A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing

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       Chapter Two

      When Martha woke, she knew she had slept badly. Several times she had half roused, with the urgent knowledge that she ought to be attending to something; and this anxiety seemed to be of the same quality as that suggested by the great dragging circle of lights, which continued to flicker through her sleep like a warning. The ceiling of the small bedroom spun with light until after midnight, when the wheel was stilled; then bars of yellow light lay deep over the ceiling, over the bed, across Douglas’s face, from a room opposite, where a man must be lying awake reading, or a woman keeping vigil with a sick child.

      At six she was fully awake. The sky outside was chilly white-gold haze; winter was coming. She leaned on her elbow to look out at the wheel; in this small colourless light it rested motionless, insignificant, and the machinery of the fun fair beneath it seemed tawdry and even pathetic. It no longer had the power to move her; and the fact that it had so disturbed her sleeping was absurd. But Martha had been born – or so it seemed – with the knowledge that the hours of sleep were long and busy, and of the same texture as the hours of waking. She entered sleep cautiously, like an enemy country. She knew, too, however, that for most it was a sudden dropping of a dark curtain, and regarded this other family of mankind with a simple envy, the result of her upbringing so far away from the centres of sophistication, where she would have learned to use the word ‘neurotic’ as a label that would make any further thought on the subject unnecessary, or as a kind of badge guaranteeing a superior sensibility. She was in that primitive condition where she was able to pay healthy respect to – Douglas, for instance.

      She looked at him now with a rather wistful curiosity. He lay on his back, easily outstretched among the sheets and blankets. He was handsome when he slept. His face was open and rather flushed. An outflung arm, as if it had just fallen loose from the act of throwing something, lay in a calm, beautiful line from waist to shoulder. The upper part of his body emerging from the clothes, was solid, compact, the flesh clear and healthy; a light sprinkling of freckles over white, bright skin. He looked stern and dignified, sealed away from her in his sleep, and restored to the authority of good sense. Martha’s respect for him was now deep and genuine. She thought, with a simplicity which was authorized and confirmed by the dignity of his face, I shall say we must stop being married; he won’t mind.

      When he woke, everything would be explained and settled.

      Waiting for him to wake, she sat up and looked out. The town, no less than the fun fair, looked small and mean after the hazy splendours of the night. The two big blocks of flats opposite rose white and solid, but rain had streaked their sides into dinginess. Their windows were dead and asleep. Beyond them, half a dozen business houses, their surfaces clean with paint, glossy with money; and beyond these again, the tin-roofed shanties of the Coloured town, which marked the confines of order; for on two sides of this organized centre stretched the locations, or straggling slums where the Africans were. From a single small window she could overlook at least three worlds of life, quite separate, apparently self-contained, apparently linked by nothing but hate …But these familiar ideas, sprung in her mind by the simple act of looking through a window, were too much of a burden this morning. First Douglas should wake, and then it would be time to look out of the window. She might suggest to him, for instance, that he should at once throw up his job, and they should go and ‘live among the people’.

      She sprang out of bed, but noiselessly, and went next door to the living room. There, as she expected, lay a small heap of letters where Douglas had flung them down the night before. She carried them back to bed with her. Most were of that sort which people write to those getting married, in order that they may say with pride, ‘We have had so and so many letters of congratulation.’ At least, Martha could not yet see letters of politeness in any other way. She therefore tossed them aside, and took up one from her brother, now at the University of Cape Town. It was a good-humoured letter, full of determinedly humorous tolerance; their relations were always harmonious; in order that two people may quarrel they must СКАЧАТЬ