The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  He waited for her to go on.

  Deciding she would not go on, she went on:’ Dr Lamb, what words would you use to describe that, how would you put it?’

  A hesitation. Now he laughed. ‘I’d rather you told me, Mrs. Hesse.’

  Martha listened to the bells of warning for a moment and said:’ The best part of me. The only part that is real-that’s permanent, anyway.’

  ‘Ah, ’ he said, affably. ‘I see.’

  He waited. It was as if gages had been flung down, the ground marked out.

  She waited.

  Her interview came to an end while they sat silent.

  She went back home, feeling that she had betrayed herself.

  She was lying on the floor, face down, the lights out, when she saw, not six inches from her face, a shoe with a foot in it. She turned over. Mark sat in the chair, the cat on his knee, watching her.

  ‘Well, ’ he said.

  Then, as was bound to happen, for the third time in his life Mark found a woman clinging to him, ‘Save me, save me’ and again he became the all-strong, the all-consoling.

  A man’s body: that country she had not been in for-four years was it?

  Of course they should have done this years ago, right from the beginning. What fools they had been! (For, in this-country, where the ordinary rules of life are put aside, one says such things, pretends that the long sad affair with Patty Samuels had not been as inevitable as this was, since both belonged inside the laws of growth.)

  The room was outside pain. It vibrated with shared intimacy, trust, happiness, love.

  Except that somewhere in Martha sat the person who watched and waited. Oh God, if only she could kill that person, send her, it, him, away, make it silent, be able just once again to vanish entirely into this place of smooth warm bodies whose language was more beautiful and more intelligent than any other…

  ‘Mark, is there somebody in you who always watches what goes on, who is always apart?’

  And now, a sudden tension in the loving body. After a time:’ No.’

  ‘Lynda said something like that, did she?’

  ‘Yes, I believe she did.’

  So, quick, make love again, cover it all over, this moment when ordinary life came in again-forget it, quick.

  ‘Martha, tell me-have you always had it-the other person?’

  ‘Yes. And more and more.’

  He comforted her. He was infinitely kind and strong.

  ‘Tell me, Mark, when you were a boy, were you ever with Margaret when she was ill-something like that?’

  ‘I don’t think my mother has ever been ill in her life.’

  ‘Or unhappy?’

  ‘In one of my interviews with your Dr Lamb he was suggesting something of the kind.’

  Dr Lamb having entered, he was not likely to go away again.

  ‘I told him that if what he suggested was true, I thought it wasn’t important. The thing is, they grasp hold of something, and then they make it everything.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was right, in a way. I went with her on a holiday to Scotland. I suppose one could say she was ill. My father had just died. I thought she was desperately unhappy. I suppose she was. But she was already in love with Oscar. I hated her for it-I half knew it. Looking back, I see that she spent those holidays with me as a sort of an apology. She let me look after her. I was never so happy in my life. Then at the end of the holidays she told me she was going to marry Oscar. I felt as if I’d been made a fool of. I admitted all this to Lamb

  ‘Funny, isn’t it, one automatically talks of admitting-as if he had the right

  ‘I said to him, very well. I was able to look after Lynda because something happened to me that time with my mother. As far as she was concerned, she was paying off a debt to one of her sons. If she thought of it at all-she’s not introspective. But for me, during that time, I learned I was not a little boy any longer. I looked after everything-herself, and me-everything, for three months.’

  Lynda; then Patty; now me, thought Martha.

  He said:’ There was Patty. I was able to help her. I know I can help you. If he wants to make it a mechanism, that’s his affair. But everything is, if you want to look at it like that. That’s the trouble with these people: they think it’s enough to say you behave like that because when you were six and a half or sixteen and a half, you did that. My answer to them is-and so what? And certain types of people set themselves up as judge and jury. Good luck to them.’

  The only thing is, thought Martha, you’ve never found yourself in bed with the bedclothes pulled over your head for weeks at a time, unable to get up.

