COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  ‘I know, you mentioned it,’ said Martha coldly. She swiftly put satin, flannel, scissors and pins into a drawer, as if concealing them, and faced her mother like - the image came pat to Mrs Quest - an animal defending her cubs.

  The older woman said, laughing, ‘Well, there’s no need to look like that. After all, I have had experience and you have had none.’

  Again the vision of Mr Quest hovered between them. Mrs Quest, doing her duty, said like a lesson, ‘Your father says he thinks you are too young to have a baby, and you should consider what you’re doing.’

  At this Martha flung herself into a chair, and laughed helplessly; and after a moment Mrs Quest joined her in an inquiring peal.

  ‘I’ll make tea,’ said Martha, springing up.

  They drank it while Mrs Quest explained exactly how this child should be brought up. Martha said nothing. At the end of an hour she exclaimed abruptly, her voice seething with anger, ‘You know, this is my baby.’ At once Mrs Quest’s eyes filled with tears; she was the small girl who had been slapped for something she has not done. Martha felt guilty, and told herself that her mother could not help it. She said quickly, ‘You must stay and have lunch.’

  Mrs Quest had planned to stay the day. But she rose and said unhappily that she had shopping to do. She left, filled again with the conviction of bitter injustice, her heart aching with love refused.

  She went back to the farm and told Mr Quest that as usual he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, that Martha was quite wild with happiness. Then she went off into a long complaint of how Martha’s ideas about children were absurd and she was bound to ruin them.

  After listening in silence for some time, Mr Quest rose and took out his writing things. ‘God knows why you two have to go on like this,’ he said bitterly. ‘Why? why? why?’ His words drifted out of the window and died among the noises of owl and cricket. He sat stiffly holding the pen between his fingers, staring out of the window to where the Seven Sisters burned low over the glare from the fireswept mountains, a pale smudge against that nearer conflagration which still sent wings of flame up into the great black starry vault of the sky. ‘One would think,’ he observed to this scene of splendour where his mind dwelt at ease, ‘that people would have some sense of proportion, considering the state the world’s in.’

  A pause. He turned his pen angrily between his fingers. Mrs Quest knitted behind him in silence; she had that evening begun on a jacket for the baby Jeffrey.

  ‘But I suppose it makes no difference one way or the other,’ he went on. Mrs Quest, clicked her tongue protestingly.

  Mr Quest, with a final, confirming glance at the stars, the fiery mountain, the empty veld, murmured, ‘After all - those stars are millions of years away, so they say …’

  ‘My dear,’ said Mrs Quest again, uneasily.

  Mr Quest’s pen was motionless in mid-air. His eyes were wide at the sky. ‘So if one damned foolish girl wants to make a mess of her life …” He lowered his pen carefully to the paper and began to write.

  When her mother had left, Martha cupped her hands protectingly over her stomach, and murmured to the creature within that nothing would be allowed to harm it, no pressure would deform it, freedom would be its gift. She, Martha, the free spirit, would protect the creature from her, Martha, the maternal force; the maternal Martha, that enemy, would not be allowed to enter the picture. It was as one independent being to another that Martha spoke; and her hands on her flesh were light, as if even this pressure might be an unforgivable imposition.

  To Douglas she forcibly outlined the things they must avoid in this child’s future. First, even to suggest that the child might be one sex rather than another might have deplorable results - to be born as it chose was its first inalienable right. Secondly they, the parents, must never try to form its mind in any way whatsoever. Thirdly, it must be sent to a progressive school, where it might survive the process of education unmutilated - for Martha felt, like so many others, that progressive schools were in some way outside society, vacuums of progress, as it were. If this last necessity involved their sending the child at an early age to a country where there was a progressive school, then so much the better; for a child without any parents at all clearly had a greater chance of survival as a whole personality.

  To all this Douglas easily agreed. The ease with which he did agree disconcerted Martha slightly; for her convictions had after all come from the bitterest schooling, which he had escaped. He did remark at one point that the war might make it difficult to do as they liked about schools, but she waved this aside.

