A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

A long time passed; she rolled her eyes to the window and saw that it showed grey light; a single white star hung quivering; it faded; a pink flush crept up the sky. She heard the sound of a wet brush on a floor. It was a native woman, on her knees with a scrubbing brush. The screens had gone from the other white bed. Martha tensed and groaned, and the native woman raised her head, looked over, and smiled encouragement. There was no one else in the room. Martha could hear the cacophony of screaming babies from the other end of the building.

  The native woman gave a quick look into the passage, and then came over to Martha. She was young, her dark face polished and smiling. She wore a neat white cloth on her head. She laid her wet dirty hand on Martha’s striving stomach. ‘Bad,’ she said, in her rich voice. ‘Bad. Bad.’ As a fresh pain came, she said, ‘Let the baby come, let the baby come, let the baby come.’ It was a croon, an old nurse’s song. Martha trembled with exhaustion, and tensed herself, but the woman smiled down and sang, ‘Yes, missus, yes, let it come, let it come.’

  Martha let the cold knot of determination loosen, she let herself go, she let her mind go dark into the pain.

  ‘That’s right, missus, that’s right, that’s right.’

  Suddenly the hand was withdrawn, leaving a cold wetness on her stomach. Martha looked, and saw that the native woman was on her knees with the scrubbing brush, and the young pink nurse stood beside her, looking suspiciously at the scrubbing woman. The brush was going slosh, slosh, wetly and regularly over the floor. Martha listened to the sound as if it were the pulse of her own nature, and did not listen as the pink nurse lifted her legs, levered them energetically up and down, and said, ‘That’s the stuff, push!’ Later, Martha heard the bright voice calling from the door, ‘Yes, doctor, she’s ripe!’ The room was full of people again. She was sucking in chloroform like an addict, and no longer even remembered that she had been determined to see the child born.

  When her eyes cleared, she caught a glimpse of Dr Stern holding up a naked pallid infant, its dark hair plastered wet in streaks to its head, mouthing frustratedly at the air. Martha momentarily lost consciousness again, and emerged, feeling it must be years later, to see Dr Stern, in the same position, still holding the white baby, which looked rather like a forked parsnip and was making strangled, grumbling gasps. Two nurses were watching him. They looked triumphant and pleased. This humanity comforted Martha. She heard one say, ‘A lovely little girl, isn’t she?’ Then the pink nurse bent over her and began lifting handfuls of Martha’s now slack stomach, and squeezing it like oranges. Martha shrieked, with the intention of being heard. ‘Oh, drat it,’ said the nurse; and the dome of white chloroform came down again over Martha’s face.

  This time her eyes opened on a scene of white beds, and faces leaning against white pillows. After a time, she realized that she was pillowed at last in comfort. Five woman were in the other beds. Excitement flooded her, and she attempted to sit up. The lower part of her body announced that it was bruised and sore, and did not want to move. Martha raised herself on her hands and the woman next to her asked how she felt. Martha was struck by the lazy self-absorption of that voice. She said she felt fine, and the woman nodded. But her eyes were on the door. It opened, and the pink nurse entered with five babies balanced all over her arms. They were yelling, with hungry open mouths. The babies were plopped neatly one after another on to the beds, and gathered in by the waiting mothers. The pink nurse, empty-armed, arrived at Martha’s bed, and inquired, ‘Well, how are you?’

  ‘Where’s my baby?’ asked Martha anxiously.

  ‘She’s having a nice rest,’ said the nurse, already on her way out.

  ‘But I haven’t seen her yet,’ said Martha, weak tears behind her lids.

  ‘You don’t want to disturb her, do you?’ said the nurse disapprovingly.

  The door shut. The woman, whose long full breast sloped already into the baby’s mouth, looked up and said, ‘You’d better do as they want, dear. It saves trouble. They’ve got their own ideas.’

  Martha, cheated and empty, lay and watched the other women suckle their babies. It was intolerable that after nine months of close companionship with the creature, now announced as a girl, she might not even make its acquaintance. There was something impossible in the idea that yesterday the child had been folded in her flesh and it now lay rooms away, washed and clothed, in a cradle with its name on it. It made her uneasy; she wanted to see it - she even felt irrationally that the child might have died at birth and they were lying to her.

