The Temptation of Jack Orkney Read online

  The Temptation of Jack Orkney

  Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  Doris Lessing

  The Temptation of Jack Orkney

  His father was dying. It was a telegram, saying also: YOU UNOBTAINABLE TELEPHONE. He had been on the telephone since seven that morning. It was the housekeeper who had sent the telegram. Did Mrs Markham not know that she could have asked the telephone authorities to interrupt his conversations for an urgent message? The irritation of the organizer who is manipulating intractable people and events now focussed on Mrs Markham, but he tried to alleviate it by reminding himself that Mrs Markham was housekeeper not only to his father but to a dozen other old people.

  It had been a long time since he had actually organized something political; others had been happy to organize him — his name, his presence, his approval. But an emotional telephone call from an old friend, Walter Renting, before seven that morning, appealing that they 'all' should make a demonstration of some sort about the refugees — the nine million refugees of Bangladesh this time — and the information that he was the only person available to do the organizing, had returned him to a politically active past. Telephoning, he soon discovered that even the small demonstration they envisaged would be circumscribed, because people were saying they could see no point in a demonstration when television, radio and every newspaper did little else but tell the world about these millions of sufferers. What was the point of a dozen or twenty people 'sitting down' or 'marching' or even being hungry for twenty-four hours in some prominent place? Surely the point of these actions in the past had been to draw public attention to a wrong?

  Now the strength of his reaction to Mrs Markham's inadequacy made him understand that his enthusiastic response to Walter so early that morning had been mostly because of weeks, months, of inactivity. He could not be so exaggerating details if he were not under-employed. He had been making occupation for himself, calling it stocktaking. He had been reading old diaries, articles of his own, twenty or more years old, letters of people he had not seen, sometimes, for as long. Immersing himself in his own past had of course been uncomfortable; this is what it had been really like in Korea, Israel, Pretoria, during such and such an event; memory had falsified. One knew that it did, but he had believed himself exempt from this law. Every new day of this deliberate evocation of the past had made his own part in it seem less worthwhile, had diminished his purposes and strengths. It was not that he now lacked offers to work, but that he could not make himself respond with the enthusiastic willingness which he believed every job of work needed. Of his many possibilities the one that attracted him most was to teach journalism in a small college in Nigeria, but he could not make up his mind to accept: his wife didn't want to go. Did he want to leave her in England for two years? No; but at one time this certainly would not have been his reaction!

  Nor did he want to write another adventure book: in such empty times in the past he had written, under noms de plume, novels whose attraction was the description of the countries he had set them in. He had travelled a great deal in this life, often dangerously in the course of this war or that, as a soldier and as a journalist.

  He might also write a serious book of social or political analysis: he had several to his credit.

  He could do television work, or return to active journalism.

  The thing was that now the three children were through university he did not need to earn so much money.

  Leisure, leisure at last! he had cried, as so many of his friends were doing, finding themselves similarly placed.

  But half a morning's energetic organizing was enough to tell him — exactly as his mother had been used to tell him when he was adolescent — 'Your trouble is, you haven't got enough to do!'

  He sent a telegram to Mrs Markham: ARRIVING TRAIN EARLY EVENING. Flying would save him an hour; proper feeling would no doubt choose the air; but he needed the train's pace to adjust him for what was ahead. He rang Walter Kenting to say that with the organizing still undone, urgent family matters were claiming him. Walter was silent at this, so he said: Actually, my old man is going to die in the next couple of days. It has been on the cards for some time.'

  'I am sorry.' said Walter. 'I'll try Bill or Mona. I've got to go to Dublin in fifteen minutes. Are you going to be back by Saturday? — oh, of course, you don't know.' Realizing that he was sounding careless or callous, he said: 'I do hope things will be all right.' This was worse and he gave up: 'You think that a twenty-four-hour fast meets that bill better than the other possibilities? Is that what most people feel, do you think?'

  'Yes. But I don't think they are as keen as usual.'

  ‘Well, of course not, there's too much of bloody everything, that's why. You could be demonstrating twenty-four hours a day. Anyway, I've got to get to my plane.'

  While Jack packed, which he knew so well how to do, in ten minutes, he remembered that he had a family. Should everyone be at the deathbed? Oh, surely not! He looked for his wife: she was out. Of course! The children off her hands, she too had made many exclamations about the attractions of leisure, but almost at once she signed up for a psychology course as part of a plan to become a Family Counsellor. She had left a note for him: 'Darling, there's some cold lamb and salad.' He now left a note for her: 'Old man on his way out. See you whenever. Tell girls and Joseph. All my love. Jack.'

