To Room Nineteen

by Doris Lessing

  What it amounted to was that Mother’s Room, and her need for privacy, had become a valuable lesson in respect for other people’s rights. Quite soon Susan was going up to the room only because it was a lesson it was a pity to drop. Then she took sewing up there, and the children and Mrs Parkes came in and out: it had become another family room.

  She sighed, and smiled, and resigned herself – she made jokes at her own expense with Matthew over the room. That is, she did from the self she liked, she respected. But at the same time, something inside her howled with impatience, with rage … And she was frightened. One day she found herself kneeling by her bed and praying: ‘Dear God, keep it away from me, keep him away from me.’ She meant the devil, for she now thought of it, not caring if she were irrational, as some sort of demon. She imagined him, or it, as a youngish man, or perhaps a middle-aged man pretending to be young. Or a man young-looking from immaturity? At any rate, she saw the young-looking face which, when she drew closer, had dry lines about mouth and eyes. He was thinnish, meagre in build. And he had a reddish complexion, and ginger hair. That was he – a gingery, energetic man, and he wore a reddish hairy jacket, unpleasant to the touch.

  Well, one day she saw him. She was standing at the bottom of the garden, watching the river ebb past, when she raised her eyes and saw this person, or being, sitting on the white stone bench. He was looking at her, and grinning. In his hand was a long crooked stick, which he had picked off the ground, or broken off the tree above him. He was absent-mindedly, out of an absent-minded or freakist impulse of spite, using the stick to stir around in the coils of a blindworm or a grass snake (or some kind of snake-like creature: it was whitish and unhealthy to look at, unpleasant). The snake was twisting about, flinging its coils from side to side in a kind of dance of protest against the teasing prodding stick.

  Susan looked at him thinking: Who is the stranger? What is he doing in our garden? Then she recognized the man around whom her terrors had crystallized. As she did so, he vanished. She made herself walk over to the bench. A shadow from a branch lay across thin emerald grass, moving jerkily over its roughness, and she could see why she had taken it for a snake, lashing and twisting. She went back to the house thinking: Right, then, so I’ve seen him with my own eyes, so I’m not crazy after all – there is a danger because I’ve seen him. He is lurking in the garden and sometimes even in the house, and he wants to get into me and to take me over.

  She dreamed of having a room or a place, anywhere, where she could go and sit, by herself, no one knowing where she was.

  Once, near Victoria, she found herself outside a news agent that had Rooms to Let advertised. She decided to rent a room, telling no one. Sometimes she could take the train in from Richmond and sit alone in it for an hour or two. Yet how could she? A room would cost three or four pounds a week, and she earned no money, and how could she explain to Matthew that she needed such a sum? What for? It did not occur to her that she was taking it for granted she wasn’t going to tell him about the room.

  Well, it was out of the question, having a room; yet she knew she must.

  One day, when a school term was well established, and none of the children had measles or other ailments, and everything seemed in order, she did the shopping early, explained to Mrs Parkes she was meeting an old school friend, took the train to Victoria, searched until she found a small quiet hotel, and asked for a room for the day. They did not let rooms by the day, the manageress said, looking doubtful, since Susan so obviously was not the kind of woman who needed a room for unrespectable reasons. Susan made a long explanation about not being well, being unable to shop without frequent rests for lying down. At last she was allowed to rent the room provided she paid a full night’s price for it. She was taken up by the manageress and a maid, both concerned over the state of her health … which must be pretty bad if, living at Richmond (she had signed her name and address in the register), she needed a shelter at Victoria.

  The room was ordinary and anonymous, and was just what Susan needed. She put a shilling in the gas fire, and sat, eyes shut, in a dingy armchair with her back to a dingy window. She was alone. She was alone. She was alone. She could feel pressures lifting off her. First the sounds of traffic came very loud; then they seemed to vanish; she might even have slept a little. A knock on the door; it was Miss Townsend the manageress, bringing her a cup of tea with her own hands, so concerned was she over Susan’s long silence and possible illness.

