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This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!
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The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: Pages 617 – 635, the end.
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Free Women 5. "Molly gets married and Anna has an affair."
(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Anna thinks to herself that she's at loose ends now that Janet is in boarding school. Molly has her flat back because Tommy is away with Marion in Italy trying to help Danilo Dolci (sometimes referred to as the Sicilian Gandhi) in his work against poverty and the Mafia.
Through Molly, Anna meets an American screenwriter named Nelson. She spends the night with him once, knowing that he's a second-rate stand-in for Michael whom she still misses.
She starts reading several different newspapers a day, obsessively pinning up clippings on the walls of her room until she's used up all available wall space. She leafs through her four notebooks, feeling guilty that Tommy may have tried to kill himself because of something that he read in her notebooks. She reflects that Tommy has now become that which he tried to kill himself (and blinded himself) to prevent becoming: a version of his father.
A friend of Molly telephones and says that an American "left-winger" named Milt needs a room for a few days. Milt shows up the next day. He's like a smug version of Saul. He strolls in and, before she can think to stop him, comes into her room and sees the clippings papering the walls. He peruses them and leafs through her four notebooks though she asks him to stop.
Anna is already making her bed with fresh sheets, and preparing to let him have a room for the couple of days that he needs. He baldly asks her for sex, saying that he needs it and when someone needs something, you give it to him. Anna mentions that she wrote a novel once. He says he knows but didn't like her novel and considered it meretricious. She finds herself liking him better for it.
He takes down all her clippings and tidies up for her. He cheerfully admits that he tends to suck all the creativity and vitality out of the women with whom he stays. Then he says that at least he's honest and self-aware enough to admit to this, unlike most emotional parasites. She claims that she has had a mental breakdown, but the fact that her daughter is returning from boarding school will give her back the structure she misses and force a return to mental health.
They go to sleep together in her bed. The next morning they wake up and have sex. Then they bid each other goodbye with perhaps a bit of relief, and Milt strolls on out of her life. When Janet comes home that day, Anna is preparing to move them to a smaller flat and to get a job.
Anna visits Molly who admits that she's getting married to a rich man she has recently met. Anna reciprocates with the information that she's getting a job in marriage counseling plus she'll be teaching disadvantaged kids twice a week at night. She will not be writing anymore. Molly tries to hide her disapproval that Anna is giving up writing for good. Both women seem rueful that, in their own ways, they've both turned into that which they used to despise: the middle-class British matron. Anna says she has to return home to be there when Janet comes back from the cinema. The two women kiss and go their separate ways. The End.
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