Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

job, and gratefully thanked him. She sent this letter by the cook, so urgent did it seem that he should at once know her reaction.

      With Joss’s letter in her hand, she walked onto the veranda, and informed her parents, in a hasty way, that she was taking a job in town; and she hardly heard their startled queries. It all seemed so easy now. ‘But you can’t expect me to stay here for the rest of my life!’ she demanded incredulously, just as if she had not been ‘here’ for two years, apparently as if she considered there could be no possible end to it.

      ‘But why Joss – I mean, if you felt like this, we could ask our friends …’ protested poor Mrs Quest, helplessly.

      She was thinking in terms of the future, something unpleasant to be faced, perhaps, next week; and when she heard that Martha intended to go into town, with Mr McFarline, the very next morning, she said she forbade it. Martha made no reply, and she suddenly announced she was coming into town with her.

      ‘Oh, no, you’re not,’ said Martha, in the deadly tone of unmistakable hatred which always disarmed Mrs Quest, who had never admitted that hatred inside a family was even possible.

      Martha was not in the house that last afternoon, so Mrs Quest went into her bedroom, and looked helplessly around it for some kind of clue to her daughter’s state of mind. She found Joss’s note, which struck her unpleasantly; she found the soiled white dress, still crushed into the paper bag and already going green with mildew; she looked at the books on the table by the bed, with a feeling that they must be responsible; but they were Shelley and Byron and Tennyson and William Morris; and though she had not read them herself since she was a girl, she thought of them as too respectable to be in any way dangerous.

      Martha, in the meantime, was consciously bidding farewell to her childhood. She visited the ant heap where she had knelt in ecstatic prayer during her ‘religious phase’; and she walked through the thick scrub to the quartz reef under which a spring came bubbling clear and cold, where she had lain thinking of the stream that must reach the sea hundreds of miles away; she walked through the compound, where she had secretly played with the native children against her mother’s orders. She paid a last visit to the big tree. It was all useless; her childhood, it seemed, had already said goodbye to her, nothing had power to move her.

      Next day she went to town with Mr McFarline, who tried to impress her with the fact that he had just been elected member of Parliament for one of the city constituencies, but received only an abstracted politeness for his pains. She interviewed Mr Cohen, the uncle, got the job, and found herself a room before nightfall. Her parents expected her home. She sent them a wire saying would they please send on her books and clothes. ‘Do not worry, everything fine.’

      And a door had closed, finally; and behind it was the farm, and the girl who had been created by it. It no longer concerned her. Finished. She could forget it.

      She was a new person, and an extraordinary, magnificent, an altogether new life was beginning.

       Part Two

       The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her.

      – BARON CORVO

       Chapter One

      The offices of Robinson, Daniel and Cohen were crushed into the top floor of a building on Founders’ Street, a thoroughfare which marked the division between that part of the town built in the 1890s and the centre, which was modern. From the windows one looked away left over the low tin roofs and shantylike structures which were now kaffir stores, Indian stores, and the slum of the coloured quarter. To the right rose gleaming white buildings fronted with glass, and at the end of the street was the rambling, pillared, balconied brown mansion known as McGrath’s Hotel, whose erection was remembered by old inhabitants as a sign of the triumph of progress: the first modern hotel in the colony. Founders’ Street was narrow and shabby; and although it was named to commemorate those adventurers who had come riding over the veld to plant the Union Jack, regardless of the consequences to themselves or to anybody else, it was now synonymous in the minds of the present citizens with dubious boardinghouses and third-rate shops. This building shared the doubtful quality. On the ground floor was a large wholesale business, so that as one mounted the central iron staircase, which spiralled up like an outsized corkscrew, it was to look down on a warren of little offices, each inhabited by a man in shirtsleeves, half buried in papers, or by a girl with a typewriter; while at the back was a narrow strip of counter where the ‘samples’ were stacked. With what relief did the romantic eye turn to that counter, past the hive of impersonal offices! For the half-dozen coloured blankets, the dozen rolls of material, which surely, from a practical point of view, were as good as useless, seemed to suggest that the owner, a brother of Mr Cohen upstairs, a cousin of Mr Cohen from the kaffir store, also felt a need to remind himself and others of the physical existence of machinery, textiles, and a thousand other fascinating things which were sold through this office by means of those little bits of paper. Perhaps Mr Cohen, who had made his fortune in another small native store just down the street, regretted those days when he handled beads and bicycles and stuffs, and kept that counter embedded among the desks and filing cabinets as a nostalgic reminder of personal trading, trade as it should be. On the counter were big tinted pictures of shipping, locomotives, the ports of the world. No one seemed to penetrate to it save old Mr Samuel Cohen himself, who might be observed (by someone climbing the iron staircase) handling the blankets and rearranging the pictures.

      The first and second floors were let as rooms, and the less said about them, the better. Clients ascending to the sober legal offices above might catch sight of a woman in a dressing-gown hurrying (but aggressively, since she had paid her rent and had the right to it) to the bathroom. At night, working late the partners had been known to telephone the police to quell a brawl or eject an improper person. In fact, this layer of the building was altogether undignified and unsuitable; but, as the partners were waiting to rebuild, everything was allowed to remain. Martha discovered a familiar atmosphere almost at once when she heard Mr Cohen say to a client, ‘I must apologize for the surroundings, but we really aren’t responsible.’ This although the building was owned and controlled by him; because he planned a change, he could not be considered as really being here.

      On the other hand, the very age of the place gave it dignity. People from older countries might think it strange to describe a building dated 1900 as old; but it had been the first to raise its three storeys above the bungalows and for this it was affectionately remembered, and one entered it with a comforting sense of antiquity – as in Spain one lifts one’s eyes from the guidebook murmuring reverently, ‘This was first built three centuries before Christ, think of that!’ and afterwards poverty and squalor seem merely picturesque.

      This, the oldest legal firm in the city, was known as Robinson’s on account of the first Mr Robinson, now dead; for the young Mr Robinson gave precedence to both Mr Cohens, and to Mr Daniel when he was there, which was seldom, for he was a member of Parliament, and therefore very busy. But all this became clear to Martha slowly; for she was too confused, to begin with, to understand more than her own position, and even that was not so simple.

      The partners each had a small room, reached by squeezing through the main room, which was packed tight with typewriters and filing cabinets and telephones; but though this main room at first sight looked like chaos, holding as it did fifteen women of varying ages, certain divisions soon became apparent. The chief one was that the four senior secretaries sat at one end, with telephones on their desks; but Martha was so ignorant of office routine she did not at first notice this. She arrived on the first morning in a state of keyed desire to show impossible heights of efficiency: arrived half an hour before anyone else, and sat waiting for the demands on her to begin. But the other girls drifted in, talked a little; and then came the partners; and still no one asked her for anything. She was left sitting until a slight, sparrowlike woman, with bright fringed hair and round blue eyes, came past