Stories

by Doris Lessing

  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 in a suffocating shadow emphasised 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 machinelike 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 was 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 commonsense. “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 recognise from their eyes in a crowd, could hide themselves. Not everyone recognised 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 quick, 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, cloud, 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 lea
ve 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 order that you may use us, and consume us; and with our willing connivance; but it doesn’t do to despise …

  He said, not surprising her that he did, since their minds so often moved together: “You are more split than I am, do you know that?”

  She thought: If I were not split, if one-half (if that is the division) were not able to move in your world, even if only for short periods, then I would not be sitting here, you would not want me.

  He said: “I wasn’t criticising. Not at all. Because you have the contact. What more do you want?”

  “Contact,” she said, looking at the cold word.

  “Yes. Well, it’s everything.”

  “How can you sit there, insisting on the things you insist on, and say it’s everything?”

  “If that’s what you are, then be it.”

  “Just one thing or the other?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? It’s true that what I think contradicts what I feel, but…”

  “But?”

  “All right, it’s all meaningless, with my mind I know it, it’s an accident, it’s a freak, but all the same, everything gives me pleasure all the time. Why should it be a contradiction, why should it?”

  “You don’t see it as a contradiction?”

  “No.”

  “You’re living on the fat of your ancestors, the fat of their belief, that’s all.”

  “Possibly, but why should I care?”

  “A fly buzzing in the sun,” he said. His smile was first wry and tender, then full of critical dislike. The criticism, the coldness of it, hurt her, and she felt tears rise. So today she could not stay long, because tears were not allowed, they were part of the other argument, or fight, a personal one, played out (or fought out), finished.

  She was blinking her eyes dry, without touching them, so that he would not see she wanted to cry, when he said: “Suppose that I am the future?”

  A long silence, and she thought: Possibly, possibly.

  “It seems to me that I am. Suppose the world fills more and more with people like me, then—”

  “The little flies will have to buzz louder.”

  He laughed, short but genuine. She thought, I don’t care what you say, that laugh is stronger than anything. She sat in silence for the thousandth time, willing it to be stronger, feeling herself to be a centre of life, or warmth, with which she would fill this room.

  He sat, smiling, but in an inert, heavy way, his limbs seeming, even from where she sat across the room, cold and confused. She went to him, squatted on her knees by his chair, lifted his hand off the black leather arm-piece, and felt it heavy with cold. It gave her hand a squeeze more polite than warm, and she gripped it firmly, willing life to move down her arm through her hand into his. Closing her eyes, she now made herself remember, with her flesh, what she had discarded (almost contemptuous) on the pavement—the pleasure from the touch of faded books, pleasure from the sight of ranked fruit and vegetables. Discoloured print, shut between limp damp cotton, small voices to be bought for sixpence or ninepence, became a pulse of muttering sound, a pulse of vitality, like the beating colours of oranges, lemons and cabbages, gold and green, a dazzle, a vibration in the eyes—she held her breath, willed, and made life move down into his hand. It lay warmer and more companionable in hers. After a while he opened his eyes and smiled at her; sadness came into the smile, then a grimness, and she kissed his cheek and went back to her place on the rough blanket. “Flies,” she said.

  He was not looking at her. She thought: Why do I do it? These girls who come through here for a night, or two nights, because he needs their generous naivety, give him no less. I, or one of them, it makes no difference. “I’d like a drink,” she said.

  He hesitated, hating her drinking at all, but he poured her one, while she said silently (feeling adrift, without resources, and cold through every particle of herself): All right, but in the days when our two bodies together created warmth (flies, if you like, but I don’t feel it), I wouldn’t have asked for a drink. She was thinking: And suppose it is yours that is the intoxication and not mine? when he remarked: “Sometimes when I’ve been alone here a couple of days I wonder if I’m not tipsy on sheer …” He laughed, in an intellectual pleasure at an order of ideas she was choosing not to see.

  “The delight of nihilism?”

  “Which of course you don’t feel, ever!”

  She saw that this new aggressiveness, this thrust of power and criticism (he was now moving about the room, full of energy(was in fact her gift to him; and she said, suddenly bitter: “Flies don’t feel, they buzz.”

