COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  Alice did not respond. Her criticism of him formed itself in the thought, he has to have his own way over everything. And then the final blow: Heaven preserve me from being married to him, I wouldn’t have him as a gift.

  ‘Who’s next?’ he asked briskly.

  ‘Mrs Black,’ said Alice, going to the other door to call her in.

  ‘She ought to be starting her next baby soon,’ he remarked.

  ‘Have a heart,’ she said indignantly. ‘The other’s only six months old.’

  ‘Get them over young,’ he said. ‘That’s the best way.’ He added, ‘You ought to be starting a family yourself.’

  Alice paused with her hand on the knob of the door, and said irritably, ‘The way you go on! If I catch you with less than five when you get married …’

  He looked sharply at her; he had only just understood she was really annoyed; he wished again that he might have a nurse with whom he did not have to choose his words. But she was speaking:

  ‘You Jews have got such a strong feeling for family, it makes me sick!’

  He seemed to stiffen and retreat a little; then he laughed and said, ‘There’s surely every reason why we should?’

  She looked at him vaguely, then dismissed history with ‘I don’t see why everybody shouldn’t leave everybody else alone.’

  ‘Neither do I, Mrs Burrell, neither do I.’

  This was savage. ‘You’re the sort of man who’d choose a wife because she had a good pelvis,’ she said.

  ‘There are worse ways of choosing one,’ he teased her.

  ‘Oh, Lord!’

  ‘Let’s have Mrs Black. Okay - shoot.’

  Alice opened the door and called, ‘Mrs Black, please.’ She shut the door after the smiling Mrs Black, who was already seating herself; and, as she crossed the room on her way out, heard his voice, calmly professional: ‘Well, Mrs Black, and what can I do for you?’

  She joined Martha and Stella, saying, ‘Wait, I must tell the other nurse …’

  She came back almost at once, pulling out the frayed cigarette stub from her pocket and lighting it. Then she began tugging and pushing at the wisps of black hair that were supposed to make a jaunty frame for her face, but were falling in lank witch locks. ‘Oh, damn everything,’ she muttered crossly, pulling a comb through her hair with both hands, while the cigarette hung on her lip. Finally she gave a series of ineffective little pats at her dress, and said again, in a violent querulous voice, ‘Oh, damn everything. I’m going to give up this job. I’m sick to death of Dr Stern. I’m just fed up.’

  Martha and Stella, momentarily united in understanding, exchanged a small humorous smile, and kept up a running flow of vaguely practical remarks until they had reached the hot pavement. They glanced cautiously towards Alice: she had apparently recovered. Stella immediately dropped the female chivalry with which women protect each other in such moments, and said jealously, ‘I wouldn’t have thought Dr Stern would be so hard to work for.’

  ‘Oh, no, he’s not,’ agreed Alice at once, and without the proprietary air that Stella would have resented. ‘Anyway, I’m really going to give it up. I didn’t train as a nurse to do this sort of thing. I might as well be a hotel receptionist.’

  ‘You’re mad to work when you’re married,’ said Stella. ‘I’ve given notice to my boss. Of course, we’re quite broke, but it’s too much, looking after a husband then slaving oneself to death in an office.’

  Alice and Martha in their turn exchanged an amused smile, while Stella touched it up a little: ‘Men have no idea, they think housework and cooking get done by miracles.’

  ‘Why, haven’t you got a boy, dear?’ inquired Alice vaguely, and then broke into Stella’s reply with ‘Do you like Dr Stern, Matty? If not, I shan’t bother to make out a card for you.’

  ‘One doctor’s as good as another,’ said Martha ungraciously. ‘Anyway, I’m never ill.’

  ‘Oh, but he’s very good,’ exclaimed Alice, at once on the defensive. ‘He’s really wonderful with babies.’

  ‘But I’m not going to have a baby, not for years.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t blame you,’ agreed Alice at once. ‘I always tell Willie that life’s too much one damned thing after another to have babies as well.’

  ‘What do you do?’ inquired Martha, direct.

  Alice laughed, on the comfortable note which Martha found so reassuring. ‘Oh, we don’t bother much, really. Luckily, all I have to do is to jump off the edge of a table.’

  They were at a turning. ‘I think I’ll just go home, dear, if you don’t mind,’ said Alice. ‘Willie might come home early, and I won’t bother about a drink.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ protested Stella at once. ‘We’ll all run along to Matty’s place, You can ring Willie and tell him to come along,’

  And now Martha once again found herself protesting that of course they must all come to her flat; an extraordinary desperation seized her at the idea of being alone; although even as she protested another anxious voice was demanding urgently that she should pull herself free from this compulsion.

  ‘Oh, well,’ agreed Alice good-naturedly, ‘I’ll come and drink to your getting married.’

  Martha was silent. Now she had gained her point she had to brace herself to face another period of time with both Stella and Alice. She thought, Let’s get it over quickly, and then … And then would come a reckoning with herself; she had the feeling of someone caught in a whirlpool.

  The three women drifted inertly down the hot street, shading their eyes with their hands. Alice yawned and remarked in her preoccupied voice, ‘But I get so tired, perhaps I’m pregnant? Surely I’m not? Oh, Lord, maybe that’s it!’

  ‘Well, jump off a table, then!’ said Stella with her jolly crude laugh.

  ‘It’s all very well, dear, but this worrying all the time just gets me down. Sometimes I think I’ll have a baby and be done with it. That’d be nine months’ peace and quiet at least.’

  ‘What’s the good of working for a doctor if he can’t do something?’ suggested Stella, with a look at Martha which said she should be collecting information that might turn out to be useful.

  Alice looked annoyed; but Stella prodded, ‘I’ve heard he helps people sometimes.’

  Alice drew professional discretion over her face and remarked, ‘They say that about all the doctors.’

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ said Stella, annoyed.

  ‘If Dr Stern did all the abortions he was asked to do, he’d never have time for anything else. There’s never a day passes without at least one or two crying their eyes out and asking him.’

  ‘What do they do?’ asked Martha, unwillingly fascinated.

  ‘Oh, if they’re strong-minded, they just go off to Beira or Johannesburg. But most of us just get used to it,’ said Alice, laughing nervously, and unconsciously pressing her hands around her pelvis.

  Stella, with her high yell of laughter, began to tell a story about the last time she got pregnant. ‘There I was, after my second glass of neat gin, rolling on the sofa and groaning, everything just started nicely, and in came the woman from next door. She was simply furious. She said she’d report me to the police. Silly old cow. She can’t have kids herself, so she wants everyone else to have them for her. I told her to go and boil her head, and of course she didn’t do anything. She just wanted to upset me and make me unhappy.’ At the last words Stella allowed her face and voice to go limp with self-pity.

  The police?’ inquired Martha blankly.

  ‘It’s illegal,’ explained Alice tolerantly. ‘If you start a baby, then it’s illegal not to have it. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Do you mean to say that a woman’s not entitled to decide whether she’s going to have a baby or not?’ demanded Martha, flaring at once into animated indignation.

  This violence amused both Stella and Alice, who now, in their turn, exchanged that small tolerant smile.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Alice indulgently, ‘don’t waste any breath on that. Everyone kno
ws that more kids get frustrated than ever get born, and half the women who have them didn’t want to have them, but if the Government wants to make silly laws, let them get on with it, that’s what I say, I suppose they’ve got nothing better to do. Don’t worry, dear, If you get yourself in a fix just give me a ring and I’ll help you out, you don’t want to lose sleep over the Government, there are better things to think about.’

  Stella said with quick jealousy, ‘I’ve already told Matty, I’m just around the corner, and God knows I’ve got enough experience, even though I’m not a nurse.’

  Surprised, Alice relinquished the struggle for the soul of Martha — she had not understood there was one.

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it?’ she agreed easily.

  They had now reached the flats. They were a large block, starkly white in the sunlight. The pavement was so heated that its substance gave stickily under their feet; and its bright grey shone up a myriad tiny oily rainbows. A single tree stood at the entrance; and on this soft green patch their eyes rested, in relief from the staring white, the glistening grey, the hard, brilliant blue of the sky. Under the tree stood a native woman. She held a small child by one hand and a slightly larger one by the other, and there was a new baby folded in a loop of cloth on her back. The older children held the stuff of her skirt from behind. Martha stopped and looked at her. This woman summed up her uncomfortable thoughts and presented the problem in its crudest form. This easy, comfortable black woman seemed extraordinarily attractive, compared with the hard gay anxiety of Stella and Alice. Martha felt her as something simple, accepting - whole. Then she understood that she was in the process of romanticizing poverty; and repeated firmly to herself that the child mortality for the colony was one of the highest in the world. All the same …

  Alice and Stella, finding themselves alone in the hall, came back and saw Martha staring at the tree. There was nothing else to look at.

  ‘It’s all very well for us,’ remarked Martha with a half-defiant laugh, seeing that she was being observed. ‘We’re all right, but how about her?’

  Alice looked blank; but Stella, after a spasm of annoyance had contracted her face, broke into a loud laugh, To Alice she said boisterously, ‘Matty is a proper little Bolshie, did you know? Why, we had to drag her away from the Reds before she was married, she gets all hot and bothered about our black brothers.’ She laughed again, insistently, but Alice apparently found no need to do the same.

  ‘Come along, dear,’ she said kindly to Martha. ‘Let’s have a drink and get it over with, if you don’t mind.’

  Martha obediently joined them. But Stella could not leave it. She said brightly, ‘It’s different for them. They’re not civilized, having babies is easy for them, everyone knows that.’

  They were climbing the wide staircase. Alice remarked indifferently, ‘Dr Stern has a clinic for native women. Every Sunday morning. I tell him he’s so keen on everybody having babies that he can’t even give Sunday a rest.’

  Stella involuntarily stopped. ‘Dr Stern treats kaffirs?’ she asked, horrified. It appeared that he was in imminent danger of losing a patient.

  ‘He’s very goodhearted,’ said Alice vaguely. The words restored her own approval of Dr Stern. ‘He only charges them sixpence, or something like that.’ She continued to drag herself up the staircase, ahead of the others.

  Stella was silent. Her face expressed a variety of emotions, doubt being the strongest. Then Dr Stern effected in her that small revolution in thinking which crosses a gulf to philanthropy. She remarked, still dubiously, ‘Well, of course, we should be kind to them.’

  Martha, three steps below her, laughed outright. Alice looked at her in surprise, Stella with anger.

  ‘Well, if everyone was like you, they’d get out of hand,’ Stella said sourly. ‘It’s all very well, but everyone knows they are nothing but animals, and it doesn’t hurt them to have babies, and …’ She added doubtfully, ‘Dr Stern is always modern.’

  ‘He’s making a study about it,’ said Alice. She was waiting for them on the landing. ‘It’s not true they are different from us. They’re just the same, Dr Stern says.’

  Stella was deeply shocked and disturbed; she burst into her loud vulgar laughter. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘But it’s scientific,’ said Alice vaguely.

  ‘Oh, doctors!’ suggested Stella, in precisely the same indulgent tone Alice had previously used for ‘the Government’.

  Martha, arrived beside them on the landing, said bitterly, ‘It seems even Dr Stern is only interested in writing papers about them.’

  Alice was offended. ‘Well, so long as they get help, I don’t suppose they mind, do you? And he’s very kind. How many doctors can you think of would work as hard as he does all the week and every night and then spend all Sunday morning helping kaffir women with their babies? And for as good as nothing, too.’

  ‘Well, sixpence is the same for them as ten shillings would be for us,’ protested Martha.

  Alice was really angry now. ‘It’s not the same for Dr Stern.’

  ‘Whose fault is that?’ demanded Martha hotly.

  Stella cut the knot by opening the door. ‘Oh, let’s have a drink,’ she said impatiently. ‘Don’t take any notice of Matty. Douggie’ll put some sense into her head. You can’t be a Red if you’re married to a civil servant.’

  They went inside. Martha was acutely depressed at the finality of what Stella had said. She began to take out glasses and syphons, until Stella took them impatiently out of her hands. She sat down, and let Stella arrange things as she wished; with the feeling she had done this many times before.

  Alice was unobservant and relaxed in a deep chair, puffing out clouds of smoke until she was surrounded by blue haze. ‘For crying out loud, but I’m tired,’ she murmured; and, without moving the rest of her body, she held out her hand to take the glass Stella put into it.

  The room was rather small, but neat; it was dressed with striped modern curtains, light rugs, cheerful strident cushions. Stella’s taste, as Martha observed to herself bitterly, although telling herself again that it was her own fault. Well, she’d be gone soon, and then …

  She took the glass Stella handed her, and let herself go loose, as Alice was doing.

  Stella, accompanied apparently by two corpses, remained upright and energetic in her chair, and proceeded to entertain Alice with an amusing account of ‘their’ honeymoon.

  ‘… And you should have seen Matty, coping with the lads as if she were an old hand at the game. No wedding night for poor Matty, we were driving all night, and we had two breakdowns at that - the funniest thing you ever saw. We got to the hotel at two in the morning, and then all the boys arrived, and it wasn’t until that night we all decided it was really time that Matty had a wedding night, so we escorted them to their room, playing the Wedding March on the mouth-organs, and the last we saw of Matty was her taking off Douggie’s shoes and putting him into bed.’ She laughed, and Martha joined her. But Alice, who had not opened her eyes, remarked soothingly that Douggie was a hell of a lad, but Matty needn’t worry, these wild lads made wonderful husbands, look at Willie, he’d been one of the worst, and now butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  The thought of her husband made her sit up, and say in a determined voice that she really must go; Willie was a pet lamb, he never worried about anything - but all the same, she wasn’t going to start setting a bad example. She struggled out of her chair, drained her glass, and nervously pressed Martha’s hand. ‘Sorry, dear, but I really must - I’ll see you soon, I expect, my Willie and your Douglas being such friends. And now I really …’ She smiled hastily at Stella, waved vaguely, and hurried out. They could hear her running down the stairs on her high heels.

  ‘Alice is just an old fusser,’ said Stella, settling herself comfortably. ‘If Willie isn’t tied to her apron string she can’t sit still.’ Martha said nothing. ‘That’s no way to keep a man. They don’t like it. You should manage th
em without them knowing it.’

  Martha observed irritably that Stella and Alice talked about husbands as if they were a sort of wild animal to be tamed.

  Stella looked at her, and then remarked in an admonishing way that Martha was very young, but she’d soon learn that the way to keep a lad like Douggie was to give him plenty of rope to hang himself.

  Irritation was thick in the air, like the tobacco smoke that now made a heavy bluish film between them. Martha was praying, I wish she’d go.

  Stella made a few more remarks, which were received in silence. Then she looked angrily across and said that if she were Matty she’d have a good sleep and then take life easy.

  She rose, and stood for a moment looking at the mirror inside the flap of her handbag. Everything was in order. She shut the handbag, and gazed around the little room; she adjusted a cushion, then turned her gaze towards Martha, who was sprawling gracelessly in her chair.

  Martha looked back, acknowledging the discouragement that filled her at the sight of this woman. Stella must have gained this perfect assurance with her maturity at the age of - what? There were photographs of her at fifteen, showing her no less complete than she was now.

  It appeared that the moment for parting had at last arrived. Martha struggled up. And now Martha was filled with guilt. For Stella’s face showed a genuine concern for her; and Martha reminded herself that Stella was nothing if not kind and obliging - for what was kindness, if not this willingness to devote oneself utterly to another person’s life? Martha was too tired even to instil irony into it. She kissed Stella clumsily on one of her smooth tinted cheeks, and thanked her. Stella brightened, blushed a little, and said that any time Matty wanted anything she had only to … At last she left, smiling, blowing a kiss from the door, in precisely that pose of competent grace which most depressed Martha.

  The moment she was alone, Martha rummaged for a pair of scissors and went with determination to the bathroom. There she knelt on the edge of the gleaming and slippery bath, and in an acutely precarious position leaned up to look into the shaving mirror. It was too high for her. There was a large mirror at a suitable height next door, but for some reason this was the one she must use. Nothing in her reflection pleased her. She was entirely clumsy, clodhopping, graceless. Worse than this, she was filled with uncomfortable memories of how she had looked at various stages of her nineteen years-for she might be determined to forget how she had felt in her previous incarnations, but she could not forget how she had looked. Her present image had more in common with her reflection at fifteen, a broad and sturdy schoolgirlishness, than it had with herself of only six months ago.