Stories

by Doris Lessing

  “For one thing, they are both very fond of you.”

  “Fond,” she said smiling.

  “Judith, I’ve never in my life felt such an atmosphere of being let down.”

  Judith considered this. “When something happens that shows one there is really a complete gulf in understanding, what is there to say?”

  “It could scarcely have been a complete gulf in understanding. I suppose you are going to say we are being interfering?”

  Judith showed distaste. “That is a very stupid word. And it’s a stupid idea. No one can interfere with me if I don’t let them. No, it’s that I don’t understand people. I don’t understand why you or Betty should care. Or why the Rineiris should, for that matter,” she added with the small tight smile.

  “Judith!”

  “If you’ve behaved stupidly, there’s no point in going on. You put an end to it.”

  “What happened? Was it the cat?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But it’s not important.” She looked at me, saw my ironical face, and said: “The cat was too young to have kittens. That is all there was to it.”

  “Have it your way. But that is obviously not all there is to it.”

  “What upsets me is that I don’t understand at all why I was so upset then.”

  “What happened? Or don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t give a damn whether I talk about it or not. You really do say the most extraordinary things, you and Betty. If you want to know, I’ll tell you. What does it matter?”

  T would like to know, of course.”

  “Of course!” she said. “In your place I wouldn’t care. Well, I think the essence of the thing was that I must have had the wrong attitude to that cat. Cats are supposed to be independent. They are suppposed to go off by themselves to have their kittens. This one didn’t. It was climbing up on to my bed all one night and crying for attention. I don’t like cats on my bed. In the morning I saw she was in pain. I stayed with her all that day. Then Luigi—he’s the brother, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Betty mention him? Luigi came up to say it was time I went for a swim. He said the cat should look after itself. I blame myself very much. That’s what happens when you submerge yourself in somebody else.”

  Her look at me was now defiant; and her body showed both defensiveness and aggression. “Yes. It’s true. I’ve always been afraid of it. And in the last few weeks I’ve behaved badly. It’s because I let it happen.”

  “Well, go on.”

  “I left the cat and swam. It was late, so it was only for a few minutes. When I came out of the sea the cat had followed me and had had a kitten on the beach. That little beast Michele—the son, you know?—well, he always teased the poor thing, and now he had frightened her off the kitten. It was dead, though. He held it up by the tail and waved it at me as I came out of the sea. I told him to bury it. He scooped two inches of sand away and pushed the kitten in—on the beach, where people are all day. So I buried it properly. He had run off. He was chasing the poor cat. She was terrified and running up the town. I ran too. I caught Michele and I was so angry I hit him. I don’t believe in hitting children. I’ve been feeling beastly about it ever since.”

  “You were angry.”

  “It’s no excuse. I would never have believed myself capable of hitting a child. I hit him very hard. He went off, crying. The poor cat had got under a big lorry parked in the square. Then she screamed. And then a most remarkable thing happened. She screamed just once, and all at once cats just materialised. One minute there was just one cat, lying under a lorry, and the next, dozens of cats. They sat in a big circle around the lorry, all quite still, and watched my poor cat.”

  “Rather moving,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “There is no evidence one way or the other,” I said in inverted commas, “that the cats were there out of concern for a friend in trouble.”

  “No,” she said energetically. “There isn’t. It might have been curiosity. Or anything. How do we know? However, I crawled under the lorry. There were two paws sticking out of the cat’s back end. The kitten was the wrong way round. It was stuck. I held the cat down with one hand and I pulled the kitten out with the other.” She held out her long white hands. They were still covered with fading scars and scratches. “She bit and yelled, but the kitten was alive. She left the kitten and crawled across the square into the house. Then all the cats got up and walked away. It was the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen. They vanished again. One minute they were all there, and then they had vanished. I went after the cat, with the kitten. Poor little thing, it was covered with dust—being wet, don’t you know. The cat was on my bed. There was another kitten coming, but it got stuck too. So when she screamed and screamed I just pulled it out. The kittens began to suck. One kitten was very big. It was a nice fat black kitten. It must have hurt her. But she suddenly bit out—snapped, don’t you know, like a reflex action, at the back of the kitten’s head. It died, just like that. Extraordinary, isn’t it?” she said, blinking hard, her lips quivering. “She was its mother, but she killed it. Then she ran off the bed and went downstairs into the shop under the counter. I called to Luigi. You know, he’s Mrs. Rineiri’s brother.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He said she was too young, and she was badly frightened and very hurt. He took the alive kitten to her but she got up and walked away. She didn’t want it. Then Luigi told me not to look. But I followed him. He held the kitten by the tail and he banged it against the wall twice. Then he dropped it into the rubbish heap. He moved aside some rubbish with his toe, and put the kitten there and pushed rubbish over it. Then Luigi said the cat should be destroyed. He said she was badly hurt and it would always hurt her to have kittens.”

  “He hasn’t destroyed her. She’s still alive. But it looks to me as if he were right.”

  “Yes, I expect he was.”

  “What upset you—that he killed the kitten?”

  “Oh no, I expect the cat would if he hadn’t. But that isn’t the point, is it?”

  “What is the point?”

