A Proper Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page A

in an office.’
Alice and Martha in their turn exchanged an amused smile, while Stella touched it up a little: ‘Men have no idea, they think housework and cooking get done by miracles.’
‘Why, haven’t you got a boy, dear?’ inquired Alice vaguely, and then broke into Stella’s reply with ‘Do you like Dr Stern, Matty? If not, I shan’t bother to make out a card for you.’
‘One doctor’s as good as another,’ said Martha ungraciously. ‘Anyway, I’m never ill.’
‘Oh, but he’s very good,’ exclaimed Alice, at once on the defensive. ‘He’s really wonderful with babies.’
‘But I’m not going to have a baby, not for years.’
‘Oh, I don’t blame you,’ agreed Alice at once. ‘I always tell Willie that life’s too much one damned thing after another to have babies as well.’
‘What do you do?’ inquired Martha, direct.
Alice laughed, on the comfortable note which Martha found so reassuring. ‘Oh, we don’t bother much, really. Luckily, all I have to do is to jump off the edge of a table.’
They were at a turning. ‘I think I’ll just go home, dear, if you don’t mind,’ said Alice. ‘Willie might come home early, and I won’t bother about a drink.’
‘Oh, no,’ protested Stella at once. ‘We’ll all run along to Matty’s place, You can ring Willie and tell him to come along,’
And now Martha once again found herself protesting that of course they must all come to her flat; an extraordinarydesperation seized her at the idea of being alone; although even as she protested another anxious voice was demanding urgently that she should pull herself free from this compulsion.
‘Oh, well,’ agreed Alice good-naturedly, ‘I’ll come and drink to your getting married.’
Martha was silent. Now she had gained her point she had to brace herself to face another period of time with both Stella and Alice. She thought, Let’s get it over quickly, and then … And then would come a reckoning with herself; she had the feeling of someone caught in a whirlpool.
The three women drifted inertly down the hot street, shading their eyes with their hands. Alice yawned and remarked in her preoccupied voice, ‘But I get so tired, perhaps I’m pregnant? Surely I’m not? Oh, Lord, maybe that’s it!’
‘Well, jump off a table, then!’ said Stella with her jolly crude laugh.
‘It’s all very well, dear, but this worrying all the time just gets me down. Sometimes I think I’ll have a baby and be done with it. That’d be nine months’ peace and quiet at least.’
‘What’s the good of working for a doctor if he can’t do something?’ suggested Stella, with a look at Martha which said she should be collecting information that might turn out to be useful.
Alice looked annoyed; but Stella prodded, ‘I’ve heard he helps people sometimes.’
Alice drew professional discretion over her face and remarked, ‘They say that about all the doctors.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ said Stella, annoyed.
‘If Dr Stern did all the abortions he was asked to do, he’d never have time for anything else. There’s never a day passes without at least one or two crying their eyes out and asking him.’
‘What do they do?’ asked Martha, unwillingly fascinated.
‘Oh, if they’re strong-minded, they just go off to Beira or Johannesburg. But most of us just get used to it,’ said Alice,laughing nervously, and unconsciously pressing her hands around her pelvis.
Stella, with her high yell of laughter, began to tell a story about the last time she got pregnant. ‘There I was, after my second glass of neat gin, rolling on the sofa and groaning, everything just started nicely, and in came the woman from next door. She was simply furious. She said she’d report me to the police. Silly old cow. She can’t have kids herself, so she wants everyone else to have them for her. I told her to go and boil her head, and of course she didn’t do anything. She just wanted to upset me and make me unhappy.’ At the last