The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Martha told Lynda she did not care much for her new friends, which Lynda accepted, in her way of tolerating the unenlightened. Thereafter she would telephone Martha to say: ‘Have you time for a visit to the condemned cell? ’-or some such joke.

  Martha was much alone, in the doldrums, her life becalmed. She was doing her job, that was all. The house was running, the children’s lives organized, Mark’s affairs attended to. But what was she really doing? What ought she to be doing? She did not know. She sat in her room and watched the structure of the sycamore tree disappear in spring green. Spring moved futilely in her veins. She watched. She was a person who watched other people in a turmoil of living. Could that be true? When Mark, or Lynda, or even Mrs. Mellendip looked at her, did they see a woman who watched and waited-passive?

  For what? For the bad time to be over? It was like waiting for the end of the war. Worse: war was easier, it had a form, one knew what one was supposed to be feeling, even if one didn’t conform to it. The last war, after all, had been easy: one’s head and one’s heart had moved together. By and large and for better or for worse, she, and everyone she knew, had been able to identify with their country, with their side: and now, with all the slogans and the speeches and the propaganda in perspective, all the accounts done, they could still say, ‘Yes, we were right, fascism was worse than anything.’

  But now? If a new war started now, spreading out from Korea; if, to use the political shorthand of the time ‘America dropped the bomb on Russia before Russia could develop the bomb’ - then what would she feel? No use to sit here thinking, it won’t happen, because it might very well, and it was now that she should decide what to do. To decide that, meant deciding or deciphering what she felt. This country would be allied with America, that could be assumed. She could not support America; she could not support communism. She would have to support one or the other. No matter what form the war took this time, and it wouldn’t be remotely like the last, but probably all slow spreading poisons and panic and hysteria and terror at the unknown, she would have to be a traitor, not only from the point of view of society-her country, and the point of view of her ‘side’ - socialism, but from her own. Because there would be no middle place. Well then, she would be a patriot and a coward, rather than a traitor and a coward … she was immensely tired. A lethargy like an invisible poison filled her. Sitting through the darkening evenings, she looked out into the street, at the lively tree, and she began to think of death, of suicide. If the war started, that is what she would do, kill herself.

  Thoughts of death slowly filled the room. When she came into it, it was to enter a region where death waited. While spring slowly crammed London with flowers and greenery, she allowed herself to be taken over … and then, one afternoon when she had been down to see Lynda, she thought how strange it was … a few weeks ago it was in the basement that people, or rather, Lynda, talked of death, of suicide, of killing. Now, with no outside circumstance changed, the basement was alive again, and futures were possible and talked about-even if they were no more than a dress or that Dr Lamb’s horoscope promised he would be in a good mood for next week’s monthly visit. Death had moved up to Martha’s room on the second floor.

  It seemed as if her capacity to think this, see this, had the power to shift the fog in the room, start a fresh current.

  She was able to move outside the listless woman who sat hour after hour looking through a window.

  She had a glimpse into a view of life where the house and the people in it could be seen as a whole, making a whole. It was not a glimpse or insight which could be easily brought down into an ordinary air: it came late at night, and afterwards Martha remembered that the phrase, ‘Having something in common’, had had, for the time the condition lasted, a real meaning. They, in this house, had something in common, made up something …

  Mark and the comrades, all furious energy and defence; Lynda and her Dorothy in the twilight of their basement; Martha, all passivity; the two sad children, who were the pasts and the futures of the adult people: but an onlooker, someone looking into this house as if it were a box whose lid could be taken off, would be struck by a curious fact. Martha, defeated by the house, by the currents of personality in it, was the one person in it who had no reason at all to be suffering, to be weighed down: yet she was the only person who (at that time, during that particular spring) was weighed down, was suffering, who thought of death.

  Martha was suddenly (not easily, but after effort) able to look down into the house, achieve that viewpoint. As she did so, the heavy atmosphere of death in her room cleared, thinned, and went.

