COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  She was opening the gate when she heard a voice. A youth with a watering can emerged from a small shed and demanded what she wanted.

  ‘I’ve come to see Solly Cohen,’ she said, with a touch of defiance, for she had not, until now, remembered those other members of the community who might forbid her.

  He was very young, Jewish, and every inch of him an intellectual, though it appeared he wanted to look like a peasant. After a pause, he nodded reluctantly, and turned away.

  Martha went on up the path. There was a smell of hot sun on hot earth, the smell of evaporating water. Small bunches of brilliant green lettuce studded the dark earth, drops of water hung glistening in their leaves. They had just been watered; she could hear the deep soft drinking sound of water being sucked into dry soil. She walked slowly, for the pleasure of hearing it. She remembered how on the farm, after a storm, the tiny mealie plants held in their centres a single round, perfect drop of glittering water … But she was being observed, and by someone who resented her being there. She hurriedly climbed the steps. Whatever squalor had been here was cleaned away. The veranda, a small patch of dark-red cement between low grey walls, was polished and gleaming. The front door was newly painted a bright, strong blue. New paint, and cleanliness, and the windows were sparkling! She opened the blue door and found herself in the living room. It was empty. It was not a large room, but looked so because it had so little in it. The red cement floor had a piece of striped purple-and-yellow matting on it. There were half a dozen low wooden chairs, painted yellow. The walls had books all round them. That was all. To find this room in this street … But at this moment, a door was pushed open and Solly entered. His face showed blank surprise; then he hastily adjusted his expression.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked unwillingly.

  Martha sat down without being asked. ‘Do you mind my coming to see you?’ she asked. It sounded rather aggressive.

  He could only reply that he did not. He sat down himself, with the air of one being polite against his will. Martha looked to see how he might have changed. Since she had seen him last, he had been to the university, quarrelled with his family, made a trip to England, almost got to Spain, had a love affair, returned, thrown up university for good. None of this showed on his face. He was exactly as he had been, tall, very thin, with a loose knobbly look about his movements. His face was sharp-featured and bony, with the look of the young intellectual Jew: lively and critical, but with an additional sarcastic hostility about him. His clothes were different, however. He wore very short dark-blue shorts and a rusty-brown shirt, falling loose. He was tanned a dark brown.

  ‘I like the name you’ve chosen for your communal settlement,’ said Martha, ready to laugh with him.

  ‘We didn’t choose it. It was the name before.’

  ‘Oh!’ Then: ‘Do you mean the Coloured people called it Utopia?’ she asked, dismayed and touched.

  ‘That’s right. Stoo-pid, isn’t it?’

  She saw he was jeering at her, and came back with ‘I thought you had the grace to laugh at yourselves, at least.’

  But he was not prepared to be provoked. In any case Martha blurted out, ‘Can I come and live here, too?’

  He looked at her, first grinning, then grave. ‘Well, well,’ he commented at last. Then, cautiously: ‘I thought you’d just got married?’

  ‘I have. But I want …’ But it was impossible to make explanations. ‘I shouldn’t have got married, anyway. I would like to come and live here. Why shouldn’t I?’ she demanded like a child.

  Here Solly, who had been preparing some gestures of amazement or amusement, simply shrugged.

  ‘But you can’t do that,’ he said reproachfully at last.

  Martha was indignant. ‘Why did you write me that letter, then?’ she asked naively.

  ‘But, Matty …’ Here he relapsed into his old manner. He was going to be simple and natural. ‘But, Matty, you can’t go getting married one week and throwing it up the next.’ He was looking at her inquiringly; his face showed an intelligent comprehension - but not kindness.

  Martha’s spirits were sinking lower and lower. She saw she had been extremely foolish. However, she continued lamely, ‘You mean, everyone feels like this, it’s like measles, one just has to go through with it?’

  ‘Having never been married myself …’ he began portentously, but dropped the manner at once. ‘What did you get married for?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Martha ruefully.

  ‘Anyway, you can’t live here,’ he announced at last. ‘For one thing, there aren’t any women.’

  Martha felt herself blushing, and was furious. For the first time it occurred to her that Solly might be taking this as a personal interest in himself. It was intolerable! She exclaimed belligerently, ‘You keep out women?’

  At once Solly recovered his jaunty manner. ‘We did ask some girls. Unfortunately none of you can be torn away from your bright lights and your clothes. I suppose you understand that here everything is in common – books, money, everything. And we don’t smoke and we don’t drink.’

  ‘And you are all celibate?’ she inquired sarcastically.

  ‘Naturally.’ Then he added, ‘But marriage is allowed.’

  But now she laughed scornfully. ‘Anyone’d see that married couples would wreck it.’

  ‘Luckily we are none of us intending to get married, so that’s all right.’ She was sitting upright in her chair, eyes bright with anger, face flushed — he deliberately lounging in his, with an appearance of conscious ease. ‘And you’re not Jewish either,’ he said. He sounded embarrassed.

