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At this he regarded her gravely for some moments, and she did not know what he was thinking. At last he said: ‘Well, I expect you’re right. But you could suggest she writes to a marriage bureau.’ He laughed at the look of distaste that showed on her face, and went on: ‘Yes, but you’d be surprised how many good marriages I’ve organized myself, through marriage bureaux.’
‘You sound like — a sort of psychiatric social worker,’ she said, and as soon as the words were out, she knew what the reply would be. Dr West, the sound general practitioner, with no patience for ‘frills’, made jokes about his colleague, ‘the witch-doctor’, to whom he sent patients in serious mental trouble. This, then, was ‘the witch-doctor’.
Paul Tanner was saying, with reluctance: ‘That’s what I am, in a sense.’ She knew the reluctance was because he did not want from her the obvious response. What the response was she knew because she had felt a leap inside herself of relief and interest, an uneasy interest because he was a witch-doctor, possessed of all sorts of knowledge about her. She said quickly: ‘Oh, I’m not going to tell you my troubles.’ After a pause during which, she knew, he was looking for words which would discourage her from doing so, he said: ‘And I never give advice at parties.’
‘Except to widow Brown,’ she said.
He smiled, and remarked: ‘You’re middle-class, aren’t you?’ It was definitely a judgement. Ella was hurt. ‘By origin,’ she said. He said: ‘I’m working-class, so perhaps I know rather more about widow Brown than you do.’
At this point Patricia Brent came over, and took him away to talk to some member of her staff. Ella realized that they had made an absorbed couple, in a party not designed for couples. Patricia’s manner had said that they had drawn attention. So Ella was rather annoyed. Paul did not want to go. He gave her a look that was urgent, and appealing, yet also hard. Yes, thought Ella, a hard look, like a nod of command that she should stay where she was until he was free to come back to her. And she reacted away from him again.
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About
The Golden Notebook is a collaboration between if:book London and Apt.
Principal funding by Arts Council England.
HarperCollins, the publisher of The Golden Notebook, digitized the book for us and generously gave permission to reproduce it here in its entirety at no cost.
Additional support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and New York University
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