A Proper Marriage (46 page)

‘So I should think,’ she said, with a sort of bright desperation. She was terrified of becoming pregnant.

The next few days, which were occupied in seeing the house, deciding it was satisfactory, and moving into it, going to parties, giving them, making and receiving visits, were interspersed also with love-making. She was tense with anxiety that she might have become pregnant that first night. The old trapped feeling had her again; she was sleeping badly, although for a year she had slept very well; she was again lying through the nights listening to the sad music of the fun fair, and conscious of every twinge or response of her body as if it might vouchsafe to give up its secrets if only she concentrated on it hard enough. Then she knew she was not pregnant. She was able to give her mind fully to this new task of managing a large house, four servants, Caroline and a husband.

Part Four

He must be a dubious hero, a man with possibilities.

C. G. JUNG
, On Marriage

Chapter One

The house was in the older part of the city, at the corner of a block. From its gate one could see a mile in four directions along tree-bordered avenues. The town planners, when faced with a need for more houses, always solved the problem by laying a rule neatly over a map which represented a patch of unused veld, causing a pattern of streets to come into existence which crossed each other regularly at right angles. Everything was straight, orderly, unproblematical; grey strips of tarmac stretched endlessly, the naked earth at either side sprouted grass and wild-flowers. Above, trees: the glossy dark masses of the cedrelatoona, the sun-sculptured boughs of the Jacarandas, and, between, those small stiff trees the bauhinias, with their pink-and-white blossoms perched on them like butterflies. It was October, and the Jacarandas were purple and the streets were blue, as if they ran water or reflected the sky, which was unrelievedly blue and pulsing with heat.

Inside the gate was a large tree, under which Martha stood looking out. Behind her was a rough lawn, where Caroline was playing with a native girl who now attended to her. Martha turned her back on the tiring glitter of the street, and surveyed the house, which was a series of large rooms casually assembled and surrounded by a wide creeper-curtained veranda, reached by a deep flight of red cement steps. The garden was big and untidy. The garden boy squatted beside a border, gently prodding the earth with a fork while he dreamed of his own affairs. He was a young lad of about fifteen, who from time to time turned admiring eyes towards the girl. She, however, was mission-trained and sat very neat and proper in her clean white dress, legs
tucked soberly to one side, her head, outlined in a scarlet crocheted cap, bent over her knitting. She did not look at him, but occasionally called out shrilly to Caroline, who was supposed to stay in the shade. The little girl, in a brief white dress, her wisps of black hair shining iridescent in the sun, was running over the rough grass in bare feet. She stopped when she saw her mother, smiled, took two steps towards her, then turned and trotted off to the garden boy, who laid down his fork and began clapping his hands regularly to attract her.

‘Caroline?’ the girl called, but did not move.

Martha reflected that the boy was supposed to be digging a bed for vegetables at the back of the house, where, however, he would not see the girl; and she was supposed to be ironing at this hour. If she, Martha, were really efficient, she would at once raise her voice and put things right. But she could see no reason why they should not all stay as they were; so she left the shade of the big tree and went rapidly through the blazing sun to the house. Caroline let out a protesting wail, then lost interest, and began digging with the garden boy’s fork, while he watched her, smiling proudly.

Martha gained the veranda, stood behind the creeper, and looked out. The sunlight made her eyes ache. She hastily called to the girl to take Caroline away into the shade, and turned her back on the scene of persuasion and protest that followed. As usual she was feeling uncomfortable; she hated giving orders and was always at a disadvantage with her servants. Since she could not look at Alice, the native nurse, without thinking that she ought to be married and looking after her own children, or at the garden boy without thinking that he should be at school, or at the cook in the kitchen without finding it intolerable that a grown man should be under the orders of a girl a third his age, her voice always had a tinge of guilt when she spoke to them. The houseboy, a young man of twenty bursting with health and energy, was engaged in polishing bits of furniture in the dining room. She stopped to watch him. From where she stood, greasy polish marks showed on the shining table, and she knew
that it was her duty to instruct him in polishing tables. She continued through the house to the back veranda. Here the piccaninny – the small black child who was engaged, according to custom, for odd jobs – was playing with Caroline’s toys on the steps. Since Martha pretended not to see him, he continued to roll a small green car along the edge of a step, growling like an engine in his throat.

