The Golden Notebook

‘You’re being inconsistent, mother,’ said Tommy, looking towards her, but not at her. He had this way of directing his gaze towards someone, but maintaining an inward-seeming stare. His face was heavy, almost stupid-looking, with the effort he was making to give everyone their due. ‘You know it’s not just a question of taking a job, is it? It means I’ve got to live like them.’ Richard shifted his legs and let out an explosive breath, but Tommy continued: ‘I don’t mean any criticism, father.’

‘If it’s not a criticism, what is it?’ said Richard, laughing angrily.

‘Not a criticism, just a value judgement,’ said Molly, triumphant.

‘Ah, hell,’ said Richard.

Tommy ignored them, and continued to address the part of the room in which his mother was sitting.

‘The thing is, for better or for worse, you’ve brought me up to believe in certain things, and now you say I might just as well go and take a job in Portmain’s. Why?’

‘You mean,’ said Molly, bitter with self-reproach, ‘why don’t I offer you something better?’

‘Perhaps there isn’t anything better. It’s not your fault—I’m not suggesting it is.’ This was said with a soft, deadly finality, so that Molly frankly and loudly sighed, shrugged and spread out her hands.

‘I wouldn’t mind being like your lot, it’s not that. I’ve been around listening to your friends for years and years now, you all of you seem to be in such a mess, or think you are even if you’re not,’ he said, knitting his brows, and bringing out every phrase after careful thought, ‘I don’t mind that, but it was an accident for you, you didn’t say to yourselves at some point: I am going to be a certain kind of person. I mean, I think that for both you and Anna there was a moment when you said, and you were even surprised, Oh, so I’m that kind of person, am I?’

Anna and Molly smiled at each other, and at him, acknowledging it was true.

‘Well then,’ said Richard jauntily. ‘That’s settled. If you don’t want to be like Anna and Molly, there’s the alternative.’

‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘I haven’t explained myself, if you can say that. No.’

‘But you’ve got to do something,’ cried Molly, not at all humorous, but sounding sharp and frightened.

‘You don’t,’ said Tommy, as if it were self-evident.

‘But you’ve just said you didn’t want to be like us,’ said Molly.

‘It’s not that I wouldn’t want to be, but I don’t think I could.’ Now he turned to his father, in patient explanation. ‘The thing about mother and Anna is this; one doesn’t say, Anna Wulf the writer, or Molly Jacobs the actress—or only if you don’t know them. They aren’t—what I mean is—they aren’t what they do; but if I start working with you, then I’ll be what I do. Don’t you see that?’

‘Frankly, no.’

‘What I mean is, I’d rather be…’ he floundered, and was silent a moment, moving his lips together, frowning. ‘I’ve been thinking about it because I knew I’d have to explain it to you.’ He said this patiently, quite prepared to meet his parents’ unjust demands. ‘People like Anna or Molly and that lot, they’re not just one thing, but several things. And you know they could change and be something different. I don’t mean their characters would change, but they haven’t set into a mould. You know if something happened in the world, or there was a change of some kind, a revolution or something…’ He waited, a moment, patiently, for Richard’s sharply irritated indrawn breath over the word revolution, to be expelled, and went on: ‘they’d be something different if they had to be. But you’ll never be different, father. You’ll always have to live the way you do now. Well I don’t want that for myself,’ he concluded, allowing his lips to set, pouting over his finished explanation.

‘You’re going to be very unhappy,’ said Molly, almost moaning it.

‘Yes, that’s another thing,’ said Tommy. ‘The last time we discussed everything, you ended by saying, Oh, but you’re going to be unhappy. As if it’s the worst thing to be. But if it comes to unhappiness, I wouldn’t call either you or Anna happy people, but at least you’re much happier than my father. Let alone Marion.’ He added the last softly, in direct accusation of his father.

Richard said, hotly, ‘Why don’t you hear my side of the story, as well as Marion’s?’

Tommy ignored this, and went on: ‘I know I must sound ridiculous. I knew before I even started I was going to sound naïve.’

‘Of course you’re naïve,’ said Richard.

‘You’re not naïve,’ said Anna.

‘When I finished talking to you last time, Anna, I came home and I thought, Well, Anna must think I’m terribly naïve.’

‘No, I didn’t. That’s not the point. What you don’t seem to understand is, we’d like you to do better than we have done.’

‘Why should I?’

‘Well perhaps we might still change and be better,’ said Anna, with deference towards youth. Hearing the appeal in her own voice she laughed and said, ‘Good Lord, Tommy, don’t you realize how judged you make us feel?’

For the first time Tommy showed a touch of humour. He really looked at them, first at her, and then at his mother, smiling. ‘You forget that I’ve listened to you two talk all my life. I know about you, don’t I? I do think that you are both rather childish sometimes, but I prefer that to…’ He did not look at his father, but left it.

‘It’s a pity you’ve never given me a chance to talk,’ said Richard, but with self-pity; and Tommy reacted by a quick, dogged withdrawal away from him. He said to Anna and Molly, ‘I’d rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I’m not saying I’m choosing failure. I mean, one doesn’t choose failure, does one? I know what I don’t want, but not what I do want.’

‘One or two practical questions,’ said Richard, while Anna and Molly wryly looked at the word failure, used by this boy in exactly the same sense they would have used it. All the same, neither had applied it to themselves—or not so pat and final, at least.

‘What are you going to live on?’ said Richard.

Molly was angry. She did not want Tommy flushed out of the safe period of contemplation she was offering him by the fire of Richard’s ridicule.

But Tommy said: ‘If mother doesn’t mind I don’t mind living off her for a bit. After all, I hardly spend anything. But if I have to earn money, I can always be a teacher.’

‘Which you’ll find a much more straitened way of life than what I’m offering you,’ said Richard.

Tommy was embarrassed. ‘I don’t think you really understood what I’m trying to say. Perhaps I didn’t say it right.’

‘You’re going to become some sort of a coffee-bar bum,’ said Richard.

‘No. I don’t see that. You only say that because you only like people who have a lot of money.’

Now the three adults were silent. Molly and Anna because the boy could be trusted to stand up for himself; Richard because he was afraid of unleashing his anger. After a time Tommy remarked: ‘Perhaps I might try to be a writer.’

Richard let out a groan. Molly said nothing, with an effort. But Anna exclaimed: ‘Oh Tommy, and after all that good advice I gave you.’

He met her with affection, but stubbornly: ‘You forget, Anna, I don’t have your complicated ideas about writing.’

‘What complicated ideas?’ asked Molly sharply.

Tommy said to Anna: ‘I’ve been thinking about all the things you said.’

‘What things?’ demanded Molly.

Anna said: ‘Tommy, you’re frightening to know. One says something and you take it all up so seriously.’

‘But you were serious?’

Anna suppressed an impulse to turn it off with a joke, and said: ‘Yes, I was serious.’

‘Yes, I know you were. So I thought about what you said. There was something arrogant in it.’

‘Arrogant?’

‘Yes, I think so. Both the times I came to see you, you talked, and when I put together all the things you said, it sounds to me like arrogance. Like a kind of contempt.’