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‘Oh, come on! We wouldn't have been able to start this business at all without the grandmothers helping with everything.'

‘Roz is so damned tactful all the time,' said Mary, and it exploded out of her, the champagne aiding and abetting. She poured some more. ‘They're both so tactful.'

‘You must be short of something to complain about.'

‘I feel they are watching us all the time to make sure we
come up to the mark.'

‘What mark?'

‘I don't know,' said Mary, tears imminent. ‘I wish I knew. There's something
there
.'

‘They don't want to be interfering mothers-in-law.'

‘Sometimes I hate them.'

‘
Hate
,' Hannah dismissed, with a smile.

‘They've got them, don't you see? Sometimes I feel . . .'

‘It's because they didn't have fathers – the boys. Ian's father died and Tom's went off and married someone else. That's why the four of them are so close.'

‘I don't care why. Sometimes I feel like a spare part.'

‘I think you're being unfair.'

‘Tom wouldn't care who he was married to. It could be a seagull or a . . . or a . . . wombat.'

Hannah flung herself back in her chair, laughing.

‘I mean it. Oh, he's ever so damned kind. He's so nice. I shout at him and I pick a fight, anything just to make him – see me. And then the next thing we're in bed having a good screw.'

But Hannah didn't feel anything like that. She knew Ian needed her. It was not only the slight dependence because of his gammy leg, he sometimes clung to her, childlike. Yes, there was something of the child in him – a little. One night he had called out to Roz in his sleep, and Hannah had woken him. ‘You were dreaming of Roz,' she told him.

At once awake and wary, he said, ‘Hardly surprising. I've known her all my life. She was like another mother.' And he buried his face in her breasts. ‘Oh, Hannah, I don't know what I'd do without you.'

Now that Hannah was standing up to her, Mary was even more alone. Once she had felt, there's Hannah, at least I've got Hannah.

Thinking over this conversation afterwards, Mary knew there was something there that eluded her. That was what she always felt. And yet what was she complaining about? Hannah was right. When she looked at their situation from outside, married to these two covetable men, well-known, well-set-up, well-off, generally liked – so what was she complaining about? I have everything, she decided. But then, a voice from her depths – I have nothing. She lacked everything. ‘I have nothing,' she told herself, as waves of emptiness swept over her. In the deep centre of her life – nothing, an absence.

And yet she could not put her finger on it, what was wrong, what was lacking. So there must be something wrong with her. She, Mary, was at fault. But why? What was it? So she puzzled, sometimes so unhappy she felt she could run away out of the situation for good.

When Mary found the bundle of letters, forgotten in an old bit of luggage, she had at first thought they were all from Lil to Tom, conventional, of the kind you'd expect from an old friend or even a second mother. They began, Dear Tom and ended Love, Lil, with sometimes a cross
or two for a kiss. And then there was the other letter, from Tom to Lil, that had not been posted. ‘Why shouldn't I write to you, Lil, why not, I have to, I think of you all the time, oh my God, Lil, I love you so much, I dream of you, I can't bear being apart from you, I love you I love you . . .' and so on, pages of it. So, she read Lil's letters again, and saw them differently. And then she understood everything. And when she stood on the path with Hannah, below Baxter's Gardens, and heard Roz's laughter, she knew it was mocking laughter. It mocked her, Mary, and she understood everything at last. It was all clear to her.

About the author

Meet Doris Lessing

About the book

On Not Winning the Nobel Prize: The Nobel Lecture

Read on

Have You Read? More by Doris Lessing

 

Meet Doris Lessing

© Ingrid von Kruse

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life of the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a “civilized” Edwardian life among “savages,” but her
father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.

Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home and then installed Doris in a convent school, where the nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, where she briefly attended an all-girls high school before dropping out. She was thirteen, and it was the end of her formal education.

But like other women writers from southern Africa who did not graduate from high school, such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She once commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers: “Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then—I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time.” The
parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, and Kipling; later she discovered D. H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth; her mother told them to the children, and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's formative years were also spent absorbing her father's bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of “poison.” “We are all of us made by war,” Lessing has written, “twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.”

In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, “in a fever of erotic longing.” Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. “There is a whole generation of  About the author women,” she has said, speaking of her mother's era, “and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic—because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually
happened to them.” Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of “setting at a distance,” taking “the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.”

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen she married Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists “who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read.” Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel,
The Grass Is Singing
, and began her career as a professional writer.

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual's own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa.
In 1956, in response to Lessing's outrageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century—their “climate of ethical judgment”—to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1952–1959), a formally conventional
bildungsroman
(novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of its heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with
The Golden Notebook
(1962). This novel was a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation.

Attacked for being “unfeminine” in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.” As at least one critic noticed, Anna Wulf “tries to live with the freedom of a man,” a point Lessing seems to confirm: “These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of
The Golden Notebook
. Her “inner-space fiction” deals with cosmic fantasies (
Briefing for a Descent into
Hell
, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (
Memoirs of a Survivor
, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (the series Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979–1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society.

Lessing's other works include
The Good Terrorist
(1985) and
The Fifth Child
(1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
, 1983, and
If the Old Could . . .
, 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. In the last decade of the twentieth century, Lessing published a variety of books, including
The Real Thing
(stories, 1992);
African Laughter
(reportage, 1992); two volumes of autobiography,
Under My Skin
(1994) and
Walking in the Shade
(1997); and the novel
Mara and Dann: An Adventure
(1999).

Ben, in the World
, the poignant sequel to
The Fifth Child
, was published in 2000, followed by the novels
The Sweetest Dream
(2002),
The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels
(2003),
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog
(2006, sequel to
Mara and Dann
), and
The Cleft
(2007). In 2008 she published
Alfred & Emily
, an exploration of the lives of
her parents through both fiction and memoir.

In 2007, Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.