COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  Mrs Knowell responded slowly, with a nervous gratitude. She tentatively mentioned the baby; Martha talked of it without defences. Mrs Knowell, released by this new baby into her memories of her own, spoke of them as she had obviously intended not to do. She began talking of the way they had died - blackwater, malaria, a neglected appendix. She began telling a long story, in a heavy, slow, tired voice, of an occasion when she had found herself alone on a farm, fifty miles from anywhere, her husband having gone to buy some cattle. She had been pregnant with her second child, her first having died. She had slept each night with locked and barricaded doors, a revolver under her pillow. In the day she had been frightened to move away from the house. Martha could imagine it, the lonely farmhouse, blistering in the heat, the empty veld stretching for miles all around. ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Knowell, smiling drily, ‘I never told Philip I was lonely.’ Into this loneliness had come riding a young policeman on his rounds. ‘He was so kind to me, Matty - he was so kind.’ Martha, who had been expecting the story to continue, found it had reached its conclusion. Mrs Knowell stirred herself, and remarked, ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I never talk about it.’ Martha, who was triumphant at that admission, which it was her need, for some reason, to gain, replayed, as it were, in her head, like a recording, that story of the weeks of loneliness, in the light of that final ‘He was so kind to me’ - and found it enough.

  She was being very kind to Mrs Knowell. She liked her enormously, and knew Mrs Knowell liked her. It was understood that Mrs Knowell would stay to lunch, would spend the afternoon with Martha, and in the evening the three of them would go out somewhere. Into this scene burst Douglas, cheerfully rubbing his hands, and embraced his mother with the words, ‘Well, Mater, what have you been up to?’

  There was a short pause, while the currents changed, and Mrs Knowell visibly rallied the bright old lady. She offered some hilarious stories about the people she had just been staying with. Her weeks in that house had been one long picnic of jam-making, bottling, pickling. She had cut her finger — she wagged it before them, laughing. Now she was departing south, and had taken the opportunity to drop in and see the dear children.

  Douglas invited his mother to admire Martha’s health and attractiveness. She did so. Both Douglas and Martha became offhandedly practical about the whole affair; Douglas began to tease his mother about her preoccupation with such old-lady-like things as embroidered pillowcases and lace-edged dresses. Mrs Knowell preserved her amused sprightliness for a while, but became noticeably silent, while Martha chattered brightly, in a hard voice, about unhygienic sentimentality - this was not at all as she had been alone with her.

  After a while Mrs Knowell suggested wistfully that it was such fun to make things for a new baby; and saw them exchanging glances in tolerant silence.

  ‘But it is!’ she cried out. ‘I’d love to have the chance of making little things again.’

  ‘Now come off it, Mater,’ said Douglas cheerfully. ‘We’re not going to have any of that.’

  After a while she got up and remarked that as she was going to play bridge with Mrs Talbot that afternoon she must hurry away.

  Douglas, relieved, teased her about being a frivolous old woman. She bravely announced that she had taken one shilling and sixpence off Mrs Talbot the last time she had played with her.

  In a flurry of jokes, kisses, promises to meet soon, she departed. Martha was left with the memory of those yellowing tired eyes resting on her in hurt disappointment. She felt a traitor. And yet, by themselves, they had understood each other so well!

  Douglas was speaking with grateful enthusiasm about his mother’s capacity for enjoying herself so much at her age - Martha reminded herself that, after all, Mrs Knowell was only fifty. Douglas went on to remark practically that at least they needn’t expect any interference from her, she always had far too much on her own plate to bother about other people. Martha was on the point of repudiating this comfortable evasion of the truth, but let the moment go.

  Mrs Knowell departed from the city that evening, after sending a small parcel by Mrs Talbot’s houseboy, containing a dozen long muslin dresses, exquisitely embroidered and tucked, with a note saying; ‘These were Douglas’s when he was a baby. I offered them to my daughter, but she said they were not practicable. But if you can’t use them, then they’ll do as dusters. I really haven’t time to see you dear children again, I must get off to the Valley, they’re having a picnic on Sunday, and I wouldn’t miss that for worlds.’

