Martha Quest (13 page)

There was a murmur from the listening people. There seemed to be many more people in the room than before, they had been crowding in, and Martha found herself thinking how different was this man’s position in his household to her father’s: the silence was due to him as a spokesman, he was a patriarch in a culture where the feared and dominating father is still key to the family group; and Martha felt a twinge of fear, because she understood this was not to be taken as a personal conversation, she was being questioned as 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 of 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 with 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 wrote back that she would at once apply for the 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.

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 shirt sleeves, 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 build
ing 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 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, sparrow-like woman, with bright fringed hair and round blue eyes, came past and remarked warningly that she should keep her eyes open and learn the ropes. From which Martha gathered that she had already failed in her first duty, and opened them again from a vision of herself receiving quantities of illegible scrawl and transforming it, as if by magic, into sober and dignified legal documents of the kind Mrs Buss produced from her typewriter. She forced herself to watch what was going on around her.

At lunch hour she stayed at her desk, because she had ten shil
lings between herself and the end of the month, and told herself it would be good for her figure. She went from typewriter to typewriter to see what kind of work she would be asked to do, and felt dismayed in spite of her large intentions; for these legal documents—no, no, it was as if she, Martha, were being bound and straightened by the formal moribund language of legality.

Just before the others were due back, the door marked ‘Mr Jasper Cohen’ opened, and he came out, stopping in surprise when he saw her. He laid some documents on Mrs Buss’s desk and went back again. Almost at once a buzzer sounded, and then, while she confusedly looked for the right instrument, the door opened again and he said, ‘Never mind the telephone. You won’t mind my asking—have you any money, Miss Quest?’

For some reason she protested, ‘Oh, yes, quite a lot,’ and then blushed because it sounded so childish.

He looked at her dubiously, and said, ‘Come into my office for a moment,’ and she followed him. It was very small; he had to squeeze past the corner of the big desk to the corner he sat in. He told her to sit down.

Mr Jasper Cohen already owned her heart because of a quality one might imagine would make it impossible: he was hideously ugly. No, not hideously: he was fantastically ugly, so ugly the word hardly applied. He was short, he was squat, he was pale; but these were words one might as justly use for Joss, his nephew, or his brother, Max. His body was broad beyond squareness; it had a swelling, humped look. His head enormous; a vast, pale, domed forehead reached to a peak where the hair began, covering a white, damp scalp in faint oily streaks, and breaking above the ears into a black fuzz that seemed to Martha pathetic, like the tender, defenceless fuzz of a baby’s head. His face was inordinately broad, a pale, lumpy expanse, with a flat, lumpy nose, wide, mauvish lips, and ears rioting out on either side like scrolls. His hands were equally extraordinary: broad, deep palms puffed themselves into rolls of thick white flesh, ending in short, spatulate fingers almost as broad as long. They were the hands of a gro
tesque; and as they moved clumsily in a drawer, looking for something, Martha watched them in suspense, wishing she might offer to help him. She longed to do something for him; for this ugly man had something so tender and sweet in his face, together with the stubborn dignity of an afflicted person who intends to make no apologies or claims for something he cannot help, that she was asking herself, What is ugliness? She was asking it indignantly, the protest directed against nature itself; and perhaps for the first time in her life, she wondered with secret gratitude what it would be like to be born plain, born ugly, instead of into, if not the aristocracy, at least the middle classes of good looks.

He at last found what he wanted. It was a roll of notes, and he took five of them, sliding them free of each other with an awkward movement; and said, ‘You are only getting a small salary, and so…’ As Martha hesitated, he continued quickly, ‘It was my fault for not remembering you might be short of money, coming in from the farm like that. Besides, you are an old friend of my nephew.’ That clinched the thing for him; and Martha took the money, feeling guilty because she had not been a good friend to Joss. She thanked him with emotion, which seemed to upset him, and he said hurriedly, ‘In a day or two we’ll give you something to do. Just pick up what you can, it must be strange to you if you’ve never been in an office before.’

The interview was over. She went to the door and, as she opened it, heard him say, ‘I shall be pleased if you do not mention this to Mrs Buss. There is no reason why she should know.’ She glanced incredulously at him, for he sounded apprehensive; she was even ready to laugh. But he was looking at some papers.

