The Grandmothers. Doris Lessing
shall cry my eyes out. I shall go into a decline.’
‘We shall grow old gracefully,’ said Lil.
‘Like hell,’ said Roz. ‘I shall fight every inch of the way’
Not old women yet, nor anywhere near it. Over forty, though, and the boys were definitely not boys, and their time of wild beauty had gone. You’d not think now, seeing the two strong, confident, handsome young men, that once they had drawn eyes struck as much by awe as by lust or love. And the two women, one day reminding themselves how their two had been like young gods, rummaged in old photographs, and could find nothing of what they knew had been there: just as, looking at their old photographs, they saw pretty girls, nothing more.
Ian was already working with his mother in the management of the chain of sports shops, and was an up-and-coming prominent citizen. Harder to make a mark in the theatre: Tom was still working in the foothills when Ian was already near the top. A new position for Tom, who had always been first, Ian looking up to him.
But he persevered. He worked. And as always he was charming with Lil, and as often in her bed as he could, considering the long and erratic hours of the theatre.
‘There you are,’ said Lil to Roz. ‘It’s a beginning. He’s getting tired of me.’
But Ian showed no signs of relinquishing Roz, on the contrary. He was attentive, demanding, possessive, and when one day he saw her lying on her pillows, love-making just concluded, smoothing down loose ageing skin over her forearms, he let out a cry, clasped her, and shouted, ‘No, don’t, don’t, don’t even think of it. I won’t let you grow old.’
‘Well,’ said Roz, ‘it is going to happen, for all that.’
‘No.’ And he wept, just as he had done when he was still the frightened abandoned boy in her arms. ‘No, Roz, please, I love you.’
‘So I mustn’t get old, is that it, Ian? I’m not allowed to? Mad, the boy is mad,’ said Roz, addressing invisible listeners, as we do when sanity does not seem to have ears.
And alone, she felt uneasiness, and, indeed, awe. It was mad, his demand on her. It really did seem that he had refused to think she might grow old. Mad! But perhaps lunacy is one of the great invisible wheels that keep our world turning.
Meanwhile Tom’s father had not given up his aim, to rescue Tom. He made no bones about it. ‘I’m going to rescue you from those femmes fatales,’ he said on the telephone. ‘You get up here and let your old father take you in hand.’
‘Harold is going to rescue me from you,’ said Tom to his mother, on his way to Lil’s bed. ‘You’re a bad influence.’
‘A bit late,’ said Roz.
Tom spent a fortnight in the university town. In the evenings a short walk took him out into the hot sandy scrub where hawks wheeled and watched. He became friends with Molly, Roz’s successor, and with his half-sister, aged eight, and a new baby.
It was a boisterous child-centred house, but Tom told Ian he found it restful.
‘Nice to get to know you, at last,’ said Molly.
‘And now,’ said Harold, ‘don’t leave it so long.’
Tom didn’t. He accepted an offer to direct West Side Story in the university theatre, and said he would stay in his father’s house.
As always, the young women clustered and clung. ‘Time you were married, your father thinks,’ said Molly.
‘Oh, does he?’ said Tom. ‘I’ll marry in my own good time.’
He was in his late twenties. His classmates, his contemporaries, were married or had ‘partners’.
There was a girl he did like, perhaps because of her difference from Lil and from Roz. She was a little dark-haired, ruddy-faced girl, pretty enough, and she flirted with him in a way that made no claims on him. For here, so far from home, from his mother and from Lil, he understood how many claims and ties bound him there. He admired his mother, even if she exasperated him, and he loved Lil. He could not imagine himself in bed with anyone else. But they bound him, oh, yes, they did, and Ian, too, a brother in reality if not in fact. Down there – so he apostrophised his city, his home, so much part of the sea that here, when he heard wind in the bushes it was the waves he heard. ‘Down there, I’m not free.’
Up here, he was. He decided to accept work on another production. That meant another three months ‘up here’. By now it was accepted that he and Mary Lloyd were a unit, ‘an item’. Tom was passive, hearing this characterisation of him and Mary. He neither said yes, nor did he say no, he only laughed. But it was Mary who went with him to the cinema or who came home with him to his father for special meals.
‘You could do a lot worse,’ said Harold to his son.
‘But I’m not doing anything, as far as I can see,’ said Tom.
‘Is that so? I don’t think she sees it like that.’
Later Harold said to Tom, ‘Mary asked me if you’re queer?’
‘Gay?’ said Tom. ‘Not as far as I know’
It was breakfast time, the family ate at table, the girl watching what went on, as little girls do, the infant babbling attractively in her high chair. A delightful scene. Part of Tom ached for it, for his future, for himself. His father had wanted ordinary family life and here it was.
‘Then, what gives?’ asked Harold. ‘Is there a girl back home, is that it?’
‘You could say that,’ said Tom, calmly helping himself to this and that.
‘Then you should let Mary go,’ said Harold.
‘Yes,’ said Molly, on behalf of her sex. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘I wasn’t aware I had her tied.’
‘Tom,’ said his father.
‘That’s not on,’ said his father’s wife.
Tom said nothing. Then he was in bed with Mary. He had slept only with Lil, no one else. This fresh young bouncy body was delightful, he liked it all, and took quiet satisfaction in Mary’s, ‘I thought you were gay, I really did.’ Clearly, she was agreeably surprised.
So there it was. Mary came often to spend the night with Tom in Harold’s and Molly’s house, all very en famille and cosy. If weddings were not actually mentioned, that was because tact had been decided on. And because of something else, still ill-defined. In bed, Mary had exclaimed over the bite mark on Tom’s calf. ‘God,’ said she. ‘What was this? A dog?’ ‘That was a love bite,’ he said, after thought. ‘Who on earth …’ And Mary, in play, tried to fit her mouth over the bite, but found Tom’s leg, and then Tom, pulling away from her. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, which was fair enough. But then, in a voice she had certainly never heard from him, nor anything like it: ‘Don’t you dare ever do that again.’
She stared, and began to cry. He simply got off the bed and went off into the bathroom. He came back clothed, and did not look at her.
There was something here … something bad … some place where she must not go. Mary understood that. She felt so shocked by the incident that she nearly broke off from Tom, then and there.
Tom thought he might as well go back home. What he loved about being ‘up here’ was being free, and that delightful condition had evaporated.
This town was imprisoning him. It was not a large one, but that wasn’t the point. He liked it, as a place, spreading suburbs of bungalows around a centre of university and business, and all around the scrubby shrubby desert. He could walk from the university theatre after rehearsal and find himself in ten minutes with strong-smelling thorny bushes all around, and under his feet coarse yellow sand where the fallen thorns made pale warning gleams: careful, don’t tread on us, we can pierce