LITMIR.BIZ

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of the coconut matting, she was seeing, too, the landscape of devastation, shattered trees, churned and muddy earth, a tangle of barbed wire, with a piece of cloth fluttering from it that had once been part of a man’s uniform. She understood that the roar of a starting car outside had become the sound of an approaching shell, and tried to shake herself free of the compulsion. She was weighted with a terrible, tired, dragging feeling, like a doom. It was all so familiar, so horribly familiar, even to the exact words her father would use next, the exact tone of his voice, which was querulous, but nevertheless held a frightening excitement.

      When the door opened and her parents came in, Martha rose to meet them with the energy of one prepared to face the extremities of moral and physical persuasion; but all she heard was a grumbling note in Mrs Quest’s voice as she said, ‘It wasn’t polite of you not to come and have tea when you were asked.’ It was exactly as she might complain of Martha’s rude behaviour to visitors on the farm; and Martha was surprised into silence. ‘Well, dear,’ continued Mrs Quest, briskly moving around the room as if it were her own, ‘I’ve unpacked your things and arranged them, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, and I moved the bed, it was in a draught, and you must be careful to sleep a lot.’ Noticing the look on Martha’s face, she hurried on: ‘And now Daddy and I must go back to the farm, we really hadn’t time to leave it, but you’re such a helpless creature, you look tired, do go to bed early.’

      Martha, as usual, pushed away the invading feeling of tiredness and pointed out to herself that her sudden guilt was irrational, since she had not asked them to leave the farm and come in after her. She decided to leave this room at once for another which would be free of her mother’s atmosphere and influence.

      Mr Quest was standing at the french door, his back to the women. ‘Mr Gunn must have been an interesting chap,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He was in the Somme country. Must have missed him by two weeks. Get Mrs Gunn to tell you about him some time, Matty, old chap. Died of gas from the war, she says. Pity those War Office blokes never understood that people could be ill because of the war, and it only showed afterwards. He got no compensation, she says. Damned unfair.’ He turned himself around, and his face had put on its absorbed, devoted look. He reached for a bottle in the skirts of his bush shirt – he always refused to change from his farm clothes when he came into town – and stood holding it, helplessly looking around. ‘A glass?’ he asked. Mrs Quest took it from him, measured his dose at the washstand, and he drank it down. ‘Well?’ he asked irritably, ‘it’s quite a way back, you know, with our old car.’

      ‘Coming,’ said Mrs Quest, guiltily, ‘coming.’ She moved Martha’s things on the dressing table to her own liking, and changed the position of a chair. Then she went across to Martha, who stood stiffly, in nervous hostility, and began patting her shoulders, her hair, her arms, in a series of fussy little pushes, as a bad sculptor might ineffectually push and pat a botched piece of work. ‘You look tired,’ she murmured, her voice sinking. ‘You look tired, you must sleep, you must go to bed early.’

      ‘May!’ exclaimed Mr Quest irritatedly, and Mrs Quest flew to join him. Martha watched them drive away, the thatched, rattling, string-bound machine jogging through the modern traffic. People turned and smiled indulgently at this reminder that it was a farming country – even, still, a pioneer country. Martha could not manage a smile. She stood tensely in the middle of the room and decided to leave at once.

      Mrs Gunn knocked. The knock, a courtesy to which she was not accustomed, soothed Martha, and she said politely, ‘Come in.’

      Mrs Gunn was a tall, large-framed woman with abundant loose flesh. She had faded reddish hair, pale, pretty blue eyes, and an air of tired good nature. ‘It was nice to speak to your mother,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t help wondering, a young thing like you by yourself.’

      Martha was trying to frame words, which would convey, politely, that she was leaving, and that it was no fault of Mrs Gunn that she must. But Mrs Gunn talked on, and she found herself without the courage to say it.

      ’… your mother says you don’t eat, and I must make you. I said you were providing for yourself, but I’d do what I could.’

      ‘There’s no need, Mrs Van Rens –’ Martha stopped, confused. ‘I mean, Mrs Gunn. I eat like a horse.’

      Mrs Gunn nodded comfortably. ‘You look as if you had a head on your shoulders. I told her, girls have sense these days. My Rosie was out and about two years before she married, and I never had to raise my voice to her. The thing is you must keep men in their place, so they know from the start they’re not getting something for nothing.’

      Martha was ready to be sarcastic at this remark; but Mrs Gunn came over and kissed her, and she was warmed by gratitude into good humour.

      ‘If you want anything, just come to me. I know young things don’t want to be nagged at, but think of me like a mother.’

      ‘Thank you, Mrs Van R – Mrs Gunn,’ said Martha gratefully, and Mrs Gunn went out.

      Martha gazed around the room with as much dislike as if it had been contaminated. She looked into her drawers, and every crease and fold of her clothing spoke of her mother’s will. But she had paid the rent till the end of the month, and she could not afford to move. She flung all the clothes out onto the floor, and then rearranged them to her own taste, though no outsider would have seen any difference; she pushed the bed back to what she imagined had been its old position, but she was unobservant and did not accurately know what that position had been. Having finished, she was very tired; and although it was early, she undressed, and stood by the door and watched the cars go racing past, while their lights spun over her in blotches and streaks of gold, and over the flowers in the garden, touching them into sudden colour. Beyond the garden and the street, there were black shapes of trees against a dim night sky. It was the park. And beyond, the city; but she imagined its delights in terms of what she had read of London and New York. She dreamed of the moment when she would be invited to join these pleasures, while her eyes remained on the trees and she unconsciously compared their shapes with those of the skyline on the farm; and soon it was as if the farm had stretched itself out, like a long and shadowy arm across the night, and at its end, as in the hollow of a large, enfolding palm, Martha stood like a pigmy and safely surveyed her new life. And when she awoke in the morning and saw the sunlight warm and yellow over the coconut matting, she wondered sleepily if the water-cart brakes had given, for it was making such a noise; and she sat up, while the new room rearranged itself about her; and now her ears had been informed by her brain that this was not the water-cart but a delivery van, they began to ache in protest.

      At the office that day, she was left to ‘keep her eyes open’ until after the lunch hour. Then Mr Max Cohen brought her a document to copy. She was so nervous, she had to start afresh three time; and when he came to fetch it, all that had been achieved were the words ‘Memorandum of an Agreement of Sale’ typed raggedly across the top of the sheet. She shrank under his impatient assurance that it did not matter in the least, and she must take her time. Her fingers were heavy and trembling, and her head was thick. To type two pages of his small neat writing into something clean and pleasant to look at seemed to her, just then, an impossibly difficult task. He went home without coming to her desk again; and she flung a dozen sheets of paper into the wastepaper basket, and decided she would come early next morning and do it before anyone else arrived.

      Mrs Buss, on her way out, asked, ‘Have you got any certificates?’ Martha said no, she had learned to type at home. Mrs Buss said nothing consoling, but merely nodded absent-mindedly, for her eyes were on the elegant Mrs Jasper Cohen.

      Martha left the office so humiliated she could hardly see where she was going. She was filled with a violent revulsion against the law and everything connected with it. What she said to herself was, I won’t spend the rest of my life typing this stupid jargon.

      She stood at the corner of the street, with Mr Jasper Cohen’s money – or rather what was left of it – in her handbag, and watched a crowd of carefree young people going into McGrath’s Hotel, and felt sick with envy. Then she crossed the street and went into the offices of the Zambesi News. She was going to see Mr Spur, an old journalist, whom she had known ‘as

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