Читать книгу A Proper Marriage - Doris Lessing - Страница 9

Officially pronounced not pregnant, Martha determined to use her freedom sensibly. But if there was a weight off her mind, her flesh remained uncomfortable. She might say that she would settle her future once and for all; but it was not so easy: she was feeling – but how did she feel? For no matter how many charts of her emotions and flesh she may be armed with, it is not so easy for a very young woman, newly married, to discriminate between this sensation and that. Her body, newly licensed for use by society, stimulated – as Dr Stern had so humorously and succinctly put it – three times a day after meals, was in any case a web of sensations. Buzzings, burnings, swarmings: she was like a hive. And as for her tendency to feel dizzy or queasy in the mornings – what could one expect if one slept so little, ate so erratically, and, it must be confessed, drank such a lot? That is, regarded statistically, she drank a lot. But not more than everybody else. Still, from six in the evening until four the next morning she was unlikely to be without a glass in her hand, or at least, without a glass standing somewhere near. Drunk, no; one did not get drunk. A person who drinks too much is he who drinks more than the people around him. Besides, she was persistently tipsy as much from excitement as from alcohol; for the wave of elation which rose as the sun went down was as much the expectation of another brilliant, festive dancing night where the braziers burned steadily into the dawn. So Martha shifted the load of worry about how uneasy and unpredictable she felt on to how she was behaving, which she would have been the first to describe as idiotic. But then, it would not last long: the very essence of those exciting weeks was nostalgia for something doomed.

The town was restless with rumour. The voice of authority, the Zambesia News, faithfully reflecting the doubts and confusions of the unfortunate British Government, left ordinary people with no resource but to besiege the men in the know with questions. Everyone had some such person to whom they repaired for information. The young Knowells, for instance, had Colonel Brodeshaw; everyone knew a minor member of Parliament or a big businessman. Whenever Douglas returned from the world of offices, bars and clubs, it was with some final and authoritative statement, such as that conscription was imminent, or that people wouldn’t stand for it; or that the British Government was about to declare war on Hitler the next weekend, or that – and this was very persistent during those weeks of June and July – Hitler and the British Government would together attack Stalin, thus ridding the world of what was clearly its main enemy.

But alas for the glamour and glory of great public events, their first results, regardless of how one may see them afterwards, ‘in perspective’, as the phrase is, tend to show themselves in the most tawdry and insignificant ways. In this case, the business of collecting the latest news proved so fascinating that young husbands preferred the bars and clubs of the city to returning home for lunch with their wives.

These three young wives reacted to this state of affairs according to their respective temperaments. Alice, after three or four days of nervous speculation over her apologetic Willie, arranged that she would meet him every day at one o’clock, and go with him on his rounds; which meant, of course, that the specifically male establishments were now out of bounds. But it was not her fault, she remarked, with her vague good-natured giggle, if men were so silly as to exclude women. As for Stella, it was all at once made evident to everyone that she had a mother. A rich widow, she was living in the suburbs. Stella, like all these young women, had fought the good fight for independence, had routed her mother from her affairs as a question of principle, no less; but now, like the heroine of a music-hall joke, she rushed back to her. At five in the evening, when Andrew went home to find his wife so that they might start on the evening round of dancing and drinking, she was not there; he had to drive out to the suburbs, where he found these two antagonists drinking tea and treating him with a calculated coolness, a weapon taken from Stella’s mother’s armoury of weapons against men. But this time it did not work. After some days, Andrew remarked with calm Scotch common sense; ‘Well, Stella, it’s not a bad idea, your having lunch with your mother. It means you’re not alone all day.’ Stella was doomed to a life always much less dramatic than she felt it was entitled to be.

As for Martha, whose first fierce tenet in life was hatred for the tyranny of the family, naturally she was barred from these contemptible female ruses. It was she who, after Douglas had rung up twice at lunchtime to say that he was just running off with the boys for a drink, and did she mind if he was a little late, suggested that it would be more interesting for him if he did not come home at all. He was surprised and grateful that his wife set no bounds to his freedom. It was an additional reason to be proud of his acquisition. But later in the evening, when he came home, there was perhaps a slightly resentful look on his face, as Martha inquired where he had gone, and whom he had met – of course with the friendliest interest and without any suspicion of jealousy. She would then listen intently, making him retrace his conversations and arguments by the sheer force of her interest in them. It was almost as if she had been there in his place; almost as if she were putting the words into his mouth for future conversations. Tyranny, it seems, is not so easily legislated against.

Besides, Douglas, like all these other young men with wives, wore during these weeks a steady, if faint, look of guilt. It had become known that a dozen of the richer young men of the city had flown Home to England to offer their services to the Air Force. Douglas, Willie and Andrew, late at night, made reckless with alcohol, discussed hopelessly how they might do the same. But if it turned out there would be no war after all? They would be without jobs, without money; they were not the sons of rich fathers. But of course, if they had been free – if they had no responsibilities … Even alcohol, even the relaxed and intimate hour of four in the morning by the coffee stalls, could not release that thought into words. But the wives, listening with consciously sardonic patience, heard the sigh after lost freedom in every gap in the conversation.

‘Men,’ remarked Stella to Martha, with charged womanly scorn, ‘are nothing but babies.’

Martha disliked her own most intimate voice in Stella’s mouth. But she was wrestling with a degree of contempt for Douglas that dismayed her. She could not afford it. She pushed it away. These young men, so eagerly discussing the prospects of being in at the kill, seemed to her like lumpish schoolboys. She despised them quite passionately: the nightly-recurring sight of Douglas, Willie and Andrew behaving like small boys wistful after adventure made her seethe with impatient contempt.

To Stella she said angrily, ‘If they knew they were going to fight for something, if they cared at all …’

To which Stella replied indignantly, after the briefest possible pause, switching course completely in a way which could hardly strike her as odd, since it was no more than the authorities did from day to day, ‘But it’s our duty to squash Communism.’

The Mathews’ man in the know was an upper secretary in the establishment of Mr Player; fed from this source, Stella was a well of good reasons why Communism should be instantly suppressed. It had flickered into Martha’s mind that Andrew had talked of getting a job in the Player offices. She instantly dismissed the suspicion. It was one of her more pleasant but less efficient characteristics that she was unable to believe in that degree of cynicism from anyone. For naturally she persisted in believing that people should be conscious of their motives. Someone has remarked that there is no such thing as a hypocrite. In order to believe that, one must have reached the age to understand how persistently one has not been a hypocrite oneself.

Martha devoted herself to explaining to Stella how intolerable it was that she as a Jewess should have a good word to say for Hitler; while Stella, torn between persistent suspicions that there might be something in the rumours that Hitler ill-treated Jews and her terror that Andrew might not conform to Mr Player’s qualifications for a minor administrator, defended the Third Reich as an ally for Britain. That is, she continued to do so more or less consistently, interspersed with short periods when someone else’s man in the know had supplied other authoritative information sufficiently persuasive.

