To Room Nineteen

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Thank you,’ said Susan, knowing that Fred (if this was Fred, and not George, or Herbert or Charlie) was looking at her, not so much with curiosity, an emotion he would not own to, for professional reasons, but with a philosophical sense of what was appropriate. Having taken her money and shown her up and agreed to everything, he was clearly disapproving of her for coming here. She did not belong here at all, so his look said. (But she knew, already, how very much she did belong: the room had been waiting for her to join it.) ‘Would you have me called at five o’clock, please?’ and he nodded and went downstairs.

  It was twelve in the morning. She was free. She sat in the armchair, she simply sat, she closed her eyes and sat and let herself be alone. She was alone and no one knew where she was. When a knock came on the door she was annoyed, and prepared to show it: but it was Fred himself, it was five o’clock and he was calling her as ordered. He flicked his sharp little eyes over the room – bed, first. It was undisturbed. She might never have been in the room at all. She thanked him, said she would be returning the day after tomorrow, and left. She was back home in time to cook supper, to put the children to bed, to cook a second supper for her husband and herself later. And to welcome Sophie back from the pictures where she had gone with a friend. All these things she did cheerfully, willingly. But she was thinking all the time of the hotel room, she was longing for it with her whole being.

  Three times a week. She arrived promptly at ten, looked Fred in the eyes, gave him twenty shillings, followed him up the stairs, went into the room, and shut the door on him with gentle firmness. For Fred, disapproving of her being here at all, was quite ready to let friendship, or at least companionship, follow his disapproval, if only she would let him. But he was content to go off on her dismissing nod with the twenty shillings in his hand.

  She sat in the armchair and shut her eyes.

  What did she do in the room? Why, nothing at all. From the chair, when it had rested her, she went to the window, stretching her arms, smiling, treasuring her anonymity, to look out. She was no longer Susan Rawlings, mother of four, wife of Matthew, employer of Mrs Parkes and of Sophie Traub, with these and those relations with friends, schoolteachers, tradesmen. She no longer was mistress of the big white house and garden, owning clothes suitable for this and that activity or occasion. She was Mrs Jones, and she was alone, and she had no past and no future. Here I am, she thought, after all these years of being married and having children and playing those roles of responsibility – and I’m just the same. Yet there have been times I thought that nothing existed of me except the roles that went with being Mrs Matthew Rawlings. Yes, here I am, and if I never saw any of my family again, here I would still be … how very strange that is! And she leaned on the sill, and looked into the street, loving the men and women who passed, because she did not know them. She looked at the downtrodden buildings over the street, and at the sky, wet and dingy, or sometimes blue, and she felt she had never seen buildings or sky before. And then she went back to the chair, empty, her mind a blank. Sometimes she talked aloud, saying nothing – an exclamation, meaningless, followed by a comment about the floral pattern on the thin rug, or a stain on the green satin coverlet. For the most part, she wool-gathered – what word is there for it? – brooded, wandered, simply went dark, feeling emptiness run deliciously through her veins, like the movement of her blood.

  This room had become more her own than the house she lived in. One morning she found Fred taking her a flight higher than usual. She stopped, refusing to go up, and demanded her usual room, Number 19. ‘Well, you’ll have to wait half an hour then,’ he said. Willingly she descended to the dark disinfectant-smelling hall, and sat waiting until the two, man and woman, came down the stairs, giving her swift indifferent glances before they hurried out into the street, separating at the door. She went up to the room, her room, which they had just vacated. It was no less hers, though the windows were set wide open, and a maid was straightening the bed as she came in.

  After these days of solitude, it was both easy to play her part as mother and wife, and difficult – because it was so easy: she felt an impostor. She felt as if her shell moved here, with her family, answering to Mummy, Mother, Susan, Mrs Rawlings. She was surprised no one saw through her, that she wasn’t turned out of doors, as a fake. On the contrary, it seemed the children loved her more; Matthew and she ‘got on’ pleasantly, and Mrs Parkes was happy in her work under (for the most part, it must be confessed) Sophie Traub. At night she lay beside her husband, and they made love again, apparently just as they used to, when they were really married. But she, Susan, or the being who answered so readily and improbably to the name of Susan, was not there: she was in Fred’s Hotel, in Paddington, waiting for the easing hours of solitude to begin.

