Free A Proper Marriage by Doris Lessing Page B

her. It was a thin, limp paper. She looked at it dubiously. It was called The Watchdog. The headlines, large and strident, assaulted her mind. She heard him laugh, and saw that she was holding the thing as if it might explode in her face. She smiled ruefully.
‘Nasty crude paper,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be seen with it. What would your friends say? Let alone your nice husband.’
Since she did not feel at all identified with her husband or his circle, she let this pass. She looked down again at the paper. The exclamatory style, the hectoring language, affected her uncomfortably, as if her whole system had been injected by some powerful irritating substance that it must throw off. But she looked at it steadily and saw that what it was saying was no more than Solly’s just-concluded lecture on the international situation.
He summed up her thought by saying, ‘It’s all right if you hear it all said in nice intellectual language in a nice comfortable room, but it’s quite different like that, isn’t it?’
She laid it down on a chair and looked at him. She needed to wound him as he was wounding her. She asked, ‘Why don’t you join the Communist Party, then?’ He simply maintained his steady grin; she realized that he must have joined it, otherwise he would not look so satirical. After a moment, she tried another tack: ‘Who’s paying for this house and this quiet intellectual existence?’ He reddened; and she persisted, ‘Your four fathers, no doubt. So your share of it comes from the profits made out of the kaffir store in the district. I don’t see that you are any better than I am, if itcomes to that.’ He was waiting for a chance to get in at her, but she went on hastily, delighted with her advantage: ‘So I’ll leave you to your independence, until the bull gets into this rose garden.’
She quickly shut the door behind her, and walked rapidly down the garden. All vegetables, of course, she thought, trying to be spiteful, but on the verge of tears. No flowers for the high-minded, naturally! While she had been inside, the earth around the little green clumps of lettuce had dried. Small granules of grey earth lay evenly over the base of wet dark richness. The youth was steadily hoeing potatoes at the far end of the garden. He did not lift his head as she came past. Then she heard her name called: Solly stood on the veranda.
‘Matty — would you like to come to a meeting here tonight?’
She hesitated, then called back sardonically, ‘Unfortunately I have a sundowner party-’ But she was unable to finish. Solly was doubled up in a pantomime of laughter.
She turned her back on him and walked away under the trees that shaded the pavement. It was some minutes before she was able to smile at herself and at him, her regret at having to leave was so strong. She felt forsaken; and nothing but the memory of Solly’s savage farewell laughter prevented her from hurrying back and saying that of course she would come to the meeting. When she reached the flat, she occupied herself with altering a dress to fit her for the sundowner party that night, and with an ironical consciousness of how Solly would see this proceeding. But there was something much stronger, a feeling of Well, then, I’ll show him! The showing him consisted in making the dress and herself as attractive as she knew how. It was not until she realized this that she remembered the moment when she had felt he might be thinking that she had come to him as a man, and not as a person in that romantic thing, a communal settlement. She burned with embarrassment; she could not forgive him. Now, looking back at the meeting, she could see the thing in no other way; everything they had said was permeated with this other emotion; to it she attributed hisaggressiveness and that sarcastic stare. She was hating him quite vividly. In a short while, the memory of that interview had become quite unbearable; and she was putting stitches into the fabric of her