COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  The nursing home was flooded with light. From some room down the corridor came a subdued chorus: several scores of babies were yelling there. A door opened; the orchestra swelled up into a cacophony of protest. It shut; the sound subsided again. A very young nurse came hurrying past. She saw Martha, exclaimed, ‘Oh, damn, here’s another!’ then suggested impatiently that Martha should sit down and wait. Martha sat obediently, while the distant orchestra swelled up and down as the door opened and shut; and nurses in uniform went hurrying past, carrying half a dozen bundled babies each, with the satisfied proficiency of waiters balancing several piles of plates at once. Finally a large, fat nurse went briskly past, wheeling a tea trolley with six bundles of babies on the top layer and six on the bottom. Martha saw a dozen twisted searching heads, a dozen open mouths nuzzling for absent breasts. Doors opened and shut. The sound of hungry crying diminished. All at once there was silence over the building; the unshaded lights glared down into an intensity of stillness, long white corridors, gleaming emptily away in all directions.

  At last there emerged an immensely tall, thin, springlike woman, a long white glazed pillar of efficiency, from which peered two calm, brisk dark eyes. She laid her hand on Martha’s shoulder, consideringly, rocked her slightly back and forth a little, then said, ‘Let me see, what’s next? Oh, yes, of course, the forms.’ Martha and Douglas were invited into an office, and found themselves engaged in that indispensable preliminary to every vital activity - filling in forms in triplicate. Douglas complied efficiently; Martha felt disappointed that this adventure should be interrupted by such banalities. When it was over, Miss Galbind told Douglas that he must go away and ring up in the morning. ‘Be a good boy, don’t ring up every five minutes - we’re coping with the Easter rush.’ While Martha subdued her indignation that she was included in anything so ordinary as an Easter rush, Miss Galbind received Douglas’s conscious grin with a relieved and even coquettish smile. Encouraged, she proceeded, ‘Why you young people restrict your fun and games to certain times of the years, I can’t think.’

  Douglas laughed. The two stood together, laughing; while Martha waited on one side. She had decided that she wanted Douglas to go; she noted that while Miss Galbind was made ageless by the uniform - she could not be more than thirty-five – it also enabled her to call Douglas a good boy and to flirt with him.

  Douglas squeezed her shoulder encouragingly, and said he would go off and find Willie so that they might give it a bang. With this he departed, rubbing his hands. A nurse came rushing down the long brightly lit corridor, calling out for Miss Galbind, who again invited Martha to sit down and wait a while - ‘Unless there is any hurry, dear?’ She went off on her soundless springlike feet. Martha was again left alone in the entrance hall. She walked up and down for some half an hour, from the big door that stood open, like a door of a sanctuary, showing the star-crowded sky and the distant glow of the city across the ridge, to another door - large, white, closed, on which was painted ‘No Admittance’. She was listening to the rhythm of her muscles. Five minutes to the second. She was extraordinarily impatient; it seemed to her intolerable that nature should be thus bound by the clock; all the needs of her being demanded that this baby should be born forthwith, without any further nonsense. In her mind, it was already born. A nurse who came past, holding her face down tenderly to a white silent bundle, aroused in Martha a flood of impatient tenderness. It was reassuring to see that busy young woman in a moment of love snatched from the white-glaring, painfully shining, bare, heartless efficiency. Martha wondered if Alice was asleep. She wished she might go and talk to her. She looked longingly towards the door of her room, but did not dare to go towards it.

  At last another nurse came hurrying along, and said in a harassed way that she was terribly sorry to leave Martha so long, but there were five babies being born, there wasn’t a bed to put Martha in just now – would she mind filling in time by having a bath?

  Martha was shown into a bathroom, and told to ring the bell if she needed anything. She was undressing when a second nurse put her head around the door and said hopefully that she could see from Martha’s face that she was the sensible sort, not like some, who carried on in a way you wouldn’t believe. As she spoke, a door opened somewhere near, and Martha heard a woman screaming on a high note, ‘Mother … Mother … Mother …’

  ‘Listen to that!’ said the nurse, a girl of perhaps twenty, with a round, pink, disapproving face surrounded by light wisps of shining fair hair. ‘And she’s only just started.’

