Stories

by Doris Lessing

  “The nurse thinks he is unlikely to wake, but I am sure it would be what he would wish if one of us were to stay.”

  That he had used another of the obligatory phrases struck Jack with more than amusement: now it was with relief as well. Now the fact that the prescribed phrases made their appearance one after the other was like a guarantee that he was behaving appropriately, that everything would go smoothly and without embarrassment, and that he could expect his father’s eyes to appear from behind the corrupted lids—that he would speak the words Jack needed to hear. Cedric and Ellen quite understood, but demanded to be called at once if … They went off together across the bright grass towards the hotel.

  Jack sat up all night; but there was no night, midsummer swallowed the dark; at midnight the church was still glimmering and people strolled, talking softly, over the lawns. He had skimmed through Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, and had dipped into a book of his own called With the Guerrillas in Guatemala. The name on the spine was Jack Henge, and now he wondered if he had ever told his father that this was one of his noms de plume, and he thought that if so, it showed a touching interest on his father’s part, but if not, that there must have been some special hidden sympathy shown in the choice or chance that led to its sitting here on the old man’s shelves side by side with the complete works of Trollope and George Eliot and Walter Scott. But of course, it was unlikely now that he would ever know…. His father had not woken, had not stirred, all night. Once he had tiptoed in, and the nurse had lifted her head and smiled; clearly, though the old man had gone past the divisions of day and night, the living must still adhere to them, for the day nurse had spoken aloud, but now it was night, the nurse whispered: “The injection is working well. You try to rest, Mr. Orkney.” Her solicitude for him, beaming out from the bright cave hollowed from the dark of the room, enclosed them together in the night’s vigil, and when the day nurse came, and the night nurse went yawning, looking pale, and tucking dark strands of hair as if tidying up after a night’s sleep, her smile at Jack was that of a comrade after a shared ordeal.

  Almost at once the day nurse came back into the livingroom and said: “Is there someone called Ann?”

  “Yes, a granddaughter; he was asking for her?”

  “Yes. Now, he was awake for a moment.”

  Jack suppressed: “He didn’t ask for me?”—and ran back into the bedroom, which was now filled with a stuffy light that presented the bruised lids to the nurse and to Jack.

  “I’ll tell my brother that Ann has been asked for.”

  Jack walked through fresh morning air that had already brought a few people onto the grass around the church, to the hotel, where he found Cedric and Ellen at breakfast.

  He said that no, he had not been wanted, but that Ann was wanted now. Ellen and Cedric conferred and agreed that Ann “could reasonably be expected” never to forgive them if she was not called. Jack saw that these words soothed them both; they were comforting himself. He was now suddenly tired. He drank coffee, refused breakfast, and decided on an hour’s sleep. Ellen went to telephone greetings and the news that nothing had changed to her family; Cedric to summon Ann, while Jack wondered if he should telephone Rosemary. But there was nothing to say. He fell on his bed and dreamed, woke, dreamed again, woke, forced himself back to sleep but was driven up out of it to stand in the middle of his hotel room, full of horror. His dreams had been landscapes of dark menacing shapes that were of man’s making—metallic, like machines, steeped in a cold grey light, and scattered about on a plain where cold water lay spilled about, gleaming. This water reflected, he knew, death, or news, or information about death, but he stood too far away on the plain to see what pictures lay on its surfaces.

  Now, Jack was one of those who do not dream. He prided himself on never dreaming. Of course he had read the “new” information that everyone dreamed every night, but he distrusted this information. For one thing, he shared in the general distrust of science, of its emphatic pronouncements; for another, travelling around the world as he had, he had long ago come to terms with the fact that certain cultures were close to aspects of life which he, Jack, had quite simply forbidden. He had locked a door on them. He knew that some people claimed to see ghosts, feared their dead ancestors, consulted witchdoctors, dreamed dreams. How could he not know? He had lived with them. But he, Jack, was of that part of mankind delivered from all that; he, Jack, did not consult the bones or allow himself to be afraid of the dark. Or dream. He did not dream.

