COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  A few paces away a score of youths were saying goodbye to their families, who were preserving a brave cheerfulness which was becoming increasingly unbearable.

  The engine suddenly let out a long shriek. Elaine gathered herself up in a movement as if she would fling herself after her lover, but she let herself sink back. Mrs Talbot was now clinging to the girl. The train moved; the sunlight flashed along its windows. A chorus of goodbyes broke out. They all watched the boyish, grave, charming face; then he lifted his hand in salute, and withdrew: the window was empty. Elaine remained standing on the extreme edge of the platform, stiff in the arms of her mother, gazing after the train, while the groups of people dissolved about them. Mrs Talbot was weeping openly. Elaine seemed to awaken, she smiled at her mother, put her arm about her, and walked beside her to the arched entrance: they went out of sight. Mr Talbot, whose gaze had never left his wife, nodded formally to Martha, gave a stiff bow to Douglas, and strode after the two women.

  Douglas remained gazing after the train, whose smoke was settled in sunlit clouds over the platform. Martha, who knew he was feeling nothing but envy of the young men who soon would be in the Air Force in England, looked away from him. Close by, she saw Maisie, shaking the hands of an elderly couple who were urging her to come home with them. Their smiles were stiff and determined: Maisie had married their son that morning. They had been prevented by the taboos from saying that she was of the wrong class; now it was appropriate that their son’s wife should come home ‘at least for the evening’, as they repeated disapprovingly. ‘He would have wanted it,’ the lady murmured, sighing, to her husband.

  Maisie was standing lazily before them, her weight slumped on to one plump hip, her loose fair curls shining in a haze of sunlight. There was an ink mark on her yellow skirt. She was repeating with a forbearance as marked as theirs, ‘Thank you, thank you so much, but I have an appointment this evening.’ Her face continued polite; theirs were increasingly resentful. At last, putting an end to it, she said directly, ‘I am sure you mean it kindly.’ And hurried away.

  Her face changed into a strained blank gaze. Through it came a glimmer of recognition. She came walking towards Martha, the good-natured blue eyes heavy with shock. Martha instinctively put out a hand to steady her as she came to rest, still looking after the train.

  ‘So they’ve gone, eh?’ Maisie said. She was incredulous.

  Douglas said kindly, ‘Bad luck, I’m sorry.’

  She looked through him, turned the round blue eyes on Martha and said, ‘We got married this morning. I said to Dickie, “What’s the point? It makes no difference to us, and it only gets them down.”’ She jerked her shoulder towards her parents-in-law, who were standing hypnotized, listening a few paces off. ‘I said to him, “After all, with their ideas from England, they can’t help it, so why get them all upset for nothing?” But he’d got a bee in his bonnet, so I married him. Men are romantic, aren’t they?’ she ended on an inquiry, wanting confirmation from Martha. The parents-in-law were exchanging looks in which, as Martha could see, their intention to show a democratic forbearance was rapidly vanishing under fury that this young woman should have no idea of her good fortune. Maisie, who had forgotten them, went on: ‘As long as it made him happy, I don’t mind. I wouldn’t mind having a baby, really,’ she added, frankly inspecting Martha. ‘You don’t show much, either, considering.’

  Her eyes moved past Martha to where the railway lines curved gleaming out of sight. Her mouth fell open, like a child’s. ‘They’ve gone,’ she muttered again.

  The parents-in-law exchanged another look, and moved away heavily with a look of patient endurance.

  Martha and Douglas took an arm on either side of Maisie and moved her towards the entrance. She was heavy and inert.

  Outside the station she seemed to recover. She shook herself free calmly, and remarked, ‘I’ve got a date tonight with Binkie. I don’t really feel like it, but Dickie wouldn’t like me to sit at home and mope.’ She nodded and smiled. The blue eyes were solemn and puzzled. ‘I suppose everyone else knows what the war’s for,’ she remarked resentfully, as she turned away with a final wondering stare at the station, ‘but it’s more than I do.’

  With this she walked off past the car where her new parents-in-law were sitting. She offered them a polite unhappy smile, and slightly increased her lazy amble along the street which led to McGrath’s. She was late for her date with Binkie.

  Chapter Two

  Stella was now explaining to both Alice and Martha that it was the duty of young married couples to have children while they were young: their duty to the children, who would naturally prefer to have parents who were brothers and sisters to them. No one contradicted her. She went on to insist that to have a baby now, while the men were on active service, was the essence of good planning: the nursery stage would be over by the time they got back. To which Alice replied irritably, ‘They haven’t gone yet, for crying out loud!’ And Martha, ‘But Stella, that isn’t what you said.’

  Stella drew herself up; indignation flashed from every line of her charming body. She retreated to her own flat, sulking. As usual, neither Alice nor Martha seemed to understand the gesture. She emerged, at the end of the week, in full dresses, with a look of warm loosening fulfilment. After many hours before the mirror she had decided to pile her hair loosely on top of her head, like a busy mother too occupied to bother with personal attractions. Presenting herself thus, she earned from Alice the good-natured remark, ‘You look lovely, Stell.’ And from Martha, ‘But, Stella, why do you rush into smocks when you aren’t even showing yet?’

