Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

a representative. And she did not feel herself to be representative.

      Mr Van Rensberg dropped his pipe in dramatic comment, with a nod at the others, and remarked heavily, ‘So! So!’

      Martha said quickly, with the defensive humour which she could not prevent, though she knew he found it insulting, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t come, why shouldn’t you? As far as I am concerned, you’re welcome.’

      There was a silence, he seemed to be waiting for more; then he said, ‘There should be equal rights, there should be rights for both languages.’

      Martha was remembering, very ruefully, that other conversation, with Joss. She smiled and said firmly, with considerable courage, considering the nature of her audience, that she believed in equal rights for all people, regardless of race and –

      Billy tugged at her from behind, and said in an urgent voice, ‘Hey, Matty, come and dance.’

      Mr Van Rensberg, who had dismissed the improbable suspicion from his mind as soon as it appeared said, rather taken aback, ‘Well, that’s all right, then, that’s all right.’ Afterwards, he would call Martha a hypocrite, like all the English.

      On the veranda, Billy called her one to her face, without knowing he was doing so. ‘Why don’t you learn to speak Afrikaans?’ he asked, as if this followed naturally from what he had heard her say.

      But to Martha this was narrowing the problem away from its principles, and she said, half flippantly, ‘Well, if it’s a question of doing justice to majorities, one’d have to learn at least a dozen native languages as well.’

      His hand tightened across her back. To him it was as if she put the Afrikaans language on a level with those of the despised kaffirs. It was a moment of hatred; but at last he gave a short, uncomfortable laugh, and bent his head beside hers, closing his eyes to the facts of her personality, wishing to restore this illusory unity. It was late, some of the people had already left, and Martha was dancing in his arms stiffly and unwillingly, frowning over the incident that had just occurred. He felt that dancing would no longer be enough – or rather, that it was too late to wait for the spell to settle over them again. He drew her to the veranda steps. The moon was now standing level with the tops of the trees, the mud of the clearing was glimmering with light. ‘Let’s go down for a minute,’ he said.

      ‘But it’s all muddy.’

      ‘Never mind,’ he said hastily, and pulled her down.

      Once again the wet squelched around her shoe, and she picked her way from ridge to ridge of hardening mud, hanging on Billy’s arm, while he steered them both to the side of the house out of sight. She tried to hold her skirts clear of the mud, while he pinned her arms down with his, and kissed her. His mouth was hard, and ground her head back. She resented this hard intrusive mouth, even while from outside – always from outside – came the other pressure, which demanded that he should simply lift her and carry her off like booty – but to where? The red mud under the bushes? She pushed aside this practical and desecrating thought, and softened to the kiss; then she felt a clumsy and unpractised hand creeping down her thigh, and she jerked away, saying in a voice that annoyed her, because of its indignant coldness: ‘Stop it!’

      ‘Sorry,’ he said at once, and let her go, with a humility that made her loathe him.

      She walked away in front, leaving him to follow as he wished, and walked confusedly up the steps, because the few couples that were watching them with derisive smiles, and none of the communal teasing that had been drawn by the other couples. Martha saw the eyes drop to her skirt, and looked down, and saw that the hem was dragging heavy wth red mud.

      Marnie came running forward, exclaiming, ‘But Matty, your lovely dress, you’ve spoilt it …’ She clicked over Martha for a moment, then tugged her through the house on her hand, saying, ‘Come and wash it off, before it dries.’

      Martha went, without so much as a glance at the unfortunate Billy, grateful for Marnie, who thus took her back into the group.

      ‘You’d better take that dress off,’ said Marnie. ‘You’re staying the night, so it doesn’t matter.’

      ‘I forgot my suitcase,’ said Martha awkwardly, leaving herself completely in Marnie’s hands. For she had forgotten to pack her night things; her imagination had reached no further forward than the dancing and the exaltation.

      ‘Doesn’t matter, I’ll lend my pyjamas.’

      Mrs Van Rensberg came fussing in, pleasant and maternal, saying she would ring Mrs Quest. It seemed that Martha ruining her dress while making love to her son was the most natural thing in the world. She kissed Martha, and said she hoped she would sleep well, and she mustn’t worry, everything was all right. The warm and comfortable words made Martha want to cry, and she embraced Mrs Van Rensberg like a child, and like a child allowed herself to be led to her room, and left alone.

      It was a larger room built to the back of the house, lit by two tall candles, one on either side of the vast double bed spread with white. The windows were open to the veld, which was already greying to the dawn, and the moon had a pallid, exhausted look. A sheet of silver, inclining at the end of the room, took Martha’s attention, and she looked again, and saw it was a mirror. She had never been alone in a room with a full-length mirror before, and she stripped off her clothes and went to stand before it. It was as if she saw a vision of someone not herself; or rather, herself transfigured to the measure of a burningly insistent future. The white naked girl with the high small breasts that leaned forward out of the mirror was like a girl from a legend; she put forward her hands to touch, then as they encountered the cold glass, she saw the naked arms of the girl slowly rise to fold defensively across those breasts. She did not know herself. She left the mirror, and stood at the window for a moment, bitterly criticizing herself for allowing Billy, that impostor, to take possession of her at all, even for an evening, even under another’s features.

      Next day she took breakfast with the Van Rensbergs, a clan of fifteen, cousins and uncles and aunts, all cheerfully mingled.

      She walked home through the bush, carrying the dress in a brown paper bag, and, halfway, took off her shoes for the pleasure of feeling the mud squeeze and mould around her feet. She arrived untidy and flushed and healthy, and Mrs Quest, in a flush of relief, kissed her and said she hoped she had enjoyed herself.

      For a few days, Martha suffered a reaction like a dulling of all her nerves. She must be tired, murmured Mrs Quest, over and over again, you must be tired, you must sleep, sleep, sleep. And Martha slept, hypnotized.

      Then she came to herself and began to read, hungrily, for some kind of balance. And more and more, what she read seemed remote; or rather, it seemed that through reading she created a self-contained world which had nothing to do with what lay around her; that what she believed was separated from her problems by an invisible wall; or that she was guided by a great marsh light – but no, that she could not afford, not for a moment, to accept. But not merely was she continuously being flooded by emotions that came from outside, or so it seemed; continuously other people refused to recognize the roles they themselves had first suggested. When Joss, for instance, or Mr Van Rensberg, posed their catechism, and received answers qualifying her for their respective brotherhoods, surely at that moment some door should have opened, so that she might walk in, a welcomed daughter into that realm of generous and freely exchanged emotion for which she had been born – and not only herself, but every human being; for what she believed had been built for her by the books she read, and those books had been written by citizens of that other country; for how can one feel exiled from something that does not exist?

      She felt as if a phase of her life had ended, and that now a new one should begin; and it was about a fortnight after the Van Rensbergs’ dance that Joss wrote: ‘I heard there was a job going, at the firm of lawyers where my uncles are both partners. I spoke to them about you. Get a lift into town and interview Uncle Jasper. Do it quickly. You must get yourself out of this setup. Yours, Joss.’ This was hastily scribbled, as if in a hurry; and there followed a neat and sober postscript: ‘If I’m interfering, I’m sorry.’

      She