Martha Quest (33 page)

In the event, the visiting sportsmen seemed disinclined to make much of
the girls provided for them.

The dance was held at McGrath’s. The big dining room now showed its oblong of bare boards, for the tables were pushed against the wall, their stained brown surfaces showing faded rings from wet glasses. The musicians were on the platform in their bower of ferns and potted shrubs. The tables in this room were mostly occupied by the young married crowd, while the cricketers, with the Sports Club men and the girls, were in the lounge, around a long improvised table that stretched almost from wall to wall of the enormous room. But the cricketers drifted off to the bar and remained there, and the girls, who were after all not forced by any pressure from statistics into being good-natured wallflowers, soon drifted off in the arms of local men, who had come prepared to remain womanless for the evening. Martha danced when she was asked, and quite late in the evening returned to the table to find that half a dozen or so of the cricketers were now seated at the table, for the girls had become absorbed elsewhere. They did not seem to mind, they were drinking and talking and looking at their watches, though one of them rose and asked Martha to dance.
She tried to talk, but found it difficult, and, being the prig that she was, was disgusted that people whose names were commonplaces in the news, idols of England, talked of by the Sports Club crowd with reverence, were like schoolboys in conversation. She was surprised, in short, that athletes were not intellectual, for somewhere within her was still a notion that famous people must necessarily be brilliant in every way. Besides, only that morning the
Zambesia News
had devoted three columns to the opinions of the captain of the team: the international situation, he said, was uncertain, but if sportsmen of all countries could play together regularly, unhindered by their governments, peace would be assured; all day businessmen, Rotary members, and civil servants had been quoting this judgement with approval and saying, yes, he must be a fine chap.

Martha danced with this same man later, and was piqued that he was as bored as she—or rather, his attitude was so different from the Colonial men that she at first thought he was bored. She was accustomed to wait for attentive appreciation, while he, it seemed, wanted her to flatter him. When the dance was over, she sat down, shaking her head at an invitation to dance again, and reminded herself that ‘millions of women’ would envy her, but was unable to find pleasure in the thought. For McGrath’s was ugly, the band was bad, and though she was drinking steadily as usual, her brain was critically alert. She wished herself back in bed. At the same time, she observed herself chatting brightly; her face stretched in a smile, just like the few other girls who remained; and when a pert ‘amusing’ remark ended unexpectedly in a yawn, she shook herself irritably into attention, and rearranged the smile.

Maisie, who happened to be there, remarked in that indolent voice, ‘Ohh, our Matty’s been having too many late nights.’ This was offered to general entertainment, and received with laughter, while Maisie was teased about her own popularity. Through this she smiled sleepily, and then she said in a low voice to Martha, ‘For crying out loud, these English boys give me the pip, they’re so stuck-up, you’d think they were doing us a favour.’ She then got up to dance with one
of them, offering herself to him with a meekly submissive movement of her body as she slid into his arms, while her eyes arched upwards in attentive silence. Over his shoulder she winked at Martha, which lit her face into spiteful but resigned mockery. She was danced away, the very image of a willing and admiring maiden.

It was at this point that Martha found herself addressed by the routine ‘Hullo, beautiful, why haven’t we met before?’ She got up to dance, the responsive smile already arranged in her eyes. She saw that this was a young man she had seen occasionally at the Club. His name was Douglas Knowell, which inevitably became Know all. He was a cheerful, grinning young man, of middle height, rather round than lean, with a round fleshy face, light-blue eyes, a nose that would have been well shaped had it not been flattened by an accident of sport, and palish hair plastered with water into a dull sodden mat. He bounced rather than danced Martha around the room, and from time to time let out a yell of triumph, while Martha automatically soothed and admonished him into civilized behaviour.

‘Who are you?’ she asked at last flirtatiously, and he said, ‘Ah, that’s asking, but I know who you are.’

‘Then you have the advantage,’ she said, wanting him to tell her his name, for she was perhaps a little piqued that he had not made any attempt to get to know her before.

‘Adam,’ he said, twinkling his blue eyes at her in a consciously merry look; and Martha glanced at him, startled, for this was more literary than one might expect from a wolf, and she knew that he was one of the senior members of the pack: he had helped Binkie start the Club, so she had been told.

‘What a pity I can’t be Eve, since you know my name,’ she said, and instinctively dropped, without knowing it, the maternal note from her voice.

