The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Mrs. Quest said, trying hard:’ Then Mr. Coldridge is bringing up the child?’

  Martha observed:’ He is being brought up.’ It was rather grim; Mrs. Quest looked quickly at her; Martha was smiling, queerly: Mrs. Quest thought, that’s like Milly! Wanting to meet Martha, to contact her here, she fumbled:’ Well, it can’t be easy, with that background.’

  Martha’s smile faded. ‘No, ’ she said.

  They were in a taxi, Mrs. Quest’s luggage filling every possible space.

  Martha said, turning to her mother, again with the dryness, the humour, which made Mrs. Quest’s spirits lift:’ We thought it would be easier if we-you and I, were alone today, all things considered!’ She waited, smiling straight into her mother’s face.

  Mrs. Quest, reaching, fumbling, desperate to match up to this opportunity, found words:’ Who’s we?’ she demanded.

  Martha’s paleness deepened, her mouth went tight.

  Mrs. Quest, desperate, wanting to cry out: No, no, I didn’t

  Martha said, ‘Mark. He’s my employer, after all. I suppose, ’ she added, with a sort of desperation of her own which at least hinted at the possibility of a return of the dry, cool, irony where Mrs. Quest had never thought she might be able to meet her daughter.

  Afraid now, Mrs. Quest told herself to be silent. Later. Things would be all right later. Now, some demon had hold of her tongue, she had not meant to …

  Martha said: ‘I asked the driver to go past St Paul’s. And then through Piccadilly Circus, and then past the Palace-But if you’re too tired …’

  Mrs. Quest heard this, like a child being offered sweets, when it has grown out of them. Martha meant well, she knew. And of course she longed to see St Paul’s and the rest.

  Martha said, trying hard, as her mother could see:’ It wasn’t until I actually came that I saw what you had been talking about all these years.’

  And now Mrs. Quest heard herself let out a snort of laughter. ‘When were you last in St Paul’s or at the Changing of the Guard?’

  Martha did not look at her; she looked away out of the window. Mrs. Quest was now as pale as her daughter. In silence they drove past St Paul’s. In Fleet Street, she said timidly:’ Perhaps I am rather tired, perhaps …’

  Martha leaned forward, knocked on the glass, and gave new directions.

  Then she set herself, as her mother could see, to be polite. She asked a great many questions about her brother, about Bessie, the children, the farm, the voyage, and Mrs. Quest answered, in the same spirit. Martha did not mention Caroline. Mrs. Quest volunteered that she thought Caroline was well; she was clever; she always got very good reports from school. Martha said nothing.

  Later she said, as if apologizing for it:’ Of course London must have changed a lot.’

  ‘It was bound to, ’ said Mrs. Quest. Privately she thought it had not changed much: but probably Martha would be offended if she said so. All kinds of buildings were changed, landmarks gone, but the essence of the place, what could change that-the heavy grey weight of it?

  And when they passed the Museum, then nothing had changed, and Mrs. Quest for a moment forgot her daughter, remembered only how she had walked here as a girl with her father.

  She was smiling when the taxi stopped outside the house. She stood on the pavement waiting, while Martha paid the driver. Then she understood that the taximan and Martha were together dragging the luggage inside: there were no servants? She helped. Two large trunks, three large suitcases, and a dozen packages and bundles were stowed in the hall. ‘No, Mark will bring them up when he comes, ’ Martha said. But, guilty, Mrs. Quest insisted on carrying up, Martha helping, all the weight that two women could manage, all but the two trunks. She was in a most charming bedroom on the third floor. Mrs. Quest suppressed the desire to say that all through her girlhood she had had the front bedroom on the third floor: she felt now, as if she had come home. Martha was standing by a pile of objects on a table: obviously she wanted her mother to notice them. Mrs. Quest saw some flannel, a hot-water bottle, some safety-pins, a lot of other things.

  ‘I got them for you, ’ said Martha.

  Mrs. Quest had to think what she meant.

  ‘Well, you needn’t have bothered, ’ she said. ‘I’m quite capable of shopping I suppose.’

  She could have bitten her tongue off: but it was too late. Martha turned away, bright scarlet. When she came back, she was white, and would not meet her mother’s imploring eyes.

