At last she said: ‘There isn’t any family I’ve ever seen that doesn’t seem to me all wrong. But what right have I to feel like that? Where do I get the idea from that something better is possible? I keep thinking and thinking about it-why? Perhaps it’s always like this, it has always been like that? Ugly. But that’s how I do see things. I used to worry and nag at myself: there’s something wrong with me that I do see what’s going on as ugly. As if I were the only person awake and everyone else in a kind of bad dream, but they couldn’t see that they were. That’s how I felt on the ship coming over-you know, pleasure. Several hundred people “living it up", “whooping it up"-enjoying themselves. Of course, you know ships from a different angle, you’ve worked on them, that’s different. But that voyage-it was like being in a nightmare. People who had saved up money. From all over Africa. Just for that trip-years of saving. Pleasure-eating three times a day like pigs, no five times a day, getting drunk, always just a little drunk, just to make this tolerable. Flirting, sex for titillation. There wasn’t one person on that boat-except for one girl. And she was ill. She was coming to England for treatment. We used to sit by ourselves and watch. They called us spoil-sports. It was like watching a lot of people who had been hypnotized.’
From Jack nothing. He might be asleep. She went on: ‘For some reason, I’ve had that all my life. What’s the use of thinking there must be something wrong with me? One’s got to stand by what one is, how one sees things. What else can you do? And I’ve had the other thing too, the mirror of it: all my life I’ve believed that somewhere, sometime, it wasn’t like that, it needn’t be like this. But why should I? Last night again-the nightmare. But at the same time, the marvellous family walking with their friendly animals. The golden age. Why? But I’ve been thinking, Jack. What’s the use of imagining impossibly marvellous ways of living, they aren’t anywhere near us, are they? You’ve got to accept… parents have no choice but to be the world for their children. And if the world is ugly and bad for that time, then parents have to take that burden on themselves, they are ugly and bad too.’ She started crying again. This time it was hysteria: it would be easy for her now to switch over into being ‘Matty’, then to make fun of herself, apologize … ‘Matty’ had always been an aspect of hysteria? She steadied herself to finish: ‘Babies are born into this, what there is. A baby is born with infinite possibilities for being good. But there’s no escaping it, it’s like having to go down into a pit, a terrible dark blind pit, and then you fight your way up and out: and your parents are part of it, of what you fight out of. The mistake is, to think there is a way of not having to fight your way out. Everyone has to. And if you don’t, then it’s too bad, no one’s going to cry for you, it’s no loss, only to yourself, it’s up to you …’ Hysteria arose again in a great wave: she was trembling, shaking with it. She was saying what she really believed and it was to a man who was asleep. She laughed and she cried, trembling. At last she stopped. Silence. Jack had turned his head: his face was visible. He was listening, with his eyes closed. The hand that lay stretched out was in a tight fist and it trembled.
‘I’m sorry, ’ she said, sober. ‘I know you hate-fuss.’ Jack did not say anything. ‘But in a way it’s a compliment. I could have chosen not to be hysterical. But I’ve discovered something, Jack. About hysteria. It can be a sort of-rehearsal.’ She was thinking of last night, walking. She could not ‘remember’ the lit, alive space; though she knew it had been there; but she could remember the approach to it: something giggly, silly, over-receptive-hysterical. ‘When you get to a new place in yourself, when you are going to break into something new, then it sometimes is presented to you like that; giggling and tears and hysteria. It’s things you’ll understand properly one day-being tested out. First you have to accept them like that-silly and giggly … Jack? ’ She knelt close up to him. ‘Jack? ’ She had to stop herself saying: ‘Are you angry? ’ like a little girl-like ‘Matty’.
‘I’ve been listening, ’ he said. ‘And do you know what I was thinking? Is this just Martha’s way of being a woman, of getting her own way over being married and having a child. But I can see it wasn’t that.’ He sat up. He looked beat: pale, ill, and under his eyes, dark bruises. ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t follow what you were saying. It didn’t mean anything to me. I know you mean it for yourself and that’s good enough for me.’ He got off the bed. He was shivering. ‘Martha, I’m so hungry I’ve got to eat.’
