The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  Ella watches developments in the office, and sees, that towards the end of a week, Patricia Brent has a new manner with Dr West. The tough, efficient, professional woman’s manner has become soft, almost girlish. Patricia has been the last on Dr West’s short list, for he has tried and failed with two of the secretaries. Ella watches: maliciously pleased that Dr West has ended up with what, for him, was the worst choice; angry on behalf of her sex that Patricia Brent is positively grateful and flattered; terror that accepting the favours of a Dr West might be the end of her own road; angry amusement that Dr West, turned down by herself, made a point of indicating: You wouldn’t have me, but you see, I don’t care!

  And all these emotions are uncomfortably strong, rooted in a resentment that has nothing to do with Dr West. Ella dislikes feeling them, and is ashamed. She asks herself why she is not sorry for Dr West, a middle-aged, not very attractive man, married to an essentially competent and probably dull wife. Why shouldn’t he try to attract some romance to himself? But it is no use. She resents and despises him.

  Meeting Julia at a friend’s house, their relations are chilly. Ella, “by chance,” starts telling her about Dr West. In a few moments the two women are friendly again, as if there had never been a coldness. But they are now friends on the basis of an aspect of their relationship which had always been subordinate before—criticism for men.

  Julia caps Ella’s story about Dr West with this one: an actor at the theatre Julia was playing in brought her home one night and came up for coffee and sat complaining about his marriage. Julia: “I was all kind and full of good advice as usual, but I was so bored at hearing it all again I wanted to scream.” Julia, at four in the morning, suggested she was tired and he should go home. “But my dear, you’d think I’d mortally insulted him. I could see that if he didn’t make me that night his ego would be all deflated, and so I went to bed.” The man was impotent, Julia good-humoured. “In the morning, he said could he come over again that night. He said, it was the least I could do, to give him a chance to redeem himself. He’s got a sense of humour at least.” And so this man spent a second night with Julia. With no better results. “Naturally he left at four, so that the little woman could believe he had been working late. Just as he left he turned on me and said: ‘You’re a castrating woman, I thought you were from the moment I saw you.’”

  “Jesus,” said Ella.

  “Yes,” said Julia fiercely. “And the funny thing is, he’s a nice man. I mean, I would never have expected that sort of remark from him.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone to bed.”

  “But you know how it is—it’s always that moment, when a man looks all wounded in his masculinity, one can’t bear it, one needs to bolster him up.”

  “Yes, but they just kick us afterwards as hard as they can, so why do we do it?”

  “Yes, but I never seem to learn.”

  A few weeks later, Ella sees Julia, tells her: “Four men, and I haven’t even flirted with them before, have telephoned to say their wives are away, and every time they have a delightful coy note in their voices. It really is extraordinary—one knows a man, to work with, for years, then it’s enough that their wives should go away for them to change their voices and they seem to think you’re going to fall over yourself to get into bed. What on earth do you suppose goes through their minds?”

  “Much better not think about that.”

  Ella says to Julia, out of an impulse to placate, to charm (and she recognises it as she speaks as the same need she has to charm or placate a man): “Well at least when I was living in your house, this didn’t happen. Which is odd in itself, isn’t it?”

  Julia shows a flash of triumph, as if she would like to say: Well, I was good for something, then…

  There is now a moment of discomfort: Ella lets slide, out of cowardice, the chance of saying that Julia has behaved badly about her leaving; the chance of “getting it all out into the open.” And in the silence of this discomfort, there is the thought, which follows naturally from the “it is odd in itself, isn’t it?”—it is possible they thought us Lesbians?

  Ella had considered this before, with amusement. But she is thinking: No. If they had thought us Lesbian it would have attracted them, they would have been around in swarms. Every man I’ve ever known has spoken with relish—either openly or unconsciously, about Lesbians. It’s an aspect of their incredible vanity: seeing themselves as redeemers of these lost females.

  Ella listens to the bitter words she is using in her mind and is shaken by them. At home she tries to analyse the bitterness which possesses her. She literally feels poisoned by it.

  She thinks that nothing has occurred which has not been happening all her life. Married men, temporarily wifeless, trying to have an affair with her—etc., etc., ten years ago she would not have even noticed or remarked on it. All this was taken by her as part of the hazards and chances of being a “free woman.” But ten years ago, she realised, she had been feeling something that she had not then recognised. An emotion of satisfaction, of victory over the wives; because she, Ella, the free woman, was so much more exciting than the dull tied women. Looking back and acknowledging this emotion she is ashamed.

  She thinks, too, that the quality of her tone with Julia is that of a bitter spinster. Men. The enemy. They. She decides not to confide in Julia again, or at least to banish the tone of dry bitterness.

  Soon afterwards, the following incident. One of the subeditors at the office is working with Ella on a series of articles giving advice about emotional problems—the problems which arise most often in the letters which come in. Ella and this man spend several evenings together at the office. There are to be six articles, and each has two titles, an official one and one for jocular use by Ella and her colleague. For instance, Do you sometimes feel Bored with Your Home? is for Ella and Jack: Help! I’m going round the bend. And: The Husband who neglects his Family, becomes My Husband sleeps around. And so on. Both Ella and Jack laugh a great deal, and make fun of the over-simple style of the articles, yet they write them carefully, taking trouble with them. They both know their joking is because of the unhappiness and frustration of the letters which pour into the office, and which they do not believe their articles will do anything to alleviate.

