A Proper Marriage

They were climbing the wide staircase. Alice remarked indifferently, ‘Dr Stern has a clinic for native women. Every Sunday morning. I tell him he’s so keen on everybody having babies that he can’t even give Sunday a rest.’

Stella involuntarily stopped. ‘Dr Stern treats kaffirs?’ she asked, horrified. It appeared that he was in imminent danger of losing a patient.

‘He’s very goodhearted,’ said Alice vaguely. The words restored her own approval of Dr Stern. ‘He only charges them sixpence, or something like that.’ She continued to drag herself up the staircase, ahead of the others.

Stella was silent. Her face expressed a variety of emotions, doubt being the strongest. Then Dr Stern effected in her that small revolution in thinking which crosses a gulf to philanthropy. She remarked, still dubiously, ‘Well, of course, we should be kind to them.’

Martha, three steps below her, laughed outright. Alice looked at her in surprise, Stella with anger.

‘Well, if everyone was like you, they’d get out of hand,’ Stella said sourly. ‘It’s all very well, but everyone knows they are nothing but animals, and it doesn’t hurt them to have babies, and …’ She added doubtfully, ‘Dr Stern is always modern.’

‘He’s making a study about it,’ said Alice. She was waiting for them on the landing. ‘It’s not true they are different from us. They’re just the same, Dr Stern says.’

Stella was deeply shocked and disturbed; she burst into her loud vulgar laughter. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

‘But it’s scientific,’ said Alice vaguely.

‘Oh, doctors!’ suggested Stella, in precisely the same indulgent tone Alice had previously used for ‘the Government’.

Martha, arrived beside them on the landing, said bitterly, ‘It seems even Dr Stern is only interested in writing papers about them.’

Alice was offended. ‘Well, so long as they get help, I don’t suppose they mind, do you? And he’s very kind. How many doctors can you think of would work as hard as he does all the week and every night and then spend all Sunday morning helping kaffir women with their babies? And for as good as nothing, too.’

‘Well, sixpence is the same for them as ten shillings would be for us,’ protested Martha.

Alice was really angry now. ‘It’s not the same for Dr Stern.’

‘Whose fault is that?’ demanded Martha hotly.

Stella cut the knot by opening the door. ‘Oh, let’s have a drink,’ she said impatiently. ‘Don’t take any notice of Matty. Douggie’ll put some sense into her head. You can’t be a Red if you’re married to a civil servant.’

They went inside. Martha was acutely depressed at the finality of what Stella had said. She began to take out glasses and syphons, until Stella took them impatiently out of her hands. She sat down, and let Stella arrange things as she wished; with the feeling she had done this many times before.

Alice was unobservant and relaxed in a deep chair, puffing out clouds of smoke until she was surrounded by blue haze. ‘For crying out loud, but I’m tired,’ she murmured; and, without moving the rest of her body, she held out her hand to take the glass Stella put into it.

The room was rather small, but neat; it was dressed with striped modern curtains, light rugs, cheerful strident cushions. Stella’s taste, as Martha observed to herself bitterly, although telling herself again that it was her own fault. Well, she’d be gone soon, and then …

She took the glass Stella handed her, and let herself go loose, as Alice was doing.

Stella, accompanied apparently by two corpses, remained upright and energetic in her chair, and proceeded to entertain Alice with an amusing account of ‘their’ honeymoon.

‘… And you should have seen Matty, coping with the lads as if she were an old hand at the game. No wedding night for poor Matty, we were driving all night, and we had two breakdowns at that – the funniest thing you ever saw. We got to the hotel at two in the morning, and then all the boys arrived, and it wasn’t until that night we all decided it was really time that Matty had a wedding night, so we escorted them to their room, playing the Wedding March on the mouth-organs, and the last we saw of Matty was her taking off Douggie’s shoes and putting him into bed.’ She laughed, and Martha joined her. But Alice, who had not opened her eyes, remarked soothingly that Douggie was a hell of a lad, but Matty needn’t worry, these wild lads made wonderful husbands, look at Willie, he’d been one of the worst, and now butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

The thought of her husband made her sit up, and say in a determined voice that she really must go; Willie was a pet lamb, he never worried about anything – but all the same, she wasn’t going to start setting a bad example. She struggled out of her chair, drained her glass, and nervously pressed Martha’s hand. ‘Sorry, dear, but I really must – I’ll see you soon, I expect, my Willie and your Douglas being such friends. And now I really …’ She smiled hastily at Stella, waved vaguely, and hurried out. They could hear her running down the stairs on her high heels.

