The Golden Notebook

  (At this point Ella became herself, one person, both of them thinking as one.)

  She lay beside him, controlling physical disappointment, smiling.

  “Oh boy!” he said, contented. “That’s what I like. No problems with you.”

  She thought this one out slowly, her arms around him. Then he began talking of his wife, apparently at random. “Do you know what? We go to the club, dancing, two, three nights a week. You know, that’s the best club in the town. All the boys look at me and think, lucky bastard! She’s the prettiest girl there, even after five kids. They are thinking we have a whale of a time. Oh boy, and sometimes I think, suppose I told them—we have five kids. And we’ve had it five times since we married. Well, I’m exaggerating, but that’s about it. She’s not interested, though she looks as if she is.”

  “What’s the trouble?” asked Ella, demure.

  “Search me. Before we got married, when we were dating, she was hot enough then. Oh boy, when I think!”

  “How long were you—dating?”

  “Three years. Then we got engaged. Four years.”

  “And you never made love?”

  “Made love—oh, I see. No, she wouldn’t let me, and I wouldn’t have wanted her to. But everything but. And she was hot then, boy, when I think! And then on the honeymoon she froze up. And now I never touch her. Well if we’re tight after a party sometimes.” He let out his youthful energetic laugh, throwing his large brown legs up and letting them fall. “And we go dancing, she’s all dressed to kill, and all the boys looking at her and envying me, and I think: if they just knew!”

  “Don’t you mind?”

  “Hell, of course I mind. But I’m not going to force myself on anyone. That’s what I like about you—let’s go to bed, you say, and that’s fine and easy. I like you.”

  She lay beside him, smiling. His large healthy body was pulsing with well-being. He said: “Wait a while, I’ll make it again. Out of practice, I guess.”

  “Do you have other women?”

  “Sometimes. When I get the chance. I don’t chase any. Haven’t the time.”

  “Too busy getting where you want to go?”

  “That’s right.”

  He put his hand down and felt himself.

  “You wouldn’t rather I did that?”

  “What? You don’t mind?”

  “Mind?” she said, smiling, lying on her elbow beside him.

  “Hell, my wife won’t touch me. Women don’t like it.” He let out another whoop of laughter. “You don’t mind then?”

  After a moment, his face changed into wondering sensuality. “Hell,” he said. “Hell. Oh boy!”

  She made him big, taking her time; and then said: “And now, don’t be in such a hurry.”

  He frowned in thought; Ella could see him thinking this out; well, he wasn’t stupid—but she was wondering about his wife, about the other women he had had. He came into her; and Ella was thinking: I’ve never done this before—I’m giving pleasure. Extraordinary; I’ve never used the phrase before, or even thought of it. With Paul, I went into the dark and ceased to think. The essence of this is, I’m conscious, skilled, discreet—I’m giving pleasure. It has nothing to do with what I had with Paul. But I’m in bed with this man and this is intimacy. His flesh moved in hers, too fast, unsubtle. Again she did not come, and he was roaring with delight, kissing her and shouting: “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!”

  Ella was thinking: But with Paul, I would have come in that time—so what’s wrong?—it’s not enough to say, I don’t love this man? She understood suddenly that she would never come with this man. She thought: for women like me, integrity isn’t chastity, it isn’t fidelity, it isn’t any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven’t any control over. I could never have an orgasm with this man, I can give pleasure and that’s all. But why not? Am I saying that I can never come except with a man I love? Because what sort of a desert am I condemning myself to if that’s true?

  He was enormously pleased with her, generously appreciative, glistening with well-being. And Ella was delighted with herself, that she could make him so happy.

  When she had dressed to go home, and was telephoning for a taxi, he said: “I wonder what it would be like, being married to someone like you—hell!”

  “You’d enjoy it?” asked Ella, demure.

  “It’d be—man! a woman you can talk to, and have such fun in the sack too—man, I can’t even imagine it!”

  “Don’t you talk to your wife?”

  “She’s a fine girl,” he said soberly. “I think the world of her and of the kids.”

  “Is she happy?”

