Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Yours sincerely,

FELICITY WATKINS

It was ten in the morning. In a large public room on the first floor, which overlooked a formal pattern of flowerbeds now dug over and left exposed to catch the first frosts, a couple of beeches in their end-of-year colouring, and some late-flowering roses, sat, or lounged, about forty or fifty people. None looked out of the windows. They were of any age, size, type and of both sexes. But the middle-aged predominated, and particularly, middle-aged women. Some watched television, or rather, since the programme had not yet started, were looking at the test picture, of some water rushing down over some rocks, under spring trees in full flower. Some knitted. Some chatted. It would be easy to think that one had walked into the lounge of a second-rate or provincial hotel, except for the characteristic smell of drugs.

There were tables as well as easy chairs dotted about the room, and at a table in full centre, which was spread all over with a particularly complicated game of patience, sat a young girl, all by herself. She was a brunette, of a Mediterranean type. She had smooth dark hair, large black eyes, olive skin. She was slender, but rounded, but not excessively the latter, thus conforming both to current ideas about beauty in women, and that moment’s fashion. She wore a black crepe dress that fitted her smoothly over her breasts and hips. The sleeves were long and tight. The neck was high and close. The dress had simple white linen cuffs and a round white collar. These were slightly grubby. This dress would have been appropriate for a housekeeper, a perfect secretary, or a Victorian young lady spending a morning with her accounts, if it had not ended four inches below the top of the thigh. In other words, it was a particularly lopped mini-dress. It would be hard to imagine a type of dress more startling as a mini-dress. The contrast between its severity, its formality, and the long naked legs was particularly shocking: it shocked. The girl’s legs were not quite bare. She wore extremely fine pale grey tights. But she did not wear any panties. She sat with her legs sprawled apart in a way that suggested that she had forgotten about them, or that she had enough to do to control and manage the top half of her, without all the trouble of remembering her legs and her sex as well. Her private parts were evident as a moist dark fuzzy patch, and their exposure gave her a naïve, touching, appealing look.

There were two female nurses sitting among the patients. Both were poor women, badly paid, working class, and were only here because their husbands were not paid enough to keep a family according to the standards which television promises the nation as its right. These women looked at the young girl more often than at any other patient. It was with a resentment that ten times the wage they earned would not have been enough to assuage.

Both had female children, adolescents; and both were familiar with fights over makeup and dresses. One woman liked her daughter in very short dresses and plenty of makeup, and the other did not, but this difference between them had vanished under the pressure of a profounder disquiet. It was because of the violent battles both had with this girl, Violet, whose mini-dresses were shorter even than fashion demanded, and which both thought disgusting, even without the fact that she refused to wear panties. And her accusations of them, the nurses (mother-and-authority-figures, as both had been trained to understand very well) that they were old-fashioned, girl-hating, sex-hating, old , and so forth, were exactly the same, but exactly, word for word as both had during their fights with their own daughters. The fact that Violet was crazy, and that she used their own daughters’ arguments for not wearing panties, so that she always looked provocative and was a source of trouble with already unstable male patients, was seditious of the framework of ordinary morality. Of course, one nurse’s framework was very much more liberal — the one who was happy to let her daughter wear mini-skirts and make up her eyes with false lashes and loads of coloured grease — than the other’s; but to both of them the thought was brought home several times a day, that these stands, liberal, and old-fashioned, stands on which both women prided themselves, were made to look irrelevant and even ridiculous by Miss Violet Stoke’s sitting there with her legs apart showing everything she had got. And on principle. In the name of freedom, the rights of youth, and the advancement of womanhood. Both women had confessed to themselves, to each other, and to doctors that of all the patients in their charge, Violet made it hardest to maintain self-control. They were prepared to say that they hated her, an attitude which some of the doctors in authority deplored, as lacking in insight and control, and others applauded, as showing a releasing honesty and frankness — releasing to the patient as much as to themselves. They both knew quite well that her way of sitting there, dressed in a parody of a housekeeper’s dress with her sex on view was a challenge to their sanity. Besides, she was not washing as much as she ought (a very familiar sign of her illness) and she smelled, apart from smelling sickly from the drugs.

She was also beautiful, and in an exotic and un-British way.

She sat alone, for she knew she had always been alone. She was playing patience because it is a game that is played alone. All around her, if only people had the eyes to see it, was a space where flickered and darted flames of hatred, a baleful fire. She was isolated by this aura of hatred, which only she knew about. She was aware that the two middle-aged women observed her more than they did the others, but she did not see them as they were, poor women doing an unpleasant job because they were not qualified for better paid jobs. She saw them three times lifesize, arbitrarily powerful, dangerous, frightening. She hated them wholeheartedly because they were middle-aged, dowdy, tired, suburban, poor, and because that morning and for the last week of mornings they had told her she must put on panties as well as tights, and that she looked disgusting, and that their task was difficult enough without having men getting excited on her account, and that she was selfish, antisocial, disobedient.

When she looked at them, she was possessed by a young person’s terror that she was looking at her own future, for it so happened that her life had taught her very early that it was easy, and indeed, common, to be young and pretty and gay, and then soon afterwards, to be middle-aged, tired and disregarded.

In some of Goya’s earlier pictures, not those that describe war or madness, but the gay and gallant pictures, there is something that disturbs, but you don’t know what it is. Not at first. It is because of any group of those people, the charming, the formal, the pastoral, the essentially civilised, there is always one that looks straight out of the group, out of the canvas, into the eyes of the person who is looking at the picture. This person who refuses to conform to the conventions of the picture the artist has set him in, questions and, in fact, destroys the convention. It is as if the artist said to himself: I suppose I’ve got to paint this kind of picture, it is expected of me— but I’ll show them . As you stand and gaze in, all the rest of the picture fades away, the charmers in their smiles and flounces, the young heroes, the civilisation, all these dissolve away because of that long straight gaze from the one who looks back out of the canvas and says silently that he or she knows it is all a load of old socks. He is there to tell you that he thinks so.