Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

own hall, and a thatched church where they worshipped their angry God. And their speech had the rich cadences of a living religion.

      They came to fetch their mail on a day when the village would be empty. Their cars drew up together outside Socrates’ store; moved away together to the garage across the railway track; returned together to the station building, one after another in a file, with the slow deliberation that suggested a team of covered wagons.

      So it was today. There were eleven cars, standing behind each other; and from them had come enough people to populate a small village, men, women and children, talking, reading mail, playing in groups.

      Martha stood on Socrates’ veranda among the grain sacks and looked at them, and tried to find what it was which gave these people their look of cohesion. Physically they were strong and broadly built, with the blunt open features of their Dutch ancestry; but the word ‘Dutch’ surely suggests a picture of fair skin and hair, blue eyes, and easy health? These people tended to be dark, as if the sun had fed a strain of resistance into defenceless light skin and the light hair that becomes dry and limp in the south. The older women wore black – here the colour of respectability, though in other cultures, other contexts, it may be the colour of mourning or sophistication. The younger women wore print frocks that were pretty rather than smart; some of the children wore the flapping sunbonnets of the tradition; the men were in the male uniform of the country, khaki shorts and open-necked shirts. No, the clothing here expressed only a restlessness, a movement, even uncertainty; for if it was true that the pretty sunbonnets could have been seen nowhere else, the little girls’ frocks were likely to have been made by a pattern from an English magazine; and if no one but a certain type of Dutchwoman would wear those black lace hats (so that, catching sight of one a hundred yards away, one might imagine the face under it, broad, practical, humorous, earthy), then the black dress she wore with it was probably mass-produced in America.

      The closeness of this group expressed itself somewhere else, perhaps in the look of dogged self-sufficiency, the look of the inveterate colonizer; but in that case, they were colonizers in a country which considered itself past the colonizing stage. Not so easy to put flesh and blood on the bones of an intellectual conviction; Martha was remembering with shame the brash and easy way she had said to Joss that she repudiated race prejudice; for the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards. She stood on the veranda of Socrates’ store, and looked over the empty dusty space to the railway line, and thought of the different people who passed there: the natives, the nameless and swarming; the Afrikaans, whose very name held the racy poetic quality of their vigorous origins; the British, with their innumerable subgroupings, held together only because they could say, ‘this is a British country’ – held together by the knowledge of ownership. And each group, community, clan, colour, strove and fought away from the other, in a sickness of dissolution; it was as if the principle of separateness was bred from the very soil, the sky, the driving sun; as if the inchoate vastness of the universe, always insistent in the enormous unshrouded skies, the enormous mountain-girt horizons, so that one might never, not for a moment, forget the inhuman, relentless struggle of soil and water and light, bred a fever of self-assertion in its children like a band of explorers lost in a desert, quarrelling in an ecstasy of fear over their direction, when nothing but a sober mutual trust could save them. Martha could feel the striving forces in her own substance: the effort of imagination needed to destroy the words black, white, nation, race, exhausted her, her head ached and her flesh was heavy on her bones. She looked at the Van Rensbergs’ car, and thought that she had known them for years, and yet she was reluctant even to cross the dust and greet them. She walked off the veranda and towards the car, smiling rather queerly, for when it was too late to retreat it occurred to her that they might not wish to have their friendship with the Quests so publicly emphasized.

      She came to a standstill at the car door, and said good afternoon to Mr Van Rensberg. He nodded at her, and went on reading the newspaper, having made a hunching movement with his shoulder towards the back of the car, where Marnie was sitting between two married sisters who held small babies. There was a young man beside Mr Van Rensberg, who greeted Martha, and she smiled at him hastily, thinking, This must be a cousin; for his face was the family face.

      Marnie was smiling with constrained pleasure, and looked uncomfortably at her father’s back; and this made Martha wish she had not come. Over his shoulder, she could see the name of the most rabid nationalist journal from the south; while she did not know the language, there was hardly any need to, for the words and phrases of nationalism are the same in any tongue, but the knowledge that the brain behind the close-cropped black head beside her was agreeing with what was bound to be a violent complaint about the very existence of the British made her drop her voice like a guilty person as she said to Marnie, ‘Why don’t you come over and see me soon?’

      ‘I’d like to, man. I’d like to,’ agreed Marnie, in the same low tone, and with another glance at her father. ‘Your dress is the tops, Martha,’ she added. ‘May I have the pattern?’

      ‘Of course,’ said Martha, with an involuntary glance at Marnie’s matronly body. ‘Come over for the day …’ She had lowered her voice almost to a whisper; the absurdity of it made her angry. She and Marnie quickly said goodbye, smiling at each other like conspirators; she dropped another smile in the direction of the attentive young man in the front seat, and hastily retreated back to the store.

      She had no lift home. She would have liked to walk; she intended to, but … She imagined that eyes would follow her, queerly, as she set off, on foot, along a road where a dozens cars might be expected to pass that afternoon. White girls do not … As she was hesitating on the veranda, she saw Joss approaching, and smiled with what was, had she known it, a tenderly amused appreciation of the figure he cut. He wore a respectable dark suit, he carried books under his arm, he moved in a careful, constrained way, eyes watching the direction of his feet, his shoulders a little hunched. He seemed, in fact, already the sober professional man he intended to become; he was altogether out of place among these khaki-clad, open-air people; and knew it, and approved. For these farmers, these men of the soil: when they approached, one saw first the exposed developed limbs, the body; one marked the hard muscled forearm perhaps, or the bronze knotted pillar of the thigh, or the stride, or the swing of the arms; they moved magnificently, at ease, slowly, to match the space and emptiness of the country – no suggestion here of limbs grown cautious and self-contained, against possible undesired contact. Yes, here one stands at a distance from a man, a woman, and sees them whole. First the way of walking, the stance of the body. Then lift your eyes to the face, and the first impression is confirmed: what fine, exposed, frank faces, wholesomely weathered, unafraid, open to every glance. And then (but lastly) the eyes, look straight at the eyes – which of course meet yours with the completest frankness. Nothing to hide here, they say; everything above-board, take it or leave it. But always, behind the friendly brown eyes, the welcoming blue ones, is the uneasiness; something not easily defined. but expressed best, perhaps, in a moment of laughter. The man laughs out loud, an infectious wholehearted laugh; but there is a faint sideways flickering movement of the eyes, the eyes are not altogether there, there is an absence, something blank and empty. Take, for instance, that contingent of fine young colonials marching down the Strand with their English cousins. What fine young men, what physique; a head taller than the rest, bronzed, muscled, strong as horses. Then look at the eyes. But the eyes seem to say, ‘What do you want with us? Aren’t our bodies enough for you?’ There is a pale and fretful look; the soft and luminous darkness that should lie behind the iris is simply not there. Something is missing.

      And so it seems that one cannot have it both ways, one has to choose; and Joss chose, without any hesitation.

      Martha, watching him approach, was conscious of the most perverse but definite feeling of pity. Why pity? She envied him almost to the point of bitterness, knowing exactly what he wanted, and how to get it. She saw how the compact, neat body, hidden under dark grey flannel, moved carefully across the sunlit, filthy dust, as if every nerve and muscle were connected direct to his will; she saw how his eyes were focused, steady and direct, the whole of himself behind them, so that it was only when one looked into his eyes that one saw him; she saw the great difference there was between Joss and