The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  “Tommy, that’s stupid.”

  “No it isn’t. The only reason they’re doing it is, no one can join the communist party now, it’s a sort of substitute. They use that awful jargon—well I’ve heard you and my mother laughing about the jargon so why is it all right for them to use it? Because they’re young, I suppose you are going to say, but it’s not good enough. And I’ll tell you something. In five years time Tony will have a fine job on the National Coal Board or something like that. He’ll be a Labour M.P. perhaps. He’ll be making speeches about left this and socialist that—” Tommy had become shrill again, he was out of breath.

  “He might also be doing a very useful job,” said Anna.

  “He doesn’t really believe in it. It’s an attitude he’s taken up. And he’s got a girl—he’s going to marry her. A sociologist. She’s one of that crowd too. They rush around sticking up posters and shouting slogans.”

  “You sound as if you envy him.”

  “Don’t patronise me, Anna. You’re patronising me.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I don’t think I was.”

  “Yes you are. I know quite well if you were discussing Tony with my mother you’d be saying something different. And if you could see that girl—I can just hear what you’d be saying. She’s a sort of mother figure. Why aren’t you honest with me Anna?” This last phrase he positively shrieked at her; his face was distorted. He glared at her, then turned quickly, and as if he had needed this flare of anger to give him courage, he began examining her notebooks, his back set in stubborn opposition to the possibility of her preventing him.

  Anna sat still, terribly exposed, forcing herself into immobility. She was suffering, remembering the intimacy of what she had written. And he read on and on, in a stubborn fever, while she simply sat there. Then she felt herself go into a kind of stupor of exhaustion, and thought vaguely: Well, what does it matter? If this is what he needs, then what does it matter what I feel?

  Some time later, perhaps as long as an hour, he asked: “Why do you write things in different kinds of hand-writing? And you bracket bits off? You give importance to one kind of feeling and not to others? How do you decide what’s important and what isn’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That isn’t good enough. You know it isn’t. Here you’ve got an entry, it was when you were still living in our house. ‘I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I’d flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and the brains.”’

  He looked at her, accusing, and Anna was silent. “When you had written that, you put heavy brackets around it. And then you wrote: ‘I went to the shop and bought a pound and a half of tomatoes, half a pound of cheese, a pot of cherry jam, and a quarter of tea. Then I made a tomato salad and took Janet to the park for a walk.”’

  “Well?”

  “That was the same day. Why did you put brackets round the first bit, about licking up the blood and the brains?”

  “We all have mad flashes about being dead on the pavement, or cannibalism, or committing suicide or something.”

  “They aren’t important?”

  “No.”

  “The tomatoes and the quarter of tea is what is important?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you decide that the madness and the cruelty isn’t just as strong as the—getting on with living?”

  “It’s not just that. I’m not bracketing off the madness and the cruelty—it’s something else.”

  “What?” He insisted on an answer, and Anna, out of her depths of exhaustion, looked for one.

  “It’s a different kind of sensibility. Don’t you see? In a day when I buy food and cook it and look after Janet and work, there’s a flash of madness—when I write it down it looks dramatic and awful. It’s just because I write it down. But the real things that happened in that day were the ordinary things.”

  “Then why write it down at all? Do you realise the whole of this notebook, the blue one, is either newspaper cuttings, or bits like the blood and brain bit, all bracketed off, or crossed out; and then entries like buying tomatoes or tea?”

  “I suppose it is. It’s because I keep trying to write the truth and realising it’s not true.”

  “Perhaps it is true,” he said suddenly, “perhaps it is, and you can’t bear it, so you cross it out.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why the four notebooks? What would happen if you had one big book without all those divisions and brackets and special writing?”

  “I’ve told you, chaos.”

  He turned to look at her. He said sourly: “You look such a neat little thing and look at what you write.”

  Anna said: “You sounded just like your mother then: that’s how she criticises me—in that tone of voice.”

  “Don’t put me off, Anna. Are you afraid of being chaotic?”

