Doris Lessing - Landlocked

She lay still, looking at his face. Her flesh was both relaxed, because of its contentment, and yet fearful because his large hand lay an inch from her knee, on the blanket. He was calmly looking her over, then into her face; looking at her hand, her knee, her breast, then into her eyes.

She said, unable to bear it after all: ‘It’s a tragedy, you’ve made me all happy, and so I’m no longer thin and interesting.’

She had put on flesh again. She was again a strong, young woman. But she searched for and loved, every frail or delicate line in herself as he did. She wished herself as fragile as a bird’s skeleton for him who loved so much what he was not – the qualities of delicacy, grace.

He said: ‘You’re a fine girl.’ He smiled gently, his face lit again with the almost-wonder of the moment she had surprised through the slits in the floor. ‘You think I’m nothing but a peasant, Martha?’ He laid his hand on her knee; it shrank like a horse’s skin, then she felt, through her knee-cap, the warm strength of his hand. ‘You think: there’s Thomas, a peasant from Sochaczen. A fine, strong, healthy fellow, not a sick thought in him – you think that?’

He bent over her. His face was desperate with what he was trying to make her accept from him. ‘Martha, do you see this line here?’ He ran a finger up the inside of her upper arm: the flesh shrank, then waited.

‘See that?’

Martha, serious; Thomas, serious; looked at the curve of flesh, a line as mortal as that made by a raindrop sliding down glass; they looked as if their futures depended on looking.

‘I tell you, I want to die when I see that.’ He crushed her upper arm in a great fist, and his face grimaced with the pain he felt for her. ‘Do you understand? No, you don’t understand. But I tell you, Matty, when I see that line, that curve, I want to cut my throat, I couldn’t ever be that, don’t you see?’

His face lay, desperate, against the warmth of her upper arm; the ‘line’ that tormented him, was for Martha merely a surface of sensation. ‘Ah God, Martha, I can’t stand it, I tell you, I’m insane. You think I don’t care for you when I say this to you?’

She smiled, her eyes filled with tears. She let her fingertips, sensitized beyond pleasure, rub gently up the rough surface of his turned cheek. His breath sent warmth over her arm.

‘I know you do.’

‘Yes, I do. But, Martha, I don’t understand it myself – I’d give the whole of you and everything I am for that line there, and for where your cheek lifts when you smile. That’s something I’m not. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘But perhaps they aren’t what I am either?’

‘Yes, yes, maybe. But I can’t help it.’ He was in a rage of despair. Tears ran down her face, she could feel a hot wetness travelling, with edges of chill, down to her chin. What was she to think, to feel – if Thomas loved, to such lengths, the temporary delicacy of a curve of flesh, if he had singled out, with the eye of an insane artist, two, perhaps three ‘lines’ which had purity, had delicacy, the kind of absolute perfection that kept even her, their supposed owner or possessor or creator, in awed appreciation of them – well, why choose a woman who was shaped, as he always said, half-groaning, half-pleased, ‘like a healthy peasant’?

She said: ‘But Thomas, why not get yourself a thin woman then?’

He said, rubbing his head backwards and forwards over her shoulder, as if he was trying to rub out the ‘line’, ‘But I care for you, I keep telling you.’

‘Well, then, I don’t know, I give up.’

He turned her towards him like a doll and said: ‘I once saw a woman, it was in the Cape – she was shaped like a flamingo. She was like a canary, I tell you. I put the energy into getting her that could have won the war two years earlier, but Matty, I didn’t care for her.’

Martha laughed and thought: Well, what about his wife? The photograph of her showed a slight, fair woman with a delightful smile. Yes, but how could she, Martha, say: Your wife’s like a flamingo, she’s as fragile as a handful of canaries, and obviously that’s why you married her?

‘Not to have this here, I can’t stand it.’

‘What do you mean, have it.’

‘That’s the point.’ His face was full of real anguish, the pain of his mind. ‘Don’t humour me, Martha, don’t be maternal – I’ll kill you, I tell you, if you go maternal on me.’

Their love-making was short – he had to go back to his farm, and she had to visit her father and then run errands for Johnny Lindsay. It was short, too, because of the violence of this emotion.

‘I tell you, Martha, there are times when I’m sorry we started, it’s all too much for me, I can tell you.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘So you do!’

They lay smiling at each other from half an inch’s distance, eye to eye.

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Wait, I’ll take you.’

Suddenly a noise as if gravel was being flung about everywhere. It was raining in loud, splashing drops through a strong, orange evening sunlight. The six inches of glass ran in a streaked gold light. Thunder cracked, but a bird safe in a bunch of warm leaves repeated a long, slow, liquid phrase over and over again.

A handful of rain, blown in by a hard gust of wind, scalded them with cold. They leaped out of bed and stood below the tiny window, through which rods of strong wet drove and stung their strong, fresh, satiated bodies.

They opened their mouths and let the wet run in, and watched the greenish reflections from the deep tree outside, and the orange lights from the window-glass, run and slide on their polished skins. They laughed and rubbed the freezing water from the sky over each other’s shoulders and breasts. They felt as if they might never see each other again after this afternoon, and that while they touched each other, kissed, they held in that moment everything the other was, had been, ever could be. They felt half-savage with the pain of loss.

Then a shrill voice from the back veranda of the house. Thomas’s brother’s wife, Sarah, was shouting at her husband, her servant, or her children, through the din of rain. Which stopped as if she had ordered it to stop, in a crash of thunder. And Martha and Thomas laughed, it was so sad and so comical.

They stood on tip-toe to see through the minute window a plump woman in a too-tight white dress shrilly agitating on a dripping veranda. Five years ago, she had been a pretty girl, and now – ‘God!’ said Thomas, in a sudden, deep sincerity, ‘she’s a good girl, they’re all good people, these householders, but when I see them, I want to run and jump into the lake and that’s the truth.’

And Martha deepened her vow that she would never be the mistress of a household in a bad temper because … but they did not know why the plump woman on the veranda was so angry. She was too far off for her actual words to be heard; but her body, the set of her head, the edge of her scolding voice said: ‘I’m in a rage, I’m beside myself with rage.’

The two crept down the ladder and stood on the red, rough, warm-smelling brick, looking out into the garden, seeing the strong, brown trunk of the jacaranda whose lacy masses had waved above their naked bodies which still stung pleasantly with memories of the lashing rain. All around them were soaked, sparkling lawns, dripping boughs, a welter of wet flowers. Everything was impossibly brilliant in the clear, washed light. And the bird sang on from its invisible perch. Martha was faint with happiness and with sadness, and Thomas’s face told her he was in the same condition. The woman in the white dress went inside her house and Thomas said: ‘All right now, Martha.’ They ran over squelching grass to his lorry.