Martha turned on her back to stretch her body’s happiness in cool, leaf-smelling warmth. Through the minute window the tree blazed out its green against violent sun-soaked blue, against black, thunderous clouds which at any moment would break and empty themselves.
A deep forest silence. This shed had been built at the bottom of a large garden to hold tools and seedlings. The house (it was in the avenues, a couple of hundred yards from the Quests’ house) now belonged to Thomas’s brother and his wife. During the war Thomas had appropriated the shed and had built a loft across one half of it, half-inch boards on gum poles, as flimsy a construction as a child makes for himself in a tree. But it was strong enough, for it held a bed and even books and could be locked. The brick floor of the shed below was covered with divided petrol tins full of seedlings. Thomas, based on the farm where his wife lived, was also a nurseryman in the city. During the war he had kept an eye on the farm while he moved about the Colony from one camp to another. Now he moved back and forth from the farm to the town, bringing in lorry-loads of shrubs, flowers, young trees grown on the farm to sell here. ‘Thomas Stern’s Nursery’ it said on a board on the gate, which was the back gate of Mr and Mrs Joseph Stern’s garden.
Here Martha came most afternoons and some evenings to make love, or simply to turn a key on herself and be alone.
She had complained that her life had consisted of a dozen rooms, each self-contained, that she was wearing into a frazzle of shrill nerves in the effort of carrying herself, each time a whole, from one ‘room’ to the other. But adding a new room to her house had ended the division. From this centre she now lived—a loft of aromatic wood from whose crooked window could be seen only sky and the boughs of trees, above a brick floor hissing sweetly from the slow drippings and wellings from a hundred growing plants, in a shed whose wooden walls grew from lawns where the swinging arc of a water-sprayer flung rainbows all day long, although, being January, it rained most afternoons.
Once upon a time, so it is said, people listened to their dreams as if bending to a door beyond which great figures moved; half-human, speaking half-divine truths. But now we wake from sleep as if our fingers have been on a pulse: ‘So that’s it! That’s how matters stand!’ Martha’s dreams registered a calmly beating pulse, although she knew that loving Thomas must hold its own risks, and that this was as true for him as for her.
When he came back into the shed below, Martha turned over again on her stomach to watch him. He did not at once come up the ladder, but bent over green leaves to adjust a label. His face was thoughtful, held the moment’s stillness that accompanies wonder—which in itself is not far off fear. ‘No joke, love,’ as he had said, in joke, more than once; for these two had not said they loved each other, nor did it seem likely now that they would. But what Martha saw now, on Thomas’s face, as he bent, one hand at work on a twist of rusty wire, was what she felt in the few moments each time before she was actually in his presence: no, it was too strong, it was not what she wanted, it was too much of a wrench away from what was easy: much easier to live deprived, to be resigned, to be self-contained. No, she did not want to be dissolved. And neither did he: smiling, Martha—her teeth lightly clenching the flesh of her forearm, her nose accepting the delicious odours of her skin—watched Thomas straighten to come up the ladder, his broad, brown face, his blue eyes serious, serious—then slowly warming with smiles. Up the ladder slowly mounted a brown, sturdy man, with a brown, broad face and blue eyes that seemed full of sunlight. He wore his working khaki from the farm, and his limbs emerged from it no differently than they had from the khaki of his uniform during the war. Slowly he came up the ladder, and Martha’s stomach shrank, turned liquid, and her shoulders, breasts, thighs (apparently on orders from Thomas, since her body no longer owed allegiance to her) shrank and waited for his touch.
Thomas sat down on the bottom of the bed, or pallet. It was made of strips of hide over a wooden frame. It had on it a thin mattress and a rough blanket. He looked, smiling, at the naked woman lying face downwards, who then, because his gaze at her was apparently unbearable, turned over on her back. But her hand, obeying this other creature in Martha who was Thomas’s, covered up the centre of her body, while her mind thought: Look at that, how very extraordinary! For now that her body had become a newly discovered country with laws of its own, she studied it with passionate curiosity.
Thomas sat quiet, looking at the naked woman whose right hand was held in the gesture of modesty celebrated in art (and at which both were by temperament likely to smile) and she lay looking back at him. They forced themselves to remain quiet and look at each other’s faces now, having confessed that they could hardly bear it, and that it was something they must learn to do. For while the word ‘love’ was something apparently tabooed, for both of them, and they had confessed that this experience was something unforeseen, and therefore by definition not entirely desired?—when they looked at each other, seriousness engulfed them, and questions arose which they both would rather not answer.
For instance, this was a woman twice married (though she had not been really married, she knew) and with a lover or so besides. As for him, he was married to a woman he adored. One could say, in Thomas’s voice, apparently in reply to his own thoughts, since Martha did not mention it: ‘I have to love women, Martha, and that’s no joke, believe you me.’ Or, as Thomas answered Martha: ‘Yes, Martha, of course. God knows what men do with women in this part of the world, but every time I have a woman, well, nearly every time, I realize that her old man doesn’t know what he’s at. God knows what it’s all about, but let me tell you, in Poland when I had a woman I had a woman, here I take it for granted I’m going to be faced with a virgin…but for all that, Martha, every time a woman likes a man in bed, then he is her first lover. And who am I to dispute the tactful arrangements of nature?’
