A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing
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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.’
‘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