  Then she remembered the moment when she had seen it lifted, mouthing and struggling for air, and winced suddenly with remembered pain. She had entered on a new state. The shadow of the pain she had felt, though not the terrible intensity of it, threatened her. She must not think of it, as otherwise the bruised flesh of her stomach began to contract in remembered waves of pain. Also, the absolute peace of those moments between the pains had gone. She was sore and aching, and her body was gripped tight in a stiff roll of stuff, under which she could feel the slack flesh folded together.

  The babies lapsed into content all round her, and she watched them being taken away. The elation she felt, the achievement, slackened into disappointment.

  When Douglas came in that afternoon, beaming, rubbing his hands with pride, smelling strongly of beer, her intention to appeal to him vanished in dislike. He announced with pride that he and Willie had been giving it a bang with the boys ail night, he had not been to bed, he had rung up the home at half-hour intervals until Miss Galbind had told him he was a nuisance. He said, too, that the baby was fine.

  ‘I haven’t seen her,’ said Martha faintly.

  ‘Oh, well, they know best,’ he said.

  At this moment Mrs Quest entered, tremulous with emotion, and said that the baby was beautiful, but that she was quite sure the nurses had no idea how to treat a new baby; she had a good mind to go to the matron. At this Martha reacted with the announcement that the nursing-home people certainly knew what they were doing.

  When Douglas and Mrs Quest left, Martha lay and quivered with anger and frustration. It was late afternoon. For the third time she saw the white bundles brought in and handed to the mothers, while she lay watching.

  Late that evening, after the babies had been fed for the last time, Miss Galbind briskly entered and asked if everyone was happy, and Martha inquired when she could see her baby.

  ‘You want to see her, do you?’ inquired Miss Galbind reasonably. ‘Oh, well, I suppose you may as well.’ She departed, having shed friendly good nights around the room; and Martha raised herself, waiting for the moment.

  But it seemed Miss Galbind was in no hurry; half an hour crawled by, while Martha watched the door. At last the pink nurse entered, with a tight white bundle, and deposited it carelessly on the bed. ‘There’s your daughter,’ she announced. ‘Five minutes, now.’

  Under the jealous inspection of the pink nurse, Martha turned back the flap of blanket, and saw a tiny flushed sleeping face. Again curiosity flooded over into a passionate protective tenderness, and she held the baby close; but the nurse, restless hovering at the side of the bed, decided it was enough.

  ‘Now then,’ she announced, ‘you’ll have enough of her in the next few months, I bet!’ And with this she deftly removed the bundle, and went out with it, switching off the lights.

  The other five women had already laid themselves down for the night. Martha, who to her fury once again discovered that she wanted only to cry, looked around for support. She caught the eye of the woman in the next bed, who said kindly, ‘It’s no good getting upset. They’ll let you have her in the morning, I expect.’ She turned herself carefully on to her side, and shut her eyes, in an obvious determination to submit to the routine and get it over. She remarked, with closed eyes, ‘This is my third. I always say I’ll never come here again, but it’s easier on the whole. You can do what you like when you get home, that’s a comfort.’ She began breathing deeply.

  Martha lay tensely awake. S
he heard a car drive up: another baby was due to be born; but already the condition of waiting for a baby to be born seemed far behind. She felt a calm superiority over the women who still had to go through with it. But when, later, doors opened and shut, feet hurried, and a woman began moaning down the passage, she had to bury her head in the pillow, because each moan seemed to drag a wave of pain out of her own stomach. She could not sleep. Excitement was beating through her. She was longing for the morning - perhaps then she might be allowed to feed the baby. The women slept heavily all around her, reminding her, with their heavy breathing, of cows on a dark hillside. But her mind was at the other end of the building, in the room full of babies. She watched the stars move across the windows, and wished they might hurry, hurry, hurry to the dawn. Then a baby began crying, a faint persistent wail, and soon they were all crying. The women began stirring and listening in their beds.

