A Proper Marriage (16 page)

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 presistently 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.