A Proper Marriage

Martha sat down without being asked. ‘Do you mind my coming to see you?’ she asked. It sounded rather aggressive.

He could only reply that he did not. He sat down himself, with the air of one being polite against his will. Martha looked to see how he might have changed. Since she had seen him last, he had been to the university, quarrelled with his family, made a trip to England, almost got to Spain, had a love affair, returned, thrown up university for good. None of this showed on his face. He was exactly as he had been, tall, very thin, with a loose knobbly look about his movements. His face was sharp-featured and bony, with the look of the young intellectual Jew: lively and critical, but with an additional sarcastic hostility about him. His clothes were different, however. He wore very short dark-blue shorts and a rusty-brown shirt, falling loose. He was tanned a dark brown.

‘I like the name you’ve chosen for your communal settlement,’ said Martha, ready to laugh with him.

‘We didn’t choose it. It was the name before.’

‘Oh!’ Then: ‘Do you mean the Coloured people called it Utopia?’ she asked, dismayed and touched.

‘That’s right. Stoo-pid, isn’t it?’

She saw he was jeering at her, and came back with ‘I thought you had the grace to laugh at yourselves, at least.’

But he was not prepared to be provoked. In any case Martha blurted out, ‘Can I come and live here, too?’

He looked at her, first grinning, then grave. ‘Well, well,’ he commented at last. Then, cautiously: ‘I thought you’d just got married?’

‘I have. But I want …’ But it was impossible to make explanations. ‘I shouldn’t have got married, anyway. I would like to come and live here. Why shouldn’t I?’ she demanded like a child.

Here Solly, who had been preparing some gestures of amazement or amusement, simply shrugged.

‘But you can’t do that,’ he said reproachfully at last.

Martha was indignant. ‘Why did you write me that letter, then?’ she asked naïvely.

‘But, Matty …’ Here he relapsed into his old manner. He was going to be simple and natural. ‘But, Matty, you can’t go getting married one week and throwing it up the next.’ He was looking at her inquiringly; his face showed an intelligent comprehension – but not kindness.

Martha’s spirits were sinking lower and lower. She saw she had been extremely foolish. However, she continued lamely, ‘You mean, everyone feels like this, it’s like measles, one just has to go through with it?’

‘Having never been married myself …’ he began portentously, but dropped the manner at once. ‘What did you get married for?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Martha ruefully.

‘Anyway, you can’t live here,’ he announced at last. ‘For one thing, there aren’t any women.’

Martha felt herself blushing, and was furious. For the first time it occurred to her that Solly might be taking this as a personal interest in himself. It was intolerable! She exclaimed belligerently, ‘You keep out women?’

At once Solly recovered his jaunty manner. ‘We did ask some girls. Unfortunately none of you can be torn away from your bright lights and your clothes. I suppose you understand that here everything is in common – books, money, everything. And we don’t smoke and we don’t drink.’

‘And you are all celibate?’ she inquired sarcastically.

‘Naturally.’ Then he added, ‘But marriage is allowed.’

But now she laughed scornfully. ‘Anyone’d see that married couples would wreck it.’

‘Luckily we are none of us intending to get married, so that’s all right.’ She was sitting upright in her chair, eyes bright with anger, face flushed – he deliberately lounging in his, with an appearance of conscious ease. ‘And you’re not Jewish either,’ he said. He sounded embarrassed.

This was something she had not thought of; and she saw at once it was unpardonable of her. She flushed deeper; her face was burning steadily, so that she would have liked to hide it. She wanted to say something like ‘So now you’re being exclusive,’ but an awkward guilt stopped her. ‘Well, that’s certainly final,’ she said, trying to sound light and casual. And then, seeing that he was still a little embarrassed, she went on: ‘How many of you?’

‘Four, at the moment. We are modelling ourselves on the settlements in Israel.’

‘Israel?’

‘Palestine to you,’ and he could not help a sudden savage grin.

‘But what will you do when the war starts?’ she asked awkwardly.

‘When the old men have finished their diplomatic fiddling and we can see what they’re up to, we’ll decide. I shall be a conscientious objector if they turn the war against the Soviet Union, and I shall fight if it’s against Hitler.’

She felt very small beside this enviable clarity of mind. ‘How nice to have everything so tidily planned, how nice to be so sure about everything.’ She tried to jeer at him, but it sounded thin.

‘There’s nothing to stop you,’ he said.

She got up, and with a familiar gesture turned to look at the bookshelves. She had only the time to see the names of books she had not heard of, authors that were new, when he said, trying to make a joke of it, ‘No, Matty, you can’t borrow books here. It’s a joint library.’

‘I wasn’t going to.’ She moved towards the door. ‘Well, I’ll go back home, then.’

But now he was obviously contrite. ‘You don’t have to run away. We won’t eat you.’

After hesitation, she returned to her chair. They were now warm with friendship for each other. They were both remembering how often they had sat thus, in a small room filled with books, at the station; outside, the ox waggons rolled heavily through clouds of red dust, and the farmers in their loose working khaki hurried from store to garage, from garage to post office, with their letters and groceries; outside, the black people swarmed around the door of the store, fingering their bits of money and talking excitedly about the bargains they would make. Martha looked out of the window: a mass of dirty little houses, swarms of brown-skinned, poverty-ridden children; but under the window a Jewish youth was hoeing a patch of potatoes.

‘You have no servants?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Well, I don’t see what you’re going to achieve by it,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Except, of course, you’ll have a lovely time yourselves.’ Her tone suggested that this was an aim she was prepared to approve of; but his black eyes watched her sarcastically as from an inner truth she could not be expected to see.

Silence, and the hoe rose and fell in the soft earth outside, with a thud, thud, thud. Someone turned a tap on somewhere close inside the house; the water rushed loudly, then it was cut off – silence again.

‘You study all day, you discipline yourselves, you work hard?’ Martha attempted again.

‘That’s right.’

‘You might just as well be – up in the white town. Why do you have to come and live here?’

‘We have contacts with the local people,’ he said defensively; it seemed this was a weak point.

‘You could have classes for them?’ she said excitedly.

But at this he laughed heavily. ‘That’s right, so we could. As for you, you’ll be dishing out charity to the poor from your lofty position in the civil service, inside five years.’

She shrugged this off impatiently, untouched by the gibe.

‘What sort of – contacts?’ She used the stiff, impersonal word with difficulty, trying to make it into a picture: Solly and his friends, talking, in this room, with some of the poor Coloured people she could see out of the window.

‘Actually,’ he announced briskly, ‘the Coloured community are a waste of time. In their position halfway between the blacks and the white Herrenvolk, they are bound to be unstable, they are petty bourgeois to the core, all of them.’

He was jettisoning them all! Martha, very shocked, said feebly, ‘They are human beings, after all.’