To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

by Doris Lessing

  ‘And who was it last night said he wouldn’t have fat on his meat and changed it for hers?’ said Lennie smiling, but full of reproach.

  ‘Oh, I’m just as bad as the rest of you,’ said Charlie, sounding false. ‘It makes me wild to see it,’ he said, sounding sincere. Didactically he said: ‘All the women in the village – they take it for granted. If someone organized them so that they had half a day to themselves sometimes, they’d think they were being insulted – they can’t stop working. Just look at Mum, then. She comes into Doncaster to wrap sweets two or three times a week – well, she actually loses money on it, by the time she’s paid bus fares. I said to her, “You’re actually losing money on it,” and she said: “I like to get out and see a bit of life.” A bit of life! Wrapping sweets in a bloody factory. Why can’t she just come into town of an evening and have a bit of fun without feeling she has to pay for it by wrapping sweets, sweated bloody labour? And she actually loses on it. It doesn’t make sense. They’re human beings, aren’t they? Not just …’

  ‘Not just what?’ asked Lennie angrily. He had listened to Charlie’s tirade, his mouth setting harder, his eyes narrowing. ‘Here’s the station,’ he said in relief. They waited for the young miners to clatter down and off before going forward themselves. ‘I’ll come with you to your stop,’ said Charlie; and they crossed the dark shiny, grimy street to the opposite stop for the bus which would take Lennie back to Doreen.

  ‘It’s no good thinking we’re going to change, Charlie boy.’

  ‘Who said change?’ said Charlie excitedly; but the bus had come, and Lennie was already swinging on to the back. ‘If you’re in trouble just write and say,’ said Lennie, and the bell pinged and his face vanished as the lit bus was absorbed by the light-streaked drizzling darkness.

  There was half an hour before the London train. Charlie stood with the rain on his shoulders, his hands in his pockets, wondering whether to go after his brother and explain – what? He bolted across the street to the pub near the station. It was run by an Irishman who knew him and Lennie. The place was still empty, being just after opening time.

  ‘It’s you then,’ said Mike, drawing him a pint of bitter without asking. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ said Charlie, swinging himself up on to a stool.

  ‘And what’s in the great world of learning?’

  ‘Oh Jesus, no!’ said Charlie. The Irishman blinked, and Charlie said quickly: ‘What have you gone and tarted this place up for?’

  The pub had been panelled in dark wood. It was ugly and comforting. Now it had half a dozen bright wallpapers and areas of shining paint, and Charlie’s stomach moved again, light filled his eyes, and he set his elbows hard down for support, and put his chin on his two fists.

  ‘The youngsters like it,’ said the Irishman. ‘But we’ve left the bar next door as it was for the old ones.’

  ‘You should have a sign up: Age This Way,’ said Charlie. ‘I’d have known where to go.’ He carefully lifted his head off his fists, narrowing his eyes to exclude the battling colours of the wallpapers, the shine of the paint.

  ‘You look bad,’ said the Irishman. He was a small, round, alcoholically cheerful man who, like Charlie, had two voices. For the enemy – that is, all the English whom he did not regard as a friend, which meant people who were not regulars – he put on an exaggerated brogue which was bound, if he persisted, to lead to the political arguments he delighted in. For friends like Charlie he didn’t trouble himself. He now said: ‘All work and no play.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘I went to the doctor. He gave me a tonic and said I am fundamentally sound in wind and limb. “You are sound in wind and limb,” he said,’ said Charlie, parodying an upper-class English voice for the Irishman’s pleasure.

  Mike winked, acknowledging the jest, while his professionally humorous face remained serious. ‘You can’t burn the candle at both ends,’ he said in earnest warning.

  Charlie laughed out. ‘That’s what the doctor said. You can’t burn the candle at both ends, he said.’

  This time, when the stool he sat on, and the floor beneath the stool, moved away from him, and the glittering ceiling dipped and swung, his eyes went dark and stayed dark. He shut them and gripped the counter tight. With his eyes still shut he said facetiously: ‘It’s the clash of cultures, that’s what it is. It makes me light-headed.’ He opened his eyes and saw from the Irishman’s face that he had not said these words aloud.