They had been to eat very late at midday; and it was not yet six in the evening. ‘I was lying on the bed, feeling all my bones. Sometimes when I lie still like that, I’m a skeleton: I can’t feel the flesh anywhere, just bones. I’ve got to get some flesh on me.’
They went back to the Indian restaurant, through late afternoon streets. A meagre sunlight; people rushing back from work along the ugly street. In the restaurant, the Indian who had served them their lunch, was still on duty. He was from Calcutta, had been sent for by an uncle who owned another, much smarter restaurant, in Earl’s Court. This was a new, small restaurant, the bottom floor of an old house. The Indian from Calcutta, working for a pittance in a cold foreign country to escape from his family’s poverty, welcomed them with white-teethed affability, and for the second time that day, served them with enormous quantities of food. Then they returned to Jack’s house. They were both sad and low, and gentle with each other. When they went in, the door was open into the room where the grinning boy lived. He was sitting with his back to the wall, cross-legged, playing patience with a candle alight beside him. He nodded and grinned and waved. They nodded, leaving his smile behind to fade on the dark stuffy air of the stairs.
They lay on the bed with their arms around each other.
‘You won’t come and live here, Martha? ’
‘No. I can’t, Jack.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t. I suppose that’s why I was afraid to bring it up-I didn’t want to hear you say no.’
‘Somebody else will, I expect.’
‘Yes. But I would have liked it if you could have trusted me.’ He was nearly crying again.
‘Have you ever thought-we make decisions all the time: but how? It’s always in reference to-we make them in obedience to something we don’t know anything about? ’
‘No. I make decisions!’
‘Ah, you’re master of your fate.’
But one did not tease Jack, he could not be teased.
‘Don’t laugh at me, Martha!’
‘I’m not. But looking back, we think we’ve made decisions-it’s something else that makes them.’
‘Ah, Martha,’ he said suddenly, rough: ‘You’re not coming back to me, you aren’t going to stay with me!’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No? I don’t know why, but that’s what I thought you were saying.’
‘No.’
‘You’ve got to believe I want you to. I know what you’re thinking-you’re a woman! He’s got so many girls, he doesn’t care. But it’s not true. I’m not promiscuous, I don’t like changing and having new girls. I want girls who’ll always come back, the same girls. I’m very faithful, Martha, you’ve got to believe me.’
Soon he fell asleep. She was not sleepy. She lay holding his body, the long thin cage of bones, over which such a light shelter of flesh lay breathing. She felt how he was alert, ready to wake at a sound or a touch, even though he seemed to be deeply asleep. She would have got up and dressed and gone, if she could have done it without waking him. But she knew he would start up if she so much as slid her arm away from beneath his head. Her hand lay on his back, feeling the bones branch off from the central column of bone. Past his shoulder she looked into the recess where the window was that had to be kept shuttered because of the odours from the canal. Beneath that window, a scene of littered back garden, unkept hedges, rubbish bins, a slope of dirty soil to a low weed-grown canal. On a hot afternoon during the vanished heatwave, she had sat in the window watching children brown from six weeks of that sun, dive and
swim like water-rats among the weeds. From time to time a woman shrieked from a window: Tommy! Annie! Where are you? You’re not to swim in that water! The children cowered in the water, looking up at the windows. The women knew that the children were in the water, and that there was no way of stopping them: they had swum there themselves when they were sleek brown rats among water-weeds.
The candle on the floor near this window sunk, shook wildly and went out. The man in Martha’s arms slept, his face, a boy’s face, tear-marked, a few inches from hers. The candles on the mantelpiece burned for a while longer. Then the room was a pit of dark. Then Martha herself dropped into the pit. She dreamed. That picture, or vision, she had seen behind her eyes of the house with the sad children, came again but now it was not a sharp image, a ‘still’, or a series of ‘stills’; but a long moving dream. A large London house-but not this one. There was traffic outside it, but also the presence of trees. Full of people. Children. Half-grown children. Sad. It was a sad, sad dream. But not a nightmare: no fear came with it. Martha was in the dream, she was responsible for the children. She was worried, anxious: but she held the fort, she manned defences.
