Читать книгу The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing - Страница 9

[The second notebook, the red one, had been begun without any hesitations at all. The British Communist Party was written across the first page, underlined twice, and the date, Jan. 3rd, 1950, set underneath:]

Last week, Molly came up at midnight to say that the Party members had been circulated with a form, asking for their history as members, and there was a section asking them to detail their ‘doubts and confusions’. Molly said she had begun to write this, expecting to write a few sentences, had found herself writing ‘a whole thesis—dozens of bloody pages’. She seemed upset with herself. ‘What is it I want—a confessional? Anyway, since I’ve written it, I’m going to send it in.’ I told her she was mad. I said: ‘Supposing the British Communist Party ever gets into power, that document will be in the files, and if they want evidence to hang you, they’ve got it—thousands of times over.’ She gave me her small, almost sour smile—the smile she uses when I say things like this. Molly is not an innocent communist. She said: ‘You’re very cynical.’ I said: ‘You know it’s the truth. Or could be.’ She said: ‘If you think in that way, why are you talking of joining the Party?’ I said: ‘Why do you stay in it, when you think in that way too?’ She smiled again, the sourness gone, ironically, and nodded. Sat a while, thinking and smoking. ‘It’s all very odd, Anna, isn’t it?’ And in the morning she said: ‘I took your advice, I tore it up.’

On the same day I had a telephone call from Comrade John saying that he had heard I was joining the Party, and that ‘Comrade Bill’—responsible for culture—would like to interview me. ‘You don’t have to see him of course, if you don’t feel like it,’ said John hastily, ‘but he said he would be interested to meet the first intellectual prepared to join the Party since the cold war started.’ The sardonic quality of this appealed to me and I said I’d see Comrade Bill. This although I had not, in fact, finally decided to join. One reason not to, that I hate joining anything, which seems to me contemptible. The second reason, that my attitudes towards communism are such that I won’t be able to say anything I believe to be true to any comrade I know, is surely decisive? It seems not, however, for in spite of the fact that I’ve been telling myself for months I couldn’t possibly join an organization that seems to me dishonest, I’ve caught myself over and over again on the verge of the decision to join. And always at the same moments—there are two of them. The first, whenever I meet, for some reason, writers, publishers, etc.—the literary world. It is a world so prissy, maiden-auntish; so class-bound; or, if it’s the commercial side, so blatant, that any contact with it sets me thinking of joining the Party. The other moment is when I see Molly, just rushing off to organize something, full of life and enthusiasm, or when I come up the stairs, and I hear voices from the kitchen—I go in. The atmosphere of friendliness, of people working for a common end. But that’s not enough. I’ll see their Comrade Bill tomorrow and tell him that I’m by temperament, ‘A fellow-traveller,’ and I’ll stay outside.

The next day.

Interview at King Street, a warren of little offices behind a facade of iron-protected glass. Had not really noticed the place before though I’ve been past it often enough. The protected glass gave me two feelings—one of fear; the world of violence. The other, a feeling of protectiveness—the need to protect an organization that people throw stones at. I went up the narrow stairs thinking of the first feeling: how many people have joined the British CP because, in England, it is difficult to remember the realities of power, of violence; the CP represents to them the realities of naked power that are cloaked in England itself? Comrade Bill turned out to be a very young man, Jewish, spectacled, intelligent, working-class. His attitude towards me brisk and wary, his voice cool, brisk, tinged with contempt. I was interested that, at the contempt, which he was not aware he was showing, I felt in myself the beginnings of a need to apologize, almost a need to stammer. Interview very efficient; he had been told I was ready to join, and although I went to tell him I would not, I found myself accepting the situation. I felt (probably because of his attitude of contempt), well, he’s right, they’re getting on with the job, and I sit around dithering with my conscience. (Though of course, I don’t think he’s right.) Before I left, he remarked, out of the blue, in five years’ time, I suppose you’ll be writing articles in the capitalist press exposing us as monsters, just like ‘all the rest.’ He meant, of course, by ‘all the rest’—intellectuals. Because of the myth in the Party that it’s the intellectuals who drift in and out, when the truth is the turnover is the same in all the classes and groups. I was angry. I was also, and that disarmed me, hurt. I said to him: ‘It’s lucky that I’m an old hand. If I were a raw recruit, I might be disillusioned by your attitude.’ He gave me a long, cool, shrewd look which said: Well, of course I wouldn’t have made that remark if you hadn’t been an old hand. This both pleased me—being back in the fold, so to speak, already entitled to the elaborate ironies and complicities of the initiated; and made me suddenly exhausted. I’d forgotten of course, having been out of the atmosphere so long, the tight, defensive, sarcastic atmosphere of the inner circles. But at the moments when I’ve wanted to join it’s been with a full understanding of the nature of the inner circles. All the communists I know—that is, the ones of any intelligence, have the same attitude towards ‘the centre’—that the Party has been saddled with a group of dead bureaucrats who run it, and that the real work gets done in spite of the centre. Comrade John’s remark for instance, when I first told him I might join: ‘You’re mad. They hate and despise writers who join the Party. They only respect those who don’t.’ ‘They’ being the centre. It was a joke of course, but fairly typical. On the underground, read the evening newspaper. Attack on Soviet Union. What they said about it seemed to me true enough, but the tone—malicious, gloating, triumphant, sickened me, and I felt glad I had joined the Party. Came home to find Molly. She was out, and I spent some hours despondent, wondering why I had joined. She came in and I told her, and said: ‘The funny thing is I was going to say I wouldn’t join but I did.’ She gave her small sourish smile (and this smile is only for politics, never for anything else, there is nothing sour in her nature): ‘I joined in spite of myself too.’ She had never given any hint of this before, was always such a loyalist, that I must have looked surprised. She said: ‘Well now you’re in, I’ll tell you.’ Meaning that to an outsider the truth could not be told. ‘I’ve been around Party circles so long that…’ But even now she couldn’t say straight out ‘that I knew too much to want to join’. She smiled, or grimaced instead. ‘I began working in the Peace thing, because I believed in it. All the rest were members. One day that bitch Ellen asked me why I wasn’t a member. I was flippant about it—a mistake, she was angry. A couple of days later she told me there was a rumour I was an agent, because I wasn’t a member. I suppose she started the rumour. The funny thing is, obviously if I was an agent I’d have joined—but I was so upset, I went off and signed on the dotted line…’ She sat smoking and looking unhappy. Then said again: ‘All very odd, isn’t it?’ And went off to bed.

5th Feb., 1950

It’s as I foresaw, the only discussions I have about politics where I say what I think are with people who have been in the Party and have now left. Their attitude towards me frankly tolerant—a minor aberration, that I joined.

19th August, 1951

Had lunch with John, the first time since I joined the Party. Began talking as I do with my ex-Party friends, frank acknowledgement of what is going on in Soviet Union. John went into automatic defence of the Soviet Union, very irritating. Yet this evening had dinner with Joyce, New Statesman circles, and she started to attack Soviet Union. Instantly I found myself doing that automatic-defence-of-Soviet-Union act, which I can’t stand when other people do it. She went on; I went on. For her, she was in the presence of a communist so she started on certain clichés. I returned them. Twice tried to break the thing, start on a different level, failed—the atmosphere prickling with hostility. This evening Michael dropped in, I told him about this incident with Joyce. Remarked that although she was an old friend, we probably wouldn’t meet again. Although I had changed my mental attitudes about nothing, the fact I had become a Party member, made me, for her, an embodiment of something she had to have certain attitudes towards. And I responded in kind. At which Michael said: ‘Well, what did you expect?’ He was speaking in his role of East European exile, ex-revolutionary, toughened by real political experience, to me in my role as ‘political innocent’. And I replied in that role, producing all sorts of liberal inanities. Fascinating—the roles we play, the way we play parts.