It had reached the end of July. A second batch of young men left for England. It caused an extraordinary resentment. That there were no class distinctions of any sort in this society was an axiom; one was not envious of people who sent their children to university, or even – in extreme cases – to finishing schools in Europe; it was all a question of luck. But for some days now the young men who could not afford air fares, or to gamble with their jobs, spoke with a rancour which was quite new. Opinion seethed, and brought forth a scheme by which a sufficient number of young men should besiege their heads of department and employers to give them time off, so that they should be ready and trained for instant service when war started. This admirable scheme came to nothing, because the authorities in Britain had not yet made up their minds how the colonies were to be used. There was only one principle yet decided, and this was that the men from the colonies were clearly all officer material, because of lives spent in ordering the black population about. The phrase used was, ‘They are accustomed to positions of authority.’ It would be a waste for Douglas, Willie and Andrew to take the field as mere cannon fodder. But although the wave of determination disintegrated against various rocks of this nature, for at least a week the young men in question thought and spoke of little else. As a result, the women turned over various ideas of their own.

They were all sitting late one night in the Burrells’ flat, which it is unnecessary to describe, since it was identical with the Knowells’ and the Mathews’ flats, when Alice remarked, with a nervous laugh, that it was no good Willie’s thinking of dashing off to the wars, because she thought she was pregnant.

Willie was sitting next to her as usual; he squeezed his large sunburnt hand on her shoulder, and laughed, giving her his affectionate protective look. ‘It’s all very well,’ persisted Alice. ‘Oh, well, to hell with everything.’ And she reached for a cigarette.

No one took it seriously. But a week later, when the Burrells were rung up to join a party for dancing, Alice remarked in a calm way that she had no time for dancing for a couple of days, because she had to do something about this damned baby. Douglas, returning from the office, reported to Martha that he had met Willie in the bar and Willie said it was very serious, no laughing matter at all. Stella, all delighted animation, rang up to offer her services. But Alice, the trained nurse, was vaguely reassuring. She was quite all right, she said.

Stella was offended, and showed it by saying that it was stupid to get pregnant when – But this sentence flowed into ‘And, in any case, she’s only doing it to keep Willie from being called up.’ Martha said indignantly that anyone would think Alice was doing it on purpose. To which Stella replied with her rich, shrewd laugh. Martha was annoyed because she was associated with a sex which chose such dishonest methods for getting its own way.

‘I bet she’s not really doing anything about getting rid of it,’ said Stella virtuously. But one felt her energies were not really behind this indignation.

She and Martha were secure in a plan of their own. Martha had suggested they might go and take a course in Red Cross. It was on a day when the newspaper had warned them that an enemy (left undefined, like a blank in an official form to be filled in later as events decided) might sweep across Africa in a swastikaed or – the case might be – hammer-and-sickled horde. In this case, the black population, always ungrateful to the British colonists, would naturally side with the unscrupulous invaders, undermined as they were by sedition-mongers, agitators and Fabian influences from England. The prospect brightened the eyes of innumerable women; one should be prepared; and in due time Red Cross courses were announced.

‘Matty and I are thinking of joining an ambulance unit,’ said Stella demurely. ‘After all, we won’t have any responsibilities here if you go on active service, will we?’

Martha had dropped this suggestion in passing, just as she had tentatively suggested the Red Cross course, only to find it taken up and moulded by Stella. And the uneasy silence of their husbands contributed to their perseverance. At ten o’clock one morning, Martha and Stella were in their seats for the first of these lectures.

It was a large room filled with rows of school desks. They were crowded with about sixty women, who must be housewives or leisured daughters at this hour of the day. The lecturer was an elderly woman, fat, red-faced, with jolly little black eyes. Under the edges of her flowing coif showed flat scooplike curls of iron-grey hair, gummed against her cheeks; for, unlike the nuns whose garb this so much resembled, this woman was a female still – those curls proclaimed it. The masses of her flesh were tightly confined in glazed white, and supported on the large splayed feet which were the reward of her work.

This, then, was Sister Dorothy Dalraye, known for the last thirty years to her friends and colleagues, now numbering several thousands, as Doll. She introduced herself with the cheerful cry of ‘Well, girls, since we’re all going to be together for six weeks, you must call me Sister Doll!’ And proceeded to a series of bright remarks, infusing into her animated black eyes a look of insinuating suggestiveness, so that her audience instinctively listened as if some doubtful joke was imminent. But no: it appeared her innuendoes referred to the coming war – or rather, the enemy who was as yet unnamed. Martha unravelled her ambiguities to mean that she, unlike Stella, hoped to fight Hitler and not Stalin; at last she made some references to ‘the Hun’ which settled the matter. That this was a memory from the last war was made clear when she called it, just as Mr Quest might do, ‘the Great Unmentionable’, but without his bitter note of betrayal. Sister Doll had fought alongside the boys during the Great Unmentionable, and on various fronts. She named them. She produced anecdote after anecdote, apparently at random. But Martha slowly realized that this was not at all as casual as it looked. This gathering of some sixty women had ceased to be individuals. They were being slowly welded together. They were listening in silence, and every face showed anticipation, as if they were being led, by the cheerful tallyhoing of Sister Doll, to view entrancing vistas of country. Sister Doll was adroitly, and with the confidence of one who had done it many times before, building up a picture of herself, and so of them, as a cheerfully modest, indefatigably devoted minister of mercy who took physical bravery for granted. But behind this picture, absolutely genuine, was another; and it was this that beckoned the audience: adventure. Sister Doll was promising them adventure. Once again Martha heard the mud, the squalor, the slaughter of the trenches recreated in the memory of someone who had been a victim of them – Sister Doll remarked in passing that she had ‘lost’ her boy at Passchendaele – as cleanly gallant and exciting.

She spoke for some twenty minutes, this jolly old campaigner; then, judging it was enough, she proceeded to talk about discipline. It was clear that this was by no means as popular as those inspiring reminiscences – perhaps because these women, being mostly married women with servants, had reached the position where they believed their task was to discipline others and not themselves. In this they resembled Sister Doll. At any rate, judging from the critical and sceptical look on their faces, they were reflecting that the discipline of the nursing profession, like its uniform, was more hierarchic than practical. They were minutely observing Sister Doll’s uniform, with its white glaze, its ritual buckles and badges, and its romantic flowing white veil, with the common sense of disparaging housewives. They began to cough and shuffle like a theatre audience. Not a moment too soon Sister Doll prevented them from separating again into a collection of individuals, by turning to her main topic for that day, which was how to make a bed properly. Not, however, without remarking with a sort of regretful severity, looking at the wall in case she might be accused of singling anyone out, that some people said, though of course she wouldn’t know if it were true or not, that the young people of today hadn’t the sense of vocation of her generation. Martha had decided that she had no intention of devoting six weeks, although only a few hours a week were demanded of her, to the company of this elderly war horse who nevertheless continually suggested a happy hockey-playing schoolgirl. She therefore occupied her time in trying to decide what was the common denominator of this mass of women; for certainly there must be a special kind of woman who rushes, at the first sound of the bugle, to learn how to nurse ‘the boys’. There was no doubt that this was how they were picturing themselves, and how Sister Doll was encouraging them to think; a white-garbed angel among wounded men was the image that filled their minds, despite this talk of a threatened civilian population. But she could only conclude that the difference between them and herself was that they were all taking down minute notes about the correct way to fold bedclothes.

