Stories

by Doris Lessing

  He went back to the shop. Under the counter stood the bottle of Black & White beside the glass stained sour with his father’s tippling. He made sure the bottle was still half-full before turning the lights out and settling down to wait. Not for long. When he heard the key in the lock, he set the door open wide so Mrs. Fortescue must see him.

  “Why, Fred, whatever are you doing?”

  “I noticed Dad left the light on, so I came down.” Frowning with efficiency, he looked for a place to put the whisky bottle, while he rinsed the dirtied glass. Then casual, struck by a thought, he offered: “Like a drink, Mrs. Fortescue?” In the dim light she focussed, with difficulty, on the bottle. “I never touch the stuff, dear….” Bending his face down past hers, to adjust a wine bottle, he caught the liquor on her breath, and understood the vagueness of her good nature.

  “Well, all right, dear,” she went on, “just a little one to keep you company. You’re like your dad, you know that?”

  “Is that so?” He came out of the shop with the bottle under his arm, shutting the door behind him and locking it. The stairs glimmered dark. “Many’s the time he’s offered me a nip on a cold night, though not when your mother could see.” She added a short triumphant titter, resting her weight on the stair-rail as if testing it.

  “Let’s go up,” he said insinuatingly, knowing he would get his way, because it had been so easy this far. He was shocked it was so easy. She should have said: “What are you doing out of bed at this time?” “A boy of your age, drinking, what next!”

  She obediently went up ahead of him, pulling herself up.

  The small room she went into, vaguely smiling her invitation that he should follow, was crammed with furniture and objects, all of which had the same soft glossiness of her clothes, which she now went to the next room to remove. He sat on an oyster-coloured satin sofa, looked at blueish brocade curtains, a cabinet full of china figures, thick creamy rugs, pink cushions, pink-tinted walls. A table in a corner held photographs. Of her, so he understood, progressing logically back from those he could recognise to those that were inconceivable. The earliest was of a girl with yellow collarbone-length curls, on which perched a top-hat. She wore a spangled bodice, in pink; pink satin pants, long black lace stockings, white gloves, and was roguishly pointing a walking-stick at the audience—at him, Fred. Like a bloody gun, he thought, feeling the shameful derisive grin come onto his face. He heard the door shut behind him, but did not turn, wondering what he would see: he never had seen her, he realised, without hat, veil, furs. She said, pottering about behind his shoulder: “Yes, that’s me when I was a Gaiety Girl, a nice outfit, wasn’t it?”

  “Gaiety Girl?” he said, protesting, and she admitted: “Well, that was before your time, wasn’t it?”

  The monstrousness of this second “wasn’t it” made it easy for him to turn and look: she was bending over a cupboard, her back to him. It was a back whose shape was concealed by thick, soft, cherry-red, with a tufted pattern of whirls and waves. She stood up and faced him, displaying, without a trace of consciousness at the horror of the fact, his sister’s dressing-gown. She carried glasses and a jug of water to the central table that was planted in a deep pink rug, and said: “I hope you don’t mind my getting into something comfortable, but we aren’t strangers.” She sat opposite, having pushed the glasses towards him, as a reminder that the bottle was still in his hand. He poured the yellow, smelling liquid, watching her face to see when he must stop. But her face showed nothing, so he filled her tumbler half-full. “Just a splash, dear …” He splashed, and she lifted the glass and held it, in the vague tired way that went with her face, which, now that for the first time in his life he could really look at it, was an old shrunken face, with small black eyes deep in their sockets, and a small mouth pouting out of a tired mesh of lines. This old, rather kind face, at which he tried not to stare, was like a mask held between the cherry-red gown over a body whose shape was slim and young, and the hair, beautifully tinted a tactful silvery-blond and waving softly into the hollows of an ancient neck.

  “My sister’s got a dressing-gown like that.”

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it? They’ve got them in at Richard’s down the street, I expect she got hers there too, did she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, the proof of the pudding’s in the eating, isn’t it?”

  At this remark, which reminded him of nothing so much as his parents’ idiotic pattering exchange at supper time, when they were torpid before sleep, he felt the ridiculous smile leave his face. He was full of anger, but no longer of shame.

  “Give me a cigarette, dear,” she went on, “I’m too tired to get up.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “If you could reach me my handbag.”

  He handed her a large crocodile bag that she had left by the photographs. “I have nice things, don’t I?” she agreed with his unspoken comment on it. “Well, I always say, I always have nice things, whatever else…. I never have anything cheap or nasty, my things are always nice…. Baby Batsby taught me that, never have anything cheap or nasty, he used to say. He used to take me on his yacht, you know, to Cannes and Nice. He was my friend for three years, and he taught me about having beautiful things.”

  “Baby Batsby?”

  “That was before your time, I expect, but he was in all the papers once, every week of the year. He was a great spender, you know, generous.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “I’ve always been lucky that way, my friends were always generous. Take Mr. Spencer, now, he never lets me want for anything; only yesterday he said: Tour curtains are getting a bit passe, I’ll get you some new ones.’ And mark my words, he will, he’s as good as his word.”

