Stories

by Doris Lessing

  Walter was talking about some negotiation with the Conservatives. Normally, Jack would be listening to an admirably concise and intelligent account of human beings in conflict. Now Jack could see only that on his friend’s face was a look which said: I am Power. Jack suddenly got up, with a gesture of repulsion. Walter rose automatically, still talking, not noticing Jack’s condition. Jack reminded himself that in criticising Walter he had forgotten that he must be careful about himself: he had again, and suddenly, become conscious of the expressions that were fitting themselves down over his face, reflecting from Walter’s, horrifying him in their complacency or their cruelty. And his limbs, his body, kept falling into postures of self-esteem and self-approval.

  Walter was moving to the door, still talking. Jack, trying to keep his face blank, to prevent his limbs from expressing emotions which seemed to him appropriate for a monster, moved cautiously after him. Walter stood in the door—talking. Jack wanted him to go. It tired him, this self-observation he could not stop: there was his image at the door, oblivious to anything in the world but his own analysis of events. Yet at last, as Walter said goodbye and he saw Jack again—which he had not done for some minutes, being too self-absorbed—a worried look came into his face, and because of this look Jack knew that what Walter saw was a man standing in a rigid unnatural position who had his hands at his lower cheeks, fretfully fingering the jawbone, as if it were out of place.

  Walter said, in a simple and awkward voice: “It’s a bit of a shock when your old man goes. I know when mine died it took me quite a time to get back to normal.”

  He left, like a health visitor, and Jack thought that Walter had had to get back to normal when his father died. He was thinking, too, that the cure for his condition was activity. Walter was more sensible than himself: he filled every moment of his time.

  He decided to go to the family doctor for sleeping pills. This was a house that self-consciously did not go in for pills of any kind. Or did not now: Rosemary, during what she now called “my silly time”—which after all had gone on for some years—had taken sleeping pills a lot. But that, even while she did it, had seemed to her a betrayal of her real nature. The girls went in for health in various ways—diets, yoga, homemade bread. His son was too strong—of course!—to need medicine. He smoked pot, Jack believed, and on principle—well, so would Jack have done at his age; the law on marihuana was absurd.

  He told the doctor he was not sleeping well. The doctor asked for how long. He had to think. Well, for about a month, perhaps six weeks.

  The doctor said: “That’s not going to kill you, Jack!”

  “All right, but before I get into the habit of not sleeping I’d like something—and not a placebo, please.” The glance the doctor gave him at this told him that he had in fact been deciding to prescribe a placebo, but there had been something in Jack’s voice to make him change his mind.

  “Is there anything else worrying you?”

  “Nothing. Or everything.”

  “I see,” said the doctor, and prescribed sleeping pills and antidepressants.

  Jack had the prescriptions made up, then changed his mind; if he started taking these pills, it would be some sort of capitulation. To what, he did not know. Besides, he was thinking: Perhaps they might make it worse? “It” was not only the sweet mawkishness which threatened him at every turn, in a jingle of a tune for an advertisement on television, a shaft of light from behind a cloud at sunrise, a kitten playing in the next garden, but the feeling, getting worse, that he was transparent, an automaton of unlikable and predictable reactions. He was like a spy in his own home, noticing the slightest reactions of thought or emotion in his wife and daughters, seeing them as robots. If they knew how he was seeing them, how loathsome they were in their predictability, their banality, they would turn and kill him. And quite rightly. For he was not human. He was outside humanity. He even found himself walking abruptly out of rooms where he was sitting with Rosemary, or one or other of the girls; he could not stand his own horror and pity because of them, himself, everybody.

  Yet they were treating him with perfect kindness. He knew that this was what it really was: even if he had to see it all as falsity, mere habits of kindness, sympathy, consideration, tact, which none of them really felt, wanting him to get back to normal, so that life could go on without stress. His wife particularly longed for this. While he took care that he did not betray the horror he was immersed in, she knew well enough their time was over—the gaiety and charm of it, the irresponsibility. Probably for good. Being what she was, thoughtful, considerate (taught by society to show thoughtfulness and sympathy when she wasn’t really feeling it, he could not stop himself thinking), she was trying to decide what to do for the best. Sometimes she asked if he didn’t think he should write another book—even if he would like to make a trip abroad without her; she talked about Nigeria. Each time Nigeria was mentioned his response to it was strong: it was the idea of forgetting himself entirely in an active and tightly planned life.

