The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  She was confused, wondering: George, he means? But he didn’t count, I didn’t love him. I hated him touching me. “I don’t know,” she said, and as she spoke understood he meant that she had slept with him out of hunger. Her face began to burn and she got quickly up off the rug, turning her face away, and then said, in a voice which sounded ugly to herself: “Not since last week. I picked up a man at a party and brought him home with me.” She was looking for words from her memories of the girls at the canteen, during the war. She found them, and said: “A nice piece of flesh, he was.” She got into the car, slamming the door. He threw the rug into the back of the car, got hastily in, and began the business of reversing the car back and forth so as to get it facing out of the field.

  “You make a habit of it, then?” he enquired. His voice was sober, detached. She thought that whereas a moment ago he was asking on his own account, as a man; now he was again talking “like a man behind a desk.” She was thinking that she only wanted the drive home to be over so that she could go home and cry. The love-making was now linked in her mind with memories of her husband, and the shrinking of her body from George’s, because she was shrinking away in spirit from this new man.

  “Do you make a habit of it?” he asked again.

  “Of what?” She laughed. “Oh, I see.” And she looked at him incredulously, as if he were mad. At the moment he seemed to her slightly mad, his face tense with suspicion. He was not at all, now, the “man behind a desk,” but a man hostile to her. Now she was quite set against him, and she laughed angrily, and said: “You’re very stupid after all.”

  They did not speak again until they reached the main road, and joined the stream of traffic slowly congealed along the way back to the city. Then he remarked, in a different voice, companionable, a peace-offering: “I’m not in a position to criticise, after all. My love life could hardly be described as exemplary.”

  “I hope you found me a satisfactory diversion.”

  He looked puzzled. He seemed stupid to her because he was not understanding. She could see him framing words and then discarding them. And so she gave him no chance to talk. She felt as if she had been dealt, deliberately, one after the other, blows which were aimed at some place just below her breasts. She was almost gasping at the pain of these blows. Her lips were trembling, but she would rather have died than cry in front of him. She turned her face aside, watching a country-side now falling into shadow and cold, and began to talk herself. She could, when she set herself to it, be hard, malicious, amusing. She entertained him with sophisticated gossip about the magazine office, the affairs of Patricia Brent, etc. etc., while she despised him for accepting this counterfeit of herself She talked on and on, while he was silent; and when they reached Julia’s house, she got fast out of the car, and was in the doorway before he could follow her. She was fumbling with the key in the lock when he came up behind her and said: “Would your friend Julia put your son to bed tonight? We could go to a play if you’d like it. No, a film, it’s Sunday.” She positively gasped with surprise: “But I’m not going to see you again, surely you don’t expect me to?”

  He took her shoulders with his hands from behind and said: “But, why not? You liked me, it’s no good pretending you didn’t.” To this, Ella had no answer, it was not her language. And she could not remember, now, how happy she had been with him in the field. She said: “I’m not seeing you again.”

  “Why not?”

  She furiously wriggled her shoulders free, put the key in the door, turned it, and said: “I haven’t slept with anyone at all for a long time. Not since an affair I had for a week, two years ago. It was a lovely affair…” She saw him wince and felt pleasure because she was hurting him, and because she was lying, it had not been a lovely affair. But, telling the truth now, and accusing him with every atom of her flesh, she said: “He was an American. He never made me feel bad, not once. He wasn’t at all good in bed, I’m sure that’s one of your phrases, isn’t it? But he didn’t despise me.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You’re so stupid,” she said, in a gay scornful voice. And she felt a hard bitter gaiety rise in her, destructive of him and of herself. “You talk about my husband. Well what’s he got to do with it? As far as I’m concerned I never slept with him at all…” He laughed, incredulously and bitterly, but she went on: “I hated sleeping with him. It didn’t count. And you say, how long is it since you slept with another man? Surely it’s all perfectly simple. You’re a psychiatrist, you say, a soul-doctor, and you don’t understand the simplest things about anyone.”

  With which she went into Julia’s house, and shut the door, and put her face to the wall and began to cry. From the feeling of the house she knew it was still empty. The bell rang, almost in her ear: Paul trying to make her open the door. But she left the sound of the bell behind, and went up through the dark well of the house to the bright little flat at the top, slowly, crying. And now the telephone rang. She knew it was Paul, in the telephone box across the street. She let it ring, because she was crying. It stopped and started again. She looked at the compact, impersonal black curves of the instrument and hated it; she swallowed her tears, steadied her voice and answered. It was Julia. Julia said she wanted to stay to supper with her friends; she would bring the child home with her later and put him to bed, and if Ella wanted to go out she could. “What’s the matter with you?” came Julia’s voice, full and calm as usual, across two miles of streets. “I’m crying.” “I can hear you are, what for?” “Oh, these bloody men, I hate them all.” “Oh well, if it’s like that, but better go off to the pictures then, it’ll cheer you up.” Immediately Ella felt better, the incident was less important, and she laughed.

