Martha Quest

The two women began discussing, as was natural, how they had behaved when young, but with reservations, for Mrs Van Rensberg sensed that her own experience included a good deal that might shock the English lady; so what they exchanged were not the memories of their behaviour, but the phrases of their respective traditions, which sounded very similar – Mrs Van Rensberg was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church; the Quests, Church of England. Just as they never discussed politics, so they never discussed – but what did they discuss? Martha often reflected that their years-old friendship had survived just because of what had been left out, everything of importance, that is; and the thought caused the girl the swelling dislike of her surroundings which was her driving emotion. On the other hand, since one lady was conservative British and the other conservative Afrikaans, this friendship could be considered a triumph of tact and good feeling over almost insuperable obstacles, since they were bound, by those same traditions, to dislike each other. This view naturally did not recommend itself to Martha, whose standards of friendship were so high she was still waiting for that real, that ideal friend to present himself.

‘The Friend,’ she had copied in her diary, ‘is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas …’ And so down the page to the next underlined sentence: ‘There goes a rumour that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore.’ And the next: ‘Our actual friends are but distant relations of those to whom we pledged.’

And could Mrs Van Rensberg be considered even as a distant relation? Clearly not. It would be a betrayal of the sacred name of friendship.

Martha listened (not for the first time) to Mrs Van Rensberg’s long account of how she had been courted by Mr Van Rensberg, given with a humorous deprecation of everything that might be described (though not by Martha, instinctively obedient to the taboos of the time) as Romance. Mrs Quest then offered an equally humorous though rather drier account of her own engagement. These two heavily, though unconsciously, censored tales at an end, they looked towards Martha, and sighed, resignedly, at the same moment. Tradition demanded from them a cautionary moral helpful to the young, the fruit of their sensible and respectable lives; and the look on Martha’s face inhibited them both.

Mrs Van Rensberg hesitated, and then said firmly (the firmness was directed against her own hesitation), ‘A girl must make men respect her.’ She was startled at the hatred and contempt in Martha’s suddenly raised eyes, and looked for support towards Mrs Quest.

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Quest, rather uncertainly. ‘A man will never marry a girl he does not respect.’

Martha slowly sat up, closing her book as if it were of no more use to her, and stared composedly at them. She was now quite white with the effort of controlling that hatred. She got up, and said in a low tight voice, ‘You are loathsome, bargaining and calculating and …’ She was unable to continue. ‘You are disgusting,’ she ended lamely, with trembling lips. Then she marched off down the garden, and ran into the bush.

The two ladies watched her in silence. Mrs Quest was upset, for she did not know why her daughter thought her disgusting, while Mrs Van Rensberg was trying to find a sympathetic remark likely to be acceptable to her friend.

‘She’s so difficult,’ murmured Mrs Quest apologetically; and Mrs Van Rensberg said, ‘It’s the age, my Marnie’s just as bad.’ She did not know she had failed to find the right remark: Mrs Quest did not consider her daughter to be on a level with Marnie, whom she found in altogether bad taste, wearing grown-up clothes and lipstick at fifteen, and talking about ‘boys’. Mrs Van Rensberg was quite unconscious of the force of her friend’s feeling. She dismissed her strictness with Martha as one of those English foibles; and besides, she knew Marnie to be potentially a sensible woman, a good wife and mother. She continued to talk about Marnie, while Mrs Quest listened with the embarrassment due to a social gaffe, saying ‘Quite’ or ‘Exactly’, thinking that her daughter’s difficulty was caused by having to associate with the wrong type of child, meaning Marnie herself. But the Dutchwoman was unsnubbable, since her national pride was as deep as the Englishwoman’s snobbishness, and soon their conversation drifted back to servants and cooking. That evening, each would complain to her husband – one, with the English articulateness over matters of class, that Mrs Van Rensberg was ‘really so trying’, while the other, quite frankly, said that these rooineks got her down, they were all the same, they thought they owned the earth they walked on. Then, from unacknowledged guilt, they would ring each other up on the district telephone, and talk for half an hour or so about cooking and servants. Everything would continue as usual, in fact.

In the meantime, Martha, in an agony of adolescent misery, was lying among the long grass under a tree, repeating to herself that her mother was hateful, all these old women hateful, every one of these relationships, with their lies, evasions, compromises, wholly disgusting. For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.

After a short time, she grew more composed. A self-preserving nerve had tightened in her brain, and with it her limbs and even the muscles of her face became set and hardened. It was with a bleak and puzzled look that she stared at a sunlit and glittering bush which stood at her feet; for she did not see it, she was seeing herself, and in the only way she was equipped to do this – through literature. For if one reads novels from earlier times, and if novels accurately reflect, as we hope and trust they do, the life of their era, then one is forced to conclude that being young was much easier then than it is now. Did X and Y and Z, those blithe heroes and heroines, loathe school, despise their parents and teachers who never understood them, spend years of their lives fighting to free themselves from an environment they considered altogether beneath them? No, they did not; while in a hundred years’ time people will read the novels of this century and conclude that everyone (no less) suffered adolescence like a disease, for they will hardly be able to lay hands on a novel which does not describe the condition. What then? For Martha was tormented, and there was no escaping it.

