Landlocked

by Doris Lessing

  Martha sat looking at the keys. They’d be appropriate for—but she had never seen such keys, enormous black keys such as no one used these days. They were keys fit for a dungeon. Meanwhile, the radio was on, much too loud, outside on the veranda, and every time Martha turned it off, her mother turned it on again. Meanwhile, the little white dog yapped as he ran in a frenzy of activity in at the door, up on to a settee, out of the low window, on to the veranda, in at the door, around and around, snapping at the noise from the radio, at a bee on the golden shower, at Martha’s ankles. And meanwhile, Martha thought that her daughter was with Mr Quest, and had been alone with him for some time, and that this, which made her uneasy, was something which apparently she could not prevent.

  The room was full of light reflected from the glittering foliage in the garden. This room, so unlike the living-room of the house on the farm with its windows opening on to a landscape that showed ranges of mountains East, West, South, yet resembled it—why? Because through the windows one saw the shrubs and trees of the garden, the waving tops of trees in the park; because the light changed here all day, so that one could say: it is full sunlight, it is a clouded day, by one glance at the air in the room—which tended to be a bit stale this afternoon, or seemed so, perhaps because of the jigging radio, the smelly little dog.

  The radio must be on because Mrs Quest had said: It’s nice for your father. But, of course, he could scarcely hear it from where he was. Where he was with the small girl Caroline.

  Martha sat, looking at the keys. When Martha said it looked as if she would really be going to England at last, Mrs Quest looked out all the keys she had ever had in her life, put them together on a new key-ring, and presented them to Martha. ‘I suppose some of the boxes may have got lost, but it’s always a good idea to have plenty of nice keys.’

  She was now making scones in the kitchen. She could not really hear the music from the radio. Martha got up and leaned through the window and first turned the sound low, then off. Silence. Blessed silence. Martha, straining her ears, could just hear a small girl’s voice, three rooms away. It sounded normally cheerful, that was something.

  Again Martha sat down, by the table on which were the keys. Yes, this room was like that other room—although one was of mud-plastered walls and thatch, the other of brick and plaster; one almost part of the bush which surrounded it, the other set in a big, lush, town garden. Why were they alike? Because some of the pictures were the same? For instance, a picture of a comical small boy who sat fishing on the side of a stream; but he had gone to sleep, and on the end of his line was a great fish the size of a whale who peered up out of the water with an expression which said: Who is this monstrously impertinent imp who has dared…

  This picture, probably given to the Quests as a wedding present by some person who had said: What on earth shall we give dear Alfred and May, had hung on Mrs Quest’s walls wherever she had moved for nearly thirty years. The little dog, yap, yap, yap, bounded around in another circle, and Martha lost her temper, and swept him up roughly as a flame of rage licked through her blood and caused her to drop him out of the window. She slammed the door. He jumped back in, wagging his tail. She picked him up and threw him into the dining-room, and with two doors shut between herself and him, sat with her head in her hands, listening to the silence. Real silence now. She could not hear Caroline’s voice at all, though.

  There were the keys still, black, rusty, jutting, awkward, all by themselves on the table. Mrs Quest, so she had informed Martha, had lain awake all night worrying, because of Martha’s going to England. She had got up at five in the morning to ferret out the keys, and assemble them, and she had been at a shop when it opened to buy the key-ring. Yet the date for Martha’s leaving was not yet fixed, the ships were so full of people deprived of pleasure-tripping for the duration of the war. Nor was the divorce fixed, for there were long waiting-lists for that amenity as well. Yet Mrs Quest already lay awake. She had lain awake all last night, afraid that Martha would not accept the keys, it would be just like her, she said, handing the jangling, rusty, appalling object to Martha, looking as guilty as if she had just stolen something.

  The thing was unbelievable, preposterous—it had the same quality of preposterousness as that awful coy picture which had been part of the Quests’ lives for no reason at all for thirty years; as that frightful, smelly little dog who was whining two rooms away; as the fact that Caroline was with her grandfather, Mr Quest—described by Mrs Quest as: It’s nice for the poor little girl to get to know her grandfather while she has the chance; as the fact that Caroline was here, in the same house as Martha at all.

