To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One. Doris Lessing
she put on a manner of cool and even languid charm; it was the extreme good manners of heartlessness, and at first George was chilled: but then he saw through the pose; for whatever world Bobby Tippett had been born into he did not think it was the English class to which these manners belonged. She replied with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to questions about herself; he gathered that her parents were dead, but there was a married sister she saw sometimes; and for the rest she had lived around and about London, mostly by herself, for ten or more years. When he asked her if she had not been lonely, so much by herself, she drawled, ‘Why, not at all, I don’t mind being alone.’ But he saw her as a small, brave child, a waif against London, and was moved.
He did not want to be the big man of the theatre; he was afraid of evoking the impersonal admiration he was only too accustomed to; but soon he was asking her questions about her career, hoping that this might be the point of her enthusiasm. But she spoke lightly of small parts, odd jobs, scene painting and understudying, in a jolly good-little-trouper’s voice; and he could not see that he had come any closer to her at all. So at last he did what he had tried to avoid, and sitting up against his pillows like a judge or an impresario, he said: ‘Do something for me, dear. Let me see you.’ She went next door like an obedient child, and came back in tight black trousers, but still in her demure little blouse, and stood on the carpet before him, and went into a little song-and-dance act. It wasn’t bad. He had seen a hundred worse. But he was very moved; he saw her now above all as the little urchin, the gamin, boy-girl and helpless. And utterly touching. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘this is half of an act. I always have someone else.’
There was a big mirror that nearly filled the end wall of the large, dark room. George saw himself in it, an elderly man sitting propped up on pillows watching the small doll-like figure standing before him on the carpet. He saw her turn her head towards her reflection in the darkened mirror, study it, and then she began to dance with her own reflection, dance against it, as it were. There were two small, light figures dancing in George’s room; there was something uncanny in it. She began singing, a little broken song in stage cockney, and George felt that she was expecting the other figure in the mirror to sing with her; she was singing at the mirror as if she expected an answer.
‘That’s very good, dear,’ he broke in quickly, for he was upset, though he did not know why. ‘Very good indeed.’ He was relieved when she broke off and came away from the mirror, so that the uncanny shadow of her went away.
‘Would you like me to speak to someone for you, dear? It might help. You know how things are in the theatre,’ he suggested apologetically.
‘I don’t maind if I dew,’ she said in the stage cockney of her act; and for a moment her face flashed into a mocking, reckless, gaminlike charm. ‘Perhaps I’d better change back into my skirt?’ she suggested. ‘More natural-like for a nurse, ain’t it?’
But he said he liked her in her tight black trousers, and now she always wore them, and her neat little shirts; and she moved about the flat as a charming feminine boy, chattering to him about the plays she had had small parts in and about the big actors and producers she had spoken to, who were, of course, George’s friends or, at least, equals. George sat up against his pillows and listened and watched, and his heart ached. He remained in bed longer than there was need, because he did not want her to go. When he transferred himself to a big chair, he said: ‘You mustn’t think you’re bound to stay here, dear, if there’s somewhere else you’d rather go.’ To which she replied, with a wide flash of her black eyes, ‘But I’m resting, darling, resting. I’ve nothing better to do with myself.’ And then: ‘Oh aren’t I awful, the things wot I sy?’
‘But you do like being here? You don’t mind being here with me, dear?’ he insisted.
There was the briefest pause. She said: ‘Yes, oddly enough I do like it.’ The ‘oddly enough’ was accompanied by a quick, half-laughing, almost flirtatious glance; and for the first time in many months the pressure of loneliness eased around George’s heart.
Now it was a happiness to him because when the distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the theatre or of letters came to see him, Bobby became a cool, silky little hostess; and the instant they had gone she relapsed into urchin charm. It was proof of their intimacy. Sometimes he took her out to dinner or to the theatre. When she dressed up she wore bold, fashionable clothes and moved with the insolence of a mannequin; and George moved beside her, smiling fondly, waiting for the moment when the black, reckless, freebooting eyes would flash up out of the languid stare of the woman presenting herself for admiration, exchanging with him amusement at the world; promising him that soon, when they got back to the apartment, by themselves, she would again become the dear little girl or the gallant, charming waif.
Sometimes, sitting in the dim room at night, he would let his hand close over the thin point of her shoulder; sometimes, when they said good night, he bent to kiss her, and she lowered her head, so that his lips encountered her demure, willing forehead.
George told himself that she was unawakened. It was a phrase that had been the prelude to a dozen warm discoveries in the past. He told himself that she knew nothing of what she might be. She had been married, it seemed – she dropped this information once, in the course of an anecdote about the theatre; but George had known women in plenty who after years of marriage had been unawakened. George asked her to marry him; and she lifted her small sleek head with an animal’s startled turn and said: ‘Why do you want to marry me?’
‘Because I like being with you, dear. I love being with you.’
‘Well, I like being with you.’ It had a questioning sound. She was questioning herself? ‘Strainge,’ she said in cockney, laughing. ‘Strainge but trew.’
The wedding was to be a small one, but there was a lot about it in the papers. Recently several men of George’s generation had married young women. One of them had fathered a son at the age of seventy. George was flattered by the newspapers, and told Bobby a good deal about his life that had not come up before. He remarked for instance that he thought his generation had been altogether more successful about this business of love and sex than the modern generation. He said, ‘Take my son, for instance. At his age I had had a lot of affairs and knew about women; but there he is, nearly thirty, and when he stayed here once with a girl he was thinking of marrying I know for a fact they shared the same bed for a week and nothing ever happened. She told me so. Very odd it all seems to me. But it didn’t seem odd to her. And now he lives with another young man and listens to that long-playing record thing of his, and he’s engaged to a girl he takes out twice a week, like a schoolboy. And there’s my daughter, she came to me a year after she was married, and she was in an awful mess, really awful … it seems to me your generation are very frightened of it all. I don’t know why.’
‘Why my generation?’ she asked, turning her head with that quick listening movement. ‘It’s not my generation.’
‘But you’re nothing but a child,’ he said fondly.
He could not decipher what lay behind the black, full stare of her sad eyes as she looked at him now; she was sitting cross-legged in her black glossy trousers before the fire, like a small doll. But a spring of alarm had been touched in him and he didn’t say any more.
‘At thirty-five, I’m the youngest child alive,’ she sang, with a swift sardonic glance at him over her shoulder. But it sounded gay.
He did not talk to her again about the achievements of his generation.
After the wedding he took her to a village in Normandy where he had been once, many years ago, with a girl called Eve. He did not tell her he had been there before.
It was spring, and the cherry trees were in flower. The first evening he walked with her in the last sunlight under the white-flowering branches, his arm around her thin waist, and it seemed to him that he was about to walk back through the gates of a lost happiness.
They had a large comfortable room with windows which overlooked the cherry trees and there was a double bed. Madame Cruchot, the farmer’s wife, showed them the room with shrewd, non-commenting eyes, said she was always happy to shelter honeymoon couples, and