Doris Lessing - Landlocked

A deep forest silence. This shed had been built at the bottom of a large garden to hold tools and seedlings. The house (it was in the avenues, a couple of hundred yards from the Quests’ house) now belonged to Thomas’s brother and his wife. During the war Thomas had appropriated the shed and had built a loft across one half of it, half-inch boards on gum poles, as flimsy a construction as a child makes for himself in a tree. But it was strong enough, for it held a bed and even books and could be locked. The brick floor of the shed below was covered with divided petrol tins full of seedlings. Thomas, based on the farm where his wife lived, was also a nurseryman in the city. During the war he had kept an eye on the farm while he moved about the Colony from one camp to another. Now he moved back and forth from the farm to the town, bringing in lorry-loads of shrubs, flowers, young trees grown on the farm to sell here. ‘Thomas Stern’s Nursery’ it said on a board on the gate, which was the back gate of Mr and Mrs Joseph Stern’s garden.

Here Martha came most afternoons and some evenings to make love, or simply to turn a key on herself and be alone.

She had complained that her life had consisted of a dozen rooms, each self-contained, that she was wearing into a frazzle of shrill nerves in the effort of carrying herself, each time a whole, from one ‘room’ to the other. But adding a new room to her house had ended the division. From this centre she now lived – a loft of aromatic wood from whose crooked window could be seen only sky and the boughs of trees, above a brick floor hissing sweetly from the slow drippings and wellings from a hundred growing plants, in a shed whose wooden walls grew from lawns where the swinging arc of a water-sprayer flung rainbows all day long, although, being January, it rained most afternoons.

Once upon a time, so it is said, people listened to their dreams as if bending to a door beyond which great figures moved; half-human, speaking half-divine truths. But now we wake from sleep as if our fingers have been on a pulse: ‘So that’s it! That’s how matters stand!’ Martha’s dreams registered a calmly beating pulse, although she knew that loving Thomas must hold its own risks, and that this was as true for him as for her.

When he came back into the shed below, Martha turned over again on her stomach to watch him. He did not at once come up the ladder, but bent over green leaves to adjust a label. His face was thoughtful, held the moment’s stillness that accompanies wonder – which in itself is not far off fear. ‘No joke, love,’ as he had said, in joke, more than once; for these two had not said they loved each other, nor did it seem likely now that they would. But what Martha saw now, on Thomas’s face, as he bent, one hand at work on a twist of rusty wire, was what she felt in the few moments each time before she was actually in his presence: no, it was too strong, it was not what she wanted, it was too much of a wrench away from what was easy: much easier to live deprived, to be resigned, to be self-contained. No, she did not want to be dissolved. And neither did he: smiling, Martha – her teeth lightly clenching the flesh of her forearm, her nose accepting the delicious odours of her skin – watched Thomas straighten to come up the ladder, his broad, brown face, his blue eyes serious, serious – then slowly warming with smiles. Up the ladder slowly mounted a brown, sturdy man, with a brown, broad face and blue eyes that seemed full of sunlight. He wore his working khaki from the farm, and his limbs emerged from it no differently than they had from the khaki of his uniform during the war. Slowly he came up the ladder, and Martha’s stomach shrank, turned liquid, and her shoulders, breasts, thighs (apparently on orders from Thomas, since her body no longer owed allegiance to her) shrank and waited for his touch.

Thomas sat down on the bottom of the bed, or pallet. It was made of strips of hide over a wooden frame. It had on it a thin mattress and a rough blanket. He looked, smiling, at the naked woman lying face downwards, who then, because his gaze at her was apparently unbearable, turned over on her back. But her hand, obeying this other creature in Martha who was Thomas’s, covered up the centre of her body, while her mind thought: Look at that, how very extraordinary! For now that her body had become a newly discovered country with laws of its own, she studied it with passionate curiosity.

Thomas sat quiet, looking at the naked woman whose right hand was held in the gesture of modesty celebrated in art (and at which both were by temperament likely to smile) and she lay looking back at him. They forced themselves to remain quiet and look at each other’s faces now, having confessed that they could hardly bear it, and that it was something they must learn to do. For while the word ‘love’ was something apparently tabooed, for both of them, and they had confessed that this experience was something unforeseen, and therefore by definition not entirely desired? – when they looked at each other, seriousness engulfed them, and questions arose which they both would rather not answer.

For instance, this was a woman twice married (though she had not been really married, she knew) and with a lover or so besides. As for him, he was married to a woman he adored. One could say, in Thomas’s voice, apparently in reply to his own thoughts, since Martha did not mention it: ‘I have to love women, Martha, and that’s no joke, believe you me.’ Or, as Thomas answered Martha: ‘Yes, Martha, of course. God knows what men do with women in this part of the world, but every time I have a woman, well, nearly every time, I realize that her old man doesn’t know what he’s at. God knows what it’s all about, but let me tell you, in Poland when I had a woman I had a woman, here I take it for granted I’m going to be faced with a virgin … but for all that, Martha, every time a woman likes a man in bed, then he is her first lover. And who am I to dispute the tactful arrangements of nature?’

But for Martha, every other experience with a man had become the stuff of childhood. Poor Anton – well, it was not his fault. And poor Douglas.

But that was not honest either. For by no means easily had she become what Thomas insisted she must be. Of course, her real nature had been put into cold storage for precisely this, but when what she had been waiting for happened at last, then she discovered that that creature in her self whom she had cherished in patience was fighting and reluctant. To be dissolved so absolutely – yes, but what was going to happen to her when Thomas – she could not say ‘when Thomas loves someone else’, or ‘if Thomas goes back to his wife’, and so she said: When Thomas goes away.

‘Why do you say that, Martha?’

‘Say what?’

‘You say, I’m going away?’

‘But, Thomas, you are always going away somewhere.’

‘Yes, but that’s not what you mean.’

‘Well, something like that.’

‘But it’s you who are going away, you’re going to England.’

‘Ah, yes, but even if I didn’t go to England.’

A silence while they looked at each other – serious. ‘Yes, I know,’ said Thomas.

‘Well then?’

‘But in the meantime, I’m here.’

A command, this last – for Thomas, or the creature in him who corresponded to the Martha he had created, demanded that she should give herself to him completely and that she must not listen to the warning: What shall I do when Thomas goes away?

And in any case, what was this absolute giving up of herself, and his need for it? What was the prolonged almost unbearable look at each other, as if doors were being opened one after another inside their eyes as they looked? – how was it that she was driven by him back and back into regions of herself she had not known existed, when in any case, she had judged him at the time he had first approached her as: ‘No, he’s not the right one’? But then, of course, she was not the right one for him either, his wife was that: he said so. Or rather, that he wished she was.