To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Well, Rosie?’ said George, challengingly, the misery of the sleepless night bursting out of him.

  ‘Well what?’ temporized Rose, wiping dishes. She kept her head lowered and her face was pale and set hard. Confronted thus, with George’s unhappiness, her decision did not seem so secure. She wanted to cry. She could not afford to cry now, in front of him. She went to the window so that her back might be turned to him. It was a deep basement, and she looked up at the rubbish-can and railings showing dirty black against the damp, grey houses opposite. This had been her view of the world since she could remember. She heard George saying, uncertainly: ‘You marry me on Wednesday, the way we fixed it, and your Dad’ll be all right, he can stay here or live with us, just as you like.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rose after a pause.

  ‘But why, Rosie, why?’

  Silence. ‘Don’t know,’ she muttered. She sounded obstinate but unhappy. Grasping this moment of weakness in her, he laid his hand on her shoulder and appealed. ‘Rosie girl, you’re upset, that’s all it is.’ But she tensed her shoulder against him and then, since his hand remained there, jerked herself away and said angrily: ‘I’m sorry. It’s no good. I keep telling you.’

  ‘Three years,’ he said slowly, looking at her in amazed anger. ‘Three years! And now you throw me over.’

  She did not reply at once. She could see the monstrousness of what she was doing and could not help herself. She had loved him then. Now he exasperated her. ‘I’m not throwing you over,’ she said defensively.

  ‘So you’re not!’ he shouted in derision, his face clenched in pain and rage. ‘What are you doing then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly.

  He stared at her, suddenly swore under his breath and went to the door: ‘I’m not coming back,’ he said, ‘you’re just playing the fool with me, Rosie. You shouldn’t’ve treated me like this. No one’d stand for it, and I’m not going to.’ There was no sound from Rose, and so he went out.

  Jem slowly let down the paper and remarked: ‘You want to think what you’re doing, Rosie.’

  She did not reply. The tears were pouring down her face, but she wiped them impatiently away and bent to the oven. Later that day Jem watched her secretly over the top of the paper. There was a towel-rail beside the dresser. She was unscrewing it and moving it to a different position. She rolled the dresser itself into the opposite corner and then shifted various ornaments on the mantelpiece. Jem remembered that over each of these things she had bickered with her mother: the women could not agree about where the dresser would stand best, or the height of the towel-rail. So now Rose was having her own way, thought Jem, amazed at the sight of his daughter’s quiet but determined face. The moment her mother was dead she moved everything to suit herself … Later she made tea and sat down opposite him, in her mother’s chair. Women, thought Jem, half humorous, half shocked at the persistence of the thing. And she was throwing over a nice, decent chap just because of – what? At last he shrugged and accepted it; he knew she would have her way. Also, at the bottom of his heart, he was pleased. He would never have put any pressure on her to give up marriage, but he was glad that he did not have to move, that he could stay in his old ways without disturbance. She’s still young, he comforted himself; there’s plenty of time for her to marry.

  A month later they heard George had married someone else. Rose had a pang of regret, but it was the kind of regret one feels for something inevitable, that could not have been otherwise. When they met in the street, she said, ‘Hullo, George,’ and he gave her a curt, stiff nod. She even felt a little hurt because he would not let bygones be; that he felt he had to store resentment. If she could greet him nicely, as a friend, then it was unkind of him to treat her coldly … She glanced with covert interest at the girl who was his wife, and waited for a greeting; but the girl averted her face and stared coldly away. She knew about Rose; she knew she had got George on the rebound.

  This was in 1938. The rumours and the fear of war were still more an undercurrent in people’s minds than a part of their thinking. Vaguely, Rose and her father expected that everything would continue as they were. About four months after the mother’s death, Jem said one day: ‘Why don’t you give up your work now. We can manage without what you earn, if we’re careful.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Rose, in the sceptical way which already told him his pleading was wasted. ‘You’ve got too much,’ he persisted. ‘Cleaning and cooking, and then out all day at work.’

  ‘Men,’ she said simply, with a good-natured but dismissing sniff.

