To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Just as well then that we didn’t manage to make the same place, the same time.’

  And now their eyes blazed up with regret, and a far from dead emotion.

  ‘Oh no,’ she began, and gathered herself to get up and go. He put out a hand to hold her. She subsided, looking at the large but fine hand that gripped her bare forearm. She shut her eyes, holding her breath.

  ‘My God,’ he said, softly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Then his hand fell lingeringly off her arm, and both sighed.

  ‘I heard you were married,’ she remarked.

  ‘And of course you were.’

  ‘Why of course?’

  He let that pass. ‘We have both been married,’ he summed up, lips tight and amused – life’s like that.

  ‘I am married.’

  ‘I suppose I am, really,’ he confessed.

  ‘How like you,’ she accused, with bitterness.

  ‘Oh no, not like that, you’re wrong, as it happens it is she who … but never mind.’

  ‘No, never mind,’ she said.

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Two,’ she said. ‘The girl is sixteen. The boy – fifteen.’

  ‘Grown up,’ he said. ‘And I have three. Three girls. A houseful of women.’

  ‘Just your style,’ she said, but quite amiably. She laughed. Not unamiably.

  ‘So what did happen that day?’ he enquired, achieving an amused detachment.

  ‘That far off day.’

  ‘Not so far off, evidently,’ he said, and again their eyes blazed up at each other.

  By now they were almost alone in the room, and the last guests, looking back, noticed these two, locked in their intensity. One woman actually laughed and shrugged, worldly and envious, indicating the couple to her companion. A man. He grimaced.

  ‘I waited for you,’ he insisted.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. Why should you doubt it?’

  She thought seriously about this. Then, ‘I doubt it because – I waited so long. And because – well, it seemed all of a pattern with …’

  ‘Really? It really did? And what had I ever done to make you think … I adored you,’ he accused her. Fierce. Intimate, his face near hers.

  ‘You knew that.’

  ‘Then why …?’

  ‘I was there,’ he said.

  She shut her eyes. She sat, eyes closed, and there were tears on her lashes.

  He groaned, seeing them.

  She opened her eyes. ‘Then it was the wrong day. We got the day wrong.’

  ‘Certainly not the wrong hotel,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t go past that hotel now without feeling sick.’

  ‘No. In fact I don’t go near it.’

  ‘The Green Swan?’

  ‘The Green Swan.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you telephone me?’ he asked.

  ‘Because – it was the last straw,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’

  ‘But I did. I rang twice. Then I thought, to hell with her.’

  ‘You did ring me?’ she said derisively, but with what seemed like hope that it was true.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  She snarled prettily. ‘Well, water under bridges.’ She got up and now he didn’t stop her. Perhaps she had expected him to. He watched her stand there hesitating. He looked at her bare brown forearm, as if he still had it in his grasp. Then he stood up.

  ‘I don’t think I feel that,’ he said. A proposition.

  She shook her head slightly, teeth gripping her lower lip. She walked towards the exit: walked clumsily – blind.

  He followed just behind her. ‘Darling,’ he said, in a low voice.

  She shook her head and walked on, fast.

  ‘You bloody fool,’ he heard her say, softly, wildly, accusing. ‘You poor bloody fool.’

  And he said, ‘You mean, you don’t believe I was there? Ah, poor darling, poor darling.’

  But she had gone. He was now the last guest in the room, ignored by the waitresses who were tidying up. But they were all aware of him, and he realized they knew something had happened, had been watching them. We must have been putting on quite a show, she and I, he thought.

  Quickly he walked out of the big room, through corridors, and then out of a side door of the hotel into a street that was dark, lights blurred because of rain. He stood on the pavement, his back to the hotel. There was no one in the street. Then a young woman came through the rain towards him, under a black umbrella, which hid her face. As he had done then, all those years ago, he stared: Is it she? Has she come at last? But she went on past him, and he turned his attention to the end of the street where she had come from. He stared as he had done then, through grey shrouds of rain. No one came, no one. And he went on standing there in the shabby street, while bitterness filled his throat and it seemed to him the twenty years still to be lived through were empty years, and because she had not come that day her absence had shadowed his life, forbidding him all love, all joy. He could not face what he still had to live through, and it was her fault …

  Then, suddenly, he thought, I bet she isn’t standing somewhere in the rain grieving for me. She hasn’t given me a thought. When did she ever care a damn about me – not really … here I am standing here like a dolt thinking about her and she …

  A clean and cold bitterness jolted him like electricity, and he walked briskly away to his own life full of the energy of decision.

  To Room Nineteen

  This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlingses’ marriage was grounded in intelligence.

  They were older when they married than most of their married friends: in their well-seasoned late twenties. Both had had a number of affairs, sweet rather than bitter; and when they fell in love – for they did fall in love – had known each other for some time. They joked that they had saved each other ‘for the real thing’. That they had waited so long (but not too long) for this real thing was to them a proof of their sensible discrimination. A good many of their friends had married young, and now (they felt) probably regretted lost opportunities; while others, still unmarried, seemed to them arid, self-doubting, and likely to make desperate or romantic marriages.