She looked towards Stella, who was coiled seductively on the hard bench, head propped on slender hands, eyes fixed on Sister Doll. It was clear that she was not listening to a word. It looked as if she was deliberately trying to present the picture of a detached observer. She happened to be wearing a white linen dress, whose severity was designed to emphasize her slim curves; or perhaps it was that she had felt white to be more ‘suitable’ for a nursing course than any other colour. But her small, apricot-tinted face with its enormous lazy dark eyes, the soft slender body in its white, were the cruellest comment on the only other white figure in the room, fat and perspiring Sister Doll, half a dozen paces away. It appeared that Sister Doll felt it, or at least her inattention; for during those pauses while she was waiting for her class to take down sentences such as ‘The greatest care must be taken to keep the patient’s bed neat and tidy’, she turned hot little eyes full of rather flustered reproach, on Stella, who was regarding her with indolent inquiry. Catching Martha’s eye, Stella made a small movement of her own eyes towards the door. Martha frowned back. Stella gave a petulant shrug.

The moment Sister Doll dismissed her class, Stella took Martha’s arm and hurried her out. Her first words were, ‘Let’s go and see Alice.’

‘Really,’ exclaimed Martha, her boredom and dissatisfaction exploding obliquely, ‘what a waste of time – all this nonsense about making beds.’

‘It’s only just up the road.’ Stella tugged at her arm.

‘And we’ve paid all that money for the course.’

‘Oh, well … Anyway, I expect there won’t be a war anyway.’

‘Why not?’ Martha stopped and looked at Stella, really wanting to know.

‘Andrew says they won’t start training them. Well, then, if there was going to be a war, they would train people like Douglas and Andrew, wouldn’t they? He said so this morning. I thought they’d start playing soldiers any minute now.’ Stella dismissed the thing, and said, ‘Oh, come on, Matty, it’s only just up the road.’

‘But she doesn’t know we’re coming. She doesn’t want to see us.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Stella with energy. The matter thus settled, they walked towards Alice’s flat.

Stella knocked at the door in a manner that suggested discreet determination. Her eyes were alive with interest. There was a long silence.

‘She’s out,’ said Martha hopefully. She knew that Alice, like herself, preferred to take the more intimate crises of life in private.

‘Nonsense,’ Stella said, and knocked again. A long silence. Stella changed the tempo of her knocking to a peremptory summons. ‘She’s only trying to get rid of us,’ she remarked with her jolly laugh.

Alice opened the door sharply on that laugh. She was annoyed.

‘It’s us,’ Stella said and walked blandly inside.

Alice was in a pale-pink taffeta dressing gown which had been bought for the fresh young woman she had been as a bride; now she was rather yellow and very thin, and her freckles seemed to have sprung up everywhere over the pale sallow skin. Her black hair hung dispiritedly on her shoulders.

‘Well?’ demanded Stella at once.

Alice regarded her from a distance, and remarked that she wasn’t feeling at all well.

Stella, a little figure bristling with frustrated purpose, said, ‘Oh, stop it, Alice.’ then she frowned, decided to change tactics, and said diplomatically, ‘Shall I make you a nice cup of tea?’

‘Oh, do make it, dear. I’m really exhausted.’ And Alice subsided backwards into a chair, and lay there extinguished.

The moment Stella had gone to the kitchen, Alice opened her eyes and looked at Martha as if to ask, ‘Am I safe from you?’

Martha was equally limp in another chair. She inquired childishly, ‘Is it true you only have to jump off a table?’ She meant to sound competent, but in fact her face expressed nothing but distaste. ‘Did you know I went to Dr Stern and he said I wasn’t?’ she went on.

‘Did you, dear?’ This was discretion itself; it was the trained nurse remembering her loyalties.

But it was not what Martha wanted. ‘He said I was quite all right.’

A short silence. Then Alice remarked vaguely, ‘You know, they don’t know everything.’

Alarm flooded Martha; she shook it off. ‘But he’s supposed to be very good at – this sort of thing.’

To this Alice could only reply that he was, very. Then Stella came in with a tray. She set it down, and proceeded to cross-examine Alice while she poured the tea. Alice replied vaguely with that good humour which is rooted in indifference. Vague as a cloud, lazy as water, she lay with half-shut eyes and let fall stray remarks which had the effect of stinging Stella into a frenzy of exasperation. At the end of ten minutes’ hard work Stella had succeeded in eliciting the positive information that Alice believed herself to be three months gone.

‘Well, really!’ Horror at this incompetence shook Stella. ‘But three months!’

Clinical details followed, which Alice confirmed as if they could not possibly have any reference to herself. ‘Well, dear, I really don’t know,’ she kept saying helplessly.

‘But you must know,’ exclaimed the exasperated Stella. ‘One either has a period or one has not.’

‘Oh, well – I never take any notice of mine, anyway.’

This caused Martha to remark with pride that she never did, either. For she and Alice belonged to the other family of women from Stella, who proceeded to detail, with gloomy satisfaction, how much she suffered during these times. Alice and Martha listened with tolerant disapproval.

Checked on this front, Stella brooded for a while on how to approach a more intimate one. Martha had more than once remarked with distaste to Douglas that if Stella were given a chance she would positively wallow in the details of the marriage bed. This chance was not given her. Women of the tradition to which Alice and Martha belonged are prepared to discuss menstruation or pregnancy in the frankest of detail, but it is taboo to discuss sex, notwithstanding the show of frankness the subject is surrounded with. It follows that they get their information about how other women react sexually from their men, a system which has its disadvantages. More than once had Stella been annoyed by reticences on the part of Martha and Alice which seemed to her the most appalling prudery; an insult, in fact, to their friendship. But she did not persist now; she returned to ask direct what steps Alice proposed to take. Alice said with a lazy laugh that she had done everything. Cross-examination produced the information that she had drunk gin and taken a hot bath. Even more shocked, Stella delivered a short and efficient lecture, which interested Martha extremely, but to which Alice listened indifferently, occasionally suppressing a genuine yawn. Stella then supplied the names of three wise women, two Coloured and one white, who would do the job for a moderate fee. To which Alice replied, with her first real emotion that day, that she had seen enough of girls ruined for life by these women ever to go near them herself.

