The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two

‘Report on the Threatened City’ is a story that attracts letters from readers. I was thinking of San Francisco when I wrote, whose inhabitants always have an earthquake somewhere at the back of their minds, but they would not dream of moving away. I wouldn’t either, for it is surely one of the most beautiful of the world’s cities. This tale is sometimes classed as space fiction, or even as science fiction, but I see it as the starkest realism, for it is about our way of opening our hearts and minds to near and immediate dangers, but ignoring equally threatening long-term disasters. It appeared first in Playboy magazine, which in those days printed serious stories.

‘Not a Very Nice Story’ is another letter-attractor. This is because its ‘message’ can be taken to advocate immorality, and people either approve or disapprove. (I don’t like ‘messages’ in literature.) It certainly is about that side of our natures which has never heard of right and wrong. Once upon a time homage was paid to this anarchic area when they had days, once a year, when all morality and restraints were cancelled under a Lord of Misrule. Certain office parties carry on the tradition.

‘The Temptation of Jack Orkney’ is – like ‘The Habit of Loving’, and ‘To Room Nineteen’, and ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ (the last three are from Volume One) – a story with hidden depths. Often this happens without a writer knowing how she or he has tapped a deeper vein. The new way of education, which is often to omit any teaching of history, may mean that some young thing may enquire about the title, and then you have to spell out the irony, that Jack Orkney sees God (and the other hidden dimensions of life) as a temptation to compromise with the integrities of his stern atheism, whereas for many centuries, not to say millennia, temptations were to do with the flesh, and the lack of belief in God. A nice little version of the whirligig of time, this one. You may try saying to such a youngster, ‘Go to a picture gallery and see how the saints were tormented by visions of food and sex and happy disbelief.’ But they look at you, these infinitely indulged ones, with amazement, for it has never occurred to them to do without anything in the way of fleshly delights, unless it is for fear of AIDS, or because they are slimming.

‘An Old Woman and Her Cat’ has been a good deal reprinted.

‘Mrs Fortescue’ came into being because I once lived in a building that had two professional whores in it, who had lived there for many years.

‘Side Benefits of an Honourable Profession’ was written with relish, after certain experiences in show business.

Doris Lessing, 1994

Our Friend Judith (#u3776eae9-781d-5be9-ac14-65c9509fa16a)

I stopped inviting Judith to meet people when a Canadian woman remarked, with the satisfied fervour of one who has at last pinned a label on a rare specimen: ‘She is, of course, one of your typical English spinsters.’

This was a few weeks after an American sociologist, having elicited from Judith the facts that she was fortyish, unmarried, and living alone, had inquired of me: ‘I suppose she has given up?’ ‘Given up what?’ I asked; and the subsequent discussion was unrewarding.

Judith did not easily come to parties. She would come after pressure, not so much – one felt – to do one a favour, but in order to correct what she believed to be a defect in her character. ‘I really ought to enjoy meeting new people more than I do,’ she said once. We reverted to an earlier pattern of our friendship: odd evenings together, an occasional visit to the cinema, or she would telephone to say: ‘I’m on my way past you to the British Museum. Would you care for a cup of coffee with me? I have twenty minutes to spare.’

It is characteristic of Judith that the word spinster, used of her, provoked fascinated speculation about other people. There are my aunts, for instance: aged seventy-odd, both unmarried, one an ex-missionary from China, one a retired matron of a famous London hospital. These two old ladies live together under the shadow of the cathedral in a country town. They devote much time to the Church, to good causes, to letter writing with friends all over the world, to the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of relatives. It would be a mistake, however, on entering a house in which nothing has been moved for fifty years, to diagnose a condition of fossilized late-Victorian integrity. They read every book reviewed in the Observer or The Times, so that I recently got a letter from Aunt Rose inquiring whether I did not think that the author of On the Road was not – perhaps? – exaggerating his difficulties. They know a good deal about music, and write letters of encouragement to young composers they feel are being neglected – ‘You must understand that anything new and original takes time to be understood.’ Well-informed and critical Tories, they are as likely to dispatch telegrams of protest to the Home Secretary as letters of support. These ladies, my aunts Emily and Rose, are surely what is meant by the phrase English spinster. And yet, once the connection has been pointed out, there is no doubt that Judith and they are spiritual cousins, if not sisters. Therefore it follows that one’s pitying admiration for women who have supported manless and uncomforted lives needs a certain modification?

