Landlocked. Doris Lessing

bed, smiling at Martha as he turned out the light and turned a back which signalled in its own language, right across anything he might have felt: Very well then – but who owns you? I do! And Martha could feel her body wanting to assume a sort of silly, sly, giggling posture which said: Oh, so that’s what you think, is it?

      It was all humiliating, ridiculous … she could not let it happen again. She had to cut Anton out of her consciousness, had to bring down a curtain in herself and shut him out. Otherwise she would get ill. There she was, sharing a flat with him, cooking his food, going out with him sometimes, lying in a twin bed every night in a shared bedroom. But she was not there: she had knotted her emotions tight with Thomas and shut Anton out.

      Even so, she was on the edge all the time of being ill. It was never far off. This was not at all the vague, tight tension of before Thomas, which had been not so much the threat of illness as the illness itself: a perpetual dry inner trembling, a super-brightness, extra-attention, a lightness of her being – the stage on to which might walk, at any time, the disembodied emotions she could not give soil and roots to within herself.

      No: this was something quite different, on a different level – directly physical. If she let her connection with Thomas weaken; if she let her – what? Body? (but what part of it?) remember Anton and that he was her husband, well, her nerves reacted at once and in the most immediately physical way. She vomited. Her bladder became a being in the flesh of her lower stomach, and told her it was there and on guard. It did not like what she was doing – did not like it at all. Her stomach, her intestines, her bladder complained that she was the wife of one man and they did not like her making love with another.

      But of course, none of this could be told to Anton, or even mentioned to him. They were being civilized, he and she; they made civilized arrangements about marriage when it was not a success, and lived together like brother and sister, sharing single beds in a small bedroom, saying things like: ‘Did you have a good day, Anton?’

      ‘Yes, very good. I’m reorganizing that whole department. Yes, I may be an enemy alien and a damned German, but I’m organizing their freight department for them.’

      ‘And about time too, I’m sure.’

      ‘And I went to see Colonel Brodeshaw. After all, he is Member of Parliament for this constituency.’

      ‘Oh, good, can he help you?’

      ‘I think he wants to. I begin to think that Marxist theory underrates the role that the democratic consciousness plays in the British way of life. It is not only a mask for reaction, it is not just hypocrisy.’

      ‘Oh, you think not?’

      ‘No. Although he is a proper old Blimp, he is really very decent.’