Doris Lessing - A Proper Marriage

‘Alice is just an old fusser,’ said Stella, settling herself comfortably. ‘If Willie isn’t tied to her apron string she can’t sit still.’ Martha said nothing. ‘That’s no way to keep a man. They don’t like it. You should manage them without them knowing it.’

Martha observed irritably that Stella and Alice talked about husbands as if they were a sort of wild animal to be tamed.

Stella looked at her, and then remarked in an admonishing way that Martha was very young, but she’d soon learn that the way to keep a lad like Douggie was to give him plenty of rope to hang himself.

Irritation was thick in the air, like the tobacco smoke that now made a heavy bluish film between them. Martha was praying, I wish she’d go.

Stella made a few more remarks, which were received in silence. Then she looked angrily across and said that if she were Matty she’d have a good sleep and then take life easy.

She rose, and stood for a moment looking at the mirror inside the flap of her handbag. Everything was in order. She shut the handbag, and gazed around the little room; she adjusted a cushion, then turned her gaze towards Martha, who was sprawling gracelessly in her chair.

Martha looked back, acknowledging the discouragement that filled her at the sight of this woman. Stella must have gained this perfect assurance with her maturity at the age of – what? There were photographs of her at fifteen, showing her no less complete than she was now.

It appeared that the moment for parting had at last arrived. Martha struggled up. And now Martha was filled with guilt. For Stella’s face showed a genuine concern for her; and Martha reminded herself that Stella was nothing if not kind and obliging – for what was kindness, if not this willingness to devote oneself utterly to another person’s life? Martha was too tired even to instil irony into it. She kissed Stella clumsily on one of her smooth tinted cheeks, and thanked her. Stella brightened, blushed a little, and said that any time Matty wanted anything she had only to … At last she left, smiling, blowing a kiss from the door, in precisely that pose of competent grace which most depressed Martha.

The moment she was alone, Martha rummaged for a pair of scissors and went with determination to the bathroom. There she knelt on the edge of the gleaming and slippery bath, and in an acutely precarious position leaned up to look into the shaving mirror. It was too high for her. There was a large mirror at a suitable height next door, but for some reason this was the one she must use. Nothing in her reflection pleased her. She was entirely clumsy, clodhopping, graceless. Worse than this, she was filled with uncomfortable memories of how she had looked at various stages of her nineteen years – for she might be determined to forget how she had felt in her previous incarnations, but she could not forget how she had looked. Her present image had more in common with her reflection at fifteen, a broad and sturdy schoolgirlishness, than it had with herself of only six months ago.

Her dissatisfaction culminated as she put the scissors to the heavy masses of light dryish hair that fell on her shoulders. She remembered briefly that Stella had laid stress on her hair being properly cut; but the mere idea of submitting herself to the intentions of anybody else must be repulsed. Steadily, her teeth set to contain a prickling feverish haste, she cut around her hair in a straight line. Then she fingered the heavy unresponsive mass, and began snipping at the ends. Finally she lifted individual pieces and cut off slabs of hair from underneath, so that it might not be so thick. From the way the ends curved up, she could see that Stella might be right – her hair would curl. At last she plunged her head into water and soaped it hard, rubbing it roughly dry afterwards, in a prayerful hope that these attentions might produce yet another transformation into a different person. Then she swept up the cushions of hair from the floor and went into the bedroom. It was after six, and night had fallen. She switched on the light, to illuminate the cheerful room whose commonplace efficiency depressed her; and stood in front of the other mirror trying to shape the sodden mass of hair into waves. She thought her appearance worse than before. Giving it up in despair, she switched off the light again and went to the window. She was thinking with rueful humour that now she was undeniably longing for Douglas to come so that he might reassure her; whereas for most of the last week she had been struggling with waves of powerful dislike of him that she was too well educated in matters psychological not to know were natural to a newly married woman. Or, to put this more precisely, she had gone through all the handbooks with which she was now plentifully equipped, seized on phrases and sentences which seemed to fit her case, and promptly extended them to cover the whole of womankind. There was nothing more paradoxical about her situation than that, while she insisted on being unique, individual, and altogether apart from any other person, she could be comforted in such matters only by remarks like ‘Everybody feels this’ or ‘It is natural to feel that’.

She leaned against the sill, and tried to feel that she was alone and able to think clearly, a condition she had been longing for, it seemed for weeks. But her limbs were seething with irritation; she could not stand still. She fetched a chair and sat down, trying to relax. Behind her, the two small and shallow rooms were dark, holding their scraps of furniture in a thinned shadow, which was crossed continually by shifting beams of light from the street. Under her, the thin floor crept and reverberated to footsteps behind the walls. Above her, feet tapped beyond the ceiling. She found herself listening intently to these sounds, trying to isolate them, to make them harmless. She shut her mind to them, and looked outwards.

The small, ramshackle colonial town had become absorbed in luminous dark. A looming pile of flats was like a cliff rising from the sea, and the turn of a roof like a large elbow half blocking the stars. Below this aerial scene of moon, sky, roofs and the tops of trees, the streets below ran low and indistinct, with lights of cars nosing slow along them among the isolated yellow spaces which were street lamps. Whiffs of petrol-laden dust and staled scent from flowers in the park a hundred yards away drifted down past her towards the back of the building, where it would mingle with the heavier, composted smell: the smell which comes rich and heavy out of the undertown, the life of African servants, cramped, teeming, noisy with laughter and music. Singing came now from the native quarters at the back; and this small lively music flowed across the dark to join the more concentrated bustle of noise that came from a waste lot opposite. The fun fair had come to town; and over the straggling dusty grass, showing yellow in the harsh composite glare from a hundred beating lights, rose swings and roundabouts and the great glittering wheel. Once a year this fair visited the city on its round of the little towns of southern Africa, and spilled its lights and churning music for a few hours nightly into the dark.

The great wheel was revolving slowly, a chain of lights that mingled with the lamps of Orion and the Cross. Martha laid her wet and uncomfortable head against the wall, and looked at the wheel steadily, finding in its turning the beginnings of peace. Slowly she quietened, and it seemed possible that she might recover a sense of herself as a person she might, if only potentially, respect. It was really all quite simple, she assured herself. That this marriage was a foolish mistake must certainly be obvious to Douglas himself; for if humility can be used to describe such an emotion, Martha was genuinely humble in thinking of him and herself as involved in an isolated act of insanity which a simple decision would reverse. His personality and hers had nothing to do with it. The whole graceless affair had nothing to do with what she really felt or – surely? – what he felt, either.