Martha Quest

Yesterday, Martha had been on the point of getting out her bicycle in order to ride in to the station, so badly did she need to see the Cohen boys; when the thought of another scene with her mother checked her. Guiltily, she left the bicycle where it was. And now, although she wanted more than anything else to tell them about her silly and exaggerated behaviour in front of Mrs Van Rensberg, so that they might laugh good-naturedly at it, and restore it to proportion, she could not make the effort to rise from under the big tree, let alone get out the bicycle and go secretly into the station, hoping she would not be missed. And so she remained under the tree, whose roots were hard under her back, like a second spine, and looked up through the leaves to the sky, which shone in a bronze clamour of light. She ripped the fleshy leaves between her fingers, and thought again of her mother and Mrs Van Rensberg. She would not be like Mrs Van Rensberg, a fat and earthy housekeeping woman; she would not be bitter and nagging and dissatisfied like her mother. But then, who was she to be like? Her mind turned towards the heroines she had been offered, and discarded them. There seemed to be a gap between herself and the past, and so her thoughts swam in a mazed and unfed way through her mind, and she sat up, rubbing her stiffened back, and looked down the aisles of stunted trees, over a wash of pink feathery grass, to the red clods of a field which was invisible from the house.

There moved a team of oxen, a plough, a native driver with his long whip, and at the head of the team a small black child, naked except for a loincloth, tugging at the strings which passed through the nostrils of the leaders of the team. The driver she did not like – he was a harsh and violent man who used that whip with too much zest; but the pity she refused herself flooded out and surrounded the black child like a protective blanket. And again her mind swam and shook, like clearing water, and now, instead of one black child, she saw a multitude, and so lapsed easily into her familiar daydream. She looked away over the ploughed land, across the veld to the Dumfries Hills, and refashioned that unused country to the scale of her imagination. There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and the stunted trees, a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its falling flower-bordered terraces. There were splashing fountains, and the sound of flutes; and its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together; and these groups of elders paused, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of the children – the blue-eyed, fair-skinned children of the North playing hand in hand with the bronze-skinned, dark-eyed children of the South. Yes, they smiled and approved these many-fathered children, running and playing among the flowers and the terraces, through the white pillars and tall trees of this fabulous and ancient city …

It was about a year later. Martha was seated beneath the same tree, and in rather the same position, her hands full of leaves which she was unconsciously rubbing to a green and sticky mess. Her head was filled with the same vision, only more detailed. She could have drawn a plan of that city, from the central market place to the four gates. Outside one of the gates stood her parents, the Van Rensbergs, in fact most of the people of the district, forever excluded from the golden city because of their pettiness of vision and small understanding; they stood grieving, longing to enter, but barred by a stern and remorseless Martha – for unfortunately one gets nothing, not even a dream, without paying heavily for it, and in Martha’s version of the golden age there must always be at least one person standing at the gate to exclude the unworthy. She heard footsteps, and turned her head to find Marnie picking her way down the native path, her high heels rocking over the stones.

‘Hey,’ said Marnie excitedly, ‘heard the news?’

Martha blinked her eyes clear of the dream, and said, rather stiffly, ‘Oh, hullo.’ She was immediately conscious of the difference between herself and Marnie, whose hair was waved, who wore lipstick and nail varnish, and whose face was forced into an effect of simpering maturity, which continually vanished under pressure from her innate good sense. Now she was excited she was like a healthy schoolgirl who had been dressing up for fun; but at the sight of the sprawling and undignified Martha, who looked rather like an overgrown child of eleven, with a ribbon tying her lanky blonde hair, and a yoked dress in flowered print, she remembered her own fashionable dress, and sat primly on the grass, placed her black heels together, and looked down at her silk-stockinged legs with satisfaction.

‘My sister’s getting married,’ she announced.

There were five sisters, two already married, and Martha asked, ‘Who, Marie?’ For Marie was next, according to age.

‘No, not Marie,’ said Marnie with impatient disparagement. ‘Marie’ll never get herself a man, she hasn’t got what it takes.’

At the phrase ‘get herself a man,’ Martha flushed, and looked away, frowning. Marnie glanced doubtfully at her, and met a glance of such scorn that she blushed in her turn, though she did not know what for.

