The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

  So there they were, quite soon, teenagers, Lil the athlete, excelling in every sport, and Roz in the school plays, with big parts, making people laugh, extrovert, large, vital, loud: they complemented each other as once they had been as like as two peas: ‘You can hardly tell them apart.’

  They both went to university, Lil because of the sport, Roz because of the theatre group, and they remained best friends, sharing news about their conquests, and making light of their rivalries, but their closeness was such that although they starred in such different arenas, their names were always coupled. Neither went in for the great excluding passions, broken hearts, jealousies.

  And now that was it, university done with, here was the grownup world, and this was a culture where girls married young. ‘Twenty and still not married!’

  Roz began dating Harold Struthers, an academic, and a bit of a poet, too; and Lil met Theo Western, who owned a sports equipment and clothes shop. Rather, shops. He was well off. The men got on – the women were careful that they did, and there was a double wedding.

  So far so good.

  Those shrimps, the silverfish, the minnows, were now wonderful young women, one in a wedding dress like an arum lily (Liliane) and Roz’s like a silver rose. So judged the main fashion page of the big paper.

  They lived in two houses in a street running down to the sea, not far from the outspit of land that held Baxter’s, unfashionable but artistic, and, by that law that says if you want to know if an area is going up, then look to see if those early swallows, the artists, are moving in, it would not be unfashionable for long. They were on opposite sides of the street.

  Lil was a swimming champion known over the whole continent and abroad too, and Roz not only acted and sang, but was putting on plays and began devising shows and spectacles. Both were very busy. Despite all this Liliane and Theo Western announced the birth of Ian, and Rozeanne and Harold Struthers followed within a week with Thomas.

  Two little boys, fair-haired and delightful, and people said they could be brothers. In fact Tom was a solid little boy easily embarrassed by the exuberances of his mother, and Ian was fine drawn and nervy and ‘difficult’ in ways Tom never was. He did not sleep well, and sometimes had nightmares.

  The two families spent weekends and holidays together, one big happy family, as Roz sang, defining the situation, and the two men might go off on trips into the mountains or to fish, or backpacking. Boys will be boys, as Roz said.

  All this went on, and anything that was not what it should be was kept well out of sight. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ Roz might say. She was concerned for Lil, for reasons that will emerge, but not for herself. Lil might have her problems, but not she, not she and Harold and Tom. Everything was going along fine.

  And then this happened.

  The scene: the connubial bedroom, when the boys were about ten. Roz lay sprawling on the bed, Harold sat on the arm of a chair, looking at his wife, smiling, but determined. He had just said he had been offered a professorship, in a university in another state.

  Roz said, ‘Well, I suppose you can come down for weekends or we can come up.’

  This was so like her, the dismissal of a threat – surely? – to their marriage, that he gave a short, not unaffectionate laugh, and after a pause said, ‘I want you and Tom to come too.’

  ‘Move from here? And Roz sat up shaking her fair and now curly head so that she could see him clearly. ‘Move?’

  ‘Why don’t you just say it? Move from Lil, that’s the point, isn’t it?’

  Roz clasped her hands together on her upper chest, all theatrical consternation. But she was genuinely astounded, indignant.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting. I’m saying. Strange as it may seem …’ – This phrase usually signals strife – ‘I’d like a wife. A real one.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘No. I want you to watch something.’ He produced a canister of film. ‘Please, Roz. I mean it. I want you to come next door and watch this.’

  Up got Roz, off the bed, all humorous protest.

  She was all but nude. With a deep sigh, aimed at the gods, or some impartial viewer, she put on a pink feathered negligee, salvaged from a plays wardrobe: she had felt it was so her.

  She sat in the next room, opposite a bit of white wall kept clear of clutter. ‘And now what are you up to, I wonder?’ she said, amiably. ‘You big booby, Harold. Really, I mean, I ask you!’

