COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  She remained, tossing from one mood to the other, motionless on the edge of the bed, while the darkness came down outside and the street lights shone out.

  There were steps in the middle of the house, the door opened, the lights crashed on. Douglas came in. He said in a jolly voice, ‘What are you doing, sitting in the dark?’ But there was a cautious look on his face.

  She roused herself and said, ‘Oh, nothing.’

  He looked at the mess of newspapers on the bed, and said contemptuously, ‘Oh, that rubbish!’ - meaning world affairs in general - and she saw that the self-satisfied note in his voice was of the same quality as her own mood of gloomy fatality.

  She hastily folded up the papers, with a movement as if she were concealing something from him. ‘Is Caroline in bed?’

  He opened the door into the next room. Caroline was being watched at her supper by Alice.

  He returned, and said sentimentally, ‘Matty, surely you can give the child her supper at least.’

  She shut down her anger, and remarked, ‘The doctor says she is perfectly well.’

  ‘Oh - that’s a good thing.’ He stood looking at her with a tentative indignation.

  ‘And I’m perfectly well, too,’ said Martha abruptly, smiling in a way which she meant to be unpleasant.

  ‘That’s good.’ This was bluff and hearty; he turned away to hang up his jacket in the wardrobe. ‘I’ve got some news,’ he began, still in a bluff voice, which made her stiffen defensively. ‘Old Billy in Y — has got leave, and they want me to go down and take his place for a few weeks.’

  ‘Well, are you going?’

  He turned sharply, and gve her a consciously reproachful look, biting his fat lips. ‘You could come, too,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘There’s a house.’

  ‘But, Douglas, what are we to do with this one? Just shut it up?’

  ‘Oh, well, if you feel like that …’ ‘How long are you going for?’

  ‘Three weeks.’ He looked at her again, sideways. ‘What did old Stern have to say?’

  ‘Nothing much — but there really isn’t any need to worry about Caroline’s well-being.’ Again it was a moment when the hatred between them shocked and dismayed them both.

  ‘Well, perhaps, it’s just as well we’ll - have a break for a few weeks, eh, Matty?’ He came over and stood a few inches from her, smiling in appeal.

  She at once responded by rising and kissing him - but on the cheek, for her lips, which had intended to meet his, instinctively moved past in revulsion. This revulsion frightened her so much she flung her arms about him and warmly embraced him.

  The act of love immediately followed.

  There is a type of woman - although whether she is a modern phenomenon or has always existed is not a question for novelists - who cannot bear to be found wanting physically. In Martha’s case, it worked like this: her mother had a rooted dislike for all matters sexual; therefore it was a matter of pride for Martha not only to be attractive sexually, but to be good in bed. There are hundreds of thousands of young women in our society who when all else fails - they may be inefficient at their work, and bored wives and mothers - find solace in the belief that they are good in bed. Not for one moment have they ever paused in their determination to be better than their parents by flying this particular flag. But they have no hesitation in taking from their parents the romanticism which becomes the moral support not of free love - Martha came too late to believe in that; it was associated with the Twenties and thus had a stale and jaded sound to it - but of a determined hedonism, an accomplished athleticism, since ‘the book’ lays all doubts and suspicions, above all by the variety and ingenuity of the physical attitudes it recommends. Douglas could hardly be blamed for not understanding the thoroughness of Martha’s dislike for him, since that prohibition prevented her from ever expressing it in bed. The moment she did so, it would have meant the complete collapse of the romantic picture she maintained of him. A young woman of this type will expend immense energy on arranging her image of her husband into something admirable and attractive. And this as a question of principle. Such a young woman will confuse all bystanders by being charmingly devoted to her husband, angrily defending him against every word of criticism until the very moment she leaves him. After which she will not have one good word to say for him.

  On this particular occasion Martha was irritable and, when she realized it, apologetic. She finally escaped with the abrupt remark, ‘I must go and see how Caroline is.’