‘You haven’t even asked who,’ she said accusingly, though with a timid note; and then burst out, ‘Man, believe it or not, but it’s Stephanie.’

Stephanie was seventeen, but Martha merely nodded.

Damped, Marnie said, ‘She’s doing very well for herself, too, say what you like. He’s got a V-8, and he’s got a bigger farm than Pop.’

‘Doing well for herself’ caused Martha yet another internal shudder. Then the thought flashed across her mind: I criticize my mother for being a snob, but despise the Van Rensbergs with a clear conscience, because my snobbishness is intellectual. She could not afford to keep this thought clear in her mind; the difficult, painful process of educating herself was all she had to sustain her. But she managed to say after a pause, though with genuine difficulty, ‘I’m glad, it will be nice to have another wedding.’ It sounded flat.

Marnie sighed, and she glanced down at her pretty fingernails for comfort. She would have so much liked an intimate talk with a girl of her own age. Or rather, though there were girls of her own age among the Afrikaans community growing up around her father’s farm, she would have liked to be friends with Martha, who she admired. She would have liked to say, with a giggle, that she was sixteen herself and could get a man, with luck, next year, like Stephanie. Finding herself confronted by Martha’s frowning eyes, she wished she might return to the veranda, where the two mothers would be discussing the fascinating details of the courtship and wedding. But it was a tradition that the men should talk to the men, women with women, and the children should play together. Marnie did not consider herself a child, though Martha, it seemed, did. She thought that if she could return by herself to the veranda, she might join the women’s talk, whereas if Martha came with her they would be excluded. She said, ‘My mom’s telling your mom.’

Martha said, with that unaccountable resentment, ‘Oh, she’ll have a wonderful time gossiping about it.’ Then she added quickly, trying to make amends for her ungraciousness, ‘She’ll be awfully pleased.’

‘Oh, I know your mom doesn’t want you to marry young, she wants you to make a career,’ said Marnie generously.

But again Martha winced, saying angrily, ‘Oh she’d love it if I married young.’

‘Would you like it, hey?’ suggested Marnie, trying to create an atmosphere where they might ‘have a good talk’.

Martha laughed satirically and said, ‘Marry young? Me? I’d die first. Tie myself down to babies and housekeeping …’

Marnie looked startled, and then abashed. She remarked defiantly, ‘Mom says you’re sweet on Joss Cohen.’ At the sight of Martha’s face she giggled with fright. ‘Well, he’s sweet on you, isn’t he?’

Martha gritted her teeth, and ground out, ‘Sweet on!’

‘Hell, he likes you, then.’

‘Joss Cohen,’ said Martha angrily.

‘He’s a nice boy. Jews can be nice, and he’s clever, like you.’

‘You make me sick,’ said Martha, reacting, or so she thought, to this racial prejudice.

Again Marnie’s good-natured face drooped with puzzled hurt, and she gave Martha an appealing look. She stood up, wanting to escape.

But Martha slid down a flattened swathe of long grass, and scrambled to her feet. She rubbed the back of her thighs under the cotton dress, saying, ‘Ooh, taken all the skin off.’

Her way of laughing at herself, almost clowning, at these graceless movements, made Marnie uncomfortable in a new way. She thought it extraordinary that Martha should wear such clothes, behave like a clumsy schoolboy, at sixteen, and apparently not mind. But she accepted what was in intention an apology, and looked at the title of the book Martha held – it was a life of Cecil Rhodes – and asked, was it interesting? Then the two girls went together up the native path, which wound under the low scrubby trees, through yellow grass that reached to their shoulders, to the clearing where the house stood.

It was built native style, with mud walls and thatched roof, and had been meant to last for two seasons, for the Quests had come to the colony after seeing an exhibition in London which promised new settlers that they might become rich on maize-growing almost from one year to the next. This had not happened, and the temporary house was still in use. It was a long oval, divided across to make rooms, and around it had been flung out projecting verandas of grass. A square, tin-roofed kitchen stood beside it. This kitchen was now rather tumble down, and the roof was stained and rusted. The roof of the house too had sagged, and the walls had been patched so often with fresh mud that they were all colours, from dark rich red through dulling yellow to elephant grey. There were many different kinds of houses in the district, but the Quests’ was original because a plan which was really suitable for bricks and proper roofing had been carried out in grass and mud and stamped dung.