  Soon she made a new arrangement with Fred and with Sophie. It was for five days a week. As for the money, five pounds, she simply asked Matthew for it. She saw that she was not even frightened he might ask what for: he would give it to her, she knew that, and yet it was terrifying it could be so, for this close couple, these partners, had once known the destination of every shilling they must spend. He agreed to give her five pounds a week. She asked for just so much, not a penny more. He sounded indifferent about it. It was as if he were paying her, she thought: paying her off – yes, that was it. Terror came back for a moment, when she understood this, but she stilled it: things had gone too far for that. Now, every week, on Sunday nights, he gave her five pounds, turning away from her before their eyes could meet on the transaction. As for Sophie Traub, she was to be somewhere in or near the house until six at night, after which she was free. She was not to cook, or to clean, she was simply to be there. So she gardened or sewed, and asked friends in, being a person who was bound to have a lot of friends. If the children were sick, she nursed them. If teachers telephoned, she answered them sensibly. For the five daytimes in the school week, she was altogether the mistress of the house.

  One night in the bedroom, Matthew asked: ‘Susan, I don’t want to interfere – don’t think that, please – but are you sure you are well?’

  She was brushing her hair at the mirror. She made two more strokes on either side of her head, before she replied: ‘Yes, dear, I am sure I am well.’

  He was again lying on his back, his big blond head on his hands, his elbows angled up and part-concealing his face. He said: ‘Then Susan, I have to ask you this question, though you must understand, I’m not putting any sort of pressure on you.’ (Susan heard the word pressure with dismay, because this was inevitable, of course she could not go on like this.) ‘Are things going to go on like this?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, going vague and bright and idiotic again, so as to escape: ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’

  He was jerking his elbows up and down, in annoyance or in pain, and, looking at him, she saw he had got thin, even gaunt; and restless angry movements were not what she remembered of him. He said: ‘Do you want a divorce, is that it?’

  At this, Susan only with the greatest difficulty stopped herself from laughing: she could hear the bright bubbling laughter she would have emitted, had she let herself. He could only mean one thing: she had a lover, and that was why she spent her days in London, as lost to him as if she had vanished to another continent.

  Then the small panic set in again: she understood that he hoped she did have a lover, he was begging her to say so, because otherwise it would be too terrifying.

  She thought this out, as she brushed her hair, watching the fine black stuff fly up to make its little clouds of electricity, hiss, hiss, hiss. Behind her head, across the room, was a blue wall. She realized she was absorbed in watching the black hair making shapes against the blue. She should be answering him. ‘Do you want a divorce, Matthew?’

  He said: ‘That surely isn’t the point, is it?’

  ‘You brought it up, I didn’t,’ she said, brightly, suppressing meaningless tinkling laughter.

  Next day she asked Fred: ‘Have inquiri
es been made for me?’

  He hesitated, and she said: ‘I’ve been coming here a year now. I’ve made no trouble, and you’ve been paid every day. I have a right to be told.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Mrs Jones, a man did come asking.’

  ‘A man from a detective agency?’

  ‘Well, he could have been, couldn’t he?’

  ‘I was asking you … well, what did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him a Mrs Jones came every weekday from ten until five or six and stayed in Number 19 by herself.’

  ‘Describing me?’

  ‘Well, Mrs Jones, I had no alternative. Put yourself in my place.’

  ‘By rights I should deduct what that man gave you for the information.’

  He raised shocked eyes: she was not the sort of person to make jokes like this! Then he chose to laugh: a pinkish wet slit appeared across his white crinkled face: his eyes positively begged her to laugh, otherwise he might lose some money. She remained grave, looking at him.

  He stopped laughing and said: ‘You want to go up now?’ – returning to the familiarity, the comradeship, of the country where no questions are asked, on which (and he knew it) she depended completely.