  ‘Oh, but, Matty, she’s got the nurse, and I’m going away for weeks.’

  ‘But she mustn’t be neglected,’ she said, laughing in a way which told them both that the moment of reconciliation had been a failure. They ate dinner in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  Next day, Douglas left for Y—, which was a couple of hundred miles south, a small administrative centre.

  They embraced affectionately at parting. Then Douglas said sentimentally, ‘Do look after Caroline, Matty.’ He added, ‘You have so much to give her.’ He had taken to using the last phrase, half guiltily, meaning that he knew she intended that what she had to give would not all be swallowed in children and housekeeping, whereas he was determined it should be.

  She said involuntarily, ‘Don’t be so damned dishonest.’

  He muttered angrily, ‘I hope you’ll be in a better temper when I come back.’

  After a few moments of guilt, not so much at what she had said, but because she had allowed herself to see him as clumsy and ridiculous, she went indoors, feeling deliciously alone and free.

  She read a little, played with Caroline, sewed for a while, as if she had no intention of spending the three weeks of freedom in any other way. Then, without knowing until the moment she lifted down the receiver that she was going to do so, she telephoned Jasmine.

  Jasmine was calm, unsurprised, and very efficient about dates and places.

  Martha arranged to meet her and William the following evening, to talk things over.

  Chapter Two

  Martha waited for that first appointment with Jasmine like a girl going to her lover. She was dressed and ready two hours before the time, and was just about to start when Jasmine telephoned to say that unluckily she had an unexpected meeting. But she would meet Martha at eight outside McGrath’s so that they might both go to yet another meeting, organized by Help for Our Allies. Jasmine felt, she said in that small demure voice, that Martha would find it interesting.

  Martha set herself to wait another two hours, conscious that much of her enthusiasm was ebbing. There is something in the word ‘meeting’ which arouses an instinctive and profound distrust in the bosoms of British people at this late hour of their history. And then the name ‘Help for Our Allies’ had a childish sound, with strong overtones of tract and even charity. Martha had lapsed back into her condition of irritated distaste long before the time appointed, and it was with an effort of will that she roused herself to go to the car. She waited outside the hotel for some twenty minutes before Jasmine and William appeared, each carrying armfuls of books and leaflets. There was between these two such a look of shared mission that Martha felt lonely and excluded as she followed them into McGrath’s ballroom, which was released for this one evening from mess dinners and war charity dances.

  The place was full. Seven or eight hundred people were crowded into the big ugly hall. Martha saw that they were all well-dressed and comfortable citizens, and her confusion was completed when she noticed Mr Maynard and Mrs Maynard seated side by side in the front row - large, imposing, black-browed, and apparently pleased to shed approval on the proceedings by being there.

  She was hurried to an empty seat by Jasmine, who at once left her and pushed her way through the crowds to the platform, where she sat at a table with a group of people whom Martha did not know. Looking at her programme, however - it was beautifully printed on expensive paper – she saw that the speakers included two clergymen, two members of the Cabinet, a leader of the Soci
al Democratic Party. These gentlemen beamed protective approval at Jasmine, a small demure figure in bright flowered silk.

  Jasmine whispered for a moment to a tall, thin man, the Minister for Native Affairs, who stood up and began to speak. He spoke for about ten minutes about the glorious heroism of our Russian allies, interrupted at every moment by storms of applause. All around Martha people were sitting leaning forward, hands poised ready for the next point where they might clap approval; faces were smiling and flushed. When the tall thin man sat down, they applauded for a long time, and they began again before the next speaker could open his mouth.

  Yet were these not the same citizens who had been reading and approving the Zambesia News in its phase of, recently, pitying these same heroes for their ragged and enslaved condition, and, not so long before that, execrating them for their barbarity?

