A Proper Marriage

‘So they are,’ he said with his brisk jeer, his black eyes snapping scorn. ‘So they are. We are all human beings, and everyone is as good as everyone else, all born equal in the sight of God.’

‘Well, you brought in God, I didn’t. What’s God got to do with it?’

They were now as awkward with hostility as they had been a few moments before with friendship.

‘Anyway, there are a few hundred Coloureds, and several million Africans – what’s the point of it?’

‘We’d have lived in the location, but it’s against the law. So we chose the next best thing.’

‘Rubbish, you only came to live here because people’d be shocked, that’s all.’

He tapped the long bony fingers on the arm of his chair and yawned. It was not for some seconds that she realized the yawn was deliberate. At once she got up and said, ‘I’ll go. I’ve got things to do.’

‘Your housewifely duties?’ he asked sarcastically.

She stood behind her chair, looking regretfully at this pleasant room, the books, feeling the atmosphere of dedicated freedom, feeling herself an exile. But she felt something else too: a deep pity for him. He seemed all at once very young and absurd.

‘Well,’ she said flatly, ‘when the war comes, that’ll be the end of it. But it’ll be nice while it lasts.’

He regarded her in silence, apparently considering whether she was worth the trouble he might decide to take. Then he said, ‘Now, listen, Matty, I shall now give you a short lecture on the international situation.’ He grinned savagely, and she smiled back gratefully. She noted at the same time, half consciously, that he, unlike his brother, could take nothing seriously. That was how she felt it: the jaunty self-consciousness, the invisible quotation marks around his phrases, the drawled ‘situ-a-tion’, gave her a strong feeling of disbelief.

She stood, however, behind her chair and listened. He spoke for some ten minutes, as if he were delivering a lecture, but in the harsh, flat language of controlled cynicism, which chimed in very well with what she felt herself. And although the picture he presented of what was happening in Europe was cold, simple and logical, that harshness and cynicism could only feed her own. So that when he had finished she said drily, ‘Well, whichever way it goes, there’ll be a war, won’t there?’

‘Well?’

She shrugged, avoiding the hard aggressiveness of that black stare.

He began to jeer again. ‘Yes, poor Matty, life is hard, life isn’t easy. People get killed, the cows get into the rose garden, violence keeps popping up its ugly head.’

She remarked irrelevantly, ‘My father was in the last war. He talks about it.’

He stared. ‘Well?’ Then, in a flat, angry voice, quite different from any she had heard from him – for the first time carrying the conviction of deep personal feeling: ‘And the Jews are in the concentration camps. Who cares? Do you? If the British Government wanted, they could stop it all in a month – if they wanted. As for you,’ and here he mimicked her doubting, hesitant voice, ‘all you say is, Don’t let’s have any nastiness, please let everything be comfortable.’

She was now so confused by all this hostility – for it was clear that she had become for him the enemy he hated most – that she could only say, ‘Well, Solly …’ and tailed off into silence.

He was now waiting for her to go. She asked, ‘What do you hear from Joss?’

‘We don’t write.’

She went towards the door.

‘He’s joined the Communist Party,’ she heard.

‘Well, I thought he was a Communist anyway.’

‘He’s joined it, that’s quite different from talking.’

There was such spite in his voice that she turned and inquired, ‘Why, do you mind him joining?’ Then she saw it was directed against herself. He picked up a newspaper from beside him and handed it to her. It was a thin, limp paper. She looked at it dubiously. It was called The Watchdog. The headlines, large and strident, assaulted her mind. She heard him laugh, and saw that she was holding the thing as if it might explode in her face. She smiled ruefully.

‘Nasty crude paper,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be seen with it. What would your friends say? Let alone your nice husband.’

Since she did not feel at all identified with her husband or his circle, she let this pass. She looked down again at the paper. The exclamatory style, the hectoring language, affected her uncomfortably, as if her whole system had been injected by some powerful irritating substance that it must throw off. But she looked at it steadily and saw that what it was saying was no more than Solly’s just-concluded lecture on the international situation.

He summed up her thought by saying, ‘It’s all right if you hear it all said in nice intellectual language in a nice comfortable room, but it’s quite different like that, isn’t it?’

