Martha Quest

Martha assured him that she wanted to be an efficient secretary, even while she felt quite indignant; she felt herself capable of much more. She thanked him, went back to her desk, and once again sat idle. She was waiting for someone to direct her; then she understood she was now expected to direct herself, and went to Mrs Buss, asking for information about the Polytechnic.

Mrs Buss’s face cleared into a gratified relief that seemed to Martha offensive; and she took a piece of paper from her desk, with clear directions as to classes and times. Then she delivered herself – with a pause between each, for assent – of the following remarks: ‘I’m glad you’ve got some sense … You don’t want to get like these girls here, sitting with their eyes on the clock, just waiting till their boy friends fetch them at half past four, and out all night and then so tired next day they just sit yawning … There’s plenty of work here, believe me, for those with the intention to do it.’ And finally, her china-blue eyes fixed on Martha’s: ‘When you’ve got someone to work for as good as Mr Cohen, then you work your best?’ Martha said yes; but it was not enough. ‘I’ve worked for my living since I was fifteen, and in England till two years ago, and in England girls are expected to be efficient, it’s not like here, where they can get married for the asking, and I’ve never known anyone like Mr Cohen.’ Martha said yes; and Mrs Buss insisted challengingly, ‘He’s got a heart as big as his body,’ and this time Martha said yes with real feeling, and she was released.

And now Martha was able to understand – but only since it had been pointed out to her – the real division in this closely packed mass of women. When Miss Gale leaned over and whispered, like a schoolgirl, ‘Get off easily?’ she replied coldly, ‘I’m going to the Polytechnic,’ and Miss Gale shrugged and looked indifferently away, like one who does not intend to show she feels her cause has been deserted. But Martha looked away from this group she had been put into with envy and admiration for the four secretaries and for the two accountants who sat side by side over their big ledgers. She intended, in fact, to emulate the skilled; and her eyes, when she regarded the complacent Miss Gale, were scornful. These women had in common not that they were younger, or even more attractive, than the others, but a certain air of tolerance; they were paying fee to something whose necessity they entirely deplored.

After work, Martha walked the hundred yards or so to the Polytechnic, which was further down Founders’ Street. It was a low brown building, though now it swarmed with activity; and its front was barricaded by stacked bicycles. Martha, as usual doing nothing by halves, enrolled herself for classes which would take up every evening of her week, and walked home through the park, where the paths already glimmered pale among the darkening trees, her mind filled with visions of herself in Mrs Buss’s place, though they were certainly lit by the highly coloured experimental glow that had coloured earlier visions of herself as a painter, a ballet dancer or an opera singer, for like most people of her age and generation she had already tasted every profession, in mind at least.

When she reached her room, she imagined for a moment she had come to the wrong place, for through the light curtains across the french door she could see a shape she did not know. She hesitantly entered at last, and there stood a young man who asked, ‘Martha Quest? My mother had a letter from your mother and –’ He stopped, and looked appreciatively at Martha; for until then he had been speaking with a politeness that said quite plainly, ‘I’m doing this because I’ve been told to.’

He was a youth of about twenty. Martha, who had known only the physical, open-air men of the district, and the Cohen boys, who were all she had met of the student type, and her brother, who was a student because it was expected of him, found in Donovan Anderson something quite new. He was a rather tall, broad-framed handsome young man, wearing a sharply-cut light summer suit, and a heavy gold signet ring on one hand. She was not observant, but because of this impression of broad-shouldered masculinity she was instinctively looking for resemblances, and her eyes lingered on the way his shirt front caved inwards under the flowing blue tie; for if Billy or her brother had been wearing that suit it would have bulged out, and the sleeves would have been filled with muscle. Looking upwards from the hollow chest, she received from that correctly arranged healthily sunburned face – large nose, square jaw, open brow – an altogether incongruous impression of weakness.

He said gracefully, ‘We were expecting a nice girl from the wide-open spaces, we heard you were sporting and hunted big game.’

At first Martha started at the ‘we’; then she laughed, and averred that she loathed sport of any kind, as if this was a claim to grace in itself.

‘That’s a relief, because I’m ever such an indoor type, and I was expecting to have to take you to something energetic.’

Martha said spitefully that she was surprised he did as he was ordered; to which he returned a politely appreciative laugh, and said, ‘Well, then, I’ll take you to the pictures instead. You must come and meet my mamma. It is what both our mammas would expect.’

Martha agreed that she would like to do this, and it was arranged that it would all take place the following evening – which, incidentally, meant that she must postpone her first lesson in shorthand. They informed each other that they insisted on being called respectively Don and Matty. His mamma, said Donovan, called him Donny, but one knew what mammas were. He most elegantly shook her hand, and told her that she must not be late tomorrow, for if there was one thing he could not endure it was being kept waiting by girls. He then took his leave.

Martha wandered around her room in a state of breathless exhilaration, already picturing Donovan as a lover, but in an extraordinarily romantic light, considering the nature of the books she read. The time between the present and tomorrow evening must be lived through; she felt she could not bear it, and just as she had decided she would go to sleep, in order to dispose of as much of it as possible in oblivion, Mrs Gunn knocked and asked anxiously if she would like some supper. Martha refused, because of the anxious note, which automatically stiffened her resistance. Yet she had hardly eaten since she came to town; she had too little money to ‘waste on food’ – in other words, she was by no means finished with that phase of her life when she was continuously thinking about food, not because she intended to eat any, but because she meant to refuse it. She would think of the next meal due to her according to convention, assess it in terms of flesh, and then nervously pass her hands downwards over her hips, as if stroking their outlines smaller.