  He said:’ Who is Dr Lamb? He’s been in my life for let’s see, it must be getting on for ten years. If you are treated by him, he’ll be in it a lot longer. One of these days I’ll be getting a pleasant little letter from him, do I feel inclined to go along and have a little talk about Martha. I’ll trot along. We’ll chat about Lynda and Martha. Lynda can’t live without him. But when all is said and done, who is he? He’s a decent enough chap, I suppose.’

  For a week she did not go near Dr Lamb: she was safe with Mark, and nothing existed outside the landscape she inhabited with him.

  Then a date on a calendar three weeks away, sent her back.

  She talked. She talked about the mechanisms.

  He said at last:’ If you are in the mechanism, then that’s what you are.’ It was calculated: she could feel him calculating.

  ‘No. If I were in the grip of the mechanism one hundred per cent, that is not all I would be.’

  ‘What would you be?’

  Martha, having again made a decision not to mention the silent watcher, to protect her deepest self, said, with aggression:’ I’d be the person who watches.’

  He let this pass: it was extraordinary how, sitting here, alert, alive, all senses functioning, she could feel the lightning movements of his-mind? No, all of him, in this work he brought in all of him, a sensing whole: formidable. He said, deliberately:’ You are sleeping with Mark now-just when your mother is coming. It’s for only one reason. You’re saying to your mother: “Look I’m a big girl now."’

  She laughed: out of surprise that he had chosen this, a much lesser provocation, than he could have done. For a second he looked put out because she laughed.

  Of course. I know that. I can explain this bit of the mechanism as well as you can. My mother was a woman who hated her own sexuality and she hated mine too. She wanted me to be a boy always-before I was born. She knew I was going to be a boy. She had a boy’s name for me. My way of fighting her was-to be a clown.’ (Martha, saying this, realized that after all, saying something, made one understand it differently.)’She was always making fun of me because I wasn’t good at the boy’s things. My brother was always beating me. But I never once said, which is what I should have said: I’m a girl, why should I be good at boys’ things? No, I did them, but I did them badly and laughed at myself. I clowned, and she laughed at me. It was a way of protecting myself. I know that. When at last I became a girl, and I spent years and years longing for the moment when I would have breasts and be a woman, I was able to defy her at last. I made myself beautiful clothes, and every man I had, for a long time, was a weapon against her. Do you suppose I don’t know that?’

  He waited. She was not going on.

  ‘What don’t you know then?’ he inquired, with irony-calculated.

  ‘It’s a question of how one knows it, ’ she said waiting for him to meet her here on this, the furthest point she had reached in her life.

  He sat intuiting for the right provocative words. He wanted to provoke. He wanted to … a word came into her mind. It was ‘explode’. Yes. He wanted an explosion. The word had a weight of meaning. She did not have time to examine it now.

  ‘I think you are proud of your knowing-you are proud of that more than anything. It’s your intelligence you are proud of. You are still fighting your mother with that-the masculine intelligence.’r />
  He waited, all alert, watching.

  Anger flared: was held.

  ‘I didn’t learn that out of books. I experienced it. Is what you know from experience, the masculine intelligence?’

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ he said, deliberate, cold, watching.

  ‘My first weapon was my sexuality. My second was-what I got out of books?’

  He sat, alert, his mind nosing about among what he knew of her-for the right words. He was all alive, alert, watchful attack. She, all alert, watchful defence.

  The time was running out. At the same moment, they thought it, and he glanced, deliberate, at the clock. Five minutes. He was casting about for the trigger to set off the explosion. Her mind racing she checked up possible triggers he might use. At all costs, whatever happened, she wasn’t going to explode-she needed the energy.

  ‘You said, I think, that this person, the observer in you, could be masculine?’

