The tide was out. Gulls squawked in their sea voices over the low marsh of water between smelling mud banks in search, not of fish in these polluted waters, but of refuse. White preened wings balanced over diluted chemical, between grey cement walls that held such a weight of building. And it was so ugly, so ugly: what race was this that filled their river with garbage and excrement and let it run smelling so evilly between the buildings that crystallized their pride, their history. Except-she could not say that now, she was here, one of them; and to stay. It was time she crossed the river. But it was hard to leave it. But she must leave it. She came so often to lean with elbows on damp concrete looking down at ebbing or racing or swelling or lurking waters because here she was able to feel most strongly-what she had been before she had left ‘home’ to come ‘home’. In a street full of strangers, on the top of a bus in a part of London all barren little houses and smoking chimneys-who was she? Martha? Certainly not ‘Matty’. She became lightheaded, empty, sometimes dizzy. But by the river, looking down at the moving water, she was connected still with-a feeling of being herself. She was able to see herself as if from a hundred yards up, a tiny coloured blob, among other blobs, on top of a bus, or in a street. Today she could see herself, a black blob, in Mrs. Van’s coat, a small black blob beside a long grey parapet. A tiny entity among swarms: then down, back inside herself, to stand. arms on damp concrete: this was what she was, a taste or flavour of existence without a name. Who remembered. Who noted. And not much more.
A stranger last week had said: ‘What’s your name? ’ Her mind dizzying, Martha had said: Phyllis Jones. For an afternoon and an evening she had been Phyllis Jones, with an imaginary history of war-time work in Bristol. And just as it was enough to offer to Stella phrases like ‘the sun is overhead at midday’ to evoke for her all the stimulation of a new country, so now it did not matter she had never been to Bristol, even when talking about it to a man who knew it well. Enough to say: Ships, terraces, and Yes, I know so and so, I’ve been to so and so. In such a conversation she was just as much Phyllis Jones as she was Martha with Stella. People filled in for you, out of what they wanted, needed, from-not you, not you at all, but from their own needs. Phyllis Jones, a young widow with a small boy, an object of great interest and compassion to Leslie Haddon, a clerk from Bristol, a man uncomfortably married and in search of a ‘congenial female companion’ - spoke through Martha’s mouth for some hours, until, pleading maternal duties and an inviolable memory of her dead husband, she left him in the pub. And left Phyllis Jones. And-interesting this-a week later, when another stranger, had said, What’s your name, she had nearly offered Phyllis Jones, but it was the wrong name. This person, a woman on a train, was wrong for Phyllis Jones, did not evoke her. So Martha had been someone called Alice Harris instead. Why not?
For a while at least. What difference did it make to her, the sense of identity, like a silent statement ‘I am here’, if she were called Phyllis or Alice, or Martha or Matty; or if her history were this or that? But for a while only. Because she knew that ringing up Phoebe was not only because now she must earn money, and become responsible to her fellow human beings. Something (a sense of self-preservation?) could not tolerate much longer her walking and riding and talking the time away under this name or that, this disguise or that; calling strange identities into being with a switch of clothes or a change of voice-until one felt like an empty space without boundaries and it did not matter what name one gave a stranger who asked: What is your name? Who are you?
Martha crossed the river, left it, moved among streets that looked as if they had just survived an earthquake, and came to the rubble of damage left by the bomb that had fallen on St Paul’s. To Iris, ‘where the bomb fell across the river’. She had been to visit the scene the day after. So had Stella and some of her men. City workers emerged everywhere from doorways, hurried off to buses and tubes. This day was ending-and where was she going to sleep tonight? Another telephone box, orangy-pink and faded, stood ahead. She went into it, to ring Phoebe. Soon, on the pile of telephone books, there were bits of paper with telephone numbers on them-Phoebe’s among them. And the café’s number. If she rang there now, saying, even as Martha, ‘I’m coming back tonight, ’ Jimmy or Iris would say: ‘You’re coming back then, are you? ’ And she would walk in, and, after a moment to judge whether she brought pain with her, a snub, they would smile. Extraordinarily kind they were; kindness was stronger than their anxious need to hold, to keep.