The girls could see their mothers sitting behind the screen of golden shower; and at the point where they should turn to climb the veranda steps, Martha said hastily, ‘You go,’ and went off into the house, while Marnie thankfully joined the women.

Martha slipped into the front room like a guilty person, for the people on the veranda could see her by turning their heads. When the house was first built, there had been no verandas. Mrs Quest had planned the front of the house to open over the veld ‘like the prow of a ship,’ as she herself gaily explained. There were windows all around it, so that there had been a continuous view of mountains and veld lightly intersected by strips of wall, like a series of framed ‘views’. Now the veranda dipped over them, and the room was rather dark. There were chairs and settees, and a piano on one side, and a dining table on the other. Years ago, when the rugs and chintzes were fresh, this had been a pretty room, with cream-washed walls and smooth black linoleum under the rugs. Now it was not merely faded, but dingy and overcrowded. No one played the piano. The silver teatray that had been presented to Mrs Quest’s grandfather on retirement from his bank stood on the sideboard among bits of rock, nuts and bolts from the ploughs, and bottles of medicine.

When Mrs Quest first arrived, she was laughed at, because of the piano and the expensive rugs, because of her clothes, because she had left visiting cards on her neighbours. She laughed herself now, ruefully, remembering her mistakes.

In the middle of the floor was a pole of tough thornwood, to hold the end of the ridgepole. It had lain for weeks in a bath of strong chemical, to protect it from ants and insects; but now it was riddled with tiny holes, and if one put one’s ear to it there could be heard a myriad tiny jaws at work, and from the holes slid a perpetual trickle of faint white dust. Martha stood beside it, waiting for the moment when everyone on the veranda would be safely looking the other way, and felt it move rockingly on its base under the floor. She thought it typical of her parents that for years they had been reminding each other how essential it was to replace the pole in good time, and, now that the secretly working insects had hollowed it so that it sounded like a drum when tapped, remarked comfortingly, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, the ridgepole never really rested in the fork, anyway.’ And indeed, looking up at the thatch, one could see a clear two inches between the main spine of the roof and its intended support. The roof seemed to be held well enough on the web of light poles which lay under the thatch. The whole house was like this – precarious and shambling, but faithful, for it continued to remain upright against all probability. ‘One day it’ll fall on our heads,’ Mrs Quest would grumble when her husband said, as usual, that they could not afford to rebuild. But it did not fall.

At a suitable moment, Martha slipped into the second room. It was her parents’ bedroom. It was a large square, and rather dark, for there were only two windows. The furniture was of petrol and paraffin boxes nailed together and painted and screened by cretonne. The curtains, originally bought in London, had faded to a yellowish grey. On the thin web of the stuff, which hung limp against the glare, showed a tenacious dark outline of strutting peacocks. There were two large iron beds standing side by side on one wall, a dressing table facing them on the other. Habit had not dulled Martha into blindness of these things, of the shabby neglect of the place. But the family lived here without really living here. The house had been built as temporary, and was still temporary. Next year they would go back to England, or go into town. The crops might be good; they would have a stroke of luck and win the sweepstake; they would find a gold mine. For years Mr and Mrs Quest had been discussing these things; and to such conversations Martha no longer listened, for they made her so irritable she could not stand them. She had seen clearly, when she was about eleven or twelve, that her parents were deluding themselves; she had even reached the stage where she could say, if they really wanted to move, they would. But this cold, exasperated thought had never been worked out, and she still shared her parents’ unconscious attitude, although she repudiated their daydreaming and foolishness, that this was not really her home. She knew that to Marnie, to others of their neighbours, this house seemed disgracefully shabby, even sordid; but why be ashamed of something that one has never, not for a moment, considered as home?

When Martha was alone in this room, and had made sure the doors were closed, she moved carefully to the small square mirror that was nailed to the centre of the window, over the dressing table. She did not look at the things on the dressing table, because she disliked them. For many years, Mrs Quest had been describing women who used cosmetics as fast; then she saw that everyone else did, and bought herself lipstick and nail varnish. She had no instinct for them and they were the wrong colour. Her powder had a musty, floury smell, like a sweet, rather stale cake. Martha hastily put the lid on the box and slipped it into a drawer, so as to remove the smell. Then she examined herself in the mirror, leaning up on her toes, for it was too high; Mrs Quest was a tall woman. She was by no means resigned to the appearance her mother thought suitable. She spent much time at night, examining herself with a hand mirror; she sometimes propped the mirror by her pillow, and, lying beside it, would murmur like a lover, ‘Beautiful, you are so beautiful.’ This happened when Mrs Quest had made one of her joking remarks about Martha’s clumsiness, or Mr Quest complained that girls in this country matured so early.

