The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

  Annette was a tall stout woman, with dry fair hair in a roll on her neck – Betty Grable; her husband ordered her to keep it like that. She wore sensible shoes, which she needed for work, managing a whole floor of the Fairview, which kept her on her feet all day.

  Now she hauled up this man, using strength, because he was stiff from sitting in that twisted pose. She put her hand into his arm and steered him through bright cheerful streets to his hotel. The Seaview. Surely he could do better than that, with those clothes!

  He had left his parcel of fruits behind on the bench, which would be found later by a tramp.

  She stood with him while he composed himself, and pushed the door open and stepped into a poorly lit and dingy lobby. She approved of his self-command, which was taking him to the desk for his key, and up iron stairs which would not have been out of place in a warehouse. She knew he would not turn and smile, or indicate he knew she was there: he was too deep inside, dealing with whatever it was that was eating him. ‘I’d give a good bit to know what’s eating him, but I never will!’ She caught a last glimpse of a wretched face.

  And she went home, two hours late.

  As for him he had no picture in his mind of the kind unknown who had, so he felt, held him together. His memory of Annette Rogers was of arms holding him: the haven of an embrace.

  James and Helen continued their exemplary life. He was now in charge of a department at the Town Hall, and the wellbeing of a good many of his fellow citizens depended on him. She was prominent in all kinds of local charities. He played cricket. She taught gym and modern dance. They were members of a Ramblers Club and went for long hikes with their daughter, who was doing well at school.

  James’s father died. His mother at once turned off the radio, put her knitting and crochet into a drawer and let her house. She took trips all over the British Isles and then to Europe. With a group of merry widows, she went on long sea cruises or to exotic isles, by plane, sending postcards back to James and Helen. He had a carton full of them.

  Not a letter came to their house without his quick glance at it. Helen knew what he was waiting for. She let him know she understood. He tried to be first at any telephone call. He had shown her the photograph of the boy who was as real to her as the ones she had seen of her husband, as a boy.

  There was another trip to Cape Town and she said she would go with him. He did not demur.

  Deirdre had changed, it seemed overnight, from a friendly and sensible girl into a vindictive, spiteful, cruel creature they did not recognise. ‘Hormones,’ murmured Helen. ‘Oh, dear!’ Deirdre was invited to go with them to Cape Town and said she would rather die. ‘I want you out of my life,’ she shouted, in one of the formulas of 1960s’ teenage rebellion. ‘I’m going to live with my friend Mary.’ Judging that this stage might have passed by the time they returned, James and Helen set off without her, relieved.

  By now the planes flew to Salisbury, then Johannesburg; the two glamorous stops in between had gone.

  In Cape Town they were in a good hotel: James insisted on one high enough for a view of the sea.

  Helen was enchanted by the Cape, for who is not? They drove up the coast, the incomparable coast, they visited gardens, and climbed Table Mountain and drove about through vineyards. James took her where he was pretty sure he remembered trestles full of fruit of all kinds, of all colours, but could not find it: stern hygiene had intervened.

  She saw how he looked carefully at every face, in gardens, in the hotel, in streets; and she did too, she was looking for a younger version of James. He would be a young man now, a very young man, like the photographs of James, in uniform.

  Day after day: and then James said they should go to the university. It was term time. And they walked about everywhere, looking at every youngster who passed: Jimmy Reid, James the younger, walking towards them, or in a group, or with a girl. That was one day and then James wanted to go again, for another. After that, it would be time to leave Cape Town.

  Helen said to him, ‘Look, James, you mustn’t give up. One day there’ll be a letter, or a telephone call, or we’ll open the door and there he’ll be.’

  He smiled. She didn’t know of that thick pack of letters. He was certain Betty would have kept her promise: she had promised. Daphne would have read those letters to her which contained the best of himself, his essence, his reality, ‘what I really am’. She must have read them. But if she had told her son, their son, then by now there would have arrived that letter, been that phone call, the ring at the door. He was twenty. Twenty and so many months and days. If he knew, he was old enough to make up his own mind.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Helen, ‘It’ll happen one of these days.’

  They were lying in bed, and she knew what he was thinking, because he was staring, as he so often did, into the empty dark.

  He put his arm around her and drew her to him, in gratitude for her kindness, her loyalty to him, her love. But he was thinking, a deep, secret, cruel thought: ‘If you want to call that love.’

  About the author

  DORIS LESSING, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetimes Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. She lives in north London.

  Reviews

  From the reviews of The Grandmothers:

  ‘These four thought-provoking, vigorous short novels … differ in style and setting, but strong themes braid them skilfully together … These novels show us what fun romantic love is, and how sharply desire defines us. These are not morality tales, just an account of what happens, and why; our infinite capacity for self-delusion, by-blow of our drive for pleasure. We go into the dark, Lessing tells us, but the shimmering texture of lived days in these bittersweet stories works against melancholy. The Grandmothers is a feast from life’s long and crowded banqueting table, and the sparrow darts on through the sunlight above it’

  Maggie Gee, Independent

  ‘Lessing is a skilled practitioner of the art of brevity … In these novellas, she sketches characters and situations with wonderful energy and economy, deftly providing just what is required to understand the complex relationships at the heart of each tale. The effect is bracing: the speed and ease of the narratives make the emotional revelations all the more precise and shocking … The warmth and humanity and love of people which [Lessing] saw as vital for the novelist continue to enrich her perception and her writing … At eighty-four, Doris Lessing’s inventive powers remain as fertile as ever’

