To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

by Doris Lessing

  I was no longer lying on the bed, but sitting by the fire across the room, looking at the bed and at the window. Outside a shrill quarrel went on, the voices rising up from the street. I felt cold, I was shivering, and my eyes watered. In the little grate sat three small lumps of shiny coal, smoking dismally. Under me was a cushion or a folded coat, something like that. The room seemed much larger. Yes, it was a largish room. A chest of brown-varnished wood stood by the bed which was low, a good foot lower than mine. There was a red army blanket stretched across the bed’s foot. The recesses on either side of the fireplace had shallow wooden shelves down them, holding folded clothes, old magazines, crockery, a brown teapot. These things conveyed an atmosphere of thin poverty.

  I was alone in the room, though someone was next door. I could hear sounds that made me unhappy, apprehensive. From upstairs a laugh, hostile to me. Was the old Swedish lady laughing? With whom? Had her husband come back suddenly?

  I was desolate with loneliness that felt it would never be assuaged, no one would ever come to comfort me. I sat and looked at the bed which had the cheap red blanket on it that suggested illness, and sniffed because the smoke was tearing at the back of my throat. I was a child, I knew that. And that there was a war, something to do with war, war had something to do with this dream or memory – whose? I came back to my own room, lying on my bed, with silence upstairs and next door. I was alone in the flat, watching my soft dark blue curtains softly moving. I was filled with misery.

  I left my pretty bedroom and made myself tea; then returned to draw the curtains and let the light in. I switched on the gas heater which came up hot and red, driving the memory of cold away; and I looked behind its bronze efficiency into a grate that had not had coals in it, I knew, for years.

  I have tried to dream myself back into that other room which is under this room, or beside it, or in it, or existing in someone’s memory. Which war was it? Whose was the chilly poverty? And I would like to know more about the frightened little child. He (or she) must have been very small for the room to look so big. So far I have failed. Perhaps it was the quarrel outside in the street that … that what? And why?

  England versus England

  ‘I think I’ll be off,’ said Charlie. ‘My things are packed.’ He had made sure of getting his holdall ready so that his mother wouldn’t. ‘But it’s early,’ she protested. Yet she was already knocking red hands together to rid them of water while she turned to say goodbye: she knew her son was leaving early to avoid the father. But the back door now opened and Mr Thornton came in. Charlie and his father were alike: tall, overthin, big-boned. The old miner stooped, his hair had gone into grey wisps, and his hollow cheeks were coal-pitted. The young man was still fresh, with jaunty fair hair and alert eyes. But there were scoops of strain under his eyes.

  ‘You’re alone,’ said Charlie involuntarily, pleased, ready to sit down again. The old man was not alone. Three men came into view behind him in the light that fell into the yard from the door, and Charlie said quietly: ‘I’m off, Dad, it’s goodbye till Christmas.’ They all came crowding into the little kitchen, bringing with them the spirit of facetiousness that seemed to Charlie his personal spiteful enemy, like a poltergeist always standing in wait somewhere behind his right shoulder. ‘So you’re back to the dreaming spires,’ said one man, nodding goodbye. ‘Off to t’palaces of learning,’ said another. Both were smiling. There was no hostility in it, or even envy, but it shut Charlie out of his family, away from his people. The third man, adding his tribute to this, the most brilliant son of the village, said: ‘You’ll be coming back to a right Christmas with us, then, or will you be frolicking with t’lords and t’earls you’re the equal of now?’

  ‘He’ll be home for Christmas,’ said the mother sharply. She turned her back on them, and dropped potatoes one by one from a paper bag into a bowl.

  ‘For a day or so, any road,’ said Charlie, in obedience to the prompting spirit. ‘That’s time enough to spend with t’hewers of wood and t’drawers of water.’ The third man nodded, as if to say: That’s right! and put back his head to let out a relieved bellow. The father and the other two men guffawed with him. Young Lennie pushed and shoved Charlie encouragingly and Charlie jostled back, while the mother nodded and smiled because of the saving horseplay. All the same, he had not been home for nearly a year, and when they stopped laughing and stood waiting for him to go, their grave eyes said they were remembering this fact.

  ‘Sorry I’ve not had more time with you, son,’ said Mr Thornton, ‘but you know how ‘tis.’

  The old miner had been union secretary, was now chairman, and had spent his working life as miners’ representative in a dozen capacities. When he walked through the village, men at a back door, or a woman in an apron, called: ‘Just a minute, Bill,’ and came after him. Every evening Mr Thornton sat in the kitchen, or in the parlour when the television was claimed by the children, giving advice about pensions, claims, work rules, allowances; filling in forms; listening to tales of trouble. Ever since Charlie could remember, Mr Thornton had been less his father than the father of the village. Now the three miners went into the parlour, and Mr Thornton laid his hand on his son’s shoulder, and said: ‘It’s been good seeing you,’ nodded, and followed them. As he shut the door he said to his wife: ‘Make us a cup of tea, will you, lass?’

  ‘There’s time for a cup, Charlie,’ said the mother, meaning there was no need for him to rush off now, when it was unlikely any more neighbours would come in. Charlie did not hear. He was watching her slosh dirty potatoes about under the running tap while with her free hand she reached for the kettle. He went to fetch his raincoat and his holdall listening to the nagging inner voice which he hated, but which he felt as his only protection against the spiteful enemy outside: ‘I can’t stand it when my father apologizes to me – he was apologizing to me for not seeing more of me. If he wasn’t as he is, better than anyone else in the village, and our home the only house with real books in it. I wouldn’t be at Oxford, I wouldn’t have done well at school, so it cuts both ways.’ The words, cut both ways, echoed uncannily in his inner ear, and he felt queasy, as if the earth he stood on was shaking. His eyes cleared on the sight of his mother, standing in front of him, her shrewd, non-judging gaze on his face. ‘Eh, lad,’ she said, ‘you don’t look any too good to me.’ ‘I’m all right,’ he said hastily, and kissed her, adding: ‘Say my piece to the girls when they come in.’ He went out, with Lennie behind him.

  The two youths walked in silence past fifty crammed lively brightly lit kitchens whose doors kept opening as the miners came in from the pit for their tea. They walked in silence along the front of fifty more houses. The fronts were all dark. The life of the village, even now, was in the kitchens where great fires roared all day on the cheap coal. The village had been built in the thirties by the company, now nationalized. There were two thousand houses, exactly alike, with identical patches of carefully tended front garden, and busy back yards. Nearly every house had a television aerial. From every chimney poured black smoke.

  At the bus stop Charlie turned to look back at the village, now a low hollow of black, streaked and spattered with sullen wet lights. He tried to isolate the gleam from his own home, while he thought how he loved his home and how he hated the village. Everything about it offended him, yet as soon as he stepped inside his kitchen he was received into warmth. That morning he had stood on the front step and looked out on lines of grey stucco houses on either side of grey tarmac; on grey ugly lamp-posts and greyish hedges, and beyond to the grey minetip and the neat black diagram of the minehead.

  He had looked, listening while the painful inner voice lectured: ‘There nothing in sight, not one object or building anywhere, that is beautiful. Everything is so ugly and mean and graceless that it should be bulldozed into the earth and out of the memory of man.’ There was not even a cinema. There was a post office, and attached to it a library that had romances and war stories. There were two miners’ clubs for dr
inking. And there was television. These were the amenities for two thousand families.

  When Mr Thornton stood on his front step and looked forth he smiled with pride and called his children to say: ‘You’ve never seen what a miners’ town can be like. You couldn’t even imagine the conditions. Slums, that’s what they used to be. Well, we’ve put an end to all that … Yes, off you go to Doncaster, I suppose, dancing and the pictures – that’s all you can think about. And you take it all for granted. Now, in our time …’

  And so when Charlie visited his home he was careful that none of his bitter criticisms reached words, for above all, he could not bear to hurt his father.

