Martha Quest (28 page)

When they were seated, he said, ‘I’ve played in this band.’

She was going to reply, as if accepting information, ‘Have you?’ Then she understood, and said, with a dry smile that was already, after knowing him not more than three or four hours, like a tolerant, ironic comment, ‘Well, and why shouldn’t you?’

Again his face was tormented by mingled sarcasm, gratitude and relief. Soon her impatience grew intolerable, and she suggested they should leave. The place was half empty, everyone was dancing up at the Club. Irrationally, she longed to be there. He said quickly, ‘You’d like to be dancing with the others, wouldn’t you?’

‘I could have gone if I’d wanted,’ she said, and got up from her chair, adding that she was tired and wanted to go to bed.

She went home, and spent the evening reading. She hoped nervously that he had found her dull, and would not attempt to get in touch with her again. She even brought herself to believe this, so that she succeeded in feeling surprised when the telephone rang next day
and he asked her to spend the evening with him. Because of this surprise she felt, she accepted, but in a hasty, confused way, which he complained about the moment he set eyes on her again.

‘Why did you sound so cold on the telephone?’

‘I didn’t—I didn’t mean to,’ she apologized.

Again they went to the night club when it was still empty; and afterwards to the pictures, reversing the usual procedure; and again she said she wanted to go to bed early. By now she was in a condition of bewildered apathy; her emotions were in a turmoil. By turns she pitied him, hated him, felt protective, despised him, while all the time her imagination was at work, making him into an interesting and persecuted figure. She told herself he was intelligent, meaning simply that her image of him had this dubious, fantastic quality. She had discovered, through persistent questioning, that he was a Polish Jew, that his parents had emigrated to South Africa during the gold rush, that his father had been a jeweller in Johannesburg. All this had a romantic air, she was fascinated, and tried to make him talk of it, but he answered stiffly and reluctantly. Finally, he doused the fires of her imagination, by saying, like any conventional British colonial, that he had come to this country at the earliest opportunity because it was British. He was now naturalized. Martha was thinking of the Cohen boys, she was wondering at the difference between them and this man; but by now her feelings were so deeply involved that she could not afford to think very clearly. She pitied him too much to say he was unpleasant and cowardly; she was ready to fight the world on his behalf—or at least her world.

On the third evening of their acquaintance, she was sitting with him at McGrath’s when she understood that someone must be staring at her, because of her strong desire to turn her head. She turned it, and saw Stella and Andrew and Donovan, sitting by themselves in a corner and smiling pointedly at her. She waved and smiled; but Stella made insistent signs that she wanted to speak to her. Martha thought this was an invitation to both of them, and looked at Adolph, who, however, was watching her with a fixed and deadly smile.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘She wants to speak to you.’

Martha flushed at his tone, and promptly rose and went across to the other table, where she stood waiting by Stella’s side.

‘You’re a naughty girl,’ began Donovan. ‘You just have to be different, don’t you, Matty dear?’

‘Different about what?’ she said coldly, and turned pointedly away from him, looking at Stella. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘You shouldn’t be here with Dolly,’ said Stella, in that discreet womanly voice of hers, which was several tones lower than her usual one.

Martha elaborately raised her eyebrows and glanced at Andrew. He, however, looked away; he was obviously embarrassed. ‘Why not?’ she asked bluntly.

Stella’s colour was higher than usual, and her eyes were evasive. At the same time she managed to look both sympathetic and self-righteous. It was this look that Martha could see embarrassed Andrew. ‘You should take our word for it,’ said Stella softly. ‘We’re older than you.’

This was a fatal argument to use to Martha; and she looked direct at Stella, meaning to convey by that look that she was shocked by what seemed to be disgraceful dishonesty. Stella maintained the responsible, womanly dignity, while her eyes shone with scandalized delight. Martha therefore said shortly that she was a big girl now and could look after herself. She said goodbye formally, and returned to Adolph, wishing that she did not so vividly feel the glances she received as disapproving. She told herself she was being influenced by Adolph’s persecution complex.

She sat down beside him, smiling tenderly for the benefit of observers, but this smile fled as he said, ‘Well, they’ve warned you not to be seen in public with a disgusting Jew.’

‘You seem to forget Stella’s Jewish herself.’

‘Yes, but she’s from an old English family, she’s not scum from Eastern Europe, like me.’

Martha stared, coloured, then laughed scornfully. ‘Really, you
are ridiculous,’ she said, not realizing that this cold scorn was possible only because she saw these distinctions from the heights of her British complacency. She laughed, but immediately checked herself, for there was a look of such hurt on his face that she could not bear it. ‘Don’t take any notice,’ she said protectively. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

He rose at once, in his obedient way, and they left the hotel; and this time she did not say she wanted to go to bed early. Instead, she assented when he suggested they might drive for a bit, and found herself pouring scorn on Stella and Donovan (she omitted Andrew, for some reason) for being Philistines, and on the whole Sports Club crowd for being…Here she hesitated, before she was off down that slippery slope of compelled confession that was like a moment of madness, but she did not know the words for what she felt; she was thinking of Perry. The men of the Sports Club were disgusting, they were like little boys, they just messed about and…her voice lamely faltered into silence. She was blushing painfully, and hoped it was too dark to show. Adolph was watching her intently, and after a moment showed that he had understood her only too well, by saying that it was all very well, but she was rather young. This was unbearable; she protested that she wasn’t young; then laughed, remembering that she was, after all, eighteen. But the word ‘youth’ meant to her only something defiant, a reminder of her right to do as she pleased. Again his quickness took her off guard, for he nodded and said, ‘Well, if you know what you are doing.’ This checked her; and she did not reply.

He turned the car at a corner, and began driving back to town. She was wondering why she must always rush into these moments of urgent speech; she was feeling lost, self-abandoned and she glanced at Adolph, half hoping that he was taking her back to her room, so that she might evade the choice. Then another emotion, a fearful, clutching need to grasp whatever came her way, made her hope that he was taking her to his; it never entered her head to ask him into her room, the idea would have seemed preposterous.

Soon, outside a big house gleaming with lights which fell across a wide shadowy garden, he stopped, with that characteristic gesture
of holding the car on its brakes while he let the engine purr a little louder than usual, as if he would take an opposite course at the drop of her hat. ‘Coming in?’ he suggested in a soft, suggestive voice. This tone offended her, and she hesitated. At once he said, ‘Please come in,’ and she saw it as a challenge to her generosity.

‘Of course,’ she said gaily. She was now on a wave of elation, and walked up the path between flowerbeds, talking rather too loudly, while he followed in silence. There was a side veranda, and he unlocked a door and they went into a large room that had curving windows all around the front, overlooking the garden. This gave a tweak at her memory; and she stood still, frowning, wondering why nostalgia was sickening her nerves, and looked at those curving windows—‘like the prow of a ship,’ she thought vaguely. Then she knew he was watching her, and instinctively intensified the dreamy absorption of her face for his admiration.

He said, with his uncertain laugh, ‘Don’t look so aloof,’ and, stung, she turned swiftly, smiling, to see that his smile had already gone from his face: he could never maintain any sort of criticism for longer than a moment, it vanished instantly, in fear of a snub; and at this thought she again dissolved in pity for him.

He was sitting on the extreme edge of his bed, that small dark man, with his watchful eyes and cautiously poised head, the suggestion of dammed power in the taut limbs. She became nervous; as usual, he was waiting to see what
she
would do. Since she did nothing, he said softly, forcing himself into direct speech, and letting the last words die away into a hesitating mumble, ‘I suppose you’ve changed your mind.’

‘About what?’ she asked swiftly and quite sincerely, for it is true, though it might seem unlikely, that she had never directly admitted to herself why she was here.

He was now able to be sarcastic, and it was without any hesitation of manner that he said, ‘Of course, I knew you wouldn’t.’

