Walking in the Shade by Doris Lessing Page A

she liked the dreams I ‘brought’ her. Psychotherapists are like doctors and nurses who treat patients like children: ‘Just a little spoonful for me .’ ‘Put out your tongue for me .’ When we have a dream, it is ‘for’ the therapist. Often it is: I swear I dreamed dreams to please her, after we had been going along for a while. But at my very first session she had asked for dreams, preferably serial dreams, and she was pleased with my ancient-lizard dream and the dreams I was having about my father, who, too shallowly buried in a forest, would emerge from his grave, or attract wolves who came down from the hills to dig him up. ‘These are typically Jungian dreams,’ she would say gently, flushed with pleasure. ‘Sometimes it can take years to get someone to dream a dream on that level.’ Whereas ‘Jungian’ dreams had been my night landscape for as long as I could remember, I had not had ‘Freudian’ dreams. She said she used Freud when it was appropriate, and that was, I gathered, when the patient was still at a very low level of individuation. She made it clear that she thought I was. *
    â€˜Jungian dreams’—wonderful, those layers of ancient common experience, but what was the use of that if I had to go to bed with the covers over my head at the news my mother was about to arrive? Here I was. Here I am, Mrs. Sussman. Do what you will with me, but for God’s sake, cure me.
    I needed support for other reasons.
    One of them was my lover. Moidi Jokl suggested that I should go with her one evening to a party, and there I met a man I was destined—so I felt then—to live with, and to have and to hold and be happy with.
    Yes, he had a name. But as always, there is the question of chil dren and grandchildren. Since Under My Skin came out, I have met not a few grandchildren, children, of my old mates from those far-off times and learned that the views of contemporaries about each other need not share much with the views of their children. Whole areas of a parent’s, let alone a grandparent’s, life can be unknown to them. And why not? Children do not own their parents’ lives, though they—and I too—jealously pore over them as if they hold the key to their own.
    I say to a charming young man who has come to lunch to discuss his father, ‘When James was working on the mines on the Rand—’
    â€˜Oh, I’m sure he never did that,’ comes the confident reply.
    To another: ‘You didn’t know your father was a great lover of women?’ A faintly derisive smile, meaning: What, that old stick? So then of course you shut up; after all, it has nothing to do with him.
    I will call this man Jack. He was a Czech. He had worked as a doctor with our armies throughout the war. He was—what else?—a communist.
    He fell in love with me, jealously, hungrily, even angrily—with that particular degree of anger that means a man is in conflict. I did not at once fall in love with him. At the start, what I loved was his loving me so much: a nice change after Gottfried. The way I saw this— felt this—was that now I was ready for the right man: my ‘mistakes’ were over, and I was settled in London, where I intended to stay. All my experiences had programmed me for domesticity. I might now tell myself—and quite rightly—that I had never been ‘really’ married to Frank Wisdom, but for four years we had a conventional marriage. Gottfried and I had hardly been well matched, but we had lived conventionally enough. The law and society saw me as a woman who had had two marriages and two divorces. I felt that these marriages did not count. I had been too young, too immature. The fact that the bouncy, affectionate, almost casual relationship I had had with Frank was hardly unusual—particularly in those war years, when people married far too easily—did not mean I did