The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  All this time we had been making jokes that Mrs Boothby was in love with Paul. Perhaps she was, a little. But she was a very simple woman and a hard-working one. Very hard-working since the war, and the hotel which had once been a place for travellers to stop the night had become a week-end resort. It must have been a strain for her. And then there was June who had been transformed in the last few weeks from a sulking adolescent into a young woman with a future. Looking back I think it was June’s marriage that was at the bottom of her mother’s unhappiness. June must have been her only emotional outlet. Mr Boothby was always behind the bar counter, and he was the kind of drinker that is hardest of all to live with. Men who drink heavily in bouts are nothing compared to the men who “carry their drink well”—who carry a load of drink every day, every week, year in and year out. These steady hard-drinkers are very bad for their wives. Mrs Boothby had lost June, who was going to live three hundred miles away. Nothing: no distance for the Colony, but she had lost her for all that. And perhaps she had been affected by the wartime restlessness. A woman who must have resigned herself, years ago, to not being a woman at all, she had watched for weeks now, Mrs Lattimer who was the same age as herself, being courted by Stanley Lett. Perhaps she did have secret dreams about Paul. I don’t know. But looking back I see Mrs Boothby as a lonely pathetic figure. But I didn’t think so then. I saw her as a stupid “aborigine.” Oh, Lord, it’s painful thinking of the people one has been cruel to. And she would have been made happy by so little—if we had invited her to come and drink with us sometimes, or talked to her. But we were locked in our group and we made stupid jokes and laughed at her. I can remember her face as Paul and I left the kitchen. She was gazing after Paul—hurt, bewildered; her eyes seemed frantic with incomprehension. And her sharp high voice to Jackson: “You’re getting very cheeky Jackson. Why are you getting so cheeky?”

  It was the rule that Jackson should have three to five off every afternoon, but like a good feudal servant, when things were busy, he waived this right. This afternoon it was not until about five that we saw him leave the kitchen and walk slowly towards his house. Paul said: “Anna dear, I would not love you so much if I didn’t love Jackson more. And by now it’s a question of principle…” And he left me and walked down to meet Jackson. The two stood talking together by the fence, and Mrs Boothby watched them from her kitchen window. George had joined me when Paul left. George looked at Jackson and said: “The father of my child.”

  “Oh, stop it,” I said, “it doesn’t do any good.”

  “Do you realise Anna what a farce it all is? I can’t even give that child of mine money? Do you realise how utterly bloodily bizarre—Jackson earns five quid a month. Admittedly, burdened down by children and the senile as I am, five quid a month is a lot to me—but if I gave Marie five pounds, just to get that poor kid some decent clothes, it would be so much money for them that…she told me, food for the Jackson family costs ten shillings a week. They live on pumpkin and mealiemeal and scraps from the kitchen.”

  “Doesn’t Jackson even suspect?”

  “Marie thinks not. I asked her. Do you know what she said: ‘He’s a good husband to me,’ she said. ‘He’s kind to me and all my children’ …do you know Anna, when she said that, I’ve never in all my life felt such a sod.”

  “You’re still sleeping with her?”

  “Yes. Do you know, Anna, I love that woman, I love that woman so much that…”

  After a while we saw Mrs Boothby come out of the kitchen and walk towards Paul and Jackson. Jackson went into his shack, and Mrs Boothby, rigid with lonely anger, went to her house. Paul came in to us and told us she had said to Jackson: “I don’t give you time off to talk cheeky with white men who ought to know better.” Paul was too angry to be flippant. He said: “My God, Anna, my God. My God.” Then, slowly recovering, he swung me off to dance again and said: “What really interests me is that there are people, like you for instance, who genuinely believe that the world can be changed.”

