To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Yes,’ said Maureen. ‘I’ve had five abortions and one of them was by one of those old women. I don’t even use anything, and I don’t get pregnant … How did you like Jack’s new girl?’

  ‘I liked her,’ said Peggy, apologetically.

  ‘She’s an intellectual,’ said Maureen: it sounded like ‘inteleshual’.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ever so bright and well-informed.’ Maureen battled a while with her better self, won the battle, and said: ‘But why? She’s attractive, but she’s such a schoolgirl, she’s a nice bright clever little schoolgirl with nice bright little clothes.’

  Peggy said: ‘Stop it. Stop it at once.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maureen. But she added, out of her agonized depths: ‘And she can’t even cook!’

  And now Peggy laughed, flinging herself back and spilling more brandy from her drunken hand. After a while, Maureen laughed too.

  Peggy said: ‘I was thinking, how many times have wives and mistresses said about us: Peggy’s such a bore, Maureen’s so obvious.’

  ‘I can hear them: of course they’re very pretty, and of course they can dress well, and they’re marvellous cooks, and I suppose they’re good in bed, but what have they got?’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Peggy.

  Both women were now drunk. It was getting late. The room was full of shadow, its white walls fading into blue heights; the glossy chairs, tables, rugs, sending out deep gleams of light.

  ‘Shall I turn on the light?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Peggy now got up herself to refill her glass. She said: ‘I hope she has the sense not to throw up her job.’

  ‘Who, Jack’s red-headed bitch?’

  ‘Who else? Tom’s girl is all right, she’s actually pregnant.’

  ‘You’re right. But I bet she does, I bet Jack’s trying to make her give it up.’

  ‘I know he is. Just before I left Tom – before he threw me over – your Jack and she were over to dinner. Jack was getting at her for her column, he was sniping at her all evening – he said it was a left-wing society hostess’s view of politics. A left-wing bird’s-eye view, he said.’

  ‘He hated me painting,’ said Maureen. ‘Every time I said I wanted a morning to paint, he made gibes about Sunday painters. I’d serve him his breakfast, and go up to the studio – well, it’s the spare room really. First he’d shout up funny cracks, then he’d come up and say he was hungry. He’d start being hungry at eleven in the morning. Then if I didn’t come down and cook, he’d make love. Then we’d talk about his work. We’d talk about his bloody films all day and half the night …’ Maureen’s voice broke into a wail: ‘It’s all so unfair, so unfair, so unfair … they were all like that. I’m not saying I’d have been a great painter, but I might have been something. Something of my own … Not one of those men did anything but make fun, or patronize me … all of them, in one way or another. And of course, one always gives in, because one cares more for …’

  Peggy who had been half asleep, drooping over her settee, sat up and said: ‘Stop it, Maureen. What’s the good of it?’

  ‘But it’s true. I’ve spent twenty years of my life, eighteen hours a day, bolstering up some man’s ambition. Well, isn’t it true?’

  ‘It’s true, but stop it. We chose it.’

  ‘Yes. And if that silly red-haired bitch gives up her job, she’ll get what she deserves.’

  ‘She’ll be where we are.’

  ‘But Jack says he’s going to marry her.’

  ‘Tom married me.’

  ‘He was intrigued by that clever little red-headed mind of hers. All those bright remarks about politics. But now he’s doing everything he can to stop her column. Not that it would be any loss to the nation, but she’d better watch out, oh yes, she had …’ Maureen weaved her brandy glass back and forth in front of hypnotized eyes.

  ‘Which is the other reason I came to see you.’

  ‘You didn’t come to see the new me?’

  ‘It’s the same thing.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘How much money have you got?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘How long is the lease for this flat?’ Maureen held up the fingers of one hand. ‘Five years? Then sell the lease.’

  ‘Oh I couldn’t.’

  ‘Oh yes you could. It would bring you in about two thousand, I reckon. We could take a flat somewhere less expensive.’

  ‘We could?’

  ‘And I’ve got forty pounds a month. Well, then.’

