Four Gated City by Doris Lessing Page A

Elizabeth. ‘And there I suddenly understood, Martha-I was mad . I’d been mad all my life, ever since I could remember being a little kicker. I had spent every moment of my life hating my father. I stood on the edge of the sea, and that was something, the sea, for the first time. I had hardly known the sea existed. No one ever mentioned it, not really. God it makes you want to cry, man, sometimes it does make me cry, all the little kickers black and white all over the Fatherland, and they’ve never seen the sea, and Port Elizabeth and Cape Town and Durban and Johannesburg are the big cities. I stood throwing stones at the sea and crying. Because I’d understood-my father was nothing. It made me feel like nothing. All my life spent hating a poor little tyrant on a few morgen of poor soil, and he’d never known anything else. I knew I had to beat hating him. I knew if I went back to the farm I’d be finished, I’d kill him, I knew I would. I had spent most of my childhood working out ways how to kill the old man. So I said I was eighteen and got a job on the docks. But the hatred-it’s there. It comes back into me when I don’t expect it. It’s my enemy. I can’t hate that poor little nothing of a backveld farmer, how can I, what am I hating? But I do … I can’t help it.’
    So Martha stroked the backs of his thighs, following with her fingers marks made by an oxhide whip held by a little tyrant now dead and lying under a thorn tree under the red sand, while Jack closed his eyes, and let hatred rise in him so that he could hold it and control it. He lay trembling with the force of his hatred, his lashes pressed hard against his cheek, until, with a gasp, the tension held, he opened his eyes and he smiled into her face.
    Her face which was-whose? For her eyes were her father’s, and her mouth too; and her nose and the shape of her face and even where the lines showed how they would fall, and a mole, her mother’s. Yet it was Martha who lay now, endowed with thesefeatures which were not hers at all, merely from stock, the storehouse of the race, and smiled at Jack? Who smiled? Who smiled back, who, what? -When Martha smiled at Jack, Jack at Martha, in these shapes of flesh that had come together as if a sculptor had flung noses, eyes, hands, mouths together. And was it Jack then, who bent her head back so that he could see where the thirty years of her life were written into the soft place just under her chin. Just there and nowhere else on her body did the wear of time show. He touched with soft fingers the soft crinkling place, and kissed it, tears in his eyes because of the anguish of time eating. Jack comforted Martha. Martha took comfort from Jack.
    And now, the ritual was complete. They lay, taut with power held and controlled. Ready. But if things had not gone right, if the hatred had built up and exploded, as sometimes it did, so that he gasped and jumped away from her, to beat his ñsts on the wall, swearing and crying and trembling; if he had gone white and cold remembering the terror of his being in the sea with his blood leaking away; if she had let herself go away from him into the anonymity of an ancient femaleness, something indifferent to men, even hostile, self-sufrciently female; if she had let herself go into the great indifference of sorrow, thinking how soon her body would sag down over her bones in a gutter of flesh, so that what delight there could be now was not worth the making of it, since it so soon would be in the past-if they went away from each other off a finely achieved and held point, then Jack would kiss her, jump up and say: Well, that’s not right, it’s not working this time-and make them both cocoa. This achievement of control which was so hard, could not tolerate a second best, or a falling away: sex that was an explosion of force, or a weakening of it, was not possible, or too damaging to let happen.
    ‘Martha, do you know what I’ve discovered-making love? I understood