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

Matty?’
She agreed with enthusiasm that it had. At the same time she glanced incredulously at him to assure herself that he must be joking. But he was grinning in the half-dark. She simply could not comprehend that his satisfaction, his pleasure, was fed less by her than by what other people found in their marriage.
Her silence dismayed him. He gripped her arm, pressed it, and urged, ‘Really, everyone’s been awfully good to us, haven’t they, Matty? Haven’t they? They’ve given us a hell of a start?’
Again she enthusiastically agreed. He lay alert now, feeling her worry and preoccupation. Then he suddenly inquired, ‘Did you see the doctor? What did he say?’
‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said, sleepy and bad-tempered. ‘He doesn’t seem to know more than we do, only he does the big-medicine-man act awfully well.’
But Douglas could not agree with this. ‘He’s very good, Matty — very good indeed.’
Her motherliness was warmed by his anxiety, and she at once assured him that he had been very kind and she had liked him enormously.
‘That’s all right, then. You’ll be all right with him.’ A pause. ‘Well, what did he recommend? Those effells are a pain in the neck, only for bachelors.’ He laughed proudly.
‘He made a joke about them.’
‘What did he say?’ She told him. ‘He’s a helluva lad, Dr Stern, isn’t he, Matty? Isn’t he?’
She hesitated. Besides, she did not want to think now about the machinery of birth control, which suddenly appeared to her distasteful. But since from the beginning it had been a matter of pride to be efficient, gay and matter-of-fact, she could not say that she detested the jellies and bits of rubber which from now on would accompany what Dr Stern had referred to as her love life as if it were something separate from life itself; she could not now say what for the moment was true: that she wished she were like that native woman, who was expected to have a baby every year. She wished at the very least that it should not all be made into a joke. She wanted to cry her eyes out; nothing could be more unreasonable.
Suddenly Douglas observed, ‘We’ve just done it without anything. I suppose that’s a bit silly, eh, Matty?’
‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ she said hastily, unwilling to move. She felt it would be ‘all right’ because since the ‘act of love’ had been what Dr Stern described as unsatisfactory, she felt it had not occurred at all. She was unaffected, and therefore it would be unfair, if not unnatural, that a child might result from it.
‘Because you’d better get out of bed and go to the bathroom,’ he suggested uneasily.
‘Judging from the book of words,’ she said, with a dry anger that astounded even herself, ‘those little dragons of yours go wriggling along at such a rate it would be too late by now.’
‘Well, maybe it would be better than nothing,’ he urged.
‘Oh, I’m too tired to move,’ she said irritably. ‘Besides,’ she added firmly, ‘I’m not going to have a baby for years. It would be idiotic, with a war coming.’
‘Well, Matty …’ But he was at a loss for words in the face of this irrationality. ‘At any rate,’ he announced firmly, ‘we mustn’t take any more chances at all. Actually we’re being helluva fools. It’s not the first time.’
‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ she agreed amenably, quite comfortable in the conviction, luckily shared by so many women who have not been pregnant, that conception, like death,was something remarkable which could occur to other people, but not to her.
‘Did you tell Dr Stern about your periods?’ he persisted.
‘What about them?’ she asked irritably, disengaging herself from his arm and lying parallel to him, not touching him.
‘Well, you did say they were a bit irregular.’
‘Oh, do stop fussing,’ she cried, tormented. ‘According to the book of words thousands of women have irregular periods before they have a baby and it doesn’t mean a