Stories

by Doris Lessing

  The summer gardeners all seem to be youngsters working with bare torsos, or bare feet. They cool off by standing in the fountain’s spray as the wind switches it about. “They say” that the hippies have decided this work, summer gardening, is good for them, us, society. One evening I heard these sentiments offered to one gardening girl by another:

  “There aren’t any hangups here, you can do your own thing, but you’ve got to pull your weight, that’s fair enough.”

  There is a different relationship between these summer amateur gardeners and the park’s visitors, and between the visitors and the familiar older gardeners, these last being more proprietary. I remember an exchange with one, several springs ago, on an occasion when it had snowed, the sun had come out, and friends had rung to say that the crocuses were particularly fine. Out I went to the park and found that the new crocuses, white, purple, gold, stood everywhere in the snow. Each patch had been finely netted with black cotton to stop the birds eating them. I was bending over to see how the netting was done—a tricky and irritating job, surely?—when I saw that a uniformed gardener had emerged from his watchman’s hut and was standing over me.

  “And what may you be doing?”

  “I am looking at your crocuses.”

  “They are not my crocuses. They are public property.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “And I am paid to watch them.”

  “You mean to tell me that you are standing in that unheated wooden hut in all this cold and snow just to guard the crocuses?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Isn’t this cotton any use, then?”

  “Cotton is effective against bird thieves. I am not saying anything about human thieves.”

  “But I wasn’t going to eat your crocuses!”

  “I am only doing my job.”

  “Your job is, as it were, to be a crocus-watcher?”

  “Yes, madam, and it always has been and my father before me. When I was a little lad I knew the work I wanted to do and I’ve done it ever since.”

  Not thus the youngsters, much less suspicious characters, understanding quite well how respectable citizens may envy them their jobs.

  There was this incident when the geraniums had flowered once, and needed to be picked over to induce a second flowering. There were banks of them, covered with dead flower. I myself had resisted the temptation to nip over the railings and deadhead the lot: another had not resisted. With a look of defiant guilt, an elderly man was crouching in the geraniums, hard at work. Leaning on his spade, watching him, was a summer gardener, a long-haired, barefooted, and naked-chested youth.

  “What’s he doing that for?” said he to me.

  “He can’t stand that there won’t be a second flowering,” I said. “I can understand it. I’ve just deadheaded all mine in my own garden.”

  “All I’ve got room for is herbs in a pot.”

  The elderly man, seeing us watching him, talking about him, probably about to report his crime, looked guiltier than ever. But he furiously continued his work, a man of principle defying society for duty.

  On a single impulse, I and the gardener parted and went in different directions; we were not able to bear causing him such transports of moral determination.

  But, of course, he was quite in the right; when all the other banks of geraniums were brown and flowerless, the bank he had picked over was as brilliant as in spring.

  By now it had rained, and had rained well, and just as it was hard to remember the long cold wet of the early year in the cold drought, and the cold drought in the dry heat, now the long dryness had vanished out of memory, for it was a real English summer, all fitfully showery, fitfully cool and hot. Yet it was autumn; the overfullness of everything said it must be. A strong breeze sent leaves spinning down, and the smell of the stagnant parts of the lakes was truly horrible, making you wonder about the philosophy of the parkkeepers—it was against their principles to clear away the smelly rubbish? They couldn’t afford a man in a boat once a week to take it away? Or they had faith in the power of nature to heal everything?

  In my garden last year’s wasteland, so very soon to be left behind, the roses, the thyme, geranium, clematis, were all strongly flowering, and butterflies crowded over lemon balm and hyssop. The pear tree was full of small tasteless pears. The tree was too old. It could produce masses of blossom, but couldn’t carry the work through to good fruit. At every movement of the air, down thumped the pears. All the little boys from the Council flats came jumping over the walls to snatch up the pears, which they needed to throw at each other, not to eat. When invited to come in and pick them, great sullenness and resentment resulted, because the point was to raid the big rich gardens along the canal, into which hundreds of gardenless people looked down from the flats, to raid them, dart away with the spoils, and then raid again, coming in under the noses of furious householders.

