Stories

by Doris Lessing

  “You are the woman for him?” enquired her dress designer.

  “That’s what he said—I swear it.”

  Mary was then invited, and for the first time, to weekend at his house. Her lover made her some dinner dresses, romantic rather than frank, and the two of them considered her day clothes, since both felt strongly that she should be properly dressed for the occasion. But as at the time she was wearing very short skirts, if she wore skirts at all, and she was not prepared completely to lose her character, a trouser suit was concocted that was chiefly mink, which, worn with mink boots, made her look like a moon Eskimo.

  Mary discovered that for the weekend there would be three people in the house: herself, gentleman John, and the manservant. She found the house charming. It fitted her like a glove, she insisted to disbelieving friends. In the afternoon she was taken for a drive, the manservant driving, drank sherry in the library before dinner, the manservant acting as butler, and ate a long and formal dinner, the manservant handing the dishes he had previously chosen. Then, intrigued to the point of hysteria, as she afterwards said, Mary waited for what surely must be a dishonourable proposal.

  At eleven-fifty-five John leaned his handsome person towards her and said: “My dear, you must understand what my feelings towards you are, but before I could ask any woman to share my life, there is something I must do. If you like, you can call it a test.”

  Mary was willing for the test.

  John then nodded at the servant, who went out of the room and came back a moment later wheeling a tall black coffin, upright. It had wheels at the feet-end, for manoeuvreability. This coffin was steered, upright, in front of a tall mirror. The servant, in his impeccable black clothes, stood as it were to attention, at one side of it. John, with a smiling nod of encouragement at Mary, went to the coffin, and stood inside it, his hands crossed on his breast, gazing into the mirror. Inside the black coffin, black-clothed John; beside it, the black-clothed servant.

  Mary said afterwards that she was bothered because no gesture or pose that occurred to her seemed to be appropriate. So she rubbed out her cigarette, folded her hands in her lap, and remained silent, smiling. At the end of a long five minutes, her John stepped down from the coffin and nodded at the servant, who wheeled it away. He leaned intimately towards her.

  “Brandy?” he enquired.

  “Just a little, please.”

  Nothing more was said about the coffin. Soon after, he escorted her to her room. There, but outside it, he kissed her. “And not bad either,” she said, describing the moment. “Not—bad—at all!” He said that she had passed every test, and with her permission he would like to ask her to marry him. She said she would think it over, and he kissed her hand and hoped that she would sleep well.

  Still thinking it over, she returned next day to London, driven by the manservant, who offered not one word about the midnight ceremony. She had decided that she would be damned if she would ask him questions, but she cracked, and so found that the ceremony of the coffin took place every night of her John’s life at midnight. “It’s not every woman,” said the servant, “who goes along with it. Some I’ve seen come and go who didn’t take it as you did, madam.”

  Mary consulted with her lover, who designed her a bridal gown, inspired, he said, by a fifteenth-century French court dress—too way out for current fashions, but he had been dying to make use of the ideas it provoked.

  The dress ready, Mary wrote to John saying that he could have his answer, but he must come around to the dressingroom after the performance one night. If she could forgive him, he replied, he would not actually watch the performance again; one show a year was really enough for him, though it went without saying, he hoped, that he respected her profession.

  When he arrived at the dressingroom door, he was made to wait. At last the dresser admitted him. He did not immediately know where to look—Mary was not there, it seemed, and since he had never been in an actress’s dressingroom before, or, for that matter, backstage at all, the little room with its efficient mirrors, the cold strong working light, the surgical-looking appliances on the dressing-table, the clinical jars and bottles, were hostile to him. There stood the dresser, a small devoted grey figure, hands folded, her face saying nothing, in front of something that looked like—yes, she stood aside and there it was, a long black coffin, and in it, stretched out, dressed in the white wedding gown, eyes closed, hands folded around flowers, flowers all around her, lay his love Mary, dressed for a wedding ceremony, but most adamantly dead.

  “As dead as blasted Ophelia,” as she said, when describing the scene to her friends and her lover in their favourite restaurant later that night.

