London Observed

by Doris Lessing

  ‘It’s beginning to get to me, believe it or not. We moved, did you know? It’s got a big garden. I suppose you don’t know. Well, let bygones be, what do you say?’

  ‘You and Brian?’ inquired Myra carefully. Brian was the builder’s merchant.

  ‘Oh not him, we split up. And good riddance. He beat me, Mum!’ said Shirley, and laughed. Full of resentment, full of admiration. That meant he had left her, Myra decided.

  ‘Are you divorced then?’

  ‘Yes, it came through just after Christmas. And now I’ve got a really nice one. You’d like him, I know that.’

  ‘Have I met him?’ inquired Myra, drily, thinking of the naked man she’d seen through the kitchen window, whose voice she had heard, yelling with laughter. But it seemed Shirley had forgotten the incident, or at least that there had been a man Myra might remember.

  ‘You couldn’t have met him. I only met him myself last autumn.’

  ‘You’re going to marry him, then?’

  ‘Christ no, what’s the point? No, twice is enough. We’ll live together. We hit it off though. Made for each other.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Myra. She noted that as usual with this daughter she was watching every word she said. Shirley reacted unpredictably, could be rude, explosive, sullen, even pleasant – but one never knew. Myra felt that half her life she had been behaving as if Shirley were a minefield, and she was running across it.

  The two women walked on in silence. The lawn with squirrels running about it. The shrubby hillside. Where the long path up to the fountain crossed this one, Myra hesitated, letting Shirley choose, but Shirley decided to walk straight on, and not to go up to the fountain. Myra meekly went with her. As always.

  At the café Myra wondered whether to say, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ but did not dare.

  On they went, and for the second time Myra was walking slowly along the path where beds of roses stood on either side. Shirley stopped. Myra stopped. ‘How do you prune these things?’ asked Shirley.

  ‘Well, that’s easy enough,’ said Myra, and she bent over the low railing, ready to show how. ‘You must prune to an outside bud,’ she began, and was going on, when it struck her. Shirley might be – everything she was, but she wasn’t stupid. If she was taking cuttings – stealing cuttings – then she must know how to prune. She would have learnt out of a book, as Myra had. Myra straightened herself and said, ‘Would you like to come over one day and I’ll show you on my roses at home?’

  ‘That’s an idea. Yes, I’d like that,’ said Shirley.

  ‘When would you like to come? The weekend? The thing is, Dad won’t be there, he’s off fishing this weekend.’

  ‘We’ll be by ourselves, then?’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to bring your new – the one you’re living with now?’

  ‘Oh, him! What for? No, I’d just like to see you, I’ve been missing you, believe it or not.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice.’

  ‘He goes on nature rambles,’ said Shirley, ‘every bloody weekend.’

  ‘Then I’ll be a fishing widow and you’ll be a nature ramble widow,’ dared Myra, smiling – as she knew – with nervousness.

  ‘Why do you put up with it?’ demanded Shirley, suddenly full of furious black resentment that positively scorched her mother. ‘You always put up with everything. Why do you?’

  ‘But I don’t mind. Why should I? Does us good to be apart the occasional weekend.’

  ‘You always put up with everything,’ shrieked Shirley. ‘I’ve never heard you stand up to him, never.’

  ‘Stand up to him?’ said Myra, amazed. ‘Why should I need to do that?’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Shirley. ‘I can’t believe it. I simply cannot believe …’ She stopped, evidently remembering that she had just made up with her mother and did not want to quarrel again. At least, not yet. ‘Oh well, it takes all sorts,’ she conceded, as agreeably as was possible to her.

  ‘Yes, it certainly does,’ said Myra with a sigh. But she changed the sigh into a cough, for fear it would set Shirley off again.