‘Oh, but you can be Eve, you are,’ he shouted, drawing her closer, in his reckless bouncing dance around the room.

When the band stopped playing, Martha was startled that it was so late; she had enjoyed herself. Douglas told her it was a matter of
luck he had come at all, he had not been going out much recently. ‘So I’m in luck, because you are rather—rather a fine,’ he said, with a beaming pressure from his eyes.

‘I’m what?’ she asked, startled.

‘You’re really a fine,’ he said again, using the adjective as a noun, which was a trick of his, as was his way of isolating each word as if considering it, so that his slangy speech had a curious effect of pedantry.

She asked him why he had not been going out, why he was so seldom at the Club, and he replied, quite in the code of the pack, that he was studying for an exam, and besides, he was on the tack.

Habit almost made Martha approve, ‘That’s the ticket, kid, that’s the style,’ but instead she asked bluntly, ‘Why, do you drink too much?’

He replied seriously that now he was too old for rugger, he was not as fit as he had been, he must keep his weight down, and besides, the doctor said he was getting an ulcer. Now, most of the men at the Club had stomach ulcers, and they all spoke of it in this same way, a protective way; they said, ‘No, that’s not my line, I can’t eat that,’ or ‘My ulcer won’t allow me that,’ like a mother crooning over a baby. They addressed that part of themselves which was the ulcer as if promising to protect and look after it. They sounded proud of it.

She said flippantly, ‘Having ulcers is positively an occupational disease of a wolf.’

‘What’s that?’ he demanded quickly, ready to be offended; then he laughed and repeated, smiling with his eyes, ‘Yes, you-you are really-really rather a fine.’ And now Martha noted that stammer which was no stammer, not a nervous thing, but a trick of speech.

But she liked him, she was warmed by him; she went home looking forward to having tea with him the next day. ‘Having tea,’ too, was exciting. One did not ‘have tea’ with a wolf, it was a meal that had no social place in their lives. Douglas was already appearing to her as something new and rare, he was so different from the Sports Club men!

And so they ate strawberries and cream at McGrath’s, and she insisted on paying for her own, for he said casually he had sold his car, he could not afford it. If one could not afford a car, that was a confession of poverty indeed; for a reliable secondhand car could be bought at twenty-five pounds, and the most junior clerk owned one as a matter of course. Martha pitied him for this cheerful confession, and wondered at what must be a romantic reason for it, because he was fairly high in his department; at his level in the Service, one was not poor. But all this was confused in her mind, she was always vague about money; all she felt was a pitying admiration; and after tea, when he asked her to walk with him to the office, as he intended to work late, she went willingly.

When they reached the big block of Government offices, it was natural she should go in with him. His office was a large and airy room overlooking the tree-lined avenue. She wandered around it, trying to be interested in calculating machines and other appurtenances of finance; for she always felt an instinctive revulsion when confronted with what she still referred to as arithmetic. In fact, it chilled her so much that she was wondering if she might politely take her leave, when she caught sight of a magazine lying on the desk, and darted forward to pick it up, exclaiming, ‘You didn’t tell me you took the
New Statesman
!’ She might have been saying, ‘Why, we are members of the same brotherhood!’

‘Yes, I do take it, it’s a fine-fine paper,’ he said.

She looked at him with wide and delighted eyes; she even unconsciously went across to him and took his hand. ‘Well,’ she said inarticulately, ‘how nice, well then…’ Suddenly she saw herself behaving thus, and flushed, and dropped his hand, moving away. ‘All the same,’ she said resentfully, ‘it’s nice to meet someone who—In the Club, everyone is practically mentally deficient!’

He laughed with pleasure at this sincere flattery, and they began to talk, testing each other’s opinions. Or rather, Martha flung down her opinions like gages, and waited for him to pick them up; and when she said aggressively that she thought the natives were shockingly
underpaid, and waited for him to say, ‘It’s no good spoiling kaffirs, they don’t understand kindness,’ and he said instead: ‘Oh, yes, it would be desirable if there were a change of policy,’ she gave a large, grateful sigh, and relapsed into the silence of one who has at last come home. But it was an expectant silence. It seemed to her that now their friendship was on an altogether new plane; and when he said, ‘I ought to be doing some more work,’ she exclaimed, as if he were insulting their friendship, ‘Oh, no, you must come home with me to my room, I’ve just got a new parcel of books from England, I wired for them.’

