Stories

by Doris Lessing

  He was in the grip of terror. He was afraid he might slide off the seat. He could no longer help himself.

  “London’s a big place, for strangers,” said the woman.

  “But it makes a nice change,” said Charlie, trying hard.

  The woman, delighted that a real conversation was at last under way, settled her shabby old head against a leather bulge, and said: “Yes, it does make a nice change.” The shine on the leather confused Charlie’s eyes; he glanced over at the magazine, but its glitter, too, seemed to invade his pupils. He looked at the dirty floor for comfort, and said: “It’s good for people to get a change now and then.”

  “Yes, that’s what I tell my husband, don’t I, Father? It’s good for us to get away now and then. We have a married daughter in Streatham.”

  “It’s a great thing, family ties.”

  “Yes, but it’s a drag,” said the man. “Say what you like, but it is. After all, I mean, when all is said and done.” He paused, his head on one side, with a debating look, waiting for Charlie to take it up.

  Charlie said: “There’s no denying it, say what you like, I mean, there’s no doubt about that” And he looked interestedly at the man for his reply.

  The woman said: “Yes, but the way I look at it, you’ve got to get out of yourself sometimes, look at it that way.”

  “It’s all very well,” said the husband, on a satisfied but grumbling note, “but if you’re going to do that, well, for a start-off, it’s an expense.”

  “If you don’t throw a good penny after a bad one,” said Charlie judiciously. “I mean, what’s the point?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” said the woman excitedly, her old face animated. “That’s what I say to Father, what’s the point if you don’t sometimes let yourself go?”

  “I mean, life’s bad enough as it is,” said Charlie, watching the magazine slowly lower itself. It was laid precisely on the seat. The girl now sat, two small brown-gloved hands in a ginger-tweeded lap, staring him out. Her blue eyes glinted into his, and he looked quickly away.

  “Well, I can see that right enough,” said the man, “but there again, you’ve got to know where to stop.”

  “That’s right,” said Charlie, “you’re dead right.”

  “I know it’s all right for some,” said the man, “I know that, but if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to consider. That’s what I think.”

  “But Father, you know you enjoy it, once you’re there and Joyce has settled you in your corner with your own chair and your cup to yourself.”

  “Ah,” said the man, nodding heavily, “but it’s not as easy as that, now, is it? Well, I mean, that stands to reason.”

  “Ah,” said Charlie, shaking his head, feeling it roll heavily in the socket of his neck, “but if you’re going to consider at all, then what’s the point? I mean, what I think is, for a start-off, there’s no doubt about it.”

  The woman hesitated, started to say something, but let her small bright eyes falter away. She was beginning to colour.

  Charlie went on compulsively, his head turning like a clockwork man’s: “It’s what you’re used to, that’s what I say, well I mean. Well, and there’s another thing, when all is said and done, and after all, if you’re going to take one thing with another …”

  “Stop it,” said the girl, in a sharp high voice.

  “It’s a question of principle,” said Charlie, but his head had stopped rolling and his eyes had focussed.

  “If you don’t stop I’m going to call the guard and have you put in another compartment,” said the girl. To the old people she said in a righteous scandalised voice: “Can’t you see he’s laughing at you? Can’t you see?” She lifted the magazine again.

  The old people looked suspiciously at Charlie, dubiously at each other. The woman’s face was very pink and her eyes bright and hot.

  “I think I am going to get forty winks,” said the man, with general hostility. He settled his feet, put his head back, and closed his eyes.

  Charlie said: “Excuse me,” and scrambled his way to the corridor over the legs of the man, then the legs of the woman, muttering: “Excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry.”

  He stood in the corridor, his back jolting slightly against the shifting wood of the compartment’s sides. His eyes were shut, his tears running. Words, no longer articulate, muttered and jumbled somewhere inside him, a stream of frightened protesting phrases.

  Wood slid against wood close to his ear, and he heard the softness of clothed flesh on wood.

