A Proper Marriage Read online

  ‘Admirable,’ he commented. Then: ‘Entirely admirable. If I may give you some advice.’

  ‘Oh, I do assure you that I’ve taken the point,’

  He looked at her straight. ‘And I assure you that you will find it much more tolerable this way.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ she said angrily.

  He was on the point of making some further attempt, when she felt a hand on her arm. It was Douglas. He looked rather nervous, first because he was disturbing her conversation with Mr Maynard, secondly because she was looking so guilty. She felt very guilty. She jumped up quickly as he said, ‘Matty, we should be going.’

  Mr Maynard released her courteously, and returned to his chair beside his wife. They stood at the door shaking hands with Colonel Brodeshaw and his wife. Mrs Brodeshaw took the opportunity to ask, ‘My dear, I wonder if you would like to help on the committee for organizing the ladies …’ It took Martha by surprise, and Mrs Brodeshaw swiftly went on: ‘Though of course, my dear, you don’t want to be worried by all this sort of thing yet, do you? It’s not fair, when you’re just married. We’ll leave you in peace for the time being,’ she promised, smiling. Then she added, ‘There’s a suggestion of starting a committee to investigate the conditions of the Coloured–’

  ‘I was down there this morning,’ remarked Martha.

  Mrs Brodeshaw looked startled, then said, ‘Oh, yes, we know you are interested.’

  Douglas came quickly in with ‘Perhaps we can fix it later, when we’re more settled.’

  Again Mrs Brodeshaw retreated gracefully. They said goodbye. Douglas and Martha went to the car in silence. She saw he looked annoyed, and wondered why.

  ‘You know, Matty, I think you might have been a bit more pleasant about it.’

  ‘Charity?’ said Martha angrily.

  ‘It’s not such a bad idea, you know.’ He was referring to her being ‘in’ with the Brodeshaws.

  ‘Charity,’ she said finally. It dismayed her that he might even consider it possible. Then she felt sorry for him - he looked utterly taken aback.

  ‘But, Matty …’

  She took his arm. She was now lifted on waves of alcohol: she was recklessly happy.

  ‘Mr Maynard was having a long talk with you?’ he inquired.

  ‘Yes. Let’s go and dance, Douglas.’

  ‘The Club? What? With the gang?’

  ‘The gang,’ she mocked. ‘We’ve put up with them for long enough, haven’t we?’

  ‘Let’s have a night by ourselves.’

  But by now she could not bear to go tamely back to the flat. There was something in the talk with Mr Maynard which had unsettled her, made her restless - she needed to dance. Besides, she was instinctively reluctant to go now, in this mood of disliking him, which she did unaccountably, to spend an evening with Douglas.

  ‘Come on - come on,’ she urged, tugging at him.

  ‘All right, then, we’ll go and beat up Stella and Andy - and let’s get Willie and Alice. We’d better buy some brandy …’

  She was hardly listening. She was wildly elated, she could feel that she was very attractive to him in this mood; it intoxicated her and deeply disturbed her that he should find her desirable when she was engaged in despising him. ‘Come on, come on,’ she called impatiently, and ran off down the path through the bushes to the car. He followed, running heavily behind her. It was dark now. The gateposts reflected a white gleam back to a large low white moon. The town had lost its ramshackle shallowness. A mile of roofs shone hard and white like plates of white salt, amid acres of softly glinting leaves. The road lay low and grey, with a yellow glimmer of light from the street lamps.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Well, Matty, and now you’ll be free to get on with your own work.’

  It was with these words that Douglas dropped his parting kiss on her cheek when he left for the office each morning, and with a look of pure satisfaction. The kindly, confident young man crossed the untidy bedroom towards the door, bouncing a little from the balls of his feet, smiling backwards at Martha, who was sitting in a tangle of crumpled and stained silk in a mess of bedclothes, and vanished whistling down the corridor. The gleam of proprietary satisfaction never failed to arouse in Martha a flush of strong resentment, which was as unfailingly quenched by a succeeding guilt. To account for the resentment, for above all it was essential to account for every contradictory emotion that assailed one, she had already formed a theory.

  After Douglas had left, she kicked off the bedclothes, and allowed herself to fall backwards on the cooling sheets and pillows. She lay quiet. Opposite her, two neat squares of bright blue sky, in one of which was suspended the stilled black wheel of the fair; reflected sunlight quivered hot on the wall. From all around, from above, from below, the sound of voices, a broom swishing, a child crying. But here, in the heart of the building, two rooms, white, silent, empty. And, on the bed, Martha, uncomfortably fingering the silk of her nightdress, trying most conscientiously to relax into the knowledge of space and silence. At the same time she was thinking of Douglas, now already at his office; she could see the self-conscious look with which he allowed himself to be teased; every night he came back to share with her his pleasure in how the office had said this or that. And how she hated him for it! And it was her husband about whom she was feeling this resentment, this violent dislike.