Perhaps, she thought (retreating into the sour humour that was her refuge at such moments), one should simply take the years from, let us say, fourteen to twenty as read, until those happier times arrive when adolescents may, and with a perfectly clear conscience, again enjoy themselves? How lucky, she thought, those coming novelists, who would be able to write cheerfully, and without the feeling that they were evading a problem: ‘Martha went to school in the usual way, liked the teachers, was amiable with her parents, and looked forward with confidence to a happy and well-spent life!’ But then (and here she suffered a twisting spasm of spite against those cold-minded mentors who so persistently analysed her state, and in so many volumes), what would they have to write about?

That defensive spite released her, and it was almost with confidence that she again lay back, and began to consider herself. For if she was often resentfully conscious that she was expected to carry a burden that young people of earlier times knew nothing about, then she was no less conscious that she was developing a weapon which would enable her to carry it. She was not only miserable, she could focus a dispassionate eye on that misery. This detached observer, felt perhaps as a clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead, was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station, who had been lending her books for the last two years. Joss Cohen tended towards economics and sociology, which she read without feeling personally implicated. Solly Cohen was in love (there is no other word for it) with psychology; he passionately defended everything to do with it, even when his heroes contradicted each other. And from these books Martha had gained a clear picture of herself, from the outside. She was adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy; British, and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class; female, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past. She was tormented with guilt and responsibility and self-consciousness; and she did not regret the torment, though there were moments when she saw quite clearly that in making her see herself thus the Cohen boys took a malicious delight which was only too natural. There were moments, in fact, when she hated them.

But what they perhaps had not foreseen was that this sternly objective picture of herself merely made her think, no doubt unreasonably, Well, if all this has been said, why do I have to go through with it? If we know it, why do we have to go through the painful business of living it? She felt, though dimly, that now it was time to move on to something new, the act of giving names to things should be enough.

Besides, the experts themselves seemed to be in doubt as to how she should see herself. There was the group which stated that her life was already determined when she still crouched sightless in the womb of Mrs Quest. She grew through phases of fish and lizard and monkey, rocked in the waters of ancient seas, her ears lulled by the rhythm of the tides. But these tides, the pulsing blood of Mrs Quest, sang no uncertain messages to Martha, but songs of anger, or love, or fear or resentment, which sank into the passive brain of the infant, like a doom.

Then there were those who said it was the birth itself which set Martha on a fated road. It was during the long night of terror, the night of the difficult birth, when the womb of Mrs Quest convulsed and fought to expel its burden through the unwilling gates of bone (for Mrs Quest was rather old to bear a first child), it was during that birth, from which Martha emerged shocked and weary, her face temporarily scarred purple from the forceps, that her character and therefore her life were determined for her.

And what of the numerous sects who agreed on only one thing, that it was the first five years of life which laid an unalterable basis for everything that followed? During those years (though she could not remember them), events had occurred which had marked her fatally forever. For the feeling of fate, of doom, was the one message they all had in common. Martha, in violent opposition to her parents, was continually being informed that their influence on her was unalterable, and that it was much too late to change herself. She had reached the point where she could not read one of these books without feeling as exhausted as if she had just concluded one of her arguments with her mother. When a native bearer came hastening over the veld with yet another parcel of books from the Cohen boys, she felt angry at the mere sight of them, and had to fight against a tired reluctance before she could bring herself to read them. There were, at this very moment, half a dozen books lying neglected in her bedroom, for she knew quite well that if she read them she would only be in possession of yet more information about herself, and with even less idea of how to use it.

But if to read their books made her unhappy, those occasions when she could visit them at the store were the happiest of her life. Talking to them exhilarated her, everything seemed easy. She walked over to the kaffir store when her parents made the trip into the station; sometimes she got a lift from a passing car. Sometimes, though secretly, since this was forbidden, she rode in on her bicycle. But there was always an uneasiness about this friendship, because of Mrs Quest; only last week, she had challenged Martha. Being what she was, she could not say outright, ‘I don’t want you to know Jewish shopkeepers.’ She launched into a tirade about how Jews and Greeks exploited the natives worse than anyone, and ended by saying that she did not know what to do with Martha, who seemed bent on behaving so as to make her mother as unhappy as possible. And for the first time that Martha could remember, she wept; and though her words were dishonest, her emotion was not. Martha had been deeply disturbed by those tears.