  She went up to sit in her wicker chair. But it was not the same. Her husband had searched her out. (The world had searched her out.) The pressures were on her. She was here with his connivance. He might walk in at any moment, here, into Room 19. She imagined the report from the detective agency: ‘A woman calling herself Mrs Jones, fitting the description of your wife (etc., etc., etc.) stays alone all day in Room No. 19. She insists on this room, waits for it if it is engaged. As far as the proprietor knows, she receives no visitors there, male or female.’ A report something on these lines, Matthew must have received.

  Well of course he was right: things couldn’t go on like this. He had put an end to it all simply by sending the detective after her.

  She tried to shrink herself back into the shelter of the room, a snail pecked out of its shell and trying to squirm back. But the peace of the room had gone. She was trying consciously to revive it, trying to let go into the dark creative trance (or whatever it was) that she had found there. It was no use, yet she craved for it, she was as ill as a suddenly deprived addict.

  Several times she returned to the room, to look for herself there, but instead she found the unnamed spirit of restlessness, a prickling fevered hunger for movement, an irritable self-consciousness that made her brain feel as if it had coloured lights going on and off inside it. Instead of the soft dark that had been the room’s air, were now waiting for her demons that made her dash blindly about, muttering words of hate; she was impelling herself from point to point like a moth dashing itself against a windowpane, sliding to the bottom, fluttering off on broken wings, then crashing into the invisible barrier again. And again and again. Soon she was exhausted, and she told Fred that for a while she would not be needing the room, she was going on holiday. Home she went, to the big white house by the river. The middle of a weekday, and she felt guilty at returning to her own home when not expected. She stood unseen, looking in at the kitchen window. Mrs Parkes, wearing a discarded floral overall of Susan’s, was stooping to slide something into the oven. Sophie, arms folded, was leaning her back against a cupboard and laughing at some joke made by a girl not seen before by Susan – a dark foreign girl, Sophie’s visitor. In an armchair Molly, one of the twins, lay curled, sucking her thumb and watching the grownups. She must have some sickness, to be kept from school. The child’s listless face, the dark circles under her eyes, hurt Susan: Molly was looking at the three grownups working and talking in exactly the same way Susan looked at the four through the kitchen window: she was remote, shut off from them.

  But then, just as Susan imagined herself going in, picking up the little girl, and sitting in an armchair with her, stroking her probably heated forehead, Sophie did just that: she had been standing on one leg, the other knee flexed, its foot set against the wall. Now she let her foot in its ribbon-tied red shoe slide down the wall, stood solid on two feet, clapping her hands before and behind her, and sang a couple of lines in German, so that the child lifted her heavy eyes at her and began to smile. Then she walked, or rather skipped, over to the child, swung her up, and let her fall into her lap at the same moment she sat herself. She said: ‘Hopla! Hopla! Molly …’ and began stroking the dark untidy young head that Molly laid on her shoulder for comfort.

  Well … Susan blinked the tears of farewell out of her eyes, and went quietly up the house to her bedroom. There she sat looking at the river through the trees. She felt at peace, but in a way that was new to her. She had no desire to move, to talk, to do anything at all. The devils that had haunted the house, the garden, were not there; but she knew it was because her soul was in Room 19 in Fred’s Hotel; she was not really here at all. It was a sensation that should have been frightening: to sit at her own bedroom window, listening to Sophie’s rich young voice sing German nursery songs to her child, listening to Mrs Parkes clatter and move below, and to know that all this had nothing to do with her: she was already out of it.

  Later, she made herself go down and say she was home: it was unfair to be here unannounced. She took lunch with Mrs Parkes, Sophie, Sophie’s Italian friend Maria, and her daughter Molly, and felt like a visitor.

  A few days later, at bedtime, Matthew said: ‘Here’s your five pounds,’ and pushed them over to her. Yet he must have known she had not been leaving the house at all.

  She shook her head, gave it back to him, and said, in explanation, not in accusation: ‘As soon as you knew where I was, there was no point.’