  Martha, ignoring the last few months in town before her marriage, because she could not bear to think about them, went back to that period when she was a girl on the farm. From this, several incidents had been selected by her need for a theory. There had been that young man who … and the other one … and that occasion when … After hours of determined concentration she would emerge with the phrase, ‘Women hate men who take them for granted.’ It would have done for a story in a magazine. But that impersonal ‘woman’ was a comfort - briefly, for no sooner had she reached it than she saw the image that the words conjured up: something sought, wooed, capricious, bestowing favours. No, there was something extremely distasteful about that capricious female; no sooner had Martha caught a glimpse of her than she must repudiate her entirely; she was certainly from the past! The suggestion of coyness was unbearable. Yet she and Douglas had achieved a brotherly friendliness almost immediately; and when he bounced cheerfully into bed, clutching her in a cheerful and companionable act of love that ignored the female which must be wooed, she undoubtedly loathed him from the bottom of her heart, an emotion which was as inevitably followed by a guilty affection. The situation was, as she jauntily and bleakly put it, unsatisfactory.

  She therefore got out of bed and went into the living room, and knelt in front of the bookcase. Books. Words. There must surely be some pattern of words which would neatly and safely cage what she felt — isolate her emotions so that she could look at them from outside. For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves by literature. And the books which spoke most directly were those which had come out of Western Europe during the past hundred years, and of those, the personal and self-confessing. And so she knelt in front of a bookcase, in driving need of the right arrangement of words; for it is a remarkable fact that she was left unmoved by criticisms of the sort of person she was by parents, relations, preachers, teachers, politicians and the people who write for the newspapers; whereas an unsympathetic description of a character similar to her own in a novel would send her into a condition of anxious soul-searching for days. Which suggests that it is of no use for artists to insist, with such nervous disinclination for responsibility, that their productions are only ‘a divine play’ or ‘a reflection from the creative fires of irony’, etc., etc. while the Marthas of this world read and search with the craving thought, What does this say about my life? It will not do at all - but it must be admitted that there always came a point where Martha turned from the novelists and tale tellers to that section of the bookcase which was full of books called The Psychology of …, The Behaviour of…. A Guide to �
�, with the half-formulated thought that the novelists had not caught up with life; for there was no doubt that the sort of things she or Stella or Alice talked about found no reflection in literature - or rather, it was the attitudes of mind they took for granted that did not appear there, from which she deduced that women in literature were still what men, or the men-women, wished they were. In this other part of the bookcase, however, were no such omissions; she found what she was thinking and feeling described with an admirable lack of ambiguity. And yet, after hours of search among the complexities and subtleties of character, she was likely to return to her bedroom profoundly comforted, with some such resounding and original remark as The young husband, therefore, must be careful to be specialty understanding during the difficult weeks after marriage.’ For, since Douglas, the young husband in question, so logically insisted on relying upon the common sense she insisted on, she must with some part of herself take his place by being understanding, compassionate, etc. Martha was able to preserve an equilibrium because of an observing and satirical eye focused upon her own behaviour from a superior vantage point that was of course in no way influenced by that behaviour. She achieved quite extraordinary degrees of self-forbearance by this device.

  In the bedroom the bedclothes still lying dragged back, clothes lay everywhere; the morning was slipping past and she was not dressed. And now this question of work confronted her. She had understood she was not alone in her position of a woman who disdained both housework and a ‘job’, but was vaguely expected by her husband - but only because of her own insistence on it - to be engaged in work of her own. Both Stella and Alice had claimed the state. Martha had heard their respective husbands speak to them in precisely the same tone of pride and satisfaction that Douglas used to her. Their wives were not as those of other men.

  Feeling the distant pressure of this ‘work’, Martha dutifully went to the bathroom to equip herself to face it.

  The bathroom was modern. A high window showed yet another angle of clear blue sky, together with the tops of the trees in the park. A large white bath filled with heavy greenish water where spangles of light quivered, white cabinets, white shelves - it was all a gleam of white enamel. Martha took off her nightdress, and was alone with her body. But it was not that calm and obedient body which had been so pleasant a companion. White it was, and solid and unmarked — but heavy, unresponsive; her flesh was uncomfortable on her bones. It burned and unaccountably swelled; it seemed to be pursuing ideas of its own. Inside the firm thick flesh a branch of bones which presumably remained unchanged: the thought was comforting. Martha looked down at her shape of flesh with the anxious thought that it was upon this that the marriage depended; for this, in fact, they - she and Douglas - had been allowed by society to shut themselves away in two high rooms with a bathroom attached. It was almost with the feeling of a rider who was wondering whether his horse would make the course that she regarded this body of hers, which was not only divided from her brain by the necessity of keeping open that cool and dispassionate eye, but separated into compartments of its own. Martha had after all been provided with a map of her flesh by ‘the book’, in which each area was marked by the name of a different physical sensation, so that her mind was anxiously aware, not only of a disconnected partner, a body, but of every part of it, which might or might not come up to scratch at any given occasion. There were moments when she felt she was strenuously held together by nothing more than an act of will. She was beginning to feel that this view of herself was an offence against what was deepest and most real in her. And again she thought of the simple women of the country, who might be women in peace, according to their instincts, without being made to think and disintegrate themselves into fragments. During those few weeks of her marriage Martha was always accompanied by that other, black woman, like an invisible sister simpler and wiser than herself; for no matter how much she reminded herself of statistics and progress, she envied her from the bottom of her heart. Without, of course having any intention of emulating her: loyalty to progress forbade it.