  ‘There’s no sense in it,’ he protested, knowing he was wasting his breath. His wife had insisted on working until Rose was sixteen and could take her place. ‘Women should be independent,’ she had said. And now Rose was saying: ‘I like to be independent.’

  Jem said: ‘Women. They say all women want is a man to keep them, but you and your mother, you go on as if I’m trying to do you out of something when I say you mustn’t work.’

  ‘Women here and women there,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t know about women. All I know is what I think.’

  Jem was that old type of Labour man who has been brought up in the trade union movement. He went to meetings once or twice a week, and sometimes his friends came in for a cup of tea and an argument. For years he had been saying to his wife: ‘If they paid you proper, it’d be different. You work ten hours a day, and it’s all for the bosses.’ Now he used the argument on Rose, and she said: ‘Oh, politics, I’m not interested.’ Her father said: ‘You’re as stubborn as a mule, like your mother.’

  ‘Then I am,’ said Rose, good-humouredly. She would have said she had not ‘got on’ with her mother; she had had to fight to become independent of that efficient and possessive woman. But in this she agreed with her: it had been instilled into her ever since she could remember, that women must look after themselves. Like her mother, who was indulgent about the trade union meetings, as if they were a childish amusement that men should be allowed: and she voted Labour to please him, as her mother had done. And every time her father pleaded with her to give up her job at the bakery she inexorably replied: ‘Who knows what might happen? It’s silly not to be careful.’ And so she continued to get up early in order to clean the basement kitchen and the two little rooms over it that was their home; then she made the breakfast, and went out to shop. Then she went to the bakery, and at six o’clock came back to cook supper for her father. At weekends she had a grand clean-up of the whole place, and cooked puddings and cakes. They were in bed most nights by nine. They never went out. They listened to the radio while they ate, and they read the newspapers. It was a hard life, but Rose did not think of it as hard. If she had ever used words like happiness she would have said she was happy. Sometimes she thought wistfully, not of George, but of the baby his wife was going to have. Perhaps, after all, she had made a terrible mistake? Then she squashed the thought and comforted herself: There’s plenty of time, there’s no hurry, I couldn’t leave Dad now.

  When the war started she accepted it fatalistically, while her father was deeply upset. His vision of the future had been the old socialist one: everything would slowly get better and better; and one day the working man would get into power by the automatic persuasion of common sense, and then – but his picture of that time was not so clear. Vaguely he thought of a house with a little garden and a holiday by the sea once a year. The family had never been able to afford a proper holiday. But the war cut right across this vision.

  ‘Well, what did you expect?’ asked Rose satirically.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded aggressively. ‘If Labour’d been in, it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘You’re just like your mother,’ he complained again. ‘You haven’t got any logic.’

  ‘Well, you’ve been going to meetings for years and years, and you make resolutions, and you talk, but there’s a war just the same.’ She felt as if this ended t
he argument. She felt, though she could never have put it into words, that there was a deep basic insecurity, that life itself was an enemy to be placated and humoured, liable at any moment to confront her, or people like her, with death or destitution. The only sensible thing to do was to gather together every penny that came along and keep it safe. When her mother had been alive, she paid thirty shillings of the two pounds a week she earned towards the housekeeping. Now that thirty shillings went straight into the post office. When the newspapers and the wireless blared war and horror at her, she thought of that money, and it comforted her. It didn’t amount to much, but if something happened … What that something might be, she did not clearly know. But life was terrible, there was no justice – had not her own mother been killed by a silly lorry crossing the street she had crossed every day of her life for twenty-five years … that just proved it. And now there was a war, and all sorts of people were going to be hurt, all for nothing – that proved it too, if it needed any proof. Life was frightening and dangerous – therefore, put money into the post office; hold on to your job, work, and – put money into the post office.

  Her father sat over the wireless set, bought newspapers, argued with his cronies, trying to make sense of the complicated, cynical movements of power politics, while the family pattern of life dissolved into the slogans and noise of war, and the streets filled with uniforms and rumours. ‘It’s all Hitler,’ he would say aggressively to Rose.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘Well, he started it, didn’t he?’