‘Alice is just an old fusser,’ said Stella, settling herself comfortably. ‘If Willie isn’t tied to her apron string she can’t sit still.’ Martha said nothing. ‘That’s no way to keep a man. They don’t like it. You should manage them without them knowing it.’

Martha observed irritably that Stella and Alice talked about husbands as if they were a sort of wild animal to be tamed.

Stella looked at her, and then remarked in an admonishing way that Martha was very young, but she’d soon learn that the way to keep a lad like Douggie was to give him plenty of rope to hang himself.

Irritation was thick in the air, like the tobacco smoke that now made a heavy bluish film between them. Martha was praying, I wish she’d go.

Stella made a few more remarks, which were received in silence. Then she looked angrily across and said that if she were Matty she’d have a good sleep and then take life easy.

She rose, and stood for a moment looking at the mirror inside the flap of her handbag. Everything was in order. She shut the handbag, and gazed around the little room; she adjusted a cushion, then turned her gaze towards Martha, who was sprawling gracelessly in her chair.

Martha looked back, acknowledging the discouragement that filled her at the sight of this woman. Stella must have gained this perfect assurance with her maturity at the age of – what? There were photographs of her at fifteen, showing her no less complete than she was now.

It appeared that the moment for parting had at last arrived. Martha struggled up. And now Martha was filled with guilt. For Stella’s face showed a genuine concern for her; and Martha reminded herself that Stella was nothing if not kind and obliging – for what was kindness, if not this willingness to devote oneself utterly to another person’s life? Martha was too tired even to instil irony into it. She kissed Stella clumsily on one of her smooth tinted cheeks, and thanked her. Stella brightened, blushed a little, and said that any time Matty wanted anything she had only to … At last she left, smiling, blowing a kiss from the door, in precisely that pose of competent grace which most depressed Martha.

The moment she was alone, Martha rummaged for a pair of scissors and went with determination to the bathroom. There she knelt on the edge of the gleaming and slippery bath, and in an acutely precarious position leaned up to look into the shaving mirror. It was too high for her. There was a large mirror at a suitable height next door, but for some reason this was the one she must use. Nothing in her reflection pleased her. She was entirely clumsy, clodhopping, graceless. Worse than this, she was filled with uncomfortable memories of how she had looked at various stages of her nineteen years – for she might be determined to forget how she had felt in her previous incarnations, but she could not forget how she had looked. Her present image had more in common with her reflection at fifteen, a broad and sturdy schoolgirlishness, than it had with herself of only six months ago.

Her dissatisfaction culminated as she put the scissors to the heavy masses of light dryish hair that fell on her shoulders. She remembered briefly that Stella had laid stress on her hair being properly cut; but the mere idea of submitting herself to the intentions of anybody else must be repulsed. Steadily, her teeth set to contain a prickling feverish haste, she cut around her hair in a straight line. Then she fingered the heavy unresponsive mass, and began snipping at the ends. Finally she lifted individual pieces and cut off slabs of hair from underneath, so that it might not be so thick. From the way the ends curved up, she could see that Stella might be right – her hair would curl. At last she plunged her head into water and soaped it hard, rubbing it roughly dry afterwards, in a prayerful hope that these attentions might produce yet another transformation into a different person. Then she swept up the cushions of hair from the floor and went into the bedroom. It was after six, and night had fallen. She switched on the light, to illuminate the cheerful room whose commonplace efficiency depressed her; and stood in front of the other mirror trying to shape the sodden mass of hair into waves. She thought her appearance worse than before. Giving it up in despair, she switched off the light again and went to the window. She was thinking with rueful humour that now she was undeniably longing for Douglas to come so that he might reassure her; whereas for most of the last week she had been struggling with waves of powerful dislike of him that she was too well educated in matters psychological not to know were natural to a newly married woman. Or, to put this more precisely, she had gone through all the handbooks with which she was now plentifully equipped, seized on phrases and sentences which seemed to fit her case, and promptly extended them to cover the whole of womankind. There was nothing more paradoxical about her situation than that, while she insisted on being unique, individual, and altogether apart from any other person, she could be comforted in such matters only by remarks like ‘Everybody feels this’ or ‘It is natural to feel that’.

