Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

look of understanding and complicity in his fine, dark eyes. For in that look was a touch of the rake; and at these moments when he flirted a little with Mrs Van Rensberg, he came alive; and Mrs Quest was uneasy, and Martha unaccountably rather sad, seeing her father as he must have been when he was young. His good looks were conventional, even dull, save for his moments of animation. And they were rare, for if Mr Quest was a rake, he did not know it.

      When Mrs Quest said teasingly, but with an uneasy undertone, ‘Mrs Van Rensberg, poor soul, got quite flustered this afternoon, the way you flirted with her,’ Mr Quest said, rather irritated, ‘What do you mean, I flirted? I was only talking for politeness’ sake.’ And he really believed it.

      What he liked best was to sit for hours on end in his deck-chair on the veranda, and watch the lights and shadows move over the hills, watch the clouds deploying overhead, watch the lightning at night, listen to the thunder. He would emerge after hours of silence, remarking, ‘Well, I don’t know, I suppose it all means something’; or ‘Life is a strange business, say what you like.’ He was calm, even cheerful, in his absent-minded way, as long as he was not disturbed, which meant these days, as long as he was not spoken to. At these moments he became suffused with angry irritation; and now both women were continually appealing for his support, and he would reply helplessly, ‘For heaven’s sake, what is there to quarrel for? There isn’t anything to quarrel about.’ When his wife came to him secretly, talking insistently until he had to hear her, he shouted in exasperation, ‘Well, if the child wants to make herself ridiculous, then let her, don’t waste your time arguing.’ And when Martha said helplessly, ‘Do talk to her, do tell her I’m not ten years old any longer,’ he said, ‘Oh, Lord, do leave me alone, and anyway, she’s quite right, you’re much too young, look at Marnie, she makes me blush wriggling around the farm in shorts and high heels.’ But this naturally infuriated Martha, who did not envisage herself in the style of a Marnie. But the women could not leave him alone, several times a day they came to him, flushed, angry, their voices querulous, demanding his attention. They would not leave him in peace to think about the war, in which he had lost his health, and perhaps something more important than health; they would not leave him to dream tranquilly about the future, when some miracle would transport them all into town, or to England; they nagged at him, as he said himself, like a couple of darned fishwives! Both felt that he let them down, and became irritable against him, so that at such times it was as if this very irritation cemented them together, and against him. But such is the lot of the peacemakers.

       Chapter Two

      Early in her sixteenth year, Martha was expected to pass the matric – it goes without saying, quite brilliantly. She did not even sit the examination; and it was not the first time she had withdrawn from a situation through circumstances which it occurred to no one, particularly Martha herself, to call anything but bad luck. At eleven, for instance, there had been just such a vital examination, and she had become ill the week before. She was supposed to be exceptionally musical, but by some fatality was always prevented from proving it by gaining the right number of marks. She was prepared for confirmation three times, and in the end the whole thing was allowed to drop, for it appeared that in the meantime she had become an agnostic. And now here was this important examination. For months Mrs Quest was talking about university and scholarships, while Martha listened, sometimes eagerly, but more often writhing with embarrassment. A week before the vital date, Martha got pink eye, which happened to be raging through the school. Not a very serious affliction, but in this case it appeared Martha’s eyes were weakened.

      It was October, the month of heat and flowers, and dust and tension. October: the little town where Martha was at school was hung with flowers, as for a festival. Every street was banked with purple-blooming trees, the jacarandas held their airy clouds of blossom over every sidewalk and garden; and beneath them blew, like a descant, the pale pink-and-white bauhinias; and behind, like a deep note from the trumpet, the occasional splash of screaming magenta where a bougainvillaea unloaded its weight of colour down a wall. Colour and light: the town was bombarded by light, the heat beat down from a whitish sky, beat up from the grey and glittering streets, hung over the roofs in shimmering waves. The greens of the foliage were deep and solid and shining, but filmed with dust; like neglected water where debris gathers. As one walked past a tree, the light shifted glittering from facet to facet of a branch or leaf. How terrible October is! Terrible because so beautiful, and the beauty springs from the loaded heat, the dust, the tension; for everyone watches the sky, and the heavy trees along the avenues, and the sullen clouds, while for weeks nothing happens; the wind lifts an eddy of dust at a street corner, and subsides, exhausted. One cannot remember the smell of flowers without the smell of dust and petrol; one cannot remember that triumphant orchestra of colour without the angry, white-hot sky. One cannot remember … Afterwards Martha remembered that her eyes had ached badly, then they closed and festered, and she lay in half-darkness making jokes about her condition because she was so afraid of going blind. She was even more afraid of her fear, because nothing could have been more absurd, since half the girls in the school were similarly afflicted. It was merely a question of waiting till her eyes grew better. She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what? She sat and sniffed painfully at the weighted air, as if it were dealing her blows like an invisible enemy. Also, there was the examination to be taken; she always relied on intensive study during the last fortnight before an examination, for she was the kind of person with a memory that holds anything, almost photographically, for about a month; afterwards what she had learned disappeared as if she had never known it. Therefore, if she took the examination, she would probably pass, but in a mediocre way.

      Mrs Quest was told that her daughter had pink eye. Then she got a letter from Martha, a very hysterical letter; then another, this time flat and laconic. Mrs Quest went into town, and took her daughter to an oculist, who tested her and said there was nothing wrong with the eyes. Mrs Quest was very angry and took her to another oculist; the anger was the same as that she directed towards those doctors who did not immediately accept her diagnoses of her husband’s condition. The second oculist was patient and ironical and agreed to everything Mrs Quest said.

      Curious that Mrs Quest, whose will for years had been directed towards Martha distinguishing herself – curious that she should accept those damaged eyes so easily, even insist that they were permanently injured when Martha began to vacillate. For as soon as Mrs Quest arrived in town and took the situation in hand, Martha found herself swept along in a way she had not foreseen. If one can use the word ‘see’ in connection with anything so confused and contradictory. The end of it was that Martha went back to the farm – ‘to rest her eyes,’ as Mrs Quest explained to the neighbours, with a queer pride in the thing that made Martha uneasy.

      So here was Martha at home, ‘resting her eyes’ but reading as much as ever. And how curious were the arguments between the two women over this illogical behaviour. For Mrs Quest did not say, ‘You are supposed to have strained your eyes, why are you reading?’ She made such remarks as ‘You do it on purpose to upset me!’ Or ‘Why do you have to read that kind of book?’ Or ‘You are ruining your whole life, and you won’t take my advice.’ Martha maintained a stubborn but ironical silence, and continued to read.

      So here was Martha, at sixteen, idle and bored, and sometimes secretly wondering (though only for a moment, the thought always vanished at once) why she had not sat that examination, which she could have passed with such ease. For she had gone up the school head of her class, without even having to work. But these thoughts could not be clearly faced, so she shut them out. But why was she condemning herself to live on this farm, which more than anything in the world she wanted to leave? The matric was a simple passport to the outside world, while without it escape seemed so difficult she was having terrible nightmares of being tied hand and foot under the wheels of a locomotive, or struggling waist-deep in quicksands, or eternally climbing