that the novelists had not caught up with life; for there was no doubt that the sort of things she or Stella or Alice talked about found no reflection in literature – or rather, it was the attitudes of mind they took for granted that did not appear there, from which she deduced that women in literature were still what men, or the men-women, wished they were. In this other part of the bookcase, however, were no such omissions; she found what she was thinking and feeling described with an admirable lack of ambiguity. And yet, after hours of search among the complexities and subtleties of character, she was likely to return to her bedroom profoundly comforted, with some such resounding and original remark as ‘The young husband, therefore, must be careful to be specially understanding during the difficult weeks after marriage.’ For, since Douglas, the young husband in question, so logically insisted on relying upon the common sense she insisted on, she must with some part of herself take his place by being understanding, compassionate, etc. Martha was able to preserve an equilibrium because of an observing and satirical eye focused upon her own behaviour from a superior vantage point that was of course in no way influenced by that behaviour. She achieved quite extraordinary degrees of self-forbearance by this device.
In the bedroom the bedclothes still lying dragged back, clothes lay everywhere; the morning was slipping past and she was not dressed. And now this question of work confronted her. She had understood she was not alone in her position of a woman who disdained both housework and a ‘job’, but was vaguely expected by her husband – but only because of her own insistence on it – to be engaged in work of her own. Both Stella and Alice had claimed the state. Martha had heard their respective husbands speak to them in precisely the same tone of pride and satisfaction that Douglas used to her. Their wives were not as those of other men.
Feeling the distant pressure of this ‘work’, Martha dutifully went to the bathroom to equip herself to face it.
The bathroom was modern. A high window showed yet another angle of clear blue sky, together with the tops of the trees in the park. A large white bath filled with heavy greenish water where spangles of light quivered, white cabinets, white shelves – it was all a gleam of white enamel. Martha took off her nightdress, and was alone with her body. But it was not that calm and obedient body which had been so pleasant a companion. White it was, and solid and unmarked – but heavy, unresponsive; her flesh was uncomfortable on her bones. It burned and unaccountably swelled; it seemed to be pursuing ideas of its own. Inside the firm thick flesh a branch of bones which presumably remained unchanged: the thought was comforting. Martha looked down at her shape of flesh with the anxious thought that it was upon this that the marriage depended; for this, in fact, they – she and Douglas – had been allowed by society to shut themselves away in two high rooms with a bathroom attached. It was almost with the feeling of a rider who was wondering whether his horse would make the course that she regarded this body of hers, which was not only divided from her brain by the necessity of keeping open that cool and dispassionate eye, but separated into compartments of its own. Martha had after all been provided with a map of her flesh by ‘the book’, in which each area was marked by the name of a different physical sensation, so that her mind was anxiously aware, not only of a disconnected partner, a body, but of every part of it, which might or might not come up to scratch at any given occasion. There were moments when she felt she was strenuously held together by nothing more than an act of will. She was beginning to feel that this view of herself was an offence against what was deepest and most real in her. And again she thought of the simple women of the country, who might be women in peace, according to their instincts, without being made to think and disintegrate themselves into fragments. During those few weeks of her marriage Martha was always accompanied by that other, black woman, like an invisible sister simpler and wiser than herself; for no matter how much she reminded herself of statistics and progress, she envied her from the bottom of her heart. Without, of course having any intention of emulating her: loyalty to progress forbade it.
At that hour of the morning the sun fell in bright lances through the high window. Martha stood where they might fall on her flesh; her skin shone with a soft iridescence, the warmth kneaded together her unhappily disconnected selves, she began to dissolve into well-being. But first there was another ritual to be gone through. From the high cupboard she took down the cans and rubber tubes prescribed by Dr Stern and washed away the sweats of love in the rocking green water. Then she refilled the bath for what she thought of as her own bath. In this she wallowed, while the sunlight moved up over the sides of the bath and into the water, and she was whole and at peace again, floating in sunlight and water like a fish. She might have stayed there all morning, if there wasn’t this question of work; so she got out too soon, and thought with vague anxiety that those areas of tenderness on breasts and belly were no more than was to be expected after such an intensive love life. The thought of pregnancy crossed her mind; and was instantly dismissed. She felt that it was hard enough to keep Martha Quest, now Knowell, afloat on a sea of chaos and sensation without being pregnant as well – no, it was all too difficult. But her dress was tight; she must eat less, she told herself. Then she made tea and ate bread and butter with satisfaction at the thought that she was depriving herself of a meal.
And now it was ten in the morning, and her day was her own. Her work was free to start when it would. Martha went to the other room, and arranged herself comfortably on the divan. Or rather, it was with the intention of comfort, for the divan was a high, hard mattress on a native-made bed covered with loosely woven brown linen. Comfortable it was not; but it suitably supported the rest of the room, and Martha chose it because one might sit there without surrendering to the boundaries of a chair.
Into this little box of a room had flowed so many different items of furniture – and then out again. Now two small jolly chairs were set at neat angles on a clean green rug. A new table of light wood, surrounded by four chairs of the same, filled the opposite corner. The curtains, of that material known as folk-weave, whose rough grain held pockets of yellow light, were of the same brown she sat on. It was safe to say that the furniture that had flowed in and out of this room with the restless owners of it was indistinguishable from what filled it now. This thought gave Martha an undefined and craving hollowness, a sort of hunger. Yet everything was so practical and satisfactory! She looked at this room, from chair to window, from table to cupboard, and her eyes rested on nothing, but moved onwards hastily to the next article, as if this might provide that quality she was searching for.
It was not her flat; it belonged to that group of people who had seen her married. Almost at once her thoughts floated away from this place she sat in, these white boxes in the heart of the building, and slowly she tested various other shells for living in, offered to her in books. There were, after all, not so many of them; and each went with a kind of life she must dismiss instantly and instinctively. For instance, there was her father’s childhood in the English country cottage, honest simplicity with the bones of the house showing through lathe and plaster. Outside, a green and lush country – but tame, tamed; it would not do at all. Or – and this was a dip into the other stream that fed her blood – a tall narrow Victorian house, crammed with heavy dark furniture, buttoned and puffed and stuffed and padded, an atmosphere of things unsaid. If that country cottage could be acknowledged with a self-conscious smile, like a charmingly naive relation, this narrow dark house could not be admitted too close, it was too dangerous. And that house which was being built now everywhere, in every country of the world, the modern house, cosmopolitan, capable of being lifted up from one continent and dumped down in any other without exciting remark – no, certainly not, it was not to be thought of. So there remained the flat in which she was in fact now sitting? But she was not here at all; she did not live in it; she was waiting to be moved on somewhere …
About eleven in the morning she roused herself. For she knew that since both Stella and Alice were as free for their own work as she was, either or both of them were likely to drop in. She therefore put the kettle on and made sandwiches, prepared to spend the rest of the morning gossiping or – as pleasantly – alone.
By now the stores would have delivered by native messenger the groceries, meat and vegetables she had ordered by telephone; putting away these things interrupted work for a few minutes. Preparing a light