  This was something she had not thought of; and she saw at once it was unpardonable of her. She flushed deeper; her face was burning steadily, so that she would have liked to hide it. She wanted to say something like ‘So now you’re being exclusive,’ but an awkward guilt stopped her. ‘Well, that’s certainly final,’ she said, trying to sound light and casual. And then, seeing that he was still a little embarrassed, she went on: ‘How many of you?’

  ‘Four, at the moment. We are modelling ourselves on the settlements in Israel.’

  ‘Israel?’

  ‘Palestine to you,’ and he could not help a sudden savage grin.

  ‘But what will you do when the war starts?’ she asked awkwardly.

  ‘When the old men have finished their diplomatic fiddling and we can see what they’re up to, we’ll decide. I shall be a conscientious objector if they turn the war against the Soviet Union, and I shall fight if it’s against Hitler.’

  She felt very small beside this enviable clarity of mind. ‘How nice to have everything so tidily planned, how nice to be so sure about everything.’ She tried to jeer at him, but it sounded thin.

  ‘There’s nothing to stop you,’ he said.

  She got up, and with a familiar gesture turned to look at the bookshelves. She had only the time to see the names of books she had not heard of, authors that were new, when he said, trying to make a joke of it, ‘No, Matty, you can’t borrow books here. It’s a joint library.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’ She moved towards the door. ‘Well, I’ll go back home, then.’

  But now he was obviously contrite. ‘You don’t have to run away. We won’t eat you.’

  After hesitation, she returned to her chair. They were now warm with friendship for each other. They were both remembering how often they had sat thus, in a small room filled with books, at the station; outside, the ox waggons rolled heavily through clouds of red dust, and the farmers in their loose working khaki hurried from store to garage, from garage to post office, with their letters and groceries; outside, the black people swarmed around the door of the store, fingering their bits of money and talking excitedly about the bargains they would make. Martha looked out of the window: a mass of dirty little houses, swarms of brown-skinned, poverty-ridden children; but under the window a Jewish youth was hoeing a patch of potatoes.

  ‘You have no servants?’


  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see what you’re going to achieve by it,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Except, of course, you’ll have a lovely time yourselves.’ Her tone suggested that this was an aim she was prepared to approve of; but his black eyes watched her sarcastically as from an inner truth she could not be expected to see.

  Silence, and the hoe rose and fell in the soft earth outside, with a thud, thud, thud. Someone turned a tap on somewhere close inside the house; the water rushed loudly, then it was cut off - silence again.

  ‘You study all day, you discipline yourselves, you work hard?’ Martha attempted again.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You might just as well be - up in the white town. Why do you have to come and live here?’

  ‘We have contacts with the local people,’ he said defensively; it seemed this was a weak point.

  ‘You could have classes for them?’ she said excitedly.

  But at this he laughed heavily. ‘That’s right, so we could. As for you, you’ll be dishing out charity to the poor from your lofty position in the civil service, inside five years.’

  She shrugged this off impatiently, untouched by the gibe.

  ‘What sort of - contacts?’ She used the stiff, impersonal word with difficulty, trying to make it into a picture: Solly and his friends, talking, in this room, with some of the poor Coloured people she could see out of the window.

  ‘Actually,’ he announced briskly, ‘the Coloured community are a waste of time. In their position halfway between the blacks and the white Herrenvolk, they are bound to be unstable, they are petty bourgeois to the core, all of them.’

  He was jettisoning them all! Martha, very shocked, said feebly, ‘They are human beings, after all.’

  ‘So they are,’ he said with his brisk jeer, his black eyes snapping scorn. ‘So they are. We are all human beings, and everyone is as good as everyone else, all born equal in the sight of God.’

  ‘Well, you brought in God, I didn’t. What’s God got to do with it?’

  They were now as awkward with hostility as they had been a few moments before with friendship.

  ‘Anyway, there are a few hundred Coloureds, and several million Africans - what’s the point of it?’

  ‘We’d have lived in the location, but it’s against the law. So we chose the next best thing.’

  ‘Rubbish, you only came to live here because people’d be shocked, that’s all.’

  He tapped the long bony fingers on the arm of his chair and yawned. It was not for some seconds that she realized the yawn was deliberate. At once she got up and said, ‘I’ll go. I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘Your housewifely duties?’ he asked sarcastically.

  She stood behind her chair, looking regretfully at this pleasant room, the books, feeling the atmosphere of dedicated freedom, feeling herself an exile. But she felt something else too: a deep pity for him. He seemed all at once very young and absurd.

  ‘Well,’ she said flatly, ‘when the war comes, that’ll be the end of it. But it’ll be nice while it lasts.’

  He regarded her in silence, apparently considering whether she was worth the trouble he might decide to take. Then he said, ‘Now, listen, Matty, I shall now give you a short lecture on the international situation.’ He grinned savagely, and she smiled back gratefully. She noted at the same time, half consciously, that he, unlike his brother, could take nothing seriously. That was how she felt it: the jaunty self-consciousness, the invisible quotation marks around his phrases, the drawled ‘situ-a-tion’, gave her a strong feeling of disbelief.