‘Well, then, how about Dr Stern?’

Alice said angrily, with the curtness of a schoolmistress, that if Stella wasn’t careful she’d find herself in trouble, saying such things about honest doctors! Stella rose, red and angry, her tongue quivering with expert retaliations. Alice gave her a weary and apologetic smile, and said, ‘Oh, sit down, Stella, I haven’t the energy for a row.’

Stella sat. After a while she asked, in a deceptively sweet voice, on a note of modest interest, if perhaps Alice intended to have this baby after all?

Alice said good-naturedly, ‘We all have to have them sometime, dear, don’t we?’ Here she laughed again, and it was with reckless pleasure; at the same time her look at Stella was challenging, triumphant, very amused.

Stella, after a shocked and accusing stare, turned away, with an effect of indifference, and elaborately changed the subject.

Leaving the flat, Stella remarked coldly that it was utterly irresponsible of Alice to have a baby when they were so hard up; then that it was criminal to have a baby when war was starting; finally, after a long pause, that as for herself she was too delicate to have a baby, she would probably die in childbirth. There was a speculative look on her face as she said this, which caused Martha to remark, amused, that it would be awfully inconsistent of Stella to have a baby herself, after what she had said. Stella reacted with an affronted ‘It would be quite unfair to Andrew; I’d never do a thing like that.’

The two young women parted almost at once, without regret.

Martha walked slowly home, thinking about Alice. Her emotions were violent and mixed. She felt towards the pregnant woman, the abstraction, a strong repulsion which caused various images, all unpleasant, to rise into her mind one after another. From her childhood came a memory of lowered voices, distasteful intimacies, hidden sicknesses. It was above all frightening that all this furtive secrecy, which she and all her friends so firmly repudiated, was waiting there, strong as ever, all around her, as she knew: Alice, because she was pregnant, was delivered back into the hands of the old people – so Martha felt it. She felt caged, for Alice. She could feel the bonds around herself. She consciously shook them off and exulted in the thought that she was free. Free! And the half-shaded flat she had left, with the pale, sallow-looking woman in pink taffeta, seemed like a suffocating prison. But at the same time a deeper emotion was turning towards Alice, with an unconscious curiosity, warm, tender, protective. It was an emotion not far from envy. In six months, Alice would have a baby. Why, it was no time at all, she thought. But no sooner had she put it into words than she reacted back again with a shuddering impulse towards escape. She could see the scene: Alice, loose and misshapen, with an ugly wet-mouthed infant, feeding-bottles, napkins, smells.

Martha reached her flat, removed her clothes and anxiously examined every inch of her body. Unmarked, whole, perfect – smooth solid flesh; there was not a stain on it. Here Martha gave an uncomfortable look at her breasts, and acknowledged they were heavier than they had been. There was a bruised, reddish look about them – here came a flood of panic, and then she subsided into perfect trust in Dr Stern. She felt particularly supported by the knowledge that ever since her second visit she and Douglas had followed the prescribed rituals with determined precision. She was free. She continued to revel in her freedom all that afternoon, while underneath she thought persistently of Alice, and wondered why she was now so contented to have a baby, when, as short a time ago as a month, she had spoken of having one with vigorous rejection.

When Douglas returned from the office, she described the day’s doings, passing over the nursing lecture as an utter waste of time, and laughing at Stella’s frustrated homilies and Alice’s vague determination. But Douglas, who had moments, which were becoming increasingly frequent, of remembering that he was a government official, remarked rather officiously that Stella would get herself into trouble one of these days. It was illegal to procure abortions: that was the cold phrase he used. But at this Martha flew into an angry tirade against governments who presumed to tell women what they should do with their own bodies; it was the final insult to personal liberty. Douglas listened, frowning, and said unanswerably that the law was the law. Martha therefore retreated into herself, which meant that she became very gay, hard, and indifferent. She listened to his rather heavy insistence about what she intended to do in place of the nursing course, and understood that he was above all concerned that she should not be in the war – should not go in pursuit of the adventure he himself was quivering to find; he was even more reluctant because of his own daydreams as to certain aspects of that adventure.

He went so far, carried away by the official in him, as to make various sound remarks about the unsuitability of danger for women. She thought he must be joking; nothing is more astonishing to young women than the ease with which men, even intelligent and liberal-minded men, lapse back into that anonymous voice of authority whenever their own personal authority is threatened, saying things of a banality and a pomposity infinitely removed from their own level of thinking.

Martha was first incredulous, then frightened, then she began to despise him. She became even more gay and brilliant; he became fascinated; she despised him the more for being fascinated; he began to resent the offhandedness of her manner and retreated again into the official. She mocked at him recklessly, they quarrelled. As a result of this hatred, they spent a hectic evening, ending up at four in the morning at the fair, where Martha, sick and giddy, revolved on the great wheel as if her whole future depended on her power to stick it out. High over the darkened town – where a few widely scattered windows showed the points where revellers were at last going to bed – plunging sickeningly to earth and up again. Martha clung on, until the wheel was stopped, the music stopped churning, and there was literally nowhere to go but bed. From the bedroom window they could see the lights greying along the street. The native servants were coming in from the location in time to be at work.

She woke with a start; the bed next to her was empty. There were noises next door. Then she saw it was nearly eleven. While she stood in her nightdress, fumbling at her dressing gown, the door began very gently to open inwards. Its cautious movement was arrested; then the person the other side dropped something; the door crashed back against the wall, and Mrs Quest stumbled into the room, reaching out for parcels which scattered everywhere.

‘Oh, so you’re up,’ Mrs Quest said sharply. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you. I was coming in quietly.’ Then, retrieving a last package to make a neat pile on the bed, she added archly, ‘What a dashing life you lead, lying in bed till eleven.’

This roguishness aroused in Martha the usual strong distaste. She had covered herself entirely with her dressing gown, buttoning it up tight from throat to hem.

‘I thought you must be ill, I peeped in and saw you. Shall I go for the doctor, don’t get up, stay in bed and I’ll nurse you – for today, at least.’

‘I’m perfectly well,’ said Martha ungraciously. ‘Let’s go and have some tea.’ Firmly, she led the way from the bedroom, but Mrs Quest did not follow her at once.

Martha sat on the divan listening. Her mother was following the ritual that she had already gone through here, in this room. The flowers had been removed from their vases and rearranged, the chairs set differently, books put into place. Mrs Quest had reassured herself by touching and arranging everything in the living room, and was now doing the same in the bedroom. Martha had time to make the tea and bring in the tray before her mother reappeared.

‘I’ve just made your bed, your nightdress is torn, did you know? I’ve brought it to mend while I’m here, your bathroom isn’t done, it’s wet,’ Mrs Quest remarked flurriedly. She had Martha’s nightdress clutched in one hand. She glanced at it, blushed, and remarked coquettishly, ‘How you can wear these transparent bits of fluff I don’t know.’

