The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Spent, she lay, everything she had got back, gone again. Slowly, she sat up, took up a thread, a fragment, a scrap; sunlight on a wall, a voice, a smile, and worked again to the point where she had to enter the house where plants stood on sunny veranda walls, and where Mrs. Quest… she held it. As one puts a hand into hot water, withdraws it, puts it back, gingerly, hold it there, withdraws it-so she worked. The house in the avenues had come back, and she walked into the room which smelled of drugs and faeces and saw her father’s white face on a pillow. Soon her mother came in, and she watched her fill a glass with pink medicine, and go frowning to the bedside, heard her voice:’ Alfred, I should take this now if I were you, you had all that chicken for supper.’

  Then she collapsed, lay unable to move, to feel, to think. But what she had excavated, remained. Small self-contained landscapes, lit with pain, remained. She was able to move in and out of them. She went back then to the house on a hill in the veld. Nothing remained of it. Of the farm, nothing remained but a hot sunlight, a glitter of stars. On starlit nights they had sat out in deckchairs and watched the stars, watched the fires burn in chains of red light over the hills. She sat there again. The roughness of canvas. An owl. The lamplight fell on a slope of stony soil. A strong scent of verbena-her mother stood, outlined by light from the door, saying in a cheerful indoors voice:’ Time for bed, it’s late.’ Pain came, swallowed everything; back went Martha, patiently, to a scent of flowers, an owl hooting, the smell of her father’s pipe. Soon she moved into the house. Room by room she created it, or rather, holding on to a detail, a cushion, the grain of a curtain, light on a strand of thatch, she allowed the rest to come back. Slowly. It was very slow. It was very painful. It was completely exhausting. Her stomach clenched and hurt. She fought. Who fought? She could sit on a chair, or rather feel herself held on soft support, and look at a tree, or rather, a brownish-grey thing that stuck out of the pavement and became a green mass, which was made up of a thousand little pieces of green-look, feel, as empty as a pool. Who? Into the pool came a word, sycamore. Came, chair. Into the pool came scents, sounds, voices, pictures. When scents, sounds, pictures, words, went, she remained. Who? If one day she found herself memoryless in a new city, and they said, ‘What’s your name?’ she might say, Let’s see, Rosalind Macintosh. Or Montague Iones. Why not? The sense of herself which stayed had no sex. Suppose shutting her eyes, holding that sense, that presence, she imagined herself into the body of a man? Why not. An elderly man, large-framed, broad, with guttering flesh, blue-eyed, a slow ruminative man, with a history behind him of work and women and children. Why not? Or a young man, Aaron, Rachel’s brother, a lithe, sparkling boy. Or even, letting the sense of herself go into a different shape, a horse, a small white horse. She saw it; into it she fitted herself, saw the world on either side of her head in two outstretching expanses of grass, bushes. Who are you then? Why, me, of course, who else, horse, woman, man, or tree, a glittering faceted individuality of breathing green, here is the sense of me, nameless, recognizable only to me. Who, what?

  This being moved in and out of the house on the kopje, every detail of every room clear, sharp, visible. But, let this person become Martha-she was swallowed in a wash of hot pain. Right then, fight it.

  She fought. The house was back, the country around the house was back, she was able to sit in imagination under the tree and look across the valley as it had been, a low scrubby valley, with its varying tints of green and red and brown. But there were great gaps in her memory. There were still months, even years, where she could say nothing but: I was in these and these rooms, these streets; at that time these people were around me. She worked, laying hold of a detail, a cushion, a flower, a voice, the light on the lenses of a pair of spectacles. White shoes: small white shoes, a child’s: a small girl with a pink dress and shining black curls. She turned her face towards Martha, a small, rather sharp face, watchful. Her smile was strained. Martha reached towards the smile, saw it dissolve in tears: Martha heard herself crying. She wept, while a small girl wept with her, mamma, mamma, why are you so cold, so unkind, why did you never love me?

  Day after day, Martha loafed about, lay about, sat about the room in Radlett Street: performed what duties were necessary adequately. ‘Would you like some dinner cooked tonight, Mark? Very well, what time?’ Mark and Martha sat on either side of a dinner-table, and chatted. He did not like, was uneasy about her forthcoming visit to Dr Lamb.

  ‘I don’t really see what they can do for you, these people, but if you say you …’

  Dr Lamb could do nothing for the person, or being who was there always; the sense, only, of existence. But he could, he must do something for Martha.

  Somewhere a long way back, beyond where she could reach with memory, an angry fighting resentful Martha had been born. It was a result of a battle against pity. Pity, a long time ago, had been an enemy. Pity could have destroyed.

  What Dr Lamb must do for her was to give her back pity, the strength to hold it, and not be destroyed by it. She must be able, when her mother came, to pity her, to love her, to cherish her, and not be destroyed.