  Anna felt her stomach contract in a sort of fear, and said, after a pause: “I suppose I must be.”

  “Then it’s dishonest. After all, you take your stand on something, don’t you? Yes you do—you despise people like my father, who limit themselves. But you limit yourself too. For the same reason. You’re afraid. You’re being irresponsible.” He made this final judgement, the pouting, deliberate mouth smiling with satisfaction. Anna realised that this was what he had come to say. This was the point they had been working towards all evening. And he was going on, but in a flash of knowledge she said: “I often leave my door open—have you been in here to read these notebooks?”

  “Yes, I have. I was here yesterday, but I saw you coming up the street so I went out before you could see me. Well I’ve decided that you’re dishonest Anna. You are a happy person but…”

  “I, happy?” said Anna, derisive.

  “Content then. Yes you are. Much more than my mother—or anyone I know. But when you get down to it, it’s all a lie. You sit here writing and writing, but no one can see it—that’s arrogant, I told you so before. And you aren’t even honest enough to let yourself be what you are—everything’s divided off and split up. So what’s the use of patronising me and saying: You’re in a bad phase. If you’re not in a bad phase, then it’s because you can’t be in a phase, you take care to divide yourself up into compartments. If things are a chaos, then that’s what they are. I don’t think there’s a pattern anywhere—you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren’t good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else. All the best people can be good to one other person or their families. But that’s egotism, it isn’t being good. We aren’t any better than the animals, we just pretend to be. We don’t really care about each other at all.” Now he came and sat down opposite her; apparently himself, the obstinate slow-moving boy she knew. Then he gave a sudden bright frightening giggle, and she saw the flash of spite again.

  She said: “Well there’s nothing I can say to that, is there?”

  He leaned forward and said: “I’m going to give you another chance Anna.”

  “What?” she said, startled, almost ready to laugh. But his face was terrifying, and she said, after a pause: “What do you mean?”

  “I’m serious. Now tell me. You used to live by a philosophy—well didn’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And now you say, the communist myth. So what do you live by now? No, don’t use words like stoicism, it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It seems to me something like this—every so often, perhaps once in a century, there’s a sort of—act of faith. A well of faith fills up, and there’s an enormous heave forward in one country or another, and that’s a forward movement for the whole world. Because it’s an act of imagination—of what is possible for the whole world. In our century it was 1917 in Russia. And in China. Then
the well runs dry, because, as you say, the cruelty and the ugliness are too strong. Then the well slowly fills again. And then there’s another painful lurch forward.”

  “A lurch forward?” he said.

  “yes.”

  “In spite of everything, a lurch forward?”

  “Yes—because every time the dream gets stronger. If people can imagine something, there’ll come a time when they’ll achieve it.”

  “Imagine what?”

  “What you said—goodness. Kindness. The end of being animals.”

  “And for us now, what is there?”

  “Keeping the dream alive. Because there’ll always be new people, without—paralysis of the will.” She concluded strongly, with an energetic nod; and thought as she spoke that she sounded like Mother Sugar at the end of a session: One must have faith! Trumpets and fanfares. There must have been a small self-accusatory smile on her face—she could even feel it there, although she believed in what she had said, for Tommy nodded with a sort of malicious triumph. The telephone rang and he said: “That’ll be my mother, checking on how my phase is working itself out.”

  Anna answered the telephone, said yes and no, put down the receiver and turned to Tommy.

  “No it wasn’t your mother, but I’m expecting a visitor.”

  “Then I must go.” He got up slowly, with his characteristic lumbering slowness, and arranged on his face the blank inward-looking stare he had entered with. He said: “Thank you for talking to me.” He was saying: Thank you for confirming what I had expected to find in you.

  The moment he had gone Anna telephoned Molly, who had just come in from the theatre. She said: “Tommy’s been here, and he’s just left. He frightens me. There’s something terribly wrong, but I don’t know what, and I don’t think I said the right things.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well he says everything is rotten.”

