The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  Next day sunlight was settled over London, and the trees in the streets seemed not to be part of the weight of the buildings, and of pavements, but an extension of fields and grass and country. Ella’s indecision about the drive that afternoon swung into pleasure as she imagined sunshine on grass; and she understood, from the sudden flight upwards of her spirits, that she must recently have been more depressed than she had realised. She found herself singing as she cooked the child’s lunch. It was because she was remembering Paul’s voice. At the time she had not been conscious of Paul’s voice, but now she heard it—a warm voice, a little rough where the edges of an uneducated accent remained. (She was listening, as she thought of him, rather than looking at him.) And she was listening, not to the words he had used, but to tones in which she was now distinguishing delicacy, irony, and compassion.

  Julia was taking Michael off for the afternoon to visit friends, and she left early, as soon as lunch was over, so that the little boy would not know his mother was going for a drive without him. “You look very pleased with yourself, after all,” said Julia. Ella said: “Well, I haven’t been out of London for months. Besides, this business of not having a man around doesn’t suit me.” “Who does it suit?” retorted Julia. “But I don’t think any man is better than none.” And having planted this small dart, she departed with the child, in good humour.

  Paul was late, and from the way he apologised, almost perfunctorily, she understood he was a man often late, and from temperament, not only because he was a busy doctor with many pressures on him. On the whole she was pleased he was late. One look at his face, that again had the cloud of nervous irritability settled on it, reminded her that last night she had not liked him. Besides, being late meant that he didn’t really care for her, and that eased a small tension of panic that related to George, and not to Paul. (She knew this herself.) But as soon as they were in the car and heading out of London, she was aware that he was again sending small nervous glances towards her; she felt determination in him. But he was talking and she was listening to his voice, and it was every bit as pleasant as she remembered it. She listened, and looked out of the window, and laughed. He was telling how he came to be late. Some misunderstanding between himself and the group of doctors he worked with at his hospital, “No one actually said anything aloud, but the upper-middle-classes communicate with each other in inaudible squeaks, like bats. It puts people of my background at a terrible disadvantage.” “You’re the only working-class doctor there?” “No, not in the hospital, just in that section. And they never let you forget it. They’re not even conscious of doing it.” This was good-humoured, humorous. It was also bitter. But the bitterness was from old habit, and had no sting in it.

  This afternoon it was easy to talk, as if the barrier between them had been silently dissolved in the night. They left the ugly trailing fringes of London behind, sunlight lay about them, and Ella’s spirits rose so sharply that she felt intoxicated. Besides, she knew that this man would be her lover, she knew it from the pleasure his voice gave her, and she was full of a secret delight. His glances at her now were smiling, almost indulgent, and like Julia he remarked: “You look very pleased with yourself.” “Yes, it’s getting out of London.” “You hate it so much?” “Oh, no, I like it, I mean, I like the way I live in it. But I hate—this.” And she pointed out of the window. The hedges and trees had again been swallowed by a small village. Nothing left here of the old England, it was new and ugly. They drove through the main shopping street, and the names on the shops were the same as they had driven past repeatedly, all the way out of London.

  “Why?”

  “Well, obviously, it’s so ugly.” He was looking curiously into her face. After a while he remarked: “People live in it.” She shrugged. “Do you hate them as well?” Ella felt resentful: it occurred to her that for years, anyone she was likely to meet would have understood without explanation why she hated “all this”; and to ask her if she “hated them as well,” meaning ordinary people, was off the point. Yet after thinking it over, she said, defiant: “In a way, yes. I hate what they put up with. It ought to be swept away—all of it.” And she made a wide sweeping movement with her hand, brushing away the great dark weight of London, and the thousand ugly towns, and the myriad small cramped lives of England.

  “But it’s not going to be, you know,” he said, with a small smiling obstinacy. “It’s going to go on—and there’ll be more chain shops, and television aerials, and respectable people. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “Of course. But you just accept it. Why do you take it all for granted?”

  “It’s the time we live in. And things are better than they were.”

  “Better!” she exclaimed, involuntarily, but checked herself. For she understood she was setting against the word better a personal vision that dated from her stay in hospital, a vision of some dark, impersonal destructive force that worked at the roots of life and that expressed itself in war and cruelty and violence. Which had nothing to do with what they argued. “You mean,” she said, “better in the sense of no unemployment and no one being hungry?”

  “Strangely enough, yes, that’s what I do mean.” He said it in such a way that it put a barrier between them—he was from the working-people, and she was not, and he was of the initiated. So she kept silence until he insisted: “Things are much better, much much better. How can you not see it? I remember…” And he stopped—this time, not because (as Ella put it) he was “bullying” her, from superior knowledge, but from the painfulness of what he remembered.

