Now it is nearly eight o’clock and another pressure starts; this is Michael’s day for going to the hospital in South London, so he must wake at eight to be in time. He prefers Janet to have left for school before he wakes. And I prefer it, because it divides me. The two personalities—Janet’s mother, Michael’s mistress, are happier separated. It is a strain having to be both at once. It is no longer raining. I wipe the fog of condensed breath and night-sweat from the windowpane, and see it is a cool, damp, but clear day. Janet’s school is close, a short walk. I say: “You must take your raincoat.” Instantly her voice raises into protest: “Oh no, mummy, I hate my raincoat, I want my duffle coat.” I say, calm and firm: “No. Your raincoat. It’s been raining all night.” “How do you know when you were asleep?” This triumphant retort puts her into a good humour. She will now take the raincoat and put on her gum-boots without any further fuss. “Are you going to fetch me from school this afternoon?” “Yes, I think so, but if I’m not there, then come back, and Molly will be here.” “Or Tommy.” “No, not Tommy.” “Why not?” “Tommy’s grown-up now, and he’s got a girl-friend.” I say this on purpose because she has shown signs of jealousy of Tommy’s girl. She says, calmly: “Tommy will always like me best.” And adds: “If you’re not there to pick me up, I’ll go and play at Barbara’s house.” “Well, if you do I’ll come and fetch you at six.” She rushes off down the stairs, making a terrific din. It sounds like an avalanche sliding down the centre of the house. I am afraid Molly might wake. I stand at the head of the stairs, listening, until, ten minutes later, the front door slams; and I make myself shut out all thoughts of Janet until the proper time. I go back into the bedroom. Michael is a dark hump under the bedclothes. I draw the curtains right back, and sit on the bed and kiss Michael awake. He grips me and says: “Come back to bed.” I say: “It’s eight o’clock. After.” He puts his hands on my breasts. My nipples begin to burn, and I control my response to him and say: “It’s eight o’clock.” “Oh, Anna, but you’re always so efficient and practical in the morning.” “It’s just as well I am,” I say, lightly, but I can hear the annoyance in my voice. “Where is Janet?” “Gone to school.” He lets his hands fall from my breasts, and now I feel disappointment—perversely—because we won’t make love. Also relief; because if we did he would be late, and short-tempered with me. And of course, the resentment: my affliction, my burden, and my cross. The resentment is because he said: “You are always so efficient and practical,” when it is precisely my efficiency and practicality that gains him an extra two hours in bed.
He gets up and washes and shaves and I make his breakfast. We always eat it on a low table by the bed, whose covers have been hastily pulled up. Now we have coffee and fruit and toast; and he is already the professional man, smooth-suited, clear-eyed, calm. He is watching me. I know this is because he plans to tell me something. Is today the day he will break it off? I remember this is the first morning together for a week. I don’t want to think about this because it is unlikely that Michael, feeling confined and unhappy in his home, as he does, has been with his wife for the last six days. Where then? My feeling is not so much of jealousy, as of a dull heavy pain, the pain of loss. But I smile, pass him the toast, offer him the newspapers. He takes the papers, glances at them, and remarks: “If you can put up with me two nights running—I have to be at the hospital down the road this evening to give a lecture.” I smile; for a moment we exchange irony, because of the years we have spent night after night together. Then he slides off into sentimentality, but parodying it at the same time: “Ah, Anna, but look how it has worn thin for you.” I merely smile again, because there’s no point in saying anything, and then he says, this time gaily, in the parody of a rake’s manner: “You get more and more practical with every day that dawns. Every man with sense knows that when a woman gets all efficient on him, the time has come to part.” Suddenly it’s too painful for me to play this game, and I say: “Well, anyway, I’ll love you to come this evening. Do you want to eat here?” He says: “It’s not likely I should refuse to eat with you when you’re such a cook, now is it?” “I shall look forward to it,” I say.
