Walking in the Shade

by Doris Lessing

At first it was Mordecai and his then woman, Cathie, I saw most of, for he was living just down the road in Church Street for some months. It was the informal colonial style, dropping in and out, making impromptu meals. Cathie was a loud, forthright, clever woman, and there was a running joke that though she was a shiksa, she cooked better Jewish food than any Jewish woman. A lot of jokes, a lot of drink, a lot of good food. Later it was Reuben I saw most of: we were friends for years.

  This ‘group’ was in rapid change. For one thing, marriages and liaisons were breaking up—Ted Allan’s, Reuben’s, soon Mordecai’s. The wives or girlfriends who had shared early hard times and acted as agents and counsellors, even earners—out. When this happens so often, is so common, what is the point of moral indignation? It seems to me that men have to fight so hard to free themselves from their mothers, but then circumstances and their natures make their wives into mothers, and they free themselves again: not always—far from it—swapping an old model for a younger one. Young women taking on young artists or men with futures should know from the start that this may turn out to be a labour of love.

  It was a hard-drinking crowd. Now, I had hardly drunk at all since leaving Rhodesia. In Denbigh Road I had no money, and no one drank. At Joan’s we drank wine, but not regularly. With these North Americans, it certainly was not wine they drank, and a great deal of competitive expertise went on about the right way to make this or that cocktail. ‘Only one drop of vermouth in the gin, or better still, merely pass the cork over the top of it.’ That kind of thing. And competition about pills, for some of them took amazing amounts. Later Clancy Sigal and Reuben would hold out palms to each other, on which were arrayed their daily quota, while one taunted the other about how their own were stronger, weaker, reliable, dangerous, only just invented. I used to be shocked at the style of their jesting, though I enjoyed it. This was the hard, aggressive North American humour, often cruel. Later Donald Ogden Stewart wrote a play, The Kidders, put on at the Unity Theatre, where the characters ‘kidded’ themselves and each other into violence and death. It was a good play, but the Unity Theatre was then unfashionable.

  The jokes were mostly about which of them was a CIA agent. With these McCarthy exiles, I don’t think there was an agent at all, but did it matter? There wouldn’t need to be an agent, even a parttime one, for groups of exiles to damage themselves with suspicion of each other. This was my first group of exiles, and so I didn’t know paranoia has to be the rule. Soon there were the South African exiles. I was never part of that crowd, because I didn’t want to succumb to the South African weakness, which is that they tend, when away from their homeland, to meet only each other. I am pretty sure that the South African government, efficient about espionage, would have ensured that there was an agent or two around, but suppose they hadn’t? It would have made no difference, from the point of view of the level of paranoia and the cruel suspicions and persecutions of each other.

  Later still I was in Paris and met, briefly, some of the exiles from the Soviet Union. That was a truly poisonous atmosphere. They distrusted each other, knew that every French person they met was an agent for the KGB, were obsessed. I can say with confidence that I can think of no worse fate than to be one of a group of political exiles.

  Now, as I look back, what interests me about the McCarthy exiles was their ‘contradictions’—the same as communists everywhere then, but concentrated because of their insecurity. They had been communists, or fellow travellers (not Mordecai Richler; he was the odd one out), and by definition believed—surely?—in the violent overthrow of the capitalist state. Yet obviously they could not really have believed this article of faith, for they greeted with genuine derision the idea that they were or could have been any danger to the United States. This was partly because no one could believe that that powerful country could have been threatened by such a small number of people. But if you believe the ends justify the means, then why not Reds under the beds, why not Moscow gold? But no one I met believed that the Soviet Union financed communist newspapers, or Soviet-loving organisations, like the British Soviet Friendship Society and its American equivalents. The communist jargon was put into inverted commas: for instance, ‘capitalist lies’—this was partly because by now everyone knew these capitalist lies were true. Above all, what these people felt was that they were innocent: they hadn’t done anything. Well, they hadn’t, had only talked. McCarthy was ludicrous, making a fool of himself. And when his lieutenants, Cohn and Schine, came on a trip around Europe, spreading McCarthy’s message, everyone had to laugh. But McCarthy was frightening enough to his victims, as a hundred memoirs have testified—that is, the people who came up before his committees. And, too, then and later I met, or was told of, how quite small and unimportant rank-and-file Reds in the States were visited regularly by the FBI and threatened, lost their jobs, could not get employment, a steady year-in, year-out persecution. But I don’t believe there were many American communists who experienced this. I think that the life of the average Red in America, as in Britain, was about as exciting as being a member of a Women’s Institute or a church. That was certainly true of most British Reds, but things were bound to be worse in America, because Americans are an extreme people. No one ever seems to notice this, or comment on it: they always take whatever faith or crusade or persecution they go in for to extremes. But then the hurricane passes and is forgotten. Here, even the worst time of the Cold War was mild compared to the United States.

