The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Martha left. She leaned outside the door, too tired to move farther. Almost, she collapsed where she stood, lay like a dog outside the door. Inside Mrs. Quest was singing:’ Rock of Ages Cleft for Me.’ Then:’ Filthy pigs. I’m expected to clean up after their mess, pigs. I’m nothing but a servant and she’s a whore. Pig. Let me hide myself in Thee. They think I’m going to be their servant and do all their dirty work

  When Martha came up next morning at nine, the voice was still talking. It continued as she went into the room, drew the curtains and said good morning. It went on, while Mrs. Quest looked through Martha as if she did not see her. ‘Whore, ’ she said. ‘A decent woman shouldn’t be under the same roof…”

  ‘Mother, the taxi will be here soon.’

  ‘I don’t really feel up to it, ’ said Mrs. Quest brightly. ‘How are you today? Are you better?’

  ‘I am quite well.’

  She fetched her mother’s clothes and stood by the bed with them.

  ‘I don’t think I can move today, ’ said Mrs. Quest, cowering under the clothes, holding them to her chin like a shield.

  Martha stayed where she was. Suddenly Mrs. Quest flung back the covers, got up, and began to dress.

  ‘It’s a very nice day, ’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  When she had dragged vests, bloomers, skirt, jersey over her ancient body, displayed carelessly, brutally to Martha, as if making a point, she clung suddenly to a wall and said she was in too much pain to go out.

  ‘I’ll help you, ’ said Martha. She assisted her mother downstairs. Mrs. Quest clung to walls, banisters, and handles of doors, and crawled with two sticks into the taxi.

  She came back that afternoon, walked up the steps and then up the stairs into her room where she began packing. Martha went in, and Mrs. Quest said, in a normal, almost jolly voice:’ I’ve changed my ticket. I’m flying tomorrow.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to be sorry to miss the sea voyage?’

  Oh I don’t know. It’s rather tiring really-those big boats, they’re not very nice.’

  She did not mention Dr Lamb.

  Martha telephoned Dr Lamb who said that he had been standing at his window waiting when the taxi drew up with the old lady in it. She had skipped out, paid the taxi-man, with a haste which said how much she longed for the moment she could be face to face with Martha’s friend. She ran up three flights of stairs, was met by Dr Lamb at his door, and without saying more than ‘I am Martha’s mother’ ran into the room, sat down, and began to abuse Martha. She did not ask:’ Who are you? What kind of a doctor are you?’ She sat, and out of her flooded years and years and years of resentment, all focused on Martha. Dr Lamb had sat and listened. He had asked just one question:’ If you two don’t get on, perhaps it would be better if you weren’t in the same house?’

  Oh, she needn’t think I’m going to stay there, just to be a servant, ’ she had said, and continued with her complaint. At the end of an hour, reminded that someone else was waiting to see Dr Lamb, she had not heard. Twice, thrice, she did not hear; and then, suddenly, she jumped up, said:’ It was so nice talking to you-it’s not often Martha lets me meet one of her friends, ’ had shaken Dr Lamb’s hand, and had run all the way downstairs again. She had walked rapidly away out of sight. Straight to the travel bureau? She did not say. It was not mentioned.

  When the time came to drive her to the airport, Mrs. Quest refused to be driven: she wanted to leave at the air terminal-she did not wish to be a trouble.

  They went to the air terminal in a taxi, both silent, avoiding each other’s eyes, miserable, wishing to cry.

  They chatted about small topics till the flight was called, then, as she vanished from her daughter’s life for ever, Mrs. Quest gave a small tight smile, and said:’ Well, I wonder what all that was about really?’

  ‘Yes, ’ said Martha, ‘so do I.’

  They kissed politely, exchanged looks of ironic desperation, smiled and parted.