  The woman in the next bed said in a resigned voice, ‘Well, they’re as tough as anything, that’s a comfort.’ She was lying tense; Martha saw she was crying. This upset her - the mother of three, calmly resigned, had given her strength to bear her own childish impatiences.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Martha anxiously. Then: ‘Are the babies hungry?’

  The woman gave a weak laugh through her tears, and said, ‘They can’t be hungry till six. It’s against the rules.’ Then she turned herself over with another cautious heave, and remarked, ‘I always cry like a leaking tap for weeks after I have a baby. Don’t take any notice.’

  For a while Martha saw how the women turned and tossed, listening; then the chorus of crying dimmed and they slept again. Martha heard the cocks crow, and then again. She could see the Seven Sisters, a faint clustering glow over a spiring black gum tree. The babies began to scream again. It was nearly dawn. The sky was lightening. The women sat up, blinking, as the lights came on and a bright gay voice shouted, ‘Get ready, girls.’ It was morning, though the stars were shining outside. It was half past four.

  ‘What’s funny is this,’ said the woman next to Martha, with tolerant good nature, ‘it’s supposed to be six, but even the nurses can’t stick it out, so they stretch it a bit.’

  Half an hour passed. ‘My breasts are dripping,’ said one woman. ‘Every morning my bed’s flooded,’ said another. Martha was helpless with envy. Her breasts were still limp.

  This time six small yelling bundles came in on a trolley. Martha received her daughter with trembling eagerness. The baby was crying; it looked, to Martha, distressed, hot and miserable. She took the little thing, and held the yelling round mouth to her nipple. It moved in sudden desperate silence this way and that, eyes showing anxious gleams of blue, and then – miracle! – the lips fastened and began to suck. Strong waves of suction passed through Martha and into her womb with contractions of pain. She did not expect this, and moved uncomfortably, gripping herself against it. The baby sucked steadily, small slits of hazy blue showing in the tiny red face. Martha daringly undid the tight roll, and the infant fell loosely into the shape of a baby, so that Martha was able to hold it to herself comfortably, instead of in the shape of a papoose. She moved it over to the other breast, admonishing both to be quick and supply milk.

  Miss Galbind came springing silently in, and stood watchfully over Martha. ‘All right,’ she announced, after a minute, ‘she’s a good sucker.’ With this she removed the child, rolled it again into the papoose of white blanket, and said, ‘That’s enough for a start.’ She went out, the baby tucked under her arm like a long parcel sticking out behind.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the woman in the next bed, giving Martha an amused look. ‘You can do anything to a baby, even bounce it.’ Martha therefore lay back and refused to worry. She had accepted this woman as a guide; she was able to because she disliked the discipline as Martha did, and yet could dismiss it all as another of those unaccountable bureaucratic stupidities thought up to plague honest females - that was her attitude. Martha found the tolerant matron - she was perhaps thirty - frightening because she had three children and was so satisfied to be a maternal housewife, but at the same time inexpressibly comforting. Through her, Martha was accepted into this community of women, all so much older than herself, all absorbed into the rhythm of eating, sleeping and nursing.

  When Mrs Quest and Douglas entered that afternoon, it was as if foreigners had come from a strange country. A gay message from Alice in the next room meant more than Douglas’s talk of parties and the Club; and Mrs Quest’s announcement that it was absurd to feed babies to the clock found Martha calmly determined that everything was as it should be.

  Next morning, when she woke, her breasts were heavy, and she received the baby with pride that she had milk for her. She was now in a state of settled calm elation, she could not conceive that she had ever imagined anything but a girl child, or a child in the slightest way different from this one. A faint warning voice from the well of fatality did remark that a girl child was in the direct line of matriarchy she so feared, but it left her indifferent. This tiny, delightful creature, with its exquisite hands, its small round red face, cuddled with such perfect trust to Martha that she could not believe she could be anything but good for it, and to it.

