Martha Quest (35 page)

The telephone rang for Martha. It was Maisie, being calmly, amusedly informative. Having congratulated Martha on ‘hooking Douggie—no one ever thought Douggie’d get hooked,’ she went on to say that the wolves had practically wrecked the town, they’d torn up the whole place. There was a chamber-pot on the statue of Cecil Rhodes that morning, and all the lamp-posts were slashed with red paint. Perry, Binkie and Douglas had spent the hours between four and seven not in a prison cell, which was hardly fitting for people of their standing, but drinking brandy with the policeman on duty at the charge office. They had been fined ten shillings each and presumably were now back administering the affairs of the nation.

‘Douglas was
with
them?’ said Martha, dumbfounded.

‘You’re telling me he was with them, you haven’t seen our Douggie when he gets going.’

Martha put down the telephone, and found Mr Robinson waiting to congratulate her. There followed Mr Max Cohen. Both shook her hand, smiling with an altogether new emphasis, like those welcoming a new member (But of what?). She understood, however, that she had done well for herself. That was implicit in every smile, every gesture, every inflection of their voices. Mr Robinson smiled continually, the same eager, interested, rather wistful smile that Martha was to see on every face for the next few weeks. He said, ‘Your young man has just telephoned me. Off with you and enjoy yourself. You only get married once—or so I hope,’ he added, with a glance at his girls, and they laughed dutifully.

Martha lingered in the cloakroom, powdering her face, while she tried to examine the idea that she was doing well for herself. It made no sense to her. And in any case, of course it didn’t matter. So she went downstairs, and found Douglas on the pavement. He was transformed. Martha felt a disgust at the first glance, which she immediately banished. He was red-eyed, his plump cheeks were darkened with stubble, his clothes were crumpled.

‘Come on,’ he cried, ‘we’ll give it a bang.’ He gave a whoop, standing there on the pavement, so that people turned around and smiled: it appeared that everyone in the city knew. ‘I haven’t been in bed yet,’ he said triumphantly; and she laughed, even while she felt a stab of irritation at the self-satisfied look on his face.

Martha found herself being led to the Mathews’s flat. She hung back, protesting. But it appeared that Stella had known Douggie for years, they were the greatest of friends, Stella had rung Douggie at nine that morning to ask the happy couple to lunch.

In the flat, Stella took Martha into a warm embrace, her eyes shone with tender emotion, and even tears; she murmured, ‘I’m so glad, Matty dear. Now everything’s all right, isn’t it.’ The slightly sustained pressure of her embrace was the only reminder, for that moment, of the incident with Adolph, though at any point in the conversation where there might be an opportunity for remembrance Stella smiled in a secret, warm conspiracy over at Martha. Martha did
not return these smiles; this was the only way in which she remained loyal to herself.

They drank all morning. Long before lunchtime, Martha was gone on the tide. She was wildly elated. They had a long and alcoholic lunch at McGrath’s, where they were interrupted every moment by people coming with congratulations; and no sooner had lunch finished than they went to the Sports Club, where the crowd was arriving, for it was then four o’clock. At the Club, Martha and Douglas were kissed and clasped and slapped by dozens of people; they were half drowned in champagne, to the refrain, ‘I never thought anyone’d hook our Douggie.’

Binkie danced with Martha several times, in a puzzled, angry sort of way, repeating that she was a nice kid; then he gave it up, with the remark that there was something in the air, everyone was getting married, he’d have to get hooked himself in self-defence soon, though of course now Matty was out of the question there was no point in it. And he heaved a large sigh, which was genuine; he had lost control of his Club, and he knew it.

The party went down to the Knave of Clubs at four in the morning, and at sunup returned to the flat, where Martha and Douglas collapsed on the divan and slept. They woke to find Stella, attractively sluttish in a rather soiled purple satin dressing-gown, her ropes of dark glistening hair falling like a corrupted schoolgirl’s over her shoulder, waiting with cups of tea, and suggestive jokes, because the loving couple had been sleeping back to back, with several inches between them.

