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

I thought, and I understood. The afternoon before a man (a producer from America, but that doesn’t matter) had come to see me in my dressing-room and after he left I thought: Yes, there it is again, I know that sensation, that means he has set the forces in motion and so I can expect my work to show it … It showed it, with a vengeance! Well, and so that taught me to discriminate, I learned I must be careful, must allow no second-rate man to come near me. And so put up barriers, strengthened around me the circle of cold, of impersonality, that should always lie between me and people, between me and the auditorium; I made a cool, bare space no man could enter, could break across, unless his power, his magic, was very strong, the true complement to mine.

Very seldom now do I feel my self alight, on fire, touched awake, created again by – what?

I live alone now. No, you would never be able to imagine how. For I knew when I saw you this evening that you exist, you are, only in relation to other people, you are always giving out to your work, your wife, friends, children, your wife has the face of a woman who gives, who is confident that what she gives will be received. Yes, I understand all that, I know how it would be living with you, I know you.

After we had all separated, and I had watched you drive off with your wife, I came home and … no, it would be no use telling you, after all. (Or anyone, except, perhaps, my colleague and rival Irma Painter!) But what if I said to you – but no, there are certain disciplines which no one can understand but those who use them.

So I will translate into your language, I’ll translate the truth so that it has the affected, almost embarrassing exaggerated ring that goes with the actress Victoria Carrington, and I’ll tell you how when I came home after meeting you my whole body was wrenched with anguish, and I lay on the floor sweating and shaking as if I had bad malaria, it was like knives of deprivation going through me, for, meeting you, it was being reminded again what it would be like to be with a man, really with him, so that the rhythm of every day, every night, carried us both like the waves of a sea.

Everything I am most proud of seemed nothing at all – what I have worked to achieve, what I have achieved, even the very core of what I am, the inner sensitive balance that exists like a sort of self-invented super instrument, or a fantastically receptive and cherished animal – this creation of myself, which every day becomes more involved, sensitive, and delicate, seemed absurd, paltry, spinsterish, a shameful excuse for cowardice. And my life, which so contents me because of its balance, its order, its steadily growing fastidiousness, seemed eccentrically solitary. Every particle of my being screamed out, wanting, needing – I was like an addict deprived of his drug.

I picked myself off the floor, I bathed myself, I looked after myself like an invalid or like a – yes, like a pregnant woman. These extraordinary fertilizations happen so seldom now that I cherish them, waste nothing of them, and I both long for and dread them. Every time it is like being killed, like being torn open while I am forced to remember what it is I voluntarily do without.

Every time it happens I swear I can never let it happen again, the pain is too terrible. What a flower, what a fire, what a miracle it would be if, instead of smiling (the ‘sweetly piercing’ smile of my dying beauty), instead of accepting, submitting, I should turn to you and say …

But I shall not, and so something very rare (something much more beautiful than your wife could ever give you, or any of the day-to-day wives could imagine) will never come into being.

Instead … I sit and consume my pain, I sit and hold it, I sit and clench my teeth and …

It is dark, it is very early in the morning, the light in my room is a transparent grey, like the ghost of water or of air, there are no lights in the windows I see from my own. I sit on my bed, and watch the shadows of the tree moving on the brick wall of the garden, and I contain pain and …

Oh my dear one, my dear one, I am a tent under which you lie, I am the sky across which you fly like a bird, I am …

My soul is a room, a great room, a hall – it is empty, waiting. Sometimes a fly buzzes across it, bringing summer mornings in another continent, sometimes a child laughs in it, and it is like the generations chiming together, child, youth, and old woman as one being. Sometimes you walk into it and I shut my eyes because of the sweet recognition in me of what you are, I feel what you are as if I stood near a tree and put my hand on its breathing trunk.

I am a pool of water in which fantastic creatures move, in which you play, a young boy, your brown skin glistening, and the water moves over your limbs like hands, my hands, that will never touch you, my hands that tomorrow night, in a pool of listening silence, will stretch up towards the thousand people in the auditorium, creating love for them from the consumed pain of my denial.

