The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  These were people who had all been stripped. And their talk, when one got past the slogans and the temporary excitements of this big March and all the people, was extremely sensible. And rather sad. For one thing few believed that they had futures, in the sense that their grandparents would have defined a future. These were people who knew, before they were twenty, what their grandparents knew, perhaps, as they died.

  They were also people prepared to protect their parents from unpleasant realities. For instance, for the whole of a marching, or strolling afternoon, Martha had walked behind a group of students who were discussing the potions bubbling in the cauldrons of the laboratories of the world that will turn us all into sprites or toads. They were discussing their children, and how they might be geniuses or idiots; that they would almost certainly be mutants of some kind; and what their own attitude would be. A father of one of the girls came past, heard a scrap of the talk, exclaimed sharply that they were being very negative. At which the students politely engaged him in safe talk until he went on appeased, when they continued with their discussion. What kinds of mutant might be expected? How would one recognize one? What kind of capacity of brain, heart, imagination would be welcomed and what feared? Perhaps there were mutants already, for good or for bad, but one did not yet know it. After all, so much radioactive material was already loose in air and soil and water, it was likely that changes were in existence. And in which case … the talk went on until it was time to stop in a field for a meal. The girl’s father appeared, and inquired in joke, if she was still being so pessimistic. At which she had called him bourgeois, using the word correctly, meaning a person preferring safety, comfort, illusion, to the hazards and adventures of revolution. But in this case the revolution had gone inwards, was in the structure of life’s substance.

  This incident was typical. The discussions that went on up and down the columns were infinitely in advance of the slogans on the banners and placards; which might account for the number of people who chanted slogans like ‘Ban the Bomb’ and so on as if they found the syllables absurd. Of course it is not possible to have a political slogan that is anything but simple and therefore absurd. But there probably has never been a political demonstration where the content of people’s talk was more divergent from the banners they walked under. In imagination they were exploring worlds of extraordinary possibilities, change, discovery, revolution; meanwhile they chanted Ban the Bomb and Down With … and Hands Off…

  When Mark came into view, he was at the very end of the March, surrounded by fifteen-year-olds blowing feather squeakers and wearing funny hats. The banner above them said:’ The Moxton Young Socialists for Peace.’ With Mark was Jimmy Wood. His newest book was about a human mutant quite invisible to ordinary humanity because he was apparently and outwardly normal. Yet his capacities were superhuman. These children had read’The Man Two Doors Down’; they had never heard of Mark Coldridge. As the end of the March trailed into Hyde Park, the children were suggesting to Jimmy various capacities which humanity might find useful, if only they could be developed: Jimmy was seriously writing them down on the back of an envelope; Mark was waving at Martha and looking for Lynda.

  A band stationed by the entrance was so loud it was necessary to stop talking till they were past ‘And When the Saints …’

  In this area of Hyde Park was a sea of people, an ocean. The word went round that there were a hundred thousand people; two hundred thousand perhaps? No, that was too high, but as many people as would attend a good football match stood and sat on damp grass or were preparing to leave this stopping place: the head of the column had left as the tail came in.

  And there was Lynda. She wore her pale shaggy coat, her pale hair was up in a knot, her pale face smiled. She sat on a shooting stick, and was trying to peel an orange into a paper handkerchief with heavily gloved fingers. She could not take off the gloves because of her bitten finger ends.

  They joined her and stood watching the people, who were all engaged in watching each other for friends, relatives, comrades in arms from other countries.

  They were all feeling that light-headedness, a pleasant unreality that comes from watching large numbers of people moving apparently at random across space. Trees in new leaf seemed to move as the people moved, as one moved oneself; and overhead meandered great clouds. Lynda, Mark, Martha watched. In a great concourse of people one may watch Martha, Lynda, Mark pass and repass in front of one, variations on a theme.

  For instance, Francis went past with young Nicky, and a strongly built, vital girl with short, yellow hair and dark eyes. Nicky, female, would be a Lynda; Francis would be his father-and how many different shapes had Martha already worn? A strongly-built dark woman, middle-aged, with greying hair, on the arm of her husband, a tall thin rather stooped fair man, greying, his blue eyes remote and inwardly turned, had with them a roundish flat-faced girl with flat soft hair and straight gaze. Martha, Lynda, Mark. Three students went past, a tall, rather stooping, blonde girl with great, grey eyes, and a stocky, energetic blonde with her hand in that of a round, smiling boy. A strongly built man, probably a journalist or writer of some kind, accompanied a roundly-built, flat-faced, brown-eyed woman, possibly his wife; a blond tall boy, their son perhaps, was with them. Martha, Mark, Lynda.

  They passed and repassed, on the thick spring grass, under rolling pearly clouds.

  ‘Your mother is here, ’ said Lynda.

  ‘Checking her guest-list no doubt, ’ said Mark.