She had a broad but shapely face, with a pointed chin, severe hazel eyes, a full mouth, clear straight dark brows. Sometimes she would take the mirror to her parents’ bedroom, and hold it at an angle to the one at the window, and examine herself, at this double remove, in profile; for this view of herself had a delicacy her full face lacked. With her chin tilted up, her loose blonde hair falling back, her lips carefully parted in an eager expectant look, she possessed a certain beauty. But it seemed to her that her face, her head, were something quite apart from her body; she could see herself only in sections, because of the smallness of the mirror. The dresses her mother made looked ugly, even obscene, for her breasts were well grown, and the yokes emphasized them, showing flattened bulges under the tight band of material; and the straight falling line of the skirt was spoiled by her full hips. Her mother said that girls in England did not come out until at the earliest sixteen, but better still eighteen, and girls of a nice family wore dresses of this type until coming out. That she herself had not ‘come out’, and that her family had not by many degrees reached that stage of niceness necessary to coming out, was not enough to deflect her. For on such considerations is the social life of England based, and she was after all quite right in thinking that if only she had married better, or if only their farming had been successful, it would have been possible to arrange with the prosperous branch of the family that Martha should come out. So Martha’s sullen criticisms of her snobbishness had no effect at all; and she would smooth the childish dresses down over Martha’s body, so that the girl stood hunched with resentment, and say with an embarrassed coyness, ‘Dear me, you are getting a pouter pigeon, aren’t you?’

Once, Mrs Van Rensberg, watching this scene, remarked soothingly, ‘But, Mrs Quest, Martha has a nice little figure, why shouldn’t she show it?’ But outwardly the issue was social convention, and not Martha’s figure; and if Mrs Van Rensberg said to her husband that Mrs Quest was going the right way to make Martha ‘difficult’ she could not say so to Mrs Quest herself.

This afternoon was a sudden climax after a long brooding underground rebellion. Standing before the mirror, she took a pair of scissors and severed the bodice from the skirt of her dress. She was trying to make the folds lie like Marnie’s, when the door suddenly opened, and her father came in. He stopped, with an embarrassed look at his daughter, who was naked, save for a tiny pair of pink drawers; but that embarrassment was having it both ways, for if Martha was still a child, then one could look at her naked.

He said gruffly, ‘What are you doing?’ and went to a long cupboard beside his bed, formed of seven petrol boxes, one above another, painted dark green, and covered by a faded print curtain. It was packed with medicine bottles, crammed on top of each other so that a touch might dislodge them into an avalanche. He said moodily, ‘I think I’ll try that new stuff, I’ve a touch of indigestion,’ and tried to find the appropriate bottle. As he held them up to the light of the window, one after another, his eyes fell on Martha, and he remarked, ‘Your mother won’t like you cutting her dresses to pieces.’

She said defiantly, ‘Daddy, why should I wear dresses like a kid of ten?’

He said resentfully, ‘Well, you are a kid. Must you quarrel all the time with your mother?’

Again the door swung in, banging against the wall, and Mrs Quest entered, saying, ‘Why did you run off, Martha, they wanted to tell you about Stephanie, it really is rude of you –‘ She stopped, stared, and demanded, ‘Whatever are you doing?’

‘I’m not wearing this kind of dress any more,’ said Martha, trying to sound calm, but succeeding only in her usual sullen defiance.

‘But, my dear, you’ve ruined it, and you know how badly off we are,’ said Mrs Quest, in alarm at the mature appearance of her daughter’s breasts and hips. She glanced at her husband, then came quickly across the room, and laid her hands on either side of the girl’s waist, as if trying to press her back into girlhood. Suddenly Martha moved backwards, and involuntarily raised her hand; she was shuddering with disgust at the touch of her own mother, and had been going to slap her across the face. She dropped her hand, amazed at her own violence; and Mrs Quest coloured and said ineffectually, ‘My dear …’

‘I’m sixteen,’ said Martha, between set teeth, in a stifled voice; and she looked towards her father, for help. But he quickly turned away, and measured medicine into a glass.

