The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

  Lil said to Roz she was so happy it made her afraid. ‘How could anything possibly be as wonderful?’ she whispered, afraid to be overheard – by whom? No one was anywhere near. What she meant was, and Roz knew she did, that such an intense happiness must have its punishment. Roz grew loud and jokey and said that this was a love that dare not speak its name, and sang, ‘I love you, yes I do, I love you, it’s a sin to tell a lie …’

  ‘Oh, Roz,’ said Lil, ‘sometimes I get so afraid.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Roz. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll soon get bored with the old women and go after girls their own age.’

  Time passed.

  Ian went to college and learned business and money and computers, and worked in the sports firms, helping Lil: soon he would take his father’s place. Tom decided to go into theatre management. The best course in the whole country was in his father’s university, and it seemed obvious that there was where he should go. Harold wrote and rang to say that there was plenty of room in the house he now shared with his new wife, his new daughter. Harold and Roz had divorced, without acrimony. But Tom said he would stay here, this town was his home, he didn’t want to go north. There was a good enough course right here, and besides, his mother was an education in herself. Harold actually made the trip to argue with his son, planning to say that Tom’s not wanting to leave home was a sign of his becoming a real mummy’s boy, but when he actually confronted Tom, this self-possessed and decided young man, much older than his real age, he could not bring out the evidently unjust accusation. While Harold was staying, several days, Ian had to stay home, and Tom too, in his own house, and none of the four liked this. Harold was conscious they wanted him to leave; he was not wanted. He was uneasy, he was uncomfortable, and said to Roz that surely the two boys were too old to be so often with the older women. ‘Well, we haven’t got them on leashes,’ said Roz. ‘They’re free to come and go.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Harold, in the end, defeated. And he went back to his new family.

  Tom enrolled for theatre management, stage management, stage lighting, costume design, the history of the theatre. The course would take three years.

  ‘We’re all working like dogs,’ said Roz, loudly to Harold on the telephone. ‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about.’

  ‘You should get married again,’ said Roz’s ex-husband.

  ‘Well, if you couldn’t stand me, then who could?’ demanded Roz.

  ‘Oh, Roz, it’s just that I am an old-fashioned family man. And you must admit you don’t exactly fit that bill.’

  ‘Look. You ditched me. You’ve got yourself your ideal wife. Now, leave me alone. Get out of my life, Harold.’

  ‘I hope you don’t really mean that.’

  Meanwhile, Saul Butler courted Lil.

  It became a bit of a joke for all of them, Saul too. He would arrive with flowers and sweets, magazines, a poster, when he had seen Lil go into Roz’s, and call out, ‘Here comes old faithful.’ The women made a play of it all, Roz sometimes pretending the flowers were for her. He also visited Lil in her house, leaving at once if Tom were there, or Ian.

  ‘No,’ said Lil, ‘I’m sorry, Saul. I just don’t see myself married again.’

  ‘But you’re getting older, Lil. You’re getting on. And here is old faithful. You’ll be glad of him one day.’ Or he said to Roz, ‘Lil’ll be glad of a man about the place, one of these days.’

  One day the boys, or young men, were readying themselves to go out to the big ocean for surfing, when Saul arrived, with flowers for both women. ‘Now, you two, sit down,’ he said. And the women, smiling, sat and waited.

  The boys on the verandah over the sea were collecting surfboards, towels, goggles. ‘Hi, Saul,’ said Tom. A long pause before Ian’s, ‘Hello, Saul.’ That meant that Tom had nudged Ian into the greeting.

  Ian resented and feared Saul. He had said to Roz, ‘He wants to take Lil away from us.’ ‘You mean, from you.’ ‘Yes. And he wants to get me too. A ready-made son. Why doesn’t he make his own kids?’

  ‘I thought I had got you,’ said Roz.

  At which Ian leaped at her, or on her, demonstrating who had got whom.

  ‘Charming,’ said Roz.

  ‘And Saul can go and screw himself,’ had said Ian.

