To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One. Doris Lessing

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      ‘No,’ she said.

      ‘I really did think you might be ill.’

      She laughed. ‘Perhaps I am.’

      ‘What’s the matter, my darling? What is it? He was angry, wasn’t he? Because I came?’

      ‘He thinks you’re jealous,’ she said shortly.

      ‘Well, perhaps I am rather,’ said George.

      She did not speak.

      ‘I’m sorry, dear, I really am. I didn’t mean to spoil anything for you.’

      ‘Well, that’s certainly that,’ she remarked, and she sounded impersonally angry.

      ‘Why? But why should it be?’

      ‘He doesn’t like – having things asked of him,’ she said, and he remained silent while they drove home.

      Up in the warmed, comfortable old flat, she stood before the fire, while he brought her a drink. She smoked fast and angrily, looking into the fire.

      ‘Please forgive me, dear,’ he said at last. ‘What is it? Do you love him? Do you want to leave me? If you do, of course you must. Young people should be together.’

      She turned and stared at him, a black strange stare he knew well.

      ‘George,’ she said, ‘I’m nearly forty.’

      ‘But darling, you’re a child still. At least, to me.’

      ‘And he,’ she went on, ‘will be twenty-two next month. I’m old enough to be his mother.’ She laughed, painfully. ‘Very painful, maternal love … or so it seems … but then how should I know?’ She held out her bare arm and looked at it. Then, with the fingers of one hand she creased down the skin of that bare arm towards the wrist, so that the ageing skin lay in creases and folds. Then, setting down her glass, her cigarette held between tight, amused, angry lips, she wriggled her shoulders out of her dress, so that it slipped to her waist, and she looked down at her two small, limp, unused breasts. ‘Very painful, dear George,’ she said, and shrugged her dress up quickly, becoming again the formal woman dressed for the world. ‘He does not love me. He does not love me at all. Why should he?’ She began singing:

      He does not love me

      With a love that is trew …

      Then she said in stage cockney, ‘Repeat; I could ‘ave bin ‘is muvver, see?’ And with the old rolling derisive black flash of her eyes she smiled at George.

      George was thinking only that this girl, his darling, was suffering now what he had suffered, and he could not stand it. She had been going through this for how long now? But she had been working with that boy for nearly two years. She had been living beside him, George, and he had had no idea at all of her unhappiness. He went over to her, put his arms around her, and she stood with her head on his shoulder and wept. For the first time, George thought, they were together. They sat by the fire a long time that night, drinking, smoking and her head was on his knee and he stroked it, and thought that now, at last, she had been admitted into the world of emotion and they would learn to be really together. He could feel his strength stirring along his limbs for her. He was still a man, after all.

      Next day she said she would not go on with the new show. She would tell Jackie he must get another partner. And besides, the new act wasn’t really any good. ‘I’ve had one little act all my life,’ she said, laughing. ‘And sometimes it’s fitted in, and sometimes it hasn’t.’

      ‘What was the new act? What’s it about?’ he asked her.

      She did not look at him. ‘Oh, nothing very much. It was Jackie’s idea, really …’ Then she laughed. ‘It’s quite good really, I suppose …’

      ‘But what is it?’

      ‘Well, you see …’ Again he had the impression she did not want to look at him. ‘It’s a pair of lovers. We make fun … it’s hard to explain, without doing it.’

      ‘You make fun of love?’ he asked.

      ‘Well, you know, all the attitudes … the things people say. It’s a man and a woman – with music of course. All the music you’d expect, played offbeat. We wear the same costume as for the other act. And then we go through all the motions … It’s rather funny, really …’ she trailed off, breathless, seeing George’s face. ‘Well,’ she said, suddenly very savage, ‘if it isn’t all bloody funny, what is it?’ She turned away to take a cigarette.

      ‘Perhaps you’d like to go on with it after all?’ he asked ironically.

      ‘No. I can’t. I really can’t stand it. I can’t stand it any longer, George,’ she said, and from her voice he understood she had nothing to learn from him of pain.

      He suggested they both needed a holiday, so they went to Italy. They travelled from place to place, never stopping anywhere longer than a day, for George knew she was running away from any place around which emotion could gather. At night he made love to her, but she closed her eyes and thought of the other half of the act; and George knew it and did not care. But what he was feeling was too powerful for his old body; he could feel a lifetime’s emotions beating through his limbs, making his brain throb.

      Again they curtailed their holiday, to return to the comfortable old flat in London.

      On the first morning after their return, she said: ‘George, you know you’re getting too old for this sort of thing – it’s not good for you; you look ghastly.’

      ‘But, darling, why? What else am I still alive for?’

      ‘People’ll say I’m killing you,’ she said, with a sharp, half angry, half amused, black glance.

      ‘But, my darling, believe me …’

      He could see them both in the mirror; he, an old pursy man, head lowered in sullen obstinacy; she … but he could not read her face.

      ‘And perhaps I’m getting too old?’ she remarked suddenly.

      For a few days she was gay, mocking, then suddenly tender. She was provocative, teasing him with her eyes; then she would deliberately yawn and say, ‘I’m going to sleep. Good night, George.’

      ‘Well, of course, my darling, if you’re tired.’

      One morning she announced she was going to have a birthday party; it would be her fortieth birthday soon. The way she said it made George feel uneasy.

      On the morning of her birthday she came into his study where he had been sleeping, carrying his breakfast tray. He raised himself on his elbow and gazed at her, appalled. For a moment he had imagined it must be another woman. She had put on a severe navy blue suit, cut like a man’s; heavy black-laced shoes; and she had taken the wisps of black hair back off her face and pinned them into a sort of clumsy knot. She was suddenly a middle-aged woman.

      ‘But, my darling,’ he said, ‘my darling, what have you done to yourself?’

      ‘I’m СКАЧАТЬ