  The bitterness, being the note of the exchange they could not allow themselves, made her finish her few drops of liquor, making a new warmth in her stomach where she had needed a spark of warmth.

  He said: “For all that, it seems to me I’m nearer the truth than you are.”

  The word “truth” did not explode into meaning: it sounded hard and self-defined, like a stone; she let it lie between them, setting against it the pulse that throbbed in the soft place by the ankle bone—her feet being stretched in front of her, so she could see them.

  He said: “It seems to me that the disconnected like me must see more clearly than you people. Does that sound ridiculous to you? I’ve thought about it a great deal, and it seems to me you are satisfied with too little.”

  She thought: I wish he would come over here, sit by me on this blanket, and put his arm around me—that’s all. That’s all and that’s all. She was very tired. Of course I’m tired—it’s all the buzzing I have to do….

  Without warning, without even trying, she slipped into being him, his body, his mind. She looked at herself and thought: This little bundle of flesh, this creature who will respond and warm, lay its head on my shoulder, feel happiness—how unreal, how vulgar, and how meaningless!

  She shook herself away from him, up and away from the settee. She went to the window.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Enjoying your view.”

  The sky was clear, it was evening, and far below in the streets the lights had come on, making small yellow pools and gleams on pavements where the tiny movement of people seemed exciting and full of promise. Now he got himself out of his machinelike chair and came to stand by her. He did not touch her; but he would not have come at all if she had not been there. He supported himself with one big hand on the sill and looked out. She felt him take in a deep breath. She stood silent, feeling the life ebbing and coiling along the pavements and hoping he felt it. He let out his breath. She did not look at him. He took it in again. The hand trembled, then tensed, then set solid, a big, firmly made hand, with slightly freckled knuckles—its steadiness comforted her. It would be all right. Still without looking at his face, she kissed his cheek and turned away. He went back to his chair, she resumed her place on the blanket. The room was filling with dusk, the sky was greying, enormous, distant.

  “You should get curtains, at least.”

  “I should be tempted to keep them drawn all the time.”

  “Why not, then, why not?” she insisted, feeling her eyes wet again. “All right, I won’t cry,” she said reasonably.

  “Why not? If you feel like crying.”

  She no longer wept. But once, and not so long ago, she had wept herself almost to pieces over him, her, their closeness which nevertheless the cold third, like a cruel king, refused to sanction. She noted that the pulse moving in her ankle had the desperate look of something fighting death; her foot in the dusk was a long way off; she felt divided, not in possession of herself. But she remained where she was, containing her fragmentation. And he held out his fist, steady, into the glimmer of grey light from the sky, watching it exactly as she looked at her own pulse, the stranger.
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br />   “For God’s sake turn the light on,” she said, giving in. He put out his hand, pressed down the switch; a harsh saving light filled the room.

  He smiled. But he looked white again, and his forehead gleamed wet. Her heart ached for him, and for herself, who would now get up deliberately and go away from him. The ache was the hurt of exile, and she was choosing it. She sat smiling, chafing her two ankles with her hands, feeling the warmth of her breathing flesh. Their smiles met and exchanged, and now she said: “Right, it’s time to go.”

  She kissed him again, he kissed her, and she went out, saying: “I’ll ring you.”

  Always, when she left his door shut behind her, the black door which was exactly the same as all the others in the building except for the number, she felt in every particle of herself how loneliness hit him when she (or anybody) left.

  The street she went out into was unfamiliar to her, she felt she did not know it. The hazy purple sky that encloses London at night was savage, bitter, and the impulse behind its shifting lights was a form of pain. The roughness of the pavement, which she knew to be warm, struck cold through the soles of her sandals, as if the shadows were black ice. The people passing were hostile, stupid animals from whom she wished to hide herself. But worse than this, there was a flat, black-and-white two-dimensional jagged look to things, and (it was this that made it terrifying) the scene she walked through was a projection of her own mind; there was no life in it that belonged there save what she could breathe into it. And she herself was dead and empty, a cardboard figure in a flat painted set of streets.