A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  But inside the stern web of fatality did flicker small hopeful flames. One thought was that after all it had not always been that these great life-and-death struggles were fought out inside the family; presumably things might change again. Another was that she had decided not to have a baby; and it was in her power to cut the cycle.

  Which brought her back into the conversation with a question on her tongue.

  Mrs Quest was talkng about the coming war. She had no doubt at all as to the shape it would assume. It was Britain’s task to fight Hitler and Stalin combined. Martha suggested that this might be rather a heavy task. Mrs Quest said sharply that Martha had no patriotism, and never had had. Even without those lazy and useless Americans who never came into the war until they could make good pickings out of it, Britain would ultimately muddle through to victory, as she always did.

  Martha was able to refrain from being logical only by her more personal preoccupations. She plunged straight in with an inquiry as to whether her mother had ever had an abortion. She hastened to add that she wanted to know because of a friend of hers.

  Mrs Quest, checked, took some moments to adjust to this level. She said vaguely, ‘It’s illegal …’ Having made this offering to the law, she considered the question on its merits and said in a lowered voice, a look of distaste on her face, ‘Why — are you like that?’

  Martha suppressed the hostility she felt at the evasion, and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you look like it,’ said Mrs Quest bluntly, with triumph.

  ‘Well, I’m not.’ Martha added the appeal, ‘I do wish you’d tell me …’ She had no idea what she really wanted to know!

  Mrs Quest looked at her, her vigorous face wearing the dubious rather puzzled expression which meant she was trying to remember her own past.

  Martha was telling herself that this appeal was doomed to produce all kinds of misunderstanding and discomfort. They always did. And what did she want her mother to say? She looked at her in silence, and wished that some miracle would occur and her mother would produce a few simple, straightforward remarks, a few words - not emotional, nothing deviating from the cool humorous understatement that would save them both from embarrassment. Martha needed the right words.

  She reflected that Mrs Quest had not wanted her. How, then, had she come to accept her? Was that what she wanted to know? But looking at her now, she could only think that Mrs Quest had spent a free, energetic youth, had ‘lived her own life’ — she had used the phrase herself long before it was proper for middle-class daughters to do so - and had, accordingly, quarrelled with her father. She had not married until very late.

  For many years now, she had been this immensely efficient down-to-earth matron; but somewhere concealed in her was the mother who had borne Martha. From her white and feminine body she, Martha, had emerged - that was certainly a fact! She could remember seeing her mother naked; beautiful she had been, a beautiful, strong white body, with full hips, small high breasts - the Greek idea of beauty. And to that tender white body had belonged the strong soft white hands Martha remembered. Those hands had tended her, the baby. Well, then, why could her mother not resurrect that woman in her and speak the few simple, appropriate words?

  But now she was turning Martha’s flimsy nightgown between her thickened, clumsy hands, as if determined not to say she disapproved of it; and frowned. She looked uncomfortable. Martha quite desperately held on to that other image to set against this one. She could see that earlier woman distinctly. More, she could feel wafts of tenderness coming from her.

  Then, suddenly, into this pure and simple emotion came something new: she felt pity like a clutching hand. She was remembering something else. She was lying in the dark in that house on the farm, listening to a piano being played several rooms away. She got up, and crept through the dark rooms to a doorway. She saw Mrs Quest seated at the keyboard, a heavy knot of hair weighting her head and glistening gold where the light touched it from two candle flames which floated steadily above the long white transparent candles. Tears were running down her face while she set her lips and smiled. The romantic phrases of a Chopin nocturne rippled out into the African night, steadily accompanied by the crickets and the blood-thudding of the tom-toms from the compound. Martha smiled wryly: she could remember the gulf of pity that sight had thrown her into.

  Mrs Quest looked up over the nightdress and inquired jealously, ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘Mother,’ she said desperately, ‘you didn’t want to have me. Well, then …’

  Mrs Quest laughed, and said Martha had come as a surprise to her.

  Martha waited, then prodded. ‘What did you feel?’

  A slight look of caution came on to her mother’s honest square face. ‘Oh, well …’ But almost at once she launched into the gay and humorous account, which Martha had so often heard, of the difficulties of getting the proper clothes and so on; which almost at once merged with the difficulties of the birth itself - a painful business, this, as she had so often been told.

  ‘But what did you feel about it all? I mean, it couldn’t have been as easy as all that,’ said Martha.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t easy — I was just telling you.’ Mrs Quest began to repeat how awkward a baby Martha had been. ‘But it wasn’t really your fault. First I didn’t have enough milk, though I didn’t know it; and then I gave you a mixture, and didn’t know until the doctor told me that it was only half the right strength. So in one way and another I half starved you for the first nine months of your life.’ Mrs Quest laughed ruefully, and said, ‘No wonder you never stopped crying day or night.’

  A familiar resentment filled Martha, and she at once pressed on. ‘But, Mother, when you first knew you were going to have a baby - ‘

  Mrs Quest interrupted. ‘And then I had your brother, he was such a good baby, not like you.’

