A Proper Marriage (38 page)

And now what contests of will followed! Caroline had been used to a forceful pillar of a mother standing over her with a glinting hard spoon full of stuff that she
must
eat, no matter how she tightened her lips and turned away her face; now she saw this woman - and from one day to the next – sitting away from her on the other side of the room, not listening to her cries of rage and shrieks of defiance. Caroline picked up the bowl of porridge and flung it on the floor so that the greyish mess splashed everywhere; Martha turned a page and did not look. Caroline sparked her black eyes at Martha, let our short sharp cries of anger to
make
her look; then she picked up a mug of milk and poured it all over herself. Martha remained indifferent in her chair; but there was a tight-lipped tension about her that Caroline knew. She paddled her hands in a lake of soiled milk and rubbed them in her hair, singing our her defiance. And suddenly Martha became a whirlwind of exasperation. She jumped up and
said despairingly, ‘Oh, Caroline! You are a naughty, naughty girl!’

The little girl, with blobs of porridge on her face, her hair plastered and dripping with milk, gurgled out triumphant, defiance. Then she found herself lifted roughly from the chair; she yelled angrily while Martha held her kicking under her arm, and bent to fill the bath. She was dropped into the water, soaped hastily; she felt herself whirled into new clean clothes, and then she was dropped into her wooden pen, where she soon forgot all about it, and began playing with her toys.

In the meantime Martha was scrubbing porridge and milk off the floor, the furniture, herself. She was sick with disgust at the mess. She was asking herself why she had endured months of that other mess with only occasional lapses into distaste; a period when napkins and then clothes and blankets had been wet and dirty, without difficulty: the book had said so. The book and she had been admirably justified: Caroline was now, as the phrase went, perfectly clean. But that had been no problem; the battle centred on food. What is it all about? asked Martha in despair. She was furious with herself for losing her temper. She could have wept with annoyance. She was saying to herself, as she wiped off milk and grey pulp, Oh, Lord, how I do hate this business, I do loathe it so. She was saying she hated her daughter; and she knew it. Soon, the hot anger died; guilt unfailingly succeeded. Outside, on the little veranda which was like a wired cage projecting out into the sunlight - the sun was now pouring down from over the trees in the park - Caroline was cheerfully gurgling and singing to herself. Inside the room, Martha was seated, tired and miserable. Her heart was now a hot enlarged area of tenderness for the child whom she was so lamentably mishandling.

She went out on to the veranda. Caroline, in her short bright dress, looked up with her quick black eyes, and made an inquiring noise. She was snatched up and held against Martha’s bosom. At once she began striving free; Martha laughed ruefully and put her down; she staggered around the room, singing to herself.

But she had eaten absolutely nothing. Martha produced rusks, and left them surreptitiously about the room. Caroline seized on them and began chewing vigorously.

‘Oh, Caroline,’ sighed Martha, ‘what am I going to do with you?’

She was forming the habit of talking to the child as if to herself. The small brain was receiving the sound of a half-humorous, resentful, grumbling, helpless voice rumbling away over her head.

‘My poor unfortunate brat, what have you done to deserve a mother like me? Well, there’s no help for it, you’ll just have to put up with it. You bore me to extinction, and that’s the truth of it, and no doubt I bore you. But as far as I can make out, one of the most important functions of parents is that they should be suitable objects of hate: if psychology doesn’t mean that, it means nothing, Well, then, so it’s right and proper you should hate my guts off and on, you and I are just victims, my poor child, you can’t help it, I can’t help it, my mother couldn’t help it, and her mother …’

After a silence the voice went on, rather like Caroline’s own meditative experimental rumblings and chirpings: ‘So there we are, and we’d better make the best of it. As soon as possible I’ll send you to a nursery school where you are well out of my poisonous influence. I’ll do that for you at least.’