  But he did not want to commit himself. He felt he would be losing an opportunity—but of what? And besides, how could he? He believed he was seriously ill, in some inconceivable, unprecedented way; how could he take a job when his energies had to go into presenting a bland and harmless surface to those around him, into preventing his hand rising furtively up to his face, to see if the masks of greed or power were fastened there, into watching the postures his body assumed, which must betray his vices to anyone looking his way—or would betray them, if everybody wasn’t blind and deaf, absorbed in their kindness, their awful, automatic, meaningless “sympathy.”

  One night his son arrived upstairs. Joseph used sometimes to come, unannounced, and went up through the girls’ room to the attic to sleep. He took food from his sisters’ kitchen. Sometimes he brought friends.

  About a year ago there had been a row over the friends. Feeling one evening as if the top part of his house had been invaded by a stealthy army, Jack had gone up and found a dozen or so young men, and a couple of girls, all lying about on sleeping bags and blankets under the rafters. They had moved in. A girl was cooking sausages in a frying pan that was on a camping stove; about a foot away was a drum that had written on it: PARAFFIN. INFLAMMABLE. The flame from the stove was turned too high, and showed around the edges of the frying pan. Jack jumped forward, turned it down, removed the pan, and stood up, facing them, the pan in his hand. His usual responses to his son—apology, or the exhaustion due to the effort to be fair, had been cut, and he asked: “What’s the matter with you lot? What’s wrong? You aren’t stupid!”

  Coming up the stairs he had been preparing a “humorous” remark—which he was afraid would sound pompous, to the effect: “How about introducing me to my guests?” Now he stared at them, and the young faces stared back. There was a half-scared smile on the face of the girl who had been cooking, but no one said anything. “I think you had better get out,” said Jack at last, and went downstairs. Soon after he had watched the whole lot cross the garden like a tribe on the move, with their stove, their cartons, their paper-carriers, their guitars, their sleeping bags.

  Now he came to think of it, this incident had been the beginning of his inadmissible depression. He had spent days, weeks, months, thinking about it. He felt there was a contempt there, in the carelessness, that went beyond anything he knew how to cope with; he did not understand it, them—his son. Who, meanwhile, had resumed his habits, and continued to drop in for a night or two when he had nowhere better to sleep. So it was not, Jack reasoned, that Joseph despised a roof over his head, as such? They had all been so stoned they had not known what they were doing? No, it hadn’t seemed like it. They had not bothered to look at the drum, had not known it was full? But that was scarcely an excuse—no, it was all too much, not understandable…. He had not talked to his son since, only seen him go past.

  The telephone rang from upstairs: Carrie said that Joseph would be down to see him in a few moments, if Jack “had not
hing better to do.”

  Instantly Jack was on the defensive: he knew that Joseph criticised him for having been away so much when the three children were growing up. This message was a reference to that—again? If it was simply careless, what had come into his head, then that made it even worse, in a way…. Joseph came running lightly down the stairs and into the livingroom. A muscular young man, he wore skin-tight blue jeans, a tight blue sweatshirt, and a small red scarf at his throat tied like a pirate’s. The clothes were old, but as much care had gone into their choosing, preparation and presentation as a model getting ready for a photograph…. While Jack knew he had already begun the process of comparison that always left him exhausted, he could not stop, and he was wondering: Was it that we were as obsessed with what we wore but I’ve forgotten it? No, it’s not that: our convention was that it was bourgeois to spend time and money on clothes, that was it, but their convention is different; that’s all it is and it is not important.