  We spent the evening dancing and drinking. We all went to bed very late. Willi and I went to bed in a bad temper with each other. He was angry because George had been pouring out his troubles again and he was bored with George. He said to me: “You and Paul seem to be getting on very well.” He could have said that any time during the last six months. I replied: “And it’s equally true that you and Maryrose are.” We were already in our twin beds on either side of the room. He had some book on the development of early German socialism in his hand. He sat there, all his intelligence concentrated behind his gleaming spectacles, wondering if it was worth while to quarrel. I think he decided it would only turn into our familiar argument about George…“sloppy sentimentality” vs “dogmatic bureaucracy.” Or perhaps—for he was a man incredibly ignorant about his motives—he believed that he resented my relationship with Paul. And perhaps he did. Challenged then, I replied: “Maryrose.” Challenged now, I would say that every woman believes in her heart that if her man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another. That is her first and strongest thought, regardless of how she might soften it later out of pity or expediency. But Willi and I were not together because of sex. And so? I write this and think how strong must have been that argumentative battling quality between us that even now I instinctively and out of sheer habit assess it in terms of rights or wrongs. Stupid. It’s always stupid.

  We didn’t quarrel that night. After a moment he began his lonely humming: Oh the shark has, wicked teeth dear…and he picked up his book and read and I went to sleep.

  Next day bad temper prickled through the hotel. June Boothby had gone to a dance with her fiancé, and had not returned until morning. Mr Boothby had shouted at his daughter when she came in and Mrs Boothby had wept. The row with Jackson had permeated through the staff. The waiters were sullen with us all at lunch. Jackson went off at three o’clock according to the letter of the law, leaving Mrs Boothby to do the food for the dance, and June would not help her mother because of how she had been spoken to the day before. And neither would we. We heard June shouting: “If you weren’t so mean you’d get another assistant cook, instead of making a martyr of yourself for the sake of five pounds a month.” Mrs Boothby had red eyes, and again her face had the look of frantic disorganised emotion, and she followed June around, protesting. Because, of course, she was not mean. Five pounds was nothing to the Boothbys; and I suppose the reason why she didn’t get an extra cook was because she didn’t mind working twice as hard and thought there was no reason why Jackson shouldn’t as well.

  She went off to her house to lie down. Stanley Lett was with Mrs Lattimer on the verandah. The hotel tea was served at four by a waiter, but Mrs Lattimer had a headache and wanted black coffee. I suppose there must have been some trouble with her husband, but we had come to take his complaisance so much for granted we didn’t think of that until later. Stanley Lett went to the kitchen to ask the waiter to make coffee but the coffee was locked up, and Jackson, trusted family retainer, had the keys of the store cupboard. Stanley Lett went off to Jackson’s cottage to borrow the keys. I don’t think it occurred to him that this was tactless, in the circumstances. He was simply, as was his nature, “organising” supplies. Jackson, who liked Stanley because he associated the R.A.F. with human treatment, came down from his cottage to open the cupboard and make black coffee for Mrs Lattimer. Mrs Boothby must have seen all this from her bedroom windows, for now she came down and told Jackson that if he ever did such a thing again he would get the sack. Stanley tried to soothe her but it was no use, she was like a possessed woman, and her husband had to take her off to lie down again.

  George came to Willi and me and said: “Do you realise what it would mean if Jackson got the sack? The whole family would be sunk.”

  “You mean you would,” said Willi.

  “No, you silly clot, for once I’m thinking of them. This is their home. Jackson’d never find another place where he could have his family with him. He’d have to get a job s
omewhere and the family would have to go back to Nyasaland.”

  “Very likely,” said Willi. “They’d be in the same position as the other Africans, instead of being in the minority of half of one per cent—if it’s as much as that.”

  The bar opened soon after, and George went off to drink. He had Jimmy with him. It seems I’ve forgotten the most important thing of all—Jimmy’s having upset Mrs Boothby. This had happened the weekend before. Jimmy in the presence of Mrs Boothby had put his arms around Paul and kissed him. He was drunk at the time. Mrs Boothby, an unsophisticated woman, was terribly shocked. I tried to explain to her that the virile conventions or assumptions of the Colony were not those of England, but afterwards she could not look at Jimmy without disgust. She had not minded the fact that he was regularly drunk, that he was unshaven and looked really unpleasant with the two half-healed scars showing through yellow stubble, that he slumped about in an unbuttoned uncollared uniform. All that was all right; it was all right for real men to drink and not to shave and to disregard their looks. She had even been rather maternal and gentle with him. But the word “homosexual” put him outside her pale. “I suppose he’s what they call a homosexual,” she said, using the word as if it, too, were poisoned.

