Landlocked. Doris Lessing

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 dryly under her eyes into a pile of dust, broken brick, a jut of ant-eaten rafter, a slant of rusting iron. And then, while she watched, the ruin changed: it was the house of the kopje, collapsed into a mess of ant-tunnelled mud, ant-consumed grass, where red ant-made tunnels wove a net, like red veins, over the burial mound of Martha’s soul, over the rotting wood, rotting grass, subsiding mud; and bushes and trees, held at bay so long (but only just, only very precariously) by the Quests’ tenancy, came striding in, marching over the fragments of substance originally snatched from the bush, to destroy the small shelter for the English family that they had built between teeming earth and brazen African sky.

      Yes, she knew that – Martha knew that, if she could not trust her judgement, or rather, if her judgement of outside things, people, was like a light that grew brighter, harsher, as the area it covered grew smaller, she could trust with her life (and with her death, these dreams said) the monitor, the guardian, who stood somewhere, was somewhere in this shell of substance, smooth brown flesh so pleasantly curved into the shape of a young woman with smooth browny-gold hair, alert dark eyes. The guardian was to be trusted in messages of life and death; and to be trusted too when the dream (the Dream, she was beginning to think of it, it came in so many shapes and guises, and so often) moved back in time, or perhaps forward – she did not know; and was no longer the shallow town house of thin brick, and cement and tin, no longer the farm house of grass and mud; but was tall rather than wide, reached up, stretched down, was built layer on layer, but shadowy above and below the shallow mid-area comprising (as they say in the house agents’ catalogues) ‘comprising six or so rooms’ for which this present Martha was responsible, and which she must keep separate.

      Keeping separate meant defeating, or at least holding at bay, what was best in her. The warm response to ‘the biggest legal firm in the city’; the need to put her arms around Mr Robinson when he hurt himself so cruelly on the drawer; the need to say Yes, to comply, to melt into situations; the pleasant relationship with Maisie – well, all this wouldn’t do, she must put an end to it. She had simply to accept, finally, that her role in life, for this period, was to walk like a housekeeper in and out of different rooms, but the people in the rooms could not meet each other or understand each other, and Martha must not expect them to. She must not try and explain, or build bridges.

      Between now and twelve tonight, she would have moved from the office and Mr Robinson, up-and-coming lawyer, future Member of Parliament, with his wife, his two children, and his house in the suburbs, to Maisie; from Maisie to Joss and Solly Cohen; from them, the Cohen boys, to old Johnny Lindsay; from the old miner’s sick-bed to her father’s, nursed by her mother; from the Quests’ house to Anton. None of these people knew each other, or could meet with understanding. Improbably (almost impossibly, she thought) Martha was the link between them. And, a more violently discordant association than any of these, there was Mr Maynard. Mr Maynard was after Maisie, he was on the scent after Maisie, through her, Martha – which brought her back to her immediate preoccupation.

      It was her duty to explain to Maisie, to warn Maisie … the cigarette was finished, and she must leave. She left the washroom door swinging softly behind her, and ran down the wide bare steps, and into the clanging, shouting, sun-glittering street. Her bicycle was in the rack on the pavement. She dropped it into the river of traffic, slid up on to it, and was off down the street, but turned sideways to detour past the parking lot whose edges were now loaded with great mounds of jade-green frothing grass, like waves with white foam on them, past the gum trees whose trunks shed loose coils of scented bark; past the Indian stores and then back in a great curve into Founders’ Street. It was, in fact, as the crow flew (or as a young woman might choose to bicycle straight along the street, instead of detouring past grass verges where midges danced in a swoon of grass-scent and eucalyptus) only a few hundred yards from Robinson, Daniel and Cohen’s new offices to where Maisie lived. Founders’ Street had not changed. On the very edge of the new glittering modern centre, it remained low and shabby, full of odorous stores, cheap cafés, wholesale warehouses, small grass lots with bits of rusted iron and dark-skinned children playing, full of the explosive vitality of the unrespectable. There was a bar called Webster’s on a corner, which Martha had never been in, since women did not go into the bars of the city, and besides it was ugly, and besides it usually had groups of men standing about outside it, with the violent look of men waiting for bars to open, or hanging about in frustration because a bar has closed. But Maisie now lived over this place, in two rooms directly above the bar, and she worked in Webster’s as a barmaid.

      Martha came to rest at the kerb, lifted the bicycle up on to the pavement, then left it leaning, locked with a chain like a tethered dog, while she squeezed back against the wall past a dark glass window that had Webster’s on it in scratched white paint. Half a dozen Africans lifted crates of beer from a lorry, which had the name of the city’s brewery on its side, to the pavement, and from the pavement to the open door of the bar. It was nearly opening time, and a couple of youths in khaki, farm assistants, from the look of them, hung smoking by the open door, watching the crates being shouldered in past a red-sweaty-faced, paunchy man in shirt sleeves who frowned his concentration that the beer-handlers should not crash or damage the great bottle-jammed crates. As Martha went past him to the small side door that led to Maisie’s rooms, a violent crash, a splintering of glass, angry shouts from the red-faced man, who was presumably Mr Webster? and complaints, expostulations, even a laugh from the watching farm assistants. A sudden sour reek of beer across the sun-baked street. Martha ascended dark wooden stairs fast, away from the beer stench. She knocked on Maisie’s door and heard: ‘Is that you, Matty? Come in then.’ She entered on a scene of a small child being put to bed for the night.

      The two rooms, small and crammed, but very bright, had in them Maisie, a black nurse-girl, and the baby girl Rita, now about a year old. The child did not want to go to bed. She was fighting the nurse. ‘I-don’t-want-nursie, I-don’t-want,’ while the girl, indefatigably good-humoured, was trying to push windmilling arms and legs into scarlet pyjamas. ‘There СКАЧАТЬ