  ‘I’m not interested who started it. All I know is, ordinary people don’t want war. And there’s war all the time. They make me sick if you want to know – and you men make me sick, too. If you were young enough, you’d be off like the rest of them,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘But, Rosie,’ he said, really shocked. ‘Hitler’s got to be stopped, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Hitler,’ she said scornfully. ‘Hitler and Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt – they all make me sick, if you want to know. And that goes for your Attlee too.’

  ‘Women haven’t got any logic,’ he said, in despair.

  So they came not to discuss the war at all, they merely suffered it. Slowly, Rose came to use the same words and slogans as everyone else; and like everyone else, with the deep, sad knowledge that it was all talk, and what was really happening in the world was something vast and terrible, beyond her comprehension; and perhaps it was wonderful, too, if she only knew – but she could never hope to understand. Better get on with the job, live as best she could, try not to be afraid and – put money in the post office.

  Soon she switched to a job in a munitions factory. She felt she ought to do something for the war, and also, she was paid much better than in the bakery. She did fire-watching, too. Often she was up till three or four and then woke at six to clean and cook. Her father continued as a bricklayer and did fire-watching three or four nights a week. They were both permanently tired and sad. The war went on, month after month, year after year, food was short, it was hard to keep warm, the searchlights wheeled over the dark wilderness of London, the bombs fell screaming, and the black-out was like a weight on their minds and spirits. They listened to the news, read the newspapers, with the same look of bewildered but patient courage; and it seemed as if the war was a long, black, noisome tunnel from which they would never emerge.

  In the third year Jem fell off a ladder one cold, foggy morning and injured his back. ‘It’s all right, Rose,’ he said. ‘I can get back to work all right.’

  ‘You’re not working,’ she said flatly. ‘You’re sixty-seven. That’s enough now, you’ve been working since you was fourteen.’

  ‘There won’t be enough coming in every week.’

  ‘Won’t there?’ she said triumphantly. ‘You used to go on at me for working. Aren’t you glad now? With your bit of pension and what I get, I can still put some away every week if I try. Funny thing,’ she said reflectively, not without grim humour: ‘It was two pounds a week when there was peace, and I was supposed to be grateful for it. Comes a war and they pay you like you was a queen. I’m getting seven pounds a week now, one way and another. So you take things easy, and if I find you getting back to work, with your back as it is, and your rheumatism, you’ll catch it from me, I’m telling you.’

  ‘It’s not right for me to sit at home, with the war and all,’ he said uneasily.

  ‘Well, did you make the war? No! You have some sense now.’

  Now things were not so hard for Rose because when Jem could get out of bed he cleaned the rooms for her and there was a cup of tea waiting when she came in at night. But there was an emptiness in her and she could not pretend to herself there was not. One day she saw George’s wife in the street with a little girl of about four, and stopped her. The girl was hostile, but Rose said hurriedly: ‘I wanted to know, how’s George?’ Rather unwillingly came the reply: ‘He’s all right, so far, he’s in North Africa.’ She held the child to her as she spoke, as if for comfort, and the tears came into Rose’s eyes. The two women stood hesitating on the pavement, then Rose said appealingly: ‘It must be hard for you.’ ‘Well it’ll be over some day – when they’ve stopped playing soldiers,’ was the grim reply; and at this Rose smiled in sympathy and the women suddenly felt friendly towards each other. ‘Come over some time if you like,’ said George’s wife, slowly; and Rose said quickly: ‘I’d like to ever so much.’