15th Sept., 1951

The case of Jack Briggs. Journalist on The Times. Left it at outbreak of war. At that time, unpolitical. Worked during the war for British intelligence. During this time influenced by communists he met, moved steadily to the left. After the war refused several highly-paid jobs on the conservative newspapers, worked for low salary on left paper. Or-leftish; for when he wanted to write an article on China, that pillar of the left, Rex, put him in a position where he had to resign. No money. At this point, regarded as a communist in the newspaper world, and therefore unemployable, his name comes up in the Hungarian Trial, as British agent conspiring to overthrow communism. Met him by accident, he was desperately depressed—a whispering campaign around the Party and near-Party circles, that he was and had been ‘a capitalist spy’. Treated with suspicion by his friends. A meeting of the writers’ group. We discussed this, decided to approach Bill, to put an end to this revolting campaign. John and I saw Bill, said it was obviously untrue Jack Briggs could ever be an agent, demanded he should do something. Bill affable, pleasant. Said he would ‘make enquiries’, let us know. We let the ‘enquiries’ pass; knowing this meant a discussion higher up the Party. No word from Bill. Weeks passed. Usual technique of Party officials—let things slide, in moments of difficulty. We went to see Bill again. Extremely affable. Said he could do nothing. Why not? ‘Well in matters of this case when there might be doubt…’ John and I angry, demanded of Bill if he, personally, thought it was conceivable Jack could ever have been an agent. Bill hesitated, began on a long, manifestly insincere rationalization, about how it was possible that anyone could be an agent, ‘including me’. With a bright, friendly smile. John and I left, depressed, angry—and with ourselves. We made a point of seeing Jack Briggs personally, and insisting that others did, but the rumours and spiteful gossip continue. Jack Briggs in acute depression, and also completely isolated, from right and left. To add to the irony, three months after his row with Rex about the article on China, which Rex said was ‘communist in tone’, the respectable papers began publishing articles in the same tone, whereupon Rex, the brave man, found it the right time to publish an article on China. He invited Jack Briggs to write it. Jack in an inverted, bitter mood, would not.

This story, with variations more or less melodramatic, is the story of the communist or near-communist intellectual in this particular time.

3rd Jan., 1952

I write very little in this notebook. Why? I see that everything I write is critical of the Party. Yet I am still in it. Molly too.

Three of Michael’s friends hanged yesterday in Prague. He spent the evening talking to me—or rather to himself. He was explaining, first, why it was impossible that these men could be traitors to communism. Then he explained, with much political subtlety, why it was impossible that the Party should frame and hang innocent people; and that these three had perhaps got themselves, without meaning to, into ‘objectively’ anti-revolutionary positions. He talked on and on and on until finally I said we should go to bed. All night he cried in his sleep. I kept jerking awake to find him whimpering, the tears wetting the pillow. In the morning I told him that he had been crying. He was angry—with himself. He went off to work looking an old man, his face lined and grey, giving me an absent nod—he was so far away, locked in his miserable self-questioning. Meanwhile I help with a petition for the Rosenbergs. Impossible to get people to sign it, except Party and near-Party intellectuals. (Not like France. The atmosphere of this country has changed dramatically in the last two or three years, tight, suspicious, frightened. It would take very little to send it off balance into our version of McCarthyism.) I am asked, even by people in the Party, let alone the ‘respectable’ intellectuals, why do I petition on behalf of the Rosenbergs but not on behalf of the people framed in Prague? I find it impossible to reply rationally, except that someone has to organize an appeal for the Rosenbergs. I am disgusted—with myself, with the people who won’t sign for the Rosenbergs, I seem to live in an atmosphere of suspicious disgust. Molly began crying this evening, quite out of the blue—she was sitting on my bed, chatting about her day, then she began crying. In a still, helpless way. It reminded me of something, could not think of what, but of course it was Maryrose, suddenly letting the tears slide down her face sitting in the big room at Mashopi, saying: ‘We believed everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won’t.’ Molly cried like that. Newspapers all over my floor, about the Rosenbergs, about the things in Eastern Europe.

The Rosenbergs electrocuted. Felt sick at night. This morning I woke asking myself: why should I feel like this about the Rosenbergs, and only feel helpless and depressed about the frame-ups in communist countries? The answer an ironical one. I feel responsible for what happens in the West, but not at all for what happens over there. And yet I am in the Party. I said something like this to Molly, and she replied, very brisk and efficient (she’s in the middle of a hard organizing job): ‘All right, I know, but I’m busy.’

Koestler. Something he said sticks in my mind—that any communist in the West who stayed in the Party after a certain date did so on the basis of a private myth. Something like that. So I demand of myself, what is my private myth? That while most of the criticisms of the Soviet Union are true, there must be a body of people biding their time there, waiting to reverse the present process back to real socialism. I had not formulated it so clearly before. Of course there is no Party member I could say this to, though it’s the sort of discussion I have with ex-Party people. Suppose that all the Party people I know have similarly incommunicable private myths, all different? I asked Molly. She snapped: ‘What are you reading that swine Koestler for?’ This remark is so far from her usual level of talk, political or otherwise, I was surprised, tried to discuss it with her. But she’s very busy. When she’s on an organizing job (she is doing a big exhibition of art from Eastern Europe) she’s too immersed in it to be interested. She’s in another role altogether. It occurred to me today, that when I talk to Molly about politics, I never know what person is going to reply—the dry, wise, ironical political woman, or the Party fanatic who sounds, literally, quite maniacal. And I have these two personalities myself. For instance, met Editor Rex in the street. That was last week. After the greetings were exchanged, I saw a spiteful, critical look coming on to his face, and I knew it was going to be a crack about the Party. And I knew if he made one, I’d defend it. I couldn’t bear to hear him, being spiteful, or myself, being stupid. So I made an excuse and left him. The trouble is, what you don’t realize when you join the Party, soon you meet no one but communists or people who have been communists who can talk without that awful dilettantish spite. One becomes isolated. That’s why I shall leave the Party, of course.

I see that I wrote yesterday, I would leave the Party. I wonder when, and on what issue?

Had dinner with John. We meet rarely—always on the verge of political disagreement. At the end of the dinner, he said: ‘The reason why we don’t leave the Party is that we can’t bear to say good-bye to our ideals for a better world.’ Trite enough. And interesting because it implies he believes, and that I must, only the Communist Party can better the world. Yet we neither of us believe any such thing. But above all, this remark struck me because it contradicted everything he had been saying previously. (I had been arguing that the Prague affair was obviously a frame-up and he was saying that while the Party made ‘mistakes’ it was incapable of being so deliberately cynical.) I came home thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind when I joined the Party was a need for wholeness, for an end to the split, divided, unsatisfactory way we all live. Yet joining the Party intensified the split—not the business of belonging to an organization whose every tenet, on paper, anyway, contradicts the ideas of the society we live in; but something much deeper than that. Or at any rate, more difficult to understand. I tried to think about it, my brain kept swimming into blankness, I got confused and exhausted. Michael came in, very late. I told him what I was trying to think out. After all he’s a witch-doctor, a soul-curer. He looked at me, very dry and ironic, and remarked: ‘My dear Anna, the human soul, sitting in a kitchen, or for that matter, in a double bed, is quite complicated enough, we don’t understand the first thing about it. Yet you’re sitting there worrying because you can’t make sense of the human soul in the middle of a world revolution?’ And so I left it, and I was glad to, but I was nevertheless feeling guilty because I was so happy not to think about it.

I went to visit Berlin with Michael. He in search of old friends, dispersed in the war, might be anywhere. ‘Dead, I expect,’ he said in his new tone of voice, which is flat with a determination not to feel. Dates from the Prague trial, this voice. East Berlin terrifying place, bleak, grey, ruinous, but above all the atmosphere, the lack of freedom like an invisible poison continually spreading everywhere. The most significant incident this one: Michael ran into some people he knew from before the war. They greeted him with hostility—so that Michael, having run forward, to attract their attention, saw their hostile faces and shrank into himself. It was because they knew he had been friendly with the hanged men in Prague, or three of them. They were traitors, so that meant he was a traitor too. He tried, very quiet and courteous, to talk. They were like a group of dogs, or animals, facing outward, pressing against each other for support against fear. I’ve never experienced anything like that, the fear and hate on their faces. One of them, a woman with flaming angry eyes, said: ‘What are you doing, comrade, wearing that expensive suit?’ Michael’s clothes are always off the peg, he spends nothing on clothes. He said: ‘But Irene, it’s the cheapest suit I could buy in London.’ Her face snapped shut into suspicion, she glanced at her companions, then a sort of triumph. She said: ‘Why do you come here, spreading that capitalist poison? We know you are in rags and there are no consumer goods.’ Michael was at first stunned, then he said, still with irony, that even Lenin had understood the possibility that a newly-established communist society might suffer from a shortage of consumer goods. Whereas England which, ‘as I think you know, Irene,’ is a very solid capitalist society, is quite well-equipped with consumer goods. She gave a sort of grimace of fury, or hatred. Then she turned on her heel and went off, and her companions went with her. All Michael said was: ‘That used to be an intelligent woman.’ Later he made jokes about it, sounding tired and depressed. He said for instance: ‘Imagine, Anna, that all those heroic communists have died to create a society where Comrade Irene can spit at me for wearing a very slightly better suit than her husband has.’

