Doris Lessing - Walking in the Shade - Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

When I went to Paris my toilette was hardly of the level to attract French compliments, but it was true every man gave you a quick, expert once-over – hair, face, what you were wearing – allotting you marks. This was a dispassionate, disinterested summing-up, not necessarily leading to invitations.

A scene: I took myself to the opera, and in the foyer, at the interval, saw enter a very young woman, eighteen, perhaps, in what was perhaps her first evening dress, a column of white satin. She was exquisite, and so was the dress. She stood poised just in the entrance, while the crowd looked … assessed … judged. Not a word, but they might as well have been clapping. She was at first ready to shrink away with shyness but slowly filled with confidence, stood smiling, tears in her eyes, lifted on invisible waves of expert appreciation, approval, love. Adorable France, which loves its women, gives them confidence in their femininity – and that from the time when they are tiny girls.

On this first trip I was in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, so cheap I could hardly believe it. Gottfried had said I should look up his sister’s husband’s mother. I did and found an elderly lady in old-fashioned clothes living in a tiny room high up under the roof of one of those tall ancient cold houses. Through her I was admitted into a network of middle-aged and old women, without men, all poor, shabby, living from hand to mouth in maids’ rooms or in any comer that would let them fit themselves in. There they were, every one a victim of war, and some of them had lived in their little refuges through the war and, clearly, often did not know how they had managed it. They were witty and they were wise, and the best of company. As with the refugees in London then, it was hard to know what they lived on. I was served precious coffee in beautiful cups, by a stove that had to be fed with wood and coal – and whatever was burnable that could be picked up in the street, brought toiling up hundreds of cold stairs. Madame Gise had not heard from her son since the beginning of the war and said that he had chosen to despise her, because she was not a communist. She despised communists and communism. I said I was a kind of communist, and she said, Nonsense, you don’t know anything about it. These women, whose husbands or lovers or sons had been killed or had forgotten them: they were so brave, supporting each other in their poverty and when they were ill. Again, as in London, I was hearing tales of impossible survivals, endurances. Our talk in London of politics, all ideas and principles, of what went on in other countries, dissolved here into: ‘My cousin … Ravensbrook’; ‘My son was shot by the Germans for harbouring a member of the Resistance’; ‘I escaped from Germany … from Poland … from Russia … from Spain …’

In Paris I bought a hat. This needs explanation. I had to: it was a need of the times. A Paris hat proved you had captured elegance itself. Madame Gise stood by me. Saying, No, not that one, Yes, that one, she was representing Paris itself, that shabby woman with a carefully counted out store of francs in her handbag. I never wore the hat. But I owned a Paris hat. Joan said, But what are you going to do with it?

Another trip, and in another shabby hotel, I suddenly thought, But surely this was where Oscar Wilde died? Down I went to the desk, and the proprietress said. Yes, indeed that was so, he died here, and it was in the room you are in. People sometimes came to ask her about it, but she couldn’t say much; after all, she hadn’t been here. When I wanted to pay the bill, there was no one at the desk. I knocked at a door, and was told, Entrez. It was a dark, cluttered room, with mirrors gleaming from corners, shawls over chairs, a cat. There was Madame, in an armchair, flesh bulging over her pink corset, her fat feet in a basin of water. The maid, a young girl, was brushing her rusty old hair, while Madame tossed it back as if it were a treasure, in her imagination young tresses. This was a scene from Balzac? Zola? Certainly not a twentieth-century novel. Or Degas: The Concierge, perhaps? I lingered at the door, entranced. ‘Leave your money at the desk,’ she said. ‘The bill is there. And let us see you again, Madame.’ But I didn’t go back: one shouldn’t spoil perfection. And I didn’t see Madame Gise again either, and about that I feel bad.

On one of these trips there was one of the oddest encounters of my life. The plane back from Paris was delayed, by hours. At Orly we sat around, bored, tired, fractious. At last we were on. Next to me was a South African man, who, hearing from my voice that I was from Rhodesia, began talking. He was, I thought, drunk, then thought, No, that’s not drink. I hardly listened: We would land after midnight; I was years away from being able to afford taxis; Peter still woke at five. Slowly, what the man was saying began to penetrate. He was telling me that he had made a trip to Palestine to aid Irgun in its fight against the British occupying forces, and he had just helped to blow up the King David Hotel. Now, his duty as a Jew done, he was returning with a good conscience to South Africa. Women are used to hearing confessions, particularly if they are young – well, by then youngish – and reasonably attractive. Women don’t really count, as people, to a man who is drunk, or not himself for one reason or another – or to many men sober, if it comes to that. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was an enemy of my country and I should be thinking of how to alert the authorities. We landed. The airport was almost deserted. I was imagining what would happen if I said to the air hostess, I want to speak to the police. ‘What for?’ I could hear – and the voice would be tart, for she would be longing for bed, just like me. The police – a man, or two men – would arrive, after a delay, while I watched other people going off to find a bus. ‘I have been sitting on the plane from Paris next to a man who says he has been blowing up the King David Hotel. Among other things.’ The policeman hesitates. He glances at his partner. They examine me. My appearance, tired and cross, does not impress.

‘So this man told you he’d been blowing up this hotel?’

‘Yes.

‘Do you know him?’

‘No.’

‘So he was telling a perfect stranger that he had been committing murder and treason and God knows what in Jerusalem?’

‘Oh, forget it.’

But of course that would not be the end, and I’d have to hang around while sceptical officials questioned. If they didn’t decide I was simply daft.

‘There, there, just you run along home, dear, and forget all about it.’

The thing was – and is – I am sure he was telling the truth. Or – perhaps even more interesting – he had imagined it all so strongly, the blowing up of the hotel, the murder of policemen, that for him it was all true and had to be shared, even if only with a stranger in the next seat on an aeroplane.

I went to Dublin too, invited by writers, I am sure, for there was a convivial evening. But that is not what I remember most, what I cannot forget. I was just over a year out of all that sunlight, that dry heat, and I thought I had experienced everything in the way of dismalness and greyness in London, but suddenly I was in this city of old, unkempt buildings, and dignified, a city proud of itself, but everywhere ran about ragged children, with bare feet, legs red with cold, hungry faces. Never has there been such a poor place as Dublin then, and it was a sharp, biting poverty, which afflicted the writers too, for one of them pressed into my hands a book called Leaves for the Burning, unjustly forgotten, by Mervin Wall, the account of a drunken weekend, but this was the drinking of desperation. That city of rags and hunger had disappeared when I went again less than ten years later.