  So Rose got into the habit of going over once a week to the rooms that had originally been got ready for herself. She went because of the little girl, Jill. She was secretly asking herself now: Did I make a mistake then? Should I have married George? – But even as she asked the question she knew it was futile: she could have behaved in no other way; it was one of those irrational emotional things that seem so slight and meaningless, but are so powerful. And yet, time was passing, she was nearly thirty, and when she looked in the mirror she was afraid. She was very thin now, nothing but a white-faced shrimp of a girl, with lank, tired, stringy black hair. Her sombre dark eyes peered anxiously back at her over hollowed and bony cheeks. ‘It’s because I work so hard,’ she comforted herself. ‘No sleep, that’s what it is, and the bad food, and those chemicals in the factory … it’ll be better after the war.’ It was a question of endurance; somehow she had to get through the war, and then everything would be all right. Soon she looked forward all week to the Sunday night when she went over to George’s wife, with a little present for Jill. When she lay awake at nights she thought not of George, nor of the men she met at the factory who might have become interested in her, but of children. ‘What with the war and all the men getting killed,’ she sometimes worried, ‘perhaps it’s too late. There won’t be any men left by the time they’ve finished killing them all off.’ But if her father could have managed for himself before, he could not now; he was really dependent on her. So she always pushed away her fears and longings with the thought: ‘When the war’s over we can eat and sleep again, and then I’ll look better, and then perhaps …’

  Not long before the war ended Rose came home late one night, dragging her feet tiredly along the dark pavement, thinking that she had forgotten to buy anything for supper. She turned into her street, was troubled by a feeling that something was wrong, looked down towards the house where she lived, and stopped dead. There were heaps of smoking rubble showing against the reddish glare of fire. At first she thought: ‘I must have come to the wrong street in the black-out.’ Then she understood and began to run towards her home, clutching her handbag tightly, holding the scarf under her chin. At the edge of the street was a deep crater. She nearly fell into it, but righted herself and walked on stumblingly among bomb refuse and tangling wires. Where her gate had been she stopped. A group of people were standing there. ‘Where’s my father?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Where is he?’ A young man came forward and said, ‘Take it easy, miss.’ He laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘You live here? I think your Dad was an unlucky one.’ The words b
rought no conviction to her and she stared at him, frowning. ‘What have you done with him?’ she asked, accusingly. ‘They took him away, miss.’ She stood passively, then she heavily lifted her head and looked around her. In this part of the street all the houses were gone. She pushed her way through the people and stood looking down at the steps to the basement door. The door was hanging loose from the frame, but the glass of the window was whole. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, half-aloud. She took a key from her handbag and slowly descended the steps over a litter of bricks. ‘Miss, miss,’ called the young man, ‘you can’t go down there.’ She made no reply, but fitted the key into the door and tried to turn it. It would not turn, so she pushed the door, it swung in on its one remaining hinge, and she went inside. The place looked as it always did, save that the ornaments on the mantelpiece had been knocked to the floor. It was half-lit from the light of burning houses over the street. She was slowly picking up the ornaments and putting them back when a hand was laid on her arm. ‘Miss,’ said a compassionate voice, ‘you can’t stay down here.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ she retorted, with a flash of stubbornness.

  She looked upwards. There was a crack across the ceiling and dust was still settling through the air. But a kettle was boiling on the stove. ‘It’s all right,’ she announced. ‘Look, the gas is still working. If the gas is all right then things isn’t too bad, that stands to reason, doesn’t it now?’

  ‘You’ve got the whole weight of the house lying on that ceiling,’ said the man dubiously.

  ‘The house has always stood over the ceiling hasn’t it,’ she said, with a tired humour that surprised him. He could not see what was funny, but she was grinning heavily at the joke. ‘So nothing’s changed,’ she said, airily. But there was a look on her face that worried him, and she was trembling in a hard, locked way, as if her muscles were held rigid against the weakness of her flesh. Sudden spasmodic shudders ran through her, and then she shut her jaw hard to stop them. ‘It’s not safe,’ he protested again, and she obediently gazed around her to see. The kettle and the pans stood as they had ever since she could remember; the cloth on the table was one her mother had embroidered, and through the cracked window she would see the black, solid shape of the dustcan, though beyond it there were no silhouettes of grey houses, only grey sky spurting red flame. ‘I think it’s all right,’ she said, stolidly. And she did. She felt safe. This was her home. She lifted the kettle and began making tea. ‘Have a cup?’ she inquired, politely. He did not know what to do. She took her cup to the table, blew off the thick dust and began stirring in sugar. Her trembling made the spoon tinkle against the cup.