People had forgotten. Already? Was it possible? Margaret for instance, just as in the old days, was dropping in and out of the house. That Mark tended to be ironical in manner, she chose to put down to the fact that Lynda (‘she always did!’) had put Mark against her. ‘Why did she always hate me so much?’ she cried, her fine eyes misting. Mark had waited for weeks after it became evident that Margaret again considered herself his mother, for some word of explanation if not apology. She did once remark that now that man Stalin was dead, perhaps people would be sensible again. The end of an epoch. A matter for pain? Incredulity? Roars, in the end, of laughter, bursting out between Martha and Mark at the breakfast-table. Margaret had telephoned, a brisk call, the third in a week, to ask if Mark would like some plants for the house. Yes, he would be delighted, of course … he had put down the telephone, and looked at Martha, his face alive with the readiness for indignation, anger-anything. In the end he had flung himself down at the head of a table where The Times lay folded waiting for his attention, as it had for his father, and had roared with laughter. Martha joined him. They had laughed until they stopped, knowing they would cry if they didn’t. The end of an epoch. But Mark had lost innocence, naivety-according to how one saw it. Had become-cynical, if that’s a word you use.
Martha thought: he’s become stripped, he’s been flayed. For somewhere about this time an image became very real to her-born perhaps in a dream? A stupid, ignorant, half-drunk cook, a solid ox of a woman, stands on two planted legs by a rather dirty kitchen table. In her hand she holds a bunch of root vegetables, just dragged out of the garden. She has a hand on one bulky hip. With the other she thrashes the bunch of roots against the table edge: dirt flies off. A turnip rolls under the table. The woman throws turnips, carrots, parsnips on to the table, and carelessly chops off the tops. A great boot cracks down on the fallen turnip. She looks. She hesitates, then picks up the bruised turnip, and into the soup pot it goes with the rest.
Mark was alone. The days of the self-constituted committee were over. All over London, indeed, all over Europe, new groupings, new societies, people talking, fresh versions of the unconstituted committees. But for Mark this was no longer possible.
In his study he had put up two enormous maps of the world: this at random, and without, or so it seemed, knowing what he was going to do with them when he had them up. When Martha asked what they were for, he said: Well, he thought perhaps it might be an idea to see what was really happening-you know, really happening.
One wall was soon devoted to atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, large bombs, small bombs (what one committee in the States had christened ‘kitten bombs’) and the establishments which developed them, made them, and sold them. Soon the wall was covered with little red flags, such as his father might have used to mark the course of battles in various parts of the world. With black flags, on the same map, were marked the factories and laboratories which researched, made and sold, materials for germ warfare, chemical warfare, and drugs used in the control and manipulation of the brain. With yellow flags, on this map, were marked areas of air, soil and water contaminated by bomb-blasts, fall-out, the disposal of radioactive waste, concentrations of chemicals used for spraying crops, and oil discharged from ships. From collecting and studying material for the proper disposal of all these little markers, Mark soon learned how very little indeed was known by the men who used these various techniques. For instance, the movement of the air around our globe, which might carry poisons of different kinds into the lungs and flesh of humans and beasts, was not well understood. Therefore this map could never be anything more than approximate and rough: not only was information hard to get, guarded by officialdom, hidden-in a word, lied about-but the basis was ignorance.
The other wall had an almost metaphysical or medieval aspect. On it in varying colours were markers denoting War, Famine, Riots, Poverty, Prisons. These markers, like those on the opposing wall, steadily multiplied. On neither map was any attention paid to nationalisms or politics.
The study had in fact taken the place of the unconstituted committee. That it had was marked by the fact that various ex-members of the old committee, now all differently aligned, had protested that Mark was showing’ subjectivity’ - because the essence of the unconstituted committees anywhere is a readiness to manipulate and reclassify in terms of the national and the political. Maps with War, Poverty, Famine, etc. etc., like medieval Humours, are abhorrent to that way of thinking. Soon nobody, or rather, none of the old friends, was allowed into the study but Martha; and she was finding that most of her work consisted of studying and extracting information from reports, blueprints, newspapers, which enabled the maps to cluster their little coloured flags more thickly. Such work, once, a decade ago, she had done for Mrs. Van der Bylt, who had similar information in filing cabinets under headings like Food Shortages.
It was not only the reaction of his so recent allies that told Mark he had become, overnight, a reactionary, but also the reception of his new book, dismissed by one reviewer like this:’ These days who wants stories about tory mums, even if they are well-written? Mr. Coldridge should be told that in the’ thirties we were fighting fascism.’ The writer was just out of university, the brother of a friend of Graham Patten.
A pity, said Mark, that the book had not come out even two years before: it would have been right for the mandarin mood then prevailing. But things had changed. Gone were the days of the ivory tower, art for art’s sake, and the rest. Progress was back in fashion.
