Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962. Doris Lessing
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was a communist, and they were – or felt themselves to be – on sufferance in Britain, as foreigners. Or perhaps they didn’t like him. He was applying for jobs on the level which he knew he deserved. No one would even give him an interview. The joke was, ten years later it would be chic to be German and a communist. Meanwhile he was working for the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. This organization owned a house in Kensington Square, where there were lectures on the happy state of the arts in the USSR. At every meeting the two back rows of chairs were filled with people who had actually lived under communism: they were trying to tell us how horrible communism was. We patronized them: they were middle-aged or old, they didn’t know the score, they were reactionary. A well-chosen epithet, flattering to the user, is the surest way of ending all serious thought. Gottfried earned very little money. He was being sheltered by Dorothy Schwartz, who had a large flat near Belsize Park Underground. The height – or depth – of the Cold War made him even more bitterly, angrily, coldly contemptuous of any opinion even slightly deviating from the Party Line. I was finding it almost impossible to be with him. I did not say to myself, But how did I stick him for so long? For we had had no alternative. About the child there were no disagreements. Peter spent most weekends with Gottfried and Dorothy. I would take him over there, sit down, have a cup of this or that, and listen to terrible, cold denunciations, then leave for two days of freedom. I went to the theatre a lot. In those days you queued in the mornings for a stool in the queue for the evening and saw the play from pit or gallery for the equivalent in today’s money of three or four pounds. I saw most of the plays on in London, in this way, sometimes standing. I continued madly in love with the theatre.
I also went off to Paris. There is no way now of telling how powerful a dream France was then. The British – that is, people who were not in the forces – had been locked into their island for the war and for some years afterwards. People would say how they had suffered from claustrophobia, dreamed of abroad – and particularly of Paris. France was a magnet because of de Gaulle, and the Free French, and the Resistance, by far the most glamorous of the partisan armies. Now that our cooking and our coffee and our clothes are good, it is hard to remember how people yearned for France as for civilization itself. And there was another emotion too, among women. French men loved women and showed it, but in Britain the most women could hope for was to be whistled at by workmen in the street, not always a friendly thing. Joan adored France. She had spent happy times there and spoke French well. Her father’s current girlfriend was French. Joan saw her as infinitely beautiful, while she was a mere nothing in comparison. This was far from the truth, but there was no arguing with her. (This was certainly not the only time in my life I have known a woman who wore rose-tinted spectacles for every woman in the world but herself.) Isn’t she gorgeous, she would moan over some woman less attractive than she was. She had had a very smart black suit made, with a tight skirt and a waistcoat like a man’s, which she wore with white shirts ruffled at throat and wrists. She actually went over to Paris to get it judged. There, men would compliment you on your toilette. She came back restored. Quite a few women I knew said that for the sake of one’s self-respect one had to visit Paris from time to time. This was not a situation without its little ironies. There was a newspaper cartoon then of a Frenchman, dressed in semi-battle gear, old jacket, beret, a Gauloise hanging from a lip, accompanying a Frenchwoman dressed like a model – a short stocky scruffy man, a tall slim elegant woman.
When I went to Paris my toilette was hardly of the level to attract French compliments, but it was true every man gave you a quick, expert once-over – hair, face, what you were wearing – allotting you marks. This was a dispassionate, disinterested summing-up, not necessarily leading to invitations.
A scene: I took myself to the opera, and in the foyer, at the interval, saw enter a very young woman, eighteen, perhaps, in what was perhaps her first evening dress, a column of white satin. She was exquisite, and so was the dress. She stood poised just in the entrance, while the crowd looked … assessed … judged. Not a word, but they might as well have been clapping. She was at first ready to shrink away with shyness but slowly filled with confidence, stood smiling, tears in her eyes, lifted on invisible waves of expert appreciation, approval, love. Adorable France, which loves its women, gives them confidence in their femininity – and that from the time when they are tiny girls.
On this first trip I was in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, so cheap I could hardly believe it. Gottfried had said I should look up his sister’s husband’s mother. I did and found an elderly lady in old-fashioned clothes living in a tiny room high up under the roof of one of those tall ancient cold houses. Through her I was admitted into a network of middle-aged and old women, without men, all poor, shabby, living from hand to mouth in maids’ rooms or in any comer that would let them fit themselves in. There they were, every one a victim of war, and some of them had lived in their little refuges through the war and, clearly, often did not know how they had managed it. They were witty and they were wise, and the best of company. As with the refugees in London then, it was hard to know what they lived on. I was served precious coffee in beautiful cups, by a stove that had to be fed with wood and coal – and whatever was burnable that could be picked up in the street, brought toiling up hundreds of cold stairs. Madame Gise had not heard from her son since the beginning of the war and said that he had chosen to despise her, because she was not a communist. She despised communists and communism. I said I was a kind of communist, and she said, Nonsense, you don’t know anything about it. These women, whose husbands or lovers or sons had been killed or had forgotten them: they were so brave, supporting each other in their poverty and when they were ill. Again, as in London, I was hearing tales of impossible survivals, endurances. Our talk in London of politics, all ideas and principles, of what went on in other countries, dissolved here into: ‘My cousin … Ravensbrook’; ‘My son was shot by the Germans for harbouring a member of the Resistance’; ‘I escaped from Germany … from Poland … from Russia … from Spain …’
In Paris I bought a hat. This needs explanation. I had to: it was a need of the times. A Paris hat proved you had captured elegance itself. Madame Gise stood by me. Saying, No, not that one, Yes, that one, she was representing Paris itself, that shabby woman with a carefully counted out store of francs in her handbag. I never wore the hat. But I owned a Paris hat. Joan said, But what are you going to do with it?
Another trip, and in another shabby hotel, I suddenly thought, But surely this was where Oscar Wilde died? Down I went to the desk, and the proprietress said. Yes, indeed that was so, he died here, and it was in the room you are in. People sometimes came to ask her about it, but she couldn’t say much; after all, she hadn’t been here. When I wanted to pay the bill, there was no one at the desk. I knocked at a door, and was told, Entrez. It was a dark, cluttered room, with mirrors gleaming from corners, shawls over chairs, a cat. There was Madame, in an armchair, flesh bulging over her pink corset, her fat feet in a basin of water. The maid, a young girl, was brushing her rusty old hair, while Madame tossed it back as if it were a treasure, in her imagination young tresses. This was a scene from Balzac? Zola? Certainly not a twentieth-century novel. Or Degas: The Concierge, perhaps? I lingered at the door, entranced. ‘Leave your money at the desk,’ she said. ‘The bill is there. And let us see you again, Madame.’ But I didn’t go back: one shouldn’t spoil perfection. And I didn’t see Madame Gise again either, and about that I feel bad.
On one of these trips there was one of the oddest encounters of my life. The plane back from Paris was delayed, by hours. At Orly we sat around, bored, tired, fractious. At last we were on. Next to me was a South African man, who, hearing from my voice that I was from Rhodesia, began talking. He was, I thought, drunk, then thought, No, that’s not drink. I hardly listened: We would land after midnight; I was years away from being able to afford taxis; Peter still woke at five. Slowly, what the man was saying began to penetrate. He was telling me that he had made a trip to Palestine to aid Irgun in its fight against the British occupying forces, and he had just helped to blow up the King David Hotel. Now, his duty as a Jew done, he was returning with a good conscience to South Africa. Women are used to hearing confessions, particularly if they are young – well, by then youngish – and reasonably attractive. Women don’t really count, as people, to a man who is drunk, or not himself for one reason or another – or to many men sober, if it comes to that. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was an enemy of my country and I should be thinking of how to alert the authorities.