  She was now very uncomfortable with the pressure of the milk. Her breasts were swollen like two full skins attached to her body. Her determination, fed by the book, that it was her duty to femininity to preserve the shape of them fell before the surging plenty nature offered. In the night she woke, hearing the yelling roomful of babies down the corridor, and her breasts swelled and stung in answer; and she found her sides wet with useless milk. In the morning, the women would sit up in bed, helplessly laughing, as they supported their enormous breasts with her hands and let the milk spurt away in streams into the cloth that had bound them. And the babies, who had been restless and hungry for several hours, would come fighting to the engorged breasts and choke there. The faint sweet smell of milk filled the women’s nostrils all day.

  Soon Martha found herself light and easy in bed; slipping her hands down under the tight hard cloth over her stomach, she pulled in the muscles and felt them respond, a hard wall under the rolls of fat. Then the woman in the next bed announced to her doctor that five days in this factory was enough. She climbed unsteadily to her feet, and went. Martha noticed with a pang of apprehension that this woman, who in her bed had seemed so light and easy, on her feet was heavy and shapeless – a veritable wet nurse of a female. She missed her when she had gone. They put into her bed a girl having her first baby with precisely Martha’s looks of determined cheerfulness, under which showed anxiety. It upset Martha, that hard gaiety. Then Alice came to see her from the next room; and she saw her as not at all radiant and pretty, as she had been on the first morning after the birth, but pale, tired, bedraggled, with a loose stomach and full clumsy hips; Alice was unhappy. Her helpless giggle rang out repeatedly as she complained that she couldn’t stick these damned women in uniform - the Lord help her, she said with a shocked smile; if she thought she had been as inhumanly efficient as that when she was a nurse, she’d hang herself. It was clear that she felt she had.

  She complained they were never left in peace for half an hour together. If it wasn’t cups of tea or bedpans, it was visitors, babies, or having to wash, she said; she couldn’t sleep at night for listening for the babies crying. She burst into tears herself, and Miss Galbind, entering hastily, said, ‘Now, really, Mrs Burrell! Surely you should know better than that.’ Alice was led away, sobbing.

  Martha was quite shocked at this collapse. The next day, however, she found herself heavy, languid, tired; the wings of elation had folded under her. She thought that when she got home she would be ugly and shapeless; she would be bound for months and months of servitude, without any escape from it; she found herself regarding the infant Caroline with a detached scrutiny that resulted in the faint, bored thought that this was a baby like any other, of no interest to anybody, not even herself. She would certainly grow u
p to be like these women about her, a dull housewife with no purpose in life but to continue the cycle of procreation. Martha found herself disliking the child, hating her swollen breasts, and filled with disgust at the way milk flowed over her a dozen times a day like a tide. She found herself no longer seated up in bed, bright and animated, chatting to Douglas about the parties, questioning him about what So-and-so had said, but lying flat on her back with no desire ever to sit up again.

  Miss Galbind came in to ask how she did, and she was astounded to find herself in tears. But it seemed Miss Galbind found nothing surprising in this.

  ‘It’s the reaction, dear,’ she explained; and Martha, who could never feel anything but resentment at the idea that her emotions might be the result of predictable chemical processes in her body, said, ‘I don’t care a damn what it is, but I wish I’d never had a baby at all.’

  Miss Galbind listened and clicked her tongue, clearly because she felt it might do Martha good to be disapproved of. Martha found that her things were being collected together, and she was invited to get out of bed and walk next door. Miss Galbind said it would be nice for Martha and her friend Mrs Burrell to be together and cheer each other up.

  Martha found that she and Alice had been put in a kind of enclosed veranda with glass around three sides. The sun came streaming into the white, shining place. Alice lay in bed on her back, looking up at the ceiling. She rolled her eyes towards Martha, and remarked indifferently, ‘Oh, so it’s you.’

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Martha, grimly.

  Miss Galbind looked from one to the other, and remarked, ‘You’ll both feel better in a couple of days.’

  Martha got into the new bed and lay flat. From depths of utter indifference to life, the two women lay and looked at a ceiling whose flat emptiness seemed to mirror their condition.

  After some time Alice remarked, with a shocked giggle, ‘I hate that damned brat, and that’s the truth.’ ‘So do I,’ said Martha at once.