COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  All the morning, sunlight moved and deployed around the flat. After lunch the sun had moved away; the rooms were warm, airless, stagnant. And then Martha put Caroline into her push-chair, and filled in the time by wheeling her around the streets for an hour, two hours, three hours. Or she sat in the park under a tree with dozens of other young mothers and nannies, watching the children play. This period of the day seemed to concentrate into it the essence of boredom. It was boredom like an illness. But at six in the evening, Caroline was washed, fed, and put into her cot. Silence descended. Martha was free. She could go out, see people, go to the pictures. But she did not. She sat alone, reading and thinking interminably, turning over and over in her mind this guilty weight of thoughts, which were always the same. Those people who have been brought up in the nonconformist pattern may shed God, turn upside down the principles they were brought up to; but they may always be relied upon to torment themselves satisfactorily with problems of right behaviour. From these dreary self-searchings there emerged a definite idea: that there must be, if not in literature, which evaded these problems, then in life, that woman who combined a warm accepting femininity and motherhood with being what Martha described vaguely but to her own satisfaction as ‘a person’. She must look for her.

  Then one day she saw Stella in the street. They exchanged the gay guilty promises to come and see each other which people do who are dropping out of each other’s lives. Afterwards Martha thought that Stella looked very contented. She had changed. Two years ago she had been a lithe, alive, beautiful young woman. Having a baby had turned her into a stout and handsome matron, very smart, competent and - this was the point - happy. Or so it seemed in retrospect. Thinking wistfully for several days about Stella’s unfailing self-assurance, in whatever role life asked her to play, turned her, for Martha, into a symbol of satisfactory womanhood. On an impulse then she dropped Caroline in the house across the park with her mother, and drove out to the house in the suburbs where Stella now lived with her mother.

  It was a very bright sparkling day, with a tang of chill in the air. The sky was glacially blue. The white houses in their masses of heavy green foliage shone in a thin clear light, with a remote, indrawn look, as if prepared to be abandoned by warmth for a short season. The wave of painful emotion that is a clearer sign of changing seasons than the loosening of a leaf or a clap of thunder after seven months’ silence entered Martha suddenly with familiar and pleasurable melancholy - winter was coming. In such a mood, to inquire from Stella how one should live appeared absurd; nostalgia imposed different values - nothing mattered very much. Suppressing it, she drove on through the avenues, turned outwards over a narrow road through a shallow grass-filled vlei, and entered a new suburb; the town was spreading fast under the pressures of war. This suburb was a mile of new bungalows scattered hastily over a rock-strewn rise. Stella’s mother’s new house was at its limit; beyond stretched the unscarred veld; and the garden was bounded by heaps of granite boulders tangled over by purple bougainvillaea. The bungalow was small, but no longer a colonial bungalow. The veranda was a small porch, and there were green shutters to the windows, and there was a look of glossy smartness about it. Martha parked the car, went up prim steps, and rang the bell, feeling like someone paying a visit.

  Stella appeared and cried out a gay welcome. She was wearing a handsome scarlet housecoat, and her dark braids fell down her back. In the living room her mother was playing with the baby. The room looked like an illustration from a magazine; it was all cream leather and red carpet. Through the cream-shaded windows a stretch of sere drying veld looked in and disowned the alien. Martha felt a sharp dislocation in her sense of what was fitting, as she always did with Mrs Barbazon, who, with her careful dark eyes, seemed a stray from the capitals of Europe.

  Stella flung back her dark braids carelessly, and, with her new look of matronly contentment, sat down, watching her child - a little girl, dark-eyed, slender, pale. Both women were competing for Esther’s attention. Mrs Barbazon was holding up her crystal beads and swinging them before the infant’s moving eyes. Stella leaned forward and offered the end of one of her long thick plaits. Esther reached out for it, and with a satisfied smile, Stella lifted her on to her own lap.

  ‘How’s Andrew?’ asked Martha.

  Without lifting her eyes from Esther’s face, Stella said, ‘Oh – I haven’t had a letter recently. I don’t know.’ This was hard and careless.

  ‘I heard from my brother that he’d met him somewhere up north.’

  Stella looked up quickly, searched Martha’s face, asked, ‘What did he say he was doing?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much, just that they’d met. My brother’s with the South Africans.’

  ‘This terrible, terrible war,’ said Mrs Barbazon.

  ‘Oh, they seem to be having a good enough time,’ said Stella, with a careless laugh. Her face looked set for a moment; then she smiled at Esther, and began tickling her cheeks with the soft brush at the end of the braid.

  ‘And how’s Esther?’

  Mrs Barbazon, smiling reminiscently, opened her mouth to give information. Stella cut in first with a story of how the child had crawled this morning across her bed. Mrs Barbazon said, ‘You should let her sleep with me - you’d get some rest.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve nothing else to do, and you’re a good girl, aren’t you, Esther?’

  There was a silence. Martha felt the room oppressive. She could see that both women were devoting their lives to Esther; it was a close, jealous, watchful household.