  Martha understood, from the fresh face, and the voice, that the girl was newly from England; she at once felt the appropriate reaction: What right has she to criticize us? Besides, she was such a baby, thought Martha, from the immense superiority of her proud belly, her primed breasts.

  The girl gave Martha another encouraging smile, and said that if everybody was as sensible as Martha, life would be much easier. With this she left her alone.

  Martha flung her cotton smock off, with the triumphant thought that she would never have to wear it again. She heaved herself into the deep hot water and looked at her stomach. It was now almost square, mottled and streaked purple, glistening with strain. The baby was as tense as a knot; and Martha’s every muscle was braced with the intention of hurrying the process. She lay stiff in the water, her eyes on the watch. Five minutes. Five minutes. Five minutes. The pains came steadily, like the strokes of a bell, and, each time, Martha’s whole body tensed against them.

  She lay there for nearly an hour; the water was getting cold. The woman across the corridor was moaning steadily. The noise was beginning to get on Martha’s nerves; or rather, her intention that it should not succeed in fermenting in her an angry irritation. Five minutes - Martha found herself exhausted, and lapsed into tired indifference. It was into this lull of absence that there shot a new intense pain, strong enough to make her catch her breath. She got quickly out of the bath, and put on the ugly calico garment provided for her. She caught a glimpse in the steam-dewed mirror of a fat, bedraggled shining-faced slut with a look of frowning concentration. She combed her hair, and made up her face. Thus armed, she walked out into a deserted corridor, still gleaming timelessly with regular white lights. Lines of shut doors stretched to either side. She walked to the right, and was met with a door marked ‘Labour Ward’. She stood there, listening to the woman moaning inside. It opened abruptly, and a nurse came out, who, seeing Martha, pushed her gently to one side, and then ran fast down the corridor and out of sight. Martha walked back in the other direction and found herself in front of an open door. Inside were half a hundred white cradles, silent under a low shaded light, and at a long central table sat the fat nurse whom Martha had seen wheeling the loaded trolley. She exclaimed, ‘What are you doing here?’ then glanced keenly at Martha’s face, and said in a different voice, regulated to kindness, ‘You fed up with waiting?’ She regarded Martha cautiously over a poised needle. Then she inched the needle into the white stuff she held, and pushed it away over the shining table. Everything in that room shone, even in the subdued light. The walls were very white, the floor black, with pools of shining light moving over it. The cribs were white, the nurse’s glazed uniform was white. Piles of white napkins, white baby clothes, were stacked everywhere. Martha suddenly found herself gripping the table’s edge.

  The fat nurse walked unhurriedly towards her, laid a hand on her shoulder, and waited till she straightened up. ‘That’s right,’ she approved.

  Again there was a keen, impersonal glance. Martha felt there was something in her face which should not be there, for the nurse said, ‘Cheer up, you’ll have got it out by this time tomorrow. Nearly over!’

  Martha felt her lips tremble. She would have liked to fling herself on that fat shining bosom. The impulse annoyed her.

  ‘Can I see Mrs Burrell’s baby?’ she asked timidly.

  The nurse hesitated, then stepped along the lines of cradles. At the foot of each was a name on a card. She nodded t
o Martha, who followed her, and bent over a tightly stretched white blanket, where showed the top of a small red head that was crinkled and covered with loose dark fuzz. A powerful stirring of tenderness came into Martha; she resisted it; she felt it to be dangerous to her intention of concentrating on getting her own baby born.

  The fat nurse sat down again, pulled the white stuff towards her, and said, ‘You’d better get back to your room, you know.’

  ‘I haven’t got one yet,’ said Martha forlornly.