  This question so surprised him that he leaned up on his elbow to consider it and her—he was frowning with seriousness. Ella found herself liking him enormously; she sat dressed, on the side of the bed, liking him. He said, after thinking it out: “She’s got the best house in the town. She’s got everything she ever asks for, for the house. She’s got five boys—I know she wants a girl, but perhaps next time…She has a fine time with me—we go out dancing once or twice a week, and she’s always the smartest girl wherever we go. And she’s got me—and I’m telling you Ella, I don’t mean to boast, I can see from your smile when I say it—but she’s got a man who’s doing pretty well.”

  Now he lifted down the photograph of his wife from where it stood by the bed and said: “Does she look like an unhappy woman?” Ella looked at the pretty little face and said: “No, she doesn’t.” She added: “I could no more understand a woman like your wife than fly.”

  “No, I don’t think you would, at that.”

  The taxi was waiting; and Ella kissed him and left, after he had said: “I’ll ring you tomorrow. Boy, but I want to see you again.”

  Ella spent the following evening with him. Not out of any promise of pleasure, but out of liking. And besides, she felt that if she refused to see him, he might be hurt.

  They had dinner again, and in the same restaurant. (“This is our restaurant, Ella,” he said sentimentally; as he might have said: “This is our tune, Ella.”)

  He talked about his career.

  “And when you’ve passed all your examinations and attended all the conferences, what then?”

  “I’m going to try for Senator.”

  “Why not President?”

  He laughed with her, at himself, good-natured as always. “No, not President. But Senator—yes. I tell you, Ella, you watch for my name. You’ll find it, fifteen years’ time, head of my profession. I’ve done everything I said I would do up till now, haven’t I? So I know what I’ll do in the future. Senator Cy Maitland, Wyoming. Want to bet?”

  “I never make bets I know I’ll lose.”

  He was leaving for the States again next day. He had interviewed a dozen top doctors in his field, seen a dozen hospitals, attended four conferences. He was finished with England.

  “I’d like to go to Russia,” he said. “But I can’t, not with things as they are now.”

  “You mean McCarthy?”

  “You’ve heard of him then?”

  “Well, yes, we’ve heard of him.”

  “Those Russians, they’re pretty well up in my field, I read them up, I wouldn’t mind a trip, but not with things as they are.”

  “When you’re Senator, what’ll your attitude be to McCarthy?”

  “My attitude? You’re kidding me again?”

  “Not at all.”

  “My attitude—well, he’s right, we can’t have the Reds taking over.”

  Ella hesitated, then said, demure: “The woman I share a house with is a communist.”

  She felt him stiffen; then he thought; then he loosened again. He said: “I know things are different here with you. I don’t get it, I don’t mind telling you that.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter.”

  “No. You coming back to the hotel with me?”

  “If you like.”

  “If I like!”

  Again, she
gave pleasure. She liked him, and that was all.

  They talked about his work. He specialised in leucotomies: “Boy, I’ve cut literally hundreds of brains in half?”

  “It doesn’t bother you, what you’re doing?”

  “Why should it?”

  “But you know when you’ve finished that operation, it’s final, the people are never the same again?”

  “But that’s the idea, most of them don’t want to be the same again.” Then, with the fairness which characterised him, he added: “But I’ll admit it, sometimes when I think, I’ve done hundreds, and it is pretty final.”

  “The Russians wouldn’t approve of you at all,” said Ella.

  “No. That’s why I wouldn’t mind a trip, to find out what they do instead. Tell me, how come you know about leucotomies?”

  “I once had an affair with a psychiatrist. He was a neurologist too. But not a brain surgeon—he told me he never recommended leucotomies—except very rarely.”

  He suddenly said: “Ever since I told you I was a specialist in that operation you haven’t liked me as much.”

  She said, after a pause: “No. But I can’t help it.”

  Then he laughed, and said: “Well, I can’t help it either.” Then he said: “You say, I once had an affair, just like that?”

  Ella had been thinking that when she used the phrase, of Paul: I once had an affair, it was the exact equivalent of his “a pretty flighty piece”—or whatever the words were he had used that meant the same. She found herself thinking, involuntarily: Good! he said I was like that! Well, I am, and I’m glad of it.

  Cy Maitland was saying: “Did you love him?”

  The word love had not been used before between them; he had not used it in connection with his wife.

  She said: “Very much.”

  “You don’t want to get married?”

  She said, demurely: “Every woman wants to get married.”

