A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  She looked towards Stella, who was coiled seductively on the hard bench, head propped on slender hands, eyes fixed on Sister Doll. It was clear that she was not listening to a word. It looked as if she was deliberately trying to present the picture of a detached observer. She happened to be wearing a white linen dress, whose severity was designed to emphasize her slim curves; or perhaps it was that she had felt white to be more ‘suitable’ for a nursing course than any other colour. But her small, apricot-tinted face with its enormous lazy dark eyes, the soft slender body in its white, were the cruellest comment on the only other white figure in the room, fat and perspiring Sister Doll, half a dozen paces away. It appeared that Sister Doll felt it, or at least her inattention; for during those pauses while she was waiting for her class to take down sentences such as ‘The greatest care must be taken to keep the patient’s bed neat and tidy’, she turned hot little eyes full of rather flustered reproach, on Stella, who was regarding her with indolent inquiry. Catching Martha’s eye, Stella made a small movement of her own eyes towards the door. Martha frowned back. Stella gave a petulant shrug.

  The moment Sister Doll dismissed her class, Stella took Martha’s arm and hurried her out. Her first words were, ‘Let’s go and see Alice.’

  ‘Really,’ exclaimed Martha, her boredom and dissatisfaction exploding obliquely, ‘what a waste of time - all this nonsense about making beds.’

  ‘It’s only just up the road.’ Stella tugged at her arm.

  ‘And we’ve paid all that money for the course.’

  ‘Oh, well … Anyway, I expect there won’t be a war anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’ Martha stopped and looked at Stella, really wanting to know.

  ‘Andrew says they won’t start training them. Well, then, if there was going to be a war, they would train people like Douglas and Andrew, wouldn’t they? He said so this morning. I thought they’d start playing soldiers any minute now.’ Stella dismissed the thing, and said, ‘Oh, come on, Matty, it’s only just up the road.’

  ‘But she doesn’t know we’re coming. She doesn’t want to see us.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Stella with energy. The matter thus settled, they walked towards Alice’s flat.

  Stella knocked at the door in a manner that suggested discreet determination. Her eyes were alive with interest. There was a long silence.

  ‘She’s out,’ said Martha hopefully. She knew that Alice, like herself, preferred to take the more intimate crises of life in private.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Stella said, and knocked again. A long silence. Stella changed the tempo of her knocking to a peremptory summons. ‘She’s only trying to get rid of us,’ she remarked with her jolly laugh.

  Alice opened the door sharply on that laugh. She was annoyed.

  ‘It’s us,’ Stella said and walked blandly inside.

  Alice was in a pale-pink taffeta dressing gown which had been bought for the fresh young woman she had been as a bride; now she was rather yellow and very thin, and her freckles seemed to have sprung up everywhere over the pale sallow skin. Her black hair hung dispiritedly on her shoulders.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Stella at once.

  Alice regarded her from a distance, and remarked that she wasn’t feeling at all well.

  Stella, a little figure bristling with frustrated purpose, said, ‘Oh, stop it, Alice.’ then she frowned, decided to change tactics, and said diplomatically, ‘Shall I make you a nice cup of tea?’

  ‘Oh, do make it, dear. I’m really exhausted.’ And Alice subsided backwards into a chair, and lay there extinguished.

  The moment Stella had gone to the kitchen, Alice opened her eyes and looked at Martha as if to ask, ‘Am I safe from you?’

  Martha was equally limp in another chair. She inquired childishly, ‘Is it true you only have to jump off a table?’ She meant to sound competent, but in fact her face expressed nothing but distaste. ‘Did you know I went to Dr Stern and he said I wasn’t?’ she went on.

  ‘Did you, dear?’ This was discretion itself; it was the trained nurse remembering her loyalties.

  But it was not what Martha wanted. ‘He said I was quite all right.’

  A short silence. Then Alice remarked vaguely, ‘You know, they don’t know everything.’

  Alarm flooded Martha; she shook it off. ‘But he’s supposed to be very good at - this sort of thing.’

