Читать книгу Martha Quest - Doris Lessing - Страница 7

Mrs Quest watched her daughter and husband returning from the fields, with nervous anticipation. The night before, in the dark bedroom, she had demanded that he must speak to Martha, who wouldn’t listen to her own mother, she was ruining her future. Mr Quest’s cigarette glowed exasperatedly, illuminating his bent and troubled face; and at the sight of that face, Mrs Quest leaned over the edge of the bed towards him, and her voice rose into peevish insistence; for as long as the darkness allowed her to forget her husband’s real nature, she spoke with confidence. And what was he expected to say? he demanded. ‘Yes, yes, I daresay,’ and ‘I am quite sure you’re right,’ and ‘Yes, but, May, old girl, surely that’s putting it a bit strongly?’

Mrs Quest had lain awake most of the night, framing those angry complaints against him in her mind that she could not say aloud. Since it had always been understood that only bad luck and ill-health had brought the family to such irremediable if picturesque poverty, how could she say now what she thought: For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together, and run the farm properly, and then we can send Martha to a good school which will undo the bad effects caused by the Van Rensbergs and the Cohen boys?

She thought of writing to her brother; she even made this decision; then the picture of Martha in a well-regulated suburban London household, attending a school for nice English girls, entered her mind with uncomfortable force. She remembered, too, that Martha was seventeen; and her anger was switched against the girl herself; it was too late, it was much too late, and she knew it. Thoughts of Martha always filled her with such violent and supplicating and angry emotions that she could not sustain them; she began to pray for Martha: please help me to save her, please let her forget her silly ideas, please let her be like her brother. Mrs Quest fell asleep, soothed by tender thoughts of her son.

But it seemed that half an hour’s angry and urgent pleading last night had after all pricked Alfred into action. There was something in the faces of these two (they were both uncomfortable, and rather flushed) that made her hopeful. She called for tea and arranged herself by the tea table on the veranda, while Martha and Mr Quest fell into chairs, and each reached for a book.

‘Well, dear?’ asked Mrs Quest at last, looking at them both. Neither heard her. Martha turned a page; Mr Quest was filling his pipe, while his eyes frowningly followed the print on the pages balanced against his knee. The servant brought tea, and Mrs Quest filled the cups.

She handed one to Mr Quest, and asked again, ‘Well, dear?’

‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Mr Quest, without looking up.

Her lips tightened, and as she gave Martha her cup she demanded jealously, ‘Had a nice talk?’

‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Martha vaguely.

Mrs Quest regarded them both, and with a look of conscious but forgiving bitterness. Her husband was half hidden in a cloud of lazy blue smoke. He was the very picture of a hard-working farmer taking his repose. Martha, at first sight, might pass for that marriageable and accomplished daughter it seemed that Mrs Quest, after all, desired. In her bright-yellow linen dress, her face tinted carefully with cosmetics, she appeared twenty. But the dress had grass stains on it, was crumpled, she was smoking hungrily, and her fingers were already stained with nicotine, her rifle was lying carelessly across her lap, and on it was balanced a book which, as Mrs Quest could see, was called The Decay of the British Empire. That Martha should be reading this book struck her mother as criticism of herself; she began to think of the hard and disappointing life she had led since she came to the colony; and she lay back in her chair, and onto her broad square, rather masculine face came a look of patient regret; her small blue eyes clouded, and she sighed deeply.

The sigh, it appeared, had the power to reach where her words could not. Both Martha and Mr Quest glanced up, guiltily. Mrs Quest had forgotten them; she was looking through them at some picture of her own; she was leaning her untidy grey head against the mud wall of the house; she was twiddling a lock of that limp grey hair round and round one finger – a mannerism which always stung Mr Quest – while with the other hand she stroked her skirt, in a tired hard, nervous movement which affected Martha like a direct criticism of ingratitude.

‘Well, old girl?’ demanded Mr Quest, with guilty affection.

She withdrew her eyes from her private vision, and rested them on her husband. ‘Well?’ she returned, and with a different intonation, dry and ironic, and patient.

Martha saw her parents exchange a look which caused her to rise from her chair, in order to escape. It was a look of such sardonic understanding that she could not bear it, for it filled her with a violent and intolerable pity for them. Also, she thought, How can you be so resigned about it? and became fearful for her own future, which she was determined would never include a marriage whose only basis was that ironic mutual pity. Never, never, she vowed; and as she picked up her rifle and was moving towards the steps she heard a car approaching.

‘Visitors,’ she said warningly; and her parents sighed at the same moment, ‘Oh, Lord!’

But it was Marnie sitting beside one of her sisters’ husbands.

‘Oh, Lord,’ said Mr Quest again. ‘If she’s wearing those damned indecent shorts, then …’ He got up, and hastily escaped.

The car did not come close to the house, but remained waiting on the edge of the small plateau in front. Marnie approached. She was not wearing shorts, but a bright floral dress, with a bunch of flowers and lace at the neck. She was now very fat, almost as large as her mother; and her heavy browned arms and legs came out of the tight dyed crepe like the limbs of an imprisoned Brünhilde. Her hair was crimped into tight ridges around the good-natured housewife’s face.

‘I haven’t come to stay,’ she called from a distance, and quickened her steps. Martha waited for her, wishing that her mother also would go away; but Mrs Quest remained watchful above the teacups. So she walked down to meet Marnie, where they might both be out of earshot.

Marnie said hastily, ‘Listen, Matty, man, we’re having a dance, well, just friends, sort of, and would you like to come. Next Saturday?’ she looked apprehensively at Mrs Quest, past Martha’s shoulder.

Martha hesitated, and found herself framing excuses; then she agreed rather stiffly, so that Marnie coloured, as if she had been snubbed. Seeing this, Martha, with a pang of self-dislike, said how much she had been longing to dance, that in this district there was nothing to do – even that she was lonely. Her voice, to her own surprise, was emotional; so that she too coloured, as at a self-betrayal.

