Stories: Introduction by Margaret Drabble (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series, Band 316) - Hardcover

Lessing, Doris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307269884 ISBN 13: 9780307269881

Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

This wide-ranging collection of the stories by the renowned Nobel Laureate—spanning more than two decades of her astonishing career—highlights her singular gifts for portraying the complex lives of men and women in a modern, often alienating world.

 

Included are seminal stories like “To Room Nineteen,” in which a woman reacts against the oppression of her banal marriage with dreadful results; “One off the Short List,” which traces the surprising conclusion to a seduction gone awry; “The Habit of Loving,” in which a lonely older man who takes a vivacious, young wife witnesses an unexpected reversal of intimacy. Here are two classic novellas as well: The Temptation of Jack Orkney and The Other Woman, which exemplify Lessing’s grasp of the most essential human psychology. Rich and various in mood and background—the settings range across England and France—these stories powerfully convey the uncompromising insight, intelligence, and vision of one of the most ardently admired writers of our time.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Doris Lessing was born in 1919. The author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007. She lives in England.

Margaret Drabble, the author of several works of fiction, including The Millstone, The Witch of Exmoor, and The Red Queen, and of nonfiction, lives in London.

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WINE

A MAN AND woman walked towards the boulevard from a little hotel in a side street.

The trees were still leafless, black, cold; but the fine twigs were swelling towards spring, so that looking upward it was with an expectation of the first glimmering greenness. Yet everything was calm, and the sky was a calm, classic blue.

The couple drifted slowly along. Effort, after days of laziness, seemed impossible; and almost at once they turned into a cafe´ and sank down, as if exhausted, in the glass-walled space that was thrust forward into the street.

The place was empty. People were seeking the midday meal in the restaurants. Not all: that morning crowds had been demonstrating, a procession had just passed, and its straggling end could still be seen. The sounds of violence, shouted slogans and singing, no longer absorbed the din of Paris traffic; but it was these sounds that had roused the couple from sleep.

A waiter leaned at the door, looking after the crowds, and he reluctantly took an order for coffee.

The man yawned; the woman caught the infection; and they laughed with an affectation of guilt and exchanged glances before their eyes, without regret, parted. When the coffee came, it remained untouched. Neither spoke. After some time the woman yawned again; and this time the man turned and looked at her critically, and she looked back. Desire asleep, they looked. This remained: that while everything which drove them slept, they accepted from each other a sad irony; they could look at each other without illusion, steady-eyed.

And then, inevitably, the sadness deepened in her till she consciously resisted it; and into him came the flicker of cruelty.

‘Your nose needs powdering,’ he said.

‘You need a whipping boy.’

But always he refused to feel sad. She shrugged, and, leaving him to it, turned to look out. So did he. At the far end of the boulevard there was a faint agitation, like stirred ants, and she heard him mutter, ‘Yes, and it still goes on . . .’

Mocking, she said, ‘Nothing changes, everything always the same . . .’

But he had flushed. ‘I remember,’ he began, in a different voice. He stopped, and she did not press him, for he was gazing at the distant demonstrators with a bitterly nostalgic face.

Outside drifted the lovers, the married couples, the students, the old people. There the stark trees; there the blue, quiet sky. In a month the trees would be vivid green; the sun would pour down heat; the people would be brown, laughing, bare-limbed. No, no, she said to herself, at this vision of activity. Better the static sadness. And, all at once, unhappiness welled up in her, catching her throat, and she was back fifteen years in another country. She stood in blazing tropical moonlight, stretching her arms to a landscape that offered her nothing but silence; and then she was running down a path where small stones glinted sharp underfoot, till at last she fell spent in a swath of glistening grass. Fifteen years.

It was at this moment that the man turned abruptly and called the waiter and ordered wine.

‘What,’ she said humorously, ‘already?’

‘Why not?’

For the moment she loved him completely and maternally, till she suppressed the counterfeit and watched him wait, fidgeting, for the wine, pour it, and then set the two glasses before them beside the still-brimming coffee cups. But she was again remembering that night, envying the girl ecstatic with moonlight, who ran crazily through the trees in an unsharable desire for – but that was the point.

‘What are you thinking of ?’ he asked, still a little cruel.

‘Ohhh,’ she protested humorously.

‘That’s the trouble, that’s the trouble.’ He lifted his glass, glanced at her, and set it down. ‘Don’t you want to drink?’

‘Not yet.’

He left his glass untouched and began to smoke.

These moments demanded some kind of gesture – something slight, even casual, but still an acknowledgement of the separateness of those two people in each of them; the one seen, perhaps, as a soft-staring never-closing eye, observing, always observing, with a tired compassion; the other, a shape of violence
that struggled on in the cycle of desire and rest, creation and
achievement.

He gave it to her. Again their eyes met in the grave irony, before he turned away, flicking his fingers irritably against the table; and she turned also, to note the black branches where the sap was tingling.

‘I remember,’ he began; and again she said, in protest, ‘Ohhh!’ He checked himself. ‘Darling,’ he said dryly, ‘you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.’ They laughed.

‘It must have been this street. Perhaps this cafe´ – only they change so. When I went back yesterday to see the place where I came every summer, it was a paˆtisserie, and the woman had forgotten me. There was a whole crowd of us – we used to go around together – and I met a girl here, I think, for the first time.

There were recognised places for contacts; people coming from Vienna or Prague, or wherever it was, knew the places – it couldn’t be this cafe´, unless they’ve smartened it up. We didn’t have the money for all this leather and chromium.’

‘Well, go on.’

‘I keep remembering her, for some reason. Haven’t thought of her for years. She was about sixteen, I suppose. Very pretty – no, you’re quite wrong. We used to study together. She used to bring her books to my room. I liked her, but I had my own girl, only she was studying something else, I forget what.’ He paused
again, and again his face was twisted with nostalgia, and involuntarily she glanced over her shoulder down the street. The procession had completely disappeared; not even the sounds of singing and shouting remained.

‘I remember her because . . .’ And, after a preoccupied silence: ‘Perhaps it is always the fate of the virgin who comes and offers herself, naked, to be refused.’ ‘What!’ she exclaimed, startled. Also, anger stirred in her. She noted it, and sighed. ‘Go on.’

‘I never made love to her.We studied together all that summer. Then, one weekend, we all went off in a bunch. None of us had any money, of course, and we used to stand on the pavements and beg lifts, and meet up again in some village. I was with my own girl, but that night we were helping the farmer get in his
fruit, in payment for using his barn to sleep in, and I found this girl Marie was beside me. It was moonlight, a lovely night, and we were all singing and making love. I kissed her, but that was all. That night she came to me. I was sleeping up in the loft with another lad. He was asleep. I sent her back down to the others. They were all together down in the hay. I told her she was too young. But she was no younger than my own girl.’ He stopped; and after all these years his face was rueful and puzzled. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I sent her back.’ Then he laughed. ‘Not that it matters, I suppose.’

‘Shameless hussy,’ she said. The anger was strong now. ‘You had kissed her, hadn’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘But we were all playing the fool. It was a glorious night – gathering apples, the farmer shouting and swearing at us because we were making love more than working, and singing and drinking wine. Besides, it was that time: the youth movement. We regarded faithfulness and jealousy and all that sort of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Everyman's Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307269884
• ISBN 13: 9780307269881
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 696
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar