The Grandmothers. Doris Lessing

‘You big booby, Harold. Really, I mean, I ask you!’

      Harold began running the film – home movies. It was of the four of them, two husbands, the two women. They had been on the beach, and wore wraps over bikinis. The men were still in their swimming trunks. Roz and Lil sat on the sofa, this sofa, where Roz now was, and the men were in hard upright chairs, sitting forward to watch. The women were talking. What about? Did it matter? They were watching each other’s faces, coming in quickly to make a point. The men kept trying to intervene, join in, the women literally did not hear them. Harold, then Theo, was annoyed, and they raised their voices, but the women still did not hear, and when at last the men shouted, insisting, Roz put out a hand to stop them.

      Roz remembered the discussion, just. It was not important. The boys were to go to a friend’s for a weekend camp. The parents were discussing it, that was all. In fact the mothers were discussing it, the fathers might just as well not have been there.

      The men had been silenced, sat watching and even exchanged looks. Harold was annoyed, but Theo’s demeanour said only, ‘Women, what do you expect?’

      And then, that subject disposed of – the boys – Roz said, ‘I simply must tell you …’ and leaned forward to tell Lil, dropping her voice, not knowing she did this, telling her something, nothing important.

      The husbands sat and watched, Harold all alert irony, Theo bored.

      It went on. The tape ran out.

      ‘Do you mean to say you actually filmed that – to trap me? You set it up, to get at me!’

      ‘No, don’t you remember? I had made a film of the boys on the beach. Then you took the camera and filmed me and Theo. And then Theo said, “How about the girls?’”

      ‘Oh,’ said Roz.

      ‘Yes. It was only when I played it back later – yesterday, in fact, that I saw … Not that I was surprised. That’s how it always is. It’s you and Lil. Always.’

      ‘What are you suggesting? Are you saying we’re lezzies?’

      ‘No. I’m not. And what difference would it make if you were?’

      ‘I simply don’t get it.’

      ‘Obviously sex doesn’t matter that much. We have, I think, more than adequate sex, but it’s not me you have the relationship with.’

      Roz sat, all twisted with emotion, wringing her hands, the tears ready to start.

      ‘And so I want you to come with me up north.’

      ‘You must be mad.’

      ‘Oh, I know you won’t, but you could at least pretend to think about it.’

      ‘Are you suggesting we divorce?’

      ‘I wasn’t, actually. If I found a woman who put me first then …’

      ‘You’d let me know!’ she said, all tears at last.

      ‘Oh, Roz,’ said her husband. ‘Don’t think I’m not sorry. I’m fond of you, you know that. I’ll miss you like crazy. You’re my pal. And you’re the best lay I’m ever likely to have and I know that too. But I feel like a sort of shadow here. I don’t matter. That’s all.’

      And now it was his turn to blink away tears and then put his hands up to his eyes. He went back to the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and she joined him. They comforted each other. ‘You’re mad, Harold, do you know that? I love you.’ ‘And I love you too Roz, don’t think that I don’t.’

      Then Roz asked Lil to come over, and the two women watched the film, without speaking, to its end.

      ‘And that’s why Harold is leaving me,’ said Roz, who had told Lil the outlines of the situation.

      ‘I don’t see it,’ said Lil at last, frowning with the effort of trying. She was deadly serious, and Roz serious but smiling and angry.

      ‘Harold says my real relationship is with you, not with him.’

      ‘What does he want, then?’ asked Lil.

      ‘He says you and I made him feel excluded.’

      ‘He feel excluded! I’ve always felt – left out. All these years I’ve been watching you and Harold and I’ve wished …’ Loyalty had locked her tongue until this moment, but now she came out with it at last: ‘I have a lousy marriage. I have a bad time with Theo. I’ve never … but you knew. And you and Harold, always so happy … I don’t know how often I’ve left you two here and gone home with Theo and wished …’

      ‘I didn’t know … I mean, I did know, of course, Theo isn’t the ideal husband.’

      ‘You can say that again.’

      ‘It seems to me it’s you who should be getting a divorce.’

      ‘Oh, no, no,’ said Lil, warding off the idea with an agitated hand. ‘No; I once said in joke to Ian – testing him out, what he’d think if I got a divorce and he nearly went berserk. He was silent for such a long time – you know how he goes silent, and then he shouted and began crying. “You can’t,” he said. “You can’t. I won’t let you.’”

      ‘So poor Tom is going to be without a father,’ said Roz.

      ‘And Ian doesn’t have much of one,’ said Lil. And then, when it could seem the conversation was at an end, she enquired, ‘Roz, did Harold say that we are lezzies?’

      ‘All but – well no, not exactly.’

      ‘Is that what he meant?’

      ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Roz was suffering now with the effort of this unusual and unwonted introspection. ‘I don’t understand, I told him. I don’t understand what you’re on about.’

      ‘Well, we aren’t, are we?’ enquired Lil, apparently needing to be told.

      ‘Well, I don’t think we are,’ said Roz.

      ‘We’ve always been friends, though.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘When did it start? I remember the first day at school.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘But before that? How did it happen?’

      ‘I can’t remember. Perhaps it was just – luck.’

      ‘You can say that again. The luckiest thing in my life – you.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Roz. ‘But that doesn’t make us … Bloody men,’ she said, suddenly energetic and brisk with anger.

      ‘Bloody men,’ said Lil, with feeling, because of her husband.

      This note, obligatory for that time, having been struck, the conversation was over.

      Off went Harold to his university which was surrounded, not by ocean and sea winds and the songs and tales of the sea, but by sand, scrub and thorns. Roz visited him, and then returned there to put on Oklahoma! – a great success – and they enjoyed their more than adequate sex. She said, ‘I don’t see what you’re complaining about,’ and he said, ‘Well, no, you wouldn’t, would you?’ When he came down to visit her and the boys – who being always together were always referred to in the plural – nothing seemed to have changed. As a family they went about, the amiable Harold and the exuberant Roz, a popular young couple – perhaps not so young now – as described often in the gossip columns. For a marriage that had been given its notice to quit the two seemed no less of a couple. As they jested – jokes had never been in short supply – they were like those trees whose centre has rotted away, or the bushes spreading from the centre, which disappear as its suburbs spring up. It was so hard for this couple to fray apart. Everywhere they went, his old pupils greeted him and people who had been involved in one of her productions greeted her. They were Harold and