The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  When I slept I dreamed this film sequence—in colour. Now it was not on a roof-top, but in a thin tinted mist or fog, an exquisitely-coloured fog swirled and a man and a woman wandered in it. She was trying to find him, but when she bumped into him, or found him, he nervously moved away from her; looking back at her, then away, and away again.

  The morning after the party Nelson telephoned and announced that he wanted to marry me. I recognised the dream. I asked him why he had said that. He shouted: “Because I wanted to.” I said he was closely bound to his wife. Then the dream, or film sequence stopped, and his voice changed and he said, humorous: “My God, if that’s true, I’m in trouble.” We talked a bit longer, then he said he had told his wife he had slept with me. I was very angry, I said he was using me in his fight with his wife. He started screaming and reviling me as he had screamed at her the night before at the party.

  I put down the receiver and he was over in a few minutes. He was now defending himself about his marriage, not to me, but to some invisible observer. I don’t think he was very conscious of my being there. I realised who it was when he said his analyst was on holiday for a month.

  He went off, shouting and screaming at me—at women. An hour later he telephoned me to say he was sorry, he was “nuts” and that was all there was to it. Then he said: “I haven’t hurt you, Anna, have I?” This stunned me—I felt the atmosphere of the terrible dream again. But he went on: “Believe me, I wanted nothing more than to have the real thing with you—” and then, switching into the painful bitterness—“If the love they say is possible is more real than what we seem to get.” And then again, insistent and strident: “But what I want you to say is that I haven’t hurt you, you’ve got to say it.” I felt as if a friend had slapped me across the face, or spat at me, or, grinning with pleasure, had taken a knife out and was turning it in my flesh. But I said that of course he had hurt me, but not in a way which betrayed what I felt; I spoke as he had spoken, as if my being hurt was something that could be thought of casually three months after the beginning of such an encounter.

  He said: “Anna, it occurs to me—surely I can’t be so bad—if I can imagine how one ought to be, if I can imagine really loving someone, really coming through for someone…then it’s a kind of blueprint for the future, isn’t it?”

  Well these words moved me, because it seems to me half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine; and so we ended this conversation, with every appearance of comradeship.

  But I sat, in a kind of cold fog, and I thought: What has happened to men that they can talk like this to women? For weeks and weeks Nelson has been involving me in himself—and he has been using all his charm, his warmth, his experience of involving women, and using them particularly when I’ve been angry, or he knows he has said something particularly frightening. And then he turns casually and says: Have I hurt you? For it seems to me such an abrogation of everything that a man is, that when I think of what it means I feel sick and lost (like being in a cold fog somewhere), things lose their meaning, and even the words I use then, become echo-like, become a parody of meaning.

  It was after the time he rang me to ask: Have I hurt you? that I dreamed and recognised it as the joy-in-destruction. The dream was a telephone conversation between me and Nelson. Yet he was in the same room. His outward guise was the responsible, warm-feeling man. Yet as he spoke his smile changed and I recognised the sudden unmotivated spite. I felt the knife turn in my flesh, between my ribs, the edges of the knife grinding sharp against the bone. I could not speak, because the danger, the destruction, came from someone I was close to, someone I liked. Then I began to speak into the telephone receiver, and on my own face I could feel the beginning of the smile, the smile of joyful spite. I even made a few dancing steps, the head-jerking, almost doll-like stiff dance of the animated vase. I remember thinking in the dream: So now I am the evil vase; next I’ll be the old man-dwarf; then the hunch-backed old woman. Then what? Then Nelson’s voice down the receiver into my ear: Then the witch, then the young witch. I woke, hearing the words ring out with a terrible spiteful gleeful joy: “The witch, and then the young witch!”

  I have been very depressed. I have depended a great deal on that personality—Janet’s mother. I continually ask myself—how extraordinary, that when inside I am flat, nervous, dead, that I can still, for Janet, be calm, responsible, alive?

  I haven’t had the dream again. But two days ago I met a man at Molly’s house. A man from Ceylon. He made overtures, and I rejected them. I was afraid of being rejected, of another failure. Now I am ashamed. I am becoming a coward. I am frightened because my first impulse, when a man strikes the sexual note, is to run, run anywhere, out of the way of hurt.

  [A heavy black line across the page.]

  De Silva from Ceylon. He was a friend of Molly’s. I met him years ago at her house. He came to London some years ago and earned his living as a journalist, but rather poorly. He married an English woman. He impressed one at a party by his sarcastic cool manner; he made witty remarks about people, cruel, but curiously detached. Remembering him, I see him standing away from a group of people, looking on, smiling. He lived with his wife in the bed-sitting-room, spaghetti-life of the literary fringes. They had one small child. Unable to earn a living here, he decided to return to Ceylon. His wife was unwilling: he is the younger son of a high-class family, very snobbish, who resented his marrying a white woman. He persuaded his wife to go back with him. His family would not take his wife in, so he found a room for her and spent his time half with her and the child and the other half with the family. She wanted to return to England, but he said it would be all right, and talked her into having another baby, which she did not want. No sooner was this second child born than he took flight.