  A group of young miners came along for the bus. They wore smartly shouldered suits, their caps set at angles, and scarves flung back over their shoulders. They greeted Lennie, looked to see who the stranger was, and when Lennie said: ‘This is my brother,’ they nodded and turned quickly to board the bus. They went upstairs, and Lennie and Charlie went to the front downstairs. Lennie looked like them, with a strong cloth cap and a jaunty scarf. He was short, stocky, strong – ‘built for t’pit,’ Mr Thornton said. But Lennie was in a foundry in Doncaster. No pit for him, he said. He had heard his father coughing through all the nights of his childhood, and the pit wasn’t for him. But he had never said this to his father.

  Lennie was twenty. He earned seventeen pounds a week, and wanted to marry a girl he had been courting for three years now. But he could not marry until the big brother was through college. The father was still on the coal face, when by rights of age he should have been on the surface, because he earned four pounds a week more on the face. The sister in the office had wanted to be a schoolteacher, but at the moment of decision all the extra money of the family had been needed for Charlie. It cost them two hundred pounds a year for his extras at Oxford. The only members of the family not making sacrifices for Charlie were the schoolgirl and the mother.

  It was half an hour on the bus, and Charlie’s muscles were set hard in readiness for what Lennie might say, which must be resisted. Yet he had come home thinking: Well, at least I can talk it out with Lennie, I can be honest with him.

  Now Lennie said facetiously, but with an anxious loving inspection of his brother’s face: ‘And what for do we owe the pleasure of your company, Charlie boy? You could have knocked us all down with a feather when you said you were coming this weekend.’

  Charlie said angrily: ‘I got fed up with t’earls and t’dukes.’

  ‘Eh,’ said Lennie quickly, ‘but you didn’t need to mind them, they didn’t mean to rile you.’

  ‘I know they didn’t.’

  ‘Mum’s right,’ said Lennie, with another anxious but carefully brief glance, ‘you’re not looking too good. What’s up?’

  ‘What if I don’t pass t’examinations,’ said Charlie in a rush.

  ‘Eh, but what is this, then? You were always first in school. You were the best of everyone. Why shouldn’t you pass, then?’

  ‘Sometimes I think I won’t,’ said Charlie lamely, but glad he had let the moment pass.

  Lennie examined him again, this time frankly, and gave a movement like a shrug. But it was a hunching of the shoulders against a possible defeat. He sat hunched, his big hands on his knees. On his face was a small critical grin. Not critical of Charlie, not at all, but of life.

  His heart beating painfully with guilt, Charlie said: ‘It’s not as bad as that, I’ll pass.’ The inner enemy remarked softly: I’ll pass, then I’ll get a nice pansy job in a publisher’s office with the other wet-nosed little boys, or I’ll be a sort of clerk. Or I’ll be a teacher – I’ve no talent for teaching, but what’s that matter? Or I’ll be on the management side of industry, pushing people like Lennie around. And the joke is, Lennie’s earning more than I shall for years.’ The enemy behind his right shoulder began satirically tolling a bell and intoned: ‘Charlie Thornton, in his third year at Oxford, was found dead in a gas-filled bed-sitting room this morning. He had been overworking. Death from natural causes.’ The enemy added a loud rude raspberry and fell silent. But he was waiting: Charlie could feel him there waiting.

  Lennie said: ‘Seen a doctor, Charlie boy?’

  ‘Yes. He said I should take it easy a bit. That’s why I came home.’

  ‘No point killing yourself working.’

  ‘No, it’s not serious, he just said I must take it easy.’

  Lennie’s face remained grave. Charlie knew that when he got home he would say to the mother: ‘I think Charlie’s got summat on his mind.’ And his mother would say (while she stood shaking chips of potato into boiling fat): ‘I expect sometimes he wonders is the grind worth it. And he sees you earning, when he isn’t.’ She would say, after a silence during which they exchanged careful looks: ‘It must be hard for him, coming here, everything different, then off he goes, everything different again.’

  ‘Shouldn’t worry, Mum.’

  ‘I’m not worrying. Charlie’s all right.’

  The inner voice inquired anxiously: ‘If she’s on the spot about the rest, I suppose she’s right about the last bit too – I suppose I am all right?’

  But the enemy behind his right shoulder said: ‘A man’s best friend is his mother, she never lets a thing pass.’