Marnie’s good heart responded at once to what must be an appeal, even a reproach, and she said, ‘But Matty, I’ve been wanting to ask you for ages, really, but I thought that …’ She stumbled over the unsayable truth, which was half a complaint against the snobbish English and half an explanation of her father’s attitude. She went on in a rush, falling back into the easy, suggestive raillery: ‘If you knew what my brother Billy thinks of you, oh, man! He thinks you’re the tops.’ She giggled, but Martha’s face stopped her.

The two girls, scarlet as poinsettias, were standing in silence, in the most confusing state of goodwill and hostility, when Mrs Quest came down the path. From a distance, they might have been on the point of either striking each other or falling into each other’s arms; but as she arrived beside them Martha turned and exclaimed vivaciously, ‘I’m going to dance at Marnie’s place on Saturday night!’

‘That’s nice, dear,’ she said doubtfully, after a pause.

‘It’s only just informal, Mrs Quest, nothing grand,’ and Marnie squeezed Martha’s arm. ‘Well, be seeing you, we’ll come and fetch you about eight.’ She ran off, calling back, ‘My mom says Matty can stay the night, if that’s all right.’ She climbed heavily into the car, sending back beaming smiles and large waves of the hand; and in a moment the car had slid down off the hill into the trees.

‘So you’re making friends with the Van Rensbergs,’ said Mrs Quest reproachfully, as if this confirmed all her worst fears; and a familiar note was struck for both of them when Martha said coldly, ‘I thought you and the Van Rensbergs had been friends for years?’

‘What’s all this about Billy?’ asked Mrs Quest, trying to disinfect sex, as always, with a humorous teasing voice.

‘What about him?’ asked Martha, and added, ‘He’s a very nice boy.’ She walked off towards her bedroom in such a state of exaltation that a voice within her was already inquiring, Why are you so happy? For this condition could be maintained only as long as she forgot Billy himself. She had not seen him for two or three years, but it occurred to her that he might have caught sight of her somewhere; for surely he could not have tender memories of their last encounter? Martha, on a hot, wet, steamy afternoon, had spent two hours wriggling on her stomach through the undergrowth to reach a point where she might shoot a big koodoo that was grazing in a corner of the Hundred Acres. Just as she rested the rifle to fire, a shot rang out, the koodoo fell, and Billy Van Rensberg walked out from the tree a few paces away, to stand over the carcase like a conqueror. ‘That’s my koodoo!’ said Martha shrilly. She was covered with red mud, her hair hung lank to her shoulders, her eyes trickled dirty tears. Billy was apologetic but firm, and made things worse by offering her half; for it was not the meat she cared about. He bestrode the carcase, and began stripping off the hide: a brown, shock-headed lad, who occasionally lifted puzzled blue eyes towards this girl who walked around and around him, crying with rage, and insisting, ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair!’ Finally she said, as the hot smell of blood reeked across the sunlight, ‘You’re no better than a butcher!’ With this, she marched away across the red clods of the field, trying to look indifferent. Martha had long since decided that this incident belonged to her childhood, and therefore no longer concerned her; and it made her uncomfortable that Billy might still be remembering it. Altogether the mere idea of Billy aroused in her an altogether remarkable resentment; and she chose not to think of him.

This was on a Wednesday. During the next day or two she could scarcely eat or sleep; she was in a condition of restless expectation that was almost unbearable. The Saturday dance seemed like an entrance into another sort of life, for she was seeing the Van Rensbergs’ house magnified, and peopled with youthful beings who had less to do with what was likely than with that vision of legendary cities which occupied so much of her imagination. The Quests were watching, with fearful amazement, a daughter who was no longer silent and critical, but bright-eyed and chattering and nervous: a proper condition for a girl going to her first dance.

Martha was agonized over what to wear, for Marnie, who had been wearing grown-up clothes since she was about thirteen, would of course have evening dresses. Mrs Quest hopefully offered a frilly pink affair which had belonged to a ten-year-old cousin, saying that it came from Harrods, which was a guarantee of good taste. Martha merely laughed, which was what Mrs Quest deserved for she was seeing her daughter as about twelve, with a ribbon in her hair, an Alice-in-Wonderland child, for this vision made the idea of Billy less dangerous. There was a quarrel: Martha began sarcastically to explain why it was that even if she had been twelve she could not have worn this pink frilled georgette to the Van Rensbergs’ house, since nice little English girls were not for export. At length, Mrs Quest withdrew, saying bitterly that Martha was only trying to be difficult, that she needn’t think they could afford to buy her a new one. She had the pink dress ironed and put on Martha’s bed; Martha quickly hid it, for she was really terrified at what the Van Rensbergs might say if they ever caught sight of that charming, coy, childish frock.

On the Friday morning she telephoned Mr McFarline, and was down at the turn-off waiting for him before nine in the morning.

Mr McFarline drove more slowly than usual to the station. He was nervous of Martha, who had accepted ten shillings from him, like a child, but who was now using him with the calm unscrupulousness of a good-looking woman who takes it for granted that men enjoy being used. She was looking, not at him, but out of the window at the veld; and he asked at last, ‘And what’s the great attraction at the station?’

‘I’m going to buy material for a dress,’ she announced.

He could think of no approach after that impersonal statement that might make it possible to joke with her, or even ask her for a kiss; and it occurred to him that the stern young profile, averted from him as if he were not there, was not that of a girl one might kiss. Mr McFarline was made to think, in fact, of his age, which was not usual for him. Two years before, this girl and her brother had come riding on their bicycles, over to his mine, eating chocolate biscuits, and listening to his tales of adventurous living, accepting his generous tips with an equally generous embarrassment. No more than two years ago, he had slapped Martha across the bottom, pulled her hair, and called her his lassie.

He said sentimentally, ‘Your father has no luck, but he’s got something better than money.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Martha politely.