  On the last evening of their collaboration Jack drives Ella home. He is married, has three children, is aged about thirty. Ella likes him very much. She offers him a drink, he goes upstairs with her. She knows the moment will soon approach when he will invite her to make love. She is thinking: But I’m not attracted to him. But I might be, if only I could shake off the shadow of Paul. How do I know I won’t be attracted to him once I’m in bed? After all, I was not immediately attracted to Paul. This last thought surprises her. She sits listening, while the young man talks and entertains her, and is thinking: Paul always used to say, joking, but really serious, that I had not been in love with him at first. Now I say it myself. But I don’t think it’s true. I probably only say it because he said it…but no wonder I can never work up any interest in a man if I’m thinking all the time of Paul.

  Ella goes to bed with Jack. She classifies him as the efficient type of lover. “The man who is not sensual, has learned love-making out of a book, probably called How to Satisfy Your Wife.” He gets his pleasure from having got a woman into bed, not from sex itself.

  These two are cheerful, friendly, continuing the good sense of their work together in the office. Yet Ella is fighting down a need to cry. She is familiar with this sudden depression and combats it thus: It’s not my depression at all; it is guilt, but not my guilt; it is the guilt from the past, it has to do with the double standard which I repudiate.

  Jack, announcing the fact that he must return home, begins talking about his wife. “She is a good girl,” he remarks, and Ella freezes at the condescension in his voice. “I make damned sure she never suspects me when I go off the rails. Of course, she gets pretty fed up, stuck with the kids, they’re a bit of a handful, but
she copes.” He is putting on his tie, pulling on his shoes as he sits on Ella’s bed. He is full of well-being; his face is the unmarked, open face of a boy. “I’m pretty lucky in my old woman,” he goes on; but now there is resentment in it, against his wife; and Ella knows that this occasion, his sleeping with her, is going to be used subtly as a means to denigrate his wife. And he is jaunty with satisfaction, not because of the pleasures of love, about which he knows very little, but because he has proved something to himself. He says good-bye to Ella, remarking: “Well, back to the grindstone. My wife’s the best in the world, but she’s not exactly an exhilarating conversationalist.” Ella checks herself, does not say that a woman with three small children, stuck in a house in the suburbs with a television set, has nothing much exhilarating to talk about. The depths of her resentment amaze her. She knows that his wife, the woman who is waiting for him miles away somewhere across London, will know, the moment he enters the bedroom, that he has been sleeping with another woman, from his self-satisfied jauntiness.

  Ella decides (a) that she will be chaste until she falls in love and (b) that she will not discuss this incident with Julia.

  Next day she telephones Julia, they meet for lunch and she tells Julia. She is reflecting, as she does so, that while she has always steadily refused to confide in Patricia Brent, or at least refused to be an accomplice in her sardonic criticism of men (Ella thinks that the sardonic, almost good-natured quality of Patricia’s criticism of men is what her own present bitterness will mellow into and she is determined that it won’t) yet she is prepared to confide in Julia whose bitterness is turning rapidly into a corroding contempt. She again decides not to indulge in these conversations with Julia, thinking that two women, friends on a basis of criticism of men, are Lesbian, psychologically if not physically.

  This time she keeps her promise to herself not to talk to Julia. She is isolated and lonely.

  Now something new happens. She begins to suffer torments of sexual desire. Ella is frightened because she cannot remember feeling sexual desire, as a thing in itself, without reference to a specific man before, or at least not since her adolescence, and then it was always in relation to a fantasy about a man. Now she cannot sleep, she masturbates, to accompaniment of fantasies of hatred about men. Paul has vanished completely: she has lost the warm strong man of her experience, and can only remember a cynical betrayer. She suffers sex desire in a vacuum. She is acutely humiliated, thinking that this means she is dependent on men for “having sex,” for “being serviced,” for “being satisfied.” She uses this kind of savage phrase to humiliate herself.

  Then she realises she is falling into a lie about herself, and about women, and that she must hold on to this knowledge: that when she was with Paul she felt no sex hungers that were not prompted by him; that if he was apart from her for a few days, she was dormant until he returned; that her present raging sexual hunger was not for sex, but was fed by all the emotional hungers of her life. That when she loved a man again, she would return to normal: a woman, that is, whose sexuality would ebb and flow in response to his. A woman’s sexuality is, so to speak, contained by a man, if he is a real man; she is, in a sense, put to sleep by him, she does not think about sex.

  Ella holds on fast to this knowledge, and thinks: every time in life I go through a dry time, a period of deadness, I always do this: hold on to a set of words, the phrases of a kind of knowledge, even while they are dead and meaningless, but knowing that life will come back and make them live too. But how strange that one should hold on to a set of sentences, and have faith in them.