  The most interesting thing that emerges from the now plentiful books about the CIA and the FBI is the ignorance of the heresy-hunters about what communists were really like. This is probably because spy-catchers took their information from defecting Soviet spies, or professional agents, all of whom seemed to live in lurid worlds of their own. They certainly had no idea at all of how they looked to more sophisticated parts of the world, or they could not have sent those pathetic clowns Roy Cohn and David Schine out around Europe to represent them.*

  From the time I met him, I was under pressure from Jack to get myself my own place. ‘You are a big girl now.’ He said Joan bossed me about, but I knew his attitude to Joan was to do with some ‘unresolved conflict’ of his own. The ways in which I had or had not turned Joan into my mother were of course discussed with Mrs. Sussman. I thought Jack missed the point, which was that it was good for Peter to be in Joan’s house, for he loved her, and she him, and Ernest was as good as an older brother. Surely Jack could see this. He was a psychiatrist, wasn’t he? This was truly naive, but in those early days psychoanalysts and psychiatrists were considered infallible or at least given credit for insights in ways that would be impossible now: we know they are mere human beings, like the rest of us.

  Now, there is no woman in the world whose lover urges her into leaving all others to find a place of her own who does not feel what he says, even if her mind is saying something else, as a promise. I was seeing less of Jack than I had. I thought I would see more of him when I achieved my own place.

  I was missing the essential thing. It was not only me but other woman friends of his who were being told they must get their own homes. This was a man who had been very poor all his childhood, in a country and culture where security was a chimera. For a poor person, the first step into security is a roof over one’s head. Decades later, when I was involved with some very poor old women, I heard all the time: ‘a roof over my head’; ‘I got a roof over my head’; ‘You must keep the roof over your head.’ Jack’s advice to everyone was to find a house or flat in an unfashionable area, get a mortgage, and be sure there is enough space to let a room or two, which will cover expenses. This is the recipe for survival in hard times. But I had never thought like that, had moved so many times in my life I could no longer remember when or where, felt nervous at the thought of staying in one place. I had been in Joan’s for four years—1950-1954.

  It was not that I had not tried. I had been urged to buy a vast house in Blenheim Crescent, in bad repair, going for £2,500, ludicrousl
y cheap even then. I asked the bank manager for a loan, but he said that house prices were so unreasonably high they were bound to fall, and he would not advise his wife or his daughter to make such a terrible mistake. Experts. (For a time I kept a file, ‘Experts’, but I lost it in one of the moves.) If he had given me this loan, my years-long, decades-long worries over getting and keeping a roof over my head would have ended right at the beginning of my time in London.

  Suddenly there was a telephone call from Pamela Hansford Johnson, who asked me why I had not put in for the Somerset Maugham Award. It was then £400, with the proviso that it had to be spent travelling for at least 3 months. This was because Somerset Maugham felt that English writers were provincial, knew only England, and should travel. It was before the tourist explosion. I said that since I had been brought up outside the country, I thought I didn’t qualify. Never mind that, said she. She was always kind to younger writers. (In my experience, older writers are kind to the young ones.) And so I won the Somerset Maugham Award, but I had to promise to spend the £400 out of Britain. This was like being handed an apple when you are starving and told to eat it next month. I needed that £400 badly. This proviso of Maugham’s taught me that if you are going to give something, then don’t make conditions. Previous recipients, also desperate for a roof over their heads, or to eat, had cheated. One had fulfilled the letter of the law by putting the money in a bank and travelling round Italy for three months with his guitar, singing for his supper and sleeping rough. Or with kindly girls.