  He felt groggy, more than tired: the cold of the dream was undermining him, making him shiver. He got back into bed, for he had slept only an hour, and continued with the same dream. Now he and Walter Kenting were interlopers on that death-filled plain, and they were to be shot, one bullet each, on account of non-specified crimes. He woke again: it was ten minutes later. He decided to stay awake. He bathed, changed his shirt and his socks, washed the shirt and socks he had taken off, and hung them over the bath to drip. Restored by these small ritual acts which he had performed in so many hotel rooms and in so many countries, he ordered fresh coffee, drank it in the spirit of one drinking a tonic or prescribed medicine, and walked back across sunlit grass to the old people’s house.

  He entered on the scene he had left. Ellen and Cedric sat with their feet almost touching, one knitting and one reading the Daily Telegraph. Ellen said: “You haven’t slept long.” Cedric said: “He asked for you again.”

  “What!” While he had slept, his energies draining into that debilitating dream, he might have heard, at last, what his father wanted to say. “I think I’ll sit with him a little.”

  “That might not be a bad idea,” said his sister. Was she annoyed that she had not been “asked for”? If so, she showed no sign of it.

  The little sitting room was full of light; sunshine lay on the old wood sills. But the bedroom was dark, warm and smelled of many drugs.

  The nurse had the only chair—today just a piece of furniture among many. He made her keep it, and sat down slowly on the bed, as if this slow subsidence could make his weight less.

  He kept his eyes on his father’s face. Since yesterday the bruises had spread beyond the lids: the flesh all around the eyes and as far down as the cheekbones was stained.

  “He has been restless,” said the nurse, “but the doctor should be here soon.” She spoke as if the doctor could answer any question that could possibly ever be asked; and Jack, directed by her as he had been by his sister and his brother, now listened for the doctor’s coming. The morning went past. His sister came to ask if he would go with her to luncheon. She was hungry, but Cedric was not. Jack said he would stay, and while she was gone the doctor came.

  He sat on the bed—Jack had risen from it, retreating to the window. The doctor took the old man’s wrist in his hand and seemed to commune with the darkened eyelids. “I rather think that perhaps …” He took out a plastic box from his case that held the ingredients of miracle-making: syringes, capsules, methylated spirits.

  Jack asked: “What effect does that have?” He wanted to ask: Are you keeping him alive when he should be dead?

  The doctor said: “Sedative and painkiller.”

  “A heart stimulant?”

  Now the doctor said: “I have known your father for thirty years.” He was saying: I have more right than you have to say what he would have wanted.

  Jack had to agree; he had no idea if his father would want to be allowed to die, as nature directed, or whether he would like to be kept alive as long as possible.

  The doctor administered an injection, as light and as swift as the strike of a snake, rubbed the puncture with one gentle finger, and said, “Your father looked after himself. He has plenty of life in him yet.”

  He went out. Jack looked in protest at the nurse: what on earth had been meant? Was his father not dying? The nurse smiled, timidly, and from that smile Jack gathered that the words had been spoken for his father’s sake, in case he was able to hear them, understand
them, and be fortified by them.

  He saw the nurse’s face change; she bent over the old man, and Jack took a long step and was beside her. In the bruised flesh the eyes were open and stared straight up. This was not the human gaze he had been wanting to meet, but a dull glare from chinks in damaged flesh.

  “Ann,” said the old man. “Is Ann here?”

  From the owner of those sullen eyes Jack might expect nothing; as an excuse to leave the room, he said to the nurse, “I’ll tell Ann’s father.”

  In the livingroom sunlight had left the sills. Cedric was not there. “It’s Ann he wants,” Jack said. “He has asked again.”

  “She is coming. She has to come from Edinburgh. She is with Maureen.”

