COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  ‘I am firmly of the opinion that the sooner a middle class with privileges is created among the Africans, the better it will be for everyone. Unfortunately, the majority of the whites are so bogged down in intelligent considerations such as that they wouldn’t have their sisters marrying black men, that they are too stupefied to see the advantages of such a course.’

  Martha was several years from understanding this remark, and felt herself to be as stupid as that majority he had dismissed so contemptuously.

  They proceeded in silence down the empty moonlit street, Mr Maynard strolling along, putting one firm leg before the other under a heavy, massive body, hands behind his back, narrowed thoughtful eyes directed ahead. ‘They are all the same, these African agitators. You can buy any one of them for ten shillings.’

  ‘Has Mr Matushi been bought?’

  ‘They all overreach themselves, if you give them time.’

  ‘One of these days they’ll fight you with their bare hands.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. In the meantime I shall continue to do my duty in that station of life into which it has pleased God to call me.’

  Martha considered this for a time; and then inquired, really wanting to know: ‘I don’t see why you go to these meetings?’

  For the first time, Mr Maynard showed signs of discomfort. He said hastily, heavily humorous, ‘I’m an interested observer of life.’

  ‘You behave as if you were God,’ said Martha at last.

  They had reached the pavement outside the block of flats.

  ‘If you are genuinely interested in uplifting humanity, which is right and proper at your age, then there are many things you could do.’

  ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ said Martha abruptly. Mr Maynard raised his brows. Martha was embarrassed because of the hostility that had sounded in her voice; she did not really understand what she had said. ‘It was very sweet of you to take me out,’ she said like a schoolgirl.

  ‘So you have already said. Are you going to ask me up for a drink?’ he inquired, facing her massively, so that she had to look up into his face. She felt him to be powerful and dangerous; she remembered him on the second landing. She said, ‘Caroline wakes so early in the mornings.’

  Up went those brows. ‘But I thought Caroline was with your mother?’ Then he said, ‘Well, I won’t obtrude myself. Good night.’ He turned and went striding off along the street.

  Martha went indoors in a ferment of embarrassment. He had made her feel gauche and unaccomplished. Yet there had been nothing of the ironical gentleman about him on the second landing among closed doors and the unpleasant, disreputable smell. She felt that the incident had been an insult to both of them. If she chose to remember it, she would never be able to feel liking for him again. She proceeded to forget it, with the vague thought, I suppose it’s because he’s so old; that generation - kissing hastily on staircases is the sort of thing they did.

  She proceeded to think of Mr Matushi; she could not understand his extraordinarily gentle amusement. If I were Mr Matushi, she thought angrily, I would … But she could think of nothing but that she would have slapped Mr Maynard’s face. Which would have earned him a sentence for assaulting a white man.

  She went to bed in a mood of severe self-criticism.

  As for Mr Maynard, he strolled through the moonlight, hands behind his back, and the memory of Martha’s nervous hostility rankled. He felt he had been encouraged and then rebuffed. He proceeded to comfort himself by thinking of various romantic episodes. At the same time, he reflected on the meeting; he dwelt particularly on that moment when Mr Perr had laughed when he remarked that he could not understand why left-wing intellectuals always insisted on being so uncomfortable when they met. The grateful, almost obsequious note in that laugh caused another, but quite disconnected, image to float into his mind: the face of old Thompson-Jones, Minister of Finance, with whom he would be playing golf tomorrow.

