She said half-laughing, on a rueful note, one mother commiserating with another about the charming peccadilloes of the young: ‘Of course, Matty’s awfully scatterbrained, awfully wrong-headed.’
Mrs Maynard said briskly: ‘All the more reason she should be given something useful to do, don’t you think? Well, I hope to see one or another of you, if not both, tomorrow.’ She rang off, leaving Mrs Quest with the most improbable suspicion which she could not make head or tail of—that Mrs Maynard would be even happier to see Martha than to see herself. It was unfair. It was brutal. Yes, it was really cruel—like the dream. It had the gratuitous, unnecessary cruelty of her dream. Mrs Quest, who had decided that the cigarette would be the last until Jonathan’s safe homecoming, now lit another, and sat by the radio patting the little white dog. On the flowered rug, which slipped about crookedly over polished green linoleum, lay the fragment of white bone. The little dog lay with his nose to it, in wistful remembrance of better bones, juicier morsels.
‘Disgusting,’ said Mrs Quest, in real revulsion from the clean, bleached fragment of skeleton. She said in a softer ‘humorous’ voice: ‘Really, Kaiser, you don’t bring bones into drawing-rooms!’ She flipped it out of the window with a look of disgust. The little dog rushed after it and brought it back, playfully, to lie at his mistress’s feet. But she, in a rush of anger, threw it right out of the window and over the veranda wall. This time the animal sensed that he, or at least his precious bone, was not wanted, and he vanished with it behind a shrub. Mrs Quest sat alone, listening to the radio. It seemed to her that for years, for all her life, she had sat, forced to be quiet, listening to history being made. She, whose every instinct was for warm participation, was never allowed to be present. Somewhere else people danced all night, revolving in a great flower-decked room, watching the Dancer revolve, her cruel smile concealed behind the mask of a beautiful young woman. Somewhere else, unreachably far away, a great chestnut horse rose like an arrow over the dangerous fences of half a dozen leafy English counties, and on the horse’s back was the masked Rider. Three red roses, three perfect red roses, with the dew fresh on them…Mrs Quest went to the bedroom to see if her husband was awake. He lay in a dead sleep, although he had had no drug since last night. Just as well he had not gone to the Victory Parade. The servants were cleaning silver, scrubbing potatoes, sweeping steps, snipping dead blooms off rose bushes. The big house, with its many rooms, was all ready for people, for the business of life; and yet in it was a dying man, his nurse, and the two black men and the black child who looked after them. Well, soon Jonathan would come home, and then he would get married, and his children could come and stay and fill these rooms. Or perhaps Martha would have another baby and she would need…Mrs Maynard wanted her on the committee.
On the radio, the first stirrings of the Victory occasion could be heard. Horses’ hooves. Drums—real drums, not a tom-tom. The commentator spoke of the brilliant day, and of the slow approach of the Governor and his wife.
Mrs Quest heard this, saw it even, with a smile that already had the softness of nostalgia. This little town, this shallow little town, that was set so stark and direct on the African soil—it could not feed her, nourish her…an occasion where the representatives of Majesty were only ‘the Governor and the Governor’s wife’—no, it wouldn’t do. And the troops would have black faces, or at least, some of them would be black, and the dust clouds that eddied about the marching feet of the bands would be red…Mrs Quest was no longer in Africa, she was in Whitehall, by the Cenotaph, and beside her stood the handsome man who was her husband, and the personage who bent to lay the wreath was Royal.
The short hour of ritual was too short. Mrs Quest came back to herself, to this country she could never feel to be her own, empty and afraid. Now she must go and wake her husband—because he couldn’t be allowed to sleep all the time, he must be kept awake for an hour or so. He must be washed, and fed again and soon the doctor would come. And for the rest of that day, so it would be, and the day after, and the day after—she would not get to Mrs Maynard’s committee tomorrow night, and in any case, Mrs Maynard did not want her, she wanted Martha.
Mrs Quest went to the telephone and told Martha that Mr Quest had been asking after his daughter, and why didn’t she care enough for her father to come and visit him?
‘But I was there last night.’
‘Well, if you haven’t got time 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 e
at 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 pillows.
‘Father,’ said Martha, in a low voice, bending down.
‘Is that you, old chap?’ said Mr Quest, in the voice which meant that he didn’t want to wake up.
‘How are you?’
‘Oh, much the same, I suppose.’
She stayed there a few moments, but he kept his eyes shut. Anguish, the enemy, appeared: but no, she was not going to weep, feel pain, suffer. If she did, they would get her, drag her down into this nightmare house like a maze where there could be only one end, no matter how hard one ran this way, that way, like a scared rabbit.
‘Did you get to that Victory thing?’ asked the old man in a normal voice, as she straightened herself to leave.
‘No. Well, is it likely?’
‘She wanted me to go.’
‘So I hear.’
Mr Quest’s lips moved: he planned a humorous remark. Martha waited. But he lost interest and said: ‘Well, good night, old chap.’
‘Good night.’
