The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing
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she added, using the word deliberately to see appear on Julia’s face the look she had felt on her own, and had seen on the faces of Patricia and the young woman. When she saw it, she felt ashamed and sorry she had said it—as if she had deliberately committed an act of aggression towards Julia. Which I have, she thought. ‘And I don’t think I like him,’ she added, relapsing into childishness, playing with the scent bottles on Julia’s dressing-table. She rubbed scent into the flesh of her wrists, watching Julia’s face in the looking-glass, which was now again sceptical, patient and shrewd. She thought: Well, of course Julia’s a sort of mother-image, but do I have to play up to it all the time?—And besides, most of the time I feel maternal towards Julia, I have a need to protect her, though I don’t know from what. ‘Why don’t you like him?’ enquired Julia. This was serious, and Ella would now have to think seriously. Instead she said: ‘Thanks for looking after Michael,’ and went upstairs to bed, giving Julia a small, apologetic smile as she went.
Next day sunlight was settled over London, and the trees in the streets seemed not to be part of the weight of the buildings and the pavements, but an extension of fields and grass and country. Ella’s indecision about the drive that afternoon swung into pleasure as she imagined sunshine on grass; and she understood from the sudden flight upwards of her spirits, that she must recently have been more depressed than she had realized. She found herself singing as she cooked the child’s lunch. It was because she was remembering Paul’s voice. At the time she had not been conscious of Paul’s voice, but now she heard it—a warm voice, a little rough where the edges of an uneducated accent remained. (She was listening, as she thought of him, rather than looking at him.) And she was listening, not to the words he had used, but to tones in which she was now distinguishing delicacy, irony and compassion.
Julia was taking Michael off for the afternoon to visit friends, and she left early, as soon as lunch was over, so that the little boy would not know his mother was going for a drive without him. ‘You look very pleased with yourself, after all,’ said Julia. Ella said: ‘Well, I haven’t been out of London for months. Besides, this business of not having a man around doesn’t suit me.’ ‘Who does it suit?’ retorted Julia. ‘But I don’t think any man is better than none.’ And having planted this small dart, she departed with the child, in good-humour.
Paul was late, and from the way he apologized, almost perfunctorily, she understood he was a man often late, and from temperament, not only because he was a busy doctor with many pressures on him. On the whole she was pleased he was late. One look at his face, which again had the cloud of nervous irritability settled on it, reminded her that last night she had not liked him. Besides, being late meant that he didn’t really care for her, and this eased a small tension of panic that related to George, and not to Paul. (She knew this herself.) But as soon as they were in the car and heading out of London, she was aware that he was again sending small nervous glances towards her; she felt determination in him. But he was talking and she was listening to his voice, and it was every bit as pleasant as she remembered it. She listened, and looked out of the window, and laughed. He was telling how he came to be late. Some misunderstanding between himself and the group of doctors he worked with at his hospital. ‘No one actually said anything aloud, but the upper-middle-classes communicate with each other in inaudible squeaks, like bats. It puts people of my background at a terrible disadvantage.’ ‘You’re the only working-class doctor there?’ ‘No, not in the hospital, just in that section. And they never let you forget it. They’re not even conscious of doing it.’ This was good-humoured, humorous. It was also bitter. But the bitterness was from old habit, and had no sting in it.
This afternoon it was easy to talk, as if the barrier between them had been silently dissolved in the night. They left the ugly trailing fringes of London behind, sunlight lay about them, and Ella’s spirits rose so sharply that she felt intoxicated. Besides, she knew that this man would be her lover, she knew it from the pleasure his voice gave her, and she was full of a secret delight. His glances at her now were smiling, almost indulgent, and like Julia he remarked: ‘You look very pleased with yourself.’ ‘Yes, it’s getting out of London.’ ‘You hate it so much?’ ‘Oh, no, I like it, I mean, I like the way I live in it. But I hate—this.’ And she pointed out of the window. The hedges and trees had again been swallowed by a small village. Nothing left here of the old England, it was new and ugly. They drove through the main shopping street, and the names on the shops were the same as they had driven past repeatedly, all the way out of London.
‘Why?’
‘Well, obviously, it’s so ugly.’ He was looking curiously into her face. After a while he remarked: ‘People live in it.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you hate them as well?’ Ella felt resentful: it occurred to her that for years, anyone she was likely to meet would have understood without explanation why she hated ‘all this’; and to ask her if she ‘hated them as well’, meaning ordinary people, was off the point. Yet after thinking it over, she said, defiant: ‘In a way, yes. I hate what they put up with. It ought to be swept away—all of it.’ And she made a wide sweeping movement with her hand, brushing away the great dark weight of London, and the thousand ugly towns, and the myriad small cramped lives of England.
‘But it’s not going to be, you know,’ he said, with a small smiling obstinacy, it’s going to go on—and there’ll be more chain shops, and television aerials, and respectable people. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’
‘Of course. But you just accept it. Why do you take it all for granted?’
‘It’s the time we live in. And things are better than they were.’
‘Better!’ she exclaimed, involuntarily, but checked herself. For she understood she was setting against the word better a personal vision that dated from her stay in hospital, a vision of some dark, impersonal destructive force that worked at the roots of life and that expressed itself in war and cruelty and violence. Which had nothing to do with what they argued. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘better in the sense of no unemployment and no one being hungry?’
‘Strangely enough, yes, that’s what I do mean.’ He said it in such a way that it put a barrier between them—he was from the working-people, and she was not, and he was of the initiated. So she kept silence until he insisted: ‘Things are much better, much much better. How can you not see it? I remember…’ And he stopped—this time, not because (as Ella put it) he was ‘bullying’ her, from superior knowledge, but from the painfulness of what he remembered.
So she tried again: ‘I can’t understand how anyone can see what’s happening to this country and not hate it. On the surface everything’s fine—all quiet and tame and surburban. But underneath it’s poisonous. It’s full of hatred and envy and people being lonely.’
‘That’s true of everything, everywhere. It’s true of any place that has reached a certain standard of living.’
‘That doesn’t make it any better.’
‘Anything’s better than a certain kind of fear.’
You mean, real poverty. And you mean, of course, that I’m not equipped to understand that at all.’
At this he glanced at her quickly, in surprise at her persistence—and, as Ella felt, out of a certain respect for it. There was no trace in that glance of a man assessing a woman for her sexual potentialities, and she felt more at ease.
‘So you’d like to put a giant bulldozer over it all, over all England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Leaving just a few cathedrals and old buildings and a pretty village or two?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And then you’d bring the people back into fine new cities, each one an architect’s dream, and tell everyone to like it or lump it.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Or perhaps you’d like a merrie England, beer, skittles and the girls in long homespun dresses?’
She said, angry: ‘Of course not! I hate all the William Morris stuff. But you’re being dishonest. Look at you—I’m sure you’ve spent most of your energy simply getting through the class barrier. There can’t be any connection at all between how you live now and the way your parents