Martha Quest (30 page)

She took it badly. She was stunned. Then she muttered, ‘I don’t believe it.’

He laughed. ‘Look over your shoulder.’

She looked. A couple of blocks behind them crawled Adolph’s car. The mere sight of it caused her annoyance, and she involuntarily gave an impatient movement, as if shrugging off a burden. She said coldly, however, ‘That doesn’t prove anything.’

They had reached the flats. Donovan quickly stopped the car and jumped out. She saw he was waving to Adolph; the car wavered, appeared to be turning into a side street, and then adjusted itself and came straight on. Donovan, looking very manly and decided, strode a few paces to meet it, checked it with an imperiously raised hand, leaned inside the car, and spoke to Adolph; Martha caught a glimpse of Adolph’s defenceless smile.

Donovan returned, and she said, ‘What’s going on?’

‘Never mind, Matty dear, you come and talk to Stella, you’ll find out.’

They avoided looking at each other as they went up in the lift. Martha hated Donovan, and was thinking of Adolph: she was saying to herself that it would be impossible for him to spy on her, while an inner voice was replying that it was only too likely—it seemed consistent with what she knew of him. Fighting against this new conviction,
she entered the flat and found Andrew, looking very embarrassed and concealing it with an assumption of responsibility, and Stella seated waiting on the divan as if the act of waiting was in itself a torment. She leaped up, and came to kiss Martha.

Martha allowed herself to be kissed, and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

Stella led her to the divan, her arm around her shoulders with a gentle pressure that said, Be patient; then she went to sit opposite, leaning forward. She was wearing a black cocktail dress with sequins on it, which Martha’s eye noted and criticized as too bright even while she was waiting agitatedly for what Stella was going to say. Her hair was newly done, lying smooth and glossy on her small head; her oval face was tinted to an even apricot flush; her eyes glittered with excitement. At the same time, she was trying to subdue this excitement and appear deprecatingly womanly.

She said, in a low, dignified voice, which Martha at once resented as a dishonesty, ‘Matty dear, we really feel it our duty to tell you—no, don’t speak for a moment.’ For Martha’s eyebrows had involuntarily risen at the word ‘duty’. ‘Let me finish, Matty.’

Martha glanced at Donovan, who was watching avidly; at Andrew, whose face suggested that he was bound to agree with his wife, even if what she said continually came as a surprise to him. He refused to meet Martha’s eyes, which were an appeal.

‘Matty,’ continued Stella with that effusive gentleness which was like an irritant, ‘you’re very young, and you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. You should have listened to us. That man has a bad reputation, he’s immoral and—’

Here Martha laughed involuntarily, thinking of the atmosphere of sex that Stella exuded like a perfume.

Stella said hurriedly, ‘No, Martha, you mustn’t laugh. He’s not a nice man. He’s been talking about you publicly, boasting everywhere.’

This was another shock. Martha could not immediately speak. That inner voice was saying firmly, No
that’s
not true; but she was confused, thinking that if he could spy on her, which she believed,
then he might also boast. She sat frowning, looking with dislike at Stella’s triumphant face.

They were all gazing at her. In astonished horror of herself, she felt her lips beginning to tremble; the thing wavered this way and that, and then Stella expertly tightened the screw: ‘Talking about you all over the
town
, Matty.’ And Martha burst into tears. Her chief emotion was anger at herself for crying, for now she was lost. Through her tears, she saw the glint of cruelty in Stella’s bright eyes; she saw Donovan smiling, though he at once adjusted his look to sternness. A glance at Andrew showed him to be extremely uncomfortable. He got up, came over to her, and pushed away Stella, putting his arms around Martha.

‘Now, don’t cry, it’s all right,’ he said nicely, and looked angrily at his wife, who smiled and stood smoothing her hair reflectively, watching Martha’s face.

Almost immediately, much too soon to please Stella, Martha pulled herself together, trying to laugh, and asked brightly for a handkerchief.

‘You’re not the sort of girl who should cry,’ said Donovan, handing her his. ‘Stella, now, looks divine when she cries. For goodness’ sake powder your nose, Matty dear.’

‘That’s enough,’ said Andrew, annoyed. ‘Let’s call it a day now, shall we? Let’s all have a drink.’ He went to pour them.

Stella took over again. ‘And now we want you to come with us while we go and talk to him.’

