‘Why not?’
‘But it’s such a negative way of looking at things!’
‘Well then, I’d better give in-when one hears that word, it’s time to put reason into the attic for the duration.’
‘Well what do you believe?’
‘Believe, believe? Why should I believe one thing rather than another?’
‘What are you doing with those maps in the study then?’
‘Those are facts. There is one basic fact: that there are more and more and more, and bigger and nastier bombs everywhere, all the time more and nastier weapons. If you think a few thousand people marching back and forth over the countryside is going to change that-then good luck to you.’
‘If you won’t come, can we send a photographer to take pictures of your study?’
‘You’re welcome, of course. How many people do you think will ever see them? How many people do you suppose will take any notice if they do see them?’
Martha and Mark had watched the early television reports of the March. Whatever else television was, it made it harder for’them’ (in their aspect of concealers and distorters) to ‘get away with anything’. It seemed that of television one was going to have to say what one said of the newspapers: it was the price one had to pay for democracy.
On the fourth day, right at the end, Mark had driven out to join the March. He was dressed in a formal suit, and carried a rolled-up umbrella. He could not stand sloppy clothes, could not bear masses of people marching under banners, hated slogan-chanting and police-baiting. However, there seemed no help for it. This March seemed yet another occasion for’defending the bad against the worse’. Asked by a journalist why he was marching, he said it was because he believed in democracy; a reply regarded as so irrelevant that the journalist went on to somebody prepared to say something quotable.
There was nothing he could say that would not have been regarded as ‘negative’.
He did not believe that this, or indeed, anything, would halt the manufacture of weapons for war: too many people made money out of it, or wanted war. He did not believe that any government cared a damn about popular opinion, except in so far as it could be manoeuvred. He believed that within one decade, or two, or three, there would be some kind of war. He was on this March entirely under false pretences-until he began talking to others of his own generation, and found out how many agreed with him. It was better to be protesting at one’s fate than not, many felt; and it was pleasant to see thousands of young people once more prepared to consider the conduct of the world their concern.
As a result of having been observed among those columns of people, and of being the relative of Francis, Gwen and Jill, Mark was considered ‘one of us’, a member of the new progressive London. He meant well; his heart was in the right place, and so on; though if one didn’t know him of course one had to believe him a reactionary.
Graham spent the rest of the meal defining Mark’s exact degree of reaction: Stendhal he thought, was nearest; or perhaps Alexander Blok?
Mark said he had never read Alexander Blok.
The two Africans confessed they had never read either. To study law was more useful than to study literature when one lacked freedom. The cycle had come around, and to forestall some more definitions of freedom, Patty pointed out that it was eleven.
Phoebe jumped up-she wanted to go down to the House of Commons to meet her ex-husband and to introduce him to jim Troyes, who was interested in getting Arthur Coldridge’s support for some new committee to do with shop stewards. Phoebe wanted Arthur’s signature for a petition about freeing some prisoners in Northern Ireland. She had the petition on her: everyone signed it. Graham had his petition about Homosexuals; he produced it for them to sign.
Graham went off to meet his current official passion, a young woman from jamaica who sang in the newest club; and for the second night running said goodnight to the nymphets with a look of a man saying farewell to all poetry. He took Patty with him. The girls would stay the night-they went upstairs with Francis and Nicky. Paul went off with Mark to his study: Mark took opportunities when Paul was actually prepared to be friendly, even if it was because he felt excluded from the friendships of the people of his own age, to try and interest him in his schoolwork. A lost cause: everyone knew that once Paul had got into the study with Mark, had claimed Mark, he would lose interest and go off back to his own rooms where he would start playing a radio so loudly that someone or other would have to protest.
Martha went downstairs to Lynda.
Most nights they were together for a couple of hours-easier for Lynda, who slept so late, than for Martha.
This arrangement, or habit, had never been discussed, or planned-it came into being. Now they referred to it as ‘It’ or’That’.
It had begun during that period when Lynda had returned from hospital, and, without Dorothy, had started on her efforts towards an ordinary life. Mark, then, had allowed himself to dream again of Lynda as his wife, of a real marriage.
How did Martha know?
Well, she had heard him. One night, lying in bed, she had listened to odd words, phrases, word-sequences move through her mind. Her attention had been elsewhere, had returned to the words with the surprised knowledge: but that isn’t the kind of thing I think: Good Lord, am I in love with Lynda? Shocked away, the phrases, words, stopped. Silence. Then, as the muscles of her mind relaxed, and an accepting dark came back, the words started. If she was in love with Lynda, then it was with a part of herself she had never even been introduced to-even caught a glimpse of. This was the language of a schoolgirl crush! This unknown person in Martha adored Lynda, worshipped her, wished to wrap her long soft hair around her hands, said, Poor little child, poor little girl, why don’t you let me look after you?
Well! said Martha, who would have thought it? I’m a lesbian, and a schoolgirl lesbian at that. Listening to what she thought, for a while, was herself, she heard:’ If you come upstairs, darling, I swear it, I promise, you can keep the door locked as long as … let me be near you.’
