To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One. Doris Lessing

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      ‘You’re working all day.’ She was silent, he looked at her – and slowly coloured.

      ‘Listen a minute,’ she began, persuasively – not unpleasantly at all, though every word wounded Jimmie. ‘I furnished this place. It was my furniture and my money. And I’ve got a hundred still in the post office in case of accidents – I’ll need it; now the war’s over we won’t be earning so much money, if I know anything. So far, I’ve not been …’ But here her instinctive delicacy overcame her, and she could not go on. She wanted to say that she paid for the food, paid for everything. Lately, even the rent. One week he had said, apologetically, that he hadn’t the cash, and that if she could do it this once – but now it was a regular thing.

      ‘You want me to give you the money so you can stay here with the kid?’ he inquired, cautiously. She was blushing with embarrassment. ‘No, no,’ she said, quickly. ‘Listen. If you can just pay the rent – that would be enough. I could get a part-time job, just the mornings. Jill goes to school now, and I’d manage somehow.’

      He digested this silently. He was thinking, incredulously: She wants to have a kid here, a kid’s always in the way – that means she can’t love me any more. He said, slowly: ‘Well, Rosie, if that’s what you want, then go ahead.’

      Her face cleared into vivid happiness and she came running to him in the old way and kissed him and said: ‘Oh, Jimmie; oh, Jimmie …’ He held her and thought, bitterly, that all this joy was not because of him, all she cared about was the kid – women! But at the back of his mind were two other thoughts: First, that he did not know how he would find the money to pay the rent unless he passed that examination soon, and the other was that the authorities would never let Rose have Jill.

      Next evening Rose was despondent. ‘Did you see the officials?’ he asked at last.

      ‘Yes.’ She would not look at him. She was staring helpless down from the window.

      ‘Wasn’t it any good?’

      ‘They said I must prove myself a fit and proper person. So I said that I was. I told them I’d known Jill since she was born. I said I knew her mother and father.’

      ‘That’s true enough,’ he could not help interjecting, jealously. She gave him a cold look and said: ‘Don’t start that now. I told them her Granny was too old, and I could easily look after Jill.’

      ‘Well then?’

      She was silent, then, wringing her hands unconsciously, she cried out: ‘They wasn’t nice, they wasn’t nice to me at all. There were two of them, a woman and a man. They said: How could I support Jill? I said I could get money. They said I must show them papers and things …’ She was silently crying now, but she did not come to him. She stayed at the window, her back turned, shutting him out of her sorrow. ‘They asked me, how could a working girl look after a child, and I said I’d do it easy, and they said, did I have a husband …’ Here she leaned her head against the wall and sobbed bitterly. After a time he said: ‘Well, Rosie, it looks as if I’m not good for you. Perhaps you’d better give me up and get yourself a proper husband.’ At this she jerked her head up, looked incredulously at him and cried: ‘Jimmie! How could I give you up …’ He went to her, thinking, in relief: ‘She loves me better after all.’ He meant: better than the child.

      It seemed that Rose had accepted her defeat. For some days she talked sorrowfully about ‘those nosy parkers’ at the Council. She was even humorous, though in the way that made him uneasy. ‘I’ll go to them,’ she said, smiling grimly, ‘I’ll go and I’ll say: I can’t help being a surplus woman. Don’t blame me, blame the war, it’s not my fault that they keep killing all the men off in their silly wars …’

      And then his jealousy grew unbearable and he said: ‘You love Jill better than me.’ She laughed in amazement, and said, ‘Don’t be a baby, Jimmie.’ ‘Well, you must. Look how you go on and on about that kid. It’s all you think about.’

      ‘There isn’t no sense in you being jealous of Jill.’

      ‘Jealous,’ he said, roughly. ‘Who says I’m jealous?’

      ‘Well, if you’re not, what are you then?’

      ‘Oh, go to hell, go to hell,’ he muttered to himself, as he put his arms around her. Aloud he said: ‘Come on, Rosie girl, come on, stop being like this, be like you used to be, can’t you?’

      ‘I’m not any different,’ she said patiently, submitting to his caresses with a sigh.

      ‘So you’re not any different,’ he said, exasperatedly. Then, controlling himself with difficulty he coaxed: ‘Rosie, Rosie, don’t you love me a little …’

      For the truth was he was becoming obsessed with the difference in Rose. He thought of her continuously as she had been. It was like dreaming of another woman, she was so changed now. At work, busy with some job that needed all his attention, he would start as if stung, and mutter: ‘Rose – oh, to hell with her!’ He was remembering, with anguish, how she had run across the room to welcome him, how responsive she had been, how affectionate. He thought of her patient kindliness now, and wanted to swear. After work he would go straight to the flat, reaching it even before she did. The lights would be out, the rooms cold, like a reminder of how Rose had changed. She would come in, tired, laden with string-bags, to find him seated at the table staring at her, his eyes black with jealousy. ‘This place is as cold as a street-corner,’ he would say, angrily. She looked at him, sighed, then said, reasonably: ‘But Jimmie, look, here’s where I keep the sixpences for the gas – why don’t you light the fire?’ Then he would go to her, holding down her arms as he kissed her, and she would say: ‘Just leave me a minute, Jimmie. I must get the potatoes on or there’ll be no supper.’

      ‘Can’t the potatoes wait a minute?’

      ‘Let me get my arms free, Jimmie.’ He held them, so she would carefully reach them out from under the pressure of his grip, and put the string-bags on the table. Then she would turn to kiss him. He noticed that she would be glancing worriedly at the curtains, which had not been drawn, or at the rubbish-pail, which had not been emptied. ‘You can’t even kiss me until you’ve done all the housework,’ he cried, sullenly. ‘All right then, you tip me the wink when you’ve got a moment to spare and you don’t mind being kissed.’

      To this she replied, listlessly but patiently: ‘Jimmie, I come straight home from work and there’s nothing ready, and before you didn’t come so early.’

      ‘So now you’re complaining because I come straight here. Before, you complained because I dropped in for a drink somewhere first.’

      ‘I never complained.’

      ‘You sulked, even if you didn’t complain.’

      ‘Well, Jimmie,’ she said, after a sorrowful pause, as she peeled the potatoes. ‘If I went to drink with a boy-friend you wouldn’t like it either.’

      ‘That means Pearl, I suppose. Anyway, it’s quite different.’

      ‘Why is it different?’ she asked, reasonably. ‘I don’t like to go to pubs by myself, but if I did I don’t see why not, I don’t see why men should do one thing and women another.’

      These sudden lapses into feminism always baffled him. СКАЧАТЬ