Authors: Doris Lessing
Susan, hearing this, was remorseful. Because it was true. The good marriage, the house, the children, depended just as much on his voluntary bondage as it did on hers. But why did he not feel bound? Why didn’t he chafe and become restless? No, there was something really wrong with her and this proved it.
And the word
bondage
– why had she used it? She had never felt marriage, or the children, as bondage. Neither had he, or surely they wouldn’t be together lying in each other’s arms content after twelve years of marriage.
No, her state (whatever it was) was irrelevant, nothing to do with her real good life with her family. She had to accept the fact that, after all, she was an irrational person and to live with it. Some people had to live with crippled arms, or stammers, or being deaf. She would have to live knowing she was subject to a state of mind she could not own.
Nevertheless, as a result of this conversation with her husband, there was a new regime next holidays.
The spare room at the top of the house now had a cardboard sign
saying:
PRIVATE! DO NOT DISTURB!
on it. (This sign had been drawn in coloured chalks by the children, after a discussion between the parents in which it was decided that was psychologically the right thing.) The family and Mrs Parkes knew this was ‘Mother’s Room’ and that she was entitled to her privacy. Many serious conversations took place between Matthew and the children about not taking Mother for granted. Susan overheard the first, between father and Harry, the older boy, and was surprised at her irritation over it. Surely she could have a room somewhere in that big house and retire into it without such a fuss being made? Without it being so solemnly discussed? Why couldn’t she simply have announced: ‘I’m going to fit out the little top room for myself, and when I’m in it I’m not to be disturbed for anything short of fire’? Just that, and finished; instead of long earnest discussions. When she heard Harry and Matthew explaining it to the twins with Mrs Parkes coming in – ‘Yes, well, a family sometimes gets on top of a woman’ – she had to go right away to the bottom of the garden until the devils of exasperation had finished their dance in her blood.
But now there was a room, and she could go there when she liked, she used it seldom: she felt even more caged there than in her bedroom. One day she had gone up there after a lunch for ten children she had cooked and served because Mrs Parkes was not there, and had sat alone for a while looking into the garden. She saw the children stream out from the kitchen and stand looking up at the window where she sat behind the curtains. They were all – her children and their friends – discussing Mother’s Room. A few minutes later, the chase of children in some game came pounding up the stairs, but ended as abruptly as if they had fallen over a ravine, so sudden was the silence. They had remembered she was there, and had gone silent in a great gale of ‘Hush! Shhhhhh! Quiet, you’ll disturb her …’ And they went tiptoeing downstairs like criminal conspirators. When she came down to make tea for them, they all apologized. The twins put their arms around her, from front and back, making a human cage of loving limbs, and promised it would never occur again. ‘We forgot, Mummy, we forgot all about it!’
What it amounted to was that Mother’s Room, and her need for
privacy, had become a valuable lesson in respect for other people’s rights. Quite soon Susan was going up to the room only because it was a lesson it was a pity to drop. Then she took sewing up there, and the children and Mrs Parkes came in and out: it had become another family room.
She sighed, and smiled, and resigned herself – she made jokes at her own expense with Matthew over the room. That is, she did from the self she liked, she respected. But at the same time, something inside her howled with impatience, with rage … And she was frightened. One day she found herself kneeling by her bed and praying: ‘Dear God, keep it away from me, keep him away from me.’ She meant the devil, for she now thought of it, not caring if she were irrational, as some sort of demon. She imagined him, or it, as a youngish man, or perhaps a middle-aged man pretending to be young. Or a man young-looking from immaturity? At any rate, she saw the young-looking face which, when she drew closer, had dry lines about mouth and eyes. He was thinnish, meagre in build. And he had a reddish complexion, and ginger hair. That was he – a gingery, energetic man, and he wore a reddish hairy jacket, unpleasant to the touch.
Well, one day she saw him. She was standing at the bottom of the garden, watching the river ebb past, when she raised her eyes and saw this person, or being, sitting on the white stone bench. He was looking at her, and grinning. In his hand was a long crooked stick, which he had picked off the ground, or broken off the tree above him. He was absent-mindedly, out of an absent-minded or freakist impulse of spite, using the stick to stir around in the coils of a blindworm or a grass snake (or some kind of snake-like creature: it was whitish and unhealthy to look at, unpleasant). The snake was twisting about, flinging its coils from side to side in a kind of dance of protest against the teasing prodding stick.
