Читать книгу A Proper Marriage - Doris Lessing - Страница 8

‘Well, Matty, and now you’ll be free to get on with your own work.’

It was with these words that Douglas dropped his parting kiss on her cheek when he left for the office each morning, and with a look of pure satisfaction. The kindly, confident young man crossed the untidy bedroom towards the door, bouncing a little from the balls of his feet, smiling backwards at Martha, who was sitting in a tangle of crumpled and stained silk in a mess of bedclothes, and vanished whistling down the corridor. The gleam of proprietary satisfaction never failed to arouse in Martha a flush of strong resentment, which was as unfailingly quenched by a succeeding guilt. To account for the resentment, for above all it was essential to account for every contradictory emotion that assailed one, she had already formed a theory.

After Douglas had left, she kicked off the bedclothes, and allowed herself to fall backwards on the cooling sheets and pillows. She lay quiet. Opposite her, two neat squares of bright blue sky, in one of which was suspended the stilled black wheel of the fair; reflected sunlight quivered hot on the wall. From all around, from above, from below, the sound of voices, a broom swishing, a child crying. But here, in the heart of the building, two rooms, white, silent, empty. And, on the bed, Martha, uncomfortably fingering the silk of her nightdress, trying most conscientiously to relax into the knowledge of space and silence. At the same time she was thinking of Douglas, now already at his office; she could see the self-conscious look with which he allowed himself to be teased; every night he came back to share with her his pleasure in how the office had said this or that. And how she hated him for it! And it was her husband about whom she was feeling this resentment, this violent dislike.

Martha, ignoring the last few months in town before her marriage, because she could not bear to think about them, went back to that period when she was a girl on the farm. From this, several incidents had been selected by her need for a theory. There had been that young man who … and the other one … and that occasion when…After hours of determined concentration she would emerge with the phrase, ‘Women hate men who take them for granted.’ It would have done for a story in a magazine. But that impersonal ‘woman’ was a comfort – briefly, for no sooner had she reached it than she saw the image that the words conjured up: something sought, wooed, capricious, bestowing favours. No, there was something extremely distasteful about that capricious female; no sooner had Martha caught a glimpse of her than she must repudiate her entirely; she was certainly from the past! The suggestion of coyness was unbearable. Yet she and Douglas had achieved a brotherly friendliness almost immediately; and when he bounced cheerfully into bed, clutching her in a cheerful and companionable act of love that ignored the female which must be wooed, she undoubtedly loathed him from the bottom of her heart, an emotion which was as inevitably followed by a guilty affection. The situation was, as she jauntily and bleakly put it, unsatisfactory.

She therefore got out of bed and went into the living room, and knelt in front of the bookcase. Books. Words. There must surely be some pattern of words which would neatly and safely cage what she felt – isolate her emotions so that she could look at them from outside. For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves by literature. And the books which spoke most directly were those which had come out of Western Europe during the past hundred years, and of those, the personal and self-confessing. And so she knelt in front of a bookcase, in driving need of the right arrangement of words; for it is a remarkable fact that she was left unmoved by criticisms of the sort of person she was by parents, relations, preachers, teachers, politicians and the people who write for the newspapers; whereas an unsympathetic description of a character similar to her own in a novel would send her into a condition of anxious soul-searching for days. Which suggests that it is of no use for artists to insist, with such nervous disinclination for responsibility, that their productions are only ‘a divine play’ or ‘a reflection from the creative fires of irony’, etc., etc. while the Marthas of this world read and search with the craving thought, What does this say about my life? It will not do at all – but it must be admitted that there always came a point where Martha turned from the novelists and tale tellers to that section of the bookcase which was full of books called The Psychology of …, The Behaviour of …, A Guide to …, with the half-formulated thought that the novelists had not caught up with life; for there was no doubt that the sort of things she or Stella or Alice talked about found no reflection in literature – or rather, it was the attitudes of mind they took for granted that did not appear there, from which she deduced that women in literature were still what men, or the men-women, wished they were. In this other part of the bookcase, however, were no such omissions; she found what she was thinking and feeling described with an admirable lack of ambiguity. And yet, after hours of search among the complexities and subtleties of character, she was likely to return to her bedroom profoundly comforted, with some such resounding and original remark as ‘The young husband, therefore, must be careful to be specially understanding during the difficult weeks after marriage.’ For, since Douglas, the young husband in question, so logically insisted on relying upon the common sense she insisted on, she must with some part of herself take his place by being understanding, compassionate, etc. Martha was able to preserve an equilibrium because of an observing and satirical eye focused upon her own behaviour from a superior vantage point that was of course in no way influenced by that behaviour. She achieved quite extraordinary degrees of self-forbearance by this device.

In the bedroom the bedclothes still lying dragged back, clothes lay everywhere; the morning was slipping past and she was not dressed. And now this question of work confronted her. She had understood she was not alone in her position of a woman who disdained both housework and a ‘job’, but was vaguely expected by her husband – but only because of her own insistence on it – to be engaged in work of her own. Both Stella and Alice had claimed the state. Martha had heard their respective husbands speak to them in precisely the same tone of pride and satisfaction that Douglas used to her. Their wives were not as those of other men.

Feeling the distant pressure of this ‘work’, Martha dutifully went to the bathroom to equip herself to face it.

