COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  ‘You know, Mrs Knowell, half the women who come in to see me have nothing wrong with them, but it doesn’t mean to say they don’t need a doctor’s advice. Now, you, as an intelligent woman, will understand that.’

  Martha smiled disagreeably, at the ‘intelligent woman’; he saw the smile, but went on, ‘I prescribe a bottle of tonic. It does no harm. It might do some good. But I’m not going to prescribe a bottle of tonic for you. Your husband seems worried about you. You would be surprised how often I get worried telephone calls from young husbands.’ Here he laughed as if they shared a secret. ‘Perhaps it is just as well that husbands are - sometimes a little off the mark?’ He waited for her to laugh.

  She had frozen, however; it was too clumsy. He noted her frown, picked up his pen, and began making a series of sharp downward strokes on a scribbling pad.

  Martha thought, He can’t judge people deeply; what he has got is an insight into how they react. He knows I resent it, but he doesn’t know what I resent. But she understood that his technique was working very well. She was feeling with him against the world of clumsy young husbands. She reminded herself that he was not much more than thirty, not much older than herself. And then: He didn’t even know I was pregnant when I came to him that time, and yet here I sit putting myself into his hands. For the first time she suspected that perhaps he had known she was pregnant, and understood her well enough to let her become too advanced to do anything about it. Perhaps all the women who came here were handled in the same way?

  For the women of the suburbs, doctors do not make mistakes. At least, not their own doctors.

  She thought of his wife. In the circle of women it was said that Mrs Stern was not good enough for her husband. Martha had caught a glimpse of them together one Sunday afternoon in the park. Mrs Stern was a small dark plump girl with a high-coloured face, who clung to his arm while he strolled across the grass, apparently as weary and patient as always. Martha had envied her. Being married to Dr Stern would be something quite different from being the wife of one of the boys. She had thought that proud anxious clutching of his arm rather ridiculous; now, if she, Martha, had been married to Dr Stern …

  But he was speaking. ‘Before I got married myself I had all kinds of notions. But I’ve discovered that I’m not quite as clever as I thought I was. It’s one thing to give advice from outside, and another to handle things yourself. I am quite sure my wife thinks me the most clumsy of fellows.’ He looked up and smiled. It was a pleasant and disarming smile. He shrugged, as if the whole thing was beyond him; and Martha found herself smiling with him.

  ‘Now, look here, Mrs Knowell,’ he began in a completely different tone, all his cards on the table, ‘you would be surprised, I am sure, at the number of young married women who come here and sit where you are sitting, in just the same mood - you will forgive me for saying that I can see you are in a mood? I don’t want to step in where angels fear to tread, believe me. For instance, only yesterday a patient of mine came in and she was crying her eyes out and said she couldn’t stand her husband and was going to leave him. There was no other man, nothing like that, she just couldn’t stand things any longer. It’s the time of the year. And then, it was last week, I think, another patient I’ve known for years and years - ‘ he sounded like a tolerant old man, and it occurred to Martha that he could not have known any patient for years and years, he had not been practising long enough - ‘well, she was in the same mood. But she was in here this morning, and she’s going to have another baby, and she’d got over it. We do get over it and just jog along. When I come to think of it, there isn’t one of my women patients who doesn’t come in to me a couple of years after her marriage, wishing she was out of it all. It’s not much of a compliment to us men, I expect, but there it is, that’s life.’

  He again offered her his bland, tolerant smile, and she smiled back her appreciation of this life they must all accept, since there was no alternative. She was feeling quite remarkably relieved and consoled. But she could not help thinking, He’ll keep it up for a few minutes; just to make sure.

  And he did continue, using the words ‘we’, ‘all’, and ‘everybody’ in every sentence. She was both angrily humiliated and perversely appreciative of the situation.

  ‘My wife is going to have a baby quite soon, Mrs Knowell, and, believe me, I shall make a point of seeing she goes right away from me and the child in about a year’s time - we should all get away from each other sometimes. I certainly shall not allow her to have a second baby before she has been off by herself away from me for at least a month.’

