COV02 - A Proper Marriage

  The three of them, Mrs Talbot, Elaine and Douglas, were standing in a group beside the car, waiting for her to get in.

  Suddenly Douglas’s face worked again. ‘Matty, you haven’t said goodbye to Caroline - surely you’ll see her before you go?’

  That was for the benefit of Mrs Talbot and Elaine. She saw them exchange the briefest of shocked, comprehending smiles.

  She got into the car, which was filled with books at the back. Her two suitcases were beside her. Her eyes were half blinded with tears. But she blinked them clear, and drove away.

  As she reached the corner of the street she saw Mr Maynard come strolling down under the trees on his way to the Courts. He raised his hand, and she stopped.

  ‘Deserting?’ he inquired.

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘You look extraordinarily pleased about it.’ It was true, she was now so elated she felt as light as an air bubble. ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’

  She misunderstood him and said, ‘I’m going to drop my things in my room, look for a job, and then - there are five hundred envelopes to be addressed before tomorrow morning.’ She said it as if describing the height of human bliss.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he commented.

  She slowly let out the clutch.

  ‘I suppose with the French Revolution for a father and the Russian Revolution for a mother, you can very well dispense with a family,’ he observed. She pushed in the clutch again and looked at him from behind that veil which was between her and the rest of the world. After a while she conceded, ‘That is really a very intelligent remark.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I really am in a hurry, Mr Maynard.’

  ‘So I can see. I’m not going to forgive you for leaving my goddaughter,’ he said, smiling painfully.

  ‘I haven’t asked you to,’ she said coldly, wincing. She shrugged herself up in the driver’s seat as if chilly, and her face looked pinched and bleak.

  ‘Well, good luck, at any rate,’ he said suddenly, rather gruff.

  Her smile at him was painful. She was going to cry, he could see. He hastily raised his hat, and walked off in one direction, while the car slid off in another.

  About the Author

  was born of British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. Doris Lessing lives in London.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise

  “Very impressive…. Portrays modern woman in all her complexity.”

  —Literary Horizons

  An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a Failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heart-breaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her bock on marriage and security.

  A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing’s classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompossing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

  “I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do.”—BARBARA KINGSOLVER

  “A totally modern work. Martha Quest is, above all, ironically perceived by the author in whose hands irony is an instrument of compassion.”—New Republic

  “One cannot praise the writing too highly … She plays on language as on an instrument with the severe discipline of a professional master.”—Best Seller

  “With deceptive simplicity she reveals more about the private depths of mind and soul than perhaps one ought to know.” —Daily Telegraph

  ALSO BY DORIS LESSING

  NOVELS

  The Grass Is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  Briefing for a Descent into Hell

  The Summer Before the Dark

  The Memoirs of a Survivor

  The Diaries of Jane Somers:

  The Diary of a Good Neighbor

  If the Old Could …

  The Good Terrorist

  The Fifth Child

  “CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES” SERIES

  Re: Colonized Planet S-Shikasta

  The Marriages Between Zones Three,

  Four, and Five

  The Sirian Experiments

  The Making of the Representative for

  Planet Eight Documents Relating to the Sentimental

  Agents in the Volyen Empire

  “CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE” SERIES

  Martha Quest

  A Proper Marriage

  A Ripple from the Storm

  Landlocked

  The Four-Gated City

  SHORT STORIES

  This Was the Old Chief’s Country

  The Habit of Loving

  A Man and Two Women

  The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories

  African Stories

  The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches

  The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight (Music by Philip Glass)

  POETRY

  Fourteen Poems

  NONFICTION

  In Pursuit of the English

  Particularly Cats

  Going Home

  A Small Personal Voice

  Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

  The Wind Blows Away Our Words

  Particularly Cats … And Rufus

  African Laughter

  The Doris Lessing Reader

  Copyright

  A Proper Marriage was first published in the United Kingdom by Michael Joseph in 1954. First U.S. edition (in one volume together with Martha Quest) was published by Simon & Schuster in 1964.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  * * *

  First HarperPerennial edition published 1995.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lessing, Doris May, 1919–

  A proper marriage: a novel / Doris Lessing. — 1st ed.

  p, cm. — (Children of violence series)

  ISBN 978-0-06-204793-9

  1. Married women—Zimbabwe—Fiction. 2. British—Africa, Southern—Fiction.

  I. Title. II. Series: Lessing, Doris May, 1919– Children of violence.

  [PR6023.E833P76 1995]

  823’.914—dc20

  95-33114

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  07 08 09 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-04793-9

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