Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

      She thought of writing to her brother; she even made this decision; then the picture of Martha in a well-regulated suburban London household, attending a school for nice English girls, entered her mind with uncomfortable force. She remembered, too, that Martha was seventeen; and her anger was switched against the girl herself; it was too late, it was much too late, and she knew it. Thoughts of Martha always filled her with such violent and supplicating and angry emotions that she could not sustain them; she began to pray for Martha: please help me to save her, please let her forget her silly ideas, please let her be like her brother. Mrs Quest fell asleep, soothed by tender thoughts of her son.

      But it seemed that half an hour’s angry and urgent pleading last night had after all pricked Alfred into action. There was something in the faces of these two (they were both uncomfortable, and rather flushed) that made her hopeful. She called for tea and arranged herself by the tea table on the veranda, while Martha and Mr Quest fell into chairs, and each reached for a book.

      ‘Well, dear?’ asked Mrs Quest at last, looking at them both. Neither heard her. Martha turned a page; Mr Quest was filling his pipe, while his eyes frowningly followed the print on the pages balanced against his knee. The servant brought tea, and Mrs Quest filled the cups.

      She handed one to Mr Quest, and asked again, ‘Well, dear?’

      ‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Mr Quest, without looking up.

      Her lips tightened, and as she gave Martha her cup she demanded jealously, ‘Had a nice talk?’

      ‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Martha vaguely.

      Mrs Quest regarded them both, and with a look of conscious but forgiving bitterness. Her husband was half hidden in a cloud of lazy blue smoke. He was the very picture of a hard-working farmer taking his repose. Martha, at first sight, might pass for that marriageable and accomplished daughter it seemed that Mrs Quest, after all, desired. In her bright-yellow linen dress, her face tinted carefully with cosmetics, she appeared twenty. But the dress had grass stains on it, was crumpled, she was smoking hungrily, and her fingers were already stained with nicotine, her rifle was lying carelessly across her lap, and on it was balanced a book which, as Mrs Quest could see, was called The Decay of the British Empire. That Martha should be reading this book struck her mother as criticism of herself; she began to think of the hard and disappointing life she had led since she came to the colony; and she lay back in her chair, and onto her broad square, rather masculine face came a look of patient regret; her small blue eyes clouded, and she sighed deeply.

      The sigh, it appeared, had the power to reach where her words could not. Both Martha and Mr Quest glanced up, guiltily. Mrs Quest had forgotten them; she was looking through them at some picture of her own; she was leaning her untidy grey head against the mud wall of the house; she was twiddling a lock of that limp grey hair round and round one finger – a mannerism which always stung Mr Quest – while with the other hand she stroked her skirt, in a tired hard, nervous movement which affected Martha like a direct criticism of ingratitude.

      ‘Well, old girl?’ demanded Mr Quest, with guilty affection.

      She withdrew her eyes from her private vision, and rested them on her husband. ‘Well?’ she returned, and with a different intonation, dry and ironic, and patient.

      Martha saw her parents exchange a look which caused her to rise from her chair, in order to escape. It was a look of such sardonic understanding that she could not bear it, for it filled her with a violent and intolerable pity for them. Also, she thought, How can you be so resigned about it? and became fearful for her own future, which she was determined would never include a marriage whose only basis was that ironic mutual pity. Never, never, she vowed; and as she picked up her rifle and was moving towards the steps she heard a car approaching.

      ‘Visitors,’ she said warningly; and her parents sighed at the same moment, ‘Oh, Lord!’

      But it was Marnie sitting beside one of her sisters’ husbands.

      ‘Oh, Lord,’ said Mr Quest again. ‘If she’s wearing those damned indecent shorts, then …’ He got up, and hastily escaped.

      The car did not come close to the house, but remained waiting on the edge of the small plateau in front. Marnie approached. She was not wearing shorts, but a bright floral dress, with a bunch of flowers and lace at the neck. She was now very fat, almost as large as her mother; and her heavy browned arms and legs came out of the tight dyed crepe like the limbs of an imprisoned Brünhilde. Her hair was crimped into tight ridges around the good-natured housewife’s face.

      ‘I haven’t come to stay,’ she called from a distance, and quickened her steps. Martha waited for her, wishing that her mother also would go away; but Mrs Quest remained watchful above the teacups. So she walked down to meet Marnie, where they might both be out of earshot.

      Marnie said hastily, ‘Listen, Matty, man, we’re having a dance, well, just friends, sort of, and would you like to come. Next Saturday?’ she looked apprehensively at Mrs Quest, past Martha’s shoulder.

      Martha hesitated, and found herself framing excuses; then she agreed rather stiffly, so that Marnie coloured, as if she had been snubbed. Seeing this, Martha, with a pang of self-dislike, said how much she had been longing to dance, that in this district there was nothing to do – even that she was lonely. Her voice, to her own surprise, was emotional; so that she too coloured, as at a self-betrayal.

      Marnie’s good heart responded at once to what must be an appeal, even a reproach, and she said, ‘But Matty, I’ve been wanting to ask you for ages, really, but I thought that …’ She stumbled over the unsayable truth, which was half a complaint against the snobbish English and half an explanation of her father’s attitude. She went on in a rush, falling back into the easy, suggestive raillery: ‘If you knew what my brother Billy thinks of you, oh, man! He thinks you’re the tops.’ She giggled, but Martha’s face stopped her.

      The two girls, scarlet as poinsettias, were standing in silence, in the most confusing state of goodwill and hostility, when Mrs Quest came down the path. From a distance, they might have been on the point of either striking each other or falling into each other’s arms; but as she arrived beside them Martha turned and exclaimed vivaciously, ‘I’m going to dance at Marnie’s place on Saturday night!’

      ‘That’s nice, dear,’ she said doubtfully, after a pause.

      ‘It’s only just informal, Mrs Quest, nothing grand,’ and Marnie squeezed Martha’s arm. ‘Well, be seeing you, we’ll come and fetch you about eight.’ She ran off, calling back, ‘My mom says Matty can stay the night, if that’s all right.’ She climbed heavily into the car, sending back beaming smiles and large waves of the hand; and in a moment the car had slid down off the hill into the trees.

      ‘So you’re making friends with the Van Rensbergs,’ said Mrs Quest reproachfully, as if this confirmed all her worst fears; and a familiar note was struck for both of them when Martha said coldly, ‘I thought you and the Van Rensbergs had been friends for years?’

      ‘What’s all this about Billy?’ asked Mrs Quest, trying to disinfect sex, as always, with a humorous teasing voice.

      ‘What about him?’ asked Martha, and added, ‘He’s a very nice boy.’ She walked off towards her bedroom in such a state of exaltation that a voice within her was already inquiring, Why are you so happy? For this condition could be maintained only as long as she forgot Billy himself. She had not seen him for two or three years, but it occurred to her that he might have caught sight of her somewhere; for surely he could not have tender memories of their last encounter? Martha, on a hot, wet, steamy afternoon, had spent two hours wriggling on her stomach through the undergrowth to reach a point where she might shoot a big koodoo that was grazing in a corner of the Hundred Acres. Just as she rested the rifle to fire, a shot rang out, the koodoo fell, and Billy Van Rensberg walked out from the tree a few paces away, to stand over the carcase like a conqueror. ‘That’s my koodoo!’ said Martha shrilly. She was covered with red mud, her hair hung lank to her shoulders, her eyes trickled dirty tears. Billy was apologetic but firm, and made things worse