  He nodded, not looking at her. He was turned away from her: thinking, she knew, how best to handle this wife who terrified him.

  He said: ‘I wasn’t trying to … it’s just that I was worried.’

  ‘Yes I know.’

  ‘I must confess that I was beginning to wonder …’

  ‘You thought I had a lover?’

  ‘Yes, I am afraid I did.’

  She knew that he wished she had. She sat wondering how to say: ‘For a year now I’ve been spending all my days in a very sordid hotel room. It’s the place where I’m happy. In fact, without it I don’t exist.’ She heard herself saying this, and understood how terrified he was that she might. So instead she said: ‘Well, perhaps you’re not far wrong.’

  Probably Matthew would think the hotel proprietor lied: he would want to think so.

  ‘Well,’ he said, and she could hear his voice spring up, so to speak, with relief: ‘In that case I must confess I’ve got a bit of an affair on myself.’

  She said, detached and interested: ‘Really? Who is she?’ and saw Matthew’s startled look because of this reaction.

  ‘It’s Phil. Phil Hunt.’

  She had known Phil Hunt well in the old unmarried days. She was thinking: No, she won’t do, she’s too neurotic and difficult. She’s never been happy yet. Sophie’s much better. Well Matthew will see that himself, as sensible as he is.

  This line of thought went on in silence, while she said aloud: ‘It’s no point telling you about mine, because you don’t know him.’

  Quick, quick, invent, she thought. Remember how you invented all that nonsense for Miss Townsend.

  She began slowly, careful not to contradict herself: ‘His name is Michael’ – (Michael What?) - ‘Michael Plant.’ (What a silly name!) ‘He’s rather like you – in looks, I mean.’ And indeed, she could imagine herself being touched by no one but Matthew himself. ‘He’s a publisher.’ (Really? Why?) ‘He’s got a wife already and two children.’

  She brought out this fantasy, proud of herself.

  Matthew said: ‘Are you two thinking of marrying?’

  She said, before she could stop herself: ‘Good God, no!’

  She realized, if Matthew wanted to marry Phil Hunt, that this was too emphatic, but apparently it was all right, for his voice sounded relieved as he said: ‘It is a bit impossi
ble to imagine oneself married to anyone else, isn’t it?’ With which he pulled her to him, so that her head lay on his shoulder. She turned her face into the dark of his flesh, and listened to the blood pounding through her ears saying: I am alone, I am alone, I am alone.

  In the morning Susan lay in bed while he dressed.

  He had been thinking things out in the night, because now he said: ‘Susan, why don’t we make a foursome?’

  Of course, she said to herself, of course he would be bound to say that. If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let’s make a foursome!

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  ‘We could all meet for lunch. I mean, it’s ridiculous, you sneaking off to filthy hotels, and me staying late at the office, and all the lies everyone has to tell.’

  What on earth did I say his name was? – she panicked, then said: ‘I think it’s a good idea, but Michael is away at the moment. When he comes back though – and I’m sure you two would like each other.’

  ‘He’s away, is he? So that’s why you’ve been …’ Her husband put his hand to the knot of his tie in a gesture of male coquetry she would not before have associated with him; and he bent to kiss her cheek with the expression that goes with the words: Oh you naughty little puss! And she felt its answering look, naughty and coy, come on to her face.

  Inside she was dissolving in horror at them both, at how far they had both sunk from honesty of emotion.

  So now she was saddled with a lover, and he had a mistress! How ordinary, how reassuring, how jolly! And now they would make a foursome of it, and go about to theatres and restaurants. After all, the Rawlingses could well afford that sort of thing, and presumably the publisher Michael Plant could afford to do himself and his mistress quite well. No, there was nothing to stop the four of them developing the most intricate relationship of civilized tolerance, all enveloped in a charming afterglow of autumnal passion. Perhaps they would all go off on holidays together? She had known people who did. Or perhaps Matthew would draw the line there? Why should he, though, if he was capable of talking about ‘foursomes’ at all?