’re in town.’
Again she was silent, feeling apologetic for herself and for her parents. She got up and went to the bookcase, to see what was new in it; but this represented the family: the Jewish classics, books on Palestine, Poland and Russia; this was the source of the rapidly diverging streams which were Solly and Joss; and these new books would be in their shared bedroom. Into this room it was impossible to go, since she was now Miss Quest; and the glance she directed towards Joss was troubled.
He had been watching her, and, at the glance, he lifted from a table beside him a large pile of books and handed them to her. Again she felt that flush of delight; for he must have prepared them for her. He remarked calmly, ‘Take these, good for your soul.’
She looked at the titles, and was at once indignant, as a child might be if a teacher urged her to study subjects she had mastered the year before.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sardonically. ‘Not up your street?’
She said, ‘But I know all this.’ At once she wished the words unsaid, for they sounded conceited. What she meant was, ‘I agree with all the things these books represent.’
He studied her, gave an incredulous grimace, and then fired the following questions at her, in the offhand indifferent manner of the initiate to a breed utterly without the law:
‘You repudiate the colour bar?’
‘But of course.’
‘Of course,’ he said sardonically. And then: ‘You dislike racial prejudice in all its form, including anti-Semitism?’
‘Naturally’ – this with a touch of impatience.
‘You are an atheist?’
‘You know quite well that I am.’
‘You believe in socialism?’
‘That goes without saying,’ she concluded fervently; and suddenly began to laugh, from that sense of the absurd which it seemed must be her downfall as a serious person. For Joss was frowning at the laugh, and apparently could see nothing ridiculous in a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, sprung from an orthodox Jewish family, and an adolescent British girl, if possible even more conventionally bred, agreeing to these simple axioms in the back room of a veld store in a village filled with people to whom every word of this conversation would have the force of a dangerous heresy.
‘You sound as if you were asking a catechism,’ she explained, giggling irrepressibly.
He frowned again; and at once she felt indignant that he might be surprised because she had made the same intellectual journey he had. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ he demanded practically. Also, he sounded aggressive; she was beginning to feel childish and wrong for having laughed; she felt she had hurt him.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and there was an appeal in it. She raised her eye to his and waited. Because of the look on his face, she at once became conscious of the picture she presented, standing there in front of him, a young girl in a green linen frock that emphasized every line in her body.
‘I suppose you are all right,’ he conceded slowly, looking at her with approval; and she felt the unfairness of it. This was an intellectual discussion, wasn’t it? Why, then, that note in his voice?
Her look at him was now as aggressive as his had been. ‘It’s all very well for you, you’re a man,’ she said bitterly, and entirely without coquetry; but he said flippantly, even suggestively, ‘It will be all quite well for you too!’
He laughed, hoping she might laugh with him. But she stared at him in dismayed outrage, then muttered, ‘Oh, go to hell,’ and for the second time left that room, and went out into the glaring sunlight. No sooner had she gone than she understood she had been as touchy and thin-skinned as she had said he was, and almost went back. Pride forbade it; and she went into the village.
The place had a deserted look. Four in the afternoon: the sky was huge and cloudless, the sun loomed swollen through a reddish haze, and the tin roofs reflected a dulled and sombre light. It was likely to rain soon; but now the long brown pond had shrunk within lips of cracked mud to a narrow scummy puddle. Outside the bar stood half a dozen big cars, outside the station about twenty shabbier cars. Among them was the Van Rensbergs’; and they were packed with children of all ages.
What the British referred to as ‘the Afrikaans element’ had come in for their mail.
Now, it is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country’s social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it; and for Martha, who must have seen that sight dozens of times before, it was a moment of illumination, perhaps because she was feeling sore and rejected under Joss’s treatment of her; and there was something in that bearing and character of those people kin to what she felt.
On mail days there were cars of every degree of wealth, from the enormous American cars of the tobacco farmers down to eccentric creations like the Quests’, but the owners of these cars met together without any consciousness of degree. English and Scotch, Welsh and Irish, rich and poor, it was all backslapping and Christian names, a happy family atmosphere which had a touch of hysterical necessity in it, since the mail days, gymkhanas and dances were false tokens of community – for what is a community if not people who share their experience? The fact was, this district was divided into several separate communities, who shared nothing but Christian names, cards at Christmas, and a member of Parliament. The eastern part of the district, all along the flanks and slopes of Jacob’s Burg, was where the tobacco families lived, and here the common denominator was wealth; they were regarded by the rest with tolerance, for they went in for bottle parties, divorces, and modern restlessness. North and west of the Quests’ farm Scots families were settled, mostly related, hard-working, modest, sociable people who visited a great deal among themselves. Half a dozen Irish inhabited the slopes of the Oxford Range; but this was not a group; one cannot think of the Irish except as picturesque individualists. Near them were five farms where lived a collection of the English eccentrics who reach their richest bloom only in the colonies. Colonel Castairs, for instance, who lived by himself in a ranging stone mansion, sleeping all day and reading all night, preparing himself to write that history of melancholia through the ages which he would one day begin; he was now over seventy. There was Lord Jamie, who walked naked around his farm, and ate only fruit and nuts; and quarrelled bitterly with his wife because she clothed their children, for he held the view that even so much as a diaper on a baby was an insult to God who created Adam and Eve. There was a story that once he had come raking into the village on a great black horse, quite naked, with his wild red beard and his mane of red hair sparking fire in the sunlight, a great rough-cast man, whose fiercely innocent blue eyes stared out from the waving locks of his hair like the eyes of an inquiring savage. He dismounted from his horse, and went into the store to buy a pound of tobacco, a bottle of whisky, and the weekly newspaper; and it seemed that everyone in the store greeted him as casually as if he were as decently dressed as they. Then they began talking about the weather; and so it had never happened again; and the incident retreated into the fabulous past of kaffir wars, and pioneers, and violence. How exciting life must have been then, sighed the people in the district, remembering their distant origins – and yet the district had not been settled much more than thirty years. How wonderful if that wild man on the black horse appeared again in his scandalous glory! How wonderful if Commander Day walked into the store (as he had once, in the golden age) flanked by his two half-tamed leopards, with his three native concubines behind him – but alas, alas, he did not, they did not, the time for the creation of legends was past.
For many years, between this essential group of gentle maniacs and the Quests’ farm there had been hundreds of acres of empty ground, considered too poor to farm. On its verge, sharing a boundary with the Quests, were the Van Rensbergs, like the solitary swallow which would one day make a summer; for five years before another Afrikaans family arrived, rocking along the track in a hooded wagon, a vehicle which had, to this district, only literary associations from the Great Trek. Soon there came another family, and then another … And now, inside this district whose pattern of living was a large farm and two or three children, with a governess and maybe an assistant, grew up a close-knit, isolated community of Dutch people, who worked fifty and a hundred acres where the British used thousands, and made their farming pay; who bred healthy children, eight and ten to a family; who built their own hall, and a thatched church where they worshipped their angry God. And their speech had the rich cadences of a living religion.
They came to fetch their mail on a day when the village would be empty. Their cars drew up together outside Socrates’ store; moved away together to the garage across the railway track; returned together to the station building, one after another in a file, with the slow deliberation that suggested a team of covered wagons.
So it was today. There were eleven cars, standing behind each other; and from them had come enough people to populate a small village, men, women and children, talking, reading mail, playing in groups.
Martha stood on Socrates’ veranda among the grain sacks and looked at them, and tried to find what it was which gave these people their look of cohesion. Physically they were strong and broadly built, with the blunt open features of their Dutch ancestry; but the word ‘Dutch’ surely suggests a picture of fair skin and hair, blue eyes, and easy health? These people tended to be dark, as if the sun had fed a strain of resistance into defenceless light skin and the light hair that becomes dry and limp in the south. The older women wore black – here the colour of respectability, though in other cultures, other contexts, it may be the colour of mourning or sophistication. The younger women wore print frocks that were pretty rather than smart; some of the children wore the flapping sunbonnets of the tradition; the men were in the male uniform of the country, khaki shorts and open-necked shirts. No, the clothing here expressed only a restlessness, a movement, even uncertainty; for if it was true that the pretty sunbonnets could have been seen nowhere else, the little girls’ frocks were likely to have been made by a pattern from an English magazine; and if no one but a certain type of Dutchwoman would wear those black lace hats (so that, catching sight of one a hundred yards away, one might imagine the face under it, broad, practical, humorous, earthy), then the black dress she wore with it was probably mass-produced in America.
The closeness of this group expressed itself somewhere else, perhaps in the look of dogged self-sufficiency, the look of the inveterate colonizer; but in that case, they were colonizers in a country which considered itself past the colonizing stage. Not so easy to put flesh and blood on the bones of an intellectual conviction; Martha was remembering with shame the brash and easy way she had said to Joss that she repudiated race prejudice; for the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards. She stood on the veranda of Socrates’ store, and looked over the empty dusty space to the railway line, and thought of the different people who passed there: the natives, the nameless and swarming; the Afrikaans, whose very name held the racy poetic quality of their vigorous origins; the British, with their innumerable subgroupings, held together only because they could say, ‘this is a British country’ – held together by the knowledge of ownership. And each group, community, clan, colour, strove and fought away from the other, in a sickness of dissolution; it was as if the principle of separateness was bred from the very soil, the sky, the driving sun; as if the inchoate vastness of the universe, always insistent in the enormous unshrouded skies, the enormous mountain-girt horizons, so that one might never, not for a moment, forget the inhuman, relentless struggle of soil and water and light, bred a fever of self-assertion in its children like a band of explorers lost in a desert, quarrelling in an ecstasy of fear over their direction, when nothing but a sober mutual trust could save them. Martha could feel the striving forces in her own substance: the effort of imagination needed to destroy the words black, white, nation, race, exhausted her, her head ached and her flesh was heavy on her bones. She looked at the Van Rensbergs’ car, and thought that she had known them for years, and yet she was reluctant even to cross the dust and greet them. She walked off the veranda and towards the car, smiling rather queerly, for when it was too late to retreat it occurred to her that they might not wish to have their friendship with the Quests so publicly emphasized.
She came to a standstill at the car door, and said good afternoon to Mr Van Rensberg. He nodded at her, and went on reading the newspaper, having made a hunching movement with his shoulder towards the back of the car, where Marnie was sitting between two married sisters who held small babies. There was a young man beside Mr Van Rensberg, who greeted Martha, and she smiled at him hastily, thinking, This must be a cousin; for his face was the family face.
Marnie was smiling with constrained pleasure, and looked uncomfortably at her father’s back; and this made Martha wish she had not come. Over his shoulder, she could see the name of the most rabid nationalist journal from the south; while she did not know the language, there was hardly any need to, for the words and phrases of nationalism are the same in any tongue, but the knowledge that the brain behind the close-cropped black head beside her was agreeing with what was bound to be a violent complaint about the very existence of the British made her drop her voice like a guilty person as she said to Marnie, ‘Why don’t you come over and see me soon?’
‘I’d like to, man. I’d like to,’ agreed Marnie, in the same low tone, and with another glance at her father. ‘Your dress is the tops, Martha,’ she added. ‘May I have the pattern?’
‘Of course,’ said Martha, with an involuntary glance at Marnie’s matronly body. ‘Come over for the day …’ She had lowered her voice almost to a whisper; the absurdity of it made her angry. She and Marnie quickly said goodbye, smiling at each other like conspirators; she dropped another smile in the direction of the attentive young man in the front seat, and hastily retreated back to the store.
She had no lift home. She would have liked to walk; she intended to, but … She imagined that eyes would follow her, queerly, as she set off, on foot, along a road where a dozens cars might be expected to pass that afternoon. White girls do not … As she was hesitating on the veranda, she saw Joss approaching, and smiled with what was, had she known it, a tenderly amused appreciation of the figure he cut. He wore a respectable dark suit, he carried books under his arm, he moved in a careful, constrained way, eyes watching the direction of his feet, his shoulders a little hunched. He seemed, in fact, already the sober professional man he intended to become; he was altogether out of place among these khaki-clad, open-air people; and knew it, and approved. For these farmers, these men of the soil: when they approached, one saw first the exposed developed limbs, the body; one marked the hard muscled forearm perhaps, or the bronze knotted pillar of the thigh, or the stride, or the swing of the arms; they moved magnificently, at ease, slowly, to match the space and emptiness of the country – no suggestion here of limbs grown cautious and self-contained, against possible undesired contact. Yes, here one stands at a distance from a man, a woman, and sees them whole. First the way of walking, the stance of the body. Then lift your eyes to the face, and the first impression is confirmed: what fine, exposed, frank faces, wholesomely weathered, unafraid, open to every glance. And then (but lastly) the eyes, look straight at the eyes – which of course meet yours with the completest frankness. Nothing to hide here, they say; everything above-board, take it or leave it. But always, behind the friendly brown eyes, the welcoming blue ones, is the uneasiness; something not easily defined. but expressed best, perhaps, in a moment of laughter. The man laughs out loud, an infectious wholehearted laugh; but there is a faint sideways flickering movement of the eyes, the eyes are not altogether there, there is an absence, something blank and empty. Take, for instance, that contingent of fine young colonials marching down the Strand with their English cousins. What fine young men, what physique; a head taller than the rest, bronzed, muscled, strong as horses. Then look at the eyes. But the eyes seem to say, ‘What do you want with us? Aren’t our bodies enough for you?’ There is a pale and fretful look; the soft and luminous darkness that should lie behind the iris is simply not there. Something is missing.
And so it seems that one cannot have it both ways, one has to choose; and Joss chose, without any hesitation.
Martha, watching him approach, was conscious of the most perverse but definite feeling of pity. Why pity? She envied him almost to the point of bitterness, knowing exactly what he wanted, and how to get it. She saw how the compact, neat body, hidden under dark grey flannel, moved carefully across the sunlit, filthy dust, as if every nerve and muscle were connected direct to his will; she saw how his eyes were focused, steady and direct, the whole of himself behind them, so that it was only when one looked into his eyes that one saw him; she saw the great difference there was between Joss and these farmers, and she half envied, half pitied him. Pity? What for? One does not pity a person who knows what it is he chooses and why.
Martha was watching him in a way which would allow her to pretend, to herself at least, that she was not; she was afraid he might go past her with another of his formal nods. He came straight towards her, however, extended the books, and said brusquely, ‘I thought you’d like these.’
‘How did you know I was still here?’ – with feminine obliquity.
‘I can see the store through the trees.’
For a moment Martha was irrationally angry, as if she had been spied upon; then he asked, ‘How are you getting home?’ and she replied defiantly, ‘I’m walking.’ It seemed, however, that Joss could see no reason why she should not walk; and after a hesitation he merely said, ‘So long!’ and walked back across the dust. Martha was disappointed – he might have asked her back to his home, she thought. Then she understood that he was waiting for her to invite herself; and this confused her. She shrugged away the thought of Joss, who always made her feel deficient in proper feeling; and with the parcel of books under her arm, which gave her confidence, she walked away off Socrates’ veranda, and along the road home.
