COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  But Alice looked understanding and relieved. ‘Neither can I. I wish I’d never started. If I’d known it was going to take so long …’

  They looked across the intervening wastes of yellow grass to the grove of blue gums, the white shining building where lay fortunate women, already delivered of their burdens. They stood there a long time, gazing at the promised land, until Alice said irritably, ‘Oh, well, I suppose this is just stupid.’

  Martha assented, and they returned in their separate cars to Martha’s flat. The barriers had gone down.

  Now they spent their days together. They did not talk much. They smoked, sewed a little, or amused themselves by balancing some objects on their stomachs, such as a box of matches, until a thrusting limb or a butting head knocked it off on to the floor. Long periods of inactivity caused Alice to remark helplessly, ‘I suppose the little so-and-so’s asleep. Well, good luck to it, it doesn’t know when it’s lucky.’ This was a reference to her misery because Willie, like Douglas, was so seldom at home.

  Some person high in the Government, exasperated beyond endurance by the importunities of the young men, had cried out, ‘For God’s sake, find something for them to do. Keep them quiet until we know what to do with them.’ As a result, the men of Willie’s and Douglas’s generation spent every afternoon after work deploying on a red dust square with various obsolete weapons, under an old sergeant from the last war who resented this occupation bitterly: he wanted only to be sent to the front somewhere. After an hour or so’s drill the men went to drink. They were soldiers. They returned to their women late in the evening, cheerful strangers. Or at least that was how Martha felt.

  Alice greeted Willie with sardonic hostility; later she might weep and cling to him.

  Martha was scrupulously undemanding, but inquired who had said what, until Douglas said impatiently, ‘Oh, it was all just as usual.’

  It was a heavy rainy season that year, Many afternoons the square was a squelching mass of water and red mud. Once Martha and Alice drove up to watch, which they did in derisive silence. The drill was impossible, so the soldiers were scrambling and fighting across the mud, throwing great handfuls of it into each other’s faces, yelling and whooping, knocking each other over.

  It was painful to the women, seeing their men turned into willing savages. They never told their husbands they had been up to watch. They never mentioned it again to each other; they did not even like to think of it. There was some sort of disloyalty to their husbands, and to their marriages, in remembering how the men had fought among the mud puddles with each other, their eyes gleaming with savage joy out of mud-streaked faces, because they were not allowed to go off and fight some enemy.

  The women were very close together. It rained endlessly. They felt enclosed behind a high misty grey curtain which shut out everything.

  Martha had no satisfaction from this rain, which drenched down and was stopped by surfaces of concrete, surfaces of brick. Half an hour after the storm, the town was clean but dry; the water had been repelled and was flooding off into swollen gutters away from the streets. In the park opposite, the soil received it, small acres of greenness in a waste of impervious streets. She leaned at a window, looking out into the swirling mists that arose faintly about the hard glittering rods which caught a gleam of light from a window, or a car nosing far below. She was helpless with melancholy, inert with waiting; for on such afternoons both women stiffened and listened at every sound outside, the men might perhaps be coming home, since it was surely impossible to drill. But the hours went by, it was dark before they came.

  One afternoon Douglas rang to ask if the girls would stretch a point: he and Willie wanted to go on to some celebration. He was speaking in the overcontrite, almost mockingly pleading way men use when they band together against the impositions of their women. He had never spoken so before; Martha had always winced with angry distaste at hearing Willie speak so to Alice, or Andrew to Stella. Now, because Douglas was with Willie, in that atmosphere of men escaping their wives, he put on that tone with her. She was furious that he could do it. She assured him, gaily, that of course he must go out with the boys, of course she didn’t mind - as she always spoke on these occasions. But when she put the telephone down she was angry. It was all intolerable. She was shut in here, in this flimsy little flat, by the rain, because of the baby in her stomach, forced to accept that falsely humble voice from a young man who by himself would never think of using it: she was the wife of one of the lads. That was all.

