Doris Lessing - The Grandmothers

And she went home, two hours late.

As for him he had no picture in his mind of the kind unknown who had, so he felt, held him together. His memory of Annette Rogers was of arms holding him: the haven of an embrace.

James and Helen continued their exemplary life. He was now in charge of a department at the Town Hall, and the well-being of a good many of his fellow citizens depended on him. She was prominent in all kinds of local charities. He played cricket. She taught gym and modern dance. They were members of a Ramblers Club and went for long hikes with their daughter, who was doing well at school.

James’s father died. His mother at once turned off the radio, put her knitting and crochet into a drawer and let her house. She took trips all over the British Isles and then to Europe, With a group of merry widows, she went on long sea cruises or to exotic isles, by plane, sending postcards back to James and Helen. He had a carton full of them.

Not a letter came to their house without his quick glance at it. Helen knew what he was waiting for. She let him know she understood. He tried to be first at any telephone call. He had shown her the photograph of the boy who was as real to her as the ones she had seen of her husband, as a boy.

There was another trip to Cape Town and she said she would go with him. He did not demur.

Deirdre had changed, it seemed overnight, from a friendly and sensible girl into a vindictive, spiteful, cruel creature they did not recognise. ‘Hormones,’ murmured Helen. ‘Oh, dear!’ Deirdre was invited to go with them to Cape Town and said she would rather die. ‘I want you out of my life,’ she shouted, in one of the formulas of I960s’ teenage rebellion. ‘I’m going to live with my friend Mary.’ Judging that this stage might have passed by the time they returned, James and Helen set off without her, relieved.

By now the planes flew to Salisbury, then Johannesburg; the two glamorous stops in between had gone.

In Cape Town they were in a good hotel: James insisted on one high enough for a view of the sea.

Helen was enchanted by the Cape, for who is not? They drove up the coast, the incomparable coast, they visited gardens, and climbed Table Mountain and drove about through vineyards. James took her where he was pretty sure he remembered trestles full of fruit of all kinds, of all colours, but could not find it: stern hygiene had intervened.

She saw how he looked carefully at every face, in gardens, in the hotel, in streets; and she did too, she was looking for a younger version of James. He would be a young man now, a very young man, like the photographs of James, in uniform.

Day after day: and then James said they should go to the university. It was term time. And they walked about everywhere, looking at every youngster who passed: Jimmy Reid, James the younger, walking towards them, or in a group, or with a girl. That was one day and then James wanted to go again, for another. After that, it would be time to leave Cape Town.

Helen said to him, ‘Look, James, you mustn’t give up. One day there’ll be a letter, or a telephone call, or we’ll open the door and there he’ll be.’

He smiled. She didn’t know of that thick pack of letters. He was certain Betty would have kept her promise: she had promised. Daphne would have read those letters to her which contained the best of himself, his essence, his reality, ‘what I really am’. She must have read them. But if she had told her son, their son, then by now there would have arrived that letter, been that phone call, the ring at the door. He was twenty. Twenty and so many months and days. If he knew, he was old enough to make up his own mind.

‘You’ll see,’ said Helen. ‘It’ll happen one of these days,’

They were lying in bed, and she knew what he was thinking, because he was staring, as he so often did, into the empty dark.

He put his arm around her and drew her to him, in gratitude for her kindness, her loyalty to him, her love. But he was thinking, a deep, secret, cruel thought: ‘If you want to call that love.’

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