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

He was not looking at her. She thought: Why do I do it? These girls who come through here for a night, or two nights, because he needs their generous naïveté, give him no less. I, or one of them, it makes no difference. ‘I’d like a drink,’ she said.

He hesitated, hating her drinking at all, but he poured her one, while she said silently (feeling adrift, without resources, and cold through every particle of herself): All right, but in the days when our two bodies together created warmth (flies, if you like, but I don’t feel it) I wouldn’t have asked for a drink. She was thinking: And suppose it is yours that is the intoxication and not mine? when he remarked: ‘Sometimes when I’ve been alone here a couple of days I wonder if I’m not tipsy on sheer …’ He laughed, in an intellectual pleasure at an order of ideas she was choosing not to see.

‘The delight of nihilism?’

‘Which of course you don’t feel, ever!’

She saw that this new aggressiveness, this thrust of power and criticism (he was now moving about the room, full of energy) was in fact her gift to him; and she said, suddenly bitter: ‘Flies don’t feel, they buzz.’

The bitterness, being the note of the exchange they could not allow themselves, made her finish her few drops of liquor, making a new warmth in her stomach where she had needed a spark of warmth.

He said: ‘For all that, it seems to me I’m nearer the truth than you are.’

The word truth did not explode into meaning: it sounded hard and self-defined, like a stone; she let it lie between them, setting against it the pulse that throbbed in the soft place by the ankle bone – her feet being stretched in front of her, so she could see them.

He said: ‘It seems to me that the disconnected like me must see more clearly than you people. Does that sound ridiculous to you? I’ve thought about it a great deal, and it seems to me you are satisfied with too little.’

She thought: I wish he would come over here, sit by me on this blanket, and put his arm around me – that’s all. That’s all and that’s all. She was very tired. Of course I’m tired – it’s all the buzzing I have to do …

Without warning, without even trying, she slipped into being him, his body, his mind. She looked at herself and thought: This little bundle of flesh, this creature who will respond and warm, lay its head on my shoulder, feel happiness – how unreal, how vulgar, and how meaningless!

She shook herself away from him, up and away from the settee. She went to the window.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Enjoying your view.’

The sky was clear, it was evening, and far below in the streets the lights had come on, making small yellow pools and gleams on pavements where the tiny movement of people seemed exciting and full of promise. Now he got himself out of his machine-like chair and came to stand by her. He did not touch her; but he would not have come at all if she had not been there. He supported himself with one big hand on the glass and looked out. She felt him take in a deep breath. She stood silent, feeling the life ebbing and coiling along the pavements and hoping he felt it. He let out his breath. She did not look at him. He took it in again. The hand trembled, then tensed, then set solid, a big, firmly made hand, with slightly freckled knuckles – its steadiness comforted her. It would be all right. Still without looking at his face, she kissed his cheek and turned away. He went back to his chair, she resumed her place on the blanket. The room was filling with dusk, the sky was greying, enormous, distant.

‘You should get curtains, at least.’

‘I should be tempted to keep them drawn all the time.’

‘Why not, then, why not?’ she insisted, feeling her eyes wet again. ‘All right, I won’t cry,’ she said reasonably.

‘Why not? If you feel like crying.’

She no longer wept. But once, and not so long ago, she had wept herself almost to pieces over him, her, their closeness which nevertheless the cold third, like a cruel king, refused to sanction. She noted that the pulse moving in her ankle had the desperate look of something fighting death; her foot in the dusk was a long way off; she felt divided, not in possession of herself. But she remained where she was, containing her fragmentation. And he held out his fist, steady, into the glimmer of grey light from the sky, watching it exactly as she looked at her own pulse, the stranger.

‘For God’s sake turn the light on,’ she said, giving in. He put out his hand, pressed down the switch, a harsh saving light filled the room.

He smiled. But he looked white again, and his forehead gleamed wet. Her heart ached for him, and for herself, who would now get up deliberately and go away from him. The ache was the hurt of exile, and she was choosing it. She sat smiling, chafing her two ankles with her hands, feeling the warmth of her breathing flesh. Their smiles met and exchanged, and now she said: ‘Right, it’s time to go.’

She kissed him again, he kissed her, and she went out, saying: ‘I’ll ring you.’

Always, when she left his door shut behind her, the black door which was exactly the same as all the others in the building except for the number, she felt in every particle of herself how loneliness hit him when she (or anybody) left.

The street she went out into was unfamiliar to her, she felt she did not know it. The hazy purple sky that encloses London at night was savage, bitter, and the impulse behind its shifting lights was a form of pain. The roughness of the pavement, which she knew to be warm, struck cold through the soles of her sandals, as if the shadows were black ice. The people passing were hostile, stupid animals from whom she wished to hide herself. But worse than this, there was a flat, black-and-white two-dimensional jagged look to things, and (it was this that made it terrifying) the scene she walked through was a projection of her own mind, there was no life in it that belonged there save what she could breathe into it. And she herself was dead and empty, a cardboard figure in a flat painted set of streets.

She thought: Why should it not all come to an end, why not? She saw again the potato face of Fred the vegetable seller whose interest in Ada’s husband’s illness was only because she was a customer at his stall; she looked at Ada whose ugly life (she was like a heave of dirty earth or some unnameable urban substance) showed in her face and movements like a visible record of thick physical living. The pathos of the adolescents did not move her, she felt disgust.

She walked on. The tall building, like a black tower, stood over her, kept pace with her. It was not possible to escape from it.

Her hand, swinging by her thigh, on its own life, suddenly lifted itself and took a leaf off a hedge. The leaf trembled: she saw it was her fingers which shook, with exhaustion. She stilled her fingers, and the leaf became a thin hard slippery object, like a coin. It was small, round, shining, a blackish-green. A faint pungent smell came to her nostrils. She understood it was the smell of the leaf which, as she lifted it to her nostrils, seemed to explode with a vivid odour into the senses of her brain so that she understood the essence of the leaf and through it the scene she stood in.

She stood fingering the leaf, while life came back. The pulses were beating again. A warmth came up through her soles. The sky’s purplish orange was for effect, for the sake of self-consciously exuberant theatricality, a gift to the people living under it. An elderly woman passed, mysterious and extraordinary in the half-light, and smiled at her. So. She was saved from deadness, she was herself again. She walked slowly on, well-being moving in her, making a silent greeting to the people passing her. Meanwhile the dark tower kept pace with her, she felt it rising somewhere just behind her right shoulder. It was immensely high, narrow, terrible, all in darkness save for a light flashing at its top where a man, held upright by the force of his will, sat alone staring at a cold sky in vertiginous movement.