He was driving along a piece of road that was dust between ruts, on a dangerous slant, and it was not for several seconds that he could turn his eye to her face. She was looking at him direct, with a slow quizzical gleam that made him redden. An outrageous idea occurred to him but he dismissed it at once, not because he was afraid of his neighbours knowing his life, but because Martha was too young to acknowledge that she knew: there was something in her face which made him think of his children in the compound, and even more of their mothers.

With a short, amused laugh, Martha again turned to the window.

He said gruffly, ‘It’s a fine thing for your father, a daughter like you. When I look at you, lassie, I wish I had married.’

Once again Martha turned to look at him, her eyebrows raised, her mouth most comically twisted. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you couldn’t marry them all, one can see that.’

They had reached the station, and he dragged at the brakes. His heavy, handsome face, with its network of tiny red veins, was now a uniform purple. Martha opened the door, got out and said, very politely, ‘Thanks for the lift.’ She turned away, then over her shoulder gave him a delightful amused smile, which at once infuriated Mr McFarline and absolved him of guilt. He watched her walk away, in her rather stiff awkward manner, to Socrates’ store; and he was swearing, Damn little … Then he, too, laughed and went off to town in the best of spirits, though at bottom he was very shocked; for when he was drunk he enjoyed thinking of himself as a sinner, and it was in these moods that the local charities were sent such generous cheques.

Martha went into the Greek store. It was empty. Socrates was behind the counter, as usual, reading a murder story. He greeted her as ‘Miss Quest’, and showed her what materials he had, apologizing for not having anything good enough for such a fine young lady. He was a short, plump man, with black eyes like raisins, and a pale, smooth skin, and a manner of suggesting that Mr Quest owed him a hundred pounds; and Martha said coldly, ‘No, I’m afraid you’re quite right, you have nothing very attractive, have you?’ She walked out, reluctantly, for there was a piece of green figured silk she would have liked to buy.

On the veranda she stood hesitating, before plunging into the glare of that dusty space, where the sunlight lashed up from tin roofs and from the shrinking pond. A dark greasy cloud held light like a vast sponge, for the sun rayed out whitely from behind it, like incandescent swords across the sky. She was thinking apprehensively, I hope he doesn’t get angry and send Daddy a bill. She was also thinking, Damned little dago; and checked herself, with guilt, for ‘dago’ was a word she had outlawed.

She narrowed her eyes to a slit of light, and walked out towards the Cohens’ store. She parted the bead curtain with relief, though blindly, and expected her eyes to clear on the sight of Mr Cohen; but it was Joss who stood there, palms down on the counter, like a veritable salesman, waiting for a native to make up his mind over a banjo. This man, seeing a white person enter, moved aside for her, but she saw Joss’s eyes on her, and said in kitchen kaffir, ‘No, when you’ve finished.’ Joss gave a small approving nod; and she watched the man finger the instrument, and then another, until at last he began counting sixpences and shillings from a piece of dirty cloth that was suspended from his neck. The banjo cost thirty shillings, which was two months’ wages to this farm-worker, and when he left, clutching the instrument with a childlike pleasure, she and Joss exchanged looks which left nothing to say. She even felt guilty that she was coming to buy anything so frivolous as an evening frock; and with this feeling was another, an older one: helpless anger that her father’s debt of a hundred pounds at Sock’s store was more than the farm-worker might earn in the whole of his short life.

Joss said, ‘And what can I do for you?’ and she watched him pull out the heavy rolls of stuff and stack them along the counter.

‘Why are you still here?’ she asked, acknowledging to herself that she had come to get some news of him.

‘Delay over the sale. Sock’s working a pretty point. He knows we’re keen to sell out.’

‘And so you can’t start university. I don’t see why you should sacrifice yourself,’ she said indignantly.

‘My, my, listen to the rebel who never leaves home,’ he remarked, raising his eyes to the fly-covered ceiling, while he competently slipped yards of pink cotton from hand to hand.

‘That isn’t why I don’t leave home,’ said Martha stiffly, as if he had been accusing her of wrong feelings.

‘You don’t say,’ he said, sarcastically; and then, more gently, when she lifted troubled eyes to his face: ‘Why don’t you be a brave girl and get into town, and learn a thing or two?’

She hesitated, and her look was appealing; and he said, ‘I know you’re very young, but you could get into a girls’ hostel, or share a flat with someone, couldn’t you?’

The idea of a girls’ hostel struck Martha before the kindness of his intention, and her eyebrows swiftly rose in derision.

He gave her a look which said plainly, ‘What the hell do you want then?’ and became impersonal. ‘I don’t think we have anything suitable, you’d better try Sock, he’s got a consignment of new materials.’

‘I’ve been to Sock,’ she said plaintively, feeling abandoned.

‘Then if he hasn’t, we certainly haven’t.’ He laid his palms downwards again, in the salesman’s gesture which annoyed her, like an affectation. But she still waited. Soon he let his hands fall from the counter, and looked at her seriously. He was relenting. ‘I’ll choose something for you,’ he said at last, and looked along the shelves. Martha, thinking of their tasteless back room, was momentarily alarmed, and ashamed of herself for the feeling; but he reached down a roll of white cotton, and said with a rough, unwilling tenderness, which touched her deeply, ‘White. Suitable for a young girl.’

She saw at once it would make an attractive dress, and said, ‘I’ll have six yards.’ And now his look seemed to say that she had agreed too quickly; and she fingered the crisp material to please him, while her mind already held a picture of how it would look made up. ‘I’m going to dance at the Van Rensbergs’,’ she remarked, with a confused intention; and his face stiffened, after a quick glance, and he cut the material without speaking.

‘Why don’t you come and dance with me?’ he asked with a challenge.

‘Why don’t you ask me?’ she replied quickly. But there was no response. He was folding the material, smoothing it in a way which kept her looking at his hands; and at last he tied it and handed it to her with a slightly sardonic bow. ‘On the account?’ he inquired.

‘No, I’m paying.’ She handed over the money, and waited for at least a look from him; but he said, ‘So long!’ and went quickly into the back part of the building, leaving the store quite empty. So she began the hot, wearying walk home, but this time was overtaken by the McDougalls before she had gone more than a few hundred yards.

