The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  “The last three months she was pregnant. Never seen anything like it, she just turned them out one after the other.”

  There were a couple of hundred pencil drawings, all of two bodies in every kind of balance, tension, relationship. The two bodies were Jack’s and Dorothy’s, mostly unclothed, but not all. The drawings startled, not only because they marked a real jump forward in Dorothy’s achievement, but because of their bold sensuousness. They were a kind of chant, or exaltation about the marriage. The instinctive closeness, the harmony of Jack and Dorothy, visible in every movement they made towards or away from each other, visible even when they were not together, was celebrated here with a frank, calm triumph.

  “Some of them are pretty strong,” said Jack, the northern workingclass boy reviving in him for a moment’s puritanism.

  But Stella laughed, because the prudishness masked pride: some of the drawings were indecent.

  In the last few of the series the woman’s body was swollen in pregnancy. They showed her trust in her husband, whose body, commanding hers, stood or lay in positions of strength and confidence. In the very last Dorothy stood turned away from her husband, her two hands supporting her big belly, and Jack’s hands were protective on her shoulders.

  “They are marvellous,” said Stella.

  “They are, aren’t they.”

  Stella looked, laughing, and with love, towards Jack; for she saw that his showing her the drawings was not only pride in his wife’s talent, but that he was using this way of telling Stella not to take Dorothy’s mood too seriously. And to cheer himself up. She said, impulsively: “Well that’s all right then, isn’t it?”

  “What? Oh yes, I see what you mean, yes, I think it’s all right.”

  “Do you know what?” said Stella, lowering her voice. “I think Dorothy’s guilty because she feels unfaithful to you.”

  “What?”

  “No, I mean, with the baby, and that’s what it’s all about.”

  He turned to face her, troubled, then slowly smiling. There was the same rich unscrupulous quality of appreciation in that smile as there had been in Dorothy’s laugh over her husband and Lady Edith. “You think so?” They laughed together, irrepressibly and loudly.

  “What’s the joke?” shouted Dorothy.

  “I’m laughing because your drawings are so good,” shouted Stella.

  “Yes, they are, aren’t they?” But Dorothy’s voice changed to flat incredulity: “The trouble is, I can’t imagine how I ever did them, I can’t imagine ever being able to do it again.”

  “Downstairs,” said Jack to Stella, and they went down to find Dorothy nursing the baby. He nursed with his whole being, all of him in movement. He was wrestling with the breast, thumping Dorothy’s plump pretty breast with his fists. Jack stood looking down at the two of them, grinning. Dorothy reminded Stella of a cat, half-closing her yellow eyes to stare over her kittens at work on her side, while she stretched out a paw where claws sheathed and unsheathed themselves, making a small rip-rip-rip on the carpet she lay on.

  “You’re a savage creature,” said Stella, laughing.

  Dorothy raised her small vivid face and smiled. “Yes, I am,” she said, and looked at the two of them calm, and from a distance, over the head of her energetic baby.

  Stella cooked supper in a stone kitchen, with a heater brought by Jack to make it tolerable. She used the good food she had brought with her, taking trouble. It took some time, then the three ate slowly over a big wooden table. The baby was not asleep. He grumbled for some minutes on a cushion on the floor, then his father held him briefly, before passing him over, as he had done earlier, in response to his mother’s need to have him close.

  “I’m supposed to let him cry,” remarked Dorothy. “But why should he? If he were an Arab or an African baby he’d be plastered to my back.”

  “And very nice too,” said Jack. “I think they come out too soon into the light of day; they should just stay inside for about eighteen months, much better all around.”

  “Have a heart,” said Dorothy and Stella together, and they all laughed; but Dorothy added, quite serious: “Yes, I’ve been thinking so too.”

  This good nature lasted through the long meal. The light went cool and thin outside; and inside they let the summer dusk deepen, without lamps.

  “I’ve got to go quite soon,” said Stella, with regret.

