Martha Quest (22 page)

She remained exasperatedly patient.

‘What books have you ordered?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what’s come,’ she replied evasively, with the feeling that this, at least, should be her own.

‘Why don’t you arrange your books in a nice case so that people may see them when they come? It’s no good having books under the bed. And you’re really a clever girl, Matty, but you talk just like everybody else. You’d impress people if you tried.’

Martha put on a sarcastic expression for his benefit, but he was not looking at her.

‘Now, take Ruth Manners. She went home to England with her mamma, and she’s come back ever so intelligent, she went to the theatres and the galleries, and you’ve no idea, she’s so North Avenue these days—Turn around a little, Matty, lift your hip—that’s right. You do slouch, you know, but not in the right way, it’s very sexy to slouch, if you know how. Well, it’s done everything for Ruth. You haven’t got a rich mamma to buy you clothes, but at least you’ve read everything; but you don’t know how to make the best of yourself—Let your shoulders forward a little—you should learn to stand with your bottom tucked
in
, and your hips forward, and your shoulders slightly curved, but held so that your breasts stand out. Like
that
, Matty.’

He rose to his feet in front of her, and with one hand pressed in her buttocks, and with the other pressed down her shoulders so that
her breasts came forward, almost against his. His frowning eyes met her antagonistic ones, and he dropped his hands, and his handsome face, now showing coarse-featured, fleshy, shiny with heat and effort, slowly went a sullen red. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, with an attempt at grace. ‘Well, I promise I’ll make love to you, Matty, I will, really, but not now.’ He looked at his watch, and became himself. ‘Now you will lie down and sleep, because you really look awful, you know. I will come and dress you at six. You must have a bath at five, but don’t touch your hair, I’ll do it.’ Waving a cheerful goodbye, he hastened away, and Martha lay obediently, shuddering with dislike of him, and also with gusts of hysterical laughter.

She did not sleep. Soon she rose and filled the bath, and lay in it while the water cooled, listening to the iron roof creeping and tensing with the heat. Through the open fanlight she could hear Mrs Gunn’s sighs and complaints, where she sat on the veranda. The thunder muttered and growled like an animal. Soon she fell to inspecting her own body according to that other standard, ‘long, lean, narrow,’ but it was difficult to respect that standard when she saw herself naked, and soon, with frank adoration, she fell into a rite of self-love. Her limbs lay smooth and light in the water, her thighs seemed to her like two plump and gleaming fishes, she scattered water over her white belly, and watched the drops fall like rough jewels and slide to a perfect quivering silver globule in her navel. Meantime, her body lay unmoved and distant, congealing into perfection under the eyes of this lover; while Martha thought of Mrs Gunn’s groaning sweaty body, and was fiercely grateful for her own; she thought of the ugly scar across her mother’s stomach, and swore protectively to her own that it would never, never be so marred; she thought of Mrs Van Rensberg’s legs, and with tender reassurance passed her hands over her own smooth brown legs, murmuring that it was all right, all right, nothing would harm them.

A few heavy drops fell like stones on the iron roof; there was a swish and a swirl of rain and wind and dust; the thunder cracked overhead and the rain plunged like a steel barrage. Her spirits rose like a
kite, till she was singing inside the din at the top of her voice; and faintly, through the thunder, the crashing rain, the gurgling bath water, Mrs Gunn could be heard chanting relief like a prayer of thankfulness to the rain god. Martha left the bathroom, her depression flooded away with the bath water, and found that around the table on the back veranda Mrs Gunn and her daughter were drinking tea, their faces bright and soft and smiling. Martha stood by the table in her red dressing-gown and drank tea with them, and they talked and watched the rain drive in gleaming spears beyond the faded green mosquito gauze, and the irritable tension of the early afternoon was so far away there was no need to apologize for it. Mrs Gunn put her arm around Martha’s hips and said she was her girl, she was her daughter, now that her own had left her; and the young woman at the other end of the table laughed, and they all laughed, and the rain fell endlessly, everything rushed and gurgled and swam, and they laughed again when the thunder came crashing dangerously over the roof like armies, so loud that they could hear no sound of voices, though they were shrieking at each other like grinning maniacs. With a pantomime of laughing regret, Martha indicated she must go and dress; and was sorry to leave them. She could not understand how she had so disliked Mrs Gunn earlier; and Mrs Gunn’s daughter, who had a new baby, and was therefore usually an object of repulsion to Martha, seemed delightfully simple and womanly as she sat there beside her mother, nursing the dribbling, mouthing infant.

