Doris Lessing - Martha Quest

Before she went to bed that night, she ironed the dress she intended to wear the following evening. An instinct she did not know she possessed chose it from the point of view of a Donovan, and the same instinct made the downward-stroking movement over hips and thighs appreciative and satisfied. She had slimmed herself during the past two years so that the bones of her pelvis were prominent, and this gave her great pleasure; and she went to bed vowing she must not put on weight.

At the office next day she helped Miss Gale with the filing, and found that she liked her after all; for some reason, there was a flow of sympathy between them, and more than once Mrs Buss looked sharply towards them and they lowered their voices guiltily.

Half past four soon came, and Martha flew home to dress, though Donovan was not expected until six. She annointed and prepared herself with the aid of mirrors large and small, a bathroom next door, and no Mrs Quest likely to interrupt. She bathed, painted her fingernails and – for the first time, and with a delicious sense of sinfulness – her toenails, powdered her body, plucked her eyebrows, which did not need it, and arranged her hair; and all this under the power of that compulsion that seemed to come from outside, as if Donovan’s dark and languid eyes were dictating what she must do, even to the way her hair should lie on her shoulders. For the first time, she knew the delight of dressing for a man: her father never noticed what she wore, unless it was pointed out; her brother had not gone beyond the stage of defensive derision, or at least not with her; and a Billy Van Rensberg was likely to approve anything she wore.

But when Donovan arrived and she presented herself to him (still in the power of that outside necessity), he behaved in a way she had never imagined any man might behave. He looked at her, critically narrowed his eyes, and even walked around her thoughtfully, his head rather on one side. She could not resent it, for it was quite impersonal. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, ‘yes, but …’ He lifted her hair back from her face, studied her anew, then let it fall back, and nodded. To Martha it was an extraordinary sensation, as if he were not only receiving her appearance as an impact, but as if he were, for the moment, herself, and her clothing covered him, and he felt the shape and lines of her dress with the sympathy of his own flesh. It was like being possessed by another personality; it was disturbing, and left her with a faint but pronounced distaste.

Donovan emerged from this prolonged study, saying thoughtfully, ‘You know what this dress needs, my dear? What you need is …’ He went to the wardrobe as if he had been using it for years, flung it open, and searched for something that already existed in his mind. ‘You must buy a black patent belt tomorrow,’ he announced firmly. ‘About an inch and a half wide, with a small, flat buckle.’ And he was right, Martha saw that at once. ‘You must ask my mamma about clothes,’ he continued pleasantly. ‘She’s very good at them. Now come on, she doesn’t like being kept waiting.’ And he led the way to his car.

It was a small open car, dark green, shabby but highly polished and when he climbed into the front seat and sat languidly waiting for her to join him, the man and the car instantly became a unit. ‘Like it?’ he enquired indifferently. ‘Got it for twelve pounds ten last month. We junior civil servants must make do on other people’s leavings.’ Yet he was indifferent because he knew he might be quite satisfied with both himself and the car.

They drove a short way out of town; that is to say, when they had left behind them the avenues of old houses that had been built between 1900 and 1920, there was about half a mile of tree-lined dust track to cover before they came to a signboard which said ‘The Wellington Housing Estate’. Here they turned off on to another dust track which would one day be a street between houses, because the foundations of the houses were already lightly sketched, in cement, in the raw-surfaced earth; and piles of red brick lay everywhere.

‘We got in early and bought the first lot while it was dirt cheap, but it’s already expensive, this is going to be ever such a smart place to live,’ Donovan said; and she saw that he was politely pointing out what things she should admire, as he had done over the car. And so it was when they reached the house, the only completed house, which stood like a narrow brick box, spotted with round windows like portholes, and laced with a great deal of scrolled iron-work. ‘My mamma thought she would like a Spanish house,’ said Donovan, apparently meaning the iron; and again Martha knew she was being instructed.

Inside while they waited for Mrs Anderson, Martha was shown the ground-floor rooms, and found them smart and expensive, as Donovan said they were; and apparently he was satisfied with her response, for her politeness might easily be taken for the same thing as that negligence he was careful to maintain. Now, Martha was adapting herself to Donovan according to that outside pressure which said that she must; and yet this pliability was possible only because something was still informing her, in a small voice but a clear one, that this had nothing to do with her; in fact, it could be said she was so easy and comfortable with him just because of this fundamental indifference.

When they had finally settled in the big drawing room, an incident occurred which was final as far as Martha was concerned. She reached for a book from the big bookcase, to see what kind of people these were, as she always did in a new house, and heard Donovan say, ‘Oh, my dear, it’s no use looking at the books. We have nothing new in the place.’

Martha left her hand on the book, while she turned her stern, derisive eyes on Donovan as if she could not possibly have heard aright. ‘What do you mean, nothing new?’ she inquired, in a voice he had not heard from her and was not likely to, or at any rate, not yet.

‘My mamma forgot to send to England for the new books. All these are last year’s best sellers.’

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