Martha was opening her mouth to join in angry argument, when she noted that Douglas was politely agreeing with both her parents. She therefore deflated, sat back, and listened while Mr Quest explained to Douglas that, according to prophecy, Armageddon was due almost immediately, there would be seven million dead lying around Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives would be split in twain (probably by a bomb) and God would appear, to separate the believers from the faithless. Here his voice changed, and he remarked, with an irritated eye fixed on Martha, that Douglas might not know it, but Martha was not only a socialist, which was not important, since it was only a disease natural to her age, but an atheist as well.
Martha was expecting Douglas to say that he was also an atheist, but he merely said that he thought what Mr Quest said was so interesting, and perhaps he could borrow some pamphlets sometime.
Martha therefore sank into comforting dependence on Douglas, although somewhere within her was a protesting voice remarking that he needn’t treat her father as if he were a child. Then she told herself that he was a child, and Douglas was quite right. At the thought, she felt sad, and looked unhappily at her father, for he seemed even more distracted than before. He seemed to be thinner, and his hair was greying fast. The handsome dark eyes peered with a remote and angry gleam from under shelves of bristling white hair. Surely, wondered Martha, he has not changed so much in a few weeks? Was it that she had not noticed, living so close to him, that he was becoming an old man? At the thought that her father was old, her heart contracted painfully; and she said to herself, Nonsense, most of his diseases are imaginary, and anyway, people can live for years and years with diabetes. In fact, because she could not endure the thought that her father might die, she assured herself he was hardly ill at all. All the same, she longed to comfort him, but this was impossible, for one half of her attention was still standing at the alert, waiting for the scene which surely was due to start at any moment. She was nervously watching her mother, but quite soon Mrs Quest said she must go and give orders about lunch, the new boy was so stupid he couldn’t even lay the table, and she had to do everything herself.
Mr Quest, having finished a long explanation of how Russia was the Antichrist, and therefore the war could not start until the sides had become reshuffled in some way, remarked, ‘Well, there was something I wanted to say.’ He glanced apprehensively over his shoulder towards where his wife had gone, and said, ‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of your mother, she’s not—well she doesn’t understand this kind of thing.’ He paused, staring at the ground for a few moments, and then went on, as if there had been no interruption: ‘I suppose you two are not getting married because you’ve got to? Matty isn’t in any sort of trouble?’ He looked uncomfortably at the silent couple, the frail white skin of his face flushing. He does look old, thought Martha miserably, trying to look courageously at this new vision of him; for, in spite of everything, she had always thought of him as a young man.
Douglas said, ‘No, sir, there’s nothing of the kind.’
Mr Quest stared disbelievingly at him. ‘Well, why get married in such a hurry, people will talk, you know.’
‘People,’ said Martha scornfully.
‘I daresay,’ said her father angrily. ‘Well, I don’t care, it’s your affair, but what people say causes more trouble than you seem to think.’ He paused again, and said appealingly, ‘Matty, I wouldn’t like to think of you getting married when you didn’t really want to—of course, this has nothing personal in it, Douglas.’ Douglas nodded reassuringly. ‘Because if you are in the family way, then we’ll do something about it, provided your mother doesn’t know,’ he said aggressively, with another glance over his shoulder.
The words ‘family way’ caused Martha acute resentment, and with a glance at her face, her father said, ‘Oh, very well, then, if it’s all right, I’m glad to hear it.’ He then began telling Douglas about his war, while Martha waited, with her nerves on edge, for him to say, ‘But that was the Great Unmentionable, and of course you don’t want to hear about that, you’re all too busy enjoying yourselves.’
Douglas said politely that he was very interested in everything Mr Quest said; and Mr Quest’s face brightened, and then he sighed, and said, ‘Yes, it’s starting again, and I’m out of it, they wouldn’t have me. I’m too old.’
Martha could not endure this. She abruptly got up and went out.
Her mother was returning from the kitchen. Martha braced herself for the opposition that must come, but Mrs Quest hurried past, saying, ‘I must get him his injection, and there’s his new tonic, oh, dear, and where have I put it?’ But she checked herself, and came back, saying quickly, with a downward look at Martha’s stomach, ‘You’re not—I mean, you haven’t…?’ Her eyes were lit with furtive interest.
Martha snapped out coldly, with as much disgust as Mrs Quest might have considered due to the cause of the possible event, ‘No, I’m not pregnant.’
Mrs Quest looked abashed and disappointed, and said, ‘Oh, well, then, if you are—well, I mean, but your father shouldn’t know, it would kill him.’ She hurried away.
At lunchtime Mrs Quest inquired whether they wanted to be married at the district church, and Martha said hotly that they were both atheists, and it would be nothing but hypocrisy to be married in church. She was expecting an argument, but Mrs Quest glanced at Douglas, and sighed, and let her face drop, and finally muttered, ‘Oh, dear, it really isn’t very nice, is it?’
That evening, when Martha went to her bedroom, she sat on the edge of her bed, and pointed out to herself that not only had her parents accepted the marriage, but she could expect her mother to take full control of the thing. In fact, she already felt as if it concerned her mother more than herself. The door opened, Mrs Quest entered, and she said that she was going to come into town with Martha on Monday to buy her trousseau. Martha said firmly that she didn’t want a trousseau. They wrangled for a few moments; then Mrs Quest said, ‘Well, at least you should have a nightdress.’ She blushed furiously, while Martha demanded, ‘Whatever do I want a nightdress for?’
‘My dear child,’ said her mother, ‘you must. Besides, you hardly know him.’ At this she blushed again, while Martha began to laugh. Suddenly good-natured, she kissed her mother and said she would be delighted to have a nightdress, and it was very nice of her to suggest it.
But Mrs Quest hesitated, and then asked, ‘What kind of an engagement ring is he getting you?’
Now, neither Martha nor Douglas had thought of an engagement ring, and Martha said, ‘There isn’t any need for an engagement ring. Anyway, he can’t afford it.’
Mrs Quest took a diamond ring from her finger, and said nervously, sounding guilty, ‘Now, do be sensible, think what people will say, wear it for my sake, so people won’t think…I mean, Marnie had such a lovely ring, and…’
The usual anger rose in Martha, succeeded by a kind of apathy. She took the ring, and slipped it on her engagement finger. It was a fine ring, a conventional five-stoned affair, but it had no beauty; it was a ring that said, Here are five expensive diamonds displayed in a row. Martha thought it unpleasant; besides, the cold metal sank into her flesh like a chain. She hastily took it off, and handed it back, laughing weakly and saying, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want a ring.’
‘Now, please, Matty,’ said Mrs Quest, almost in tears.
Martha looked at her mother in astonishment. She shrugged, and put the ring back, while Mrs Quest embraced her, and again there was a guilty look on her face.
When her mother had gone, Martha removed the ring and laid it on the dressing table. She was now feeling lost and afraid. She was vividly conscious of the night outside, the vast teeming night, which was so strong, and seemed to be beating down into the room, through the low shelter of the thatch, through the frail mud walls. It was as if the house itself, formed of the stuff and substance of the veld, had turned enemy. Inside the thatch, she knew, were a myriad small creatures, spiders, working ants, beetles; once a s
nake had been killed—it was coiled between the thatch and the top of the wall. Under the thin and cracked linoleum that clothed the stamped mud floor, the shoots from the trees cut two decades ago were struggling upwards, sickly white, to seek the light. Sometimes they pushed the linoleum aside, and had to be cut level. Martha, hating the room, went to the window. The light of the stars was strong and white, there was a sheet of white hazy light over the mealie fields. She was even more afraid. She looked at the door leading to her parents’ room. It was open. It had stood open all night ever since she could remember. She thought now, with a half-derisive grin, how often her father had complained, ‘Can’t we shut the door now, May? The kids are old enough, they won’t choke in their sleep.’ But Mrs Quest could never bring herself to treat that door as one that might be shut. The other door, which opened into the end room, had also stood open. In fact, it could not shut, because the lintel had swollen to a bulge. Now, however, this door was closed and fastened with a heavy padlock, of the kind that was used to secure the storeroom against the native servants. Martha went silently to examine this door, and found that the lintel had been planed flat, showing startingly white, like new wood.
