Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

breakfast she again looked at Joss’s books, skimming through them rapidly. They were written by clearly well-meaning people who disliked poverty. Her feeling was, I know this already; which did not only mean that she agreed with any conclusion which proved hopelessly unfair a system which condemned her, Martha Quest, to live on the farm, instead of in London with people she could talk to. She made this joke against herself rather irritably, for she knew it to be half true. What she felt was, Yes, of course poverty is stupid so why say it again? How do you propose to alter all this? And ‘all this’ meant the farm, the hordes of deprived natives who worked it, the people in the district, who assumed they had every right to live as they did and use the natives as they pleased. The reasonable persuasiveness of the books seemed merely absurd when one thought of violent passions ranged against them. She imagined the author of books like these as a clean, plump, suave gentleman, shut in a firelit study behind drawn curtains, with no sound in his ears but the movement of his own thoughts.

      She kept the books a week, and then returned them on a mail day with the postboy. She also sent a note saying: ‘I wish you would let me have some books about the emancipation of women.’ It was only after the man had left that the request struck her as naive, a hopeless self-exposure; and she could hardly bear to open the parcel which was sent to her. Inside was the note she had expected: ‘I’m glad you have absorbed so much knowledge of economics in three days. What a clever girl you are. I enclose a helpful handbook on sexual problems. I could ask Solly, who has a fine collection of psychology, etc., but alas, he has gone off to “live his own life”, and our relations are not such that I could handle his books without asking him.’ The enclosed book was Engels’ Origin of the Family. Martha read it, and agreed with every word of it – or rather, with what she gained from it, which was a confirmation of her belief that the marriages of the district were ridiculous and even sordid, and most of all old-fashioned.

      She sat under her tree, hugging her sun-warmed arms, feeling the firm soft flesh with approval, and the sight of her long and shapely legs made her remember the swollen bodies of the pregnant women she had seen, with shuddering anger, as at the sight of a cage designed for herself. Never, never, never, she swore to herself, but with a creeping premonition; and she thought of Solly’s books, now out of bounds, because he and Joss so unreasonably insisted on quarrelling; and she thought of Joss, for whom she was feeling a most irrational dislike. At one moment she scorned him because he had dared to treat her like an attractive young female; and the next because he had taken her at her word, and simply offered books; and the confusion hardened into a nervous repulsion: Well, she could do without Joss!

      She returned Engels with such a formal note that no further word came from Joss, though she was waiting for one; and then melancholy settled over her, and she wandered around the farm like a girl under a spell of silence.

      One morning she came on her father, seated on a log of wood at the edge of a field, watching the natives dig a furrow for storm water. Mr Quest held his pipe between his teeth, and slowly rolled plugs of rich dark tobacco between his palms, while his eyes rested distantly on his labourers.

      ‘Well, old son?’ he inquired, as Martha sat beside him; for he might call either his male or his female child ‘old son’.

      Martha rested the rifle across her knees, pulled herself some chewing grass, and lapsed into his silence; for these two, away from Mrs Quest, were quite easy together.

      But she could not maintain it; she had to worry at him for his attention; and soon she began to complain about her mother, while Mr Quest uneasily listened. ‘Yes, I daresay,’ he agreed, and ‘Yes, I suppose you are right’; and with every agreement his face expressed only the wish that she might remove this pressure on him to consider not only her position but his own. But Martha did not desist; and at last the usual irritability crept into his voice, and he said, ‘Your mother’s a good woman,’ and he gave her a look which meant ‘Now, that’s enough.’

      ‘Good?’ said Martha, inviting him to define the word.

      ‘That’s all very well,’ he said, shifting himself slightly away.

      ‘What do you mean by “good”?’ she persisted. ‘You know quite well she’s – I mean, if goodness is just doing what you want to do, behaving in a conventional way, without thinking, then goodness is easy enough to come by!’ Here she flung a stone crossly at the trunk of a tree.

      ‘I don’t see where you end, when you start like this,’ said Mr Quest, complainingly. For this was by no means the first time this conversation had taken place, and he dreaded it. They were both remembering that first occasion, when he had demanded angrily, ‘Well, don’t you love your mother, then?’ and Martha had burst into peals of angry laughter, saying ‘Love? What’s love got to do with it? She does exactly as she wants, and says, “Look how I sacrifice myself,” she never stops trying to get her own way, and then you talk about love.’

      After a long silence, during which Mr Quest slowly slid away into his private thoughts, Martha said defiantly, ‘Well, I don’t see it. You just use words and – it’s got nothing to do with what actually goes on …’ She stopped, confused; though what she felt was clear enough; not only that people’s motives were not what they imagined them to be, but that they should be made to see the truth.

      ‘Oh Lord, Matty,’ said Mr Quest, suddenly bursting into that helpless anger, ‘What do you want me to do? The last year has been hell on earth, you never stop bickering.’

      ‘So you want me to go away?’ asked Martha pathetically and her heart sang at the idea of it.

      ‘I never said anything of the sort,’ said poor Mr Quest, ‘you’re always so extreme.’ Then, after a pause, hopefully: ‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it? You always say you’ve out-grown your mother, and I daresay you have.’

      Martha waited, and it was with the same hopeful inquiry she had felt with Joss: she was wanting someone to take the responsibility for her; she needed a rescue. Mr Quest should have suggested some practical plan, and at once, very much to his surprise, he would have found an amenable and grateful daughter. Instead, the silence prolonged itself into minutes. He sighed with pleasure, as he looked over the sunlit field, the silent, heat-slowed bush; then he lowered his eyes to his feet, where there were some ants at work in an old piece of wood.

      Suddenly he remarked, in a dreamy voice, ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it, seeing these ants? I wonder how they see us, like God, I shouldn’t be surprised? When that soil specialist was out last year, he said ants have a language, and a police force – that sort of thing.’

      There was no reply from Martha. At last he shot her an apprehensive glance sideways, and met eyes that were half angry, half amused, but with a persistent criticism that caused him to rise to his feet, saying, ‘How about going up to the house and asking for some tea? Weather makes you thirsty.’

      And in silence the father and daughter returned to the house on the hill.

       Chapter Three

      Mrs Quest watched her daughter and husband returning from the fields, with nervous anticipation. The night before, in the dark bedroom, she had demanded that he must speak to Martha, who wouldn’t listen to her own mother, she was ruining her future. Mr Quest’s cigarette glowed exasperatedly, illuminating his bent and troubled face; and at the sight of that face, Mrs Quest leaned over the edge of the bed towards him, and her voice rose into peevish insistence; for as long as the darkness allowed her to forget her husband’s real nature, she spoke with confidence. And what was he expected to say? he demanded. ‘Yes, yes, I daresay,’ and ‘I am quite sure you’re right,’ and ‘Yes, but, May, old girl, surely that’s putting it a bit strongly?’

      Mrs Quest had lain awake most of the night, framing those angry complaints against him in her mind that she could not say aloud. Since it had always been understood that only bad luck and ill-health had brought the family to such irremediable if picturesque poverty, how could she say now what she thought: For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together,