They woke very early, having slept so early. It was just light-about five. Jack cooked them breakfast on his spirit stove. Then she kissed him and left. The door off the hall was still open, and in the low grey light, the mad youth lay asleep on the floor beside the candle that had burned itself out. Outside, a young morning, with a low wet sun. With luck, it would be a fine day. Martha set off towards Iris and Jimmy across the river, locked inside Mrs. Van’s coat.
Chapter Three
She rode high in a red bus over streets tinted by damp sunlight, crossed a strongly ebbing river with gulls at eye-level-flashing white wings, seen through dull glass; and descended to earth or street-level as Big Ben said it was seven. But it would not do to reach Joe’s café before eight. That household had two starts to its day, one at about five, when Iris, Jimmy still asleep, rose to feed cornflakes, toast, scrambled powdered egg and tea to some young lorry drivers from a lodging house down the street whose landlady would not feed them so early; another at nine, when the side of the card that said OPEN was turned in invitation to the pavement. With the apprentice lorry drivers were a couple of older men, among them Iris’s cousin Stanley, whom she had fancied for Martha; and some charwomen, their early office-cleaning over, who dropped in for a cup of tea before going home to feed breakfast to their families. Between five and eight that café was a scene of bustling, steaming animation, of intimacy. If Martha were to go in now, unexpected, after two unexplained nights, she could only do so as ‘Matty’. And she was damned if she would. If I get taken over by her, then I’ll have her riding me for the rest of the day, and I won’t have her around when I’m lunching with Phoebe.
Early sun flashed on a thousand windows and on the gulls’ wings. The great buildings on either side of the river stood waiting, empty; not empty: for at this hour an army of women were at work with their vacuum cleaners, making them hum and vibrate like beehives. They stopped to gossip along corridors where soon, but not for two hours yet, men still fighting for another few minutes’ sleep in surburban bedrooms ten, fifteen, twenty miles away, would come hurrying in. Good morning, good morning, good morning, diverging into rooms where the waste-paper baskets had been emptied. In they’d flow, to be flung out again by the sound of Big Ben striking five, as thousands of telephones went silent, all at once. Martha dawdled, lost her way in a mesh of little streets, and hit the street of the café a hundred yards down from the bombed site. Turning right, she greeted the slab or hulk of timber. In the less than two days since she had seen it, a minute yellow flower had emerged from a crevice. That great salty, sour, more-stone-than-wood monument had put out a coronet of green leaves and a flower. A small wind tugged at it, but the flower held Arm, its roots being well dug in. Martha peered through a wire door that had the death’s head and No Children on it, and saw the lock was loose in its socket. She pushed and went in. Deserted: too early for the children. But no, a small girl wearing an ancient black jersey over a white dress that looked as if it had been starched for a party sat on a brick in the dust. She kept still. ‘Good morning, ’ said Martha cheerfully and the child’s eyes concentrated in terror. Then she fled, jumping like a cat over a far wall into safety away from the woman in the black coat. If this were a ruined city, a poisoned city, what would the excavators a hundred years later deduce from what they saw here? Facing Martha, the surface of a jagged wall, three stories of it, rose up sharp from the low edges of rubble. There were three fireplaces, one above another. Each level of wall was tinted a different colour, as if by moss or lichen: wallpaper soaked and dried, soaked and dried, again and again. Pale green. Above that, pinkish shaggy brown. Above that dim yellow. Coming closer, it could be seen, where a long strip had been torn away off the green, that beneath was a darker green. Martha got up on to an edge of wall, and slid her fingernails under the edge of paper. A thick sog of paper: layers of it, now stuck together. Once each had been a loving and loved skin for the walls, which held the lives of people. But they were fused together, like a kind of felt. Martha pulled. A lump came away. Picking at the layers, she counted thirteen. Thirteen times had a man stood on trestles, or perhaps a table (these were small cheaply built houses, with low ceilings, and probably the kitchen table would have been high enough) and stretched new clean paper over the stains and dirts of the layer beneath. Thirteen times had a wife, or children said: Yes, that’s very nice, I like that, dad; or had said No, we chose wrong. The two papers at the very bottom were rather beautiful, judging from the inch or so she had to look at: they got progressively uglier as the decades slid by. The one at the top was hideous, must have been an acid green, with a bad jangling pattern. In the middle was a rather pretty sprigged pattern, like a Victorian young lady’s morning dress … voices from the street. Precisely as the little girl had done, Martha froze: authority! She ought not to be here. She sneaked down off the wall, pushing the wadge of coagulated paper into Mrs. Van’s pocket; and hid behind a heap of bricks until it seemed safe to go out into the street.