  ‘For the last time, ’ said Lynda. Last night Lynda, who was not very well, had said she must be here today because she felt this would be the biggest March, and she wanted to see it. The crowds were much larger than last year. Next year, Phoebe and others like her thought, they would be larger still. The obvious Tightness of their point of view would bring out, year by year, larger and larger numbers of people wearing black and white badges, until from Land’s End to John O’Groats blossomed with the symbol and-swords would be beaten into ploughshares on the spot. Something like that.

  But next year Margaret would not be here.

  ‘I’m going home,’ said Lynda. ‘All these people. I feel in a swarm of bees.’

  Margaret approached across the grass. She did not really approve of the March, but so many of her friends were there, that she had taken out, by car, luncheon hampers to wherever they were likely to be, by lunchtime. Her food was, of course, very good. Behind her, smiling, came her husband John. The focus being off homosexuality and turned elsewhere, John was on the whole a better husband to Margaret. In their circle they joked (it was Graham’s joke first) that his father no longer felt obliged to prove himself. Margaret had just returned from a jaunt to Moscow where she had seen her truant son and been to many banquets: she had some Russian officials staying with her at the moment.

  She observed her son, gentleman farmer, standing on two planted feet, his umbrella used as a stick; his wife, peeling an orange, and Martha, eating bits of Lynda’s orange.

  ‘A charming ménage à trois, ’ she murmured, not so much cattily, but as it were attempting to define a position.

  ‘Goodness, is that what we are?’ asked Lynda.

  ‘How should I know!’ said Margaret.

  ‘I should say sometimes yes and sometimes no, ’ said Martha.

  ‘I don’t see that it matters what anyone says, ’ said Mark.

  Oh are you angry? I’m sorry, ’ said Margaret. ‘Now you won’t come to supper. And so many of your chums are coming.’

  ‘Unfortunately I can’t, ’ said Mark.

  ‘My darling Russians are ever so interested in your book about me, ’ said Margaret. ‘They are talking of translating it.’

  Mark did not say anything. Margaret smiled, nodded and returned to her guests. Behind her went John.

  Phoebe came up, in her blue cellophane wrappings; she frowned.

  ‘But dear Phoebe, it is such a success, ’ said Lynda. ‘And so well organized.’

  ‘It would be if it wasn�
��t for those lunatics.’

  There came to them, then, one of the lunatics, Francis. He gave his mother, as always, his wary glance for storm warnings; as always Lynda smiled, for him. He accepted a bit of orange.

  ‘Really, ’ said Phoebe, ‘why do you people have to, why do you spoil everything? I’ve had the police around again-what is the use of my making plans with the police if you people then change everything?’

  ‘What you are saying is, ’ said Francis, ‘why don’t we let you run everything for us, because you know how to do it and we don’t?’

  ‘No, but…’

  ‘Yes. And I’m not even there, am I? Here I am, with the forces of law and order.’

  ‘Well, tell your Nicky to come and see me tonight, I really must discuss it with him.’

  ‘I’ll suggest it. And he’ll probably be in prison tonight.’

  Nicky had left the main March to go off and join in a Committee of a Hundred demonstration in front of the Soviet Embassy. Phoebe approved, personally, of the demonstration; but knew that many of her committee would not. Her committee had formally disassociated themselves from this particular demonstration.

  Several times a week, Phoebe rang up Francis to instruct Nicky; Francis remained polite.

  ‘And have you seen Gwen?’

  ‘She’s with Nick.’

  Oh for heaven’s sake, if she gets arrested again then I suppose …’ She stopped herself, while he waited for her to do so. He was smiling courteously.

  ‘And I suppose Jill is here too?’

  ‘Jill’s just watching somewhere,’ he said gently.

  Jill, some months before, had become pregnant by a visiting West Indian jazzman. She had refused to have an abortion until the last minute. Phoebe was urging her to have one. Jill had said, for about fifteen hours of every day, that Phoebe’s wanting her, Jill, to have an abortion meant that Phoebe’s support of Africans was all a sham. Secretly, said Jill, her mother must hate coloured people, otherwise she’d love her daughter to have ‘a dear little black baby’. This phrase nearly drove Phoebe wild with exasperation. When it got to three months or so, Phoebe said she thought it was too late now to get an abortion, and she would stand by Jill and help her with the baby. Then Jill decided to have an abortion after all; but it was nearly four months by the time she got into hospital, and she had had a bad time with it. Everyone had had a bad time.

  Phoebe had been relying on Francis. A woman who never asked for help, because she did not believe it could be given, now without knowing it, appealed for help continually, in voice, gesture, glance. Usually from Francis, that rock of good sense, Jill’s friend.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on her, don’t worry, ’ said Francis.

  Her smile was stiff, pathetic. Relying on Francis was not all jam. When she had complained to him about Jill’s behaviour, all he had said was: What were you like when you were seventeen? This had made Phoebe furious: it was unjust. Yes, she did see that for Francis the immorality of it (the carelessness, the indifference to the child’s well-being) was not the point: he was saying that everyone was difficult when they were seventeen. For him, quite clearly, how they were difficult was immaterial. Phoebe brooded again that she had been a virgin when she married Arthur, and had imagined herself to be principled and self-controlled.