  There was a flat going in Warwick Road, controlled rent, for £250. It was large enough to let rooms. I gave this sum as a deposit to an Australian mother and daughter going back home. I was getting all their furniture, ‘such as it is’, included. I would go to Paris for a month. Peter would go to the Eichners’ for a month, my mother and Joan would cope for a month. Then in his holidays I would take him to the Mediterranean for a month.

  Jack was with me when the telephone call came that I had won the Somerset Maugham Prize. I was afraid to tell him—rightly, as it turned out—for he at once exclaimed, ‘And that’s it, that’s the end.’ It came from his depths, from his deep dark male depths. I was so shocked. I was so frightened. I expostulated. I begged. I appealed for justice, but that was the end, and I knew it.

  ‘You don’t love me; you only care about your writing.’

  I am sure there is not one woman writer, ever, at any time in the world’s history, who has not heard these words from her man.

  It was unjust. Far from being like George Sand, who rose from the bed of love to write all night by candlelight, while her lover lay alone, I never put writing before love, or before Jack; was infinitely amenable to any suggestions from him, giving up any writing plans for him; and in short was like Jane Austen, writing…well, if not under the cover of a blotter, then only when he was not around or expected. But we do touch here on something deeper. A woman writer, putting love before literature, when love lets her down will then make literature out of love. ‘Well, whose fault is it!’

  I put myself in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank and set myself to spend as little money as possible. Twenty-five—that’s the age for Paris; young, fancy-free, unworried. I was in my mid-thirties. I spent my days writing, but I was not living the life of a writer in Paris. I sat in cafés trying to understand the talk around me, got into clumsy conversations with strangers but made no attempt to make friends. I was low and sad, and worried, waiting for Jack to arrive, when he would see that I was not having mad passionate love affairs with all and sundry. It is no good saying now I wish I had—what a waste of Paris! Jack came for a weekend. There could scarcely have been a more misused visit to Paris than that one, but it cost very little, which was the point. Then Peter arrived, by plane, and we went down to St. Maxime for the other month. I found an extremely cheap room at the bottom of a house, large and cool, with nothing in it but a couple of mattresses on the floor, two hard chairs, and an electric plate. Small black ants were everywhere. I have never been more bored in my life, but the child, of course, loved every second, because we were out on the beach from six or seven till the sun went down. We ate picnics in our room. There were other children, but they were French and not interested in an English boy. The much reprinted and anthologised story ‘Through the Tunnel’ comes from that holiday, so you could say it paid for itself. Also a little sour story called ‘Pleasure’, about enjoying oneself.

  Back in London, it was time to move. Mrs. Sussman was supporting me. She always did. I do know how lucky I was to find her, having since seen in action therapists who do more harm than good. She told me, when I said I was worried about Jack, whom I was seeing so much less of, just as I was preparing to share a home with him, ‘But you are married to him.’ I will skip reflections on what being really married means. But probably he was married to more than one of us, apart from his wife. Like me, he had a talent for intimacy. The Shona people say that it may take years for a man and a woman to be really married. By definition, that must mean: within a framework of polygamy.

  Going to Mrs. Sussman twice or thrice a week, which I did for about three years, saved me. I knew that then; it has not taken the passing of time to tell me. She was a friend. Perhaps if I had had a good older friend, I would not have needed Mrs. Sussman. I didn’t care about the ideologies—Freud, Jung, and so forth. When she started ‘interpreting’ according to whichever creed it was, I waited for her to finish. For one thing, I had always been at home in these realms.

  Joan reached me where it hurt when she said moving would be bad for Peter. I knew that, but the flat was too small. By then he was a vigorous boy of eight. He needed more room. But what he needed most was a father, and Ernest was at least a big brother.