  ‘The bathroom is across the passage, ’ she said hurriedly. ‘I’ll go and make some tea …’

  She almost ran out of the room, calling back:’ I’ll be in the kitchen-ground floor.’

  Mrs. Quest, walking around the room, to recover herself, noted that the room was everything, but really everything, she could have imagined. Later, she would relish it, but first…

  She hurried through washing and brushing her hair, she descended through the house, found the kitchen. It was a very fine kitchen, a kind of marriage between a Victorian kitchen with larders and store-rooms off it, and modernity, with its devices and gadgets. Martha was lifting a tray off an enormous table-she led the way through the house, to a drawing-room, which was, as Mrs. Quest could see, not much used.

  ‘You needn’t put yourself out for me, ’ she said, ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance.’

  ‘I thought you’d like this room, ’ said Martha. ‘It’s a lovely room. It doesn’t seem to get used much, but when we do-’

  It seemed that Martha enjoyed the chance to sit in it? Well then, she certainly must have changed! Drinking tea, each eating small bits of cake to please the other, they exchanged information.

  Later Martha said that Mark would not be back that day: he was driving Paul to his school, would go straight to his work in the morning: they would see him, probably, the following evening.

  There was supper to get through: Mrs. Quest had decided she was very tired, she must sleep: tomorrow, she thought, they would get on a better footing. They kissed goodnight, and then the old lady arranged her bedroom, her possessions, and, in bed, wrote a very long letter to her son, page after page, until, hearing a silence all around her, looked at the clock and found it was three in the morning. She lay awake, admonishing her tongue not to betray her tomorrow.

  Tomorrow she woke late, to find Martha infinitely at her disposal. They drove about London in taxis and on the top of buses, seeing, they supposed, the same city, but Mrs. Quest, alert for moments like those of yesterday, which she had let slip, did not find them again. Martha appeared favourably disposed towards Harrods and Liberty’s, and was prepared to spend as long as the old lady wished in both. Mrs. Quest, offered tea in a Fuller’s, refused rather tartly: she was again feeling like a schoolchild being taken out for a treat. She went to bed very early: her head was aching.

  She woke early, and descended to the kitchen to make herself tea. She was quiet, so as not to disturb. There she found Mark, dressed; pleasant, but preoccupied. He departed for his factory as Mrs. Coles, the charwoman came in. Mrs. Coles sat down for a cup of tea. Mrs. Quest knew that things had changed in England; but at the end of half an hour, for which after all, someone must be paying, when Mrs. Coles, an elderly lady complaining about food prices and her feet, seemed in no hurry to start work, Mrs. Quest said she was going up to do her own room out. Both Mrs. Coles and Martha exclaimed that she should do no such thing: but she left them, carrying dusters and a vacuum cleaner.

  She did her room and the bathroom feeling criminal. Later Martha came up. Mrs. Quest could see she was ready with things to say. She sat down, fumbling for a cigarette; as Martha sat, and handed her one.

  ‘You always did let yourself be exploited by servants, ’ began Mrs. Quest, defiantly.

  ‘Yes, well, that’s not important. Look. You see, I want to say something.’

  Mrs. Quest put on a humorous expression.

  ‘Yes. I don’t know why it is, but we always do seem to-anyway. What I don’t want to happen is that we
should go through this-pretending-no, 1 don’t mean that. I mean, you never did like what I am, how I am. But what’s the use of … we could either put a good face on things, and be polite, all that kind of thing-but wouldn’t it be better if we could try …’

  Mrs. Quest listening to this, was examining her daughter’s face: every muscle, the implication of every tiny movement of eye, mouth, tense hands. She felt on the verge, at last, of discoveries. She was infinitely triumphant as her daughter sat there, in a defiant supplication.

  ‘You see, ’ said Martha, ‘I know this isn’t exactly an orthodox household, but if you take it as it is then

  ‘Aren’t you going to marry him then?’ implored Mrs. Quest, and could have bitten her tongue off.

  Martha laughed. She laughed despairingly, as if she had been bound to laugh, as if she were doomed to it.

  Mrs. Quest said:’ It’s all very well!’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. But the point is you see

  And now came the words which to Mrs. Quest were like a slap in the face, or a door closing. ‘You know, we don’t all have the same ideas about life, do we?’