  Saul waited until the two had gone off down the path to the sea, and said, ‘Now, listen. I want to put it to you both. I want to get married again. As far as I’m concerned, Lil, you’re the one. But you’ve got to decide.’

  ‘It’s no good,’ said Roz, and Lil only shrugged. ‘We can see how it must look. You’re just about as good a bargain as any women look for.’

  ‘And you’re talking for Lil, again.’

  ‘She’s often enough spoken for herself.’

  ‘But you’d both do better with a bloke,’ he said. ‘The two of you, without men, and the two lads. It’s all too much of a good thing.’

  A moment of shock. What was he saying? Implying?

  But he was going on. ‘You are two handsome girls,’ said this gallant suitor. ‘You’re both so …’ and then he seemed to freeze, his face showed he was struggling with emotions, violent ones, and then it set hard. He muttered, ‘Oh, my God …’ he stared at them, Lil to Roz and back again. ‘My God,’ he said again. ‘You must think me a bloody fool.’ His voice was toneless: the shock had gone deep.

  ‘I’m an idiot,’ he said. ‘So, that’s it.’

  ‘What?’ said Lil. ‘What are you talking about?’ Her voice was timid, because of what he might be talking about. Roz kicked her under the table. Lil actually leaned over to rub her ankle, still staring at Saul.

  ‘A fool,’ he said. ‘You two must have been having a good laugh at my expense.’ He got up and blundered out. He was hardly able to get across the street to his own house.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Lil. She was about to go after him, but Roz said, ‘Stop. It’s a good thing, don’t you see?’

  ‘And now it’s going to get around that we are lezzies,’ said Lil.

  ‘So what? Probably it wouldn’t be the first time. After all, when you think how people talk.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Lil.

  ‘Let them say it. The more the better. It keeps us all safe.’

  Soon they all went to Saul’s wedding with a handsome young woman who looked like Lil.

  The two sons were pleased. But the women said to each other, ‘We’re neither of us likely to get as good a deal as Saul again.’ That was Lil.

  ‘No,’ agreed Roz.

  ‘And what are we going to do when the boys get tired of us old women?’

  ‘I shall cry my eyes out. I shall go into a decline.’

  ‘We shall grow old gracefully,’ said Lil.

  ‘Like hell,’ said Roz. ‘I shall fight every inch of the way’

  Not old women yet, nor anywhere near it. Over forty, though, and the boys were definitely not boys, and their time of wild beauty had gone. You’d not think now, seeing the two strong, confident, handsome young men, that once they had drawn eyes struck as much by awe as by lust or love. And the two women, one day reminding themselves how their two had been like young gods, rummaged in old photographs, and could find nothing of what they knew had been there: just as, looking at their old photographs, they saw pretty girls, nothing more.

  Ian was already working with his mother in the management of the chain of sports shops, and was an up-and-coming prominent citizen. Harder to make a mark in the theatre: Tom was still working in the foothills when Ian was already near the top. A new position for Tom, who had always been first, Ian looking up to him.

  But he persevered. He worked. And as always he was charming with Lil, and as often in her bed as he could, considering the long and erratic hours of the theatre.

  ‘There you are,’ said Lil to Roz. ‘It’s a beginning. He’s getting tired of me.’

  But Ian showed no signs of relinquishing Roz, on the contrary. He was attentive, demanding, possessive, a
nd when one day he saw her lying on her pillows, love-making just concluded, smoothing down loose ageing skin over her forearms, he let out a cry, clasped her, and shouted, ‘No, don’t, don’t, don’t even think of it. I won’t let you grow old.’

  ‘Well,’ said Roz, ‘it is going to happen, for all that.’

  ‘No.’ And he wept, just as he had done when he was still the frightened abandoned boy in her arms. ‘No, Roz, please, I love you.’

  ‘So I mustn’t get old, is that it, Ian? I’m not allowed to? Mad, the boy is mad,’ said Roz, addressing invisible listeners, as we do when sanity does not seem to have ears.