Recklessly she walked across to him, feeling that again, as usual, she was being pulled down a current which she did not understand,
and stood beside him, laughing. He half violently, half doubtfully pulled her to the bed, arranged her on it, looked at her, kissed her in an experimental way, looked at her again, hesitated, then muttered an excuse, and went to the dressing table, from which he returned loosening his tie with one hand while he held in the other a packet that he had taken from a drawer. He sat on the edge of the bed, pulled off his shoes, laying them neatly side by side, and began unbuttoning his clothes. Martha lay as if her limbs had been struck by a nervous paralysis, conquering the impulse to avert her eyes, which might have been interpreted by herself, if not by him, as prudishness. There was something dismaying about these methodical preparations. Like getting ready for an operation, she thought involuntarily.

Then, having made sure that everything was satisfactorily arranged, Adolph swung his legs up so that he lay parallel, and began to make love to her, using the forms of sensitive experience, so that she was partly reassured and partly chilled, while she arranged the facts of what was occurring to fit an imaginative demand already framed in her mind. Nor was she disappointed. For if the act fell short of her demand, that ideal, the-thing-in-itself, that mirage, remained untouched, quivering exquisitely in front of her. Martha, final heir to the long romantic tradition of love, demanded nothing less than that the quintessence of all experience, all love, all beauty, should explode suddenly in a drenching, saturating moment of illumination. And since this was what she demanded, the man himself seemed positively irrelevant—this was at the bottom of her attitude, though she did not know it. For this reason, then, it was easy for her to say she was not disappointed, that everything still awaited her; and afterwards she lay coiled meekly beside him like a woman in love, for her mind had swallowed the moment of disappointment whole, like a python, so that he, the man, and the mirage were able once again to fuse together, in the future.

Almost immediately he remarked that her friends at the Sports Club would be furious if they knew.

‘I expect they would,’ said Martha indifferently. The Sports Club
people, and Stella and Donovan and Andrew, seemed immeasurably distant. The act of love had claimed her from them, and she now belonged to this man. She remained silent, looked at his smooth, dark-skinned body; he was not fat or plump, but the flesh lay close and even over the small bones, like a warm and darkened wax, the dark tendrils of hair on his chest glistened, and she played with them, after an initial reluctance—the thought had flashed through her mind that this man’s body was wrong for her, that she was having her first love affair with a man she was not at all in love with. She suppressed it at once, and when they rose and dressed she maintained a simple and demure manner, as if she were altogether at his disposal; and ignored a slow and persistent resentment that was beginning to flood out every other emotion.

They went down to the Knave of Clubs. Martha wondered why it was that before he had always hastily left when the crowd came in; now he remained, dancing every dance, smiling his uncertain smile, in which there was more than a hint of triumph. It annoyed Martha. Every time she lifted her face and saw that small gleaming smile, she had to smother anger. She was dancing badly; she simply could not dance with him; but she lay smoothly in his arms, her hand meekly lying on his shoulder, in the correct attitude for dancing, as shown on the films or in magazines. But he seemed quite indifferent as to whether she danced well or not; when she stumbled over an attempt to follow his elaborate steps, he quickly righted them both, and his eyes were roaming over her head, around the faces of the other people.

At the end of perhaps the fifth or sixth dance, when it was still early, about midnight, she pulled away from him and said in a bad-tempered voice that she wanted to go home. He hastened to take her, without a word of protest. She went to bed persuading herself that she loved him, that he was intelligent (the two things were necessarily connected), and that he was in every way superior to the Sports Club men. She was annoyed because she wanted to cry; she indignantly swallowed down her tears.

Every evening, they went to the Knave of Clubs; for in this shabby place, into which one sank, in a haze of brandy and churning music, as it half stunned, Adolph seemed as much at ease as he could ever be. Mrs Spore treated him with affectionate indulgence; the waiters, whom he tipped so heavily, hurried to greet him, to bring him what he wanted. For Adolph was very generous. Martha, who had grown used to Donovan’s frank stinginess, felt herself royally treated, though it was not long before she began to demur, saying that he should not spend so much money on her. He was some kind of a senior clerk for the municipality, his salary could not be so large; and yet he surrounded her with boxes of chocolates and silk stockings, and grew annoyed when she was embarrassed.