A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing
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job in the Player offices. She instantly dismissed the suspicion. It was one of her more pleasant but less efficient characteristics that she was unable to believe in that degree of cynicism from anyone. For naturally she persisted in believing that people should be conscious of their motives. Someone has remarked that there is no such thing as a hypocrite. In order to believe that, one must have reached the age to understand how persistently one has not been a hypocrite oneself.
Martha devoted herself to explaining to Stella how intolerable it was that she as a Jewess should have a good word to say for Hitler; while Stella, torn between persistent suspicions that there might be something in the rumours that Hitler ill-treated Jews and her terror that Andrew might not conform to Mr Player’s qualifications for a minor administrator, defended the Third Reich as an ally for Britain. That is, she continued to do so more or less consistently, interspersed with short periods when someone else’s man in the know had supplied other authoritative information sufficiently persuasive.
It had reached the end of July. A second batch of young men left for England. It caused an extraordinary resentment. That there were no class distinctions of any sort in this society was an axiom; one was not envious of people who sent their children to university, or even – in extreme cases – to finishing schools in Europe; it was all a question of luck. But for some days now the young men who could not afford air fares, or to gamble with their jobs, spoke with a rancour which was quite new. Opinion seethed, and brought forth a scheme by which a sufficient number of young men should besiege their heads of department and employers to give them time off, so that they should be ready and trained for instant service when war started. This admirable scheme came to nothing, because the authorities in Britain had not yet made up their minds how the colonies were to be used. There was only one principle yet decided, and this was that the men from the colonies were clearly all officer material, because of lives spent in ordering the black population about. The phrase used was, ‘They are accustomed to positions of authority.’ It would be a waste for Douglas, Willie and Andrew to take the field as mere cannon fodder. But although the wave of determination disintegrated against various rocks of this nature, for at least a week the young men in question thought and spoke of little else. As a result, the women turned over various ideas of their own.
They were all sitting late one night in the Burrells’ flat, which it is unnecessary to describe, since it was identical with the Knowells’ and the Mathews’ flats, when Alice remarked, with a nervous laugh, that it was no good Willie’s thinking of dashing off to the wars, because she thought she was pregnant.
Willie was sitting next to her as usual; he squeezed his large sunburnt hand on her shoulder, and laughed, giving her his affectionate protective look. ‘It’s all very well,’ persisted Alice. ‘Oh, well, to hell with everything.’ And she reached for a cigarette.
No one took it seriously. But a week later, when the Burrells were rung up to join a party for dancing, Alice remarked in a calm way that she had no time for dancing for a couple of days, because she had to do something about this damned baby. Douglas, returning from the office, reported to Martha that he had met Willie in the bar and Willie said it was very serious, no laughing matter at all. Stella, all delighted animation, rang up to offer her services. But Alice, the trained nurse, was vaguely reassuring. She was quite all right, she said.
Stella was offended, and showed it by saying that it was stupid to get pregnant when – But this sentence flowed into ‘And, in any case, she’s only doing it to keep Willie from being called up.’ Martha said indignantly that anyone would think Alice was doing it on purpose. To which Stella replied with her rich, shrewd laugh. Martha was annoyed because she was associated with a sex which chose such dishonest methods for getting its own way.
‘I bet she’s not really doing anything about getting rid of it,’ said Stella virtuously. But one felt her energies were not really behind this indignation.
She and Martha were secure in a plan of their own. Martha had suggested they might go and take a course in Red Cross. It was on a day when the newspaper had warned them that an enemy (left undefined, like a blank in an official form to be filled in later as events decided) might sweep across Africa in a swastikaed or – the case might be – hammer-and-sickled horde. In this case, the black population, always ungrateful to the British colonists, would naturally side with the unscrupulous invaders, undermined as they were by sedition-mongers, agitators and Fabian influences from England. The prospect brightened the eyes of innumerable women; one should be prepared; and in due time Red Cross courses were announced.
‘Matty and I are thinking of joining an ambulance unit,’ said Stella demurely. ‘After all, we won’t have any responsibilities here if you go on active service, will we?’
Martha had dropped this suggestion in passing, just as she had tentatively suggested the Red Cross course, only to find it taken up and moulded by Stella. And the uneasy silence of their husbands contributed to their perseverance. At ten o’clock one morning, Martha and Stella were in their seats for the first of these lectures.
It was a large room filled with rows of school desks. They were crowded with about sixty women, who must be housewives or leisured daughters at this hour of the day. The lecturer was an elderly woman, fat, red-faced, with jolly little black eyes. Under the edges of her flowing coif showed flat scooplike curls of iron-grey hair, gummed against her cheeks; for, unlike the nuns whose garb this so much resembled, this woman was a female still – those curls proclaimed it. The masses of her flesh were tightly confined in glazed white, and supported on the large splayed feet which were the reward of her work.
This, then, was Sister Dorothy Dalraye, known for the last thirty years to her friends and colleagues, now numbering several thousands, as Doll. She introduced herself with the cheerful cry of ‘Well, girls, since we’re all going to be together for six weeks, you must call me Sister Doll!’ And proceeded to a series of bright remarks, infusing into her animated black eyes a look of insinuating suggestiveness, so that her audience instinctively listened as if some doubtful joke was imminent. But no: it appeared her innuendoes referred to the coming war – or rather, the enemy who was as yet unnamed. Martha unravelled her ambiguities to mean that she, unlike Stella, hoped to fight Hitler and not Stalin; at last she made some references to ‘the Hun’ which settled the matter. That this was a memory from the last war was made clear when she called it, just as Mr Quest might do, ‘the Great Unmentionable’, but without his bitter note of betrayal. Sister Doll had fought alongside the boys during the Great Unmentionable, and on various fronts. She named them. She produced anecdote after anecdote, apparently at random. But Martha slowly realized that this was not at all as casual as it looked. This gathering of some sixty women had ceased to be individuals. They were being slowly welded together. They were listening in silence, and every face showed anticipation, as if they were being led, by the cheerful tallyhoing of Sister Doll, to view entrancing vistas of country. Sister Doll was adroitly, and with the confidence of one who had done it many times before, building up a picture of herself, and so of them, as a cheerfully modest, indefatigably devoted minister of mercy who took physical bravery for granted. But behind this picture, absolutely genuine, was another; and it was this that beckoned the audience: adventure. Sister Doll was promising them adventure. Once again Martha heard the mud, the squalor, the slaughter of the trenches recreated in the memory of someone who had been a victim of them – Sister Doll remarked in passing that she had ‘lost’ her boy at Passchendaele – as cleanly gallant and exciting.
She spoke for some twenty minutes, this jolly old campaigner; then, judging it was enough, she proceeded to talk about discipline. It was clear that this was by no means as popular as those inspiring reminiscences – perhaps because these women, being mostly married women with servants, had reached the position where they believed their task was to discipline others and not themselves. In this they resembled Sister Doll. At any rate, judging from the critical and sceptical look on their faces, they were reflecting that the discipline of the nursing profession, like its uniform, was more hierarchic than practical. They were minutely observing Sister Doll’s uniform, with its white glaze, its ritual buckles and badges, and its romantic flowing white veil, with the common sense of disparaging housewives. They began to cough and shuffle like a theatre audience. Not a moment too soon Sister Doll prevented them from separating again into a collection of individuals,