‘I didn’t go to the pictures. What did you ring me for?’
‘Oh by the way,’ said Mrs Quest, after a confused pause, her breath coming quick, ‘I thought I should tell you Caroline is here for the afternoon and so you should be careful she doesn’t see you.’
Of course! thought Martha. That’s it. I should have guessed. ‘Since I told you earlier I couldn’t get to you until eight, and since Caroline will have gone home long before that, I don’t see the point.’
‘Well, you might have come now, you bad girl, if you weren’t so busy.’ Mrs Quest now sounded playful, even coy, and to forestall anger, Martha said quickly: ‘Tell my father I’ll be there at eight, goodbye, mother.’ She put down the receiver, trembling with rage.
This situation had arisen: Mrs Quest had taken to appropriating her granddaughter several times a week for the day, or for the afternoon. The little girl played in the big garden with her nurse while Mrs Quest supervised from the windows of the room where Mr Quest lay ill. And why not? Martha considered it reasonable that the Quests should have their grandchild, while she, the child’s mother, who had forfeited all right to her, should be excluded. It was quite right she should never be seen by the child; it would upset Caroline, who was now ‘used to’, as everyone said, Elaine Talbot, now Elaine Knowell, the new mother. All this Martha agreed to, accepted, saw the justice of. But on the afternoons Caroline was with her grandmother, Mrs Quest invariably telephoned Martha to say: Caroline’s here, I can see her playing near the fish-pond, she does look pretty today. Or: Be careful not to drop in, Matty, Caroline’s here.
And Martha said, Yes mother. No mother. And never once had she said what her appalled, offended heart repeated over and over again, while she continued to say politely: ‘Yes,’ and ‘Of course’: You’re enjoying this – you love punishing me. This is a victory for you, being free to see the child when I am not – sadistic woman, cruel sadistic woman … So Martha muttered to herself, consumed with hatred for her mother, but consumed ridiculously, since the essence of Martha’s relationship with her mother must be, must, apparently, for ever be, that Mrs Quest ‘couldn’t help it’. Well, she couldn’t.
Now Martha sat, rigid, trembling, seething with thoughts she was ashamed of, knew were unfair and ridiculous, but could not prevent: ‘And now my father’s ill, really ill at last, and so I have to go to that house, and she’s got me just where she wants me, I’m helpless.’
Mr Robinson came out of his office.
‘Mr Robinson?’
‘I was going to say: advertise for a new secretary, you know the sort of thing we want.’
‘I’ll put it in the paper tomorrow. And about that ten pounds?’
‘What ten pounds?’
‘If we’re going to have proper accountants, then …’
For the hundredth time that day (it seemed) he went red and so did she.
‘Forget it,’ he muttered. Then, afraid he had sounded abrupt, he smiled hastily. She smiled brightly back. ‘Thanks,’ she said. He rushed out of the office, slamming the door. Doors slammed all down the centre of the building and then a car roared into movement.
Martha now shut drawers, doors; opened curtains again, exposing yards of heated glass; threw balls of paper into the baskets. The telephone began ringing. It was five minutes after time, so she left the instrument ringing in the hot, glowing room, and walked down the stairs, round and round the core of the building after her employer – probably now several miles away, at the speed he drove. The washroom was empty. Six basins and six square mirrors and a lavatory bowl stood gleamingly clean. The old man who was the building’s ‘boy’ had just finished cleaning. He went out as Martha came in, saying, ‘Good night, missus.’ Martha stood in front of a mirror, and lifted brown arms to her hair, then held them there, looking with a smile at the smooth, perfect flesh, at the small perfect crease in her shoulder.
The smile, however, was dry: she wiped it off her face. It was there too often, and too often did she have to push it away, and make harmless the attitude of mind it came from. She had to survive, she knew that; this phase of her life was sticking it out, waiting, keeping herself ready for when ‘life’ would begin. But that smile … there was a grimness in it that reminded her of the set of her mother’s face when she sat sewing, or was unaware she was being observed.
