London Observed

by Doris Lessing

  Then she married another American, much better placed than the first. But she said she hated America, which was why she married an Englishman who was important in the oil empires of the world. He had adored her, this exotic, clever waif, but he did not adore her long. He was reputed to have said that he should have refused to marry her, and kept her as a mistress. She would never be a wife. It was like having a beautiful spoiled pet in the house, something like a cheetah, that couldn’t be house-trained. That marriage had lasted three years.

  Rose had done some serious thinking, and taken the advice of her fortune-teller. She was already well into her thirties. Married to James she had been a real wife, a good one, presiding over comfort and good meals, with one satisfactory baby after another. These were in themselves evidence of remarkable strength of mind, for everyone knew she had had ‘dozens’ of abortions and miscarriages. Each pregnancy, and then birth, had claimed the attention not only of James, midwives, doctors, hospitals, friends, neighbours, but circles of people who had scarcely heard of Rose, so remarkable and unprecedented did it turn out to be.

  Sarah had contemplated these dramas with dislike, with distaste, and, above all, with incredulity that James could tolerate it all. One simply did not make a fuss about physical suffering (or any suffering if it came to that); one shut up, kept a stiff upper lip, bit the bullet, et cetera and so forth. Forced by Rose to examine these tenets, this English creed, Sarah concluded there was nothing wrong with it, and there was no virtue at all in all these foreign histrionics which, in Rose’s case, were always compounded with dishonesty, with calculations so devious that sometimes it was years later before one understood what had really been going on.

  Quite soon after inviting herself to tea, Rose was going to ring up and say something like this: ‘Sarah! Yes, it’s me, it’s Rose! Sarah, I wonder if you would come to dinner? No, oh, don’t say you won’t without thinking about it. Why not, Sarah? We have so many friends in common, not to mention James, oh no, I don’t mean that badly, I swear I don’t, Sarah, oh, do believe me …’

  She could see herself, one of several guests around that capacious family table, James at one end, Rose at the other, the children eyeing the adults as her own two had done her: polite, even deferential towards these appalling and cruel inevitabilities, but with nervous glances at each other, with wide, scared smiles. They would eat quickly and make excuses to leave the table and go to their rooms, where they would sit and discuss fearfully, angrily, but full of loud derision (because of their fear) the dangerous situation downstairs. ‘Our father’s first wife has come to supper … Sarah, oh don’t you know about Sarah? Well, she’s here for supper. Can I come over to your house?’ So they would talk on the telephone to some friend.

  Soon after this civilized and creditable-to-everyone family supper, James would say, with that resentful but admiring laugh he used to meet the situations Rose put him into, ‘Sarah, Rose suggested we should take the two older children with us when we go off to France. They are very good at walking, you know. I took them to the Lake District last year. Would you mind?’

  She would say she didn’t mind. And probably she wouldn’t. By then she would have become great friends with all the children, and a lot of her time would be taken up in choosing them presents and all the votive offerings children do need these days. She would have become – not a second mother, Rose would see to that – but a nice auntie, to all the children. She would say to James, ‘How nice to have Sam and Betty along. What a pity the other two aren’t old enough to come too, but perhaps next year. Of course I don’t mind their coming. Why not?’

  Except that her heart beat, her palms were itchy with sweat, and she was again prowling around the room as if preparing to leap through a window and into the street and be off – to anywhere at all.

  What power that woman had! Always!

  It was the strength of unscrupulousness, rooted in selfishness, and born from – stupidity. It had never, ever, occurred to Rose that one should not do this or that. (But of course there was the question of that childhood in the camps. Did this mean that one would never, ever, judge Rose by ordinary standards?) During Sarah’s bad time, when she had thought, much too much, about Rose, she had always come up against this, like running headlong into a glass barrier that stood between Rose and the rest of the world. To say to Rose, ‘But one can’t do that, don’t you see?’ To say, ‘But that’s not the decent thing to do!’ – why, even in imagination when it is easy to see oneself saying this and that to an antagonist, the words simply would not get themselves formed.

  But … stupidity? If it was that, then it got Rose everything. Sarah’s husband. Four children. A large house. Stability after being flotsam. A man whose life was captive to her needs. Stupidity! No, it was a force, a power, that came from some level of human existence Sarah had never entered. When she had watched James go off to Rose, she had felt exactly as she would had she seen him, in a dream, pulled into a bewitched forest governed by primitive laws. She had felt he was leaving his own best self.

  But then, there were the children. Over and over again during those years she had said to herself, ‘Sarah, there are four children. Four children, Sarah. You can’t argue with that,’ Every child brings with it the unknown, brings possibilities and chances rooted in the distant past of humanity, possibilities stretching away into the future. James might have gone off into the enchanted forest after a witch, but there he had found four packages addressed to himself, each one full of Fate.

  She supposed that Rose was James’s anima, embodying a whole parcel of attributes that James’s daylight self most deeply needed. She could see there was no fighting that.