Stalin died today. Molly and I sat in the kitchen, upset. I kept saying, ‘We are being inconsistent, we ought to be pleased. We’ve been saying for months he ought to be dead.’ She said: ‘Oh, I don’t know, Anna, perhaps he never knew about all the terrible things that were happening.’ Then she laughed and said: ‘The real reason we’re upset is that we’re scared stiff. Better the evils we know.’ ‘Well, things can’t be worse.’ ‘Why not? We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better? Why should they? Sometimes I think we’re moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who’s to stop it—us?’ When Michael came in later, I told him what Molly had said—about Stalin’s not knowing; because I thought how odd it was we all have this need for the great man, and create him over and over again in the face of all the evidence. Michael looked tired and grim. To my surprise he said: ‘Well, it might be true, mightn’t it? That’s the point—anything might be true anywhere, there’s never any way of really knowing the truth about anything. Anything is possible—everything’s so crazy, anything at all’s possible.’

His face looked disintegrated and flushed as he said this. His voice toneless, as it is these days. Later he said: ‘Well, we are pleased he is dead. But when I was young and politically active, he was a great man for me. He was a great man for all of us.’ Then he tried to laugh, and he said: ‘After all, there’s nothing wrong, in itself, in wanting there to be great men in the world.’ Then he put his hand over his eyes in a new gesture, shielding his eyes, as if the light hurt him. He said: ‘I’ve got a headache, let’s go to bed, shall we?’ In bed we didn’t make love, we lay quietly side by side, not talking. He was crying in his sleep, I had to wake him out of a bad dream.

By-election. North London. Candidates—Conservative, Labour, Communist. A Labour seat, but with a reduced majority from the previous election. As usual, long discussions in CP circles about whether it is right to split the Labour vote. I’ve been in on several of them. These discussions have the same pattern. No, we don’t want to split the vote; it’s essential to have Labour in, rather than a Tory. But on the other hand, if we believe in CP policy, we must try to get our candidate in. Yet we know there’s no hope of getting a CP candidate in. This impasse remains until emissary from Centre comes in to say that it’s wrong to see the CP as a kind of ginger group, that’s just defeatism, we have to fight the election as if we were convinced we were going to win it. (But we know we aren’t going to win it.) So the fighting speech by the man from Centre, while it inspires everyone to work hard, does not resolve the basic dilemma. On the three occasions I watched this happen, the doubts and confusions were solved by—a joke. Oh yes, very important in politics, that joke. This joke made by the man from Centre himself: It’s all right, comrades, we are going to lose our deposit, we aren’t going to win enough votes to split the Labour vote. Much relieved laughter, and the meeting splits up. This joke, completely contradicting everything in official policy, in fact sums up how everyone feels. I went up to canvass, three afternoons. Campaign HO in the house of a comrade living in the area; campaign organized by the ubiquitous Bill, who lives in the constituency. A dozen or so housewives, free to canvass in the afternoons—the men come in at night. Everyone knew each other, the atmosphere I find so wonderful—of people working together for a common end. Bill, a brilliant organizer, everything worked out to the last detail. Cups of tea and discussion about how things were going before we went out to canvass. This is a working-class area. ‘Strong support for the Party around here,’ said one woman, with pride. Am given two dozen cards, with the names of people who have already been canvassed, marked ‘doubtful’. My job to see them again, and talk them into voting for the CP. As I leave the campaign HQ, discussion about the right way to dress for canvassing—most of these women much better dressed than the women of the area. ‘I don’t think it’s right to dress differently than usual,’ says one woman, ‘it’s a kind of cheating.’ ‘Yes, but if you turn up at the door too posh, they get on the defensive.’ Comrade Bill, laughing and good-natured—the same energetic good-nature as Molly, when she’s absorbed in detailed work, says: ‘What matters is to get results.’ The two women chide him for being dishonest. ‘We’ve got to be honest in everything we do, because otherwise they won’t trust us.’ The names I am given are of people scattered over a wide area of working streets. A very ugly area of uniform, small, poor houses. A main station half a mile away, shedding thick smoke all around. Dark clouds, low and thick, and the smoke drifting up to join them. The first house has a cracked fading door. Mrs C, in a sagging wool dress and apron, a worn-down woman. She has two small boys, well-dressed and kept. I say I am from the CP; she nods. I say: ‘I understand you are undecided whether to vote for us?’ She says: ‘I’ve got nothing against you.’ She’s not hostile, but polite. She says: ‘The lady who came last week left a book.’ (A pamphlet.) Finally she says: ‘But we’ve always voted Labour, dear.’ I mark the card Labour, crossing out the ‘doubtful’, and go on. The next, a Cypriot. This house even poorer, a young man looking harassed, a pretty dark girl, a new baby. Scarcely any furniture. New in England. It emerges that the point they are ‘doubtful’ about is whether they are entitled to the vote at all. I explain that they are. Both very good-natured, but wanting me to leave, the baby is crying, an atmosphere of pressure and harassment. The man says he doesn’t mind the communists but he doesn’t like the Russians. My feeling is they won’t trouble to vote, but I leave the card ‘doubtful’ and go on to the next. A well-kept house, with a crowd of teddy-boys outside. Wolf-whistles and friendly jibes as I arrive. I disturb the housewife, who is pregnant and has been lying down. Before letting me in, she complains to her son that he said he was going to the shops for her. He says he will go later: a nice-looking, tough, well-dressed boy of sixteen or so—all the children in the area well-dressed, even when their parents are not. ‘What do you want?’ she says to me. ‘I’m from the CP’—and explain. She says: ‘Yes, we’ve had you before.’ Polite, but indifferent. After a discussion during which it’s hard to get her to agree or disagree with anything, she says her husband has always voted Labour, and she does what her husband says. As I leave she shouts at her son, but he drifts off with a group of his friends, grinning. She yells at him. But this scene has a feeling of good-nature about it: she doesn’t really expect him to go shopping for her, but shouts at him on principle, while he expects her to shout at him, and doesn’t really mind. At the next house, the woman at once and eagerly offers a cup of tea, says she likes elections, ‘people keep dropping in for a bit of a talk.’ In short, she’s lonely. She talks on and on about her personal problems on a dragging, listless harassed note. (Of the houses I visited this was the one which seemed to me to contain the real trouble, real misery.) She said she had three small children, was bored, wanted to go back to work, her husband wouldn’t let her. She talked and talked and talked, obsessively, I was there nearly three hours, couldn’t leave. When I finally asked her if she was voting for the CP, she said: ‘Yes, if you like, dear’—which I’m sure she had said to all the canvassers. She added that her husband always voted Labour. I changed the ‘doubtful’ to Labour, and went on. At about ten that night I went back, with all the cards but three changed to Labour, and handed them in to Comrade Bill. I said: ‘We have some pretty optimistic canvassers.’ He flicked the cards over, without comment, replaced them in their boxes, and remarked loudly for the benefit of other canvassers coming in: ‘There’s real support for our policy, we’ll get our candidate in yet.’ I canvassed three afternoons in all, the other two not ‘doubtfuls’ but going into houses for the first time. Found two CP voters, both Party members, the rest all Labour. Five lonely women going mad quietly by themselves, in spite of husband and children or rather because of them. The quality they all had: self-doubt. A guilt because they were not happy. The phrase they all used: ‘There must be something wrong with me.’ Back in the campaign HQ I mentioned these women to the woman in charge for the afternoon. She said: ‘Yes, wherever I go canvassing, I get the heeby-jeebies. This country’s full of women going mad all by themselves.’ A pause, then she added, with a slight aggressiveness, the other side of the self-doubt, the guilt shown by the women I’d talked to: ‘Well, I used to be the same until I joined the Party and got myself a purpose in life.’ I’ve been thinking about this—the truth is, these women interest me much more than the election campaign. Election Day: Labour in, reduced majority. Communist Candidate loses deposit. Joke. (In campaign HQ Maker of joke, Comrade Bill.) ‘If we’d got another two thousand votes, the Labour majority would have been on a knife-edge. Every cloud has a silver lining.’