  Not only they, but others, felt they were well matched: their friends’ delight was an additional proof of their happiness. They had played the same roles, male and female, in this group or set, if such a wide, loosely connected, constantly changing constellation of people could be called a set. They had both become, by virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others came for advice. They could be, and were, relied on. It was one of those cases of a man and a woman linking themselves whom no one else had ever thought of linking, probably because of their similarities. But then everyone exclaimed: Of course! How right! How was it we never thought of it before!

  And so they married amid general rejoicing, and because of their foresight and their sense for what was probable, nothing was a surprise to them.

  Both had well-paid jobs. Matthew was a sub-editor on a large London newspaper, and Susan worked in an advertising firm. He was not the stuff of which editors or publicized journalists are made, but he was much more than ‘a sub-editor’, being one of the essential background people who in fact steady, inspire and make possible the people in the limelight. He was content with this position. Susan had a talent for commercial drawing. She was humorous about the advertisements she was responsible for, but she did not feel strongly about them one way or the other.

  Both, before they married, had had pleasant flats, but they felt it unwise to base a marriage on either flat, because it might seem like a submission of personality on the part of the one whose flat it was not. They moved into a new flat in South Kensington on the clear understanding that when their marriage had settled down (a process they knew would not take long, and was in fact more a humorous concession to popular wis
dom than what was due to themselves) they would buy a house and start a family.

  And this is what happened. They lived in their charming flat for two years, giving parties and going to them, being a popular young married couple, and then Susan became pregnant, she gave up her job, and they bought a house in Richmond. It was typical of this couple that they had a son first, then a daughter, then twins, son and daughter. Everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they could choose. But people did feel these two had chosen; this balanced and sensible family was no more than what was due to them because of their infallible sense for choosing right.

  And so they lived with their four children in their gardened house in Richmond and were happy. They had everything they had wanted and had planned for.

  And yet …

  Well, even this was expected, that there must be a certain flatness …

  Yes, yes, of course, it was natural they sometimes felt like this. Like what?

  Their life seemed to be like a snake biting its tail. Matthew’s job for the sake of Susan, children, house, and garden – which caravanserai needed a well-paid job to maintain it. And Susan’s practical intelligence for the sake of Matthew, the children, the house and the garden – which unit would have collapsed in a week without her.

  But there was no point about which either could say: ‘For the sake of this is all the rest.’ Children? But children can’t be a centre of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can’t be a wellspring to live from. Or they shouldn’t be. Susan and Matthew knew that well enough.

  Matthew’s job? Ridiculous. It was an interesting job, but scarcely a reason for living. Matthew took pride in doing it well; but he could hardly be expected to be proud of the newspaper: the newspaper he read, his newspaper, was not the one he worked for.

  Their love for each other? Well, that was nearest it. If this wasn’t a centre, what was? Yes, it was around this point, their love, that the whole extraordinary structure revolved. For extraordinary it certainly was. Both Susan and Matthew had moments of thinking so, of looking in secret disbelief at this thing they had created: marriage, four children, big house, garden, charwomen, friends, cars … and this thing, this entity, all of it had come into existence, been blown into being out of nowhere, because Susan loved Matthew and Matthew loved Susan. Extraordinary. So that was the central point, the wellspring.

  And if one felt that it simply was not strong enough, important enough, to support it all, well whose fault was that? Certainly neither Susan’s nor Matthew’s. It was in the nature of things. And they sensibly blamed neither themselves nor each other.

  On the contrary, they used their intelligence to preserve what they had created from a painful and explosive world: they looked around them, and took lessons. All around them, marriages collapsing, or breaking, or rubbing along (even worse, they felt). They must not make the same mistakes, they must not.

  They had avoided the pitfall so many of their friends had fallen into – of buying a house in the country for the sake of the children; so that the husband became a weekend husband, a weekend father, and the wife always careful not to ask what went on in the town flat which they called (in joke) a bachelor flat. No, Matthew was a full-time husband, a full-time father, and at nights, in the big married bed in the big married bedroom (which had an attractive view of the river) they lay beside each other talking and he told her about his day, and what he had done, and whom he had met; and she told him about her day (not as interesting, but that was not her fault) for both knew of the hidden resentments and deprivations of the woman who has lived her own life – and above all, has earned her own living – and is now dependent on a husband for outside interests and money.

  Nor did Susan make the mistake of taking a job for the sake of her independence, which she might very well have done, since her old firm, missing her qualities of humour, balance, and sense, invited her often to go back. Children needed their mother to a certain age, that both parents knew and agreed on; and when these four healthy wisely brought-up children were of the right age, Susan would work again, because she knew, and so did he, what happened to women of fifty at the height of their energy and ability, with grown-up children who no longer needed their full devotion.