  The words ‘I certainly shall not allow’ succeeded in conjuring up such a picture of his marriage, such a complacent and uxorious young husband, that the spell snapped. She instantly decided that he had said to Douglas over the telephone, ‘Well, old chap, you know what women are.’

  ‘I can’t go for a holiday, Dr Stern, it’s out of the question.’ This was flat and rather contemptuous. Dr Stern raised those intelligent tired eyes.

  ‘Well, Mrs Knowell, if you can’t, you can’t. Bad luck, but there it is.’

  She stood up. ‘Well, thank you, doctor - I mustn’t keep you.’ She added suddenly, ‘I really am feeling tired - perhaps you could give me a tonic.’

  He drew the prescription pad towards him and wrote. ‘Yes, we none of us feel too good at this time of the year.’

  Caroline was brought in by the nurse. Dr Stern escorted Martha to the door and dismissed her with the usual invitation to drop in whenever she liked. She went through the waiting room, which as always was filled with women whose eyes were fixed on his door.

  In the street she hesitated outside a chemist’s shop, then took out the prescription for the tonic and tore it up; she thrust the pieces into her handbag with a really violent impulse of anger. Everything seemed hateful. It’s all so terrible, she was saying to herself. She wheeled Caroline along the pavement, instinctively keeping in the shade. She could not bear to think of the everyone, the we and the all. So everyone had moods in which they ran off to the doctor, that archpriest, who gave them bottles of tonic and assured them they were exactly like everyone else? They went for a holiday, then they began another baby and were perfectly happy? All the same, she said to herself, it is the mood which is the truth, and the other a lie. She could not maintain the conviction long. The irritable exhaustion faded at the idea of having another baby: it was so exciting to have a baby, to produce another human being out of nowhere - out of the hat so to speak! And then it would be all settled for once and for all. No escape then! And in two or three years’ time the baby would be just such another little person as Caroline was now, looking at her with judging eyes. A pang of tired fear went through her. She saw it all so very clearly. That phrase, ‘having a baby’, which was every girl’s way of thinking of a first child, was nothing but a mask to conceal the truth. One saw a flattering image of a madonnalike woman with a helpless infant in her arms; nothing could be more attractive. What one did not see, what everyone conspired to prevent one seeing, was the middle-aged woman who had done nothing but produce two or three commonplace and tedious citizens in a world that was already too full of them.

  Martha was on the point of sliding off into those familiar reflections about what the women of the past had felt about it, when she was brought up short by the thought of her father. He had put the problem quite clearly; she must face it.

  If she was to leave Douglas, for what way of living was she to leave? There’s something so damned vieux jeu, she thought gloomily, in leaving like Nora, to live differently! Because we’re not such fools any longer. We don’t imagine that rushing off to earn one’s living as a typist is going to make any difference. One is bound to fall in love with the junior partner, and the whole thing will begin all over again. The idea was so unpleasant that she swung round: Not at all; she would submit, as everyone else did.

  She began daydreaming. Since there was no woman she had ever met she could model herself on, she created
a brooding and female spirit in that large cool house in the avenues, surrounded by a crowd - for, while she was about it, she imagined six or seven children, not just two – a brood, then, of charming children, who fed from this source of warmth and creativeness as at a spring. A picture much more attractive than the cold and critical young woman typing letters in a business office.

  One of those warm, large, delightful, maternal, humorous females she would be; undemanding, unpossessive. One never met them, but, if she put her mind to it, no doubt she could become one. She would lapse into it as into a sea and let everything go … And, severely suppressing the pangs of pure panic that kept rising in her every moment at the idea of abandoning the person she felt herself to be, she set herself to imagine the house, all its rooms full of children, and she in the middle like a queen ant.

