Landlocked by Doris Lessing

there was no point in going through with it again.
    However, she stood drawing striped cotton over the windows, thereby shutting out a sky where the storm clouds still swept and piled in great, dramatic silver masses, and folded back the thin white covers of the two beds in which both were going to sleep so badly. Meanwhile, Anton untied his tie before a glass and watched his young wife in it, his face hard.
    ‘Well, Matty, I’m waiting.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘There was a discussion, if you’ll be good enough to search your memory.’
    ‘It looked to me this evening as if you’ve already made up your mind,’ Martha said casually. She was pulling off her dress. The solid brown curves of her legs, her arms, thus revealed, suddenly spoke to her, and with a total authority. Thomas Stern said she was a peasant, did he? She looked at her fine strong body, smelled the delightful warm odours of her armpits, her hair, and thought: So he thinks I am a peasant, does he?
    ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
    ‘You know quite well what I mean. What’s the red-head’s other name?’
    ‘I’m not going to deny that I find Millicent attractive, Matty!’
    ‘Well, I should hope not.’
    Anton, a tall, over-thin man, his flesh glistening fair, his blond head gleaming, the fine hair on his thighs and belly shining gold, stood naked before stooping to pull up his pyjama trousers.
    That’s my husband, thought Martha. What nonsense! She watched the fair fine flesh of her husband vanishing behind dark green cotton and her flesh said: He’s got nothing to do with me, that man.
    Aloud she said: ‘We agreed that if I—’ she had been going to say, took a lover, but that was too literary, even though he had used the phrase first. Very European you are, she had said to herself, derisively: take a lover! Good Lord, who do you think I am? Madame Bovary? Well, I wish we had her problems. And it was not possible with Anton, for some reason, to say: get myself a man, find myself a man—that would be a sort of insult to him. ‘We decided that if I decided to be unfaithful to you then I should be honest with you, and you would take a mist…get yourself a girl—at any rate, we’d both get other people?’
    ‘Quite correct,’ said Anton, standing upright, startlingly handsome in his admirable dark green pyjamas. He was tying the cord of his pyjama trousers.
    This was the moment when Martha should go to him, naked as she nearly was, and put her arms around him. That was what he was waiting for, and why he tied his pyjama cord so slowly. If she did this, if she played her role properly, as a good wife should, then by midnight, or at the very latest, tomorrow morning, Millicent the red-head would have become one of the little married jokes that act as such a delightful lubricant. Too bad for Millicent, too bad for whatever expectations she might, at this moment, be cherishing of Anton. If things went one way, she might reasonably hope to be Anton’s mistress, girl-friend, at any rate, have an affair with him. If Martha now played her part properly, all warm and feminine and coaxing (Martha could see herself, and shuddered with disgust) then very soonMillicent would be ‘the red-head, Anton!’—and greeted with an understanding smile by Martha, a rather proud, self-conscious little grin by Anton. She would be a married joke, a little joke to smooth the wheels of matrimony. Lord, how repulsive! How unpleasant the little jokes, the hundred dishonest little lies, the thousand sacrifices like Millicent (or like Solly if it had come to that) which marriage demands.
    If Martha played her role one way, then tomorrow or the next day Millicent, throwing away her pride to ring Anton, or to run into him in the street, would be encountered with: ‘Hello Millicent, how are things, all right?’ ‘Fine, Anton, how are you?’ ‘See you sometime, Millicent.’ If Martha went on behaving as she was now, obedient to her peremptory and at least entirely