  Jimmy and George got themselves drunk in the bar and by the time the dance started they were maudlin and affectionate. The big room was full when they came in. Jimmy and George danced together, George parodying the thing, but Jimmy looking childishly happy. Once round the room—but it was enough. Mrs Boothby was already there, looking like a seal in a black satin dress, her face flaming with distress. She went over to the couple and told them to take their disgusting behaviour somewhere else. No one else had even noticed the incident, and George told her not to be a silly bitch, and began dancing with June Boothby. Jimmy stood open-mouthed and helpless, very much the small boy who has been smacked and doesn’t know what for. Then he wandered off into the night by himself.

  Paul and I danced. Willi and Maryrose danced. Stanley and Mrs Lattimer danced. Mr Lattimer was in the bar and George kept leaving us to pay visits to his caravan.

  We were all more noisy and derisive about everything than we had ever been. I think we all knew it was our last week-end. Yet no decision had been made about not coming again; just as no formal decision had been made about coming in the first place. There was a feeling of loss; for one thing Paul and Jimmy were due to be posted soon.

  It was nearly midnight when Paul remarked that Jimmy had been gone a long time. We searched through the crowd in the big room, and no one had seen him. Paul and I went to look for him and met George at the door. Outside the night was damp and clouded. In that part of the country there is often two or three days’ break in the regularly clear weather we took for granted, while a very fine rain or mist blows softly, like the small soft rain of Ireland. So it was now, and groups and couples stood cooling off, but it was too dark to see their faces, and we wandered among them trying to distinguish Jimmy by his shape. The bar had closed by then and he was not on the hotel verandah or in the dining-room. We began to worry, for more than once we had had to rescue him from a flowerbed or under the gumtrees, hopelessly drunk. We searched through the bedrooms. We searched slowly through the gardens, stumbling over bushes and plants, not finding him. We were standing at the back of the main hotel building, wondering where to look next, when the lights went on in the kitchen half a dozen paces in front of us. Jackson came into the kitchen, slowly, alone. He did not know he was being watched. I had never seen him other than polite and on guard; but now he was both angry and troubled—I remember looking at that face and thinking I had never really seen it before. His face changed—he was looking at something on the floor. We pressed forward to see, and there was Jimmy lying asleep or drunk or both on the floor of the kitchen. Jackson bent down to raise him and, as he did so, Mrs Boothby came in behind Jackson. Jimmy awoke, saw Jackson and lifted his arms like a newly roused child and put them around Jackson’s neck. The black man said: “Baas Jimmy, Baas Jimmy, you must go to bed. You must not be here.” And Jimmy said: “You love me Jackson, don’t you, you love me, none of the others love me.”

  Mrs Boothby was so shocked that she let herself slump against the wall, and her face was a greyish colour. By then we three were in the kitchen, lifting Jimmy up and away from his clinging grip around Jackson’s neck.

  Mrs Boothby said: “Jackson, you leave tomorrow.”

  Jackson said: “Missus, what have I done?”

  Mrs Boothby said: “Get out. Go away. Take your dirty family and yourself away from here. Tomorrow, or I’ll get the police to you.”

  Jackson looked at us, his eyebrows knotting and unknotting, puckers of uncomprehending pain tightening the skin of his face and releasing it, so that his face seemed to clench and unclench. Of course, he had no idea at all why Mrs Boothby was so upset.

  He said slowly: “Missus, I’ve worked for you fifteen years.”

  George said: “I’ll speak to her, Jackson.” George had never before previously addressed a direct word to Jackson. He felt too guilty before him.

