Under My Skin. Doris Lessing

I had company, if I woke her she would come and join me, her soft weight on my shoulder. But that meant I would have to lie still … outside on the woodpile the houseboy was cutting wood, and the slow sound of the axe was like strokes of a clock. The doves were quiet, I could feel heaviness sit on my lids. I woke myself by drinking mouthfuls of the heavy sweet tepid water from the glass that had bubbles clinging inside it. Each bubble was a little world, and I picked up a straw that had fallen from the thatch and chased the silvery bubbles about inside the glass until they went out, one by one, like birthday candles.

      The watchface said five minutes had passed. Misery seized me – dread. The eternities of Mrs Scott’s were described as ‘But it was only two terms, that’s all’, while my parents looked at me, as they so often did, with amusement and with incredulity. Ahead lay the convent and another exile from home … Eternity. My mother read us the New Testament from a child’s version. Eternity: time that never ended. Lying flat on my back, arms flung out, eyes fixed on the cool under the yellow grass that seemed so high above me, I thought of time that never ended. Never ending, never ending … I was holding my breath with concentration. It never ends, never … my brain seemed to rock, my head was full of slowed time, time that has no end. For seconds, for a flash, I seemed to reach it – yes, that’s it, I got it then … I was suddenly exhausted. Surely it must be time to get up? The watch said only ten minutes had gone past. Without meaning to, I let out a great yell of outrage, then slapped both palms over my mouth, but it was no good, my mother had heard and came bursting in. ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ ‘The watch is wrong,’ I wept. ‘It’s not working.’

      She stepped efficiently to the watch, and checked. She had just had time to lay out her Croxley writing pad and envelopes, and sit, letting herself slow down, to assemble scenes from this life of hers, find words that would convey its improbability to her friend, Daisy Lane, who was an examiner for nurses in London. ‘It’s completely wild out here,’ she might have decided to write. ‘We have to bring all the water up the hill in a scotchcart several times a week, and we have to use oil lamps! I wonder what you’d say if you saw this house! But of course, it is only temporary. We’re putting in tobacco this season, and you can make a pretty penny on that!’

      She stood frowning at this difficult child, who was squatting on the bed, face streaked with tears, eyes imploring. The mother was uneasy. While the little boy, the good child, slept uncomplaining next door, this child looked as if she were being tortured. But it was with brisk humour she demanded. ‘Now what is all this nonsense?’ and pushed the child down with one hand while she flicked up the bedcover. ‘If you thrash about like that you’ll only get overheated.’

      ‘But I want to get up, can’t I get up?’

      ‘No, you can’t. You’ve not been there a quarter of an hour yet.’ And she marched out.

      ‘For ever … for ever …’ The child was walking with Jesus and his disciples along a dusty road, and it was not the track along the bottom of the hill, where dust lay in thick drifts, soft, red, and where the tracks of beetles or centipedes or buck slowly eroded as the breezes lifted the grains of sand away. It was a rocky yellowish road in – well, it was Palestine, since that was where Jesus was, but the rough dry road was from Persia. The smell in her nostrils now was not Africa, but that other place, where sunlight smelled old, full of stories from hundreds of years ago, Khosrhu and his armies marching across a rockface, but that was before Jesus, thousands of years ago, and then Jesus walked with men in striped headdresses along a dusty track where they stubbed their bare toes on big hot stones and Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life … what did he mean, what did they mean, hundreds of years ago … ? she would never grow up, never, why even to the end of the day and to bedtime was so long, long time, time was long, long … long time was not eternity, eternity was longer, it was unending, it never ended. From the bed next to hers, under its bundled mosquito net, came a small chattering sound. The cat was dreaming. Her teeth were making that funny sound. She was dreaming of chasing something? Like the dogs who would lie stretched out yelping and yapping with excitement as they chased a buck or a rabbit in a dream. Where was Lion? Where was Tiger? They were asleep in the shade under the verandah. Harry was asleep next door, the good baby. Daddy slept for a few minutes in his chair after lunch. The houseboy still sleepily measured time with his axe. And Mummy was writing to Aunt Daisy, who often wrote to me, from England, sending me presents, and often books about Jesus because she was my godmother. It was she who had sent me the stories about Jesus walking with the men in striped headdresses through the yellow dust … hundreds of years ago, hundreds.

      Indignation had gone, a melancholy had seized her whole body. Sweat ran from her armpits. Her hair was damp. She felt her cheeks dragging with wet. She leapt up, but before she reached the other bed, controlled the impetuous movement, becoming as stealthy as a cat as she curled herself around the little grey cat, who let out her protesting sound, Let me sleep. But the child strokes and strokes, her cheek on the cat’s side, the cat purrs, noblesse oblige, the child’s face lifts and falls with the purr, the child’s eyes close, the cat’s purr stops, starts again, stops … outside two doves conduct their colloquy, Croo, croo, cr-croo, the axe thuds down, slow, slow, slow …

      The woman writing to England sits with her pen suspended, smiling, for she is not here at all, she is dreaming of a winter’s evening in London, crowded noisy streets outside, and she is with her good friend Daisy Lane, the little, wry, brisk woman who had not married, for she was one of the girls whose men had been killed in the Trenches. She thinks guiltily that she has never enjoyed anything as much in her life, talking with her friend Daisy in front of a good fire, eating chocolate, or chestnuts roasted in the embers.

      Good Lord, it is already three o’clock. The children must be woken or they’ll never sleep tonight. Not that Doris is likely to have slept, and she always gets so fretful and weepy, but perhaps she has dropped off. The woman felt surrounded by sleepers, safe in a time of her own, without anyone observing her. Her husband was lost to the world in his deckchair, snoring lightly, regularly. The dogs were stretched out. An assortment of cats, one curled up against the dog Tiger’s stomach, all asleep. In the bedroom little Harry, her heart’s consolation and delight, was asleep, like a baby, his fists curled near his head. Before gently waking him, she bent over him, adoring him. She loved the way he woke, whimpering a little, small and sweet in her arms, his face in her neck, nestling, as if with his whole body he was trying to get back inside her body. She took a long time waking him, gentling him into consciousness, then slid him into his little pants and shirt. ‘You go and wake Daddy,’ she told him. She went into the bedroom next door and stopped her hand at her mouth. Where was the child? Had she run away? She always said she would – a joke, of course. No, there she was, arms around the grey cat, fast asleep. ‘There,’ thought the mother, having the last word, ‘you were tired, I knew you were, all the time.’ She stood quietly there looking down at the little girl’s tear-dirtied face. She always felt guilty, seeing the child with this cat, because of the cat left behind in Tehran, but what could she have done? After all, they couldn’t have travelled for months and months with the cat, and anyway, it was such an ugly old thing. Never had there been such storms of tears as when the family left the cat, it was ridiculous, it was out of all proportion.

      The mother did not touch the child but said briskly, in tones that sounded full of regret, a complex apology for what she was thinking, ‘Up you get now, you’ve been asleep a good half hour.’

      The child opened her eyes and looked past her mother at the room as if she had no idea where she was. Then she felt the cat against her face, and smiled. She looked up at her mother and sat up, and with a shake of her head, clearing her face of the sweat-sticky hair, ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

      ‘Oh yes you were,’ said the mother triumphantly.

      ‘I wasn’t. I wasn’t.’

      ‘Wash your face. Then we’ll have tea.’

      Tea was the family sitting in the hot shade under the verandah thatch, gingerbread, shortbread, little cakes, big cakes, scones, butter, jam. ‘You can’t have cake until you’ve eaten a scone.’ Discipline and self-restraint, this was called. The dogs lay with their noses pointing towards the food. The cats gathered around