Stories

by Doris Lessing

  “You’re an old soldier, aren’t you?” said the man. “A real tough one, a real old tramp.”

  It is possible that the cat even thought that he might be finding another human friend and a home.

  But it was not so. The haul of wild cats that week numbered hundreds, and while if Tibby had been younger a home might have been found for him, since he was amiable, and wished to be liked by the human race, he was really too old, and smelly and battered. So they gave him an injection and, as we say, “put him to sleep.”

  Side Benefits of an

  Honourable Profession

  Or rather, perhaps, a condition of the mud which nurtures? Flowers, of course—but that isn’t the point. No, definitely not an effluent, a by-product. Accurate as well as charitable to see it all as a kind of compost, the rich mad muck which feeds those disciplined performances, exactly the same night after night, that we see and marvel at and which might even cause us to exclaim—if we haven’t entirely lost that naivety which I for one maintain the theatre needs as dreams need sleep, and could not exist without for one moment: How can he/she bear to be someone else so entirely and devotedly every blessed night and two afternoons a week for hours at a stretch! Even with intervals for orange juice or Scotch. Possibly for months at a time. If the play finds favour, as they say.

  Those two, for instance: household names, or at least in those households (one per cent of the population) which prefer to give room to these rather than to the more vigorous performers, football players, or horses or dogs—those two, having rehearsed for a month a play which called for a slow progress towards a bed, made of the bed itself a stage for—not at all for the guilt-ridden and eventually murderous lusts which the play incorporated, but for innocence.

  It was an innocence so immaculate that words like “mud” and “compost” perhaps need looking at again. If, that is, we do not want to examine innocence.

  It so happened—and no chance either, I feel—that both he (well call him John) and she (Mary will do) were involved during the period of rehearsal with some pretty savage moments in their private lives. He was in trouble with his marriage; and she, having been divorced, had reached that point with a possible new husband when she must decide whether to marry him or not. On the whole she felt not. At any rate, it wasn’t at all that either could look forward, after a day of rehearsing passions not their own, to loving tranquillity. Far from it, and on the contrary, both returned to scenes, reproaches and torments not very different—and they even said so, with that appropriate good trouper’s laugh used by actors to dismiss their private lives when engaged on their real business—from those they were developing during rehearsals. Well, one night Mary found herself, when everybody had left the darkened theatre, backstage and by the great bed which was such a feature of the play. It was made up, but for economy’s sake not more than was essential. She sat by the bed on the little stool which was also part of the set and found herself shedding a tear, though for what she could not have said (her words when describing the experience). Through blurred vision she saw a figure approaching from the dressingrooms: no ghost or burglar, but the handsome John, whose feet, or at least, some impulse, had brought him here, also in the belief that the building was deserted. No need, she said, for words. He sat on the companion stool on the other side of the bed. He offered her a cigarette. Between them stretched the crumpled sheet on which they had spent at least four hours that day of steady, grindingly repetitive rehearsal locked in each other’s arms, apparently in the extremes of passion. They left half an hour later, without even the casual theatre kiss that by custom they would have offered each other on parting. Next evening, and without arranging it, they met again. For a week these two rolled, morning and afternoon and some evenings, in torments of simulated lust and its associated emotions, and at night met, chaste and tender, for a half hour before returning to their tumultuous private lives. They were too shy, as she explained, to touch each other. As in a first love, the lighting of a cigarette, the accidental meeting of a hand, were exquisitely painful—indeed, more than enough. That nightly half hour was filled with restoring breaths of air from lost horizons. Finally their affaire (so she always pronounced it) culminated in a kiss so delicate, so exquisite, that its poetry was enough to decide her not to marry her possible husband, and him to leave his wife. No, that kiss was not on the first night, but after the dress rehearsal. The first night being successfully accomplished in the usual ritual crescendo of shared tension, flowers, champagne, congratulations and the theatre emptying backstage into darkness as it had an hour ago in front, the two found themselves on their way out, by the bed, a slight detour and a temporary shedding of their first-night visitors being necessary. Looking at the pillow case, which should have been put on fresh for the just-completed performance, she noted a smear of lipstick—hers, from the dress rehearsal. “Really,” she said, irritably, “I do think they might have remembered to put on a clean pillow case for the first night.” “I quite agree,” he said, cool, and with precisely the same degree of professional irritation at incompetence, “that lipstick must have been visible from half-way up the stalls.” With which they kissed each other, comradely and brisk, as is customary, said goodnight, and parted, she to reaffirm to her lover that no, she would not marry him, and he to disagree with his wife, who was saying that really, as responsible and adult people, they should try again.

