To Room Nineteen
Authors: Doris Lessing
Collected Stones Volume One
‘The Other Woman’ was first published in
Lilliput
; ‘Through the Tunnel’ in
John Bull
; ‘The Habit of Loving’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘The Day Stalin Died’, ‘Wine’, ‘He’, ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ and ‘The Witness’ in
The Habit of Loving
; and ‘One off the Short List’, ‘A Woman on a Roof’, ‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’, ‘A Man and Two Women’, ‘A Room’, ‘England versus England’, ‘Two Potters’, ‘Between Men’ and ‘To Room Nineteen’ appeared in A
Man and Two Women.
‘Twenty Years’ was first published in 1994 in the
Daily Telegraph.
These stories have appeared previously in paperback in the following editions: ‘The Habit of Loving’, ‘The Woman’, ‘Through the Tunnel’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘The Day Stalin Died’, ‘Wine’, ‘He’, ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ and ‘The Witness’ in
The Habit of Loving
; ‘The Other Woman’ in
Five.
The rest of the stories appear in
A Man and Two Women.
All these stories have lived energetic and independent lives since I wrote them, since they have been much reprinted, in English and in other languages. None has been more anthologized than ‘Through the Tunnel’, mostly for children. I often get letters from children about it, and adolescents too, for it seems that fearful swim under the rock beneath the sea expresses their situation, or is like an initiation process. It was written because I watched a nine-year-old boy, in the South of France, longing to be accepted by a group of big boys, French, but they rejected him, and then he set challenges for himself, to become worthy of them. But, curiously, when the group turned up again some days later, the English boy had proved to his own satisfaction that he did not need them. I did not set out to write the tale for children, but this raises the whole question of writing stories especially for children. Another story, or short novel, which children like, is
The Fifth Child.
Italian adolescents, chosen from schools all over Italy, gave it a prize over other books from different parts of the world. Who would have thought that grim tale would appeal to children?
‘The Habit of Loving’ made a brilliant one hour television film, with Eric Portman. It was written because I - then fortyish - fell in love with a handsome youth, while an eminent and elderly actor was in love with me. The reversals of sex and situation from life to fiction would make an interesting exercise for those who enjoy that kind of psychological detective work.
‘One off the Short List’ earned approval from women, and, interestingly, from men too. I associate it with the Sixties, when it was written, for more and more that decade seems to me a comedy of sexual manners and mores. No one knew how to behave; there
were no rules at all. Was this for the first time, ever? I was angry when I wrote the story, but now memories of that time make me laugh. Barbara Coles says to the seducer Graham, But you don’t even find me attractive - defining a good deal more than her own situation, for most of the sexual dance was to do with power games, one-upmanship, domination, and nothing to do with attraction, let alone love, sweet love.
‘To Room Nineteen’ is another story much translated. Recently in Hong Kong’s Chinese University the professor who was teaching it wanted me to explain to his students - and, clearly, to him - the point of the story, which to him was that a woman needed privacy so much that she died for it. This need for privacy, said he, is foreign to their culture. (But perhaps not for long: a woman in Beijing recently wrote an applauded novel inspired by Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own.)
The famous culture gap, in this discussion, proved unbridgeable. I myself have never understood this story. I do not believe for a moment that Susan Rawlings knew what it was she wanted. She was driven, but by what? She was in love with death, that is certain, but why, when she had everything any reasonable person could want. A couple of German students in Berlin asked why these intelligent and socially responsible people did not go to a marriage counsellor. The storyteller’s riposte, that then there would be no story struck me, as well as them, as frivolous. Yes, they were raising literary questions rather more fundamental than they seemed to know. But the story comes out of some hidden place not only in me, but in many women of our time, otherwise it would not have proved so popular with them. My association is with Hardy’s heroine, Sue Bridehead, who said that there would come a time when people would choose not to live, or with Olive Schreiner’s heroine who said, ‘I’m so tired of it, and tired of the future before it comes.’ A kind of moral exhaustion. I believe we do not understand the reasons for these tides of feeling as well as we think we do. And sometimes I wonder if our clever methods of birth control have not struck deep into both men’s and women’s belief in themselves - into regions much deeper and more
primitive than are amenable to sweet reason.
‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ is saturated in the atmosphere of the sad and frightened time after World War Two, in Europe. I was in Germany, and I did see and experience people and places that went into the story. I visited a mental hospital, like the one I describe - and one ward in it later went up to make a scene in
The Fifth Child.
But that it is set in Germany is not the point at all. It is about the under-soul of Europe, the dark side where wars and killings and perversions are bred.