  Alice had sunk back into a chair, her face bleak and discouraged. ‘Oh, well,’ she said after a moment, with a bright unhappy laugh, ‘I suppose I don’t blame the buggers. I suppose if I were a man I’d find us dull, too.’ The two women looked at each other, acknowledging frankly in this moment that they wished they had never married, wished they were not pregnant, even hated their husbands. They looked out again into the grey thick rain.

  ‘Let’s go out in it,’ said Martha on an impulse. Alice’s face lit; she waited, though, for Martha to encourage her. ‘We’ll go and drive in it,’ Martha said again excitedly.

  Alice sprang up. They were now restored to their own self-respect. For to go out in the rain would be a gesture of defiance to their husbands, who were now so full of prohibitions and firm masculine attitudes about getting cold or tired; they had adopted this attitude because they were so little with their wives. The women had accepted the counterfeit, which was better than nothing.

  They ran downstairs, hesitated a moment in the doorway, which glittered with stalactites of rain; then ran straight out into it, leaped across the gutter and dived into Alice’s car. The cars stood side by side in the gutter, water to the wheel-hubs. Alice swore, because the size of her stomach made it hard to fit comfortably behind the driving wheel; then she stiffened her body and jammed it back repeatedly against the seat until it slid back. Her face was set, her eyes hard and lost-looking. She was putting far more force into the action than it needed. Martha saw that Alice, like herself, was thinking wildly that perhaps even now she might have a miscarriage, might be released from a position they found all at once humiliating and intolerable. Alice swung the car around and began driving recklessly through the downpour. The streets were a drumming haze of water; the headlights drowned in a wet yellowness half a dozen yards ahead. The water sliced up from the wheels in a beautiful solid, gleaming curve fringed with scattering white.

  Alice took the road to the nursing home. On the small rise opposite it, they parked the car. They were shut into a small dry space inside the swirl and squelch of the storm. Through the greyness came a movement. It took shape, and they watched a single African workman come past, the water splashing up from his bare feet. His khaki pants clung to him. The water poured over his chest. He held his arms clenched across in front, for a little warmth, and walked head bent, his body tensed in a shiver. His eyes moved sideways towards the car, then returned to the road ahead. He was concerned with nothing but getting to shelter.

  When the darker blot of his shape had been sponged into the downpour, Alice looked at Martha and said, ‘Well?’

  She began taking off her clothes, with rapid clumsy movements. Martha did the same. They held the door half open, for a last look for any possible invaders, and then plunged across the road into the long grass on the other side. Immediately they were to their knees in water held by the rough wells of saturated grass. Martha saw Alice, a long distorted female shape, pallid in the grey rain, before she vanished. She heard a shout of exultation. Then she too ran straight onwards, stumbling through the wet, dragging waist-high grass that cut and stung, through the deep drench of the rain which came hard on her shoulders and breasts in a myriad hard, stinging needles. She heard that same shout of triumph come from her own lips, and she ran on blindly, her hair a sodden mat over her eyes, her arms held out in front to keep the whipping grass off her face. She almost ran into a gulf that opened under her feet. It was a pothole, gaping like a mouth, its red crumbling side
s swimming with red water. Above it the long heavy grass almost met. Martha hesitated, then jumped straight in. A moment of repugnance, then she loosened deliciously in the warm rocking of the water. She stood to her knees in heavy mud, the red thick water closed below her shoulders. She looked up through the loose fronds of grass at the grey pit of the sky and heard a mutter of thunder. She was quite alone. A long swathe of grass had been beaten across the surface of the water, and around its stems trailed a jelly of frog spawn. A bright green frog sat six inches from her face, watching her with direct round eyes and a palpitating throat. The rain drummed on the surface of the water in a fury of white prancing drops. Martha put out her hand towards the frog. It took a clumsy leap into the froth of water, and came up to cling with its small human hands to the ends of the grass, watching her anxiously. Martha allowed herself to be held upright by the mud, and lowered her hands through the resisting water to the hard dome of her stomach. There she felt the crouching infant, still moving tentatively around in its prison, protected from the warm red water by half an inch of flesh. Her stomach stretched and contracted; and the frog swam slowly across the water, with slow, strong spasms of its legs, still watching Martha from one bright eye. In the jelly spawn were tiny dark dots of life. She could see a large snail tilting through the grass stems, its pale-brownish shell glistening and beautiful, the horned stalk of its head lifted high. Then, across the white-frothed surface of the pool, she saw an uncoiling in the wet mat of grass, and a lithe green snake moved its head this way and that, its small tongue flickering. It slid down over the red pulpy mud, and, clinging with its tail to a clutch of grass, it allowed itself to lie on the surface, swaying its vivid head just above the water.