Jean Barker. Wife of minor Party official. Aged thirty-four. Small, dark, plump. Rather plain. Husband patronizes her. She wears permanently, a look of strained, enquiring good-nature. Comes around collecting Party dues. A born talker, never stops talking, but the most interesting kind of talker there is, she never knows what she is going to say until it is out of her mouth, so that she is continually blushing, catching herself up short, explaining just what it is she has meant, or laughing nervously. Or she stops with a puzzled frown in the middle of a sentence, as if to say: ‘Surely I don’t think that?’ So while she talks she has the appearance of someone listening. She has started a novel, says she hasn’t got time to finish it. I have not yet met one Party member, anywhere, who has not written, half-written, or is not planning to write a novel, short stories, or a play. I find this an extraordinary fact, though I don’t understand it. Because of her verbal incontinence, which shocks people, or makes them laugh, she is developing the personality of a clown, or a licensed humorist. She has no sense of humour at all. But when she hears some remark she makes that surprises her, she knows from experience that people will laugh, or be upset, so she laughs herself, in a puzzled nervous way, then hurries on. She has three children. She and her husband very ambitious for them, goad them through school, to get scholarships. Children carefully educated in the Party ‘line’, conditions in Russia, etc. They have the defensive closed-in look with strangers of people knowing themselves to be in a minority. With communists, they tend to show off their Party know-how, while their parents look on, proud.

Jean works as a manager of a canteen. Long hours. Keeps her flat and her children and herself very well. Secretary of local Party branch. She is dissatisfied with herself. ‘I’m not doing enough, I mean the Party’s not enough, I get fed up, just paper work, like an office, doesn’t mean anything.’ Laughs, nervously. ‘George—’ (her husband) ‘says that’s the incorrect attitude, but I don’t see why I should always have to bow down. I mean, they’re wrong often enough, aren’t they?’ Laughs, ‘I decided to do something worthwhile for a change.’ Laughs. ‘I mean something different. After all, even the leading comrades are talking about sectarianism, aren’t they…well of course the leading comrades should be the first to say it…’ Laughs. ‘Though that’s not what seems to happen…anyway, I decided to do something useful for a change.’ Laughs. ‘I mean, something different. So now I have a class of backward children on Saturday afternoons. I used to be a teacher, you know. I coach them. No, not Party children, just ordinary children.’ Laughs. ‘Fifteen of them. It’s hard work. George says I’d be better occupied making Party members, but I wanted to do something really useful…’ And so on. The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren’t really political at all, but who have a powerful sense of service. And then there are those who are lonely, and the Party is their family. The poet, Paul, who got drunk last week and said he was sick and disgusted with the Party, but he joined it in 1935, and if he left it, he’d be leaving ‘his whole life’.

[The yellow notebook looked like the manuscript of a novel, for it was called The Shadow of the Third. It certainly began like a novel:]

Julia’s voice came loud up the stairs: ‘Ella, aren’t you going to the party? Are you going to use the bath? If not, I will.’ Ella did not answer. For one thing, she was sitting on her son’s bed, waiting for him to drop off to sleep. For another, she had decided not to go to the party, and did not want to argue with Julia. Soon she made a cautious movement off the bed, but at once Michael’s eyes opened, and he said: ‘What party? Are you going to it?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘go to sleep.’ His eyes sealed themselves, the lashes quivered and lay still. Even asleep he was formidable, a square-built, tough four-year-old. In the shaded light his sandy hair, his lashes, even a tiny down on his bare forearm gleamed gold. His skin was brown and faintly glistening from the summer. Ella quietly turned off the lights—waited; went to the door—waited; slipped out—waited. No sound. Julia came brisk up the stairs, enquiring in her jolly off-hand voice: ‘Well, are you going?’ ‘Shhhh, Michael’s just off to sleep.’ Julia lowered her voice and said: ‘Go and have your bath now. I want to wallow in peace when you’re gone.’ ‘But I said I’m not going,’ said Ella, slightly irritable.

‘Why not?’ said Julia, going into the large room of the flat. There were two rooms and a kitchen, all rather small and low-ceilinged, being right under the roof. This was Julia’s house, and Ella lived in it, with her son Michael, in these three rooms. The larger room had a recessed bed, books, some prints. It was bright and light, rather ordinary, or anonymous. Ella had not attempted to impose her own taste on it. Some inhibition stopped her: this was Julia’s house, Julia’s furniture; somewhere in the future lay her own taste. It was something like this that she felt. But she enjoyed living here and had no plans for moving out. Ella went after Julia and said: ‘I don’t feel like it.’ ‘You never feel like it,’ said Julia. She was squatting in an armchair sizes too big for the room, smoking. Julia was plump, stocky, vital, energetic, Jewish. She was an actress. She had never made much of being an actress. She played small parts, competently. They were, as she complained, of two kinds: ‘Stock working-class comic, and stock working-class pathetic.’ She was beginning to work for television. She was deeply dissatisfied with herself.

When she said: ‘You never feel like it,’ it was a complaint partly against Ella, and partly against herself. She always felt like going out, could never refuse an invitation. She would say that even when she despised some role she was playing, hated the play, and wished she had nothing to do with it, she nevertheless enjoyed what she called ‘flaunting her personality around’. She loved rehearsals, theatre shop and small talk and malice.

Ella worked for a women’s magazine. She had done articles on dress and cosmetics, and of the getting-and-keeping-a-man kind, for three years, hating the work. She was not good at it. She would have been sacked if she had not been a friend of the woman editor. Recently she had been doing work she liked much better. The magazine had introduced a medical column. It was written by a doctor. But every week several hundred letters came in and half of them had nothing to do with medicine, and were of such a personal nature that they had to be answered privately. Ella handled these letters. Also she had written half a dozen short stories which she herself described satirically as ‘sensitive and feminine’, and which both she and Julia said were the kind of stories they most disliked. And she had written part of a novel. In short, on the face of it there was no reason for Julia to envy Ella. But she did.

The party tonight was at the house of the doctor under whom Ella worked. It was a long way out, in North London. Ella was lazy. It was always an effort for her to move herself. And if Julia had not come up, she would have gone to bed and read.

‘You say,’ said Julia, ‘that you want to get married again, but how will you ever, if you never meet anybody?’

‘That’s what I can’t stand,’ said Ella, with sudden energy. ‘I’m on the market again, so I have to go off to parties.’

‘It’s no good taking that attitude—that’s how everything is run, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

Ella, wishing Julia would go, sat on the edge of the bed (at the moment a divan and covered with soft green woven stuff), and smoked with her. She imagined she was hiding what she felt, but in fact she was frowning and fidgety. ‘After all,’ said Julia, ‘you never meet anyone but those awful phonies in your office.’ She added, ‘Besides your decree was absolute last week.’

Ella suddenly laughed, and after a moment Julia laughed with her, and they felt at once friendly to each other.

Julia’s last remark had struck a familiar note. They both considered themselves very normal, not to say conventional women. Women, that is to say, with conventional emotional reactions. The fact that their lives never seemed to run on the usual tracks was because, so they felt, or might even say, they never met men who were capable of seeing what they really were. As things were, they were regarded by women with a mixture of envy and hostility, and by men with emotions which—so they complained—were depressingly banal. Their friends saw them as women who positively disdained ordinary morality. Julia was the only person who would have believed Ella if she had said that for the whole of the time while she was waiting for the divorce she had been careful to limit her own reactions to any man (or rather, they limited themselves) who showed an attraction for her. Ella was now free. Her husband had married the day after the divorce was final. Ella was indifferent to this. It had been a sad marriage, no worse than many, certainly; but then Ella would have felt a traitor to her own self had she remained in a compromise marriage. For outsiders, the story went that Ella’s husband George had left her for somebody else. She resented the pity she earned on this account, but did nothing to put things right, because of all sorts of complicated pride. And besides, what did it matter what people thought?

She had the child, her self-respect, a future. She could not imagine this future without a man. Therefore, and of course she agreed that Julia was right to be so practical, she ought to be going to parties and accepting invitations. Instead she was sleeping too much and was depressed.

‘And besides, if I go, I’ll have to argue with Dr West, and it does no good.’ Ella meant that she believed Dr West was limiting his usefulness, not from lack of conscientiousness, but from lack of imagination. Any query which he could not answer by advice as to the right hospitals, medicine, treatment, he handed over to Ella.

‘I know, they are absolutely awful.’ By they, Julia meant the world of officials, bureaucrats, people in any kind of office. They, for Julia, were by definition middle-class—Julia was a communist, though she had never joined the Party, and besides she had working-class parents.