  Pamela Norris, Literary Review

  ‘[“A Love Child”] is a simple story, but Lessing makes it the vehicle for a rich freight of ideas and impressions. With admirable economy she summons up the peculiar atmosphere of 1930s Britain … Her description of the men’s sufferings on the troopship is marvellously controlled, the hellish conditions made to seem even more awful by the sobriety of her laconic account … This is a short fiction, but Lessing has given it all the ironies and sorrowful wisdom that belong to long duration, the sense of gradual change and of inevitable loss balanced by the slow acquisition of a fully adult sensitivity. There is not only a whole life here, but a whole interconnected web of lives’

  Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

  ‘The strangeness, the waywardness, the difficulty, and sometimes the cruelty of love – this is one of Doris Lessing’s central and recurrent subjects, which she explores better than anyone else now writing. Her gaze is so steady, her judgment so sure, her sympathy so wide. She is the most credible of writers … Doris Lessing is so convincing in her depiction of how people feel, how they live part of their lives – often the greater part – in their own minds, because she places her characters so thoroughly and solidly i
n their everyday experience, because the background to her stories is so solid. She is so good at the ordinary that in her fiction you never question the extraordinary’

  Allan Massie, Scotsman

  ‘[These novellas] showcase a great novelist still at the peak of her form … [In the title story] Lessing brilliantly captures the mindset of easy-going bohemian types nibbling at forbidden fruit. “Victoria and the Staveneys” is a beautiful take on an age-old theme … But Lessing keeps the best till last. “A Love Child” … is a simple story, but embellished with real aplomb. Every detail rings true’

  David Robson, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Doris Lessing is on top form with these four short novellas. Intense and intimate, they all explore the trials and tribulations of an unconventional extended family, taking a good, old-fashioned dig at middle-class morality, racial stereotypes and personal prejudices’

  Illustrated London News

  ‘These colourful stories of possibility and loss are intelligent and moving reminders that [Lessing] has spark and wisdom enough to delight us still’

  Scottish Sunday Herald

  ‘[Lessing] is a consummate storyteller, shifting timescales and narrative perspectives with case and confidence. Every detail in her tale rings true and she gets inside the heads of her characters and develops the events of the narrative beautifully … Lessing once again proves that she more than deserves her reputation as the grande dame of literary fiction. The Grandmothers is one of the finest short story collections to emerge in recent years, and it should make a welcome addition to any bookshelf’

  Sunday Business Post

  ‘This quartet of long short stories is another exemplary display of a dazzling literary talent that seems to get stronger with every passing year … The tales are beautiful, moving, funny and tragic, each one managing to capture intertwined lives with cinematic vision, while also attending exquisitely to the minutiae of everyday existence … Lessing’s command of mood, emotion and language is unbeatable, making The Grandmothers a simply brilliant display of modern literature at its best’

  The List

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  The Grass is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  Briefing for a Descent into Hell

  The Summer Before the Dark

  Memoirs of a Survivor

  Diary of a Good Neighbour

  If the Old Could …

  The Good Terrorist

  Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard) Love, Again

  Mara and Dann

  The Fifth Child

  Ben, in the World

  The Sweetest Dream

  The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

  The Cleft

  ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

  The Sirian Experiments

  The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

  Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

  ‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence Martha Quest

  A Proper Marriage

  A Ripple from the Storm

  Landlocked

  The Four-Gated City

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Under My Skin: Volume 1

  Walking in the Shade: Volume 2

  SHORT STORIES

  Five

  The Habit of Loving

  A Man and Two Women

  The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

  Winter in July

  The Black Madonna

  This Was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Stories, Vol. 1) The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories, Vol. 2) To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1) The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2) London Observed

  The Old Age of El Magnifico

  Particularly Cats

  Rufus the Survivor

  On Cats

  The Grandmothers

  DRAMA

  Each His Own Wilderness

  Play with a Tiger

  The Singing Door

  POETRY

  Fourteen Poems

  NON-FICTION

  In Pursuit of the English

  Going Home

  A Small Personal Voice

  Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

  The Wind Blows Away Our Words

  African Laughter

  Time Bites

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  A selection of other books by Doris Lessing

  The Grass is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  The Good Terrorist

  Love, Again

  The Fifth Child

  The Grass is Singing:

  Chapter 1

  MURDER MYSTERY

  By Special Correspondent

  Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered.

  It is thought he was in search of valuables.

  The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.

  And then they turned the page to something else.

  But the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.

  To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would have never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy.

  Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply ‘kept themselves to themselves’; that was all. They were never seen at district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. It was not right to seclude themselves like that; it was a slap in the face of everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, in
deed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house – it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.

  And then it was that someone used the phrase ‘poor whites’. It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. ‘Poor whites’ were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites.

  Though the arguments were unanswerable, people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. The Turners were British, after all.

  Thus the district handled the Turners, in accordance with that esprit de corps which is the first rule of South African society, but which the Turners themselves ignored. They apparently did not recognize the need for esprit de corps; that, really, was why they were hated.

  The more one thinks about it, the more extraordinary the case becomes. Not the murder itself; but the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered. But they did not ask questions.

  For instance, they must have wondered who that ‘Special Correspondent’ was. Someone in the district sent in the news, for the paragraph was not in newspaper language. But who? Marston, the assistant, left the district immediately after the murder. Denham, the policeman, might have written to the paper in a personal capacity, but it was not likely. There remained Charlie Slatter, who knew more about the Turners than anyone else, and was there on the day of the murder. One could say that he practically controlled the handling of the case, even taking precedence over the Sergeant himself. And people felt that to be quite right and proper. Whom should it concern, if not the white farmers, that a silly woman got herself murdered by a native for reasons people might think about, but never, never mentioned? It was their livelihood, their wives and families, their way of living, at stake.