Martha Quest (37 page)

She slipped out of the door that led into the garden, receiving a drench of glittering starlight faintly perfumed with geranium. She looked over the landscape of her childhood, lying dark and mysterious, to the great bulk of Jacob’s Burg, and tried to get some spark of recognition from it. It was shut off from her, she could feel nothing. There was a barrier, and that barrier (she felt) was Douglas. And as she thought of him, she turned sharply at a sound, and he came towards her grinning from the end bedroom.

He slipped his arm around her, and said, ‘You mustn’t get so prickly with your parents. After all, we’ve rather sprung it on them, and they’ve been very decent.’

She assented, and could not help feeling that even this mild protest was in some way a betrayal to their side.

‘You’ll see,’ said Douglas consolingly, ‘it’ll be ever-ever such a fine wedding, and you’ll like it.’

Again she assented. It had been arranged that they would be married by Mr Maynard, Binkie’s father. He would marry them, as a favour, in their own flat—the flat which Douglas had already found for them ‘from a pal’. Afterwards they were going off on a honeymoon with Stella and Andrew to the Falls. She had hardly listened to these arrangements, because all these formalities were so unimportant.

He remarked, ‘I must say, all this looks as wild as hell, gives me the creeps.’ She said yes, rather forlornly, for it did look wild and lonely; and she had never felt lonely in the veld before. The pressure of his arm on her shoulder suggested she should move beside him back to his room, and she went, gladly, with the warmth of his arm as guide.

She said passionately, ‘I wish it was all over.’ She repeated it des
perately, as if she were talking about an unpleasant if not dangerous operation.

But inside the end room, which had been her brother’s, she began to laugh at herself. One could almost think of this room as disconnected from the rest of the house. It was small and quiet, with whitewashed walls, and the glistening thatch slanting low over a small window. The low hissing of the oil lamp was soothing, and she sighed comfortably when she heard an owl hooting from the trees.

Douglas was a wall of strength; and from her clinging to him, and his calm reassurance, their love-making flowed out, and died into sleep. The ‘act of love’—that fatally revealing phrase—was no act at all tonight, if one gives to the words what is due to them of willed achievement. For both these people were heirs, whether they liked it or not, of the English puritan tradition, where sex is either something to be undergone (heard in the voices of innumerable chilled women, whispering their message of endurance to their daughters) or something to be shut out, or something to be faced and overcome. At least two generations of rebels have gone armed to the combat with books on sex to give them the assurance they did not feel; for both Martha and Douglas, making love when and how they pleased was positively a flag of independence in itself, a red and defiant flag, waving in the faces of the older generation.

In the morning Martha woke first, and found herself curled delightfully against Douglas’s inert and heavy body. She was floating free and away from all the strained preoccupation of the day before. She thought with good humour of her mother’s absorption in the wedding arrangements, and with amusement of her father, who would probably not notice the wedding ceremony at all if not reminded to do so. She lay gently, feeling the slow rise and fall of the warm flesh, and listened to the servant chopping wood outside, and watched the light from the window deepen on the white wall to a reflected yellow glow from the warming soil. Then the yellow patch began to shake and tremble—the sun had risen to the height of the tree outside; and slowly a pattern of leaves grew dark against a clear,
luminous orange, and trembled as if a breeze were flowing through the room itself.

Douglas stirred and greeted her with an affectionate ‘Well, Matty.’ Then he turned over, and her body began to tense into waiting. ‘Let’s try like this,’ he said with determination, and she caught a glimpse of his face, which was rigid with concentration, before she closed her eyes and lay alertly ready to follow what he intended to do. What she was thinking was, and with a really extraordinary resentment, Why does he have to spoil last night? Her attention was so strained to miss no new movement of his, for she was terrified he might find her lacking, that the end came unexpectedly for her, and left her reassuring him, as usual, that all was well. She was very tender and consoling, and lay stroking his hair, while she thought, Well, it was lovely last night, at any rate. Now, last night she had not been conscious of anything very much; she was in fact arranging the dark, underwater movements of last night into a pattern to measure against this morning’s failure. She was also thinking worriedly about her mother. It no longer seemed unimportant or amusing that her parents were as they were. She was apprehensive. Back in her room, she looked at the open door into her parents’ room, which had the force now of a deliberate reproach, and waited until Douglas was ready to go with her to the breakfast table, so that she need not face her parents unsupported.

