Friday 12 October 2012

Our Collective Cultural Insanity




For interesting insights on Alzheimer's, Old age and loneliness, origin of 'self-hater' in The Four-Gated City ,  newspaper reading ,  and  "It's taken for granted that music is a good thing. It's incredible to me that this should be such an unexamined area."  and  "Do you think everybody lives their lives in a tumult of emotion in one form or another? Because, if so, it's a pretty horrific thought. Even the so called intellect is emotional. In fact, in my experience intellectuals are very emotional."
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Lessing: I've been thinking a lot recently about an old woman I got to know, particularly with reference to Alzheimer's, a word we spray around fairly lightly. I knew her for six or seven years before she finally died when she was over ninety.
She was, in fact, a woman of low intelligence. She had a poor childhood and married because it was expected of her, Most of her adult life she was a waitress and adored her work. She was a completely social person — she danced and had a wonderful pub life — and this social satisfaction was what she wanted from life.
At the age of sixty-five she was given the sack from her job because she was too old. Shortly after that her husband died. She had no pension and she went to pieces. From having the restaurant, where she worked and where everybody knew and loved her and she had a lot of friends, she became an old woman alone in her room. She became a drunk. People around here told me about it, and at the time I got to know her, she was into her eighties and totally demoralised. Although by then she was no longer drinking so much, she was in a filthy condition and could hardly get out of the flat. What really interested me about this was not the side issues about social services and so on, it was that because she had never been anything else but a social person and couldn't cope with being alone, she got more and more stupid when she was on her own. Whenever you went to see her, if she had been alone for twenty-four hours, you'd think she was demented. I'm sure any doctor would say she was suffering from ‘Alzheimer's' or senility or something, but I noticed that if she had two or three people in to talk to her for a while, the craziness left her. She made sense. Sense on a pretty low level, but it was sense.
The point about her not being intelligent is relevant because, although she had always been a stupid woman, when she was normal, she made sense, was lively and quite funny. But whenever the services hadn't worked, and perhaps no one had seen her for two or three days, and I visited her, she was gone — totally senile again!
This happened again and again, I would go and see her and, when I arrived, she would ramble and waffle. She didn't know what time of day it was, what day of the week, or the year. But, by the time I left, she would be making perfect sense again. She was properly herself.
Now this seems to me terribly important. I cannot help but wonder how many old people are diagnosed as ill, or senile, when in fact they just need human contact.
Tyrrell: I'm sure that's true. I've also noticed that people who work on their own at home for long periods, for example, illustrators, behave oddly. I used to commission work from illustrators. Their work was detailed and time consuming requiring long periods of concentration. The artists often got obsessive about it and spent long, lonely hours working. And when I went to see them they would behave strangely for a while, either very extroverted — talking crazily a me for an hour or two, needing lots of attention — or be excessively introverted, taking ages to start talking and gradually becoming more themselves again. So people that work alone for days on end also get odd.
Lessing: But they weren't mentally ill?
Tyrrell: Well, not disturbingly so. But illustrators and artists have a reputation for eccentricity and obsession and I think this is why. Some cultivate this, of course, but I noticed many times that, by spending time with them, they would get okay again. What you're saying is, if people are left alone for days or weeks on end, they are bound to go crazy.
Lessing: And then they are given drugs by some busy doctor who says, ‘This person is senile', or whatever. And then they get worse even more quickly. There was a time when this old lady was told to take five different kinds of drugs each day. But no one ever asked what relation these drugs had to each other in her brain and body. She threw the drugs away when no one was looking for which I applauded her. And then she became quite reasonable again. But I wonder if people who look after the elderly are taught the concept that an old person living by themselves is not necessarily crazy but maybe just needs more contact with other people?
Tyrrell: They must be. Many people must have observed this.
Lessing: If it is taught they certainly didn't apply it to her and, if it isn't taught, then that's pretty frightening.
Tyrrell: One nurse going round has to visit so many people, And these nurses are under so much pressure, they can only spare a few minutes with each one, which is sad if that visit is the highlight of that old person's week.
Lessing: At one time this particular old woman was getting visits most days from a nurse who would come in for five minutes to make sure she took her pills. A home help was also supposed to do an hour and a half a week with her but would usually end up doing ten minutes. A social worker would sweep in and out once a week but for as short a time as possible. The person who helped most was a good neighbour — she was the best of the lot. What disturbed me was the readiness of the doctors to just drug her. I didn't see the point of that.
Tyrrell: That's how doctors are taught to treat people but many of them question this nowadays.
Lessing: It's a matter of luck what doctor you have. I once met Dr William Sargent who wrote Battle for the Mind and we were talking about drug treatments and he said, "Put yourself in my position. I'm sitting at my desk and in front of me is a totally depressed person and I know that there's a good chance that this depression will be shifted by a course of a certain drug. Now, what would you do?" Well I didn't know what to say because I should imagine one would try anything to get rid of depression. But what strikes me is that all these drugs treatments are so hit and miss. No one really seems to know what they are doing. It's all "if it works, good. If not, let's try something else..."
Tyrrell: Do you know much about depression in other cultures?
Lessing: I only know that some cultures don't have a word for it. A doctor friend of mine who trained here in the west but is working out in Bangalore, told me that there they bring in young women day after day who are totally depressed, but it was no use talking to them in the language we use here — it was no good asking, "Are you unhappy?", or "Why are you unhappy?" or, "What do you think brought this on?" because happiness is not something that they feel they are entitled to. He had to develop a whole new approach to communicate with them. There was no way he could talk directly to the patient, he had to talk through the relatives, which was difficult because they were often responsible for the depression.
Peter Brent, who wrote, among other things, Godmen of India, mentioned in one of the books that a doctor in India would often take a mentally sick patient out of their family and into his own household to join his large, extended family. The idea was that a saner setting would cure the insane person. It's the opposite of putting people in mental hospitals. Apparently it often worked.
Tyrrell: There is a lot of evidence that depression and schizophrenia are due to people cracking up under impossible stresses from their family or work situation. The abnormal behaviours of schizophrenics often seem to be strategies for dealing with apparently irreconcilable situations.
Lessing: I think that we are all much nearer being crazy than we ever want to think about. I once sent myself crazed on purpose. I wrote about it in my book The Four Gated City. I had been struck by the fact that, if you read accounts of what shamans do when they initiate people, and what people experience in prison camps, and what schizophrenics and others describe, the symptoms are nearly always the same. They hear voices, become disassociated and have revelations. The thing they all have in common is that they haven't eaten or slept well.
Now this thought was precipitated by seeing what happened to a girl who was living at my house at the time. A tall, thin, beautiful girl who was unhappy in her love life. She didn't eat or sleep properly for weeks. One day she suddenly found herself floating above her own body looking down as she walked across Westminster Bridge.
So, okay, I thought, I am going to try this — and I do not recommend this to anybody. I went down to my place in Devon where I knew I wouldn't be interrupted because it's difficult to have a couple of weeks by oneself in London. I went without food and sleep, deliberately watching everything that happened. It took about three days for me to begin going crazy. Then what happened was that a 'figure' appeared that I christened the 'self-hater'. It's a creature schizophrenics often describe. This figure, a person who shouts and screams at us, is obviously the conditioned conscience. It is what society creates in us, what daddy and mummy do to us; "Oh, you're a naughty girl", or "Oh, you're a naughty boy." It exists inside one but sounds as if it's coming from outside.
Anyway this voice yammering away in my head was terrifying because it was so strong. And two thoughts were running through my mind as this was happening. The first thought was that, if I wasn't moderately sophisticated in this area, I'd rush off and tell a doctor what I was experiencing and he would fill me full of drugs and probably have me sectioned. And the other thought was the fact that some of the hallucinations I was experiencing were common in all accounts of breakdowns. For example, 'the voyage', which appears in different cultures all over the world and takes different forms. If you're a Tibetan you have one type of journey or if you're Egyptian you have another. Christians have the stations of the cross. Ancient Greeks had Jason looking for the golden fleece. There is always a journey. And I had my journey.
So I watched all these things going on inside me which would have landed me in a mental hospital if I didn't know what I was doing. Well, my time in Devon was coming to an end and, after two weeks, I started to eat and sleep properly again. It took a long time, at least three weeks, to get back to normal. So I think that perhaps a lot of people are having breakdowns, or described as schizophrenics, who are simply not eating or sleeping enough. Students studying for exams, for example, often go over the edge. People crossing the Atlantic in small boats hear God talking to them, especially when food is running low. It also seems to me that it's people who have been brought up too rigidly in one way or another who have this 'self-hater' in them — this bullying, "you are naughty" figure. And it's not too far below the surface. So craziness is not quite as far away as we like to think.
Tyrrell: No it's not. And, of course, sleep deprivation and poor diet have been used to manipulate people since time immemorial. But now this is well known it should be possible to help people who are suffering.
Lessing: That's right. It ought to be. Kurt Vonegutt's son had a schizophrenic breakdown in the 1960's. He went crazy and then wrote a stage by stage account of his breakdown and why it actually happened. He ended up giving the following advice to anyone subject to this kind of breakdown: eat three meals a day, take your vitamin pills, sleep properly, don't drink too much and never touch drugs, not even pot!
Tyrrell: That's interesting. Someone I knew whose home life was unhappy, recently began behaving oddly and is now under psychiatrists and labelled schizophrenic and, for several years, he hardly ate anything else other than bread and jam!
Lessing: Vitamins! For two or three years a doctor friend of mine in Sweden, a neurologist, has been testing the effects of diet and taking vitamins on two classes of people, schizophrenics and alcoholics. He discovered that poor diet and lack of vitamins create schizophrenics and alcoholics. And putting them on a proper diet cured a large percentage of them! The only thing he could never predict who was going to be cured. He couldn't be precise. All he could say was that, in which ward, X number will be cured if I give them plenty of vitamin B and a proper diet with all the vitamins they need.
Tyrrell: How else do you think we cope with craziness?
Lessing: Yesterday I visited a friend of mine who I knew first when I was twenty-one. He is tall, thin, bony and was adopted when he was six months old. For the first six months of his life he was in an orphanage and it's clearly quite obvious that nobody cuddled him much. He's had several breakdowns and he's a painter and it's the painting that keeps him from going crazy. Nothing else helps. He can't drink because that drives him over the top. He needs his therapeutic, absorbing hobby to keep him relatively sane. People are that close to breakdown but they find ways to cope. I know painting helps but it's not all that easy is it? You can't just say to someone, "Why don't you take up painting because it's good for you?"
Tyrrell: No. When someone is suffering in depression it's hard for them to change direction themselves. Spike Milligan, who was labelled manic depressive, said that, when you are down, you don't take responsibility for your own psychological state. But the difficulty is that painting and similar therapeutic activities are something you have to do for yourself, it has to come from within.
Lessing: That's the problem. You can't make people want to do something, even if it is what they need. Sometimes it helps to get people having a breakdown to talk about their feelings into a tape recorder. A doctor I knew, who treated angry, confused people, used to do that. He would say to them, " When you are alone and feel bad, talk into a tape recorder and tell me what you feel. It doesn't matter what you say, just say it. It doesn't matter if what you say makes sense or not. Shout it, scream it if necessary, but record what you are feeling for me to hear." And with some people that worked. It was like bursting a boil of pus.
Tyrrell: Some people just need someone to take a neutral interest when they're in a crisis and listen for a while in an accepting supportive way.
Lessing: That's the trouble isn't it? There aren't enough people to listen. I think that's why some find therapy successful because they are buying a friend really. I had therapy when I was in my early 30s, for two or three years, a pretty relaxed affair. It wasn't analysis or anything like that. But now, when I look back, I know that I was buying a friend, someone who supported me all the time because I was being got at by so many people. It so happens that she was a Jungian and a Roman Catholic, but she could have been anything. Anyway, people would say to me, "Isn't it just the same as having a very good friend listening to you?" But the patience of a good friend is limited. If they hear the same miseries day in and day out they get fed up.
Tyrrell: And time spent with a therapist is usually bound up by a time limit, an hour or two a week. Also, a good therapist remains detached and knows how to promote a positive change, whereas a friend can get sucked in.
Lessing: Very easily! It doesn't take much. We can all go over the edge and disappear so quickly. A friend of mine was once very seriously depressed having an extraordinary bad time — and another friend and I would take turns to go and listen to his depressing, monotone, monologue. After a couple of hours I would find myself thinking, "That's right, what is the point to it all? You might just as well die. You haven't got the life you want. You haven't got any friends..." and I had to rush off before I was overwhelmed and lost my sanity. It's difficult not to get sucked in. Depression seems to me to be the worst of all, much worse than schizophrenia.
Tyrrell: There's a hell of a lot of it about.
Lessing: I wonder why? I know several people who get deeply depressed and they say it is the most painful thing physically. I couldn't understand this until three years ago when I really experienced the emotion of grief for the first time. It was not depression, but grief and anguish. It is an emotion that expresses itself physically.
Tyrrell: Heartache! The heart is supposed to be only a pump and yet there is a tremendous tightness and pain around the heart that's associated with these strong emotions.
Lessing: Jung said somewhere in one of his books that he would very often have a patient sitting in front of him who is completely in a trap in their life situation and neither he nor his patient could see any possible way out. Then he would meet this person four or five days later and find their problem had been solved in a way that neither of them could possibly have foreseen. And then he said something like this, that you have to have faith in the unconscious guide in the unconscious part of the person you are trying to help.
I'm sure that's true because you do see people who seem as if they are shut in a dark room and yet, somehow or other they get out, or somebody unexpectedly helps them out.
Another thing I've found is that you should never give up on anybody. That I am quite sure of because, over and over again, and I am sure you've had the same experience, we see people who are an absolutely dead loss. Hopeless cases. And yet they can, quite unexpectedly, be transformed later in their life. So, never give up on anyone, hard as it may seem sometimes.
One of the best ways to overcome that miserable feeling in the morning when you think, "Oh my God, I really can't face it!" is to smile! You don't want to smile. You don't feel like smiling. But if you move the set of your facial muscles into a smile it cheats your brain and changes the chemical balances in such a way that you quickly feel much better. I find it works like anything!
Tyrrell: Yes, that's partly why laughter is so therapeutic.
Lessing: I have a rather fanciful interpretation about schizophrenia, which is probably nonsense, but it might interest some people. It is that this self-hater part of ourselves, the conditioned conscience, is usually disassociated and is just sitting there ready to pounce. Then, then some crisis activates it, it gets plugged into the entire human psyche. It isn't just personal, it becomes an impersonal accuser, as if the whole of society is behind it. And that's why people can't bear it. It's so powerful. It isn't just the voice of mummy or daddy, it's the total collective power of dislike, accusation and pure hatred. In other cultures this is probably a recognised aspect of a god — I wouldn't be surprised — certainly in India you'd find it in, probably Kali or another of those terrible goddesses. But I'm sure that schizophrenics get plugged into something so enormously powerful they can't bear it.
Tyrrell: Perhaps that's why schizophrenics commonly believe they are being spied on by evil alien creatures.
Lessing: They often think they're spied on through electric sockets on skirting boards.
The latest one I've heard is the check-out points at supermarkets! There is an interesting cult in South Africa which I was told about. They believe that the world is being controlled by an evil force, '666', which is taking over the entire world through the agency of check-outs of supermarkets. And this is easily proved because so often the numbers on the printouts from these check-outs have 666 on them. You can't fault the logical of crazy people! And this cult now has a paid up membership. They are waiting for Satan. South Africa breeds amazing cults for some reason.
Tyrrells: Cults in human groups seem to form as automatically as crystals.
Lessing: Yes, they do. One of my most amazing and improbable memories is from New York in the 70s. I was walking across Central Park when I saw a man in a dressing gown, sitting cross-legged on the grass, surrounded by people. And I asked my friend. "Who is that chap?" She said, "That man started coming up to Central Park at lunchtimes for a break as regular as clockwork and he always sat down on the grass in some kind of robe. Before long people gathered and sat around him. He became known as the silent guru." Every day people appeared and sat with him through the lunch-hour for his 'silent benediction'. He never opened his mouth. He never said a word. Then summer ended, and no one sat on the grass any more. Apparently the man himself was immensely tickled by the whole thing.
That's how easy it is to create a legend and a cult!
Tyrrell: That reminds me of the Middle Eastern story of the traveller whose favourite donkey died on a pilgrimage. He was heartbroken when he buried the donkey and wept over its grave and people came by and saw how distraught he was. He was too upset to speak and the people assumed a holy man had died and built a tomb over the donkey's grave. People started to visit the tomb to receive blessings from the 'saint' they believed it contained. Eventually a town grew up around the tomb.
Lessing: That's a lovely story. It's supposed to be true.
Tyrrell: I know you feel that about our culture, and the way we live and entertain ourselves, blunts our sensibilities and prevents us from absorbing more subtle ideas and feelings. Can you expand on this?
Lessing: Well, we are all sensation junkies aren't we? Everything has to be bigger and better and louder and more noteworthy, I've been wondering a lot about music recently — I'm sure I'm not the first to wonder about it — and this is related to the problem. In past cultures it was always believed that music had powerful effects on our state of mind and people acted accordingly. War dance music, for example, was used to send men off to fight. Soldiers still march to music to bind them together. Patriotic music is used for every kind of occasion to whip up strong feelings of national identity. Shamans used music to induce trance states. All religions use music to generate emotions that they, I think mistakenly, believe are 'spiritual'. And we are told by genuine spiritual teachers that music is very powerful and has been used, under precise, controlled, conditions to assist with human development. And yet we now deluge ourselves in music day and night, usually extremely loudly, as if the effects were of no consequence. I wonder if we will ever ask ourselves what this is doing to us?
You know what it's like when something strikes you and you can't understand why you never saw it before? Well it's like this for me with this musical deluge. I ask myself, how is it possible that we don't question it? We switch on the radio and listen to music, we switch off and think, well, I wouldn't mind listening to a CD, and we listen to that. Some people even go round with music channelled straight into their ears and brain. But what is it doing to us?
Supposing continuous loud sounds are partly responsible for crime. It's a bit jump I know, but kids are not only saturated with television culture, which I'm sure is harmful, they're blasted with an excess of music. What sort of imbalance does that create in music and has anyone researched this?
Tyrrell: Well there was research done in Canada on the effects of music. They had two groups of people. One attended a concert of exquisite, spiritual, uplifting music, and the other group heard no music in the previous twenty four hours. Both groups were then shown graphic details of a disgusting and violent crime and were asked to assess the sort of punishment given to the perpetrator.
The unexpected result was that the people who had just left the 'spiritually uplifting' concert reacted in a far more judgemental, cruel and insensitive way than those who just pottered through the day without hearing any music. The people who had heard the music tended to say the criminal should be executed, castrated or whatever, and the other group were more rational and would say things like, "He's a very sick man", "He needs treatment", and so on.
The thing that struck me about this is that all music raises the emotional temperature — and emotional temperature doesn't discriminate. I think we're not, as we like to believe, 'spiritually uplifted' by Mozart, but we are emotionally aroused. And this is a different thing entirely. Music is designed to manipulate our emotions. Film makers are experts at this. All films are an exercise in manipulating emotions with music, which is often highly enjoyable, but perhaps we should be more aware of it.
Lessing: More research is needed I think. My generation were swamped in highly emotional, usually yearning, loving music — mostly from the 20s and 30s. We listened to it day and night and I wonder if we were not enormously sentimentalised by it. Nowadays the music is more pounding — often with an air of brutal violence about it. This must reach a completely different area of our minds.
Tyrrell: I'm sure it does.
Lessing: Ever since I can remember things have got louder and more dramatic. It is almost as if we can't hear anything that isn't put dramatically. And we don't ask ourselves what it is doing to us. You can't see a television program without music. They can't show a deer running across a mountain side without a sentimental tune of some kind.
Tyrrell: Even news programs start with music!
Lessing: It's taken for granted that music is a good thing. It's incredible to me that this should be such an unexamined area.
Tyrrell: Well the people what examine it in one kind of way are those who make and use music – composers, performers, film makers, programme makers, advertisers etc. They use it to influence us so, in a sense, they have researched it because they know what works.
Lessing: But it isn't the sort of research that I would regard as useful. And this is because most people automatically think that music is a good thing? We should challenge our assumptions. Is music good for us? Is even classical music good and ennobling?
Tyrrell: The research that has been done seems to show it isn't. But few people would like that idea.
Lessing: I don't think we've begun to ask the range of questions about how we are manipulated and why we allow ourselves to be. Newspapers are another area which I think needs looking at. We disturb ourselves by buying newspapers. When I see a compartment in a train full of people reading just two or three different newspapers, it looks to me like mass brainwashing which we willingly allow. I crave print if I am deprived of it. I'm a print junkie.
Tyrrell: it's addictive...
Lessing: There are other things about ourselves we don't notice because they're taken so much for granted. Politics, for a start, which seems to become more and more like theatre and less to do with real information. Politics has become an entertainment similar to gambling. Look at our ridiculous election days for example, where we sit up all night watching all the prediction apparatus, trying to find out who will win, a fact we will all know anyway at 8 o'clock the following morning. The nation is locked into a gambling mentality.
Tyrrell: I think it's all part of raising the emotional temperature, using anything that is happening for emotional excitement which we mistake for 'bring more real'. But then we are being manipulated.
Lessing: True. The common denominator is the emotional temperature. Idries Shah, who introduced many new ideas into the spiritual and psychological tradition of Sufism said to me a long time ago that he had observed that our Western culture is soaked in two assumptions — we believe that politics and sex are the solution to everything. We never examine this so we don't know the extent by which we're manipulated by these assumptions. The corollary is that we find it extremely hard to look at previous cultures because they didn't have these assumptions. Past cultures operated by completely different sets of expectations and demands than those that operate us. Now I believe we have to add two other stimulants, crime and killing, to these assumptions. These are a major voyeuristic features of television every night. They are now doing real life reconstructions, horrific crimes lovingly recreated, two or three times a week. Even serious newspapers regularly include 'real life crime; stories in grizzly detail because they know it sells papers.
Tyrrell: Shah also said that, when he was younger, he had expected Westerners to take on board with enthusiasm all the information that modern research was revealing about human behaviour. He thought that this would be necessary as a precursor to further human development and had hoped it would happened much as the world absorbed the necessity for hygiene in the 19th century. But, over the years, he found it wasn't being absorbed, except in highly selective ways which unbalances us. He thought that the main reason for this was that the truth about ourselves is not emotionally exciting enough.
Lessing: I know, I find this when I am interviewed. An interview is usually a map of the mind of the interviewer. I can go through the whole interview replying to questions that totally bore me. The interviewers usually say, "What would you like to talk about?" And I say, "Well this is what really interests me..." And I might like to talk, for example, about the discoveries of Edward T. Hall which he wrote up in books like The Silent Language, andThe Dance of Life. His books are full of revolutionary observations about what we are like — he explored the unspoken ideas behind cultures and the rhythms of time and life — but he is hardly known. But the interviewers' faces fall and they quickly steer me back to my childhood, feminism or how many words a minute I write.
Tyrrell: Have you ever tried to talk to interviewers about human behaviour?
Lessing: Yes. They are not interested.
Tyrrell: And they don't publish it?
Lessing: Not only that, I can see they literally don't hear what I am saying.
Tyrrell: Have any of them asked you in any depth about your interest in what Sufis have observed and know about culture and human behaviour?
Lessing: Not really. The nearest some of them get is to say, "Oh I hear you are a Sufi." And by that you know immediately that they are quite ignorant of the subject. They, if they have thought about it at all, probably think Sufism is a cult — an easy mistake to make because there are many cults that call themselves Sufis. So then I stop them and what I say now is, "I've been studying this for a long time. It's what interests me more than anything else, but I don't want to make a series of cliché remarks which will be then misunderstood by you and your readers." And then I tell them that people who are really interested will find the necessary books that are freely available. That does the trick — They usually have amnesia about even having asked the question!
But sometimes I meet people as I travel around who are more serious and have studied the material and it has struck a chord in them. In Singapore recently I met two ordinary young men who wanted to talk about Shah's work. I can meet such people anywhere and can talk seriously about it. But interviewers are generally not interested in ideas and knowledge, not really.
The observations and evidence that Shah has presented about the way the world really works I continually find astonishing. Many of his ideas are now common currency. Thirty years ago they were unknown and, unless you can remember the shock of hearing these ideas when they were new to us, you cannot credit it because we think we've always thought like we do now. I see them around all over the place now. For example, he was the first to draw attention to all the different levels of importance of giving and receiving attention, and distinguishing the difference between wants and needs — which seems familiar and obvious now, but was quite startling and new in the 60s.
And the idea that most of what we do is fuelled by greed, even acts that appear altruistic, is now quite common but it wasn't at all then. When a new idea starts floating around I often think that it is something we first heard from Shah not so long ago, or it's in one of his books. I think the way he deliberately put ideas into our culture is an astonishing cultural phenomenon.
Tyrrell: It's a sort of seedling isn't it?
Lessing: Yes it is. There are things that we need to know about ourselves that might take generations to take root, but the ideas have to be planted. It's certainly happening. But few people notice, or are interested in, long term changes to whole cultures, changes that take generations to occur.
Tyrrell: But certain types of people are attracted to the larger view. It's one of the reasons the best of science fiction is so stimulating.
Lessing: Yes. And the rises and falls of civilizations provide a quite distinct excitement from the 'little girl having an emergency operation' type of story that we have evolved to get excited about. An observation I think about often is to the effect that, 'once we played with toys but now our toys play with us'. It's true! From cars to weapons! TV to computers. Everything! Our lives are determined by our inventions, which is why the Frankenstein theme is so popular.
Another thing that interests me is the fact that we have binary minds. We always have to have an 'either/or'. I see myself and others affected by this all the time. For example, if I'm giving a lecture, invariably half the questions begin, if I'm giving a lecture, invariably half the questions begin, "Mrs Lessing, do you think this or do you think that?" "Is it A or B?" And I say, "Well, it's both, or something else entirely", this satisfies nobody.
But this is how we think. We take some element out of a subject or person and use that to label it or them for ever after. It's as if we can only have one idea or fact — so we have to choose. We can't have a pattern in our minds about the subject or person, we have to have a single label that we can refer to all the time.
Tyrrell: It is unusual to find people who can look at a person and see a pattern. We're tremendously influenced by first impressions. When we meet somebody for the first time, if they happen to be angry or sad or laughing or frivolous, that is the impression that colours our lifelong image of that person. Later, when we know them much better, we still judge their actions against that first impression.
Instead of looking at a person and saying, "This is a person who at this moment is laughing," and knowing, as we all must know intellectually, that this person must have a vast hinterland of other behavioural reactions in different circumstances, we still work on this ridiculous labelling assumption.
Lessing: And we can't make much progress while we simplify everything like this. But I wonder why we do it?
Tyrrell: It's left brain functioning. I suppose it has and still has it's uses. I mean, you can get on if you remove doubt by labelling things, even if the label doesn't bear scrutiny. The trouble is, most of the time we are not aware we are doing it.
Lessing: It's easy to see it going on in another culture. In China it is so obvious. I went there recently and they have a slogan for absolutely everything. They never seem to analyse a problem, they reduce it to a label. "Let a thousand flowers bloom..." or something. I spoke to a Chinese official there, one of a whole group of young directors and writers, and I said that, from the outside, China struck us as a culture that swung very easily from one extreme to another...
Tyrrell: ... like a vast shoal of fish, all moving as one...
Lessing: ...yes. Immediately the Chinese in the group started laughing at me because they knew that I meant that, at the moment, they were in a liberal swing. And they told me about the story of a friend of theirs who had written a novel about the awful state of morale in China's army where the soldiers have just about as bad a time as Russian soldiers. This novel exposed the situation – he was allowed to write it because openness is supposed to reign now. But it was sent back from the censor with the following remark – 'Not every writer can be published. Not every book can be printed.' And that was the end of that. Everybody accepted it! That's what they are like. They have got labelling down to a fine art.
Tyrrell: That's worrying, the Chinese are going to have so much power over us too.
Lessing: They don't give a damn about Europe and the things we find important. They have a saying which I find rather endearing. Every time they are criticised about ill-treating people or whatever, they will say, "Ah yes, the Yangtze river always flows East, as they say." And that's the end of the matter.
My father used to say that people like me have no idea at all of what the minds of people were like when he was a child. He was brought up in the country near Colchester and said that people then didn't think about the world much at all. And if they thought about something happening in Europe, it was quite rare. What they thought about was the local scene – who is going to win the race in the next school picnic etc. And going up to London was a great treat. This provincialism was what a person's mind was like. And that must have been true for the whole of Europe, unless you were very rich. Then the First World War changed everything. Suddenly the outside world exploded into everyone's consciousness and there were films, radio, and so on. He said that, between his mind and his father's mind, there was a total gulf and between his mind and my mind was a total gulf. His father would not have believed that anyone could go to the moon. He would have just laughed at the idea – and at television and so on – all facts that we now take for granted. Now we think we know everything that happens everywhere in the world. But this deceives us because we have no idea what's important. There is nothing in us that really knows how to select those bits of information that are valuable. It's all on a par. Sadly, the way we entertain new ideas seems to depend almost entirely on whether they're exciting or not. Hardly anybody is interested in real information.
Tyrrell: People do get interested in little exciting bits, especially If they can be marketed, like NLP or 'How to Use Both Sides Of Your Brain', just little pieces of information really, but people build careers on them.
Lessing: Edward de Bono did just that.
Tyrrell: Many people do it. Exploiting information instead of absorbing it is one of my difficulties!
Lessing: For years my problem has been that I am much too emotional about everything and this over-emotional response is a great enemy. As you say, emotion stops us seeing what's really going on. But I don't know, you see, how much like other people I am. Am I worse or just the same? Is everyone so emotionally orientated? I don't know.
An interesting thing happened when I gave a lecture to the Institute of Cultural Research on 'Barriers to Perception'. I listed ten barriers to perception, one of which was guilt. Now, come question time, nobody asked a question about anything but guilt! People still stop me now and say "remember that lecture you gave about guilt?" This is astonishing to me! What are we so guilty about? Why are we all so ridden with guilt? What is this about? Maybe it's the embodied accuser again.
Tyrrell: I wonder if it's because we are not doing something which some part of us, deep within, knows we should be doing?
Lessing: Well, I think that's possibly true. With these emotions I've got myself now to the point where I am able to watch them proliferating away and can detach from them. But it isn't easy. Shah once said that, if you are in a state of terrific emotion, it's possible and useful to switch to another mode by, for example, doing an arithmetic problem in your head, or something very unemotional like listening to arousing music, then switching it off and doing a crossword puzzle — you use a completely different part of your brain.
Tyrrell: To do that on command would be wonderful, wouldn't it?
Lessing: Yes. But I find it almost impossible although I am better at it now. The interesting thing is that I wrote that tip down and forgot all about it until I re-read my diary last month. I had completely forgotten!
Tyrrell: Well, that's probably because the emotional part of your mind doesn't want you to think about it. It feels threatened and is protecting itself.
Lessing: Do you think everybody lives their lives in a tumult of emotion in one form or another? Because, if so, it's a pretty horrific thought. Even the so called intellect is emotional. In fact, in my experience intellectuals are very emotional.
Tyrrell: A lot of intellectual activity seems to me to be a strategy for suppressing or dealing with emotions, and the emotions often cause intellectuals to behave in peculiar ways, which is why they so often appear, despite their 'cleverness' to be blind to the obvious. It's an unthinking strategy. Although it's intellectual, it's done automatically. We can't help doing it.
Lessing: Yes. The sad thing is, all these issues about human behaviour are so important, and so fundamental to why people get ill, anxious, sad and behave criminally, that they ought to be looked at calmly and scientifically by more people and talked about more widely. But these issues are not explored yet much on TV or in other media and yet they are far more important that politics or the 'arts'. That's why what you're doing in the Human Givens Journal is so valuable.