  It was Rose’s fortune-teller who had said Rose was James’s anima. And where had Sarah’s comparable male been? Often enough Sarah had dwelled, but no more than adequately, on the two men with whom she had had affairs after James left her. Affairs are not easy, with adolescent children already sensitized to be on the watch for wrongdoing, not easy when you are holding down a job, and having to move to this or that town or country to keep it, always juggling children, their needs, term times, holidays, flats, houses, travelling. Her two affairs had been pleasant enough, if harassed and circumscribed by all these problems, and indeed the men in question put that rich relishing smile on her face whenever she thought of them. But she did not believe they represented any more than themselves.

  No, it was James, she believed, who embodied that man who was her imperative, her other self. But there seemed to be an imbalance somewhere in the psychological equation. Often enough she had tried to picture some dark, dramatic, vibrant lying man who would silence all her best instincts, but she had concluded at last that this force could only be female. (She did not like this conclusion because she was a feminist.) She could not imagine a man with Rose’s attributes. She had never met one, or even read about one. A man like Rose would be degenerate, or criminal.

  But Rose was not degenerate or criminal. She was simply – female. Of a certain type that every woman at once and instinctively recognized at first sight. And every man had to respond to, at once, either with attraction, or unease and dislike. No man was ever indifferent to Rose.

  Rose had only to walk into a room …

  Ten years after she and James had married, ten happy years – and James always made a point of granting that, being fair, decent, and honourable – the two of them went to a party together. They had got there late because of some problem with a baby-sitter.

  In the middle of a room stood a couple, a dark dramatic-looking woman, and a very young man. He was a boy, really, a poetic English boy, like Rupert Brooke. She was fascinating him. He was hypnotized by her. She was tall and slender, though this could hardly be discerned under swirling draperies, for she wore a gown made out of a scarlet, silver-broidered sari. Her black glistening hair snaked down her shoulders and back. One strand lay on a slim brown arm, and – this was Sarah’s immediate, sardonic observation – this seductive coil was
being kept there on sleek and shining skin by an angle of that arm, the elbow lifted, making a tender, poignant curve. Rose was not beautiful, but everyone was looking at her; and at the poor young man, kept helpless by the black depths of her eyes.

  Sarah was indignant that the youth was being used in this way. Rose was sending out sly swift glances to the men who were watching, to judge her effect on them, and glances of connivance at the women who, and she would never ever understand this, were hating her for it, and would not send back equal glances. ‘Look what a fool I am making of this poor male sucker,’ was what she expected all the women present to share. Sarah looked at James, counting on him to feel what she felt, but she saw that his look at Rose was like the young man’s. He was already lost with his first view of Rose, while his good wife Sarah was engaged at feeling ashamed for her sex at its worst. What Sarah was thinking at the very moment her husband was losing his senses, his good sense, was, ‘She’s female, she’s female in a basic gutter way that every decent woman in the world hates.’

  He walked straight over to Rose. People looked at Sarah standing there, abandoned, for she had been: nothing could have been more blatant. The poor poetic youth, forgotten from that moment, stumbled to one side as James took his place. And that was how Sarah had lost her husband to Rose, as simply and as inevitably as that. When the time came to go home, she touched him on the arm, and he came away from Rose with whom he had been talking for three hours, not looking at his wife or at anyone else.

  She took the bemused man home, and he came to the same bed, and he lay awake, and so did she, listening to how he sighed and suffered, and there was a moment towards morning, the early light already in the room, when he said, ‘But Sarah, what happened? I don’t understand. Did I behave badly?’

  Everyone in that room knew what had happened. That very next morning Olive, the couple’s great friend, rang up Sarah and said, ‘Forget it, there’s nothing you can do, it’ll have to run its course.’

  And ‘it’ was still running its course.

  ‘It’ was about to engulf her too.

  ‘Sarah,’ said Sarah to herself, as elderly people do. ‘Sarah, do you realize you are thinking of actually running away? Running out of this flat, which you like, from this city, which you love, simply to get away from Rose, get away from … ?

  ‘No, come on, surely you are exaggerating. Suppose you do exactly what James suggests, neither more nor less. You will go off with him for three weeks on a walking trip (and what you are imagining now is the delight, not of lovemaking, but of talking, talking with someone who perfectly understands you, your other self), and it doesn’t matter where you go – Scotland, Timbuktu. You will of course insist that Rose should be told, for that is the decent and honourable thing to do. You will not respond to her telephone calls, but simply be polite, no more, nor to the indirect telephone calls, each one of which will have the unmistakable flavour of Rose’s deviousness. You will not become a guest at Rose’s table, or a kind auntie to her children – part, in short, of Rose’s life, her family, that quicksand. You will simply go off with James for a walking holiday and that is that! All simple and aboveboard.’

  Sarah sank down in her little straightbacked armchair and closed her eyes. She was being absurd. Even to begin to think like this meant she was already sucked in.

  ‘No,’ she would have to tell James. ‘No, no, no, James, it simply will not do, you must see that.’ He would have seen it at once, if he had not spent fifteen years with Rose.

  Even before the telephone rang she was staring at it as if it was about to explode.

  Cautiously she lifted the handpiece and said, ‘Yes?’

  A child’s voice.