  So she tried again: “I can’t understand how anyone can see what’s happening to this country and not hate it. On the surface everything’s fine—all quiet and tame and suburban. But underneath it’s poisonous. It’s full of hatred and envy and people being lonely.”

  “That’s true of everything, everywhere. It’s true of any place that has reached a certain standard of living.”

  “That doesn’t make it any better.”

  “Anything’s better than a certain kind of fear.”

  “You mean, real poverty. And you mean, of course, that I’m not equipped to understand that at all.”

  At this he glanced at her quickly, in surprise at her persistence—and, as Ella felt, out of a certain respect for it. There was no trace in that glance of a man assessing a woman for her sexual potentialities, and she felt more at ease.

  “So you’d like to put a giant bulldozer over it all, over all England?”

  “Yes.”

  “Leaving just a few cathedrals and old buildings and a pretty village or two?” “Yes.” “And then you’d bring the people back into fine new cities, each one an architect’s dream, and tell everyone to like it or lump it.” “Yes.” “Or perhaps you’d like a merrie England, beer, skittles, and the girls in long homespun dresses?”

  She said, angry: “Of course not! I hate all the William Morris stuff. But you’re being dishonest. Look at you—I’m sure you’ve spent most of your energy simply getting through the class barrier. There can’t be any connection at all between how you live now and the way your parents lived. You must be a stranger to them. You must be split into two parts. That’s what this country is like. You know it is. Well I hate it, I hate all that. I hate a country so split up that—I didn’t know anything about it until the war and I lived with all those women.”

  “Well,” he said at last, “they were right last night—you’re a revolutionary after all.”

  “No, I’m not. Those words don’t mean anything to me. I’m not interested in politics at all.”

  At which he laughed, but said, with an affection that touched her: “If you had your way, building the new Jerusalem, it would be like killing a plant by suddenly moving it into the wrong soil. There’s a continuity, some kind of invisible logic to what happens. You’d kill the spirit of people if you had your way.”

  “A continuity isn’t necessarily right, just because it’s a continuity.”

 
“Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is.”

  This was so personal, that it was her turn to glance, surprised, at him, and decide to say nothing. He is saying, she thought, that the split in himself is so painful that sometimes he wonders if it was worth it…and she turned away to look out of the window again. They were passing through another village. This was better than the last: there was an old centre, of mellow rooted houses, warm in the sunshine. But around the centre, ugly new houses and even in the main square, a Wool-worth’s, indistinguishable from all the others, and a fake Tudor pub. There would be a string of such villages, one after another. Ella said: “Let’s get away from the villages, where there isn’t anything at all.”

  This time his look at her, which she noted, but did not understand until afterwards, was frankly startled. He did not say anything for a time, but when a small road appeared, wandering off through deep sun-lit trees, he turned off into it. He asked: “Where’s your father living?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I see what you’re getting at. Well he’s not like that at all.”

  “Like what? I didn’t say anything.”

  “No, but you imply it all the time. He’s ex-Indian army. But he isn’t like the caricatures. He got unfit for the army and was in the administration for a time. And he’s not like that either.”

  “So what is he like?”

  She laughed. The sound held affection which was spontaneous and genuine, and a bitterness which she did not know was there. “He bought an old house when he left India. It’s in Cornwall. It’s small and isolated. It’s very pretty. Old—you know. He’s an isolated man, he always has been. He reads a lot. He knows a lot about philosophy and religion—like Buddha, for instance.”

  “Does he like you?”

  “Like me?” The question was startling to Ella. Not once had she asked herself whether her father liked her. She turned to Paul in a flash of recognition, laughing: “What a question. But you know, I don’t know?” And added, in a small voice: “No, come to think of it, and I never have, I don’t believe he does, not really.”

  “Of course he does,” said Paul over-hastily, clearly regretting he had asked.

  “There’s no of course about it,” and Ella sat silent, thinking. She knew that Paul’s glances at her were guilty and affectionate, and she liked him very much for his concern for her.

