Doris Lessing - The Temptation of Jack Orkney

Yet they were treating him with perfect kindness. He knew that this was what it really was: even if he had to see it all as falsity, mere habits of kindness, sympathy, consideration, tact, which none of them really felt, wanting him to get back to normal, so that life could go on without stress.

His wife particularly longed for this. While he took care that he did not betray the horror he was immersed in, she knew well enough their time was over — the gaiety and charm of it, the irresponsibility. Probably for good. Being what she was, thoughtful, considerate (taught by society to show thoughtfulness and sympathy when she wasn't really feeling it, he could not stop himself thinking), she was trying to decide what to do for the best. Sometimes she asked if he didn't think he should write another book—even if he would like to make a trip abroad without her; she talked about Nigeria. Each time Nigeria was mentioned, his response to it was strong: it was the idea of forgetting himself entirely in an active and tightly planned life.

But he did not want to commit himself. He felt he would be losing an opportunity — but of what? And besides, how could he? He believed he was seriously ill, in some inconceivable, unprecedented way; how could be take a job when his energies had to go into presenting a bland and harmless surface to those around him, into preventing his hand rising furtively up to his face, to see if the masks of greed or power were fastened there, into watching the postures his body assumed, which must betray his vices to anyone looking his way — or would betray them, if everybody wasn't blind and deaf, absorbed in their 'kindness', their awful, automatic, meaningless 'sympathy'.

One night his son arrived upstairs. Joseph used sometimes to come, unannounced, and go up through the girls' rooms to the attic to sleep. He took food from his sisters' kitchen. Sometimes he brought friends.

About a year ago there had been a row over the friends. Feeling one evening as if the top part of his house had been invaded by a stealthy army, Jack had gone up and found a dozen or so young men, and a couple of girls, all lying about on sleeping bags and blankets under the rafters. They had moved in. A girl was cooking sausages in a frying-pan that was a camping stove; about a foot away was a drum that had written on it: PARAFFIN. INFLAMMABLE. The flames from the stove were turned too high, and showed around the edges of the frying-pan. Jack jumped forward, turned it down, removed the pan, and stood up, facing them, the pan in his hand. His usual responses to his son — apology, or the exhaustion due to the effort to be fair — had been cut, and he asked: 'What's the matter with you lot? What's wrong? You aren't stupid!'

Coming up the stairs he had been preparing a 'humorous' remark — which he was afraid would sound pompous, to the effect: How about introducing me to my guests? Now he stared at them, and the young faces stared back. There was a half-scared smile in the face of the girl who had been cooking, but no one said anything. 'I think you had better get out,' said Jack at last and went downstairs. Soon after he had watched the whole lot cross the garden like a tribe on the move, with their stove, their cartons, their paper-carriers, their guitars, their sleeping bags.

Now he came to think of it, this incident had been the beginning of his inadmissible depression. He had spent days, weeks, months, thinking about it. He felt there was a contempt there, in the carelessness, that went beyond anything he knew how to cope with: he did not understand it, them — his son. Who, meanwhile, had resumed his habits, and continued to drop in for a night or two when he had nowhere better to sleep. So it was not, Jack reasoned, that Joseph despised a roof over his head, as such? They had all been so stoned they had not known what they were doing? No, it hadn't seemed like it. They had not bothered to look at the drum, had not known it was full? But that was scarcely and excuse — no, it was all too much, not understandable... He had not talked to his son since, only seen him go past.

The telephone rang from upstairs: Carrie said that Joseph would be down to see him in a few moments, if Jack 'had nothing better to do'.

Instantly Jack was on the defensive: he knew that Joseph criticized him for having been away so much when the three children were growing up. This message was reference to that — again? If it was simply careless, what had come into his head, then that made it even worse, in a way... Joseph came running lightly down the stairs and into the living-room. A muscular young man, he wore skin-tight blue jeans, a tight blue sweatshirt, and a small red scarf at his throat tied like a pirate's. The clothes were old but as much care had gone into their choosing, preparation and presentation as a model getting ready for a photograph... While Jack knew he had already begun the process of comparison that always left him exhausted, he could not stop, and he was wondering: Was it that we were as obsessed with what we wore but I've forgotten it? No, it's not that: our convention was that it was bourgeois to spend time and money on clothes, that was it, but their convention it different, that's all it is and it is not important.

Joseph had a strong blue gaze, and a strong straight mouth. The mouth was hidden under a wiry golden beard. A mane of wiry yellow hair fell to his shoulders. Jack thought that the beard and the long hair were there because they were fashionable, and would be dropped the moment they were not. .. well, Why not? He wished very much he could have swaggered about in beard and mane — that was the truth.

This aggressively vivid young man sat on a chair opposite Jack, put his palms down on his thighs with his fingers pointing towards each other, and the elbows, our. In this considering, alert position he looked at his father.

Jack, a faded, larger, softer version of what he was seeing, waited.

Joseph said: 'I hear you have got religion.'

'The opium,' said Jack, in a formal considering way, 'of the people. Yes. If that's what it is, I have got it.'

Jack felt particularly transparent, because of his son's forceful presence. He knew that his posture, the smile on his face, were expressing apology. He already knew the meeting was doomed to end unpleasantly. Yet he was looking for the words to appeal to his son, to begin the 'real' talk that they should be having.

Joseph said: 'Well, that's your business.' He sounded impatient: having raised the subject, or at least used it as an opener, now he was saying that his father's processes were of no interest or importance. 'You've been following the Robinson affair?'

Jack could not remember for a moment which affair that was but did not like to say so.

‘We have to pay the defence lawyer. And there's the bail. We need at least three thousand pounds.'

Jack did not say anything. It was not from policy, but inadequacy, yet he saw his son beginning to make the irritable movements of power, of confidence, checked and thwarted. It crossed his mind that of course his son saw him as powerful and confident, and this it was that accounted for the aggression, the hostility, the callousness. Into Jack's mind now came sets of words framed rhetorically; since this was not how he was feeling, he was surprised. "Why does it have to be like this, that more hate is used on people of the same side, thus preventing us ever from uniting in a common front, preventing us from bringing down the enemy?' These were words from the imaginary conversation with Joseph that he so often indulged in: only now it did strike him that he never had fantasies of a personal relationship — of their going for a holiday together for instance, or just spending an evening, or walking for and hour or so. 'Can't you see,' the inner rhetoric-maker was continuing, 'that the vigour of your criticism, your iconoclasm, your need to condemn the past without learning from it, will take you relentlessly to stand exactly where your despised elders stand now?'