Doris Lessing - The Memoirs of a Survivor

Dirty, dirty… the harsh cold sound of the word, to me watching this scene, was the air of the 'personal', the unalter — ability of the laws of this world. Whiteness, dislike sounding in a word, a frigidity, a smothering, as the air fell and fell, dragged down by a storm of white in which the puppets jerked on their strings… Suppose, then, that the dams were to fill up with ice and the snows came down for ever, an eternal descent of white; suppose the rooms filled up with cold powder, all water gone and crystallised, all warmth held latent in dry chill air that shocked and starved the lungs … a scene of the parents' bedroom, where the white curtains are drawn back, drifts of white dotted muslin. Beyond these the snow is white on white again, for the sky is blotted out. The two great beds lifted high, high, half-way to the smothering white ceiling, are filled. Mother in one, father in the other. There is a new thing in the room, a cot, all white again, a gelid glittering white. A tall thing, this cot, not as high as the towering beds that have the great people in them, but still beyond one's reach. A white figure bustles in, the one whose bosom is a full slope, which is hard. A bundle is lifted from the cot. While the two people in the beds smile encouragingly, this bundle is held out and presented to her face. The bundle smells, it smells: sharp, and dangerous are these odours, like scissors, or hard tormenting hands. Such a desolation and an aloneness as no one in the world (except everyone in the world) has felt, she feels now, and the violence of her pain is such that she can do nothing but stand there, stiff, staring first at the bundle, then at the great white-clothed nurse, then at the mother and the father smiling in their beds.

She could have sunk down and away from the sight of them, the smiling ones, the great people held up high there against the ceiling in their warm stifling room, red and white, white and red, red carpet, the red flames crowding there in the fireplace. It is all too much, too high, too large, too powerful; she does not want anything but to creep away and hide somewhere, to let it all slide away from her. But she is being presented again and again with the smelling bundle.

'Now, then, Emily, this is your baby,' comes the smiling but peremptory voice from the large woman's bed. 'It is your baby, Emily.'

This lie confuses her. Is it a game, a joke, at which she must laugh and protest, as when her father 'tickles' her, a torture which will recur in nightmares for years afterwards? Should she now laugh and protest and wriggle? She stares around at the faces, the mother, the father, the nurse, for all have betrayed her. This is not her baby, and they know it, so why… But again and again they say: 'This is your baby, Emily, and you must love him.'

The bundle was being pushed against her, and she was supposed to put her arms out and hold it. Another deception, for she was not holding it, the nurse did. But now they were smiling and commending her for holding the thing in her arms. And so it was all too much, the lies were too much, the love was too much. They were too strong for her. And she did hold the baby: it was always being lifted down to her, against her, towards her. She held it and she loved it with a passionate violent protective love that had at its heart a trick and a betrayal, heat with a core of ice…

Now the room is the one with the red velvet curtains, and a little girl of about four, dressed in a flowered smock, is standing over a pudgy open-mouthed infant who sits slackly on a piece of linoleum stretched across the carpet.

'No, not like that, like this,' she commands, as the little boy, gazing in admiration at this strong and clever mentor of his, attempts to put a block on another block. It topples off. 'Like this,' she shrills, and feverishly kneels and puts blocks one on top of another, very fast and skilfully. She is quite absorbed, every atom of her, in her need to do this, to do it well, to show she can do it, to prove to herself she can do it. The amiable infant sits there, is watching, is impressed, but to do it is the thing, yes, to do it, to place the blocks one above the other, perfectly, corner to corner, edge to edge: 'No, not like that, like this!' The words ring through the room, the room next door, the rooms downstairs, the garden. 'Like this, Baby, don't you see? Like this.'

Things continued to be easier between Emily and me, because of my visit to her other home. I was able, for instance, to comment on her smeared face and swollen eyes one morning. She had not been to Gerald's place the day before, and showed no signs of going now. It was already midday and she had not dressed. She wore what she had slept in, a cotton shift — like garment that had once been a summer evening dress. She was on the floor, her arms around Hugo.

'I don't really see what I am doing there at all,' she said, and meant it as a question.

'I should have said you were doing everything there.'

She held her look steadily on me; she smiled — bitter, and not self-consciously so. 'Yes, but if I didn't, someone would.'

Now, this I did not expect: it was, if you like, too adult a thought. Even while I was privately commending her on it, I was also reacting with alarm, for the other side of this thought, its shadow, is dark indeed, and leads to every sort of listlessness and despair: it is often the first step, to be precise about it, towards suicide… at the very least, it is the most deadly of the energy-drainers.

But I sidestepped with: 'Very true. True for everyone of us. But that doesn't mean to say we can all stay in bed! But the thought in my mind is, why do you feel like this now? This moment. What triggered it off?'

She smiled — oh yes, she was very quick, very shrewd: 'Well I'm not going to cut my throat!' And then, in a complete switch of level, a plunge, she cried out: 'But if I did, what of it?'

'Is it Maureen?1 I asked. I could think of nothing else to offer.

My stupidity enabled her to check herself; she was back again, on her own level. She looked at me; she looked — oh, those looks, which I took one after another, light mocking blows. This one meant: Oh, a melodrama! He does not love me, he loves another!

'Maureen…' she let slip out of her, like a shrug, and did in fact shrug. But then, condescending, she allowed: 'It is not Maureen, actually, at this very minute it is June.'

And she waited and watched, with her little sour smile, for my 'What, nonsense, it can't be!'

'It's not right, is it?' she mimicked.

'But she's — how old?'

'Actually, she is eleven, but she says she is twelve.'

She was smiling now, and out of her own, her real philosophy: my energetic disapproval was feeding energy into her, and she even sat up and laughed. My tongue was rejecting, one after another, an assortment of verbalisations, not one of which, I knew, could earn anything less than mockery. Finally, she did mock me again with: 'Well, she can't get pregnant, that's something at least.'

I wasn't going to capitulate. 'All the same,' I said, 'it can't possibly be good for her.'

Her smile changed: it was a little sad, envious perhaps; it meant: You forget we are not in a position to afford your standards. We are not so fortunate remember?

Because of this smile, I stayed quiet, and then she said: 'You're thinking, Oh she's just a child, how wrong! — that sort of thing, but I'm thinking, June was my friend and now she isn't.'

And now I really was silenced. For what nonsense was this? If June was not a friend now, she would be in a week, when Gerald went on to one of the others. In one moment — and it seemed that this happened a dozen times a day — Emily had switched from a realm of sophistication far beyond me (making that word mean an acceptance, an understanding, of how things work) to being a child, really a child, and even as they used to be… I shrugged, leaving her to it. I could not help it, this switchbacking conversation had been too much for me.