4b8
DORIS LESSING
informed us tersely of her doings. Then Betty decided she must
go by herself for a holiday. She had been appalled by the
discovery that
if
her husband was away for a night she couldn't
sleep; and when he went to Australia for three weeks, she
stopped living until he came back. She had discussed this with
him, and he had agreed that, if she really felt the situation to
be serious, he would despatch her by air, to Italy, in order
to recover her self-respect.
As
she put it.
I got
this
letter from her: "Its no use, I'm coming home.
I might have known. Better face it, once you're really married
you're not fit for man nor beast. And if you remember what
I used to be like!
Well!
I moped around Milan. I sunbathed
in. Venice, then I thought my tan was surely worth something,
so I was on the point of starting an affair with another lonely
soul, but I lost heart, and went to Florence to see Judith. She
wasn't there. She'd gone to the Italian Riviera. I had nothing
better to do, so I followed her. When I saw the place I wanted
to laugh, it's so much not Judith, you know, all those palms
and umbrellas and gaiety at all costs and ever such an
ornamental blue sea. Judith is in an enormous stone room up
on the hillside above the sea, with grape-vines all over the
place. You should see her, she's got beautiful. It seems for the
last fifteen years she's been going to Soho every Saturday
morning to buy food at an Italian shop. I must have looked
surprised, because she explained she liked Soho. I suppose
because all that dreary vice and nudes and prostitutes and
everything prove how right she is to be as she is? She told the
people in the shop she was going to Italy, and the signora said,
what a coincidence, she was going back to Italy too, and she
did hope an old friend like Miss Castlewell would visit her there.
Judith said to me: 'I felt lacking, when she used the word
friend. Our relations have always been formal. Can you under–
stand it?' she said to me. 'For fifteen years,' I said to her. She
said: 'I think I must feel it's a kind of imposition, don't you
know, expecting people to feel friendship for one.'
Well.
I said:
