The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

the first time Tommy showed a touch of humour. He really looked at them, first at her, and then at his mother, smiling. ‘You forget that I’ve listened to you two talk all my life. I know about you, don’t I? I do think that you are both rather childish sometimes, but I prefer that to…’ He did not look at his father, but left it.

      ‘It’s a pity you’ve never given me a chance to talk,’ said Richard, but with self-pity; and Tommy reacted by a quick, dogged withdrawal away from him. He said to Anna and Molly, ‘I’d rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I’m not saying I’m choosing failure. I mean, one doesn’t choose failure, does one? I know what I don’t want, but not what I do want.’

      ‘One or two practical questions,’ said Richard, while Anna and Molly wryly looked at the word failure, used by this boy in exactly the same sense they would have used it. All the same, neither had applied it to themselves—or not so pat and final, at least.

      ‘What are you going to live on?’ said Richard.

      Molly was angry. She did not want Tommy flushed out of the safe period of contemplation she was offering him by the fire of Richard’s ridicule.

      But Tommy said: ‘If mother doesn’t mind I don’t mind living off her for a bit. After all, I hardly spend anything. But if I have to earn money, I can always be a teacher.’

      ‘Which you’ll find a much more straitened way of life than what I’m offering you,’ said Richard.

      Tommy was embarrassed. ‘I don’t think you really understood what I’m trying to say. Perhaps I didn’t say it right.’

      ‘You’re going to become some sort of a coffee-bar bum,’ said Richard.

      ‘No. I don’t see that. You only say that because you only like people who have a lot of money.’

      Now the three adults were silent. Molly and Anna because the boy could be trusted to stand up for himself; Richard because he was afraid of unleashing his anger. After a time Tommy remarked: ‘Perhaps I might try to be a writer.’

      Richard let out a groan. Molly said nothing, with an effort. But Anna exclaimed: ‘Oh Tommy, and after all that good advice I gave you.’

      He met her with affection, but stubbornly: ‘You forget, Anna, I don’t have your complicated ideas about writing.’

      ‘What complicated ideas?’ asked Molly sharply.

      Tommy said to Anna: ‘I’ve been thinking about all the things you said.’

      ‘What things?’ demanded Molly.

      Anna said: ‘Tommy, you’re frightening to know. One says something and you take it all up so seriously.’

      ‘But you were serious?’

      Anna suppressed an impulse to turn it off with a joke, and said: ‘Yes, I was serious.’

      ‘Yes, I know you were. So I thought about what you said. There was something arrogant in it.’

      ‘Arrogant?’

      ‘Yes, I think so. Both the times I came to see you, you talked, and when I put together all the things you said, it sounds to me like arrogance. Like a kind of contempt.’

      The other two, Molly and Richard, were now sitting back, smiling, lighting cigarettes, being excluded, exchanging looks.

      But Anna, remembering the sincerity of this boy’s appeal to her, had decided to jettison even her old friend Molly, for the time being at least.

      ‘If it sounded like contempt, then I don’t think I can have explained it right.’

      ‘Yes. Because it means you haven’t got confidence in people. I think you’re afraid.’

      ‘What of?’ asked Anna. She felt very exposed, particularly before Richard, and her throat was dry and painful.

      ‘Of loneliness. Yes I know that sounds funny, for you, because of course you choose to be alone rather than to get married for the sake of not being lonely. But I mean something different. You’re afraid of writing what you think about life, because you might find yourself in an exposed position, you might expose yourself, you might be alone.’

      ‘Oh,’ said Anna, bleakly. ‘Do you think so?’

      ‘Yes. Or if you’re not afraid, then it’s contempt. When we talked about politics, you said the thing you’d learned from being a communist was that the most terrible thing of all was when political leaders didn’t tell the truth. You said that one small lie could spread into a marsh of lies and poison everything—do you remember? You talked about it for a long time…well then. You said that about politics. But you’ve got whole books you’ve written for yourself which no one ever sees. You said you believed that all over the world there were books in drawers, that people were writing for themselves—and even in countries where it isn’t dangerous to write the truth. Do you remember, Anna? Well, that’s a sort of contempt.’ He had been looking, not at her, but directing towards her an earnest, dark, self-probing stare. Now he saw her flushed, stricken face, but he recovered himself, and said hesitantly: ‘Anna, you were saying what you really thought, weren’t you?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘But Anna, you surely didn’t expect me not to think about what you said?’

      Anna closed her eyes a moment, smiling painfully. ‘I suppose I underestimated—how much you’d take me seriously.’

      ‘That’s the same thing. It’s the same thing as the writing. Why shouldn’t I take you seriously?’

      ‘I didn’t know Anna was writing at all, these days,’ said Molly, coming in firmly.

      ‘I don’t,’ said Anna, quickly.

      ‘There you are,’ said Tommy. ‘Why do you say that?’

      ‘I remember telling you that I’d been afflicted with an awful feeling of disgust, of futility. Perhaps I don’t like spreading those emotions.’

      ‘If Anna’s been filling you full of disgust for the literary career,’ said Richard, laughing, ‘then I won’t quarrel with her for once.’

      It was a note so false that Tommy simply ignored him, which he did by politely controlling his embarrassment and going straight on: ‘If you feel disgust, then you feel disgust. Why pretend not? But the point is, you were talking about responsibility. That’s what I feel too—people aren’t taking responsibility for each other. You said the socialists had ceased to be a moral force, for the time, at least, because they wouldn’t take moral responsibility. Except for a few people. You said that, didn’t you—well then. But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that’s not being responsible.’

      ‘A very great number of people would say that it was irresponsible to spread disgust. Or anarchy. Or a feeling of confusion.’ Anna said this half-laughing, plaintive, rueful, trying to make him meet her on this note.

      And he reacted immediately, by closing up, sitting back, showing she had failed him. She, like everyone else—so his patient, stubborn pose suggested, was bound to disappoint him. He retreated into himself, saying: ‘Anyway, that’s what I came down to say. I’d like to go on doing nothing for a month or two. After all it’s costing much less than going to university as you wanted.’

      ‘Money’s not the point,’ said Molly.

      ‘You’ll find that money is the point,’ said Richard. ‘When you change your mind, ring me up.’

      ‘I’ll ring you up in any case,’ said Tommy, giving his father his due.

      ‘Thanks,’ said Richard, short and bitter. He stood for a moment, grinning angrily at the two women. ‘I’ll drop in one of these days, Molly.’

      ‘Any time,’ said Molly, with sweetness.

      He