  Ellen said this as if he was bound to know who Maureen was. She was probably one of Cedric’s ghastly wife’s ghastly relations. Thinking of the awfulness of Cedric’s wife made him feel kindly towards Ellen. Ellen wasn’t really so bad. There she sat, knitting, tired and sad but not showing it. When you came down to it she didn’t look all that different from Rosemary—unbelievably also a middleaged woman. But at this thought Jack’s loyalty to the past rebelled. Rosemary, though a large, fresh-faced, greying woman, would never wear a suit which looked as if its edges might cut, or hair set in a helmet of ridges and frills. She wore soft pretty clothes, and her hair was combed straight and long, as she had always worn it: he had begged her to keep it like that. But if you came to think of it, probably the lives the two women led were similar. Probably they were all more alike than any one of them would care to admit. Including Cedric’s awful wife.

  He looked at Ellen’s lids, lowered while she counted stitches. They were her father’s eyes and lids. When she lay dying probably her lids would bruise and puff.

  Cedric came in. He was very like the old man—more like him than any of them. He, Jack, was more like their mother, but when he was dying perhaps his own lids … Ellen looked up, smiled at Cedric, then at Jack. They were all smiling at each other. Ellen laid down her knitting, and lit herself a cigarette. The brothers could see that this was the point when she might cry. But Mrs. Markham came in, followed by a well-brushed man all white cuffs and collar and pink fresh skin.

  “The Dean,” she breathed, with the smile of a girl.

  The Dean said: “No, don’t get up. I dropped in. I am an old friend of your father’s, you know. Many and many a game of chess have we played in this room …” and he had followed Mrs. Markham into the bedroom.

  “He had Extreme Unction yesterday,” said Ellen.

  “Oh,” said Jack. “I didn’t realise that Extreme Unction was part of his …” He stopped, not wanting to hurt feelings. He believed both Ellen and Cedric to be religious.

  “He got very High in the end,” said Cedric.

  Ellen giggled. Jack and Cedric looked enquiry. “It sounded funny,” she said. “You know, the young ones talk about getting high.”

  Cedric’s smile was wry; and Jack remembered there had been talk about his elder son, who had threatened to become addicted. What to? Jack could not remember; he would have to ask the girls.

  “I suppose he wants a church service and to be buried?” asked Jack.

  “Oh yes,” said Cedric. “I have got his will.”

  “Of course, you would have.”

  “Well, we’ll have to get through it all,” said Ellen. It occurred to Jack that this was what she probably said, or thought, about her own life: Well, I’ve just got to get through it. The thought surprised him; Ellen was pleasantly surprising him. Now he heard her say: “Well, I suppose some people have to have religion.”

  And now Jack looked at her in disbelief.

  “Yes,” said Cedric, equally improbably, “it must be a comfort for them, one can see that.” He laid small strong hands around his crossed knees and made the knuckles crack.

  “Oh, Cedric,” complained Ellen, as she had as a girl: this knuckle-cracking had been Cedric’s way of expressing tension since he had been a small boy.

  “Sorry,” said Cedric. He went on, letting his hands fall to his sides, and swing there, in a conscious effort towards relaxing himself, “From time to time I take my pulse—as it were. Now that I am getting on for sixty one can expect the symptoms. Am I getting God? Am I still myself? Yes, no, doubtful? But so far, I can report an even keel, I am happy to say.”

  “Oh one can understand it,” said Ellen. “God knows, one can understand it only too well. But I really would be ashamed …”

  Both Ellen and Cedric were looking to him, to add his agreement of which they were sure, of course. But he could not speak. He had made precisely the same joke a month ago, in a group of “the Old Guard” about taking his pulse to find out if he had caught religion. And everyone had confessed to the same practice. To get God, after a lifetime of enlightened rationalism, would be the most shameful of capitulations.

  Now his feelings were the same as those of members of a particularly exclusive Club on being forced to admit the lower classes; or the same as the Victorian Bishop who, travelling to some cannibal-land to baptise the converted, had been heard to say that he could wish that his Church admitted degrees of excellence in its material: he could not believe that his lifetime of impeccable service would weigh the same as those of these so recently benighted ones.

  Besides, Jack was shocked: to hear these ideas from Ellen, looking as she did, leading the life she did—she had no right to them! She sounded vulgar.

