The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
from Volume One) – a story with hidden depths. Often this happens without a writer knowing how she or he has tapped a deeper vein. The new way of education, which is often to omit any teaching of history, may mean that some young thing may enquire about the title, and then you have to spell out the irony, that Jack Orkney sees God (and the other hidden dimensions of life) as a temptation to compromise with the integrities of his stern atheism, whereas for many centuries, not to say millennia, temptations were to do with the flesh, and the lack of belief in God. A nice little version of the whirligig of time, this one. You may try saying to such a youngster, ‘Go to a picture gallery and see how the saints were tormented by visions of food and sex and happy disbelief.’ But they look at you, these infinitely indulged ones, with amazement, for it has never occurred to them to do without anything in the way of fleshly delights, unless it is for fear of AIDS, or because they are slimming.
‘An Old Woman and Her Cat’ has been a good deal reprinted.
‘Mrs Fortescue’ came into being because I once lived in a building that had two professional whores in it, who had lived there for many years.
‘Side Benefits of an Honourable Profession’ was written with relish, after certain experiences in show business.
Doris Lessing, 1994
I stopped inviting Judith to meet people when a Canadian woman remarked, with the satisfied fervour of one who has at last pinned a label on a rare specimen: ‘She is, of course, one of your typical English spinsters.’
This was a few weeks after an American sociologist, having elicited from Judith the facts that she was fortyish, unmarried, and living alone, had inquired of me: ‘I suppose she has given up?’ ‘Given up what?’ I asked; and the subsequent discussion was unrewarding.
Judith did not easily come to parties. She would come after pressure, not so much – one felt – to do one a favour, but in order to correct what she believed to be a defect in her character. ‘I really ought to enjoy meeting new people more than I do,’ she said once. We reverted to an earlier pattern of our friendship: odd evenings together, an occasional visit to the cinema, or she would telephone to say: ‘I’m on my way past you to the British Museum. Would you care for a cup of coffee with me? I have twenty minutes to spare.’
It is characteristic of Judith that the word spinster, used of her, provoked fascinated speculation about other people. There are my aunts, for instance: aged seventy-odd, both unmarried, one an ex-missionary from China, one a retired matron of a famous London hospital. These two old ladies live together under the shadow of the cathedral in a country town. They devote much time to the Church, to good causes, to letter writing with friends all over the world, to the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of relatives. It would be a mistake, however, on entering a house in which nothing has been moved for fifty years, to diagnose a condition of fossilized late-Victorian integrity. They read every book reviewed in the Observer or The Times, so that I recently got a letter from Aunt Rose inquiring whether I did not think that the author of On the Road was not – perhaps? – exaggerating his difficulties. They know a good deal about music, and write letters of encouragement to young composers they feel are being neglected – ‘You must understand that anything new and original takes time to be understood.’ Well-informed and critical Tories, they are as likely to dispatch telegrams of protest to the Home Secretary as letters of support. These ladies, my aunts Emily and Rose, are surely what is meant by the phrase English spinster. And yet, once the connection has been pointed out, there is no doubt that Judith and they are spiritual cousins, if not sisters. Therefore it follows that one’s pitying admiration for women who have supported manless and uncomforted lives needs a certain modification?
One will, of course, never know; and I feel now that it is entirely my fault that I shall never know. I had been Judith’s friend for upwards of five years before the incident occurred which I involuntarily thought of – stupidly enough – as ‘the first time Judith’s mask slipped’.
A mutual friend, Betty, had been given a cast-off Dior dress. She was too short for it. Also she said: ‘It’s not a dress for a married woman with three children and a talent for cooking. I don’t know why not, but it isn’t.’ Judith was the right build. Therefore one evening the three of us met by appointment in Judith’s bedroom, with the dress. Neither Betty nor I were surprised at the renewed discovery that Judith was beautiful. We had both too often caught each other, and ourselves, in moments of envy when Judith’s calm and severe face, her undemonstratively perfect body, succeeded in making everyone else in a room or a street look cheap.
Judith is tall, small-breasted, slender. Her light brown hair is parted in the centre and cut straight around her neck. A high straight forehead, straight nose, a full grave mouth are setting for her eyes, which are green, large and prominent. Her lids are very white, fringed with gold, and moulded close over the eyeball, so that in profile she has the look of a staring gilded mask. The dress was of dark green glistening stuff, cut straight, with a sort of loose tunic. It opened simply at the throat. Init Judith could of course evoke nothing but classical images. Diana, perhaps, back from the hunt, in a relaxed moment? A rather intellectual wood nymph who had opted for an afternoon in the British Museum reading room? Something like that. Neither Betty nor I said a word, since Judith was examining herself in a long mirror, and must know she looked magnificent.
Slowly she drew off the dress and laid it aside. Slowly she put on the old cord skirt and woollen blouse she had taken off. She must have surprised a resigned glance between us, for she then remarked, with the smallest of mocking smiles: ‘One surely ought to stay in character, wouldn’t you say?’ She added, reading the words out of some invisible book, written not by her, since it was a very vulgar book, but perhaps by one of us: ‘It does everything for me, I must admit.’
‘After seeing you in it,’ Betty cried out, defying her, ‘I can’t bear for anyone else to have it. I shall simply put it away.’ Judith shrugged, rather irritated. In the shapeless skirt and blouse, and without makeup, she stood smiling at us, a woman at whom forty-nine out of fifty people would not look twice.
A second revelatory incident occurred soon after. Betty telephoned me to say that Judith had a kitten. Did I know that Judith adored cats? ‘No, but of course she would,’ I said.
Betty lived in the same street as Judith and saw more of her than I did. I was kept posted about the growth and habits of the cat and its effect on Judith’s life. She remarked for instance that she felt it was good for her to have a tie and some responsibility. But no sooner was the cat out of kittenhood than all the neighbours complained. It was a tomcat, ungelded, and making every night hideous. Finally the landlord said that either the cat or Judith must go, unless she was prepared to have the cat ‘fixed’. Judith wore herself out trying to find some person, anywhere in Britain, who would be prepared to take the cat. This person would, however, have to sign a written statement not to have the cat ‘fixed’. When Judith took the cat to the vet to be killed, Betty told me she cried for twenty-four hours.
‘She didn’t think of compromising? After all, perhaps the cat might have preferred to live, if given the choice?’
‘Is it likely I’d have the nerve to say anything so sloppy to Judith? It’s the nature of a male cat to rampage lustfully about, and therefore it would be morally wrong for Judith to have the cat fixed, simply to suit her own convenience.’
‘She said that?’
‘She wouldn’t have to say it, surely?’
A third incident was when she allowed a visiting young American, living in Paris, the friend of a friend and scarcely known to her, to use her flat while she visited her parents over Christmas. The young man and his friends lived it up for ten days of alcohol and sex and marijuana, and when Judith came back it took a week to get the place clean again and the furniture mended. She telephoned twice to Paris. The first time to say that he was a disgusting young thug and if he knew what was good for him he would keep out of her way in the future;