  He stared, stiffened, and went white—all this from the dresser, because as Mary said, she was damned if she was going to open her eyes and spoil the performance. He then bowed, and went silently out, taking his dismissal like a gentleman.

  The dress became a starry item in the designer’s next collection, but by then he and Mary were no longer together. Discussing it in the friendly matter-of-fact way imposed on them by their style, or mode, they agreed there was something quite unassimilable about that wedding dress. Either she would put the bloody thing on and go to a registry office and be done with it, or they should call the thing off, with no hard feelings.

  The dress then, prêt à porter, ready-to-wear, boutiqued, internationalised, led a thousand brides to the altar and the registrar’s table.

  Still quite straightforward, or at least, understandable. But now enters the dark—or, at least, the tale turns slightly to the moonlit side.

  Mary had the dress hanging up in her cupboard for some months. She could not wear it, it was not her style, but she did not want, for some reason, to part with it. At last she wore it for a fancy-dress party, and became for one night a fifteenth-century court lady.

  At the party were stage and film directors, as well as the cooks, dress designers, hair-dressers and pop stars who were the lions of the current fashionable scene. A director who had seen Mary a dozen times in her usual kind of role on stage or on television saw her now in a new light. A man with a fine nose for what was next, he wanted to make a large full-blooded film of a nineteenth-century novel whose heroine was a headstrong aristocratic daughter in love with a revolutionary plebeian. He was dubious about Mary’s voice, but it turned out her own voice did very well—he was the first person to have heard it for years. She got the part. She had to learn to ride. The film was shot in Somerset, where gentleman John had his country house.

  For weeks she was riding across fields and woods where his grandmother, whose incarnation he had said she was, had won the admiration of a county. But gentleman John had gone abroad with his broken heart, taking the coffin and the manservant with him. Mary did not enquire, for to tell the truth, she hardly thought of him. As she said in a television interview, when she was emotionally involved in a part, she had no time for anything else. As for him, since he hates films as much as he hates the theatre, he will probably never see this film at all.

  But she was observed, while taking a fence, by a local country squire. She married him, briefly—but as she said when it was all over, for long enough. She changed her style, on her way to becoming what every leading actress is doomed to become, a grande dame of the British theatre.

  Which reminds me of the grande dame who was acting in what she critically described as a kitchen sink play—there were few of the other kind available at that time. Throughout the rehearsals she complained of the disgusting immorality of the words she was forced to speak. At lunchtimes in the pub, at the top of a voice trained to carry, she described her views about current morality. At the top of the same voice she told the following story. She was on tour somewhere in the North. To her dressingroom came a man she did feel she had known. This feeling was so strong that she could not bring herself to say she had no idea who he was, and she agreed to go to dinner with him. Dinner over, she was still in the dark, although she hadn’t been able
to enjoy a mouthful for racking her brains for some clue. She at last confessed her predicament. He was rather put out, she said.

  She didn’t remember the restaurant, at least?

  Well, there was something about it….

  “You don’t remember that we came here every night for that marvellous week before I robbed you of your ever-so-precious virginity, darling?”

  “They must have redecorated it! Besides, that must have been 1935—I haven’t been here since—I think. And besides, you must know that was before I became a Roman Catholic….”

  Which reminds me of that actress who, playing a nun in a stormily religious play, used to take the habit home with her—with the connivance of the dresser, who understood her feelings. The play, she explained, lacked a true Christian insight. She wore the habit for ironing, washing-up, rinsing out her underclothes—tasks which she called “my little hair shirts.”