  There she was, in her room, empty, at peace. She watched other people developing their lives. And she? In every life there is a curve of growth, or a falling away from it; there is a central pressure, like sap forcing up a trunk, along a branch, into last year’s wood, and there, from a dead-looking eye, or knot, it bursts again in a new branch, in a shape that is inevitable but known only to itself until it becomes visible. Yet here she sat, watching the sap pressing up in other people, feeling none in herself.

  One of the observers, or critics, who might be imagined looking down through that roof would say: a man. This is a young woman, and she wants a man. Martha had been here for nearly three years now, and she had put aside thoughts of a man, of marriage, and even, foi most of the time, sex. She had been dormant.

  Now she was invaded by sex. One had only to think: a man, I need a man, and sex invades in its battalions. Mark? She wanted Mark? She had only to think this, and she did. Yet she had not. She found herself, all at once, jealous of Patty Samuels. Then, soon, furiously, self-pityingly jealous of Lynda who had kept Mark’s love for years without having done anything to deserve it. This last, for a time, did not strike her as absurd. She was possessed. Waves of vicious emotion washed in and out of her.

  The room, a few weeks before fogged by the listlessness of a drift to death, was now all sexual fantasy, anger, hatred.

  On the stairs she passed men on their way to and from Mark’s study. She looked at men: sex. This one? That one? She nodded a greeting to Patty Samuels and hated her. She was unable to go down to the basement: she hated Lynda.

  In this condition she telephoned, again, the house by the canal. Jack answered. He said he would love to see Martha.

  In this condition she made the trip across London to visit a memory.

  The terrace of houses, since she had been here before, had been partly done up. Some houses were still corpses, with leprous faces, others were clean and had jolly coloured doors. In Jack’s house, she entered a hall which was carpeted, and softly lit. The door into the room where the mad youth had camped was open. It was now somebody’s drawing-room, a pleasant room with sofas and chairs and books. A young woman carried a baby out of this room, and with a smile, disappeared into the room on the other side of the hall.

  Martha, already half-sober, ascended the stairs. Jack’s door was opened by a plump blonde girl who said, in a low voice: ‘Come in-you’re Martha? He’s asleep.’

  The studio room had not changed. Jack was propped up in the bed, and there was an atmosphere of illness. The blonde girl returned to her chair by the bed. Jack opened his eyes and said: ‘Hello, Martha, ’ and began coughing. The coughing roused him. He tried to sit up, failed, collapsed back, and lay holding Martha’s hand, and the blonde girl’s. He had lit, wild eyes, a feverish glow on the bones of his face; was very thin.

  Martha stayed for a time, until he went back to sleep.

  In the hall, as Martha left, the blonde girl, Betty, said that Jack had insisted on leaving the sanatorium, against the advice of the doctors, and that she was nursing him. But she was persuading him to go back there: if he would only stick it out in the sanatorium, he would be cured, they said. But Jack was very worried about leaving the house: Mr. Vasallo, a not very nice man, took unfair advantage-Martha was an old friend, please would she come again?

  Martha, cured, left that house and returned home. />
  But she was not cured of anger, of hatred.

  Λ few weeks ago, she had sat watching Lynda and Dorothy pursuing their fortune-telling, their astrology; and Mark and Patty Samuels, with their communism. She had watched, interested, as if there was no more to be said than: Well, that’s what they are doing, that’s how they are.

  Now, she found herself in the grip of violent distaste for the preoccupations of the basement; and disgust for Mark and his politics.

  Even a few weeks ago, she had been reading the newspapers that flooded into the house from left, right, and centre; observing a process of interlocking, inter-reacting currents. Now she read the right-wing Press as if every word had been written by herself: and it was not only with fear, but with hatred that she read the papers of the left. She was able only to maintain enough objectivity to recognize the depth of the fear. She was being threatened with another conversion. She could see that. But seeing it was not enough to shift it, to chase away the disgust. A phrase used by Mark, from the communist jargon, or an insensitively jolly competence observed on Patty’s face, flooded her with an angry irritation.

