The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  He knocked, said through the door, “Don’t want to disturb you, I’m going for a little walk.” Without knowing I was going to do this, I went to the door, opened it—he had already started off down the stairs, and asked: “Are you going to see Jane Bond?” He stiffened, then slowly turned and faced me. “No, I’m going for a walk.”

  I didn’t say anything, because I was thinking it was not possible he should lie, when I asked him directly. I should have asked: “Did you see Jane Bond last night?” I realise now I didn’t because I was afraid he would say no.

  I made some bright and unimportant remark, and turned away, shutting the door. I couldn’t think or even move. I was ill. I kept saying to myself: He’s got to go, he’s got to leave here. But I knew I couldn’t ask him to go, so I kept saying to myself: Then you must try to detach yourself.

  When he came back, I knew I’d been waiting for his step for hours. It was nearly dark by then. He called a loud over-friendly greeting to me and went straight into the bathroom. (*12) I sat there thinking: It’s simply not possible that this man should come straight back from Jane Bond and then go and wash off sex, knowing that I must know what he was doing. It’s not possible. And yet I knew it was possible. I sat screwing myself up to say: Saul have you been sleeping with Jane Bond?

  When he came in I said it. He gave his loud, crude laugh, and said: “No, I haven’t.” Then he looked at me closely and came over and put his arms around me. He did so simply and warmly that I immediately succumbed. He said, very friendly: “Now Anna, you’re much too sensitive about everything. Take things easy.” He caressed me a little and then said: “I think you ought to try and understand something—we’re very different people. And another thing, the way you were living here before I came wasn’t good for you. It’s all right, I’m here.” With this he laid me down on the bed and began soothing me, as if I were ill. And in fact I was. My mind was churning and my stomach churned. I couldn’t think, because the man who was being so gentle was the same man who made me ill. Later he said: “And now make me supper, it’ll be good for you. God help you, but you’re a real domestic woman, you ought to be married to a nice settled husband somewhere.” Then, sullen, (*13) “God help me, I always seem to pick them.” I made him supper.

  This morning, early, the telephone rang. I answered it and it was Jane Bond. I woke Saul, told him, left the room and went to the bathroom, where I made a lot of noise, running water, etc. When I came back he was back in bed, curled up, half asleep. I was expecting him to tell me what Jane had said or wanted, but he didn’t mention the telephone call. I was angry again. Yet the whole of last night was warm and affectionate, he had turned to me like a lover in his sleep, kissing and touching me, and even using my name, so it was meant for me. I didn’t know what to feel. After breakfast he said he had to go out. He made a long, detailed explanation of having to see some man in the film industry. I knew, because of the wooden obstinate look on his face, and because of the unnecessary complication of the explanations, that he was going to see Jane Bond, he had made an arrangement to see her when she telephoned him. As soon as he left I went up to his room. Everything extremely neat and tidy. Then I began to look among his papers. I remember thinking, without any shock at myself, but as if it were my right, because he lied, that this was the first time in my life I had read another person’s letters or private papers. I was angry and sick but very methodical. I found a stack of letters rubber-banded together in one corner, from a girl in America. They had been lovers. She complained he hadn’t written. Then another stack of letters from a girl in Paris—again, complaints that he hadn’t written. I put the letters back, not carefully, but anyhow, and looked for something else. Then I found stacks of diaries. (*14) I remember thinking it was odd that his diaries ran chronologically, not all split up like mine are. I leafed through some of the earlier ones, not reading them, but getting an impression, an unending list of new places, different jobs, an endless list of girls’ names. And as a thread through the diversity of place-names, women’s names, details of loneliness, detachment, isolation. I sat there on his bed, trying to marry the two images, the man I knew, and the man pictured here, who is totally self-pitying, cold, calculating, emotionless. Then I remembered that when I read my notebooks I didn’t recognise myself. Something strange happens when one writes about oneself. That is, one’s self direct, not one’s self projected. The result is cold, pitiless, judging. Or if not judging, then there’s no life in it—yes, that’s it, it’s lifeless. I realise, in writing this, I’m back at the point in the black notebook where I wrote about Willi. If Saul said, about his diaries, or, summing his younger self up from his later self: I was a swine, the way I treated women. Or: I’m right to treat women the way I do. Or: I’m simply writing a record of what happened, I’m not making moral judgements about myself—well, whatever he said, it would be irrelevant. Because what is left out of his diaries is vitality, life, charm. “Willi allowed his spectacles to glitter across the room and said…” “Saul, standing four-square and solid, grinning slightly—grinning derisively at his own seducer’s pose, drawled: Come’n baby, let’s fuck, I like your style.” I went on reading entries, first appalled by the cold ruthlessness of them; then translating them, from knowing Saul, into life. So I found myself continually shifting mood, from anger, a woman’s anger, into the delight one feels at whatever is alive, the delight of recognition.

