Stories

by Doris Lessing

  The ornate bridge with its white pillars, its six iron lampposts, its balustrades, has at its ends flat oblong rectangles like pedestals, but empty. Here I paused to summon and set on watch my own personal lion. The way I see it, a park which has no extensions to or connections with the country, with uncreated wildness, has no rights; it has allowed itself to be enclosed and owned by houses. Already there are wild animals caged there, and right in its centre the roses in their circle are tamed and willing. The lion came off his dry hillside to crouch on St. Mark’s Bridge, facing inwards, a golden beast, his fore-paws tucked under an eternal chest, his eyes green and solid, the eyes of a man, but man much more than any we know. For if I could walk through those eyes, like gates, into the region between them, it would be into a form of understanding that we hear only rumours about. I left him there, as patient under the falling autumn leaves as on his rock on the slopes of (I think) the Hindu Kush, eyes unblinking, with no need to swat away thoughts, words, feelings, for he was everything he saw.

  The avenue that runs from St. Mark’s Bridge Gate to the memorial to Sir Cowasjee Jehangir was silent with warm sun, and full of people walking slowly to feel it, and through their lungs, our lungs, sweetly fanned, sixteen breaths a minute, the breath of trees whose long exhalation had begun at sunrise that morning. The trees are big here, each one claiming attention, and the air lies heavily, the felt essence of tree. Not only tree, but goat too, a dozen or so white, smelling goats, and when they are passed, the wire paddock, where wolves whose howls will keep good people awake on the winter nights that are coming play charmingly around a tree-trunk.

  Almost, almost, I reach that moment when leaves, birds, burn up separately one by one, but I fail, because of the urgency that prompts: quick, this is the last day, probably the very last before the thick cold grey fills the air between me, us, and the sun; the last day when warmth lies about us like the slow support of warm water.

  So nearly “almost” that it was a pain to come back to the worry of separateness, the pain of not knowing, not being bird, leaf, rose. But here I was, in the outer precincts still, with paths and gates to cross, not even at

  This Fountain

  Erected by the

  Metropolitan Drinking Fountain

  and Cattle Trough Association

  Was the Gift of

  SIR COWASJEE JEHANGIR

  (Companion of the Star of India)

  A Wealthy Parsee Gentleman of Bombay

  As a Token of Gratitude to the People of England for the

  Protection Enjoyed by Him and His Parsee Fellow Countrymen

  Under British Rule in India.

  Inaugurated by H.R.H. Princess Mary,

  Duchess of Teck, 1869.

  Near this, my favourite zany monument, is a green wooden cross among shining green foliage which was attended by a small boy who leaned through railings to stick on it some halfpenny stamps. His earnest tongue protruded, and over it, one after another, he wiped the orange stamps he then transferred to the cross.

  A hundred yards down the avenue appear the Mappin Terraces, far away on the right in front of tall flats on Primrose Hill, so juxtaposed it seems that bears might climb from rock shelves to balconies among potted plants. Suppose I had just this moment descended from Mars, what could I make of this park, full of beasts and colours and creatures? What, my eyes just opening on newness, would I make of a tree? What had I made of it all those years ago, opening my eyes on the terrace in a dry hot plain between the snow mountains? Suppose that I, entertaining this being from Mars, had the task of explanation: Well, sir, yes—I do see … but not quite. The same general idea, I grant you (though we are smaller), sap runs, limbs branch, but wait a minute, they are fastened to the earth, they can’t move … and besides, in every spring they suck in leaves from the soil and then every autumn spit them out again. What for? You do have a point, it is preposterous, when you think of it, tons and tons and tons of leaf, just think how many thousands of tons weighing the trunks and branches of this park alone, and all sucked up the trunks every year, then dropped again to make their own way back to the roots. Besides, we can think, yes.

  In front of me now the chestnut avenue that has, half-way down it, the cruel white boy who so casually dunks the dolphin’s head, and a few paces away the urn held by four grinning winged lions most of the year concealed by dripping leaves and petals. The chestnuts are blazing, are burning, orangy-yellow under the blue sky, and the earth is littered precisely, clearly, with solid, ribbed, curved leaves, green-gold, each one lying defined in its small shell of brown shadow. The long stretch of earth between the chestnut trunks and the sober wooden benches seems embossed with solid shapes of gold; it is all a glitter of blue and gold, and the distractions of the long avenue vanish as the light flares up, just for one moment, for one small moment, into the steady clarity of seeing what I want, then fades again, leaving me teeth-gripped, furious on behalf of us all who have so much around us that we cannot take in. I will do it, I swear, I will—and turn right between small neat trees whose trunks are marred brown satin, across the road of the Inner Circle, and in. Now I can turn left to the centre of roses (Queen Mary’s—she again, metamorphosed now out of Princess- and Duchesshood) or go on past the big knobbed tree that says it is a manna ash, and on past the next which is a weeping elm, to the little hill still fragrant with herbs, although most of them are withering.

