The Cleft by Doris Lessing

third his age. Young relatives and young men who thought of me as a patron were suddenly often in my house, and I thought it would not be long before she married one of them, causing me a little pang or two: and this was – contradictorily – because I thought so much of my first wife and what I had missed. And those boys, those wonderful young men, whose childhood I had scarcely been conscious of.
    I asked Julia to marry me, saying that we must agree on a deal. She would give me two children, and I would ask nothing of her beyond that, and she and the children would be well provided for. She agreed, but not without hesitation, having learned that young men were desiring her in plenty. But they weren’t rich, like me. And she did like me, as a friend. Or perhaps as a tutor? She told me she enjoyed talking with me and listening to me because ‘I learn such a lot, you see’. She was almost completely ignorant.
    And now something unexpected. I had taken it for granted that this fresh, plump girl (‘my little partridge’) would bring forth children easily, but her first pregnancy was difficult and the birth worse. She told me it was because she had bad illnesses as a child, and sometimes the family didn’t get enough to eat. If she had asked me to let her renege on the second half of our bargain – the second child – I would have been ready to forgive her. I had not enjoyed seeing her discomfort, and then the difficult birth. But she was an honest girl, the partridge, and she went ahead for the second child, though she had a bad enough time with that one, too.
    The two infants once born were handed into the care of the slave girls working in the children’s wing – and I don’t think she thereafter ever thought of them. It had not occurred to me to make part of our bargain ‘Give me two babes and be a mother to them’. But when I did tax her about her indifference to her children she said, ‘Bad enough having to be a child withouthaving to look after them too.’ I learned that she was the eldest of the children, with a sickly and worn-out mother, and she had had to be a mother to her siblings, with the help of one inadequate slave girl, a runaway slave from some great estate, where they treated slaves badly. Julia’s helper could hardly speak our language – she was Greek. Julia had sworn that when she got to maturity she would refuse to marry a man who could not provide her with slaves. A pretty big oath to swear, if you are very poor, from a small country town. But that explained why she agreed with her mother to come and offer her services to me.
    Her delay in agreeing to ‘make a deal’ with me was explained. I could not have asked her to do anything more difficult than to have a child, let alone two.
    She said, too, that she did not have motherly feelings, she never had them. She had asked her mother why she was always ordered to feed and wash the babies but her brothers were not. Her mother simply said that this was how things were. It is not recorded what the Greek slave thought about it all, but no one would be interested in her.
    Julia’s uninhibited remarks were thought most original and daring, but she did not understand why people laughed at them and commended her. At first I am sure she did not intend to shock or surprise, though she was acquiring a reputation for her wit and boldness. Soon she was in circles whose prevailing tone was a world-weary cynicism, and then she did play up to it: what had been fresh and natural to her became a style; shefitted in with people I didn’t like, and there was not much left in her of the small-town girl with her own view on life.
    I did say to her that her generation struck people of mine as selfish, self-indulgent, amoral, compared with the women like my mother, who were virtuous and famed for their piety and strength of character. Julia seemed interested in my strictures, but as if they