‘What for?’ protested Martha sullenly. She had imagined it was all over.

‘You don’t want him ruining you, we must stop him talking; the whole town is gossiping,’ cried Stella indignantly.

‘I don’t see any necessity to go and see him,’ said Andrew stiffly.

But Stella and Donovan were already on their feet, waiting, and Andrew rose, too, in spite of himself.

‘I don’t think we should,’ said Martha faintly. ‘He won’t be in, anyway,’ she added hopefully, and this rider was her undoing; for she
understood suddenly that Donovan had arranged that he should be in, when he spoke to him in the car. The sense of elaborate preparations, discussions, intrigues which she had not begun to comprehend kept her silent while Stella impatiently pulled her up from the divan and said, ‘Oh, come on, Matty, he’s expecting us.’

As they drove the few blocks to Adolph’s room, Martha, from her worried preoccupation, dimly heard Stella chattering animatedly about how easy it was for a young girl to go astray; it sounded like a magazine story. She looked incredulously at Stella, thinking surely this was an act, but Stella was carried away by the drama, and when Martha glanced towards Andrew, thinking that at least he must be amused, no, he was silent; his wife’s self-righteousness seemed to have infected him, for he sentimentally pressed Martha’s hand, and said, ‘You see, it’s all disgusting, isn’t it?’ Stella promptly said, with a relieved look at him, that yes, it must have been a great shock to Martha. Martha understood that they meant sex; and an uncomfortable but derisive grin appeared on her face, and she turned her face away to hide it, for she felt guilty because she could smile at all; she was by now bitterly regretting being here, and hoped that Adolph would have the sense to avoid this ridiculous scene.

But of course he was waiting. As the four entered the big room with its curved windows—and for the first time it flashed into Martha’s mind that the reason she had been so drawn to them was because they reminded her of home—Adolph was standing in the centre of the room, watching them, a small, ugly smile on his face. He looked caged; he stared helplessly at Stella, after a quick resentful glance at Martha, who even found herself signalling with her eyes, Don’t take any notice of them.

But he could not take his eyes off Stella, and it was she who conducted the interview, while the two men remained standing in the background, waiting.

Stella began, in that womanly voice, ‘You know why we’ve come.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Adolph, with his scared smile.

Stella drew in her breath, outraged by the hypocrisy. ‘I’ve come to speak to you, because I feel it to be my duty, I’m a Jew myself and I feel—’

‘
Stella!
’ protested Andrew and Martha together.

Stella impatiently motioned them to be quiet, and went on, smoothing her black silk skirt with a hand that looked curiously agitated, in contrast with the bland smiling face. ‘You know quite well what people say, then why do you add ammunition to it, seducing an innocent English girl.’

‘Stella,’ said Martha again, but by now neither of them was interested in her.

Adolph moved his lips in his scared, guilty smile, and Martha thought, ‘Why don’t you stand up to her? Don’t look so crestfallen.’ She was sick with anger at this scene, and with her part in it.

‘You married a Scotsman,’ said Adolph at last, weakly.

Stella straightened herself, and said with dignity, ‘I married him. I didn’t drag down my people to be gossiped about.’

Adolph suddenly let out a nervous giggle; his face was dull purple, his eyes went from one to another of the group in front of him, in angry appeal. And since he said nothing, Stella lost poise; her body was tense with the desire for a good vulgar scene, but it seemed there should be no scene.

She dropped her voice and cooed reasonably, ‘You must see you’ve behaved shockingly.’

There was a silence. Then Andrew said angrily, ‘Oh, come on, Stella, that’s enough, this is all off the point.’

And at last Adolph flashed into anger, and ground out, ‘And may I ask what this has got to do with you?’

‘Because I’m a Jewess,’ said Stella, with dignity. ‘Because I’ve a right to say it.’

It seemed Adolph had exhausted his anger; and after a pause, Stella rose calmly, remarking; ‘I’ll leave it to your conscience, then.’

She walked to the door, shepherding her flock before her. Donovan, looking moodily irritable, went out first. Andrew followed, saying
uncomfortably to Adolph, ‘Goodbye.’ There was no reply. Martha looked swiftly over her shoulder at Adolph in guilty apology and saw his eyes so filled with hatred that she averted hers, and hurried out.

