A Proper Marriage (27 page)

The fat nurse walked unhurriedly towards her, laid a hand on her shoulder, and waited till she straightened up. ‘That’s right,’ she approved.

Again there was a keen, impersonal glance. Martha felt
there was something in her face which should not be there, for the nurse said, ‘Cheer up, you’ll have got it out by this time tomorrow. Nearly over!’

Martha felt her lips tremble. She would have liked to fling herself on that fat shining bosom. The impulse annoyed her.

‘Can I see Mrs Burrell’s baby?’ she asked timidly.

The nurse hesitated, then stepped along the lines of cradles. At the foot of each was a name on a card. She nodded to Martha, who followed her, and bent over a tightly stretched white blanket, where showed the top of a small red head that was crinkled and covered with loose dark fuzz. A powerful stirring of tenderness came into Martha; she resisted it; she felt it to be dangerous to her intention of concentrating on getting her own baby born.

The fat nurse sat down again, pulled the white stuff towards her, and said, ‘You’d better get back to your room, you know.’

‘I haven’t got one yet,’ said Martha forlornly.

‘Dear me,’ said the nurse. ‘Well, we’re so full — it’s the war. There’s a crop of babies suddenly that took us all by surprise.’ She was sewing steadily, her needle going with flashes of light through the white stuff.

Martha drifted out again, and was standing in the corridor when the pink English girl came hurrying along. ‘Oh, there you are, you shouldn’t have got out of that bath without me, you know,’ she reproved. ‘The doctor wants to see you.’

Martha followed the pink nurse, who led her into another room marked ‘Labour Ward’, and said, ‘You’ll just have to make the best of this. There’s nowhere else to put you till morning.’

It was another gleaming white room, this time with the lights bulging down from the ceiling like eyeballs. There was nothing in it but trolleys full of sharp instruments, and two very high, very narrow white beds.

‘Lie down,’ said the nurse, sharp with impatience.

Martha climbed with difficulty on to one of the high narrow beds, and almost at once Dr Stern came in.

‘Well, Mrs Knowell? You girls all insist on having your babies in the small hours.’ She knew him well enough by
now to understand that he had said this many times before. Once again she submitted to those skilled impersonal hands, while he remarked that it was a good time of the year for having babies, she had done well to arrange things thus. He then removed his hands, said, ‘Fine, fine,’ and turned to depart. Martha, who had half believed that this was nearly over, demanded how long it would be; at which he remarked absorbedly, on his way out, that she must be a good girl, and be patient. The door swung silently shut behind him, and she was alone.

For some time she lay stiff on the very narrow slope of the bed, and waited. In this position, it seemed that the pains were worse. Or rather that she could not command herself as well. She climbed down, and walked up and down the deserted room. Now it was every four minutes, and she was doubled up with them, shutting her teeth against the desire to groan, cautiously unfolding herself again. She noticed she was wet with sweat. It was very hot in the room. She went to the window and looked out. Across the faintly moonlit veld, the glow from the city burned steadily, swallowing a glitter of stars. The stars vanished in another hot wave of pain. This time she found herself crouching on the floor, astonished and indignant at the violence of it. The pain had swallowed
her
up; and dismay at having lost guard caused her to return to the bed, where she might keep her attention on the process, keep that sentinel alert against the dark engulfing sea. Tight, stiff, cautious, she felt the baby knot and propel itself down; it recoiled and slackened, and she with it. The pain had changed. She could mark the point at which, just as it had abruptly changed its quality a couple of hours before in the bath, so now it ground into a new gear, as it were. It gripped first her back, then her stomach, then it was as if she and the baby were being wrung out together by a pair of enormous steel hands. But still she kept that small place in her brain alive and watchful. She would not give in. She lay like a tight spring, with half her attention given to not rolling off the bed, or table - which was so narrow she could not have turned on it - and concentrated.

The baby-faced nurse hurried in, and inquired, ‘How are
you doing?’ And hurried out again. Martha, engulfed in a pain, most passionately resented that uncommitted virgin with her determination not to be disturbed by suffering. But it was to the practical cool little voice that she was submitted; and when, at some indeterminate time later, the nurse came back, to say that Martha was being a good girl, and in the morning she would have a comfortable bed, she was able to achieve a humorous gasp that she wouldn’t mind a comfortable bed now.