‘Look at this,’ said Ella excitedly, pulling a folded blue paper from her handbag. It was a letter, on cheap writing paper, and it read: ‘Dear Dr Allsop. I feel I must write to you in my desperation. I get my rheumatism in my neck and head. You advise other sufferers kindly in your column. Please advise me. My rheumatism began when my husband passed over on the 9th March, 1950, at 3 in the afternoon at the Hospital. Now I am getting frightened, because I am alone in my flat, and what might happen if my rheumatism attacked all over and then I could not move for help. Looking forward to your kind attention, yours faithfully. (Mrs) Dorothy Brown.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he had been engaged to write a medical column, not to run an out-patients for neurotics.’

‘I can hear him,’ said Julia, who had met Dr West once and recognized him as the enemy at first glance.

‘There are hundreds and thousands of people, all over the country, simmering away in misery and no one cares.’

‘No one cares a damn,’ said Julia. She stubbed out her cigarette and said, apparently giving up her struggle to get Ella to the party, ‘I’m going to have my bath.’ And she went downstairs with a cheerful clatter, singing.

Ella did not at once move. She was thinking: If I go, I’ll have to iron something to wear. She almost got up to examine her clothes, but frowned and thought: If I’m thinking of what to wear, that means that I really want to go? How odd. Perhaps I do want to go? After all, I’m always doing this, saying I won’t do something, then I change my mind. The point is, my mind is probably already made up. But which way? I don’t change my mind. I suddenly find myself doing something when I’ve said I wouldn’t. Yes. And now I’ve no idea at all what I’ve decided.

A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The death of a young man who had not known he was going to commit suicide until the moment of death, when he understood that he had in fact been preparing for it, and in great detail, for months. The point of the novel would be the contrast between the surface of his life, which was orderly and planned, yet without any long-term objective, and an underlying motif which had reference only to the suicide, which would lead up to the suicide. His plans for his future were all vague and impossible, in contrast with the sharp practicality of his present life. The undercurrent of despair, or madness or illogicality would lead on to, or rather, refer back from, the impossible fantasies of a distant future. So the real continuity of the novel would be in the at first scarcely noticed substratum of despair, the growth of the unknown intention to commit suicide. The moment of death would also be the moment when the real continuity of his life would be understood—a continuity not of order, discipline, practicality, commonsense, but of unreality. It would be understood, at the moment of death, that the link between the dark need for death, and death itself, had been the wild, crazy fantasies of a beautiful life; and that the commonsense and the order had been (not as it had seemed earlier in the story) symptoms of sanity, but intimations of madness.

The idea for this novel had come to Ella at the moment when she found herself getting dressed to go out to dine with people after she had told herself she did not want to go out. She said to herself, rather surprised at the thought: This is precisely how I would commit suicide. I would find myself just about to jump out of an open window or turning on the gas in a small closed-in room, and I would say to myself, without any emotion, but rather with the sense of suddenly understanding something I should have understood long before: Good Lord! So that’s what I’ve been meaning to do. That’s been it all the time! And I wonder how many people commit suicide in precisely this way? It is always imagined as some desperate mood, or a moment of crisis. Yet for many it must happen just like that—they find themselves putting their papers in order, writing farewell letters, even ringing up their friends, in a cheerful, friendly way, almost with a feeling of curiosity…they must find themselves packing newspapers under the door, against window-frames, quite calmly and efficiently, remarking to themselves, quite detached: Well, well! How very interesting. How extraordinary I didn’t understand what it was all about before!

Ella found this novel difficult. Not for technical reasons. On the contrary, she could imagine the young man very clearly. She knew how he lived, what all his habits were. It was as if the story were already written somewhere inside herself, and she was transcribing it. The trouble was, she was ashamed of it. She had not told Julia about it. She knew her friend would say something like: ‘That’s a very negative subject, isn’t it?’ Or: ‘That’s not going to point the way forward…’ Or some other judgement from the current communist armoury. Ella used to laugh at Julia for these phrases, yet at the bottom of her heart it seemed that she agreed with her, for she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it. And besides being surprised and ashamed of its subject, she was sometimes frightened. She had even thought: Perhaps I’ve made a secret decision to commit suicide that I know nothing about? (But she did not believe this to be true.) And she continued to write the novel, making excuses such as: ‘Well, there’s no need to get it published, I’ll just write it for myself.’ And in speaking of it to friends, she would joke: ‘But everyone I know is writing a novel.’ Which was more or less true. In fact her attitude towards this work was the same as someone with a passion for sweet-eating, indulged in solitude, or some other private pastime, like acting out scenes with an invisible alter ego, or carrying on conversations with one’s image in the looking-glass.

Ella had taken a dress out of the cupboard and set out the ironing-board, before she said: So, I’m going to the party after all, am I? I wonder at what point I decided that? While she ironed the dress, she continued to think about her novel, or rather to bring into the light a little more of what was already there, waiting, in the darkness. She had put the dress on and was looking at herself in the long glass before she finally left the young man to himself, and concentrated on what she was doing. She was dissatisfied with her appearance. She had never very much liked the dress. She had plenty of clothes in her cupboard, but did not much like any of them. And so it was with her face and hair. Her hair was not right, it never was. And yet she had everything to make her really attractive. She was small, and small-boned. Her features were good, in a small, pointed face. Julia kept saying: ‘If you did yourself up properly you’d be like one of those piquant French girls, ever so sexy, you’re that type.’ Yet Ella always failed. Her dress tonight was a simple black wool which had looked as if it ought to be ‘ever so sexy’ but it was not. At least, not on Ella. And she wore her hair tied back. She looked pale, almost severe.

But I don’t care about the people I’m going to meet, she thought, turning away from the glass. So it doesn’t matter. I’d try harder for a party I really wanted to go to.

Her son was asleep. She shouted to Julia outside the bathroom door: ‘I’m going after all.’ To which Julia replied with a calm triumphant chuckle: ‘I thought you would.’ Ella was slightly annoyed at the triumph, but said: ‘I’ll be back early.’ To which Julia did not reply directly. She said: ‘I’ll keep my bedroom door open for Michael. Goodnight.’

To reach Dr West’s house meant half an hour on the underground, changing once, and then a short trip by bus. One reason why Ella was always reluctant to drag herself out of Julia’s house, was because the city frightened her. To move, mile after mile, through the weight of ugliness that is London in its faceless peripheral wastes made her angry; then the anger ebbed out, leaving fear. At the bus-stop, waiting for her bus, she changed her mind and decided to walk, to punish herself for her cowardice. She would walk the mile to the house, and face what she hated. Ahead of her the street of grey mean little houses crawled endlessly. The grey light of a late summer’s evening lowered a damp sky. For miles in all directions, this ugliness, this meanness. This was London—endless streets of such houses. It was hard to bear, the sheer physical weight of the knowledge because—where was the force that could shift the ugliness? And in every street, she thought, people like the woman whose letter was in her handbag. These streets were ruled by fear and ignorance, and ignorance and meanness had built them. This was the city she lived in, and she was part of it, and responsible for it…Ella walked fast, alone in the street, hearing her heels ring behind her. She was watching the curtains at the windows. At this end, the street was working-class, one could tell by the curtains of lace and flowered stuffs. These were the people who wrote in the terrible unanswerable letters she had to deal with. But now things suddenly changed, because the curtains at the windows changed—here was a sheen of peacock blue. It was a painter’s house. He had moved into the cheap house and made it beautiful. And other professional people had moved in after him. Here were a small knot of people different from the others in the area. They could not communicate with the people further down the street, who could not, and probably would not, enter these houses at all. Here was Dr West’s house—he knew the first-comer, the painter, and had bought the house almost opposite. He had said: ‘Just in time, the values are rising already.’ The garden was untidy. He was a busy doctor with three children and his wife helped him with his practice. No time for gardens. (The gardens further down the street had been mostly well-tended.) From this world, thought Ella, came no letters to the oracles of the women’s magazines. The door opened in on the brisk, kindly face of Mrs West. She said: ‘So here you are at last,’ and took Ella’s coat. The hall was pretty and clean and practical—Mrs West’s world. She said: ‘My husband tells me you’ve been having another brush with him over his lunatic fringe. It’s good of you to take so much trouble over these people.’ ‘It’s my job,’ said Ella. ‘I’m paid for it.’ Mrs West smiled, with a kindly tolerance. She resented Ella. Not because she worked with her husband—no, this was too crude an emotion for Mrs West. Ella had not understood Mrs West’s resentment until one day she had used the phrase: You career girls. It was a phrase so discordant, like ‘lunatic fringe’ and ‘these people’ that Ella had been unable to reply to it. And now Mrs West had made a point of letting her know that her husband discussed his work with her, establishing wifely rights. In the past, Ella had said to herself: But she’s a nice woman, in spite of everything. Now, angry, she said: She’s not a nice woman. These people are all dead and damned, with their disinfecting phrases, lunatic fringe and career girls. I don’t like her and I’m not going to pretend I do…She followed Mrs West into the living-room, which held faces she knew. The woman for whom she worked at the magazine, for instance. She was also middle-aged, but smart and well-dressed, with bright curling grey hair. She was a professional woman, her appearance part of her job, unlike Mrs West, who was pleasant to look at, but not at all smart. Her name was Patricia Brent, and the name was also part of her profession—Mrs Patricia Brent, editress. Ella went to sit by Patricia, who said: ‘Dr West’s been telling us you’ve been quarrelling with him over his letters.’ Ella looked swiftly around, and saw people smiling expectantly. The incident had been served up as party fare, and she was expected to play along with it a little, then allow the thing to be dropped. But there must not be any real discussion, or discordance. Ella said smiling: ‘Hardly quarrelling.’ She added, on a carefully plaintive-humorous note, which was what they were waiting for: ‘But it’s very depressing, after all, these people you can’t do anything for.’ She saw she had used the phrase, these people, and was angry and dispirited. I shouldn’t have come, she thought. These people (meaning, this time, the Wests and what they stood for) only tolerate you if you’re like them.