  Thunder shook the clouds again; and Martha looked up and felt a lightening of the dark enclosing grey. She could hear nothing but the drumming of the rain, see nothing but rods of shining rain; but certainly it was clearing. All of a sudden she was panic-stricken. She must get back to the car before the rain stopped and she was exposed and visible. She struggled out of the pool, while the snake pulled back on its spring of a tail away from the rocking water and flickered its tongue a little. The frog hopped into the middle of the pool with a splash. She was red to her armpits; and she stood still, while the rain came down and drove the red off her into the grass and she was clean and shining. Carrying her belly proudly, she walked blindly back to where she thought the car might be. At last she came on to the road, and saw with a fresh panic that there the rain was sending down its last big drops. The car was a hundred yards away. Suddenly she felt that there might be hidden eyes anywhere in the trees or the grass. She ducked low into the stinging grass, and ran crouching along its verges until the car was opposite. She dived across the road and into the front seat.

  Almost at once Alice appeared, looking apprehensively up and down the road. She too flung herself over the exposed road and into the car. They looked at each other, holding their mats of sodden hair away from their faces. They went off into fits of laughter at the sight of their large, aggressive swollen stomachs, streaked purple and red, resting with such self-satisfaction on their slender white legs. But they were covered all over with minute red scratches from the grass, and fragments of wet grass clung to them. Outside the car, the rain had stopped, and a wash of strong orange sunlight was coming fast over the low, beaten grass, which was already slowly lifting itself frond by frond, as the heavy sparkling drops sprang off. The women took their petticoats and scrubbed themselves. In a moment they were dry enough to put on their clothes - in the nick of time - for a crowd of labourers came along the road, gave a curious glance at the two bedraggled young women, and then averted their eyes.

  They drove back through heavy sultry sunlight which dragged shining clouds of steam from the earth. Eveything was saturated; everything shook off water; the road was still running a foot of water.

  ‘Those potholes are probably filthy,’ said Alice all at once, with a nervous laugh.

  Martha was thinking the same. Back in the neat enclosed car, with her clean clothes about her, that plunge into the wet soiled veld seemed to her exaggerated and unpleasant. But there was no doubt they were both free and comfortable in their minds, their bodies felt relaxed and tired; they did not care now that their men preferred other company to theirs.

  As soon as Martha was home she rushed to wash off the experience in a deep clean bath. She now hated to think of the mud of the vlei in her pores. ‘Not,’ she remarked to the crouching baby, ‘that it makes any difference to you whether it’s clean or dirty water outside, does it?’ The child lurched, and the whole balance of Martha’s stomach changed as it went into a new position. The skin on the lower slopes was breaking into purple weals; on the upper part of the thighs were red straining patches. Her breasts were heavy, bruised-looking. But the woman who only a few months before had enjoyed such ecstasies of self-worship had apparently died. She felt no more than a pang for the lost perfection. She traced the purple stretch marks with one finger, and felt something like satisfaction mingled with half-humorous appreciation of the ironies of her position. She reminded herself that she would never be perfect again. She told herself that never again would she look herself over, finding not one mark or faulty line on her body. It was gone, that brief flowering. It crossed her mind that perhaps, when it came to being old - at thirty or even sooner, for she was still proudly revolting away from the thought of being old - when it came to that moment of renunciation, perhaps she would feel no more than this amused ironical appreciation? But it was an intolerable thought, to be pushed indignantly away.