  She was saying: “Of course I do go to church sometimes to please Freddy.” Her husband. “But he seems to be losing fervour rather than gaining it, I am glad to say.”

  “Yes,” said Cedric. “I am afraid I have rather the same thing with Muriel. We have compromised on Christmas and Easter. She says it is bad for my image not to be a church-goer. Peters-bank is a small place you know, and the good people do like their lawyers and doctors to be pillars of society. But I find that sort of trimming repulsive and I tell her so.”

  Again they waited for Jack; again he had to be silent. But surely by now they would take his opinions for granted? Why should they? If they could become atheist, then what might he not become? The next thing, they’ll turn out to be socialists, he thought. Surely all this godlessness must be a new development? He could have sworn that Ellen had been devout and Cedric correct towards a Church which—as far as Jack had been concerned—had been irritation, humiliation, tedium, throughout his childhood. Even now he could not think of the meaningless services, the Sunday school, the fatuity of the parsons, the social conformity that was associated with the Church, without feeling as if he had escaped from a sticky trap.

  Ellen was saying: “As for me, I am afraid I find it harder to believe as I get older. I mean, God, in this terrible world, with new horrors every minute. No, I am afraid it is all too much.”

  “I quite agree,” said Cedric. “The devil’s more like it.”

  “Yes,” said Jack, able to speak at last. “Yes, that’s about it, I’m afraid.” It was the best he could do. The room was now full of good feeling, and they would have begun to talk about their childhood if the bedroom door had not opened, and the Dean come out. The smile he had shed on the nurse was still on his healthy lips, and he now let it benefit the three, while he raised his hand in what looked like a benediction. “No, don’t get up!” He was almost at once out of the other door, followed close by Mrs. Markham.

  The look the three now shared repudiated the Dean and all his works. Ellen smiled at her brother exactly as—he realised in capitulation to a totally unforeseen situation—his own wife would have done. Cedric nodded private comment on the stupidities of mankind.

  Soon Cedric went to the bedroom, to return with the report that the old man looked pretty deep in. Then Ellen went and came back saying that she didn’t know how the nurse could bear it in that dark room. But as she sat down, she said: “In the old days, one of us would have been in there all the time?”

  “Yes,” said Cedric. “All of us.”

>   “Not just a nurse,” said Ellen. “Not a stranger.”

  Jack was thinking that if he had stuck it out, then he would have been there when his father called for him, but he said: “I’m glad it is a nurse. I don’t think there is very much left of him.”

  Ann arrived. What Jack saw first was a decided, neat little face, and that she wore a green jacket and trousers that were not jeans but “good” as her Aunt Ellen used the word. Ellen always had “good” clothes that lasted a long time. Ann’s style was not, for instance, like Jack’s daughters’, who wore rags and rubbish and cast-offs and who looked enchanting, like princesses in disguise. She kissed her father, because he was waiting for her to do this. She stood examining them with care. Her father could be seen in her during that leisurely, unembarrassed examination: it was both her right and her duty to do this. Now Jack saw that she was small, with a white skin that looked greenish where it was shaded, and hair as pale as her father’s had been. Her eyes, like her father’s, were green.

  She said: “Is he still alive?”

  The voice was her father’s, and it took her aunt and her uncle back, back—she did not know the reason for their strained, reluctant smiles as they gazed at her.

  They were suffering that diminution, that assault on individuality which is the worst of families: some invisible dealer had shuffled noses, hands, shoulders, hair and reassembled them to make—little Ann, for instance. The dealer made out of parts a unit that the owner would feed, maintain, wash, medicate for a lifetime, thinking of it as “mine,” except at moments like these, when knowledge was forced home that everyone was put together out of stock.

  “Well,” said Ann, “you all look dismal enough. Why do you?”

  She went into the bedroom, leaving the door open. Jack understood that Ann had principles about attitudes towards death: like his own daughters.

  The three crowded into the room.

  Ann sat on the bed, high up near the pillow, in a way that hid the old man’s face from them. She was leaning forward, the nurse—whom Ann had ignored—ready to intervene.