A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing

singling anyone out, that some people said, though of course she wouldn’t know if it were true or not, that the young people of today hadn’t the sense of vocation of her generation. Martha had decided that she had no intention of devoting six weeks, although only a few hours a week were demanded of her, to the company of this elderly war horse who nevertheless continually suggested a happy hockey-playing schoolgirl. She therefore occupied her time in trying to decide what was the common denominator of this mass of women; for certainly there must be a special kind of woman who rushes, at the first sound of the bugle, to learn how to nurse ‘the boys’. There was no doubt that this was how they were picturing themselves, and how Sister Doll was encouraging them to think; a white-garbed angel among wounded men was the image that filled their minds, despite this talk of a threatened civilian population. But she could only conclude that the difference between them and herself was that they were all taking down minute notes about the correct way to fold bedclothes.

      She looked towards Stella, who was coiled seductively on the hard bench, head propped on slender hands, eyes fixed on Sister Doll. It was clear that she was not listening to a word. It looked as if she was deliberately trying to present the picture of a detached observer. She happened to be wearing a white linen dress, whose severity was designed to emphasize her slim curves; or perhaps it was that she had felt white to be more ‘suitable’ for a nursing course than any other colour. But her small, apricot-tinted face with its enormous lazy dark eyes, the soft slender body in its white, were the cruellest comment on the only other white figure in the room, fat and perspiring Sister Doll, half a dozen paces away. It appeared that Sister Doll felt it, or at least her inattention; for during those pauses while she was waiting for her class to take down sentences such as ‘The greatest care must be taken to keep the patient’s bed neat and tidy’, she turned hot little eyes full of rather flustered reproach, on Stella, who was regarding her with indolent inquiry. Catching Martha’s eye, Stella made a small movement of her own eyes towards the door. Martha frowned back. Stella gave a petulant shrug.

      The moment Sister Doll dismissed her class, Stella took Martha’s arm and hurried her out. Her first words were, ‘Let’s go and see Alice.’

      ‘Really,’ exclaimed Martha, her boredom and dissatisfaction exploding obliquely, ‘what a waste of time – all this nonsense about making beds.’

      ‘It’s only just up the road.’ Stella tugged at her arm.

      ‘And we’ve paid all that money for the course.’

      ‘Oh, well … Anyway, I expect there won’t be a war anyway.’

      ‘Why not?’ Martha stopped and looked at Stella, really wanting to know.

      ‘Andrew says they won’t start training them. Well, then, if there was going to be a war, they would train people like Douglas and Andrew, wouldn’t they? He said so this morning. I thought they’d start playing soldiers any minute now.’ Stella dismissed the thing, and said, ‘Oh, come on, Matty, it’s only just up the road.’

      ‘But she doesn’t know we’re coming. She doesn’t want to see us.’

      ‘Nonsense,’ said Stella with energy. The matter thus settled, they walked towards Alice’s flat.

      Stella knocked at the door in a manner that suggested discreet determination. Her eyes were alive with interest. There was a long silence.

      ‘She’s out,’ said Martha hopefully. She knew that Alice, like herself, preferred to take the more intimate crises of life in private.

      ‘Nonsense,’ Stella said, and knocked again. A long silence. Stella changed the tempo of her knocking to a peremptory summons. ‘She’s only trying to get rid of us,’ she remarked with her jolly laugh.

      Alice opened the door sharply on that laugh. She was annoyed.

      ‘It’s us,’ Stella said and walked blandly inside.

      Alice was in a pale-pink taffeta dressing gown which had been bought for the fresh young woman she had been as a bride; now she was rather yellow and very thin, and her freckles seemed to have sprung up everywhere over the pale sallow skin. Her black hair hung dispiritedly on her shoulders.

      ‘Well?’ demanded Stella at once.

      Alice regarded her from a distance, and remarked that she wasn’t feeling at all well.

      Stella, a little figure bristling with frustrated purpose, said, ‘Oh, stop it, Alice.’ then she frowned, decided to change tactics, and said diplomatically, ‘Shall I make you a nice cup of tea?’

      ‘Oh, do make it, dear. I’m really exhausted.’ And Alice subsided backwards into a chair, and lay there extinguished.

      The moment Stella had gone to the kitchen, Alice opened her eyes and looked at Martha as if to ask, ‘Am I safe from you?’

      Martha was equally limp in another chair. She inquired childishly, ‘Is it true you only have to jump off a table?’ She meant to sound competent, but in fact her face expressed nothing but distaste. ‘Did you know I went to Dr Stern and he said I wasn’t?’ she went on.

      ‘Did you, dear?’ This was discretion itself; it was the trained nurse remembering her loyalties.

      But it was not what Martha wanted. ‘He said I was quite all right.’

      A short silence. Then Alice remarked vaguely, ‘You know, they don’t know everything.’

      Alarm flooded Martha; she shook it off. ‘But he’s supposed to be very good at – this sort of thing.’

      To this Alice could only reply that he was, very. Then Stella came in with a tray. She set it down, and proceeded to cross-examine Alice while she poured the tea. Alice replied vaguely with that good humour which is rooted in indifference. Vague as a cloud, lazy as water, she lay with half-shut eyes and let fall stray remarks which had the effect of stinging Stella into a frenzy of exasperation. At the end of ten minutes’ hard work Stella had succeeded in eliciting the positive information that Alice believed herself to be three months gone.

      ‘Well, really!’ Horror at this incompetence shook Stella. ‘But three months!’

      Clinical details followed, which Alice confirmed as if they could not possibly have any reference to herself. ‘Well, dear, I really don’t know,’ she kept saying helplessly.

      ‘But you must know,’ exclaimed the exasperated Stella. ‘One either has a period or one has not.’

      ‘Oh, well – I never take any notice of mine, anyway.’

      This caused Martha to remark with pride that she never did, either. For she and Alice belonged to the other family of women from Stella, who proceeded to detail, with gloomy satisfaction, how much she suffered during these times. Alice and Martha listened with tolerant disapproval.

      Checked on this front, Stella brooded for a while on how to approach a more intimate one. Martha had more than once remarked with distaste to Douglas that if Stella were given a chance she would positively wallow in the details of the marriage bed. This chance was not given her. Women of the tradition to which Alice and Martha belonged are prepared to discuss menstruation or pregnancy in the frankest of detail, but it is taboo to discuss sex, notwithstanding the show of frankness the subject is surrounded with. It follows that they get their information about how other women react sexually from their men, a system which has its disadvantages. More than once had Stella been annoyed by reticences on the part of Martha and Alice which seemed to her the most appalling prudery; an insult, in fact, to their friendship. But she did not persist now; she returned to ask direct what steps Alice proposed to take. Alice said with a lazy laugh that she had done everything. Cross-examination produced the information that she had drunk gin and taken a hot bath. Even more shocked, Stella delivered a short and efficient lecture, which interested Martha extremely, but to which Alice listened indifferently, occasionally suppressing a genuine yawn. Stella then supplied the names of three wise women, two Coloured and one white, who would do the job for a moderate fee. To which Alice replied, with her first real emotion that day, that she had seen enough of girls ruined