That her mother had been in her room during the night Martha could see from her look of strained curiosity. And yet, this was surely no more than could be expected from a conventional middle-class matron concerned that her daughter might go to the altar, or rather to the table at the register office, a virgin? That square, vigorous, set face, the small blue eyes, always clenched under a brow of worry, were now directed persistently towards Douglas. Mrs Quest could not take her eyes off her daughter’s young man. She talked to him like a reproachful but eager girl, there was an arch and rather charming smile on her face, even while the gaze was persistent, tinged with guilt. She looked as if she had been done out of something, Martha
remarked unpleasantly to herself; and she knew that immediately after breakfast her mother would come to her, on some pretext or another, but really fulfilling a driving need to talk about what had happened. Martha felt exhausted, a dragging tiredness overcame her at the idea of it, and as soon as they rose from the table she attached herself to her father; and at last Mrs Quest went off with Douglas, since it seemed Martha was deaf to any suggestions that it would be nice to discuss the wedding.

Mr Quest took his deck-chair to the side of the house, and leaned back in it smoking, gazing over the slopes of the veld to Jacob’s Burg. The great heave of blue mountain was this morning towering up into the blue sky, and wisps and wraiths of cloud dissolved around it. Martha sank beside him, with the comfortable feeling of repeating something she had done a thousand times. The sunlight slowly soaked into her flesh, she felt her hair grow warm around her face, she sighed with pleasure, and prepared to let the morning slide past, while her thoughts drifted away—not towards the wedding, that annoying incident which must somehow be accepted, but to the time afterwards. They would go to England, or to the South of France; Martha dreamed of the Mediterranean while her father thought of—but what was it likely to be this morning? After a while he began talking, after the preparatory ‘Well, old son!’ and she listened with half her mind, checking it up, as it were, on the landmarks of his thought. He was thinking of her brother who (lucky devil) would be allowed to fight in this new war. From there he slid back into his tales of the trenches, of the weeks before Passchendaele, from which he had been rescued by that lucky flesh wound: none of his company had come through it, all were killed. From there he passed to the international situation.

Martha lit another cigarette, lifted her skirt so that the sun might deepen the brown of her legs, and asked suddenly, ‘Do you like Douglas?’ She might have been talking about an acquaintance. When she heard the tone of her voice, she felt guilty, because of this unwelcome, deep understanding with her father that lay beneath ‘all this nonsense about the British Israelites and the war’—the understanding
that made Douglas seem like a stranger whom they might discuss without disloyalty.

‘What?’ he asked, annoyed at being interrupted. Then he collected himself, and said indifferently, ‘Oh, yes, he’s quite all right, it seems.’ After a pause he said, ‘Well, as I was saying…’

Some minutes later Martha inquired, ‘Are you pleased I’m getting married?’

‘What’s that?’ He frowned at her, then seeing the sardonic lift of her brows, said guiltily, ‘Yes—no. Oh, well, you don’t care what I think, anyway.’ This had the irritability due to the younger generation, and she giggled. Slowly he began to smile.

‘I don’t believe you’ve even understood that I’m getting married in five days,’ she said accusingly.

‘Well, what am I expected to do about it? There was one thing I wanted to say. What was it, now? Oh, yes. You shouldn’t have children—I mean, that’s in my view, it’s not my affair, but there’s plenty of time.’

‘Of course not,’ said Martha vaguely. That went without saying.

‘What do you mean, of course not?’ he said crossly. ‘You may think you’re better men than your parents, but we didn’t mean to have you, the doctor said we were neither of us in a fit state, but you happened along nine months to the day. But then we didn’t anticipate the wedding ceremony. We were both having severe nervous breakdowns, due to the Great Unmentionable’—he snarled this phrase over at her, but without any real emotion, so that she smiled patiently—‘so we were taking all the necessary precautions, or rather your mother was, she’s a nurse, so it’s in her line, that sort of thing. So I thought I’d better point out, children have a habit of resulting from getting married.’