  Yet, while she was in this condition, a set of phrases or sentences from the armoury of the right which objectivized precisely what she was feeling, so that she could see the crude ugliness of it, was enough to switch her over-not to any position where she could include, hold, tolerate, understand-but to an extreme leftism, just as if she had never left there.

  For some days she kept switching from one viewpoint to the other; one day she was violently ‘anti-communist’ - and self-righteously so. The next, she was a pure, dedicated, self-righteous communist. The two states had no connection at all-apparently.

  In this condition she had a dream which, while she could not clearly remember it, woke her with a warning. She was muttering: ‘If I let myself do this, I’ll have to live through it again, I’ll be made to do it again.’ She went back to sleep and woke in a clear morning, summer outside, the sky all sunlight and fresh white clouds, knowing that she had made a shift in her sleep. She knew, as if someone had told her so, that if she now allowed herself to hate Mark, to hate Patty Samuels, to hate the comrades, she would be doing worse than hating a younger self. She would be threatened with more than ‘Having to do it all over again’. Inside her would be lying in wait what she hated, to emerge in ogreish disguises she could not now imagine. And this would be the same if she returned to being a communist. Shapes of hatred much larger than she could envisage waited like the shadows on a nursery wall for fear to fill and move them.

  But, knowing what she had to do, she could not do it. The energy it needed, the effort-she could not find it. Brought again and again by herself to that point in her where she had to untie knots of violent emotions, she shied away, baulked. No, no, no: she could not. For days she was locked in that condition which is called a sulk, turning herself away, saying no, no.

  Then, one night, she had a dream of Patty Samuels, who was also her younger self. Patty approached her smiling. But Martha turned angrily away. Patty Samuels, multiplied into an army, in the shape of a nation which was all sinister threatening power, encompassed Martha, threatened her with death. This was a nightmare and it woke Martha completely. She sat in the dark room whose walls had the shadow of the tree moving on them-shadows on a shadow, and she listened to the dream. She could not sleep. The moon rose. Light came into the room and the tree’s shadow dissolved. Over the earth’s shoulder the moon was catching light from the sun. A quietness came into the room, with the vision of the little world, one half bathed in moonlight, the other in sunlight.

  Next day, meeting Patty Samuels in the kitchen, she was able to smile at her younger self. A stiffness went from her face; muscles went loose all over her body that she had not known were knotted.

  Patty Samuels wore a brisk blue skirt and white shirt, and had a pile of papers in a suitcase. She was cool with Martha, then, after a hesitation, warmed. Because, as Martha saw, Patty felt that Martha had changed. In the kitchen, observing each other, Patty made coffee, Martha made coffee, and neither was in a hurry to leave. Soon they sat drinking coffee at the table, allowing goodwill to do its work.

  Patty had at first met Martha with the hard shell of contempt that went with the words ‘ex-communist that has sold out’. She had once muttered, so Martha could hear: ‘Well, of course people leave when the heat’s turned on …’

  Patty Samuels had become a communist when she was twenty, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Her life had been spent organizing. She had been a secretary, or assistant, to communist officials, had been an official herself, though on an unimportant level. She was now ‘doing Culture’. She used the phrase now with irony; five years before she would have regarded irony as treachery. A great part of her time was spent wrestling with Soviet and other East European countries in order to get their ideas of efficiency over visas for delegations, and so forth, to coincide with hers. This was a task which had reduced the strongest to nervous breakdown; and Patty, a strong woman, was showing strain. Also, by the nature of things she was bound to know a great many of the people in Russia and in other communist countries who had disappeared into prison or were dead; and most of her friends in Britain and in America were under suspicion, passportless, or in one sort of trouble or another.