‘Ah, but that’s the point,’ said Dr West. He said it briskly. He was an altogether brisk, competent man. He added, teasing Ella: ‘Unless the whole system’s changed of course. Our Ella’s a revolutionary without knowing it.’ ‘I imagined,’ said Ella, ‘that we all wanted the system changed.’ But that was altogether the wrong note. Dr West involuntarily frowned, then smiled. ‘But of course we do,’ he said. ‘And the sooner the better.’ The Wests voted for the Labour Party. That Dr West was ‘Labour’ was a matter of pride to Patricia Brent, who was a Tory. Her tolerance was thus proved. Ella had no politics, but she was also important to Patricia, for the ironical reason that she made no secret of the contempt she felt for the magazine. She shared an office with Patricia. The atmosphere of this office, and all the others connected with the magazine had the same atmosphere, the atmosphere of the magazine—coy, little-womanish, snobbish. And all the women working there seemed to acquire the same tone, despite themselves, even Patricia herself, who was not at all like this. For Patricia was kind, hearty, direct, full of a battling self-respect. Yet in the office she would say things quite out of character, and Ella, afraid for herself, criticized her for it. Then she went on to say that while they were both in a position where they had to earn their livings, they didn’t have to lie to themselves about what they had to do. She had expected, even half-wished, that Patricia would tell her to leave. Instead she had been taken out to an expensive lunch where Patricia defended herself. It turned out that for her this job was a defeat. She had been fashion editress of one of the big smart women’s magazines, but apparently had not been considered up to it. It was a magazine with a fashionable cultural gloss, and it was necessary to have an editress with a nose for what was fashionable in the arts. Patricia had no feeling at all for the cultural band-wagon, which, as far as Ella was concerned, was a point in her favour, but the proprietor of this particular group of women’s magazines had shifted Patricia over to Women at Home, which was angled towards working-class women, and had not even a pretence of cultural tone. Patricia was now well-suited for her work, and it was this which secretly chagrined her. She had wistfully enjoyed the atmosphere of the other magazine which had fashionable authors and artists associated with it. She was the daughter of a county family, rich but philistine; her childhood had been well supported by servants, and it was this, an early contact with ‘the lower-classes’—she referred to them as such, inside the office, coyly; outside, unself-consciously—that gave her her shrewd direct understanding of what to serve her readers.

Far from giving Ella the sack, she had developed the same wistful respect for her that she had for the glossy magazine she had had to leave. She would casually remark that she had working for her someone who was a ‘highbrow’—someone whose stories had been published in the ‘highbrow papers’.

And she had a far warmer, more human understanding of the letters which came into the office than Dr West.

She now protected Ella by saying: ‘I agree with Ella. Whenever I take a look at her weekly dose of misery, I don’t know how she does it. It depresses me so I can’t even eat. And believe me, when my appetite goes, things are serious.’

Now everybody laughed, and Ella smiled gratefully at Patricia. Who nodded, as if to say: ‘It’s all right, we weren’t criticizing you.’

Now the talk began again and Ella was free to look around her. The living-room was large. A wall had been broken down. In the other, identical little houses of the street, two minute ground-floor rooms served as kitchen—full of people and used to live in, and parlour, used for company. This room was the entire ground-floor of the house, and a staircase led up to the bedrooms. It was bright, with a good many different colours—sharp blocks of contrasting colour, dark green, and bright pink and yellow. Mrs West had no taste, and the room didn’t come off. In five years’ time, Ella thought, the houses down the street will have walls in solid bright colours, and curtains and cushions in tune. We are pushing this phase of taste on them—in Women at Home, for instance. And this room will be—what? Whatever is the next thing, I suppose…but I ought to be more sociable, this is a party, after all…

Looking around again she saw it was not a party, but an association of people who were there because the Wests had said: ‘It’s time we asked some people around,’ and they had come saying: ‘I suppose we’ve got to go over to the Wests.’

I wish I hadn’t come, Ella thought, and there’s all that long way back again. At this point a man left his seat across the room and came to sit by her. Her first impression was of a lean young man’s face, and a keen, nervously critical smile which, as he talked, introducing himself (his name was Paul Tanner and he was a doctor), had moments of sweetness, as it were against his will, or without his knowledge. She realized she was smiling back, acknowledging these moments of warmth, and so she looked more closely at him. Of course, she had been mistaken, he was not as young as she had thought. His rather rough black hair was thinning at the crown, and his very white, slightly freckled skin was incised sharply around his eyes. These were blue, deep, rather beautiful; eyes both combative and serious, with a gleam in them of uncertainty. A nerve-hung face, she decided, and saw that his body was tensed as he talked, which he did well, but in a self-watchful way. His self-consciousness had her reacting away from him, whereas only a moment ago she had been responding to the unconscious warmth of his smile.

These were her first reactions to the man she was later to love so deeply. Afterwards he would complain, half-bitter, half-humorous: ‘You didn’t love me at all, to begin with. You should have loved me at first sight. If just once in my life a woman would take one look at me and fall in love, but they never do.’ Later still, he would develop the theme, consciously humorous now, because of the emotional language: ‘The face is the soul. How can a man trust a woman who falls in love with him only after they have made love. You did not love me at all.’ And he would maintain a bitter, humorous laugh, while Ella exclaimed: ‘How can you separate love-making off from everything else? It doesn’t make sense.’

Her attention was going away from him. She was aware she was beginning to fidget, and that he knew it. Also that he minded: he was attracted to her. His face was too intent on keeping her: she felt that somewhere in all this was pride, a sexual pride which would be offended if she did not respond, and this made her feel a sudden desire to escape. This complex of emotions, all much too sudden and violent for comfort, made Ella think of her husband George. She had married George almost out of exhaustion, after he had courted her violently for a year. She had known she shouldn’t marry him. Yet she did; she did not have the will to break with him. Shortly after the marriage she had become sexually repelled by him, a feeling she was unable to control or hide. This redoubled his craving for her, which made her dislike him the more—he even seemed to get some thrill or satisfaction out of her repulsion for him. They were apparently in some hopeless psychological deadlock. Then, to pique her, he had slept with another woman and told her about it. Belatedly she had found the courage to break with him that she lacked before: she took her stand, dishonestly, in desperation, on the fact he had broken faith with her. This was not her moral code, and the fact she was using conventional arguments, repeating endlessly because she was a coward, that he had been unfaithful to her, made her despise herself. The last few weeks with George were a nightmare of self-contempt and hysteria, until at last she left his house, to put an end to it, to put a distance between herself and the man who suffocated her, imprisoned her, apparently took away her will. He then married the woman he had made use of to bring Ella back to him. Much to Ella’s relief.

She was in the habit, when depressed, of worrying interminably over her behaviour during this marriage. She made many sophisticated psychological remarks about it; she denigrated both herself and him; felt wearied and soiled by the whole experience, and worse, secretly feared that she might be doomed, by some flaw in herself, to some unavoidable repetition of the experience with another man.

