The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  How could they? They never had in the past! So they must make the most of it, enjoy it while it was there; and she above all must use what time there was on ‘work’, the silent hours by herself in her room.

  The upheaval came not from Lynda, from whom they expected it; but from the children, who for so long had been people who came for holidays, or for week-ends, but who did not actually live in the house.

  Paul came home first.

  If he were at an ordinary school, one could say that he had been expelled. But progressive schools do not expel children: this would be bad for their ‘image’. Far more than ordinary schools, however, they ‘ask children to leave’. Paul had been asked to leave before. He stole. He had been stealing (or pilfering, a smaller word) since he had been there. Trifles like sweets and socks and ties to begin with; then, as he grew, pens and bicycle pumps and small sums of money. Then he organized with some friends small thefts from the shops of the village near the school. At this point, two years before, there had been a great scene, Paul had been threatened with being asked to leave, and first Mark, then Martha, had gone down for a lot of interviews with staff and with Paul.

  With Paul one had conversations of extreme frankness which, since no adult could for a moment forget his painful history, they felt as brutal. With Paul one was always in a position of having to be brutal.

  He had been about nine when Martha had overheard a conversation between him and some friends of the same age. They had all been sitting on a grassy bank outside a window within which she sat.

  A small girl said:’ Paul, you can’t be friends with Marcia.’

  Paul said:’ Why not, if I want to?’

  Another small girl:’ Your temperament isn’t right for Marcia.’

  First small girl:’ You’re not compatible.’

  Paul:’ You’re jealous: you want me to be your friend.’

  Second girl:’ Yes, that’s true, Rosie, you do, but I don’t. I don’t want to be your friend, Paul. I’ve got my friend for this term.’

  Paul: ‘I don’t want you or you. But I’m friends with Marcia.’

  First small girl:’ It won’t last, then.’

  Paul: ‘I didn’t say I wanted it to last, did I? Nothing does.’

  This being the atmosphere in which he grew, the conversation between Paul and Martha on that occasion was straightforward.

  Paul:’ If I do steal, and I’m not admitting it, then I’m stealing love. Anyone could tell you that.’

  Martha:’ That isn’t how the shopkeepers see it.’

  Paul:’ They’ve had a progressive school on their doorstep for years, so it’s time they did then!’

  Martha:’ The headmaster says you must leave.’

  Paul:’ I’m not going to leave. This is my school just as much as it is his school.’

  Martha: ‘I don’t think he sees it like that.’

  Paul:’ But that’s what he is always saying.’

  Martha:’ What he’s saying now is, stop stealing or leave.’

  Paul:’ If no one ever loves me then I have to steal.’

  Martha:’ Then I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.’

  Paul:’ He means, it is my school as much as it is his school as long as I do what he wants.’

  Martha:’ As long as you behave so he doesn’t get into trouble with the Education Authorities.’

  Paul:’ Why should I have to agree with the Education Authorities?’

  Martha:’ You can reform the educational system when you grow up.’

  Paul:’ Lynda loves me. Nobody else does.’

  Martha:’ Does she tell you to steal?’

  Paul:’ Give her my love. All of it.’

  Martha: ‘I shall. But, Paul, you’d better think hard. You can stay here on one condition: that you don’t steal again. It’s up to you.’

  Paul (screaming):’ It’s not fair. It’s not fair.’

  Martha:’ Whoever said it was fair? What is? Goodbye. Better ring Mark tonight and say what you’ve decided.’

  That night he sent a telegram which read: I submit to blackmail. Love to Lynda. Paul.

  For a couple of terms, exemplary behaviour, but his schoolwork was very bad-suddenly he was at the bottom of the class.

  Mark said:’ You’re just sulking. What you are saying is, If I’m not allowed to steal, I’m not going to work.’

  Paul said: ‘I can work any time I want to, I don’t have to when I don’t.’