  On the train he thought of what he was in for. A family reunion, no less. His brother wasn't so bad, but the last time he had seen Ellen, she had called him a Boy Scout, and he had called her a Daughter of the British Empire. Considering it a compliment, she had been left with the advantage. A really dreadful woman, and as for her husband — surely he wouldn't be there too? He would have to be, as a man? Where would they all fit in? Certainly not in that tiny flat. He should have put in the note to Rosemary that she should telephone hotels in S—. Would the other grandchildren be there? Well, Cedric and Ellen would be certain to do the right thing, whatever that was: as for himself he could telephone home when he had found what the protocol was. But, good God, surely it was bad enough that three of them, grown — up and intelligent people — grown-up, anyway — were going to have to sit about waiting, in a deathbed scene, because of — superstition. Yes, that was what it was. Certainly no more than outdated social custom. And it all might go on for days. But perhaps the old man would be pleased? At the approach of a phrase similar to those suitable for deaths and funerals, he felt irritation again: this would lead, unless he watched himself, to self — mockery, the spirit of farce. Farce was implicit, anyway, in a situation which had himself, Ellen and Cedric in one room.

  Probably the old man wasn't even conscious. He should have telephoned Mrs Markham before rushing off like that — well, like a journalist, with two pairs of socks, a spare shirt and a sweater. He should have bought a black tie? Would the old man have wished it? (Jack noted the arrival of an indubitably 'suitable' phrase, and feared worse for the immediate future.)

  The old man had not worn black or altered his cheerfulness when his wife died.

  His wife, Jack's mother.

  The depression that he suspected was in wait for him, now descended. He understood that he had been depressed for some time: this was like dark coming down into a fog. He had not admitted that he was depressed, but he ought to have known it by the fact what he had woken up to each morning was not his own expectation of usefulness or accomplishment, but his wife's.

  Now if Rosemary died... but he would not think about that, it would be morbid.

  When his mother died, his father had made the simplest of funerals for her — religious, of course. All the family, the grandchildren too, had stayed in t
he old house, together for the first time in years. The old man had behaved like a man who knew that his grief ought not be inflicted on others. Jack had not been close to his mother: he had not liked her. He was close to no member of the family. He now knew that the loved his wife, but that had not been true until recently. There were his beautiful daughters. There was his son Joseph, who was a chip off the old block — so everyone insisted on saying, though it infuriated Joseph. But they could not meet without quarrelling. That was closeness of a kind?

  He ought to have been more attentive when the mother died, to the old man, who had probably been concealing a good deal behind his mild dignity. Of course! And, looking back ten years, Jack knew that he had known what his father was feeling, had been sympathetic, but had also been embarrassed and unable to give anything of himself — out of fear that more would be asked? — had pretended obtuseness.

  The old house was Church property, divided into units for old people who had been good parishioners. None had been friends before going to live there, but now it seemed that they were all close friends, or at least kept each other company in a variety of ways under the eye of Mrs Markham who also lived there, looked after the house, after them. She put flowers in the church and mended surplices and garments of that sort — she was fifty, poor old thing, Jack now told himself that he was over fifty, although the 'baby of the family', and that his sister Ellen with whom he was to spend an unknown number of days was fifty — five, while his boring brother Cedric was older still.

  This train was not full and moved pleasantly through England's green and pleasant land. There were two other people in the compartment. Second class. Jack travelled second class when he could: this was one of the ways he used to check up on himself that he was not getting soft with success — if you could call what he had success. His brother and sister did, but that was the way they looked at life.

  One fellow — passenger was middle — aged woman, and one a girl of about twenty-three or -four, who leaned an elbow on the window ledge and stared at Buckinghamshire, then Berkshire, then Wiltshire, all green and soft on this summery day. Her face was hidden behind glittering yellow hair. Jack classed her as a London secretary on her way home for a family visit, and as the kind of young person he would get on with — that is, like his daughters rather than his son.

  He was finding the company of his girls all pleasure and healing. It seemed to him that everything he had looked for in women now flowed generously towards him from Carrie and Elizabeth. It was not that they always approved him, far from it; it was the quality of their beauty that caressed and dandled him. The silk of their hair flattered, their smiles, even when for somebody else, gave him answers to questions that he had been asking of women — so it seemed to him now — all his life.

  Though of course he did not see much of them: while living in the same house, upstairs, they led their own lives.

  The woman, whom he disliked because she was not young and beautiful—he was aware that he should be ashamed of this reaction, but put this shame on to an agenda for the future — got off the train, and now the girl at the window turned towards him and the rest of the journey was bound to be delightful. He had been right — of course, he was always right about people. She worked in an office in Great Portland Street, and she was going for a visit to her parents — no, she' got on' with them all right, but she was always pleased to be back in her flat with her friends. She was not a stranger to Jack's world; that is, she was familiar with the names of people whose lives expressed concern for public affairs, public wrong and suffering, and she used the names of his friends with a proprietary air — she had, as it were, eaten them up to form herself, as he, Jack, had in his time swallowed Keir Hardie, Marx, Freud, Morris and the rest. She, those like her, now possessed 'the Old Guard', their history, their opinions, their claims. To her, Walter Kenting, Bill, Mona, were like statues on plinths, each representing a degree of opinion. When the time came to give her his own name, he said it was Jack Sebastian, not Jack Orkney, for he knew he would join the pantheon of people who were her parents-in-opinion, and, as he had understood, were to be criticized, like parents.

  The last time he had been Jack Sebastian was to get himself out of a tight spot in Ecuador, during a small revolution: he had escaped prison and possibly death by this means.