He says: “If you can get dressed quickly, I can give you a lift to your office.” I hesitate, because I am thinking: If I have to cook this evening, then I must buy food before I go to work. He says quickly, because of the hesitation: “But if you’d rather not, then I’ll be off.” He kisses me; and the kiss is a continuation of all the love we’ve had together. He says, cancelling the moment of intimacy, for his words continue the other theme: “If we have nothing else in common, we have sex.” Whenever he says this, and it is only recently he has been saying it, I feel the pit of my stomach go cold; it is the total rejection of me, or so I feel it; and there is a great distance between us. Across the distance I say ironically: “Is that all we have together?” and he says: “All? But my dear Anna, my dear Anna—but I must go, I’ll be late.” And he goes, with the bitter rueful smile of a rejected man.
And now I must hurry. I wash again and dress. I choose a black and white wool dress with a small white collar, because Michael likes it, and there mightn’t be time to change before this evening. Then I run down to the grocer and the butcher. It is a great pleasure, buying food I will cook for Michael; a sensuous pleasure, like the act of cooking itself. I imagine the meat in its coat of crumbs and egg; the mushrooms, simmering in sour cream and onions, the clear, strong, amber-coloured soup. Imagining it I create the meal, the movements I will use, checking ingredients, heat, textures. I take the provisions up and put them on the table; then I remember the veal must be beaten and I must do it now, because later it will wake Janet. So I beat the veal flat and fold the tissues of meat in paper and leave them. It is now nine o’clock. I’m short of money so I must go by bus, not taxi. I have fifteen minutes in hand. I hastily sweep the room and make the bed, changing the undersheet which is stained from last night. As I push the stained sheet into the linen-basket I notice a stain of blood. But surely it’s not time yet for my period? I hastily check dates, and realise yes, it’s today. Suddenly I feel tired and irritable, because these feelings accompany my periods. (I wondered if it would be better not to choose today to write down everything I felt; then decided to go ahead. It was not planned; I had forgotten about the period. I decided that the instinctive feeling of shame and modesty was dishonest: no emotion for a writer.) I stuff my vagina with the tampon of cotton wool, and am already on my way downstairs, when I remember I’ve forgotten to take a supply of tampons with me. I am late. I roll tampons into my handbag, concealing them under a handkerchief, feeling more and more irritable. At the same time I am telling myself that if I had not noticed my period had started, I would not be feeling nearly so irritable. But all the same, I must control myself now, before leaving for work, or I’ll find myself cracking into bad temper in the office. I might as well take a taxi after all—that way I’ll have ten minutes in hand. I sit down and try to relax in the big chair. But I am too tense. I look for ways to relax tension. There are half a dozen pots of creeper on the window sill, a greenish-grey wandering plant I don’t know the name of. I take the six earthenware pots to the kitchen and submerge them, one after another, in a basin of water, watching the bubbles rise as the water sinks down and drives up the air. The leaves sparkle with water. The dark earth smells of damp growth. I feel better. I put the pots of growth back on the window sill where they can catch the sun, if there is any. Then I snatch up my coat and run downstairs, passing Molly, sleepy in her housecoat. “What are you in such a hurry for?” she asks; and I shout back: “I’m late,” hearing the contrast between her loud, lazy, unhurried voice, and mine, tense. There isn’t a taxi before I reach the bus-stop, and a bus comes along so I get on, just as the rain comes down. My stockings are slightly splashed; I must remember to change them tonight; Michael notices this sort of detail. Now, sitting on the bus, I feel the dull drag at my lower belly. Not bad at all. Good, if this first pang is slight, then it will al
