The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ knew quite well there wasn’t a white person in the Colony who wouldn’t have resented it, and in our political roles we were capable of infinite patience and understanding in explaining to some white person why their racial attitudes were inhuman.

      I remember something else—Ted reasoning with Stanley Lett about Mrs Lattimore. Ted said that Mr Lattimore was getting jealous and with good reason. Stanley was good-naturedly derisive: Mr Lattimore treated his wife like dirt, he said, and deserved what he got. But the derision was really for Ted, for it was he who was jealous, and of Stanley. Stanley did not care that Ted was hurt. And why should he? When anyone is wooed on one level for the sake of another it is always resented. Always. Of course, Ted was primarily in pursuit of the ‘butterfly under the stone’ and his romantic emotions were well under control. But they were there all right, and Ted deserved that moment, which occurred more than once, when Stanley smiled his hard-lipped knowing smile, his cold eyes narrowed, and said: ‘Come off it, mate. You know that’s not my cup of tea.’ And yet Ted had been offering a book, or an evening listening to music. Stanley had become openly contemptuous of Ted. And Ted, instead of telling him to go to hell, allowed it. Ted was one of the most scrupulous people I’ve known, yet he would go off on ‘organizing expeditions’ with Stanley, to get beer or filch food. Afterwards he would tell us he had only gone in order to get an opportunity to explain to Stanley that this was not, ‘as he would come to see in time’, the right way to live. But then he would give us a quick, ashamed glance, and turn his face away, smiling his new bitterly self-hating smile.

      And then there was the affair of George’s son. All the group knew about it. Yet George was by nature a discreet man and I’m sure during that year he was tormenting himself he had mentioned it to no one. Neither Willi nor I told anyone. Yet we all knew. I suppose that one night when we were half-drunk, George made some reference that he imagined was unintelligible. Soon we were joking about it in the way we now made joking despairing references to the political situation in the country. I remember that one evening George made us laugh until we were helpless with a fantasy about how one day his son would come to his house demanding work as a houseboy. He, George, would not recognize him, but some mystical link, etc., would draw him to the poor child. He would be given work in the kitchen and his sensitivity of nature and innate intelligence, ‘all inherited from me of course’, would soon endear him to the whole household. In no time he would be picking up the cards the four old people dropped at the card-table and providing a tender undemanding friendship for the three children—‘his half-siblings’. For instance, he would prove invaluable as a ball-boy when they played tennis. At last his patient servitude would be rewarded. Light would flash on George suddenly, one day, at the moment when the boy was handing him his shoes, ‘very well-polished, of course’. ‘Baas, is there anything more I can do?’ ‘My son!’ ‘Father. At last!’ And so on and so on.

      That night we saw George sitting by himself under the trees, head in his hands, motionless, a despondent heavy shadow among the moving shadows of the glittering spear-like leaves. We went down to sit with him, but there was nothing that any one could say.

      On that last week-end there was to be another big dance, and we arrived by car and by train, at various times through the Friday, and met in the big room. When Willi and I arrived Johnnie was already at the piano with his red-faced blonde beside him; Stanley was dancing with Mrs Lattimore, and George was talking to Maryrose. Willi went straight over and ousted George, and Paul came over to claim me. Our relationship had remained the same, tender and half-mocking and full of promise. Outside observers might have, and probably did, think the link-up was Willi and Maryrose, Paul and myself. Though at moments they might have thought it was George and myself and Paul and Maryrose. Of course the reason why these romantic, adolescent relationships were possible was because of my relationship with Willi which was, as I’ve said, almost a-sexual. If there is a couple in the centre of a group with a real full sexual relationship it acts like a catalyst for the others, and often, indeed, destroys the group altogether. I’ve seen many such groups since, political and unpolitical, and one can always judge the relationship of the central couple (because there is always a central couple) by the relationships of the couples around them.

      On that Friday there was trouble within an hour of our arrival. June Boothby came up to the big room to ask Paul and myself to come to the hotel kitchen and help her with food for the dinner that evening, because Jackson was busy with the party food for tomorrow. June had by then become engaged to her young man and had been released from her trance. Paul and I went with her, Jackson was mixing fruit and cream for an ice-pudding, and Paul at once began talking to him. They were discussing England, to Jackson such a remote and magical place that he would listen for hours to the simplest details about it—the underground system, for instance, or the buses, or Parliament. June and I stood together and made salads for the hotel evening meal. She was impatient to be free for her young man, who was expected at any moment. Mrs Boothby came in, looked at Paul and Jackson, and said: ‘I thought I told you I wouldn’t have you in the kitchen?’

      ‘Oh, Mom,’ said June impatiently, ‘I asked them, why don’t you get another cook, it’s too much work for Jackson.’

      ‘Jackson’s been doing the work for fifteen years, and there’s never been trouble till now.’

      ‘Oh, Mom, there’s no trouble. But since the war and all the airforce boys all the time, there’s more work. I don’t mind helping out, and neither does Paul and Anna.’

      ‘You’ll do as I tell you, June,’ said her mother.

      ‘Oh, Mom,’ said June, annoyed but still good-natured. She grimmaced at me: Don’t take any notice. Mrs Boothby saw her, and said: ‘You’re getting above yourself, my girl. Since when have you given orders in the kitchen?’

      June lost her temper and walked straight out of the room.

      Mrs Boothby, breathing heavily, her plain, always high-coloured face even redder than usual, looked in distress at Paul. If Paul had made some gentle remark, done anything at all to mollify her, she would have collapsed into her real good-nature at once. But he did as he had done before: nodded at me to go with him, and went calmly out of the back door saying to Jackson: ‘I’ll see you later when you’ve finished work. If you ever do finish work.’ I said to Mrs Boothby: ‘We wouldn’t have come if June hadn’t asked us.’ But she wasn’t interested in appeals from me and made no reply. So I went back to the big room and danced with Paul.

      All this time we had been making jokes that Mrs Boothby was in love with Paul. Perhaps she was, a little. But she was a very simple woman and a hard-working one. Very hard-working since the war, and the hotel which had once been a place for travellers to stop the night had become a week-end resort. It must have been a strain for her. And then there was June who had been transformed in the last few weeks from a sulking adolescent into a young woman with a future. Looking back I think it was June’s marriage that was at the bottom of her mother’s unhappiness. June must have been her only emotional outlet. Mr Boothby was always behind the bar counter, and he was the kind of drinker that is hardest of all to live with. Men who drink heavily in bouts are nothing compared to the men who ‘carry their drink well’—who carry a load of drink every day, every week, year in and year out. These steady hard-drinkers are very bad for their wives. Mrs Boothby had lost June, who was going to live three hundred miles away. Nothing: no distance for the Colony, but she had lost her for all that. And perhaps she had been affected by the wartime restlessness. A woman who must have resigned herself, years ago, to not being a woman at all, she had watched for weeks now, Mrs Lattimore who was the same age as herself, being courted by Stanley Lett. Perhaps she did have secret dreams about Paul. I don’t know. But looking back I see Mrs Boothby as a lonely pathetic figure. But I didn’t think so then. I saw her as a stupid ‘aborigine’. Oh, Lord, it’s painful thinking of the people one has been cruel to. And she would have been made happy by so little—if we had invited her to come and drink with us sometimes, or talked to her. But we were locked in our group and we made stupid СКАЧАТЬ