She had never made this journey on foot; always by car, or, as a child, perched on top of the hot hairy grain sacks on the wagon. During the first mile she was remembering the creaking sway of the old wagon, which seemed always as if it might spring apart between the dragging weight of the sacks and the forward-heaving oxen; there was a place towards the front of the wagon where it seemed that the tension was localized, and here she liked to sit, shuddering with excitement, because of the groaning timbers under her, which always were on the point of flying asunder, but never did, carrying their burden mile after slow and labouring mile. She was remembering the alarming way the sacks shifted under her; heavy sacks they were, but sliding and subsiding easily with the sway of the vehicle. She remembered the pleasurable warm smell of the cow droppings falling plop, plop in the red dust, and releasing, deliciously, the odours of fresh grass; so that, although the wagon wheels perpetually flung up rivers of red sand, and she travelled in a column of whirling ruddy dust, the sweet perfumes of newly cudded grass mingled with it, mile after mile, as if the four-divided stomachs of the great oxen were filled with nothing but concentrated memories of hours of grazing along the water heavy vleis.
Later, she hesitated outside the McDougall’s farm; for if she went in she would be given a wonderful Scotch tea of bannocks and griddle cakes and newly churned butter. But she did not go in, for the McDougalls had not yet noticed that she was now Miss Quest; they still treated her like a child, and this she could not bear.
She walked more slowly now, not wanting the journey to end; she was savouring freedom: the station far behind, where she was convinced everyone remarked her, commented on her; the house not yet in sight, where the mere existence of her parents was like a reminder that she must be wary, ready to resist. Now there was no one to mark her, not a soul in sight; and she dawdled along the track, skipping from one run to another, and pulling from their delicate green sheaths the long sweet-tasting grass stems that are as pleasant to chew along a dusty road as sticks of sugar cane. She was happy because she was, for the moment, quite free; she was sad because before long she would reach home; these two emotions deepened together, and it flashed across her mind that this intense, joyful melancholy was a state of mind she had known in the past and – But at once she dismissed the thought; it passed as lightly as the shadow of a wing of a bird, for she knew that the experience associated with that emotion was not to be courted. One did not lie in wait for it; it was a visitor who came without warning. On the other hand, even the fact that the delicious but fearful expectation had crossed her mind at all was enough to warn it away; the visitor liked the darkness, this Martha knew, and she hastened to think of something else. At the same time, she was thinking that she had associated the experience with what she now, rather scornfully, called her ‘religious phase’; and becoming an atheist, which she had done from one day to the next, as easily as dropping a glove, had been painful only because she imagined she must pay the price for intellectual honesty by bidding farewell to this other emotion, this fabulous visitor. It seemed, then, that no such price had been asked of her, it seemed that –
Martha caught herself up, already bad-tempered and irritable: she must not analyse, she must not be conscious; and here she was, watching the movements of her mind as if she were observing a machine. She noted, too, that she was walking very fast, quite blind to the beauties of the trees and grass. For it was evening, and very beautiful; a rich watery gold was lighting the dark greens of the foliage, the dark red of the soil, the pale blonde of the grass, to the solemn intensity of the sunset hour. She noted a single white-stemmed tree with its light cloud of glinting leaf rising abruptly from the solid-packed red earth of an anthill, all bathed in a magical sky-reflecting light, and her heart moved painfully in exquisite sadness. She consciously walked more slowly, consciously enjoyed the melancholy; and all at once found herself on a slight rise, where the trees opened across a wide reach of country; and the sight, a new one, caused her to forget everything else. She could see their house, crouched low on the green-shrouded hill, and between was an unbroken stretch of silver-gold mealies; it was perhaps five miles from where she stood to the Van Rensbergs’ boundary, a dark belt of trees behind which solemn blue sky rose like a wall. The mealies swayed and whispered, and the light moved over them; a hawk lay motionless on a current of blue air; and the confused and painful delirium stirred in her again, and this time so powerfully she did not fear its passing. The bush lay quiet about her, a bare slope of sunset-tinted grass moving gently with a tiny rustling sound; an invisible violet tree shed gusts of perfume, like a benediction; and she stood quite still, waiting for the moment, which was now inevitable. There was a movement at the corner of her eye, and she turned her head, cautiously, so as not to disturb what was swelling along her nerves, and saw a small buck, which had come from the trees and stood quietly, flicking its tail, a few paces away. She hardly dared to blink. The buck gazed at her, and then turned its head to look into the bush laying its ears forward. A second buck tripped out from the trees, and they both stood watching her; then they walked daintily across the ground, their hooves clicking sharp on the stones, the sun warm on their soft brown hides. They dropped their heads to graze, while their little tails shook from side to side impatiently, with flashes of white.
Suddenly the feeling in Martha deepened, and as it did so she knew she had forgotten, as always, that what she had been waiting for like a revelation was a pain, not a happiness; what she remembered, always, was the exultation and the achievement, what she forgot was this difficult birth into a state of mind which words like ecstasy, illumination, and so on could not describe, because they suggest joy. Her mind having been formed by poetic literature (and little else), she of course knew that such experiences were common among the religious. But the fact was, so different was ‘the moment’ from what descriptions of other people’s ‘moments’ led her to believe was common, that it was not until she had come to accept the experience as ordinary and ‘incidental to the condition of adolescence’ as she put it sourly, and with positive resentment, that it occurred to her. Why, perhaps it is the same thing, after all? But if so, they were liars, liars one and all; and that she could understand, for was it not impossible for her to remember, in between, how terrible an illumination it was?
There was certainly a definite point at which the thing began. It was not; then it was suddenly inescapable, and nothing could have frightened it away. There was a slow integration, during which she, and the little animals, and the moving grasses, and the sun-warmed trees, and the slopes of shivering silvery mealies, and the great dome of blue light overhead, and the stones of earth under her feet, became one, shuddering together in a dissolution of dancing atoms. She felt the rivers under the ground forcing themselves painfully along her veins, swelling them out in an unbearable pressure; her flesh was the earth, and suffered growth like a ferment; and her eyes stared, fixed like the eye of the sun. Not for one second longer (if the terms for time apply) could she have borne it; but then, with a sudden movement forwards and out, the whole process stopped; and that was ‘the moment’ which it was impossible to remember afterwards. For during that space of time (which was timeless) she understood quite finally her smallness, the unimportance of humanity. In her ears was an inchoate grinding, the great wheels of movement, and it was inhuman, like the blundering rocking movement of a bullock cart; and no part of that sound was Martha’s voice. Yet she was part of it, reluctantly allowed to participate, though on terms – but what terms? For that moment, while space and time (but these are words, and if she understood anything it was that words, here, were like the sound of a baby crying in a whirlwind) kneaded her flesh, she knew futility; that is, what was futile was her own idea of herself and her place in the chaos of matter. What was demanded of her was that she should accept something quite different; it was as if something new was demanding conception, with her flesh as host; as if it were a necessity, which she must bring herself to accept, that she should allow herself to dissolve and be formed by that necessity. But it did not last; the force desisted, and left her standing on the road, already trying to reach out after ‘the moment’ so that she might retain its message from the wasting and creating chaos of darkness. Already the thing was sliding backwards, becoming a whole in her mind, instead of a process; the memory was changing, so that it was with nostalgia that she longed ‘to try again’.
There had been a challenge that she had refused. But the wave of nostalgia made her angry. She knew it to be a falsity; for it was a longing for something that had never existed, an ‘ecstasy’, in short. There had been no ecstasy, only difficult knowledge. It was as if a beetle had sung. There should be a new word for illumination.
She saw that she was standing off the road in the grass, staring at the two little bucks, who indifferently flicked their tails and grazed their way off into the bush. Martha thought that she had often shot these little creatures, and that she would never do so again, since they had shared the experience with her. And even as she made the decision, she was as helplessly irritable as if she had caught herself out in a lie which was pointless. She felt, above all, irritable; not sad, merely flat and stale; the more because not five minutes after ‘the moment’ it had arranged itself in her mind as a blissful joy; it was necessary, apparently, to remember the thing as an extremity of happiness.
She walked slowly homewards, taking a short cut along the fence through the mealies. The ground was hard and packed, cracked across with drought under her feet, which ached, for her sandals were meant for show and not for use. She climbed the hill draggingly, and went to her room, so as to compose herself before meeting her parents, or rather, her mother, for to meet her father was rather like trying to attract the attention of an irritable spectre.
Alas for visions and decisions. In her bedroom she felt nothing but angry resentment: against the people in the district, against Mr McFarline, against Marnie, who would now ‘drop over’ and borrow patterns.
Her mother entered with the oil lamp, for it was dusk, and exclaimed, ‘My dear, I was worrying, and you don’t even tell me you’re home.’
‘Well, there’s no harm done, safe and sound and still a virgin.’
‘My dear –’ Mrs Quest checked herself, and hung the lamp on the wall. The flame vibrated bluely, then sent a pleasant yellow glow over the uneven plaster, and up to the thatch, where a strand of tarnished silver glistened among shadow. ‘How did you get back?’ asked Mrs Quest cautiously.
‘Walked,’ Martha said aggressively; and even felt disappointed because Mrs Quest did not protest.
‘Well, come on, we’re going to have supper now.’
Martha followed her mother obediently, and suddenly found herself saying, in a bright flippant voice, ‘That dirty old man, Mr McFarline, he tried to make love to me.’ She looked at her father but he was slowly crumbling his bread in time with his thoughts.
Mrs Quest said hastily, ‘Nonsense, you’re imagining it, he couldn’t have done.’
The suggestion that she was too young for such attentions made Martha say, ‘And then he had an attack of conscience, and offered me ten shillings.’ She giggled uncomfortably, with another glance at her abstracted father; and Mrs Quest said, ‘He knows better, he’s too nice.’
‘Nice,’ said Martha acidly, ‘with a compound full of his children.’
Mrs Quest said hastily, with a glance at the servant who was handing vegetables, ‘You shouldn’t listen to gossip.’
‘Everybody knows it, and besides, I heard you saying so to Mrs McDougall.’
‘Well, but that doesn’t mean – I don’t think …’
‘Damned hypocrisy,’ said Martha, ‘all this colour-bar nonsense, and Mr McFarline can sleep with whoever he likes and –’
‘My dear,’ said Mrs Quest, with a desperate look towards the impassive servant, ‘do think of what you’re saying.’
‘Yes, that’s all you think of, provided all the lies and ugliness are covered up.’
Mrs Quest raised her voice in anger, and the battle was on; mother and daughter said the things both had said so often before; not even waiting for the other to finish a sentence, until the noise caused Mr Quest to snap out, ‘Shut up, both of you.’
They looked at him immediately, and with relief; one might have supposed this was the result they intended. But Mr Quest said no more; after a baffled and exasperated glare, he dropped his eyes and continued to eat.
‘You hear what your father says?’ demanded Mrs Quest unfairly.
Martha was filled with frightened pain, at this alliance against her; and she exclaimed loudly, ‘Anything for peace, you and your Christianity, and then what you do in practice …’ But almost at once she became ashamed, because of the childishness of what she was saying. But the things we say are usually on a far lower level than what we think; it seemed to Martha that perhaps her chief grievance against her parents was this: that in her exchanges with them she was held down at a level she had long since outgrown, even on this subject, which, to her parents, was the terrifying extreme outpost of her development.
But her remark at least had had the power to pierce her father’s defences, for he raised his head and said angrily, ‘Well, if we’re so rotten, and you haven’t time for us, you can leave. Go on,’ he shouted, carried away by the emotions his words generated, ‘go on, then, get out and leave us in peace.’
Martha caught her breath in horror; on the surface of her mind she was pointing out to herself that her own father was throwing her out of her home – she, a girl of seventeen. Deeper down, however, she recognized this for what it was, an emotional release, which she should ignore. ‘Very well,’ she said angrily, ‘I will leave.’ She and her father looked at each other across the breadth of the table – her mother sat in her usual place at the head; and those two pairs of dark and angry eyes stared each other out.
It was Mr Quest who dropped his head and muttered, half-guiltily, ‘I simply cannot stand this damned fight, fight, fight!’ And he pettishly threw down his napkin. Immediately the servant bent and picked it up, and handed it to his master. ‘Thanks,’ said Mr Quest automatically, arranging it again across his lap.
‘My dear,’ said Mrs Quest, in a small appealing voice to her husband.
He replied grumblingly, ‘Well, fight if you like, but not when I’m around, for God’s sake.’
Now they all remained silent; and immediately after the meal Martha went to her bedroom, saying to herself that she would leave home at once, imagining various delightful rescues. The parcel of books lay unopened on her bed. She cut the string and looked at the titles, and her feeling of being let down deepened. They were all on economics. She had wished for books which might explain this confusion of violent feeling she found herself in.
Next day she rose early, and went out with the gun and killed a duiker on the edge of the Big Tobacco Land (where her father had grown tobacco during his season’s phase of believing in it). She called a passing native to carry the carcase home to the kitchen which, as it happened, was already full of meat.
But put this way it implies too much purpose. Martha woke early, and could not sleep; she decided to go for a walk because the sunrise was spread so exquisitely across the sky; she took the gun because it was her habit to carry it, though she hardly ever used it; she shot at the buck almost half-heartedly, because it happened to present itself; she was surprised when it fell dead; and when it was dead, it was a pity to waste the meat. The incident was quite different from actually planning the thing, or so she felt; and she thought half-guiltily, Oh, well what does it matter, anyway?
After breakfast she again looked at Joss’s books, skimming through them rapidly. They were written by clearly well-meaning people who disliked poverty. Her feeling was, I know this already; which did not only mean that she agreed with any conclusion which proved hopelessly unfair a system which condemned her, Martha Quest, to live on the farm, instead of in London with people she could talk to. She made this joke against herself rather irritably, for she knew it to be half true. What she felt was, Yes, of course poverty is stupid so why say it again? How do you propose to alter all this? And ‘all this’ meant the farm, the hordes of deprived natives who worked it, the people in the district, who assumed they had every right to live as they did and use the natives as they pleased. The reasonable persuasiveness of the books seemed merely absurd when one thought of violent passions ranged against them. She imagined the author of books like these as a clean, plump, suave gentleman, shut in a firelit study behind drawn curtains, with no sound in his ears but the movement of his own thoughts.
She kept the books a week, and then returned them on a mail day with the postboy. She also sent a note saying: ‘I wish you would let me have some books about the emancipation of women.’ It was only after the man had left that the request struck her as naive, a hopeless self-exposure; and she could hardly bear to open the parcel which was sent to her. Inside was the note she had expected: ‘I’m glad you have absorbed so much knowledge of economics in three days. What a clever girl you are. I enclose a helpful handbook on sexual problems. I could ask Solly, who has a fine collection of psychology, etc., but alas, he has gone off to “live his own life”, and our relations are not such that I could handle his books without asking him.’ The enclosed book was Engels’ Origin of the Family. Martha read it, and agreed with every word of it – or rather, with what she gained from it, which was a confirmation of her belief that the marriages of the district were ridiculous and even sordid, and most of all old-fashioned.
She sat under her tree, hugging her sun-warmed arms, feeling the firm soft flesh with approval, and the sight of her long and shapely legs made her remember the swollen bodies of the pregnant women she had seen, with shuddering anger, as at the sight of a cage designed for herself. Never, never, never, she swore to herself, but with a creeping premonition; and she thought of Solly’s books, now out of bounds, because he and Joss so unreasonably insisted on quarrelling; and she thought of Joss, for whom she was feeling a most irrational dislike. At one moment she scorned him because he had dared to treat her like an attractive young female; and the next because he had taken her at her word, and simply offered books; and the confusion hardened into a nervous repulsion: Well, she could do without Joss!