At the same time, he had a play running, briefly at the little theatre, The Red Cockerel where Patty was working. It had been her idea. One evening he had been saying what a pity all that work on the doomed brother and sister, Aaron and Rachel, was wasted: it was a rotten book. A lot of it being in dialogue, he was prepared to see it as a play. Patty carried the mass of typescript off, and from it carved out, with the aid of a lively director, a play dealing with the events that led up to the resistance to the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. But while the atmosphere in book-reviewing had changed, the theatre had not yet changed; not quite yet. Critics had not been near The Red Cockerel, except to patronize or sneer, for years. Mark’s play was found by one or two critics who did go, embarrassing, naïve, and simple-minded. It was played to an audience of ten, twenty, thirty people: but then, their audiences were never bigger. The lively director, who had been producing some of the most interesting work in the British theatre, was used to it; Mark did not mind particularly; Patty minded very much-she remained a person who did, and must.
Meanwhile, an interesting development with The City. Throughout the Cold War Mark had not been able to find a publisher in the States: publishers said with commendable frankness they would not publish a communist. It was now published, and was taken up by the science fiction addicts, jimmy’s novel, his first, came out at the same time. Mark began to spend time with science fiction writers: of course such work was not then taken seriously in literary circles, but he found their way of looking at the world nearer to his own than any other.
In fact, Mark was extremely busy. So recently a man who never left his home except to go to the factory, a man entirely under siege, now he was never at home except for breakfast, which meal he and Martha took together. They both rose very early, for different reasons, and met in the kitchen. The basement was still asleep-would be asleep for some hours yet. The telephone was silent. It was an hour or so of gay and warm intimacy. Like a lovers’ meeting. Except that they were not lovers now. They were more like an old married couple-so they joked.
There had been no moment when they had said: Now it’s over. Yet it was over. Sometimes they slept together, from liking and good humour. Mark was having odd affairs: he might refer to them, casually, over breakfast. Martha had had an affair-it was more out of curiosity than need: she wanted to find out what she was like now, as she explained to Mark. They agreed that affairs were all very well, but weren’t much, after all. Yet they did not return to loving each other. It was l
atent between them: the possibility that they might again. Or that, if other things had not intervened, they might still be lovers. But neither of them were people who could say: If only … They had been stripped of that. Things having been as they had been, Mark, Martha, being as they were, then nothing else could have happened, and regrets were not in order. Mark might say: I must see to it that I don’t let myself be a St George again-his shorthand for what he hoped was an outgrown need to console and support. And she would say: Well, some women are unmanageable. For now that she was out and about again, no longer under siege with Mark, there was not one man she could imagine herself married to, no man she wanted to marry. The fact was, she supposed, that in a way she was married to Mark. No joke that: it was a kind of truth.
They were split people, he with his Lynda, whom he would always love, and she with-what she had acquired during the last three, four years.
It seems that any battle must win more than the territory that is being fought over! She had done more than she had set out to do. It was as if she had pulled herself up, hand over hand, out of a hold full of old dirty water, a sour greyness. An interior experience had matched the exterior, the bad time. She was now able to say, simply: I’ve got it all back. Well, most of it. There were still blanked-out spots where, she knew, pain lay congealed too thickly to melt easily. But, she could walk easily in and out of that house, or place, or garden, or room, touch articles of furniture, sense the exact time of a year by the feel, the smell of sunlight or a quality of dry air. She could live again through this time, that time, when she wanted, so that, if she wanted, the past enveloped, seeped through, the present. Sitting at breakfast with Mark, she was able to sit at that other table, a child, with her father and mother, at breakfast; talking late at night with Mark, Thomas walked in to the room and she could hear him say: Well, Martha? Pain had become, not something which engulfed, but a landscape she could move into and out again. The hatreds and resentments were places or regions in her mind which she could visit, test-as one might dip a hand into water to see if it is too hot to bear.
But (and here was the point) all this fighting, the effort, had led her so much further than she had expected. On the lowest level, there was the machinery of it. If it is a question of survival, on a full day with a hundred letters to be dealt with and the children’s food to be ordered, then one gets up an hour earlier. Impossible, you would have thought, to get up an hour earlier, so dulled and held and sleep-logged you are, at that time. But you do it, if you have to, and it’s a question of survival. And, if drinking brandy with your lover after dinner leaves you too dulled to work before sleeping you drink less brandy and eat less and even dismiss the lover, poor Mark, turned out of her heart for the sake of-survival. And if you find, as you sit fighting to dredge back that incident, sift out that emotion, that you are sitting knotted and tensed and your muscles hurt too much to let you concentrate: then you do exercises to release tension. Never had Martha said to herself, I must sleep less, I eat too much, I am physically flabby, I must not drink so much brandy in the evenings with Mark: but she had discovered, fighting against the dark, that she was sunk fathoms deep in sleep and lethargy and sloth and so-she had had to survive.
And had made discoveries. She had found doors she had not known existed. She had wrestled herself out of the dark because she had had to, and had entered places in herself she had not known were there.