She leaned against the sill, and tried to feel that she was alone and able to think clearly, a condition she had been longing for, it seemed for weeks. But her limbs were seething with irritation; she could not stand still. She fetched a chair and sat down, trying to relax. Behind her, the two small and shallow rooms were dark, holding their scraps of furniture in a thinned shadow, which was crossed continually by shifting beams of light from the street. Under her, the thin floor crept and reverberated to footsteps behind the walls. Above her, feet tapped beyond the ceiling. She found herself listening intently to these sounds, trying to isolate them, to make them harmless. She shut her mind to them, and looked outwards.

The small, ramshackle colonial town had become absorbed in luminous dark. A looming pile of flats was like a cliff rising from the sea, and the turn of a roof like a large elbow half blocking the stars. Below this aerial scene of moon, sky, roofs and the tops of trees, the streets below ran low and indistinct, with lights of cars nosing slow along them among the isolated yellow spaces which were street lamps. Whiffs of petrol-laden dust and staled scent from flowers in the park a hundred yards away drifted down past her towards the back of the building, where it would mingle with the heavier, composted smell: the smell which comes rich and heavy out of the undertown, the life of African servants, cramped, teeming, noisy with laughter and music. Singing came now from the native quarters at the back; and this small lively music flowed across the dark to join the more concentrated bustle of noise that came from a waste lot opposite. The fun fair had come to town; and over the straggling dusty grass, showing yellow in the harsh composite glare from a hundred beating lights, rose swings and roundabouts and the great glittering wheel. Once a year this fair visited the city on its round of the little towns of southern Africa, and spilled its lights and churning music for a few hours nightly into the dark.

The great wheel was revolving slowly, a chain of lights that mingled with the lamps of Orion and the Cross. Martha laid her wet and uncomfortable head against the wall, and looked at the wheel steadily, finding in its turning the beginnings of peace. Slowly she quietened, and it seemed possible that she might recover a sense of herself as a person she might, if only potentially, respect. It was really all quite simple, she assured herself. That this marriage was a foolish mistake must certainly be obvious to Douglas himself; for if humility can be used to describe such an emotion, Martha was genuinely humble in thinking of him and herself as involved in an isolated act of insanity which a simple decision would reverse. His personality and hers had nothing to do with it. The whole graceless affair had nothing to do with what she really felt or – surely? – what he felt, either.

The dragging compulsion which had begun to operate when they met, which had made it impossible for her to say no at any stage of the process, seemed broken. It would be easy, she thought, to tell Douglas when he entered the room that they must part at once; he must agree. For since he shared her view that the actual ceremony was no more than a necessary bit of ritual to placate society, it followed he would view a divorce in the same light.

Thus Martha – while her eyes hypnotically followed the circling of the great wheel. But at the back of her mind was an uncomfortable memory. It was of Stella roaring with laughter as she told the story, while her husband laughed with her, of how she had, the day after their wedding, run back to her mother, because she had decided she didn’t want to be married at all, and most particularly not to Andrew; after some months of marriage, it seemed that Stella found this mood nothing but a joke. The fact that what she was feeling now might be nothing but what everybody felt filled Martha with exhaustion. She remained clinging to the sill, while tiredness flowed into her, an extreme of fatigue, like the long high note on the violin that holds a tension while the ground swell of melody gathers strength beneath it. Her limbs were so heavy she could hardly prevent herself from sliding off the chair; while her mind, like a bright space above a dark building, was snapping with activity. The small, clear picture of Stella laughing at her own story was succeeded by another: she saw Binkie, large, fat, heavy, grotesquely dancing with the baboon on the lawn outside the hotel; she saw herself laughing at the scene, arm in arm with Douglas. Finally, she saw a small yellow flower on the very edge of the Falls, drenched with spray and tugging at its roots like a flag in a gale, but returning to its own perfect starred shape whenever the wind veered. She could not remember having actually seen this flower. It was frightening that she could not – yet there was something consoling about it, too. She tried again and again to place the moment she had seen it; her mind went dark with the effort, as if a switch had been turned down. Then she heard, with a movement of slow, swelling sadness, the music from the amusement park. And now she understood that she was looking back at the hectic elation of those four days with regret – nostalgia was invading her together with the rhythm of the false cheap music. Yet the truth was she had disliked every moment of the time. She jerked herself fully awake; that lie she had no intention of tolerating. She stood up, and told herself with a bleak and jaunty common sense that she needed a good night’s sleep.