  To this Alice could only reply that he was, very. Then Stella came in with a tray. She set it down, and proceeded to cross-examine Alice while she poured the tea. Alice replied vaguely with that good humour which is rooted in indifference, Vague as a cloud, lazy as water, she lay with half-shut eyes and let fall stray remarks which had the effect of stinging Stella into a frenzy of exasperation. At the end of ten minutes’ hard work Stella had succeeded in eliciting the positive information that Alice believed herself to be three months gone.

  ‘Well, really!’ Horror at this incompetence shook Stella. ‘But three months!’

  Clinical details followed, which Alice confirmed as if they could not possibly have any reference to herself. ‘Well, dear, I really don’t know,’ she kept saying helplessly.

  ‘But you must know,’ exclaimed the exasperated Stella. ‘One either has a period or one has not.’

  ‘Oh, well – I never take any notice of mine, anyway.’

  This caused Martha to remark with pride that she never did, either. For she and Alice belonged to the other family of women from Stella, who proceeded to detail, with gloomy satisfaction, how much she suffered during these times. Alice and Martha listened with tolerant disapproval.

  Checked on this front, Stella brooded for a while on how to approach a more intimate one. Martha had more than once remarked with distaste to Douglas that if Stella were given a chance she would positively wallow in the details of the marriage bed. This chance was not given her. Women of the tradition to which Alice and Martha belonged are prepared to discuss menstruation or pregnancy in the frankest of detail, but it is taboo to discuss sex, notwithstanding the show of frankness the subject is surrounded with. It follows that they get their information about how other women react sexually from their men, a system which has its disadvantages. More than once had Stella been annoyed by reticences on the part of Martha and Alice which seemed to her the most appalling prudery; an insult, in fact, to their friendship. But she did not persist now; she returned to ask direct what steps Alice proposed to take. Alice said with a lazy laugh that she had done everything. Cross-examination produced the information that she had drunk gin and taken a hot bath. Even more shocked, Stella delivered a short and efficient lecture, which interested Martha extremely, but to which Alice listened indifferently, occasionally suppressing a genuine yawn. Stella then supplied the names of three wise women, two Coloured and one white, who would do the job for a moderate fee. To which Alice replied, with her first real emotion that day, that she had seen enough of girls ruined for life by these women ever to go near them herself.

  ‘Well, then, how about Dr Stern?’

  Alice said angrily, with the curtness of a schoolmistress, that if Stella wasn’t careful she’d find herself in trouble, saying such things about honest doctors! Stella rose, red and angry, her tongue quivering with expert retaliations. Alice gave her a weary and apologetic smile, and said, ‘Oh, sit down, Stella, I haven’t the energy for a row.’

  Stella sat. After a while she asked, in a deceptively sweet voice, on a note of modest interest, if perhaps Alice intended to have this baby after all?

  Alice said good-naturedly, ‘We all have to have them sometime, dear, don’t we?’ Here she laughed again, and it was with reckless pleasure; at the same time her look at Stella was challenging, triumphant, very amused.

  Stella, after a shocked and accusing stare, turned away, with an effect of indifference, and elaborately changed the subject.

  Leaving the flat, Stella remarked coldly that it was utterly irresponsible of Alice to have a baby when they were so hard up; then that it was criminal to h
ave a baby when war was starting; finally, after a long pause, that as for herself she was too delicate to have a baby, she would probably die in childbirth. There was a speculative look on her face as she said this, which caused Martha to remark, amused, that it would be awfully inconsistent of Stella to have a baby herself, after what she had said. Stella reacted with an affronted ‘It would be quite unfair to Andrew; I’d never do a thing like that.’

  The two young women parted almost at once, without regret.

