Doris Lessing - The Memoirs of a Survivor

Hugo and I stood side by side, looking at her. My hand was on the beast's neck, and I could feel the tremors of his disquiet coming up into my hand from his misgiving heart. Emily was fourteen or so, but 'wellgrown' as once they had been used to put it. She was in evening dress. The dress was scarlet. It is hard to describe what my feelings were on seeing it, seeing her. They were certainly violent. I was shocked by the dress, or rather, that such dresses had ever been tolerated, ever been worn by any woman, because of what they made of the woman. But they had been taken for granted, had been seen as just another fashion, no worse or better than any.

The dress was tight around waist and bust: the word bust is accurate, those weren't breasts, that breathed and lifted or drooped and could change with emotion, or the month's changes: they made a single, inflated, bulging mound. Shoulders and back were naked. The dress was tight to the knees over hips and bottom — again the accurate word, for Emily's buttocks were rounded out into a single protuberance. Below, it twirled and flared around her ankles. It was a dress of blatant vulgarity. It was also, in a perverted way, non-sexual, for all its advertisement of the body, and embodied the fantasies of a certain kind of man who, dressing a woman thus, made her a doll, ridiculous, both provocative and helpless; disarmed her, made her something to hate, to pity, to fear — a grotesque. In this monstrosity of a dress, which was a conventional garment worn by hundreds of thousands of women within my lifetime, coveted by women, admired by women in innumerable mirrors, used by women to clothe their masochistic fantasies — inside this scarlet horror stood Emily, turning her head this way and that before the glass. Her hair was 'up', leaving her nape bare. She had scarlet nails. In Emily's lifetime the fashion had never been thus — there had been no fashion at all, at least, for ordinary people, but here she was, a few paces from us, and, sensing us there, her faithful animal and her anxious guardian, she turned her head, slow, slow, and looked at us with long lowered lashes, her lips held apart for fantasy kisses. Into the room came the large tall woman, Emily's mother, and her appearance at once diminished Emily, made her smaller, so that she began to dwindle from the moment the mother stood there. Emily faced her and, as she shrank in size acted out her provocative sex, writhing and letting her tongue protrude from her mouth. The mother gazed, horrified full of dislike, while her daughter got smaller and smaller, was a tiny scarlet doll, with its pouting bosom, its bottom outlined from waist to knees. The little doll twisted and postured, and then vanished in a flash of red smoke, like a morality tale of the flesh and the devil.

Hugo moved forward into the space before the mirror and sniffed and smelled at it, and then at the floor where Emily had stood. The mother's face was twisted with dislike, but now it was this beast that was affecting her so. 'Go away,' she said, in a low breathless voice — that voice squeezed out of us by an extremity of dislike or fear. 'Go away you dirty filthy animal.' And Hugo retreated to me, we backed away together before the advancing woman who had her fist raised to hit me, hit Hugo. We backed away, fast, then faster, while the woman advanced, grew large, became enormous, absorbing into herself Emily's girlhood room with its simpering conventionality, the incongruous mirror and — snap! — we were back in the living — room, in the dark place where the single candle bloomed in its hollow of light, where the small fire wanned a little space of air around it. I was sitting in my usual place. Hugo was upright near the wall, looking at me. We looked at each other. He was whimpering… no, the right word is crying. He was crying, in desolation, as a human does. He turned and crept away into my bedroom.

And that was the last time I saw Emily there in what I have called the 'personal'. I mean that I did not again enter scenes that showed her development as a girl, or baby, or child. That horrible mirror-scene, with its implications of perversity, was the end. Nor, entering that other world through — and this was new, too — the flames, or the husbanded glow of the fire as I sat beside it through these long autumn nights, did I find the rooms which opened and opened out from each other: or I did not think I had. Returning from a trip into that place I could not keep a clear memory of what I had experienced, where I had been. I would know that I had been there, from the emotions that sustained, or were draining, me: I had been fed there, from some capacious murmuring source all comfort and sweetness; I had been frightened and threatened. Or perhaps in, or under, the thick light of this room seemed now to shimmer another light which came from there — I had brought it with me and it stayed for a while, making me long for what it represented.

And when it faded, how slow and dim and heavy was the air… Hugo had developed a dry cough, and as we sat together, he might suddenly jump up and go to the window, nosing at it, his sides labouring, and I would open it, realising that I, too, was in a stupor from the fug and the heaviness of the room. We would stand there side by side, breathing the air that flowed in from outside, trying to flush our lungs clean with it.

After some days when I had not seen Emily at all, I went to Gerald's house through streets which were disordered, as always, but seemed much cleaner. It was as if an excess of dirtiness and mess had erupted everywhere, but then winds, or at least movements of air, had taken some of it away. I saw no one during this walk.

I half expected to find that efforts had been made towards restoring the vegetable garden. No. It was wrecked and trampled, and some chickens were at work in it. A dog was creeping towards them under the bushes. This was so rare a sight that I had to stop and look. Not one dog, but a pack of dogs, and they were creeping on all sides towards the pecking chickens. I cannot tell you how uneasy this made me: there was something enormous waiting to burst in on me, some real movement and change in our situation: dogs! a pack of dogs, eleven or twelve of them, what could it possibly mean? And, watching them, my prickling skin and the cold sweat on my forehead told me I was afraid, and had good reason to be: the dogs could choose me instead of the chickens. I went as fast as I could inside the house. Which was clean and empty. Ascending through the house I was listening for life in the rooms off the landings — nothing. At the top of the house a closed door. I knocked and Emily opened it a crack — saw it was me, and let me in, shutting it fast again and bolting it. She was dressed in furs, trousers of rabbit or cat, a fur jacket, a grey fur cap pulled low over her face. She looked like a pantomime cat. But pale, and sorrowful. Where was Gerald?

She returned to a nest she had made for herself on the floor, of fur rugs and fur cushions. The room smelled like a den from the furs, but sniffing, trying it out, I realised that otherwise the air was fresh and sharp, and that I was breathing it in great gasps. Emily made a place for me in the rugs, and I sat and covered myself. It was very cold: no heating here. We sat quietly together — breathing.

She said: 'Now that the air outside has become impossible to breathe, I spend as much time as I can here.'

And I understood it was true: this was a moment when someone said something which crystallised into fact intimations only partly grasped that had been pointing towards on obvious conclusion… in this case, it was that the air we breathed had indeed become hard on our lungs, had been getting fouler and thicker for a long time. We had become used to it, were adapting: I, like everyone else, had been taking short reluctant breaths, as if rationing what we took into our lungs, our systems, could also ration the poisons — what poisons? But who could know, or say! This was 'it', again, in a new form — 'it', perhaps, in its original form?