But for Martha, every other experience with a man had become the stuff of childhood. Poor Anton—well, it was not his fault. And poor Douglas.
But that was not honest either. For by no means easily had she become what Thomas insisted she must be. Of course, her real nature had been put into cold storage for precisely this, but when what she had been waiting for happened at last, then she discovered that that creature in her self whom she had cherished in patience was fighting and reluctant. To be dissolved so absolutely—yes, but what was going to happen to her when Thomas—she could not say ‘when Thomas loves someone else’, or ‘if Thomas goes back to his wife’, and so she said: When Thomas goes away.
‘Why do you say that, Martha?’
‘Say what?’
‘You say, I’m going away?’
‘But, Thomas, you are always going away somewhere.’
‘Yes, but that’s not what you mean.’
‘Well, something like that.’
‘But it’s you who are going away, you’re going to England.’
‘Ah, yes, but even if I didn’t go to England.’
A silence while they looked at each other—serious. ‘Yes, I know,’ said Thomas.
‘Well then?’
‘But in the meantime, I’m here.’
A command, this last—for Thomas, or the creature in him who corresponded to the Martha he had created, demanded that she should give herself to him completely and that she must not listen to the warning: What shall I do when Thomas goes away?
And in any case, what was this absolute giving up of herself, and his need for it? What was the prolonged almost unbearable look at each other, as if doors were being opened one after another inside their eyes as they looked?—how was it that she was driven by him back and back into regions of herself she had not known existed, when in any case, she had judged him at the time he had first approached her as: ‘No, he’s not the right one’? But then, of course, she was not the right one for him either, his wife was that: he said so. Or rather, that he wished she was.
She lay still, looking at his face. Her flesh was both relaxed, because of its contentment, an
d yet fearful because his large hand lay an inch from her knee, on the blanket. He was calmly looking her over, then into her face; looking at her hand, her knee, her breast, then into her eyes.
She said, unable to bear it after all: ‘It’s a tragedy, you’ve made me all happy, and so I’m no longer thin and interesting.’
She had put on flesh again. She was again a strong, young woman. But she searched for and loved, every frail or delicate line in herself as he did. She wished herself as fragile as a bird’s skeleton for him who loved so much what he was not—the qualities of delicacy, grace.
He said: ‘You’re a fine girl.’ He smiled gently, his face lit again with the almost-wonder of the moment she had surprised through the slits in the floor. ‘You think I’m nothing but a peasant, Martha?’ He laid his hand on her knee; it shrank like a horse’s skin, then she felt, through her knee-cap, the warm strength of his hand. ‘You think: there’s Thomas, a peasant from Sochaczen. A fine, strong, healthy fellow, not a sick thought in him—you think that?’
He bent over her. His face was desperate with what he was trying to make her accept from him. ‘Martha, do you see this line here?’ He ran a finger up the inside of her upper arm: the flesh shrank, then waited.
‘See that?’
Martha, serious; Thomas, serious; looked at the curve of flesh, a line as mortal as that made by a raindrop sliding down glass; they looked as if their futures depended on looking.
‘I tell you, I want to die when I see that.’ He crushed her upper arm in a great fist, and his face grimaced with the pain he felt for her. ‘Do you understand? No, you don’t understand. But I tell you, Matty, when I see that line, that curve, I want to cut my throat, I couldn’t ever be that, don’t you see?’
His face lay, desperate, against the warmth of her upper arm; the ‘line’ that tormented him, was for Martha merely a surface of sensation. ‘Ah God, Martha, I can’t stand it, I tell you, I’m insane. You think I don’t care for you when I say this to you?’
She smiled, her eyes filled with tears. She let her fingertips, sensitized beyond pleasure, rub gently up the rough surface of his turned cheek. His breath sent warmth over her arm.
‘I know you do.’
‘Yes, I do. But, Martha, I don’t understand it myself—I’d give the whole of you and everything I am for that line there, and for where your cheek lifts when you smile. That’s something I’m not. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘But perhaps they aren’t what I am either?’
‘Yes, yes, maybe. But I can’t help it.’ He was in a rage of despair. Tears ran down her face, she could feel a hot wetness travelling, with edges of chill, down to her chin. What was she to think, to feel—if Thomas loved, to such lengths, the temporary delicacy of a curve of flesh, if he had singled out, with the eye of an insane artist, two, perhaps three ‘lines’ which had purity, had delicacy, the kind of absolute perfection that kept even her, their supposed owner or possessor or creator, in awed appreciation of them—well, why choose a woman who was shaped, as he always said, half-groaning, half-pleased, ‘like a healthy peasant’?
She said: ‘But Thomas, why not get yourself a thin woman then?’
He said, rubbing his head backwards and forwards over her shoulder, as if he was trying to rub out the ‘line’, ‘But I care for you, I keep telling you.’
‘Well, then, I don’t know, I give up.’
He 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.
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