  “If it’s that bloody little bint I’ll kill her,” said a voice, small and quiet, from his diaphragm.

  He opened his murderous eyes on the woman. She looked concerned.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, stiff and sullen, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …”

  “It’s all right,” she said, and laid her two red hands on his crossed quivering forearms. She took his two wrists, and laid his arms gently down by his sides. “Don’t take on,” she said, “it’s all right, it’s all right, son.”

  The tense rejection of his flesh caused her to take a step back from him. But there she stood her ground and said: “Now look, son, there’s no point taking on like that, well, is there? I mean to say, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s no other way of looking at it.”

  She waited, facing him, troubled but sure of herself.

  After a while Charlie said: “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  She nodded and smiled, and went back into the compartment. After a moment, Charlie followed her.

  Two Potters

  I have only known one potter in this country, Mary Tawnish, and she lives out of London in a village where her husband is a school-teacher. She seldom comes to town, and I seldom leave it, so we write.

  The making of pots is not a thing I often think of, so when I dreamed about the old potter it was natural to think of Mary. But it was difficult to tell her; there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don’t, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other. Mary Tawnish says, when others relate their dreams: “I’ve never had a dream in my life.” And adds, to soften or placate: “At least, I don’t remember. They say it’s a question of remembering?”

  I would have guessed her to be a person who would dream a good deal, I don’t know why.

  A tall woman, and rather large, she has bright brown clustering hair, and brown eyes that give the impression of light, though not from their surface: it is not a “bright” or “brilliant” glance. She looks at you, smiling or not, but always calm, and there is an impression of light, which seems caught in the structure of colour in the iris, so sometimes her eyes look yellow, set off by smooth brown eyebrows.

  A large, slow-moving woman, with large white slow hands. And a silent one—she is a listener.

  Her life has been a series of dramas: a childhood on the move with erratic parents, a bad first marriage, a child that died, lovers, but none lasting; then a second marriage to William Tawnish who teaches physics and biology. He is a quick, biting, bitter little man with whom she has three half-grown children.

  More than once I have told her story, without comment, in order to observe the silent judgement: Another misfit, another unhappy soul, only to see the judger confounded on meeting her, for there was never a woman less fitted by nature for discord or miseries. Or so it would seem. So it seems she feels herself, for she disapproves of other people’s collisions with themselves, just as if her own life had nothing to do with her.

  The first dream about the potter was simple and short. Once upon a time … there was a village or a settlement, not in England, that was certain, for the scene was of a baked red-dust bareness. Low rectangular structures, of simple baked mud, also reddish-brown, were set evenly on the baked soil, yet because some were roofless and others in the process of crumbling, and others half-built, there was nothing finished or formed about this place. And for leagues and leagues, in all directions, the great plain, o
f reddish earth, and in the middle of the plain the settlement that looked as if it were hastily moulded by a great hand out of wet clay, allowed to dry, and left there. It seemed uninhabited, but in an empty space among the huts, all by himself, working away on a primitive potter’s wheel turned by foot, was an old man. He wore a garment of coarse sacking over yellowish and dusty limbs. One bare foot was set in the dust near me, the cracked toes spread and curled. He had a bit of yellow straw stuck in close grizzling hair.

  When I woke from this dream I was rested and excited, in spite of the great dried-up plain and the empty settlement one precarious stage from the dust. In the end I sat down and wrote to Mary Tawnish, although I could hear her flat comment very clearly: Well, that’s interesting. Our letters are usually of the kind known as “keeping in touch.” First I enquired about her children, and about William, and then I told the dream: “For some reason I thought of you. I did know a man who made pots in Africa. The farmer he worked for discovered he had a talent for potmaking (it seemed his tribe were potters by tradition), because when they made bricks for the farm, this man, Elija, slipped little dishes and bowls into the kiln to bake with the bricks. The farmer used to pay him a couple of shillings a week extra, and sold the dishes to a dealer in the city. He made simple things, not like yours. He had no wheel, of course. He didn’t use colour. His things were a darkish yellow, because of the kind of soil on that farm. A bit monotonous after a bit. And they broke easily. If you come up to London give me a ring….”

