Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page A

her energy, had gone into it, as if for an examination. This realization had come to her when she was visiting Daisy, where she had not been for some time, beingtoo busy with soft furnishing. She laid in front of Daisy swatches of silks, velvets, velveteen, and saw Daisy’s face, which was saying, ‘Well, then, what has got into you, Emily?’ What had? Sitting in the little sitting-room at Daisy’s, with Daisy and the woman who had taken her place in the house, one Dido, once her own staff nurse, now sister in the ward Sister McVeagh had ruled, it seemed as if she had been under a spell. The swatches of fabric now seemed like a comment on the absurdity of her, Sister McVeagh. This was not what she was.
    Here, where she had lived with Daisy, gossiping about hospital matters, she felt she had never left the Royal Free. Her life since her splendid marriage was as if someone else had lived it.
    Daisy shrewdly contemplated her friend, and remarked, ‘Well, Emily, I would never have believed you could care about all this.’ Daisy was still a little thing and, beside the well-fleshed Emily, seemed she might blow away or disappear if you stamped your foot.
    Emily was thinking wildly that she would not leave here, it was where she belonged. Even Mrs. Bruce, seeing her go up the stairs, seemed pleased. ‘Welcome home,’ she said as a joke, but it chimed with Emily’s feeling.
    Her husband, the eminent doctor, was going to a professional dinner tonight so Emily could stay…and she stayed. She pushed the pretty fabric away into her purse and talked about events at the Royal Free as if she had never left.
    When she got home her William was getting ready for bed.
    He had drunk a little too much – but God forbid this could be compared with Bert’s excesses. He was in a good mood, and kissed Emily more warmly than usual. Feeling he appreciated her, even actually saw her, made her expand into recklessness, and as he put his arms around her, she said, ‘Oh, what would you say if I went back to the Royal Free?’ This shows she was not a tactful wife: surely the wrong time and place for such an impetuous announcement. He dropped his arms, stood staring at her while disapproval took him over. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be very nice for me, would it, Sister McVeagh?’
    But when they were slowly coming to an understanding, Dr. Martin-White and Sister McVeagh, hadn’t it been very nice indeed? He turned away and got into his own bed: they had separate beds.
    So that was that! No question of it.
    And the way he had said Sister McVeagh told her that he had not entirely admired her, or did not now.
    Well, he could hardly stop her, could he? Yes, he had, with one cold remark.
    Emily, who had seen very little of Daisy, went there as much as she could. She felt so excluded, left out, shut out.
    If the Emily who had thought, bought, shopped for, ordered, even dreamed of wallpapers and paints for so long – she was going to have to admit it was a good deal more than a year – if this Emily suddenly seemed alien to her, then Mrs. Martin-White, the doctor’s wife, seemed even more so. She was desperately unhappy, though at first she thought she was ill. What could account for her heavy heart, her anxiety, herfeelings of wild panic that took her over for no reason, without warning? In those days people did not automatically search in their memories of childhood to explain current wrongs. Yes, she had felt like this before, she knew she had, but could not remember why or when. She reminded herself that she had lost her mother, aged three, and presumably she had been unhappy then. But this, what she was feeling now, pain her element, unhappiness the air she breathed? And whom could she tell? She did remark to Daisy, when Dido was not there, that she felt low and bad and unhappy, and did not know why.
    Daisy had no experience of being married or even thinking much about marriage.