Landlocked. Doris Lessing

for your own father, that’s another thing,’ said Mrs Quest, and heard her own rough voice with dismay. She had not meant to be impatient with Martha. She reached for the box of cigarettes with one hand. The box was empty. She had smoked twenty or more that morning. If Jonathan’s arm did not heal well, or if he was sunk coming home, then it would be her fault.

      ‘I had a letter from Jonathan,’ said Mrs Quest. ‘I think we might very well go and live in England now that the war is over. He’s talking of settling in Essex.’

      Nothing, not a sound from Martha. But Mrs Quest could hear her breathing.

      The servant came into the room to say that it was time to cook lunch, what would she like? Mrs Quest gestured to the empty box and pushed some silver towards him, with a pantomime that he must go and buy some cigarettes. Now, the nearest shop was half a mile away, and she was being unreasonable, and she knew it. She had never done this before.

      She said loudly to Martha: ‘I said, did you hear me, we might go and settle in England?’

      ‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Martha at last, and Mrs Quest, furious with the girl, looked at the servant, holding the silver in his palm.

      ‘See you tonight without fail,’ said Mrs Quest, putting down the telephone. ‘What is it?’ she said sharply to the man.

      ‘Perhaps missus telephone the shop, I want to clean the veranda,’ said the servant.

      ‘No, missus will not telephone the shop, don’t be so damned lazy, do as I tell you,’ said Mrs Quest.

      She could not bear to wait for the hour, two hours, three hours, before the shop could deliver. She had smoked not at all for five years, except for the few days when Jonathan was wounded, but now she would not wait an hour for a cigarette. ‘Take the young master’s bicycle and go quickly,’ she ordered.

      ‘Yes, missus.’

      That evening, Martha arrived to find her mother sitting on the veranda, hunched inside a jersey with a rug around her knees, smoking. Mrs Quest had spent the afternoon in a long fantasy about how Martha joined Mrs Maynard’s ladies, but had to be expelled. Martha cycled up the garden at that moment when in her mother’s mind she was leaving the Maynard drawing-room in disgrace.

      Mrs Quest’s mind ground to a stop. Actually faced with Martha she yearned for her affection. It was not that she forgot the nature of her thoughts; it was rather that it had never occurred to her that thoughts ‘counted’.

      In short, Mrs Quest was like ninety-nine per cent of humanity: if she spent an afternoon jam-making, while her mind was filled with thoughts envious, spiteful, lustful – violent; then she had spent the afternoon making jam.

      She smiled now, rather painfully, and thought: Perhaps we can have a nice talk, if he doesn’t want me for anything.

      She saw a rather pale young woman who seemed worried. But there was something else: Martha was wearing a white woollen suit, and it disturbed Mrs Quest. It’s too tight, she thought. She did not think of Martha having a body. What she saw was ‘a white suit’, as if in a fashion advertisement. And there were disturbing curves and shapes from which her mind shrank because of a curiosity she could not own.

      Martha thought that the old woman who sat in the dusk on the veranda looked tired. Feeling guilty about something, from the look of her.

      Mrs Quest said: ‘You look tired.’

      ‘I am tired.’

      ‘And you’re much too thin.’

      ‘It’s one of my thin phases,’ said Martha vaguely. Flames of rage leaped unexpectedly in Mrs Quest … ‘one of my thin phases’… so like her, cold, unfeeling, just like her!

      ‘Then why don’t you eat more?’ said Mrs Quest with an angry titter.

      ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll just get fat again by myself.’

      Martha sat down and lit a cigarette. Light from the door fell over her mother. Martha saw, under the rug, a brownish skirt, and a pink woollen jersey. Martha looked incredulously at the jersey. How was it possible for a woman, for any woman at all, to wear such a hideous salmon-coloured thing? Why, to touch it must be positively painful.

      ‘I had a letter from Jonathan.’

      ‘Oh, good. You said so actually.’

      ‘He’s getting better. Of course his arm will never be what it was.’

      ‘Of course not,’ said Martha, with an unpleasant intention Mrs Quest was sure of but chose not to analyse.

      ‘I’ve been talking things over with your father. He quite agrees with me that it would be wise to go and live in England near Jonathan. If he decides to live there.’

      ‘Oh, then my father’s better?’ Martha got up, ready to go in. But at her mother’s gesture, she sat down again.

      ‘The doctor was here, he said perhaps your father has turned the corner. He wasn’t feeling up to the Victory Parade this morning, but he’s been quite rested all day, and in fact he slept all afternoon without drugs.’

      ‘Good.’

      Again Martha got up, ready to go in.

      ‘I’ve gone back to smoking,’ said Mrs Quest pathetically, almost demanding that her daughter should congratulate her on her long self-sacrifice.

      ‘Well, you were quite marvellous to give it up,’ said Martha politely. ‘I simply can’t think how you do it.’ She had turned herself away, mostly from the salmon-pink sweater. It seemed to her that everything impossible about her mother was summed up by the sheer insensitivity, the hideousness, of that thick, rough, pink object.

      ‘Mrs Maynard was very disappointed we could not go to the Victory thing. She’s starting a committee for the problems of Peace, and she says she wants you on it. I can’t imagine why, when you’re such a flibberty-gibbet.’ Mrs Quest brought out this last sentence with a nervous titter, simultaneously looking at her daughter in appeal. She knew quite well that Martha was far from being a flibberty-gibbet, but the phrase had come, because of Mrs Quest’s nervousness, her unhappiness on the point of Mrs Maynard, from battles in Martha’s childhood.

      Martha stared at the pink jersey. She was quite white, raging inside with the need to say a thousand wounding things. With an unbelievable effort, she managed to stay silent, smiling painfully, thinking: I hope she has the sense to shut up now, because otherwise …

      Mrs Quest went on: ‘Well, surely you can say something, it’s quite an honour to be asked to Mrs Maynard’s things!’

      Martha began: ‘Mrs Maynard wants me on the committee because of …’ She stopped herself just in time from saying: Because of Maisie.

      ‘What were you going to say?’ said Mrs Quest, wanting to know so badly that her casualness about it grated. Suspicion was flaming through her: there was something odd about Mrs Maynard’s wanting Martha in the first place; and now there was something odd about Martha’s manner.

      ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Martha. ‘Don’t worry. She doesn’t really want me, you know.’

      The words ‘don’t worry’ made Mrs Quest sit straight up saying: ‘What do you mean, why should I care if Mrs Maynard wants you!’

      Martha escaped, saying with a vague bright smile: ‘I’ll just go and see if …’ On the way to the bedroom Martha was muttering: ‘They’ll do for me yet, between them, they’ll get me yet if I don’t watch out.’ The smells of medicine and stool filled her nostrils. Her father had just had an enema and the whole house knew it. Martha allowed herself to think, for a few short moments, of her mother’s life, the brutal painfulness of it – but could not afford to think for long. It made her want to run away now, this minute – out of this house and away, before ‘it’ could get her, destroy her.

      In the bedroom, a small, grey man was asleep, against