A Proper Marriage (10 page)

Here she laughed with him, in genuine appreciation of that wit which, however, he was determined should never be more than socially agreeable. But he went on, with the astounding frankness with which he said what he really felt: ‘Anyway, Matty, if a girl marries a man with money and so on, what more can she want?’ He sounded really aggrieved. She let out a snort of laughter; saw him flush, and then he rose gracefully. ‘Well, Matty, I shall now leave you.’ His smile was cold; their eyes met unpleasantly; then he sailed,
in a way which was reminiscent of his mother, across the veranda to another empty chair.

Martha’s glass was refilled for her. She was becoming depressed as the alcohol took effect. She was disappointed that there was anyone here that she knew; and looked back to her first weeks in town, when the people she met seemed like glorious and disconnected phenomena, meteors and rockets that went shooting across her vision, only to disappear. But certainly not tamely connected in social circles. That Donovan, Ruth, even Mr Maynard, should be brought to this veranda on this evening by a mysterious connection gave her a feeling of oppression. She could feel the nets tightening around her. She thought that she might spend the rest of her life on this veranda, or others like it, populated by faces she knew only too well. It was at this point, and for the first time, that she found herself thinking, The war will break it up, it won’t survive the war. Then she was sincerely dismayed and ashamed. She said it must be her own fault that she could see no face, hear no voice, which could make her happy at the idea of being here.

Half a dozen chairs away, Mrs Talbot and Elaine were discussing with a third lady a new method of cutting sandwiches, and, Martha noted, with precisely the same allowance of deferential charm that they had given her marriage. Opposite them, two ladies were arguing - what else? the iniquities of their servants. Mrs Maynard, at the other end of the veranda, and at the top of her confident voice, was discussing hers. Mr Maynard, from the depths of his resigned boredom, took up the theme with a slow, deliberate account of a case he had judged that morning. A native youth had stolen some clothes from his employer; the question before him, the magistrate, had been: Should the sentence be prison or an official beating? He told his story with a calm objectivity that sounded brutal. But Martha, as she watched that heavy and handsome face, saw the full, authoritative eyes move slightly from one face to another, saw suddenly that he was using this audience, which, after all, was not so arbitrarily associated, as a sort of sounding board.

Everyone was listening now, waiting to jump into the discussion with their own opinions; for certainly this was a subject,
the
subject, on which they were all equipped to speak. But Mr Maynard was not yet ready to throw the ball out for play. Having concluded with the bare facts of the case, he turned to a similarly large and authoritative gentleman in a neighbouring chair, and remarked, ‘It is a question, of course, of whether a sentence should be regarded as a punishment or a deterrent. Until that is decided — and they certainly haven’t decided it even in England - I can hardly be expected to have any opinions?’

The half-dozen people who had been leaning forward, mouths half open, ready to say what they thought, were taken aback by the depths of intellectuality into which they were expected to plunge. They waited. One lady muttered, ‘Nonsense, they should all be whipped!’ But she turned her eyes, with the rest, towards the gentleman appealed to.

He appeared to be thinking it over. He sat easily in his chair, an impressive figure, his body and face presenting a series of wide smooth surfaces. His corpulence was smoothly controlled by marvellous suiting, the fat pink areas of cheek and chin seemed scarcely interrupted by the thin pink mouth, the small eyes. When he lifted his eyes, however, in a preliminary circling glance before speaking, it was as if the bulk of ordinary flesh, commonplace cheeks, took an unimportant position behind the cold and deliberate stare. Those eyes were not to be forgotten. It was as if the whole personality of this man struggled to disguise itself behind the appearance of a man of business who was devoted to good, but good-natured, living - struggled and failed, for the calculating, clever eyes betrayed him. He said in a casual voice that in his opinion the whole legal system as affecting the Africans was ridiculously out of date and should be radically overhauled.

