READING PASSAGE

The new cafe

By the novelist Doris Lessing

There is a new cafe in our main street, Stephanie’s, a year old now, and always full. It is French, liker the “ Boucheie” next to it a very British butcher like the “ Brasserie” opposite, and it is run by two Greeks. At once it acquired its regulars, of whom I am one. Here, as in all good cafes, may observed real-life soap operas, to be defined as a series omotional events that certainly not unfamiliar, since you are bound to have seen something like them before, but to which you luck the key that will make them not trite, but shockingly individual.

Last summer, the miraculous summer of 1989, when one hot blue day foolowed another, made pavement life as intense as in Paris or Rome, and our cafe had tables outside, crammed againts the aromatic offerings of a greengrocer. There everyone prefers to sit, but you are lucky to find a seat. Early in summer two German girl appeared, large, attractive, uninhitedly in search of boyfriends for their holidays. They were always together, usually outside, and for a few days sat alone eating the delicious cakes genuinely French that none can resist. They were delighted when someone said, “ Is this chair free?” Once this was me. They had three weeks in London. They were in a small hotel ten minutes away. They though London a fine place. The weather was wonderful and look! How brown we are getting. While they chatted their eyes at once flew to anyone coming.

And then they were with a young man. I had seen him here before. He sometimes dropped in for a coffee and was off at once. The German girls liked him. They leaned forward on their large and confident behinds and laughed and flung back blonde manes and their rows of dewy teeth shone out at everybody. For they continued to keep an eye on possibilities. He leaned back in his chair, legs hooked around the legs, and entertained them. “ I like that one,” you could imagine one girl saying to the other. “ He is a joker, I think?”

He was a likeable man, perhaps 27 or 28, blue-eyed, fair-haired all that kind of thing, but he had about him something that said, Keep Off. He was a little like a young hawk that hasn’t the hang of it, with a fluffy apprentice fierceness. And he was restless, always hooking and unhooking his legs, or flinging them hastily to one side to get them out of the way of someone coming past, or who seemed to sit too close. For a few days the three of them were together, usually in the early afternoon. When they left, a girl was on either side of him. But there ought to be a fourth, and soon there he was. When the four me, inside the cafe or on pavement, it did not seem as if they had paired off. The girls still kept their eyes on the entertainer, their bright mouths smiling in anticipation for the moment they could laugh, for that’s what they liked best to do. And he sat watching them laugh, pleased he was giving them what they wanted, and the other young man, who did not seem to hope for much, laughed too.

Once or twice they ate a proper meal. Sometimes they talked about a film they had seen. One afternoon he came in with a dark composed girl who had a sisterly and faintly satiric air. He bought her coffee and cakes and seemed apologetic about something. When the German girls came in he waved at them, tucked his legs in an awkward parcel to make room, and the three girls and man stayed for a time, and then went off together. Thereafter  I saw him with the dark girl and with other girls and he treated them as he did the German girls, for he seemed to like them all.

Once two tables outside were empty and I sat at one and soon he wsa at other, dropping into a chair at the last moment as he went past, as if he might as well do that as anything else. By now we were cafe acquaintances. He remarked that the summer wasn’t bad at all and he was glad hadn’t gone to Spain, for it was better here. There was a week left of his holiday. He worked at the builders’ supply shop down the road. It wasn’t bad, he quite liked it. Sitting close to him in the strong light I could see that he was older than he seemed. There were lines under his eyes, and he was often abstacted, as if he was continually being removed from present surroundings by an inner buzzer attend to this.

The German girls arrived and they were laughing in anticipation before they sat down.

Then they were not coming to the cafe, and he was back at work. He dropped in once or twice with a colleague from work, two young men wearing very white boiler suits, which were to make them look knowledgeable about building materials. The German girls’ young man seemed frail inside the thick suit.

One day I was standing out the Underground station, waiting to meet someone. He strolled past, taking his time, preoccupied. Then his face spread in a smile so unlike anything I had seen there. I quickly turned. Just ahead of him was a small pale young girl with a pram. No, when you looked she was a small pale young woman, probably 20, and she was tha baby’s mother, from the tender way she bent to tuck it into already overwhelming covers. She smiled at the concealed baby, and then turned, startled, as the man came up and said in his whimsical, don’t take me seriously way, “ Hilda, it’s me.” The two stood, dissolved in smiles. In a moment they would be in an embrace, but she recovered herself and quickly stood back. Then he, too, put on responsibility, as if fitting a winter’s coat over his white boiler siut. Because he could not, apparently, embrace the mother, he leaned over the pram with a gallant air, and she leaned past him, lifted a bundle from its depths and held the baby so that he could see its face. He bent politely over it and made appropriate noises, laughing at himself so that she had to laugh too. But all the time his eyes were on the young mother. She laughed again and pretended to thrust the baby at him for him to hold. At which he staggered back in a pantomime of the bundle back under its covers and stood soberly, confronting him. He too was serious. They stood there a long time, long at least for an observer, perhaps a minute or more, looking at each other, entranced. These two were a match, a fit, the same kind: you had to say about them as you do, rarely, about a couple: they are two halves of a whole, they belong together.

Again it was she who recovered her self and pushed the pram away down the pavement. Slowly pushed. After a few steps she turned to look at him. On she went but turned again. He still stood there, gazing after her. She gave him a brave little wave, and went on. She went slower, slower...but she had to go on, she had to, and she reached the corner much too soon, where she stopped and looked back to where he stood, his face as miserable as hers. Again the seconds sped past. But at last she firmly pushed the pram on and away disappeared. Never has there been a corner of a street as empty as that one. He stared. She had gone. He took two steps to go after her, then came back, sending over his shoulder a quick glance; yes, she really had gone.

Slowly he walked on, slower and stopped. He was level with me. He wasn’t seeing anybody or anything, he was inside himself. He stood with his knees slightly bent, his arms loose, palms showing, his head back, as if he planned at some point to raise his eyes to the sky.

On the face of the charmed man chased emoyions. There was regret, but a self-consciously dandyish regret, for even in his extremity he was not going to let go of this lifeline. There was bewilderment. There was loss. Above all, tenderness banishing the others. Meanwhile his forehead was tense and his eyes sombre. What was he thinking? “ What was all that? What? But what happened...what did happen, I don’t understand what happened....I don,t understand....”

Something like that.