  Miss Townsend was a lonely woman of fifty, running this hotel with all the rectitude expected of her, and she sensed in Susan the possibility of understanding companionship. She stayed to talk. Susan found herself in the middle of a fantastic story about her illness, which got more and more improbable as she tried to make it tally with the large house at Richmond, well-off husband, and four children. Suppose she said instead: Miss Townsend, I’m here in your hotel because I need to be alone for a few hours, above all alone and with no one knowing where I am. She said it mentally, and saw, mentally, the look that would inevitably come on Miss Townsend’s elderly maiden’s face. ‘Miss Townsend, my four children and my husband are driving me insane, do you understand that? Yes, I can see from the gleam of hysteria in your eyes that comes from loneliness controlled but only just contained that I’ve got everything in the world you’ve ever longed for. Well, Miss Townsend, I don’t want any of it. You can have it, Miss Townsend. I wish I was absolutely alone in the world, like you. Miss Townsend, I’m besieged by seven devils, Miss Townsend, Miss Townsend, let me stay here in your hotel where the devil can’t get me …’ Instead of saying all this, she described her anaemia, agreed to try Miss Townsend’s remedy for it, which was raw liver, minced, between wholemeal bread, and said yes, perhaps it would be better if she stayed at home and let a friend do shopping for her. She paid her bill and left the hotel, defeated.

  At home Mrs Parkes said she didn’t really like it, no, not really, when Mrs Rawlings was away from nine in the morning until five. The teacher had telephoned from school to say Joan’s teeth were paining her, and she hadn’t known what to say; and what was she to make for the children’s tea, Mrs Rawlings hadn’t said.

  All this was nonsense, of course. Mrs Parkes’s complaint was that Susan had withdrawn herself spiritually, leaving the burden of the big house on her.

  Susan looked back at her day of ‘freedom’ which had resulted in her becoming a friend to the lonely Miss Townsend, and in Mrs Parkes’s remonstrances. Yet she remembered the short blissful hour of being alone, really alone. She was determined to arrange her life, no matter what it cost, so that she could have that solitude more often. An absolute solitude, where no one knew her or cared about her.

  But how? She thought of saying to her old employer: I want you to back me up in a story with Matthew that I am doing part-time work for you. The truth is that … but she would have to tell him a lie too, and which lie? She could not say: I want to sit by myself three or four times a week in a rented room. And besides, he knew Matthew, and she could not really ask him to tell lies on her behalf, apart from his being bound to think it meant a lover.

  Suppose she really took a part-time job, which she could get through fast and efficiently, leaving time for herself. What job? Addressing envelopes? Canvassing?

  And there was Mrs Parkes, working widow, who knew exactly what she was prepared to give to the house, who knew by instinct when her mistress withdrew in spirit from her responsibilities. Mrs Parkes was one of the servers of this world, but she needed someone to serve. She had to have Mrs Rawlings, her madam, at the top of the house or in the garden, so that she could come and get support from her: ‘Yes, the bread’s not what it was when I was a girl … Yes, Harry’s got a wonderful appetite, I wonder where he puts it all … Yes, it’s lucky the twins are so much of a size, they can wear each other’s shoes, that’s a saving in these hard times … Yes, the cherry jam from Switzerland is not a patch on the jam from Poland, and three times the price …’ And so on. That sort of talk
Mrs Parkes must have, every day, or she would leave, not knowing herself why she left.

  Susan Rawlings, thinking these thoughts, found that she was prowling through the great thicketed garden like a wild cat: she was walking up the stairs, down the stairs, through the rooms, into the garden, along the brown running river, back, up through the house, down again … It was a wonder Mrs Parkes did not think it strange. But on the contrary, Mrs Rawlings could do what she liked, she could stand on her head if she wanted, provided she was here. Susan Rawlings prowled and muttered through her house, hating Mrs Parkes, hating poor Miss Townsend, dreaming of her hour of solitude in the dingy respectability of Miss Townsend’s hotel edroom, and she knew quite well she was mad. Yes, she was mad.

  She said to Matthew that she must have a holiday. Matthew agreed with her. This was not as things had been once – how they had talked in each other’s arms in the marriage bed. He had, she knew, diagnosed her finally as unreasonable. She had become someone outside himself that he had to manage. They were living side by side in this house like two tolerably friendly strangers.