Saturday 25 August 2012

Resources

http://lesswrong.com/lw/d27/neuroscience_basics_for_lesswrongians/

There is some interesting stuff on neuroscience. Then I was put off by many world interpretation of QM and discussions thereof. Well MWI came from Everett and endorsed by DeWitt and Wheeler. I remain committed to Copenhagen interpretation. I am missing something..Can't see attraction of MWI

Monday 20 August 2012

Right hemisphere/Left Hemisphere


Differences Between Left and Right Hemisphere


                                       Hemispheric Dominance Inventory

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I took the test and my result is here

Which Side Do You Use?

You responded as a right brained person to 16 questions, and you responded as a left brained person to 3 questions. According to the Hemispheric Dominance test, you use your right brain the most. The summary briefly describes your dominance type. Remember, this only represents half of the picture. After you read the description, click on the link at the bottom of the page to find out how to use this information to improve your study strategies. Do not forget to print your results, if your instructor has requested you to do so. 

Some of the traits associated with the right side of the brain are listed in the table. Not all of the traits will apply to you. Remember, we use both side of our brain, but your right sides gets the most exercise. 

Type of Cognitive Processing
     
Brief Description
HolisticProcessing information from whole to part; sees the big picture first, not the details.
RandomProcessing information with out priority, jumps form one task to another.
ConcreteProcesses things that can be seen , or touched - real objects.
IntuitiveProcesses information based on whether or not it feels right know answer but not sure how it was derived.
NonverbalProcesses thought as illustrations.
Fantasy-OrientedProcesses information with creativity; less focuses on rules and regulations


Compare your left brain to your right brain.
Wow ! That makes me concrete and fantasy-oriented ! A scatter- brain!


