The Golden Notebook (71 page)

brilliance. Yes, I suppose mottoes out of Christmas crackers is just.' 'Well, let's have them.' 'In the first place, you don't laugh enough Anna. I've been thinking. Girls laugh. Old women laugh. Women of your age don't laugh, you're all too damned occupied with the serious business of living.' 'But I was in fact laughing my head off-I was laughing about free women.' I told him the plot of my short story, he sat listening, smiling wryly. Then he said: 'That's not what I meant, I meant really laughing.' 'I'll put it on my agenda.' 'No, don't say it like that. Listen Anna, if we don't believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there's no hope for us. We're going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.' 'We've got to believe in our blueprints?' 'We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.' 'Right. What next?' 'Secondly, you can't go on like this, you've got to start writing again.' 'Obviously if I could, I would.' 'No, Anna, that's not good enough. Why don't you write that short story you've just told me about? No, I don't want all that hokum you usually give me-tell me, in one simple sentence, why not. You can call it Christmas cracker mottoes if you like, but while I was walking about I was thinking that if you could simplify it in your mind, boil it all down to something, then you could take a good long look at it and beat it.' I began to laugh, but he said: 'No, Anna, you're going to really crack up unless you do.' 'Very well then. I can't write that short story or any other, because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me.' 'Who? Do you know?' 'Of course I know. It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro's guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the F. L. N. Or Mr. Mathlong. They stand here in the room and they say, why aren't you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?' 'You know very well that's not what any of them would say.' 'No. But you know quite well what I mean. I know you do. It's the curse of all of us.' 'Yes, I do know. But Anna, I'm going to force you into writing. Take up a piece of paper and a pencil.' I laid a sheet of clean paper on the table, picked up a pencil and waited. 'It doesn't matter if you fail. Why are you so arrogant? Just begin.' My mind went blank in a sort of panic. I laid down the pencil. I saw him staring at me, willing me, forcing me-I picked up the pencil again. 'I'm going to give you the first sentence then. There are the two women you are, Anna. Write down: The two women were alone in the London flat.' 'You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?' 'Why say it like that? Write it, Anna.' I wrote it. 'You're going to write that book, you're going to write it, you're going to finish it' I said: 'Why is it so important to you that I should?' 'Ah,' he said, in self-mocking despair. 'A good question. Well, because if you can do it, then I can.' 'You want me to give you the first sentence of your novel?' 'Let's hear it.' 'On a dry hillside in Algeria, the soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle.' He smiled. 'I could write that, you couldn't.' 'Then write it.' 'On condition you give me your new notebook.' 'Why?' 'I need it. That's all.' 'All right.' 'I'm going to have to leave, Anna, you know that?' 'Yes.' 'Then cook for me. I never thought I'd say to a woman, cook for me. I regard the fact that I can say it at all as a small step towards what they refer to as being mature.' I cooked and we slept. This morning I woke first and his face, sleeping, was ill and thin. I thought it was impossible he should go, I couldn't let him, he was in no state to go. He woke, and I was fighting the desire to say: You can't go. I must look after you. I'll do anything if only you'll say you'll stay with me. I knew he was fighting his own weakness. I was wondering what would have happened if, all those weeks ago, he had not put up his arms around my neck unconsciously, in his sleep. I wanted, then, for him to put his arms up around my neck. I lay, fighting not to touch him, as he was fighting not to appeal to me, and I was thinking how extraordinary that an act of kindness, of pity, could be such a betrayal. My brain blacked out with exhaustion, and while it did, the pain of pity took me over and I cradled him in my arms, knowing it was a betrayal. He clung to me, immediately, for a second of genuine closeness. Then, at once, my falseness created his, for he murmured, in a child's voice: 'Ise a good boy,' not as he had ever whispered to his own mother, for those words could never have been his, they were out of literature. And he murmured them mawkishly, in parody. But not quite. Yet as I looked down at him, I saw his sharp ill face show first the sentimental falseness that went with the words; then a grimace of pain; then, seeing me look down, in horror, his grey eyes narrowed into a pure hating challenge, and we looked at each other helpless with our mutual shame and humiliation. Then his face relaxed. For a few seconds he slept, blacked out, as I had blacked out the moment before, just before I had bent to put my arms around him. Then he jerked himself out of sleep, all tenseness and fight, jerked himself out of my arms, glancing alert and efficient around the room for enemies, then stood up; all in one movement, so fast did these reactions follow each other. He said: 'We can't either of us ever go lower than that.' I said: 'No.' 'Well that's played out,' he said. 'Buttoned up and finished,' I said. He went up to pack his few things into his bag and cases. He came down again soon and leaned against the door of my big room. He was Saul Green. I saw Saul Green, the man who had walked into my flat some weeks before. He was wearing the new close-fitting clothes that he had bought to clothe his thinness. He was a neat, smallish man with over-big shoulders and the bones of a too-thin face standing out, insisting that this was a stocky, strong-fleshed body, that this would again be a strong, broad-shouldered man when he had worked through his illness into health. I could see standing beside the small, thin, fair man, with his soft brush of blond hair, his sick yellow face, a strong sturdy brown-fleshed man, like a shadow that would absorb the body that cast it. Meanwhile he looked stripped for action, pared down, light on his feet, wary. He stood, thumbs hooked in his belt, fingers arrowing down (but now it was like a gallant parody of a rake's stance) and he was sardonically challenging, his cool grey eyes on guard, but friendly enough. I felt towards him as if he were my brother, as if, like a brother, it wouldn't matter how we strayed from each other, how far apart we were, we would always be flesh of one flesh, and think each other's thoughts. He said: 'Write the first sentence for me in the book.' 'You want me to write it for you?' 'Yes, write it down.' 'Why?' 'You're part of the team.' 'I don't feel that. I hate teams.' 'You think about it then. There are a few of us around in the world, we rely on each other even though we don't know each other's names. But we rely on each other all the time. We're a team, we're the ones who haven't given in, who'll go on fighting. I tell you, Anna, sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O. K., then I won't have to write it.' 'All right, I'll write your first sentence for you.' 'Good. Write it, and I'll come back and get the book and say good-bye and I'll be on my way.' 'Where are you going?' 'You know quite well I don't know.' 'Sometime you're going to have to know.' 'All right, all right, but I'm not mature yet, have you forgotten?' 'Perhaps you'd better go back to America.' 'Why not? Love's the same the world over.' I laughed, and I went to the pretty new notebook, while he went off downstairs, and I wrote: 'On a dry hillside in Algeria, a soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle.' [Here Anna's handwriting ended, the golden notebook continued in Saul Green's handwriting, a short novel about the Algerian soldier. This soldier was a farmer who was aware that what he felt about life was not what he was expected to feel. By whom? By an invisible they, who might be God, or the State, or Law, or Order. He was captured, tortured by the French, escaped, rejoined the F. L. N., and found himself torturing, under orders to do so, French prisoners. He knew that he should feel something about this that he did not in fact feel. He discussed his state of mind late one night with one of the French prisoners whom he had tortured. The French prisoner was a young intellectual, a student of philosophy. This young man (the two men were talking secretly in the prisoner's cell) complained that he was in an intellectual prison-house. He recognised, had recognised for years, that he never had a thought, or an emotion, that didn't instantly fall into pigeon-holes, one marked 'Marx' and one marked 'Freud.' His thoughts and emotions were like marbles rolling into predetermined slots, he complained. The young Algerian soldier found this interesting, he didn't find that at all, he said, what troubled him-though of course it didn't really trouble him, and he felt it should-was that nothing he thought or felt was what was expected of him. The Algerian soldier said he envied the Frenchman-or rather, he felt he ought to be envying him. While the French student said he envied the Algerian from the bottom of his heart: he wished that just once, just once in his life, he felt or thought something that was his own, spontaneous, undirected, not willed on him by Grandfathers Freud and Marx. The voices of the two young men had risen more than was wise, particularly that of the French student, crying out against his situation. The Commanding Officer came in, found the Algerian talking, like a brother, with the prisoner he