To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One. Doris Lessing
of green light. His hands, groping forward, met nothing; and his feet, kicking back, propelled him out into the open sea.
He drifted to the surface, his face turned up to the air. He was gasping like a fish. He felt he would sink now and drown; he could not swim the few feet back to the rock. Then he was clutching it and pulling himself up on to it. He lay face down, gasping. He could see nothing but a red-veined, clotted dark. His eyes must have burst, he thought; they were full of blood. He tore off his goggles and a gout of blood went into the sea. His nose was bleeding, and the blood had filled the goggles.
He scooped up handfuls of water from the cool, salty sea, to splash on his face, and did not know whether it was blood or salt water he tasted. After a time, his heart quietened, his eyes cleared, and he sat up. He could see the local boys diving and playing half a mile away. He did not want them. He wanted nothing but to get back home and lie down.
In a short while, Jerry swam to the shore and climbed slowly up the path to the villa. He flung himself on his bed and slept, waking at the sound of feet on the path outside. His mother was coming back. He rushed to the bathroom, thinking she must not see his face with bloodstains, or tearstains, on it. He came out of the bathroom and met her as she walked into the villa, smiling, her eyes lighting up.
‘Have a nice morning?’ she asked, laying her hand on his warm brown shoulder a moment.
‘Oh yes, thank you,’ he said.
‘You look a bit pale.’ And then, sharp and anxious, ‘How did you bang your head?’
‘Oh, just banged it,’ he told her.
She looked at him closely. He was strained; his eyes were glazed-looking. She was worried. And then she said to herself, Oh, don’t fuss! Nothing can happen. He can swim like a fish.
They sat down to lunch together.
‘Mummy,’ he said, ‘I can stay under water for two minutes – three minutes, at least.’ It came bursting out of him.
‘Can you, darling?’ she said. ‘Well, I shouldn’t overdo it. I don’t think you ought to swim any more today.’
She was ready for a battle of wills, but he gave in at once. It was no longer of the least importance to go to the bay.
There were two great feasts, or turning points, in Mary Rogers’s year. She began preparing for the second as soon as the Christmas decorations were down. This year, she was leafing through a fashion magazine when her husband said, ‘Dreaming of the sun, old girl?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ she said, rather injured. ‘After all, it’s been four years.’
‘I really don’t see how we can afford it.’
On her face he saw a look that he recognized.
Her friend Mrs Baxter, the manager’s wife, also saw the magazine, and said, ‘You’ll be off to the south of France again, this year, I suppose, now that your daughter won’t be needing you.’ She added those words which in themselves were justification for everything: ‘We’ll stay faithful to Brighton, I expect.’
And Mary Rogers said, as she always did: ‘I can’t imagine why anyone takes a holiday in Britain when the same money’d take them to the Continent.’
For four years she had gone with her daughter and the grandchildren to Cornwall. It sounded a sacrifice on the altar of the family, the way she put it to her friends. But this year the daughter was going to the other grandmother in Scotland, and everyone knew it. Everyone. That is, Mrs Baxter, Mrs Justin-Smith, and Mrs Jones.
Mary Rogers bought gay cottons and spread them over the living room. Outside, a particularly grim February held the little Midlands town in a steady shiver. Rain swept the windowpanes. Tommy Rogers saw the cottons and said not a word. But a week later she was fitting a white linen sunsuit before the mirror when he said, ‘I say, old girl, that shows quite a bit of leg, you know …’
At that moment it was acknowledged that they should go. Also, that the four years had made a difference in various ways. Mary Rogers secretly examined her thighs and shoulders before the glass, and thought they might very well be exposed. But the clothes she made were of the sensible but smart variety. She sewed at them steadily through the evenings of March, April, May, June. She was a good needlewoman. Also, for a few happy months before she married, she had studied fashion designing in London. That had been a different world. In speaking of it now, to the women of her circle – Mrs Baxter, Mrs Justin-Smith, and Mrs Jones – her voice conveyed the degree of difference. And Mrs Baxter would say, kindly as always, ‘Ah well, we none of us know what’s in store for us when we’re young.’
They were about to leave towards the end of July. A week before, Tommy Rogers produced a piece of paper on which were set out certain figures. They were much lower figures than ever before. ‘Oh, we’ll manage,’ said Mary vaguely. Her mind was already moving among scenes of blue sea, blue sky.
‘Perhaps we’d better book at the Plaza.’
‘Oh, surely no need. They know us there.’
The evening before they left there was a bridge party in the Baxters’ house for the jaunting couple. Tommy Rogers was seen to give his wife an uneasy glance as she said, ‘With air travel as cheap as it is now, I really can’t understand why …’
For they had booked by train, of course, as usual.
They successfully negotiated the Channel, a night in a Paris hotel, and the catching of the correct train.
In a few hours they would see the little village on the sea where they had first come twenty-five years ago on their honeymoon. They had chosen it because Mary Hill had met, in those artistic circles which she had enjoyed for, alas, so short a time, a certain well-known stage decorator who had a villa there. During that month of honeymoon, they had spent a happy afternoon at the villa.
As the train approached, she was looking to see the villa, alone on its hill above the sea. But the hill was now thick with little white villas, green-shuttered, red-roofed in the warm southern green.
‘The place seems to have grown quite a bit,’ said Tommy. The station had grown, too. There was a long platform now, and a proper station building. And gazing down towards the sea, they saw a cluster of shops and casinos and cafés. Even four years before, there had been only a single shop, a restaurant, and a couple of hotels.
‘Well,’ said Mary bitterly, ‘if the place is full of tourists now, it won’t be the same at all.’
But the sun was shining, the sea tossed and sparkled, and the palm trees stood along the white beach. They carried their suitcases down the slope of the road to the Plaza, feeling at home.
Outside the Plaza, they looked at each other. What had been a modest building was now an imposing one, surrounded by gay awnings and striped umbrellas. ‘Old Jacques is spreading himself,’ said Tommy, and they walked up the neat gravel path to the foyer, looking for Jacques who had welcomed them so often.
At the office, Mary inquired in her stiff, correct French for Monsieur Jacques. The clerk smiled and regretted that Monsieur Jacques had left them three years before. ‘He knew us well,’ said Mary, her voice coming aggrieved and shrill. ‘He always had room for us here.’
But certainly there was a room for Madame. Most certainly. At once attendants came hurrying for the suitcases.
‘Hold your horses a minute,’ said Tommy. ‘Wait. Ask what it costs now.’
Mary inquired, casually enough, what the rates now were. She received the information with a lengthening of her heavy jaw, and rapidly transmitted it to Tommy. He glanced, embarrassed, at the clerk, who, recognizing a situation, turned tactfully to a ledger and prepared to occupy himself so that the elderly English couple could confer.
They