The bathroom was modern. A high window showed yet another angle of clear blue sky, together with the tops of the trees in the park. A large white bath filled with heavy greenish water where spangles of light quivered, white cabinets, white shelves – it was all a gleam of white enamel. Martha took off her nightdress, and was alone with her body. But it was not that calm and obedient body which had been so pleasant a companion. White it was, and solid and unmarked – but heavy, unresponsive; her flesh was uncomfortable on her bones. It burned and unaccountably swelled; it seemed to be pursuing ideas of its own. Inside the firm thick flesh a branch of bones which presumably remained unchanged: the thought was comforting. Martha looked down at her shape of flesh with the anxious thought that it was upon this that the marriage depended; for this, in fact, they – she and Douglas – had been allowed by society to shut themselves away in two high rooms with a bathroom attached. It was almost with the feeling of a rider who was wondering whether his horse would make the course that she regarded this body of hers, which was not only divided from her brain by the necessity of keeping open that cool and dispassionate eye, but separated into compartments of its own. Martha had after all been provided with a map of her flesh by ‘the book’, in which each area was marked by the name of a different physical sensation, so that her mind was anxiously aware, not only of a disconnected partner, a body, but of every part of it, which might or might not come up to scratch at any given occasion. There were moments when she felt she was strenuously held together by nothing more than an act of will. She was beginning to feel that this view of herself was an offence against what was deepest and most real in her. And again she thought of the simple women of the country, who might be women in peace, according to their instincts, without being made to think and disintegrate themselves into fragments. During those few weeks of her marriage Martha was always accompanied by that other, black woman, like an invisible sister simpler and wiser than herself; for no matter how much she reminded herself of statistics and progress, she envied her from the bottom of her heart. Without, of course having any intention of emulating her: loyalty to progress forbade it.

At that hour of the morning the sun fell in bright lances through the high window. Martha stood where they might fall on her flesh; her skin shone with a soft iridescence, the warmth kneaded together her unhappily disconnected selves, she began to dissolve into well-being. But first there was another ritual to be gone through. From the high cupboard she took down the cans and rubber tubes prescribed by Dr Stern and washed away the sweats of love in the rocking green water. Then she refilled the bath for what she thought of as her own bath. In this she wallowed, while the sunlight moved up over the sides of the bath and into the water, and she was whole and at peace again, floating in sunlight and water like a fish. She might have stayed there all morning, if there wasn’t this question of work; so she got out too soon, and thought with vague anxiety that those areas of tenderness on breasts and belly were no more than was to be expected after such an intensive love life. The thought of pregnancy crossed her mind; and was instantly dismissed. She felt that it was hard enough to keep Martha Quest, now Knowell, afloat on a sea of chaos and sensation without being pregnant as well – no, it was all too difficult. But her dress was tight; she must eat less, she told herself. Then she made tea and ate bread and butter with satisfaction at the thought that she was depriving herself of a meal.

And now it was ten in the morning, and her day was her own. Her work was free to start when it would. Martha went to the other room, and arranged herself comfortably on the divan. Or rather, it was with the intention of comfort, for the divan was a high, hard mattress on a native-made bed covered with loosely woven brown linen. Comfortable it was not; but it suitably supported the rest of the room, and Martha chose it because one might sit there without surrendering to the boundaries of a chair.

Into this little box of a room had flowed so many different items of furniture – and then out again. Now two small jolly chairs were set at neat angles on a clean green rug. A new table of light wood, surrounded by four chairs of the same, filled the opposite corner. The curtains, of that material known as folk-weave, whose rough grain held pockets of yellow light, were of the same brown she sat on. It was safe to say that the furniture that had flowed in and out of this room with the restless owners of it was indistinguishable from what filled it now. This thought gave Martha an undefined and craving hollowness, a sort of hunger. Yet everything was so practical and satisfactory! She looked at this room, from chair to window, from table to cupboard, and her eyes rested on nothing, but moved onwards hastily to the next article, as if this might provide that quality she was searching for.

It was not her flat; it belonged to that group of people who had seen her married. Almost at once her thoughts floated away from this place she sat in, these white boxes in the heart of the building, and slowly she tested various other shells for living in, offered to her in books. There were, after all, not so many of them; and each went with a kind of life she must dismiss instantly and instinctively. For instance, there was her father’s childhood in the English country cottage, honest simplicity with the bones of the house showing through lathe and plaster. Outside, a green and lush country – but tame, tamed; it would not do at all. Or – and this was a dip into the other stream that fed her blood – a tall narrow Victorian house, crammed with heavy dark furniture, buttoned and puffed and stuffed and padded, an atmosphere of things unsaid. If that country cottage could be acknowledged with a self-conscious smile, like a charmingly naive relation, this narrow dark house could not be admitted too close, it was too dangerous. And that house which was being built now everywhere, in every country of the world, the modern house, cosmopolitan, capable of being lifted up from one continent and dumped down in any other without exciting remark – no, certainly not, it was not to be thought of. So there remained the flat in which she was in fact now sitting? But she was not here at all; she did not live in it; she was waiting to be moved on somewhere …

About eleven in the morning she roused herself. For she knew that since both Stella and Alice were as free for their own work as she was, either or both of them were likely to drop in. She therefore put the kettle on and made sandwiches, prepared to spend the rest of the morning gossiping or – as pleasantly – alone.

By now the stores would have delivered by native messenger the groceries, meat and vegetables she had ordered by telephone; putting away these things interrupted work for a few minutes. Preparing a light lunch for Douglas could not take longer than half an hour. In the long interval before lunch, Martha drifted once more in front of her mirror, with the air of one prepared to be surprised by what she saw there. And from this, as a natural consequence of a long and dissatisfied examination of herself, she collected scissors and needle and material, and in a few moments she was at the table with the sewing machine. And now her look of vagueness had vanished; for the first time since she had risen that morning, she was centred behind what her hands did. She had the gift of running up sundowner frocks, dance dresses, out of a remnant from the sales, even discarded curtains or old-fashioned clothes that her mother had kept. She could transform them without effort – apart from the long, dreamy meditations which might fill half a week; for when a woman claims with disarming modesty that she has run up this dress for ten shillings, the long process of manipulating the material around her image of herself, those hours of creation, are not taken into account. Very few women’s time is money, even now. But while the clothes she made for after dark were always a success, it seemed her sureness of touch must desert her for the daytime. Her friends might exclaim loyally that her morning dress was absolutely wonderful, but it was only over the evening clothes that their voices held the authentic seal of envy. From which it follows?

