Adore by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page A

turning.
    Meanwhile Tom’s father had not given up his aim, to rescue Tom. He made no bones about it. ‘I’m going to rescue you from those femmes fatales ,’ he said on the telephone. ‘You get up here and let your old father take you in hand.’
    â€˜Harold is going to rescue me from you,’ said Tom to hismother, on his way to Lil’s bed. ‘You’re a bad influence.’
    â€˜A bit late,’ said Roz.
    Tom spent a fortnight in the university town. In the evenings a short walk took him out into the hot sandy scrub where hawks wheeled and watched. He became friends with Molly, Roz’s successor, and with his half-sister, aged eight, and a new baby.
    It was a boisterous child-centred house, but Tom told Ian he found it restful.
    â€˜Nice to get to know you, at last,’ said Molly.
    â€˜And now,’ said Harold, ‘don’t leave it so long.’
    Tom didn’t. He accepted an offer to direct West Side Story in the university theatre, and said he would stay in his father’s house.
    As always, the young women clustered and clung. ‘Time you were married, your father thinks,’ said Molly.
    â€˜Oh, does he?’ said Tom. ‘I’ll marry in my own good time.’
    He was in his late twenties. His classmates, his contemporaries, were married or had ‘partners.’
    There was a girl he did like, perhaps because of her difference from Lil and from Roz. She was a little dark-haired, ruddy-faced girl, pretty enough, and she flirted with him in a way that made no claims on him. For here, so far from home, from his mother and from Lil, he understood how many claims and ties bound him there. He admired his mother, even if she exasperated him, and he loved Lil. He could not imagine himself in bed with anyoneelse. But they bound him, oh, yes, they did, and Ian, too, a brother in reality if not in fact. Down there – so he apostrophised his city, his home, so much part of the sea that here, when he heard wind in the bushes it was the waves he heard. ‘Down there, I’m not free.’
    Up here, he was. He decided to accept work on another production. That meant another three months ‘up here’. By now it was accepted that he and Mary Lloyd were a unit, ‘an item’. Tom was passive, hearing this characterisation of him and Mary. He neither said yes, nor did he say no, he only laughed. But it was Mary who went with him to the cinema or who came home with him to his father for special meals.
    â€˜You could do a lot worse,’ said Harold to his son.
    â€˜But I’m not doing anything, as far as I can see,’ said Tom.
    â€˜Is that so? I don’t think she sees it like that.’
    Later Harold said to Tom, ‘Mary asked me if you’re queer?’
    â€˜Gay?’ said Tom. ‘Not as far as I know.’
    It was breakfast time, the family ate at table, the girl watching what went on, as little girls do, the infant babbling attractively in her high chair. A delightful scene. Part of Tom ached for it, for his future, for himself. His father had wanted ordinary family life and here it was.
    â€˜Then, what gives?’ asked Harold. ‘Is there a girl back home, is that it?’
    â€˜You could say that,’ said Tom, calmly helping himselfto this and that.
    â€˜Then you should let Mary go,’ said Harold.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Molly, on behalf of her sex. ‘It’s not fair.’
    â€˜I wasn’t aware I had her tied.’
    â€˜Tom,’ said his father.
    â€˜That’s not on ,’ said his father’s wife.
    Tom said nothing. Then he was in bed with Mary. He had slept only with Lil, no one else. This fresh young bouncy body was delightful, he liked it all, and took quiet satisfaction in Mary’s, ‘I thought you were gay, I really did.’ Clearly, she was agreeably surprised.
    So there it was. Mary came often to spend the night with Tom in Harold’s and