  Storms

  In Frankfurt they told me there was a metre of water in the streets of London. These floods had come just after the great storm of wind that blew down so many of London’s trees. When I came out of the airport building in the late afternoon to find a taxi, the pastel-tinted, flying skies made everything under them seem small and temporary, and people’s faces had a look of mourning. I had a cough and a bad throat and should not have flown at all: my ears had taken punishment and I was half-deaf. I stood in the taxi queue with one eye on those unreliable skies, and wondered if the storm damage in my garden I had left two days ago had been cleared up yet, and if the floods had made things even worse. Because my mind was at odds with itself, being full of storm winds and waters and the results of cough medicines, when my turn came I hesitated: the small bobbing man in tweeds and that kind of cap you can pull down over the ears – tied now into a flat checked pancake across the top of the head – seemed more like a countryman at a market than a London taxi driver. ‘Are you going to get in, then?’ he asked, and I got in and said I lived in West Hampstead up the hill from Mill Lane. This formula is at once recognized by every London taxi driver, but he replied that he did not drive in London, and this remark seemed part of my general delirium. I joked that I had never driven with a phantom taxi driver before. He was silent, his head half turned to me, listening, then gruffly said that he was no phantom, and there was a Mill Lane near where he lived, and how did he know I didn’t mean that? So he was a bit deaf. Just as I was, that evening. He began questioning me about where I lived: he did not want to admit he didn’t know what I said every taxi driver knew and he asked if, in my opinion, the best way to go was this way or that, for he always liked to learn other people’s routes. It was hard to hear him, for my ears hurt badly, and I was leaning forward. This gave me a look of willing attention, but I had decided I’d rather he didn’t talk at all, for he did not seem at his ease, but drove like grandfather being given his turn to drive the family car on a Sunday afternoon. He gripped the wheel and peered over it and muttered about other drivers’ behaviour, and exclaimed, ‘Did you see that? Did you see what he did then?’ I thought: Well, better be philosophical, this is one of the journeys you are going to be pleased to see the end of. We were taking the slow roads in, not the quick side roads drivers use who know an area. What was this man who did not drive in London doing here? Should he be driving at all? Meanwhile we talked: I leaned forward: he half-turned his head. First of all, of course, about the big storm of three nights ago. He, at the bottom of his house, had slept through it and woke to find the trees down in the street and his garden shed’s roof gone. I told him how it had been with me, sitting up in my bed at the top of the house, having been woken suddenly about two. The sky kept changing completely, one minute black with the glimmer of sheet lightning far away across London, and then clear and starry, and the stars had a rinsed look because of the clear, washed air, then black again, and the temperature was changing, stuffy and warm and then suddenly cold, then warm again, while the trees, particularly the big ash at the bottom of the garden, were boiling and thrashing about and everything in the house was rattling and banging, and the roof seemed about to shake itself off. All the lights were on in the houses, for people were watching and waiting, but they went out when the power failed, and you could see for miles across the blacked-out city, with one remote twinkle of light far away in the dark. You don’t often see London without its lights, the last time was the big strike in the seventies, but I noticed then that it is never really black dark, light comes from somewhere: surely the candles and torches glimmering in every house are not enough to make the soft ghost’s light? It was not until I remarked that my cat had not wanted me up there, had tried to get me to move downstairs, and had gone down himself to a safe place in the heart of the house, that he became interested. ‘You should have done what your cat told you to do,’ he said, ‘
they know better than we do.’

  ‘I’m still alive,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but you never know what might have happened.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have missed that sight for anything.’

  ‘Yes, and all those branches flying about and the tiles crashing … did you notice where the cat put himself? Then that’s the safest place in the house. You should remember that. It was under a beam somewhere, wasn’t it? Then that’s it – they know. That’s where people put themselves in the blitz, under the stairs or under a good strong beam.’

  I asked if he had a cat, but he said, ‘No, a dog. I like a good dog, a dog’s a friend to you.’

  ‘But so is a cat,’ I said.

  A pause. ‘I lost my dog,’ he said, or half-shouted back at me – this conversation continued with difficulty. His voice was gruff and even angry. ‘Yes, it was a month ago. I had to take him to the vet, you see …’ The way he said this told me, This hurts, keep off, so I only said that I sympathized because a few weeks ago I had had to take a special cat to the vet, when he became too ill to live. I missed him, I said. I kept expecting him to walk in at the door.

