COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  There was a sardonic cheer. Binkie and Perry appeared on the roof of one of the carriages, and stood swaying there, grinning, arms outstretched.

  ‘Go it, Binkie!’ shouted a shrill voice. ‘Give the Jerries stick!’ roared the female chorus. Meanwhile the sober families smiled steadily.

  Binkie and Perry were doing a war dance, and singing ‘Hold Him Down, the Zulu Warrior’; while the band joined in half a bar behind. A group of officers, smiling but cautionary, appeared at the edge of the crowd; and Binkie and Perry clung to each other in a parody of fright, and staggered up and down like clowns on a tightrope. The officers were shouting some orders; Binkie craned forward, blinking foolishly, one hand behind his ear. His foot slipped, someone shrieked; he rolled down over the roof into the crowd. Perry staggered back and forth like a man trying to get his balance, his great handsome blond face wooden with deliberate stupidity; then he took a neat nosedive off into a group, which caught him. For a moment Perry and Binkie were tossed up and down, yelling and laughing, while the officers gesticulated futilely on the edge of the crowd.

  The train shrieked, Douglas, who was holding Martha’s hand out of the window, was laughing appreciatively at Perry and Binkie. She held up her face, he bent to kiss it; but the train jerked forward a foot, and they both laughed, while their eyes met in regret that it was impossible to be serious at this last moment. Two paces away, Binkie and Perry were locked in embrace, singing in thick wobbling voices, ‘Kiss me goodbye …’ But the crowd took it up seriously for a few bars; then someone shouted, ‘Get on the train, you silly buggers, it’s going.’ Mr Maynard stood forward and held out his hand to his son. Binkie dropped his fooling, and came to meet him, looking responsible. Mrs Maynard, blinking away tears, impulsively flung her arms around him in a convulsive embrace. Binkie remained still, then made a joke in her ear, so that she stepped back, grimacing with laughter as the tears fell.

  Binkie and Perry began running down the creeping train in slow motion, with exaggeratedly lifted legs and pumping arms. The train stopped again. A sardonic cheer from the soldiers in it, who were leaning out waving beer bottles. Perry and Binkie swung themselves on to the back bumpers. The train jerked, nearly flinging them off, then let out another shriek, and began to move in earnest. It rumbled along the platform with its burden of soldiers, who were hanging from their waists in every window or clustered on the foot plates. As the train gathered speed, Binkie and Perry appeared on the roof of the last carriage, through a cloud of filthy grey smoke. They were dancing and waving beer bottles. An epoch was going out to the strains of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’; and the crowd on the platform left facing the empty rails were silent.

  The band stopped, then played ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’. The crowd eddied and thinned. In a few moments there remained a group of young wives with babies, looking with determined stoicism after their husbands. A group of girls who had run some way along the train now returned, wild-eyed, untidy, tipsy. Maisie was among them, and she greeted Martha cheerfully as she passed, with ‘So now we’re all girls without men. What a life, hey?’

  Stella, Martha and Alice looked at each other, and smiled; smiled steadily. The train, a black snake blotched with khaki, was now far away over the veld. A wave of blue gritty smoke came drifting back. The sun, a heavy orange ball, dropped behind the mountain, and the white station lights came on. Yellow flags still idled under the roof; the band had gone.

  Alice’s face was white; but all she said was, ‘So that’s that.’

  Stella suddenly collapsed into tears, and was led away by her mother. Martha and Alice left the station. Mr Maynard stood on the pavement, beside a car where his iron-browed wife was weeping over the driving wheel.

  ‘There, there!’ he was saying. ‘There, there!’ As Martha went past, he looked at her, suddenly produced a heavy sarcastic smile which was like a grimace of pain, and observed, ‘So much for the happy warriors!’

  ‘Oh, the foolish, foolish boys,’ Mrs Maynard cried out. ‘They’ll all kill themselves before they even get to the fighting.’

  ‘I think not,’ said Mr Maynard patiently. He had turned back to her, and Martha went on with Alice. The two women lifted their infants into their respective cars, and drove away home.

