Walking in the Shade

by Doris Lessing

  It was at that meal that Penelope congratulated me on my enterprise in going ‘to get material’ for In Pursuit of the English, which had recently come out. I said I hadn’t been getting material, it was necessity. I had had no money to speak of, a small child, and the only people prepared to take me in with a small child was that warm-hearted Mediterranean household. Penelope had always been rich. I was angry: the moment epitomised one of the reasons I sometimes felt uncomfortable in these circles and why I felt at home with, let’s say, the new young people at the Royal Court: none of them would have needed to have it explained to them.

  Later I knew Jill Bennett too. I thought then, and think now, that any woman allowing herself to be in love with John Osborne must be crazy. Yet all his women were remarkable, and all mourned him when he ditched them. My judgements are those of the noncombatant. With me he was never anything but courteous and kind. Affable, that is the word. Magnanimous in his judgements. Gentleman John, that was his real nature—and then something deep and spiteful forced him into venom.

  I felt kin to John because of that pain of his, like an abscess deep within. I understood the throb of anguish, making you irritable. I went to dinner with John two or three times at Jocelyn Rickards’s house. It was after Mary Ure but before Penelope Gilliatt. This leads me to the reflection that the reigns of mistresses are often more secure than those of wives. At least, Jocelyn was the only one of his women he was complimentary about after he had broken with her. Tony Richardson was there. This was the time of Woodfall Productions. They were working on their films and spent a lot of time together. The two men were irritable, affectionate, competitive, and in any gathering were the centre because of the electricity they engendered. In his memoirs John called it a mariage blanc, but I thought they were like brothers, and as with siblings, behind everything said or not said were suggestions of long, intense entwined experience. Yet they had not known each other long. How precarious, chancy, and brief those friendships were: looking back, what I see is how we were all being blown together into quick, intense, trustful comradeship, as if we were members of an extended family, and then a shift of the kaleidoscope, and for no reason at all—apparently—new arrangements of people. I used to meet John here and there, with Penelope, with Jill Bennett. He went in for ambiguous postcards: he sent me several, I think after Penelope but before Jill, or perhaps it was after Jill but before his final wife. They beckoned you forward but at the same time slapped you back. For instance, the picture of a grim seaside street with Bed-and-Breakfast houses that had ‘Vacancies’ on them, or ‘To Let’. He wrote, ‘I wish you were here.’ A couple of kisses, but at first glance you might think they were crosses on graves. Unsigned. Or, ‘J.’ Then, ‘Why haven’t you rung?’ Speech after long silence. I did nothing about it. I was very fond of John. But if there was ever a man who needed allowances made, attention paid, constant vigilance for fear you might say something he would find wounding, it was John, and I was so beset by burdens of all kinds then that it was all too much of a good thing. I have said that I was born with skins too few, but John seemed to have no defences at all. He reminded me of a young dog who has been badly treated. It bravely confronts the world, licks your hand, is grateful for a caress, but its hide is shivering and shrinking when a hand comes too close, away from a possible blow. I used to dream about John for years. Now, those were interesting dreams. Straightforward sexual dreams are not interesting; you wake and think, Oh, one of those. But there is a kind of dream about a man that is affectionate, friendly, and with a flicker of amorousness, like old lovers meeting, and there is regret and humour and charm. Charm—the main thing; landscapes that seem to smile; nothing to do with ordinary life.

  Two stories came out of that time. ‘Between Men’, which later made a brilliant half-hour television play, very funny, and won a prize, and ‘The Side Benefits of an Honourable Profession’.

  I found all these fashionable Lefties irritating, no matter how much I liked them personally. There is such a thing as revolutionary snobbishness: What right have you to call yourself, etc. They had all put on Marxism like the latest jacket and enjoyed themselves shocking people. They knew nothing of the history of communism and would not listen to anyone who had actually been in the Party.