  And alone, she felt uneasiness, and, indeed, awe. It was mad, his demand on her. It really did seem that he had refused to think she might grow old. Mad! But perhaps lunacy is one of the great invisible wheels that keep our world turning.

  Meanwhile Tom’s father had not given up his aim, to rescue Tom. He made no bones about it. ‘I’m going to rescue you from those femmes fatales,’ he said on the telephone. ‘You get up here and let your old father take you in hand.’

  ‘Harold is going to rescue me from you,’ said Tom to his mother, on his way to Lil’s bed. ‘You’re a bad influence.’

  ‘A bit late,’ said Roz.

  Tom spent a fortnight in the university town. In the evenings a short walk took him out into the hot sandy scrub where hawks wheeled and watched. He became friends with Molly, Roz’s successor, and with his half-sister, aged eight, and a new baby.

  It was a boisterous child-centred house, but Tom told Ian he found it restful.

  ‘Nice to get to know you, at last,’ said Molly.

  ‘And now,’ said Harold, ‘don’t leave it so long.’

  Tom didn’t. He accepted an offer to direct West Side Story in the university theatre, and said he would stay in his father’s house.

  As always, the young women clustered and clung. ‘Time you were married, your father thinks,’ said Molly.

  ‘Oh, does he?’ said Tom. ‘I’ll marry in my own good time.’

  He was in his late twenties. His classmates, his contemporaries, were married or had ‘partners’.

  There was a girl he did like, perhaps because of her difference from Lil and from Roz. She was a little dark-haired, ruddy-faced girl, pretty enough, and she flirted with him in a way that made no claims on him. For here, so far from home, from his mother and from Lil, he understood how many claims and ties bound him there. He admired his mother, even if she exasperated him, and he loved Lil. He could not imagine himself in bed with anyone else. But they bound him, oh, yes, they did, and Ian, too, a brother in reality if not in fact. Down there – so he apostrophised his city, his home, so much part of the sea that here, when he heard wind in the bushes it was the waves he heard. ‘Down there, I’m not free.’

  Up here, he was. He decided to accept work on another production. That meant another three months ‘up here’. By now it was accepted that he and Mary Lloyd were a unit, ‘an item’. Tom was passive, hearing this characterisation of him and Mary. He neither said yes, nor did he say no, he only laughed. But it was Mary who went with him to the cinema or who came home with him to his father for special meals.

  ‘You could do a lot worse,’ said Harold to his son.

  ‘But I’m not doing anything, as far as I can see,’ said Tom.

  ‘Is that so? I don’t think she sees it like that.’

  Later Harold said to Tom, ‘Mary asked me if you’re queer?’

  ‘Gay?’ said Tom. ‘Not as far as I know’

  It was breakfast time, the family ate at table, the girl watching what went on, as little girls do, the infant babbling attractively in her high chair. A delightful scene. Part of Tom ached for it, for his future, for himself. His father had wanted ordinary family life and here it was.

  ‘Then, what gives?’ asked Harold. ‘Is there a girl back home, is that it?’

  ‘You could say that,’ said Tom, calmly helping himself to this and that.

  ‘Then you should let Mary go,’ said Harold.

  ‘Yes,’ said Molly, on behalf of her sex. ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware I had her tied.’

  ‘Tom,’ said his father.

  ‘That’s not on,’ said his father’s wife.

  Tom said nothing. Then he was in bed with Mary. He had slept only with Lil, no one else. This fresh young bouncy body was delightful, he liked it all, and took quiet satisfaction in Mary’s, ‘I thought you were gay, I really did.’ Clearly, she was agreeably surprised.

  So there it was. Mary came often to spend the night with Tom in Harold’s and Molly’s house, all very en famille and cosy. If weddings were not actually mentioned, that was because tact had been decided on. And because of something else, still ill-defined. In bed, Mary had exclaimed over the bite mark on Tom’s calf. ‘God,’ said she. ‘What was this? A dog?’ ‘That was a love bite,’ he said, after thought. ‘Who on earth …’ And Mary, in play, tried to fit her mouth over the bite, but found Tom’s leg, and then Tom, pulling away from her. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, which was fair enough. But then, in a voice she had certainly never heard from him, nor anything like it: ‘Don’t you dare ever do that again.’