  A Year in Regent’s Park

  Last year was out of ordinary from the start—just like every other year. What start, January? But January is a mid-month, in the middle of cold, snow, dark. Above all, dark. In January nothing starts but the new calendar, which says that the down-swing of our part of the earth towards the long light of summer has already begun, is already stimulating the plants, changing their responses. I would make the beginning back in autumn, when I “found myself possessor”—I put it like that because someone else is now in possession—of a wild, very long, narrow garden, between mellow brick walls. There was an old pear tree in the middle, and at its end a small wood of recently sprung trees, sycamores, an elder, an ash. This treasure of space was twenty minutes’ strolling time from Marble Arch, on a canal. The garden had to be prepared for planting. By luck I found a boy up from the country to try his fortune in London, who hated all work in the world but digging. He chose to live in half a room, which he curtained with blankets, carpeted with newspapers, then matting, and wallpapered with his poems and pictures. He was, of course, in the old romantic tradition of the adventurous young, challenging a big city, but he saw himself and the world as newly hatched, let’s say a year before, when he became twenty and discovered that he was free and probably a hippie. He lived on baked beans and friendship and, when he needed money, dug people’s gardens. Together we stripped off the top layer of this potential garden, which was all builder’s rubble, cans, bottles, broken glass. Under this was London clay. It is a substance you hear enough about; indeed, London’s history seems made of it. But when you actually come on tons of the stuff, yards deep, heavy, wet, impervious, without a worm or a root in it, it is so airless and unused, you wonder how London ever came to be all gardens and woodland. I could not believe my gardening book, which said that clay is perfect potential soil for plants. I, friends, and the boy from the country, made shapes of the stuff, and thought it was a pity none of us was a sculptor—but that wasn’t going to turn the clay into working earth. At last, we marked out flowerbeds, and turned over the clay in large clods, the weeds and grass still on them. The place looked like a ploughed field before the cultivators move in. But even before the first frosts, the soil between the flinty-sided miniature boulders was showing the beginning of a marriage between rotting grass and clay fragments. It had rained. It was raining. As London does, it rained. Going out to inspect the clods, each so heavy I could only pick one up at a time, I found they had softened their harsh contours somewhat, but I couldn’t break them by flinging them down or bashing them with a spade. They looked eternal. Steps led up from the under-earth—the flat was a basement flat—and standing at eye-level to the garden, it all looked like a First World War film: trenches full of water, wet mats of the year’s leaf, enormous clods, rotting weeds, bare trunks and dripping branches. All, everything, wet, bare, raw.

  That was December. Around Christmas, after several heavy frosts, I went up to see how things went on, kicked one of the clods—and it crumbled. The boy from the country who, not being a farming boy, but a country-town boy, and who therefore had not believed the book either, saying the garden needed a bulldozer, came on my telephone call, and about an hour of the lightest work with a hoe transformed the heaving scene into neat areas of tilth mixed with dead grass. Not really dead, of course: but ready to come to fife with the spring. But now we had faith in the book, and we turned the roots upwards to be killed by the frost. This happened. Each piece of stalk or root filled with wet, and then swelled as it froze, and burst like water mains in severe cold. Long before spring the earth lay broken and tamed, all the really hard work done not by the spade, or the hoe, or even the worms, but by the frost. The thing is, I knew Africa, or a part of it, and there you can never forget the power of sun, wind, rain. But in gentler England you do forget, as if the north-slanting sun must have less power than a sun overhead, as if nature itself is less drastic in her workings. You can forget it, that is, until you see what a handful of weeks of weather can do to smash a seventy-by-twenty-foot bit of wilderness into conformity.

  It rained in January, and in February it did not stop. If I set one foot off the top of the steps that came up from the flat, I sank in clay to my ankle. The light was strained through cold cloud, but it was strong enough to drag the snowdrops up into it. I walked in Regent’s Park along paths framed with black glistening twigs which were swelling, ready to burst: the shape of spring, next year’s promise, is exposed from the moment the leaves fall. The park was all grey water, sodden grass, black trees, and the waterfowl had to contend for crumbs and crusts with the gulls that had come inland from a stormy sea. In March it rained, and was dull. Usually by March more than snowdrops and crocuses are showing from snow or mud; and already the paths are loaded with people staking claims in the spring. But it was a bad month. My new garden was calling forth derisory remarks from friends who were not gardeners and who did not know what a month’s warmth can do for water-filled trenches, bare walls, sodden earth. April wasn’t doing anything like what the poet meant when he said, “Oh, to be in England”—certainly he would have returned at once to his beloved Italy. April was not the beginning of spring, but the continuation of winter. It was wet, wet, wet, and cold, and it all went on the same, day after day. And in the park, where I walked daily, only the lengthening evenings talked of spring, for in spite of crocuses everywhere, the buds seemed frozen on the bushes and trees. It would never end. I don’t know how they bear it in northern countries, like Sweden or Russia. It is like being shut inside a caul of ice, when the winter lengthens itself so.