Saturday 21 July 2012

The Shadow of the Third

The theme of this extract -

As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern. And the pattern .......is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn't think like that at all.




Julia's voice came loud up the stairs: 'Ella, aren't you going to the party? Are you going to use the bath? If not, I will.' Ella did not answer. For one thing, she was sitting on her son's bed, waiting for him to drop off to sleep. For another, she had decided not to go to the party, and did not want to argue with Julia. Soon she made a cautious movement off the bed, but at once Michael's eyes opened, and he said: 'What party? Are you going to it?'
'No,' she said, 'go to sleep.' His eyes sealed themselves, the lashes quivered and lay still. Even asleep he was formidable, a square-built, tough four-year-old. In the shaded light his sandy hair, his lashes, even a tiny down on his bare forearm gleamed gold. His skin was brown and faintly glistening from the summer. Ella quietly turned off the lights-waited; went to the door- waited; slipped out-waited. No sound. Julia came brisk up the stairs, enquiring in her jolly off-hand voice: 'Well, are you going?'
'Shhhh, Michael's just off to sleep.' Julia lowered her voice and said: 'Go and have your bath now. I want to wallow in peace when you're gone.'
'But I said I'm not going,' said Ella, slightly irritable.
'Why not?' said Julia, going into the large room of the flat. There were two rooms and a kitchen, all rather small and low-ceilinged, being right under the roof. This was Julia's house, and Ella lived in it, with her son Michael, in these three rooms. The larger room had a recessed bed, books, some prints. It was bright and light, rather ordinary, or anonymous. Ella had not attempted to impose her own taste on it. Some inhibition stopped her: this was Julia's house, Julia's furniture; somewhere in the future lay her own taste.
It was something like this that she felt. But she enjoyed living here and had no plans for moving out. Ella went after Julia and said: 'I don't feel like it.'
'You never feel like it,' said Julia. She was squatting in an armchair sizes too big for the room, smoking. Julia was plump, stocky, vital, energetic, Jewish. She was an actress. She had never made much of being an actress. She played small parts, competently. They were, as she complained, of two kinds: 'Stock working-class comic, and stock working-class pathetic' She was beginning to work for television. She was deeply dissatisfied with herself.
When she said: 'You never feel like it,' it was a complaint partly against Ella, and partly against herself. She always felt like going out, could never refuse an invitation. She would say that even when she despised some role she was playing, hated the play, and wished she had nothing to do with it, she nevertheless enjoyed what she called 'flaunting her personality around.' She loved rehearsals, theatre shop and small talk and malice.
Ella worked for a woman's magazine. She had done articles on dress and cosmetics, and of the getting-and-keeping-a-man kind, for three years, hating the work. She was not good at it. She would have been sacked if she had not been a friend of the woman editor. Recently she had been doing work she liked much better. The magazine had introduced a medical column. It was written by a doctor. But every week several hundred letters came in and half of them had nothing to do with medicine, and were of such a personal nature that they had to be answered privately. Ella handled these letters. Also she had written half a dozen short stories which she herself described satirically as 'sensitive and feminine,' and which both she and Julia said were the kind of stories they most disliked. And she had written part of a novel. In short, on the face of it there was no reason for Julia to envy Ella. But she did.
The party tonight was at the house of the doctor under whom Ella worked. It was a long way out, in North London. Ella was lazy. It was always an effort for her to move herself. And if Julia had not come up, she would have gone to bed and read.
'You say,' said Julia, 'that you want to get married again, but how will you ever, if you never meet anybody?'
'That's what I can't stand,' said Ella, with sudden energy. 'I'm on the market again, so I have to go off to parties.'
'It's no good taking that attitude-that's how everything is run, isn't it?'
'I suppose so.'
Ella, wishing Julia would go, sat on the edge of the bed (at the moment a divan and covered with soft-green-woven stuff), and smoked with her. She imagined she was hiding what she felt, but in fact she was frowning and fidgety. 'After all,' said Julia, 'you never meet anyone but those awful phonies in your office.' She added, 'Besides your decree was absolute last week.'
Ella suddenly laughed, and after a moment Julia laughed with her, and they felt at once friendly to each other.
Julia's last remark had struck a familiar note. They both considered themselves very normal, not to say conventional women. Women, that is to say, with conventional emotional reactions. The fact that their lives never seemed to run on the usual tracks was because, so they felt, or might even say, they never met men who were capable of seeing what they really were. As things were, they were regarded by women with a mixture of envy and hostility, and by men with emotions which-so they complained-were depressingly banal. Their friends saw them as women who positively disdained ordinary morality. Julia was the only person who would have believed Ella if she had said that for the whole of the time while she was waiting for the divorce she had been careful to limit her own reactions to any man (or rather, they limited themselves) who showed an attraction for her. Ella was now free. Her husband had married the day after the divorce was final. Ella was indifferent to this. It had been a sad marriage; no worse than many, certainly; but then Ella would have felt a traitor to her own self had she remained in a compromise marriage. For outsiders, the story went that Ella's husband George had left her for somebody else. She resented the pity she earned on this account, but did nothing to put things right, because of all sorts of complicated pride. And besides, what did it matter what people thought?
She had the child, her self-respect, a future. She could not imagine this future without a man. Therefore, and of course she agreed that Julia was right to be so practical, she ought to be going to parties and accepting invitations. Instead she was sleeping too much and was depressed.
'And besides, if I go, I'll have to argue with Dr West, and it does no good.' Ella meant that she believed Dr West was limiting his usefulness, not from lack of conscientiousness, but from lack of imagination. Any query which he could not answer by advice as to the right hospitals, medicine, treatment, he handed over to Ella.
'I know, they are absolutely awful.' By they, Julia meant the world of officials, bureaucrats, people in any kind of office. They, for Julia, were by definition middle-class-Julia was a communist, though she had never joined the Party, and besides she had working-class parents.
'Look at this,' said Ella excitedly, pulling a folded blue paper from her handbag. It was a letter, on cheap writing paper, and it read: 'Dear Dr. Allsop. I feel I must write to you in my desperation. I get my rheumatism in my neck and head. You advise other sufferers kindly in your column. Please advise me. My rheumatism began when my husband passed over on the 9th March, 1950, at 3 in the afternoon at the Hospital. Now I am getting frightened, because I am alone in my flat, and what might happen if my rheumatism attacked all over and then I could not move for help. Looking forward to your kind attention, yours faithfully. (Mrs.) Dorothy Brown.'
'What did he say?'
'He said he had been engaged to write a medical column, not to run an out-patients for neurotics.'
'I can hear him,' said Julia, who had met Dr West once and recognised him as the enemy at first glance.
'There are hundreds and thousands of people, all over the country, simmering away in misery and no one cares.'
'No one cares a damn,' said Julia. She stubbed out her cigarette and said, apparently giving up her struggle to get Ella to the party, 'I'm going to have my bath.' And she went downstairs with a cheerful clatter, singing.
Ella did not at once move. She was thinking: If I go, I'll have to iron something to wear. She almost got up to examine her clothes, but frowned and thought: If I'm thinking of what to wear, that means that I really want to go? How odd. Perhaps I do want to go? After all, I'm always doing this, saying I won't do something, then I change my mind. The point is, my mind is probably already made up. But which way? I don't change my mind. I suddenly find myself doing something when I've said I wouldn't. Yes. And now I've no idea at all what I've decided.
A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The death of a young man who had not known he was going to commit suicide until the moment of death, when he understood that he had in fact been preparing for it, and in great detail, for months. The point of the novel would be the contrast between the surface of his life, which was orderly and planned, yet without any long-term objective, and an underlying motif which had reference only to the suicide, which would lead up to the suicide. His plans for his future were all vague and impossible, in contrast with the sharp practicality of his present life. The undercurrent of despair or madness or illogicalness would lead on to, or rather, refer back from, the impossible fantasies of a distant future. So the real continuity of the novel would be in the at first scarcely noticed substratum of despair, the growth of the unknown intention to commit suicide. The moment of death would also be the moment when the real continuity of his life would be understood-a continuity not of order, discipline, practicality, commonsense, but of unreality. It would be understood at the moment of death that the link between the dark need for death, and death, itself, had been the wild, crazy fantasies of a beautiful life; and that the commonsense and the order had been (not as it had seemed earlier in the story) symptoms of sanity, but intimations of madness.
The idea for this novel had come to Ella at a moment when she found herself getting dressed to go out to dine with people after she had told herself she did not want to go out. She said to herself, rather surprised at the thought: This is precisely how I would commit suicide. I would find myself just about to jump out of an open window or turning on the gas in a small closed-in room, and I would say to myself, without any emotion, but rather with the sense of suddenly understanding something I should have understood long before: Good Lord! So that's what I've been meaning to do. That's been it all the time! And I wonder how many people commit suicide in precisely this way? It is always imagined as some desperate mood, or a moment of crisis. Yet for many it must happen just like that-they find themselves putting their papers in order, writing farewell letters, even ringing up their friends, in a cheerful, friendly way, almost with a feeling of curiosity... they must find themselves packing newspapers under the door, against window-frames, quite calmly and efficiently, remarking to themselves, quite detached: Well, well! How very interesting. How extraordinary I didn't understand what it was all about before!
Ella found this novel difficult. Not for technical reasons. On the contrary, she could imagine the young man very clearly. She knew how he lived, what all his habits were. It was as if the story were already written somewhere inside herself, and she was transcribing it. The trouble was, she was ashamed of it. She had not told Julia about it. She knew her friend would say something like: 'That's a very negative subject, isn't it?' Or: 'That's not going to point the way forward...' Or some other judgment from the current communist armoury. Ella used to laugh at Julia for these phrases, yet at the bottom of her heart it seemed that she agreed with her, for she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it. And besides being surprised and ashamed of its subject, she was sometimes frightened. She had even thought: Perhaps I've made a secret decision to commit suicide that I know nothing about? (But she did not believe this to be true.) And she continued to write the novel, making excuses such as: 'Well, there's no need to get it published, I'll just write it for myself.' And in speaking of it to friends, she would joke: 'But everyone I know is writing a novel.' Which was more or less true. In fact her attitude towards this work was the same as someone with a passion for sweet-eating, indulged in solitude, or some other private pastime, like acting out scenes with an invisible alter ego, or carrying on conversation with one's image in the looking-glass.
Ella had taken a dress out of the cupboard and set out the ironing-board, before she said: So, I'm going to the party after all, am I? I wonder at what point I decided that? While she ironed the dress, she continued to think about her novel, or rather to bring into the light a little more of what was already there, waiting, in the darkness. She had put the dress on and was looking at herself in the long glass before she finally left the young man to himself, and concentrated on what she was doing. She was dissatisfied with her appearance. She had never very much liked the dress. She had plenty of clothes in her cupboard, but did not much like any of them. And so it was with her face and hair. Her hair was not right, it never was. And yet she had everything to make her really attractive. She was small, and small-boned. Her features were good, in a small, pointed face. Julia kept saying: 'If you did yourself up properly you'd be like one of those piquant French girls, ever so sexy, you're that type.' Yet Ella always failed. Her dress tonight was a simple black wool which had looked as if it ought to be 'ever so sexy' but it was not. At least, not on Ella. And she wore her hair tied back. She looked pale, almost severe.
'But I don't care about the people I'm going to meet,' she thought, turning away from the glass. 'So it doesn't matter. I'd try harder for a party I really wanted to go to.'
Her son was asleep. She shouted to Julia outside the bathroom door: 'I'm going after all.' To which Julia replied with a calm triumphant chuckle: 'I thought you would.' Ella was slightly annoyed at the triumph, but said: 'I'll be back early.' To which Julia did not reply directly. She said: 'I'll keep my bedroom door open for Michael. Good night.'
To reach Dr West's house meant half an hour on the underground, changing once, and then a short trip by bus.
One reason why Ella was always reluctant to drag herself out of Julia's house was because the city frightened her. To move, mile after mile, through the weight of ugliness that is London in its faceless peripheral wastes made her angry; then the anger ebbed out, leaving fear. At the bus-stop, waiting for her bus, she changed her mind and decided to walk, to punish herself for her cowardice. She would walk the mile to the house, and face what she hated. Ahead of her the street of grey mean little houses crawled endlessly. The grey light of a late summer's evening lowered a damp sky. For miles in all directions, this ugliness, this meanness. This was London- endless streets of such houses. It was hard to bear, the sheer physical weight of the knowledge because-where was the force that could shift the ugliness? And in every street, she thought, people like the woman whose letter was in her handbag. These streets were ruled by fear and ignorance, and ignorance and meanness had built them. This was the city she lived in, and she was part of it, and responsible for it... Ella walked fast, alone in the street, hearing her heels ring behind her. She was watching the curtains at the windows. At this end, the street was working-class, one could tell by the curtains, of lace and flowered stuffs. These were the people who wrote in the terrible unanswerable letters she had to deal with. But now things suddenly changed, because the curtains at the windows changed-here was a sheen of peacock blue. It was a painter's house. He had moved into the cheap house and made it beautiful. And other professional people had moved in after him. Here were a small knot of people different from the others in the area. They could not communicate with the people further down the street, who could not, and probably would not, enter these houses at all. Here was Dr West's house-he knew the first-comer, the painter, and had bought the house almost opposite. He had said: 'Just in time, the values are rising already.' The garden was untidy. He was a busy doctor with three children and his wife helped him with his practice. No time for gardens. (The gardens further down the street had been mostly well-tended.) From this world, thought Ella, came no letters to the oracles of the women's magazines. The door opened in on the brisk, kindly face of Mrs. West. She said: 'So here you are at last,' and took Ella's coat. The hall was pretty and clean and practical-Mrs. West's world. She said: 'My husband tells me you've been having another brush with him over his lunatic fringe. It's good of you to take so much trouble over these people.'
'It's my job,' said Ella. 'I'm paid for it.' Mrs. West smiled, with a kindly tolerance. She resented Ella. Not because she worked with her husband-no, this was too crude an emotion for Mrs. West. Ella had not understood Mrs. West's resentment until one day she had used the phrase: You career girls. It was a phrase so discordant, like 'lunatic fringe' and 'these people' that Ella had been unable to reply to it. And now Mrs. West had made a point of letting her know that her husband discussed his work with her, establishing wifely rights. In the past, Ella had said to herself: But she's a nice woman, in spite of everything. Now, angry, she said: She's not a nice woman. These people are all dead and damned, with their disinfecting phrases, lunatic fringe and career girls. I don't like her and I'm not going to pretend I do... She followed Mrs. West into the living-room, which held faces she knew. The woman for whom she worked at the magazine, for instance. She was also middle-aged, but smart and well-dressed, with bright curling grey hair. She was a professional woman, her appearance part of her job, unlike Mrs. West, who was pleasant to look at, but not at all smart. Her name was Patricia Brent, and the name was also part of her profession-Mrs. Patricia Brent, editress. Ella went to sit by Patricia, who said: 'Dr West's been telling us you've been quarrelling with him over his letters.' Ella looked swiftly around, and saw people smiling expectantly. The incident had been served up as party fare, and she was expected to play along with it a little, then allow the thing to be dropped. But there must not be any real discussion, or discordance. Ella said smiling: 'Hardly quarrelling.' She added, on a carefully plaintive-humorous note, which was what they were waiting for: 'But it's very depressing, after all, these people you can't do anything for.' She saw she had used the phrase, these people, and was angry and dispirited. I shouldn't have come, she thought. These people (meaning, this time, the Wests and what they stood for) only tolerate you if you're like them.
'Ah, but that's the point,' said Dr West. He said it briskly. He was an altogether brisk, competent man. He added, teasing Ella: 'Unless the whole system's changed of course. Our Ella's a revolutionary without knowing it.'