  ‘Dear me,’ said the nurse. ‘Well, we’re so full — it’s the war. There’s a crop of babies suddenly that took us all by surprise.’ She was sewing steadily, her needle going with flashes of light through the white stuff.

  Martha drifted out again, and was standing in the corridor when the pink English girl came hurrying along. ‘Oh, there you are, you shouldn’t have got out of that bath without me, you know,’ she reproved. ‘The doctor wants to see you.’

  Martha followed the pink nurse, who led her into another room marked ‘Labour Ward’, and said, ‘You’ll just have to make the best of this. There’s nowhere else to put you till morning.’

  It was another gleaming white room, this time with the lights bulging down from the ceiling like eyeballs. There was nothing in it but trolleys full of sharp instruments, and two very high, very narrow white beds.

  ‘Lie down,’ said the nurse, sharp with impatience.

  Martha climbed with difficulty on to one of the high narrow beds, and almost at once Dr Stern came in.

  ‘Well, Mrs Knowell? You girls all insist on having your babies in the small hours.’ She knew him well enough by now to understand that he had said this many times before. Once again she submitted to those skilled impersonal hands, while he remarked that it was a good time of the year for having babies, she had done well to arrange things thus. He then removed his hands, said, ‘Fine, fine,’ and turned to depart. Martha, who had half believed that this was nearly over, demanded how long it would be; at which he remarked absorbedly, on his way out, that she must be a good girl, and be patient. The door swung silently shut behind him, and she was alone.

  For some time she lay stiff on the very narrow slope of the bed, and waited. In this position, it seemed that the pains were worse. Or rather that she could not command herself as well. She climbed down, and walked up and down the deserted room. Now it was every four minutes, and she was doubled up with them, shutting her teeth against the desire to groan, cautiously unfolding herself again. She noticed she was wet with sweat. It was very hot in the room. She went to the window and looked out. Across the faintly moonlit veld, the glow from the city burned steadily, swallowing a glitter of stars. The stars vanished in another hot wave of pain. This time she found herself crouching on the floor, astonished and indignant at the violence of it. The pain had swallowed her up; and dismay at having lost guard caused her to return to the bed, where she might keep her attention on the process, keep that sentinel alert against the dark engulfing sea. Tight, stiff, cautious, she felt the baby knot and propel itself down; it recoiled and slackened, and she with it. The pain had changed. She could mark the point at which, just as it had abruptly changed its quality a couple of hours before in the bath, so now it ground into a new gear, as it were. It gripped first her back, then her stomach, then it was as if she and the baby were being wrung out together by a pair of enormous steel hands. But still she kept that small place in her brain alive and watchful. She would not give in. She lay like a tight spring, with half her attention given to not rolling off the bed, or table - which was so narrow she could not have turned on it - and concentrated.

  The baby-faced nurse hurried in, and inquired, ‘How are you doing?’ And hurried out again. Martha, engulfed in a pain, most passionately resented that uncommitted virgin with her determination not to be disturbed by suffering. But it was to the practical cool little voice that she was submitted; and when, at some indeterminate time later, the nurse came back, to say that Martha was being a good girl, and in the morning she would have a comfortable bed, she was able to achieve a humorous gasp that she wouldn’t mind a comfortable bed now.

  ‘Well, what can we do?’ demanded the pink girl. ‘We can’t help it if all the babies decided to get born at once, can we?’ She vanished again, remarking, ‘We’ve got three of them out, that’s something. Let’s pray no more of you come in tonight.’

