Landlocked - Doris Lessing

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he was dozing.

      Martha sat down to wait. She had not been moved to such thoughts by the presence of her brother and the young men whose little-boy faces had put them out of court in such matters, but now she remembered that half an hour ago she had been lying in the loft with Thomas. She wondered if her father would sense it.

      When he opened his eyes with a start, she saw that he was not really there that afternoon.

      ‘How are you?’

      ‘Much as usual. And you’re all right?’

      ‘Fine.’

      That’s good.’

      She went on to supply a series of vague remarks until he was not listening: that the garden looked beautiful, and the weather was lovely, and the rain that afternoon had been a real monkey’s wedding, half storm, half sunshine.

      ‘That’s good,’ he said again, and sat drowsing.

      She thought of how often she had sat by this half-conscious man. Where did he go to, her father, while the elderly, shrunken grey man sat dozing? She stared at him, stared, as if the pressure of her eyes could suddenly materialize him, her father, Mr Quest, the vigorous, irascible man who knew, when he chose, so much about her. She felt as if he were there all the time – as if this invalid were an impostor, a mask. But really her father was there – and if so she was in communion with him? Where was he? She looked at the old, sick head slipping sideways and at the half-open mouth and demanded in silent and futile rage: Well, talk to me, where have you got to? Meanwhile her heart ached. It ached.

      Inside, her mother was bustling enjoyably about. Soon Martha went in to see her. These days, now her son was home and she was released into vigour, cooking supper for a dozen young people, running the big house, organizing parties and excursions, Mrs Quest was good-tempered again. Now the nursing of her husband was only one of many things she had to do, not the reason for her existence. These days she did not complain that Martha was a bad daughter. In fact the two women enjoyed seeing each other.

      They kissed.

      ‘Well, where are you gadding off to now?’ asked Mrs Quest, good-humouredly.

      ‘I’m going to a meeting on current affairs,’ said Martha, offering the absurd phrase to her mother in an invitation to laugh.

      ‘Well,’ said Mrs Quest, energetically folding towels, ‘I suppose there’s no harm in it, but I should have thought we had enough of them. And when are you going to see Mrs Maynard – bad girl, she keeps asking after you.’

      ‘I’m sure she does!’

      The ghost of ill-humour appeared, but vanished again, because of the full, strong physical well-being of the two women. Almost, Martha was cold and irritable, and Mrs Quest cold and unjust.

      ‘What’s all this about someone called Maisie? She keeps talking about a girl called Maisie something or other.’

      ‘You might very well ask!’ ‘But I’m not supposed to, is that it?’ Martha laughed, so did her mother, and again they kissed, before Martha went off to Johnny Lindsay’s.

       Chapter Two

      Martha had given up her job with Mr Robinson. Otherwise she could not have the afternoons with Thomas. The day after Thomas had said to her: ‘Well then, what are you earning, what’s keeping you there?’ Martha, on the simplicity of will that was Thomas’s gift to her, walked into Mr Robinson’s office and gave notice. By herself it would have taken weeks of thinking, I should do this or that, and then a drift into a decision. But now she lived from this new centre, the room she shared with Thomas, a room that had in it, apparently, a softly running dynamo, to which, through him, she was connected. Everything had become easy suddenly.

      Or nearly everything. For of course, there were new problems. Martha ‘worked at home’. Or, as she told everyone, with an apparently firm intention: ‘I’m using the flat as an office.’ It was no good: as far as others were concerned, Matty had given up her job, and was free in the daytime.

      She had told Mrs Van she wanted typing work; and now the Members of Parliament who were Mrs Van’s friends, and Mrs Van herself, brought work to Martha. The hours she sat before her typewriter every day were a third as long as before, and she earned twice as much. If the seriousness of ‘work’ is measured by what one earns for it, then Martha was working twice as hard as she did in Mr Robinson’s office. As Thomas pointed out.

      It was the same as when she was the wife of Douglas Knowell – the cast had changed, the play was the same. Now came, every morning, Marjorie Black, Maisie McGrew, Betty Krueger, Mrs Quest – even Mrs Van.

      Every morning, as Martha sat at her typewriter, transforming scribbled sheets into piles of ordered black print, there would come a knock on the half-open door. (Why don’t you lock your door then? said Thomas – But it’s so hot!) Into the room would come one or several of these women, each exclaiming that they did not wish to waste Martha’s time, that they had work to do of their own in any case, but they had just dropped in. (Why don’t you tell them to go away, Martha? Just say, you’re sorry, you’re working.)

      And why did Martha not ask them to go away?

      Thomas said: ‘You never go to them, to their houses, do you?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘There you are. It never even occurs to you. It’s not something you do. So they come to you.’

      ‘Well?’

      ‘So you have to become a woman who is not to be disturbed in the daytime, because it’s not something you do.’

      ‘Ah, but it’s not so easy.’

      ‘Perfectly easy, if you decide to do it.’

      To serve tea, to sit talking, being sympathetic, charming (etc., etc., ad nauseam) creating a web of talk which (she knew quite well and so did they) had no relation to the events and people they discussed but which seemed to have a validity of its own – there was the most powerful attraction in it. She could positively see, after the women left, the soft, poisonous, many-coloured web of comment and gossip they had created, hanging there in the smoky air of the little room.

      But of course these were ‘intelligent’ people; some of them even ‘educated’; even – though this was a word they used with an increasingly humorous grimness, ‘progressive’ people. Yet what had changed in the talk, since Martha had chafed at the talk at the women’s tea-parties in the avenues? These women did not complain about their servants; they deplored, instead, that they had servants, wished they could do without them, and often indeed, took decisions to give them up. And they did not complain about their husbands, but about ‘society’, which made marriage unsatisfactory. They did not talk scandal in the sense of have you heard that so and so has left her husband? They discussed people’s characters, with all the dispassionate depth offered them by their familiarity with ‘psychology’. Why anybody ever did anything was immediately obvious to these psychologically educated females, and people’s motives were an open book to them, their own included. Recipes they exchanged – to talk about food was not reactionary, though to discuss clothes for too long was frivolous, if not reactionary. As for politics, there were two kinds of politics, neither needing much comment. Local politics, which meant, here, the situation of the black man – well, one can reach a degree of sophistication which means one has only to glance at a newspaper and exclaim bitterly: Of course, what would one expect! – to have said everything necessary. As for world politics, the manifestations of ‘the cold war’, a recently christened phenomenon, made it impossible for this tiny group of people to communicate easily, since they represented between them every variety of ‘left’ opinion, each grade of it needing the most incredible tact and forbearance with the others.

      And, of course, there was a horrible fascination, the dark attraction of Martha’s secret fears, in the fact that

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