The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing
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in the meantime?’
‘In the meantime I’m going to study and you will go off and let George weep on your shoulder and be very sorry for him, which will achieve precisely nothing.’
I left him and walked slowly back up to the big room. George was leaning against the wall, a glass in his hand, eyes closed. I knew I should go to him, but I didn’t. I went into the big room. Maryrose was sitting by herself at a window and I joined her. She had been crying.
I said: ‘This seems to be a day for everyone to cry.’
‘Not you,’ said Maryrose. This meant that I was too happy with Willi to need to cry, so I sat down by her and said ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I was sitting here and watching them dance and I began thinking. Only a few months ago we believed that the world was going to change and everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won’t.’
‘Do we?’ I said, with a kind of terror.
‘Why should it?’ she asked, simply. I didn’t have the moral energy to fight it, and after a pause she said: ‘What did George want you for? I suppose he said I was a bitch for hitting him?’
‘Can you imagine George saying anyone is a bitch for hitting him? Well why did you?’
‘I was crying about that too. Because of course, the real reason I hit him was because I know someone like George could make me forget my brother.’
‘Well perhaps you should let someone like George have a try?’
‘Perhaps I should,’ she said. She gave me a small, old smile, which said so clearly: What a baby you are!—that I said angrily: ‘But if you know something, why don’t you do something about it?’
Again the small smile, and she said: ‘No one will ever love me like my brother did. He really loved me. George would make love to me. And that wouldn’t be the same thing, would it? But what’s wrong with saying: I’ve had the best thing already and I’ll never have it again, instead of just having sex. What’s wrong with it?’
‘When you say, what’s wrong with it, like that, then I never know what answer to make, even though I know there’s something wrong.’
‘What, then?’ She sounded really curious, and I said, even more angry: ‘You just don’t try, you don’t try. You just give up.’
‘It’s all very well for you,’ she said, meaning Willi again, and now I couldn’t say anything. It was my turn to want to cry, and she saw it, and said out of her infinite superiority in suffering: ‘Don’t cry, Anna, there’s never any point. Well I’m going to get washed for lunch.’ And she went off. All the young men were now singing, around the piano, so I left the room too, and went to where I had seen George leaning. I clambered through nettles and blackjacks, because he had moved further around to the back, and was standing staring through a group of paw-paw trees at the little shack where the cook lived with his wife and his children. There were a couple of brown children squatting in the dust among the chickens.
I noticed that George’s very sleek arm was trembling as he tried to light a cigarette, and he failed, and threw it impatiently away, unlit, and he remarked calmly: ‘No, my bye-blow is not present.’
A gong rang down at the hotel for lunch.
‘We’d better go in,’ I said.
‘Stay here with me a minute.’ He put his hand on my shoulder, and the heat of it burned through my dress. The gong stopped sending out its long metallic waves of sound, and the piano stopped inside. Silence, and a dove cooed from the jacaranda tree. George put his hand on my breast, and he said: ‘Anna, I could take you to bed now—and then Marie, that’s my black girl, and then go back to my wife tonight and have her, and be happy with all three of you. Do you understand that, Anna?’
‘No,’ I said, angry. And yet his hand on my breast made me understand it.
‘Don’t you?’ he said, ironic. ‘No?’
‘No,’ I insisted, lying on behalf of all women, and thinking of his wife, who made me feel caged.
He shut his eyes. His black eyelashes made tiny rainbows as they trembled on his brown cheek. He said, without opening his eyes: ‘Sometimes I look at myself from the outside. George Hounslow, respected citizen, eccentric of course, with his socialism, but that’s cancelled out by his devotion to all the aged parents and his charming wife and three children. And beside me I can see a whacking great gorilla swinging its arms and grinning. I can see the gorilla so clearly I’m surprised no one else can.’ He let his hand fall off my breast so that I was able to breathe steadily again and I said: ‘Willi’s right. You can’t do anything about it so you must stop tormenting yourself.’ His eyes were still shut. I didn’t know I was going to say what I did, but his eyes flew open and he backed away, so it was some sort of telepathy. I said: ‘And you can’t commit suicide.’
‘Why not?’ he asked curiously.
‘For the same reason you can’t take the child into your house. You’ve got nine people to worry about.’
‘Anna, I’ve been wondering if I’d take the child into my house if I had—let’s say, only two people to worry about?’
I didn’t know what to say. After a moment he put his arm around me and walked me through the blackjacks and the nettles saying: ‘Come down with me to the hotel and keep the gorilla off.’ And now of course, I was perversely annoyed that I had refused the gorilla and was in the role of sexless sister, and I sat by Paul at lunch and not George. After lunch we all slept for a long time, and began to drink early. Although the dance that night was private, for ‘the associated farmers of Mashopi and District’, by the time the farmers and their wives arrived in their big cars the dancing room was already full of people dancing. All of us, and a lot more airforce down from the city, and Johnnie was playing the piano and the regular pianist, who was not a tenth as good as Johnnie, had gone very willingly off to the bar. The master of ceremonies for the evening formalized matters by making a hasty and not very sincere speech about welcoming the boys in blue, and we all danced until Johnnie got tired, which was about five in the morning. Afterwards we stood about in groups under a clear cold star-frosted sky, and the moon made sharp black shadows around us. We all had our arms about each other and we were singing. The scent of the flowers was clear and cool again in the reviving night air, and they stood up fresh and strong. Paul was with me, we had been dancing together all evening. Willi was with Maryrose—he had been dancing with her. And Jimmy, who was very drunk, was stumbling around by himself. He had cut himself again somehow and was bleeding from a small wound over his eyes. And that was the end of our first full day, and it set the pattern for all the rest. The big ‘general’ dance next night was attended by all the same people, and the Boothbys’ bar did well, the Boothbys’ cook was overworked, and presumably his wife had assignations with George. Who was painfully, fruitlessly attentive to Maryrose.
On the second evening Stanley Lett began his attentions to Mrs Lattimore, the red-head, which ended in—but I was going to say disaster. That word is ridiculous. Because what is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then—we went on dancing. Stanley Lett’s affair with Mrs Lattimore only led to an incident that I suppose must have happened a dozen times in her marriage.
She was a woman of about forty-five, rather plump, with the most exquisite hands and slender legs. She had a delicate white skin, and enormous soft periwinkle blue eyes, the hazy, tender, short-sighted, almost purple blue eyes that look at life through a mist of tears. But in her case it was alcohol as well. Her husband was a big bad-tempered commercial type who was a steady brutal drinker. He began drinking when the bar opened and drank all day, getting steadily morose. Whereas drinking made her soft and sighing and tearful. I never, not