Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [103]
She was also beautiful, and in an exotic and un-British way.
She sat alone, for she knew she had always been alone. She was playing patience because it is a game that is played alone. All around her, if only people had the eyes to see it, was a space where flickered and darted flames of hatred, a baleful fire. She was isolated by this aura of hatred, which only she knew about. She was aware that the two middle-aged women observed her more than they did the others, but she did not see them as they were, poor women doing an unpleasant job because they were not qualified for better paid jobs. She saw them three times lifesize, arbitrarily powerful, dangerous, frightening. She hated them wholeheartedly because they were middle-aged, dowdy, tired, suburban, poor, and because that morning and for the last week of mornings they had told her she must put on panties as well as tights, and that she looked disgusting, and that their task was difficult enough without having men getting excited on her account, and that she was selfish, antisocial, disobedient.
When she looked at them, she was possessed by a young person’s terror that she was looking at her own future, for it so happened that her life had taught her very early that it was easy, and indeed, common, to be young and pretty and gay, and then soon afterwards, to be middle-aged, tired and disregarded.
In some of Goya’s earlier pictures, not those that describe war or madness, but the gay and gallant pictures, there is something that disturbs, but you don’t know what it is. Not at first. It is because of any group of those people, the charming, the formal, the pastoral, the essentially civilised, there is always one that looks straight out of the group, out of the canvas, into the eyes of the person who is looking at the picture. This person who refuses to conform to the conventions of the picture the artist has set him in, questions and, in fact, destroys the convention. It is as if the artist said to himself: I suppose I’ve got to paint this kind of picture, it is expected of me—but I’ll show them. As you stand and gaze in, all the rest of the picture fades away, the charmers in their smiles and flounces, the young heroes, the civilisation, all these dissolve away because of that long straight gaze from the one who looks back out of the canvas and says silently that he or she knows it is all a load of old socks. He is there to tell you that he thinks so.
The eyes of Violet Stoke had the same effect, that of negating the rest of her appearance—and perhaps of saying the same thing.
As if it were all not enough of a challenge, the shocking contrast between formal black dress and the lower nakedness, the smooth dancer’s hair and the sad moist patch below, the social position of “the cardplayer” and the isolation spread around her by her fear and hatred, as if these were not enough (to which must be added the social and possibly less important comment made by the expensiveness of her dress, shoes, handbag, any of which was a week’s salary for the poor nurses) there was this other contrast. The girl’s black eyes looked directly out of the picture, and if you followed that gaze, let yourself slide inwards, so that you slid into her head, what you became part of was not the violence of hatred, but a puddle of tears, and a little girl’s tears at that: Oh love me, hold me, forgive me, and never let me go, don’t make me grow up. What she was feeling inside that façade of upsetting contrasts, was what a very small girl feels when she has been beaten or ill-treated by a powerful parent, and she knows quite well it will happen again next time the parent is angry or drunk or frightened himself—or herself. She was all victim, betrayed, tormented, vulnerable, and a sponge for love.
She