Two catastrophes, either of which might have killed him—one, a shell exploding beside him, another, a tank going up in flames—had apparently not marked him, except for the arm, which was in plaster, and about which he was attractively diffident.
The arm still gave him a good deal of pain, and he had to attend the local hospital several times a week for treatment. Otherwise he would already be on his farm, which was waiting for him ‘up North’. This time, ‘up North’ meant a couple of hundred miles beyond the Quests’ old farm, near the Zambesi Valley.
His mother was a woman with a new lease of life. She cooked, she entertained, she smiled and made plans.
Mr Quest was better. No one had expected him ever to leave his bed again, but now he sat long hours in a deep grass chair on the veranda. He was neither altogether drugged, nor quite free of drugs. His waking condition was like a light sleep, Martha thought. He would see what was going on, without seeming to watch his surroundings, and he might comment on something, but usually some time afterwards. He would let out words, phrases, exclamations, that came out of his thoughts, but he did not know when he had done this. Sometimes he talked to people from the past, usually from ‘the old war’. There was a man called Ginger, whom Martha had never heard of. Well, Mr Quest talked a good deal to Ginger. They were in the trenches, it seemed, and Ginger was having some sort of brain-storm or nervous collapse. Mr Quest would urge Ginger to pull himself together and be a man. Sometimes Mr Quest would call out in terror—thick, mumbling, protesting phrases: a shell was going to burst near him, something was going to explode. Or the water in the trench was too high up his legs, which were cold, or he was out in no man’s land and could not see his comrades. Then Martha, or Mrs Quest, or whoever was near, would sit by him, and talk him gently awake, as one does with a child having a bad dream.
Everyone came to congratulate Mr Quest on his recovery, just as they enquired after Jonathan’s arm. Everyone behaved, Martha thought, as if the long illness, the damaged arm, were matters for pride—even for envy. Martha knew she was childish, she disliked the deep, useless rage she felt, and yet she could not bring herself to enquire lengthily after the wounded arm and the painful treatments it needed, or after her father’s health. She came in every day and sat a little while with ‘my two war casualties’ as Mrs Quest now called them, with a fond, proud little laugh.
This afternoon Jonathan was not alone. Two young men played ping-pong on a side veranda, while the little white dog snapped at the ball and jumped up and down and generally made a nuisance of himself. In the front room were two girls. These days, the Quests’ house was full of young men and young women. The men were all back from the war, and the girls, as Martha noted with complicated feelings, were a new generation of girls aged eighteen, nineteen, who apparently had sprung into existence during the last year. At any rate, they were not at all interested in the war as such, but they regarded these young men, delivered to their bosoms fresh from the world’s battlefields, as escorts and future husbands satisfactorily seasoned by experience.
Martha smiled at her brother, waved at the ping-pong players and at the girls, for all of whom she was ‘the Quests’ married daughter’ and ‘a Red with ideas about the kaffirs’, and went around the corner of the veranda to see if her father was awake. He sat with his back to a screen of morning glory, whose brilliant but fragile blue trumpets were dwindling into limp rags of dirty white. His magazine had slipped to the floor and he was dozing.
Martha sat down to wait. She had not been moved to such thoughts by the presence of her brother and the young men whose little-boy faces had put them out of court in such matters, but now she remembered that half an hour ago she had been lying in the loft with Thomas. She wondered if her father would sense it.
When he opened his eyes with a start, she saw that he was not really there that afternoon.
‘How are you?’
‘Much as usual. And you’re all right?’
‘Fine.’
‘That’s good.’
She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that the garden looked beautiful, and the weather was lovely, and the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey’s wedding, half storm, half sunshine.
‘That’s good,’ he said again, and sat drowsing.
She thought of how often she had sat by this half-conscious man. Where did he go to, her father, while the elderly, shrunken grey man sat dozing? She stared at him, stared, as if the pressure of her eyes could suddenly materialize him, her father, Mr Quest, the vigorous, irascible man who knew, when he chose, so much about her. She felt as if he were there all the time—as if this invalid were an impostor, a mask. But really her father was there—and if so she was in communion with him? Where was he? She looked at the old, sick head slipping sideways and at the half-open mouth and demanded in silent and futile rage: Well, talk to me, where have you got to? Meanwhile her heart ached. It ached.
Inside, her mother was bustling enjoyably about. Soon Martha went in to see her. These days, now her son was home and she was released into vigour, cooking supper for a dozen young people, running the big house, organizing parties and excursions, Mrs Quest was good-tempered again. Now the nursing of her husband was only one of many things she had to do, not the reason for her existence. These days she did not complain that Martha was a bad daughter. In fact the two women enjoyed seeing each other.
They kissed.
‘Well, where are you gadding off to now?’ asked Mrs Quest, good-humouredly.
‘I’m going to a meeting on current affairs,’ said Martha, offering the absurd phrase to her mother in an invitation to laugh.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Quest, energetically folding towels, ‘I suppose there’s no harm in it, but I should have thought we had enough of them. And when are you going to see Mrs Maynard—bad girl, she keeps asking after you.’
‘I’m sure she does!’
