Doris Lessing - Martha Quest

‘My policy – our policy – is, that there is no reason why girls should not have a good time and work well too, but I would suggest to you that you don’t get into the way of some girls we have – oh, they’re very useful, and we couldn’t do without them, but they seem to think that because they will get married one day, that is all that can reasonably be expected of them.’ Here Martha glanced quickly at him; there was a resentful note that could have nothing to do with herself. Again Mr Cohen eased his great body in his chair, fingered the pencil, seemed to be on the point of speaking, and then said abruptly, ‘I think that’s all. You will forgive me for making these remarks. I feel, we feel – in short, you have undoubted capacities, Miss Quest, and I hope you will use them, for efficient secretaries are rare. Which is remarkable, when you think of it, since most women these days seem to train to be secretaries?’ On that query he paused and reflected and then said, ‘I hope you don’t feel that being a secretary is not a worth-while career?’

Martha assured him that she wanted to be an efficient secretary, even while she felt quite indignant; she felt herself capable of much more. She thanked him, went back to her desk, and once again sat idle. She was waiting for someone to direct her; then she understood she was now expected to direct herself, and went to Mrs Buss, asking for information about the Polytechnic.

Mrs Buss’s face cleared into a gratified relief that seemed to Martha offensive; and she took a piece of paper from her desk, with clear directions as to classes and times. Then she delivered herself – with a pause between each, for assent – of the following remarks: ‘I’m glad you’ve got some sense … You don’t want to get like these girls here, sitting with their eyes on the clock, just waiting till their boy friends fetch them at half past four, and out all night and then so tired next day they just sit yawning … There’s plenty of work here, believe me, for those with the intention to do it.’ And finally, her china-blue eyes fixed on Martha’s: ‘When you’ve got someone to work for as good as Mr Cohen, then you work your best?’ Martha said yes; but it was not enough. ‘I’ve worked for my living since I was fifteen, and in England till two years ago, and in England girls are expected to be efficient, it’s not like here, where they can get married for the asking, and I’ve never known anyone like Mr Cohen.’ Martha said yes; and Mrs Buss insisted challengingly, ‘He’s got a heart as big as his body,’ and this time Martha said yes with real feeling, and she was released.

And now Martha was able to understand – but only since it had been pointed out to her – the real division in this closely packed mass of women. When Miss Gale leaned over and whispered, like a schoolgirl, ‘Get off easily?’ she replied coldly, ‘I’m going to the Polytechnic,’ and Miss Gale shrugged and looked indifferently away, like one who does not intend to show she feels her cause has been deserted. But Martha looked away from this group she had been put into with envy and admiration for the four secretaries and for the two accountants who sat side by side over their big ledgers. She intended, in fact, to emulate the skilled; and her eyes, when she regarded the complacent Miss Gale, were scornful. These women had in common not that they were younger, or even more attractive, than the others, but a certain air of tolerance; they were paying fee to something whose necessity they entirely deplored.

After work, Martha walked the hundred yards or so to the Polytechnic, which was further down Founders’ Street. It was a low brown building, though now it swarmed with activity; and its front was barricaded by stacked bicycles. Martha, as usual doing nothing by halves, enrolled herself for classes which would take up every evening of her week, and walked home through the park, where the paths already glimmered pale among the darkening trees, her mind filled with visions of herself in Mrs Buss’s place, though they were certainly lit by the highly coloured experimental glow that had coloured earlier visions of herself as a painter, a ballet dancer or an opera singer, for like most people of her age and generation she had already tasted every profession, in mind at least.

When she reached her room, she imagined for a moment she had come to the wrong place, for through the light curtains across the french door she could see a shape she did not know. She hesitantly entered at last, and there stood a young man who asked, ‘Martha Quest? My mother had a letter from your mother and –’ He stopped, and looked appreciatively at Martha; for until then he had been speaking with a politeness that said quite plainly, ‘I’m doing this because I’ve been told to.’

He was a youth of about twenty. Martha, who had known only the physical, open-air men of the district, and the Cohen boys, who were all she had met of the student type, and her brother, who was a student because it was expected of him, found in Donovan Anderson something quite new. He was a rather tall, broad-framed handsome young man, wearing a sharply-cut light summer suit, and a heavy gold signet ring on one hand. She was not observant, but because of this impression of broad-shouldered masculinity she was instinctively looking for resemblances, and her eyes lingered on the way his shirt front caved inwards under the flowing blue tie; for if Billy or her brother had been wearing that suit it would have bulged out, and the sleeves would have been filled with muscle. Looking upwards from the hollow chest, she received from that correctly arranged healthily sunburned face – large nose, square jaw, open brow – an altogether incongruous impression of weakness.

He said gracefully, ‘We were expecting a nice girl from the wide-open spaces, we heard you were sporting and hunted big game.’

At first Martha started at the ‘we’; then she laughed, and averred that she loathed sport of any kind, as if this was a claim to grace in itself.

‘That’s a relief, because I’m ever such an indoor type, and I was expecting to have to take you to something energetic.’

Martha said spitefully that she was surprised he did as he was ordered; to which he returned a politely appreciative laugh, and said, ‘Well, then, I’ll take you to the pictures instead. You must come and meet my mamma. It is what both our mammas would expect.’

Martha agreed that she would like to do this, and it was arranged that it would all take place the following evening – which, incidentally, meant that she must postpone her first lesson in shorthand. They informed each other that they insisted on being called respectively Don and Matty. His mamma, said Donovan, called him Donny, but one knew what mammas were. He most elegantly shook her hand, and told her that she must not be late tomorrow, for if there was one thing he could not endure it was being kept waiting by girls. He then took his leave.

Martha wandered around her room in a state of breathless exhilaration, already picturing Donovan as a lover, but in an extraordinarily romantic light, considering the nature of the books she read. The time between the present and tomorrow evening must be lived through; she felt she could not bear it, and just as she had decided she would go to sleep, in order to dispose of as much of it as possible in oblivion, Mrs Gunn knocked and asked anxiously if she would like some supper. Martha refused, because of the anxious note, which automatically stiffened her resistance. Yet she had hardly eaten since she came to town; she had too little money to ‘waste on food’ – in other words, she was by no means finished with that phase of her life when she was continuously thinking about food, not because she intended to eat any, but because she meant to refuse it. She would think of the next meal due to her according to convention, assess it in terms of flesh, and then nervously pass her hands downwards over her hips, as if stroking their outlines smaller.