A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing
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said Stella, annoyed.
‘If Dr Stern did all the abortions he was asked to do, he’d never have time for anything else. There’s never a day passes without at least one or two crying their eyes out and asking him.’
‘What do they do?’ asked Martha, unwillingly fascinated.
‘Oh, if they’re strong-minded, they just go off to Beira or Johannesburg. But most of us just get used to it,’ said Alice, laughing nervously, and unconsciously pressing her hands around her pelvis.
Stella, with her high yell of laughter, began to tell a story about the last time she got pregnant. ‘There I was, after my second glass of neat gin, rolling on the sofa and groaning, everything just started nicely, and in came the woman from next door. She was simply furious. She said she’d report me to the police. Silly old cow. She can’t have kids herself, so she wants everyone else to have them for her. I told her to go and boil her head, and of course she didn’t do anything. She just wanted to upset me and make me unhappy.’ At the last words Stella allowed her face and voice to go limp with self-pity.
‘The police?’ inquired Martha blankly.
‘It’s illegal,’ explained Alice tolerantly. ‘If you start a baby, then it’s illegal not to have it. Didn’t you know?’
‘Do you mean to say that a woman’s not entitled to decide whether she’s going to have a baby or not?’ demanded Martha, flaring at once into animated indignation.
This violence amused both Stella and Alice, who now, in their turn, exchanged that small tolerant smile.
‘Oh, well,’ said Alice indulgently, ‘don’t waste any breath on that. Everyone knows that more kids get frustrated than ever get born, and half the women who have them didn’t want to have them, but if the Government wants to make silly laws, let them get on with it, that’s what I say, I suppose they’ve got nothing better to do. Don’t worry, dear. If you get yourself in a fix just give me a ring and I’ll help you out, you don’t want to lose sleep over the Government, there are better things to think about.’
Stella said with quick jealousy, ‘I’ve already told Matty, I’m just around the corner, and God knows I’ve got enough experience, even though I’m not a nurse.’
Surprised, Alice relinquished the struggle for the soul of Martha – she had not understood there was one.
‘Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it?’ she agreed easily.
They had now reached the flats. They were a large block, starkly white in the sunlight. The pavement was so heated that its substance gave stickily under their feet; and its bright grey shone up a myriad tiny oily rainbows. A single tree stood at the entrance; and on this soft green patch their eyes rested, in relief from the staring white, the glistening grey, the hard, brilliant blue of the sky. Under the tree stood a native woman. She held a small child by one hand and a slightly larger one by the other, and there was a new baby folded in a loop of cloth on her back. The older children held the stuff of her skirt from behind. Martha stopped and looked at her. This woman summed up her uncomfortable thoughts and presented the problem in its crudest form. This easy, comfortable black woman seemed extraordinarily attractive, compared with the hard gay anxiety of Stella and Alice. Martha felt her as something simple, accepting – whole. Then she understood that she was in the process of romanticizing poverty; and repeated firmly to herself that the child mortality for the colony was one of the highest in the world. All the same …
Alice and Stella, finding themselves alone in the hall, came back and saw Martha staring at the tree. There was nothing else to look at.
‘It’s all very well for us,’ remarked Martha with a half-defiant laugh, seeing that she was being observed. ‘We’re all right, but how about her?’
Alice looked blank; but Stella, after a spasm of annoyance had contracted her face, broke into a loud laugh. To Alice she said boisterously, ‘Matty is a proper little Bolshie, did you know? Why, we had to drag her away from the Reds before she was married, she gets all hot and bothered about our black brothers.’ She laughed again, insistently, but Alice apparently found no need to do the same.
‘Come along, dear,’ she said kindly to Martha. ‘Let’s have a drink and get it over with, if you don’t mind.’
Martha obediently joined them. But Stella could not leave it. She said brightly, ‘It’s different for them. They’re not civilized, having babies is easy for them, everyone knows that.’
They were climbing the wide staircase. Alice remarked indifferently, ‘Dr Stern has a clinic for native women. Every Sunday morning. I tell him he’s so keen on everybody having babies that he can’t even give Sunday a rest.’
Stella involuntarily stopped. ‘Dr Stern treats kaffirs?’ she asked, horrified. It appeared that he was in imminent danger of losing a patient.
‘He’s very goodhearted,’ said Alice vaguely. The words restored her own approval of Dr Stern. ‘He only charges them sixpence, or something like that.’ She continued to drag herself up the staircase, ahead of the others.
Stella was silent. Her face expressed a variety of emotions, doubt being the strongest. Then Dr Stern effected in her that small revolution in thinking which crosses a gulf to philanthropy. She remarked, still dubiously, ‘Well, of course, we should be kind to them.’
Martha, three steps below her, laughed outright. Alice looked at her in surprise, Stella with anger.
‘Well, if everyone was like you, they’d get out of hand,’ Stella said sourly. ‘It’s all very well, but everyone knows they are nothing but animals, and it doesn’t hurt them to have babies, and …’ She added doubtfully, ‘Dr Stern is always modern.’
‘He’s making a study about it,’ said Alice. She was waiting for them on the landing. ‘It’s not true they are different from us. They’re just the same, Dr Stern says.’
Stella was deeply shocked and disturbed; she burst into her loud vulgar laughter. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’
‘But it’s scientific,’ said Alice vaguely.
‘Oh, doctors!’ suggested Stella, in precisely the same indulgent tone Alice had previously used for ‘the Government’.
Martha, arrived beside them on the landing, said bitterly, ‘It seems even Dr Stern is only interested in writing papers about them.’
Alice was offended. ‘Well, so long as they get help, I don’t suppose they mind, do you? And he’s very kind. How many doctors can you think of would work as hard as he does all the week and every night and then spend all Sunday morning helping kaffir women with their babies? And for as good as nothing, too.’
‘Well, sixpence is the same for them as ten shillings would be for us,’ protested Martha.
Alice was really angry now. ‘It’s not the same for Dr Stern.’
‘Whose fault is that?’ demanded Martha hotly.
Stella cut the knot by opening the door. ‘Oh, let’s have a drink,’ she said impatiently. ‘Don’t take any notice of Matty. Douggie’ll put some sense into her head. You can’t be a Red if you’re married to a civil servant.’
They went inside. Martha was acutely depressed at the finality of what Stella had said. She began to take out glasses and syphons, until Stella took them impatiently out of her hands. She sat down, and let Stella arrange things as she wished; with the feeling she had done this many times before.
Alice was unobservant and relaxed in a deep chair, puffing out clouds of smoke until she was surrounded by blue haze. ‘For crying out loud, but I’m tired,’ she murmured; and, without moving the rest of her body, she held out her hand to take the glass Stella put into it.
The room was rather small, but neat; it was dressed with striped modern curtains, light rugs, cheerful strident cushions. Stella’s taste, as Martha observed to herself bitterly,