A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing

pale smudge against that nearer conflagration which still sent wings of flame up into the great black starry vault of the sky. ‘One would think,’ he observed to this scene of splendour where his mind dwelt at ease, ‘that people would have some sense of proportion, considering the state the world’s in.’

      A pause. He turned his pen angrily between his fingers. Mrs Quest knitted behind him in silence; she had that evening begun on a jacket for the baby Jeffrey.

      ‘But I suppose it makes no difference one way or the other,’ he went on. Mrs Quest, clicked her tongue protestingly.

      Mr Quest, with a final, confirming glance at the stars, the fiery mountain, the empty veld, murmured, ‘After all – those stars are millions of years away, so they say …’

      ‘My dear,’ said Mrs Quest again, uneasily.

      Mr Quest’s pen was motionless in mid-air. His eyes were wide at the sky. ‘So if one damned foolish girl wants to make a mess of her life …’ He lowered his pen carefully to the paper and began to write.

      When her mother had left, Martha cupped her hands protectingly over her stomach, and murmured to the creature within that nothing would be allowed to harm it, no pressure would deform it, freedom would be its gift. She, Martha, the free spirit, would protect the creature from her, Martha, the maternal force; the maternal Martha, that enemy, would not be allowed to enter the picture. It was as one independent being to another that Martha spoke; and her hands on her flesh were light, as if even this pressure might be an unforgivable imposition.

      To Douglas she forcibly outlined the things they must avoid in this child’s future. First, even to suggest that the child might be one sex rather than another might have deplorable results – to be born as it chose was its first inalienable right. Secondly they, the parents, must never try to form its mind in any way whatsoever. Thirdly, it must be sent to a progressive school, where it might survive the process of education unmutilated – for Martha felt, like so many others, that progressive schools were in some way outside society, vacuums of progress, as it were. If this last necessity involved their sending the child at an early age to a country where there was a progressive school, then so much the better; for a child without any parents at all clearly had a greater chance of survival as a whole personality.

      To all this Douglas easily agreed. The ease with which he did agree disconcerted Martha slightly; for her convictions had after all come from the bitterest schooling, which he had escaped. He did remark at one point that the war might make it difficult to do as they liked about schools, but she waved this aside.

      Douglas was very satisfied with Martha. There had been moments in the last few weeks when she had seemed unreasonable, but that had all vanished. She was now gay and amenable, and the whole business of having a baby was being made to appear as a minor incident, to be dealt with as practically as possible. Practicality was the essence of the business, they both agreed; and the completed cot, a mass of icy white satin and lace, was a frivolous note of contrast to the sternness of their approach. For Martha, who was prepared to spend infinite emotional energy on protecting the child from her emotions, it was a matter of principle that the physical requirements should be as simple as possible. She took one look at the lists of things supposed to be needed for a small baby, and dismissed them with derision, as Alice had already done. By the end of a fortnight after she knew she was pregnant, she already had everything necessary to sustain that child for the first six months of its life. They filled a small basket. The child might be born now, if it chose. Martha even had the feeling that the business was nearly over. For she was once more in the grip of a passionate need to hurry. Impatience to be beyond this milestone was a fever in her. The five months between now and the birth of the child were nothing—five months of ordinary living flashed by so fast they were unnoticeable, therefore it was possible to look forward to the birth as if it were nearly here. Almost, it seemed to Martha that strength of mind alone would be enough to rush her through those months; even her stomach might remain flat, if she were determined enough.

      In the meantime, she continued to live exactly as she had done before. She would have scorned to abdicate in any way, and in this Alice agreed with her: the two women, meeting at some dance or drinking party in the evening, congratulated each other on not showing anything; retiring into comfortable distortion would have seemed a complete surrender to weakness.

      Almost at once, however, and it seemed from one day to the next, the wall of Martha’s stomach pushed out in a hard curve, behind which moved the anonymous but powerful child, and Martha’s fingers, tentatively exploring the lump, received messages that strength of mind alone was not enough. Besides, while Alice and she, the centre of a group of approving and envious people, insisted gaily that no fuss whatsoever was to be made about these children, that they were not to be allowed to change their parents’ lives – and in their own interests at that – it was obvious that both were very jealous of their privacy. Husbands and friends found these women admirably unchanged; during the daytime they retired, and were irritable at being disturbed.

      The moment Douglas had gone to the office, Martha drifted to the divan, where she sat, with listening hands, so extraordinarily compelling was the presence of the stranger in her flesh. Excitement raced through her; urgency to hurry was on her. Yet, after a few minutes, these emotions sank. She had understood that time, once again, was going to play tricks with her. At the end of the day, when Douglas returned from the office, she roused herself with difficulty, dazed. To her it was as if vast stretches of time had passed. Inside her stomach the human race had fought and raised its way through another million years of its history; that other time was claiming her; she understood the increasing vagueness of Alice’s eyes; it was becoming an effort to recognize the existence of anything outside this great central drama.

      Into it, like noises off, came messages from the ordinary world.

      For instance, from her father. A few lines in his careful hand, dated three weeks back – clearly he had forgotten to post it.

      

      My dear Matty,

      I understand you are going to have a baby. I suppose this is a good thing? Naturally, it is for you to say. Your mother is very pleased. What I wanted to say was, if there is anything I can do, I shall be glad. Children have a tendency not to be what you expect. But why should they be? Some damned kaffir has let a fire start on the Dumfries Hills. Extraordinarily pretty it is. We have been watching it at nights.

      

      And then the careful close, the basic forms of the letters shaped and formed, with the capital letters all flourishes: ‘You affectionate Father.’ After this, hasty and expostulating, one rapid sentence which said all that he had failed to get into his letter: ‘Damn it all, Matty, it’s so damned inconsistent!’

      Martha felt helpless with tenderness for him. She could see him writing it: the pen hovering before each word and dipped so reluctantly into the wells of feeling because duty demanded it of him; his mouth set in duty; and all the time his eyes straying towards the landscape outside. She wrote him a flippant letter saying she was apparently doomed to be inconsistent; she was terribly happy to be having a baby; she couldn’t imagine why she had not wanted one!

      And there was politics, in the shape of a twenty-page letter from Solly. Solly had been betrayed. The communal settlement, only three months old, had been blown into fragments by the Stalin-Hitler pact. Having read it twice, Martha pushed it aside, with every intention of writing to assuage the unhappiness it revealed. But after a day or so she was left not with the impression of unhappiness: she saw, rather, a dramatic figure on a stage. She did not understand it. If, however, she had remembered that with no personal memory of the Twenties she had succeeded in imaginatively experiencing the atmosphere of the decade from people who had, she might have looked forward to the time when the Thirties would be similarly reconstructed for her. As it was, she could only shrug. Solly – vociferous, exclamatory, bitter, had gone into the Cohen store as ‘the lowest-paid clerk’, which, he seemed to feel, served history right. Also, he had taken a packing case to the market square where the Africans bought their vegetables, stood on it and harangued them for an hour on how they had been betrayed, they now stood alone, on their own efforts would their future depend.

      Apparently