Landlocked. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ turned her towards him like a doll and said: ‘I once saw a woman, it was in the Cape – she was shaped like a flamingo. She was like a canary, I tell you. I put the energy into getting her that could have won the war two years earlier, but Matty, I didn’t care for her.’

      Martha laughed and thought: Well, what about his wife? The photograph of her showed a slight, fair woman with a delightful smile. Yes, but how could she, Martha, say: Your wife’s like a flamingo, she’s as fragile as a handful of canaries, and obviously that’s why you married her?

      ‘Not to have this here, I can’t stand it.’

      ‘What do you mean, have it.’

      ‘That’s the point.’ His face was full of real anguish, the pain of his mind. ‘Don’t humour me, Martha, don’t be maternal – I’ll kill you, I tell you, if you go maternal on me.’

      Their love-making was short – he had to go back to his farm, and she had to visit her father and then run errands for Johnny Lindsay. It was short, too, because of the violence of this emotion.

      ‘I tell you, Martha, there are times when I’m sorry we started, it’s all too much for me, I can tell you.’

      ‘I know what you mean.’

      ‘So you do!’

      They lay smiling at each other from half an inch’s distance, eye to eye.

      ‘I’ve got to go.’

      ‘Wait, I’ll take you.’

      Suddenly a noise as if gravel was being flung about everywhere. It was raining in loud, splashing drops through a strong, orange evening sunlight. The six inches of glass ran in a streaked gold light. Thunder cracked, but a bird safe in a bunch of warm leaves repeated a long, slow, liquid phrase over and over again.

      A handful of rain, blown in by a hard gust of wind, scalded them with cold. They leaped out of bed and stood below the tiny window, through which rods of strong wet drove and stung their strong, fresh, satiated bodies.

      They opened their mouths and let the wet run in, and watched the greenish reflections from the deep tree outside, and the orange lights from the window-glass, run and slide on their polished skins. They laughed and rubbed the freezing water from the sky over each other’s shoulders and breasts. They felt as if they might never see each other again after this afternoon, and that while they touched each other, kissed, they held in that moment everything the other was, had been, ever could be. They felt half-savage with the pain of loss.

      Then a shrill voice from the back veranda of the house. Thomas’s brother’s wife, Sarah, was shouting at her husband, her servant, or her children, through the din of rain. Which stopped as if she had ordered it to stop, in a crash of thunder. And Martha and Thomas laughed, it was so sad and so comical.

      They stood on tip-toe to see through the minute window a plump woman in a too-tight white dress shrilly agitating on a dripping veranda. Five years ago, she had been a pretty girl, and now – ‘God!’ said Thomas, in a sudden, deep sincerity, ‘she’s a good girl, they’re all good people, these householders, but when I see them, I want to run and jump into the lake and that’s the truth.’

      And Martha deepened her vow that she would never be the mistress of a household in a bad temper because … but they did not know why the plump woman on the veranda was so angry. She was too far off for her actual words to be heard; but her body, the set of her head, the edge of her scolding voice said: ‘I’m in a rage, I’m beside myself with rage.’

      The two crept down the ladder and stood on the red, rough, warm-smelling brick, looking out into the garden, seeing the strong, brown trunk of the jacaranda whose lacy masses had waved above their naked bodies which still stung pleasantly with memories of the lashing rain. All around them were soaked, sparkling lawns, dripping boughs, a welter of wet flowers. Everything was impossibly brilliant in the clear, washed light. And the bird sang on from its invisible perch. Martha was faint with happiness and with sadness, and Thomas’s face told her he was in the same condition. The woman in the white dress went inside her house and Thomas said: ‘All right now, Martha.’ They ran over squelching grass to his lorry.

      Martha asked: ‘What does she think, your sister-in-law?’

      Thomas frowned.

      Martha could have left it, but she pressed: ‘Well, doesn’t she say anything?’

      ‘She said something to my brother, he told her it wasn’t her business.’

      Martha thought this over: she could imagine the scene – the uncomfortable husband, guilty because he was supporting his brother’s freedom to do as he liked, the insistent woman in a dress that was too tight, the husband finally making a stand with vehemence (and she knew it) for reasons neither of them could afford to say out loud.

      There was an unpleasant taste in Martha’s mouth, which she knew she ought to ignore. Thomas had started the lorry and they were moving off.

      She said: ‘I suppose it’s the place Thomas brings his girls to, is that it?’

      Thomas gave her a discouraged look, and said: ‘If you want to make it like that, you can.’

      She nearly said: ‘But I haven’t made it like that, have I?’ But she didn’t. She was sorry she had said anything. Besides, no one but she, Martha, went to the loft these days, and in fact it had been closed while Thomas was in W——, waiting to be demobilized. All the same, she thought of Sarah Stern, watching Thomas emerge from the shed with other girls, and for a moment she could not bear it. They drove a couple of blocks in silence, and both felt they were a long way from the simplicities of their being together in the loft.

      ‘We’d better stop here,’ said Martha, before they reached her mother’s gate.

      Thomas stopped, and sat with his hand on the gear lever, while the engine throbbed. The whole lorry shook, and they shook with it. They began to laugh. ‘I’ll be in town the day after tomorrow,’ Thomas said. ‘I don’t know whether early afternoon or late, but if you want to go to the shed and read or something …’

      They kissed, smiling, holding themselves steady, with difficulty, against the vibrations of the lorry. Then she said: ‘See you soon,’ and went up the path to her mother’s veranda, deliberately annulling the time between now and the day after tomorrow.

      The other house, from whose garden she had just come, was almost identical with this. Both gardens, large, deeply foliaged, full of flowers and birds, seemed miles from the streets that ran just outside them. One held the young Jewish couple with their children, a unit dedicated to virtues which would make them honoured members of their community and prosper their shop: Thomas’s brother sold sports equipment from a smart shop in the centre of the city. In the Quests’ house, everything had changed in the last few months: Jonathan had come home. As Martha came up the path she saw him sitting on the veranda reading a magazine: a handsome, fair young man, with a small, fair moustache and Mrs Quest’s innocent blue eyes.

      Two catastrophes, either of which might have killed him – one, a shell exploding beside him, another, a tank going up in flames – had apparently not marked him, except for the arm, which was in plaster, and about which he was attractively diffident.

      The arm still gave him a good deal of pain, and he had to attend the local hospital several times СКАЧАТЬ