  Yet at the same time this horror was absolutely natural and indeed inevitable: Mrs Quest, whose life was so narrowed, so deprived—her son had married and gone off to farm in the mountains three hundred miles away—was right to want to have her granddaughter in the house as often as she could.

  Of course.

  Just as: why not collect half-a-century’s keys on a key-ring to present to one’s getting-on-for-thirty daughter? Why not treat a little dog as if he were a loved baby and call him, ‘in joke’, Kaiser? Why not leave a child of six alone for hours with a sick old man who scarcely knew what he was doing?

  And above all, could Mrs Quest be blamed, as busy as she was, if she forgot to tell Martha the child was there, if she forgot to tell the child’s father and her stepmother that Martha would be there—if she, faced with this situation which was entirely Martha’s fault, behaved as if there was no situation?

  After all, it was a situation for which there were no precedents, Martha could see that. She could remember no novels about it, no plays, no poems—though it was the sort of thing that occurred in Victorian melodrama. There wasn’t even any mention of it in the books on ‘child guidance’ which presumably the child’s new stepmother used, as Martha had done.

  Anyway, for some months now Martha had been coming to her mother’s, and finding the little girl there. Elaine Talbot was having a baby of her own at last, and it was natural that Caroline should spend time with her grandparents. All absolutely natural, in order, and indeed, bound to happen.

  Meanwhile, Martha inwardly howled with sheer rage, with pain—and saw everybody’s point of view, and above all, saw no point in feeling anything at all, since what good would it do? She came to the house, greeted the little girl, her daughter, like a stranger, and then, as the child became used to her, like a friendly grown-up—an ‘auntie’. Caroline called her Auntie, and Mrs Quest never lost an opportunity—Let Auntie Matty tell you a story dear, Auntie Matty will take you to wash your hands.

  So Martha was neither ‘seeing’ the child, nor not ‘seeing’ her. ‘You know you aren’t allowed to see her, it’s not fair on her,’ said Mrs Quest, at least once a week, even now. ‘Seeing’ apparently meant Caroline’s knowing that Martha was her mother. Well, of course, Caroline should not ‘know’, if that meant knowing so casually, that Martha was her mother. But surely she should not, either, meet a woman who was her mother, as if there were no situation at all.

  But who was to be censured for all this? Martha, of course. Mrs Quest? Of course not, for the essence of Mrs Quest was that she could never be censured for anything, she was so much of a victim. Victims cannot be blamed. The weak cannot be blamed. The defeated are in the right. The old, the exploited, the miserable, are to be pardoned.

  So this, the situation of the child, like the business of the keys—and like everything else, Martha could not help muttering—had this quality of sheer, brutal, farcical impossibility. There was a surface of sense, of civilized life: Well, it’s nice for Caroline to get to know her grandfather while she can. But underneath there was such horror that…if a young woman commits the crime of leaving a child, without the wailing, the weeping, the wringing of the hands that make it, almost, an act within nature (as the writers of Victorian melodrama understood very well) then everything will be unnatural, horror will remain unreleased, and of course Martha ‘behavin
g sensibly’, as it was her nature to do, must run into a pretty little girl of three, four, five, six years old at her mother’s house and hear ‘there’s Auntie Matty!’

  ‘Are you my auntie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A week ago, Martha was cycling past the Quests on her way to take Jack Dobie a letter from Thomas, which described the sufferings of a village of Africans in the Zambesi Valley. Their crops had failed through drought. ‘No one would ever have heard of it if I hadn’t been here by chance. They are dying, they say, because Nyaminyami, the River God of the Zambesi, is angry with them.’ She had dropped in to see how her father was. On the veranda was her brother and his wife. They were already a family. A handsome, fair young farmer, with a crippled hand; his plump, freckled little wife; two tiny children, one a baby. It was about five in the afternoon. ‘Yes, your father is awake,’ Mrs Quest had said.

  Martha had gone to the door of her father’s room. It was half-open. Silence. He was asleep? Martha had stood hesitating, on the point of not going in after all. Then she heard the old man’s voice: ‘It’s my hand, it’s my hand, it’s my hand.’ It was a fierce, hungry whisper. Then, while Martha chilled to the rapaciousness of the old man’s voice, a child’s voice said, polite and firm: ‘No, grandad, it’s my hand. It’s mine.’