  He saw that the whisky, coming on top of whatever she’d had earlier, was finishing her off. She sat blinking smeared eyes at him; and her cigarette, secured between thumb and forefinger six inches from her mouth, shed ash on her cherry-red gown. She took a gulp from the glass, and nearly set it down on air; Fred reached forward just in time.

  “Mr. Spencer’s a good man, you know,” she told the air about a foot from her unfocussed gaze.

  “Is he?”

  “We’re just old friends now, you know. We’re both getting on a bit. Not that I don’t let him have a bit of a slap and a tickle sometimes to keep him happy, though I’m not interested, not really.”

  Trying to insert the end of the cigarette between her lips, she missed, and jammed the butt against her cheek. She leaned forward and stubbed it out. Sat back—with dignity. Stared at Fred, screwed up her eyes to see him, failed, offered the stranger in her room a social smile.

  This smile trembled into a wrinkled pout as she said: “Take Mr. Spencer, now, he’s a good spender, I’d never say he wasn’t, but but but …” She fumbled at the packet of cigarettes and he hastened to extract one for her and to light it. “But. Yes. Well, he may think I’m past it, but I’m not, and don’t you think it. There’s a good thirty years between us, do you know that?”

  “Thirty years,” said Fred politely, his smile now fixed by a cold determined loathing.

  “What do you think, dear? He always makes out we’re the same age, now he’s past it, but—well, look at that, then, if you don’t believe me.” She pointed her scarlet-tipped and shaking left hand at the table with the photographs. “Yes, that one, just look at it, it’s only from last summer.” Fred leaned forward and lifted towards him the image of her just indicated which, though she was sitting opposite him in the flesh, must prove her victory over Mr. Spencer. She wore a full-skirted, tightly belted, tightly bodiced striped dress, from which her ageing bare arms hung down by her sides, and her old neck and face rose shameless under the beautiful gleaming hair.

  “Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it,” she said. “Well, what do you think then?”

  “When’s Mr. Spencer coming?” he asked.

  “I’m not expecting him tonight, he’s working. I admire him, I really
do, holding down that job, three, four in the morning sometimes, and it’s no joke, those layabouts you get at those places and it’s always Mr. Spencer who has to fix them up with what they fancy, or get rid of them if they make trouble, and he’s not a big man, and he’s not young any more, I don’t know how he does it. But he’s got tact. Tact. Yes, I often say to him, you’ve got tact, I say, it’ll take a man anywhere.” Her glass was empty, and she was looking at it.

  The news that Mr. Spencer was not expected did not surprise Fred; he had known it, because of his secret brutal confidence born when she had said: “I never touch the stuff, dear.”

  He now got up, went behind her, stood a moment steeling himself, because the embarrassed shamefaced grin had come back onto his face, weakening his purpose—then put two hands firmly under her armpits, lifted her and supported her.

  She at first struggled to remain sitting, but let herself be lifted. “Time for bye-byes?” she said. But as he began to push her, still supporting her, towards the bedroom, she said, suddenly coherent: “But, Fred, it’s Fred, Fred, it’s Fred….” She twisted out of his grip, fell two steps back, and was stopped by the door to the bedroom. There she spread her two legs under the cherry gown, to hold her trembling weight, swayed, caught at Fred, held tight, and said: “But it’s Fred.”

  “Why should you care?” he said, cold, grinning.

  “But I don’t work here dear, you know that—no, let me go.” For he had put two great schoolboy hands on her shoulders.

  He felt the shoulders tense, and then grow small and tender in his palms.

  “You’re like your father, you’re the spitting image of your father, did you know that?”

  He opened the door with his left hand; then spun her around by pushing at her left shoulder as she faced him; then, putting both hands under her armpits from behind, marched her into the bedroom, while she tittered.

  The bedroom was mostly pink. Pink silk bedspread. Pink walls. A doll in a pink flounced skirt lolled against the pillow, its chin tucked into a white fichu over which it stared at the opposite wall where an eighteenth-century girl held a white rose to her lips. Fred pushed Mrs. Fortescue over dark red carpet, till her knees met the bed. He lifted her, and dropped her on it, neatly moving the doll aside with one hand before she could crush it.

  She lay eyes closed, limp, breathing fast, her mouth slightly open. The black furrows beside the mouth were crooked; the eyelids shone blue in wells of black.

  “Turn the lights out,” she implored.