Douglas told Stella that she was a dirty-minded girl, which was an echo of Donovan that made Martha cold and thoughtful. Douglas followed Stella into the kitchen, where the pair of them cooked breakfast and flirted until Andrew became annoyed. Miraculously, Stella transformed herself into the image of a quiet, devoted wife ministering to others. She served the breakfast, garbed in a white linen dress as simple as that of a nurse. Her hair was now coiled meekly around her exquisite head. She was so attractive that neither her husband nor Douglas could take his eyes off her. Martha did not notice this, for
she was sunk in depression. But soon after that late breakfast they began to drink again, and again Martha was elated.

And so it went on for the whole of that week. In the office Martha was treated like a queen, she was allowed to come late, to stay away for three hours for lunch, even not to come at all. The four of them spent their time together, while Stella’s calm assumption that she was in some way fitted to lead the couple along the flowery road to matrimony was accepted by them quite naturally. And Martha was completely swept away by it all. There were occasional cold moments when she thought that she must somehow, even now, check herself on the fatal slope towards marriage, somewhere at the back of her mind was the belief that she would never get married, there would be time to change her mind later. And then the thought of what would happen if she did chilled her. It seemed that half the town was celebrating; she had not begun to realize how well known Douglas was; the Sports Club were magnificently marrying him off, with a goodwill in which there was more than a hint of malice. The wolves fêted him and toasted him; several times in an evening he was rushed at by a group of them, and tossed protesting and laughing into the air, while Martha stood by smiling uneasily, feeling that she must be perverse to dislike what everyone else thought so amusing and natural. But she was uneasy about Douglas himself. The quiet, responsible, serious young man she had imagined she was marrying had vanished, for the time at any rate. He was jocular, he wore a steady smile of triumph that deepened self-consciously when he entered a room with Martha; and towards the end of an evening he was likely to vanish into a pack of stamping, yelling young men who moaned inarticulately in an ecstasy of frustrated energy, ‘We’ll tear the place up, we’ll give it a bang.’ Martha thought secretly that there was something very strange about it all, for if the point of this public orgy was sex—which surely it must be, judging from the meaning smiles, the jokes, and the way Douglas was continually taken aside by a young man, and teased until he began directing uneasy, proud, guilty looks at Martha which she tried hard not to hate him for—then sex, the-thing-in-itself, had mys
teriously become mislaid in the publicity. For after a dance the couple found themselves back in the Mathews’s flat, half-drunk, completely exhausted, and Douglas in this mood of jocular triumph was so repulsive to her that she nervously protested she was tired, and he at once dropped off to sleep as if the thing were of no importance. She was, in fact, already feeling a creeping disgust of him. It would, however, all be all right when they were married. It was odd that Martha, who thought of the wedding ceremony as an unimportant formula that must be gone through for the sake of society, was also thinking of it as a door which would enclose Douglas and herself safely within romantic love; in fact, in a contradictory, twisted way, while she slept limb to limb with Douglas every night, she was thinking of that unimportant wedding ceremony rather as her mother might have done. Naturally this comparison wouldn’t have dared to enter her head. She thought of the marriage as a door closing firmly against her life in town, which she was already regarding with puzzled loathing. She was longing for the moment when it would no longer have anything to do with her.

By the Friday of that week, Martha was tired and irritable. She was also persistently depressed, which no one would have guessed from her smiling face. On that evening she was unresponsive when Douglas suggested they should go and see Stella, and said she would rather stay in her room.

‘Come on, you only-only get married-married once,’ he said coaxingly; so they went to the flat and drank, but when Stella suggested they should go and dance, Martha said she was tired, and wanted to go to bed.

‘Ooooh, naughty, naughty Matty,’ sang Stella, waving her tinted forefinger at the couple, her eyes bright with complicity and curiosity.

Douglas smiled and said proudly, ‘Give-give us a break, Stell.’

They went home. There Douglas produced a book and said, ‘We can’t go wrong with this, can we?’ It was Van der Velde’s treatise on marriage. It may be said that few middle-class young couples dare
marry without this admirable handbook; and as Douglas had seen it in his young married friends’ bookcases, he had bought it.