As soon as she had reached her room, and spread the material on her bed, Mrs Quest entered, saying virtuously, ‘Oh my dear, we’ve been so worried …’ Then she saw the material, and reddened with anger. ‘How dare you waste your father’s money when you know we haven’t got it and we owe Sock so much money as it is?’

‘I paid for it myself,’ said Martha sullenly.

‘How could you pay for it yourself?’

‘There was the money from last Christmas, and the ten shillings Mr McFarline gave me.’

Mrs Quest hesitated, then chose a course and insisted, ‘The money wasn’t given to you to waste, and in any case …’

‘In any case, what?’ asked Martha coldly.

Again Mrs Quest hesitated; and at last her feelings expressed themselves in a voice that was uncertain with the monstrousness of what she was saying: ‘Until you’re twenty-one, you’ve no right to own money, and if we took it to court, the judge would … I mean, I mean to say …’ Martha was quite white, and unable to speak; it was her silence, the bitter condemnation in her eyes, which caused her mother to walk out of the room, saying unhappily: ‘Well, at least, I mean, I must speak to your father.’

Martha was exhausted with the violence of what she felt, and it was only the thought that this was midday Friday, and the dress must be ready tomorrow, that enabled her to go on sewing.

At suppertime Mrs Quest was bright and humorous, and there was an apology in her manner which Martha might have answered; but she was repeating to herself that the incident over the money was something she would never, never forget – it was to join the other incidents chalked up in her memory. Mr Quest ate his meal in peace, gratefully persuading himself that this unusual silence between his womenfolk was one induced by harmony and goodwill.

Immediately after supper Martha went to her room, and soon they heard the whirr of the sewing machine. Mrs Quest, in an agony of curiosity, timidly entered her daughter’s room, towards midnight, saying, ‘You must go to bed, Matty, I order you.’

Martha did not reply. She was sitting on the bed, surrounded by billowing folds of white. She did not even lift her head. Mrs Quest tugged the curtains across invading moonlight that flung a colder greener light over the warm dull lampshine, and said, ‘You’ll spoil your eyes.’

‘I thought my eyes were already spoiled,’ said Martha coldly; and for some reason Mrs Quest was unable to answer what seemed to be an accusation. She left the room, saying ineffectually, ‘You must go to bed at once, do you hear me?’

The machine whirred until nearly morning, an unusual undercurrent to the chirping crickets, the call of the owl. Mrs Quest woke her husband to complain that Martha would not obey her; but he said, ‘Well, if she wants to make a fool of herself let her,’ and turned over in bed with a clanging of the ancient springs. Martha heard both these voices, as she was meant to; and though she had been on the point of going to bed, since the sky was greying the square of the window and she was really very tired, she made a point of working on for another half hour.

She woke late, from a dream that she was wearing her white frock in a vast ballroom hung with glittering chandeliers, the walls draped with thick red crimson; and as she walked towards a group of people who stood rather above the floor, in long fluted gowns, like living statues, she noticed a patch of mud on her skirt and, looking down, saw that all her dress was covered with filth. She turned helplessly for flight, when Marnie and her brother came towards her, bent with laughter, their hands pressed over their mouths, gesturing to her that she must escape before the others, those beautiful and legendary beings at the end of the long hall, should catch sight of her.

She sat up in bed, and saw that the room was filled, not with sunlight, but with a baleful subdued glare reflected from clouds like still mountains. It was nearly midday, and if she was to finish her dress she must hurry. But the thought of it was no longer a pleasure; all the delight had gone from it while she slept. She decided, tiredly, that she would wear an ordinary dress; and it was only because Mrs Quest put her head around the door to say that lunch was ready, and Martha must come at once, that she replied she would not take lunch, she had to finish the dress.

Work on it restored the mood she had lost; and when it began to rain, her exultation was too great to be deepened – these were the first rains of the season; and she sat on the bed clicking her needle through the stiff material, and while overhead the old thatch rustled as the wet soaked in, as if it remembered still, after so many years, how it had swelled and lifted to the rain when it stood rooted and uncut. Soon it was soaked, and the wet poured off the edge of thatch in glittering stalactites, while the grey curtain of rain stood solid behind, so dense that the trees barely twenty paces away glimmered like faint green spectres. It was dark in the room, so Martha lit a candle, which made a small yellow space under the all-drenching blackness; but soon a fresh coloured light grew at the window, and, going to it, Martha saw the grey back of the storm already retreating. The trees were half emerged from the driving mists, and stood clear and full and green, dripping wet from every leaf; the sky immediately overhead was blue and sunlit, while only a few degrees away it was still black and impenetrable. Martha blew out the candle, and put the last stitches in her dress. It was only four in the afternoon, and the hours before she would be fetched seemed unbearable. At last, she went in to supper in her dressing gown; and Mrs Quest said nothing, for there was a dreamy, exalted look on her daughter’s face which put her beyond the usual criticisms.

Five minutes before eight o’clock, Martha came from her room, a candle in each hand, with her white dress rustling about her. To say she was composed would be untrue. She was triumphant; and that triumph was directed against her mother, as if she said, You can’t do anything about it now, can you? She did not look at Mrs Quest at all, but passed her steadily, her naked brown shoulders slightly tensed. Nor did her pose loosen, or she stand naturally, until she was before her father, where she waited, her eyes fixed on his face, in a look of painful inquiry. Mr Quest was reading a book printed by a certain society which held that God had personally appointed the British nation to rule the world in His Name, a theory which comforted his sense of justice; and he did not immediately raise his eyes, but contracted his brows in protest as the shadow fell over his book. When he did, he looked startled, and then gazed, in a long silence, at Martha’s shoulders, after a quick evasive glance at her demanding, hopeful eyes.

‘Well?’ she asked breathlessly at last.

‘It’s very nice,’ he remarked flatly, at length.

‘Do I look nice, Daddy?’ she asked again.