But after she had been with Paul Tanner for only a short time, she would say, with the utmost simplicity: ‘Of course, I never loved George.’ As if there was nothing more to be said about it. And as far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to be said. Nor did it worry her at all that all the complicated psychological attitudes were hardly on the same level as: ‘Of course I never loved him,’ with its corollary that: ‘I love Paul.’

Meanwhile she was restless to get away from him and felt trapped—not by him, by the possibilities of her past resurrecting itself in him.

He said: ‘What was the case that sparked off your argument with West?’ He was trying to keep her. She said: ‘Oh, you’re a doctor too, they’re all cases, of course.’ She had sounded shrill and aggressive, and now she made herself smile and said: ‘I’m sorry. But the work worries me more than it should, I suppose.’ ‘I know,’ he said. Dr West would never have said: ‘I know,’ and instantly Ella wanned to him. The frigidity of her manner, which she was unconscious of, and which she could never lose except with people she knew well, melted away at once. She fished in her handbag for the letter, and saw him smile quizzically at the disorder she revealed. He took the letter, smiling. He sat with it in his hand, unopened, looking at her with appreciation, as if welcoming her, her real self, now open to him. Then he read the letter and again sat holding it, this time opened out. ‘What could poor West do? Did you want him to prescribe ointments?’ ‘No, no, of course not.’ ‘she’s probably been pestering her own doctor three times a week ever since’—he consulted the letter—‘the 9th of March, 1950. The poor man’s been prescribing every ointment he can think of.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to answer it tomorrow morning. And about a hundred more.’ She held out her hand for the letter. ‘What are you going to say to her?’ ‘What can I say? The thing is, there are thousands and thousands, probably millions of them.’ The word millions sounded childish, and she looked intently at him, trying to convey her vision of a sagging, dark weight of ignorance and misery. He handed her the letter and said: ‘But what are you going to say?’ ‘I can’t say anything she really needs. Because what she wanted, of course, was for Dr Allsop himself to descend on her, and rescue her, like a knight on a white horse.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘That’s the trouble. I can’t say. Dear Mrs Brown, you haven’t got rheumatism, you’re lonely and neglected, and you’re inventing symptoms to make a claim on the world so that someone will pay attention to you. Well, can I?’ ‘You can say all that, tactfully. She probably knows it herself. You could tell her to make an effort to meet people, join some organization, something like that.’ ‘It’s arrogant, me telling her what to do.’ ‘She’s written for help, so it’s arrogant not to.’ ‘Some organization, you say! But that’s not what she wants. She doesn’t want something impersonal. She’s been married for years and now she feels as if half of herself’s torn away.’

At this he regarded her gravely for some moments, and she did not know what he was thinking. At last he said: ‘Well, I expect you’re right. But you could suggest she writes to a marriage bureau.’ He laughed at the look of distaste that showed on her face, and went on: ‘Yes, but you’d be surprised how many good marriages I’ve organized myself, through marriage bureaux.’

‘You sound like—a sort of psychiatric social worker,’ she said, and as soon as the words were out, she knew what the reply would be. Dr West, the sound general practitioner, with no patience for ‘frills’, made jokes about his colleague, ‘the witch-doctor’, to whom he sent patients in serious mental trouble. This, then, was ‘the witch-doctor’.

Paul Tanner was saying, with reluctance: ‘That’s what I am, in a sense.’ She knew the reluctance was because he did not want from her the obvious response. What the response was she knew because she had felt a leap inside herself of relief and interest, an uneasy interest because he was a witch-doctor, possessed of all sorts of knowledge about her. She said quickly: ‘Oh, I’m not going to tell you my troubles.’ After a pause during which, she knew, he was looking for words which would discourage her from doing so, he said: ‘And I never give advice at parties.’

‘Except to widow Brown,’ she said.

He smiled, and remarked: ‘You’re middle-class, aren’t you?’ It was definitely a judgement. Ella was hurt. ‘By origin,’ she said. He said: I’m working-class, so perhaps I know rather more about widow Brown than you do.’

At this point Patricia Brent came over, and took him away to talk to some member of her staff. Ella realized that they had made an absorbed couple, in a party not designed for couples. Patricia’s manner had said that they had drawn attention. So Ella was rather annoyed. Paul did not want to go. He gave her a look that was urgent, and appealing, yet also hard. Yes, thought Ella, a hard look, like a nod of command that she should stay where she was until he was free to come back to her. And she reacted away from him again.

It was time to go home. She had only been at the Wests’ an hour, but she wanted to get away. Paul Tanner was now sitting between Patricia and a young woman. Ella could not hear what was being said but both the women wore expressions of half-excited, half-furtive interest, which meant they were talking, obliquely or directly, about Dr Tanner’s profession, and as it illuminated themselves, while he maintained a courteous, but stiff smile. He’s not going to get free of them for hours, Ella thought; and she got up and made her excuses to Mrs West, who was annoyed with her for leaving so soon. She nodded at Dr West, whom she would meet tomorrow over a pile of letters, and smiled at Paul, whose blue eyes swung up, very blue and startled, at the news that she was leaving. She went into the hall to put on her coat, and he came out, hurriedly, behind her, offering to take her home. His manner was now off-hand, almost rude, because he had not wanted to be forced into such a public pursuit. Ella said: ‘It’s probably out of your way.’ He said: ‘Where do you live?’ and when she told him, said firmly it was not out of his way at all. He had a small English car. He drove it fast and well. The London of the car-owner and taxi-user is a very different city from that of the tube and bus-user. Ella was thinking that the miles of grey squalor she had travelled through were now a hazy and luminous city blossoming with lights; and that it had no power to frighten her. Meanwhile, Paul Tanner darted at her sharp enquiring glances and asked brief practical questions about her life. She told him, meaning to challenge his pigeon-holing of her, that she had served throughout the war in a canteen for factory women, and had lived in the same hostel. That after the war she had contracted tuberculosis, but not badly, and had spent six months on her back in a sanatorium. This was the experience that had changed her life, changed her much more deeply than the war years with the factory women. Her mother had died when she was very young, and her father, a silent, hard-bitten man, an ex-army officer from India, had brought her up. ‘If you could call it a bringing-up, I was left to myself, and I’m grateful for it,’ she said, laughing. And she had been married, briefly and unhappily. To each of these bits of information, Paul Tanner nodded; and Ella saw him sitting behind a desk, nodding at the replies to a patient’s answers to questions. ‘They say you write novels,’ he said, as he slid the car to a standstill outside Julia’s house. ‘I don’t write novels,’ she said, annoyed as at an invasion of privacy, and immediately got out of the car. He quickly got out of his side and reached the door at the same time she did. They hesitated. But she wanted to go inside, away from the intentness of his pursuit of her. He said brusquely: ‘Will you come for a drive with me tomorrow afternoon?’ As an after-thought, he gave a hasty glance at the sky, which was heavily clouded, and said: ‘It looks as if it will be fine.’ At this she laughed, and out of the good feeling engendered by the laugh, said she would. His face cleared into relief—more, triumph. He’s won a kind of victory, she thought, rather chilled. Then, after another hesitation, he shook hands with her, nodded, and went off to his car, saying he would pick her up at two o’clock. She went indoors through the dark hall, up dark stairs, through the silent house. A light showed under Julia’s door. It was very early, after all. She called: ‘I’m back, Julia,’ and Julia’s full clear voice said: ‘Come in and talk.’ Julia had a large comfortable bedroom, and she lay on massed pillows in a large double bed, reading. She wore pyjamas, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. She looked good-natured, shrewd and very inquisitive. ‘Well, how was it?’ ‘Boring,’ said Ella, making this a criticism of Julia for forcing her to go—by her invisible strength of will. ‘I was brought home by a psychiatrist,’ she added, using the word deliberately to see appear on Julia’s face the look she had felt on her own, and had seen on the faces of Patricia and the young woman. When she saw it, she felt ashamed and sorry she had said it—as if she had deliberately committed an act of aggression towards Julia. Which I have, she thought. ‘And I don’t think I like him,’ she added, relapsing into childishness, playing with the scent bottles on Julia’s dressing-table. She rubbed scent into the flesh of her wrists, watching Julia’s face in the looking-glass, which was now again sceptical, patient and shrewd. She thought: Well, of course Julia’s a sort of mother-image, but do I have to play up to it all the time?—And besides, most of the time I feel maternal towards Julia, I have a need to protect her, though I don’t know from what. ‘Why don’t you like him?’ enquired Julia. This was serious, and Ella would now have to think seriously. Instead she said: ‘Thanks for looking after Michael,’ and went upstairs to bed, giving Julia a small, apologetic smile as she went.