  Having told Mrs Parkes, or rather, asked for her permission, she went off on a walking holiday in Wales. She chose the remotest place she knew of. Every morning the children telephoned her before they went off to school, to encourage and support her, just as they had over Mother’s Room. Every evening she telephoned them, spoke to each child in turn, and then to Matthew. Mrs Parkes, given permission to telephone for insructions or advice, did so every day at lunchtime. When, as happened three times, Mrs Rawlings was out on the mountainside, Mrs Parkes asked that she should ring back at such and such a time, for she would not be happy in what she was doing without Mrs Rawlings’s blessing.

  Susan prowled over wild country with the telephone wire holding her to her duty like a leash. The next time she must telephone, or wait to be telephoned, nailed her to her cross. The mountains themselves seemed trammelled by her unfreedom. Everywhere on the mountains, where she met no one at all, from breakfast time to dusk, except sheep, or a shepherd, she came face to face with her own craziness which might attack her in the broadest valleys, so that they seemed too small; or on a mountain-top from which she could see a hundred other mountains and valleys, so that they seemed too low, too small, with the sky pressing down too close. She would stand gazing at a hillside brilliant with ferns and bracken, jewelled with running water, and see nothing but her devil, who lifted inhuman eyes at her from where he leaned negligently on a rock, switching at his ugly yellow boots with a leafy twig.

  She returned to her home and family, with the Welsh emptiness at the back of her mind like a promise of freedom.

  She told her husband she wanted to have an au pair girl.

  They were in their bedroom, it was late at night, the children slept. He sat, shirted and slippered, in a chair by the window, looking out. She sat brushing her hair and watching him in the mirror. A time-hallowed scene in the connubial bedroom. He said nothing, while she heard the arguments coming into his mind, only to be rejected because every one was reasonable.

  ‘It seems strange to get one now, after all, the children are in school most of the day. Surely the time for you to have help was when you were stuck with them day and night. Why don’t you ask Mrs Parkes to cook for you? She’s even offered to – I can understand if you are tired of cooking for six people. But you know that an au pair girl means all kinds of problems, it’s not like having an ordinary char in during the day …’

  Finally he said carefully: ‘Are you thinking of going back to work?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, not really.’ She made herself sound vague, rather stupid. She went on brushing her black hair and peering at herself so as to be oblivious of the short uneasy glances her Matthew kept giving her. ‘Do you think we can’t afford it?’ she went on vaguely, not at all the old efficient Susan who knew exactly what they could afford.

  ‘It’s not that,’ he said, looking out of the window at dark trees, so as not to look at her. Meanwhile she examined a round, candid, pleasant face with clear dark brows and clear grey eyes. A sensible face. She brushed thick healthy black hair and thought: Yet that’s the reflection of a madwoman. How very strange! Much more to the point if what looked back at me was the gingery green-eyed demon with his dry meagre smile … Why wasn’t Matthew agreeing? After all, what else could he do? She was breaking her part of the bargain and there was no way of forcing her to keep it: that her spirit, her soul, should live in this house, so that the people in it could grow like plants in water, and Mrs Parkes remain content in their service. In return for this, he would be a good loving husband, and responsible towards the children. Well, nothing like this had been true of either of them for a long time. He did his duty, perfunctorily; she did not even pretend to do hers. And he had become like other husbands, with his real life in his work and the people he met there, and very likely a serious affair. All this was her fault.

  At last he drew heavy curtains, blotting out the trees, and turned to force her attention: ‘Susan, are you really sure we need a girl?’ But she would not meet his appeal at all. She was running the brush over her hair again and again, lifting fine black clouds in a small hiss of electricity. She was peering in and smiling as if she were amused at the clinging hissing hair that followed the brush.

  ‘Yes, I think it would be a good idea on the whole,’ she said, with the cunning of a madwoman evading the real point.

  In the mirror she could see Matthew lying on his back, his hands behind his head, staring upwards, his face sad and hard. She felt her heart (the old heart of Susan Rawlings) soften and call out to him. But she set it to be indifferent.

