The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  “But about Richard.”

  “Oh yes. Well. It wasn’t important. He was just an incident. But he brought me home all in his new Jaguar. I gave him coffee. He was all ready. I sat there and thought, Well he’s no worse than some of the morons I’ve slept with.”

  “Anna, what has got into you?”

  “You mean you’ve never felt that awful moral exhaustion, what the hell does it matter?”

  “It’s the way you talk. It’s new.”

  “I daresay. But it occurred to me—if we lead what is known as free lives, that is, lives like men, why shouldn’t we use the same language?”

  “Because we aren’t the same. That is the point.”

  Anna laughed. “Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love…”

  “Anna, what happened with Richard?”

  “Nothing. You’re making too much of it. I sat drinking coffee and looking at that stupid face of his and I was thinking, If I was a man I’d go to bed, quite likely simply because I thought he was stupid—if he were a woman, I mean. And then I was so bored, so bored, so bored. Then he felt my boredom and decided to reclaim me. So he stood up and said: Oh well I suppose I’d better be getting home to 16 Plane Avenue, or whatever it is. Expecting me to say, Oh no, I can’t bear you to leave. You know, the poor married man, bound to wife and kiddies. They all do it. Please be sorry for me, I have to get home to 16 Plane Avenue and the dreary labour-saving house in the suburbs. He said it once. He said it three times—just as if he didn’t live there, weren’t married to her, as if it had nothing to do with him. The little house at 16 Plane Avenue and the missus.”

  “As a matter of accuracy, a bloody great mansion with two maids and three cars at Richmond.”

  “You must admit he radiates an atmosphere of the suburbs. Odd. But they all do—I mean those tycoons, they all did. One could positively see the labour-saving devices and the kiddies all in their slumber-wear, coming down to kiss daddy good night. Bloody complacent swine they all are.”

  “You are talking like a whore,” said Molly; then looked conscious, smiling, because she was surprised she had used the word.

  “Oddly enough it’s only by the greatest effort of will I don’t feel like one. They put so much effort—oh unconsciously, of course, and that’s where they win, every time, into making one feel it. Well. Anyway. I said, ‘Good night, Richard, I’m so sleepy, and thank you so much for showing me all that high life.’ He stood there wondering if he shouldn’t say, Oh dear, I’ve got to go home to my dreary wife, for the fourth time. He was wondering why that unimaginative woman Anna was so unsympathetic to him. Then I could see him thinking, of course, she’s nothing but an intellectual, what a pity I didn’t take one of my other girls. So then I waited—you know, for that moment, when they have to pay one back? He said: ‘Anna, you should take more care of yourself, you’re looking ten years older than you should, you are getting positively wizened.’ So I said, ‘But Richard, if I’d said to you, Oh yes, do come into bed, at this very moment you’d be saying how beautiful I was. Surely the truth lies somewhere in between?’ …”

  Molly was holding a cushion to her breasts, and hugging it and laughing.

  “So he said: ‘But Anna, when you invited me up to coffee you surely must have known what it meant. I’m a very virile man,’ he said, ‘and I either have a relationship with a woman or I don’t.’ So then I got tired of him, and said, ‘Oh do go away Richard, you’re an awful bore…’ so you can understand that there were bound to be—is the word I’m looking for tensions—between me and Richard today.”

  Molly stopped laughing and said: “All the same, you and Richard, you must be mad.”

  “Yes,” said Anna, completely serious. “Yes, Molly, I think I’ve been not far off it.”

  But at this Molly got up, and said quickly: “I’m going to make lunch.” The look she gave Anna was guilty and contrite. Anna got up too, and said “Then I’ll come into the kitchen for a moment.”

  “You can tell me the gossip.”

  “Ohhh,” said Anna yawning, very casual. “Come to think of it, what can I tell you that’s new? Everything’s the same. But exactly.”

  “In a year? The Twentieth Congress. Hungary. Suez. And doubtless the natural progression of the human heart from one thing to another? No change?”

