Stories

by Doris Lessing

  Both married couples made extensive love that night, as the atmosphere all evening had promised they would.

  Muriel and Frederick did not examine their behaviour as much as such compulsive examiners of behaviour might have been expected to do. The point was, the incident was out of character, unlike them, so very much not what they believed in, that they didn’t know what to think about it, let alone what to feel. Muriel had always set her face against the one-night stand. Trivial, she had said it was—the word “sordid” was over-moral. Frederick, both professionally and personally, had a lot to fsay about the unsatisfactory nature of casual sexual relationships. In his consulting room he would show carefully measured disapproval for the results—venereal disease or pregnancy—of such relations. It was not a moral judgement he was making, he always said; no, it was a hygienic one. He had been heard to use the word “messy.” Both these people had gone in, one could say on principle, for the serious affair, the deep involvement. Even in wartime, neither had had casual sex.

  So while it was hardly possible that such extraordinary behaviour could be forgotten, neither thought about it: the incident could not be included in their view of themselves.

  And besides, there was so much to do, starting the new practice, arranging the new homes.

  Besides, too, both couples were so pleased with each other, and had such a lot of love to make.

  About six weeks after that evening at the pub, Frederick had to drop in to Henry and Muriel’s to pick up something, and found Muriel alone. Again, not one word having been said, they went to the bedroom and—but I think the appropriate word here is “screwed.” Thoroughly and at length.

  They parted, and again unable to understand themselves, let the opportunity to think about what had happened slide away.

  The thing was too absurd! They could not say, for instance, that during that famous evening at the pub, when they first met, that they had eyed each other with incipient desire, or had sent out messages of need or intent. They had not done more than to say to themselves, as one does: I’d like to make love with this man, this woman, if I wasn’t well-suited already. They certainly could not have said that during the intervening six weeks they had dreamed of each other, finding their actual partners unsatisfactory. Far from it.

  For if these, Muriel and Frederick, were natural sexual partners, then so were Frederick and Althea, Henry and Muriel.

  If we now move on ten years and look back, as the guilty couple, Frederick and Muriel, then did—or rather, as both couples did, ten years being a natural time or place for such compulsive self-examiners to make profit-and-loss accounts—it is only in an effort to give the right emphasis to the thing.

  For it is really hard to get the perspective right. Suppose that I had, in fact, described the emotions of the two very emotional courtships, the emotional and satisfying affairs that preceded marriage, the exciting discoveries of marriage and the depths and harmonies both couples found, and had then said, simply: On many occasions two of these four people committed adultery, without forethought or afterthought, and these adulterous episodes, though extremely enjoyable, had no effect whatever on the marriages—thus making them sound something like small bits of grit in mouthfuls of honey. Well, but even the best of marriages can hardly be described as honey. Perhaps it is that word “adultery”—too weighty? redolent of divorces and French farce? Yet it is still in use, very much so: it is a word that people think, and not only in the law courts.

  Perhaps, to get the right emphasis, in so far as those sexual episodes were having an effect on the marriages, one might as well not mention them at all? But not to mention them is just as impossible—apart from what happened in the end, the end of the story. For surely it is absolutely outside what we all know to be psychologically possible for the partners of happy marriages, both of them founded on truth and love and total commitment, to have casual sex with close mutual friends—thus betraying their marriages, their relationships, themselves—and for these betrayals to have no effect on them at all?

  No guilt? No private disquiet? What was felt when gazing into their loving partners’ eyes, with everything open and frank between them, Frederick, Muriel, had to think: How can I treat my trusting partner like this?

  They had no such thoughts. For ten years the marriages had prospered side by side. The Joneses had produced three children, the Smiths two. The young doctors worked hard, as doctors do. In the two comfortable gardened houses, the two attractive young wives worked as hard as wives and mothers do. And all that time the marriages were being assessed by very different standards, which had nothing to do with those trivial and inelegant acts of sex—which continued whenever circumstances allowed, quite often, though neither guilty partner searched for occasions—all that time the four people continued to take their emotional pulses, as was their training: the marriages were satisfactory; no, not so satisfactory; yes, very good again. It was better in the second year than in the first, but less good in the third than in the fourth. The children brought the couples closer together in some ways, but not in others—and so on. Frederick was glad he had married delightful and sexy little Althea; and she was glad she had married Frederick, whose calm strength was her admirable complement. And Henry was pleased with Muriel, so vivacious, fearless and self-sufficing; and Muriel was similarly glad she had chosen Henry, whose quietly humorous mode of dealing with life always absorbed any temporary disquiets she might be suffering.