Since her earliest years Martha had been offered the information that she was unwanted in the first place, and that she had a double nervous breakdown for godparents, and so the nerve it reached now was quite dulled; and she merely repeated casually that she had no intention of having children for years and years.

Mr Quest remarked with relief that that was all right, then, and—his duty as father done—began talking about what they would do when they left the farm. If Martha had been listening, she might have noted that these plans were much more sensible and concrete than they ever had been; but she was not listening.

Soon the sun grew too warm, and they moved their chairs under the sheltering golden shower, and now faced outwards to the Dumfries Hills. They were low and clear today; the rocks and trees showed across the seven miles of distance as if the heights of this hill and the height of that range shared a dimension where the ordinary rule of space did not apply. Martha felt she could lean forward over the lower slopes of ground between (where the Afrikaans community lived) and stroke the bluish contours of those brooding sunlit hills.

The servant brought morning tea, with the message that the Little Missus and the Big Baas must take it by themselves, for the Big Missus and the New Baas had gone off to the vegetable garden.

‘He’s being awfully tactful, isn’t he?’ remarked Mr Quest half sarcastically. ‘He’s being so well behaved. Well, I daresay that’s the way to get on in this world.’ This was the nearest he had got to comment or criticism; and Martha invited him to continue with a glance and a receptive silence. He said: ‘Sex is important in marriage. I do hope that is all right. Your mother, of course…However…’ He paused, with a guilty glance at her, and Martha was filled with triumph, though she could not have said why. ‘All your generation’ (and the usual irritation was applied to the surface of his words) ‘take it in your stride, or so I understand.’ The look he gave her was an unwilling inquiry. How much she would have liked, then, to talk to him! She had even leaned forward, opened her mouth to begin, though she did not know what it was she was going to say, when he said hastily, ‘So that’s all right, then, isn’t it?’ He handed her his cup for some more tea. There was a silence, but it lagged on unbroken. Martha was now restrained by that reiterated ‘young people’, ‘your generation’ she owed it to her contemporaries to treat the whole subject with nonchalance. And soon he began talking about a girl he had been in love
with before he met Mrs Quest. ‘Lord, I was in love,’ he said longingly, trying to sound amused. ‘Lord, Lord, but I had a good time—but that was before I married, before the war, so it wouldn’t interest you.’ He was silent, smiling thoughtfully over at the Dumfries Hills, his whitening eyebrows lifted in perverse and delighted comment, while he occasionally glanced towards Martha, and then withdrew his eyes as if those glances were the results of thoughts he would rather not own.

As for Martha, she was now unhappy and restless, and wished that Douglas would return from the vegetable garden.

Immediately after lunch, it was time for them to go back to town. During the drive, Martha was telling herself that the last hurdle was past, she had ‘obtained her parents’ permission’. She used the phrase half humorously, half with spite, for she was feeling, contradictorily enough for a girl who refused formalities with such vehemence, that surely there had been something wrong with that weekend at home? Surely (or so she dimly felt) she should have had to fight, face real opposition, only to emerge a victor at the end, crowned by the tearful blessings of her father and mother? Surely there should have been some real moment of crisis, a point of choice? Alas for the romantic disposition, always waiting for these ‘moments’, these exquisite turning points where everything is clear, the past lying finished, completed, in one’s shadow, the future lying clear and sunlit before! For, looking back on the weekend, Martha felt nothing but that she had been cheated; her mother’s attitude and her father’s seemed equally wrong and perverse.

So, as usual, she gave an impatient shrug, and dismissed the whole thing; soon that door would be closing on her past; all the mistakes and miseries of her time in town would be forever behind her. She had merely to live through five days to the wedding. She asked Douglas what her mother had arranged with him, intending that the undertone of sarcasm should provoke him, but he did not hear it. He replied enthusiastically that everything would be fine, everything would be satisfactory. He continued to talk of various
details, and Martha understood, and with amazement, that she would not be getting married under the aegis of the Club; she had had a vague idea that surely they would all be there, wolves and virgins. For Douglas was remarking casually, as if he were not a senior member himself, that they ‘must keep it dark, we don’t want that crazy bunch spoiling it.’ He added with mixed pride and shame that if Binkie knew the exact time and place he’d turn it into a proper-proper scrum. Mr Maynard, it seemed, had promised to keep it all secret, even from his son.