London Observed

by Doris Lessing

  Again it was she who recovered herself and pushed the pram away down the pavement. Slowly pushed. After a few steps she turned to look at him. On she went – but turned again. He still stood there, gazing after her. She gave him a brave little wave, and went on. Slower, slower … but she had to go on, she had to, and she reached the corner much too soon, where she stopped and looked back to where he stood, his face as miserable as hers. Again the seconds sped past … But at last she firmly pushed the pram on and away and disappeared. Never has there been a corner of a street as empty as that one. He stared. She had gone. He took two steps to go after her, then came back, sending over his shoulder a quick glance: yes, she really had gone.

  Slowly he walked on, slower, and stopped. He was level with me. He wasn’t seeing anybody or anything, he was inside himself. He stood with his knees slightly bent, his arms loose, palms showing, his head back, as if he planned at some point to raise his eyes to the sky.

  On the face of the charmed man chased emotions. There was regret, but a self-consciously dandyish regret, for even in his extremity he was not going to let go of this lifeline. There was bewilderment. There was loss. Above all, tenderness, banishing the others. Meanwhile his forehead was tense and his eyes sombre. What was he thinking? ‘What was all that? What? But what happened … what did happen, I don’t understand what happened … I don’t understand …’

  Something like that.

  Romance 1988

  Two young women sat on opposite sides of a table in the cafeteria in Terminal Three, Heathrow airport. They were in the raised part, which is like a little stage. Sybil had gone straight to this area though there were places empty in the lower, less emphasized, part of the room.

  They were sisters, both large-boned, stocky, with broad sensible faces. But Sybil refused to be ordinary, wore dramatic makeup, short yellow hair, clothes you had to look at. She was a dazzler, like a pop star. No one would particularly notice Joan, and she sat admiring Sybil and giving London full credit, at least for this: they were from northern England, and they valued this sound inheritance, so much better than anything the frivolous and spoiled south could produce. They were in the old tradition of two sisters, the pretty one and the clever one, and so they had been cast in their childhoods – Joan, clever, and Sybil, pretty. But they were both clever attractive hard-working girls who pursued their chances with skill.

  Joan was saying, ‘But you’re only twenty-two. I thought you were going to take your time?’ She was the older sister, twenty-four.

  Sybil said in her loud careless voice that everyone had to listen to, always, ‘But my dear, I’ll never find anyone like Oliver, I know that.’

  Joan smiled. Deliberately. She raised her brows.

  Sybil grinned at her, acknowledging the older sister act.

  They did not need to hurry this conversation. Joan was on her way to Bahrain where she had got herself a job as secretary in a part-American, part-English firm. She had just flown in from Yorkshire, and there were three hours before her flight out. Sybil had said that of course she would come out to Heathrow to be with her sister, no, it didn’t matter, she just wouldn’t go to work that day. She had arrived in London two years before and had at once taken possession of it, getting herself – God only knew how – a secondhand car, and she thought nothing of driving out to the airport at six in the morning or eleven at night to have a chat with friends who were always on their way through, or of dropping in on several parties in one night, in places as far apart as Greenwich and Chiswick. She had come to London as a secretary, but had decided that ‘temping’ was a better bet. Thus one sampled all kinds of different work, met a lot of different men, and when she was offered a job that suited her she would stay put. At least, that was what she had said until recently.

  ‘You said all that about Geoff, remember,’ said Joan, not unpleasantly, but putting the case.

  ‘Oh God’, said Sybil, ‘but I was only an infant then.’

  ‘Eighteen,’ said Joan.

  ‘All right! Granted! And I know it doesn’t sound likely, but we are made for each other, Oliver and I.’

  ‘Has he said so?’

  ‘I think we’re in for it – marriage, kids, a mortgage, the lot.’ The loud confident voice was attracting attention, and Joan was embarrassed. As she had been, all her life, by her sister.

  She said in a pointedly low voice, ‘Sybil, you told me it was all off with Oliver.’