‘England versus England’ is often printed in magazines and collections outside this country. Other people look at us, and see what I saw when I wrote it: the depredations of our class system. I was in a mining village near Doncaster for a week, in a miner’s family, and I saw a good deal of what is described.
‘Between Men’ made a very funny half-hour television film. Television companies took more risks then than they do now.
‘A Woman on a Roof’ is liked by young people. It would make a half-hour film, and it nearly did.
‘The Day Stalin Died’ is appreciated by old Reds everywhere. When I wrote it, so I was told, the Communist Party high-ups laughed, but in public had to disapprove of it. It was the tone that was wrong: it does not do to treat serious matters lightly.
‘How I Finally Lost My Heart’ is one of my favourite stories, but not necessarily other people’s.
‘Two Potters’ has never been one of my best-liked tales, but authors have to resign themselves to having unloved favourites. Another tale - this time a novel, also had as a basis or theme a serial dream -
The Summer Before the Dark
- and both have for me the attraction and curiosity due to the hidden sides of ourselves. The continuing dreams of the vast dusty plain, the fragile and mortal mud houses and the old potter, went on for a decade or so, and were as interesting to me as an old and much-loved tale. Or visits to a country one has known well and left.
‘A Room’ has the same quality - for me - of a world as real as
our daytime world, where time slips and slides, and people we have never met are as familiar as old friends.
‘Wine’, a very short story, is a distilling of a four-year-long love affair.
‘He’ has sometimes annoyed feminists, but I think it tells the truth about many women’s feeling for men.
Doris Lessing, 1994
In 1947 George wrote again to Myra, saying that now the war was well over she should come home again and marry him. She wrote back from Australia, where she had gone with her two children in 1943 because there were relations there, saying she felt they had drifted apart; she was no longer sure she wanted to marry George. He did not allow himself to collapse. He cabled her the air fare and asked her to come over and see him. She came, for two weeks, being unable to leave the children for longer. She said she liked Australia; she liked the climate; she did not like the English climate any longer; she thought England was, very probably, played out; and she had become used to missing London. Also, presumably, to missing George Talbot.
For George this was a very painful fortnight. He believed it was painful for Myra, too. They had met in 1938, had lived together for five years, and had exchanged for four years the letters of lovers separated by fate. Myra was certainly the love of his life. He had believed he was of hers until now. Myra, an attractive woman made beautiful by the suns and beaches of Australia, waved goodbye at the airport, and her eyes were filled with tears.
George’s eyes, as he drove away from the airport, were dry. If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love that collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye. George dismissed the taxi early and walked through St James’s Park. Then it seemed too small for him, and he went to Green Park. Then he walked into Hyde Park and through to Kensington Gardens. When the dark came and they closed the great gates of the park he took a taxi home. He lived in a block of flats near Marble Arch. For five years Myra had lived with
him there, and it was here he had expected to live with her again. Now he moved into a new flat near Covent Garden. Soon after that he wrote Myra a very painful letter. It occurred to him that he had often received such letters, but had never written one before. It occurred to him that he had entirely underestimated the amount of suffering he must have caused in his life. But Myra wrote him a sensible letter back, and George Talbot told himself that now he must finally stop thinking about Myra.
Therefore, he became rather less of a dilettante in his work than he had been recently, and he agreed to produce a new play written by a friend of his. George Talbot was a man of the theatre. He had not acted in it for many years now; but he wrote articles, he sometimes produced a play, he made speeches on important occasions and was known by everyone. When he went into a restaurant people tried to catch his eye, and he often did not know who they were. During the four years since Myra had left, he had had a number of affairs with young women round and about the theatre, for he had been lonely. He had written quite frankly to Myra about these affairs, but she had never mentioned them in her letters. Now he was very busy for some months and was seldom at home; he earned quite a lot of money, and he had a few affairs with women who were pleased to be seen in public with him. He thought about Myra a great deal, but he did not write to her again, nor she to him, although they had agreed they would always be great friends.
One evening in the foyer of a theatre he saw an old friend of his he had always admired, and he told the young woman he was with that that man had been the most irresistible man of his generation – no woman had been able to resist him. The young woman stared briefly across the foyer and said, ‘Not really?’