  Later, Mrs Talbot remarked that Mrs Knowell had been as erratic as ever: she had promised to stay a week, and left after half a day. She was really so wonderful for her age.

  Martha was sitting down the next morning to write a nice letter to the old lady, to make some amends for the unpleasant way she knew she had behaved, when a native messenger arrived from Douglas’s office. There was a note saying: ‘Well, we’re off! War’s just been declared.’ After the signature, the words, ‘Matters appear extremely serious.’

  Martha tried to feel that matters were extremely serious. Outside, however, a serene sunlight, and the pleasant bustle of an ordinary morning. She switched the wireless on – silence. Then the telephone rang. Alice, in tears, repeating angrily, ‘And now Willie’s bound to go and I’ll be alone.’ Then Stella, who also wept: the situation demanded no less.

  But, having put the receiver down, she stood listening to the silence as if there was something more, some other word that needed to be said; she heard now that same dissatisfaction in the voices of the two women who had ceased speaking, and were doubtless engaged in busily telephoning others to find whatever it was they all needed. ‘They say that war has been declared, Matty?’ It was this incredulous query which floated in her inner ear. She was extremely restless. She looked at the blue squares of park and sky which opened the walls of the flat, and it seemed menacing that nothing had changed. She went out into the streets. There, surely, the war would be visible? But everything was the same. A knot of people in sober argument stood on the pavement’s edge. She approached them and found them talking about the prices of farm implements. She walked through the streets, listening for a voice, any voice, speaking of the war, so that it might seem real. After a while she found herself outside the offices of the newspaper. There clustered a small crowd, faces lifted towards windows where could be seen the large indistinct shapes of machinery. They were hushed and apprehensive; here danger could be felt. But Martha saw after a minute that they were all older people; she did not belong with them.

  She went home to the wireless set, which was playing dance music. It was now lunchtime, and she wished Douglas might come home. At the end of half an hour she was disgusted to find herself making angry speeches of reproach to him in her mind - a conventional jailer wife might do no less! Nothing, she told herself, was more natural than that he should find the bars and meeting places of the city more exciting than coming home to her. She would do the same in his place. And so she waited until afternoon in a mood of impatient expectancy; and when the door at last opened, and he came in, she flew at him and demanded, ‘What’s the news? What’s happened?’ For surely something must have!

  But it appeared that nothing had happened. In both their minds was a picture of London laid in ruins, smoking and littered with corpses. But it seemed that while they thought of London, of England, the imaginations of most were moving far nearer home. Douglas announced ruefully that women were already sitting shuddering in their homes, convinced that Hitler’s armies might sweep down over Africa in ‘a couple of days’, and more - the natives were on the point of rising. In any colony, a world crisis is always seen first in terms of native uprising. In fact it seemed that the dark-skinned people had only the vaguest idea that the war had started, and the authorities’ first concern was to explain to them through wireless and loudspeaker why it was their patriotic task to join their white masters in taking up arms against the monster across the seas in a Europe they could scarcely form a
picture of, whose crimes consisted of invading other people’s countries and forming a society based on the conception of a master race.

  Douglas was stern, subdued, authoritative. Martha was only too ready to find this impressive. Almost, she found her dissatisfactions fed. But it was soon clear that Douglas too was waiting for that word, that final clinching of emotion. He moved about the flat as if it was confining him, and suggested they should drop across to the Burrells. They met the Burrells and the Mathews coming in. They went in a body up to the Sports Club, where several hundred young people were waiting for the wireless to shape what they felt into something noble and dramatic.