  They were romantics, sentimental. Tears came into their eyes at any number of heartbreaking themes. There was a novel about poverty in southern Italy by Carlo Levi, called Christ Stopped at Eboli. It was always in a prominent position on Tony Richardson’s desk. Ken Tynan was deeply moved by Dr. Schweitzer, as everyone was then. I did remark that people like Schweitzer had worked, were working, in hospitals up and down Africa without anyone noticing them, but we need a figurehead, an exemplar; a multiplicity of admirable people is too much for us. Some humble doctor, or a nun, or a missionary, working in a bare and ill-equipped hospital in the bush for years, unfunded, isolated—no excitement in that. We need Dr. Schweitzer to turn his back ostentatiously on European delights. All over India, so I am told, people work in intolerable conditions relieving poverty, but it takes Mother Teresa to make our eyes fill with tears.

  An incident sums it all up for me. A group of theatre notables, all Lefties, were taken to Germany to meet and mingle with the Brecht Ensemble. The Wall was built by then. They were taken there by a woman who had left Germany as a child refugee. Her relatives were dead or had suffered under Hitler: her whole life had been wrenched off course by Hitler and then Stalin. There did come a moment when it occurred to them that this underling, this nonentity of a PR girl, was a full representative of the tragedies of Europe. ‘You haven’t been back to Germany since you left as a refugee?’

  ‘No, this is the first time. I haven’t had the money,’ said she. Their faces, she said, froze over. It was too much for them to take in, she said. They didn’t know how to cope with the real thing, a real victim, a survivor. And that was that; they continued to treat her as they had been doing, a useful employee.

  An odd thing happened with Lindsay Anderson. We hadn’t met for some time, and he rang to say there was something urgent. He and David Storey had been working on the film script of This Sporting Life for a year, and they were stale. Would I read the novel and see what I thought? I read it overnight and in the morning telephoned to say I was excited by it. Lindsay came with three big folders—three scripts. He did not want me to do an original script; I was to read the three failed scripts and then cobble together a new one from them. I had a week to do this. I was angry: surely this was as unprofessional as one could get. If he had told me I would have to hash three botched scripts into one, I would have said no from the start. And I was disappointed, because by now the tale had taken hold of me. But no one was ever angry with Lindsay for long. Lovable, that is what he was, always, even when he got ill and old and unreasonable, for as with many of us, his failings were concentrated by age. Liking Lindsay was a spikey business. He was another who long ago had been deeply and irrevocably hurt. He said it was his public school, about which he was bitter. He jested about it, but jokes don’t cure wounds.

  On the rare occasions when we met, we argued. Of all the fashionable Lefties, I found him the most exasperating. Every second person mentioned was a ‘sell-out’. Sell-out from what, to what? No one, and certainly not Lindsay, could ever say. This was a fashionable cant word for years. There are phrases that seem designed to stop thought, and ‘sell-out’ is one. Another one is ‘committed’, which was much in vogue. It meant someone who supports the same political aims or actions. Another was ‘cause’. It has moralistic overtones, for a Cause is by definition good. ‘Fascist’ has only quite recently gone. Meaning anyone even vaguely right-wing.

  There were dozens of cant words from the Soviet Union. For a time Edward Thompson, John Saville, and the rest of us were ‘revisionists’, meaning that we were deviants from the Party Line, were seen as having tried to change the Party Line, which had to be the correct one. Another of their words was ‘correct’.

  I liked the f
ilm* This Sporting Life when it came out, but thought it did not make enough of the pride of body, physical pride, of young working-class men who see themselves at a peak of their lives and ahead of them nothing but a descent into grey ordinariness.

  Reuben Ship was now married to Elaine Grand. She had been the ‘glamour girl’ of early Canadian television. She was like Lucille Ball and Lana Turner, with round tight bottom (or ass), tight pert protruding breasts, a friendly, sisterly sexiness. For a while Canadian and American young women coming over here looked like this, but then the sixties demanded new body shapes: combative, confrontational. Most of the Canadian community had changed partners. Reuben was an extraordinarily nice man…do I mean ‘good’? No. He had a dimension to him, a humanity. There are plenty of people you can say anything to when current tolerances allow a particular theme, but there is no echo back from their experience or their imaginative comprehension. With Reuben you could say anything and be understood. One reason I enjoyed visiting him was because he liked Peter and was kind to this boy so desperate for a father.