One will, of course, never know; and I feel now that it is entirely my fault that I shall never know. I had been Judith’s friend for upwards of five years before the incident occurred which I involuntarily thought of – stupidly enough – as ‘the first time Judith’s mask slipped’.

A mutual friend, Betty, had been given a cast-off Dior dress. She was too short for it. Also she said: ‘It’s not a dress for a married woman with three children and a talent for cooking. I don’t know why not, but it isn’t.’ Judith was the right build. Therefore one evening the three of us met by appointment in Judith’s bedroom, with the dress. Neither Betty nor I were surprised at the renewed discovery that Judith was beautiful. We had both too often caught each other, and ourselves, in moments of envy when Judith’s calm and severe face, her undemonstratively perfect body, succeeded in making everyone else in a room or a street look cheap.

Judith is tall, small-breasted, slender. Her light brown hair is parted in the centre and cut straight around her neck. A high straight forehead, straight nose, a full grave mouth are setting for her eyes, which are green, large and prominent. Her lids are very white, fringed with gold, and moulded close over the eyeball, so that in profile she has the look of a staring gilded mask. The dress was of dark green glistening stuff, cut straight, with a sort of loose tunic. It opened simply at the throat. Init Judith could of course evoke nothing but classical images. Diana, perhaps, back from the hunt, in a relaxed moment? A rather intellectual wood nymph who had opted for an afternoon in the British Museum reading room? Something like that. Neither Betty nor I said a word, since Judith was examining herself in a long mirror, and must know she looked magnificent.

Slowly she drew off the dress and laid it aside. Slowly she put on the old cord skirt and woollen blouse she had taken off. She must have surprised a resigned glance between us, for she then remarked, with the smallest of mocking smiles: ‘One surely ought to stay in character, wouldn’t you say?’ She added, reading the words out of some invisible book, written not by her, since it was a very vulgar book, but perhaps by one of us: ‘It does everything for me, I must admit.’

‘After seeing you in it,’ Betty cried out, defying her, ‘I can’t bear for anyone else to have it. I shall simply put it away.’ Judith shrugged, rather irritated. In the shapeless skirt and blouse, and without makeup, she stood smiling at us, a woman at whom forty-nine out of fifty people would not look twice.

A second revelatory incident occurred soon after. Betty telephoned me to say that Judith had a kitten. Did I know that Judith adored cats? ‘No, but of course she would,’ I said.

Betty lived in the same street as Judith and saw more of her than I did. I was kept posted about the growth and habits of the cat and its effect on Judith’s life. She remarked for instance that she felt it was good for her to have a tie and some responsibility. But no sooner was the cat out of kittenhood than all the neighbours complained. It was a tomcat, ungelded, and making every night hideous. Finally the landlord said that either the cat or Judith must go, unless she was prepared to have the cat ‘fixed’. Judith wore herself out trying to find some person, anywhere in Britain, who would be prepared to take the cat. This person would, however, have to sign a written statement not to have the cat ‘fixed’. When Judith took the cat to the vet to be killed, Betty told me she cried for twenty-four hours.

‘She didn’t think of compromising? After all, perhaps the cat might have preferred to live, if given the choice?’

‘Is it likely I’d have the nerve to say anything so sloppy to Judith? It’s the nature of a male cat to rampage lustfully about, and therefore it would be morally wrong for Judith to have the cat fixed, simply to suit her own convenience.’

‘She said that?’

‘She wouldn’t have to say it, surely?’

A third incident was when she allowed a visiting young American, living in Paris, the friend of a friend and scarcely known to her, to use her flat while she visited her parents over Christmas. The young man and his friends lived it up for ten days of alcohol and sex and marijuana, and when Judith came back it took a week to get the place clean again and the furniture mended. She telephoned twice to Paris. The first time to say that he was a disgusting young thug and if he knew what was good for him he would keep out of her way in the future; the second time to apologize for losing her temper. ‘I had a choice either to let someone use my flat, or to leave it empty. But having chosen that you should have it, it was clearly an unwarrantable infringement of your liberty to make any conditions at all. I do most sincerely ask your pardon.’ The moral aspects of the matter having been made clear, she was irritated rather than not to receive letters of apology from him – fulsome, embarrassed, but above all, baffled.

It was the note of curiosity in the letters – he even suggested coming over to get to know her better – that irritated her most. ‘What do you suppose he means?’ she said to me. ‘He lived in my flat for ten days. One would have thought that should be enough, wouldn’t you?’

The facts about Judith, then, are all in the open, unconcealed, and plain to anyone who cares to study them; or, as it became plain she feels, to anyone with the intelligence to interpret them.