  Chapter Two

  The two rooms at the top of the block of flats were filled with light from the sky as soon as the sun, splendid, enlarged and red, swelled up over the horizon of suburb-clotted hills, pulling behind it filaments of rose-and-gold cloud. By half past five fingers of warm yellow were reaching over the big bed, over Caroline’s cot. Martha lay warm in the blankets, listening to Caroline wake. She always woke the moment the child first stirred, as if an alarm had gone off; she woke instantly if Caroline murmured in her sleep at night. Caroline gurgled, and strove with her limbs until the covers were off. She sat up. Martha, through eyes kept half closed, saw the tiny energetic creature in its white gown rolling over and stretching, two small rosy feet playing in the air, while the voice tried itself: a soft chuckle, then a deep, self-absorbed murmur; silence, and a sudden shriek of triumphant vitality as the cot shook and rattled with her movements. The low meditative murmur began again; Caroline, crouching on all fours, looked steadily at the white blanket while she listened to her own voice; there was a look of thoughtful surprise on the small face. She dropped sideways, rolled to her back, her legs stuck straight up, she grunted and puffed while her face reddened. She lay there, rocking her legs from side to side, silent for the moment, apparently waiting with docile patience to hear what new sound her throat would bring forth. A high single note, like a bird’s; another, a fifth lower; a long silence, and again a triumphant yell. Caroline clambered resolutely to her feet, clutched the edge of the cot, put her chin on it, and looked out of the window at the sun. The big yellow ball swam now in a clear sky. Caroline blinked at it; beads of sweat clung under her short black curls. She squeezed her eyes shut, and rocked, humming, from one foot to another, the sun sharply etching her rosy face with shadow and warm light. She opened her eyes cautiously; the sun still filled her eyes with its dazzle. She turned her head slightly, and, frowning with determination, put up a clenched fist over one eye, and opened the other at the sun: it was still there, hanging in the blue square of the window. She stretched out one fist and spread it into a shaft of yellow light that swam with golden dust; the small fingers moved wildly, then clutch! They shut on nothing. Caroline looked down, puzzled, at her empty palm. She tried again; her hand went clutch! clutch! at the mote-filled sunlight. Then she stretched out both hands to the sun, a look of desperate desire on her face. She let out a high, angry, baffled yell and shook the bars of her cot furiously. She lost her footing, rolled over, and lay on her back, legs waving comfortably in the warm sunlight, contentedly trying out her voice.

  Martha shut her eyes and tried to sleep again. She could not. There was this band of tension, felt deeply as a web of tight anxiety, between her and the child. Every moment, every sound Caroline made reverberated through Martha. Relax! said Martha to herself, but she felt tension in every limb. She was waiting for that moment when Caroline’s high shriek peremptorily sounded the summons for the day to begin.

  And yet, during those three days while Caroline had been with her grandmother, Martha had slept, waked, gone about living as if Caroline did not exist, had never existed. Not for a moment had Martha felt anxiety; she had scarcely thought of the child. She came home; and again Martha was caught up into the rhythm of this other small life. Her long day was regulated by the clock to Caroline’s needs; and she went to bed at night exhausted by Caroline’s experience.

  She lay now, eyes closed to a narrow slit, the sun making rainbows on her eyelashes, so that she might see it as Caroline had just seen it, and knew that her reluctance to get out of bed was simply boredom at the thought of the day ahead. She wished it were already the end of the day, and Caroline safely in bed and asleep. Then her, Martha’s, life might begin. And yet the hours of evening were as restless and dissatisfied; she always went to bed early to put an end to them. Her whole life was a hurrying onwards, to get it past; she was back in the tension of hurry, hurry, hurry; and yet there was nothing at the end of it to hurry towards, not even the end of the war, which would change nothing for her.

  At this point in her reflections, she again to
ld herself to relax: her inability to enjoy Caroline simply filled her with guilt. Yet she could not relax into Caroline; that would be a disloyalty and even a danger to herself. Cycles of guilt and defiance ruled her living, and she knew it; she had not the beginnings of an understanding what it all meant.

  Caroline was now chanting steadily, with a note of urgency in her voice that Martha knew. Her limbs involuntarily stiffened; she made them lie loose.

  Caroline bundled herself over, dragged herself hand over hand up the bars of the cot, rested her chin on the rail and looked at her mother. Martha saw the small, white-gowned girl, her alert bright black eyes shrewdly watching her. Caroline let out a shriek of warning and waited, Martha suddenly laughed, won over into tender amusement. Caroline surveyed her mother for a moment, and shook the bars like a monkey. In an instant, Martha had swung her legs over, lifted Caroline out and set her on the big bed.

  The book prescribed rusk and orange juice. Martha fetched them. Caroline staggered around the room on her unsteady little legs, sucking the rusk into a sticky fawn-coloured paste.

  The small white-painted room was filled with sunlight, like a glass bowl full of quivering bright water. Martha took a bath: the bathroom was shot with needles of sunlight; the water rocked in the white bath in spangles and opals of light. Then she dressed swiftly in one of the brief coloured dresses that gave her so much pleasure to wear. How lovely to wear so little, to feel her brown smooth limbs coming out of the slip of coloured linen; she was all free and her own again; she was light and supple, and the stains and distortions of pregnancy belonged to another epoch. How lovely then to wash the little girl, and see her in her fresh pretty cotton dress, the delicate pink feet balancing so surely and strongly over the floor.