  Then the delight vanished as I came across an entry which frightened me, because I had already written it, out of some other kind of knowledge, in my yellow notebook. It frightens me that when I’m writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn’t live at all if one used it for living. Three entries: “Must get out of Detroit, I’ve got from it all I need. Mavis making trouble. I was crazy for her a week ago, now nothing. Strange.” Then: “Mavis came to my apartment last night. I had Joan with me. Had to go out into the hall and send Mavis away.” Then: “Got a letter from Jake in Detroit. Mavis cut her wrists with a razor. They got her to hospital in time. Pity, a nice girl.” There were no more references to Mavis. I was angry, with the cold, vindictive anger of the sex war; so angry I simply switched off my imagination. I left the mass of diaries. They would have taken weeks to read and I wasn’t interested. I was curious now to know what he had written about me. I found the date he had come to this flat. “Saw Anna Wulf. If I’m going to stick around London, it’ll do. Mary offered me a room, but I saw trouble there. She’s a good lay, but that’s all. Anna doesn’t attract me. A good thing in the circumstances. Mary made a scene. Jane at the party. We danced, practically fucked on the dance floor. Small, slight, boyish—took her home. Fucked all night—oh boy!” “Today, talking to Anna, can’t remember anything I said, I don’t think she noticed anything.” No entries for some days. Then: “Funny thing, I like Anna better than anyone, but I don’t enjoy sleeping with her. Perhaps time to move on? Jane making trouble. Well screw these dames, literally!” “Anna making trouble about Jane. Well too bad for her.” “Broke with Jane. Pity, she’s the best lay I’ve had in this bloody country. Marguerite in the coffee bar.” “Jane telephoned. Making trouble about Anna. Don’t want trouble with Anna. Date with Marguerite.”

  That was today, so when he went off it was to Marguerite and not to Jane. I am shocked at myself because I am not shocked at reading someone’s private papers. On the contrary, I’m full of a triumphant ugly joy because I’ve caught him out.

  (*15) The entry, I don’t enjoy sleeping with Anna, cut me so deep I couldn’t breathe for a few moments. Worse, I didn’t understand it. Worse, I lost faith, for a few minutes, in the judgement of the female creature who responds, or does not, according to whether Saul is making love out of conviction or not. She can’t be lied to. For a moment I imagined she had been deluding herself. I was ashamed that I cared more for his not wanting to sleep with me, since at the best
I would be “a good lay” than his liking me. I put away the diaries, but carelessly, out of a kind of contempt, as I had put away the letters, and came downstairs to write this. But I’m too confused to write sensibly.

  I’ve just been up to have another look at the diary—he wrote “I don’t like sleeping with her” in the week that he didn’t come downstairs. Since then, he’s been making love as a man does when he’s attracted to a woman. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand anything.

  Yesterday I forced myself to challenge him: “Are you ill, and if so in what way?” He said, and I’d almost expected this: “How do you know?” I even laughed. He said, carefully: “I think if you’re in trouble you should put it under your belt and not afflict other people with it.” He said this seriously, the responsible man. I said: “But in fact you’re doing just that. What’s wrong?” I feel as if I were caught in a sort of psychological fog. He said seriously: “I was hoping that I didn’t put it on you.” “I’m not complaining,” I said. “But I think that it’s no good locking things up, you should get them into the open.”

  He said, suddenly abrasive and hostile: “You sound like a bloody psycho-analyst.”

  I was thinking how, in any conversation, he can be five or six different people; I even waited for the responsible person to come back. He did, and said: “I’m not in any too good a shape, that’s true. I’m sorry if it’s shown. I’ll try to do better.” I said: “It’s not a question of doing better.”

  He turned the conversation determinedly; there was a hunted, wounded look on his face; he was a man defending himself.

  I rang up Dr Paynter, and I said I wanted to know what was wrong with someone who had no sense of time, and seemed to be several different people. He replied: “I don’t diagnose over telephones.” I said: “Oh come off it.” He said: “My dear Anna, I think you’d better make an appointment.” “It’s not for me,” I said. “It’s a friend,” but there was a silence. Then he said: “Please don’t be alarmed, you’d be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves. Do make an appointment.” “What’s the cause of it?” “Well, I’d say, hazarding a guess, and not saying a word too much, it’s all due to the times we live in.” “Thanks,” I said. “And no appointment?” “No.” “That’s very bad, Anna, that’s spiritual pride, if you’re several different people whose bootstraps are you going to pull yourself up on?” “I’ll convey your message to the right quarter,” I said.

  I went to Saul and said: “I’ve telephoned my doctor and he thinks I’m ill. I told him I had a friend—you see?” Saul looked sharp and hunted, but he grinned. “He says I should make an appointment, but that I shouldn’t be in any way alarmed at being several different people at once with no sense of time.”

  “Is that how I strike you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Thanks. I expect he’s right, at that.”

  He said to me today, “Why should I waste money on a psychiatrist when I get treatment from you, free?” It was said savagely, with triumph. I said to him it was unfair to use me in this role. He said, with the same triumphant hate: “English woman! Fair! Everyone makes use of each other. You make use of me to create a Hollywood dream of happiness, and in return I’m going to use your experience of the witch-doctors.” A moment after we were making love. When we quarrel, we hate each other, then sex comes out of the hate. It’s a hard violent sex, like nothing I’ve known before, nothing (*16) to do with the creature who is the woman-in-love. She disowns it completely.