By nine in the morning, it seemed always as if long stretches of the day had been lived through. And yet it was three hours till lunchtime. Martha sewed – she and Caroline had dozens of cheap pretty dresses. She watched the clock. She cooked little messes for Caroline. She leafed hopefully through the book - or rather, whichever one of them seemed most likely to provide what she wanted - to see if she had overlooked some pattern of words that might help her to feel better. And at the least she felt she was being honest, that virtue which she was still convinced was the supreme one. Somewhere at the bottom of her heart was a pleasant self-righteousness that while she was as little fitted for maternity as her mother had been, she at least had the honesty to admit it.

She would watch lunchtime approaching with helpless
despair. But she was determined to break this cycle of determination, which always ended in her own violent anger and Caroline’s rebellious screams.

She learned to put Caroline’s food in front of her and then go out of the room altogether. When she came back, she forbade herself to notice the unpleasant fly-covered mess on the high chair. She quickly lifted the child out, and washed her, and set her back in her pen without saying a word. Day after day, Martha lay face down on the bed at every mealtime, her fingers stuck in her ears, reading, while Caroline yelled for attention next door. Slowly the yells lessened. There came a point where the child received her food and ate it. Martha returned from her exile in the bedroom, the victory won. She had succeeded in defeating the demon of antagonism.

And now she was able to cook the food and serve Caroline with it and not care if she ate it or not. And, of course, now it was eaten. And Martha existed on hastily cut slabs of bread and butter and tea. She could not be interested in food unless she was cooking it for someone with whom she would share it afterwards. Women living by themselves can starve themselves into a sickness without knowing what is wrong with them.

Then she became perversely sad because she had won the victory. It seemed that something must have snapped between her and her daughter. It increased her persistent uneasiness, which expressed itself in those interminable puzzled humorous monologues: ‘It’s all very well, Caroline, but there must be something wrong when you have to learn
not
to care. Because the trouble with me is not that I care too much, but that I care too little. You’d be relieved, my poor brat, if you knew that when you were with my mother I never thought of you at all - that’s a guarantee of your future emotional safety, isn’t it?’ Silence, while Caroline pursued her own interests about the room; if the silence persisted, however, she cocked a bright inquiring eye towards her mother. ‘But what I can’t understand is this: Two years ago, I was as free as air. I could have done anything, been anything. Because the essence of the daydreams of every girl
who isn’t married is just that: it’s the only time they are more free than men. Men
have
to be something, but you’ll find when you grow up, my poor child, that you’ll see yourself as a ballet dancer, or a business executive, or the wife of a Prime Minister, or the mistress of somebody important, or even in extreme moments a nun or a missionary. You’ll imagine yourself doing all sorts of things in all sorts of countries; the point is, your will will be your limit. Anything’ll be possible. But you will not see yourself sitting in a small room bound for twenty-four hours of the day - with years of it in front of you - to a small child. For God’s sake, Caroline, don’t marry young, I’ll stop you marrying young if I have to lock you up. But I can’t do that,’ concluded Martha humorously, ‘because that would be putting pressure on you and that’s the unforgivable sin. All I can promise is that I won’t put any pressure on you of any kind. I simply
won’t care
… But supposing that not caring is only the most subtle and deadly way of putting pressure on people - what then? … But what is most difficult is this: If you read novels and diaries, women didn’t seem to have these problems. Is it really conceivable that we should have turned into something quite different in the space of about fifty years? Or do you suppose they didn’t tell the truth, the novelists? In the books, the young and idealistic girl gets married, has a baby – she at once turns into something quite different; and she is perfectly happy to spend her whole life bringing up children with a tedious husband. Natasha, for instance: she was content to be an old hen, fussing and dull; but supposing all the time she saw a picture of herself as she had been, and saw herself as what she had become and was miserable – what then? Because either that’s the truth or there is a completely new kind of woman in the world, and surely that isn’t possible, what do you think, Caroline?’