  Douglas was very satisfied with Martha. There had been moments in the last few weeks when she had seemed unreasonable, but that had all vanished. She was now gay and amenable, and the whole business of having a baby was being made to appear as a minor incident, to be dealt with as practically as possible. Practicality was the essence of the business, they both agreed; and the completed cot, a mass of icy white satin and lace, was a frivolous note of contrast to the sternness of their approach. For Martha, who was prepared to spend infinite emotional energy on protecting the child from her emotions, it was a matter of principle that the physical requirements should be as simple as possible. She took one look at the lists of things supposed to be needed for a small baby, and dismissed them with derision, as Alice had already done. By the end of a fortnight after she knew she was pregnant, she already had everything necessary to sustain that child for the first six months of its life. They filled a small basket. The child might be born now, if it chose. Martha even had the feeling that the business was nearly over. For she was once more in the grip of a passionate need to hurry. Impatience to be beyond this milestone was a fever in her. The five months between now and the birth of the child were nothing - five months of ordinary living flashed by so fast they were unnoticeable, therefore it was possible to look forward to the birth as if it were nearly here. Almost, it seemed to Martha that strength of mind alone would be enough to rush her through those months; even her stomach might remain flat, if she were determined enough.

  In the meantime, she continued to live exactly as she had done before. She would have scorned to abdicate in any way, and in this Alice agreed with her: the two women, meeting at some dance or drinking party in the evening, congratulated each other on not showing anything; retiring into comfortable distortion would have seemed a complete surrender to weakness.

  Almost at once, however, and it seemed from one day to the next, the wall of Martha’s stomach pushed out in a hard curve, behind which moved the anonymous but powerful child, and Martha’s fingers, tentatively exploring the lump, received messages that strength of mind alone was not enough. Besides, while Alice and she, the centre of a group of approving and envious people, insisted gaily that no fuss whatsoever was to be made about these children, that they were not to be allowed to change their parents’ lives - and in their own interests at that - it was obvious that both were very jealous of their privacy. Husbands and friends found these women admirably unchanged; during the daytime they retired, and were irritable at being disturbed.

  The moment Douglas had gone to the office, Martha drifted to the divan, where she sat, with listening hands, so extraordinarily compelling was the presence of the stranger in her flesh. Excitement raced through her; urgency to hurry was on her. Yet, after a few minutes, these emotions sank. She had understood that time, once again, was going to play tricks with her. At the end of the day, when Douglas returned from the office, she roused herself with difficulty, dazed. To her it was as if vast stretches of time had passed. Inside her stomach the human race had fought and raised its way through another million years of its history; that other time was claiming her; she understood the increasing vagueness of Alice’s eyes; it was becoming an effort to recognize the existence of anything outside this great central drama.

  Into it, like noises off, came messages from the ordinary world.

  For instance, from her father. A few lines in his careful hand
, dated three weeks back - clearly he had forgotten to post it.

  My dear Matty,

  I understand you are going to have a baby. I suppose this is a good thing? Naturally, it is for you to say. Your mother is very pleased. What I wanted to say was, if there is anything I can do, I shall be glad. Children have a tendency not to be what you expect. But why should they be? Some damned kaffir has let a fire start on the Dumfries Hills. Extraordinarily pretty it is. We have been watching it at nights.

  And then the careful close, the basic forms of the letters shaped and formed, with the capital letters all flourishes; ‘Your affectionate Father.’ After this, hasty and expostulating, one rapid sentence which said all that he had failed to get into his letter: ‘Damn it all, Matty, it’s so damned inconsistent!’

  Martha felt helpless with tenderness for him. She could see him writing it: the pen hovering before each word and dipped so reluctantly into the wells of feeling because duty demanded it of him; his mouth set in duty; and all the time his eyes straying towards the landscape outside. She wrote him a flippant letter saying she was apparently doomed to be inconsistent; she was terribly happy to be having a baby; she couldn’t imagine why she had not wanted one!

