Stories

by Doris Lessing

  It was then she paused to look about her, and it was then her face changed and Mr. Brooke slowly went cold. He saw the room with her eyes, and saw himself, too, as she would see him henceforward.

  It was a small room, with patterned wallpaper, all roses and ribbons. The canary hung in the window, the dog’s basket was under the bed. There was nothing else of Mr. Brooke in the room that had been inhabited by so many people before him. Except the pictures, which covered most of the wallpaper.

  Marnie moved forward slowly, with a queer hunching of her shoulders, as if a draught blew on them, and Mr. Brooke went after her, unconsciously holding out his hands behind her back in appeal.

  “I must buy some pictures,” he said, trying to sound casual.

  There were film stars, bathing beauties, half-nude women all over his walls, dozens of them.

  He knew, instinctively, that he should ask for her pity, as she had asked for his. He said: “I can’t afford to buy pictures.”

  But when she turned towards him at last, he knew his expression must be wrong, for she searched his face, and looked as if she had trodden on something unpleasant.

  “I had forgotten about them,” he cried, truthfully and desperately. Then: “I’m not like that, Marnie, not really.”

  Her hand swung out and stung his cheek. “You dirty old man,” she said. “You dirty, dirty old man.”

  She ran out of his room, and as she went the landlady came in.

  “Baby-snatching?” she said. “You can’t have women here, I told you.”

  “She’s my daughter,” said Mr. Brooke.

  The door slammed. He sat on his bed and looked at the walls, and felt, for just a few moments, old and mean and small. Then he recovered himself and said aloud: “Well, and what do you expect, making me live alone?” He was addressing not only Marnie and the landlady but all the women he had seen in the street, or on the screen, or eating at the next table.

  “You wouldn’t have stayed, anyway,” he muttered at last. He began tearing the pictures off the walls. Then he slowly put them back again. He even cut out a new one from a paper called ?arisian Fancies, which he had sent for because of an advertisement, and hung it immediately over his bed. “That will give you something to think about,” he said to the landlady, whom he could hear stomping about in the next room. Then he went out and got very drunk indeed.

  Next morning the landlady saw the picture while he was in his bath, and told him he must go or she would fetch the police. “Indecent exposure, that’s what it is,” she said.

  “Do you think I care?” said Mr. Brooke.

  He was still a little drunk when he reached the office. He walked in aggressively, and at once Miss Ives sniffed and stared at him. She got up immediately and went into Mr. Jones’s room. Mr. Jones came out with her and said: “If you do this again, Brooke, you must go. There’s a limit to everything.”

  Through the open door, Mr. Brooke could see Marnie swinging herself round and round in Mr. Jones’s big chair, eating sweets.

  Towards the middle of the morning Miss Jenkins started to cry and said, “Either she goes or I do.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Miss Ives. She nodded her head up and down significantly. “It won’t last. Something will happen, one way or the other. Things can’t go on like this.” Miss Jenkins went home, saying she had a headache. Richards went into Mr. Jones’s office for something and came out, too angry to speak. The typewriters were silent next door. No one did any work except Miss Ives. It seemed everyone was waiting.

  At lunchtime they all left early. Mr. Brooke stayed in the office. His head ached, his limbs were stiff, and he couldn’t face the two flights of stairs. He ate sandwiches and then went to sleep with his head on his desk. When he woke he was still alone. He could not think clearly and wondered for a moment where he was. Then he saw flies gathering over the crumbs on his papers and got up stiffly to fetch a duster. The door into the typists’ room was closed. He opened it a few inches and peered cautiously through. He thought for a moment he was still asleep, for there were Marnie and Mr. Jones. His face was buried in her hair, and he was saying, “Please, Marnie, please, please, please …” as if he were drunk.

  Mr. Brooke stared, his eyes focussing with difficulty. Then Marnie gave a little scream and Mr. Jones jumped up. “Spying!” he said angrily.