  Martha walked slowly home, thinking about Alice. Her emotions were violent and mixed. She felt towards the pregnant woman, the abstraction, a strong repulsion which caused various images, all unpleasant, to rise into her mind one after another. From her childhood came a memory of lowered voices, distasteful intimacies, hidden sicknesses. It was above all frightening that all this furtive secrecy, which she and all her friends so firmly repudiated, was waiting there, strong as ever, all around her, as she knew: Alice, because she was pregnant, was delivered back into the hands of the old people - so Martha felt it. She felt caged, for Alice. She could feel the bonds around herself. She consciously shook them off and exulted in the thought that she was free. Free! And the half-shaded flat she had left, with the pale, sallow-looking woman in pink taffeta, seemed like a suffocating prison. But at the same time a deeper emotion was turning towards Alice, with an unconscious curiosity, warm, tender, protective. It was an emotion not far from envy. In six months, Alice would have a baby. Why, it was no time at all, she thought. But no sooner had she put it into words than she reacted back again with a shuddering impulse towards escape. She could see the scene: Alice, loose and misshapen, with an ugly wet-mouthed infant, feeding-bottles, napkins, smells.

  Martha reached her flat, removed her clothes and anxiously examined every inch of her body. Unmarked, whole, perfect - smooth solid flesh; there was not a stain on it. Here Martha gave an uncomfortable look at her breasts, and acknowledged they were heavier than they had been. There was a bruised, reddish look about them - here came a flood of panic, and then she subsided into perfect trust in Dr Stern. She felt particularly supported by the knowledge that ever since her second visit she and Douglas had followed the prescribed rituals with determined precision. She was free. She continued to revel in her freedom all that afternoon, while underneath she thought persistently of Alice, and wondered why she was now so contented to have a baby, when, as short a time ago as a month, she had spoken of having one with vigorous rejection.

  When Douglas returned from the office, she described the day’s doings, passing over the nursing lecture as an utter waste of time, and laughing at Stella’s frustrated homilies and Alice’s vague determination. But Douglas, who had moments, which were becoming increasingly frequent, of remembering that he was a government official, remarked rather officiously that Stella would get herself into trouble one of these days. It was illegal to procure abortions: that was the cold phrase he used. But at this Martha flew into an angry tirade against governments who presumed to tell women what they should do with their own bodies; it was the final insult to personal liberty. Douglas listened, frowning, and said unanswerably that the law was the law. Martha therefore retreated into herself, which meant that she became very gay, hard, and indifferent. She listened to his rather heavy insistence about what she intended to do in place of the nursing course, and understood that he was above all concerned that she should not be in the war - should not go in pursuit of the adventure he himself was quivering to find; he was even more reluctant because of his own daydreams as to certain aspects of that adventure.

  He went so far, carried away by the official in him, as to make various sound remarks about the unsuitability of danger for women. She thought he must be joking; nothing is more astonishing to young women than the ease with which men, even intelligent and liberal-minded men, lapse back into that anonymous voice of authority whenever their own personal authority is threatened, saying things of a banality and a pomposity infinitely removed from their own level of thinking.

  Martha was first incredulous, then frightened, then she began to despise him. She became even more gay and brilliant; he became fascinated; she despised him the more for being fascinated; he began to resent the offhandedness of her manner and retreated again into the official. She mocked at him recklessly, they quarrelled. As a result of this hatred, they spent a hectic evening, ending up at four in the morning at the fair, where Martha, sick and giddy, revolved on the great wheel as if her whole future depended on her power to stick it out. High over the darkened town - where a few widely scattered windows showed the points where revellers were at last going to bed - plunging sickeningly to earth and up again. Martha clung on, until the wheel was stopped, the music stopped churning, and there was literally nowhere to go but bed. From the bedroom window they could see the lights greying along the street. The native servants were coming in from the location in time to be at work.

  She woke with a start; the bed next to her was empty. There were noises next door. Then she saw it was nearly eleven. While she stood in her nightdress, fumbling at her dressing gown, the door began very gently to open inwards. Its cautious movement was arrested; then the person the other side dropped something; the door crashed back against the wall, and Mrs Quest stumbled into the room, reaching out for parcels which scattered everywhere.

  ‘Oh, so you’re up,’ Mrs Quest said sharply. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you. I was coming in quietly.’ Then, retrieving a last package to make a neat pile on the bed, she added archly, ‘What a dashing life you lead, lying in bed till eleven.’