  ‘You do miss them. I don’t expect to get used to not having my dog with me, not for a good time yet.’

  I sat back in the seat and looked at the fallen trees, their roots in the air like hands that had tried to grip the soil to keep them upright, but failed. The soil packed among the roots was already being washed out. Everywhere were broken branches, and the signs of recent high water, tidemarks of rubble and leaves and twigs. It was becoming dark. October: the clocks would soon go back for the winter.

  When we came to the Westway it was solid with cars, and he said he had never seen the Westway like this before – thus casually making his claim to being a London driver, after all. Not usual, this, to have to slow down on Westway, and then crawl along and then have to stop altogether. We agreed that the seas of water had been too much for drains, or for the electricity or gas pipes, and so some roads had had to close. We crawled … stopped … crawled. How much he hated London, he said violently, and I leaned forward again. He had been so happy, moving to a small town not far from London. London was not what it was, it was full of people he didn’t think were Londoners at all. And they talked in a funny way. Only last week he had bought a newspaper from a shop he remembered from before he left, and a boy behind the counter, just a youngster he was, had said, ‘There you go, then.’ And he had said, ‘How do you know I’m going anywhere?’ ‘It stands to reason you’re going somewhere, grandad.’ ‘Well, what’s that to you, if I am? Do you talk to your grandad like that?’

  ‘It’s a manner of speaking,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not my manner,’ he said. ‘And, if you ask me, they have no manners at all, not one of them.’

  And now I began to tell him how much I enjoyed London, from that ridiculous need to make other people like what you like. It was like a great theatre, I said; you could watch what went on all day, and sometimes I did. You could sit for hours in a café or on a bench and just watch. Always something remarkable, or amusing … and the parks, I said, Regent’s Park, Hampstead Heath: you could never get tired of them. Here he remarked that the parks had all been closed because of the storm, so many trees had come crashing down, it was enough to make you cry, he said, he had seen people stand at their gates crying their eyes out because of their trees lying smashed and broken … I was understanding that this voice was full of grief, it was not the grumbling grievance of an old man, no, this was sorrow, and it was what I had been hearing, seeing, since I got into his cab. Was all this because of his dog? Surely not!

  I went on talking about London, partly because I enjoy sharing what I feel about this city, but also because I wanted to find out what the mystery was I felt in him. Perhaps this wasn’t his taxi, and he was driving it for someone else, for some reason? Or he had stopped driving, but had had to go back to it? Or something in his own small town was making it hard for him to drive there?

  He was silent as I talked about London, but then allowed it had its advantages – or, rather, once had had advantages, but now nothing would make him leave his own little town, a country town, where there wasn’t all this noise and rush.

  On the Westway I had suggested he avoid Kilburn High Street, always crammed, but it turned out that West End Lane was as bad. ‘What are all these people doing here at this time of the evening?’ he wanted to know, clutching his wheel and glaring this way and that. ‘It’s past rush hour.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘they might be off to the theatre, or coming home after having supper in town.’

  ‘They’d do better to eat in their own homes, what are they going to get in a restaurant better than they get at home? Gadding about and spending money, never staying quiet and thinking their own thoughts.’ His voice was full of hurt.

  When I suggested a short cut round the back streets he took it, and we went along faster, through streets still full of litter and blown leaves. Here and there a tree was down, or slanting, and branches had been ripped off. Along the strip of scrubby ground that drops to the railway lines the storm had not done much damage. I commented on this, saying I was pleased for the sake of the animals and birds who live there, and he said it was a poor state of affairs when animals have to take refuge in towns because the countryside is so hard on them.