  All four of course, would sometimes wonder if they should have married at all, in the way everyone does; and all four would discuss with themselves and with each other, or as a foursome, the ghastliness of marriage as an institution and how it should be abolished and something else put in its place. Sometimes, in the grip of a passing attraction for someone else, all four might regret that their choices were now narrowed down to one. (At such times neither Frederick nor Muriel thought of each other; they took each other for granted, since they were always available to each other, like marriage partners.) In short, and to be done with it, at the end of ten years, and during the soul-searching and book-keeping that went on then, both couples could look back on marriages that had in every way fulfilled what they had expected, even in the way of “taking the rough with the smooth.” For where is the pleasure in sweet-without-sour? In spite of, because of, sexually exciting times and chilly times, of temporary hostilities and harmonies, of absences or illnesses, of yearning, briefly, for others—because of all this they had enjoyed a decade of profoundly emotional experience. In joy or in pain, they could not complain about flatness, or absence of sensation. And after all, emotion is the thing, we can none of us get enough of it.

  What transports the couples had suffered! What tears the two women had wept! What long delicious nights spent on prolonged sexual pleasure! What quarrels and crises and dramas! What depth of experience everywhere! And now the five children, each one an emotion in itself, each one an extension of emotion, claiming the future for similar pleasurable or at least sensational rivers of feeling.

  It was round about the eleventh year that there came a moment of danger to them all. Althea fell in love with a young doctor who had come to help in the practice while the two senior doctors took leave: the two families usually took holidays together, but this time the men went off tramping in Scotland leaving the women and children.

  Althea confided in Muriel. It was not a question of leaving her Frederick: certainly not. She could bear to hurt neither him nor the children. But she was suffering horribly, from desire and all kinds of suddenly discovered deprivations, for the sake of the young man with whom she had slept half a dozen times furtively—horrible word!—when the children were playing in the garden or were asleep at night. Her whole life seemed a desert of dust and ashes. She could not bear the future. What was the point of living?

  The two young women sat talking in Althea’s kitchen.

  They were at either end of the breakfast table around which so many jolly occasions had been share
d by them all. Althea was weeping.

  Perhaps this is the place to describe these two women. Althea was a small round dark creature, who always smelled delightful, and who was described by her husband as the most eminently satisfactory blend of femininity and commonsense. As for Muriel, she was a strong large-boned woman, fair, with the kind of skin that tans quickly, so that she always looked very healthy. Her clothes were of the kind called casual and she took a lot of trouble over them. Both women of course often yearned to be like the other.

  These two different women sat stirring coffee cups as they had done a hundred times, while the five children shouted, competed and loved in the garden, and Althea wept, because she said this was a watershed in her marriage, like eating the apple in Eden. If she told her beloved husband that she was—temporarily, she did so hope and believe—besottedly in love with this young doctor, then it must be the end of everything between them. But if she didn’t tell him, then it was betrayal. Whatever she did would have terrible results. Not telling Frederick seemed to her worse even than the infidelity itself. She had never, ever concealed anything from him. Perfect frankness and sincerity had been their rule—no, not a rule, they had never had to lay down rules for behaviour that came so excellently and simply out of their love and trust. She could not imagine keeping anything from Frederick. And she was sure he told her everything. She could not bear it, would certainly leave him at once, if she knew that he had ever lied to her. No, she would not mind infidelity of a certain kind—how could she mind?—now that she forfeited any rights in the matter! But lies, deceptions, furtiveness—no, that would be the end, the end of everything.

  Althea and Muriel stayed together, while one woman wept and talked and the other listened, stopping only when the children came in, for all that day, and all the next, and for several after that. For Muriel was understanding that it was the words and tears that were the point, not what was said: soon the energy of suffering, the tension of conflict, would have spent itself, making it all seem less important. But Muriel was determined not to listen for one minute more than was necessary. And soon she was able to advise Althea, the tears having abated, not to tell her Fred anything at all, she would just have to learn to live with a lie.

  And now of course she had to think, really to think, whether she liked it or not, about the way she had been making love—or sex—in a frivolous, and some people might say sordid, way with her best friend’s husband. She was being made to think. Most definitely she did not want to think: it was extraordinary, the strength of her instinct not to examine that area of her life.

  However, examining it, or rather, touching lightly on it, she was able to congratulate herself, or rather, both herself and dear Fred, that never had they in the presence of their spouses enjoyed that most awful of betrayals, enjoyment of their complicity while their said spouses remained oblivious. She could not remember ever, when together, their so much as looking at each other in an invitation to make love, or sex; she was positive they had never once allowed their eyes to signal: these poor fools don’t know our secret. For certainly they had never felt like this. They had not ever, not once, made plans to meet alone. They might have fallen into each other’s arms the moment the opportunity offered, as if no other behaviour was possible to them, but they did not engineer opportunities. And, having arrived in each other’s arms, all laughter and pleasure, there was never a feeling of having gone one better than Althea and Henry, of doing them down in any way. And, having separated, they did not think about what had happened, nor consider their partners: it was as if these occasions belonged to another plane altogether—that trivial, sordid, and unimportant, that friendly, good-natured and entirely enjoyable plane that lay beside, or above, or within these two so satisfactory marriages.

  It occurred to Muriel that its nature, its essence, was lack of emotion. Her feeling for Frederick, what Frederick felt for her, was all calm sense and pleasure, with not so much as a twinge of that yearning anguish we call being in love.