Martha poured the tea in silence. She was exaggeratedly irritated. The violence of this emotion was what kept her silent; for she was quite able to assure herself that nothing could be more natural, and even harmless and pathetic, than this unfortunate woman’s need to lead every other life but her own. This is what her intelligence told her; her conscience remarked that she was making a fuss about nothing; but in fact she seethed with irritation. The face she presented to her mother was one of numbed hostility. This, as usual, affected Mrs Quest like an accusation.

The next phase of this sad cycle followed: Mrs Quest said that it was unfair to Douglas not to sleep enough: she could get ill and then he would have to pay the bills. Martha’s face remaining implacable, she went on, in tones of hurried disapproval: ‘If you’ll give me a needle and thread, I’ll mend your nightdress.’

Martha got up, found needle and thread, and handed them to Mrs Quest without a word. The sight of that nightdress, still warm from her own body, clutched with nervous possession in her mother’s hands was quite unendurable. She was determined to endure it. After all, she thought, if it gives her pleasure … And then: It’s not her fault she was brought up in that society. This thought gave her comparative detachment. She sat down and looked at the worn, gnarled hands at work on her nightdress. They filled her with pity for her mother. Besides, she could remember how she had loved her mother’s hands as a child; she could see the white and beautiful hands of a woman who no longer existed.

Mrs Quest was talking of matters on the farm, about the house in town they were shortly to buy, about her husband’s health.

Martha scarcely listened. She was engaged in examining and repairing those intellectual bastions of defence behind which she sheltered, that building whose shape had first been sketched so far back in her childhood she could no longer remember how it then looked. With every year it had become more complicated, more ramified; it was as if she, Martha, were a variety of soft, shell-less creature whose survival lay in the strength of those walls. Reaching out in all directions from behind it, she clutched at the bricks of arguments, the stones of words, discarding any that might not fit into the building.

She was looking at Mrs Quest in a deep abstract speculation, as if neither she nor her mother had any validity as persons, but were mere pawns in the hands of an old fatality. She could see a sequence of events, unalterable, behind her, and stretching unalterably into the future. She saw her mother, a prim-faced Edwardian schoolgirl, confronting, in this case, the Victorian father, the patriarchal father, with rebellion. She saw herself sitting where her mother now sat, a woman horribly metamorphosed, entirely dependent on her children for any interest in life, resented by them, and resenting them; opposite her, a young woman of whom she could distinguish nothing clearly but a set, obstinate face; and beside these women, a series of shadowy dependent men, broken-willed and sick with compelled diseases. This the nightmare, this the nightmare of a class and generation: repetition. And although Martha had read nothing of the great interpreters of the nightmare, she had been soaked in the minor literature of the last thirty years, which had dealt with very little else: a series of doomed individuals, carrying their doom inside them, like the seeds of fatal disease. Nothing could alter the pattern.

But inside the stern web of fatality did flicker small hopeful flames. One thought was that after all it had not always been that these great life-and-death struggles were fought out inside the family; presumably things might change again. Another was that she had decided not to have a baby; and it was in her power to cut the cycle.

Which brought her back into the conversation with a question on her tongue.

Mrs Quest was talkng about the coming war. She had no doubt at all as to the shape it would assume. It was Britain’s task to fight Hitler and Stalin combined. Martha suggested that this might be rather a heavy task. Mrs Quest said sharply that Martha had no patriotism, and never had had. Even without those lazy and useless Americans who never came into the war until they could make good pickings out of it, Britain would ultimately muddle through to victory, as she always did.

Martha was able to refrain from being logical only by her more personal preoccupations. She plunged straight in with an inquiry as to whether her mother had ever had an abortion. She hastened to add that she wanted to know because of a friend of hers.

Mrs Quest, checked, took some moments to adjust to this level. She said vaguely, ‘It’s illegal…’ Having made this offering to the law, she considered the question on its merits and said in a lowered voice, a look of distaste on her face, ‘Why – are you like that?’

Martha suppressed the hostility she felt at the evasion, and said, ‘No.’

‘Well, you look like it,’ said Mrs Quest bluntly, with triumph.

‘Well, I’m not.’ Martha added the appeal, ‘I do wish you’d tell me …’ She had no idea what she really wanted to know!

Mrs Quest looked at her, her vigorous face wearing the dubious rather puzzled expression which meant she was trying to remember her own past.

Martha was telling herself that this appeal was doomed to produce all kinds of misunderstanding and discomfort. They always did. And what did she want her mother to say? She looked at her in silence, and wished that some miracle would occur and her mother would produce a few simple, straightforward remarks, a few words—not emotional, nothing deviating from the cool humorous understatement that would save them both from embarrassment. Martha needed the right words.

She reflected that Mrs Quest had not wanted her. How, then, had she come to accept her? Was that what she wanted to know? But looking at her now, she could only think that Mrs Quest had spent a free, energetic youth, had ‘lived her own life’ – she had used the phrase herself long before it was proper for middle-class daughters to do so – and had, accordingly, quarrelled with her father. She had not married until very late.

For many years now, she had been this immensely efficient down-to-earth matron; but somewhere concealed in her was the mother who had borne Martha. From her white and feminine body she, Martha, had emerged – that was certainly a fact! She could remember seeing her mother naked; beautiful she had been, a beautiful, strong white body, with full hips, small high breasts – the Greek idea of beauty. And to that tender white body had belonged the strong soft white hands Martha remembered. Those hands had tended her, the baby. Well, then, why could her mother not resurrect that woman in her and speak the few simple, appropriate words?

But now she was turning Martha’s flimsy nightgown between her thickened, clumsy hands, as if determined not to say she disapproved of it; and frowned. She looked uncomfortable. Martha quite desperately held on to that other image to set against this one. She could see that earlier woman distinctly. More, she could feel wafts of tenderness coming from her.

Then, suddenly, into this pure and simple emotion came something new: she felt pity like a clutching hand. She was remembering something else. She was lying in the dark in that house on the farm, listening to a piano being played several rooms away. She got up, and crept through the dark rooms to a doorway. She saw Mrs Quest seated at the keyboard, a heavy knot of hair weighting her head and glistening gold where the light touched it from two candle flames which floated steadily above the long white transparent candles. Tears were running down her face while she set her lips and smiled. The romantic phrases of a Chopin nocturne rippled out into the African night, steadily accompanied by the crickets and the blood-thudding of the tom-toms from the compound. Martha smiled wryly: she could remember the gulf of pity that sight had thrown her into.

Mrs Quest looked up over the nightdress and inquired jealously, ‘What are you laughing at?’

‘Mother,’ she said desperately, ‘you didn’t want to have me. Well, then …’

Mrs Quest laughed, and said Martha had come as a surprise to her.

