The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

to say. It’s a dangerous place, Mashopi. We’ll come here, week-end after week-end and hibernate in all this beer and moonlight and good food. Where will it all end, I ask you?’

      We did not return for a month. We had all understood how tired we were, and I think we were frightened what might happen if we let the tension of tiredness snap. It was a month of very hard work. Paul, Jimmy and Ted were finishing their training and flew every day. The weather was good. There was a great deal of peripheral political activity like lectures, study groups and survey work. But ‘the Party’ only met once. The other sub-group had lost five members. It is interesting that on the one occasion we all met we fought bitterly until nearly morning; but for the rest of the month we were meeting personally all the time, and with good feeling, to discuss details of the peripheral work we were responsible for. Meanwhile our group continued to meet in the Gainsborough. We made jokes about the Mashopi hotel and its sinister relaxing influence. We used it as a symbol for every sort of luxury, decadence and weakmindedness. Our friends who had not been there, but who knew it was an ordinary roadside hotel said we were mad. A month after our visit there was a long week-end, from Thursday night to the following Wednesday—in the Colony they took their holidays seriously; and we made up a party to go again. It consisted of the original six and Ted’s new protégé, Stanley Lett from Manchester, for whose sake he later failed himself as a pilot. And Johnnie, a jazz pianist, Stanley’s friend. We also arranged that George Hounslow should meet us there. We got ourselves there by car and by train and by the time the bar closed on the Thursday night it was clear that this week-end would be very different from the last.

      The hotel was full of people for the long week-end. Mrs Boothby had opened an annexe of an extra dozen rooms. There were to be two big dances, one public and one private, and already there was an air of pleasant dislocation of ordinary life. When our party sat down to dinner very late, a waiter was decorating the corners of the dining-room with coloured paper and strings of light bulbs; and we were served with an especial ice pudding made for the following night. And there was an emissary from Mrs Boothby to ask if the ‘airforce boys’ would mind helping her decorate the big room tomorrow. The messenger was June Boothby, and it was clear she had come out of curiosity to see the boys in question, probably because her mother had talked of them. But it was equally clear she was not impressed. A good many Colonial girls took one look at the boys from England and dismissed them for ever as sissy and wet and soft. June was such a girl. That evening she stayed just long enough to deliver the message and to hear Paul’s over-polite delight in accepting ‘on behalf of the airforce’ her mother’s kind invitation. She went out again at once. Paul and Willi made a few jokes about the marriageable daughter, but it was in the spirit of their jest about ‘Mr and Mrs Boothby, the publican and his wife’. For the rest of that week-end, and the succeeding week-ends they ignored her. They apparently considered her so plain that they refrained from mentioning her out of a sense of pity, or perhaps even—though neither of these men showed much sign of this emotion generally—a sense of chivalry. She was a tall, big-bodied girl, with great red clumsy arms and legs. Her face was high-coloured, like her mother’s; she had the same colourless hair prinked around her full clumsy-featured face. She had not one feature or attribute with charm. But she did have a sulky bursting prowling sort of energy, because she was in that state so many young girls go through—a state of sexual obsession that can be like a sort of trance. When I was fifteen, still living in Baker Street with my father, I spent some months in that state, so that now I can’t walk through that area without remembering, half-amused, half-embarrassed, an emotional condition which was so strong it had the power to absorb into it pavements, houses, shop windows. What was interesting about June was this: surely nature should have arranged matters so that the men she met must be aware of what afflicted her. Not at all. That first evening Maryrose and I involuntarily exchanged glances and nearly laughed out aloud from recognition and amused pity. We did not, because we also understood that the so obvious fact was not obvious to the men and we wanted to protect her from their laughter. All the women in the place were aware of June. I remember sitting one morning on the verandah with Mrs Lattimore, the pretty red-haired woman who flirted with young Stanley Lett, and June came into sight prowling blindly under the gum-trees by the railway lines. It was like watching a sleep-walker. She would take half a dozen steps, staring across the valley at the piled blue mountains, lift her hands to her hair, so that her body, tightly outlined in bright red cotton showed every straining line and the sweat patches dark under the armpits—then drop her arms, her fists clenched at her sides. She would stand motionless, then walk on again, pause, seem to dream, kick at the cinders with the toe of a high white sandal, and so on, slowly, till she was out of sight beyond the sun-glittering gum-trees. Mrs Lattimore let out a deep rich sigh, laughed her weak indulgent laugh, and said: ‘My God, I wouldn’t be a girl again for a million pounds. My God, to go through all that again, not for a million million.’ And Maryrose and I agreed. Yet, although to us every appearance of this girl was so powerfully embarrassing, the men did not see it and we took care not to betray her. There is a female chivalry, woman for woman, as strong as any other kind of loyalty. Or perhaps it was we didn’t want brought home to us the deficiencies of imagination of our own men.

