A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing

then, how about Dr Stern?’

      Alice said angrily, with the curtness of a schoolmistress, that if Stella wasn’t careful she’d find herself in trouble, saying such things about honest doctors! Stella rose, red and angry, her tongue quivering with expert retaliations. Alice gave her a weary and apologetic smile, and said, ‘Oh, sit down, Stella, I haven’t the energy for a row.’

      Stella sat. After a while she asked, in a deceptively sweet voice, on a note of modest interest, if perhaps Alice intended to have this baby after all?

      Alice said good-naturedly, ‘We all have to have them sometime, dear, don’t we?’ Here she laughed again, and it was with reckless pleasure; at the same time her look at Stella was challenging, triumphant, very amused.

      Stella, after a shocked and accusing stare, turned away, with an effect of indifference, and elaborately changed the subject.

      Leaving the flat, Stella remarked coldly that it was utterly irresponsible of Alice to have a baby when they were so hard up; then that it was criminal to have a baby when war was starting; finally, after a long pause, that as for herself she was too delicate to have a baby, she would probably die in childbirth. There was a speculative look on her face as she said this, which caused Martha to remark, amused, that it would be awfully inconsistent of Stella to have a baby herself, after what she had said. Stella reacted with an affronted ‘It would be quite unfair to Andrew; I’d never do a thing like that.’

      The two young women parted almost at once, without regret.

      Martha walked slowly home, thinking about Alice. Her emotions were violent and mixed. She felt towards the pregnant woman, the abstraction, a strong repulsion which caused various images, all unpleasant, to rise into her mind one after another. From her childhood came a memory of lowered voices, distasteful intimacies, hidden sicknesses. It was above all frightening that all this furtive secrecy, which she and all her friends so firmly repudiated, was waiting there, strong as ever, all around her, as she knew: Alice, because she was pregnant, was delivered back into the hands of the old people – so Martha felt it. She felt caged, for Alice. She could feel the bonds around herself. She consciously shook them off and exulted in the thought that she was free. Free! And the half-shaded flat she had left, with the pale, sallow-looking woman in pink taffeta, seemed like a suffocating prison. But at the same time a deeper emotion was turning towards Alice, with an unconscious curiosity, warm, tender, protective. It was an emotion not far from envy. In six months, Alice would have a baby. Why, it was no time at all, she thought. But no sooner had she put it into words than she reacted back again with a shuddering impulse towards escape. She could see the scene: Alice, loose and misshapen, with an ugly wet-mouthed infant, feeding-bottles, napkins, smells.

      Martha reached her flat, removed her clothes and anxiously examined every inch of her body. Unmarked, whole, perfect – smooth solid flesh; there was not a stain on it. Here Martha gave an uncomfortable look at her breasts, and acknowledged they were heavier than they had been. There was a bruised, reddish look about them – here came a flood of panic, and then she subsided into perfect trust in Dr Stern. She felt particularly supported by the knowledge that ever since her second visit she and Douglas had followed the prescribed rituals with determined precision. She was free. She continued to revel in her freedom all that afternoon, while underneath she thought persistently of Alice, and wondered why she was now so contented to have a baby, when, as short a time ago as a month, she had spoken of having one with vigorous rejection.

      When Douglas returned from the office, she described the day’s doings, passing over the nursing lecture as an utter waste of time, and laughing at Stella’s frustrated homilies and Alice’s vague determination. But Douglas, who had moments, which were becoming increasingly frequent, of remembering that he was a government official, remarked rather officiously that Stella would get herself into trouble one of these days. It was illegal to procure abortions: that was the cold phrase he used. But at this Martha flew into an angry tirade against governments who presumed to tell women what they should do with their own bodies; it was the final insult to personal liberty. Douglas listened, frowning, and said unanswerably that the law was the law. Martha therefore retreated into herself, which meant that she became very gay, hard, and indifferent. She listened to his rather heavy insistence about what she intended to do in place of the nursing course, and understood that he was above all concerned that she should not be in the war – should not go in pursuit of the adventure he himself was quivering to find; he was even more reluctant because of his own daydreams as to certain aspects of that adventure.

      He went so far, carried away by the official in him, as to make various sound remarks about the unsuitability of danger for women. She thought he must be joking; nothing is more astonishing to young women than the ease with which men, even intelligent and liberal-minded men, lapse back into that anonymous voice of authority whenever their own personal authority is threatened, saying things of a banality and a pomposity infinitely removed from their own level of thinking.

      Martha was first incredulous, then frightened, then she began to despise him. She became even more gay and brilliant; he became fascinated; she despised him the more for being fascinated; he began to resent the offhandedness of her manner and retreated again into the official. She mocked at him recklessly, they quarrelled. As a result of this hatred, they spent a hectic evening, ending up at four in the morning at the fair, where Martha, sick and giddy, revolved on the great wheel as if her whole future depended on her power to stick it out. High over the darkened town – where a few widely scattered windows showed the points where revellers were at last going to bed – plunging sickeningly to earth and up again. Martha clung on, until the wheel was stopped, the music stopped churning, and there was literally nowhere to go but bed. From the bedroom window they could see the lights greying along the street. The native servants were coming in from the location in time to be at work.

      She woke with a start; the bed next to her was empty. There were noises next door. Then she saw it was nearly eleven. While she stood in her nightdress, fumbling at her dressing gown, the door began very gently to open inwards. Its cautious movement was arrested; then the person the other side dropped something; the door crashed back against the wall, and Mrs Quest stumbled into the room, reaching out for parcels which scattered everywhere.

      ‘Oh, so you’re up,’ Mrs Quest said sharply. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you. I was coming in quietly.’ Then, retrieving a last package to make a neat pile on the bed, she added archly, ‘What a dashing life you lead, lying in bed till eleven.’

      This roguishness aroused in Martha the usual strong distaste. She had covered herself entirely with her dressing gown, buttoning it up tight from throat to hem.

      ‘I thought you must be ill, I peeped in and saw you. Shall I go for the doctor, don’t get up, stay in bed and I’ll nurse you – for today, at least.’

      ‘I’m perfectly well,’ said Martha ungraciously. ‘Let’s go and have some tea.’ Firmly, she led the way from the bedroom, but Mrs Quest did not follow her at once.

      Martha sat on the divan listening. Her mother was following the ritual that she had already gone through here, in this room. The flowers had been removed from their vases and rearranged, the chairs set differently, books put into place. Mrs Quest had reassured herself by touching and arranging everything in the living room, and was now doing the same in the bedroom. Martha had time to make the tea and bring in the tray before her mother reappeared.

      ‘I’ve just made your bed, your nightdress is torn, did you know? I’ve brought it to mend while I’m here, your bathroom isn’t done, it’s wet,’ Mrs Quest remarked flurriedly. She had Martha’s nightdress clutched in one hand. She glanced at it, blushed, and remarked coquettishly, ‘How you can wear these transparent bits of fluff I don’t know.’

      Martha poured the tea in silence. She was exaggeratedly irritated. The violence of this emotion was what kept her silent; for she was quite able to assure herself that nothing could be more natural, and even harmless and pathetic, than this unfortunate woman’s need to lead every other life but her own. This is what her intelligence told her; her conscience remarked that she was making a fuss about nothing; but in fact she seethed with irritation. The face she presented to her mother was one of numbed hostility.