  The small kitchen was white, crammed with order, glistening from the surfaces of ranked coloured cups, plates, dishes; and from drops of steam condensing on the walls and ceiling. The windows were misted. The oven seemed to leap and heave with the energy of the heat inside it. Molly flung up the window and a hot smell of roasting meat rushed out over damp roofs and soiled back yards, as a waiting ball of sunlight leaped neatly over the sill and curled itself on the floor.

  “England,” said Molly. “England. Coming back this time was worse than usual. I felt the energy going out of me even on the boat. I walked into the shops yesterday and I looked at the nice, decent faces, everyone so kind, and so decent and so bloody dull.” She stared briefly out of the window, and then determinedly turned her back on it.

  “We’d better accept the fact that we and everybody we know’s likely to spend their lives grumbling about England. We are living in it, however.”

  “I’m going to leave again soon. I’d go tomorrow if it wasn’t for Tommy. Yesterday I was down rehearsing at the theatre. Every man in the cast is a queer but one, and he’s sixteen. So what am I doing here? All the time I was away, everything came naturally, the men treat you like women, you feel good, I never remembered my age, I never thought about sex. I had a couple of nice gay affairs, nothing tormented, everything easy. But as soon as you set foot here, you have to tighten your belt, and remember, Now be careful, these men are Englishmen. Except for the rare exception. And you get all self-conscious and sex-conscious. How can a country so full of screwed up people be any good?”

  “You’ll have settled down in a week or two.”

  “I don’t want to settle down. I can feel resignation creeping up already. And this house. It ought to be painted again. I simply don’t want to start—painting and putting up curtains. Why is everything such hard work here? It isn’t in Europe. One sleeps a couple of hours a night and is happy. Here, one sleeps and makes an effort…”

  “Yes, yes,” said Anna, laughing. “Well, I’m sure we’ll be making the same speech to each other for years, every time we come back from somewhere.”

  The house shook as a train went past, close, underground. “And you ought to do something about that ceiling,” added Anna, looking up at it. The house, laid open by a bomb towards the end of the war, had stood empty for two years, receiving wind and rain through all its rooms. It had been patched up again. When the trains passed, grains of substance could be heard trickling behind clean surfaces of paint. The ceiling had a crack across it.

  “Oh hell,” said Molly. “I can’t face it. But I suppose I shall. Why is it, it’s only in this country everybody one knows seems to put a good face on things, everyone is bravely carrying a burden.” Tears were smudging her eyes, and she blinked them away and turned back to her oven.

  “Because this is the country we know. The other countries are the places we don’t think in.”

  “That’s not altogether true and you know it. Well. You’d better be quick with the news. I’m going to serve lunch in a minute.” It was now Molly’s turn to exude an atmosphere of being alone, of not having been met. Her hands, pathetic and stoical, reproached Anna. As for Anna she was thinking: If I join in now, in a what’s-wrong-with-men session, then I won’t go home, I’ll stay for lunch and all afternoon, and Molly and I will feel warm and friendly, all barriers gone. And when we part, there’ll be a sudden resentment, a rancour—because after all, our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women…Anna nearly sat down, ready to submerge herself. But she did not. She thought: I want to be done with it all, finished with the men vs. women business, all the complaints and the reproaches and th
e betrayals. Besides, it’s dishonest. We’ve chosen to live a certain way, knowing the penalties, or if we didn’t we know now, so why whine and complain…and besides, if I’m not careful, Molly and I will descend into a kind of twin old-maidhood where we sit around saying to each other, Do you remember how that man, what-was-his-name said that insensitive thing, it must have been in 1947…

  “Well, let’s have it,” said Molly, very brisk, to Anna, who had stood silent for some time now.

  “Yes. You don’t want to hear about the comrades, I take it?”

  “In France and Italy the intellectuals talk day and night about the Twentieth Congress and Hungary, the perspectives of and the lessons of and mistakes to be learned from.”