  ‘Well then what?’ Maureen was lying practically flat in the big chair, her white lace shirt ruffled up around her breasts, so that a slim brown waist and diaphragm showed above the tight brown trousers. She held her brandy glass in front of her eyes and moved it back and forth, watching the amber liquid slopping in the glass. From time to time the brandy fell on her brown stomach flesh and she giggled.

  Peggy said: ‘If we don’t do something, I’ve got to go back to my parents in Oudtshoorn – they’re ostrich farmers. I was the bright girl that escaped. Well, I’ll never make an actress. So I’ll be back living out my life among the sugar-bushes and the ostriches. And where will you be?’

  ‘Ditto, ditto.’ Maureen now wriggled her soft brown head sideways and let brandy drip into her open mouth.

  ‘We’re going to open a dress shop. If there’s one thing we both really understand, it’s how to dress.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘What city would you fancy?’

  ‘I fancy Paris.’

  ‘We couldn’t compete in Paris.’

  ‘No, can’t compete in … how about Rome? I’ve got three ex-lovers in Rome.’

  ‘They’re not much good when it comes to trouble.’

  ‘No good at all.’

  ‘Better stay in London.’

  ‘Better stay in London. Like another drink?’

  ‘Yes. Yesssh.’

  ‘I’ll get-get-itit.’

  ‘Next time, we mustn’t go to bed without the marriage shertificate.’

  ‘A likely shtory.’

  ‘But it’s against my prinshiples, bargaining.’

  ‘Oh I know, I know.’

  ‘Yesh.’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better be leshbians, what do you think?’

  Peggy got up, with difficulty, came to Maureen, and put her hand on Maureen’s bare diaphragm. ‘Doesh that do anything for you?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘I fanshy men myself,’ said Peggy, returning to her settee, where she sat with a bump, spilling liquor.

  ‘Me too and a fat lot of good it duz ush.’

  ‘Next time, we don’t give up our jobs, we stick with the dress shop.’

  ‘Yessh …’

  A pause. Then Peggy sat up, and focused. She was pervaded by an immense earnestness. ‘Listen, she said. ‘No, damn it, lishen, that’s what I mean to shay all the time, I really mean it.’

  ‘I do too.’

  ‘No. No giving it up the firsht time a m-m-man appearsh. Damn it, I’m drunk, but I mean it … No, Maureen, I’m not going to shtart a dresh shop unless that’s undershtood from the shtart. We musht we musht agree to that, work firsht, or elshe, or else you know where we’re going to end up.’ Peggy brought out the last in a rush, and lay back, satisfied.

  Maureen now sat up, earnest, trying to control her tongue: ‘But … what … we are both good at, itsh, it’s bolshtering up some damned genus, genius.’

  ‘Not any more. Oh no. You’ve got to promish me, Maureen, promish me, or elshe …’

  ‘All right, I promish.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Have another drink?’

  ‘Lovely brandy, lovely lovely lovely blandy.’

  ‘Lovely brandy …’

  The Witness

  In the mornings, when Mr Brooke had hung his hat carefully on the nail over his desk, and arranged his pipe and tobacco at his elbow, he used to turn to the others and say hopefully: ‘You should have just seen Twister today. He brought my n
ewspaper from the doorstep without dropping it once.’ Then he looked at the polite, hostile faces, laughed a short, spluttering, nervous laugh, and bent his head to his papers.

  Miss Jenkins, the private secretary, kept a peke called Darling, and she had only to mention him for everyone to listen and laugh. As for Richards, he was engaged, and they pulled his leg about it. Every time he went purple and writhed delightedly under his desk. The accountant, Miss Ives, a tart old maid who lived some proud, defiant life of her own, had a garden. When she talked about trees the office grew silent with respect. She won prizes at flower shows. There was no getting past her.

  At eight, as they settled down for the day, at eleven when cups of tea came round slopped into saucers, at three in the afternoon when they ate cream cakes, they all had something.

