A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing
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her husband. She was looking through him; and at once he was annoyed that she should not remember such an important figure at what was surely an important occasion. This annoyance was succeeded by a more sincere pressure: she, if anyone could, would be able to tell him where his son Binkie was.
He stood firmly before her, blocking her preoccupied stare, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Knowell.’
Martha glanced hastily sideways to see whom he was addressing, then blushed. She looked closely at him, and then exclaimed, ‘Oh – Mr Maynard!’
‘And how,’ inquired Mr Maynard, cutting short this mutual embarrassment, ‘do you find the married state?’
She considered this seriously, then said, ‘Well, I’ve only been married five days.’
‘A very sensible attitude.’
She looked at him and waited. He was struck by her tiredness, and the unhappy set of her mouth. That critical look, however, checked in him the instinct to instruct. He was not a magistrate and the descendant of magistrates and landowners for nothing. He found himself searching for the right tone.
She saved him the trouble by asking, ‘Has Binkie come home yet?’
‘I thought you would be able to tell me.’
‘The last we saw of him was when he left the Falls at two last night. He said he was going to swim across the Falls if it was the last thing he did. It probably would be, too,’ she added dispassionately.
Mr Maynard winced. ‘He was drunk, I suppose?’
‘Not drunk.’ This, it seemed, she found crude. But she added, ‘No more than usual.’
Mr Maynard looked sharply at her, saw this was not criticism but information willingly given, and said, ‘I suppose the fact that the river is full of crocodiles wouldn’t deter him?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t really do it,’ she said quickly, on a maternal note. ‘They rushed off in a horde saying they would. Three years ago they say one of them tried to jump across to that little island – you know the one, when the river is low – and he went over the edge. We reminded them about it just as they left. Besides, Binkie’s far too sensible.’
‘Binkie’s sensible?’ exclaimed Mr Maynard, very bitterly.
Martha, feeling that she was included in the bitterness, moved slightly away with ‘Well, I’m not responsible for Binkie.’
He hesitated, then again moved in front of her. ‘Young woman, it would interest me very much to know why you think Binkie is sensible. He drinks like a fish. He never does any work if he can help it. He is continually either giving it a bang or tearing the place to pieces.’ He heavily isolated these last phrases, and handed them to her, as it were, like a challenge.
After a pause for reflection Martha observed, ‘He always knows what he’s doing.’ This comment, it appeared, was enough.
‘You amaze me. You really do amaze me, you know.’ He waited for more.
Martha offered him a sudden friendly smile, and said, ‘I shouldn’t worry. In twenty years’ time he’ll be a magistrate, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’ She laughed, as if this in itself was funny.
‘My youth was not misspent. We neither gave it a bang nor tore the place to pieces.’
Martha’s eyebrows at once went up. ‘Really? I understood that you did – judging from novels, at least. Though of course in England you’d call it something else probably, you people.’
‘Who is “you people”?’ he asked, annoyed.
Martha looked at him as if suspecting a deliberate dishonesty, and then remarked, blushing because she had to put it into words, ‘Why, the upper classes, of course, who else?’
Ironically stiff, he remarked, ‘My son Binkie also uses the phrase “you people” – and in the same way.’
‘For all that, he’ll end up by being a magistrate.’ And Martha laughed with real enjoyment and looked straight at him, expecting him to share it.
He did not laugh. He was hurt. ‘You are exempt from this law?’
The shaft went home at once. She lost her shell of confidence, her face contracted, she looked at him from a haze of anxiety before turning away from him. He had no idea why this should be so.
He was contrite. Then he said apologetically, ‘Well, thank you. I daresay Binkie will turn up at midnight again. I don’t know why he imagines he can miss three days at the office without even ringing up to apologize – his chief rang me this morning.’ He heard his own voice becoming so bitter that he hastened to restore his balance by sarcasm. ‘Don’t imagine I am inquiring on my own account. As far as I am concerned, I decided long ago it would be no loss to society if Binkie did fall prey to the crocodiles. But my wife will have a sick headache until he returns.’
Under the impression that he had ended the interview on a note which must leave him whole in her eyes, he was about to turn away with a ‘Good afternoon’, when he saw her offering him a look of such ironic pity that he stopped.
She smiled and he found himself returning her smile. ‘Well, Mr Maynard,’ she remarked in precisely his own tone of cool self-punishing sarcasm. ‘If Binkie has learned to ignore sick headaches, then it must be because he knows he’d be doing someone out of a pleasure if he did not.’ But this logical sentence crumbled, and she added awkwardly, ‘I mean, everyone knows about sick headaches … Besides – they’re so old-fashioned,’ she went on angrily. And then: ‘Not that everything doesn’t just go on, even when one might think they had no right to exist any longer.’
Ignoring the last part of this, he seized upon the first with an ironical ‘Well, well!’ His relations with his wife had been conducted on this principle, but he would have considered it unchivalrous to do more than talk blandly about ‘the female element’ when with his male friends. Yet here was a representative of this same element who seemed to feel no disloyalty in putting what he had imagined to be a male viewpoint. It occurred to him, first, that he was out of touch with the young; secondly, a note had been struck which he instinctively responded to with gallantry.
Instilling gallantry into his voice, and a gleam of ironic complicity into his eyes, he moved nearer and said, ‘You interest me enormously.’
At once she frowned, and even moved away. He dropped the tone; but held it in reserve for a later occasion.
Then he lowered his voice like a conspirator, and inquired expanding his eyes with a look of vast inquiry, ‘Tell me, Mrs Knowell, is it the fashion now for young people to take their honeymoons in crowds? In my young days a honeymoon was an opportunity to be alone.’
‘You know quite well we did our best to get away without Binkie and the gang,’ said Martha resentfully.
‘I was referring to the other couple, the Mathews.’
For a moment it was touch and go whether she would repudiate them; but another loyalty was touched, for she laughed and asserted that they had all had a marvellous time and it was absolutely gorgeous.
Mr Maynard watched her, then raised his heavy brows and said drily, ‘So it would appear.’
He had expected her to succumb in confusion to this pressure; instead she suddenly chuckled, and met his eyes appreciatively. He said quickly, ‘Our generation has not made such a success of things that we can expect you to follow our example.’ This seemed to him the extreme of magnanimity, but she smiled sceptically and said, ‘Thanks.’
There was another pause. Martha was thinking that his eighteenth-century flavour had, after all, its own piquancy – not fifty yards away the farmers still lounged and argued prices and the weather and the labour question, while almost at their elbow arched the great marble doors of the cinema.
But surely Stella should be returning by now? And all this talk of generations