'I imagined,' said Ella, 'that we all wanted the system changed.' But that was altogether the wrong note. Dr West involuntarily frowned, then smiled. 'But of course we do,' he said. 'And the sooner the better.' The Wests voted for the Labour Party. That Dr West was 'Labour' was a matter of pride to Patricia Brent, who was a Tory. Her tolerance was thus proved. Ella had no politics, but she was also important to Patricia, for the ironical reason that she made no secret of the contempt she felt for the magazine. She shared an office with Patricia. The atmosphere of this office, and all the others connected with the magazine, had the same atmosphere, the atmosphere of the magazine-coy, little-womanish, snobbish. And all the women working there seemed to acquire the same tone, despite themselves, even Patricia herself, who was not at all like this. For Patricia was kind, hearty, direct, full of a battling self-respect. Yet in the office she would say things quite out of character, and Ella, afraid for herself, criticised her for it. Then she went on to say that while they were both in a position where they had to earn their livings, they didn't have to lie to themselves about what they had to do. She had expected, even half-wished, that Patricia would tell her to leave. Instead she had been taken out to an expensive lunch where Patricia defended herself. It turned out that for her this job was a defeat. She had been fashion editress of one of the big smart woman's magazines, but apparently had not been considered up to it. It was a magazine with a fashionable cultural gloss, and it was necessary to have an editress with a nose for what was fashionable in the arts. Patricia had no feeling at all for the cultural band-waggon, which, as far as Ella was concerned, was a point in her favour, but the proprietor of this particular group of woman's magazines had shifted Patricia over to Women at Home, which was angled towards working-class women, and had not even a pretence of cultural tone. Patricia was now well-suited for her work, and it was this which secretly chagrined her. She had wistfully enjoyed the atmosphere of the other magazine which had fashionable authors and artists associated with it. She was the daughter of a county family, rich but philistine; her childhood had been well supported by servants, and it was this, an early contact with 'the lower-classes'-she referred to them as such, inside the office, coyly; outside, unself-consciously-that gave her her shrewd direct understanding of what to serve her readers.
Far from giving Ella the sack, she had developed the same wistful respect for her that she had for the glossy magazine she had had to leave. She would casually remark that she had working for her someone who was a 'highbrow'-someone whose stories had been published in the 'highbrow papers.'
And she had a far warmer, more human understanding of the letters which came into the office than Dr West.
She now protected Ella by saying: 'I agree with Ella. Whenever I take a look at her weekly dose of misery, I don't know how she does it. It depresses me so I can't even eat. And believe me, when my appetite goes, things are serious.'
Now everybody laughed, and Ella smiled gratefully at Patricia who nodded, as if to say: 'It's all right, we weren't criticising you.'
Now the talk began again and Ella was free to look around her. The living-room was large. A wall had been broken down. In the other, identical little houses of the street, two minute ground-floor rooms served as kitchen- full of people and used to live in, and parlour, used for company. This room was the entire ground-floor of the house, and a staircase led up to the bedrooms. It was bright, with a good many different colours-sharp blocks of contrasting colour, dark green, and bright pink and yellow. Mrs. West had no taste, and the room didn't come off. In five years' time, Ella thought, the houses down the street will have walls in solid bright colours, and curtains and cushions in tune. We are pushing this phase of taste on them-in Women at Home, for instance. And this room will be-what?
Whatever is the next thing, I suppose... but I ought to be more sociable, this is a party, after all...
Looking around again she saw it was not a party, but an association of people who were there because the Wests had said: 'It's time we asked some people around,' and they had come saying: 'I suppose we've got to go over to the Wests.'
I wish I hadn't come, Ella thought, and there's all that long way back again. At this point a man left his seat across the room and came to sit by her. Her first impression was of a lean young man's face, and a keen, nervously critical smile which, as he talked, introducing himself (his name was Paul Tanner and he was a doctor) had moments of sweetness, as it were against his will, or without his knowledge. She realised she was smiling back, acknowledging these moments of warmth, and so she looked more closely at him. Of course, she had been mistaken, he was not as young as she had thought. His rather rough black hair was thinning at the crown, and his very white, slightly freckled skin was incised sharply around his eyes. These were blue, deep, rather beautiful; eyes both combative and serious, with a gleam in them of uncertainty. A nerve-hung face, she decided, and saw that his body was tensed as he talked, which he did well, but in a self-watchful way. His self-consciousness had her reacting away from him, whereas only a moment ago she had been responding to the unconscious warmth of his smile.
These were her first reactions to the man she was later to love so deeply. Afterwards he would complain, half-bitter, half-humorous: 'You didn't love me at all, to begin with. You should have loved me at first sight. If just once in my life a woman would take one look at me and fall in love, but they never do.' Later still, he would develop the theme, consciously humorous now, because of the emotional language: 'The face is the soul. How can a man trust a woman who falls in love with him only after they have made love? You did not love me at all.' And he would maintain a bitter, humorous laugh, while Ella exclaimed: 'How can you separate love-making off from everything else? It doesn't make sense.'
Her attention was going away from him. She was aware she was beginning to fidget, and that he knew it. Also that he minded: he was attracted to her. His face was too intent on keeping her; she felt that somewhere in all this was pride, a sexual pride which would be offended if she did not respond, and this made her feel a sudden desire to escape. This complex of emotions, all much too sudden and violent for comfort, made Ella think of her husband George. She had married George almost out of exhaustion, after he had courted her violently for a year. She had known she shouldn't marry him. Yet she did; she did not have the will to break with him. Shortly after the marriage she had become sexually repelled by him, a feeling she was unable to control or hide. This redoubled his craving for her, which made her dislike him the more-he even seemed to get some thrill or satisfaction out of her repulsion for him. They were apparently in some hopeless psychological deadlock. Then, to pique her, he had slept with another woman and told her about it. Belatedly she had found the courage to break with him that she lacked before: she took her stand, dishonestly, in desperation, on the fact he had broken faith with her. This was not her moral code, and the fact she was using conventional arguments, repeating endlessly because she was a coward, that he had been unfaithful to her, made her despise herself. The last few weeks with George were a nightmare of self-contempt and hysteria, until at last she left his house, to put an end to it, to put a distance between herself and the man who suffocated her, imprisoned her, apparently took away her will. He then married the woman he had made use of to bring Ella back to him. Much to Ella's relief.
She was in the habit, when depressed, to worry interminably over her behaviour during this marriage. She made many sophisticated psychological remarks about it; she denigrated both herself and him; felt wearied and soiled by the whole experience, and worse, secretly feared that she might be doomed, by some flaw in herself, to some unavoidable repetition of the experience with another man.
But after she had been with Paul Tanner for only a short time, she would say, with the utmost simplicity: 'Of course, I never loved George.' As if there were nothing more to be said about it. And as far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to be said. Nor did it worry her at all that all the complicated psychological attitudes were hardly on the same level as: 'Of course I never loved him,' with its corollary that: 'I love Paul.'
Meanwhile she was restless to get away from him and felt trapped-not by him, by the possibilities of her past resurrecting itself in him.
He said: 'What was the case that sparked off your argument with West?' He was trying to keep her. She said: 'Oh, you're a doctor too, they're all cases, of course.' She had sounded shrill and aggressive, and now she made herself smile and said: 'I'm sorry. But the work worries me more than it should, I suppose.'
'I know,' he said. Dr West would never have said: 'I know,' and instantly Ella warmed to him. The frigidity of her manner, which she was unconscious of, and which she could never lose except with people she knew well, melted away at once. She fished in her handbag for the letter, and saw him smile quizzically at the disorder she revealed. He took the letter, smiling. He sat with it in his hand, unopened, looking at her with appreciation, as if welcoming her, her real self, now open to him. Then he read the letter and again sat holding it, this time opened out. 'What could poor West do? Did you want him to prescribe ointments?'
'No, no, of course not.'
'She's probably been pestering her own doctor three times a week ever since-' he consulted the letter, '-the 9th of March, 1950. The poor man's been prescribing every ointment he can think of.'
'Yes, I know,' she said. 'I've got to answer it tomorrow morning. And about a hundred more.' She held out her hand for the letter. 'What are you going to say to her?'
'What can I say? The thing is, there are thousands and thousands, probably millions of them.' The word millions sounded childish, and she looked intently at him, trying to convey her vision of a sagging, dark weight of ignorance and misery. He handed her the letter and said: 'But what are you going to say?'
'I can't say anything she really needs. Because what she wanted, of course, was for Dr. Allsop himself to descend on her, and rescue her, like a knight on a white horse.'
'Of course.'
'That's the trouble. I can't say, Dear Mrs. Brown, you haven't got rheumatism, you're lonely and neglected, and you're inventing symptoms to make a claim on the world so that someone will pay attention to you. Well, can IT 'You can say all that, tactfully. She probably knows it herself. You could tell her to make an effort to meet people, join some organisation, something like that.'
'It's arrogant, me telling her what to do.'
'She's written for help, so it's arrogant not to.'
'Some organisation, you say! But that's not what she wants. She doesn't want something impersonal. She's been married for years and now she feels as if half of herself's torn away.'
At this he regarded her gravely for some moments, and she did not know what he was thinking. At last he said: 'Well, I expect you're right. But you could suggest she write to a marriage bureau.' He laughed at the look of distaste that showed on her face, and went on: 'Yes, but you'd be surprised how many good marriages I've organised myself, through marriage bureaux.'
'You sound like-a sort of psychiatric social worker,' she said, and as soon as the words were out, she knew what the reply would be. Dr West, the sound general practitioner, with no patience for 'frills,' made jokes about his colleague, 'the witch-doctor,' to whom he sent patients in serious mental trouble. This, then, was 'the witch-doctor.'
Paul Tanner was saying, with reluctance: 'That's what I am, in a sense.' She knew the reluctance was because he did not want from her the obvious response. What the response was she knew because she had felt a leap inside herself of relief and interest, an uneasy interest because he was a witch-doctor, possessed of all sorts of knowledge about her. She said quickly: 'Oh, I'm not going to tell you my troubles.' After a pause during which, she knew, he was looking for the words which would discourage her from doing so, he said: 'And I never give advice at parties.'
'Except to widow Brown,' she said.
He smiled, and remarked: 'You're middle-class, aren't you?' It was definitely a judgement. Ella was hurt. 'By origin,' she said. He said: 'I'm working-class, so perhaps I know rather more about widow Brown than you do.'
At this point Patricia Brent came over, and took him away to talk to some member of her staff. Ella realised that they had made an absorbed couple, in a party not designed for couples. Patricia's manner had said that they had drawn attention. So Ella was rather annoyed. Paul did not want to go. He gave her a look that was urgent, and appealing, yet also hard. Yes, thought Ella, a hard look, like a nod of command that she should stay where she was until he was free to come back to her. And she reacted away from him again.
It was time to go home. She had only been at the Wests an hour, but she wanted to get away. Paul Tanner was now sitting between Patricia and a young woman. Ella could not hear what was being said but both the women wore expressions of half-excited, half-furtive interest, which meant they were talking, obliquely or directly, about Dr Tanner's profession, and as it illuminated themselves, while he maintained a courteous but stiff smile. He's not going to get free of them for hours, Ella thought; and she got up and made her excuses to Mrs. West, who was annoyed with her for leaving so soon. She nodded at Dr West, whom she would meet tomorrow over a pile of letters, and smiled at Paul, whose blue eyes swung up, very blue and startled, at the news that she was leaving. She went into the hall to put on her coat, and he came out, hurriedly, behind her, offering to take her home. His manner was now off-hand, almost rude, because he had not wanted to be forced into such a public pursuit. Ella said: 'It's probably out of your way.' He said: 'Where do you live?' and when she told him, said firmly it was not out of his way at all. He had a small English car. He drove it fast and well. The London of the car-owner and taxi-user is a very different city from that of the tube and bus-user. Ella was thinking that the miles of grey squalor she had travelled through were now a hazy and luminous city blossoming with lights; and that it had no power to frighten her. Meanwhile, Paul Tanner darted at her sharp enquiring glances and asked brief practical questions about her life. She told him, meaning to challenge his pigeon-holing of her, that she had served throughout the war in a canteen for factory women, and had lived in the same hostel. That after the war she had contracted tuberculosis, but not badly, and had spent six months on her back in a sanatorium. This was the experience that had changed her life, changed her much more deeply than the war years with the factory women. Her mother had died when she was very young, and her father, a silent, hardbitten man, an ex-army officer from India, had brought her up. 'If you could call it a bringing-up-I was left to myself, and I'm grateful for it,' she said, laughing. And she had been married, briefly and unhappily. To each of these bits of information, Paul Tanner nodded; and Ella saw him sitting behind a desk, nodding at the replies to a patient's answers to questions. 'They say you write novels,' he said, as he slid the car to a standstill outside Julia's house. 'I don't write novels,' she said, annoyed as at an invasion of privacy, and immediately got out of the car. He quickly got out of his side and reached the door at the same time she did. They hesitated. But she wanted to go inside, away from the intentness of his pursuit of her. He said brusquely: 'Will you come for a drive with me tomorrow afternoon?' As an after-thought, he gave a hasty glance at the sky, which was heavily clouded, and said: 'It looks as if it will be fine.' At this she laughed, and out of the good feeling engendered by the laugh, said she would. His face cleared into relief-more, triumph. He's won a kind of victory, she thought, rather chilled. Then, after another hesitation, he shook hands with her, nodded, and went off to his car, saying he would pick her up at two o'clock. She went indoors through the dark hall, up dark stairs, through the silent house. A light showed under Julia's door. It was very early, after all. She called: 'I'm back, Julia,' and Julia's full clear voice said: 'Come in and talk.' Julia had a large comfortable bedroom, and she lay on massed pillows in a large double bed, reading. She wore pyjamas, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. She looked good-natured, shrewd and very inquisitive. 'Well, how was it?'
'Boring,' said Ella, making this a criticism of Julia for forcing her to go-by her invisible strength of will. 'I was brought home by a psychiatrist,' she added, using the word deliberately, to see appear on Julia's face the look she had felt on her own, and seen on the faces of Patricia and the young woman. When she saw it, she felt ashamed and sorry she had said it-as if she had deliberately committed an act of aggression towards Julia. Which I have, she thought. 'And I don't think I like him,' she added, relapsing into childishness, playing with the scent bottles on Julia's dressing-table. She rubbed scent into the flesh of her wrists, watching Julia's face in the looking-glass, which was now again sceptical, patient and shrewd. She thought: Well, of course Julia's a sort of mother-image, but do I have to play up to it all the time?-And besides, most of the time I feel maternal towards Julia, I have a need to protect her, though I don't know from what. 'Why don't you like him?' enquired Julia. This was serious, and Ella would now have to think seriously. Instead she said: 'Thanks for looking after Michael,' and went upstairs to bed, giving Julia a small, apologetic smile as she went.
Next day sunlight was settled over London, and the trees in the streets seemed not to be part of the weight of the buildings, and of pavements, but an extension of fields and grass and country. Ella's indecision about the drive that afternoon swung into pleasure as she imagined sunshine on grass; and she understood, from the sudden flight upwards of her spirits, that she must recently have been more depressed than she had realised. She found herself singing as she cooked the child's lunch. It was because she was remembering Paul's voice. At the time she had not been conscious of Paul's voice, but now she heard it-a warm voice, a little rough where the edges of an uneducated accent remained. (She was listening, as she thought of him, rather than looking at him.) And she was listening, not to the words he had used, but to tones in which she was now distinguishing delicacy, irony, and compassion.
Julia was taking Michael off for the afternoon to visit friends, and she left early, as soon as lunch was over, so that the little boy would not know his mother was going for a drive without him. 'You look very pleased with yourself, after all,' said Julia. Ella said: 'Well, I haven't been out of London for months. Besides, this business of not having a man around doesn't suit me.'
'Who does it suit?' retorted Julia. 'But I don't think any man is better than none.' And having planted this small dart, she departed with the child, in good humour.
Paul was late, and from the way he apologised, almost perfunctorily, she understood he was a man often late, and from temperament, not only because he was a busy doctor with many pressures on him. On the whole she was pleased he was late. One look at his face, that again had the cloud of nervous irritability settled on it, reminded her that last night she had not liked him. Besides, being late meant that he didn't really care for her, and that eased a small tension of panic that related to George, and not to Paul. (She knew this herself.) But as soon as they were in the car and heading out of London, she was aware that he was again sending small nervous glances towards her; she felt determination in him. But he was talking and she was listening to his voice, and it was every bit as pleasant as she remembered it. She listened, and looked out of the window, and laughed. He was telling how he came to be late. Some misunderstanding between himself and the group of doctors he worked with at his hospital, 'No one actually said anything aloud, but the upper-middle-classes communicate with each other in inaudible squeaks, like bats. It puts people of my background at a terrible disadvantage.'
'You're the only working-class doctor there?'
'No, not in the hospital, just in that section. And they never let you forget it. They're not even conscious of doing it.' This was good-humoured, humorous. It was also bitter. But the bitterness was from old habit, and had no sting in it.
This afternoon it was easy to talk, as if the barrier between them had been silently dissolved in the night. They left the ugly trailing fringes of London behind, sunlight lay about them, and Ella's spirits rose so sharply that she felt intoxicated. Besides, she knew that this man would be her lover, she knew it from the pleasure his voice gave her, and she was full of a secret delight. His glances at her now were smiling, almost indulgent, and like Julia he remarked: 'You look very pleased with yourself.'
'Yes, it's getting out of London.'
'You hate it so much?'
'Oh, no, I like it, I mean, I like the way I live in it. But I hate-this.' And she pointed out of the window. The hedges and trees had again been swallowed by a small village. Nothing left here of the old England, it was new and ugly. They drove through the main shopping street, and the names on the shops were the same as they had driven past repeatedly, all the way out of London.