  Martha went back, into a collapse. She went to bed. She lay there, one day, two days, three days. She had an appointment with Dr Lamb. She cancelled it. Then she cancelled another. She got out of bed and began testing her memory, prod, prod, was that still there? That incident intact? Yes, she had lost nothing of what she gained in the long battle before Dr Lamb. There was a great deal more she had to do: for instance, her mother’s visit had gone into blackness, a blank. She had to get it back. She went to Dr Lamb, there was a violent explosion of emotion-she was back in bed. When she got out she knew she could no longer go to Dr Lamb: it was economics, psychic economics; she needed energy. She wrote and told him she would not come back, thanked him for’doing what she supposed she had gone to him for’. He replied that he was pleased to have been of use, and enclosed his account.

  Martha began getting up very early in the mornings, to have an hour or so of quiet, so as to work on her memory, the salvage operation. She did not like leaving Mark, and he did not like waking to a bed cold beside him. But she told him she had to do it. Now, not seeing Dr Lamb, it meant that the focus of her life was on the two hours in the early mornings, before breakfast with Mark; and then again in the evenings. She knew Mark had looked forward to her mother’s departure, so they could return again to the evenings, closed-in, sheltered, shut off from life, the curtains of love-making drawn around them. But she wanted her evenings, she had to have them. She was miraculously restored to energy again. She was able, again, to say: Today I will do this, and then do it. After dinner, she went to her room, and worked on her own mind, with her mind. The weeks of her mother’s visit came back, each scene fought back into memory against lethargy, pain, reluctance. Afterwards she crawled into bed, worn out. Then Mark came in, to hold her and comfort her. She wanted this, very much. But also, she didn’t want it-she had to stop being this helpless creature who clung and needed.

  It was not that they ceased to be lovers-they were, but differently.

  She knew that soon they would not be lovers. And he was hurt, deeply, where it mattered, not anywhere on the surface where it could be talked about. For the second time, or the third time, Mark had given everything that was good in him, all his strength and patience and warmth, to a woman who said, Save me, Save me, and who then had-not been saved, or who had gone off to doctors, or at any rate, had not needed him.

  They did not plan it or decide it, but soon it was at an end. Besides, there were the children, and Paul was a person from whom one could conceal nothing.

  Part Three

  We can usefully think of air as an ocean in which we are submerged. Everywhere in this ocean currents swirl and eddy, torrents flow, masses as homogeneous as whales sink and rise while travelling in the effort for equilibrium of hot and cold.

  *

  Air is a fluid mixture of gases and solids. 78 per cent of it is gaseous nitrogen. It is nitrogen which is the principal food of plant life. Nitrogen is shocked into chemical existence by the action of lightning, and rain washes it down to the surface of the earth.

  *

  A lightning flash is only a spark which bridges cloud and earth or cloud and cloud. But in order for this spark to happen, one place must be negatively charged and the other positively charged.

  *

  Lightning is the parent of fire on our earth. It has its birth in clouds, which are water vapour suspended in air. This vapour falls in rain when drops can form about minute particles of dirt or solid matter. Thus, in a drama miles above our heads earth is host to rain which is suspended in air where fire is implicit in the separation of cloud and earth masses.

  *

  Various remarks about the weather

  from school textbooks

  Chapter One

  1956, as everyone knows, was a climactic year, a water-shed, a turning-point, a cross-roads; it has become one of the years one refers to: oh yes, that year, of course! As if years were pegs in a wall, on which one hangs a certain type of memory, or gives stars to, like hotels and restaurants. 195
6 was a five-star year, classed with 1942: Stalingrad; or 1949: the birth of Communist China. Or-well, other parts of the world might look at it differently; or even other people in the same part. Harold Butts, for instance, tended to say things like:’ That was the year the marjoram did so well’; and Iris across the river would say:’ Let me see, that was the year we got that new bit of carpet in the front room.” 1956 was particularly easy to see and to remember as extraordinary because of that one week when coincidentally the Hungarians rose against their Russian masters (impossible) and in Britain thousands of people made their ideas known about a view of Britain’s role referred to as‘Suez’: unlikely, for no one had protested about anything for so long.