He gave a queer, irritable hunch to his shoulders, as if he disliked a pressure, or distrusted himself. ‘Very nice,’ he said slowly. And then, suddenly, in an exasperated shout: ‘Too damned nice, go away!’

Martha still waited. There was that most familiar division in her: triumph, since this irritation was an acknowledgment that she did in fact look ‘nice’; but also alarm, since she was now abandoned to her mother. And Mrs Quest at once came forward and began, ‘There you are, Matty, your father knows what is best, you really cannot wear that frock and …’

The sound of a car grew on their ears; and Martha said, ‘Well, I’m going.’ With a last look at her parents, which was mingled with scorn and appeal, she went to the door, carefully holding her skirts. She wanted to weep, an impulse she indignantly denied to herself. For at that moment when she had stood before them, it was in a role which went far beyond her, Martha Quest: it was timeless, and she felt that her mother, as well as her father, must hold in her mind (as she certainly cherished a vision of Martha in bridal gown and veil) another picture of an expectant maiden in dedicated white; it should have been a moment of abnegation, when she must be kissed, approved, and set free. Nothing of this could Martha have put into words, or even allowed herself to feel; but now, in order to regain that freedom where she was not so much herself as a creature buoyed on something that flooded into her as a knowledge that she was moving inescapably through an ancient role, she must leave her parents who destroyed her; so she went out of the door, feeling the mud sink around her slight shoes, and down the path towards a man who came darkly against stars which had been washed by rain into a profusely glittering background to her mood. Martha, who had known Billy Van Rensberg all her childhood, who had been thinking of him during the last half hour with suppressed resentment, as of something she must bypass, an insistent obstacle, found herself now going towards him half fainting with excitement. For she at once told herself this was not Billy; this man, whose face she could clearly see in the bright glow, might be a cousin of some kind, for he had a family likeness.

Martha found herself on the back seat of the car, on his knee, together with five other people, who were so closely packed together it was hard to know whose limbs were whose. Marnie’s half-smothered voice greeted her from the front seat. ‘Matty, meet – Oh, George, stop it, I’ve got to do the intros, oh, do stop it. Well, Matty, you’ll have to find out who everybody is.’ And she stopped in a smother of giggles.

While the car slid greasily down the steep road, and then skidded on its brakes through the mealie-fields, Martha lay stiffly on the strange man’s knee, trying to will her heart, which was immediately beneath his hand, to stop beating. His close hold of her seemed to lift her away from the others into an exquisite intimacy that was the natural end of days of waiting; and the others began to sing, ‘Horsey, keep your tail up, keep your tail up, keep your tail up’; and she was hurt that he at once joined in, as if this close contact which was so sweet to her was matter-of-fact to him. Martha also began to sing, since it appeared this was expected of her, and heard her uncertain voice slide off key; and at once Marnie said, with satisfaction, ‘Matty’s shocked!’

‘Oh, Matty’s all right,’ said the strange man, slightly increasing the pressure of his hand, and he laughed. But it was a cautious laugh, and he was holding her carefully, with an exact amount of pressure; and Martha slowly understood that if the intimacy of the young people in this car would have been shocking to Marnie’s mother, or at least to her own, it was governed by a set of rigid conventions, one of which was that the girls should giggle and protest. But she had been lifted away into a state of feeling where the singing and the giggles seemed banal; and could only remain silent, with the strange man’s cheek against hers, watching the soft bright trees rush past in the moonlight. The others continued to sing, and to call out, ‘Georgie, what are you doing to Marnie?’ or ‘Maggie, don’t let Dirk get you down,’ and when this attention was turned to Martha and her partner, she understood he was replying for her when he said again, ‘Oh, Matty’s all right, leave her alone.’ She could not have spoken; it seemed the car was rocking her away from everything known into unimaginable experience; and as the lights of her own home sank behind the trees, she watched for the light of the Van Rensbergs’ house as of the beacons on a strange coast. The singing and shouting were now a discordant din beneath the low roof of the car; and in their pocket of silence, the man was murmuring into Martha’s ear, ‘Why didn’t you look at me then, why?’ With each ‘why’ he modified his hold of her in a way which she understood must be a divergence from his own code; for his grip became compelling, and his breathing changed; but to Martha the question was expected and delightful, for if he had been looking for her, had she not for him? A glare of light swept across the inside of the car, the man swiftly released her, and they all sat up. The Van Rensbergs’ house was in front of them, transfigured by a string of coloured lights across the front of the veranda, and by the moonlit trees that stood about it.

They tumbled out of the car, and nine pairs of eyes stroked Martha up and down. She saw she was the only person in evening dress; but at once Marnie said, in breathless approval, ‘You look fine, Matty, can I have the pattern?’ She took Martha’s arm, and led her away from the others, ignoring the lad with whom she had been in the car. Martha could not help glancing back to see how he took what she felt as a betrayal, for she was dizzy and shocked; but George had already slipped his arm around another girl, and was leading her to the veranda. She looked round for her own partner, feeling that surely he must come forward and claim her from Marnie, but the young man, in a tight uncomfortable suit whose thick texture her fingers knew, and whose appearance had the strangest look of alienation, was bending, with his back to her, over the open engine of the car, reaching down into it with a spanner.

So she went forward with Marnie, on to the wide veranda, which was cleared for dancing. There were about a dozen people waiting. She knew them vaguely by sight, having seen them at the station, and she smiled in the manner of one who has been prevented from achieving friendship by all manner of obstacles. Marnie took her through the veranda and into the room behind, where Mr Van Rensberg was sitting in his shirt sleeves, reading a newspaper beside an oil lamp. He nodded, then raised his head again and stared rudely; and Martha began to feel ashamed, for of course her dress was too elaborate for the occasion; and it was only Marnie’s exclamations of delight and admiration that kept her mood from collapsing entirely.