'Why?'
'Well, obviously, it's so ugly.' He was looking curiously into her face. After a while he remarked: 'People live in it.' She shrugged. 'Do you hate them as well?' Ella felt resentful: it occurred to her that for years, anyone she was likely to meet would have understood without explanation why she hated 'all this'; and to ask her if she 'hated them as well,' meaning ordinary people, was off the point. Yet after thinking it over, she said, defiant: 'In a way, yes. I hate what they put up with. It ought to be swept away-all of it.' And she made a wide sweeping movement with her hand, brushing away the great dark weight of London, and the thousand ugly towns, and the myriad small cramped lives of England.
'But it's not going to be, you know,' he said, with a small smiling obstinacy. 'It's going to go on-and there'll be more chain shops, and television aerials, and respectable people. That's what you mean, isn't it?'
'Of course. But you just accept it. Why do you take it all for granted?'
'It's the time we live in. And things are better than they were.'
'Better!' she exclaimed, involuntarily, but checked herself. For she understood she was setting against the word better a personal vision that dated from her stay in hospital, a vision of some dark, impersonal destructive force that worked at the roots of life and that expressed itself in war and cruelty and violence. Which had nothing to do with what they argued. 'You mean,' she said, 'better in the sense of no unemployment and no one being hungry?'
'Strangely enough, yes, that's what I do mean.' He said it in such a way that it put a barrier between them-he was from the working-people, and she was not, and he was of the initiated. So she kept silence until he insisted: 'Things are much better, much much better. How can you not see it? I remember...' And he stopped-this time, not because (as Ella put it) he was 'bullying' her, from superior knowledge, but from the painfulness of what he remembered.
So she tried again: 'I can't understand how anyone can see what's happening to this country and not hate it. On the surface everything's fine-all quiet and tame and suburban. But underneath it's poisonous. It's full of hatred and envy and people being lonely.'
'That's true of everything, everywhere. It's true of any place that has reached a certain standard of living.'
'That doesn't make it any better.'
'Anything's better than a certain kind of fear.'
'You mean, real poverty. And you mean, of course, that I'm not equipped to understand that at all.'
At this he glanced at her quickly, in surprise at her persistence-and, as Ella felt, out of a certain respect for it. There was no trace in that glance of a man assessing a woman for her sexual potentialities, and she felt more at ease.
'So you'd like to put a giant bulldozer over it all, over all England?'
'Yes.'
'Leaving just a few cathedrals and old buildings and a pretty village or two?'
'Yes.'
'And then you'd bring the people back into fine new cities, each one an architect's dream, and tell everyone to like it or lump it.'
'Yes.'
'Or perhaps you'd like a merrie England, beer, skittles, and the girls in long homespun dresses?'
She said, angry: 'Of course not! I hate all the William Morris stuff. But you're being dishonest. Look at you-I'm sure you've spent most of your energy simply getting through the class barrier. There can't be any connection at all between how you live now and the way your parents lived. You must be a stranger to them. You must be split into two parts. That's what this country is like. You know it is. Well I hate it, I hate all that. I hate a country so split up that-I didn't know anything about it until the war and I lived with all those women.'
'Well,' he said at last, 'they were right last night-you're a revolutionary after all.'
'No, I'm not. Those words don't mean anything to me. I'm not interested in politics at all.'
At which he laughed, but said, with an affection that touched her: 'If you had your way, building the new Jerusalem, it would be like killing a plant by suddenly moving it into the wrong soil. There's a continuity, some kind of invisible logic to what happens. You'd kill the spirit of people if you had your way.'
'A continuity isn't necessarily right, just because it's a continuity.'
'Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is.'
This was so personal, that it was her turn to glance, surprised, at him, and decide to say nothing. He is saying, she thought, that the split in himself is so painful that sometimes he wonders if it was worth it... and she turned away to look out of the window again. They were passing through another village. This was better than the last: there was an old centre, of mellow rooted houses, warm in the sunshine. But around the centre, ugly new houses and even in the main square, a Woolworth's, indistinguishable from all the others, and a fake Tudor pub. There would be a string of such villages, one after another. Ella said: 'Let's get away from the villages, where there isn't anything at all.'
This time his look at her, which she noted, but did not understand until afterwards, was frankly startled. He did not say anything for a time, but when a small road appeared, wandering off through deep sun-lit trees, he turned off into it. He asked: 'Where's your father living?'
'Oh,' she said, 'I see what you're getting at. Well he's not like that at all.'
'Like what? I didn't say anything.'
'No, but you imply it all the time. He's ex-Indian army. But he isn't like the caricatures. He got unfit for the army and was in the administration for a time. And he's not like that either.'
'So what is he like?'
She laughed. The sound held affection which was spontaneous and genuine, and a bitterness which she did not know was there. 'He bought an old house when he left India. It's in Cornwall. It's small and isolated. It's very pretty. Old-you know. He's an isolated man, he always has been. He reads a lot. He knows a lot about philosophy and religion-like Buddha, for instance.'
'Does he like you?'
'Like me?' The question was startling to Ella. Not once had she asked herself whether her father liked her. She turned to Paul in a flash of recognition, laughing: 'What a question. But you know, I don't know?' And added, in a small voice: 'No, come to think of it, and I never have, I don't believe he does, not really.'
'Of course he does,' said Paul over-hastily, clearly regretting he had asked.
'There's no of course about it,' and Ella sat silent, thinking. She knew that Paul's glances at her were guilty and affectionate, and she liked him very much for his concern for her.
She tried to explain: 'When I go home for week-ends, he's pleased to see me-I can see that. He never complains that I don't go more often though. But when I'm there it doesn't seem to make any difference to him. He has a routine. An old woman does the house. The meals are just so. He has a few things to eat he always has, like red beef and steak and eggs. He drinks one gin before lunch, and two or three whiskys after dinner. He goes for a long walk every morning after breakfast. He gardens in the afternoon. He reads every night until very late. When I'm there, it's all just the same. He doesn't even talk to me.' She laughed again. 'It's what you said earlier-I'm not on the wavelength, he has one very close friend, a colonel, and they look alike, both lean and leathery with fierce eyebrows, and they communicate in high, inaudible squeaks. They sometimes sit opposite each other for hours and never say a word, just drink whisky, or they sometimes make short references to India. And when my father is alone, I think he communicates with God or Buddha or somebody. But not with me. Usually if I say something, he sounds embarrassed, or talks about something else.' Ella fell silent thinking that was the longest speech she had made to him, and it was odd it should be so, since she seldom spoke of her father, or even thought of him. Paul did not take it up, but instead asked abruptly: 'How's this?' The rough track had come to an end in a small hedged-in field. 'Oh,' said Ella. 'Yes. This morning I was hoping you'd take me to a small field, just like this.' She got quickly out of the car, just conscious of his startled glance; but she did not remember it until later, when she was searching her memory to find out how he had felt about her that day.
She wandered for a time through the grasses, fingering them, smelling them, and letting the sun fall on her face. When she drifted back to him, he had spread a rug on the grass and was sitting on it, waiting. His look of waiting destroyed the ease that had been created in her by the small freedom of the sun-lit field, and set up a tension. She thought, as she flung herself down, he's set on something, good Lord, is he going to make love to me so soon? Oh, no, he wouldn't, not yet. All the same, she lay near him, and was happy, and was content to let things take their course.
Later-and not so much later, he would say, teasing her, that she had brought him here because she had decided she wanted him to make love to her, that she had planned it. And she always got furiously indignant, and then as he persisted, set cold towards him. And then she would forget it. And then he came back to it, and because she knew it was important to him, the little recurring wrangle left a poisoned spot which spread. It was not true. In the car she had known he would be her lover, because of the quality of his voice, which she trusted. But at some time, it didn't matter when. He would know the right time, she felt. And so if the right time was then, that first afternoon alone, it must be right. 'And what do you suppose I would have done if you hadn't made love to me?' she would ask, later, curious and hostile. 'You'd have been bad-tempered,' he replied, laughing but with a curious undertone of regret. And the regret, which was genuine, drew her to him, as if they were fellow-victims of some cruelty in life neither could help.
'But you arranged it all,' she would say. 'You even brought out a rug for the purpose. I suppose you always take a rug in the car for afternoon jaunts, just in case.'
'Of course, nothing like a nice warm rug on the grass.'
At which she would laugh. And later still she would think, chilled: 'I suppose he had taken other women to that field, it was probably just a habit of his.'
Yet at the time she was perfectly happy. The weight of the city was off her, and the scent of the grasses and the sun delicious. Then she became aware of his half-ironical smile and sat up, on the defensive. He began to talk, consciously ironical, about her husband. She told him what he wanted to know, briefly, since she had offered the facts last night. And then she told him, also briefly, about the child; but this time she was cursory because she felt guilty because she was here, in the sun, and Michael would have enjoyed the drive and the warm field.
She understood that Paul had said something about his wife. It took some moments for this to sink in. He also said he had two children. She felt a shock, but did not let it disturb her confidence in the moment. The way he spoke of his wife, which was hurried and almost irritable, told Ella he did not love her. She was using the word 'love' already, and with a naivety quite foreign to her normal way of analysing relationships. She even imagined he must be separated from his wife, if he could speak of her so casually.
He made love to her. Ella thought, 'Well he's right, it is the right moment, here, where it's beautiful.' Her body held too many memories of her husband for her to lack tensions. But soon she gave herself up, and in confidence, because their bodies understood each other. (But it was only later, she would use a phrase like 'our bodies understood each other.' At the time, she was thinking: We understand each other.) Yet once, opening her eyes, she saw his face, and it held a hard, almost ugly look. And she shut her eyes not to see it, and was happy in the movements of love. Afterwards, she saw his face turned away, and the hard look again. She instinctively moved away from him, but his hand on her belly held her down. He said, half-teasing: 'You're much too thin.' She laughed, without hurt, because the way his hand lay on her flesh told her he liked her as she was. And she liked herself, naked. It was a frail, slight body, with sharp edges to the shoulders and the knees, but her breasts and stomach glistened white, and her small feet were delicate and white. Often she had wanted to be different, had longed to be larger, fuller, rounder, 'more of a woman,' but the way his hand touched her cancelled all that and she was happy. He kept his hand's soft pressure on her vulnerable stomach for some moments, then suddenly withdrew it and began to dress. She, feeling abandoned, began to dress also. She was suddenly unaccountably close to tears, and her body again seemed too thin and light. He asked: 'How long since you slept with a man?'
She was confused, wondering: George, he means? But he didn't count, I didn't love him. I hated him touching me. 'I don't know,' she said, and as she spoke understood he meant that she had slept with him out of hunger. Her face began to burn and she got quickly up off the rug, turning her face away, and then said, in a voice which sounded ugly to herself: 'Not since last week. I picked up a man at a party and brought him home with me.' She was looking for words from her memories of the girls at the canteen, during the war. She found them, and said: 'A nice piece of flesh, he was.' She got into the car, slamming the door. He threw the rug into the back of the car, got hastily in, and began the business of reversing the car back and forth so as to get it facing out of the field.
'You make a habit of it, then?' he enquired. His voice was sober, detached. She thought that whereas a moment ago he was asking on his own account, as a man; now he was again talking 'like a man behind a desk.' She was thinking that she only wanted the drive home to be over so that she could go home and cry. The love-making was now linked in her mind with memories of her husband, and the shrinking of her body from George's, because she was shrinking away in spirit from this new man.
'Do you make a habit of it?' he asked again.
'Of what?' She laughed. 'Oh, I see.' And she looked at him incredulously, as if he were mad. At the moment he seemed to her slightly mad, his face tense with suspicion. He was not at all, now, the 'man behind a desk,' but a man hostile to her. Now she was quite set against him, and she laughed angrily, and said: 'You're very stupid after all.'
They did not speak again until they reached the main road, and joined the stream of traffic slowly congealed along the way back to the city. Then he remarked, in a different voice, companionable, a peace-offering: 'I'm not in a position to criticise, after all. My love life could hardly be described as exemplary.'
'I hope you found me a satisfactory diversion.'
He looked puzzled. He seemed stupid to her because he was not understanding. She could see him framing words and then discarding them. And so she gave him no chance to talk. She felt as if she had been dealt, deliberately, one after the other, blows which were aimed at some place just below her breasts. She was almost gasping at the pain of these blows. Her lips were trembling, but she would rather have died than cry in front of him. She turned her face aside, watching a country-side now falling into shadow and cold, and began to talk herself. She could, when she set herself to it, be hard, malicious, amusing. She entertained him with sophisticated gossip about the magazine office, the affairs of Patricia Brent, etc. etc., while she despised him for accepting this counterfeit of herself. She talked on and on, while he was silent; and when they reached Julia's house, she got fast out of the car, and was in the doorway before he could follow her. She was fumbling with the key in the lock when he came up behind her and said: 'Would your friend Julia put your son to bed tonight? We could go to a play if you'd like it. No, a film, it's Sunday.' She positively gasped with surprise: 'But I'm not going to see you again, surely you don't expect me to?'
He took her shoulders with his hands from behind and said: 'But, why not? You liked me, it's no good pretending you didn't.' To this, Ella had no answer, it was not her language. And she could not remember, now, how happy she had been with him in the field. She said: 'I'm not seeing you again.'
'Why not?'
She furiously wriggled her shoulders free, put the key in the door, turned it, and said: 'I haven't slept with anyone at all for a long time. Not since an affair I had for a week, two years ago. It was a lovely affair...' She saw him wince and felt pleasure because she was hurting him, and because she was lying, it had not been a lovely affair. But, telling the truth now, and accusing him with every atom of her flesh, she said: 'He was an American. He never made me feel bad, not once. He wasn't at all good in bed, I'm sure that's one of your phrases, isn't it? But he didn't despise me.'
'Why are you telling me this?'
'You're so stupid,' she said, in a gay scornful voice. And she felt a hard bitter gaiety rise in her, destructive of him and of herself. 'You talk about my husband. Well what's he got to do with it? As far as I'm concerned I never slept with him at all...' He laughed, incredulously and bitterly, but she went on: 'I hated sleeping with him. It didn't count. And you say, how long is it since you slept with another man? Surely it's all perfectly simple. You're a psychiatrist, you say, a soul-doctor, and you don't understand the simplest things about anyone.'
With which she went into Julia's house, and shut the door, and put her face to the wall and began to cry. From the feeling of the house she knew it was still empty. The bell rang, almost in her ear: Paul trying to make her open the door. But she left the sound of the bell behind, and went up through the dark well of the house to the bright little flat at the top, slowly, crying. And now the telephone rang. She knew it was Paul, in the telephone box across the street. She let it ring, because she was crying. It stopped and started again. She looked at the compact, impersonal black curves of the instrument and hated it; she swallowed her tears, steadied her voice and answered. It was Julia. Julia said she wanted to stay to supper with her friends; she would bring the child home with her later and put him to bed, and if Ella wanted to go out she could. 'What's the matter with you?' came Julia's voice, full and calm as usual, across two miles of streets. 'I'm crying.'
'I can hear you are, what for?'
'Oh, these bloody men, I hate them all.'
'Oh well, if it's like that, but better go off to the pictures then, it'll cheer you up.' Immediately Ella felt better, the incident was less important, and she laughed.
When the telephone rang half-an-hour later, she answered it, not thinking of Paul. But it was he. He had waited in his car, he said, to telephone again. He wanted to talk to her. 'I don't see what we'll achieve by it,' said Ella, sounding cool and humorous. And he, sounding humorous and quizzical, said: 'Come to the pictures, and we won't talk.' So she went. She met him with ease. This was because she had told herself she would not make love with him again. It was all finished. Her going out with him was because it seemed melodramatic not to. And because his voice on the telephone had no connection at all with the hardness of his face above her in the field. And because they now would return to their relationship in the car driving away from London. His attitude to having had her in the field had simply cancelled it out. It hadn't happened, if that was the way he felt about it!
Later he would say: 'When I telephoned you, after you had flounced indoors-you just came, you just needed persuading.' And he laughed. She hated the tone of the laugh. At such moments he would put on a rueful, and self-consciously rueful, rake's smile, playing the part of a rake so that he could laugh at himself. Yet he was having it both ways, Ella felt, for his complaint was genuine. And so at such moments she would first smile with him, at his parody of the rake; and then quickly change the subject. It was as if he had a personality at these moments not his. She was convinced it was not his. It was on a level that not only had nothing to do with the simplicity and ease of their being together; but betrayed it so completely that she had no alternative but to ignore it. Otherwise she would have had to break with him.