  Reuben was unlucky in his timing. He wrote some film scripts, and they got made, one with Norman Wisdom, but his talent was for angry satire, as with The Investigator, and he was too early for the satire revolution of the sixties. He died of drinking too much, but I don’t know if that was over disappointment about his work.

  When Peter was away at school, then Reuben and Elaine were free to pursue their plans to get me married. I might find waiting apprehensively as I entered their place in Chelsea that male guest the spare or single woman finds so often—not as much now as then. But unattached women make even close friends nervous. They tried to match me with visiting Canadians or Americans. At the first possible moment, I would whisper to him, ‘It’s all right—I don’t want to get married.’ Then we became like two children who have a secret from the grown-ups. ‘What’s the joke?’ Meanwhile the two intended sat side by side, looking guilty, but pleased with themselves.

  One of the men they inveigled me to meet is memorable for reasons that even at the time seemed alarming. He had been left a widower with a very small daughter, aged two or three. He would describe to me how they slept in the same bed, and he made sure she was familiar with his body and encouraged to examine his private parts and even play with them. ‘She’s never going to suffer from penis envy’, he would say, proud of himself for defying obscurantism. I suggested that this practice might have unforeseen results, such as that later she might never be able to free herself from him to love someone else. He was disappointed at my lack of real insight. He was a large hairy sorrowful man, heavy in speech and thought, and imprisoned by Freud. We were spectacularly ill suited, and our private agreement not to be afraid of each other’s matrimonial intentions had more than the usual force.

  There was another young widower. His wife had died suddenly, and it was generally agreed that he should remarry as soon as possible. This was foolish, for he was pulverised by grief and in shock. I fell in love with him. Not too much, though. Enough to overthrow common sense. I actually moved down to stay with him in his house in Chelsea, a pretty bijou little place which had in it a beautiful red setter, badly missing its mistress, and cupboards full of the dead woman’s clothes. Again I was being dragged along by an undertow, a continuation of the dragging will-lessness of after Clancy. Actually it was the end of something, the end of passivity.

  He worked for the Daily Express: I was suddenly in a world so distant from mine that it was like walking into the pages of a novel. His friends went to the races, bet on horses, had favourite pubs, and were all right-wing. At the Express he was a promising young man, watched by superiors, and particularly the big boss himself. If Beaverbrook liked an article, he would send round a hundred pounds by messenger. This lordly behaviour amused me, but the aspirant apprentice loved it. He also worked, but I’ve forgotten why or how, for Bernstein, at Granada Television. He liked being in this position, the favourite son of powerful men. One night, at about three in the morning, the telephone rang. Bernstein. There was to be a strike next day at Granada, and Bernstein was outraged, but more incredulous. ‘How can they do this to me?’ he kept demanding. ‘Don’t they love me?’ Don’t they love me—ever the cry of the despot. I listened to my—temporary—love: ‘Yes, of course they admire you, we all do.’ This was not how Bernstein was being seen then, but women often have a worm’s-eye view of history. Bernstein is another who has been unjustly forgotten. He set out to raise the level of television programmes, and he did. None of our present television moguls have it in them to be as adventurous and courageous as Granada Television was then.

  There was a moment when my situation came home to me. There I was, in Chelsea, surrounded by shopping women, in the middle of the morning, taking the dog for a walk. What the hell did I think I was doing? What was all this about? I broke it off and went home. He was too armoured by real grief to be much hurt by this. As for me, I had come to the conclusion that I had become a falling-in-love junkie. What I had become addicted to was the condition of being in love—a high, a fix. That is, the mild intoxications, nothing to do with really being in love. How was it I hadn’t seen this before? All I needed to do was to look at some things I had written, for instance, ‘The Habit of Loving’. That was written because I had been trying to repeat the experience with Jack, but blindly fluttering about and blundering, and backing out again.

