The Cleft by Doris Lessing Page B

you’re just silly .’
    â€˜I’m not silly,’ she half screams, and runs to the girls. ‘Why, why, why?’ she demands, as one whisks her up in her arms.
    â€˜Don’t cry,’ says this nurse. ‘Don’t give him that satisfaction.’ ‘It’s not fair,’ sobs the child, and the other girl says, ‘But if you had that you wouldn’t know what to do with it,’ sending me a great wink, and a laugh. (But I have never been that kind of Master: perhaps she wished I were.)
    And at that moment I knew I would at least try and take on this task, my history of that ancient, long-ago time. Scenes I had pondered over, thinking, but after these ages, how can you really understand what it meant when females and the males were together in that valley, while the eagles watched them, not knowing anything – and we Romans know so much – about why the girls were shaped like this, and the boys like that, let alone what it all meant.
    They were driven by powerful instincts – and we do know how strong they are, nothing has changed there – but I keep coming back to a thought: that the boys seemed to be hungering for something, wanting something, needing – but did not know what it was their squirts wanted – forcing all the rest of themselves to want, to need.
    And the girls: organs they did not know they had drove them across the mountain to the boys, and even when they knew that mating meant later births, they did not know why. Or for a long time they didn’t.
    It was because of my observations in the nursery wing that I decided to attempt this history, despite the difficulties. I am sure that certain exchanges between the males and the females would not have altered all that much, in spite of the long ages (and ages – etc.). That scene I saw in the nursery was enacted then, or something like it. Must have been.
    And how about the scene I saw when the boy Titus, waking in the morning with an erection, slowly stood up, grasping the sides of his bed, looking down, andshouting, ‘Mine! It’s mine! Mine, mine, mine, mine …’
    So much I believe has not changed. But if those old people could come back, and observe, and see, and find so much unchanged, then other things they would not understand at all.
    My account of my marriage, my Julia, my first and second families, they would not recognise. The old senator and his young wife? No. Why not? A very simple reason: they did not live long. It was a hard and dangerous time and not even the ‘Old Shes’, the ‘Old Ones’, could have been very old. An ‘old female’ we hear and what do we see? Some grey-haired, wrinkled, bent old crone. Nothing in any of the records describes an aged person.
    No one I have ever met, or have heard of, would not at once understand ‘The old senator and his very young wife’. They might smile, or grimace, or look condemning, but they would know what is involved here. And so I begin this history, this present history, even when I was daily in the nursery, watching the children, and while Julia was off, mostly with her new friends.
    She never lied to me, except by omission. It was assumed she had a lover, and she encouraged me to think that. What need did I have of more information when the material was at my disposal of Rome’s secret services? She was now an intimate of some very highly placed circles: parties that can only be called orgies went on every night. She was friends with infamous women, and with others who did not survive into the next emperor’s reign.
    I did say to her, when she was sitting there after some great party or other, watching me, as if she expected me to reprimand her, ‘Julia, you are flying too high.’ I waited for her to defend herself but she didn’t. Perhaps she was herself troubled. ‘The higher you fly the further you fall,’ I said, smiling, so as not to seem judgemental.