  The relation between herself and Martha was a curious one, based on the closest of understandings born of shared experience, yet full of antagonism. For there was no person more hated, vilified, and distrusted by the comrades, at that particular time, than people like Martha.

  What Patty Samuels wanted, Martha realized, had been wanting for a long time-was to talk about Mark. They did not talk about Mark during this first reconnaissance over the coffee cups, but as their cautious friendship developed, Patty began to talk, and obsessively, about Mark, his friends, his way of life.

  She suspected, of course, that Martha was in love with Mark. ‘All’s fair in love and war, ’ she said, once, accepting a rivalry as natural. But she was much more worried about Lynda, whom she had not yet met; it was some time before Lynda entered their conversations.

  She did not understand Mark. ‘These upper-class types? ’ she would say, or inquire; or ‘People like him? ’ or ‘These political demivierges!’

  The affair was in bad difficulties.

  ‘Do you know what I sometimes think, Martha? I do believe that Mark thinks that one of these days in the extremes of passion I’m going to divulge the truth about his brother-he keeps coming back to it. I keep saying I don’t know anything, I mean, why should he think that I should? He simply doesn’t know the score …’

  Knowing the score: the painful phrase at that time, for the grim realities of communism, which was so shortly to become absorbed into that other phrase: ‘Stalinsim’. Soon, trusting Martha, the enemy, she began discussing, or rather, suggesting at, or talking around, what was going on inside communism. A great deal did not need to be said: there being no substitute for experience. Martha, for the most part, listened: for the most part, when with one’s younger self, one listens; one hears, bouncing off oneself, one’s younger voice. Painful. But not to be rejected, or repudiated, without asking for bad trouble.

  Very painful, for both of them, these times when they drank coffee, or Patty came up to Martha’s room. Patty was in the grip of an aspect of herself she had not known existed, and which she feared and despised.

  Mark was the enemy: he was a capitalist, member of an old upper-class family, and an intellectual, to cap it all. Yet she was fascinated by all this, and knew it. She would have been delighted to be introduced to this world. But even she, who had every reason to understand, from her own experience, the realities of isolation, did not understand how cut off Mark was from his own kind. She believed that Mark was deliberately excluding her from his real life, his friends. Once she asked: ‘Tell me, is Mark mean with housekeeping money? I mean, is he careful? ’ She did not at all see that her attraction for him was-her world, which she
was tired of, had grown out of. The fact that for years she had lived in bed-sitting-rooms, eaten badly if at all, in cafés, and cheap restaurants; had not taken holidays, had worked like a horse for so little money, was, in short, dedicated, seemed to Mark-not romantic, but admirable. He admired her. He enjoyed tasting this life for which he knew he had no capacity. He liked to turn up at her shabby room near King’s Cross, late at night, to find her still at work for her cause. And he did not see, as Martha did, that she was due to break. He thought the reason she did not want to discuss ‘The Party’ with him, was because of secretiveness, possibly even because she was concealing facts about his brother. But the truth was, for her he was a relief from the monotony of her life and work.

  Underneath all that jolly competence was a very tired woman. And a frightened one. After all, she was getting on for thirty-five. She had been married and divorced; but that was some time ago. She had had some affairs. She wanted children. She was beginning to see that Mark would never marry her. And now she brought up Lynda. ‘Surely he ought to divorce her? ’ she kept saying.

  One day she met Lynda, who had come up for something. She saw a very thin, untidy woman, with strained wide eyes, in a dress that looked as if it had been slept in.

  The encounter changed Patty.

  ‘You say he loves her? ’ she inquired, in a way which was characteristic of her at that time, troubled but determined to know.

  ‘Yes, I think he does.’

  ‘Well, that’s not my idea of love. I mean, what’s the point of being in love with someone who can’t ever give you anything? ’ She looked scared, hearing herself say this: for she had announced an intention, and knew it. She laughed, at last. ‘I’m not getting any younger, am I? ’ and, finally: ‘I mean, love ought to be a partnership.’