The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ whom Ella worked. It was a long way out, in North London. Ella was lazy. It was always an effort for her to move herself. And if Julia had not come up, she would have gone to bed and read.

      ‘You say,’ said Julia, ‘that you want to get married again, but how will you ever, if you never meet anybody?’

      ‘That’s what I can’t stand,’ said Ella, with sudden energy. ‘I’m on the market again, so I have to go off to parties.’

      ‘It’s no good taking that attitude—that’s how everything is run, isn’t it?’

      ‘I suppose so.’

      Ella, wishing Julia would go, sat on the edge of the bed (at the moment a divan and covered with soft green woven stuff), and smoked with her. She imagined she was hiding what she felt, but in fact she was frowning and fidgety. ‘After all,’ said Julia, ‘you never meet anyone but those awful phonies in your office.’ She added, ‘Besides your decree was absolute last week.’

      Ella suddenly laughed, and after a moment Julia laughed with her, and they felt at once friendly to each other.

      Julia’s last remark had struck a familiar note. They both considered themselves very normal, not to say conventional women. Women, that is to say, with conventional emotional reactions. The fact that their lives never seemed to run on the usual tracks was because, so they felt, or might even say, they never met men who were capable of seeing what they really were. As things were, they were regarded by women with a mixture of envy and hostility, and by men with emotions which—so they complained—were depressingly banal. Their friends saw them as women who positively disdained ordinary morality. Julia was the only person who would have believed Ella if she had said that for the whole of the time while she was waiting for the divorce she had been careful to limit her own reactions to any man (or rather, they limited themselves) who showed an attraction for her. Ella was now free. Her husband had married the day after the divorce was final. Ella was indifferent to this. It had been a sad marriage, no worse than many, certainly; but then Ella would have felt a traitor to her own self had she remained in a compromise marriage. For outsiders, the story went that Ella’s husband George had left her for somebody else. She resented the pity she earned on this account, but did nothing to put things right, because of all sorts of complicated pride. And besides, what did it matter what people thought?

      She had the child, her self-respect, a future. She could not imagine this future without a man. Therefore, and of course she agreed that Julia was right to be so practical, she ought to be going to parties and accepting invitations. Instead she was sleeping too much and was depressed.

      ‘And besides, if I go, I’ll have to argue with Dr West, and it does no good.’ Ella meant that she believed Dr West was limiting his usefulness, not from lack of conscientiousness, but from lack of imagination. Any query which he could not answer by advice as to the right hospitals, medicine, treatment, he handed over to Ella.

      ‘I know, they are absolutely awful.’ By they, Julia meant the world of officials, bureaucrats, people in any kind of office. They, for Julia, were by definition middle-class—Julia was a communist, though she had never joined the Party, and besides she had working-class parents.

      ‘Look at this,’ said Ella excitedly, pulling a folded blue paper from her handbag. It was a letter, on cheap writing paper, and it read: ‘Dear Dr Allsop. I feel I must write to you in my desperation. I get my rheumatism in my neck and head. You advise other sufferers kindly in your column. Please advise me. My rheumatism began when my husband passed over on the 9th March, 1950, at 3 in the afternoon at the Hospital. Now I am getting frightened, because I am alone in my flat, and what might happen if my rheumatism attacked all over and then I could not move for help. Looking forward to your kind attention, yours faithfully. (Mrs) Dorothy Brown.’

      ‘What did he say?’

      ‘He said he had been engaged to write a medical column, not to run an out-patients for neurotics.’

      ‘I can hear him,’ said Julia, who had met Dr West once and recognized him as the enemy at first glance.

      ‘There are hundreds and thousands of people, all over the country, simmering away in misery and no one cares.’

      ‘No one cares a damn,’ said Julia. She stubbed out her cigarette and said, apparently giving up her struggle to get Ella to the party, ‘I’m going to have my bath.’ And she went downstairs with a cheerful clatter, singing.

      Ella did not at once move. She was thinking: If I go, I’ll have to iron something to wear. She almost got up to examine her clothes, but frowned and thought: If I’m thinking of what to wear, that means that I really want to go? How odd. Perhaps I do want to go? After all, I’m always doing this, saying I won’t do something, then I change my mind. The point is, my mind is probably already made up. But which way? I don’t change my mind. I suddenly find myself doing something when I’ve said I wouldn’t. Yes. And now I’ve no idea at all what I’ve decided.

      A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The death of a young man who had not known he was going to commit suicide until the moment of death, when he understood that he had in fact been preparing for it, and in great detail, for months. The point of the novel would be the contrast between the surface of his life, which was orderly and planned, yet without any long-term objective, and an underlying motif which had reference only to the suicide, which would lead up to the suicide. His plans for his future were all vague and impossible, in contrast with the sharp practicality of his present life. The undercurrent of despair, or madness or illogicality would lead on to, or rather, refer back from, the impossible fantasies of a distant future. So the real continuity of the novel would be in the at first scarcely noticed substratum of despair, the growth of the unknown intention to commit suicide. The moment of death would also be the moment when the real continuity of his life would be understood—a continuity not of order, discipline, practicality, commonsense, but of unreality. It would be understood, at the moment of death, that the link between the dark need for death, and death itself, had been the wild, crazy fantasies of a beautiful life; and that the commonsense and the order had been (not as it had seemed earlier in the story) symptoms of sanity, but intimations of madness.

      The idea for this novel had come to Ella at the moment when she found herself getting dressed to go out to dine with people after she had told herself she did not want to go out. She said to herself, rather surprised at the thought: This is precisely how I would commit suicide. I would find myself just about to jump out of an open window or turning on the gas in a small closed-in room, and I would say to myself, without any emotion, but rather with the sense of suddenly understanding something I should have understood long before: Good Lord! So that’s what I’ve been meaning to do. That’s been it all the time! And I wonder how many people commit suicide in precisely this way? It is always imagined as some desperate mood, or a moment of crisis. Yet for many it must happen just like that—they find themselves putting their papers in order, writing farewell letters, even ringing up their friends, in a cheerful, friendly way, almost with a feeling of curiosity…they must find themselves packing newspapers under the door, against window-frames, quite calmly and efficiently, remarking to themselves, quite detached: Well, well! How very interesting. How extraordinary I didn’t understand what it was all about before!

      Ella found this novel difficult. Not for technical reasons. On the contrary, she could imagine the young man very clearly. She knew how he lived, what all his habits were. It was as if the story were already written somewhere inside herself, and she was transcribing it. The trouble was, she was ashamed of it. She had not told Julia about it. She knew her friend would say something like: ‘That’s a very negative subject, isn’t it?’ Or: ‘That’s not going to point the way forward…’ Or some other СКАЧАТЬ