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Very different is ‘A Love Child’ about James, a wartime soldier, sick after his voyage from England to Capetown, a mass of rashes and blisters, fevered, scarcely able to talk, who falls in love on sight with a married woman and demands she respond instantly, which, infected with his madness, she does. He leaves for India almost immediately and gets commissioned because the Colonel’s wife likes his voice — Lessing has always been sharply aware that the right voice got the jobs in the England of those days. James never sees or hears from the woman again though the memory of his great moment, his only great moment, haunts him for life.
‘Victoria and the Stavenings’ is also about deprivation of love, the kind a black mother feels when she knows she must allow her daughter’s wealthy white grandparents to send her child away to boarding school. An iron hand in a velvet glove is kidnapping my child, she thinks, knowing she may well lose her altogether. Does she really find solace in thinking she might marry the clergyman who wants children or is it just rueful stoicism, the armour she puts on every day?
In ‘The Reason for It’, Lessing conjures up an imaginary country of a brave new world in which gradually restrictions go out of the window, freedom is all and barbarians flourish until life becomes a dog-eat-dog existence only a return to their old laws can stop.
Could this happen? Possibly, thinks Less- ing, but it would take centuries.
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