Authors: Doris Lessing
‘We shouldn’t have come.’
They watched the cripple lever himself up over a deep doorstep, dragging his body up behind his arms, using the stump of his body as a support while he reached up with long arms to ring the bell.
‘What about the money?’ she asked.
‘We’ll go home when it runs out.’
‘Good, we’ll go back tomorrow.’
Instantly they felt gay; they were leaving tomorrow.
They walked along the street, looking at the menus outside the hotels. He said, ‘Let’s go in here. It’s expensive, but it’s the last night.’
It was a big, brown, solid-looking hotel called the Lion’s Head; and on the old-fashioned gilded signboard was a great golden lion snarling down at them.
Inside was a foyer, lined with dark, shining wood; there were dark, straight-backed wooden settles around the walls and heavy arrangements of flowers in massive brass tubs. Glass doors opened into the restaurant proper. This was a long room lined with the same gleaming dark wood, and in each corner stood even larger brass tubs crammed with flowers. The table-cloths were heavy white damask; a profusion of cutlery and glass gleamed and glittered. It was a scene of solid middle-class comfort. A waiter showed them to an empty table at one side. The menu was placed between them. They exchanged a grimace, for the place was far too expensive for them, particularly as now they were committed to spending so much of their money on fares away and out of Germany into France – a country where they would feel no compulsion at all to make disparaging and ironical remarks about tourists or tourism.
They ordered their dinner and, while they waited, sat examining the other diners. The Americans were not here. Their hotels were the big, new, modern ones at the top of the village. The clientele here was solidly German. Again the two British tourists were conscious of a secret, half-ashamed unease. They looked from one face to another, thinking: Six years ago, what were you doing? And you – and you? We were mortal enemies then; now we sit in the same room, eating together. You were the defeated.
The last was addressed as a reminder to themselves, for no people could have looked less defeated than these. A more solid, sound, well-dressed, comfortable crowd could not be imagined; and they were eating with the easy satisfaction of those who cannot imagine ever being short of a meal. Yet six years ago …
The waiter brought two plates of soup, very big plates, mono-grammed with the sign of the Lion’s Head, so full that they asked him to take them away and divide one portion between the two of
them. For they had observed that a single portion (served on large metal dishes) of any dish here was enough for two English stomachs. Not that they were not more than willing to do as well as these people around them – the defeated whose capacity seemed truly incredible. But one day in this country of hearty eaters had not enlarged their stomachs to German capacity; and now that they were leaving not later than tomorrow, it was too late.
They consumed their half-portions of very strong meat soup, full of vegetables; and pointed out to each other that, even so, their plates held twice as much as they would in England; and continued to dart curious, half-guilty glances at their fellow diners.
Six years ago these people were living amid ruins, in cellars, behind any scrap of masonry that remained standing. They were half-starved, and their clothes were rags. An entire generation of young men were dead. Six years. A remarkable nation, surely.
The jugged hare came and was eaten with appreciation.
They had ordered pastries with cream; but alas, before they could eat them, they had to restore themselves with strong cups of coffee.
Back in France, they told themselves and each other, they would find themselves at home, at table as well as spiritually. By this time tomorrow, they would be in France. And now, with the last meal over and the bill to pay, came the moment of general reckoning, soon over, and in fact accomplished hastily on the back of an envelope.
To take a train, third-class, back to the nearest suitable spot in the French Alps would use up half of their available currency; and it would be a choice of staying out their full three weeks and eating one meal a day – and that a very slender meal – or staying a week and then going home.
They did not look at each other as they reached this final depressing conclusion. They were thinking, of course, that they were mad to leave at all. If to come to Germany was the result of some sort of spiritual quixotry, a symptom of moral philanthropy suitable only for liberal idealists whom – they were convinced – they both despised, then to leave again was simply weak-minded. In fact, their present low-spiritedness was probably due to being
over-tired, for they had spent two successive nights sitting upon hard wooden train seats, sleeping fitfully on each other’s shoulders.
