COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  A pause. Then Alice let out a small, resigned chuckle, as a suggestion that she might, at some future time, be prepared to find her present mood ridiculous.

  Martha said, ‘We might just as well be a couple of cows.’

  Into this shared misery suddenly entered Stella, with a cheerful matronly smile, bearing flowers, her plump body graceful even now in its folds of dark silk. Martha looked at her, and noticed that her reaction to the sight of Stella’s protuberant stomach was one of repugnance; Stella was as distasteful to her as poor Caroline now was.

  Stella looked at the two women and stopped abruptly. ‘What on earth is wrong with you? It’s the first day they’d let me in, I’ve been every day to ask.’

  ‘It’s no good coming to see us,’ remarked Alice flatly. ‘We both wish we were dead.’

  Stella gave them a shocked look, then sat midway between them, as if she were distributing her friendship equally.

  ‘What’s the matter? The boys said you were doing fine, and I’ve seen your babies. They’re lovely. I do wish I’d started when you did, I’d have got it over by now.’ She was looking anxiously from one to the other; and recognition of duty to a fellow woman stirred in Alice and Martha simultaneously: they aroused themselves and thanked her for the beautiful flowers she had brought.

  ‘Did you have an awful time in labour?’ she asked, with bright eyes.

  Alice said indifferently, ‘Oh - mine just fell out.’

  Martha said honestly, for now, at this wide distance of five days, she could barely remember the experience, ‘There’s nothing to it.’

  After a pause Stella said jealously that Dr Stern said she had narrow hips. Since there was only the disapproving silence that she was used to from these two unaccountable women, and which confused her, she went on to demand practically. ‘If it’s easy as all that, why are you going on like this? And look at your hair!’ she added disapprovingly. ‘You look awful, both of you.’

  Almost, Martha and Alice were stirred into their duty to be attractive at all costs. But they subsided again into lethargy. Quite soon, Stella flushed with shocked disappointment, got up and said that if she had got it over and done with, they wouldn’t find her behaving like this! ‘It’s not nice for your husbands,’ she concluded on the familiar note, which succeeded only in eliciting a faint giggle from Alice and an exasperated sigh from Martha.

  She was on the point of leaving, when both women felt guilty, and Alice spoke for them both when she raised herself in bed and said appealingly, ‘Now, look here, Stella, don’t take any notice. We’re in a bad mood.’

  Stella brightened, glanced gratefully towards them both, and left radiant with happy maternity.

  They slumped back into the comfort of their beds.

  ‘Poor Stella,’ remarked Alice. ‘Little does she know.’ Then she giggled, and suddenly burst into tears. She cried out that she wished she had never got married, she knew now that she had never loved Willie at all; she couldn’t understand how she had been so crazy as to tie herself down to being nothing but a piece of livestock to be stuffed three times a week, and then swollen like dropsy, and then a cow streaming with milk, and her breasts were so sore she couldn’t bear it. ‘Look at these silly bitches,’ she said, meaning the nurses, ‘all they have to think about is boyfriends, and going out, and earning money and having nice clothes – they’ve got some sense, at least.’ Half crying, half laughing, she continued until the babies were brought in. Then she stopped herself, and fed her child with an air of tired endurance.

  But later that afternoon Martha saw that she was being bad-tempered with Willie, and felt envious, because this was evidence of more emotional energy than she could command. Next morning, when the stars were extinguished as the electric light came plunging on, she noted that Alice immediately shot up in bed, then sat regarding her chest, which was padded tight in wads of wool, with a grim smile. She stripped off the wool, exposed the two knotted swollen breasts, and then remarked cheerfully, ‘Oh, well, who cares?’ She combed her black hair, applied lipstick, and announced to Martha as she lit a cigarette that life wasn’t as bad as she had thought.

  From which Martha deduced that by the next day she, too, might be over ‘the reaction’. And so it proved.

  But, in her gay competence of the next morning, she knew that she was left with a certain uneasiness. Nature, that great mother, might have done better, she felt. To remove the veil of illusion, to allow the sustaining conviction of necessity to fail, even for a moment, must leave her female children always helpless against a fear that it might happen again, and with as little warning.