‘Well, what can we do?’ demanded the pink girl. ‘We can’t help it if all the babies decided to get born at once, can we?’ She vanished again, remarking, ‘We’ve got three of them out, that’s something. Let’s pray no more of you come in tonight.’

Martha no longer had the energy to achieve a mild amusement. The small lit place in her brain was dimming most alarmingly with the pains. Every time, the light nearly went out; always, it flickered precariously and shone up again. Martha noted that something new was happening to time. The watch that lay six inches from her nose on her crooked arm said the pains were punctual at two minutes. But from the moment that the warning hot wave of pain swept up her back, she entered a place where there was no time at all. An agony so unbelievable gripped her that her astounded and protesting mind cried out it was impossible such pain should be. It was a pain so violent that it was no longer pain, but a condition of being. Every particle of flesh shrieked out, while the wave spurted like an electric current from somewhere in her backbone and went through her in shock after shock. The wave receded, however, just as she had decided she would disintegrate under it; and then she felt the fist that gripped her slowly loosen. Through the sweat in her eyes she saw that ten seconds had passed; she went limp, into a state of perfect painlessness, an exquisite exhaustion in which the mere idea of pain seemed impossible - it was impossible that it could recur again. And as soon as the slow flush of sensation began, the condition of painlessness seemed as impossible as the pain had seemed only a few moments before. They were two states of being,
utterly disconnected, without a bridge, and Martha found herself in a condition of anxious but exasperated anger that she could
not
remember the agony fifteen seconds after it had ended. She was now lying almost naked, her great tight knotted belly sticking up in a purple lump, watching with fascination how it contracted and strained, while she kept alert the determination not to lose control of the process; while she was lit with curiosity as to the strange vagaries of time and, above all, and increasingly, almost to the point of weeping fury, that all her concentration, all her self-consciousness, could not succeed in creating the state of either pain or painlessness while its opposite was in her. It was a complete failure of her, the free spirit: how was it possible not to remember something that had passed ten seconds before, and would recur so soon? The anger at her failure was strong enough nearly, but not quite, to quench that part of her mind which must stay alert. She sobered herself. When the wave of pain had receded, and she lay spent, she was grimly flogging her mind to
imagine
the quality of the pain that had just gone. Impossible. And when she was writhing in the grip of the giant fist, she was gasping with determination to
imagine
no pain. She could not. With all her determination, she could not. There were two Marthas, and there was nothing to bridge them. Failure. Complete failure. She was helpless with rage. She heard the pain-gripped Martha cry out, ‘Oh, God, oh God!’ and she was curious at the ancient being in her that cried out to God. Damned liar, coward, idiot! said Martha to herself from across the gulf. It only needs that you should call out ‘Mother!’ And behold, Martha, that free spirit, understood from the exquisite shore of complete, empty non-sensation that she had been groaning out ‘Mother, Mother, Mother!’ Without a flicker of feeling in any part of her body, she felt the tears of failure roll down her face; and looked up through them to see the pink nurse looking down at her with unmistakable disappointment.

‘Well, dear,’ said the girl disapprovingly, ‘it’s no good carrying on like that
yet.’
Her plump little hands, tightly sealed in pink rubber, went plunging into Martha’s body. ‘Not
nearly yet, you know,’ she remarked, regarding Martha while she grunted and rolled in another pain. ‘And anyway,’ heard Martha, the young bright voice coming distorted through hot agony, ‘we’ve got to get this other baby born before we can attend to you. Do you think you could hold it a bit?’

