The Memoirs of a Survivor. Doris Lessing
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said, in a manner that matched her bright impervious voice and smile. Pert? At any rate a hard, an enamelled presence. I was trying to get past, or around it; I was conscious that I was desperately making signals – my smile, gestures – that might perhaps reach something softer and warmer which must be there behind that cold defence of hers.
‘Well, will you sit down? Or can I make you something to eat? Some tea? I do have some real tea, but of course …’
‘I’d like to see my room please,’ she said. And now her eyes were, quite without her knowing it, an appeal, She needed, she needed very much, to know what walls, what shelter, she was going to be able to pull around her, like a blanket, for comfort.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I haven’t thought yet, I don’t quite … I must …’ Her face seemed to shrivel. But she preserved her bright desperation. ‘You see,’ I went on, ‘I wasn’t expecting … let’s see now.’ She waited. Stubbornly, she waited. She knew that she was to live with me. She knew that her shelter, her four walls, her den, the little space that was hers and which she could creep into was here somewhere. ‘There’s the spare room,’ I said. ‘I call it that. But it isn’t very …’ But I went, and I remember how helplessly and unhappily I did, into the little front lobby, and through it to the spare room.
The flat was on the front of the building, the south side. The living-room took up most of the space: its size was why I had taken the flat. At the end away from the entrance lobby, so that you had to walk through the living-room to get to it, was the kitchen, on the corner of the building. This was quite large, with cupboards and storage space, and was used for eating as well. From the entrance lobby went two doors, one to the living-room, one to the room I called a spare room. This room was connected with the bathroom. My bedroom was on the front of the building, reached from the living-room. The bathroom, lobby, spare room, took up the same space as my bedroom, which was not large. It will be seen that the spare room was very small. It had a small high window. It was stuffy. There was no way of making it attractive. I never used it except for keeping things in or, with apologies, for a friend staying the night.
‘I’m sorry that it is so small and dark … perhaps we should …’
‘No, no, I don’t mind,’ she said, in the cool jaunty way which was so much hers; but she was looking at the bed with longing, and I knew she had found her refuge, hers, here it was at last. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, you don’t believe me, you don’t know what …’ But she left the possibility of an explanation of what she had been experiencing, and waited, her whole body expressing how she wanted me to leave.
‘And we’ll have to share the bathroom,’ I said.
‘Oh, I’ll be ever so tidy,’ she assured me. ‘I’m really very good, you know, I won’t make a mess, I never do.’
I knew that if I were not in this flat, if she did not feel she must behave well, she would be between the blankets, she would already be far away from the world.
‘I won’t be a tick,’ she assured me. ‘I must get tidy. I’ll be as quick as I can.’
I left her and waited for her in the living-room, first standing by the window looking out, wondering perhaps if fresh surprises were on the way. Then I sat down, rather, I imagine, in the attitude of The Thinker, or some such concentrated pose.
Yes, it was extraordinary. Yes, it was all impossible. But after all, I had accepted the ‘impossible’. I lived with it. I had abandoned all expectations of the ordinary for my inner world, my real life in that place. And as for the public, the outer world, it had been a long time since that offered the normal. Could one perhaps describe that period as ‘the ordinariness of the extraordinary?’ Well, the reader should have no difficulty here: these words are a description of the times we have lived through. (A description of all life? – probably, but it is not much help to think so.)
But these words convey perfectly the atmosphere of what was happening when Emily was brought to me. While everything, all forms of social organisation, broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives, as if nothing fundamental was happening. It was amazing how determined, how stubborn, how self-renewing, were the attempts to lead an ordinary life. When nothing, or very little, was left of what we had been used to, had taken for granted even ten years before, we went on talking and behaving as if those old forms were still ours. And indeed, order of the old kind – food, amenities, even luxuries, did exist at higher levels, we all knew that; though of course those who enjoyed these things did not draw attention to themselves. Order could also exist in pockets, of space, of time – through periods of weeks and months or in a particular district. Inside them, people would live and talk and even think as if nothing had changed. When something really bad happened, as when an area got devastated, people might move out for days, or weeks, to stay with relatives or friends, and then move back, perhaps to a looted house, to take up their jobs, their housekeeping – their order. We can get used to anything at all; this is a commonplace, of course, but perhaps you have to live through such a time to see how horribly true it is. There is nothing that people won’t try to accommodate into ‘ordinary life’. It was precisely this which gave that time its peculiar flavour; the combination of the bizarre, the hectic, the frightening, the threatening, an atmosphere of siege or war – with what was customary, ordinary, even decent.
For instance, on the newscasts and in the papers they would pursue for days the story of a single kidnapped child, taken from its pram perhaps by some poor unhappy woman. The police would be combing suburbs and the countryside in hundreds, looking for the child, and for the woman, to punish her. But the next news flash would be about the mass deaths of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. We still believed, wanted to believe, that the first, the concern about the single child, the need to punish the individual criminal, even if it took days and weeks and hundreds of our hard-worked police force to do it, was what really represented us; the second, the catastrophe, was, as such items of news had always been for people not actually in the threatened area, an unfortunate and minor – or at least not crucial – accident, which interrupted the even flow, the development, of civilisation.
This is the sort of thing we accepted as normal. Yet for all of us there were moments when the game we were all agreeing to play simply could not stand up to events: we would be gripped by feelings of unreality, like nausea. Perhaps this feeling, that the ground was dissolving under our feet, was the real enemy … or we believed it to be so. Perhaps our tacit agreement that nothing much, or at least, nothing irrecoverable, was happening, was because for us the enemy was Reality, was to allow ourselves to know what was happening. Perhaps our pretences, everyone’s pretences, which in the moments when we felt naked, defenceless, seemed like playacting and absurd, should be regarded as admirable? Or perhaps they were necessary, like the games of children who can make playacting a way of keeping reality a long way from their weaknesses? But increasingly, all the time, one had to defeat the need, simply, to laugh: oh, not a good laughter, far from it. Rather bellows and yells of derision.
For instance again: in the same week as a horde of two hundred or so hooligans had surged through our neighbourhood, leaving a corpse on the pavement across from the street from my windows, leaving smashed windows, looted shops, the remains of bonfires, a group of middleaged women, self-appointed vigilantes were making formal protests to the police about an amateur theatricals group some youngsters had set up. This group had written and put on a play describing the tensions inside an ordinary family living in a block of flats like ours, a family which had taken in half a dozen refugees from the eastern counties. (As long as travellers were with the migrating gangs they were ‘hooligans’, but when they hived off to find shelter with some family or household they were ‘refugees’). A household that had held five people suddenly held twelve, and the resulting frictions led to adultery and an incident where ‘a young girl seduced a man old enough to be her grandfather’ as the good women indignantly described it. They managed to organise a not-very-well-attended meeting about the ‘decay of family life’, about ‘immorality’, about ‘sexual indulgence’. This was comic, of course. Unless it was sad. Unless – as I’ve suggested – it was admirable; a sign of the vitality of the said ‘ordinary life’ which would in the end defeat chaos, disorder,