  Mr. Brooke had lost his breath. His mouth fell open; his hands spread out helplessly. Finally, he said to Marnie, “Why didn’t you slap his face?”

  She ran across the room shouting, “You dirty old man, you dirty old man!”

  “He’s older than I am.”

  “You shut up, Brooke,” said Mr. Jones.

  “He has grownup children. He has grandchildren, Marnie.”

  Mr. Jones lifted his fist; but at that moment Marnie said triumphantly, “I’m going to marry him. I’m going to get married. So there!” Mr. Jones dropped his arm; and his angry red face became slowly complacent, grateful, adoring.

  Mr. Brooke saw that she had said that for the first time; that if he had not entered perhaps she would never have said it.

  He looked at Mr. Jones, and out of his knowledge of himself, hated him, but with a small feeling of envious admiration. The confused thought in his mind was: If he had pictures he would be careful to keep them hidden.

  After a while he said, half-pityingly, half-spitefully, to Marnie, “You are a silly little girl. You’ll be sorry.” Then he turned and groped his way out, holding on to the walls.

  Later in the afternoon Miss Ives brought him a check. He was dismissed with a bonus of ten pounds. Ten pounds for thirty years’ work! He was too numbed to notice it.

  “Did you know she was marrying him?” he asked Miss Ives, wanting to see her made angry.

  But she sounded pleased. “He told us just now.”

  “He’s older than I am….”

  “Serves her right,” snapped Miss Ives. “Little fool like that. It’s all she’s good for. Getting married. That’s all these girls think of. She’ll learn what men are.”

  And then she handed him his hat and began gently pushing him to the door. “You’d better go,” she said, but not unkindly. “He doesn’t want to see you again. He said so. And you look after yourself. You can’t go drinking like that, at your age.”

  Then she shut the door behind him. When he saw he was quite alone in the passage, he began to laugh. He laughed hysterically for some time. Then he went slowly and carefully down the stairs, holding his hat in one hand and his fountain pen in the other. He began to walk down the street, but at the corner he came back, and waited at the foot of the stairs. He wanted to say goodbye to the people he had worked with so long. He could imagine them saying in the typists’ room: “What! Old Brooke has gone, has he? I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to see him before he left.”

  The Day Stalin Died

  That day began badly for me with a letter from my aunt in Bournemouth. She reminded me that I had promised to take my Cousin Jessie to be photographed at four that afternoon. So I had; and forgotten all about it. Having arranged to meet Bill at four, I had to telephone him to put it off. Bill was a film writer from the United States who, having had some trouble with an Un-American Activities Committee, was blacklisted, could no longer earn his living, and was trying to get a permit to live in Britain. He was looking for someone to be a secretary to him. His wife had always been his secretary; but he was divorcing her after twenty years of marriage on the grounds that they had nothing in common. I planned to introduce him to Beatrice.

  Beatrice was an old friend from South Africa whose passport had expired. Having been named as a communist, she knew that once she went back she would not get out again, and she wanted to stay another six months in Britain. But she had no money. She needed a job. I imagined that Bill and Beatrice might have a good deal in common; but later it turned out that they disapproved of each other. Beatrice said that Bill was corrupt, because he wrote sexy comedies for TV under another name and acted in bad fil
ms. She did not think his justification, namely, that a guy has to eat, had anything in its favour. Bill, for his part, had never been able to stand political women. But I was not to know about the incompatibility of my two dear friends; and I spent an hour following Bill through one switchboard after another, until at last I got him in some studio where he was rehearsing for a film about Lady Hamilton. He said it was quite all right, because he had forgotten about the appointment in any case. Beatrice did not have a telephone, so I sent her a telegram.

  That left the afternoon free for Cousin Jessie. I was just settling down to work when comrade Jean rang up to say she wanted to see me during lunch hour. Jean was for many years my self-appointed guide or mentor towards a correct political viewpoint. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say she was one of several self-appointed guides. It was Jean who, the day after I had my first volume of short stories published, took the morning off work to come and see me, in order to explain that one of the stories, I forget which, gave an incorrect analysis of the class struggle. I remember thinking at the time that there was a good deal in what she said.

