Doris Lessing - The Temptation of Jack Orkney

'I quite agree,' said Cedric. The devil's more like it.'

'Yes,' said Jack, able to speak at last. 'Yes, that's about it, I'm afraid.' It was the best he could do. The room was now full of good feeling, and they would have begun to talk about their childhood if the bedroom door had not opened, and the Dean come out. The smile he had shed on the nurse was still on his healthy lips, and he now let it benefit the three, while he raised his hand in what looked like a benediction. 'No, don't get up!' He was almost at once out of the other door, followed close by Mrs Markham.

The look the three now shared repudiated the Dean and all his works. Ellen smiled at her brother exactly as — he realized in capitulation to a totally unforeseen situation — his own wife would have done. Cedric nodded private comment on the stupidities of mankind.

Soon Cedric went to the bedroom, to return with the report that the old man looked pretty deep in. Then Ellen went, and came back saying that she didn't know how the nurse could bear it in that hot dark room. But as she sat down, she said: 'In the old days, one of us would have been in there all the time?'

'Yes,' said Cedric. All of us.'

'Not just a nurse,' said Ellen. 'Not a stranger'

Jack was thinking that if he had stuck it out, then he would have been there when his father called for him; but he said: I'm glad it is a nurse. I don't think there is very much left of him.'

Ann arrived. What Jack saw first was a decided, neat little face, and that she wore a green jacket and trousers that were not jeans but 'good' as her aunt Ellen used the word. Ellen always had 'good' clothes that lasted a long time. Ann's style was not, for instance, like Jack's daughter', who wore rags and rubbish and cast — offs and who looked enchanting, like princesses in disguise. She kissed her father, because he was waiting for her to do this. She stood examining them with care. Her father could be seen in her during that leisurely, unembarrassed examination: it was both her right and her duty to do this. Now Jack saw that she was small, with a white skin that looked greenish where it was shaded, and hair as pale as her father's had been. Her eyes, like her father's, were green.

She said: 'Is he still alive?'

The voice was her father's, and it took her aunt and her uncle back, back — she did not know the reason for their strained, reluctant smiles as they gazed at her.

They were suffering that diminution, that assault on individuality which is the worst of families: some invisible dealer had shuffled noses, hands, shoulders, hair and reassembled them to make — little Ann, for instance. The dealer made out of parts a unit that the owner would feed, maintain, wash, medicate for a lifetime, thinking of it as ‘mine’, except at moments like these, when knowledge was forced home that everyone was put together out of stock.

'Well,' said Ann, 'you all look dismal enough. Why do you?'

She went into the bedroom, leaving the door open. Jack understood that Ann had principles about attitudes towards death: like his own daughters.

The three crowded into the room.

Ann sat on the bed, high up near the pillow, in a way that hid the old man's face from them. She was leaning forward, the nurse — whom Ann had ignored — ready to intervene.

'Grandad'' she said. 'Grandad! It's me!'

Silence. Then it came home to them that she had called up Lazarus. They heard the old man's voice, quite as they remembered it: 'It's you, is it? It is little Ann?'

'Yes, Grandad, it's Ann.'

They crowded forward, to see over her shoulder. They saw their father, smiling normally. He looked like a tired old man, that was all. His eyes, surrounded by the puffy bruises, had light in them.

‘Who are these people?' he asked. ‘Who are all these tall people?'

The three retreated, leaving the door open.

Silence from the bedroom, then singing. Ann was singing is a small clear voice: All things bright and beautiful.'

Jack looked at Cedric. Ellen looked at Cedric. He deprecated: 'Yes, I am afraid that she is. That's the bond, you see.'

'Oh,' said Ellen, 'I see, that explains it.'

The singing went on:

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

The singing went on, verse after verse like a lullaby.

'She came to stay with him,' said Cedric. ‘At Easter, I think it was. She slept here, on the floor.'

Jack said: 'My girls are religious. But not my son of course.'

They looked blankly sympathetic: it occurred to Jack that his son's fame was after all circumscribed to a pretty small circle.

‘He takes after me,' said Jack.

‘Ah,' said Cedric.

‘A lot of them are religious,' said Ellen, brisk.

'It's the kind of religion that sticks in one's craw,' said Jack.

‘Simple faith and Celtic crosses.'

‘I agree,' said Cedric' Pretty low-level stuff.'

'Does,' the level matter?' asked Ellen. 'Surely c'est le premier pas quicoute?'

At which Jack looked at his sister in a disbelief that was meant to be noticed. Cedric, however, did not seem surprised: of course, he saw Ellen more often. He said mildly: 'I don't agree. One wouldn't mind if they went on to something a bit more elevated. It's this servants' hall village green mother's meeting sort of thing. Your spend a fortune trying to educate them decently and then it ends up in... My eldest was a Jesus freak for a few months, for example. After Winchester, Balliol, the lot.'

What is a Jesus freak?' inquired Ellen.

What is sounds like.'

Normally Jack would have cut out emotionally and mentally at the words 'servants' hall', but he was still with them. He said: What gets me is that they spout it all out, so pat and pretty, you know, and you get the feeling it might be anything, anything they had picked up or lay to hand — pour epater les bourgeois, you know.'

At this he had to think that the other two must be thinking, but were too polite to say, that his own socialism, a degree or two off full communism when he was in his teens, had had no deeper cause. This unspoken comment brought the conversation to a stop.

The singing had stopped too. It was getting dark.

'Well, ' said Ellen, 'I tell you what I'm going to do, I am going to have a bath and then dinner and then a good night's sleep. I think Ann is meeting Father's requirements better than we could.'

'Yes,' said Cedric.

He went to the door, and communicated this news to his daughter, who said she would be fine, she would be super, she would stay with her grandad, and if she got tired she could sleep on the floor.

Over the dinner table at the hotel, it was a reunion of people who had not met for a long time. They drank some wine and they were sentimental.

But the little time of warmth died with the coffee, served in the hall, which let in draughts from the street every time somebody came in.

Jack said: 'I'll turn in, I didn't sleep last night.' 'Nor I.' 'Nor I.'

They nodded at each other; to kiss would have been exaggerated. Jack went upstairs, while Cedric and Ellen went to telephone their families.

In the bedroom he stood by the window and watched how the light filled the lime outside. Breaths of tree-air came to his face. He was full of variegated emotions, none, he was afraid, to do with his father: they were about his brother and his sister, his childhood, that past of his which everything that happened to him these days seemed to evoke, seemed to present to him, sharp, clear, and for the most part painful: he did not feel he could sleep, he was over-stimulated. He would lie on his bed for a rest. Waking much later, to a silence that said the night had deepened all around him, with the heaviness of everybody's sleeping, he started up into a welter of feeling that he could not face, and so burrowed back into sleep again, there to be met by — but it was hard to say what.