One could hear the small suppressed gasp of dismay from his listeners. But Mr Maynard kept his full prompting eyes fixed on the cold grey ones, and merely nodded; whether in agreement or not, he intended to convey, was quite unimportant, for it was his task to administer the law and not to
change it. Martha was expecting an outburst from these people; she had not spent the greater part of her nineteen years listening to talk about the native problem for nothing. She was astounded that they remained silent.

It was Mrs Maynard who spoke for them; it was the politeness of her disagreement that told Martha that this fat pig of a man must be Mr Player. She could not easily believe it; a man cannot become a legend without certain penalties, and it seemed to her altogether too simple that people so inevitably become like the caricatures that their worst enemies make of them; besides, it was hard to connect the groomed pink face with that large hot red one she had once caught a glimpse of on a racecourse. Mrs Maynard was announcing firmly that it was obvious the natives were better served by being whipped than being sent to prison, for they didn’t mind prison, it was no disgrace to them. They were nothing but children, after all. At this a dozen ladies angrily flung out their agreement. Martha listened with tired familiarity - this was something one could always be sure of. One after another, it was stated in varying ways that the natives should be kept in their place - and then Martha lost a few remarks, because she was considering something she had just realized. Two familiar words had not been used: nigger and
kaffir;
either this was an evolution in opinion or this circle of people were different and less brutal than those she had been used to.

There was a silence in progress when Martha became attentive again. Then the second camp made itself heard. It was Mrs Talbot who said, with a breathless air of defiance, that the poor things shouldn’t be whipped, everyone should be kind to everyone else. Her daughter murmured agreement, and was rewarded by a glance of grateful affection from her mother, who was flushed by her own daring. For while ‘poor things’ was certainly not a new note, the suggestion that poor things and children should not be whipped for their own good, was.

At this point, the young man from England, the secretary of the secretary, gave it as his opinion, with a quick and
rather nervous glance towards Mr Player, that public opinion in the colony was behind the times. The silence that followed was a delicate snub to the newcomer because of the burden of problems that they all carried. Ruth remarked in a detached voice that progressive people thought that whipping only made people worse. The word ‘progressive’ was allowed to pass; she was very young, and had been educated largely in England. Then Douglas stoutly averred, with the slight stammer which Martha was only just beginning to see could be a delicate compliment to superiors, that what was needed in the colony was good housing and good feeding, and the colony could never move forward while the bulk of the population was so backward. A silence again, during which Martha looked with grateful affection towards him; and everyone looked towards Mr Player.

The great man nodded affably towards Douglas, and said, ‘I quite agree.’ Again he allowed a pause for considered thought, and that slow, circling grey stare. Then he began to speak; and Martha heard with amazement the liberal point of view expressed by this pillar of reaction, this man who was a symbol of ‘the Company’. It was a shock to everything she had believed possible. And now many people who had been silent came in. Martha looked from face to face and tried to see what connected the champions of progress. At first she failed. Then she saw that mostly they were ‘business’ as opposed to ‘civil service’. The talk went on, and it was not until she had heard the phrases ‘greater efficiency’, ‘waste of labour’, etc., etc., often enough, that she understood.

What she had understood was finally crystallized by Mr Player’s summing up. He said that the whites were ruining their own interests; if the blacks (Martha noted that his use of the emotional word was calculated) were not to revolt, they must be fed and housed; and he, Mr Player, blamed above all the Editors of the
Zambesia News,
for persistently feeding the public with nonsense. For the last ten years, said Mr Player, ignorance had been pandered to by a policy that could only be described as monstrously stupid; any expression of a desire for improvement on the part of the natives was immediately described as impertinence, or sedition, or
even worse. We were, after all, living in the twentieth century, concluded Mr Player, while he directed his grey stare towards a man halfway down the veranda.

Following the searchlight of that stare, Martha saw at the end of it an uncomfortable, flushed gentleman angrily clutching at a glass of whisky. Since it was obvious that Mr Player did nothing casually, it followed that this gentleman must be connected with the press. As soon as Mr Player had finished, he remarked aggressively that the press was not concerned with fostering the interests of any particular section of the population. His look at Mr Player was pure defiance.