  ‘Hungary’;‘Suez’; violently juxtaposed, one of those moments when that other pattern briefly becomes visible, manifested in coincidence; as when, in the underground, in a part of London you visit once in three years, you find sitting next to you a man not seen or even thought of for months. But you thought about him last night. Not odd at all, then, that there he is with his brief-case, in the next seat:’ You live here, do you?’ says he; ‘I don’t think I’ve been in this part of London for let’s see, four or five years.’ Or, those remarkable meetings that come under the heading of:’ It’s a small world, isn’t it?’ Or all those other hints and indications that the laws which operate have in fact nothing at all to do with, for instance, the way of thinking that gives 1956 five stars for importance, except that perhaps it is, just here, that we pay tribute to the other pattern, momentarily visible.

  Subtract the words Suez, Hungary, with their associations of communism, revisionism, imperialism, etc. etc., what there is left is … that a great many people, in one way or another said: No, enough, no more of that. And they milled about in open places in this city and that, with guns and hand grenades or without, shouting or silent, with policemen and troops in control or not, and, as a result of this activity, then there followed that-but about what followed no two people are likely to agree. It was a year of protest and activity and lively disagreement, though, that is certain. So that now, looking back, the people who lived through it say, for the sake of speed and easy understanding: 1956, and what is conveyed is the idea of change, breaking up, clearing away, movement.

  Yet the air had cleared well before 1956.

  When a very bad time is over there is no moment when one can say: this is it, now it’s finished. In an atmosphere where everything is slow, dark, sluggish, where every event is soaked in suspicion and dislike and fear then suddenly there intrudes an event of a different quality. But one looks at it with distrust, distrust being one’s element at the time, like being deep under filthy water. The river suddenly floats down flowers-but you wouldn’t dream of touching them, they are probably poisoned, a trap.

  Years later one says no, no, it wasn’t like that at all, that was the moment when …

  Apparently nothing very much changed in the house in Radlett Street. It had ceased to be so totally isolated when Phoebe and Arthur and Mary became visitors. They had come because they were under siege, disliked and feared in their own country, just as Mark was. And for some time, when they met, they exchanged news about the anonymous letters they got, or a visit from the police, or that Arthur was threatened with expulsion from his own Party. They continued to discuss how their letters were being opened and their telephones tapped and how, ‘taking the matter up’ with this body or that, nothing came of it but polite denials or statements that Britain, like any other state had the right to protect itself from Trojan horses. And conversations with Phoebe, Arthur, Mary continued to be full of tricky places which had to be negotiated, just as conversations with Gerald Smith, Patty, and Bob Hasty, visiting Radlett Street because there were still few places where they could visit with comfort, had to be handled carefully.

  Patty, although over her breakdown, was particularly complicated. She had switched into a happy-go-lucky anarchism which everyone found irritating, even though they did see a self-protecting mechanism at work. For, any reminder that she had held (and only a few months before) the opinions she had in fact held, might cause her to break into angry tears. The ex-communists (for they had been expelled from, or had resigned from, the Communist Party) had been informed by the Mother of Communism that they were revisionists, and were now engaged in analysing their position in a way satisfying to themselves and honourable to the new term Revisionist. But they were not easy company, did not get on with that part of the left represented by Arthur and Phoebe, and were of no help to Mark who was engaged in his own process of self-discovery-which once again was to spend hours talking to Martha in order to find out what it was he thought.

  Through all this Elizabeth, James’s daughter, came often. For a long time it was hard to discover why: she said so little and did not seem fond of anyone. It turned out she was engaged in a late adolescent battle with her conservative family. Once again it was salutary to discover how very little the storms of political life affected’ ordinary people’. Mark Coldridge according to them, Elizabeth’s family, country people from Norfolk, was a traitor. Recent shifts of the wind had not reached them: probably in a decade or so they might be surprised to learn that Mark was something else. Meanwhile, to visit Mark was to be the essence of defiant nonconformity. Elizabeth would wait patiently until Mark was alone, and then needle him slowly to get out of him remarks or definitions which she could take home to annoy her parents. In return she quoted to Mark what they said about him, mostly that he should be shot or deported. This went on for months and months: she was nearly thirty and had had one of the most expensive educations the country can provide. It was Elizabeth more than anything else that prevented Mark from realizing how deeply things had changed.