Martha made up her face, smoothed down pink cotton over hips and thighs, combed her hair. She could not prevent, this time, as she leaned forward into the mirror, a pang of real pain. She was twenty-four years old. She had never been, probably never would be again, as attractive as she was now. And what for? – that was the point. From now, four-thirty on a brilliant March afternoon until midnight, when she would receive Anton’s kiss on her cheek, she would be running from one place to another, seeing one set of people after another, all of them greeting her in a certain way, which was a tribute to – not only her looks at this time – but a quality which she could not define except as it was expressed in reverse, so to speak, by their attitude. Yet she remained locked in herself, and … what a damned waste, she ended these bitter thoughts, as she turned to examine her back view. To the waist only, the mirror was set too high. Because of all the ‘running around’ – Anton’s phrase for it; because her life at this time was nothing but seeing people, coping with things, dealing with situations and people, one after another, she was thin, she was ‘in a thin phase’, she was again ‘a slim blonde’. Well, almost: being blonde is probably more a quality of texture than of colour: Martha was not sleek enough to earn the word blonde.
And besides, what was real in her, underneath these metamorphoses of style or shape or – even, apparently – personality, remained and intensified. The continuity of Martha now was in a determination to survive – like everyone else in the world, these days, as she told herself; it was in a watchfulness, a tension of the will that was like a small flickering of light, like the perpetual tiny dance of lightning on the horizon from a storm so far over the earth’s curve it could only show reflected on the sky. Martha was holding herself together – like everybody else. She was a lighthouse of watchfulness; she was a being totally on the defensive. This was her reality, not the ‘pretty’ or ‘attractive’ Martha Hesse, a blondish, dark-eyed young woman who smiled back at her from the mirror where she was becomingly set off in pink cotton that showed a dark shadow in the angle of her hips. Yet it was the ‘attractive’ Matty Hesse she would take now to see Maisie; and it was necessary to strengthen, to polish, to set off the attractive Matty, the shell, because above all Maisie always understood by instinct what was going on underneath everybody’s false shells, and this was why Martha loved being with Maisie, but knew at the same time she must protect herself … there were fifteen minutes before Maisie expected her. Martha lit a cigarette, propped herself on the edge of a washbasin, shut her eyes, and let bitter smoke drift up through her teeth. She felt the smoke’s touch on the down of her cheek, felt it touch and cling to her lashes, her brows.
She must keep things separate, she told herself.
Last Saturday morning she had spent with Maisie, relaxed in a good-humoured grumbling gossip, a female compliance in a pretence at accepting resignation. And what had been the result of that pleasure, the delight of being off guard? Why, the situation she was now in with Maisie, a false situation. She had not kept things separate, that was why.
Martha’s dreams, always a faithful watchdog, or record, of what was going on, obligingly provided her with an image of her position. Her dream at this time, the one which recurred, like a thermometer, or gauge, from which she could check herself, was of a large house, a bungalow, with half a dozen different rooms in it, and she, Martha (the person who held herself together, who watched, who must preserve wholeness through a time of dryness and disintegration), moved from one room to the next, on guard. These rooms, each furnished differently, had to be kept separate – had to be, it was Martha’s task for this time. For if she did not – well, her dreams told her what she might expect. The house crumbled dryly under her eyes into a pile of dust, broken brick, a jut of ant-eaten rafter, a slant of rusting iron. And then, while she watched, the ruin changed: it was the house of the kopje, collapsed into a mess of ant-tunnelled mud, ant-consumed grass, where red ant-made tunnels wove a net, like red veins, over the burial mound of Martha’s soul, over the rotting wood, rotting grass, subsiding mud; and bushes and trees, held at bay so long (but only just, only very precariously) by the Quests’ tenancy, came striding in, marching over the fragments of substance originally snatched from the bush, to destroy the small shelter for the English family that they had built between teeming earth and brazen African sky.
Yes, she knew that – Martha knew that, if she could not trust her judgement, or rather, if her judgement of outside things, people, was like a light that grew brighter, harsher, as the area it covered grew smaller, she could trust with her life (and with her death, these dreams said) the monitor, the guardian, who stood somewhere, was somewhere in this shell of substance, smooth brown flesh so pleasantly curved into the shape of a young woman with smooth browny-gold hair, alert dark eyes. The guardian was to be trusted in messages of life and death; and to be trusted too when the dream (the Dream, she was beginning to think of it, it came in so many shapes and guises, and so often) moved back in time, or perhaps forward – she did not know; and was no longer the shallow town house of thin brick, and cement and tin, no longer the farm house of grass and mud; but was tall rather than wide, reached up, stretched down, was built layer on layer, but shadowy above and below the shallow mid-area comprising (as they say in the house agents’ catalogues) ‘comprising six or so rooms’ for which this present Martha was responsible, and which she must keep separate.
