The Real Thing by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page B

examining in his mind’s eye the picture of Mrs Khan’s face, that proud, cold, refusing look. So would a woman look while her husband shouted at her, ‘You stupid woman, she can’t go to the big school with the others, why are you so stubborn? Do I have to explain it to you again?’ She must have confronted her husband with this look and her silence a hundred times! And so he had not turned up for the appointment, or for the other appointment, because he knew it was no good. He didn’t want to have to say to some social worker, ‘My wife’s a fine woman, but she has this little peculiarity!’ And Hassan wasn’t going to say, ‘You see, sir, there’s a little problem with my mother.’
    Stephen, eyes still shut, went on replaying what he had seen in that room: the tenderness on Mrs Khan’s face for her afflicted child, the smile on the boy’s face, the real, warm, affectionate smile, at his sister. The little girl was swaddled in their tenderness, the family adored her, what was she going to learn at the special school better than she was getting from her family?
    Stephen found he was filling with emotions that threatened to lift him off the walkway with the wind and float him off into the sky like a balloon. He wanted to laugh, or clap his hands, or sing with exhilaration. That woman, that
mother
, would not admit her little girl was simple. She just wouldn’t agree to it! Why, it was a wonderful thing, a miracle! Good for you, Mrs Khan, said Stephen Bentley opening his eyes, looking at the curtained windows four floors above him where he had no doubt Mrs Khan was watching him, proud she had won yet another victory against those busybodies who would class her Shireen as stupid.
    ‘Bloody marvellous,’ shouted the social worker into the wind. He opened his file against his knee then and there and wrote, ‘Father did not turn up as arranged. His presence essential.’ The date. His own name.

P leasures of the Park
    An elderly man stood with his face to the wire of the bird enclosure. Everything about him was yellowish and dry, like a fungus on an old log, but even his back was full of the vitality of indignation. In the enclosure live flamingos and demoiselle cranes, but he was looking at a fowl, a chicken, a rooster like a sunset in the act of exploding, all iridescent black, gold and scarlet, a resplendent cock who sat on a shiny log raising its wings and crowing, a triumphal shout. ‘You shut up,’ threatened the man through the wire. The cock riposted, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo,’ or, perhaps, ‘Cock-a-rico,’ and the man said, ‘What are you so pleased with yourself about?’-at which, ‘Crack-acrack-ooow,’ said the cock, lifting himself a few inches into the air and settling again. ‘Cock-a-rooi!’ ‘Just you shut up,’ said the man. People were looking humorous and pointing him out. He realized this, and turned, squaring his shoulders and glaring. Then off he marched, one-two, one-two, through the trees. The cock shook scarlet wattles and stepped daintily off his log.
    Not far away is the paddock where the deer and the goats are kept. At that wire generations of children have learned their parents’ attitudes to the animals. ‘Nastyvicious things, goats,’ says mummy, out of centuries-old memories of goat as Lucifer, goat as witches’ friend, goat driven away under its load of sins, and a little boy says, ‘Nasty goats.’ Or, ‘Darling, look at that lovely little kid.’ But everybody loves the deer.
    Deer and goats coexist. The goats are dominant. If goodies are being offered, carrots, apples, bread, then even the big stags will allow themselves to be shouldered aside by goats a third their size. If the goats are replete the stags command the fences. Then come the females, in order of their size and weight and, perhaps, even of their personalities. Behind the deer stand last year’s fawns, while this year’s, who still have their bambi foreheads (Ohhhh, look at the bambis!), stand