  I suddenly had a telephone call from him, asking for Molly, who was away. He said he was in England because “he had won a bet in Bombay, as a result of which he had a free ticket to England.” Later I heard this was untrue: he had gone to Bombay on a journalistic assignment where, on an impulse, he had borrowed money and flown to London. He had hoped that Molly, from whom he had borrowed money in the past, would take him on. No Molly, so he tried Anna. I said I had no money to lend at that time, which was true, but because he said he was out of touch with things, asked him to dinner and invited some friends to meet him. He didn’t come, but telephoned a week later, abject, childish, apologetic, saying he was too depressed to meet people, “couldn’t remember my telephone number on the evening of the dinner.” Then I met him at Molly’s, who had come back. He was his usual cool, detached, witty self. He had got a journalist’s job, spoke with affection of his wife who was “coming to join him, probably next week.” That was the night he invited me and I ran away. With good reason. But my fear was not from judgement, it was running away from any man, and that was why when he telephoned me next day I asked him to supper. I saw from how he ate that he wasn’t eating enough. He had forgotten he had said that his wife was coming “probably next week,” and now said “she didn’t want to leave Ceylon, she was very happy.” He said this in a detached way, as if he were listening to what he said. Up to this point we had been rather gay and friendly. But the mention of his wife struck a new note, I could feel it. He kept giving me cool, speculative and hostile glances. The hostility was not to do with me. We went into my big room. He was walking around it, alert, his head on one side, as it were listening, giving me the quick impersonal interested glances. Then he sat down, and said: “Anna I want to tell you something that happened to me. No, just sit and listen. I want to tell you and I want you to just sit and listen and not say anything.”

  I sat and listened out of the passivity that now frightens me, because I know I should have said no, and at just that point. Because there was hostility and aggression in it—not personal at all. But the atmosphere was full of it. He told me this story, remote, detached, smiling, watching my face.

  A few nights before he ha
d made himself high on marihuana. Then he walked into the street, somewhere in Mayfair—“you know Anna, the atmosphere of wealth and corruption, you can smell it. It attracts me. I walk there sometimes and I smell corruption, it excites me.” He saw a girl on the pavement, and walked straight up to her and said: “I think you’re beautiful, will you sleep with me?” He couldn’t have done this, he said, unless he was high on alcohol or on marihuana. “I didn’t think she was beautiful, but she had beautiful clothes, and as soon as I had said it, I thought she was beautiful. She said, quite simply, yes.” I asked, was she a prostitute? He said, with a calm impatience (as if he’d been expecting me to ask just that question and even willed it): “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” I was struck by the way he said: It doesn’t matter. Cool, deadly—he was saying: What does it matter about anyone else, I’m talking about me. She said to him: “I think you’re handsome, I’d like to sleep with you.” And of course he is a handsome man, with alert, vigorous, glossy good looks. But cold good looks. He said to her: “I want to do something. I’m going to make love to you, as if I were desperately in love with you. But you mustn’t respond to me. You must just give me sex, and you must ignore what I say. Do you promise?” She said, laughing: “Yes, I promise.” They went to his room. “This was the most interesting night of my life, Anna. Yes, I swear it, do you believe me? Yes, you must believe me. Because I behaved as if I loved her, as if I loved her desperately. And I even believed I did. Because—you must understand this, Anna, loving her was just for that night, the most wonderful thing you can imagine. And so I told her that I loved her, I was like a man desperately in love. But she kept falling out of her role. Every ten minutes I could see her face change and she responded to me like a woman who is loved. And then I had to stop the game and say: No, that’s not what you promised. I love you, but you know I don’t mean it. But I did mean it. For that night I adored her. I have never been so in love. But she kept spoiling it by responding. And so I had to send her away, because she kept being in love with me.”

  “Was she angry?” I asked. (Because I felt angry, listening, and I knew he wanted me to be angry.)

  “Yes. She was very angry. She called me all kinds of names. But it didn’t matter to me. She called me sadist and cruel—everything like that. But it didn’t matter to me. We had made the pact, she agreed, and then she spoiled everything for me. I wanted to be able to love a woman once in my life without having to give something back in return. But of course it doesn’t matter. I’m telling you this because it doesn’t matter. Do you understand that Anna?”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  “No, of course not. I went back to the street where I picked her up, though I knew I wouldn’t see her. I hoped she was a prostitute, but I knew she wasn’t, because she told me she wasn’t. She was a girl who worked in one of the coffee bars. She said she wanted to fall in love.”