  When the telephone rang half-an-hour later, she answered it, not thinking of Paul. But it was he. He had waited in his car, he said, to telephone again. He wanted to talk to her. “I don’t see what we’ll achieve by it,” said Ella, sounding cool and humorous. And he, sounding humorous and quizzical, said: “Come to the pictures, and we won’t talk.” So she went. She met him with ease. This was because she had told herself she would not make love with him again. It was all finished. Her going out with him was because it seemed melodramatic not to. And because his voice on the telephone had no connection at all with the hardness of his face above her in the field. And because they now would return to their relationship in the car driving away from London. His attitude to having had her in the field had simply cancelled it out. It hadn’t happened, if that was the way he felt about it!

  Later he would say: “When I telephoned you, after you had flounced indoors—you just came, you just needed persuading.” And he laughed. She hated the tone of the laugh. At such moments he would put on a rueful, and self-consciously rueful, rake’s smile, playing the part of a rake so that he could laugh at himself. Yet he was having it both ways, Ella felt, for his complaint was genuine. And so at such moments she would first smile with him, at his parody of the rake; and then quickly change the subject. It was as if he had a personality at these moments not his. She was convinced it was not his. It was on a level that not only had nothing to do with the simplicity and ease of their being together; but betrayed it so completely that she had no alternative but to ignore it. Otherwise she would have had to break with him.

  They did not go to the pictures, but to a coffee bar. Again he told stories about his work at the hospital. He had two posts, at two different hospitals. At one he was a consultant psychiatrist. At the other he was doing a reorganising job. As he put it: “I’m trying to change a snake-pit into something more civilised. And who do I have to fight? The public? Not at all, it’s the old-fashioned doctors…” His stories had two themes. One the stuffed-shirt pomposity of the middle level of the medical establishment. Ella realized that all his criticisms were from the simplest class viewpoint; implicit in what he said, though he didn’t say it, was that stupidity and lack of imagination were middle-class characteristics, and that his attitude, progre
ssive and liberating, was because he was working-class. Which of course was how Julia talked; and how Ella herself criticised Dr West.

  And yet several times she found herself stiffening in resentment, as if it were she who was being criticised; and when this happened she fell back on her memories of the years in the canteen, and thought that if she had not had that experience she would not be able now to see the upper class of this country, from beneath, through the eyes of the factory girls, like so many bizarre fish viewed through the glass bottom of an aquarium. Paul’s second theme was the reverse side of the first, and marked by a change of his whole personality when he touched on it. Telling his critical stories he was full of a delighted malicious irony. But talking of his patients he was serious. His attitude was the same as hers to the “Mrs Browns”—they were already referring to her petitioners in this collective way. He spoke of them with an extraordinary delicacy of kindness, and with an angry compassion. The anger was for their helplessness.

  She liked him so much now that for her it was as if the episode in the field had not happened. He took her home and came into the hall after her, still talking. They went up the stairs, and Ella was thinking: I suppose we’ll have some coffee and then he’ll go. She was quite genuine in this. And yet, when he again made love to her, she again thought: Yes, it’s right, because we’ve been so close together all evening. Afterwards, when he complained: “Of course you knew I’d make love to you again,” she would reply: “Of course I didn’t. And if you hadn’t it wouldn’t have mattered.” At which he would either reply: “Oh, what a hypocrite!” Or: “Then you’ve no right to be so unconscious of your motives.”

  Being with Paul Tanner, that night, was the deepest experience Ella had with a man; so different from anything she had known before that everything in the past became irrelevant. This feeling was so final, that when, towards early morning, Paul asked: “What does Julia think about this sort of thing?” Ella replied vaguely: “What sort of thing?”

  “Last week, for instance. You said you brought a man home from a party.”

  “You’re mad,” she said, laughing comfortably. They lay in the dark. She turned her head to see his face; a dark line of cheek showed against the light from the window; there was something remote and lonely about it, and she thought: He’s got into the same mood he was in earlier. But this time it did not disturb her, for the simplicity of the warm touch of his thigh against hers made the remoteness of his face irrelevant.

  “But what does Julia say?”

  “What about?”

  “What will she say in the morning?”

  “Why should she say anything at all?”

  “I see,” he said briefly; and got up and added: “I’ll have to go home and shave and get a clean shirt.”

  That week he came to her every night, late, when Michael was asleep. And he left early every morning, to “pick up a clean shirt.”

  Ella was completely happy. She drifted along on a soft tide of not-thinking. When Paul made a remark from “his negative personality,” she was so sure of her emotions that she replied: “Oh, you’re so stupid, I told you, you don’t understand anything.” (The word negative was Julia’s, used after a glimpse of Paul on the stairs: “There’s something bitter and negative about that face.”) She was thinking that soon he would marry her. Or perhaps not soon. It would be at the right time, and he would know when that was. His marriage must be no marriage at all, if he could stay with her, night after night, going home at dawn, “for a clean shirt.”