She slipped out of the door that led into the garden, receiving a drench of glittering starlight faintly perfumed with geranium. She looked over the landscape of her childhood, lying dark and mysterious, to the great bulk of Jacob’s Burg, and tried to get some spark of recognition from it. It was shut off from her, she could feel nothing. There was a barrier, and that barrier (she felt) was Douglas. And as she thought of him, she turned sharply at a sound, and he came towards her grinning from the end bedroom.
He slipped his arm around her, and said, ‘You mustn’t get so prickly with your parents. After all, we’ve rather sprung it on them, and they’ve been very decent.’
She assented, and could not help feeling that even this mild protest was in some way a betrayal to their side.
‘You’ll see,’ said Douglas consolingly, ‘it’ll be ever-ever such a fine wedding, and you’ll like it.’
Again she assented. It had been arranged that they would be married by Mr Maynard, Binkie’s father. He would marry them, as a favour, in their own flat—the flat which Douglas had already found for them ‘from a pal’. Afterwards they were going off on a honeymoon with Stella and Andrew to the Falls. She had hardly listened to these arrangements, because all these formalities were so unimportant.
He remarked, ‘I must say, all this looks as wild as hell, gives me the creeps.’ She said yes, rather forlornly, for it did look wild and lonely; and she had never felt lonely in the veld before. The pressure of his arm on her shoulder suggested she should move beside him back to his room, and she went, gladly, with the warmth of his arm as guide.
She said passionately, ‘I wish it was all over.’ She repeated it desperately, as if she were talking about an unpleasant if not dangerous operation.
But inside the end room, which had been her brother’s, she began to laugh at herself. One could almost think of this room as disconnected from the rest of the house. It was small and quiet, with whitewashed walls, and the glistening thatch slanting low over a small window. The low hissing of the oil lamp was soothing, and she sighed comfortably when she heard an owl hooting from the trees.
Douglas was a wall of strength; and from her clinging to him, and his calm reassurance, their love-making flowed out, and died into sleep. The ‘act of love’—that fatally revealing phrase—was no act at all tonight, if one gives to the words what is due to them of willed achievement. For both these people were heirs, whether they liked it or not, of the English puritan tradition, where sex is either something to be undergone (heard in the voices of innumerable chilled women, whispering their message of endurance to their daughters) or something to be shut out, or something to be faced and overcome. At least two generations of rebels have gone armed to the combat with books on sex to give them the assurance they did not feel; for both Martha and Douglas, making love when and how they pleased was positively a flag of independence in itself, a red and defiant flag, waving in the faces of the older generation.
In the morning Martha woke first, and found herself curled delightfully against Douglas’s inert and heavy body. She was floating free and away from all the strained preoccupation of the day before. She thought with good humour of her mother’s absorption in the wedding arrangements, and with amusement of her father, who would probably not notice the wedding ceremony at all if not reminded to do so. She lay gently, feeling the slow rise and fall of the warm flesh, and listened to the servant chopping wood outside, and watched the light from the window deepen on the white wall to a reflected yellow glow from the warming soil. Then the yellow patch began to shake and tremble—the sun had risen to the height of the tree outside; and slowly a pattern of leaves grew dark against a clear, luminous orange, and trembled as if a breeze were flowing through the room itself.