  He said aloud: ‘Actually the doctor was right, he meant well. But Mike, I’m not going to make it, I’m going to fail.’

  ‘Well, it won’t be the end of the world.’

  ‘Jesus. That’s what I like about you, Mike, you take a broad view of life.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ said Mike, going to serve a customer.

  A week ago Charlie had gone to the doctor with a cyclostyled leaflet in his hand. It was called ‘A Report Into the Increased Incidence of Breakdown Among Undergraduates’. He had underlined the words:

  Young men from working-class and lower-middle-class families on scholarships are particularly vulnerable. For them, the gaining of a degree is obviously crucial. In addition they are under the continuous strain of adapting themselves to middle-class mores that are foreign to them. They are victims of a clash of standards, a clash of cultures, divided loyalties.

  The doctor, a young man of about thirty, provided by the college authorities as a sort of father figure to advise on work problems, personal problems and (as the satirical alter ego took pleasure in pointing out) on clash-of-culture problems, glanced once at the pamphlet and handed it back. He had written it. As, of course, Charlie had known. ‘When are your examinations?’ he asked. Getting to the root of the matter, just like Mum, remarked the malevolent voice from behind Charlie’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ve got five months, doctor, and I can’t work and I can’t sleep.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘It’s been coming on gradually.’ Ever since I was born, said the enemy.

  ‘I can give you sedatives and sleeping pills, of course, but that’s not going to touch what’s really wrong.’

  Which is, all this unnatural mixing of the classes. Doesn’t do, you know. People should know their place and stick to it. ‘I’d like some sleep pills, all the same.’

  ‘Have you got a girl?’

  ‘Two.’

  The doctor paid out an allowance of man-of-the-world sympathy, then shut off his smile and said: ‘Perhaps you’d be better with one?’

  Which, my mum figure, or my lovely bit of sex? ‘Perhaps I would, at that.’

  ‘I could arrange for you to have some talks with a psychiatrist – well, not if you don’t want,’ he said hastily, for the alter ego had exploded through Charlie’s lips in a horselaugh and: ‘What can the trick cyclist tell me I don’t know?’ He roared with laughter, flinging his legs up; and an ashtray went circling around the room on its rim. Charlie laughed, watched the ashtray, and thought: There, I knew all the time it was a poltergeist sitting there behind my shoulder. I swear I never touched that damned ashtray.

  The doctor waited until it circled near him, stopped it with his foot, picked it up, laid it back on the desk. ‘It’s no point your going to him if you feel like that.’

  All avenues explored, all roads charted.

  ‘Well now, let’s see, have you been to see your family recently?’

  ‘Last Christmas. No doctor, it’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I can’t work there.’ You try working in an atmosphere of trade union meetings and the telly and the pictures in Doncaster. You try it, doc. And besides all my energies go into not upsetting them. Because I do upset them. My dear doc, when we scholarship boys jump our class, it’s not me who suffer, it’s our families. We are an expense, doc. And besides – write a thesis, I’d like to read it … Call it: Long-term effects on working-class or lower-middle-class family of a scholarship child whose existence is a perpetual reminder that they are nothing but ignorant non-
cultured clods. How’s that for a thesis, doc? Why, I do believe I could write it myself.

  ‘If I were you, I’d go home for a few days. Don’t try to work at all. Go to the pictures. Sleep and eat and let them fuss over you. Get this prescription made up and come and see me when you get back.’

  ‘Thanks, doc, I will.’ You mean well.

  The Irishman came back to find Charlie spinning a penny, so intent on this game that he did not see him. First he spun it with his right hand, anticlockwise, then with his left, clockwise. The right hand represented his jeering alter ego. The left hand was the didactic and rational voice. The left hand was able to keep the coin in a glittering spin for much longer than the right.

  ‘You ambidextrous?’

  ‘Yes, always was.’

  The Irishman watched the boy’s frowning, teeth-clenched concentration for a while, then removed the untouched beer and poured him a double whisky. ‘You drink that and get on the train and sleep.’

  ‘Thanks, Mike. Thanks.’

  ‘That was a nice girl you had with you last time.’

  ‘I’ve quarrelled with her. Or rather, she’s given me the boot. And quite right too.’

