To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

by Doris Lessing

  They consumed their half-portions of very strong meat soup, full of vegetables; and pointed out to each other that, even so, their plates held twice as much as they would in England; and continued to dart curious, half-guilty glances at their fellow diners.

  Six years ago these people were living amid ruins, in cellars, behind any scrap of masonry that remained standing. They were half-starved, and their clothes were rags. An entire generation of young men were dead. Six years. A remarkable nation, surely.

  The jugged hare came and was eaten with appreciation.

  They had ordered pastries with cream; but alas, before they could eat them, they had to restore themselves with strong cups of coffee.

  Back in France, they told themselves and each other, they would find themselves at home, at table as well as spiritually. By this time tomorrow, they would be in France. And now, with the last meal over and the bill to pay, came the moment of general reckoning, soon over, and in fact accomplished hastily on the back of an envelope.

  To take a train, third-class, back to the nearest suitable spot in the French Alps would use up half of their available currency; and it would be a choice of staying out their full three weeks and eating one meal a day – and that a very slender meal – or staying a week and then going home.

  They did not look at each other as they reached this final depressing conclusion. They were thinking, of course, that they were mad to leave at all. If to come to Germany was the result of some sort of spiritual quixotry, a symptom of moral philanthropy suitable only for liberal idealists whom – they were convinced – they both despised, then to leave again was simply weak-minded. In fact, their present low-spiritedness was probably due to being over-tired, for they had spent two successive nights sitting upon hard wooden train seats, sleeping fitfully on each other’s shoulders.

  They would have to stay. And now that they reached this conclusion, depression settled on them both; and they looked at the rich Germans who surrounded them with a gloomy hatred which, in their better moments, they would have utterly repudiated.

  Just then the waiter came forward, followed by an energetically striding young man apparently fresh from a day’s skiing, for his face was flaming scarlet under untidy shags of sandy hair. They did not want him at their table, but the restaurant was now quite full. The waiter left their bill on the tablecloth; and they occupied themselves in finding the right change, under the interested inspection of the young sportsman, who, it seemed, was longing to advise them about money and tips. Resenting his interest, they set themselves to be patient. But the waiter did not return for some time, so busy was he at the surrounding tables; and they watched a party of new arrivals who were settling down at a nearby table that had been reserved for them. There came first a handsome woman in her early middle age, unfastening a shaggy, strong-looking fur coat of the kind worn for winter sports or bad weather outdoors. She flung this open on her chair, making a kind of nest, in which she placed herself, wrapping it closely around her legs. She was wearing a black wool dress, full-skirted and embroidered in bright colours, a dress which flirted with the idea of peasant naïvety. Having arranged herself, she raised her face to greet the rest of her family with a smile that seemed to mock and chide them for taking so long to follow after her. It was a handsome face: she was a fine-looking woman, with her fair curling hair, and a skin bronzed deep with the sun and oil of many weeks of winter sport. Next came a young lad, obviously her son, a very tall, good-looking, attractive youth, who began teasing her because of her hurry to begin eating. He flashed his white strong teeth at her, and his young blue eyes, until she playfully took his arm and shook him. He protested. Then both, with looks of mock concern because this was a public place, desisted, lowered their voices, and sat laughing while the daughter, a delightfully pretty girl of fifteen or so, and the father, a heavy, good-humoured gentleman, took the two empty chairs. The family party was complete. The waiter was attentive for their order, which was for four tall glasses of beer, which they insisted on having that moment, before they could order or even think of food. The waiter hurried off to fetch the beer, while they settled down to study the menus. And one could be sure that there would be no half-portions for this family, either for financial reasons or because they suffered from limitations of appetite.

  Watching this family, it came home to the couple from Britain that what they were resenting was very likely their sheer capacity for physical enjoyment. Since, like all British people of their type, they spent a great deal of emotional energy on complaining about the inability of their countrymen to experience joy and well-being, they told themselves that what they felt was both churlish and inconsistent. The woman said to the man in a conciliating, apologetic, almost resigned voice, ‘They really are extraordinarily good-looking.’

  To this he responded with a small ironical grimace: and he returned his attention to the family.

  Mother, father, and son were laughing over some joke, while the girl turned a very long tapering glass of beer between thumb and forefinger of a thin, tanned hand so that the frost beads glittered and spun. She was staring out of the family group, momentarily lost to it, a fair, dreaming tendril of a girl with an irregular wedge of a little face. Her eyes wandered over the people at the tables, encountered those of our couple, and lingered in open, bland curiosity. It was a gaze of frank unselfconsciousness, almost innocence; the gaze of a protected child who knew she might commit no folly on her own individual account, since the family stood between her and the results of folly. Yet, just then, she chose to be out of the family group; or at least, she gazed out of it as one looks through an open door. Her pale, pretty eyes absorbed what she wanted of the British couple, and, at their leisure, moved on to the other diners; and all the time her fingers moved slowly up and down the slim cold walls of her beer glass. The woman, finding in this girl a poetic quality totally lacking from the stolid burghers who filled this room, indicated her to the man by saying: ‘She’s charming.’ Again he grimaced, as if to say: Every young girl is poetic. And: She’ll be her mother in ten years.

