The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online

saw her lying on her pillows, lovemaking just concluded, smoothing down loose ageing skin over her forearms, he let out a cry, clasped her, and shouted, ‘No, don’t, don’t, don’t even think of it. I won’t let you grow old.’
    ‘Well,’ said Roz, ‘it is going to happen, for all that.’
    ‘No.’ And he wept, just as he had done when he was still the frightened abandoned boy in her arms. ‘No, Roz, please, I love you.’
    ‘So I mustn’t get old, is that it, Ian? I’m not allowed to? Mad, the boy is mad,’ said Roz, addressing invisible listeners, as we do when sanity does not seem to have ears.
    And alone, she felt uneasiness, and, indeed, awe. It was mad, his demand on her. It really did seem that he had refused to think she might grow old. Mad! Hut perhaps lunacy is one of the great invisible wheels that keep our world 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.’
    ‘Harold is going to rescue me from you,’ said Tom to his mother, on his way to Lil’s bed. ‘You’re a bad influence.!
    ‘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.
    ‘Nice to get to know you, at last,’ said Molly.
    ‘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.
    ‘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 anyone else. 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. Hut it was Mary who went with him to the cinema or who came home with him to his father for special meals.
    ‘You could do a lot worse,’ said Harold to his son.
    ‘But I’m not doing anything, as far as I can see,’ said Tom.
    ‘Is that so? I don’t think she sees it like that.’
    Later Harold said to Tom, ‘Mary asked me if you’re queer?’
    ‘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.
    ‘Then, what gives?’ asked Harold. ‘Is there a girl back home, is that it:’
    ‘You could say that,’ said Tom, calmly helping himself to this