  ‘Oh, easily. Or anything. A horse …’ As she said this, she thought a horse, masculine. What’s a tree? She did not say, ‘tree’, but impelled by this extraordinary need to placate the betrayer in her, she said instead, grasping up a phrase from the armoury of masculine words, ‘or an express train … do you know why I said that? I was sitting in my room thinking, my mother’s visit rushes towards me like an express train. Masculine. Dr Lamb would like that. No, I don’t think of myself as an express train-the phrase got into the wrong place, because I said horse, and I knew you’d think, ha! masculine. An empty pool if you like. That’s round. Feminine

  She waited. In he came, under her guard.

  ‘And, of course, the other reason you are sleeping with Mark is because you are saying to me, I don’t find you attractive, Dr Lamb, I have another man.’

  Martha snapped into rage. She saw red. ‘Rubbish!’ she snapped, while she clutched to the thought that around her the air had been red-for a flash of time. No metaphor at all. A wave of hot scarlet with sparks in it that had faded into ordinary air: but the fade itself, the time of it, had a quality about it as if it belonged to another measurement or wavelength of time. But now she was drained. She had exploded. He was looking at the clock. The interview was over. He had done what he had intended to do.

  She sat, thinking: making notes of what she must remember and try to understand afterwards.

  He smiled gently:’ You are not a woman’, he said, ‘who is likely to admit easily that she is attracted to a man.’

  This was right off any point. It simply was not true. But she was suddenly understanding something; she was grabbing at a comprehension as it fled past. It was this: it did not matter what he said nearly so much as the time he chose to do it.

  She said:’ That isn’t true. I am easily attracted to men. And if you weren’t my doctor, I could easily be attracted to you. In fact I am. It’s not the point.’

  He smiled with a calculated, as it were retrospective, sarcasm. No need now for the triggers: today’s work had been done. She had exploded. He was merely keeping the weapons oiled for next time. Some time in the future, at the next session perhaps, but at the right moment, he would say: You are not a woman who will easily admit she is attracted to a man-and she would explode into anger. Or-but almost anything would do. You are a woman who is over anxious to admit that she is attracted to a man-why? It was all a question of timing: the whole process was built on it.

  She went home, preoccupied.

  To Mark. To bed. To love. To happiness. At this time she was a woman who couldn’t stand not being in bed. Yet for four years sex had been an appetite she had chosen not to feed. Except when, for a brief period, she suffered violent desire for Mark because of that mechanism, jealousy for Patty Samuels. She might easily never have gone to bed with Mark, just as she would never go to bed with Or Lamb. If she went to bed with Dr Lamb, they would enter, effortlessly, the marvellous country of love; as may any man or woman ‘on the same wave-length’. She had seen red. She had had an extraordinary experience. It hadn’t seemed extraordinary at all. It was necessary now to say: don’t forget it, don’t take it for granted-you must think about it.

  There were a great many other things to think about.

  Mrs. Quest kept putting off, or threatening to put off, or promising to make, her visit. Each letter was as if written in reply to one of Martha’s which had put off, or rejected, or invited. But Martha continued to write, every two or three days, the same letter: your room is ready and I am waiting for your visit.

  In a pretty house on the slopes above Cape Town an old lady was engaged in a fight with a cold, rejecting, hating demon to which she gave the name Martha.

  Martha was being treated by Dr Lamb. But she was not seeing Dr Lamb. In theory, she was going three times a week. In practice, she kept postponing appointments. It was a simple question of psychological economy, the medium of exchange being energy. She wanted to see Dr Lamb, she lived hour by hour in a curve of expectation towards the next, but cancelled appointment. Because when it came to the point, she could not face the collapse into lethargy which must follow Dr Lamb’s making her angry so that she exploded. She had too much to do.

  For one thing there was Mark. For another, there was his work. The publishers had asked: Where was his next book? Mark returned a joke, that he was a once-in-five-years novelist. But this would not do. Publishing was changing. Literature, like everything else, is an industry. A book comes out, a ‘name’ is promoted; reviewers go into action; a few months later, that book is processed, done. Where is the next? Well, Mark was working on the story of Rachel and Aaron. When was it going to be finished? Put like that, Mark had to face that it wasn’t going to be finished. It was being written to himself, perhaps to Martha, or to the dead Sally-Sarah. To Thomas?

