The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing
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a dominating neurotic woman who had sapped all the vitality out of the girl, a woman of about fifty, as vigorous and fussy as an old hen. For Maryrose’s sake we were polite, we accepted her when she came bustling after her daughter into the Gainsborough. When she was there Maryrose sank into a state of listless irritation, a nervous exhaustion. She knew she ought to fight her mother, but did not have the moral energy. This woman, whom we were prepared to be bored by, to humour, Willi cured in half a dozen words. She had come into the Gainsborough one evening and found us all sitting around the deserted dining-room talking. She said loudly: ‘So there you all are as usual. You ought to be in bed.’ And she was just about to sit down and join us, when Willi, without raising his voice, but letting those spectacles of his glitter at her, said: ‘Mrs Fowler.’ ‘Yes, Willi? Is that you again?’ ‘Mrs Fowler, why do you come here chasing after Maryrose and making such a nuisance of yourself?’ She gasped, coloured, but remained standing by the chair she had been about to sit down in, staring at him. ‘Yes,’ said Willi, calmly. ‘You are an old nuisance. You can sit down if you like, but you must keep quiet and not talk nonsense.’ Maryrose turned quite white with fright and with pain on behalf of her mother. But Mrs Fowler, after a moment’s silence, gave a short flustered laugh and sat down and kept perfectly quiet. And after that, if she came into the Gainsborough she always behaved with Willi like a well-brought-up small girl in the presence of a bullying father. And it was not only Mrs Fowler and the woman who owned the Gainsborough.
Now it was Mrs Boothby, who was not at all the bully who seeks a bully stronger than herself. Nor was she insensitive about intruding herself. And yet, even after she must have understood with her nerves, if not her intelligence—she was not an intelligent woman—that she was being bullied, she would come back again and again for more. She did not succumb into flustered satisfaction at having been ‘given a hiding’, like Mrs Fowler, or get coy and girlish like Mrs James at the Gainsborough; she would listen patiently, and argue back, engage herself so to speak with the surface of the talk, ignoring the underlying insolence, and in this way she sometimes even shamed Willi and Paul back into courtesy. But in private sometimes I am sure she must sometimes have flushed up, clenching her fists, and muttering: ‘Yes, I’d like to hit them. Yes, I should have hit him when he said that.’
That evening Paul almost at once started on one of his favourite games—parodying the Colonial clichés to the point where the Colonial in question must become aware he or she was being made fun of. And Willi joined in.
‘Your cook has, of course, been with you for years—would you like a cigarette?’
‘Thank you, my dear, but I don’t smoke. Yes, he’s a good boy, I must say that for him, he’s always been very loyal.’
‘He’s almost one of the family, I should think?’
‘Yes, I think of him like that. And he’s very fond of us, I’m sure. We’ve always treated him fair.’
‘Perhaps not so much as a friend as a child?’ (This was Willi.) ‘Because they are nothing but great big children.’
‘Yes, that’s true. They’re just children when you really understand them. They like to be treated the way you’d treat a child—firm, but right. Mr Boothby and I believe in treating the blacks fair. It’s only right.’
‘But on the other hand, you mustn’t let them take advantage of you,’ said Paul. ‘Because if you do, they lose all respect.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that, Paul, because most of you English boys have all kinds of fancy ideas about the kaffirs. But it’s true. They have to know there’s a line they must never step over.’ And so on and so on and so on.
It wasn’t until Paul said—he was sitting in his favourite pose—tankard poised, his blue eyes fixed winningly on hers: ‘And, of course, there’s centuries of evolution between them and us, they’re nothing but baboons really,’ that she blushed and looked away. Baboons was a word already too crude for the Colony, although even five years before it was acceptable, and even in the newspaper leaders. (Just as the word kaffirs would have become in its turn, too crude in ten years’ time.) Mrs Boothby could not believe that an ‘educated young man from one of the best colleges in England’ would use the word baboons. But when she again looked at Paul, her honest red face prepared for hurt, there he sat, his cherubic smile just as winningly attentive as it had been a month ago when he had been, undeniably, nothing more than a rather homesick boy glad to be mothered a little. She sighed abruptly, and got up, saying politely: ‘And now if you’ll excuse me I’ll go and get the old man’s supper. Mr Boothby likes a late snack—he never gets time for his dinner, serving in the bar all evening.’ She wished us good night, giving Willi, then Paul, a long, rather hurt, earnest inspection. She left us.
Paul put back his head and laughed and said: ‘They’re incredible, they’re fantastic, they are simply not true.’
‘Aborigines,’ said Willi, laughing. Aborigines was his word for the white people of the Colony.
Maryrose said quietly: ‘I don’t see the point of that, Paul. It’s just making fools of people.’
‘Dear Maryrose. Dear beautiful Maryrose,’ said Paul, chuckling into his beer.
Maryrose was beautiful. She was a tiny slender girl, with waves of honey-coloured hair and great brown eyes. She had appeared on magazine covers in the Cape, had been a dress model for a while. She was entirely without vanity. She smiled patiently and insisted in her slow good-humoured way: ‘Yes, Paul. After all, I’ve been brought up here. I understand Mrs Boothby. I was like that too until people like you explained I was wrong. You won’t change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.’
Paul again gave his deep chuckle, and insisted: ‘Maryrose, Maryrose, you’re too good to be true too.’
But later that evening she did succeed in making him ashamed.
George Hounslow, a roads man, lived a hundred miles or so down the line in a small town with his wife, three children, and the four old parents. He was arriving at midnight in his lorry. He proposed to spend the evenings of the week-end with us, attending to his work along the main road in the daytime. We left the dining-room and went off to sit under the bunch of gum-trees near the railway line to wait for George. Under the trees was a rough wooden table and some wooden benches. Mr Boothby sent down a dozen bottles of chilled Cape white wine. We were all mildly tight by then. The hotel was in darkness. Soon the lights in the Boothbys’ house went out. There was a small light from the station building and a small gleam of lights from the bedroom block up the rise several hundreds of yards off. Sitting under the gum-trees with the cold moonlight sifting over us through the branches, and the night wind lifting and laying the dust at our feet, we might have been in the middle of the veld. The hotel had been absorbed into the wild landscape of granite-bouldered kopjes, trees, moonlight. Miles away the main road crossed a rise, a thin gleam of pale light between banks of black trees. The dry oily scent of the gum-trees, the dry irritating smell of dust, the cold smell of wine, added to our intoxication.
Jimmy fell asleep, slumped against Paul, who had his arm around him. I was half-asleep, against Willi’s shoulder. Stanley Lett and Johnnie, the pianist, sat side by side watching the rest of us with an amiable curiosity. They made no secret of the fact, now or at any other time, that we, not they, were on sufferance, and this on the clearly expressed grounds that they were working-class, would remain working-class, but they had no objection to observing at first hand, because of the happy accidents of war, the behaviour of a group of intellectuals. It was Stanley who used the word, and he refused to drop it. Johnnie, the pianist, never talked. He did not use words, ever. He always sat near Stanley, allying himself in silence with him.
Ted had already begun to suffer because of Stanley, the ‘butterfly under a stone’, who refused to see himself as in need of rescue. To console himself he sat by Maryrose and put his arm around her. Maryrose smiled good-humouredly, and remained in the circle of his arm, but as if she detached herself from him and every other man. Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this is