Martha Quest (25 page)

There was a short, astonished silence, while everyone looked at the smooth, down-drooping face in its madonna pose; and Andrew said crudely, ‘Fat lot you care,’ and gave a sardonic laugh.

But Stella was conscious that this apparent lack of sympathy was
only on the surface a discord. She laughed, gave another conquering glance around, and then waited, as if to say, ‘Well, I’ve done my turn, the young married turn, and now are you ready to do your part?’ She sat drinking, in silence, waiting for someone to take up the torch of conversation. But no one did. So she continued: Now that she was openly married, she had had to give up her job—her firm did not employ married women; they were very, very poor. (She said this with an appropriate sigh.) Even the furniture would have been hire-purchase but for the grace of Andrew’s father, who had come round with it as a belated wedding present. Really, things had been so bad (here she gave a long dark, liquid look sideways at her craggy and forthright husband) that positively it had almost come to sleeping on the floor; she had been prepared to sleep on the floor, to be with her chosen. But here Andrew gave another sardonic snort, which checked her for a moment, and she smilingly took a sip of her drink, and looked with satisfaction down at her extended naked toes—she had beautiful, small feet. Then she complained gently that this was a terrible place to live in, because the neighbours kept protesting because of their parties—but really, one couldn’t end a party before dawn, how could you? Everyone went to bed so early in this country, and—here she hesitated the briefest moment before smoothly switching the talk into a more reckless channel—really, what with one thing and another, she and Andy were reduced to making love only in the afternoons, and on Saturdays at that, because the neighbours…

And now everyone laughed, with relief, for this note united what she actually said with that other conversation her body held on its own, with everybody, man or woman; and Andrew said gruffly that she was a disgusting wench, and a damned liar, because he couldn’t imagine her starving on love once a week; and here she gave a yell of laughter, and said he was a hypocrite.

Martha, even while she was slowly involved in this, the new atmosphere, with its taboos and licence, based on the young couple, understood (though with difficulty, since she had not encountered it before) that the grudging practical look of Andrew, his gruff, protest
ing voice, was only assumed; or if not he was letting that part of himself out on leash; he was not only prepared to see his wife display herself thus to others, but he was an accomplice. Such a reversal was it to Martha’s instinctively held ideas, that she was continually, surreptitiously looking to Stella for signs that she resented being shown off. For she was remembering her own continuous half-suppressed resentment of the way Donovan showed her off.

And in the meantime Donovan was curiously silent, for him; he lounged and watched, and laughed admiringly at Stella; Ruth smiled carefully, blinking her red-rimmed, watchful eyes; Perry sat stiffly in a shallow chair which looked as if it would splay out under the weight of his big body, and listened unsmilingly, while from time to time—at those moments when laughter was jerked out of him by Stella—he threw back his head with a sudden dismayed movement, and flung half a glass of liquor down his throat.

Soon, when the subject of love-making lost its piquancy, Stella put on a womanly, serious look, and began talking to Donovan. They were the greatest friends in the world, it seemed, they knew everything about each other, and yet they had not seen each other for six months, and that was at another party. Similarly, Martha found herself being treated with the same simple, affectionate intimacy by Andrew; she soon felt as close to him as to an old friend. And Perry too: when it was his turn to be charmed by Stella into the circle of amity, he turned his great body over sideways in the fragile little chair, and allowed himself to be coaxed by Stella’s merry, warm glance into what was almost loquacity. He was uneasy, he did not like it, but he allowed Stella to hold his hand, and at the same time (as if her naked, gleaming shoulders, that small white hand, could have no connection at all with the words they were using) talked to her slowly, seriously, about the finances of the Sports Club, and listened solemnly to her tales of Hong Kong, where she had been brought up.

It was getting late, and cold too; for outside it was raining from the now slow-moving masses of ragged, fitfully moonlit cloud. But when Stella caught herself in a yawn, she cried out that it was impossi
ble to go to bed and she was starving. They therefore descended through the bowels of the building again, in the big lift, and ran through the rain to the cars, and so off down to the hot-dog stands. The town was dead and asleep, under the slow cold rain; but the hot-dog stands were like a small gypsy camp that had sprung up in a side street. All along the pavements, night after night, until dawn, these small high rooms, lit with swinging hurricane lamps, perched on their wheels, and supplied food to the taste of all comers: big mixed grills, rolls filled with eggs, ham, sausages, cups of hot weak coffee or very strong tea, and there were shelves piled with tinned food, which would be opened to order. Martha had often come here to eat, with Donovan, after the pictures.

Stella did not want to leave the car to join the crowds at the stalls. She was in a sentimental mood. She leaned her graceful head against her husband’s shoulder, and, it appeared, was no longer hungry, for she did not eat. No one was particularly hungry. But an inertia had settled on them, they could not bear to go to bed, and all around the stalls were ranks of cars filled with people, similarly afflicted. It was four in the morning, neither day nor night; the lights of the stalls glimmering weakly; the black waiters stood yawning over their trays, or beside the stoves; and half the youth of the town ate and drank, watching the sky for that first spear of red light which would release them, so that they might go to bed, saying they had been up all night. But the sky was obscured. The moon appeared briefly, small and hard and bright in the welter of wet dark cloud, and vanished, this time finally. It rained steadily, making an illuminated yellow mist around the lamps. Martha yawned, and was chided for letting the side down; and they ordered more rolls, more coffee; and at last a grey damp light grew along the streets, the houses seemed to darken, harden into shapes, and a weak pallid glow in the sky announced the dawn, which must be plunging in violent rose and gold above the clouds, but here was no more than a reflection of imagined splendour. And now they could go home.

