The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [101]
Unlike his brothers, he did not seem able to get himself together; wasted his time at university, married very young, came to London, did this job and that; wrote a book that was noticed but made no money, then another, a jaunty and irreverent account of a journalist’s career in the provinces. This was based on his father’s life, and it did well enough to bring in five thousand pounds, a lot of money in the mid-fifties. He saw—Dorothy advising and supporting him—that this was a chance that might not recur. He bought a small printing firm that had gone bankrupt, and because of contacts in the Labour Party and all kinds of left-wing political groups, soon had a bread-and-butter basis of pamphlets, brochures, tracts, leaflets, and then a couple of small newspapers. The firm flourished with the good times of the sixties, and Cedric started the stationer’s as a speculation, but it at once did well. The family thankfully left the small shabby flat in Stockwell, and bought a comfortable house in Hampstead. Good times! That was what they all remembered of the sixties, the golden age when everything came so easily. Times of easy friendships, jobs, opportunities, money; people dropping in and out, long family meals around an enormous table in the big kitchen, achievements at school, parties, holidays all over the Continent.
Cedric Mellings had an affair or two, and then so did Dorothy Mellings. Shocks, storms, rages, accusations; long family discussions, the children much involved, things patched up and smoothed over, the family united. But by then the children were growing, growing up, grown, going, going, gone—Alice up north, back to her father’s territory, though at first she did not see this.
Cedric Mellings and Dorothy Mellings were alone in the too-large house. Which did not cease to be full of visitors coming and going, eating and drinking. Cedric fell in love with Jane. He went off to live with her. Dorothy remained in the large house.
All gone. Blown away, and gone, the good times, the easy jobs, even, it seemed, the accomplishment, the friends, affection, money.
Cedric and Dorothy had seemed a centre, even an essential one; so many well-known people had been in and out with their politics, books, causes, marches for this and that, demonstrations. There had seemed to be a shine or gloss on Cedric and Dorothy, an aura or atmosphere about them, of success, of confidence. But then … what had happened to all that? Cedric with Jane was a very different matter! For one thing, a much smaller house, because, after all, C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers, had to support two establishments; Cedric and Jane’s house did not have that elusive but unmistakable atmosphere of ease, of success. Dorothy, left in the bigger house, alone for a time and later with Alice and Jasper, seemed to have fewer friends. Certainly those who came for a meal with Dorothy Mellings—while Alice was there, with Jasper—tended to come in ones or twos, mostly women, perhaps needing Dorothy’s advice, or even to borrow money; divorced friends—so many of the couples that had been to the Mellingses’ in the good days, had split up. Or a couple, who talked a lot about how things had been, and how they weren’t the same now. If Dorothy gave a party, and it was only a small party, it was an effort, and she appeared to be tired of it all, to have forgotten how, in the sixties and early seventies, parties just happened. They took the house over and sucked in people from everywhere and telephones rang with careless invitations and orders to wine merchants and grocers.
Whereas, for a time, Cedric Mellings had been the ugly duckling of the family turned swan—for who else of his siblings lived this glittering glamorous life?—now there was a shabby-duckling quality again. Anyway, what had it all amounted to? scorned Alice, triumphantly examining that too-pale, anxious, strained face, with beads of sweat on the forehead: printing fucking