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

As for Ephraim, he went back to Johannesburg when the war finished, and continued to cut diamonds and to play poker on Sunday nights.

This story ended more or less with the calling of the flight number. As we went to the tarmac where illuminated wisps of fog still lingered, the lady from Texas asked the man who had told the story if perhaps he was Ephraim?

‘No,’ said Dr Rosen, a man of sixty or so from Johannesburg, a brisk, well-dressed man with nothing much to notice about him – like most of the world’s citizens.

No, he was most emphatically not Ephraim.

Then how did he know all this? Perhaps he was there?

Yes, he was there. But if he was to tell us how he came to be a hundred miles from where he should have been, in that chaotic, horrible week – it was horrible, horrible! – and in civvies, then that story would be even longer than the one he had already told us.

Couldn’t he tell us why he was there?

Perhaps he was after that tin of Ephraim’s too! We could think so if we liked. It would be excusable of us to think so. There was a fortune in that tin, and everyone in the regiment knew it.

He was a friend of Ephraim’s then? He knew Ephraim?

Yes, he could say that. He had known Ephraim for, let’s see, nearly fifty years. Yes, he thought he could say he was Ephraim’s friend.

In the aircraft Dr Rosen sat reading, with nothing more to tell us.

But one day I’ll meet a young man called Nikki, or Raffaele; or a girl wearing a single pearl around her neck on a gold chain or perhaps a middle-aged woman who says she thinks pearls are unlucky, she would never touch them herself: a man once gave her younger sister a pearl and it ruined her entire life. Something like that will happen, and this story will have a different shape.

Yes, I saw the look your wife’s face put on when I said, ‘I have so many husbands, I don’t need a husband.’ She did not exchange a look with you, but that was because she did not need to – later when you got home she said, ‘What an affected thing to say!’ and you replied, ‘Don’t forget she is an actress.’ You said this meaning exactly what I would mean if I had said it, I’m certain of that. And perhaps she heard it like that. I do hope so because I know what you are and if your wife does not hear what you say then this is a smallness on your part that I don’t forgive you. If I can live alone, and out of fastidiousness, then you must have a wife as good as you are. My husbands, the men who set light to my soul (yes, I know how your wife would smile if I used that phrase), are worthy of you … I know that I am giving myself away now, confessing how much that look on your wife’s face hurt. Didn’t she know that even then I was playing my part? Oh no, after all, I don’t forgive you your wife, no I don’t.

If I said, ‘I don’t need a husband, I have so many lovers,’ then of course everyone at the dinner-table would have laughed in just such a way: it would have been the rather banal ‘outrageousness’ expected of me. An ageing star, the fading beauty … ‘I have so many lovers’ – pathetic, and brave too. Yes, that remark would have been too apt, too smooth, right for just any ‘beautiful but fading’ actress. But not right for me, because after all, I am not just any actress, I am Victoria Carrington, and I know exactly what is due to me and from me. I know what is fitting (not for me, that is not important) but for what I stand for. Do you imagine I couldn’t have said it differently – like this, for instance: ‘I am an artist and therefore androgynous.’ Or: ‘I have created inside myself Man who plays opposite to my Woman.’ Or: ‘I have objectified in myself the male components of my soul and it is from this source that I create.’ Oh, I’m not stupid, not ignorant, I know the different dialects of our time and even how to use them. But imagine if I had said any of these things last night! It would have been a false note, you would all have been uncomfortable, irritated, and afterwards you would have said: ‘Actresses shouldn’t try to be intelligent.’ (Not you, the others.) Probably they don’t believe it, not really, that an actress must be stupid, but their sense of discrepancy, or discordance, would have expressed itself in such a way. Whereas their silence when I said, ‘I don’t need a husband, I have so many husbands,’ was right, for it was the remark right for me – it was more than ‘affected’, or ‘outrageous’ – it was making a claim that they had to recognize.

That word ‘affected’, have you ever really thought why it is applied to actresses? (You have of course, I’m no foreign country to you, I felt that, but it gives me pleasure to talk to you like this.) The other afternoon I went to see Irma Painter in her new play, and afterwards I went back to congratulate her (for she had heard, of course, that I was in the auditorium and would have felt insulted if I hadn’t gone – I’m different, I hate it when people feel obliged to come back). We were sitting in her dressing-room and I was looking at her face as she wiped the make-up off. We are about the same age, and we have both been acting since the year——I recognized her face as mine, we have the same face, and I understood that it is the face of every real actress. No, it is not ‘mask-like’, my face, her face. Rather, it is that our basic face is so worn down to its essentials because of its permanent readiness to take other guises, become other people, it is almost like something hung up on the wall of a dressing-room ready to take down and use. Our face is – it has a scrubbed, honest, bare look, like a deal table, or a wooden floor. It has modesty, a humility, our face, as time wears on, wearing out of her, out of me, our ‘personality’, our ‘individuality’.

I looked at her face (we are called rivals, we are both called ‘great’ actresses) and I suddenly wanted to pay homage to it, since I knew what that scoured plain look cost her – what it costs me, who have played a thousand beautiful women, to keep my features sober and decent under the painted shell of my make-up, ready for other souls to use.

At a party, all dressed up, when I’m a ‘person’, then I try to disguise the essential plainness and anonymity of my features by holding together the ‘beauty’ I am known for, creating it out of my own and other people’s memories. Of course it is almost gone now, nearly all gone the sharp, sweet, poignant face that so many men loved (not knowing it was not me, it was only what was given to me to consume slowly for the scrubbed face I must use for work). While I sat last night opposite you and your wife, she so pretty and human, her prettiness no mask, but expressing every shade of what she felt, and you being yourself only, I was conscious of how I looked. I could see my very white flesh that is guttering down away from its ‘beauty’; I could see my smile that even now has moments of its ‘piercing sweetness’; I could see my eyes, ‘dewy and shadowed’, even now … but I also knew that everyone there, even if they were not aware of it, was conscious of that hard, honest, workaday face that lies ready for use under this ruin, and it is the discrepancy between that working face and the ‘personality’ of the famous actress that makes everything I do and say affected, that makes it inevitable and right that I should say, ‘I don’t want a husband, I have so many husbands.’ And I tell you, if I had said nothing, not one word, the whole evening, the result would have been the same: ‘How affected she is, but of course she is an actress.’