Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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son was tall, tough and good-looking. The women watched how the boy, returning with an empty basket, swung out a filled one from the back of the milk-cart, receiving instructions from his father with a smile and a nod. There was perfect understanding there; and the two women, both of them bringing up children without men, exchanged a grimacing envious smile.
‘The point is,’ said Anna, ‘neither of us was prepared to get married simply to give our children fathers. So now we must take the consequences. If there are any. Why should there be?’
‘It’s very well for you,’ said Molly, sour; ‘you never worry about anything, you just let things slide.’
Anna braced herself—almost did not reply, and then with an effort said: ‘I don’t agree, we try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule? That’s what it amounts to.’
‘There you are,’ said Molly, antagonistic; ‘but I’m not a theoretical type. You always do that—faced with something, you start making up theories. I’m simply worried about Tommy.’
Now Anna could not reply: her friend’s tone was too strong. She returned to her survey of the street. Mr Gates and his boy were turning the corner out of sight, pulling the red milk-cart behind them. At the opposite end of the street was a new interest: a man pushing a hand-cart. ‘Fresh country strawberries,’ he was shouting. ‘Picked fresh this morning, morning-picked country strawberries…’
Molly glanced at Anna, who nodded, grinning like a small girl. (She was disagreeably conscious that the little-girl smile was designed to soften Molly’s criticism of her.) ‘I’ll get some for Richard too,’ said Molly, and ran out of the room, picking up her handbag from a chair.
Anna continued to lean over the sill, in a warm space of sunlight, watching Molly, who was already in energetic conversation with the strawberry seller. Molly was laughing and gesticulating, and the man shook his head and disagreed, while he poured the heavy red fruit on to his scales.
‘Well you’ve no overhead costs,’ Anna heard, ‘so why should we pay just what we would in the shops?’
‘They don’t sell morning-fresh strawberries in the shops, miss, not like these.’
‘Oh go on,’ said Molly, as she disappeared with her white bowl of red fruit. ‘Sharks, that’s what you are!’
The strawberry man, young, yellow, lean and deprived, lifted a snarling face to the window where Molly had already inserted herself. Seeing the two women together he said, as he fumbled with his glittering scales, ‘Overhead costs, what do you know about it?’
‘Then come up and have some coffee and tell us,’ said Molly, her face vivid with challenge.
At which he lowered his face and said to the street floor: ‘Some people have to work, if others haven’t.’
‘Oh go on,’ said Molly, ‘don’t be such a sourpuss. Come up and eat some of your strawberries. On me.’
He didn’t know how to take her. He stood, frowning, his young face uncertain under an over-long slope of greasy fairish hair. ‘I’m not that sort, if you are,’ he remarked, at last, offstage, as it were.
‘So much the worse for you,’ said Molly, leaving the window, laughing at Anna in a way which refused to be guilty.
But Anna leaned out, confirmed her view of what had happened by a look at the man’s dogged, resentful shoulders, and said in a low voice: ‘You hurt his feelings.’
‘Oh hell,’ said Molly, shrugging. ‘It’s coming back to England again—everybody so shut up, taking offence, I feel like breaking out and shouting and screaming whenever I set foot on this frozen soil. I feel locked up, the moment I breathe our sacred air.’
‘All the same,’ said Anna, ‘he thinks you were laughing at him.’
Another customer had slopped out of the opposite house; a woman in Sunday comfort, slacks, loose shirt and a yellow scarf around her head. The strawberry man served her, non-committal. Before he lifted the handles to propel the cart onwards, he looked up again at the window, and seeing only Anna, her small sharp chin buried in her forearm, her black eyes fixed on him, smiling, he said with grudging good-humour: ‘Overhead costs, she says…’ and snorted lightly with disgust. He had forgiven them.
He moved off up the street behind the mounds of softly-red, sunglistening fruit, shouting: ‘Morning-fresh strawberries. Picked this morning!’ Then his voice was absorbed into the din of traffic from the big street a couple of hundred yards down.
Anna turned and found Molly setting bowls of the fruit, loaded with cream, on the sill. ‘I’ve decided not to waste any on Richard,’ said Molly, ‘he never enjoys anything anyway. More beer?’
‘With strawberries, wine, obviously,’ said Anna greedily; and moved the spoon about among the fruit, feeling its soft sliding resistance, and the slipperiness of the cream under a gritty crust of sugar. Molly swiftly filled glasses with wine and set them on the white sill. The sunlight crystallized beside each glass on the white paint in quivering lozenges of crimson and yellow light, and the two women sat in the sunlight, sighing with pleasure and stretching their legs in the thin warmth, looking at the colours of the fruit in the bright bowls and at the red wine.
But now the door-bell rang, and both instinctively gathered themselves into more tidy postures. Molly leaned out of the window again, shouted: ‘Mind your head!’ and threw down the door-key, wrapped in an old scarf.
They watched Richard lean down to pick up the key, without even a glance upwards, though he must know that at least Molly was there. ‘He hates me doing that, ’she said, isn’t it odd? After all these years? And his way of showing it is simply to pretend it didn’t happen.’
Richard came into the room. He looked younger than his middle age, being well-tanned after an early summer holiday in Italy. He wore a tight yellow sports shirt, and new light trousers: every Sunday of his year, summer or winter, Richard Portmain wore clothes that claimed him for the open air. He was a member of various suitable golf and tennis clubs, but never played unless for business reasons. He had had a cottage in the country for years; but sent his family to it alone, unless it was advisable to entertain business friends for a week-end. He was by every instinct urban. He spent his week-ends dropping from one club, one pub, one bar, to the next. He was a shortish, dark, compact man, almost fleshy. His round face, attractive when he smiled, was obstinate to the point of sullenness when he was not smiling. His whole solid person—head poked out forward, eyes unblinking, had this look of dogged determination. He now impatiently handed Molly the key, that was loosely bundled inside her scarlet scarf. She took it and began trickling the soft material through her solid white fingers, remarking: ‘Just off for a healthy day in the country, Richard?’
Having braced himself for just such a jibe, he now stiffly smiled, and peered into the dazzle of sunlight around the white window. When he distinguished Anna, he involuntarily frowned, nodded stiffly, and sat down hastily across the room from both of them, saying: ‘I didn’t know you had a visitor, Molly.’
‘Anna isn’t a visitor,’ said Molly.
She deliberately waited until Richard had had the full benefit of the sight of them, indolently displayed in the sunshine, heads turned towards him in benevolent enquiry, and offered: ‘Wine, Richard? Beer? Coffee? Or a nice cup of tea perhaps?’
‘If you’ve got a Scotch, I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Beside you,’ said Molly.
But having made what he clearly felt to be a masculine point, he didn’t move. ‘I came to discuss Tommy.’ He glanced at Anna, who was licking up the last of her strawberries.
‘But you’ve already discussed all this with Anna, so I hear, so now we can all three discuss it.’
‘So Anna’s told you…’
‘Nothing,’