Heart” is fascinating in its diagrammatic exposition of Lessing’s views on romantic love. The story opens as the unnamed “I,” a woman, is awaiting the arrival of her escort for the evening, a man designated only as C. The narrator explains that C is the third “serious” love of her life, the first two being A and B. Earlier in the day, the speaker has had lunch with A and tea with B and is pleased that she has been able to enjoy their company with equanimity; she is, finally, “out of love” with them. Recognizing her sensation at this discovery as one of relief, the speaker begins to question her exhilaration at the thought of spending the evening with C, “because there was no doubt that both A and B had caused me unbelievable pain. Why, therefore, was I looking forward to C? I should rather be running away as fast as I could.”

Her questioning leads her to a new recognition of what lies behind the human desire to be “in love.” It is not, she concludes, that “one needs a person who, like a saucer of water, allows one to float off on him/her, like a transfer.” It is not, then, that one needs to “lose one’s heart” by blending with another. Rather, “one carries with one a sort of burning spear stuck in one’s side, that one waits for someone else to pull out; it is something painful, like a sore or a wound, that one cannot wait to share with someone else.” One needs to “lose one’s heart” literally, to get rid of it by giving it to someone else. The catch is that we are expected to take their heart in return. Lessing envisages a grotesque sort of barter, two people demanding of each other, “take my wound.”

Moving to the telephone to call C and suggest that they agree to keep their hearts to themselves, the speaker is forced to hang up the phone:For I felt the fingers of my left hand push outwards around something rather large, light and slippery—hard to describe this sensation, really. My hand is not large, and my heart was in a state of inflation after having had lunch with A, tea with B, and then looking forward to C. Anyway, my fingers were stretching out rather desperately to encompass an unknown, largish, lightish object, and I said: Excuse me a minute to C, looked down, and there was my heart, in my hand.

There her heart stays, attached to her hand, for four days, growing to the flesh of her palm. She cannot remove it by any “act of will or intention of desire,” but when, distracted by events outside her window, she temporarily forgets herself, she feels it begin to loosen. One can “lose one’s heart” only by forgetting about it’ but it is still attached, and who is one to give it to?

She has previously covered the heart with aluminum foil, in part because it is messy and in part because, unaccustomed to the air, “it smarts.” Now wrapping a scarf around her hand, heart and all, she walks about London, finally taking a train on the underground. In the train, she sits across from a woman maddened by love, who ceaselessly, jerkily, accuses her lover or husband of giving his mistress a gold cigarette case. The woman is on the verge of total breakdown, of lapsing into total immobility and, watching her, the narrator forgets herself. She feels the heart loosen from her hand, plucks it off and gives it to the mad woman:For a moment she did not react, then with a groan or a mutter of relieved and entirely theatrical grief, she leaned forward, picked up the glittering heart, and clutched it in her arms.

The woman has “taken heart”; she now has the energy of the heart and the “theatrical” grief it brings with it. She can once again play love as a game, insisting that her husband or lover “take her wound.” The narrator, finally, is free. “No heart. No heart at all. What bliss. What freedom.”

“How I Finally Lost My Heart,” although uncharacteristic in its style, can serve as a paradigm for most of Lessing’s stories on the relations between men and women. It is valuable because it points out so clearly her vision that the important choice is not among A and B and C, but it is rather the choice of freedom or bondage. If people choose freedom and break out of the patterns of romantic love, they are then able to see clearly and can move on to new ways of loving. This will necessitate new forms of the family, which Lessing sees, in its traditional structure, as the institutionalized destruction of its individual members. If, however, they remain convinced that the important choice is that of who to love, not how to love, they remain in delusion.

“A Man and Two Women”

This same lesson is exemplified in the more traditional story “A Man and Two Women,” one of Lessing’s many explorations of the strains and restrictions of marriage. The plot is simple: Two couples, good friends, arrange to spend some time together in a country cottage. The couple who owns the cottage, Dorothy and Jack, have recently had a baby. Of the visiting couple, Stella and Paul, only Stella is actually able to come. The story is impressing in its precise delineation of the relationships among the members of the quartet and in its explorations of Dorothy’s languor and withdrawal after childbirth. The real excitement, however, lies in Stella’s slow examination of her own marriage in light of the situation she finds between Jack and Dorothy. Both marriages are perceived by the couples to be extraordinary in their strength and exuberance, yet both are strained. The connection between Jack and Dorothy is threatened by the strength of Dorothy’s attachment to her new son. Also, Stella realizes that her connection with Paul has been more strained by their occasional infidelities than she has realized.