They did not go to the pictures, but to a coffee bar. Again he told stories about his work at the hospital. He had two posts, at two different hospitals. At one he was a consultant psychiatrist. At the other he was doing a reorganising job. As he put it: 'I'm trying to change a snake-pit into something more civilised. And who do I have to fight? The public? Not at all, it's the old-fashioned doctors...' His stories had two themes. One the stuffed-shirt pomposity of the middle level of the medical establishment. Ella realised that all his criticisms were from the simplest class viewpoint; implicit in what he said, though he didn't say it, was that stupidity and lack of imagination were middle-class characteristics, and that his attitude, progressive and liberating, was because he was working-class. Which of course was how Julia talked; and how Ella herself criticised Dr West. And yet several times she found herself stiffening in resentment, as if it were she who was being criticised; and when this happened she fell back on her memories of the years in the canteen, and thought that if she had not had that experience she would not be able now to see the upper class of this country, from beneath, through the eyes of the factory girls, like so many bizarre fish viewed through the glass bottom of an aquarium. Paul's second theme was the reverse side of the first, and marked by a change of his whole personality when he touched on it. Telling his critical stories he was full of a delighted malicious irony. But talking of his patients he was serious. His attitude was the same as hers to the 'Mrs. Browns' -they were already referring to her petitioners in this collective way. He spoke of them with an extraordinary delicacy of kindness, and with an angry compassion. The anger was for their helplessness.
She liked him so much now that for her it was as if the episode in the field had not happened. He took her home and came into the hall after her, still talking. They went up the stairs, and Ella was thinking: I suppose we'll have some coffee and then he'll go. She was quite genuine in this. And yet, when he again made love to her, she again thought: Yes, it's right, because we've been so close together all evening. Afterwards, when he complained: 'Of course you knew I'd make love to you again,' she would reply: 'Of course I didn't. And if you hadn't it wouldn't have mattered.' At which he would either reply: 'Oh, what a hypocrite!' Or: 'Then you've no right to be so unconscious of your motives.'
Being with Paul Tanner, that night, was the deepest experience Ella had with a man; so different from anything she had known before that everything in the past became irrelevant. This feeling was so final, that when, towards early morning, Paul asked: 'What does Julia think about this sort of thing?' Ella replied vaguely: 'What sort of thing?'
'Last week, for instance. You said you brought a man home from a party.'
'You're mad,' she said, laughing comfortably. They lay in the dark. She turned her head to see his face; a dark line of cheek showed against the light from the window; there was something remote and lonely about it, and she thought: He's got into the same mood he was in earlier. But this time it did not disturb her, for the simplicity of the warm touch of his thigh against hers made the remoteness of his face irrelevant.
'But what does Julia say?'
'What about?'
'What will she say in the morning?'
'Why should she say anything at all?'
'I see,' he said briefly; and got up and added: 'I'll have to go home and shave and get a clean shirt.'
That week he came to her every night, late, when Michael was asleep. And he left early every morning, to 'pick up a clean shirt.'
Ella was completely happy. She drifted along on a soft tide of not-thinking. When Paul made a remark from 'his negative personality,' she was so sure of her emotions that she replied: 'Oh, you're so stupid, I told you, you don't understand anything.' (The word negative was Julia's, used after a glimpse of Paul on the stairs: 'There's something bitter and negative about that face.') She was thinking that soon he would marry her. Or perhaps not soon. It would be at the right time, and he would know when that was. His marriage must be no marriage at all, if he could stay with her, night after night, going home at dawn, 'for a clean shirt.'
On the following Sunday, a week after their first excursion into the country, Julia again took the little boy off to friends, and this time Paul took Ella to Kew. They lay on the grass behind a hedge of sheltering rhododendrons, trees above them, the sun sifting over them. They held hands. 'You see,' said Paul, with his small rake's grimace, 'we're like an old married couple already-we know we're going to make love in bed tonight, so now we just hold hands.'
'But what's the matter with it?' asked Ella, amused.
He was leaning over, looking into her face. She smiled up at him. She knew that he loved her. She felt a perfect trust in him. 'What's the matter with it?' he said with a sort of humorous desperation. 'It's terrible. Here you and I are...' How they were was reflected in his face and eyes, which were warm on her face-'and look what it would be like if we were married.' Ella felt herself go cold. She thought, Surely he's not saying that as a man does, warning a woman? He's not so cheap, surely? She saw an old bitterness on his face, and thought: No, he's not, thank God, he's carrying on some conversation with himself. And the light inside her was relit. She said: 'But you aren't married at all. You can't call that being married. You never see her.'
'We got married when we were both twenty. There should be a law against it,' he added, with the same desperate humour, kissing her. He said, with his mouth on her throat: 'You're very wise not to get married, Ella. Be sensible and stay that way.'
Ella smiled. She was thinking: And so I was wrong after all. That's exactly what he's doing, saying: You can expect just so much from me. She felt completely rejected. And he still lay with his hands on her arms, and she could feel the warmth of them right through her body, and his eyes, warm and full of love for her, were a few inches above hers. He was smiling.
That night in bed, making love to him was a mechanical thing, she went through the motions of response. It was a different experience from the other nights. It seemed he did not know it; and they lay afterwards as usual close in each other's arms. She was chilled and full of dismay.
The day after she had a conversation with Julia, who had been silent all this time about Paul's staying the nights. 'He's married,' she said. 'He's been married thirteen years. It's a marriage so that it doesn't matter if he doesn't go home at nights. Two children.' Julia made a non-committal grimace and waited. 'The thing is, I'm not sure at all... and there's Michael.'
'What's his attitude to Michael?'
'He's only seen him once, for a moment. He comes in late-well you know that. And he's gone by the time Michael wakes up. To pick up a clean shirt from home.' At which Julia laughed, and Ella laughed with her.
'An extraordinary woman she must be,' said Julia. 'Does he talk about her?'
'He said, they got married too young. And then he went off to the wars, and when he came back, he felt a stranger to her. And as far as I can make out, he's done nothing but have love affairs ever since.'
'It doesn't sound too good,' said Julia. 'What do you feel for him?' At the moment, Ella felt nothing but a cold hurt despair. For the life of her she could not reconcile their happiness and what she called his cynicism. She was in something like a panic. Julia was examining her, shrewdly. 'I thought, the first time I saw him, he's got such a tight miserable face.'
'He's not at all miserable,' said Ella quickly. Then, seeing her instinctive and unreasoning defence of him, she laughed at herself and said: 'I mean, yes, there is that in him, a sort of bitterness. But there's his work and he likes it. He rushes from hospital to hospital, and tells marvellous stories about it all, and then the way he talks about his patients-he really cares. And then with me, at night, and he never seems to need to sleep.' Ella blushed, conscious that she was boasting. 'Well, it's true,' she said, watching Julia's smile. 'And then off he rushes in the morning, after practically no sleep, to pick up a shirt and presumably have a nice little chat with his wife about this and that. Energy. Energy is not being miserable. Or even bitter, if it comes to that. The two things aren't connected.'
'Oh, well,' said Julia. 'In that case you'd better wait and see what happens, hadn't you?'
That night Paul was humorous and very tender. It's as if he's apologising, Ella thought. Her pain melted. In the morning she found herself restored to happiness. He said, as he dressed: 'I can't see you tonight, Ella.' She said, without fear: 'Well, that's all right.' But he went on, laughing: 'After all, I've got to see my children sometime.' It sounded as if he were accusing her of having deliberately kept him from them. 'But I haven't stopped you,' said Ella. 'Oh, yes you have, you have,' he said, half-singing it. He kissed her lightly, laughing, on the forehead. That's how he kissed his other women, she thought, when he left them for good. Yes. He didn't care about them, and he laughed and kissed them on the forehead. And suddenly a picture came into her mind, at which she stared, astonished. She saw him putting money on to a mantelpiece. But he was not-that she knew, the sort of man who would pay a woman. Yet she could see him, clearly, putting money on a mantelpiece. Yes. It was somewhere implicit in his attitude. And to her, Ella, but what's that got to do with all these hours we've been together, when every look and move he's made told me he loved me? (For the fact that Paul had told her, again and again, that he loved her, meant nothing, or rather would have meant nothing if it had not been confirmed by how he touched her, and the warmth of his voice.) And now, leaving, he remarked, with his small bitter grimace: 'And so you'll be free tonight, Ella.'
'What do you mean, free?'
'Oh... for your other boy-friends; you've been neglecting them, haven't you?'
She went to the office, after leaving the child at his nursery school, feeling as if cold had got into her bones, into her backbone. She was shivering slightly. Yet it was a warm day. For some days she had not been in connection with Patricia, she had been too absorbed in her happiness. Now she easily came close to the older woman again. Patricia had been married for eleven years; and her husband had left her for a younger woman. Her attitude towards men was a gallant, good-natured, wisecracking cynicism. This jarred on Ella; it was something foreign to her. Patricia was in her fifties, lived alone, and had a grown-up daughter. She was, Ella knew, a courageous woman. But Ella did not like to think too closely about Patricia; to identify with her, even in sympathy, meant she might be cutting off some possibility for herself. Or so she felt. Today Patricia made some dry comment about a male colleague who was separating from his wife, and Ella snapped at her. Later she came back into the room, and apologised, for Patricia was hurt. Ella always felt at a disadvantage with the older woman. She did not care for her as much as she knew Patricia did for her. She knew she was some sort of symbol for Patricia, a symbol perhaps of her own youth? (But Ella would not think about that, it was dangerous.) Now she made a point of staying with Patricia and talking and making jokes, and saw, with dismay, tears in her employer's eyes. She saw, very sharply, a plump, kindly, smart, middle-aged woman, with clothes from the fashion magazines that were like a uniform, and her gallant mop of tinted greying curls; and her eyes-hard for her work, and soft for Ella. While she was with Patricia, she was telephoned by the editor of one of the magazines that had published a story of hers. He asked if she were free to lunch. She said she was, listening in her mind to the word free. For the last ten days she had not felt free. Now she felt, not free, but disconnected, or as if she floated on someone else's will- Paul's. This editor had wanted to sleep with her, and Ella had rejected him. Now she thought that very likely she would sleep with him. Why not? What difference did it all make? This editor was an intelligent, attractive man, but the idea of his touching her repelled her. He had not one spark of that instinctive warmth for a woman, liking for a woman, which was what she felt in Paul. And that was why she would sleep with him; she could not possibly have let a man touch her now, whom she found attractive. But it seemed Paul did not care one way or the other; he made jokes about the 'man she had taken home from the party,' almost as if he liked her for it. Very well, then; very well-if that's what he wanted, she didn't care at all. And she took herself off to lunch, carefully made-up, in a mood of sick defiance of the whole world.
The lunch was as usual-expensive; and she liked good food. He was amusing; and she liked his talk. She was eased into her usual intellectual rapport with him, and meanwhile watched him and thought it was inconceivable that she could make love with him. Yet why not? She liked him, didn't she? Well then? And love? But love was a mirage, and the property of the women's magazines; one certainly couldn't use the word love in connection with a man who didn't care whether one slept with other men or not. But if I'm going to sleep with this man, I'd better do something about it. She did not know how to; she had rejected him so often he took the rejection for granted. When lunch was over, and they were on the pavement, Ella was suddenly released: what nonsense, of course she wasn't going to sleep with him, now she would go back to the office and that would be that. Then she saw a couple of prostitutes in a doorway, and she remembered her picture of Paul that morning; and when the editor said: 'Ella, I do so wish that...' she interrupted with a smile and said: 'Then take me home. No, to your place, not to mine.' For she could not have borne to have any man but Paul in her own bed now. This man was married, and he took her to his bachelor flat. His home was in the country, he was careful to keep his wife and children there, and he used this flat for adventures like these. All the time she was naked with this man, Ella was thinking of Paul. He must be mad. What am I doing with a madman? He really imagines I could sleep with another man when I'm with him? He can't possibly believe it. Meanwhile, she was being as nice as she could be to this intelligent comrade of her intellectual lunches. He was having difficulties, and Ella knew this was because she did not really want him, and so it was her fault, though he was blaming himself. And so she set herself to please, thinking there was no reason for him to feel bad, simply because she was committing the crime of sleeping with a man she did not care tuppence for... and when it was all over, she simply discounted the whole incident. It had meant nothing at all. She was left, however, vulnerable, quivering with the need to cry, and desperately unhappy. She was yearning, in fact, towards Paul. Who rang her next day to say that he couldn't come that night either. And now Ella's need for Paul was so great that she told herself it didn't matter in the slightest, of course he had to work, or to go home to his children.
The next evening they met full of defences on either side. A few minutes later they had all vanished, and they were together again. Some time that night he remarked: 'Odd isn't it, it really is true that if you love a woman sleeping with another woman means nothing.' At the time she did not hear this-somewhere in her a mechanism had started to work which would prevent her hearing him when he made remarks that might make her unhappy. But she heard it next day, the words suddenly came back into her mind and she listened to them. So during those two nights he had been experimenting with someone else, and had had the same experience as she. So now she was full of confidence again, and of trust in him. Then he began to question her about what she had done during those two days. She said she had had lunch with an editor who had published one of her stories. 'I've read one of your stories. It was rather good.' He said this with pain, as if he had rather the story were bad. 'Well, why shouldn't it be good?' she asked. 'I suppose that was your husband, George?'
'Partly, not altogether.'
'And this editor?' For a moment she thought of saying: 'I've had the same experience you've had.' Then she thought: If he's capable of being upset by things that never happened, what would he say if I told him I did sleep with that man? Though I didn't, it didn't count, it was not the same thing at all.
Afterwards Ella judged that their 'being together' (she never used the word affair) started from that moment- when they had both tested their responses to other people and found that what they felt for each other made other people irrelevant. That was the only time she was to be unfaithful to Paul, though she did not feel it mattered. Yet she was miserable she had done it because it became a sort of crystallisation of all his later accusations of her. After that he came to her nearly every night, and when he could not come she knew it was not because he did not want to. He would come in late, because of his work, and because of the child. He helped her with her letters from 'Mrs. Brown,' and this was a very great pleasure to her, working together over these people for whom she could sometimes do something.
She did not think of his wife at all. At least, not at the beginning.
Her only worry, at the beginning, was Michael. The little boy had loved his own father, now married again and living in America. It was natural for the child to turn with affection to this new man. But Paul would stiffen when Michael put his arms around him, or when he rushed at him in welcome. Ella watched how he instinctively stiffened, half-laughed, and then his mind (the mind of the soul-doctor, considering how best to deal with the situation) started to work. He would gently put down Michael's arms, and talk to him gently, as if he were grown-up. And Michael responded. It hurt Ella to see how the little boy, denied this masculine affection, would respond by being grown-up, serious, answering serious questions. A spontaneity of affection had been cut off in him. He kept it for her, warm and responsive in touch and in speech, but for Paul, for the men's world, he had a responsible, calm, thoughtful response. Sometimes Ella, panicked a little: I'm doing Michael harm, he is going to be harmed. He'll never again have a natural warm response to a man. And then she would think: But I don't really believe it. It must be good for him that I'm happy, it must be good for him that I'm a real woman at last. And so Ella did not worry for long, her instincts told her not to. She let herself go into Paul's love for her, and did not think. Whenever she found herself looking at this relationship from the outside, as other people might see it, she felt frightened and cynical. So she did not. She lived from day to day, and did not look ahead.
Five years.
If I were to write this novel, the main theme, or motif, would be buried, at first, and only slowly take over. The motif of Paul's wife-the third. At first Ella does not think about her. Then she has to make a conscious effort not to think about her. This is when she knows her attitude towards this unknown woman is despicable: she feels triumph over her, pleasure that she has taken Paul from her. When Ella first becomes conscious of this emotion she is so appalled and ashamed that she buries it, fast. Yet the shadow of the third grows again, and it becomes impossible for Ella not to think. She thinks a great deal about the invisible woman to whom Paul returns (and to whom he will always return), and it is now not out of triumph, but envy. She envies her. She slowly, involuntarily, builds up a picture in her mind of a serene, calm, unjealous, unenvious, undemanding woman, full of resources of happiness inside herself, self-sufficient, yet always ready to give happiness when it is asked for. It occurs to Ella (but much later, about three years on) that this is a remarkable image to have developed, since it does not correspond to anything at all Paul says about his wife. So where does the picture come from? Slowly Ella understands that this is what she would like to be herself, this imagined woman is her own shadow, everything she is not. Because by now she knows, and is frightened of, her utter dependence on Paul. Every fibre of herself is woven with him, and she cannot imagine living without him. The mere idea of being without him causes a black cold fear to enclose her, so she does not think of it. And she is clinging, so she comes to realise, to this image of the other woman, the third, as a sort of safety or protection for herself.
