Landlocked. Doris Lessing

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      She saw a rather pale young woman who seemed worried. But there was something else: Martha was wearing a white woollen suit, and it disturbed Mrs Quest. It’s too tight, she thought. She did not think of Martha having a body. What she saw was ‘a white suit’, as if in a fashion advertisement. And there were disturbing curves and shapes from which her mind shrank because of a curiosity she could not own.

      Martha thought that the old woman who sat in the dusk on the veranda looked tired. Feeling guilty about something, from the look of her.

      Mrs Quest said: ‘You look tired.’

      ‘I am tired.’

      ‘And you’re much too thin.’

      ‘It’s one of my thin phases,’ said Martha vaguely. Flames of rage leaped unexpectedly in Mrs Quest … ‘one of my thin phases’… so like her, cold, unfeeling, just like her!

      ‘Then why don’t you eat more?’ said Mrs Quest with an angry titter.

      ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll just get fat again by myself.’

      Martha sat down and lit a cigarette. Light from the door fell over her mother. Martha saw, under the rug, a brownish skirt, and a pink woollen jersey. Martha looked incredulously at the jersey. How was it possible for a woman, for any woman at all, to wear such a hideous salmon-coloured thing? Why, to touch it must be positively painful.

      ‘I had a letter from Jonathan.’

      ‘Oh, good. You said so actually.’

      ‘He’s getting better. Of course his arm will never be what it was.’

      ‘Of course not,’ said Martha, with an unpleasant intention Mrs Quest was sure of but chose not to analyse.

      ‘I’ve been talking things over with your father. He quite agrees with me that it would be wise to go and live in England near Jonathan. If he decides to live there.’

      ‘Oh, then my father’s better?’ Martha got up, ready to go in. But at her mother’s gesture, she sat down again.

      ‘The doctor was here, he said perhaps your father has turned the corner. He wasn’t feeling up to the Victory Parade this morning, but he’s been quite rested all day, and in fact he slept all afternoon without drugs.’

      ‘Good.’

      Again Martha got up, ready to go in.

      ‘I’ve gone back to smoking,’ said Mrs Quest pathetically, almost demanding that her daughter should congratulate her on her long self-sacrifice.

      ‘Well, you were quite marvellous to give it up,’ said Martha politely. ‘I simply can’t think how you do it.’ She had turned herself away, mostly from the salmon-pink sweater. It seemed to her that everything impossible about her mother was summed up by the sheer insensitivity, the hideousness, of that thick, rough, pink object.

      ‘Mrs Maynard was very disappointed we could not go to the Victory thing. She’s starting a committee for the problems of Peace, and she says she wants you on it. I can’t imagine why, when you’re such a flibberty-gibbet.’ Mrs Quest brought out this last sentence with a nervous titter, simultaneously looking at her daughter in appeal. She knew quite well that Martha was far from being a flibberty-gibbet, but the phrase had come, because of Mrs Quest’s nervousness, her unhappiness on the point of Mrs Maynard, from battles in Martha’s childhood.

      Martha stared at the pink jersey. She was quite white, raging inside with the need to say a thousand wounding things. With an unbelievable effort, she managed to stay silent, smiling painfully, thinking: I hope she has the sense to shut up now, because otherwise …

      Mrs Quest went on: ‘Well, surely you can say something, it’s quite an honour to be asked to Mrs Maynard’s things!’

      Martha began: ‘Mrs Maynard wants me on the committee because of …’ She stopped herself just in time from saying: Because of Maisie.

      ‘What were you going to say?’ said Mrs Quest, wanting to know so badly that her casualness about it grated. Suspicion was flaming through her: there was something odd about Mrs Maynard’s wanting Martha in the first place; and now there was something odd about Martha’s manner.

      ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Martha. ‘Don’t worry. She doesn’t really want me, you know.’

      The words ‘don’t worry’ made Mrs Quest sit straight up saying: ‘What do you mean, why should I care if Mrs Maynard wants you!’

      Martha escaped, saying with a vague bright smile: ‘I’ll just go and see if …’ On the way to the bedroom Martha was muttering: ‘They’ll do for me yet, between them, they’ll get me yet if I don’t watch out.’ The smells of medicine and stool filled her nostrils. Her father had just had an enema and the whole house knew it. Martha allowed herself to think, for a few short moments, of her mother’s life, the brutal painfulness of it – but could not afford to think for long. It made her want to run away now, this minute – out of this house and away, before ‘it’ could get her, destroy her.

      In the bedroom, a small, grey man was asleep, against pillows.

      ‘Father,’ said Martha, in a low voice, bending down.

      ‘Is that you, old chap?’ said Mr Quest, in the voice which meant that he didn’t want to wake up.

      ‘How are you?’

      ‘Oh, much the same, I suppose.’

      She stayed there a few moments, but he kept his eyes shut. Anguish, the enemy, appeared: but no, she was not going to weep, feel pain, suffer. If she did, they would get her, drag her down into this nightmare house like a maze where there could be only one end, no matter how hard one ran this way, that way, like a scared rabbit.

      ‘Did you get to that Victory thing?’ asked the old man in a normal voice, as she straightened herself to leave.

      ‘No. Well, is it likely?’

      ‘She wanted me to go.’

      ‘So I hear.’

      Mr Quest’s lips moved: he planned a humorous remark. Martha waited. But he lost interest and said: ‘Well, good night, old chap.’

      ‘Good night.’

      ‘He’s asleep,’ said Martha to her mother on the veranda, just as she had done the night before. She went to the bicycle and slid herself on the seat.

      ‘I don’t know how you can bicycle decently in a skirt as tight as that.’

      ‘I wasn’t thinking about bicycling decently,’ said Martha, sullenly. Then she smiled. Mrs Quest smiled too. ‘And where are you gallivanting off to now?’

      Martha sat on her bicycle, with one foot on the wall of the steps. She smiled steadily. She was thinking she might say: Well, as it happens, I’ve got to meet Athen – he’s a communist newspaper-seller from Greece. Maisie’s on the thorny path to hell, he thinks. Maisie? Well, she’s the mother of Binkie Maynard’s by-blow. Yes, I did say Binkie СКАЧАТЬ