No one spoke. In her mind, Martha was framing words to express what she felt: she wanted to say this was the most dishonest disgraceful scene, she wanted to ask sarcastically why Stella had not said any of the things she had protested she intended to say. A glance at Stella’s satisfied face silenced her, and a kind of tiredness came over her.

They went to the car and drove in silence uptown. At the intersection Martha said, ‘I should like to get out and go home.’

‘No, Matty dear,’ said Stella maternally. ‘Come home and have some nice supper with us.’

‘Let her go home,’ said Donovan unexpectedly. His voice was sulky, his heavy black brows were knitted together over his eyes; he was scowling.

Andrew stopped the car, and Martha got out. Stella leaned persuasively out of the car, and said, ‘Now, go to bed early, Matty, don’t worry, you need some sleep, it’s all over and no harm done.’

Martha saw that Stella was waiting to be thanked; but the words stuck on her tongue. ‘Goodbye,’ was all that she could get out; and she sounded cold and reproachful. She was reproaching herself for being a coward.

Stella leaned further out, and said gaily that Martha must look on their flat as a home, she must come and see them next day.

Martha nodded, with a stiff smile, and went home.

And in her room she was so ashamed she could hardly bear her own company. She said to herself wildly that she must rush down to Adolph’s room and say she was sorry, that it had had nothing to do with her, she had not known it was going to be like that. But at the back of her mind was a profound thankfulness that it was all over. There was no doubt that it was a relief that she need not see him again. And so, after a while, she soothed her conscience with the thought that she would write to him, she would apologize. Not now—tomorrow, later; she would write when a letter no longer had the power to bring him back.

Martha was alone in her room. She felt exposed, unable to bear other
people. She wished she were ill, and so able to stay away from the office for two or three weeks. Soon she did feel a vague, listless aching, rather like an illness. Her mother had sent her a thermometer to ‘help her look after herself’. She took her temperature. It was a little over normal. She assured herself that a temperature might be low in the morning and high in the afternoon, and got Mrs Gunn to telephone the office, saying she was unwell.

In the afternoon, she was standing by the door, with the thermometer in her mouth, when she saw herself from outside, and at the same time remembered her father, medicine bottles stacked in hundreds by his bed—her father, whose image persistently composed itself in her mind as a worried, inward-looking man, standing moodily at a window but seeing nothing out of it, holding one wrist between the fingers of his other hand, to measure his pulse. The thought frightened her; she whipped out the thermometer, and stood hestitating, thinking, I’ll throw the thing away. She glanced at the silver thread, for she might as well have a look at it first, and then it slipped from her hand and broke. Before it fell, she had seen that it stood at
a hundred. Well, she had a temperature, she was justified. Soberly, she swept up the glass, and said consolingly that she would never buy another thermometer, she would not fuss over her health. But it was a relief, nevertheless, to be slightly ill, to be able to go to bed.

To bed she did not go. She put on a dressing-gown, arranged books, and prepared for a few days’ retreat from the world.

A few days: looking back on that period of her life afterwards, what she felt was wistful envy of the self she had been; she envied her lost capacity for making the most of time—that was how she put it, as if time were a kind of glass measure which one could fill or not.

She had left the farm a few weeks before; but put like that it was nonsense. Those few weeks seemed endless, one could not think of time—which is an affair of seconds, hours, days—in connection with it. It seemed she had been in town for years—no, that was another term for the divisions of the clock. What she had experienced since she got that momentous letter from Joss, which had released her from her imprisonment like the kiss of the prince in the fairy tales, was something quite different from the slow, measured years she had spent on the farm.

She thought of farm time, that strict measuring rod, where life was kept properly defined—for there could be no nonsense when the seasons were used as boundaries. On the farm, it was January, she told herself, it was in the middle of the rainy season. After the rainy season came the dry season; and after that, again, the rains. But when she came to think of it, it was not so simple. What of the season of veld fires, which had a climate of its own: lowering, smoky horizons, the yellow thickness of the middle air, the black wastes of veld? It was an extra season inserted into the natural year. What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month? Again, it was neither dry season nor wet for how can a month be called dry that is spent, minute by dragging minute, thinking of the approaching inevitable rain, watching a sky banked with clouds which must break, break soon? October was another season that was given, offered free, as it were, to vary a climate which is thought of as ‘dry
season, wet season’. And so the rains break at last, if not in October, then in November, or even, when it comes to the worst, in December; the word ‘October’ does as well as any other to fix the terrible beckoning period of tension which comes in every year, comes inevitably; one cannot have the breaking of the rains without the time of preparation and agonizing waiting to which one gives the name ‘October’. And the word ‘October’ gave off to Martha (her birthday was in that month) a faint marshlight from another world, that seemingly real but illusionary gleam from literature: overseas, October was the closing of the year, in a final blaze of cold-scorched foliage followed by the ritual lighting of the fire on the hearth. No, it was not easy at all, to moor oneself safely, with the words that meant one thing only, to use names like lighthouses; these rocks shifted, as if they too floated treacherously on water.

