Doris Lessing - Doris Lessing

Alice felt she did not know her mother. Dorothy Mellings, in the good old days, the days that could fill Alice's memory for hours at a time, had been a tall, striking woman with reddish-gold hair in a chignon, creamy, delicately freckled skin, greeny-blue eyes. Rather pre-Raphaelite, really, they had used to joke, all of them. But since Dorothy never lolled or languished or rolled her eyes about, the comparison did not go far. Now she was a tall, strong, elderly woman with all that untidy white hair. Her eyes were like squarish lumps of green stone. When she was with other people - Zoë Devlin, for instance - she was all vitality and laughter.

"Who's been here visiting you, then?"

"Mrs. Wood from downstairs."

Alice stood up, stared, sat down again. "Mrs. Wood! What do you mean, Mrs. Wood! Why, she's..."

"Are you suggesting she isn't good enough for me?"

"But..." Alice was literally unable to speak. All that splendour of hospitality, the big house, the people coming in and out, the meals, the... "Mrs. Wood," she stammered.

"I didn't know you knew her."

"But you can't..."

"You mean that she's working-class? Surely, Alice, you can't hold that against her? As for me, I've reverted to my proper level. And who is it that boasts all the time about her working-class grandfather?" Dorothy, for the first time this evening, was smiling, was really looking at Alice, those greenish eyes cold, angry. "Or is it that you think she's not intelligent enough for me?"

"But you have nothing in common - she's never read anything in her life, for a start, I bet."

"A sudden reverence for literature?" she enquired. And took another mouthful of whisky. "I can tell you, I find the company of Mrs. Wood just as rewarding as... a good many people I might mention. She's not all full of rubbish and pretensions."

This, reminding Alice of that inexplicable movement of her mother towards savage criticism of things she had held dear all her life, filled her eyes with tears, and she thought: It's all been too much for her; oh, how awful, poor thing. She cried out, "You should simply never have said you'd leave home. You should have said you wouldn't go. Then you wouldn't have had to come here."

This sounded like an appeal, as if her mother might even now say, "Yes, it was all a mistake," and go back to her own house.

Dorothy was looking surprised. Then the cautious look was back, with the frown.

"But, Alice, you know what happened."

"What does it matter, what happened? What is going to happen now, that's the point?"

"Well, I do rather despair of talking to you lot about... necessity. It's no use. You've all had it so easy all your lives, you simply do not understand. If you want something, then you take it for granted you can have it...." Alice let out a little protesting sound, meaning to say that as far as she was concerned, her mother had gone off the point entirely. But Dorothy went on, "I know it is no use. I have been thinking hard about you, Alice. And I have come to one simple conclusion. You're all spoiled rotten. You're rotten. And Zoë's children are the same."

This was said without emotion. Almost indifferently. All passion spent.

Alice let this go by her, as part of Dorothy's new persona, or craziness. It was best ignored. Would go away, probably, like this nonsense over living here.

"I think you should tell Cedric that you won't live here; he must give you more money."

Dorothy sighed, shifted about on her hard little chair, seemed to want to droop away from sheer weariness, pulled herself together, sat up.

"Listen, Alice. And this is for the last time. I don't know why you don't seem able to take it in. It's not very complicated." She now leaned forward, eyes fixed on Alice's pudgy, pathetic, protesting face, and spoke slowly, spelling it all out.

"When your father left me, he said I could stay in the house. I was to have the top floor converted into a self-contained flat. I would let the flat and it would pay expenses. Rates. Electricity. Gas." Alice nodded at this, connecting with what was being said. Encouraged, Dorothy went on, "But instead I took in you and Jasper. You wrote asking if you could come home for a bit."

"I don't remember anything like that. You wrote to me and said why didn't I come home for a bit?"

"Well. Very well, Alice. As you like. I'm not going to argue. There's no point. However it happened, you did come home. I took you and Jasper in. I told your father some people needed a long time to grow up - I was talking about you, of course. I don't care about Jasper."

A chill of rejection afflicted Alice. She strengthened herself, as she had done so often, to take the burden of it, on Jasper's behalf.

"Your father kept on saying, 'Throw them out. They are old enough to fend for themselves. I don't see why I should have to keep that pair of scroungers.' But I couldn't. I couldn't, Alice." This last was said in a different voice, the first "nice" voice Alice had heard from her mother that evening. It was low, hurt, an appeal.

Alice felt strengthened by it and said, "Well, of course, that big house and only you in it, and your cronies coming in and out."

Dorothy was again surprised by Alice. She peered at her daughter, the frown well established.

"It's funny," she said, "how you simply don't seem to be able to take it in." If Alice seemed unable to grasp an essential point about the situation, then Dorothy was unable to take in an essential fact about Alice. "Why can't you?" she enquired, not of Alice but of the room, the air, something or other. "I simply cannot make you see... The point is, I would be there now, at home, if it weren't for you and Jasper. No, Alice, I am not blaming you, I am blaming myself." Another good gulp of Scotch. At this rate she would be tight soon. Then Alice would simply leave! She hated her mother tight; it was then she began saying all those negative things.

"And so that's it, Alice. Though why I bother to say it all again, I can't imagine. You are not my favourite person, Alice. I don't particularly want to see you."

Alice was wrestling with a difficult thought. Her face was screwed up. She bit her pink lips. She looked offended, as if Dorothy had said, "I don't like the blouse you are wearing."

"But when Jasper and I left, why didn't you get the flat converted then, and let it?"

"Because," Dorothy spelled it out, "I had spent the money Cedric gave me for converting the flat. On you. That means on Jasper, of course. Besides, since the only way I could get rid of you seemed to be to move, I had already arranged everything with the estate agent. As you know, since you were making the telephone calls..." She stopped herself, sighed. "No, of course it wasn't that. Your father said he had had enough. That was the reason. Cedric said: Enough! And I don't blame him."

"Wait a minute," said Alice, "what do you mean, I made the telephone calls?"

"Well, of course you did. You took it all on, didn't you? Being helpful. As only you know how to be."

"I made the calls?"

Alice could remember nothing of that. Dorothy could not believe Alice did not remember. For the thousandth time the situation was recurring where Alice said, "I don't remember, no, you're wrong," thinking that her mother maliciously made things up, while Dorothy sighed and pursued interesting thoughts about the pathology of lying.

"In any case, you could have said you had changed your mind."

This time Dorothy's sigh was elaborate and histrionic. "In the normal world, Alice - but you wouldn't know anything about that - there are such things as contracts."

"Oh, shit," said Alice.

"Quite so. Shit. But there were two reasons I wouldn't have changed my mind, even if Cedric had changed his. For one thing, I wanted to be rid of all that. You did me a great service, Alice. There was a time I could have wrung your neck - I felt like a visitor in my own house; I could hardly go into my own kitchen-then suddenly I thought, My God, what a release! I am free of all that. Who said I had to spend my life buying food and cooking it? Years, years of my life I've spent, staggering around with loads of food and cooking it and serving it to a lot of greedy-guts who eat too much anyway."