  To Martha it was quite inexplicable, and she looked for enlightenment towards the wall where William stood leaning together with a group of others. Boris and Betty were there, and some men in uniform. Martha saw that as the applause crashed out and the speakers paused, smiling with the deprecating modesty suitable to such moments, this group tended to exchange glances under eyebrows slightly raised. When they applauded, which they did promptly, it was without that self-abandoning enthusiasm which apparently had everyone else in its grip, but in a measured way. Yet surely if there was any group of people in this room entitled to be delighted, even grateful, that the Soviet Union was being honoured in this fashion, it was this one? Their faces expressed - what was it? It was a sort of patient irony, and to Martha, who was in the first flush of adolescent longing to fling herself wholeheartedly into a cause, their look of irony was like a chill of cold water. She positively hated them for not flinging themselves away in abandoned applause, like the others. Then, turning her eyes back towards the platform, she happened to notice Mr and Mrs Maynard, and on their faces too was precisely that look of reserve; they too exchanged glances, with a tightening of the lips, and they clapped decently and firmly, and as if to a time limit. Martha looked more closely among the throng of eager citizens, and saw that there were several others - a couple of journalists from the News, a row of people near the Maynards, Colonel Brodeshaw and his wife - who were similarly doling out their applause to measured limits. From which she had to conclude that there were two groups of people in the room who were in command of themselves and their thoughts, and the look of irony which both had was in fact a rather contemptuous resignation towards the hundreds in the grip of mass emotion.

  After about two hours of speeches and applause, Jasmine rose and suggested that they might ask one of the men who were ‘actually doing the fighting’ to say a few words. William came forward and climbed on the platform. His uniform was greeted with fervour. He waited patiently for silence, his notes held ready in his hand. Then he said that of course men in the Forces were not allowed to take a part in politics, but raising money for our allies was obviously a different matter. He then, with a rapid glance downwards towards his notes, began to speak on that subject which filled Martha’s thoughts. He had a quiet, easy, informal way of talking, not at all the professional manner with which they had been wooed for the last two hours, and it was noticeable that there were a few moments’ chill. And there seemed to be a few people who considered that an analysis of what he called the campaign of lies about the Soviet Union was not really unpolitical. But in a short while he had the whole crowd roaring with laughter, although there was a note of discomfort in it. He had with him (or rather, Jasmine produced them obligingly from behind the table) a pile of Zambesia News for the past four years, and proceeded to discover and expose the contradictions and improbabilities that newspaper had offered its readers - who were now laughing delightedly, or so it seemed, at themselves. As a final feat, he took a single issue from the year before, and reduced it in a few moments to the most abject nonsense, while the crowd chuckled and the News reporters, who were seated at a special table to one side, took notes with expressions of calm and democratic indifference.

  William then invited them to learn to read newspapers with more discrimination. He pointed out that until perhaps two months before there might have been twelve people in the whole colony - excluding the men of the Air Force, of course, he added involuntarily, causing a small chill to fall for a moment — who knew that Soviet tanks were not made of cardboard and that the Soviet people were not abject serfs. And these twelve people - he would say twelve for the sake of argument - were better informed not because they were in any way more intelligent than the ladies and gentlemen now seated before him, but because they had learned to treat the newspapers with the suspicion they deserved. As for the heroism of the Soviet people — but here the applause crashed out again, and he waited for it to stop, There were piles of books and pamphlets at the door, he concluded, and he invited them to buy them on their way out. With this he smiled, and retired from the platform by jumping lightly down from it to the floor, a feat which earned fresh handclapping and a few appreciative jeers from some men in uniform at the back. To which he responded with a half-mocking bow, and made his way to the table next to the door, where he seated himself behind barricades of literature.

  Jasmine got up and thanked ‘our young friend from the Air Force’ for his contribution, and appealed for money to buy medical supplies ‘for our gallant allies’. In a few moments the sum of over a thousand pounds had been collected; bank notes and cheques appeared everywhere, and the air was thick with the sound of chinking silver.

  The meeting was over. Martha, crushed in a jam of people by a pillar, saw Mr and Mrs Maynard go past. Mrs Maynard was saying, ‘I think one might drop a word in the right quarter.’