  Today he criticised me in bed for a movement, and I realised he was comparing me with someone. I remarked that there were different schools in love-making, and we came from two different schools. We were hating each other, but all this was quite good-humoured. For he began thinking about it, and then he roared with laughter. “Love,” he said, sentimental as a schoolboy, “is international.” “Screwing,” I said, “is a matter of national styles. No Englishman would make love like you. I am referring of course to the ones that do make love.” He began making up a pop-song—“I’ll like your national style if you’ll like mine.”

  The walls of this flat close in on us. Day after day we’re alone here. I’m conscious that we are both mad. He says, with a yell of laughter: “Yeah, I’m crazy, it’s taken me all my short life to recognise it, and now what? Suppose I prefer being crazy, what then?”

  Meanwhile my anxiety is permanent, I’ve forgotten what it is like to wake up normally; yet I watch this state I’m in, and even think: Well, I’ll never suffer from my own anxiety state, so I might just as well experience someone else’s while I get the chance.

  Sometimes I try to play “the game.” Sometimes I write in this and the yellow notebook. Or I watch the light change on the floor, so that a grain of dirt or a knot in the wood magnify and symbolise themselves. Upstairs Saul walks up and down, up and down, or there are long periods of silence. Both silence and the sound of feet reverberate along my nerves. When he leaves the flat “to go for a little walk” my nerves seem to stretch out and follow him, as if tied to him.

  Today he came in and I knew by instinct he had been sleeping with someone. I challenged him, not out of being hurt, but because we are two antagonists, and he said: “No, what makes you think that?” Then his face became greedy, cunning, furtive, and he said: “I’ll produce an alibi if you like.” I laughed, although I was angry, and the fact that I laughed restored me. I am mad, obsessed with a cold jealousy which I have never experienced before. I am the sort of woman who reads private letters and diaries; yet when I laugh, I am cured. He didn’t like my laughing, for he said: “Prisoners learn to talk a certain language.” And I said: “If I’ve never been a jailor before, and if I’ve now become one, perhaps it is because you need one.”

  His face cleared, he sat down on my bed, and he said, with the simplicity he can switch into from one moment to the next: “The trouble is, when we took each other on, you took fidelity for granted, and I didn’t. I’ve never been faithful to anyone. It didn’t arise.”

  “Liar,” I said. “You mean, when a woman began to care about you, or found you out, you simply moved on to the next.”

  He gave his frank young laugh, instead of the hostile young laugh and said: “And perhaps there’s something in that, too.”

  I was on the point of saying, Then move on. I was wondering why I didn’t, what sort of personal logic I was following, through him. During the flash of a second, when I almost said: Then move on, he gave me a quick, frightened glance, and said: “You should have told me that it mattered to you.”

  I said: “Then I’m telling you now that it matters to me.”

  “O.K.,” he said, carefully, after a pause. His face had the furtive cunning look. I knew perfectly well what he was thinking.

  Today he went out for a couple of hours, after a telephone call, and I went straight upstairs to read the recent entries in his diary. “Anna’s jealousy is driving me mad. Saw Marguerite. Went home with her. A nice kid. Marguerite cold to me. Met Dorothy at her house. I’ll sneak out when Anna goes to visit Janet next week. When the cat’s away!”

  I read this with cold triumph.

  And yet, in spite of this, there are hours of affectionate friendliness, while we talk and talk. And we make love. We sleep together every night, and it’s a marvellous deep sleep. Then the friendliness switches to hate in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes the flat is an oasis of loving affection, then suddenly it’s a battleground, even the walls vibrate with hate, we circle around each other like two animals, the things we say to each other are so terrible that thinking about them afterwards I am shocked. And yet we are quite capable of saying these things, listening to what we’ve said, and then bursting out into laughter so that we laugh and roll on the floor.

  I went down to see Janet. All the way I was miserable because I knew Saul was making love to Dorothy, whoever she was. I was unable to shake this off when with Janet. She seems happy—remote from me,
a little school-girl, absorbed in her friends. Coming back in the train, I thought again how strange it is—for twelve years, every minute of every day has been organised around Janet, my time-table has been her needs. And yet she goes to school, and that’s that. I instantly revert to an Anna who never gave birth to Janet. I remember Molly saying the same thing: Tommy went for a holiday with some friends when he was sixteen, and she spent days walking around the house astonished at herself. “I feel as if I’d never had a child at all,” she kept saying.

  Getting near my flat, the tension in my stomach increased. By the time I reached the house I was sick. I went straight to the bathroom to be sick. I’ve never in my life been sick from nervous tension. Then I called upstairs. Saul was in. He came down, cheerful. Hi! How was it, etc. As I looked at him, his face changed into furtive caution, with triumph behind it, and I could see myself, cold and malicious. He said: “Why are you looking at me like that?” Then: “What are you trying to find out?”