  Suddenly a telephone call from the school. Paul had organized a real robbery, with two friends, from a shop. He had stolen about £500 worth of goods. The robbery, according to the police, ‘might have been the work of a professional thief’. What the children had stolen were things like tape recorders, cameras, record players: the school was flooded with them. They had been unable to sell them quietly, though they had tried.

  And now Paul was being asked to leave. His two accomplices had already left, having been removed by angry parents.

  Mark went down to fetch him in the car, but came back without Paul. He had refused to get into the car, had sat on his bed and sulked. He said he would not leave.

  Martha went down. As she had done so many times before, she crossed the green playing flelds, passed old houses converted into school buildings, saw the flights of brightly coloured children swooping and swerving in the gentle English air. A boy stopped, on seeing her, and said that Paul had sent a message: he was prepared to talk to her on such and such a bench.

  Martha made her way to a bench under an ash tree, from which there was a view of a field covered with small boys playing cricket, and waited. To her, then, came Paul, vividly sulking.

  ‘You’ve got to leave, you know.’

  ‘I’m not going to.’

  There he sat, a thin, lithe, black-eyed boy, all his sulky charm smouldering. He wore the uniform of his age: jeans and a sweater.

  ‘If you don’t come home they’ll make you.’

  ‘It’s not my home.’

  ‘It’s the one you’ve got.’

  ‘Suppose I don’t want it?’

  ‘Too bad. What are you going to do instead?’

  ‘When I’m old enough I’m going to run away.’

  ‘When you’re old enough, you can.’

  ‘I shall go to my father in Moscow.’

  ‘If he is in Moscow.’

  ‘If he isn’t dead you mean.’

  ‘Perhaps he is. I don’t know.’

  A long silence. He watched, as she did, the children playing cricket. He was good at it.

  ‘You thought they weren’t going to kick you out because they’d admire you for doing such a professional job.’

  This, a shot in the dark, told. He swung around towards her, hating her, eyes black and deadly.

  ‘Well, isn’t that true?’

  ‘I’m not leaving.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ll call the police to take you away.’

  ‘It’s my school, they can’t.’

  ‘You blew they’d kick you out if you did it again.’

  And now the moment when one was defeated: he drooped, went limp and miserable. He had not known it: he had not believed it: it was not possible that this place, which was his real home, or so he saw it, could throw him out.

  ‘If there weren’t two other people involved, if the other two hadn’t had to leave, I daresay it could have been patched up, but now it can’t. It wouldn’t be fair if you stayed, you must see that.’

  ‘Pair!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Well, are you going to come with me? They can send your things on.’

  ‘No.’

  He got up and rushed off back to the main building, bounding like a deer in full flight. He was extraordinarily graceful. Passing another group of children, who greeted him, he greeted them, with a wild wave of a hand and a shout.

  Martha returned home. Telephone calls to the school revealed that he was sitting on his bed, in silence, with some of the stolen loot packed in heaps around him. He was wa
iting. Presumably for the police. Headmaster and staff reasoned with him but he would not reply. He was putting the adult world in the position where they would have to carry him bodily to car or train. Possibly he was even waiting for the police to bring him home or take him to prison. Meanwhile, there he sat.

  Meanwhile, Francis’s school holidays were due. He had been at Eton for one year. He did not like it but he had chosen it.

  For years, two or three days before his holidays he had telephoned:’ Is Paul going to be there?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘Then I’m going to the Butts.’

  Or:’ No, he’s with friends this holiday.’

  ‘I’ll be on the eleven-twelve train.’

  It had never been discussed, brought out into the open, ventilated. With Paul, one said everything. With Francis, one could say nothing, had to be careful, tactful, oblique. And Mark, who with Paul was easy and open, could not talk to his son at all.

  Francis telephoned. He said:’ Is it true that Paul has been expelled?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Is he going to be at home then?’

  ‘I suppose so. He’ll be at day school from the look of it.’