  So here was this couple, testing their marriage, looking after it, treating it like a small boat full of helpless people in a very stormy sea. Well, of course, so it was … The storms of the world were bad, but not too close – which is not to say they were selfishly felt: Susan and Matthew were both well-informed and responsible people. And the inner storms and quicksands were understood and charted. So everything was all right. Everything was in order. Yes, things were under control.

  So what did it matter if they felt dry, flat? People like themselves, fed on a hundred books (psychological, anthropological, sociological) could scarcely be unprepared for the dry, controlled wistfulness which is the distinguishing mark of the intelligent marriage. Two people, endowed with education, with discrimination, with judgment, linked together voluntarily from their will to be happy together and to be of use to others – one sees them everywhere, one knows them, one even is that thing oneself: sadness because so much is after all so little. These two, unsurprised, turned towards each other with even more courtesy and gentle love: this was life, that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other. In fact, even to say so, to think in such a way, was banal, they were ashamed to do it.

  It was banal, too, when one night Matthew came home late and confessed he had been to a party, taken a girl home and slept with her. Susan forgave him, of course. Except that forgiveness is hardly the word. Understanding, yes. But if you understand something, you don’t forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don’t understand. Nor had he confessed – what sort of word is that?

  The whole thing was not important. After all, years ago they had joked: Of course I’m not going to be faithful to you, no one can be faithful to one other person for a whole lifetime. (And there was the word faithful – stupid, all these words, stupid, belonging to a savage old world.) But the incident left both of them irritable. Strange, but they were both bad-tempered, annoyed. There was something unassimilable about it.

  Making love splendidly after he had come home that night, both had felt that the idea that Myra Jenkins, a pretty girl met at a party, could be even relevant was ridiculous. They had loved each other for over a decade, would love each other for years more. Who, then, was Myra Jenkins?

  Except, thought Susan, unaccountably bad-tempered, she was (is?) the first. In ten years. So either the ten years’ fidelity was not important, or she isn’t. (No, no, there is something wrong with this way of thinking, there must be.) But if she isn’t important, presumably it wasn’t important either when Matthew and I first went to bed with each other that afternoon whose delight even now (like a very long shadow at sundown) lays a long, wand-like finger over us. (Why did I say sundown?) Well, if what we felt that afternoon was not important, nothing is important, because if it hadn’t been for what we felt, we wouldn’t be Mr and Mrs Rawlings with four children, etc., etc. The whole thing is absurd – for him to have come home and told me was absurd. For him not to have told me was absurd. For me to care, or for that matter not to care, is absurd … and who is Myra Jenkins? Why, no one at all.

  There was only one thing to do, and of course these sensible people did it: they put the thing behind them, and consciously, knowing what they were doing, moved forward into a different phase of their marriage, giving thanks for past good fortune as they did so.

  For it was inevitable that the handsome, blond, attractive, manly man, Matthew Rawlings, should be at times tempted (oh, what a word!) by the attractive girls at parties she could not attend because of the four children; and that sometimes he would succumb (a word even more repulsive, if possible) and that she, a good-looking woman in the big well-tended gar
den at Richmond, would sometimes be pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness. Except that bitterness was not in order, it was out of court. Did the casual girls touch the marriage? They did not. Rather it was they who knew defeat because of the handsome Matthew Rawlings’s marriage body and soul to Susan Rawlings.

  In that case why did Susan feel (though luckily not for longer than a few seconds at a time) as if life had become a desert, and that nothing mattered, and that her children were not her own?

  Meanwhile her intelligence continued to assert that all was well. What if her Matthew did have an occasional sweet afternoon, the odd affair? For she knew quite well, except in her moments of aridity, that they were very happy, that the affairs were not important.

  Perhaps that was the trouble? It was in the nature of things that the adventures and delights could no longer be hers, because of the four children and the big house that needed so much attention. But perhaps she was secretly wishing, and even knowing that she did, that the wildness and the beauty could be his. But he was married to her. She was married to him. They were married inextricably. And therefore the gods could not strike him with the real magic, not really. Well, was it Susan’s fault that after he came home from an adventure he looked harassed rather than fulfilled? (In fact, that was how she knew he had been unfaithful, because of his sullen air, and his glances at her, similar to hers at him: What is it that I share with this person that shields all delight from me?) But none of it by anybody’s fault. (But what did they feel ought to be somebody’s fault?) Nobody’s fault, nothing to be at fault, no one to blame, no one to offer or to take it … and nothing wrong, either, except that Matthew never was really struck, as he wanted to be, by joy; and that Susan was more often threatened by emptiness. (It was usually in the garden that she was invaded by this feeling: she was coming to avoid the garden, unless the children or Matthew were with her.) There was no need to use the dramatic words, unfaithful, forgive, and the rest: intelligence forbade them. Intelligence barred, too, quarrelling, sulking, anger, silences of withdrawal, accusations and tears. Above all, intelligence forbids tears.