  Which was true. Already the family had become aware of the infidelity of this, their youngest member; already the handsome mother was leaning over her daughter, rallying her for her dreamy inattention, claiming her by little half-caressing, peremptory exclamations. The solid, kindly father laid his brown and capable hand on the girl’s white-wool-covered forearm and bent towards her with solicitude, as if she were sick. The boy put a large forkful of meat into his mouth and ate it ruminantly, watching his sister with an irreverent grin. Then he said in a low tone some word that was clearly an old trumpet for disagreement between them, for she swung her chin towards him petulantly with a half-reproachful and half-resentful epithet. The brother went on grinning, protective but derisive; the father and mother smiled tenderly at each other because of the brother-and-sister sparring.

  No, clearly, this young girl had no chance of escaping from the warm prison of her family; and in a few years she would be a capable, handsome, sensual woman, married to some manufacturer carefully chosen for her by her father. That is, she would be unless another war or economic cataclysm intervened and plunged all her people into the edge-of-disater hunger-bitten condition from which they had just emerged. Though they did not look as if they had …

  Returned full circle to the point of their complicated and irrational dislike, the man and woman raised ironical eyes at each other, and the man said briefly: ‘Blond beasts.’

  These two were of another family of mankind from most of the people in the restaurant.

  The man was Scotch, small-built, nervous, energetic, with close-springing black hair, white freckled skin, quick, deep blue eyes. He tended to be sarcastic about the English, among whom, of course, he had spent most of his life. He was busy, hard-working, essentially pragmatic, practical, and humane. Yet above and beyond all these admirably useful qualities was something else, expressed in his characteristic little grimace of ironical bitterness, as if he
were saying: Well, yes, and then?

  As for her, she was small, dark, and watchful, Jewish in appearance and arguably by inheritance, since there had been a Jewish great-grandmother who had escaped from pogrom-loving Poland in the last century and married an Englishman. More potent than the great-grandmother was the fact that her fiancé, a medical student and a refugee from Austria, had been killed in the early days of the war flying over this same country in which they now sat and took their holiday. Mary Parrish was one of those people who had become conscious of their claims to being Jewish only when Hitler drew their attention to the possibility they might have some.

  She now sat and contemplated the handsome German family and thought: Ten years ago … She was seeing them as executioners.

  As for the man, who had taken his name, Hamish, from a string of possible names, some of them English, because of another kind of national pride, he had served in his capacity as a doctor on one of the commissions that, after the war, had tried to rescue the debris of humanity the war had left all over Europe.

  It was no accident that he had served on this commission. Early in 1939 he had married a German girl, or rather, a Jewish girl, studying in Britain. In July of that year she had made a brave and foolhardy attempt to rescue some of her family who had so far escaped the concentration camps, and had never been heard of since. She had simply vanished. For all Hamish knew, she was still alive somewhere. She might very well be in this village of O—. Ever since yesterday morning when they entered Germany, Mary had been watching Hamish’s anxious, angry, impatient eyes moving, preoccupied, from the face of one woman to another; old women, young women, women on buses, trains, platforms; women glimpsed at the end of a street; a woman at a window. And she could feel him thinking: Well, and if I did see her, I wouldn’t recognize her.

  And his eyes would move back to hers; she smiled; and he gave his small, bitter, ironical grimace.

  They were both doctors, both hard-working and conscientious, both very tired because, after all, while living in Britain has many compensations, it is hard work, this business of maintaining a decent level of life with enough leisure for the pursuits that make life worth-while, or at least to cultivated people, which they both were, and determined to remain. They were above all, perhaps, tired people.

  They were tired and they needed to rest. This was their holiday. And here they sat, knowing full well that they were pouring away energies into utterly useless, irrelevant and, above all, unfair emotions.

  The word ‘unfair’ was one they both used without irony.

  She said, ‘I think one week in France would be better than three here. Let’s go. I really do think we should.’

  He said, ‘Let’s go into one of the smaller villages higher up the valley. They are probably just ordinary mountain villages, not tarted-up like this place.’

  ‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ she agreed with relief.

  Here they both became alert to the fact that the young man who had sat down at their table was watching them, at the same time as he heartily chewed a large mouthful of food, and looked for an inlet into their conversation. He was an unpleasant person. Tall, with an uncoordinated, bony look, his blue eyes met the possibilities of their reaction to him with a steady glare of watchful suspicion out of an ugly face whose skin had a peculiar harsh red texture. The eyes of our couple had been, unknown to them, returning again and again to this remarkable scarlet face, and at the back of their minds they had been thinking professionally: A fool to overheat himself in this strong reflected light up here.