  Joseph had a strong blue gaze, and a strong straight mouth. The mouth was hidden under a wiry golden beard. A mane of wiry yellow hair fell to his shoulders. Jack thought that the beard and the long hair were there because they were fashionable, and would be dropped the moment they were not…. Well, why not? He wished very much he could have swaggered about in beard and mane—that was the truth.

  This aggressively vivid young man sat on a chair opposite Jack, put his palms down on his thighs with his fingers pointing towards each other, and the elbows out. In this considering, alert position he looked at his father.

  Jack, a faded, larger, softer version of what he was seeing, waited.

  Joseph said: “I hear you have got religion.”

  “The opium,” said Jack, in a formal considering way, “of the people: Yes. If that’s what it is, I have got it.”

  Jack felt particularly transparent, because of his son’s forceful presence. He knew that his posture, the smile on his face, were expressing apology. He already knew the meeting was doomed to end unpleasantly. Yet he was looking for the words to appeal to his son, to begin the “real” talk that they should be having. Joseph said: “Well, that’s your business.” He sounded impatient; having raised the subject, or at least used it as an opener, now he was saying that his father’s processes were of no interest or importance.

  “You’ve been following the Robinson affair?”

  Jack could not remember for a moment which affair that was, but did not like to say no.

  “We have to pay the defence lawyer. And there’s the bail. We need at least three thousand pounds.”

  Jack did not say anything. It was not from policy, but inadequacy, yet he saw his son beginning to make the irritable movements of power, of confidence, checked and thwarted. It crossed his mind that of course his son saw him as powerful and confident, and this it was that accounted for the aggression, the hostility, the callousness. Into Jack’s mind now came sets of words framed rhetorically; since this was not how he was feeling, he was surprised. “Why does it have to be like this, that more hate is used on people of the same side, thus preventing us ever from uniting in a common front, preventing us from bringing down the enemy?” These were words from the imaginary conversation with Joseph that he so often indulged in: only now did it strike him that he never had fantasies of a personal relationship—of their going for a holiday together, for instance, or just spending an evening, or walking for an hour or so. “Can’t you see?”—the inner rhetoric-maker was continuing, “that the vigour of your criticism, your iconoclasm, your need to condemn the past without learning from it, will take you relentlessly to stand exactly where your despised elders stand now?”

  It suddenly occurred to Jack, and for the first time, that he had repudiated his past. This so frightened him, leaving him, as it must, by himself out in the air somewhere, without comrades and allies—without a family—that he almost forgot Joseph’s presence. He was thinking: For weeks now, ever since the old man’s death—before, even?—I’ve been thinking as if I have abandoned socialism.

  Joseph was saying: “I don’t have to tell you what the conditions are like in that prison, how they are being treated.”

  Jack saw that the “I don’t have to tell you” was in fact an admission that in spite of everything he said, Joseph saw him as an ally. “You’ve come to me for money?” he asked, as if there could be another reason.

  “Yeah. Yeah. That’s about it, I suppose.”

  “Why do you have to be American?” Jack asked in sudden real irritation. “You’re not American. Why do you all have to?”

  Joseph said, with a conscious smile: “It’s a mannerism, that’s all.” Then he looked stern again, in command.

  Jack said: “I’m one of the old rich lefties you were publicly despising not long ago. You didn’t want to have anything to do with us, you said.”

  Joseph frowned and made irritable movements which said that he felt that the sort of polemic which abused people not standing exactly where he stood was rather like breathing, a tradition, and he genuinely felt his father was being unreasonable in taking such remarks personally. Then he said, as if nothing better could be expected: “Then I take it it is no?”

  “No,” said Jack, “I am sorry.”

  Joseph got up; but he looked hesitant, and even now could sit down—if Jack said the right things. If he could push aside the rhetorical sentences that kept coming to his tongue: how should they not?—he had spent many hours of fantasy ensuring that they would!

  Jack suddenly heard himself saying, in a low, shaking, emotional voice: “I am so sick of it all. It all just goes on and on. Over and over again.”

  “Well,” said Joseph, “they say it is what always happens, so I suppose that ought to make us feel better.” His smile was his own, not forced, or arranged.