Martha watched her friend rub lipstick on to protruding, smiling lips before the mirror, and waited on one side, for she did not want to see herself in the glass; but as they returned to the veranda she caught sight of herself in a windowpane; she did not know this aloof, dream-logged girl who turned a brooding face under the curve of loose blonde hair; so strange did it seem that she even glanced behind her to see if some other girl stood there in just such another white dress, and noticed her escort standing outside the door to the veranda.

‘You’re all right,’ he said impatiently, as if he had been kept waiting; and an old gramophone began to play from behind a window.

At once the space filled with couples; and Martha, lagging back to watch, to adjust herself, was dismayed by a savage discrepancy between what she had imagined and what was happening; for dancing may mean different things to different people, but surely (or so she felt) it could not mean this. Male and female, belly to belly, they jigged and bounced, in that shallow space between roof and floor of the veranda which projected out into the enormous night, in a good-natured slapdash acceptance of movement, one foot after another, across the floor, as if their minds owned no connection with what their bodies and limbs were doing, while the small tinny music came from the neat black box. It was a very mixed group – that is, it must appear so to an outsider, though Martha felt the partners were chosen according to certain invisible obligations. The one link missing was joy of any kind. The married couples walked themselves cheerfully around; partners of marked family resemblance stuck together as if their very features bound them; the only members of the party who seemed unbound by these invisible fetters were several small girls between nine or ten and fifteen, who danced together, politely adjusting their movements, while their eyes watched the older members of their society with patient envy, as if anticipating what must seem to them a delicious freedom. The women wore ordinary dresses, the young men stiff suits, in which they looked ugly, or the easy khaki of their farmwear, which made them into handsome peasants. Martha was again humiliated because of her dress, though there was no criticism, only detached curiosity, in the glances she received.

She looked instinctively towards her partner for support, feeling that his appreciation would sustain her. And this time she really looked at him, and not at the mental image created by the idea of dancing, of one’s ‘first dance’. He was a half-grown, lanky youth, with light hair plastered wetly across a low forehead, and the heavy muscles of shoulders and arms – too heavy for the still boyish frame – distorted the neat clerkly suit. He was regarding her with embarrassed pride, while he jerked her loosely around the dancing space, one stride after another, his arms pumping, with a check at each corner so that they might achieve a change of direction. The truth came into her mind, and at the same moment she stammered out, ‘I don’t know your name’, and he at first stretched his mouth into a polite laugh, as at a jest, and then stopped dead, and dropped his arms, and stood staring at her, while his blunt and honest face went crimson.

‘What’s my name?’ he asked; and then, to save them both: ‘You’ve got a funny sense of humour.’ Again he held her in a dancing position, while his limbs laboured through the movements dictated by his mind, and they continued self-consciously around the veranda.

‘Well, I haven’t seen you for so long,’ she apologized, and again, even as she spoke, understood that it was he who had sat beside his father at the station; she could not imagine how she had failed to see Billy in this young man.

‘Oh, all right, all right,’ he muttered; and then suddenly burst out singing, in Afrikaans, which was as good as saying, ‘We have nothing to say to each other.’

Others joined in; it was a folk tune, and the small jazzy tune stopped, and someone put on another record. Now all the people on the veranda had arranged themselves quickly into two long lines, facing each other, while they clapped their hands. Martha, who had never seen the old dances, shook her head and fell out, and, as soon as the dancing began, found the spontaneous joy of movement that had been lacking in the other. Everyone enjoyed himself, everyone smiled, and sang; for the few minutes the music lasted, every person on the veranda lost self-consciousness and became part of the larger whole, the group; their faces were relaxed, mindless, their eyes met those of the men and women they must meet and greet in the dance with an easy exchange. It was no longer their responsibility; the responsibility of being one person alone, was taken off them. And soon the music stopped, and the other, newer music, with its wailing complaint, took its place. But Martha had fled, to collect herself, into the kitchen, where Mrs Van Rensberg was arranging the supper.

Marnie ran after her, pulled her aside and said, ‘It’s all right. I’ve told him you didn’t mean it, you’re not stuck-up, you’re just shy.’

Martha was resentful that she had been thus discussed, but found herself being pushed forward into Billy’s arms, while Marnie patted them both encouragingly, saying, ‘That’s right, that’s the idea, don’t take offence, man, the night is yet young.’

Billy held her at arm’s length, and gave her troubled but pleading glances; and she chattered brightly, on a note she knew was false. But she felt cold, and nervous. She wished bitterly she had not come; and then that she was better able to adjust herself, and the small tight critical knot in her could dissolve, and she become one with this friendly noisy crowd of people. She set herself to be nice to Billy, and for this he was half grateful, or at least took it as better than nothing. As the night slowly went by, and they made repeated trips to the buffet inside, where there were ranks of bottles of Cape brandy, and ginger beer, another illusory haze formed itself, within which she was able to persuade herself that Billy was the culmination of the last few days of helpless waiting: even, indeed, that the white frock had been made for him.

By midnight the house was filled with singing and laughter and the thin churning gramophone music could be heard only in snatches. The crowd had a confined look; the rooms were too full, and couples continually moved to the veranda steps, laughing and hesitating, because outside the ground was churned to a thick red mud, and the moon shone on the puddles left by the storm. Some made a tentative step down, while the others shouted encouragement; then owned themselves beaten, and went to find a private corner in one of the busy rooms, or in the kitchen, where Mrs Van Rensberg stood, hour after hour, slicing the bread, piling cream and fruit on the cakes. Martha saw Marnie seated on the knee of a strange youth while both talked to Mrs Van Rensberg; and she wished enviously that her own mother might be as tolerant and generous. For while she watched Marnie, as a guide to how she might behave herself, she knew it was impossible for her to do the same: she was not so much shocked as dismayed at the way Marnie was with one young man after another, as if they were interchangeable. She saw, too, that it was not her formal dress but the fact that she was dancing only with Billy that set her apart from the others. Yet she could not have gone with anyone else; it would have driven across the current of feeling which said that Billy – or rather, what he represented – had claimed her for the evening; for alcohol had strengthened the power of that outside force which had first claimed her four days before, at the moment she agreed to go to the dance. She was not herself, she was obedient to that force, which wore Billy’s form and features; and to the others it seemed as if she was as helpless to move away from him as he was reluctant to let her go. This absorbed couple who moved in a private dream were felt to be upsetting; whichever room they entered was disturbed by them; and at length Mr Van Rensberg broke the spell by arresting Martha as she trailed past him on Billy’s arm, by pointing his pipestem at her and saying, ‘Hey, Matty, come here a minute.’ She faced him, blinking and visibly collecting herself. The soft look on her face disappeared and she became watchful, gazing straight at him.