Douglas stirred and greeted her with an affectionate ‘Well, Matty.’ Then he turned over, and her body began to tense into waiting. ‘Let’s try like this,’ he said with determination, and she caught a glimpse of his face, which was rigid with concentration, before she closed her eyes and lay alertly ready to follow what he intended to do. What she was thinking was, and with a really extraordinary resentment, Why does he have to spoil last night? Her attention was so strained to miss no new movement of his, for she was terrified he might find her lacking, that the end came unexpectedly for her, and left her reassuring him, as usual, that all was well. She was very tender and consoling, and lay stroking his hair, while she thought, Well, it was lovely last night, at any rate. Now, last night she had not been conscious of anything very much; she was in fact arranging the dark, underwater movements of last night into a pattern to measure against this morning’s failure. She was also thinking worriedly about her mother. It no longer seemed unimportant or amusing that her parents were as they were. She was apprehensive. Back in her room, she looked at the open door into her parents’ room, which had the force now of a deliberate reproach, and waited until Douglas was ready to go with her to the breakfast table, so that she need not face her parents unsupported.
That her mother had been in her room during the night Martha could see from her look of strained curiosity. And yet, this was surely no more than could be expected from a conventional middle-class matron concerned that her daughter might go to the altar, or rather to the table at the register office, a virgin? That square, vigorous, set face, the small blue eyes, always clenched under a brow of worry, were now directed persistently towards Douglas. Mrs Quest could not take her eyes off her daughter’s young man. She talked to him like a reproachful but eager girl, there was an arch and rather charming smile on her face, even while the gaze was persistent, tinged with guilt. She looked as if she had been done out of something, Martha remarked unpleasantly to herself; and she knew that immediately after breakfast her mother would come to her, on some pretext or another, but really fulfilling a driving need to talk about what had happened. Martha felt exhausted, a dragging tiredness overcame her at the idea of it, and as soon as they rose from the table she attached herself to her father; and at last Mrs Quest went off with Douglas, since it seemed Martha was deaf to any suggestions that it would be nice to discuss the wedding.
Mr Quest took his deck-chair to the side of the house, and leaned back in it smoking, gazing over the slopes of the veld to Jacob’s Burg. The great heave of blue mountain was this morning towering up into the blue sky, and wisps and wraiths of cloud dissolved around it. Martha sank beside him, with the comfortable feeling of repeating something she had done a thousand times. The sunlight slowly soaked into her flesh, she felt her hair grow warm around her face, she sighed with pleasure, and prepared to let the morning slide past, while her thoughts drifted away—not towards the wedding, that annoying incident which must somehow be accepted, but to the time afterwards. They would go to England, or to the South of France; Martha dreamed of the Mediterranean whi
le her father thought of—but what was it likely to be this morning? After a while he began talking, after the preparatory ‘Well, old son!’ and she listened with half her mind, checking it up, as it were, on the landmarks of his thought. He was thinking of her brother who (lucky devil) would be allowed to fight in this new war. From there he slid back into his tales of the trenches, of the weeks before Passchendaele, from which he had been rescued by that lucky flesh wound: none of his company had come through it, all were killed. From there he passed to the international situation.
Martha lit another cigarette, lifted her skirt so that the sun might deepen the brown of her legs, and asked suddenly, ‘Do you like Douglas?’ She might have been talking about an acquaintance. When she heard the tone of her voice, she felt guilty, because of this unwelcome, deep understanding with her father that lay beneath ‘all this nonsense about the British Israelites and the war’—the understanding that made Douglas seem like a stranger whom they might discuss without disloyalty.
‘What?’ he asked, annoyed at being interrupted. Then he collected himself, and said indifferently, ‘Oh, yes, he’s quite all right, it seems.’ After a pause he said, ‘Well, as I was saying…’
Some minutes later Martha inquired, ‘Are you pleased I’m getting married?’
‘What’s that?’ He frowned at her, then seeing the sardonic lift of her brows, said guiltily, ‘Yes—no. Oh, well, you don’t care what I think, anyway.’ This had the irritability due to the younger generation, and she giggled. Slowly he began to smile.
‘I don’t believe you’ve even understood that I’m getting married in five days,’ she said accusingly.
‘Well, what am I expected to do about it? There was one thing I wanted to say. What was it, now? Oh, yes. You shouldn’t have children—I mean, that’s in my view, it’s not my affair, but there’s plenty of time.’