  ‘Is that Sarah?’ said a little girl (Betty, probably, in a breathless voice that had in it, already, all of Rose’s shamelessness).

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Is my father there?’

  ‘No,’ said Sarah.

  Prompted by Rose, the child said, ‘Thank you,’ and the line went dead.

  Sarah was standing by the telephone in a dark room, and the two tall side windows showed tenebrous branches against a hazy sky. She was weakened already. She was unable to prevent thoughts of what it would be like with James back in her life. Good Lord, how much he had taken with him, when he left her for Rose! And now, how easy not to go away (run away, she was fiercely accusing herself); how easy to stay and see it through to the end.

  The end? Why the end?

  Sarah switched on the lights, and stood in a small bright room, the night shut away from her. She was breathing fast, her whole being prickling with some kind of energy … it was hard to keep still, she was striding around that room of hers, so much too small for her. She saw in one of the little mirrors a distressed, wild-looking creature with distracted eyes, and with moving lips, too. She was muttering to herself, this woman, this Sarah – herself.

  She was muttering, ‘It’s not me, it’s her. Not Sarah, Rose.’

  What did she mean by that … ‘What is it?’ she demanded of herself irritably. ‘What is the matter?’ For she felt as if she was being invaded by some understanding that was like a powerful substance, changing her. ‘Rose, it’s Rose. Not me, but Rose.’ These words were on her lips forcing her to attend to them.

  She switched off the lights again and stood by the window in the end wall. The disorder of the gardens was hidden by the dark, and all she could see were roofs against the sky.

  She shut her eyes. She breathed slowly. She was seeing (the picture forced itself on her, the fragile arms of a young girl stretching upward out of some kind of pit, or trap. Golden brown arms, with a fine sheen of dark hair … the child’s fingers reached up, closed on the edge of the pit, and then big boots came crunching down, and the arms fell back but crept up again, and tenacious fingers clutched at the loose soil that crumbled as she tried to hold it. The delicate arms tensed there, trembling … ). Sarah shut her eyes so as not to see the big boots come stamping down.

  How had pretty young girls got themselves out of all that … how had they survived?

  Sarah was a child in the war, and while it went on her view of it was the conventional one presented to her by the necessities of wartime. Her father was in the Air Force. After the war both parents were involved with helping refugees out of the shambles that was Europe. Sarah had known about ‘all that’. But without knowing about it. Still a child she had told herself, ‘Of course one can’t really understand what it is like, all that, not if one is English.’ Meaning, ‘not if you’ve been safe all your life,’ (And will go on being safe, was implicit.) ‘All that’ was a horror outside ordinary living, and there was no point dwelling on it, because if one hadn’t been in it, one would never understand. Sarah had closed a door in herself. Rather, she had refused to open it. And yes, she believed she was right to do it. One needn’t allow oneself to wallow in horrors.

  When she had first heard Rose’s history she had listened and kept the door shut. For one thing she did not believe it. Yes, she knew Rose had been there, had escaped from ‘all that’. Not necessarily, however, in the way she said. Rose was a liar. She lied as she breathed. Rose was one of those people who, if they say they walked up a street on the right side going east, one automatically corrected it to ‘the left side, going west’.

  Rose had been – so she had told some people – in a concentration camp. Had told others, more than one. Her mother had died in a camp. Her father was a fabulously rich South American who had had this amazing love affair with her beautiful mother, but he was married and had gone back to his wife. True? Who knew! (Who cared, Sarah had added, in moments of moral exhaustion. There was always too much of Rose!)

  Sarah knew that a lot of people who had emerged from ‘all that’ said they were in camps, and perhaps they had been, but the words stood for a horror that people who had not been part of ‘all that’ did not have to enter. Could not enter. A kind of shorthand, that’s what these words were … the camps had only be
en part of it. They were a black pit into which people were sucked, or thrown, or fell, but around it people had struggled and fought to save themselves, save others, in ways that no outsider could imagine. Rose had emerged from ‘all that’, and if her stories weren’t true, what of it?

  She had come out. She had survived. That was enough.

  She had three times been the petted, petulant, child-wife, mistress-wife, of adoring men who had got rid of her because she could not fit herself into being ordinary, being a wife.

  How had she seen that? She had played a part she had to believe in, because it brought her out of the black pit, because it had saved her, but then it hadn’t been appropriate after all. She had then decided to become a good wife, all home-made bread and noisy children in a family house. But she had had to make the decision to be that. This Rose, the good wife of James, was a construct, a role, just as the other, the petted, pretty, child-mistress had been.

  Rose had never understood this world, the safe, ordered world, which was not ‘all that’. She had never ever been able to grasp the rules that governed it. Yes, they were mostly unwritten rules, and yes of course one absorbed them as one grew up, the way Sarah had.

  Rose had not.

  Sarah stood by the window in a dark room with her eyes shut, and her perspectives had so far changed that she was almost Rose, she was feeling with her. And what she felt (Sarah now knew, in her own bones and flesh) was panic. Fear was the air Rose breathed. She was like someone continually reaching out for hand-holds that seemed solid but gave way. Three husbands, married for safety, had crumbled in her hands, leaving her desperate, determined to find – James.