  Martha had taken a step forward, already disgusted—no, that was not the word, appalled, though she did not know why the scene she was going to see would be terrible. Perhaps it was that the child’s voice, the cold correctness of it, the politeness, was the voice of common sense—which was the mask for all this horror. ‘It’s nice for the little girl to get to know her grandfather.’ ‘Are you my auntie?’ ‘No, it’s not your hand, grandad, it’s mine.’

  Martha saw the old man, not only sitting up in bed, which he had not had strength to do for weeks, but sitting up and forward away from the pillows. His shoulders slumped with weakness, but the sick, white face was clenched with purpose. The hand, bone merely, a skeleton’s hand with thin folds of flesh loose on it, was gripped around the plump, fresh arm of the little girl.

  Caroline wore a pretty pink dress. She was a charming little creature, with her black eyes, her black curls, and she sat perched high on the bed, one brown leg under her, the other down, so that a bare, brown foot was propped on the fat neck of the little white dog who devotedly crouched by the bed, waiting for her to come and play. She sat like a little queen, her delicious brown foot on the fat white dog, and Martha saw how she teased the dog, rubbing the folds of fat back and forth over his neck with her toes. She had kept the dog by her, by tantalizing him with her foot, while she had sat politely on the bed, ‘getting to know’ her grandfather. Meanwhile, the old dog rolled up its eyes in ecstasy, shivering and groaning. Caroline was very pale. She sat up straight. Her mouth was slightly open. She breathed irregularly, staring at six inches’ distance into the face of the old, sick man. She tried to bend her head back as far as it would go, without seeming to. There was a look of disgust on the fresh little face. The room smelled of sickness, a thick, sweet, cloying smell, the smell of death.

  Mr Quest had hold of the child’s arm and was saying fiercely: ‘It’s my hand, it’s my hand.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, grandfather, I’ve told you already, it’s mine.’

  ‘It’s my hand, it’s my hand.’

  And he clumsily slid his hand towards him along the plump forearm of the little girl, afraid she might wrench it away from him. Now he was gripping the wrist tight with his right hand. Then, balancing himself upright with difficulty, he laid his left hand on the crumpled sheet beside the imprisoned hand which Martha could see was beginning to redden and swell. He stared at the white, bony hand, which was damp with sweat, and at the little girl’s hand.

  ‘It’s my hand,’ he muttered, ‘yes it is.’

  ‘Oh no, grandfather,’ said Caroline decidedly, in the high, clear tones of a well-brought-up little girl. But there was ‘charm’ in that voice, too—Martha could hear, behind the cool self-sufficiency of this voice, the murmuring self-effacement of the two women, the Talbots, mother and daughter. ‘Oh no, really grandpa, it’s my hand, of course it is.’

  Martha stepped forward. Mr Quest and Caroline heard her. Mr Quest raised his eyes, from which water flowed weakly down his cheeks. His mouth was open, his lips trembled. And Caroline’s face was sharp with relief.

  ‘Here’s Auntie Matty!’ she exclaimed.

  But the old man had forgotten he still held the child’s wrist in a circle of bone. She tugged, hard, and he swayed back and forth, then she said: ‘Grandad! You’re hurting!’ ‘Oh, dear,’ he muttered, and let go. Caroline leaped off the bed, rubbing her wrist, her face a mask of fear and revulsion. In a moment the little girl and her attendant dog had whirled from the room in a din of yapping and cries of ‘Down, Kaiser, down, Kaiser, down!’

  Martha gently laid the old man back on his pillows. Tears ran down his face. ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,’ he muttered. He held up that hideous object, his hand, and looked at it, his lips trembling. He let it drop with a grimace of shame and pain. ‘I don’t want to die, I haven’t lived yet, I don’t want to die.’

  Martha sat by the bed, thinking not of her father, but of the child: how would she remember that scene?

