The Temptation of Jack Orkney

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The Temptation of Jack Orkney Page 7

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit


  He knew now what to expect from Walter.

  Walter was looking furtive. Of course Jack knew that his furtiveness was not anything he would have noticed normally: this state he was in exaggerated every emotion on other people's faces into caricatures. But Walter was playing a double part, almost that of a spy (as he had with Mona of course, now he came to think of it), and Furtiveness was written large on him.

  Walter mentioned the Fast — a success — and then made a clumsy sort of transition which Jack missed, and was talking about Lourdes. Jack wondered why Lourdes? And then he laughed: it was a short laugh, of astonishment, and Walter did not notice it. Or, rather, had not expected a laugh in this place, found it discordant, and therefore discounted it, as if it had not happened. Walter was trying to find out if Jack's religious conversion — the rumour had spread that he went to church on Sundays — included a belief in miracles, such as took place, they said, at Lourdes. Jack said he had been to Lourdes once for the Daily — over some so-called miracles some years ago. Walter nodded, as if to say: That's right. He was already feeling relieved, because Jack had used the right tone. But he was still showing the anxiety of a priest who knew his beliefs to be the correct ones and was afraid of a lamb straying from the flock. He mentioned that Mona was suspected of having become a Roman Catholic. 'Good God, no,' said Jack, 'she can't have.' He sounded shocked. This was because his reaction was that she had been deceiving him, had lied. He sat silent trying to remember the exact tones of her voice, how she had looked. If she was a Catholic, could she have said she did not believe in a personal survival? But he knew nothing at all of what Catholics thought, except that they did not believe in birth control, but did believe in the Pope.

  Remembering that Walter was still there, and silent, he looked up to see him smiling with relief, the smile seemed to him extraordinary in its vulgarity, yet he knew that what he was seeing was the pleasure of a good comrade: Walter was happy that nothing was going to spoil their long friendship. The spontaneity of his reply over Mona had reassured him; now, mission accomplished, Walter was already thinking about the various obligations he had to get back to. But he stayed a little, to discuss some committee on pollution he was helping to set up.

  He talked: Jack listened, wondering if this was the right time to raise the question of 'the young'. Walter's two sons were both classic revolutionaries and they despised their father for his success, his position in the socialist world, for 'his compromise with the ruling class'. Jack was thinking that of all the people in the world it was Walter, so like himself in experience, position and — he was afraid — character, with whom he should be able to talk about his preoccupation. But he was beginning to realize that there was a difference, and it was obviously an important one, between them. Jack was more on the outskirts of politics. He was more of a freelance, but Walter was always in the thick of every political struggle, always involved with the actual details of organization. He never did anything else. And this was why he was so far from Jack's present vision of things, which saw them all — the people like them — continually planning and arranging and organizing towards great goals, but fated to see these plains fail, or become so diluted by pressures of necessity that the results resembled nothing of what had been envisaged at the start. Sitting there, looking at his old friend's forceful and energetic face, it was in a double vision. On the one hand he thought that this was the one man he knew whom he would trust to see them all through any public or private tight spot; but at the same time he wanted to howl out, in a protest of agonized laughter, that if the skies fell (as they might very well do), if the seas rolled in, if all the water became undrinkable and the air poisoned and the food so short everyone was scratching for it in the dust like animals, Walter, Bill, Mona, himself, and all those like them, would be organizing Committees, Conferences, Sit-downs, Fasts, Marches, Protests and Petitions, and writing to the authorities about the undemocratic behaviour of the police.

  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 criticizing Walter he had forgotten that he must be careful about himself: he had again, and suddenly, became 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 jaw-bone, 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 know: 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, home-made 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 automation of unlikeable 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 be 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 go up through the girls' rooms 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 a camping stove; about a foot away was a drum that had written on it: PARAFFIN. INFLAMMABLE. The flames from the stove were 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 in 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 and 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 nothing better to do'.

  Instantly Jack was on the defensive: he knew that Joseph criticized him for having been away so much when the three children were growing up. This message was 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 living-room. 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 it 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, our. 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 so.

  ‘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 it did 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 and 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 saving, in a low, shaking, emotional voice: 'I am so sick of it all. It all just goes on and on. Over and over again.'

 

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