Martha Quest (32 page)

‘Come on, damn it,’ said Perry frowning. He stood staring at the waiter as if he simply did not understand, while the man avoided his
eyes. Then the blood rushed to Perry’s face, and he muttered, ‘You damned black…’ He had lost his temper completely.

The waiter shrugged, a controlled disdain, and walked towards the white wall of people, which divided instinctively to make way for him. He strolled through, and when he was near a door he suddenly broke into a run and vanished; he had been afraid.

‘Gently, kid,’ said one of the girls maternally, clutching Perry’s arm. ‘Don’t lose your temper, it’s not worth it, kid.’

Perry stood breathing heavily, and even looked rather puzzled. ‘All I wanted was him to dance, that’s all, for crying out loud,’ he said noisily, looking around him for appreciation and support. There were consoling murmurs from the girls. ‘That’s all I asked, that’s the bloody kaffirs all over, I ask him to dance and he gets cheeky.’ He looked towards the doors, but there was not a waiter in sight, they had all vanished.

And the white people were left unaccountably bad-tempered, and rather sorry for themselves. They drifted off in groups, Martha walked away with Donovan, who had not said a word. And it was not until they reached his car that he said coldly, in that well-bred indifferent voice, ‘I suppose you’re feeling sorry for the kaffir.’

For a moment Martha was silent; what struck her was the deliberate way he said it, as if intending to provoke her. And the scene had made her very angry; also, which was worse, had made her afraid. What was terrible, she felt dimly, was the sentimental grievance of Perry and his friends: they really felt ill-used and misunderstood. It was like a madness.

‘Not at all,’ she said, intending not to quarrel; but then she could not help adding, ‘I’m sorry for us, I think it’s disgusting.’

‘I thought you would,’ said Donovan coldly.

They did not speak again for a few moments; they were both thinking of things to say.

‘I suppose you thought it was a charming idea to ask him to sing. “Hold him
down
, the Zulu warrior,” ’ said Martha angrily, giving in
to the silence; and she rather clumsily mimicked the pseudo-manly tone of the ‘hold him
down
’.

At once he said, ‘If you’re not careful, Matty dear, you’ll become a proper little nigger-lover.’

At this she laughed in astonishment: it was his inevitable fatal false note. Now she had the advantage, and she went on: ‘Dear, dear
me
, how
awful
, isn’t it, I should be such a naughty,
naughty
girl to have such wicked, unpopular opinions, and just
think
what people might
say
!’

And now he was furious, for she had minced out the sentence with a really unpleasant parody of his mannerisms. She had wounded him in his vanity, and so it was no longer a question of her opinion or his. They drove for a block or so in silence, while she waited for the thunderbolt to fall. She glanced at him nervously, wondering why he was so silent, but frowned blackly, his face averted.

Then he said, ‘Well, Matty, we don’t seem to go together at all, do we. I’m simply not broadminded enough for your Jews and your niggers.’

And now she was very angry. She said, ‘You needn’t flatter yourself you have a mind at all.’ It sounded so childish, she would have recalled it, if she could, in favour of something calm and dignified. But it was too late.

The moment the car stopped, she jumped out, and went to her room, without even looking at him. She was furious with herself; alas, with what self-command do we conduct these arguments in imagination!

‘Well,’ she said finally, in a mood of wild elation, ‘that’s over, I’m finished with
that
.’

And what she meant was she was finished with the Sports Club, and everything it stood for.