  Harold began running the film – home movies. It was of the four of them, two husbands, the two women. They had been on the beach, and wore wraps over bikinis. The men were still in their swimming trunks. Roz and Lil sat on the sofa, this sofa, where Roz now was, and the men were in hard upright chairs, sitting forward to watch. The women were talking. What about? Did it matter? They were watching each other’s faces, coming in quickly to make a point. The men kept trying to intervene, join in, the women literally did not hear them. Harold, then Theo, was annoyed, and they raised their voices, but the women still did not hear, and when at last the men shouted, insisting, Roz put out a hand to stop them.

  Roz remembered the discussion, just. It was not important. The boys were to go to a friend’s for a weekend camp. The parents were discussing it, that was all. In fact the mothers were discussing it, the fathers might just as well not have been there.

  The men had been silenced, sat watching and even exchanged looks. Harold was annoyed, but Theo’s demeanour said only, ‘Women, what do you expect?’

  And then, that subject disposed of – the boys – Roz said, ‘I simply must tell you …’ and leaned forward to tell Lil, dropping her voice, not knowing she did this, telling her something, nothing important.

  The husbands sat and watched, Harold all alert irony, Theo bored.

  It went on. The tape ran out.

  ‘Do you mean to say you actually filmed that – to trap me? You set it up, to get at me!’

  ‘No, don’t you remember? I had made a film of the boys on the beach. Then you took the camera and filmed me and Theo. And then Theo said, “How about the girls?’”

  ‘Oh,’ said Roz.

  ‘Yes. It was only when I played it back later – yesterday, in fact, that I saw … Not that I was surprised. That’s how it always is. It’s you and Lil. Always.’

  ‘What are you suggesting? Are you saying we’re lezzies?’

  ‘No. I’m not. And what difference would it make if you were?’

  ‘I simply don’t get it.’

  ‘Obviously sex doesn’t matter that much. We have, I think, more than adequate sex, but it’s not me you have the relationship with.’

  Roz sat, all twisted with emotion, wringing her hands, the tears ready to start.

  ‘And so I want you to come with me up north.’

  ‘You must be mad.’

  ‘Oh, I know you won’t, but you could at least pretend to think about it.’

  ‘Are you suggesting we divorce?’

  ‘I wasn’t, actually. If I found a woman who put me first then …’

  ‘You’d let me know!’ she said, all tears at last.

  ‘Oh, Roz,’ said her husband. ‘Don’t think I’m not sorry. I’m fond of you, you know that. I’ll miss you like crazy. You’re my pal. And you’re the best lay I’m ever likely to have and I know that too. But I feel like a sort of shadow here. I don’t matter. That’s all.’

  And now it was his turn to blink away tears and then put his hands up to his eyes. He went back to the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and she joined him. They comforted each other. ‘You’re mad, Harold, do you know that? I love you.’ ‘And I love you too Roz, don’t think that I don’t.’

  Then Roz asked Lil to come over, and the two women watched the film, without speaking, to its end.

  ‘And that’s why Harold is leaving me,’ said Roz, who had told Lil the outlines of the situation.

  ‘I don’t see it,’ said Lil at last, frowning with the effort of trying. She was dea
dly serious, and Roz serious but smiling and angry.

  ‘Harold says my real relationship is with you, not with him.’

  ‘What does he want, then?’ asked Lil.

  ‘He says you and I made him feel excluded.’

  ‘He feel excluded! I’ve always felt – left out. All these years I’ve been watching you and Harold and I’ve wished …’ Loyalty had locked her tongue until this moment, but now she came out with it at last: ‘I have a lousy marriage. I have a bad time with Theo. I’ve never … but you knew. And you and Harold, always so happy … I don’t know how often I’ve left you two here and gone home with Theo and wished …’

  ‘I didn’t know … I mean, I did know, of course, Theo isn’t the ideal husband.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘It seems to me it’s you who should be getting a divorce.’