She wanted to go to that dance more than she had ever wanted anything; her whole being was poised and dedicated; and when Donovan came in, shrieking with laughter over his damp evening clothes, he found Martha bright-eyed and chattering and amenable, ready to be sewn into her dress.

But it took such a long time. Donovan wiped off her makeup, and made her shut her eyes while he painted her face again. He arranged and rearranged her hair. She was compliant, but impatient. At the end, he led her triumphantly to the long mirror, and said, ‘Now, then, Matty…’

Martha looked, and, in spite of her pleasure, was uneasy. It was not herself, she felt. The simplicity of that white dress had been given a touch of the bizarre—no,
that
was not it; as she regarded herself, she was instinctively forming herself to match that young woman in the mirror, who was cold, unapproachable, and challenging. But from the cool, remote face peered a pair of troubled and uneasy eyes.

As she saw that glance—her own, it seemed—Donovan came forward quickly, and said, ‘Now, listen, Matty, you really must see that you must change yourself for a dress like this. Don’t you see?’ He bent towards her, his hand hovering, ready to seize on what was wrong. ‘Look,’ he said finally, ‘your eyes too. Lift your head.’ As she remained motionless, his palm raised her head. ‘With those cheekbones,’ he said, ‘look, your eyes should be like this.’ With something like horror, Martha saw him slide his own eyes slantingly sideways, into a languid, distant gleam. ‘You
see
?’ he demanded triumphantly. He did it again. For a flash of a second, he was terrifyingly herself; and she stared at him in fascinated disgust. This time her laugh was nervous, and he dropped his hand, and looked at her and flushed.

‘You really are—extraordinary,’ she said at last, slowly; and the dislike she felt was strong in her voice. The silence was a long one; it was a moment of decision between them. Martha, looking helplessly at him, saw, but remotely, that if she was confused and unhappy, so was he; he had a sullen and little-boy look about him that should have claimed her pity, but merely irritated her; and across this barrier flowed a faint guilt that she could not, for the life of her, say something comforting; it was terrifying, in a different way, to see that assured young man so distressed and lost.

At last he sat himself down, flinging one leg moodily over the other, and he remarked, ‘I should have been a dress designer. I would have been a very good one, Matty dear.’ That light, ‘Matty dear,’ fed back his self-belief; he was already recovering. ‘But if one is raised in the colonies, then what can one do but go into statistics and wait for one’s chief to retire!’ Here he laughed with genuine bitterness; and Martha understood that if anything bound them it was their mutual
conviction that
if
they had been born into other circumstances,
if only…

‘Well,’ she said awkwardly, ‘don’t let’s quarrel. You’d better give me up as a bad job, you know. I don’t think I’m cut out for a mannequin!’ She was laughing at him, but she longed for—what? Some gesture that might express that thing they shared? She felt he should have put his arms around her in a light and brotherly way, and thus the whole incident would have been put behind them.

Instead, he laughed again, angrily, and said, ‘Oh, well, to hell with everything, Matty. Let’s go to the party, and astonish them all.’

At the door, she saw that the rain had stopped. A dusky sunset was reflected in the lake which lay between them and the gate.

‘I suppose you expect me to carry you, like a he-man on the films,’ he said. ‘But I shan’t. Now, don’t let the mud get on your skirts.’

He shrieked in gay alarm as she began balancing her way cautiously from the step to a rocking stone, and from there to a small point of brick that stood blackly amid the rosy waters. And here she stood, precariously, laughing at herself, and at him, for he was agitatedly dancing on the steps, saying, ‘Matty, Matty, do be careful.’ There was something about that shrill and helpless exhortation which turned her mood into defiance. She looked calmly about her: there were six feet of muddy water between her and the gate. ‘To hell with it,’ she remarked; and fell all at once into her element. She lifted her crisp white skirts in a bunch around her waist, and composedly walked in her gold shoes, the water lapping cool around her ankles, to the sidewalk, saying, ‘Oooh, it’s lovely, it’s lovely, Don,’ like a child paddling.

In a series of leaps, he came splashing across to join her. ‘Matty,’ he said, in distressed and incredulous astonishment, ‘Matty, you’re mad. I suppose you haven’t even paid for those shoes yet.’

‘Of course not,’ she said recklessly, letting her skirts fall, and laughing at him, despising him, most sincerely, from the bottom of her heart.

‘But your feet are wet,’ he complained.