  Outside my house he had to double park. Having put my case down on the pavement he came forward to me and stood close. His head was on a level with mine. In the half dark of the street I saw he was a gingery whiskery little man, with warm brown eyes full of need. He gripped my hand urgently and said, ‘You see, driving like this all day, it numbs your mind, it dulls you, and you can’t think the thoughts you ought to have in your mind.’ Gripping my hand he turned me around so that the light from the street lamp fell on to my face and he could see it, and his hand was strong, and warm, a kind hand, with nothing of the wild dislocation that was in his voice, matching torn trees and flying skies. ‘I’m not a cab driver by rights,’ he said. ‘I was a musician. I had my own group – you’d know the name if I told you, that is, if you know music. But then … you see, it was a woman, that’s what happened, a woman. All my troubles began with her. Her father and her brothers were taxi drivers and she wanted me to be one and so for her sake that’s what I did. I spent months cycling all over London learning The Knowledge – do you know what that is?’

  ‘Of course I do. Everyone knows London taxi drivers have to pass an examination before they get a licence.’

  ‘Yes, and it’s a real exam, I can tell you, you have to know your streets, and that’s The Knowledge … well, months I was on it, months … that was a long time ago and I have another wife now.’ He gripped my hand even tighter and leaned forward to look into my face to make sure I was going to accept what he said. I don’t like people,’ he said. ‘I like animals. They are better than we are. They are kind, not cruel, like us.’ Meanwhile, a car was waiting to pass, and had given us enough time to say whatever it was we had to say. It began to hoot, persistently, like the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth. He let my hand go. ‘People are ugly and stupid,’ I heard, as he got into his seat. ‘If you don’t agree with me now, you will, you’ll see, we’re no good!’ He gave me a wave, more like a formal but comradely salute. He drove off, a small, squashed-looking figure behind the wheel, peering over it. He had told me he was going straight back to Heathrow to pick up another fare.

  Her

  What makes a salon? A potent hostess, or host? A house or room with sympathetic qualities? The guests? Easy to say that the recipe must be a combination of all these, until exceptions start knocking at your memory. But surely it would be generally agreed that these days we do not have salons, the paradigmatic At Homes were in the past. Everyone knows the names of the resplendent hostesses who were centres of politics and literature, in London and in Paris, and they certainly knew that their drawing-rooms were salons. Now it is possible to find out, long after the e
vent, that a house visited innocently was really a salon, and similarly writers may find out they were part of a Movement. Did all the Bloomsburies know what they were?

  To be a molecule in a literary group is expected of a writer, but not in this country. Writers often get this letter: ‘What literary group do you belong to, and what does it stand for?’ The reply: ‘We do not have literary groups in this country, writers tend to leave London and find solitude in the countryside, dipping back into London for special occasions or in a rare fit of gregariousness.’ There is no guarantee that they, too, will not find that they were part of some Movement or other, perhaps on the basis of a visit to a restaurant or an acquaintance. Certainly houses or living rooms, which do not know they are, will turn out to have been salons. Not long ago in London a couple on the fringes of diplomacy ‘received’ on a certain evening in every week. Invitations were not sent out, welcome guests were told, almost as an aside, that they would find food and drink, and a mix of people. These were mostly politicians and journalists, some of them attracted because of the other. To know how often titbits of information, ‘leaked’ secrets, careless talk, made paragraphs and even Leaders, or inspired television programmes, one would have to have been a regular. But this Salon was worth visiting, once, twice, out of curiosity about what goes on up there, in the high lands of influence, particularly when ‘the country’ was in a seethe about something: we tend to use this corporate word at such times.

  The house was ten minutes by taxi from the House of Commons, and politicians would drop in for a few minutes, or an hour, between appointments with Duty in the House. They tended to arrive in groups. One could imagine a Member saying to another, ‘Let’s drop over to Mix and Match for a bite.’ No one knew who made this joke first.

  The reception room extended over the first floor, overlooking a small formal garden at the back, and at the front a street with a name that was a guarantee of worth. Along one wall was a buffet, and trays of drinks circled through the guests, borne by smiling girls. When the politicians came in they brought with them the excitement familiar to anyone who has taken part in the organization of public events, the elation that goes with the conviction that one has power.