  Part Three

  When a person dies for his country, then you can say he loves it.

  TURGENEV, On the Eve

  Chapter One

  The skies of Africa being for the most part blue and clear, and eminently suitable for aeroplanes, there were few cities in the subcontinent that did not hastily throw up on their outskirts camps of Nissen huts, hangars, runways and temporary houses, surrounded by fences and barbed wire and as self-contained and isolated as those other towns outside the city, the native locations.

  For weeks before anything changed, the local inhabitants would drive out of a Sunday afternoon to watch the building; for weeks nothing was spoken of but that the Air Force was coming. That phrase, together with those others now constantly used by the newspapers, like ‘Knights of the Air’ and ‘our boys’, evoked in the minds of the population, which was now after all mostly female, an image of a tall graceful youth fitted neatly into sky-blue cloth. Certain poets were partly responsible for this charming figure - the newspapers are not to blame for everything. Besides, this was the period of the Battle of Britain; a need for heroism, starved so long, was being fed at last; it was as if the gallant youth from 1914 had donned a uniform the colour of the sky and taken wing. Their own young men who had left the colony in search of adventure were mostly dead, and killed in the air. The air was their medium, they felt. Useless to ask a country separated from the sea by hundreds of miles to think of itself as a breeder of sailors; and of that mass of young men who had departed north for land fighting, few had as yet actually fought. When they did, when those deaths and wounds were announced, the shock of it would breed a new image; in the meantime, it was an air war, and it was fitting that this colony should be asked to train airmen.

  More than this lay behind their impatience for the moment when ‘the boys’ should actually arrive. Few of them had not been brought up with the words ‘Home’ and ‘England’ continually in their mouths, even if they had not been born there; it was their own people they were expecting - and more: themselves, at one remove, and dignified by responsibility and danger. They knew what to expect: the colony was being fed month by month in peacetime by immigrants who were certainly of the stock which produced rather graceful young men, even if they changed in so few weeks into people like themselves - not charming, not - but the word ‘effeminate’ was one the Battle of Britain made obsolete; it was conceded that the war and the number of deaths in the skies over London made those more sheltered cousins the equals of any veld adventurer or horizon conqueror.

  But before an aeroplane can be sent into the air with its proper complement of highly trained young men, there must be so many others on the ground to provide for the welfare of both. It was this that the local people had not taken into account.

  Suddenly, overnight, the streets changed. They were filled with a race of beings in thick, clumsy greyish uniforms; and from these ill-fitting cases of cloth emerged pallid faces and hands which had - to people who above all always had enough to eat and plenty of sunshine - a look of incompleteness. It was as if nature had sketched an ideal - that tall, well-fed charming youth, so easily transformed into a tough hero – and, being starved of material to complete it with, had struggled into what perfection it could. That, obscurely, was how they felt; they could not own these ancestors; their cousins from Home were a race of dwarfs, several inches shorter than themselves. They were not burnt and brown, but unhealthily pale. They were not glorious and rebellious individuals - for, above all, emigrants to the colonies have been that - but they had the look, as they strayed cautiously and curiously about the shallow little colonial streets, of a community whose oneness was only emphasized by the uniform.

  In short, they were different.
/>   It never entered their heads to apologize for being different.

  They made no effort to become like their hosts.

  Worse than anything, the faces of these new guests - a colonial people instinctively feel themselves as hosts - expressed nothing but a patient and sardonic criticism. They were unwilling guests.

  These groundlings, dumped arbitrarily into the middle of Africa, strayed about the town, noted the two cinemas, half a dozen hotels, a score of bars; noted that the amenities usual for ten thousand white inhabitants were to be stretched to provide for them in their hundreds of thousands; noted that women would be in short supply for the duration; and, with that calm common sense which distinguishes the British working man, decided to make themselves as comfortable as possible in circumstances fully as bad as they had expected. For a time the grey tide ebbed back from the city into the camps that were surrounded by the high, forbidding fences.

