Going Home - Doris May Lessing [92]
11
A white trade-union leader came to see me, to put the white trade-union case. What he was saying in effect was: ‘For God’s sake! The white trade unionists are human, aren’t they? What do you expect?’
All the time he was talking I was remembering the Whartons, who used to live opposite to us in the Mansions.
The Mansions had been built by a young architect who wanted to astonish the city with modern design. (That was fifteen years ago—now the city has fine modern buildings.) They were flats, shaped rather like a magnet standing on the closed end, with the open ends bent inwards.
We had a flat on the top, on one side, and the Whartons had the flat on the other. Between the flats was a gulf, crossed by a small iron stairway shaped like a rounded bridge.
We first got into acquaintance with the Whartons because they sacked their servant, Dickson, and he came to us. The Whartons never kept a servant longer than a month. Dickson was a gay and amiable person, who spent all his money on clothes. At any reference to the Whartons, or at the sound of the raised voices, the quarrelling, that came continuously from over the gulf, he would roll up his eyes, grimace, shrug deeply, and then laugh.
Sometimes Alice Wharton would yell across to him to bring in that cloth or keep an eye on her baby while he swept out our rooms, but he went on working as if he had not heard her. Alice Wharton shared the attitude that any black man in sight was available for doing odd jobs for her. Once she came across to complain that he was cheeky, just as if he had not stopped working for her weeks before. Alice Wharton’s servants were always cheeky. One could hear her, or Bob Wharton, shouting to their servant. Their voices held that tense exasperation, that note of nagging despair, that means an obsession. In places like the Residence and the Mansions one heard that note often. Paternalism, that fine feudal kindness with one’s servants, does not occur below a certain income level.
Bob Wharton came from England with his wife and two children in the hungry ’thirties. He was a bricklayer and a Socialist, interested in his trade union, and on his bookshelves were Keir Hardie, Morris, Shaw, the old stalwarts of British Socialism.
At first things went well with him. He rented a small house, the two children went to school, his head was well above water. He became an official of the trade union, and was well liked by his mates. And then there was a third child, a spastic; and it was too bad to be cured. Both parents adored this child; and soon, with hospitals and doctors and the illnesses that he kept having, their heads were no longer above water. They were in debt.
There was no sense in having a fourth child, but one was born, and Mrs Wharton, who was now a tired and harassed woman in her late thirties, swore that she would never, never have another child. She would no longer sleep with her husband, and went into the bed beside Robbie, the sick boy, as if she were married to him. And the marriage, which had been a good one, was full of bitterness. As for the two elder children, they were tender with the sick brother, but there was a terrible resentment in them. Deep down they felt as if they had done wrong in being born healthy and strong, for their mother’s love went on the sick child, and she was only brisk and irritable with them. Bob Wharton began to drink, not heavily but enough to make a difference to the monthly bills. One night when he came home quite drunk he made a scene with his wife, and after the scene they broke down and wept together, and from this moment of warmth there began another child. But now Alice Wharton was determined. She used a knitting needle on herself, and killed the child, and nearly killed herself, but she could never have children again, and that, as she told me often, was the one bright thing in her life, the one weight off her shoulders. She used to say it loudly, and the elder children heard it, and they used to look at each other helplessly, trying