Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ ascending to the sober legal offices above might catch sight of a woman in a dressing-gown hurrying (but aggressively, since she had paid her rent and had the right to it) to the bathroom. At night, working late the partners had been known to telephone the police to quell a brawl or eject an improper person. In fact, this layer of the building was altogether undignified and unsuitable; but, as the partners were waiting to rebuild, everything was allowed to remain. Martha discovered a familiar atmosphere almost at once when she heard Mr Cohen say to a client, ‘I must apologize for the surroundings, but we really aren’t responsible.’ This although the building was owned and controlled by him; because he planned a change, he could not be considered as really being here.

      On the other hand, the very age of the place gave it dignity. People from older countries might think it strange to describe a building dated 1900 as old; but it had been the first to raise its three storeys above the bungalows and for this it was affectionately remembered, and one entered it with a comforting sense of antiquity – as in Spain one lifts one’s eyes from the guidebook murmuring reverently, ‘This was first built three centuries before Christ, think of that!’ and afterwards poverty and squalor seem merely picturesque.

      This, the oldest legal firm in the city, was known as Robinson’s on account of the first Mr Robinson, now dead; for the young Mr Robinson gave precedence to both Mr Cohens, and to Mr Daniel when he was there, which was seldom, for he was a member of Parliament, and therefore very busy. But all this became clear to Martha slowly; for she was too confused, to begin with, to understand more than her own position, and even that was not so simple.

      The partners each had a small room, reached by squeezing through the main room, which was packed tight with typewriters and filing cabinets and telephones; but though this main room at first sight looked like chaos, holding as it did fifteen women of varying ages, certain divisions soon became apparent. The chief one was that the four senior secretaries sat at one end, with telephones on their desks; but Martha was so ignorant of office routine she did not at first notice this. She arrived on the first morning in a state of keyed desire to show impossible heights of efficiency: arrived half an hour before anyone else, and sat waiting for the demands on her to begin. But the other girls drifted in, talked a little; and then came the partners; and still no one asked her for anything. She was left sitting until a slight, sparrowlike woman, with bright fringed hair and round blue eyes, came past and remarked warningly that she should keep her eyes open and learn the ropes. From which Martha gathered that she had already failed in her first duty, and opened them again from a vision of herself receiving quantities of illegible scrawl and transforming it, as if by magic, into sober and dignified legal documents of the kind Mrs Buss produced from her typewriter. She forced herself to watch what was going on around her.

      At lunch hour she stayed at her desk, because she had ten shillings between herself and the end of the month, and told herself it would be good for her figure. She went from typewriter to typewriter to see what kind of work she would be asked to do, and felt dismayed in spite of her large intentions; for these legal documents – no, no, it was as if she, Martha, were being bound and straightened by the formal moribund language of legality.

      Just before the others were due back, the door marked ‘Mr Jasper Cohen’ opened, and he came out, stopping in surprise when he saw her. He laid some documents on Mrs Buss’s desk and went back again. Almost at once a buzzer sounded, and then, while she confusedly looked for the right instrument, the door opened again and he said, ‘Never mind the telephone. You won’t mind my asking – have you any money, Miss Quest?’

      For some reason she protested, ‘Oh, yes, quite a lot,’ and then blushed because it sounded so childish.

      He looked at her dubiously, and said, ‘Come into my office for a moment,’ and she followed him. It was very small; he had to squeeze past the corner of the big desk to the corner he sat in. He told her to sit down.

      Mr Jasper Cohen already owned her heart because of a quality one might imagine would make it impossible: he was hideously ugly. No, not hideously: he was fantastically ugly, so ugly the word hardly applied. He was short, he was squat, he was pale; but these were words one might as justly use for Joss, his nephew, or his brother, Max. His body was broad beyond squareness; it had a swelling, humped look. His head enormous; a vast, pale, domed forehead reached to a peak where the hair began, covering a white, damp scalp in faint oily streaks, and breaking above the ears into a black fuzz that seemed to Martha pathetic, like the tender, defenceless fuzz of a baby’s head. His face was inordinately broad, a pale, lumpy expanse, with a flat, lumpy nose, wide, mauvish lips, and ears rioting out on either side like scrolls. His hands were equally extraordinary: broad, deep palms puffed themselves into rolls of thick white flesh, ending in short, spatulate fingers almost as broad as long. They were the hands of a grotesque; and as they moved clumsily in a drawer, looking for something, Martha watched them in suspense, wishing she might offer to help him. She longed to do something for him; for this ugly man had something so tender and sweet in his face, together with the stubborn dignity of an afflicted person who intends to make no apologies or claims for something he cannot help, that she was asking herself, What is ugliness? She was asking it indignantly, the protest directed against nature itself; and perhaps for the first time in her life, she wondered with secret gratitude what it would be like to be born plain, born ugly, instead of into, if not the aristocracy, at least the middle classes of good looks.

      He at last found what he wanted. It was a roll of notes, and he took five of them, sliding them free of each other with an awkward movement; and said, ‘You are only getting a small salary, and so …’ As Martha hesitated, he continued quickly, ‘It was my fault for not remembering you might be short of money, coming in from the farm like that. Besides, you are an old friend of my nephew.’ That clinched the thing for him; and Martha took the money, feeling guilty because she had not been a good friend to Joss. She thanked him with emotion, which seemed to upset him, and he said hurriedly, ‘In a day or two we’ll give you something to do. Just pick up what you can, it must be strange to you if you’ve never been in an office before.’

      The interview was over. She went to the door and, as she opened it, heard him say, ‘I shall be pleased if you do not mention this to Mrs Buss. There is no reason why she should know.’ She glanced incredulously at him, for he sounded apprehensive; she was even ready to laugh. But he was looking at some papers.

      She went out, and met the other Mr Cohen returning. She disliked him as much as she liked his brother. He was ordinary in appearance, smartly commonplace: a neat, pale, respectable Jewish-looking person, in a striped business suit, and his manner was snappy but formal, as if he tried to cover a natural ill-humour by the forms of good feeling. And where his brother swelled and protruded into large shapes, he seemed concerned to give the opposite impression. His hair lay in a smooth black cap; his hands were neatly moving, and weighted on either little finger with a heavy signet ring; his lie lay safely behind a narrow gold chain; a gold watch chain confined his neat little stomach.

      Martha returned to her desk as the other girls came in, and spent the afternoon watching them. There was no need to be told (as Mrs Buss made a point of telling her) that this was an easy office to work in. There was no feeling of haste; and if they paused in what they were doing for a chat, or a cigarette, they did not pretend otherwise if one of the partners came through. When Mr Max Cohen entered with work for his secretary, he asked politely, ‘Would you mind doing this for me, when you’ve finished your tea?’ And his secretary finished her tea before even looking to see what he had brought her to do. All this was strange to Martha, although she had not known what she must expect. Perhaps she was remembering what her father had said of his days in an office in England, for it was to escape from that office that he had come farming: ‘I simply couldn’t stick it. Day in and day out, damned routine, and then, thank God, there was the war, and then, after that, going back to the office was nothing but purgatory, sitting at a desk like a mouse in a hole.’ So it may have been that Martha was unconsciously expecting a purgatory, and had now found this pleasant working place; but of course she had not yet so much as lifted СКАЧАТЬ