  If he told this girl about that, he knew that as he sat opposite her, she would gaze in judiciously measured admiration at a man retreating from her into history. He listened to her talk about herself, and knew that if things had been otherwise — he meant, not his father's dying, but his recently good relations with his wife — he could easily have got off the train with the girl, and persuaded her to spend the rest of her holiday with him, having made excuses to her family. Or he could have met her in London. But all he wanted now was to hear her voice, and to let himself be stimulated by the light from her eyes and her hair.

  She got off the train, with a small laughing took that made his heart beat, and she strode off across the platform with her banners of yellow hair streaming behind her, leaving him alone in the brown compartment full of brown air.

  At the station he was looking for a taxi when he was his brother Cedric. A brown suit that discreetly confined a small stomach came towards him. That suit could only clothe a member of the professional classes, it had to be taken into account before the face, which was, as it happened, a mild pale face that had a look on it of duty willingly performed.

  Cedric said, in his way of dealing all at once with every possible contingency: 'Mrs Markham said it had to be this train. I came because Ellen has only just come herself: I arrived first.'

  He had a Rover, dark blue, not now. He and Jack, defined by this car and particularly accurately in this country town, drove through soothingly ancient streets.

  The brothers drove more or less in silence to the church precincts. As they passed in under a thirteenth-century stone archway, Cedric said: 'Ellen booked a room for you. It is the Royal Arms, and she and I are there too. It is only five minutes from Father'

  They walked in silence over grass to the back door of this solid brick house which the Church devoted to the old. Not as a charity of course. These were the old whose own saved money or whose children could pay for their rooms and for Mrs Markham. The poor old were elsewhere.

  Mrs Markham came forward from her sitting-room and said, 'How do you do, Mr Orkney?' to Jack, smiling like a hostess at Cedric. 'I am sure you would all like some tea now,' she directed. 'I'll bring you some up.' She was like the woman on the train. And like Ellen.

  He followed his brother up old wooden stairs that gleamed, and smelled of lavender and wax polish. As always happened, the age of the town, and of the habits, of the people who lived in it, the smell of tradition, enveloped Jack in well-being: he had to remind himself that he was here for an unpleasant occasion. At the top of the stairs various unmarked doors were the entrances to the lives of four old people. Cedric opened one without knocking, and Jack followed him into a room he had been in twice before on duty visits. It was a smallish, but pleasant, room with windows overlooking the lawn that surrounded the church.

  Sister, Ellen, in thick grey tweed, sat knitting. She said: 'Oh Jack, there you are, we are all here at last.'

  Jack sat. Cedric sat. They had to arrange their feet so as not to entangle in the middle of the small floor. They all exchanged news. The main thing that had happened to the three of them was that the children had all grown up.

  The grandchildren, eight of them, knew each other, and had complicated relationships: they were a family, unlike their parents.

  Mrs Markham brought tea, of the kind appropriate to this room, this town: scones, butter, jam, comb honey, fruit buns, cherry cake, fruit cake. Also cream. She left, giving the three a glance that said. At last it is all as it should be.

  Jack asked: 'Have you seen him?'

  'No.' said Cedric a fraction of a second before Ellen did. It was clear that here was competition for the perfect
disposition of this death. Jack was remembering how these two had fought for domination over each other, and over, of course, himself.

  'That is to say,' said Ellen, 'we have seen him, but he was not conscious.'

  ‘Another stroke?' asked Jack.

  'He had another before Christmas,' said Cedric, 'but they didn't tell us, he didn't want to worry us.'

  'I heard about it through Jilly,' said Ellen. Jilly was her daughter.

  And I through Ann,' said Cedric. Ann was his.

  Jack had now to remind himself that these names represented persons, not samples of pretty infancy.

  'He is very close to Ann,' said Cedric.

  'He is fond of Jilly too,' said Ellen.

  'I suppose there is a nurse in there?' asked Jack. 'Oh of course, there must be.'

  'There is a day nurse and a night nurse, and they change places at dawn and dusk,' said Ellen. 'I must say, I am glad of this tea. There was no restaurant on the train.'

  'I wonder if I could see him?' asked Jack, and then corrected it: 'I shall go in to see him.' He Knew, as they spoke, that all the way on the train he had in fact been waiting for the moment when he could walk into the little bedroom, and his father would smile at him and say — he had not been able to imagine what, but it must be something that he had been able to imagine what, but it must be something that he had been waiting to hear from him, or from somebody, for years. This surely was the real purpose of coming here? That what he had in fact been expecting was something of coming here? That what he had in fact been expecting was something like a 'deathbed scene', with vital advice and mutual comfort, embarrassed him, and he felt that he was stupid. Now he understood that embarrassment was the air of this room: the combat between elder brother and sister was nominal; they skirmished from habit to cover what they felt. Which was that they were in a position not allowed for by their habits of living. Jack had a vision of rapidly running trains — their lives; but they had had to stop the trains, had had to pull the emergency cords, and at great inconvenience to everyone, because of this ill-timed death. Death had to be ill-timed? It was its nature? Why was it felt to be? There was something ridiculous about this scene in which he was trapped: three middle-aged children sitting about in one room, idle, thinking of their real lives which stagnated, while in another room an old man lay dying, attended by a strange woman.