  The question was more, perhaps, was it written by Mark? Certainly the admirers of the war novel, or of A City, would never think so. If Mark had wanted to write a book all blood, sweat and tears, well, this was it. It had good bits in it. To make it a good book, one would have to remove all the parts that were emotional, violent, protesting. He could make a separate book of them perhaps? He had written two books? A novel and a play? The emotional parts were written mostly in dialogue. Interesting that, if you thought of it: Mark, plunging into anger, and the rest of the emotions so remarkably absent from his usual kind of work, then had to separate himself into characters who might easily walk on and off a stage: the directions were already here.

  Miriam (speaking slowly, haltingly: she is very frightened): But, Aaron, if they catch you, they’ll kill you … (Miriam was Aaron’s mother.)

  And so on.

  Thinking about it, talking about it, they spread sheets of typescript all over the floors, the desk, the bed in which they spent so much time.

  The publisher, Terence Boles, was insistent:’ But, Mark, you have to keep your name before the public!’ He was humorous, but he meant it. Was there not something else Mark had that could be published? There was something lying in the drawer?

  As it happened, there was. Long ago, before the war, when he was a boy, Mark had written a series of stories, or sketches, about his mother’s house in the country, where she had entertained politicians, writers, relations. The sketches were about the people who had been guests. They were mostly fanciful, since Mark had so seldom been home; were created, built up, out of things his brothers had said: for the most part what Colin had said. Colin had found the proceedings for the most part humorous. Colin had had a great sense of humour in those days-Mark remembered this with surprise: one had not, for many years, associated Colin with a sense of humour, or even enjoyment. It must have been the war that had changed him. These stories were not so much immature, as thin. It seemed that Mark’s persona, the writer, the person in him who wrote, had never been ‘young’, had been born an old man. It was not the view of an adolescent boy, but of a humorous mature observer, part Colin, but mostly Mark.

  Well, these sketches, formed into a book, might very well do. Nothing startling, but adequat
e. A holding operation; something to keep the machine fed while Mark considered what he should do next. While he considered, he continued to do what he enjoyed, which was to let that remarkable manuscript proliferate, in which two dead people fed the existences of the two soon-to-be-murdered, Rachel and Aaron, brother and sister, Miriam’s children.

  Martha polished up the sketches. She got ready her mother’s room. She and Mark made love, remained inside a tender and charming fantasy life where there was no responsibility, no time.

  From which Martha woke one morning with the knowledge that in two days from now her mother would arrive.

  She ran to the telephone to confirm an appointment with Dr Lamb.

  She travelled towards him through the hot and noisy traffic of a summer’s day, thinking that he was going to make her ‘explode’. Why? Why was the antidote to her lethargies to make her explode? In all those innumerable books she had by now read, she could not remember it being stated that way. There was the word, catharsis. Hmmm. What was that? An explosion. In the old plays, the old theatre, that was what they did? Pity and terror-one was forced to live through it, one exploded, one came out at peace? What was the result of years and years of this process, during which, several times a week, one was exploded, and so skilfully, by Dr Lamb? A continual repetition of the same skilful process, the explosion of certain energies. Bad energies? Bang, bang, up go terror, fear, anger, resentment, in a surge of energy. Red. Pity, too. What colour was pity? It didn’t matter-bang! Up goes pity, bang, bang. And bang to love, warmth, compassion? Years and years of it, for some people.

  Chatting to Terence Boles, about the book, he had remarked that his wife was finishing an analysis that week. At the time she had not been listening, had been thinking about the new book, The Way of a Tory Hostess. What an extraordinary phrase that was: finishing an analysis. Terence had let it drop quite casually: he had not found it extraordinary. ‘My cost of living is going to drop sharply this week, ’ he said, humorously. ‘My wife’s finishing her analysis.’

  At some point, after years of being exploded by Dr Lamb, one stepped forth, a developed human being, ‘finished’.