  “In that case, since it’s the same here, though thank God people are getting bored with it, I’ll skip it.”

  “Good.”

  “But I think I’ll mention three of the comrades—oh, only in passing,” added Anna hastily, as Molly grimaced. “Three fine sons of the working class and trade union officials.”

  “Who?”

  “Tom Winters, Len Colhoun, Bob Fowler.”

  “I knew them, of course,” said Molly quickly. She always knew, or had known, everyone. “Well?”

  “Just before the Congress, when there was all that disquiet in our circles, what with this plot and that, and Yugoslavia, etc., it so happened that I met them, in connection with what they naturally referred to as cultural matters. With condescension. At that time I and similar types were spending a lot of time fighting inside the Party—a naïve lot we were, trying to persuade people it was much better to admit that things stank in Russia than to deny it. Well. I suddenly got letters from all three of them—independently, of course, they didn’t know, any of them, the others had written. Very stern, they were. Any rumours to the effect that there was any dirty work in Moscow or ever had been or that Father Stalin had ever put a foot wrong were spread by enemies of the working class.”

  Molly laughed, but from politeness; the nerve had been touched too often.

  “No, that isn’t the point. The point is, these letters were interchangeable. Discounting handwriting of course.”

  “Quite a lot to discount.”

  “To amuse myself, I typed out all three letters—long ones at that, and put them side by side. In phraseology, style, tone, they were identical. You couldn’t possibly have said, this letter was written by Tom, or that one by Len.”

  Molly said resentfully: “For that notebook or whatever it is you and Tommy have a secret about?”

  “No. To find out something. But I haven’t finished.”

  “Oh all right, I won’t press you.”

  “Then came the Congress and almost instantly I got three more letters. All hysterical, self-accusatory, full of guilt, self-abasement.”

  “You typed them out again?”

  “Yes. And put them side by side. They might have been written by the same person. Don’t you see?”

  “No. What are you trying to prove?”

  “Well, surely the thought follows—what stereotype am I? What anonymous whole am I part of?”

  “Does it? It doesn’t for me.” Molly was saying: “If you choose to make a nonentity of yourself, do, but don’t stick that label on me.”

  Disappointed, because this discovery and the ideas that had followed from it were what she had been most looking forward to talking over with Molly, Anna said quickly: “Oh all right. It struck me as interesting. And that’s about all—there was a period of what may be described as confusion, and some left the Party. Or everyone left the Party—meaning those whose psychological time was up. Then suddenly, and in the same week—and that’s what’s so extraordinary Molly…” In spite of herself, Anna was appealing to Molly again—“In the same week, I got three more letters. Purged of doubt, stern and full of purpose. It was the week after Hungary. In other words, the whip had been cracked, and the waverers jumped to heel. Those three letters were identical too—I’m not talking about the actual words, of course,” said Anna impatiently, as Molly looked deliberately sceptical. “I mean the style, the phrases, the way words were linked together. And those intermediary letters, the hysterical self-abasing letters, might never have been written. In fact I’m sure Tom, Len and Bob have suppressed the memory that they ever wrote them.”

  “But you kept them?”

  “Well I’m not going to use them in a court of law, if that’s what you mean.”

  Molly stood slowly wiping glasses on a pink and mauve striped cloth, and holding each one up to the light before setting it down. “Well I’m so sick of it all I don’t think I want ever to bother with it again.”

  “But Molly, we can’t do that, surely? We were communists or near-communists or whatever you like for years and years. We can’t suddenly say, Oh well, I’m bored.”

  “The funny thing is I’m bored. Yes I know it’s odd. Two or three years ago I felt guilty if I didn’t spend all my free time organising something or other. Now I don’t feel at all guilty if I simply do my job and laze around for the rest. I don’t care any more, Anna. I simply don’t.”

  “It’s not a question of feeling guilty. It’s a question of thinking out what it all means.”

  Molly did not reply, so Anna went on quickly: “Would you like to hear about the Colony?”