  And, thinking about it all, as these long sessions with weeping and miserable (enjoyable miserable?) Althea had made her do, she understood, and became determined to hold on to, her belief that her instinct, or compulsion, never to examine, brood, or make emotional profit-and-loss accounts about the sex she had with Frederick was healthy. For as soon as she did put weight on that area, start to measure and weigh, all sorts of sensations hitherto foreign to this relationship began to gabble and gobble, insist and demand. Guilt, for one.

  She came to a conclusion. It was so seditious of any idea held in common by these four and their kind that she had to look at it, as it were, sideways. It was this: that very likely the falling-in-love with the young doctor was not at all as Althea was seeing it (as anyone was likely to see it); the point was not the periods of making love—love, not sex!—which of course had been all rapture, though muted, inevitably, with their particular brand of wry and civilised understanding, but it was the spilling of emotion afterwards, the anguish, the guilt. Emotion was the point. Great emotion had been felt, had been suffered. Althea had suffered, was suffering abominably. Everyone had got it wrong: the real motive for such affairs was the need to suffer the pain and the yearning afterwards.

  The two marriages continued to grow like trees, sheltering the children who flourished beneath them.

  Soon, they had been married fifteen years.

  There occurred another crisis, much worse.

  Its prelude was this. Due to a set of circumstances not important—Althea had to visit a sick mother and took the children; the Smith children went to visit a grandmother, Henry was away—Frederick and Muriel spent two weeks alone with each other. Ostensibly they were in their separate homes, but they were five minutes’ drive from each other, and not even in a gossipy inbred little English town could neighbours see anything wrong in two people being together a lot who were with each other constantly year in and out.

  It was a time of relaxation. Of enjoyment. Of quiet. They spent nights in the same bed—for the first time. They took long intimate meals together alone, for the first time. They had seldom been alone together, when they came to think of it. It was extraordinary how communal it was, the life of the Joneses and the Smiths.

  Their relationship, instead of being the fleeting, or flighty thing it had been—rolls in the hay (literally), or in the snow, an hour on the drawingroom carpet, a quick touch-up in a telephone booth—was suddenly all dignity, privacy and leisure.

  And now Frederick showed a disposition to responsible feeling—“love” was the word he insisted on using, while Muriel nervously implored him not to be solemn. He pointed out that he was betraying his beloved Althea, that she was betraying her darling Henry, and that this was what they had been doing for years and years, and without a twinge of guilt or a moment’s reluctance.

  And without, Muriel pointed out, feeling.

  Ah yes, she was right, how awful, he was really beginning to feel that …

  For God’s sake, she cried, stop it, don’t spoil everything, can’t you see the dogs of destruction are sniffing at our door? Stop it, darling Fred, I won’t have you using words like “love,” no, no, that is our redeeming point, our strength—we haven’t been in love, we have never agonised over each other, desired each other, missed each other, wanted each other; we have not ever “felt” anything for each other….

  Frederick allowed it to be seen that he found this view of them too cool, if not heartless.

  But, she pointed out, what they had done was to help each other in every way, to be strong pillars in a foursome, to rejoice at the birth of each other’s children, to share ideas and read books recommended by the other. They had enjoyed random and delightful and irresponsible sex without a twang of conscience when they could—had, in short, lived for fifteen years in close harmony.

  Fred called her an intelligent woman.

  During that fortnight love was imminent on at least a dozen occasions. She resisted.

  But there wa
s no doubt, and Muriel saw this with an irritation made strong by self-knowledge—for of course she would have adored to be “in love” with Frederick, to anguish and weep and lie awake—that Frederick, by the time his wife came back, was feeling thoroughly deprived. His Muriel had deprived him. Of emotional experience.

  Ah emotion, emotion, let us bathe in thee!

  For instance, the television, that mirror of us all:

  A man has crashed his car, and his wife and three children have burned to death.

  “And what did you feel when this happened?” asks the bland, but humanly concerned, young interviewer. “Tell us, what did you feel?”

  Or, two astronauts have just survived thirty-six hours when every second might have meant their deaths.

  “What did you feel? Please tell us, what did you feel?”

  Or, a woman’s two children have spent all night exposed on a mountain top but were rescued alive.

  “What did you feel?” cries the interviewer. “What did you feel while you were waiting?”

  An old woman has been rescued from a burning building by a passerby, but for some minutes had every reason to think that her end had come.

  “What did you feel? You thought your number was up, you said that, didn’t you? What did you feel when you thought that?”

  What do you think I felt, you silly nit, what would you have felt in my place? What does everybody watching this programme know perfectly well what I felt? So why ask me when you know already?

  Why, madam?—of course it is because feeling is our substitute for tortured slaves and dying gladiators. We have to feel sad, anxious, worried, joyful, agonised, delighted. I feel. You feel. They felt. I felt. We were feeling … If we don’t feel, then how can we believe that anything is happening to us at all?

  And since none of us feel as much as we have been trained to believe that we ought to feel in order to prove ourselves profound and sincere people, then luckily here is the television where we can see other people feeling for us. So tell me, madam, what did you feel while you stood there believing that you were going to be burned to death? Meanwhile the viewers will be chanting our creed: We feel, therefore we are.