A Proper Marriage (39 page)

Stella looked up quickly, searched Martha’s face, asked, ‘What did he say he was doing?’

‘Oh, nothing much, just that they’d met. My brother’s with the South Africans.’

‘This terrible, terrible war,’ said Mrs Barbazon.

‘Oh, they seem to be having a good enough time,’ said Stella, with a careless laugh. Her face looked set for a moment; then she smiled at Esther, and began tickling her cheeks with the soft brush at the end of the braid.

‘And how’s Esther?’

Mrs Barbazon, smiling reminiscently, opened her mouth to give information. Stella cut in first with a story of how the child had crawled this morning across her bed. Mrs Barbazon said, ‘You should let her sleep with me - you’d get some rest.’

‘Oh, I’ve nothing else to do, and you’re a good girl, aren’t you, Esther?’

There was a silence. Martha felt the room oppressive. She could see that both women were devoting their lives to Esther; it was a close, jealous, watchful household.

‘And are you having a good time?’ asked Mrs Barbazon, in a way which told Martha they had been discussing her unfavourably.

‘I’ve got my hands full with Caroline.’

‘Oh, there’s no time for anything else with a baby in the house.’

‘I had a letter from Andrew last month,’ said Stella casually. ‘He says the boys up north are all demoralized because their wives and girlfriends are unfaithful to them with the Air Force.’

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ said Mrs Barbazon, ‘when our men are sacrificing everything to fight, and the women have no loyalty.’

Here there was an inexplicable long look between Mrs Barbazon and Stella; the older woman rose, and said, ‘I’ll
make some tea, the servants are out.’ She left the room with a small wistful smile in the direction of Esther.

As soon as her mother had left the room, Stella set the child on the floor and gave her attention to Martha. She asked if Caroline was walking yet; when Martha said yes, she said quickly that a year was early to be walking, from which Martha deduced that Esther had fallen behind schedule in her achievements.

Martha looked at Esther with detached criticism, in which was concealed the distaste that women feel for other women’s babies while they are still closely physically linked with their own. Esther, she decided, was listless and heavy compared to the ceaselessly mobile Caroline.

Stella began talking of how she had had to wean the child after three months; her health had not permitted her to stand the strain of breast-feeding; as she spoke, she unconsciously felt her now plump breasts with both hands. ‘Having babies ruins the figure, ruins it.’ She looked over at Martha and said, ‘You’ve lost the weight you put on.’

‘I didn’t lose it,’ said Martha grimly, ‘I starved it off.’

‘Oh, I could never diet, I’m not strong enough. Anyway, Andrew always said he wished I was fatter.’ Stella sighed, and her face fell into dissatisfied lines. The beautiful dark eyes looked strained and shadowed. The remote exotic gleam had gone; the seductive quality that Martha had so envied, that had showed itself in her every glance and movement, had completely vanished; she was a good-looking housewife, no more.

The doorbell rang. Stella’s eyes gathered life; she half rose, then said, ‘But I’m not dressed!’

‘Leave it - I’ll go,’ said Mrs Barbazon from the kitchen.

Stella stood with her hands to her hair.

‘You’d better get yourself dressed,’ said Mrs Barbazon, as she came through to go to the door. There was a disapproving note in her voice which caused Martha to glance curiously at Stella.

A look of anger crossed Stella’s face, then went. ‘Oh, yes, I can’t be seen like this,’ she said, and went out quickly just before Mrs Barbazon came back with a young officer.

He was a big, bulky, fair-headed man, blue-eyed, Northern-looking. He sat down, while Mrs Barbazon moved and fussed about him. She sat down and began questioning him with the touching, self-immolating devotion which was what she offered to her daughter, about how the flying had gone yesterday, had he been sleeping better?

‘Stella’s just getting dressed. You know what things are with a baby in the house.’

The newcomer, reminded of the household’s obligations, clucked at the baby. Mrs Barbazon, seeing him occupied, went out and quickly returned with a tea-waggon. She began pouring.

