The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing

husbands, I don’t need a husband.’ She did not exchange a look with you, but that was because she did not need to – later when you got home she said, ‘What an affected thing to say!’ and you replied, ‘Don’t forget she is an actress.’ You said this meaning exactly what I would mean if I had said it, I’m certain of that. And perhaps she heard it like that. I do hope so because I know what you are and if your wife does not hear what you say then this is a smallness on your part that I don’t forgive you. If I can live alone, and out of fastidiousness, then you must have a wife as good as you are. My husbands, the men who set light to my soul (yes, I know how your wife would smile if I used that phrase), are worthy of you … I know that I am giving myself away now, confessing how much that look on your wife’s face hurt. Didn’t she know that even then I was playing my part? Oh no, after all, I don’t forgive you your wife, no I don’t.

      If I said, ‘I don’t need a husband, I have so many lovers,’ then of course everyone at the dinner-table would have laughed in just such a way: it would have been the rather banal ‘outrageousness’ expected of me. An ageing star, the fading beauty … ‘I have so many lovers’ – pathetic, and brave too. Yes, that remark would have been too apt, too smooth, right for just any ‘beautiful but fading’ actress. But not right for me, because after all, I am not just any actress, I am Victoria Carrington, and I know exactly what is due to me and from me. I know what is fitting (not for me, that is not important) but for what I stand for. Do you imagine I couldn’t have said it differently – like this, for instance: ‘I am an artist and therefore androgynous.’ Or: ‘I have created inside myself Man who plays opposite to my Woman.’ Or: ‘I have objectified in myself the male components of my soul and it is from this source that I create.’ Oh, I’m not stupid, not ignorant, I know the different dialects of our time and even how to use them. But imagine if I had said any of these things last night! It would have been a false note, you would all have been uncomfortable, irritated, and afterwards you would have said: ‘Actresses shouldn’t try to be intelligent.’ (Not you, the others.) Probably they don’t believe it, not really, that an actress must be stupid, but their sense of discrepancy, or discordance, would have expressed itself in such a way. Whereas their silence when I said, ‘I don’t need a husband, I have so many husbands,’ was right, for it was the remark right for me – it was more than ‘affected’, or ‘outrageous’ – it was making a claim that they had to recognize.

      That word ‘affected’, have you ever really thought why it is applied to actresses? (You have of course, I’m no foreign country to you, I felt that, but it gives me pleasure to talk to you like this.) The other afternoon I went to see Irma Painter in her new play, and afterwards I went back to congratulate her (for she had heard, of course, that I was in the auditorium and would have felt insulted if I hadn’t gone – I’m different, I hate it when people feel obliged to come back). We were sitting in her dressing-room and I was looking at her face as she wiped the make-up off. We are about the same age, and we have both been acting since the year——I recognized her face as mine, we have the same face, and I understood that it is the face of every real actress. No, it is not ‘mask-like’, my face, her face. Rather, it is that our basic face is so worn down to its essentials because of its permanent readiness to take other guises, become other people, it is almost like something hung up on the wall of a dressing-room ready to take down and use. Our face is – it has a scrubbed, honest, bare look, like a deal table, or a wooden floor. It has modesty, a humility, our face, as time wears on, wearing out of her, out of me, our ‘personality’, our ‘individuality’.

      I looked at her face (we are called rivals, we are both called ‘great’ actresses) and I suddenly wanted to pay homage to it, since I knew what that scoured plain look cost her – what it costs me, who have played a thousand beautiful women, to keep my features sober and decent under the painted shell of my make-up, ready for other souls to use.

      At a party, all dressed up, when I’m a ‘person’, then I try to disguise the essential plainness and anonymity of my features by holding together the ‘beauty’ I am known for, creating it out of my own and other people’s memories. Of course it is almost gone now, nearly all gone the sharp, sweet, poignant face that so many men loved (not knowing it was not me, it was only what was given to me to consume slowly for the scrubbed face I must use for work). While I sat last night opposite you and your wife, she so pretty and human, her prettiness no mask, but expressing every shade of what she felt, and you being yourself only, I was conscious of how I looked. I could see my very white flesh that is guttering down away from its ‘beauty’; I could see my smile that even now has moments of its ‘piercing sweetness’; I could see my eyes, ‘dewy and shadowed’, even now … but I also knew that everyone there, even if they were not aware of it, was conscious of that hard, honest, workaday face that lies ready for use under this ruin, and it is the discrepancy between that working face and the ‘personality’ of the famous actress that makes everything I do and say affected, that makes it inevitable and right that I should say, ‘I don’t want a husband, I have so many husbands.’ And I tell you, if I had said nothing, not one word, the whole evening, the result would have been the same: ‘How affected she is, but of course she is an actress.’

      Yet it was the exact truth, what I said: I no longer have lovers, I have husbands, and that has been true ever since …

      That is why I am writing this letter to you; this letter is a sort of homage, giving you your due in my life. Or perhaps, simply, I cannot tonight stand the loneliness of my role (my role in life).

      When I was a girl it seemed that every man I met, or even heard of, or whose picture I saw in the paper, was my lover. I took him as my lover, because it was my right. He may never have heard of me, he might have thought me hideous (and I wasn’t very attractive as a girl – my kind of looks, striking, white-fleshed, red-haired, needed maturity, as a girl I was a milk-faced, scarlet-haired creature whose features were all at odds with each other, I was pretty only when made up for the stage) … he may have found me positively repulsive, but I took him. Yes, at that time I had lovers in imagination, but none in reality. No man in the flesh could be as good as what I could invent, no real lips, hands, could affect me as those that I created, like God. And this remained true when I married my first husband, and then my second, for I loved neither of them, and I didn’t know what the word meant for years. Until, to be precise, I was thirty-two and got very ill that year. No one knew why, or how, but I knew it was because I did not get a big part I wanted badly. So I got ill from disappointment, but now I see how right it was I didn’t get the part. I was too old – if I had played her, the charming ingenuous girl (which is how I saw myself then, God forgive me), I would have had to play her for three or four years, because the play ran for ever, and I would have been too vain to stop. And then what? I would have been nearly forty, too old for charming girls, and then, like so many actresses who have not burned the charming girl out of themselves, cauterized that wound with a pain like styptic, I would have found myself playing smaller and smaller parts, and then I would have become a ‘character’ actress, and then …

      Instead, I lay very ill, not wanting to get better, ill with frustration, I thought, but really with the weight of years I did not know how to consume, how to include in how I saw myself, and then I fell in love with my doctor, inevitable I see now, but then a miracle, for that was the first time, and the reason I said the word ‘love’ to myself, just as if I had not been married twice, and had a score of men in my imagination, was because I could not manipulate him, for the first time a man remained himself, I could not make him move as I wanted, and I did not know his lips and hands. No, I had to wait for him to decide, to move, and when he did become my lover I was like a young girl, awkward, I could only wait for his actions to spring mine.

      He loved me, certainly, but not as I loved him, and in due course he left me. I wished I could die, but it was then I understood, with gratitude, what had happened – I played, for the first time, a woman, as distinct from that fatal creature ‘a charming girl’, as distinct from ‘the heroine’ – and I and everyone else knew that I had moved into a new dimension of myself, I was born again, and only I knew it was out of love for that man, my first husband (so I called him, though everyone else saw him as my doctor with whom I rather amusingly had had an affair).

      For