  Jack saw that Joseph had taken what he had said as an appeal for understanding between them personally: he had believed that his father was saying he was sick of their bad relations.

  Had that been what he was saying? He had imagined he was talking about the political cycle. Jack now understood that if in fact he made enough effort, Joseph would respond, and then … He heard himself saying: “Like bloody automatons. Over and over again. Can’t you see that it is going to take something like twenty years for you lot to become old rich lefties?”

  “Or would if we aren’t all dead first,” said Joseph, ending the thing as Jack would, and with a calm, almost jolly smile. He left, saying: “The Robinson brothers are likely to get fifteen years if we don’t do something.”

  Jack, as if a button had been pushed, was filled with guilt about the Robinson brothers and almost got up to write a cheque there and then. But he did not: it had been an entirely automatic reaction.

  He spent a few days apparently in the state he had been in for weeks; but he knew himself to have reached the end of some long inner process that had proved too much for him. This interview with his son had been its end, as, very likely, the scene in the attic had been its beginning? Who knew? Who could know! Not Jack. He was worn out, as at the end of a long vigil. He found himself one morning standing in the middle of his livingroom saying over and over again: “I can’t stand any more of this. I can’t. I won’t.”

  He found the pills and took them with the same miserable determination that he would have had to use to kill something that had to be killed. Almost at once he began to sleep, and the tension eased. He no longer felt as if he was carrying around, embodied in himself, a question as urgent as a wound that needed dressing, but that he had no idea what the language was in which he might find an answer. He ceased to experience the cloying sweetness that caused a mental nausea a hundred times worse than the physical. In a few days he had already stopped seeing his wife and daughters as great dolls who supplied warmth, charm, sympathy, when the buttons of duty or habit were pressed. Above all, he did not have to be on guard against his own abhorrence: his fingers did not explore masks on his face, nor was he always conscious of the statements
made by his body and his limbs.

  He was thinking that he was probably already known throughout the Left as a renegade; yet, examining the furniture in his mind, he found it not much changed.

  It occurred to him, and he went on to consider it in a brisk judicious way, that it was an extraordinary thing that whereas he could have sat for an examination at a moment’s notice on the history, the ideas, and the contemporary situation of socialism, communism and associated movements, with confidence that he would know the answers even to questions on the details of some unimportant sect in some remote country, he was so ignorant of religious history and thought that he could not have answered any questions at all. His condition in relation to religious questions was like that of a person hearing of socialism for the first time and saying: “Oh yes, I’ve often thought it wasn’t fair that some people should have more than others. You agree, do you?”

  He decided to go to the British Museum Reading Room. He had written many of his books there. His wife was delighted, knowing that this meant he was over the crisis.

  He sent in his card for books on the history of the religions, on comparative religion, and on the relation of religion to anthropology.

  For the first few days it seemed that he was still under the spell of his recent experience: he could not keep his attention from wandering from the page, and the men and women all around him bending over books seemed to him insane; this habit of solving all questions by imbibing information through the eyes off the printed page was a form of self-hypnotism. He was seeing them and himself as a species that could not function unless it took in information in this way.

  But this soon passed and he was able to apply himself.

  As he read, he conscientiously examined what he thought; was this changing at all? No, his distaste for the whole business could be summed up by an old idea of his, which was that if he had been bred, let us say, in Pakistan, that would have been enough for him to kill other people in the name of Mohammed, and if he had been born in India, to kill Moslems without a qualm. That had he been born in Italy, he would have been one brand of Christian, and if he had stuck with his family’s faith, he would be bound to suspect Roman Catholicism. But above all what he felt was that this was an outdated situation. What was he doing sitting here surrounded by histories and concordances and expositions and exegetics? He would be better occupied doing almost anything else—a hundred years ago, yes, well, that had been different. The struggle for a Victorian inside the Church had meant something; for a man or a woman then to say: “If I had been born an Arab I would be praying five times a day looking at Mecca, but had I been a Tibetan I would have believed in the Dalai Lama”—that kind of statement had needed courage then, and the effort to make it had been worthwhile.