A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing
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this sad cycle followed: Mrs Quest said that it was unfair to Douglas not to sleep enough: she could get ill and then he would have to pay the bills. Martha’s face remaining implacable, she went on, in tones of hurried disapproval: ‘If you’ll give me a needle and thread, I’ll mend your nightdress.’
Martha got up, found needle and thread, and handed them to Mrs Quest without a word. The sight of that nightdress, still warm from her own body, clutched with nervous possession in her mother’s hands was quite unendurable. She was determined to endure it. After all, she thought, if it gives her pleasure … And then: It’s not her fault she was brought up in that society. This thought gave her comparative detachment. She sat down and looked at the worn, gnarled hands at work on her nightdress. They filled her with pity for her mother. Besides, she could remember how she had loved her mother’s hands as a child; she could see the white and beautiful hands of a woman who no longer existed.
Mrs Quest was talking of matters on the farm, about the house in town they were shortly to buy, about her husband’s health.
Martha scarcely listened. She was engaged in examining and repairing those intellectual bastions of defence behind which she sheltered, that building whose shape had first been sketched so far back in her childhood she could no longer remember how it then looked. With every year it had become more complicated, more ramified; it was as if she, Martha, were a variety of soft, shell-less creature whose survival lay in the strength of those walls. Reaching out in all directions from behind it, she clutched at the bricks of arguments, the stones of words, discarding any that might not fit into the building.
She was looking at Mrs Quest in a deep abstract speculation, as if neither she nor her mother had any validity as persons, but were mere pawns in the hands of an old fatality. She could see a sequence of events, unalterable, behind her, and stretching unalterably into the future. She saw her mother, a prim-faced Edwardian schoolgirl, confronting, in this case, the Victorian father, the patriarchal father, with rebellion. She saw herself sitting where her mother now sat, a woman horribly metamorphosed, entirely dependent on her children for any interest in life, resented by them, and resenting them; opposite her, a young woman of whom she could distinguish nothing clearly but a set, obstinate face; and beside these women, a series of shadowy dependent men, broken-willed and sick with compelled diseases. This the nightmare, this the nightmare of a class and generation: repetition. And although Martha had read nothing of the great interpreters of the nightmare, she had been soaked in the minor literature of the last thirty years, which had dealt with very little else: a series of doomed individuals, carrying their doom inside them, like the seeds of fatal disease. Nothing could alter the pattern.
But inside the stern web of fatality did flicker small hopeful flames. One thought was that after all it had not always been that these great life-and-death struggles were fought out inside the family; presumably things might change again. Another was that she had decided not to have a baby; and it was in her power to cut the cycle.
Which brought her back into the conversation with a question on her tongue.
Mrs Quest was talkng about the coming war. She had no doubt at all as to the shape it would assume. It was Britain’s task to fight Hitler and Stalin combined. Martha suggested that this might be rather a heavy task. Mrs Quest said sharply that Martha had no patriotism, and never had had. Even without those lazy and useless Americans who never came into the war until they could make good pickings out of it, Britain would ultimately muddle through to victory, as she always did.
Martha was able to refrain from being logical only by her more personal preoccupations. She plunged straight in with an inquiry as to whether her mother had ever had an abortion. She hastened to add that she wanted to know because of a friend of hers.
Mrs Quest, checked, took some moments to adjust to this level. She said vaguely, ‘It’s illegal…’ Having made this offering to the law, she considered the question on its merits and said in a lowered voice, a look of distaste on her face, ‘Why – are you like that?’
Martha suppressed the hostility she felt at the evasion, and said, ‘No.’
‘Well, you look like it,’ said Mrs Quest bluntly, with triumph.
‘Well, I’m not.’ Martha added the appeal, ‘I do wish you’d tell me …’ She had no idea what she really wanted to know!
Mrs Quest looked at her, her vigorous face wearing the dubious rather puzzled expression which meant she was trying to remember her own past.
Martha was telling herself that this appeal was doomed to produce all kinds of misunderstanding and discomfort. They always did. And what did she want her mother to say? She looked at her in silence, and wished that some miracle would occur and her mother would produce a few simple, straightforward remarks, a few words—not emotional, nothing deviating from the cool humorous understatement that would save them both from embarrassment. Martha needed the right words.
She reflected that Mrs Quest had not wanted her. How, then, had she come to accept her? Was that what she wanted to know? But looking at her now, she could only think that Mrs Quest had spent a free, energetic youth, had ‘lived her own life’ – she had used the phrase herself long before it was proper for middle-class daughters to do so – and had, accordingly, quarrelled with her father. She had not married until very late.
For many years now, she had been this immensely efficient down-to-earth matron; but somewhere concealed in her was the mother who had borne Martha. From her white and feminine body she, Martha, had emerged – that was certainly a fact! She could remember seeing her mother naked; beautiful she had been, a beautiful, strong white body, with full hips, small high breasts – the Greek idea of beauty. And to that tender white body had belonged the strong soft white hands Martha remembered. Those hands had tended her, the baby. Well, then, why could her mother not resurrect that woman in her and speak the few simple, appropriate words?
But now she was turning Martha’s flimsy nightgown between her thickened, clumsy hands, as if determined not to say she disapproved of it; and frowned. She looked uncomfortable. Martha quite desperately held on to that other image to set against this one. She could see that earlier woman distinctly. More, she could feel wafts of tenderness coming from her.
Then, suddenly, into this pure and simple emotion came something new: she felt pity like a clutching hand. She was remembering something else. She was lying in the dark in that house on the farm, listening to a piano being played several rooms away. She got up, and crept through the dark rooms to a doorway. She saw Mrs Quest seated at the keyboard, a heavy knot of hair weighting her head and glistening gold where the light touched it from two candle flames which floated steadily above the long white transparent candles. Tears were running down her face while she set her lips and smiled. The romantic phrases of a Chopin nocturne rippled out into the African night, steadily accompanied by the crickets and the blood-thudding of the tom-toms from the compound. Martha smiled wryly: she could remember the gulf of pity that sight had thrown her into.
Mrs Quest looked up over the nightdress and inquired jealously, ‘What are you laughing at?’
‘Mother,’ she said desperately, ‘you didn’t want to have me. Well, then …’
Mrs Quest laughed, and said Martha had come as a surprise to her.
Martha waited, then prodded. ‘What did you feel?’
A slight look of caution came on to her mother’s honest square face. ‘Oh, well …’ But almost at once she launched into the gay and humorous account, which Martha had so often heard, of the difficulties of getting the proper clothes and so on; which almost at once merged with the difficulties of the birth itself – a painful business, this, as she had so often been told.
‘But what did you feel about it all? I mean, it couldn’t have been as easy as all that,’ said Martha.
‘Oh, it wasn’t easy – I was just telling you.’ Mrs Quest began to repeat how awkward a baby Martha had been. ‘But it wasn’t really your fault. First I didn’t have enough milk, though I didn’t know it; and then I gave you a mixture, and didn’t know until the doctor told me that