  She tried to explain: “When I go home for week-ends, he’s pleased to see me—I can see that. He never complains that I don’t go more often though. But when I’m there it doesn’t seem to make any difference to him. He has a routine. An old woman does the house. The meals are just so. He has a few things to eat he always has, like red beef and steak and eggs. He drinks one gin before lunch, and two or three whiskys after dinner. He goes for a long walk every morning after breakfast. He gardens in the afternoon. He reads every night until very late. When I’m there, it’s all just the same. He doesn’t even talk to me.” She laughed again. “It’s what you said earlier—I’m not on the wavelength, he has one very close friend, a colonel, and they look alike, both lean and leathery with fierce eyebrows, and they communicate in high, inaudible squeaks. They sometimes sit opposite each other for hours and never say a word, just drink whisky, or they sometimes make short references to India. And when my father is alone, I think he communicates with God or Buddha or somebody. But not with me. Usually if I say something, he sounds embarrassed, or talks about something else.” Ella fell silent thinking that was the longest speech she had made to him, and it was odd it should be so, since she seldom spoke of her father, or even thought of him. Paul did not take it up, but instead asked abruptly: “How’s this?” The rough track had come to an end in a small hedged-in field. “Oh,” said Ella. “Yes. This morning I was hoping you’d take me to a small field, just like this.” She got quickly out of the car, just conscious of his startled glance; but she did not remember it until later, when she was searching her memory to find out how he had felt about her that day.

  She wandered for a time through the grasses, fingering them, smelling them, and letting the sun fall on her face. When she drifted back to him, he had spread a rug on the grass and was sitting on it, waiting. His look of waiting destroyed the ease that had been created in her by the small freedom of the sun-lit field, and set up a tension. She thought, as she flung herself down, he’s set on something, good Lord, is he going to make love to me so soon? Oh, no, he wouldn’t, not yet. All the same, she lay near him, and was happy, and was content to let things take their course.

  Later—and not so much later, he would say, teasing her, that she had brought him here because she had decided she wanted him to make love to her, that she had planned it. And she always got furiously indignant, and then as he persisted, set cold towards him. And then she would forget it. And then he came back to it, and because she knew it was important to him, the little recurring wrangle left a poisoned spot which spread. It was not true. In the car she had known he would be her lover, because of the quality of his voice, which she trusted. But at some time, it didn’t matter when. He would know the right time, she felt. And so if the right time was then, that first afternoon alone, it must be right. “And what do you suppose I would have done if you hadn’t made love to me?” she would ask, later, curious and hostile. “You’d have been bad-tempered,” he replied, laughing but with a curious undertone of regret. And the regret, which was genuine, drew her to him, as if they were fellow-victims of some cruelty in life neither could help.

  “But you arranged it all,” she would say. “You even brought out a rug for the purpose. I suppose you always take a rug in the car for afternoon jaunts, just in case.”

  “Of course, nothing like a nice warm rug on the grass.”

  At which she would laugh. And later still she would think, chilled: “I suppose he had taken other women to that field, it was probably just a habit of his.”

  Yet at the time she was perfectly happy. The weight of the city was off her, and the scent of the grasses and the sun delicious. Then she became aware of his half-ironical smile and sat up, on the defensive. He began to talk, consciously ironical, about her husband. She told him what he wanted to know, briefly, since she had offered the facts last night. And then she told him, also briefly, about the child; but this time she was cursory because she felt guilty because she was here, in the sun, and Michael would have enjoyed the drive and the warm field.

  She understood that Paul had said something about his wife. It took some moments for this to sink in. He also said he had two children. She felt a shock, but did not let it disturb her confidence in the moment. The way he spoke of his wife, which was hurried and almost irritable, told Ella he did not love her. She was using the word “love” already, and with a naivety quite foreign to her normal way of analysing relationships. She even imagined he must be separated from his wife, if he could speak of her so casually.

  He made love to her. Ella thought, “Well he’s right, it is the right moment, here, where it’s beautiful.” Her body held too many memories of her husband for her to lack tensions. But soon she gave herself up, and in confidence, because their bodies understood each other. (But it was only later, she would use a phrase like “our bodies understood each other.” At the time, she was thinking: We understand each other.) Yet once, opening her eyes, she saw his face, and it held a hard, almost ugly look. And she shut her eyes not to see it, and was happy in the movements of love. Afterwards, she saw his face turned away, and the hard look again. She instinctively moved away from him, but his hand on her belly held her down. He said, half-teasing: “You’re much too thin.” She laughed, without hurt, because the way his hand lay on her flesh told her he liked her as she was. And she liked herself, naked. It was a frail, slight body, with sharp edges to the shoulders and the knees, but her breasts and stomach glistened white, and her small feet were delicate and white. Often she had wanted to be different, had longed to be larger, fuller, rounder, “more of a woman,” but the way his hand touched her cancelled all
that and she was happy. He kept his hand’s soft pressure on her vulnerable stomach for some moments, then suddenly withdrew it and began to dress. She, feeling abandoned, began to dress also. She was suddenly unaccountably close to tears, and her body again seemed too thin and light. He asked: “How long since you slept with a man?”