She was like a woman with a secret, or one who is pregnant, but who hasn’t yet told anyone she is pregnant. Yet she looked for people to talk to, people who would understand what she said. For it was certainly not possible that she was the only person to have made such discoveries. Where were they, then, the others? She went about listening, dropping a hint, a suggestion, waiting for an echo, but carefully, particularly with Mark, since above all she was still concerned that he would not have to think: First Lynda, and now Martha. No, she was looking for people who wouldn’t think she was crazy.
Meanwhile she protected her life, so that she could be free for an hour before breakfast, so that she would not be so tired before she slept at night to ‘work’ as she put it. For she knew very well that the Martha she had created during the last few years was fragile, and might easily again be lost into the dark.
Which was why she did not wish to look for a husband, though she could not explain this to Mark. She was now thirty-six-no, thirty-seven. If she didn’t find a husband now she probably would not. But it was an abstract remark, almost a formal one, issued to her by convention, like ‘clothes suitable for one’s age’.
The truth was, she feared marriage, looking at it from outside now, unable to believe that she had ever been in it. What an institution! What an absurd arrangement! Such remarks she made to herself, remarks issued to her, as it were, as suitable for use in her situation-the unmarried woman still of marriageable age. But to herself she was able to say precisely what she feared. It was the rebirth of the woman in love. If one is with a man, ‘in love’, or in the condition of loving, then there comes to life that hungry, never-to-be-fed, never-at peace woman who needs and wants and must have. That creature had come into existence with Mark. She could come into existence again. For the unappeasable hungers and the cravings are part, not of the casual affair, or of friendly sex, but of marriage and the’serious’ love. God forbid.
It was poor Dorothy, of all people, who said it, put the words out into the air for her to look at. Dorothy had continued in one job after another, attracting various sad men, until she had come to rest in a large stationer’s shop which she managed with a widower who decided he wanted to marry her. Dorothy for a time flirted with the idea of marriage. She treated him very badly, as it seemed that she had to, but he came again and again to the basement, could see apparently, nothing at all wrong with Dorothy except that’she needed security’. With him, she was coy, peremptory, an insulted queen-most upsetting to watch, since he was prepared to put up with it. To Martha she said, sensibly, with a sad humour:’ When you get to the point when a man is a sort of thing for keeping you quiet-do you know what I mean? You know, you’re in a bad mood, you just want to scream and throw cups, then you think, oh for God’s sake, why doesn’t he sleep with me and shut me up … Well, what I think is, it’s the end. I mean, who needs it?’
Well, quite so, when a woman has reached that point when she allies part of herself with the man who will feed that poor craving bitch in every woman, then enough, it’s time to move on.
When it’s a question of survival, sex the uncontrollable can be controlled. And therefore had Martha joined that band of women who have affairs because men have ceased to be explorations into unknown possibilities.
The possibilities had moved ground, were elsewhere-somewhere there must be people who could tell her, talk to her, explain.
Martha wandered over London, went to parties, looked, listened. The city had lost its grey shoddiness; that dirty, ruinous, war-soaked city she had arrived in, where the food was uneatable, the clothes hideous, the people with the manners of a beleaguered minority-it was gone. A fresh soft air moved through it, blowing colour on to houses, smiles on to faces, lifting and silvering the leaves on the trees. There were shops now that sold clothes one wanted to wear: clothes for enjoyment, for fun; there were coffee shops everywhere that sold coffee one could drink and where people sat and talked. She walked through this city and kept that other one in her mind, so that a long street of fashionably bright buildings had behind it, or in it, an avenue of nightmare squalor, a darkness and a lightness together, the light so precarious a skin on a weight of dark, for these sagging old carcasses had been dabbed, merely, with paint: there was a surface of freshness, hiding weights of shoddiness that theatened to crumble and lean, like the house in Radlett Street, with its white surfaces over a structure attacked by war and damp. And everywhere, a frenzy of rebuilding. Even walking in those squares that are synonym for permanence, stability, was like moving through a slow earthquake. Somewhere in our minds there is an
idea of a city. A City, rather! a solid, slow-moving thing, not far off that picture of a city presented by Mark, where streets ran North and South and East and West and known landmarks could be referred to through generations. But London heaved up and down, houses changed shape, collapsed, whole streets were vanishing into rubble, and arrow shapes in cement reached up into the clouds. Even the street surfaces were never level; they were always ‘up’, being altered, dug into, pitted, while men rooted in them to find tangled pipes in wet earth, for it seemed as if the idea of a city or town as something slow-changing, almost permanent, belonged to the past when one had not needed so many pipes, cables, runnels, and types of machinery to keep it going. If time were slightly speeded up, then a city now must look like fountains of rubble cascading among great machines, while buildings momentarily form, change colour like vegetation, dissolve, reform.
The old city was all movement. Exhilarating. just the setting for the ‘affair’ which one might discuss, pleasantly, with Mark at the breakfast-table. Though there was no particular reason why one should have one at all, since she had proved that the hungers and the cravings belonged somewhere else.
They discussed these and similar matters exactly like prisoners on parole meeting to exchange notes on benefits encountered out in the free world.
For neither believed that things would go on like this, easy, amiable, pleasant.
The Four-Gated City Page 38