  On the following Sunday, a week after their first excursion into the country, Julia again took the little boy off to friends, and this time Paul took Ella to Kew. They lay on the grass behind a hedge of sheltering rhododendrons, trees above them, the sun sifting over them. They held hands. “You see,” said Paul, with his small rake’s grimace, “we’re like an old married couple already—we know we’re going to make love in bed tonight, so now we just hold hands.”

  “But what’s the matter with it?” asked Ella, amused.

  He was leaning over, looking into her face. She smiled up at him. She knew that he loved her. She felt a perfect trust in him. “What’s the matter with it?” he said with a sort of humorous desperation. “It’s terrible. Here you and I are…” How they were was reflected in his face and eyes, which were warm on her face—“and look what it would be like if we were married.” Ella felt herself go cold. She thought, Surely he’s not saying that as a man does, warning a woman? He’s not so cheap, surely? She saw an old bitterness on his face, and thought: No, he’s not, thank God, he’s carrying on some conversation with himself. And the light inside her was relit. She said: “But you aren’t married at all. You can’t call that being married. You never see her.”

  “We got married when we were both twenty. There should be a law against it,” he added, with the same desperate humour, kissing her. He said, with his mouth on her throat: “You’re very wise not to get married, Ella. Be sensible and stay that way.”

  Ella smiled. She was thinking: And so I was wrong after all. That’s exactly what he’s doing, saying: You can expect just so much from me. She felt completely rejected. And he still lay with his hands on her arms, and she could feel the warmth of them right through her body, and his eyes, warm and full of love for her, were a few inches above hers. He was smiling.

  That night in bed, making love to him was a mechanical thing, she went through the motions of response. It was a different experience from the other nights. It seemed he did not know it; and they lay afterwards as usual close in each other’s arms. She was chilled and full of dismay.

  The day after she had a conversation with Julia, who had been silent all this time about Paul’s staying the nights. “He’s married,” she said. “He’s been married thirteen years. It’s a marriage so that it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t go home at nights. Two children.” Julia made a non-committal grimace and waited. “The thing is, I’m not sure at all…and there’s Michael.”

  “What’s his attitude to Michael?”

  “He’s only seen him once, for a moment. He comes in late—well you know that. And he’s gone by the time Michael wakes up. To pick up a clean shirt from home.” At which Julia laughed, and Ella laughed with her.

  “An extraordinary woman she must be,” said Julia. “Does he talk about her?”

  “He said, they got married too young. And then he went off to the wars, and when he came back, he felt a stranger to her. And as far as I can make out, he’s done nothing but have love affairs ever since.”

  “It doesn’t sound too good,” said Julia. “What do you feel for him?” At the moment, Ella felt nothing but a cold hurt despair. For the life of her she could not reconcile their happiness and what she called his cynicism. She was in something like a panic. Julia was examining her, shrewdly. “I thought, the first time I saw him, he’s got such a tight miserable face.” “He’s not at all miserable,” said Ella quickly. Then, seeing her instinctive and unreasoning defence of him, she laughed at herself and said: “I mean, yes, there is that in him, a sort of bitterness. But there’s his work and he likes it. He rushes from hospital to hospital, and tells marvellous stories about it all, and then the way he talks about his patients—he really cares. And then with me, at night, and he never seems to need to sleep.” Ella blushed, conscious that she was boasting. “Well, it’s true,” she said, watching Julia’s smile. “And then off he rushes in the morning, after practically no sleep, to pick up a shirt and presumably have a nice little chat with his wife about this and that. Energy. Energy is not being miserable. Or even bitter, if it comes to that. The two things aren’t connected.”

  “Oh, well,” said Julia. “In that case you’d better wait and see what happens, hadn’t you?”

  That night Paul was humorous and very tender. It’s as if he’s apologising, Ella thought. Her pain melted. In the morning she found herself restored to happiness. He said, as he dressed: “I can’t see you tonight, Ella.” She said, without fe
ar: “Well, that’s all right.” But he went on, laughing: “After all, I’ve got to see my children sometime.” It sounded as if he were accusing her of having deliberately kept him from them. “But I haven’t stopped you,” said Ella. “Oh, yes you have, you have,” he said, half-singing it. He kissed her lightly, laughing, on the forehead. That’s how he kissed his other women, she thought, when he left them for good. Yes. He didn’t care about them, and he laughed and kissed them on the forehead. And suddenly a picture came into her mind, at which she stared, astonished. She saw him putting money on to a mantelpiece. But he was not—that she knew, the sort of man who would pay a woman. Yet she could see him, clearly, putting money on a mantelpiece. Yes. It was somewhere implicit in his attitude. And to her, Ella, but what’s that got to do with all these hours we’ve been together, when every look and move he’s made told me he loved me? (For the fact that Paul had told her, again and again, that he loved her, meant nothing, or rather would have meant nothing if it had not been confirmed by how he touched her, and the warmth of his voice.) And now, leaving, he remarked, with his small bitter grimace: “And so you’ll be free tonight, Ella.” “What do you mean, free?” “Oh…or your other boy-friends; you’ve been neglecting them, haven’t you?”