  It was a shock to me—a real one—this experience. Truly the end of something. I wrote ‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’. Then I went back to The Golden Notebook, assembling it from the material already more or less organised in my mind.

  I wrote a good deal in that flat, mostly The Golden Notebook and Landlocked. Up I got in the morning. I dragged on trousers and shirt or sweater. I brushed my hair, cleaned my teeth, made tea. Cup after cup of tea all morning and all afternoon, interrupted by little sessions of restoring sleep. Sometimes I wrote off and on all day. Sometimes thousands of words, or perhaps all the day’s work landed in the waste-paper basket. In the evenings, exhausted, a slump in front of the television, or I walked by myself through the streets. Week after week. Not very exciting, the life of a working writer. It went on for a year or so, but whenever Peter came home, with a friend, I took them off down to Cornwall. The flat was too small for the energies of teenage boys.

  Sometime during this period were two experiences with doctors, not without relevance to the theme of passivity.

  I am lying in bed in one of our most prestigious teaching hospitals, for a gynaecological check-up. I am always tired, and it is thought the condition of my womb may be the reason. There are twelve women on the beds, and we are waiting for the consultant. On the bed next to mine a woman lies rigid, miserably trying to repress sobs. A young nurse is keeping an eye on us. The great man enters, followed by a dozen or so very young men. He uses the cold sarcastic voice: to hear it is to shrivel. He starts at the bed next to mine. ‘I’ve told you before, Mrs.—what’s her name?—Mrs. Jones, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve got to get your husband in to see me. He’s the reason you don’t conceive. Have you told him that?’

  ‘He gets so angry,’ weeps the woman.

  ‘He gets angry, does he? Then why are you wasting my time? And public money? Do you know what you are costing the taxpayer? No? Then you should.’ The cold drawling voice goes on. ‘Don’t come here again, Mrs.…Tell him he’s got to come.’

  ‘But he won’t come, Doctor,’ she wails.

  ‘That’s your problem, isn’t it, not mine.’

  Meanwhile I am observing that the young nurse is embarrassed. And I am thinking, Surely I’m not going to be expected to open my legs in front of all these pimply youths? It had not occurred to me this could happen. Dedicated though I was to the repudiation of prudery, this was going too far. The young students are already self-conscious, grinning, sharing looks. I am the youngest woman in this ward. The nurse has in her hand a cloth or napkin about two feet square. What is she going to do w
ith it? She twitches down the blanket covering my lower body as the doctor arrives at the foot of the bed. He is looking at his notes; then he glances up at me. ‘Do you expect me to instruct my students while your legs are crossed?’ The nurse hisses, ‘Open your legs,’ and holds up in front of my face the scanty cloth. ‘Don’t waste my time, Mrs.…,’ says the doctor. I open my legs, though I know I should leap up, strike him, shout abuse at the ogling students. I do none of these things. ‘Here we have an example of a perfect multiparia,’ says the doctor. ‘Three children…’ He consults the notes. ‘Yes, three. Pity we don’t see more like this.’ Then he stands square on his planted legs like Cecil Rhodes staring north at the continent of Africa from Cape Town, and raises his voice and says to the ward generally: ‘You should have your children young. That’s what nature wants. The reason you’ve got all these female troubles is because you don’t have your babies young enough.’ He strolls on, with his tumescent acolytes. I could have killed him, of course, but the pathetic railings and accusations of the cowardly victim always remain unvoiced. The nurse, ashamed and on my side, as scornful of the two-foot-square napkin as I am, says in a low voice, ‘Better get yourself dressed. You’re fine.’ She goes quickly to the woman in the next bed, now weeping uncontrollably. ‘Shhhhh…,’ she says. ‘Go and get dressed. I’ll bring you a cup of tea. His bark is worse than his bite.’ We two trail off dismally to the cubicles. As I dress, I hear her collapse in an abandon of grief. I see through the curtain that she is lying on an examination bed, her arm across her face. Her noisy sobs are affecting everyone. I feel myself churning with angry emotions. How could I let myself be so bullied? Why? What was it about doctors that made me so helpless?