Martha was again solitary, for a few days. She told herself it was only
February, to still her extraordinary panic; she was so restless she could hardly bear to sleep; she would start awake after an hour’s light doze, feeling that life was escaping her, that there was something urgent she should be doing. She flung herself into work at the office, which all at once seemed easy instead of tedious; she studied at the Polytechnic with all her concentration, and was commended by Mr Skye. Afterwards, avoiding speaking to anyone, she walked home to her room through the park. There was a drought; the sun shone steadily all day, the sky was strong and blue, there was a smell of dust. (On the farm, the scents and wet heat of the jungle had vanished, and the grass was yellowing.) She tried to read, and could not. While the darkness settled over the town, she stood at her door, listening. For, night after night, music came from across the park, from down the street, from the hotel half a dozen blocks away: the whole town was dancing. The dance music flowed from all over the town, like water throbbing from dark sources, to mingle in a sound that was not music but could be felt along the nerves like the convulsive beating of a vast pulse. And there stood Martha at her doorway, carefully keeping out of sight
behind the soiled lace curtain, watching the cars pass and hoping that none would stop, for she feared being dragged back to the compulsion of pleasure, saying that she should be studying—but what?—and feeling like a waif locked out of a party; she was missing something vitally sweet.

During those few days she made various inconclusive attempts to escape. At a sundowner party weeks before, she had met a young woman who dressed windows for one of the big stores. Martha, buoyed as usual by the conviction that there was nothing she could not do, given the opportunity, sought out this young woman, and went to interview a certain Mr Baker, who owned the biggest store in town, offering herself as a potential window dresser. Mr Baker, far from being discouraging, seemed to approve; and it was not until the unpleasant subject of money was approached that Martha realized she was being engaged for the sum of five pounds a month, which, Mr. Baker blandly assured her, was the salary all his girls were first employed at. Martha asked naïvely how it was possible to live on it. The gentleman replied that his work girls lived at home, or, if this were not possible, he arranged for them to live in a certain well-known hostel. Now, Martha knew this hostel was run on charity, and that Mr Baker was a town councillor, a very influential person. She was young enough to be surprised and shocked that he should get his labour so cheap by such methods. Mr Baker, who had imagined that he was on the point of getting a young and attractive girl ‘of a good type’ (this was his particular euphemism for the uncomfortable word ‘middle class’) for five pounds a month, was astounded to find this same apparently mild and amenable person suddenly half inarticulate with fury, informing him in short and angry jerks that he ought to be ashamed of himself. Mr Baker at once grasped the situation, said to himself that this spirit could be useful if properly handled, and, in the suave and reasonable voice of an experienced handler of labour, began handling her. He said her views did her credit, but that she was mistaken. His salesgirls were contented and happy—why, they stayed with him for years! After all, if one was training to become a servant of the public,
one expected to pay for that training: if Martha was going to be a doctor, for instance, she would have to spend thousands on it, whereas he was offering to
pay
her (though admittedly not enough to live on) to learn a skilled job. Surely Miss Quest was reasonable enough to…Martha could not stand up to this urbanity. She collapsed, not into agreement, but into a stubborn silence, trying to find reasonable words to express her anger. Why, it was only last week that Mr Baker had made a compassionate speech appealing for public money to support the hostel ‘for those unfortunate girls at the mercy of…’ She could not speak, but she abruptly left, slamming the door, only to collapse immediately afterwards into a most familiar rage at herself for her ineffectiveness.

She paid a second visit to the
Zambesia News
. Mr Spur was delighted to see her. She was cool, like an acquaintance, though one day she would remember with gratitude that it was in his library she had first heard the words, ‘Yes, my child, you must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn’t matter what you read at first, later you’ll learn discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself.’ But that remark had been addressed to a child, whose affectionate admiration she now entirely disowned. She was, however, troubled by a vague feeling of indebtedness.

Mr Spur said that since her shorthand was now passable, and her typing fast, if inaccurate, she could certainly have a job with the woman’s page. But—how it happened she did not know—she found herself arguing with half-inarticulate anger about the capitalist press. The
Zambesia News
was a disgrace, she said: why didn’t it print the truth about what was happening in Europe? Mr Spur said, half annoyed, that the truth was always a matter of opinion; and then, controlling himself, said with the humorous gentleness of old age that on the woman’s page she would be corrupting no one.

‘The
woman’s
page!’ said Martha indignantly.

It was only afterwards that it occurred to her that he might perhaps have inquired, ‘Why do you come asking for a job when you
despise the paper so thoroughly?’ But there was only one paper; if she was going to be a journalist, then she would have to make use of it.