The fact is that as soon as Douglas returned from the office for lunch, the day was already nearly at evening. For he returned finally at four; and after that, it was only a question of time before their eyes met on a query: at the Sports Club, everyone they knew would be delighted to see them, and afterwards there would be dancing there or at the hotels. It seemed as if the day was only a drab preliminary to the night, as if the pageant of sunset was meant only as a curtain-raiser to that moment when the lights sprung up along the streets, and with them a feeling of vitality and excitement. For in the hotels, the clubs and the halls, the orchestras struck up at eight and from every point in the town dance music was flowing like water from a concealed reservoir of nostalgia hidden below it. These were the nights of African winter, sharp, clear, cold, a high and luminous starlit dark lifting away from the low, warm glitter of city lights. In the white courts of the hotels, braziers offered a little futile heat to the cold dry air, and groups of young people formed and dissolved around them: there was no room for everyone inside, there was no room for all the people who needed, suddenly, to dance.

Night after night, they moved from the Club to the Plaza and on to McGrath’s; and the self-contained parties that began the evening expected to dissolve into a great whole as midnight approached. By midnight they were dancing as if they formed one soul; they danced and sang, mindless, in a half-light, they were swallowed up in the sharp, exquisite knowledge of loss and impending change that came over the seas and continents from Europe; and underneath it all, a rising tide of excitement that was like a poison. Uniforms were appearing here and there, and the wearers carried themselves with self-effacing modesty, as if on a secret mission, but conscious that all eyes in the room were fixed on them. The rumours were beginning. This regiment was going to be called up, they were going to conscript the whole population; but the question of conscription was surely an irrelevance when every young man in the town was thinking only of the moment when he could put on a uniform – and that before it was decided what the war was to be fought about. They were all longing to be swallowed up in something bigger than themselves; they were, in fact, already swallowed up. And since each war, before it starts, has the look of the last one, it did not matter how often stern and important young men assured hushed audiences that the world could not survive a month of modern warfare, they would all be bombed to pieces by new and secret weapons; it was necessary only for the orchestra to play ‘Tipperary’ or ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ – which they did on every conceivable occasion – for the entire gathering to become transformed into a congregation of self-dedicated worshippers of what their parents chose to remember of 1914.

In between dances, groups formed to discuss what was happening in Europe – or rather to exchange the phrases they had read that morning in the Zambesia News. The fact that this newspaper was contradicting itself with the calmest of assurance from day to day did not matter in the least; there was going to be a war, and night after night youth danced and sang itself into a condition of preparation for it. Their days and work, their loves and love-making, were nothing but a preparation for that moment when hundreds of them stamped and shouted in great circles to the thudding drums, felt less as sound than as their own pulses; this was the culmination of the day, the real meaning of it, the moment of surrender.

Then the music stopped suddenly and disastrously, the managers came forward bowing with strained politeness, ignoring the pleas and imprecations about their hard-heartedness – and the masses of young people streamed out into the still, frost-bound air, under the glitter of the Cross. It was at this point that Martha and Douglas were reminded that they were married; for ‘the gang’ – those of them that remained unbound to the girls whose one preoccupation it was to get married to the doomed as quickly as possible – went off shouting and stamping to the fun fair, which they kept going until early morning. The young married couples departed to one of the flats; and it was then that it became apparent there was a certain difference of viewpoint between husbands and wives. Stella, Alice, Martha, might have been part of that single yearning heart only half an hour before, but now they tended to fall silent, and even exchanged tolerant glances as their respective young men held forth on their plans for joining up. For it is a strain on any marriage, which after all is likely to begin with the belief that it must provide satisfaction and happiness for at least a few years, when one of the partners show signs of such restlessness to ‘rush off to the wars’ – as the girls acidly put it – the moment a war, any war, offers itself.

By the time Martha and Douglas reached home, reached the small, brightly lit, untidy bedroom, still littered with their day clothes and filled with the loud, sad, bitter music from the fun fair – for the wheel was still dragging its glittering load of cars in its circle – by this time, their elation was flagging, and there was a feeling of anticlimax. Now, drenched and submerged by the music, which it was impossible to keep out even with shut windows, Martha crept closer to Douglas and demanded the assurance that he did not really want to leave her; just as Stella and Alice were doing in their bedrooms. Douglas, manfully clasping Martha to him, murmured reassurances and looked over her head at the glitter of the wheel. He had not known how intolerably boring and empty his life was until there was a chance of escaping from it; and the more fiercely he determined not to be left out of things, the more tightly he held Martha and consoled her. He was holding a warm, confiding bundle of female flesh, he wished only to love her and be proud of her – for, above all, his pride was fed by her anxious demands for his love; but it was all no use. For, just as he was playing a role which was surely inconsistent with what he thought – the young hero off to the wars for adventure – so she began to speak in the ancient female voice which he found utterly irritating. After a long silence, during which he hoped she might have gone to sleep so that he might dream of adventure without guilt, a small, obstinate, ugly voice remarked that there would be wars so long as men were such babies. At this point he would loosen his grip and lie stiff beside her, and begin to explain in an official tone that surely, Matty, she must see they must be prepared … But it was no use; that official tone carries no conviction any longer, not even to the people who use it. She sniggered derisively; and he felt foolish.

