To Room Nineteen

by Doris Lessing

  Walls, faces, railings, umbrellas and pigeons’ backs …

  No, all that was no good at all, it just made things worse. What I must do is to take myself by surprise, as it were, the way I was taken by surprise over the woman and the pigeons and the sharp sounds of heels and silk wings.

  I put on my coat, held my lumpy scarfed arm across my chest, so that if anyone said: What have you done with your hand? I could say: I’ve banged my finger in the door. Then I walked down into the street.

  It wasn’t easy to go among so many people, when I was worried that they were thinking: What has that woman done to her hand? because that made it hard to forget myself. And all the time it tingled and throbbed against my fingers, reminding me.

  Now I was out I didn’t know what to do. Should I go and have lunch with someone? Or wander in the park? Or buy myself a dress? I decided to go to the Round Pond, and walk around it by myself. I was tired after four days and nights without sleep. I went down into the Underground at Oxford Circus. Midday. Crowds of people. I felt self-conscious, but of course need not have worried. I swear you could walk naked down the street in London and no one would even turn round.

  So I went down the escalator and looked at the faces coming up past me on the other side, as I always do; and wondered, as I always do, how strange it is that those people and I should meet by chance in such a way, and how odd that we would never see each other again, or, if we did, we wouldn’t know it. And I went on to the crowded platform and looked at the faces as I always do, and got into the train, which was very full, and found a seat. It wasn’t as bad as at rush hour, but all the seats were filled. I leaned back and closed my eyes, deciding to sleep a little, being so tired. I was just beginning to doze off, when I heard a woman’s voice muttering, or rather, declaiming:

  ‘A gold cigarette case, well, that’s a nice thing, isn’t it, I must say, a gold case, yes …’

  There was something about this voice which made me open my eyes: on the other side of the compartment, about eight persons away, sat a youngish woman, wearing a cheap green cloth coat, gloveless hands, flat brown shoes, and lisle stockings. She must be rather poor – a woman dressed like this is a rare sight, these days. But it was her posture that struck me. She was sitting half twisted in her seat, so that her head was turned over her left shoulder, and she was looking straight at the stomach of an elderly man next to me. But it was clear she was not seeing it: her young staring eyes were sightless, she was looking inwards.

  She was so clearly alone, in the crowded compartment, that it was not as embarrassing as it might have been. I looked around, and people were smiling, or exchanging glances, or winking, or ignoring her, according to their natures, but she was oblivious of us all.

  She suddenly aroused herself, turned so that she sat straight in her seat, and directed her voice and her gaze to the opposite seat:

  ‘Well so that’s what you think, you think that, you think that do you, well, you think I’m just going to wait at home for you, but you gave her a gold case and …’

  And with a clockwork movement of her whole thin person, she turned her narrow pale-haired head sideways over her left shoulder, and resumed her stiff empty stare at the man’s stomach. He was grinning uncomfortably. I leaned forward to look along the line of people in the row of seats I sat in, and the man opposite her, a young man, had exactly the same look of discomfort which he was determined to keep amused. So we all looked at her, the young, thin, pale woman in her private drama of misery, who was so completely unconscious of us that she spoke and thought out aloud. And again, without particular warning or reason, in between stops, so it wasn’t that she was disturbed from her dream by the train stopping at Bond Street, and then jumping forward again, she twisted her body frontways, and addressed the seat opposite her (the young man had got off, and a smart grey-curled matron had got in):

  ‘Well I know about it now, don’t I, and if you come in all smiling and pleased well then I know, don’t I, you don’t have to tell me, I know, and I’ve said to her, I’ve said, I know he gave you a gold cigarette case …’

  At which point, with the same clockwork inpulse, she stopped, or was checked, or simply ran out, and turned herself half around to stare at the stomach – the same stomach, for the middle-aged man was still there. But we stopped at Marble Arch and he got out, giving the compartment, rather than the people in it, a tolerant half-smile which said: I am sure I can trust you to realize that this unfortunate woman is stark staring mad …

  His seat remained empty. No people got in at Marble Arch, and the two people standing waiting for seats did not want to sit by her to receive her stare.