The ghost of ill-humour appeared, but vanished again, because of the full, strong physical well-being of the two women. Almost, Martha was cold and irritable, and Mrs Quest cold and unjust.
‘What’s all this about someone called Maisie? She keeps talking about a girl called Maisie something or other.’
‘You might very well ask!’
‘But I’m not supposed to, is that it?’
Martha laughed, so did her mother, and again they kissed, before Martha went off to Johnny Lindsay’s.
Chapter Two
Martha had given up her job with Mr Robinson. Otherwise she could not have the afternoons with Thomas. The day after Thomas had said to her: ‘Well then, what are you earning, what’s keeping you there?’ Martha, on the simplicity of will that was Thomas’s gift to her, walked into Mr Robinson’s office and gave notice. By herself it would have taken weeks of thinking, I should do this or that, and then a drift into a decision. But now she lived from this new centre, the room she shared with Thomas, a room that had in it, apparently, a softly running dynamo, to which, through him, she was connected. Everything had become easy suddenly.
Or nearly everything. For of course, there were new problems. Martha ‘worked at home’. Or, as she told everyone, with an apparently firm intention: ‘I’m using the flat as an office.’ It was no good: as far as others were concerned, Matty had given up her job, and was free in the daytime.
She had told Mrs Van she wanted typing work; and now the Members of Parliament who were Mrs Van’s friends, and Mrs Van herself, brought work to Martha. The hours she sat before her typewriter every day were a third as long as before, and she earned twice as much. If the seriousness of ‘work’ is measured by what one earns for it, then Martha was working twice as hard as she did in Mr Robinson’s office. As Thomas pointed out.
It was the same as when she was the wife of Douglas Knowell—the cast had changed, the play was the same. Now came, every morning, Marjorie Black, Maisie McGrew, Betty Krueger, Mrs Quest—even Mrs Van.
Every morning, as Martha sat at her typ
ewriter, transforming scribbled sheets into piles of ordered black print, there would come a knock on the half-open door. (Why don’t you lock your door then? said Thomas—But it’s so hot!) Into the room would come one or several of these women, each exclaiming that they did not wish to waste Martha’s time, that they had work to do of their own in any case, but they had just dropped in. (Why don’t you tell them to go away, Martha? Just say, you’re sorry, you’re working.)
And why did Martha not ask them to go away?
Thomas said: ‘You never go to them, to their houses, do you?’
‘No.’
‘There you are. It never even occurs to you. It’s not something you do. So they come to you.’
‘Well?’
‘So you have to become a woman who is not to be disturbed in the daytime, because it’s not something you do.’
‘Ah, but it’s not so easy.’
‘Perfectly easy, if you decide to do it.’
To serve tea, to sit talking, being sympathetic, charming (etc., etc., ad nauseam) creating a web of talk which (she knew quite well and so did they) had no relation to the events and people they discussed but which seemed to have a validity of its own—there was the most powerful attraction in it. She could positively see, after the women left, the soft, poisonous, many-coloured web of comment and gossip they had created, hanging there in the smoky air of the little room.
But of course these were ‘intelligent’ people; some of them even ‘educated’ even—though this was a word they used with an increasingly humorous grimness, ‘progressive’ people. Yet what had changed in the talk, since Martha had chafed at the talk at the women’s tea-parties in the avenues? These women did not complain about their servants; they deplored, instead, that they had servants, wished they could do without them, and often indeed, took decisions to give them up. And they did not complain about their husbands, but about ‘society’, which made marriage unsatisfactory. They did not talk scandal in the sense of have you heard that so and so has left her husband? They discussed people’s characters, with all the dispassionate depth offered them by their familiarity with ‘psychology’. Why anybody ever did anything was immediately obvious to these psychologically educated females, and people’s motives were an open book to them, their own included. Recipes they exchanged—to talk about food was not reactionary, though to discuss clothes for too long was frivolous, if not reactionary. As for politics, there were two kinds of politics, neither needing much comment. Local politics, which meant, here, the situation of the black man—well, one can reach a degree of sophistication which means one has only to glance at a newspaper and exclaim bitterly: Of course, what would one expect!—to have said everything necessary. As for world politics, the manifestations of ‘the cold war’, a recently christened phenomenon, made it impossible for this tiny group of people to communicate easily, since they represented between them every variety of ‘left’ opinion, each grade of it needing the most incredible tact and forbearance with the others.
And, of course, there was a horrible fascination, the dark attraction of Martha’s secret fears, in the fact that of the younger women there was not one who hadn’t sworn, ten years ago: I will not get like that! I won’t be dragged in. They all felt it, acknowledged it. Perhaps this knowledge, that none of them was strong enough to resist the compulsion to create the many-coloured poisonous web of talk, was why they all felt exhausted after such mornings. Just like the frivolous, non-progressive women of the avenues, they spent their days over cups of tea, and went home in a sort of dragging, rather peevish dissatisfaction, while in their heads still ran on, like a gramophone record that could not be turned off, the currents of their gossip: The trouble with Betty is, she is mother-fixated, her headaches are obviously of psychological origin, and Martha’s trouble is, she is unstable, and Marjorie’s trouble is, she is a masochist, why have another baby when she’ll only complain at the extra work, and Mrs Van—well, she’s marvellous, but she’s awfully conventional really, and Jack Dobie is not doing the progressive cause much good, if he hadn’t framed that Bill in such an aggressive way, he’d have got it through the House, but he has a father-complex, which makes it necessary for him to challenge authority.