  He gave a snort of laughter; and then turned to look at her, shrewd. “I don’t get you, Ella, you know that? I don’t understand you at all. But I understand you are a pretty independent sort of woman.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I am.”

  Now he put his arms around her and said: “Ella, you’ve taught me things.”

  “I’m glad. I hope they were pleasant.”

  “Well, yes, they were too.”

  “Good.”

  “You kidding me?”

  “Just a little.”

  “That’s all right, I don’t mind. You know Ella, I mentioned your name to someone today and they said you had written a book?”

  “Everyone has written a book.”

  “If I told my wife I’d met a real writer, she’d never get over it, she’s mad about culture and that kind of thing.”

  “But perhaps you’d better not tell her.”

  “What if I read your book?”

  “But you don’t read books.”

  “I can read,” he said, good-humoured. “What’s it about?”

  “Well…let me see. It’s full of insight and integrity and one thing and another.”

  “You don’t take it seriously?”

  “Of course I take it seriously.”

  “O.K. then. O.K. You’re not going?”

  “I have to—my son’ll wake up in about four hours from now, and unlike you, I need to sleep.”

  “O.K. I won’t forget you, Ella. I wonder what it would be like, married to you.”

  “I’ve got a feeling you wouldn’t like it very much.”

  She was dressing; he lay at ease in bed, watching her, shrewd and thoughtful.

  “Then I wouldn’t like it,” he said and laughed, stretching his arms. “I probably wouldn’t at that.”

  “No.”

  They parted, with affection.

  She went home in a taxi, and crept up the stairs so as not to disturb Julia. But there was a light under Julia’s door, and she called out: “Ella?”

  “Yes. Was Michael all right?”

  “Not a cheep out of him. How was it?”

  “Interesting,” said Ella, with deliberation.

  “Interesting?”

  Ella went into the bedroom. Julia lay propped on pillows, smoking and reading. She examined Ella, thoughtfully.

  Ella said: “He was a very nice man.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And I’m going to be extremely depressed in the morning. In fact I can feel it coming on already.”

  “Because he’s going back to the States?”

  “No.”

  “You look terrible. What’s the matter, wasn’t he any good in bed?”

  “Not much.”

  “Oh well,” said Julia, tolerant. “Have a cigarette?”

  “No. I’m going to sleep before it hits me.”

  “It’s hit you already. Why do you go to bed with a man who doesn’t attract you?”

  “I didn’t say he didn’t attract me. The point is, there’s no use my going to bed with anyone but Paul.”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “Yes, of course. But it takes a long time.”

  “You must persevere,” said Julia.

  “I intend to,” said Ella. She said good night and went up to her rooms.

  15th September, 1954

  Last night Michael said (I had not seen him for a week): “Well, Anna, and so our great love affair is coming to an end?” Characteristic of him that it is a question mark: he is bringing it to an end, but talks as if I am. I said, smiling but ironical in spite of myself: “But at least it has been a great love affair?” He, then: “Ah, Anna, you make up stories about life and tell them to yourself, and you don’t know what is true and what isn’t.” “And so we haven’t had a great love affair?” This was breathless and pleading; though I had not meant it. I felt a terrible dismay and coldness at his words, as if he were denying my existence. He said, whimsically: “If you say we have, then we have. And if you say not, then not.” “So what you feel doesn’t count?” “Me? But Anna, why should I count?” (This was bitter, mocking, but affectionate.) Afterwards I fought with a feeling that always takes hold of me after one of these exchanges: unreality, as if the substance of my self were thinning and dissolving. And then I thought how ironical it was that in order to recover myself I had to use precisely that Anna which Michael dislikes most; the critical and thinking Anna. Very well then; he says I make up stories about our life together. I shall write down, as truthfully as I can, every stage of a day. Tomorrow. When tomorrow ends I shall sit down and write.