  ‘Yes, I know I did,’ said Sybil loudly. ‘He said he didn’t want to marry again. He liked being free. And off he went. I didn’t see him for months. He broke my heart. When he came after me again I said to him, You’ve broken my heart once, so this time you’re going to have to make the running, I’m not coming after you. Not the way I did when I first met him,’ she explained. And she cast a glance around to make sure her audience was still rapt.

  Joan considered all this. Then she asked, ‘When you’re married, are you going to travel abroad with him when he’s on his trips?’

  Oliver travelled a great deal for his firm, was more often away than in London.

  ‘No. Oh well, I’ll go with him sometimes, if it’s somewhere interesting, but I’ll make a home for him in London. No, I’m going to be a real wife,’ she insisted, to her sister’s quizzical smile.

  ‘You always have to go to extremes.’

  ‘What’s extreme about that?’

  ‘If you can’t see it’s over the top! Anyway, last time you said whenever he went abroad he took a different girl.’

  ‘Yes, I know. He was in Rome last week and I knew he had slept with someone though he didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Because it was not my business …’ Joan was looking so humorous that it was with an effect of shouting against noise that Sybil went on, ‘Yes. But then he confessed he had slept with someone and he felt guilty about it. Because of me. And I’ve been feeling guilty if I slept with anyone but him right from the very first time I slept with him.’

  ‘Well,’ sighed Joan, ‘I suppose that’s pretty conclusive.’

  ‘Yes, I think it is. And what about you and Derek? Is he going to wait until you get back from Bahrain?’

  ‘He says he will, but I have my doubts.’

  They smiled at each other.

  ‘Plenty of fish in the sea,’ said Sybil.

  ‘He’s all right. But I reckon I’ll have saved up thirty thousand out there, that is if I stick it out. There’s nothing to spend anything on.’

  ‘And then you’ll be independent.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll buy a house the moment I get back.’

  ‘Makes sense. And Oliver and I are looking for a house. We were looking last Sunday. It’s fun looking at houses. There was one I think he would settle for, but I said to him, No, if we are going to be Upwardly Mobile, then let’s do it. That house isn’t good enough. You’re doing better and better all the time, I said to him. Because he is. He’s shooting up in his firm, and he gets more and more eligible every day.’

  ‘You always did say you would marry for money.’

  ‘Yes, I did. And I am. But I wouldn’t marry him if I didn’t feel like this about him.’

  ‘But do you feel like this about him because he is so eligible?’ enquired Joan, laughing.

  ‘Probably. But what’s the matter with that?’

  ‘Would you marry him if he was poor?’

  The sisters were now leaning forward, faces close, laughing and full of enjoyment.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. I’ve got to have money. I know myself, don’t I?’

  ‘I hope you do,’ said the older sister, suddenly sober.

  Meanwhile people nearby were smiling at each other because of the two young adventurers, probably feeling that they ought to be shocked or something.

  There was a pause, while they attended to coffee, croissants, fruit juice.

  And then, suddenly, Sybil announced, ‘And we are both going to have an AIDS test.’ Now the people listening stopped smiling, though they were certainly attendin
g. ‘We both decided, at the same time. I mentioned it first, and found he had thought of it too. He slept around a lot after his divorce, and I have too, since I came to London. And you never know. But the trouble is, I’m going to have it done privately, because if it’s on the National Health then it’s in the records for everyone to see. Because then it would look as if you were worried.’

  ‘And it’s expensive.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I can’t afford it, I don’t have the money, but Oliver can and he’ll pay for me.’

  Joan smiled. ‘Certainly one way of making him responsible for you.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘What will you do if either of you is positive?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure we won’t be! We’re both as hetero as they come. But you never know. We want to be on the safe side. No, we’ll have the tests done and then we’ll give each other our certificates.’ Her face was soft and dreamy, full of love. For the first time she had forgotten her audience.

  ‘Well,’ said Joan, taking neat little sips of coffee, ‘I suppose that’s one way of doing it.’

  ‘It means much more than an engagement ring, I mean, it’s a real commitment.’

  ‘And he is going to have to be faithful to you now, isn’t he?’

  ‘But I’ll have to be faithful to him!’