  Last year he had brought Jenny down for a weekend, to satisfy the family’s friendly curiosity about the posh people he knew these days. Jenny was a poor clergyman’s daughter, bookish, a bit of a prig, but a nice girl. She had easily navigated the complicated currents of the weekend, while the family waited for her to put on ‘side’. Afterwards Mrs Thornton had said, putting her finger on the sore spot: ‘That’s a right nice girl. She’s a proper mother to you, and that’s a fact.’ The last was not a criticism of the girl, but of Charlie. Now Charlie looked with envy at Lennie’s responsible profile and said to himself: Yes, he’s a man. He has been for years, since he left school. Me, I’m a proper baby, and I’ve got two years over him.

  For above everything else, Charlie was made to feel, every time he came home, that these people, his people, were serious; while he and the people with whom he would now spend his life (if he passed the examination) were not serious. He did not believe this. The inner didactic voice made short work of any such idea. The outer enemy could, and did, parody it in a hundred ways. His family did not believe it, they were proud of him. Yet Charlie felt it in everything they said and did. They protected him. They sheltered him. And above all, they still paid for him. At his age, his father had been working in the pit for eight years.

  Lennie would be married next year. He already talked of a family. He, Charlie (if he passed the examination), would be running around licking people’s arses to get a job, Bachelor of Arts, Oxford, and a drug on the market.

  They had reached Doncaster. It was raining. Soon they would pass where Doreen, Lennie’s girl, worked. ‘You’d better get off here,’ Charlie said. ‘You’ll have all that drag back through the wet.’ ‘No, s’all right, I’ll come with you to the station.’

  There were another five minutes to go. ‘I don’t think it’s right, the way you get at Mum,’ Lennie said, at last coming to the point.

  ‘But I haven’t said a bloody word,’ said Charlie, switching without having intended it into his other voice, the middle-class voice which he was careful never to use with his family except in joke. Lennie gave him a glance of surprise and reproach and said: ‘All the same. She feels it.’

  ‘But it’s bloody ridiculous.’ Charlie’s voice was rising. ‘She stands in that kitchen all day, pandering to our every whim, when she’s not doing housework or making a hundred trips a day with that bloody coal …’ In the Christmas holidays, when Charlie had visited home last, he had fixed up a bucket on the frame of an old pram to ease his mother’s work. This morning he had seen the contrivance collapsed and full of rainwater in the back yard. After breakfast Lennie and Charlie had sat at the table in their shirtsleeves watching their mother. The door was open into the back yard. Mrs T
hornton carried a shovel whose blade was nine inches by ten, and was walking back and forth from the coalhole in the yard, through the kitchen, into the parlour. On each inward journey, a small clump of coal balanced on the shovel. Charlie counted that his mother walked from the coalhole to the kitchen fire and the parlour fire thirty-six times. She walked steadily, the shovel in front, held like a spear in both hands, and her face frowned with purpose. Charlie had dropped his head on to his arms and laughed soundlessly until he felt Lennie’s warning gaze and stopped the heave of his shoulders. After a moment he had sat up, straight-faced. Lennie said: ‘Why do you get at Mum, then?’ Charlie said: ‘But I haven’t said owt.’ ‘No, but she’s getting riled. You always show what you think, Charlie boy.’ As Charlie did not respond to his appeal – for far more than present charity – Lennie went on: ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ ‘Old! She’s not fifty!’

  Now Charlie said, continuing the early conversation: ‘She goes on as if she were an old woman. She wears herself out with nothing – she could get through all the work she has in a couple of hours if she organized herself. Or if just for once she told us where to get off.’

  ‘What’d she do with herself then?’

  ‘Do? Well, she could do something for herself. Read. Or see friends. Or something.’

  ‘She feels it. Last time you went off she cried.’

  ‘She what?’ Charlie’s guilt almost overpowered him, but the inner didactic voice switched on in time and he spoke through it: ‘What right have we to treat her like a bloody servant? Betty likes her food this way and that way, and Dad won’t eat this and that, and she stands there and humours the lot of us – like a servant.’