10 - Epilogue

Summary

But if the broader picture for humankind is presented as increasingly dark, Lessing's latest work, Alfred and Emily, casts a kindly eye on a possible past. In Under My Skin, she tells how she had at one point wanted to write ‘My Alternative Lives’, where she herself as a doctor, a vet, a farmer, an explorer would live out different lives in universes, realities, parallel to that of her own writerly self: ‘A nice idea for a book, but time is running out’, she said (US 228). But in a revised form the idea must lie behind the novella that makes up the first part of Alfred and Emily. The foreword repeats what she had come to realize about her parents some years before: that ‘the First World War did them both in’. Now she gives them the lives they might have had if the Zeitgeist of their time had been different, if the First World War had never happened; but this is certainly not a romanticized version. As she says in the Explanation,

I have relied not only on traits of character that may be extrapolated, or extended, but on tones of voice, sighs, wistful looks, signs as slight as those used by skillful trackers. (AE 139)

Her father did not pose many problems; he had always wanted a farm in England, and was a keen and talented sportsman. Lessing gives him back the future he wanted, with a wife who was, like her mother, a nurse but who settles into village life, supports him on the farm, and enjoys their love life. Emily, however, presented greater challenges, as her character was already established before the war as a girl, a woman determined to go her own way. Lessing has her become the nurse at the Royal Free Hospital that indeed she was, and enjoy a very successful time there, as she did in real life; Lessing recalls in an aside that her mother would say that was the best time, ‘fiercely gathering those years into her arms and holding them safe’ (AE 240). But then life has to change: Lessing has her marry the doctor who had drowned in real life; for a time she is absorbed in arranging her house (as she was initially in their African home) and in playing hostess for her wealthy husband.