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ said Lil, warding off the idea with an agitated hand. ‘No; I once said in joke to Ian – testing him out, what he’d think if I got a divorce and he nearly went berserk. He was silent for such a long time – you know how he goes silent, and then he shouted and began crying. “You can’t,” he said. “You can’t. I won’t let you.’”

  ‘So poor Tom is going to be without a father,’ said Roz.

  ‘And Ian doesn’t have much of one,’ said Lil. And then, when it could seem the conversation was at an end, she enquired, ‘Roz, did Harold say that we are lezzies?’

  ‘All but – well no, not exactly.’

  ‘Is that what he meant?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Roz was suffering now with the effort of this unusual and unwonted introspection. ‘I don’t understand, I told him. I don’t understand what you’re on about.’

  ‘Well, we aren’t, are we?’ enquired Lil, apparently needing to be told.

  ‘Well, I don’t think we are,’ said Roz.

  ‘We’ve always been friends, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did it start? I remember the first day at school.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But before that? How did it happen?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Perhaps it was just – luck.’

  ‘You can say that again. The luckiest thing in my life – you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roz. ‘But that doesn’t make us … Bloody men,’ she said, suddenly energetic and brisk with anger.

  ‘Bloody men,’ said Lil, with feeling, because of her husband.

  This note, obligatory for that time, having been struck, the conversation was over.

  Off went Harold to his university which was surrounded, not by ocean and sea winds and the songs and tales of the sea, but by sand, scrub and thorns. Roz visited him, and then returned there to put on Oklahoma! – a great success – and they enjoyed their more than adequate sex. She said, ‘I don’t see what you’re complaining about,’ and he said, ‘Well, no, you wouldn’t, would you?’ When he came down to visit her and the boys – who being always together were always referred to in the plural – nothing seemed to have changed. As a family they went about, the amiable Harold and the exuberant Roz, a popular young couple – perhaps not so young now – as described often in the gossip columns. For a marriage that had been given its notice to quit the two seemed no less of a couple. As they jested – jokes had never been in short supply – they were like those trees whose centre has rotted away, or the bushes spreading from the centre, which disappear as its suburbs spring up. It was so hard for this couple to fray apart. Everywhere they went, his old pupils greeted him and people who had been involved in one of her productions greeted her. They were Harold and Roz to hundreds of people. ‘Do you remember me – Roz, Harold?’ She always did and Harold knew his old pupils. Like Royalty who expect of themselves that they remember faces and names. ‘The Struthers are separating? Oh, come on! I don’t believe it.’

  And now the other couple, no less in the limelight, Lil always judging swimming or running or other sports events, bestowing prizes, making speeches. And there too was the handsome husband, Theo, known for the chain of sports equipment and clothes shops. The two lean, good-looking people, on view, like their friends, the other couple, but so different in style. Nothing excessive or exuberant about them, they were affable, smiling, available, the very essence of good citizenship.

  The break-up of Roz and Harold did not disrupt Theo and Lil. The marriage had been a façade for years. Theo had a succession of girls, but, as he complained, he couldn’t get into his bed anywhere without finding a girl in it: he travelled a lot, for the firm.

  Then Theo was killed in a car crash, and Lil was a well-off widow, with her boy Ian, the moody one, so unlike Tom, and in that seaside town, where the climate and the style of living put people so much on view, there were two women, without men, and their two little boys.

  The young couple with their children: interesting that, the turning point, the moment of change. For a time, seen, commented on, a focus, the young parents, by definition sexual beings, and tagging along or running around them the pretty children. ‘Oh, what a lovely little boy, what a pretty little girl, What’s your name? – what a nice name!’ – and then all at once, or so it seems, the parents, no longer quite so young, seem to lose height a little, even to shrink, they certainly lose colour and lustre. ‘How old did you say he is, she is …’ The young ones are shooting up and glamour has shifted its quarters. Eyes are following them, rather than the parents. ‘They do grow up so fast these days, don’t they?’