Iris felt for Martha, or rather Martha’s experience that enabled her to drop into the life of Joe’s Café like a migrating bird, exactly the same emotion as she felt for a baulk of timber hauled up out of the tides of the river or a yard of curtain material got oft the ration, or teaspoons found among rubble after a bomb had dropped. Which was not to denigrate what she felt: not at all. Martha had been something extra, something given, something unearned-as the children playing on the bomb site had come running into the café with an old metal meat dish found under some broken bricks, used now for the week’s meat ration at Sunday midday. Treasure. And Martha to Stella was a heady wind from countries she would never visit.
Henry Matheson’s number, on a bus ticket: she had, also, to telephone Henry. She could sleep at Jack’s-that is, she could if he didn’t have another girl there, which was likely. She should ring Henry. Not wanting to ring Henry was quite a different reluctance from not wanting to ring Marjorie’s sister. Henry Matheson was a relation of Mrs. Maynard. Mr. Maynard had arrived to say good-bye to Martha at the station when she left, not oblivious to the fact that Martha did not want to say good-bye, or even to see him-but not caring. He was in the grip of that need with which Martha had become only too familiar seeing it at work in so many different people: it was to make sure that Martha did not escape from him, or rather, from what he represented. His wife’s cousins the Mathesons would be only too delighted to see her, said he, formidably present for a half-hour before the train steamed out of the station from which she, at last, after having seen so many people leave there for adventures in England, was leaving. Clearly her manner had not indicated strongly enough that she would be delighted to see the cousins, so Henry Matheson had been at the boat train to meet her. Martha felt no obligation to be grateful to the Maynards, who were not kind; but did feel she must at least be polite to Henry, who was. Henry, altogether charming, and delightful, had hovered, the eye of the Maynards, in the background of those weeks; and Martha had bought him off by offering-not ‘Matty’, too crude a persona for him, but a slaphappy, freebooting adventuress, cousin of ‘Matty’, who, she thought, was close enough to his secret fantasies about himself-he was the essence of conformity-to keep him quiet. She did not want letters from Henry to the Maynards of a kind which would cause Mrs. Maynard to telephone her mother in the mountains near the Zambesi: ‘About that gal of yours, it would appear that
The thing was, Henry had offered her a job in his firm: he was a lawyer, and she had legal experience. But she had refused it. Typical of anyone anywhere near the Maynards, thought Martha, that it had not been enough to refuse the job once: somewhere Henry was so convinced of his generosity and Martha’s luck that he could not believe she would be foolish enough to refuse it-must believe she was too green to know how good a job it was. Jobs as good as that one were short, she knew. The only way to convince him was to take another.
She rang Jack. ‘Jack, this is Martha.’ ‘Oh, Martha, just a moment …’ So he was not alone. She waited. Outside the glass-apertured box in which Martha stood, people jostled, heads down, under their low weeping sky. Like cattle rushing forward into the dip on the farm: it was the same blind impelled movement. On a barrow at the corner, fruit-apples mostly. A pile of waxy-green apples with rain on them. And, crowning a pile of apples, a single bunch of grapes, displayed proudly on a wad of fibre. A single bunch of green grapes. In Cape Town grapes had dripped, dangled, overflowed, from barrows, carts, shops, a wealth of grapes, from which one bunch had flown overseas to
land on this cart by the rubble near St Paul’s. As she held the receiver and watched, a woman picked up the bunch, decided it was too expensive, replaced it, and a single grape rolled down off the cart on to the pavement, lying like a pale green jewel among trampling feet. The sales boy, who had been looking desperate, dived for the grape, retrieved it, and with a quick look, wiped it on a bit of newspaper and then was about to put it back on the crown of grapes when a small child buttoned into a hooded raincoat stared at the grapes from eye level. He had probably never seen grapes at all. The youth pressed the grape into the child’s mouth. Smiles: from young mamma to youth, from mamma urging child to smile, at last, from child to youth: thank you. Apples were bought and the child went off on mamma’s hand, looking back at the bunch of translucent wet green grapes. ‘Martha, I’m so glad you telephoned, man, but where have you been? ’ He was South African, but his accent had been fined down by much war-travelling. ‘Jack, I haven’t got anywhere to sleep tonight? ’ A pause for calculations. ‘Just a tick, Martha, I must just …’ Again the other end of the phone had gone silent, but receptive: Martha could hear voices off somewhere, Jack’s, a girl’s. Jack was telling a story of some kind to the girl who was there. Or the truth, who knew? He came back. ‘It’s like this, Martha, I’m going to have to work till midnight.’ She laughed. Then, so did he. ‘Midnight would suit me fine.’ ‘See you, Martha.’ ‘See you, Jack.’