She laid it down on a chair and looked at him. She needed to wound him as he was wounding her. She asked, ‘Why don’t you join the Communist Party, then?’ He simply maintained his steady grin; she realized that he must have joined it, otherwise he would not look so satirical. After a moment, she tried another tack: ‘Who’s paying for this house and this quiet intellectual existence?’ He reddened; and she persisted, ‘Your four fathers, no doubt. So your share of it comes from the profits made out of the kaffir store in the district. I don’t see that you are any better than I am, if it comes to that.’ He was waiting for a chance to get in at her, but she went on hastily, delighted with her advantage: ‘So I’ll leave you to your independence, until the bull gets into this rose garden.’

She quickly shut the door behind her, and walked rapidly down the garden. All vegetables, of course, she thought, trying to be spiteful, but on the verge of tears. No flowers for the high-minded, naturally! While she had been inside, the earth around the little green clumps of lettuce had dried. Small granules of grey earth lay evenly over the base of wet dark richness. The youth was steadily hoeing potatoes at the far end of the garden. He did not lift his head as she came past. Then she heard her name called: Solly stood on the veranda.

‘Matty – would you like to come to a meeting here tonight?’

She hesitated, then called back sardonically, ‘Unfortunately I have a sundowner party – ’ But she was unable to finish. Solly was doubled up in a pantomime of laughter.

She turned her back on him and walked away under the trees that shaded the pavement. It was some minutes before she was able to smile at herself and at him, her regret at having to leave was so strong. She felt forsaken; and nothing but the memory of Solly’s savage farewell laughter prevented her from hurrying back and saying that of course she would come to the meeting. When she reached the flat, she occupied herself with altering a dress to fit her for the sundowner party that night, and with an ironical consciousness of how Solly would see this proceeding. But there was something much stronger, a feeling of Well, then, I’ll show him! The showing him consisted in making the dress and herself as attractive as she knew how. It was not until she realized this that she remembered the moment when she had felt he might be thinking that she had come to him as a man, and not as a person in that romantic thing, a communal settlement. She burned with embarrassment; she could not forgive him. Now, looking back at the meeting, she could see the thing in no other way; everything they had said was permeated with this other emotion; to it she attributed his aggressiveness and that sarcastic stare. She was hating him quite vividly. In a short while, the memory of that interview had become quite unbearable; and she was putting stitches into the fabric of her dress with strong stabs of the needle, while she muttered incoherently, Idiot! Conceited idiot! And even: Can’t they ever see us differently?

When Douglas returned that afternoon, he was welcomed by an extremely cheerful young woman, who proceeded to amuse him with a satirical account of how she had rushed down to see Solly – all intelligent in blue trousers and sunburn – and how she had wanted to join the settlement. Because, as everyone knows, we girls go through these moments of not wanting to be married.

‘And me too,’ confessed Douglas, apologetically, kissing her with a rueful laugh. This mutual confession delighted them. They were back together in the warmest affection, which almost at once led to the bed – there was half an hour to fill in, as he pointed out. The half-hour was hilarious. In a mood of tearing gaiety, they experimented with a couple of new positions sanctioned by the book, and were freshly delighted with their efficiency. Then, seeing the time, six o’clock, that hour sacred to sundowner parties, they hastened off the bed and got dressed. They drove off to the party with the look of competent unconcern that they had both already learned to wear in public.

Colonel Brodeshaw’s house was in the part of the town which had been the most fashionable before the new suburbs began to spread. There were several avenues of big sprawling shady houses in big gardens – these were the nearest approach to an individual architecture the colony had achieved. They had been built for comfort, for the climate, by people with money and enough self-confidence not to need the extra boost of that kind of smart house which was now being built. They were the natural expression, in fact, of the type of English person whose families have been in the habit of administering this part or that of the British Empire, accustomed to making themselves comfortable in a difficult climate. Comfort was their keynote. The servants’ quarters, built in a row along the end of the back garden, and reminiscent of stables, were vast – not because these people intended to make their servants comfortable, but because they meant to have plenty of servants. The rooms were large and cool, the verandas enormous; whatever these houses might look like from outside, sprawling, shapeless, often shabby, they were a delight to live in.