She has lived for the last twenty years in a small two-roomed flat high over a busy West London street. The flat is shabby and badly heated. The furniture is old, was never anything but ugly, is now frankly rickety and fraying. She has an income of £200 a year from a dead uncle. She lives on this and what she earns from her poetry and from lecturing on poetry to night classes and extramural university classes.

She does not smoke or drink, and eats very little, from preference, not self-discipline.

She studied poetry and biology at Oxford, with distinction.

She is a Castlewell. That is, she is a member of one of the academic upper-middle-class families, which have been producing for centuries a steady supply of brilliant but sound men and women who are the backbone of the arts and sciences in Britain. She is on cool terms with her family who respect her and leave her alone.

She goes on long walking tours, by herself, in such places as Exmoor or West Scotland.

Every three or four years she publishes a volume of poems.

The walls of her flat are completely lined with books. They are scientific, classical and historical; there is a great deal of poetry and some drama. There is not one novel. When Judith says: ‘Of course I don’t read novels,’ this does not mean that novels have no place, or a small place, in literature; or that people should not read novels; but that it must be obvious she can’t be expected to read novels.

I had been visiting her flat for years before I noticed two long shelves of books, under a window, each shelf filled with the works of a single writer. The two writers are not, to put it at the mildest, the kind one would associate with Judith. They are mild, reminiscent, vague and whimsical. Typical English belles-lettres, in fact, and by definition abhorrent to her. Not one of the books in the two shelves has been read; some of the pages are still uncut. Yet each book is inscribed or dedicated to her: gratefully, admiringly, sentimentally and, more than once, amorously, in short, it is open to anyone who cares to examine these two shelves, and to work out dates, to conclude that Judith from the age of fifteen to twenty-five had been the beloved young companion of one elderly literary gentleman, and from twenty-five to thirty-five the inspiration of another.

During all that time she had produced her own poetry, and the sort of poetry, it is quite safe to deduce, not at all likely to be admired by her two admirers. Her poems are always cool and intellectual; that is their form, which is contradicted or supported by a gravely sensuous texture. They are poems to read often; one has to, to understand them.

I did not ask Judith a direct question about these two eminent but rather fusty lovers. Not because she would not have answered, or because she would have found the question impertinent, but because such questions are clearly unnecessary. Having those two shelves of books where they are, and books she could not conceivably care for, for their own sake, is publicly giving credit where credit is due. I can imagine her thinking the thing over, and deciding it was only fair, or perhaps honest, to place the books there; and this despite the fact that she would not care at all for the same attention to be paid to her. There is something almost contemptuous in it. For she certainly despises people who feel they need attention.

For instance, more than once a new emerging wave of ‘modern’ young poets have discovered her as the only ‘modern’ poet among their despised and well-credited elders. This is because, since she began writing at fifteen, her poems have been full of scientific, mechanical and chemical imagery. This is how she thinks, or feels.

More than once has a young poet hastened to her flat, to claim her as an ally, only to find her totally and by instinct unmoved by words like modern, new, contemporary. He has been outraged and wounded by her principle, so deeply rooted as to be unconscious, and to need no expression but a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, that publicity seeking or to want critical attention is despicable. It goes without saying that there is perhaps one critic in the world she has any time for. He has sulked off, leaving her on her shelf, which she takes it for granted is her proper place, to be read by an appreciative minority.

Meanwhile she gives her lectures, walks alone through London, writes her poems, and is seen sometimes at a concert or a play with a middle-aged professor of Greek who has a wife and two children.

Betty and I speculated about this professor, with such remarks as: Surely she must sometimes be lonely? Hasn’t she ever wanted to marry? What about that awful moment when one comes in from somewhere at night to an empty flat?

It happened recently that Betty’s husband was on a business trip, her children visiting, and she was unable to stand the empty house. She asked Judith for a refuge until her home filled again.

Afterwards Betty rang me up to report:

‘Four of the five nights Professor Adams came in about ten or so.’

‘Was Judith embarrassed?’

‘Would you expect her to be?’

‘Well, if not embarrassed, at least conscious there was a situation?’

‘No, not at all. But I must say I don’t think he’s good enough for her. He can’t possibly understand her. He calls her Judy.’

‘Good God.’

Yes. But I was wondering. Suppose the other two called her Judy – little Judy – imagine it! Isn’t it awful? But it does rather throw a light on Judith?’

‘It’s rather touching.’