The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  He had left school. Three months before his O-levels, having done no work of any sort, he had suddenly begun to work frantically. His teacher had said in front of the whole class that with his, Paul’s, brains, there should be nothing to stop him getting ten good O-levels. Paul had then insisted on taking ten O-levels. He had done fairly well on three, scraped through two, and failed the rest. Creditable on the whole, having done so little work; but then appeared the first evidence (or at least it was the first time they had noticed it) of that pattern which was peculiarly Paul’s and would recur in one form or another. He had been let down, or so he felt. It was not his fault that he had done so badly. Not at all. Receiving the news that he had not got ten first-class O-levels, he sulked, had a tantrum, and then confronted his teacher with:’ You didn’t keep your promise.’ The sheer lunacy of this caused the teacher to interview Mark. The central fact here was that he, like all teachers in state schools, was so overworked that nothing much could be expected of him. He said:’ He behaves as if I’d made a contract with him-something like that! Perhaps you could throw some light on …’

  “He said it! He can’t pretend now he didn’t say it, ’ Paul kept repeating. He would not go back to that school, or to any school. He seemed now to believe that he had only promised to stay on for the extra year past the leaving age of fifteen, because he had been promised ten good O-levels. The school suggested Paul could do with a psychiatrist.

  Paul had done with several before, but in small doses. Dr Lamb was once again consulted and Paul was interviewed, not by Dr Lamb himself, now so high in the reaches of his profession that he was not available for bad risks, and Paul was that; but by a smaller reputation. But the opinion was that Paul, like Lynda, was simply not suited for therapy. He lacked the necessary basis for it.

  What then was that basis? Translated into the language of ordinary living, they were back where they were before: Paul’s absent sense of right and wrong.

  He might not have one, but he certainly had something, perhaps a sense of self-preservation? He was always on the watch for what other people thought of right and wrong: was that not enough? On the whole, it was thought not.

  Paul inquired when his therapy was to start; and was told that it wasn’t going to. He said, first:’ You aren’t paying school fees for me. I don’t see why you can’t afford analysis.’ He said, next:’ As far as I can make out, I’m too ill to be treated? How well do I have to be before they take me on?’

  It became clear that Paul’s not having therapy was going to be felt by him as yet another symptom of his abnormality: Mark therefore arranged for him to have some treatment with a less demanding therapist. Paul went twice, and returned saying she was a silly old twit, and he wasn’t going to go again.

  He did nothing for a time; stayed in his rooms, watched the television, read a little, and fought with Martha, trailing her around the house to find opportunities of combat.

  They usually occurred over food. He ate a great deal.

  ‘Martha, would you say if I eat a lot it’s because I’m eating reassurance?’

  ‘Did one of them say that?’

  ‘Two of them.’

  ‘Or perhaps you are greedy?’

  ‘But that’s not the kind of vice people have these days. You can be too fat-that’s a vice. But eating too much isn’t. I’m not at all fat. I’m very thin. Therefore I can eat myself silly and according to our ideas now, it’s not a vice.’

  ‘Then do please have another helping.’

  ‘I have already had another helping. More, please

  His rooms were even fuller of odd, or bizarre or beautiful or sinister objects. Not so long ago his things, the cushions or bits of cloth or junk that had his stamp, his sheen, were like an exotic skin over the sober basis of bed, chairs, chests of the old house. But now the old furniture had been turned out, and that floor was all Paul’s. He collected things from the markets and shops and nooks and corners of London, the great junkhouse. They weren’t stolen. He didn’t steal these days. He could see no reason at all why he shouldn’t; but other people did: he was positively magnanimous about seeing their point of view. He bartered and bargained and haggled; he spent days of resource and cunning to get that old chair, that rug, that table: he would not trouble over something easily got.

  ‘Well, but I haven’t stolen it, Martha-so why do you look like that?’ He was sullen, or frantic: he was being law-abiding, he was abiding by their rules-so why did they, did she, always look like that?