  When she arrived that day at lunchtime, she had her sandwiches with her in a paper bag, but she accepted some coffee, and said she hoped I didn’t mind her disturbing me, but she had been very upset by something she had been told I had said.

  It appeared that a week before, at a meeting, I had remarked that there seemed to be evidence for supposing that a certain amount of dirty work must be going on in the Soviet Union. I would be the first to admit that this remark savoured of flippancy.

  Jean was a small, brisk woman with glasses, the daughter of a Bishop, whose devotion to the workingclass was proved by thirty years of work in the Party. Her manner towards me was always patient and kindly. “Comrade,” she said, “intellectuals like yourself are under greater pressure from the forces of capitalist corruption than any other type of Party cadre. It is not your fault. But you must be on your guard.”

  I said I thought I had been on my guard; but nevertheless I could not help feeling that there were times when the capitalist press, no doubt inadvertently, spoke the truth.

  Jean tidily finished the sandwich she had begun, adjusted her spectacles, and gave me a short lecture about the necessity for unremitting vigilance on the part of the workingclass. She then said she must go, because she had to be at her office at two. She said that the only way an intellectual with my background could hope to attain to a correct workingclass viewpoint was to work harder in the Party; to mix continually with the workingclass; and in this way my writing would gradually become a real weapon in the class struggle. She said, further, that she would send me the verbatim record of the Trials in the Thirties, and if I read this, I would find my present vacillating attitude towards Soviet justice much improved. I said I had read the verbatim records a long time ago; and I always did think they sounded unconvincing. She said that I wasn’t to worry; a really sound workingclass attitude would develop with time.

  With this she left me. I remember that, for one reason and another, I was rather depressed.

  I was just settling down to work again when the telephone rang. It was Cousin Jessie, to say she could not come to my flat as arranged, because she was buying a dress to be photographed in. Could I meet her outside the dress shop in twenty minutes? I therefore abandoned work for the afternoon and took a taxi.

  On the way the taxi man and I discussed the cost of living, the conduct of the government, and discovered that we had everything in common. Then he began telling me about his only daughter, aged eighteen, who wanted to marry his best friend, aged forty-five. He did not hold with this; had said so; and thereby lost daughter and friend at one blow. What made it worse was that he had just read an article on psychology in the woman’s magazine his wife took, from which he had suddenly gathered that his daughter was father-fixated. “I felt real bad when I read that,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing to come on suddenlike, a thing like that.” He drew up smartly outside the dress shop and I got out.

  “I don’t see why you should take it to heart,” I said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we weren’t all father-fixated.”

  “That’s not the way to talk,” he said, holding out his hand for the fare. He was a small, bitter-looking man, with a head like a lemon or like a peanut, and his small blue eyes were brooding and bitter. “My old woman’s been saying to me for years that I favoured our Hazel too much. What gets me is, she might have been in the right of it.”

  “Well,” I said, “look at it this way. It’s better to love a child too much than too little.”

  “Love?” he said. “Love, is it? Precious little love or anything else these days, if you ask me, and Hazel left home three months ago with my mate George and not so much as a postcard to say where or how.”

  “Life’s pretty difficult for everyone,” I said, “what with one thing and another.”

  “You can say that,” he said.

  This conversation might have gone on for some time, but I saw my Cousin Jessie standing on the pavement watching us. I said goodbye to the taxi man and turned, with some apprehension, to face her.

  “I saw you,” she said. “I saw you arguing with him. It’s the only thing to do. They’re getting so damned insolent these days. My principle is, tip them sixpence regardless of the distance, and if they argue, let them have it. Only yesterday I had one shouting at my back all down the street because I gave him sixpence. But we’ve got to stand up to them.”