  She stood, however, behind her chair and listened. He spoke for some ten minutes, as if he were delivering a lecture, but in the harsh, flat language of controlled cynicism, which chimed in very well with what she felt herself. And although the picture he presented of what was happening in Europe was cold, simple and logical, that harshness and cynicism could only feed her own. So that when he had finished she said drily, ‘Well, whichever way it goes, there’ll be a war, won’t there?’

  ‘Well?’

  She shrugged, avoiding the hard aggressiveness of that black stare.

  He began to jeer again. ‘Yes, poor Matty, life is hard, life isn’t easy. People get killed, the cows get into the rose garden, violence keeps popping up its ugly head.’

  She remarked irrelevantly, ‘My father was in the last war. He talks about it.’

  He stared. ‘Well?’ Then, in a flat, angry voice, quite different from any she had heard from him - for the first time carrying the conviction of deep personal feeling: ‘And the Jews are in the concentration camps. Who cares? Do you? If the British Government wanted, they could stop it all in a month - if they wanted. As for you,’ and here he mimicked her doubting, hesitant voice, ‘all you say is, Don’t let’s have any nastiness, please let everything be comfortable.’

  She was now so confused by all this hostility - for it was clear that she had become for him the enemy he hated most - that she could only say, ‘Well, Solly …’ and tailed off into silence.

  He was now waiting for her to go. She asked, ‘What do you hear from Joss?’

  ‘We don’t write.’

  She went towards the door.

  ‘He’s joined the Communist Party,’ she heard.

  ‘Well, I thought he was a Communist anyway.’

  ‘He’s joined it, that’s quite different from talking.’

  There was such spite in his voice that she turned and inquired, ‘Why, do you mind him joining?’ Then she saw it was directed against herself. He picked up a newspaper from beside him and handed it to her. It was a thin, limp paper. She looked at it dubiously. It was called The Watchdog. The headlines, large and strident, assaulted her mind. She heard him laugh, and saw that she was holding the thing as if it might explode in her face. She smiled ruefully.

  ‘Nasty crude paper,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be seen with it. What would your friends say? Let alone your nice husband.’

  Since she did not feel at all identified with her husband or his circle, she let this pass. She looked down again at the paper. The exclamatory style, the hectoring language, affected her uncomfortably, as if her whole system had been injected by some powerful irritating substance that it must throw off. But she looked at it steadily and saw that what it was saying was no more than Solly’s just-concluded lecture on the international situation.

  He summed up her thought by saying, ‘It’s all right if you hear it all said in nice intellectual language in a nice comfortable room, but it’s quite different like that, isn’t it?’

  She laid it down on a chair and looked at him. She needed to wound him as he was wounding her. She asked, ‘Why don’t you join the Communist Party, then?’ He simply maintained his steady grin; she realized that he must have joined it, otherwise he would not look so satirical. After a moment, she tried another tack: ‘Who’s paying for this house and this quiet intellectual existence?’ He reddened; and she persisted, ‘Your four fathers, no doubt. So your share of it comes from the profits made out of the kaffir store in the district. I don’t see that you are any better than I am, if it comes to that.’ He was waiting for a chance to get in at her, but she went on hastily, delighted with her advantage: ‘So I’ll leave you to your independence, until the bull gets into this rose garden.’

  She quickly shut the door behind her, and walked rapidly down the garden. All vegetables, of course, she thought, trying to be spiteful, but on the verge of tears. No flowers for the high-minded, naturally! While she had been inside, the earth around the little green clumps of lettuce had dried. Small granules of grey earth lay evenly over the base of wet dark richness. The youth was steadily hoeing potatoes at the far end of the garden. He did not lift his head as she came past. Then she heard her name called: Solly stood on the veranda.

  ‘Matty — would you like to come to a meeting here tonight?’

  She hesitated, then called back sardonically, ‘Unfortunately I have a sund
owner party-’ But she was unable to finish. Solly was doubled up in a pantomime of laughter.

  She turned her back on him and walked away under the trees that shaded the pavement. It was some minutes before she was able to smile at herself and at him, her regret at having to leave was so strong. She felt forsaken; and nothing but the memory of Solly’s savage farewell laughter prevented her from hurrying back and saying that of course she would come to the meeting. When she reached the flat, she occupied herself with altering a dress to fit her for the sundowner party that night, and with an ironical consciousness of how Solly would see this proceeding. But there was something much stronger, a feeling of Well, then, I’ll show him! The showing him consisted in making the dress and herself as attractive as she knew how. It was not until she realized this that she remembered the moment when she had felt he might be thinking that she had come to him as a man, and not as a person in that romantic thing, a communal settlement. She burned with embarrassment; she could not forgive him. Now, looking back at the meeting, she could see the thing in no other way; everything they had said was permeated with this other emotion; to it she attributed his aggressiveness and that sarcastic stare. She was hating him quite vividly. In a short while, the memory of that interview had become quite unbearable; and she was putting stitches into the fabric of her dress with strong stabs of the needle, while she muttered incoherently, Idiot! Conceited idiot! And even: Can’t they ever see us differently?