The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing Page A

baby, seemed to be tender and considerate. The baby was high in the air, held up in the nurse’s arms. The baby was laughing. The mother wanted to take the baby from the nurse, but the nurse held tight and said: ‘Oh, no, this one, this is my baby, he’s my baby.’ ‘Oh no, Nurse,’ said the strong tower of a mother, taller than anything in the room, taller than the big nurse, almost as high as the ceiling: ‘Oh no,’ she said, smiling but with her lips tight, ‘he’s my baby.’ “No, this is my baby,’ said the nurse, now rocking and crooning the infant, ‘he’s my darling baby, but the other one, she’s your baby, Emily is yours, madam.’ And she turned her back on the mother in a show of emotional independence, while she loved and rocked the baby. At which the mother smiled, a smile different from the other, and not understood by the little girl, except that it led to her being pulled up roughly on the mother’s hand, and told: ‘Why aren’t you undressed? I told you to get undressed.’ And there began a rapid, uncomfortable scrambling and pushing; she was trying to remain steady on her feet while layers of clothes were pulled off her. First the blue velvet dress of which she was proud, because it suited her - she had been told so by voices of all kinds insisting against each other high over her head, but it had many little buttons up the inside of her arm and down her back, each one taking so long to undo while the big fingers hurt and bruised. Then, off came the petticoat, quite fast but scratching at her chin, then long white tights too big for her which released a warm, likeable smell into the air: the mother noticed it and made a grimace. ‘And now into bed with you,’ she said as she hastily pulled down a white nightdress over the child’s head.
    Emily crept into her bed near the window, hauling herself up by the head-rail, for her it was a big bed; and she lifted a corner of the heavy red velvet to look out at the stars. At the same time she watched the two large people, the mother and the nurse, tending the baby. Her face was old and weary. She seemed to understand it all, to have foreseen it, to be living through it because she had to, feeling it as a thick heaviness all around her - time, through which she must push herself, till she could be free of it. For none of them could help themselves, not the mother, that feared and powerful woman, not the nurse, bad-tempered because of her life, not the baby, for whom she, the little girl, already felt a passion of love that melted her, made her helpless. And she, the child, could not help herself either, not at all; and when the mother said in her impatient, rough way, which came out as a sort of gaiety, a courage that even then the child recognized as a demand on her compassion: ‘Emily, you should lie down. Off to sleep with you,’ she lay down; and watched the two women taking the baby into another room from where could be heard a man’s voice, the father’s. A ceremony of goodnight, and she was excluded: they had forgotten she had not been taken to say goodnight to her father. She turned herself over, back to the hot white room, where the red flames pulsed out heat, filled the heavy white clothes on the bars with hot smells, made red shadows in the caves behind the edges of the red curtains, made a prickling heat start up all over her under the heavy bedclothes. She took hold of the dangling red tassels on the curtains, brought them close to her, and lay pulling them, pulling them …
    This small child was of course the Emily who had been given into my care, but I did not understand for some days that I had been watching a scene from her childhood (but that was impossible, of course, since no such childhood existed these days, it was obsolete), a scene, then, from her memory, or her history, which had formed her … I was sitting with her one morning, and some movement she made told me what should have been obvious. Then I kept glancing