Susan looked at him thinking: Who is the stranger? What is he doing in our garden? Then she recognized the man around whom her terrors had crystallized. As she did so, he vanished. She made herself walk over to the bench. A shadow from a branch lay across thin emerald grass, moving jerkily over its roughness, and she could
see why she had taken it for a snake, lashing and twisting. She went back to the house thinking: Right, then, so I’ve seen him with my own eyes, so I’m not crazy after all – there
is
a danger because I’ve seen him. He is lurking in the garden and sometimes even in the house, and he wants
to get into me and to take me over.
She dreamed of having a room or a place, anywhere, where she could go and sit, by herself, no one knowing where she was.
Once, near Victoria, she found herself outside a news agent that had Rooms to Let advertised. She decided to rent a room, telling no one. Sometimes she could take the train in from Richmond and sit alone in it for an hour or two. Yet how could she? A room would cost three or four pounds a week, and she earned no money, and how could she explain to Matthew that she needed such a sum? What for? It did not occur to her that she was taking it for granted she wasn’t going to tell him about the room.
Well, it was out of the question, having a room; yet she knew she must.
One day, when a school term was well established, and none of the children had measles or other ailments, and everything seemed in order, she did the shopping early, explained to Mrs Parkes she was meeting an old school friend, took the train to Victoria, searched until she found a small quiet hotel, and asked for a room for the day. They did not let rooms by the day, the manageress said, looking doubtful, since Susan so obviously was not the kind of woman who needed a room for unrespectable reasons. Susan made a long explanation about not being well, being unable to shop without frequent rests for lying down. At last she was allowed to rent the room provided she paid a full night’s price for it. She was taken up by the manageress and a maid, both concerned over the state of her health … which must be pretty bad if, living at Richmond (she had signed her name and address in the register), she needed a shelter at Victoria.
The room was ordinary and anonymous, and was just what Susan needed. She put a shilling in the gas fire, and sat, eyes shut, in a dingy armchair with her back to a dingy window. She was alone.
She was alone. She was alone. She could feel pressures lifting off her. First the sounds of traffic came very loud; then they seemed to vanish; she might even have slept a little. A knock on the door; it was Miss Townsend the manageress, bringing her a cup of tea with her own hands, so concerned was she over Susan’s long silence and possible illness.
Miss Townsend was a lonely woman of fifty, running this hotel with all the rectitude expected of her, and she sensed in Susan the possibility of understanding companionship. She stayed to talk. Susan found herself in the middle of a fantastic story about her illness, which got more and more improbable as she tried to make it tally with the large house at Richmond, well-off husband, and four children. Suppose she said instead: Miss Townsend, I’m here in your hotel because I need to be alone for a few hours, above all
alone and with no one knowing where I am.
She said it mentally, and saw, mentally, the look that would inevitably come on Miss Townsend’s elderly maiden’s face. ‘Miss Townsend, my four children and my husband are driving me insane, do you understand that? Yes, I can see from the gleam of hysteria in your eyes that comes from loneliness controlled but only just contained that I’ve got everything in the world you’ve ever longed for. Well, Miss Townsend, I don’t want any of it. You can have it, Miss Townsend. I wish I was absolutely alone in the world, like you. Miss Townsend, I’m besieged by seven devils, Miss Townsend, Miss Townsend, let me stay here in your hotel where the devil can’t get me …’ Instead of saying all this, she described her anaemia, agreed to try Miss Townsend’s remedy for it, which was raw liver, minced, between wholemeal bread, and said yes, perhaps it would be better if she stayed at home and let a friend do shopping for her. She paid her bill and left the hotel, defeated.
At home Mrs Parkes said she didn’t really like it, no, not really, when Mrs Rawlings was away from nine in the morning until five. The teacher had telephoned from school to say Joan’s teeth were paining her, and she hadn’t known what to say; and what was she to make for the children’s tea, Mrs Rawlings hadn’t said.