Mr Player stared back. Then he said that it was in no one’s interest that the blacks (this time the word was a small concession to the press) should be ill-fed and ill-housed into a condition where they weren’t fit for work. He paused and, having narrowed his eyes for a final stab, said, ‘For instance, I hear that on the Canteloupe Mine a policy of proper feeding and housing is gaining quite remarkable results.’ He elaborated this policy for some time. It occurred to Martha belatedly that this same mine was almost certain to be connected with the Company, and that Mr Player himself had originated this enlightened policy. Mr Player redirected his stare towards him, and remarked, ‘Some people might wonder why something that is after all an experiment is not considered newsworthy by a paper which claims to represent everybody?’

The victim grew redder, resisted for a moment, then said clumsily, ‘Well, of course, we are always ready to print genuine news.’

At once Mr Player removed his gaze and elaborated his theme in a different key for a while, then passed to another. He did not look towards the
News
again. They all listened in silence – the Service, business, two members of Parliament, the press - while Mr Player continued to express views which ninety per cent of the white population would consider dangerous and advanced. Obstinate, even ironical faces seemed to suggest that it was all very well for Mr Player, who did not have to answer to this same ninety per cent, but only to investors overseas. One felt that no slighter
provocation than this could have provoked them even to think of these investors, particularly as such thoughts were likely to be followed by others - such as, that the Company indirectly owned a large part of the
News
and most of the businesses who used its advertising space.

A telephone rang inside the long room which could be glimpsed through the open French windows. A native servant emerged, anonymous in his white ducks and red fez, to say Mr Player was wanted on the telephone. The secretary of the secretary made a movement towards rising; and subsided as Mr Player rose with a sharp look at him. He sat stiffly beside Ruth, discomfited. There was a long silence, while they listened to the voice inside. Then Mrs Brodeshaw remarked with a smile that Mr Player had a horse running in a race in England. There was a burst of relieved, admiring laughter.

Martha was looking at Mr Maynard, who did not laugh, but appeared bored and indulgent. Her persistent, speculative stare had its effect, for he got heavily to his feet and came down towards her. He sat down, saying, ‘If you young women will change your hair styles every day, what can you expect?’

‘I cut it,’ said Martha awkwardly - everyone had watched him coming to join her. Then Mrs Brodeshaw mentioned her roses, and conversation began again.

‘Did Binkie come back?’

‘He returned last night,’ said Mr Maynard. A glance at him showed his face momentarily clenched; a second, blandly indifferent. ‘His mother is a different woman as a result,’ he remarked; but at this point Mr Player returned. Everyone looked expectantly prepared to triumph or commiserate over the horse in England, but Mr Player sat down, and leaned over to murmur something to the young secretary. He was pink with importance.

Mr Maynard watched the scene, holding his glass between two loosely cupped hands, and said, ‘That is a very pretty young man.’

‘Oh, very!’ she agreed scornfully.

‘Have you noticed that the type of immigrant is changing?
The era of the younger sons is passing. A pity - I am a firm believer in younger sons. Now we have what the younger sons, such as myself, for instance, left England to escape from.’ The idea of Mr Maynard as a younger son made Martha laugh; and he gave her a quizzical look. ‘Now, in the old days – but you wouldn’t remember that.’ He glanced at her and sighed. Martha felt she was being dismissed. He did not continue. Instead he asked, in a casual but intimate voice that referred to yesterday’s encounter, ‘Well, what do you make of it all?’ He glanced around the long veranda and then at her.

Martha blurted out at once, ‘Awful. It’s all awful!’

He gave her another glance and remarked, ‘So I thought. I have been looking at you and thinking that if you must feel so strongly you’d better learn to hide it. If I may give you advice from the height of my - what? fifty-six years.’