  Meantime, men approached her and she refused them, because she knew she could not love them. The words she used to herself were: I won’t sleep with a man until I know I could love him.

  Yet, some weeks later, the following incident: Ella meets a man at a party. She is again conscientiously going to parties, hating the process of “being on the market again.” The man is a script-writer, Canadian. He does not attract her particularly physically. Yet he is intelligent, with the cool wise-cracking transatlantic humour she enjoys. His wife, at the party, is a beautiful girl, as it were professionally beautiful. Next morning, this man arrives at Ella’s flat, unannounced. He has brought gin, tonic, flowers; he makes a game of the situation “man coming to seduce girl met at a party the night before, bringing flowers and gin.” Ella is amused. They drink and laugh and make jokes. Out of the laughter, they go to bed. Ella gives pleasure. She feels nothing, and is even prepared to swear that he feels nothing either. For at the moment of penetration the knowledge goes through her that this is something that he set himself to do and that’s all. She thinks: Well, I’m doing this without feeling so why am I criticising him? It’s not fair. Then she thinks, rebellious: But that’s the point. The man’s desire creates a woman’s desire, or should, so I’m right to be critical.

  Afterwards they continue to drink and to make jokes. Then he remarks, at random, not from anything that has gone before: “I have a beautiful wife whom I adore. I have work I like to do. And now I have a girl.” Ella understands that she is the girl, and that this enterprise, sleeping with her, is a sort of project or plan for a happy life. She realises that he expects the relationship to continue, he takes it for granted that it will. She indicates that as far as she is concerned the exchange is over; as she speaks there is a flash of ugly vanity on his face, though she has said it gently, positively compliantly, as if her refusal were due to circumstances beyond her control.

  He studies her, hard-faced. “What’s wrong, baby, haven’t I satisfied you?” He says this wearily, at a loss. Ella hastens to assure him that he has; although he has not. But she understands this is not his fault, she has not had a real orgasm since Paul left her.

  She says, dry in spite of herself: “Well, I don’t think there’s much conviction in it for either of us.”

  Again the hard, weary, clinical look. “I have a beautiful wife,” he announces. “But she doesn’t satisfy me sexually. I need more.”

  This silences Ella. She feels as if she’s in some perverse emotional no-man’s-land that has nothing to do with her, although she has temporarily strayed into it. Yet she realises that he really does not understand what is the matter with what he offers her. He has a large penis; he is “good in bed.” And that’s it. Ella stands, silent, thinking that the weariness of sensuality he has in bed is the other side of his cold world-weariness out of it. He stands looking her over. Now, thinks Ella, now he’s going to lash out, he’s going to let me have it. She sets herself to take it.

  “I’ve learned,” he drawls, sharp with wounded vanity, “that it’s not necessary to have a beautiful woman in the sack. It’s enough to concentrate on one part of her—anything. There’s always something beautiful in even an ugly woman. An ear for instance. Or a hand.”

  Ella suddenly laughs and tries to catch his eye thinking that surely he will laugh. Because for the couple of hours before they had got into bed, their relationship had been good-humoured and humorous. What he has just said is positively the parody of a worldly-wise philanderer’s remark. Surely he will smile at it? But no, it had been intended to hurt, and he would not withdraw it, even by a smile.

  “Lucky I have nice hands, if nothing else,” says Ella at last, very dry. He comes to her, picks up her hands, kisses them, wearily, rake-like: “Beautiful, doll, beautiful.”

  He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

  That evening Ella goes to Julia’s house, and finds Julia in what she classified as “Patricia’s mood”—that is, sardonic rather than bitter.

  Julia tells Ella, humorous, that the man, the actor who had called her a “castrating woman,” had turned up a few days before with flowers, just as if nothing had happened. “He was really quite surprised that I wouldn’t play. He was ever so jolly and companionable. And I sat there,
looking at him, and remembering how I had cried my eyes out after he had left—you remember, there were two nights, and I had been ever so sweet and kind putting him at his ease, and then he said I was…and even then I couldn’t hurt his damned feelings. And I sat there and I thought: Do you suppose he’s forgotten what he said or why he said it? Or aren’t we supposed to care what they say? We’re just supposed to be tough enough to take anything? Sometimes I think we’re all in a sort of sexual mad house.”

  Ella says drily: “My dear Julia, we’ve chosen to be free women, and this is the price we pay, that’s all.”

  “Free,” says Julia. “Free! What’s the use of us being free if they aren’t? I swear to God, that every one of them, even the best of them, have the old idea of good women and bad women.”

  “And what about us? Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they’re with a woman they don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him. What’s free about that?”

  Julia says: “Then you’re luckier than I have been. I was thinking yesterday: of the ten men I’ve been in bed with during the last five years, eight have been impotent or come too quickly. I was blaming myself—of course, we always do, isn’t it odd, the way we positively fall over ourselves to blame ourselves for everything? But even that damned actor, the one who said I was castrating, was kind enough to remark, oh, only in passing of course, that he had only found one woman in his life he could make it with. Oh, don’t run away with the idea that he mentioned it to make me feel better, not at all.”