  She had reached a corner where she must turn off into the leafy avenues. She was dipping the wheels of the push-chair down off the pavement, when she heard a shrill whistle. There was a note in it which made her glance sharply around. On the opposite pavement stood a group of young men in the grey uniform, and they were whistling after her with mixed derision and admiration. She at once felt herself stiffen and become self-conscious. She turned her head away as the whistles rang out again, with a jeering note in them because of her aloofness, and was furious with herself because of that self-consciousness. She hastily gained the opposite pavement, and turned off into the avenue before her own so as to escape the men and her own embarrassment.

  This small episode had destroyed the vision of the brooding mother with the flock of children. She could not regain it. She marched sternly up under the drooping purple jacarandas – the sun had lost its hot white glare, and was beaming out a thick yellow which shaped the jacaranda blossoms into clusters of heavy purple - and was pervaded with a disgust of herself, life, everything, so strong it was like a nausea.

  She heard steps hurrying up behind her, heard her name called, and turned to see William approaching. She had not seen him since that afternoon eighteen months ago when Douglas returned.

  ‘Were you with that - mob?’ she inquired, sour but smiling.

  And he grinned, returning equably, ‘Boys will be boys.’ For naturally he, the individual, had nothing to do with the group he had been part of a moment before. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Home,’ said Martha, resuming her progress.

  William advanced his opinion that Caroline was growing a big girl. Martha agreed. William said it was a long time since they had met. Martha said a very long time. William said he found the weather very trying. Their eyes met and they laughed.

  He certainly did not look comfortable. The thick stiff cloth seemed more than ever like a variety of shell. In movement he had a quick lightness, almost grace, but the uniform was too much for him, he looked eclipsed. But from the grey carapace his pale face emerged, now rather flushed, and the very clear blue eyes - not like Douglas’s eyes, which were a strong rather muddy blue, but a deep blue, like water or sapphires - were calm and intelligent. His hair was bright rough brown, like metal in the sunshine, under a cap which he wore jauntily, at a rakish angle, as they all did - as if it was a joke that they must wear it at all.

  ‘I’ll go with you a little way - nothing better to do this fine afternoon.’ And he marched along beside her, hands in his pockets.

  ‘How’s the - group?’ inquired Martha awkwardly.

  ‘Oh … fine.’ But he relented and said in a friendly, casual way, ‘We did hope you would join us. But of course it is difficult now — we see your difficulties,’ he amended, colouring a little.

  But what did that ‘we’ mean now?

  ‘You’ve broken away from that – the old gang?’

  ‘Well, of course, with this sudden swing, it’s easy to get things going.’

  ‘What sudden swing?’

  He looked at her swiftly, frowning and incredulous. Then: ‘Surely it must be obvious even to the wives of prominent civil servants that there’s a change in the atmosphere?’

  ‘I haven’t been reading the newspapers,’ she said confusedly.

  He pursed up his lips a little, was silent; then he saw her apologetic face and inquired obligingly, ‘Why not?’ ‘They’re all so disgusting.’

  ‘Oh granted, granted.’ But he again relented and said, ‘There are other ways of coping with it than not reading them.’ His air of disapproval annoyed her. She thought, He’s nothing but a boy, anyway. He was about twenty, and she two years older; but she was married and had a child. She felt maternal towards him.

  They had reached the house. Through the flowering hedges, beneath its sheltering trees, it looked very large, settled, permanent. The garden boy was chatting with the nursegirl under a tree, the piccaninny was gathering peas in the vegetable beds, the houseboy was sweeping the deep flight of front steps.

  ‘A delightful feudalism,’ he remarked pleasantly. ‘Truly delightful. And you the chatelaine of it all.’ She could not help laughing, though she was angry with him. ‘Oh, well, it can’t be helped,’ he went on, casting calm blue eyes over the place. ‘And I’ll admit that there are worse ways of spending one’s life.’

  He wanted to be asked in, she could see. But she remembered Douglas: he would be angry. First, she thought confusedly, I must get this business sorted out - for once and for all!