  After the visit to the doctor Charlie had gone straight to Jenny. He had guyed the interview while she sat, gravely listening. Then he had given her his favourite lecture on the crass and unalterable insensibility of anybody anywhere born middle-class. No one but Jenny ever heard this lecture. She said at last: ‘You should go and see a psychiatrist. No, don’t you see, it’s not fair.’

  ‘Who to, me?’

  ‘No, me. What’s the use of shouting at me all the time? You should be saying these things to him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, surely you can see that. You spend all your time lecturing me. You make use of me, Charles.’ (She always called him Charles.)

  What she was really saying was: ‘You should be making love to me, not lecturing me.’ Charlie did not really like making love to Jenny. He forced himself when her increasingly tart and accusing manner reminded him that he ought to. He had another girl, whom he disliked, a tall crisp middle-class girl called Sally. She called him, mocking: Charlie boy. When he had slammed out of Jenny’s room, he had gone to Sally and fought his way into her bed. Every act of sex with Sally was a slow, cold subjugation of her by him. That night he had said, when she lay at last, submissive, beneath him: ‘Horny-handed son of toil wins by his unquenched virility beautiful daughter of the moneyed classes. And doesn’t she love it.’

  ‘Oh yes I do, Charlie boy.’

  ‘I’m nothing but a bloody sex symbol.’

  ‘Well,’ she murmured, already self-possessed, freeing herself, ‘that’s all I am to you.’ She added defiantly, showing that she did care, and that it was Charlie’s fault: ‘And I couldn’t care less.’

  ‘Dear Sally, what I like about you is your beautiful honesty.’

  ‘Is that what you like about me? I thought it was the thrill of beating me down.’

  Charlie said to the Irishman: ‘I’ve quarrelled with everyone I know in the last weeks.’

  ‘Quarrelled with your family too?’

  ‘No,’ he said, appalled, while the room again swung around him. ‘Good Lord no,’ he said in a different tone – grateful. He added savagely: ‘How could I? I can never say anything to them I really think.’ He looked at Mike to see if he had actually said these words aloud. He had, because now Mike said: ‘So you know how I feel. I’ve lived thirty years in this mucking country, and if you arrogant sods knew what I’m thinking half the time …’

  ‘Liar. You say whatever you think, from Cromwell to the Black and Tans and Casement. You never let up. But it’s not hurting yourself to say it.’

  ‘Yourself, is it?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s all insane. Do you realize how insane it all is, Mike? There’s my father. Pillar of the working class. Labour Party, trade union, the lot. But I’ve been watching my tongue not to say I spent last term campaigning about – he takes it for granted even now that the British should push the wogs around.’

  ‘You’re a great nation,’ said the Irishman. ‘But it’s not your personal fault, so drink up and have another.’

  Charlie drank his first Scotch, and drew the second glass towards him. ‘Don’t you see what I mean?’ he said, his voice rising excitedly. ‘Don’t you see that it’s all insane? There’s my mother, her sister is ill and it looks as if she’ll die. There are two kids, and my mother’ll take them both. They’re nippers, three and four, it’s like starting a family all over again. She thinks nothing of it. If someone’s in trouble, she’s the mug, every time. But there she sits and says: “Those juvenile offenders ought to be flogged until they are senseless.” She read it in the papers and so she says it. She said it to me and I kept my mouth shut. And they’re all alike.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re not going to change it, Charlie, so drink up.’

  A man standing a few feet down the bar had a paper sticking out of his pocket. Mike said to him: ‘Mind if I borrow your paper for the winners, sir?’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  Mike turned the paper over to the back page. ‘I had five quid on today,’ he said. ‘Lost it. Lovely bit of horseflesh, but I lost it.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Charlie excitedly, straightening the paper so he could see the front page. WARDROBE MURDERER GETS SECOND CHANCE it said. ‘See that?’ said Charlie. ‘The Home Secretary says he can have another chance, they can review the case, he says.’

  The Irishman read, cold-faced. ‘So he does,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I mean to say, there’s some decency left, then. I mean if the case can be reviewed it shows they do care about something at least.’