Against the dim muslin that screened the café, shapes of bodies; the lively intimacy of the early morning session shed warmth on to the pavement. She was too early after all. Martha went around into the side street where, this house being on a corner, was a side door into a yard. The door was of slats of wood held with two cross-boards. It had been painted once, for there was crumbling greenish pigment in the cracks. But now it was a greyish colour. ‘From before the war, ’ Iris had said. When Iris said something was from before the war, this meant, something that would have been replaced, or mended or painted, if there had not been a war. She would not, for instance, have said that the wall which was a single yellow brick’s thickness surmounted at the height of a tall man’s head by a litter of broken glass, was from before the war. Martha unlatched the door and was in-a neat, tended garden. Hidden behind these street fronts, tucked in among wastes of brick and cement, were gallant little gardens. This one, the size of a large room, had a pear tree, an old wooden bench recently painted a new bright green by Jimmy; and an ancient rose ambled over the back of the house. It was in full pink bloom and it scented all the air. In the corner of this patch of garden was a privy: the house did not have an indoor lavatory. It was like a little sentry box, and to it was a flagged path with musky plants growing in crevices. Beyond the window into the kitchen, Iris sat, at a table framed by pink roses. When she had finished with the early morning stint, she took what she said was a bit of a kip: she slumped in a tortoise condition, her hand stretched towards a flagon of tea, her eyes open, but not really seeing anything. Meanwhile Jimmy had got up and had taken over the café. He was not in the kitchen now. Martha pushed open the back door and was received by a sleepy stare from the surface of Iris’s eyes. Then, she said vaguely, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Martha sat down, and Iris gestured towards a brown teapot and yawned. ‘We’ve used your ration, ’ sh
e said. ‘You didn’t come, did you? ’ Martha poured tea. Iris smiled: but she resented being made to wake up.
The kitchen was small. Along one wall was apparatus for the café: the frying machine for the fish and the chips; and an electric stove which Jimmy had filched from the ruins down the road after the bomb had fallen. There was also an old-fashioned wood stove, which was used as a cupboard, or larder.
‘So you’re off? ’ said Iris.
‘Yes. I’ve come to get my things.’
‘They’re ready. And I’ve put your ration book and your coupons on your case. Upstairs.’
‘Thank you, Iris.’
‘Stanley’s next door, if you want to see him.’ Martha had not wanted to see Stanley, evidence of her bad heart though this undoubtedly was; and Iris’s tone said that see him she ought, even if Stanley did not particularly want to see her. But now, since it was clearly up to her to go through and make her presence known to the man whom Iris had decided would suit her as a husband, Martha actually got as far as the door before rebelling. Why should she? Whatever debts she would leave behind her, Stanley was not one of them. She sat down again, in silence. The two women confronted each other: Martha determined not to apologize, plead guilty, or evade, Iris now awake, exuding a stubborn determination to suffer betrayal.
‘I don’t think Stanley and I are suited, ’ said Martha.
The Four-Gated City Page 10