Free The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing Page B

morning trying to remember myself back into sitting under the trees in the vlei near Mashopi. Failed. [Here appeared the title or heading of the notebook:]
    THE DARK
    [The pages were divided down the middle by a neat black line, and the subdivisions headed:]
    Source Money
    [Under the left word were fragments of sentences, scenes remembered, letters from friends in Central Africa gummed to the page. On the other side, a record of transactions to do with Frontiers of War, money received from translations, etc., accounts of business interviews and so on. After a few pages the entries on the left ceased. For three years the black notebook had in it nothing but business and practical entries which appeared to have absorbed the memories of physical Africa. The entries on the left began again opposite, a typed manifesto-like sheet gummed to the page, which was a synopsis of Frontiers of War, now changed to Forbidden Love, written by Anna with her tongue in her cheek, and approved by the synopsis desk in her agent's office:] Dashing young Peter Carey, his brilliant scholastic career at Oxford broken by World War II, is posted to Central Africa with the sky-blue-uniformed youth of the R. A. F. to be trained as a pilot. Idealistic and inflammable, young Peter is shocked by the go-getting, colour-ridden small-town society he finds, falls in with the local group of high-living lefts, who exploit his naive young radicalism. During the week they clamour about the injustices meted out to the blacks; weekends they live it up in a lush out-of-town hotel run by John-Bull-type landlord Boothby and his comely wife, whose pretty teen-age daughter falls in love with Peter. He encourages her, with all the thoughtlessness of youth; while Mrs. Boothby, neglected by her hard-drinking money-loving husband, conceives a powerful but secret passion for the good-looking youth. Peter, disgusted by the leftists' weekend orgies, secretly makes contact with the local African agitators, whose leader is the cook at the hotel. He falls in love with the cook's young wife, neglected by her politics-mad husband, but this love defies the taboos and mores of the white settler society. Mistress Boothby surprises them in a romantic rendezvous; and in her jealous rage informs the authorities of the local R. A. F. camp, who promise her Peter will be posted away from the Colony. She tells her daughter, unaware of her unconscious motive, which is to humiliate the untouched young girl whom Peter has preferred to herself and who becomes ill because of the insult to her white-girl's pride and announces she will leave home in a scene where the mother, frantic, screams: 'You couldn't even attract him. He preferred the dirty black girl to you.' The cook, informed by Mrs. Boothby of his young wife's treachery, throws her off, telling her to return to her family. But the girl, proudly defiant, goes instead to the nearest town, to take the easy way out as a woman of the streets. Heart-broken Peter, all his illusions in shreds, spends his last night in the Colony drunk, and by chance encounters his dark love in some shabby shebeen. They spend their last night together in each other's arms, in the only place where white and black may meet, in the brothel by the sullied waters of the town's river. Their innocent and pure love, broken by the harsh inhuman laws of this country and by the jealousies of the corrupt, will know no future. They talk pathetically of meeting in England when the war is over, but both know this to be a brave lie. In the morning Peter says good-bye to the group of local 'progressives'; his contempt for them clear in his grave young eyes. Meanwhile his dark young love is lurking at the other end of the platform in a group of her own people. As the train steams out she waves; he does not see her; his eyes already reflect thought of the death that awaits him-Ace Pilot that he is!-and she returns to the streets of the dark town, on the arm of another man, laughing