  Later Willie and Douglas came in. It was nearly midnight and they were rather drunk. They played the role of humble apologetic husbands for a little; then Willie went off to Alice, and Douglas reverted at once to his usual self. ‘Sorry, Matty,’ he said nicely, ‘but I didn’t want to miss it - I knew you wouldn’t mind.’

  By now she did not; the fact that she didn’t was making him uneasy, she saw. An old instinct came up, and she found herself grumbling humrously: who would be a woman, stuck at home, while the boys go off and have fun. He brightened as he listened. Then he came over to her and put his arms about her.

  Chapter Three

  Weeks before the babies were born, the two women sat waiting, while each twinge, each shift of pressure, a pang down the thigh, caused them to alert: was that the beginning of the pains? For both women had scorned Dr Stern’s calculations, and had arrived at dates a week earlier than his.

  ‘It might as well be born now,’ said Alice. ‘I’ve only got to give the finishing touches, so to speak.’ From which Martha understood that her feelings were shared, an incredulous relief that she had so far successfully sheltered the creature and it was now a human being. The fact that it might be born safely now was merely a step to believing that it would be.

  But every morning they awoke to deserts of time. Both would turn over, to sleep away another hour or so. At least when they were unconscious time resumed its proper shape.

  Then Martha’s self-allotted period was up. A day passed, then another. She rushed in a frenzy of disappointment to the other extreme, and exclaimed that there was no reason at all why she should not have to wait another month. Alice reached her day and passed it. Both women slumped into an irritated depression which made them snap at each other; they found each other repulsive to look at, exasperatingly self-absorbed. After spending every day together for months, they withdrew into solitude, alone with their swollen discomfort like animals in a cave.

  One morning Willie rang to say that Alice had started pains at twelve the night before, and now had a son. At this announcement, making the extraordinary adventure so banal, Martha fell into a state of sullen resignation. She drove out to see Alice, entering the nursing home with the feeling of a rightful inmate unjustly treated as a visitor, and found her seated bolt upright in bed, looking flushed, bright-eyed and very pretty, her black hair curled for the first time in months. She greeted Martha with c
asual triumph, and announced that nothing would ever induce her to have another baby, and if women knew what they were in for, they’d think twice. Martha heard this as if it were meant for someone else. If she had ever thought of childbirth as an ordeal, it was - she was convinced - because people were weak-minded enough to allow it to be one. She watched the gay and elated Alice with a hurt conviction that she was betraying her, Martha, by so completely repudiating the condition she had been in only yesterday. She might never have been so clumsy, heavy, waddling, misshapen.

  Martha went home in despair. She informed Douglas that she was convinced the child would not be born for at least another month. Douglas pointed out that Dr Stern had predicted tomorrow. But Martha scorned Dr Stern. The contrast between Alice, now two beings, and herself, still one, was too great. Having finally given up, or so it seemed, the intention ever to have a baby at all, she spent the evening sorting books that would provide the basis for a study course on economics. She was sitting on the floor surrounded by them, when there was a small stabbing pain in her vitals. She frowned with alert concentration; then told herself that she was sick of imagining that every twinge was the herald of the end. She was about to get undressed when she felt another. There was no doubt it was of a completely different quality from all the other stabs and twinges. She prowled cautiously about the room, admonishing the child to keep still, so that she might listen better to the activities of her muscles. The child was seething and striving like a wrestler. It was momentarily still on the third stab of pain. Martha was lifted on a wave of excitement; she cried out, ‘Hurray, this is it!’ and, like some sort of savage creature, proceeded to dance in heavy lopsided triumph around the room. Never had she felt such a soaring elation as this.

  Douglas, who was on the point of sleeping, awoke at once, inquired practically if she was sure, and began to dress. He was delighted. It was a moment of pure delight for both of them, being alone thus, the lights of the city dimming all around them, while they were setting off on such an adventure. Martha announced her intention of walking to the nursing home. Douglas’s satisfaction in a wife who had such a carefree attitude was submerged in concern. She was put into the car, together with the case which had been packed for the last two months, and driven rapidly to the home. She had established, by the time she had reached there, that the pains were coming every five minutes; it troubled her that this was not what the book said was correct.