To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One. Doris Lessing
not.’
‘You’re just like your mother,’ he complained again. ‘You haven’t got any logic.’
‘Well, you’ve been going to meetings for years and years, and you make resolutions, and you talk, but there’s a war just the same.’ She felt as if this ended the argument. She felt, though she could never have put it into words, that there was a deep basic insecurity, that life itself was an enemy to be placated and humoured, liable at any moment to confront her, or people like her, with death or destitution. The only sensible thing to do was to gather together every penny that came along and keep it safe. When her mother had been alive, she paid thirty shillings of the two pounds a week she earned towards the housekeeping. Now that thirty shillings went straight into the post office. When the newspapers and the wireless blared war and horror at her, she thought of that money, and it comforted her. It didn’t amount to much, but if something happened … What that something might be, she did not clearly know. But life was terrible, there was no justice – had not her own mother been killed by a silly lorry crossing the street she had crossed every day of her life for twenty-five years … that just proved it. And now there was a war, and all sorts of people were going to be hurt, all for nothing – that proved it too, if it needed any proof. Life was frightening and dangerous – therefore, put money into the post office; hold on to your job, work, and – put money into the post office.
Her father sat over the wireless set, bought newspapers, argued with his cronies, trying to make sense of the complicated, cynical movements of power politics, while the family pattern of life dissolved into the slogans and noise of war, and the streets filled with uniforms and rumours. ‘It’s all Hitler,’ he would say aggressively to Rose.
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
‘Well, he started it, didn’t he?’
‘I’m not interested who started it. All I know is, ordinary people don’t want war. And there’s war all the time. They make me sick if you want to know – and you men make me sick, too. If you were young enough, you’d be off like the rest of them,’ she said accusingly.
‘But, Rosie,’ he said, really shocked. ‘Hitler’s got to be stopped, hasn’t he?’
‘Hitler,’ she said scornfully. ‘Hitler and Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt – they all make me sick, if you want to know. And that goes for your Attlee too.’
‘Women haven’t got any logic,’ he said, in despair.
So they came not to discuss the war at all, they merely suffered it. Slowly, Rose came to use the same words and slogans as everyone else; and like everyone else, with the deep, sad knowledge that it was all talk, and what was really happening in the world was something vast and terrible, beyond her comprehension; and perhaps it was wonderful, too, if she only knew – but she could never hope to understand. Better get on with the job, live as best she could, try not to be afraid and – put money in the post office.
Soon she switched to a job in a munitions factory. She felt she ought to do something for the war, and also, she was paid much better than in the bakery. She did fire-watching, too. Often she was up till three or four and then woke at six to clean and cook. Her father continued as a bricklayer and did fire-watching three or four nights a week. They were both permanently tired and sad. The war went on, month after month, year after year, food was short, it was hard to keep warm, the searchlights wheeled over the dark wilderness of London, the bombs fell screaming, and the black-out was like a weight on their minds and spirits. They listened to the news, read the newspapers, with the same look of bewildered but patient courage; and it seemed as if the war was a long, black, noisome tunnel from which they would never emerge.
In the third year Jem fell off a ladder one cold, foggy morning and injured his back. ‘It’s all right, Rose,’ he said. ‘I can get back to work all right.’
‘You’re not working,’ she said flatly. ‘You’re sixty-seven. That’s enough now, you’ve been working since you was fourteen.’
‘There won’t be enough coming in every week.’
‘Won’t there?’ she said triumphantly. ‘You used to go on at me for working. Aren’t you glad now? With your bit of pension and what I get, I can still put some away every week if I try. Funny thing,’ she said reflectively, not without grim humour: ‘It was two pounds a week when there was peace, and I was supposed to be grateful for it. Comes a war and they pay you like you was a queen. I’m getting seven pounds a week now, one way and another. So you take things easy, and if I find you getting back to work, with your back as it is, and your rheumatism, you’ll catch it from me, I’m telling you.’
‘It’s not right for me to sit at home, with the war and all,’ he said uneasily.
‘Well, did you make the war? No! You have some sense now.’
Now things were not so hard for Rose because when Jem could get out of bed he cleaned the rooms for her and there was a cup of tea waiting when she came in at night. But there was an emptiness in her and she could not pretend to herself there was not. One day she saw George’s wife in the street with a little girl of about four, and stopped her. The girl was hostile, but Rose said hurriedly: ‘I wanted to know, how’s George?’ Rather unwillingly came the reply: ‘He’s all right, so far, he’s in North Africa.’ She held the child to her as she spoke, as if for comfort, and the tears came into Rose’s eyes. The two women stood hesitating on the pavement, then Rose said appealingly: ‘It must be hard for you.’ ‘Well it’ll be over some day – when they’ve stopped playing soldiers,’ was the grim reply; and at this Rose smiled in sympathy and the women suddenly felt friendly towards each other. ‘Come over some time if you like,’ said George’s wife, slowly; and Rose said quickly: ‘I’d like to ever so much.’
So Rose got into the habit of going over once a week to the rooms that had originally been got ready for herself. She went because of the little girl, Jill. She was secretly asking herself now: Did I make a mistake then? Should I have married George? – But even as she asked the question she knew it was futile: she could have behaved in no other way; it was one of those irrational emotional things that seem so slight and meaningless, but are so powerful. And yet, time was passing, she was nearly thirty, and when she looked in the mirror she was afraid. She was very thin now, nothing but a white-faced shrimp of a girl, with lank, tired, stringy black hair. Her sombre dark eyes peered anxiously back at her over hollowed and bony cheeks. ‘It’s because I work so hard,’ she comforted herself. ‘No sleep, that’s what it is, and the bad food, and those chemicals in the factory … it’ll be better after the war.’ It was a question of endurance; somehow she had to get through the war, and then everything would be all right. Soon she looked forward all week to the Sunday night when she went over to George’s wife, with a little present for Jill. When she lay awake at nights she thought not of George, nor of the men she met at the factory who might have become interested in her, but of children. ‘What with the war and all the men getting killed,’ she sometimes worried, ‘perhaps it’s too late. There won’t be any men left by the time they’ve finished killing them all off.’ But if her father could have managed for himself before, he could not now; he was really dependent on her. So she always pushed away her fears and longings with the thought: ‘When the war’s over we can eat and sleep again, and then I’ll look better, and then perhaps …’
Not long before the war ended Rose came home late one night, dragging her feet tiredly along the dark pavement, thinking that she had forgotten to buy anything for supper. She turned into her street, was troubled by a feeling that something was wrong, looked down towards the house where she lived, and stopped dead. There were heaps of smoking rubble showing against the reddish glare of fire. At first she thought: ‘I must have come to the wrong street in the black-out.’ Then she understood and began to run towards her home, clutching her handbag tightly, holding the scarf under her chin. At the edge of the street was a deep crater. She nearly fell into it, but righted herself and walked on stumblingly among bomb refuse and tangling wires. Where her gate had been she stopped. A group of people were standing there. ‘Where’s my father?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Where is he?’