Landlocked. Doris Lessing
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her at a run, and the door to the sick-room opened and closed on her father’s voice: ‘Oh there you are. What time is it?’
Martha went back to the darkened veranda, and peered into the room which held her daughter. A small dark girl squatted in the folds of a scarlet rug, fondling the ears of the white dog. ‘Your name is Kaiser,’ she was saying. ‘Did you know that? Your name is King Kaiser Wilhelm the First. Isn’t that a funny name for a pooh dog?’ The dog rolled adoring eyes, and flickered a pink tongue at the child’s face. Martha heard her mother charging down the passage, and she withdrew from the window.
‘I’m sorry about that, Matty, but I gave him a washout earlier, and as I thought, he wanted the bedpan.’
‘Oh, it’s really all right. I’ll see him tomorrow.’
‘I really don’t know what I’m going to do if it goes on like this. It’s been five days without any real result and I gave him two washouts yesterday alone. Yes, cook?’
‘Missus, the meat’s ready, missus.’
‘Well, I think you’d better try to keep it hot. The doctor’s coming, he might like some supper.’
Martha tried not to show her relief. ‘But mother, I can’t wait for supper for hours.’
‘I wasn’t expecting you to,’ said Mrs Quest, hoity-toity, but triumphant. ‘Anton has telephoned me three times, he was expecting you hours ago.’
‘Then he must have misunderstood.’
‘One of us certainly did, because I got in a beautiful bit of sirloin, and now it’s going to be wasted, unless the doctor eats it.’
‘I’ll get home then,’ said Martha. She almost ran down the steps to her bicycle, with Mrs Quest after her: ‘I had a letter from Jonathan today.’
‘Oh, did you?’
‘Yes, he’s got sick-leave in Cairo, but he’s being sent to a hospital in England.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘He didn’t say.’
Jonathan had been wounded slightly in the leg at El Alamein, but recovered. Recently he had been wounded again in the arm, and the arm showed no signs of properly healing, much to everyone’s relief. As Mr Quest said: ‘If he gets out of it with nothing worse than a gammy arm, he’ll be doing quite well.’
‘Shhhhh,’ said Mrs Quest suddenly, as Caroline said from the window where she was swinging from the burglar bars: ‘Who’s that lady, Granny, who is that lady?’
Martha picked up her bicycle, jumped on it, and cycled fast through the bushes to the invisibility which would enable Mrs Quest to turn the child’s attention to something else. At a telephone box, Martha rang the Piccadilly. Johnny was happy to bring his compatriot to the telephone. Martha told Athen she could not see him that evening.
‘I’m sorry,’ came Athen’s voice, raised against the clatter of a hundred eating humans. ‘Well then, I’ll see you in about a week, and in the meantime, will you please see my friend Clive de Wet?’
‘I met him this evening at Johnny’s. I don’t think he wants to see me. I’m sure of it.’
‘No, I spoke to him about you. He wants to see you.’
‘When did you speak to him?’
‘I’ve just been to his house, he was there and I spoke to him. He said he thought you were associated with Mrs Van.’
‘I don’t understand, he was reading to Johnny, doesn’t he approve of Johnny?’
‘He does, very much. But he does not trust Mrs Van, I think.’
‘That’s ridiculous – how can he like Johnny and not like Mrs Van?’
‘At any rate, it would be helpful if you explain things to him. They need much help – they have no books, and wish to be taught many things.’
‘Oh well, in that case … and I’ll see you next week.’
‘Yes. And give my greetings to your husband.’
And now, at last, she must go home to Anton. Home was a new place, half a flat, half a house – two little rooms, a bathroom and a shared kitchen that was really a screened-off veranda over a patch of shared dirty lawn. The woman they shared with was a Mrs Huxtable. Martha did not like her, but as there was never any time for cooking anyway, it didn’t matter.
Anton had telephoned her three times. Three times. The information had been received apprehensively by her nerves. Her emotions repeated, with monotony: It’s not fair, it’s not fair – meaning that this kind of demand, or reproach, was not in the bargain of her marriage with Anton. Meanwhile her brain was sending messages of warning that she was scared to listen to. For months now there had been a kind of equilibrium in the marriage. Having acknowledged it was a bad marriage, that they had made a mistake, that they would split up again as soon as the war ended, a sort of friendliness, even kindness, even – perhaps? – a tenderness was established. But while, for Martha, this new relationship was welcome because it softened an intolerable strain; it seemed that for Anton it meant a new promise. At any rate, three different telephone calls in one afternoon was a language, a demand, Martha could not begin to answer.
Cycling past McGrath’s hotel, she remembered that after all she belonged to a world where people might sit drinking in large rooms, served by waiters; they might dance; they might even eat dinners (bad dinners, but formal, that was something) in restaurants. She would ring up Anton from the foyer and ask him to join her for a drink, and perhaps dinner. He would say humorously: ‘And what are we celebrating, Matty, have I forgotten your birthday?’
He would protest at having to come, but he would be pleased. They could drink for an hour or so, have dinner, listen to the band, and in this way both could forget (Martha hoped) the implications of the fact that practically everything he said, or did, these days, was really a reproach for her not doing, or being, what he now wanted her to be.
It was almost seven. Martha had been waiting since five. Waiting now being a condition of her life, like breathing, it scarcely mattered whether she waited for an interview or for when peace would be restored – the new phrase, which showed that the old one, ‘when the war ends’, had proved inadequate. She waited with the whole of herself, as other people might pray, yet with even prayer become something to be practised, kept in use merely, since it could be effective only with the beginning of a new life. Waiting for her life to begin, when she could go to England, she waited for ‘the contact from the African group’, and with the same ability to cancel out present time. She read half a pamphlet about Japanese atrocities with an irritated boredom with propaganda which did not mean she disbelieved what she read. She absorbed a column or so of statistics about African education but with the irritation of impotence. She filed her nails, brushed her hair as she never had time to do in her bedroom, ‘fifty strokes on each side’, tidied a cupboard full of pamphlets that dealt definitively with affairs in at least a hundred countries, and finally sat down with deliberately idle but restless hands, on a bench under the window over Founders’ Street.
The heat of a stormy day had drained into the scarlet flush that still spread, westwards, under bright swollen stars only intermittently visible. Hailstones from the recent storm scattered the street and lay on the dirty windowsill, and gusts of sharp cold air drove from racing clouds across the hot currents rising from the pavements. It would be winter soon, the ice seemed promise of it. Martha’s calves sweated slipperily against the wood of the bench, and she sucked a bit of ice as an ally against heat, watching her smooth brown skin pucker under the gold down on her forearm into protest against cold. There was a blanket folded on top of the wooden cupboard. The blanket was because friends in the RAF sometimes slept here if they were too late for the last bus