LITMIR.BIZ

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down at all, so the doctor says it will be a question of rectal feeding soon. Did you enjoy yourself last night at the pictures?’

      ‘I didn’t go to the pictures. What did you ring me for?’

      ‘Oh by the way,’ said Mrs Quest, after a confused pause, her breath coming quick, ‘I thought I should tell you Caroline is here for the afternoon and so you should be careful she doesn’t see you.’

      Of course! thought Martha. That’s it. I should have guessed. ‘Since I told you earlier I couldn’t get to you until eight, and since Caroline will have gone home long before that, I don’t see the point.’

      ‘Well, you might have come now, you bad girl, if you weren’t so busy.’ Mrs Quest now sounded playful, even coy, and to forestall anger, Martha said quickly: ‘Tell my father I’ll be there at eight, goodbye, mother.’ She put down the receiver, trembling with rage.

      This situation had arisen: Mrs Quest had taken to appropriating her granddaughter several times a week for the day, or for the afternoon. The little girl played in the big garden with her nurse while Mrs Quest supervised from the windows of the room where Mr Quest lay ill. And why not? Martha considered it reasonable that the Quests should have their grandchild, while she, the child’s mother, who had forfeited all right to her, should be excluded. It was quite right she should never be seen by the child; it would upset Caroline, who was now ‘used to’, as everyone said, Elaine Talbot, now Elaine Knowell, the new mother. All this Martha agreed to, accepted, saw the justice of. But on the afternoons Caroline was with her grandmother, Mrs Quest invariably telephoned Martha to say: Caroline’s here, I can see her playing near the fish-pond, she does look pretty today. Or: Be careful not to drop in, Matty, Caroline’s here.

      And Martha said, Yes mother. No mother. And never once had she said what her appalled, offended heart repeated over and over again, while she continued to say politely: ‘Yes,’ and ‘Of course’: You’re enjoying this – you love punishing me. This is a victory for you, being free to see the child when I am not – sadistic woman, cruel sadistic woman … So Martha muttered to herself, consumed with hatred for her mother, but consumed ridiculously, since the essence of Martha’s relationship with her mother must be, must, apparently, for ever be, that Mrs Quest ‘couldn’t help it’. Well, she couldn’t.

      Now Martha sat, rigid, trembling, seething with thoughts she was ashamed of, knew were unfair and ridiculous, but could not prevent: ‘And now my father’s ill, really ill at last, and so I have to go to that house, and she’s got me just where she wants me, I’m helpless.’

      Mr Robinson came out of his office.

      ‘Mr Robinson?’

      ‘I was going to say: advertise for a new secretary, you know the sort of thing we want.’

      ‘I’ll put it in the paper tomorrow. And about that ten pounds?’

      ‘What ten pounds?’

      ‘If we’re going to have proper accountants, then …’

      For the hundredth time that day (it seemed) he went red and so did she.

      ‘Forget it,’ he muttered. Then, afraid he had sounded abrupt, he smiled hastily. She smiled brightly back. ‘Thanks,’ she said. He rushed out of the office, slamming the door. Doors slammed all down the centre of the building and then a car roared into movement.

      Martha now shut drawers, doors; opened curtains again, exposing yards of heated glass; threw balls of paper into the baskets. The telephone began ringing. It was five minutes after time, so she left the instrument ringing in the hot, glowing room, and walked down the stairs, round and round the core of the building after her employer – probably now several miles away, at the speed he drove. The washroom was empty. Six basins and six square mirrors and a lavatory bowl stood gleamingly clean. The old man who was the building’s ‘boy’ had just finished cleaning. He went out as Martha came in, saying, ‘Good night, missus.’ Martha stood in front of a mirror, and lifted brown arms to her hair, then held them there, looking with a smile at the smooth, perfect flesh, at the small perfect crease in her shoulder.

      The smile, however, was dry: she wiped it off her face. It was there too often, and too often did she have to push it away, and make harmless the attitude of mind it came from. She had to survive, she knew that; this phase of her life was sticking it out, waiting, keeping herself ready for when ‘life’ would begin. But that smile … there was a grimness in it that reminded her of the set of her mother’s face when she sat sewing, or was unaware she was being observed.

      Martha made up her face, smoothed down pink cotton over hips and thighs, combed her hair. She could not prevent, this time, as she leaned forward into the mirror, a pang of real pain. She was twenty-four years old. She had never been, probably never would be again, as attractive as she was now. And what for? – that was the point. From now, four-thirty on a brilliant March afternoon until midnight, when she would receive Anton’s kiss on her cheek, she would be running from one place to another, seeing one set of people after another, all of them greeting her in a certain way, which was a tribute to – not only her looks at this time – but a quality which she could not define except as it was expressed in reverse, so to speak, by their attitude. Yet she remained locked in herself, and … what a damned waste, she ended these bitter thoughts, as she turned to examine her back view. To the waist only, the mirror was set too high. Because of all the ‘running around’ – Anton’s phrase for it; because her life at this time was nothing but seeing people, coping with things, dealing with situations and people, one after another, she was thin, she was ‘in a thin phase’, she was again ‘a slim blonde’. Well, almost: being blonde is probably more a quality of texture than of colour: Martha was not sleek enough to earn the word blonde.

      And besides, what was real in her, underneath these metamorphoses of style or shape or – even, apparently – personality, remained and intensified. The continuity of Martha now was in a determination to survive – like everyone else in the world, these days, as she told herself; it was in a watchfulness, a tension of the will that was like a small flickering of light, like the perpetual tiny dance of lightning on the horizon from a storm so far over the earth’s curve it could only show reflected on the sky. Martha was holding herself together – like everybody else. She was a lighthouse of watchfulness; she was a being totally on the defensive. This was her reality, not the ‘pretty’ or ‘attractive’ Martha Hesse, a blondish, dark-eyed young woman who smiled back at her from the mirror where she was becomingly set off in pink cotton that showed a dark shadow in the angle of her hips. Yet it was the ‘attractive’ Matty Hesse she would take now to see Maisie; and it was necessary to strengthen, to polish, to set off the attractive Matty, the shell, because above all Maisie always understood by instinct what was going on underneath everybody’s false shells, and this was why Martha loved being with Maisie, but knew at the same time she must protect herself … there were fifteen minutes before Maisie expected her. Martha lit a cigarette, propped herself on the edge of a washbasin, shut her eyes, and let bitter smoke drift up through her teeth. She felt the smoke’s touch on the down of her cheek, felt it touch and cling to her lashes, her brows.

      She must keep things separate, she told herself.

      Last Saturday morning she had spent with Maisie, relaxed in a good-humoured grumbling gossip, a female compliance in a pretence at accepting resignation. And what had been the result of that pleasure, the delight of being off guard? Why, the situation she was now in with Maisie, a false situation. She had not kept things separate, that was why.

      Martha’s dreams, always a faithful watchdog, or record, of what was going on, obligingly provided her with an image of her position. Her dream at this time, the one which recurred, like a thermometer, or gauge, from which she could check herself, was of a large house, a bungalow, with half a dozen different rooms in it, and she, Martha (the person who held herself together, who watched, who must preserve wholeness through a time of dryness and disintegration), moved from one room to the next, on guard. These rooms, each furnished differently, had to be kept separate – had to be, it was Martha’s task for this time. For if she did not – well, her dreams told her what she might expect. The house crumbled

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