Martha Quest (24 page)

It was quite early; people were still arriving, and remained, as they settled themselves, in their parties or couples, though these couples might join others, or a girl from one group pass naturally to another. It was all so easy and friendly and informal. The waiters came with tray after tray of beer and brandy. Martha, drinking brandy and ginger beer as usual, was instinctively regulating the flame of her intoxication: the men might get staggeringly drunk, the girls should be softened by alcohol, not dissolved in it. Binkie, having returned Ruth to Donovan, switched the lights out in the big dance room, and
swirled coloured lights steadily across it, in a slow persistent rhythm, which dulled the mind and heightened the senses.

Martha danced in turn with Binkie, who seemed to think that more than one dance with Perry was dangerous, with Perry, with Donovan. But it did not matter with whom one danced; it was all impersonal: one moved trancelike from one man to the next, one danced cheek to cheek, intimately, body to body, and then the music stopped, one drank again, chattered a little, and plunged back into the hot, coloured darkness of the dance room, while the music throbbed. Three times Martha found herself drawn onto the veranda by one or other of the wolves (afterwards she had to remind herself who they had been) and kissed; and always in the same way. Abruptly, without any sort of preface, she was held rigid against a hard body, whose lower half pushed against hers in an aggressive but at the same time humble way; and her head was bent back under a thrusting, teeth-bared kiss. Afterwards, he breathed heavily, like a runner, and sighed, and said, ‘I’m terrible, hey? Forgive me baby, you’ll forgive me.’ And to this the spirit of the place made Martha reply graciously, ‘It’s all right, Perry,’ or Douggie or Binkie; ‘it’s all right, don’t worry.’ She should have said, ‘Don’t worry, kid’ but that word would not come off her tongue. She wanted to laugh; at the same time she found it revolting that they should become so humble and apologetic, while in those humble eyes was such an aggressive gleam. Each kiss was a small ceremony of hatred; and at the fourth occasion, when some anonymous youth began compulsively tugging her towards the veranda, she resisted, and saw his baleful glance.

‘Toffee-nosed, hey?’ he demanded. And afterwards, at the table, he indicated Martha to the others, and said, ‘This baby’s toffee-nosed, she’s…’ And he made a show of shivering and holding a coat around him and chattering his teeth.

Donovan suddenly called, ‘Well, Matty dear, and how
are
you?’ and it was only after she had seen a couple of the young men exchange grimaces in the direction of Donovan that she understood Donovan had been watching her all evening, that for some reason these young
men’s attentions to her were a challenge to Donovan. She saw, too, that he was pleased because she had been found lacking. She sat quietly at the end of the table, feeling hurt, and confused; her own idea of herself was destroyed. That other veiled personage that waits, imprisoned, in every woman, to be released by love, that person she feels to be (obstinately and against the evidence of all experience) what is real and enduring in her, was tremblingly insecure. She hated Donovan, with a pure, cool contempt; she looked at the young men, and despised them passionately.

When Perry, for the second time, danced her out of the big room, through the dancing couples on the veranda, and to the steps, she went with him easily. ‘But it’s muddy,’ she said, laughing nervously, looking out at the playing fields, which were saturated with water and moonlight.

‘Never mind,’ said Perry. ‘Never mind, baby.’ He tugged at her arm, and when she did not follow him, picked her up, and lifted her down. She could hear his feet squelching through the heavy mud. He carried her around the corner of the building, and without putting her down kissed her.

This was something different, being suspended strongly, in space. Perry, the individual, was merging easily into that ideal figure, a young strong man, who wooed that other ideal person within her (veiled, but certainly lovely), when she suddenly cried out, ‘Perry, my
dress
!’

‘What’s the matter, kid?’ asked Perry, annoyed but devoted. ‘What have I done?’

She felt a coldness strike down her thigh, and, peering with difficulty over the thick curve of his arm, said, ‘My dress is torn.’ And it was.

‘Baby, I’m sorry, I’m a clumsy brute,’ said Perry sentimentally; and he carried her back to the veranda, squelch, squelch, through the moon-gilded puddles. There she stood, on the steps, examining the damage.

She understood there was a silence, people were watching. Her
spirits rose in a defiant wave of elation, and she cried gaily, ‘Don, you were quite right, my dress is torn.’ She walked calmly to the table, holding the gaping cloth together over her naked thigh, and stood beside Donovan, while Perry followed, muttering, ‘Kid, I’m sorry. You kill me. You’ll be the death of me.’