  Joan’s face was suggesting this was not the same thing. Then she asked, teasing, ‘Faithful for ever?’

  ‘Yes … well … for as long as we can, anyway. We don’t want to sleep with anyone else, not the way we feel now. What’s the point of risking it, anyway?’

  She glanced around, but her audience no longer attended to her. They were talking to each other. If this was their way of showing disapproval, then …

  Two and a half hours to go.

  Sybil raised her voice. ‘We tried condoms, too, but God knows how people get them to work. We laughed so much that in the end we simply had to settle for going to sleep.’

  ‘Shhhhh,’ said Joan, in agony. ‘Shhhhhh.’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter, no, let me tell you, if the safety of the nation is going to depend on condoms, then …’

  At this point a young man who had been sitting near them, listening, got up because it was time for him to be off on his way to somewhere or other in the world. He tapped Sybil on the shoulder and said, ‘If you can’t get the hang of condoms, then just get in touch with me … no, no, any time, a pleasure!’

  His words were far from an invitation, were more of a public rebuke, and on his face was the look that goes with someone taking it on himself to keep things in order. But from the door he sent them a glance and a grin and disappeared for ever with a wave. As for Joan and Sybil, they sat half turned to watch him go. They looked like a couple of teenagers, their hands half-covering scandalized and delighted smiles.

  What Price the Truth?

  I want to tell you something, I have to tell someone. I have to talk. I suddenly understood you are the only person left who will know what I’m talking about. Has that happened to you? You suddenly think, My God, that was twenty, thirty years ago and I am the only person left who knows what really happened?

  Do you remember Caesar? Remember I worked for him? Do you – most people have forgotten. We called him Caesar … he never knew it of course. Because he used to say, I’m going to conquer Britain – remember that? If you do, then you and I are the only people left who do. Well, Caesar’s son married my daughter last weekend … yes, exactly, you can’t improve on life, can you, Life: God’s little script-writer. But you only know the half of it, listen.

  Did you ever meet Robert, Caesar’s son? If you did, he must have been an infant. Well, he’s turned out a charming boy, sweet, but really, really nice.

  Ten years ago he rang me at the office and asked me out to dinner. He was fourteen. I was struck dumb. Well, as far as I can be struck dumb. I was so tickled – of course I said yes. But wait until you hear where. It was at the Berengaria. Yes, quite so. I don’t know what I expected, but he did it all perfectly. He might have been thirty-five, this kid, this baby, he called for me in a taxi with flowers, in a hired suit. He had booked a table and gone in to discuss it all with the head waiter. The waiters were hovering about like nannies, they were tickled out of their wits, because of this kid and me – of course they knew me for years, I used to go there with Caesar, or I went in to arrange special dinners for him. He used to talk as if it was his restaurant … are you getting the picture? Not by a nod or a beck did the waiters embarrass him, they were wonderful. I sat there going mad with curiosity. Fourteen. Then I thought, All right, we are all mad at fourteen, forget it. And I was busy then, as usual. But it must have cost him fifty quid. Where did he get it? Not from his father, that mean old …

  The next thing, he writes me a letter on best quality ivory vellum notepaper, with his name printed on it, Robert Meredith Stone, asking me to go for a walk in St James’s Park, and then tea at the Ritz. Wait a minute, I thought, just wait a minute … it’s time to do some thinking.

  Dinner at the Berengaria fair enough, it was Caesar’s place, but a walk in the park? Caesar has never set foot off a London pavement. He probably doesn’t know a daffodil from a rose. In his old age he sits like a sour old goat grumping at 1930s films on the video, don’t imagine he limps about the garden philosophizing while he prunes the roses. Marie has always done the gardening.

  I thought it all over, but really thought, and then I asked Marie for lunch. I needed to talk to her without Caesar knowing, I didn’t want to give poor Robert away.