Martha waited, then prodded. ‘What did you feel?’

A slight look of caution came on to her mother’s honest square face. ‘Oh, well …’ But almost at once she launched into the gay and humorous account, which Martha had so often heard, of the difficulties of getting the proper clothes and so on; which almost at once merged with the difficulties of the birth itself – a painful business, this, as she had so often been told.

‘But what did you feel about it all? I mean, it couldn’t have been as easy as all that,’ said Martha.

‘Oh, it wasn’t easy – I was just telling you.’ Mrs Quest began to repeat how awkward a baby Martha had been. ‘But it wasn’t really your fault. First I didn’t have enough milk, though I didn’t know it; and then I gave you a mixture, and didn’t know until the doctor told me that it was only half the right strength. So in one way and another I half starved you for the first nine months of your life.’ Mrs Quest laughed ruefully, and said, ‘No wonder you never stopped crying day or night.’

A familiar resentment filled Martha, and she at once pressed on. ‘But, Mother, when you first knew you were going to have a baby –’

Mrs Quest interrupted. ‘And then I had your brother, he was such a good baby, not like you.’

And now Martha abdicated, as she had so often done before; for it had always, for some reason, seemed right and inevitable that Mrs Quest should prefer the delicate boy child to herself. Martha listened to the familiar story to the end, while she suppressed a violent and exasperated desire to take her mother by the shoulders and shake her until she produced, in a few sensible and consoling sentences, that truth which it was so essential Martha should have. But Mrs Quest had forgotten how she felt. She was no longer interested. And why should she be, this elderly woman with all the business of being a woman behind her?

In a short while she returned to the war, dismissed Chamberlain with a few just sentences, and recommended Mr Churchill for his job. The Quests belonged to that section of the middle class who would be happy and contented to be conservatives if only the conservatives could be more efficient. As it was, they never ceased complaining about the inefficiency and corruption of the party they would unfailingly vote for if they lived in England.

Towards lunchtime she left, with the advice that Martha should go and see the doctor and get a good tonic. She looked dreadful – it wasn’t fair to Douglas.

The result of that visit from her mother was that Martha decided again she must not sink into being a mere housewife. She should at once learn a profession, or at least take some kind of job. But this decision was not as firm as it might seem from the energy she used in speaking about it to Douglas.

She was gripped by a lethargy so profound that in fact she spent most of her time limp on that divan, thinking about nothing. She felt heavy and uncomfortable and sick. And she was clinging to Douglas with the dependence of a child. She was miserable when he left in the morning; she was waiting anxiously for his return hours before he might be expected. Pride, however, forbade her to show it, or to ask him to come home for lunch. At night, the loud sad music from the fair was becoming an obsession. She found herself waking from sleep and crying, but what she was weeping for she had no idea at all. She drew the curtains so that she might not see the great wheel; and then lay watching the circling of light through their thin stuff. She accused herself of every kind of weak-mindedness and stupidity; nevertheless, the persistent monotony of that flickering cycle seemed a revelation of an appalling and intimate truth; it was like being hypnotized.

During the daytime she sat with a book, trying to read, and realized that she was not seeing one word of it. It was, she realized, as if she were listening for something; some kind of anxiety ran through every limb.

One morning she was very sick, and all at once the suspicion she had been ignoring for so long became a certainty – and from one moment to the next. When Douglas came home that night she said sullenly, as if it was his fault, that she must be pregnant; and insisted when he said that Dr Stern could not be wrong. At last he suggested she should go and talk to Stella, whose virtuosity in these matters was obvious. She said she would; but when it came to the point, she shrank from the idea and instead went to Alice.

It was a hot, dusty morning. A warm wind swept flocks of yellowing leaves along the streets. The jacarandas were holding up jaded yellow arms. This drying, yellowing, fading month, this time when the year tensed and tightened towards the coming rains, always gave her a feeling of perverted autumn, and now filled her with an exquisite cold apprehension. The sky, above the haze of dust, was a glitter of hot blue light.

Alice was in her pink taffeta dressing gown in her large chair. She greeted Martha with cheerful indifference, and bade her sit down. On the table beside her was a pile of books, called variously Mothercraft, Baby Handling and Your Months of Preparation.

Martha glanced towards them, and Alice said, ‘The nonsense they talk, dear, you wouldn’t believe it.’ She pushed them gently away. Then she got up, and stood before Martha, with her two hands held tenderly over her stomach. ‘I’m as flat as a board still,’ she remarked with pride. She looked downwards with a preoccupied blue stare; she seemed to be listening. ‘According to the books, it doesn’t quicken until – but now I’ve worked out my dates, and actually it quickens much earlier. At first I thought it must be wind,’ remarked Alice, faintly screwing up her face with the effort of listening.

‘I think I’m pregnant, too,’ remarked Martha nervously.

‘Are you, dear?’ Alice sat down, keeping her hands in a protective curve, and said, ‘Oh, well, when you get used to it, it’s quite interesting really.’

‘Oh, I’m not going to have it,’ said Martha with energy.

Alice did not reply. Martha saw that she had gone completely into her private world of sensation, and that anything which happened outside was quite irrelevant. She recognized the feeling: what else had she been fighting against during the last few weeks?

After a pause Alice continued the conversation she was having with herself by remarking, ‘Oh, well, to hell with everything. Who cares, anyway?’ She gave her dry nervous laugh, and reached for a cigarette.

‘Well, you look pleased with yourself,’ said Martha, half laughing.

Alice frowned as these words reached her, and said, ‘Help yourself to cigarettes, dear.’

The morning drifted past. Alice, dim and safe in her private world, smoked constantly, stubbing out the cigarettes as she lit them, and from time to time dropping remarks such as ‘It ought to be February, I think.’ When Martha roused herself to go, Alice appeared to be reminding herself that she had not been as sympathetic as she could have been. She held the door open, Martha already being outside it, and proceeded to offer various bits of advice in an apologetic voice, the most insistent being that she should at once go and see Stella.

Martha went home, reached for the telephone, but was unable to dial Stella’s number. She shrank away from Stella with a most extraordinary dislike of her. She was thinking of Alice; and in spite of her own deep persistent misery, her knowledge that the web was tight around her, she knew, too, that she was most irrationally elated. Anyone would think that you were pleased, she said angrily to herself. With an efficiency which Stella must have applauded, she put on her dressing gown, locked the door, and took the telephone off the hook. She then drank, with calm deliberation, glass after glass of neat gin, until a full bottle was gone. Then she lay down and slept. When she woke it was four in the afternoon, and she felt nothing but a weakness in her knees. She filled the bath with water so hot that she could not put her hand into it, and, setting her teeth, got in. The pain was so intense that she nearly fainted. She was going through with this, however; and she sat in the bath until the water was tepid. When she reeled out, she was boiled scarlet, and could not touch her skin. Having rubbed cream all over herself, she lay on the bed, shrinking from the touch of the sheet, and cried a little from sheer pain. She slept again. Douglas was rattling at the locked door when she woke, and she staggered to let him in.

