The Golden Notebook (74 page)

little queers who exploit her, and she adores them and she giggles a lot and drinks just a little too much, and thinks they are ever such fun.' Molly's hands lay on her lap, fitted together at the fingertips, exercising malicious no-comment. 'Well' 'And how about your American?' 'Well I had an affair with him.' 'Not the most sensible thing you ever did, I should have thought.' Anna laughed. 'What's funny?' 'Getting married to a man who has a house in Hampstead is going to make you very remote from the emotional rat-race.' 'Yes, thank God.' 'I'm going to take a job.' 'You mean, you're not going to write?' 'No.' Molly turned away, and flipped omelettes on to plates, filling a basket with bread. She determinedly said nothing. 'Do you remember Dr. North?' said Anna. 'Of course.' 'He's starting a sort of marriage welfare centre-half-official, half-private. He says three-quarters of the people who come to him with aches and pains are in fact in trouble with their marriages. Or lack of marriages.' 'And you're going to dish out good advice.' 'Something like that. And I'm going to join the Labour Party and teach a night class twice a week for delinquent kids.' 'So we're both going to be integrated with British life at its roots.' 'I was carefully avoiding that tone.' 'You're right-it's just the idea of you doing matrimonial welfare work.' 'I'm very good at other people's marriages.' 'Oh, quite so. Well perhaps you'll find me in that chair opposite you one of these days.' 'I doubt it.' 'Me too. There's nothing like knowing the exact dimensions of the bed you're going to fit yourself into.' Annoyed with herself, Molly's hands made an irritated gesture, and she grimaced and said: 'You're a bad influence on me, Anna. I was perfectly resigned to it all until you came in. Actually I think we'll get on very well.' 'I don't see why not,' said Anna. A small silence. 'It's all very odd, isn't it Anna?' 'Very.' Shortly after, Anna said she had to get back to Janet, who would have returned by now from the cinema, where she had been with a friend. The two women kissed and separated.

The End

Cover Blurb

"Urgent, daring, The Golden Notebook is the story of Anna, a modern woman who has found the courage to abandon an unsatisfactory marriage, borne a child, taken lovers freely and as freely dismissed them, and whose life is a passionate search for self-fulfillment in the larger world of men. Acclaimed as a masterpiece of modern fiction, The Golden Notebook is a powerful-and ultimately liberating-novel of the real revolution of our time, which is not Chinese, not Russian, but the revolution of women against men." "Overwhelming... Surely no one has ever told with such merciless power and courageous honesty the intricate terrors and glories of womanhood." -Chicago Sun-Times "Devastatingly real... undoubtedly the best and most powerful of Doris Lessing's books." -San Francisco Chronicle FROM THE REVIEWS: "Doris Lessing... proves herself to be, in my opinion, not only the best woman novelist we have but one of the most serious, intelligent and honest writers of the whole postwar generation." -Jeremy Brooks, London Sunday Times "Her major work.... With all its passionate probing and deliberate truthtelling, it is sexually, biologically clinical to a point which may offend some readers. Others will find it a painful, revelatory, fascinating book." -Virginia Kirkus "Brilliant... places Doris Lessing in the forefront of present British women novelists." -John Barkham, Saturday Review "I know nothing that has so exposed and annotated the present troubles of sexual life between men and women.... The reader one aspires to for The Golden Notebook will have constant shocks of identification and recognition." -Queen, London "One of the strangest and strongest works in recent English fiction." -New York Herald Tribune