Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

wrinkled his brows and pretended not to hear. Mr Parry’s Welsh speech had lost nothing of its lilt and charm; but the phrases had worn slack; his ‘Look you’ sounded more like ‘Look ye’; and when he used the Welsh ‘whatever’, it came haphazard in his speech, with a surprised, uncertain note.

      Mr Quest, disappointed of a listener, came to the car, climbed in, and said, ‘They don’t listen. I was telling him the Russians are going to join with the Germans and attack us. I know they are. Just after the war – my war – I met a man in a train who said he had seen with his own eyes the way the Russians were kidnapping German scientists and forcing them to work in their factories so they could learn how to make tanks to smash the British Empire. I said to Parry here …’

      Martha heard these words somewhere underneath her attention, which was given to her own problems. Mr Quest looked over his shoulder at her, and said sarcastically, ‘But don’t let me bore you with the Great Unmentionable. Your time’ll come, and then I can say I told you so.’

      Martha turned her face away; her lids stung with tears; she felt the most rejected and desolate creature in the world. It occurred to her that the Cohen boys might have felt like this when she (or so it had appeared) rejected them; but she dismissed the thought at once. The possessors of this particular form of arrogance may know its underside is timidity; but they seldom go on to reflect that the timidity is based on the danger of thinking oneself important to others, which necessitates a return of feeling. She was saying to herself that she could not imagine the clever and self-sufficient Cohen brothers caring about her one way or the other. But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles. For the first time, she said to herself that the Cohens were almost completely isolated in the district. The farmers nodded to them, offered remarks about the weather, but never friendship. The Greek family maintained a complicated system of friendship with the other Greeks from stores all along the railway line. The Cohens had relations in the city, no one nearer.

      At last Mr Parry found a trail of bubbles sizzling up through the dirty water from the tube, and shouted to Gideon, ‘Come ye, now, you lazy black loafer, and do it quick whateffer you do, and listen well, now.’

      Gideon indolently lifted himself and went to mend the puncture, while Mr Parry came back to the car in order to resume his conversation with Mr Quest.

      ‘Sorry, Captain, but if you want a good job, you do it yourself, whateffer else, it’s no good trusting the blacks, they’ve no pride in their work.’

      ‘As I was saying, you people have your heads buried in the sand. Anyone can see war is coming. If it’s not this year, it’ll be the next, as soon as they’re strong enough.’

      ‘You think the Jerries’ll have another shot at us?’ asked Mr Parry, polite but doubtful, and turned so that he might keep an eye on Gideon.

      Another native came loping across the railway tracks and stopped by the car. ‘Baas Quest?’ he asked.

      Mr Quest, once again interrupted, turned his darkly irritable eyes on him. But Martha recognized him: he was the Cohens’ cook; and she reached for the parcel he held.

      ‘For me,’ she said, and asked the man to wait. He went off to help Gideon with the tyre.

      The parcel was a book from Joss, entitled The Social Aspect of the Jewish Question, and inside was a note: ‘Dear Matty Quest, This will be good for your soul, so do, do read it. Yours thin-skinnedly, Joss.’

      She was filled with outrageous delight. It was forgiveness. She interrupted her father once again to borrow a pencil, and wrote: ‘Thanks for the book. As it happened, I borrowed it from you and of course agreed with it, three years ago. But I shall read it again and return it next time we come to the station.’ She was determined that would be very soon.

      Next mail day she suggested that they should make the trip, but her father refused, with an air of being exploited.

      ‘Why do you want to go?’ asked Mrs Quest curiously; and Martha said, ‘I want to see the Cohen boys.’

      ‘You’re making friends with them?’ demurred Mrs Quest.

      ‘I thought we always were friends with them,’ said Martha scornfully; and since this put the argument on that hypocritical level where it was maintained that of course the Quests did not think Jews, or even shopkeepers, beneath them, and the only reason they did not continually meet was an inconvenience of some sort, Mrs Quest could not easily reply.

      Martha telephoned the McDougalls to ask if they were going to the station. They were not. She asked the Van Rensbergs; Marnie said awkwardly that Pop didn’t often go to the station these days. Finally she telephoned Mr McFarline, the old miner from the small working in the Dumfries Hills; and he said yes, he was going to town tomorrow. She told her mother she would get a lift back (for ‘town’ in this case meant the city, not the station, as it sometimes did), and added, with the apparently deliberate exaggeration which was so infuriating, ‘If I don’t get a lift, I’ll walk.’ Which of course was absurd, infringed one of the taboos – ‘a young white girl walking alone’, etc. – and was calculated to provoke an argument. The argument immediately followed; and both women appealed to Mr Quest

      ‘Why shouldn’t she walk?’ demanded Mr Quest vaguely. ‘When I was a young man in England, I used to walk thirty miles an afternoon and think nothing of it.’

      ‘This isn’t England,’ said Mrs Quest tremulously, filled with horrid visions of what might happen to Martha if she encountered an evil native.

      Martha came back with, ‘I walk miles and miles all over the farm, but that doesn’t matter for some reason. How can you be so illogical?’

      ‘Well, I don’t like it, and you promised not to go more than half a mile from the house.’

      Martha laughed angrily, and chose this moment to say what until now she had been careful to keep dark: ‘Why, I often walk over to the Dumfries Hills, or even to Jacob’s Burg, I’ve been doing it for years.’

      ‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mrs Quest helplessly. She had known quite well that Martha was doing this, but to be told so now was another thing. ‘What would happen if a native attacked you?’

      ‘I should scream for help,’ said Martha flippantly.

      ‘Oh, my dear …’

      ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Martha angrily. ‘If a native raped me, then he’d be hung and I’d be a national heroine, so he wouldn’t do it, even if he wanted to, and why should he?’

      ‘My dear, read the newspapers, white girls are always being ra – attacked.’

      Now, Martha could not remember any case of this happening; it was one of the things people said. She remarked, ‘Last week a white man raped a black girl, and was fined five pounds.’

      Mrs Quest said hastily, ‘That’s not the point; the point is girls get raped.’

      ‘Then I expect they want to be,’ said Martha sullenly; and caught her breath, not because she did not believe the truth of what she said, but because of her parents’ faces: she could not help being frightened. For they were united for once, in genuine emotion, and began lecturing her on the consequences of her attitude. It ended with ‘and so they’ll drive us into the sea, and then the country will be ruined, what would these ignorant blacks do without us.’ And the usual inconsequent conclusion: ‘They have no sense of gratitude at all for what we do for them.’ It had all been said so often that it rang stale and false for both sides; and Martha remained silent in a way which they could take as an agreement, for comfort’s sake.

      Next morning she was waiting down on the track, by the signpost in the long grass, for Mr McFarline; and they made the journey to the station in just over ten minutes.