The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing Page B

matter.’
    ‘Someone should warn him. He’s asking for it. Those waves out there, you’ve got to respect them.’
    ‘Have you warned him?’
    ‘I’ve tried my best.’
    ‘Thanks,’ said Roz. ‘I’ll tell his mother.’
    She told Lil, who said to her son that he was playing too close to the safety margins. If the old boatman was worried, then that meant something, Ian said, ‘Thanks.’
    One evening, at sunset, the boatman came in to find Roz or one of them on the beach, but had to go up to the house, found Mary, told her that Ian was lying smashed up on one of the outer beaches.
    Then Ian was in hospital. Told by the doctor, ‘You’ll live,’ his face said plainly he wished he could have heard something else. He had hurt his spine. But that would probably heal. He had hurt his leg, and that would never be normal.
    He left hospital and lay in his bed at home, in a room which for years had not been much more than a place where he changed his clothes, before crossing the street to Roz. But in that house were now Tom and Mary. He turned his face to the wall. His mother tried to coax him up and on to his feet, but could not make him take exercise. Lil could not, but Hannah could and did. She came to visit her old friend Mary, slept in that house, and spent most of her time sitting with Ian, holding his hand, often in sympathetic tears.
    ‘For an athlete it must he so hard,’ she kept saying to Lil, to Mary, to Tom. ‘I can understand why he is so discouraged.’
    A good word, an accurate one. She persuaded Ian to turn his face towards her, and then, soon, to get up and take the prescribed steps up and down the room, then on to the verandah, and soon, across the road and down to swim. But he would not ever surf again. He would always limp.
    Hannah kissed the poor leg, kissed him, and Ian wept with her: her tears gave him permission to weep. And soon there was another wedding, an even larger one, since Ian and his mother Liliane were so well known, and their sports shops so beneficial to every town they found themselves in, and both were famed for their good causes and their general benevolence.
    So there they were, the new young couple, Ian and Hannah, in Lil’s house with Lil. Opposite, Roz’s old house was now Tom’s and Mary’s. Lil was uncomfortable in her role as mother-in-law, and was unhappy every time she saw the house opposite, now so changed. But after all, she was rich, unlike Roz. She bought one
    of the houses almost on the beach, not a couple of hundred yards from the two young couples, and Roz moved in. The women were together again, and Saul Butler when he met them allowed a special measure of sarcastic comment into his, ‘Ah, together again, I see!’ ‘As you see,’ said Roz or Lil. ‘Can’t fool you, Saul, can we?’ said Lil, or Roz.
    Then Hannah was pregnant and Ian was appropriately proud.
    ‘It has turned out all right,’ said Roz to Lil.
    ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Lil.
    ‘What mote could we expect?’
    They were on the beach, in their old chairs, moved to outside the new fence.
    ‘I didn’t expect anything,’ said Lil.
    ‘Hut?’
    ‘I didn’t expect to feel the way I do,’ said Lil. ‘I feel …’
    ‘All right,’ said Roz quickly. ‘Let it go. I know But look at it this way, we’ve had …’
    ‘The best,’ said Lil. ‘Now all that time seems to me like a dream. I can’t believe it, such happiness, Roz,’ she whispered, turning her face and leaning forward a little, though there wasn’t a soul for fifty yards.
    ‘I know,’ said Roz. “Well - that’s it.’ And she leaned back, shutting her eyes. From below her dark glasses tears trickled.
    Ian went off with his mother a good bit on trips to their shops. He was everywhere greeted with affectionate, respectful generosity. It was known how he had got his limp. As foolhardy as an Everest hero, as brave as - well, as a man outrunning a wave like a mountain - he was so handsome, so courteous, such a gentleman,