Keeping separate meant defeating, or at least holding at bay, what was best in her. The warm response to ‘the biggest legal firm in the city’; the need to put her arms around Mr Robinson when he hurt himself so cruelly on the drawer; the need to say Yes, to comply, to melt into situations; the pleasant relationship with Maisie – well, all this wouldn’t do, she must put an end to it. She had simply to accept, finally, that her role in life, for this period, was to walk like a housekeeper in and out of different rooms, but the people in the rooms could not meet each other or understand each other, and Martha must not expect them to. She must not try and explain, or build bridges.
Between now and twelve tonight, she would have moved from the office and Mr Robinson, up-and-coming lawyer, future Member of Parliament, with his wife, his two children, and his house in the suburbs, to Maisie; from Maisie to Joss and Solly Cohen; from them, the Cohen boys, to old Johnny Lindsay; from the old miner’s sick-bed to her father’s, nursed by her mother; from the Quests’ house to Anton. None of these people knew each other, or could meet with understanding. Improbably (almost impossibly, she thought) Martha was the link between them. And, a more violently discordant association than any of these, there was Mr Maynard. Mr Maynard was after Maisie, he was on the scent after Maisie, through her, Martha – which brought her back to her immediate preoccupation.
It was her duty to explain to Maisie, to warn Maisie … the cigarette was finished, and she must leave. She left the washroom door swinging softly behind her, and ran down the wide bare steps, and into the clanging, shouting, sun-glittering street. Her bicycle was in the rack on the pavement. She dropped it into the river of traffic, slid up on to it, and was off down the street, but turned sideways to detour past the parking lot whose edges were now loaded with great mounds of jade-green frothing grass, like waves with white foam on them, past the gum trees whose trunks shed loose coils of scented bark; past the Indian stores and then back in a great curve into Founders’ Street. It was, in fact, as the crow flew (or as a young woman might choose to bicycle straight along the street, instead of detouring past grass verges where midges danced in a swoon of grass-scent and eucalyptus) only a few hundred yards from Robinson, Daniel and Cohen’s new offices to where Maisie lived. Founders’ Street had not changed. On the very edge of the new glittering modern centre, it remained low and shabby, full of odorous stores, cheap cafés, wholesale warehouses, small grass lots with bits of rusted iron and dark-skinned children playing, full of the explosive vitality of the unrespectable. There was a bar called Webster’s on a corner, which Martha had never been in, since women did not go into the bars of the city, and besides it was ugly, and besides it usually had groups of men standing about outside it, with the violent look of men waiting for bars to open, or hanging about in frustration because a bar has closed. But Maisie now lived over this place, in two rooms directly above the bar, and she worked in Webster’s as a barmaid.
Martha came to rest at the kerb, lifted the bicycle up on to the pavement, then left it leaning, locked with a chain like a tethered dog, while she squeezed back against the wall past a dark glass window that had Webster’s on it in scratched white paint. Half a dozen Africans lifted crates of beer from a lorry, which had the name of the city’s brewery on its side, to the pavement, and from the pavement to the open door of the bar. It was nearly opening time, and a couple of youths in khaki, farm assistants, from the look of them, hung smoking by the open door, watching the crates being shouldered in past a red-sweaty-faced, paunchy man in shirt sleeves who frowned his concentration that the beer-handlers should not crash or damage the great bottle-jammed crates. As Martha went past him to the small side door that led to Maisie’s rooms, a violent crash, a splintering of glass, angry shouts from the red-faced man, who was presumably Mr Webster? and complaints, expostulations, even a laugh from the watching farm assistants. A sudden sour reek of beer across the sun-baked street. Martha ascended dark wooden stairs fast, away from the beer stench. She knocked on Maisie’s door and heard: ‘Is that you, Matty? Come in then.’ She entered on a scene of a small child being put to bed for the night.
The two rooms, small and crammed, but very bright, had in them Maisie, a black nurse-girl, and the baby girl Rita, now about a year old. The child did not want to go to bed. She was fighting the nurse. ‘I-don’t-want-nursie, I-don’t-want,’ while the girl, indefatigably good-humoured, was trying to push windmilling arms and legs into scarlet pyjamas. ‘There Miss Rita, there now Miss Rita.’
