The Temptation of Jack Orkney

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  Besides, Jack was shocked: to hear these sentiments 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 churchgoer. Petersbank 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 thin, 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 realized 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 hot 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 daughter', 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.

  'Grandad'' she said. 'Grandad! It's me!'

  Silence. Then it came home to them that she had called up Lazarus. They heard the old man's voice, quite as they remembered it: 'It's you, is it? It is little Ann?'

  'Yes, Grandad, it's Ann.'

  They crowded forward, to see over her shoulder. They saw their father, smiling normally. He looked like a tired old man, that was all. His eyes, surrounded by the puffy bruises, had light in them.

  ‘Who are these people?' he asked. ‘Who are all these tall people?'

  The three retreated, leaving the door open.

  Silence from the bedroom, then singing. Ann was singing is a small clear voice: All things bright and beautiful.'

  Jack looked at Cedric. Ellen looked at Cedric. He deprecated: 'Yes, I am afraid that she is. That's the bond, you see.'

  'Oh,' said Ellen, 'I see, that explains it.'

  The singing went on:

  All things bright and beautiful,

  All creatures great and small

  All things wise and wonderful,

  The Lord God made them all.

  The singing went on, verse after verse like a lullaby.

  'She came to stay with him,' said Cedric. ‘At Easter, I think it was. She slept here, on the floor.'

  Jack said: 'My girls are religious. But not my son of course.'

  They looked blankly sympathetic: it occurred to Jack that his son's fame was after all circumscribed to a pretty small circle.

  ‘He takes after me,' said Jack.

  ‘Ah,' said Cedric.

  ‘A lot of them are religious,' said Ellen, brisk.

  'It's the kind of religion that sticks in one's craw,' said Jack.

  ‘Simple faith and Celtic crosses.'

  ‘I agree,' said Cedric' Pretty low-level stuff.'

  'Does,' the level matter?' asked Ellen. 'Surely c'est le premier pas quicoute?'

  At which Jack looked at his sister in a disbelief that was meant to be noticed. Cedric, however, did not seem surprised: of course, he saw Ellen more often. He said mildly: 'I don't agree. One wouldn't mind if they went on to something a bit more elevated. It's this servants' hall village green mother's meeting sort of thing. Your spend a fortune trying to educate them decently and then it ends up in... My eldest was a Jesus freak for a few months, for example. After Winchester, Balliol, the lot.'

  What is a Jesus freak?' inquired Ellen.

  What is sounds like.'

  Normally Jack would have cut out emotionally and mentally at the words 'servants' hall', but he was still with them. He said: What gets me is that they spout it all out, so pat and pretty, you know, and you get the feeling it might be anything, anything they had picked up or lay to hand — pour epater les bourgeois, you know.'

  At this he had to think that the other two must be thinking, but were too polite to say, that his own socialism, a degree or two off full communism when he was in his teens, had had no deeper cause. This unspoken comment brought the conversation to a stop.

  The singing had stopped too. It was getting dark.

  'Well, ' said Ellen, 'I tell you what I'm going to do, I am going to have a bath and then dinner and then a good night's sleep. I think Ann is meeting Father's requirements better than we could.'

  'Yes,' said Cedric.

&nbs
p; He went to the door, and communicated this news to his daughter, who said she would be fine, she would be super, she would stay with her grandad, and if she got tired she could sleep on the floor.

  Over the dinner table at the hotel, it was a reunion of people who had not met for a long time. They drank some wine and they were sentimental.

  But the little time of warmth died with the coffee, served in the hall, which let in draughts from the street every time somebody came in.

  Jack said: 'I'll turn in, I didn't sleep last night.' 'Nor I.' 'Nor I.'

  They nodded at each other; to kiss would have been exaggerated. Jack went upstairs, while Cedric and Ellen went to telephone their families.

