A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing

– but you wouldn’t remember that.’ He glanced at her and sighed. Martha felt she was being dismissed. He did not continue. Instead he asked, in a casual but intimate voice that referred to yesterday’s encounter, ‘Well, what do you make of it all?’ He glanced around the long veranda and then at her.

      Martha blurted out at once, ‘Awful. It’s all awful!’

      He gave her another glance and remarked, ‘So I thought. I have been looking at you and thinking that if you must feel so strongly you’d better learn to hide it. If I may give you advice from the height of my – what? fifty-six years.’

      ‘Why should I hide it?’ she demanded.

      ‘Well, well,’ he commented. ‘But it won’t do, you know!’

      ‘You didn’t even know it was me, you didn’t recognize me,’ she accused him.

      ‘I have noticed,’ he swerved off again, ‘that at your age women are really most extraordinarily unstable in looks. It’s not till you’re thirty or so that you stay the same six months together. I remember my wife …’ He stopped frowning.

      There was a conversation developing at the bottom of the veranda. Martha heard the words ‘the war’, and sat up.

      ‘Mr Player must naturally be concerned with the international situation,’ remarked Mr Maynard. ‘A man who controls half the minerals in the central plateau can hardly be expected to remain unmoved at the prospect of peace being maintained.’

      Martha digested this; what he was saying had, to her, the power to blast everyone in this house off into a limbo of contempt. It was more difficult for her to understand that for him it was enough to say it. She could find nothing polite enough to express what she felt. He looked at her again, and it disconcerted her because he saw so clearly what she would have liked to say.

      ‘My dear Mrs Knowell, if I may advise you – ’But again he checked himself, and said, ‘Why should I? You’ll do as you like, anyway.’

      ‘What advice?’ she asked, genuinely.

      But now he fidgeted his large and powerful dark-clad limbs in his chair, and said with the gruffness which was his retreat, ‘Let’s leave it at this: that I’m profoundly grateful I’m nearly sixty.’ He paused and added scathingly, ‘I can leave it all safely in the hands of Binkie.’

      ‘There are other people,’ she remarked awkwardly; she was thinking of Joss and Solly. Suddenly it occurred to her that there was an extraordinary resemblance between this dignified man and the rebel in the settlement in the Coloured quarters. Of course! It was their savage and destructive ways of speaking.

      But now he remarked, ‘I daresay one attaches too much importance to one’s own children.’ He sounded tired and grim. She was immediately sorry for him. She was trying to find words to express it, when he nodded down towards the end of the veranda to direct her attention there.

      Colonel Brodeshaw was speaking.’ … a difficult problem,’ she heard. ‘If we conscript the blacks, the question of arming them arises. It’ll come up before the House in due course …’ Once again, this gathering was being used as a sounding board. This time there was no doubt, no cleavage of opinion, no need even for discussion. From one end of the veranda to the other, there was a murmur of ‘Obviously not. Out of the question.’ It was so quickly disposed of that Colonel Brodeshaw had the look of an orator on a platform who has been shouted at to sit down in the middle of a speech. He murmured, ‘Well, it’ll not be settled as easily as all that.’ People looked towards Mr Player; it appeared he had no views on the matter. Mrs Maynard announced finally, ‘If they learn to use arms, they can use them on us. In any case, this business of sending black troops overseas is extremely shortsighted. They are treated as equals in Britain, even by the women.’ There was no need to say more.

      Mr Maynard remarked, ‘One of the advantages of living in a society like this, though I don’t expect you’ll appreciate it yet, is that things can be said. Now, in Britain it would take a very stupid person to talk in such a tone. In the colonies there is an admirable frankness which makes politics child’s play in comparison.’

      ‘It’s revolting,’ she said angrily.

      ‘Well,’ he said, flipping his forefinger against his glass again, ‘well, when this colony has reached the stage where a gathering like this talks about uplifting the masses of the people, you’ll find that politics will be much more complicated than they are now.’

      ‘Mr Player has just been talking about it.’

      ‘But with what engaging truth, with what disarming frankness. Enlightened self-interest – it has taken us long enough to reach it. Why, only a year ago, I remember, the suggestion by dieticians that Africans were not conveniently equipped by nature to subsist healthily on mealie meal and nothing else was treated as the voice of revolution itself. We advance, we advance! Now, in my youth, my “class” – as you so refreshingly have no inhibitions in putting it – were for the most part outspokenly engaged in putting the working classes in their place. But when I paid a visit to England last year, how different things were! The working classes were undoubtedly just where they used to be, but everyone of my “class” seemed concerned only to prove not only that they were entitled to a good life, but that they had already achieved it. Further, it was almost impossible to hold a conversation with my friends and relations, because their speech was full of gaps, pauses, and circumlocutions where words used to be. With what relief did I return to this country, where a spade is still called a spade and I can use the vocabulary that I was taught to use during my admirable education. I can no longer say, ‘The kaffirs are getting out of hand’, that is true. But I can say, ‘The blacks need firm treatment.’ That’s something. I am grateful for it.’

      Martha did not know what to say. She could not make out from this succession of smooth and savage sentences which side he was on. As she put it, with a straightforwardness which she imagined he would commend, ‘If you think it’s terrible, then why do you …?’

      ‘But I didn’t say I thought it was terrible. On the contrary, if there’s one thing my generation has learned it is that the more things change, the more they remain the same.’

      Martha reached out her hand to take his glass. ‘You’re going to break it,’ she warned. He had in fact broken it – there was a mess of wet glass in his hand. He glanced at it, with raised brows, then reached for a handkerchief. Martha was looking around to see if the incident had been noticed. But everyone was listening to Mrs Brodeshaw, who was explaining how she was forming a women’s organization in preparation for the war.

      A servant came forward to remove the bits of glass.

      ‘We old men,’ Mr Maynard said apologetically, ‘are full of unaccountable emotions.’

      ‘I know,’ said Martha at once. ‘You’re like my father – what upset you was the 1914 war, wasn’t it?’

      He looked exceedingly uncomfortable, but assented.

      ‘You really seemed to think it was going to change things, didn’t you?’

      ‘We did attach a certain importance to it at the time.’

      She heard her name called. Donovan was grinning at her with a gay spite which warned her. ‘You don’t agree, Matty dear, do you?’ he was calling down the veranda.

      ‘I wasn’t listening.’

      Mrs Talbot came out with apologetic charm, ‘Donovan was telling us that you were a pacifist. I don’t blame you, dear, war is so utterly dreadful.’ She broke off with a confused look around her.

      ‘But I’m not a pacifist,’ said Martha stubbornly.

      Mr Maynard broke in quickly with ‘All my generation were pacifists – until 1914.’

      There was a burst of relieved laughter. Donovan looked at Martha; she looked back angrily. He turned back to Ruth with a gay shrug.

      Martha saw that Mr Maynard had been