She returned Engels with such a formal note that no further word came from Joss, though she was waiting for one; and then melancholy settled over her, and she wandered around the farm like a girl under a spell of silence.
One morning she came on her father, seated on a log of wood at the edge of a field, watching the natives dig a furrow for storm water. Mr Quest held his pipe between his teeth, and slowly rolled plugs of rich dark tobacco between his palms, while his eyes rested distantly on his labourers.
‘Well, old son?’ he inquired, as Martha sat beside him; for he might call either his male or his female child ‘old son’.
Martha rested the rifle across her knees, pulled herself some chewing grass, and lapsed into his silence; for these two, away from Mrs Quest, were quite easy together.
But she could not maintain it; she had to worry at him for his attention; and soon she began to complain about her mother, while Mr Quest uneasily listened. ‘Yes, I daresay,’ he agreed, and ‘Yes, I suppose you are right’; and with every agreement his face expressed only the wish that she might remove this pressure on him to consider not only her position but his own. But Martha did not desist; and at last the usual irritability crept into his voice, and he said, ‘Your mother’s a good woman,’ and he gave her a look which meant ‘Now, that’s enough.’
‘Good?’ said Martha, inviting him to define the word.
‘That’s all very well,’ he said, shifting himself slightly away.
‘What do you mean by “good”?’ she persisted. ‘You know quite well she’s – I mean, if goodness is just doing what you want to do, behaving in a conventional way, without thinking, then goodness is easy enough to come by!’ Here she flung a stone crossly at the trunk of a tree.
‘I don’t see where you end, when you start like this,’ said Mr Quest, complainingly. For this was by no means the first time this conversation had taken place, and he dreaded it. They were both remembering that first occasion, when he had demanded angrily, ‘Well, don’t you love your mother, then?’ and Martha had burst into peals of angry laughter, saying ‘Love? What’s love got to do with it? She does exactly as she wants, and says, “Look how I sacrifice myself,” she never stops trying to get her own way, and then you talk about love.’
After a long silence, during which Mr Quest slowly slid away into his private thoughts, Martha said defiantly, ‘Well, I don’t see it. You just use words and – it’s got nothing to do with what actually goes on …’ She stopped, confused; though what she felt was clear enough; not only that people’s motives were not what they imagined them to be, but that they should be made to see the truth.
‘Oh Lord, Matty,’ said Mr Quest, suddenly bursting into that helpless anger, ‘What do you want me to do? The last year has been hell on earth, you never stop bickering.’
‘So you want me to go away?’ asked Martha pathetically and her heart sang at the idea of it.
‘I never said anything of the sort,’ said poor Mr Quest, ‘you’re always so extreme.’ Then, after a pause, hopefully: ‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it? You always say you’ve out-grown your mother, and I daresay you have.’
Martha waited, and it was with the same hopeful inquiry she had felt with Joss: she was wanting someone to take the responsibility for her; she needed a rescue. Mr Quest should have suggested some practical plan, and at once, very much to his surprise, he would have found an amenable and grateful daughter. Instead, the silence prolonged itself into minutes. He sighed with pleasure, as he looked over the sunlit field, the silent, heat-slowed bush; then he lowered his eyes to his feet, where there were some ants at work in an old piece of wood.
Suddenly he remarked, in a dreamy voice, ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it, seeing these ants? I wonder how they see us, like God, I shouldn’t be surprised? When that soil specialist was out last year, he said ants have a language, and a police force – that sort of thing.’
There was no reply from Martha. At last he shot her an apprehensive glance sideways, and met eyes that were half angry, half amused, but with a persistent criticism that caused him to rise to his feet, saying, ‘How about going up to the house and asking for some tea? Weather makes you thirsty.’
And in silence the father and daughter returned to the house on the hill.
Chapter Three (#ulink_ee041acc-fb1d-53ab-b335-7f57c310956c)
Mrs Quest watched her daughter and husband returning from the fields, with nervous anticipation. The night before, in the dark bedroom, she had demanded that he must speak to Martha, who wouldn’t listen to her own mother, she was ruining her future. Mr Quest’s cigarette glowed exasperatedly, illuminating his bent and troubled face; and at the sight of that face, Mrs Quest leaned over the edge of the bed towards him, and her voice rose into peevish insistence; for as long as the darkness allowed her to forget her husband’s real nature, she spoke with confidence. And what was he expected to say? he demanded. ‘Yes, yes, I daresay,’ and ‘I am quite sure you’re right,’ and ‘Yes, but, May, old girl, surely that’s putting it a bit strongly?’
Mrs Quest had lain awake most of the night, framing those angry complaints against him in her mind that she could not say aloud. Since it had always been understood that only bad luck and ill-health had brought the family to such irremediable if picturesque poverty, how could she say now what she thought: For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together, and run the farm properly, and then we can send Martha to a good school which will undo the bad effects caused by the Van Rensbergs and the Cohen boys?
She thought of writing to her brother; she even made this decision; then the picture of Martha in a well-regulated suburban London household, attending a school for nice English girls, entered her mind with uncomfortable force. She remembered, too, that Martha was seventeen; and her anger was switched against the girl herself; it was too late, it was much too late, and she knew it. Thoughts of Martha always filled her with such violent and supplicating and angry emotions that she could not sustain them; she began to pray for Martha: please help me to save her, please let her forget her silly ideas, please let her be like her brother. Mrs Quest fell asleep, soothed by tender thoughts of her son.
But it seemed that half an hour’s angry and urgent pleading last night had after all pricked Alfred into action. There was something in the faces of these two (they were both uncomfortable, and rather flushed) that made her hopeful. She called for tea and arranged herself by the tea table on the veranda, while Martha and Mr Quest fell into chairs, and each reached for a book.
‘Well, dear?’ asked Mrs Quest at last, looking at them both. Neither heard her. Martha turned a page; Mr Quest was filling his pipe, while his eyes frowningly followed the print on the pages balanced against his knee. The servant brought tea, and Mrs Quest filled the cups.
She handed one to Mr Quest, and asked again, ‘Well, dear?’
‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Mr Quest, without looking up.
Her lips tightened, and as she gave Martha her cup she demanded jealously, ‘Had a nice talk?’
‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Martha vaguely.
Mrs Quest regarded them both, and with a look of conscious but forgiving bitterness. Her husband was half hidden in a cloud of lazy blue smoke. He was the very picture of a hard-working farmer taking his repose. Martha, at first sight, might pass for that marriageable and accomplished daughter it seemed that Mrs Quest, after all, desired. In her bright-yellow linen dress, her face tinted carefully with cosmetics, she appeared twenty. But the dress had grass stains on it, was crumpled, she was smoking hungrily, and her fingers were already stained with nicotine, her rifle was lying carelessly across her lap, and on it was balanced a book which, as Mrs Quest could see, was called The Decay of the British Empire. That Martha should be reading this book struck her mother as criticism of herself; she began to think of the hard and disappointing life she had led since she came to the colony; and she lay back in her chair, and onto her broad square, rather masculine face came a look of patient regret; her small blue eyes clouded, and she sighed deeply.
The sigh, it appeared, had the power to reach where her words could not. Both Martha and Mr Quest glanced up, guiltily. Mrs Quest had forgotten them; she was looking through them at some picture of her own; she was leaning her untidy grey head against the mud wall of the house; she was twiddling a lock of that limp grey hair round and round one finger – a mannerism which always stung Mr Quest – while with the other hand she stroked her skirt, in a tired hard, nervous movement which affected Martha like a direct criticism of ingratitude.
‘Well, old girl?’ demanded Mr Quest, with guilty affection.
She withdrew her eyes from her private vision, and rested them on her husband. ‘Well?’ she returned, and with a different intonation, dry and ironic, and patient.
Martha saw her parents exchange a look which caused her to rise from her chair, in order to escape. It was a look of such sardonic understanding that she could not bear it, for it filled her with a violent and intolerable pity for them. Also, she thought, How can you be so resigned about it? and became fearful for her own future, which she was determined would never include a marriage whose only basis was that ironic mutual pity. Never, never, she vowed; and as she picked up her rifle and was moving towards the steps she heard a car approaching.
‘Visitors,’ she said warningly; and her parents sighed at the same moment, ‘Oh, Lord!’
But it was Marnie sitting beside one of her sisters’ husbands.
‘Oh, Lord,’ said Mr Quest again. ‘If she’s wearing those damned indecent shorts, then …’ He got up, and hastily escaped.
The car did not come close to the house, but remained waiting on the edge of the small plateau in front. Marnie approached. She was not wearing shorts, but a bright floral dress, with a bunch of flowers and lace at the neck. She was now very fat, almost as large as her mother; and her heavy browned arms and legs came out of the tight dyed crepe like the limbs of an imprisoned Brünhilde. Her hair was crimped into tight ridges around the good-natured housewife’s face.
‘I haven’t come to stay,’ she called from a distance, and quickened her steps. Martha waited for her, wishing that her mother also would go away; but Mrs Quest remained watchful above the teacups. So she walked down to meet Marnie, where they might both be out of earshot.
Marnie said hastily, ‘Listen, Matty, man, we’re having a dance, well, just friends, sort of, and would you like to come. Next Saturday?’ she looked apprehensively at Mrs Quest, past Martha’s shoulder.
Martha hesitated, and found herself framing excuses; then she agreed rather stiffly, so that Marnie coloured, as if she had been snubbed. Seeing this, Martha, with a pang of self-dislike, said how much she had been longing to dance, that in this district there was nothing to do – even that she was lonely. Her voice, to her own surprise, was emotional; so that she too coloured, as at a self-betrayal.
Marnie’s good heart responded at once to what must be an appeal, even a reproach, and she said, ‘But Matty, I’ve been wanting to ask you for ages, really, but I thought that …’ She stumbled over the unsayable truth, which was half a complaint against the snobbish English and half an explanation of her father’s attitude. She went on in a rush, falling back into the easy, suggestive raillery: ‘If you knew what my brother Billy thinks of you, oh, man! He thinks you’re the tops.’ She giggled, but Martha’s face stopped her.
The two girls, scarlet as poinsettias, were standing in silence, in the most confusing state of goodwill and hostility, when Mrs Quest came down the path. From a distance, they might have been on the point of either striking each other or falling into each other’s arms; but as she arrived beside them Martha turned and exclaimed vivaciously, ‘I’m going to dance at Marnie’s place on Saturday night!’
‘That’s nice, dear,’ she said doubtfully, after a pause.
‘It’s only just informal, Mrs Quest, nothing grand,’ and Marnie squeezed Martha’s arm. ‘Well, be seeing you, we’ll come and fetch you about eight.’ She ran off, calling back, ‘My mom says Matty can stay the night, if that’s all right.’ She climbed heavily into the car, sending back beaming smiles and large waves of the hand; and in a moment the car had slid down off the hill into the trees.
‘So you’re making friends with the Van Rensbergs,’ said Mrs Quest reproachfully, as if this confirmed all her worst fears; and a familiar note was struck for both of them when Martha said coldly, ‘I thought you and the Van Rensbergs had been friends for years?’
‘What’s all this about Billy?’ asked Mrs Quest, trying to disinfect sex, as always, with a humorous teasing voice.
‘What about him?’ asked Martha, and added, ‘He’s a very nice boy.’ She walked off towards her bedroom in such a state of exaltation that a voice within her was already inquiring, Why are you so happy? For this condition could be maintained only as long as she forgot Billy himself. She had not seen him for two or three years, but it occurred to her that he might have caught sight of her somewhere; for surely he could not have tender memories of their last encounter? Martha, on a hot, wet, steamy afternoon, had spent two hours wriggling on her stomach through the undergrowth to reach a point where she might shoot a big koodoo that was grazing in a corner of the Hundred Acres. Just as she rested the rifle to fire, a shot rang out, the koodoo fell, and Billy Van Rensberg walked out from the tree a few paces away, to stand over the carcase like a conqueror. ‘That’s my koodoo!’ said Martha shrilly. She was covered with red mud, her hair hung lank to her shoulders, her eyes trickled dirty tears. Billy was apologetic but firm, and made things worse by offering her half; for it was not the meat she cared about. He bestrode the carcase, and began stripping off the hide: a brown, shock-headed lad, who occasionally lifted puzzled blue eyes towards this girl who walked around and around him, crying with rage, and insisting, ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair!’ Finally she said, as the hot smell of blood reeked across the sunlight, ‘You’re no better than a butcher!’ With this, she marched away across the red clods of the field, trying to look indifferent. Martha had long since decided that this incident belonged to her childhood, and therefore no longer concerned her; and it made her uncomfortable that Billy might still be remembering it. Altogether the mere idea of Billy aroused in her an altogether remarkable resentment; and she chose not to think of him.
This was on a Wednesday. During the next day or two she could scarcely eat or sleep; she was in a condition of restless expectation that was almost unbearable. The Saturday dance seemed like an entrance into another sort of life, for she was seeing the Van Rensbergs’ house magnified, and peopled with youthful beings who had less to do with what was likely than with that vision of legendary cities which occupied so much of her imagination. The Quests were watching, with fearful amazement, a daughter who was no longer silent and critical, but bright-eyed and chattering and nervous: a proper condition for a girl going to her first dance.
Martha was agonized over what to wear, for Marnie, who had been wearing grown-up clothes since she was about thirteen, would of course have evening dresses. Mrs Quest hopefully offered a frilly pink affair which had belonged to a ten-year-old cousin, saying that it came from Harrods, which was a guarantee of good taste. Martha merely laughed, which was what Mrs Quest deserved for she was seeing her daughter as about twelve, with a ribbon in her hair, an Alice-in-Wonderland child, for this vision made the idea of Billy less dangerous. There was a quarrel: Martha began sarcastically to explain why it was that even if she had been twelve she could not have worn this pink frilled georgette to the Van Rensbergs’ house, since nice little English girls were not for export. At length, Mrs Quest withdrew, saying bitterly that Martha was only trying to be difficult, that she needn’t think they could afford to buy her a new one. She had the pink dress ironed and put on Martha’s bed; Martha quickly hid it, for she was really terrified at what the Van Rensbergs might say if they ever caught sight of that charming, coy, childish frock.
On the Friday morning she telephoned Mr McFarline, and was down at the turn-off waiting for him before nine in the morning.
Mr McFarline drove more slowly than usual to the station. He was nervous of Martha, who had accepted ten shillings from him, like a child, but who was now using him with the calm unscrupulousness of a good-looking woman who takes it for granted that men enjoy being used. She was looking, not at him, but out of the window at the veld; and he asked at last, ‘And what’s the great attraction at the station?’
‘I’m going to buy material for a dress,’ she announced.
He could think of no approach after that impersonal statement that might make it possible to joke with her, or even ask her for a kiss; and it occurred to him that the stern young profile, averted from him as if he were not there, was not that of a girl one might kiss. Mr McFarline was made to think, in fact, of his age, which was not usual for him. Two years before, this girl and her brother had come riding on their bicycles, over to his mine, eating chocolate biscuits, and listening to his tales of adventurous living, accepting his generous tips with an equally generous embarrassment. No more than two years ago, he had slapped Martha across the bottom, pulled her hair, and called her his lassie.
He said sentimentally, ‘Your father has no luck, but he’s got something better than money.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Martha politely.