  “Well it is,” said Molly, loud and cheerful. In the couple of hours since she had last spoken of her son, she had played the part of a jolly landlady—a part she despised in a play she despised—but she was still inside this part. And she had been to the pub with some of the cast and had enjoyed it. She was very far from her earlier mood.

  “And Marion has just telephoned me from the phone box downstairs. She’s come up by the last train especially to see me.”

  “What on earth for?” said Molly, annoyed.

  “I don’t know. She’s drunk. I’ll tell you in the morning. Molly…” Anna was filled with panic, remembering how Tommy had gone out. “Molly, we’ve got to do something for Tommy, quickly. I’m sure we have.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” said Molly, practically.

  “There’s Marion at the door. I must let her in. Good night.”

  “Good night. I’ll report on the state of Tommy’s morale in the morning. I expect we are worrying about nothing. After all, think of how awful we were at that age.” Anna heard her friend’s loud, jolly laugh as the receiver clicked down.

  Anna pressed the button that released the catch of the front door, and listened to the clumsy sounds of Marion’s ascent up the stairs. She could not go to help Marion, who would certainly resent it.

  Marion, when she came in, smiled rather as Tommy had: it was a smile prepared before entering, and directed at the whole room. She reached the chair Tommy had sat in, and collapsed heavily into it. She was a heavy woman—tall, with abundant tired flesh. Her face was soft, or rather, blurred-looking, and her brown gaze was both blurred and suspicious. As a girl she had been slender, vivacious, humorous. “A nut-brown maid,” as Richard said—once with affection, but now with hostility.

  Marion was staring about her, alternatively screwing up her eyes and then letting them widen. Her smile had gone. It was clear that she was very drunk, and that Anna should try to get her into bed. Meanwhile Anna sat opposite her, where she could easily be brought into focus—in the same chair she had sat opposite to Tommy.

  Marion adjusted her head and her eyes so that she could see Anna, and said with difficulty: “How lucky—you—are, Anna. I do—think—you—are so lucky to live, to live as you—like. Such a pretty room. And you—you—you are free. Do as you like.”

  “Marion, let me put you to bed, we can talk in the morning.”

  “You think I’m drunk,” said Marion clearly and with resentment.

  “Yes of course you are. It doesn’t matter. You should go to sleep.”

  Anna was now so tired, and all of a sudden, that fatigue was like heavy hands dragging down her legs and her arms. She sat loose in her chair, fighting waves of tiredness.

  “I want a drunk,” said Marion peevishly. “I want a drunk. I want a drunk.”

  Anna roused herself, went to the kitchen next door, filled a glass with some weak tea left in her teapot, added about a teaspoon of whisky, and brought it to Marion.

  Marion said “Thanksh,” took a gulp of the mixture and nodded. She held the glass carefully, lovingly, her fingers clenched around it.

  “How is Richard?” she next enquired, carefully, her face tight with the effort of getting the words out. She had prepared this question before she came in. Anna translated it, as it were, into Marion’s normal voice, and thought: Good God, Marion’s jealous of me, and it never crossed my mind.

  She said drily: “But Marion, surely you’re more likely to know than I am?”

  She saw the dry tone vanish into the drunken space between herself and Marion; saw Marion’s mind working suspiciously on the sense of the words. She said slowly and loudly: “Marion there’s no need to be jealous of me. If Richard has said something then it’s not the truth.”

  “I’m not jealous of you,” said Marion in a hissing spurt. The word jealous had revived her jealousy; and for a few moments she was a jealous woman, her face contorted as she peered around the room at objects which had played a part in her jealous fantasies, her eyes returning again and again to the bed.

  “It’s not true,” said Anna.

  “Not—that—that it makes much differesh,” said Marion with something like a good-natured laugh. “Why not you, when there’sh sho many? At least you aren’t an insult.”

  “But I’m not anything.”

  Marion now lifted her chin, and let the tea and whisky mixture go down her throat in three big gulps. “I needed that,” she said with solemnity, holding out the glass so that Anna could refill it. Anna did not take the glass. She said: “Marion, I’m glad you’ve come to see me, but really, you are making a mistake.”