And so he went with her, not so much surprised as bewildered. For Martha had all at once turned into something quite different. She would have been indignant had anyone told her that weeks of the Sports Club atmosphere had altered her manner. Martha Quest, at McGrath’s or at a dance at the Club, was either a bored, sullen, critical young woman with a forced smile or a chattering ninny with a high and affected laugh. Now her acquired manner dropped from her, and she could be natural. She was herself.

‘Herself’, in her room, making tea, and then sitting on the floor with the new books spread out all around her, was completely childlike. Her hair fell out of the careful loose waves and was pushed hastily back, her eyes were bright and fixed on his with a delighted wonder; she talked quickly, as if the shock of finding a fellow spirit was so exquisite that she could not hurry fast enough to the next confirmation of it. She was altogether confiding and trustful. Not to tell him
everything
would have been a betrayal of their relationship; she felt as if she had known him forever; the world was suddenly beautiful, and the future full of promise.

And it was the future they spoke of; for she found he was as dissatisfied as herself with the present. He wanted to go to England, he said; he had plans, too, to live in the South of France and become a wine farmer. That would be the life; one could live cheaply and be free, and his father had been a farmer: he wanted to get back to the soil.

She urged him to describe these plans in more detail, but since
they were still hazy, she made them for him. He must borrow a little money, enough to get over there—fifty pounds would be enough, living was so cheap in France, everyone said, all one had to do was to get there, and then life would begin.

It was midnight when he said he must leave; which he did reluctantly. A serious, responsible young man, he seemed to Martha, with his warm and approving blue eyes, and that touch of hesitation in his speech, which made everything he said so deliberate, so considered.

Martha told herself fiercely that he was a man, at least, and not a silly little boy. And so intelligent too! She slept that night deeply and dreamlessly, for the first time in weeks; she did not start up, half a dozen times, with the feeling that there was something she ought to be doing, if she only knew what it was; she woke on a delicious wave of anticipation, the day beckoning to her like a promise. But she did not say she was in love. For of course she was going to have a career. Besides, when she said, ‘He’s a man, at least,’ that ‘at least’ was by no means rhetorical. She was still capable of being critical. For several days they were together all their leisure time, and she looked surreptitiously at him, with a feeling of disloyalty, and the round, rather low forehead struck her unpleasantly—there was something mean about it, something commonplace; the shallow dry lines across it affected her; as for his hands, they were large and clumsy, rather red, heavily freckled, and covered with hair. Soon she averted her eyes from his hands, she did not see them; she did not see his forehead, with those unaccountably unpleasant lines, like the lines of worry on an elderly face. She saw his eyes, the approving and warm blue eyes. She had never known this easy warm friendliness with anyone before; she could say what she liked; she felt altogether approved, and she expanded in it delightedly, and her manner lost its half-timid aggressiveness.

Also, he was so sensible! When she told him, making a funny story of it, how she had nearly gone to England as a nursemaid, he listened, seriously, and said she should not go to England without being sure of something to go to; and that it was ‘ill-advised’ to
become a chauffeur, because the job had no prospects, while at her remark that she thought of becoming a freelance writer, he produced all kinds of practical objections, the least of which was the question of talent, for it seemed he had once had the same notion himself, had ‘gone into the question from every angle,’ in fact. He found a folder packed with sketches she had made of the wardrobe, the flowers in the garden, and evolved a most sensible plan. She should take a course in commercial art at the Polytechnic, and then she would be equipped to move from country to country as she liked. And Martha caught at this with enthusiasm, the idea gripped her completely for a couple of evenings. Then she began to condemn herself bitterly, as usual, for indecision; a creeping reluctance came over her at the mere idea of two or three years’ serious study. But what she was thinking involuntarily was, What’s the use of it?—meaning the war. ‘Two years?’ she murmured, looking at him evasively. That knowledge of urgency was in her, stronger than ever. Unconsciously, the coming war was there, before her, like a dark chasm in her spirit. And when he said, ‘Well, two years isn’t long,’ she laughed suddenly, and the maternal note was back in her voice, so that they both felt uncomfortable. It was a discord in their relationship. And they continued to talk, like two children at college, about growing grapes in France, or going to America, delightedly planning half a dozen different careers at once.