He was driving along a piece of road that was dust between ruts, on a dangerous slant, and it was not for several seconds that he could turn his eye to her face. She was looking at him direct, with a slow quizzical gleam that made him redden. An outrageous idea occurred to him but he dismissed it at once, not because he was afraid of his neighbours knowing his life, but because Martha was too young to acknowledge that she knew: there was something in her face which made him think of his children in the compound, and even more of their mothers.
With a short, amused laugh, Martha again turned to the window.
He said gruffly, ‘It’s a fine thing for your father, a daughter like you. When I look at you, lassie, I wish I had married.’
Once again Martha turned to look at him, her eyebrows raised, her mouth most comically twisted. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you couldn’t marry them all, one can see that.’
They had reached the station, and he dragged at the brakes. His heavy, handsome face, with its network of tiny red veins, was now a uniform purple. Martha opened the door, got out and said, very politely, ‘Thanks for the lift.’ She turned away, then over her shoulder gave him a delightful amused smile, which at once infuriated Mr McFarline and absolved him of guilt. He watched her walk away, in her rather stiff awkward manner, to Socrates’ store; and he was swearing, Damn little … Then he, too, laughed and went off to town in the best of spirits, though at bottom he was very shocked; for when he was drunk he enjoyed thinking of himself as a sinner, and it was in these moods that the local charities were sent such generous cheques.
Martha went into the Greek store. It was empty. Socrates was behind the counter, as usual, reading a murder story. He greeted her as ‘Miss Quest’, and showed her what materials he had, apologizing for not having anything good enough for such a fine young lady. He was a short, plump man, with black eyes like raisins, and a pale, smooth skin, and a manner of suggesting that Mr Quest owed him a hundred pounds; and Martha said coldly, ‘No, I’m afraid you’re quite right, you have nothing very attractive, have you?’ She walked out, reluctantly, for there was a piece of green figured silk she would have liked to buy.
On the veranda she stood hesitating, before plunging into the glare of that dusty space, where the sunlight lashed up from tin roofs and from the shrinking pond. A dark greasy cloud held light like a vast sponge, for the sun rayed out whitely from behind it, like incandescent swords across the sky. She was thinking apprehensively, I hope he doesn’t get angry and send Daddy a bill. She was also thinking, Damned little dago; and checked herself, with guilt, for ‘dago’ was a word she had outlawed.
She narrowed her eyes to a slit of light, and walked out towards the Cohens’ store. She parted the bead curtain with relief, though blindly, and expected her eyes to clear on the sight of Mr Cohen; but it was Joss who stood there, palms down on the counter, like a veritable salesman, waiting for a native to make up his mind over a banjo. This man, seeing a white person enter, moved aside for her, but she saw Joss’s eyes on her, and said in kitchen kaffir, ‘No, when you’ve finished.’ Joss gave a small approving nod; and she watched the man finger the instrument, and then another, until at last he began counting sixpences and shillings from a piece of dirty cloth that was suspended from his neck. The banjo cost thirty shillings, which was two months’ wages to this farm-worker, and when he left, clutching the instrument with a childlike pleasure, she and Joss exchanged looks which left nothing to say. She even felt guilty that she was coming to buy anything so frivolous as an evening frock; and with this feeling was another, an older one: helpless anger that her father’s debt of a hundred pounds at Sock’s store was more than the farm-worker might earn in the whole of his short life.
Joss said, ‘And what can I do for you?’ and she watched him pull out the heavy rolls of stuff and stack them along the counter.
‘Why are you still here?’ she asked, acknowledging to herself that she had come to get some news of him.
‘Delay over the sale. Sock’s working a pretty point. He knows we’re keen to sell out.’
‘And so you can’t start university. I don’t see why you should sacrifice yourself,’ she said indignantly.
‘My, my, listen to the rebel who never leaves home,’ he remarked, raising his eyes to the fly-covered ceiling, while he competently slipped yards of pink cotton from hand to hand.
‘That isn’t why I don’t leave home,’ said Martha stiffly, as if he had been accusing her of wrong feelings.
‘You don’t say,’ he said, sarcastically; and then, more gently, when she lifted troubled eyes to his face: ‘Why don’t you be a brave girl and get into town, and learn a thing or two?’
She hesitated, and her look was appealing; and he said, ‘I know you’re very young, but you could get into a girls’ hostel, or share a flat with someone, couldn’t you?’
The idea of a girls’ hostel struck Martha before the kindness of his intention, and her eyebrows swiftly rose in derision.
He gave her a look which said plainly, ‘What the hell do you want then?’ and became impersonal. ‘I don’t think we have anything suitable, you’d better try Sock, he’s got a consignment of new materials.’
‘I’ve been to Sock,’ she said plaintively, feeling abandoned.
‘Then if he hasn’t, we certainly haven’t.’ He laid his palms downwards again, in the salesman’s gesture which annoyed her, like an affectation. But she still waited. Soon he let his hands fall from the counter, and looked at her seriously. He was relenting. ‘I’ll choose something for you,’ he said at last, and looked along the shelves. Martha, thinking of their tasteless back room, was momentarily alarmed, and ashamed of herself for the feeling; but he reached down a roll of white cotton, and said with a rough, unwilling tenderness, which touched her deeply, ‘White. Suitable for a young girl.’
She saw at once it would make an attractive dress, and said, ‘I’ll have six yards.’ And now his look seemed to say that she had agreed too quickly; and she fingered the crisp material to please him, while her mind already held a picture of how it would look made up. ‘I’m going to dance at the Van Rensbergs’,’ she remarked, with a confused intention; and his face stiffened, after a quick glance, and he cut the material without speaking.
‘Why don’t you come and dance with me?’ he asked with a challenge.
‘Why don’t you ask me?’ she replied quickly. But there was no response. He was folding the material, smoothing it in a way which kept her looking at his hands; and at last he tied it and handed it to her with a slightly sardonic bow. ‘On the account?’ he inquired.
‘No, I’m paying.’ She handed over the money, and waited for at least a look from him; but he said, ‘So long!’ and went quickly into the back part of the building, leaving the store quite empty. So she began the hot, wearying walk home, but this time was overtaken by the McDougalls before she had gone more than a few hundred yards.
As soon as she had reached her room, and spread the material on her bed, Mrs Quest entered, saying virtuously, ‘Oh my dear, we’ve been so worried …’ Then she saw the material, and reddened with anger. ‘How dare you waste your father’s money when you know we haven’t got it and we owe Sock so much money as it is?’
‘I paid for it myself,’ said Martha sullenly.
‘How could you pay for it yourself?’
‘There was the money from last Christmas, and the ten shillings Mr McFarline gave me.’
Mrs Quest hesitated, then chose a course and insisted, ‘The money wasn’t given to you to waste, and in any case …’
‘In any case, what?’ asked Martha coldly.
Again Mrs Quest hesitated; and at last her feelings expressed themselves in a voice that was uncertain with the monstrousness of what she was saying: ‘Until you’re twenty-one, you’ve no right to own money, and if we took it to court, the judge would … I mean, I mean to say …’ Martha was quite white, and unable to speak; it was her silence, the bitter condemnation in her eyes, which caused her mother to walk out of the room, saying unhappily: ‘Well, at least, I mean, I must speak to your father.’
Martha was exhausted with the violence of what she felt, and it was only the thought that this was midday Friday, and the dress must be ready tomorrow, that enabled her to go on sewing.
At suppertime Mrs Quest was bright and humorous, and there was an apology in her manner which Martha might have answered; but she was repeating to herself that the incident over the money was something she would never, never forget – it was to join the other incidents chalked up in her memory. Mr Quest ate his meal in peace, gratefully persuading himself that this unusual silence between his womenfolk was one induced by harmony and goodwill.
Immediately after supper Martha went to her room, and soon they heard the whirr of the sewing machine. Mrs Quest, in an agony of curiosity, timidly entered her daughter’s room, towards midnight, saying, ‘You must go to bed, Matty, I order you.’
Martha did not reply. She was sitting on the bed, surrounded by billowing folds of white. She did not even lift her head. Mrs Quest tugged the curtains across invading moonlight that flung a colder greener light over the warm dull lampshine, and said, ‘You’ll spoil your eyes.’
‘I thought my eyes were already spoiled,’ said Martha coldly; and for some reason Mrs Quest was unable to answer what seemed to be an accusation. She left the room, saying ineffectually, ‘You must go to bed at once, do you hear me?’
The machine whirred until nearly morning, an unusual undercurrent to the chirping crickets, the call of the owl. Mrs Quest woke her husband to complain that Martha would not obey her; but he said, ‘Well, if she wants to make a fool of herself let her,’ and turned over in bed with a clanging of the ancient springs. Martha heard both these voices, as she was meant to; and though she had been on the point of going to bed, since the sky was greying the square of the window and she was really very tired, she made a point of working on for another half hour.
She woke late, from a dream that she was wearing her white frock in a vast ballroom hung with glittering chandeliers, the walls draped with thick red crimson; and as she walked towards a group of people who stood rather above the floor, in long fluted gowns, like living statues, she noticed a patch of mud on her skirt and, looking down, saw that all her dress was covered with filth. She turned helplessly for flight, when Marnie and her brother came towards her, bent with laughter, their hands pressed over their mouths, gesturing to her that she must escape before the others, those beautiful and legendary beings at the end of the long hall, should catch sight of her.
She sat up in bed, and saw that the room was filled, not with sunlight, but with a baleful subdued glare reflected from clouds like still mountains. It was nearly midday, and if she was to finish her dress she must hurry. But the thought of it was no longer a pleasure; all the delight had gone from it while she slept. She decided, tiredly, that she would wear an ordinary dress; and it was only because Mrs Quest put her head around the door to say that lunch was ready, and Martha must come at once, that she replied she would not take lunch, she had to finish the dress.
Work on it restored the mood she had lost; and when it began to rain, her exultation was too great to be deepened – these were the first rains of the season; and she sat on the bed clicking her needle through the stiff material, and while overhead the old thatch rustled as the wet soaked in, as if it remembered still, after so many years, how it had swelled and lifted to the rain when it stood rooted and uncut. Soon it was soaked, and the wet poured off the edge of thatch in glittering stalactites, while the grey curtain of rain stood solid behind, so dense that the trees barely twenty paces away glimmered like faint green spectres. It was dark in the room, so Martha lit a candle, which made a small yellow space under the all-drenching blackness; but soon a fresh coloured light grew at the window, and, going to it, Martha saw the grey back of the storm already retreating. The trees were half emerged from the driving mists, and stood clear and full and green, dripping wet from every leaf; the sky immediately overhead was blue and sunlit, while only a few degrees away it was still black and impenetrable. Martha blew out the candle, and put the last stitches in her dress. It was only four in the afternoon, and the hours before she would be fetched seemed unbearable. At last, she went in to supper in her dressing gown; and Mrs Quest said nothing, for there was a dreamy, exalted look on her daughter’s face which put her beyond the usual criticisms.
Five minutes before eight o’clock, Martha came from her room, a candle in each hand, with her white dress rustling about her. To say she was composed would be untrue. She was triumphant; and that triumph was directed against her mother, as if she said, You can’t do anything about it now, can you? She did not look at Mrs Quest at all, but passed her steadily, her naked brown shoulders slightly tensed. Nor did her pose loosen, or she stand naturally, until she was before her father, where she waited, her eyes fixed on his face, in a look of painful inquiry. Mr Quest was reading a book printed by a certain society which held that God had personally appointed the British nation to rule the world in His Name, a theory which comforted his sense of justice; and he did not immediately raise his eyes, but contracted his brows in protest as the shadow fell over his book. When he did, he looked startled, and then gazed, in a long silence, at Martha’s shoulders, after a quick evasive glance at her demanding, hopeful eyes.
‘Well?’ she asked breathlessly at last.
‘It’s very nice,’ he remarked flatly, at length.
‘Do I look nice, Daddy?’ she asked again.
He gave a queer, irritable hunch to his shoulders, as if he disliked a pressure, or distrusted himself. ‘Very nice,’ he said slowly. And then, suddenly, in an exasperated shout: ‘Too damned nice, go away!’
Martha still waited. There was that most familiar division in her: triumph, since this irritation was an acknowledgment that she did in fact look ‘nice’; but also alarm, since she was now abandoned to her mother. And Mrs Quest at once came forward and began, ‘There you are, Matty, your father knows what is best, you really cannot wear that frock and …’
The sound of a car grew on their ears; and Martha said, ‘Well, I’m going.’ With a last look at her parents, which was mingled with scorn and appeal, she went to the door, carefully holding her skirts. She wanted to weep, an impulse she indignantly denied to herself. For at that moment when she had stood before them, it was in a role which went far beyond her, Martha Quest: it was timeless, and she felt that her mother, as well as her father, must hold in her mind (as she certainly cherished a vision of Martha in bridal gown and veil) another picture of an expectant maiden in dedicated white; it should have been a moment of abnegation, when she must be kissed, approved, and set free. Nothing of this could Martha have put into words, or even allowed herself to feel; but now, in order to regain that freedom where she was not so much herself as a creature buoyed on something that flooded into her as a knowledge that she was moving inescapably through an ancient role, she must leave her parents who destroyed her; so she went out of the door, feeling the mud sink around her slight shoes, and down the path towards a man who came darkly against stars which had been washed by rain into a profusely glittering background to her mood. Martha, who had known Billy Van Rensberg all her childhood, who had been thinking of him during the last half hour with suppressed resentment, as of something she must bypass, an insistent obstacle, found herself now going towards him half fainting with excitement. For she at once told herself this was not Billy; this man, whose face she could clearly see in the bright glow, might be a cousin of some kind, for he had a family likeness.
Martha found herself on the back seat of the car, on his knee, together with five other people, who were so closely packed together it was hard to know whose limbs were whose. Marnie’s half-smothered voice greeted her from the front seat. ‘Matty, meet – Oh, George, stop it, I’ve got to do the intros, oh, do stop it. Well, Matty, you’ll have to find out who everybody is.’ And she stopped in a smother of giggles.
While the car slid greasily down the steep road, and then skidded on its brakes through the mealie-fields, Martha lay stiffly on the strange man’s knee, trying to will her heart, which was immediately beneath his hand, to stop beating. His close hold of her seemed to lift her away from the others into an exquisite intimacy that was the natural end of days of waiting; and the others began to sing, ‘Horsey, keep your tail up, keep your tail up, keep your tail up’; and she was hurt that he at once joined in, as if this close contact which was so sweet to her was matter-of-fact to him. Martha also began to sing, since it appeared this was expected of her, and heard her uncertain voice slide off key; and at once Marnie said, with satisfaction, ‘Matty’s shocked!’
