Read Online A Proper Marriage by Doris Lessing - Free Book Online Page B

showed blank surprise; then he hastily adjusted his expression.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked unwillingly.
Martha sat down without being asked. ‘Do you mind my coming to see you?’ she asked. It sounded rather aggressive.
He could only reply that he did not. He sat down himself, with the air of one being polite against his will. Martha looked to see how he might have changed. Since she had seen him last, he had been to the university, quarrelled with his family, made a trip to England, almost got to Spain, had a love affair, returned, thrown up university for good. None of this showed on his face. He was exactly as he had been, tall, very thin, with a loose knobbly look about his movements. His face was sharp-featured and bony, with the look of the young intellectual Jew: lively and critical, but with an additional sarcastic hostility about him. His clothes were different, however. He wore very short dark-blue shorts and a rusty-brown shirt, falling loose. He was tanned a dark brown.
‘I like the name you’ve chosen for your communal settlement,’ said Martha, ready to laugh with him.
‘We didn’t choose it. It was the name before.’
‘Oh!’ Then: ‘Do you mean the Coloured people called it Utopia?’ she asked, dismayed and touched.
‘That’s right. Stoo-pid, isn’t it?’
She saw he was jeering at her, and came back with ‘I thought you had the grace to laugh at yourselves, at least.’
But he was not prepared to be provoked. In any case Martha blurted out, ‘Can I come and live here, too?’
He looked at her, first grinning, then grave. ‘Well, well,’ he commented at last. Then, cautiously: ‘I thought you’d just got married?’
‘I have. But I want …’ But it was impossible to make explanations. ‘I shouldn’t have got married, anyway. I would like to come and live here. Why shouldn’t I?’ she demanded like a child.
Here Solly, who had been preparing some gestures of amazement or amusement, simply shrugged.
‘But you can’t do that,’ he said reproachfully at last.
Martha was indignant. ‘Why did you write me that letter, then?’ she asked naively.
‘But, Matty …’ Here he relapsed into his old manner. He was going to be simple and natural. ‘But, Matty, you can’t go getting married one week and throwing it up the next.’ He was looking at her inquiringly; his face showed an intelligent comprehension - but not kindness.
Martha’s spirits were sinking lower and lower. She saw she had been extremely foolish. However, she continued lamely, ‘You mean, everyone feels like this, it’s like measles, one just has to go through with it?’
‘Having never been married myself …’ he began portentously, but dropped the manner at once. ‘What did you get married for?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Martha ruefully.
‘Anyway, you can’t live here,’ he announced at last. ‘For one thing, there aren’t any women.’
Martha felt herself blushing, and was furious. For the first time it occurred to her that Solly might be taking this as a personal interest in himself. It was intolerable! She exclaimed belligerently, ‘You keep out women?’
At once Solly recovered his jaunty manner. ‘We did ask some girls. Unfortunately none of you can be torn away from your bright lights and your clothes. I suppose you understand that here everything is in common – books, money, everything. And we don’t smoke and we don’t drink.’
‘And you are all celibate?’ she inquired sarcastically.
‘Naturally.’ Then he added, ‘But marriage is allowed.’
But now she laughed scornfully. ‘Anyone’d see that married couples would wreck it.’
‘Luckily we are none of us intending to get married, so that’s all right.’ She was sitting upright in her chair, eyes bright with anger, face flushed — he deliberately lounging in his, with an appearance of conscious ease. ‘And you’re not Jewish either,’ he said. He sounded embarrassed.
This was something she had not thought of;