Doris Lessing - Martha Quest

So here was Martha at home, ‘resting her eyes’ but reading as much as ever. And how curious were the arguments between the two women over this illogical behaviour. For Mrs Quest did not say, ‘You are supposed to have strained your eyes, why are you reading?’ She made such remarks as ‘You do it on purpose to upset me!’ Or ‘Why do you have to read that kind of book?’ Or ‘You are ruining your whole life, and you won’t take my advice.’ Martha maintained a stubborn but ironical silence, and continued to read.

So here was Martha, at sixteen, idle and bored, and sometimes secretly wondering (though only for a moment, the thought always vanished at once) why she had not sat that examination, which she could have passed with such ease. For she had gone up the school head of her class, without even having to work. But these thoughts could not be clearly faced, so she shut them out. But why was she condemning herself to live on this farm, which more than anything in the world she wanted to leave? The matric was a simple passport to the outside world, while without it escape seemed so difficult she was having terrible nightmares of being tied hand and foot under the wheels of a locomotive, or struggling waist-deep in quicksands, or eternally climbing a staircase that moved backwards under her. She felt as if some kind of spell had been put on her.

Then Mrs Quest began saying that Marnie had just passed the matric, and she said it unpleasantly: Look, if she can pass it, why not you?

Martha did not want to see Marnie, and it was easy to avoid doing so, for the Van Rensbergs and the Quests were drifting apart. It was more than one of those inexplicable changes of feeling between neighbours; there was a good reason for it. Mr Van Rensberg was becoming violently nationalist, and Mrs Van Rensberg had an apologetic look on her face when she saw Mrs Quest at the station. And so, by a natural reaction, the Quests began saying, ‘These damned Afrikaners,’ although the two families had been friends, shelving the question of nationality for so many years.

Martha did not want to think of these things, she was turned in on herself, in a heavy trancelike state. Afterwards she was to think of this time as the worst in her life. What was so frightening was this feeling of being dragged, being weighted. She did not understand why she was acting against her will, her intellect, everything she believed. It was as if her body and brain were numbed.

There was nothing to do. The farm lay about her like a loved country which refused her citizenship. She repeated the incantatory names of childhood like a spell which had lost its force. The Twenty Acres, the Big Tobacco Land, the Field on the Ridge, the Hundred Acres, the Kaffir Patch, the Bush by the Fence, the Pumpkin Patch – these words became words; and, walking by herself across the Twenty Acres, which was bounded on three sides by a straggle of gum trees (a memory of her father’s afforestation phase), a patch of sloping land tinted pink and yellow, full of quartz reefs and loose white pebbles, she said to herself scornfully, Why Twenty Acres? It’s about twelve acres. Why the Hundred Acres, when it is only seventy-six? Why has the family always given large-sounding names to things ordinary and even shabby? For everything had shrunk for her. The house showed as if an unkind light had been shone on it. It was not only shabby, it was sordid. Everything decayed and declined, and leaned inwards.

And, worse, far worse, she was watching her father with horror, for he was coming to have, for her, a fatal lethargy of a dream-locked figure. He had the look of a person half claimed by sleep. He was middle-aged, she told herself, neither young nor old; he was in the long middle period of life when people do not change, but his changelessness was imposed, not by a resisting vigour but by – what? He was rising late in the morning, he dreamed over his breakfast, wandered off into the bedroom to test himself for his real disease and for various imaginary ones; returned early from the farmwork to lunch, slept after it, and for a longer time every day, and then sat immobile in his deck-chair, waiting for the sunset. After it, supper – a calculatedly healthy meal – and an early bed. Sleep, sleep, the house was saturated by it; and Mrs Quest’s voice murmured like the spells of a witch, ‘You must be tired, darling; don’t overtire yourself, dear.’ And when these remarks were directed at Martha, she felt herself claimed by the nightmare, as if she were standing beside her father; and, in fact, at the word ‘tired’ she felt herself tired and had to shake herself.

‘I will not be tired,’ she snapped to her mother, ‘it’s no good trying to make me tired’: extraordinary words; and even more extraordinary that Mrs Quest did not question them. Her face fell in patient and sorrowful lines, the eternal mother, holding sleep and death in her twin hands like a sweet and poisonous cloud of forgetfulness – that was how Martha saw her, like a baneful figure in the nightmare in which she herself was caught.

But sometimes their arguments were more sensible. ‘You are terribly unfair to your father,’ Mrs Quest complained. ‘He’s ill, he’s really ill.’

‘I know he’s ill,’ said Martha, miserably, feeling guilty. Then she roused herself to say, ‘Look at Mr Blank, he’s got it, too, he’s quite different.’ Mr Blank, over the other side of the district, had the same disease, and much more seriously than Mr Quest, and led an active life, as if this business of injecting oneself with substitute gland juices once a day was on the same level as cleaning one’s teeth or making a point of eating fruit for breakfast. But Mr Quest was completely absorbed in the ritual of being ill, he talked of nothing else – his illness and the war, the war and illness; it was as if a twin channel drove across his brain, and if his thoughts switched from one subject, they must enter the other, like a double track leading to the same destination.

It even seemed to Martha that her father was pleased that the Van Rensbergs no longer visited them, because with Mr Van Rensberg he talked about the farm, while with Mr McDougall, who took his place, he shared memories of the trenches.

Martha, coming down the veranda, a silent and critical figure, would see her father at one end, leaning back in his deck-chair like a contemplative philosopher, and hear his voice: ‘We were out in no man’s land, six of us, when the star shells went up, and we saw we weren’t three paces from the Boche trenches and …’

At the other end of the veranda, Mrs Quest was talking to Mrs McDougall. ‘That’s when we got the wounded in from Gallipoli and …’

Martha listened, absorbed in these twin litanies of suffering in spite of herself, for they been murmuring down her childhood as far back as she could remember, and were twined with her deepest self. She was watching, fearfully, the effect on herself of the poetry of suffering; the words ‘no man’s land’, ‘star shells’, ‘Boche’, touched off in her images like those of poetry; no man’s land was the black and wasted desert between the living forces; star shells exploded in coloured light, like fireworks, across her brain, drenched in reminiscence; Boche was fearful and gigantic, nothing human, a night figure; the tripping word ‘Gallipoli’ was like a heroic dance. She was afraid because of the power of these words, which affected her so strongly, who had nothing to do with what they stood for.

On one such afternoon, when she was standing on the steps, listening, her father called out to her, ‘Matty, did I ever tell you about –’ and she said ungraciously, but with discomfort, ‘Quite a thousand times, I should think.’

He jerked up his head and stared at her, and on to his face came that look of baffled anger. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ he said. ‘We came out of the trenches, and then suddenly the war was bad form. The Great Unmentionable, that’s what you called it.’