In the final scene, Jack begins to make love to Stella, something Dorothy has goaded him into, declaring that she does not care what he does; he has become insignificant to her. At first, Stella responds:She thought: What is going to happen now will blow Dorothy and Jack and that baby sky-high; it’s the end of my marriage. I’m going to blow everything to bits. There was almost uncontrollable pleasure in it.

Remembering the baby, however, she pulls back and waits for Jack to drive her to the station, making the final comment “It really was a lovely night”—a mundane comment for a return to the usual.

Using the paradigm of “How I Finally Lost My Heart,” readers see that the story ends with Stella’s struggle over choosing A or B, Jack or Paul, and with her desire to abandon herself to love. “There was almost uncontrollable pleasure in it.” She agonizes only over whom she will ask to “take my wound.” Although she perceives that both her marriage and Jack’s marriage are failures, she leaves with her heart in her hand, carrying it back to Paul. She sees more clearly than she did at the opening of the story, but she is not yet able to act on her perceptions. She has not yet lost her heart.

“A Man and Two Women” ends, then, in ambiguity but not in pessimism. Stella may not yet be able to act on her perceptions, but she is admirable in her willingness to reexamine her life. Readers should consider emulating her. They are left not with a blueprint for action but with feelings and emotions that must be examined. It is typical of Lessing’s short fiction that they, like Stella, are awakened to reality and then are left to take their own directions.

“The New Café”

In her collection The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches, Lessing offers glimpses of life in her hometown of London in the 1980’s, played out in a series of everyday human experiences. As usual, Lessing’s stories on a surface level are simple enough, common to even the most detached observer of urban life. However, her aim is much deeper, as demonstrated in “The New Café,” the story of a woman entranced by the conduct of a fellow customer who appears at once distant and interested in his flirtatious banter with female acquaintances, but whose charms suddenly disappear during a mysterious encounter with a young mother and her child on a London street. In recalling the story, Lessing’s narrator notes:here, as in all good cafés, may be observed real-life soap operas, to be defined as series of emotional events that are certainly not unfamiliar, since you are bound to have seen something like them before, but to which you lack the key that will make them not trite, but shockingly individual.

“Sparrows”

With “Sparrows,” set again in a café, the trite once more becomes the profound, as a series of diners react to a family of sparrows who persist in feeding off scraps of food thrown by guests or left at tables. The seemingly innocuous behavior of the birds elicits reactions ranging from outright indifference to the intrigue expressed by members of one family who see in the sparrows’ actions a lesson that applies to their own personal situations.

“Casualty”

In “Casualty” matters of life and death are clearly distinguished, as Lessing relates the tale of a group of hospital emergency room patients and their reactions not only to their own plights but also to the hysterics of an elderly woman who feels her condition warrants immediate attention, despite being deemed minor by the head nurse. Only when a critically injured young workman is rushed into the room do the others give pause to their situations, and then only temporarily in the case of the older woman, who appears to the reader to be a casualty of another kind.

“Storms”

Lessing’s love of London comes through clearly in “Storms,” the story of a woman’s encounter with a cranky old taxi driver with whom she is paired upon her return from a visit to Frankfurt. Adding to the driver’s dim disposition is the debris covering the streets through which he is attempting to maneuver following an overnight storm. With each compliment the woman expresses for her hometown on the drive back, the driver immediately counters with an invective. By journey’s end the woman comes to the realization that the litany of complaints she was hearing was born of sorrow, not of age.

“Two Old Women and a Young One”

“Two Old Women and a Young One” explores the seemingly unlimited capacity of people to deal in delusional thoughts, particularly when engaged in social intercourse with the opposite sex. Beginning with the two women of the title who grossly misinterpret the charms of their young male host at a business luncheon, to the host himself, who later mistakes the attentions of an attractive young woman at the same affair, there is little but empty rhetoric. The conversations reflect neither the personal needs nor the identities necessary to building a human connection. It is a rampant self-absorption that inflicts many of Lessing’s characters throughout her work, no matter the setting.