  For Martha knew quite well that he could not have got such and such an object for that price, unless the stall-holder or dealer or housewife-he knocked on people’s doors in poor areas and tricked and charmed his way inside-was stunned, chloroformed, by that quality in him which was so excessive. In the game of haggling, bargaining, there are certain rules: they are unwritten, but they exist. None of them include Paul’s knife-like need to have, to outwit, to do down. There is a pretence that this is what haggling and barter is about. In fact the basis is a kind of good humour. Somewhere behind this business of exchange which keeps objects of all kinds flowing through the cities is the recognition of human need which graces the barter of a corner of a sackful of potatoes for a fowl which has gone past laying. But all Paul knew was that there are rules which say you should not simply take.

  ‘What are you going to do? Start a junkshop?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that if I did?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘But you’d like it better if I went to work in an office?’

  ‘Why don’t you start a junkshop?’

  ‘Why should I pay rent for a place when I can use here? If you make this lovely pudding again tomorrow I’ll give you my new print.’

  ‘I’ll make it anyway if you want it.’

  But Martha’s room became scattered with small jackdaw objects.

  ‘Oh I know! You don’t really like them! But you can have this cushion if you make me a black silk shirt.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t bring myself to-it’s my generation. I won’t make or wear a black shirt.’

  ‘God, that’s ridiculous. God, that’s sentimental.’

  ‘If you like. But you said that knowing what I was going to say. So I’m obliging you.’

  Here he got sullen, and flashed handsome sulking eyes, was betrayed. Games. The games you have to play. She played them. And one night overheard his fantasy: If that silly twit Harry Singer says he didn’t mean to let me have that cushion, I’ll say it was stolen. The police would fínd it in Martha’s room. She’d have to go to prison.

  He found Zena working in a shoeshop. She had run away from home, which was in Birmingham. She was eighteen years old and she lived in a ‘friend’s’ flat. The friend, Martha gathered, was an ex-lover of her mother’s. Zena was Paul’s female image, lithe, black-haired, black-eyed. They spent hours in his rooms playing games in front of a long mirror, winding bits of cloth around themselves, posing for imaginary photographers. Sometimes she slept there.

  ‘Martha, I suppose you think we’re having sex. You lot are so filthy minded.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn whether you have sex or not.’

  ‘Then why don’t you? You are supposed to be looking after me, aren’t you? Suppose Zena gets pregnant?’

  ‘Then we’ll deal with it when we come to it.’

  ‘There you are-you’re filthy. We don’t have sex. You wouldn’t believe that of course, and she lives with that dirty old man and he adores her but she never lets him touch her. She doesn’t like being touched.’

  ‘Then that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t think so, do you? You’d like it better if we screwed each other day and night-you’d think that was normal, wouldn’t you.’

  ‘Each to his taste, ’ said Martha.

  Paul’s fantasy, overheard in small emotionless words trickling through her mind, so that it had the effect of a violently drawn cartoon with the words printed neatly in a sma
ll bubble over the action: I’ll tell Martha that Zena does sleep with the old pig. I’ll say: Zena’s got VD. She’s been using your towel. It’s doesn’t matter, does it?

  Paul said at breakfast:’ Zena’s mother’s lover has got filthy habits.’

  ‘Poor Zena.’

  ‘How do you know she hasn’t picked something up off a towel-they share a bathroom?’

  ‘Well, when she does, I expect we’ll all know soon enough.’

  ‘Filthy. You’re filthy.’ He was shrilly miserable, his eyes wide with hate: with hatred he watched the world outside. But with him, away from the world, safe, was Zena. At table they sat opposite each other, giving each other’s faces small soft looks like kisses or the touches of a cat’s paw. They wore jeans, bright sweaters, glossy black hair. In Paul’s room they squatted opposite each other on the floor, adoring each other, not touching.