She understood that this was not herself, it was Mark. Making every kind of allowance for one’s unconscious, it was past ordinary reason to take unto oneself attitudes that after all, had been under one’s nose as Mark’s for years.
It wasn’t her way of using words: that’s how Mark thought.
Then: Perhaps I think that’s what Mark is likely to be thinking?
But there was no way of proving anything, deciding anything-much better let the whole thing slide.
She switched off, firmly, turned her attention to ordinary practical problems. Next day, at breakfast, Mark used some of the words she had heard him use: he was confessing, with a kind of embarrassed desperation, that he was going to try to get Lynda back into his life, his room.‘But if it makes it easier for her, I’ll promise to keep the door locked until she feels …”
Very odd to hear this man talking, in his sad, hot, embarrassed voice, about his plans for Lynda, having heard his thoughts trickle impersonally, and without the colour of emotion, through one’s head.
But then Lynda ‘became silly’ again, to forestall his pressures on her.
Martha forgot about it.
Later she began to hear Paul. At first she tried not to. Good heavens, it wasn’t far off eavesdropping, or reading other people’s letters. Besides, hearing Paul was almost unbearable, like listening to a trapped animal thinking.
All his fantasies were of achieving power, in one form or another. In his day-dreams he outbid, overrode, undercut, triumphed, made them all look sharp, made them run, made them look out. He turned tables, and showed people up for what they were-interminably, night after night, when the radio stopped from upstairs, it was as if another had switched on.
But-after a while, questions. And she did not know how to answer them, let alone where to go for answers.
For instance: if a person is thinking, or at least, letting fantasies, words, a linked pattern of notions run through one’s head
, which is what most people’s thinking is, and this goes on for sixteen hours a day, and then of course in a different form in his, her, sleep, and then someone else, Martha for instance, overhears that odd phrase, that short trickle of words, then one has to ask: Why those words? Why not others? What Mark thought, what Paul thought, appeared in her mind as a small trickle of words. Was what she picked up words in its original form? Or did some mechanism exist which could pick up an idea, rather than words, from Paul’s brain, Mark’s, and translate it into words-like one of those simultaneous translators at a conference. Or like, or so they said was possible, a kind of computer that changed one language into another. Or perhaps it wasn’t an idea to start with but an emotion. Who knew? Who could tell her? For although it seemed certain that the original impulse had been in words, since what she heard was recognizably Paul’s or Mark’s phrasing, it didn’t do to say yes or no to that. It was conceivable after all that a hot wave of some emotion in Paul hit Martha as Paul’s emotion, no one else’s; and this emotion got translated into Paul-like words.
It looked as if Martha picked up an idea, or emotion, a, b, c, because she was tuned in’ to a, b, c. For it was an interesting fact that while she might hear things that surprised her, or even shocked her because she was not expecting to hear (pick up) that thing at that moment, she had never picked up an idea, set of words, or an impulse that she might not have decided for herself was within Paul’s, Mark’s, range of behaviour. This could mean either that she knew them so well their behaviour could hold no surprises for her-possible; or that impulses, ideas, emotions in them which she did not expect from them, did not associate with them, got themselves translated into the nearest impulse, idea, emotion that Martha would accept. Was tuned in to.
And here she returned, and at such an odd and unlooked for place, to that rule, or law current in Rosa Mellendip’s circles: which was the paradox that one could never be told what one did not already know, though of course the ‘knowing’ might be hidden from oneself.
In this realm one did not hear something, pick up something that one didn’t know, or wasn’t prepared to accept, already. Which didn’t mean at all that what one had already known wasn’t something of a surprise. Perhaps it was more a question of remembering-that was a more accurate word, or idea.
And then-but the questions came fast. Why did she not hear Francis? As far as she knew, she had not. Or Lynda? Sometimes when in the same room with her, yes, but not casually, and when not expecting it.
If emotion as they said it was, was the conductor of such impulses, then that explained why Paul was the most often ‘on the air’ - since he was more than anyone in the house a seething olla podrida of emotion. But then why Mark and not Francis? Mark was a simmering, locked-up man; Francis a simmering, locked-up boy. Neither was as violently emotional as Paul.
She knew Mark very well; she knew Francis less. She thought she knew Lynda as well as anyone … why then-So she brooded and puzzled and questioned and wished more than ever there were people to talk to, people to ask. Back came the other need, or almost a belief-she would walk into a room, or stop by a group of men digging in the street, or ask a girl serving butter. behind a counter, and she, he or they would reply: Of course, you’ll find the answer to what you are asking there … there’s a man who …
One night, going down to see if Lynda was all right, before she herself went to bed, she asked:’ Lynda, do you ever overhear what people are thinking?’
Lynda turned, swift, delighted: Oh, ’ she exclaimed, ‘you do? I was waiting for you to …’
And Martha was already feeling extremely foolish. For what else had Lynda been saying all this time, in so many different ways. But Martha had not heard. She had not been able to hear. She had not had anything to hear with-there being no substitute for experience.