Yesterday, Martha had been on the point of getting out her bicycle in order to ride in to the station, so badly did she need to see the Cohen boys; when the thought of another scene with her mother checked her. Guiltily, she left the bicycle where it was. And now, although she wanted more than anything else to tell them about her silly and exaggerated behaviour in front of Mrs Van Rensberg, so that they might laugh good-naturedly at it, and restore it to proportion, she could not make the effort to rise from under the big tree, let alone get out the bicycle and go secretly into the station, hoping she would not be missed. And so she remained under the tree, whose roots were hard under her back, like a second spine, and looked up through the leaves to the sky, which shone in a bronze clamour of light. She ripped the fleshy leaves between her fingers, and thought again of her mother and Mrs Van Rensberg. She would not be like Mrs Van Rensberg, a fat and earthy housekeeping woman; she would not be bitter and nagging and dissatisfied like her mother. But then, who was she to be like? Her mind turned towards the heroines she had been offered, and discarded them. There seemed to be a gap between herself and the past, and so her thoughts swam in a mazed and unfed way through her mind, and she sat up, rubbing her stiffened back, and looked down the aisles of stunted trees, over a wash of pink feathery grass, to the red clods of a field which was invisible from the house.

There moved a team of oxen, a plough, a native driver with his long whip, and at the head of the team a small black child, naked except for a loincloth, tugging at the strings which passed through the nostrils of the leaders of the team. The driver she did not like – he was a harsh and violent man who used that whip with too much zest; but the pity she refused herself flooded out and surrounded the black child like a protective blanket. And again her mind swam and shook, like clearing water, and now, instead of one black child, she saw a multitude, and so lapsed easily into her familiar daydream. She looked away over the ploughed land, across the veld to the Dumfries Hills, and refashioned that unused country to the scale of her imagination. There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and the stunted trees, a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its falling flower-bordered terraces. There were splashing fountains, and the sound of flutes; and its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together; and these groups of elders paused, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of the children – the blue-eyed, fair-skinned children of the North playing hand in hand with the bronze-skinned, dark-eyed children of the South. Yes, they smiled and approved these many-fathered children, running and playing among the flowers and the terraces, through the white pillars and tall trees of this fabulous and ancient city …

It was about a year later. Martha was seated beneath the same tree, and in rather the same position, her hands full of leaves which she was unconsciously rubbing to a green and sticky mess. Her head was filled with the same vision, only more detailed. She could have drawn a plan of that city, from the central market place to the four gates. Outside one of the gates stood her parents, the Van Rensbergs, in fact most of the people of the district, forever excluded from the golden city because of their pettiness of vision and small understanding; they stood grieving, longing to enter, but barred by a stern and remorseless Martha – for unfortunately one gets nothing, not even a dream, without paying heavily for it, and in Martha’s version of the golden age there must always be at least one person standing at the gate to exclude the unworthy. She heard footsteps, and turned her head to find Marnie picking her way down the native path, her high heels rocking over the stones.

‘Hey,’ said Marnie excitedly, ‘heard the news?’

Martha blinked her eyes clear of the dream, and said, rather stiffly, ‘Oh, hullo.’ She was immediately conscious of the difference between herself and Marnie, whose hair was waved, who wore lipstick and nail varnish, and whose face was forced into an effect of simpering maturity, which continually vanished under pressure from her innate good sense. Now she was excited she was like a healthy schoolgirl who had been dressing up for fun; but at the sight of the sprawling and undignified Martha, who looked rather like an overgrown child of eleven, with a ribbon tying her lanky blonde hair, and a yoked dress in flowered print, she remembered her own fashionable dress, and sat primly on the grass, placed her black heels together, and looked down at her silk-stockinged legs with satisfaction.

‘My sister’s getting married,’ she announced.

There were five sisters, two already married, and Martha asked, ‘Who, Marie?’ For Marie was next, according to age.

‘No, not Marie,’ said Marnie with impatient disparagement. ‘Marie’ll never get herself a man, she hasn’t got what it takes.’

At the phrase ‘get herself a man,’ Martha flushed, and looked away, frowning. Marnie glanced doubtfully at her, and met a glance of such scorn that she blushed in her turn, though she did not know what for.

‘You haven’t even asked who,’ she said accusingly, though with a timid note; and then burst out, ‘Man, believe it or not, but it’s Stephanie.’

Stephanie was seventeen, but Martha merely nodded.

Damped, Marnie said, ‘She’s doing very well for herself, too, say what you like. He’s got a V-8, and he’s got a bigger farm than Pop.’

‘Doing well for herself’ caused Martha yet another internal shudder. Then the thought flashed across her mind: I criticize my mother for being a snob, but despise the Van Rensbergs with a clear conscience, because my snobbishness is intellectual. She could not afford to keep this thought clear in her mind; the difficult, painful process of educating herself was all she had to sustain her. But she managed to say after a pause, though with genuine difficulty, ‘I’m glad, it will be nice to have another wedding.’ It sounded flat.

