Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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be just business, but something constructive, like the United Nations or Unesco. He could get in through you, couldn’t he?’
‘Yes, he could.’
‘What did he say, Anna?’ asked Molly.
‘He said he wanted to be left alone to think. And why not? He’s twenty. Why shouldn’t he think and experiment with life, if that’s what he wants? Why should we bully him?’
‘The trouble with Tommy is he’s never been bullied,’ said Richard.
‘Thank you,’ said Molly.
‘He’s never had any direction. Molly’s simply left him alone as if he was an adult, always. What sort of sense do you suppose it makes to a child—freedom, make-up-your-own-mind, I’m-not-going-to-put-any-pressure-on-you; and at the same time, the comrades, discipline, self-sacrifice, and kow-towing to authority…’
‘What you have to do is this,’ said Molly. ‘Find a place in one of your things that isn’t just share-pushing or promoting or money-making. See if you can’t find something constructive. Then show it to Tommy and let him decide.’
Richard, his face red with anger over his too-yellow, too-tight shirt, held a glass of whisky between two hands, turning it round and round, looking down into it. ‘Thanks,’ he said at last, ‘I will.’ He spoke with such a stubborn confidence in the quality of what he was going to offer his son, that Anna and Molly again raised their eyebrows at each other, conveying that the whole conversation had been wasted, as usual. Richard intercepted this glance, and said: ‘You two are so extraordinarily naive.’
‘About business?’ said Molly, with her loud jolly laugh.
‘About big business,’ said Anna quietly, amused, who had been surprised, during her conversations with Richard, to discover the extent of his power. This had not caused his image to enlarge, for her; rather he had seemed to shrink, against a background of international money. And she had loved Molly the more for her total lack of respect for this man who had been her husband, and who was in fact one of the financial powers of the country.
‘Ohhh,’ groaned Molly, impatient.
‘Very big business,’ said Anna laughing, trying to make Molly meet this, but the actress shrugged it off, with her characteristic big shrug of the shoulders, her white hands spreading out, palms out, until they came to rest on her knees.
‘I’ll impress her with it later,’ said Anna to Richard. ‘Or at least try to.’
‘What is all this?’ asked Molly.
‘It’s no good,’ said Richard, sarcastic, grudging, resentful. ‘Do you know that in all these years she’s never been interested enough even to ask?’
‘You’ve paid Tommy’s school fees, and that’s all I ever wanted from you.’
‘You’ve been putting Richard across to everyone for years as a sort of—well an enterprising little businessman, like a jumped-up grocer,’ said Anna. ‘And it turns out that all the time he’s a tycoon. But really. A big shot. One of the people we have to hate—on principle,’ Anna added laughing.
‘Really?’ said Molly, interested, regarding her former husband with mild surprise that this ordinary and—as far as she was concerned—not very intelligent man could be anything at all.
Anna recognized the look—it was what she felt—and laughed.
‘Good God,’ said Richard, ‘talking to you two, it’s like talking to a couple of savages.’
‘Why?’ said Molly. ‘Should we be impressed? You aren’t even self-made. You just inherited it.’
‘What does it matter? It’s the thing that matters. It may be a bad system, I’m not even going to argue—not that I could with either of you, you are both as ignorant as monkeys about economics, but it’s what runs this country.’
‘Well of course,’ said Molly. Her hands still lay, palms upward, on her knees. She now brought them together in her lap, in an unconscious mimicry of the gesture of a child waiting for a lesson.
‘But why despise it?’ Richard, who had obviously been meaning to go on, stopped, looking at those meekly mocking hands. ‘Oh Jesus!’ he said, giving up.
‘But we don’t. It’s too—anonymous—to despise. We despise…’ Molly cut off the word you, and as if in guilt at a lapse in manners, let her hands lose their pose of silent impertinence. She put them quickly out of sight behind her. Anna, watching, thought amusedly: If I said to Molly, you stopped Richard talking simply by making fun of him with your hands, she wouldn’t know what I meant. How wonderful to be able to do that, how lucky she is…
‘Yes, I know you despise me, but why? You’re a half-successful actress, and Anna once wrote a book?’
Anna’s hands instinctively lifted themselves from beside her, and fingers touching, negligent, on Molly’s knee, said, ‘Oh what a bore you are, Richard.’ Richard looked at them, and frowned.
‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ said Molly.
‘Indeed.’
‘It’s because we haven’t given in,’ said Molly, seriously.
‘To what?’
‘If you don’t know we can’t tell you.’
Richard was on the point of exploding out of his chair—Anna could see his thigh muscles tense and quiver. To prevent a row she said quickly, drawing his fire: ‘That’s the point, you talk and talk, but you’re so far away from—what’s real, you never understand anything.’
She succeeded. Richard turned his body towards her, leaning forward so that she was confronted with his warm smooth brown arms, lightly covered with golden hair, his exposed brown neck, his brownish-red hot face. She shrank back slightly with an unconscious look of distaste, as he said: ‘Well, Anna, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know you better than I did before, and I can’t say you impress me with knowing what you want, what you think or how you should go about things.’
Anna, conscious that she was colouring, met his eyes with an effort, and drawled deliberately: ‘Or perhaps what it is you don’t like is that I do know what I want, have always been prepared to experiment, never pretend to myself the second-rate is more than it is, and know when to refuse. Hmmmm?’
Molly, looking quickly from one to the other, let out her breath, made an exclamation with her hands, by dropping them apart, emphatically, on to her knees, and unconsciously nodded—partly because she had confirmed a suspicion and partly because she approved of Anna’s rudeness. She said, ‘Hey, what is this?’ drawling it out arrogantly, so that Richard turned from Anna to her. ‘If you’re attacking us for the way we live again, all I can say is, the less you say the better, what with your private life the way it is.’
‘I preserve the forms,’ said Richard, with such a readiness to conform to what they both expected of him, that they both, at the same moment, let out peals of laughter.
‘Yes, darling, we know you do,’ said Molly. ‘Well, how’s Marion? I’d love to know.’
For the third time Richard said, ‘I see you’ve discussed it,’ and Anna said: ‘I told Molly you had been to see me. I told her what I didn’t tell you—that Marion had been to see me.’
‘Well, let’s have it,’ said Molly.
‘Why,’ said Anna, as if Richard were not present, ‘Richard is worried because Marion is such a problem to him.’
‘That’s nothing new,’ said Molly, in the same tone.
Richard sat still, looking at the women in turn. They waited; ready to leave it, ready for him to get up and go, ready for him to justify himself. But he said nothing. He seemed fascinated by the spectacle of these two, dashingly hostile to him, a laughing