  “Oh, no, you’ve got to stay!” said Dorothy, strident. It was sudden, the return of the woman who made Jack and Dorothy tense themselves to take strain.

  “We all thought Philip was coming. The children will be back tomorrow night, they’ve been on holiday.”

  “Then stay till tomorrow, I want you,” said Dorothy, petulant.

  “But I can’t,” said Stella.

  “I never thought I’d want another woman around, cooking in my kitchen, looking after me, but I do,” said Dorothy, apparently about to cry.

  “Well, love, you’ll have to put up with me,” said Jack.

  “Would you mind, Stell?”

  “Mind what?” asked Stella, cautious.

  “Do you find Jack attractive?”

  “Very.”

  “Well I know you do. Jack, do you find Stella attractive?”

  “Try me,” said Jack, grinning; but at the same time signalling warnings to Stella.

  “Well, then!” said Dorothy.

  “A ménage à trois?” asked Stella, laughing. “And how about my Philip? Where does he fit in?”

  “Well, if it comes to that, I wouldn’t mind Philip myself,” said Dorothy, knitting her sharp black brows and frowning.

  “I don’t blame you,” said Stella, thinking of her handsome husband.

  “Just for a month, till he comes back,” said Dorothy. “I tell you what, we’ll abandon this silly cottage, we must have been mad to stick ourselves away in England in the first place. The three of us’ll just pack up and go off to Spain or Italy with the baby.”

  “And what else?” enquired Jack, good-natured at all costs, using his pipe as a safety valve.

  “Yes, I’ve decided I approve of polygamy,” announced Dorothy. She had opened her dress and the baby was nursing again, quietly this time, relaxed against her. She stroked his head, softly, softly, while her voice rose and insisted at the other two people: “I never understood it before, but I do now. I’ll be the senior wife, and you two can look after me.”

  “Any other plans?” enquired Jack, angry now. “You just drop in from time to time to watch Stella and me have a go, is that it? Or are you going to tell us when we can go off and do it, give us your gracious permission?”

  “Oh I don’t care what you do, that’s the point,” said Dorothy, sighing, sounding forlorn, however.

  Jack and Stella, careful not to look at each other, sat waiting.

  “I read something in the newspaper yesterday, it struck me,” said Dorothy, conversational. “A man and two women living together – here, in England. They are both his wives, they consider themselves his wives. The senior wife has a baby, and the younger wife sleeps with him – well, that’s what it looked like, reading between the lines.”

  “You’d better stop reading between lines,” said Jack. “It’s not doing you any good.”

  “No, I’d like it,” insisted Dorothy. “I think our marriages are silly. Africans and people like that, they know better, they’ve got some sense.”

  “I can just see you if I did make love to Stella,” said Jack.

  “Yes!” said Stella, with a short laugh, which, against her will, was resentful.

  “But I wouldn’t mind,” said Dorothy, and burst into tears.

  “Now, Dorothy, that’s enough,” said Jack. He got up, took the baby, whose sucking was mechanical now, and said: “Now listen, you’re going right upstairs and you’re going to sleep. This little stinker’s full as a tick, he’ll be asleep for hours, that’s my bet.”

  “I don’t feel sleepy,” said Dorothy, sobbing.

  “I’ll giv
e you a sleeping pill, then.”

  Then started a search for sleeping pills. None to be found.

  “That’s just like us,” wailed Dorothy, “we don’t even have a sleeping pill in the place.… Stella, I wish you’d stay, I really do. Why can’t you?”

  “Stella’s going in just a minute, I’m taking her to the station,” said Jack. He poured some Scotch into a glass, handed it to his wife and said: “Now drink that, love, and let’s have an end of it. I’m getting fed-up.” He sounded fed-up.

  Dorothy obediently drank the Scotch, got unsteadily from her chair and went slowly upstairs. “Don’t let him cry,” she demanded, as she disappeared.