All this was nonsense, of course. Mrs Parkes’s complaint was that Susan had withdrawn herself spiritually, leaving the burden of the big house on her.
Susan looked back at her day of ‘freedom’ which had resulted in her becoming a friend to the lonely Miss Townsend, and in Mrs Parkes’s remonstrances. Yet she remembered the short blissful hour of being alone, really alone. She was determined to arrange her life, no matter what it cost, so that she could have that solitude more often. An absolute solitude, where no one knew her or cared about her.
But how? She thought of saying to her old employer: I want you to back me up in a story with Matthew that I am doing part-time work for you. The truth is that … but she would have to tell him a lie too, and which lie? She could not say: I want to sit by myself three or four times a week in a rented room. And besides, he knew Matthew, and she could not really ask him to tell lies on her behalf, apart from his being bound to think it meant a lover.
Suppose she really took a part-time job, which she could get through fast and efficiently, leaving time for herself. What job? Addressing envelopes? Canvassing?
And there was Mrs Parkes, working widow, who knew exactly what she was prepared to give to the house, who knew by instinct when her mistress withdrew in spirit from her responsibilities. Mrs Parkes was one of the servers of this world, but she needed someone to serve. She had to have Mrs Rawlings, her madam, at the top of the house or in the garden, so that she could come and get support from her: ‘Yes, the bread’s not what it was when I was a girl … Yes, Harry’s got a wonderful appetite, I wonder where he puts it all … Yes, it’s lucky the twins are so much of a size, they can wear each other’s shoes, that’s a saving in these hard times … Yes, the cherry jam from Switzerland is not a patch on the jam from Poland, and three times the price …’ And so on. That sort of talk Mrs Parkes must have, every day, or she would leave, not knowing herself why she left.
Susan Rawlings, thinking these thoughts, found that she was prowling through the great thicketed garden like a wild cat: she
was walking up the stairs, down the stairs, through the rooms, into the garden, along the brown running river, back, up through the house, down again … It was a wonder Mrs Parkes did not think it strange. But on the contrary, Mrs Rawlings could do what she liked, she could stand on her head if she wanted, provided she was
here.
Susan Rawlings prowled and muttered through her house, hating Mrs Parkes, hating poor Miss Townsend, dreaming of her hour of solitude in the dingy respectability of Miss Townsend’s hotel edroom, and she knew quite well she was mad. Yes, she was mad.
She said to Matthew that she must have a holiday. Matthew agreed with her. This was not as things had been once – how they had talked in each other’s arms in the marriage bed. He had, she knew, diagnosed her finally as
unreasonable.
She had become someone outside himself that he had to manage. They were living side by side in this house like two tolerably friendly strangers.
Having told Mrs Parkes, or rather, asked for her permission, she went off on a walking holiday in Wales. She chose the remotest place she knew of. Every morning the children telephoned her before they went off to school, to encourage and support her, just as they had over Mother’s Room. Every evening she telephoned them, spoke to each child in turn, and then to Matthew. Mrs Parkes, given permission to telephone for insructions or advice, did so every day at lunchtime. When, as happened three times, Mrs Rawlings was out on the mountainside, Mrs Parkes asked that she should ring back at such and such a time, for she would not be happy in what she was doing without Mrs Rawlings’s blessing.
Susan prowled over wild country with the telephone wire holding her to her duty like a leash. The next time she must telephone, or wait to be telephoned, nailed her to her cross. The mountains themselves seemed trammelled by her unfreedom. Everywhere on the mountains, where she met no one at all, from breakfast time to dusk, except sheep, or a shepherd, she came face to face with her own craziness which might attack her in the broadest valleys, so that they seemed too small; or on a mountain-top from which she could see a hundred other mountains and valleys, so that they seemed too low, too small, with the sky pressing down too close. She would
stand gazing at a hillside brilliant with ferns and bracken, jewelled with running water, and see nothing but her devil, who lifted inhuman eyes at her from where he leaned negligently on a rock, switching at his ugly yellow boots with a leafy twig.