  Or take that well-known playwright, now dead, whose dissatisfaction with his wives was not so much proclaimed—they were all damned fine women, he told the newspapers—as demonstrated by the fact that he dismissed them one after another, usually about four years after marrying them. He was on his sixth wife when she met, by chance, wives five and four, and confessed that things were not as they ought to be. Remarks were made that caused them to contact previous wives. Six women, five ex-wives and the present incumbent, met one afternoon—not, they said, in any spirit of anger, but from a scientific desire for psychological clarity. In each of this man’s plays (we will call him John) appeared a woman, sometimes in a leading part, sometimes not, who was wise, witty, warm, tender, beautiful and all-forgiving, the last quality being the most valuable, in life if not theatrically, as each of these women had discovered. They were all actresses and all had played this woman, presented under different names, in different clothes and in different epochs. The first wife had played her in his first-performed play as a suburban school-teacher; the current wife had played her, evolved into full flower, four years ago in the shape of an Italian princess. They all had had the same experience, an uneasiness, which developed even during those first rapturous days of an at-last-discovered perfect love, that made them feel—and all of them said they had felt it—as if they were not themselves, as if, in life, they were being forced into a role, and even, as one of them put it, as if there were always a third person present—a ghost. The ghost, of course, of the stage woman. And each one had experienced that moment when, betrayed, wounded, knifed to the heart by reality, their John had shouted (and with such conviction of betrayal that there was nothing at all to be said): “Why don’t you behave like …? You aren’t like her at all!”—using the name for whichever incarnation of his “she” that she had in fact played. And this was the moment when, giving her a look of disgusted dismissal, he had gone off into his study to begin the new play which would incorporate, in minor or major part, the new version of this woman who must continually be recreated in art since she did not exist in life. Which play, when it was put on, would infallibly lead to her—the present wife’s—divorce. Because, although she did not know it, was perhaps still a half-tried girl waiting for her big chance, the new wife was already blue-printed, summoned. And from that moment, about a week after the rehearsals started, when she approached the great man shyly, her beautiful eyes shining with the effort it was costing her, and said: “I must say this, I really must, forgive me, but thank you for letting me play this beautiful part in your beautiful play”—nothing was more certain tha
n that he would marry her, and then divorce her the moment he finally understood that she was, after all, only Mary, who might sulk, complain, or cry just like any woman.

  Or take the case of Mary X—this time a female writer. It was when she was well on her career that her husband pointed out, and with rancour, that in almost everything she wrote occurred the same figure, male, though that was not the point, because he was for all practical purposes sexless, being a slight wry clown or harlequin figure, on whose face was printed the same grimace whatever he was actually doing, whether playing the flute, dancing, or being—apparently—a normal person, a smile that could not be distinguished from the contractions of the muscles which indicate pain or sorrow. Once having understood the truth of her husband’s accusation, she searched through every word she had ever written. Sure enough, there he was, right from the beginning, even in those apprentice pieces written decades before and now filed away. The point was, who was he? Where did he come from? Her father? No. Her brothers? No. Her husband? Certainly not, nothing of the Petrouchka about him, and besides, the demon lover (her husband’s name for him) had predated the husband by years. Her sons? She sincerely hoped not. Her mother, then?—since such figures from the underworld are no respecters of sex. No. Who? Who, possibly? No one. There was nobody she could think of, no matter how far back she went in her childhood, who could possibly have stood in for or inspired this ambiguously enticing wraith. But she did know, in the present, one, two, perhaps three of him. Pursuing this discovery, she made the new one that while until the performance of her first play, twelve years ago now, she had not met once, not once, any person, male or female, who incarnated the sad clown, since then and starting with the actor who had played the part (nicknamed Pierrot by the company even before her play was known by them) briefly, a friend before he had faded, as befitted his character, into a wry offstage existence on the fringes of her life, she had known several; she was never without him. The fact was, then, that the making flesh and blood of her—but her what? fantasy? a figure from her nightdreams?—on stage had had the power to bring him finally towards her? Well if so, it is not a thought a sensible person could enjoy. Particularly not a writer. She contents herself, when, meeting a man who turns that unmistakable face towards her, with saying to herself, never to her husband, who so strangely and obdurately resents this rival who could never be one, Here he is again, and with the secret contraction of the heart, the laugh that is half a shudder, which are the tributes we pay to the dark of our natures.

  But to return to the light, the easily understood, with a man whom I once knew who claimed that his tragedy was that, while loving women, he was unable. He was always in our company, and taking us out, and being seen in public with us, but, when it came to the point—there it was, he said. Very well then. He was shooting a big film. During the course of this, it was necessary, he said, to make a screen test of the leading actor for another film, also to be shot by him, in which he, the actor, might again play the leading role. Reasonable enough—it was a very different film in which a handsome acholic eighteenth-century rake would endeavour, but fail, to rape a beautiful village girl in circumstances which would force her to become his mistress. In the film which was currently being shot, he was playing a lusty workingclass youth before whom women fell like cut grass. The scene was set for the test. In came the actor, transmogrified out of overalls and a cloth cap into aristocratic elegancies. It was about ten in the morning. The scene to be shot was the moment of the gentleman’s failure with the lady—her lack of refinement and probably unwashed condition were responsible, the script suggested. Usually half a morning would have done for such a test. But for the whole of that day, hour after hour, the studio with its armies of hands, lighting experts, camera crews, makeup women, watched the mad director with the marvellous politeness of their most necessary discipline, while he watched the handsome hero attempt and fail, attempt and fail, and attempt and fail and fail, again and again, to have the beautiful and scornful girl. The great expanse of the harshly lit studio, the small area of especially focussed lights, the fourposter bed, and at least three hundred people standing about, if they were not actually assisting, forced to watch while the lusty young man who for weeks and weeks had been light-heartedly romping his way through at least a dozen women in one film, was reduced to public impotence for the benefit of another. Again and again. And again.

