The Golden Notebook

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 recognized 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 illogicality 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 the 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 judgement 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 conversations 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. Goodnight.’

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, criticized 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 women’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-wagon, which, as far as Ella was concerned, was a point in her favour, but the proprietor of this particular group of women’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 criticizing 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 realized 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, of worrying 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 was 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 wanned 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 I?’ ‘You can say all that, tactfully. She probably knows it herself. You could tell her to make an effort to meet people, join some organization, something like that.’ ‘It’s arrogant, me telling her what to do.’ ‘She’s written for help, so it’s arrogant not to.’ ‘Some organization, 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 writes 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 organized 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 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 realized 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, hard-bitten 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 had 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 the 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 realized. 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 apologized, 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, which 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 this 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.