She went out, and met the other Mr Cohen returning. She disliked him as much as she liked his brother. He was ordinary in appearance, smartly commonplace: a neat, pale, respectable Jewish-looking person, in a striped business suit, and his manner was snappy but formal, as if he tried to cover a natural ill-humour by the forms of good feeling. And where his brother swelled and protruded into large shapes, he seemed concerned to give the opposite impression. His hair
lay in a smooth black cap; his hands were neatly moving, and weighted on either little finger with a heavy signet ring; his tie lay safely behind a narrow gold chain; a gold watch chain confined his neat little stomach.

Martha returned to her desk as the other girls came in, and spent the afternoon watching them. There was no need to be told (as Mrs Buss made a point of telling her) that this was an easy office to work in. There was no feeling of haste; and if they paused in what they were doing for a chat, or a cigarette, they did not pretend otherwise if one of the partners came through. When Mr Max Cohen entered with work for his secretary, he asked politely, ‘Would you mind doing this for me, when you’ve finished your tea?’ And his secretary finished her tea before even looking to see what he had brought her to do. All this was strange to Martha, although she had not known what she must expect. Perhaps she was remembering what her father had said of his days in an office in England, for it was to escape from that office that he had come farming: ‘I simply couldn’t stick it. Day in and day out, damned routine, and then, thank God, there was the war, and then, after
that
, going back to the office was nothing but purgatory, sitting at a desk like a mouse in a hole.’ So it may have been that Martha was unconsciously expecting a purgatory, and had now found this pleasant working place; but of course she had not yet so much as lifted her fingers to the typewriter.

Two incidents occurred that first afternoon. At a table near the door where the clients came in sat a young woman whose task it was to take money from debtors. They came in, one after another, white, black and coloured, to pay off small sums on what they owed. The young woman was strictly impersonal; and because of this, Martha’s first impulse towards pity was dulled. But almost immediately after the midday break a shabby woman entered, with a small child on either hand, and began to cry, saying she could not pay what was due and perhaps her creditor would let her off that month? The impersonal young woman argued with her in a warningly low voice, as if to per
suade the shabby one to lower hers. But all the typists were watching, and Martha saw they glanced towards Mrs Buss.

Sure enough, it was not very long before the dues collector went to Mrs Buss and said, ‘Can you talk to Mr Cohen? You know, she really does have a hard time, and she’s having another kid, too.’

Mrs Buss said flatly, ‘Well, whose fault is it she has a new kid every year?’

‘But—’

‘I’m not going to ask Mr Cohen, he’ll give in to her again, and anyway she’s a fraud—she was drunk in McGrath’s last night, I saw her.’

The shabby woman began to cry. ‘Let me explain to Mr Cohen, just let me explain,’ she pleaded.

Mrs Buss kept her head stoically down over the typewriter and her fingers drummed angrily, until the door behind her opened and Mr Jasper Cohen came out.

‘What’s all this?’ he demanded mildly.

‘Nothing,’ said Mrs Buss indignantly, ‘nothing at all.’

Mr Cohen looked over the listening heads of his staff to the weeping woman.

‘Mr Cohen,’ she wept, ‘Mr Cohen, you’ve got a good heart, you know I try my best, you can put in a good word for me.’

‘You did promise, you know,’ said Mr Cohen, and then hastily: ‘Very well, don’t cry, I’ll write to our clients. Make a note of it, Mrs Buss.’ And he escaped quickly into his room.

The woman left the office, wiping her eyes, with a triumphant look at Mrs Buss; while Mrs Buss let her hands fall dramatically from her machine, like a pianist at the end of a piece, and exclaimed, ‘There, what did I tell you?’

The dues collector looked positively guilty under that blue and accusing stare, and murmured, ‘Well, he’s got a right to decide.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Buss tragically. ‘Yes, and that’s what always happens. I do my best to protect him, but…Well, when we get into the
new offices this sort of thing won’t happen, believe
me
!’ And she lifted her hands to the keys again.

The second incident was similar. Charlie, the office-boy, came round with a tray of tea, and then went to speak to Mrs Buss, while she let those dedicated hands rest on the keys like someone not prepared to be interrupted.

‘No,’ she said loudly, ‘no, Charlie, it’s no good.’ And she began typing.

Charlie raised his voice over the noise; she typed faster; he cried, ‘Madam!’