But now it was January. Christmas was over. Martha stood at her doorway behind a rather soiled lace curtain, and looked at the street. It was hot and wet. The puddles in the garden never had time to dry—to sink into the earth or lose themselves in the air. The sky sweltered with water; several times a day the clouds drove incontinently over the town, everything grew dark for a few minutes in a sudden grey drench of rain, and then the sun was exposed again, and the tarmac rocked off its waves of wet heat, the trees in the park quivered through waves of rising moisture. January, January in the town.

On the farm, everything was vivid, a violent green, while the earth was a blaring red. The sky from Jacob’s Burg to the Oxford Range, from the Dumfries Hills away back, over the unbounded north, was a deep, soft hall of blue; and the clouds wheeled and deployed and marched day and night, flinging down hail, storming down rain, rolling and rocking to an orchestra of thunder, while the lightning danced about the thunderheads and quivered over the mountains. On the farm, the bush on the hill where the house stood was so soaked and lush that walking through it meant red mud to the ankles, and saturated branches springing loads of sparkling water at every step. On the farm, the cattle were grazing with nervous haste
on the short, thick grass, which they knew would be tough and wiry in so short a time. For this was the season when it was impossible to remember the burning drought of the long dry season. The veld was like those blackened brittle sticks one picks off a rock on a kopje, apparently dead and ready to rot, which one places into water, only to find an hour later, that this lifeless twig has burst into crisp, vivid little leaves. In January, the drought-ridden, fire tortured veld was as teeming and steamy and febrile as a jungle. In the rotting trunks of trees the infant mosquitoes wriggled like miniature dragons; one might find the energetic creatures in the hollow of a big leaf, or in the imprint of a cow’s foot or the tangled wetness of a low-growing clump of grass.

Last January, Martha’s eyes (fixed as usual on some image of herself in an urban setting—a college girl in Cape Town, perhaps?) were caught by a slow squirm on a branch which she was just about to allow to splash, like a sponge, across her already drenched head, and she saw, as if the deep-green substance of the leafage had taken on another form, two enormous green caterpillars, about seven inches long, the thickness of a wrist; pale green they were, a sickly intense green, smooth as skin, and their silky-paper surfaces were stretched to bursting as if the violence of this pulsating month was growing in them so fast (Martha could see the almost liquid substance swimming inside the frail tight skin) that they might burst asunder with the pressure of their growth before they could turn themselves, as was right and proper, into dry cases, like bits of stick, and so into butterflies or moths. They were loathsome, disgusting; Martha felt sick as she looked at these fat and seething creatures rolling clumsily on their light fronds of leaves, blind, silent, their heads indicated only by two small horns, mere bumpish projections of the greenish skin, like pimples—they were repulsive, but she was exhilarated. She went home singing.

One might imagine I was homesick! she said to herself dryly; for she could not return to the farm again, not if it were the last thing she did. And yet, for the moment, it seemed she could not face the town either, for here she was, shut in her room with a dubious illness that
could be described by courtesy as malaria. Why not? She had had malaria as a child, and everyone knew that ‘once it was in your blood…’ She had a ‘touch’ of malaria, then—as one might speak of a ‘touch’ of the sun—and she was not homesick. Everything was satisfactory, for she was telling herself that her experience with Adolph could be justified as such; one is not an honorary member of the youth of the 1920s without knowing that one is entitled to experience, if to nothing else. And it was true she was not ashamed of the affair with Adolph; she was ashamed—to that point where one bursts into inarticulate exclamations of disgust, alone in one’s room, one’s face burning—because of that scene with Stella. She told herself that never, not on any account, would she go near the Mathews’s flat again.