  Later on in the evening he told me the following story: he has a close friend, the painter B. B. is married, the marriage has never been sexually satisfactory. (He said: “Of course the marriage has never been sexually satisfactory, and the words, sexually satisfactory sounded like a clinical term.) B. lives in the country. A woman from the village comes in every day to clean the house. For something like a year B. slept with this woman, every morning, on the kitchen floor, while his wife was upstairs. De Silva went down to visit B. but B. was away. So was his wife. De Silva used the house waiting for them to come back and the cleaning woman came in every day as usual. She told De Silva that she had been sleeping with B. for a year, that she loved B. “but of course, I’m not good enough for him, it’s only because his wife isn’t good for him.” “Isn’t that charming, Anna? That phrase, his wife isn’t good for him—it’s not our language, it’s not the language of our kind.” “Speak for yourself,” I said, but he put his head on one side, and said: “No, I liked that—the warmth of it. And so I made love to her too. On the kitchen floor on a sort of home-made rug they have there, just as B. did. I wanted to because B. had. I don’t know why. And of course, it didn’t matter to me.” And then B.’s wife came back. She came back to get the house ready for B. She found De Silva there. She was pleased to see De Silva, because he was her husband’s friend and “she tries to please her husband out of bed because she doesn’t care about him in bed.” De Silva spent the whole evening trying to find out if she knew about her husband’s love-making with the cleaning woman. “Then I realised she didn’t know so I said: ‘Of course, your husband’s affair with the cleaning woman doesn’t mean anything, you shouldn’t mind.’ She blew up. She went frantic with jealousy and hate. Can you understand that, Anna? She kept saying: He has been sleeping with that woman every morning on the kitchen floor. That was the phrase she kept saying: He’s been sleeping with her on the kitchen floor while I was reading upstairs.” So De Silva did everything to pacify B.’s wife, as he put it, and then B. came back. “I told B. what I’d done and he forgave me. His wife said she’d leave him. I think she’s going to leave him. Because he slept with the cleaning woman ‘on the kitchen floor.’”

  I asked: “What did you do it for?” (Listening, I felt an extraordinary cold, a listless terror. I was passive in a sort of terror.)

  “Why? Why do you ask? What does it matter? I wanted to see what would happen, that’s all.”

  As he spoke he smiled. It was a reminiscent, rather sly, enjoyable, interested smile. I recognised the smile—it was the essence of my dream, it was the smile from the figure in my dream. I wanted to run out of the room. And yet I was thinking: This quality, this intellectual “I wanted to see what was going to happen,” “I want to see what will happen next,” is something loose in the air, it is in so many people one meets, it is in me. It is part of what we all are. It is the other face of: It doesn’t matter, it didn’t matter to me—the phrase that kept ringing through what De Silva said.

  De Silva and I spent the night together. Why? Because it didn’t matter to me. Its mattering to me, the possibility of its mattering to me was pushed well away into a distance. It belonged to the Anna who was normal, who was walking away somewhere on a horizon of white sand, whom I could see but could not touch.

  For me, the night was deadly, like his interested, detached smile. He was cool, detached, abstracted. It didn’t matter to him. Yet at moments he suddenly relapsed into an abject mother-needing child. I minded these moments more than the cool detachment and the curiosity. For I kept thinking stubbornly: Of course it’s him, not me. For men create these things, they create us. In the morning, remembering how I clung, how I always cling on to this, I felt foolish. Because why should it be true?

  In the morning, I gave him breakfast. I felt cold and detached. Blasted—I felt as if there was no life or warmth left in me. I felt as if he had drained life out of me. But we were perfectly friendly. I felt friendly and detached from him. Just as he left, he said he would telephone me and I said that I would not sleep with him again. His face changed suddenly into a vicious anger; and I saw his face as it must have been when the girl he picked up in the street responded to his saying that he loved her. That was how he looked when she responded—angry and vicious. But I had not expected it. Then the mask of smiling detachment came back, and he said: “Why not?” I said: “Because you don’t care a damn whether you sleep with me or not.” I had expected him to say: “But you don’t care either,” which I would have accepted. But suddenly he cracked into the pathetic child of the moments in the night, and he said: “But I do, indeed I do.” He was positively on the point of beating his breast to prove it—he stopped his clenched hand on the way to his breast, I saw him. And again I felt the atmosphere of the dream of the fog—meaninglessness, the emptiness of emotion.

  I said: “No, you don’t. But we’ll go on as friends.” He went right downstairs, without a word. That afternoon he rang me up. He told me two or three cool, amused, malicious stories about people we know in common. I knew something else was coming, because I felt apprehensio
n, but I couldn’t imagine what. Then he remarked, abstractedly almost indifferent: “I want you to let a friend of mine sleep in your upstairs room tonight. You know, the one just above your room where you sleep.”

  “But it’s Janet’s room,” I said. I couldn’t understand what he was really saying.

  “But you could move her out—but it doesn’t matter. Any room. Upstairs. I’ll bring her this evening about ten o’clock.”

  “You want to bring a woman friend to my flat to stay the night?” I was so stupid that I didn’t know what he meant. But I was angry, so I should have understood.

  “Yes,” he said, detached. Then in the abstracted cool voice: “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway.” And he rang off.

  I stood thinking. Then I understood, because of my anger, so I rang him back. I said: “Do you mean that you want to bring a woman into my flat so that you can sleep with her?”

  “Yes. Not a friend of mine. I was going to take a prostitute off the station and bring her. I wanted to sleep with her just above your room so that you could hear us.”