  Martha no longer had the energy to achieve a mild amusement. The small lit place in her brain was dimming most alarmingly with the pains. Every time, the light nearly went out; always, it flickered precariously and shone up again. Martha noted that something new was happening to time. The watch that lay six inches from her nose on her crooked arm said the pains were punctual at two minutes. But from the moment that the warning hot wave of pain swept up her back, she entered a place where there was no time at all. An agony so unbelievable gripped her that her astounded and protesting mind cried out it was impossible such pain should be. It was a pain so violent that it was no longer pain, but a condition of being. Every particle of flesh shrieked out, while the wave spurted like an electric current from somewhere in her backbone and went through her in shock after shock. The wave receded, however, just as she had decided she would disintegrate under it; and then she felt the fist that gripped her slowly loosen. Through the sweat in her eyes she saw that ten seconds had passed; she went limp, into a state of perfect painlessness, an exquisite exhaustion in which the mere idea of pain seemed impossible - it was impossible that it could recur again. And as soon as the slow flush of sensation began, the condition of painlessness seemed as impossible as the pain had seemed only a few moments before. They were two states of being, utterly disconnected, without a bridge, and Martha found herself in a condition of anxious but exasperated anger that she could not remember the agony fifteen seconds after it had ended. She was now lying almost naked, her great tight knotted belly sticking up in a purple lump, watching with fascination how it contracted and strained, while she kept alert the determination not to lose control of the process; while she was lit with curiosity as to the strange vagaries of time and, above all, and increasingly, almost to the point of weeping fury, that all her concentration, all her self-consciousness, could not succeed in creating the state of either pain or painlessness while its opposite was in her. It was a complete failure of her, the free spirit: how was it possible not to remember something that had passed ten seconds before, and would recur so soon? The anger at her failure was strong enough nearly, but not quite, to quench that part of her mind which must stay alert. She sobered herself. When the wave of pain had receded, and she lay spent, she was grimly flogging her mind to imagine the quality of the pain that had just gone. Impossible. And when she was writhing in the grip of the giant fist, she was gasping with determination to imagine no pain. She could not. With all her determination, she could not. There were two Marthas, and there was nothing to bridge them. Failure. Complete failure. She was helpless with rage. She heard the pain-gripped Martha cry out, ‘Oh, God, oh God!’ and she was curious at the ancient being in her that cried out to God. Damned liar, coward, idiot! said Martha to herself from across the gulf. It only needs that you should call out ‘Mother!’ And behold, Martha, that free spirit, understood from the exquisite shore of complete, empty non-sensation that she had been groaning out ‘Mother, Mother, Mother!’ Without a flicker of feeling in any part of her body, she felt the tears of failure roll down her face; and looked up through them to see the pink nurse looking down at her with unmistakable disappointment.

  ‘Well, dear,’ said the girl disapprovingly, ‘it’s no good carrying on like that yet.’ Her plump little hands, tightly sealed in pink rubber, went plunging into Martha’s body. ‘Not nearly yet, you know,’ she remarked, regarding Martha while she grunted and rolled in another pain. ‘And anyway,’ heard Martha, the young bright voice coming distorted through hot agony, ‘we’ve got to get this other baby born before we can attend to you. Do you think you could hold it a b
it?’

  Martha saw the door open, and a stretcher wheeled in. Suddenly the room was filled with people. She saw a woman, similarly grotesque, inhuman, grunting, being rolled over on to the other narrow high table, while Dr Stern and a couple of nurses stood about with a look of intent concentration. Then the white screens went up and hid them. Martha looked away, and submitted to another trial. The woman on the other table seemed to be having pains about every half-minute; what Martha’s determination could not achieve, her nerves could: she suffered in her flesh that other woman’s pains, like a counterpoint, a faint but faithful echo of her own, in jarring opposition to her own rhythm. Suddenly the sounds of striving flesh ceased, a faint smell of chloroform was in the air; Martha found herself avidly breathing it in. Instruments clinked; she heard Dr Stern’s voice giving orders; she heard the stiff rustle of starch. There was a gasp, and a baby started crying.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ nagged Martha to her child, ‘get yourself out of there quickly.’ The child, however, was crouched waiting for the next spring forward; and Martha watched the flesh shrink and harden in the new contraction. This time she heard herself give a shriek. She no longer cared at all. All she fought for was to drag herself as soon as possible out of each gulf, not to give in more than she had to.