All the morning, sunlight moved and deployed around the flat. After lunch the sun had moved away; the rooms were warm, airless, stagnant. And then Martha put Caroline into her push-chair, and filled in the time by wheeling her around the streets for an hour, two hours, three hours. Or she sat in the park under a tree with dozens of other young
mothers and nannies, watching the children play. This period of the day seemed to concentrate into it the essence of boredom. It was boredom like an illness. But at six in the evening, Caroline was washed, fed, and put into her cot. Silence descended. Martha was free. She could go out, see people, go to the pictures. But she did not. She sat alone, reading and thinking interminably, turning over and over in her mind this guilty weight of thoughts, which were always the same. Those people who have been brought up in the nonconformist pattern may shed God, turn upside down the principles they were brought up to; but they may always be relied upon to torment themselves satisfactorily with problems of right behaviour. From these dreary self-searchings there emerged a definite idea: that there must be, if not in literature, which evaded these problems, then in life, that woman who combined a warm accepting femininity and motherhood with being what Martha described vaguely but to her own satisfaction as ‘a person’. She must look for her.

Then one day she saw Stella in the street. They exchanged the gay guilty promises to come and see each other which people do who are dropping out of each other’s lives. Afterwards Martha thought that Stella looked very contented. She had changed. Two years ago she had been a lithe, alive, beautiful young woman. Having a baby had turned her into a stout and handsome matron, very smart, competent and - this was the point - happy. Or so it seemed in retrospect. Thinking wistfully for several days about Stella’s unfailing self-assurance, in whatever role life asked her to play, turned her, for Martha, into a symbol of satisfactory womanhood. On an impulse then she dropped Caroline in the house across the park with her mother, and drove out to the house in the suburbs where Stella now lived with her mother.

It was a very bright sparkling day, with a tang of chill in the air. The sky was glacially blue. The white houses in their masses of heavy green foliage shone in a thin clear light, with a remote, indrawn look, as if prepared to be abandoned by warmth for a short season. The wave of painful emotion that is a clearer sign of changing seasons than the loosening
of a leaf or a clap of thunder after seven months’ silence entered Martha suddenly with familiar and pleasurable melancholy - winter was coming. In such a mood, to inquire from Stella how one should live appeared absurd; nostalgia imposed different values - nothing mattered very much. Suppressing it, she drove on through the avenues, turned outwards over a narrow road through a shallow grass-filled vlei, and entered a new suburb; the town was spreading fast under the pressures of war. This suburb was a mile of new bungalows scattered hastily over a rock-strewn rise. Stella’s mother’s new house was at its limit; beyond stretched the unscarred veld; and the garden was bounded by heaps of granite boulders tangled over by purple bougainvillaea. The bungalow was small, but no longer a colonial bungalow. The veranda was a small porch, and there were green shutters to the windows, and there was a look of glossy smartness about it. Martha parked the car, went up prim steps, and rang the bell, feeling like someone paying a visit.

Stella appeared and cried out a gay welcome. She was wearing a handsome scarlet housecoat, and her dark braids fell down her back. In the living room her mother was playing with the baby. The room looked like an illustration from a magazine; it was all cream leather and red carpet. Through the cream-shaded windows a stretch of sere drying veld looked in and disowned the alien. Martha felt a sharp dislocation in her sense of what was fitting, as she always did with Mrs Barbazon, who, with her careful dark eyes, seemed a stray from the capitals of Europe.

Stella flung back her dark braids carelessly, and, with her new look of matronly contentment, sat down, watching her child - a little girl, dark-eyed, slender, pale. Both women were competing for Esther’s attention. Mrs Barbazon was holding up her crystal beads and swinging them before the infant’s moving eyes. Stella leaned forward and offered the end of one of her long thick plaits. Esther reached out for it, and with a satisfied smile, Stella lifted her on to her own lap.

‘How’s Andrew?’ asked Martha.

Without lifting her eyes from Esther’s face, Stella said,
‘Oh – I haven’t had a letter recently. I don’t know.’ This was hard and careless.

‘I heard from my brother that he’d met him somewhere up north.’