Now, the sight of the scientific and modern book had a double effect on Martha. (She had of course read it.) It gave her assurance and made her feel a woman experienced in love, while at the same time she felt unaccountably irritable that Douglas should produce it now—like a cooking book, she remarked to herself before that persistently disagreeable voice was silenced by an effort of will. On the one hand, the gleam in Douglas’s eyes excited her to try…but here that irritating voice remarked, Position C, subsection (d); and once again it was squashed. She was adapting herself compliantly to Douglas’s attitude (the book was lying open at the chosen recipe) when suddenly a wave of exasperation swept over, and she said angrily that she was tired, she was exhausted, she was fed up with the whole thing; she sat up with a jerk, and burst into tears.

Douglas was astounded. However, the thought that women are…came to his aid; he asked her nicely what was the matter, said ‘Don’t cry,’ and comforted her like a brother. Martha wept unrestrainedly, loved him for his kindness; and in due course they made love, and for the first time, and without the aid of the book, in a way that pleased them both.

He went home early, saying she needed sleep. He promised not to go to the Sports Club, which for some reason seemed important to her, though he could not imagine why. Martha woke with the feeling of a prisoner before execution, and said to herself that she would ring him up and say she could not possibly marry him.

When she got up, there was a letter from her mother, ten pages of every sort of abuse, in which the phrases ‘you young people’, ‘the younger generation’, ‘freethinkers’, ‘Fabian sentimentalists’, and words like ‘immoral’, were repeated in every sentence. Martha read the first page, flew to the telephone, and implored Douglas to come to her at once. He came, within fifteen minutes, to find Martha in a state of locked hysteria. She was dangerously calm, very sarcastic, shooting out epigrams about virtue and conventionality like bullets.
She then burst into tears again, and said, half crying and half laughing, ‘How dare they? How dare she? It’s not as if…If only they—well, it’s not as if they cared a damn
really
one way or the other, and…’

Douglas calmed her, but did not make love to her, thinking this was hardly the moment, poor little thing. Martha was soon calm again, and Douglas was perturbed that now it seemed she was cold with him as well as with the rest of the world. However, he used the ancient formula, She’ll be all right once we’re married, and reminded her that today was the day they had arranged to go to the farm.

She seemed to feel annoyed that he thought it necessary to remind her. He went to fetch Binkie’s car, which he was borrowing, and when they had packed their things they started, Martha rather subdued and silent, he transformed back into the serious and sensible young man whom it was easy to love.

The road drove straight across country, twinkling off sunlight from the marbling lanes of asphalt, up the side of a vlei, down the next, between low walls of yellowing grass whose roots were still cluttered and bedded in the mess of last year’s subsiding growth—that is, save where the veld fires had swept and blackened soil (charred and cracked even after the drenching rains), so that new stems rose glistening, as clean as reeds from water. The sky was as deep and blue and fresh as a sweep of sea, and the white clouds rolled steadily in it. The veld, so thickly clothed with grass, broken with small tumbling kopjes which glittered with hot granite boulders, lifted itself unafraid to meet that sky. This naked embrace of earth and sky, the sun hard and strong overhead, pulling up the moisture from foliage, from soil, so that the swimming glisten of heat is like a caress made visible, this openness of air, everything visible for leagues, so that the circling hawk (the sun glancing off its wings) seems equipoised between sun and boulder—this frank embrace between the lifting breast of the land and the deep blue warmth of the sky is what exiles from Africa dream of; it is what they sicken for, no matter how hard they try to shut their minds against the memory of it. And what if one sickens for it when one still lives in Africa, one chooses to remain in town? Living in town, Martha
had forgotten this infinite exchange of earth and sky. She met it again as if she had returned from the North, where veils of mist and vapour and pollution hang over the land, where a dim and muted sunset seems to be taking place in another universe, the sky is self-contained, it broods introspectively behind its veils, the sun shines, the rain falls, but absently, dreaming, and the people on the earth accept what comes, with hardly a glance at their cold partner. And Martha came out of the town into the veld like an astonished stranger; she had been shut from it by a matter of a few weeks among the shells and surfaces of brick and concrete. She might have been in another country.