  Dr Lamb turned out to be a middle-aged man, wearing a good dark suit. He had a strong guarded face. On inspection it became clear the armoured look was due to spectacles. His quick instinct for what his visitors felt was shown by how he removed them, at the moment Martha discovered she was looking at the spectacles as at a defence she couldn’t penetrate. A rather nice-looking man; the eyes, thoughtful, shrewd, quick; the mouth firm, held to contain humour in its right times and places. At conferences, reports of which she had studied, Dr Lamb showed a nice dry style of wit. An altogether likeable man. She looked at him. She heard what Lynda had said of him; what Dorothy had said; what Mark had said. ‘Not a bad sort of chap, I suppose.’ Lynda had once screamed that he was a devil.

  He was a round man: round face, round head, rounding body, and the hands that go with it: sensible and confident hands. He sat in a black leather chair, his back at an angle to the window, so that its light would fall full on his visitors. The room was entirely functional. Square, white, it had a desk, a neat black leather couch, with a tartan rug folded at its foot, a couple of leather armchairs. There was no object in this room that connected with Dr Lamb as a person, except, perhaps, the rug. For the kind of room that Dr Lamb would choose, as a person, was not this room. When he put on that suit in the mornings, he put on his profession; when he came into this room, he entered the impersonal. Yet, if one could only see them, this room’s air must be saturated, crammed, with painful and violent emotions: years, probably, of anguish and terror were concentrated in it. The walls must be sodden, vibrating with them. Emotions. But not Dr Lamb’s.

  Sitting there, while Dr Lamb waited, courteously, for her to speak, she had. all at once, such an extraordinarily strong sense, of this proceeding, this process, that she was struck into silence by it. Hundreds and thousands of people, millions of them, came into this room, or others like it, to Dr Lamb, or people like him, their lives having run out into dry sand. A hundred years ago, what had they done? A hundred years hence, what would they do? In such a short space of time, this phenomenon had come into existence, Dr Lamb, who, because of several years spent taking degrees in universities and in medical schools, could sit there adjudicating, could say, this is wrong with Martha, that is wrong; was prepared to take the responsibility for the results of what he decided; was unmoved whether Lynda screamed that he was a devil, or that Mark said he was a decent chap. Society had willed it. Had suffered it, then: Martha, too, who was prepared to come several days a week for goodness knows how many years, and to spend every penny that she had in the bank.

  If he beat his wife, or was cold to his children; if he was an arrogant man, or a humble man-it was all the same. Like a character in a play who wore a mask which said ‘I am Wisdom’, it did not matter what he was personally. If Martha decided, on the evidence on which she conducted her life outside this bleak room, that Dr Lamb was lacking
in insight, or was arrogant, then in this room, this decision could mean only that she fought, resisted, her own higher self, as represented by Dr Lamb. For any emotions in this room, any attitudes, beliefs, were hers, never his. Dr Lamb might choose to sit absolutely silent for months or years; or, to give advice and direct (according to his persuasion)-but as far as he was concerned, and society too, as long as Martha reacted against him in awe or in criticism it was her own best development that she thwarted.

  Yet outside this room, he might go off to a meeting of fellow practitioners where they would disagree; or might write papers for medical journals which contradicted other papers; or might not love his children, so that they became the patients of other men or women wearing masks that say: Wisdom. Truth.

  Well, what was she doing here then?

  Because she had nowhere else to go.

  He shifted his position in his chair, and spoke. About Lynda, first, and about Mark, then about Dorothy. This was to find out if his treatment of the two sick women might have to be adapted because of Martha: or if Martha was here because of either of them.

  As he talked, she noted that her attitudes to Dr Lamb became less and less objective, took on Lynda’s and Dorothy’s: she was seeing him as powerful, to be placated. With this, came resentment. By the time they had gone around to her, she noted that she was even sitting in a position which said: I am resentful, I fear you. He watched her, missing nothing.

  Asked why she had come to him, she put forward the view of his profession, as she had been seeing it, only a few minutes before, and inquired if, with this attitude, he believed anything could be done for her. Now, while she had toned down, softened, out of sheer politeness, what she had been thinking, it came out aggressively enough. He listened with blandness, as if the situation she had described, extraordinary from any point of view, could have nothing to do with him.

  He inquired if there was an immediate problem which brought her here.

  She said it was that her mother was about to pay her a visit. Her problem was that what her intelligence said had no effect at all on her emotions. The first said that her mother deserved, at last, a pair of loving arms and someone to comfort her until she died. Her emotions put her into bed with the covers over her head, made her a creature without will or energy … well, of course, that had not been entirely true. But here she remembered Lynda’s warning and was able to keep quiet.

  ‘Hmmmm, ’ commented Dr Lamb.

  Here he glanced at his clock, prominently in evidence. She was astounded to find that over half an hour had passed. She had another quarter of an hour.

  Here Dr Lamb made a series of statements all of them to do with his particular school of thought’s approach to the human soul, with which she was bound to disagree. But of course he knew she was bound to disagree: watching, while tides of anger arose, she saw that he was choosing precisely what he said. Extremely angry, she countered what he had said with her own position. With five minutes to go, she had talked herself into rejection of everything Dr Lamb stood for. At which he reasonably said that in that case he did not think he could help her. She reacted in a flood of being rejected, refused, turned out, which caused her to beg for another appointment at the very earliest moment. Tomorrow?

  Alas no. Dr Lamb was so busy: but in two days’ time perhaps?