The kitchen was large, equipped with all kinds of modern devices. The cook was putting away the vegetables and groceries which had just been delivered from the stores. She left the kitchen and went towards the large refrigerator which stood on the veranda. She proudly opened it; it was her secret pride that it was always stocked with jars of sauces and mayonnaise, pastry of various kinds folded in stiff white slabs ready for cooking, biscuit dough that needed only to be put in the oven, jugs of iced tea and coffee, ice cream and complicated iced puddings that had taken hours to make. Martha told Douglas with satisfaction that she could serve a meal for ten any time at half an hour’s notice, and he was pleased with her. But the cook, who after all existed solely to serve meals for two adults and a child, and was delighted if half a dozen people dropped in, suffered this organization unwillingly. Sometimes Martha told him he might take a few hours off, and cooked what she thought of as her own meals; and then, hurt in his pride, he retired to the back garden, where he watched her disapprovingly. He was a very good cook.

There was nothing to do in the refrigerator, so Martha went to the pantry. This was a room large enough to be a room for sleeping or working in; it was cool, with a gauze window that overlooked the vegetable beds at the back. It had a stone floor, stone shelves, dazzling white walls. There was a delicious cool smell of sugar and spices, the warm fresh tang of new flour. Sacks of sugar, flour, meal, stood along the floor. Martha dipped her fingers through the dry glisten of the sugar, touched soft clinging flour, and gazed along shelves where, in neat tins, were stored the groceries: tea and coffee; the starches in all their amazing variations; corn flour and bean flour, soya flour and the grades of
oatmeals, rapoka meal and pea flour and split peas and beans; the rices, short and long and wild and cleaned, and ground and polished - six variations of them; the pastas from Italy, long and thin, long and fat, and moulded into all their possible forms, shells and buttons and letters and animals - these last for Caroline; the sagos and the tapiocas, and flour of the same; potato flour and lentils, red and brown and grey, and samp and sugar - all the colours and grades of it, from the fine thin white to the masses of heavy black treacle from the West Indies. From the sugar the cans and bottles shaded through to the exotics: dried cherries and almonds, coriander and ginger root and preserved and dried ginger; vanilla and candied peel, and currants and sultanas and raisins and the fine fresh crystallized fruits from the Cape. Beyond, jars of preserved peaches and apricots and plums and guavas; jams, chutneys, spiced mangoes and fruit syrups.

Martha opened one tin after another, sniffing the stored exhaling odours with keen delight, while she ran her eyes along the rows of massed and glistening bottles of fruit. This was her favourite room in the house. But she shut the door on its pleasures and went back to the veranda. A large ginger cat now sat on the steps, patting at the little car as the small black child rolled it past.

The cook came out of his kitchen and said, ‘Madam, what shall I cook for lunch?’

Martha consulted with him at leisure; he went back to the kitchen, and she through several rooms to the bedroom. It was large, with a pleasant high white ceiling, and windows opening on three sides into the garden. It had a conventional suite of bedroom furniture, rather ugly, and twin beds covered in green silk.

She had a choice of three rooms to sit in, but she sat on her bed, and looked at the white trumpets of the moonflowers hanging outside the window. She thought that she might very well run across the street into Mrs Randall’s for morning tea. She resisted it like a temptation, although she grumbled humorously to Douglas that these women’s tea parties were driving her crazy. Gossip, gossip about their
servants, she complained; and then their doctors, and how they brought up their children (she did not add, ‘And the dullness of their husbands’). The fact was, there was something about these daily orgies of shared complaint, for they were nothing if not that, which was beginning to attract her like a drug.

