Doris Lessing - To Room Nineteen - Collected Stories Volume One

On the way the taxi man and I discussed the cost of living, the conduct of the government, and discovered we had everything in common. Then he began telling me about his only daughter, aged eighteen, who wanted to marry his best friend, aged forty-five. He did not hold with this; had said so; and thereby lost daughter and friend at one blow. What made it worse was that he had just read an article on psychology in the woman’s magazine his wife took, from which he had suddenly gathered that his daughter was father-fixated. ‘I felt real bad when I read that,’ he said. ‘It’s a terrible thing to come on suddenlike, a thing like that.’ He drew up smartly outside the dress shop and I got out.

‘I don’t see why you should take it to heart,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we weren’t all father-fixated.’

‘That’s not the way to talk,’ he said, holding out his hand for the fare. He was a small, bitter-looking man, with a head like a lemon or like a peanut, and his small blue eyes were brooding and bitter. ‘My old woman’s been saying to me for years that I favoured our Hazel too much. What gets me is, she might have been in the right of it.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘look at it this way. It’s better to love a child too much than too little.’

‘Love?’ he said. ‘Love, is it? Precious little love or anything else these days if you ask me, and Hazel left home three months ago with my mate George and not so much as a postcard to say where or how.’

‘Life’s pretty difficult for everyone,’ I said, ‘what with one thing and another.’

‘You can say that,’ he said.

This conversation might have gone on for some time, but I saw my cousin Jessie standing on the pavement watching us. I said goodbye to the taxi man and turned, with some apprehension, to face her.

‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘I saw you arguing with him. It’s the only thing to do. They’re getting so damned insolent these days. My principle is, tip them sixpence regardless of the distance, and if they argue, let them have it. Only yesterday I had one shouting at my back all down the street because I gave him sixpence. But we’ve got to stand up to them.’

My cousin Jessie is a tall girl, broad-shouldered, aged about twenty-five. But she looks eighteen. She has light brown hair which she wears falling loose around her face, which is round and young and sharp-chinned. Her wide, light blue eyes are virginal and fierce. She is altogether like the daughter of a Viking, particularly when battling with bus conductors, taxi men, and porters. She and my Aunt Emma carry on permanent guerrilla warfare with the lower orders; an entertainment I begrudge neither of them, because their lives are dreary in the extreme. Besides, I believe their antagonists enjoy it. I remember once, after a set-to between Cousin Jessie and a taxi driver, when she had marched smartly off, shoulders swinging, he chuckled appreciatively and said: ‘That’s a real old-fashioned type, that one. They don’t make them like that these days.’

‘Have you bought your dress?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got it on,’ she said.

Cousin Jessie always wears the same outfit: a well-cut suit, a round-necked jersey, and a string of pearls. She looks very nice in it.

‘Then we might as well go and get it over,’ I said.

‘Mummy is coming, too,’ she said. She looked at me aggressively.

‘Oh well,’ I said.

‘But I told her I would not have her with me while I was buying my things. I told her to come and pick me up here. I will not have her choosing my clothes for me.’

‘Quite right,’ I said.

My Aunt Emma was coming towards us from the tearoom at the corner, where she had been biding her time. She is a very large woman, and she wears navy blue and pearls and white gloves like a policeman on traffic duty. She has a big, heavy-jowled, sorrowful face; and her bulldog eyes are nearly always fixed in disappointment on her daughter.

‘There!’ she said as she saw Jessie’s suit. ‘You might just as well have had me with you.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Jessie quickly.

‘I went in to Renée’s this morning and told them you were coming, and I asked them to show you that suit. And you’ve bought it. You see, I do know your tastes as I know my own.’

Jessie lifted her sharp battling chin at her mother, who dropped her eyes in modest triumph and began poking at the pavement with the point of her umbrella.

‘I think we’d better get started,’ I said.

Aunt Emma and Cousin Jessie, sending off currents of angry electricity into the air all around them, fell in beside me, and we proceeded up the street.

‘We can get a bus at the top,’ I said.

‘Yes, I think that would be better,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘I don’t think I could face the insolence of another taxi driver today.’

‘No,’ said Jessie, ‘I couldn’t either.’

We went to the top of the bus, which was empty, and sat side by side along the two seats at the very front.

‘I hope this man of yours is going to do Jessie justice,’ said Aunt Emma.

‘I hope so too,’ I said. Aunt Emma believes that every writer lives in a whirl of photographers, press conferences, and publishers’ parties. She thought I was the right person to choose a photographer. I wrote to say I wasn’t. She wrote back to say it was the least I could do. ‘It doesn’t matter in the slightest anyway,’ said Jessie, who always speaks in short, breathless, battling sentences, as from an unassuageably painful inner integrity that she doesn’t expect anyone else to understand.

It seems that at the boarding house where Aunt Emma and Jessie live, there is an old inhabitant who has a brother who is a TV producer. Jessie had been acting in Quiet Wedding with the local Reps. Aunt Emma thought that if there was a nice photograph of Jessie, she could show it to the TV producer when he came to tea with his brother at the boarding house, which he was expected to do any weekend now; and if Jessie proved to be photogenic, the TV producer would whisk her off to London to be a TV star.

What Jessie thought of this campaign I did not know. I never did know what she thought of her mother’s plans for her future. She might conform or she might not; but it was always with the same fierce and breathless integrity of indifference.

‘If you’re going to take that attitude, dear,’ said Aunt Emma, ‘I really don’t think it’s fair to the photographer.

‘Oh, Mummy!’ said Jessie.

‘There’s the conductor,’ said Aunt Emma, smiling bitterly. ‘I’m not paying a penny more than I did last time. The fare from Knightsbridge to Little Duchess Street is threepence.’

‘The fares have gone up,’ I said.

‘Not a penny more,’ said Aunt Emma.

But it was not the conductor. It was two middle-aged people, who steadied each other at the top of the stairs and then sat down, not side by side, but one in front of the other. I thought this was odd, particularly as the woman leaned forward over the man’s shoulder and said in a loud parrot voice: ‘Yes, and if you turn my goldfish out of doors once more, I’ll tell the landlady to turn you out. I’ve warned you before.’

The man, in appearance like a damp, grey, squashed felt hat, looked in front of him and nodded with the jogging of the bus.

She said, ‘And there’s fungus on my fish. You needn’t think I don’t know where it came from.’

Suddenly he remarked in a high insistent voice, ‘There are all those little fishes in the depths of the sea, all those little fishes. We explode all these bombs at them, and we’re not going to be forgiven for that, are we, we’re not going to be forgiven for blowing up the poor little fishes.’