  When it was all over, but not until five minutes before the trade union rules made it inevitable that the camera crews must go home to tea and their wives, the mad director said, addressing the by-now-exhausted young man: “Well, that’ll do I think. But actually, love, I do think that X [another actor] could probably be better in this particular role. You are too earthy, darling, let’s face it. He’s more subtle.”

  Or the famous screen actress, American, well known for her fastidiousness about what she plays. Much dreaded is that moment when, surrounded by lawyers, agents, a husband and protectors of all kinds, she hands back a script with: “As it stands, it really is not for me—if we may suggest some changes …”

  What, then, is for her? She has played, for some decades now, women in every kind of desperate situation, ex-jailbirds, betrayed lovers, doomed invalids, sorrowing mothers. But what can be the common denominator which causes her to say: “Yes, this is for me”? I once knew a man who worked, on a very humble level, in films she was starring in. What was she like? I wanted to know. It was offered that she was businesslike, adamant in her choices of co-stars, would not be photographed without the exact density of a piece of gauze being specified by lawyers, in triplicate, for certain revealing shots; that she could never be shot in such a way that her nose, not her best point, could emphasise itself … yes, but what is she like? “Good God!” said he, “you must have seen her in a hundred films.”

  She lives, has lived, a life of improbable probity, married to the same man, with never a breath of scandal; remains a lady who insists on maintaining what she describes as the high standards of Hollywood.

  Not long ago, I heard, she turned down a part which would have involved her battering to death her husband (in such a way that it would look as if someone else had done it) so that she could benefit from his will. That was, she claimed, nothing but unmotivated nastymindedness. Soon afterwards she was pleased to play a part where she battered to death—but openly, as it were, nobly—a lawyer lover who had tricked her out of a fortune.

  Fairly straightforward really, daylight stuff still, as is this …

  A certain English gentleman, a sort of semi-lord, being a middle son (he refers to himself with a rather tetchy refusal to conform to current prejudices as well-connected), lives in a large country house but alone, as his wife died shortly after their marriage. Alone, that is, except for his manservant. Failing to remarry, the usual rumours gathered about him and his way of life, dark tastes of all kinds were hinted at, and the women who had not succeeded in marrying him allowed it to be understood that it was their discovery of his secret which had cooled their pursuit.

  He had been a widower for more than a decade when he was taken to what he called “a show.” He did not care for the theatre at all. There he saw Mary Griffiths, a woman who had been married twice but who had announced to everyone and even to the Press that she did not intend to remarry, she chose freedom.

  She was an attractive blond woman, her stage personality formed in the Fifties to the formula of that time—casual, loudmouthed, frank—and, as she insisted, as common as dirt. She took pains to conceal her middleclass origin—a handicap when she first started to act. She took care to play parts suited to this formula—mostly sad dishevelled girls doomed to disharmony. “A lost ugly duckling with moments of swan,” as one critic put it. A jolie laide, said another, thus enabling Mary to describe herself as more laid than jolly, and to reap double benefit, when people protested the joke was not new, by claiming: “Well, I’ve never had an education—I’ve never pretended I did—have I, then?”

  What th
e gentleman saw in her struck his friends into incredulity, and her into laughter, and then thought. She was the reincarnation, he said, of his grandmother, the best horsewoman in the county, the bravest woman he had ever known—and, but of course, a great lady.

  Mary wondered for a while whether to take riding lessons, in case some play or film producer saw in her what her still unknown admirer saw, but decided against it. They were introduced, and he began to court her—the only word for it. She was living at the time with a fashionable dress designer, and it was hard to say which of the two, Mary or her lover (“boyfriend”), got more excitement from the ritual. John sent her flowers, formally charming notes, left visiting cards, took her to tea, drove her into the country in his Bentley—or rather, sat with her in the back seat while the manservant drove—took her to dinner. From each excursion Mary returned to mourn with her dress designer the sad lack of romance in modern life, and more than once they lay wrapped tearfully in each other’s arms, because of the poetry their relationship lacked and must now always lack (there being a time and a place for everything) because for them flowers, formal notes, drives and long intimate dinners were simply impossible, out of key. Their fate had been to meet before a fitting-room mirror, to quarrel half an hour later, and to start living together a week after. Surely, they both wondered, it was not possible that gentleman John could be working up to a proposal of marriage? As Mary put it: “I know he’s nuts, but he’s not completely gone—me, his wife, he must be joking.”

  About six months went by, of a patient courtship conducted to rules invisible to Mary, but which she respected. Why not? As she said, she’d have time to fit in a dozen of such relationships concurrently, apart from acting in one play and rehearsing for another and keeping her boyfriend happy. What did those people do with themselves in those days, she asked, putting that time at about a hundred years back, while waiting for the moment of truth? Then, at last, John told her that he had decided she was the woman for him.