  Martha squeezed through to the table, which was now nearly empty of its books and pamphlets, and heard one of the men in uniform, a tall, dark, hollow-faced man with a satirical look, remark, ‘Well, what a performance – but it was the wrong audience.’

  ‘Not for collecting money,’ returned Jasmine with a small satisfied smile. She turned and saw Martha, who was waiting to be gathered in then and there to the bosom of this group of people where she knew she belonged. But Jasmine merely said, ‘Well, what did you think? Not bad, considering.’

  ‘Oh, it was marvellous!’ said Martha indignantly. ‘Come and have some tea with me,’ she added hopefully.

  ‘I can’t, I have a meeting,’ said Jasmine at once. Then, as Martha looked disappointed, she said, I’ll ring you tomorrow.’

  With this Martha had to be content. She was pushing her way out in the tail of the retreating crowd, when William came after her and said, ‘Can’t we sell you some lit?’

  ‘What’s lit?’ she asked.

  ‘We feel you should do some reading.’ And with this he handed her some books. ‘That will be twelve and sixpence.’

  She found the money hastily and with difficulty, reflecting that to him she was rich: he was not likely to understand the god, middle age, for whose sake she was always short of money. Then she thanked him. Her look was such that he forgot for a moment that she was a soul to be saved.

  He asked intimately, ‘Well, did you like it?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said again eagerly.

  He smiled, and said, unexpectedly blushing, ‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow afternoon - if you’re free.’

  She left, feeling like a child left out of a party, because they did not at once invite her to that meeting to which they would all now go. But the way William had blushed made her feel it would not be long before she would be one of them.

  At home she glanced cursorily into the nursery, where Caroline was asleep in her cot, and Alice beside her on the divan. Then she retired to her bed with the books. She read through them one after another; the dawn was coming up red behind the moonflowers when she had finished.

  She had a very confused idea of what she had read; she was content to leave the mass of facts and figures until later. But behind these dull bricks of truth rose the glo
rious outline of a view of life she had not suspected. The emotion that gripped her was mostly rage: she was twenty-two; she had been born during that revolution, which, to say the least, had been important in the world’s development, and yet this was the first time she had been told anything about it. Her rage was even greater because she had been such a willing accomplice in this process of not thinking. For there had been plenty of moments when she might have fitted a few facts together to make a truth. She had not. Her upbringing, her education, her associates, the newspapers, had all conspired to bring her to the age of twenty-two, an adult, that is, without feeling more about what was going on in the socialist sixth of the world - which happened to be the title of one of the books - than a profound reluctance to think about it at all.

  Even now, as she sat there, still dressed, on the edge of her bed, she had two clear and distinct pictures of that other part of the world - one noble, creative and generous, the other ugly, savage and sordid. There was no sort of connection between the two pictures. As she looked at one, she wanted to fling herself into the struggle, to become one of the millions of people who were creating a new world; as she looked at the other, she felt stateness, futility.

  What, then, was the cynicism that certainly afflicted all the people around her who thought at all? It no longer seemed even mildly attractive. With one sudden movement of her whole being she discarded it, and committed herself to the other. It was as if her eyes had been opened and her ears made to hear; it was like a rebirth. For the first time in her life she had been offered an ideal to live for.

  But the immediate political emotion of anyone shaken suddenly into thinking is anger: she was filled with rage at having been cheated; she felt as if she had been lied to, led by the nose, made a fool of, all her life. She was as angry with herself as she was with the people whom she saw in this beautiful naïve moment of awakening as an organized and cynical group who consciously devoted themselves to deceiving her and her generation out of their birthright. What she wanted, in short, was some sort of revenge: if the first political emotion of people like Martha is anger, the second is blind anarchy; if anyone had asked her in that moment to take a gun in her hand and go out to destroy those people who had been making a fool of her, she would have gone without a second thought. Luckily, however, there was no one to make any such demand.