The Fifth Child

ALSO BY DORIS LESSING

The Grass Is Singing
This Was the Old Chief’s Country
(stories)
The Habit of Loving
(stories)
In Pursuit of the English
Going Home
Fourteen Poems
The Golden Notebook
A Man and Two Women
(stories)
Particularly Cats
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories
The Summer Before the Dark
A Small Personal Voice
The Memoirs of a Survivor
African Stories
Stories
The Diary of a Good Neighbour
(under the pseudonym Jane Somers)
^*
If the Old Could …
(under the pseudonym Jane Somers)
^*
The Good Terrorist
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
The Doris Lessing Reader

CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE

Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City

CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES

Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

*
Published together as
The Diaries of Jane Somers

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1989

Copyright © 1988 by Doris Lessing

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1988.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lessing, Doris May, 1919–

    The fifth child.

    (Vintage international)

    I. Title.

[PR6023.E833F54     1989]       823′.914       88-40379

eISBN: 978-0-307-77764-5

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

First Page

About the Author

H
ARRIET AND DAVID
met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that this was what they had been waiting for. Someone conservative, old-fashioned, not to say obsolescent; timid, hard to please: this is what other people called them, but there was no end to the unaffectionate adjectives they earned. They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves, which was that they were ordinary and in the right of it, should not be criticised for emotional fastidiousness, abstemiousness, just because these were unfashionable qualities.

At this famous office party, about two hundred people crammed into a long, ornate, and solemn room, for three hundred and thirty-four days of the year a boardroom. Three associated firms, all to do with putting up buildings, were having their end-of-year party. It was noisy. The pounding rhythm of a small band shook walls and floor. Most people were dancing, packed close because of lack of space, couples bobbing up and down or revolving in one spot as if they were on invisible turntables. The women were dressed up, dramatic, bizarre, full of colour:
Look at me! Look at me!
Some of the men demanded as much attention. Around the walls were pressed a few non-dancers, and among these were Harriet and David, standing by themselves,
holding glasses—observers. Both had reflected that the faces of the dancers, women more than men, but men, too, could just as well have been distorted in screams and grimaces of pain as in enjoyment. There was a forced hecticity to the scene … but these thoughts, like so many others, they had not expected to share with anyone else.

From across the room—if one saw her at all among so many eye-demanding people—Harriet was a pastel blur. As in an Impressionist picture, or a trick photograph, she seemed a girl merged with her surroundings. She stood near a great vase of dried grasses and leaves and her dress was something flowery. The focussing eye then saw curly dark hair, which was unfashionable … blue eyes, soft but thoughtful … lips rather too firmly closed. In fact, all her features were strong and good, and she was solidly built. A healthy young woman, but perhaps more at home in a garden?

David had been standing just where he was for an hour drinking judiciously, his serious grey-blue eyes taking their time over this person, that couple, watching how people engaged and separated, ricochetting off each other. To Harriet he did not have the look of someone solidly planted: he seemed almost to hover, balancing on the balls of his feet. A slight young man—he looked younger than he was—he had a round, candid face and soft brown hair girls longed to run their fingers through, but then that contemplative gaze of his made itself felt and they desisted. He made them feel uncomfortable. Not Harriet. She knew his look of watchful apartness mirrored her own. She judged his humorous air to be an effort. He was making similar mental comments about her: she seemed to dislike these occasions as much as he did. Both had found out who the other was. Harriet was in the sales department of a firm that designed and supplied building materials; David was an architect.

So what was it about these two that made them freaks and oddballs? It was their attitude to sex! This was the sixties! David
had had one long and difficult affair with a girl he was reluctantly in love with: she was what he did
not
want in a girl. They joked about the attraction between opposites. She joked that he thought of reforming her: “I do believe
you
imagine you are going to put the clock back, starting with me!” Since they had parted, unhappily enough, she had slept—so David reckoned—with everyone in Sissons Blend & Co. With the girls, too, he wouldn’t be surprised. She was here tonight, in a scarlet dress with black lace, a witty travesty of a flamenco dress. From this concoction her head startlingly emerged. It was pure nineteen-twenties, for her black hair was sleeked down into a spike on her neck at the back, with two glossy black spikes over her ears, and a black lock on her forehead. She sent frantic waves and kisses to David from across the room where she circled with her partner, and he smiled matily back: no hard feelings. As for Harriet, she was a virgin. “A virgin
now
,” her girl friends might shriek; “are you crazy?” She had not thought of herself as a virgin, if this meant a physiological condition to be defended, but rather as something like a present wrapped up in layers of deliciously pretty paper, to be given, with discretion, to the right person. Her own sisters laughed at her. The girls working in the office looked studiedly humorous when she insisted, “I am sorry, I don’t like all this sleeping around, it’s not for me.” She knew she was discussed as an always interesting subject, and usually unkindly. With the same chilly contempt that good women of her grandmother’s generation might have used, saying, “She is quite immoral you know,” or, “She’s no better than she ought to be,” or, “She hasn’t got a moral to her name”; then (her mother’s generation), “She’s man-mad,” or, “She’s a nympho”—so did the enlightened girls of now say to each other, “It must be something in her childhood that’s made her like this. Poor thing.”