  Now, at the same moment, the two doctors realized that the surface of his face was a skin-graft; that the whole highly-coloured, shiny, patchy surface, while an extraordinarily skilful reconstruction of a face, was nothing but a mask, and what the face had been before must be guessed at. They saw, too, that he was not a young man, but, like themselves, in early middle age. Instantly pity fought with their instinctive dislike of him; and they reminded themselves that the aggressive glare of the blue eyes was the expression of the pitiful necessity of a wounded creature to defend itself.

  He said in stiff but good English, or rather, American: ‘I must beg your pardon for interrupting your conversation, and beg leave to introduce myself – Dr Schröder. I wish to place myself at your service. I know this valley well, and can recommend hotels in the other villages.’

  He was looking at Hamish, as he had from the time he began speaking; though he gave a small, minimal bow when Mary Parrish introduced herself and instantly returned his attention to the man.

  Both the British couple felt discomfort; but it was hard to say whether this was because of the man’s claim on their pity; because of their professional interest in him, which they must disguise; or because of the impolite insistence of his manner.

  ‘That is very kind of you,’ said Hamish; and Mary murmured that it was very kind. They wondered whether he had heard Hamish’s ‘blond beasts’. They wondered what other indiscretions they might have committed.

  ‘As it happens,’ said Dr Schröder, ‘I have a very good buddy who runs a guest house at the top of the valley. I was up there this morning, and she has a dandy room to let.’

  Once again they indicated that it was very kind of him.

  ‘If it is not too early for you, I shall be taking the 9.30 autobus up the valley tomorrow for a day’s skiing, and I shall be happy to assist you.’

  And now it was necessary to take a stand one way or the other. Mary and Hamish glanced at each other inquiringly; and immediately Dr Schröder said, with a perceptible increase of tension in his manner, ‘As you know, at this time in the season, it is hard to find accommodation.’ He paused, seemed to assure himself of their status by a swift inspection of their clothes and general style, and added: ‘Unless you can afford one of the big hotels – but they are not of the cheapest.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Mary, trying to make of what he must have heard her say before a simple question of caprice: ‘Actually we were wondering whether we might not go back to France? We are both very fond of France.’

  But Dr Schröder was not prepared to take this from them. ‘If it is a queston of skiing, then the weather report announced today that the snow is not as good in the French Alps as it is with us. And, of course, France is much more expensive.’

  They agreed that this was so; and he continued to say that if they took the empty room at his buddy’s guest house it would cost them much less than it would at a German pension, let alone a French pension. He examined their clothes again and remarked, ‘Of course, it must be hard for you to have such unfortunate restrictions with your travel allowance. Yes, it must be annoying. For people of a good salary and position it must be annoying.’

  For both these two the restrictions of the travel allowance merely confirmed a fact; they could not have afforded more than the allowance in any case. They realized that Dr Schröder was quite unable to decide whether they were rich and eccentric English people who notoriously prefer old clothes to new clothes, or whether they were rich people deliberately trying to appear poor, or whether they were poor. In the first two cases they would perhaps be eager to do some trade in currency with him? Was that what he wanted?

  It seemed it was; for he immediately said that he would be very happy to lend them a modest sum of dough, in return for which he would be glad if they would do the same for him when he visited London, which he intended to do very soon. He fastened the steady glare of his eyes on their faces, or rather, on Hamish’s face, and said: ‘Of course, I am prepared to offer every guarantee.’ And he proceeded to do so. He was a doctor attached to a certain hospital in the town of S—, and his salary was regular. If they wished to make independent inquiries they were welcome to do so.

  And now Hamish intervened to make it clear that they could not afford to spend on this vacation one penny more than the travel allowance. For a long moment Dr Schröder did not believe him. Then he examined their clothes again and openly nodded.

  Now, perha
ps, the man would go away?

  Not at all. He proceeded to deliver a harangue on the subject of his admiration for Britain. His love for the entire British nation, their customs, their good taste, their sportsmanship, their love of fair play, their history, and their art were the ruling passions of his life. He went on like this for some minutes, while the British couple wondered if they ought to confess that their trade was the same as his. But, if they did, presumably it would let them in for even closer intimacy. And by a hundred of the minute signs which suffice for communication between people who know each other well, they had said that they disliked this man intensely and wished only that he would go away.

  But now Dr Schröder inquired outright what profession his new friend Mr Anderson pursued; and when he heard that they were both doctors, and attached to hospitals whose names he knew, his expression changed. But subtly. It was not surprise, but rather the look of a prosecutor who has been cross-examining witnesses and at last got what he wants.

  And the British couple were beginning to understand what it was Dr Schröder wanted of them. He was talking with a stiff, brooding passion of resentment about his position and prospects as a doctor in Germany. For professional people, he said, Germany was an unkind country. For the business people – yes. For the artisans – yes. The workers were all millionaires these days, yes sir! Better far to be a plumber or an electrician than a doctor. The ruling dream of his life was to make his way to Britain, and there become an honoured – and, be it understood – a well-paid member of his profession.