A Proper Marriage (6 page)

She listened, smiling maternally, while he calculated aloud how many hours they had slept. It took him several minutes: he was nothing if not efficient.

‘Do you realize we couldn’t have slept more than about three hours a night during the last six weeks?’ he inquired proudly.

‘Awful, isn’t it?’ she agreed, in the same tone.

After a pause: ‘It’s been lovely, hasn’t it, Matty?’

She agreed with enthusiasm that it had. At the same time she glanced incredulously at him to assure herself that he must be joking. But he was grinning in the half-dark. She simply could not comprehend that his satisfaction, his pleasure, was fed less by her than by what other people found in their marriage.

Her silence dismayed him. He gripped her arm, pressed it, and urged, ‘Really, everyone’s been awfully good to us, haven’t they, Matty? Haven’t they? They’ve given us a hell of a start?’

Again she enthusiastically agreed. He lay alert now, feeling her worry and preoccupation. Then he suddenly inquired, ‘Did you see the doctor? What did he say?’

‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said, sleepy and bad-tempered. ‘He doesn’t seem to know more than we do, only he does the big-medicine-man act awfully well.’

But Douglas could not agree with this. ‘He’s very good, Matty — very good indeed.’

Her motherliness was warmed by his anxiety, and she at once assured him that he had been very kind and she had liked him enormously.

‘That’s all right, then. You’ll be all right with him.’ A pause. ‘Well, what did he recommend? Those effells are a pain in the neck, only for bachelors.’ He laughed proudly.

‘He made a joke about them.’

‘What did he say?’ She told him. ‘He’s a helluva lad, Dr Stern, isn’t he, Matty? Isn’t he?’

She hesitated. Besides, she did not want to think now about the machinery of birth control, which suddenly appeared to her distasteful. But since from the beginning it had been a matter of pride to be efficient, gay and matter-of-fact, she could not say that she detested the jellies and bits of rubber which from now on would accompany what Dr Stern had referred to as her love life as if it were something separate from life itself; she could not now say what for the moment was true: that she wished she were like that native woman, who was expected to have a baby every year. She wished at the very least that it should not all be made into a joke. She wanted to cry her eyes out; nothing could be more unreasonable.

Suddenly Douglas observed, ‘We’ve just done it without anything. I suppose that’s a bit silly, eh, Matty?’

‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ she said hastily, unwilling to move. She felt it would be ‘all right’ because since the ‘act of love’ had been what Dr Stern described as unsatisfactory, she felt it had not occurred at all. She was unaffected, and therefore it would be unfair, if not unnatural, that a child might result from it.

‘Because you’d better get out of bed and go to the bathroom,’ he suggested uneasily.

‘Judging from the book of words,’ she said, with a dry anger that astounded even herself, ‘those little dragons of yours go wriggling along at such a rate it would be too late by now.’

‘Well, maybe it would be better than nothing,’ he urged.

‘Oh, I’m too tired to move,’ she said irritably. ‘Besides,’ she added firmly, ‘I’m not going to have a baby for years. It would be idiotic, with a war coming.’

‘Well, Matty …’ But he was at a loss for words in the face of this irrationality. ‘At any rate,’ he announced firmly, ‘we mustn’t take any more chances at all. Actually we’re being helluva fools. It’s not the first time.’

‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ she agreed amenably, quite comfortable in the conviction, luckily shared by so many women who have not been pregnant, that conception, like death,
was something remarkable which could occur to other people, but not to her.

‘Did you tell Dr Stern about your periods?’ he persisted.

‘What about them?’ she asked irritably, disengaging herself from his arm and lying parallel to him, not touching him.

‘Well, you did say they were a bit irregular.’

‘Oh, do stop fussing,’ she cried, tormented. ‘According to the book of words thousands of women have irregular periods before they have a baby and it doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘But, Matty, do be reasonable,’ he implored.