  By evening, the hotels were full. To dance would be heartless and unpatriotic; but to stay at home was out of the question. The bands were playing ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ to packed, silent masses of people who seemed to find it not enough. They stood waiting. They were waiting for the King’s speech, and with a nervous hunger that began to infect Martha. The pillars of the long, low white dance room were wreathed in flags; when the band struck up ‘God Save the King’ the wind of the music seemed to stir the Union Jacks hanging bunched over their heads. When the slow, diffident voice floated out over the crowd, it was noticeable that a stern, self-dedicated look was deepening on all the faces around her. Douglas, she saw, was standing to attention, his face set and proud. So were Willie and Andrew. Alice, however, appeared miserable; and Stella, whose facial muscles were set into a mould of devoted service, was steadily tapping her small gold-covered foot, not impatiently, but as if preserving some rhythm of her own. As for Martha, she found these three young men, stiff as ramrods, with their fists clenched down by their sides, rather ridiculous. After all, she was pointing out to herself, even while her throat muscles tightened irritably against an unaccountable desire to weep - she resented very much that her emotions were being roused by flags, music and solemnity against her will - after all, if any of these young men were to be asked what they thought about the monarchy, their attitude would rather be one of indulgent allowance towards other people’s weaknesses. She glanced sideways towards Alice, and Stella; involuntarily they glanced back, and, not for the first time or last time, acknowledged what they felt by a small, humorous tightening of the lips.

  The speech was over. The enormous crowd breathed out a sigh. But they remained there, standing, in silence. The courtyards were packed, the bars crammed, the big room itself jammed tight. For some people it was clear that the word had been said – they were released. A few groups disengaged themselves from the edges of the crowd and went home: mostly elderly people. Everyone else was waiting. The band again struck up ‘Tipperary’. Then it slid into a dance tune. No one moved. Stern glances assailed the manager, who stood in acute indecision by the pillar. He made a gesture to the band. Silence. But they could not stand there indefinitely; nor could they go home. Soon people were standing everywhere, glasses in their hands, in the dance room itself, the verandas, the bars, the courts. The band remained on its platform, benevolently regarding the crowd, their instruments at rest. At last they began playing music which was neutral and inoffensive; selections from The Merry Widow and The Pirates of Penzance. And still no one went home. The manager stood watching his patrons with puzzled despair. Clearly he should be giving them something else. At last he approached a certain visiting general from England, who was standing at the bar. This gentleman climbed up beside the band, and began to speak. He spoke of 1914. The date, and the words Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme, were like a bell tolling, and led to the conclusion of the speech, which was: ‘… this day, September the third, 1939.’ Heightened and solemn it was; and the hours they had been living through, so formless and unsatisfactory, achieved their proper shape, and became a day they would remember always; it could be allowed to slide back into the past, and become another note of the solemn bell pealing the black dates of history.

  There was nothing more to be said. The general, with a long, half-appealing look at his audience, as if to say ‘I’ve done my best,’ climbed from the platform, hastily adjusting his tunic. The band rose and gathered their instruments. Now they could all go home.

  As the Knowells, the Burrells, and the Mathews reached the pavement, Stella remarked in a humorous, apologetic voice that she thought she was going to have a baby. It fell flat.

  Alice said pleasantly, ‘That’s nice, dear.’ She clutched her husband’s arm, and said, ‘Do let’s go home.’ Her voice had risen in a wail of tears.

  The days went by slowly, as slowly as if people had been wrenched out of a habit; as to live in exactly the same way as before was in itself something unexpected and impossible. A ship was sunk thousands of miles away. An army crossed to France, arousing in the older people memories that apparently fed them with certainty about what was going to happen next. In Britain, the Government bickered, and the newspapers put it into the language of dignified disagreement. Anticlimax deepened. It was as if the date for the beginning of a tragic winter had been announced, and a late summer persisted in shedding a tentative sunlight.