They rolled apart and lay without touching; even apologizing in an offhand, hasty way if they happened to touch by accident. Douglas soon fell asleep. Martha could not sleep while the wheel turned and churned out music. She was in a mood of angry self-contempt for being infected by that dangerous undertow of excitement. For she had caught herself daydreaming of being a nurse, and no less than a ministering angel. But, alas, alas, we know all about that ministering angel; we know what she comes to in the end; and Martha could only return to thoughts of her father. She considered the undoubted fact that while Mr Quest might expatiate about the inefficiency and corruption of the leaders of his war, about the waste of life, the uselessness of the thing, while he might push into Martha’s hands books like All Quiet on the Western Front with an irascible command that she should read it and understand that that was war, while he might talk of that war with the bitter, savage consciousness of betrayal, yet there was always an undercurrent of burning regret. Then he had been alive. ‘The comradeship,’ he would exclaim, ‘the comradeship! I’ve never experienced that since!’ and then the terrible ‘It was the only time in my life I was really happy.’

When the wheel stilled at last Martha was able to sleep; and in the morning she was a different creature, easily able to withstand the insinuations of the ministering angel in the white coif, and prepared to look soberly at the alternatives – or rather at a single alternative, for the possibility of in fact settling down to a life of tea parties, sundowners, and in due course, children, was out of the question. She was trying to form the confusion of feelings that afflicted her to fit the sharp, clear view of life held by Solly and Joss – that was how she saw it. What she actually wanted, of course, was for some man to arrive in her life, simply take her by the hand, and lead her off into this new world. But it seemed he did not exist. And so she read the newspapers, and enjoyed the cynicism they produced in her. There was the Zambesia News, for instance, at that period in a state of such uneasy uncertainty. On the one hand it was reminding its readers about the atrocious nature of Hitler’s Germany; on the other it seemed to be suffering from a certain reluctance to do so. Hard to forget that these same atrocities, concentration camps and so on, had been ignored by the Zambesia News, as by its betters, until it was impossible to ignore them; while even now, like those great exemplars overseas, it showed real indignation only over Hitler’s capacity for absorbing other countries. Nor was she able to feel any less derisive when she read the great exemplars themselves, the newspapers from Home. As for that other, deeper knowledge, the pulse that really moved her, gained from her almost religious feeling for literature, a knowledge that amounted to a vision of mankind as nobility bound and betrayed – this was vanishing entirely beneath the pressure of enjoyable cynicism which was being fed by everything about her, and particularly by her own behaviour. For despite all her worried introspection, her determination to act rationally if only it was possible to find out what rational behaviour should be, the fact was that her sluggish days were nothing but a preparation for the first drink at sundown, which led to that grand emotional culmination at midnight when she joined the swinging circle of intoxicated dancers controlled by the thudding of the drums.

It was about six weeks after her marriage that all this confusion was shaken into a single current by the fact that she was violently sick one morning. Lethargy caused her to murmur consolingly that it must be the result of not sleeping enough – probably nothing but a hangover. But she succeeded in forgetting it.

Two days later, in Stella’s flat, after a dance, it happened that Maisie was there. She was wearing a dress of white tulle, frilled and flounced like a baby’s bassinette, and from it her plump shoulders, her lazy pretty face, emerged with a placid enjoyment of life which apparently had not been disturbed by the fact that she had become engaged to one of the young men who was training to be a pilot. She came to sit by Martha, murmuring vaguely, ‘Well, Matty …’ as if they saw each other every day. In fact they did, at dances but from across the room. She bent down to rip off a strip of dirty white from the bottom of her dress where it had been trodden on, rolled it up, and tossed it into the corner of the room; and sat looking speculatively at Martha, her fair face flushed and beaded with the heat. ‘You look fine, you don’t show yet,’ she remarked good-naturedly, looking frankly at Martha’s stomach.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Martha.

Maisie was startled. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized hastily. ‘I thought…’ Someone spoke to her, and she took the opportunity to get up and sit somewhere else. From time to time during the rest of the evening, she glanced towards Martha, but with the determination not to catch her eye. She left before Martha did, arm in arm with her pilot, including Martha with the rest of the room in a large, vague smile of farewell.

Afterwards Martha said indignantly to Douglas that it was the limit, people were saying she was pregnant. To which he replied a little awkwardly that some of the lads from the Club had suggested this was the case.

‘Do you mean to say they think we got married because we had to?’ she exclaimed, furious; for she felt this was an insult towards them as free beings able to do as they wished.

But he misunderstood her indignation, and said, laughing, ‘After all, Matty, since most of the people who get married get married because they have to …’

She laughed, but she was very uneasy.

Again she forgot about it, until there was a letter from her mother, which immediately caught her attention because of its casual tone. At the end of it was an inquiry as to how she felt. Again she burned with indignation – there was a conspiracy against her!

For some days, there was no reason to think of it; then she got a charming letter from Mrs Talbot, which had the same hurried apologetic manner as her speech. She asked why Matty did not drop in to see her one morning, she would so like to have a proper talk.

The letters were always on thick white paper, in a fine-pointed black hand; they gave an impression of casual elegance which made Martha curious, for never had she known anyone whose letters were not utilitarian. The letters, like Mrs Talbot herself, spoke of an existence altogether remote from this colonial town. But what was this life which Mrs Talbot seemed so anxious Martha should share? And what was this proper talk?

‘We have supper or spend the evening with them at least two or three times a week,’ Martha pointed out to Douglas, quite bewildered.

‘Oh, go and see her, Matty, she’ll be pleased.’

