Doris Lessing - Martha Quest

‘That isn’t why I don’t leave home,’ said Martha stiffly, as if he had been accusing her of wrong feelings.

‘You don’t say,’ he said, sarcastically; and then, more gently, when she lifted troubled eyes to his face: ‘Why don’t you be a brave girl and get into town, and learn a thing or two?’

She hesitated, and her look was appealing; and he said, ‘I know you’re very young, but you could get into a girls’ hostel, or share a flat with someone, couldn’t you?’

The idea of a girls’ hostel struck Martha before the kindness of his intention, and her eyebrows swiftly rose in derision.

He gave her a look which said plainly, ‘What the hell do you want then?’ and became impersonal. ‘I don’t think we have anything suitable, you’d better try Sock, he’s got a consignment of new materials.’

‘I’ve been to Sock,’ she said plaintively, feeling abandoned.

‘Then if he hasn’t, we certainly haven’t.’ He laid his palms downwards again, in the salesman’s gesture which annoyed her, like an affectation. But she still waited. Soon he let his hands fall from the counter, and looked at her seriously. He was relenting. ‘I’ll choose something for you,’ he said at last, and looked along the shelves. Martha, thinking of their tasteless back room, was momentarily alarmed, and ashamed of herself for the feeling; but he reached down a roll of white cotton, and said with a rough, unwilling tenderness, which touched her deeply, ‘White. Suitable for a young girl.’

She saw at once it would make an attractive dress, and said, ‘I’ll have six yards.’ And now his look seemed to say that she had agreed too quickly; and she fingered the crisp material to please him, while her mind already held a picture of how it would look made up. ‘I’m going to dance at the Van Rensbergs’,’ she remarked, with a confused intention; and his face stiffened, after a quick glance, and he cut the material without speaking.

‘Why don’t you come and dance with me?’ he asked with a challenge.

‘Why don’t you ask me?’ she replied quickly. But there was no response. He was folding the material, smoothing it in a way which kept her looking at his hands; and at last he tied it and handed it to her with a slightly sardonic bow. ‘On the account?’ he inquired.

‘No, I’m paying.’ She handed over the money, and waited for at least a look from him; but he said, ‘So long!’ and went quickly into the back part of the building, leaving the store quite empty. So she began the hot, wearying walk home, but this time was overtaken by the McDougalls before she had gone more than a few hundred yards.

As soon as she had reached her room, and spread the material on her bed, Mrs Quest entered, saying virtuously, ‘Oh my dear, we’ve been so worried …’ Then she saw the material, and reddened with anger. ‘How dare you waste your father’s money when you know we haven’t got it and we owe Sock so much money as it is?’

‘I paid for it myself,’ said Martha sullenly.

‘How could you pay for it yourself?’

‘There was the money from last Christmas, and the ten shillings Mr McFarline gave me.’

Mrs Quest hesitated, then chose a course and insisted, ‘The money wasn’t given to you to waste, and in any case …’

‘In any case, what?’ asked Martha coldly.

Again Mrs Quest hesitated; and at last her feelings expressed themselves in a voice that was uncertain with the monstrousness of what she was saying: ‘Until you’re twenty-one, you’ve no right to own money, and if we took it to court, the judge would … I mean, I mean to say …’ Martha was quite white, and unable to speak; it was her silence, the bitter condemnation in her eyes, which caused her mother to walk out of the room, saying unhappily: ‘Well, at least, I mean, I must speak to your father.’

Martha was exhausted with the violence of what she felt, and it was only the thought that this was midday Friday, and the dress must be ready tomorrow, that enabled her to go on sewing.

At suppertime Mrs Quest was bright and humorous, and there was an apology in her manner which Martha might have answered; but she was repeating to herself that the incident over the money was something she would never, never forget – it was to join the other incidents chalked up in her memory. Mr Quest ate his meal in peace, gratefully persuading himself that this unusual silence between his womenfolk was one induced by harmony and goodwill.

Immediately after supper Martha went to her room, and soon they heard the whirr of the sewing machine. Mrs Quest, in an agony of curiosity, timidly entered her daughter’s room, towards midnight, saying, ‘You must go to bed, Matty, I order you.’

Martha did not reply. She was sitting on the bed, surrounded by billowing folds of white. She did not even lift her head. Mrs Quest tugged the curtains across invading moonlight that flung a colder greener light over the warm dull lampshine, and said, ‘You’ll spoil your eyes.’

‘I thought my eyes were already spoiled,’ said Martha coldly; and for some reason Mrs Quest was unable to answer what seemed to be an accusation. She left the room, saying ineffectually, ‘You must go to bed at once, do you hear me?’

The machine whirred until nearly morning, an unusual undercurrent to the chirping crickets, the call of the owl. Mrs Quest woke her husband to complain that Martha would not obey her; but he said, ‘Well, if she wants to make a fool of herself let her,’ and turned over in bed with a clanging of the ancient springs. Martha heard both these voices, as she was meant to; and though she had been on the point of going to bed, since the sky was greying the square of the window and she was really very tired, she made a point of working on for another half hour.

She woke late, from a dream that she was wearing her white frock in a vast ballroom hung with glittering chandeliers, the walls draped with thick red crimson; and as she walked towards a group of people who stood rather above the floor, in long fluted gowns, like living statues, she noticed a patch of mud on her skirt and, looking down, saw that all her dress was covered with filth. She turned helplessly for flight, when Marnie and her brother came towards her, bent with laughter, their hands pressed over their mouths, gesturing to her that she must escape before the others, those beautiful and legendary beings at the end of the long hall, should catch sight of her.

She sat up in bed, and saw that the room was filled, not with sunlight, but with a baleful subdued glare reflected from clouds like still mountains. It was nearly midday, and if she was to finish her dress she must hurry. But the thought of it was no longer a pleasure; all the delight had gone from it while she slept. She decided, tiredly, that she would wear an ordinary dress; and it was only because Mrs Quest put her head around the door to say that lunch was ready, and Martha must come at once, that she replied she would not take lunch, she had to finish the dress.

Work on it restored the mood she had lost; and when it began to rain, her exultation was too great to be deepened – these were the first rains of the season; and she sat on the bed clicking her needle through the stiff material, and while overhead the old thatch rustled as the wet soaked in, as if it remembered still, after so many years, how it had swelled and lifted to the rain when it stood rooted and uncut. Soon it was soaked, and the wet poured off the edge of thatch in glittering stalactites, while the grey curtain of rain stood solid behind, so dense that the trees barely twenty paces away glimmered like faint green spectres. It was dark in the room, so Martha lit a candle, which made a small yellow space under the all-drenching blackness; but soon a fresh coloured light grew at the window, and, going to it, Martha saw the grey back of the storm already retreating. The trees were half emerged from the driving mists, and stood clear and full and green, dripping wet from every leaf; the sky immediately overhead was blue and sunlit, while only a few degrees away it was still black and impenetrable. Martha blew out the candle, and put the last stitches in her dress. It was only four in the afternoon, and the hours before she would be fetched seemed unbearable. At last, she went in to supper in her dressing gown; and Mrs Quest said nothing, for there was a dreamy, exalted look on her daughter’s face which put her beyond the usual criticisms.