  ‘Shhh, father,’ she murmured mechanically, her mind on Caroline who at that moment rushed past the window with the leaping, yapping little dog—‘pretty little girl in a sunlit garden’—yes, she could be described like that, felt like that. The child’s face was concentrated on the business of holding up a stick for the dog to leap up at. But she raised her eyes and encountered Martha’s eyes. Martha dreaded this look, which they exchanged, often. There was knowledge in it, a sharp almost cynical knowledge. There was a sharp knowledgeable quality in the little face, and even now, as she ran away among the flowering bushes, there was a look on it of fear, Martha was certain of it.

  Mr Quest whimpered, with shut eyes.

  Then he said, in an effort which clenched the muscles of his face and neck: ‘It’s so shameful, it’s so humiliating…’ His head fell sideways, his mouth fell open. He was, apparently, asleep. Martha sat by him in silence. The smell in the room was so strong, she felt it cling to her clothes, damp and thick, like a fog.

  Soon Mrs Quest came in.

  ‘May, May, May…’

  ‘What is it, dear?’

  ‘I don’t want to die.’

  ‘But we all have to die sometime dear,’ Mrs Quest sounded brisk, efficient. She was bustling around the room, tidying it up. The dog had brought in a bit of stick, and Caroline’s jersey lay on a chair.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want, I don’t want.’

  ‘We’ll meet again in heaven, I keep telling you that.’

  Mrs Quest, revived by the presence of her son, stood smiling by the window, looking into the garden where Caroline stood holding up the stick for the dog to jump at.

  ‘Yes, but how do we know?’ said Mr Quest fretfully.

  Mrs Quest turned from the window and hastily tucked in the bedclothes. ‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘I think it’s time for your medicine.’

  The old man whimpered, turning his head from side to side on the pillow.

  ‘Why don’t you give me an injection, put me out of my misery? You’d do it for a dog,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t do that,’ said Mrs Quest.

  Briefly, Martha and Mrs Quest looked at each other, with guilt. Every one of the family, Martha knew, had gone to the doctor, after scenes like this, asking openly or disguisedly, as their natures dictated, if Mr Quest could not be ‘given an injection’. From the way the doctor took it, it was clear it was not the first time he had been asked. He had said to Martha: ‘If your father wants to die, all he has to do is take all the pills in one of the bottles by his bed, he knows that.’

  The doctor, a good man whose attendance at this interminable death-bed was more for support to the family than for the sake of the patient, showed h
is goodness by not being shocked, and by discussing at great length the ethics of the thing. ‘Putting people out of their misery,’ as Mrs Quest put it. ‘Murder,’ as Martha put it.

  ‘How do you know,’ said he, ‘that there’s not a part of your father looking on all the time, watching? How would you feel, killing him?’

  ‘That’s just the point,’ said Martha. ‘If there wasn’t a part of him conscious, it wouldn’t matter. I sit by him and I’m afraid a part of him is awake, is conscious—and that’s so terrible…’

  ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,’ muttered the old man, clinging with his hard, bony fingers to his wife’s hand.

  ‘But we all have to go,’ she said again, looking tired and distressed now. ‘I’ll make you a nice cup of Benger’s,’ she added, and went off to the kitchen.

  Suddenly Mr Quest returned to himself. ‘I don’t think I want to see any of you again,’ he said as crossly as his weakness would allow. ‘Bad enough having you day in, day out, without having to put up with you beyond the Pearly Gates as well!’ Martha laughed with relief. ‘Laugh,’ he said, ‘laugh. Funny thing, laughing. It makes a funny noise. I never thought about it before. What’s laughing for? Well, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I can tell you, I could do without any of you for a hundred years or so, two hundred, if it comes to that.’

  And now Caroline was with her grandfather again—had been with him a couple of hours. And what disturbed Martha was this: a little girl with such a will, such self-confidence, she would not have gone in to visit the dying man unless she had wanted to. ‘Caroline’s very fond of her grandfather,’ Mrs Quest had said, in a chuckling sort of voice, that went with the normal situation: small child, grandfather.

  Martha stayed in front of the keys, refusing to go in. Suppose he sat there again, gripping the child’s wrist and saying: It’s mine, it’s mine, clinging on to the last breath of life, even at the cost of any dignity or pride? And, worse: suppose Caroline sat there willingly, suppose she teased the old man with her freshness, her self-confidence, just as she teased the little dog? Or sat there out of curiosity, or wished the nearness of death?