The outer door crashed open; the light crashed on. A cheerful young man came towards her, whirled her up in his arms, and began squeezing her, saying, ‘Well, Matty, here we are in our own place at last, and about time, too!’ With this he gave her a large affectionate kiss on the cheek, and set her down, and stood rubbing his hands with satisfaction. Then it seemed that something struck him; doubt displaced the large grin, and he said, ‘But, Matty, what’ve you done to yourself?’

Turning away quickly, Martha said, ‘I’ve cut off my hair. Don’t look at it now, it’ll be all right in the morning.’

Taking her at her word, he said, ‘Oh, all right, changed your hair style, eh?’ And he rubbed his hands again, with pleasure: she could see he took it as a compliment to himself that she should. ‘Sorry I was late, but I ran into some of the boys and I couldn’t get away. Had to celebrate.’ His proprietary look half annoyed her; but she could feel the beginning of fatal pleasure. From the way he looked at her and rubbed his hands, she knew that he had again been congratulated on his acquisition; and while she puzzled over the knowledge that this could have nothing to do with herself, she could not help feeling less heavy and unattractive.

‘They think I’m a helluva lucky…’ he announced; and at the thought of the scenes in the bar with the boys, a reflection of his proud and embarrassed grin appeared on his face. He swooped over to her, ground her tightly to him, and announced, ‘And so-so I am.’

Then, still holding her, but loosening his grip because his mind was on them and not on her, he began telling her some of the things they had said, in a comradely way, sharing the pleasure with her. At first she said, half anxiously, half pleased, ‘And what else?’ ‘And what did they say then?’ Until suddenly she jerked away from him, angry and red, and said, ‘I don’t think that’s funny, that’s disgusting.’

The very image of an offended prude, she turned her back on him; while, half shamefaced, half sniggering, he looked at her and said at last, ‘Oh, come off it, Matty, don’t put on an act.’

Martha undressed in silence, flinging crumpled blue dress, knickers, petticoat, in all directions. She stood naked. In the mood she was in, it had nothing to do with coquetry.

To Douglas, however, this was not apparent. He found the naked and angry girl an argument for forgiveness. Flinging off his own clothes, he bounced on to the bed, and moved over to give her room. Still frowning, she moved chastely in beside him; for the fact that they were annoyed with each other made the act of getting naked into bed on a level with sitting beside him at breakfast. She was irritated to discover that he did not understand this. She was on the point of turning over away from him, when the instinct to please turned her towards him. Love had brought her here, to lie beside this young man; love was the key to every good; love lay like a mirage through the golden gates of sex. If this was not true, then nothing was true, and the beliefs of a whole generation were illusory. They made love. She was too tired to persuade herself that she felt anything at all. Her head was by now swimming with exhaustion.

‘God, but I’m tired, Matty,’ he announced, rolling off her. He yawned and said with satisfaction, ‘How many hours have we slept during the last fortnight?’

She did not reply. Loyalty towards love was forcing her to pretend that she was not disappointed, and that she did not – at that moment she was sick with repulsion – find him repulsive. But already that image of a lover that a woman is offered by society, and carries with her so long, had divorced itself from Douglas, like the painted picture of a stencil floating off paper in water. Because that image remained intact and unhurt, it was possible to be good-natured. It is that image which keeps so many marriages peaceable and friendly.

She listened, smiling maternally, while he calculated aloud how many hours they had slept. It took him several minutes: he was nothing if not efficient.

‘Do you realize we couldn’t have slept more than about three hours a night during the last six weeks?’ he inquired proudly.