A gay voice was heard outside. ‘Mother, where’s my hairbrush?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Barbazon spoke sharply. She stood looking at the doorway, with the teapot held suspended in her hand. Stella, in a dress of apple-green linen which showed her apricot-coloured arms, was standing in the doorway, her loosened masses of hair about her face, apparently oblivious of the officer.

‘Ah, there it is. Naughty Esther, you had it.’ Stella reached for the hairbrush, holding back her heavy hair with one hand. ‘Why, Rupert, is that you?’

Mrs Barbazon steadily poured tea, her lips compressed.

‘You know how things get all over the place, with babies in the house,’ said Stella with her jolly laugh. She stood in front of the big man, who had risen and was awkwardly facing her, and began brushing back the loads of glistening hair that slipped with a hiss over her shoulders. He could not keep his eyes off it. Her small smooth face emerged from the frame of falling hair, and Martha saw that the spirit of attraction had lit it again; Stella looked as she had done before the baby. She smiled and asked how he did, while he said, ‘Fine, fine, thank you,’ and his eyes followed the movement of the hair. She held the scene for a few moments longer; then, with a final swift toss of her head backwards, which flung the hair into an oiled, iridescent, dead-black curve, she said, ‘Excuse me, I’ll just finish dressing.’

The three sat and made conversation while the officer’s
eyes rested on the door through which Stella had gone. She returned in a few moments, the black hair done up demurely in its heavy knot, and sat down near him. Little Esther began tugging at the green linen. Stella put her hands down once or twice, and then said hastily, ‘Let’s call the nurse - she can go out for a bit.’

Mrs Barbazon rose, picked up Esther, and went out. She did not return.

Martha soon got up and said she must go and feed Caroline.

At once Stella said, ‘Do come and see us again, Matty. You’re a naughty girl, forgetting your friends like this.’ But she was looking at the officer even as she spoke; Martha felt something like pity for the big likeable man with the candid blue eyes.

Stella came with her to the door. ‘He’s a nice boy,’ she remarked. ‘We try and make him feel at home. It must be hard for them, so far from their families.’

Martha laughed. Stella looked at her, puzzled.

‘He’s a really nice boy. Mother says she feels towards him like a son,’ she went on, smiling a small, dreamy and quite unconscious smile.

Martha urged Stella with false animation to visit her soon. Stella again berated Martha for being so unsociable. They exchanged urgent invitations for a few moments, and parted, disliking each other.

Martha was feeling extraordinarily foolish as she drove home. The reaction against Stella sent her back to Alice. The two women had in common a basic self-absorption that made it possible to forget each other for weeks and meet again easily without any embarrassment. They understood each other very well. They would seek each other out for the sole reason that they needed a safety valve; they would discuss in humorous, helpless voices, for an hour or so, their boredom, the tediums of living alone, the unsatisfactory nature of marriage, the burden of bringing up children, and part in the best of humours with the unscrupulous and buccaneering chuckle that came of being so ruthlessly disloyal to everything they were.

Then each retired again into isolation. Alice was half crazy with being alone. She was very thin, her hair hung limp about her face, she neglected her clothes. From time to time she exclaimed defiantly, ‘Oh, to hell with everything,’ and rang up Martha to say she was going out with the Air Force. Martha always assured her that this was the least of her rights. Alice pulled out an old dance dress, combed her hair back, scrawled some lipstick across her face. She then set herself to be the life and soul of whichever party she happened to be at. Returned to her flat by some ardent young man, she allowed herself to be kissed and caresssed for a while, as if she owed this to her self-respect, and then said, ‘Oh, well, that’s that - thanks for a lovely time.’ With which she departed indoors, with a hasty apologetic wave. She never saw any young man for a second time. On these occasions Martha was likely to be rung up at three in the morning by Alice, who concluded her desperate, gay, rambling comments on the party by ‘The point is, once you’ve been married there’s no point in it. I don’t enjoy anything any more.’ And then, firmly: ‘But if Willie thinks I’m going to sit at home weeping for him, he’d better think again, after what I heard he was up to!’ With this, she let out her high fatalistic giggle, and wished Martha a good night.