  ‘He’s a thief!’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  A long waiting silence. Suddenly Martha said, on an impulse:’ Francis, I think you should come home.’

  He said nothing.

  She said:’ Please, Francis.’

  He said nothing. But he did not put down the receiver.

  She said:’ Francis, you’ve got to come home.’

  ‘In that case I’ve got to.’ But he sounded pleased. He had been waiting to be ordered?

  He came, in a couple of days, and took possession of his room.

  Mark hung about, looking helplessly at his son, and Francis was polite, and said Yes and No, till Mark went off.

  Yet he was waiting.

  Francis was now thirteen. He was a small adult, not a child. He looked like Mark. When they were in the same room, one saw Mark, and then his smaller copy, a dark round closed-in boy. He was not yet adolescent, had not yet shot into that stage of uneasy, half-poetic, half-mucky charm.

  In the last five years he could not have spent more than half a dozen months in this, his home. When here, he had always been intolerably well-behaved. He was being intolerably well-behaved now. Martha remembered the small boy who had cried himself to sleep night after night after night. Did he remember it? Adults look at children and ask secretly: Do you remember? As if it matters that they remember the same things.

  But he was here, though he had arrived in that lackey’s dress of his which he had said embarrassed him.

  Martha and he sat at the kitchen table. She poured tea and offered sandwiches and waited, as one had to, for the moment when he would give some sort of indication of what he wanted to be said.

  At last she said:’ It looks as if Paul will be living here—all the time.’

  He said nothing. Then, in a kind of a jeer, from the snobberies of his education: ‘A day school?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no law that says a boy has to go to boarding-school.’

  When such triggered moments were over, he was himself, he had paid tribute to what he had been taught. Now he seemed to be thinking.

  ‘Well, I suppose there are some good ones.’

  ‘I should be surprised if we can get him into a good one.’

  ‘I’m not going to be sorry for him, ’ he muttered, miserable, flushing.

  ‘Which means that you are?’

  Oh, he’s all right, I suppose.’

  More silence, more tea, and he made himself some toast.

  With his back turned he said:’ Lynda will be pleased if Paul is here all the time?’

  Now this was it, this was the moment. She said:’ Has it never occurred to you that your mother has made a sort of favourite of Paul because she never sees you?’

  This remark, had it been made to Paul, would have been no more than the stuff of the level he lived on, at his school. It was too straight for Francis.

  He stood burning the toast, dropped it. then threw it into the waste-bin and sat down. He had made himself sit down, instead of going out of the kitchen altogether. He was now pale with the effort of staying, and facing her.

  She said:’ She’s your mother, not Paul’s.’

  He gabbled, ‘Jolly bad show then, if that’s it.’ But he was looking imploringly at her.

  ‘Why don’t you try?’

  He got up and went out. She remained, discouraged. That had been no use, she decided. But in a moment he came back, having made himself come back. But he didn’t sit down.

  ‘But he’s going to be here all the time!’ he said.

  ‘But it’s not a question of a-competition. She’s your mother. You’re her son.’

  ‘That’s all very well, isn’t it?’

  ‘And there’s no reason why you should stay at Eton if you don’t like it, is there?’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted to leave.’

  ‘No. But you don’t like it, do you?’

  ‘I don’t think one is meant to like it, ’ he said seriously, wanting an answer.

  ‘Well-why shouldn’t one enjoy one’s school? You’re going to be there a long time yet, aren’t you?’

  Now, after a moment when he might have gone out again, he turned himself about for her benefit, demonstrating his clothes, and their absurdity, with a seriousness that was masked by facetiousness.

  ‘Are these funnier than any other clothes?’ he enquired.

  ‘If you like we’ll find out about schools in London that are-appropriate.’

  She meant; not what you’d consider, after that prep-school, and a small dose of Eton, eccentric. So he understood her.

  ‘All right, ’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you take off that outfit now? It’s the holidays after all.’

