Martha Quest (11 page)

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, and 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 excape 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 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.