The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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But she was herself again (herself examined and discarded) at once; and while he still supported himself by the door, she went to sit in her usual place on a long benchlike settee that had a red blanket over it. The flat had two rooms, one very small and always darkened by permanently drawn midnight blue curtains, so that the narrow bed with the books stacked up the wall beside it was a suffocating shadow emphasized by a small yellow glow from the bed lamp. This bedroom would have caused her to feel (he spent most of his time in it) at first panic of claustrophobia, and then a necessity to break out or let in light, open the walls to the sky. How long would her amiability of the blood survive in that? Not long, she thought, but she would never know, since nothing would make her try the experiment. As for him, this second room in which they both sat in their usual positions, she watchful on the red blanket, he in his expensive chair which looked surgical, being all black leather and chromium and tilting all ways with his weight, was the room that challenged him, because of its openness – he needed the enclosed dark of the bedroom. It was large, high, had airy white walls, a clear black carpet, the dark red settee, his machine-like chair, more books. But one wall was virtually all window: it was window from knee height to ceiling, and the squalors of this part of London showed as if from an aeroplane, the flat was so high, or seemed so, because what was beneath was so uniformly low. Here, around this room (in which, if she were alone, her spirits always spread into delight) winds clutched and shook and tore. To stand at those windows, staring straight back at sky, at wind, at cloud, at sun, was to her a release. To him, a terror. Therefore she had not gone at once to the windows; it would have destroyed the moment of equality over their shared giddiness – hers from the lift, his from illness. Though not-going had another danger, that he might know why she had refrained from enjoying what he knew she enjoyed, and think her too careful of him?
He was turned away from the light. Now, perhaps conscious that she was looking at him, he swivelled the chair so he could face the sky. No, this was not one of his good days, though at first she had thought his paleness was due to his dark blue sweater, whose tight high neck isolated and presented his head. It was a big head, made bigger because of the close-cut reddish hair that fitted the back of the skull like fur, exposing a large pale brow, strong cheekbones, chin, a face where every feature strove to dominate, where large calm green eyes just held the balance with a mouth designed, apparently, only to express the varieties of torment. A single glance from a stranger (or from herself before she had known better) would have earned him: big, strong, healthy, confident man. Now, however, she knew the signs, could, after glancing around a room, say: Yes, you and you and you … Because of the times she had been him, achieved his being. But they, looking at her, would never claim her as one of them, because being him in split seconds and intervals had not marked her, could not, her nerves were too firmly grounded in normality. (Normality?) But she was another creature from them, another species, almost. To be envied? She thought so. But if she did not think them enviable, why had she come here, why did she always come? Why had she deliberately left behind the happiness (word defiantly held on to, despite them) she felt in the streets? Was it that she believed the pain in this room was more real than the happiness? Because of the courage behind it? She might herself not be able to endure the small dark-curtained room which would force her most secret terrors; but she respected this man who lived on the exposed platform swaying in the clouds (which is how his nerves felt it) – and from choice?
Doctors, friends, herself – everyone who knew enough to say – pronounced: the warmth of a family, marriage if possible, comfort, other people. Never isolation, never loneliness, not the tall wind-battered room where the sky showed through two walls. But he refused common sense. ‘It’s no good skirting around what I am, I’ve got to crash right through it, and if I can’t, whose loss is it?’
Well, she did not think she was strong enough to crash right through what she most feared, even though she had been born healthy, her nerves under her own command.
‘Yes, but you have a choice, I haven’t, unless I want to become a little animal living in the fur of other people’s warmth.’
(So went the dialogue.)
But he had a choice too: there were a hundred ways in which they, the people whom she could now recognize from their eyes in a crowd, could hide themselves. Not everyone recognized them, she would say; how many people do we know (men and women, but more men than women) enclosed in marriages, which are for safety only, or attached to other people’s families, stealing (if you like) security? But theft means not giving back in exchange or kind, and these men and women, the solitary ones, do give back, otherwise they wouldn’t be so welcome, so needed – so there’s no need to talk about hanging on to the warmth of belly fur, like a baby kangaroo, it’s a question of taking one thing, and giving back another.
‘Yes, but I’m not going to pretend, I will not, it’s not what I am – I can’t and it’s your fault that I can’t.’
This meant that he had been the other, through her, just as she had, through him.
‘My dear, I don’t understand the emotions, except through my intelligence, normality never meant anything to me until I knew you. Now all right, I give in …’
This was sullen. With precisely the same note of sullenness she used to censor the words her healthy nerves supplied like love, happiness, myself, health. All right this sullenness meant: I’ll pay you your due, I have to, my intelligence tells me I must. I’ll even be you, but briefly, for so long as I can stand it.
Meanwhile they were – not talking – but exchanging information. She had seen X and Y and Z, been to this place, read that book.
He had read so-and-so, seen X and Y, spent a good deal of his time listening to music.
‘Do you want me to go away?’
‘No, stay.’
This very small gift made her happy; refusing to examine the emotion, she sat back, curled up her legs, let herself be comfortable. She smoked. He put on some jazz. He listened to it inert, his body not flowing into it, there was a light sweat on his big straining forehead. (This meant he had wanted her to stay not out of warmth, but for need of somebody there. She sat up straight again, pushed away the moment’s delight.) She saw his eyes were closed. His face, mouth tight in an impersonal determination to endure, looked asleep, or –
‘Bill,’ she said quickly, in appeal.
Without opening his eyes, he smiled, giving her sweetness, friendship, and the irony, without bitterness, due from one kind of creature to another.
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
The piano notes pattered like rain before a gust of wind that swept around the corner of the building. White breaths of cloud were blown across the thin blue air. The drum shook, hissed, steadily, like her blood pumping the beat, and a wild flute danced a sky sign in the rippling smoke of a jet climbing perpendicular from sill to ceiling. But what did he hear, see, feel, sitting eyes closed, palm hard on the armrest for support? The record stopped. He opened his eyes, they resolved themselves out of a knot of inward difficulty, and rested on the wall opposite him, while he put out his hand to stop the machine. Silence now.
He closed his eyes again. She discarded the cross talk in her flesh of music, wind, clouds, raindrops, patterning grass and earth, and tried to see – first the room, an insecure platform in height, tenacious against storm and rocking foundations; then a certain discordance of substance that belonged to his vision; then herself, as he saw her – at once she felt a weariness of the spirit, like a cool sarcastic wink from a third eye, seeing them both, two little people, him and herself, as she had seen the vegetable seller, the adolescents, the woman whose husband had rheumatism. Without charity she saw them, sitting there together in silence on either side of the tall room, and the eye seemed to expand till it filled the universe with disbelief and negation.
Now, she admitted the prohibited words love, joy (et cetera), and gave them leave to warm her, for not only could she not bear the world without them, she needed them to disperse her anger against him: Yes, yes, it’s all very well, but how could the play go on, how could it, if it wasn’t for me, the people like me? We create you in