  The herbs draw me, sniffing, the air being dry and sharp; unlike the slow breath in the avenue, here it is a quick air, a stimulant. And now, despite six stiff-uniformed park attendants sitting side by side on a bench to enjoy the sunlight, it is Italy, with tall aspiring trees around a five-jetted fountain, its white central plume a noble dropping curve. Towards it a path ascends, gently, in measured steps, with generously foliaged urns and sets of red roses and white roses; roses wild-fire coloured, and icy roses bedded in a blue haze.

  Again it comes, or becomes: the fountains can never blow in any other shape, each leaf is self-contained, each rose perpetual, the sky blazes blueness into my brain, and as the moment swells up, I begin to exult, feeling that at last I know a hint of what the lion knows always, by nature, but snap!—what I feared happens, words came out of the silence though I had sworn, had promised, that for one day they would be held off.

  “No matter how I stare with silent mind …”

  Oh, quite so, quite so (even though the words do have the stiff lilt proper to a park which, I swear, is native of a century that would understand nothing at all of us), quite so, no matter what I do, it can be guaranteed that clouds of thoughts will come packing my mind, each one better known than the last, and that words will eat up the precious sharpness of feeling like packs of greedy dogs.

  “No matter how I stare with silent mind …”

  Mayakovsky said: “Not a man, but a cloud in trousers.” Affected, I used to think this; but I don’t think so now. Today I choose him, unlikely companion—what would he make of this order, this urbanity?—for the long stroll down the descending path, my back to the plumed fountain, past the six basking attendants, past the working gardeners, past babies in prams and women with reddening necks in hastily, that-morning-resumed summer blouses. I walk, shut from the day inside a whirling white or tinted, brownish or rainbow, cloud of thought. Which nothing can dissipate or make silent.

  At the foot of this descent are the big gilded gates and a choice: left, past the ponds and the water-flowers and the rose beds, to the circle of the rose garden; right, past the restaurant, then down under trees so heavy and so huge their weight is a silence, over the little bridge and then curving leftwards again to the boats … past the boats, over more bridges and so to the road of the Outer Circle and the long way around to the zoo, where I’ll see the four giraffes stretching their astonished heads into the sky, rubbing their necks against a scratching post, four giraffes with hides marked like the cracked mud at the bottom of dried river beds. Or the elephants, swaying their trunks. Suppose that man from Mars
…? Or suppose I had just that moment jumped into this skin from another planet, what would I think? Well, would a giraffe seem more extraordinary than a tree, if you had never seen either, or elephants than roses?

  I’ll go back by the rose garden, to Madame Louis Laperrière, Monique, and Rose Gaujat; Soraya and Helen Traubel; Rose Hellène, Pink Parfait, Peace and Malagana. We sit on unobtrusive benches, looking at the coloured roses under this foreign sun, smiling at each other and at ourselves, and a woman sits down and tells us all in confidence: “I’ve just seen a squirrel, its tail was all shining, like a girl’s hair, it’s because of the sun you know.” A retired gentleman comes to claim his seat, opens a newspaper, but is observed to let it fall again, where it lies gently palpitating on his stomach, while his eyes blink slowly and in wonder at the garden before they close.

  It is slow here, a drugged place, where voices lower and people walking through put out a finger to almost touch a petal. When the shadows from the tall garlandlike climbing roses have moved enough to make a different place of it, I leave, and walk out of the great gilded gates to where a tree glitters, each leaf shaking separately, in a million different rhythms. All my resolves for the day have been stolen from me by the sweet delusions of the rose garden, so I tell myself stolidly that this frantic dance means no more than that the wind is there, and that a tree has no hands, nor eyes, nor wants them, and so I went retracing paths until towards the northeast exit a man shovelled leaves into a barrow so fast it seemed as if a continuous stream of gold showered from his spade.

  The tall houses of the long terraces stood silent, their windowpanes on fire.

  Since I had entered the park, the earth had spun a tenth of its way around itself and thousands of miles around the sun; and the sun had sped, dragging us with it, in an inconceivable curve towards …

  As I walked past the shower of gold from the man’s shovel, the wind swerved leaves off the barrow, tugged them off the trees, scattered the brilliant grass with copper and with gold.

  Leaves, words, people, shadows, whirled together towards autumn and the solstice.

  Outside the park, on the pavement, there she was. Still grinning, still tugging at her red-spotted kerchief, apparently brimful of glee, she stood near, or rather, under, a huge policeman who looked down at her, quite expressionless, his features determined to make no comment. But “Is that so?” his pose said, or even “Fancy that!” to her news of her relationship with the sun, the moon, and this our wet planet.

  Not a Very Nice Story

  This story is difficult to tell. Where to put the emphasis? Whose perspective to use? For to tell it from the point of view of the lovers (but that was certainly not their word for themselves—from the viewpoint, then, of the guilty couple) is as if a life were to be described through the eyes of some person who scarcely appeared in it; as if a cousin from Canada had visited, let’s say, a farmer in Cornwall half a dozen unimportant times, and then wrote as if these meetings had been the history of the farm and the family. Or it is as if a stretch of years were to be understood in terms of the extra day in Leap Year.