Maisie surveyed this scene from the doorway between the rooms, smoking; the soft blue of her cotton dress pushed out in a great bulge by the hip she rested her weight on. She wore a white wool jacket, and as Martha came in, dusted ash off it with one hand, while she raised her eyes with the same cosmos-questioning gesture and shrug she had once used for: ‘And who’d be a woman, hey?’ But now she was saying: ‘Well, Matty, who’d be a mother, man? Just look at her.’
Nevertheless, she smiled, and the nurse-girl smiled, having safely accomplished the task of getting all four dissident little limbs disposed in the scarlet arms and legs of the pyjamas. Now Rita stuck her thumb in her mouth and blinked great black eyes, fighting each heavy blink, blink, with an obstinate tightening of her face. She was fighting sleep. Peace. Silence. The black girl smiled at Maisie, and began picking up garments from all over the room. Rita was scooped up by her mother, where she stood to attention, as it were, in her arms. Maisie tried to rock and cradle the child, but Rita would not go limp. A little stubborn bulldog, she tightened her lips in a determination not to sleep. Meanwhile Maisie, a cigarette hanging from her lips, blew smoke out above the small head. Suddenly, the child went limp, she was half-asleep. Maisie looked down into the child’s face, thoughtful, frowning. Martha came up close to look too. Martha did not touch the child. Last Saturday, when Rita had put her arms around the knees of her mother’s friend, Maisie had called her away and said: ‘Yes, I can see it must be hard for you, when you’ve not got your own kid, I can see that.’ Maisie was winding a piece of Rita’s black hair around her finger. But the hair was straight, and simply fell loose again. Maisie stood with a cigarette in her mouth, Rita cradled in one arm, trying with her free hand to make ringlets in Rita’s hair. Then she put up her hand to wind a strand of her own fair hair around her forefinger. It sprang off in a perfect ringlet. Ash scattered on the red pyjamas, and Martha rescued the cigarette. ‘Thanks, Matty, you’re a pal.’ The child sucked her thumb noisily, the small pink lips working around the white wet thumb. She blinked, blinked. Maisie gave up the attempt to make the heavy black hair curl, and took a cautious step towards the small bed beside her big one. The child opened her eyes and started up, struggling to stand in her mother’s arms.
‘Let me,’ said Martha, and nodded in response to Maisie’s quick look of enquiry. Rita went into Martha’s arms, staring in solemn curiosity into the new face close to hers.
‘She’s old for her age,’ said Maisie. ‘Do you know what, Matty? I think they’re born older than they used to be. Sometimes Rita just gives me the creeps, watching me, you’d think she knew everything already.’ Certainly it was a serious and knowledgeable look. Martha did not feel she held a tiny child in her arms, and it made things easier, for this was the first time she had held a baby since she had left her own. She held the solid heavy little girl, while Maisie stripped off her dress and said: ‘Poor Matty, but perhaps one of these days you’ll have another baby and then you’ll forget all your sorrow.’
‘Yes, I expect I will,’ said Martha. She sat on Maisie’s bed, holding the child carefully. Rita was at last going to sleep, at last she seemed a baby – small, warm, confiding. Maisie stood in her pink satin petticoat, her strong white legs planted firmly, and frowned into a mirror, while she wet her eyebrows with a forefinger. The nurse came in and said: ‘Can I go home now, missus?’ ‘Yes, you go home, nursie.’ ‘I’ll do Miss Rita’s washing in the morning.’ ‘Yes, that’s fine.’ ‘Good night, Miss Maisie.’ ‘Good night, nursie.’ The girl nodded at Martha, with a quick unconscious smile of love for the sleeping child, and went out.
‘She’s a good girl,’ said Maisie. ‘She’s got two kids of her own, she leaves them with her mom in the Location. I tell her she’s lucky to have her mom near her, I wish I did.’ She frowned, stretching her mouth to take lipstick. ‘Her husband, or so she calls him, has gone to the mines in Jo’burg, well, I tell her she’s lucky to be rid of him, men are more trouble than they are worth.’