  She didn’t come, but soon I had a letter with a postscript: “What an interesting dream, thanks so much for telling me.”

  I dreamed about the old potter again. There was the great, flat, dust-beaten reddish plain, ringed by very distant blue-hazed mountains, so far away they were like mirages, or clouds, or low-lying smoke. There was the settlement. And there the old potter, sitting on one of his own upturned pots, one foot set firmly in the dust, and the other moving the wheel; one palm shaping the clay, the other shedding water which glittered in the low sullen glare in flashes of moving light on its way to the turning wet clay. He was extremely old, his eyes faded and of the same deceiving blue as the mountains. All around him, drying in rows on a thin scattering of yellow straw, were pots of different sizes. They were all round. The huts were rectangular, the pots round. I looked at these two different manifestations of the earth, separated by shape; and then through a gap in the huts to the plain. No one in sight. It seemed no one lived there. Yet there sat the old man, with the hundreds of pots and dishes drying in rows on the straw, dipping his hand into an enormous jar of water and scattering drops that smelled sweet as they hit the dust and pitted it.

  Again I thought of Mary. But they had nothing in common, that poor old potter who had no one to buy his work, and Mary who sold her strange coloured bowls and jugs to the big shops in London. I wondered what the old potter would think of Mary’s work—particularly what he’d think of a square flat dish I’d bought from her, coloured a greenish-yellow. The square had, as it were, slipped out of whack, and the surface is rough, with finger marks left showing. I serve cheese on it. The old man’s jars were for millet, I knew that, or for soured milk.

  I wrote and told Mary the second dream, thinking: Well, if it bores or irritates her, it’s too bad. This time she rang me up. She wanted me to go down to one of the shops which had been slow in making a new order. Weren’t her things selling? she wanted to know. She added she was getting a fellow feeling for the old potter; he didn’t have any customers either, from the size of his stock. But it turned out that the shop had sold all Mary’s things, and had simply forgotten to order more.

  I waited, with patient excitement, for the next instalment, or unfolding, of the dream.

  The settlement was now populated, indeed, teeming, and it was much bigger. The low flat rooms of dull earth had spread over an area of some miles. They were not separated now, but linked. I walked through a system of these rooms. They were roughly the same size, but set at all angles to each other so that, standing in one, it might have one, two, three doors, leading to a corresponding number of mud rooms. I walked for something like half a mile through low dark rooms without once needing to cross a roofless space, and when I emerged in the daylight, there was the potter, and beyond him a marketplace. But a poor one. From out of his great jars, women, wearing the same sort of yellowish sacking as he, sold grain and milk to dusty, smallish, rather listless people. The potter worked on, under heavy sunlight, with his rows and rows of clay vessels drying on the glinting yellow straw. A very small boy crouched by him, watching every movement he made. I saw how the water shaken from the old fingers on the whirling pot flew past it and spattered the small intent poverty-shaped face with its narrowed watching eyes. But the face received the water unflinching, probably unnoticed.

  Beyond the settlement stretched the plain. Beyond that, the thin, illusory mountains. Over the red flat plain drifted small shadows: they were from great birds wheeling and banking and turning.

  I wrote to Mary and she wrote back that she was glad the old man had some customers at last, she had been worried about him. As for her, she thought it was time he used some colour, all that red dust was depressing. She said she could see the settlement was short of water, since I hadn’t mentioned a well, let alone a river, only the potter’s great brimming jar which reflected the blue sky, the sun, the great birds. Wasn’t a diet of milk and millet bad for people? Here she broke off to say she supposed I couldn’t help all this, it was my nature, and “Apropos, isn’t it time your poor village had a storyteller at least? How bored the poor things must be!”

