The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  She was sitting in the leather chair opposite Dr Lamb, who, as she could see with one part of her mind, wanted to talk about her sleeping with Mark, and her wishing to sleep with him, Dr Lamb. She was thinking what it could mean, what they, Dr Lamb, could possibly mean when they said ‘finishing an analysis’, when she heard Dr Lamb say: ‘I think you’ll see it more clearly when you’ve finished.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. What did you say?’

  ‘I said, when you’ve finished your analysis, Mrs. Hesse, you’ll see it in proportion.’

  ‘What made you say that then?’

  He looked humorous.

  Dr Lamb had never mentioned finishing an analysis before.

  She had never before thought of finishing an analysis.

  Some weeks ago, she had been sitting here, and the air of the room had flashed scarlet. She had’seen red’ but literally. The blaze of scarlet had faded slowly as her anger had faded.

  ‘I put it to you, Mrs. Hesse, that you are feeling guilty because you’ve been sleeping with Mark. You have been breaking your appointments with me at the last moment because you’ve been afraid I’m going to punish you for it.’

  She considered this.

  ‘How could you punish me?’

  The time was up. She made an appointment for a week later, because her mother was coming, and she could be quite sure her time would not be her own. She went home.

  Chapter Four

  An old lady sat in a flower-crammed balcony high above the breathing sea. Behind her was the famous mountain. She had looked at it, admired it, been taken up it, had made a great many exclamations about it, and about the magnificent views. Milly was infinitely kind, dragging her about all over the peninsula, to look at views. Milly had suggested a second trip up the mountain: Mrs. Quest’s refusal was pettish. She had believed she had been polite, half believed this was what she had wanted, being dragged about … good Lord, had she actually used the word? Been impolite? Certainly, she hadn’t meant to be querulous: her own voice had shocked her. First she had seen the look on Milly’s face, then, wondering at its cause, heard her own voice. Surely she hadn’t been … apologetic, flurried, she redoubled her exclamations. It was dreadful! Milly, who worked so hard, had given up many plans of her own, Mrs. Quest was sure of that, to visit oak forests and vineyards and beauty spots of all kinds.

  But Milly was a young woman who was really, truly kind, unlike others who-here Mrs. Quest’s mind went dark briefly, refusing to specify who was not kind.

  Milly was silent, thoughtful, then suggested that May should herself ask to be driven, when she felt like it. ‘Please, my dear, I really would like you to please yourself.’

  The phrase almost touched off another charge of rage: when had she ever pleased herself? When had she not sacrificed herself for others? But she was learning not to use those words, no matter how often she thought them. When she did, that look appeared on people’s faces which … People? Her children. Her own children, for whom she had …

  Old people, servants, children, slaves, all those who aren’t in control of their own lives, watch faces for minute signs in eyes, gestures, lips, as weather-watchers examine the skies. It seemed to Mrs. Quest that for years now she had been covertly watching her son’s face, his wife’s face, for that look. For a long time she had not been able to put a name to it, for the truth was so impossible. How was it that the sacrifice of her own life led to-embarrassment. As if she were an ill-mannered little girl, or a dog who had to be patted and fed but who embarrassed by tactless remarks or by jumping up to bark and lick.

  Milly did not look embarrassed, though perhaps she might be hurt, or thinking, Why did she not say so before?

  Well, why hadn’t Mrs. Quest said so before? For Milly was so kind, unlike … Milly was really kind. She never made one feel as if… Mrs. Quest did not want to think that Milly, a young woman every bit as busy, as responsible, as her own children, had time for real kindness, whereas they … She did not want to think about the last few years on the high dry hilly farm horizoned by mountains. She had had enough of mountains, peaks, rocks, dryness and the winds that shrank one’s flesh till one felt all dried skin on old bones.

  Mrs. Quest sat among flowers hundreds of feet above the sea. It seemed that if she leaned forward, she might dip her hand into it, or even pick up a toy ship, or simply float off, like a sea-bird, over the crisping, bounding or solid surfaces of water to play like the wind, on moving blue, or green or grey.