‘Oh, Matty’s all right,’ said the strange man, slightly increasing the pressure of his hand, and he laughed. But it was a cautious laugh, and he was holding her carefully, with an exact amount of pressure; and Martha slowly understood that if the intimacy of the young people in this car would have been shocking to Marnie’s mother, or at least to her own, it was governed by a set of rigid conventions, one of which was that the girls should giggle and protest. But she had been lifted away into a state of feeling where the singing and the giggles seemed banal; and could only remain silent, with the strange man’s cheek against hers, watching the soft bright trees rush past in the moonlight. The others continued to sing, and to call out, ‘Georgie, what are you doing to Marnie?’ or ‘Maggie, don’t let Dirk get you down,’ and when this attention was turned to Martha and her partner, she understood he was replying for her when he said again, ‘Oh, Matty’s all right, leave her alone.’ She could not have spoken; it seemed the car was rocking her away from everything known into unimaginable experience; and as the lights of her own home sank behind the trees, she watched for the light of the Van Rensbergs’ house as of the beacons on a strange coast. The singing and shouting were now a discordant din beneath the low roof of the car; and in their pocket of silence, the man was murmuring into Martha’s ear, ‘Why didn’t you look at me then, why?’ With each ‘why’ he modified his hold of her in a way which she understood must be a divergence from his own code; for his grip became compelling, and his breathing changed; but to Martha the question was expected and delightful, for if he had been looking for her, had she not for him? A glare of light swept across the inside of the car, the man swiftly released her, and they all sat up. The Van Rensbergs’ house was in front of them, transfigured by a string of coloured lights across the front of the veranda, and by the moonlit trees that stood about it.
They tumbled out of the car, and nine pairs of eyes stroked Martha up and down. She saw she was the only person in evening dress; but at once Marnie said, in breathless approval, ‘You look fine, Matty, can I have the pattern?’ She took Martha’s arm, and led her away from the others, ignoring the lad with whom she had been in the car. Martha could not help glancing back to see how he took what she felt as a betrayal, for she was dizzy and shocked; but George had already slipped his arm around another girl, and was leading her to the veranda. She looked round for her own partner, feeling that surely he must come forward and claim her from Marnie, but the young man, in a tight uncomfortable suit whose thick texture her fingers knew, and whose appearance had the strangest look of alienation, was bending, with his back to her, over the open engine of the car, reaching down into it with a spanner.
So she went forward with Marnie, on to the wide veranda, which was cleared for dancing. There were about a dozen people waiting. She knew them vaguely by sight, having seen them at the station, and she smiled in the manner of one who has been prevented from achieving friendship by all manner of obstacles. Marnie took her through the veranda and into the room behind, where Mr Van Rensberg was sitting in his shirt sleeves, reading a newspaper beside an oil lamp. He nodded, then raised his head again and stared rudely; and Martha began to feel ashamed, for of course her dress was too elaborate for the occasion; and it was only Marnie’s exclamations of delight and admiration that kept her mood from collapsing entirely.
Martha watched her friend rub lipstick on to protruding, smiling lips before the mirror, and waited on one side, for she did not want to see herself in the glass; but as they returned to the veranda she caught sight of herself in a windowpane; she did not know this aloof, dream-logged girl who turned a brooding face under the curve of loose blonde hair; so strange did it seem that she even glanced behind her to see if some other girl stood there in just such another white dress, and noticed her escort standing outside the door to the veranda.
‘You’re all right,’ he said impatiently, as if he had been kept waiting; and an old gramophone began to play from behind a window.
At once the space filled with couples; and Martha, lagging back to watch, to adjust herself, was dismayed by a savage discrepancy between what she had imagined and what was happening; for dancing may mean different things to different people, but surely (or so she felt) it could not mean this. Male and female, belly to belly, they jigged and bounced, in that shallow space between roof and floor of the veranda which projected out into the enormous night, in a good-natured slapdash acceptance of movement, one foot after another, across the floor, as if their minds owned no connection with what their bodies and limbs were doing, while the small tinny music came from the neat black box. It was a very mixed group – that is, it must appear so to an outsider, though Martha felt the partners were chosen according to certain invisible obligations. The one link missing was joy of any kind. The married couples walked themselves cheerfully around; partners of marked family resemblance stuck together as if their very features bound them; the only members of the party who seemed unbound by these invisible fetters were several small girls between nine or ten and fifteen, who danced together, politely adjusting their movements, while their eyes watched the older members of their society with patient envy, as if anticipating what must seem to them a delicious freedom. The women wore ordinary dresses, the young men stiff suits, in which they looked ugly, or the easy khaki of their farmwear, which made them into handsome peasants. Martha was again humiliated because of her dress, though there was no criticism, only detached curiosity, in the glances she received.
She looked instinctively towards her partner for support, feeling that his appreciation would sustain her. And this time she really looked at him, and not at the mental image created by the idea of dancing, of one’s ‘first dance’. He was a half-grown, lanky youth, with light hair plastered wetly across a low forehead, and the heavy muscles of shoulders and arms – too heavy for the still boyish frame – distorted the neat clerkly suit. He was regarding her with embarrassed pride, while he jerked her loosely around the dancing space, one stride after another, his arms pumping, with a check at each corner so that they might achieve a change of direction. The truth came into her mind, and at the same moment she stammered out, ‘I don’t know your name’, and he at first stretched his mouth into a polite laugh, as at a jest, and then stopped dead, and dropped his arms, and stood staring at her, while his blunt and honest face went crimson.
‘What’s my name?’ he asked; and then, to save them both: ‘You’ve got a funny sense of humour.’ Again he held her in a dancing position, while his limbs laboured through the movements dictated by his mind, and they continued self-consciously around the veranda.
‘Well, I haven’t seen you for so long,’ she apologized, and again, even as she spoke, understood that it was he who had sat beside his father at the station; she could not imagine how she had failed to see Billy in this young man.
‘Oh, all right, all right,’ he muttered; and then suddenly burst out singing, in Afrikaans, which was as good as saying, ‘We have nothing to say to each other.’
Others joined in; it was a folk tune, and the small jazzy tune stopped, and someone put on another record. Now all the people on the veranda had arranged themselves quickly into two long lines, facing each other, while they clapped their hands. Martha, who had never seen the old dances, shook her head and fell out, and, as soon as the dancing began, found the spontaneous joy of movement that had been lacking in the other. Everyone enjoyed himself, everyone smiled, and sang; for the few minutes the music lasted, every person on the veranda lost self-consciousness and became part of the larger whole, the group; their faces were relaxed, mindless, their eyes met those of the men and women they must meet and greet in the dance with an easy exchange. It was no longer their responsibility; the responsibility of being one person alone, was taken off them. And soon the music stopped, and the other, newer music, with its wailing complaint, took its place. But Martha had fled, to collect herself, into the kitchen, where Mrs Van Rensberg was arranging the supper.
Marnie ran after her, pulled her aside and said, ‘It’s all right. I’ve told him you didn’t mean it, you’re not stuck-up, you’re just shy.’
Martha was resentful that she had been thus discussed, but found herself being pushed forward into Billy’s arms, while Marnie patted them both encouragingly, saying, ‘That’s right, that’s the idea, don’t take offence, man, the night is yet young.’
Billy held her at arm’s length, and gave her troubled but pleading glances; and she chattered brightly, on a note she knew was false. But she felt cold, and nervous. She wished bitterly she had not come; and then that she was better able to adjust herself, and the small tight critical knot in her could dissolve, and she become one with this friendly noisy crowd of people. She set herself to be nice to Billy, and for this he was half grateful, or at least took it as better than nothing. As the night slowly went by, and they made repeated trips to the buffet inside, where there were ranks of bottles of Cape brandy, and ginger beer, another illusory haze formed itself, within which she was able to persuade herself that Billy was the culmination of the last few days of helpless waiting: even, indeed, that the white frock had been made for him.
By midnight the house was filled with singing and laughter and the thin churning gramophone music could be heard only in snatches. The crowd had a confined look; the rooms were too full, and couples continually moved to the veranda steps, laughing and hesitating, because outside the ground was churned to a thick red mud, and the moon shone on the puddles left by the storm. Some made a tentative step down, while the others shouted encouragement; then owned themselves beaten, and went to find a private corner in one of the busy rooms, or in the kitchen, where Mrs Van Rensberg stood, hour after hour, slicing the bread, piling cream and fruit on the cakes. Martha saw Marnie seated on the knee of a strange youth while both talked to Mrs Van Rensberg; and she wished enviously that her own mother might be as tolerant and generous. For while she watched Marnie, as a guide to how she might behave herself, she knew it was impossible for her to do the same: she was not so much shocked as dismayed at the way Marnie was with one young man after another, as if they were interchangeable. She saw, too, that it was not her formal dress but the fact that she was dancing only with Billy that set her apart from the others. Yet she could not have gone with anyone else; it would have driven across the current of feeling which said that Billy – or rather, what he represented – had claimed her for the evening; for alcohol had strengthened the power of that outside force which had first claimed her four days before, at the moment she agreed to go to the dance. She was not herself, she was obedient to that force, which wore Billy’s form and features; and to the others it seemed as if she was as helpless to move away from him as he was reluctant to let her go. This absorbed couple who moved in a private dream were felt to be upsetting; whichever room they entered was disturbed by them; and at length Mr Van Rensberg broke the spell by arresting Martha as she trailed past him on Billy’s arm, by pointing his pipestem at her and saying, ‘Hey, Matty, come here a minute.’ She faced him, blinking and visibly collecting herself. The soft look on her face disappeared and she became watchful, gazing straight at him.
Mr Van Rensberg was a short, strong, thickset man of about sixty, though his round bristling black head showed not a trace of grey and his weathered face was hardly lined. He wore a dark-red scarf twisted thick around his bull neck, though it was swelteringly hot; and over it the small black, mordant eyes were as watchful as hers.
‘So your father lets you come visiting us, hey?’ he demanded.
Martha coloured; and half laughed, because of this picture of her father; and after a hesitation she said, consciously winsome and deferential, ‘You used to come visiting us, not so long ago.’ She checked herself, with a quick glance at the others – for there were several people listening; she feared he might resent this reminder of his long friendship with the Quests.
But he did not take her up on this point. With a kind of deliberate brutality, he lifted his pipestem at her again, and demanded, Did she admit that the English behaved like brutes in the Boer War?
At this, she could not help laughing, it was (to her) such an irrelevance.
‘It’s not a funny matter to us,’ he said roughly.
‘Nor to me,’ said Martha, and then, diffidently: ‘It was rather a long time ago, wasn’t it?’
‘No!’ he shouted. Then he quietened, and insisted, ‘Nothing has changed. The English are arrogant. They are all rude and arrogant.’
‘Yes, I think that’s true,’ said Martha, knowing it was often true; and then could not prevent herself asking that fatally reasonable question, ‘If you dislike us so much, why do you come to a British colony?’
There was a murmur from the listening people. There seemed to be many more people in the room than before, they had been crowding in, and Martha found herself thinking how different was this man’s position in his household to her father’s: the silence was due to him as a spokesman, he was a patriarch in a culture where the feared and dominating father is still key to the family group; and Martha felt a twinge of fear, because she understood this was not to be taken as a personal conversation, she was being questioned as a representative. And she did not feel herself to be representative.
Mr Van Rensberg dropped his pipe in dramatic comment, with a nod at the others, and remarked heavily, ‘So! So!’
Martha said quickly, with the defensive humour which she could not prevent, though she knew he found it insulting, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t come, why shouldn’t you? As far as I am concerned, you’re welcome.’
There was a silence, he seemed to be waiting for more; then he said, ‘There should be equal rights, there should be rights for both languages.’
Martha was remembering, very ruefully, that other conversation, with Joss. She smiled and said firmly, with considerable courage, considering the nature of her audience, that she believed in equal rights for all people, regardless of race and –
Billy tugged at her from behind, and said in an urgent voice, ‘Hey, Matty, come and dance.’
Mr Van Rensberg, who had dismissed the improbable suspicion from his mind as soon as it appeared said, rather taken aback, ‘Well, that’s all right, then, that’s all right.’ Afterwards, he would call Martha a hypocrite, like all the English.
On the veranda, Billy called her one to her face, without knowing he was doing so. ‘Why don’t you learn to speak Afrikaans?’ he asked, as if this followed naturally from what he had heard her say.
But to Martha this was narrowing the problem away from its principles, and she said, half flippantly, ‘Well, if it’s a question of doing justice to majorities, one’d have to learn at least a dozen native languages as well.’
His hand tightened across her back. To him it was as if she put the Afrikaans language on a level with those of the despised kaffirs. It was a moment of hatred; but at last he gave a short, uncomfortable laugh, and bent his head beside hers, closing his eyes to the facts of her personality, wishing to restore this illusory unity. It was late, some of the people had already left, and Martha was dancing in his arms stiffly and unwillingly, frowning over the incident that had just occurred. He felt that dancing would no longer be enough – or rather, that it was too late to wait for the spell to settle over them again. He drew her to the veranda steps. The moon was now standing level with the tops of the trees, the mud of the clearing was glimmering with light. ‘Let’s go down for a minute,’ he said.
‘But it’s all muddy.’
‘Never mind,’ he said hastily, and pulled her down.
Once again the wet squelched around her shoe, and she picked her way from ridge to ridge of hardening mud, hanging on Billy’s arm, while he steered them both to the side of the house out of sight. She tried to hold her skirts clear of the mud, while he pinned her arms down with his, and kissed her. His mouth was hard, and ground her head back. She resented this hard intrusive mouth, even while from outside – always from outside – came the other pressure, which demanded that he should simply lift her and carry her off like booty – but to where? The red mud under the bushes? She pushed aside this practical and desecrating thought, and softened to the kiss; then she felt a clumsy and unpractised hand creeping down her thigh, and she jerked away, saying in a voice that annoyed her, because of its indignant coldness: ‘Stop it!’
‘Sorry,’ he said at once, and let her go, with a humility that made her loathe him.
She walked away in front, leaving him to follow as he wished, and walked confusedly up the steps, because the few couples that were watching them with derisive smiles, and none of the communal teasing that had been drawn by the other couples. Martha saw the eyes drop to her skirt, and looked down, and saw that the hem was dragging heavy wth red mud.
Marnie came running forward, exclaiming, ‘But Matty, your lovely dress, you’ve spoilt it …’ She clicked over Martha for a moment, then tugged her through the house on her hand, saying, ‘Come and wash it off, before it dries.’
Martha went, without so much as a glance at the unfortunate Billy, grateful for Marnie, who thus took her back into the group.
‘You’d better take that dress off,’ said Marnie. ‘You’re staying the night, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘I forgot my suitcase,’ said Martha awkwardly, leaving herself completely in Marnie’s hands. For she had forgotten to pack her night things; her imagination had reached no further forward than the dancing and the exaltation.
‘Doesn’t matter, I’ll lend my pyjamas.’
Mrs Van Rensberg came fussing in, pleasant and maternal, saying she would ring Mrs Quest. It seemed that Martha ruining her dress while making love to her son was the most natural thing in the world. She kissed Martha, and said she hoped she would sleep well, and she mustn’t worry, everything was all right. The warm and comfortable words made Martha want to cry, and she embraced Mrs Van Rensberg like a child, and like a child allowed herself to be led to her room, and left alone.
It was a larger room built to the back of the house, lit by two tall candles, one on either side of the vast double bed spread with white. The windows were open to the veld, which was already greying to the dawn, and the moon had a pallid, exhausted look. A sheet of silver, inclining at the end of the room, took Martha’s attention, and she looked again, and saw it was a mirror. She had never been alone in a room with a full-length mirror before, and she stripped off her clothes and went to stand before it. It was as if she saw a vision of someone not herself; or rather, herself transfigured to the measure of a burningly insistent future. The white naked girl with the high small breasts that leaned forward out of the mirror was like a girl from a legend; she put forward her hands to touch, then as they encountered the cold glass, she saw the naked arms of the girl slowly rise to fold defensively across those breasts. She did not know herself. She left the mirror, and stood at the window for a moment, bitterly criticizing herself for allowing Billy, that impostor, to take possession of her at all, even for an evening, even under another’s features.