  By seven every morning Martha and her daughter were dressed and ready for the day, and they ate breakfast together; or rather, Martha drank tea and painfully did not care that Caroline would not eat.

  Ever since the day Mr Maynard had entered on the unpleasant scene of Caroline being fed, when Martha had seen it sharply through his eyes, she had forced herself, and with an effort that exhausted her, not to care about Caroline’s eating. She must break this bond! That was how she felt it: as something compulsive and deadly that would most certainly affect the child’s whole future. So Martha no longer cared, on principle. But at the beginning it had not been so easy. She prepared the messes suitable for Caroline’s age, set them on the wooden platform before the child, put a piece of linoleum under the high chair, and retired with a cup of tea and a book, forcing herself not to look at her.

  And now what contests of will followed! Caroline had been used to a forceful pillar of a mother standing over her with a glinting hard spoon full of stuff that she must eat, no matter how she tightened her lips and turned away her face; now she saw this woman - and from one day to the next – sitting away from her on the other side of the room, not listening to her cries of rage and shrieks of defiance. Caroline picked up the bowl of porridge and flung it on the floor so that the greyish mess splashed everywhere; Martha turned a page and did not look. Caroline sparked her black eyes at Martha, let our short sharp cries of anger to make her look; then she picked up a mug of milk and poured it all over herself. Martha remained indifferent in her chair; but there was a tight-lipped tension about her that Caroline knew. She paddled her hands in a lake of soiled milk and rubbed them in her hair, singing our her defiance. And suddenly Martha became a whirlwind of exasperation. She jumped up and said despairingly, ‘Oh, Caroline! You are a naughty, naughty girl!’

  The little girl, with blobs of porridge on her face, her hair plastered and dripping with milk, gurgled out triumphant, defiance. Then she found herself lifted roughly from the chair; she yelled angrily while Martha held her kicking under her arm, and bent to fill the bath. She was dropped into the water, soaped hastily; she felt herself whirled into new clean clothes, and then she was dropped into her wooden pen, where she soon forgot all about it, and began playing with her toys.

  In the meantime Martha was scrubbing porridge and milk off the floor, the furniture, herself. She was sick with disgust at the mess. She was asking herself why she had endured months of that other mess with only occasional lapses into distaste; a period when napkins and then clothes and blankets had been wet and dirty, without difficulty: the book had said so. The book and she had been admirably justified: Caroline was now, as the phrase went, perfectly clean. But that had been no problem; the battle centred on food. What is it all about? asked Martha in despair. She was furious with herself for losing her temper. She could have wept with annoyance. She was saying to herself, as she wiped off milk and grey pulp, Oh, Lord, how I do hate this business, I do loathe it so. She was saying she hated her daughter; and she knew it. Soon, the hot anger died; guilt unfailingly succeeded. Outside, on the little veranda which was like a wired cage projecting out into the sunlight - the sun was now pouring down from over the trees in the park - Caroline was cheerfully gurgling and singing to herself. Inside the room, Martha was seated, tired and miserable. Her heart was now a hot enlarged area of tenderness for the child whom she was so lamentably mishandling.

  She went out on to the veranda. Caroline, in her short bright dress, looked up with her quick black eyes, and made an inquiring noise. She was snatched up and held against Martha’s bosom. At once she began striving free; Martha laughed ruefully and put her down; she staggered around the room, singing to herself.

  But she had eaten absolutely nothing. Martha produced rusks, and left them surreptitiously about the room. Caroline seized on them and began chewing vigorously.

  ‘Oh, Caroline,’ sighed Martha, ‘what am I going to do with you?’

  She was forming the habit of talking to the child as if to herself. The small brain was receiving the sound of a half-humorous, resentful, grumbling, helpless voice rumbling away over her head.