  She had always loved the sea. She was that member of the family who loved the sea. ‘What I really enjoy is a good sea voyage.’ As a child, holidays on the Isle of Wight, trips around Cowes, journeys across the Channel or to Ireland; small boons for a sea-lover, which she had always been, knowing that, in spite of her circumscription, she was born, like the real sea-people, for sailing ships, merchant ships, sea ports, sea islands, sea winds, tangy and alien shores and the men who chart them. To her, the sea meant what deserts mean to the desert-lover, or mountains to those madmen (or so they seem to those who do not love the mountains) who choose to die absurdly on peaks among storms and avalanches.

  This being so, how was it that she had spent thirty years, more, on the highveld, thousands of feet up and away from the sea, where the only reminders of sea were the sound of wind in long grass, or a mackerel sky at sundown?

  For, as she sat expanding and breathing in the salt air, she was forced to think that one could say, every day of one’s life, that one loved the sea, but could forget, except in the falseness of nostalgia, what the sea could be.

  How was it possible for a sea-creature so to organize her life that she hadn’t been near it? What had happened?

  Simply, what had happened was that she had married Mr. Quest; and therefore had she spent her life as a farmer’s wife on the highveld, instead of as a sailor’s wife near some port.

  An old lady with grown-up children and five grandchildren sat thinking: Perhaps I made a mistake, I should have married …

  She thought it defiantly; she had a right to the thought, hadn’t she? After all, it had depended on her, on her choice-hadn’t it? Yet there was something about the thought itself that made her mind go suddenly dark, as if it fainted, refused to go on. More and more these days, her mind kept coming up against places where it jibbed, shied away, seized up: or she’d find herself giving a small sharp laugh, like a stifled snort: then she’d glance quickly around to see if anyone had heard. But no, for hours of every day, she was alone in the flat, could talk to herself if she wished. And she did. Why not? Didn’t everyone? Her son’s wife might give her that look but she talked to herself too: but then she was a young woman who, when caught talking to herself could make a joke of it, even claim it, as part of an attraction. But if an old woman did talk to herself they gave you that look.

  Here she was alone every morning, till lunchtime, when Milly’s little boy came in from his nursery school and the coloured girl came to clean and be nursemaid. In the afternoons Mrs. Quest became a helpful old lady-what else was she alive for, if not to help others? But in the mornings-what was she then?

  Sometimes, sea-bird, sailor’s wife, she sneaked in off the balcony to look into the mirror and saw a timid, defiant old face with its wind-shrivelled flesh, but her mind went dark, it kept going dark: she returned to the balcony, where she sat wrestling with something concealed, something she could not meet, did not know how to meet: sets of facts, or of emotions, kept jangling together, but could not merge, they did not fit.

  An old lady, sitting alone, thinking of children, grandchildren, may say to herself. Well, you needn’t have been in existence, any of you! I might have married johnnie, or Freddie, or Paul. And where would you have been then?

  It had been up to her, forty odd years ago, to say, I choose you, or you, or you … and because of that choice, such and such children, new people in the world, had come into being; but if she had made another choice, they would have been different. But she could n
ot begin to imagine Jonathan or Martha as different. They were inevitable. The fact that she could see only too clearly the embarrassed look either would give her if she had suggested such an idea, proved how ridiculous it was. But if that was ridiculous, where had been her choice? It was here lay the impossibility, the incongruity, the heart of something terrible … as if she, May Quest, were nothing, a nullity, a channel merely.

  As if in a romantic novel, or a fairy story, she saw herself, wayward beauty, flirting with this one or that one, then bestowing herself: I, your despised mother, gave myself to your father, your grandfather-your existence is the result of my choice.

  Such thoughts elderly ladies have, while they pass the marmalade or darn the socks-and watch, fearfully, like servants or infants, the faces of their powerful children, who imagine, God bless them, that they are in control of their own lives. (Mrs. Quest, sitting on the balcony heard herself titter, and looked around sharply-it was all right, she was alone.)

