The Fifth Child. Doris Lessing
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enough, it is as if we are being judged: Harriet and David seemed to themselves meagre and inadequate, with nothing to hold on to but stubborn beliefs other people had always judged as wrong-headed.
David had never taken money from his well-off father and stepmother, who had paid for his education, but that was all. (And for his sister Deborah’s education; but she had preferred her father’s way of life as he had preferred his mother’s, and so they had not often met, and the differences between brother and sister seemed to him summed up in this – that she had chosen the life of the rich.) He did not now want to ask for money. His English parents – which was how he thought of his mother and her husband – had little money, being unambitious academics.
One afternoon, these four – David and Harriet, David’s mother, Molly, with Frederick – stood in the family room by the stairs and surveyed the new kingdom. There was by now a very large table, which would easily accommodate fifteen or twenty people, at the kitchen end; there were a couple of vast sofas, and some commodious armchairs bought second-hand at a local auction. David and Harriet stood together, feeling themselves even more preposterously eccentric, and much too young, faced with these two elderly people who judged them. Molly and Frederick were large and untidy, with a great deal of grey hair, wearing comfortable clothes that complacently despised fashion. They looked like benevolent haystacks, but were not looking at each other in a way David knew well.
‘All right, then,’ he said humorously, unable to bear the strain, ‘you can say it.’ And he put his arm around Harriet, who was pale and strained because of morning sickness and because she had spent a week scrubbing floors and washing windows.
‘Are you going to run a hotel?’ enquired Frederick reasonably, determined not to make a judgement.
‘How many children are you intending to have?’ asked Molly, with the short laugh that means there is no point in protesting.
‘A lot,’ said David softly.
‘Yes,’ said Harriet. ‘Yes.’ She did not realize, as David did, how annoyed these two parents were. Aiming, like all their kind, at an appearance of unconformity, they were in fact the essence of convention, and disliked any manifestation of the spirit of exaggeration, of excess. This house was that.
‘Come on, we’ll give you dinner, if there is a decent hotel,’ said David’s mother.
Over that meal, other subjects were discussed until, over coffee, Molly observed, ‘You do realize that you are going to have to ask your father for help?’
David seemed to wince and suffer, but he had to face it: what mattered was the house and the life that would be lived in it. A life that – both parents knew because of his look of determined intention, which they judged full of the smugness of youth – was going to annul, absolve, cancel out all the deficiencies of their life, Molly’s and Frederick’s; and of James’s and Jessica’s life, too.
As they separated in the dark car-park of the hotel, Frederick, said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you are both rather mad. Well, wrong-headed, then.’
‘Yes,’ said Molly. ‘You haven’t really thought it out. Children…no one who hasn’t had them knows what work they make.’
Here David laughed, making a point – and an old one, which Molly recognized, and faced, with a conscious laugh. ‘You are not maternal,’ said David. ‘It’s not your nature. But Harriet is.’
‘Very well,’ said Molly, ‘it’s your life.’
She telephoned James, her first husband, who was on a yacht near the Isle of Wight. This conversation ended with ‘I think you should come and see for yourself.’
‘Very well, I will,’ said he, agreeing as much to what had not been said as to what had: his difficulty in keeping up with his wife’s unspoken languages was the main reason he had been pleased to leave her.
Soon after this conversation, David and Harriet again stood with David’s parents – the other pair – in contemplation of the house. This time they were outside it. Jessica stood in the middle of a lawn still covered with the woody debris of the winter and a windy spring, and critically surveyed the house. To her it was gloomy and detestable, like England. She was the same age as Molly and looked twenty years younger, being lean and brown and seeming to glisten with sun oil even when her skin was without it. Her hair was yellow and short and shiny and her clothes bright. She dug the heels of her jade-green shoes in the lawn and looked at her husband, James.
He had already been over the house and now he said, as David had expected. ‘It’s a good investment.’
‘Yes,’ said David.
‘It’s not overpriced. I suppose that’s because it’s too big for most people. I take it the surveyor’s report was all right?’
‘Yes,’ said David.
‘In that case I shall assume responsibility for the mortgage. How long is it going to take to pay off?’
‘Thirty years,’ said David.
‘I’ll be dead by then, I expect. Well, I didn’t give you much in the way of a wedding present.’
‘You’ll have to do the same by Deborah,’ said Jessica.
‘We have already done much more for Deborah than for David,’ said James. ‘Anyway, we can afford it.’
She laughed, and shrugged: it was mostly her money. This ease with money characterized their life together, which David had sampled and rejected fiercely, preferring the parsimony of the Oxford house – though he had never used that word aloud. Flashy and too easy, that was the life of the rich; but now he was going to be beholden to it.
‘And how many kids are you planning, if one may ask?’ enquired Jessica, looking like a parakeet perched on that damp lawn.
‘A lot,’ said David.
‘A lot,’ said Harriet.
‘Rather you than me, then,’ said Jessica, and with that David’s other parents left the garden, and then England, with relief.
Now entered on to this scene Dorothy, Harriet’s mother. It occurred to neither Harriet nor David to think, or say, ‘Oh God, how awful, having one’s mother around all the time,’ for if family life was what they had chosen, then it followed that Dorothy should come indefinitely to help Harriet, while insisting that she had a life of her own to which she must return. She was a widow, and this life of hers was mostly visiting her daughters. The family house was sold, and she had a small flat, not very nice, but she was not one to complain. When she had taken in the size and potential of the new house, she was more silent than usual for some days. She had not found it easy bringing up three girls. Her husband had been an industrial chemist, not badly paid, but there never had been much money. She knew the cost, in every way, of a family, even a small one.
She attempted some remarks on these lines one evening at supper. David, Harriet, Dorothy. David had just come home late: the train was delayed. Commuting was not going to be much fun, was going to be the worst of it, for everyone, but particularly of course for David, for it would take nearly two hours twice a day to get to and from work. This would be one of his contributions to the dream.
The kitchen was already near what it ought to be: the great table, with heavy wooden chairs around it –only four now, but more stood in a row along the wall, waiting for guests and still unborn people. There was a big stove, an Aga, and an old-fashioned dresser with cups and mugs on hooks. Jugs were full of flowers from the garden where summer had revealed a plenitude of roses and lilies. They were eating a traditional English pudding, made by Dorothy; outside, the autumn was establishing itself in flying leaves that sometimes hit the windowpanes with small thuds and bangs, and in the sound of a rising wind. But the curtains were drawn, warm thick flowered curtains.
‘You know,’ said Dorothy, ‘I’ve been thinking about you two.’ David put down his spoon to listen as he would never have done for his unworldly mother, or his worldly father. ‘I don’t believe