Next day she took breakfast with the Van Rensbergs, a clan of fifteen, cousins and uncles and aunts, all cheerfully mingled.
She walked home through the bush, carrying the dress in a brown paper bag, and, halfway, took off her shoes for the pleasure of feeling the mud squeeze and mould around her feet. She arrived untidy and flushed and healthy, and Mrs Quest, in a flush of relief, kissed her and said she hoped she had enjoyed herself.
For a few days, Martha suffered a reaction like a dulling of all her nerves. She must be tired, murmured Mrs Quest, over and over again, you must be tired, you must sleep, sleep, sleep. And Martha slept, hypnotized.
Then she came to herself and began to read, hungrily, for some kind of balance. And more and more, what she read seemed remote; or rather, it seemed that through reading she created a self-contained world which had nothing to do with what lay around her; that what she believed was separated from her problems by an invisible wall; or that she was guided by a great marsh light – but no, that she could not afford, not for a moment, to accept. But not merely was she continuously being flooded by emotions that came from outside, or so it seemed; continuously other people refused to recognize the roles they themselves had first suggested. When Joss, for instance, or Mr Van Rensberg, posed their catechism, and received answers qualifying her for their respective brotherhoods, surely at that moment some door should have opened, so that she might walk in, a welcomed daughter into that realm of generous and freely exchanged emotion for which she had been born – and not only herself, but every human being; for what she believed had been built for her by the books she read, and those books had been written by citizens of that other country; for how can one feel exiled from something that does not exist?
She felt as if a phase of her life had ended, and that now a new one should begin; and it was about a fortnight after the Van Rensbergs’ dance that Joss wrote: ‘I heard there was a job going, at the firm of lawyers where my uncles are both partners. I spoke to them about you. Get a lift into town and interview Uncle Jasper. Do it quickly. You must get yourself out of this setup. Yours, Joss.’ This was hastily scribbled, as if in a hurry; and there followed a neat and sober postscript: ‘If I’m interfering, I’m sorry.’
She wrote back that she would at once apply for the job, and gratefully thanked him. She sent this letter by the cook, so urgent did it seem that he should at once know her reaction.
With Joss’s letter in her hand, she walked onto the veranda, and informed her parents, in a hasty way, that she was taking a job in town; and she hardly heard their startled queries. It all seemed so easy now. ‘But you can’t expect me to stay here for the rest of my life!’ she demanded incredulously, just as if she had not been ‘here’ for two years, apparently as if she considered there could be no possible end to it.
‘But why Joss – I mean, if you felt like this, we could ask our friends …’ protested poor Mrs Quest, helplessly.
She was thinking in terms of the future, something unpleasant to be faced, perhaps, next week; and when she heard that Martha intended to go into town, with Mr McFarline, the very next morning, she said she forbade it. Martha made no reply, and she suddenly announced she was coming into town with her.
‘Oh, no, you’re not,’ said Martha, in the deadly tone of unmistakable hatred which always disarmed Mrs Quest, who had never admitted that hatred inside a family was even possible.
Martha was not in the house that last afternoon, so Mrs Quest went into her bedroom, and looked helplessly around it for some kind of clue to her daughter’s state of mind. She found Joss’s note, which struck her unpleasantly; she found the soiled white dress, still crushed into the paper bag and already going green with mildew; she looked at the books on the table by the bed, with a feeling that they must be responsible; but they were Shelley and Byron and Tennyson and William Morris; and though she had not read them herself since she was a girl, she thought of them as too respectable to be in any way dangerous.
Martha, in the meantime, was consciously bidding farewell to her childhood. She visited the ant heap where she had knelt in ecstatic prayer during her ‘religious phase’; and she walked through the thick scrub to the quartz reef under which a spring came bubbling clear and cold, where she had lain thinking of the stream that must reach the sea hundreds of miles away; she walked through the compound, where she had secretly played with the native children against her mother’s orders. She paid a last visit to the big tree. It was all useless; her childhood, it seemed, had already said goodbye to her, nothing had power to move her.
Next day she went to town with Mr McFarline, who tried to impress her with the fact that he had just been elected member of Parliament for one of the city constituencies, but received only an abstracted politeness for his pains. She interviewed Mr Cohen, the uncle, got the job, and found herself a room before nightfall. Her parents expected her home. She sent them a wire saying would they please send on her books and clothes. ‘Do not worry, everything fine.’
And a door had closed, finally; and behind it was the farm, and the girl who had been created by it. It no longer concerned her. Finished. She could forget it.
She was a new person, and an extraordinary, magnificent, an altogether new life was beginning.
Part Two (#ulink_7af52eae-5c0a-5af4-8c2e-aead8e50847f)
The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her.
– BARON CORVO
Chapter One (#ulink_deb77f4c-1b26-5cde-849a-4bbb1db235f7)
The offices of Robinson, Daniel and Cohen were crushed into the top floor of a building on Founders’ Street, a thoroughfare which marked the division between that part of the town built in the 1890s and the centre, which was modern. From the windows one looked away left over the low tin roofs and shantylike structures which were now kaffir stores, Indian stores, and the slum of the coloured quarter. To the right rose gleaming white buildings fronted with glass, and at the end of the street was the rambling, pillared, balconied brown mansion known as McGrath’s Hotel, whose erection was remembered by old inhabitants as a sign of the triumph of progress: the first modern hotel in the colony. Founders’ Street was narrow and shabby; and although it was named to commemorate those adventurers who had come riding over the veld to plant the Union Jack, regardless of the consequences to themselves or to anybody else, it was now synonymous in the minds of the present citizens with dubious boardinghouses and third-rate shops. This building shared the doubtful quality. On the ground floor was a large wholesale business, so that as one mounted the central iron staircase, which spiralled up like an outsized corkscrew, it was to look down on a warren of little offices, each inhabited by a man in shirtsleeves, half buried in papers, or by a girl with a typewriter; while at the back was a narrow strip of counter where the ‘samples’ were stacked. With what relief did the romantic eye turn to that counter, past the hive of impersonal offices! For the half-dozen coloured blankets, the dozen rolls of material, which surely, from a practical point of view, were as good as useless, seemed to suggest that the owner, a brother of Mr Cohen upstairs, a cousin of Mr Cohen from the kaffir store, also felt a need to remind himself and others of the physical existence of machinery, textiles, and a thousand other fascinating things which were sold through this office by means of those little bits of paper. Perhaps Mr Cohen, who had made his fortune in another small native store just down the street, regretted those days when he handled beads and bicycles and stuffs, and kept that counter embedded among the desks and filing cabinets as a nostalgic reminder of personal trading, trade as it should be. On the counter were big tinted pictures of shipping, locomotives, the ports of the world. No one seemed to penetrate to it save old Mr Samuel Cohen himself, who might be observed (by someone climbing the iron staircase) handling the blankets and rearranging the pictures.
The first and second floors were let as rooms, and the less said about them, the better. Clients ascending to the sober legal offices above might catch sight of a woman in a dressing-gown hurrying (but aggressively, since she had paid her rent and had the right to it) to the bathroom. At night, working late the partners had been known to telephone the police to quell a brawl or eject an improper person. In fact, this layer of the building was altogether undignified and unsuitable; but, as the partners were waiting to rebuild, everything was allowed to remain. Martha discovered a familiar atmosphere almost at once when she heard Mr Cohen say to a client, ‘I must apologize for the surroundings, but we really aren’t responsible.’ This although the building was owned and controlled by him; because he planned a change, he could not be considered as really being here.
On the other hand, the very age of the place gave it dignity. People from older countries might think it strange to describe a building dated 1900 as old; but it had been the first to raise its three storeys above the bungalows and for this it was affectionately remembered, and one entered it with a comforting sense of antiquity – as in Spain one lifts one’s eyes from the guidebook murmuring reverently, ‘This was first built three centuries before Christ, think of that!’ and afterwards poverty and squalor seem merely picturesque.
This, the oldest legal firm in the city, was known as Robinson’s on account of the first Mr Robinson, now dead; for the young Mr Robinson gave precedence to both Mr Cohens, and to Mr Daniel when he was there, which was seldom, for he was a member of Parliament, and therefore very busy. But all this became clear to Martha slowly; for she was too confused, to begin with, to understand more than her own position, and even that was not so simple.
The partners each had a small room, reached by squeezing through the main room, which was packed tight with typewriters and filing cabinets and telephones; but though this main room at first sight looked like chaos, holding as it did fifteen women of varying ages, certain divisions soon became apparent. The chief one was that the four senior secretaries sat at one end, with telephones on their desks; but Martha was so ignorant of office routine she did not at first notice this. She arrived on the first morning in a state of keyed desire to show impossible heights of efficiency: arrived half an hour before anyone else, and sat waiting for the demands on her to begin. But the other girls drifted in, talked a little; and then came the partners; and still no one asked her for anything. She was left sitting until a slight, sparrowlike woman, with bright fringed hair and round blue eyes, came past and remarked warningly that she should keep her eyes open and learn the ropes. From which Martha gathered that she had already failed in her first duty, and opened them again from a vision of herself receiving quantities of illegible scrawl and transforming it, as if by magic, into sober and dignified legal documents of the kind Mrs Buss produced from her typewriter. She forced herself to watch what was going on around her.
At lunch hour she stayed at her desk, because she had ten shillings between herself and the end of the month, and told herself it would be good for her figure. She went from typewriter to typewriter to see what kind of work she would be asked to do, and felt dismayed in spite of her large intentions; for these legal documents – no, no, it was as if she, Martha, were being bound and straightened by the formal moribund language of legality.
Just before the others were due back, the door marked ‘Mr Jasper Cohen’ opened, and he came out, stopping in surprise when he saw her. He laid some documents on Mrs Buss’s desk and went back again. Almost at once a buzzer sounded, and then, while she confusedly looked for the right instrument, the door opened again and he said, ‘Never mind the telephone. You won’t mind my asking – have you any money, Miss Quest?’
For some reason she protested, ‘Oh, yes, quite a lot,’ and then blushed because it sounded so childish.
He looked at her dubiously, and said, ‘Come into my office for a moment,’ and she followed him. It was very small; he had to squeeze past the corner of the big desk to the corner he sat in. He told her to sit down.
Mr Jasper Cohen already owned her heart because of a quality one might imagine would make it impossible: he was hideously ugly. No, not hideously: he was fantastically ugly, so ugly the word hardly applied. He was short, he was squat, he was pale; but these were words one might as justly use for Joss, his nephew, or his brother, Max. His body was broad beyond squareness; it had a swelling, humped look. His head enormous; a vast, pale, domed forehead reached to a peak where the hair began, covering a white, damp scalp in faint oily streaks, and breaking above the ears into a black fuzz that seemed to Martha pathetic, like the tender, defenceless fuzz of a baby’s head. His face was inordinately broad, a pale, lumpy expanse, with a flat, lumpy nose, wide, mauvish lips, and ears rioting out on either side like scrolls. His hands were equally extraordinary: broad, deep palms puffed themselves into rolls of thick white flesh, ending in short, spatulate fingers almost as broad as long. They were the hands of a grotesque; and as they moved clumsily in a drawer, looking for something, Martha watched them in suspense, wishing she might offer to help him. She longed to do something for him; for this ugly man had something so tender and sweet in his face, together with the stubborn dignity of an afflicted person who intends to make no apologies or claims for something he cannot help, that she was asking herself, What is ugliness? She was asking it indignantly, the protest directed against nature itself; and perhaps for the first time in her life, she wondered with secret gratitude what it would be like to be born plain, born ugly, instead of into, if not the aristocracy, at least the middle classes of good looks.
He at last found what he wanted. It was a roll of notes, and he took five of them, sliding them free of each other with an awkward movement; and said, ‘You are only getting a small salary, and so …’ As Martha hesitated, he continued quickly, ‘It was my fault for not remembering you might be short of money, coming in from the farm like that. Besides, you are an old friend of my nephew.’ That clinched the thing for him; and Martha took the money, feeling guilty because she had not been a good friend to Joss. She thanked him with emotion, which seemed to upset him, and he said hurriedly, ‘In a day or two we’ll give you something to do. Just pick up what you can, it must be strange to you if you’ve never been in an office before.’
The interview was over. She went to the door and, as she opened it, heard him say, ‘I shall be pleased if you do not mention this to Mrs Buss. There is no reason why she should know.’ She glanced incredulously at him, for he sounded apprehensive; she was even ready to laugh. But he was looking at some papers.
She went out, and met the other Mr Cohen returning. She disliked him as much as she liked his brother. He was ordinary in appearance, smartly commonplace: a neat, pale, respectable Jewish-looking person, in a striped business suit, and his manner was snappy but formal, as if he tried to cover a natural ill-humour by the forms of good feeling. And where his brother swelled and protruded into large shapes, he seemed concerned to give the opposite impression. His hair lay in a smooth black cap; his hands were neatly moving, and weighted on either little finger with a heavy signet ring; his lie lay safely behind a narrow gold chain; a gold watch chain confined his neat little stomach.
Martha returned to her desk as the other girls came in, and spent the afternoon watching them. There was no need to be told (as Mrs Buss made a point of telling her) that this was an easy office to work in. There was no feeling of haste; and if they paused in what they were doing for a chat, or a cigarette, they did not pretend otherwise if one of the partners came through. When Mr Max Cohen entered with work for his secretary, he asked politely, ‘Would you mind doing this for me, when you’ve finished your tea?’ And his secretary finished her tea before even looking to see what he had brought her to do. All this was strange to Martha, although she had not known what she must expect. Perhaps she was remembering what her father had said of his days in an office in England, for it was to escape from that office that he had come farming: ‘I simply couldn’t stick it. Day in and day out, damned routine, and then, thank God, there was the war, and then, after that, going back to the office was nothing but purgatory, sitting at a desk like a mouse in a hole.’ So it may have been that Martha was unconsciously expecting a purgatory, and had now found this pleasant working place; but of course she had not yet so much as lifted her fingers to the typewriter.
Two incidents occurred that first afternoon. At a table near the door where the clients came in sat a young woman whose task it was to take money from debtors. They came in, one after another, white, black and coloured, to pay off small sums on what they owed. The young woman was strictly impersonal; and because of this, Martha’s first impulse towards pity was dulled. But almost immediately after the midday break a shabby woman entered, with a small child on either hand, and began to cry, saying she could not pay what was due and perhaps her creditor would let her off that month? The impersonal young woman argued with her in a warningly low voice, as if to persuade the shabby one to lower hers. But all the typists were watching, and Martha saw they glanced towards Mrs Buss.
Sure enough, it was not very long before the dues collector went to Mrs Buss and said, ‘Can you talk to Mr Cohen? You know, she really does have a hard time, and she’s having another kid, too.’
Mrs Buss said flatly, ‘Well, whose fault is it she has a new kid every year?’
‘But –’
‘I’m not going to ask Mr Cohen, he’ll give in to her again, and anyway she’s a fraud – she was drunk in McGrath’s last night, I saw her.’
The shabby woman began to cry. ‘Let me explain to Mr Cohen, just let me explain,’ she pleaded.
Mrs Buss kept her head stoically down over the typewriter and her fingers drummed angrily, until the door behind her opened and Mr Jasper Cohen came out.
