The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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Oh my dear one, my dear one, I am a tent under which you lie, I am the sky across which you fly like a bird, I am …
My soul is a room, a great room, a hall – it is empty, waiting. Sometimes a fly buzzes across it, bringing summer mornings in another continent, sometimes a child laughs in it, and it is like the generations chiming together, child, youth, and old woman as one being. Sometimes you walk into it and I shut my eyes because of the sweet recognition in me of what you are, I feel what you are as if I stood near a tree and put my hand on its breathing trunk.
I am a pool of water in which fantastic creatures move, in which you play, a young boy, your brown skin glistening, and the water moves over your limbs like hands, my hands, that will never touch you, my hands that tomorrow night, in a pool of listening silence, will stretch up towards the thousand people in the auditorium, creating love for them from the consumed pain of my denial.
I am a room in which an old man sits, smiling, as he has smiled for fifty centuries, you, whose bearded loins created me.
I am a world into which you breathed life, have smiled life, have made me. I am, with you, what creates, every moment, a thousand animalcules, the creatures of our dispensation, and every one we have both touched with our hands and let go into space like free birds.
I am a great space that enlarges, that grows, that spreads with the steady lightening of the human soul, and in the space, squatting in the corner, is a thing, an object, a dark, slow, coiled, amorphous heaviness, embodied sleep, a cold stupid sleep, a heaviness like the dark in a stale room – this thing stirs in its sleep where it squats in my soul, and I put all my muscles, all my force, into defeating it. For this was what I was born for, this is what I am, to fight embodied sleep, putting around it a confining girdle of light, of intelligence, so that it cannot spread its slow stain of ugliness over the trees, over the stars, over you.
It is as if, since you turned towards me and smiled, letting light go through me again, it is as if a King had taken a Queen’s hand and set her on his throne: a King and his Queen, hand in hand on top of my mountain sit smiling at ease in their country.
The morning is coming on the brick wall, the shadow of the tree has gone, and I think of how today I will walk out on to the stage, surrounded by the cool circle of my chastity, the circle of my discipline, and how I will raise my face (the flower face of my girlhood) and how I will raise my arms from which will flow the warmth you have given me.
And so, my dear one, turn now to your wife, and take her head on to your shoulder, and both sleep sweetly in the sleep of your love. I release you to go to your joys without me. I leave you to your love. I leave you to your life.
Last year was out of ordinary from the start – just like every other year. What start, January? But January is a mid-month, in the middle of cold, snow, dark. Above all, dark. In January nothing starts but the new calendar, which says that the down-swing of our part of the earth towards the long light of summer has already begun, is already stimulating the plants, changing their responses. I would make the beginning back in autumn, when I ‘found myself possessor’ – I put it like that because someone else is now in possession – of a wild, very long, narrow garden, between mellow brick walls. There was an old pear tree in the middle, and at its end a small wood of recently sprung trees, sycamores, an elder, an ash. This treasure of space was twenty minutes’ strolling time from Marble Arch, on a canal. The garden had to be prepared for planting. By luck I found a boy, up from the country to try his fortune in London, who hated all work in the world but digging. He chose to live in half a room which he curtained with blankets, carpeted with newpapers, then matting, and wall-papered with his poems and pictures. He was, of course, in the old romantic tradition of the adventurous young, challenging a big city, but he saw himself and the world as newly hatched, let’s say a year before, when he became twenty and discovered that he was free and probably a hippy. He lived on baked beans and friendship, and when he needed money, dug people’s gardens. Together we stripped off the top layer of this potential garden, which was all builder’s rubble, cans, bottles, broken glass. Under this was London clay. It is a substance you hear enough about; indeed, London’s history seems made of it. But when you actually come on tons of the stuff, yards deep, heavy, wet, impervious, without a worm or a root in it, it is so airless and unused, you wonder how London ever came to be all gardens and woodland. I could not believe my gardening book, which said that clay is perfect potential soil for plants. I, friends, and the boy from the country, made shapes of the stuff, and thought it was a pity none of us was a sculptor – but that wasn’t going to turn the clay into working earth. At last, we marked out flowerbeds, and turned over the clay in large clods, the weeds and grass still on them. The place looked like a ploughed field before the cultivators move in. But even before the first frosts, the soil between the flinty-sided miniature boulders was showing the beginning of a marriage between rotting grass and clay fragments. It had rained. It was raining. As London does, it rained. Going out to inspect the clods, each so heavy I could only pick one up at a time, I found they had softened their harsh contours somewhat, but I couldn’t break them by flinging them down or bashing them with a spade. They looked eternal. Steps led up from the under-earth – the flat was a basement flat – and standing at eye-level to the garden, it all looked like a First World War film: trenches full of water, wet mats of the year’s leaf, enormous clods, rotting weeds, bare trunks and dripping branches. All, everything, wet, bare, raw.
That was December. Around Christmas, after several heavy frosts, I went up to see how things went on, kicked one of the clods – and it crumbled. The boy from the country who, being not a farming boy but a country-town boy, and who therefore had not believed the book either, saying the garden needed a bulldozer, came on my telephone call, and about an hour of the lightest work with a hoe transformed the heaving scene into neat areas of tilth mixed with dead grass. Not really dead, of course, but ready to come to life with the spring. But now we had faith in the book, and we turned the roots upwards to be killed by the frost. This happened. Each piece of stalk or root filled with wet, and then swelled as it froze, and burst like water-mains in severe cold. Long before spring the earth lay broken and tamed, all the really hard work done, not by the spade, or the hoe, or even by the worms, but by the frost. The thing is, I knew Africa, or a part of it, and there you can never forget the power of sun, wind, rain. But in gentler England you do forget, as if the north-slanting sun must have less power than a sun overhead, as if nature itself is less drastic in her working. You can forget it, that is, until you see what a handful of weeks of weather can do to smash a seventy-by-twenty-foot bit of wilderness into conformity.
It rained in January, and in February it did not stop. If I set one foot off the top of the steps that came up from the flat, I sank in clay to my ankles. The light was strained through cold coud, but it was strong enough to drag the snowdrops up into it. I walked in Regent’s Park along paths framed with black glistening twigs which were swelling, ready to burst: the shape of spring, next year’s promise, is exposed from the moment the leaves fall. The park was all grey water, sodden grass, black trees, and the water-fowl had to contend for crumbs and crusts with the gulls that had come inland from a stormy sea. In March it rained, and was dull. Usually by March more than snowdrops and crocuses are showing from snow or mud; and already the paths are loaded with people staking claims in the spring. But it was a bad month. My new garden was calling forth derisory remarks from friends who were not gardeners and who did not know what a month’s warmth can do for water-filled trenches, bare walls, sodden earth. April wasn’t doing anything like what the poet meant when he said, ‘Oh, to be in England’ – certainly he would have returned at once to his beloved Italy. April was not the beginning of spring, but the continuation of winter. It was wet, wet, wet, and cold, and it all went on the same day after day. And in the park, where I walked daily, only the lengthening evenings talked of spring, for in spite of crocuses everywhere, the buds seemed frozen on the bushes and trees. It would never end. I don’t know how they bear it in northern countries, like Sweden or Russia. It is like being shut inside a caul of ice, when the winter lengthens itself so.
And it was so wet. If you took one step off the paths you squelched. No air, you