She was silent. Even more did she want to weep. But this would have meant abandoning herself to him, and to explanations of what she could not explain herself — a feeling of being caged and trapped. Until two weeks ago, her body had been free and her own, something to be taken for granted. She would have scorned to fuss about, or even to notice, a period that was heavy or one that chose not to come at all. And now this precious privacy, this independence, so lately won from her mother’s furtive questioning, was being threatened by an impertinent stranger.

‘Matty,’ he said again, ‘don’t you think you’re being unreasonable?’

‘I’m so tired I could scream,’ she muttered defiantly.

Silence. Music from the waste lot came throbbing into the room. The big wheel, glittering with the white lights, revolved steadily, Like a damned wedding ring, she thought crossly, abandoning herself to anger, since she was not free to cry.

‘I do hope you’ll be in a better humour in the morning,’ said Douglas coldly, after a pause.

Her mind began producing wounding remarks with the efficiency of a slot machine. She was quite dismayed at the virulence of some of the things that came to her tongue. She cautiously turned her head and saw his face showing in the steady flicker of lights. He looked young - a boy, merely; with a boy’s sternness. She asked, in a different tone, ‘Dr Stern said something about your stomach.’

His head turned quickly. Guardedly he said, ‘What did he tell you,?’

‘Nothing – only mentioned it. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Oh – I don’t know.’

The pride that concealed a weakness appealed to her. She reached out her hand and laid it on his arm above the elbow. It stiffened, then responded.

‘I’ve an ulcer - nothing much. I just go on the tack when I feel it.’

She could not help a pang of repulsion from the idea of an ulcer; then another of pity. ‘I thought you had to have a special diet for ulcers?’

‘Oh - don’t fuss.’ He added, contrite, ‘I lay off fats when it starts up.’

‘You’re very young to have an ulcer,’ she remarked at last. Then, thinking this sounded like a criticism, she tightened her fingers about the thick warm flesh. It was slack. He was asleep, and breathing deeply.

Chapter Two

When Martha woke, she knew she had slept badly. Several times she had half roused, with the urgent knowledge that she ought to be attending to something; and this anxiety seemed to be of the same quality as that suggested by the great dragging circle of lights, which continued to flicker through her sleep like a warning. The ceiling of the small bedroom spun with light until after midnight, when the wheel was stilled; then bars of yellow light lay deep over the ceiling, over the bed, across Douglas’s face, from a room opposite, where a man must be lying awake reading, or a woman keeping vigil with a sick child.

At six she was fully awake. The sky outside was chilly white-gold haze; winter was coming. She leaned on her elbow to look out at the wheel; in this small colourless light it rested motionless, insignificant, and the machinery of the fun fair beneath it seemed tawdry and even pathetic. It no longer had the power to move her; and the fact that it had so disturbed her sleeping was absurd. But Martha had been born - or so it seemed - with the knowledge that the hours of sleep were long and busy, and of the same texture as the hours of waking. She entered sleep cautiously, like an enemy country. She knew, too, however, that for most it was a sudden dropping of a dark curtain, and regarded this other family of mankind with a simple envy, the result of her upbringing so far away from the centres of sophistication, where she would have learned to use the word ‘neurotic’ as
a
label that would make any further thought on the subject unnecessary, or as a kind of badge guaranteeing a superior sensibility. She was in that primitive condition where she was able to pay healthy respect to - Douglas, for instance.

She looked at him now with a rather wistful curiosity. He lay on his back, easily outstretched among the sheets and blankets. He was handsome when he slept. His face was open and rather flushed. An outflung arm, as if it had just fallen loose from the act of throwing something, lay in a calm, beautiful line from waist to shoulder. The upper part of his body emerging from the clothes, was solid, compact, the flesh clear and healthy; a light sprinkling of freckles over white, bright skin. He looked stern and dignified, sealed away from her in his sleep, and restored to the authority of good sense. Martha’s respect for him was now deep and genuine. She thought, with a simplicity which was authorized and confirmed by the dignity of his face, I shall say we must stop being married; he won’t mind.