They would have to stay. And now that they reached this conclusion, depression settled on them both; and they looked at the rich Germans who surrounded them with a gloomy hatred which, in their better moments, they would have utterly repudiated.
Just then the waiter came forward, followed by an energetically striding young man apparently fresh from a day’s skiing, for his face was flaming scarlet under untidy shags of sandy hair. They did not want him at their table, but the restaurant was now quite full. The waiter left their bill on the tablecloth; and they occupied themselves in finding the right change, under the interested inspection of the young sportsman, who, it seemed, was longing to advise them about money and tips. Resenting his interest, they set themselves to be patient. But the waiter did not return for some time, so busy was he at the surrounding tables; and they watched a party of new arrivals who were settling down at a nearby table that had been reserved for them. There came first a handsome woman in her early middle age, unfastening a shaggy, strong-looking fur coat of the kind worn for winter sports or bad weather outdoors. She flung this open on her chair, making a kind of nest, in which she placed herself, wrapping it closely around her legs. She was wearing a black wool dress, full-skirted and embroidered in bright colours, a dress which flirted with the idea of peasant naïvety. Having arranged herself, she raised her face to greet the rest of her family with a smile that seemed to mock and chide them for taking so long to follow after her. It was a handsome face: she was a fine-looking woman, with her fair curling hair, and a skin bronzed deep with the sun and oil of many weeks of winter sport. Next came a young lad, obviously her son, a very tall, good-looking, attractive youth, who began teasing her because of her hurry to begin eating. He flashed his white strong teeth at her, and his young blue eyes, until she playfully took his arm and shook him. He protested. Then both, with looks of mock concern because this was a public place, desisted, lowered their voices, and sat laughing while the daughter, a delightfully pretty girl of fifteen or so, and the father, a heavy,
good-humoured gentleman, took the two empty chairs. The family party was complete. The waiter was attentive for their order, which was for four tall glasses of beer, which they insisted on having that moment, before they could order or even think of food. The waiter hurried off to fetch the beer, while they settled down to study the menus. And one could be sure that there would be no half-portions for this family, either for financial reasons or because they suffered from limitations of appetite.
Watching this family, it came home to the couple from Britain that what they were resenting was very likely their sheer capacity for physical enjoyment. Since, like all British people of their type, they spent a great deal of emotional energy on complaining about the inability of their countrymen to experience joy and well-being, they told themselves that what they felt was both churlish and inconsistent. The woman said to the man in a conciliating, apologetic, almost resigned voice, ‘They really are extraordinarily good-looking.’
To this he responded with a small ironical grimace: and he returned his attention to the family.
Mother, father, and son were laughing over some joke, while the girl turned a very long tapering glass of beer between thumb and forefinger of a thin, tanned hand so that the frost beads glittered and spun. She was staring out of the family group, momentarily lost to it, a fair, dreaming tendril of a girl with an irregular wedge of a little face. Her eyes wandered over the people at the tables, encountered those of our couple, and lingered in open, bland curiosity. It was a gaze of frank unselfconsciousness, almost innocence; the gaze of a protected child who knew she might commit no folly on her own individual account, since the family stood between her and the results of folly. Yet, just then, she chose to be out of the family group; or at least, she gazed out of it as one looks through an open door. Her pale, pretty eyes absorbed what she wanted of the British couple, and, at their leisure, moved on to the other diners; and all the time her fingers moved slowly up and down the slim cold walls of her beer glass. The woman, finding in this girl a poetic quality totally lacking from the stolid burghers who
filled this room, indicated her to the man by saying: ‘She’s charming.’ Again he grimaced, as if to say: Every young girl is poetic. And: She’ll be her mother in ten years.