  And now Jackson turned his eyes slowly towards George and blinked slowly, like someone who has been hit. And George stayed quiet, waiting. Then Jackson said: “You don’t want us to leave, baas?”

  I don’t know how much that meant. Perhaps Jackson had known about his wife all the time. It certainly sounded like it then. But George shut his eyes a moment, then stammered out something, and it sounded ludicrous, like an idiot talking. Then he stumbled out of the kitchen.

  We half lifted, half pushed Jimmy out of the kitchen, and we said: “Good night, Jackson, thank you for trying to help Baas Jimmy.” But he did not answer.

  We put Jimmy to bed, Paul and I. As we came down from the bedroom block through the wet dark, we heard George talking to Willi a dozen paces away. Willi was saying: “Quite so.” And “Obviously.” And “Very likely.” And George was getting more and more vehement and incoherent.

  Paul said in a low voice: “Oh, my God, Anna, come with me, now.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “I might leave the country any day now. I might never see you again.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  Without replying he walked off into the dark, and I was just going after him when Willi came up. We were close to our bedroom, and we went into it. Willi said: “It’s the best thing that can have happened. Jackson and family will leave and George will come to his senses.”

  “This means, almost for certain, that the family will have to split up. Jackson won’t have his family with him again.”

  Willi said: “That’s just like you. Jackson’s been lucky enough to have his family. Most of them can’t. And now he’ll be like the others. That’s all. Have you been weeping and wailing because of all the others without their families?”

  “No, I’ve been supporting policies that should put an end to the whole bloody business.”

  “Quite. And quite right.”

  “But I happen to know Jackson and his family. Sometimes I can’t believe you mean the things you say.”

  “Of course you can’t. Sentimentalists can never believe in anything but their own emotions.”

  “And it’s not going to make any difference to George. Because the tragedy of George is not Marie but George. When she goes there’ll be someone else.”

  “It might teach him a lesson,” said Willi, and his face was ugly as he said it.

  I left Willi in the bedroom and stood on the verandah. The mist had thinned to show a faint diffused cold light from a half-obscured sky. Paul was standing a few paces off looking at me. And suddenly all the intoxication and the anger and misery rose in me like a bomb bursting and I didn’t care about anything except being with Paul. I ran down to him and he caught my hand and without a word we both ran, without knowing where we were running or why. We ran along the main road east, slipping and stumbling on the wet puddling tarmac, and swerved off on to a rough grass track th
at led somewhere, but we didn’t know where. We ran along it, through sandy puddles we never saw, through the faint mist that had come down again. Dark wet trees loomed up on either side, and fell behind and we ran on. Our breath went, and we stumbled off the track into the veld. It was covered with a low invisible leafy growth. We ran a few paces, and fell side by side in each other’s arms in the wet leaves while the rain fell slowly down, and over us low dark clouds sped across the sky, and the moon gleamed out and went, struggling with the dark, so that we were in the dark again. We began to tremble so hard that we laughed; our teeth were clattering together. I was wearing a thin crepe dance dress and nothing else. Paul took off his uniform jacket and put it round me, and we lay down again. Our flesh together was hot, and everything else was wet and cold. Paul, maintaining his poise even now, remarked: “I’ve never done this before, darling Anna. Isn’t it clever of me to choose an experienced woman like you?” Which made me laugh again. We were neither of us at all clever, we were too happy. Hours later the light grew clear above us and the distant sound of Johnnie’s piano at the hotel stopped, and looking up we saw the clouds had swept away and the stars were out. We got up, and remembering where the sound of the piano had come from we walked in what we thought was the direction of the hotel. We walked, stumbling, through scrub and grass, our hands hot together, and the tears and the wet from the grass ran down our faces. We could not find the hotel: the wind must have been blowing the sound of the dance music off course. In the dark we scrambled and climbed and finally we found ourselves on the top of a small kopje. And there was a complete silent blackness for miles around under a grey glitter of stars. We sat together on a wet ledge of granite with our arms around each other, waiting for the light to come. We were so wet and cold and tired we did not talk. We sat cheek to cold cheek and waited.