‘My feet are so wet,’ she mimicked him cruelly. ‘Oh, dear, I might get a
cold
.’ She stopped, already feeling herself uncertain. After all, the shoes were expensive; after all it was rather childish. ‘Oh, don’t be such an old woman,’ she said crossly, and got into the car. ‘They won’t notice my feet,’ she said coaxingly at last. ‘They’ll be looking at your beautiful dress.’ She lifted her feet and examined them. The gold leather had dulled, and was crinkling; there was a faint brown tidemark around her ankles. She could not help looking at them with satisfaction; the elegant, cool white dress seemed quite remote from her, a mere surface to her body, which continued strongly upwards from those reckless strong ankles.

She shook her head to loosen her hair, and laughed heartlessly when he said, ‘You look like a nice open-air girl, if that’s what you want. But for heaven’s sake, Matty, do move carefully, I’ve just tacked you into that dress so as not to spoil the line, and if you bounce about it’ll fall off. I suppose you’d like that.’

‘Of course,’ she said lightly; but she imagined herself thus suddenly exposed, and laughed on a thrill of excitement. ‘Of course,’ she said again, and saw his face darken with irritated annoyance.

They arrived at the Club. The veranda was illuminated by strings of coloured lights, and a large electric sign said: ‘Three weeks to Christmas—Let it Rip, Boys and Girls.’

The large room was cleared for the dance, and was empty. On the main veranda young men and women were drinking, some in evening dress, some not yet changed from their sports clothes. Martha knew most of them by sight, and was greeted by intimate sisterly smiles from the girls, the usual howls and whistles from the men. Her resentment at this had been not so much dulled as pushed away into that part of herself she acknowledged to be the true one. As for Donovan, she saw he was being received with queries: ‘Well, stranger, you back?’—a statement, in fact, which meant that in spite of what he said he was no stranger to the Club. She expected they would sit by themselves, if she expected anything at all—for this way of hers, submitting herself to a person or a place, with a demure, childish compli
ance, as if she were under a spell, meant that she did not consciously expect or demand; she might dream about things being different, but that, after all, commits one to nothing.

Far from leading Martha away from the others, Donovan held a court for a few minutes, while he debated aloud, gaily, with a frank rudeness, whether Binkie’s table or another’s would suit him best. At last he took Martha’s hand and seated her at a table where Binkie and his lieutenants and their girls were drinking and eating peanuts, saying, ‘And now here you are, Matty, all among the huskies.’

He then sat himself between two girls, and ignored Martha completely, which at first annoyed her, and then relieved her, for now she was free to behave as she pleased.

It was about seven in the evening. Beyond the dark spines of the blue gums, the sunset faded in a hushed and tender glow; the playing fields were shimmering green under the water; the clubhouse itself was surrounded by a churned mass of red mud. It was the cloistral hour, the hour of silence, as if the very fact that in the trees, and in the veld that was no more than half a mile’s walk distant, the little creatures and birds were sinking into sleep aroused, in these people, though briefly, the memory of that other cycle submerged in their blood. The lights were not switched on; they sat in a flushed half-dark, and unconsciously their voices lowered, though they were teasing each other about the mud on their clothes and because some were reluctant to cross the mud to the cars so that they might go and dress. Martha showed her shoes and made a funny story out of wading through the water; halfway through it she became nervous, because she realized it put Donovan in a bad light, but continued, avoiding his eyes; and the young man next to her said that if he had been there he’d have carried Matty in his arms through the flood. He was a big, blond-fleshed youth, his fair hair crinkled tight over his head, with a reddish glint in it; and in a square, burnt, determined face were blue and direct eyes. Martha thought it remarkable that this young man, whom she knew to be manager of a big insurance company, should be content to appear like a buffooning schoolboy. She began talking
to him rather awkwardly, about a book she had just read. He answered reluctantly. When she persisted, he gave a public sigh, which drew all the expectant eyes towards him, and said mournfully, ‘Baby, baby, you’ll be the death of me.’ Then he indicated Martha with an outstretched thumb, and said, ‘She’s intelligent. This baby’s got brains.’ And he laughed and rolled up his eyes and shook his head with a kind of subsiding shudder into himself. Martha flushed, and, as soon as the conversation had got under way around them, began talking ‘amusingly’, as she was expected to do. The uneasy blue eyes fixed on her in relief; his face cleared, and she understood that all was well. Soon he got up, saying that he must go and change; but Matty must remember he would die for her, she killed him, and he insisted on the first dance.