  He said: ‘Susan, the children?’ It was an appeal that almost reached her. He opened his arms, lifting them from where they had lain by his sides, palms up, empty. She had only to run across and fling herself into them, on to his hard, warm chest, and melt into herself, into Susan. But she could not. She would not see his lifted arms. She said vaguely: ‘Well, surely it’ll be even better for them? We’ll get a French or a German girl and they’ll learn the language.’

  In the dark she lay beside him, feeling frozen, a stranger. She felt as if Susan had been spirited away. She disliked very much the woman who lay here, cold and indifferent beside a suffering man, but she could not change her.

  Next morning she set about getting a girl, and very soon came Sophie Traub from Hamburg, a girl of twenty, laughing, healthy, blue-eyed, intending to learn English. Indeed, she already spoke a good deal. In return for a room – ‘Mother’s Room’ – and her food, she undertook to do some light cooking, and to be with the children when Mrs Rawlings asked. She was an intelligent girl and understood perfectly what was needed. Susan said: ‘I go off sometimes, for the morning or for the day – well, sometimes the children run home from school, or they ring up, or a teacher rings up. I should be here, really. And there’s the daily woman …’ And Sophie laughed her deep fruity Fräulein’s laugh, showed her fine white teeth and her dimples, and said: ‘You want some person to play mistress of the house sometimes, not so?’

  ‘Yes, that is just so,’ said Susan, a bit dry, despite herself, thinking in secret fear how easy it was, how much nearer to the end she was than she thought. Healthy Fräulein Traub’s instant understanding of their position proved this to be true.

  The au pair girl, because of her own common sense, or (as Susan said to herself with her new inward shudder) because she had been chosen so well by Susan, was a success with everyone, the children liking her, Mrs Parkes forgetting almost at once that she was German, and Matthew finding her ‘nice to have around the house’. For he was now taking things as they came, from the surface of life, withdrawn both as a husband and a father from the household.

  One day Susan saw how Sophie and Mrs Parkes were talking and laughing in the kitchen, and she announced that she would be away until teatime. She knew exactly where to go and what she must look for. She took the District Line to South Kensington, change
d to the Circle, got off at Paddington, and walked around looking at the smaller hotels until she was satisfied with one which had FRED’S HOTEL painted on windowpanes that needed cleaning. The façade was a faded shiny yellow, like unhealthy skin. A door at the end of the passage said she must knock; she did, and Fred appeared. He was not at all attractive, not in any way, being fattish, and rundown, and wearing a tasteless striped suit. He had small sharp eyes in a white creased face, and was quite prepared to let Mrs Jones (she chose the farcical name deliberately, staring him out) have a room three days a week from ten until six. Provided of course that she paid in advance each time she came? Susan produced fifteen shillings (no price had been set by him) and held it out, still fixing him with a bold unblinking challenge she had not known until then she could use at will. Looking at her still, he took up a ten-shilling note from her palm between thumb and forefinger, fingered it; then shuffled up two half-crowns, held out his own palm with these bits of money displayed thereon, and let his gaze lower broodingly at them. They were standing in the passage, a red-shaded light above, bare boards beneath, and a strong smell of floor polish rising about them. He shot his gaze up at her over the still-extended palm, and smiled as if to say: What do you take me for? ‘I shan’t,’ said Susan, ‘be using this room for the purposes of making money.’ He still waited. She added another five shillings, at which he nodded and said: ‘You pay, and I ask no questions.’ ‘Good,’ said Susan. He now went past her to the stairs, and there waited a moment: the light from the street door being in her eyes, she lost sight of him momentarily. Then she saw a sober-suited, white-faced, white-balding little man trotting up the stairs like a waiter, and she went after him. They proceeded in utter silence up the stairs of this house where no questions were asked – Fred’s Hotel, which could afford the freedom for its visitors that poor Miss Townsend’s hotel could not. The room was hideous. It had a single window, with thin green brocade curtains, a three-quarter bed that had a cheap green satin bedspread on it, a fireplace with a gas fire and a shilling meter by it, a chest of drawers, and a green wicker armchair.