  Martha went back to her divan. Where the bright pinnacles of the trees in the park, persistent green against the persistent blue, showed in the open squares in the white wall, Martha sat watching patterns of sunlight shift and lengthen across the floor, watching the blue convolutions of smoke from her cigarette dissolve into a yellowish haze. Sometimes she stretched out her arm and received the warmth of the sun direct through her skin on behalf of the new creature within; it seemed to her that the sudden glow was answered by an increased vigour of its movements. Or, smoothing down the cotton stuff of her tunic over the swelling mound she watched the wall of flesh pulse, or how the weight of flesh distributed differently – as if a sleeper turned in his sleep. It was as if on the floor of a dark sea a half-recognized being crouched, moving sometimes against the change of the tides. Or she looked at the blue vein on her wrist and thought it swollen, and was glad because its larger weight of impurities guaranteed the fresh strength of the new red current that fed the infant. She had succumbed entirely to that other time. She had even tried to remember the flood of excitement that had swept through her, and so short a time ago, at the words: Only five months, four and a half months, four months … For now these seemed immensely long epochs; she could hardly see the end of a day from its beginning.

  She was alone from early in the morning till dark. Douglas was spending all his time with the boys, rocking delightedly on every fresh current of rumour. It was understood that he was going on active service very soon. He felt guilty in his own delight in it. He even felt uneasy because Martha concurred so easily. For he did not understand that five months, in this new scale of time, seemed so immensely long. It was as if he was planning to leave her in a distant future. Naturally he would go! To put any pressure on him not to would be unpardonable — she would always refuse to play any such role. But the fact was, the outside noises of war seemed like increasingly distant thunder.

  One morning there came a little note from Mrs Talbot saying it would give her great pleasure if dear Douglas and Matty would come with her to the station to see a friend off to England. Douglas reported that Elaine had become engaged to a young man from the Cape.

  The long grey station was hot with evening sunlight. The train, that perfect symbol of the country, stood waiting. Behind the engine stretched the coaches; one or two white faces showed from the windows of each. At the extreme end, there was a long truck, like a truck for cattle, confining as many black people as there were whites in the rest of the train. In between, a couple of ambiguous coaches held Indians and Coloured people, who were allowed to remain provided no white person demanded their seats.

  Halfway down the train was a concentration of white faces. These were young men, the sons of fathers who had been able to afford their learning to fly, but not to risk their jobs before war actually started. Outside the windows stood groups of well-dressed elderly people. At a window away from the ot
hers leaned a youth of perhaps twenty, not more. He was slight and pale, with a shock of light straw-coloured hair. His face was sensitive and intelligent, his eyes direct and blue, very serious. Elaine stood beneath, looking up at him. So isolated were they, that when Mrs Talbot appeared at the station entrance, in an impulsive movement of love which would carry her across to join her daughter, she was checked. Her eyes overflowed. She turned to Douglas and held out her arms, in a helpless gesture of emptiness, before slowly letting them fall.

  Douglas at once went to her, laid a hand on her shoulder, and said stoutly, ‘Bear up, Mrs Talbot.’

  Her whole body shook; she let her head droop beside his for a moment; then she raised a sad face. ‘It’s awful - they’ve only been together a few days.’

  She looked across to where Elaine and her lover still gazed at each other. She took a step forward, and stopped as if afraid to disturb them. Douglas supported her and led her towards the window. Mr Talbot emerged from the entrance. He nodded at Martha formally; again she felt herself instinctively shrink away from him. He was now looking at his wife. Douglas, with a small bow, released Mrs Talbot to her husband’s protection; but as Mr Talbot showed no signs of supporting her as she needed to be, Douglas replaced his comforting arm. Martha watched Mr Talbot’s hard close look at his wife. Again she felt shrinking discomfort, which was almost fear. Experience gave her no clue to that jailer’s look; but she could not remove her puzzled gaze from that saturnine pillar of a man who stood erect, dark, concentrated with watchfulness, just behind his wife. She felt protective towards Mrs Talbot. He remained perfectly still, watching, while his wife allowed her head to fall in a momentary gesture of despair on Douglas’s shoulder, and while Douglas squeezed and patted her shoulders consolingly and exchanged with her a smile of intimate sympathy. Finally Mrs Talbot took two helpless steps forward by herself, and was within the orbit of the lovers. Elaine smiled quietly out from that charmed circle at her mother; but immediately turned her eyes back towards the young man.