‘He’s asleep,’ said Martha to her mother on the veranda, just as she had done the night before. She went to the bicycle and slid herself on the seat.
‘I don’t know how you can bicycle decently in a skirt as tight as that.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about bicycling decently,’ said Martha, sullenly. Then she smiled. Mrs Quest smiled too. ‘And where are you gallivanting off to now?’
Martha sat on her bicycle, with one foot on the wall of the steps. She smiled steadily. She was thinking she might say: Well, as it happens, I’ve got to meet Athen—he’s a communist newspaper-seller from Greece. Maisie’s on the thorny path to hell, he thinks. Maisie? Well, she’s the mother of Binkie Maynard’s by-blow. Yes, I did say Binkie Maynard. And the reason why Mrs Maynard wants me in her gang is so she can get her hooks into Maisie. And that’s why she’s being nice to you—if that’s the word for it. Yes, and Athen wants me to give Maisie a helpful lecture of a moral nature…The sheer imbecility of this caused Martha to smile even more brightly. She said: ‘See you soon,’ and bicycled off. At the foot of the garden she turned briefly to take a last look at the pink jersey which from here seemed a small, pathetic blob which said: Help me, help me, help me.
Mrs Quest went in to her supper, alone. She had ordered enough for two, had even cooked some jam tart. Martha is so fond of it, she had thought. Though she knew quite well Martha never ate sweets of any kind. Imagining the scene, where she put a slice of tart, with its trickles of sweet cream, before Martha, but she shook her head, Mrs Quest’s eyes filled with rejected tears.
She ate a good deal, though she was not hungry, and smoked several cigarettes. Then she listened to the nine o’clock news. All over Europe people danced among ruins, danced in a frenzy of joy because of the end of the war. Mrs Quest sat imagining the scenes in London. As a small girl she had been taken by her father to join the rioting crowds on Mafeking night. She re-created those memories and filled London with them in her mind. Then, the radio ceased to talk of victory, the day was over. Mrs Quest ‘settled her husband for the night’—which meant, this evening, since he was half-asleep and did not want to be awakened, giving him an injection and another sedative, in case he woke in the early dawn, which is what he dreaded more than anything. Mrs Quest patted her little white dog, went to the kitchen to find him a tit-bit from the refrigerator, then she went to bed herself. Her powerful unused energies surged through her, and soon she was again lying wakeful, thinking in hatred of her daughter. The fantasy of expulsion from Mrs Maynard’s drawing-room had gone a stage further. Mrs Maynard had arranged for Martha’s arrest for ‘communist activities’. Martha was in front of judge and jury. Mrs Quest, chief witness, was testifying that Martha had always been difficult: ‘She’s as stubborn as a mule, your honour!’ But with careful handling, she would become a sensible person. Martha was let off, by the judge, on condition that she lived in her mother’s house, in her mother’s custody.
Mrs Quest drifted towards sleep. The scent of roses came in through the window, and she smiled. Th
is time they remained in her hand—three crimson roses. The brutal woman, her beautiful mother, remained invisible in her dangerous heaven. The painful girl, Martha, was locked in her bedroom, under orders from Court and Judge. Mrs Quest had become her own comforter, her own solace. Having given birth to herself, she cradled Mrs Quest, a small, frightened girl, who lay in tender arms against a breast covered in the comfort of bright salmon-pink, home-knitted wool.
Martha bicycled through streets which tried to create Victory night. Knots of people walked about with feather blowers and balloons. In the hotels they were dancing. Sometimes a car went past with its hooter screeching. But it was no good. Hard enough for most of these people to feel the war; how then were they to feel the peace? Besides, the Colony’s men were still up North, or in Burma, or in England, or in prison camps.
In the office was evidence of a just-concluded political meeting. The ash-trays were filled with mess, and the air was foul. Whose meeting? Probably one of the African groups. There were two or three now. But there was a new African leader, so it was rumoured, called Mr Zlentli, and he had nothing to do with the white sympathizers, so he would not have been here.
Martha sat down, doing nothing about tidying the place, simply submitting to the fug and the mess. She was waiting to argue with Athen. It was Athen’s contention that she, Martha, should make Maisie leave her job as barmaid, and take what he called ‘a job for a nice girl’. It was Martha’s contention that if Athen did not want to take on Maisie himself, then he should not interfere. Last time he had raised the question, Martha said: ‘Athen, if you’re so concerned, then why don’t you save Maisie by marrying her?’
To which he had replied by nodding and saying: ‘Yes, I had thought of it. She is a good girl and she needs a man to look after her. But I think it would not be a good thing for Maisie to be made a widow again.’
When the door opened, it was Thomas Stern who came in. He wore the uniform of the medical corps, and carried in his hand a bundle of civilian clothes. He smiled at Martha and said: ‘You’ll excuse me, but I’m going to change.’ He proceeded to do so, while she turned her back and looked out over the dark town. The National Anthem seemed to be oozing from a dozen different sources, played at different rates and in different manners.
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