She did not think about Bill, because she could not be bothered with the anger she felt at herself. Besides, that anguishing passion now seemed an irrelevance. A young man—much younger than his years, as unstable as an adolescent—had been magicked by Julie, just like all of them, and, like them all, had not been himself.
She thought of Henry, all right, but only in that realm behind or beyond ordinary life, full of smiles and ease, where—if they chanced to meet—they would at once go on with an interrupted conversation. Unlikely, though: she was taking good care this would not happen.
That place was where once had lived her little brother Hal, when loving him had seemed the only pledge there was or could be for the hope of love.
Her brother of now, however, was certainly not in any other place, for he had taken to turning up in the evenings, unannounced. ‘But, Hal, couldn’t you telephone first?’
‘But you don’t have anything much to do, do you?’
He sat himself plumply in the chair she thought of as her visitors’ chair, and emanated a hot uncomprehending resentment against her and against everything.
If she said she was busy, he asked, ‘What with?’
She might say—humorously, of course, for he had to be humoured—‘I’m writing letters.’ ‘I’m reading.’ ‘I’m thinking out a theatre problem.’ If she persisted: ‘Then I won’t disturb your important concerns,’ and he rolled away again.
Sometimes, when he arrived and would not go, she might watch him, her little brother, sitting in his high chair, his little mouth moving wetly, his plump hands waving gently beside him, full of the confidence of the loved child.
‘But, Sarah, why don’t we go and live in France?’
‘But, Hal, I like living in London.’
There was news from Briony and Nell, who were friends again with their mother and with Joyce—when she was at home. Anne had reported that Hal was ‘seeing’ the head of Physiotherapy at the hospital, and with a bit of luck she might take Hal on.
‘It does look promising,’ Nell told Sarah. ‘He said he was going away for a week, and we think he’s taking her.’
‘Please don’t be too nice to him,’ Briony said to Sarah, ‘or we’ll never get him married again.’
acknowledgements
D. H. Lawrence, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edward Thomas, Publilius Syrus, Byron, Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Louis MacNeice, Plautus, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Ecclesiastes, T. S. Eliot, Sappho, Bob Dylan, François Villon, John Vanbrugh, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Cecil Spring Rice, Archbishop Whately of Dublin, Harry Graham.
About the Author
DORIS LESSING was born of British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. Her most recent works include African Laughter and the autobiography Under My Skin. Doris Lessing lives in London.
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Praise
“Lessing wields a formidable analytic intelligence that makes this work provocative and often astonishingly beautiful.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Lessing strips away the romantic surfaces, ultimately tracing the roots of love and longing all the way down and back to the primary emotional attachments formed (or deformed) with the earliest parent-child bond.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Reading Love, Again, we find ourselves watching in awe, enjoying and admiring, as Lessing bravely and unselfconsciously chops away with her axe until at last she has revealed that brilliant kernel at the heart of it all that we recognize as the truth.”
—Francine Prose, Washington Post Book World
“Compassionately insightful…Lessing handily ties the surprises of inappropriate love to the sharp issues of ageism, emotional instability, the roles of women at the end of the 20th Century, the shaky states of marriage and parent-child relationships, contemporary English culture and the ongoing general quirkiness of the human condition.”
—Miami Herald
“An exhilarating and disquieting meditation on old age and romantic love. Lessing leads readers of Love, Again deep into the irrational zones her characters inhabit and invites us to settle in and make ourselves uneasily at home.”
—The Nation
“Beautifully written and psychologically penetrating…. Lessing has discovered an aspect of love that few have written about before.”
—Newark Star-Ledger
Also by Doris Lessing
Novels
The Grass Is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries of Jane Somers:
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
If the Old Could…
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
“Canopus in Argos: Archives” series
Re: Colonized 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
“Children of Violence” series
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
Short Stories
This Was the Old Chief’s Country
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories
Stories
African Stories
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches
Opera
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)
Poetry
Fourteen Poems
Nonfiction
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
Particularly Cats…and Rufus
African Laughter
Under My Skin
The Doris Lessing Reader
Copyright
LOVE, AGAIN. Copyright © 1995 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061849718
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Doris Lessing
Copyright
About the Publisher