  And now Martha abdicated, as she had so often done before; for it had always, for some reason, seemed right and inevitable that Mrs Quest should prefer the delicate boy child to herself. Martha listened to the familiar story to the end, while she suppressed a violent and exasperated desire to take her mother by the shoulders and shake her until she produced, in a few sensible and consoling sentences, that truth which it was so essential Martha should have. But Mrs Quest had forgotten how she felt. She was no longer interested. And why should she be, this elderly woman with all the business of being a woman behind her?

  In a short while she returned to the war, dismissed Chamberlain with a few just sentences, and recommended Mr Churchill for his job. The Quests belonged to that section of the middle class who would be happy and contented to be conservatives if only the conservatives could be more efficient. As it was, they never ceased complaining about the inefficiency and corruption of the party they would unfailingly vote for if they lived in England.

  Towards lunchtime she left, with the advice that Martha should go and see the doctor and get a good tonic. She looked dreadful - it wasn’t fair to Douglas.

  The result of that visit from her mother was that Martha decided again she must not sink into being a mere housewife. She should at once learn a profession, or at least take some kind of job. But this decision was not as firm as it might seem from the energy she used in speaking about it to Douglas.

  She was gripped by a lethargy so profound that in fact she spent most of her time limp on that divan, thinking about nothing. She felt heavy and uncomfortable and sick. And she was clinging to Douglas with the dependence of a child. She was miserable when he left in the morning; she was waiting anxiously for his return hours before he might be expected. Pride, however, forbade her to show it, or to ask him to come home for lunch. At night, the loud sad music from the fair was becoming an obsession. She found herself waking from sleep and crying, but what she was weeping for she had no idea at all. She drew the curtains so that she might not see the great wheel; and then lay watching the circling of light through their thin stuff. She accused herself of every kind of weak-mindedness and st
upidity; nevertheless, the persistent monotony of that flickering cycle seemed a revelation of an appalling and intimate truth; it was like being hypnotized.

  During the daytime she sat with a book, trying to read, and realized that she was not seeing one word of it. It was, she realized, as if she were listening for something; some kind of anxiety ran through every limb.

  One morning she was very sick, and all at once the suspicion she had been ignoring for so long became a certainty - and from one moment to the next. When Douglas came home that night she said sullenly, as if it was his fault, that she must be pregnant; and insisted when he said that Dr Stern could not be wrong. At last he suggested she should go and talk to Stella, whose virtuosity in these matters was obvious. She said she would; but when it came to the point, she shrank from the idea and instead went to Alice.

  It was a hot, dusty morning. A warm wind swept flocks of yellowing leaves along the streets. The Jacarandas were holding up jaded yellow arms. This drying, yellowing, fading month, this time when the year tensed and tightened towards the coming rains, always gave her a feeling of perverted autumn, and now filled her with an exquisite cold apprehension. The sky, above the haze of dust, was a glitter of hot blue light.

  Alice was in her pink taffeta dressing gown in her large chair. She greeted Martha with cheerful indifference, and bade her sit down. On the table beside her was a pile of books, called variously Mothercraft, Baby Handling and Your Months of Preparation.

  Martha glanced towards them, and Alice said, ‘The nonsense they talk, dear, you wouldn’t believe it.’ She pushed them gently away. Then she got up, and stood before Martha, with her two hands held tenderly over her stomach. ‘I’m as flat as a board still,’ she remarked with pride. She looked downwards with a preoccupied blue stare; she seemed to be listening. ‘According to the books, it doesn’t quicken until - but now I’ve worked out my dates, and actually it quickens much earlier. At first I thought it must be wind,’ remarked Alice, faintly screwing up her face with the effort of listening.

  ‘I think I’m pregnant, too,’ remarked Martha nervously.

  ‘Are you, dear?’ Alice sat down, keeping her hands in a protective curve, and said, ‘Oh, well, when you get used to it, it’s quite interesting really.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going to have it,’ said Martha with energy.

  Alice did not reply. Martha saw that she had gone completely into her private world of sensation, and that anything which happened outside was quite irrelevant. She recognized the feeling: what else had she been fighting against during the last few weeks?

  After a pause Alice continued the conversation she was having with herself by remarking, ‘Oh, well, to hell with everything. Who cares, anyway?’ She gave her dry nervous laugh, and reached for a cigarette.

  ‘Well, you look pleased with yourself,’ said Martha, half laughing.

  Alice frowned as these words reached her, and said, ‘Help yourself to cigarettes, dear.’

  The morning drifted past. Alice, dim and safe in her private world, smoked constantly, stubbing out the cigarettes as she lit them, and from time to time dropping remarks such as ‘It ought to be February, I think.’ When Martha roused herself to go, Alice appeared to be reminding herself that she had not been as sympathetic as she could have been. She held the door open, Martha already being outside it, and proceeded to offer various bits of advice in an apologetic voice, the most insistent being that she should at once go and see Stella.

  Martha went home, reached for the telephone, but was unable to dial Stella’s number. She shrank away from Stella with a most extraordinary dislike of her. She was thinking of Alice; and in spite of her own deep persistent misery, her knowledge that the web was tight around her, she knew, too, that she was most irrationally elated. Anyone would think that you were pleased, she said angrily to herself. With an efficiency which Stella must have applauded, she put on her dressing gown, locked the door, and took the telephone off the hook. She then drank, with calm deliberation, glass after glass of neat gin, until a full bottle was gone. Then she lay down and slept. When she woke it was four in the afternoon, and she felt nothing but a weakness in her knees. She filled the bath with water so hot that she could not put her hand into it, and, setting her teeth, got in. The pain was so intense that she nearly fainted. She was going through with this, however; and she sat in the bath until the water was tepid. When she reeled out, she was boiled scarlet, and could not touch her skin. Having rubbed cream all over herself, she lay on the bed, shrinking from the touch of the sheet, and cried a little from sheer pain. She slept again. Douglas was rattling at the locked door when she woke, and she staggered to let him in.

  Faced with a tousled, bedraggled, red-faced female, reeking of gin, Douglas was naturally upset; but he was informed in a cold and efficient voice that this was necessary. He sat wincing while Martha climbed repeatedly on to the table and jumped off, crashing down on her heels with the full force of her weight. At the end of half an hour he could no longer stand it, and forcibly put her to bed. In a small triumphant voice Martha informed him that if that didn’t shift it nothing would.

  In the morning she woke, feeling as if her limbs had been pulverized from within and as if her skin were a separate, agonized coating to her body, but otherwise whole. Douglas was astounded to hear her say, in a voice of unmistakable satisfaction, that she must be as strong and healthy as a horse. He was unable to bear it: this female with set will, tight mouth, and cold and rejecting eyes was entirely horrifying to him.

  ‘Well,’ demanded Martha practically, ‘do we or do we not want to have this baby?’

  Douglas evaded this by saying that she should go forthwith to see Dr Stern, and escaped to his office, trying to ignore the inescapable fact that Martha was contemptuous of him because of his male weakness.

  Late that afternoon Martha entered Dr Stern’s consulting room, in a mood of such desperate panic that he recognized it at once and promptly offered her a drink, which he took from a cupboard. Martha watched him anxiously, and saw him look her up and down with that minute, expert inspection which she had seen before. On whose face? Mrs Talbot’s, of course!

  Dr Stern, kindness itself, then examined Martha. She told him, laughing, of the measures she had taken, to which he replied gravely, looking at her scarlet skin, that she shouldn’t overdo these things. But never, not for one second, did he make the mistake of speaking in the anonymous voice of male authority which she would have so passionately resented,

  Finally he informed her that she was over four months pregnant; which shocked her into silence. Such was his bland assurance, such was the power of this man, the doctor in the white coat behind the big desk, that the words stammering on her tongue could not get themselves said. But he saw her reproachful look and said that doctors were not infallible; he added almost at once that a fine, healthy girl like herself should be delighted to have a baby. Martha was silent with misery. She said feebly after a pause that there was no point in having a baby when the war was coming. At which he smiled slightly and said that the birthrate, for reasons best known to itself, always rose in wartime. She felt caught up in an immense impersonal tide which paid no attention to her, Martha. She looked at this young man who was after all not so much older then herself; she looked at the grave responsible face, and hated him bitterly from the bottom of her heart.

  She asked him bluntly if he would do an abortion.

  He replied immediately that he could not.

  There was a long and difficult silence. Dr Stern regarded her steadily from expert eyes, and reached out for a small statuette which stood on his desk. It was in bronze, of a mermaidlike figure diving off a rock. He fingered it lightly and said, ‘Do you realize that your baby is as big as this already?’ It was about five inches high.

  The shock numbed her tongue. She had imagined this creature as ‘it’, perhaps a formless blob of jellylike substance, or alternatively, as already born, a boneless infant in a shawl, but certainly not as a living
being five inches long coiled in her flesh.

  ‘Eyes, ears, arms, legs - all there.’ He fingered the statuette a little longer; then he dropped his hand and was silent.

  Martha was so bitter that she could not yet move or speak a word. All she was for him, and probably for Douglas too, she thought, was a ‘healthy young woman’.

  Then he said with a tired humorous smile that if she knew the proportion of his women patients who came, as she did, when they found they were pregnant, not wanting a baby, only to be delighted when they got used to the idea, she would be surprised.

  Martha did not reply. She rose to leave. He got up, too, and said with a real human kindness that she was able to appreciate only later, that she should think twice before rushing off to see one of the wise women: her baby was too big to play tricks with now. If she absolutely insisted on an abortion, she should go to Johannesburg, where, as everyone knew, there was a hospital which was a positive factory for this sort of thing. The word ‘factory’ made her wince; and she saw at once, with a satirical appreciation of his skill in handling her, that it was deliberately chosen.