  Not before a number of disturbing incidents had occurred. For instance, several innocent men had brought Coloured women into the bars of an evening, and had violently resented being asked to leave. Others were observed offering black men cigarettes on street corners, while talking to them, or even walking with them. It was rumoured that quite a number had actually gone into the homes of the servants of the city, in the native location. But this was not the worst; it was felt that such behaviour was merely the result of ignorance; a short acquaintance with local custom would put things right. No, it was something more indefinable, something inarticulate, an atmosphere like an ironic stare, which, since it was not put into words, could not be answered.

  A group of airmen might be walking down the street, hoping that some diversion might offer itself, when their attention was drawn by the sound of a wild and urgent motorhorn. An expensive car stood by them, into which a couple, smiling with fervent goodwill, urged they should enter. They climbed, therefore, into the car, and were whisked off to McGrath’s Hotel, where drinks were called for all round. The orchestra still played, war or no war, from its bower of ferns. The native waiters came round with trays of beer. All was gilt and imitation marble. And this couple, so eager to be kind, were kindness itself. But why this positively effusive hospitality? Why? They might almost have been guilty about something. They talked about England: Do you remember, do you know, have you ever been to … But, but! the colonial’s England is not the England that these men longed for, not the pubs and streets they were exiled from. They were kind enough not to point this out.

  That but was felt like a piece of grit in the mouthful of honey which was this chance to be welcoming hosts. How seldom do colonials, starved in their deepest need to be hosts, get the chance to take to their bosoms not one or two but twenty thousand grateful guests at once? All over the city, in bars and hotel lounges and even in private drawing rooms, could be seen — in that first week or so - a couple, man and wife, entertaining anything up to twenty polite but determinedly inarticulate groundlings, who drank and ate all they could, since the pushed-around are entitled to take what crumbs fate offers them, but certainly did not return that loving approval which is what hosts most essentially ask in return. Yes, this was a fine country; yes, it was a grand town; yes, it was a wonderful achievement for half a century. But. But. But.

  The tide receded. It would return. Thousands upon thousands more men were arriving every week from Home. From those first tentative contacts it was clear that there was a situation which should be faced by those whose task it was to administer and guide.

  In every city there is a group of middle-aged and elderly women who in fact run it. The extent to which they are formally organized is no gauge of their real power. The way in which they respond to danger is that gauge; and from the frankness with which they express their intentions can be measured the extent of the danger. To students of ‘local politics’ let there be recommended the activities of the mothers of the city;

  About a week after the first grey tide, there occurred a conversation between Mr Maynard and his wife, not on the pillow - they had not shared one for many years - but at the breakfast table.

  Mrs Maynard was the leader of the council of matriarchs. She was fitted for it not merely by character. The wives of prime ministers, Cabinet ministers, governors, mayors, because of the necessity that they should be above struggle and party strife, are precluded from certain positions. Far from envying such women, Mrs Maynard rather pitied them. She could have been one had she chosen. As it was, she was the daughter of an English family who for centuries had occupied itself with ‘public work’; she was a cousin to the existing Governor, her husband was a third cousin to the Prime Minister of Britain; but he was only a magistrate; she was, so it was hoped it would be considered, not only reliable, but above all independent. Nothing she said would be taken as from the Government or a political party.

  She remarked over the sheets of the Zambesia News, ‘It is quite disgraceful that the authorities are not doing anything about it.’

  Mr Maynard laid down his paper and asked, ‘About what?’

  ‘Millions of poor boys brought into the country and nothing whatsoever done for them.’ ‘You exaggerate slightly, I think?’

  ‘Well — fifty thousand, a hundred thousand. One thousand would be bad enough.’

  ‘There are cinemas and canteens in the camps, I believe.’ ‘You know quite well what I mean.’

  Mr Maynard stirred his coffee, and remarked, ‘Even in peacetime men outnumber women.’ He added, ‘I assume you are not suggesting a brothel - the churches wouldn’t stand for it.’