Because she could not work in the mornings, Martha would say to Anton, on the evenings when Thomas was not in town: ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to work after supper.’ Most evenings Martha worked, and Anton read or might go out—presumably to see Millicent.
‘You don’t feel any guilt about telling your husband you want to work, but you do when the women come around to gossip?’
‘He’s not my husband.’
‘Of course not. And this work, typing out reports for Jack Dobie about his trade unionists—that’s important?’
‘It’s better than talking about the du Preez’s children’s psychological problems and Piet du Preez’s power complex.’
‘Is it? Then if you feel it is, it is.’
Martha said: ‘When I’m here and you say it, of course, it’s ridiculous. But afterwards it’s all very serious.’
‘Only because you let it be serious.’
Martha said: ‘All these things that drive us crazy, when you put them into words, they sound silly. But it is important.’
‘All you have to do is to come here every morning when Anton goes to work and work here.’
They sat on the low bed, side by side. It was in the evening, before he had to go back to his farm. A single, small bulb laid shadow and light about them. They were enclosed in a small, sweet-smelling world of wood and foliage. He was making white marks on her thigh with the pressure of his fingers, lifting them to let the blood flow in, then pressing down again. Both watched, absorbed, this life of the flesh which flourished in its own laws under their eyes.
‘You were going to say something about when I go away, Martha. There’s a look on your face which means that.’
‘Yes, that’s what I was thinking.’
‘I know you were. Well, you’re right. Look, I’m not disputing it, believe me.’
‘Disputing what? I haven’t said anything.’
‘You get a look on your face. That means I should shut up. You are claiming your right to make safeguards.’
‘For when I go away?’
‘That’s below the belt, it really is, Martha. You mean, because I don’t marry you, then you have to sit around all morning gossiping and complaining afterwards?’
‘Who said anything about marrying?’
‘You’re in the right to mention it.’
‘I didn’t mention it at all.’
‘Ah, my God, you’ll drive me mad. Then we’ll discuss your serious problems. Look then. You say you wouldn’t have left that office job except for me? Look how easy that was. When Mr Robinson got in the way of serious things, like a lover, then you changed your life at once. Now you say the women waste your time in the mornings—then come here, so they don’t know where you are.’
‘Ah yes, but it’s all very well, you’ll go away. And heaven knows how long I’ll have to stay here, years very likely. Anton hasn’t heard a word from Germany yet.’
‘Just leave him!’
‘But you know I can’t. If I do then it makes him unrespectable and he’ll never be made a British citizen.’
‘But he doesn’t want to be a British citizen.’
‘Perhaps he does—I don’t know. Why do we have to talk about Anton?’
‘He’s your husband, that’s why.’
‘He’s not my husband.’
That rainy season, she spent nearly every afternoon in the loft, and most evenings. Then there were fewer evenings—Thomas’s work was suffering, he said. For a while Martha stayed at home when Thomas was not coming—but then returned to the loft. Every evening, after supper, she told Anton she must work, and she went to the loft.
Every afternoon Martha went to the loft, hoping she would see no one, hoping that Thomas’s brother’s wife would not see her. But the plump, watchful
woman was nearly always sewing on her veranda. So Martha went openly across the back garden and into the shed. There she waited for Thomas. Sometimes he did not come, and she read, or simply did nothing, watching the green shadows from the tree ripple on the planks of the floor. Here she was ‘herself’, no one put pressure on her. Even when Thomas did not come, she returned happy, and—this was increasingly the point—armed, against Anton. It came to this: she began to go to the shed in the mornings, not because of the idle women, but because of Anton.
For her feelings about Anton had gone beyond anything she could understand. Like ‘the circle of women’, ‘her husband’ provoked in her only the enemy, feelings so ancient and, it seemed, autonomous, they were beyond her control.
For consider how irrational it was. First there had been the period of months when they, Anton and Martha, decided that they would ‘live their own lives’. During this time, when presumably Anton had pursued his affair with Millicent, and Martha had had nobody, but waited for Thomas, they lived together amicably—without any emotional contact, but certainly without strain.
This ease had ended, but at once, that day when Martha had first made love with Thomas. She had not expected anything to change. After all, had not Anton assumed, all this time, that she had a lover?
Yet the night after she had first made love with Thomas, Anton made love to her, and for the first time in months. Stranger still, although she was claimed by Thomas, absorbed by what she had discovered and knew she would discover, she went through the motions of compliance with Anton. Why? She did not have to. She did not even mean to. Yet she did. She despised herself for it, certainly, but that was hardly the point, compared with the knowledge that if Anton had come into her bed the night before (before making love with Thomas) she would have said No, or implied No—but of course Anton would not have come, he only made love to her because of Thomas.