A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing

been frightened to move away from the house. Martha could imagine it, the lonely farmhouse, blistering in the heat, the empty veld stretching for miles all around. ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Knowell, smiling drily, ‘I never told Philip I was lonely.’ Into this loneliness had come riding a young policeman on his rounds. ‘He was so kind to me, Matty – he was so kind.’ Martha, who had been expecting the story to continue, found it had reached its conclusion. Mrs Knowell stirred herself, and remarked, ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I never talk about it.’ Martha, who was triumphant at that admission, which it was her need, for some reason, to gain, replayed, as it were, in her head, like a recording, that story of the weeks of loneliness, in the light of that final ‘He was so kind to me’ – and found it enough.

      She was being very kind to Mrs Knowell. She liked her enormously, and knew Mrs Knowell liked her. It was understood that Mrs Knowell would stay to lunch, would spend the afternoon with Martha, and in the evening the three of them would go out somewhere. Into this scene burst Douglas, cheerfully rubbing his hands, and embraced his mother with the words, ‘Well, Mater, what have you been up to?’

      There was a short pause, while the currents changed, and Mrs Knowell visibly rallied the bright old lady. She offered some hilarious stories about the people she had just been staying with. Her weeks in that house had been one long picnic of jam-making, bottling, pickling. She had cut her finger—she wagged it before them, laughing. Now she was departing south, and had taken the opportunity to drop in and see the dear children.

      Douglas invited his mother to admire Martha’s health and attractiveness. She did so. Both Douglas and Martha became offhandedly practical about the whole affair; Douglas began to tease his mother about her preoccupation with such old-lady-like things as embroidered pillowcases and lace-edged dresses. Mrs Knowell preserved her amused sprightliness for a while, but became noticeably silent, while Martha chattered brightly, in a hard voice, about unhygienic sentimentality – this was not at all as she had been alone with her.

      After a while Mrs Knowell suggested wistfully that it was such fun to make things for a new baby; and saw them exchanging glances in tolerant silence.

      ‘But it is!’ she cried out. ‘I’d love to have the chance of making little things again.’

      ‘Now come off it, Mater,’ said Douglas cheerfully. ‘We’re not going to have any of that.’

      After a while she got up and remarked that as she was going to play bridge with Mrs Talbot that afternoon she must hurry away.

      Douglas, relieved, teased her about being a frivolous old woman. She bravely announced that she had taken one shilling and sixpence off Mrs Talbot the last time she had played with her.

      In a flurry of jokes, kisses, promises to meet soon, she departed. Martha was left with the memory of those yellowing tired eyes resting on her in hurt disappointment. She felt a traitor. And yet, by themselves, they had understood each other so well!

      Douglas was speaking with grateful enthusiasm about his mother’s capacity for enjoying herself so much at her age – Martha reminded herself that, after all, Mrs Knowell was only fifty. Douglas went on to remark practically that at least they needn’t expect any interference from her, she always had far too much on her own plate to bother about other people. Martha was on the point of repudiating this comfortable evasion of the truth, but let the moment go.

      Mrs Knowell departed from the city that evening, after sending a small parcel by Mrs Talbot’s houseboy, containing a dozen long muslin dresses, exquisitely embroidered and tucked, with a note saying; ‘These were Douglas’s when he was a baby. I offered them to my daughter, but she said they were not practicable. But if you can’t use them, then they’ll do as dusters. I really haven’t time to see you dear children again, I must get off to the Valley, they’re having a picnic on Sunday, and I wouldn’t miss that for worlds.’

      Later, Mrs Talbot remarked that Mrs Knowell had been as erratic as ever: she had promised to stay a week, and left after half a day. She was really so wonderful for her age.

      Martha was sitting down the next morning to write a nice letter to the old lady, to make some amends for the unpleasant way she knew she had behaved, when a native messenger arrived from Douglas’s office. There was a note saying: ‘Well, we’re off! War’s just been declared.’ After the signature, the words, ‘Matters appear extremely serious.’

      Martha tried to feel that matters were extremely serious. Outside, however, a serene sunlight, and the pleasant bustle of an ordinary morning. She switched the wireless on – silence. Then the telephone rang. Alice, in tears, repeating angrily, ‘And now Willie’s bound to go and I’ll be alone.’ Then Stella, who also wept: the situation demanded no less.

      But, having put the receiver down, she stood listening to the silence as if there was something more, some other word that needed to be said; she heard now that same dissatisfaction in the voices of the two women who had ceased speaking, and were doubtless engaged in busily telephoning others to find whatever it was they all needed. ‘They say that war has been declared, Matty?’ It was this incredulous query which floated in her inner ear. She was extremely restless. She looked at the blue squares of park and sky which opened the walls of the flat, and it seemed menacing that nothing had changed. She went out into the streets. There, surely, the war would be visible? But everything was the same. A knot of people in sober argument stood on the pavement’s edge. She approached them and found them talking about the prices of farm implements. She walked through the streets, listening for a voice, any voice, speaking of the war, so that it might seem real. After a while she found herself outside the offices of the newspaper. There clustered a small crowd, faces lifted towards windows where could be seen the large indistinct shapes of machinery. They were hushed and apprehensive; here danger could be felt. But Martha saw after a minute that they were all older people; she did not belong with them.

      She went home to the wireless set, which was playing dance music. It was now lunchtime, and she wished Douglas might come home. At the end of half an hour she was disgusted to find herself making angry speeches of reproach to him in her mind – a conventional jailer wife might do no less! Nothing, she told herself, was more natural than that he should find the bars and meeting places of the city more exciting than coming home to her. She would do the same in his place. And so she waited until afternoon in a mood of impatient expectancy; and when the door at last opened, and he came in, she flew at him and demanded, ‘What’s the news? What’s happened?’ For surely something must have!

      But it appeared that nothing had happened. In both their minds was a picture of London laid in ruins, smoking and littered with corpses. But it seemed that while they thought of London, of England, the imaginations of most were moving far nearer home. Douglas announced ruefully that women were already sitting shuddering in their homes, convinced that Hitler’s armies might sweep down over Africa in ‘a couple of days’, and more – the natives were on the point of rising. In any colony, a world crisis is always seen first in terms of native uprising. In fact it seemed that the dark-skinned people had only the vaguest idea that the war had started, and the authorities’ first concern was to explain to them through wireless and loudspeaker why it was their patriotic task to join their white masters in taking up arms against the monster across the seas in a Europe they could scarcely form a picture of, whose crimes consisted of invading other people’s countries and forming a society based on the conception of a master race.

      Douglas was stern, subdued, authoritative. Martha was only too ready to find this impressive. Almost, she found her dissatisfactions fed. But it was soon clear that Douglas too was waiting for that word, that final clinching of emotion. He moved about the flat as if it was confining him, and suggested they should drop across to the Burrells. They met the Burrells and the Mathews coming in. They went in a body up to the Sports Club, where several hundred young people were waiting for the wireless to shape what they felt into something noble and dramatic.

      By evening, the hotels were full. To dance would be heartless and unpatriotic; but to stay at home was out of the question. The bands were playing ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ to packed, silent masses of people who seemed to find it not enough. They stood