Mr Maynard released her courteously, and returned to his chair beside his wife. They stood at the door shaking hands with Colonel Brodeshaw and his wife. Mrs Brodeshaw took the opportunity to ask, ‘My dear, I wonder if you would like to help on the committee for organizing the ladies …’ It took Martha by surprise, and Mrs Brodeshaw swiftly went on: ‘Though of course, my dear, you don’t want to be worried by all this sort of thing yet, do you? It’s not fair, when you’re just married. We’ll leave you in peace for the time being,’ she promised, smiling. Then she added, ‘There’s a suggestion of starting a committee to investigate the conditions of the Coloured –’
‘I was down there this morning,’ remarked Martha.
Mrs Brodeshaw looked startled, then said, ‘Oh, yes, we know you are interested.’
Douglas came quickly in with ‘Perhaps we can fix it later, when we’re more settled.’
Again Mrs Brodeshaw retreated gracefully. They said goodbye. Douglas and Martha went to the car in silence. She saw he looked annoyed, and wondered why.
‘You know, Matty, I think you might have been a bit more pleasant about it.’
‘Charity?’ said Martha angrily.
‘It’s not such a bad idea, you know.’ He was referring to her being ‘in’ with the Brodeshaws.
‘Charity,’ she said finally. It dismayed her that he might even consider it possible. Then she felt sorry for him – he looked utterly taken aback.
‘But, Matty …’
She took his arm. She was now lifted on waves of alcohol: she was recklessly happy.
‘Mr Maynard was having a long talk with you?’ he inquired.
‘Yes. Let’s go and dance, Douglas.’
‘The Club? What? With the gang?’
‘The gang,’ she mocked. ‘We’ve put up with them for long enough, haven’t we?’
‘Let’s have a night by ourselves.’
But by now she could not bear to go tamely back to the flat. There was something in the talk with Mr Maynard which had unsettled her, made her restless – she needed to dance. Besides, she was instinctively reluctant to go now, in this mood of disliking him, which she did unaccountably, to spend an evening with Douglas.
‘Come on – come on,’ she urged, tugging at him.
‘All right, then, we’ll go and beat up Stella and Andy – and let’s get Willie and Alice. We’d better buy some brandy …’
She was hardly listening. She was wildly elated, she could feel that she was very attractive to him in this mood; it intoxicated her and deeply disturbed her that he should find her desirable when she was engaged in despising him. ‘Come on, come on,’ she called impatiently, and ran off down the path through the bushes to the car. He followed, running heavily behind her. It was dark now. The gateposts reflected a white gleam back to a large low white moon. The town had lost its ramshackle shallowness. A mile of roofs shone hard and white like plates of white salt, amid acres of softly glinting leaves. The road lay low and grey, with a yellow glimmer of light from the street lamps.
‘Well, Matty, and now you’ll be free to get on with your own work.’
It was with these words that Douglas dropped his parting kiss on her cheek when he left for the office each morning, and with a look of pure satisfaction. The kindly, confident young man crossed the untidy bedroom towards the door, bouncing a little from the balls of his feet, smiling backwards at Martha, who was sitting in a tangle of crumpled and stained silk in a mess of bedclothes, and vanished whistling down the corridor. The gleam of proprietary satisfaction never failed to arouse in Martha a flush of strong resentment, which was as unfailingly quenched by a succeeding guilt. To account for the resentment, for above all it was essential to account for every contradictory emotion that assailed one, she had already formed a theory.
After Douglas had left, she kicked off the bedclothes, and allowed herself to fall backwards on the cooling sheets and pillows. She lay quiet. Opposite her, two neat squares of bright blue sky, in one of which was suspended the stilled black wheel of the fair; reflected sunlight quivered hot on the wall. From all around, from above, from below, the sound of voices, a broom swishing, a child crying. But here, in the heart of the building, two rooms, white, silent, empty. And, on the bed, Martha, uncomfortably fingering the silk of her nightdress, trying most conscientiously to relax into the knowledge of space and silence. At the same time she was thinking of Douglas, now already at his office; she could see the self-conscious look with which he allowed himself to be teased; every night he came back to share with her his pleasure in how the office had said this or that. And how she hated him for it! And it was her husband about whom she was feeling this resentment, this violent dislike.
Martha, ignoring the last few months in town before her marriage, because she could not bear to think about them, went back to that period when she was a girl on the farm. From this, several incidents had been selected by her need for a theory. There had been that young man who … and the other one … and that occasion when…After hours of determined concentration she would emerge with the phrase, ‘Women hate men who take them for granted.’ It would have done for a story in a magazine. But that impersonal ‘woman’ was a comfort – briefly, for no sooner had she reached it than she saw the image that the words conjured up: something sought, wooed, capricious, bestowing favours. No, there was something extremely distasteful about that capricious female; no sooner had Martha caught a glimpse of her than she must repudiate her entirely; she was certainly from the past! The suggestion of coyness was unbearable. Yet she and Douglas had achieved a brotherly friendliness almost immediately; and when he bounced cheerfully into bed, clutching her in a cheerful and companionable act of love that ignored the female which must be wooed, she undoubtedly loathed him from the bottom of her heart, an emotion which was as inevitably followed by a guilty affection. The situation was, as she jauntily and bleakly put it, unsatisfactory.
She therefore got out of bed and went into the living room, and knelt in front of the bookcase. Books. Words. There must surely be some pattern of words which would neatly and safely cage what she felt – isolate her emotions so that she could look at them from outside. For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves by literature. And the books which spoke most directly were those which had come out of Western Europe during the past hundred years, and of those, the personal and self-confessing. And so she knelt in front of a bookcase, in driving need of the right arrangement of words; for it is a remarkable fact that she was left unmoved by criticisms of the sort of person she was by parents, relations, preachers, teachers, politicians and the people who write for the newspapers; whereas an unsympathetic description of a character similar to her own in a novel would send her into a condition of anxious soul-searching for days. Which suggests that it is of no use for artists to insist, with such nervous disinclination for responsibility, that their productions are only ‘a divine play’ or ‘a reflection from the creative fires of irony’, etc., etc. while the Marthas of this world read and search with the craving thought, What does this say about my life? It will not do at all – but it must be admitted that there always came a point where Martha turned from the novelists and tale tellers to that section of the bookcase which was full of books called The Psychology of …, The Behaviour of …,