  ‘My poor unfortunate brat, what have you done to deserve a mother like me? Well, there’s no help for it, you’ll just have to put up with it. You bore me to extinction, and that’s the truth of it, and no doubt I bore you. But as far as I can make out, one of the most important functions of parents is that they should be suitable objects of hate: if psychology doesn’t mean that, it means nothing, Well, then, so it’s right and proper you should hate my guts off and on, you and I are just victims, my poor child, you can’t help it, I can’t help it, my mother couldn’t help it, and her mother …’

  After a silence the voice went on, rather like Caroline’s own meditative experimental rumblings and chirpings: ‘So there we are, and we’d better make the best of it. As soon as possible I’ll send you to a nursery school where you are well out of my poisonous influence. I’ll do that for you at least.’

  By nine in the morning, it seemed always as if long stretches of the day had been lived through. And yet it was three hours till lunchtime. Martha sewed – she and Caroline had dozens of cheap pretty dresses. She watched the clock. She cooked little messes for Caroline. She leafed hopefully through the book - or rather, whichever one of them seemed most likely to provide what she wanted - to see if she had overlooked some pattern of words that might help her to feel better. And at the least she felt she was being honest, that virtue which she was still convinced was the supreme one. Somewhere at the bottom of her heart was a pleasant self-righteousness that while she was as little fitted for maternity as her mother had been, she at least had the honesty to admit it.

  She would watch lunchtime approaching with helpless despair. But she was determined to break this cycle of determination, which always ended in her own violent anger and Caroline’s rebellious screams.

  She learned to put Caroline’s food in front of her and then go out of the room altogether. When she came back, she forbade herself to notice the unpleasant fly-covered mess on the high chair. She quickly lifted the child out, and washed her, and set her back in her pen without saying a word. Day after day, Martha lay face down on the bed at every mealtime, her fingers stuck
in her ears, reading, while Caroline yelled for attention next door. Slowly the yells lessened. There came a point where the child received her food and ate it. Martha returned from her exile in the bedroom, the victory won. She had succeeded in defeating the demon of antagonism.

  And now she was able to cook the food and serve Caroline with it and not care if she ate it or not. And, of course, now it was eaten. And Martha existed on hastily cut slabs of bread and butter and tea. She could not be interested in food unless she was cooking it for someone with whom she would share it afterwards. Women living by themselves can starve themselves into a sickness without knowing what is wrong with them.

  Then she became perversely sad because she had won the victory. It seemed that something must have snapped between her and her daughter. It increased her persistent uneasiness, which expressed itself in those interminable puzzled humorous monologues: ‘It’s all very well, Caroline, but there must be something wrong when you have to learn not to care. Because the trouble with me is not that I care too much, but that I care too little. You’d be relieved, my poor brat, if you knew that when you were with my mother I never thought of you at all - that’s a guarantee of your future emotional safety, isn’t it?’ Silence, while Caroline pursued her own interests about the room; if the silence persisted, however, she cocked a bright inquiring eye towards her mother. ‘But what I can’t understand is this: Two years ago, I was as free as air. I could have done anything, been anything. Because the essence of the daydreams of every girl who isn’t married is just that: it’s the only time they are more free than men. Men have to be something, but you’ll find when you grow up, my poor child, that you’ll see yourself as a ballet dancer, or a business executive, or the wife of a Prime Minister, or the mistress of somebody important, or even in extreme moments a nun or a missionary. You’ll imagine yourself doing all sorts of things in all sorts of countries; the point is, your will will be your limit. Anything’ll be possible. But you will not see yourself sitting in a small room bound for twenty-four hours of the day - with years of it in front of you - to a small child. For God’s sake, Caroline, don’t marry young, I’ll stop you marrying young if I have to lock you up. But I can’t do that,’ concluded Martha humorously, ‘because that would be putting pressure on you and that’s the unforgivable sin. All I can promise is that I won’t put any pressure on you of any kind. I simply won’t care … But supposing that not caring is only the most subtle and deadly way of putting pressure on people - what then? … But what is most difficult is this: If you read novels and diaries, women didn’t seem to have these problems. Is it really conceivable that we should have turned into something quite different in the space of about fifty years? Or do you suppose they didn’t tell the truth, the novelists? In the books, the young and idealistic girl gets married, has a baby – she at once turns into something quite different; and she is perfectly happy to spend her whole life bringing up children with a tedious husband. Natasha, for instance: she was content to be an old hen, fussing and dull; but supposing all the time she saw a picture of herself as she had been, and saw herself as what she had become and was miserable – what then? Because either that’s the truth or there is a completely new kind of woman in the world, and surely that isn’t possible, what do you think, Caroline?’