Doris Lessing - The Temptation of Jack Orkney - Collected Stories Volume Two

Doctors, friends, herself – everyone who knew enough to say – pronounced: the warmth of a family, marriage if possible, comfort, other people. Never isolation, never loneliness, not the tall wind-battered room where the sky showed through two walls. But he refused common sense. ‘It’s no good skirting around what I am, I’ve got to crash right through it, and if I can’t, whose loss is it?’

Well, she did not think she was strong enough to crash right through what she most feared, even though she had been born healthy, her nerves under her own command.

‘Yes, but you have a choice, I haven’t, unless I want to become a little animal living in the fur of other people’s warmth.’

(So went the dialogue.)

But he had a choice too: there were a hundred ways in which they, the people whom she could now recognize from their eyes in a crowd, could hide themselves. Not everyone recognized them, she would say; how many people do we know (men and women, but more men than women) enclosed in marriages, which are for safety only, or attached to other people’s families, stealing (if you like) security? But theft means not giving back in exchange or kind, and these men and women, the solitary ones, do give back, otherwise they wouldn’t be so welcome, so needed – so there’s no need to talk about hanging on to the warmth of belly fur, like a baby kangaroo, it’s a question of taking one thing, and giving back another.

‘Yes, but I’m not going to pretend, I will not, it’s not what I am – I can’t and it’s your fault that I can’t.’

This meant that he had been the other, through her, just as she had, through him.

‘My dear, I don’t understand the emotions, except through my intelligence, normality never meant anything to me until I knew you. Now all right, I give in …’

This was sullen. With precisely the same note of sullenness she used to censor the words her healthy nerves supplied like love, happiness, myself, health. All right this sullenness meant: I’ll pay you your due, I have to, my intelligence tells me I must. I’ll even be you, but briefly, for so long as I can stand it.

Meanwhile they were – not talking – but exchanging information. She had seen X and Y and Z, been to this place, read that book.

He had read so-and-so, seen X and Y, spent a good deal of his time listening to music.

‘Do you want me to go away?’

‘No, stay.’

This very small gift made her happy; refusing to examine the emotion, she sat back, curled up her legs, let herself be comfortable. She smoked. He put on some jazz. He listened to it inert, his body not flowing into it, there was a light sweat on his big straining forehead. (This meant he had wanted her to stay not out of warmth, but for need of somebody there. She sat up straight again, pushed away the moment’s delight.) She saw his eyes were closed. His face, mouth tight in an impersonal determination to endure, looked asleep, or –

‘Bill,’ she said quickly, in appeal.

Without opening his eyes, he smiled, giving her sweetness, friendship, and the irony, without bitterness, due from one kind of creature to another.

‘It’s all right,’ he said.

The piano notes pattered like rain before a gust of wind that swept around the corner of the building. White breaths of cloud were blown across the thin blue air. The drum shook, hissed, steadily, like her blood pumping the beat, and a wild flute danced a sky sign in the rippling smoke of a jet climbing perpendicular from sill to ceiling. But what did he hear, see, feel, sitting eyes closed, palm hard on the armrest for support? The record stopped. He opened his eyes, they resolved themselves out of a knot of inward difficulty, and rested on the wall opposite him, while he put out his hand to stop the machine. Silence now.

He closed his eyes again. She discarded the cross talk in her flesh of music, wind, clouds, raindrops, patterning grass and earth, and tried to see – first the room, an insecure platform in height, tenacious against storm and rocking foundations; then a certain discordance of substance that belonged to his vision; then herself, as he saw her – at once she felt a weariness of the spirit, like a cool sarcastic wink from a third eye, seeing them both, two little people, him and herself, as she had seen the vegetable seller, the adolescents, the woman whose husband had rheumatism. Without charity she saw them, sitting there together in silence on either side of the tall room, and the eye seemed to expand till it filled the universe with disbelief and negation.

Now, she admitted the prohibited words love, joy (et cetera), and gave them leave to warm her, for not only could she not bear the world without them, she needed them to disperse her anger against him: Yes, yes, it’s all very well, but how could the play go on, how could it, if it wasn’t for me, the people like me? We create you in order that you may use us, and consume us; and with our willing connivance; but it doesn’t do to despise …

He said, not surprising her that he did, since their minds so often moved together: ‘You are more split than I am, do you know that?’

She thought: If I were not split, if one-half (if that is the division) were not able to move in your world, even if only for short periods, then I would not be sitting here, you would not want me.

He said: ‘I wasn’t criticizing. Not at all. Because you have the contact. What more do you want?’

‘Contact,’ she said, looking at the cold word.

‘Yes. Well, it’s everything.’

‘How can you sit there, insisting on the things you insist on, and say it’s everything?’

‘If that’s what you are, then be it.’

‘Just one thing or the other?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? It’s true that what I think contradicts what I feel, but …”

‘But?’

‘All right, it’s all meaningless, with my mind I know it, it’s an accident, it’s a freak, but all the same, everything gives me pleasure all the time. Why should it be a contradiction, why should it?’

‘You don’t see it as a contradiction?’

‘No.’

‘You’re living on the fat of your ancestors, the fat of their belief, that’s all.’

‘Possibly, but why should I care?’

‘A fly buzzing in the sun,’ he said. His smile was first wry and tender, then full of critical dislike. The criticism, the coldness of it, hurt her, and she felt tears rise. So today she could not stay long, because tears were not allowed, they were part of the other argument, or fight, a personal one, played out (or fought out), finished.

She was blinking her eyes dry, without touching them, so that he would not see she wanted to cry, when he said: ‘Suppose that I am the future?’

A long silence, and she thought: Possibly, possibly.

‘It seems to me that I am. Suppose the world fills more and more with people like me, then –’

‘The little flies will have to buzz louder.’

He laughed, short but genuine. She thought, I don’t care what you say, that laugh is stronger than anything. She sat in silence for the thousandth time, willing it to be stronger, feeling herself to be a centre of life, or warmth, with which she would fill this room.

He sat, smiling, but in an inert, heavy way, his limbs seeming, even from where she sat across the room, cold and confused. She went to him, squatted on her knees by his chair, lifted his hand off the black leather arm-piece, and felt it heavy with cold. It gave her hand a squeeze more polite than warm, and she gripped it firmly, willing life to move down her arm through her hand into his. Closing her eyes, she now made herself remember, with her flesh, what she had discarded (almost contemptuous) on the pavement – the pleasure from the touch of faded books, pleasure from the sight of ranked fruit and vegetables. Discoloured print, shut between limp damp cotton, small voices to be bought for sixpence or ninepence, became a pulse of muttering sound, a pulse of vitality, like the beating colours of oranges, lemons and cabbages, gold and green, a dazzle, a vibration in the eyes – she held her breath, willed, and made life move down into his hand. It lay warmer and more companionable in hers. After a while he opened his eyes and smiled at her: sadness came into the smile, then a grimness, and she kissed his cheek and went back to her place on the rough blanket. ‘Flies,’ she said.