Doris Lessing - The Memoirs of a Survivor

And, then, suddenly, it all went into reverse. Of course it did not seem sudden at the time. It is now, looking back, that it is all so obvious: even, I am afraid, banal and mechanical, as the inevitable does seem — in retrospect.

Some youths from our blocks of flats took to hanging about on the opposite pavement and the waste lot, under the scorched trees. These youths were sharing in lost glory and adventure: memories of the time when migrating tribes had lit fires and feasted there. They pointed out to each other the blackened parts of the pavement, told and re-told episodes from the epic. At first there were two or three, then half a dozen, then… Emily had forsaken her dreaming to watch them. Not that you could make out from her face anything but scorn of them. I remember I felt pity for the raucous adolescent boys, so desperately wanting to be noticed and looked at, who were so forlorn and unappetising in their lumpish bodies; pity for her, the fat girl looking out of her window, the princess in disguise. I marvelled that such a short time, a few years, would transform these grubs into beauties. But I was wrong: time had so speeded up that years were not needed any longer… one evening Emily sauntered out and stood in front of the building with a look like a jeer, while her body pleaded and demanded. The boys ignored her. Then they made some comments about her figure. She came indoors, sat thoughtfully in her sofa corner for some hours — and stopped eating.

She lost weight fast. She was living on herb teas and yeast extracts. And now I watched the reverse process, a shape emerging whole and clear while increments of lard melted away around it.

I began to remonstrate: you must eat something, you should set yourself a proper diet. But she did not hear me. I was distant from her need to make herself worthy of the heroes of the pavement… quite a few of them now that the days were lengthening and spring healed the scarred trees.

We were watching, though I still did not recognise this, the birth of a gang, a pack, a tribe. It would be pleasant to be able to say now that I was aware of the processes going on in front of me. Now I judge myself to have been blind. How else do things work always unless by imitation bred of the passion to be like? All the processes of society are based on it, all individual development. For some reason it was something that we seemed to have a conspiracy to ignore or not to mention, even while most singlemindedly engaged in it. There was some sort of conspiracy of belief that people — children, adults, everyone — grew by an acquisition of unconnected habits, of isolated bits of knowledge, like choosing things off a counter: 'Yes, I'll have that one,' or 'No, I don't want that one!' But in fact people develop for good or for bad by swallowing whole other people, atmospheres, events, places — develop by admiration. Often enough unconsciously, of course. We are the company we keep.

In front of my eyes, on that pavement, for weeks, for months, I could have watched as in a textbook or a laboratory, the genesis, growth and flowering of society's new unit. But I did no such thing, for I was absorbed in Emily, my concern for her. Those processes went on, and I observed them; details did stand out for me; I watched for the effects of this or that event on Emily. It is only now, looking back, I see what an opportunity I missed.

Emily was not the only young girl preparing herself to take her place as a woman among other women. Janet White, for instance: before her parents stopped her, Janet passed a dozen times a day outside our windows in front of the jeering boys. There was a period when boys and girls, on opposite sides of the road, stood in hostile battalions exchanging taunts and abuse.

Then it was noticeable that they jeered less, stood more often in silence, or quietly talked among themselves, though always watching the other groups while pretending not to.

Inside the flat Emily remembered the sheepskins. Again she arranged them around her, belted them tight, swaggered about in them with her hair loose.

She came to me: 'I found that sewing machine. Can I use it?'

'Of course. But don't you want to buy clothes? That thing is so old. It must be thirty-five years old.'

'It works.'

The money I had given her was still in the drawer. This she now took out and quickly, almost secretively, walked the five or six miles to the centre of the city where the big shops were with the goods for the official class, or for anyone who could afford them. Nearly always the same thing. She came back with some good cloth from the pre-crisis time. She came back with sewing cottons and a tape measure and scissors. She also visited the secondhand shops and the market stalls, and the floor of her room was heaped with loot, with booty. She invited Janet White in from the pavement, having of course first politely asked my permission, and the two nymphs squeezed themselves into the tiny room, and chattered and competed, and arranged their images this way and that way before the long mirror — a ritual which was repeated when Janet White in her turn went off on her foray to capture materials and old clothes… repeated in Janet's room along the corridor. And this led to her being forbidden the street and the pleasures of the tribe and warned not to take Emily for a friend. For Janet was destined differently. To tell the truth I did not realise how high the Whites were placed in the administrative circles; but then, they were not the only official family to half-hide themselves in this way, living quietly, in an ordinary flat, apparently like everyone else but with access to sources of food, goods, clothes, transport, denied to most.

Emily did not seem to mind Janet discarding her. There followed a period of weeks when she was every bit as self — absorbed as when she had been eating, dreaming, indolent, but now she was full of energy and self-denial, at least for food, and I watched. I watched endlessly, for I had never seen anything like this for concentration.

For if she, Emily, had gone inwards, as much now in this new activity as she had when lazy and dreaming, at least now what she felt herself to be was all visible, presented to me in the shape of her fantastic costumes.

Her first self-portrait… she had found an old dress, white with sprigs of pink flowers. Parts were stained and worn. These she cut away. Bits of lace and tulle, beads, scarves, were added and removed to a kaleidoscope garment that changed with her needs. Most often it was a bride's dress. Then it was a young girl's dress — that ambiguous declaration of naivete more usually made by a maturer vision than that of the wearer, an eye that sees the fragility of certain types of young girls' clothes as the expression of the evanescence of that flesh. It was nightdress when she wore its transparency over her naked body. It was evening dress, and sometimes when she did not intend this, for a hardness in her, the watchfulness of her defences, took away innocence from anything she wore, so that she might have flowers in her hands and in her hair, in an attempt at her version of Primavera, yet she had about her the look of a woman who has calculated the exact amount of flesh she will show at a dinner party. This dress was for me an emotional experience. I was frightened by it. Again, this was a question of my helplessness with her. I believed her capable of going out on the pavement wearing it. Now I judge myself to have been stupid: the elderly tend not to see — they have forgotten! — that hidden person in the young creature, the strongest and most powerful member among the cast of characters inhabiting an adolescent body, the self which instructs, chooses experience — and protects.

And then, to see this creation now, at such a time of savagery and anarchy, this archetype of a girl's dress — or rather, this composite of archetypes; the way this child, this little girl, had found the materials for her dreams in the rubbish heaps of our old civilisation, had found them, worked on them, and in spite of everything had made her images of herself come to life… but such old images, so indestructible, and so irrelevant — all this was too much for me, and I retired from the scene, determined to say nothing, show nothing, betray nothing. And it was lucky I did. She wore the thing about the flat, a naked girl only just veiled; she wore it flauntingly, bashfully, daringly, fearfully; she was 'trying on' not a dress, but self-portraits, and I might as well not have been there, she took no notice of me. Well, of course, the pressures on everyone's privacy had taught us how to absent ourselves into inner solitudes, we were all adept at being with others and not being with them.