  In the bedroom he stood by the window and watched how the light filled the lime outside. Breaths of tree-air came to his face. He was full of variegated emotions, none, he was afraid, to do with his father: they were about his brother and his sister, his childhood, that past of his which everything that happened to him these days seemed to evoke, seemed to present to him, sharp, clear, and for the most part painful: he did not feel he could sleep, he was over-stimulated. He would lie on his bed for a rest. Waking much later, to a silence that said the night had deepened all around him, with the heaviness of everybody's sleeping, he started up into a welter of feeling that he could not face, and so burrowed back into sleep again, there to be met by — but it was hard to say what.

  Terror was not the word. Nor fear. Yet there were no other words that he knew for the state he found himself in. It was more like a state of acute attention, as if his whole being — memory, body, present and past chemistries — had been assaulted by a warning, so that he had to attend to it. He was standing, as it were, at the alert, listening to something which said: Time is passing, be quick, listen, attend.

  It was the knowledge of passing time that was associated with the terror, so that he found himself standing upright in the dark room, crying out: 'Oh, no, no, I understand, I am sorry, I...' He was whimpering like a puppy. The dark was solid around him, and he didn't know where he was. He believed himself to be in a grave, and he rushed to the window, throwing it open as if he were heaving a weight off himself. The window was hard to open. At last he forced it, leaning out to let the tree-air come to his face, but it was not air that came in, but a stench, and this smell was confirmation of a failure which had taken place long ago, in some choice of his, that he had now forgotten. The feeling of urgency woke him: he was lying on his bed. Now he really did shoot into the centre of the room, while the smell that had been the air of the dream was fading around him. He was terrified. But that was not the word... he feared that the terror that the terror would fade, he would forget what he had dreamed; the knowledge that there was something that had to be done, done soon, would fade, and he would forget even that he had dreamed.

  What had he dreamed? Something of immense importance.

  But as he stood there, with the feeling of urgency draining away and his daytime self coming back, even while he knew, as powerfully as he had ever known anything, that the dream was the most important statement ever made to him, the other half of him was asserting old patterns of thought, which said that to dream was neurotic and to think of death morbid.

  He turned on the light, out of habit, a child chasing away night-fears, and then at once switched it off again, since the light was doing its job too well: the dream was dwindling into a small feeling that remarked in a tiny nagging voice that he should be attending to something. And Jack was chasing after the dream: No, no, don't go...

  But the feeling of the dream had gone, and he was standing near the window, telling himself — but it was an intellectual statement now, without force — that he had had a warning. A warning? Was it that? By whom? To whom? He must do something.. .but what? He had been terrified of dying: he had been forced to be afraid of that. For the first time in his life he had been made to feel the fear of death. He knew what this is what he would feel when he was in his fathers position, lying propped on pillows, with people around him waiting for him to die. (If the state of the world would allow his death such a degree of civilization!)

  All his life he had said lightly: Oh, death, I'm not afraid of death, it will be like a candle going out, that's all. One these occasions when, just like his brother Cedric, he checked up on himself for internal weakness, he had said to himself: I shall die, just like a cat or a dog, and too bad, when I die, that's that. He had known the fear of fear of course: he had been a soldier in two wars. He had known what it was to rehearse in his mind all the possible deaths that were available to him, removing pain and horror by making them familiar, and choosing suitable ways of responding — words, postures, silences, stoicisms — that would be a credit to him, to humanity. He knew very well the thought that to be hit over that head like an ox, stunned before the throat was cut, was the highest that he could hope for: annihilation was what he had elected.

  But his dream had been horror of annihilation, the threat of nothingness... it already seemed far away. He stretched his arms up behind his head, feeling the strength of his body. His body, that was made of fragments of his mother and his father, and of their mothers and their fathers, and shared with little Ann, with his daughters, and of course with his son — exactly like him, his copy. Yes, his, his body, strong and pulsing with energy — he pushed away the warning from the dream, and switched on the light again, feeling that that was over. It was one in the morning, hardly the hour, in an English country hotel, to ask for tea, for coffee. He knew he would not dare to lie again on that bed, so he went down, to let himself out. He was going to his father.

  Ann was wrapped in blankets, lying on the floor of the living-room. He knelt by her and gazed at the young face, the perfect eyelids that sealed her eyes shut like a baby's, incisive but delicate, shining, whole.

  He sat on his father's bed where Ann had sat, and saw that the old man was slipping away. Jack could not have said why he knew, but he did know the death would be this day: it occurred to him that if he had not had that dream, he would not have known; he would not have been equipped to know, without the dream.

  He walked the rest of the night away, standing to watch the bulk of the old church dwindling down under a sky lightening with dawn. When the birds began, he returned to the hotel bathed and with confidence work his sister and brother, saying that yes, they could have breakfast but should not take too much time over it.

  At eight-thirty they arrived to find Ann again crouched up on the bed near the old man, crooning to him bits of hymn, old tunes, nursery rhymes. He died without opening his eyes again.

  Cedric said he would deal with all the arrangements, and that he would notify them of the funeral, which would probably be on Monday. The three children of the old man separated in good feeling and with kisses saying that they really ought to see more of each other. And Jack said to Ann that she must come and visit. She said yes, it would be super, she could see Elizabeth and Carrie again, how about nest week-end? There was to be Pray-in for Bangladesh.

  Jack returned to his home, or rather to his wife. She was out. He suppressed grievance that there was no note from her: after all, he had not telephoned. She was at another class, he supposed.

  He went to see if anybody was in the girls' flat. Carrie and Elizabeth had made rooms for themselves on the top floor, and paid rent for them. They both had good jobs. There was an attic room used occasionally by Joseph.

  Hearing sounds, he knocked, with a sense of intruding, and was bidden to come in by Carrie, who seemed in conflict at the sight of him. This was because she, like the others, had been waiting for his coming, waiting for the news of the death. She had prepared the appropriate responses, but had just finished cooking a meal, and was putting dishes on to the table. A young man whose face he did not know was coming towards the table, ready to eat.

  Carrie was flushed, her long dark hair fell about, and she was wearing something like a white sack, bordered with deep white lace.

  'My fathe
r died,' he said.

  'Oh, poor you,' said Carrie.

  'I don't know,' said Jack.

  'This is Bob,' said Carrie. 'My father. Dad, would you like to eat with us? It is a business lunch, actually.'

  'No, no,' said Jack. 'I'll see you later.' She called after him:

  'Dad, Dad, I'm sorry about Grandad.'

  'Oh, he was due to go,' Jack called back.

  He cut himself bread and cheese, and rang Walter's office. Walter was back from Dublin, but had to fly to Glasgow that afternoon: he was to appear on television in a debate on the Common Market. He would be back by midday Saturday: the Twenty-Four-Hour Fast would start at two o'clock Saturday. Thirty people were expected to take part. It was a good thing Jack was back: he could take over again.

  But what was there to be done?

  Nothing much really; he should keep a tag on the names. Some might decide to drop out again. Considering the scale of the horror at that moment taking place in India, the mass misery, it would be a surprisingly small turn-out — he was sorry, he had to leave, a car was waiting.

  It is normal to feel, on returning to the place one lives in, after having been away, that one has not left at all: this is not what Jack was feeling now. Whether it was because he was so tired, or because he was more upset by his father's death than he knew, he felt at a distance from his commonplace self, and particularly at a distance from the Jack Orkney who knew so well how to organize a sit-down, or a march, or how to produce such occasions properly for the Press or television.

  Walter's contrasting the numbers of the people involved in the Bangladesh tragedy with the numbers who were prepared not to eat, publicly, for twenty-four hours in London had struck him as bathos, as absurdity, but he knew that normally that was how he would be reacting himself.

  Now he tried to restore himself by summoning well-tried thoughts. Every time the radio or television was turned on, every time you saw a newspaper, the figure nine million was used, with the information that these refugees had no future, or none of a normal kind. (India's short, sharp, efficient war that reprieved these same nine million was of course months in the future.) But there was nothing to be done; the catastrophe had the same feeling as the last, which had been Nigeria: a large number of people would die of starvation or would be murdered, but there was no power strong enough to stop this.