  The Colony was the name they gave to a group of Americans, all living in London for political reasons.

  “Oh God no. I’m sick of them too. No, I’d like to know what happened to Nelson, I’m fond of him.”

  “He’s writing the American masterpiece. He left his wife. Because she was neurotic. Got himself a girl. Very nice one. Decided she was neurotic. Went back to his wife. Decided she was neurotic. Left her. Has got himself another girl who so far hasn’t become neurotic.”

  “And the others?”

  “In one way and another, ditto, ditto, ditto.”

  “Well let’s skip them. I met the American colony in Rome. Bloody miserable lot they are.”

  “Yes. Who else?”

  “Your friend Mr Mathlong—you know, the African?”

  “Of course I know. Well he’s currently in prison so I suppose by this time next year he’ll be Prime Minister.”

  Molly laughed.

  “And there’s your friend de Silva.”

  “He was my friend,” said Molly laughing again, but resisting Anna’s already critical tone.

  “Then the facts are as follows. He went back to Ceylon with his wife—if you remember she didn’t want to go. He wrote to me because he had written to you and got no reply. He wrote that Ceylon is marvellous and full of poetry and that his wife was expecting another child.”

  “But she didn’t want another child.”

  Suddenly Anna and Molly both laughed; they were suddenly in harmony.

  “Then he wrote to say he missed London and all its cultural freedoms.”

  “Then I suppose we can expect him any moment.”

  “He came back. A couple of months ago. He’s abandoned his wife, apparently. She’s much too good for him, he says, weeping big tears, but not too big, because after all she is stuck with two kids in Ceylon and no money, so he’s safe.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “Yes.” But Anna found herself unable to tell Molly what had happened. What would be the use? They’d end up, as she had sworn they would not, spending the afternoon in the dry bitter exchange that came so easily to them.

  “And how about you Anna?”

  And now, for the first time, Molly had asked in a way which Anna could reply to, and she said at once:

  “Michael came to see me. About a month ago.” She had lived with Michael for five years. This affair had broken up three years ago, against her will.

  “How was it?”

  “Oh, in some ways, as if nothing had happened.”

  “Of course, when you know each other so well.”

  “But he was behaving—how shall I put it? I was a dear old frien
d, you know. He drove me to some place I wanted to go. He was talking about a colleague of his. He said, ‘Do you remember Dick?’ Odd, don’t you think, that he couldn’t remember if I remembered Dick, since we saw a lot of him then. Dick’s got a job in Ghana he said. He took his wife. His mistress wanted to go too, said Michael. Very difficult these mistresses are, said Michael, and then he laughed. Quite genuinely, you know, the debonair touch. That was what was painful. Then he looked embarrassed, because he remembered that I had been his mistress, and went red and guilty.”

  Molly said nothing. She watched Anna closely.

  “That’s all, I suppose.”

  “A lot of swine they all are,” said Molly cheerfully, deliberately striking the note that would make Anna laugh.

  “Molly,” said Anna painfully, in appeal.

  “What? It’s no good going on about it, is it?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking. You know, it’s possible we made a mistake.”

  “What? Only one?”

  But Anna would not laugh. “No. It’s serious. Both of us are dedicated to the proposition that we’re tough—no listen, I’m serious. I mean—a marriage breaks up, well, we say, our marriage was a failure, too bad. A man ditches us—too bad we say, it’s not important. We bring up kids without men—nothing to it, we say, we can cope. We spend years in the communist party and then we say, Well, well, we made a mistake, too bad.”

  “What are you trying to say,” said Molly, very cautious, and at a great distance from Anna.

  “Well don’t you think it’s at least possible, just possible that things can happen to us so bad that we don’t ever get over them? Because when I really face it I don’t think I’ve really got over Michael. I think it’s done for me. Oh I know, what I am supposed to say is, Well, well, he’s ditched me—what’s five years after all, on with the next thing.”

  “But it has to be, on with the next thing.”