The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

to be a socialist—well of course we agree.’

      ‘The royal we. The socialist we. Or just the we of Anna and Molly?’

      ‘Socialist, for the purposes of this argument,’ said Anna.

      ‘And yet in the last two years you’ve made an about-turn.’

      ‘No we haven’t. It’s a question of a way of looking at life.’

      ‘You want me to believe that the way you look at life, which is a sort of anarchy, as far as I can make out, is socialist?’

      Anna glanced at Molly; Molly ever-so-slightly shook her head, but Richard saw it, and said, ‘No discussion in front of the children, is that it? What astounds me is your fantastic arrogance. Where do you get it from, Molly? What are you? At the moment you’ve got a part in a masterpiece called The Wings of Cupid.’

      ‘We minor actresses don’t choose our plays. Besides, I’ve been bumming around for a year, not earning, and I’m broke.’

      ‘So your assurance comes from the bumming around? It certainly can’t come from the work you do.’

      ‘I call a halt,’ said Anna. ‘I’m chairman—this discussion is closed. We’re talking about Tommy.’

      Molly ignored Anna, and attacked. ‘What you say about me may or may not be true. But where do you get your arrogance from? I don’t want Tommy to be a businessman. You are hardly an advertisement for the life. Anyone can be a businessman, why, you’ve often said so to me. Oh come off it, Richard, how often have you dropped in to see me and sat there saying how empty and stupid your life is?’

      Anna made a quick warning movement, and Molly said, shrugging, ‘All right, I’m not tactful. Why should I be? Richard says my life isn’t up to much, well I agree with him, but what’s his? Your poor Marion, treated like a housewife or a hostess, but never as a human being. Your boys, being put through the upper-class mill simply because you want it, given no choice. Your stupid little affairs. Why am I supposed to be impressed?’

      ‘I see that you two have after all discussed me,’ said Richard, giving Anna a look of open hostility.

      ‘No we haven’t,’ said Anna. ‘Or nothing we haven’t said for years. We’re discussing Tommy. He came to see me and I told him he should go and see you, Richard, and see if he couldn’t do one of those expert jobs, not business, it’s stupid to be just business, but something constructive, like the United Nations or Unesco. He could get in through you, couldn’t he?’

      ‘Yes, he could.’

      ‘What did he say, Anna?’ asked Molly.

      ‘He said he wanted to be left alone to think. And why not? He’s twenty. Why shouldn’t he think and experiment with life, if that’s what he wants? Why should we bully him?’

      ‘The trouble with Tommy is he’s never been bullied,’ said Richard.

      ‘Thank you,’ said Molly.

      ‘He’s never had any direction. Molly’s simply left him alone as if he was an adult, always. What sort of sense do you suppose it makes to a child—freedom, make-up-your-own-mind, I’m-not-going-to-put-any-pressure-on-you; and at the same time, the comrades, discipline, self-sacrifice, and kow-towing to authority…’

      ‘What you have to do is this,’ said Molly. ‘Find a place in one of your things that isn’t just share-pushing or promoting or money-making. See if you can’t find something constructive. Then show it to Tommy and let him decide.’

      Richard, his face red with anger over his too-yellow, too-tight shirt, held a glass of whisky between two hands, turning it round and round, looking down into it. ‘Thanks,’ he said at last, ‘I will.’ He spoke with such a stubborn confidence in the quality of what he was going to offer his son, that Anna and Molly again raised their eyebrows at each other, conveying that the whole conversation had been wasted, as usual. Richard intercepted this glance, and said: ‘You two are so extraordinarily naive.’

      ‘About business?’ said Molly, with her loud jolly laugh.

      ‘About big business,’ said Anna quietly, amused, who had been surprised, during her conversations with Richard, to discover the extent of his power. This had not caused his image to enlarge, for her; rather he had seemed to shrink, against a background of international money. And she had loved Molly the more for her total lack of respect for this man who had been her husband, and who was in fact one of the financial powers of the country.

      ‘Ohhh,’ groaned Molly, impatient.

      ‘Very big business,’ said Anna laughing, trying to make Molly meet this, but the actress shrugged it off, with her characteristic big shrug of the shoulders, her white hands spreading out, palms out, until they came to rest on her knees.

      ‘I’ll impress her with it later,’ said Anna to Richard. ‘Or at least try to.’

      ‘What is all this?’ asked Molly.

      ‘It’s no good,’ said Richard, sarcastic, grudging, resentful. ‘Do you know that in all these years she’s never been interested enough even to ask?’

      ‘You’ve paid Tommy’s school fees, and that’s all I ever wanted from you.’

      ‘You’ve been putting Richard across to everyone for years as a sort of—well an enterprising little businessman, like a jumped-up grocer,’ said Anna. ‘And it turns out that all the time he’s a tycoon. But really. A big shot. One of the people we have to hate—on principle,’ Anna added laughing.

      ‘Really?’ said Molly, interested, regarding her former husband with mild surprise that this ordinary and—as far as she was concerned—not very intelligent man could be anything at all.

      Anna recognized the look—it was what she felt—and laughed.

      ‘Good God,’ said Richard, ‘talking to you two, it’s like talking to a couple of savages.’

      ‘Why?’ said Molly. ‘Should we be impressed? You aren’t even self-made. You just inherited it.’

      ‘What does it matter? It’s the thing that matters. It may be a bad system, I’m not even going to argue—not that I could with either of you, you are both as ignorant as monkeys about economics, but it’s what runs this country.’

      ‘Well of course,’ said Molly. Her hands still lay, palms upward, on her knees. She now brought them together in her lap, in an unconscious mimicry of the gesture of a child waiting for a lesson.

      ‘But why despise it?’ Richard, who had obviously been meaning to go on, stopped, looking at those meekly mocking hands. ‘Oh Jesus!’ he said, giving up.

      ‘But we don’t. It’s too—anonymous—to despise. We despise…’ Molly cut off the word you, and as if in guilt at a lapse in manners, let her hands lose their pose of silent impertinence. She put them quickly out of sight behind her. Anna, watching, thought amusedly: If I said to Molly, you stopped Richard talking simply by making fun of him with your hands, she wouldn’t know what I meant. How wonderful to be able to do that, how lucky she is…

      ‘Yes, I know you despise me, but why? You’re a half-successful actress, and Anna once wrote a book?’

      Anna’s hands instinctively lifted themselves from beside her, and fingers touching, negligent, on Molly’s knee, said, ‘Oh what a bore you are, Richard.’ Richard looked at them, and frowned.

      ‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ said Molly.

      ‘Indeed.’

      ‘It’s because we haven’t given in,’ said Molly, seriously.

      ‘To what?’

      ‘If you don’t know we can’t tell you.’

      Richard was on the point of exploding out of his chair—Anna could