  She left. In the taxi she noted two things. One, she was exhausted. The sudden burst of anger, so skilfully evoked by him, had drained her. She was emotionless. Second: He had not at any point not known exactly what he was doing: nor, had there been any point when she had not watched what he was doing, and understood it.

  She went home to bed. She had planned for that evening some hard work, on recovering more of her past. But she did not have the energy. For weeks she had had the energy, for this hardest of all effort, had had it even when busy, worried, or almost incapacitated by the thought: She’s coming, she’s coming.

  Yet tonight, not. Yet she knew, absolutely, without any doubt at all, that this ‘work’ was more important than anything, more important than anything Dr Lamb or anybody else could do. Yes she was committed to return to Dr Lamb.

  She remained listless, merely a person who, at such and such a time, would return to Dr Lamb. She was not able to work on her past. Indeed, the person who had been able, seemed farther away.

  During that hour, she talked. That was the process, the patient talked and talked, the doctor listened. The process made sense. She could understand it, not only theoretically, but out of experience. One talked, one did this or that: finally, one ‘heard’ for the first time what one’s life had been saying over and over again, in various ways, for years. One hadn’t heard before, because one had had nothing to ‘hear’ with. Living was simply a process of developing different ‘ears’, senses, with which one ‘heard’, experienced, what one couldn’t before.

  Dr Lamb, then, embodied that growing principle in life which fed one, developed one, so that one had ‘ears’ where one hadn’t before?

  She talked. She was emotionless. She had had no emotions since she had sat there last, two days before. When she left it was as if nothing had happened. Well, no, that was not quite true: for she had gone there-that had happened. And this process, submitting oneself to Dr Lamb, seemed to annul the other, the work prompted by the silent watcher.

  On the third occasion, she knew from the moment she sat down that Dr Lamb was trying something different from what he had done yesterday. With great skill, playing her like a fish, he brought her again and again to points where she would be angry. Watching, she avoided, fought, backed away, because more than anything else she dreaded the exhaustion that would follow. Then she cracked as she was bound to: she wept, she screamed, she shouted. He remained bland, unmoved. She crawled home, like a fly on sticky paper, and crept into bed. Now, the idea that she had once had the energy to sit in a chair and fight with her own mind, her own memory, seemed utterly ludicrous. She knew she ought not to go back to Dr Lamb. If her own self, her own self-preservation was being destroyed, then that was more important than anything, and she should stand by that.

  ‘Ah, ’ she remembered Lynda saying, ‘But you get sucked in.’

  She rang Lynda downstairs, and asked her to come up and see her. Lynda came, in a pink dressing-gown that, as always, seemed very faintly soiled. In her hand she carried the small jewelled box, a present from Mark, in which she kept her pills.

  Lynda sat in the chair. The cat, purring, jumped on her lap. Martha lay in bed, watching Lynda.

  ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘Yes?’ Lynda observed Martha, from her distance, shrewd, rather sour perhaps.

  ‘When you talked with the doctors, had psychotherapy, did it do anything for you at all?’

  ‘Well you learn things about yourself, I suppose.’

  She did not go on. When she used that tone of voice, Martha knew it meant that one was being stupid. Lynda had come up here, she was sitting there, she was quite prepared to talk-but Martha must ask the right questions.

  ‘What does he do for you now then? When you go and see him?’

  ‘They give me pills now.’

  A silence. Impasse. Lynda crooned at the cat. After a decent interval, she got up to go.

  At the door she said:’ If I were you, don’t take pills, I mean, if they give you pills, don’t take them. Whatever you do.’

  She left. Martha lay and thought that these two women lived on pills, their lives were regulated by pills, and their visits to the doctors where they got prescriptions for more pills.

  Of course, Lynda was paranoic: one of the doctors she had been to had said so.

  Next day she said to Dr Lamb:’ Would you mind telling me what my diagnosis is? What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Certainly, Mrs. Hesse, ’ he said instantly, announcing it with the willingness to come clean that was the policy of his particular sect:’ You’re manic-depressive, with schizoid tendencies.’

  Now Martha suppressed a joke wh
ich she would have made had Dorothy not used it continually:’ If that’s depression, then when’s the mania?’

  One of Lynda’s diagnoses (not by Dr Lamb but by another doctor) had been that she was manic-depressive with schizoid tendencies.

  ‘Dr Lamb, what is schizoid?’

  ‘Well now, that’s quite a question!’

  ‘Well, just a rough working definition?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean that you are two people.’

  Doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s a layman’s view of it.’

  ‘It would have nothing to do, for instance, with that part of me that watches all the time?’

  She said this, deliberately, daring danger, listening to Lynda’s warning. She had to say it: this process, sitting here, opposite the silent listener, in this case Dr Lamb, forced you to say it, say everything. She knew now that it made no difference what resolutions she might make outside this room, not to say this and that, to be this and that: he played her like a fish. The antidote was cunning. That was Lynda’s weapon. It was not Martha’s. Cunning was the weapon of the desperate. Martha then, was not desperate?

  He had picked up her fear at once, for he now said, heartily reassuring:’ Well, if it did, what of it?’