  Thirty or forty years ago, I, a courted and desired young woman, chose…

  Though of course she had not been beautiful. She had been plain. They had always said: you are the plain one. ‘What a pity she is so plain.’ Plain Jane they had called her, in fun; and she had taken it like a good sort. She had been forced to be a good sort. Why had she been plain? After all, she had had a beautiful mother. A thought came to life here which she remembered having before, oh, but so very long ago-when? She had been a young girl? She had looked in mirrors, tied her hair this way and that, bit her lips to make them red: they had laughed at her, teased her. Perhaps she had never been plain at all? This thought, appalling in its implications, came near consciousness, was refused admittance, as it had been shut out before, but knocked again …

  Mrs. Quest, who never moved without her photographs, dug into her trunk, opened an album from her girlhood. A serious round-faced girl, with her hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon, stared back at her. Plain. Why, plain? As if a mask or a veil were drawn off the young face, she saw her, poor plain Jane, as a good-looking girl. If she had been able to paint and powder, the way everyone did now, or arrange her hair differently without being laughed at, she wouldn’t have been plain at all! And she had had a good figure-they had always conceded her that. And of course she had always carried herself well, unlike these girls nowadays who slouched about anyhow. Who slouched? Martha? Jonathan’s wife? Milly? Slouching, lolling, painting and powdering, lazy flibbertygibbets, who ragtimed and tea-danced and cocktailed and were definitely no better than they ought to be, a frieze of irresponsible and dutiless girls unrolled before the old lady’s eyes-and vanished, like the ugly veil over her own photograph. She ought to do something about the way she spoke perhaps? Was that what made people embarrassed? But was it right to criticize an old woman because her slang was out of date? Was it kind? What was in a word, after all … and why go on punishing her, hadn’t they all done enough, with that miserable girlhood behind her-Plain Jane. She hadn’t been plain. She had been pretty. More, perhaps, if anyone had ever been kind enough to help, or encourage. Rage spurted and boiled, an awful anger that seemed beneath everything she did, like an underswell in the sea, ready to leap up and overwhelm at a word or a look.

  Besides, even if she had been plain, that didn’t mean plenty of men hadn’t seen her as a good wife. There was the young naval doctor, dead in the old war. He had never’spoken’, but everyone knew what he felt for her. For years his photograph had stood on her dressing-table-where was it? Where had she put it? Surely she hadn’t lost it?

  But why that photograph, why not others? It was as if she had been allowed one photograph, one alternative love: an allowance made by her family: mummy might have married the poor doctor killed in the First World War. Her lost love. Poor mummy’s dead love, a memory, an official memory, the family’s memory which she had permitted to become hers. Why had she? Why had she allowed herself to be plain Jane? Why had she married … Why, why, why, why! It was all nonsense, starting with that sad good sort of schoolgirl. There had been half a dozen men, at the time she got married, who wanted to marry her. They were patients; men wanted to marry their nurses. Men did marry their nurses. Her husband had married her. Handsome Captain Quest had married his plain nurse. What of the others? Odd that she had so completely discounted them as possible husbands, which they had been after all. They proposed, or allowed to be understood that they would if she gave them a chance. But she had not considered them-why not? She had considered marrying the naval doctor, had married the soldier who became a farmer. But she had not only not married the others, but had not even thought of them as husbands. Yet they were every bit as good as the doctor or the soldier. Yes, of course, she had loved. Twice. Love. An old lady who had been using the word love with confidence for decades, looked at it, and her mouth had the thin peaked look of the mouth of an unloved little girl, or the wife of a man who has married his mother. Love, she thought, love-her mind went dark. If that was love, then it had taken her to a hard sad life on first one farm, with her husband, then to another, with a son, hundreds of miles away and up from her real love, the sea.

