A Proper Marriage (49 page)

‘Oh, dear,’ she muttered, ‘just put that coat in your wardrobe for the time being, I’ve so much to carry.’ ‘I’ll carry it to the car for you.’ ‘Oh, no - it’ll do another time.’

‘You already have one coat and a cardigan in my wardrobe.’

‘It’s a very big wardrobe,’ said Mrs Quest hastily. ‘Not as big as all that,’ Martha said, and suddenly laughed irresistibly.

Mrs Quest looked at her with suspicion, and said, ‘You just keep them, I’ll call for them, I’m too much in a hurry, another time.’ She sounded flustered. The small girl was strong in her face - a little girl deprived of something she badly wanted.

Martha put the coat on a chair, and saw her mother’s face brighten. She shrugged helplessly.

They went out through the various rooms to the front veranda. Alice and the garden boy and Caroline were once more seated under the tree as if nothing had happened. Caroline was lying on her back on the grass, her legs waving in the air, crooning to herself, while the boy twanged at his hand piano. A yellow butterfly hovered over the grass, and settled with fanning wings on Caroline’s foot. She felt the tickle, and craned up her head to see. It was comical to see the puzzled little face watching her own motionless foot where the butterfly clung. Alice was knitting industriously.

Martha looked at Mrs Quest to share her pleasure at the scene, but saw there only the familiar look of agonized disgust.

‘Oh, Matty,’ said Mrs Quest urgently, ‘it’s so awful, you really must keep that man away from her.’

Martha put her arm in her mother’s, and propelled her fast down the garden path towards the car, which was parked outside the gate under a jacaranda tree. The roof of the car was scattered with loose mauve flowers. Mrs Quest energetically whisked the flowers off, got into the driver’s seat, and looked past Martha at the group under the tree. Her distress was sincere and painful.

‘Matty,’ she began again, her voice trembling, ‘Mrs Talbot told me you let that black girl sleep in Caroline’s room when you go out - they have all kinds of diseases, it’s awful.’

‘You’ll be late,’ said Martha briskly.

‘Well, you must boil the sheets afterwards.’ She offered Martha a small wan smile. The eyes of the two women met in pure antagonism, and immediately separated. Mrs Quest drove off firmly down the wrong side of the street.

Martha returned indoors, past the group under the tree. Almost at once, Douglas arrived for lunch. He went first over to Caroline, offered her a small toy he had picked up for her, spoke a few cheerful words to the garden boy and the nursegirl, and came in.

As soon as the meal was served, Martha inquired abruptly,
‘I want to know if it’s true that you and my mother have been having a nice frank talk about me behind my back.’

He shot her an uncomfortable look, took a large mouthful, and swallowed it before replying: ‘We did have a talk, yes. She is your mother, after all,’ he said sentimentally.

‘Quite.’ She said no more. She felt it as an intolerable disloyalty.

After some minutes’ silence, Douglas said bluffly but uneasily, ‘Oh, come off it, Matty, there’s no harm.’

‘I think there is,’ she said, and rang the bell for the next course. The servant came in with a complicated coloured pudding. Douglas cast an approving eye at it, and softened. The servant went out again. ‘Now, look here, Matty, something’s got into you, and I think you should snap out of it,’ he said firmly.

‘Just what conclusions did you and my mother come to about Caroline?’

He flushed a raw-beef colour and said hastily, ‘Well, she’s not looking so well, is she?’

‘I neglect her?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘What are you saying, then? You know quite well that at this time of the year all children get worn out with the heat.’

‘Well, perhaps you might spend more time with her.’

She looked at him in amazement. ‘Let’s get this straight. Caroline wakes at five. I have her until seven. I supervise her breakfast. I have her while Alice washes and irons. I always supervise her lunch. I have her from four until she goes to bed. I make all her clothes. She never eats a mouthful I haven’t prepared myself-’ But at this point she stopped; for she saw quite clearly that this was like an argument with her mother, conducted on two different levels.

