Doris Lessing - The Temptation of Jack Orkney

Doris Lessing

His father was dying. It was a telegram, saying also: YOU UNOBTAINABLE TELEPHONE. He had been on the telephone since seven that morning. It was the housekeeper who had sent the telegram. Did Mrs Markham not know that she could have asked the telephone authorities to interrupt his conversations for an urgent message? The irritation of the organizer who is manipulating intractable people and events now focussed on Mrs Markham, but he tried to alleviate it by reminding himself that Mrs Markham was housekeeper not only to his father but to a dozen other old people.

It had been a long time since he had actually organized something political; others had been happy to organize him — his name, his presence, his approval. But an emotional telephone call from an old friend, Walter Renting, before seven that morning, appealing that they 'all' should make a demonstration of some sort about the refugees — the nine million refugees of Bangladesh this time — and the information that he was the only person available to do the organizing, had returned him to a politically active past. Telephoning, he soon discovered that even the small demonstration they envisaged would be circumscribed, because people were saying they could see no point in a demonstration when television, radio and every newspaper did little else but tell the world about these millions of sufferers. What was the point of a dozen or twenty people 'sitting down' or 'marching' or even being hungry for twenty-four hours in some prominent place? Surely the point of these actions in the past had been to draw public attention to a wrong?

Now the strength of his reaction to Mrs Markham's inadequacy made him understand that his enthusiastic response to Walter so early that morning had been mostly because of weeks, months, of inactivity. He could not be so exaggerating details if he were not under-employed. He had been making occupation for himself, calling it stocktaking. He had been reading old diaries, articles of his own, twenty or more years old, letters of people he had not seen, sometimes, for as long. Immersing himself in his own past had of course been uncomfortable; this is what it had been really like in Korea, Israel, Pretoria, during such and such an event; memory had falsified. One knew that it did, but he had believed himself exempt from this law. Every new day of this deliberate evocation of the past had made his own part in it seem less worthwhile, had diminished his purposes and strengths. It was not that he now lacked offers to work, but that he could not make himself respond with the enthusiastic willingness which he believed every job of work needed. Of his many possibilities the one that attracted him most was to teach journalism in a small college in Nigeria, but he could not make up his mind to accept: his wife didn't want to go. Did he want to leave her in England for two years? No; but at one time this certainly would not have been his reaction!

Nor did he want to write another adventure book: in such empty times in the past he had written, under noms de plume, novels whose attraction was the description of the countries he had set them in. He had travelled a great deal in this life, often dangerously in the course of this war or that, as a soldier and as a journalist.

He might also write a serious book of social or political analysis: he had several to his credit.

He could do television work, or return to active journalism.

The thing was that now the three children were through university he did not need to earn so much money.

Leisure, leisure at last! he had cried, as so many of his friends were doing, finding themselves similarly placed.

But half a morning's energetic organizing was enough to tell him — exactly as his mother had been used to tell him when he was adolescent — 'Your trouble is, you haven't got enough to do!'

He sent a telegram to Mrs Markham: ARRIVING TRAIN EARLY EVENING. Flying would save him an hour; proper feeling would no doubt choose the air; but he needed the train's pace to adjust him for what was ahead. He rang Walter Kenting to say that with the organizing still undone, urgent family matters were claiming him. Walter was silent at this, so he said: Actually, my old man is going to die in the next couple of days. It has been on the cards for some time.'

'I am sorry.' said Walter. 'I'll try Bill or Mona. I've got to go to Dublin in fifteen minutes. Are you going to be back by Saturday? — oh, of course, you don't know.' Realizing that he was sounding careless or callous, he said: 'I do hope things will be all right.' This was worse and he gave up: 'You think that a twenty-four-hour fast meets that bill better than the other possibilities? Is that what most people feel, do you think?'

'Yes. But I don't think they are as keen as usual.'

‘Well, of course not, there's too much of bloody everything, that's why. You could be demonstrating twenty-four hours a day. Anyway, I've got to get to my plane.'

While Jack packed, which he knew so well how to do, in ten minutes, he remembered that he had a family. Should everyone be at the deathbed? Oh, surely not! He looked for his wife: she was out. Of course! The children off her hands, she too had made many exclamations about the attractions of leisure, but almost at once she signed up for a psychology course as part of a plan to become a Family Counsellor. She had left a note for him: 'Darling, there's some cold lamb and salad.' He now left a note for her: 'Old man on his way out. See you whenever. Tell girls and Joseph. All my love. Jack.'

On the train he thought of what he was in for. A family reunion, no less. His brother wasn't so bad, but the last time he had seen Ellen, she had called him a Boy Scout, and he had called her a Daughter of the British Empire. Considering it a compliment, she had been left with the advantage. A really dreadful woman, and as for her husband — surely he wouldn't be there too? He would have to be, as a man? Where would they all fit in? Certainly not in that tiny flat. He should have put in the note to Rosemary that she should telephone hotels in S—. Would the other grandchildren be there? Well, Cedric and Ellen would be certain to do the right thing, whatever that was: as for himself he could telephone home when he had found what the protocol was. But, good God, surely it was bad enough that three of them, grown — up and intelligent people — grown-up, anyway — were going to have to sit about waiting, in a deathbed scene, because of — superstition. Yes, that was what it was. Certainly no more than outdated social custom. And it all might go on for days. But perhaps the old man would be pleased? At the approach of a phrase similar to those suitable for deaths and funerals, he felt irritation again: this would lead, unless he watched himself, to self — mockery, the spirit of farce. Farce was implicit, anyway, in a situation which had himself, Ellen and Cedric in one room.

Probably the old man wasn't even conscious. He should have telephoned Mrs Markham before rushing off like that — well, like a journalist, with two pairs of socks, a spare shirt and a sweater. He should have bought a black tie? Would the old man have wished it? (Jack noted the arrival of an indubitably 'suitable' phrase, and feared worse for the immediate future.)

The old man had not worn black or altered his cheerfulness when his wife died.

His wife, Jack's mother.

The depression that he suspected was in wait for him, now descended. He understood that he had been depressed for some time: this was like dark coming down into a fog. He had not admitted that he was depressed, but he ought to have known it by the fact what he had woken up to each morning was not his own expectation of usefulness or accomplishment, but his wife's.