A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing
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and casual labourers had listened with respect for his efforts, but without understanding, as they should instantly have done, the nature of the revelations being made to them. Solly had been taken off in a police van and – final insult – fined ten shillings for being drunk and disorderly. ‘As you know, I consider alcohol degrading.’ It all went to show the incredible stupidity of the authorities in not understanding their real enemies, personified by Solly.
Solly stood before the magistrate – as it happened, Mr Maynard – and delivered a fine speech on the historical development of liberty. Mr Maynard, interested but at sea, had suggested practically that it was a pity he didn’t finish at the university; such talents should not be wasted. This was the final blow to Solly’s pride.
Martha got a letter from Mr Maynard, giving his version of the affair.
… A friend of yours, apparently? I took him out to lunch after the case, because of my insatiable interest in the vagaries of the young. His vagaries, however, do seem to me to be out of ‘historical context’ – a phrase I learned from him. Surely behaviour more appropriate for England or Europe? One feels it is wasted on us. It would appear that he feels there is no hope for the world at all; I find it enviable that people should still care that this should be so. At my age, I take it for granted. He says he is now a Trotskyist. I said that I was sure this would be a great blow to Stalin, but that I would infinitely prefer my own son to be a Trotskyist rather than the town buffoon, it at least shows an interest in public affairs. This annoyed your friend exceedingly. He feels I should have sent him to prison for six months. If I had only known, I would have obliged him. Why not? But, as I pointed out to him, since the sons of our Chief Citizens think nothing of spending their nights in the custody of the police – Binkie was given a ‘shakedown’, as he calls it, the other night in the company of some of the ‘lads’ – the hands of the police are hardly the place for conscientious intellectuals. They wouldn’t appreciate him, either.
Making feeble elderly jokes of this kind had the opposite effect to that I intended. He remarked darkly that the Revolution (which?) took too little heed of the differences in the degree of consciousness of the ruling classes. He said there was nothing he despised more than a reactionary who imagined himself a liberal. Could this mean me? He went on to say I was making a mistake to underrate him. I took this to mean that there must be a vast conspiracy under our noses among the blacks.
My information, however, is that this is not the case. An interesting similarity, this; between the good ladies of the city, who are moaning with horror over their bridge tables about your friend Solomon’s exploit, and your friend Solomon himself, whose imagination is no less romantic. However, I was writing to say that I am delighted you are having a baby. Since you are probably still bathed in the sweats of the honeymoon, you will not agree with me when I say that children are the only justification of marriage. I should like to be godfather to your (I hope) daughter. Naturally, I hasten to say, without the benefit of religion. If I’m not mistaken, this would be against your principles? I should like, however, to be ‘in’ on it. I wanted a daughter more than anything.
This last sentence touched Martha deeply, coming as it did after the painful self-punishments of the rest of the letter. It was to the writer of that sentence she sent an affectionate reply, ignoring the rest.
Almost at once various other letters arrived, and, her nose being as acute as it was to sense any form of spiritual invasion, she was becoming aware that the people who are sucked irresistibly into the orbit of marriage are by no means the same as those who respond to the birth of a child. Mr Maynard, for instance, could be witty about marriage, but not about daughters. Mrs Talbot was never anything but tender about daughters, sighed continually over the children she had not had, sent a charming note of congratulation to Martha, but for some weeks saw very little of the young couple, for she had become absorbed in the wedding of a friend of Elaine’s, who needed all her attention. Various elderly ladies, scarcely known to Martha, rushed into her flat, folded her in their arms, offered her their friendship, and lingered, talking about their own children with the wistful, discouraged look which always made Martha feel so lacking.
Above all, the elder Mrs Knowell, who had done no more than send sprightly telegrams of congratulation from the other end of the colony about the wedding, suddenly arrived in person. That creature in Martha which was the animal alert for danger against her cub waited tensely for the arrival of a possible enemy; and the other raw nerve was sounding a warning: this woman was likely to be a forecast of her own fate. For – she had worked it out with mathematical precision – since men were bound to marry their mothers, then she, in the end, would become Douglas’s mother. But she was committed to be like her own mother. And if the two women were not in the least alike? That did not matter; in its own malevolent way, fate would adjust this incompatibility too, and naturally to Martha’s disadvantage.
As Mrs Knowell entered the room, Martha’s defences went down. They had been erected in the wrong quarter. She had been expecting something gay, jolly, with the self-conscious eccentricity of the letters and telegrams. Mrs Knowell stood hesitating, kissed Martha carefully, and took her seat like a visitor. At once she took out a cigarette. Martha unconsciously curled out of sight her own stained fingers, and looked at the big, rather nervous hands, soaked in nicotine. This was something altogether different from what she had been waiting for! Mrs Knowell was a tall woman, big in the bone, yet with thick flesh loose about her. She had heavy brown eyes, the whites stained yellow; she wore a mass of faded yellow hair in a big untidy bun. Her skin was sallow, and as a concession to what was expected of her she had put a hasty rub of yellowish lipstick across a full sad mouth. She wore a yellowish-brown dress. Nervous exhaustion came from her like a breath of stale air. She watched Martha as she made the tea, and made conversation, in a way which said clearly that she had come prepared not to interfere or infringe. It positively made Martha nervous. Her talk quite contradicted the heavy watchful eyes: it was gay and amusing; this was the personality which enabled her friends from what she herself referred to as her ‘palmy’ days to entertain her with a warm amused affection as a persistent enfant terrible. That gay old child, flitting erractically from one house to another, dropping in on a bridge game from a town seventy miles away, or suddenly taking flight in the middle of a two-week visit on an irresistible impulse to see a friend at the other end of the colony, was a creation of such tact that Martha found herself undermined by pity and admiration.
Mrs Knowell was not of the first generation of pioneering women. She had ridden in covered waggons in the months-long journey from the south, but without need to take cover against hostile tribes. She had lived in the remote parts of the country, but the rifle which leaned against the wall was against wild animals and not a native rising. Her husband had been farmer, miner, policemen, businessman, as opportunity offered; he had made several fortunes and lost them in the casual way which was then customary. She had borne eight children, and kept two alive. The daughter in England was married to a small-town solicitor; they kept up a bright and entertaining correspondence.
Mrs Knowell had succeeded in imposing on everyone who knew her this gallant and independent old lady, the jolly old girl; yet, if that heavy yellow stare, that tight defensive set of her limbs, that tired dry undercurrent to her voice meant anything, it was that her battles had been fought not against lions and flooded rivers or the accidents of a failing gold reef. She was in every way of the second generation; and Martha, impulsively ignoring the ‘amusing’ remarks, as if she were insulted that such a fraud should be offered to her, spoke direct to what she felt was the real woman, out of her deepest conviction that anything less than the truth was the worst of betrayals, and more – that this truth should be an acknowledgment of some kind of persistent dry cruelty feeding the roots of life. Nothing else would do.
Mrs Knowell responded slowly, with a nervous gratitude. She tentatively mentioned the baby; Martha talked of it without defences. Mrs Knowell, released by this new baby into her memories of her own, spoke of them as she had obviously intended not to do. She began talking of the way they had died – blackwater, malaria, a neglected appendix. She began telling a long story, in a heavy, slow, tired voice, of an occasion when she had found herself alone on a farm, fifty miles from anywhere, her husband having gone to buy some cattle. She had been pregnant with her second