The young Knowells drove through several avenues filled with such houses, and were able to feel a pleasant regret for the past. They murmured that it was a pity people did not build like that these days. They parked the car with a dozen others in the ditch outside a flaring hibiscus hedge, and walked up a narrow drive that was like a green tunnel. Through gaps in the foliage, hoses could be seen playing on a smooth green lawn, and beyond that the garden was bounded by a warm red-brick wall draped with morning glory, a vivid sky blue which was beginning – the sun was setting – to show edges of white. Soon it would be as if scraps of limp dirty-white linen hung among the green. A few steps further, and the front veranda was in sight, a garden inside a garden, for it was filled with painted tubs of flowering plants, and festooned with golden shower. People too, of course; but the veranda was as big as a large room, and able to absorb large numbers of people among the columns of brick and tubs of flowers.

From outside, Martha caught a glimpse of faces she knew, and felt a stab of disappointment: she could not rid herself of the belief that being married would introduce her to something new and exciting. She could see Donovan, and Ruth Manners; and was looking for others, when Douglas remarked, ‘Mr Player is going to be here, I believe.’ He tried to sound casual, but could not prevent a note of pleased deference.

Martha was looking for Mr Player, when they arrived at the top of the steps and were met by Colonel Brodeshaw and Mrs Brodeshaw. The Colonel was a tall, thin, bent man, with a small dark moustache and mahogany skin, so much the colonel in manner and appearance that it must save Martha the effort of looking for further individuality. His wife was competently dispensing hospitality in a black-and-white flowered dress, a colonel’s lady, clipped, brisk and smiling.

Martha had not taken two steps before she was absorbed into the warm embrace of Mrs Talbot, and welcomed with a warm but timid smile by Mrs Talbot’s daughter. Martha knew that of all the people who were being made happy by this marriage, Mrs Talbot was perhaps the happiest. She had received no less than three charming notes from her in the last week, welcoming her into – what? And now she was putting her arm around Martha’s shoulders, turning her away from other groups on the veranda, and leading her to a chair beside her own. Over her shoulder she smiled and murmured to Douglas, ‘You really must allow me to deprive you of Matty for just a few minutes.’ And Douglas, smiling and touched, seemed prepared to wait.

Mrs Talbot was, above all, a lady of charm. In each movement, each tone of her voice, was this suggestion of deferential murmuring grace; and as she seated herself beside Martha she did so with a hurried, almost apologetic movement of her hindquarters, as if even this personal necessity was something deplorable because it detracted from the wholehearted attention she was determined to bestow upon Martha. Both she and her daughter then leaned towards her, smiling with warm friendship, and proceeded to tell her how happy they were that Douggie was married at last, how wonderful, how suitable, how … As one woman arrived at the end of a breathless phrase, searching for the superlatives that could not express what she felt, the other took it up; and it was a duet of self-immolation towards Martha.

Martha seated, smiling a little awkwardly, looked from one to the other, trying to see them, for she felt herself in danger of being smothered by this perfumed attack. She was able at last to see Mrs Talbot as a tall, fair-haired woman, slight, pliant, with a smooth oval face tinted uniformly pink, like a fine breathing enamel. Everything, hair, face, dress, was so smoothly perfect, so exquisitely created, that one felt impelled to look at the daughter to find the raw materials from which this work of art had been begun. Elaine was like her mother, a slight graceful creature, but the oval face, the large grey eyes, showed signs of strain and ill-health. The skin was pale, flawed; there were faint blue shadows under the eyes. Martha looked from one to the other, noting the looks of affectionate reassurance that continually passed between them, and thought only that for a girl of eighteen to be so close to her mother must in itself be perverse. She felt herself menaced by it. But since there was no need for her to say anything but ‘Thank you’ and ‘How very kind of you’, she allowed her attention to pass to that other problem which was so much her preoccupation. For the spiritual hangers-on which every marriage attracts must certainly expect to suggest the question, What is it they themselves have found, or lack, in marriage? Since Mrs Talbot and her daughter could not be delighted that it was Martha who had married Douglas – they did not know her, as Martha reminded herself – it must be the idea of marriage that fed this delight? Martha tried to form some sort of image of Mr Talbot, and it was only then that she realized that she did not even know whether there was one. She had heard a great deal about Mrs Talbot during the past weeks, but it was always ‘Mrs Talbot and Elaine’, ‘Elaine and Mrs Talbot’ – that was how the world spoke of the Talbot family. Together they enveloped Martha in caressing affection, and together they rose, after a long, smiling, intimate look at her which – even in this small matter of agreeing that it was time to release Martha – overflowed into a glance of understanding between them. The young Knowells were invited to spend the evening very soon with Mrs Talbot and Elaine, and (for of course he was so happy about the marriage, too) Mr Talbot – if he wasn’t out (‘He always has so much to do’); and the two women withdrew into chairs further away, where they proceeded to allow their reservoirs of charm to overflow on to Douglas.