When George Talbot got home that night he was alone, and he looked at himself with honesty in the mirror. He was sixty, but he did not look it. Whatever had attracted women to him in the past had never been his looks, and he was not much changed: a stoutish man, holding himself erect, grey-haired, carefully brushed, well dressed. He had not paid much attention to his face since those days
many years ago when he had been an actor; but now he had an uncharacteristic fit of vanity and remembered that Myra had admired his mouth, while his wife had loved his eyes. He took to taking glances at himself in foyers and restaurants where there were mirrors, and he saw himself as unchanged. He was becoming conscious, though, of a discrepancy between that suave exterior and what he felt. Beneath his ribs his heart had become swollen and soft and painful, a monstrous area of sympathy playing enemy to what he had been. When people made jokes he was often unable to laugh; and his manner of talking, which was light and allusive and dry, must have changed, because more than once old friends asked him if he were depressed, and they no longer smiled appreciatively as he told his stories. He gathered he was not being good company. He understood he might be ill, and he went to the doctor. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with his heart, he had thirty years of life in him yet – luckily, he added respectfully, for the British theatre.
George came to understand that the word ‘heartache’ meant that a person could carry a heart that ached around with him day and night for, in his case, months. Nearly a year now. He would wake in the night, because of the pressure of pain in his chest; in the morning he woke under a weight of grief. There seemed to be no end to it; and this thought jolted him into two actions. First, he wrote to Myra, a tender, carefully phrased letter, recalling the years of their love. To this he got, in due course, a tender and careful reply. Then he went to see his wife. With her he was, and had been for many years, good friends. They saw each other often, but not so often now the children were grown-up; perhaps once or twice a year, and they never quarrelled.
His wife had married again after they divorced, and now she was a widow. Her second husband had been a member of Parliament, and she worked for the Labour Party, and she was on a Hospital Advisory Committee and on the Board of Directors of a progressive school. She was fifty, but did not look it. On this afternoon she was wearing a slim grey suit and grey shoes, and her grey hair had a wave of white across the front which made her look distinguished. She was animated, and very happy to see George; and she talked
about some deadhead on her hospital committee who did not see eye to eye with the progressive minority about some reform or other. They had always had their politics in common, a position somewhere left of centre in the Labour Party. She had sympathized with his being a pacifist in the First World War – he had been for a time in prison because of it; he had sympathized with her militant feminism. Both had helped the strikers in 1926. In the thirties, after they were divorced, she had helped with money when he went on tour with a company acting Shakespeare to people on the dole, or hunger-marching.
Myra had not been at all interested in politics, only in her children. And in George, of course.
George asked his first wife to marry him again, and she was so startled that she let the sugar tongs drop and crack a saucer. She asked what had happened to Myra, and George said: ‘Well, dear, I think Myra forgot about me during those years in Australia. At any rate, she doesn’t want me now.’ When he heard his voice saying this it sounded pathetic, and he was frightened, for he could not remember ever having to appeal to a woman. Except to Myra.
His wife examined him and said briskly: ‘You’re lonely, George. Well, we’re none of us getting any younger.’
‘You don’t think you’d be less lonely if you had me around?’
She got up from her chair in order that she could attend to something with her back to him, and she said that she intended to marry again quite soon. She was marrying a man considerably younger than herself, a doctor who was in the progressive minority at her hospital. From her voice George understood that she was both proud and ashamed of this marriage, and that was why she was hiding her face from him. He congratulated her and asked her if there wasn’t perhaps a chance for him yet? ‘After all, dear, we were happy together, weren’t we? I’ve never really understood why that marriage ever broke up. It was you who wanted to break it up.’
‘I don’t see any point in raking over that old business,’ she said, with finality, and returned to her seat opposite him. He envied her very much, looking young with her pink and scarcely lined face under that brave lock of deliberately whitened hair.
‘But dear, I wish you’d tell me. It doesn’t do any harm now, does it? And I always wondered … I’ve often thought about it and wondered.’ He could hear the pathetic note in his voice again, but he did not know how to alter it.
‘You wondered,’ she said, ‘when you weren’t occupied with Myra.’
‘But I didn’t know Myra when we got divorced.’
‘You knew Phillipa and Georgina and Janet and lord knows who else.’
‘But I didn’t care about them.’
She sat with her competent hands in her lap and on her face was a look he remembered seeing when she told him she would divorce him. It was bitter and full of hurt. ‘You didn’t care about me either,’ she said.
‘But we were happy. Well, I was happy …’ he trailed off, being pathetic against all his knowledge of women. For, as he sat there, his old rake’s heart was telling him that if only he could find them, there must be the right words, the right tone. But whatever he said came out in this hopeless, old dog’s voice, and he knew that this voice could never defeat the gallant and crusading young doctor. ‘And I did care about you. Sometimes I think you were the only woman in my life.’