‘What’s all this?’ he demanded mildly.
‘Nothing,’ said Mrs Buss indignantly, ‘nothing at all.’
Mr Cohen looked over the listening heads of his staff to the weeping woman.
‘Mr Cohen,’ she wept, ‘Mr Cohen, you’ve got a good heart, you know I try my best, you can put in a good word for me.’
‘You did promise, you know,’ said Mr Cohen, and then hastily: ‘Very well, don’t cry, I’ll write to our clients. Make a note of it, Mrs Buss.’ And he escaped quickly into his room.
The woman left the office, wiping her eyes, with a triumphant look at Mrs Buss; while Mrs Buss let her hands fall dramatically from her machine, like a pianist at the end of a piece, and exclaimed, ‘There, what did I tell you?’
The dues collector looked positively guilty under that blue and accusing stare, and murmured, ‘Well, he’s got a right to decide.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Buss tragically. ‘Yes, and that’s what always happens. I do my best to protect him, but … Well, when we get into the new offices this sort of thing won’t happen, believe me!’ And she lifted her hands to the keys again.
The second incident was similar. Charlie, the office-boy, came round with a tray of tea, and then went to speak to Mrs Buss, while she let those dedicated hands rest on the keys like someone not prepared to be interrupted.
‘No,’ she said loudly, ‘no, Charlie, it’s no good.’ And she began typing.
Charlie raised his voice over the noise; she typed faster; he cried, ‘Madam!’
She stopped suddenly, in a dramatic silence, glared at him, shouted ‘No!’ and at once rattled on.
Charlie gave an immense, good-natured shrug, and went out. Immediately, Mrs Buss rested her hands, looked around the office, and demanded breathlessly, ‘What do you think of that for cheek?’ The girls laughed sympathetically and, it seemed, did not need to be told why it was cheek.
Martha, who was at sea, looked closely at Charlie when he came back to collect the empty cups. He was a tall and handsome young man, with a dark bronze skin, a small toothbrush moustache, and careless eyes. He was whistling a dance tune under his breath.
Mrs Buss watched him over her jigging hands, and then protested sharply, ‘Charlie!’
‘Yes, madam?’ he answered at once, turning to her.
‘We know you’re a dancing champion, you don’t have to whistle like that,’ she said, without expecting an answer, for she tore a sheet of paper out of her machine and inserted another without looking at him.
Charlie stopped his muted whistle; and then, with his black and gallant eyes fixed on her, sidled past her towards Mr Cohen’s door.
‘It’s all right, I’ll get his cup,’ she said firmly, flushed with anger. She glared at him; he looked back with, it seemed, appreciation of the duel, for his eyes were snapping with amusement.
‘Charlie,’ she said furiously, ‘you’re not going to ask Mr Cohen for that money!’
‘No, madam,’ he agreed, and gave a large and fatalistic shrug. With a humorous look at her, he went out and began a shrill whistle just outside the door.
‘Did you ever see anything like it?’ asked Mrs Buss, faint with indignation. ‘He’d go past me, into Mr Cohen’s office, and ask for an advance!’
Suddenly Martha asked, ‘What does he earn?’ and knew at once she should not have asked, or at least not in that tone of voice.
Mrs Buss said aggressively, ‘He earns five pounds a month. It’s more than he’s worth, by about four pounds. Have you ever heard of an office-boy earning that much? Why, even the head cook at McGrath’s earns only seven! Mr Cohen’s so softhearted …’ She was overcome by inarticulate indignation, and continued to type like a demon.
Martha reflected uneasily that she herself was to earn twelve pounds ten shillings, and an altogether unreasonable protest was aroused in her; for if she supported the complete equality of all races, then she must applaud this small advance towards it. On the other hand, because of her upbringing, she was shocked. She asked the blonde young woman next to her what Charlie did in the office, and was told that he delivered letters by hand, sent others to the post, made the tea and ran errands for the girls in the office.
‘He’s a real character, Charlie is,’ the girl added good-humouredly.
‘Mr Cohen makes a joke. He says, “The two best-dressed men in town are my brother” – that’s Max, you know – “and my office-boy.”’ She looked at Martha to make sure she would laugh, and when Martha did she continued, ‘I like Charlie. He’s much better than most of the niggers, and that’s saying something, isn’t it?’
Martha agreed absent-mindedly that it was, while she argued with the voices of her upbringing. She had never heard of a native being paid more than twenty shillings a month. Her father’s boss-boy earned twenty, after ten years’ service. With half her emotions she commended Mr Cohen for his generosity, both to herself and to Charlie, and with the other she fought down an entirely new fear – new to her, that is: she could not help feeling afraid that the gap between her and Charlie was seven pounds and ten shillings, in hard cash.
At half past four something happened which cannot be described as an incident, since she understood it occurred every day. The girls were covering their typewriters when the door swung open and in came a tall, fair woman, who simply nodded at Mrs Buss and stood waiting. Mrs Buss lifted her telephone receiver.
‘Here’s our beauty,’ muttered the blonde girl to Martha. ‘I wouldn’t mind her clothes, would you? These Jews always give their wives everything they want.’
Well, of course; what could Mr Cohen’s wife be called, if not ‘beauty’? But Martha was troubled by something else – that she was not the only female creature prepared to overlook Mr Cohen’s appearance. It had never entered her head that there could be a Mrs Cohen; but almost immediately the balance was redressed by a fresh conviction of injustice. Mrs Cohen was not, Martha decided, in the least beautiful; whereas Mr Cohen was – in any sense that mattered. Conventionally, she might be called tall, slim and elegant; Martha preferred to describe her as bony, brassyhaired and over-dressed. She wore a clinging white crepe afternoon suit, a white cap with dangling black plumes, and a great deal of jewellery. The jewellery was sound, but colourful. When Mr Cohen came out in answer to Mrs Buss’s call, Martha was still able to feel sorry for him; but she was at once forced to examine this emotion when she understood that all the women around her were feeling the same thing.
‘Poor man,’ said Mrs Buss calmly, as she came pushing her own narrow hips this way and that around the sharp desks, and pulling on black suede gloves. ‘Poor man. Oh, well, it’s not my affair.’ And she went out, at a discreet distance from her employer and his wife, watching them jealously.
Chapter Two (#ulink_3fb564db-f1d0-5bc3-bc16-7a9d5f4df240)
When Martha arrived in the room she was prepared to call her home, her mother and father were there, and she was angry. She had not expected them for at least a week; it seemed to be monstrously unfair that she had been tormented for years by those terrible preparations for the excursions over a seventy-mile stretch of road, and now, it seemed, there was no more necessity for preparations. Mr and Mrs Quest, like anybody else, had ‘come in for the afternoon’. Mr Quest was talking about the Great War with Mrs Gunn, the landlady, when Mrs Quest gave him an opportunity, for she was concerned to get Mrs Gunn to agree that girls were headstrong and unsatisfactory. Martha could hear this talk going on in the back veranda, through the fanlight of her room, which opened on to it. She sulkily refused to join them, but sat on her bed, waiting for what she expected would be a battle.
The room was large, and plainly furnished. The iron bed was low and spread with white, and reminded her of her own. There was simple brown coconut matting on the red cement floor, and a French door opened into a small garden filled with flowers. Beyond the garden lay a main road, and the noise was difficult for a country person who had learned not to hear only the din of thunder, the song of the frogs, the chirping crickets. As she sat waiting on her bed, Martha was conscious of strain. She understood that her eardrums, like separate beings, were making difficult and painful movements to armour themselves against the sound of traffic. There was a quivering sensitiveness inside her ears. A big lorry roaring down the tarmac ripped across tender flesh, or so it felt; the ching-ching of a bicycle bell came sharply, almost as if it were in the room. She sat listening and painfully attentive, and at the same time marked the progress of the conversation next door. Her father was winning Mrs Gunn’s attention; it was becoming a monologue.
‘Yes, that was two weeks before Passchendaele,’ she heard. ‘And I had foreknowledge of it, believe it or not. I wrote to my people, saying I expected to be killed. I felt as if there was a black cloud pressing down on me, as if I was inside a kind of black velvet hood. I was out inspecting the wire – and then the next thing I knew, I was on the hospital ship.’
That these words should be following her still made Martha feel not only resentful but afraid. In spite of herself, even as she isolated each traffic sound in a difficult attempt to assimilate it, even while she looked at the rough and hairy surface of the coconut matting, she was seeing, too, the landscape of devastation, shattered trees, churned and muddy earth, a tangle of barbed wire, with a piece of cloth fluttering from it that had once been part of a man’s uniform. She understood that the roar of a starting car outside had become the sound of an approaching shell, and tried to shake herself free of the compulsion. She was weighted with a terrible, tired, dragging feeling, like a doom. It was all so familiar, so horribly familiar, even to the exact words her father would use next, the exact tone of his voice, which was querulous, but nevertheless held a frightening excitement.
When the door opened and her parents came in, Martha rose to meet them with the energy of one prepared to face the extremities of moral and physical persuasion; but all she heard was a grumbling note in Mrs Quest’s voice as she said, ‘It wasn’t polite of you not to come and have tea when you were asked.’ It was exactly as she might complain of Martha’s rude behaviour to visitors on the farm; and Martha was surprised into silence. ‘Well, dear,’ continued Mrs Quest, briskly moving around the room as if it were her own, ‘I’ve unpacked your things and arranged them, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, and I moved the bed, it was in a draught, and you must be careful to sleep a lot.’ Noticing the look on Martha’s face, she hurried on: ‘And now Daddy and I must go back to the farm, we really hadn’t time to leave it, but you’re such a helpless creature, you look tired, do go to bed early.’
Martha, as usual, pushed away the invading feeling of tiredness and pointed out to herself that her sudden guilt was irrational, since she had not asked them to leave the farm and come in after her. She decided to leave this room at once for another which would be free of her mother’s atmosphere and influence.
Mr Quest was standing at the french door, his back to the women. ‘Mr Gunn must have been an interesting chap,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He was in the Somme country. Must have missed him by two weeks. Get Mrs Gunn to tell you about him some time, Matty, old chap. Died of gas from the war, she says. Pity those War Office blokes never understood that people could be ill because of the war, and it only showed afterwards. He got no compensation, she says. Damned unfair.’ He turned himself around, and his face had put on its absorbed, devoted look. He reached for a bottle in the skirts of his bush shirt – he always refused to change from his farm clothes when he came into town – and stood holding it, helplessly looking around. ‘A glass?’ he asked. Mrs Quest took it from him, measured his dose at the washstand, and he drank it down. ‘Well?’ he asked irritably, ‘it’s quite a way back, you know, with our old car.’
‘Coming,’ said Mrs Quest, guiltily, ‘coming.’ She moved Martha’s things on the dressing table to her own liking, and changed the position of a chair. Then she went across to Martha, who stood stiffly, in nervous hostility, and began patting her shoulders, her hair, her arms, in a series of fussy little pushes, as a bad sculptor might ineffectually push and pat a botched piece of work. ‘You look tired,’ she murmured, her voice sinking. ‘You look tired, you must sleep, you must go to bed early.’
‘May!’ exclaimed Mr Quest irritatedly, and Mrs Quest flew to join him. Martha watched them drive away, the thatched, rattling, string-bound machine jogging through the modern traffic. People turned and smiled indulgently at this reminder that it was a farming country – even, still, a pioneer country. Martha could not manage a smile. She stood tensely in the middle of the room and decided to leave at once.
Mrs Gunn knocked. The knock, a courtesy to which she was not accustomed, soothed Martha, and she said politely, ‘Come in.’
Mrs Gunn was a tall, large-framed woman with abundant loose flesh. She had faded reddish hair, pale, pretty blue eyes, and an air of tired good nature. ‘It was nice to speak to your mother,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t help wondering, a young thing like you by yourself.’
Martha was trying to frame words, which would convey, politely, that she was leaving, and that it was no fault of Mrs Gunn that she must. But Mrs Gunn talked on, and she found herself without the courage to say it.
’… your mother says you don’t eat, and I must make you. I said you were providing for yourself, but I’d do what I could.’
‘There’s no need, Mrs Van Rens –’ Martha stopped, confused. ‘I mean, Mrs Gunn. I eat like a horse.’
Mrs Gunn nodded comfortably. ‘You look as if you had a head on your shoulders. I told her, girls have sense these days. My Rosie was out and about two years before she married, and I never had to raise my voice to her. The thing is you must keep men in their place, so they know from the start they’re not getting something for nothing.’
Martha was ready to be sarcastic at this remark; but Mrs Gunn came over and kissed her, and she was warmed by gratitude into good humour.
‘If you want anything, just come to me. I know young things don’t want to be nagged at, but think of me like a mother.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Van R – Mrs Gunn,’ said Martha gratefully, and Mrs Gunn went out.
Martha gazed around the room with as much dislike as if it had been contaminated. She looked into her drawers, and every crease and fold of her clothing spoke of her mother’s will. But she had paid the rent till the end of the month, and she could not afford to move. She flung all the clothes out onto the floor, and then rearranged them to her own taste, though no outsider would have seen any difference; she pushed the bed back to what she imagined had been its old position, but she was unobservant and did not accurately know what that position had been. Having finished, she was very tired; and although it was early, she undressed, and stood by the door and watched the cars go racing past, while their lights spun over her in blotches and streaks of gold, and over the flowers in the garden, touching them into sudden colour. Beyond the garden and the street, there were black shapes of trees against a dim night sky. It was the park. And beyond, the city; but she imagined its delights in terms of what she had read of London and New York. She dreamed of the moment when she would be invited to join these pleasures, while her eyes remained on the trees and she unconsciously compared their shapes with those of the skyline on the farm; and soon it was as if the farm had stretched itself out, like a long and shadowy arm across the night, and at its end, as in the hollow of a large, enfolding palm, Martha stood like a pigmy and safely surveyed her new life. And when she awoke in the morning and saw the sunlight warm and yellow over the coconut matting, she wondered sleepily if the water-cart brakes had given, for it was making such a noise; and she sat up, while the new room rearranged itself about her; and now her ears had been informed by her brain that this was not the water-cart but a delivery van, they began to ache in protest.
At the office that day, she was left to ‘keep her eyes open’ until after the lunch hour. Then Mr Max Cohen brought her a document to copy. She was so nervous, she had to start afresh three time; and when he came to fetch it, all that had been achieved were the words ‘Memorandum of an Agreement of Sale’ typed raggedly across the top of the sheet. She shrank under his impatient assurance that it did not matter in the least, and she must take her time. Her fingers were heavy and trembling, and her head was thick. To type two pages of his small neat writing into something clean and pleasant to look at seemed to her, just then, an impossibly difficult task. He went home without coming to her desk again; and she flung a dozen sheets of paper into the wastepaper basket, and decided she would come early next morning and do it before anyone else arrived.
Mrs Buss, on her way out, asked, ‘Have you got any certificates?’ Martha said no, she had learned to type at home. Mrs Buss said nothing consoling, but merely nodded absent-mindedly, for her eyes were on the elegant Mrs Jasper Cohen.
Martha left the office so humiliated she could hardly see where she was going. She was filled with a violent revulsion against the law and everything connected with it. What she said to herself was, I won’t spend the rest of my life typing this stupid jargon.