  Mr Brooke had brought his terrier Twister simply so that he could make them notice him sometimes. First it was a canary, but he decided at last canaries couldn’t be interesting. Although Miss Jenkins’ peke did nothing but eat, she could talk about it every day and get an audience, but then she was a very attractive girl. She wouldn’t have been the boss’s private secretary if she wasn’t. Mr Brooke’s dog did everything. He taught it at night, in his room, to beg and balance and wait for sugar. He used to rub its ears gratefully, thinking: ‘It will make them sit up when I tell them he can keep perfectly still for ten minutes by the watch the office gave me when I had worked for them twenty years.’ He used to say things like that to himself long after he had given up trying to attract their notice.

  And, after all, he had not been alone, had not added up figures from eight to four for thirty years, without making something of his own he could live from. He decided to keep the canary, because it took no room and he had come to enjoy its noise. He kept the dog, too, because it was company, of a kind. The real reason why he got rid of neither was because they annoyed his landlady, with whom he bickered continually. After office he used to walk home thinking that after supper he would make the dog bark so that she would come in and make a scene. These scenes usually ended in her crying; and then he could say: ‘I am alone in the world too, my dear.’ Sometimes she made him a cup of tea before going to bed, saying bitterly: ‘If you won’t look after yourself I suppose someone must. But don’t let that damned dog spill it all over the floor.’

  After she had gone to bed, and there was no chance of meeting her in the passage, he cut out pictures from magazines, sent off postal orders to addresses he was careful to keep hidden from her inquisitive eyes, and was not in the least ashamed of himself. He was proud of it; it was a gesture of defiance, like getting drunk every Friday. He chose Fridays because on Saturday mornings, when he was really not fit for work, he could annoy Miss Ives by saying: ‘I went on the loose last night.’ Then he got through the hours somehow. A man was entitled to something, and he did not care for gardens.

  The rest of the week he used to sit quietly at his desk, watching them talk together as if he were simply not there, and wish that Miss Jenkins’ dog would get ill, and she would ask him for advice; or that Miss Ives would say: ‘Do help me with my ledger; I have never seen anyone who could calculate as fast as you’; or that Richards would quarrel with his girl and confide in him. He imagined himself saying: ‘Women! Of course! You can’t tell me anything.’

  Other times he stood looking out of the window, listening to the talk behind him, pretending not to, pretending he was indifferent. Two storeys down in the street life rushed past. Always, he felt, he had been looking out of windows. He dreamed, often, that two of the cars down below would crash into each other, and that he was the only witness. Police would come stamping up the stairs with notebooks, the typists would ask avidly ‘What actually happened, Mr Brooke?’, the boss would slap him on the shoulder and say: ‘How lucky you saw it. I don’t know what I would do without you.’ He imagined himself in Court, giving evidence. ‘Yes, your Worship, I always look out of the window at that time every day. I make a habit of it. I saw everything …’

  But there never was an accident, the police only came once, and that was to talk to Miss Jenkins when her peke got lost, and he hardly saw Mr Jones except to nod to. It was Miss Ives who was his real boss.

  He used to peep through the door of the typists’ room, where six girls worked, when the boss went through each morning, and go sick with envious admiration.

  Mr Jones was a large, red-faced man with hair grown white over the ears; and after lunch every day he smelled of beer. Nevertheless, the girls would do anything for him. He would say breezily: ‘Well, and how’s life today?’ Sometimes he put his arm round the prettiest and said: ‘You’re too cute to keep long. You’ll be getting married …’ He said it as if he were handing out medals, something one had to do, part of his job. It’s only to make them work harder, thought Mr Brooke bitterly, surreptitiously shutting the door, and listening to how the typewriters started clattering furiously the moment Mr Jones left. Then he used to go to the washroom and look at his own face in the glass. He had no white hair himself: he was quite a good-looking man, he thought. But if he put his arm round a girl’s shoulder he would get his face slapped, he knew that.

  It was the year he was fifty-five, retiring age, that Marnie de Kok came into the office as a junior, straight from school. Mr Brooke did not want to leave off working. He couldn’t live on what he had saved; and in any case the office was all he had. For some weeks he looked crumpled up with apprehension, but Mr Jones said nothing, and after a while he took heart again. He did not want to think about it, and besides, with Marnie there everything was changed. After one morning there was a different feeling in the office.