The second motif is in fact part of the first, though this would not be apparent until the end of the novel-Paul's jealousy. The jealousy increases, and is linked with the rhythm of his slow withdrawal. He accuses her, half-laughing, half-serious, of sleeping with other men. In a cafe he accuses her of making eyes at a man she has not even noticed. To begin with, she laughs at him. Later she grows bitter, but always suppresses bitterness, it is too dangerous. Then, as she comes to understand the image she has created of the other serene, etc., woman, she wonders about Paul's jealousy, and comes to think-not from bitterness, but to understand it, what it really means. It occurs to her that Paul's shadow, his imagined third, is a self-hating rake, free, casual, heartless. (This is the role he sometimes plays, self-mockingly, with her.) So what it means is, that in coming together with Ella, in a serious relationship, the rake in himself has been banished, pushed aside, and now stands in the wings of his personality, temporarily unused, waiting to return. And Ella now sees, side by side with the wise, serene, calm woman, her shadow, the shape of this compulsive self-hating womaniser. These two discordant figures move side by side, keeping pace with Ella and Paul. And there comes a moment (but right at the end of the novel, its culmination) when Ella thinks: Paul's shadow-figure, the man he sees everywhere, even in a man I haven't even noticed, is this almost musical-comedy libertine. So that means that Paul with me is using his 'positive' self. (Julia's phrase.) With me he is good. But I have as a shadow a good woman, grown-up and strong and un-asking. Which means that I am using with him my 'negative' self. So this bitterness I feel growing in me, against him, is a mockery of the truth. In fact, he's better than I am, in this relationship. These invisible figures that keep us company all the time prove it.
Subsidiary motifs. Her novel. He asks what she is writing and she tells him. Reluctantly, because his voice is always full of distrust when he mentions her writing. She says: 'It's a novel about suicide.'
'And what do you know about suicide?'
'Nothing, I'm just writing it.' (To Julia she makes bitter jokes about Jane Austen hiding her novels under the blotting paper when people come into the room; quotes Stendhal's dictum that any woman under fifty who writes, should do so under a pseudonym.)
During the next few days he tells her stories about his patients who are suicidal. It takes her a long time to understand he is doing this because he thinks she is too naive and ignorant to write about suicide. (And she even agrees with him.) He is instructing her. She begins to hide her work from him. She says she doesn't care about 'being a writer, she just wants to write the book, to see what will happen.' This makes no sense to him, it seems, and soon he begins to complain that she is using his professional knowledge to get facts for the novel.
The motif of Julia. Paul dislikes Ella's relationship with Julia. He sees it as a pact against him, and makes professional jokes about the Lesbian aspects of this friendship. At which Ella says that in that case, his friendships with men are homosexual? But he says she has no sense of humour. At first Ella's instinct is to sacrifice Julia for Paul; but later their friendship does change, it becomes critical of Paul. The conversations between the two women are sophisticated, full of critical insight, implicitly critical of men. Yet Ella does not feel this is disloyalty to Paul, because these conversations come from a different world; the world of sophisticated insight has nothing to do with her feeling for Paul.
The motif of Ella's maternal love for Michael. She is always fighting to get Paul to be a father to the child and always failing. And Paul says: 'You'll come to be glad yet, you'll see I was right.' Which can only mean: When I've left you, you'll be glad I didn't form close ties with your son. And so Ella chooses not to hear it.
The motif of Paul's attitude to his profession. He is split on this. He takes his work for his patients seriously, but makes fun of the jargon he uses. He will tell a story about a patient, full of subtlety and depth, but using the language of literature and of emotion. Then he will judge the same anecdote in psychoanalytical terms, giving it a different dimension. And then, five minutes later, he will be making the most intelligent and ironical fun of the terms he has just used as yardsticks to judge the literary standards, the emotional truths. And at each moment, in each personality-literary, psychoanalytical, the man who distrusts all systems of thought that consider themselves final-he will be serious and expect Ella to accept him, fully for that moment; and he resents it when she attempts to link these personalities in him.
Their life together becomes full of phrases, and symbols. 'Mrs. Brown' means his patients and her women who ask for help.
'Your literary lunches,' is his phrase for her infidelities, used sometimes humourously, sometimes seriously.
'Your treatise on suicide.' Her novel, his attitude to it. And another phrase which becomes more and more important, though when he uses it first she does not understand how deep an attitude in him it reflects. 'We are both boulder-pushers.' This is his phrase for what he sees as his own failure. His fight to get out of his poor background, to win scholarships, to get the highest medical degrees, came out of an ambition to be a creative scientist. But he knows now he will never be this original scientist. And this defect has been partly caused by what is best in him, his abiding, tireless compassion for the poor, the ignorant, the sick. He has always, at a point when he should have chosen the library or the laboratory, chosen the weak instead. He will never now be a discoverer or a blazer of new paths. He has become a man who fights a middle-class, reactionary medical superintendent who wants to keep his wards locked and his patients in strait jackets. 'You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents, into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. We push the boulder. I sometimes wish I had died before I got this job I wanted so much-I thought of it as something creative. How do I spend my time? Telling Dr Shackerly, a frightened little man from Birmingham who bullies his wife because he doesn't know how to love a woman, that he must open the doors of his hospital, that he must not keep poor sick people shut in a cell lined with buttoned white leather in the dark, and that straitjackets are stupid. That is how I spend my days. And treating illness that is caused by a society so stupid that... And you, Ella. You tell the wives of workmen who are all just as good as their masters to use the styles and furnishings made fashionable by businessmen who use snobbery to make money. And you tell poor women who are slaves of everyone's stupidity to go out and join a social club or to take up a healthful hobby of some kind, to take their minds off the fact they are unloved. And if the healthful hobby doesn't work, and why should it, they end up in my Out-patients... I wish I had died, Ella. I wish I had died. No, of course you don't understand that, I can see from your face you don't...'
Death again. Death come out of her novel and into her life. And yet death in the form of energy, for this man works like a madman, out of a furious angry compassion, this man who says he wishes he were dead never rests from work for the helpless.
It is as if this novel were already written and I were reading it. And now I see it whole I see another theme, of which I was not conscious when I began it. The theme is, naivety. From the moment Ella meets Paul and loves him, from the moment she uses the word love, there is the birth of naivety.
And so now, looking back at my relationship with Michael (I used the name of my real lover for Ella's fictitious son with the small over-eager smile with which a patient offers an analyst evidence he has been waiting for but which the patient is convinced is irrelevant), I see above all my naivety. Any intelligent person could have foreseen the end of this affair from its beginning. And yet I, Anna, like Ella with Paul, refused to see it. Paul gave birth to Ella, the naive Ella. He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.
Now, when I am drawn to a man, I can assess the depth of a possible relationship with him by the degree to which the naive Anna is re-created in me.
Sometimes when I, Anna, look back, I want to laugh out loud. It is the appalled, envious laughter of knowledge at innocence. I would be incapable now of such trust. I, Anna, would never begin an affair with Paul. Or Michael. Or rather, I would begin an affair, just that, knowing exactly what would happen; I would begin a deliberately barren, limited relationship.
What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety.
The end of the affair. Though that was not the word that Ella used then. She used it afterwards, and with bitterness.
Ella first understands that Paul is withdrawing from her at the moment when she realises he is not helping her with the letters. He says: 'What's the use? I deal with widow Brown all day at the hospital. I can't do any good, not really. I help one here and there. Ultimately the boulder-pushers don't really help anything. We imagine we do. Psychiatry and welfare work, it's putting poultices on unnecessary misery.'
'But Paul, you know you help them.'
'All the time I'm thinking, we are all obsolete. What sort of a doctor is it who sees his patients as symptoms of a world sickness?'
'If it were true you really feel like that, you wouldn't work so hard.'
He hesitated, then delivered this blow: 'But Ella, you're my mistress, not my wife. Why do you want me to share all the serious business of life with you?'
Ella was angry. 'Every night you lie in my bed and tell me everything. I am your wife.' As she said it, she knew she was signing the warrant for the end. It seemed a terrible cowardice that she had not said it before. He reacted with a small offended laugh, a gesture of withdrawal.
Ella finishes her novel and it is accepted for publication. She knows it is a quite good novel, nothing very startling. If she were to read it she would report that it was a small, honest novel. But Paul reads it and reacts with elaborate sarcasm.
He says: 'Well, we men might just as well resign from life.'
She is frightened, and says: 'What do you mean?' Yet she laughs, because of the dramatic way he says it, parodying himself.
Now he drops his self-parody and says with great seriousness: 'My dear Ella, don't you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution-they're nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.'
'But Paul, that doesn't mean anything to me.'
'I saw a film last week, I went by myself, I didn't take you, that was a film for a man by himself.'
'What film?'
'Did you know that a woman can now have children without a man?'
'But what on earth for?'
'You can apply ice to a woman's ovaries, for instance. She can have a child. Men are no longer necessary to humanity.'
At once Ella laughs, and with confidence. 'But what woman in her senses would want ice applied to her ovaries instead of a man?'
Paul laughs too. 'For all that Ella, and joking apart, it's a sign of the times.'
At which Ella cries out: 'My God, Paul, if at any time during the last five years you'd asked me to have a baby, I'd have been so happy.'
The instinctive, startled movement of withdrawal from her. Then the deliberate careful answer, laughing: 'But, Ella, it's the principle of the thing. Men are no longer necessary.'
'Oh, principles,' says Ella, laughing. 'You're mad. I always said you were.'
At which he says, soberly: 'Well, maybe you're right. You are very sane, Ella. You always were. You say I'm mad. I know it. I get madder and madder. Sometimes I wonder why they don't lock me up instead of my patients. And you get saner and saner. It's your strength. You'll have ice applied to your ovaries yet.'
At which she cries out, so hurt that she doesn't care any longer how she sounds to him: 'You are mad. Let me tell you I'd rather die than have a child like that. Don't you know that ever since I've known you I've wanted to have your child? Ever since I've known you everything has been so joyful that...' She sees his face, which instinctively rejects what she has just said. 'Well, all right then. But supposing that is why you'll ultimately turn out to be unnecessary- because you haven't got any faith in what you are...' His face is now startled and sad, but she is in full flood and doesn't care. 'You've never understood one simple thing-it's so simple and ordinary that I don't know why you don't understand. Everything with you has been happy and easy and joyful, and you talk about women putting ice on their ovaries. Ice. Ovaries. What does it mean? Well, if you want to sign yourselves off the face of the earth then do it, I don't care.' At which he says, opening his arms. 'Ella. Ella! Come here.' She goes to him, he holds her, but in a moment he teases her: 'But you see, I was right-when it comes to the point you openly admit it, you'd push us all off the edge of the earth and laugh.'
Sex. The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. Women deliberately choose not to think about technical sex. They get irritable when men talk technically, it's out of self-preservation: they want to preserve the spontaneous emotion that is essential for their satisfaction.
Sex is essentially emotional for women. How many times has that been written? And yet there's always a point even with the most perceptive and intelligent man, when a woman looks at him across a gulf: he hasn't understood; she suddenly feels alone; hastens to forget the moment, because if she doesn't she would have to think. Julia, myself and Bob sitting in her kitchen gossiping. Bob telling a story about the breakup of a marriage. He says: 'The trouble was sex. Poor bastard, he's got a prick the size of a needle.' Julia: 'I always thought she didn't love him.' Bob, thinking she hadn't heard: 'No, it's always worried him stiff, he's just got a small one.' Julia: 'But she never did love him, anyone could see that just by looking at them together.' Bob, a bit impatient now: 'It's not their fault, poor idiots, nature was against the whole thing from the start.' Julia: 'Of course it's her fault. She should never have married him if she didn't love him.' Bob, irritated because of her stupidity, begins a long technical explanation, while she looks at me, sighs, smiles, and shrugs. A few minutes later, as he persists, she cuts him off short with a bad-tempered joke, won't let him go on.
As for me, Anna, it was a remarkable fact that until I sat down to write about it, I had never analysed how sex was between myself and Michael. Yet there was a perfectly clear development during the five years, which shows in my memory like a curving line on a graph.
When Ella first made love with Paul, during the first few months, what set the seal on the fact she loved him, and made it possible for her to use the word, was that she immediately experienced orgasm. Vaginal orgasm that is. And she could not have experienced it if she had not loved him. It is the orgasm that is created by the man's need for a woman, and his confidence in that need.
As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical-a man wouldn't use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalised sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants all her response. Everything else is a substitute and a fake, and the most inexperienced woman feels this instinctively. Ella had never experienced clitoral orgasm before Paul, and she told him so, and he was delighted. 'Well, you are a virgin in something, Ella, at least.' But when she told him she had never experienced what she insisted on calling 'a real orgasm' to anything like the same depth before him, he involuntarily frowned, and remarked: 'Do you know that there are eminent physiologists who say women have no physical basis for vaginal orgasm?'
'Then they don't know much, do they?' And so, as time went on, the emphasis shifted in their love-making from the real orgasm to the clitoral orgasm, and there came a point when Ella realised (and quickly refused to think about it) that she was no longer having real orgasms. That was just before the end, when Paul left her. In short, she knew emotionally what the truth was when her mind would not admit it.
It was just before the end, too, that Paul told her something which (since in bed he preferred her having clitoral orgasm) she simply shrugged away as another symptom of this man's divided personality-since the tone of the story, his way of telling it, contradicted what she in fact was experiencing with him.
'Something happened at the hospital today that would have amused you,' he said. They were sitting in the dark parked car outside Julia's. She slid across to be near him, and he put his arm around her. She could feel his body shaking with laughter. 'As you know, our august hospital gives lectures every fortnight for the benefit of the staff. Yesterday it was announced that Professor Bloodrot would lecture us on the orgasm in the female swan.' Ella instinctively moved away, and he pulled her back, and said: 'I knew you were going to do that. Sit still and listen. The hall was full-I don't have to tell you. The professor stood up, all six foot three of him, like a buckled foot-rule, with his little white beard wagging, and said he had conclusively proved that female swans do not have an orgasm. He would use this useful scientific discovery as a basis for a short discussion on the nature of the female orgasm in general.' Ella laughed. 'Yes, and I knew you would laugh at just that point. But I haven't finished. It was noticeable that at this point there was a disturbance in the hall. People were getting up to leave. The venerable professor, looking annoyed, said that he trusted that this subject would not be found offensive to anyone. After all, research into sexuality, as distinct from superstition about sex, was being conducted in all hospitals of this type throughout the world. But still, people were leaving. Who was leaving? All the women. There were about fifty men, and about fifteen women. And every one of those lady doctors had got up and were going out as if they had been given an order. Our professor was very put out. He stuck out his little beard in front of him, and said that he was surprised his lady colleagues, for whom he had such a respect, were capable of such prudery. But it was no use, there wasn't a woman in sight. At which our professor cleared his throat and announced he would continue his lecture, despite the deplorable attitude of the female doctors. It was his opinion, he said, based on his researches into the nature of the female swan, that there was no physiological basis for a vaginal orgasm in women... no, don't move away, Ella, really women are most extraordinarily predictable. I was sitting next to Dr Penworthy, father of five, and he whispered to me that it was very strange- usually the professor's wife, being a lady of great public-mindedness, was present at her husband's little talks, but she had not come that day. At this point I committed an act of disloyalty to my sex. I followed the women out of the hall. They had all vanished. Very strange, not a woman in sight. But at last I found my old friend Stephanie, drinking coffee in the canteen. I sat down beside her. She was definitely very withdrawn from me. I said: 'Stephanie, why have you all left our great professor's definitive lecture on sex?" She smiled at me very hostile and with great sweetness and said: "But my dear Paul, women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex." It took me half an hour's hard work and three cups of coffee to make my friend Stephanie like me again.' He was laughing again, holding her inside his arm. He turned to look at her face, and said: 'Yes. Well don't be angry with me too, just because I am the same sex as the professor-that's what I said to Stephanie too.' Ella's anger dissolved and she laughed with him. She was thinking: Tonight he'll come up with me. Whereas until recently he had spent nearly every night with her, now he went home two or three nights a week. He said, apparently at random: 'Ella, you're the least jealous woman I've ever known.' Ella felt a sudden chill, then panic, then the protective mechanism worked fast: She simply did not hear what he had said, and asked: 'Are you coming up with me?' He said: 'I'd decided not to. But if I had really decided I wouldn't be sitting here, would I?' They went upstairs, holding hands. He remarked: 'I wonder how you and Stephanie would get on?' She thought that his look at her was strange, 'as if he's testing something.' Again the small panic, while she thought, he talks a great deal about Stephanie these days, I wonder if... Then her mind went dim, and she said: 'I've got some supper ready if you'd like it.'
They ate, and he looked over at her and said: 'And you're such a good cook too. What am I going to do with you, Ella?'
'What you are doing now,' she said.
He was watching her, with a look of desperate, despairing humour that she saw very often now. 'And I've not succeeded in changing you in the slightest. Not even your clothes or the way you do your hair.'