  At that hour of the morning the sun fell in bright lances through the high window. Martha stood where they might fall on her flesh; her skin shone with a soft iridescence, the warmth kneaded together her unhappily disconnected selves, she began to dissolve into well-being. But first there was another ritual to be gone through, From the high cupboard she took down the cans and rubber tubes prescribed by Dr Stern and washed away the sweats of love in the rocking green water. Then she refilled the bath for what she thought of as her own bath. In this she wallowed, while the sunlight moved up over the sides of the bath and into the water, and she was whole and at peace again, floating in sunlight and water like a fish. She might have stayed there all morning, if there wasn’t this question of work; so she got out too soon, and thought with vague anxiety that those areas of tenderness on breasts and belly were no more than was to be expected after such an intensive love life. The thought of pregnancy crossed her mind; and was instantly dismissed. She felt that it was hard enough to keep Martha Quest, now Knowell, afloat on a sea of chaos and sensation without being pregnant as well - no, it was all too difficult. But her dress was tight; she must eat less, she told herself. Then she made tea and ate bread and butter with satisfaction at the thought that she was depriving herself of a meal.

  And now it was ten in the morning, and her day was her own. Her work was free to start when it would. Martha went to the other room, and arranged herself comfortably on the divan. Or rather, it was with the intention of comfort, for the divan was a high, hard mattress on a native-made bed covered with loosely woven brown linen. Comfortable it was not; but it suitably supported the rest of the room, and Martha chose it because one might sit there without surrendering to the boundaries of a chair.

  Into this little box of a room had flowed so many different items of furniture - and then out again. Now two small jolly chairs were set at neat angles on a clean green rug. A new table of light wood, surrounded by four chairs of the same, filled the opposite corner. The curtains, of that material known as folk-weave, whose rough grain held pockets of yellow light, were of the same brown she sat on. It was safe to say that the furniture that had flowed in and out of this room with the restless owners of it was indistinguishable from what filled it now. This thought gave Martha an undefined and craving hollowness, a sort of hunger. Yet everything was so practical and satisfactory! She looked at this room, from chair to window, from table to cupboard, and her eyes rested on nothing, but moved onwards hastily to the next article, as if this might provide that quality she was searching for.

  It was not her flat; it belonged to that group of people who had seen her married. Almost at once her thoughts floated away from this place she sat in, these white boxes in the heart of the building, and slowly she tested various other shells for living in, offered to her in books. There were, after all, not so many of them; and each went with a kind of life she must dismiss instantly and instinctively. For instance, there was her father’s childhood in the English country cottage, honest simplicity with the bones of the house showing through lathe and plaster. Outside, a green and lush country - but tame, tamed; it would not do at all. Or - and this was a dip into the other stream that fed her blood - a tall narrow Victorian house, crammed with heavy dark furniture, buttoned and puffed and stuffed and padded, an atmosphere of things unsaid. If that country cottage could be acknowledged with a self-conscious smile, like a charmingly naïve relation, this narrow dark house could not be admitted too close, it was too dangerous. And that house which was being built now everywhere, in every country of the world, the modern house, cosmopolitan, capable of being lifted up from one continent and dumped down in any other without exciting remark — no, certainly not, it was not to be thought of. So there remained the flat in which she was in fact now sitting? But she was not here at all; she did not live in it; she was waiting to be moved on somewhere …

  About eleven in the morning she roused herself. For she knew that s
ince both Stella and Alice were as free for their own work as she was, either or both of them were likely to drop in. She therefore put the kettle on and made sandwiches, prepared to spend the rest of the morning gossiping or - as pleasantly — alone.

  By now the stores would have delivered by native messenger the groceries, meat and vegetables she had ordered by telephone; putting away these things interrupted work for a few minutes. Preparing a light lunch for Douglas could not take longer than half an hour. In the long interval before lunch, Martha drifted once more in front of her mirror, with the air of one prepared to be surprised by what she saw there. And from this, as a natural consequence of a long and dissatisfied examination of herself, she collected scissors and needle and material, and in a few moments she was at the table with the sewing machine. And now her look of vagueness had vanished; for the first time since she had risen that morning, she was centred behind what her hands did. She had the gift of running up sundowner frocks, dance dresses, out of a remnant from the sales, even discarded curtains or old-fashioned clothes that her mother had kept. She could transform them without effort - apart from the long, dreamy meditations which might fill half a week; for when a woman claims with disarming modesty that she has run up this dress for ten shillings, the long process of manipulating the material around her image of herself, those hours of creation, are not taken into account. Very few women’s time is money, even now. But while the clothes she made for after dark were always a success, it seemed her sureness of touch must desert her for the daytime. Her friends might exclaim loyally that her morning dress was absolutely wonderful, but it was only over the evening clothes that their voices held the authentic seal of envy. From which it follows?