‘I didn’t say–’ he shouted, furious with her and himself. He knew he was in the wrong – he should not have succumbed to Mrs Quest. On the other hand, he felt himself to be insulted and diminished by this cold and logical mood of Martha’s.

‘I should like you to say, one way or the other, if you agree with my mother that Caroline is neglected.’

‘Of course not,’ he shouted.

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘You should have another baby,’ he said quickly, ducking his head to his spoonful of pudding.

‘So I should.’

‘I tell you what, Matty,’ he urged in a brotherly, man-to-man way. ‘Why not pop down to old Stern and talk it over, eh?’

‘Because I am sick or Caroline is?’ inquired Martha.

‘Look here, Matty, let me tell you – I rang up old Stern, as a matter of fact, and made an appointment with him for this afternoon.’

She digested this. ‘My mother said you should make me see the doctor, you rang up Dr Stern, and asked him to talk to me for my own good.’

She saw that he was on the verge of a mood which was occurring more and more often: he would suddenly turn from a sensible, masculine, responsible young man, though perhaps an angry one, into a sulky little boy, his lips quivering with self-pity. He was going to do it now. She hastily said, ‘I’ll go and see Dr Stern, if you like.’ She could not bear the sulky little boy, it made her hate him.

‘That’s the ticket, Matty,’ he said, relieved. He rose and said, ‘I must be getting back to the office, there’s so much work. Actually, I’ve been thinking I won’t come home to lunch. I’ll take sandwiches, we’re so understaffed.’

She said, ‘Very well,’ casually.

He looked swiftly at her, dismayed - he seemed to feel let down. ‘It’ll mean a long day for you,’ he prompted.

‘I’ll miss you terribly,’ she said at once, and he kissed her affectionately and went out.

She immediately began chiding herself for her utter dishonesty. The instinct to comply, to please, seemed to her more and more unpleasant and false. Yet she had to reassure Douglas and kiss him before he left if she was not to feel guilty and lacking as a woman.

Pushing aside this problem, she went inside to smarten herself up for Dr Stern. But Douglas was calling her from the veranda. His voice was authoritative. She went out to him.
‘Look at that, Matty,’ he said with the sentimental note she hated. She followed his self-consciously shocked gaze, and saw Caroline asleep, sprawled on a rug under the tree, while Alice sat over her, moving a frond of leaves through the hot still air.

She looked at him, puzzled. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘She should be sleeping in her cot,’ he said, still in that stern, sentimental voice.

‘But, Douglas, you yourself suggested that she should sleep under the tree in this weather — it’s cooler than on the veranda.’

He gave her a quick, rather ashamed look: the rather fattish reddish face expressed an official indignation, however. ‘Why can’t you have the cot moved out there?’ he asked.

‘But the girl stays there, Caroline isn’t left,’ said Martha helplessly. ‘You know,’ she added humorously, ‘what’s happening is this: You’re in a mood of disapproving of me, my mother’s got under your skin, and you’re just looking for a stick to beat me with.’ She laughed uncomfortably and looked at him, waiting.

He went dark red, fidgeted; it was touch and go whether he lost his temper. He put his arms around her and said in a muffled, affectionate voice, ‘Oh, Matty …’ She kissed him, feeling like a traitor to herself, and off he went to the car, beaming and happy, giving Caroline as he passed a proud and proprietary look. Alice made a kind of seated curtsy towards the master, smiling bashfully, while she continued to wave the frond of leaves over the sleeping child’s face.

Martha went indoors again. She felt that some kind of crisis had been precipitated. But every instinct she had shrank away from it. To wait, that was what she would like to do - to drift on, and then something would happen, she did not know what. A rescue of some kind - someone would say something; she was listening unconsciously for the right pattern of words again. She decided she would go and see her father, there was over an hour before she must be at Dr Stern’s.