Mr Van Rensberg was a short, strong, thickset man of about sixty, though his round bristling black head showed not a trace of grey and his weathered face was hardly lined. He wore a dark-red scarf twisted thick around his bull neck, though it was swelteringly hot; and over it the small black, mordant eyes were as watchful as hers.

‘So your father lets you come visiting us, hey?’ he demanded.

Martha coloured; and half laughed, because of this picture of her father; and after a hesitation she said, consciously winsome and deferential, ‘You used to come visiting us, not so long ago.’ She checked herself, with a quick glance at the others – for there were several people listening; she feared he might resent this reminder of his long friendship with the Quests.

But he did not take her up on this point. With a kind of deliberate brutality, he lifted his pipestem at her again, and demanded, Did she admit that the English behaved like brutes in the Boer War?

At this, she could not help laughing, it was (to her) such an irrelevance.

‘It’s not a funny matter to us,’ he said roughly.

‘Nor to me,’ said Martha, and then, diffidently: ‘It was rather a long time ago, wasn’t it?’

‘No!’ he shouted. Then he quietened, and insisted, ‘Nothing has changed. The English are arrogant. They are all rude and arrogant.’

‘Yes, I think that’s true,’ said Martha, knowing it was often true; and then could not prevent herself asking that fatally reasonable question, ‘If you dislike us so much, why do you come to a British colony?’

There was a murmur from the listening people. There seemed to be many more people in the room than before, they had been crowding in, and Martha found herself thinking how different was this man’s position in his household to her father’s: the silence was due to him as a spokesman, he was a patriarch in a culture where the feared and dominating father is still key to the family group; and Martha felt a twinge of fear, because she understood this was not to be taken as a personal conversation, she was being questioned as a representative. And she did not feel herself to be representative.

Mr Van Rensberg dropped his pipe in dramatic comment, with a nod at the others, and remarked heavily, ‘So! So!’

Martha said quickly, with the defensive humour which she could not prevent, though she knew he found it insulting, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t come, why shouldn’t you? As far as I am concerned, you’re welcome.’

There was a silence, he seemed to be waiting for more; then he said, ‘There should be equal rights, there should be rights for both languages.’

Martha was remembering, very ruefully, that other conversation, with Joss. She smiled and said firmly, with considerable courage, considering the nature of her audience, that she believed in equal rights for all people, regardless of race and –

Billy tugged at her from behind, and said in an urgent voice, ‘Hey, Matty, come and dance.’

Mr Van Rensberg, who had dismissed the improbable suspicion from his mind as soon as it appeared said, rather taken aback, ‘Well, that’s all right, then, that’s all right.’ Afterwards, he would call Martha a hypocrite, like all the English.

On the veranda, Billy called her one to her face, without knowing he was doing so. ‘Why don’t you learn to speak Afrikaans?’ he asked, as if this followed naturally from what he had heard her say.

But to Martha this was narrowing the problem away from its principles, and she said, half flippantly, ‘Well, if it’s a question of doing justice to majorities, one’d have to learn at least a dozen native languages as well.’

His hand tightened across her back. To him it was as if she put the Afrikaans language on a level with those of the despised kaffirs. It was a moment of hatred; but at last he gave a short, uncomfortable laugh, and bent his head beside hers, closing his eyes to the facts of her personality, wishing to restore this illusory unity. It was late, some of the people had already left, and Martha was dancing in his arms stiffly and unwillingly, frowning over the incident that had just occurred. He felt that dancing would no longer be enough – or rather, that it was too late to wait for the spell to settle over them again. He drew her to the veranda steps. The moon was now standing level with the tops of the trees, the mud of the clearing was glimmering with light. ‘Let’s go down for a minute,’ he said.

‘But it’s all muddy.’

‘Never mind,’ he said hastily, and pulled her down.

Once again the wet squelched around her shoe, and she picked her way from ridge to ridge of hardening mud, hanging on Billy’s arm, while he steered them both to the side of the house out of sight. She tried to hold her skirts clear of the mud, while he pinned her arms down with his, and kissed her. His mouth was hard, and ground her head back. She resented this hard intrusive mouth, even while from outside – always from outside – came the other pressure, which demanded that he should simply lift her and carry her off like booty – but to where? The red mud under the bushes? She pushed aside this practical and desecrating thought, and softened to the kiss; then she felt a clumsy and unpractised hand creeping down her thigh, and she jerked away, saying in a voice that annoyed her, because of its indignant coldness: ‘Stop it!’

‘Sorry,’ he said at once, and let her go, with a humility that made her loathe him.

She walked away in front, leaving him to follow as he wished, and walked confusedly up the steps, because the few couples that were watching them with derisive smiles, and none of the communal teasing that had been drawn by the other couples. Martha saw the eyes drop to her skirt, and looked down, and saw that the hem was dragging heavy wth red mud.

Marnie came running forward, exclaiming, ‘But Matty, your lovely dress, you’ve spoilt it …’ She clicked over Martha for a moment, then tugged her through the house on her hand, saying, ‘Come and wash it off, before it dries.’

Martha went, without so much as a glance at the unfortunate Billy, grateful for Marnie, who thus took her back into the group.

‘You’d better take that dress off,’ said Marnie. ‘You’re staying the night, so it doesn’t matter.’

‘I forgot my suitcase,’ said Martha awkwardly, leaving herself completely in Marnie’s hands. For she had forgotten to pack her night things; her imagination had reached no further forward than the dancing and the exaltation.