I am a room in which an old man sits, smiling, as he has smiled for fifty centuries, you, whose bearded loins created me.

I am a world into which you breathed life, have smiled life, have made me. I am, with you, what creates, every moment, a thousand animalcules, the creatures of our dispensation, and every one we have both touched with our hands and let go into space like free birds.

I am a great space that enlarges, that grows, that spreads with the steady lightening of the human soul, and in the space, squatting in the corner, is a thing, an object, a dark, slow, coiled, amorphous heaviness, embodied sleep, a cold stupid sleep, a heaviness like the dark in a stale room – this thing stirs in its sleep where it squats in my soul, and I put all my muscles, all my force, into defeating it. For this was what I was born for, this is what I am, to fight embodied sleep, putting around it a confining girdle of light, of intelligence, so that it cannot spread its slow stain of ugliness over the trees, over the stars, over you.

It is as if, since you turned towards me and smiled, letting light go through me again, it is as if a King had taken a Queen’s hand and set her on his throne: a King and his Queen, hand in hand on top of my mountain sit smiling at ease in their country.

The morning is coming on the brick wall, the shadow of the tree has gone, and I think of how today I will walk out on to the stage, surrounded by the cool circle of my chastity, the circle of my discipline, and how I will raise my face (the flower face of my girlhood) and how I will raise my arms from which will flow the warmth you have given me.

And so, my dear one, turn now to your wife, and take her head on to your shoulder, and both sleep sweetly in the sleep of your love. I release you to go to your joys without me. I leave you to your love. I leave you to your life.

Last year was out of ordinary from the start – just like every other year. What start, January? But January is a mid-month, in the middle of cold, snow, dark. Above all, dark. In January nothing starts but the new calendar, which says that the down-swing of our part of the earth towards the long light of summer has already begun, is already stimulating the plants, changing their responses. I would make the beginning back in autumn, when I ‘found myself possessor’ – I put it like that because someone else is now in possession – of a wild, very long, narrow garden, between mellow brick walls. There was an old pear tree in the middle, and at its end a small wood of recently sprung trees, sycamores, an elder, an ash. This treasure of space was twenty minutes’ strolling time from Marble Arch, on a canal. The garden had to be prepared for planting. By luck I found a boy, up from the country to try his fortune in London, who hated all work in the world but digging. He chose to live in half a room which he curtained with blankets, carpeted with newpapers, then matting, and wall-papered with his poems and pictures. He was, of course, in the old romantic tradition of the adventurous young, challenging a big city, but he saw himself and the world as newly hatched, let’s say a year before, when he became twenty and discovered that he was free and probably a hippy. He lived on baked beans and friendship, and when he needed money, dug people’s gardens. Together we stripped off the top layer of this potential garden, which was all builder’s rubble, cans, bottles, broken glass. Under this was London clay. It is a substance you hear enough about; indeed, London’s history seems made of it. But when you actually come on tons of the stuff, yards deep, heavy, wet, impervious, without a worm or a root in it, it is so airless and unused, you wonder how London ever came to be all gardens and woodland. I could not believe my gardening book, which said that clay is perfect potential soil for plants. I, friends, and the boy from the country, made shapes of the stuff, and thought it was a pity none of us was a sculptor – but that wasn’t going to turn the clay into working earth. At last, we marked out flowerbeds, and turned over the clay in large clods, the weeds and grass still on them. The place looked like a ploughed field before the cultivators move in. But even before the first frosts, the soil between the flinty-sided miniature boulders was showing the beginning of a marriage between rotting grass and clay fragments. It had rained. It was raining. As London does, it rained. Going out to inspect the clods, each so heavy I could only pick one up at a time, I found they had softened their harsh contours somewhat, but I couldn’t break them by flinging them down or bashing them with a spade. They looked eternal. Steps led up from the under-earth – the flat was a basement flat – and standing at eye-level to the garden, it all looked like a First World War film: trenches full of water, wet mats of the year’s leaf, enormous clods, rotting weeds, bare trunks and dripping branches. All, everything, wet, bare, raw.