Doris Lessing - Landlocked

Martha asked: ‘What does she think, your sister-in-law?’

Thomas frowned.

Martha could have left it, but she pressed: ‘Well, doesn’t she say anything?’

‘She said something to my brother, he told her it wasn’t her business.’

Martha thought this over: she could imagine the scene – the uncomfortable husband, guilty because he was supporting his brother’s freedom to do as he liked, the insistent woman in a dress that was too tight, the husband finally making a stand with vehemence (and she knew it) for reasons neither of them could afford to say out loud.

There was an unpleasant taste in Martha’s mouth, which she knew she ought to ignore. Thomas had started the lorry and they were moving off.

She said: ‘I suppose it’s the place Thomas brings his girls to, is that it?’

Thomas gave her a discouraged look, and said: ‘If you want to make it like that, you can.’

She nearly said: ‘But I haven’t made it like that, have I?’ But she didn’t. She was sorry she had said anything. Besides, no one but she, Martha, went to the loft these days, and in fact it had been closed while Thomas was in W——, waiting to be demobilized. All the same, she thought of Sarah Stern, watching Thomas emerge from the shed with other girls, and for a moment she could not bear it. They drove a couple of blocks in silence, and both felt they were a long way from the simplicities of their being together in the loft.

‘We’d better stop here,’ said Martha, before they reached her mother’s gate.

Thomas stopped, and sat with his hand on the gear lever, while the engine throbbed. The whole lorry shook, and they shook with it. They began to laugh. ‘I’ll be in town the day after tomorrow,’ Thomas said. ‘I don’t know whether early afternoon or late, but if you want to go to the shed and read or something …’

They kissed, smiling, holding themselves steady, with difficulty, against the vibrations of the lorry. Then she said: ‘See you soon,’ and went up the path to her mother’s veranda, deliberately annulling the time between now and the day after tomorrow.

The other house, from whose garden she had just come, was almost identical with this. Both gardens, large, deeply foliaged, full of flowers and birds, seemed miles from the streets that ran just outside them. One held the young Jewish couple with their children, a unit dedicated to virtues which would make them honoured members of their community and prosper their shop: Thomas’s brother sold sports equipment from a smart shop in the centre of the city. In the Quests’ house, everything had changed in the last few months: Jonathan had come home. As Martha came up the path she saw him sitting on the veranda reading a magazine: a handsome, fair young man, with a small, fair moustache and Mrs Quest’s innocent blue eyes.

Two catastrophes, either of which might have killed him – one, a shell exploding beside him, another, a tank going up in flames – had apparently not marked him, except for the arm, which was in plaster, and about which he was attractively diffident.

The arm still gave him a good deal of pain, and he had to attend the local hospital several times a week for treatment. Otherwise he would already be on his farm, which was waiting for him ‘up North’. This time, ‘up North’ meant a couple of hundred miles beyond the Quests’ old farm, near the Zambesi Valley.

His mother was a woman with a new lease of life. She cooked, she entertained, she smiled and made plans.

Mr Quest was better. No one had expected him ever to leave his bed again, but now he sat long hours in a deep grass chair on the veranda. He was neither altogether drugged, nor quite free of drugs. His waking condition was like a light sleep, Martha thought. He would see what was going on, without seeming to watch his surroundings, and he might comment on something, but usually some time afterwards. He would let out words, phrases, exclamations, that came out of his thoughts, but he did not know when he had done this. Sometimes he talked to people from the past, usually from ‘the old war’. There was a man called Ginger, whom Martha had never heard of. Well, Mr Quest talked a good deal to Ginger. They were in the trenches, it seemed, and Ginger was having some sort of brain-storm or nervous collapse. Mr Quest would urge Ginger to pull himself together and be a man. Sometimes Mr Quest would call out in terror – thick, mumbling, protesting phrases: a shell was going to burst near him, something was going to explode. Or the water in the trench was too high up his legs, which were cold, or he was out in no man’s land and could not see his comrades. Then Martha, or Mrs Quest, or whoever was near, would sit by him, and talk him gently awake, as one does with a child having a bad dream.

Everyone came to congratulate Mr Quest on his recovery, just as they enquired after Jonathan’s arm. Everyone behaved, Martha thought, as if the long illness, the damaged arm, were matters for pride – even for envy. Martha knew she was childish, she disliked the deep, useless rage she felt, and yet she could not bring herself to enquire lengthily after the wounded arm and the painful treatments it needed, or after her father’s health. She came in every day and sat a little while with ‘my two war casualties’ as Mrs Quest now called them, with a fond, proud little laugh.

This afternoon Jonathan was not alone. Two young men played ping-pong on a side veranda, while the little white dog snapped at the ball and jumped up and down and generally made a nuisance of himself. In the front room were two girls. These days, the Quests’ house was full of young men and young women. The men were all back from the war, and the girls, as Martha noted with complicated feelings, were a new generation of girls aged eighteen, nineteen, who apparently had sprung into existence during the last year. At any rate, they were not at all interested in the war as such, but they regarded these young men, delivered to their bosoms fresh from the world’s battlefields, as escorts and future husbands satisfactorily seasoned by experience.

Martha smiled at her brother, waved at the ping-pong players and at the girls, for all of whom she was ‘the Quests’ married daughter’ and ‘a Red with ideas about the kaffirs’, and went around the corner of the veranda to see if her father was awake. He sat with his back to a screen of morning glory, whose brilliant but fragile blue trumpets were dwindling into limp rags of dirty white. His magazine had slipped to the floor and he was dozing.

Martha sat down to wait. She had not been moved to such thoughts by the presence of her brother and the young men whose little-boy faces had put them out of court in such matters, but now she remembered that half an hour ago she had been lying in the loft with Thomas. She wondered if her father would sense it.

When he opened his eyes with a start, she saw that he was not really there that afternoon.

‘How are you?’

‘Much as usual. And you’re all right?’

‘Fine.’

That’s good.’

She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that the garden looked beautiful, and the weather was lovely, and the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey’s wedding, half storm, half sunshine.

‘That’s good,’ he said again, and sat drowsing.

She thought of how often she had sat by this half-conscious man. Where did he go to, her father, while the elderly, shrunken grey man sat dozing? She stared at him, stared, as if the pressure of her eyes could suddenly materialize him, her father, Mr Quest, the vigorous, irascible man who knew, when he chose, so much about her. She felt as if he were there all the time – as if this invalid were an impostor, a mask. But really her father was there – and if so she was in communion with him? Where was he? She looked at the old, sick head slipping sideways and at the half-open mouth and demanded in silent and futile rage: Well, talk to me, where have you got to? Meanwhile her heart ached. It ached.