In short, the door had opened, as it tends to do, just under Martha’s eyes, where it had been standing open for a long time now, unobserved, if she had only cared to look just there, had not looked in the wrong places.
But, having made that step, what then-another blank wall, another check.
Martha descended night after night, when the day’s business was over, to talk to Lynda, during that part of the day when they could be alone and undisturbed.
They called it ‘working’.
But they did not know what to call it, nor how to go about it.
Questions. It was a private, diffident pursuit of-but if they had known what to call it, then at least they would have known where to start. And they had to be secret; not because of any decision made or taken, but because circumstances ordained it.
Mark could not be upset; Mark found it all very upsetting.
The children must not be diverted from their proper education, must not be allowed to feel any more unusual than they were bound to be anyway.
The old cronies of the basement, Mrs. Mellendip and the rest, had dispersed with the going of Dorothy: though Lynda did sometimes see Rosa Mellendip, who at least did understand what they were talking about when they talked about what interested them. But Rosa was busy; she was rather successful in her career these days. And then, like all specialists, she tended rather to become impatient, or worse, tolerant, if they wished to speculate outside her field-fortune-telling by palms, cards, and horoscope.
Somewhere, and this was certain, there would be people who they could talk to.
They chased hunches, gleams of insight, wrote letters to people who dropped remarks on television or in newspapers that seemed hopeful; wrote to authors; cross-questioned people they met who might say something which sounded like the promise of an unlocked door. They used their dreams, their slips of the tongue, their fantasies, not at all as a Dr Lamb might have wished them to do, but as maps or signposts for a country which lay just beyond or alongside, or within the landscape they could see and touch.
They ordered all kinds of periodicals which had to be hidden from everybody. with names like Destiny, or Startime, and examined them for those gleams of information which might appear in the most unlikely places. But here, in this region, already known, or at least partly known, through Rosa and the cronies of the old days, was something too easy, too complaisant. That door could so easily be opened into an area where people knew each other so very well, were very cosy, and all in an atmosphere of the initiated minority sharing truths denied to the outside world-repulsive; though one had to beware of losing opportunities to learn this and that, through finding anything distasteful.
And then there had been the business of Jimmy Wood. He had now had published two very successful’space fiction’ novels. The plots of both these novels depended on the existence of people who had more senses than are considered normal. The last one had been about a conflict between a race who had inner vision and hearing, and a race that duplicated these capacities with machines. The machine-race killed out the others, on the grounds that they were abnormal.
Martha, having read this with excitement, side-tracked Jimmy to the kitchen for a talk. There he sat, smiling as always, while she tried to get out of him where he got his ideas for the plots-a question which he seemed to find naïve. ‘They were in the air, ’ he said at last. And went on to say that ‘all of us’ wrote about such ideas. He meant, by ‘all of us’ other space fiction writers. He then went on to describe a new machine which he was working on that could stimulate or destroy areas of the brain, and not through anything crude like putting wires into the brain with electric charges, but by using frequencies of sound, or vibrations which, said Jimmy, could be used with great sensitivity. Already he was within reach of aiming at an area of the brain of the size of a pea …
Yes, said Martha, but supposing there were no machines. This race of people he had written about for instance, had he ever himself experienced anything which might …? but he was not listening. Not listening in the sense that he could not listen: his experience did not connect with what she said. He was not able to hear.
Mark often went with Ji
mmy Wood to a certain pub where science fiction writers congregated. He found their company stimulating because the ideas in their books usually did not appear in the books of accepted and ‘literary’ writers.
He would have been as polite as Jimmy was, however, if Martha had asked if he went there because of any personal conviction or experience. Martha went with them to this pub. Twenty or so men, one or two women, discussed their craft. Martha kept approaching one after another, with questions kept tentative. Odd in itself that this had to be so: a man has written half a dozen books about people with this or that sense out of the normal; but he is embarrassed when asked if people might in fact have this or that sense. More than odd, when you thought about it … But Martha had to come back and report to Lynda that she had drawn a blank. They drew blanks everywhere.
Yet in their own inner experience this was a time of possibility. It was as if doors kept opening in their brains just far enough to admit a new sensation, or a glimmer of something-and although they closed again, something was left behind. Just for Lynda and Martha, not for the other people they met and so anxiously, if carefully, questioned? Yet poetry, drama, old plays-everywhere, were full of hints and suggestions about what they looked for! During this period both read, or rather re-read poems, authors not read for years: they understood what it meant that’scales should fall from one’s eyes’ - scales had fallen. Where passages, lines, words had been obscured, or dark, or simply skipped over, suddenly there was light. What they wanted, looked for, searched for was everywhere, all around them, like a finer air shimmering in the flat air of everyday. But to lay hands on it, to net it, that was different. It was as if the far-off sweetness experienced in a dream, that unearthly impossible sweetness, less the thing itself than the need or hunger for it, a question and answer sounding together on the same fine high note-as if that sweetness known all one’s life, tantalizingly intangible, had come closer, a little closer, so that one continually sharply turned one’s head after something just glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, or tried to refine one’s senses to catch something just beyond them …
The Four-Gated City Page 47