  Marion winked, horribly; and said with drunken roguishness: “Oh but I think I’ve come because I’m envious. You are what I want to be—you’re free, and you have lovers and you do as you like.”

  “I’m not free,” said Anna; heard the dryness in her tone and understood she must banish it. She said: “Marion, I’d like to be married. I don’t like living like this.”

  “It’s easy to say that. But you could get married if you want. Well you’ll have to let me sleep here tonight. The last train has gone. And Richard’s too mean for me to hire a car. Richard’s awfully mean. Yes he is.” (Anna noted that Marion sounded much less drunk, when railing at her husband.) “Would you believe it, that he could be so mean? He’s as rich as hell. Do you know, we are among the one per cent of people as rich as—but he examines my accounts every month. He boasted that we were among the top one per cent, but I bought a model dress and he complained. Of course when he examines my accounts he’s finding out how much I spend on liquor, but it’s the money as well.”

  “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “What bed? Who’s upstairs?”

  “Janet and my lodger. But there’s another bed.”

  Marion’s eyes lit with a delighted suspicion. She said: “How odd of you to have a lodger. It’s a man. How strange of you.”

  Again Anna translated, and heard the jokes that Richard and Marion might make about her when Marion was sober. They made jokes about the man lodger. Anna suffered a su
dden revulsion, much rarer these days than once, against people like Marion and Richard. She thought: It might be a strain, living as I do, but at least I don’t live with people like Marion and Richard, I don’t live in that world where a woman can’t have a male lodger without spiteful jokes being made.

  “What does Janet think, you living here with a man in your flat?”

  “Marion, I’m not living here with a man. I have a large flat and I let a room in it. He was the first person who came to see the room and wanted it. There’s a tiny room upstairs with no one in it. Please let me put you to bed.”

  “But I hate going to bed. Once it was the happiest time of my life. When we were first married. That’s why I envy you. No man’s ever going to want me again. That’s all finished. Sometimes Richard sleeps with me, but he has to make himself. Men are stupid, aren’t they, they think we don’t know. Anna have you ever slept with a man when you know he’s making himself?”

  “It was like that when I was married.”

  “Yes, but you left him. Good for you. Did you know a man fell in love with me—he wanted to marry me and he said he’d have the children too. Richard pretended to love me again. All he wanted was to keep me as a nursemaid for the children. That’s all. I wish I had gone away when I knew that’s all he wanted. Did you know, Richard took me for a holiday this summer? It was like that all the time. We went to bed and then he made himself perform. I knew he was thinking all the time about that little tart he’s got in his office.” She thrust the glass at Anna, and said peremptorily: “Fill it.” Anna went next door, made the same mixture of tea and whisky, and came back with it. Marion drank and her voice rolled upwards in a wail of self-pity: “What would you feel, Anna, if you knew you’d never have a man loving you again? When we went on holiday I thought it would be different. I don’t know why I did. On the first night we went to the hotel restaurant and there was an Italian girl at the next table. Richard kept looking at her, I suppose he thought I didn’t notice. Then he said I should go up to bed early. He wanted to get the Italian girl. But I wouldn’t go to bed early.” She let out a high sobbing screech of satisfaction. “‘Oh no.’ I said, ‘You’ve come on a holiday with me, not to pick up tarts.’” Now her eyes were reddened with vindictive tears, and rough wet red patches appeared on her full cheeks. “He says to me, ‘You’ve got the children, haven’t you?’ But why should I care about the children if you don’t care about me—that’s what I say to him. But he doesn’t understand that. Why should you care about a man’s children if he doesn’t love you? Isn’t that true, Anna? Well isn’t it true? Go on, say something, it’s true, isn’t it? When he said he wanted to marry me, he said he loved me, he didn’t say I’m going to give you three children and then I’m going off to the little tarts leaving you with the children. Well say something Anna. And it’s all very well for you, you live with just one child, and you can do exactly as you like. It’s easy for you to be attractive for Richard, when he just pops in for a quick one now and again.”