Marnie sighed, and she glanced down at her pretty fingernails for comfort. She would have so much liked an intimate talk with a girl of her own age. Or rather, though there were girls of her own age among the Afrikaans community growing up around her father’s farm, she would have liked to be friends with Martha, who she admired. She would have liked to say, with a giggle, that she was sixteen herself and could get a man, with luck, next year, like Stephanie. Finding herself confronted by Martha’s frowning eyes, she wished she might return to the veranda, where the two mothers would be discussing the fascinating details of the courtship and wedding. But it was a tradition that the men should talk to the men, women with women, and the children should play together. Marnie did not consider herself a child, though Martha, it seemed, did. She thought that if she could return by herself to the veranda, she might join the women’s talk, whereas if Martha came with her they would be excluded. She said, ‘My mom’s telling your mom.’

Martha said, with that unaccountable resentment, ‘Oh, she’ll have a wonderful time gossiping about it.’ Then she added quickly, trying to make amends for her ungraciousness, ‘She’ll be awfully pleased.’

‘Oh, I know your mom doesn’t want you to marry young, she wants you to make a career,’ said Marnie generously.

But again Martha winced, saying angrily, ‘Oh she’d love it if I married young.’

‘Would you like it, hey?’ suggested Marnie, trying to create an atmosphere where they might ‘have a good talk’.

Martha laughed satirically and said, ‘Marry young? Me? I’d die first. Tie myself down to babies and housekeeping …’

Marnie looked startled, and then abashed. She remarked defiantly, ‘Mom says you’re sweet on Joss Cohen.’ At the sight of Martha’s face she giggled with fright. ‘Well, he’s sweet on you, isn’t he?’

Martha gritted her teeth, and ground out, ‘Sweet on!’

‘Hell, he likes you, then.’

‘Joss Cohen,’ said Martha angrily.

‘He’s a nice boy. Jews can be nice, and he’s clever, like you.’

‘You make me sick,’ said Martha, reacting, or so she thought, to this racial prejudice.

Again Marnie’s good-natured face drooped with puzzled hurt, and she gave Martha an appealing look. She stood up, wanting to escape.

But Martha slid down a flattened swathe of long grass, and scrambled to her feet. She rubbed the back of her thighs under the cotton dress, saying, ‘Ooh, taken all the skin off.’

Her way of laughing at herself, almost clowning, at these graceless movements, made Marnie uncomfortable in a new way. She thought it extraordinary that Martha should wear such clothes, behave like a clumsy schoolboy, at sixteen, and apparently not mind. But she accepted what was in intention an apology, and looked at the title of the book Martha held – it was a life of Cecil Rhodes – and asked, was it interesting? Then the two girls went together up the native path, which wound under the low scrubby trees, through yellow grass that reached to their shoulders, to the clearing where the house stood.

It was built native style, with mud walls and thatched roof, and had been meant to last for two seasons, for the Quests had come to the colony after seeing an exhibition in London which promised new settlers that they might become rich on maize-growing almost from one year to the next. This had not happened, and the temporary house was still in use. It was a long oval, divided across to make rooms, and around it had been flung out projecting verandas of grass. A square, tin-roofed kitchen stood beside it. This kitchen was now rather tumble down, and the roof was stained and rusted. The roof of the house too had sagged, and the walls had been patched so often with fresh mud that they were all colours, from dark rich red through dulling yellow to elephant grey. There were many different kinds of houses in the district, but the Quests’ was original because a plan which was really suitable for bricks and proper roofing had been carried out in grass and mud and stamped dung.

The girls could see their mothers sitting behind the screen of golden shower; and at the point where they should turn to climb the veranda steps, Martha said hastily, ‘You go,’ and went off into the house, while Marnie thankfully joined the women.

Martha slipped into the front room like a guilty person, for the people on the veranda could see her by turning their heads. When the house was first built, there had been no verandas. Mrs Quest had planned the front of the house to open over the veld ‘like the prow of a ship,’ as she herself gaily explained. There were windows all around it, so that there had been a continuous view of mountains and veld lightly intersected by strips of wall, like a series of framed ‘views’. Now the veranda dipped over them, and the room was rather dark. There were chairs and settees, and a piano on one side, and a dining table on the other. Years ago, when the rugs and chintzes were fresh, this had been a pretty room, with cream-washed walls and smooth black linoleum under the rugs. Now it was not merely faded, but dingy and overcrowded. No one played the piano. The silver teatray that had been presented to Mrs Quest’s grandfather on retirement from his bank stood on the sideboard among bits of rock, nuts and bolts from the ploughs, and bottles of medicine.

When Mrs Quest first arrived, she was laughed at, because of the piano and the expensive rugs, because of her clothes, because she had left visiting cards on her neighbours. She laughed herself now, ruefully, remembering her mistakes.