  And there was politics, in the shape of a twenty-page letter from Solly. Solly had been betrayed. The communal settlement, only three months old, had been blown into fragments by the Stalin-Hitler pact. Having read it twice, Martha pushed it aside, with every intention of writing to assuage the unhappiness it revealed. But after a day or so she was left not with the impression of unhappiness: she saw, rather, a dramatic figure on a stage. She did not understand it. If, however, she had remembered that with no personal memory of the Twenties she had succeeded in imaginatively experiencing the atmosphere of the decade from people who had, she might have looked forward to the time when the Thirties would be similarly reconstructed for her. As it was, she could only shrug. Solly - vociferous, exclamatory, bitter, had gone into the Cohen store as ‘the lowest-paid clerk’, which, he seemed to feel, served history right. Also, he had taken a packing case to the market square where the Africans bought their vegetables, stood on it and harangued them for an hour on how they had been betrayed, they now stood alone, on their own efforts would their future depend.

  Apparently this throng of illiterate servants and casual labourers had listened with respect for his efforts, but without understanding, as they should instantly have done, the nature of the revelations being made to them. Solly had been taken off in a police van and – final insult – fined ten shillings for being drunk and disorderly. ‘As you know, I consider alcohol degrading.’ It all went to show the incredible stupidity of the authorities in not understanding their real enemies, personified by Solly.

  Solly stood before the magistrate - as it happened, Mr Maynard - and delivered a fine speech on the historical development of liberty. Mr Maynard, interested but at sea, had suggested practically that it was a pity he didn’t finish at the university; such talents should not be wasted. This was the final blow to Solly’s pride.

  Martha got a letter from Mr Maynard, giving his version of the affair.

  … A friend of yours, apparently? I took him out to lunch after the case, because of my insatiable interest in the vagaries of the young. His vagaries, however, do seem to me to be out of ‘historical context’ - a phrase I learned from him. Surely behaviour more appropriate for England or Europe? One feels it is wasted on us. It would appear that he feels there is no hope for the world at all; I find it enviable that people should still care that this should be so. At my age, I take it for granted. He says he is now a Trotskyist. I said that I was sure this would be a great blow to Stalin, but that I would infinitely prefer my own son to be a Trotskyist rather than the town buffoon, it at least shows an interest in public affairs. This annoyed your friend exceedingly. He feels I should have sent him to prison for six months. If I had only known, I would have obliged him. Why not? But, as I pointed out to him, since the sons of our Chief Citizens think nothing of spending their nights in the custody of the police - Binkie was given a ‘shakedown’, as he calls it, the other night in the company of some of the ‘lads’ - the hands of the police are hardly the place for conscientious intellectuals. They wouldn’t appreciate him, either.

  Making feeble elderly jokes of this kind had the opposite effect to that I intended. He remarked darkly that the Revolution (which?) took too little heed of the differences in the degree of consciousness of the ruling classes. He said there was nothing he despised more than a reactionary who imagined himself a liberal. Could this mean me? He went on to say I was making a mistake to underrate him. I took this to mean that there must be a vast conspiracy under our noses among the blacks.

  My information, however, is that this is not the case. An interesting similarity, this; between the good ladies of the city, who are moaning with horror over their bridge tables about your friend Solomon’s exploit, and your friend Solomon himself, whose imagination is no less romantic. However, I was writing to say that I am delighted you are having a baby. Since you are probably still bathed in the sweats of the honeymoon, you will not agree with me when I say that children are the only justification of marriage. I should like to be godfather to your (I hope) daughter. Naturally, I hasten to say, without the benefit of religion. If I’m not mistaken, this would be against your principles? I should like, however, to be ‘in’ on it. I wanted a daughter more than anything.

  This last sentence touched Martha deeply, coming as it did after the painful self-punishments of the rest of the letter. It was to the writer of that sentence she sent an affectionate reply, ignoring the rest.

