Doris Lessing - Landlocked

Inside, her mother was bustling enjoyably about. Soon Martha went in to see her. These days, now her son was home and she was released into vigour, cooking supper for a dozen young people, running the big house, organizing parties and excursions, Mrs Quest was good-tempered again. Now the nursing of her husband was only one of many things she had to do, not the reason for her existence. These days she did not complain that Martha was a bad daughter. In fact the two women enjoyed seeing each other.

They kissed.

‘Well, where are you gadding off to now?’ asked Mrs Quest, good-humouredly.

‘I’m going to a meeting on current affairs,’ said Martha, offering the absurd phrase to her mother in an invitation to laugh.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Quest, energetically folding towels, ‘I suppose there’s no harm in it, but I should have thought we had enough of them. And when are you going to see Mrs Maynard – bad girl, she keeps asking after you.’

‘I’m sure she does!’

The ghost of ill-humour appeared, but vanished again, because of the full, strong physical well-being of the two women. Almost , Martha was cold and irritable, and Mrs Quest cold and unjust.

‘What’s all this about someone called Maisie? She keeps talking about a girl called Maisie something or other.’

‘You might very well ask!’ ‘But I’m not supposed to, is that it?’ Martha laughed, so did her mother, and again they kissed, before Martha went off to Johnny Lindsay’s.

Martha had given up her job with Mr Robinson. Otherwise she could not have the afternoons with Thomas. The day after Thomas had said to her: ‘Well then, what are you earning, what’s keeping you there?’ Martha, on the simplicity of will that was Thomas’s gift to her, walked into Mr Robinson’s office and gave notice. By herself it would have taken weeks of thinking, I should do this or that, and then a drift into a decision. But now she lived from this new centre, the room she shared with Thomas, a room that had in it, apparently, a softly running dynamo, to which, through him, she was connected. Everything had become easy suddenly.

Or nearly everything. For of course, there were new problems. Martha ‘worked at home’. Or, as she told everyone, with an apparently firm intention: ‘I’m using the flat as an office.’ It was no good: as far as others were concerned, Matty had given up her job, and was free in the daytime.

She had told Mrs Van she wanted typing work; and now the Members of Parliament who were Mrs Van’s friends, and Mrs Van herself, brought work to Martha. The hours she sat before her typewriter every day were a third as long as before, and she earned twice as much. If the seriousness of ‘work’ is measured by what one earns for it, then Martha was working twice as hard as she did in Mr Robinson’s office. As Thomas pointed out.

It was the same as when she was the wife of Douglas Knowell – the cast had changed, the play was the same. Now came, every morning, Marjorie Black, Maisie McGrew, Betty Krueger, Mrs Quest – even Mrs Van.

Every morning, as Martha sat at her typewriter, transforming scribbled sheets into piles of ordered black print, there would come a knock on the half-open door. (Why don’t you lock your door then? said Thomas – But it’s so hot!) Into the room would come one or several of these women, each exclaiming that they did not wish to waste Martha’s time, that they had work to do of their own in any case, but they had just dropped in. (Why don’t you tell them to go away, Martha? Just say, you’re sorry, you’re working.)

And why did Martha not ask them to go away?

Thomas said: ‘You never go to them, to their houses, do you?’

‘No.’

‘There you are. It never even occurs to you. It’s not something you do. So they come to you.’

‘Well?’

‘So you have to become a woman who is not to be disturbed in the daytime, because it’s not something you do.’

‘Ah, but it’s not so easy.’

‘Perfectly easy, if you decide to do it.’

To serve tea, to sit talking, being sympathetic, charming (etc., etc., ad nauseam) creating a web of talk which (she knew quite well and so did they) had no relation to the events and people they discussed but which seemed to have a validity of its own – there was the most powerful attraction in it. She could positively see, after the women left, the soft, poisonous, many-coloured web of comment and gossip they had created, hanging there in the smoky air of the little room.

But of course these were ‘intelligent’ people; some of them even ‘educated’; even – though this was a word they used with an increasingly humorous grimness, ‘progressive’ people. Yet what had changed in the talk, since Martha had chafed at the talk at the women’s tea-parties in the avenues? These women did not complain about their servants; they deplored, instead, that they had servants, wished they could do without them, and often indeed, took decisions to give them up. And they did not complain about their husbands, but about ‘society’, which made marriage unsatisfactory. They did not talk scandal in the sense of have you heard that so and so has left her husband? They discussed people’s characters, with all the dispassionate depth offered them by their familiarity with ‘psychology’. Why anybody ever did anything was immediately obvious to these psychologically educated females, and people’s motives were an open book to them, their own included. Recipes they exchanged – to talk about food was not reactionary, though to discuss clothes for too long was frivolous, if not reactionary. As for politics, there were two kinds of politics, neither needing much comment. Local politics, which meant, here, the situation of the black man – well, one can reach a degree of sophistication which means one has only to glance at a newspaper and exclaim bitterly: Of course, what would one expect! – to have said everything necessary. As for world politics, the manifestations of ‘the cold war’, a recently christened phenomenon, made it impossible for this tiny group of people to communicate easily, since they represented between them every variety of ‘left’ opinion, each grade of it needing the most incredible tact and forbearance with the others.

And, of course, there was a horrible fascination, the dark attraction of Martha’s secret fears, in the fact that of the younger women there was not one who hadn’t sworn, ten years ago: I will not get like that! I won’t be dragged in. They all felt it, acknowledged it. Perhaps this knowledge, that none of them was strong enough to resist the compulsion to create the many-coloured poisonous web of talk, was why they all felt exhausted after such mornings. Just like the frivolous, non-progressive women of the avenues, they spent their days over cups of tea, and went home in a sort of dragging, rather peevish dissatisfaction, while in their heads still ran on, like a gramophone record that could not be turned off, the currents of their gossip: The trouble with Betty is, she is mother-fixated, her headaches are obviously of psychological origin, and Martha’s trouble is, she is unstable, and Marjorie’s trouble is, she is a masochist, why have another baby when she’ll only complain at the extra work, and Mrs Van – well, she’s marvellous, but she’s awfully conventional really, and Jack Dobie is not doing the progressive cause much good, if he hadn’t framed that Bill in such an aggressive way, he’d have got it through the House, but he has a father-complex, which makes it necessary for him to challenge authority.

Because she could not work in the mornings, Martha would say to Anton, on the evenings when Thomas was not in town: ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to work after supper.’ Most evenings Martha worked, and Anton read or might go out – presumably to see Millicent.