Which was true. Already the family had become aware of the infidelity of this, their youngest member; already the handsome mother was leaning over her daughter, rallying her for her dreamy inattention, claiming her by little half-caressing, peremptory exclamations. The solid, kindly father laid his brown and capable hand on the girl’s white-wool-covered forearm and bent towards her with solicitude, as if she were sick. The boy put a large forkful of meat into his mouth and ate it ruminantly, watching his sister with an irreverent grin. Then he said in a low tone some word that was clearly an old trumpet for disagreement between them, for she swung her chin towards him petulantly with a half-reproachful and half-resentful epithet. The brother went on grinning, protective but derisive; the father and mother smiled tenderly at each other because of the brother-and-sister sparring.
No, clearly, this young girl had no chance of escaping from the warm prison of her family; and in a few years she would be a capable, handsome, sensual woman, married to some manufacturer carefully chosen for her by her father. That is, she would be unless another war or economic cataclysm intervened and plunged all her people into the edge-of-disater hunger-bitten condition from which they had just emerged. Though they did not look as if they had …
Returned full circle to the point of their complicated and irrational dislike, the man and woman raised ironical eyes at each other, and the man said briefly: ‘Blond beasts.’
These two were of another family of mankind from most of the people in the restaurant.
The man was Scotch, small-built, nervous, energetic, with close-springing black hair, white freckled skin, quick, deep blue eyes. He tended to be sarcastic about the English, among whom, of course, he had spent most of his life. He was busy, hard-working, essentially pragmatic, practical, and humane. Yet above and beyond all these admirably useful qualities was something else, expressed in
his characteristic little grimace of ironical bitterness, as if he were saying: Well, yes, and then?
As for her, she was small, dark, and watchful, Jewish in appearance and arguably by inheritance, since there had been a Jewish great-grandmother who had escaped from pogrom-loving Poland in the last century and married an Englishman. More potent than the great-grandmother was the fact that her fiancé, a medical student and a refugee from Austria, had been killed in the early days of the war flying over this same country in which they now sat and took their holiday. Mary Parrish was one of those people who had become conscious of their claims to being Jewish only when Hitler drew their attention to the possibility they might have some.
She now sat and contemplated the handsome German family and thought: Ten years ago … She was seeing them as executioners.
As for the man, who had taken his name, Hamish, from a string of possible names, some of them English, because of another kind of national pride, he had served in his capacity as a doctor on one of the commissions that, after the war, had tried to rescue the debris of humanity the war had left all over Europe.
It was no accident that he had served on this commission. Early in 1939 he had married a German girl, or rather, a Jewish girl, studying in Britain. In July of that year she had made a brave and foolhardy attempt to rescue some of her family who had so far escaped the concentration camps, and had never been heard of since. She had simply vanished. For all Hamish knew, she was still alive somewhere. She might very well be in this village of O—. Ever since yesterday morning when they entered Germany, Mary had been watching Hamish’s anxious, angry, impatient eyes moving, preoccupied, from the face of one woman to another; old women, young women, women on buses, trains, platforms; women glimpsed at the end of a street; a woman at a window. And she could feel him thinking: Well, and if I did see her, I wouldn’t recognize her.
And his eyes would move back to hers; she smiled; and he gave his small, bitter, ironical grimace.
They were both doctors, both hard-working and conscientious,
both very tired because, after all, while living in Britain has many compensations, it is hard work, this business of maintaining a decent level of life with enough leisure for the pursuits that make life worth-while, or at least to cultivated people, which they both were, and determined to remain. They were above all, perhaps, tired people.
They were tired and they needed to rest. This was their holiday. And here they sat, knowing full well that they were pouring away energies into utterly useless, irrelevant and, above all, unfair emotions.
The word ‘unfair’ was one they both used without irony.
She said, ‘I think one week in France would be better than three here. Let’s go. I really do think we should.’
He said, ‘Let’s go into one of the smaller villages higher up the valley. They are probably just ordinary mountain villages, not tarted-up like this place.’