  Stella wept. Martha and Alice looked at each other in complete amazement. They offered handkerchiefs and the advice to take things easy.

  Martha was feeling that of the three of them it was Stella who was really enjoying herself; for zest, always Stella’s quality, was the one thing which neither she nor Alice possessed.

  She was essentially divided. One part of herself was sunk in the development of the creature, appallingly slow, frighteningly inevitable, a process which she could not alter or hasten, and which dragged her back into the impersonal blind urges of creation; with the other parts she watched it; her mind was like a lighthouse, anxious and watchful that she, the free spirit, should not be implicated; and engaged in daydreams of the exciting activities that could begin when she was liberated.

  Into this precarious balance burst Mrs Quest again and again, bright-eyed, insistent, stating continually that the deepest satisfaction in life was maternity and that Martha must sacrifice herself to her children as she had done, concluding always with the triumphant remark, ‘You won’t have time for all your ideas when the baby is born, believe me!’

  To which Martha reacted with a cold, loathing determination that she must keep brightly burning that lamp above the dark blind sea which was motherhood. She would not allow herself to be submerged.

  To Douglas she cried continually, ‘Why can’t she leave me alone?’

  But one day he entered on a scene where Mrs Quest, irritable, impatient, and insistent, was demanding that Martha should order a certain pattern of jacket rather than the one she preferred, while Martha was logically arguing that in Iceland, or perhaps it was Chile, babies wore no jackets at all, and therefore - He collapsed into a chair and laughed until his face was wet. Mrs Quest regarded him with smiling forbearance. Martha, however, felt she had been betrayed. She looked forward to when her father would come into town; he, she was convinced, would support her against the forces of tyranny.

  It was not long before the household had been moved, and she received the message she expected. Mrs Quest said that her father had something important to say to her; she must come over at once.

  Martha therefore walked across the park, and found Mr Quest seated under a folded mass of purple bougainvillaea, which in its turn was shaded by branches of Jacaranda in full bloom. The masses of light-mauve blossoms swayed over him; occasionally a flower detached itself and floated
down. Mr Quest, from a distance, looked as if he were seated in a clear blue lake.

  ‘I wanted to say something to you, what was it?’ he demanded, conscientiously turning his eyes on his daughter. He examined his future grandchild with the frank appraisal of a countryman, and remarked, ‘You’re shaping nicely, all things considered. I can’t remember what your mother said I should say, but you wouldn’t take any notice anyway, so it doesn’t matter, does it?’

  Martha sat down. The house was of red brick, with verandas flung out all around. A golden shower climbed the pillars in front, and laid heavy green arms over the corrugated-iron roof. Through the windows could be seen the furniture from the farm. Martha felt a sadness which she understood was shared by her father when he said, ‘It’s all very well, we had a bad time on the farm, but I feel so damned shut in, with all these streets.’ The park opened its acres of green and flowers immediately across the street, the garden was shadowed by shrubs and trees from the bisecting street, but Martha felt an exile, as he did. She did not know how much it had meant that her parents, at least, had been on the land. Some balance had been upset in her. That fatal dichotomy, soil, city, had been at least held even by thinking of her father working his land. Now she felt altogether cut off from her roots, even more so because she disliked the idea of actually living on a farm so much.

  ‘It’s not that I enjoy all the inconvenience,’ went on Mr Quest, looking over at her for confirmation. ‘It’s not that at all. I don’t see any point in lamps instead of electric light, or being miles from doctors, or no shops near by. Some people seem to enjoy that sort of thing. But, damn it all, I liked knowing what was going on – you can’t even see how the rain comes and goes here. I liked watching the rain coming across the hills.’

  Martha assented. What she was feeling was something like disloyalty: she could not share with her father her love for that particular patch of soil the farm, which in fact he was now aching after. She probed, ‘But it wasn’t the same for you as England, was it? You know, when you used to go rabbiting in the fields, and then the horses - you told me, you remember?’

  She waited. It worked, as it always did. Mr Quest, eyes narrowed at the hard blue area of sky overhead, sighed. Then it was as if he expanded in water. He let himself fall back in the chair and stretched his legs in front of him luxuriously. ‘Ah, well, now, that was a different thing altogether!’ He looked at her suspiciously, and asked, ‘But I told you, didn’t I?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Martha quickly.

  ‘I thought I had.’ He removed his eyes from her face, suppressed any thought that she might be tolerating an old man, and remarked, ‘The rain is different there - things smell after rain. There’s nothing like the smell of the earth after rain in England.’ To Martha, for whom the smell of this African earth after the first rains of the season was the keenest pleasure of the year, it was as if a door had been shut: she had invited it. ‘And then those long evenings, not like this damned country, where the night shuts down on you like – like – I can’t bear being shut in,’ he said.