  T don’t think I really know.” She had been speaking breathlessly, and fast. Now she said slowly: “It’s not a question of right or wrong, is it? Why should it be? It’s a question of what one is. That night Luigi wanted to go promenading with me. For him, that was that. Something had to be done, and he’d done it. But I felt ill. He was very nice to me. He’s a very good person,” she said, defiantly.

  “Yes, he looks it.”

  “That night I couldn’t sleep. I was blaming myself. I should never have left the cat to go swimming. Well, and then I decided to leave the next day. And I did. And that’s all. The whole thing was a mistake, from start to finish.”

  “Going to Italy at all?”

  “Oh, to go for a holiday would have been all right.”

  “You’ve done all that work for nothing? You mean you aren’t going to make use of all that research?”

  “No. It was a mistake.”

  “Why don’t you leave it a few weeks and see how things are then?”

  “Why?”

  “You might feel differently about it.”

  “What an extraordinary thing to say. Why should I? Oh, you mean, time passing, healing wounds—that sort of thing? What an extraordinary idea. It’s always seemed to me an extraordinary idea. No, right from the beginning I’ve felt ill at ease with the whole business, not myself at all.”

  “Rather irrationally, I should have said.”

  Judith considered this, very seriously. She frowned while she thought it over. Then she said: “But if one cannot rely on what one feels, what can one rely on?”

  “On what one thinks, I should have expected you to say.”

  “Should you? Why? Really, you people are all very strange. I don’t understand you.” She turned off the electric fire, and her face closed up. She smiled, friendly and distant, and said: “I don’t really see any point
at all in discussing it.”

  Each Other

  I suppose your brother’s coming again?”

  “He might.”

  He kept his back bravely turned while he adjusted tie, collar, and jerked his jaw this way and that to check his shave. Then, with all pretexts used, he remained rigid, his hand on his tie knot, looking into the mirror past his left cheek at the body of his wife, which was disposed prettily on the bed, weight on its right elbow, its two white forearms engaged in the movements obligatory for filing one’s nails. He let his hand drop and demanded: “What do you mean, he might?” She did not answer, but held up a studied hand to inspect five pink arrows. She was a thin, very thin, dark girl of about eighteen. Her pose, her way of inspecting her nails, her pink-striped nightshirt which showed long, thin, white legs—all her magazine attitudes were an attempt to hide an anxiety as deep as his; for her breathing, like his, was loud and shallow.

  He was not taken in. The lonely fever in her black eyes, the muscles showing rodlike in the flesh of her upper arm, made him feel how much she wanted him to go; and he thought, sharp because of the sharpness of his need for her: There’s something unhealthy about her, yes…. The word caused him guilt. He accepted it, and allowed his mind, which was over-alert, trying to pin down the cause of his misery, to add: Yes, not clean, dirty. But this fresh criticism surprised him, and he remembered her obsessive care of her flesh, hair, nails, and the long hours spent in the bath. Yes, dirty, his rising aversion insisted.

  Armed by it, he was able to turn, slowly, to look at her direct, instead of through the cold glass. He was a solid, well set up, brushed, washed young man who had stood several inches shorter than she at the wedding a month ago, but with confidence in the manhood which had mastered her freakish adolescence. He now kept on her the pressure of a blue stare both appealing (of which he was not aware) and aggressive—which he meant as a warning. Meanwhile he controlled a revulsion which he knew would vanish if she merely lifted her arms towards him.

  “What do you mean, he might?” he said again.

  After some moments of not answering, she said, languid, turning her thin hand this way and that: “I said, he might.”

  This dialogue echoed, for both of them, not only from five minutes before; but from other mornings, when it had been as often as not unspoken. They were on the edge of disaster. But the young husband was late. He looked at his watch, a gesture which said, but unconvincingly, bravado merely: I go out to work while you lie there…. Then he about-turned, and went to the door, slowing on his way to it. Stopped. Said: “Well, in that case I shan’t be back to supper.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, languid. She now lay flat on her back, and waved both hands in front of her eyes to dry nail varnish which, however, was three days old.

  He said loudly: “Freda! I mean it. I’m not going to …” He looked both trapped and defiant; but intended to do everything, obviously, to maintain his self-respect, his masculinity, in the face of—but what? Her slow smile across at him was something (unlike everything else she had done since waking that morning) she was quite unaware of. She surely could not be aware of the sheer brutality of her slow, considering, contemptuous smile? For it had invitation in it; and it was this, the unconscious triumph there, that caused him to pale, to begin a stammering: “Fre-Fre-Fred-Freda …” but give up, and leave the room. Abruptly though quietly, considering the force of his horror.

  She lay still, listening to his footsteps go down, and the front door closing. Then, without hurrying, she lifted her long thin white legs that ended in ten small pink shields, over the edge of the bed, and stood on them by the window, to watch her husband’s well-brushed head jerking away along the pavement. This was a suburb of London, and he had to get to the City, where he was a clerk-with-prospects: and most of the other people down there were on their way to work. She watched him and them, until at the corner he turned, his face lengthened with anxiety. She indolently waved, without smiling. He stared back, as if at a memory of nightmare; so she shrugged and removed herself from the window, and did not see his frantically too late wave and smile.