  ‘I don’t see it your way at all. It’s England versus England, that’s all. Fair play all round, but they’ll hang the poor sod on the day appointed as usual.’ He turned the newspaper and studied the race news.

  Charlie waited for his eyes to clear, held himself steady with one hand flat on the counter, and drank his second double. He pushed over a pound note, remembering it had to last three days, and that now he had quarrelled with Jenny there was no place for him to stay in London.

  ‘No, it’s on me,’ said Mike. ‘I asked you. It’s been a pleasure seeing you, Charlie. And don’t take the sins of the world on your personal shoulders, lad, because that doesn’t do anyone any good, does it, now?’

  ‘See you at Christmas, Mike, and thanks.’

  He walked carefully out into the rain. There was no solitude to be had on the train that night, so he chose a compartment with one person in it, and settled himself in a corner before looking to see who it was he had with him. It was a girl. He saw then that she was pretty, and then that she was upper-class. Another Sally, he thought, sensing danger, seeing the cool, self-sufficient little face. Hey, there, Charlie, he said to himself, keep yourself in order, or you’ve had it. He carefully located himself: he, Charlie, was now a warm, whisky-comforted belly, already a little sick. Close above it, like a silent loudspeaker, was the source of the hectoring voice. Behind his shoulder waited his grinning familiar. He must keep them all apart. He tested the didactic voice: It’s not her fault, poor bitch, victim of the class system, she can’t help she sees everyone under her like dirt … But the alcohol was working strongly and meanwhile his familiar was calculating: She’s had a good look, but can’t make me out. My clothes are right, my haircut’s on the line, but there’s something that makes her wonder. She’s waiting for me to speak, then she’ll make up her mind. Well, first I’ll get her, and then I’ll speak.

  He caught her eyes and signalled an invitation, but it was an aggressive invitation, to make it as hard for her as he could. After a bit, she smiled at him. Then he roughened his speech to the point of unintelligibility and said: ‘’Appen you’d like t’window up? What wi’ t’rain and t’wind and all.’

  ‘What?’ she said sharply, her face lengthening into such a comical frankness of shock that he laughe
d out, and afterwards inquired impeccably: ‘Actually it is rather cold, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you like to have the window up?’ She picked up a magazine and shut him out, while he watched, grinning, the blood creep up from under her neat collar to her hairline.

  The door slid back; two people came in. They were a man and his wife, both small, crumpled in face and flesh, and dressed in their best for London. There was a fuss and a heaving of suitcases and murmured apologies because of the two superior young people. Then the woman, having settled herself in a corner, looked steadily at Charlie, while he thought: Deep calls to deep, she knows who I am all right, she’s not foxed by the trimmings. He was right, because soon she said familiarly: ‘Would you put the window up for me, lad? It’s a rare cold night and no mistake.’

  Charlie put up the window, not looking at the girl, who was hiding behind the magazine. Now the woman smiled, and the man smiled too, because of her ease with the youth.

  ‘You comfortable like that, father?’ she asked.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said the husband on the stoical note of the confirmed grumbler.

  ‘Put your feet up beside me, any road.’

  ‘But I’m all right, lass,’ he said bravely. Then, making a favour of it, he loosened his laces, eased his feet inside too-new shoes, and set them on the seat beside his wife.

  She, for her part, was removing her hat. It was of shapeless grey felt, with a pink rose at the front. Charlie’s mother owned just such a badge of respectability, renewed every year or so at the sales. Hers was always bluish felt, with a bit of ribbon or coarse net, and she would rather be seen dead than without it in public.

  The woman sat fingering her hair, which was thin and greying. For some reason, the sight of her clean pinkish scalp shining through the grey wisps made Charlie wild with anger. He was taken by surprise, and again summoned himself to himself, making the didactic voice lecture: ‘The working woman of these islands enjoys a position in the family superior to that of the middle-class woman, etc., etc., etc.’ This was an article he had read recently, and he continued to recite from it, until he realized the voice had become an open sneer, and was saying: ‘Not only is she the emotional bulwark of the family, but she is frequently the breadwinner as well, such as wrapping sweets at night, sweated labour for pleasure, anything to get out of the happy home for a few hours.’