  And it was so wet. If you took one step off the paths you squelched. No air, you knew, could possibly remain in that sponge. There was so much water everywhere, tons of it hanging in the air over our heads, tons falling every day, lakes underfoot.

  Suddenly there were some days of summer. No, not spring. Last year was without spring. In no other country that I know is it possible for things to change so fast. And when one state holds, then the one just past seems impossible. In the garden, from which baths of steam flew up to join the by-now-summer-like clouds, bluebells, hyacinths, crocuses and narcissus had sprung up, and if you turned the earth, the worms were energetically at work. Weeks of growth were being concentrated into each day; nature did overtime to catch up; and if things had gone on like that, we would have been precipitated straight into full summer, with fruit blossoms and spring flowers flying past as in a speeded-up film, but no, suddenly we were in a cold drought. And it went on for weeks. A cold sunless drought, a dry dull cold, with sometimes a cold withdrawn sun. In the garden the water sank fast in the newly turned, loose earth, and you could walk easily over the clay. The pear tree hung on the edge of blossom, but did not flower. The trees at the bottom of the garden had a look of green about them, but it was like the smear of moss on soil soaked and soaked again. When I turned a spade of earth, the worms were sluggish. The birds, dodging plentiful cats, snapped off each new blade of grass as it appeared, and slashed the crocuses with their beaks. In the park, the black boughs had frills of leaf on them, but walk
ing along the shores you could see the ducks and the geese sitting on their eggs on leafless islands. The waters were still tenanted by adult birds, who converged towards their providers on the lakes’ edges and climbed out on the banks with coloured beaks open, hissing and demanding. Soon, off the little islands would tumble nestfuls of baby birds, who would learn from their parents to follow the stiffly moving shapes along the banks with their expectations for bread. But not yet. And the blossoms were not yet. Everything was in check in that no-spring of last year where first it rained without sun, and then held a chilly drought for weeks. Yet we knew that spring must have arrived, must be here. Slowly, the chestnut avenue unfurled shrill green from each stiff twig’s end. The catkins were dangling on branches inhibited from bursting into leaf. The roses had been pruned almost to the earth, but very late. The fine hair-lines of the willow branches trailing into the water had become yellow-green instead of wintry yellow-grey. And everywhere, on hawthorn and cherry, on plum and currant, on whitebeam and apple, the buds of that year’s flowering stood arrested among leafbuds. The park’s gardeners bent heavily sweatered over flowerbeds that had a cold dusty look, and the grass wore thin and showed the soil, as often happens in late summer after drought, but not often so early in the year. The evenings had already nearly reached their midsummer length—for just as spring stands outlined in black buds on empty branches in November, so the lengthening evenings of April, May, then June, spread summer light everywhere when the earth is still gripped with cold, and you are clutching at summer before it has begun, marking Midsummer Day as a turn towards the dark of winter before the winter has been warmed from the soil. The earth is tilted forward, dipped completely into light, light that urges on blossom, leaf, grass, light which is more powerful for growth even than warmth. The avenues are filled with strolling people until nine and after; the theatre is open; the swings in the children’s playgrounds are never still. England’s myriads of expert gardeners visit the rose gardens to match those paragons with the inhabitants of their own gardens—but last year found that the cold was still holding the roses, tightening their veins and arteries, and giving the long reddening shoots the pinched look of a person short of blood. And it all went on and on, the dry cold, just as, earlier, the wet winter had extended itself, and the park seemed like a sponge that could never dry.