And indeed she had sometimes felt herself unfortunate or deficient in some way, because the men with whom she went
out for a meal or to the cinema would take her refusal as much as evidence of a pathological outlook as an ungenerous one. She had gone about with a girl friend, younger than the others, for a time, but then this one had become “like all the others,” as Harriet despairingly defined her, defining herself as a misfit. She spent many evenings alone, and went home often at weekends to her mother. Who said, “Well, you’re old-fashioned, that’s all. And a lot of girls would like to be, if they got the chance.”

These two eccentrics, Harriet and David, set off from their respective corners towards each other at the same moment: this was to be important to them as the famous office party became part of their story. “Yes, at exactly the same time …” They had to push past people already squeezed against walls; they held their glasses high above their heads to keep them out of the way of the dancers. And so they arrived together at last, smiling—but perhaps a trifle anxiously—and he took her hand and they squeezed their way out of this room into the next, which had the buffet and was as full of noisy people, and through that into a corridor, sparsely populated with embracing couples, and then pushed open the first door whose handle yielded to them. It was an office that had a desk and hard chairs, and, as well, a sofa. Silence … well, almost. They sighed. They set down their glasses. They sat facing each other, so they might look as much as they wished, and then began to talk. They talked as if talk were what had been denied to them both, as if they were starving for talk. And they went on sitting there, close, talking, until the noise began to lessen in the rooms across the corridor, and then they went quietly out and to his flat, which was near. There they lay on his bed holding hands and talked, and sometimes kissed, and then slept. Almost at once she moved into his flat, for she had been able to afford only a room in a big communal flat. They had already decided to marry in the spring. Why wait? They were made for each other.

Harriet was the oldest of three daughters. It was not until she left home, at eighteen, that she knew how much she owed to her childhood, for many of her friends had divorced parents, led adventitious and haphazard lives, and tended to be, as it is put, disturbed. Harriet was not disturbed, and had always known what she wanted. She had done well enough at school, and went to an arts college where she became a graphic designer, which seemed an agreeable way of spending her time until she married. The question whether to be, or not to be, a career woman had never bothered her, though she was prepared to discuss it: she did not like to appear more eccentric than she had to be. Her mother was a contented woman who had everything she could reasonably want; so it appeared to her and to her daughters. Harriet’s parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one.

David’s background was a quite different matter. His parents had divorced when he was seven. He joked, far too often, that he had two sets of parents: he had been one of the children with a room in two homes, and everybody considerate about psychological problems. There had been no nastiness or spite, if plenty of discomfort, even unhappiness—that is, for the children. His mother’s second husband, David’s other father, was an academic, an historian, and there was a large shabby house in Oxford. David liked this man, Frederick Burke, who was kind, if remote, like his mother, who was kind and remote. His room in this house had been his home—was, in his imagination, his real home now, though soon, with Harriet, he would create another, an extension and amplification of it. This home of his was a large bedroom at the back of the house overlooking a neglected garden; a shabby room, full of his boyhood, and rather chilly, in the English manner. His real father married one of his kind: she was a noisy, kind, competent woman, with the cynical good humour of the rich. James Lovatt was a boat builder, and when David did consent to visit, his place could
easily be a bunk on a yacht, or a room (“This is your room, David!”) in a villa in the South of France or the West Indies. But he preferred his old room in Oxford. He had grown up with a fierce private demand on his future: for his own children it would all be different. He knew what he wanted, and the kind of woman he needed. If Harriet had seen her future in the old way, that a man would hand her the keys of her kingdom, and there she would find everything her nature demanded, and this as her birthright, which she had—at first unknowingly, but then very determinedly—been travelling towards, refusing all muddles and dramas, then he saw his future as something he must aim for and protect. His wife must be like him in this: that she knew where happiness lay and how to keep it. He was thirty when he met Harriet, and he had been working in the dogged disciplined manner of an ambitious man: but what he was working for was a home.