  We all sat, looking gently in front of us, pretending to ourselves and to each other that we didn’t know the poor woman was mad and that in fact we ought to be doing something about it. I even wondered what I should say: Madam, you’re mad – shall I escort you to your home? Or: Poor thing, don’t go on like that, it doesn’t do any good, you know – just leave him, that’ll bring him to his senses …

  And behold, after the interval that was regulated by her inner mechanism had elapsed, she turned back and said to the smart matron who received this statement of accusation with perfect self-command:

  ‘Yes, I know! Oh yes! And what about my shoes, what about them, a golden cigarette case is what she got, the filthy bitch, a golden case …’

  Stop. Twist. Stare. At the empty seat by her.

  Extraordinary. Because it was a frozen misery, how shall I put it? A passionless passion – we were seeing unhappiness embodied, we were looking at the essence of some private tragedy – rather, Tragedy. There was no emotion in it. She was like an actress doing Accusation, or Betrayed Love, or Infidelity, when she has only just learned her lines and is not bothering to do more than get them right.

  And whether she sat in her half-twisted position, her unblinking eyes staring at the greenish, furry, ugly, covering of the train seat, or sat straight, directing her accusation to the smart woman opposite, there was a frightening immobility about her – yes, that was why she frightened us. For it was clear that she might very well (if the inner machine ran down) stay silent, for ever, in either twisted or straight position, or at any point between them – yes, we could all imagine her, frozen perpetually in some arbitrary pose. It was as if we watched the shell of some woman going through certain predetermined motions.

  For she was simply not there. What was there, who she was, it was impossible to tell, though it was easy to imagine her thin, gentle little face breaking into a smile in total forgetfulness of what she was enacting now. She did not know she was in a train between Marble Arch and Queensway, nor that she was publicly accusing her husband or lover, nor that we were looking at her.

  And we, looking at her, felt an embarrassment and shame that was not on her account at all …

  Suddenly I felt, under the scarf and the tin foil, a lightening of my fingers, as my heart rolled loose.

  I hastily took it off my palm, in case it decided to adhere there again, and I removed the scarf, leaving balanced on my knees a perfect stylized heart, like a silver heart on a Valentine card, though of course it was three-dimensional. This heart was not so much harmless, no that isn’t the word, as artistic, but in very bad taste, as I said. I could see that the people in the train, now looking at me and the heart, and not at the poor mad-woman, were pleased with it.

  I got up, took the four or so paces to where she was, and laid the tin-foiled heart down on the seat so that it received her stare.

  For a moment she did not react, then with a groan or a mutter of relieved and entirely theatrical grief, she leaned forward, picked up the glittering heart, and clutched it in her arms, hugging it and rocking it back and forth, even laying her cheek against it, while staring over its top at her husband as if to say: Look what I’ve got, I don’t care about you and your cigarette case, I’ve got a silver heart.

  I got up, since we were at Notting Hill Gate, and, followed by the pleased c
ongratulatory nods and smiles of the people left behind, I went out on the platform, up the escalators, into the street, and along to the park.

  No heart. No heart at all. What bliss. What freedom …

  Hear that sound? That’s laughter, yes.

  That’s me laughing, yes, that’s me.

  A Man and Two Women

  Stella’s friends the Bradfords had taken a cheap cottage in Essex for the summer, and she was going down to visit them. She wanted to see them, but there was no doubt there was something of a letdown (and for them too) in the English cottage. Last summer Stella had been wandering with her husband around Italy; had seen the English couple at a café table, and found them sympathetic. They all liked each other, and the four went about for some weeks, sharing meals, hotels, trips. Back in London the friendship had not, as might have been expected, fallen off. Then Stella’s husband departed abroad, as he often did, and Stella saw Jack and Dorothy by herself. There were a great many people she might have seen, but it was the Bradfords she saw most often, two or three times a week, at their flat or hers. They were at ease with each other. Why were they? Well, for one thing they were all artists – in different ways. Stella designed wallpapers and materials; she had a name for it.