Faced with a tousled, bedraggled, red-faced female, reeking of gin, Douglas was naturally upset; but he was informed in a cold and efficient voice that this was necessary. He sat wincing while Martha climbed repeatedly on to the table and jumped off, crashing down on her heels with the full force of her weight. At the end of half an hour he could no longer stand it, and forcibly put her to bed. In a small triumphant voice Martha informed him that if that didn’t shift it nothing would.

In the morning she woke, feeling as if her limbs had been pulverized from within and as if her skin were a separate, agonized coating to her body, but otherwise whole. Douglas was astounded to hear her say, in a voice of unmistakable satisfaction, that she must be as strong and healthy as a horse. He was unable to bear it: this female with set will, tight mouth, and cold and rejecting eyes was entirely horrifying to him.

‘Well,’ demanded Martha practically, ‘do we or do we not want to have this baby?’

Douglas evaded this by saying that she should go forthwith to see Dr Stern, and escaped to his office, trying to ignore the inescapable fact that Martha was contemptuous of him because of his male weakness.

Late that afternoon Martha entered Dr Stern’s consulting room, in a mood of such desperate panic that he recognized it at once and promptly offered her a drink, which he took from a cupboard. Martha watched him anxiously, and saw him look her up and down with that minute, expert inspection which she had seen before. On whose face? Mrs Talbot’s, of course!

Dr Stern, kindness itself, then examined Martha. She told him, laughing, of the measures she had taken, to which he replied gravely, looking at her scarlet skin, that she shouldn’t overdo these things. But never, not for one second, did he make the mistake of speaking in the anonymous voice of male authority which she would have so passionately resented.

Finally he informed her that she was over four months pregnant; which shocked her into silence. Such was his bland assurance, such was the power of this man, the doctor in the white coat behind the big desk, that the words stammering on her tongue could not get themselves said. But he saw her reproachful look and said that doctors were not infallible; he added almost at once that a fine, healthy girl like herself should be delighted to have a baby. Martha was silent with misery. She said feebly after a pause that there was no point in having a baby when the war was coming. At which he smiled slightly and said that the birthrate, for reasons best known to itself, always rose in wartime. She felt caught up in an immense impersonal tide which paid no attention to her, Martha. She looked at this young man who was after all not so much older then herself; she looked at the grave responsible face, and hated him bitterly from the bottom of her heart.

She asked him bluntly if he would do an abortion.

He replied immediately that he could not.

There was a long and difficult silence. Dr Stern regarded her steadily from expert eyes, and reached out for a small statuette which stood on his desk. It was in bronze, of a mermaidlike figure diving off a rock. He fingered it lightly and said, ‘Do you realize that your baby is as big as this already?’ It was about five inches high.

The shock numbed her tongue. She had imagined this creature as ‘it’, perhaps a formless blob of jellylike substance, or alternatively, as already born, a boneless infant in a shawl, but certainly not as a living being five inches long coiled in her flesh.

‘Eyes, ears, arms, legs – all there.’ He fingered the statuette a little longer; then he dropped his hand and was silent.

Martha was so bitter that she could not yet move or speak a word. All she was for him, and probably for Douglas too, she thought, was a ‘healthy young woman’.

Then he said with a tired humorous smile that if she knew the proportion of his women patients who came, as she did, when they found they were pregnant, not wanting a baby, only to be delighted when they got used to the idea, she would be surprised.

Martha did not reply. She rose to leave. He got up, too, and said with a real human kindness that she was able to appreciate only later, that she should think twice before rushing off to see one of the wise women: her baby was too big to play tricks with now. If she absolutely insisted on an abortion, she should go to Johannesburg, where, as everyone knew, there was a hospital which was a positive factory for this sort of thing. The word ‘factory’ made her wince; and she saw at once, with a satirical appreciation of his skill in handling her, that it was deliberately chosen.

He shook hands with her, invited her to drop in and talk it all over if she felt like it at any time, and went back to his desk.

Martha returned to her flat in a trance of despair. Not the least of her bitterness was due to her knowledge that in some part of herself she was already weakening towards this baby. She could not forget that diving creature, bent in moulded bronze, about five inches long. In her bedroom, she found herself standing as she had seen Alice stand, hands curiously touching her stomach. It occurred to her that this child had quickened already; she understood that this long process had been one of determined self-deception – almost as if she had wanted this damned baby all the time, she thought quickly, and immediately pushed the idea from her mind. But how could she have mistaken those irregular but definite movements for anything else?

When Douglas came home she informed him that nothing would induce her to have this child, with which he at once agreed. She found herself slightly annoyed by this. It was agreed that she should go at once to Johannesburg. Douglas knew of an astounding number of women who had made the trip and returned home none the worse for it.

Martha, left alone next day to make preparations for the trip, did nothing at all. Then her mother flew in. Against all her intentions, Martha blurted out that she was going to have a baby; and was immediately folded in Mrs Quest’s arms. Mrs Quest was delighted; her face beamed pleasure; she said it was lovely, it was the best thing that could possibly happen, it would settle Martha down and give her no time at all for all her funny ideas. (Here she gave a small, defiant, triumphant laugh.) Unfortunately, as she had to get back to the farm, she could not stay with her daughter, much as she wanted to. She embraced Martha again, and said in a warm, thrilled voice that it was the greatest experience in a woman’s life. With this she left, wet-eyed and with a tremulous smile.

Martha was confounded; she sat thinking that her mother must be out of her mind; above all she was thinking angrily of the triumph she had shown. She roused herself again to pack and make telephone calls; but they again faded out in indecision. The child, five inches long, with eyes, nose, mouth, hands and feet, seemed very active. Martha sat feeling the imprisoned thing moving in her flesh, and was made more miserable by the knowledge that it had been moving for at least a week without her noticing it than by anything else. For what was the use of thinking, of planning, if emotions one did not recognize at all worked their own way against you? She was filled with a strong and seething rage against her mother, her husband, Dr Stern, who had all joined the conspiracy against her. She addressed angry speeches of protest to them, fiery and eloquent speeches; but, alas, there was no one there but herself.

Sometime later Stella came in, stepping blithely around the door, hips swaying lightly, eyes bright with interest. She had heard the news; the boys were already drinking Douglas’s health in the Club.

‘Everyone’s quite convinced that you had to get married,’ said Stella with a delighted chuckle.

An astonishing thought occurred to Martha for the first time. ‘Do you know,’ she cried out, half laughing, ‘if I’m as pregnant as Dr Stern says I am, then I must have been when I got married!’ At this she flung herself back and roared with laughter. Stella joined her briefly; then she regarded Martha impatiently, waiting for the rather helpless wail of laughter to end.