  She stared, and began to cry. He simply got off the bed and went off into the bathroom. He came back clothed, and did not look at her.

  There was something here … something bad … some place where she must not go. Mary understood that. She felt so shocked by the incident that she nearly broke off from Tom, then and there.

  Tom thought he might as well go back home. What he loved about being ‘up here’ was being free, and that delightful condition had evaporated.

  This town was imprisoning him. It was not a large one, but that wasn’t the point. He liked it, as a place, spreading suburbs of bungalows around a centre of university and business, and all around the scrubby shrubby desert. He could walk from the university theatre after rehearsal and find himself in ten minutes with strong-smelling thorny bushes all around, and under his feet coarse yellow sand where the fallen thorns made pale warning gleams: careful, don’t tread on us, we can pierce through the thickest soles. At night, after a performance or a rehearsal, he walked straight out into the dark and stood listening to the crickets, and above him the unpolluted sky glittered and sparked off coloured fire. When he got back to his father’s, Mary might be waiting for him.

  ‘Where did you get to?’

  ‘I went for a walk.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I like to walk too.’

  ‘I’m a bit of a lone wolf,’ said Tom. ‘I’m the cat who walks by himself. So, if that’s not your style, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Mary. ‘Don’t bite my head off.’

  ‘Well, you’d better know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

  At this, Harold and Molly exchanged glances: that was a commitment, surely? And Mary, hearing a promise, said ‘I like cats. Luckily’

  But she was secretly tearful and fearful.

  Tom was restless, he was moody. He was very unhappy but did not know it. He had not been unhappy in his life. He did not recognise the pain for what it was. There are people who are never ill, are unthinkingly healthy, then they get an illness and are so affronted and ashamed and afraid that they may even die of it. Tom was the emotional equivalent of such a person.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong with me?’ he groaned, waking with a heavy weight across his chest. ‘I’d like to stay right here in bed and pull the covers over my head.’

  But what for? There was nothing wrong with him.

  Then, one evening, standing out under the stars, feeling sad enough to howl up at them, he said to himself, ‘Good Lord, I’m so unhappy. Yes, that’s it.’

  He told Mary he wasn’t well. When she was solicitous he said, ‘Leave me alone.’

  From the periphery of the little town, roads which soon became tracks ran out into the desert, to places used by students for their picnics and excursion
s. In between the used ways almost invisible paths made their way between the odoriferous bushes that had butterflies clinging to them in the day, and at night sent out waves of scent to attract bats. Tom walked out on the tarmacked road, turned on to the dusty track, turned off that and found a faint path to a little hill that had rocks on it, one a big flat one, which held the sun’s heat well into the night. Tom lay on this hot rock and let unhappiness fill him.

  ‘Lil,’ he was whispering. ‘Lil.’

  He knew at last that he was missing Lil, that was the trouble. Why was he surprised? Vaguely, he had all this time thought that one day he’d get a girl his own age and then … but it had been so vague. Lil had always been in his life. He lay face down on the rock and sniffed at it, the faint metallic tang, the hot dust, and vegetable aromas from little plants in the cracks. He was thinking of Lil’s body that always smelled of salt, of the sea. She was like a sea creature, in and out, the sea water often drying on her and then she was in again. He bit into his forearm, remembering that his earliest memory was of licking salt off Lil’s shoulders. It was a game they played, the little boy and his mother’s oldest friend. Every inch of his body had been available to Lil’s strong hands since he had been born, and Lil’s body was as familiar to him as his own. He saw again Lil’s breasts, only just covered by the bikini top, and the faint wash of glistening sand in the cleft between her breasts, and the glitter of tiny sand grains on her shoulders.