  She coloured and tightened her lips; this mask of annoyed rectitude vanished as she smiled with dry appreciation. ‘Personally I’d rather brothels than - but that isn’t what I meant.’ She frowned and said, ‘We should provide entertainment - something to keep them occupied.’

  ‘My dear Myra, save your trouble. Every woman in the town is already lost. Wait until the pilots arrive.’

  ‘I am thinking of the blacks,’ she said, irritated. A short pause. Then, as it were, thinking aloud, ‘I heard from Edgar that they have no idea at all how to treat natives. Not their fault, of course, poor things. I suggested to him a course of lectures on native policy, that sort of thing, before they arrive in the country.’

  ‘So you are not concerned with the morals of our wives and mothers?’ He smiled at her, the heavy urbane eyebrows raised.

  She returned an equally bland smile. ‘I am concerned with both. The first thing should be a dance hall, with canteens, ping-pong - something like that.’

  ‘I have just understood that you intend me to sponsor it - is that it?’

  ‘You would do very well,’ she suggested, for the first time with a touch of appeal.

  ‘No,’ he said decidedly.

  ‘You’ve got to do something. Everybody’s doing something.’

  He continued to stir his coffee, and to look at her. It was a challenge.

  It was met. ‘We are at war, you know!’ she cried out at last, from her real emotions. She was now flushed, indignant, and with a hint of quivering softness about brows and mouth - a reminiscence of a certain striking dark beauty.

  He smiled unpleasantly; apparently he felt this to be a victory.

  But she did not attempt to quell her emotion. ‘Your attitude is extraordinary, extraordinary!’ she said, lips quivering. ‘Don’t you care that we are at war?’

  ‘I care very much. But not enough to run a refined club for the boys,’ he added. Then: ‘I shall confine myself to keeping the native population in its place. Nothing could be more useful than that, surely?’

  They exchanged a long married look, which held dislike, and respect. The two faces, both heavy, black-browed, commanding, confronted each other from opposite ends of the long table. It was, as always, a deadlock.

  ‘Then I shall ask that old stick Anderson to run it.’

  ‘An admirable choice.’

  She rose, and went towards the door. His raised voice followed her: ‘As regar
ds the problem of the dear boys and the native women, it is my personal view that - regarded from a long-term point of view, of course — a few thousand more half-caste children would be a good thing. It might force the authorities to provide better amenities for them. As things are the Coloured community provides more petty criminals than any other section of the population.’

  This was designed to annoy. But one of the minor pleasures of power is to exchange in private views which would ruin you if your followers ever had a suspicion you held them. Mrs Maynard let out a short dry chuckle and said, ‘There are surely simpler ways of getting better housing for the Coloureds than infecting all our boys with VD.’

  Two days later a paragraph in the paper announced that three entertainment centres for the Air Force personnel were to be opened shortly under the experienced patronage of Mr Anderson, late of the Department of Statistics, a well-known public figure.

  A second grey tide flowed abruptly over the town. Not quite so grey: the idea of the blue air fed a tinge of blue into those stiff uniforms, and now the hungry expectations of the people were assuaged, for these were the cousins, the welcomed relatives from Home - these, the aviators in person, recognizably the same species as themselves. They were perfectly at ease in drawing rooms, clubs, bars and dance rooms, where they at once appeared in their hundreds; and the city, long accustomed to indulging its young men in whatever follies they might choose to use, found nothing remarkable in their behaviour. They brought with them an atmosphere of dedication to danger, of reckless exuberance which - as every woman in the city soon had reason to know — was covered by a most charming modesty; and this in its turn was a mask for a cynical nihilism which was more dangerously attractive than even recklessness. If the note of the First World War was idealistic dedication, succeeded by its mirror image, sarcastic anger, then the symbol for this period of the Second World War was a cynical young airman sprouting aggressive but flippant moustaches capable of the most appalling heroism, but prone to surprising lapses into self-pitying but stoic despair, during which moments he would say he hoped he would be killed, because there was no point in living, anyway. The truth of the morale of any army is most likely to be discovered between the sheets.