  ‘No. But I have never said to anybody that we did!’

  Silence. Martha got up, went to the window, looked out, and Mrs. Quest examined her back.

  ‘Are you living with him then?’

  ‘Well-here I am. But no, I think, on the whole, that no I’m not.’

  ‘Because what his wife must be thinking I really can’t…’

  ‘I did tell you she was here, you know. She’s downstairs. She’s ill.’

  Mrs. Quest’s mind raced: had she been told? If so, not in a way that one could take in.

  Martha turned. ‘Anyway. I don’t know why it is, we never seem to-’

  Again Mrs. Quest felt triumph, a feeling of victory. This apology, which it seemed the girl was offering, was always the culminating moment of fantasies about Martha. At the same time, she was crying out: No, no, no, I don’t want this, I only want to understand, at last.

  She said sourly:’ What is it you want to say?’

  ‘Nothing in particular I suppose. But Mark and I were talking. It would be easy to-make things easy as it were. But that’s what we’ve always done, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be better if you tried to-accept me as I was?’

  ‘What frightful sins are you concealing then?’ inquired Mrs. Quest, with the intention of humour.

  ‘It’s not…’ Martha sat down and laughed again.

  ‘Well I don’t know!’ said Mrs. Quest.

  ‘I don’t know either!’

  This was, genuinely, a moment of ironical contact, and they were both grateful for it. But Martha went down to do some work for Mark, and Mrs. Quest went down to the kitchen, where Mrs. Coles, whose feelings had been hurt, sulked and would not respond to invitations to gossip. For the old lady had been left with the feeling that the household concealed some monstrousness, or a hidden vice, which she might find out about if she tried.

  Nothing happened for a couple of days. Then she was told that people were coming for dinner.

  ‘Not a dinner party-it’s informal.’

  There was something else meant here-what? Mrs. Quest wondered if Martha was worried that she would be wrongly dressed? Inquiring, she saw this was not the case: an afternoon dress would do nicely.

  She approached the occasion with a defiant suspicion, and understood when she saw there were two black gentlemen in the drawing-room, with sherry glasses in their hands, talking to Martha and to Mark. There was also quite a pretty woman who looked tired, called Phoebe, in some kind of relationship to Mark, and a gingery funny-looking man with such big spectacles you could see nothing else of his face.

  Mrs. Quest was annoyed that Martha thought she would not know how to behave. She demonstratively shook two black hands and inquired where the men came from. Both were from Kenya. She was about to say something about Mau Mau, but realized that it was at least possible that black men in this house were ‘on the side of’ Mau Mau, which for some years now Mrs. Quest had been told represented every sort of evil. And so it turned out.

  Throughout a long dinner-cooked jointly, she discovered, by Mark and Martha, the old lady sat quietly, listening to talk which took it for granted that Mau Mau was in the right, and that her own views and the conduct of the British Government disgusting. Towards the end of the dinner she decided that it would be simply cowardice not to say anything of where she stood, and she chose a pause in which to remark firmly that she did not mind being thought reactionary, but she hated communism, which would be the ruin of Africa. At which first Phoebe, with a look of bitter meaning towards Mark, and then both Africans, who were bland but firm, said they entirely agreed with her.

  Martha, she saw, was looking humorous, and Mark angry.

  A violent discussion ensued, for which Mrs. Quest was afraid she could be blamed. There was very bad feeling here, she could see; Phoebe expressed sentiments with which Mrs. Quest was in agreement, while Mark, cold and authoritative, disagreed. A cold man, she thought, that awful logicality again: it went on to the end of the meal, and Mrs. Quest could not follow it. Her head was aching.

  Back in the drawing-room, the two black men discussed with Mark how best to get a book published which would put a view other than the official one, on Kenya. Phoebe joined in. She seemed to be responsible for the Africans. Mrs. Quest could not stop herself thinking that Phoebe had never been in Africa and had no right to have such decided views about it. Mrs. Quest talked to Jimmy Wood, Mark’s partner, but found him hard to follow: he kept making jokes and laughing, but Mrs. Quest did not understand what was so funny.