‘Doesn’t matter, I’ll lend my pyjamas.’

Mrs Van Rensberg came fussing in, pleasant and maternal, saying she would ring Mrs Quest. It seemed that Martha ruining her dress while making love to her son was the most natural thing in the world. She kissed Martha, and said she hoped she would sleep well, and she mustn’t worry, everything was all right. The warm and comfortable words made Martha want to cry, and she embraced Mrs Van Rensberg like a child, and like a child allowed herself to be led to her room, and left alone.

It was a larger room built to the back of the house, lit by two tall candles, one on either side of the vast double bed spread with white. The windows were open to the veld, which was already greying to the dawn, and the moon had a pallid, exhausted look. A sheet of silver, inclining at the end of the room, took Martha’s attention, and she looked again, and saw it was a mirror. She had never been alone in a room with a full-length mirror before, and she stripped off her clothes and went to stand before it. It was as if she saw a vision of someone not herself; or rather, herself transfigured to the measure of a burningly insistent future. The white naked girl with the high small breasts that leaned forward out of the mirror was like a girl from a legend; she put forward her hands to touch, then as they encountered the cold glass, she saw the naked arms of the girl slowly rise to fold defensively across those breasts. She did not know herself. She left the mirror, and stood at the window for a moment, bitterly criticizing herself for allowing Billy, that impostor, to take possession of her at all, even for an evening, even under another’s features.

Next day she took breakfast with the Van Rensbergs, a clan of fifteen, cousins and uncles and aunts, all cheerfully mingled.

She walked home through the bush, carrying the dress in a brown paper bag, and, halfway, took off her shoes for the pleasure of feeling the mud squeeze and mould around her feet. She arrived untidy and flushed and healthy, and Mrs Quest, in a flush of relief, kissed her and said she hoped she had enjoyed herself.

For a few days, Martha suffered a reaction like a dulling of all her nerves. She must be tired, murmured Mrs Quest, over and over again, you must be tired, you must sleep, sleep, sleep. And Martha slept, hypnotized.

Then she came to herself and began to read, hungrily, for some kind of balance. And more and more, what she read seemed remote; or rather, it seemed that through reading she created a self-contained world which had nothing to do with what lay around her; that what she believed was separated from her problems by an invisible wall; or that she was guided by a great marsh light – but no, that she could not afford, not for a moment, to accept. But not merely was she continuously being flooded by emotions that came from outside, or so it seemed; continuously other people refused to recognize the roles they themselves had first suggested. When Joss, for instance, or Mr Van Rensberg, posed their catechism, and received answers qualifying her for their respective brotherhoods, surely at that moment some door should have opened, so that she might walk in, a welcomed daughter into that realm of generous and freely exchanged emotion for which she had been born – and not only herself, but every human being; for what she believed had been built for her by the books she read, and those books had been written by citizens of that other country; for how can one feel exiled from something that does not exist?

She felt as if a phase of her life had ended, and that now a new one should begin; and it was about a fortnight after the Van Rensbergs’ dance that Joss wrote: ‘I heard there was a job going, at the firm of lawyers where my uncles are both partners. I spoke to them about you. Get a lift into town and interview Uncle Jasper. Do it quickly. You must get yourself out of this setup. Yours, Joss.’ This was hastily scribbled, as if in a hurry; and there followed a neat and sober postscript: ‘If I’m interfering, I’m sorry.’

She wrote back that she would at once apply for the job, and gratefully thanked him. She sent this letter by the cook, so urgent did it seem that he should at once know her reaction.

With Joss’s letter in her hand, she walked onto the veranda, and informed her parents, in a hasty way, that she was taking a job in town; and she hardly heard their startled queries. It all seemed so easy now. ‘But you can’t expect me to stay here for the rest of my life!’ she demanded incredulously, just as if she had not been ‘here’ for two years, apparently as if she considered there could be no possible end to it.

‘But why Joss – I mean, if you felt like this, we could ask our friends …’ protested poor Mrs Quest, helplessly.

She was thinking in terms of the future, something unpleasant to be faced, perhaps, next week; and when she heard that Martha intended to go into town, with Mr McFarline, the very next morning, she said she forbade it. Martha made no reply, and she suddenly announced she was coming into town with her.

‘Oh, no, you’re not,’ said Martha, in the deadly tone of unmistakable hatred which always disarmed Mrs Quest, who had never admitted that hatred inside a family was even possible.

Martha was not in the house that last afternoon, so Mrs Quest went into her bedroom, and looked helplessly around it for some kind of clue to her daughter’s state of mind. She found Joss’s note, which struck her unpleasantly; she found the soiled white dress, still crushed into the paper bag and already going green with mildew; she looked at the books on the table by the bed, with a feeling that they must be responsible; but they were Shelley and Byron and Tennyson and William Morris; and though she had not read them herself since she was a girl, she thought of them as too respectable to be in any way dangerous.

Martha, in the meantime, was consciously bidding farewell to her childhood. She visited the ant heap where she had knelt in ecstatic prayer during her ‘religious phase’; and she walked through the thick scrub to the quartz reef under which a spring came bubbling clear and cold, where she had lain thinking of the stream that must reach the sea hundreds of miles away; she walked through the compound, where she had secretly played with the native children against her mother’s orders. She paid a last visit to the big tree. It was all useless; her childhood, it seemed, had already said goodbye to her, nothing had power to move her.

Next day she went to town with Mr McFarline, who tried to impress her with the fact that he had just been elected member of Parliament for one of the city constituencies, but received only an abstracted politeness for his pains. She interviewed Mr Cohen, the uncle, got the job, and found herself a room before nightfall. Her parents expected her home. She sent them a wire saying would they please send on her books and clothes. ‘Do not worry, everything fine.’

And a door had closed, finally; and behind it was the farm, and the girl who had been created by it. It no longer concerned her. Finished. She could forget it.

She was a new person, and an extraordinary, magnificent, an altogether new life was beginning.