‘Well,’ demanded Stella, ‘and what are we going to do about it?’

It was at this point that Martha, in the stubborn, calm voice of complete conviction, found herself explaining to Stella how foolish an abortion would be at this stage. Stella grew increasingly persuasive, and Martha obstinate. The arguments she now found for having this baby were as strong and unanswerable as those she had been using, only ten minutes ago, against it. She found herself intensely excited at the idea of having a baby.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ remarked Stella disgustedly at last. ‘You and Alice are mad. Both mad, quite mad.’

She rose, and stood poised before Martha to deliver the final blow; but Martha intercepted it by suggesting teasingly that Stella herself ought to start a baby, as otherwise she’d be left out of it.

At this Stella allowed a brief gleam of a smile; but at once she substituted a disapproving frown. ‘I’m not going to have kids now, it wouldn’t be fair to Andrew. But if you want to shut yourself into a nursery at your age, then it’s your own affair.’ She gave the triumphant and amused Martha a long, withering look, dropped a goodbye, pulled on her gloves gracefully, and went out.

She sustained the sweep of her exit until she reached the street. She had meant to go shopping, but instead she went to Douglas’s office. She told the typist to announce her, but was unable to wait, and followed the girl in, saying urgently, ‘Douggie – I must see you.’

‘Come in, Stell.’ He nodded to the typist, who went out again.

Stella sat down. ‘I’ve just seen Matty.’

‘Yes, it’s a bit of a mess,’ he said at once. But he looked self-conscious, even proud.

Seeing it, Stella said impatiently, ‘She’s much too young. She doesn’t realize.’

‘Oh, I don’t know – she’s been putting the fear of God into me. She’ll be ill. I wish you’d speak to her, Stell.’

‘But I have been speaking to her. She won’t listen.’

‘After all, there’s no danger in a proper operation in Johannesburg, but messing about with gin and all that nonsense …’

Stella shrugged this away, and said, ‘She’s as stubborn as a mule. She’s just a baby herself. She’s pleased now, of course, but that’s natural.’

Douglas looked up sharply, and went red. His lips trembled. He stood up, then sat down again. Now he was white.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked, smiling but irritated.

‘I’ll talk to her again,’ he muttered. He understood. Now all he wanted was for her to go. For the first time he had imagined the baby being born. He was imagining himself a father. Pride was invading him. It had already swallowed up his small pang of hurt that Martha had made up her mind without him, his aggrieved annoyance at her inconsistency. He felt nothing but swelling exaltation.

Stella had risen. ‘You’re both crazy,’ she said.

‘There, Stella …’ he said, hesitated; then kissed her.

‘Well!’ she exclaimed, laughing.

‘Look, Stell, I’m awfully busy.’

She nodded and said, ‘Come and have a drink, both of you, this evening. We’ll celebrate. Though I think you’re both mad.’ With another unconsciously envious look at his flushed, proud face, she went out.

The moment she had gone he rang Martha. Her voice came gay over the air as she announced her conviction that having a baby was the most sensible thing they could both do.

‘Why, Matty!’ he shouted. Then he let out a yell of pure elation. He heard her laugh.

‘Come home to lunch?’ she asked. Then she added scrupulously, ‘Not if you’re busy.’

‘Well, actually, I’ve got an awful lot of work.’

‘Oh, very well, we’ll celebrate this evening.’

‘Actually, Stella asked us over.’

‘Oh, but Stella …’ She stopped.

‘We can decide that later.’ They each held the receiver for a while, waiting for the other to say something. Then he said, very stern and efficient, ‘Matty, you’re quite sure?’

She giggled at his tone, and said derisively, ‘I’ve been perfectly sure for a whole hour.’

‘See you later, then.’ He put down the receiver – and nearly lifted it to ring her again. Something more, surely, must be said or done. He was seething with the need to release his elation, his pride. It was impossible to sit quietly working in the office. He walked across to the door of his chief’s office, and stood outside it. No – he would tell him later. He left a message that he would be back in half an hour, and went into the street. He was walking towards the flat, he realized. His steps slowed, then he stopped. On a street corner he stood staring at nothing, breathing heavily, smiling. There was a florist’s shop opposite. He was drawn to the window. He was looking at some deep-red carnations. He would send Matty some flowers – yes, that was it. But as he was about to go into the shop, he saw again her face as he had last seen it that morning – set, angry, stiff-lipped. He did not enter the shop. A big clock at the end of the street said it was after twelve. He hesitated, turned, and set off towards the flat after all. He would surprise her for lunch. Then again he stopped, standing irresolute on the pavement. Nearly, he went back to the office. Almost, he directed himself to Martha. He gave another long look at the mass of deep crimson carnations behind the glass. Then he thought, I could do with a drink. He walked off to the Club, where he usually had a drink before lunch.

The first person he saw was Perry at the bar, eating potato chips with a glass of beer. They nodded, and Perry pushed the plate of chips towards him.

Douglas shook his head. ‘My ulcer’s been playing me up again.’

‘The more I ill-treat mine, the more it likes it.’ Perry directed very bright hard blue eyes at him, and asked, ‘What are you looking so pleased about?’

‘We’re having a kid,’ said Douglas proudly. He knew tears stood in his eyes: it was the climax of his exultation.

‘You’re joking,’ said Perry, polite but satiric.

Douglas laughed, then whooped, so that people turned around to stare and smile sympathetically. ‘It’s a fact.’ He called to the barman, ‘Drinks on me. Drinks all round.’ In a moment the two were surrounded and Douglas was being thumped over the shoulders and back. ‘Stop it, silly sods,’ he said, grinning, ‘stop it.’

Then Perry, with a wooden face, deliberately reached into his pocket and fetched out papers. ‘You’ll want to fix this up right away,’ he said, pushing the papers towards Douglas.

‘Don’t work so damned hard,’ said Douglas, laughing, pushing the papers back. Insurance policies – Perry worked as manager of a big insurance company.

‘The finest policy south of the Sahara,’ said Perry. He pulled out a fountain pen and handed it to Douglas. ‘Sign on the dotted line.’

Douglas pushed them back at him again.

But as they drank and talked, Douglas glanced over the papers, and as the two men left the bar he said, ‘I wouldn’t mind having another look at that policy sometime.’

‘I’ll send it over to you,’ said Perry.

‘You think it’s the ticket, hey?’

‘It’s the one I’d have if I was starting a kid.’

Perry nodded and was walking away. Douglas thought, It’ll be a surprise for Matty. He wanted to take something back to her. He called after Perry, and the two went together to the insurance offices. Douglas signed the documents then and there. He rang up his office to say that he would not be back this afternoon, and went home to Martha. He ran the last few yards of the way, and pounded up the stairs holding the packet of papers in his hand, grinning like a boy with pleasure at the thought of her face when she saw the policy.