Martha saw the door open, and a stretcher wheeled in. Suddenly the room was filled with people. She saw a woman, similarly grotesque, inhuman, grunting, being rolled over on to the other narrow high table, while Dr Stern and a couple of nurses stood about with a look of intent concentration. Then the white screens went up and hid them. Martha looked away, and submitted to another trial. The woman on the other table seemed to be having pains about every half-minute; what Martha’s determination could not achieve, her nerves could: she suffered in her flesh that other woman’s pains, like a counterpoint, a faint but faithful echo of her own, in jarring opposition to her own rhythm. Suddenly the sounds of striving flesh ceased, a faint smell of chloroform was in the air; Martha found herself avidly breathing it in. Instruments clinked; she heard Dr Stern’s voice giving orders; she heard the stiff rustle of starch. There was a gasp, and a baby started crying.

‘For God’s sake,’ nagged Martha to her child, ‘get yourself out of there quickly.’ The child, however, was crouched waiting for the next spring forward; and Martha watched the flesh shrink and harden in the new contraction. This time she heard herself give a shriek. She no longer cared at all. All she fought for was to drag herself as soon as possible out of each gulf, not to give in more than she had to.

A long time passed; she rolled her eyes to the window and saw that it showed grey light; a single white star hung quivering; it faded; a pink flush crept up the sky. She heard the sound of a wet brush on a floor. It was a native woman, on her knees with a scrubbing brush. The screens had gone from the other white bed. Martha tensed and groaned, and the native woman raised her head, looked over, and smiled encouragement. There was no one else in the room. Martha could hear the cacophony of screaming babies from the other end of the building.

The native woman gave a quick look into the passage, and then came over to Martha. She was young, her dark face polished and smiling. She wore a neat white cloth on her head. She laid her wet dirty hand on Martha’s striving stomach. ‘Bad,’ she said, in her rich voice. ‘Bad. Bad.’ As a fresh pain came, she said, ‘Let the baby come, let the baby come, let the baby come.’ It was a croon, an old nurse’s song. Martha trembled with exhaustion, and tensed herself, but the woman smiled down and sang, ‘Yes, missus, yes, let it come, let it come.’

Martha let the cold knot of determination loosen, she let herself go, she let her mind go dark into the pain.

‘That’s right, missus, that’s right, that’s right.’

Suddenly the hand was withdrawn, leaving a cold wetness on her stomach. Martha looked, and saw that the native woman was on her knees with the scrubbing brush, and the young pink nurse stood beside her, looking suspiciously at the scrubbing woman. The brush was going slosh, slosh, wetly and regularly over the floor. Martha listened to the sound as if it were the pulse of her own nature, and did not listen as the pink nurse lifted her legs, levered them energetically up and down, and said, ‘That’s the stuff, push!’ Later, Martha heard the bright voice calling from the door, ‘Yes, doctor, she’s ripe!’ The room was full of people again. She was sucking in chloroform like an addict, and no longer even remembered that she had been determined to see the child born.

When her eyes cleared, she caught a glimpse of Dr Stern holding up a naked pallid infant, its dark hair plastered wet in streaks to its head, mouthing frustratedly at the air. Martha momentarily lost consciousness again, and emerged, feeling it must be years later, to see Dr Stern, in the same position, still holding the white baby, which looked rather like a forked parsnip and was making strangled, grumbling gasps. Two nurses were watching him. They looked triumphant and pleased. This humanity comforted Martha. She heard one say, ‘A lovely little girl, isn’t she?’ Then the pink nurse bent over her and began lifting handfuls of Martha’s now slack stomach, and squeezing it like oranges. Martha
shrieked, with the intention of being heard. ‘Oh, drat it,’ said the nurse; and the dome of white chloroform came down again over Martha’s face.

This time her eyes opened on a scene of white beds, and faces leaning against white pillows. After a time, she realized that she was pillowed at last in comfort. Five woman were in the other beds. Excitement flooded her, and she attempted to sit up. The lower part of her body announced that it was bruised and sore, and did not want to move. Martha raised herself on her hands and the woman next to her asked how she felt. Martha was struck by the lazy self-absorption of that voice. She said she felt fine, and the woman nodded. But her eyes were on the door. It opened, and the pink nurse entered with five babies balanced all over her arms. They were yelling, with hungry open mouths. The babies were plopped neatly one after another on to the beds, and gathered in by the waiting mothers. The pink nurse, empty-armed, arrived at Martha’s bed, and inquired, ‘Well, how are you?’