The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

hearing his own voice, he altered it. ‘You silly buggers. You drunken sots, you’ll trip all over the railway lines.’

      ‘I said,’ remarked Paul casually, ‘that we’ll come and tuck you in.’ He swayed as he stood, but steadied himself. Paul, like Willi, could drink heavily and hardly show it. But he was drunk by now.

      ‘No,’ said George. ‘I said no. Didn’t you hear me?’

      And now Jimmy came to himself, staggering up off the bench, and hooking on to Paul for steadiness. The two young men swayed a moment, then went off in a rush towards the railway lines and George’s caravan.

      ‘Come back,’ shouted George. ‘Silly idiots. Drunken fools. Clods.’ They were now yards away, balancing their bodies on fumbling legs. The shadows from the long sprawling legs cut sharp and black across the glittering sand almost to where George stood. They looked like small jerky marionettes, descending long black ladders. George stared, frowned, then swore deeply and violently and ran after them. Meanwhile the rest of us made tolerant grimaces at each other—What’s wrong with George? George reached the two, grabbed their shoulders, spun them around to face him. Jimmy fell. There was a stretch of rough gravel by the lines and he slipped on the loose stones. Paul remained upright, stiff with the effort of keeping his balance. George was down in the dirt with Jimmy, trying to get him up again, trying to lift the heavy body in its thick felt-like case of uniform. ‘You silly sod,’ he was saying, roughly tender to the drunken boy. ‘I told you to come back, didn’t I? Well didn’t I?’ And he almost shook him with exasperation, though he checked himself, even while he was trying, and with the tenderest compassion, to raise him. By this time the rest of us had run down and stood by the others on the track. Jimmy was lying on his back, eyes closed. He had cut his forehead on the gravel, and the blood poured black across his white face. He looked asleep. His lank hair had for once achieved grace, and lay across his forehead in a full springing wave. The individual hairs gleamed.

      ‘Oh hell,’ said George, full of despair.

      ‘Then why make such a fuss?’ said Ted. ‘We were only going to take you to your lorry.’

      Willi cleared his throat. It was always a rasping, rather clumsy sound. He did this frequently. It was never from nervousness, but sometimes as a tactful warning, and sometimes the statement: I know something you don’t. I recognized that this time it meant the second, and he was saying that the reason why George didn’t want anyone near his caravan was because there was a woman in it. Willi would never betray a confidence, even indirectly, when sober, so that meant he was drunk. To cover the indiscretion I whispered to Maryrose: ‘We keep forgetting that George is older than us, we must seem like a pack of kids to him.’ I spoke loudly enough for the others to hear. And George heard and gave me a wry grateful smile over his shoulder. But we still couldn’t move Jimmy. There we all stood, looking down at him. It was now long after midnight, and the heat had gone from the soil, and the moon was low over the mountains behind us. I remember wondering how it was that Jimmy, who when in his senses could never seem anything but graceless and pathetic, had just this once, when he was lying drunk in a patch of dirty gravel, managed to appear both dignified and moving, with the black wound on his forehead. And I was simultaneously wondering who the woman could be—which of the tough farmers’ wives, or marriageable daughters, or hotel guests we had drunk with in the bar that evening had crept down to George’s caravan, trying to make herself invisible in the water-clear moonlight. I remember envying her. I remember loving George for just that moment with a sharp painful love, while I called myself all kinds of a fool. For I had turned him down often enough. At that time in my life, for reasons I didn’t understand until later, I didn’t let myself be chosen by men who really wanted me.

      At last we managed to get Jimmy on his feet. It took all of us, tugging and pulling. And we supported and pushed him up between the gum-trees and the long path between the flower-beds to the hotel room. There he instantly rolled over, asleep, and stayed asleep while we sponged his cut. It was deep and full of gravel, and took a long time to stop the blood. Paul said he would stay up and watch beside Jimmy, ‘though I hate myself in the role of a bloody Florence Nightingale.’ No sooner had he sat down, however, than he fell asleep, and in the end it was Maryrose who sat up and watched beside both of them until morning. Ted departed to his room with a brief, almost angry good night. (Yet in the morning he would have swung over into a mood of self-mockery and cynicism. He was to spend months altering sharply between a guilty gravity and an increasingly bitter cynicism—later he was to say that this was the time in his life he was most ashamed of.) Willi, George and myself stood on the steps in the now dimming moonlight. ‘Thanks,’ said George. He looked hard and close into my face and then Willi’s, hesitated, and did not say what he had been going to. Instead he added the gruffly obligatory jest: ‘Do the same for you sometime.’ And he strode off down towards the lorry near the railway lines, while Willi murmured: ‘He looks just like a man with an assignation.’ He was back in his sophisticated role, drawling it, with a knowing smile. But I was envying the unknown woman too much to respond, and we went to sleep in silence. And we would have slept, very likely, until midday, if we had not been woken by the three airforce men, bringing in our trays. Jimmy had a bandage around his head, and looked ill. Ted was wildly and improbably gay, and Paul was radiating charm as he announced: ‘We’ve already started undermining the cook, because he allowed us to cook your breakfast, darling Anna, and as an additional but necessary chore, Willi’s.’ He slid the tray before me with an air. ‘The cook’s at work on all the good things for tonight. Do you like what we’ve brought you?’

      They had brought food enough for us all, and we feasted on paw-paw and avocado pear, and bacon and eggs and hot fresh bread and coffee. The windows were open and the sunlight was hot outside, and wind coming into the room was warm and smelling of flowers. Paul and Ted sat on my bed and we flirted; and Jimmy sat on Willi’s and was humble about being drunk the night before. But it was already late, and the bar was open, and we soon got dressed and walked down together through the flower-beds that filled all the sunlight with the dry spicy-smelling tang of wilting and overheated petals, to the bar. The verandahs of the hotel were full of people drinking, the bar was full, and the party, as Paul announced, waving his tankard, had begun.

      But Willi had withdrawn himself. For one thing, he did not approve of such bohemianism as collective bedroom breakfasts. ‘If we were married,’ he complained, ‘it might be all right.’ I laughed at him, and he said: ‘Yes. Laugh. But there’s sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.’ He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. ‘What position?’—I was suddenly very angry, because of the trapped feeling women get at such moments. ‘Yes, Anna, but things are different for men and for women. They always have been and they very likely always will be.’ ‘Always have been?’—inviting him to remember his history. ‘For as long as it matters.’ ‘Matters to you—not to me.’ But we had had this quarrel before; we knew all the phrases either was likely to use—the weakness of women, the property sense of men, women in antiquity, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. We knew it was a clash of temperament so profound that no words could make any difference to either of us—the truth was that we shocked each other in our deepest feelings and instincts all the time. So the future professional revolutionary gave me a stiff nod and settled himself on the hotel verandah with his Russian grammars. But he would not be left alone to study for long, for George was already striding up through the gum-trees, looking very serious.

      Paul greeted me with: ‘Anna, come and see the lovely things in the kitchen.’ He put his arm around me, and I knew Willi had seen, as I had intended him to, and we walked through the stone-floored passages to the kitchen, which was a large low room at the back of the hotel. The tables were loaded with food, and draped with netting against the flies. Mrs Boothby was there with the cook, and clearly wondering how she had put herself into the position that we were such favoured guests we could wander in and out of the kitchen at will. Paul at once greeted the cook and enquired after his family. Mrs Boothby didn’t like this of course; this was the reason for Paul’s doing it at all. Both the cook and his white employer responded to Paul in the same way—watchful, puzzled, slightly distrustful. For the cook was confused. Not the least of the results of having hundreds and thousands