  They descended the stairs side by side, hand in hand, their soft dark eyes staring in front of them, Paul and Zena, Zena and Paul. The others called them The Siamese Twins.

  ‘You do realize, Paul, ’ said earnest Jill, ‘that for both of you it’s a narcissistic act?’

  ‘Thank you, ’ said Paul. ‘We know that. But love is always narcissistic. Look at most married couples-it’s not that they’ve grown like each other. They were like each other to start with. That’s why they chose each other, whether they knew it or not. But most of them are ugly. Hideous. They know they are ugly so they choose someone just as ugly so they can lie on their pillows staring at their own ugly faces. But we are beautiful. Zena and I are extremely beautiful.’

  ‘Oh listen to him!’

  ‘It’s true. And you can’t keep your eyes off us. None of you. You stare at us all the time.’

  Below Paul and Zena-Martha. But of all the times in her life she had never been less Martha than now. Partly because of Lynda’s being ill again; partly because of the young people, she was never alone, always tired; she was simply holding on. Never mind: everything passes.

  Even her room was not hers: it was always bursting open under the pressure of some demand. The other rooms on this floor, James’s old room, Francis’s old room, now had occupants, usually Gwen and Jill who after all couldn’t actually sleep in Francis’s room, even though it is where they spent most of their time. It was not that they lived here: they lived, as usual, with Phoebe their mother. But Phoebe’s breakdown caused them all to quarrel-or their quarrels caused the breakdown. Pleasanter here. Often, Arthur Coldridge’s other family, the girls’ half-sisters, came too. This floor seemed all young females, giggling, talking interminably in low tones, doing their hair and their faces-and popping in and out of Martha’s room to take her clothes and her shoes, with the minimum of apology. This being one of the functions middle-aged women perform for young ones, she performed it-at first because she ought, and then in gratitude for what in fact was being done for her. After a year, or two years, with one’s once cherished possessions, shoes, dresses, wraps, scent, always part of the setting for some young girl, all the delicious paraphernalia of attraction had ceased to be one’s own. It was as if a shell or a skin had been peeled off, as if an aspect of one’s self had floated away and become part of that timeless and fluid creature, A Young Girl, whose features were as little Gwen’s or Jill’s as they were hers.

  And never again could she buy a scarf or a pair of earrings except as it were for some hierarchic figure whose function one temporarily had to fulfil, or for a character in a play. The rejuvenation a young girl gives her mother or an older woman is a setting free into impersonality, a setting free, also, from her personal past.

  Every time Martha wished she could slap Gwen or tell Jill that she was a monster-she remembered Martha Quest. That girl, shrill, violent, cruel, cold, using any weapon fair or foul to survive, as she had had to do, as everyone’s first task was to do, had been stripped off her, had gone away, was simply a character worn for a day or two, a week or two, a year, half a dozen years, by Gwen or Jill or anybody else who needed it.

  There were lines written ready to be spoken; there was a play set like a duty.

  Phoebe, apparently without any idea at all that she was behaving as if she had walked on to a stage and into the part of a mother with adolescent daughters, was speaking lines that Martha remembered word for word from Mrs. Quest. There were moments when Martha heard herself saying things which she no more felt, or felt personally, than things said by Phèdre or Lady Macbeth. ‘If you haven’t any more consideration for…’ ‘You wait till you get to my age and …’ ‘When you have responsibilities of your own then …’

  Arthur Coldridge, who had left the bosom of his Tory family at eighteen, quarrelling so badly with his mother that even now Margaret and he could hardly be polite to each other, had been aided in his flight by his first love, the wife of a communist poet who had been killed in Spain. His first public act therefore had been as much sexual as political and it had ended his formal education. His views on morality (public) were liberal. But he told Gwen and Jill probably twice a week that they should finish their schooling and (he hoped) university, before’messing about’ with sex, and that if they got in after ten o’clock at night he hoped Phoebe was being severe with them.