Martha had discovered that Mrs Talbot was not, as one might infer from her appearance, about thirty-five, but over sixty; she was very rich, but in a way seemed to apologize for the unpleasant fact that there was such a thing as money in the world at all. During those evenings, she would take Douglas – apologizing first – into an inner room, and they would discuss investments and properties. ‘There are no flies on Mrs Talbot,’ he said appreciatively. And then, always: ‘She’s an absolute marvel, a wonder! Why, Matty, would you think she was a day over thirty. Isn’t she terrific?’

‘But Elaine …’ pointed out Martha jealously.

‘Oh, Elaine’s all right, she’s a nice kid,’ said Douglas, dismissing her.

That Elaine should be thought of as a nice kid made Martha laugh – it was easier to tolerate the amazing Mrs Talbot. For at the bottom of an uneasy disapproval of that lady was Martha’s physical arrogance – the pride of the very young. She was young and whole and comely; secretly she felt a fierce, shuddering repulsion for the old and unsightly. For a brief ten years – she was convinced that thirty was the end of youth and good looks – she was allowed by nature to be young and attractive. For Mrs Talbot to be beautiful at sixty was not fair.

‘She can’t be sixty,’ she had protested hopefully. But she was.

Martha told Douglas that she didn’t want to have a proper talk with Mrs Talbot; but on the morning after getting the letter she found herself disinclined for that ‘work’, and set off on impulse for Mrs Talbot’s house. It was half past nine; the morning was well advanced for a society which began work at eight. Martha walked through the park and along the avenues: the house was one of the delightful houses of the older town. It was almost hidden from the street by trees and flowering bushes. The door opened immediately from the garden path, and not off a wide veranda. The house had an introspective, inward-turning look because of this discreet black door with its shining door knocker. Mrs Talbot’s house, like herself, could not help suggesting the England one knew from novels. The door might be flanked on either side by poinsettias, ragged pointed scraps of scarlet silk fluttering on naked, shining silken stems, but one felt they were there only to suggest an ironical contrast.

Martha rang, and was admitted by a native servant, and shown into a small side room kept for just this purpose. She summoned her memories of what she had read, and then saw, as she had expected, a tray on a stand, littered with visiting cards. At this it occurred to her that the phrase ‘dropping in’ might have a different meaning to Mrs Talbot than it had for herself and her friends. Before she could recover herself, Mr Talbot came in. She had seen very little of him; he went to the Club in the evenings when his wife entertained. He was wearing a dark silk dressing gown, was tall and heavily built, with a dark, heavy face, and he came stooping forward with his hand outstretched, apologizing for his dressing gown. She was embarrassed because of her thoughts about him. She did not like him. She did not like the way he would come into his wife’s drawing room, on his way out, a man paying forced tribute to women’s amusements; besides, he suggested a spy – his look at Mrs Talbot always made her uncomfortable. Finally, he was an old man, and distasteful because he had a sardonic, intimate manner with her that made it impossible to dismiss him so easily. He was forcing her now to think of him as a man, and she stammered a little as she said she had come to see Mrs Talbot. He said very politely that he didn’t think his wife was up yet, but that Martha might care to wait?

She said at once, no – of course not; she was only on a walk, and she would come up another time.

He held her eyes with his while he inquired if she would like to see Elaine.

Martha said yes, she would like to very much.

Mr Talbot stood aside for her to precede him out of the door, and she felt uncomfortable as she passed him, as if he might suddenly put out his hands and grasp her. In the passage, he indicated the drawing-room door, and apologized again for his dressing gown. Then he opened another door; Martha caught a glimpse of a large brown-leather chair, a pipe smoking on a small table, a litter of newspapers; he went inside, having held her eyes again in another direct glance.

She went into the drawing room, feeling its contrast with the brown masculine study he had gone into. It was large, low-ceilinged, rather dim. It was carpeted from wall to wall with a deep rosy, flowing softness that gave under her feet. It was full of furniture that Martha instinctively described as antiques. It was a charming room, it was like an Edwardian novel; and one could not be in it without thinking of the savage country outside. Martha kept looking out of the windows which were veiled in thin pale stuffs, as if to assure herself this was in fact Africa. It might have vanished, she felt, so strong was the power of this room to destroy other realities.

Elaine came forward, from a small sunny veranda enclosed by glass and filled with plants in such a way that it suggested a conservatory. Elaine was wearing a loose linen smock, and she was doing the flowers.

She asked Martha, with charming formality, if she would like to come to the sun porch, and Martha followed her. There was a small grass chair, and Martha sat on it and watched Elaine fitting pink and mauve sweet peas into narrow silver vases like small fluted trumpets.

Elaine said that her mother was never up before eleven, and accompanied this remark by a small smile which did not invite shared amusement, but rather expressed an anxious desire that no one should find it remarkable. Elaine, standing by her trestle, with her copper jugs of water, her shears, her rows of sweet peas and roses, her heavy gauntlets, had the air of a fragile but devoted handmaid to her mother’s way of life. Martha watched her and found herself feeling protective. This girl should be spared any unpleasantness which might occur outside the shining glass walls of the sun porch. Her fragility, her air of fatigue, the blue shadows under her eyes, removed her completely from any possibility of being treated by Martha as an equal. Martha found herself censoring her speech; in a few minutes they were making conversation about gardening. Then a bell shrilled from close by, and Elaine hastily excused herself, laid down her flowers, and went to a door which led to Mrs Talbot’s bedroom.

In a few minutes she came back to say that her mother was awake and was delighted to hear that Martha had come to see her. If dear Matty did not mind being treated so informally – and here Elaine again offered a small anxious smile, as if acknowledging at least the possibility of amusement – would she like to come into the bedroom? Martha went to the door, expecting Elaine to come with her; but Elaine remained with her flowers, a pale effaced figure in her yellow smock, drenched in the sunlight that was concentrated through the blazing glass of the sun porch.