Donovan was silent for a critical moment, then he shrieked with laughter. Everyone joined in. It was a relieved laughter, a little hysterical. Donovan said, ‘Well, I can’t do anything without a needle and thread.’

Binkie told a waiter to go and get these things. The waiter protested, sulkily, that he did not know where to find them, and was dismissed peremptorily with ‘Go on, Jim. Don’t argue. If I say needle and thread, then get them.’ He waved his hand dismissingly, and the waiter went away; and returned after a few minutes with the things.

Donovan, again master of the situation, laughed, and stitched up Martha’s dress, while Ruth blinked her short-sighted eyes and watched in her quiet interested way, and Donovan said that Martha was a disgusting girl, she had mud on her dress. For some reason, this incident had released them all into gay amity. Martha sat beside Donovan, who held her hand; Ruth held Donovan’s on the other side; Perry lounged beside Martha, watching her curiously. Outside, between the veranda pillars, the moon flooded wild and fitful light over the ruffling dark water. The gum trees moved their black hulking shapes over the stars. The music came pulsing steadily from inside. It was midnight. Some of the older people were going home, smiling in a way which suggested that while youth must have its due, it should not, nevertheless, demand too much. Binkie was muttering, like a storm warning, ‘Let’s break it up, kids, come on, let’s break it up.’

Inside, during the next dance, they broke it up. Whooping and yelling, stamping and surging, they flung themselves indiscriminately around the room, while the band played and played and played, pulling rhythm from their instruments with steady fingers, smiling with conscious power, as if it were they, the human beings, who directed the movements of jerking, lolling marionettes below. Martha caught
a glimpse, over Perry’s arm, of Donovan, dancing loose-limbed, like a jointed doll, flinging out his arms and legs around him, his black hair falling in thick locks over his face, and smiling in a way which plainly said, ‘This is quite idiotic, I’m doing it because it’s the thing.’ Ruth, now no longer cool and possessed, jerked unregarded in the pumping arms of Binkie, with a look of patient suffering on her face. And Martha realized that the ridiculous suffering look was the same as that on her own face; she did not like this, she could not let herself go into it. At the moment she became aware of that critical and untouched person within herself, she looked at Perry, and thought in a flash, Despite what he wants us to think, it’s the same with him. Perry, apparently, was in a trance of violence. He was letting his shoulders rise and fall convulsively; his eyes rolled to the ceiling, darted sideways with a flash of white eyeball, and settled glazedly in a stare at the floor. His whole body shuddered and rocked and shook; and all the time he was quite unaffected, for when, by chance, Martha encountered for a moment those blue eyes as they rolled past her, she saw them possessed only on the surface, for underneath they were cool and observant, absorbed in appreciative direction of his frenzy. ‘Look how madly we are behaving,’ that deep gleam seemed to say. At the same time, it disliked being noticed: during that second when Martha’s eyes and Perry’s met, it was exactly as if two people supposed to be wholly absorbed in a religious ceremony, turn to spy on each other, and are annoyed and embarrassed to see the other’s treachery. She wanted to giggle; she did laugh, nervously; and he pressed her close, as if to say, ‘Do be quiet,’ and said, ‘Baby, you’re killing me.’ He let out an agonized groan, which made her laugh again.

No, like Ruth, she could not enjoy it. At the end of the first dance—that is, the first dance of abandon—she went back to the table on the veranda, leaving Perry to find someone else, and saw Donovan, already calm and composed, his black hair sleek as ever, sitting with Ruth.

‘Really, Matty dear,’ said Donovan peevishly, ‘these orgies don’t do anything for you. You’d better comb your hair—no, let me do it.’

But she did it herself, rather perfunctorily, while the stampede continued inside, and she listened, half scornfully, half regretfully, because of this self-exclusion, which left her cool and mistress of herself, listening while Donovan talked to Ruth.

Soon she heard Donovan let out a grateful yell, and saw two people, thus arrested, pause, laugh, and come towards them. One was a small, striking-looking dark-eyed Jewish girl, dressed in tight striped satin, and the other, in striking contrast to her smooth, smart woman-of-the-world look, a rather large and clumsy man, with a craggy-featured Scots face and blue shrewd Scots eyes.