  Before leaving Joan’s I wrote to Somerset Maugham, thanking him for the £400. I got a grudging letter back, saying that, first, he had nothing to do with the choosing of prize winners and, two, he had never read anything I had written and, three, no one before me had ever written to thank him. So much for good manners. ‘You must always write bread-and-butter letters saying thank you.’ Or, ‘Doddis is a good little baba.’ (Under My Skin) This letter from Maugham hurt. It was meant to. But I owed him a roof over my head.

  Before committing myself to the new flat, I asked my accountant, and my bank manager, if the law was likely to change. I did not want to spend my precious £250 on a protected tenancy and then find I was out on the street. Certainly not, they both said; there is absolutely no possibility of the law changing. Well, it did, or that part of the law which affected me. Experts. But not for four years.

  Warwick Road

  SW5

  THE FLAT WAS IN WARWICK ROAD, A SINGULARLY UGLY STREET, where lorries thundered all day and most of the night. It consisted of a large kitchen, a very large living room, and upstairs two decent bedrooms and two small ones. A ‘maisonette’. This was the first place I could call mine, of all the many rooms, flats, houses I had lived in. It was all brown wood and cream paint, twenty years later to be the last word in chic, but then the very essence of dowdy provincialism. I could not have lived with it. I painted it white, all of it, and that took two and a half months. I balanced on ladders, and windowsills, on contraptions of ladders and chairs and planks, even over stairwells: I now shudder to think of what I did. A painter dropping in from downstairs, hearing that this female was usurping his place in the economy, looked at the paint rollers, just invented, and said no decent workman would use such rubbish. ‘No one can do a good job with rollers.’ Experts.

  The furniture that came with the flat was quite awful. I painted some of it. I put up cheap but pretty curtains. I dyed the ancient carpet green. A friend told me the other day that when she came into the flat and saw I had a black cover on the bed she was shocked. But it was red, surely? I remember dyeing a ‘brocade’ bedcover dark red. At first I took one of the tiny rooms as a bedroom, but then when Jack ditched me I moved downstairs, and the big living room was where I slept, worked
, lived.

  When I went into this flat or ‘maisonette’, which was really like a little house, was my approach much different from someone conquering a bit of wilderness? This flat was mine. I was not renting a corner in someone else’s home. We put our mark on new houses, flats, with curtains, colours, furniture, but I did not have the money for all that. What I hung at the windows was not what I would have chosen. It was the dazzling skin of white over every inch of the walls that was my mark. I had thought my kitchen was mine—blue linoleum floor, white woodwork, a red wallpaper—but Jack stood in it, smiling, and said, ‘What a colour box! You share more than you know with my wife. She’s got the same wallpaper in her kitchen.’ In those days there wasn’t so much choice as now, not hundreds of possible kitchen wallpapers, so this was not really so surprising. But deflating, yes.

  I could not have afforded this flat without letting a room, at least when I began. The rent was very low, but no one could let such rooms these days, even in the provinces. There were merely adequate beds, dressing tables, and wardrobes; painted board floors, everything bright and cheap. The bathroom and lavatory were shared. Peter had one of the big rooms. There was a succession of tenants: I had entered that world of the lost, the lonely, the misfits, the waifs and strays that drift from one let room to another in big cities. It was a nasty experience. It didn’t help that I was a youngish woman, by myself. My highest social point as a landlady was when a couple of minor diplomats from the French Embassy took a big room and a small one. They were charming, affectionate in the caressing French man-to-woman way, and that was certainly good for my morale. They brought me flowers, offered to do all kinds of little jobs I found difficult, like moving heavy furniture. They were good to Peter. They were fascists—I mean, real ones. This was when the French were fighting the rearguard action in Vietnam, and they called the Vietnamese little brown scared bunnies. The two handsome young men staged a rabbit hunt through the four rooms upstairs, frightening Peter because they were violent and vicious, though they were making a joke of it. They were anti-Semitic, in a conventional way. They complained about the black people in the streets: ‘They should go back where they came from.’ So depressing was this experience of letting rooms that after a few months I decided I would chance it and live on what came in, hoping it would be enough. It was, more or less.