  Chapter Four

  On the same afternoon, Alice and Martha stood on the steps of the nursing home, expelled from the community of women back into ordinary life, each carrying a white bundle of baby, each clinging tightly to her husband’s arm.

  Willie remarked that there were dozens of aunts and so on waiting to welcome Alice home. She murmured, ‘Oh, God!’ and emitted her high, helpless giggle, looking inquiringly towards Martha for support; for Douglas had just told Martha that she must expect a similar ordeal. That it would be an ordeal was an axiom with them all.

  Martha was just about to get into the car, when another drew up. She saw an immensely large young woman, surrounded by older women, go towards the building. She recognized Marnie Van Rensberg. She ran after her and stopped her. At first Marnie did not seem to recognize Martha. Then she and her mother exclaimed and kissed her. Mrs Van Rensberg was in black - black lace hat, black crêpe, an enormous black bag stuffed with knitting. Marnie was as broad as a bed, and smocked in pink roses. Her honest, happy face beamed under crimped fair hair.

  ‘You’ve got a lovely baby, Matty,’ she said enthusiastically and for a moment Caroline passed from one to another of the attendant sisters and aunts. Then Marnie seemed to stiffen; she clutched her mother’s arm for a few seconds, then she cried out, ‘Oh, Mom!’

  ‘Quick,’ said Mrs Van Rensberg. She hurried Marnie into the home, both women sending warm smiles back towards Martha as they went. Marnie’s, however, rather strained. The flock of women entered the building; and were received by Miss Galbind. A young man, stiff in his Sunday suit, stood on the steps. Presumably the husband. He passed his hand nervously over his plastered-down hair, and went in. The steps were empty.

  Martha went back to the car. Douglas said that they had all agreed it would do the girls good to drop in for a drink at the Club before going home. The Burrells’ car was already departing down the avenue of frangipanis. Alice was turning to wave and smile back at Martha. Thus had they so often set off on one of those long nights of dancing. But it was not the same.

  ‘Perhaps we could go to the Club after Caroline’s asleep?’ suggested Martha.

  But Douglas said, ‘No, the boys want to give the kids the once over. Just for a minute - It’ll do you good after being cooped up for so long.’

  They arrived therefore on the veranda of the Club among the bare brown legs and the beer glasses, and were vociferously welcomed. Both babies had been celebrated continuously for some days now; their actual appearance was felt, at least by the mothers, to be an anticlimax. After a few minutes Martha’s look at Alice received support for she rose, slightly unsteady, and said that it was time the little so-and-so was fed. Martha made a similarly cheerful remark; for a few minutes the two women stood clutching their babies amid a knot of admiring girls, and then the young couples separated to go home.

  Next morning both were visited by the nurse appointed by the authorities for this purpose. Sister Doll, armed with pamphlets, charts, scales and an insistence that to ‘pick up’ a crying child, or to feed it five minutes before the clock said it should be fed, would be - her tone, shocked and grave, conveyed it - no less than a crime against nature. Alice and Martha exchanged ribald scorn at Sister Doll over the telephone, but the fact was that their lives were now regulated by her weekly visits, periods which were broken not into days and nights, but into shorter i
ntervals by the clock striking six, ten, two, six, ten.

  They would sit, both tense in every nerve, in their separate flats, with their eyes on the clock, their breasts tingling with milk, while the infants screamed in their cradles for an hour, two hours, three hours - until the second hand touched the hour, and they might spring up and lift the child to be fed. The strain of it was something to be acknowledged only in half-humorous grumbling remarks over the telephone.

  Alice, much weaker clay than Martha, broke first. She rang up one morning to announce, in the hushed shocked tones of one who is prepared to take the burden of a sin on herself, that she had fed the child in the night. Martha was silent and censorious.