  My Cousin Jessie is a tall girl, broad-shouldered, aged about twenty-five. But she looks eighteen. She has light brown hair which she wears falling loose around her face, which is round and young and sharp-chinned. Her wide, light blue eyes are virginal and fierce. She is altogether like the daughter of a Viking, particularly when battling with bus conductors, taxi men, and porters. She and my Aunt Emma carry on permanent guerrilla warfare with the lower orders; an entertainment I begrudge neither of them, because their lives are dreary in the extreme. Besides, I believe their antagonists enjoy it. I remember once, after a set-to between Cousin Jessie and a taxi driver, when she had marched smartly off, shoulders swinging, he chuckled appreciatively and said: “That’s a real oldfashioned type, that one. They don’t make them like that these days.”

  “Have you bought your dress?” I asked.

  “I’ve got it on,” she said.

  Cousin Jessie always wears the same outfit: a well-cut suit, a round-necked jersey, and a string of pearls. She looks very nice in it.

  “Then we might as well go and get it over,” I said.

  “Mummy is coming, too,” she said. She looked at me aggressively.

  “Oh well,” I said.

  “But I told her I would not have her with me while I was buying my things. I told her to come and pick me up here. I will not have her choosing my clothes for me.”

  “Quite right,” I said.

  My Aunt Emma was coming towards us from the tearoom at the corner, where she had been biding her time. She is a very large woman and she wears navy blue and pearls and white gloves like a policeman on traffic duty. She has a big, heavy-jowled, sorrowful face; and her bulldog eyes are nearly always fixed in disappointment on her daughter.

  “There!” she said as she saw Jessie’s suit. “You might just as well have had me with you.”

  “What do you mean?” said Jessie quickly.

  “I went in to Renée’s this morning and told them you were coming, and I asked them to show you that suit. And you’ve bought it. You see, I do know your tastes as I know my own.”

  Jessie lifted her sharp battling chin at her mother, who dropped her eyes in modest triumph and began poking at the pavement with the point of her umbrella.

  “I think we’d better get started,” I said.

  Aunt Emma and Cousin Jessie, sending off currents of angry electricity into the air all around them, fell in beside me, and we proceeded up the street.

  “We can get a bus at the top,” I said.

>   “Yes, I think that would be better,” said Aunt Emma. “I don’t think I could face the insolence of another taxi driver today.” “No,” said Jessie, “I couldn’t either.”

  We went to the top of the bus, which was empty, and sat side by side along the two seats at the very front.

  “I hope this man of yours is going to do Jessie justice,” said Aunt Emma.

  “I hope so, too,” I said. Aunt Emma believes that every writer lives in a whirl of photographers, press conferences, and publishers’ parties. She thought I was the right person to choose a photographer. I wrote to say I wasn’t. She wrote back to say it was the least I could do. “It doesn’t matter in the slightest anyway,” said Jessie, who always speaks in short, breathless, battling sentences, as from an unassuageably painful inner integrity that she doesn’t expect anyone else to understand.

  It seems that at the boarding house where Aunt Emma and Jessie live, there is an old inhabitant who had a brother who is a TV producer. Jessie had been acting in Quiet Wedding with the local Reps. Aunt Emma thought that if there was a nice photograph of Jessie, she could show it to the TV producer when he came to tea with his brother at the boarding house, which he was expected to do any weekend now; and if Jessie proved to be photogenic, the TV producer would whisk her off to London to be a TV star.

  What Jessie thought of this campaign I did not know. I never did know what she thought of her mother’s plans for her future. She might conform or she might not; but it was always with the same fierce and breathless integrity of indifference.

  “If you’re going to take that attitude, dear,” said Aunt Emma, “I really don’t think it’s fair to the photographer.”

  “Oh, Mummy!” said Jessie.

  “There’s the conductor,” said Aunt Emma, smiling bitterly. “I’m not paying a penny more than I did last time. The fare from Knightsbridge to Little Duchess Street is threepence.”

  “The fares have gone up,” I said.

  “Not a penny more,” said Aunt Emma.