When she had changed from one brief, tight bright dress
into another, and painted colour into a face she thought was pale and even rather ugly, she went out to the garden with the push-chair. Caroline was now half awake, blinking up at the tree that stretched over her. Her fists were curled up beside her head - she was a baby again. Then she saw her mother, smiled, and became a little girl, scrambling energetically to her feet. Martha put her into the push-chair, and told the girl she was free until five o’clock. Alice gave her that delightful shy smile, which showed white strong teeth, and went off singing to the back garden.

Martha rapidly wheeled the chair through the patches of shade along the side of the street. Petals fell like a slow blue rain from the masses of sun-filled blossom overhead. Caroline watched them, her eyes rather strained with the midday glare. Martha thought anxiously that perhaps the child was not well after all - she was certainly pale. Perhaps she was not eating enough, perhaps she … Martha stopped herself, and went off along the other track of worry: what was wrong with Caroline was that she, Martha, did not feel the right way about her. Do I love her? she asked herself sternly, looking with steady criticism at the little girl. The emotion of love vanished as she examined it. At this moment she felt nothing but the bond of responsibility. Then she saw Caroline’s black eyes turn towards her, and the little face opened in a warm, confiding smile. Martha’s heart went soft with tenderness. At this, the other thought came driving in: It would be much better for her if I didn’t. I must be careful not to be too much interested in what she does. But even as she was making these resolutions she felt her face soften in a protective smile, and she thought despairingly, Oh, Lord, there’s no escaping it, she’ll hate me, too. Yet the idea of her and Caroline hating each other seemed absurd.

But the child was certainly pale, Martha thought anxiously. And there was sweat on her forehead. She went faster; only another block to go. The wheels of the push-chair made two bruised tracks through the thick carpet of petals, the light dry scent of them came up all about them, a scent so faint it was like the smell of dryness itself, a ghost merely. The flowers of light, they were: she could see how
the sun shaded a single flower from a light dry mauve that was almost white to a deep purple where the shade clung. She handed a blossom to the child and watched her turn it over and over in the sun; she wondered if the little brain was absorbing the same impressions that she did - then she stopped herself. Why should Caroline see what she saw? It was blackest tyranny even to want it or think it. But here she gained the house.

Her father was asleep under a tree in a deck chair, a white handkerchief over his face. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. She hesitated; should she go into the house? But she hated it, with its tasteless furniture and its ugly pictures. But that was not the real truth. She could not see the things that had made the landscape of her childhood - a silver tray, a row of books, the pictures themselves - without sharp pain at seeing them
here:
they belonged to a ramshackle, silent house in the veld, they belonged to memory. She never entered the house unless she had to. She would spend hours with her father in the garden, but could not enter that house without a confused and painful disturbance which she did not understand.

She wheeled the push-chair as silently as she could towards her father; but as she came near, he sat up and pushed the handkerchief from his eyes, and blinked at her, his face stiff and wooden from sleep. Then it lightened into affection. He said cordially, ‘Hullo, old chap, nice to see you.’

She put Caroline down to play, and took the deck chair beside her father. ‘How are you?’ she asked, and waited patiently while he answered the question with preoccupied attention to detail. She gathered that on the whole he was rather better than usual.

‘But you don’t want to be bored with my troubles,’ he said hastily at the end, and asked, equally from habit, ‘And how are things with you?’

She hesitated. She realized she had come here to complain to him about her mother. The banality of the thing stopped her. Besides, it troubled him so, any appeal to him. She said, ‘Oh, I’m fine.’

But he had noticed the hesitation, and was looking at her keenly. She felt uncomfortable. Nine parts of his time, Mr Quest was safe in his inner world of memory and vague philosophical speculations; but he could come out of it abruptly, and be warm, shrewd, paternal. This, if she wanted, was one of the times. She hesitated again.

He turned his eyes away, and looked at Caroline, who was rolling over and over on the grass. ‘That’s a nice kid,’ he observed, as if seeing her for the first time. Martha laughed, and again those very shrewd and knowledgeable old eyes turned towards her.