The Grandmothers. Doris Lessing

welcome to visit,’ said his ex-wife. ‘But let’s not push our luck.’

      Thomas telephoned Victoria to ask if he could take Mary to his swimming pool. Victoria said the child didn’t know how to swim, and Thomas said he would teach her.

      Then it was the zoo, the planetarium and a trip on the river-boat to Greenwich.

      Meanwhile Victoria was thinking, ‘But I have two children. What about Dickson? ‘What was happening was unfair. Yes, Dickson was still tiny, just three, but he knew his sister was getting treats that he didn’t.

      Jessy had remarked that it was not right, when there were two children, if one got more than the other.

      Edward said at once, ‘Don’t even think of it, Mother.’

      ‘Perhaps we could take him out sometimes with Mary?’

      ‘No. One’s enough. I’m sorry, but there are limits.’

      Now Mary was in her first year at school and miserable. This made Victoria remember how miserable she had been, though she had managed it by being quiet, and keeping out of trouble and – frankly – sucking up to the big boys and girls. She told Mary to do the same, and suffered herself, knowing that the child cried herself to sleep at nights.

      She speculated, amazed, how it was that the Staveneys could willingly submit their precious children to such nastiness, such cruelty – for she believed that the good schools, the ones children like theirs would attend, would be free of all that. In her most secret dreams, not shared even with Bessie. Victoria was hoping the Staveneys would send little Mary to a good school where she could learn and become somebody.

      Then Jessy telephoned to ask if Mary would enjoy a matinée? Victoria thought of Les Misérables and said Mary would love it. Victoria took Mary to the Staveney house where off went Jessy and Mary in a taxi, to be returned, in a taxi, to the council estate. Mary was in a state of babbling incoherent delight. Victoria never came to grips with what the little girl had seen. But the next time she was whisked off to that other land, the Staveneys, Mary asked Thomas if she could go to another ‘matney’. ‘A what?’ It turned out she thought matney was the name for a theatre. She went to another matney with Jessy and then to the zoo with Edward and Edward’s wife, and their three-year-old. And then, having begged, to another matinée, of a show Lionel was in. She returned to say that her grandfather was a funny man but she liked him. ‘He likes me, Ma,’ she confided in Victoria.

      Whenever this grandfather was mentioned grandfathers whirled dolefully in Victoria’s mind. She was being reminded that she must have had a grandfather, but as a fact he had simply disappeared. It was Phyllis’s grandfather she thought of as grandfather, a generic progenitor, an old man with his smelly urine bottle. But – she could not dispute it – Lionel Staveney was her little girl’s grandfather, and when Mary said, ‘She told me I was her grandchild and so I must call her grandmother,’ Victoria felt the earth shaking under her feet. When she confessed how she felt, Bessie reasonably said, ‘But what did you expect, when you told them?’

      Well, what had she expected? Nothing like this. It was the thoroughness of the acceptance of Mary that was – well, what? It was all too much! Bessie told her she was ungrateful, she was looking a gift-horse in the mouth. Victoria at last came out with: ‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d be so pleased to have a black grandchild.’

      ‘She’s not black, she’s more caramel,’ Bessie pronounced. ‘If she was my colour I bet they wouldn’t be so pleased.’

      About a year after she had first telephoned Thomas, Jessy wrote a letter to say the family were taking a house in Dorset in the summer, for a month, and people would come and go. Would Victoria agree to Mary’s joining them? Edward’s Samantha would be there for the whole month. Victoria was not invited, and she knew it was because of Dickson. Mary was sweet, lovable, biddable and friendly, but Dickson, now nearly four, was a different matter.

      The question of colour – no, it couldn’t be evaded – though Victoria could be pardoned for thinking that the Staveneys, except for Thomas of course, had never noticed that colour could be a differentiator, often enough a contumacious one, believing that whatever had happened – regrettably – in the past, was no longer a force in human affairs.

      Dickson was black, black as boot polish or piano keys. Somewhere long ago in his family tree genes had been nurtured to cope with the suns of tropical Africa. He sweated easily. Sometimes sweat flew off him as freely as off an over-hot dog’s tongue. He roared and fought; at the minder’s he was a problem, making trouble, causing tears. Mary was able to calm and charm him, but no one else could, certainly not Victoria, who often found herself weeping with exhaustion over Dickson’s brawling and biting. Bessie adored him, called him her little black imp from hell, her hell’s angel, and sometimes he would allow himself to be held by her, but not often. By now he knew that he was excessive and impossible and everyone’s headache, but that made him worse in behaviour and worse in effect, for he acquired pathos, saying things like, ‘But why am I impossible? Why am I a headache, why, why, why, I’m not, I’m not,’ and he would kick out around him until he fell sobbing on the floor.

      He could not possibly be an easy guest in any family, black or white. The Staveneys had scarcely seen the child. It seemed they had enquired of Mary if she would like Dickson to be invited, but Mary had replied, gravely, in her responsible little way, that Dickson would quarrel with everyone and would scratch and bite Samantha. ‘I told her – Jessy – that he would grow out of it,’ Mary told Victoria she had said. Quoting Bessie. ‘Don’t worry, Victoria, he’ll grow out of it.’

      But here was a real turn of the screw. Little visits here and there, a matinée, a tea party, but to go away by herself, for a month – they were asking her for a month? Yes, they were. The politician a mother has to be – let alone an economist – told Victoria that the Staveneys wanted Mary because of Samantha. Mary was good with small children. At the minder’s she was commended for it. Victoria thought – and it was bitter – Mary’s going to be a nurse for Samantha. Bitter and unfair and she knew it. Mary loved Samantha. An unanchored bitterness, ready to become suspicion, floated near enough to the surface in Victoria to be dangerous – she pressed it down. Wasn’t this what she had wanted for Mary? The little girl was being so lucky, and Victoria should be giving thanks for the blessing of it.

      This was what Bessie, who was taking to religion, called it. ‘It’s a blessing, Victoria. That family – they’re Mary’s blessing from God.’

      Now there was the question of clothes. Samantha’s were different, and Mary knew exactly what she needed. Victoria found herself being taken to a shop, by her little daughter, and instructed on what to buy. So this was what Samantha wore? Cheeky little clothes, and the colours were gorgeous – and it was all so expensive. But there was money in the bank for Mary’s clothes, put there by Thomas, and this was when she must spend it.

      Victoria was thinking, I am losing Mary to the Staveneys. She was able to contemplate this calmly. She did not believe Mary would come to despise her mother: she was relying on the child’s kind heart. She was thinking, as mothers so often seem to do, How is it possible that these two such different children came out of the same womb? A little angel – the minder’s name for Mary – and a little devil. ‘Never mind,’ said Bessie. ‘They’ll both grow out of it.’ And Victoria found she was thinking about her daughter as Phyllis had thought about her. The terrible dangers that lie in wait for girls … the traps, the snares, baited by the devil with a girl’s best qualities – Bessie had just had an abortion. She wanted the baby, but she would have liked a father for it, and while she had a flat to put it in, she didn’t have a home.

      Off went Mary, wild with excitement, with the Staveneys. She rang her mother most days, for Victoria had insisted, and kept saying that it was lovely, oh, it’s so lovely, Ma. And then Victoria was asked to go down for a weekend. She arranged for Dickson to stay at the minder’s and took the train, two hours, into England’s green and pleasant land. But Victoria had hardly ever been out of London. It seemed to her she was being smothered in green, a wet green: it had rained.

      She stood