  “Oh you silly bitch!” he shouted after her. “When have I let him cry? Here, you hold on a minute,” he said to Stella, handing her the baby. He ran upstairs.

  Stella held the baby. This was almost for the first time, since she sensed how much another woman’s holding her child made Dorothy’s fierce new possessiveness uneasy. She looked down at the small, sleepy, red face and said softly: “Well, you’re causing a lot of trouble, aren’t you?”

  Jack shouted from upstairs: “Come up a minute, Stell.” She went up, with the baby. Dorothy was tucked up in bed, drowsy from the Scotch, the bedside light turned away from her. She looked at the baby, but Jack took it from Stella.

  “Jack says I’m a silly bitch,” said Dorothy, apologetic to Stella.

  “Well, never mind, you’ll feel different soon.”

  “I suppose so, if you say so. All right, I am going to sleep,” said Dorothy, in a stubborn, sad little voice. She turned over, away from them. In the last flare of her hysteria she said: “Why don’t you two walk to the station together? It’s a lovely night.”

  “We’re going to,” said Jack, “don’t worry.”

  She let out a weak giggle, but did not turn. Jack carefully deposited the now sleeping baby in the bed, about a foot from Dorothy. Who suddenly wriggled over until her small, defiant white back was in contact with the blanketed bundle that was her son.

  Jack raised his eyebrows at Stella: but Stella was looking at mother and baby, the nerves of her memory filling her with sweet warmth. What right had this woman, who was in possession of such delight, to torment her husband, to torment her friend, as she had been doing – what right had she to rely on their decency as she did?

  Surprised by these thoughts, she walked away downstairs, and stood at the door into the garden, her eyes shut, holding herself rigid against tears.

  She felt a warmth on her bare arm – Jack’s hand. She opened her eyes to see him bending towards her, concerned.

  “It’d serve Dorothy right if I did drag you off into the bushes…”

  “Wouldn’t have to drag me,” he said; and while the words had the measure of facetiousness the situation demanded, she felt his seriousness envelop them both in danger.

  The warmth of his hand slid across her back, and she turned towards him under its pressure. They stood together, cheeks touching, scents of skin and hair mixing with the smells of warmed grass and leaves.

  She thought: What is going to happen now will blow Dorothy and Jack and that baby sky-high; it’s the end of my marriage; I’m going to blow everything to bits. There was almost uncontrollable pleasure in it.

  She saw Dorothy, Jack, the baby, her husband, and two half-grown children, all dispersed, all spinning downwards through the sky like bits of debris after an explosion.

  Jack’s mouth was moving along her cheek towards her mouth, dissolving her whole self in delight. She saw, against closed lids, the bundled baby upstairs, and pulled back from the situation, exclaiming energetically: “Damn Dorothy, damn her, damn her, I’d like to kill her…”

  And he, exploding into reaction, said in a low furious rage: “Damn you both! I’d like to wring both your bloody necks…”

  Their faces were at a foot’s distance from each other, their eyes staring hostility. She thought that if she had not the vision of the helpless baby they would now be in each other’s arms – generating tenderness and desire like a couple of dynamos, she said to herself, trembling with dry anger.

  “I’m going to miss my train if I don’t go,” she said.

  “I’ll get your coat,” he said, and went in, leaving her defenceless against the emptiness of the garden.

  When he came out, he slid the coat around her without touching her, and said: “Come on, I’ll take you by car.” He walked away in front of her to the car, and she followed meekly over rough lawn. It really was a lovely night.

  How I Finally Lost My Heart

  Doris Lessing

  Doris Lessing (b. 1919) is a British novelist, poet, playwright, biographer and short story writer. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in British Literature and she was ranked fifth on The Times list of the ‘50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945’. Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature.

  It would be easy to say that I picked up a knife, slit open my side, took my heart out, and threw it away; but unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as that. Not that I, like everyone else, had not often wanted to do it. No, it happened differently, and not as I expected.