Martha’s eyes were full of sunlight, and in this room it was nearly dark. She stood blinded just inside the door, and heard Mrs Talbot murmuring affectionate greetings from the shadows. She stumbled forward, sat on a chair that was pushed under her, and then saw that Mrs Talbot was up and in a dressing gown, a dim figure agitated by the delight this visit gave her, but even more agitated by apologies because she was not dressed.

‘If I’d known you were coming, Matty darling … But I’m so terribly lazy, I simply can’t get out of bed before twelve. It was so sweet of you to come so soon when I asked you – but we old women must be allowed our weaknesses …’

Martha was astounded by that ‘old women’; but there was no suggestion of coyness in it. She tried to peer through the dark, for she was longing to see how Mrs Talbot must look before she had created herself for her public. All she could see was a slender figure in an insinuating rustle of silks, perched on the bed. Mrs Talbot lit a cigarette; almost at once the red spark was crushed out again; Martha saw that this flutter was due simply to a routine being upset.

‘I rang up my hairdresser when I heard your voice, I told him not to come this morning. I’m sure it won’t hurt me to show an inch or so of grey just for once. When you reach the age of going grey, Matty darling, don’t be silly and dye your hair. It’s an absolute martyrdom. If I had only known …’

Martha was now able to see better. Mrs Talbot’s face came out of the shadow in a splash of white. It was some kind of a face mask. ‘Shall I go out till you are dressed?’ she suggested awkwardly.

But Mrs Talbot rose with a swirl of silk and said, ‘If you don’t mind it all, Matty, I’d adore you to stay.’ There was a nervous gasp of laughter; she was peering forward to see Martha, to find out her reaction. It occurred to Martha that the apology, the deference, was quite sincere and not a pose, as she had assumed. Mrs Talbot’s nervousness was that of a duchess who had survived the French Revolution and timidly continued to wear powdered curls in the privacy of her bedroom because she did not feel herself in the new fashions.

Martha saw the slight figure rise, go to the window, and tug at a cord. At once the room was shot with hazy yellow light. Mrs Talbot was wearing a shimmering grey garment with full flounced sleeves; she was covered in stark-white paste from collarbones to hairline, and from this mask her small eyes glimmered out through black holes. Her pale smooth hair was looped loosely on her neck; there was no sign of grey. She sat before a large dressing table and dabbed carefully at her face with tufts of cotton wool. The room was long, low, subdued, with shell-coloured curtains, dove-grey carpet, and furniture of light, gleaming wood which looked as if it had been embroidered; it had a look of chaste withdrawal from the world; and Mrs Talbot was a light, cool, uncommitted figure, even when she was poised thus on her stool, leaning forward into her mirror, her submissive charm momentarily lost in a focus of keen concentration. Her skin was emerging patchily from under the white paste, and she muttered, ‘In a minute, Matty.’

Soon she rose and went to an old-fashioned washstand, where a graceful ewer stood in a shining rose-patterned basin. It was clear that taps running hot and cold would be too much of a modern note in this altar to the past. Mrs Talbot splashed water vigorously over her face, while the air was pervaded by the odour of violets. In the meantime Martha, still examining every detail of the room, had noticed the bed. It was very big – too big, she thought involuntarily, for Mrs Talbot. Then she saw it was a double bed, with two sets of pillows. She must readmit Mr Talbot, whom she had again forgotten. This bed, untidy and sprawling, gave Martha the most uncomfortable feeling of something unseemly: it was, she saw, because a man’s pyjamas lay where they had been flung off, on the pillow. There were of maroon-striped silk, and strongly suggested the person of Mr Talbot, as did a jar of pipes on the bed table. So uncomfortable did this make Martha that she turned away from the bed, feeling her face hot. Mrs Talbot, however, returning from her ablutions, could not be aware of how Martha was feeling, for she carelessly rolled these pyjamas together and tucked them under the pillow, observing, ‘Men are always so untidy.’ Then she sat herself on the edge of the bed, with the air of one prepared to devote any amount of time to friendship.

And now they must talk. There would follow the proper talk. Martha saw the gleam of affection in Mrs Talbot’s eyes and was asking herself, Does she really like me? If so, why? But Mrs Talbot was talking about Douglas: how he was such a dear boy, how he was always so clever and helpful, and with such a sense for these horrid, horrid financial things; and then – impulsively – how lovely it was that he had married such a sweet girl. At this Martha involuntarily laughed; and was sorry when she saw the look of surprise on this delightful lady’s face. She rose from her chair and began walking about the room, touching the curtains, which slipped like thick silken skin through her fingers, laying a curious finger on the wood of the dressing table, which had such a gleaming softness that it was strange it should oppose her flesh with the hardness of real wood. Mrs Talbot watched without moving. There was a small, shrewd smile on her lips.

‘Are you shocked, Matty, at all this fuss?’ she asked a little plaintively; and when Martha turned quickly to see what she could mean, she continued quickly, ‘I know it all looks so awful until it’s tidied up; Elaine is so sweet, she comes in and tidies everything for me, and then this is a lovely room, but I know it must look horrid now, with face creams and cotton wool everywhere. The trouble is …’ Here she tailed off, with a helpless shrug which suggested that there was nothing she would like better than to relapse into the comfortable condition of being an old woman, if only she knew how. Martha involuntarily glanced at Mr Talbot’s side of the bed and then blushed as she guiltily caught Mrs Talbot’s eyes. But it was clear that this was one thing she could not understand in Martha; she looked puzzled.