Martha was dropped at the kerb from Donovan’s car, but it was
Perry who came to the door and kissed her; from which she understood she was now Perry’s girl and not Donovan’s. She was alone, it was five in the morning, and there was no point in going to bed if one must be up again in a couple of hours.

She opened her parcel of books and yawned till her jaws ached, and drank tea, sitting on the floor; and reflected that Stella and Andrew—an already sufficiently interesting combination—and Donovan and Ruth, and she and Perry, six people so ill-assorted it might seem they would have nothing to say to each other, not only had spent a pleasant evening together, but were planning to be together the following evening. For it had been taken for granted, under the spell of that intimacy, that of course they must be together; they could not bear to be separated. They would go dancing, having first taken sundowners in the Mathews’s flat; they would then…

And here Martha, feeling chilled, moved from where she leaned against the bed, and sat in the elongated square of weak, wet sunlight that already lay across the matting, and slowly succumbed to disgust that deepened coldly within her as her flesh warmed to the warming sunlight. She was thinking that she had not been in town more than a few weeks and already she was bored and longing for something different; also she was consumed by such a passion of restlessness that the conflict made her feel weak and sick. She was thinking that at any moment during the last evening, had she been asked, she would have replied that she was bored; yet, as she looked back on it, her nerves responded with a twinge of excitement. She knew that the coming evening would be as barren, and yet she could not think of it without pleasure.

Even more painful than this cold-minded analysis was the knowledge that it was all so banal; just as the stare from that dispassionate cool eye, which judged herself as adolescent, and therefore inevitably contradictory and dissatisfied, was harder to bear than the condition of adolescence itself. She was, in fact, suffering from the form of moral exhaustion which is caused by seeing a great many facts without knowing the cause for them; by seeing oneself as an isolated person,
without origin or destination. But since the very condition of her revolt, her very existence had been that driving individualism, what could she do now?

Slowly, and after a long interval, she began to think of Joss, who was never in any doubt about what was the right thing to do. Joss would say it all served her right, this was what she could expect; she should have telephoned Jasmine and joined the Left Book Club—and at this point she began to laugh with the nervous helplessness that is the result of an anticlimax. For that was how she felt it: that all the terrific, restless force embodied in her was too powerful to be confined in the Left Book Club, and she began to feel critical and hurt at Joss, as if he had been unsympathetic, unfeeling, as if he had misunderstood her. She was mentally criticizing him, exactly as if he were responsible for her, and her failures and triumphs should belong to him. Since this criticism received no reply, her mental image of him remained stubbornly sorrowfully silent; her mind slipped into a heightened mazy condition, and in a fevered daydream she imagined that some rich and unknown relation would come forward with a hundred pounds, and say, ‘Here, Martha Quest, you deserve this, this is to set you free.’

For there was no doubt that the root of all this dissatisfaction was that she deserved something life had not offered her. The daydream locked not only her mind, but her limbs; soon she was cramped and stiff, and she had to get up and move about the room, till the blood flowed back, and she went to the door to receive the flood of now soft and hotly welcoming sunlight. It was as if the night had never been; for the light was heavy and rich and yellow, the sky was as thick with rain clouds as it had been yesterday, there was still the oppressive atmosphere of coming storm. There was the ringing of hard boots on tarmac, and the soft padding of bare feet. She stood quite still while past her moved a file of men. First, two policemen in the boots, their crisp khaki tunics belted tight, their buttons shining, their little hats cocked at an angle. Then perhaps twenty black men and women, in various clothing, barefooted and shabby. Then, following these, two
more policemen. The prisoners were handcuffed together, and it was these hands that caught Martha’s attention: the working hands, clasped together by broad and gleaming steel, held carefully at waist level, steady against the natural movement of swinging arms—the tender dark flesh cautious against the bite of the metal. These people were being taken to the magistrate for being caught at night after curfew, or forgetting to carry one of the passes which were obligatory, or—but there were a dozen reasons, each as flimsy. Now, Martha had seen this sight so often that she was not dulled to it so much as patiently angry. She marched, in imagination, down the street, one of the file, feeling the oppression of a police state as if it were heavy on her; and at the same time was conscious of the same moral exhaustion which had settled on her earlier.

She was thinking, It’s all so dreadful, not because it exists, merely, but because it exists
now
. She was thinking—for, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other way—that all this had been described in Dickens, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silent—for here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding. The faces of the policemen, however, were the faces of those doing what they were paid to do.

And what now? demanded that sarcastic voice inside Martha; and it answered itself, Go out and join the Prisoners’ Aid Society. Here she sank into self-derisory impotence, and, leaving the door, returned to her room. A clock was chiming hurriedly from the back veranda. Seven o’clock, time to dress for the office. But first she lifted the books from the floor, and looked through them as if she were looking for a kind of deliverance. An advertisement in the
New Statesman and Nation
had brought her certain poets; and she hastily opened some volumes and glanced through them.

She read it with deepening anger, for mentally she was still marching with that file of prisoners.

Did it once issue from the carver’s hand healthy? demanded the black print silently; and Martha passionately averred that it had, it had—and turned the page quickly.

This poem she read through several times; and she watched herself sliding into the gulf of rich and pleasurable melancholy where she was so dangerously at home, while a sarcastic and self-destructive voice inside her remarked, Well, well, and did you see
that
?

The clock struck one, a clear dissolving note, and she thought, I must be quick, and snatched up another volume. Not the twilight of the gods, she read, but a precise dawn of sallow and grey brick, and the newsboys crying war…

The word ‘war’ separated itself, and she thought of her father, and with irritation. He would like a war, too, she thought angrily; and she took her things and went to the bathroom. They say there’s going to be a war because they want one, she thought confusedly; for since it was necessary to resist her parents, it was necessary to resist this voice too.