The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ a tightening of his face, and it remained angry as George said: ‘No, it’s the responsibility. It’s the gap between what I believe in and what I do.’

      Willi shrugged and we were silent. Through the heavy midday hush, came the sound of Johnnie’s drumming fingers.

      George looked at me again and I rallied myself to fight Willi. Looking back I want to laugh—because I automatically chose to argue in literary terms, just as he automatically answered in political terms. But at the time it didn’t seem extraordinary. And it didn’t seem extraordinary to George either, who sat nodding as I spoke.

      ‘Look,’ I said. ‘In the nineteenth century literature was full of this. It was a sort of moral touchstone. Like Resurrection, for instance. But now you just shrug your shoulders and it doesn’t matter?’

      ‘I haven’t noticed that I shrugged,’ said Willi. ‘But perhaps it is true that the moral dilemma of a society is no longer crystallized by the fact of an illegitimate child?’

      ‘Why not?’ I asked.

      ‘Why not?’ said George, very fierce.

      ‘Well, would you really say the problem of the African in this country is summed up by the Boothbys’ cook’s white cuckoo?’

      ‘You put things so prettily,’ said George angrily. (And yet he would continue to come to Willi humbly for advice, and revere him, and write to him self-abasing letters for years after he left the Colony.) Now he stared out into the sunlight, blinking away tears, and then he said: ‘I’m going to get my glass filled.’ He went off to the bar.

      Willi lifted his text-book, and said without looking at me: ‘Yes, I know. But I’m not impressed by your reproachful eyes. You’d give him the same advice, wouldn’t you? Full of ohs and ahs, but the same advice.’

      ‘What it amounts to is that everything is so terrible that we’ve got calloused because of it and we don’t really care.’

      ‘May I suggest you stick to certain basic principles—such as abolishing what is wrong, changing what is wrong? Instead of sitting around crying about it?’

      ‘And in the meantime?’

      ‘In the meantime I’m going to study and you will go off and let George weep on your shoulder and be very sorry for him, which will achieve precisely nothing.’

      I left him and walked slowly back up to the big room. George was leaning against the wall, a glass in his hand, eyes closed. I knew I should go to him, but I didn’t. I went into the big room. Maryrose was sitting by herself at a window and I joined her. She had been crying.

      I said: ‘This seems to be a day for everyone to cry.’

      ‘Not you,’ said Maryrose. This meant that I was too happy with Willi to need to cry, so I sat down by her and said ‘What’s wrong?’

      ‘I was sitting here and watching them dance and I began thinking. Only a few months ago we believed that the world was going to change and everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won’t.’

      ‘Do we?’ I said, with a kind of terror.

      ‘Why should it?’ she asked, simply. I didn’t have the moral energy to fight it, and after a pause she said: ‘What did George want you for? I suppose he said I was a bitch for hitting him?’

      ‘Can you imagine George saying anyone is a bitch for hitting him? Well why did you?’

      ‘I was crying about that too. Because of course, the real reason I hit him was because I know someone like George could make me forget my brother.’

      ‘Well perhaps you should let someone like George have a try?’

      ‘Perhaps I should,’ she said. She gave me a small, old smile, which said so clearly: What a baby you are!—that I said angrily: ‘But if you know something, why don’t you do something about it?’

      Again the small smile, and she said: ‘No one will ever love me like my brother did. He really loved me. George would make love to me. And that wouldn’t be the same thing, would it? But what’s wrong with saying: I’ve had the best thing already and I’ll never have it again, instead of just having sex. What’s wrong with it?’

      ‘When you say, what’s wrong with it, like that, then I never know what answer to make, even though I know there’s something wrong.’

      ‘What, then?’ She sounded really curious, and I said, even more angry: ‘You just don’t try, you don’t try. You just give up.’

      ‘It’s all very well for you,’ she said, meaning Willi again, and now I couldn’t say anything. It was my turn to want to cry, and she saw it, and said out of her infinite superiority in suffering: ‘Don’t cry, Anna, there’s never any point. Well I’m going to get washed for lunch.’ And she went off. All the young men were now singing, around the piano, so I left the room too, and went to where I had seen George leaning. I clambered through nettles and blackjacks, because he had moved further around to the back, and was standing staring through a group of paw-paw trees at the little shack where the cook lived with his wife and his children. There were a couple of brown children squatting in the dust among the chickens.

      I noticed that George’s very sleek arm was trembling as he tried to light a cigarette, and he failed, and threw it impatiently away, unlit, and he remarked calmly: ‘No, my bye-blow is not present.’

      A gong rang down at the hotel for lunch.

      ‘We’d better go in,’ I said.

      ‘Stay here with me a minute.’ He put his hand on my shoulder, and the heat of it burned through my dress. The gong stopped sending out its long metallic waves of sound, and the piano stopped inside. Silence, and a dove cooed from the jacaranda tree. George put his hand on my breast, and he said: ‘Anna, I could take you to bed now—and then Marie, that’s my black girl, and then go back to my wife tonight and have her, and be happy with all three of you. Do you understand that, Anna?’

      ‘No,’ I said, angry. And yet his hand on my breast made me understand it.

      ‘Don’t you?’ he said, ironic. ‘No?’

      ‘No,’ I insisted, lying on behalf of all women, and thinking of his wife, who made me feel caged.

      He shut his eyes. His black eyelashes made tiny rainbows as they trembled on his brown cheek. He said, without opening his eyes: ‘Sometimes I look at myself from the outside. George Hounslow, respected citizen, eccentric of course, with his socialism, but that’s cancelled out by his devotion to all the aged parents and his charming wife and three children. And beside me I can see a whacking great gorilla swinging its arms and grinning. I can see the gorilla so clearly I’m surprised no one else can.’ He let his hand fall off my breast so that I was able to breathe steadily again and I said: ‘Willi’s right. You can’t do anything about it so you must stop tormenting yourself.’ His eyes were still shut. I didn’t know I was going to say what I did, but his eyes flew open and he backed away, so it was some sort of telepathy. I said: ‘And you can’t commit suicide.’

      ‘Why not?’ he asked curiously.

      ‘For the same reason СКАЧАТЬ