Before she went to bed that night, she ironed the dress she intended to wear the following evening. An instinct she did not know she possessed chose it from the point of view of a Donovan, and the same instinct made the downward-stroking movement over hips and thighs appreciative and satisfied. She had slimmed herself during the past two years so that the bones of her pelvis were prominent, and this gave her great pleasure; and she went to bed vowing she must not put on weight.

At the office next day she helped Miss Gale with the filing, and found that she liked her after all; for some reason, there was a flow of sympathy between them, and more than once Mrs Buss looked sharply towards them and they lowered their voices guiltily.

Half past four soon came, and Martha flew home to dress, though Donovan was not expected until six. She annointed and prepared herself with the aid of mirrors large and small, a bathroom next door, and no Mrs Quest likely to interrupt. She bathed, painted her fingernails and – for the first time, and with a delicious sense of sinfulness – her toenails, powdered her body, plucked her eyebrows, which did not need it, and arranged her hair; and all this under the power of that compulsion that seemed to come from outside, as if Donovan’s dark and languid eyes were dictating what she must do, even to the way her hair should lie on her shoulders. For the first time, she knew the delight of dressing for a man: her father never noticed what she wore, unless it was pointed out; her brother had not gone beyond the stage of defensive derision, or at least not with her; and a Billy Van Rensberg was likely to approve anything she wore.

But when Donovan arrived and she presented herself to him (still in the power of that outside necessity), he behaved in a way she had never imagined any man might behave. He looked at her, critically narrowed his eyes, and even walked around her thoughtfully, his head rather on one side. She could not resent it, for it was quite impersonal. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, ‘yes, but …’ He lifted her hair back from her face, studied her anew, then let it fall back, and nodded. To Martha it was an extraordinary sensation, as if he were not only receiving her appearance as an impact, but as if he were, for the moment, herself, and her clothing covered him, and he felt the shape and lines of her dress with the sympathy of his own flesh. It was like being possessed by another personality; it was disturbing, and left her with a faint but pronounced distaste.

Donovan emerged from this prolonged study, saying thoughtfully, ‘You know what this dress needs, my dear? What you need is …’ He went to the wardrobe as if he had been using it for years, flung it open, and searched for something that already existed in his mind. ‘You must buy a black patent belt tomorrow,’ he announced firmly. ‘About an inch and a half wide, with a small, flat buckle.’ And he was right, Martha saw that at once. ‘You must ask my mamma about clothes,’ he continued pleasantly. ‘She’s very good at them. Now come on, she doesn’t like being kept waiting.’ And he led the way to his car.

It was a small open car, dark green, shabby but highly polished and when he climbed into the front seat and sat languidly waiting for her to join him, the man and the car instantly became a unit. ‘Like it?’ he enquired indifferently. ‘Got it for twelve pounds ten last month. We junior civil servants must make do on other people’s leavings.’ Yet he was indifferent because he knew he might be quite satisfied with both himself and the car.

They drove a short way out of town; that is to say, when they had left behind them the avenues of old houses that had been built between 1900 and 1920, there was about half a mile of tree-lined dust track to cover before they came to a signboard which said ‘The Wellington Housing Estate’. Here they turned off on to another dust track which would one day be a street between houses, because the foundations of the houses were already lightly sketched, in cement, in the raw-surfaced earth; and piles of red brick lay everywhere.

‘We got in early and bought the first lot while it was dirt cheap, but it’s already expensive, this is going to be ever such a smart place to live,’ Donovan said; and she saw that he was politely pointing out what things she should admire, as he had done over the car. And so it was when they reached the house, the only completed house, which stood like a narrow brick box, spotted with round windows like portholes, and laced with a great deal of scrolled iron-work. ‘My mamma thought she would like a Spanish house,’ said Donovan, apparently meaning the iron; and again Martha knew she was being instructed.

Inside while they waited for Mrs Anderson, Martha was shown the ground-floor rooms, and found them smart and expensive, as Donovan said they were; and apparently he was satisfied with her response, for her politeness might easily be taken for the same thing as that negligence he was careful to maintain. Now, Martha was adapting herself to Donovan according to that outside pressure which said that she must; and yet this pliability was possible only because something was still informing her, in a small voice but a clear one, that this had nothing to do with her; in fact, it could be said she was so easy and comfortable with him just because of this fundamental indifference.

When they had finally settled in the big drawing room, an incident occurred which was final as far as Martha was concerned. She reached for a book from the big bookcase, to see what kind of people these were, as she always did in a new house, and heard Donovan say, ‘Oh, my dear, it’s no use looking at the books. We have nothing new in the place.’

Martha left her hand on the book, while she turned her stern, derisive eyes on Donovan as if she could not possibly have heard aright. ‘What do you mean, nothing new?’ she inquired, in a voice he had not heard from her and was not likely to, or at any rate, not yet.

‘My mamma forgot to send to England for the new books. All these are last year’s best sellers.’

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