  Sometime, after these long lazy mornings, when it was as if the sea had invaded her, filled her with a soft, blue, murmuring peace, and she returned indoors, to play with the little boy, and to help the coloured girl, Annie, she thought: If I had been able to live like this, been myself, would I have been good and kind, as I am now, instead of turning into a …

  Had she had a choice, ever? If her choice of a husband had been no choice at all-as the solid finality of her children, her grandchildren proved, then what choice had she ever had? Of course it was different for all these flighty girls now, they did as they liked, look at Martha, it was certain she was pleasing herself, as she always had, selfish, inconsiderate, immoral … Mrs. Quest’s head ached, she felt sick. These days, girls did choose, they were free: but in her young time, girls had that brief moment before they were married, when Plain jane was courted, was free to choose a husband, could say yes, no, I want this one and not that one, before she became a mother, and a nurse and had no choice but to sacrifice herself.

  She must be careful never to use that word when she was with Martha: she’d be lucky to get away with embarrassment! No, probably some cold, hard argument-unkindness. An awful kind of commonsense, a logic. Like Jonathan’s. Every word was a trap, one had to watch every syllable as it came out.

  Yet in the evenings here with Milly, she spoke as she felt. Milly liked her, Milly was pleased to have her here, with a husband away. Milly reminded her very much of a schoolfriend she once had. She had timidly said so, and Milly had not minded: old ladies seldom meet new faces, new people. Milly, the daughter of an old friend, with her pale little face, her seriousness, her tendency to headache and lassitude, was very like Rosemary. Milly who had asked her to stay for a week while waiting for the boat to sail, had, exactly as Rosemary once would, asked her to stay as long as she liked, ‘to make herself at home.’ Milly’s husband was a journalist, and he was attending some international occasion in America. Milly had a job teaching at the university. The little boy, Mrs. Quest thought, missed his parents, although the coloured girl was quite good. Why did Milly have to work at all? -but she must stop criticizing, it was not her business.

  Bringing it up, delicately, with Milly, Mrs. Quest heard that there was a previous wife in Johannesburg, and she was paid alimony. Milly’s salary was necessary to help out. Did Milly mind? Mrs. Quest wondered-but she must not pry. Bringing it up, she found Milly ready to discuss, to be comically dry about it all. With Milly she could talk like a human being, but not with …

  On the other farm she hadn’t talked to anyone for years.

  By the time the old lady arrived there, there were two small children and another on the way. Both Jonathan and Bessie worked very hard. The farm was a new one. The house was large. There was a great deal for Mrs. Quest to do. ‘If there is one thing I know about, ’ said she to herself, and to them, ‘it
is how hard a farmer’s wife does work!’ She busied herself with the children, and was sure Bessie did not mind. When the baby was born, Bessie added to her other duties, the business of looking after the dairy herd. Mrs. Quest thought this wrong: quite enough to be a mother and a farmer’s wife. But Bessie was stubborn. She was pregnant again very soon, and at suggestions it was too soon, said the pregnancy was ‘planned’. The young couple had planned four children, as they had planned to buy this remote raw farm, and build a large stone house on it.

  It was all too much, they did too much, they were both worn out, looked pale, were on their feet from six in the morning to nine at night, and then of course there were broken nights with the children.

  The whole thing was absurd: Mrs. Quest brooded and grieved and lay awake at night herself, for fear she might miss a baby crying, and not get to it before it woke her son or his wife. Then there was the first of the big rows. Bessie had snapped out one breakfast-time, Mrs. Quest had defended herself, the young husband, looking impatient, had stayed away from the farmwork, (thus making Mrs. Quest feel guilty) to calm the two women. The ‘row’ went on all morning: afterwards Mrs. Quest could only see the faces of those two, sitting opposite her, irritable, weary-embarrassed. They kept saying:’ You must try and understand that everyone doesn’t see life as you do.’ And, ‘Yes, but you see, we don’t agree with you.’ We! The word ‘we’ used of that unit her son and his wife, cut her every time she heard it. She had complained that’they discussed her behind her back’, and that ‘Jonathan always takes her side’.

  Afterwards she stayed in her room for days, full of that grieving concern for others which she had always called ‘love’. But, also, a nerve of justice had been struck. What they had said was true. Underneath everything she felt, was this: that they ought not to be here on this farm at all. She even felt it as a kind of betrayal.