  Yet now she was depending on Francis, who treated her, so she muttered privately, as if she were just as bad and cruel as Jill. When he went off into the crowd, she trailed after him, as if after a possible saviour. She looked as if she were tailing him: her rather reddened nose projecting past the edge of the blue plastic hood, her hands clutching papers and plans of all kinds.

  Soon, Paul came past with the theatre group he had attached himself to. At first he did not see the three people to whom he referred, with this characteristic mixture of insolence and charm as’my extended family’. He was talking to a director from Hamburg, a man who listened to the boy with a smile that said he was being well entertained. Paul saw the three. Expressions passed rapidly across his face, each one unmixed with what preceded or followed it. First, the look an animal has when it sees something possibly dangerous; next, a beam of pure spontaneous warm affection; next a look meant to be observed by them, and by anyone else, of humorous tolerance for the absurd; finally, what he imagined to be a smile of worldly ease. Gently patting Zena to one side, with yet another smile, indulgent, gentle, he ran gracefully towards the three. Among the people he had left, some turned to note the writer Mark Coldridge; without appearing to, Paul watched to see who these were. ‘What, no orange for me?’ he asked Lynda, who handed him a piece of orange, with a smile that said, though affectionately: You aren’t fooling me. These two had recently become friends again; at least there was a truce.

  ‘Yes, I know, ’ said Paul aloud.‘But dependent entirely on my own resources as I am, having to make my own way in this wicked world as I do, you must expect me to use you.’

  ‘Oh, not at all, ’ said Mark.

  Paul gave them all a smile both affectionate and impudent, and returned, running lightly, to rejoin his group. They saw how first, he reassured Zena, with a look and a touch, before slipping in again beside the German celebrity.

  They looked at each other, but muting what they felt, because from fifty yards away Paul craned back to see if he had gone too far? His face was apprehensive. They waved frantically. Delighted, he waved back.

  On the whole, they were pleased with him.

  Some months ago he announced that’thanks to them he had no more education than the son of a workman’ and that he supposed he had to educate himself since they would not.

  He then set himself to acquire education, or rather, information, as he acquired objects and trash from London’s markets. He pursued people, or places that could inform him. Secretly he even watched television programmes that taught-but he did not like anyone to know this. Throughout the four days of the March he had been approaching people, not necessarily celebrities, who could give him something of what he wanted. The German director was at the moment in the news: Paul had announced before the week-end that he would become ‘a friend of his you’ll see’. A friend of Francis, a German boy, had recently stayed in the house for a week, and Paul had discovered he had a facility for languages: he had learned enough German to talk to the director. A part of this game was that Paul should not use Mark’s name in any way-that is, not until Paul himself had made some kind of contact with whoever it was he pursued. This rule, like others, had been worked out from the beginning: another was that he should not have to pay for anything. The whole thing was to be done by charm.

  The adults watched what was probably the birth of a conman; but after all, how much better that than some other futures they could only too easily imagine. And besides, there were other sides to Paul-Zena, for instance. She was now on the whole a liability to Paul, who was no longer shut in his floor of the house with his beautiful fabrics and his mirrors and his treasures. She stayed there when he was out, a silent, passive, beautiful little creature whom no one else could talk to. There she was, pale and listless, waiting for Paul. Her childhood had been so bad, or so it seemed, that she expected nothing from anyone: was surprised if anything was offered; assumed that it would be taken away again. Paul, she knew, would soon fly off or become impatient with her, as so many others had done before.

  But Paul did not send her away. He was not unkind. He had even gone to’the old man’, her mother’s ex-lover, who was the chucker-out in a gambling club, and told him that if he did harm to Zena, he, Paul, would go to the police. The old man had thrown her out. Paul had taken her in. As he said: she practically lives here anyway, so what difference does it make? He went up to Birmingham where Zena’s mother now was. to fínd out what went on: all Zena had said was that’mum doesn’t want me’. This was half true. The mother had had a lot of children, and would probably go on having children: she was only just forty, and had Zena’s numbed passivity. She spoke with a detached interest about Zena: as
if the girl were not her daughter at all. Paul asked her if Zena couldn’t come for week-ends, or a holiday:’ Zena is missing her family, ’ he said. The passive mother had thought this was a good idea, but didn’t say when Zena should come. Zena still felt she would not be welcome. Paul then took Zena to stay the week-end with her mother: this boy who cared apparently only for the beautiful, for success, for accomplishment, for comfort, bullied a worn-out woman and her rather ill, or at least drinking husband, into being kind to Zena for a few days. He had even done the washing up and fed the small children.

  But they all knew that one day Paul would have to give up Zena: what else could he do?

  Next to come past, with another theatre group, was Patty Samuels. She was with her current young man, another of the new working-class actors from the provinces. She did not look her best wearing a raincoat and a scarf: she looked like a healthy Jewish housewife. He was handsome, confidently working the vogue for his kind, with eyes on the lookout for every possible advantage. He spied Mark: they watched him edging her out of the column to come and greet the author. Patty was resisting-she even sent them a large good-natured shrug and a wink as if to say: Don’t blame me for him!