was supposed to be guarding. The Algerian soldier said: 'Sir, I did what I was ordered: I tortured this man. You did not tell me I should not talk with him.' The Commanding Officer decided that his man was some sort of a spy, probably recruited while he had been a prisoner. He ordered him to be shot. The Algerian soldier and the French student were shot together, on the hillside, with the rising sun in their faces, side by side, the next morning.] [This short novel was later published and did rather well.] Molly gets married and Anna has an affair When Janet first asked her mother if she could go to boarding-school, Anna was reluctant. She hated everything boarding-schools stood for. Having made enquiries about various 'progressive' schools, she talked to Janet again; but meanwhile the little girl had brought home a friend of hers, already at a conventional boarding-school, to help persuade her mother. The two children, bright-eyed and apprehensive that Anna might refuse, chattered about uniforms, dormitories, school outings and so on; and Anna understood that a 'progressive' school was just what Janet did not want. She was saying, in fact, 'I want to be ordinary, I don't want to be like you.' She had taken a look at the world of disorder, experiment, where people lived from day to day, like balls perpetually jigging on the top of jets of prancing water; keeping themselves open for any new feeling or adventure, and had decided it was not for her. Anna said: 'Janet, do you realise how different it will be from anything you've ever known? It means going for walks in crocodiles, like soldiers, and looking like everyone else, and doing things regularly at certain times. If you're not careful you're going to come out of it like a processed pea, just like everyone else.' 'Yes, I know,' said the thirteen-year-old, smiling. The smile said: I know you hate all that, but why should I? 'It will be a conflict for you.' 'I don't think it will,' said Janet, suddenly sullen, reacting away from the idea that she could ever accept her mother's way of life enough to be in conflict over it. Anna understood, when Janet had gone to school, how much she had depended on the discipline which having a child had enforced on her-getting up at a certain time in the morning, going to bed soon enough not to be tired because of having to get up early, arranging regular meals, organising her moods so as not to upset the child. She was alone in the enormous flat. She should move to a smaller one. She did not want to let rooms again, the idea of another experience like the one with Ronnie and Ivor frightened her. And it frightened her that it frightened her-what was happening to her, that she shrank from the complications of people, shrank from being involved? It was a betrayal of what she felt she ought to be. She compromised: she would stay in the flat another year; she would let a room; she would look around for a suitable job. Everything seemed to have changed. Janet was gone. Marion and Tommy, paid for by Richard, went off to Sicily, taking with them a large number of books on Africa. They intended to visit Dolci, to find out if they could, as Marion put it, 'be of any help to the poor thing. Do you know Anna, I keep a photograph of him on my desk all the time?' Molly was also alone in an empty house, having lost her son to her ex-husband's second wife. She invited Richard's sons to stay with her. Richard was delighted, although he still blamed Molly's life for his son's blindness. Molly entertained the boys while Richard went to Canada with his secretary to arrange the financing of three new steel mills. This trip was something like a honeymoon, since Marion had now agreed to a divorce. Anna discovered she was spending most of her time doing nothing at all; and decided the remedy for her condition was a man. She prescribed this for herself like a medicine. She was telephoned by a friend of Molly's she had no time for, because she was busy with Richard's sons. This man was Nelson, an American script-writer whom she had met at Molly's, and sometimes had dinner with. When he rang Anna he said: 'I must warn you against seeing me at all. I'm in danger of finding my wife impossible for the third time.' At dinner they talked mostly about politics. 'The difference between a red in Europe and a red in America is that in Europe a red is a communist; but in America he is a man who has never taken out a Party card out of caution or cowardice. In Europe you have communists and fellow-travellers. In America you have communists and ex-reds. I-and I insist on the difference, was a red. I don't want to get into any more trouble than I am in already. Well now I've denned my position, will you take me home with you tonight?' Anna was thinking: There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best. What's the use of always hankering after Michael? So she spent the night with Nelson. He was, as she soon