  They were delivered from Elizabeth by young Graham, transmogrified from a mannered undergraduate into a jazz musician. Or rather, he did not play himself or even, one suspected, particularly listen to jazz; it was that he had visited America at just the time that jazz was’taking’, and there he had acquired a new vocabulary and set of attitudes. These were all to do with patient long-suffering, tolerance of other people’s disabilities, loyalty to one’s intimates, a contained despair: the qualities, in short, of a beleaguered minority, expressed in a highly stylized and formalized language. It sounded, in people who had no reason for the attributes of defence, like the romanticism of despair. Not since the days of Werther has there been so sentimental a cult. In Graham its acquisition was as if he continued to wear scarlet cloaks lined with leopard skin-for he was vigorous, energetic, confident, capable and with irons in a dozen fires. One of them was the film industry. He had written a script, according to a then acceptable formula, about a Russian communist girl in love with a capitalist boy with a mutual passion for traditional jazz which they listened to in some bistro in Paris until … (This plot was plentifully and variously used during the brief period of the break-up of the Cold War.) Graham’s did not look as if it would become a film, but he thought that if his uncle’s name was on it as co-writer, there would be a better chance for it. This aim he expressed to Mark with candour; perhaps more as if conferring a benefit. His whole upbringing had taught him that people would always be ready to assist him on his way; in fact, this is practically a definition of his education. In his new tongue, but with his old accent, he confessed that he was a little low on the artistic thing, but the ideas he had were fine, just fine, and if Mark could spare a few weeks-and besides it would be just fine to take a trip to Paris and choose the ground. He was not able to see that Mark’s ideas were not his, because he was incapable of listening to anybody. For weeks he haunted Mark’s house, waiting for Mark to announce that he was ready to start. But there he met Elizabeth, a kind of cousin, or niece, and she found his relaxed phrases about sex, drugs, race and so on more useful in her guerrilla war with her family than Mark’s politics could ever be. Graham and Elizabeth floated out of the house on the wings of a love affair that was publicized in the papers and which caused a g
reat many angry telephone calls from her father to Mark.

  Meanwhile Mark had been going out, at first with reluctance, to a dinner party here, a party there. For him it was not all enjoyable until he saw that the way he was seeing them, his hosts, his fellow guests, was not at all as they saw themselves. His practised suspicion that there must be more to it all was-simply, not useful. Or not useful now. What he had learned, that when you are in a tight spot you are lucky to have half a dozen friends, must be kept in reserve until, as it was bound to, it again became useful. Well, of course, it is no more than what ‘everyone’ knows; since a thousand old saws, mottoes, bits of folk wisdom, proclaim this truth. Yes, but he had learned it. This new London that was coming into being after the long freeze, where everyone was so charming, so loving, so friendly, and so very tolerant, and where-so it seemed-everyone suffered from severe amnesia, it did well enough, it did for its purposes, none of them serious.

  But, having learned not to take it seriously, he went more often, and with more pleasure. He would return late at night from a party to drop into Martha’s room with remarks about this and that person, or the food, or the clothes, as one does from parties.

  The air had cleared, lifted, lightened, without there being any point where they could say it had. It was some time early in the five-star year that Mark said to Martha over the breakfast-table:’ Good God, Martha, that was an awful time, wasn’t it?’

  Saying it put it in the past. They looked back at a bad time. They had got through it. Fear had moved away, somewhere else. Fear was no longer nakedly manifest in events-or not the events that affected them. Five years, six, had been endless to live through. But now they slid together in memory and became a phrase or a set of words, like a peg on a wall on which one hung certain memories.

  At a dinner party someone might say: One day we’ll find out just how close we were to war then. (A real war, not skirmishes like Korea, Kenya, Cyprus, Berlin.) Or: Thank God the Soviet Union has got the bomb at last, that gives us a breathing space. Or even: That’s just American propaganda, you can’t believe that … In short, the most respectable people were making the kind of remark which as recently as the three-starred years, 1954, 1955, had been treasonable, and had not been made out of the circles of the extreme left. Where, for the time being at least, had set in a distrust for the processes of any government anywhere-anarchy, in short; a bitter nihilism.