  ‘And are you having a good time?’ asked Mrs Barbazon, in a way which told Martha they had been discussing her unfavourably.

  ‘I’ve got my hands full with Caroline.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no time for anything else with a baby in the house.’

  ‘I had a letter from Andrew last month,’ said Stella casually. ‘He says the boys up north are all demoralized because their wives and girlfriends are unfaithful to them with the Air Force.’

  ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ said Mrs Barbazon, ‘when our men are sacrificing everything to fight, and the women have no loyalty.’

  Here there was an inexplicable long look between Mrs Barbazon and Stella; the older woman rose, and said, ‘I’ll make some tea, the servants are out.’ She left the room with a small wistful smile in the direction of Esther.

  As soon as her mother had left the room, Stella set the child on the floor and gave her attention to Martha. She asked if Caroline was walking yet; when Martha said yes, she said quickly that a year was early to be walking, from which Martha deduced that Esther had fallen behind schedule in her achievements.

  Martha looked at Esther with detached criticism, in which was concealed the distaste that women feel for other women’s babies while they are still closely physically linked with their own. Esther, she decided, was listless and heavy compared to the ceaselessly mobile Caroline.

  Stella began talking of how she had had to wean the child after three months; her health had not permitted her to stand the strain of breast-feeding; as she spoke, she unconsciously felt her now plump breasts with both hands. ‘Having babies ruins the figure, ruins it.’ She looked over at Martha and said, ‘You’ve lost the weight you put on.’

  ‘I didn’t lose it,’ said Martha grimly, ‘I starved it off.’

  ‘Oh, I could never diet, I’m not strong enough. Anyway, Andrew always said he wished I was fatter.’ Stella sighed, and her face fell into dissatisfied lines. The beautiful dark eyes looked strained and shadowed. The remote exotic gleam had gone; the seductive quality that Martha had so envied, that had showed itself in her every glance and movement, had completely vanished; she was a good-looking housewife, no more.

  The doorbell rang. Stella’s eyes gathered life; she half rose, then said, ‘But I’m not dressed!’

  ‘Leave it - I’ll go,’ said Mrs Barbazon from the kitchen.

  Stella stood with her hands to her hair.

  ‘You’d better get yourself dressed,�
�� said Mrs Barbazon, as she came through to go to the door. There was a disapproving note in her voice which caused Martha to glance curiously at Stella.

  A look of anger crossed Stella’s face, then went. ‘Oh, yes, I can’t be seen like this,’ she said, and went out quickly just before Mrs Barbazon came back with a young officer.

  He was a big, bulky, fair-headed man, blue-eyed, Northern-looking. He sat down, while Mrs Barbazon moved and fussed about him. She sat down and began questioning him with the touching, self-immolating devotion which was what she offered to her daughter, about how the flying had gone yesterday, had he been sleeping better?

  ‘Stella’s just getting dressed. You know what things are with a baby in the house.’

  The newcomer, reminded of the household’s obligations, clucked at the baby. Mrs Barbazon, seeing him occupied, went out and quickly returned with a tea-waggon. She began pouring.

  A gay voice was heard outside. ‘Mother, where’s my hairbrush?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Barbazon spoke sharply. She stood looking at the doorway, with the teapot held suspended in her hand. Stella, in a dress of apple-green linen which showed her apricot-coloured arms, was standing in the doorway, her loosened masses of hair about her face, apparently oblivious of the officer.

  ‘Ah, there it is. Naughty Esther, you had it.’ Stella reached for the hairbrush, holding back her heavy hair with one hand. ‘Why, Rupert, is that you?’

  Mrs Barbazon steadily poured tea, her lips compressed.

  ‘You know how things get all over the place, with babies in the house,’ said Stella with her jolly laugh. She stood in front of the big man, who had risen and was awkwardly facing her, and began brushing back the loads of glistening hair that slipped with a hiss over her shoulders. He could not keep his eyes off it. Her small smooth face emerged from the frame of falling hair, and Martha saw that the spirit of attraction had lit it again; Stella looked as she had done before the baby. She smiled and asked how he did, while he said, ‘Fine, fine, thank you,’ and his eyes followed the movement of the hair. She held the scene for a few moments longer; then, with a final swift toss of her head backwards, which flung the hair into an oiled, iridescent, dead-black curve, she said, ‘Excuse me, I’ll just finish dressing.’

  The three sat and made conversation while the officer’s eyes rested on the door through which Stella had gone. She returned in a few moments, the black hair done up demurely in its heavy knot, and sat down near him. Little Esther began tugging at the green linen. Stella put her hands down once or twice, and then said hastily, ‘Let’s call the nurse - she can go out for a bit.’

  Mrs Barbazon rose, picked up Esther, and went out. She did not return.

  Martha soon got up and said she must go and feed Caroline.

  At once Stella said, ‘Do come and see us again, Matty. You’re a naughty girl, forgetting your friends like this.’ But she was looking at the officer even as she spoke; Martha felt something like pity for the big likeable man with the candid blue eyes.

  Stella came with her to the door. ‘He’s a nice boy,’ she remarked. ‘We try and make him feel at home. It must be hard for them, so far from their families.’