If she did not now ring Henry, she would take a bus to Bayswater and spend the evening drifting in and out of the pubs with the other visitors, migrants, freebooters. They would talk about England. That is, for a lot of the time, about Henry Matheson and what he stood for; and Iris and Stella and what they stood for. Someone would have a newspaper that jittered about the advent of red socialism in Britain, and how the working classes grew fat and luxurious, and how the upper classes dwindled into poverty. The aliens would look at the newspaper and talk about Iris and Stella, whom it appeared literate natives did not meet.
She rang Henry’s office. He was, said the telephone girl, just about to leave. This girl’s voice was a careful London suburban (Martha could already place it) and was exactly why she, Martha, if she accepted that job, would be working, not where she dealt with people on the telephone, but in an office where her merits would be of benefit to her fellow-workers and not, or at least not immediately, to the public.
Henry came to the telephone. ‘But my dear Martha, where have you been? I was just about to send out a search party!” She laughed; convivial buccaneer with secrets she was prepared to share; and calculated whether she would be able to get away with just saying, even if for the third time: Henry, I’ve decided I don’t want that job. ‘Henry, I was ‘phoning to say I’ve done some serious thinking and thanks ever so much, I don’t think I’ll take the job.’ A pause. The two ‘wrong’ phrases, carefully planted into this arrangement of words to emphasize what Henry must find so hard to take in her, were doing their work. ‘Well, Martha … if you’re sure, but we would be so pleased to have you.’ ‘Yes, I’m sure …’ and now she made a mistake, from nervousness. ‘I’ve been working, as a matter of fact …’ Too late to think of a satisfactory lie, she had to go on, ‘In a pub.’ Silence. ‘How very enterprising of you. You did promise to ring, Martha. Look, how about a bite and a sup. Have you time? ’
‘Yes, I’d love to.’
‘How about Baxter’s? Do you know it? ’ This meant, as Martha knew perfectly well, are you properly dressed for it?
‘Of course, how should I not know? It’s in all those novels about the twenties? ’
“Is it? Dear me. How very well read you are-so much, better than I am. Well then, if you get there before I do, tell old Bertie-he’s the head man, you know, that you’re supping with me.’
‘I’ll do that. In about an hour? ’
‘Yes, we can have a drink first and you can tell me all your adventures.”
It was now raining hard: a dirty rain. Martha would have stayed in the box, but a girl was knocking on the door. Martha opened it. The girl had a wet headscarf and a thick, damp mackintosh. Beneath this disguise she was a pretty dapple-cheeked English girl. ‘Did you want to get out of the rain, or to telephone? ’ A short offended laugh. ‘Actually to telephone.’ ‘In that case, I’ll leave.’ Another, but an appeased laugh. She watched Martha, wary, offering her smile like a shield. These were people totally on the defensive. The war? Their nature? But Martha was so clearly an outsider, breaking the rules with a smile in an alien accent, that had she persisted, talked, broken barriers, the girl would have enjoyed it, would have been grateful to have the defences broken, but also resenting, also wary, like an animal accepting overtures but ready to bite at a clumsy movement.
It was pouring. Martha went into a cigarette shop. The woman behind the counter raised eyes to Martha’s face and then looked at Martha’s feet. Water dripped from Mrs. Van’s coat to the floor, which was already smeared and wet.
And now Martha thought-although it meant she would have instantly to leave the shop and go out into the rain, asked: ‘Can I have a dozen boxes of matches? ’
Sullen: ‘You can have one box.’
‘Oh, I’d like a dozen. Half a dozen? ’
‘There’s been a war on, you know.’
Martha had asked for three boxes of matches in a kiosk during her first week. Since then, she had made a point of asking for a dozen, in kiosks in every area of London.