  The Bradfords were real artists. He painted, she drew. They had lived mostly out of England in cheap places around the Mediterranean. Both from the North of England, they had met at art school, married at twenty, had taken flight from England, then returned to it, needing it, then off again: and so on, for years, in the rhythm of so many of their kind, needing, hating, loving England. There had been seasons of real poverty, while they lived on pasta or bread or rice, and wine and fruit and sunshine, in Majorca, southern Spain, Italy, North Africa.

  A French critic had seen Jack’s work, and suddenly he was successful. His show in Paris, then one in London, made money; and now he charged in the hundreds where a year or so ago he charged ten or twenty guineas. This had deepened his contempt for the values of the markets. For a while Stella thought that this was the bond between the Bradfords and herself. They were so very much, as she was, of the new generation of artists (and poets and playwrights and novelists) who had one thing in common, a cool derision about the racket. They were so very unlike (they felt) the older generation with their Societies and their Lunches and their salons and their cliques: their atmosphere of connivance with the snobberies of success. Stella, too, had been successful by a fluke. Not that she did not consider herself talented; it was that others as talented were unfêted, and unbought. When she was with the Bradfords and other fellow spirits, they would talk about the racket, using each other as yardsticks or fellow consciences about how much to give in, what to give, how to use without being used, how to enjoy without becoming dependent on enjoyment.

  Of course Dorothy Bradford was not able to talk in quite the same way, since she had not yet been ‘discovered’; she had not ‘broken through’. A few people with discrimination bought her unusual delicate drawings, which had a strength that was hard to understand unless one knew Dorothy herself. But she was not at all, as Jack was, a great success. There was a strain here, in the marriage, nothing much; it was kept in check by their scorn for their arbitrary rewards of ‘the racket’. But it was there, nevertheless.

  Stella’s husband had said: ‘Well, I can understand that, it’s like me and you – you’re creative, whatever that may mean, I’m just a bloody TV journalist.’ There was no bitterness in this. He was a good journalist, and besides he sometimes got the chance to make a good small film. All the same, there was that between him and Stella, just as there was between Jack and his wife.

  After a time Stella saw something else in her kinship with the couple. It was that the Bradfords had a close bond, bred of having spent so many years together in foreign places, dependent on each other because of their poverty. It had been a real love marriage, one could see it by looking at them. It was now. And Stella’s marriage was a real marriage. She understood she enjoyed being with the Bradfords because the two couples were equal in this. Both marriages were those of strong, passionate, talented individuals; they shared a battling quality that strengthened them, not weakened them.

  The reason why it had taken Stella so long to understand this was that the Bradfords had made her think about her own marriage, which she was beginning to take for granted, sometimes even found exhausting. She had understood, through them, how lucky she was in her husband; how lucky they all were. No marital miseries; nothing of (what they saw so often in friends) one partner in a marriage victim to the other, resenting the other; no claiming of outsiders as sympathizers or allies in an unequal battle.

  There had been a plan for these four people to go off again to Italy or Spain, but then Stella’s husband departed, and Dorothy got pregnant. So there was the cottage in Essex instead, a bad second choice, but better, they all felt, to deal with a new baby on home ground, at least for the first year. Stella, telephoned by Jack (on Dorothy’s particular insistence, he said), offered and received commiserations on its being only Essex and not Majorca or Italy. She also received sympathy because her husband had been expected back this weekend, but had wired to say he wouldn’t be back for another month, probably – there was trouble in Venezuela. Stella wasn’t really forlorn; she didn’t mind living alone, since she was always supported by knowing her man would be back. Besides, if she herself were offered the chance of a month’s ‘trouble’ in Venezuela, she wouldn’t hesitate, so it wasn’t fair … fairness characterized their relationship. All the same, it was nice that she could drop down (or up) to the Bradfords, people with whom she could always be herself, neither more or less.