  She was a girl of eighteen from some little dorp miles away, the youngest of ten children. She had a small plump, fresh face that always had a look of delighted expectation, a shrill, expressive voice, and was as slim and as quick as a fish. She darted about the place, talking to the staff as if it had never entered her head that anyone in the world could not be pleased to waste his time on her account. She shattered the sacred silence of the main office with her gossip about her family, sat on the desks and swung her legs, put vases of flowers among the telephones. And even Miss Ives took off her glasses and watched her. They all watched her, and particularly Mr Jones who made plenty of excuses to leave his desk, with the indulgent, amused, faintly ironic smile with which one looks at children, remembering what all that fearlessness and charm is going to come to. As for Mr Brooke he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. For a while he was afraid to speak, for Marnie, like the others, seemed not to know he was there, and when he did, she looked at him with startled distaste, a look he was used to, though it in no way corresponded with what he felt about himself. She might be my daughter, he said to himself defensively; and he used to ask her whom she ate lunch with, what picture she has seen the night before, as a jealous lover can’t resist talking about his mistress, feeling that even to speak about what she has been doing robs it of its danger, makes the extraordinary and wonderful life she leads apart from him, in some way his. But Marnie answered shortly, or not at all, wrinkling up her nose.

  Even that he found attractive. What was so charming about her was her directness, the simplicity of her responses. She knew nothing of the secret sycophancy of the office which made the typists speak of Mr Jones in one voice and Miss Ives in another. She treated everyone as if she had known them always. She was as confiding as a child, read her letters out loud, jumped with joy when parcels came from home, and wept when someone suggested gently that there were better ways of doing her work.

  For she was catastrophically inefficient. She was supposed to learn filing; but in actual fact she made the tea, slipped over to the teashop across the road ten times a day for cream cakes, and gave people advice about their colds or how to make their dresses.

  The other typists, who were after all her natural enemies, were taken by surprise and treated her with the tenderest indulgence. It was because it occurred to no one that she could last o
ut the first month. But Miss Ives made out her second pay-cheque, which was very generous, with a grim face, and snubbed her until she cried.

  It was Miss Ives, who was afraid of nothing, who at last walked into Mr Jones’ office and said that the child was impossible and must leave at once. As it was the files would take months to get straight. No one could find anything.

  She came back to her desk looking grimmer than ever, her lips twitching.

  She said angrily, ‘I’ve kept myself for twenty-seven years this March. I’ve never had anything. How many women have the qualifications I have? I should have had a pretty face.’ And then she burst into tears. It was mild hysterics. Mr Brooke was the first to fuss around with water and handkerchiefs. No one had ever seen Miss Ives cry.

  And what about? All Mr Jones had said was that Marnie was the daughter of an old school friend and he had promised to look after her. If she was no good at filing, then she must be given odd jobs.

  ‘Is this an office or a charitable institution?’ demanded Miss Ives. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, never.’ And then she turned to Mr Brooke, who was leaning ineffectually over her, and said: ‘There are other people who should go too. I suppose he was a friend of your father? Getting drunk and making a pig of yourself. Pictures of girls in your desk, and putting grease on your hair in the washrooms …’

  Mr Brooke went white, tried to find words, looked helplessly round for support to Miss Jenkins and Richards. They did not meet his eyes. He felt as if they were dealing him invisible blows on the face; but after a few moments Miss Ives put away her handkerchief, picked up her pen with a gesture of endurance, and went back to her ledger. No one looked at Mr Brooke.

  He made himself forget it. She was hysterical, he said. Women would say anything. He knew from what men had told him there were times you should take no notice of them. An old maid, too, he said spitefully, wishing he could say it aloud, forgetting that she, too, had made of her weakness a strength, and that she could not be hurt long by him, any more than he could by her.

  But that was not the only case of hysteria. It seemed extraordinary that for years these people had worked together, making the same jokes, asking after each other’s health, borrowing each other’s things, and then everything went wrong from one day to the next.