‘There’s been a war on, you know.’
And with what hostility, what resentment. And what personal satisfaction.
‘I’m sorry, I was forgetting.’
‘I suppose some people can.’
Martha got one box of matches in return for her tuppence, and smiled into a frozenly angry face. But the face said she must leave, must get soaked in punishment for her heartless indifference to the sufferings of her nation.
Martha left. A bus looked as if it might have room. She jumped on, and the conductor said: Hold on then, love. She smiled, he smiled. Disproportionate relief! She had discovered, swapping notes with other aliens in pubs, that it was not only she who had to fight paranoia, so many invisible rules there were to break, rules invisible to those who lived by them, that was the point. Warming herself at the conductor’s smile, the journey was made up Fleet Street, invisible behind cold rain, past Trafalgar Square, where lions loomed in a cold grey steam, and up to Piccadilly Circus, where the conductor sent her on her way with smiles, a wink, and an injunction to look after herself and enjoy her holiday.
It was with Henry that she had first seen this place, on a clear gold evening, the sky awash with colour. She looked at the haphazard insignificance of it, and the babyish statue, and began to laugh.
‘My dear Martha? ’
‘This, ’ she tried to explain, ‘is the hub of the Empire.’
For him a part of London one passed through, he attempted her vision, and smiled his failure: ‘Isn’t that rather more your problem than it is ours? ’
‘But, Henry, that’s so much the point, can’t you see? ’ For this exchange seemed to sum up hours of their failure to meet on any sort of understanding; during which nagged the half memory of a previous failure-what, who, when? Yes, as a child, when her mother had laid down this attitude, this dogmatism, this ‘It’s right, it’s wrong’ and Martha, reacting, had examined, criticized, taken a stand, brought back a stand to the challenger-who had lost interest, was no longer there, had even forgotten.
‘Well, it’s quite a jolly little place, isn’t it? ’ he inquired, uncomfortably facing her-but only just.
‘Well, I suppose it’s the war again, ’ she said at last, ‘all that myth-making, all that shouting, the words-but you can’t say things like “jolly little place”.’
‘You’re a romantic, ’ he said, sour.
‘Ah, but you’re having it both ways, always-having it both ways, sliding out …’ She had, for a moment, been unable to conceal a real swell of painful feeling, all kinds of half-bur
ied, half-childish, myth-bred emotions were being dragged to the surface: words having such power! Piccadilly Circus, Eros, Hub, Centre, London, England … each tapped underground rivers where the Lord only knew what fabulous creatures swam! She tried to hide pain, Henry not being a person who knew how to share it.
She supposed she did hide it, for in a moment he was urging her into a pub, buying her drinks, talking about the war, and radiating relief that nothing was to be asked of him.
‘You know, Henry, after one’s been a week here, one simply wants to put one’s arms around you-oh no, not you personally.’
‘Oh dear, I was rather hoping …’ said he, laughing with relief that he would have to suffer no such demonstration. He had even involuntarily glanced around to see if there was anyone near that he knew.
‘No, the whole island, all of you.’
‘Oh but why? Do tell me!’
‘If I could, you see, there’d be no need to feel that.’
The exterior of Baxter’s was in no way more distinguished than that of foe’s. A modest brown door had Baxter’s on it-just the word, nothing more. There was a window completely covered by white muslin that needed washing. Martha stood outside for a moment, holding this delicious moment known only to newcomers in a city: behind this door, which was just like so many others, what will there be? A southern courtyard with a lemon-tree beside a fountain and a masked Negro lute-player asleep? A man with a red blanket slung across his shoulder, stands by a black mule? A pale girl in sprigged muslin goes upstairs with a candle in her hand? Two old men in embroidered skullcaps play chess beside a fire? Why not? Since what actually does appear is so improbable. Last week she had opened a door by mistake on a staircase in Bayswater and a woman in a tight black waspwaisted corset, pearls lolling between two great naked breasts, stood by a cage made of gold wire the size of a fourposter bed, in which were a dozen or so brilliantly fringed and tinted birds. Martha said: ‘I’m sorry.’ The woman said: ‘If you are looking for Mr. Pelham, he’s in Venice this week.’
The Four-Gated City Page 3