  She now stood, frowning, in front of the long glass in the new wardrobe: a very tall girl, stooped by her height, all elbows and knees, and even more ridiculous because of the short nightshirt. She stripped this off over her head, taking assurance in a side-glance from full-swinging breasts and a rounded waist; then slipped on a white negligee that had frills all down it and around the neck, from which her head emerged, poised. She now looked much better, like a model, in fact. She brushed her short gleaming black hair, stared at length into the deep anxious eyes, and got back into bed.

  Soon she tensed, hearing the front door open, softly; and close, softly again. She listened, as the unseen person also listened and watched; for this was a two-roomed flatlet, converted in a semidetached house. The landlady lived in the flatlet below this one on the ground floor; and the young husband had taken to asking her, casually, every evening, or listening, casually, to easily given information, about the comings and goings in the house and the movements of his wife. But the steps came steadily up towards her, the door opened, very gently, and she looked up, her face bursting into flower as in came a very tall, lank, dark young man. He sat on the bed beside his sister, took her thin hand in his thin hand, kissed it, bit it lovingly, then bent to kiss her on the lips. Their mouths held while two pairs of deep black eyes held each other. Then she shut her eyes, took his lower lip between her teeth, and slid her tongue along it. He began to undress before she let him go; and she asked, without any of the pertness she used for her husband: “Are you in a hurry this morning?”

  “Got to get over to a job in Exeter Street.”

  An electrician, he was not tied to desk or office.

  He slid naked into bed beside his sister, murmuring: “Olive Oyl.”

  Her long body was pressed against his in a fervour of gratitude for the love name, for it had never received absolution from her husband as it did from this man; and she returned, in as loving a murmur: “Popeye.” Again the two pairs of eyes stared into each other at an inch or so’s distance. His, though deep in bony sockets like hers, were prominent there, the eyeballs rounded under thin, already crinkling, bruised-looking flesh. Hers, however, were delicately outlined by clear white skin, and he kissed the perfected copies of his own ugly eyes, and said, as she pressed towards him: “Now, now, Olive Oyl, don’t be in such a hurry, you’ll spoil it.”

  “No, we won’t.”

  “Wait, I tell you.”

  “All right then …”

  The two bodies, deeply breathing, remained still a long while. Her hand, on the small of his back, made a soft, circular pressing motion, bringing him inwards. He had his two hands on her hipbones, holding her still. But she succeeded, and they joined, and he said again: “Wait now. Lie still.” They lay absolutely still, eyes closed.

  After a while he asked suddenly: “Well, did he last night?”

  “Yes.”

  His teeth bared against her forehead and he said: “I suppose you made him.”

  “Why made him?”

  “You’re a pig.”

  “All right then, how about Alice?”

  “Oh her. Well, she screamed and said: ‘Stop. Stop.’”

  “Who’s a pig, then?”

  She wriggled circularly, and he held her hips still, tenderly murmuring: “No, no, no, no.”

  Stillness again. In the small bright bedroom, with the suburban sunlight outside, new green curtains blew in, flicking the too large, too new furniture, while the long white bodies remained still, mouth to mouth, eyes closed, united by deep soft breaths.

  But his breathing deepened; his nails dug into the bones of her hips, he slid his mouth free and said: “How about Charlie, then?”

  “He made me scream too,” she murmured, licking his throat, eyes closed. This time it was she who held his loins steady, saying: “No, no, no, you’ll spoil it.”

  They lay togeth
er, still. A long silence, a long quiet. Then the fluttering curtains roused her, her foot tensed, and she rubbed it delicately up and down his leg. He said, angry: “Why did you spoil it then? It was just beginning.”

  “It’s much better afterwards if it’s really difficult.” She slid and pressed her internal muscles to make it more difficult, grinning at him in challenge, and he put his hands around her throat in a half-mocking, half-serious pressure to stop her, simultaneously moving in and out of her with exactly the same emulous, taunting but solicitous need she was showing—to see how far they both could go. In a moment they were pulling each other’s hair, biting, sinking between thin bones, and then, just before the explosion, they pulled apart at the same moment, and lay separate, trembling.

  “We only just made it,” he said, fond, uxorious, stroking her hair.

  “Yes. Careful now, Fred.”

  They slid together again.

  “Now it will be just perfect,” she said, content, mouth against his throat.

  The two bodies, quivering with strain, lay together, jerking involuntarily from time to time. But slowly they quietened. Their breathing, jagged at first, smoothed. They breathed together. They had become one person, abandoned against and in each other, silent and gone.

  A long time, a long time, a long …

  A car went past below in the usually silent street, very loud, and the young man opened his eyes and looked into the relaxed gentle face of his sister.

  “Freda.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “Yes, I’ve got to go, it must be nearly dinnertime.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “No, or we’ll get excited again, well spoil everything.”

  They separated gently, but the movements both used, the two hands gentle on each other’s hips, easing their bodies apart, were more like a fitting together. Separate, they lay still, smiling at each other, touching each other’s face with fingertips, licking each other’s eyelids with small cat licks.

  “It gets better and better.”

  “Yes.”