Martha was therefore left alone for a moment, looking down the great veranda, which was like a room with three walls of green leaves. The last rays of sunlight fell through the leaves, patterning the faces of the guests. Perhaps forty people were sitting, with glasses in their hands, in this green-dappled glow. Martha could see Donovan poised on the edge of his chair, addressing Ruth Manners. ‘But, my dear, it was the funniest thing you ever saw,’ she heard his light voice say, before he let it drop and leaned forward to continue the sentence in a lower key; it was a bit of gossip: the discreetly malicious smile on Ruth’s face showed it. Beside Ruth sat a young man whom Martha had not seen before. She immediately recognized him as being fresh from England, because of his pink-faced, cautious look of one on trial. From the way he and Ruth smiled at each other, it was clear they were a couple.

Far down the veranda, in a well of green shadow, Mr Maynard was surveying the guests with his look of sardonic but controlled contempt. Beside him was that formidable lady his wife, who in a high, firm, commanding voice was saying the last word about something she felt strongly: ‘And so I said to her, “It is quite out of the question!”’ She turned to look at her husband, commanding agreement; but Mr Maynard continued to gaze in front of him, lightly flipping his fingers against the glass he held. The clink, clink, clink, came travelling softly down among the voices and laughter, like irritation made audible; and Martha looked at this black-browed energetic woman, and remembered, with a strong feeling of incongruity, that sick headaches were her weapon of choice. She was convicting Mrs Maynard of having no sense of period, when she saw Mr Anderson, sitting not far from his son, a small dapper man radiating bad temper because it was necessary to be here at all and to make conversation. He was making it, Martha saw with surprise, to Mrs Anderson, who sat near him. The fact that Mr Anderson could be persuaded to leave his solitude reminded Martha that this was an important sundowner party, and she searched for Mr Player. Remembering a brief glimpse of a large, red-faced man, she searched in vain – he could not have arrived.

The chair beside her was still empty. Donovan rose from his place and joined her, remarking gaily, ‘Well, Matty, so here you are nicely settled at last.’ This reference to her marriage she let pass; she was looking to see if there was anything in his face which might suggest that he remembered the ugliness of their last meeting. But it seemed not. He proceeded to entertain her with a scandalous story about their hostess. To which Martha replied that the moment he left her he would undoubtedly make a spitefully funny story about her marriage. He giggled gracefully and said that he had been dining out on stories about her for the last week. ‘Really, Matty, why do you waste such an occasion for being on show? Now, look at Ruth, she’s got herself engaged, and she’s having a nice engagement party, and we’ll all give her expensive presents, and everything’s so satisfactory for her and her friends.’

‘On the other hand, there won’t be any funny stories about her wedding,’ she pointed out. ‘You can’t have it both ways.’

‘True,’ he conceded, ‘true.’

He was looking among the guests to see if there might be someone to inspire an anecdote, when Martha inquired, ‘What’s Ruth’s young man like?’

‘On the way up. Secretary to the secretary of Mr Player. Money, family, everything.’ Then with his usual gay spite: ‘One could hardly expect less of Ruth, after all, considering what’s been done for her.’

‘Yes, but what’s he like?’ inquired Martha naïvely, looking at the neat little English face, all the features correctly in place, the small fair moustache, the sober clothes that succeeded in suggesting only what the limbs and body must be like underneath – correct, controlled, adequate.