Doris Lessing - A Proper Marriage

Martha, sardonically watching Stella in her frozen pose, thought that she would not recognize herself if she caught a glimpse of herself walking down a street, or – a phrase which she saw no reason not to use, even to his face – managing her husband.

Stella saw her look, turning abruptly, and said with annoyance that, they would go that moment to the hairdresser.

‘There isn’t time,’ appealed Martha desperately.

‘Nonsense,’ said Stella. She took Martha’s hand in her own, and began tugging her along the pavement: an attractive matron whose sensuality of face and body had vanished entirely under the pressure of the greater pleasures of good management.

Martha pulled herself free again, and said, ‘I don’t want to have my hair cut.’ Then, as a final appeal: ‘I’ll miss my appointment with Dr Stern.’

‘You can have an appointment with Dr Stern any time. I can always fix it.’ Stella, preoccupied, frowned at Martha, and commanded, ‘Just wait for me here, I’ll go and tell Mrs Kent you’re a friend of mine, she’ll do it as a favour.’ With this she hastened over the street and vanished into a door under the sign ‘Chez Paris. Coiffeuse’.

Martha remained at the street’s edge, telling herself she would hurry after Stella and put her foot down. A familiar lassitude overcame her, and she remained where she was, wishing that Stella would leave her alone and return to her own life – if she had one at all. But this spiteful final jab was rather as if she were sticking a pin into her own image, for whose fault was it, if not her own, that she had spent most of the last month with Stella, that the four of them had even gone off together on what was virtually a honeymoon for four? ‘After all, I don’t even like her,’ muttered Martha obstinately, thus committing herself to the acknowledgment, always imminent the moment she was left alone, that she didn’t like any of the things she had become obliged to like by the fact of marrying. The communal exaltation, like a sort of drunkenness, vanished the moment she was alone, leaving her limp with exhaustion. But she had not been alone for five minutes since her marriage.

Feeling her back stung by the sun, she moved into the shade of a pillar to wait. She was looking along the pavement backed by low buildings. Half a mile away, at the end of the street, a glint of waving burnished grass showed the vlei. The urban scene, solid and compact in the main streets, tended to dissolve the moment one moved into the side streets. The small colonial town was at a crossroads in its growth: half a modern city, half a pioneers’ achievement; a large block of flats might stand next to a shanty of wood and corrugated iron, and most streets petered out suddenly in a waste of scrub and grass.

Outside a sprawling shed that was a showroom for agricultural implements lounged a group of farmers in their khaki; past them came a city man in smooth grey flannel. Martha’s eyes followed this man, the only moving object in the heat-stilled street. She was deep in worried introspection. Into this grey lake plopped the thought, I know that man, don’t I? It was enough to restore a little sight to her eyes, and she watched him coming towards her, while with another part of her mind she was thinking, When Stella comes out I shall tell her I won’t have my hair cut – as if this act of defiance would in itself be a protest against her whole situation.

The man was tall, rather heavy; the grey flannel which encased him was like a firm outer skin to his assurance. His large elderly face had the authority of a commanding nose, jowled cheeks, strong hazel eyes deep under thick black brows. It was that English face which, with various small deviations, has been looking down so long from the walls and countless picture galleries of country houses. Handsome it was, but more – every feature, every curve, had an impressive finality, an absolute rightness, as if the atoms which composed it had never had a moment’s hesitation in falling where they did.

Martha thought: here is another person who is complete – finished in his way as Stella is in hers. Whereas she herself was formless, graceless, and unpredictable, a mere lump of clay. She rejected even the sight of him, and returned to her own preoccupations.

Mr Maynard was also preoccupied, whether pleasantly or not could be deduced only by a certain sarcastic twist of the lips. He noticed a girl standing listlessly by a pillar, and was about to walk past her, when he slowed his pace: he ought to know her. Then he remembered that less than a week before he had married her to her husband. She was looking through him; and at once he was annoyed that she should not remember such an important figure at what was surely an important occasion. This annoyance was succeeded by a more sincere pressure: she, if anyone could, would be able to tell him where his son Binkie was.

He stood firmly before her, blocking her preoccupied stare, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Knowell.’

Martha glanced hastily sideways to see whom he was addressing, then blushed. She looked closely at him, and then exclaimed, ‘Oh – Mr Maynard!’

‘And how,’ inquired Mr Maynard, cutting short this mutual embarrassment, ‘do you find the married state?’

She considered this seriously, then said, ‘Well, I’ve only been married five days.’

‘A very sensible attitude.’

She looked at him and waited. He was struck by her tiredness, and the unhappy set of her mouth. That critical look, however, checked in him the instinct to instruct. He was not a magistrate and the descendant of magistrates and landowners for nothing. He found himself searching for the right tone.

She saved him the trouble by asking, ‘Has Binkie come home yet?’

‘I thought you would be able to tell me.’

‘The last we saw of him was when he left the Falls at two last night. He said he was going to swim across the Falls if it was the last thing he did. It probably would be, too,’ she added dispassionately.

Mr Maynard winced. ‘He was drunk, I suppose?’

‘Not drunk.’ This, it seemed, she found crude. But she added, ‘No more than usual.’

Mr Maynard looked sharply at her, saw this was not criticism but information willingly given, and said, ‘I suppose the fact that the river is full of crocodiles wouldn’t deter him?’

‘Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t really do it,’ she said quickly, on a maternal note. ‘They rushed off in a horde saying they would. Three years ago they say one of them tried to jump across to that little island – you know the one, when the river is low – and he went over the edge. We reminded them about it just as they left. Besides, Binkie’s far too sensible.’

‘Binkie’s sensible?’ exclaimed Mr Maynard, very bitterly.

Martha, feeling that she was included in the bitterness, moved slightly away with ‘Well, I’m not responsible for Binkie.’

He hesitated, then again moved in front of her. ‘Young woman, it would interest me very much to know why you think Binkie is sensible. He drinks like a fish. He never does any work if he can help it. He is continually either giving it a bang or tearing the place to pieces.’ He heavily isolated these last phrases, and handed them to her, as it were, like a challenge.

After a pause for reflection Martha observed, ‘He always knows what he’s doing.’ This comment, it appeared, was enough.

‘You amaze me. You really do amaze me, you know.’ He waited for more.

Martha offered him a sudden friendly smile, and said, ‘I shouldn’t worry. In twenty years’ time he’ll be a magistrate, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’ She laughed, as if this in itself was funny.

‘My youth was not misspent. We neither gave it a bang nor tore the place to pieces.’