  Martha would lie awake for hours, listening to Caroline crying, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and responding gaily to Douglas’s admonitions that she should bear up - for he sometimes woke. The most she would do was to feed the child a few spoonfuls of water, as the nursing home and Sister Doll recommended, in the hopes that it might be deceived into thinking itself fed. Those nights were a torture. She could not understand why the crying should so work on her nerves. Caroline had only to stir and let out a single cry, for Martha to spring tinglingly awake. She tried to pretend it was a child belonging to some other woman; after all, the baby through the wall in the next flat cried often, and Martha did not hear it. But it was good for Caroline to cry, Sister Doll said so; and her character would be ruined for life if Martha was to give in.

  After a few days Alice - now almost hostile in her determination to break the taboos - rang up to say briefly to hell with everyone, she was putting her son on the bottle, she couldn’t stand it any longer. Martha received this too with polite disapproval.

  But now she began to worry that her own milk was getting less. She worried all through the day, listening, as it were, to the activities of her breasts as she had listened to the movements of Caroline in her body. By four every afternoon, with Caroline already screaming for food, she would anxiously hold her breasts, still limp and half empty; she would even, desperate with worry, lift the baby from her crib half an hour before the clock allowed, with an instinctive feeling that the warmth of the little thing against her might encourage the flow of milk.

  Then Sister Doll weighed the child and found that she had achieved half an ounce of flesh less than was proper. Martha was quite frantic, and began drinking milk herself, pints of it, and horrid preparations of baked flour which were supposed to assist the process. And still Caroline cried, and Martha’s nerves vibrated in extraordinary response, as if the child were connected to her flesh by innumerable invisible fibres. That energetic, angry wail seemed to scrape direct on her backbone like a sharp fiddle on a bone. She would hang over the crib, hands locked behind her back to prevent them from reaching out to the child, watching the scarlet little face moving open-mouthed from side to side to find the breast, while her heart beat with anxious pity.

  She would not, however, weaken like that traitor Alice, who had routed Sister Doll, and fed her child not only from the bottle, but regularly in the middle of the night, a practice which was bound to ruin its stomach. ‘Oh, well, dear,’ said Alice forbearingly, to Martha’s disapproval, ‘I suppose you are right, but I just couldn’t stick it, that’s all.’

  And Martha looked secretly at the small Richard, and agreed that he seemed to be surviving under the treatment remarkably well.

  From one day to the next, Martha changed front. Caroline let the breasts go without protest. She was taking the bottle inside twenty-four hours, and Martha had tied up her suffering breasts with linen - their work was over.

  Peace at last.

  Mrs Quest looked at Caroline with an odd little smile, and then remarked with the bright guilty laugh in which was the note of triumph that always stung Martha, ‘I suppose you’ve been starving her as I starved you.’

  And now Martha was free again, she proceeded to starve herself. By dint of literally not eating anything, she had lost twenty pounds at the end of six weeks. Better, she had regained that slimness which had been hers before she had married. Looking incredulously into the mirror - for she never looked into one without preparing to be surprised at what she might see there - she confronted a slight, firm young woman with high breasts, a determined mouth, and tawny-coloured hair in rough curls all over her head.

  She was herself, though a new self; and Caroline, as the rules said she ought to be, was content to take milk from bottles at stated hours. The nights were calm. Martha was lifting her head to look about her, with the burden of maternity properly regulated and herself free to see what life might have to offer, when authority spoke again: all of Douglas’s generation were whisked into uniform and into a camp just outside the city. It was said they might train there for some months; that was the rumour. Martha was adjusting herself to a life which would receive a husband released for afternoons or an occasional weekend, when a fresh surge of rumours settled into a decision.

  All the men were to be sent at once up north. At one stroke, two evenings from now, several hundred of them, the junior civil servants, administrators and executives, the clerks and the businessmen and the lawyers - that firm masculine cement that held the community safe and steady - would be sent away. After the long months of waiting for precisely this moment, of eagerness held in check but fed steadily by the phrases, the ritual dancing and drinking, it was as if a bell had struck, but on the wrong note. For, while it was understood that the boys would be given a bang of a send-off, and the clubs and the dance halls dedicated themselves for the occasion, it was observable that there was a curious look of uncertainty, even anticlimax, on faces hitherto lit by wild excitement.