This was a recurrent battle between them. He would move her hair this way and that about her head, pull the stuff of her dress into a different line, and say: 'Ella, why do you insist on looking like a rather severe school-mistress? God knows, you're not remotely like that.' He would bring her a blouse cut low, or show her a dress in a shop window, and say: 'Why don't you buy a dress like that?'
But Ella continued to wear her black hair tied back, and refused the startling clothes he liked. At the back of her mind was the thought: He complains now that I'm not satisfied with him and I want another man. What would he think if I started to wear sexy clothes? If I made myself very glamorous he'd not be able to bear it. It's bad enough as it is.
She once said, laughing at him: 'But Paul, you bought me that red blouse. It's cut to show the top of my breasts. But when I put it on, you came into the room, and came right over and buttoned it up-you did it instinctively.'
Tonight he came over to her and untied her hair and let it fall loose. Gazing close into her face, frowning, he teased out fronds of hair over her forehead, and arranged it around her neck. She allowed him to do as he liked, remaining quiet under the warmth of his hands, smiling at him. Suddenly she thought: He's comparing me with someone, he's not seeing me at all. She moved away from him, quickly, and he said: 'Ella, you could be a really beautiful woman if you would let yourself be.'
She said: 'So you don't think I'm beautiful then?' He half-groaned, half-laughed, and pulled her down on to the bed. 'Obviously not,' he said. 'Well then,' she said, smiling and confident.
It was that night that he remarked, almost casually, that he had been offered a job in Nigeria, and was thinking of going. Ella heard him, but almost absentmindedly; accepting the off-hand tone he imposed on the situation. Then she realised a pit of dismay had opened in her stomach and that something final was happening. Yet she insisted on thinking, Well it will solve everything. I can go with him. There's nothing to keep me here. Michael could go to some kind of school there. And what have I here to keep me?
It was true. Lying in the darkness, inside Paul's arms, she thought that those arms had slowly, over the years, shut out everyone else. She went out very little, because she did not enjoy going out by herself, and because she had accepted, very early on, that to go out together into company meant more trouble than it was worth. Either Paul was jealous, or he said he was odd-man-out among her literary friends. At which Ella would say: 'They aren't friends, they are acquaintances.' She had no vital connection with anyone but her son, Paul, and Julia. Julia would keep, it was a friendship for life. So now she said: 'I can come with you, can't I?' He hesitated, and said, laughing: 'But you don't want to give up all your exciting literary goings-on in London?' She told him he was quite crazy, and began making plans to go.
One day she went with him to his home. His wife and children were away on holiday. It was after a film they had just seen together, and he had said he wanted to pick up a clean shirt. He pulled his car up outside a small house, in a row of identical houses in a suburb off to the north of Shepherd's Bush. Children's toys lay abandoned over a small patch of neat garden.
'I keep telling Muriel about the kids,' he said, irritated. They really can't leave their things lying about like this.'
This was the moment that she understood this was his home.
'Well, come in a moment,' he said. She did not want to go inside, but she followed him. The hall had a conventional flowered wallpaper and a dark sideboard and a strip of pretty carpet. For some reason it comforted Ella. The living-room came from a different epoch of taste: it had three different wallpapers and discordant curtains and cushions. Evidently it had just been done up; it still had the look of being on show. It was depressing, and Ella followed Paul into the kitchen on his search for the clean shirt, on this occasion a medical journal he needed. The kitchen was the used room of the house, and was shabby. But one wall had been covered with red wallpaper, so it seemed that this room, too, was in the process of being transformed. On the kitchen table were stacked dozens of copies of Women at Home. Ella felt she had been delivered a direct blow; but told herself that after all she worked for this nasty snobbish magazine, and what right had she to sneer at people who read it? She told herself that she knew no one who was absorbed heart and soul in the work they did; everyone seemed to work reluctantly, or with cynicism, or with a divided mind, so she was no worse than everyone else. But it was no use; there was a small television set in a corner of the kitchen, and she imagined the wife sitting here, night after night, reading Women at Home or looking at the television set and listening for the children upstairs. Paul saw her standing there, fingering the magazines and examining the room, and remarked, with his familiar grim humour: 'This is her house, Ella. To do as she likes in. It's surely the least I can do.'
'Yes, it's the least.'
'Yes. It must be upstairs,' and Paul left the kitchen and started upstairs, saying over his shoulder: 'Well come up, then?' She wondered: Is he showing me his home in order to demonstrate something? Because he wants to tell me something? He doesn't know I hate being here?
But she again obediently followed him up and into the bedroom. This room was different again, and had evidently been exactly as it was now for a long time. It had twin beds, on either side of a neat little table on which was a big framed photograph of Paul. The colours were green and orange and black, with a great many restless zebra stripes-the 'jazz' era in furnishing, twenty-five years after its birth. Paul had found his magazine, which was on the bedside table, and was ready to leave again. Ella said: 'One of these days I'll get a letter, handed on by Dr West. "Dear Dr Allsop. Please tell me what to do. Lately I can't sleep at nights. I've been drinking hot milk before going to bed and trying to keep a relaxed mind, but it doesn't help. Please advise me, Muriel Tanner. P. S. I forgot to mention, my husband wakes me early, about six o'clock, coming in from working late at the hospital. Sometimes he doesn't come home all week. I get low in my spirits. This has been going on five years now." '
Paul listened, with a sober, sad face. 'It's been no secret to you,' he said at last, 'that I'm not exactly proud of myself as a husband.'
'For God's sake, why don't you put an end to it then?'
'What!' he exclaimed, half-laughing already, and back in his role as a rake, 'abandon the poor woman with two children?'
'She might get herself a man who cared for her. Don't tell me you'd mind if she did. Surely you don't like the idea of her living like this?'
He answered seriously: 'I've told you, she's a very simple woman. You always assume other people are like you. Well they aren't. She likes watching television and reading Women at Home and sticking bits of wallpaper on the walls. And she's a good mother.'
'And she doesn't mind not having a man?'
'For all I know she has, I've never enquired,' he said, laughing again.
'Oh well, I don't know!' said Ella, completely dispirited, following him downstairs again. She left the discordant little house thankfully, as if escaping from a trap; and she looked down the street and thought that probably they were all like this, all in fragments, not one of them a whole, reflecting a whole life, a whole human being; or, for that matter, a whole family. 'What you don't like,' said Paul, as they drove off, 'is that Muriel might be happy living like this.'
'How can she be?'
'I asked her some time ago, if she'd like to leave me. She could go back to her parents, if she wanted. She said no. Besides, she'd be lost without me.'
'Good Lord!' said Ella, disgusted and afraid.
'It's true, I'm a sort of father, she depends on me completely.'
'But she never sees you.'
'I'm nothing if not efficient,' he said, shortly. 'When I go home I deal with everything. The gas heaters, and the electricity bill and where to buy a cheap carpet, and what to do about the children's school. Everything.' When she did not reply he insisted: 'I've told you before, you're a snob, Ella. You can't stand the fact that maybe it's how she likes to live.'
'No, I can't. And I don't believe it. No woman in the world wants to live without love.'
'You're such a perfectionist. You're an absolutist. You measure everything against some kind of ideal that exists in your head, and if it doesn't come up to your beautiful notions then you condemn it out of hand. Or you pretend to yourself that it's beautiful even when it isn't.'
Ella thought: He means us; and Paul was already going on: 'For instance-Muriel might just as well say of you: Why on earth does she put up with being my husband's mistress, what security is there in that? And it's not respectable.'
'Oh, security!'
'Oh, quite so. You say, scornfully, Oh, security! Oh, respectability! But Muriel wouldn't. They're very important to her. They're very important to most people.'
It occurred to Ella that he sounded angry and even hurt. It occurred to her that he identified himself with his wife (and yet all his tastes, when he was with her, Ella, were different) and that security and respectability were important to him also.
She was silent, thinking: If he really likes living like that, or at least, needs it, it would explain why he's always dissatisfied with me. The other side of the sober respectable little wife is the smart, gay, sexy mistress. Perhaps he really would like it if I were unfaithful to him and wore tarty clothes. Well I won't. This is what I am, and if he doesn't like it he can lump it.
Later that evening he said, laughing, but aggressive: 'It would do you good, Ella, to be like other women.'
'What do you mean?'
'Waiting at home, the wife, trying to keep your man against the other woman. Instead of having a lover at your feet.'
'Oh, is that where you are?' she said, ironically. 'But why do you see marriage as a kind of fight? I don't see it as a battle.'
'You don't!' he said, ironical in his turn. And after a pause: 'You've just written a novel about suicide.'
'What's that got to do with it?'
'All that intelligent insight...' He checked himself and sat looking at her, rueful and critical and-Ella thought, condemning. They were up in her little room, high under the roof, the child sleeping next door, the remains of the meal she had cooked on the low table between them, as they had been a thousand times. He turned a glass of wine between his fingers and said, in pain: 'I don't know how I'd have got through the last months without you.'
'What's happened particularly the last few months?'
'Nothing. That's the point. It all goes on and on. Well, in Nigeria I won't be patching up old sores, wounds on a mangy lion. That's my work, putting ointment on the wounds of an old animal that hasn't the vitality any more to heal itself. At least in Africa I'll be working for something new and growing.'
He went to Nigeria with unexpected suddenness. Unexpected, at least, to Ella. They were still talking of it as something that would happen in the future when he came in to say he was leaving next day. The plans for how she would join him were necessarily vague, until he knew the conditions there. She saw him off at the airport, as if she would be meeting him again in a few weeks. Yet after he had kissed her good-bye, he turned with a small bitter nod and a twisted smile, a sort of a painful grimace of his whole body, and suddenly Ella felt the tears running down her face, and she was cold with loss in every nerve. She was unable to stop crying, to prevent the cold that made her shiver, steadily, for days afterwards. She wrote letters, and made plans, but it was from inside a shadow that slowly deepened over her. He wrote once, saying it was impossible to say definitely yet how she and Michael could come out to join him; and then there was silence.
One afternoon she was working with Dr West, over a pile of the usual letters, and he remarked: 'I had a letter from Paul Tanner yesterday.'
'Did you?' Dr West, so far as she knew, did not know of her relationship with Paul.
'Sounds as if he's liking it out there, so I suppose he'll take his family out.' He carefully clipped some letters together for his own pile, and went on: 'Just as well he went, I gather. He told me just before he left he'd got himself involved with a pretty flighty piece. Heavily involved, it sounded. She didn't sound much good to me.'
Ella made herself breathe normally, examined Dr West, and decided that this was just casual gossip about a mutual friend, and not meant to wound her. She took up a letter he had handed her, which began: 'Dear Dr Allsop, I'm writing to you about my little boy who is walking in his sleep...' and said: 'Dr West, surely this is your province?' For this amiable battle had continued, unchanged, for all the years they had worked together. 'No, Ella, it is not. If a child walks in its sleep, it's no good my prescribing medicines, and you'd be the first to blame me if I did. Tell the woman to go to the clinic and suggest tactfully that it's her fault and not the child's. Well, I don't have to tell you what to say.' He took up another letter and said: 'I told Tanner to stay out of England as long as possible. These things are not always easy to break off. The young lady was pestering him to marry her. A not-so-young lady, actually. That was the trouble. I suppose she'd got tired of a gay life and wanted to settle down.'
Ella made herself not-think about this conversation until she had completed the division of letters with Dr West. Well, I've been naive, she decided at last. I suppost he was having an affair with Stephanie at the hospital. At least, he never mentioned anyone but Stephanie, he was always talking about her. But he never spoke of her in that tone, 'flighty piece.' No that's the Wests' language, they use idiotic phrases like flighty piece and getting tired of a gay life. How extraordinarily common these respectable middle-class people are.
Meanwhile she was deeply depressed; and the shadow that she had been fighting off since Paul had left engulfed her completely. She thought about Paul's wife: she must have felt like this, this complete rejection, when Paul lost interest in her. Well at least she, Ella, had had the advantage of being too stupid to realise that Paul was having an affair with Stephanie. But perhaps Muriel had also chosen to be stupid- had chosen to believe that Paul spent so many nights at the hospital?
Ella had a dream which was unpleasant and disturbing. She was in the ugly little house, with its little rooms that were all different from each other. She was Paul's wife, and only by an effort of will could she prevent the house disintegrating, and flying off in all directions because of the conflict between the rooms. She decided she must furnish the whole house again, in one style, hers. But as soon as she hung new curtains or painted a room out, Muriel's room was re-created. Ella was like a ghost in this house and she realised it would hold together, somehow, as long as Muriel's spirit was in it and it was holding together precisely because every room belonged to a different epoch, a different spirit. And Ella saw herself standing in the kitchen, her hand on the pile of Women at Home; she was a 'sexy piece' (she could hear the words being said, by Dr West) with a tight coloured skirt and a very tight jersey and her hair was cut fashionably. And Ella realised that Muriel was not there after all, she had gone to Nigeria to join Paul, and Ella was waiting in the house until Paul came back.
When Ella woke after this dream she was crying. It occurred to her, for the first time, that the woman from whom Paul had had to separate himself, for whom he had gone to Nigeria, because he had at all costs to separate himself from her, was herself. She was the flighty piece.
She understood alsp that Dr West had spoken deliberately, perhaps because of some phrase in Paul's letter to him; it was a warning from the respectable world of Dr West, protecting one of its members, to Ella.
Strangely enough, the shock was enough, for a while at least, to break the power of the depressive mood that had held her for months now in its dark grip. She swung over into a mood of bitter, angry defiance. She told Julia that Paul had 'ditched her,' and that she had been a fool not to see it before (and Julia's silence said she agreed with Ella completely). She said that she had no intention of sitting around and crying about it.
Without knowing that she had been unconsciously planning to do this, she went out and bought herself new clothes. They were not the 'sexy' clothes Paul had urged on her, but they were different from any clothes she had worn before, and fitted her new personality, which was rather hard, casual, and indifferent-or at least, so she believed. And she had her hair cut, so it was in a soft provocative shape around her small pointed face. And she decided to leave Julia's house. It was the house she had lived in with Paul, and she could no longer stand it.
Very cool, clear and efficient, she found herself a new flat and settled into it. It was a large flat, much too large for the child and herself. It was only after she had settled in it she understood the extra space was for a man. For Paul, in fact, and she was still living as if he were returning to her.
Then she heard, quite by chance, that Paul had returned to England for leave and had been here already for two weeks. On the night of the day she heard this news, she found herself dressed and made-up, her hair carefully done, standing at the window looking down into the street, and waiting for him. She waited until long after midnight, thinking: His work at the hospital might easily keep him as late as this, I mustn't go to bed too early, because he'll see the lights are out, and not come up, for fear of waking me.
She stood there, night after night. She could see herself standing there, and said to herself: This is madness. This is being mad. Being mad is not being able to stop yourself doing something that you know to be irrational. Because you know Paul will not come. And yet she continued to dress herself and to stand for hours at the window, waiting, every night. And, standing there and looking at herself, she could see how this madness was linked with the madness that had prevented her from seeing how the affair would inevitably end, the naivety that had made her so happy. Yes, the stupid faith and naivety and trust had led, quite logically, into her standing at the window waiting for a man whom she knew, quite well, would never come to her again.
After some weeks, she heard from Dr West, apparently casually, though with a hidden triumphant malice, that Paul had gone back to Nigeria again. 'His wife wouldn't go with him,' said Dr West. 'She doesn't want to uproot herself. Perfectly happy where she is, apparently.'
The trouble with this story is that it is written in terms of analysis of the laws of dissolution of the relationship between Paul and Ella. I don't see any other way to write it. As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern. And the pattern of an affair, even one that has lasted five years and has been as close as a marriage, is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn't think like that at all.
Supposing I were to write it like this: two full days, in every detail, one at the beginning of the affair, and one towards the end? No, because I would still be instinctively isolating and emphasising the factors that destroyed the affair. It is that which would give the thing its shape. Otherwise it would be chaos, because these two days, separated by many months in time, would have no shadow over them, but would be records of a simple unthinking happiness with perhaps a couple of jarring moments (which in fact would be reflections of the approaching end but would not be felt like that at the time) but moments swallowed in the happiness.
Literature is analysis after the event.
The form of that other piece, about what happened in Mashopi, is nostalgia. There is no nostalgia in this piece, about Paul and Ella, but the form is a kind of pain.
To show a woman loving a man one should show her cooking a meal for him or opening a bottle of wine for the meal, while she waits for his ring at the door. Or waking in the morning before he does to see his face change from the calm of sleep into a smile of welcome. Yes. To be repeated a thousand times. But that isn't literature. Probably better as a film. Yes, the physical quality of life, that's living, and not the analysis afterwards, or the moments of discord or premonition. A shot in a film: Ella slowly peeling an orange, handing Paul yellow segments of the fruit, which he takes, one after another, thoughtfully, frowning: he is thinking of something else.