  Meanwhile Martha poured coffee on the other side of the room and was a silent observer: her mother had not before seen her in this role. Just as she was finding Jimmy Wood intolerable, Martha came over and began talking to both of them. Well, she was more tactful than she used to be, that was something! But Mrs. Quest did not understand the talk, which was about the deliberate creation, by some government, through science, of an inferior race whose job it was to do all the menial work of a society. She suspected Jimmy, and probably Martha, of in this way attacking her for her own views on race-which she had been careful not to express. Suddenly she found herself talking loudly, with glances across the room at the two Africans, about Steven, whom she had been remembering painfully all evening. ‘It wasn’t true, ’ she kept saying, hot and defiant, that the black people hated the whites, why just before she left home she had had a little black boy called Steven who … they listened, the Africans too, in silence. Mrs. Quest felt she had betrayed Steven; and anyway, she was not being understood.

  Her head was aching dreadfully now. Just as she was deciding it would be tactful to go up to bed, a tall fair woman came into the room. She was surely wearing a dressing-gown? Though it was certainly very pretty. So was she. Mark was polite to her. Martha left Mrs. Quest to go across to offer coffee. There were introductions: Mrs. Coldridge sat down, took some coffee, talked a little to Martha, then put down her cup untouched, nodded, smiled and went out again, Mark politely going with her to the door.

  Jimmy remarked, with a sort of giggle, that he wished it would take his wife like that: Mrs. Quest suddenly couldn’t stand another moment of him. Whatever else Mark’s wife might be, she was a lady: that was infinitely reassuring. But Jimmy! Mrs. Quest said to herself, angrily, that he was common, he was not a gentleman, he shouldn’t be here-she said goodnight and went. Martha ran after her, to say she mustn’t be upset by Jimmy: for her part it wasn’t until she had met Jimmy that she had understood the phrase ‘a screw loose’. Mrs. Quest could see that Martha meant well, but she was sore, and very upset, and could not respond as she knew she ought. She went to bed, and lay awake, saying (she was afraid it was aloud, she could hear her own voice talking) the things that she had not said during the meal.

  Martha did not refer to what had happened next day.

  A couple of days later she was asked if she would like to join�
�some people’ to go to the theatre: Martha added hastily that Phoebe wouldn’t be there. Mrs. Quest replied firmly that she had no objection at all to going to the theatre with Africans, if they were educated and clean. She wasn’t all that behind the times.

  She was careful to have a long rest that afternoon: she didn’t want to be tired out again. The party consisted of Mark and Martha, Mrs. Quest, a young woman called Patty Samuels, a young man called Gerald Smith, and a girl, Mark’s niece, Elizabeth. Mrs. Quest did not care who was there, provided it wasn’t Jimmy Wood. Mrs. Quest liked Gerald Smith who was definitely a gentleman-charming. Patty Samuels, whom Martha warned had been ill, did not seem ill, but was a jolly sort of a girl, if not a lady. Elizabeth was a lady, but never opened her mouth.

  They were going to Shakespeare-a relief, one knew where one was.

  It turned out that the little theatre was a communist theatre, and well known for it. It was nearly empty. The play was The Tempest and it was in modern dress, and Caliban was an African. The programme said the play was a parable ‘if you liked’ about the oppression of the black man in Africa. There were references to Kenya. Mrs. Quest did not like. She thought it was puerile, and in bad taste-but she was determined not to say so. Thank goodness they hadn’t tampered with the language, that was something.

  Afterwards they went back home, where there was a large supper. Mark had cooked it. Why hadn’t Martha cooked it? Mark replied that Martha hadn’t been feeling well, she had wanted to lie down. Mrs. Quest was very upset and hurt. Why hadn’t she been asked to help? And what was the matter with Martha?

  Nothing at all, said Martha, cross, but Mrs. Quest was not going to leave it at that: she’d get to the bottom of it later.

  Meanwhile they all sat around the great kitchen table and tore the production of The Tempest they had just seen to pieces, saying everything that Mrs. Quest had been thinking: not that she would have used this clever-clever language. It appeared that this play, and the theatre, represented everything that was bad about the communist attitude towards the arts. Sectarian. Dogmatic. Narrow. Lifeless. Mechanistic, etc. It appeared that the charming young man Gerald was a communist, and so was Patty, and that they both spent a large part of their time ‘fighting’ to change the party line. Mrs. Quest had thought that anybody in the communist party who disagreed with it was shot.