      June spent most of her time on the verandah of the Boothby house which was a couple of hundred yards to one side of the hotel. It was built on ten-foot-deep foundations away from the ants. Its verandah was deep and cool, white-painted, and had creepers and flowers everywhere. It was extraordinarily bright and pretty, and here June lay on an old cretonne-covered sofa listening to the portable gramophone, hour after hour, inwardly fashioning the man who would be permitted to deliver her from her sleep-walking state. And a few weeks later the image had become strong enough to create the man. Maryrose and I were sitting on the hotel verandah when a lorry stopped on its way down East, and out got a great lout of a youth with massive red legs and sun-heated arms the size of ox-thighs. June came prowling down the gravelled path from her father’s house, kicking at the gravel with her sharp sandals. A pebble scattered to his feet as he walked to the bar. He stopped and gazed at her. Then, looking repeatedly over his shoulder, with a blank, almost hypnotized glance, he entered the bar. June followed. Mr Boothby was serving Jimmy and Paul with gins-and-tonic and talking about England. He took no notice of his daughter, who sat in a corner and posed herself, looking dreamily out past Maryrose and myself into the hot morning dust and glitter. The youth took his beer and sat along the bench about a yard from her. Half an hour later, when he climbed back into his lorry June was with him. Maryrose and I suddenly and at the same moment burst into fits of helpless laughter and we only stopped ourselves when Paul and Jimmy looked out of the bar to find out what the joke was. A month later June and the boy were officially engaged, and it was only then that everyone became aware that she was a quiet, pleasant and sensible girl. The look of drugged torpor had gone completely from her. It was only then that we realized how irritated Mrs Boothby had been because of her daughter’s state. There was something over-gay, over-relieved in the way she accepted her help in the hotel, became friends with her again, discussed plans for the wedding. It was almost as if she had felt guilty at how irritated she had been. And perhaps this long irritation was the part cause of her later losing her temper and behaving so unjustly.

      Shortly after June had left us on that first night, Mrs Boothby came in. Willi asked her to sit down and join us. Paul hastened to add his invitation. Both spoke in what seemed to the rest of us an exaggeratedly, offensively polite way. Yet the last time she had been with Paul, on the week-end we had all been so tired, he had been simple and without arrogance, talking to her about his father and mother, about ‘home’. Though of course, his England and hers were two different countries.

      The joke among us was that Mrs Boothby had a weakness for Paul. We, none of us, really believed it; if we had we wouldn’t have joked—or I hope very much that we wouldn’t. For at this early stage we liked her very much. But Mrs Boothby was certainly fascinated by Paul. Yet she was also fascinated by Willi. And precisely because of the quality we hated in them both—the rudeness, the arrogance that underlay their cool good manners.

      It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I’ve seen it over and over again. If there was a woman the rest of us found difficult, whom we humoured, whom we made allowances for, Willi would say: ‘You just don’t know anything, what she needs is a damned good hiding.’