  Some members of her generation found the lines harder to say well than others … yet Martha believed that’the children’ were never more delighted, more enjoyably furious, than when listening to some resounding piece of traditional morality.

  ‘God, I hate you’ Jill would shriek, as Martha intoned:’ Of course you should never let a man kiss you on the first time you go out with him.’ ‘God, you’re so sordid, ’ she moaned. But half an hour later she would be lying across Martha’s bed to talk about clothes and love as if nothing whatsoever had happened.

  And Paul would have been delighted if Mark or Martha had lectured him, had assumed the worst of his relations with Zena. Paul would descend to the basement to provoke Lynda into saying she disliked Zena, or that she thought Paul was lazy. Lynda, he felt, had a sense of morality, unlike Mark, who never gave advice, and unlike Martha, whose disapprobation could not be relied upon to be more than intermittent.

  When Lynda shouted at him:’ You’re a self-indulgent little beast!’ Paul glowed with fulfilment.

  One ought to force oneself to recite the lines of this so ancient play, whether one believed in them or not? She came back and back, to the same point, the only point of importance, she had to feel, about bringing up children, about being anywhere near children: from the moment the eyes of a tiny baby focused and looked at you, so straight, and so seriously, and not a whit different from the look that person, when adult, would give, then it was as if one had to play games, marking time, until the baby grew into the eyes. It was not possible to take the games seriously. But of course it had all to be done right, to be played right … yet it was all absolute nonsense. Yet Martha lay awake to worry, should I be doing this, should I be doing that; and Mark and Martha and Lynda met to worry: What do you think? Ought we to? But if we instead did …

  And yet when she had finished the cruel battle she had to fight with Paul (there was one thing everyone agreed about, including Paul himself, who said so, that he should never be allowed to get away with anything), then what was real was the moment when Paul suddenly caught her eyes with his, in the shared glance of acknowledgement, or amusement: how ridiculous all this is.

  Then the games went on, and they resumed their roles, adolescent and grown-up, all doing what they had to do.

  Exactly as it was with Jill and Gwen, the pretty adolescent girls. Between them and Martha there lay a cool understanding, a liking. But the games went on, the sulks and the looks and the banged doors and the complaints about their mother, the complaints about life.

  Whichever game it was, over, then one or both would come into Martha’s room, simple, straightforward, altogether delightful girls, and stay there for an hour or for the evening, and their eyes would have the straight intelligence of an infant
’s, or a mature person’s … until it was time to go on with working out or through a part of that other pattern, the need to feed and develop the adolescent.

  It was as if veils of mist kept blowing across between them; as if steadily glowing lights, always there, moved towards and away from each other, but in a steady trust; while waves of turbulence came between, rocked and tossed violently for a while, then moved on, and the lights shone out again, communicating with each other.

  The girls were coming to Martha, because their mother was ill.

  The illness had been precipitated because Phoebe had agreed to marry Jim Troyes, and then the marriage had not happened. For a time things had gone well. Everyone was pleased that hardworking Phoebe was at last going to have some love and warmth in her life. Even some glamour-for Jim did not see Phoebe as dull or dutiful. On the contrary, his experience had been mostly local politics in various Northern provincial towns, and Phoebe was very different from the women he had worked with. For one thing, she was the ex-wife, still the friend, of the gallant crusader Arthur Coldridge. She was at home in London’s political circles; much wider ones than strictly Labour, Indeed he was rather shocked that the political demarcations of his experience blurred here in London into what he could not help seeing as an indifference to principle. (When he left London it was always with the feeling that he was leaving moral danger.) And then, Phoebe was at home in the literary world-so he saw Mark Coldridge. She called by Christian name a dozen of Africa’s new rulers, all of whom had been her friends. And yet this accomplished and many-sided woman needed him. He was altogether delighted with Phoebe, and prepared to be delighted with the little girls: his own children were grown up. He was divorced.