Now she put on a cocktail dress, suitable for her calling as a barmaid. It was a bright blue crêpe, tight over the big hips, pleated and folded marvellously over the breasts, showing large areas of solid white neck and white shoulder. She put on diamanté ear-rings, a diamanté brooch. She inspected herself, then used thumb and forefinger to crimp her pale hair into waves around her face. Martha thought: I wonder what Andrew would say if he could see Maisie now, and this apparently communicated itself to Maisie, for she turned from the mirror, smiling unpleasantly, to say, ‘If Andrew could see me, he’d have a fit. Well, that’s his funeral, isn’t it?’ She now came over to Martha, lifted the baby, and slid her under the covers of the little bed. Off went the light. The room, dimmed, seemed larger. Except for the child’s bed, it was exactly the same as the bedroom in the flat where Maisie had lived with Andrew. The same plump blue shining quilt, the same trinkets and pictures. A girl’s bedroom. But no photographs – not a sign of them: Binkie and Maisie’s three husbands were not here.
‘Have you heard from Andrew yet?’
‘Yes, strangely enough. He said would I come to England to live. But I can’t see myself. Of course you want to go to England and I can see that it takes all sorts.’
She now sat near Martha on the bed, offered her a cigarette, lit one herself, and said: ‘Everything’s nuts. When the war was bad, well, we used to think, the war will be over soon, and so will our troubles. But it just goes on. Well, they say it’s going to be over soon but why should it? I mean, they had a war for a hundred years once, didn’t they? But Athen says it will be over soon.’
‘Have you seen Athen?’
Maisie’s face changed to an expression Martha had seen there before, when Athen was mentioned. A new look – resentment. ‘He came in to see me last week. Well, he’s too good for this world, I can tell you that!’ Then she sighed, lost her bitterness and said: ‘Yes, it’s a fact, he’s not long for this world.’ At Martha’s look she nodded and insisted: ‘Yes, it’s true when they say the good people go first. Look at my two first husbands, they’re dead, aren’t they?’ ‘And Andrew’s bad just because he’s still alive?’ said Martha, smiling.
At this Maisie jumped up and said: ‘We’ll wake Rita if we natter in here.’ She pushed open the window and instantly the room reeked from the spilt beer on the pavement just below. She shut the window again, saying: ‘Well, lucky it’ll be winter soon, I can have the windows shut. Sometimes I can’t stand the smell, and then the men from the bar start fighting and being sick so I can’t sleep sometimes.’
She went into the other room and Martha followed.
‘I’m late for the bar,’ said Maisie, and sat down calmly, to smoke. ‘Athen says he wants to see you, Matty.’
‘Well, I’m always happy to see him.’
‘Yes, he’s one of the people …’ Again resentment, a sighing, puzzled resentment. ‘All the same, Matty. He said I shouldn’t be working in a bar. I said to him: “All right then, you find me a job where I can have my baby, just above my work all the time, you find me that job and I’ll take it.” And then he went on and on, so I said: “And what about your mom and your sisters? Didn’t you tell me the things they had to do because they were poor? They had to do bad things. And your sister married a man she didn’t love because he said he’d pay your mom’s debts. Well, you said that didn’t you?” And he said: “Yes, but they were poor and you aren’t.” Well, Matty, that made me so mad …’ Her voice was shaking, her eyes full of tears. ‘Excuse me a sec, Matty.’ She went to the bedroom to fetch a handkerchief, and came back saying: ‘Well, who’d be a woman, eh?’ exactly as she used to; and Martha saw the old, maidenly, fighting Maisie in the fat barmaid dressed garishly for her work.
Martha said, with difficulty: ‘You know, Maisie, I used to think you could love Athen if …’
Maisie gave Martha a look, first conscious, then defiant. ‘Love. That’s right. Well, he’s the best man I’ve ever known in my life, I’ll grant you that much. But what would he do with me in Greece? He doesn’t even know when they’re sending him back. There are six Greeks hanging about here, all trained to the ears to be pilots, but they don’t send them to Greece. Athen says it’s because of politics. Well, but he won’t be a pilot after the war, and he used to be a newspaper seller. But anyway, I wouldn’t be good enough for him, would I? I told you, he’s too good for this world and I told him that too.’
‘So he’s coming to see me?’
‘He’s got a message about something. Something political about the blacks, I think it was. He told me but I forgot. He said he’d come this week so expect him. And you can tell him from me I’m not a bad girl just because I work in a bar.’
‘Well, Maisie, I don’t believe he really thinks so.’