  I wrote back to say I was not responsible for this settlement, and whereas if I had my way, it would be set in groves of fruit trees and surrounded by whitening cornfields, with a river full of splashing brown children. I couldn’t help it, that’s how things were in this place, wherever it was.

  One day in a shop I saw a shelf of her work and noticed that some of them were of smooth, dully shining brown, like polished skin—jars, and flat round plates. Our village potter would have known these, nothing to surprise him here. All the same, there was a difference between Mary’s consciously simple vessels and the simplicity of the old potter. I looked at them and thought: Well, my dear, that’s not going to get you very far…. But I would have found it hard to say exactly what I meant, and in fact I bought a plate and a jar, and they gave me great pleasure, thinking of Mary and the old potter linked in them, between my hands.

  Quite a long time passed. When I dreamed again, all the plain was populated. The mountains had come closer in, reaching up tall and blue into blue sky, circumscribing the plain. The settlements, looked at from the height of the mountain tops, seemed like patches of slightly raised surface on the plain. I understood their nature and substance: a slight raising of the dust here and there, like the frail patterning of raindrops hitting dry dust, pitting it, then the sun coming out swiftly to dry the dust. The resulting tiny fragile patterned crust of dried dust—that gives, as near as I can, the feeling the settlements gave me, viewed from the mountains. Except that the raised dried crusts were patterned in rectangles. I could see the tiny patternings all over the plain. I let myself down from the mountains, through the great birds that wheeled and floated, and descended to the settlement I knew. There sat the potter, the clay curving under his left hand as he flicked water over it from his right. It was all going on as usual—I was reassured by his being there, creating his pots. Nothing much had changed, though so much time had passed. The low flat monotonous dwellings were the same, though they had crumbled to dust and raised themselves from it a hundred times since I had been here last. No green yet, no river. A scum-covered creek had goats grazing beside it, and the millet grew in straggly patches, flattened and brown from drought. In the marketplace were pinkish fruits, lying in heaps by the soft piles of millet, on woven straw mats. I didn’t know the fruit: it was small, about plum-size, smooth-skinned, and I felt it had a sharp pulpy ta
ste. Pinky-yellow skins lay scattered in the dust. A man passed me, with a low slinking movement of the hips, holding his sacklike garment in position at his side with the pressure of an elbow, staring in front of him over the pink fruit which he pressed against sharp yellow teeth.

  I wrote and told Mary the plain was more populated, but that things hadn’t improved much, except for the fruit. But it was astringent, I wouldn’t care for it myself.

  She wrote back to say she was glad she slept so soundly, she would find such dreams depressing.

  I said there was nothing depressing about it. I entered the dream with pleasure, as if listening to a storyteller say: Once upon a time …

  But the next was discouraging, I woke depressed. I stood by the old potter in the marketplace, and for once his hands were still, the wheel at rest. His eyes followed the movements of the people buying and selling, and his mouth was bitter. Beside him, his vessels stood in rows on the warm glinting straw. From time to time a woman came picking her way along the rows, bending to narrow her eyes at the pots. Then she chose one, dropped a coin in the potter’s hand, and bore it off over her shoulder.

  I was inside the potter’s mind and I knew what he was thinking. He said: “Just once, Lord, just once, just once!” He put his hand down into a patch of hot shade under the wheel and lifted on his palm a small clay rabbit which he held out to the ground. He sat motionless, looking at the sky, then at the rabbit, praying: “Please, Lord, just once.” But nothing happened.

  I wrote Mary that the old man was tired with long centuries of making pots whose life was so short: the litter of broken pots under the settlement had raised its level twenty feet by now, and every pot had come off his wheel. He wanted God to breathe life into his clay rabbit. He had hoped to see it lift up its long red-veined ears, to feel its furry feet on his palm, and watch it hop down and off among the great earthenware pots, sniffing at them and twitching its ears—a live thing among the forms of clay.