Chapter Three

The airstrip was an irregular stretch of glistening white sand in the dull-green bush. As the aircraft turned in to land, the shadow of its wings dipped over an acre or so of tin-and-brick bungalows. The soldiers in the aircraft peered down past the tilting wings and suggested Lower Egypt, Abyssinia, Kenya, Uganda. It seemed that they had all seen this shanty-town in the bush many times before.

The aircraft bounced a little as it landed, then slewed to a stop. A thick cloud of white dust drifted up. The door was kept shut till it cleared. Then they descended - half a dozen men on their feet. An ambulance was already motoring across the half-mile between here and the red-brick shack that was an office, to pick up the stretcher cases. The half-dozen stood on one side hopefully while the stretchers were slid inside the white car, but it drove off immediately. They walked across the white glisten of the strip, sand giving with a silken crunch beneath their boots, then through low dun-coloured bushes towards the office. Small paper-white butterflies hovered over the bushes, or clung with fanning wings. There was a hot, spicy smell of leaves. Over the squashed remains of a chameleon, spreadeagled on the sand like a small dragon’s skin pegged out, was a thick black clot of ants. A stray kaffir dog, his skeleton showing clear through tight skin, lay in the pit of blue shade outside the veranda. They stepped over the dog and went in.

It was a single room. A South African sergeant sat behind a small deal table. A black man in a sort of orderly’s uniform stood at ease beside him. The sergeant was pouring a glass of water from a bedroom decanter. He tipped back his head,
poured the water into his mouth, wiped his hand across his mouth, looked at them and said, ‘So there you are.’

Douglas said half facetiously, ‘Where are we, we’d like to know.’

The sergeant thought, concluded that the information could not subvert the course of the war, and offered cautiously, ‘Nyasaland.’

The men exchanged startled, bitter glances. ‘Pretty far from the front,’ said Douglas, his face hard.

A quick glance from the sergeant. He said officially, ‘Are you OK till you get into town? There’s a car coming for you.’

He nodded at a bench set against the wall. They did not immediately sit down. They stood tense, looking at each other, at the sergeant.

‘Sit down,’ said the sergeant again, authoritative but uneasy.

They slowly walked over, dropped their packs by the wall, sat. Six men, all tough soldiers, very burnt, apparently fit for anything. Yet here they sat. They sat and waited with the patience which a year in the Army had taught them. Indeed, for that year they had done little else but wait. They had marched, drilled - and waited; slept under canvas or in the open - and waited; they had been told nothing, knew nothing. For the first time in their lives they had been
pushed around;
they were expected to wait. And now things were really happening up north, and they were back only a few hundred miles from home. They waited. The small brick room, unceilinged, was roofed with corrugated iron; the heat poured down. The brick at their backs burned through the thick khaki; they sat away and forward from the wall, looking out of the doorway into the sunlight. The aircraft looked like a small silver insect glittering off sunlight. It was apparently abandoned. A pair of hawks circled above on steady wings.

Douglas, at the end of the bench, blinked regularly out into the dazzle. Beside him sat Perry, legs sprawling in front of him, the big blond sun-reddened body tense. Douglas heard the breath coming fast and irregular, and glanced swiftly sideways; Perry was staring angrily at a map of
Africa nailed to the brick wall opposite. Arrows of black ink showed the offensives and counter-offensives in North Africa. Their unit was - so they believed - combining with the Australians against Rommel at that moment. Perry’s mouth, when closed, was a hard, lipless line; when slightly open, as now, it had a spoilt and peevish droop.

Douglas muttered with warning cheerfulness, ‘Hey, take it easy, man.’

Perry moved his legs, showing mats of wet hair on the reddened skin where they had adhered together. Sweat was dripping steadily off all of them. ‘There’s been a balls-up, a mucking balls-up.’ The tone was one they all knew; legs shifted, bodies eased, all along the bench. The sergeant, seated behind his table, was writing a letter home, and did not look up.