  Martha laughed. Stella looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘He’s a really nice boy. Mother says she feels towards him like a son,’ she went on, smiling a small, dreamy and quite unconscious smile.

  Martha urged Stella with false animation to visit her soon. Stella again berated Martha for being so unsociable. They exchanged urgent invitations for a few moments, and parted, disliking each other.

  Martha was feeling extraordinarily foolish as she drove home. The reaction against Stella sent her back to Alice. The two women had in common a basic self-absorption that made it possible to forget each other for weeks and meet again easily without any embarrassment. They understood each other very well. They would seek each other out for the sole reason that they needed a safety valve; they would discuss in humorous, helpless voices, for an hour or so, their boredom, the tediums of living alone, the unsatisfactory nature of marriage, the burden of bringing up children, and part in the best of humours with the unscrupulous and buccaneering chuckle that came of being so ruthlessly disloyal to everything they were.

  Then each retired again into isolation. Alice was half crazy with being alone. She was very thin, her hair hung limp about her face, she neglected her clothes. From time to time she exclaimed defiantly, ‘Oh, to hell with everything,’ and rang up Martha to say she was going out with the Air Force. Martha always assured her that this was the least of her rights. Alice pulled out an old dance dress, combed her hair back, scrawled some lipstick across her face. She then set herself to be the life and soul of whichever party she happened to be at. Returned to her flat by some ardent young man, she allowed herself to be kissed and caresssed for a while, as if she owed this to her self-respect, and then said, ‘Oh, well, that’s that - thanks for a lovely time.’ With which she departed indoors, with a hasty apologetic wave. She never saw any young man for a second time. On these occasions Martha was likely to be rung up at three in the morning by Alice, who concluded her desperate, gay, rambling comments on the party by ‘The point is, once you’ve been married there’s no point in it. I don’t enjoy anything any more.’ And then, firmly: ‘But if Willie thinks I’m going to sit at home weeping for him, he’d better think again, after what I heard he was up to!’ With this, she let out her high fatalistic giggle, and wished Martha a good night.

  Chapter Three

  The airstrip was an irregular stretch of glistening white sand in the dull-green bush. As the aircraft turned in to land, the shadow of its wings dipped over an acre or so of tin-and-brick bungalows. The soldiers in the aircraft peered down past the tilting wings and suggested Lower Egypt, Abyssinia, Kenya, Uganda. It seemed that they had all seen this shanty-town in the bush many times before.

  The aircraft bounced a little as it landed, then slewed to a stop. A thick cloud of white dust drifted up. The door was kept shut till it cleared. Then they descended - half a dozen men on their feet. An ambulance was already motoring across the half-mile between here and the red-brick shack that was an office, to pick up the stretcher cases. The half-dozen stood on one side hopefully while the stretchers were slid inside the white car, but it drove off immediately. They walked across the white glisten of the strip, sand giving with a silken crunch beneath their boots, then through low dun-coloured bushes towards the office. Small paper-white butterflies hovered over the bushes, or clung with fanning wings. There was a hot, spicy smell of leaves. Over the squashed remains of a chameleon, spreadeagled on the sand like a small dragon’s skin pegged out, was a thick black clot of ants. A stray kaffir dog, his skeleton showing clear through tight skin, lay in the pit of blue shade outside the veranda. They stepped over the dog and went in.

  It was a single room. A South African sergeant sat behind a small deal table. A black man in a sort of orderly’s uniform stood at ease beside him. The sergeant was pouring a glass of water from a bedroom decanter. He tipped back his head, poured the water into his mouth, wiped his hand across his mouth, looked at them and said, ‘So there you are.’

  Douglas said half facetiously, ‘Where are we, we’d like to know.’

  The sergeant thought, concluded that the information could not subvert the course of the war, and offered cautiously, ‘Nyasaland.’

  The men exchanged startled, bitter glances. ‘Pretty far from the front,’ said Douglas, his face hard.

  A quick glance from the sergeant. He said officially, ‘Are you OK till you get into town? There’s a car coming for you.’

  He nodded at a bench set against the wall. They did not immediately sit down. They stood tense, looking at each other, at the sergeant.

  ‘Sit down,’ said the sergeant again, authoritative but uneasy.

  They slowly walked over, dropped their packs by the wall, sat. Six men, all tough soldiers, very burnt, apparently fit for anything. Yet here they sat. They s
at and waited with the patience which a year in the Army had taught them. Indeed, for that year they had done little else but wait. They had marched, drilled - and waited; slept under canvas or in the open - and waited; they had been told nothing, knew nothing. For the first time in their lives they had been pushed around; they were expected to wait. And now things were really happening up north, and they were back only a few hundred miles from home. They waited. The small brick room, unceilinged, was roofed with corrugated iron; the heat poured down. The brick at their backs burned through the thick khaki; they sat away and forward from the wall, looking out of the doorway into the sunlight. The aircraft looked like a small silver insect glittering off sunlight. It was apparently abandoned. A pair of hawks circled above on steady wings.