  She left London at midday by train, armed with food unobtainable in Essex: salamis, cheeses, spices, wine. The sun shone, but it wasn’t particularly warm. She hoped there would be heating in the cottage, July or not.

  The train was empty. The little station seemed stranded in a green nowhere. She got out, cumbered by bags full of food. A porter and a stationmaster examined, then came to succour her. She was a tallish, fair woman, rather ample; her soft hair, drawn back, escaped in tendrils, and she had great helpless-looking blue eyes. She wore a dress made in one of the materials she had designed. Enormous green leaves laid hands all over her body, and fluttered about her knees. She stood smiling, accustomed to men running to wait on her, enjoying them enjoying her. She walked with them to the barrier where Jack waited, appreciating the scene. He was a smallish man, compact, dark. He wore a blue-green summer shirt, and smoked a pipe and smiled, watching. The two men delivered her into the hands of the third, and departed, whistling, to their duties.

  Jack and Stella kissed, then pressed their cheeks together.

  ‘Food,’ he said, ‘food’, relieving her of the parcels.

  ‘What’s it like here, shopping?’

  ‘Vegetables all right, I suppose.’

  Jack was still Northern in this: he seemed brusque, to strangers; he wasn’t shy, he simply hadn’t been brought up to enjoy words. Now he put his arm briefly around Stella’s waist, and said: ‘Marvellous, Stell, marvellous.’ They walked on, pleased with each other. Stella had with Jack, her husband had with Dorothy, these moments, when they said to each other wordlessly: If I were not married to my husband, if you were not married to your wife, how delightful it would be to be married to you. These moments were not the least of the pleasures of this four-sided friendship.

  ‘Are you liking it down here?’

  ‘It’s what we bargained for.’

  There was more than his usual shortness in this, and she glanced at him to find him frowning. They were walking to the car, parked under a tree.

  ‘How’s the baby?’

  ‘Little bleeder never sleeps, he’s wearing us out, but he’s fine.’

  The baby was six weeks old. Having the baby was a definite achievement: getting it safely conceived and born had taken a couple of years. Dorothy, like most independent women, had had divided thoughts about a
baby. Besides, she was over thirty and complained she was set in her ways. All this – the difficulties, Dorothy’s hesitations – had added up to an atmosphere which Dorothy herself described as ‘like wondering if some damned horse is going to cake the fence’. Dorothy would talk, while she was pregnant, in a soft staccato voice: ‘Perhaps I don’t really want a baby at all? Perhaps I’m not fitted to be a mother? Perhaps … and if so … and how …?’

  She said: ‘Until recently Jack and I were always with people who took it for granted that getting pregnant was a disaster, and now suddenly all the people we know have young children and babysitters and … perhaps … if …’

  Jack said: ‘You’ll feel better when it’s born.’

  Once Stella had heard him say, after one of Dorothy’s long troubled dialogues with herself: ‘Now that’s enough, that’s enough, Dorothy.’ He had silenced her, taking the responsibility.

  They reached the car, got in. It was a second-hand job recently bought. ‘They’ (being the press, the enemy generally) ‘wait for us’ (being artists or writers who have made money) ‘to buy flashy cars.’ They had discussed it, decided that not to buy an expensive car if they felt like it would be allowing themselves to be bullied; but bought a second-hand one after all. Jack wasn’t going to give them so much satisfaction, apparently.

  ‘Actually we could have walked,’ he said, as they shot down a narrow lane, ‘but with these groceries, it’s just as well.’

  ‘If the baby’s giving you a tough time, there can’t be much time for cooking.’ Dorothy was a wonderful cook. But now again there was something in the air as he said: ‘Food’s definitely not too good just now. You can cook supper, Stell, we could do with a good feed.’

  Now Dorothy hated anyone in her kitchen, except, for certain specified jobs, her husband; and this was surprising.

  ‘The truth is, Dorothy’s worn out,’ he went on, and now Stella understood he was warning her.