She stood at the corner of the street, with Mr Jasper Cohen’s money – or rather what was left of it – in her handbag, and watched a crowd of carefree young people going into McGrath’s Hotel, and felt sick with envy. Then she crossed the street and went into the offices of the Zambesi News. She was going to see Mr Spur, an old journalist, whom she had known ‘as a child’ – that is to say, she had spent a month’s holiday with him and his wife about four years before. She was in the building about half an hour, and when she came out her face was hot with embarrassment. It had been so painful she could not bear to remember what had happened. What she must remember was that she had no qualifications whatsoever.
She understood, finally, the extent of the favour Mr Cohen was doing her; and next morning she was at her desk in a very chastened frame of mind. Her eyes were certainly opened, but she had no time to use them, for long before that first document was finished, several more arrived on her desk, and it was lunchtime before she knew it. She was very incompetent. She tried to persuade herself that the papers she sent in, neatly clipped and tied with green tape in the form of the exquisite, faultless documents Mrs Buss turned out with such ease, were satisfactory. Mr Max Cohen received them with a noncommittal glance and a nod; and later Martha saw Mrs Buss doing them again. She was given no more. For a whole day she sat idle at her desk, feeling sick and useless, wishing that she could run away, wondering what would happen.
The fair, plump girl, Miss Maisie Gale, who sat next to her said consolingly, ‘Don’t lose any sleep over it. Just do what you can get away with, that’s my motto.’
Martha was offended, and replied with a stiff smile. Later, she was told to go to Mr Jasper Cohen’s office, and she went, while her heart beat painfully.
The ugly man was waiting quietly in his chair. It seemed to Martha that the pale face was paler than ever, and the flat, brownish-mauve lips moved several times before any sound came out. Then he pulled himself together. He settled the ungainly body firmly back in his chair, lifted a pencil with that fat protuberant hand, and said gently, ‘Miss Quest, I think we were mistaken in putting you on to skilled work so soon. I thought you said you had learned to type.’
‘I thought I had,’ said Martha ruefully; and she was conscious that in using that tone she was again trading on the personal relation.
‘Well, well, it doesn’t matter; it couldn’t have been easy, learning by yourself, and I propose you take the following course. Will you go down to the Polytechnic and take lessons in shorthand and typing for a few months, and in the meantime you can work with Miss Gale. You must learn to file too, and it won’t be wasted, in the long run.’
Martha eagerly assented, and at the same time registered the fact that working with Miss Gale was beneath her. She was surprised and flattered, for all the women in the office seemed so immeasurably above her, in their self-assurance and skill, that she saw them through a glowing illusion. She understood, too, that Mr Cohen was now about to give her a lesson, very kindly and tactfully, and she must listen carefully.
‘You see, Miss Quest, you are very young – you won’t mind me saying that, I hope? It is obvious you are intelligent, and – well, if I may put it like this, you’re not considering getting married next week, are you?’ He was smiling, in the hopeful but uncertain way of a person who finds it hard to make amusing remarks; and Martha quickly laughed, and he gratefully joined in. ‘No. Of course not. At eighteen there’s plenty of time. You shouldn’t marry too quickly. In this country I think there’s a tendency – however, that’s not my affair. Well, most girls work in an office simply to pass the time until they get married – nothing wrong with that,’ he hastened to assure her. ‘But my policy – our policy – is, I think, rather unusual: that we do not believe married women make bad workers. Some firms dismiss women as soon as they marry, but you will have noticed that all our senior girls are married.’
Martha saw, with fresh humiliation, that she had been expected to notice things of this sort, and she had not.
‘My policy – our policy – is, that there is no reason why girls should not have a good time and work well too, but I would suggest to you that you don’t get into the way of some girls we have – oh, they’re very useful, and we couldn’t do without them, but they seem to think that because they will get married one day, that is all that can reasonably be expected of them.’ Here Martha glanced quickly at him; there was a resentful note that could have nothing to do with herself. Again Mr Cohen eased his great body in his chair, fingered the pencil, seemed to be on the point of speaking, and then said abruptly, ‘I think that’s all. You will forgive me for making these remarks. I feel, we feel – in short, you have undoubted capacities, Miss Quest, and I hope you will use them, for efficient secretaries are rare. Which is remarkable, when you think of it, since most women these days seem to train to be secretaries?’ On that query he paused and reflected and then said, ‘I hope you don’t feel that being a secretary is not a worth-while career?’
Martha assured him that she wanted to be an efficient secretary, even while she felt quite indignant; she felt herself capable of much more. She thanked him, went back to her desk, and once again sat idle. She was waiting for someone to direct her; then she understood she was now expected to direct herself, and went to Mrs Buss, asking for information about the Polytechnic.
Mrs Buss’s face cleared into a gratified relief that seemed to Martha offensive; and she took a piece of paper from her desk, with clear directions as to classes and times. Then she delivered herself – with a pause between each, for assent – of the following remarks: ‘I’m glad you’ve got some sense … You don’t want to get like these girls here, sitting with their eyes on the clock, just waiting till their boy friends fetch them at half past four, and out all night and then so tired next day they just sit yawning … There’s plenty of work here, believe me, for those with the intention to do it.’ And finally, her china-blue eyes fixed on Martha’s: ‘When you’ve got someone to work for as good as Mr Cohen, then you work your best?’ Martha said yes; but it was not enough. ‘I’ve worked for my living since I was fifteen, and in England till two years ago, and in England girls are expected to be efficient, it’s not like here, where they can get married for the asking, and I’ve never known anyone like Mr Cohen.’ Martha said yes; and Mrs Buss insisted challengingly, ‘He’s got a heart as big as his body,’ and this time Martha said yes with real feeling, and she was released.
And now Martha was able to understand – but only since it had been pointed out to her – the real division in this closely packed mass of women. When Miss Gale leaned over and whispered, like a schoolgirl, ‘Get off easily?’ she replied coldly, ‘I’m going to the Polytechnic,’ and Miss Gale shrugged and looked indifferently away, like one who does not intend to show she feels her cause has been deserted. But Martha looked away from this group she had been put into with envy and admiration for the four secretaries and for the two accountants who sat side by side over their big ledgers. She intended, in fact, to emulate the skilled; and her eyes, when she regarded the complacent Miss Gale, were scornful. These women had in common not that they were younger, or even more attractive, than the others, but a certain air of tolerance; they were paying fee to something whose necessity they entirely deplored.
After work, Martha walked the hundred yards or so to the Polytechnic, which was further down Founders’ Street. It was a low brown building, though now it swarmed with activity; and its front was barricaded by stacked bicycles. Martha, as usual doing nothing by halves, enrolled herself for classes which would take up every evening of her week, and walked home through the park, where the paths already glimmered pale among the darkening trees, her mind filled with visions of herself in Mrs Buss’s place, though they were certainly lit by the highly coloured experimental glow that had coloured earlier visions of herself as a painter, a ballet dancer or an opera singer, for like most people of her age and generation she had already tasted every profession, in mind at least.
When she reached her room, she imagined for a moment she had come to the wrong place, for through the light curtains across the french door she could see a shape she did not know. She hesitantly entered at last, and there stood a young man who asked, ‘Martha Quest? My mother had a letter from your mother and –’ He stopped, and looked appreciatively at Martha; for until then he had been speaking with a politeness that said quite plainly, ‘I’m doing this because I’ve been told to.’
He was a youth of about twenty. Martha, who had known only the physical, open-air men of the district, and the Cohen boys, who were all she had met of the student type, and her brother, who was a student because it was expected of him, found in Donovan Anderson something quite new. He was a rather tall, broad-framed handsome young man, wearing a sharply-cut light summer suit, and a heavy gold signet ring on one hand. She was not observant, but because of this impression of broad-shouldered masculinity she was instinctively looking for resemblances, and her eyes lingered on the way his shirt front caved inwards under the flowing blue tie; for if Billy or her brother had been wearing that suit it would have bulged out, and the sleeves would have been filled with muscle. Looking upwards from the hollow chest, she received from that correctly arranged healthily sunburned face – large nose, square jaw, open brow – an altogether incongruous impression of weakness.
He said gracefully, ‘We were expecting a nice girl from the wide-open spaces, we heard you were sporting and hunted big game.’
At first Martha started at the ‘we’; then she laughed, and averred that she loathed sport of any kind, as if this was a claim to grace in itself.
‘That’s a relief, because I’m ever such an indoor type, and I was expecting to have to take you to something energetic.’
Martha said spitefully that she was surprised he did as he was ordered; to which he returned a politely appreciative laugh, and said, ‘Well, then, I’ll take you to the pictures instead. You must come and meet my mamma. It is what both our mammas would expect.’
Martha agreed that she would like to do this, and it was arranged that it would all take place the following evening – which, incidentally, meant that she must postpone her first lesson in shorthand. They informed each other that they insisted on being called respectively Don and Matty. His mamma, said Donovan, called him Donny, but one knew what mammas were. He most elegantly shook her hand, and told her that she must not be late tomorrow, for if there was one thing he could not endure it was being kept waiting by girls. He then took his leave.
Martha wandered around her room in a state of breathless exhilaration, already picturing Donovan as a lover, but in an extraordinarily romantic light, considering the nature of the books she read. The time between the present and tomorrow evening must be lived through; she felt she could not bear it, and just as she had decided she would go to sleep, in order to dispose of as much of it as possible in oblivion, Mrs Gunn knocked and asked anxiously if she would like some supper. Martha refused, because of the anxious note, which automatically stiffened her resistance. Yet she had hardly eaten since she came to town; she had too little money to ‘waste on food’ – in other words, she was by no means finished with that phase of her life when she was continuously thinking about food, not because she intended to eat any, but because she meant to refuse it. She would think of the next meal due to her according to convention, assess it in terms of flesh, and then nervously pass her hands downwards over her hips, as if stroking their outlines smaller.
Before she went to bed that night, she ironed the dress she intended to wear the following evening. An instinct she did not know she possessed chose it from the point of view of a Donovan, and the same instinct made the downward-stroking movement over hips and thighs appreciative and satisfied. She had slimmed herself during the past two years so that the bones of her pelvis were prominent, and this gave her great pleasure; and she went to bed vowing she must not put on weight.
At the office next day she helped Miss Gale with the filing, and found that she liked her after all; for some reason, there was a flow of sympathy between them, and more than once Mrs Buss looked sharply towards them and they lowered their voices guiltily.
Half past four soon came, and Martha flew home to dress, though Donovan was not expected until six. She annointed and prepared herself with the aid of mirrors large and small, a bathroom next door, and no Mrs Quest likely to interrupt. She bathed, painted her fingernails and – for the first time, and with a delicious sense of sinfulness – her toenails, powdered her body, plucked her eyebrows, which did not need it, and arranged her hair; and all this under the power of that compulsion that seemed to come from outside, as if Donovan’s dark and languid eyes were dictating what she must do, even to the way her hair should lie on her shoulders. For the first time, she knew the delight of dressing for a man: her father never noticed what she wore, unless it was pointed out; her brother had not gone beyond the stage of defensive derision, or at least not with her; and a Billy Van Rensberg was likely to approve anything she wore.
But when Donovan arrived and she presented herself to him (still in the power of that outside necessity), he behaved in a way she had never imagined any man might behave. He looked at her, critically narrowed his eyes, and even walked around her thoughtfully, his head rather on one side. She could not resent it, for it was quite impersonal. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, ‘yes, but …’ He lifted her hair back from her face, studied her anew, then let it fall back, and nodded. To Martha it was an extraordinary sensation, as if he were not only receiving her appearance as an impact, but as if he were, for the moment, herself, and her clothing covered him, and he felt the shape and lines of her dress with the sympathy of his own flesh. It was like being possessed by another personality; it was disturbing, and left her with a faint but pronounced distaste.
Donovan emerged from this prolonged study, saying thoughtfully, ‘You know what this dress needs, my dear? What you need is …’ He went to the wardrobe as if he had been using it for years, flung it open, and searched for something that already existed in his mind. ‘You must buy a black patent belt tomorrow,’ he announced firmly. ‘About an inch and a half wide, with a small, flat buckle.’ And he was right, Martha saw that at once. ‘You must ask my mamma about clothes,’ he continued pleasantly. ‘She’s very good at them. Now come on, she doesn’t like being kept waiting.’ And he led the way to his car.
It was a small open car, dark green, shabby but highly polished and when he climbed into the front seat and sat languidly waiting for her to join him, the man and the car instantly became a unit. ‘Like it?’ he enquired indifferently. ‘Got it for twelve pounds ten last month. We junior civil servants must make do on other people’s leavings.’ Yet he was indifferent because he knew he might be quite satisfied with both himself and the car.
They drove a short way out of town; that is to say, when they had left behind them the avenues of old houses that had been built between 1900 and 1920, there was about half a mile of tree-lined dust track to cover before they came to a signboard which said ‘The Wellington Housing Estate’. Here they turned off on to another dust track which would one day be a street between houses, because the foundations of the houses were already lightly sketched, in cement, in the raw-surfaced earth; and piles of red brick lay everywhere.
‘We got in early and bought the first lot while it was dirt cheap, but it’s already expensive, this is going to be ever such a smart place to live,’ Donovan said; and she saw that he was politely pointing out what things she should admire, as he had done over the car. And so it was when they reached the house, the only completed house, which stood like a narrow brick box, spotted with round windows like portholes, and laced with a great deal of scrolled iron-work. ‘My mamma thought she would like a Spanish house,’ said Donovan, apparently meaning the iron; and again Martha knew she was being instructed.
Inside while they waited for Mrs Anderson, Martha was shown the ground-floor rooms, and found them smart and expensive, as Donovan said they were; and apparently he was satisfied with her response, for her politeness might easily be taken for the same thing as that negligence he was careful to maintain. Now, Martha was adapting herself to Donovan according to that outside pressure which said that she must; and yet this pliability was possible only because something was still informing her, in a small voice but a clear one, that this had nothing to do with her; in fact, it could be said she was so easy and comfortable with him just because of this fundamental indifference.
When they had finally settled in the big drawing room, an incident occurred which was final as far as Martha was concerned. She reached for a book from the big bookcase, to see what kind of people these were, as she always did in a new house, and heard Donovan say, ‘Oh, my dear, it’s no use looking at the books. We have nothing new in the place.’
Martha left her hand on the book, while she turned her stern, derisive eyes on Donovan as if she could not possibly have heard aright. ‘What do you mean, nothing new?’ she inquired, in a voice he had not heard from her and was not likely to, or at any rate, not yet.
‘My mamma forgot to send to England for the new books. All these are last year’s best sellers.’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/doris-lessing/martha-quest-39787545/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Дорис Лессинг
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: The opening book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.When we first meet Martha Quest, she is a girl of fifteen living with her parents on a poor African farm. She is eager for life and resentful of the deadening narrowness of home, and escapes to take a job as a typist in the local capital. Here, in the ‘big city’, she encounters the real life she was so eager to know and understand. As a picture of colonial life, ‘Martha Quest’ succeeds by the depth of its realism alone; but always at its centre is Martha, a sympathetic figure drawn with unrelenting objectivity.Martha’s Africa is Doris Lessing’s Africa: the restrictive life of the farm; the atmosphere of racial fear and antagonism; the superficial sophistication of the city. And both Martha and Lessing are Children of Violence: the generation that was born of one world war and came of age in another, whose abrasive relationships with their parents, with one another, and with society are laid bare brilliantly by a writer who understands them better than any other.