  This roguishness aroused in Martha the usual strong distaste. She had covered herself entirely with her dressing gown, buttoning it up tight from throat to hem.

  ‘I thought you must be ill, I peeped in and saw you. Shall I go for the doctor, don’t get up, stay in bed and I’ll nurse you - for today, at least.’

  ‘I’m perfectly well,’ said Martha ungraciously. ‘Let’s go and have some tea.’ Firmly, she led the way from the bedroom, but Mrs Quest did not follow her at once.

  Martha sat on the divan listening. Her mother was following the ritual that she had already gone through here, in this room. The flowers had been removed from their vases and rearranged, the chairs set differently, books put into place. Mrs Quest had reassured herself by touching and arranging everything in the living room, and was now doing the same in the bedroom. Martha had time to make the tea and bring in the tray before her mother reappeared.

  ‘I’ve just made your bed, your nightdress is torn, did you know? I’ve brought it to mend while I’m here, your bathroom isn’t done, it’s wet,’ Mrs Quest remarked flurriedly. She had Martha’s nightdress clutched in one hand. She glanced at it, blushed, and remarked coquettishly, ‘How you can wear these transparent bits of fluff I don’t know.’

  Martha poured the tea in silence. She was exaggeratedly irritated. The violence of this emotion was what kept her silent; for she was quite able to assure herself that nothing could be more natural, and even harmless and pathetic, than this unfortunate woman’s need to lead every other life but her own. This is what her intelligence told her; her conscience remarked that she was making a fuss about nothing; but in fact she seethed with irritation. The face she presented to her mother was one of numbed hostility. This, as usual, affected Mrs Quest like an accusation.

  The next phase of this sad cycle followed: Mrs Quest said that it was unfair to Douglas not to sleep enough: she could get ill and then he would have to pay the bills. Martha’s face remaining implacable, she went on, in tones of hurried disapproval: ‘If you’ll give me a needle and thread, I’ll mend your nightdress.’

  Martha got up, found needle and thread, and handed them to Mrs Quest without a word. The sight of that nightdress, still warm from her own body, clutched with nervous possession in her mother’s hands was quite unendurable, She was determined to endure it. After all, she thought, if it gives her pleasure … And then: It’s not her fault she was brought up in
that society. This thought gave her comparative detachment. She sat down and looked at the worn, gnarled hands at work on her nightdress. They filled her with pity for her mother. Besides, she could remember how she had loved her mother’s hands as a child; she could see the white and beautiful hands of a woman who no longer existed.

  Mrs Quest was talking of matters on the farm, about the house in town they were shortly to buy, about her husband’s health.

  Martha scarcely listened. She was engaged in examining and repairing those intellectual bastions of defence behind which she sheltered, that building whose shape had first been sketched so far back in her childhood she could no longer remember how it then looked. With every year it had become more complicated, more ramified; it was as if she, Martha, were a variety of soft, shell-less creature whose survival lay in the strength of those walls. Reaching out in all directions from behind it, she clutched at the bricks of arguments, the stones of words, discarding any that might not fit into the building.

  She was looking at Mrs Quest in a deep abstract speculation, as if neither she nor her mother had any validity as persons, but were mere pawns in the hands of an old fatality. She could see a sequence of events, unalterable, behind her, and stretching unalterably into the future. She saw her mother, a prim-faced Edwardian schoolgirl, confronting, in this case, the Victorian father, the patriarchal father, with rebellion. She saw herself sitting where her mother now sat, a woman horribly metamorphosed, entirely dependent on her children for any interest in life, resented by them, and resenting them; opposite her, a young woman of whom she could distinguish nothing clearly but a set, obstinate face; and beside these women, a series of shadowy dependent men, broken-willed and sick with compelled diseases. This the nightmare, this the nightmare of a class and generation: repetition. And although Martha had read nothing of the great interpreters of the nightmare, she had been soaked in the minor literature of the last thirty years, which had dealt with very little else: a series of doomed individuals, carrying their doom inside them, like the seeds of fatal disease. Nothing could alter the pattern.