Read Online Walking in the Shade by Doris Lessing - Free Book Online Page A

as if it was my birthright. But to say this to Jack…For though he might have been, now, painfully—and for him it had to be painful—critical of communism, he was a Marxist, and ‘mystical’ ideas were simply inadmissible.
    Jack attacked me for going to Mrs. Sussman at all. He said I was a big girl now and I should simply tell my mother to go off and live her own life. She was healthy, wasn’t she? She was strong? She had enough money to live on?
    My mother’s situation was causing me anguish. She was living pitifully in a nasty little suburb with George Laws, a distant cousin of my father’s. He was old, he was an invalid, and they could have nothing in common. She kept up a steady pressure to live with me. There was nowhere else for her. She found her brother’s family—he had died—as unlikeable as she always had. She actually had very little money. Common sense, as she kept saying, would have us sharing a flat and expenses, and besides, I needed help with Peter. Her sole reason for existence, she said, was to help me with Peter. And she took Peter for weekends, sometimes, and on trips. From one, to the Isle of Wight, he returned baptised. She informed me that this had been her duty. I did not even argue. There was never any point. And of course it was very good, for me, when I could go off with Jack for three days. At these times she moved into the Church Street flat, where the stairs were almost beyond her. Joan did not mind my mother; she simply said, But she’s a typical middle-class matron, that’s all. Just as I didn’t mind her mother, with whom she found it difficult to get on. I could listen to her self-pitying, wailing tales of her life dispassionately—this was social history, hard times brought off the page into a tale of a beautiful Jewish girl from the poor East End of London surviving among artists and writers.
    Jack said I should simply put my foot down with my mother, once and for all.
    Joan was also involved—a good noncommittal word—with psychotherapy. Various unsuccessful attempts had ended in her returning from a session to say that no man who had such appalling taste in art and whose house smelled of overcooked cabbage could possibly know anything about the human soul. That was good for a laugh or two, as so many painful things are.
    Joan saw her main problem as the inability to focus her talents. She had many. She drew well—like Käthe Kollwitz, as people told her: this was before Kollwitz had been accepted by the artistic establishment. She danced well. She had acted professionally. She wrote well. Perhaps she had too many talents. But whatever the reason, she could not narrow herself into any one channel of accomplishment. And here I was, in her house, getting good reviews, with three books out. She was critical of Jack, and of me because of how I brought up Peter. I was too lax and laissez-faire, and treated him like a grown-up. It was not enough to read to him and tell him stories; he needed…well, what? I thought she criticised me because of dissatisfaction over her son, for no woman can bring up a son without a full-time father around and not feel at a disadvantage. And then I was such a colonial, and graceless, and perhaps she found that hardest of all. Small things are the most abrasive. An incident: I have invited people to Sunday lunch, and among the foods I prepare are Scotch eggs, this being a staple of buffet food in Southern Africa. Joan stands looking at them, dismayed. ‘But why ,’ she demands, ‘when there’s a perfectly good delicatessen down the street?’ She criticised me—or so it felt—for everything. Yet this criticism of others was the obverse of her wonderful kindness and charity, the two things in harness. And it was nothing beside her criticism of herself, for she continued to denigrate herself in everything.
    To withstand the pressure of this continual disapproval,