  Almost at once various other letters arrived, and, her nose being as acute as it was to sense any form of spiritual invasion, she was becoming aware that the people who are sucked irresistibly into the orbit of marriage are by no means the same as those who respond to the birth of a child. Mr Maynard, for instance, could be witty about marriage, but not about daughters. Mrs Talbot was never anything but tender about daughters, sighed continually over the children she had not had, sent a charming note of congratulation to Martha, but for some weeks saw very little of the young couple, for she had become absorbed in the wedding of a friend of Elaine’s, who needed all her attention. Various elderly ladies, scarcely known to Martha, rushed into her flat, folded her in their arms, offered her their friendship, and lingered, talking about their own children with the wistful, discouraged look which always made Martha feel so lacking.

  Above all, the elder Mrs Knowell, who had done no more than send sprightly telegrams of congratulation from the other end of the colony about the wedding, suddenly arrived in person. That creature in Martha which was the animal alert for danger against her cub waited tensely for the arrival of a possible enemy; and the other raw nerve was sounding a warning: this woman was likely to be a forecast of her own fate. For – she had worked it out with mathematical precision – since men were bound to marry their mothers, then she, in the end, would become Douglas’s mother. But she was committed to be like her own mother. And if the two women were not in the least alike? That did not matter; in its own malevolent way, fate would adjust this incompatibility too, and naturally to Martha’s disadvantage.

  As Mrs Knowell entered the room, Martha’s defences went down. They had been erected in the wrong quarter. She had been expecting something gay, jolly, with the self-conscious eccentricity of the letters and telegrams. Mrs Knowell stood hesitating, kissed Martha carefully, and took her seat like a visitor. At once she took out a cigarette. Martha unconsciously curled out of sight her own stained fingers, and looked at the big, rather nervous hands, soaked in nicotine. This was something altogether different from what she had been waiting for! Mrs Knowell was a tall woman, big in the bone, yet with thick flesh loose about her. She had heavy brown eyes, the whites stained yellow; she wore a mass of faded yellow hair in a big untidy bun. Her skin was sallow, and as a concession to what was expected of her she had put a hast
y rub of yellowish lipstick across a full sad mouth. She wore a yellowish-brown dress. Nervous exhaustion came from her like a breath of stale air. She watched Martha as she made the tea, and made conversation, in a way which said clearly that she had come prepared not to interfere or infringe. It positively made Martha nervous. Her talk quite contradicted the heavy watchful eyes: it was gay and amusing; this was the personality which enabled her friends from what she herself referred to as her ‘palmy’ days to entertain her with a warm amused affection as a persistent enfant terrible. That gay old child, flitting erractically from one house to another, dropping in on a bridge game from a town seventy miles away, or suddenly taking flight in the middle of a two-week visit on an irresistible impulse to see a friend at the other end of the colony, was a creation of such tact that Martha found herself undermined by pity and admiration.

  Mrs Knowell was not of the first generation of pioneering women. She had ridden in covered waggons in the months-long journey from the south, but without need to take cover against hostile tribes. She had lived in the remote parts of the country, but the rifle which leaned against the wall was against wild animals and not a native rising. Her husband had been farmer, miner, policemen, businessman, as opportunity offered; he had made several fortunes and lost them in the casual way which was then customary. She had borne eight children, and kept two alive. The daughter in England was married to a small-town solicitor; they kept up a bright and entertaining correspondence.

  Mrs Knowell had succeeded in imposing on everyone who knew her this gallant and independent old lady, the jolly old girl; yet, if that heavy yellow stare, that tight defensive set of her limbs, that tired dry undercurrent to her voice meant anything, it was that her battles had been fought not against lions and flooded rivers or the accidents of a failing gold reef. She was in every way of the second generation; and Martha, impulsively ignoring the ‘amusing’ remarks, as if she were insulted that such a fraud should be offered to her, spoke direct to what she felt was the real woman, out of her deepest conviction that anything less than the truth was the worst of betrayals, and more - that this truth should be an acknowledgment of some kind of persistent dry cruelty feeding the roots of life. Nothing else would do.