At this she laughed. ‘Oh, George, don’t get maudlin now, please.’
‘Well, dear, there was Myra. But when you threw me over there was bound to be Myra, wasn’t there? There were two women, you and then Myra. And I’ve never understood why you broke it all up when we seemed to be so happy.’
‘You didn’t care for me,’ she said again. ‘If you had, you would never have come home from Phillipa, Georgina, Janet
et al
and said calmly, just as if it didn’t matter to me in the least, that you had been with them in Brighton or wherever it was.’
‘But if I had cared about them I would never have told you.’
She was regarding him incredulously, and her face was flushed. With what? Anger? George did not know.
‘I remember being so proud,’ he said pathetically, ‘that we had
solved this business of marriage and all that sort of thing. We had such a good marriage that it didn’t matter, the little flirtations. And I always thought one should be able to tell the truth. I always told you the truth, didn’t I?’
‘Very romantic of you, dear George,’ she said dryly; and soon he got up, kissed her fondly on the cheek, and went away.
He walked for a long time through the parks, hands behind his erect back, and he could feel his heart swollen and painful in his side. When the gates shut, he walked through the lighted streets he had lived in for fifty years of his life, and he was remembering Myra and Molly, as if they were one woman, merging into each other, a shape of warm easy intimacy, a shape of happiness walking beside him. He went into a little restaurant he knew well, and there was a girl sitting there who knew him because she had heard him lecture once on the state of the British theatre. He tried hard to see Myra and Molly in her face, but he failed; and he paid for her coffee and his own and went home by himself. But his flat was unbearably empty, and he left it and walked down by the Embankment for a couple of hours to tire himself, and there must have been a colder wind blowing than he knew, for next day he woke with a pain in his chest which he could not mistake for heartache.
He had flu and a bad cough, and he stayed in bed by himself and did not ring up the doctor until the fourth day, when he was getting lightheaded. The doctor said it must be the hospital at once.
But he would not go to the hospital. So the doctor said he must have day and night nurses. This he submitted to until the cheerful friendliness of the nurses saddened him beyond bearing, and he asked the doctor to ring up his wife, who would find someone to look after him and would be sympathetic. He was hoping that Molly would come herself to nurse him, but when she arrived he did not mention it, for she was busy with preparations for her new marriage. She promised to find him someone who would not wear a uniform and make jokes. They naturally had many friends in common; and she rang up an old flame of his in the theatre who
said she knew of a girl who was looking for a secretary’s job to tide her over a patch of not working, but who didn’t really mind what she did for a few weeks.
So Bobby Tippett sent away the nurses and made up a bed for herself in his study. On the first day she sat by George’s bed sewing. She wore a full dark skirt and a demure printed blouse with short frills at the wrist, and George watched her sewing and already felt much better. She was a small, thin, dark girl, probably Jewish, with sad black eyes. She had a way of letting her sewing lie loose in her lap, her hands limp over it; and her eyes fixed themselves, and a bloom of dark introspection came over them. She sat very still at these moments like a small china figure of a girl sewing. When she was nursing George, or letting in his many visitors, she put on a manner of cool and even languid charm; it was the extreme good manners of heartlessness, and at first George was chilled: but then he saw through the pose; for whatever world Bobby Tippett had been born into he did not think it was the English class to which these manners belonged. She replied with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to questions about herself; he gathered that her parents were dead, but there was a married sister she saw sometimes; and for the rest she had lived around and about London, mostly by herself, for ten or more years. When he asked her if she had not been lonely, so much by herself, she drawled, ‘Why, not at all, I don’t mind being alone.’ But he saw her as a small, brave child, a waif against London, and was moved.
He did not want to be the big man of the theatre; he was afraid of evoking the impersonal admiration he was only too accustomed to; but soon he was asking her questions about her career, hoping that this might be the point of her enthusiasm. But she spoke lightly of small parts, odd jobs, scene painting and understudying, in a jolly good-little-trouper’s voice; and he could not see that he had come any closer to her at all. So at last he did what he had tried to avoid, and sitting up against his pillows like a judge or an impresario, he said: ‘Do something for me, dear. Let me see you.’ She went next door like an obedient child, and came back in tight black trousers, but still in her demure little blouse, and stood on
the carpet before him, and went into a little song-and-dance act. It wasn’t bad. He had seen a hundred worse. But he was very moved; he saw her now above all as the little urchin, the gamin, boy-girl and helpless. And utterly touching. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘this is half of an act. I always have someone else.’