  ‘Give my regards to the old man,’ he said.

  He meant Douglas. She stiffened.

  ‘Well, so long. If you ever feel like a nice change, you’ve got Jasmine’s telephone number.’ And he walked off back to town.

  She was feeling mean, because she had not asked him in. Almost, she called him back. But she wheeled Caroline into the garden, and handed her over to Alice, and then went straight to the bedroom. The morning’s newspaper was spread on the beside table. She opened it and began studying it.

  Since she had last looked at a newspaper, it appeared that the Russians had become heroes and magnificent fighters. They were no longer a rabble of ill-equipped moujiks fleeing before the Nazi hordes. A remarkable change – she had ceased to read the papers because she had been sickened by their gloating tone over the invasion of Russia: everyone was delighted, it was obvious, that their gallant allies were being so thoroughly beaten.

  There was an epic battle going on at a place called Stalingrad which was - so some anonymous leader writer said - a turning point of the war.

  The local situation had remained static. There were two leaders written with that irritable self-satisfaction which was so familiar, about how the native population did not appreciate what the whites were sacrificing in uplifting them from their savage state, how they did not understand the dignity of labour, how they could not expect to be as civilized as the whites in under a thousand years, for this was the length of time it had required the British people to evolve from mud huts to democracy and plumbing. All this could be taken as read. In the letter columns there was a new and strident note. Two respected citizens wrote at length warning the population that there were agitators abroad who were putting ideas into the heads of the natives; ‘certain individuals, inspired from Moscow …’ The Government should immediately examine these organizations, which, under cover of raising aid for Russia, were, in fact, spreading ideas inimical to white civilization.

  This was all very interesting. The advertisement columns confirmed that all sorts of new activities were going on. As well as the usual cinema shows, dances and meetings, there were half a dozen notices of meetings run by as many organizations - Help for Our Allies, Sympathizers of Russia, and so on - on subjects like ‘The Constitution of the Soviet Union’ and ‘Life on a Collective Farm in the Ukraine’.

  Altogether there was a feeling of movement, stir and excitement which communicated itself to Martha. But above all was she struck by the difference in tone of the paper from a year ago about the war. She rummaged in a cupboard, and found a pile of dead newspapers. Two years ago, the Russians had been dastardly and vicious criminal
s plotting with Hitler to dominate the world. A year ago they were unfortunate victims of unscrupulous aggression, but unluckily so demoralized that as allies they were worse than useless. Now, however, they were a race of battling giants.

  While not reading the newspapers is a practice to be condemned, there are times when it can yield interesting results. For the thought which naturally presented itself to Martha was, How did the editor of this same newspaper picture his readers? There was no connection between the headlines of two years ago, a year ago, and today.

  There was a knock on the door; Alice said she had brought Caroline in to be fed. Martha said that for this once she would leave the child to her. She remained sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to collect her ideas, which were in a state of extraordinary confusion.

  It was quite clear that the group, however it was now constituted, were ‘doing something’ at last. But what? Martha began to indulge in attractive daydreams of herself going among people, like a heroine from an old Russian novel. Common sense told her to desist. If Jasmine, or William, or anyone else had been going among the people, then there would have been a much stronger reaction than a couple of indignant letters to the press. The colour bar made that form of agitation impossible.

  Suddenly, and without any warning, that feeling of staleness came over her, a sort of derisive boredom. She could not account for it, but the picture of a small group of people, middle-class every one of them, having meetings, running offices, even going among the people, struck her as absurd, pathetic - above all, old-fashioned. Here it was again, the enemy which made any kind of enthusiasm or idealism ridiculous.

  The life she was living seemed dignified and attractive.

  But no sooner had she come to this conclusion than disgust rose against it; and she thought with tender longing of these new possibilities; nothing could have seemed more heroic and admirable than Jasmine, William and the rest. Yet almost at once, and in proportion to the strength of her desire to join them at once, derision arose, that stale disgust.