  He turned out the pink-shaded lamp fixed to the head-board. She fumbled at her clothes. He stripped off his trousers, his underpants, pushed her hands aside, found silk in the opening of the gown that glowed cherry-red in the light from the next room. He stripped the silk pants off her so that her legs flew up, then flumped down. She was inert. Then her expertise revived in her, or at least in her tired hands, and he achieved the goal of his hot imaginings of these ugly autumn nights in one shattering spasm that filled him with no less hatred. Her old body stirred feebly under him, and he heard her irregular breathing. He sprang off her in a leap, tugged back pants, trousers. Then he switched on the light. She lay, eyes closed, her face blurred with woe, the upper part of her body nestled into the soft glossy cherry stuff, the white legs spread open, bare. She made an attempt to rouse herself, cover herself. He leaned over her, teeth bared in a hating grin, forcing her hands away from her body. They fell limp on the stained silk spread. Now he stripped off the gown, roughly, as if she were the doll. She whimpered, she tittered, she protested. He watched, with pleasure, tears welling out of the pits of dark and trickling down her mascara-stained face. She lay naked among the folds of cherry colour. He looked at the greyish crinkles around the armpits, the small flat breasts, the loose stomach; then at the triangle of black hair where white hairs sprouted. She was attempting to fold her legs over each other. He forced them apart, muttering: “Look at yourself, look at yourself then!”—while he held in his nausea which was being fed by the miasmic smell that he had known must be the air of this room. “Filthy old whore, disgusting, that’s what you are, disgusting!” He let his grasp slacken on her thighs, saw red marks come up on them as the legs flew together and she wriggled and burrowed to get under the cherry-red gown.

  She sat up, holding the gown around her. Pink gown, pink coverlet, pink walls, pink pink pink everywhere. And a dark red carpet. He felt as if the room were built of flesh.

  She was looking straight up at him.

  “That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

  He fell back a step, feeling his own face go hot. That was how his mother corrected him: That isn’t very nice, dear, in a long-suffering, reproachful voice exactly like Mrs. Fortescue’s.

  “That wasn’t at all nice, Fred, it wasn’t nice at all. I don’t know what can have got into you!”

  Without looking at him, she let her feet down over the edge of the bed. He could see them trembling. She was peering over and down to fit them into pink-feathered mules.

  He noted that he was feeling a need to help her fit her pathetic feet into the fancy mules. He fled. Down the stairs, into his room, and face down onto his bed. Through the ceilingboard an inch from his ear he could hear his sister move. Up he jumped again, out of his box, and through his parents’ room, which he hated so much he behaved as if it were a vacuum, and simply not there.

  His sister was lying coiled on her bed, in her cherry-pink gown, painting her nails coral.

  “Very clever, I don’t think,” she said.

  He looked for the gun: it was on her dressing-table, in a litter of lipsticks.

  He took up the gun and pointed it down at that woman his sister in her terrifying intimacy of warm pink.

  “Stupid,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  She went on doing her nails.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why?—oh do stop it, put that thing down.”

  He put it down.

  “If you don’t mind, I want to get into bed.”

  He said nothing, and she looked up at him. It was a long, hollow, upwards look that she had taken from an advertisement, probably, or a film. But then the look changed, and she was Jane. She had seen something in him.

  His face had changed? His voice had changed? He had changed?

  Triumph warmed his backbone; he smiled. He had regained his sister, he had made a step forward and come level with her again.

  “Please yourself,” he said, and went to the door.

  “Ta-ta, goodnight, mind the bugs don’t bite,” said she, in a ritual of their childhood—of last year.

  “Oh be your age,” he said. He went through the loathsome dark of his parents’ bedroom without thinking more than: Poor old things, they can’t help it.

  An Unposted Love Letter

  Yes, I saw the look your wife’s face put on when I said, “I have so many husbands, I don’t need a husband.” She did not exchange a look with you, but that was because she did not need to—later when you got home she said, “What an affected thing to say!” and you replied, “Don’t forget she is an actress.” You said this meaning exactly what I would mean if I had said it, I am certain of that. And perhaps she heard it like that, I do hope so, because I know what you are and if your wife does not hear what you say then this is a smallness on your part that I don’t forgive you. If I can live alone, and out of fastidiousness, then you must have a wife as good as you are. My husbands, the men who set light to my soul (yes, I know how your wife would smile if I used that phrase), are worthy of you…. I know that I am giving myself away now, confessing how much that look on your wife’s face hurt. Didn’t she know that even then I was playing my part? Oh no, after all, I don’t forgive you your wife, no, I don’t.

  If I said, “I don’t need a husband, I have so many lovers,” then of course everyone at the dinner table would have laughed in just such a way: it would have been the rather
banal “out-rageousness” expected of me. An ageing star, the fading beauty … “I have so many lovers”—pathetic, and brave too. Yes, that remark would have been too apt, too smooth, right for just any “beautiful but fading” actress. But not right for me, no, because after all, I am not just any actress, I am Victoria Carrington, and I know exactly what is due to me and from me. I know what is fitting (not for me, that is not important but for what I stand for). Do you imagine I couldn’t have said it differently—like this, for instance: “I am an artist and therefore androgynous.” Or: “I have created inside myself Man who plays opposite to my Woman.” Or: “I have objectified in myself the male components of my soul and it is from this source that I create.” Oh I’m not stupid, not ignorant, I know the different dialects of our time and even how to use them. But imagine if I had said any of these things last night! It would have been a false note, you would all have been uncomfortable, irritated, and afterwards you would have said: “Actresses shouldn’t try to be intelligent.” (Not you, the others.) Probably they don’t believe it, not really, that an actress must be stupid, but their sense of discrepancy, of discordance, would have expressed itself in such a way. Whereas their silence when I said, “I don’t need a husband, I have so many husbands,” was right, for it was the remark right for me—it was more than “affected,” or “outrageous”—it was making a claim that they had to recognise.