  It was just after I had had a lunch and a tea with two different men. My lunch partner I had lived with for (more or less) four and seven-twelfths years. When he left me for new pastures, I spent two years, or was it three, half-dead, and my heart was a stone, impossible to carry about, considering all the other things weighing on one. Then I slowly, and with difficulty, got free, because my heart cherished a thousand adhesions to my first love – though from another point of view he could be legitimately described as either my second real love (my father being the first) or my third (my brother intervening).

  As the folk song has it:

  I have loved but three men in my life,

  My father, my brother, and the man that

  took my life.

  But if one were going to look at the thing from outside, without insight, he could be seen as (perhaps, I forget) the thirteenth, but to do that means disregarding the inner emotional truth. For we all know that those affairs or entanglements one has between serious loves, though they may number dozens and stretch over years, don’t really count.

  This way of looking at things creates a number of unhappy people, for it is well known that what doesn’t really count for me might very well count for you. But there is no way of getting over this difficulty, for a serious love is the most important business in life, or nearly so. At any rate, most of us are engaged in looking for it. Even when we are in fact being very serious indeed with one person we still have an eighth of an eye cocked in case some stranger unexpectedly encountered might turn out to be even more serious. We are all entirely in agreement that we are in the right to taste, test, sip and sample a thousand people on our way to the real one. It is not too much to say that in our circles tasting and sampling is probably the second most important activity, the first being earning money. Or to put it another way, if you are serious about this thing, you go on laying everybody that offers until something clicks and you’re all set to go.

  I have digressed from an earlier point: that I regarded this man I had lunch with (we call him A) as my first love, and still do, despite the Freudians, who insist on seeing my father as A and possibly my brother as B, making my (real) first love C. And despite, also, those who might ask: What about your two husbands and all those affairs?

  What about them? I did not really love them, the way I loved A.

  I had lunch with him. Then, quite by chance, I had tea with B. When I say B, here, I mean my second serious love, not my brother, or the little boys I was in love with between the ages of five and fifteen, if we are going to take fifteen (arbitrarily) as the point of no return… which last phrase is in itself a pretty brave defiance of the secular arbiters.

  In between A and B (my count) there were a good many affairs, or samples, but they didn’t score. B and I clicked, we went
off like a bomb, though not quite as simply as A and I had clicked, because my heart was bruised, sullen, and suspicious because of A’s throwing me over. Also there were all those ligaments and adhesions binding me to A still to be loosened, one by one. However, for a time B and I got on like a house on fire, and then we came to grief. My heart was again a ton weight in my side.

  If this were a stone in my side, a stone,

  I could pluck it out and be free…

  Having lunch with A, then tea with B, two men who between them had consumed a decade of my precious years (I am not counting the test or trial affairs in between) and, it is fair to say, had balanced all the delight (plenty and intense) with misery (oh Lord, Lord) – moving from one to the other, in the course of an afternoon, conversing amiably about this and that, with meanwhile my heart giving no more than slight reminiscent tugs, the fish of memory at the end of a long slack line…

  To sum up, it was salutary.

  Particularly as that evening I was expecting to meet C, or someone who might very well turn out to be C; though I don’t want to give too much emphasis to C, the truth is I can hardly remember what he looked like, but one can’t be expected to remember the unimportant ones one has sipped or tasted in between. But after all, he might have turned out to be C, we might have clicked, and I was in that state of mind (in which we all so often are) of thinking: He might turn out to be the one. (I use a woman’s magazine phrase deliberately here, instead of saying, as I might: Perhaps it will be serious.)

  So there I was (I want to get the details and atmosphere right) standing at a window looking into a street (Great Portland Street, as a matter of fact) and thinking that while I would not dream of regretting my affairs, or experiences, with A and B (it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all), my anticipation of the heart because of spending an evening with a possible C had a certain unreality, because there was no doubt that both A and B had caused me unbelievable pain. Why, therefore, was I looking forward to C? I should rather be running away as fast as I could.