  ‘Just the rig for a visit to Lynda, I thought.’ The facetiousness of this hurt them both, he gave a scared smile, and hurried out of the kitchen. A few minutes later she heard him come downstairs and go to the door to the basement. He knocked. Lynda called out, ‘Come in, ’ and he went down.

  A couple of hours later he came back to the kitchen, where Martha cooked supper.

  He had changed for the visit, was wearing ordinary clothes, and he looked very tired.

  ‘Was Lynda alone?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have stayed if that female had been there, ’ he announced, making this point for the first time.

  ‘Lynda needs her.’

  ‘Is my mother better than she was?’

  ‘About the same I think.’

  ’She’s screwy, ’ he brought out, his eyes waiting to gather any crumb of information that Martha’s face might offer: he did not expect anything at all from her words, so that avid gaze said.

  ‘But that isn’t all she is, Francis.’

  He was searching her face, leaning forward to do it.

  ‘And she didn’t choose to be.’

  ‘I can’t help that, can I? If Paul had gone down in that uniform … Lynda would have thought it was funny wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Lynda didn’t like you in that uniform?’

  ‘I don’t think she likes it. But if Paul had it, they’d make a game of it.’

  ‘Yes, but then Paul isn’t her son.’ She insisted on this; she leaned forward, offering her face to his gaze, to emphasize it.

  ‘I think I make her worse, ’ he said, very pale. It seemed that he felt sick. He went to the window for air.

  ‘Well, why don’t you try for a bit-give her a chance?’

  ‘All right, ’ he said.‘But just for the holidays.’

  For three weeks then, Francis tried. And so did Lynda. Francis did not like Dorothy; Lynda therefore asked Dorothy not to be there when Francis came down. This went so far as asking Dorothy to have engagements for the evening; to go for a walk, or to the cinema. There were frightful scenes between the women: they could be hea
rd screaming at each other. There were the sounds of tears and of things breaking.

  Francis would come up to Martha, and sit watching her face, as if the pressure of his misery would force her into a comment that could dissolve the knot, make it vanish.

  ‘I think you’d do right to stick it out, ’ said Martha.

  ‘All right, I will.’

  When Mark came home, Francis stayed a little, transferring his acute, wry gaze to the face which was so like his own, and. like his own, a guard against emotion. After a while he made an excuse to go to his room.

  One evening, when Mark was not there, he came to Martha’s room carrying a large book. This he spread out on a table, and he stood beside it, turning the pages. She went to stand by him. It was a book of blank pages in which there were press cuttings and his photographs.

  He wanted her to look: she turned the pages to see.

  ‘You subscribe to a press cuttings service?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Since it all started.’

  They began in 1949. Page after page of the great book was filled with what the newspapers had said about Mark, during the bad time. There was nothing there that wasn’t painful: and for a small boy, reading about his father, it was not possible to imagine the cumulative effect of the thing. Martha was shocked-she was not able to take it all in at once. She sat down, lit a cigarette and it was her turn to look helplessly at him, waiting for aid.

  Meanwhile he stood turning the pages. He still wanted her to look. As she did not get up, he took the book to her, to spread it open in her lap, at the last filled pages, the reviews of the recent book, which he had pasted in under his heading: The Indian Summer of a Tory Hostess. Under that he had put a sub-heading: My Grandmother.

  These reviews were those which said, for the most part, that Mark was out of tune with his times, reactionary, and so on.

  ‘Has my father changed his mind?’

  ‘What about, Francis?’

  ‘About communism?’

  ‘I don’t think his mind has changed-what he thinks. What he feels has, though.’

  He looked inquiringly at her.

  ‘But he’s not a communist now?’

  ‘He never was.’

  He took the book away, closed it tidily together, and sat on the foot of her bed, looking out at the tree. The old black cat, too large for a narrow lap, curled by him. The cat was the same age as Francis: taken into the household when he was born. It was Francis’s cat. He stroked the cat with one hand, and looked forlorn.