After a short pause she said, ‘I hope you’ll be friends with Elaine, Matty. She’s such a sweet thing, so sensitive, and she doesn’t make friends easily. Sometimes I feel it is my fault – but we’ve always been so much together, and I don’t know why it is, but …’

Now Martha’s look was far more hostile than she had intended; and Mrs Talbot’s thick white skin coloured evenly. She looked like an embarrassed young girl, in spite of the faint look of wear under her eyes. Martha could not imagine herself being friends with that gentle, flower-gathering maiden; she could not prevent a rather helpless but ironical smile, and she looked direct at Mrs Talbot as if accusing her of being wilfully obtuse.

Mrs Talbot cried out, ‘But you’re so artistic, Matty, and you would have so much in common.’

Martha saw tears in her eyes. ‘But I’m not at all artistic,’ she observed obstinately – though of course with a hidden feeling that she might prove to be yet, if given the chance!

‘But all those books you read, and then anyone can see …’ Mrs Talbot was positively crying out against the fate that persisted in making Martha refuse to be artistic. ‘And Elaine is so sweet, no one knows as well as I do how sweet she is and – but sometimes I wonder if she’s strong enough to manage things the way all you clever young things do. You are all so sure of yourselves!’

Here Martha could not help another rueful smile, which checked Mrs Talbot. She was regarding Martha with extraordinary shrewdness. Martha, for her part, was waiting for the proper talk to begin; what was it that Mrs Talbot wanted to say to her?

Mrs Talbot sighed, gave the shadow of a shrug, and went back to her dressing table. Here she applied one cream after another, with steady method, and continued to talk, in between pauses for screwing up her mouth or stretching her eyelids smooth. ‘I would so much like Elaine to get married. If she could only get properly married, and I needn’t worry any more … There is no greater happiness, Matty, none! She meets so few people, always my friends, and she is so shy. And you meet so many people, Matty, all you young people are so brave and enterprising.’

For the life of her Martha could not see Elaine with the wolves of the Club, with the boys, the kids and the fellows. ‘I don’t think Elaine would like the sort of men we meet,’ observed Martha; and she caught another shrewd glance. She felt there were things she ought to be understanding, but she was quite lost.

‘There’s your Douglas,’ said Mrs Talbot, a trifle reproachfully. ‘He’s such a nice boy.’

Surely, wondered Martha, Mrs Talbot could not have wanted Douglas for Elaine? The idea was preposterous – even brutal.

‘So kind,’ murmured Mrs Talbot, ‘so helpful, so clever with everything.’

And now Martha was returned, simply by the incongruity of Douglas and Elaine, into her private nightmare. She could not meet a young man or woman without looking around anxiously for the father and mother; that was how they would end, there was no escape for them. She could not meet an elderly person without wondering what the unalterable influences had been that had created them just so. She could take no step, perform no action, no matter how apparently new and unforeseen, without the secret fear that in fact this new and arbitrary thing would turn out to be part of the inevitable process she was doomed to. She was, in short, in the grip of the great bourgeois monster, the nightmare repetition. It was like the obsession of the neurotic who must continuously be touching a certain object or muttering a certain formula of figures in order to be safe from the malevolent powers, like the person who cannot go to bed at night without returning a dozen times to see if the door is locked and the fire out. She was thinking now, But Mrs Talbot married Mr Talbot, then Elaine is bound to marry someone like Mr Talbot, there is no escaping it; then what connection is there between Douglas and Mr Talbot that I don’t see?

But Mrs Talbot was talking, ‘I’ll show you something, Matty – I would like to show you, I don’t everyone.’

Mrs Talbot was searching hurriedly through her drawers. She pulled out a large, leather-framed photograph. Martha came forward and took it, with a feeling that the nightmare was being confirmed. It was of a young man in uniform, a young man smiling direct out of the frame, with a young, sensitive, rueful look. ‘Hardly anybody knows,’ Mrs Talbot cried agitatedly, ‘but we were engaged, he was killed in the war – the other war, you know – he was so sweet, you don’t know. He was so nice.’ Her lips quivered. She turned away her face and held out her hand for the photograph.

Martha handed it back and returned to her chair. She was thinking, Well, then, so Elaine must get engaged to that young man; is it conceivable that Mrs Talbot sees Douglas like that?

But more: her mother, Mrs Quest, had been engaged to such another charming young man. This boy, weak-faced and engaging, smiled up still from a small framed photograph on her mother’s dressing table, a persistent reminder of that love which Mr Quest could scarcely resent, since the photograph was half submerged, in fact practically invisible, among a litter of things which referred to her life with him. Martha had even gone so far as to feel perturbed because this boy had not appeared in her own life; she had looked speculatively at Douglas with this thought – but no, weak and charming he was not, he could not take that role.

She sat silent in her chair, frowning; when Mrs Talbot looked at her, it was to see an apparently angry young woman, and one very remote from her. She hesitated, came forward, and kissed Martha warmly on her cheek. ‘You must forgive me,’ she said. ‘We are a selfish lot, we old women – and you probably have troubles of your own. We forget …’ Here she hesitated. Martha was looking through her, frowning. She continued guiltily: ‘And to have children – that’s the best of all, I wish I had a dozen, instead of just one. But Mr Talbot …’ She glanced hastily at Martha and fell silent.

There was a very long silence. Martha was following the nightmare to its conclusion: Well then, so Elaine will find just such a charming young man, and there’s a war conveniently at hand so that he can get killed, and then Elaine will marry another Mr Talbot, and for the rest of her life, just like all these old women, she’ll keep a photograph of her real and great love in a drawer with her handkerchiefs.

‘There’s nothing nicer than children, and you look very well, Matty,’ said Mrs Talbot suddenly.