Next day sunlight was settled over London, and the trees in the streets seemed not to be part of the weight of the buildings and the pavements, but an extension of fields and grass and country. Ella’s indecision about the drive that afternoon swung into pleasure as she imagined sunshine on grass; and she understood from the sudden flight upwards of her spirits, that she must recently have been more depressed than she had realized. She found herself singing as she cooked the child’s lunch. It was because she was remembering Paul’s voice. At the time she had not been conscious of Paul’s voice, but now she heard it—a warm voice, a little rough where the edges of an uneducated accent remained. (She was listening, as she thought of him, rather than looking at him.) And she was listening, not to the words he had used, but to tones in which she was now distinguishing delicacy, irony and compassion.

Julia was taking Michael off for the afternoon to visit friends, and she left early, as soon as lunch was over, so that the little boy would not know his mother was going for a drive without him. ‘You look very pleased with yourself, after all,’ said Julia. Ella said: ‘Well, I haven’t been out of London for months. Besides, this business of not having a man around doesn’t suit me.’ ‘Who does it suit?’ retorted Julia. ‘But I don’t think any man is better than none.’ And having planted this small dart, she departed with the child, in good-humour.

Paul was late, and from the way he apologized, almost perfunctorily, she understood he was a man often late, and from temperament, not only because he was a busy doctor with many pressures on him. On the whole she was pleased he was late. One look at his face, which again had the cloud of nervous irritability settled on it, reminded her that last night she had not liked him. Besides, being late meant that he didn’t really care for her, and this eased a small tension of panic that related to George, and not to Paul. (She knew this herself.) But as soon as they were in the car and heading out of London, she was aware that he was again sending small nervous glances towards her; she felt determination in him. But he was talking and she was listening to his voice, and it was every bit as pleasant as she remembered it. She listened, and looked out of the window, and laughed. He was telling how he came to be late. Some misunderstanding between himself and the group of doctors he worked with at his hospital. ‘No one actually said anything aloud, but the upper-middle-classes communicate with each other in inaudible squeaks, like bats. It puts people of my background at a terrible disadvantage.’ ‘You’re the only working-class doctor there?’ ‘No, not in the hospital, just in that section. And they never let you forget it. They’re not even conscious of doing it.’ This was good-humoured, humorous. It was also bitter. But the bitterness was from old habit, and had no sting in it.

This afternoon it was easy to talk, as if the barrier between them had been silently dissolved in the night. They left the ugly trailing fringes of London behind, sunlight lay about them, and Ella’s spirits rose so sharply that she felt intoxicated. Besides, she knew that this man would be her lover, she knew it from the pleasure his voice gave her, and she was full of a secret delight. His glances at her now were smiling, almost indulgent, and like Julia he remarked: ‘You look very pleased with yourself.’ ‘Yes, it’s getting out of London.’ ‘You hate it so much?’ ‘Oh, no, I like it, I mean, I like the way I live in it. But I hate—this.’ And she pointed out of the window. The hedges and trees had again been swallowed by a small village. Nothing left here of the old England, it was new and ugly. They drove through the main shopping street, and the names on the shops were the same as they had driven past repeatedly, all the way out of London.

‘Why?’

‘Well, obviously, it’s so ugly.’ He was looking curiously into her face. After a while he remarked: ‘People live in it.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you hate them as well?’ Ella felt resentful: it occurred to her that for years, anyone she was likely to meet would have understood without explanation why she hated ‘all this’; and to ask her if she ‘hated them as well’, meaning ordinary people, was off the point. Yet after thinking it over, she said, defiant: ‘In a way, yes. I hate what they put up with. It ought to be swept away—all of it.’ And she made a wide sweeping movement with her hand, brushing away the great dark weight of London, and the thousand ugly towns, and the myriad small cramped lives of England.

‘But it’s not going to be, you know,’ he said, with a small smiling obstinacy, it’s going to go on—and there’ll be more chain shops, and television aerials, and respectable people. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

‘Of course. But you just accept it. Why do you take it all for granted?’

‘It’s the time we live in. And things are better than they were.’

‘Better!’ she exclaimed, involuntarily, but checked herself. For she understood she was setting against the word better a personal vision that dated from her stay in hospital, a vision of some dark, impersonal destructive force that worked at the roots of life and that expressed itself in war and cruelty and violence. Which had nothing to do with what they argued. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘better in the sense of no unemployment and no one being hungry?’

‘Strangely enough, yes, that’s what I do mean.’ He said it in such a way that it put a barrier between them—he was from the working-people, and she was not, and he was of the initiated. So she kept silence until he insisted: ‘Things are much better, much much better. How can you not see it? I remember…’ And he stopped—this time, not because (as Ella put it) he was ‘bullying’ her, from superior knowledge, but from the painfulness of what he remembered.

So she tried again: ‘I can’t understand how anyone can see what’s happening to this country and not hate it. On the surface everything’s fine—all quiet and tame and surburban. But underneath it’s poisonous. It’s full of hatred and envy and people being lonely.’

‘That’s true of everything, everywhere. It’s true of any place that has reached a certain standard of living.’

‘That doesn’t make it any better.’

‘Anything’s better than a certain kind of fear.’

You mean, real poverty. And you mean, of course, that I’m not equipped to understand that at all.’

At this he glanced at her quickly, in surprise at her persistence—and, as Ella felt, out of a certain respect for it. There was no trace in that glance of a man assessing a woman for her sexual potentialities, and she felt more at ease.

‘So you’d like to put a giant bulldozer over it all, over all England?’

‘Yes.’

‘Leaving just a few cathedrals and old buildings and a pretty village or two?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And then you’d bring the people back into fine new cities, each one an architect’s dream, and tell everyone to like it or lump it.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Or perhaps you’d like a merrie England, beer, skittles and the girls in long homespun dresses?’

She said, angry: ‘Of course not! I hate all the William Morris stuff. But you’re being dishonest. Look at you—I’m sure you’ve spent most of your energy simply getting through the class barrier. There can’t be any connection at all between how you live now and the way your parents lived. You must be a stranger to them. You must be split in two parts. That’s what this country is like. You know it is. Well I hate it, I hate all that. I hate a country so split up that—I didn’t know anything about it until the war and I lived with all those women.’

‘Well’ he said at last, ‘they were right last night—you’re a revolutionary after all.’

‘No, I’m not. Those words don’t mean anything to me. I’m not interested in politics at all.’

At which he laughed, but said, with an affection that touched her: If you had your way, building the new Jerusalem, it would be like killing a plant by suddenly moving it into the wrong soil. There’s a continuity, some kind of invisible logic to what happens. You’d kill the spirit of people if you had your way.’

‘A continuity isn’t necessarily right, just because it’s a continuity.’

‘Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is.’

This was so personal, that it was her turn to glance, surprised, at him, and decide to say nothing. He is saying, she thought, that the split in himself is so painful that sometimes he wonders if it was worth it…and she turned away to look out of the window again. They were passing through another village. This was better than the last: there was an old centre, of mellow rooted houses, warm in the sunshine. But around the centre, ugly new houses and even in the main square, a Woolworth’s, indistinguishable from all the others, and a fake Tudor pub. There would be a string of such villages, one after another. Ella said: ‘Let’s get away from the villages, where there isn’t anything at all.’

This time his look at her, which she noted, but did not understand until afterwards, was frankly startled. He did not say anything for a time, but when a small road appeared, wandering off through deep sun-lit trees, he turned off into it. He asked: ‘Where’s your father living?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I see what you’re getting at. Well he’s not like that at all.’

‘Like what, I didn’t say anything?’

‘No, but you imply it all the time. He’s ex-Indian army. But he isn’t like the caricatures. He got unfit for the army and was in the administration for a time. And he’s not like that either.’

‘So what is he like?’

She laughed. The sound held affection which was spontaneous and genuine, and a bitterness which she did not know was there. ‘He bought an old house when he left India. It’s in Cornwall. It’s small and isolated. It’s very pretty. Old—you know. He’s an isolated man, he always has been. He reads a lot. He knows a lot about philosophy and religion—Buddha, for instance.’