The Grandmothers. Doris Lessing

been more of a mother, died, and her grandfather became her responsibility. ‘He landed on my poor shoulders like the old man of the sea,’ she would say. But she was not only bound to be grateful, she was fond of the old man who, when you saw him naked, was like a dangling puppet, thin and loose underneath the big head and face that had all his history in it.

      ‘Victoria, my girl,’ says Phyllis. ‘What are you doing in that nothing job, and you are such a clever girl?’

      ‘What do you want me to do? What shall I do?’

      What Phyllis wanted to say was, For the Lord’s sake! Get yourself out, make use of this time, because you’ll meet a man and then your number’s up. But she didn’t want to wake in Victoria the bad blood that was bound to be lurking there, and in any case the devil lay in wait for women, disguised in smiles and flattery.

      She leaned forward, took the two young hands in her own and threw all thought of being a bad influence over her shoulder. ‘You’re only young once,’ she said. ‘You’re pretty, though handsome is as handsome does. You have nothing to weigh you down yet.’ Victoria noted that yet which was a giveaway about how Phyllis Chadwick saw her own life.

      ‘There are jobs you could do, Victoria. Unless you try for them you’ll never know what you can get.’ She suppressed: if I could get a nice little job, when I wasn’t even pretty, what could you get for yourself, with your face and figure? ‘You don’t want to limit yourself to what you can get around here, in this neighbourhood. You just get yourself down to Oxford Street and Knightsbridge and up to Brent Cross and pick yourself the fanciest there is, and walk in bold as brass and say you want a job.’ She went on to talk of modelling, which is what she would have liked best, but she was not built for it. ‘Why not? You’ve got a well-made body and a face to match.’ The best of the things she had done herself, and the ones beyond her, were being presented to Victoria. Phyllis Chadwick, the descendant of slaves, whose name, Chadwick, had been the slave owner’s, knew that she had been good enough to work in places that wouldn’t have let her parents through the door. All the time she was talking, a little nerve of panic was twitching: am I sending her into danger, am I doing that? But she’s so sensible, so cool, she’ll not come to harm.

      She gave Victoria money, told her to go out and buy herself a bit of style but not be too flash.

      Victoria took all this in, not least that she had been given a glimpse into her benefactor’s life that she would have to think over.

      She fitted herself out, and, taking heart from Phyllis’s homilies, began at the top, in Oxford Street, for she did not yet know anything better and smarter. She worked for a while selling perfume and then, having learned that Oxford Street was not the empyrean, became assistant in a very exclusive shop indeed, but left that, when she became irked by it, for encouraged by Phyllis she was able to acknowledge imperfections even at the top. She hated selling beautiful clothes to women too ugly or too old, clothes that would have looked – did look – better on herself, and she found herself modelling for a photographer, not pornographic, but sexy enough to embarrass her, and then, proving herself as contradictory as Phyllis, who urged her on while counselling caution, she did nude poses for another photographer. All this time she was putting money aside, her nest egg, the entrance fee to her own place, her own, hers.

      The nude poses seemed to have as their natural end sex with the photographer, so she left.

      The grandfather died. The young ones saw from Phyllis’s grief that this had been much more than just a smelly old half-dead man, with his urine bottle, who had taken up space better used by the living.

      Into the room went the two boys, and Phyllis told Bessie and Victoria that she had never in her life before this time had her own room. She was in her own room, and she actually wept tears of gratitude to life, or fate, or God, for it.

      Bessie, a good-natured, easy-going young woman, said to Victoria, as they lay in their little room, talking into the dark, that she had thought the old man, the grandfather, her great-grandfather, a rough type: she had been embarrassed by him. ‘Yes, I was, Victoria, he used to get me really upset by some of the things he said.’

      Victoria did not comment. She had a good idea of what raw materials Phyllis had made her life. She could feel for Phyllis in ways that Bessie didn’t. Couldn’t, rather: she had had it easy. She, Victoria, was closer to Phyllis than Bessie was.

      Victoria had no idea how Phyllis yearned over her, fretted because of her, was afraid for her. She had lived as Victoria did now, dancing on the edge of danger, and while she urged Victoria on, and triumphed in the young woman’s successes, the sparkling new job, the compliment from an employer, or from a customer, she thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don’t know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.

      Oh, yes, older women understand why some people think young ones should be locked up! Good God, girl, Phyllis Chadwick might think, watching Victoria go off to work, looking a million dollars, you’re a walking catastrophe in the making, though you trip along so meek and mild not looking to right or left, you don’t sway your little hips and come on fast, you wouldn’t let that photographer go too far (Phyllis knew about the first but not the nude-poser), but all the same, girl, you’re playing with fire, and so was I, and I had no idea of what I was like. Sometimes I could shake and shudder at the risks I took.

      ‘Don’t you worry so much, Ma,’ said Bessie to her mother, after they had watched Victoria go off to work as a croupier in a gambling place. ‘She’s got an old head on her.’

      ‘I hope she has, my dear,’ and Phyllis thought how odd it was that this daughter of hers, whom of course she loved, since she was her daughter, was far away across a gulf of incomprehension, that generation gap that is the cruellest of all, between parents who have done it the hard way, to win ease and safety for their children, who then have no understanding of what they have been saved from. ‘But Victoria understands me,’ Phyllis thought.

      Now Victoria was in a job she liked better than anything so far, a big music shop, in the West End. She had earned more in other places, but this was where she belonged. The music, the people who came in, the other assistants – all perfect, all a pleasure, and she told Phyllis and Bessie that this time she would stick.

      One afternoon who should come in but Thomas Staveney: for a moment she again thought she was looking at Edward. She watched him wander about the store, at his ease in it, familiar with everything: he picked up tapes and put them down and finally bought a video of a concert from The Gambia. Then he arrived in front of her, and said, ‘You’re Victoria.’ ‘And you’re Thomas,’ she rejoined smartly. He was eyeing her but not in a way she could object to: of course he must be surprised: she knew what he was remembering. She stood smiling, letting him come to conclusions.

      Then he said the last thing she expected: ‘Why don’t you come home with me and have some supper?’

      ‘I’m not free for another hour.’

      ‘I’ll come back for you.’ He sloped out. His style was one no one need notice in this place, more Jimmy Dean than Che Guevara; there was a hole at the knee of his jeans, and another in his sweater elbow.

      When the two left the store, as it closed, they were an incongruous pair, for she was in a sleek black leather jacket, a black leather skirt, heels like shiny black chopsticks. Her hair was straight now, like black patent leather.

      They took a bus, another, and were soon outside that house that had been inhabiting her dreams for ten years.

      She was now nineteen, he, seventeen. They knew to the month how old each was. He looked much older, and she did too, a smart young woman, no girl, this.

      As he went up the steps she lingered, to grasp the moment. She was here with the tall fair boy she had been dreaming of, yet it was like those dreams where a familiar figure comes towards you, but it is not he, this is a stranger; or with what delight you see across a room your lost sweetheart and she turns her head with a smile you don’t know. This