On the third day of her retirement, she received a large and expensive bunch of flowers from Stella and Andrew, with a gay note saying that they had telephoned the office and heard she was ill. Martha was warmed by this kindness, but no sooner had she become conscious of the flush of gratitude through her veins than she remarked to herself irritably, in the old way, Nonsense, what is kindness then? She just does as comes easiest, and then…

She wrote a little note to Mr Jasper Cohen, in the humorous vein she knew she should not use, because it pleaded special privilege; for she needed a doctor’s certificate to stay at home any longer.

Then she returned to resume that other journey of discovery which alternated with the discoveries of a young woman loose in town: she returned to her books. She was reading her way slowly and vaguely from book to book, on no better system than that one author might mention another, or that a name appeared in a publisher’s spring list. She was like a bird flitting from branch to darkening branch of an immense tree; but the tree rose as if it had no trunk, from a mist. She read as if this were a process discovered by herself; as if there had never been a guide to it. She read like a bird collecting twigs for a nest. She picked up each new book, using the author’s name as a sanction, as if the book were something separate and self-contained, a world in itself. And as she read she asked herself, What has this got to do with
me? Mostly, she rejected; what she accepted she took instinctively, for it rang true with some tuning fork or guide within her; and the measure was that experience (she thought of it as one, though it was the fusion of many, varying in intensity) which was the gift of her solitary childhood on the veld: that knowledge of something painful and ecstatic, something central and fixed, but flowing. It was a sense of movement, of separate things interacting and finally becoming one, but greater—it was this which was her lodestone, even her conscience; and so, when she put down this book, that author, it was with the simplicity of perfect certainty, like the certainties of ignorance: It isn’t true. And so these authors, these philosophers who had fed and maintained (or so she understood) so many earlier generations, were discarded with the ease with which she had shed religion: they wouldn’t do, or not for her.

In the meantime, she continued with the process of taking a fragment here and a sentence there, and built them into her mind, which was now the most extraordinary structure of disconnected bits of poetry, prose, fact and fancy; so that when she claimed casually that she had read Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche, what she meant was that she had deepened her conviction of creative fatality. She had in fact not read either of them, or any other author, if reading means to take from an author what he intends to convey.

Those ‘few days’ were one of those periods which recurred in her life when she read like a famished person, cramming into the shortest possible time a truly remarkable quantity of vicarious experience. She emerged from it on Sunday evening, restless with energy, knowing she must go back to work the following day. It was almost February; already a month had gone from the new year. She must go back and work at the Polytechnic, she must fulfil all her good resolutions, so that by the end of the year she would be embarked properly on a career and know where she was going.

The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau—but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible. She clung to these
poets of sleep, and death and the heart—or so she saw them; and it did not occur to her to ask, not until long afterwards, how it was that she, not more than a few weeks in time from the farm, hardly separated from it in space (since this little town was so lightly scratched on the surface of the soil that one could see the veld by lifting one’s eyes and looking down to the end of the street, while the veld grasses sprung vigorously along the pavements)—why it was that she read these poets as if they were a confirmation of some kind of exile?

When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain—he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.

The office was concerned not so much over the death of a hero as over the new regime; for Mr Max Cohen, now in charge, had dismissed three girls, one of whom was Maisie. Mr Max Cohen and young Mr Robinson allowed it to be seen how much they did not approve of Mr Jasper’s methods. Martha was interviewed and asked perfunctorily after her health (and she looked extremely well) and told that ‘we’ were so pleased that she was persevering at the Polytechnic, because the office could no longer afford unqualified girls.

Maisie, placidly under sentence of dismissal, had already found herself another job, at an insurance office; she told Martha that she had taken four days off herself, for the Christmas season had nearly killed her—she had slept for three days without stopping. She manicured her nails, dreamily attended to the filing, and smiled with the pleasantest good nature at Mr Robinson and Mr Max, who were even more annoyed because she seemed not to regard being dismissed as a disgrace. The other two girls had left already, in a fit of outraged
amour propre
, and were employed elsewhere.

‘Wait till
our
Mr Cohen comes back,’ said Maisie calmly. ‘They’ll catch it. Nothing but slave drivers.’ But it was unlikely that Mr Jasper would be back for some months. It was not only the shock of his son’s death; his wife—or so said rumour—was going to divorce him, for
she felt that it was all her husband’s fault that Abraham had been killed, and the office appeared to agree with her.