To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One. Doris Lessing

I was with my own girl, but that night we were helping the farmer get his fruit, in payment for using his barn to sleep in, and I found this girl Marie was beside me. It was moonlight, a lovely night, and we were all singing and making love. I kissed her, but that was all. That night she came to me. I was sleeping up in the loft with another lad. He was asleep. I sent her back down to the others. They were all together down in the hay. I told her she was too young. But she was no younger than my own girl.’ He stopped; and after all these years his face was rueful and puzzled. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I sent her back.’ Then he laughed. ‘Not that it matters, I suppose.’

      ‘Shameless hussy,’ she said. The anger was strong now. ‘You had kissed her, hadn’t you?’

      He shrugged. ‘But we were all playing the fool. It was a glorious night – gathering apples, the farmer shouting and swearing at us because we were making love more than working, and singing and drinking wine. Besides, it was that time: the youth movement. We regarded faithfulness and jealousy and all that sort of thing as remnants of bourgeois morality.’ He laughed again, rather painfully. ‘I kissed her. There she was, beside me, and she knew my girl was with me that weekend.’

      ‘You kissed her,’ she said accusingly.

      He fingered the stem of his wineglass, looking over at her and grinning. ‘Yes, darling,’ he almost crooned at her. ‘I kissed her.’

      She snapped over into anger. ‘There’s a girl all ready for love. You make use of her for working. Then you kiss her. You know quite well …’

      ‘What do I know quite well?’

      ‘It was a cruel thing to do.’

      ‘I was a kid myself …’

      ‘Doesn’t matter.’ She noted, with discomfort, that she was almost crying. ‘Working with her! Working with a girl of sixteen, all summer!’

      ‘But we all studied very seriously. She was a doctor afterwards, in Vienna. She managed to get out when the Nazis came in, but …’

      She said impatiently, ‘Then you kissed her, on that night. Imagine her, waiting till the others were asleep, then she climbed up the ladder to the loft, terrified the other man might wake up, then she stood watching you sleep, and she slowly took off her dress and …’

      ‘Oh, I wasn’t asleep. I pretended to be. She came up dressed. Shorts and sweater – our girls didn’t wear dresses and lipstick – more bourgeois morality. I watched her strip. The loft was full of moonlight. She put her hand over my mouth and came down beside me.’ Again, his face was filled with rueful amazement. ‘God knows, I can’t understand it myself. She was a beautiful creature. I don’t know why I remember it. It’s been coming into my mind the last few days.’ After a pause, slowly twirling the wineglass: ‘I’ve been a failure in many things, but not with …’ He quickly lifted her hand, kissed it, and said sincerely: ‘I don’t know why I remember it now, when …’ Their eyes met, and they sighed.

      She said slowly, her hand lying in his: ‘And so you turned her away.’

      He laughed. ‘Next morning she wouldn’t speak to me. She started a love affair with my best friend – the man who’d been beside me that night in the loft, as a matter of fact. She hated my guts, and I suppose she was right.’

      ‘Think of her. Think of her at that moment. She picked up her clothes, hardly daring to look at you …’

      ‘As a matter of fact, she was furious. She called me all the names she could think of; I had to keep telling her to shut up, she’d wake the whole crowd.’

      ‘She climbed down the ladder and dressed again, in the dark. Then she went out of the barn, unable to go back to the others. She went into the orchard. It was still brilliant moonlight. Everything was silent and deserted, and she remembered how you’d all been singing and laughing and making love. She went to the tree where you’d kissed her. The moon was shining on the apples. She’ll never forget it, never, never!’

      He looked at her curiously. The tears were pouring down her face.

      ‘It’s terrible,’ she said. ‘Terrible. Nothing could ever make up to her for that. Nothing, as long as she lived. Just when everything was most perfect, all her life, she’d suddenly remember that night, standing alone, not a soul anywhere, miles of damned empty moonlight …’

      He looked at her shrewdly. Then, with a sort of humorous, deprecating grimace, he bent over and kissed her and said: ‘Darling, it’s not my fault; it just isn’t my fault.’

      ‘No,’ she said.

      He put the wineglass into her hands; and she lifted it up, looked at the small crimson globule of warming liquid, and drank with him.

       He

      ‘Goodness! You gave me a start, Mary …’

      Mary Brooke was quietly knitting beside the stove. ‘Thought I’d drop in,’ she said.

      Annie Blake pulled off her hat and flopped a net of bread and vegetables on the table; at the same time her eyes were anxiously inspecting her kitchen: there was an unwashed dish in the sink, a cloth over a chair. ‘Everything’s in such a mess,’ she said irritably.

      Mary Brooke, eyes fixed on her knitting, said, ‘Eh, sit down. It’s clean as can be.’

      After a hesitation Annie flopped herself into the chair and shut her eyes. ‘Those stairs …’ she panted. Then: ‘Like a cuppa tea, Mary?’

      Mary quickly pushed her knitting away and said, ‘You sit still. I’ll do it.’ She heaved up her large, tired body, filled a kettle from the tap, and set it on the flame. Then, following her friend’s anxious glance, she hung the dish cloth where it belonged and shut the door. The kitchen was so clean and neat it could have gone on exhibition. She sat down, reached for her knitting, and knitted without looking at it, contemplating the wall across the room. ‘He was carrying on like anything last night,’ she observed.

      Annie’s drooping lids flew open, her light body straightened. ‘Yes?’ she murmured casually. Her face was tense.

      ‘What can you expect with that type? She doesn’t get the beds made before dinnertime. There’s dirt everywhere. He was giving it to her proper. Dirty slut, he called her.’

      ‘She won’t do for him what I did, that’s certain,’ said Annie bitterly.

      ‘Shouting and banging until early morning – we all heard it.’ She counted purl, plain, purl, and added: ‘Don’t last long, do it? Six months he’s been with her now?’

      ‘He never lifted his hand to me, that’s certain,’ said Annie victoriously. ‘Never. I’ve got my pride, if others haven’t.’

      ‘That’s right, love. Two purl. One plain.’

      ‘Nasty temper he’s got. I’d be up summer and winter at four, cleaning those offices till ten, then cleaning for Mrs Lynd till dinnertime. Then if he got home and found his dinner not ready, he’d start to shout and carry on – well, I’d say, if you can’t wait five minutes, get home and cook it yourself, I’d say. I bring in as much as you do, don’t I? But he never lifted a finger. Bone lazy. Men are all the same.’

      Mary gave her friend a swift, searching glance, then murmured, ‘Eh, you can’t tell me …’

      ‘I’d have the kids and the cleaning and the cooking, and working all day – sometimes when he was unemployed I’d bring in all the money … and he wouldn’t even put the kettle on for me. Women’s work, he said.’

      ‘Two purl, plain.’ But Mary’s kindly face seemed to suggest that she was waiting to say something else. ‘We all know what it is,’ she agreed at last, patiently.

      Annie