  He continued to talk about England. He did not once mention the African farm on which he had lived for all those years. Martha listened, circling her stomach with her forearms, while with one half of her mind she saw a boy running wild across an English farm, fifty years before, and ran with him, tasting faint and exquisite dews, feeling long lush English grass around her ankles. With the other, she was indulging in the forbidden pleasure of nostalgia. The pang of lost happiness was so acute it shortened her breath. Then she asked herself if there was any moment of her childhood she would choose to live again, and she could only reply that no, there was not. If she burrowed back under the mist of illusion, she had felt a determination to continue, a curiosity perhaps, an intention to endure, but no delight. Yet that uncomfortable antagonistic childhood had over it a shimmering haze of beauty, it tugged at her to return.

  She broke across her father’s rambling monologue to inquire, ‘Were you happy as a child?’

  He was checked. The bright vague eyes clouded over - irritation at being brought back to this garden, this sky. ‘What I liked best,’ he remarked, ‘were the horses. They don’t have horses here, not like those horses!’ He looked at her again. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said practically, ‘I’ve remembered what I wanted to say. Your mother thinks that you ought to come and have your baby here. Then she can look after you both.’

  He looked steadily at her. She looked at him.

  ‘You must do as you think best,’ he said hastily. Then, after a long reflective pause, he inquired, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Doncaster with Bert’s black mare?’

  Soon after this, a letter, rather wistful, arrived from Mrs Knowell, saying that if she wouldn’t be in the way, she would like nothing better than to come and nurse mother and baby.

  Martha immediately booked a room in the nursing home which she had sworn never to enter because it was almost inevitable that she must.

  As for Alice, after discarding Dr Stern as a possible assistant in the process of birth, which she felt she understood well enough to dispense with one, she gloomily accepted him with the remark that she supposed one doctor was as bad as another. She too hastily booked a room, after representations from her grandmother that she should instantly move to the city where that old lady was living, several hundreds of miles away.

  ‘Really,’ she remarked with her familiar good-natured giggle, ‘you’d think that they’d be pleased to be finished with the awful business, instead of rushing to start all over again with us.’

  The mere act of booking a room seemed to bring the day of birth nearer; Martha felt it was positively unnatural that the actual number of days on the calendar remained the same.

  The rainy season began. The child would be born towards its end. Again she felt the discrepancy between the shortness of the rainy season, a handful of brief months in any ordinary scale of time, and the crawling days which she had to live through. She was consumed several times a day by a violent upsurge of restlessness. She could not keep still. She could not read. Above all, she felt there must be something wrong with her, to feel like this. For at the back of her mind was the vision of a woman calm, rich, maternal, radiant; that was how she should be.

  She was very much alone.

  Douglas, together with Willie and Andrew, was going through a crisis of his own. For authority had spoken, and as a result several hundreds of young men had achieved uniform. But not their age group, And it was the first time they had understood they were not the boys of the town, the golden youth. That was over. It had been a shock to find themselves thrust aside by these younger men. They were wearing the humorous resigned look of middle-aged men called ‘sir’ for the first time by their juniors. They would, however, be called up very soon, they already felt themselves to be cut off, in spirit, from the civilian population, and they filled the bars and clubs every moment they were free of work.

  To Martha, Douglas suggested she should spend her time with Alice. To Alice, Willie said that Martha was a nice kid, and just the ticket as a companion. But for a long time the two women did not meet in the daytime. They liked each other, they understood each other very well; but something prevented them from mingling their daytime lives. It was that both felt they must be in some way unnatural; they did not want to expose what they felt to the other.

  Then, one very hot morning, when Martha was seated under the square of blue sky, such a passion of rebellious restlessness took hold of her that she leaped up, ran downstairs, and got into the car. She was going to do something she had often been tempted to do before. She was going to look at the nursing home. It was five miles. She parked the car on a small ridge half a mile from it, and looked longingly across the valley to where the building stood, neat in its white paint and green shutters, on the opposite ridge. She felt that looking at it thus might bring the day nearer. She felt that looking at it made her one with the mysteries it sheltered.

  Nev
ertheless, the sight of it awoke some unwelcome and far too familiar thoughts. Scrupulously visualizing first a male child and then a female one, she shaped that unborn being, now heaving and bubbling continuously in its cage of ribs, into - Binkie Maynard, perhaps? Or one of the hockey-playing maternal amazons of the Sports Club? That was even more intolerable. Yet even as she shuddered away these possibilities, she was reminding herself that never, at any time, had she had the intention of becoming what Solly so easily dismissed as a petty-bourgeois colonial, yet here she was; so it followed that the child was doomed, also.

  It was very hot. The whitish dust of the road glittered. Heat poured down from masses of black cloud. In a haze of glare, a yellow dazzle focused into her eyes. It was a car, gathering shape in seething clouds of white dust. She knew the car - Alice’s, now slowing to a standstill. The two women looked at each other. Both blushed; then they smiled confessingly. Alice awkwardly jumped out of the car, a tall, lean creature from whose light frame of bones protruded grotesquely her child. Martha joined her. They examined each other frankly, and exchanged heavy sighs which said that while they knew they were committed to this absurd process, they at least intended to remain ironical spectators of it.

  ‘I thought I’d come and have a look at the place,’ Alice said, and giggled suddenly.

  Martha joined in with a laugh. ‘I can’t bear the way time crawls,’ she complained, with a watchful eye on Alice’s reaction. ‘I can’t bear any of it! I could scream!’