  17th September, 1954

  I could not write last night because I was too unhappy. And now of course I am wondering if the fact that I chose to be very conscious of everything that happened yesterday changed the shape of the day. That just because I was conscious I made it a special day? However, I shall write it and see how it looks. I woke early, about five, tensed, because I thought I heard Janet move in the room through the wall. But she must have moved and gone to sleep again. A grey stream of water on the windowpane. The light grey. The shapes of furniture enormous in the vague light. Michael and I were lying facing the window, I with my arms around him under his pyjama jacket, my knees tucked into the angle of his knees. A fierce healing warmth from him to me. I thought: Very soon now he won’t come back. Perhaps I’ll know it is the last time, perhaps not. Perhaps this is the last time? But it seemed impossible to associate the two feelings: Michael warm in my arms, asleep; and knowing that soon he would not be there. I moved my hand up and the hair on his breast was slippery yet rough against my palm. It gave me intense delight. He started up, feeling me awake, and said sharply: “Anna, what is it?” His voice came out of a dream, it was frightened and angry. He turned on his back, and was asleep again. I looked at his face to see the shadow of the dream on it; his face was clenched up. Once he said, waking abrupt and frightened out of a dream: “My dear Anna, if you insist on sleeping with a man who is the history of Europe over the last twenty years, you mustn’t comp
lain if he has uneasy dreams.” This was resentful: the resentment was because I wasn’t part of that history. Yet I know that one of the reasons he is with me is that I wasn’t part of it, and haven’t had something destroyed in me. This morning I looked at the tight sleeping face and again tried to imagine it, so that it was part of my own experience, what it would mean: “Seven of my family, including my mother and father, were murdered in the gas chambers. Most of my close friends are dead: communists murdered by communists. The survivors are mostly refugees in strange countries. I shall live for the rest of my life in a country which will never really be my home.” But as usual, I failed to imagine it. The light was thick and heavy because of the rain outside. His face unclenched, relaxed. It was now broad, calm, assured. Calm sealed lids, and above them the lightly-marked, glossy brows. I could see him as a child, fearless, cocky, with a clear candid, alert smile. And I could see him old: he will be an irascible, intelligent, energetic old man, locked in a bitter intelligent loneliness. I was filled with an emotion one has, women have, about children: a feeling of fierce triumph: that against all odds, against the weight of death, this human being exists, here, a miracle of breathing flesh. I shored this feeling up, strengthened it, against the other one, that he would soon be leaving me. He must have felt it in his sleep, because he stirred and said: “Go to sleep, Anna.” He smiled, his eyes shut. The smile was strong and warm; out of another world than the one where he says: But Anna, why should I count? I felt “nonsense,” of course he won’t leave me; he can’t smile at me, like that, and mean to leave me. I lay down beside him, on my back. I was careful not to sleep, because very soon Janet would wake. The light in the room was like thin greyish water, moving, because of the streaming wet on the panes. The panes shook slightly. On windy nights they batter and shake, but I don’t wake. Yet I wake if Janet turns over in bed.

