To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing

Author:Doris Lessing [ Doris Lessing]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007322275
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Two Potters

I have only known one potter in this country, Mary Tawnish, and she lives out of London in a village where her husband is a schoolteacher. She seldom comes to town, and I seldom leave it, so we write.

The making of pots is not a thing I often think of, so when I dreamed about the old potter it was natural to think of Mary. But it was difficult to tell her: there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don’t, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other. Mary Tawnish says, when others relate their dreams: ‘I’ve never had a dream in my life.’ And adds, to soften or placate: ‘At least, I don’t remember. They say it’s a question of remembering?’

I would have guessed her to be a person who would dream a good deal, I don’t know why.

A tall woman, and rather large, she has bright brown clustering hair, and brown eyes that give the impression of light, though not from their surface: it is not a ‘bright’ or ‘brilliant’ glance. She looks at you, smiling or not, but always calm, and there is an impression of light, which seems caught in the structure of colour in the iris, so sometimes her eyes look yellow, set off by smooth brown eyebrows.

A large, slow-moving woman, with large white slow hands. And a silent one – she is a listener.

Her life has been a series of dramas: a childhood on the move with erratic parents, a bad first marriage, a child that died, lovers, but none lasting; then a second marriage to William Tawnish who teaches physics and biology. He is a quick, biting, bitter little man with whom she has three half-grown children.

More than once I have told her story, without comment, in order to observe the silent judgment: Another misfit, another unhappy soul, only to see the judger confounded on meeting her, for there was never a woman less fitted by nature for discord or miseries. Or so it would seem. So it seems she feels herself, for she disapproves of other people’s collisions with themselves, just as if her own life had nothing to do with her.

The first dream about the potter was simple and short. Once upon a time … there was a village or a settlement, not in England, that was certain, for the scene was of a baked red-dust bareness. Low rectangular structures, of simple baked mud, also reddish-brown, were set evenly on the baked soil, yet because some were roofless and others in the process of crumbling, and others half built, there was nothing finished or formed about this place. And for leagues and leagues, in all directions, the great plain, of reddish earth, and in the middle of the plain, the settlement that looked as if it were hastily moulded by a great hand out of wet clay, allowed to dry, and left there. It seemed uninhabited, but in an empty space among the huts, all by himself, working away on a primitive potter’s wheel turned by foot, was an old man.

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