A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing

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 naive 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 since 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?

      The fact is that as soon as Douglas returned from the office for lunch, the day was already nearly at evening. For he returned finally at four; and after that, it was only a question of time before their eyes met on a query: at the Sports Club, everyone they knew would be delighted to see them, and afterwards there would be dancing there or at the hotels. It seemed as if the day was only a drab preliminary to the night, as if the pageant of sunset was meant only as a curtain-raiser to that moment when the lights sprung up along the streets, and with them a feeling of vitality and excitement. For in the hotels, the clubs and the halls, the orchestras struck up at eight and from every point in the town dance music was flowing like water from a concealed reservoir of nostalgia hidden below it. These were the nights of African winter, sharp, clear, cold, a high and luminous starlit dark lifting away from the low, warm glitter of city lights. In the white courts of the hotels, braziers offered a little futile heat to the cold dry air, and groups of young people formed and dissolved around them: there was no room for everyone inside, there was no room for all the people who needed, suddenly, to dance.

      Night after night, they moved from the Club to the Plaza and on to McGrath’s; and the self-contained parties that began the evening expected to dissolve into a great whole as midnight approached. By midnight they were dancing as if they formed one soul; they danced and sang, mindless, in a half-light, they were swallowed up in the sharp, exquisite knowledge of loss and impending change that came over the seas and continents from Europe; and underneath it all, a rising tide of excitement that was like a poison. Uniforms were appearing here and there, and the wearers carried themselves with self-effacing modesty, as if on a secret mission, but conscious that all eyes in the room were fixed on them. The rumours were beginning. This regiment was going to be called up, they were going to conscript the whole population; but the question of conscription was surely an irrelevance when every young man in the town was thinking only of the moment when he could put on a uniform – and that before it was decided what the war was to be fought about. They were all longing to be swallowed up in something bigger than themselves; they were, in fact, already swallowed up. And since each war, before it starts, has the look of the last one, it did not matter how often stern and important young men assured hushed audiences that the world could not survive a month of modern warfare, they would all be bombed to pieces by new and secret weapons; it was necessary only for the orchestra to play ‘Tipperary’ or ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ – which they did on every conceivable occasion – for the entire gathering to become transformed into a congregation of self-dedicated worshippers of what their parents chose to remember of 1914.

      In between dances, groups formed to discuss what was happening in Europe – or rather to exchange the phrases they had read that morning in the Zambesia News. The fact that this newspaper was contradicting itself with the calmest of assurance from day to day did not matter in the least; there was going to be a war, and