  I hadn’t seen Marie for years. We always got on, if you can call it that, having nothing in common but behaving well. She’s old these days, she’s decided to be an old woman. I’m damned if I will yet. I mean, it’s a lot of effort to let yourself get old, you have to change your clothes, your style, everything, it’s all right for her, she’s got time for all that, she’s never had to work in her life. Of course she was curious to know what it was all about and I didn’t know how to start. As soon as I saw her I realized I couldn’t ask. What was I to say? Tell me, does your Robert think that your Caesar and I had an affair and if so, what’s all this about strolls in St James’s Park and feeding the ducks?

  She thought it was ever so sweet of me to ask her for lunch, but she’s got vague, she started to talk about Caesar’s girlfriends. I never minded,’ said she, ‘not after the first …’ And then she made a joke, yes, actually a joke, ‘It’s the first one that counts, you know, le premier pas qui coûte, and he always had such nice women,’ paying me a compliment, noblesse oblige. ‘And I never did like sex,’ she says, ‘or perhaps I wasn’t lucky with Caesar, or he wasn’t lucky with me.’ I swear she was ready for me to tell her how I had found her Caesar in bed, and I understood something at that moment, it struck me all of a heap, it struck me dumb – yes, all right, but I told you I had to talk. Now, this is the point. It was always important to me that I never slept with Caesar, but it was exactly at that moment, eating a healthful salad with Caesar’s wife … ha ha, how absolutely apropos … that I knew how important it was, a point of pride. And now it mattered to her so little she didn’t even remember I had gone to her and said, Look here, Marie, I don’t know what anyone else thinks and I don’t care, but it matters to me what you think: I am not sleeping with your husband, and I never did. She didn’t remember I had gone specially to tell her. She looked at me vaguely, and said, ‘Oh yes? Did you? Funny, I forget things … but I didn’t mind, you know.’ She minded all right. She’s decided to forget that. Whether she believed me or not she minded like hell and I minded her minding. Because I was innocent. It was just the same having lunch with her as it was then – because the one thing I couldn’t say was, the most important, your husband is a mean, scrimping, pennywise tightfist, and he’s killed me with overwork, he always has to work people he employs to the bone, and he has to underpay them. Never mind about sleeping with me, I would have liked to say, then and at lunch that day, but working with that
little Scrooge never left much energy for sex.

  Have you forgotten how it was with me then? I had two kids – but do you remember? The funny thing is, meeting people in public life, professional life, you meet them as individuals, but what’s important about them, often, is what you don’t see. In my case it was two small children and an ex-husband who sometimes came through with a few quid but more often didn’t. I was being paid a senior typist’s wage when I ran Caesar’s office for him. I was his Girl Friday, I organized everything, and it was I who had the contacts, I knew everyone in the field when he was a newcomer in it. I used to set up whole shows for him, and he’d take the credit. I used to work from eight in the morning till eleven, twelve, one at night. I made that man and he knew it too, but if he’d paid me, he’d be admitting just what my real worth to him was. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have succeeded without me, but if he conquered Britain – because he did, we did, he was known everywhere and not just in this country, he was a name in France and Germany – if he did all that it was because of me. Then one day I was so exhausted I couldn’t get out of bed. I telephoned the office and said right, that was it, I was giving him notice, I couldn’t stand it. I had to get a job that paid me properly. I was in debt for the rent. I couldn’t even pay for the children’s clothes, and their father had been out of work for months – he was an actor, it wasn’t his fault. Suddenly there is Caesar ringing the doorbell, for the first time, and I’d been working for him ten years then. He comes in, he looks around. Two rooms and a bathroom, oh yes, it was a decent little place, I wasn’t going to let the kids go without, but I slept in the living room and they had the other room. ‘Nice place,’ says Caesar, sniffing about pricing everything, ‘you do yourself well.’ And he with his bloody great house at Richmond. I got back into bed and actually went to sleep, I was so ill I didn’t care. ‘You can’t just give me notice,’ he says, waking me up. ‘I am giving you notice.’ I say. To cut it short, he put up my salary a few quid a month, it was enough to pay off some of my debts. I still wasn’t earning as much as a good PR girl. ‘You can’t leave me,’ he says, and I remember the tone of his voice, it was that which struck me dumb, as if I had treated him badly.