  Late that last evening, in the crowded gilded halls of McGrath’s Hotel, while the band played from its bower of ferns, Binkie Maynard, his fat body encased in tight khaki, sat at the head of a long packed table, fingering a glass, his heavy reddened face solemn with thought.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he observed, frowning, ‘They must know something we don’t.’ Heads nodded around the table; to relinquish authority to them would come easily to none of these men. ‘I mean to say, what’s the good of just getting us together and sending us off? Where are we going to be trained? It’s not good enough, they don’t tell us anything.’

  ‘It’s wartime, kid,’ observed Maisie, who sat, plump and fair, beside him, smiling maternally.

  ‘Well, but all the same. They’re pushing us around. I’m not going to fight a parcel of …’ But complete lack of information made it impossible to finish. ‘I mean to say, I’m all for fighting the Huns — ‘ He paused; the words had given off the wrong echo. ‘The Jerries, I mean,’ he amended carefully. ‘They’ve got to be put in their place. They want to take our colonies away, that’s all they’re after. But there’s the Wops - they’re not even worth fighting as far as I can see.’

  There was a pause. The fifty people listening waited hopefully for that one word from the pastor of their days of youth which would allow them with good grace to board that train the next day. The violins, which had been sobbing through the changes of ‘Black Eyes’, stopped, were joined by a drum, and swung into ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. That song, whose impertinent, cocky mood expressed a Britain whose vigour was still in mortgage, sounded an alien note here. Half the table took it up; it petered out weakly.

  ‘It’s all very well,’ concluded Binkie indignantly, his black locks untidy over flushed civilian brows, his buttons undone, his shoulder tab crooked - Maisie reached over to straighten it - ‘it’s all very well, but somebody’s messed something up, that’s what I think.’ Instantaneous agreement. It was the anguished wail of the administrator who must become a pawn, the administrator who has no reason to have much faith in the process of government.

  ‘What I mean to say,’ pursued Binkie with difficulty, ‘it’s not fair!’

  The band had exhausted ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’, and offered ‘The Siegfried Line’. It was no good - the mood was wrong. The violins retired a l
ittle, the drums and saxophones came forward and stood looking at Binkie.

  Binkie tipped back his head, drained his beer, and produced automatically, ‘Well, to hell with everything!’ Then, in a chant: ‘I’m all right, are you all right?’

  The crowd chanted back, ‘We’re all right, we’re all right!’

  Binkie, having abandoned the difficulties of politics to his betters for the duration, climbed on a chair. He raised his arms; his tunic strained; a button flew off and Maisie stooped to pick it up.

  ‘Isn’t he a crazy kid?’ she crooned admiringly.

  The room stilled, grinning at the familiar sight, waiting for the moment when those commanding arms would descend.

  ‘“Roll Out the Barrel”!’ shouted Binkie; and the obedient orchestra crashed into the familiar tune, as Binkie’s arms descended, releasing the din of thumping feet and yelling voices.

  Nobody went to bed that night. All over the city next day wives and mothers waited for the hour of sunset in the condition of hypnotized calm that the hilarious mood of the men made necessary.

  The train was to leave at six. By five-thirty the long grey platform was packed. The train was waiting, its empty windows like so many frames waiting to be filled, and the sky over it tumultuous with a gold-and-crimson sunset. A band was playing, hardly audible in the din of talk and singing. A warm breeze smelling of sun and petrol stirred a hundred yellow streamers that idled above the heads of the crowd, which parted, shouting greetings, as the men in uniform came roaring through. They were all drunk and singing. With them came the girls, running alongside, singing and flushed with the same intoxication.

  Someone had blundered again, for there were only five minutes before the train was supposed to leave. A wave of khaki washed up over the train; the frames were filled with grinning soldiers. The relatives and friends shook themselves out into groups below the windows. The band was playing ‘Tipperary’.