A Proper Marriage (19 page)

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.