  The two good-looking women, together again as if men had not entered their equation at all, went about with the two beautiful boys, one rather delicate and poetic with sun-burnished locks falling over his forehead, and the other strong and athletic, friends, as their mothers had been at that age. There was a father in the picture, Harold, up north, but he’d shacked up with a young woman who presumably did not suffer from Roz’s deficiencies. He came to visit, and stayed in Roz’s house, but not in the bedroom (which had to strike both partners as absurd), and Tom visited him in his university. But the reality was, two women in their mid-thirties, and two lads who were not far off being young men. The houses, so close, opposite each other, seemed to belong to both families. ‘We are an extended family,’ cried Roz, not one to let a situation remain undefined.

  The beauty of young boys – now, that isn’t an easy thing. Girls, yes, full of their enticing eggs, the mothers of us all, that makes sense, they should be beautiful and usually are, even if only for a year or a day. But boys – why? What for? There is a time, a short time, at about sixteen, seventeen, when they have a poetic aura. They are like young gods. Their families and their friends may be awed by these beings who seem visitors from a finer air. They are often unaware of it, seeming to themselves more like awkwardly packed parcels they are trying to hold together.

  Roz and Lil lolled on the little verandah overlooking the sea, and saw the two boys come walking up the path, frowning a little, dangling swimming things they would put to dry on the verandah wall, and they were so beautiful the two women sat up to look at each other, sharing incredulity. ‘Good God!’ said Roz. ‘Yes,’ said Lil. ‘We made that, we made them,’ said Roz. ‘If we didn’t, who did?’ said Lil. And the boys, having disposed of their towels and trunks, went past with smiles that indicated they were busy on their own affairs: they did not want to be summoned for food or to tidy their beds, or something equally unimportant.

  ‘My God!’ said Roz again. ‘Wait, Lil …’ She got up and went inside, and Lil waited, smiling a little to herself, as she often did, at her friend’s dramatic ways. Out came Roz with a book in her hand, a photograph album. She pushed her chair against Lil’s, and together they turned the pages past babies on rugs, babies in baths – themselves, then ‘her first step’ and ‘the first tooth’ – and they were at the page they knew they both sought. Two girls, at about sixteen.

  ‘My God!’ said Roz.

  ‘We didn’t do too badly, then,’ said Lil.

  Pre
tty girls, yes, very, all sugar and spice, but if photographs were taken now of Ian and Tom, would they show the glamour that stopped the breath when one saw them walk across a room or saunter up out of the waves?

  They lingered over the pages of themselves, in this album, Roz’s; Lil’s would have to be the same. Photographs of Roz, with Lil. Two pretty girls.

  What they were looking for they did not find. Nowhere could they find the shine of unearthliness that illuminated their two sons, at this time.

  And there they were sitting, the album spread out across both their stretched-out brown legs – they were in bikinis – when the boys came out, glasses of fruit juice in their hands.

  They sat on the wall of the verandah’s edge and contemplated their mothers, Roz and Lil.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Ian seriously asked Tom.

  ‘What are they doing?’ echoed Tom, owlishly, joking as always. He jumped up, peered down at the open page, half on Roz’s, half on Lil’s knees, and returned to his place. ‘They are admiring their beauty when they were nymphets,’ he reported to Ian. ‘Aren’t you, Ma?’ he said to Roz.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Roz. ‘Tempus fugit. It fugits like anything. You have no idea – yet. We wanted to find out what we were like all those years ago.’

  ‘Not so many years,’ said Lil.

  ‘Don’t bother to count,’ said Roz. ‘Enough years.’

  Now Ian captured the album off the women’s thighs, and he and Tom sat staring at the girls, their mothers.

  ‘They weren’t bad,’ said Tom to Ian.

  ‘Not bad at all,’ said Ian to Tom.

  The women smiled at each other: more of a grimace.