‘My dear, nice girls don’t wear clothes like this until –’

‘I’m not a nice girl,’ broke in Martha, and suddenly burst into laughter.

Mrs Quest joined her in a relieved peal, and said, ‘Really my dear, you are ridiculous.’ And then, on a more familiar note, ‘You’ve spoiled that dress, and it’s not fair to Daddy, you know how difficult it is to find money …’ She stopped again, and followed the direction of Martha’s eyes. Martha was looking at the medicine cupboard. Mrs Quest was afraid that Martha might say, as she had said to her, that there must be hundreds of pounds worth of medicines in that cupboard, and they had spent more on Mr Quest’s imaginary diseases than they had spent on educating her.

This was, of course, an exaggeration. But it was strange that when Martha made these comments Mrs Quest began arguing about the worth of the medicines: ‘Nonsense, dear, you know quite well it can’t be hundreds of pounds.’ She did not say, ‘Your father is very ill.’ For Mr Quest was really ill, he had contracted diabetes three or four years before. And there was an episode connected with this that neither Martha nor Mrs Quest liked to remember. One day, Martha was summoned from her classroom at school in the city to find Mrs Quest waiting for her in the passage. ‘Your father’s ill,’ she exclaimed, and then, seeing that Martha’s face expressed only: Well, there’s nothing new in that, is there?, added hastily, ‘Yes, really, he’s got diabetes, he must go to the hospital and have tests.’ There was a long silence from Martha, who at length muttered, like a sleep-walker, ‘I knew it.’ Almost the moment these words were out, she flushed with guilt; and at once she hastened to the car, where her father sat, and both women fussed over him, while Mr Quest, who was very frightened, listened to their assurances.

When Martha remembered that phrase, which had emerged from her depths, as if it had been waiting for the occasion, she felt uneasy and guilty. Secretly, she could not help thinking, He wanted to be ill, he likes being ill, now he’s got an excuse for being a failure. Worse than this, she accused her mother, in her private thoughts, of being responsible.

The whole business of Mr Quest’s illness aroused such unpleasant depths of emotion between mother and daughter that the subject was left alone, for the most part; and now Mrs Quest said hastily, moving away to the window, ‘You’re upsetting your father, he worries about you.’ Her voice was low and nagging.

‘You mean you worry about me,’ said Martha coldly, unconsciously dropping her voice, with a glance at her father. In a half-whisper she said, ‘He doesn’t even notice we’re here. He hasn’t seen us for years …’ She was astounded to find that her voice shook, she was going to cry.

Mr Quest hastily left the room, persuading himself that his wife and daughter were not quarrelling, and at once Mrs Quest said in a normal voice, ‘You’re a worry to us. You don’t realize. The way you waste money and –‘

Martha cut it short, by walking out of the room and into her own. The door did not lock, or even fasten properly, for it hung crooked. It had been formed of planks, by a native carpenter, and had warped in the rainy seasons, so that to shut it meant a grinding push across a lumpy and swelling lintel. But though it did not lock, there were moments when it invisibly locked, and this was one of them. Martha knew her mother would not come in. She sat on the edge of her bed and cried with anger.

This was the pleasantest room of the house, a big square room, freshly whitewashed, and uncrowded. The walls rose clear to the roof, which slanted down on either side of the ridgepole in a gentle sweep of softly glistening thatch, which had turned a greyish gold with the years. There was a wide, low window that looked directly over a descent of trees to an enormous red field, and a rise on the other side, a fresh parklike bush – for it had never been cut to feed mine furnaces, as had most of the trees on the farm – and beyond this slope rose the big mountain, Jacob’s Burg. It was all flooded with evening sunlight. Sunset: the birds were singing to the day’s end, and the crickets were chirping the approach of night. Martha felt tired, and lay on her low iron bedstead, whose lumpy mattress and pillows had conformed comfortably to the shape of her body. She looked out past the orange-tinted curtains to the sky, which was flooded with wild colours. She was facing, with dubious confidence, what she knew would be a long fight. She was saying to herself, I won’t give in. I won’t; though it would have been hard for her to define what it was she fought.