When he woke, everything would be explained and settled.

Waiting for him to wake, she sat up and looked out. The town, no less than the fun fair, looked small and mean after the hazy splendours of the night. The two big blocks of flats opposite rose white and solid, but rain had streaked their sides into dinginess. Their windows were dead and asleep. Beyond them, half a dozen business houses, their surfaces clean with paint, glossy with money; and beyond these again, the tin-roofed shanties of the Coloured town, which marked the confines of order; for on two sides of this organized centre stretched the locations, or straggling slums where the Africans were. From a single small window she could overlook at least three worlds of life, quite separate, apparently self-contained, apparently linked by nothing but hate … But these familiar ideas, sprung in her mind by the simple act of looking through a window, were too much of a burden this morning. First Douglas should wake, and then it would be time to look out of the window. She might suggest to him, for instance, that he should at once throw up his job, and they should go and ‘live among the people’.

She sprang out of bed, but noiselessly, and went next door to the living room. There, as she expected, lay a small heap of letters where Douglas had flung them down the night before. She carried them back to bed with her. Most were of
that sort which people write to those getting married, in order that they may say with pride, ‘We have had so and so many letters of congratulation.’ At least, Martha could not yet see letters of politeness in any other way. She therefore tossed them aside, and took up one from her brother, now at the University of Cape Town. It was a good-humoured letter, full of determinedly humorous tolerance; their relations were always harmonious; in order that two people may quarrel they must have something in common to quarrel over.

The next, also from the university, was from Joss Cohen. She opened it with the most vivid delight; she even held it unopened for a moment, to delay the pleasure of reading it. What she expected from it was - but what did she not expect from Joss Cohen! At last she opened it. Four lines.

Dear Matty,

Your brother mentioned that you got married last week. I must admit this was something of a surprise. However, please accept my congratulations. I hope your marriage will be happy and prosperous.

yours,
joss

She put it down slowly, flushing with hurt anger. It was that word ‘prosperous’ which stung her. Then she reread it, trying to revive him as he really was, since these colourless lines could have no power to evoke him. She admitted at last that she felt abandoned because he had not thought her worth even the trouble of a sarcastic phrase. Very well, then: she dropped the letter into the pile of purely formal ones.

The third was from Marnie Van Rensberg, on blue paper with a pink rose in one corner.

Dear Matty,

Mom told me your news this morning. She heard it from your Mom at the station when she went in to get the mail. I am so happy Matty now we are both married. I hope you will be very happy. I am going to have a baby in January. The doctor says February, they think they know everything. I hope it will be a boy because Dirk
wants a boy. I don’t mind what it is, but for my sake I hope it’s a girl really, but who would be a woman in this world. Ha. Ha.

Affectionately, your old pal,
Marnie

The fourth was from Solly Cohen, and from the moment Martha opened it she knew she would find in it everything Joss had refused.

Well, well, Martha Quest. I’m not surprised, you are a born marrier, and I always told Joss so when he insisted something might be done with you. I hear high civil service prospects, pension, and no doubt a big house in the suburbs. If not yet, it will come, it will come. Well, well, you’ll have to be a good girl now, no naughty ideas about the colour bar - no ideas of any kind, for that matter. If there is one thing you can’t afford, dear Matty, in the station of life into which you’ve chosen to marry, god help you, it is ideas.

Well, as you will see from the address, I’m not in Cape Town any more. The higher education, being nothing but sh—, is not for me, though Joss is apparently prepared to go through with it. I’m making an effort towards communal life in the Coloured quarters of our great metropolis, a small light in a naughty world. All the boorjoys are very shocked, of course. I shall naturally not be allowed to have visitors of your sort, but if at any time you feel like dropping a line from your exalted world of tea parties, sundowners and sound incomes, I shall be pleased to read it.