How extraordinary it was that within a month after Douglas had returned from up north she was in this large house, with all these servants, and supplied with a new circle of friends. For all the wives of Douglas’s associates had come to see her, and she had gone to see them.

She was one of a set. She had been now for over a year.

They were all married couples, and the wives were pregnant, or intended to be soon, or had just had a baby. They all earned just so much a month, owned houses which they would finish paying for in about thirty years’ time, and in the houses was furniture bought on hire-purchase, including refrigerators, washing machines, fine electric stoves. They all had cars, and kept between two and five servants, who cost them about two pounds a month each. They were all heavily insured.

They took holidays at the Cape once in four or five years, gave sundowner parties to each other once or twice in the month, and went dancing or to the cinema two or three times in the week. They were, in short, extremely comfortable, and faced lives in which there could never be a moment’s insecurity. ‘Security’ was the golden word written up over their doorways, security was so deeply part of them that it was never questioned or discussed: the great climax of their lives would come at fifty or fifty-five, when their houses, gardens and furniture would be their own, and the pensions and policies bore fruit.

But if there is a type of man who instinctively chooses ‘the Service’, is there, then, a type of woman who inevitably marries him? This was the question that troubled Martha. She was uneasy because she had adapted herself so well to this life; some instinct to conform and comply had dictated that she must quell her loathing, as at entering a trap, which she had felt at the idea of being bound by a house and
insurance policies until the gates of freedom opened at fifty. She was instinctively compliant, enthusiastic, and took every step into bondage with affectionate applause for Douglas. But she never felt that she really lived in this house, whose furniture had been chosen by the woman who lived in it before her, whose garden had been designed by someone else. She did not feel like Douglas’s wife or Caroline’s mother. She was not even bored. It was as if three parts of herself stood on one side, idle, waiting to be called into action.

She was secretly and uneasily curious as to how these other women felt, and therefore did she go to the morning tea parties, therefore did she change her dress, brush her hair, take up her handbag and make her way to the circle of women.

On the veranda of one of their houses was set a circle of grass chairs, a table with cakes and biscuits. The babies crawled around their feet, or played on the lawns outside.

The women looked sharply at each other’s dresses and at the food provided, while they discussed economy. Money chimed through their talk like a regulator of a machine. For all the heavy insurances, the mortgages, the hire-purchase, the servants, were made possible because of their ingenuity with money. They could all make attractive and expensive-looking clothes for themselves, their children and even their husbands out of a few shillings’ worth of stuff bought at the sales; they continually discussed recipes which might cut the grocers’ bills by a fraction; they would haggle at their back doors with the native vendors over a penny like old women in a market place; they all knitted and sewed and patched and contrived like poor men’s wives. There were sharp scenes between husbands and wives at every month’s end; there was a continual atmosphere of contended silver shillings. They were all perpetually short of ready money, because of their god, a secure and comfortable middle age. They sighed out, ‘When we retire …’ as if they were saying, ‘When the prison gates are opened …’

Martha could not ask Douglas for five shillings to last until the end of the week without a sharp sense of failure; and,
since she had caught herself using a coaxing little voice to wheedle it out of him, she had reacted sharply into a stiff pride which meant she would go without meals secretly if he did not come home for them, to save the few pence they would cost. Yet, while she resented this necessity to spend all her time on running up dresses, petticoats, shirts, and clothes for Caroline on the sewing machine; while she never ceased to be conscious of the time that went on bottling, pickling and preserving, it was all a great pride and satisfaction to her. She found that when she had nothing to do she would unpick an old dress to make it into a new one, for the sheer satisfaction of getting something for nothing; just as she would spend two hours making a pudding that looked like an illustration out of Mrs Beeton, so that she might feel pride in the knowledge that it cost less than the rice pudding the cook would have made in its stead.