Doris Lessing - To Room Nineteen - Collected Stories Volume One

‘But, my dear !’ said our host, putting down his cup. ‘But of course. If you feel like that, of course.’

He looked at his assistant, Jackie, who reluctantly laid down the newspaper and pulled the cords of a curtain, revealing an alcove full of cameras and equipment. Then they both thoughtfully examined Jessie. ‘Perhaps it would help,’ said our host, ‘if you could give me an idea what you want it for? Publicity? Dust jackets? Or just for your lucky friends?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ said Cousin Jessie.

Aunt Emma stood up sand said: ‘I would like you to catch her expression. It’s just a little look of hers …’

Jessie clenched her fists at her.

‘Aunt Emma,’ I said, ‘don’t you think it would be a good idea if you and I went out for a little?’

‘But my dear …’

But our host had put his arm around her and was easing her to the door. ‘There’s a duck,’ he was saying. ‘You do want me to make a good job of it, don’t you? And I never could really do my best, even with the most sympathetic lookers-on.’

Again Aunt Emma went limp, blushing. I took his place at her side and led her to the door. As we shut it, I heard Jackie Smith saying: ‘Music, do you think?’ And Jessie: ‘I loathe music.’ And Jackie again: ‘We do rather find music helps, you know …’

The door shut and Aunt Emma and I stood at the landing window, looking into the street.

‘Has that young man done you?’ she asked.

‘He was recommended to me,’ I said.

Music started up from the room behind us. Aunt Emma’s foot tapped on the floor. ‘Gilbert and Sullivan,’ she said. ‘Well, she can’t say she loathes that. But I suppose she would, just to be difficult.’

I lit a cigarette. The Pirates of Penzance abruptly stopped.

‘Tell me, dear,’ said Aunt Emma, suddenly rougish, ‘about all the exciting things you are doing.’

Aunt Emma always says this; and always I try hard to think of portions of my life suitable for presentation to Aunt Emma. ‘What have you been doing today, for instance?’ I considered Bill; I considered Beatrice; I considered comrade Jean.

‘I had lunch,’ I said, ‘with the daughter of a Bishop.’

‘Did you, dear?’ she said doubtfully.

Music again: Cole Porter. ‘That doesn’t sound right to me,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘It’s modern, isn’t it?’ The music stopped. The door opened. Cousin Jessie stood there, shining with determination. ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, but I’m not in the mood.’

‘But we won’t be coming up to London again for another four months.’

Our host and his assistant appeared behind Cousin Jessie. Both were smiling rather bravely. ‘Perhaps we had better all forget about it,’ said Jackie Smith.

Our host said, ‘Yes, we’ll try again later, when everyone is really themselves.’

Jessie turned to the two young men and thrust out her hand at them. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, with her fierce virgin sincerity. ‘I am really terribly sorry.’

Aunt Emma went forward, pushed aside Jessie, and shook their hands. ‘I must thank you both,’ she said, ‘for the tea.’

Jackie Smith waved my newspaper over the three heads. ‘You’ve forgotten this,’ he said.

‘Never mind, you can keep it,’ I said.

‘Oh, bless you, now I can read all the gory details.’ The door shut on their friendly smiles.

‘Well,’ said Aunt Emma, ‘I’ve never been more ashamed.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Jessie fiercely. ‘I really couldn’t care less.’

We descended into the street. We shook each other’s hands. We kissed each other’s cheeks. We thanked each other. Aunt Emma and Cousin Jessie waved at a taxi. I got on a bus.

When I got home, the telephone was ringing. It was Beatrice. She said she had got my telegram, but she wanted to see me in any case. ‘Did you know Stalin was dying?’ I said.

‘Yes, of course. Look, it’s absolutely essential to discuss this business on the Copper Belt.’

‘Why is it?’

‘If we don’t tell people the truth about it, who is going to?’

‘Oh, well, I suppose so,’ I said.

She said she would be over in an hour. I set out my typewriter and began to work. The telephone rang. It was comrade Jean. ‘Have you heard the news?’ she said. She was crying.

Comrade Jean had left her husband when he became a member of the Labour Party at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, and ever since then had been living in bed-sitting rooms on bread, butter and tea, with a portrait of Stalin over her bed.

‘Yes, I have,’ I said.

‘It’s awful,’ she said sobbing. ‘Terrible. They’ve murdered him.’

‘Who has? How do you know?’ I said.

‘He’s been murdered by capitalist agents,’ she said. ‘It’s perfectly obvious.’

‘He was seventy-three,’ I said.

‘People don’t die just like that ,’ she said.

‘They do at seventy-three,’ I said.

‘We will have to pledge ourselves to be worthy of him,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose we will.’

A man and woman walked towards the boulevard from a little hotel in a side street.

The trees were still leafless, black, cold; but the fine twigs were swelling towards spring, so that looking upward it was with an expectation of the first glimmering greenness. Yet everything was calm, and the sky was a calm, classic blue.

The couple drifted slowly along. Effort, after days of laziness, seemed impossible; and almost at once they turned into a café and sank down, as if exhausted, in the glass-walled space that was thrust forward into the street.

The place was empty. People were seeking the midday meal in the restaurants. Not all: that morning crowds had been demonstrating, a procession had just passed, and its straggling end could still be seen. The sounds of violence, shouted slogans and singing, no longer absorbed the din of Paris traffic; but it was these sounds that had roused the couple from sleep.

A waiter leaned at the door, looking after the crowds, and he reluctantly took an order for coffee.

The man yawned; the woman caught the infection; and they laughed with an affectation of guilt and exchanged glances before their eyes, without regret, parted. When the coffee came, it remained untouched. Neither spoke. After some time the woman yawned again; and this time the man turned and looked at her critically, and she looked back. Desire asleep, they looked. This remained: that while everything which drove them slept, they accepted from each other a sad irony; they could look at each other without illusion, steady-eyed.

And then, inevitably, the sadness deepened in her till she consciously resisted it; and into him came the flicker of cruelty.

‘Your nose needs powdering,’ he said.

‘You need a whipping boy.’

But always he refused to feel sad. She shrugged, and, leaving him to it, turned to look out. So did he. At the far end of the boulevard there was a faint agitation, like stirred ants, and she heard him mutter, ‘Yes, and it still goes on …’

Mocking, she said, ‘Nothing changes, everything always the same …’

But he had flushed. ‘I remember,’ he began, in a different voice. He stopped, and she did not press him, for he was gazing at the distant demonstrators with a bitterly nostalgic face.

Outside drifted the lovers, the married couples, the students, the old people. There the stark trees; there the blue, quiet sky. In a month the trees would be vivid green; the sun would pour down heat; the people would be brown, laughing, bare-limbed. No, no, she said to herself, at this vision of activity. Better the static sadness. And, all at once, unhappiness welled up in her, catching her throat, and she was back fifteen years in another country. She stood in blazing tropical moonlight, stretching her arms to a landscape that offered her nothing but silence and then she was running down a path where small stones glinted sharp underfoot, till at last she fell spent in a swathe of glistening grass. Fifteen years.