This couple, it seemed, not merely ‘knew’ Donovan, but were great friends of his; they sat down, ordering drinks while they protested they must go at once. Her name was Stella, his Andrew; they were married, and very pleased about it—these facts Martha gathered before the music stopped again and she found Perry beside her. He groaned perfunctorily that she had deserted him, she was killing him; but she could no longer keep it up. She laughed at him, and, keeping her eyes fixed on his, began talking naturally—about what? It did not matter, it was her tone that mattered; she could no longer maintain that maternal indulgence. She watched him grow uneasy, even half rise, with a trapped look, before he sank down again; she had won. She felt a reckless triumph that she had coaxed one of the wolves, Binkie’s senior lieutenant, into treating her seriously! And it appeared that he was astonished himself; for when Donovan and Ruth, Stella and Andrew Mathews rose and announced they were going to the Mathews’s flat, Perry followed Martha across the big dance room, contracting his face comically as he shouted out to the distressed Binkie, ‘This baby’s got me, I’m lassoed, I’m done for!’ And they drove off, Martha with Perry in the back of Donovan’s car, while Ruth sat with him in front, thus acknowledging the change of partners.

Donovan and Ruth flirted pleasantly; as for Perry, he did not even attempt to hold Martha’s hand. He allowed that great blond athletic body of his to shake gently with the car’s movement, as if all the virtue had gone out of him; and while his head shook where it
rested on the back of the seat, he looked at Martha, and said protestingly, ‘Hey, baby, what are you doing to me?’ while she laughed at him. And when they reached the big block of flats, whose fame was due to their being six storeys high, higher than any other building in the town, he followed her meekly from the car, a tamed and uneasy wolf; and so they all went up, in their couples, to the Mathews’s flat.

The flat was bright, modern, compact. The small living room had striped curtains, pale rugs, light modern furniture. Coming into it was a relief; one enters a strange place feeling, To what must I adapt myself? But there was nothing individual here to claim one’s mood, there was no need to submit oneself. In this country, or in England, or in any other country, one enters this flat, is at home at once, with a feeling of peace. Thank God! There are enough claims on us as it is, tugging us this way and that, without considering fittings and furniture. Who used them before? What kind of people were they? What do they demand of us? Ah, the blessed anonymity of the modern flat, that home for nomads who, with no idea of where they are travelling, must travel light, ready for anything.

The windows were open; the lights of the city spread glittering below; it seemed very high—like a platform lifted precariously in the great darkness, with nothing but a thin shell of concrete between the lit space and the black and sweeping winds. For the wind was strong again. The sky, cleaned by rain that same afternoon, was already tumultuous with moon-sculptured cloud. The clouds went rolling steadily but swiftly overhead, to bank themselves high under a slanting Southern Cross, in mountainous heaps of black. It was warm; although Martha was naked save for her slip of a dance dress, the tendrils of wind that clung to her shoulders were as soft as fingers. Thunder muttered softly, like something half asleep; a heavy cloud bucketed and rolled like a ship in the hands of a driving wind, its undersurface profound and dim, its upper reaches white and illuminated. The moon went out, and there was a smell of fresh rain pouring across the dark.

Martha turned from the windows, and found Andrew serving
drinks. It seemed that, every place one entered, no sooner had one arrived, than out came the alcohol. What would happen, she wondered, if for some terrible and unforeseen reason it did not? But the critical thought lasted just so long as the influence of the night outside; soon she was wholly confined to that small lit space, the Mathews’s living room, and she reached out her hand for a brandy, and listened to what was going on.

Here it was not Donovan, or Ruth, or herself, who played lead. It was Stella. She sat on the arm of the chair, talking vivaciously, while her dark eyes glowed, resting on the faces of her audience, seeming to pull them into the circle of her magnetism. She was telling how Andrew’s father had forbidden him to marry a Jewess, how they had married secretly, and thus seemed to be living together without grace of state or church, until the old man had come imploring them to marry, because this disgrace was more than his respectable Scots soul could bear. Then they had told him they had been married all the time, given him a whisky, and asked him to stay to dinner. It wasn’t the story itself that they listened to, laughed at; for Stella was displaying herself, as it were, with her husband for foil. She poised herself on the chair arm, in her tight bright satin, and her sleek, smooth, golden-fleshed body seemed to speak to every person there in a language of its own. She was alive from her naked silk-covered toes—she had flung off her shoes—to her smooth dark hair, which seemed so sophisticated, though it was arranged as her grandmother’s might have been, parted in the middle and coiled behind in a simple bun. Her face glistened with animation, her plump tawny arms flung out and gestured until at the end, where she described her father-in-law’s collapse, she let them fall, and dropped her voice to a meek, womanly demureness. ‘And now everything’s all right. The hell is over. It’s not right for a son to quarrel with his father.’