l be over in a couple of days. Why am I so ungrateful when I suffer so little compared to other women?—Molly, for instance, groaning and complaining in enjoyable suffering for five or six days. I find my mind is on the practical treadmill again, the things I have to do today, this time in connection with the office. Simultaneously I am worrying about this business of being conscious of everything so as to write it down, particularly in connection with my having a period. Because, whereas to me, the fact I am having a period is no more than an entrance into an emotional state, recurring regularly, that is of no particular importance; I know that as soon as I write the word “blood,” it will be giving a wrong emphasis, and even to me when I come to read what I’ve written. And so I begin to doubt the value of a day’s recording before I’ve started to record it. I am thinking, I realise, about a major problem of literary style, of tact. For instance, when James Joyce described his man in the act of defecating, it was a shock, shocking. Though it was his intention to rob words of their power to shock. And I read recently in some review, a man said he would be revolted by the description of a woman defecating. I resented this; because, of course, what he meant was, he would not like to have that romantic image, a woman, made less romantic. But he was right, for all that. I realise it’s not basically a literary problem at all. For instance, when Molly said to me, with her loud jolly laugh: I’ve got the curse; I have instantly to suppress distaste, even though we are both women; and I begin to be conscious of the possibility of bad smells. Thinking of my reaction to Molly, I forget about my problems of being truthful in writing (which is being truthful about oneself), and I begin to worry: Am I smelling? It is the only smell I know of that I dislike. I don’t mind my own immediate lavatory smells; I like the smell of sex, of sweat, of skin, or hair. But the faintly dubious, essentially stale smell of menstrual blood I hate. And resent. It is a smell that I feel as strange even to me, an imposition from outside. Not from me. Yet for two days I have to deal with this thing from outside—a bad smell, emanating from me. I realise that all these thoughts would not have been in my head at all had I not set myself to be conscious. A period is something I deal with, without thinking about it particularly, or rather I think of it with a part of my mind that deals with routine problems. It is the same part of my mind that deals with the problem of routine cleanliness. But the idea that I will have to write it down is changing the balance, destroying the truth; so I shut the thoughts of my period out of my mind; making, however, a mental note that as soon as I get to the office I must go to the washroom to make sure there is no smell. I ought really to be thinking over the coming encounter with Comrade Butte. I call him comrade ironically; as he calls me, ironically, Comrade Anna. Last week I said to him, furious about something: “Comrade Butte, do you realise that if by some chance we had both been Russian communists, you would have had me shot years ago?” “Yes, Comrade Anna, that seems to me more than likely.” (This particular joke is characteristic of the Party in this period.) Meanwhile, Jack sat and smiled at us both behind his round spectacles. He enjoys my fights with Comrade Butte. After John Butte had left, Jack said: “There’s one thing you don’t take into account, and that you might very well have been the one to order the shooting of John Butte.” This remark came close to my private nightmare, and to exorcise it I joked: “My dear Jack, the essence of my position is that I am essentially the one to be shot—this is, traditionally, my role.” “Don’t be too sure, if you’d known John Butte in the ’thirties you wouldn’t be so ready to cast him in the role of a bureaucratic executioner.” “And anyway, that isn’t the point.” “Which is?” “Stalin’s been dead nearly a year, and nothing has changed.” “A great deal has changed.” “They’re letting people out of prison; nothing is being done to change the attitudes that put them there.” “They’re considering changing the law.” “The legal system’s being changed this way and that way’ll do nothing to change the spirit I’m talking about.” After a moment he nodded. “Quite possibly, but we don’t know.” He was examining me, mildly. I’ve often wondered if this mildness, this detachment, which makes it possible for us to have these conversations, is a sign of a broken personality; the sell-out most people make at some time or another; or whether it is a self-effacing strength. I don’t know. I do know that Jack is the only person in the Party with whom I can have this kind of discussion. Some weeks ago I told him I was thinking of leaving the Party, and he replied in jest: “I’ve been in the Party thirty years, and sometimes I think I and John Butte will be the only people, of the thousands I’ve known, who will remain in it.” “Is that a criticism of the Party or of the thousands who have left?” “Of the thousands who have left, naturally,” he said, laughing. Yesterday he said: “Well, Anna, if you are going to leave the Party, please give me the usual month’s notice, because you’re very useful and I shall need time to replace you.”
The Golden Notebook Page 40