The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing
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‘I’m a socialist,’ said George. ‘And as far as it’s possible in this hell-hole I try to be a socialist and fight the colour bar. Well? I stand on platforms and make speeches—oh, very tactfully of course, saying that the colour bar is not in the best interests of all concerned, and gentle Jesus meek and mild wouldn’t have approved, because it’s more than my job is worth to say it’s inhuman and stinkingly immoral and the whites are damned to eternity for it. And now I propose to behave just like every other stinking white sot who sleeps with a black woman and adds another half-caste to the Colony’s quota.’
‘She hasn’t asked you to do anything about it,’ said Willi.
‘But that isn’t the point.’ George sank his face on his flat palms, and I saw the wetness creep between his fingers. ‘It’s eating me up,’ he said. ‘I’ve known about it this last year and it’s driving me crazy.’
‘Which isn’t going to help matters much,’ said Willi, and George dropped his hands sharply, showing his tear-smeared face, and looked at him.
‘Anna?’ appealed George, looking at me. I was in the most extraordinary tumult of emotion. First, I was jealous of the woman. Last night I had been wishing I was her, but it was an impersonal emotion. Now I knew who it was, and I was astounded to find I was hating George and condemning him—just as I had resented him last night when he made me feel guilty. And then, and this was worse, I was surprised to find I resented the fact the woman was black. I had imagined myself free of any such emotion, but it seemed I was not, and I was ashamed and angry—with myself, and with George. But it was more than that. Being so young, twenty-three or four, I suffered, like so many ‘emancipated’ girls, from a terror of being trapped and tamed by domesticity. George’s house, where he and his wife were trapped without hope of release, save through the deaths of four old people, represented to me the ultimate horror. It frightened me so that I even had nightmares about it. And yet—this man, George, the trapped one, the man who had put that unfortunate woman, his wife, in a cage, also represented for me, and I knew it, a powerful sexuality from which I fled inwardly, but then inevitably turned towards. I knew by instinct that if I went to bed with George I’d learn a sexuality that I hadn’t come anywhere near yet. And with all these attitudes and emotions conflicting in me, I still liked him, indeed loved him, quite simply, as a human being. I sat there on the verandah, unable to speak for a while, knowing that my face was flushed and my hands trembling. And I listened to the music and the singing from the big room up the hill and I felt as if George were excluding me by the pressure of his unhappiness from something unbelievably sweet and lovely. At that time it seemed I spent half my life believing I was being excluded from this beautiful thing; and yet I knew with my intelligence that it was nonsense—that Maryrose, for instance, envied me because she believed Willi and I had everything she wanted—she believed we were two people who loved each other.
Willi had been looking at me, and now he said: ‘Anna is shocked because the woman is black.’
‘That’s part of it,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised that I do feel like that though.’
‘I’m surprised you admit it,’ said Willi, coldly, and his spectacles flashed.
‘I’m surprised you don’t,’ said George to Willi. ‘Come off it. You’re such a bloody hypocrite.’ And Willi lifted his grammars and set them ready on his knee.
‘What’s the alternative, have you an intelligent suggestion?’ enquired Willi. ‘Don’t tell me. Being George, you believe it’s your duty to take the child into your house. That means the four old people will be shocked into their graves, apart from the fact no one will ever speak to them again. The three children will be ostracized at school. Your wife will lose her job. You will lose your job. Nine people will be ruined. And what good will that do your son, George? May I ask?’
‘And so that’s the end of it all?’ I asked.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Willi. He wore his usual expression at such moments, obstinate and patient, and his mouth was set.
‘I could make it a test case,’ said George.
‘A test case of what?’
‘All this bloody hypocrisy.’
‘Why use the word to me—you’ve just called me a hypocrite.’ George looked humble, and Willi said: ‘Who’d pay the price of your noble gesture? You’ve got eight people dependent on you.’
‘My wife isn’t dependent on me. I’m dependent on her. Emotionally that is. Do you imagine I don’t know it?’
‘Do you want me to put the facts again?’ said Willi, over-patient, and glancing at his text-books. Both George and I knew that because he had been called a hypocrite he would never soften now, but George went on: ‘Willi, isn’t there anything at all? Surely, it can’t be finished, just like that?’
‘Do you want me to say that it’s unfair or immoral or something helpful like that?’
‘Yes,’ said George, after a pause, dropping his chin on his chest. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s what I want. Because what’s worse is that if you think I’ve stopped sleeping with her, I haven’t. There might be another little Hounslow in the Boothby kitchen any day. Of course, I’m more careful than I was.’
‘That’s your affair,’ said Willi.
‘You are an inhuman swine,’ said George after a pause.
‘Thank you,’ said Willi. ‘But there’s nothing to be done, is there? You agree, don’t you?’
‘That boy’s going to grow up there among the pumpkins and the chickens and be a farm labourer or a half-arsed clerk, and my other three are going to get through to university and out of this bloody country if I have to kill myself paying for it.’
‘What is the point?’ said Willi. ‘Your blood? Your sacred sperm, or what?’
Both George and I were shocked. Willi saw it with a tightening of his face, and it remained angry as George said: ‘No, it’s the responsibility. It’s the gap between what I believe in and what I do.’
Willi shrugged and we were silent. Through the heavy midday hush, came the sound of Johnnie’s drumming fingers.
George looked at me again and I rallied myself to fight Willi. Looking back I want to laugh—because I automatically chose to argue in literary terms, just as he automatically answered in political terms. But at the time it didn’t seem extraordinary. And it didn’t seem extraordinary to George either, who sat nodding as I spoke.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘In the nineteenth century literature was full of this. It was a sort of moral touchstone. Like Resurrection, for instance. But now you just shrug your shoulders and it doesn’t matter?’
‘I haven’t noticed that I shrugged,’ said Willi. ‘But perhaps it is true that the moral dilemma of a society is no longer crystallized by the fact of an illegitimate child?’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Why not?’ said George, very fierce.
‘Well, would you really say the problem of the African in this country is summed up by the Boothbys’ cook’s white cuckoo?’
‘You put things so prettily,’ said George angrily. (And yet he would continue to come to Willi humbly for advice, and revere him, and write to him self-abasing letters for years after he left the Colony.) Now he stared out into the sunlight, blinking away tears, and then he said: ‘I’m going to get my glass filled.’ He went off to the bar.
Willi lifted his text-book, and said without looking at me: ‘Yes, I know. But I’m not impressed by your reproachful eyes. You’d give him the same advice, wouldn’t you? Full of ohs and ahs, but the same advice.’
‘What it amounts to is that everything is so terrible that we’ve got calloused because of it and we