She went back home, and dreamed of herself as a journalist, as a window dresser, applied for a job as chauffeur to a rich old lady, and was thankful when she was turned down, on the grounds of her youth. She decided she would become an inspired shorthand writer, like Mr Skye; and answered an advertisement to help a mother across the sea to England with her three young children. This woman, a rather supercilious middle-class female whom Martha instinctively loathed, asked Martha if she liked children. Martha said frankly that no, she did not, but she wanted to go to England. The woman laughed, and there was a moment of indecision, which was ended when the lady noticed her husband’s eyes resting on Martha with rather too much appreciation. Martha was naïve enough to think she had lost this opportunity because of her clumsy answer, and once again made resolutions, in privacy, to control her tongue, to behave sensibly.

But she was still working at Robinson’s; she was, in fact, neither a journalist, a chauffeur, a shorthand writer, nor on her way to England.

For a few days then she dreamed of herself as a writer. She would be a freelance. She wrote poems, lying on the floor of her room; an article on the monopoly press; and a short story about a young girl who…This story was called ‘Revolt’. She dispatched these to the
Zambesia News
, to the
New Statesman
and to the
Observer
, convinced that all three would be accepted.

She remembered that as a child she had had a talent for drawing. She made a sketch there and then of the view of the park from her door; it really wasn’t too bad at all. But the difficulty with being a painter is that one must have equipment. Ah, the many thousands of hopeful young writers there are, for no better reason than that a pencil and writing pad take up less room than an easel, paints, and drawing boards, besides being so much less expensive.

Martha, then, would be a writer: it came to her like a revelation. If others, then why not herself? And how was she to know that one may live in London, or New York, a village in Yorkshire, or a dorp
in the backveld, one may imagine oneself as altogether unique and extraordinary (so powerfully does that pulse towards adventure beat), but one behaves inevitably, inexorably, exactly like everyone else. How was she to suspect that at least a hundred young people in the same small town stuck in the middle of Africa, kept desks full of poems, articles and stories, were convinced that
if only…
then they could be writers, they could escape into glorious freedom and untrammelled individuality—and for no better reason than that they could not face the prospect of a lifetime behind a desk in Robinson, Daniel and Cohen.

Almost immediately, the article on the monopoly press was returned from the
Zambesia News
, and the rejection slip dismayed Martha so much that she let the idea of being a freelance writer slip away.

And all the time that she dreamed with a fierce hunger of escape, and doing something vital and important, the other secret pulse was beating. There she stood, behind the curtain listening to the slow throbbing of the dance music, and wanted only to dance, dance all night; not at the Sports Club, but with some group of young people who were faceless, almost bodiless, imagined as a delicate embodiment of the dance music itself.

About ten days after she had quarrelled with Donovan, she was telephoned at the office by Perry, to ask if she were free the following evening, for there was a visiting team of cricketers from England; would she like to be one of the girls?

Martha refused. She was now finally sickened by her own inconsistency—so she said, as she proudly put down the receiver, suppressing a surge of longing and regret that she was wilfully refusing an evening of delicious pleasure. Nonsense, she told herself, it would not be pleasure, she would be bored. The thought that remained in her mind was that she was now casually rung up to fill in—to be ‘one of the girls’.

That evening, however, there was a letter from her mother. She picked it up gingerly. She was accustomed to reading the first para
graph of a letter from home and then flinging it in a crumpled mess of paper, into the wastepaper basket.

Martha threw away the letter; there were twelve pages of it, crossed and re-crossed like the letters one reads of in Victorian novels—the letters of leisure. But as the crumpled ball flew across the room and landed rather short of the wastepaper basket, a postscript written in darker ink caught her eye, and in unwilling curiosity she went to pick it up.

The effect of this letter on Martha was hardly reasonable. After half an hour of violent anger, a feeling of being caged and imprisoned, she went to the telephone, rang the Sports Club, asked for Perry, and told him she would be delighted to help entertain the visiting cricketers tomorrow.