The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
first decisions on this almighty subject had taken place years before, when they were thirteen. Even then Shirley went further (‘let them go further’) than Maureen. It was put down, between them, to Shirley’s warmer temperament – charitably; for both knew it was because of Maureen’s higher value in the market.
At the secretarial school they met boys they had not met before. Previously boys had been from the street or the neighbourhood, known from birth, and for this reason not often gone out with – that would have been boring (serious, with possibilities of marriage). Or boys picked up after dances or at the pictures. But now there were new boys met day after day in the school. Shirley went out with one for weeks, thought of getting engaged, changed her mind, went out with another. Maureen went out with a dozen, chosen carefully. She knew what she was doing – and scolded Shirley for being so soft. ‘You’re just stupid, Shirl – I mean, you’ve got to get on. Why don’t you do like me?’
What Maureen did was to allow herself to be courted, until she agreed at last, as a favour, to be taken out. First, lunch – a word she began to use now. She would agree to go out to lunch two or three times with one boy, while she was taken out to supper (dinner) by another. The dinner partner, having been rewarded by a closed-mouth kiss for eight, ten, twelve nights, got angry or sulky or reproachful, according to his nature. He dropped her, and the lunch partner was promoted to dinner partner.
Maureen ate free for the year of her training. It wasn’t that she planned it like this; but when she heard other girls say they paid their way or liked to be independent, it seemed to Maureen wrong-headed. To pay for herself would be to let herself be undervalued: even the idea of it made her nervous and sulky.
At the end of the training Maureen got a job in a big architect’s office. She was a junior typist. She stuck out for a professional office because the whole point of the training was to enable her to meet a better class of people. Of course she had already learned not to use the phrase, and when her mother did snubbed her with: ‘I don’t know what you mean, better class, but it’s not much point my going into that hardware stuck upstairs in an office by myself if I can get a job where there’s some life about.’
Shirley went into a draper’s shop where there was one other typist (female) and five male assistants.
In Maureen’s place there were six architects, out most of the time, or invisible in large offices visited only by the real secretaries; a lower stratum of young men in training, designers, draughtsmen, managers, etc., and a pool of typists.
The young men were mostly of her own class. For some months she ate and was entertained at their expense; and at each week’s end there was a solemn ceremony, the high point of the week, certainly the most exciting moment in it, when she divided her wage. It was seven pounds (rising to ten in three years) and she allocated two pounds for clothes, four for the post office, and one pound for the week’s odd expenses.
At the end of a year she understood two things. That she had saved something like two hundred pounds. That there was not a young man in the office who would take her out again. They regarded her, according to their natures, with resentment or with admiration for her cool management of them. But there was nothing doing there – so they all knew.
Maureen thought this over. If she were not taken out to meals and entertainment, she must pay for herself and save no money, or she must never go out at all. If she was going to be taken out, then she must give something in return. What she gave was an open mouth, and freedom to the waist. She calculated that because of her prettiness she could give much less than other girls.
She was using her capital with even more intelligence than before. A good part of her time – all not spent in the office or being taken out – went in front of her looking glass, or with the better-class fashion magazines. She studied them with formidable concentration. By now she knew she could have gone anywhere in these islands, except for her voice. Whereas, months before, she had sulked in a sort of fright at the idea of cutting herself off from her street and the neighbours, now she softened and shaped her voice, listening to the clients and the senior architects in the office. She knew her voice had changed when Shirley said: ‘You’re talking nice, Maureen, much nicer than me.’
There was a boy in the office who teased her about it. His name was Tony Head. He was in training to be an accountant for the firm, and was very much from her own background. After having taken her out twice to lunch, he had never asked her again. She knew why: he had told her. ‘Can’t afford you, Maureen,’ he said. He earned not much more than she did. He was nineteen, ambitious, serious, and she liked him.
Then she was nineteen. Shirley was engaged to one of the assistants in her shop, and would be married next Christmas.
Maureen took forty pounds out of her savings and went on a tour to Italy. It was her first time out of England. She hated it: not Italy, but the fact that half the sixty people on the tour were girls, like herself, looking for a good time, and the other half elderly couples. In Rome, Pisa, Florence, Venice, the Italians mooned over Maureen, courted her with melting eyes, while she walked past them, distant as a starlet. They probably thought she was one. The courier, a sharp young man, took Maureen out to supper one night after he had finished his duties, and made it clear that her mouth, even if opened, and her breasts, were not enough. Maureen smiled at him sweetly through the rest of the trip. No one paid for her odd coffees, ices and drinks. On the last night of the trip, in a panic because the forty-pound investment had yielded so little, she went out with an Italian boy who spoke seven words of English. She thought him crude, and left him after an hour.
But she had learned a good deal for her forty pounds. Quietly, in her lunch hour, she went off to the National Gallery and to the Tate. There she looked, critical and respectful, at pictures, memorizing their subjects, or main colours, learning names. When invited out, she asked to be taken to ‘foreign’ films, and when she got back home wrote down the names of the director and the stars. She looked at the book page of the Express (she made her parents buy it instead of the Mirror) and sometimes bought a recommended book, if it was a best seller.
Twenty. Shirley was married and had a baby. Maureen saw little of her – both girls felt they had a new world of knowledge the other couldn’t appreciate.
Maureen was earning ten pounds a week, and saved six.
There came to the office, as an apprentice architect, Stanley Hunt, from grammar school and technical college. Tallish, well-dressed, fair, with a small moustache. They took each other’s measure, knowing they were the same kind. It was some weeks before he asked her out. She knew, by putting herself in his place, that he was looking for a wife with a little money or a house of her own, if he couldn’t get a lady. (She smiled when she heard him using this word about one of the clients.) He tried to know clients socially, to be accepted by them as they accepted the senior architects. All this Maureen watched, her cool little face saying nothing.
One day, after he had invited a Miss Plast (Chelsea, well-off, investing money in houses) to coffee, and had been turned down, he asked Maureen to join him in a sandwich lunch. Maureen thanked him delightfully, but said she already had an engagement. She went off to the National Gallery, sat on the steps, froze off wolves and pickups, and ate a sandwich by herself.
A week later, invited to lunch by Stanley, she suggested the Trattoria Siciliana which was more expensive, as she knew quite well, than he had expected. But this meal was a success. He was impressed with her, though he knew (how could he not, when his was similar?) her background.
She was careful to be engaged for two weeks. Then she agreed to go to the pictures – ‘a foreign film, if you don’t mind, I think the American films are just boring.’ She did not offer to pay, but remarked casually that she had nearly six hundred pounds in the post office. ‘I’m thinking of buying a little business, some time. A dress shop. I’ve got a cousin in the trade.’
Stanley agreed that ‘with your taste’ it would be a sure thing.
Maureen no longer went to the Palais, or similar places (though she certainly did not conceal from Stanley that she had ‘once’), but she loved to dance. Twice they went