  It must be about six o’clock. My knees are tense. I realise that what I used to refer to, to Mother Sugar, as “the housewife’s disease” has taken hold of me. The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael’s-breakfast-don’t-forget-I’m-out-of-tea-etc.-etc. With this useless but apparently unavoidable tension resentment is also switched on. Resentment against what? An unfairness. That I should have to spend so much of my time worrying over details. The resentment focuses itself on Michael; although I know with my intelligence it has nothing to do with Michael. And yet I do resent him, because he will spend his day, served by secretaries, nurses, women in all kinds of capacities, who will take this weight off him. I try to relax myself, to switch off the current. But my limbs have started to ache, and I must turn over. There is another movement from beyond the wall—Janet is waking. Simultaneously, Michael stirs and I feel him growing big against my buttocks. The resentment takes the form: Of course he chooses now, when I am unrelaxed and listening for Janet. But the anger is not related to him. Long ago, in the course of the sessions with Mother Sugar, I learned that the resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time. I can see it in women’s faces, their voices, every day, or in the letters that come to the office. The woman’s emotion: resentment against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The lucky ones like me—fight it. It is a tiring fight. Michael takes me from behind, half asleep, fierce and close. He is taking me impersonally, and so I do not respond as I do when he is loving Anna. And besides with one half of my mind I am thinking how, if I hear Janet’s soft feet outside, I must be up and across the room to stop her coming in. She never comes in until seven; that is the rule; I do not expect her to come in; yet I have to be alert. While Michael grips me and fills me the noises next door continue, and I know he hears them too, and that part of the pleasure, for him, is to take me in hazard; that Janet, the little girl, the eight-year-old, represents for him partly women—other women, whom he betrays to sleep with me; and partly, child; the essence of child, against whom he is asserting his rights to live. He never speaks of his own children without a small, half-affectionate, half-aggressive laugh—his heirs, and his assassins. My child, a few feet away through the wall, he will not allow to cheat him of his freedom. When we are finished, he says: “And now, Anna, I suppose you are going to desert me for Janet?” And he sounds like a child who feels himself slighted for a younger brother or sister. I laugh and kiss him; although the resentment is suddenly so strong I clench my teeth against it. I control it, as always, by thinking: If I were a man I’d be the same. The control and discipline of being a mother came so hard to me, that I can’t delude myself that if I’d been a man, and not forced into self-control, I’d have been any different. And yet for the few moments it takes for me to put on the wrap to go into Janet, the resentment is like a raging poison. Before I go in to Janet I wash myself quickly between the legs so that the smell of sex may not disturb her, even though she doesn’t yet know what it is. I like the smell, and hate to wash it off so quickly; and the fact that I must adds to my bad temper. (I remember thinking that the fact I was deliberately watching all my reactions was exacerbating them; normally they would not be so strong.) Yet when I close Janet’s door behind me, and see her sitting up in bed, her black hair wild, in elflocks, her small pale face (mine) smiling, the resentment vanishes under the habit of discipline, and almost at once becomes affection. It is six-thirty and the little room is very cold. Janet’s window is also streaming with grey wet. I light the gas fire, while she sits up in bed, surrounded by bright patches of colour from her comics, watching me to see if I do everything as usual, and reading at the same time. I shrink, in affection, to Janet’s size, and become Janet. The enormous yellow fire like a great eye; the window, enormous, through which anything can enter; a grey and ominous light which waits for the sun, a devil or an angel, which will shake away the rain. Then I make myself be Anna: I see Janet, a small child in a big bed. A train passes, and the walls shake slightly. I go over to kiss her, and smell the good smell of warm flesh, and hair, and the stuff of her pyjamas, heated by sleep. While her room warms I go into the kitchen and prepare her breakfast—cereal, fried eggs and tea, on a tray. I take the tray back into her room, and she eats her breakfast sitting up in bed, and I drink tea and smoke. The house is dead still—Molly will be asleep for another two or three hours. Tommy came in late with a girl; they’ll be asleep too. Through the wall, a baby is crying. It gives me a feeling of continuity, of rest, the baby crying, as Janet once cried. It is the contented half-sleepy cry of a baby who has been fed and will be asleep in a moment. Janet says: “Why don’t we have another baby?” She says this often. And I say: “Because I haven’t got a husband and you must have a husband to get a baby.” She asks this question partly because she would like me to have a baby; and partly to be reassured about the role of Michael. Then she asks: “Is Michael here?” “Yes he is, and he is asleep,” I say firmly. My firmness reassures her; and she goes on with her breakfast. Now the room is warm, and she gets out of bed in her white sleeping suit, looking fragile and vulnerable. She puts her arms around my neck and swings on it, back and forth, singing: Rockabye baby. I swing her and sing—babying her, she has become the baby next door, the baby I won’t have. Then, abruptly, she lets me go, so that I feel myself spring up like a tree that has been bent over by a weight. She dresses herself, crooning, still half-drowsy, still peaceful. I think that she will retain the peace for years, until the pressure comes on her, and she must start thinking. In half an hour I must remember to cook the potatoes and then I must write a list for the grocer and then I must remember to change the collar on my dress and then…I want very much to protect her from the pressure, to postpone it; then I tell myself I must protect her from nothing, this need is really Anna wanting to protect Anna. She dresses slowly, chattering a little, humming; she has the lazy bumbling movements of a bee in the sun. She wears a short red pleated skirt and a dark
blue jersey and long dark blue socks. A pretty little girl. Janet. Anna. The baby is asleep next door; there is the silence of content from the baby. Everyone asleep save me and Janet. It is a feeling of intimacy and exclusiveness—a feeling that began when she was born, when she and I were awake together at times when the city slept around us. It is a warm, lazy, intimate gaiety. She seems to me so fragile that I want to put out my hand to save her from a wrong step, or a careless movement; and at the same time so strong that she is immortal. I feel what I felt with sleeping Michael, a need to laugh out in triumph, because of this marvellous, precarious, immortal human being, in spite of the weight of death.