Martha emerged from her dream remarking absently, ‘I’m always well.’ Then she heard what Mrs Talbot had said; it seemed to hang on the air waiting for her to hear it. She thought tolerantly, She’s heard a rumour that I’m pregnant. She smiled at Mrs Talbot and remarked, ‘I shan’t have children for years yet – damn it, I’m only nineteen myself.’

Mrs Talbot suppressed an exclamation. She surveyed Martha up and down, a rapid, skilled glance, and then, colouring, said, ‘But, my dear, it’s so nice to have your children when you’re young. I wish I had. I was old when she was born. Of course, people say we are like sisters, but it makes a difference. Have them young, Matty – you won’t regret it.’ She leaned forward with an urgent affectionate smile and continued, after the slightest hesitation, ‘You know, we old women get a sixth sense about these things. We know when a woman is pregnant, there’s a look in the eyes.’ She put a cool hand to Martha’s cheek and turned her face to the light. Narrowing her eyes so that for a moment her lids showed creases of tired flesh, she looked at Martha with a deep impersonal glance and nodded involuntarily, dropping her hand.

Martha was angry and uncomfortable; Mrs Talbot at this moment seemed to her like an old woman: the utterly impersonal triumphant gleam of the aged female, the old witch, was coming from the ageless jewelled face.

‘I can’t be pregnant,’ she announced. ‘I don’t want to have a baby yet.’

Mrs Talbot let out a small resigned sigh. She rose and said in a different voice, ‘I think I shall have my bath, dear.’

‘I’ll go,’ said Martha quickly.

‘You and Douggie’ll be coming to dinner tomorrow?’

‘We’re looking forward to it very much.’

Mrs Talbot was again the easy hostess; she came forward in a wave of grey silk and kissed Martha. ‘You’ll be so happy,’ she murmured gently. ‘So happy, I feel it.’

Martha emitted a short ungracious laugh. ‘But, Mrs Talbot!’ she protested – then stopped. She wanted to put right what she felt to be an impossibly false position; honesty demanded it of her. She was not what Mrs Talbot thought her; she had no intention of conforming to this perfumed silken bullying, as she most deeply felt it to be. She could not go on. The appeal in the beautiful eyes silenced her. She was almost ready to aver that she wanted nothing more than to be happy with the dear boy Douglas, for Mrs Talbot; to have a dozen children, for Mrs Talbot; to take morning tea with Elaine every day, and see her married to just such another as Douglas.

Mrs Talbot, arm lightly placed about her waist, gently pressed her to the door. She opened it with one hand, then gave Martha a small squeeze, and smiled straight into her eyes, with such knowledge, such ironical comprehension, that Martha could not bear it. She stiffened; and Mrs Talbot dropped her arm at once.

‘Elaine, dear,’ said Mrs Talbot apologetically past Martha to the sun porch, ‘if you’d like to run my bath for me.’

Elaine was now painting the row of pink and mauve sweet peas in the fluted silver vases. ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mrs Talbot delightedly, moving forward quickly to look at the water colour. She leaned over, kissing Elaine’s hair. The girl moved slightly, then remained still under her mother’s restraining arm. ‘Isn’t this lovely, Matty, isn’t she gifted?’

Martha looked at the pretty water colour and said it was beautiful. Elaine’s glance at her now held a real embarrassment; but she remained silent until her mother had gained her meed of admiration.

Then Mrs Talbot waved goodbye and returned to her bedroom; and Elaine rose, and said, ‘Excuse me, Matty, I’ll just do Mummy’s bath – she likes me to do it, rather than the boy, you know.’ Martha looked to see if there was any consciousness here of being exploited, but no: there was nothing but charming deference.

They said goodbye, and Martha, as she turned away, saw Elaine knocking at the door that led into Mrs Talbot’s bedroom. ‘Can I come in, Mummy?’

Martha walked away down the street, thinking of that last deep glance into her eyes. Nonsense, she thought; it’s nothing but old women’s nonsense, old wives’ superstition. There seemed nothing anomalous in referring to the youthful Mrs Talbot thus at this moment. ‘How can there be a look in my eyes?’

When she reached home, it was nearly lunchtime. The butcher’s boy had left a parcel of meat. For some reason she was unable to touch it. The soggy, bloody mass turned her stomach – she was very sick. But this was nonsense, she told herself sternly. She forced herself to untie the wet parcel, take out the meat, and cook it. She watched Douglas eating it, while she made a great joke of her weakness. Douglas remarked with jocularity that she must be pregnant. She flew into a temper.

‘All the same, Matty, it wouldn’t do any harm just to drop along to old Stern, would it? We don’t want kids just when the war’s starting, do we?’

That afternoon, since Stella was not there to gain priority for her, she sat out her time of waiting with the other women; and in due course found herself with Dr Stern. He gave her instructions to undress. She undressed and waited. Dr Stern, whose exquisite tact had earned him the right to have his waiting room perpetually filled with women who depended on him, explored the more intimate parts of Martha’s body with rubber-clothed fingers, and at the same time made conversation about the international situation. Finally he informed Martha that he did not think she was pregnant; she might set her mind at rest.

He than made the mistake of complimenting her on her build, which was of the best kind for easy child-bearing. Martha was stiff-lipped and resentful and did not respond. He quickly changed his tone, saying that she needn’t think about such things yet; and suggested that there was no reason why she should be pregnant if she had been carrying out his instructions? The query dismayed Martha; but she had decided to remember that he had been definite about it.

When she had left, he remarked to his new nurse that it was just as well for the medical profession that laymen had such touching faith in them. The nurse laughed dutifully and summoned the next patient.

Martha walked home very quickly; she could not wait to tell Douglas that everything was all right.