  One afternoon I was in a bus beside the park, and the wind was strong, and all the air was full of flying leaves. This was the moment, the week of real autumn. Rushing at once to the park, I just caught it. Everything was yellow, gold, brown, orange; heaps of treasure lay tidily packed ready to be burned; the wind crammed the air with coloured leafage. It was cooling—the northern hemisphere, I mean, not the park, which of course had been hot, cold, and in between ever since the year had started running true to form, some time in July. The leaves were blown into the lakes, and sank to make streams of bubbles in which the birds dived and played. All around the moorhens’ battered nest lay a starry patterning of plane leaves, in green and gold. You could see how, if this were wilderness, land would form here in this shallow place, in a season or two, how this arm of the lake would become swamp, and then, in a dry season, new earth, and the water would retreat. All the smelly backwaters were being covered over with thick soft layers of leaf, the plastic, the tins, the papers vanishing, as, no doubt, the parkkeepers had counted on happening when autumn came.

  I walked from one end of the park to the other, then back and around and across, the squirrels racing and chasing, and the birds swimming along the banks beside me in case this shape might be a food-giving shape, and this food shape might have decided to distribute largesse around the next bend and was being mean now because of future plenty. There were many fewer birds. The great families bred that year off the islands had gone, and the population was normal again, couples and individuals sedately self-sufficient.

  Only a week later, that perfection of autumn was over, and stripped boughs were showing the shape of next spring. Yet, visiting Sweden, where snow had come early and lay everywhere, then leaving it to fly home again, was flying from winter into autumn, a journey back in time in one afternoon. The aircraft did not land when it should have done, owing to some hitch or other, and luckily for us, had to go about in a wide sweep over London. I had not before flown so low, with no cloud to hide the city. It was all woodland and lakes and parks and gardens, and a highly coloured autumn still, with loads of russet and gold on the trees. All the ugly bits of London you imagine nothing could disguise were concealed by this habit of tree and garden.

  In the park, though, from the ground, the trees looked very tall, very bare, and wet. The lakes were grey and solid. When the birds came fast across to see if there was food, they left arrow shapes on the water spreading slowly, and absolutely regular, till they dissolved into the shores: there were no boats out now, for these had been drawn up and lay overturned in rows along the banks waiting for spring.

  And the dark had come down.

  The park in winter is very different from high, crammed, noisy summer.

  A long damp path in early twilight … it is not much more than three in the afternoon. Two gentlemen in trim dark suits and tidy, slightly bald heads, little frills of hair on their collars—a reminiscence of the eighteenth century or a claim on contemporary fashion, who knows?—two civil servants from the offices in the Nash Terraces, walk quietly by, their hands behind their backs, beside the wat
er. They talk in voices so low you think it must be official secrets that they have come out to discuss in privacy.

  The beds are dug and turned. New stacks of leaf are made every day as the old ones burn, scenting the air with guilt, not pleasure, for now you have to remember pollution. But the roses are all there still, blobs of colour on tall stems. All the stages of the year are visible at once, for each plant has on it brightly tinted hips, then dead roses which are brown dust rose-shaped, then the roses themselves, though each has frost-burn crimping the outer petals. Hips, dead roses, fresh blooms—and masses of buds, doomed never to come to flower, for the frosts will get them if the pruner doesn’t. Pink Parfait and Ginger Rogers, Summer Holiday and Joseph’s Coat are shortly to be slashed into anonymity.

  For it will be the dead of the year very soon now; soon it will be the shortest day.

  I sit on a bench in the avenue where in summer the poplars and fountain make Italy on a blue day, but now browny-grey clouds are driving hard across from the northeast. Crowds of sparrows materialise as I arrive, all hungry expectation, but I’ve been forgetful, I haven’t so much as a biscuit. They sit on the bench, my shoe, the bench’s back, rather hunched, the wind tugging their feathers out of shape. The seagulls are in too, so the sea must be rough today, or perhaps there is an oil slick.

  Up against the sunset, today a dramatic one, gold, red, and packed dark clouds, birds slowly rotate, like jagged debris after a whirlwind. They look like rocks, but that’s not possible; they must be more gulls. But it is nice to imagine them rocks, just as, on the walk home, the plane trees that are all bent one way by the wind, seem, with their dappled trunks, like deer ready to spring together towards the northern gates.

  Report on the

  Threatened City

  PRIORITY FLASH ONE

  All co-ordinates all plans all prints cancelled. As of now condition unforeseen by us obtaining this city. Clear all programmes all planners all forecasters for new setting on this information.

  PRIORITY

  Base to note well that transmission this channel will probably be interrupted by material originated locally. Our fuel is low and this channel therefore only one now operative.

  SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND TO MISSION

  Since our planet discovered that this city was due for destruction or severe damage, all calculations and plans of our department have been based on one necessity: how to reach the city to warn its inhabitants of what is to come. Observing their behaviour, both through Astroviewers and from our unmanned machines launched at intervals this past year, their time, our Commissioners for External Affairs decided these people could have no idea at all of what threatened, that their technology, while so advanced in some ways, had a vast gap in it, a gap that could be defined, in fact, precisely by that area of ignorance—not knowing what was to befall them. This gap seemed impossible. Much time was spent by our technicians trying to determine what form of brain these creatures could have that made this contradiction possible—as already stated, a technology so advanced in one area and blank in another. Our technicians had to shelve the problem, since their theories became increasingly improbable and since no species known to us anywhere corresponds even at a long remove with what we believed this one to be. It became, perhaps, the most intriguing of our unsolved problems, challenging and defeating one department after another.

  SUMMARY OF OBJECTIVE THIS MISSION

  Meanwhile, putting all speculations on one side, attractive though they were, all our resources have been used, at top speed and pressure, to develop a spacecraft that could, in fact, land a team on this planet, since it was our intention, having given the warning, offered the information available to us but (we thought) not to them, which made the warning necessary, to offer them more: our assistance. We meant to help clear the area, transport the population elsewhere, cushion the shock to the area and then, having done what, after all, we have done for other planets, our particular mental structure being suited to this kind of forecasting and assistance, return to base, taking some suitable specimens of them with us, in order to train them in a way that would overcome the gap in their minds and, therefore, their science. The first part we achieved: That is, we managed, in the time set for it, to develop a spacecraft that could make the journey here, carrying the required number of personnel. It strained our own technology and postponed certain cherished plans of our own. But our craft landed here, on the western shore of the land mass, as planned, and without any trouble seven days ago.

  THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

  You will have wondered why there have been no transmissions before this. There have been two reasons. One: We realised at once that there would be heavier demands on our fuel than we had anticipated and that we would have to conserve it. Two: We were waiting to understand what it was we had to tell you. We did not understand the problem. For it was almost at once clear to us that all our thinking about “the gap in their mental structure” was off the point. We have never understood the nature of the problem. So improbable is it that we delayed communicating until we were sure. The trouble with this species is not that it is unable to forecast its immediate future; it is that it doesn’t seem to care. Yet that is altogether too simple a stating of its condition. If it were so simple—that it knew that within five years its city was to be destroyed, or partly destroyed, and that it was indifferent—we should have to say: This species lacks the first quality necessary to any animal species; it lacks the will to live. Finding out what the mechanism is has caused the delay. Which I now propose to partially remedy by going into an account of what befell us, step by step. This will entail a detailed description of a species and a condition absolutely without precedent in our experience of the inhabited planets.

  AN IMPOSSIBLE FACT

  But first, here is a fact that you will find hard to believe. We did not find this out at once, but when we did, it was a moment of focus in our investigation, enabling us to see our problem clearly. This city experienced a disaster, on a fairly large scale, about sixty-five years ago, their time.

  A thought immediately suggests itself: Our experts did not know about this past disaster, only about the one to come. Our thinking is as defective in its way as theirs is. We had decided that they had a gap, that this gap made it impossible for them to see into the immediate future. Having decided this, we never once considered another possibility, the truth—that they had no gap, that they knew about the threatened danger and did not care. Or behaved as if they did not. Since we were unable to conceive of this latter possibility, we did not direct our thoughts and our instruments back in time—their time. We took it absolutely for granted, an assumption so strong that it prevented our effective functioning as these creatures’ assumptions prevent them from acting—we believed (since we are so built ourselves) that it would be impossible for a disaster to have occurred already, because if we had experienced such a thing, we would have learned from the event and taken steps accordingly. Because of a series of assumptions, then, and an inability to move outside our own mental set, we missed a fact that might have been a clue to their most extraordinary characteristic—the fact that such a very short time ago they experienced a disaster of the sort that threatens again, and soon.

  THE LANDING

  Our unmanned craft have been landing on their planet for centuries and have taken various shapes, been of varying substances. These landings were at long intervals until one year ago. These intervals were because, except for its unique destructiveness and belligerence, this species is not the most remarkable or interesting of those made available to our study by our Technological Revolution in its Space Phase. But twelve times recently, each during a period when their planet was at full light potential, we have landed craft, and each time close to the place in question. This was easy, because the terrain is semi-desert and lightly populated. We chose material for the craft that would manifest as their substance light—which is why we always used maximum their planet light as landing times. These craft were
visible, if at all, as strong moonlight. The craft we are using on this present mission, the thirteenth in this series, is of higher concentration, since it is manned.