The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ as Ella was concerned, was a point in her favour, but the proprietor of this particular group of women’s magazines had shifted Patricia over to Women at Home, which was angled towards working-class women, and had not even a pretence of cultural tone. Patricia was now well-suited for her work, and it was this which secretly chagrined her. She had wistfully enjoyed the atmosphere of the other magazine which had fashionable authors and artists associated with it. She was the daughter of a county family, rich but philistine; her childhood had been well supported by servants, and it was this, an early contact with ‘the lower-classes’—she referred to them as such, inside the office, coyly; outside, unself-consciously—that gave her her shrewd direct understanding of what to serve her readers.

      Far from giving Ella the sack, she had developed the same wistful respect for her that she had for the glossy magazine she had had to leave. She would casually remark that she had working for her someone who was a ‘highbrow’—someone whose stories had been published in the ‘highbrow papers’.

      And she had a far warmer, more human understanding of the letters which came into the office than Dr West.

      She now protected Ella by saying: ‘I agree with Ella. Whenever I take a look at her weekly dose of misery, I don’t know how she does it. It depresses me so I can’t even eat. And believe me, when my appetite goes, things are serious.’

      Now everybody laughed, and Ella smiled gratefully at Patricia. Who nodded, as if to say: ‘It’s all right, we weren’t criticizing you.’

      Now the talk began again and Ella was free to look around her. The living-room was large. A wall had been broken down. In the other, identical little houses of the street, two minute ground-floor rooms served as kitchen—full of people and used to live in, and parlour, used for company. This room was the entire ground-floor of the house, and a staircase led up to the bedrooms. It was bright, with a good many different colours—sharp blocks of contrasting colour, dark green, and bright pink and yellow. Mrs West had no taste, and the room didn’t come off. In five years’ time, Ella thought, the houses down the street will have walls in solid bright colours, and curtains and cushions in tune. We are pushing this phase of taste on them—in Women at Home, for instance. And this room will be—what? Whatever is the next thing, I suppose…but I ought to be more sociable, this is a party, after all…

      Looking around again she saw it was not a party, but an association of people who were there because the Wests had said: ‘It’s time we asked some people around,’ and they had come saying: ‘I suppose we’ve got to go over to the Wests.’

      I wish I hadn’t come, Ella thought, and there’s all that long way back again. At this point a man left his seat across the room and came to sit by her. Her first impression was of a lean young man’s face, and a keen, nervously critical smile which, as he talked, introducing himself (his name was Paul Tanner and he was a doctor), had moments of sweetness, as it were against his will, or without his knowledge. She realized she was smiling back, acknowledging these moments of warmth, and so she looked more closely at him. Of course, she had been mistaken, he was not as young as she had thought. His rather rough black hair was thinning at the crown, and his very white, slightly freckled skin was incised sharply around his eyes. These were blue, deep, rather beautiful; eyes both combative and serious, with a gleam in them of uncertainty. A nerve-hung face, she decided, and saw that his body was tensed as he talked, which he did well, but in a self-watchful way. His self-consciousness had her reacting away from him, whereas only a moment ago she had been responding to the unconscious warmth of his smile.

      These were her first reactions to the man she was later to love so deeply. Afterwards he would complain, half-bitter, half-humorous: ‘You didn’t love me at all, to begin with. You should have loved me at first sight. If just once in my life a woman would take one look at me and fall in love, but they never do.’ Later still, he would develop the theme, consciously humorous now, because of the emotional language: ‘The face is the soul. How can a man trust a woman who falls in love with him only after they have made love. You did not love me at all.’ And he would maintain a bitter, humorous laugh, while Ella exclaimed: ‘How can you separate love-making off from everything else? It doesn’t make sense.’

      Her attention was going away from him. She was aware she was beginning to fidget, and that he knew it. Also that he minded: he was attracted to her. His face was too intent on keeping her: she felt that somewhere in all this was pride, a sexual pride which would be offended if she did not respond, and this made her feel a sudden desire to escape. This complex of emotions, all much too sudden and violent for comfort, made Ella think of her husband George. She had married George almost out of exhaustion, after he had courted her violently for a year. She had known she shouldn’t marry him. Yet she did; she did not have the will to break with him. Shortly after the marriage she had become sexually repelled by him, a feeling she was unable to control or hide. This redoubled his craving for her, which made her dislike him the more—he even seemed to get some thrill or satisfaction out of her repulsion for him. They were apparently in some hopeless psychological deadlock. Then, to pique her, he had slept with another woman and told her about it. Belatedly she had found the courage to break with him that she lacked before: she took her stand, dishonestly, in desperation, on the fact he had broken faith with her. This was not her moral code, and the fact she was using conventional arguments, repeating endlessly because she was a coward, that he had been unfaithful to her, made her despise herself. The last few weeks with George were a nightmare of self-contempt and hysteria, until at last she left his house, to put an end to it, to put a distance between herself and the man who suffocated her, imprisoned her, apparently took away her will. He then married the woman he had made use of to bring Ella back to him. Much to Ella’s relief.

      She was in the habit, when depressed, of worrying interminably over her behaviour during this marriage. She made many sophisticated psychological remarks about it; she denigrated both herself and him; felt wearied and soiled by the whole experience, and worse, secretly feared that she might be doomed, by some flaw in herself, to some unavoidable repetition of the experience with another man.

      But after she had been with Paul Tanner for only a short time, she would say, with the utmost simplicity: ‘Of course, I never loved George.’ As if there was nothing more to be said about it. And as far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to be said. Nor did it worry her at all that all the complicated psychological attitudes were hardly on the same level as: ‘Of course I never loved him,’ with its corollary that: ‘I love Paul.’

      Meanwhile she was restless to get away from him and felt trapped—not by him, by the possibilities of her past resurrecting itself in him.

      He said: ‘What was the case that sparked off your argument with West?’ He was trying to keep her. She said: ‘Oh, you’re a doctor too, they’re all cases, of course.’ She had sounded shrill and aggressive, and now she made herself smile and said: ‘I’m sorry. But the work worries me more than it should, I suppose.’ ‘I know,’ he said. Dr West would never have said: ‘I know,’ and instantly Ella wanned to him. The frigidity of her manner, which she was unconscious of, and which she could never lose except with people she knew well, melted away at once. She fished in her handbag for the letter, and saw him smile quizzically at the disorder she revealed. He took the letter, smiling. He sat with it in his hand, unopened, looking at her with appreciation, as if welcoming her, her real self, now open to him. Then he read the letter and again sat holding it, this time opened out. ‘What could poor West do? Did you want him to prescribe ointments?’ ‘No, no, of course not.’ ‘she’s probably been pestering her own doctor three times a week ever since’—he consulted the letter—‘the 9th of March, 1950. The poor man’s been prescribing every ointment he can think of.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to answer it tomorrow morning. And about a hundred more.’ She held out her hand for the letter. ‘What are you going to say to her?’ ‘What can I say? The thing is, there are thousands and thousands, probably millions of them.’ The word millions sounded childish, СКАЧАТЬ