  To put it conventionally is simple: two marriages, both as happy as marriages are, both exemplary from society’s point of view, contained a shocking flaw, a secret cancer, a hidden vice.

  But this hidden horror did not rot the marriages, and seemed hardly to matter at all: the story can’t be told as the two betrayed ones saw it; they didn’t see it. They saw nothing. There would be nothing to tell.

  Now, all this was true for something like twenty years; then something happened which changed the situation. To be precise, what happened was the death of one of the four people concerned. But at any moment during those twenty years, what has been said would have been true: conventional morality would judge these marriages to have a secret face all lies and lust; from the adulterers’ point of view, what they did was not much more important than sharing a taste for eating chocolate after the doctor has said no.

  After that death, however, the shift of emphasis: the long unimportance of the twenty years of chocolate-eating could be seen as a prelude to something very different; could be seen as heartless frivolity or callousness redeemed providentially by responsibility? But suppose the death had not occurred?

  It is hard to avoid the thought that all these various ways of looking at the thing are nonsense….

  Frederick Jones married Althea, Henry Smith married Muriel, at the same time; that is, in 1947. Both men, both women, had been much involved in the war, sometimes dangerously. But now it was over, they knew that it had been the way it had gone on and on that had affected them most. It had been endless.

  There is no need to say much about their emotions when they married. Frederick and Althea, Henry and Muriel, felt exactly as they might be expected to feel, being their sort of people—middleclass, liberal, rather literary—and in their circumstances, which emotionally consisted of hungers of all kinds, but particularly for security, affection, warmth, these hungers having been heightened beyond normal during the long war. They were all four aware of their condition, were able to see themselves with the wryly tolerant eye of their kind. For they at all times knew to a fraction of a degree the state of their emotional pulse, and were much given to intelligent discussion of their individual psychologies.

  Yet in spite of views about themselves which their own parents would have regarded as intolerable to live with, their plans and aims for themselves were similar to those of their parents at the same age. Both couples wished and expected that their marriages would be the bedrock of their lives, that they would have children and bring them up well. And it turned out as they wanted. They also expected that they would be faithful to each other.

  At the time these marriages took place, the couples had not met. Both Doctor Smith and Doctor Jones, separately, had had the idea of going into partnership and possibly founding a clinic in a poor area. Both had been made idealists by the war, even socialists of a non-ideological sort. They advertised, made contact by letter, liked each other, and bought a practice in a country town in the west of England where there would be many poor people to look after, as well as the rich.

  Houses were bought, not far from each other. While the two men were already friends, with confidence in being able to work together, the wives had not met. It was agreed that it was high time this event should take place. An occasion was to be made of it. The four were to meet for dinner in a pub five miles outside the little town. That they should all get on well was known by them to be important. In fact both women had made small humorous complaints that if their “getting on” was really considered so important, then why had their meeting been left so late?

  As the two cars drove up to the country inn, the same state of affairs prevailed in each. There was bad humour. The women felt they were being patronised; the men felt that the women were probably right but were being unreasonable in making a fuss when after all the main thing was to get settled in work and in their homes. All four were looking forward to that dinner—the inn was known for its food—while for their different reasons they resented being there at all. They arrived in each other’s presence vivid with variegated emotions. The women at once knew they liked each other—but after all, they might very well have not liked each other!—and made common cause about the men. The four went into the bar where they were an animated and combative group.

  By the time they moved into the diningroom, ill-humour had vanished. There they sat, with their wine and good food. They were attracting attention, because they were obviously dressed up for a special occasion, but chiefly because of their own consciousness of well-being. This was the peak of their lives; the long tedium of the war was over; the men were still in their early thirties, the women in their twenties. They were feeling as if at last their real lives were starting. They were all goodlooking. The men were of the same type: jokes had been made about that already. They were both dark, largely built, with the authority of doctors; “comfortable,” as the wive
s said. And the women were pretty. They soon established (like showing each other their passports, or references of decency and reliability) that they shared views on life—tough, but rewarding; God—dead; children—to be brought up with the right blend of permissiveness and discipline; society—to be cured by commonsense and mild firmness but without extremes of any sort.

  Everything was well for them; everything would get better.

  They sat a long time over their food, their wine, and their happiness, and left only when the pub closed, passing into a cold clear night, frost on the ground. It happened that conversations between Frederick Jones and Muriel Smith, Althea Jones and Henry Smith, were in progress, and the couples, so arranged, stood by their respective cars.

  “Come back to us for a nightcap,” said Henry, assisting his colleague’s wife in beside him, and drove off home.

  Frederick and Muriel, not one word having been said, watched them go, then turned to each other and embraced. The embrace can best be described as being the inevitable continuation of their conversation. Frederick then drove a few hundred yards into a small wood, where the frost shone on the grass, stopped the car, flung down his coat, and then he and Muriel made love—no, that’s not right, had sex, with vigour and relish and enjoyment, while nothing lay between them and their nakedness and some degrees of frost but a layer of tweed. They then dressed, got back into the car, and went back to town, where Frederick drove Muriel to her own home, came in with her for the promised nightcap, and took his own wife home.